Heaven’s Light For Ever Shines,– Earth’s Shadows Flee

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CHAPTER XXXV

HEAVEN’S LIGHT FOR EVER

SHINES, – EARTH’S SHADOWS FLEE

LADY ELLA and Sir Godfrey Templar were married. When that terrible discovery was made about the identity of her mother’s first husband, Ella had said to her betrothed: – “Godfrey, our engagement is cancelled. Henceforth you are free.”

And when, with the tender courtesy peculiar to him, he had asked her why, she answered him sadly: “Because, Godfrey, if they should decide in the House of Lords that my mother’s first marriage was legal, then you know I am not Lady Ella at all, for in law no woman is permitted to become wife in turn to two brothers. And the case comes on shortly, you know.”

“I have nothing to do with law, my dearest," said the worthy Minister, “nor do I care an ounce for legal decisions. It is to Ella that I have given my heart, not to the heiress of Kelpies, nor to the Cairnsmuir coronet. Six months ago I asked you to be my wife, because I loved you, and I love you still. Nothing can part us, Ella, . . except your own desire.”

And she, loving him now as she never again had hoped to love any living man, had laid her hand in his and hidden her face in his great tawny beard, and blushed and cried, and called him her Dear. And for my part I think this husband and wife will be very happy. Let us throw the old shoe after them as their carriage rolls away down the street, and wish them good speed with all our hearts! God bless them, – we shall see them again no more in this world!

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Up above there, in that grey old tower of Kelpies, behind the gaping monks and nuns and griffins of the mullioned windows is the room which once was Rep’s, – the room in which we last beheld him packing that valise of his in the early dawn, twenty years and more ago. Now it is my Lady’s Chamber; and my Lady seldom leaves it. She is there now alone, on her knees by the bedside; her dark head bowed upon the white drapery, and in her hands the pearl-set miniature of the boy-husband whom she loved so dearly, Jean Le Rodeur, with his floating curls and happy dauntless eyes.

Are they together now – Jean and Tristan, – together in some far-off rolling world, where tears are shed, and hearts are broken, and laws are made no more? Are they waiting for her, – thinking of her, – longing as she longs for the time to come when they may all join hand to hand and spirit to spirit, and never again have cause to dread the sad farewells and bitter partings of earth?

“O, let me come to thee, Jean my darling! – it is so dark and lonely here! Let me see thy face and Tristan’s, let me lay my head on thy breast, my husband, as I did in the old dead days, – so long – so long ago! Come back to earth and take me hence, Beloved, as they say thou didst come on New Year’s Eve to bear away the soul of Tristan! This is a weary world without thee, Jean, and I have suffered and waited many mournful years. Yet thou comest not!”

Outside there, in the fresh spring night, the trailing plant about the window tosses its red leaves in the wind, and taps the stone walls impatiently with its twisted tendrils, as though it had a hundred eager hearts, all throbbing and yearning for liberty. Over the budding woodlands and open heather moors, and among the still pools and tarns where the heron utters its melancholy cry and the wild fowl brood over their hermit nests, – how it carols and dances, and chatters, – the goblin breeze of May! How it flirts and coquets with the Kelpies and Pixes under the waterfall, puffing incontinently at the leaping spray,

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shaking the apple blossoms from the orchard trees, and scaring the linnets and chaffinches in their teeming nurseries; what a merry independent vagrant breeze it is! Whence it cometh, or whither it goeth, – none can tell, – none shall ever know!

It is dark and silent in my Lady’s Chamber. No wind there – no airy voice, no wayward sprightly dances. Only a solemn passionate appeal that is breathed by a woman’s fevered lips, the melancholy echo of a wrecked career, and disappointed hopes; the pleading of a forlorn and widowed wife.

“Dust and ashes! Vanity of Vanities – dead-sea fruit of bitter tears and pain! From day to day the horror and the misery quicken about me, there is no escape, no peace, no rest; a web is woven over me, and I am powerless to rend its deathly meshes!. Life has no good thing to give me, Love, where thou art not, nor has any grief so sharp a sting for me as the remembrance of that blessed joy which once was mine! My Darling, my Darling, bid me come to thee; – fold me in thy loving arms, restore to me that vanished Past, call back the youth to my soul, the lovelight to my saddened heart! Where thou art, – O husband of my girlhood, father of my murdered child, – there let me be also!”

Ah, Mary, Mother, our Lady of Mercy, hear the longing prayer.

Gentlest of readers, the wind is due south. It invites us away. Put this old-fashioned cap upon your head, and slip your feet into these funny little feathered sandals, – they are part of a divine wardrobe, long since sold to defray expenses, and belonged originally to my worthy friend Hermes, late usher of the Black Rod, and ”Chargé d’Affaires,” of the Olympian Court. Let us glide down the breeze together and hear what they are saying yonder in the World’s busiest and vastest metropolis. Here, by the Duke’s column, in the heart of the great social exchange of London, two gentlemen are meeting each other.

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They are Mr. Richard Dyce Rankin and his jovial friend Carew. What will their conversation be?

“Holloa, old boy, – up in town again, are you? Been up long? You’re late this spring.”

“Yes Carry, I am. Had a very jolly time of it all the winter, down at my uncle’s in Sussex. Capital place for sport. Where are you off to this morning?

“Oh, nowhere in particular, – walk with you, old fellow. I say, – heard anything about the Cairnsmuir case?”

“Yes, I have, but can’t for the life of me make it out. It’s a deuced puzzling thing, – so intricate. Take the lawyers and bigwigs all their time I should think. How did it come out at all?”

“Oh, Cairnsmuir asked counsel’s opinion I fancy, and counsel couldn’t make head or tail of it, and referred to another counsel, and then they got into litigation before they knew where they were, and the devil’s own mess they’ve made of it! Cairnsmuir had better have kept his own counsel about the thing, – eh Dick?”

“Ha, ha! I say Carry, have you seen the papers this morning?”

“Of course I have. You mean about poor old Vau cutting it off to the Myn Heers, I suppose? Sir Timothy Wishwash suit did the trick for him you see! Pity for a man like Vau to get juggling with turf affairs. ‘Pon my soul, I’m awfully sorry to lose him though! What a judge of a cigar that fellow was, wasn’t he?”

“Ah! And of a dinner!”

“Ah!” (with profound feeling.)

“Tell you what,” cries Carew with sudden fervour, – “we forgot the wager! How about it now that poor Vau’s got quenched?”

“By Jove! And the Fräulein’s vanished too! She doesn’t show this season anywhere. Funny thing! Comet-like career wasn’t it?”

“Brilliant as a meteor while it lasted, and evanescent as the glory of a falling Starr. Ha, ha! But joking apart, its my opinion you’ll

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find by-and-by she’s married some outsider or other, and doesn’t want it known. Well, it won’t hurt, for they say the new prima donna beats her all to little bits!”

“Ah. So I was told yesterday. Let’s dine together at the Granville to-night and then go and hear her, – the new one you know.”

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Have you got that cap firmly on, dear Invisible, and are those sandals securely tied? Come then away down the river on the wings of this selfsame fresh spring breeze, away to the City, and to the Inns of Court round about Temple Bar. Look here at this group of restless excited barristers in wigs and gowns strolling together through the dingy aisles below us, and talking as they go.

“What do you make, Ferris, of the Cairnsmuir case?”

“Oh its plain enough as I take it. I don’t see what the fuss is about. The first marriage was legal enough, and the second isn’t.”

“Then Lady Ella is illegitimate?”

“That’s my view of the case, sir.”

“Well, it’s not mine. And I’ve a precedent.”

The first marriage was valid, Smiff, to a certainty, but the second couldn’t be, because one woman mustn’t marry two brothers.”

“Rubbish, Pratt. I tell you that's not the question at all! Her first husband married her under a false name.”

“No, he didn’t. Christian name was right enough, and there was no collusion. I refer you to the well-known case of Filcher v. Holdfast. First marriage stands good, – and the Earl shot his own heir therefore.”

“Christian name was not the same though,” chirps a fourth young counsellor eagerly. “The first husband married her as “Jean,” and his real name was John. Can a foreign equivalent be taken as absolutely identical –––”

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“Nonsense! Look at Filcher v. Holdfast I tell you. There’s the precedent.”

“Anyhow,” reiterates Pratt with an air of dogged sagacity, “I don’t see Lady Ella’s illegitimacy. If ignorance of identify establishes the first marriage, why shouldn’t it be held to establish the second equally? Lady Dolores couldn’t tell one man was the other man’s brother.”

“No; but she married the present Earl as though she were a single woman, whereas she had really no right to the maiden name she assumed on that occasion. It was a legal fraud.”

“Why it’s a confounded conglomeration altogether. But then, my dear boy, if she knew of her previous couventure, Cairnsmuir himself didn’t know it, and nobody else present at the solemnization of the marriage knew, – so once again where’s the collusion? If her individual knowledge of the secret invalidates the second marriage, then the precognition of the elder son John, must he held to have invalidated the first marriage. Principle’s the same, surely.”

“H'm. What does old Probeham say about it?”

“The Chancellor? Oh, he says the first marriage stands; but he’s not so sure about the second. They’re going to look up the case of Kanker and Mildieu, I think.”

“Well, it was a great pity anyhow that the poor boy got shot like that! I believe he was the heir, and now the title must go to the Deuce, for Lady Ella can’t transmit it, in any case. The patent precludes her posterity.”

“Ah, it’s about the only one in the kingdom left now with that patent, – the Cairnsmuir peerage is. There’s one other I think, somewhere, but I forget the title now. Yes it was a devilish great pity they shot the boy, for he was Cairnsmuir’s last chance. Now he’s done for himself altogether!”

“Pity!” echoes Ferris knowingly; “yes by Jove; but wasn’t it a

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queer thing for an Earl and a Cabinet Minister to be target shooting for a lark at midnight in the rooms of an obscure painter – as the boy was then? I never could understand that. Nobody found out you know until after the accident who this Le Rodeur really was!”

“Ah, my dear boy,” cries the astute Smiff, with a poke of his brief between the ribs of the last speaker, “there you’ve nailed it, have you? Accident? Did it Ne-ver –– Strike –– You –––”

A SONG OF LEAVE-TAKING

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It is ended! the rapture is broken,

The moon of my passion is set;

I knew the farewell must be spoken,

I knew we must learn to forget!

No more shall the darkness deceive us,

With dreams that are tender and fleet; ––

Alas, that a waking so grievous,

Should follow a slumber so sweet!

Must this be the end of our passion?

Ah Love, hold me once to your heart!

Kiss me once in the old tender fashion,

Mine now ––– and with sunrise we part!

We part? –– ah, the sweets that are ended,

Ah, the joys that are faded and fled

With the fume of the lamplight expended,

And the breath of the rose that is dead!

Yet Sweet, though our ways lie asunder,

WE HAVE LOVED, and your soul has been mine;

Day may waken with tempest and thunder,

But the night that is past was divine!

Past! Past! . . . O my Darling! stoop nearer,

Read the light of old times in mine eyes,

Never then were you fairer or dearer,

Than now in this moment of sighs!

Press close, let me see the love glitter,

Once more in the face that was mine;

For the gold has grown ashen, and bitter

The cup that was sweeter than wine!

Past, Past! So they languish and leave us,

These passions that once were our breath,

And the perfume of garlands is grievous,

And song dies, –– and life is as Death!