Her Cilded Cage.

Otago Witness, Issue 1474, 14 February 1880, Page 20

Her Cilded Cage.

BEING THE NEW TITLE OE SPLENDID MISERY.

SCBSTITUTBD AT THE REQUEST OF THE AUTHOR

MISS BRA.DDON.

Chapter XXVII. In the Waning Year. ARBARA was alone once more in the bleak blank beginning of the year — the dead dull time when the days lengbhen yet bring neither leaf nor flower; when the skies are gray, and the rain lashes 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 began to pall even upon the most domestic mind. Those first months of the new year are always up-hill 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 Maroh mean a succession of balls.

Alone, or almost alone, in her castle on the Cornish moor, Barbara found the early year a period of exceeding gloom. There was much rain at that time, and save for an occasional gleam 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 and makes the decay and

corruption of dying nature more splendid than her freshness and bloom.

Miss Penrutli had returned from Plymouth renewed in her strength, like that very sun which rejoiceth to run his race. Having made herself more than ever secure of a freehold in the skies, she was so much the less inclined to make herself agreeable to her fellow- 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 wore so frivolom and futile that it was a wonder they were permitted to go on living. At other times, when inveighing against the riot and wastefulness of the servantc'-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 people who had been reared upon a pittance often showed a natural bent 1 to lavish expenditure and self-indnlgence, whenever the opportunity for those vices arose.

Barbara received these stealthy thrusts with a provoking indifference. She cared too little for Miss Penruth 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 long," she told herself ; "and it is no part of my duty to falsify my own nature in order that I may please Miss Penruth."

So the two women went their own several ways. Priscilla 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 thiß 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 &i 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 Flosßie. 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 Tudway. 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 aßpect ; a person who had known trouble, had passed through the furnace .of disappointment, and had been purified in the fire of adversity. Such a dependent was a treasure above price to a lady of Priscilla's temper. Priscilla liked adulation, 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 nothing but praise for this estimable widow, whose name was Morris.

Thus the young year wore 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 fiddle-headed, but of inexhaustible energies and an immeasurable capacity for wrong-doing, 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 gave him a preoccupied ail* occasionally : but nobody at Place wanted him to be lively. Dulness 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 wore on. Jane brought her roses and nightingales ; July filled the hedgerows with ferns aud foxgloves, and changed winter's gray sea to an ocean more glorious than jasper or amethyst. And swift 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 ia the waning of the year that an unwonted gloom 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 scarce explain what, was amiss with him. He could no longer endure the fatigue of long 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 onee — at fifty 1 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." And then the cold sweat, which he had felt so often of late, gathered on his brow, as he remembered how his father had been cut off in the fulness and flower of life by heart-diseas9, 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 sofa, helpless, inert, till the fit passed, Vy vyan Penruth believed himself a doomed man.

"I an^like *the]rich man in^jthe parable," he said to himself. "Of what account are my lands and my houses ? To me, too, the awful voice has Bounded : * Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee !' Yea, lam doomed, and she will many her soldier-lover and

be happy ; happy, as she lias never bsea with me ; beloved — no, never more fondly than sho might have been by me. Th» husk is rough aud ugly, but there was a true newt ab tho core, if she would have had it."

Thon, after ajlong blank pause, ia which the pulue beat slowly, and 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 his little world would bs like af cer he wa3 dead.

His chief thought was of his wife. " Will she be sorry for m 9 when I am. gone?" he asked himself eagerly. "Of course she will marry that other man — at, hero, famous, a man for a woman to love j but when she is a happy wife, a happy mother, willshe think of me kindly, regretfully even, and say to herself sometimes,, 'He was a rough, quoer creature, but beloved me. Such aa it was, after its kind, his was true love " !'

He suffered, and hold his peace about thia new strange suffering. For some. time he would tell no one of his illness, neither wife nor sister, not even one o£ those old servants who had served hinx since he was a boy. Nor had he yeM made up his mind to consult a doctor. The fits came upon him generally at the. same time in the day, when he was alone; in his study after breakfast. He had found that lying down on his Bofa gave him relief. He would lie there quiescenfe till the fib passed, and he was his owa man again. On two or three occasions the symptoms were more violent, and h& had some difficulty in concealing his illness from the- household. He shrank with a strange aversion from the revelifction of his weakness. He felt like a 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 passing shadow, with thaft hour when he should vanish from the scene already marked upon the dial. Ho who possessed so much found it bitter to contemplate that near future in which, his possessions must slip into other handr. If they knew that a mortal disease had its grip upon him, they would begin to calculate how long he would last, howmany 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 desife it. T& sit amidst them and know that they were calculating every hour, counting eveiy breath he drew— that their hopes .waxedi strong with the pallid hue of disease^ waned when his cheek brightened — this would be too horrible. ••

" I'll keep the truth from them as long as I can," he said to himself. "Better that 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 tar him as a living thing, so fondly had het watched over its welfare !

No, he would be lord of the soil to the last.

" God help the estate when Mark owns it !" he thought. " He'll be a carelesat landlord. He'll let his tenants sell theie straw, perhaps, and break up some of the fine old pastures. And not another acre of the moor will be redeemed in his time. Things will stand still at tha best."

O, soul-torturing thought, that these> things 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 ! Batter,, perhaps, to be a beggar aud lie down. in. at, corner to die, under some dark archway, or in a stranger's porch, and to let th* 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 tatter 3, than to be a rich mart 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 1" 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 tohim in all things, and found him lying ont the sofa, inert, with that cold dew upoa his forehead.

"Are you ill, Vyvyan?" she asked, kneeling by his side. " Alittle faint," he faltered, hardlyabTa to answer her. "It will pass off—presently." " Let me get you something ; I am aura you are very ill. No, don't stir," as ha tried to rise, and fell back again on. that pillow, her face growing dim before biki clouded sight ; " I'll ring." " No ; don't let the servants see V* In® gasped ; but she had rung the bell. It was answered by Priscilla's inestimable widow.

" I beg your pardon, ma'am ; but I was passing, and the bell rang so loud. I was afraid—" " Yes, quite right. Mr Penruth has fainted. Bring some brandy directly, please, Morris." The devoted Morris tripled 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 his eyes fiad a strange sightless look, though the pupils were unnaturally dilated. "I don't know what it means," h» 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 spint-de-canter 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 posiion. ... , The brandy revived him ; a faint colour came back to his leadenjcheeks, his breathing grew more regular, and that horrible Bensation of sinking through the sofa gradually left him. "Don't mention— to my sister — or any one— that I have been— ill," he said to Mr? 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 were anything serious in the attack she might be at a loss how to act or what to suggest." " Fiddlestick !" ejaculated Vyvyan testily. " You talk as if I was a sick baby. Do you suppose I don't know how to take care of my own health, woman ? I don't want half a dozen of your fussy Bex fußSing 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, and prodded, and listened to by some spectaoled humbug in Savile row," answered Vyvyan. "If there is anything organically wrong with me, no doctor living can set me right. Ten to one but the clevereßt 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 satisfaction of your friends." "My friends 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 much 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 afterwards, and Vyvyan went about his daily business seeming none the worse for his sudden attack of faintness. Days passed, and he suffered no recurrence of those strange sensations, that sudden standing still of the clockwork 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 liver, I dare say," he Bald to himself.

Too soon had he rejoiced. Just a week after that morning on which Mb wife had surprised him, the fit came on again, about half an hour after he had taken his morning draught of honest homebrewed 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 h<jw 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 passage, "James — Dickson — some brandy !"

He came face to face with Didcott, the Oamelot 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 ?" gaaped Yy vyan. He had no strength to stand another minute, but reeled and fell back on the Bofa, 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 he 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 waistcoat, and listened to the beating of his heart. "Is it very serious ?" Vyvyan asked, after a silence that seemed long.

"Well, it ia 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 shall 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. 1 am to be patched up ; and I am to be careful how I ride, or walk, or run upstairs ; or perhaps I am never to do one 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 lam doomed to drop down some day as my father dropped, in this room, nineteen years ago, let the doom «ome. Your tinkering won't stave 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 ails me, and I know it's beyond cure. Can the cleyereat man in London put a new

heart into my body? Their scientific jargon would only worry me. No, Didcott, I shall ride my horse and look after my estate to the end, let it come soon or late. It doesn't much matter. How did you happen to be here this morning?"

"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-mor-row?"

" 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 nronderfully, 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."

" I shall do so. Don't say anything to my Bister." "Of course not," replied Mr Didcott, reserving to himself the right to break his word.

He told Miss Penruth everything next day, and Miss Penruth allowed the facts of the case to ooze out gradually, and almost unawares, in the course of 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.

" She is young and foolish, and is sure to do something silly," said Prisoilla. "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 Didcott.

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 a' minute guns— and the deathlike faintness 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 downpour. He came home late for dinner, wet to the skin, and with a desperate headache. Next day he felt dull and tired, and stayed at home by the fireside, where Barbara kept him oompany, and read yesterday's newspapers to him, and was, in all ways, as dutiful 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 came, 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 of his body.

"Head's very hot," said the surgeon, a fact also painfully palpable to the patient. "I shan'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 posseßsion of her brother in his illness, and would have turned Barbara out of the room had she dared.

"Of course I shall nurse him !" exclaimed Miss Penruth.

" 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. " Some one used to sick-nurse-ing."

" Then he can have nobody better 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. Tt 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 and invalid kind— at intervals during the night. She was to sit up with him all night, and give him his medicine at regular hours. His wife and sister would be able to do all that was wanted in the day.

_ Mrs Morris— who was that miracle a silent woman.— responded only by a res-

peotful courtsey. " You understand ?" 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 has been no return of the heart attack ?" Didcott asked conßdently, bending down to whisper the question.

" None."

" That is good at any rate. We shall have you down stairs again in a few days. Was your sister's maid properly attentive to you, giving you your beef -tea and your medicine." "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 moving down the hours. How different had the old man's pace been in the sunny garden at Oamberwell, where the light of foot went giddily round upon the springy turf to the sickly-sweet "Prima Donna," the languishing " Elfin;" or in the homely little parlour, where two people played chess and conjugated Hindostanee 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, sat aud watched him while he dozed. She w mid 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 huntingwatch, which dangled from its stand upon the table by his bed. The fire of wood and coal burnt cheerily in the wide grate, and that was the only cheerful thing in the room. On the third afternoon there came 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 oaks and firs as if they had been saplings, and tore up young plants in the shrubberies, and snapped _ the branches off 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 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 servants-hall — a b9ggar, I think — who wants to see you." " I can't leave my husband's sick-room. You ought to know that, Gilmore. Let Dickson give the man any relief he wants. "

" But he particularly wants 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— Commenced in No. 1452.)