CAPÍTULO 16.

 

            SOON after daylight an administrador came up from the hacienda to learn the particulars of the outrage, and to obtain instructions respecting the disposal of the prisoners. Leaving him to converse with James, who was not yet up, Margaret joined Noel in the sitting-room, where he had passed the last hours of the night.

 

            Noel expressed to her his joy at hearing that James showed no signs of being the worse for the attack, beyond a certain amount of exhaustion, and an unusual disposition to sleep, and asked what she wished him to do or say in the matter.

 

            ‘You always divine my wishes,’ she replied, ‘and therefore I need hardly tell you that nothing would so mortify James, as to find that you have any idea of the real cause of his leaving the house, and going out into the forest night. Indeed, in

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my distress, I told you what I meant to keep always to myself; but, somehow, in telling you anything it does not seem to me that I am telling it to another than myself. How is this?’

 

            ‘Ah, Margaret, that is one of the mysteries, the revelation of which proves the true love. Neither does it ever seem to me, that in telling you my most secret feelings or history, I am telling them to a second person, or doing other than recounting them to myself. The fact remains, conceal it as we may for the sake of others, that we are essentially one and indivisible; made so by God, and felt to be so by ourselves, though never to be so recognised by man. This last is our misfortune, against which we can only set the intense supreme happiness of knowing what we do know, and being, in our inmost souls, all in all to each other.’

 

            ‘She said nothing in reply, feeling that reply was needless for one who read her so well, but she stood by him a moment lost in thought, and murmured –

 

            ‘Oh, am I not the better through thy love!’ And then recalling herself to the outer world, she said –

 

            ‘James always says there is nothing like a good breakfast for a bad night; and as the administrador will have some with us, I must order it at once.’

 

            Having summoned a servant, and given her orders, she continued, ‘You will explain everything to him, without letting it seem strange that James was out, and you must let James himself think that you suppose he only went out on hearing a movement in the forest, when he was attacked.’

 

            ‘Has he said anything about my share in the business?’

 

            ‘He does not quite understand why the ladrones should run away at your approach, when they did not run away at his. Neither do I; unless, indeed, they were watching him, and knew him to be alone, and were taken by surprise by you.’

 

            ‘Well, perhaps the administrador will explain to him whatever is necessary. But here they come.’

 

            ‘I find that you had to use more exertion than I was aware of last night,’ said Maynard, coming forward, and cordially shaking hands with Noel. ‘Will you come down and see your captives, after we have had some coffee, or do you want to finish the sleep which I interrupted by turning you out of your own bed?’

 

            ‘I will do just as you think best,’ returned Noel; ‘though I am not fond of gazing at ruffians.’

 

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            ‘Well perhaps it is as well that you should remain incognito, and it may conduce to our safety in future that we should be supposed to be under the protection of some invincible demon of darkness. The natives are quite superstitious enough to think so. Did they hear you speak sufficiently to guess your extraction or identity?’

 

            Noel replied, laughing, that as he never talked about a thing when he had made up his mind to do it, it was most probable that he had maintained his usual reserve, and not uttered a word; and then they sat down to breakfast.

 

            When Maynard and the administrador had taken their departure, Noel said to Margaret, –

 

            ‘There is one point on which I have been wishing to ask you some questions. How has James been affected by the circumstances attending his father’s death? I mean in his character generally?’

 

            ‘Since our marriage he has never alluded to him. And I do not like to think why, for I fear that it is because the sacrifice has not brought him the happiness he looked for.’

 

            ‘What sacrifice?’

 

            ‘You must know that I, though always admiring James’s talent, and grateful for the kindness he had always shown me, was averse to marrying him. I shrank from coming near him in that way; why, I have only lately learnt. But when I saw him in trouble and distress, and knew that he had always cared for me, and then that Lord Littmass died rather than be an obstacle to his son’s happiness, I felt it would be wicked and ungrateful of me to bring ruin to the lives of the two to whom I owed everything; for I saw that James would never be himself, or do anything in the world, unless he had his way. And then, I was a burden to my aunt and cousin; and so I thought that, after all, it was only myself that was at stake, and it seemed to me that my own happiness ought to be a small matter to me where so much and so many were concerned. But I see now that I was wrong, and James has often told me so.’

 

            ‘He has reproached you for marrying him!’

 

            ‘Yes, because I knew I did not love him as he wished and deserved to be loved. Oh, but he is right, and many and many a time have Lord Littmass’s words come back to me, as a warning from a saint and a prophet.’

 

            ‘A somewhat new view of Lord Littmass,’ thought Noel, with an inward smile, but he did not say so, being determined

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to leave unshaken any illusion whose loss would cause her distress. So he asked, –

 

            ‘Can you tell me the words, and the occasion of them?’

 

            ‘Yes. He perceived the dis-sympathy between us, and in cautioning me against a marriage without sympathy, he said, with an emphasis which startled me, “To marry out of compassion one that is unloved, is to court misery for three. It is to defraud the one only possible love that Providence is keeping in reserve.” His words had no meaning for me then. I forgot them all the time when I ought most to have remembered them. And now I require not only James’s forgiveness, but yours. How could I be so blind!’

 

            ‘We had not met then,’ remarked Edmund, purposely ignoring her real meaning.

 

            ‘But I felt that he was not for me, and I ought to have trusted my faith, and believed that the yearnings of my soul would find their due fulfilment in time – or beyond it!’

 

            ‘Had you been left to yourself you might have done so; but with so energetic and practical a personage as Sophia Bevan beside you, it seems to me impossible for you to have escaped being influenced as you were.’

 

            ‘How well you comprehend her!’ exclaimed Margaret.

 

            ‘I was to blame even more than she was for the perversity of our destinies,’ returned Noel. ‘You and James are the least responsible of the four. Duty has done it all! Even that Duty which Sophia delights in preaching up as consisting in going against the grain; that is, in simply violating one’s own nature.’

 

            ‘But how are you implicated?’

 

            ‘James loved much, and therefore is to be forgiven. There was no question of duty with him. He obeyed the promptings of his nature. You acted from pity, a feeling that might have grown into love, had he been a skilful and patient husbandman.’

 

            Here Margaret shook her head doubtingly. Noel went on, –

 

            ‘Placed as you were, the pressure was irresistible. I am afraid I cannot blame you. But Sophia and I ought to have known better, for we were free.’

 

            ‘I do not understand him the least,’ interposed Margaret.

 

            ‘Neither did I, until too late. I gathered from some hints let fall by my uncle, that Lord Littmass wished us to meet, in the hope that I might at least prove a barrier to James’s suit.

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I purposely avoided you, that I might not be a party to what I deemed an act of treachery to him. That was duty; and the result is, that I should have done him a greater kindness in carrying you off from him; unless – which I suspect he would admit to be the case if asked – he would prefer being miserable with you, to being happy with anybody else.’

 

            ‘He sometimes says so,’ said Margaret, with a faint smile.

 

            ‘Well, Sophia wanted me to go to Linnwood while you and James were there. The same idea of duty kept me away. I feared also her making you feel uncomfortable, by joking about a circumstance which occurred the first and only time I ever saw you, until we met here.’

 

            ‘You had seen me before! seen me before I was married, or engaged! and – and ––’ almost gasped Margaret, but I had never seen you, or ––’ and her emotion prevented her from finishing her sentence.

 

            ‘No, no,’ hastily interposed Edmund. ‘It was in this way.’ And he told her of the distant glimpse which accident had vouchsafed to him of her when disporting in the waters of Porlock Cole, and how her form had haunted his visions, and dominated the creations of his art; and that, although her features were unknown to him, he had yet reproduced them his bust of Psyche, so that Sophia, and even Lady Bevan, had at once perceived the resemblance.

 

            Margaret listened with breathless interest to the recital, but said nothing, and Noel went on.

 

            ‘And I feared so to have you distressed by any allusion of Sophia’s to the accident, that I maintained my determination not to see you until you were married.’

 

            ‘It would have killed me, I think,’ said Margaret. ‘At least, I should never have dared to show my face again.’

 

            ‘But now?’ asked Noel.

 

            ‘Now, it seems nothing but the most natural thing in the world. It seems to me that love withdraws all that interposes, and leaves no mystery to be revealed, nothing at which to be ashamed. But you mentioned duty in connection with Sophia.’

 

            ‘At first, consulting her truer instincts, she wished me to become acquainted with you. But, – and this I only tell you because I do not consider that in telling you I am telling another than myself, – Sophia took a great fancy to James, and thought that she would suit him better than yourself. Had the suspicion of an affinity occurred to her, she would have scornfully

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repelled it as an encroachment upon her proper independence. I don’t know whether her preference went so far, but at any rate it became a duty with her to quench her own feeling, and even to influence you in his favour.’

 

            ‘Oh, how cruel,’ murmured Margaret.

 

            ‘The duty that enjoins self-sacrifice for the sake of self-sacrifice ever is cruel,’ rejoined Edmund. It shows, too, the wrongfulness of all interference in the deeper matters of the heart. Had no attempt been made by either Lord Littmass or Sophia Bevan, to bring us together, we should certainly have met, and that probably before his death. Do you feel certain that we should have had the same feelings then?’

 

            ‘Why not?’

 

            ‘It may have been the effect of your life with James to produce a certain manner, expression, or tone in you, that you would not otherwise have had. Who knows how much you owe to the discipline of your life, to make you what you are to me? Again, had I met you while we were both free, I might have fallen so headlong in love as to shock and repel you by my very ardour. The very anxiety I should have shown to win your regard, might have distorted all my words and actions, and made me seem different in your eyes. I can easily imagine your being more impressed by the self-control of one who, finding you already placed beyond his reach, seemed to you to exhibit a certain amount of moral power in repressing his feelings, than by the irrepressible eagerness of a lover who put his whole life upon the chance of winning you.’

 

            At all these suppositions, Margaret only shook her head doubtingly, as if implying that she could not conceive of him as under any circumstances manifesting such lack of the grace that wins, as to fail to attract her.

 

            ‘But I was going to ask,’ he continued, ‘what you meant by saying that Lord Littmass died rather than be an obstacle to his son’s happiness.’

 

            ‘James told me at Linnwood that Lord Littmass felt his pride to be so involved in the question of our marriage, that the mere discussion of it brought on a spasm of the heart; and that if I continued obdurate, I should be the destroyer of his life also. I did not require a full explanation of the occurrence. I trusted to him implicitly, and allowed his dark hints to have weight with me. The upshot of them was unmistakable; that the father died in order to set the son free to marry me. I

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may tell you what I have scarcely dared to allow myself to suspect. James sometimes turns things, ingeniously to his own purposes. He has a love of paradox that misleads him as to the real nature of facts where his feelings are concerned, and forces him to conclusions opposite to the plain and natural ones. I was miserable at first to think that I had, wittingly or not, been the cause of my guardian’s death. But since my marriage, I have sometimes doubted whether I could altogether trust James’s account. Do you know anything?’

 

            ‘That James loved you, and would have done almost anything to win you, there can be no doubt,’ returned Noel; ‘but you were attached, or at least grateful, to Lord Littmass, and I should be sorry to suggest anything that might diminish your faith in him. Besides, I might be mistaken. I was so much away from England at the time, that the impressions I formed from the little I heard, may have been ill-founded. I know too well the pain of having to pull any one in whom I have believed and trusted, down from the moral pedestal on which I have placed him. Ah, Margaret, what an incitement to always live up to the high level of your esteem is such a love as yours. It seems to me as if I could never dare to do anything from a lower range of motives, for fear of forfeiting your affection.’

 

            ‘You would never have gained it, had it been the only controlling motive of your character,’ she replied, with a sigh. And then they separated and retired to their respective rooms, Margaret rejoicing in having gained a confidant so tender and true; and Noel indignant with Maynard for the deception he had practised in respect of his father’s death, and wishing he could put Margaret’s life and his own back for four years. He also wondered whether James knew that Lord Littmass had robbed his ward of her portion, and left her penniless; and then it occurred to him that it might have been James’s knowledge of this fact that determined him to marry her at all hazards, by way of making reparation for the wrong she had sustained at his father’s hands. And as he thought of James’s conduct from this point of view, and the return by which it had been met, he rejoiced to think still that his friend was noble of nature, and commiserated the bitter disappointment that had befallen his hopes of happiness. And then, for the first time in his life, Noel wondered whether man is, even in the full flush of his own strong will, an independent being; or whether he is but the sport of a fate that mocks his best laid plans with

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failure, and converts his noblest actions into instruments for his torture.

 

            To recognise a power guiding events, and controlling the individual for his own benefit, and making destiny the legitimate offspring of character, involved a philosophy only attainable through an experience transcending that of Edmund Noel at this time.

 

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