it was a gusty, wild, and cloudy morning at faldon some days later, and hurstmanceaux sat in his library reading a communication which he had received from the head of the government. the epistle, which was written by the premier himself, offered him the governorship of a very important colony. the letter was extremely complimentary, and there was no possible reason to doubt its sincerity. it urged upon him the sacrifice of his independence to the welfare of his country, and hinted that as years passed on it became time to abandon certain eccentricities of opinion and habits of isolation. hurstmanceaux read it with the attention which the position of its writer demanded; but he did not waste many minutes in its consideration. it was not the first time that such offers had been pressed on him. the independence of his character was so well known, and his principles so much respected by all men, that his accession to the governing ranks would have been an increase of strength to those who were in office. but they had never been able to tempt him to forsake private for public life. he now wrote a very courteous but most decided refusal, expressing his sense of the compliment paid to him, sealed it with his signet ring, and sat still awhile at his writing-table thinking.
“i have never yet been in the scramble for the loaves and fishes,” he said to himself, “and i shall not begin now. he will find men enough and to spare who have outrun the constable, or who want handles to their names, and who will be delighted to go to the nether world and play at pseudo-sovereignty. faldon and my other poor places are kingdoms enough for me, small ones though they be; and jack’s active mind is colony enough to cultivate.”
whatever else jack might be, he was half a courcy, and must be brought up to be a man and a gentleman.
[569]at that moment jack came in followed by his dogs of all sizes, on whom ossian, lying in a reading-chair, opened a contemptuous eye; jack had permission to run free of the library as he liked. he had now a morning paper in his hand which he held out to his uncle.
“mr. adeane wishes me to ask you, please, if this is true,” he said, pointing to a paragraph marked by his tutor.
hurstmanceaux glanced at it. it announced his acceptance of the australian governorship. his brows contracted in displeasure. “nothing could be less true,” he answered. “it is true that the appointment has been offered to me. but tell adeane i decline it. leave the paper here, dear. i will send a contradiction.”
jack went out by one of the windows opening on a terrace as he had entered, his canine courtiers leaping about him, and hurstmanceaux took up the journal to see the date of the paragraph.
it was a journal of fashion and politics; the statement which concerned him was in a column containing other items of news; the name in one of these caught his eye; he read that the wife of william massarene was dead at her villa at bournemouth.
when katherine massarene closed her mother’s eyes she felt both regret and remorse. why had she not had patience and penetration enough to do justice to the unrecognized loyalty and affection in that existence of which he had only seen the envelope of flesh, only despised the narrowness and ignorance? she knew that she had never loved her mother; she felt that she must have often, very often, caused her pain and humiliation. she had persistently gazed at her mother’s foolishness and commonness; she had never tried to be just to her better qualities.
fine temperaments are always cruelly open to such self-reproach; she never ceased to blame her own heartlessness, and when she followed her only relative to the grave she said to herself, with exaggerated self-censure, that she had rolled more than one stone to her mother’s cairn.
she had indeed been indulgent, submissive, kind beyond[570] that which many would have thought incumbent upon her, but she forgot that she had been so; she only remembered her own lack of feeling, her own intolerance and antagonism, her own contemptuous isolation; all which had seemed as cold as greenland ice to the poor dead woman.
as regarded her own future she had made no plans. she would have liked to take charge of the children’s orphanage which she had founded in her mother’s name in county down; but she thought to do so would look as if she had been making a refuge for herself in creating the institution. she wished to gain her own living, without favor, simply by means of her head or her hands. she inclined toward music; she was enough of an artist to make her mark in it; but the publicity necessitated would, she knew, be very distasteful to her. for the moment she decided nothing, but when she had buried her mother in the crypt of vale royal, according to her last request, she returned to the house at bournemouth to pass there the few months during which it was still her own. the roxhalls had entreated her to remain with them, but she felt an imperative longing for solitude.
“you are much too young to live alone,” said roxhall to her.
“i feel a hundred years old,” she answered.
a great weight of what seemed to her unending regret lay like lead on her life. she was the more unhappy because happiness had been offered to her, and she had been obliged to refuse it, or had thought herself to be so obliged. it would have been happiness, great and wondrous happiness, but she tried not to think of it, lest the memory of what might have been should entirely unnerve her for the combat of her life to come. for one thing she was thankful—people had by this time quite ceased to talk about her. only a few old friends like the framlinghams and lady mary altringham wrote to her. nothing is easier than to drop out of people’s recollection if you wish it; nor is it difficult if you don’t.
she was a great deal on the sea and by the sea, and passed much of her time when on shore in the pine-wood[571] which belonged to the grounds. it was sheltered, and no one ever intruded there; and to argus it was a sylvan paradise.
a day or two after her mother’s funeral she was seated on the same bench where framlingham and hurstmanceaux had found her in an earlier time. she was reading a letter from one of the poor people whom she had raised from grinding misery in the states. it was a true and tender letter, none the less welcome because ill-writ and ill-spelt. sometimes these rude letters have more eloquence in them than lies in bossuet or john newman.
she read it twice, being touched by it, then laid it down on the bench and looked out seaward.
it was a november day, but still and bright. in the west, beyond the heaving expanse of grey water, the sun was going in rosy mists to his setting; the outline of a great liner was black against the horizon; midway in the channel there were some fishing boats, trawlers, who had put up lights betimes at their mastheads. her face looked very colorless as she sat there, the deep dull black of her dress made her skin look like snow itself, and her ungloved hands, as they rested on her lap, might have been the sculptured hands carved on the marble breast of some recumbent figure in a crypt.
“i have often wished to be alone and free,” she thought. “i have my wish.” and like most wishes in their fulfilment, this wish of hers was not very sweet.
“may i speak to you?” said a man’s voice, which thrilled through the innermost nerves of her being.
instinctively she rose. hurstmanceaux was standing as he had stood six months before; he had his face to the sunset; its light shone in his blue eyes; he uncovered his head; he did not touch her hand.
“i have come from faldon to see you,” he said. “i read of your mother’s death.”
she was silent; she had no idea what to say in answer.
“did she suffer?”
“no; happily, not much.”
“you buried her at vale royal?”
“yes; your cousin roxhall gave permission.”
“of course!”
[572]then silence ensued between them. the dog stood looking from one to another; the sun sank down beyond the edge of the far sea.
“i came to speak to you,” said hurstmanceaux with an effort. “i left you in anger and offence, and you had answered me, i think, in too great haste.”
“oh, no——”
“pardon me; hear me to the end. i have thought of little else since we parted. i have not left faldon. i have seen scarcely anyone, except my little nephew and his tutor. i have had full time for reflection. well, what i come to say to you is this. between you and me there ought not to come, there ought not to exist, any unworthy misunderstandings born of doubt, or temper, or suspicion. such are unworthy of us both.”
“there was no misunderstanding.”
“i think there was. you chose to conceive that i desired what i should regret if i obtained it, and i was too much in haste and in anger to prove to you your error. one does not persuade angels to bless one’s life, unless one wrestles with them. i took you by surprise. perhaps i spoke like a coxcomb in too great security. i should have remembered that all you had ever seen in me had been intolerable rudeness. i should have sued you more humbly——”
“oh, how can you say such things?”
“i say the truth. i was too rough, too rash, too confident. i want you to forget that: to only remember that in all i said i was entirely sincere, and that in all you objected in answer you were entirely wrong—absolutely and utterly mistaken. i once more offer you my name, my heart, my life. no man can do more. i earnestly entreat you not to let the world’s conventionalities or your own imaginations part us.”
she was profoundly moved by the words; she could not doubt their truth or their loyalty. incredible as it seemed to her, it was clear that this sentiment which had brought him hither twice was one both deep and lasting. but she could not and would not allow herself to be persuaded to his hurt.
“what did my poor mother say on her deathbed?[573] they sent me away from her to be ‘made a lady of.’ lord hurstmanceaux, your wife must be one born, not made.”
he was silent; he was the most truthful of men and he believed intensely in race.
“listen to me,” he said at last. “i should be false to the tenets of my life if i denied the influence of race. but there are exceptions to all laws. there are beggars whom a burleigh fitly mates with; that is, i think, for burleigh himself to judge. she cannot judge because, like all generous persons, if she had the casting vote, she would vote against herself. let me speak for once; and only for once, of a subject which is to me intolerable pain and shame. my sister, my best-beloved sister, who is thoroughbred in every pulse of her blood and every fibre of her being, dropped to the level of a courtezan for sake of money. she was—there can be no doubt of it—your father’s mistress; of details i know nothing, but the fact is beyond doubt.”
she tried to silence him.
“oh, why—oh, why distress yourself thus? he is dead—she is married again——”
“those circumstances alter nothing. the fact must have been—what i say. you yourself must have learnt or concluded it from his papers.”
she made no reply. she could not deny what was obvious.
“now,” said hurstmanceaux, and his face was white with pain as he spoke, “race did not keep unsoiled in her either our name or her own womanhood. i believe that you would keep both my honor and your own immaculate. if you could care for me, do not let apprehensions and doubts and mistrust divide our lives. i love you; is love so strange a word to you that you cannot even guess what it wishes and suffers?”
his eyes rested on hers as he spoke. it seemed as if a blaze of unbearable light inundated her soul.
“you love me!” she said in a hushed voice of great amaze.
“i love you. what is there so strange in that? i told you so six months ago.”
[574]she threw her arm round a young pine stem near her, and, leaning her forehead on its rough bark, burst into tears.
“lead me, guide me, take me if you will,” she said brokenly. “i have trusted to my own wisdom, and perhaps i have always done wrong.”
