a silent party was assembled in the large old-fashioned room in which margaret's presence was awaited. on the high mantel clusters of tall wax-candles were grouped, which failed to light the dusky apartment half-way along its length or across its breadth, but threw their lustre around the hearth, covered with a turkey rug.
hayes meredith leaned moodily against the fluted side of the grim black-marble chimneypiece, with one foot on the brass fender, and his keen dark glance turned towards the glowing red fire. james dugdale sat in a heavy arm-chair, his head leaning back against the red-leather cushion, his long thin fingers grasping the sides of the chair, his face, always pale, now of an ashen-gray colour, and the nervous tremor which pervaded his entire frame painfully evident to the two stronger men. mr. baldwin paced the room with folded arms. all three were silent. they had said all that was to be said in the absence of her whom their consultation concerned so deeply.
a light tread in the passage outside the door caught mr. baldwin's strained ear. james dugdale heard it too, but he did not move; he only closed his eyes, and passed his hand across his brow. in another moment margaret was in the room, was within the luminous circle made by the light, and had advanced towards meredith. her face was deadly pale, but her eyes were bright, and the old look of resolution which he had so often remarked and admired struck him once more, with his first glance at her. her figure was as slight and girlish as when he had seen her last, the principal change was in the rich dress, now become habitual to her.
hayes meredith tried hard to make his earnest greeting as gladsome as it might have been; to say, "i told you we should meet again--you see i was a true prophet;" but there was something in her face which made it quite impossible. she shook hands with him, and then she turned to james, who had now stood up, and laid her hand upon his shoulder. fitzwilliam baldwin made no sign. the worst had come now, and he had very little strength to face it.
"james," she said, "is my father dead?"
"good god, margaret," he made answer, catching her hands in his, "no! what can have put such an idea, such a fear, into your mind? he is quite well."
she kissed him on the cheek, and sat down, keeping her hand on his arm still, and, slightly turning her head towards baldwin, said in a quiet voice,
"i know there is something wrong. my husband is concealing something from me; he is right in having concealed it so far, for he is always right--" she paused for a moment to smile at him, and then meredith did not know the face--he had never seen that look in it--"and he has asked you to meet us here and tell me what it is, because he cannot bear to tell me himself. well, i will hear anything you have to tell me, if it is his wish"--again she paused and smiled at him--"but he is here, and well; my father, and my child, and you"--she pressed james's arm with the hand that lay upon it--"are well; what can there be for me to fear so very much that my husband should dread to tell it to me himself?"
she turned an earnest, imploring gaze on james, and saw the look he directed at meredith. baldwin stepped hastily towards her, but she stretched her hand out, and shrank away from him. the terrible truth was fast swooping down upon her now.
"it does not come from him," she said breathlessly; "it is the resurrection of the past--it is my old dread--it is bad news that you have brought"--her white face addressed itself to meredith--"tell me what it is quickly, for god's sake! i can bear to know it--i cannot bear the suspense."
"i will tell you, my dear," said meredith; and he left his place, and put his strong arm round her--the other two stood side by side at a little distance. "it is bad news, but not very bad; the trouble it brings will soon be over, and no ill can ever come of it. do you remember when we heard, one night when you were at my house, that hungerford had been murdered?"
she started, and said, "yes, yes."
"you recollect the date?"
"perfectly." her voice was hardly audible.
"he did not meet that dreadful fate, margaret. he did not die thus, or then."
"thank god!" she said. and then, in a bewildered way, she thought for a moment, and cried out, "he is not dead! he is not dead! that is your news--your dreadful news!"
"no, my darling, no," said mr. baldwin, coming to her side. "it is not so bad as that. thank god, your fears are so far beyond the truth. he is dead. we are not parted. no, no."
"no, no," continued meredith, still holding her; "it is not so bad as that. hungerford is dead; i saw his body, and i gave it decent burial; but he did not die until long after the time when you believed him dead."
"when did he die?" she asked. the relief was immense; but if the news she was to hear was only that, it was rather good than bad. "when did he die?"
meredith hesitated. baldwin turned away.
"tell me," she insisted.
"he died only a short time ago," said meredith slowly. "he died only a few days before i left melbourne."
she was still standing, upheld by his arm, but she lost consciousness for a little as she stood. he placed her gently in a chair, and they kept aloof from her, until her eyes opened, and she drew a long breath. then she lifted her hand to her forehead, and slowly pushed the hair away from it.
"you are better now?" said james.
"i am quite well," she said. "let me understand this. i don't quite take it in."
"it is better that she should understand all about it at once, baldwin," said meredith. "the shock is over now, and time must not be lost. the only difference this unfortunate affair will make to you, my dear, is that you must be married over again."
he spoke the words with extreme reluctance, and margaret's face crimsoned.
"what," she exclaimed, "do you mean?" and then she said gently, "ah--yes--i see--i understand," and covering her face with her hands she burst into tears.
mr. baldwin knelt down by her chair, and gently drew one hand from before her eyes.
"i think you had better leave her with me now for a little while," he said.
the two men went silently away.
all through the hours of the wintry night, margaret strove with the anguish that had come on her as bravely as she had striven against that which had turned her youth to bitterness. but she strove now with a different kind of strength, and she had consolation then denied to her. yet even in that consolation there was more sorrow. in the past she had stood alone, her grief was hers only, her misery troubled no one's peace, or she did not realise that it had any outside influence; she had to fight the battle all alone, in patience, in endurance, in defiance, no softening influence, no gentle thoughts and blessed hopes to hamper or to aid her. the hard material conflict of life had been hers, and in her heart the sting of cruel mortification, of bitter disappointment, disgust, and scorn.
but she had borne this all alone, and had been able to bear it, had come through it somehow, and, if severely wounded, had hidden her wounds, now healed by the balm of love and happiness. but in this sorrow she did not stand alone; she had the additional misery that it had brought grief upon the man who had changed her whole life into gladness, him to whom she owed all, and more than realised every dim misgiving; she had ever felt when the idea of a second marriage presented itself.
she had seen meredith and dugdale again, after her long interview with mr. baldwin had come to an end--an interview full of exquisite pain to both, and yet stored among the most precious memories of their lives--and had learned all the particulars of the plan of action upon which they had decided. then she had requested that she might be left quite alone, until her presence should be necessary in the morning. during this trying time margaret had successfully maintained her composure, and when she left them the three men remained silent for several minutes, under the impression produced by her calmness, good sense, and self-control. meredith was the first to break the silence.
"how wonderfully she has borne it!" he said. "i never hoped she would have taken it like that, though i have seen her in great trouble before, and ought to have known what she could do and bear when the screw was put on her."
"i have never seen her in any trouble until now," said mr. baldwin--there was a strange kind of pain to him in this first association with the man who had seen and helped margaret in the time now again linked so mysteriously to the present--"she does, indeed, bear this wonderfully."
"i doubt whether any of us--whether even you--can tell what it is to her," said james, and there was a little impatience in his tone.
who could really know what she suffered but he--he, dowered with the power of feeling and understanding grief as these two men, so different, and yet in some qualities of their organisation so alike, were not dowered?
the exceptional circumstances had broken down the ordinary barriers which would have shut out the subject, and the three talked over the history of margaret's life in australia fully and freely. hayes meredith told the others all he knew, and from his narrative mr. baldwin learnt how tolerantly, how mercifully, margaret had dealt with the wretched man who had made her youth so miserable, and how, while telling him the simple terrible truth as she saw it, there was much she had not seen, had failed to understand. and, as he listened to the story, and thought how the ghost of the horrid past had risen up again to blight her, he felt as if all the love with which he had loved her were nothing in comparison with that which filled his heart now; and he grieved purely, unselfishly, for her, as she was then grieving for him.
margaret had taken her child into her room. the nurse, weary of the journey, was nothing loth to be rid of her charge, and being an honest, stupid, bovine sort of person, and therefore admirably suited to her functions, she did not trouble her mind about her mistress's movements or remark her appearance. the little girl, already strikingly like her mother, now slept tranquilly in margaret's arms, and now, when in the restlessness of mental suffering she could not sit still, but walked about the room, in a deep chair before the fire.
as the night wore on, margaret would kneel beside the chair, and look at the child by the fire-light, and then stand up again, and resume her wandering up and down. surely the dawn was very long in coming. she lived through those hours as probably every one in every kind of suffering lives through certain supreme hours of that experience; in alternate paroxysms of acute anguish, spells of quiet concentrated thought, and lapses of dull pain, in which there is a kind of confused forgetfulness, wanting little of being quite a blank. when the latter came, she would rock the child upon her knees before the fire, or stand idly at the window, the curtain held back in her hand, and her face pressed against the cold damp panes.
memory formed a rack on which she was stretched, until her powers of endurance were almost exhausted, and when the release came, it was accompanied by the stupor which follows terrible physical pain. every circumstance of her past life, every pain in it, from the fiercest pang to the most ignominious little insult, came up to her, and gave her a deliberate wrench, and above all, the sense of loneliness in all this, contradictory though such a feeling was to the general tenor of her thoughts, oppressed her. no one could share that trouble with her which came from the past--therein she must suffer alone.
then she would force herself to think of the dead man, and what he had suffered; to realise that he had actually been living, and her husband, while she was on her voyage to england, while she was living her peaceful life at chayleigh, while--and at this point in her thoughts she shuddered, and a deadly coldness laid hold upon her-while she had loved and married another man, had filled a high position, and enjoyed all that wealth, station, and consideration could give her. the full horror of her position swept over her then, and afterwards came the deadness, the confusion, the vain helpless weeping over her child, the natural shrinking from what the morrow was to bring, the strange wondering sense of a totally false position, of an utterly new and disturbing element in her life, making all that had gone before seem unreal.
the hardest of all was to know, to make herself believe practically, that she, bearing fitzwilliam baldwin's name--she, the mother of his child--was not his wife. she knew how innocently, how unconsciously, she had done this wrong; they had made it plain to her how small its importance really was; but she was oppressed with a sense of shame and anguish in reference to it, almost intolerable, even when she did not turn her thoughts towards her child.
when she did not! that was seldom, indeed; for, underlying all the rest, there was the agony of the wrong her child had sustained, never to be assuaged, and many times during that dreadful night she uttered aloud to the unconscious infant some of the burden of her soul. the injury to her child, the possible touch of disgrace on the stainless story of baldwin's life; he who, as she said to herself over and over again, had lived in unblemished honour before the world, he who never needed, never wished to hide thought, or word, or deed of his, he who so loved her--these constituted the almost unbearable agony of the grief which had come upon her.
they had told her whence the remedy for all this evil was to be looked for. if the child to be born three months hence should prove to be a son, the wrong would be righted; little gerty would be no worse than if this had never happened, for it was not in any reason to be feared that the secret should ever transpire.
"and if my child should not be a son?" she had asked them simply.
"then there would be two to share baldwin's savings, and the unentailed property," hayes meredith had answered her, "and you would have to wait till the son and heir really did arrive."
she had said no more then, and now, as she mused over all that had been said, a passionate prayer arose in her heart, that the child for whose birth she now hoped, with feelings so widely, so sadly different from what they had been, might be a son. if it were so, baldwin would be satisfied; the sting would be taken out of this calamity for him, though for her it never could be.
james dugdale was right in the estimate he had formed of her feelings, little as she supposed that they were within any human ken. she did love little gertrude wonderfully; and to know her to be illegitimate, to know that she must owe her name and place in the world to a concealment, a false pretence, was a wound in the mother's heart never to be healed, and whose aching was never to be allayed.
so the hours wore away, and with their wearing; there came to margaret an increased sense of unreality. the ground she had trodden so securely was mined and shaken beneath her feet, and with the stability all the sweetness of her life had also passed away. in her thoughts she tried to avoid the keen remembrance of that beautiful, pure summertime of love and joy, over which this shadow had fallen, but she could not keep away from it; its twilight had too newly come. with keen intolerable swiftness and clearness a thousand memories of her beautiful, stately home came to haunt her, like forms of the dead, and it was all in vain that she strove to believe, with the friends who had endeavoured to cheer and console her, that the black shadow which had fallen between that home and her could ever be lifted more.
when the wintry dawn had fully come, she lay down on her bed, with her child in her arms, and slept. one tiny infant hand was doubled up against the mother's neck and her tear-stained cheek rested on the soft brown curls of the baby's hair.
margaret's slumber did not last long. she awoke long before the time at which she had told baldwin she would be ready. when she drew back the curtains and let in the cold gleaming light, there was as yet but little stir or noise in the street, and the shops opposite the hotel were but slowly struggling into their full-dressed and business-like appearance. she turned from the window, and looked at her face in the glass. was that face the same that had looked out at her only this time yesterday? she could hardly believe it was, so ghastly, so worn, so old it showed now. she turned away abruptly, and took off her dress, which she replaced by a dressing-gown, and shook down her rich hair about her neck and shoulders. presently the child awoke and cried, and margaret carried her to her nurse. she did not kiss the child, or look at her, after she had placed her in the woman's arms, but went away at once, with her teeth set.
how horrible, how unnatural, how shameful it seemed to margaret, as she dressed herself in the plainest garments her travelling trunks supplied, that this should be her wedding-day, and she was dressing for her marriage! all the painful feelings which she had experienced were concentrated and expressed in those terrible, almost incredible words. she went through her unaided task steadily, only avoiding seeing her face in the glass; and when it was quite done, when her shawl, and bonnet, and gloves were on, she knelt down by her bed, with her face upon the coverlet, and her clasped hands outstretched, and there she prayed and waited.
at nine o'clock james dugdale knocked at the door of margaret's room. she opened the door at his summons, and silently gave him her hand.
"baldwin is in the sitting-room," he said. "i see you are quite ready. are you feeling strong?"
"i am perfectly well," she replied.
they went downstairs, and into the room which the party had occupied on the preceding evening. preparations for breakfast were in active progress, and two waiters were conducting them with as much fuss and display of alacrity as possible.
hayes meredith greeted margaret with a cheerful aspect. mr. baldwin merely set a chair for her. their "good-morrow" was but a look, and what a pang this caused margaret! the servants were not to know they had not met till then.
to the practical, business-like mind of hayes meredith the painful matter on hand had not, indeed, ceased to be painful, but had advanced so far towards a happy termination, which should end its embarrassment positively, and in all human probability its danger, that he felt able to be cheerful without much effort or affectation, and took upon himself the task of keeping up appearances, to which his companions were much less equal. he really ate his breakfast, while the other three made the poorest pretence of doing so, and he did the talking about an early shopping expedition which had been proposed over night.
at length this portion of the trial came to an end in its turn, and margaret, accompanied by james, and followed by meredith and baldwin, left the hotel on foot. the two waiters witnessed the departure of the party.
"a precious glum lot for a party wot is wisitin' the metrop'lis, eh, william? said one to the other.
"ain't they just, jim! they are swells though, from wot i hear."
when they reached piccadilly meredith procured a hackney-coach, and the silent little company were driven to the city. margaret sat back, leaning her head in the corner with closed eyes. the three men hardly spoke. the way seemed very long, and yet when the coach stopped, in obedience to meredith's directions to the driver, in a crooked, narrow, dirty little street, which she had a confused notion was near the great river, margaret started, and her heart, which had lain like a lump of lead in her breast, began to beat violently.
a few minutes' walking, but by a tortuous way, brought them to a shabby little old church, damp, mouldy, and of disused aspect, and into the presence of a clergyman whose appearance matched admirably with that of the building, for he, too, was shabby, little, and old, and looked as if he were mouldered by time and seclusion. an ancient clerk, who apparently combined the clerkly office with those of the pew-opener and the verger, was the only other person present. not even a stray boy, not even a servant-girl out on an errand, or a nursemaid airing her charges in the damp, had been tempted, by the rare spectacle of an open church-door, to enter the building.
a little whispered conversation with the shabby little old clergyman, a paper shown by meredith, and a ghost-like beckoning by the clerk, with intent to marshal the wedding-party to their places, and all was ready. the words of the solemn marriage service, which it was so dreadful to those two to repeat, which they had spoken once with such joyful hearts, were said for the second time, and nothing but the signing of the register remained to be done.
as mr. baldwin with his wife followed the shabby little old clergyman into the vestry, he whispered to margaret,
"it is all over now, dearest; nothing can ever trouble or part us more but death."
she pressed the arm on which she was leaning very close to her breast, but she answered him never a word.
"sign your name here, if you please, madam," said the clerk, putting a dirty withered old finger on the blank space in the large book which held in such trite record so many first chapters of human histories.
mr. baldwin had already signed, and was looking at his wife with eager attention. he saw the spasm of agony which crossed her face as she wrote "margaret hungerford." james dugdale saw it too.
when meredith and dugdale in their turn had signed the register, and mr. baldwin had astonished the clergyman, to a degree unprecedented in his mild and mouldy existence, by the magnificence of the sum with which he rewarded his services, all was done, and the wedding-party left the church. mr. baldwin and margaret got into the coach, and were driven to a shop in piccadilly. there the driver, who was rather surprised at the novelty of a bridal pair being "dropped" at a shop instead of being taken home in orthodox style to breakfast, was dismissed. mr. and mrs. baldwin returned to the hotel, as they had left it, on foot.
"let me see--what's the name of the church and the parson?" said hayes meredith to james dugdale, as they stood in the street when the coach had taken baldwin and margaret away, and the church-door was shut upon them.
he had an old-fashioned red morocco-leather pocket-book, with a complicated clasp, composed of brass wire, open in his hand, and he carefully noted down james's reply, heading the memorandum with the initials,
f. m. b.
m. h.
"what do you write that down for?" james asked him.
"partly from habit, old fellow, and partly because i never was concerned in so strange an affair before, and i have a fancy for reminding myself of it."
he had put up the pocket-book as he spoke, and they were walking slowly away.
"i remember well," said meredith, "when i said good-bye to her on board the boomerang, i wondered what sort of fate awaited her in england. it is a very enviable one on the whole, in spite of this little cloud, which i look upon as quite blown over. it might have been an ugly business if that poor wretch had pulled through in the hospital. what a comfort that it has all been so capitally managed, isn't it?"
"yes," said james absently; "how very, very miserable she looked!"
"never mind that--it was natural--it was all so awkward you know. why, now that it is over, i can hardly believe it. but she will be all right to-morrow--the journey had something to do with her looks, you must remember."
when they reached the hotel they found mr. baldwin alone in the sitting-room. hayes meredith had recovered his spirits much more than any of the party. he was quite chatty, and inclined to enjoy himself, now that it was possible, in the delightful novelty of london. besides, he judged wisely that the less difference the event of the morning should be allowed to make in the disposition of the day the better.
mr. baldwin was ready to devote himself to his guest's pleasure, and a pleasant programme was soon made out. on reference being made to margaret she said she would remain at home all day, with the child. james, too, pleaded fatigue, and did not leave the house. and when the other two were gone he thought, "no one, not even he knows what this is to her so well as i know it."
