CHAPTER LVII.
Mrs. Poyntz was on her favourite seat by the window, and for a wonder, not
knitting--that classic task seemed done; but she was smoothing and folding
the completed work with her white comely hand, and smiling over it, as if
in complacent approval, when I entered the room. At the fire-side sat the
he-colonel inspecting a newly-invented barometer; at another window, in
the farthest recess of the room, stood Miss Jane Poyntz, with a young
gentleman whom I had never before seen, but who turned his eyes full upon
me with a haughty look as the servant announced my name. He was tall,
well proportioned, decidedly handsome, but with that expression of cold
and concentred self-esteem in his very attitude, as well as his
countenance, which makes a man of merit unpopular, a man without merit
ridiculous.
The he-colonel, always punctiliously civil, rose from his seat, shook
hands with me cordially, and said, "Coldish weather to-day; but we shall
have rain to-morrow. Rainy seasons come in cycles. We are about to
commence a cycle of them with heavy showers." He sighed, and returned to
his barometer.
Miss Jane bowed to me graciously enough, but was evidently a little
confused,--a circumstance which might well attract my notice, for I had
never before seen that high-bred young lady deviate a hairsbreadth from
the even tenor of a manner admirable for a cheerful and courteous ease,
which, one felt convinced, would be unaltered to those around her if an
earthquake swallowed one up an inch before her feet.
The young gentleman continued to eye me loftily, as the heir-apparent to
some celestial planet might eye an inferior creature from a half-formed
nebula suddenly dropped upon his sublime and perfected, star.
Mrs. Poyntz extended to me two fingers, and said frigidly, "Delighted to
see you again! How kind to attend so soon to my note!"
Motioning me to a seat beside her, she here turned to her husband, and
said, "Poyntz, since a cycle of rain begins tomorrow, better secure your
ride to-day. Take these young people with you. I want to talk with Dr.
Fenwick."
The colonel carefully put away his barometer, and saying to his daughter,
"Come!" went forth. Jane followed her father; the young gentleman
followed Jane.
The reception I had met chilled and disappointed me. I felt that Mrs.
Poyntz was changed, and in her change the whole house seemed changed. The
very chairs looked civilly unfriendly, as if preparing to turn their backs
on me. However, I was not in the false position of an intruder; I had
been summoned; it was for Mrs. Poyntz to speak first, and I waited quietly
for her to do so.
She finished the careful folding of her work, and then laid it at rest in
the drawer of the table at which she sat. Having so done, she turned to
me, and said,--
"By the way, I ought to have introduced to you my young guest, Mr.
Ashleigh Sumner. You would like him. He has talents,--not showy, but
solid. He will succeed in public life."
"So that young man is Mr. Ashleigh Sumner? I do not wonder that Miss
Ashleigh rejected him."
I said this, for I was nettled, as well as surprised, at the coolness with
which a lady who had professed a friendship for me mentioned that
fortunate young gentleman, with so complete an oblivion of all the
antecedents that had once made his name painful to my ear.
In turn, my answer seemed to nettle Mrs. Poyntz.
"I am not so sure that she did reject; perhaps she rather misunderstood
him; gallant compliments are not always proposals of marriage. However
that be, his spirits were not much damped by Miss Ashleigh's disdain, nor
his heart deeply smitten by her charms; for he is now very happy, very
much attached to another young lady, to whom he proposed three days ago,
at Lady Delafield's, and not to make a mystery of what all our little
world will know before tomorrow, that young lady is my daughter Jane."
"Were I acquainted with Mr. Sumner, I should offer to him my sincere
congratulations."
Mrs. Poyntz resumed, without heeding a reply more complimentary to Miss
Jane than to the object of her choice,--
"I told you that I meant Jane to marry a rich country gentleman, and
Ashleigh Sumner is the very country gentleman I had then in my thoughts.
He is cleverer and more ambitious than I could have hoped; he will be a
minister some day, in right of his talents, and a peer, if he wishes it,
in right of his lands. So that matter is settled."
There was a pause, during which my mind passed rapidly through links of
reminiscence and reasoning, which led me to a mingled sentiment of
admiration for Mrs. Poyntz as a diplomatist and of distrust for Mrs.
Poyntz as a friend. It was now clear why Mrs. Poyntz, before so little
disposed to approve my love, had urged me at once to offer my hand to
Lilian, in order that she might depart affianced and engaged to the house
in which she would meet Mr. Ashleigh Sumner. Hence Mrs. Poyntz's anxiety
to obtain all the information I could afford her of the sayings and
doings at Lady Haughton's; hence, the publicity she had so suddenly given
to my engagement; hence, when Mr. Sumner had gone away a rejected suitor,
her own departure from L----; she had seized the very moment when a vain
and proud man, piqued by the mortification received from one lady, falls
the easier prey to the arts which allure his suit to another. All was so
far clear to me. And I--was my self-conceit less egregious and less
readily duped than that of yon glided popinjay's! How skilfully this
woman had knitted me into her work with the noiseless turn of her white
hands! and yet, forsooth, I must vaunt the superior scope of my intellect,
and plumb all the fountains of Nature,--I, who could not fathom the little
pool of this female schemer's mind!
But that was no time for resentment to her or rebuke to myself. She was
now the woman who could best protect and save from slander my innocent,
beloved Lilian. But how approach that perplexing subject?
Mrs. Poyntz approached it, and with her usual decision of purpose, which
bore so deceitful a likeness to candour of mind.
"But it was not to talk of my affairs that I asked you to call, Allen
Fenwick." As she uttered my name, her voice softened, and her manner took
that maternal, caressing tenderness which had sometimes amused and
sometimes misled me. "No, I do not forget that you asked me to be your
friend, and I take without scruple the license of friendship. What are
these stories that I have heard already about Lilian Ashleigh, to whom you
were once engaged?"
"To whom I am still engaged."
"Is it possible? Oh, then, of course the stories I have heard are all
false. Very likely; no fiction in scandal ever surprises me. Poor dear
Lilian, then, never ran away from her mother's house?"
I smothered the angry pain which this mode of questioning caused me; I
knew how important it was to Lilian to secure to her the countenance and
support of this absolute autocrat; I spoke of Lilian's long previous
distemper of mind; I accounted for it as any intelligent physician,
unacquainted with all that I could not reveal, would account. Heaven
forgive me for the venial falsehood, but I spoke of the terrible charge
against myself as enough to unhinge for a time the intellect of a girl so
acutely sensitive as Lilian; I sought to create that impression as to the
origin of all that might otherwise seem strange; and in this state of
cerebral excitement she had wandered from home--but alone. I had tracked
every step of her way; I had found and restored her to her home. A
critical delirium had followed, from which she now rose, cured in health,
unsuspicious that there could be a whisper against her name. And then,
with all the eloquence I could command, and in words as adapted as I could
frame them to soften the heart of a woman, herself a mother, I implored
Mrs. Poyntz's aid to silence all the cruelties of calumny, and extend her
shield over the child of her own early friend.
When I came to an end, I had taken, with caressing force, Mrs. Poyntz's
reluctant hands in mine. There were tears in my voice, tears in my eyes.
And the sound of her voice in reply gave me hope, for it was unusually
gentle. She was evidently moved. The hope was soon quelled.
"Allen Fenwick," she said, "you have a noble heart; I grieve to see how it
abuses your reason. I cannot aid Lilian Ashleigh in the way you ask. Do
not start back so indignantly. Listen to me as patiently as I have
listened to you. That when you brought back the unfortunate young woman
to her poor mother, her mind was disordered, and became yet more
dangerously so, I can well believe; that she is now recovered, and thinks
with shame, or refuses to think at all, of her imprudent flight, I can
believe also; but I do not believe, the World cannot believe, that she did
not, knowingly and purposely, quit her mother's roof, and in quest of that
young stranger so incautiously, so unfeelingly admitted to her mother's
house during the very time you were detained on the most awful of human
accusations. Every one in the town knows that Mr. Margrave visited daily
at Mrs. Ashleigh's during that painful period; every one in the town knows
in what strange out-of-the-way place this young man had niched himself;
and that a yacht was bought, and lying in wait there. What for? It is
said that the chaise in which you brought Miss Ashleigh back to her home
was hired in a village within an easy reach of Mr. Margrave's lodging--of
Mr. Margrave's yacht. I rejoice that you saved the poor girl from ruin;
but her good name is tarnished; and if Anne Ashleigh, whom I sincerely
pity, asks me my advice, I can but give her this: 'Leave L----, take your
daughter abroad; and if she is not to marry Mr. Margrave, marry her as
quietly and as quickly as possible to some foreigner.'"
"Madam! madam! this, then, is your friendship to her--to me! Oh, shame
on you to insult thus an affianced husband! Shame on me ever to have
thought you had a heart!"
"A heart, man!" she exclaimed, almost fiercely, springing up, and
startling me with the change in her countenance and voice. "And little
you would have valued, and pitilessly have crushed this heart, if I had
suffered myself to show it to you! What right have you to reproach me? I
felt a warm interest in your career, an unusual attraction in your
conversation and society. Do you blame me for that, or should I blame
myself? Condemned to live amongst brainless puppets, my dull occupation
to pull the strings that moved them, it was a new charm to my life to
establish friendship and intercourse with intellect and spirit and
courage. Ah! I understand that look, half incredulous, half
inquisitive."
"Inquisitive, no; incredulous, yes! You desired my friendship, and how
does your harsh judgment of my betrothed wife prove either to me or to her
mother, whom you have known from your girlhood, the first duty of a
friend,--which is surely not that of leaving a friend's side the moment
that he needs countenance in calumny, succour in trouble!"
"It is a better duty to prevent the calumny and avert the trouble. Leave
aside Anne Ashleigh, a cipher that I can add or abstract from my sum of
life as I please. What is my duty to yourself? It is plain. It is to
tell you that your honour commands you to abandon all thoughts of Lilian
Ashleigh as your wife. Ungrateful that you are! Do you suppose it was no
mortification to my pride of woman and friend, that you never approached
me in confidence except to ask my good offices in promoting your courtship
to another; no shock to the quiet plans I had formed as to our familiar
though harmless intimacy, to hear that you were bent on a marriage in
which my friend would be lost to me?"
"Not lost! not lost! On the contrary, the regard I must suppose you had
for Lilian would have been a new link between our homes."
"Pooh! Between me and that dreamy girl there could have been no sympathy,
there could have grown up no regard. You would have been chained to your
fireside, and--and--but no matter. I stifled my disappointment as soon as
I felt it,--stifled it, as all my life I have stifled that which either
destiny or duty--duty to myself as to others--forbids me to indulge. Ah,
do not fancy me one of the weak criminals who can suffer a worthy liking
to grow into a debasing love! I was not in love with you, Allen Fenwick."
"Do you think I was ever so presumptuous a coxcomb as to fancy it?"
"No," she said, more softly; "I was not so false to my household ties and
to my own nature. But there are some friendships which are as jealous as
love. I could have cheerfully aided you in any choice which my sense
could have approved for you as wise; I should have been pleased to have
found in such a wife my most intimate companion. But that silly
child!--absurd! Nevertheless, the freshness and enthusiasm of your love
touched me; you asked my aid, and I gave it. Perhaps I did believe that
when you saw more of Lilian Ashleigh you would be cured of a fancy
conceived by the eye--I should have known better what dupes the wisest men
can be to the witcheries of a fair face and eighteen! When I found your
illusion obstinate, I wrenched myself away from a vain regret, turned to
my own schemes and my own ambition, and smiled bitterly to think that, in
pressing you to propose so hastily to Lilian, I made your blind passion an
agent in my own plans. Enough of this. I speak thus openly and boldly to
you now, because now I have not a sentiment that can interfere with the
dispassionate soundness of my counsels. I repeat, you cannot now marry
Lilian Ashleigh; I cannot take my daughter to visit her; I cannot destroy
the social laws that I myself have set in my petty kingdom."
"Be it as you will. I have pleaded for her while she is still Lilian
Ashleigh. I plead for no one to whom I have once given my name. Before
the woman whom I have taken from the altar, I can place, as a shield
sufficient, my strong breast of man. Who has so deep an interest in
Lilian's purity as I have? Who is so fitted to know the exact truth of
every whisper against her? Yet when I, whom you admit to have some
reputation for shrewd intelligence,--I, who tracked her way,--I, who
restored her to her home,--when I, Allen Fenwick, am so assured of her
inviolable innocence in thought as in deed, that I trust my honour to her
keeping,--surely, surely, I confute the scandal which you yourself do not
believe, though you refuse to reject and to annul it?"
"Do not deceive yourself, Allen Fenwick," said she, still standing beside
me, her countenance now hard and stern. "Look where I stand, I am the
World! The World, not as satirists depreciate, or as optimists extol its
immutable properties, its all-persuasive authority. I am the World! And
my voice is the World's voice when it thus warns you. Should you make
this marriage, your dignity of character and position would be gone! If
you look only to lucre and professional success, possibly they may not
ultimately suffer. You have skill, which men need; their need may still
draw patients to your door and pour guineas into your purse. But you have
the pride, as well as the birth of a gentleman, and the wounds to that
pride will be hourly chafed and never healed. Your strong breast of man
has no shelter to the frail name of woman. The World, in its health, will
look down on your wife, though its sick may look up to you. This is not
all. The World, in its gentlest mood of indulgence, will say
compassionately, 'Poor man! how weak, and how deceived! What an
unfortunate marriage!' But the World is not often indulgent,--it looks
most to the motives most seen on the surface. And the World will more
frequently say, 'No; much too clever a man to be duped! Miss Ashleigh had
money. A good match to the man who liked gold better than honour.'"
I sprang to my feet, with difficulty suppressing my rage; and, remembering
it was a woman who spoke to me, "Farewell, madam," said I, through my
grinded teeth. "Were you, indeed, the Personation of The World, whose
mean notions you mouth so calmly, I could not disdain you more." I turned
to the door, and left her still standing erect and menacing, the hard
sneer on her resolute lip, the red glitter in her remorseless eye.
