Christina Part 30

"That carriage be come from t' 'White Horse' up to Graystone, to fetch Sir Arthur Congreve. Driver he told me so hisself."

"Very well, very well," Sir Arthur said impatiently, making his way to the carriage door, and opening it, before the porter, now engaged in thoughtfully scratching his head, had collected his wits sufficiently to perform this act of courtesy for the traveller. "I conclude you know where I am to be driven," he added, speaking to the man on the box.

"Yes, sir; to the house in the valley; the house where the gentleman----"

"That will do, as long as you know where you are to go," Sir Arthur said, cutting short the coachman's volubility, and entering the brougham, glad to sit back amongst the cushions, and shut the window against the sweeping blast.

The uplands looked their very greyest and worst on that December day.

A low grey sky stooped to meet the hill-sides, on which brown heather and brown bracken made a depressing tone of colour, to mingle with the greyness of the clouds, and of the mists that crept up from the valleys. The bareness of the wide stretch of moor was broken here and there by a clump of fir-trees, which showed dark and sombre against the grey background, and the fogginess of the atmosphere obscured the great view, which was usually the chief charm of the uplands. Sir Arthur was at no time an admirer of scenery, and to-day he turned his gaze shudderingly from the barren landscape; and, drawing a paper from his pocket, proceeded to bury himself in its contents, and to thrust the outer world as far as possible away from his consciousness. By nature an unimaginative man, he had ruthlessly stamped out any germ of imagination or poetry, which might have been latent within him, setting himself with grim resolution to thrust away the beautiful as a snare, and to regard everything about him as merely temporal and destructible.

He forgot, or perhaps he deliberately chose not to recognise, that the eternal is set around the temporal, not as a thing apart, but encompa.s.sing it, permeating it, so that temporal and eternal are one.

He had sternly set his face against all the softer aspects of life, doing his duty grimly, and with stiff back, disinclined at any time to any relaxation in discipline either for himself or his fellow-sinners--more ready to rule by fear than by love, a man who would have made an equally excellent Ironside or Grand Inquisitor, according to the peculiar turn of his religious convictions.

As he drove now along the lonely white road, his thoughts chiefly centred themselves upon Margaret, his beautiful sister Margaret, who, in spite of her sins and follies, as he considered them to be, had always held a place in her brother's heart. He gave her the place grudgingly; he would have gone to the stake rather than confess that her beauty made, or ever had made, any appeal to him. And yet, as he was driven quickly onwards under the lowering skies, it was his sister's beautiful face that rose persistently before him, her face, as he had last seen it, when she was a radiant girl, in the glory of her happy girlhood. It was odd; it was even annoying to him that just this particular vision out of the past should fill his mind now, but for once in his grim and well-disciplined life, he was unable to drive away the haunting vision.

The garden of the old house made the setting of the picture--the garden that was now his own, and the sunk lawn, with the sun-dial amongst the rose-trees, that had been his father's pride. Margaret had stood beside the sun-dial, on that far-off June day, her fingers lightly tracing the motto that ran round the dial's face, her laughing eyes lifted to her brother.

"Ah! but you don't believe in the motto, you see." The words came echoing back to him across the years, until he almost felt as though he could actually hear the low voice again, and Margaret's voice had always had such unspeakable charm.

"You think a motto like this just silly and sentimental, don't you, Arthur?" And once more her fingers had traced the faint lettering, whilst she slowly read the words aloud.

"_Per incertas, certa amor_." (Through uncertainty, certain is love.)

"I mean that to be my motto, as well as the motto of the sun-dial"; just a tiny ring of defiance seemed to creep into her voice with the last words; Sir Arthur remembered it even now, and he had answered her gravely, out of the depths of his convictions. He had spoken with solemnity, of duty, as higher than love; and she had laughed again, her deep soft laugh, though the look in her eyes had belied her laughter.

"Love is the greatest thing in the world," she had said, very slowly, very quietly, but the words rang with the sureness of a great certainty. "Love is the only thing that matters in all the world, because to love properly is to be perfect. Duty, right, goodness, they all follow upon love--real love. Love is the greatest thing in the world. Through all uncertainty--love is--sure."

Well, she had acted up to her creed. She had loved and suffered for a man who was not worthy to touch the hem of her garment, in his, Sir Arthur's, opinion;--but women, as he had before reflected, women had no sense of proportion; they were incomprehensible; Margaret no less incomprehensible than all the rest of her s.e.x. He had reached this point in his reflections when he observed that the carriage was no longer bowling along the smooth high road, but had turned into a steep, and rather rough lane, which wound downwards between high hedges, that presently merged themselves into dense woods, ending abruptly at last in a small clearing, upon which stood a house surrounded by a wall.

Before the green gate in this wall, the carriage stopped. Sir Arthur's keen eyes noted with approval, the quietly respectful manner of the old servant who admitted him; he had been more than half expecting to find himself in some kind of dread and unwonted Bohemia, the very thought of which sickened his soul; and Elizabeth, with that air of the old-fashioned maid, who has only lived in the right sort of house, impressed him favourably.

"My mistress wished me to take you straight to her room, sir," she said; "and the doctor asked me to say, that any great agitation would be very bad for her."

"Is she ill, then?" The question came with sharpness.

"Yes, sir, very ill. The doctor is anxious to keep her as quiet as possible; but he thought it best she should see you, her heart is so set upon it."

Those words made Sir Arthur's own heart contract a little, and before his mental vision there flashed again the beautiful radiant face of the girl in the white gown, the girl who had stood beside the sun-dial, saying in her deep sweet voice--

"Love is the greatest thing in the world."

The words still rang in his brain as Elizabeth ushered him into a big bedroom, and his eyes fell upon the woman propped up with pillows, her face turned towards the door.

The radiant face of the girl beside the sun-dial seemed to fade slowly from his mind, whilst he stood silently looking at the woman in the bed, the woman who put out her hand to him with a faint smile, and said softly--

"It was good of you to come, Arthur. You will let us meet now as friends after all these years?"

The words were a question rather than an a.s.sertion, but he did not answer the question. He stood as though rooted to the floor, staring at her, in an astonishment too great at first for words. Then he said slowly--

"But I shouldn't have known you--I shouldn't have known you, Margaret.

I can't believe----" He broke off abruptly, a tremor in his voice, and Margaret said gently--

"I daresay I am very much changed since you last saw me. In those days I was only a girl; now I am a woman, who has known so much of life--so very much of life. It seems as though my irresponsible girlhood belongs to another existence, and life has set its marks upon my face."

"Yes," he answered vaguely, still staring at her. "I am afraid--your life----"

"There has been very much sorrow--and very much joy," she interrupted, as gently as she had spoken before; "and now--I am within sight of the end, and--I am glad."

He came close to her, and for the first time touched her hand.

"Why do you say that?" he asked, his usually grim voice curiously softened. "You are ill now, but I hope with care--in time----"

She interrupted him again, a smile on her face.

"No, it is not a question of care, or time. I am glad it is not. It is only a question of how long my strength will hold out. You know--Max--is--dead?" She said the words as simply as though she were merely saying that somebody had gone into the next room, and her brother started.

"Dead?" he exclaimed. "No; I did not know. I heard he was in England, heard it vaguely and undecidedly, and I have been trying to find you both. I wanted to prevent any--any talk--any scandal."

"There need never be any talk now. He came to England--only a few weeks before he died. He--had been--wandering about Europe--and then he came--to England--to die." She spoke quietly, but the pauses in her sentence, seemed to show what a mental strain she was enduring.

"Marion helped him to get here. I was too ill to do it, and--I did not dare to do too much, lest through me any clue to his whereabouts should be given. I do not think he was ever safe--not safe for a single instant. But--he is out of their reach now--safe at last."

Sir Arthur's mouth set tightly, there was a gleam of indignation in his eyes, but he remembered the doctor's orders, and refrained from uttering the biting speech upon his lips.

"Marion--who is Marion?" he said.

"She was English maid to Max's mother--a faithful soul, such a faithful soul. All our letters to one another pa.s.sed through her hands. She took this house; she brought Max here; she sent for me; and then--the long strain told. She had borne so much; she could bear no more.

It--was all very dreadful; she lost her reason; she went suddenly mad; and the doctors do not think she can ever be well again. She is quite happy now, quite peaceful, they tell me, like a little child, but her mind has gone."

"And you, Margaret, surely now you must regret," Sir Arthur began impetuously, the natural man a.s.serting itself, in spite of all the doctor's warnings. But again his sister's low voice broke the thread of his speech.

"Regret?" she said. "Oh! no. It hurts me to think that I hurt our father and mother, but for myself--I cannot be sorry. I love him so, and for all our lives together, I had his love--he was always mine."

"But"--do what he would, Sir Arthur felt impelled to give voice to the flood of thought within him--"he was not worthy of you, Margaret. You can't pretend that he was worthy of your love?" A great rush of colour poured over her white face, her thin hands trembled.

"Worthiness or unworthiness do not seem to come into it at all," she answered, her voice all shaken and low. "When one loves, one loves in spite of everything--in spite of everything."

Something in her tone, and in the strange illumination of her eyes, momentarily silenced Sir Arthur; he dimly felt himself to be in the presence of a force infinitely greater than anything that had ever come into his own experience. He would not have owned that he had limitations--to a man of his type, the difficulty of owning to limitations is almost insuperable--but far down in the depths of his mind, he vaguely realised that Margaret had reached a height to which he had never attained.

"And--after all, Arthur--whatever you may feel," Margaret went on, more quietly, the colour ebbing from her face, "doesn't it still seem fairer to say--_De mortuis_----"

Sir Arthur bent his head; and before his mind rose the half-defaced letters of that other Latin proverb, which Margaret had traced with her finger on the sun-dial, out amongst the roses in the sunshine of June.

"_Per incertas, certa amor_."

And she was still certain of her love--in spite of--everything!

Silence fell between them after those last words of hers; and it was she who presently broke it, speaking with an effort, and in more ordinary and matter-of-fact tones.

"But I did not telegraph to you to come here, in order to worry you with any of my own affairs. I thought I ought to ask you to come, because a strange thing has happened--a most curious coincidence.

Bring that chair nearer to the bed, and sit down. You look so judicial standing over me."

Sir Arthur meekly obeyed, feeling within himself a faint wonder, at his own unquestioning obedience, yet compelled to do what that low voice commanded. There was a certain queenliness about this woman, a dignified aloofness, which had a curiously compelling effect upon those about her. The man who so obediently drew up a chair, and seated himself, felt it hard to realise that this was his own sister, his younger sister Margaret, whom in the days of their unregenerate youth, some people had called "Peg." It had been almost impossible to see in her changed face, the features of the beautiful girl who had laughed amongst the roses by the sun-dial, and yet, in spite of the change wrought by sorrow, and suffering, and the ploughshares of life, she was regally beautiful, even more beautiful than in the days of her girlhood.