CHAPTER XXIV

MR. WADDY ACCOMPLISHES HIS RETURN

Opposite Mr. Belden’s house, which, about the time of his departure from Newport, passed into the hands of his creditors, was the old country place of the Janeway family. It was still in the possession of the representative of that family, under a different name.

The late Mr. Janeway, though a proud and, as it finally appeared, a bad man, remembered the inherited debt of his family to the Waddys, and felt some aristocratic vanity in his tutelage of the young Ira, our hero. A close intimacy of childish friendship grew up between Mr. Janeway’s only child and daughter, Mary, and his young protégé. Young Horace Belden, the handsome son of the next neighbour, Mr. Belden, the great merchant, was also a companion of Miss Janeway; in fact, the parents of these two destined them for each other. Adjoining estates, large fortunes, good blood, beauty on both sides--the two fathers thought the match a perfect one and the young people were taught to consider it settled. Something unsettled it. Horace Belden unsettled it by being himself and that self was, from early years, not a noble one. He unsettled it in the mind of Mrs. Janeway, as he grew older, by what he called his flirtation with Sally Bishop, a flaunting girl, daughter of Mr. Janeway’s ex-coachman.

Belden, however, remained very devoted to Miss Janeway. He loved her as much as was in his nature, and his pride was fully engaged in winning her, the great match of the day and his by long convention. As he grew older and no better, he began to consider this pure young lady as his bond to purer life and mentally to throw on her the responsibility of his future intended reformation. She must become his, or he would revenge his disappointment, his wounded pride, and his failure of her help and control in his proposed change of character, upon her, upon society, and upon himself.

It was about this time that Mr. Janeway began to discover that too great an intimacy was growing up between his protégé, Ira Waddy, and his daughter. It was well enough while they were children, but the son of a shopkeeper of Dullish Court, and clerk in the counting-house of Belden & Co., was not for Miss Janeway, beauty, aristocrat, heiress, belle. So Mr. Janeway was very distant to Ira Waddy, now a handsome, high-spirited, quick-tempered, energetic young man, full of generous candour and kindliness and gratitude to all the Janeways for the happy and refining influences of their society and their world. The ladies always took Ira’s part, but this only confirmed Mr. Janeway in his purpose of making him uncomfortable. At last, this gentleman, finding one day Ira tête-à-tête with Mary, quarrelled with him openly, and finally forbade him the house, speaking very ill of his character. It may have been too late. Whatever had passed between Ira and Miss Janeway that might fitly be known, Belden knew. Ira Waddy, trustful as he was true, had given his unreserved confidence to Belden, friend of the lady and of him.

Miss Janeway was twenty, two years younger than Ira Waddy, when he, suddenly, one July, fifteen years before this Return of his, went off to those regions where his namesake river rolls. Five years after, the crash in her father’s fortunes came. He became an utterly dishonoured man, financially, morally. He could bear his guilt; not its discovery. He died, as it was best he should. His daughter, belle and reputed heiress, did as scores of young ladies of New England have done: she became a teacher in a school and at last a governess. By-and-by, an old lover of Mrs. Janeway arrived. His constancy and devotion through ill-report touched the lady, and she consented to share her distress and her poverty with his humble fortunes at the West. They did not long remain humble. Where he owned a farm, there a town sprouted; where a lot, thither came a railroad demanding a station. His hillsides became stone quarries; his fields, coal mines. His wealth swelled like a fungus of the forest. His wife died and he soon followed her, fairly bullied out of existence by his own stupendous success. His whole property he bequeathed to his step-daughter on the one condition of a change of name. He thus, as it were, ceased to be childless and avoided contributing to the prosperity of his former rival’s family.

Miss Mary Janeway, the governess of Clara and Diana and Julia Wilkes, became Miss Mary Sullivan, the woman of fortune. She repurchased the Janeway estate, the house where her happy youth had passed, and it was there she had received Diana.

Mrs. Cecilia Tootler, in combination with Miss Sullivan, managed the charities of their neighbourhood. Miss Sullivan, having no incumbrance of a Thomas Tootler and Cecilia, junior, could superintend also those preventive charities, the schools, utilising here her own experience. In the sick-room or the home of the poor, the sorrowful, or the guilty, these two ladies made themselves welcome. The elder with her deep experience had learnt what others need of wisest sympathy, and the younger came like a gleam of cheerful, untarnished hope.

Cecilia in vain endeavoured to persuade her friend to see Sally Bishop.

“She is dying,” said Cecilia. “She is punished for whatever wrong she may have done. But peace of mind is totally denied her. Remorse is killing her faster than her disease. All my consolations are vain. She needs someone better and wiser than I. She needs you.”

“Has she asked for me?” said Miss Sullivan.

“No, not to see you,” replied Cecilia, “but she speaks of you often with great distress. Do come and see her--perhaps she may have some explanation to give. Mary, Mary, what is this mystery?”

“Dear Cecilia,” answered Mary, “it is not because Sally Bishop has been a very bad woman that I avoid her. But she was long ago the willing and exulting means of proving to me not only her own viciousness, but the foul treachery and utterly coarse, detestable baseness of heart and mind of one I trusted as I now trust only God. It was right that I should know the truth, but I must feel a personal horror of a woman whose ill-omened duty it was to tell me to despair and lose my faith and my happiness together. And Sally Bishop did her duty as if it were a privilege and beheld my misery with vile, vulgar, shameless triumph. I abhor the thought of her.”

Cecilia said nothing more at the time--indeed, there was nothing she could say. But as the days passed, Sally Bishop grew hopelessly worse, and her father kept himself boozy all the while. Horse-jockeys, pro-slavery judges, gamblers, and collectors of democratic customs sometimes love their families.

Miss Sullivan had just received Clara’s summons to Diana’s bed of death; she was preparing to go that evening, when Mrs. Tootler drove up in haste.

“Sally Bishop cannot live through the day,” said the lady. “She demands to see you. She has a confession to make. Coming death has absolved her from a pledge of wicked secrecy.”

And so, by the deathbed, Miss Sullivan, whose best and brightest hopes had been destroyed by the infamy of this poor, dying wretch, listened to her confession and pitied and pardoned her. Sally Bishop, vain and immodest, had nursed in her heart against young Ira Waddy the bitter spite of a shameless woman scorned. Belden, who was her first instructor in shamelessness, discovered this, and used his power to delude her into the joint revenge of the letters. Oh, what carefully villainous letters Belden made of them! how brutally treacherous! how vile! Sally Bishop took the correspondence in Ira Waddy’s writing to Miss Janeway.

“There,” said she, “you heiress, you great lady, that have stolen away my lover, because you are rich, and are engaged to him without your father’s knowledge, see what letters he used to write to me and how he spoke of you and his interviews with you. He ruined me because I loved him, and made of me what you see in my own letters, and I was willing that he should marry you because he always promised that I should be first. But now he is trying to get rid of me. He finds me in the way.”

Miss Janeway read the letters as one reads a fascinating tale of horror. There could be no doubt of them; hand, style, circumstances--it was inevitable they were his. Poor, innocent girl--she would afterward see the world and its treacheries, but never any so base as this. Her lover, with her maiden kiss upon his lips--agony! to leave her and write this.

What could she do? Die--and all the lovely sounds of nature that she had learned to love with him from childhood said to her, “die drearily.” But it was dreary life that was to be hers and slow-coming patience in her desolate retirement from the world, and experience of domestic shame and shame-crushed life and disgraced death in a darkened household and strict poverty and unaccustomed labour, and by all this a character forming--another woman than the gay, impetuous, proud, loving girl of days flattered by fulness of prosperity. Another in all but loving, and now she must love no more one she could not forget, who had fled when he learnt from her cold letter that his falseness to her was known, she could not sully her pen to tell him how, nor she, a pure woman, hear or speak or think of him more. Love!--what could she ever love again with anything more than quiet interest--she the pale schoolmistress, lonely as that betrothed Mary of the first Ira Waddy, preserver of her grandfather at Bunker Hill?

So this pale schoolmistress was calm and patient and learnt by her own wrong (the only teaching) to hate all wrong and to know it under any specious guise of quietism; and having something much to pardon in her own life, she grew to pardon other ruined lives. She saw how easily sorrow may become despair. A nobler woman she was becoming all these years, but still solitary; loving the many, but lonely of the few to love, until she found in Clara and Diana worthy objects of the closest and tenderest affection.

And now, almost forgetting the wrong this poor dying victim of Belden’s villainy had done her, in the sweet pleasure of forgiveness and the dear passion of reviving love, Miss Sullivan must go to the deathbed of her she called daughter, whose sad story she knew. She called Cecilia and resigned to her the dying woman, now at peace.

“I cannot tell you now, dear Cecilia,” she said. “I must go. I must think of what I have heard. Only, believe me, she has made me happy, happy again as a child. God forgive her, as I do.”

She went to her house by the same paths where her brilliant youth had walked; through the gate where she had so often stood for moments of the shy and lingering tenderness of parting; under the ancient elms whose gracefulness had drooped over her and her exiled lover in many a moonlight of pensive hopefulness. The glory had come back again. The freshness of youth and everlasting springtime was over all the world. She need never again force herself to say that it was good and beautiful; a brightness of transfiguring hope went before her and revealed beneath the drifting away of grey dimness and tearful mists the light of beauty unchangeable and goodness infinite.

Miss Sullivan was to depart on the same journey that Diana had made with such hopeful joy of heart. She had one little act of preparation to do. She took the Testament, her own childish gift, which she had found still the talisman of life to a drowning man, and pressing it very tenderly to her lips, she hung it about her neck. Its touch sent a warm thrill of longing to her fondly waking heart and, with the thrill, a blush shot youth again through her cheeks.

“God willed,” she said, “that I who had driven him into exile should be there at his return. How could I not know and feel that one who still in drowning and in death clung to this precious talisman of purest Life, could never be what lies had made me deem him?”

And she went on her journey to be with sorrow and death; but with a joy that no chance of any dying, to-day or to-morrow, could take away. Her joy was of eternity, for she had learnt that love such as hers can never be born and grow and be, unless it is founded upon fullest truth and worthiest worth and most honourable honour in the heart of him she loved--and truth and worth and honour are imperishable and eternal.

In those weeks, while Mr. Waddy was chasing sullenly to overtake revenge, Diana was dying among her tender friends--Clara, forlorn of her noble sister, for whom earth was not found worthy; Dunstan, Endymion, watching, while night after night, the deity of his life and of his heaven fading, perished slowly away until, one violet dawn, she was not. But the sun came up and shone upon his path of manly duty, and he will bravely walk therein, conscious that a beautiful spirit is near him and will never vanish from the sky of his visions.

* * * * *

Ira Waddy was on his return from the West. Revenge had passed away from his heart. He had seen his enemy die horribly, but not by his hand. Death had risen up terribly between him and murder. Merited revenge had overtaken the guilty, but had not chosen him for executioner. And as he turned his face again eastward, he was glad for this--glad that the weight of blood, which he would have assumed unshrinkingly, was spared him. With this storm of deadly-meaning pursuit, with its dark sullenness, unillumined until the final thunder-bolt fell--with this closing crash, all the long accumulating bitterness passed away from Ira Waddy’s nature. Heaven was clear and cloudless over him. All mysteries were swept away. It was a new dawn, and a glorious. And he hastened eastward, every moment, long as it seemed, bringing him nearer, nearer----

He had left poor Budlong under the wise and kind protection of Peter Skerrett. And there was another, a woman, who would not leave the old man’s bedside, but was there a silent, humble nurse, often bursting into bitter tears, when he inarticulately murmured to her feeble words, which only her quickened ears could construe into intentions of forgiveness.

To arrange Mr. Budlong’s affairs at Newport, and his own, Mr. Waddy passed that way on his eastward journey. He arrived, as is usual, in the fresh morning. It was still early autumn, but Vanity Fair had struck its booths, taken down its _étalage_, and gone into winter quarters. The season had ended sadly; everyone was saddened for Diana. Her inspiring beauty had been the brilliant presence that made this summer brighter than any remembered summer. There was many a dry old beau who, stimulated by the thought of her into a brief belief that he could be young, ardent, frank, and brave again, found himself looking with moistened eyes at the places she would illumine no more and feeling that a glory and a hope had passed away.

It would have all seemed rather dreary to Mr. Waddy, walking there alone, but no desolate spot of desert earth is dreary to a man who feels the warmth of his own happiness making gardens sun-shiny, roseate, wherever he treads. Not drearily, then, but full of sad sympathy, Mr. Waddy went toward the house of his gentle kinsman and friend; thinking most of Clara, now so widowed by the death of one dearer than a sister.

“I will ask her who is this Miss Sullivan, whom Granby spoke of as their governess,” he said, because his heart was full of gratitude. “Perhaps it may prove that she and my kind friend are one, and I can discover her residence and thank her suitably.”

He avoided the main entrance to his kinsman’s grounds, and took a narrow, winding path, hedged with rich, close growth of arbor vitæ. At last he reached the house, and passed into the library to wait. As he entered, a graceful figure in black disappeared through another door. She had evidently been sitting solitary reading, for the leaves of a little book on the table were still fluttering. It had a look somehow familiar. Mr. Waddy stepped toward the table and picked it up.

It was his own Testament, gift of childish friendship confirmed by after love, companion of all his better moments, and talisman of safety to his wide-wandering, bewildered life.

He raised the time-worn, tear-worn, wave-worn volume to his lips and, sitting down, covered his face with his hands, and yielded for a moment to the need of happy tears.

He was aroused by a gentle touch upon his shoulder. He turned. It was his old love; his love unforgotten, through all those years of desolate exile, and now--now, his own love forever.

And this was the full Return of Mr. Ira Waddy.

THE END

* * * * *

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.