You know what have ever been our wishes. They are the same now as heretofore; and his constancy is of that nature, that nothing will ever change it. I am persuaded that it would have been unchanged, even if you had married your cousin, though in that case he would have been studious to keep out of your way. I do not mean to press his claims at present. I have told him that he should be patient, and that if the thing be to him as important as he makes it, he should be content to wait. He replied that he would wait. I ask for no word from you at present on this subject. It will be much better that there should be no word. But it is right that you should know that there is one who loves you with a devotion which nothing can alter.
I will only add to this my urgent prayer that you will not make too much to yourself of your own misfortune, or allow yourself to think that because this and that have taken place, therefore everything must be over. It is hard to say who makes the greatest mistakes, women who treat their own selves with too great a reverence, or they who do so with too little.
Frank sends his kindest love. Write to me at once, if only to condole with me about the chapel.
Most affectionately yours,
JANET FENWICK.
My sister and Mr. Quickenham are coming here for Easter week, and I have still some hopes of getting my brother-in-law to put us up to some way of fighting the Marquis and his myrmidons. I have always heard it said that there was no case in which Mr. Quickenham couldn't make a fight.
Mary Lowther understood well the whole purport of this letter,--all that was meant as well as all that was written. She had told herself again and again that there had been that between her and the lover she had lost,--tender embraces, warm kisses, a bird-like pressure of the plumage,--which alone should make her deem it unfit that she should be to another man as she had been to him, even should her heart allow it. It was against this doctrine that her friend had preached, with more or less of explicitness in her sermon. And how was the truth? If she could take a lesson on that subject from any human being in the world, she would take it from her friend Janet Fenwick. But she rebelled against the preaching, and declared to herself that her friend had never been tried, and therefore did not understand the case. Must she not be guided by her own feelings, and did she not feel that she could never lay her head on the shoulder of another lover without blushing at her memories of the past?
And yet how hard was it all! It was not the joys of young love that she regretted in her present mood, not the loss of those soft delights of which she had suddenly found herself to be so capable; but that all the world should be dark and dreary before her! And he could hunt, could dance, could work,--no doubt could love again! How happy would it be for her if her reason would allow her to be a Roman Catholic, and a nun!
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A LOVER'S MADNESS.
The letter from Mrs. Fenwick, which the reader has just seen, was the immediate effect of a special visit which Mr. Gilmore had made to her. On the 10th of March he had come to her with a settled purpose, pointing out to her that he had now waited a certain number of months since he had heard of the rupture between Mary and her cousin, naming the exact period which Mrs. Fenwick had bade him wait before he should move again in the matter, and asking her whether he might not now venture to take some step. Mrs. Fenwick had felt it to be unfair that her very words should be quoted against her, as to the three or four months, feeling that she had said three or four instead of six or seven to soften the matter to her friend; but, nevertheless, she had been induced to write to Mary Lowther.
"I was thinking that perhaps you might ask her to come to you again," Mr. Gilmore had said when Mrs. Fenwick rebuked him for his impatience. "If you did that, the thing might come on naturally."
"But she wouldn't come if I did ask her."
"Because she hates me so much that she will not venture to come near me?"
"What nonsense that is, Harry. It has nothing to do with hating. If I thought that she even disliked you, I should tell you so, believing that it would be for the best. But of course if I asked her here just at present, she could not but remember that you are our nearest neighbour, and feel that she was pressed to come with some reference to your hopes."
"And therefore she would not come?"
"Exactly; and if you will think of it, how could it be otherwise?
Wait till he is in India. Wait at any rate till the summer, and then Frank and I will do our best to get her here."
"I will wait," said Mr. Gilmore, and immediately took his leave, as though there were no other subject of conversation now possible to him.
Since his return from Loring, Mr. Gilmore's life at his own house had been quite secluded. Even the Fenwicks had hardly seen him, though they lived so near to him. He had rarely been at church, had seen no company at home since his uncle, the prebendary, had left him, and had not dined even at the Vicarage more than once or twice. All this had of course been frequently discussed between Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick, and had made the Vicar very unhappy. He had expressed a fear that his friend would be driven half crazy by a foolish indulgence in a hopeless passion, and had suggested that it might perhaps be for the best that Gilmore should let his place and travel abroad for two or three years, so that, in that way, his disappointment might be forgotten. But Mrs. Fenwick still hoped better things than this. She probably thought more of Mary Lowther than she did of Harry Gilmore, and still believed that a cure for both their sorrows might be found, if one would only be patient, and the other would not despair.
Mr. Gilmore had promised that he would wait, and then Mrs. Fenwick had written her letter. To this there came a very quick answer. In respect to the trouble about the chapel, Mary Lowther was sympathetic and droll, as she would have been had there been upon her the weight of no love misfortune. "She had trust," she said, "in Mr. Quickenham, who no doubt would succeed in harassing the enemy, even though he might be unable to obtain ultimate conquest. And then there seemed to be a fair prospect that the building would fall of itself, which surely would be a great triumph. And, after all, might it not fairly be hoped that the pleasantness of the Vicarage garden, which Mr.
Puddleham must see every time he visited his chapel, might be quite as galling and as vexatious to him as would be the ugliness of the Methodist building to the Fenwicks?
"You should take comfort in the reflection that his sides will be quite as full of thorns as your own," said Mary; "and perhaps there may come some blessed opportunity for crushing him altogether by heaping hot coals of fire on his head. Offer him the use of the Vicarage lawn for one of his school tea-parties, and that, I should think, would about finish him."
This was all very well, and was written on purpose to show to Mrs.
Fenwick that Mary could still be funny in spite of her troubles; but the pith of the letter, as Mrs. Fenwick well understood, lay in the few words of the last paragraph.
"Don't suppose, dear, that I am going to die of a broken heart. I mean to live and to be as happy as any of you. But you must let me go on in my own way. I am not at all sure that being married is not more trouble than it is worth."
That she was deceiving herself in saying this Mary knew well enough; and Mrs. Fenwick, too, guessed that it was so. Nevertheless, it was plain enough that nothing more could be said about Mr. Gilmore just at present.
"You ought to blow him up, and make him come to us," Mrs. Fenwick said to her husband.
"It is all very well to say that, but one man can't blow another up, as women do. Men don't talk to each other about the things that concern them nearly,--unless it be about money."
"What do they talk about, then?"
"About matters that don't concern them nearly;--game, politics, and the state of the weather. If I were to mention Mary's name to him, he would feel it to be an impertinence. You can say what you please."
Soon after this, Gilmore came again to the Vicarage; but he was careful to come when the Vicar would not be there. He sauntered into the garden by the little gate from the churchyard, and showed himself at the drawing-room window, without going round to the front door. "I never go to the front now," said Mrs. Fenwick; "I have only once been through the gate since they began to build."
"Is not that very inconvenient?"
"Of course it is. When we came home from dining at Sir Thomas's the other day, I had myself put down at the church gate, and walked all the way round, though it was nearly pitch dark. Do come in, Harry."
[Illustration: "Do come in, Harry."]
Then Mr. Gilmore came in, and seated himself before the fire. Mrs.
Fenwick understood his moods so well, that she would not say a word to hurry him. If he chose to talk about Mary Lowther, she knew very well what she would say to him; but she would not herself introduce the subject. She spoke for awhile about the Brattles, saying that the old man had suffered much since his son had gone from him. Sam had left Bullhampton at the end of January, never having returned to the mill after his visit to the Vicar, and had not been heard of since.
Gilmore, however, had not been to see his tenant; and though he expressed an interest about the Brattles, had manifestly come to the Vicarage with the object of talking upon matters more closely interesting to himself.
"Did you write to Loring, Mrs. Fenwick?" he asked at last.
"I wrote to Mary soon after you were last here."
"And has she answered you?"
"Yes; she wrote again almost at once. She could not but write, as I had said so much to her about the chapel."
"She did not allude to--anything else, then?"
"I can't quite say that, Harry. I had written to her out of a very full heart, telling her what I thought as to her future life generally, and just alluding to our wishes respecting you."
"Well?"
"She said just what might have been expected,--that for the present she would rather be let alone."
"I have let her alone. I have neither spoken to her nor written to her. She does not mean to say that I have troubled her?"
"Of course you have not troubled her,--but she knows what we all mean."
"I have waited all the winter, Mrs. Fenwick, and have said not a word. How long was it that she knew her cousin before she was engaged to him?"