CHAPTER V.

ABOUT MRS. MORTOMLEY AND OTHERS.

As has been already stated, Mr. Henry Werner assisted at the wedding in the character of best man, and it was to this circumstance that he owed the good fortune of subsequently marrying Miss Trebasson himself.

Had he met that young lady--as he did afterwards meet her, as a mere guest at Homewood--in the unexalted position of Mrs. Mortomley's friend, he would never have thought of asking her to be his wife; but seeing her for the first time with the glamour of Dassell Court upon her, and the glory of her relatives surrounding her, he thought it would be a fine thing for him to win and wed such a woman even if she had not, as he soon found out was the case, a penny of fortune.

More of these matches are made than people generally imagine. It is astonishing to look around and behold the number of well-born women who have married men, that at first sight one might imagine to have been as far distant from the upper ten thousand as earth is from heaven; and it is more astonishing still to find that these women have, one and all--despite their prejudices, their pedigree, their pride, and their delicate sensitiveness--married for money.

It would be useless to deny that Leonora Trebasson did this. She was not a girl of whom such a step could have been predicated, and yet, looking at the affair from a common-sense point of view, it was quite certain--after the event--that if no one for whom she could feel affection possessed of money came to woo, she would marry some person for whom she did not care in the least.

It was necessary for her to marry; she knew it, she had always known it. Her mother's small jointure died with her. Whenever her cousin, the heir of Dassell Court, took a wife--and there was just as great a necessity for him to find an heiress as for her to meet a man possessed of a competence, at all events--she understood she and her mother would have to leave the Court, and settle down in perhaps such another cottage as that tenanted by Miss Gerace.

There had been a tenderness once between herself and Charley--the Honourable Charles Trebasson--but the elders on both sides comprehending how disastrous such a pauper union must prove, speedily nipped that attachment in the bud, and the future Lord went out into the world to look for his heiress, whilst Miss Trebasson stayed at Dassell to await the husband fate might send her.

Of these and such like matters the mother and daughter never spoke openly; but it was clearly understood between them, that curates without private fortune, officers with no income beyond their pay, the younger sons of neighbouring squires, were to be considered as utterly ineligible for husbands.

Mrs. Trebasson herself having made a love-match and suffered for the imprudence every day of her married life, she had educated Leonora to keep her feelings well in hand and on no account to let affection run away with her judgment.

When Archibald Mortomley went down that summer to fish, and recruit his health, Mrs. Trebasson's hopes grew high that love and prudence might, for once, be able to walk hand in hand together.

She liked Mortomley--he was the kind of man to whom women, especially elderly women, take naturally with as true and keen an instinct as children--and the thought passed through her mind that here, at last, was a possible son-in-law, who would not merely make a good husband to her daughter, but prove a friend to herself.

She pictured Homewood, and fancied she could end her days there happily. In those days of uncertainty the future wore a fairer face for mother and child than had ever been the case previously.

And then the vision departed--Dolly, whom Mrs. Trebasson had always regarded as less than nobody, was preferred to Leonora. Without lifting a finger to secure the prize--without the slightest effort or trouble on her part--the stranger yielded himself captive. It was not Dolly's fault, nevertheless Mrs. Trebasson regarded her with unchristian feelings for the remainder of her life.

When, after a time, Henry Werner preferred his suit and was accepted, Mrs. Trebasson never spoke of ending her days in his house; rather she trusted she "should not have to leave Dassell Court until she was laid in the family vault."

She had no fault to find with Mr. Werner. He was a much richer man than Mortomley; he was possessed of more worldly sense than any Mortomley ever boasted; he was ambitious and might rise to be a man of mark as well as one of wealth; he spent money lavishly; he evidently intended to maintain a handsome establishment; he was proud of the beauty and stately grace of his _fiancée_; he bowed down before the Darshams and worshipped them; he was of a suitable age and sufficiently presentable--and yet--and yet--Mrs. Trebasson felt her daughter ought to have married Archibald Mortomley, and then Dolly Gerace might have been chosen by Henry Werner or some one like him.

Dolly had no love, however, for Henry Werner. So far as she was in the habit of developing antipathies she felt one for him, and when she learned he had proposed for Leonora and been accepted, she expressed her opinions on the subject with a freedom which Mrs. Trebasson, at all events, keenly resented.

"You must not be angry with poor Dolly, mamma," said her friend, tearing Mrs. Mortomley's letter into very small fragments and then strewing them on the fire. Mrs. Trebasson had desired the letter should be preserved and deposited with other family treasures, to the end that Dolly might, at some future day, be confronted with it and covered with confusion; but her daughter would permit nothing of the kind.

"I do not know why you call her 'poor' Dolly," retorted Mrs. Trebasson, "she has an excellent husband who gives her everything she wants and never crosses her whims. She has plenty of money and a pretty house--she who never had a sovereign in her pocket she could call her own; and now, forsooth, she must give herself airs and presume to dictate to you."

"She does not dictate, mamma, she only expresses her opinions--she means no harm."

"It would be harm in any one else. Why should you defend her when she is so grossly impertinent?"

"I love Dolly," was the quiet answer. "She is often very foolish, sometimes very trying, always disappointing and unsatisfying; but I shall love her to the end."

When Miss Trebasson set her foot down upon such a sentence as the foregoing, Mrs. Trebasson understood further expostulation was useless, and so the offensive letter smouldered into ashes, and the bride elect tried to forget its contents as she had too readily, perhaps, forgiven them.

Fortunately for all concerned Dolly was unable to be present at her friend's wedding, and Mortomley gladly enough made the state of his wife's health a plea for excusing his own attendance.

Owing either to her own folly, or to some remoter cause with which this story has no concern, Mrs. Mortomley was, at that period, having an extremely hard fight for life. She had been happy with her child--that Lenore of whom Mr. Kleinwort made mention--for a couple of days. Every one was satisfied, husband, doctor, nurse; and then suddenly there came a reaction, and Dolly hung between life and death, insensible to the reality of either.

When Mrs. Werner, after her wedding tour, drove over and visited her friend, she found outwardly a very different Dolly to that photographed in her memory.

A pale weak woman, with hair cut short and softly curling round her temples; a creature with transparent hands; dark eyes looking eagerly and anxiously out of a white sunken face; the Dolly of old; but Dolly as she might have looked had she gone to heaven and come back again to earth; Dolly etherealised, and with a beauty of delicacy strange as it was new--but Dolly unchanged mentally.

With a feeling of surprise and regret Mrs. Werner confessed to herself that not even the fact of having set her feet in the valley of the shadow, and being brought back into the sunshine, almost by a miracle, had altered her friend.

The want there had been in Dolly before her marriage still remained unsupplied.

"I wonder what would really change her," thought Mrs. Werner looking at the poor wan cheeks, at the wasted figure, at the feeble woman too weak to hold her child in her arms and coo soft tender nothings in its ear.

One day Mrs. Werner was to understand; but before that day arrived she was destined to see many changes in Dolly.

When Mrs. Mortomley was sufficiently recovered to endure the fatigue of travelling, the doctors recommended her to leave London and remain for some time at a quiet watering-place on the East coast. Near that particular town resided some relatives of the Trebassons, and to them Mrs. Werner wrote, asking them to call on her friend.

That proved the turning point in Dolly's life, and she took, as generally proves the case, the wrong road. With what anguish of spirit, over what weary and stony paths, through what hedges set thick with thorns, she retraced her steps, it is part of the purpose of this story to show. As matters then stood, she simply went along winding lanes bordered with flowers, festooned by roses, the sun shining over-head, the birds singing all around; went on, unthinking of evil, happier than she had ever been before; satisfied, because at last she had found her vocation.

To enjoy herself--that was the object for which she was created. If she did not say this in so many words, she felt it, felt it like a blessing each night as she laid her head on her pillow--her poor foolish little head which was not strong enough to bear the excitement of the new and strange life suddenly opened before her.

She was young--she was recovering from dangerous illness; she was, notwithstanding her feeble health, bright and gay and sun-shiny. She had plenty of money, for her husband grudged her nothing his love could supply; she was interesting and fresh, and new, and naïve, and she was the dearest friend Leonora Trebasson ever had; what wonder therefore that the people amongst whom she was thrown fussed over, and petted and flattered, and humoured her, till they taught Dolly wherein her power and her genius lay; so that when Mrs. Mortomley returned home she took with her graces previously undeveloped, and left behind the virtue of unconsciousness and the mantle of personal humility which had hitherto clothed her.

Up to that time Dolly had not thought much of herself. Now she was as one possessed of a beautiful face, who having seen her own reflection for the first time can never forget the impression it produced upon her.

In her own country and amongst her own people, Dolly had been no prophet. Rather she had been regarded as a nonentity, and the little world of Dassell wondered at Mr. Mortomley's choice. Amongst strangers Dolly had spread her wings and tried her strength. She felt in the position of a usually silent man, considered by his friends rather stupid than otherwise, who in a fresh place and under unwonted circumstances opens his mouth and gives utterance to words he knew not previously were his to command.

Yes, Dolly would never be humble again. She had lost that attraction, and through all the years to follow, the years filled with happiness and sorrow, exaltation and abasement, she never recovered it.

There are plants of a rare sweetness which die more surely from excess of sunshine than from the severity of frost; common plants, yet that we miss from the borders set round and about our homes with a heart-ache we never feel when a more flaunting flower fails to make its appearance; and just such a tender blossom, just such a healing herb, died that summer in the garden of Dolly's nature.

And she only nineteen! Well-a-day, the plant had not perhaps had time to strike its roots very deep, and the soil was certainly uncongenial. At all events its place knew it no more, and something of sweetness and softness departed with it.

But it was only a very keen and close observer who could have detected all this; for other flowers sprang up and made a great show where that had been--graces of manner, inflections of voice, thoughtfulness for others, which if acquired seemed none the less charming on that account, a desire to please and be pleased, which exercised itself on rich and poor alike--these things and the sunshine of old which she still carried with her, made Dolly seem a very exceptional woman in the bright years which were still to come.

They made her so exceptional in fact, that her god-mother left her eight thousand pounds. She would not have left her eight pence in the Dassell days, but after spending a fortnight at Homewood she returned home, altered her will which had provided for the establishment and preservation of certain useless charities, and bequeathed eight thousand pounds, her plate, and her jewellery, and her lace, to her beloved god-daughter Dollabella, wife of Archibald Mortomley, Esquire, of Homewood.

If people be travelling downhill the devil is always conveniently at hand to give the vehicle they occupy a shove. That eight thousand pounds proved a nice impetus to the Mortomleys, and a further legacy from a distant relative which dropped in shortly after the previous bequest, accelerated the descent.

When Dolly was married, no girl could have come to a husband with more economical ideas than she possessed. Poverty and she had been friends all her life; she had been accustomed to shortness of money, to frugal fare, to the closest and strictest expenditure from her childhood upwards, and had Mortomley been wise as he was amiable, she might have regarded changing a five-pound note with a certain awe and hesitation to the end of her days.

In money as in other matters, however, she speedily, in that different atmosphere, lost her head. There can be no greater mistake than to suppose, because a person has made both ends meet on, say a hundred and fifty pounds a year, he will be able to manage comfortably on fifteen hundred; on the contrary, he is nearly certain either to turn miser or spendthrift. Dolly had not the faintest idea how to deal with a comfortable income, and as her husband was as incompetent as herself, he let her have pretty well her own way, which was a very bad way indeed. Like his wife, perhaps, he thought those legacies represented a great deal more money than was the case, since money only represents money according to the way in which it chances to be expended.

It is not in the unclouded noontide, however, when fortune wears its brightest smiles, that any one dreams of the wild night--the darkness of despair to follow. It seems to me that the stories we hear of second sight, of presentiments, of warnings, had a deeper origin than the usual superstitious fantasies we associate with them. I think they were originally intended as parables--as prophecies.

I believe the words of dark import were designed to convey to the man--prosperous, victorious--safe in the security of his undiscovered sins, the same lesson that Nathan's final sentence, "Thou art the Man," conveyed in _his_ hour of fancied safety to the heart of David. I believe under the disguise of a thrice-told tale, those inscrutable warnings of which we hear, arresting a man in the middle of a questionable story or a peal of drunken laughter, were meant to be as truly writings on the wall as ever silenced the merriment in Belshazzar's halls--as certainly prophecies as that dream which prefigured Nebuchadnezzar's madness.

And there was a time when portents, prophecies, and parables did influence men for good, did turn them from the evil, did turn their thoughts from earth to heaven, but that was in the days when people having time to think--thought; when sometimes alone, separate from their fellow-creatures, able to forget for a period the world and its requirements, they were free to think of that which, spite of a learned divine's dictum, is more wonderful and more bewildering than eternity--the soul of man--the object of his creation, the use and reason and purpose of his ever having been made in God's image to walk erect upon the earth.

There were not wanting, in the very middle of their abundant prosperity, signs and tokens sufficient to have assured the Mortomleys that to the life, one at least of them was leading, there must come an end; but neither husband nor wife had eyes to see presages which were patent to the very ordinary minds of some of the business men with whom the owner of Homewood had dealings. Notwithstanding his large connexion, his monopoly of several lucrative branches of his trade, his own patrimony, his wife's thousands, Mortomley was always short of money.

When once shortness of money becomes chronic, it is quite certain the patient is suffering under a mortal disease. People who are clever in commercial matters understand this fact thoroughly. Chronic shortness of money has no more to do with unexpected reverses, with solvent poverty, with any ailment curable by any means short of sharp and agonizing treatment, than the heart throbs of a man destined some day to fall down stone dead in the middle of a sentence, has a likeness to the pulsations of fever, or the languid flow of life which betokens that the body is temporarily exhausted.

Like all persons, however, who are sickening unto death, Mortomley was the last to realize the fact.

He knew he was embarrassed, he knew why he was embarrassed, and he thought he should have no difficulty in clearing himself of those embarrassments.

And, in truth, had he been a wise man he might have done so. If, after the death of his brother, which occurred about seven years subsequent to his own marriage with Dolly, he had faced his position, there would have been no story to tell about him or his estate either; but instead of doing that, he drifted--there are hundreds and thousands in business, in love, on sea or land, who when an emergency comes, always drift--and always make ship-wreck of their fortunes and their lives in consequence.

For years he had helped his step-brother by going security for him, by lending his name, by giving him money, by paying his debts. Somehow the security had never involved pecuniary outlay. The loan of the name had been renewed, passed into different channels, held over, manipulated in fact by Mr. Richard Halling, until, in very truth, Mortomley, at best as wretched a financier as he was an admirable inventor, knew no more than his own daughter how accounts stood between him and the man who had been his mother's favourite son.

One day, however, Mr. Richard Halling caught cold--a fortnight after, he was dead. The debts he left behind him were considerable; his effects small. To Mortomley he bequeathed the former, together with his son and daughter. Of his effects the creditors took possession.

The event cut up Mr. Mortomley considerably. He was a man who, making no fresh friends, felt the loss of relatives morbidly.

He returned from the funeral looking like one broken-hearted, and brought back with him to Homewood his nephew and niece, who were to remain there "until something definite could be settled about their future."

To this arrangement Dolly made no objection. Dolly would not have objected had her husband suggested inviting the noblemen composing the House of Lords, or a regiment of soldiers, or a squad of workhouse boys. People came and people went. It was all the same to Dolly.