This Man's Wife Part 64

"Mother!" cried the girl, flinging herself upon her neck, "as if I could reproach you!"

"It would not be just, my child," said Mrs Hallam, caressing the soft dark head, "for I have tried so hard."

"Yes, yes, I know, dear; and I have known ever since I have been old enough to think."

"In every letter I have sent I have prayed for his leave to come out and join him--that I might be near him, for I dared not take the responsibility upon myself with you."

"Mother!"

"If I had been alone in the world, Julia, I should have gone years upon years ago; but I felt that I should be committing a breach of trust to take his young, tender child all those thousands of miles across the sea, to a land whose society is wild, and often lawless."

"And so you asked papa to give his consent?"

"Every time I wrote to him, Julia--letters full of trust in the future, letters filled with the hope I did not feel. I begged him to give me his consent that I might come."

"And he has not replied, mother?"

"Not yet, my child. Innocent and guilty alike have a long probation to pa.s.s through."

"But he might have written, dear."

"How do we know that, Julia?" said Mrs Hallam, with a shade of sternness in her voice. "I have studied the matter deeply from the reports and dispatches, and often the poor prisoners are sent far up the country as servants--almost slaves--to the settlers. In places sometimes where there are no fellow-creatures save the blacks for miles upon miles. No roads, Julia; no post; no means of communication."

"My poor father!" sighed Julia, sinking upon the carpet, half sitting, half kneeling, with her hands clasped upon her knees, and her gaze directed up at the dimly-seen picture on the wall.

"Yes, my child, I know all," said Mrs Hallam. "I know him and his pride. Think of a man like him, innocent, and yet condemned; dragged from his home like a common felon, and forced to herd with criminals of the lowest cla.s.s. Is it not natural that his heart should rebel against society, and that he should proudly make his stand upon his innocency, and wait in silent suffering for the day when the law shall say: `Innocent and injured man, come back from the desert. You have been deeply wronged!'"

"Yes, dear mother. Poor father! But not one letter in all these years!"

"Julia, my child, you pain me," cried Mrs Hallam excitedly. "When you speak like that, your words seem to imply that he has had the power to send letter or message. He is your father--my husband. Child, you must learn to think of him with the same faith as I."

"Indeed I will, dear," cried Julia pa.s.sionately; and then she started to her feet, for there was a quick, decided knock at the front door.

Mrs Hallam hurriedly tried to compose her features; and as Thisbe's step was heard in the pa.s.sage she drew in her breath, gazed wildly at the picture, just as Julia drew down the blind and blotted it from her sight. Then the door was opened, and their visitor came in the centre of the glow shed by the pa.s.sage light.

"Aha! In the dark!" cried Bayle in his cheery voice, as Thisbe opened the door. "How I wish I had been born a lady! I always envy you that pleasant hour you spend in the half light, gazing into the fire."

Julia echoed his laugh in a pleasant silvery trill, as she hastily lit the lamp, Bayle watching her as the argand wick gradually burned round, and she put on the gla.s.s chimney, the light throwing up her handsome young face against the gloom till she lifted the great dome-shaped globe, which emitted a musical sound before being placed over the lamp, and throwing Julia's countenance once more into the shade.

"What are you laughing at?" said Bayle.

"At the idea of our Mr Bayle being idle for an hour, sitting and thinking over the fire," said Julia playfully, to draw his attention from her mother's disturbed countenance.

The attempt was a failure, for Bayle saw clearly that something was wrong; that pain and suffering had been there before him; and he sighed as he asked himself what he could do more, in his unselfish way, to chase earthly cares from that quiet home.

VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER FOUR.

THE DREADED MESSAGE.

There was quite a change in the little house in the Clerkenwell Square.

Life had been very calm and peaceful there for Julia, though she made no friends. Any advances made by neighbours were gravely and coldly repelled by Mrs Hallam.

Once, when she had felt injured by her mother's refusal of an invitation for her to some young people's party, and had raised her eyes reproachfully to her face, Mrs Hallam had taken her in her arms, kissing her tenderly.

"Not yet, my child; not yet," she whispered. "We must wait."

Julia coloured, and then turned pale, for she understood her mother's meaning. They stood aloof from ordinary society, and they possessed a secret.

But now, since Sir Gordon had been brought to the house by Christie Bayle, their life appeared to Julia to be changed. Her mother seemed less oppressed and sad during the evenings when Sir Gordon came, as he did now frequently. There was so much to listen to in the animated discussions between the banker and the clergyman; and as they discussed some political question with great animation, Julia leaned forward smiling and slightly flushed, as Bayle, with all the force of a powerful orator, delivered his opinions, that were, as a rule, more sentimental than sound, more full of heart than logic.

He would always end with a fine peroration, from the force of habit; and Julia would clap her hands while Mrs Hallam smiled.

"Wait a bit, my dear," Sir Gordon would say, nodding his head, "one story is good till the other is told."

Then, in the coolest and most matter-of-fact way, he would proceed to demolish Bayle's arguments one by one, battering them down till the structure crumbled into nothingness.

All this, too, was without effort. He simply drew logical conclusions, pointed out errors, showed what would be the consequences of following the clergyman's line of argument, and ended by giving Julia a little nod.

At the beginning the latter would feel annoyed, for her sympathies had all been with Bayle's plans; then some clever point would take her attention; her young reason would yield to the ingenuity of the highly-cultivated old man's attack; and finally she would mentally range herself upon his side, and reward him with plaudits from her little white hands, darting a triumphant look now at Bayle, as if saying, "There we have won!"

Highly good-tempered were all these encounters; and they were always followed by another harmony, that of music, Bayle playing, as of old, to Millicent's accompaniment; more often to that of her child.

It was a calm and peaceful little English home, that every day grew more attractive to the old club-lounger and lover of the sea.

He coloured slightly the first time Bayle came and found him there. The next time he nodded, as much as to say, "I thought I would run up." The next it seemed a matter of course that an easy-chair should be ready for him in one corner, where he took his place after pressing Mrs Hallam's hand warmly, and drawing Julia to him to kiss her as if she were his child.

There was a delicacy, a display of tender reverence, that disarmed all suspicion of there being an undercurrent at work. "He is one of my oldest friends," Mrs Hallam had said to herself; "he feels sympathy for me in my trouble, and he seems to love Julie with a father's love. Why should I estrange him? Why keep Julie from his society?"

It never entered into her mind that, by the sentence of the law, she was, as it were, a woman in the position of a widow, for her husband was socially dead. The seed of such an idea would have fallen upon utterly barren ground, and never have put forth germinating shoots.

No; there was the one thought ever present in her heart, that sooner or later her husband's innocence would be proclaimed, and then this terrible present would glide away, to be forgotten in the happiness to come.

Sir Gordon, with all his frank openness of manner, saw everything. The slightest word was weighed; each action was watched; and when he returned to his chambers in St James's--a tiny suite of very close and dark rooms, which Tom Porter treated as if they were the cabins of a yacht--he would cast up the observations he had made.

"Bayle means the widow," he said to himself, as he sat alone; "yes, he means the widow. She is a widow. Well, he is a young man, and I am-- well, an old fool."

Another night he was off upon the other tack.

"It's an insult to her," he said indignantly. "Bless her grand, true, sweet, innocent heart! She never thinks of him but as the good friend he is. She will never think of any one but that rascal. Good heavens!

what a fate for her! What a woman to have won!"

The thought so moved him that he paced his little bed-room for some time uneasily.

"As for that fellow Bayle," he cried, "I see through him. He means to marry my sweet little flower Julie. Hah!"

He sat down smiling, as if there was a pleasant fragrance in the very thought of the fair young girl that refreshed him, and sent him into a dreamy state full of visions of youth and innocence.

"I don't blame him," he said, after a pause. "I should do the same if I were his age. Yes," he said firmly, and as if to crush down some offered opposition, "even if she be a convict's daughter. It is not her fault. We do not mark out our own paths."