Marmaduke Part 39

She spent a restless night; she could scarcely do otherwise.

"Are you gaun to steal the very name frae the puir bairn?" was sufficient to keep her awake. Once more she found herself in a maelstrom of doubt. Wearied out, the first blink of dawn rising clear and lucent over the dark sea seemed to her a G.o.dsend. She crept out of her bed leaving the child asleep, and, dressing herself, wrapped a cloak about her, and so seating herself on a rock at the very edge of the cliff within earshot of the cottage where she lodged, set herself once more to watch the peaceful coming of light, which had so often brought her wisdom.

So had it looked that dawning when she and Duke--ah! always, always she and Duke! How curiously Fate had joined them. Yet she had disregarded Fate's handiwork even while she had told herself she had been aiding it.

Far over in the east the light was growing. So it had grown that morning when she and Duke swam----

She seemed to feel his arm on her shoulders, the touch of her arm on his neck, the cold kiss of the bitter sea stinging soul and body to new joyous life. She saw his happy face alight with laughter.

"Look! Isn't it worth it?"

Yes, it had been worth it, well worth it! And even as on that distant June morning while she looked, the restless dark horizon of the sea seemed to melt and soften, and the path of radiant gold sent by the first ray of the rising sun seemed to touch her feet and bring her answer--

Yes, life was well worth it indeed!

Who was she to cavil at what Fate had done? Who was she to worry over what she thought she had done? Comprehension came to her, she saw a clear and ordered sequence in which even her mistakes bore their fitting fruit. Life seemed to hold no cares, no errors, no animosities.

What was it Duke had said about taking too much wine that night?

"I shan't do it again, but I shouldn't have had this perfectly stunning time if I hadn't, should I?"

So it was in her life. She had had joy through her mistakes. She and her Love had been alone in the Great Sea of Time battling with the waves as best they could.

Nothing else mattered. They might be waifs on that sea, but they were together.

She slipped to her knees and watched the sun rise. Over how many mistakes, how many wasted minutes and opportunities and lives!

Wasted? No--not wasted. Even mistakes had their appointed place. Even the old man who had made the castle over yonder a spider's-web of evil was part of the Great Plan.

Slowly the light grew. The cottages below in the tiny fis.h.i.+ng village began to send up thin blue threads of smoke. The figure of a man or a woman began to pa.s.s along the narrow causeway. And someone came up the steps towards her cottage, then paused, seeing her.

"Ye'll be Mistress Marsden likely," he said, "for I've no seen ye before. There's a saxpence tae pay, but ye can gie it to the la.s.sie for me till I come back."

The postman handed her a letter as he spoke and went on his way, for his round was a long one.

She looked at the envelope curiously. The original address was almost undecipherable, being defaced with innumerable new ones, or brief notices, "Gone away;" "Try so and so."

Still the name was hers. A bill likely, sent to her old London address and forwarded to the Crimea and back again. Twice, so it seemed to her as she tried to decipher the postmarks.

Then she opened it, noting with a vague spasm of memory that a curious embossed presentment of foxhounds in full cry ran right across the flap. Where had she seen that device before?

Surely on some envelope that Marmaduke--

The writing too was vaguely familiar. The writing of a person with brains, but strangely shaky and irregular:

"DEAR MADAM,

"Since my son Marmaduke has chosen to deprive me of the possibility of an heir by dying--not even on the field of battle--out at Varna, I return the enclosed. I don't know why I kept it. To have a hold over the young man at bottom, I expect. Perhaps for other reasons. One doesn't often meet women of your description. Anyhow, I haven't.

"You can now claim your position and dowry, which my d----d cousin can very well afford to pay.

"Besides, you are worth providing for; more, at any rate than my Lady and Penelope, and I have done that. So I die quits; except for my son Peter. Why didn't he get cholera instead of Marmaduke? I could have spared him.

"Yours,

"DRUMMUIR."

The enclosure was the copy of the marriage lines which she thought she had seen the old lord in the act of destroying as she had left the room.

Yes, across the middle fold the beginning of a tear slit the paper.

She sat with the letter in her hand until the cry of a child made her rise hastily and go to her task of motherhood.

L'ENVOI

"And you mean to say," said Peter Muir, when he had heard her tale, "that knowing this imp," he looked at the child she carried, "who is to turn me out, was on the way you burnt that paper found in Marmaduke's despatch-box? I give up. Thank G.o.d one does not often meet women of your description!"

But as he spoke he was looking in the child's face.

"He will be the image of his father," he remarked at last, "and, dash it all! but I am glad, yes, glad he's here!" Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he turned away. "It will be a sell for the Jews, I'm afraid, though it serves the horse-leeches very well right!"

"It need not be a sell at all," replied Marrion. "The child shall have the t.i.tle--he must have that--but not one penny of the money shall he take till the debts are paid, Mr. Peter! I know the law. I have studied it to find out where I stand; and you are the boy's natural guardian. I"--she spoke bitterly--"am only the mother. I have no say. But I am going to buy freedom from you. Live here--promise me that--use the monies as your own. Keep the old place up for the child; but I will take him for myself. I will bring him up away from the evil traditions of this old house, and when he comes back to it, a man grown, he will be different--even from his father--even, I hope, from me!"

So she said then, but as the years pa.s.sed little Lord Drummuir came more than once to visit his invalid uncle, for Peter, away from the excitements of town life, defied the doctors for a time. And from the Carpathian pine woods the little lad travelled more than once to a solitary cairn on the Balkan hills by the side of which Andrew Fraser--who never ceased rejoicing that his plain speaking had shown Marrion the wickedness of stealing the bairn's name--would tell him marvellous tales of the dead colonel, his father, and of his prowess in every way.

The honest fellow had but one care. The double t.i.tle was the fly in the honey-pot, and when the old Princess would ask, "Where is Prince Pauloffski?" Andrew would invariably reply: "Lord Drummuir is waiting on his mother."

Thus the game of life went on and it was well worth it.

But perhaps, as Marrion often told herself, the honours lay with one who in that life had been the curse of his family.