Mildred Arkell Volume Iii Part 39

"_I_ loved _you_," murmured Travice, for he read that reproach aright, and the scales which had obscured his eyes fell from them, as by magic.

"I have long loved you--deeply, pa.s.sionately. My brightest hopes were fixed on you; the heyday visions of all my future existence represented you by my side, my wife. But these misfortunes and losses came thick and fast upon my father. They told me at home here, _he_ told me, that I was poor and that you were poor, and that it would be madness in us to think of marrying then, as it would have been. So I said to myself that I would be patient, and wait--would be content with loving you in secret, as I had done--with seeing you daily as a relative. And then the news burst upon me that you were to marry Tom Palmer; and I thought what a fool I had been to fancy you cared for me; for I knew that you were not one to marry where you did not love."

The tears were coursing down her cheeks. "But I don't understand," she said. "It is but just, as it were, that Tom has asked me; and you must be speaking of sometime ago."

The fault was Mildred's. Not quite all at once could they understand it; not until later.

"I shall never marry; indeed I shall never marry," murmured Lucy, as she yielded for the moment to the pa.s.sionate embrace in which Travice clasped her, and kissed away her tears of anguish. "My lot in life must be like my aunt's now, unloving and unloved."

"Oh, is there no escape for us!" exclaimed Travice, wildly, as all the painful embarra.s.sment of his position rushed over his mind. "Can we not fly together, Lucy--fly to some remote desert place, and leave care and sorrow behind us? Ere the lapse of many days, another woman expects to be my wife! Is there no way of escape for us?"

None; none. The misery of Travice Arkell and his cousin was sealed: their prospects, so far as this world went, were blighted. There were no means by which he could escape the marriage that was rushing on to him with the speed of wings: no means known in the code of honour. And for Lucy, what was left but to live on unwedded, burying her crushed affections within herself, as her aunt had done?--live on, and, by the help of time, strive to subdue that love which was burning in her heart for the husband of another, rendering every moment of the years that would pa.s.s, one continued, silent agony!

"The same fate--the same fate!" moaned Mildred Arkell to herself, whilst Lucy sunk into a chair and covered her pale face with her trembling hands. "I might have guessed it! Like aunt, like niece. She must go through life as I have done--and bear--and bear! Strange, that the younger brother's family, throughout two generations, should have cast their shadow for evil upon that of the elder! A blight must have fallen upon my father's race; but, perhaps in mercy, Lucy is the last of it. If I could have foreseen this, years ago, the same atmosphere in which lived Travice Arkell should not have been breathed by Lucy. The same fate! the same fate!"

Lucy was sobbing silently behind her hands. Travice stood, the image of despair. Mildred turned to him.

"Then you do not love Miss Fauntleroy?"

"Love her! I _hate_ her!" was the answer that burst from him in his misery. "May Heaven forgive me for the false part I shall have to play!"

But there was no escape for him. Mildred knew there was not; Mr. Arkell knew it; and his heart ached for the fate of this, his dearly-loved son.

"My boy," he said, "I would willingly die to save you--die to secure your happiness. I did not know this sacrifice was so very bitter."

Travice cast back a look of love. "You have done all you could for me; do not _you_ take it to heart. I may get to bear it in time."

"Get to _bear_ it!" What a volume of expression was in the words!

Mildred rose and approached Mr. Arkell.

"We had better be going, William. But oh! why did you let it come to this? Why did you not make a confidante of me?"

"I did not know you could help me, Mildred; indeed I did not."

"I will tell you who would have been as thankful to help you as I am--and that is your sister-in-law, Betsey Dund.y.k.e. She could have helped you more largely than I can."

"But not more lovingly. G.o.d bless you, Mildred!" he whispered, detaining her for a moment as she was following Travice and Lucy out.

Her eyes swam with tears as she looked up at him; her hands rested confidingly in his.

"If you knew what the happiness of serving you is, William! If you knew what a recompence this moment is for the bitter past!"

"G.o.d bless you, Mildred!" he repeated, "G.o.d bless you for ever."

She drew her veil over her face to pa.s.s out, just as she had drawn it after that interview, following his marriage, in the years gone by.

And so the credit of the good and respected old house was saved; saved by Mildred. Had it taken every farthing she had ama.s.sed; so that she must have gone forth again, in her middle age, and laboured for a living, she had rejoiced to do it! William Arkell had not waited until now, to know the value of the heart he had thrown away.

And the marriage day drew on. But before it dawned, Westerbury knew that it would bring no marriage with it. Miss Fauntleroy knew it. For the bridegroom was lying between life and death.

Of a sensitive, nervous, excitable temperament, the explanation of that evening, taken in conjunction with the dreadful tension to which his mind had been latterly subjected, far greater than any one had suspected, was too much for Travice Arkell. Conscious that Lucy Arkell pa.s.sionately loved him; knowing now that she had the money, without which he could not marry, and that part of that money was actually advanced to save his father's credit; knowing also, that he must never more think of her, but must tie himself to one whom he abhorred; that he and Lucy must never again see each other in life, but as friends, and not too much of that, he became ill. Reflection preyed upon him: remorse for doubting Lucy, and hastening to offer himself to Miss Fauntleroy, seated itself in his mind, and ere the day fixed for his marriage arrived, he was laid up with brain fever.

With brain fever! In vain they tried their remedies: their ice to his head; their cooling medicines; their blisters to his feet. His unconscious ravings were, at moments, distressing to hear: his deep love for Lucy; his impa.s.sioned adjurations to her to fly with him, and be at peace; his shuddering hatred of Miss Fauntleroy. On the last day of his life, as the doctors thought, Lucy was sent for, in the hope that her presence might calm him. But he did not know her: he was past knowing any one.

"Lucy!" he would utter, in a hollow voice, unconscious that she or any one else was present--"Lucy! we will leave the place for ever. Have you got your things ready? We will go where _she_ can't find us out, and force me to her. Lucy! where are you? Lucy!"

And Mrs. Arkell! She was the most bitterly repentant. Many a sentence is spoken lightly, many an idle threat, many a reckless wish; but the vain folly is not often brought home to the heart, as it was to Mrs. Arkell.

"I would pray Heaven to let me follow you to your grave, Travice, rather than see you marry Lucy Arkell." _He_ was past feeling or remembering the words; but they came home to _her_. She cast herself upon the bed, praying wildly for forgiveness, clinging to him in all the agony of useless remorse.

"Oh, what matters honour; what matters anything in comparison with his precious life!" she cried, with streaming eyes. "Tell him, Lucy,--perhaps he will understand _you_--that he shall indeed marry you if he will but set his mind at rest, and get well; he shall never again see Miss Fauntleroy. Lucy! are there no means of calming him? If this terrible excitement lasts, it will kill him. Tell him it is you he shall marry, not Barbara Fauntleroy."

"I cannot tell him so," said Lucy, from the very depth of her aching heart. "It would not be right to deceive him, even now. There can be no escape, if he lives, from the marriage with Miss Fauntleroy."

A few more hours, and the crisis came. The handsome, the intelligent, the refined Travice Arkell, lay still, in a lethargy that was taken to be that of death. It went forth to Westerbury that he was dead; and Lucy took her last look at him, and walked home with her aunt Mildred--to a home, which, however well supplied it was now with the world's comforts, could only seem to her one of desolation. Lucy Arkell's eyes were dry; dry with that intensity of anguish that admits not of tears, and her brain seemed little less confused than _his_ had done, in these last few days of life.

Mildred sat down in her home, and seemed to see into the future. She saw herself and her niece living on in their quiet and monotonous home; her own form drooping with the weight of years, Lucy's approaching middle life. "The old maids" they would be slightingly termed by those who knew little indeed of their inward history. And in their lonely hearts, enshrined in its most hidden depths, the image that respectively filled each in early life, the father and son, William and Travice Arkell, never, never replaced by any other, but holding their own there so long as time should last.

Seated by her fire on that desolate night, she saw it as in a vision.

CHAPTER XVI.

MISS FAUNTLEROY LOVED AT LAST.

But Travice Arkell did not die. The lethargy that was thought to be death proved to be only the exhaustion of spent nature. When the first faint indications of his awaking from it appeared, the physicians said it was possible that he might recover. He lay for some days in a critical state, hopes and fears about equally balancing, and then he began to get visibly stronger.

"I have been nearly dead, have I not?" he asked one day of his father, who was sitting by the bed.

"But you are better now, Travice. You will get well. Thank G.o.d!"

"Yes, the danger's over. I feel that, myself. Dear father! how troubled you have been!"

"Travice, I could hardly have borne to lose you," he murmured, leaning over him. "And--_thus_."

"I shall soon be well again; soon be strong. Be stronger, I hope," and Travice faintly pressed the hand in which his lay, "to go through the duties that lie before me, than I was previously."

Mr. Arkell sighed from the very depths of his heart. If his son could but have looked forward to arise to a life of peace, instead of pain!

Mildred was with the invalid often. Mrs. Dund.y.k.e, who, concerned at the imminent danger of one in whom she had always considered that she held a right, had hastened to Westerbury when the news was sent to her, likewise used to go and sit with him. But not Lucy. It was instinctively felt by all that the sight of Lucy could only bring the future more palpably before him. It might have been so different!

Mrs. Dund.y.k.e saw Mr. Arkell in private.

"Is there _no_ escape for him?" she asked; "no escape from this marriage with Miss Fauntleroy? I would give all I am worth to effect it."

"And I would give my life," was the agitated answer. "There is none.

Honour must be kept before all things. Travice himself knows there is none; neither would he accept any, were it offered out of the line of strict honour."