Our Novelettes.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1583, 1 April 1887, Page 4

Our Novelettes.

RAE GIFFORD.

CnirTEH Hl.— (Continued). " I know you will be angry with me, Miss Gifford 5 but I cannot help it. I thank you for all jou have done for me, and more you have intended to do, as I would thank Mr Gifford if he were here still. I have taken nothing belonging to you or Mr Gifford but Deli i. I know she is not all mine, I know you have a share in her, and you have been very good to h»r;, but I must have my child to myself, though it is not quite fair. Think of a mother's heart and forgive me. At the same time I shall not do anything to disgrace Delia; I will try to grow a fitter mother for ber; I will, indeed. Linton is all yours Taking away Delia, I mean to give it up for her, and to make her my child entirely. I had never anything to do with a place liko Linton. I was brought up to work for myself, lam quite able to work for my child. I wish yru to know that it was nothing in Mr Gilford's will which made me act as lam doing. He did qr.ite right, only he could not know; and I should hnve done it anyhow as soon as my marriage vow was loosed. You know that I cannot express myself as you would, hut you will understand that I beg your pardon and pray to God to bless you. Eunice Gifford. Rachaki. Giffoed." Eunice was slow to believe her own eyes; she had never suspected that Rae was discontented, never thought her unhappy. Amazement was Eunice's first sentiment. Yet it waa like Rae—that singularly unpractical woman, who had only been well off because she had been in good hands—the whole eccentric proceedings was like Rae, and so was the absurd supposition that Bhn could renounce the future inheritence of Linton for Christopher Gifford's daughter. Eunice did not much mind the ingratitude towards herself, neither had she for some time any great fear of the consequences of the foolish act. Running away—successful running away, at least —was as out of date as feudal hatred, in the modern world of expediency and universal intercourse.

Eunice was an eminently matter-of-fact, self-satisfied woman ; she was fully persuaded that Rao would not only soon be found, but that she would also soon repent of hor rash departure. All the same Eunice was ashamed of her s'ster-in-law's childish outbreak. She made up her mind that the best thing which could be dono was to say no more than that Mrs Giflord had gone away with the child for a change. Rae's behaviour admitted of this favourable construction. She had gone away in the morning, instead of at night; she had dressed herself and her child in their morning walking dresses, packed up their luggage, and got a farm boy to carry it openly to the nearest railway station. For aught that the servant knew, Eunice might be acquainted with their destination. She would wait and ascertain it quietly, without exposing to the world—the fact notorious to Eunice herself—that Rae in practical matters was little better than an idiot.

Tnere was only one objection to this line of conduct: and Miss Gifford's man of business, whom she was forced to take into her confidence, did not fail to point it out to her. In the case of any dilliculty in tracing Mrs Gifford, that dilliculty would be multiplied indefinitely by the present inactivity and delav.

" Nonsen«e," scouted Eunice ; " Mrs Gifford and the child caunot disappear. They will soon turn up And she remained firm in her opinion. It was with consternation, instead of satisfaction, that Eunice—growing gradually alarmed at the continueJ absence of any tidings of Rae and Delia—learned that, after a direct resort to the railway station and a journey of twenty mile* beyond Clouds, all trace of the couple vanished. It could not, after such a lopse of time, be recovered, even with the utmost pains. Eunice had to suffer the nine days scandal, and—what was a great deal worse to the independent, self-sustiined woman, with her family loyalty—to admit, as months passed, that she had lost sight of her brother's child and representative, little Delia. She hod to reflect, with a pang which had long mingled gall and wormwood with her own diet, that while she dwelt in the peace and respectibility of Linton, these poor creatures might be faring badly in their weakness. CuArrßßlV. " Dr. Penn, Miss Gifford; Miss Gifford, Dr. Penn." The man and the woman introduced, on one of the rare occasions when Eunice went into company, looked at each other with interest.

There was cause of controversy between them, and there was ground for sympathy, hunice Gifford had some fellow feeling with this man. lie bad been too proud to fear his past, after eight years' as a professional man; after some share in Eastern wars, rebellions, and lootings, and one piece of serrico which had made his fortune; with an honourable reputation, even in his own country, as a man wise, benevoleut, and trustworthy, he had returned to Clouds.

Eunice admire.l Dr. Penn'a knowledge, so much more simply held than Christopher's had been ; bis manly power and a certain breadth in his conclusions. She wus enough of a woman to be pleased wiih his person, that hud outgrown tho traits of the plain, precocious lad, who bad ground not only at a pestle and mortar, but at hard words, clas«es, and genera, except with the charmed moments be had lingered with Kachael Corbet. He wit- a man now, with the seal of nature's nobility stamped on ,his irregular features; and fe* Ad;nisfs bavo tho same distinction. Eunice wondered how such a one, even as a drugui-t's lad, could have had an infaltuation for Kae Gifford.

Dr. Peun, on his part, could not help valuing Eunico Gilford's clear head, her application and perseverance, the species of eingle-heurtednesa and gallantry which had made and kept her a student of solid old books, a naturalist who knew bugle from ground ivy and a tomtit from a wren, all alone in her tastes since her brother died, among the fussy, pretentious, and milk-and-water ladies about Clouds. Eunice, too, was of a type which improves with a certain number of years. She had passed the time when one expects glow and brightness. Her well-defined features wero rather mellowed than becomo shrewish. She was a handsome woman of a certain age, bearing the traces of a sensible, equable, occupied, and healthy temperament. Perhaps Dr. Penn, in his superiority, held also the Clouds' traditional respect for Misa Gifford. Kun ice asked Dr. Penn what he had thought of Indian life; what he had thought of Clouds on bis return.

Dr. Penn, in answer, gavo a short page of his individual experience, and a longer welcome tribute to Clouds, wbicli led to a reference to common pursuits; and after half-an-hour's conversation, Dr. Penn and Miss Gifford parted more, than civilly, almost cordially.

A week later Dr. Penn met Miis Gifford on one of the quiet field roads, showed her the yellow fumitory, and the relative of the purple emperor—rare in these parts, and offered to send or bring their fellows, and the lait boots which treated of the like, to Linton. Within a few months Dr. Penn visited freely at Linton as an intimate friend, and the country neighbours settled that Eunice Gifford would at last change her state, and pronounced the match a fair one. Certainly, in Eunice's acquaintance with the clever, enlightened, unassuming Doctor, there had come now life and animation to Linton. Linton had a fascination to Dr. Penn, which might have been a repulsion to another man. The man liked the bitter sweet of recollection. He liked to sit there, and ponder on all that he knew of the sad story of Rae Gifford : how she had been defeated by his silence, made a hasty marriage, disagreed with her sister-in-law, end gone away, nobody hnew whither—out of sight and forgotten by the world more than half a dozen years ago. He could fancy the lights in which these two women—between whoie chaaactjrs his own formed a link, and whose natures he could gauge without animosity, forgiving as he wanted forgiveness—had served as fire and water to each other.

Dr. Penn was sitting in his study at Clouds; and so courageous or careless was ha in facing his antecedents, that he had bought the very shabby, tumble-down house which he had inhabited with the rest of the family, as an apprentice to Joe Corbet the druggist. He had thrown out additions and improvements ; laid out a garden; aod settled himself with his man, who had been an orderly; his horse, which had seen other fire than volunteers'; and his housekeeper, who was a Clouds woman. He was not there to poach on the established doctor's practice, but to help him when he needed help, to mature his talents in the high-hearted hope of making some attainment which should have the fainteft glimmer of the splendour of the attainments of Harvey and Jenner. The room which Dr. Penn had fitted up for his books, specimens, and experiments, was a very learned-looking room to the unitiated; and it was handsome for Clouds—with its oak-root chairs, in irksomo rows, and i?a table, bleak and bare, for the convenience of bearing his solitary meals. But in this spring season, when even townspeople thought of primroses and bluebells, and began to have wild anticipations of hay-making and roses, the Doctor's study remained dry, anatomical, j and—for the Doctor photographed—horribly pungent. The drawing-room at Linton, with its old, stained ebony, and Kunice for the sole occupant, was social and home-like in comparison. Dr. Perm was conscious of this, so much so that he indulged in fallacious memories of Joe Corbet's threadbare, noisy parlour, and the corner where the girl's frippery of snips of common riband, and sprigs of common (lowers, had possessed something airy, delicate, and tender, to the ugly, manful, enterprising, and slaving apprentice. The glamour was still before his eyes when he thought of it. The doctor was reading in the early afternoon, lie was a black-haired, pale-faced msn, with a mouth slightly working still under mouetache and beard, as passionate mouths will work to the end, and with eyes having something wistful in their ldstre, a glance which propitiates in clever, successful men, saying, as it does, " I have not found everything in my great luck I have missed something, which you, my common-place, obscure, even stranded friend, may have found and may set lightly by." A ring came to the door bell, and 'he Doctor's servant interrupted him with the vaguo communication, " A porson wants to see you, sir." "What sort of a person?" inquired Dr. Penn, mindful of a brother practitioner's rights. " A better sort of a person, sir; a woman ; and she has a little girl with her; and she said, 'ls Dr. Penn at home ? Can I see Dr. Penn ? '" "There is no mistake—there, show her in." The Doctor bad only to wait a moment, when—under the full light of the April sun, casting golden motes on her black drees, srriking the hair under her bonnet end bringing out its auburn woof—Rae Oifford walked into her old home, Matthew Peun's house, leading her daughter Delia. " Rae! Mrs Giffofld !" stammered the Doctor, starting up and bowing his visitor to a seat. He was much excited, and his heart beat tumultously. Hae, whom he had known a girl, touched by a straw and transparent as crystal, was composed and self-controlled in comparison. " I have come to you, sir, to ask your help for my little girl. I am sure you would help her if you could." Then Dr. Penn recognized the old Rae, in the unbounded faith in his abilities, and the unqualified devotion to the object of her affection, which could bring her back to Clouds and Linton, to him and Eunice; which could cure her stubbornness, and cause her to destroy by her own doing, the one independent plot and act of her life, in order to rescue Delia from real or imaginary evil. He looked at Rae. Time had dealt harder with her than with him and Eunice Gifford, and her wiaows' dress made her look darker and thinner. But the face remained a unique fuce, with the chang ng light of the hair, tne steel-blue eyes, which could give out clear, warm sparks like steel, and the mouth which he still saw tender and mobile as a child's now that it was still. " Right." Matthew Penn hud the comfort of telling himself tint he aud the little town of Clouds and pompous Chiistophor Gifford had all been |right; he had not seen such another face over land and sea.

" Thank you, Mrs GifforJ," he was saying, formally; "I will do all in my po*erfor your daughter; lam sorry she should need my kelp." And with that he looked at Delia.

The rosy, bold, frank child of two or three had grown into a pale, sby little girl of nine, with her head dangling very much on one side, the only analogy that remained between her and her mock shepherdess' name. Hae began eagerly to detail the child's symptoms of weakness, passing oyer her own information of Matthew fenn's return from India, und her trick of trust in him, which had been the lure to draw her back to Clouds, as if she bad lost all consciousness of him in her care for her darling, Not a iran in a thousand, boweyer faithless and forgetful in hiuiself, but would have been mortified by this obliyiou, sacred as it was in its cause.

But Matthew Penn was a humane man and somewhat of an enthusiast in his beneficent calling. He bent his mind to see a little patient—not Rae's child, with features of Christopher Qitlbrd's, which it stung him yet to acknowledge—and to understand the case, treating it strictly as a case of suffering childhood. When he had mastered the account and formed his judgment, ho drew Kae a little aside, and spoke gravely and abstractedly, like a simple physician. " I think I can help her—l hope so; but it can only ba after a long trial. It is my duty to tell you that she is suffering from | what is always a lingering complaint, but not •incurable. If X am to do her any good I

must attend to her for weeks and months." Here the Doctor broke down, and the man spoke out short, sharp and decisive. " Rae, she mus* go to ber natural home, to her own house of Linton, and to her aunt, Miss Gifford, Tt is impossible she can stay here under other circumstances."

He had expected Rae to break out in tears and trembling as she had done when a girl, after he proposed to trj for an appointment abroad. But she was better schooled now, and the springs of her nature lay deeper. She regarded him with those old tenacious eyes which looked to him as if they had kept all that bad ever pasted before them, and held it somewhere far down in their depths, and which yet had no reminding and no reproach in their glance, and with her mouth close, contrary to its old slackness. " I will go OTer to Linton if Eunice will take me in to wait upon my little girl. I know she will receire Delia, and I think she will let me in to see to the child," said Rae, resolutely. Dr. Penn gave Rae no assurance, but he turned to his desk and wrote—- " Dkab Miss Gipiobd,— Mrs Giff ard and her child have just come to me. The child is in a bad state of health, and the mother has a fancy, a superstitution, that I could cure her. You had better come and fetch them away immediately, in case of any change of mind on Mrs Gilford's part. Yours faithfully, " Matthew Pbhk."

Eunice answered the appeal at once in person, to the great glorification of the Clouds gossips. " So you have come at last, Rae ; let me see my brother's child," was all the repioach Eunice made before she conveyed the two to Linton. Eunice did not deal in reproaches, they were not in her line: they were things that belonged to the past—useless things ; and Eunice could no more be wantonly than she could be deliberately cruel. Rae had not shown any of the great impracticability which Eunice had liberally attributed to her when thrown on her own resources. The moment that she was her own mistress Rae had conducted herself very like other people, and tolerably discreet people too, in everything save what had referred to Linton.

Iwe had possessed one relation in this country, an aunt, a childless widow, in an old-established lace trade in an old-established town seventy miles from Clouds, and which only changed its fashions in a mild way and did not ofi en change its tradespeople. This kinswoman had been fond of Bae and had cove.ed her, in spite of Mies Gifford's experience, to assist her in her trade. Kae had known she would be welcome at Oatley, and there would be no question made of her story that her husband was dead and she could not live with his sister. Bae had gore aside from the direct road to leave her luggage with an old i h a. Jiarner whom she had once employed before, and thus had unconsciously doubled upon her late pursuers. She had remained on at Oatley until Delia got sickly and until Kae heard, through a succession of third persons, that Matt fenn, the hero and magician of her girlhood, had arrived at his goal and settled at Clouds. Chapieb V. Bae was back at Linton as if she had never left it, as if she had never laid down a new tract for herself, after shrinking aod coweriug in subserviency and bondage, under "me burden of an honour," which bad threatened the individual woaiun with annihilation. Eunice, without meaning to be unkind, took far less notice of Bae than of Delia. However "Eunices mind might have been diverted from its abiding care, she was much taken up with the chud, aud that not only with bur health, in which she could not credit that there was anything far wrong. The Giffords, thougu not long livers, had enjoytd stunt, servicable constitutions while tney lasted. This ailment was nothing worse than a temporary disorder brought about by the mismanagement of the ignorant mother, lliero were many other things to be looked to—Delia's mind, manner, habits : everything was to be done over again to fie her lor growing up such a girl as Eunice would have her.

Kae had a struggle with her suffering child which wrung her own heart, and was part of her punishment to compel the little girl—accustomed, in the isolated livi e that the/ had led, to depend upon her mother for everything, and to look up to her beyond any other human being—to separate herself from her, and to rely upon aud ooey a stranger like Miss (jhfford. " You must go to your aunt, Delia; your aunt knows bes>," the pour woman bad to say meekly every day. in Dr. Penn's hearing, in answer to the mute, bewildered, disconcerned expression, some* times, to the open, angry, resistance with which poor, ailing little Delia was shaken trom her old foundations.

When Eunice bad got sufficiently acquainted with ber neice, sue was too honest a woman not to own candidly that she was agreeably surprised by the state in which she louud her.

" X suppose that she Jmust have her father's taste for reading," obieived Eunice complacently ; " but really she bas been caretuily taught so far. She understands what sue reads, and she has paid a little attention to natural history. Her powers of observation nave b. eu called lorth, and I have no doubt ie tied ion will tolloiv." " 1 did the best i could for her," replied Rae. Eunice faced rouud on her sister-in-law. " You don t mean that you taught Delia, Raer 1 How could you spare time? And you hud never uuy turn for study." " 1 had to prepare myself lor being Delia's companion," Kae exclaimed simply; "and Ainu Kitty always ado wed me to sit in the empty worK-room at night with a book, when she bad a friend with ber 111 the back parlour." Eunice had learnt something which she had not dreamt of m her philosophy. Kae had done more than keep up tho hard-won knowledge with which she had been crammed at Liniou, done more than read on at meaner editions of the old dry historic. Spurred by a woman's motive, she bad procured for herself new volumes aud sought other knowledge —knowledge more pertaining to the heart than the brain, more in keeping with her own nature, more like what Mat x»enn had taught ber—when the was bright and original herself—by the druggist's mean hearth, or out under the glorioui starlight of the Clouds lanes. Another thing Eunice remarked with amazement, was that Rue had lost the crouching, sloveuly gait of a slave. No longer gagged by rettaiut and smitten with hopeless confusion, but forgetting everything iu oue fond purpose, she now held herself up am movea alert and self-possessed in all the offices of life.

" A prodigy has come under my notice," confessed magnauimous Eunice to ber friend tho doctor. " I am very glad of it, but it is not the less a prodigy. My sister-in-law, who left me the emptiest, most tiresome, awkward woman, bas gone and served an apprenticeship to an old lace-worker, and come back almost well informed, interesting, and grace ful. It is quite wonderful how she has fitted herself to associate with Delia."

(To ie witaMwd).