The Honour of the Clintons Part 28

"I don't think so. You are rich enough to be able to replace an heirloom--it was an heirloom, wasn't it?--and make up to your wife what has been lost, without occasioning remark. Oh, you must take the money, Jim. You're as generous as any man living--I know that. But the loss cannot fall on you, now it is known where the money went to.

That poor misguided creature had it and spent it. It would be a burden on me all my life, if I couldn't put that right--and on Humphrey too.

He would feel it as much as I should."

"I'm afraid you can't put it right," said Lord Sedbergh, speaking more seriously. "And it's a burden that you and Humphrey will have to shoulder. I'll do everything I can for you, Edward; but I won't carry that burden."

"What do you mean?" asked the Squire.

Lord Sedbergh did not speak for a moment. Then he looked up and asked, "What about Mrs. Amberley?"

The Squire frowned deeply. The question was a surprise to him. He had not thought much about Mrs. Amberley, except as an example of what Susan might be made to appear before the world.

"I ought to have told you how I regard that," he said unwillingly. "I didn't, because it seems to me perfectly plain, and I thought you would see it in the same light as I do."

Lord Sedbergh waited for him to explain the light in which he saw it.

"She isn't in prison any longer. They let her out, because she was ill--or so they said. She's as free as you or I. Nothing that could be done--somebody else suffering in the same way--would wipe out what she has already undergone--and done with. Besides, it wasn't on account of the necklace that she was sent to prison. It was on account of the other thing; and that she did steal."

"Yes, that's perfectly true. She has had no more than her deserts--rather less in fact. No, you couldn't reinstate her by publishing the truth."

"Well, then, what's the difficulty?"

"There's no difficulty, Edward, in my mind, about keeping quiet. It would be too much to expect any man in your situation to bring the heaviest possible misfortune on himself, and others, for the sake of doing justice to someone who could hardly benefit by it. At least that's how it seems to me."

"Justice!" echoed the Squire. "There's no question of justice. She was punished for something quite different. If she had been found guilty of stealing the necklace, and were still undergoing punishment for it, the whole question would be different altogether. Thank G.o.d, we haven't got to face that question. It would be terrible. As it has so mercifully turned out, no injustice is done to her at all. Can't you see that?"

"Well, do you think _she_ would, if she were asked?"

Lord Sedbergh did not leave time for his question to sink in. "My dear fellow," he went on, "your course is as difficult as it could be. Who am I that I should put my finger on any one of its difficulties, and make it heavier? You have done nothing that I shouldn't have done myself if I had been in your place. At the same time, you have to take the responsibility for whatever you do, and I haven't."

"Yes, I know that; and it's just what I want to do--put things right wherever I can."

"But you wouldn't be putting anything right by paying me money. You would only be making me share your difficulties--your great and very disagreeable difficulties; and that, with all the good will in the world towards you, my dear Edward, I won't do."

The Squire saw it dimly, and what he saw did not please him. Nor was his light enough to prevent him from pressing his point.

When Lord Sedbergh had combated it for some time, with firm good humour, he said more seriously, "Can't you see that if this story were ever to come out, and I had taken your money, I should be in a very awkward position?"

"It never will come out now."

"That's your risk, Edward. I may be a monster of selfishness, but I won't make it mine."

When the Squire left the club half-an-hour later, his face was not that of a man who had been set free of a debt of seven thousand pounds.

CHAPTER IV

THIS OUR SISTER

"Clinton. On the 16th inst. the Lady Susan Clinton, aged 28."

How could such an announcement, to the Squire reading it in the obituary column of his paper, cause any emotion stronger than the feeling that all was for the best?

For one thing, although the direct cause of Susan's death had been pneumonia, there was little doubt, to him who knew the state of mind she had been in when her illness had first attacked her, that she had succ.u.mbed to that, and not to any ailment of the body, which, otherwise, she could have shaken off. She had paid the price, poor girl! The account as against her was closed, her name dropped from the ledger.

That she had died in full repentance, and would therefore escape the ultimate fate of branded sinners, his easy creed allowed him to take for granted. The very fact that she _had_ died seemed to make her state in the hereafter secure. For her it was well.

And not less so for those whom she had, in the phrase that came readily to his lips, left behind. Humphrey--poor Humphrey--who was overwhelmed with grief, as it was only natural he should be, would come to feel in time that her death had been, if not a blessing in disguise--which would be a harsh way of putting it--then a merciful dispensation of Providence. He had nothing to reproach himself with. He had cloven to his wife at a time when he might, justifiably, have played a very different part; had been prepared to share with her such of the punishment for her crime as could not be avoided; had even accepted--quixotically, as the Squire thought--part responsibility for it; and in short had fulfilled his duty towards her with a fine loyalty such as his father, remembering certain episodes in his career, had hardly thought to be in him. He had been tried as by fire, and had come well out of the ordeal, a better man in every way.

No, Humphrey had nothing to reproach himself with. Indeed, it would comfort him in the future to think that he had been tender to the poor girl in her disgrace, comforted her, been ready to throw over the life that suited him, so as to help her to recover herself, stood up for her, when she could not with reason be defended, been with her at the last, broken down when it was all over. His thoughts ran smoothly into the worn phrases apt to these sad occasions, when grief is subdued to not unpleasing melancholy, and melancholy is the shade of the tree of death, in which we are sitting for a time, but with the sunshine of life still before us.

Humphrey was still young. He could travel for a time, if he wanted to, or, perhaps better still, stay quietly at Kencote, until he had got over his loss; and then he could take up his life as before. When time had healed his wound he might even marry again. But that was to look too far ahead, with poor Susan not yet under the ground, and the Squire checked the thought at once. If she had lived he would certainly have had a very difficult time with her. A high resolve is one thing; the power to carry it out, day by day, when the exaltation in which it was made has faded away, is another. Humphrey was not trained to such efforts. He might have tired of it. Susan might have "broken out"

again. All sorts of trouble might have arisen, which--well, which, by the mercy of Providence, it was not necessary now to conjecture. For Humphrey, all was for the best.

The Squire was glad, on his own account, that he had withdrawn his embargo upon Susan's visiting Kencote, before this had happened. He had been very near to imposing it again after his interview with Lord Sedbergh; but Susan had even then been dangerously ill; and the absorption caused by the rapid progress of her illness, and the contingent comings and goings, had fortunately taken his mind off the details of her past misdemeanour. He had been preserved--mercifully--from dealing his son that extra blow.

And yet he doubted whether he would have been able to play his part with her. It was plain now, whatever it had been when he had walked down the steps of Lord Sedbergh's club, that strong reproaches would not have helped matters; that nothing he had had it in his mind, then, to do or say to ease himself of the burden, whose weight his old friend had made him compute by refusing to touch it, would have lightened it; and that the effect of his knowledge would only have been to make things more difficult alike for himself and for Humphrey. His anger against the poor girl would be buried in her grave. It would not be difficult to speak of her now with that regretful affection that would be expected of him.

And her death made him less vulnerable. He perceived now, not without a shudder, that his safety depended upon the silence of a woman who, wherever the responsibility lay, had been bought, and might be bought again; or, if that were unlikely, might lightly let loose the hint which, gathering other hints to itself, would grow into the avalanche that would involve him in the disgrace he so much feared. But an accusation against a dead woman--if it were made it would be less readily believed, more reprehensible, easier to cast off. And Susan would not be there, a possible weakness to her own defence.

Here again he checked his thoughts. He was not ready to face a situation in which he would either have to deny untruthfully, or to keep damaging silence. But, certainly, for him, all was for the best.

d.i.c.k came in, as he was sitting with the paper on his knee. He wore a black tie, but was otherwise dressed as usual. His face was becomingly grave. They talked over details of the funeral. Susan was to be buried at Kencote, in the churchyard where so many generations of Clintons had been buried, her own distant ancestors among them, but none within living memory who had not lived out the full tale of their years. Her body would lie in the church that night, and the house would fill up with many of those who would follow her to the grave on the morrow, including some members of her own family, all of whom the Squire disliked or was prepared to dislike. He ardently wished himself done with the painful ordeal. He doubted whether he would be able to acquit himself unremittingly in the manner that would be expected of him. He would have to wear a face of gloom, when he was already itching to be rid of these cheerless trailing postscripts to the message of death, and commit himself once more to the warm current of life. He would have to say so many things that he did not feel, and do so much that he hated doing.

The shadow, not of grief but of the adjuncts of grief, lay over the house, and darkened the bright June sunshine, or such of it as was allowed to filter through the blinded windows. Not for fifty years or more had such an a.s.semblage been made at Kencote. The successive funerals of the Squire's six aunts, who had lived since his marriage at the Dower House, and the last of whom had died at another house in the village only two years ago, had been untroublous, not to say brisk, ceremonies, occasions of meeting between seldom-seen relations, and of hospitality almost festive, but tempered by affectionate reminiscence of the departed, and the feeling that one might talk naturally and freely, so long as one did not actually laugh. Ripe age had fallen on the rest laid up for it; there had been no occasion to feign deep sorrow.

But--"the Lady Susan Clinton, aged 28"!--there was material for sharp sorrow there; and the Squire was disturbed by the fear that he might not be able to show it; might even, if he were off his guard, show that he did not feel it.

"Did you hear from mother this morning?" asked d.i.c.k, when they had disposed of the details he had come to discuss.

"Yes. Humphrey is bearing up; but, of course, poor fellow, he can't get used to the idea yet. We must keep him here for a bit, after we rid the house of all these people; and he'll soon come round to himself."

"Was there any trouble between them latterly?" d.i.c.k asked, in a matter-of-fact voice, but gave the Squire time to collect his thoughts by going on immediately, "I don't want to pry into your affairs or his, but I had an idea that that business of Gotch's wasn't all he came to see you about the other day."

"Why do you think that?" asked the Squire with undiplomatic directness.

"Well--your going up to town with him the next day, for one thing. I only wanted to say that if it's a question of money again, which hasn't been put right by poor Susan's death, you can count on me for help if there's any difficulty in raising it."

What a good son this was--safe, level-headed, coolly and responsibly generous! The Squire would have given a good deal to have been released from his promise, and able to take him into full confidence then and there.

"Well," he said, "there _was_ trouble about money, and I was prepared to find it, without interfering with estate affairs. That's why I didn't come to you. But the necessity is over now."

He mentally patted himself on the back for this masterpiece of statement, transgressing the strict truth by no more than perfectly allowable omission.

"Her settlement falls in, I suppose," said d.i.c.k. "I'm glad you were spared the worry, although the way out of it is sad enough. I've been sorry for Humphrey for some time. He had come to see that he had always played the fool about money, and was beginning to get his ideas straight; but poor Susan--well, one doesn't want to think about her in that way now--but there's no doubt she was a terrible drag on him. I'd seen it coming for some time, and when he talked to me at Christmas about settling down, I was pretty sure that he didn't know everything, and would be coming with another story soon."