The Last of the Mortimers

It was afternoon when Mr. Cresswell came. He was brought up to the room immediately, without a word of explanation, and accordingly knew nothing of all the dreadful history of the last twenty-four hours. He had not even a hint that anything was changed, except the health of Miss Mortimer. He came and expressed his concern in the common-place tone of an unexcited stranger; he expressed his surprise to see me with her. In his heart he set it down that this will was of my suggesting. I am certain he did; and smiled to find me the nurse of the sick woman. But Miss Mortimer (that I should still go on calling her by that name after all I had heard!) left him very little time. She recovered herself wonderfully at sight of him; her very utterance became easier in the anxiety she showed to express herself plainly. She was impatient of his inquiries and condolences. She moved her hands uneasily about the bed, and for a moment her eyes fluttered as they had done the day before; but as soon as he had prepared his papers, and taken his pen in hand, she was composed again. My heart beat so loud with anxiety to hear what she said, that I could scarcely breathe. Was she now at last to set right the injustice of a life?

“Write,” she cried, with a gasp for breath, “that I leave everything—mind, it is everything, Bob Cresswell, no partitions. My sister Milly, though she is a fool, is as fond of her, ah! as—as I am—all the Park and the lands belonging to it, to Millicent Mortimer. There! the young soldier’s wife; and to—eh! who is it? Who speaks to me?”

I grasped her hand hard in my sudden passion. It was cold, cold, a dead hand, and horrified me with its touch. “Stop,” I cried, “oh, stop, Mr. Cresswell; she cannot mean such horrible injustice! Miss Mortimer! Countess! whatever you are! will you dare to die and never repent? Do you think I will let you bring a curse on my innocent baby? Stop! Stop! I forbid it, for her soul’s sake!”

Mr. Cresswell pushed back his chair and stared in amazement too great for words. She looked at me with a strange air of cunning and superior wisdom, and then at him.

“She thinks,” said the dying woman, in a kind of whisper, addressing Mr. Cresswell, “to draw me into some foolish talk, and bring it up against the will. Fool! they are all fools; go on.”

“What does it mean?” he said looking at me.

“It means that she ought to do justice,” I cried; “that it is all she can do now; that she is going to die without repenting, without making amends. If you write it, it will be a sin.”

“Bob Cresswell, go on; it is I who am the person to be attended to,” said Miss Mortimer. “This creature, do you hear, is a fool. I know what I mean.”

“There is something here I don’t understand; my dear lady, you’re not so very ill, suppose we put it off,” said the lawyer in great perplexity; “and there’s Miss Milly, you know, she has her share in the Park.”

“Attend to me!” cried Miss Mortimer, wildly. “You will kill me; am I to be thwarted now, as well as all my life? Oh, good heavens! in my own house, and in bed, and perhaps going to die—and I am not to have my will, my will! I shall have my will, if I should write it myself!”

She stretched out her eager hand towards the writing things, stretching out of bed, and by some chance touched Mr. Cresswell. When he felt that deathly touch he grew very grave, and started with a shudder. He took up his pen immediately.

“I will do what you please,” he said. He could not resist that cry of death.

Chapter XIX

I RAN downstairs in desperation. I could not be content to let that dreadful mockery go on. It was vain, for we never, never, would have taken another man’s rights; but for herself, the miserable, guilty woman, to hinder her by any means, to save her from putting that seal upon all her cruelty and falsehood. I saw nobody as I flew down the stairs, though afterwards I was conscious that Lizzie had been standing there with my beautiful innocent boy. Do you think I would consent for a kingdom to bring the curse of wrongful wealth upon little Harry? Not if starvation and misery had been the only other choice!

I burst into the library, where I knew Aunt Milly was. Pale with watching and anxiety, she was sitting propped up in an easy-chair, with Sara Cresswell and Luigi beside her. I believe they had been telling her their story, and she, straining her ear for every sound, had been trying to listen to them. When I came in she started up from her chair and came to meet me, unconsciously putting them away. “What is it, Milly?” she cried, putting out her arms to me. I dared not permit myself to rest or even lean upon her. I seized her hand and drew her to the door.

“Come up, and interfere,” I cried; “she is making her dreadful will. She is leaving everything to me. Come, before she has put the seal to all this misery. Aunt Milly, can you stand aside and let this be done?”

“My dear,” said Aunt Milly, with a burst of tears, kissing me and looking in my face, “you know I love you, Milly; you know you are almost dearer to me now than any creature on earth.”

I could not thank her; I had no time. I did not feel grateful or pleased, but only impatient. “Come; come!” I repeated almost with violence. I could not understand how she could delay.

“Let her do what she will,” cried Aunt Milly. “If I go and argue with her, it will only make her worse. Oh, child! we can’t cross her now; don’t you see we can’t cross her now? But I took a vow, as sure as God saw us, I would do justice,” said Aunt Milly, solemnly through her tears. “She can but do what she can. We are co-heiresses! she has no power but over her own share.”

“Share!” I cried, “is it shares we have to think of? She is dying, and she does not repent.”

I could not wait there any longer; they all followed upstairs, Aunt Milly holding my hand. They all came into the dressing-room, where we could faintly hear Miss Mortimer’s voice, and where Carson stood trembling at the door. At this moment there was no order or rule in the stricken house. Then Aunt Milly went with me into the sick room. Mr. Cresswell was writing, and Miss Mortimer had stopped speaking. She turned her eyes triumphantly upon us both.

“I have carried out your wishes, Milly. I have left everything to your favourite,” she said, with pauses to got her breath. “You may sign it after me, and then it will be complete.”

“Sarah, that boy, that boy!” cried Aunt Milly. “Oh, put out your hand to him just once—think, before it is finished, what claims he has. Give him something. Sarah! Sarah! you would not take me into your confidence; but I’ll go down on my knees to you if you’ll do justice to that boy!”

“I am going to die,” said Miss Mortimer, after a pause. “I can see it in all your faces. I can’t be much worse off than I’ve been here. But look you, Milly, if you come and drive me into passion; if that wretched boy so much as comes near me, I’ll die directly, and you’ll be my murderers. His father made the choice—and I will not change, no, not if he came again, as he did yesterday, with the dead man. Cresswell, I’m growing a little faint. Is it ready to sign?”

He brought it and laid it before her on the bed; and she called to me to raise her up. I was desperate. I would rather have been content to be her murderer, as she said, than to let her do that sin.

“You are not Sarah Mortimer,” said I, as with great difficulty she wrote her signature. “It is a false name, and you know it is. Write your own name, Countess Sermoneta, and let everybody know that you have disinherited your son.”

She stared round at me, setting her teeth, then returned to the paper, and with a desperate resolution completed it. I stood perfectly aghast as I saw that dead hand trace those words, which to me cut her off for ever from every hope:—“By marriage, Sermoneta.” God help us! was there now no place of repentance?

“And now,” she said, falling back on her pillows, “send me Carson—I want no more—no more from anybody; send me my maid. I’ll forgive her though she deserted me;—nobody,” sobbed the poor voice, all at once breaking and growing feeble,—“nobody knows me but Carson. I want my maid; Carson, here!”

She had scarcely spoken, when Carson was by her side kneeling down at the bed, kissing the cold hand held out to her with such tears and eager affection as I never saw a servant show to a mistress. It was a reconciliation of love. The tears came into Miss Mortimer’s eyes. She gave her hand to her maid’s caresses with actual affection. It was the strangest conclusion to that dismal scene. One after another we three went out of the room confounded. Aunt Milly weeping tears, the bitterness of which I could not enter into. Mr. Cresswell, with a face of utter wonder, and myself, too much shocked and shaken to be able for anything. I could not go downstairs with them. I took refuge in the room that had been fitted up as a nursery for my baby. I got my boy into my arms and cried over him. It was too much; when he put his innocent arms round my neck and laid his cheek to mine to console me, my happiness struck me as with a pang. Oh, the unutterable things she had lost, that poor, miserable woman! I got up again to rush back to her with my baby, and see if that would not touch her heart, but stumbled in weariness and weakness, and fell on my knees on the floor. That was all that was to be done. I acknowledged it with that dreadful sense of impotence that one has, when hearts and souls have to be dealt with. On my knees I might help that desolate, lonely creature,—nowhere else, in no other manner. And even this not now. I was worn out with excitement and distress. I was ashamed to think, or permit myself to say, that one night’s watching had done it. I had to put little Harry back into Lizzie’s hands and lie down in the waning daylight. My head throbbed, and my heart beat, so that I could not even recollect my thoughts. And all that had happened seemed to have no impression but one upon me. I never thought of that group downstairs going over the wonderful story which nobody had so much as guessed at. I thought only of that hopeless woman, in her shut-up room, slowly floating out of existence, dying hour by hour, and minute by minute, unchanged and unsubdued. What was death that it should change her, whom love and pity, and the long-suffering of God had not changed? But I thought to myself I could never more blame those who preach out of season as well as in season, and cannot be silent. There were moments in which I could not endure myself—in which I felt as if I must go and make another appeal to her—even at the risk of thrusting myself into the room, and disturbing the quiet of her last hours.

Chapter XX

BY MISS MILLY MORTIMER

It is I who must finish what there is to tell. My dear Milly was not in a condition, either of mind or body, to go on with the story that had moved her so much; and since then, poor dear child, you may suppose how little heart she had to enter upon other things. We heard of the battle that had just been fought not long after, and knew that Harry was sure to have been in it, having got letters from him of his safe arrival just the day after my sister’s death. And then we had to wait for the lists. I can tell nobody how we lived through these days. She used to go down and teach in the village school, and to all the distressed people near. The things she did for them might have shocked me at another time. Anything, it did not matter what, a servant’s work, whatever there might happen to be to do—and came home at night tired to death, but with no sleep in her poor eyes. She used to say, though she could not sleep, that it was a kind of comfort to be very tired, it dulled her a little in her heart. When the news came he was slightly wounded, and had distinguished himself, she fell down in a faint at my feet. It was the first moment she dared be insensible. After that little term of relief, our anxieties were constant. But at last, you know, it is all over, and he is coming home.

But to go back to that day. When we left my sister’s deathbed, and I, without even Milly to support me, went down alone with them all to hear everything told over again, and all Mr. Cresswell’s remarks and astonishment, you may well imagine it was very hard to me. I would have given anything to have been able to keep all that from Mr. Cresswell, but after what he had heard, and Sarah’s extraordinary signature, of course it was indispensable that he should understand the whole business; as well as for my nephew’s sake. I am bound to say Luigi behaved to his poor mother in a very different way from that in which she had treated him. If she had been the best mother in the world he could not have told the tale more gently. He went over it all,—how there had been a secret marriage done in Leghorn, where it was not unlawful for a Catholic to marry a Protestant, and where his father came under some engagement to take our own name. How it was kept secret for some reason of her own. How my father found it out. How the Count was summoned and called upon to bind himself, now that the affair could not be mended, to come home with them, and take the name of Mortimer. How, being dreadfully irritated by his wife (I don’t doubt she could have driven a man mad, especially in the days of her beauty), he refused; and how she had renounced, and given him up, and had nothing more to say to him. You may say, why did not he claim his rights? I can’t tell. He might have ruined her reputation, to be sure, or made the whole story public; but I suppose she must have been more than a match for him. She retired away into some village, and had her baby, and left it there. Then she came home. The Count never disturbed her all his life; and when he died he told his son the story, and bade him never to rest till he had recovered his mother. The young man, all amazed, full of grief for his father and anxiety to find her, came to England, asking for the Countess Sermoneta. It was only after many failures, and seeking better information from his father’s papers, that he came to believe that she called herself still Miss Mortimer; and we know all the rest. Luigi did not blame her, not a single word; he sat with his head leaning on his hands, overcome with distress and trouble. He called her his mother, his mother, every time he spoke, and said the name in such a tone as would have gone to anybody’s heart. Little Sara sat gazing at him all the time, with her whole heart in her eyes. When he covered his face with his hands in that pitiful way, Sara was unable to contain herself; she moved restlessly in her seat, fell a-crying in extreme agitation, and then, just for a moment, laid her hand upon his and pressed it with a quick momentary touch of sympathy. Her father’s eyes gleamed out for a moment surprise, anger, I cannot tell what mixture of feelings; but, dear! dear! what had their courtships and lovemakings to do in this stricken house? I could not bear any such question just at that moment. I told Cresswell that it was needful he should make my will, too, as well as my sister’s, and that I left my share to my nephew, without any conditions. Cresswell made objections, as was natural for a lawyer. His objections were too much for me; I got angry and impatient, more than I ought to have done. Here was he pottering about proofs and such things, when I knew, and had seen, and read it all in my sister’s face. This story was the key to Sarah’s life; I understood it all now what it meant, from her never-uttered quarrel with my father, down to the time when she met Luigi on the road. And the man spoke to me about proofs! I made him draw out a kind of form of a will, like that which Sarah had signed, but which Mr. Cresswell worded so cautiously, that it would be null if Luigi was not proved my nephew—bequeathing all my share of the Park estate to him. I confess it cost me a pang to do this; I confess freely that, to part the lands, and to leave it away from Milly, and to think it was Sarah and not me who had provided for that dear child, went to my heart; but I would rather have died than refused justice to my sister’s son.

Luigi came round to my side and took my two hands and kissed them. I was so wicked as to dislike it just at that moment, and to think it was one of his Italian ways. But he stood before me with tears in his eyes, and that look of the Mortimers, which nobody could mistake. “And your love?” he said. I could not stand out against that; I broke down entirely, and cried and sobbed like a child. Dreadful days these had been! Now I was overpowered, and could do no more. When I rose to go upstairs Luigi drew my arm into his, and took care of me like a son. He begged me to go to Milly, and not to be by myself; and I cannot tell how, but his voice had so great an effect upon me, that I did just as he said. Oh, dear! dear! to think what Sarah had cast away from her. There was she, lying alone, rejecting every creature in the world but Carson,—and here was the love that belonged to her, coming to me.

I did not see Mr. Cresswell again before he went away. Sara came up a little after, in despair, saying he had ordered her to return with him, and came and hugged me silently, and cried, with a frightened look upon her pale little face. “I would say farewell to godmamma Sarah, if I dared,” cried the poor child; but I dared not let her do it. She went away, casting longing looks back at us like a creature condemned. It was natural that she should feel leaving us in so much trouble, and going back to her own quiet, motionless home. It was not Sara’s fault she had not been watching with us every moment of that terrible night; but, for all that, it was very right of Mr. Cresswell to take her away.

And then some days of watching followed. Once Sarah admitted me into her room, and she saw the doctor without making any objection—she would have lived still, had that been possible—but when I begged her to see Luigi, just to say one word to him, to let him believe she recognised him as her son, her looks grew so terrible that I dared not say more. He went himself, out of my knowledge, to her door, and begged and prayed to be let in; but Carson came out to him, pallid with terror, and begged him to go away, or he would kill Miss Mortimer—for they kept up that farce of a name to the end. Luigi came to me heart-broken; it was, indeed, a terrible position for the young man. He reproached himself for seeking his natural rights, and bringing on all this misery. He said, “I have killed my mother!” It was all I could do to comfort him. God forgive her! it was not he who was to blame.

This was how my sister Sarah died. I try never to think of it. I try not to remember that dreadful time. Thank heaven! to judge others is not our part in this life. There is very little comfort to be had out of it, anyhow; living and dying it was a sad existence for a woman. If she had not much love in her lifetime, I think there are few graves over which have been shed more bitter tears. On her tombstone she is called Countess Sermoneta; the first time she has ever borne that ill-fated name.

It was not difficult to prove the whole history. By degrees Mr. Cresswell gathered enough from other sources to convince him of Luigi’s story; and after that it did not take much persuasion to make him consent to give my nephew his daughter. It was not the match he might have made, of course. The Sermonetas are a very old family in their own country; not much wonder the Count would not consent to give up his own name, and take the name of the haughty Englishman that despised him. Luigi would have changed his, had his mother bidden him, and for his father’s sake; but the young man was deeply grateful to me for not making any conditions. For my part, I did not want him to be the representative of the Mortimers. I may safely say I came to love him like a child of my own at last. But after all he was a foreigner still, and even when I came to be fond of him, I never could see him without pain mixing with the pleasure. It was Harry, little Harry, my sweet English baby, Milly’s beautiful boy, that was to be the Mortimers’ heir.

And Sara will not be married till Harry Langham comes home. Perhaps it is not justice to Sara to say my nephew might have done better; but, after all, you know, her father is only an attorney, our family attorney. Her hair is grown now, and she is a little older, and very pretty; very pretty indeed the little creature is. She is not in the least like what my sister Sarah used to be; she can never be such a beauty as her poor godmamma was. If it were nothing else, she is too little for beauty; but I must say she is extremely pretty. I don’t know if there is such another in all Cheshire. My Milly is different. Of the two I should rather have her; but then I am not a young man.

And the war is over, and the dear child is nervously happy, and counting the days. About another week or so and Harry Langham will be at home.

POSTSCRIPT. BY MRS. LANGHAM

Harry is home, safe and well. He is to get the Medjidie and the French ribbon of honour; but you can see that in the papers. It is something else I have to tell.

It is just a week before Sara’s marriage day, and Lizzie comes to me looking very foolish. I had thought she had recovered of her awkwardness. There she stands, twisting her feet again, rolling up her arms in her white apron, holding her head to one side in a paroxysm of her old use and wont. Really, if she were not standing in such a preposterous attitude, Lizzie would look rather pretty; she has such a nice complexion, and her red-brown hair pleases me—it is not too red. It suits those features which are not at all regular, but only very pleasant and bright, with health, and youth, and a good heart. But now there is something dreadful choking Lizzie, which must be got out.

“Mem, the Captain’s come hame,” came at last in a burst.

He was brevet Major now, and most people about the Park called him Colonel; and he was in the next room, no further off, so I rather stared at Lizzie’s piece of news.

“And wee Mr. Harry, he’s a grand little gentleman,” said Lizzie; “and a’s weel, and there’s no cloud in a’ the sky as big as the dear bairn’s little finger, let abee a man’s hand.”

This solemn enumeration of my joys alarmed me considerably. “Do you know of anything that has happened, Lizzie?” I cried with a momentary return of my old fears.

“Naething’s gaun to happen,” said Lizzie, “I’m meaning no to you; naething but the blessing of God that kens a’. It was just to say–”

Here Lizzie came to a dead stop, and cried, the unfailing resource in all difficulties. A perception of the truth flashed upon me as I looked at her.

“Do you mean to say–?” cried I, but got no further in my extreme amaze.

“Eh, it’s no me!” cried Lizzie. “But eh, Menico says–”

Here she stopped again, gave me a frightened look, made an attempt to go on—and finally, startled by a sound in the next room, where Harry was, dropped the apron she had unconsciously pulled off, on the floor, and fairly ran away.

Leaving me thunderstruck, and by no means pleased. I knew if I went and told Harry he would burst into fits of laughter, and there would be an end to all serious consideration of the subject. To lose Lizzie all at once like this, to let the creature go and marry a foreigner! There was something quite unbearable in the thought; what was I to do? A foreigner, and a Catholic, too, and a man twice as old as herself; the girl was mad! The more I thought of it the more distressed I grew. At last I went to seek Aunt Milly, who was the only practicable counsellor. She was in the garden, and I went to seek her there. It was July, and sultry weather. In the hall, now better occupied than it used to be, stood Domenico, in the white suit, vast and spotless, with which he always distinguished himself in summer weather, and which always put me in mind of that dreadful day when the Count Sermoneta first came, in his own name, to the Park. Domenico started forward, noiseless and smiling, to open the door. The action brought before me in a minute our little Chester lodgings, our troubled happy days, our parting, and all the simple kindness this honest fellow had done us. His face beamed through all my recollections of that time, always thus starting forward with the courtesy of the heart. My heart warmed to him in spite of all I had been cogitating against him. Perhaps he divined what it was occupied my thoughts—he followed me out at the door.