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Chapter XIX Letters from Home

The remoteness of New Zealand from the civilised world at the time of which I write is evidenced by the fact that, while I parted from Helenora on the last day of December, it was not until the end of July that I heard from her, and thus received my first intimation of the safe arrival of the barque at its destination. During all those long months I had been at frequently recurring moments a prey to the most dread misgivings. Feverishly I opened the mails as they arrived, and sick at heart I cast them aside, after searching again and again for news of the Commodore.

But at last, and in a dazzling burst of light, the enigmatic darkness dissolved. Here was news in plenty; not only from my beloved, but also from Lady Wylde, Miss Temple, and Sir George Grey, the latter sending me also a volume of poems by a Mr. Robert Browning with which he professed himself greatly struck. Gathering together the flimsy envelopes—a necessity of foreign correspondence in those days—I hastened to a quiet spot on the river and there spent a luxurious morning with my absent friends.

It was not the Helenora from whom I had parted—tremulous, half frightened at the kisses she gave me, the child awaking—who wrote to me now. She had fallen back into slumber, and this was my old playmate, albeit in her best and most affectionate mood. Not a word said she of lovers or sweethearts, and there was but one page 267phrase in her letter which, rightly or wrongly, I could construe into such a reference. "I suppose your dear Puhi-Huia is more beautiful than ever," ran her last postscript. For the rest, her pages were full of description and the incidents, little or great, of travel. Nevertheless I read it over and over again, weighing every phrase in the scale of my love, and fancying I detected here and there a balance in my favour. Lady Wylde had little to say of her daughter, the greater part of her letter being devoted to the disappointment of my grandfather and the possible marriage of my uncle.

It was from Miss Temple that I learned most of my beloved. The governess was about to lose her dear pupil, though she was happy to say that the separation was only for a term—Lady Wylde had been kindness itself in her arrangements for the future. Dearest Helenora also, now that their long and intimate companionship was drawing, alas, to a close, had given her the sweetest evidences of affection. Mr. Tregarthen would perhaps remember moments of difficulty when the inception of the stream of knowledge was hindered by rebellious impedimenta—I knew not what to make of this passage unless it had reference to obscurities in the German text—but such were now at an end; Helenora's manner was unchangeably beautiful. The writer went on to refer to several occasions when I had been the subject of conversation, giving me Helenora's words and her own, with results to which I no doubt attached an exaggerated value. "All is yet well," she assured me, and I pondered over the word "yet" and wished she had not used it, endeavouring to persuade myself that she had done so inadvertently. "As I re-read these lines," concluded the kind lady, "I am reminded of those exquisite verses of our beloved Schiller—

'O zarte Sehnsucht, susses Hoffen,
Der erste Liebe goldne Zeit,
page 268 Das Auge sieht den Himmel offen,
Es schwelgt das Herz in Seligkeit.
O dass sie ewig grünen bliebe,
Die schöne Zeit der jungen Liebe.'

Believe me, my dear Mr. Tregarthen, ever your friend and well-wisher, Aspasia Temple."

Poor Miss Temple! It is many a long year since the hand that wrote those lines laid down its fluent pen for ever.

Of the next five years of my life I have little to tell you. My boat had drifted into a back-water, and, saving only letters from England, hardly a wave of any importance reached me. It all seems sunny now, a long summer, beneath which Time has submerged the winters, and yet, as I lived through it, busying myself in the affairs of Purcell & Tregarthen and the developing projects of Rangiora, so that there was scarcely an idle moment left, I know that it wore for me something of the insincerity of a dream. Something also of a dream's underthrob of melancholy and mystery pervaded it, and to pause in my labours was to become conscious of the continual unrest that underlay the calm surface. Currents swift and strong swept the under-waters, yet there lay my barque motionless on the serene surface.

But those letters! Ah me! How life quickened, in me as they came fluttering across the world into my eager hands. How sometimes—causelessly it may be—I exulted as I read them. How far more often they plunged me into weeks of gloom. At first there would be a letter every month or six weeks; then they declined to four a year, three—even two; but not for five years did they cease altogether. Of her doings she told me; of her school and her friends. Her account of the Alps ran into many pages, and I duly froze with her on the lesser mountain page 269peaks. I watched her jealously as she moved amid the gay scenes of Paris under the wing of her mother, accompanied her through the Louvre, and knelt with her in the dim cathedral light of Notre Dame. I attended with her the Christmas festivities in the ancestral home of the Tregarthens, met my uncle's new wife, and in due time was introduced to his baby, the desired son and heir. This was the type, the mere pleasure in reading her words once passed, that left me sad. The thrill of delight in life was in them, life, a pageant of action and colour that swept her away in its midst. What connection had it with the far-off, obscure New Zealander, moving on his petty and monotonous round?

There was another type—rare indeed, but still in the course of years they grew into a little pile of themselves—when under the influence of some passing mood she came back to me. Some little thing, no doubt, had gone wrong, she had quarrelled irreconcilably with a friend, been reproved for naughtiness, or met with some mighty disappointment, and the necessity of writing to me had caught her at that propitious moment. On a high level of wisdom and seriousness were these compositions. Literary care was evidenced in them, and they pointed out the vanity and futility of life with a subtle delight in its hollowness, only to be matched in the pages of the poets. But it was at these faint fires I warmed myself, and when I arrived at such a passage as—" I often think with longing of the happy days of my childhood in sunny Auckland, and wish that I might live them over again," then such a glow came over me that the wintriest day was changed into summer.

For my part, no mail left the Port of Auckland that did not carry a letter from me. If I was able from what she wrote to draw a more or less complete outline of her life, my letters must have furnished her with a finished picture of my own. And so it continued to be even when the page 270frequency of her replies had fallen almost to vanishing point.

It was an understood thing between my father and myself—how arrived at I cannot remember—that some day I should go for her. That the matter was in his mind I knew, not by any open speech, but indirectly, by chance words, and for these, as time went on, I came to be always on the watch. When he remarked that early marriages were a necessity with a dying race, or that barbarous peoples matured more rapidly than the highly civilised, I interpreted his words to mean that I was to wait. Once, accompanying him with Puhi-Huia round the garden, listening to his talk of the community of plants—it was the evening of a mail-day, and either I was dissatisfied with Helenora's letter or the absence of one—I think I could detect the moment when, in the midst of his cheerful talk, he became aware of my silence and abstraction. Nevertheless, on he went with his chat, passing from country to country of the world in search of his illustrations, as though the whole earth were familiar to him, and coming to a stop only when the last bed had been surveyed.

"Yet," said Puhi-Huia with gentle slyness, "you haven't told me why these buds are so long in opening, and it was to learn that that I invited you and Cedric into the garden."

"Patience, little gardener," he replied, laughing; "the flower that lasts longest takes longest to expand."

His eye as he spoke dwelt for a moment kindly on me, and I know that in some mysterious way I was comforted.

But now I was nearing my twenty-third birthday, and Helenora was in her twentieth year, and at last I broke silence.

"Shall I go now, father?"

He put a marker in his book and set it aside, fixing his eye meditatively on the log fire. Roma and Puhi-Huia page 271were in bed. For more than an hour not a word had been exchanged between us. He might very well have misunderstood my sudden question, but he did not. I could tell that his thoughts had gone straight as an arrow to the matter in my mind.

"It is very necessary that we should not make a mistake," he said with a sigh at length. "Would you care to show me anything she has written to you?"

I sprang to my feet and brought from a sacred corner in my desk her four latest letters, setting them before him in the order in which they had been received.

He read them carefully, smiling occasionally at some passage which amused him; but his face wore the same air of pondering when he had finished the last of them and laid it with the others on the table. My heart beat fast with expectation, but I contained myself and waited.

"Would you go as a claimant or a suppliant?" he asked presently.

His words raised a question I had never been able to answer to my own satisfaction, and I was silent.

"One thing emerges from these letters," he went on gently, touching them with his finger: "the writer is absolutely heart-whole. Perhaps you have thought—you may have had reason——"

"No, sir," I replied. "I am under no delusion as to her feelings—love for me is not among them."

"Is there bitterness in your tones? A shade. Natural, Cedric, but not reasonable. You have cause to congratulate yourself rather, for by this she must have met many men her equals in rank and intelligence."

"Yes, father; and for that reason——"

"Do you know that it is so?" he broke in on my impetuosity.

"Lady Wylde has told me. There have been many admirers. Two in particular."

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"Proposals?"

I assented.

"And Lady Wylde would help you—is that so?"

"She would not oppose me. Of course I cannot help feeling that in one respect I am no match for Helenora."

"She will have thirty thousand pounds, no more," my father observed indiffefently.

"And no less," I added with a rueful laugh.

He was silent awhile, toying with some trifles on his reading table. "There is evidence in her letters of a very strong regard," he said at last, "but so complete an absence of allusion to anything pending between you that I am wondering a little with regard to your own letters."

"I have always had it in mind to go to England," I answered. "In the meantime I have not run the risk of tiring her with too many protestations."

He nodded comprehension. "But that policy may be carried too far," he remarked. "It has probably served its purpose. Come. We will not go to England just yet. We will first add our proposal to those others. Make it the sole topic of your letter, beginning with the first word and discontinuing only with the last. Write also to Lady Wylde—by the way, I am sorry to read such poor accounts of her health—and tell her that you have fifty thousand pounds invested in English Consols."

"But, sir——" I cried, almost speechless with amazement.

He drew his book towards him and opened it at the mark. "We are told that all is fair in love and war," he said, with a comical glance; "yet so bold a statement should perhaps not be made without warrant. The stock was transferred to your name on your twenty-second birthday."

For several years past my ideas of my foster-father's command of money had gone on expanding, but, hazy as were my notions of what constituted wealth, I was stricken page 273breathless by the magnitude of the sum he mentioned and the careless generosity with which he bestowed it. Some confused words I began, but he cut me short with a movement almost expressive of impatience.

"Do not give it an importance it does not possess," were his words. "The money came lightly to me. I was not among the poor creatures who created it. Yet there is one thing in connection with it in which I can take pride, that it has fallen to my lot to have a share in the upbringing of a man to whom I can give it without a single fear."

Before I went to bed that night the letter was written. As I opened my long-sealed heart to her it seemed as though Nature took the pen from my hand and wrote the words for me. Though I have utterly forgotten its contents, I have a belief even to this day that it was a good letter, eloquent and moving as deep sincerity must be, and as only deep sincerity can be It left within the week, and I set myself to the months of waiting with what fortitude I might.

It was crossed not far from the shores of New Zealand by a letter from her, and she had written me another before it finally came into her hands.

The first of these was short, tinged with gloom, and so cold in its tone that the new-born lust of life which had followed on the dispatch of my proposal was quenched in me as I read it. Yet analyse the sentences as I would, I could not fix on any particular word or phrase as the cause of my dejection. It was not the joy masquerading as misery with which she had amused herself in letters already alluded to. It was unquestionably the real thing, and the reason, though it avoided expression, was to be read between the lines. She was in the south of France with her mother. Lady Wylde's health had not improved with the change, as had been hoped by her medical advisers, and now they were returning to England. No description page 274of scenes or events; no word of herself; no allusion to anything contained in my recent letters, or even acknowledgment of their receipt. I marvelled that she should be able to say so little and convey so much in the three pages to which her letter ran.

From that moment the foreboding of trouble never left me. I did not doubt that Lady Wylde was dying—difficult as it was to associate any one so beautiful with the grim spectre; yet, sorely as I should miss my kind friend and correspondent, I had an instinct of disaster which was to touch me more nearly. What form it would take I did not know, but that it would come, that probably it was already on the way, I was as sure as I was miserable in the conviction. The advent of steam to New Zealand had not so far wrought anything approaching a revolution in the length of time which attended dispatch and reply to correspondence, and I had still to look forward to many months of suspense before Helenora's answer could reach me.

But my time of trial was not to last so long. Barely three months had elapsed before my eyes were again gladdened by a sight of the familiar handwriting. Hoping and fearing, I tore open the envelope, in my haste suffering a part of the contents to fall through my fingers to the floor. I knew what the thing was before I stooped to recover it, and my mind formed the words before the opened card gave them to my vision.

"In memory of Lady Dora Helen Wylde, who died …"

"Dear Cedric,

"My mother has been in her grave a week to-day. She died on the twenty-eighth of last month, on the anniversary of the day on which your father left Tregarthen House never to return. You will say that this is a coincidence, but to my mind it brings together two facts in the relation of cause and effect. Do you think that is a wild page 275idea? I knew my mother's heart. Even when I was a little child she was as much a sister to me as she was a mother. She never grew old. Her spirit was broken for ever on the day your father deserted her, and though she was fated to lose her husband also after little more than a year of married life, that was a minor loss. Admiration and affection were all she had left to give my poor father. She was conscious to the last, resigned, even cheerful. Her only anxiety was for me. She was not forgetful of you. Within an hour of the moment she breathed her last, she spoke of you, and whether or no it was of you she was thinking, 'Cedric' was the last sound I heard from her lips. Is such loyalty, regardless of the worthlessness of its object, rising superior to all counter-influences, a thing admirable and beautiful? It seemed so in her. Yet such a state of mind might as often have its origin in weakness as in strength. You see to what condition of mental calm I have attained when I can thus coldly criticise my darling in her new-made grave. I would have you think that I am calm and deliberate when I write that my mother's grave lies between us. It is a barrier nothing can remove—no word of yours, no compassion of mine. I do not know what has been in my mind during the last seven or eight years; the wind has blown all ways: but I do know that when, a child, you asked me to be your sweetheart in the garden of St. Kevens, it was not love I had in my mind, but vengeance. As your father treated my mother, so would I treat you. I would lead you on and delude you until the moment arrived when I might pay back to you the wrongs your father inflicted on my mother. It was a cruel scheme—childhood is-cruel—but I dare say there are very few people with sufficient strength of will to carry out such an idea. I might have done so if you had been different. I have never met any one so open, so unsuspicious as you, I had never met any one—I have never since met any one—who page 276so compelled my respect, so incited me to good faith and honourable dealing. Strange, indeed, in your father's son! And so the plot failed, not from lack of evil in me, but the excess of what is good in you. Yet the end is the same, saving only that it is accomplished in sorrow and not in malice. I know that what I have written will wound you, but you may find some comfort in my unworthiness. I might wish, for your sake, that the years of our separation had abated the strength of your feelings, but not for my own. To me you will always stand for what is best in humanity—strength and resolution, gentleness and endurance—and you have formed for me an ideal I would not lose even to avoid myself suffering. And so I bid you good-bye. Do not waste yourself against my resolution. If you write I shall not answer you. Let me go quietly out of your life…."

The little office behind the store was in total darkness, when my father's voice, calling my name, roused me to the world about me. The door opened and I saw his figure against the blackness, a small lamp in one hand, an open letter in the other. His face was grave, even harassed, but its expression changed as his eye fell on my huddled figure.

"What is it?" he asked quickly, setting the lamp on the table.

In silence I put the letter into his hand.

He read it standing; then seated himself and perused it again. "You must go to her," he said at last. "The Westmoreland leaves Sydney in ten days' time." He sprang to his feet, and, taking the lamp to a file of the Southern Cross, began to search the shipping intelligence. "Yes, you can do it," he continued eagerly, after a moment; "but it means starting to-morrow. Captain Morse is to sail at midnight. We will send a message to delay him while your things are got together. Come! Everything page 277fits in admirably," and he rubbed his hands with an appearance of satisfaction.

But I did not move.

He stood a moment regarding me, and I saw his hand stealthily crumple and conceal the letter he had brought with him into the room. "It is a pity we have not a little more time to prepare, but there will be a spare day or two in Sydney, and anything you need can be purchased there. However, the first thing is to notify Morse," and he took a step towards the door.

"Father," I said—and he came to a stop on the instant, his back towards me, listening attentively—"was that letter from the chief of the Ngatihaua?"

"Yes, Cedric," he answered after a pause. "A few lines, but of no consequence—now."

"Yet, is it good news or bad?"

His reply was long in coming. "It is bad, my son," he said at last, "bad!" And in his voice was reluctance and an infinite passion of regret.

No more was said. Thank God he knew that no word he could say, or any human being could say, could tempt me to leave him then.