The Lowest Rung Part 11

An electric bell in a little box over the door rang in a furious manner.

Aunt Emmy was on her feet in a second, smoothing her fair hair at the Venetian mirror.

"Your Uncle Thomas is awake," she said, "and is ready to be read to. He never likes being kept waiting."

This seemed to be the case, for as she left the room the electric bell rang again more furiously than before, and I shook my fist at it.

PART II

If some star of heaven Led him by at even, If some magic fate Brought him, should I wait, Or fly within and bid them close the gate?

MARGARET L. WOODS.

The following year I suddenly married a soldier, the only young man I knew, and I knew him very slightly, and went out to India with him. I did not forget Aunt Emmy, we corresponded regularly; but I was young and my life was a very full one. I had seen nothing of the world till I married. I had a child. The years rushed past, joyful, miserable, vivid, surprising, happy years, in spite of the fact that my husband was not remarkably like Lord K----in appearance, and not in the least like the "plaister saint" with whom I had hurried to the altar on such slight provocation.

During these years Uncle Thomas died, and Uncle Tom married, and Aunt Emmy wrote to me that she had taken a little cottage in Abinger Forest against her brother's advice, and how, in spite of his opposition--how much it must have cost her to oppose him--he had forgiven her and presented her with the most expensive mahogany bedstead and bedding that Maple could supply--"so like him."

I wondered vaguely once or twice whether there had been any question of her marrying Mr. Kingston, but there was no mention of him in her letters, and I did not like to ask. I knew that she was very poor, but presently my heart was gladdened by hearing from her that a distant relation had left her a legacy, and that she was now comfortably off.

Then suddenly our life was darkened. Our child died. I struggled with my grief, became ill, and was sent home. Aunt Emmy urged me to go straight to her. She and Uncle Tom were my only near relations in England. He also offered to take me in for a time. He wrote with real kindness. He had a child himself. And his wife wrote too. But I need hardly say that I took my sore heart and my broken health straight to Aunt Emmy.

It was late in August when I arrived. The honeysuckle was still in bloom on Aunt Emmy's white cottage, standing in its little orchard in a clearing in the forest. She was waiting for me in the porch, and I ran feebly to her up the narrow brick path between the tall clumps of hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies; and she drew me into the little parlour and held me closely to her. And the years rolled away, and I was a child again, and she was comforting me for my broken doll.

With the egotism of youth I fear I had not given a thought to Aunt Emmy's new home until I entered it. I knew that she was happy in it, and that it had once been a gamekeeper's cottage, but that was about all.

Nowadays every one has a cottage--it is the fas.h.i.+on; and literary men and women, tired of adulatory crowds, weary of their own greatness, flee from the metropolis, and write exquisite articles about their gardens, and the peace that lurks under a thatched roof, and the simple life, lived far from shrilling crowds but near to nature, and _very_ near to the Deity. Fortunate Deity!

But in the days of which I am writing cottages and their floral and spiritual appurtenances were not the rage.

I never realised until I saw Aunt Emmy in a home of her own how much taste she possessed, or how pretty a cottage could be. It did not try to look like a house. It was just a cottage, standing amid its apple-trees, now red with apples, with its old well half hidden in clumps of lavender. The little dwelling itself, with its low ceilings and long oak beams and dim colouring and quaint furniture, had a certain austere charm, a quiet dignity of its own. The sunny air came softly in through wide-open latticed windows, bringing with it the scent of mignonette.

There had never been a breath of air in the house in Pembridge Square.

_Ole Scorpio_, that friend of my youth, looked peaceful and complacent in a little recess in which his soft colouring and perfect figure showed to great advantage against a white-washed wall in shadow.

Aunt Emmy herself, in a gown of some dull white material, with a little grey in her rippling, parted hair, seemed at home for the first time in her life. She looked a shade older, a shade thinner in the face, her sweet eyes a little sunk inwards. But her tall figure had retained all its old soft dignity and beauty of line. Looking at her as she poured out my tea for me, I suddenly felt years older than she.

This bewildering impression deepened as the days went on, and a protecting, wondering compa.s.sion became part of my affection for her.

During the years I had spent in India I had seen a good deal of both sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien strands, had marvelled and been dismayed, had marvelled and been awed, had seen the dye of my own blood on one dim thread, the gold of my own joy on another. The sheltered life had not been mine.

But Aunt Emmy had not moved mentally by a hair's-breadth. All her expansion, if expansion it could be called, had taken form in her house and garden. I had not been a week under her roof before I found that Mr.

Kingston occupied exactly the same position in her life as he had done in Pembridge Square. She had brought down her romance to adorn her new home just as she had brought down _Ole Scorpio_, in cotton wool. Each had their niche. Perhaps it was unreasonable in me to expect to find her different. I had not expected it. But I had become such a totally different person myself that her att.i.tude to life, which had appeared to me so romantic and natural when I was eighteen, now appeared irremediably pathetic, visionary, out of touch with reality. Perhaps, however, it was I who had become disillusioned and matter-of-fact. I saw with a kind of pitying wonder that her youthful romance still supplied to her, as it had done since she was nineteen, a certain atmosphere of pensive, prayerful resignation, a background for ethereal day-dreams.

Her peaceful days were pa.s.sed in a kind of picturesque haze, like the mist that, seeming in itself a rosy light, sometimes veils a tranquil September sunset.

She was evidently very happy, but it was equally evident that she did not know it. From words she let drop now and then I saw that she still imagined she was bearing the heavy cross of her mutilated youth. But to me it seemed as if some tender hand had lifted it from her shoulder.

"Aunt Emmy," I said, yielding to an ign.o.ble curiosity in the second week of my visit, as we were picking the lavender together, "when Uncle Thomas died, I had thought I should hear of your marrying Mr. Kingston."

"I also hoped it, my dear," said Aunt Emmy, snipping the lavender into a little basket, held in a loose white-gloved hand.

I dared not look at her.

"Mr. Kingston has not written," she said after a moment.

"But did you write and tell him you were free, and still in the same mind?"

"I did not. I thought it might be awkward for him in case he were--after all these years--contemplating some other possibility. I did not want to embarra.s.s him. But your Uncle Thomas's death was in all the papers, and many of his relations are acquainted with us. I have no doubt the news reached him."

Of course it had. I had felt that it was hardly to be expected that Mr.

Kingston should have kept after twenty years, more than twenty years, the same vivid memory of his early love that she had done. His silence proved that he had not done so. I looked at Aunt Emmy. How pretty and graceful and remote she looked, and how young her face was under the shadow of her charming garden hat, tied with a soft black ribbon under her chin. As long as she was not confronted with any one really young, she had no look of age. It was difficult to believe that she was forty-four. And he must be forty-six. It was too late. Middle-aged marriages are risky affairs enough, when the Rubicon of forty is within sight. But when it has been pa.s.sed----!

As I looked at her I hoped with all my heart that he would not come back to disturb her peace of mind and dislocate her life afresh.

But, astonis.h.i.+ng to say, he did come back; and there was some adequate reason, I have forgotten exactly what, for his not coming earlier. At any rate, it was adequate.

When I came down to breakfast a few days later, Aunt Emmy held a letter towards me with a shaking hand. Her lips trembled. She could not articulate.

"Am I really to read it?"

She nodded.

It was a charming letter, written in a delicate, refined hand. Mr.

Kingston had not heard of her father's death till the day before he wrote. He had been away up-country for a year, broken shoulder, etc. He was starting for England at once. He should travel almost as quickly as his letter. He should present himself at Pembridge Square and learn her address directly he landed. His s.h.i.+p was the _Sultana_.

I took up the morning paper.

"The _Sultana_ arrived yesterday," I said.

I looked at the envelope. It was directed on from Pembridge Square.

"Tom will give him my address," said Aunt Emmy faintly. "I wonder how he knows I am not living there now. _He will--arrive here--to-day._"

She looked straight in front of her through the open windows to the hollyhocks basking in the still September suns.h.i.+ne. A radiance lit up her face, like that which perhaps shone on Christian's when at last across the river he saw the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem.

"At last!" she said. "After all these years! After all these dreadful, dreadful years!"

An unbearable pain went through me. It was not new to me. I had known it once before, when I had seen my child sicken. Why did it return now?

The radiance pa.s.sed. A pitiful trembling shook her like a leaf. Her eyes turned helplessly to mine, frightened and dimmed.

"I forgot I am an old woman," she said.

I kissed her hand. I told her that she was handsomer than any one. She was very dignified and gentle.

"You are very kind to me, my dear, and it is sweet of you to feel as you do. I believe, as you say, that I am still nice-looking. But the fact remains that it is nearly twenty-five years since we have seen each other. I was nineteen then. And oh! I suppose I ought not to say it, but I _was_ pretty. People turned to look at me in the street. And now I am forty-four."

"But he is older than you, isn't he?"

"Two years. What is two years! We were the same age when we were young.