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CHAPTER IV.
OUR GRAND PROJECT.
AT the end of the fifth week of our guest's stay, among the
letters which the morning's post brought to The Glen Tower there
was one for me, from my son George, in the Crimea.
The effect which this letter produced in our little circle
renders it necessary that I should present it here, to speak for
itself.
This is what I read alone in my own room:
"MY DEAREST FATHER--After the great public news of the fall of
Sebastopol, have you any ears left for small items of private
intelligence from insignificant subaltern officers? Prepare, if
you have, for a sudden and a startling announcement. How shall I
write the words? How shall I tell you that I am really coming
home?
"I have a private opportunity of sending this letter, and only a
short time to write it in; so I must put many things, if I can,
into few words. The doctor has reported me fit to travel at last,
and I leave, thanks to the privilege of a wounded man, by the
next ship. The name of the vessel and the time of starting are on
the list which I inclose. I have made all my calculations, and,
allowing for every possible delay, I find that I shall be with
you, at the latest, on the first of November--perhaps some days
earlier.
"I am far too full of my return, and of something else connected
with it which is equally dear to me, to say anything about public
affairs, more especially as I know that the newspapers must, by
this time, have given you plenty of information. Let me fill the
rest of this paper with a subject which is very near to my
heart--nearer, I am almost ashamed to say, than the great triumph
of my countrymen, in which my disabled condition has prevented me
from taking any share.
"I gathered from your last letter that Miss Yelverton was to pay
you a visit this autumn, in your capacity of her guardian. If she
is already with you, pray move heaven and earth to keep her at
The Glen Tower till I come back. Do you anticipate my confession
from this entreaty? My dear, dear father, all my hopes rest on
that one darling treasure which you are guarding perhaps, at this
moment, under your own roof--all my happiness depends on making
Jessie Yelverton my wife.
"If I did not sincerely believe that you will heartily approve of
my choice, I should hardly have ventured on this abrupt
confession. Now that I have made it, let me go on and tell you
why I have kept my attachment up to this time a secret from every
one--even from Jessie herself. (You see I call her by her
Christian name already!)
"I should have risked everything, father, and have laid my whole
heart open before her more than a year ago, but for the order
which sent our regiment out to take its share in this great
struggle of the Russian war. No ordinary change in my life would
have silenced me on the subject of all others of which I was most
anxious to speak; but this change made me think seriously of the
future; and out of those thoughts came the resolution which I
have kept until this time. For her sake, and for her sake only, I
constrained myself to leave the words unspoken which might have
made her my promised wife. I resolved to spare her the dreadful
suspense of waiting for her betrothed husband till the perils of
war might, or might not, give him back to her. I resolved to save
her from the bitter grief of my death if a bullet laid me low. I
resolved to preserve her from the wretched sacrifice of herself
if I came back, as many a brave man will come back from this war,
invalided for life. Leaving her untrammeled by any engagement,
unsuspicious perhaps of my real feelings toward her, I might die,
and know that, by keeping silence, I had spared a pang to the
heart that was dearest to me. This was the thought that stayed
the words on my lips when I left England, uncertain whether I
should ever come back. If I had loved her less dearly, if her
happiness had been less precious to me, I might have given way
under the hard restraint I imposed on myself, and might have
spoken selfishly at the last moment.
"And now the time of trial is past; the war is over; and,
although I still walk a little lame, I am, thank God, in as good
health and in much better spirits than when I left home. Oh,
father, if I should lose her now--if I should get no reward for
sparing her but the bitterest of all disappointments! Sometimes I
am vain enough to think that I made some little impression on
her; sometimes I doubt if she has a suspicion of my love. She
lives in a gay world--she is the center of perpetual
admiration--men with all the qualities to win a woman's heart are
perpetually about her--can I, dare I hope? Yes, I must! Only keep
her, I entreat you, at The Glen Tower. In that quiet world, in
that freedom from frivolities and temptations, she will listen to
me as she might listen nowhere else. Keep her, my dearest,
kindest father--and, above all things, breathe not a word to her
of this letter. I have surely earned the privilege of being the
first to open her eyes to the truth. She must know nothing, now
that I am coming home, till she knows all from my own lips."
Here the writing hurriedly broke off. I am only giving myself
credit for common feeling, I trust, when I confess that what I
read deeply affected me. I think I never felt so fond of my boy,
and so proud of him, as at the moment when I laid down his
letter.
As soon as I could control my spirits, I began to calculate the
question of time with a trembling eagerness, which brought back
to my mind my own young days of love and hope. My son was to come
back, at the latest, on the first of November, and Jessie's
allotted six weeks would expire on the twenty-second of October.
Ten days too soon! But for the caprice which had brought her to
us exactly that number of days before her time she would have
been in the house, as a matter of necessity, on George's return.
I searched back in my memory for a conversation that I had held
with her a week since on her future plans. Toward the middle of
November, her aunt, Lady Westwick, had arranged to go to her
house in Paris, and Jessie was, of course, to accompany her--to
accompany her into that very circle of the best English and the
best French society which contained in it the elements most
adverse to George's hopes. Between this time and that she had no
special engagement, and she had only settled to write and warn
her aunt of her return to London a day or two before she left The
Glen Tower.
Under these circumstances, the first, the all-important necessity
was to prevail on her to prolong her stay beyond the allotted six
weeks by ten days. After the caution to be silent impressed on me
(and most naturally, poor boy) in George's letter, I felt that I
could only appeal to her on the ordinary ground of hospitality.
Would this be sufficient to effect the object?
I was sure that the hours of the morning and the afternoon had,
thus far, been fully and happily occupied by her various
amusements indoors and out. She was no more weary of her days now
than she had been when she first came among us. But I was by no
means so certain that she was not tired of her evenings. I had
latterly noticed symptoms of weariness after the lamps were lit,
and a suspicious regularity in retiring to bed the moment the
clock struck ten. If I could provide her with a new amusement for
the long evenings, I might leave the days to take care of
themselves, and might then make sure (seeing that she had no
special engagement in London until the middle of November) of her
being sincerely thankful and ready to prolong her stay.
How was this to be done? The piano and the novels had both failed
to attract her. What other amusement was there to offer?
It was useless, at present, to ask myself such questions as
these. I was too much agitated to think collectedly on the most
trifling subjects. I was even too restless to stay in my own
room. My son's letter had given me so fresh an interest in Jessie
that I was now as impatient to see her as if we were about to
meet for the first time. I wanted to look at her with my new
eyes, to listen to her with my new ears, to study her secretly
with my new purposes, and my new hopes and fears. To my dismay
(for I wanted the very weather itself to favor George's
interests), it was raining heavily that morning. I knew,
therefore, that I should probably find her in her own
sitting-room. When I knocked at her door, with George's letter
crumpled up in my hand, with George's hopes in full possession of
my heart, it is no exaggeration to say that my nerves were almost
as much fluttered, and my ideas almost as much confused, as they
were on a certain memorable day in the far past, when I rose, in
brand-new wig and gown, to set my future prospects at the bar on
the hazard of my first speech.
When I entered the room I found Jessie leaning back languidly in
her largest arm-chair, watching the raindrops dripping down the
window-pane. The unfortunate box of novels was open by her side,
and the books were lying, for the most part, strewed about on the
ground at her feet. One volume lay open, back upward, on her lap,
and her hands were crossed over it listlessly. To my great
dismay, she was yawning--palpably and widely yawning--when I came
in.
No sooner did I find myself in her presence than an irresistible
anxiety to make some secret discovery of the real state of her
feelings toward George took possession of me. After the customary
condolences on the imprisonment to which she was subjected by the
weather, I said, in as careless a manner as it was possible to
assume:
"I have heard from my son this morning. He talks of being ordered
home, and tells me I may expect to see him before the end of the
year."
I was too cautious to mention the exact date of his return, for
in that case she might have detected my motive for asking her to
prolong her visit.
"Oh, indeed?" she said. "How very nice. How glad you must be."
I watched her narrowly. The clear, dark blue eyes met mine as
openly as ever. The smooth, round cheeks kept their fresh color
quite unchanged. The full, good-humored, smiling lips never
trembled or altered their expression in the slightest degree. Her
light checked silk dress, with its pretty trimming of
cherry-colored ribbon, lay quite still over the bosom beneath it.
For all the information I could get from her look and manner, we
might as well have been a hundred miles apart from each other. Is
the best woman in the world little better than a fathomless abyss
of duplicity on certain occasions, and where certain feelings of
her own are concerned? I would rather not think that; and yet I
don't know how to account otherwise for the masterly manner in
which Miss Jessie contrived to baffle me.
I was afraid--literally afraid--to broach the subject of
prolonging her sojourn with us on a rainy day, so I changed the
topic, in despair, to the novels that were scattered about her.
"Can you find nothing there," I asked, "to amuse you this wet
morning?"
"There are two or three good novels," she said, carelessly, "but
I read them before I left London."
"And the others won't even do for a dull day in the country?" I
went on.
"They might do for some people," she answered, "but not for me.
I'm rather peculiar, perhaps, in my tastes. I'm sick to death of
novels with an earnest purpose. I'm sick to death of outbursts of
eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic
descriptions, and unsparing anatomy of the human heart, and all
that sort of thing. Good gracious me! isn't it the original
intention or purpose, or whatever you call it, of a work of
fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story? And how many
of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as
telling a story is concerned, the greater part of them might as
well be sermons as novels. Oh, dear me! what I want is something
that seizes hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it is
time to dress for dinner--something that keeps me reading,
reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end. You
know what I mean--at least you ought. Why, there was that little
chance story you told me yesterday in the garden--don't you
remember?--about your strange client, whom you never saw again: I
declare it was much more interesting than half these novels,
because it was a story. Tell me another about your young days,
when you were seeing the world, and meeting with all sorts of
remarkable people. Or, no--don't tell it now--keep it till the
evening, when we all want something to stir us up. You old people
might amuse us young ones out of your own resources oftener than
you do. It was very kind of you to get me these books; but, with
all respect to them, I would rather have the rummaging of your
memory than the rummaging of this box. What's the matter? Are you
afraid I have found out the window in your bosom already?"
I had half risen from my chair at her last words, and I felt that
my face must have flushed at the same moment. She had started an
idea in my mind--the very idea of which I had been in search when
I was pondering over the best means of amusing her in the long
autumn evenings.
I parried her questions by the best excuses I could offer;
changed the conversation for the next five minutes, and then,
making a sudden remembrance of business my apology for leaving
her, hastily withdrew to devote myself to the new idea in the
solitude of my own room.
A little quiet thinking convinced me that I had discovered a
means not only of occupying her idle time, but of decoying her
into staying on with us, evening by evening, until my son's
return. The new project which she had herself unconsciously
suggested involved nothing less than acting forthwith on her own
chance hint, and appealing to her interest and curiosity by the
recital of incidents and adventures drawn from my own personal
experience and (if I could get them to help me) from the
experience of my brothers as well. Strange people and startling
events had connected themselves with Owen's past life as a
clergyman, with Morgan's past life as a doctor, and with my past
life as a lawyer, which offered elements of interest of a strong
and striking kind ready to our hands. If these narratives were
written plainly and unpretendingly; if one of them was read every
evening, under circumstances that should pique the curiosity and
impress the imagination of our young guest, the very occupation
was found for her weary hours which would gratify her tastes,
appeal to her natural interest in the early lives of my brothers
and myself, and lure her insensibly into prolonging her visit by
ten days without exciting a suspicion of our real motive for
detaining her.
I sat down at my desk; I hid my face in my hands to keep out all
impressions of external and present things; and I searched back
through the mysterious labyrinth of the Past, through the dun,
ever-deepening twilight of the years that were gone.
Slowly, out of the awful shadows, the Ghosts of Memory rose about
me. The dead population of a vanished world came back to life
round me, a living man. Men and women whose earthly pilgrimage
had ended long since, returned upon me from the unknown spheres,
and fond, familiar voices burst their way back to my ears through
the heavy silence of the grave. Moving by me in the nameless
inner light, which no eye saw but mine, the dead procession of
immaterial scenes and beings unrolled its silent length. I saw
once more the pleading face of a friend of early days, with the
haunting vision that had tortured him through life by his side
again--with the long-forgotten despair in his eyes which had once
touched my heart, and bound me to him, till I had tracked his
destiny through its darkest windings to the end. I saw the figure
of an innocent woman passing to and fro in an ancient country
house, with the shadow of a strange suspicion stealing after her
wherever she went. I saw a man worn by hardship and old age,
stretched dreaming on the straw of a stable, and muttering in his
dream the terrible secret of his life.
Other scenes and persons followed these, less vivid in their
revival, but still always recognizable and distinct; a young girl
alone by night, and in peril of her life, in a cottage on a
dreary moor--an upper chamber of an inn, with two beds in it; the
curtains of one bed closed, and a man standing by them, waiting,
yet dreading to draw them back--a husband secretly following the
first traces of a mystery which his wife's anxious love had
fatally hidden from him since the day when they first met; these,
and other visions like them, shadowy reflections of the living
beings and the real events that had been once, peopled the
solitude and the emptiness around me. They haunted me still when
I tried to break the chain of thought which my own efforts had
wound about my mind; they followed me to and fro in the room; and
they came out with me when I left it. I had lifted the veil from
the Past for myself, and I was now to rest no more till I had
lifted it for others.
I went at once to my eldest brother and showed him my son's
letter, and told him all that I have written here. His kind heart
was touched as mine had been. He felt for my suspense; he shared
my anxiety; he laid aside his own occupation on the spot.
"Only tell me," he said, "how I can help, and I will give every h
our in the day to you and to George."
I had come to him with my mind almost as full of his past life as
of my own; I recalled to his memory events in his experience as a
working clergyman in London; I set him looking among papers which
he had preserved for half his lifetime, and the very existence of
which he had forgotten long since; I recalled to him the names of
persons to whose necessities he had ministered in his sacred
office, and whose stories he had heard from their own lips or
received under their own handwriting. When we parted he was
certain of what he was wanted to do, and was resolute on that
very day to begin the work.
I went to Morgan next, and appealed to him as I had already
appealed to Owen. It was only part of his odd character to start
all sorts of eccentric objections in reply; to affect a cynical
indifference, which he was far from really and truly feeling; and
to indulge in plenty of quaint sarcasm on the subject of Jessie
and his nephew George. I waited till these little
surface-ebullitions had all expended themselves, and then pressed
my point again with the earnestness and anxiety that I really
felt.
Evidently touched by the manner of my appeal to him even more
than by the language in which it was expressed, Morgan took
refuge in his customary abruptness, spread out his paper
violently on the table, seized his pen and ink, and told me quite
fiercely to give him his work and let him tackle it at once.
I set myself to recall to his memory some very remarkable
experiences of his own in his professional days, but he stopped
me before I had half done.
"I understand," he said, taking a savage dip at the ink, "I'm to
make her flesh creep, and to frighten her out of her wits. I'll
do it with a vengeance!"
Reserving to myself privately an editorial right of supervision
over Morgan's contributions, I returned to my own room to begin
my share--by far the largest one--of the task before us. The
stimulus applied to my mind by my son's letter must have been a
strong one indeed, for I had hardly been more than an hour at my
desk before I found the old literary facility of my youthful
days, when I was a writer for the magazines, returning to me as
if by magic. I worked on unremittingly till dinner-time, and then
resumed the pen after we had all separated for the night. At two
o'clock the next morning I found myself--God help
me!--masquerading, as it were, in my own long-lost character of a
hard-writing young man, with the old familiar cup of strong tea
by my side, and the old familiar wet towel tied round my head.
My review of the progress I had made, when I looked back at my
pages of manuscript, yielded all the encouragement I wanted to
drive me on. It is only just, however, to add to the record of
this first day's attempt, that the literary labor which it
involved was by no means of the most trying kind. The great
strain on the intellect--the strain of invention--was spared me
by my having real characters and events ready to my hand. If I
had been called on to create, I should, in all probability, have
suffered severely by contrast with the very worst of those
unfortunate novelists whom Jessie had so rashly and so
thoughtlessly condemned. It is not wonderful that the public
should rarely know how to estimate the vast service which is done
to them by the production of a good book, seeing that they are,
for the most part, utterly ignorant of the immense difficulty of
writing even a bad one.
The next day was fine, to my great relief; and our visitor, while
we were at work, enjoyed her customary scamper on the pony, and
her customary rambles afterward in the neighborhood of the house.
Although I had interruptions to contend with on the part of Owen
and Morgan, neither of whom possessed my experience in the
production of what heavy people call "light literature," and both
of whom consequently wanted assistance, still I made great
progress, and earned my hours of repose on the evening of the
second day.
On that evening I risked the worst, and opened my negotiations
for the future with "The Queen of Hearts."
About an hour after the tea had been removed, and when I happened
to be left alone in the room with her, I noticed that she rose
suddenly and went to the writing-table. My suspicions were
aroused directly, and I entered on the dangerous subject by
inquiring if she intended to write to her aunt.
"Yes," she said. "I promised to write when the last week came. If
you had paid me the compliment of asking me to stay a little
longer, I should have returned it by telling you I was sorry to
go. As it is, I mean to be sulky and say nothing."
With those words she took up her pen to begin the letter.
"Wait a minute," I remonstrated. "I was just on the point of
begging you to stay when I spoke."
"Were you, indeed?" she returned. "I never believed in
coincidences of that sort before, but now, of course, I put the
most unlimited faith in them!"
"Will you believe in plain proofs?" I asked, adopting her humor.
"How do you think I and my brothers have been employing ourselves
all day to-day and all day yesterday? Guess what we have been
about."
"Congratulating yourselves in secret on my approaching
departure," she answered, tapping her chin saucily with the
feather-end of her pen.
I seized the opportunity of astonishing her, and forthwith told
her the truth. She started up from the table, and approached me
with the eagerness of a child, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks
flushed.
"Do you really mean it?" she said.
I assured her that I was in earnest. She thereupon not only
expressed an interest in our undertaking, which was evidently
sincere, but, with characteristic impatience, wanted to begin the
first evening's reading on that very night. I disappointed her
sadly by explaining that we required time to prepare ourselves,
and by assuring her that we should not be ready for the next five
days. On the sixth day, I added, we should be able to begin, and
to go on, without missing an evening, for probably ten days more.
"The next five days?" she replied. "Why, that will just bring us
to the end of my six weeks' visit. I suppose you are not setting
a trap to catch me? This is not a trick of you three cunning old
gentlemen to make me stay on, is it?"
I quailed inwardly as that dangerously close guess at the truth
passed her lips.
"You forget," I said, "that the idea only occurred to me after
what you said yesterday. If it had struck me earlier, we should
have been ready earlier, and then where would your suspicions
have been?"
"I am ashamed of having felt them," she said, in her frank,
hearty way. "I retract the word 'trap,' and I beg pardon for
calling you 'three cunning old gentlemen.' But what am I to say
to my aunt?"
She moved back to the writing-table as she spoke.
"Say nothing," I replied, "till you have heard the first story.
Shut up the paper-case till that time, and then decide when you
will open it again to write to your aunt."
She hesitated and smiled. That terribly close guess of hers was
not out of her mind yet.
"I rather fancy," she said, slyly, "that the story will turn out
to be the best of the whole series."
"Wrong again," I retorted. "I have a plan for letting chance
decide which of the stories the first one shall be. They shall be
all numbered as they are done; corresponding numbers shall be
written inside folded pieces of card and well mixed together; you
shall pick out any one card you like; you shall declare the
number written within; and, good or bad, the story that answers
to that number shall be the story that is read. Is that fair?"
"Fair!" she exclaimed; "it's better than fair; it makes me of
some importance; and I must be more or less than woman not to
appreciate that."
"Then you consent to wait patiently for the next five days?"
"As patiently as I can."
"And you engage to decide nothing about writing to your aunt
until you have heard the first story?"
"I do," she said, returning to the writing-table. "Behold the
proof of it." She raised her hand with theatrical solemnity, and
closed the paper-case with an impressive bang.
I leaned back in my chair with my mind at ease for the first time
since the receipt of my son's letter.
"Only let George return by the first of November," I thought to
myself, "and all the aunts in Christendom shall not prevent
Jessie Yelverton from being here to meet him."
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