A Dark Night's Work (14 page)

Christmas was, of course, to be devoted to his own family; it was an
unavoidable necessity, as he told Ellinor, while, in reality, he was
beginning to find absence from his betrothed something of a relief. Yet
the wranglings and folly of his home, even blessed by the presence of a
Lady Maria, made him look forward to Easter at Ford Bank with something
of the old pleasure.

Ellinor, with the fine tact which love gives, had discovered his
annoyance at various little incongruities in the household at the time of
his second visit in the previous autumn, and had laboured to make all as
perfect as she could before his return. But she had much to struggle
against. For the first time in her life there was a great want of ready
money; she could scarcely obtain the servants' wages; and the bill for
the spring seeds was a heavy weight on her conscience. For Miss Monro's
methodical habits had taught her pupil great exactitude as to all money
matters.

Then her father's temper had become very uncertain. He avoided being
alone with her whenever he possibly could; and the consciousness of this,
and of the terrible mutual secret which was the cause of this
estrangement, were the reasons why Ellinor never recovered her pretty
youthful bloom after her illness. Of course it was to this that the
outside world attributed her changed appearance. They would shake their
heads and say, "Ah, poor Miss Wilkins! What a lovely creature she was
before that fever!"

But youth is youth, and will assert itself in a certain elasticity of
body and spirits; and at times Ellinor forgot that fearful night for
several hours together. Even when her father's averted eye brought it
all once more before her, she had learnt to form excuses and palliations,
and to regard Mr. Dunster's death as only the consequence of an
unfortunate accident. But she tried to put the miserable remembrance
entirely out of her mind; to go on from day to day thinking only of the
day, and how to arrange it so as to cause the least irritation to her
father. She would so gladly have spoken to him on the one subject which
overshadowed all their intercourse; she fancied that by speaking she
might have been able to banish the phantom, or reduce its terror to what
she believed to be the due proportion. But her father was evidently
determined to show that he was never more to be spoken to on that
subject; and all she could do was to follow his lead on the rare
occasions that they fell into something like the old confidential
intercourse. As yet, to her, he had never given way to anger; but before
her he had often spoken in a manner which both pained and terrified her.
Sometimes his eye in the midst of his passion caught on her face of
affright and dismay, and then he would stop, and make such an effort to
control himself as sometimes ended in tears. Ellinor did not understand
that both these phases were owing to his increasing habit of drinking
more than he ought to have done. She set them down as the direct effects
of a sorely burdened conscience; and strove more and more to plan for his
daily life at home, how it should go on with oiled wheels, neither a jerk
nor a jar. It was no wonder she looked wistful, and careworn, and old.
Miss Monro was her great comfort; the total unconsciousness on that
lady's part of anything below the surface, and yet her full and delicate
recognition of all the little daily cares and trials, made her sympathy
most valuable to Ellinor, while there was no need to fear that it would
ever give Miss Monro that power of seeing into the heart of things which
it frequently confers upon imaginative people, who are deeply attached to
some one in sorrow.

There was a strong bond between Ellinor and Dixon, although they scarcely
ever exchanged a word save on the most common-place subjects; but their
silence was based on different feelings from that which separated Ellinor
from her father. Ellinor and Dixon could not speak freely, because their
hearts were full of pity for the faulty man whom they both loved so well,
and tried so hard to respect.

This was the state of the household to which Ralph Corbet came down at
Easter. He might have been known in London as a brilliant diner-out by
this time; but he could not afford to throw his life away in fireworks;
he calculated his forces, and condensed their power as much as might be,
only visiting where he was likely to meet men who could help in his
future career. He had been invited to spend the Easter vacation at a
certain country house which would be full of such human stepping-stones;
and he declined in order to keep his word to Ellinor, and go to Ford
Bank. But he could not help looking upon himself a little in the light
of a martyr to duty; and perhaps this view of his own merits made him
chafe under his future father-in-law's irritability of manner, which now
showed itself even to him. He found himself distinctly regretting that
he had suffered himself to be engaged so early in life; and having become
conscious of the temptation and not having repelled it at once, of course
it returned and returned, and gradually obtained the mastery over him.
What was to be gained by keeping to his engagement with Ellinor? He
should have a delicate wife to look after, and even more than the common
additional expenses of married life. He should have a father-in-law
whose character at best had had only a local and provincial
respectability, which it was now daily losing by habits which were both
sensual and vulgarising; a man, too, who was strangely changing from
joyous geniality into moody surliness. Besides, he doubted if, in the
evident change in the prosperity of the family, the fortune to be paid
down on the occasion of his marriage to Ellinor could be forthcoming. And
above all, and around all, there hovered the shadow of some unrevealed
disgrace, which might come to light at any time and involve him in it. He
thought he had pretty well ascertained the nature of this possible shame,
and had little doubt it would turn out to be that Dunster's
disappearance, to America or elsewhere, had been an arranged plan with
Mr. Wilkins. Although Mr. Ralph Corbet was capable of suspecting him of
this mean crime (so far removed from the impulsive commission of the past
sin which was dragging him daily lower and lower down), it was of a kind
that was peculiarly distasteful to the acute lawyer, who foresaw how such
base conduct would taint all whose names were ever mentioned, even by
chance, in connection with it. He used to lie miserably tossing on his
sleepless bed, turning over these things in the night season. He was
tormented by all these thoughts; he would bitterly regret the past events
that connected him with Ellinor, from the day when he first came to read
with Mr. Ness up to the present time. But when he came down in the
morning, and saw the faded Ellinor flash into momentary beauty at his
entrance into the dining-room, and when she blushingly drew near with the
one single flower freshly gathered, which it had been her custom to place
in his button-hole when he came down to breakfast, he felt as if his
better self was stronger than temptation, and as if he must be an honest
man and honourable lover, even against his wish.

As the day wore on the temptation gathered strength. Mr. Wilkins came
down, and while he was on the scene Ellinor seemed always engrossed by
her father, who apparently cared little enough for all her attentions.
Then there was a complaining of the food, which did not suit the sickly
palate of a man who had drunk hard the night before; and possibly these
complaints were extended to the servants, and their incompleteness or
incapacity was thus brought prominently before the eyes of Ralph, who
would have preferred to eat a dry crust in silence, or to have gone
without breakfast altogether, if he could have had intellectual
conversation of some high order, to having the greatest dainties with the
knowledge of the care required in their preparation thus coarsely
discussed before him. By the time such breakfasts were finished, Ellinor
looked thirty, and her spirits were gone for the day. It had become
difficult for Ralph to contract his mind to her small domestic interests,
and she had little else to talk to him about, now that he responded but
curtly to all her questions about himself, and was weary of professing a
love which he was ceasing to feel, in all the passionate nothings which
usually make up so much of lovers' talk. The books she had been reading
were old classics, whose place in literature no longer admitted of keen
discussion; the poor whom she cared for were all very well in their way;
and, if they could have been brought in to illustrate a theory, hearing
about them might have been of some use; but, as it was, it was simply
tiresome to hear day after day of Betty Palmer's rheumatism and Mrs.
Kay's baby's fits. There was no talking politics with her, because she
was so ignorant that she always agreed with everything he said.

He even grew to find luncheon and Miss Monro not unpleasant varieties to
his monotonous
tete-a-tetes
. Then came the walk, generally to the town
to fetch Mr. Wilkins from his office; and once or twice it was pretty
evident how he had been employing his hours. One day in particular his
walk was so unsteady and his speech so thick, that Ralph could only
wonder how it was that Ellinor did not perceive the cause; but she was
too openly anxious about the headache of which her father complained to
have been at all aware of the previous self-indulgence which must have
brought it on. This very afternoon, as ill-luck would have it, the Duke
of Hinton and a gentleman whom Ralph had met in town at Lord Bolton's
rode by, and recognised him; saw Ralph supporting a tipsy man with such
quiet friendly interest as must show all passers-by that they were
previous friends. Mr. Corbet chafed and fumed inwardly all the way home
after this unfortunate occurrence; he was in a thoroughly evil temper
before they reached Ford Bank, but he had too much self-command to let
this be very apparent. He turned into the shrubbery paths, leaving
Ellinor to take her father into the quietness of his own room, there to
lie down and shake off his headache.

Ralph walked along, ruminating in gloomy mood as to what was to be done;
how he could best extricate himself from the miserable relation in which
he had placed himself by giving way to impulse. Almost before he was
aware, a little hand stole within his folded arms, and Ellinor's sweet
sad eyes looked into his.

"I have put papa down for an hour's rest before dinner," said she. "His
head seems to ache terribly."

Ralph was silent and unsympathising, trying to nerve himself up to be
disagreeable, but finding it difficult in the face of such sweet trust.

"Do you remember our conversation last autumn, Ellinor?" he began at
length.

Her head sunk. They were near a garden-seat, and she quietly sat down,
without speaking.

"About some disgrace which you then fancied hung over you?" No answer.
"Does it still hang over you?"

"Yes!" she whispered, with a heavy sigh.

"And your father knows this, of course?"

"Yes!" again, in the same tone; and then silence.

"I think it is doing him harm," at length Ralph went on, decidedly.

"I am afraid it is," she said, in a low tone.

"I wish you would tell me what it is," he said, a little impatiently. "I
might be able to help you about it."

"No! you could not," replied Ellinor. "I was sorry to my very heart to
tell you what I did; I did not want help; all that is past. But I wanted
to know if you thought that a person situated as I was, was justified in
marrying any one ignorant of what might happen, what I do hope and trust
never will."

"But if I don't know what you are alluding to in this mysterious way, you
must see—don't you see, love?—I am in the position of the ignorant man
whom I think you said you could not feel it right to marry. Why don't
you tell me straight out what it is?" He could not help his irritation
betraying itself in his tones and manner of speaking. She bent a little
forward, and looked full into his face, as though to pierce to the very
heart's truth of him. Then she said, as quietly as she had ever spoken
in her life,—"You wish to break off our engagement?"

He reddened and grew indignant in a moment. "What nonsense! Just
because I ask a question and make a remark! I think your illness must
have made you fanciful, Ellinor. Surely nothing I said deserves such an
interpretation. On the contrary, have I not shown the sincerity and
depth of my affection to you by clinging to you through—through
everything?"

He was going to say "through the wearying opposition of my family," but
he stopped short, for he knew that the very fact of his mother's
opposition had only made him the more determined to have his own way in
the first instance; and even now he did not intend to let out, what he
had concealed up to this time, that his friends all regretted his
imprudent engagement.

Ellinor sat silently gazing out upon the meadows, but seeing nothing.
Then she put her hand into his. "I quite trust you, Ralph. I was wrong
to doubt. I am afraid I have grown fanciful and silly."

He was rather put to it for the right words, for she had precisely
divined the dim thought that had overshadowed his mind when she had
looked so intently at him. But he caressed her, and reassured her with
fond words, as incoherent as lovers' words generally are.

By-and-by they sauntered homewards. When they reached the house, Ellinor
left him, and flew up to see how her father was. When Ralph went into
his own room he was vexed with himself, both for what he had said and for
what he had not said. His mental look-out was not satisfactory.

Neither he nor Mr. Wilkins was in good humour with the world in general
at dinner-time, and it needs little in such cases to condense and turn
the lowering tempers into one particular direction. As long as Ellinor
and Miss Monro stayed in the dining-room, a sort of moody peace had been
kept up, the ladies talking incessantly to each other about the trivial
nothings of their daily life, with an instinctive consciousness that if
they did not chatter on, something would be said by one of the gentlemen
which would be distasteful to the other.