SPLENDID MISERY.*

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVII, Issue 5680, 31 January 1880, Page 2

SPLENDID MISERY.*

A NOV EL. By the Author of ." Lady Audloy's Secret," &o. CHAPTER XXVII. IN THE WANING YEAR. Barbara was alone once more in the bleak blank beginning of the year—the dead dull time when the days lengthen, yet bring neither leaf nor flower; when the skies are grey, and the rain laßheß the pane, and the snow lies in the hollow of the hill, and the ravenous east wind roams over the earth seeking whom it may devour ; when all the domestic joys, or traditions of joys, that belong to Christmas are over and done with, and the comforts of the fireside have begun to pall even upon the moat domestic mind. Those first months of the new year are always up-liill.work, save perhaps to the sportsman who has infinite delight in horse and hound, gun and dog, and to whom the first violet is an affliction, and the yellow April butterfly a bore ; or to the young beauty, for whom February and March mean a succession of balls. Alone, or almost alone, in her castle on the Cornish moor, Birbara found the earlyy- <»r a period of exceeding gloom. There was much rain at that time, and save for au occasional qleam at close of day the sun hid his face, and it was as if there had been no such luminary to gladden the world ; for it was difficult to believe that the dull grey light of those short winter days came from the round red-gold face of that jovial Sol who glorifies the midsummer roses, aud makes the decay and corruption of dying Nature more splendid than her freshness and bloom. Miss Penruth had returned from Plymouth renewed in her strength, like that very sun, whioh rejoiceth to run his race. Having made herself more than ever secure of a freehold in the skies, she was so much the leas inclined to make herself agreeable to her fe low-mortals upon earth. She did not actually lecture Barbara, but she took every occasion of talking at her. She would remark, for instance, apropos to nothing, that some people's lives were so frivolous and futile that it was a wonder they were permitted to go on living. At other times, when inveighing against the riot and wastefulness af the servants' hall—which, she was thankful to say, she had always kept in check so long as she had any authority—she would observe, as a general proposition, that peoplo 1 who had been reared upon a pittance often showed a natural bent to lavish expenditure I ind self-indulgence whonever the opportunity 'or those vices arose. ;

Barbara received these stealthy thrusts with a provoking indifference. She cared too little for Miss PeDruth to be affected by that lady's bad opinion. She was not hypocrite enough to attempt conciliation. "If I tried to live pleasantly with her I should be pretending all day loDg," she told herself; "and it is no part of my duty to falsify my own nature in order that 1 may please Miss Penruth." So the two women went their own several ways. Piiscilla wrote long letters to other Priscillas, and read the last new book by the last new light in the evangelical world, which volume generally prophesied the approaching destruction of this planet, taking the Crimean war and the Indian mutiny as the preliminary explosions which heralded the final crash. Barbara lived her joyless, eventless life almost alone, save when at her husband's request she put on her fur-lined jacket and sat beside him in his dog-cart while he drove to look at distant farms and scold stupid farmers. She sorely missed her mother and Flossie. She was full of fear about that distant struggle which was not yet finished. Miss Penruth had by this time recovered from the shock of Jane Tudway's ingratitude, and had obtained for herself a new handmaiden and confidante of a very superior stamp to the deceitful Xudway. The new attendant- a being so intensely respectable could hardly be spoken of as a lady's maid— was a widow, young, but serious beyond her years ; soft of foot, and grave of voice and aspect; a person who had known trouble, had passed through thefurnaceof disappointment, and had been purified in the fire of adversity. Such a dependent was a treasure above price to a lady of Priscil'a's temper. Priscilla liked adulation, and here was some one to offer it, a living fountain of flattery which never ran dry. Priscilla gloried in her piety, and here was some one whose evangelical graces only stopped short at the point where they would have become presumption. The maid was only a little less enlightened than her mistress, as Plato to Socrates, or Mason to Walpole. Priscilla had notliiDg but praise for this estimable widow, whose name was Morris.

Thus the young year rolled on. Mark sold a couple of horses at a ruinous loss, and gave away another ; and having thus depopulated his stable, save of the admirable Pepper, and a sturdy brown cob, ugly and fiddleheaded, hut of inexhaustible energies and an immeasurable capacity for wrong doiDg, the manager of the quarries devoted himself to business with a steadiness which was highly pleasing to his elder brother. Business thoughts and business cares gavo him a preoccupied air occasionally ; but nobody at Place wanted him to be lively. JDulness and silence were in the very atmosphere of the shadowy old house, where Flossie's gaiety had seemed always a discordant note.

So the dull year woro 00. June brought her roses and nightingales ; July filled the hedge-rows with ;ferns and foxgloves, and changed winter's grey sea to an ocean more glorious than jasper or amethyst. And Bwift on summer's beauty came autumn's slow decay, and the skies were thunder-charged, and the last of the reapers were busy on the upland fields. It was in the waning of the year that an added and unwonted ploom deepened the shadow of Barbara's joyless home. Vyvyan, who hardly knew what it was to be ill, began to feel that his prime of life and the sense of power that goes with it were departing. Something, he could hardly explain what, was amiss with him. He could no longer endure the fatigue of loDg rides and long fasting. He, who scarce knew the meaning of weakness, felt himself suddenly and at intervals as feeble as an infant.

"Can this be age?" he asked himself angrily. " Have I become an old man all at once—at fifty? It is not possible ; yet I feel like an old man—a feeble old creature, tottering on the brink of the grave. It must be something organic." jAnd then the cold sweat, which he had felt eo often of late, gathered on his brow, as he remembered how his father had been out off in the fullness and flower of life by heart disease, unsuspected till the blow came. Remembering this, and feeling this strange torpor creeping over him, this deadly fainting, this dimness of vision, this terrible necessity of lying on his Bofa, helpless, inert, till the fit passed, Vyvyan Penruth believed himself a doomed man.

" I am like the rich man in tbe paTable," he said to himself.' "Of what account are my lands and my houses? To me too the awful voice has sounded, 'Thou fool, this night thy soul will be required of thee 1' \ e--, I am doomed, and sho will marry her soldier lover, and be happy—happy, as she has never been with me ; loving, as she has never been to me ; beloved—no, never more fondly than she might have been by me. The husk in rough and ugly, but there was a true heart at the core, if she would hr.vc had it." Then, after a long blank pause, in which the pulse beat slowly, aud that icy dew gathered on the haggard brow, and all things grew dim before the clouded sight, Vyvyan began to wonder,, with a vague self-pity, what hiß little worid would be like after he was dead.

His chief thought was of his wife.

" Will she be sorry for mo when I am gone ?" he asked himself. "Of course she will marry that other man—a hero, famous, a man for a woman to love ; but when she is a happy wife, a happy mother, will- she think of me kindly, regretfully even, and say to herself sometimes, 'He was a rough, queer erea ure, but he loved me. Such as it was, after its kind, his was true love ?' "

He suffered, and held bis peace about tliis new strange suffering. . For some time he would tell no one of his illness, neither -wife nor sister, net even one of those old servants who bad served him since he was a boy. Nor had he yet made up his mind to consult a doctor. The fits came upon him generally at the same time in the day, when be was alone in his study, after breakfast. Be had found that lying down on his sofa gave him relief. He would lie there quiescent till the fit paßsed, and he was his own man again, On two ox three occ&sioms the symptoms were more violent, and he had some difficulty in concealing his illness from the household. He shrank with a strange aversion from the revelation of his weakness. He felt like a i king discrowned, who could yet maintain the semblance of royalty. He did not want them to know that his race was all but run, that he was of no significance in the world, a mere

I*. The right of publishing " Splendid Misery in the North Island of New Zealand has been purchased by the proprietors of the.NEW Zealand Hbbals.

passing shadow, with that, hour when he should vanish from the scene already marked, on the dial. He who possessed so much, found it bitter to contemplate that near future in which his possessions must slip into other hands* If they knew that a mortal disease had its grip upon him, they iroald begin to calculate how long he would last—how many months or days they would have to wait for wealth and liberty. His wife, Priscilla, Mark—each of these would profit by his death, and each must desire it. To sit amidst them and know that they were calculating every hour, counting every breath he drew— that their hopes waxed strong with the pallid hue of disease, waned when his cheek brightened—this would be to horrible. "I'll keep the truth from them as long as I can," he said to himself. " Better I should hold on to the last, and drop like a felled tree."

Sometimes he thought he would go away and wait for death in some distant land, tended by strangers, who would be losers when he died. But to leave his wife, to leave his land—that land which was to him as a living thing, so fondly had he watched over its welfare ! No, he would" be lord of the soil to the last. '' God help the estate when Mark owns it!" bethought. "He'll be a careless landlord. He'll let his tenants sell their straw, perhaps, and break up some of the fine old pastures. And not another acre of the moor will be re- ' deemed in his time. Things will stand still, at the best." Oh, soul-torturing thought, that these thing 3 must go to another, a careless owner, a spendthrift perhaps, who would let the ancestral estate melt away acre by acre, till the Penruths ceased to have name or place in the world ! Better, perhaps, to be a beggar and lie down in a corner to die, under some dark archway, or in a stranger's porch, and to let the slough of this tired body slip off the immortal soul like a worn-out garment, of no more value or account than penury's rags and tatters, than to be a rich man anchored to earth by the weight of many acres, and much cattle, houses, money, and mines. "How little use I have made of it all!" thought Vyvyan. "I might have lived as happily on a pound a-week." One day his wife went into his study to consult him upon some household arrangement, it being her habit to defer to him in all things, and found him lying on the sofa, inert, with that cold dew upon his forehead, "Are you ill, Vyvyan?" she asked, kneeling by his side. "A little faint," he faltered, hardly able to answer her. "It will pass off—presently." "Let me get you something; 1 am sure you are very ill. -No, doo't Btir," as he tried to rise, and fell back again on the pillow, her face growing dim before, his clouded sight; •'l'jlring." "No; don't let the servants see!" he gasped ; but she had rnng the bell. It was answered by Priscilla's inestimable ividow. ' "I beg yonr pardon, ma'am; but I was passing, and the bell rang so loud. I was if raid—" j "Yes, quite right* Mr. Penroth has fainted. Bring some brandy directly, please, Morris." j

The devoted Morris tripped lightly away, while Barbara knelt by her husband's side, chafing his cold hands, gazing anxiously at his haggard face. He was not insensible, but hia eyes had a strange sightless look, though • the pupils were unnaturally dilated. "I don't know what it means,"he gasped, presently. " I feel as if I was sinking through the sofa, through the floor—a horrid feeling." Barbara was holding his clammy hands in her own, which fear made almost as cold. | She had little experience of sickness, and this was so strange a sickness. Mrs. Morris came back with a spirit decanter and a glass. Barbara poured some brandy into the glass, and persuaded Vyvyan to drink it. He obeyed her with a mechanical air, like a sleep-walker, and then fell back again into his recumbent position. The brandy revived him ; a faint colour came back to his leaden cheeks, his breathing grew more regular, and that horrible sensation o£ sinking through the sofa gradually left him. " Don't mention—to my sister—or any one —that I have been—ill," he said to Airs. Morris. "I shall obey you, of course, sir," replied the widow, -with grave respect; "but do you not think Miss Penruth ought to know ? Mrs. Penruth is so young and so inexperienced, and if there was anything serious in the attack she might be at a loss how to act or what to suggest," "Fiddlestick 1" ejaculated Vyvyan, testily. "You talk as if X was a sick baby. 130 yon suppose I don't know how to take care of my own health, woman? I don't want half a dozen of your fussy sex fussing about me. One's enough." "You ought to see a doctor, Vyvyan, and immediately," said his wife, with gentle insistence. "I am not going to be hauled about, aud prodded, and listened to by some spectacled humbug in Savile Bow," answered Vyvyan, "If there is anything organically wrong with me, no doctor living can set me right. Ten to one but the cleverest of them would make a wrong guess, and shorten my days by his experiments. Or at best he would put me on a regimen that would prolong my life for a year or so, at the cost of making it a burden to me. If my complaint is only a passing disorder, it will go as it came, without drugs or surgery." "But, sir," pleaded Mrs. Morris, "for the satisfactior of your friends." "My frienus must be satisfied with leaving me alone,' said Vyvyan, who had rallied wonderfully after that glass of brandy. " There is absolutely nothing amiss with me. I have ridden too mr.'i of late. That horse my brother bought is a tremendous puller. There, you can go, Morris; and, remember, not a word to my sister." Barbara was dismissed soon afterward, and Vyvyan went about his daily business, seeming none the worse for his sudden attack of faintnesa. Days passed, and he suffered no recurrence of those strange sensations, that sudden standing still of the clock-work within him, while the world without grew clouded and dim. He began to think the indisposition, whatever it was, had passed away, and that he should be troubled no more. " Indigestion or livf r, I dare say," he said to himself. Too soon had he rejoiced. Just a week after that morning on which his wife had surprised him, the fit came on again, five minutes after he had taken his morning draught of honest home-brewed beer. He ate little or nothing for breakfast, and was in the habit of refreshing himself with a draught of beer before he sat down to his letter-writing or newspaper-reading. He felt the deadly torpor creeping over him, the dull lethargic sensation, and remembering liow brandy had revived him on the last occasion, he rushed to the door, opened it, and called out, in a voice loud enough to reach the pantry at the end of the piss age, " James—Dickson—some brandy !" He came faco to face with Didcott, the Camelot apothecary, who was family doctor at Place, earning from twenty to thirty pounds a year by occasional attendances on Miss Penruth and the servants, "What the deuce brought you here 2" gasped Vyvyan. He had. no strength to stand another minute, but reeled and fell back on the sofa,_ and lay there like a log. Didcott took the brandy bottle and glass quietly from the servant at the door, and'administered a dose. Then lie knelt down by the sofa and felt Vyvyan's pulse. Startled by that slow pulse, he took.a.stethoscope out of his hat, opened the squire's waiscoat, and listened to the beating of bis heart. _ "Is it very serious?" Vyvyan asked, after a silence that seEmed long. "Well, it is rather serious," Didcott answered thoughtfully. '' There's the same feeble action as in your father's case. It's wonderful how these constitutional peculiarities repeat themselves in families. But don't be alarmed, my dear sir. We Bhall make you all right again : a little care—" ■ " I don't want you to make me right again. I know what you mean by that. lamto be patched up ; and I am to be careful how I ride, or walk, or run upstairs ; or perhaps I am never to do any of those things, but to sit in my chair like a mummy in a museum, and be -waited upon, and watched, and pitied, and condoled with. No, thank you, Didcott; life on such terms is not worth having. I'll go my own way, and live as I have lived; and if I am doomed to drop down some day, as my father dropped, in this room, nineteen years ago, let the doom come. Your tinkering won't Btave it off." . "I . should like you' to have another opinion. Will you go up to London and see—" ■

"No ; I have a shrewd idea what aila me, and I know it's beyond cure.. Can the cleverest man in London put a new heart in my body ? Their scientifio jargon would "only worry me. No, Didcott, I shall ride

f my horao and look after iny estate to the |.end, let it-come soon or late. It doesn't I much matter. How did you happen to be here this morning ?" I " Your sister has been suffering from a relaxed throat; nothing much, but she likes me to look after her. I was just coming from her morning room. Very retiring person that "new maid of hers. She always vanishes directly I appear." "The widow?" said Vyvyan. "Yes, she's a decent woman enough. Goes quietly about the house, and. keeps herself to herself." " Shall I come and see you to-morrow ?"

"No. What's the use of our humbugging each other ? If you were to send me medicine, I shouldn't take it. If you told me what to do, I shouldn't do it. Potter about the house, and molly-coddle my sister as much as you like. But the kindest thing you can do for me is to leave me alone." "You feel better now ?" "Much better." "That brandy revived you wonderfully, didn't it ?" " Wonderfully." "Then you'd better keep a bottle of brandy in your study, and take a little whenever you feel the attack coming on." " shall do so. Don't say anything to my sister." "Of course not," repliel Mr. Dideott, reserving to himself the right to break his word. He told Alias Penruth everything next day, and Miss Penruth allowed the facts of the case to ooze out gradually, and almost unawares, in the course oE her conversation with the inestimable widow. Barbara was told nothing. It was her sister-in law's particular desire that she should be kept in ignorance of her husband's peril. ' 1 She is young and foolish, and is sure to do something silly," said Priscilla. "If she were to make a fuss about his health, she would worry my poor brother, and it is our first duty to spare him all agitation." " That is essential," replied Mr. Dideott. More than a week passed without a recurrence of the attack; but this time Vyvyan entertained no hope that the malady was of a temporary kind. It would come upon him again, no doubt, after an interval : that dull, slow beating of his heart—throbs that seemed as far apart as minute-guns— and the death-like faiutness that followed. He lived in constant dread of this.

One day he rode further than usual, through a lonely shelterless country, and under a steady down-pour. He came home late for dinner, wet to the skia, and with a ! desperate headache. Next day he felt dull and tired, and staid at home by the fireside, where Barbara kept him company, and read yesterday'B newspapers to him, and was in all ways as a wife need be. Yet it was pain to him to watch the fair pale face, with its look of settled sadness, and to know that the utmost this young wife could give him was duty and obedience. She was more dutiful, more submissive, than a loving wife would have been. On the following day he was prostrate with some kind of low fever, and could no longer refuse to be visited by the family doctor. Didcott carae, looked at his tongue, felt his pulse, and told him that he had caught a severe cold —a fact which the patient himself knew perfectly well without the aid of science, since he could feel it in every bone in his body.

"Head's very hot," said the surgeon—a fact also painfully palpable to the patient. "I sha'n't trouble you with much medicine. A saline draught to be taken occasionally, that's all. But you'll want good nursing." Priscilla was sitting by the big, gloomy four-post bedstead. She had taken possession of her brother in his illness, and would have turned Barbara out of the room if she had dared. — - "Of course I shall nurse him !" exclaimed Miss Penrutli. " I think that is my duty," said Barbara. She was standing at the foot of the bed, pale, watchful, subdued. " He had better have one of the servants to look after him at night," said Didcott. "Someone used to sick-nursing." "Then he can have nobody bettor than Morris," replied Priscilla. "She is admirable in a sick room. I'm sure her attention to me when I had my throat in that dreadful state was beyond all praise; so gentle, so light-handed, so thoughtful. She is accustomed to sickness, poor thing, having nursed her husband in a lingering complaint."

" Let me see her," said Didcott, " and tell her what she'll have to do. It is a question of giving nourishment frequently and at regular intervals." Priscilla went in search of her new favourite ; and when Mr. Didcott left the sick-room presently, he found Mrs. Morris waiting for him in the dimly lighted corridor just outside Vyvyan's door. To her he gave his instructions briefly. The patient was to have nourishment—of the light invalid kind—at intervals during the night. She was to sit up with him all night, aud give him his medicine at regular hours. His wife and sister would be able to do all that was wanted in the day.

Mra. Morris —who wa3 that miracle, a silent woman —responded only by a respectful courtesy. " You understand 2" said the doctor. "Yes, sir." The next day, and the next after that, there was little change. If it could be said hopefully that the patient was no worse, it could also be said despondently that he was no better. " There liaß been no return of the heart attack ?" Didcott asked, confidently, bending down to whisper the question. " i*one." "That is good, at any rate. We shall have you downstairs again in a few days. Was your sister's maid properly attentive to you, giving you your beef tea and your medicine 2" " Yes; she is a very pleasant person." Those were dull slow days, in which it seemed as if grim old Time were resting on the handle of his scythe instead of mowing down the hours. How different had the old man's pace been in the sunny garden at Camber well, where the light of foot went giddily round upon the springy turf to the sickly sweet " PrimaDonua," the languishing " fcltinor in the homely little parlour, where two people played chess and conjugated Hindoostanee verbs, and sketched the plan of a happy future ! Then the longest summer day had been too short for such absolute content. . .

- Barbara was constant in her attendance upon the invalid". She read to him, she sat and watched him while he dozed. She would not be ousted from her office by Priscilla, who also sat in the sick-room, and would not budge. When ■ the invalid was asleep, the two women sat in silence, listening to the ticking of his big hunting watcb, which dangled from its stand upon the table by his bed. The fire of wood and coal burned cheerily in the wido grate, and that was the only cheerful thing in the room. . On the third afternoon there camo a remarkable change—not in the patient, but in the weather. A stormy wind swept up from the sea—a wind that bent the sturdiest of tlio oaks and fiig as if they had been saplings, and tore up young plants in the shrubberies, and snapped the branches of beech and elm, and whirled autumn's first fallen leaves in darkling gusts across the turf, and rattled the strong leaden casements. The sky was of a livid angry hue, and now and then sharp showers of hail beat against the windows with a startling suddenness.

Vyvyan was asleep, and Barbara was standing by the window watching earth and sky, when her maid, Gilmore, entered softly and beckoned to her. She went out into the corridor. "If you please, ma'am," said Gilmore, "there is a man in the servant's hall—a beggar, J think—who want 3 to see you." "I can't leave my husband's sick-room. You ought to know that, Gilmore. Let llickson give the man any relief he wants." "But he wants particularly to see you, ma'am. He was so pressing that I didn't like to refuse. He says he has a recommendation from the vicar of St. George's, Camberwell, near where you used to live." "Perhaps I had better come," said Barbara. She went back to Priscilla, told her of this curious summons, and then went down to the servants' hall. [To be continued.]