Complete Story. An Old Maid's Gragedy.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue IV, 26 July 1902, Page 202

Complete Story. An Old Maid's Gragedy.

By

A. St. JOHN ADCOCK.

Author of “East End Idylls,” Etc,

i. Having had the whole day in which to reflect and prepare herself, Miss Gurney had got her feelings so well under control that she was able to hand the photograph to Hester across the tea table and say without a tremor in her voice

“1 picked this up on the floor, Hester, after yon were gone this morning--” The girl took it from her eagerly; she had been in trouble about it all dav, wondering where she had lost it, and, in a flutter of relief and embarrassment, slipped it into her pocket. now without a word; but Miss Gurney noticed that her cheeks blushed, and then a rosier red surged back and overflowed them. The silence between them became too strained not to be broken. “Yon did not tell me, Hester, that you knew” Miss Gurney hesitated, “is he—a friend of yours, dear?” "Yes, aunt.”

"How long have you known him?” "Not very long. Not more than three months.”

This explained to Miss Gurney the change it had puzzled her to observe in Hester lately; her placid, subdued habit of mind had seemed altogether disturbed, so that sometimes she sang for very happiness, with a strange, new light in her eyes, and sometimes she was saddened and preoccupied with pensive dreaming®. “1 hope, Hester,” Miss Gurney forced herself to say in her prim, decisive fashion, "there has been no no talk of love betwixt you and this gentleman?” Hester flashed an answering glance on Iter and looked down, without speaking, but the answer was as clear to Miss Gurney as if it had been put into actual words. "My dear,” she went on, striving against her increasing agitation, “I am very, very sorry. 1 wish it had. been any other man —”

"But aunt,” Hester interrupted, astonished, “you do not know him!” “I knew,” Miss Gurney faltered, “I knew a man so like him —so exactly' like him that the moment I saw his photograph I was afraid for you, dear. It is impossible for that man to bring you anything but misery. Hard, and false, and cruel—” “Oh. but, aunt,” cried Hester, tearfully indignant, “he. is not! If you knew him you could never say that again.” “But why have you never told me about him?” “I have been wanting to.” Hester flushed again with a pretty shynestS that appealed irresistibly to all the tenderness and affection of the gentle little old lady’s nature. "I meant to, aunt, but I—l did not quite know how to. 1 meant to show you his photograph—he only gave it me yesterday—and tell you then.’ “And. of course,” Miss Gurney assumed a severity of manner she found it difficult to maintain, “he tells you that he loves you?” “He has asked me to marry him, aunt ” “And you fancy that you love him?” With this question and her earnest, passionate reply, Hester broke, down utterly. She flung herself on her knees, and covering her face with her hands laid it in Miss Gurney’s lap and sobbed all her heart out thus, as she had done years ago wl»en it had been laden with more childish griefs. Miss Gurney herself was scarcely less agitated. "There, dearie, you mustn't cry so. I did not mean to be unkind,” she said, her

eves dimmed and her thin hands shaking as she passed them caressingly over the fair, bowed head. “But I have seen more of the- world than you have, dear, and—l have never told you yet—the man I loved spoilt my life, and made me the poor, brok-

. ’ ;-;terl creature I am, and this portrait is so like what he used to be—so exactly like, that ever since 1 saw it I have been dreading—Oh, I don’t know what! I believe I could kill him, Hester, if I thought he ivould cause you half the suffering I have endured through his

um, lucre! it is too late for me to say anything now. If you love him 1 know w’hatever I can say would make no difference.” She added presently, in the calm, even tones that were* habitual to her, “You have not told me his name, Hester. What is his name?” She had to wait and ask a second time before Hester had regained sufficient composure to reply. “Richard Heywood.” Miss Gurney repeated,. mechanically nodding thoughtfully as if she had only been confirmed in what she knew already. “And where does he live?” Hester mentioned an address at Kensington.

“He is a gentleman—and rich?” pursued Miss Gurney. “Yes. His father is rich.” “And does he know how poor we are?”

"Oh, yes, aunt. He knows I am working for my living.” "How was it you first happened to meet him?”

“He is distantly related to Madam Faber.” Madam was the fashionable milliner in whose large establishment in Oxford-street Hester had been engaged these last twelve months or more. “He came in one day with some message from his sister, I think and he has called once or twice since, and then —he met me as I was coming home and walked with me, and—”

“And he has happened to meet you more than once?” Miss Gurney smiled, but became serious again. “You should have told me, dear, and have brought him to see me. Why didn’t you? You were not ashamed of his

seeing what a poor Bort of home wa lived in?”

“Oh, no, no, aunt!” Hester protested. “He would have come—l would have brought him. but I wanted to tell you about him first.” And she told her about him now, and it was all only that she loved him, and she loved him more than all the world, and she had promised to be his wife, but There was bound to be a "but”; it was what Miss Gurney had been listening for. “But it will not be for a long, while, because he is going away ” “Going away, child! Why?* Where to ?”

“He has spoken to his father about me,” said Hester, her lips quivering, “and he refuses to see me, and threatens to turn Richard into the street if he will not give me up.” “They are rich, you see, dear,” murmured Miss Gurney bitterly, “and we are poor. Probably his mother

“She has been dead several years.” “Then it is his father. He probably intends his son to marry money, or social influence ”

“But Richard won’t. He says be will never marry anyone but me. If 1 will wait for him.”

“Why is he going away?” “His father is sending him to manage a large branch of his business at Ceylon. He is to be out there three years —perhaps longer. His father Is only sending him, he says, so as to separate him from me, and he can’t refuse to go without ruining his prospects and, for my sake, he does not want to do that. I don’t care whether he is rich or poor, but Richard says if his father turned him adrift he would have nothing—and so it is best to wait, because he will never change, and I shall never change. And so he is going away at the end of this week. I can’t bear him to go. I might never sec him again, but if he lives he will come back to me.” She said it half-defiantly, half-de-spairingly, and laid her head on Miss Gurney’s lap again to hide her tears. ’ For fully ten minutes neither of them spoke; then rousing herself with a heavy sigh, Miss Gurney said hesitatingly—“l might do something. I don’t know what I can do—but bring him home with you to-morrow evening, and let me see him, dear. If he is all you think he is—but let me see him for myself. Bring him with you to-morrow evening.” IT. And the following evening when Richard Harwood came, Miss Gurney was easily converted to Hester’s opinion of him. His frank, honest eyes, his unaffected simplicity of speech and manner, his diffidence, his shy

adoration of Hester,his unconcealable love of her—all conspired to -win Miss Gurney’s confidence and approval, and won them in spite of herself. Again and again while he was there, and after he was gone, she owned, grudgingly at first, but with a growing satisfaction, that he realised her girlhood’s ideal of the man she had loved years ago and was noj, as she had feared, a reincarnationof that man as she saw him now in the light of bitter remembrances, cruel, heartless, faithless. She lay awake that night living through again in thought the longpast happiness and misery that the sight of Richard Harwood had brought back upon her with renewed intensity. She had loved, and was to have married, but seemed predestined to misfortune. First it was her mother’s death that postponed the marriage, then, a year later, her father’s; and her father dying bankrupt the man she loved had ultimately yielded to the wishes of his family and broken his engagement with her, but not before he had cruelly betrayed her, through her blind love of him, and could leave her to bear alone a shame whose memory was not buried in that little grave in the far-off country churchyard, but lived to haunt her yet, and sear her very soul as often as it returned to her. She had never seen the man since, or written to him; she was too proud to ask anything of his pity, and all the love she had felt for him had died within her.

She left her old home and came to earn her living in London among people who knew nothing of her history; being clever with her needle, she was soon able to support herself in reasonable comfort, but the hard work and the solitary, loveless life was fast ageing and hardening and embittering her, when Hester came with her childish needs and sympathies to melt the frost that had gathered about her heart and reconcile her to humanity and make the world habitable again. Hester was the orphaned child of Miss Gurney’s younger sister, and it was not strange that the two, each left desolate, should grow to be all in all to each other. If Miss Gurney’s love was the deeper, the more selfsacrifieing, that was not strange either. She was no longer young and had not hoped that her forlorn hearthunger would ever be satisfied, but Hester had come and satisfied it. It

was enough for her now that there was one living creature whom she could love and who loved her; and her love for Heater was aueh that to ensure her happiness she would gladly have endured rebuffs and humiliations that she would sooner have died than have submitted to for any advantage to herself. No self-interest could have annihilated her pride, and urged her to such lengths as she went unhesitatingly for Hester’s sake.

She rose the morning after Richard Harwood’s visit with a great resolve already fixed in her mind. She dared not reflect too much upon it or upon all its fulfilment must mean to her, for fear her courage should fail her; but early in the evening she travelled westward, and, for the first time, realised her intention to the utmost and was alarmed at her own temerity when she found herself knocking at the door of the stately house in Kensington.

If her knock had not been heard she felt she would not have dared to repeat it; but it was heard, and a supercilious footman presently opened the door. “Is Mr Harwood at home?” she asked. shrinkingly. The man eyed her dubiously; she made a rather shabby, quite insignificant little figure standing there on the doorstep. “Well—yes—he’s at home. What might you want him for?” His lofty condescension roused her to resentment, and so stiffened her drooping pride afid at once restored her self-control.

“Will you tell Mr Harwood, my man, that Miss Gurney wishes to see him. Say Miss Gurney, formerly of Barndene, please.” He sullenly obeyed, and after an interval returned to her in the hall with a perplexed expression darkening his countenance.

“Mr Harwood will see you. This way, please.”

'She followed him into a spacious, elegantly appointed dining - room, and sat down there feeling curiously out of place and bewildered.

And a minute later, a grey, elderly gentleman entered and advanced towards her. Altered as he was she knew him, and was aware that he recognised her as readily. lie offered her his hand with an obvious embarrassment, but she bowed distantly, without appearing to notice it. “I am pleased to see you, Miss Gurney,” he began lamely; and then sat down and looked at her, and seemed waiting for her to speak. But she could not trust herself yet; her heart was fluttering suffocatingly and she felt that if she attempted to answer him she was so unnerved she must burst into tears, and the very thought of thus humbling herself in his presence helped to strengthen her. “It is a very long while,” he made an effort and resumed inanely, “since we saw each other, Miss Gurney.”

"A very long while!” his halting words had an unintentional sting in them, and all at once she had flung her weakness from her. “I would not have troubled you now on my own account ”

“Please don’t say that,” she was vaguely conscious of a wistful eagerness in his tone. “If there if anything I can do for you ” “There is nothing you can do for me,” she said, with quiet decision. “You should know me better than to think I would ask any, even the smallest favour of you for myself.” He quailed under her indignant glance, and threw out his hands with a gesture of despair. “Forgive me. I know what you say is true,” he returned sadly. “You

must not think,-Ruth,” the name rose involuntarily to his lips, “that I have forgiven myself, or forgotten, or that I have been altogether happy. I know I have wronged you —terribly— terribly—and the memory of it has come between me and happiness more and more as I have grown older and had time to think. I have been punished—”

“And I!” she interposed harshly. “But I did not come to talk of what is past mending. You did me a great wrong, and I never dreamt till yesterday of seeing you again or that there was any way in which I might be brought to forgive you—”

“And is there? Tel] me what it is,” he cried. “I would give a great deal to make some reparation for what I have done. I am not the reckless, selfish fool I was in those days.” He was strongly moved, but not more so than was Miss Gurney herself; it was as much as she could do to steady her voice and keep her emotion hidden from him.

“Your son is engaged to my niece—my dead sister’s child. I did not know anything of it until two days iugo,” she said, gathering confidence as she proceeded, and speaking with "a detached air as if what she discussed did not concern herself personally. “You have forbidden your son to see her again, and are sending him away with some idea of parting them for ever. She is everything to me now— I care more for her happiness than my own—if I had not loved her so. my pride would never have allowed me to come to you, I came only to save her from such a life as mine has been. I couldn’t think, if you knew, that you would break her heart as you have broken mine.” She stopped abruptly, and he gazed at her with a sort of terror in his eyes. “T did not know who she was,” ho said huskily. “I came to tell you.” He sat looking at her, stricken dumb, for even in his most repentant moments he had not thought the consequences of his sin could spread a blight so far-reaching and so irreparable; he sat looking at her and read in her thin white hair and in her worn, furrowed features the piteous story pf what her life had been since he had seen her Inst. He had no words for his shame and his remorse and in some subtle fashion the poignancy of his emotion communicated itself to her. She would not trust herself to look at him or address him again; and though he twice made as if he would speak, each time his voice broke like a sob in his throat and he fell silent.

The tension was becoming so painful that it was an ineffable relief to both of them when a knock sounded on the door and the footman entered apologetically: “Beg pardon, sir,” lie said. Carrier at the gate, sir, for Mr Richard’s boxes. They’re all corded in his room, but he isn’t home yet, and hasn’t labelled which he wants for use during the voyage, and I thought p’raps you’d know, sir—” “It won’t matter, James,” cried Mr Harwood, himself again instantly in face of this dignified domestic. “You can tell the carrier there are no boxes to be taken now. Mr Richard has altered his arrangements—he will not be going.”