At His Gates. Volume 3

'Clara, you are mad, you are incomprehensible!' cried her father. 'Give me the boy's address.'

'I will not,' she answered, looking at him.

The woman had come to light in her at last – the woman and something of the mother. As a daughter she had neglected none of the observances of respect. She had been dutiful, though she had long been an independent agent, and had forgotten the very idea of obedience. But never had she defied her father before. She did it now calmly, as she did everything. She had upheld her family and its importance as long as mortal strength could do it; and now when that had failed, she could at least defend her boy.

'Clara, you astonish me. I could not have believed it of you,' said her father severely.

But he had no time to remonstrate or to command. He had to hurry away for his train. And she stood and looked after him, her breath for the first time quickened with excitement, her resolution bringing a certain colour to her cheek. Ned was safe, and out of all this trouble. It was the only gleam of comfort in her clouded sky. He who should bring her boy back to undergo all this shame and suffering was her enemy, though it were done on the specious pretence of serving her. To bring her son back to support and help her would be to do her the last and cruellest wrong. She could do without the help and support. She was ready to bear anything, since it must be borne. What relief could it afford her to know that another suffered too, and that other her son? She went back to the house with quickened steps under the sway of the thought, that Ned, at least, was safe and out of it. She was not the kind of woman who would complain of bearing anything alone.

Breakfast was a very late and straggling meal that day at Dura; but Mrs Burton was the first at the table – before even the young man who had proposed a bath and a walk instead of sleep. The breakfast was as sumptuous, as well served, as usual, and there were the same number of servants about, the dogs, as usual, on the lawn, the man with the post-bags, as usual, visible, coming up the avenue. The ordinary eye would have seen no indication of any change. But Mrs Burton made a calm little speech to every new group, which had the most curiously disconcerting effect upon her guests. She said to them that family circumstances compelled her to make preparations at once for leaving Dura; that some things had happened which she need not tell them of – family events – which had changed all her arrangements. She hoped, under these circumstances, they would pardon her, if she said plainly —

'Oh, yes, certainly. Not another word,' the visitors cried, dismayed. They all gazed at each other, and whispered over their teacups when her back was turned. They heard her say the same thing to one party after another – even to the Marchioness herself, who had come down fully primed, meaning to overwhelm Mrs Burton with a theatrical leave-taking.

'Why, why, why!' she cried in her wrath, 'you mean that you want to – get rid of us, Mrs Burton!' and her hair stood on end upon her noble head.

'I am afraid, without making any mystery of it, that is what I do mean, Lady Upshire,' said the woman, who was only the wife of a rich City man – a parvenue, one of the nouveaux riches– fixing her blue eyes calmly upon her splendid guest.

'What pluck she has!' the young men said to themselves. They almost cheered her for her dauntless front. And they were all gone by two o'clock – Marchioness and maid, guardsman and public servant – every visitor, gentle and simple. They disappeared as if by magic. What questions they asked each other, what speculations they entertained among themselves, Mrs Burton neither knew nor cared. The first thing was to be free of them; and when the afternoon came, she was alone with the startled servants and her two aunts, to whom as yet she had given no explanations, and whose private opinion, stated a hundred times that morning, was, that at last beyond all controversy Clara must be mad.

CHAPTER X

Mr Baldwin came back to Dura in the afternoon, worn out and disappointed – foiled by the simple fact, which had never occurred to the old man as possible, that Clary – his innocent Clary – had wittingly or unwittingly given a false indication, and that St James's, Piccadilly, knew nothing of any such marriage. Mr Baldwin drove to all the hotels, to all the churches, he could think of, from St James's, Camberwell, to St James's, Kentish Town, but in vain. Just when it was too late to follow them further, he discovered an anonymous little chapel which he must have passed a dozen times in his journeys, where the ceremony had actually taken place. Charles Golden to Clara Burton. Then he had gone to the Northern Railway Station, and discovered that they had left by the eleven o'clock train. All he had done had been to verify their movements. The poor old man aged ten years during this running to and fro. He went back to his daughter worn out and miserable. Little Clary, the pride of the family, with all her beauty, her youth, and the possibilities that lay before her! 'Now I know that we may go too far in carrying out the precepts of Christianity,' he groaned, when his sympathetic sisters came to console him. 'We thought he had repented, and we took him back to our hearts.' In this, however, poor Mr Baldwin deceived himself. Golden had been received back into their hearts, not because he had repented, but because the scandal against him had died into oblivion, and because in their souls even the honest men admired the consummate cleverness of the rogue. And in this point, at least, Mr Golden had not been mercenary; he had actually fallen in love with Clara Burton, knowing the desperate state of her father's affairs – affairs which were so desperate, when he was called on to help in regulating them, that he had been 'obliged to decline' the task. Golden had a little Sybarite 'place' of his own on the shores of the Mediterranean. So many scraps of money had adhered to his fingers in his various commercial adventures, though these adventures were always unfortunate, that he could afford himself that crowning luxury of a beautiful wife; and then Mr Baldwin was a rich man and a doting grandfather, who after a while would be sure to forgive.

As for Mrs Burton, she had expected her father's failure, and was not surprised or disappointed. She had given her daughter up, not with any revengeful or vindictive intention, but simply as a matter of fact. 'Oh, don't curse her, Clara!' Aunt Louisa sobbed in the midst of her tears. And then indeed Mrs Burton was surprised. 'Curse her! I have no intention of cursing her,' she said. Clary had taken her own way; she had pleased herself. What she had done was quite easily to be accounted for; it was human nature. Mrs Burton was not subject to passions herself, but she recognised them as a motive-power; and though perhaps in her inmost heart there was a sense of shame that her child should be violently moved by those lowest, almost brutal, forces (for so she deemed them), yet her intelligence understood and allowed the possibility. Clary had acted according to her nature; that was all that was to be said. She had laid an additional burden upon her family – or rather upon her mother, the only one of the family left to bear it; but then it was not natural to Clary to take account of what other people might have to bear. Thus Mrs Burton accepted it, making no complaint. If it gave her any additional individual pang for itself, and not merely as part of the whole, she at least said little about it, and made no individual complaint.

But there came a moment when actual feeling, emotion not to be disguised, broke forth in this self-possessed woman. She had decided to remain at Dura till further news, and until her husband's affairs could be fully examined into; and though her aunts went home, her father remained with her. Two long days passed over without news. On the third, Tuesday, Mr Baldwin went to town to make what inquiries were possible. As yet there had been but vague hints in the newspapers – rumours of changes affecting 'a well-known name in the City' – and the old man had hesitated to show himself, to ask any questions which might, as he said, 'precipitate matters.' 'While we are in ignorance, quiet is best,' he had said; but when the third day arrived, though Mrs Burton still bore the suspense like a stoic, Mr Baldwin could not bear it any longer. When he was gone, she showed no signs of impatience; she went about her business as usual, and she had a great deal to do. She had begun at once to wind up the accounts of the house, to arrange with her servants, to whom she was a just and not ungenerous mistress, when they should go, and what would be done to find them places. But when the languid afternoon came, her energy flagged a little. She did not allow, even to herself, that she was anxious. She went into the great drawing-room, and sat down near a window from which she could see the avenue. Perhaps for the first time, the impulse came into her mind to prefer a smaller room, to take refuge somewhere else than in this waste of damask and gilding; but if such was the case, she restrained and condemned the thought. She was herself so small, almost invisible, in the great, silent place, full of those mirrors which reflected nothing, those chairs where no one sat. No marble statue with a finger on its lip was ever so complete an embodiment of silence as she, seated there all alone, motionless, looking out upon the road. It might have been hours before any one came. A summer afternoon, slow, languid, endless, one vast blank of drowsy calm and blazing sunshine, the wind too listless to blow, the leaves too heavy to wave, everything still, even the birds. But at last, at last some one came – not Mr Baldwin's slow, heavy old steps, but rapid young ones, light and impatient. She gazed at the speck as it gradually approached, and became recognisable. Then her heart gave a great unexpected, painful throb. Ned! Her last little gleam of satisfaction, her last comfort, then, was not to be. He was not out of it, safe, as she had hoped, but here to bear all the brunt, to share all the shame. She tried to get up, to go and meet him, but sank back, faint and incapable, in her chair, trembling, sick to the heart; overwhelmed for the first time.

He came in, bringing a gust of fresh air (it seemed) with him. He was dusty, and pale, and eager.

'Mother!' he cried, as he came up to her.

She held up her hand with a gesture which was almost passionate, repelling him.

'Oh, Ned, Ned! why have you come here?'

'Don't you want me, mamma?'

He kissed her as he spoke, and put his arm round her. If she had been another kind of woman, he would have sobbed on her breast, for the lad's heart was very sore.

'No, I do not want you,' she said. 'I thought you were safe. I thought you were out of it all. I was ready to bear anything – it cannot hurt me – any more. But you, a boy, a lad, with all your life to come! Oh, Ned, Ned, why have you come here?' She had never done it before in all her life. She did not embrace him, but clutched at his arm with her two hands, and shed passionate, hot tears. 'I do not want you! I do not want you!' she cried, and clung to him. 'I wish you were at the end of the world!'

'Oh, mother!' cried the boy.

He was fond of her, though perhaps she had never done anything to deserve it. And she – loved him. Yes. All at once she found it out, with a mother's passion. Loved him so that she would have been glad never to see him again; glad to be cut in pieces for him; glad to suffer shame, and pain, and misery, and ruin alone, that he might be out of it. This, which she had scarcely suspected, she found out at last.

But when this moment was over, and the fact that he had come was indisputable, and had to be made the best of, Mrs Burton recovered her usual calm. She was ashamed of herself for having 'broken down.' She said it was fatigue and want of sleep which had made her weak, and then she told him all the circumstances dispassionately, as was natural to her. He himself had been summoned by a telegram from Golden. He had been at Dresden when he received it, and he had travelled night and day. But why from Golden, he asked, a man whom he hated? 'Your mother wants you here. There has been a great smash, and your presence is indispensable,' was what the telegram had said. But I will not attempt to describe how the little, pale, dispassionate mother told the tale, nor how the young son, full of youthful passion, indignation, rage, and grief, heard of his family's downfall, and the ruin of all its prospects and hopes.

When Mr Baldwin came back, he brought news still more overwhelming. The fact which had made further concealment impossible, and had driven Burton to flight, was the winding up of a trust account for which he had been responsible. The property had been invested by him, and he had paid the interest regularly; but it was found that not a penny of the original capital remained; he had appropriated all. When it was known that he had disappeared, other inquiries had been at once set on foot, but kept carefully out of the papers, lest his escape might be facilitated; and then such disclosures were made as Mr Baldwin could only repeat bit by bit, as his strength permitted. The old man cried like a child; he was utterly broken down. It had even come out about Rivers's, he said. One of the missing books, which poor Drummond had been accused of destroying, had been found in a private safe, along with other damning accounts, which the unhappy man had not been able to destroy or conceal, so quickly did his fate overtake him. The unhappy man! Both Mr Baldwin and Mrs Burton remembered the time when Robert Drummond had been thus described – when all the newspapers had preached little sermons about him, with many a repetition of this title – articles which Burton had read, and shaken his head over, and declared were as good as sermons, warning the ignorant. This flashed upon Mrs Burton's mind, and it came more dimly to her father. Fortunately, Ned's misery was not complicated by such recollections; he had enough without that.

'But the general impression is that he has escaped,' said Mr Baldwin; and he repeated to them the vague account which had been given to him of the two futile detectives, who had watched the fugitive into a house, and kept in front of it, putting the inhabitants on their guard, while he was smuggled out by a side-door. No doubt he had escaped. And it was known that he had money; for he had drawn a large sum out of the bank the day before.

'I am glad you have come back, Ned,' the grandfather added. 'It is you who ought to manage all this, and not your mother. Of course she has her settlement, which nobody can touch. And I think now, my dear, that you should leave Dura, and come with me to Clapham. You will have your aunts' society to make up a little, and it will be more convenient for Ned.'

Mrs Burton looked at her son almost wistfully.

'Ned, is there any sacrifice I can make that will induce you to go away?'

'None, mother,' he said, 'none. I will do anything else that you ask me. But here I must have a will of my own. I cannot go away.'

'Go away!' said Mr Baldwin. 'I don't know how he has got here; for your mother would not let me send for you, Ned; but of course this is your proper place. It will be very painful – very painful,' said the old man. 'But you have your settlement, Clara; and we must hope everything will turn out for the best.'

'My mother will give up her settlement, sir, of course,' said Ned. 'After what has happened, she could not – it would be impossible – What! you don't see it? Must not those suffer who have done the wrong?'

'Ned, you are a fool,' said Mr Baldwin, 'a hot-headed young fool. I see your sense now, Clara. That scoundrel, Golden, has sent for him only to increase our vexation. Give up her settlement! Then pray how is she to live?'

'With me,' said Ned, rising up, and standing behind his mother's chair. He would have taken her hand to sustain him, if he could; but she did not give him her hand. He put his on the back of her chair. That, at least, was something to give him strength.

'With you!' Mr Baldwin was moved by this absurdity to something of his former vigour. 'It would be satisfactory, indeed, trusting her to you. I will have no Quixotical nonsense brought in. This is my affair. I am the proper person to look after my daughter's settlement. It is the only comfort in a bad business. Don't let me hear any more of such childish folly.'

'It is not folly,' said Ned firmly, though his voice trembled. 'I am sure my mother feels like me. We have no right to keep anything while my father has been spending other people's money; or if we have a right in law – '

Mrs Burton put up her hand to stop him. It was the first time in her life that she had allowed herself to be discussed, what she should or would do, without taking any share in it. The fact was, the question was a new one – the problem quite strange to her. She had considered it as certain up to this moment that her settlement belonged to her absolutely, and that her husband's conduct one way or other could have no effect upon her undoubted right. The problem was altogether new. She put up her hand to interrupt the discussion.

'I have not thought of this,' she said. 'Ned, say no more. I want time to think. I shall tell you to-morrow what I will do.'

Against this decision there was not a word to say. The old man and the boy gave up their discussion as suddenly as they had begun it. Let them argue as they would, it was she who must settle the question; and just then the great bell rang – the bell which regulated the clock in the village, and warned all the countryside when the great people at the great house were going to dine. The ears which were accustomed to it scarcely noted the sound; but Ned, to whom it had become a novelty, and as great a mockery as a novelty, started violently, put up his hands to his ears, and rushed out into the hall, where Simmons stood in all the splendour of his evening dress.

'Stop that infernal noise!' cried poor Ned, in a sudden outburst of rage and humiliation. He felt tempted to knock down the solemn spy before him, who already, he saw, had noted his dusty dress, his agitated face.

'Happy to see you home, sir,' said Simmons. 'Did you speak, sir? Is there anything as I can do for you?'

'The bell is not to be rung any more,' said Ned, walking gloomily off to his room. It was the first sign to the general world that the grandeur of Dura had come to an end.

A mournful dinner followed, carefully cooked, carefully served, an assiduous, silent servant behind each chair, and eaten as with ashes, and bitterness, and tears, a few faint remarks now and then, a feeble attempt, 'for the sake of the servants,' to look as if nothing was the matter. It was Mr Baldwin chiefly, a man who never could make up his mind that all was over, who made these attempts. Mrs Burton, for her part, was above all pretences. Her long stand against approaching ruin was over; she had laid down her arms, and she no longer cared who knew it. And as for Ned, he was too miserable, too heart-broken, to look anything but overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, as he was.

In the evening he strolled out, feeling the air of the house insupportable. His mother had gone to her room with her new problem which she had to solve, and Mr Baldwin was tired, and fretful, and anxious to get to bed early, feeling that there was a certain virtue in that fact of going early to bed which might redeem the unusually disturbed, excited life he was leading – a life in which he had been fatally entangled with ruins, and elopements, and sitting up half the night. Ned, who had no mind for sleep, and no power of thinking which could have been of any service to him in the circumstances, went out disconsolately, saying to himself that a stroll in the woods might do him good. But when he had reached the top of the avenue, where the path diverged into the woods, some 'spirit in his feet' led him straight on. Why, he asked himself, should he go to the village? Why should he go to the Gatehouse? Yes, that was where he wanted to go – where his foolish heart had gone before him, courting slight and scorn. Why should he go? If she had sent him away then with contumely, how much more now? At that time, if she had but looked upon him kindly, he had thought he had something to offer her worthy her acceptance. Now he had nothing, and less than nothing – an empty purse and a dishonoured name. Ned slouched his hat over his eyes. He would go and look at the house, look at her window. If he might see her face again, that would be more than he hoped for. Norah could be nothing – nothing to him now.

So saying, he wandered down the leafy, shadowy way. The sun had set, the gray of the evening had come on; the moon was past the full, and rose late; it was one of those soft, tranquil, mournful summer evenings which fill the heart with wistfulness and longings. The water came unbidden into poor Ned's eyes. Oh, what ruin, what destruction had overwhelmed him and his since last he walked down that path! Then everything that life could offer to make up for the want of Norah (though that was nothing) lay within his grasp. Now, though Norah was clearly lost, everything else was lost with her. He saw no hope before him; his very heart was crushed; a beggar, and more than a beggar; a man who did not know how to dig or how to work; the son of a father who was disgraced. These were miserable thoughts to pour through the mind of a young man of twenty-one. There have been others who have had as much to bear; but they, perhaps, had no Norah to complicate and increase the burden. As he drew near the Gatehouse, his heart began to beat louder. Possibly she would not care to speak to him at all, he thought; how quickly she had dismissed him last time, when he had no stains upon him, as he had now!

He drew his hat still more over his brows. He walked quickly past the Gatehouse. The windows were all open, and Stephen Haldane sat within, in an interior faintly lighted up by the candles which Miss Jane had just set down upon the table.

'Don't shut my window yet,' he heard the invalid say. 'My poor window! My chief pleasure!'

It was strange to Ned to hear those words, which seemed to let him into the very secret of the sick man's life.

'And a capital window it has been too,' said Miss Jane briskly, thinking of the book, and the money it had brought in.

Ned slackened his steps when he had passed. There had been something at one of the windows on the other side – something, a shadow, a passing gleam, as of a pale face pillowed upon two arms. The poor boy turned, and went back this time more slowly. Yes, surely there was a face at the window. The arms were withdrawn now; there was no light inside to reveal who it was; only a something – a pale little face looking out.