The Golden Calf Part 45

'I am not thinking of my nephew--I am thinking of this girl, whom I have loved and trusted.'

'I was unworthy of your love and your trust,' answered Ida, looking at Miss Wendover with wide, despairing eyes. 'It is quite true--I am his wife--but he has no right to claim me. It was agreed between us that we should part--for ever--that our marriage was to be as if it had never been. It was our secret--n.o.body was ever to know.'

'And pray, after having married him, why did you wish to cancel your marriage?' asked Colonel Wendover, in a freezing voice. 'You married him of your own free will I suppose?'

'Of my own free will--yes.'

'Then why repent all of a sudden?'

She stood for a few moments silent, enduring such an agony of shame as all her sad experiences of life had not yet given her. The bitter, galling truth must be told--and in _his_ hearing. _He_ must be suffered to know how sordid and vile she had been.

'Because I had been deceived,' she faltered at last, her eyelids drooping over those piteous eyes.

Brian of the Abbey had advanced into the room by this time. He was standing by his uncle's side, his hand upon his uncle's arm. He wanted, if it were possible, to save Ida from further questioning, to restrain his uncle's wrath.

'I married your nephew under a delusion,' she said. 'I believed that I was marrying wealth and station. I had been told that the Brian Wendover I knew--the man who asked me to be his wife--was the owner of Wendover Abbey.'

'I see,' said the Colonel; 'you wanted to marry Wendover Abbey.'

Miss Rylance gave a little silvery laugh--the most highly cultivated thing in laughs--but the scowl she got from Brian of the Abbey checked her vivacity in a breath.

'Oh, I know what a wretch I must seem to you all,' said Ida, looking up at the Colonel with pleading eyes. 'But you have never known what it is to be poor--a genteel pauper--to have your poverty flung into you face like a handful of mud at every hour of your life; to have the instincts, the needs of a lady, but to be poorer and lower in status than any servant; to see your schoolfellows grinning at your shabby boots, making witty speeches about your threadbare gown; to patch, and mend, and struggle, yet never to be decently clad; to have the desire to help others, but nothing to give. If any of you--if you, Miss Rylance, with that exquisite sneer of yours, _you_ who invented the plot that wrecked me--if you had ever endured what I have borne, you would have been as ready as I was to thank Providence for having sent me a rich lover, and to accept him gratefully as my husband.'

'Brian Walford,' interrogated the Colonel, looking severely at his nephew, 'am I to understand that you married this girl without undeceiving her as to the children's, or rather Miss Rylance's, most ill-judged practical joke--that you stood before the altar in G.o.d's House, the temple of truth and holiness, and won her by a lie?'

'I never lied to her,' answered Brian Walford, sulkily. 'My cousins chose to have their joke, but there was no joke in my love for Ida. I loved her, and was ready to marry her, and take my chance of the future, as another young man in my position would have done. I never bragged about the Abbey, or told her that it belonged to me. She never asked me who I was.'

'Because she had been told a wicked, shameful falsehood, and believed it, poor darling,' cried Bessie, running to her friend and embracing her.

'Oh, forgive me, dear--pray, pray do. It was all my fault. But as you have married him, darling, and it can't be helped, do try and be happy with him, for indeed, dear, he is very nice.'

Ida stood silent, with lowered eyelids.

'My daughter is right, Miss Palliser--Mrs. Brian Walford,' said the Colonel, in a less severe tone than he had employed before. 'It is quite true that you have been hardly used. Any deception is bad, worst of all a cheat that is maintained as far as the steps of the altar. But after all, in spite of your natural disappointment at finding you had married a poor man instead of a rich one, my nephew is the same man after marriage as he was before, the man you were willing to marry. And I cannot think so badly of you as to believe that you would marry a man you did not love, for the sake of his wealth and position. No, I cannot think that of you.

I take it, therefore, that you liked my nephew for his own sake; and that it was only pique and natural indignation at having been duped which made you cast him off and agree to cancel your marriage. And I say that there is only one course open to you, as a good and honourable young woman, and that is to take your husband by the hand, as you took him in the house of G.o.d, for better for worse, and face the difficulties of life honestly and fearlessly. Heaven is always on the side of true-hearted young couples.'

Ida lifted her drooping eyelids and looked, not at the Colonel, not at her husband, not at her staunch friend Aunt Betsy, but at that other Brian--at him who this night only had declared his love. She looked at him with despair in her eyes, humbly beseeching him to stand between her and this loathed wedlock. But there was no sign in his sad countenance, no indication except of deepest sorrow, no ray of light to guide her on her path. The Colonel had spoken with such perfect common sense and justice, he had so clearly right on his side, that Brian Wendover, as a man of principle, could say nothing. Here was this woman he loved, and she was another man's wife, and that other man claimed her. If the King of Terrors himself had stretched forth his bony hand and clasped her, she could not be more utterly lost to the man who loved her than she was by this pre-existing tie. Brian of the Abbey was not the man to woo his cousin's wife.

'Do, dearest, be happy,' pleaded Bessie. 'I'm sure father is right. And you are our cousin, our own flesh and blood now, as it were. And you know I always wanted you to belong to us. And we shall all be fonder of you than ever. And you and Mr. Jardine will be cousins, later on,' she whispered, as a conclusive argument, as if for the sake of so high a privilege a girl might fairly make some sacrifice of inclination.

'Is it my duty to do as Colonel Wendover tells me?' asked Ida, looking round at them all with piteous appeal. 'Is it really my duty?'

'In the sight of G.o.d, yes,' said the Colonel and John Jardine.

'Yes, my dear, yes, there can be no doubt of it,' said the Colonel's wife and Aunt Betsy.

Brian of the Abbey said not a word, and Dr. Rylance looked on in silence, with a diabolical sneer.

What a fate for the girl who had refused a house in Cavendish square, one of the prettiest victorias in London, and a matchless collection of old hawthorn blue!

'Then I will do my duty,' said Ida; and then, before Brian Walford could take her in his arms, or make any demonstration of delight, she threw herself upon Miss Betsy Wendover's broad bosom, sobbing hysterically, and crying, 'Take me away, take me out of this house, for pity's sake!'

'I'll take her home with me. She will be calm, and quiet, and happy to-morrow,' said Aunt Betsy. And then, as Brian Walford was following them, 'Stay where you are, Brian,' she said authoritatively. 'She shall see no one but me till to-morrow. You will drive her crazy among you all, if you are not careful.'

Miss Wendover took the girl away almost in her arms, and Brian Walford disappeared at the same time without further speech.

'And now that the bride and bridegroom are gone, I suppose the wedding party can have their dance,' sneered Urania, playing the first few bars of 'Sweethearts.'

But Brian of the Abbey had vanished immediately after his cousin, and no one was disposed for dancing; so, after a good deal of talk, Bessie's birthday party broke up.

'What a dismal failure it has been, though it began so well!' said Bessie, as she and the other juveniles went upstairs to bed.

'What! still you are not happy,' quoted Horatio. 'Why, I thought you wanted Brian Walford to marry Ida Palliser?'

'So I did once,' sighed Bessie; 'but I would rather she had married Brian of the Abbey; and I know he's over head and ears in love with her.'

'Ah, then he'll have to put his love in his pipe and smoke it! That kind of thing won't do out of a French novel,' said Horatio, whose personal knowledge of French romancers was derived from the _Philosophe sous les toils_, as published wish grammatical notes for the use of schools; but he liked to talk large.

CHAPTER XX.

WAS THIS THE MOTIVE?

Brian Walford came back to The Knoll after the younger members of the family had gone to their rooms.

'Where have you been all this time?' asked the Colonel, who was strolling on the broad gravel drive in front of the house, soothing his nerves with a cheroot, after the agitations of the last hour. 'You are to have your old room, I believe; I heard it was being got ready.'

'You are very kind. I walked half way to the Abbey with my cousin. We had a smoke and a talk.'

'I should be glad of a little more talk with you. This business of to-night is not at all pleasant, you know, Brian. It does not redound to anybody's credit.'

'I never supposed that it did; but it is not my fault that there should be this fuss. If my wife had been true to me all would have gone well.'

'I don't think you had a right to expect things to go well, when you had so cruelly deceived her. It was a base thing to do, Brian.'

'You ought not to say so much as that, sir, knowing so little of the circ.u.mstances. I did not deliberately deceive her.'

'That's skittles,' said the Colonel, flinging away the end of his cigar.

'It is the truth. The business began in sport. Bessie asked me to pretend to be my cousin, just for fun, to see if Ida would fall in love with me. Ida had a romantic idea about my cousin, it appears, that he was an altogether perfect being, and so on. Well, I was introduced to her as Brian of the Abbey, and though she may have been a little disappointed--no doubt she was--she accepted me as the perfect being. As for me--well, sir, you know what she is--how lovely, how winning. I was a gone c.o.o.n from that moment. We kept up the fun--Bess, and the boys, and I--all that evening. I talked of the Abbey as if it were my property, swaggered a good deal, and so on. Then Bess, knowing that I often stayed up the river for weeks on end, asked me to go and see Ida, to make sure that old Pew was not ill-using her, that she was not going into a decline, and all that kind of thing. So I went, saw Ida, always in the company of the German teacher, and took no pains to conceal my affection for her. But I said not another word about the Abbey. I never swaggered or put on the airs of a rich man; I only told her that I loved her, and that I hoped our lives would be spent together. I did not even suggest our marriage as a fact in the near future. I knew I was in no position to maintain a wife.'

'You should have told her that plainly. As a man of honour you were bound to undeceive her.'

'I meant to do it, but I wanted her to be very fond of me first. Then came the row; old Pew expelled her because she had been carrying on a clandestine flirtation with a young man. Her character was compromised, and as a man of honour I had no course but to propose immediate marriage.'

'Her character was not compromised, because Miss Pew chose to act like a vulgar old tyrant. The German governess, everybody in the school, knew that Miss Palliser was unjustly treated. There was no wound that needed to be salved by an imprudent marriage. But in any case, before proposing such a marriage, it was your bounden duty to tell her the truth about your circ.u.mstances, not to marry her to poverty without her full consent to the union.'