CHAPTER IV.
Margaret found Gervase waiting for her in the darkness of the corridor, when she left his mother. Lady Piercey was a righteous woman, who would not keep her maid out of bed after ten o’clock; but her niece was a different matter. He caught his cousin by the arm, almost bringing from her a cry of alarm. “Meg,” he said in her ear, “do you think it’s all true?”
“Oh, Gervase, you gave me such a fright!”
“Is it all true?”
“How can I tell you? I don’t know anything about the law,” she said, with a sense of disloyalty to the poor fellow who was so ignorant; but she could not contradict her aunt, and if that was supposed to be for his good——
“If it should be,” said Gervase, with a deep sigh: and then he added, “I couldn’t let her marry me if it wasn’t to be for her good.”
“Oh, Gervase, why can’t you show yourself like that to them?” his cousin said.
“I don’t know what you mean. I make no difference,” he answered dully, as he turned away.
Then there came another disturbance. The door of Sir Giles’ room further on opened cautiously, and his servant, who was also his nurse, looked out with great precaution and beckoned to her. Sir Giles was in bed; an old man with a red face and white hair; his under lip dropped like that of Gervase, though there was still a great deal of animation in his little bright blue eyes. He called her to come to him close to his bedside, as if Dunning, his man, did not know exactly what his master was going to ask.
“Has Gervase come in?” he said.
“Yes, uncle.”
“Is he drunk?”
“Oh, no,” said Margaret eagerly, “nothing of the sort!”
“That’s all right,” said the old gentleman with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now I’ll go to sleep.”
Thus the whole household, though it was not to be called a sensitive or a loving household, held its watch over the poor lad who, in his patent stupidity, was its only hope.
Margaret Osborne went away to the end of the corridor to her own room where her little boy was sleeping. She was a few years over thirty, as I have said, and therefore was one of those whose day is supposed to be over. She would have said so herself from other reasons, with complete good faith. For was she not a widow, thrown back as wrecks are upon the shore, out of the storms and hurricanes of life? She might have added that she was cast upon a desert island, after a very brief yet sharp acquaintance with all those stirring adventures and hair-breadth escapes which sometimes make life a stormy voyage. She had married a soldier, and gone with him from place to place during a course of troubled years. They had been poor, and their marriage was what is called an imprudent one; but it was so much worse than that, that Captain Osborne had by no means intended it to be imprudent, but had remained convinced till the last moment that Sir Giles Piercey’s niece must bring something substantial with her to the common stock. He had been warned over and over again, but he had not believed the warning; and when he found himself with a wife on his hands, whose utmost endowment was a very small allowance; enough, with economy, to dress her in the simplest manner, but no more—while he himself had little more than his pay to depend on, the disappointment was grievous. Captain Osborne was a gentleman, though not a very high-minded one, and he did his best to keep the knowledge of this shock from his wife, and to look as if he shared that joy in life and intoxicating delight of freedom with which Margaret, the unconsidered orphan of Greyshott, stepped forth into the fulness of existence with the man she loved. He was able to keep that up quite a long time, his despondencies and occasional irritabilities being attributed by Margaret to anything but the real cause of them; but at the last, in an unguarded moment, the secret slipped from him. Not anything to leave an indelible mark on her memory; not that he had married her with the intention of increasing his income, which would not have been true; but only an unintentional revelation of the disappointment which had been in his mind from the very day of their marriage—the failure of a prospect upon which his thoughts were bent. “I thought I should have been able to do you more justice, Meg; but if we’ve grubbed on in a poor way, you must remember it’s that old curmudgeon of an uncle of yours that’s to blame.” She had asked what he meant, with a startled look, and gradually had elicited the story of his disappointment, which sunk into her heart like a stone. Not that she misjudged him or believed that he had married her for that only. Oh! no, no; but to think, when you have supposed your husband to be satisfied with your society as you with his; to find in you the fulfilment of all his hopes of happiness as you in him; and then to discover that from your very marriage day he has gone forth with a disappointment, with a grudge; with an unsaid reflection, “If I had but known!”—Margaret forgot it ’mid the many events that filled her existence, forgot even the bitter thought that, had he known, he need not have been subjected to those slights and scorns and forced self-denials that befall the poor; forgot everything but love and sorrow in those last sad scenes which have this one compensation—that they obliterate all that is not love from the mourner’s heart. But, nevertheless, the mark that had been made on her life was always there. We may have forgotten when, and how, and even by whose hand we got the wound, but the scar remains, and the smoothness of the injured surface can never be restored.
But she had her little boy, who was her estate, her endowment, her dowry, whatever else might be lacking; and who had come to be the delight of the house in which she was received after her widowhood—oh! not unkindly—with a quite genuine compassion and friendliness, if not love. They were not a family of delicate mind; they did not think it necessary to spare a dependent any of those snubs or small humiliations which belong to her lot. They took her in frankly because she had nowhere else to go to, with an occasional complaint of their hard fate in having to receive and support other people’s children, and an occasional gibe at the poor relations who were always a drag upon the head of the family. I do not say that she had not felt this, for she had a high spirit; and, perhaps, if she had been a woman educated as women are beginning to be now, she might have felt herself capable of achieving independence and throwing off the sore weight of charity which is so good for those who give, but generally so hard upon those who receive. But after many a weary thought she had given up the hope of this. She had not boldness enough to venture on any great and unusual undertaking, and there were no means for a woman of earning her living then, except in the way of teaching (which, at all times, must be the chief standby), for which she was not capable, having had no education herself. So that she had to accept the humiliations, to hear herself described as “my niece, you know, who has had to come back, poor thing, left without a penny. If she had not had her uncle’s house to come back to, Heaven knows what would have become of her”; and to witness the visitor’s pressure of Lady Piercey’s hand, and admiring exclamation, “How good you are!” And it was true—they were very good. She had not a moment she could call her own, but was running their errands the whole day. She was sick-nurse, lady’s maid, secretary, and reader, all in one. Sir Giles had moments when he remembered that to have such an invalid master was hard upon Dunning, and that so valuable a servant must have, now and then, an afternoon to himself; and Lady Piercey was very considerate of