A Mad Marriage, May Agnes Fleming [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

the safety, dreary though it may have

been—and to-morrow she must go forth out into the great, pitiless

world, with only her beautiful face and her wicked heart to make her

way. What dark story lay behind her? I wondered; and was this fair,

forsaken wife most to be pitied or blamed?

 

The hours of the evening crept on—ten, eleven; she never stirred. And

when, sometime before midnight, I crept away with my baby to my room,

the motionless little figure was there at the window still.

 

Next morning dawned cloudless and fair. Bettine was up betimes to

prepare breakfast—for the last time I served my little mistress. She

was dead silent through it all, and ate it in her travelling suit of

dark gray, all ready to depart. There was a train at nine; it was

half-past eight now, and the cabriolet ordered from Quebec was at the

door. She stooped for a moment over her babe; but even in this parting

hour she never kissed it, and my heart hardened against her once more.

 

“It is as Bettine says,” I thought; “she has the face of an angel and

the heart of a stone.”

 

Even as I thought it, she arose and looked at me—that charming smile

upon her charming face, that had bewitched me against my will the very

first time we met, that bewitched me out of my hot anger once again. She

held out her hand.

 

“Good-by, my solemn Joan. Don’t think too badly or me when I am gone—a

poor little woman with whom life has gone hard. You are a good girl, and

I shall always keep a grateful remembrance of you in my none too tender

heart. Take good care of my baby—you shall be amply rewarded. I may

come back years from now to look at it—who knows? At all events you

will hear from me monthly. And, if we never meet again, let me thank you

once more for your faithful and patient companionship all these months.”

 

They were the last words she ever spoke in Saltmarsh. In the yellow

sunshine of the soft summer day Mrs. Gordon passed out of the House to

Let, and out of my life forever. I watched her enter the cab, caught one

last glimpse of a pale, lovely face, of a little gloved hand waving from

the window, then the driver cracked his whip, and they were whirling

away in a cloud of dust to where quaint, gray, silent old Quebec slept

in morning quiet, the golden sunshine flooding its steep streets, its

tin roofs, its lofty spires, its high stone walls. Mrs. Gordon was gone.

 

Before nightfall I had taken the baby home and dismissed Bettine. Part

of the furniture I kept, part I sent into Quebec and sold. Late in the

evening I carried the key to Mr. Barteaux, with his rent, and on my

return my own hands replaced the placard over the gate. Saltmarsh was

once more a “House to Let.”

 

She had come among us a mystery—she left us a greater mystery still. I

write this record for the child’s sake—one day it may need it. I feel

that the story I have told does not end here, that it is but the prelude

to what is to come. So surely as that woman and this child live and

meet, trouble—sad and deep trouble to that man Gordon Caryll—will come

of it. I say again I write this for the child’s sake. One day, even what

I have set down here may be of use to her. If I die I will place it in

safe hands, to be given to her, and so I sign myself

 

JOAN KENNEDY.

 

CHAPTER V.

 

AT CARYLLYNNE.

 

Many miles away, many miles of land, many leagues of sea, far beyond

that “city set on the hill,” Quebec, far away in fair England, lay the

broad domain of Caryllynne, Gordon Caryll’s ancestral home.

 

It lay in one of the brightest, sunniest of the sunny sea-side shires, a

fair and stately inheritance, stretching away for miles of woodland and

meadowland, to the wide sea, sparkling in the late August sunshine, as

if sown with stars.

 

Under a massive Norman arch, between lofty iron gates, you went up a

sweep of broad drive, with a waving sea of many-colored foliage on

either hand, slim, silver-stemmed birches, copper beeches with leaves

like blood-red rubies, sombre pines, hoary oaks, graceful elms, and

whole rows of prim poplars, those “old maids of the wood.” Far away this

brilliant forest of Caryllynne stretched to the emerald cliffs above the

bright summer sea, to the little village nestling between those green

cliffs, a village which for two centuries had called the Squire of

Caryllynne, lord.

 

You went up this noble avenue for a mile or more past the picturesque

Swiss cottage that did duty as a gate lodge, past green and golden

slopes of sward, past parterres bright with gorgeous autumnal flowers,

to the Manor house itself, an irregular structure of gray stone,

turreted and many-gabled and much ivy-grown. There was a stately portico

entrance, a flight of shallow-stone steps, and two couchant stone dogs,

with the ancient motto, “Cave canim.” It was a very old house, one

portion as old as the reign of the greatly-married-man, Henry the

Eighth. A gift, indeed, from his Most Christian Majesty to Sir Jasper

Caryll, Knight, and cousin of Katherine Parr, on the happy occasion of

his last marriage.

 

Sir Jasper Caryll, Kt., had been sleeping beneath the chancel of

Roxhaven Church for three hundred odd years, with a brass tablet above

him recording his virtues; and many Carylls had been born and married,

and had died, within those gray stone walls since. The old, old business

of life, “Hatching, Matching, and Dispatching,” had gone on and on

within those antique chambers; and Mistress Marian Caryll, widow of the

late Godfrey Caryll, reigned now in the Manor alone.

 

The old house had been modernized. Plate-glass windows, a tessellated

hall, velvet-carpeted stairways, conservatories gay with flowers, these

made the ancient dwelling bright. Flowers, indeed, were everywhere, in

gilded vases in half a hundred nooks, in swinging baskets from the

ceilings, and over all the amber August sunshine slanting like golden

rain.

 

The last light of the brilliant autumn day was falling softly over sea

and woodland, meadow and copse; the western windows of the Manor, facing

seaward, glinted through the trees like sparks of fire. The sweet,

tremulous hush of eventide lay over the land, as through the park gates

a pony phaeton dashed up the long, tree-shaded drive. Two black

high-steppers, a dainty little basket carriage, and a lady sitting very

erect and upright, driving with a strong, firm hand—a lady in sweeping

crapes and sables—in widow’s weeds—the mistress of this fair domain.

 

A groom came forward to hold the horses. As she flung him the reins and

stepped out you saw that Mrs. Caryll was a very tall and stately lady,

bearing her forty years of life well. A tall, pale, rather cold, rather

stern, rather haughty lady, handsomer perhaps in her stately middle age

than she could ever have been in youth.

 

“I have driven the ponies very fast from Dynely Abbey, Morgan,” she said

to the groom; “see that they are slowly exercised and well rubbed down.

Has the post arrived?”

 

The man made a sort of half military salute, as to his commanding

officer.

 

“Post came ‘alf an hour ago, ma’am. I’ll attend to the ponies, ma’am,

all right.”

 

Mrs. Caryll passed on with a slow and measured sort of tread up the

stone steps, past the great couchant dogs, along the vast domed hall,

hung with suits of mail and antlered heads, up the wide stairway and

into her own rooms. The rose light of the sunset filled those elegantly

appointed apartments, and lying upon an inlaid table the mistress of the

Manor saw what she looked for—a sealed letter. Her heart gave a bound,

cold and well disciplined as it was, but (it was characteristic of the

woman) before taking it up, she slowly laid aside her bonnet and veil,

drew off her gloves, and then deliberately lifted it. A moment she

paused to glance at the free flowing writing she knew so well, then she

opened and read:

 

LONDON, August 25th, 18—.

 

MY DEAREST MOTHER:—I have arrived but this moment. By the first

train I leave for home. I write this simply to announce my coming.

I will be with you almost as soon as my note. I know that in spite

of all you will grant me this last interview at least.

 

Your affectionate son,

 

GORDON CARYLL.

 

She crushed the brief letter in her strong white hand. Her fixedly pale

face, even in the glow of the sunset, seemed to grow paler, her firm

lips set themselves in one tight unpleasant line.

 

“‘My dearest mother!’ ‘Your affectionate son,’” she said, bitterly,

looking at the letter. “Yes, I will see him—he is right—for the last

time. After to-night I shall be as though I never had a child.”

 

She folded the letter, laid it aside methodically in a drawer with many

others. Slow, methodical habits had become second nature to Mrs. Caryll.

“Yes,” she thought, “I will see him once more—once more. Whatever he

may have to say in his own defence I will hear. To him and to all

mankind I trust I shall always do my duty. But come what may, after

to-night I will never see him again.”

 

She looked at her watch—the train that would possibly bring him was due

even now. In a little time he would be with her. For two years she had

not seen him—he had been her darling, the treasure of her heart, the

apple of her eye, the “only son of his mother, and she was a widow.” Her

whole soul cried out for him, and she stood here, and crushed down every

voice of nature, and calmly resolved after this once to see him no more

forever.

 

She walked across the room, and paused before the chimney-piece. Two

pictures hung above it—the only two this room contained—two portraits.

One, the one at which she looked, was the portrait of her husband,

painted twenty years ago, in the gallant and golden days of his youth, a

present to his bride. A handsome face; the Carylls had ever been

handsome men; and this proud, self-contained woman had loved her husband

with a great and deathless love. Now, he too lay in Roxhaven church;

only a month ago they had laid him there, glad to escape by death the

shame brought upon him by an only son.

 

“There are some things that Heaven itself will not ask us to forgive,”

was her thought—“this is one of them.”

 

Beneath this portrait hung the other, a smaller one, of her son. Two

years ago that had been painted, on the eve of his departure for Canada

with his regiment. The frank fair face of the lad of twenty, gray-eyed

and yellow-haired, smiled at her from the canvas. With a resolute hand

she took it down, and turned it with the face to the wall. A little

thing again, but it told how small the mercy Gordon Caryll might expect

when he stood before his mother.

 

It had grown dark—the pale August moon rose up the misty sky. The

trees, waving faintly in the salt sea wind, cast long, slanting shadows

across the dusty whiteness of the high road, as from the town beyond,

from the brightly lit station, a fly from the railway drove through the

gates and up the moonlit avenue to the house. A young man sprang out,

paid and