He had conquered then, as he hoped to conquer now, having an energetic nature, and a strong faith in man’s power to master fortune by honest work and patience.
There was no time lost after once his decision was arrived at. He began to put his affairs in order for departure immediately, and wrote to Marian within a few hours of making up his mind as to the necessity of this voyage. He told her frankly all that had happened, that their fortune was at stake, and that it was his bounden duty to take this step, hard as it might seem to him. He could not leave England without seeing her once more, he said, recently as they had parted, and brief as his leisure must needs be. There were so many things he would have to say to her on the eve of this cruel separation.
He went down to Lidford one evening when all the arrangements for his voyage were complete, and he had two clear days at his disposal before the vessel he was to go in left Liverpool. The Listers were very much surprised and shocked when he told them what he was going to do; Mrs. Lister bitterly bewailing the insecurity of all commercial positions, and appearing to consider her brother on the verge of bankruptcy.
He found a warm welcome at the cottage from the Captain, who heartily approved of the course he was taking, and was full of hopefulness about the future.
“A few months more or less can make little difference,” he said, when Gilbert was lamenting the postponement of his wedding. “Marian will be quite safe in her old uncle’s care; and I do not suppose either of you will love each other any the less for the delay. I have such perfect confidence in you, Gilbert, you see; and it is such a happiness to me to know that my darling’s future is in the hands of a man I can so thoroughly trust. Were you reduced to absolute poverty, with the battle of life to fight all over again, I would give you my dear girl without fear of the issue. I know you are of the stuff that is not to be beaten; and I believe that neither time nor circumstance could ever change your love for her.”
“You may believe that. Every day makes her dearer to me. I should be ashamed to tell you how bitterly I feel this parting, and what a desperate mental struggle I went through before I could make up my mind to go.”
Marian came into the room in the midst of this conversation. She was very pale, and her eyes had a dull, heavy look. The bad news in Gilbert’s letter had distressed her even more than he had anticipated.
“My darling,” he said tenderly, looking down at the changed face, with her cold hand clasped in his own, “how ill you are looking! I fear I made my letter too dismal, and that it frightened you.”
“Oh no, no. I am very sorry you should have this bad fortune, Gilbert, that is all.”
“There is nothing which I do not hope to repair, dear. The losses are not more than I can stand. All that I take to heart is the separation from you, Marian.”
“I am not worth so much regret,” she said, with her eyes fixed upon the ground, and her hands clasping and unclasping each other nervously.
“Not worth so much regret, Marian!” he exclaimed. “You are all the world to me; the beginning and end of my universe.”
She looked a little brighter by-and-by, when her lover had done his best to cheer her with hopeful talk, which cost him no small effort in the depressed state of his mind. The day went by very slowly, although it was the last which those two were to spend together until Gilbert Fenton’s return. It was a hopelessly wet day, with a perpetual drizzling rain and a leaden-gray sky; weather which seemed to harmonise well enough with the pervading gloom of Gilbert’s thoughts as he stood by the fire, leaning against an angle of the mantelpiece, and watching Marian’s needle moving monotonously in and out of the canvas.
The Captain, who led an easy comfortable kind of life at all times, was apt to dispose of a good deal of his leisure in slumber upon such a day as this. He sat down in his own particular easy-chair, dozing behind the shelter of a newspaper, and lulled agreeably by the low sound of Gilbert and Marian’s conversation.
So the quiet hours went by, overshadowed by the gloom of that approaching separation. After dinner, when they had returned to the drawing-room, and Captain Sedgewick had refreshed his intellectual powers with copious draughts of strong tea, he began to talk of Marian’s childhood, and the circumstances which had thrown her into his hand.
“I don’t suppose my little girl ever showed you her mother’s jewel-case, did she, Gilbert?” he asked.
“Never.”
“I thought as much. It contains that old-fashioned jewelry I spoke of — family relics, which I have sometimes fancied might be of use to her, if ever her birthright were worth claiming. But I doubt if that will ever happen now that so many years have gone by, and there has been no endeavour to trace her. Run and fetch the case, Marian. There are some of its contents which Gilbert ought to see before he leaves England — papers which I intended to show him when I first told him your mother’s story.”
Marian left them, and came back in a few minutes carrying an old-fashioned ebony jewel-case, inlaid with brass. She unlocked it with a little key hanging to her watch-chain, and exhibited its contents to Gilbert Fenton. There were some curious old rings, of no great value; a seal-ring with a crest cut on a bloodstone — a crest of that common kind of device which does not imply noble or ancient lineage on the part of the bearer thereof; a necklace and earrings of amethyst; a gold bracelet with a miniature of a young man, whose handsome face had a hard disagreeable expression; a locket containing grey hair, and having a date and the initials “M.G.” engraved on the massive plain gold case.
These were all the trinkets. In a secret drawer there was a certificate of marriage between Percival Nowell, bachelor, gentleman, and Lucy Geoffry, spinster, at St. Pancras Church, London. The most interesting contents of the jewel-case consisted of a small packet of letters written by Percival Nowell to Lucy Geoffry before their marriage.
“I have read them carefully ever so many times, with the notion that they might throw some light upon Mr. and Mrs. Nowell’s antecedents,” said the Captain, as Gilbert held these in his hands, disinclined to look at documents of so private and sacred a character; “but they tell very little. I fancy that Miss Geoffry was a governess in some family in London — the envelopes are missing, you see, so there is no evidence as to where she was living, except that it was in London — and that she left her employment to marry this Percival Nowell. You’d like to read the letters yourself, I daresay, Gilbert. Put them in your pocket, and look them over at your leisure when you get home. You can bring them back before you leave Lidford.”
Mr. Fenton glanced at Marian to see if she had any objection to his reading the letters. She was quite silent, looking absently at the trinkets lying in the tray before her.
“You don’t mind my reading your father’s letters, Marian?” he asked.
“Not at all. Only I think you will find them very uninteresting.”
“I am interested in everything that concerns you.”
He put the papers in his pocket, and sat up for an hour in his room that night reading Percival Nowell’s love letters. They revealed very little to him, except the unmitigated selfishness of the writer. That quality exhibited itself in every page. The lovers had met for the first time at the house of some Mr. Crosby, in whose family Miss Geoffry seemed to be living; and there were clandestine meetings spoken of in the Regent’s Park, for which reason Gilbert supposed Mr. Crosby’s house must have been in that locality. There were broken appointments, for which Miss Geoffry was bitterly reproached by her lover, who abused the whole Crosby household in a venomous manner for having kept her at home at these times.
“If you loved me, as you pretend, Lucy,” Mr. Nowell wrote on one occasion, “you would speedily exchange this degrading slavery for liberty and happiness with me, and would be content to leave the future utterly in my hands, without question or fear. A really generous woman would do this.”
There was a good deal more to the same effect, and it seemed as if the proposal of marriage came at last rather reluctantly; but
it did come, and was repeated, and urged in a very pressing manner; while Lucy Geoffry to the last appeared to have hung back, as if dreading the result of that union.
The letters told little of the writer’s circumstances or social status. Whenever he alluded to his father, it was with anger and contempt, and in a manner that implied some quarrel between them; but there was nothing to indicate what kind of man the father was.
Gilbert Fenton took the packet back to the cottage next morning. He was to return to London that afternoon, and had only a few hours to spend with Marian. The day was dull and cold, but there was no rain; and they walked together in the garden, where the leaves were beginning to fall, and whence every appearance of summer seemed to have vanished since Gilbert’s last visit.
For some time they were both rather silent, pacing thoughtfully up and down the sheltered walk that bounded the lawn. Gilbert found it impossible to put on an appearance of hopefulness on this last day. It was better wholly to give up the attempt, and resign himself to the gloom that brooded over him, shutting out the future. That airy castle of his — the villa on the banks of the Thames — seemed to have faded and vanished altogether. He could not look beyond the Australian journey to the happy time of his return. The hazards of time and distance bewildered him. He felt an unspeakable dread of the distance that was to divide him from Marian Nowell — a dread that grew stronger with every hour. He was destined to suffer a fresh pang before the moment of parting came. Marian turned to him by-and-by with an earnest anxious face, and said, —
“Gilbert, there is something which I think I ought to say to you before you go away.”
“What is that, my darling?”
“It is rather hard to say. I fear it will give you pain. I have been thinking about it for a long time. The thought has been a constant reproach to me. Gilbert, it would be better if we were both free; better if you could leave England without any tie to weigh you down with anxieties when you are out yonder, and will have so much occasion for perfect freedom of mind.”
“Marian!”
“O, pray, pray don’t think me ungrateful or unmindful of your goodness to me. I am only anxious for your happiness. I am not steady enough, or fixed enough, in my mind. I am not worthy of all the thought and care you have given me.”
“Marian, have I done anything to forfeit your love?”
“O no, no.”
“Then why do you say these things to me? Do you want to break my heart?”
“Would it break your heart if I were to recall my promise, Gilbert?”
“Yes, Marian,” he answered gravely, drawing her suddenly to him, and looking into her face with earnest scrutinising eyes; “but if you do not love me, if you cannot love me — and God knows how happy I have been in the belief that I had won your love long ago — let the word be spoken. I will bear it, my dear, I will bear it.”
“O no, no,” she cried, shocked by the dead whiteness of his face, and bursting into tears. “I will try to be worthy of you. I will try to love you as you deserve to be loved. It was only a fancy of mine that it would be better for you to be free from all thoughts of me. I think it would seem very hard to me to lose your love. I don’t think I could bear that, Gilbert.”
She looked up at him with an appealing expression through her tears — an innocent, half-childish look that went to his heart — and he clasped her to his breast, believing that this proposal to set him free had been indeed nothing more than a girlish caprice.
“My dearest, my life is bound up with your love,” he said. “Nothing can part us except your ceasing to love me.”
* * *
CHAPTER VII
“GOOD-BYE”
The hour for the final parting came at last, and Gilbert Fenton turned his back upon the little gate by which he had watched Marian Nowell standing upon that first summer Sunday evening which sealed his destiny.
He left Lidford weary at heart, weighed down by a depression he had vainly struggled against, and he brooded over his troubles all the way back to town. It seemed as if all the hopes that had made life so sweet to him only a week ago had been swept away. He could not look beyond that dreary Australian exile; he could not bring his thoughts to bear upon the time that was to come afterwards, and which need be no less bright because of this delay.
“She may die while I am away,” he thought. “O God, if that were to happen! If I were to come back and find her dead! Such things have been; and men and women have borne them, and gone on living.”
He had one more duty to perform before he left England. He had to say good-bye to John Saltram, whom he had not seen since they parted that night at Lidford. He could not leave England without some kind of farewell to his old friend, and he had reserved this last evening for the duty.
He went to the Pnyx on the chance of finding Saltram there, and failing in that, ate his solitary dinner in the coffee-room. The waiters told him that Mr. Saltram had not been at the club for some weeks. Gilbert did not waste much time over his dinner, and went straight from the Pnyx to the Temple, where John Saltram had a second-floor in Figtree-court.
Mr. Saltram was at home. It was his own sonorous voice which answered Gilbert’s knock, bidding him enter with a muttered curse upon the interruption by way of addendum. The room into which Mr. Fenton went upon receiving this unpromising invitation was in a state of chaotic confusion. An open portmanteau sprawled upon the floor, and a whole wardrobe of masculine garments seemed to have been shot at random on to the chairs near it; a dozen soda-water bottles, full and empty, were huddled in one corner; a tea-tray tottered on the extreme edge of a table heaped with dusty books and papers; and at a desk in the centre of the room, with a great paraffin lamp flaring upon his face as he wrote, sat John Saltram, surrounded by fallen slips of copy, writing as if to win a wager.
“Who is it? and what do you want?” he asked in a husky voice, without looking up from his paper or suspending the rapid progress of his pen.
“Why, Jack, I don’t think I ever caught you so hard at work before.”
John Saltram dropped his pen at the sound of his friend’s voice and got up. He gave Gilbert his hand in a mechanical kind of way.
“No, I don’t generally go at it quite so hard; but you know I have a knack of doing things against time. I have been giving myself a spell of hard work in order to pick up a little cash for the children of Israel.”
He dropped back into his chair, and Gilbert took one opposite him. The lamp shone full upon John Saltram’s face as he sat at his desk; and after looking at him for a moment by that vivid light, Gilbert Fenton gave a cry of surprise.
“What is the matter, Gil?”
“You are the matter. You are looking as worn and haggard as if you’d had a long illness since I saw you last. I never remember you looking so ill. This kind of thing won’t do, John. You’d soon kill yourself at this rate.”
“Not to be done, my dear fellow. I am the toughest thing in creation. I have been sitting up all night for the last week or so, and that does rather impair the freshness of one’s complexion; but I assure you there’s nothing so good for a man as a week or two of unbroken work. I have been doing an exhaustive review of Roman literature for one of the quarterlies, and the subject involved a little more reading than I was quite prepared for.”
“And you have really not been ill?”
“Not in the least. I am never ill.”
He pushed aside his papers, and sat with his elbow on the desk and his head leaning on his hand, waiting for Gilbert to talk. He was evidently in one of those silent moods which were common to him at times.
Gilbert told him of his Melbourne troubles, and of his immediate departure. The announcement roused him from his absent humour. He dropped his arm from the table suddenly, and sat looking full at Gilbert with a very intent expression.
“This is strange news,” he said, “and it will cause the postponement of your marriage, I suppose?”
“Unhappily, yes; that is unavoidable. Ha
rd lines, isn’t it, Jack?”
“Well, yes; I daresay the separation seems rather a hardship; but you are young enough to stand a few months’ delay. When do you sail?”
“To-morrow.”
“So soon?”
“Yes. It is a case in which everything depends upon rapidity of action. I leave Liverpool to-morrow afternoon. I came up from Lidford to-day on purpose to spend a few farewell hours with you. And I have been thinking, Jack, that you might run down to Liverpool with me to-morrow, and see the last of me, eh, old fellow?”
John Saltram hesitated, looking doubtfully at his papers.
“It would be only a kind thing to do, Jack, and a wholesome change for yourself into the bargain. Anything would be better for you than being shut up in these chambers another day.”
“Well, Gilbert, I’ll go with you,” said Mr. Saltram presently with a kind of recklessness. “It is a small thing to do for friendship. Yes, I’ll see you off, dear boy. Egad, I wish I could go to Australia with you. I would, if it were not for my engagements with the children and sundry other creditors. I think a new country might do me good. But there’s no use in talking about that. I’m bound hand and foot to the old one.”
“That reminds me of something I had to say to you, John. There must have been some reason for your leaving Lidford in that sudden way the other day, and your note explained nothing. I thought you and I had no secrets from each other, It’s scarcely fair to treat me like that.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 484
