Mary Marston

"I can't confess to a lie. I owe Mr. Wardour a debt of gratitude—that is all—but no light thing, you will allow, sir!"

"I don't know; I never tried its weight. Anyhow, I should make haste to be rid of it."

"I have sought to make him this return, but he only fancies me a calumniator. Miss Yolland has been beforehand with me."

"Then, by Jove! I don't see but you're quits with him. If he behaves like that to you, don't you see, it wipes it all out? Upon my soul! I don't see why you should trouble your head about him. Let him take his way, and go to—Sepia."

"But, sir, what a dreadful thing it would be, knowing what she is, to let a man like him throw himself away on her!"

"I don't see it. I've no doubt he's just as bad as she is. We all are; we're all the same. And, if he weren't, it would be the better joke. Besides, you oughtn't to keep up a grudge, don't you know; you ought to let the—the woman have a chance. If he marries her—and that must be her game this time—she'll grow decent, and be respectable ever after, you may be sure—go to church, as you would have her, and all that—never miss a Sunday, I'll lay you a thousand."

"He's of a good old family!" said Mary, foolishly, thinking that would weigh with him.

"Good old fiddlestick! Damned old worn-out broom-end! She's of a good old family—quite good enough for his, you may take your oath! Why, my girl! the thing's not worth burning your fingers with. You've brought me here on a goose-errand. I'll go and have my lunch."

He rose.

"I'm sorry to have vexed you, sir," said Mary, greatly disappointed.

"Never mind.—I'm horribly sold," he said, with a tight grin. "I thought you must have some good thing in hand to make it worth your while to send for me."

"Then I must try something else," reflected Mary aloud.

"I wouldn't advise you. The man's only the surer to hate you and stick to her. Let him alone. If he's a stuck-up fellow like that, it will take him down a bit—when the truth comes out, that is, as come out it must. There's one good thing in it, my wife'll get rid of her. But I don't know! there's an enemy, as the Bible says, that sticketh closer than a brother. And they'll be next door when Durnmelling is mine! But I can sell it."

"If he should come to you, will you tell him the truth?"

"I don't know that. It might spoil my own little game."

"Will you let him think me a liar and slanderer?"

"No, by Jove! I won't do that. I don't promise to tell him all the truth, or even that what I do tell him shall be exactly true; but I won't let him think ill of my little puritan; that would spoil your game. Ta, ta!"

He went out, with his curious grin, amused, and enjoying the idea of a proud fellow like that being taken in with Sepia.

"I hope devoutly he'll marry her!" he said to himself as he went to his luncheon. "Then I shall hold a rod over them both, and perhaps buy that miserable little Thornwick. Mortimer would give the skin off his back for it."

The thing that ought to be done had to be done, and Mary had done it—alas! to no purpose for the end desired: what was left her to do further? She could think of nothing. Sepia, like a moral hyena, must range her night. She went to bed, and dreamed she was pursued by a crowd, hooting after her, and calling her all the terrible names of those who spread evil reports. She woke in misery, and slept no more.

CHAPTER LII.

A SUMMONS

One hot Saturday afternoon, in the sleepiest time of the day, when nothing was doing; and nobody in the shop, except a poor boy who had come begging for some string to help him fly his kite, though for the last month wind had been more scarce than string, Jemima came in from Durnmelling, and, greeting Mary with the warmth of the friendship that had always been true between them, gave her a letter.

"Whom is this from?" asked Mary, with the usual human waste of inquiry, seeing she held the surest answer in her hand.

"Mr. Mewks gave it me," said Jemima. "He didn't say whom it was from."

Mary made haste to open it: she had an instinctive distrust of everything that passed through Mewks's hands, and greatly feared that, much as his master trusted him, he was not true to him. She found the following note from Mr. Redmain:

"DEAR MISS MARSTON: Come and see me as soon as you can; I have something to talk to you about. Send word by the bearer when I may look for you. I am not well.

"Yours truly,

"F. G. REDMAIN."

Mary went to her desk and wrote a reply, saying she would be with him the next morning about eleven o'clock. She would have gone that same night, she said, but, as it was Saturday, she could not, because of country customers, close in time to go so far.

"Give it into Mr. Redmain's own hand, if you can, Jemima," she said.

"I will try; but I doubt if I can, miss," answered the girl.

"Between ourselves, Jemima," said Mary, "I do not trust that man Mewks."

"Nobody does, miss, except the master and Miss Yolland."

"Then," thought Mary, "the thing is worse than I had supposed."

"I'll do what I can, miss," Jemima went on. "But he's so sharp!—Mr. Mewks, I mean."

After she was gone, Mary wished she had given her a verbal message; that she might have insisted on delivering in person.

Jemima, with circumspection, managed to reach Mr. Redmain's room unencountered, but just as she knocked at the door, Mewks came behind her from somewhere, and snatching the letter out of her hand, for she carried it ready to justify her entrance to the first glance of her irritable master, pushed her rudely away, and immediately went in. But as he did so he put the letter in his pocket.

"Who took the note?" asked his master.

"The girl at the lodge, sir."

"Is she not come back yet?"

"No, sir, not yet. She'll be in a minute, though. I saw her coming up the avenue."

"Go and bring her here."

"Yes, sir."

Mewks went, and in two minutes returned with the letter, and the message that Miss Marston hadn't time to direct it.

"You damned rascal! I told you to bring the messenger here."

"She ran the whole way, sir, and not being very strong, was that tired, that, the moment she got in, the poor thing dropped in a dead faint. They ain't got her to yet."

His master gave him one look straight in the eyes, then opened the letter, and read it.

"Miss Marston will call here tomorrow morning," he said; "see that she is shown up at once—here, to my sitting-room. I hope I am explicit."

When the man was gone, Mr. Redmain nodded his head three times, and grinned the skin tight as a drum-head over his cheek-bones.

"There isn't a damned soul of them to be trusted!" he said to himself, and sat silently thoughtful.

Perhaps he was thinking how often he had come short of the hope placed in him; times of reflection arrive to most men; and a threatened attack of the illness he believed must one day carry him off, might well have disposed him to think.

In the evening he was worse.

By midnight he was in agony, and Lady Margaret was up with him all night. In the morning came a lull, and Lady Margaret went to bed. His wife had not come near him. But Sepia might have been seen, more than once or twice, hovering about his door.

Both she and Mewks thought, after such a night, he must have forgotten his appointment with Mary.

When he had had some chocolate, he fell into a doze. But his sleep was far from profound. Often he woke and again dozed off.

The clock in the dressing-room struck eleven.

"Show Miss Marston up the moment she arrives," he said—and his voice was almost like that of a man in health.

"Yes, sir," replied the startled Mewks, and felt he must obey.

So Mary was at once shown to the chamber of the sick man.

To her surprise (for Mewks had given her no warning), he was in bed, and looking as ill as ever she had seen him. His small head was like a skull covered with parchment. He made the slightest of signs to her to come nearer—and again. She went close to the bed. Mewks sat down at the foot of it, out of sight. It was a great four-post-bed, with curtains.

"I'm glad you're come," he said, with a feeble grin, all he had for a smile. "I want to have a little talk with you. But I can't while that brute is sitting there. I have been suffering horribly. Look at me, and tell me if you think I am going to die—not that I take your opinion for worth anything. That's not what I wanted you for, though. I wasn't so ill then. But I want you the more to talk to now. You have a bit of a heart, even for people that don't deserve it—at least I'm going to believe you have; and, if I am wrong, I almost think I would rather not know it till I'm dead and gone!—Good God! where shall I be then?"

I have already said that, whether in consequence of remnants of mother-teaching or from the movements of a conscience that had more vitality than any of his so-called friends would have credited it with, Mr. Redmain, as often as his sufferings reached a certain point, was subject to fits of terror—horrible anguish it sometimes amounted to—at the thought of hell. This, of course, was silly, seeing hell is out of fashion in far wider circles than that of Mayfair; but denial does not alter fact, and not always fear. Mr. Redmain laughed when he was well, and shook when he was suffering. In vain he argued with himself that what he held by when in health was much more likely to be true than a dread which might be but the suggestion of the disease that was slowly gnawing him to death: as often as the sickness returned, he received the suggestion afresh, whatever might be its source, and trembled as before. In vain he accused himself of cowardice—the thing was there—in him —nothing could drive it out. And, verily, even a madman may be wiser than the prudent of this world; and the courage of not a few would forsake them if they dared but look the danger in the face. I pity the poor ostrich, and must I admire the man of whose kind he is the type, or take him in any sense for a man of courage? Wait till the thing stares you in the face, and then, whether you be brave man or coward, you will at all events care little about courage or cowardice. The nearer a man is to being a true man, the sooner will conscience of wrong make a coward of him; and herein Redmain had a far-off kindred with the just. After the night he had passed, he was now in one of his terror-fits; and this much may be said for his good sense—that, if there was anywhere a hell for the use of anybody, he was justified in anticipating a free entrance.

"Mewks!" he called, suddenly, and his tone was loud and angry.

Mewks was by his bedside instantly.

"Get out with you! If I find you in this room again, without having been called, I will kill you! I am strong enough for that, even without this pain. They won't hang a dying man, and where I am going they will rather like it."

Mewks vanished.

"You need not mind, my girl," he went on, to Mary. "Everybody knows I am ill—very ill. Sit down there, on the foot of the bed, only take care you don't shake it, and let me talk to you. People, you know, say nowadays there ain't any hell—or perhaps none to speak of?"

"I should think the former more likely than the latter," said Mary.

"You don't believe there is any? I am glad of that! for you are a good girl, and ought to know."

"You mistake me, sir. How can I imagine there is no hell, when he said there was?"

"Who's he ?"

"The man who knows all about it, and means to put a stop to it some day."

"Oh, yes; I see! Hm!—But I don't for the life of me see what a fellow is to make of it all—don't you know? Those parsons! They will have it there's no way out of it but theirs, and I never could see a handle anywhere to that door!"

"I don't see what the parsons have got to do with it, or, at least, what you have got to do with the parsons. If a thing is true, you have as much to do with it as any parson in England; if it is not true, neither you nor they have anything to do with it."

"But, I tell you, if it be all as true as—as—that we are all sinners, I don't know what to do with it!"

"It seems to me a simple thing. That man as much as said he knew all about it, and came to find men that were lost, and take them home."

"He can't well find one more lost than I am! But how am I to believe it? How can it be true? It's ages since he was here, if ever he was at all, and there hasn't been a sign of him ever since, all the time!"

"There you may be quite wrong. I think I could find you some who believe him just as near them now as ever he was to his own brothers—believe that he hears them when they speak to him, and heeds what they say."

"That's bosh. You would have me believe against the evidence of my senses!"

"You must have strange senses, Mr. Redmain, that give you evidence where they can't possibly know anything! If that man spoke the truth when he was in the world, he is near us now; if he is not near us, there is an end of it all."

"The nearer he is, the worse for me!" sighed Mr. Redmain.

"The nearer he is, the better for the worst man that ever breathed."

"That's queer doctrine! Mind you, I don't say it mayn't be all right. But it does seem a cowardly thing to go asking him to save you, after you've been all your life doing what ought to damn you—if there be a hell, mind you, that is."

"But think," said Mary, "if that should be your only chance of being able to make up for the mischief you have done? No punishment you can have will do anything for that. No suffering of yours will do anything for those you have made suffer. But it is so much harder to leave the old way than to go on and let things take their chance!"

"There may be something in what you say; but still I can't see it anything better than sneaking, to do a world of mischief, and then slink away into heaven, leaving all the poor wretches to look after themselves."

"I don't think Jesus Christ is worse pleased with you for feeling like that," said Mary.

"Eh? What? What's that you say?—Jesus Christ worse pleased with me? That's a good one! As if he ever thought about a fellow like me!"

"If he did not, you would not be thinking about him just this minute, I suspect. There's no sense in it, if he does not think about you. He said himself he didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

"I wish I could repent."

"You can, if you will."

"I can't make myself sorry for what's gone and done with."

"No; it wants him to do that. But you can turn from your old ways, and ask him to take you for a pupil. Aren't you willing to learn, if he be willing to teach you?"

"I don't know. It's all so dull and stupid! I never could bear going to church."

"It's not one bit like that! It's like going to your mother, and saying you're going to try to be a good boy, and not vex her any more."

"I see. It's all right, I dare say! But I've had as much of it as I can stand! You see, I'm not used to such things. You go away, and send Mewks. Don't be far off, though, and mind you don't go home without letting me know. There! Go along."

She had just reached the door, when he called her again.

"I say! Mind whom you trust in this house. There's no harm in Mrs. Redmain; she only grows stupid directly she don't like a thing. But that Miss Yolland!—that woman's the devil. I know more about her than you or any one else. I can't bear her to be about Hesper; but, if I told her the half I know, she would not believe the half of that. I shall find a way, though. But I am forgetting! you know her as well as I do—that is, you would, if you were wicked enough to understand. I will tell you one of these days what, I am going to do. There! don't say a word. I want no advice on such things. Go along, and send Mewks."

With all his suspicion of the man, Mr. Redmain did not suspect how false Mewks was: he did not know that Miss Yolland had bewitched him for the sake of having an ally in the enemy's camp. All he could hear—and the dressing-room door was handy—the fellow duly reported to her. Already, instructed by her fears, she had almost divined what Mr. Redmain meant to do.

Mary went and sat on the lowest step of the stair just outside the room.

"What are you doing there?" said Lady Margaret, coming from the corridor.

"Mr. Redmain will not have me go yet, my lady," answered Mary, rising. "I must wait first till he sends for me."

Lady Margaret swept past her, murmuring, "Most peculiar!" Mary sat down again.

In about an hour, Mewks came and said his master wanted her.

He was very ill, and could not talk, but he would not let her go. He made her sit where he could see her, and now and then stretched out his hand to her. Even in his pain he showed a quieter spirit. "Something may be working—who can tell!" thought Mary.

It was late in the afternoon when at length he sought further conversation.

"I have been thinking, Mary," he said, "that if I do wake up in hell when I die, no matter how much I deserve it, nobody will be the better for it, and I shall be all the worse."

He spoke with coolness, but it was by a powerful effort: he had waked from a frightful dream, drenched from head to foot. Coward? No. He had reason to fear.

"Whereas," rejoined Mary, taking up his clew, "everybody will be the better if you keep out of it—everybody," she repeated, "—God, and Jesus Christ, and all their people."

"How do you make that out?" he asked. "God has more to do than look after such as me."

"You think he has so many worlds to look to—thousands of them only making? But why does he care about his worlds? Is it not because they are the schools of his souls? And why should he care for the souls? Is it not because he is making them children—his own children to understand him and be happy with his happiness?"

"I can't say I care for his happiness. I want my own. And yet I don't know any that's worth the worry of it. No; I would rather be put out like a candle."

"That's because you have been a disobedient child, taking your own way, and turning God's good things to evil. You don't know what a splendid thing life is. You actually and truly don't know, never experienced in your being the very thing you were made for."

"My father had no business to leave me so much money."

"You had no business to misuse it."

"I didn't quite know what I was doing."

"You do now."

Then came a pause.

"You think God hears prayer—do you?"

"I do."

"Then I wish you would ask him to let me off—I mean, to let me die right out when I do die. What's the good of making a body miserable?"

"That, I am sure it would be of no use to pray for. He certainly will not throw away a thing he has made, because that thing may be foolish enough to prefer the dust-hole to a cabinet."

"Wouldn't you do it now, if I asked you?"

"I would not. I would leave you in God's hands rather than inside the gate of heaven."

"I don't understand you. And you wouldn't say so if you cared for me! Only, why should you care for me?"

"I would give my life for you."

"Come, now! I don't believe that."

"Why, I couldn't be a Christian if I wouldn't!"

"You are getting absurd!" he cried. But he did not look exactly as if he thought it.

"Absurd!" repeated Mary. "Isn't that what makes him our Saviour? How could I be his disciple, if I wouldn't do as he did?"

"You are saying a good deal!"

"Can't you see that I have no choice?"

"I wouldn't do that for anybody under the sun!"

"You are not his disciple. You have not been going about with him."

"And you have?"

"Yes—for many years. Besides, I can not help thinking there is one for whom you would do it."

"If you mean my wife, you never were more mistaken. I would do nothing of the sort."

"I did not mean your wife. I mean Jesus Christ."

"Oh, I dare say! Well, perhaps; if I knew him as you do, and if I were quite sure he wanted it done for him."

"He does want it done for him—always and every day—not for his own sake, though it does make him very glad. To give up your way for his is to die for him; and, when any one will do that, then he is able to do everything for him; for then, and not till then, he gets such a hold of him that he can lift him up, and set him down beside himself. That's how my father used to teach me, and now I see it for myself to be true."

"It's all very grand, no doubt; but it ain't nowhere, you know. It's all in your own head, and nowhere else. You don't, you can't positively believe all that!"

"So much, at least, that I live in the strength and hope it gives me, and order my ways according to it."

"Why didn't you teach my wife so?"

"I tried, but she didn't care to think. I could not get any further with her. She has had no trouble yet to make her listen."

"By Jove! I should have thought marrying a fellow like me might have been trouble enough to make a saint of her."

It was impossible to fix him to any line of thought, and Mary did not attempt it. To move the child in him was more than all argument.

A pause followed. "I don't love God," he said.

"I dare say not," replied Mary. "How should you, when you don't know him?"

"Then what's to be done? I can't very well show myself where I hate the master of the house!"

"If you knew him, you would love him."

"You are judging by yourself. But there is as much difference between you and me as between light and darkness."

"Not quite that," replied Mary, with one of those smiles that used to make her father feel as if she were that moment come fresh from God to him. "If you knew Jesus Christ, you could not help loving him, and to love him is to love God."

"You wear me out! Will you never come to the point? Know Jesus Christ! How am I to go back two thousand years?"

"What he was then he is now," answered Mary. "And you may even know him better than they did at the time who saw him; for it was not until they understood him better, by his being taken from them, that they wrote down his life."

"I suppose you mean I must read the New Testament?" said Mr. Redmain, pettishly.

"Of course!" answered Mary, a little surprised; for she was unaware how few have a notion what the New Testament is, or is meant for.

"Then why didn't you say so at first? There I have you! That's just where I learn that I must be damned for ever!"

"I don't mean the Epistles. Those you can't understand—yet."

"I'm glad you don't mean them. I hate them."

"I don't wonder. You have never seen a single shine of what they are; and what most people think them is hardly the least like them. What I want you to read is the life and death of the son of man, the master of men."

"I can't read. I should only make myself twice as ill. I won't try."

"But I will read to you, if you will let me."

"How comes it you are such a theologian? A woman is not expected to know about that sort of thing."

"I am no theologian. There just comes one of the cases in which those who call themselves his followers do not believe what the Master said: he said God hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to babes. I had a father who was child enough to know them, and I was child enough to believe him, and so grew able to understand them for myself. The whole secret is to do the thing the Master tells you: then you will understand what he tells you. The opinion of the wisest man, if he does not do the things he reads, is not worth a rush. He may be partly right, but you have no reason to trust him."

"Well, you shall be my chaplain. To-morrow, if I'm able to listen, you shall see what you can make of the old sinner."

Mary did not waste words: where would have been the use of pulling up the poor spiritual clodpole at every lumbering step, at any word inconsistent with the holy manners of the high countries? Once get him to court, and the power of the presence would subdue him, and make him over again from the beginning, without which absolute renewal the best observance of religious etiquette is worse than worthless. Many good people are such sticklers for the proprieties! For myself, I take joyous refuge with the grand, simple, every-day humanity of the man I find in the story—the man with the heart like that of my father and my mother and my brothers and sisters. If I may but see and help to show him a little as he lived to show himself, and not as church talk and church ways and church ceremonies and church theories and church plans of salvation and church worldliness generally have obscured him for hundreds of years, and will yet obscure him for hundreds more!