The King's Highway Part 14

"Well, well, do not be impatient, I say," answered Green "you shall see some one else, if I don't satisfy you. But you are before your time, as I said."

He had scarcely spoken, when the door of the little room opened once more, and a woman apparently of no very high cla.s.s, and considerably advanced in years, so as to be somewhat decrepit, came in. She was dressed in a large grey cloak of common serge, with a stick in her hand, and mittens on her hands, while over her head was a large black wimple or hood, which covered a great part of her face.

The moment Green saw her, he crossed over, and said in a low but not inaudible voice, "Not a word, till all this business is over! They will ruin the cause and themselves, and all that are engaged with them, by committing all sorts of crimes. It will plunge him into the greatest dangers, if you say a word."

Much of what he said was heard by Brown; and in the meantime Green aided the woman to disembarra.s.s herself of her hood and cloak, taking the staff out of her hand, and at the same time turning the key of the door. The moment that he did so, his female companion drew herself up; the appearance of bowed decrepitude vanished; and she stood before Brown a tall graceful woman, apparently scarcely forty years of age, with a countenance still beautiful, and a demeanour which left no doubt of the society with which at one time she must have mingled.

Of Wilton himself the lady had as yet had but one glance, as she first entered the room; for, ever since, Green had stood between them so that she could not see. When she did behold him fully, however, she gazed upon him earnestly, clasping her hands, and exclaiming, "Is it--is it possible?"

The next moment her feelings seemed to overpower her--"Oh yes, yes,"

she cried, advancing "it is he himself--the same dear, blessed likeness of the dead!" and casting her arms round the young gentleman's neck, she wept long and profusely on his bosom.

Wilton was surprised and agitated, as may well be conceived. He was not sufficiently ignorant of the world not to know that there are a thousand tricks and artifices daily practised, which a.s.sume such appearances as the scene now performing before him displayed. He might, indeed, have entertained suspicions of all sorts of transformations and disguises; but there was an earnestness, a truth, in the lady's manner that was in itself convincing, and there was something more, also--there was a most extraordinary resemblance in her whole face and person to the picture which we have before mentioned in the house of the Earl of Sunbury. The features were the same, the height, the figure: the eyes were the same colour, there was the same peculiar expression about the mouth, and the only difference seemed to be the difference of age. The picture represented a girl of eighteen or nineteen: the person who stood beside him must have seen well nigh forty summers.

Though the likeness was complete, there was a certain difference.

Have we not all beheld a beautiful scene spread out in the morning light, full of radiance, and sparkling, and glorious sunshine? and have we not seen a grey cloud creep over the sky, leaving the landscape the same, but taking from it the resplendent beams in which it shone at first? So did it seem with her. All appeared the same as in the bright being whom the painter had depicted in her gay day of youth; but that Time had since brought, as it were, a grey shadow over the loveliness which it could not take away.

All these things took from Wilton every doubt; and after he had suffered the lady for a moment to give way to her feelings without a word: even throwing his arm slightly round her, and pressing her towards him, he said, "Are you--are you my mother?"

"Alas! no, my dear boy," she replied, raising her head and wiping away the tears, while the colour rose slightly in her cheek. "I am not your mother, but one who has loved you scarcely less than ever mother loved her son; one who nursed and fondled you in infancy; one who has now come from another land but for the sake of seeing you, and of holding once more to her heart the nursling of other years, even more sad and terrible than these."

"From another land!" said Wilton, thoughtfully, while through the dim and misty vista of the past, strange figures seemed to move before his eyes, as if suddenly called up out of the darkness of oblivion by some enchanter's voice. "Another land!" he said, thoughtfully--"Your face and your voice seem to wake strange memories. I think, I remember having been with you in another land, and I recollect--surely I recollect, a pretty cottage with a rose-tree at the door--a rose-tree in full bloom; and tying the knot of an officer's scarf, and his holding me long to his heart, and blessing me again and again--"

"Before he went to battle!" said the lady, "before he went to death!"

Her voice became choked in suffocating sobs, and she wept again long and bitterly.

"Nay, but tell me more," said Wilton--"in pity, tell me more. Do I not surely recollect his face, too?" and he pointed to Green, "and the sparkling sea-sh.o.r.e? and sailing long upon the ocean? Tell me more, oh, tell me more!"

"I must not yet, Wilton," she replied--"I must not yet. They tell me it is dangerous, and I believe it is. Struggles must soon take place, changes must inevitably ensue, and I would not--no, not for all the world, I would not that your young life should be plunged into those terrible contentions, which have swallowed up, as a dark whirlpool, the existence of so many of your race. If our hopes be true, the way to fortune and rank will be open to you at once: or there is no such a thing as grat.i.tude in the world. If not, you will have the means of living in quiet and tranquillity, and if you will, of struggling for higher things; for within six months the whole shall be told to you.

Ask me not! ask me not!" she added, seeing him about to speak--"I have promised in this matter to be guided by others, and I must say no more."

"But who is he?" continued Wilton, pointing to Green. The lady looked first at him, and then at their companion, with a faint, even a melancholy, smile.

"He is one," she replied, "whom you must trust, for he has ever guided others better and more successfully than he has guided himself. He is one who has every t.i.tle to direct you."

"This is all very strange," said Wilton, "and it is painful, too. You do not know--you cannot tell, how painful it is to live, as it were, in a dark cloud, knowing nothing either of the future or the past."

The lady looked down sadly upon the ground.

"There are, sometimes," she said, "certainties which are far more terrible than doubts. Be contented, Wilton, till you hear more: when you do hear more, you will hear much painful matter; you will have much to undergo, and you will need courage, determination, and strength of mind. In the meanwhile, as from your earliest years, careful, anxious, zealous, eyes have watched over you, marked your every movement, traced your every step, even while you thought yourself abandoned, forgotten, and neglected: so shall it be till the whole is explained to you. Thenceforth you will rule your own conduct, judge, determine, and act for yourself. We know, we are sure, that you will act n.o.bly, uprightly, and well in the meanwhile, and that you will do no deed which at a future period may not befit any station and any race to acknowledge."

Wilton mused deeply for several moments, and then raising his eyes to the lady's face, he demanded, in a low tone--

"Answer me only one question more. Am I the son of Lord Sunbury?"

The blood rushed violently up into the lady's countenance.

"Lord Sunbury was never married," she exclaimed--"was he?"

"I know not," replied Wilton--"all I ask is, am I his son? I ask it, because he has shown me generous kindness, care, and consideration; and at times I have seen him gazing in my face, when he thought I did not remark it, as if there were some deeper feelings in his bosom than mere friendship. Yet I cannot say that he has ever taught me to look upon myself as his son."

"Your imagination is only leading you into a labyrinth, Wilton,"

replied the personage calling himself Green, "from which you will find it difficult to extricate yourself. Be contented with what you know, and ask no more."

"I much wish, and I do entreat," replied Wilton, "that you would give me an answer to the question I have asked. There might be circ.u.mstances--indeed, I may say, that circ.u.mstances are very likely to occur, in which it would be absolutely necessary for me to know what claim I have upon the Earl of Sunbury. I have never yet asked him for anything of importance; but I foresee that the time may soon come when I may have to demand of him what I would not venture to demand, did I consider myself but the claimless child of his bounty."

The lady looked at Green, and Green at her, and they paused for several minutes. At length she answered, "I will give you a claim upon Lord Sunbury;" and she took from her finger a large ring, such as were commonly worn in those days, presenting on one side a shield of black enamel surrounded with brilliants, and in the centre a cipher, formed also of small diamonds. "Keep this," said the lady, "till all is explained to you, Wilton, and then return it to me.

Should the Earl's a.s.sistance be required in anything of vital importance, show him that ring, if he be in England, or if he be abroad, tell him that you possess it, and beseech him by all the thoughts which that may call up in his mind, to aid you to the utmost of his power.--I think he will not fail you."

Wilton was about to answer; and though it was now growing dusk, he might have lingered on much longer, striving to gain more information, but at that moment there came a sound of many feet at the pa.s.sage, and the voice of some one speaking apparently to the landlord, and demanding,--"Who the devil's horses are those walking up and down there?"

Almost at the same time, a hand was laid upon the latch of the door, and it would have been thrown open, had not Green previously taken the precaution of locking it. He now partially opened it, however, and spoke a few words to those without.

"Go into the next room," he said; "go into the next room--I will be with you directly." He then closed the door again, and turning to Wilton, took him by the arm, saying, "Now mount your horse, and be gone instantly: your time for staying here is over; make the best of your way home, without delay; and only remember, that whenever we meet in future, you do not appear to know me, unless I speak to you.

Should you want advice, direction, and a.s.sistance--and remember, that though poor and powerless as I seem, I may know more, and be able to do far more, than you imagine--ask for me here; or the first time you see me, lay your finger upon that ring which she has given you, and I will find means to learn your wishes, and to promote them instantly--Now you must go at once."

Wilton saw that the attempt to learn more, at that moment, would be vain: but before he departed, he took the lady by the hand, bidding her adieu, and saying, "At all events, I have one consolation. Since I came here, I feel less lonely in the world; I feel that there are some to whom I am dear; and yet I would fain ask you one thing more.

It is, how, when I think of you, I shall name you in my thoughts.

Your image will be frequently before me; the affection which you have shown me, the words you have spoken, will never be forgotten. But there is a pleasure in connecting all those remembrances with a name.

It seems to render them definite; to give them a habitation in the heart for ever."

"Call me Helen," replied the lady, quickly. "Where I now dwell they call me the Lady Helen. I must not add any more; and now adieu, for it is time that both you and I should leave this place."

Green once more urged him to depart; and Brown, with his curiosity not satisfied, but even more excited than ever, quitted the house, mounted his horse, and rode away slowly towards his own dwelling, meditating as he went.

CHAPTER XVI.

"Onward! onward!" cries the voice of youth; whether it may be that the days are bright, pa.s.sing in joy and tranquillity, and we can say with the greatest French poet of the present day--ay, the greatest, however it may seem--Beranger,

"Sur une onde tranquille, Voguant soir et matin, Ma nacelle est docile Au souffle du destin.

La voile s'enfie-t-elle, J'abandonne le bord.

(O doux zephir, sois-moi fidele!) Eh! vogue, ma nacelle; Nous trouverons un port"--

or whether the morning is overcast with clouds and storms, still "Onward! onward!" is the cry, either in the hope of gaining new joys, or to escape the sorrows that surround us. It is for age to stretch back the longing arms towards the Past: the fate of youth is to bound forward to meet the Future.

Wilton reached his home, and bending down his head upon his hands, pa.s.sed more than an hour in troublous meditation. All was confused and turbid. The stream of thought was like a mountain torrent, suddenly swelled by rains, overflowing its banks, knowing no restraint, no longer clear and bright, but dark and foaming and whirling in rapid and uncertain eddies round every object that it touched upon. The scene at Beaufort House, the thought of Laura, and all that had been said there, mingled strangely and wildly with everything that had taken place afterwards, and nothing seemed certain, but all confused, and indistinct, and vague. But still there came a cry from the bottom of his heart: the cry of "Onward! onward! onward! towards the fated future!"

Nor was that cry the less vehement or less importunate because he had no power whatsoever to advance or r.e.t.a.r.d the coming events by a single hour: nor had it less influence because--unlike most men, who generally have some lamp, however dim, to give them light into the dark caverns of the future--he had not even one faint ray of probability to show him what was before his footsteps.

On the contrary, the yearning to reach that future, to pa.s.s on through that darkness to some brighter place beyond, was all the more strong and urgent. In short, excited imagination had produced some hope, without the slightest probability to foster it. He had even been told that he was to expect information of a painful kind. Not one word had been said to give him the expectation of a bright destiny: and yet there was something so sweet, so happy, in having found any one whose tenderness had been bestowed upon his infant years, and whose affection had remained unchanged by time and absence, that hope--as hope always is--was born of happiness; and though that hope was wild, uncertain, and unfounded, it made the natural eagerness of youth all the more eager.

When he lay down to rest he slept not, but still many a vision floated before his waking eyes, and thought made the night seem short. On the following morning he was early up and dressed; but by seven o'clock a note was put into his hand, in a writing which he did not know. On opening it, however, he found it to contain a request, couched in the most courteous terms, from the Duke of Gaveston, that he would call upon him immediately, and before he went to the house of Lord Byerdale. There was scarcely time to do so; but he instantly ordered his horse, and galloped to Beaufort House as fast as possible. He was ushered immediately into a small saloon, and thence into the dressing-room of the Duke, whom he found in a state of considerable agitation, and evidently embarra.s.sed even in explaining to him what he wanted.

"I have sent for you, Mr. Brown," he said,--"I have sent for you to speak on a matter that may be of great consequence:--not that I know that it will be--not that I have heard anything--for I would not hear, after I found out what was the great object; but--but--"

Wilton was inclined to imagine that some unexpected obstacles had occurred in regard to the proposed alliance between the families of the Duke and of the Earl of Byerdale, and he certainly felt no inclination to aid in removing those obstacles. He replied, therefore, coldly enough, "If there is anything in which I can serve your grace, I am sure it will give me much pleasure to do so."