CHAPTER VI.

_THE YOUNG HEIR._

But the ground Of all great thoughts is sadness.

Arthur Forrest was certainly developing a taste for art--not at all a bad taste, his friends said one to the other, for a young man who had amply sufficient to live upon. It would fill up his time, keep him from the dangers of idleness, give him, in fact, something to think about. For art could easily be pursued in a most gentlemanlike manner. A person who fills the position, not of an artist indeed, but of an intelligent patron of the fine arts, is not only a useful member of society, but one who is held in some estimation by the world.

There were many who took a very close interest in the affairs of young Arthur Forrest, for he was, or would be in a few weeks--that was all the period that divided him from his majority--a young man of property. Then he was an orphan. What more natural than that tender, sympathetic young ladies and pious, well-conducted matrons should watch his proceedings with affectionate interest, and strive to do what lay within their power to save him from the evil influences which were popularly supposed to be immediately surrounding him?

Unfortunately for the pious matrons and sympathetic young ladies, Arthur was well taken care of.

Mrs. Churchill was his aunt. She had tended him in his infancy, as she often said pathetically to a circle of admirers; she had the first claim on his love and gratitude. The gratitude Mrs. Churchill was anxious to keep as her inalienable right in Arthur: the love she had already passed on to her daughter and representative, pretty Adele.

And hitherto Arthur had shown himself dutifully content with the arrangement. He did not think much of girls as a class, and certainly Adele was as good a specimen of them as he had ever met. Then he was accustomed to her; she generally knew how to keep him amused; she was pretty, lively and well dressed. Till Arthur met Margaret he had never admired a shabby person. In fact, he was languidly grateful to Aunt Ellen and the Fates for having arranged matters so comfortably, because matters were actually arranged.

Mrs. Churchill knew the world she lived in too well to allow such a thing as a tacit understanding between the cousins, which a young man's whim could break through in a moment. She did not intend that her daughter's first youth and beauty should be spent in a devotion which was destined to meet with no adequate return. Adele was rich and pretty--she would have no difficulty in meeting with a suitable partner; only to keep Arthur and his money in the family was desirable. Besides, he was young; he would make an amenable son-in-law; then he was already accustomed to the yoke--no small point this, in Mrs. Churchill's estimation.

When, therefore, Adele had reached the age of eighteen and Arthur that of twenty--events which had happened almost simultaneously shortly before my story opens--Mrs. Churchill, as she fondly hoped and believed, put the finishing stroke to the edifice she had been forming. It had been her aim, during the few years that had passed since Arthur had emerged into young manhood, to make her house the most agreeable place in the world to him, and in this she had been eminently successful. Adele had ably assisted her, for she, poor child! had always cherished affection for her handsome cousin--an affection which the dawn of womanhood and her mother's fostering influence ripened without much difficulty into a tenderer feeling.

She found it not easy, then, when wise eighteen had arrived, to understand her mother's tactics, for Arthur the welcome guest began from that date to be less warmly received, and obstacles were thrown in the way of their meetings, which had been so delightfully frequent and unembarrassed. They came notably from Mrs. Churchill, and yet her personal affection for her nephew seemed only to have increased; there was a tinge of gentle regret in her manner even while she appeared to be sending him from them.

It was almost more inexplicable to Arthur than to Adele and at last he could bear it no longer.

With the love of universal popularity so common to his age, he hated the idea of being in his relative's bad graces; besides, the charms of his cousin's society increased tenfold in his imagination as difficulties cropped up to interfere with his quiet enjoyment of them.

"By Jove!" he said to himself in the course of a cigar-fed meditation, "I must have it out with Aunt Ellen at once."

That was a memorable moment in his history. With the impulsiveness of youth he extinguished his cigar and repaired in haste to Mrs. Churchill's handsome residence. He found her alone in her drawing-room, pensive but loftily kind, and soon extracted from her what she would so much rather have kept to herself--that she was acting in Adele's interests; the dear girl was impressionable, the relationship dangerous; much as she loved her nephew, she must not forget that a mother's first duty was to watch over her child; and much more of a like nature, to all of which Arthur listened dutifully. Of course he was no match for his aunt; before the evening of that day had arrived he occupied the position of an accepted lover, blessed by a happy parent, and possessed what perhaps, on some future day, he might possibly be led to imagine the dear-bought privilege of a free _entree_ into Aunt Ellen's house. Since then matters had progressed satisfactorily, as far as Mrs. Churchill was concerned, though Adele, who took almost a motherly interest in her lover and future husband, was inclined to lament the absolute aimlessness of his life.

Women, generally speaking, have a quicker mental growth than men. The mind of a girl of eighteen is in many cases more mature than that of a man of twenty. Arthur had passed his twenty years without much thought beyond himself. Adele, with the like luxurious surroundings, had already begun to look past herself--to feel that there was a world of which she knew nothing, but with which, nevertheless, she was very closely connected--a world of want and suffering, where wrong was too often triumphant.

She was fond of reading. Perhaps some of these thoughts had crept in through the medium of poet and historian. For Adele's insight told her that there were many higher and nobler lives for a man and woman to lead than that of self-pleasing. She sometimes longed to be a man, that she might do something worth doing in a world that wanted the active and the strong. But the little she could do she did, and had she known how many blessed her for her gentle words and timely aid, she might have been less desponding about a woman's ability to take some place in the world.

For the rest she looked to Arthur, the hero of her imagination. Poor Adele! Her hero did not quite see as she did the necessity for exertion. He took life languidly, and could not conceive why people should excite themselves about what did not concern them; at least this was what he always said when she tried to instill into him some of her ideas about human wrongs and human service.

But Adele did not despair; she had a woman's supreme faith in "the to-come." Something would arouse Arthur's dormant energies and bring out the latent fire of his nature.

In the mean time she, with the rest of his world, was pleased to notice his growing interest in the fine arts, though she, wiser than they, felt inclined to put down his constant haunting of the picture-galleries to a growing restlessness that meant uneasiness with the aimless life of self-gratification he was leading and a stretching-out after something higher.

And Adele was partially right. Arthur was changed. Perhaps it was more the sadness than the beauty of that fair woman's face which haunted him so strangely, mingling with all his thoughts a certain self-reproach which he found it very difficult to understand.

It may have been that in the pale, calm face, resolute in endurance, he saw for one moment what was going on for ever around him; he read the mystic law of nature--sacrifice of self. For life is glad; where gladness is not life may be borne, but not loved or rejoiced in, and in the calm surrender of life's gladness to the call of life's necessity there is a surrender of life itself, the most beautiful part of life.

Something of this he had seen in Margaret's pale face. A joy put away, surrendered, a burden taken up and patiently borne. This it was that filled his mind when the first impression of her loveliness had in a manner passed. He saw the suffering, and beside the suffering he saw himself, self-indulgent, careless, free of hand, light of spirit, with no thought, in a general way, beyond the enjoyment of the present hour.

Often before Arthur had expressed something of this: lolling in a luxurious arm-chair with his feet on the fender, while Adele amused him by a song or read to him something that had been charming her, he would say with a comfortable sigh, "What a good-for-nothing sort of fellow I am, Adele!"

But then he had scarcely felt it, or if he had it had been only with a kind of impression that the good-for-nothingness sat elegantly on the shoulders of a young man of property.

Clever Mrs. Churchill rather encouraged the impression. Young men with ideas are apt to become unmanageable, and she was earnestly desirous of keeping Arthur in her invisible leading-strings.

But this time Arthur felt it. There was suffering, sorrow, wrong in the world; he was doing nothing but vegetate on its surface, keeping his comforts, his gladness, his fresh young life for his own selfish gratification. And the worst of it all was that he did not see a way out of it. In the days of chivalry young knights went out armed to fight for defenceless women and redress human wrongs. Arthur felt sure that his mysterious lady had been in some way cruelly wronged, and he longed to constitute himself her protector and knight; but in the first place she had persistently denied herself to him; in the second place her wrongs might prove to be such as he would find himself utterly unable to redress.

He was bound to Adele, and if it had not been so he felt instinctively that he was scarcely a suitable husband for the beautiful widow. (Arthur had made up his mind that Margaret _was_ a widow.) Under such circumstances, even if so minor an evil as poverty were her trouble, there would be a certain incongruity in offering her half his fortune, and she would probably resent such a step. He could offer it anonymously, but even in such case it would be quite possible that she might think it right to decline acceptance, and Mrs. Churchill would reasonably consider Adele and any children she might have wronged by the proceeding. Arthur, in fact, had wandered into a maze whence there really seemed to be no exit. His only hope was to see Margaret again. One more glimpse of her fair face might do more toward unravelling the mystery than hours of lonely pondering. This, then, it was, rather more than love of art, that led him to haunt the picture-galleries, and especially the one where he had first seen her.

But if it were this that led him, something else kept him. Wandering hither and thither by these trophies of mind, with this new earnestness in his spirit, he began to feel in them a power unsuspected in his former languid visits. They represented work, conflict, triumph. Each picture had its history, into each were wrought the mingled threads of human experience. In the dim glory that shone from one or two of these transcripts of Nature Arthur read the struggle of soul to express itself worthily, and his young spirit was stirred within him.

In the loving detail, all beautiful of its kind, with which the artist surrounded the fair queen of his homage, he saw the earnestness of genius, and bowing his head he worshipped in the great temple of Humanity.

The young man's thoughts began to run, not on his own elegance and superiority, but on the great problems of Nature and Art. Self was removed from its lofty pedestal. What the fair woman's face had begun human genius carried on. Arthur Forrest was changed.