"Before you receive this letter, my dear Dugdale," wrote Hayes Meredith, "you will have seen Mrs. Hungerford, and she will have told you all the news about me, in giving the history of herself--a history, by the bye, which has had a better ending than I expected, when first I made her out, according to your request.
"She is not much given to talking, I fancy, to any one, and I dare say she will not let you know much about her wretched life out here; but I can tell you it was wretched; and when I came to know her, and understand how superior a woman she is to the generality of women, such as I have known them, I was really grateful to you for giving me the chance of serving her. I don't think I was much more obliged to you in my life, and I have owed you a turn or two.
"Hungerford was a regular blackguard, and an irredeemable snob as well, and she was only to be congratulated heartily on his death. The mode of it was rather horrible, to be sure; but if he had not been knocked on the head in the bush, the chances are he would have been hanged; and there's something to choose between the two, at all events.
"She is an interesting young woman, and I was sincerely glad to do her all the service in my power, which was not much, after all. I should like to know what becomes of her. I hope she has better days to see than any she lived through here; and I hope you will write to me when you can.
"But my letter does not solely concern Mrs. Hungerford. I have a selfish purpose in writing to you also, and the explanation of it needs some detail. You know that I am, and that I have been for some years, what I may safely call a prosperous man; and though I have a large family to provide for--five of them now (they were seven, but two little ones early succumbed to the climate)--I have never found that same very difficult to do. My children are all well, hearty, jolly, sturdy children, with the exception of our eldest boy--you have seen him, you may remember--Robert. He is not exactly sickly, but he is not strong; but it is less his bodily than his mental health that troubles his mother and myself.
"The boy is not contented, not happy, not a born colonial, like the rest; he has ideas and fancies other than theirs; he has an unruly temper, a quick impressionable brain, and a great aptitude for the graces, refinements, and luxuries of life, which--as I need not tell you it has had no chance of cultivation here--must be natural to him.
"His mother and I are not people to have a favourite among our children; it is share and share alike with them all, in affection as in everything else; but Robert is a discord somehow, and captious--in short, very hard to manage--and I have not the time to devote to an exceptional person in the family.
"He has a great notion that he is very superior to his brothers--quite an unfounded one--and thinks he should do no end of wonderful things in England, if he had the chance, by which, of course, he means the money. This I can give him; and as there is no doubt he can get a better education in England than here, and should his projects fail, or should he get tired of them, he can come back whenever he pleases, and still find a corner for himself here, I am quite disposed to let him try his own plans out.
"The others are true colonials; they have not the least desire to see the old country until they can do so in independent manhood; but I can plainly perceive that, for his own sake, and that of all the household, Robert must be allowed to have his own way, as far as it lies in my power to give it him.
"There is some prospect of an improved and accelerated communication between us and England, and should it be realised by the spring of next year, I will probably bring the boy to England myself, and thus see you once more in this world, which I never had any hope of doing a little while ago.
"My wife does not like, nor, to tell the truth, do I, the notion of a whole year being taken out of our span of life together, which it must be if I make my proposed voyage; but neither does she like the idea of her son travelling alone to a strange country, and commencing his career without the assistance and the comfort of his father's presence and guidance in those important 'first steps.' We shall see, when the time comes, which of these feelings will prevail.
"In the mean time, my dear Dugdale, I rely on your friendship, aided by your experience of English life, and all the changes in public opinion and manners which have taken place since my time, to guide me in this matter, to tell me what it will be best for me to do for and with the boy.
"Robert is not ill educated, in as far as the limits of our colonial possibilities extend; but his education will aid him little in English life, and towards that his inclinations set.
"Turn all I have said over, and write to me concerning it. Then, by the time I get home, if I ever get home, and, if I do not, by the time I send my boy home, you will have made up your mind, which, in a matter of this kind will be, as it ought to be, equivalent to making up mine, as to the proper course to be pursued.
"With all his faults, Robert will interest you, my dear Dugdale, I am certain; in his industry, his ambition, and his adaptive nature you will find something to admire.
"I have almost forgotten the ways of the old country, so completely have I turned--not my mind only, but my heart and my tastes--to the life of the new. I daresay you remember the days in which I was rather a 'buck,' ran heavy accounts with our common tailor, and knew, or pretended to know, a lot about good dinners and wines.
"Ask Mrs. Hungerford what sort of rough and gruff old fellow I am now, and you will understand, from her description, the difficulty I should have in getting into, or even comprehending, the ways of the other side of the world again. But, remembering what I once did know, and thinking of what I have heard and seen since I ceased to know, I think Robert is cut out for success in England. Mind, he will not have it all to do unaided; he will have a little money, enough to keep him respectable, to back him.
"I feel I am unwise in thus talking to you so much beforehand of Robert--time enough when we meet, as I hope we shall do; but I have a notion you might hit upon some plan for him for the future more easily and successfully if you had an idea of the sort of person he is.
"If his mother could see this letter, and recognise the very moderate colours in which I have sketched her eldest son, I don't think I should hear the last of it between this and the date at which I and he are to start for England. I am such a dolt in these matters, I do not rightly know what to ask you to think about, or advise me upon; but you will know generally. Shall it be private tuition, or public school, or business life at once combined with education?
"My other boys never give me the least anxiety. I know they will take to the sheep-walk or the counting-house as readily as to their food, and plod on as comfortably and as cheerily as possible. And, indeed, while I am anxious about Robert, it would be giving you an unfair impression to say that I am uneasy about him. I am not that; but he is so different a stamp, I hardly know how to manage him.
"I have written all this to you with as much ease and confidence as if we were smoking together in the old quarters, velveteen-coated and slippered, as in the time I remember so well. I wonder if you--who have remained in England, to whom, at all events, life cannot have brought such physical changes as it has brought to me--remember it half so well as I do.
"There are hours even yet, when I am alone and thinking, when all that has intervened seems utterly unreal, and those old days, with their old associations, the one true and living period in my life. Do you remember the day after you, poor little shivering youngster as you were then, came to school, when I was a great hulking fellow, and my mother, God bless her! came to visit me, and, being taken by old Maddox to see the playground, was just in time to behold me tumble from the very top of the forbidden pear-tree and break my arm?
"I can see her face and hear her voice now, as plainly as if I could see the one and hear the other by going into the next room. And how you cried! Well, well, I suppose something of the boy remains until the last in every man's nature, and that more of it has the chance of remaining in our lives here than in yours at home.
"The progress of this place is extraordinary, and there are rumours of discoveries in metals, and so forth, which, if verified, will give it very great impetus. I don't mind them much; they don't disturb and they don't excite me even in this go-ahead colonial life. I carry my old steadiness about with me, and am go-ahead in my own business only.
"There is much in the political and social world here which would interest, but little which would please you, unless you are very much changed.
"I never could arrive at a very clear notion of you from Mrs. Hungerford; she was not communicative on any point, and she never told me anything about you, except that your health was delicate, which I could have told her from your letter. The sort of life we lead here is certainly calculated to give one the power of feeling acutely for a man to whom bodily exertion is forbidden; but you were always a patient fellow."
The letter was a very long one; the above is but an extract from it. James Dugdale had recognised the handwriting of his friend with pleasure, and had opened the letter with delighted eagerness. It would tell him something of Margaret; it would give him an insight into the troubles of her life; it would give him a clue to the enigma which lived and moved within his sight and his reach daily.
But his calculations were overthrown; he perceived at once that he was destined to gain no further knowledge of Margaret's past life from Hayes Meredith. The disappointment was so keen that at first he hardly had power to feel the interest in his friend's communication which it was calculated to evoke; and, when he had read half through the letter, he returned to the earlier portion in which Margaret was mentioned, and reperused it.
"I wish he had even told me more about Hungerford's death," said James Dugdale to himself. He was lying on a couch drawn close to the window of his own room, and he allowed the letter to drop by his side, and his gaze fixed itself on the landscape as he spoke. "I wish he had said more about him. What were the circumstances of his death? The little he says here, and one sentence of Margaret's--'when I first heard that my husband had been murdered by the black fellows'--comprise all I know--all any one knows--for her father would not mention his name, and I verily believe has forgotten that the man ever existed. I wish he had told me more."
He resumed the letter and read it again, this time through to the end, steadily and attentively.
Then he said slowly, and with a despondent shake of the head:
"I am very much afraid my old friend's son, Robert, is a bad boy."
James Dugdale had not been more than an hour at Chayleigh when he had read Hayes Meredith's letter. His return was unexpected, and he had been told by the servant who admitted him that the "ladies" were out. This was true, inasmuch as neither was in the house, but incorrect in so far as it seemed to imply that they were together.
Mrs. Carteret had departed in her pony-carriage, arrayed in handsome apparel, the materials and tints whereof were a clever combination of the requirements of the season then expiring and the season just about to begin, with a genteel recognition of the fact that an individual connected with the family had died within a period during which society would exact a costume commemorative of the circumstance. Mrs. Carteret had gone out, in high good humour with herself, and her dress, and her pony-carriage, with her smart servant, her pretty harness, her visiting-list, and the state of her complexion.
This latter was a subject of unusual self-gratulation, for Mrs. Carteret's complexion was changeable: it needed care, and, on the whole, it caused her more uneasiness, and occupied more of her attention, than any other mundane object. She was by no means a plain woman, and she had once been pretty--but her prettiness had been of a sunny, commonplace, exasperating, self-complacent kind; and now that it existed no longer, the expression of self-satisfaction was rather increased than lessened, for there was no delicacy of feature and no genuine bloom to divert attention from it.
If Mrs. Carteret believed anything firmly, it was that she was indisputably and incomparably the best, and very nearly the handsomest, of created beings; and she had a way of talking solemnly about her personal appearance,--taking careful note of its every peculiarity and variation, and bestowing upon it the minutest and most vexatious care,--which was annoying to her friends in general, and to James Dugdale in particular.
Mrs. Carteret was a woman who would be totally unmoved by any kind or degree of human suffering brought under her notice, but who would speak of a cold in her own head, or a pimple on her own face, as a calamity calculated to alarm and grieve the entire circle of her acquaintance. She was almost amusing in her transparent, engrossing, uncontrolled selfishness--amusing, that is, to strangers. It was not so pleasant to those who lived in the house or came into constant contact with her; they failed to perceive the humorous side of her character.
Her husband, who, with all his oddity and absence of mind, was not destitute of a degree of tact, in which there was a soup?on of cunning, and which he aired whenever there was any risk of his dearly-prized "quiet life" being endangered, had invented a kind of vocabulary of compliments of simulated solicitude and exa............