Works of Ellen Wood, page 1179
In his modest winning way, William Brook spoke a little of the trouble that had come upon their family — how deeply sorry he was that Ellin and he should have learnt to care for one another for all time, as it was displeasing to Mr. Delorane ——
“Hang it, man,” interrupted the lawyer irascibly, too impatient to listen further— “what on earth do you propose to yourself? Suppose I did not look upon it with displeasure? — are you in a position to marry her?”
“You would not have objected to me had we been as we once were — prosperous, and — —”
“What the dickens has that to do with it!” roared the lawyer. “Our business lies with the present, not the past.”
“I came here to tell you, sir, that I am to leave for New York to-night. My brother Charles has been writing to me about it for some time past. He says I cannot fail to get on well in my uncle’s house, and attain to a good position. Uncle Matthew has no sons: he will do his best to advance his nephews. What I wish to ask you, sir, is this — if, when my means shall be good and my position assured, you will allow me to think of Ellin?”
“The man’s mad?” broke forth Mr. Delorane, more put about than he had been at all. “Do you suppose I should let my only child go to live in a country over the seas?”
“No, sir, I have thought of that. Charles thinks, if I show an aptitude for business, they may make me their agent over here. Oh, Mr. Delorane, be kind, be merciful: for Ellin’s sake and for mine! Do not send me away without hope!”
“Don’t you think you possess a ready-made stock of impudence, William Brook?”
The young man threw his earnest, dark-blue eyes into the lawyer’s. “I feared you would deem so, sir. But I am pleading for what is dearer to me and to her than life: our lives will be of little value to us if we must spend them apart. Only just one ray of possible hope, Mr. Delorane! It is all I ask.”
“Look here; we’ll drop this,” cried the lawyer, his hands in his pockets, rattling away violently at the silver in them, his habit when put out, but nevertheless calming down in temper, for in spite of prejudice he did like the young man greatly, and he was not easy as to Ellin. “The best thing you can do is to go where you are going — over the Atlantic: and we’ll leave the future to take care of itself. The money you think to make may turn out all moonshine, you know. There; that’s every word I’ll say and every hope I’ll give, though you stop all day bothering me, William Brook.”
And perhaps it was as much as William Brook had expected: any way, it did not absolutely forbid him to hope. He held out his hand timidly.
“Will you not shake hands with me, sir — I start to-night — and wish me God speed.”
“I’ll wish you better sense; and — and I hope you’ll get over safely,” retorted Mr. Delorane: but he did not withhold his hand. “No correspondence with Ellin, you understand, young man; no underhand love-making.”
“Yes, sir, I understand; and you may rely upon me.”
He quitted the room as he spoke, to make his way out as he came — through the office. The lawyer stood in the passage and looked after him: and a thought, that had forced itself into his mind several times since this trouble set in, crossed it again. Should he make the best of a bad bargain: give Brook a chief place in his own office and let them set up in some pleasant little home near at hand? Ellin had her mother’s money: and she would have a great deal more at his own death; quite enough to allow her husband to live the idle life of a gentleman — and William was a gentleman, and the nicest young fellow he knew. Should he? For a full minute Mr. Delorane stood deliberating — yes, or no; then he took a hasty step forward to call the young man back. Then, wavering and uncertain, he stepped back again, and let the idea pass.
“Well, how have you sped?” asked Mr. St. George, as William Brook reappeared in the office. “Any hope?”
“Yes, I think so,” answered William. “At least, it is not absolutely forbidden. There’s a line in a poem my mother would repeat to us when we were boys— ‘God and an honest heart will bear us through the roughest day.’ I trust He, and it, will so bear me and Ellin.”
“Wish I had your chance, old fellow!”
“My chance!” repeated William.
“To go out to see the world; to go out to the countries where gold and diamonds are picked up for the stooping — instead of being chained, as I am, between four confined walls, condemned to spend my life over musty parchments.”
William smiled. “I don’t know where you can pick up gold and diamonds for the stooping. Not where I am going.”
“No, not in New York. You should make your way to the Australian gold-fields, Brook, or to the rich Californian mines, or to the diamond mountains in Africa, and come back — as you would in no time — with a sack of money on your shoulders, large enough to satisfy even Delorane.”
“Or lose my health, if not my life, in digging, and come home without a shirt to my back; a more common result than the other, I fancy,” remarked William. “Well, good-bye, old friend.”
St. George, towering aloft in his height and strength, put his arm around William’s shoulder and walked thus with him to the street-entrance. There they shook hands, and parted. Ellin Delorane, her face shaded behind the drawing-room curtain from the October sun, watched the parting.
There was to be no set farewell allowed to her. She understood that. But she gathered from Aunt Hester, during the day, that her father had not been altogether obdurate, and that if William could get on in the future, perhaps things might be suffered to come right. It brought to her a strange comfort. So very slight a ray, no bigger than one of the specks that fall from the sky, as children say, will serve to impart a most unreasonable amount of hope to the troubled heart.
Towards the close of the afternoon, Ellin went in her restlessness to pay a visit to her friend Grace at the Rectory, who had recently become Herbert Tanerton’s wife, and sat talking with her till it was pretty late. The moon, rising over the tops of the trees, caused her to start up with an exclamation.
“What will Aunt Hester say?”
“If you don’t mind going through the churchyard, Ellin,” said Grace, “you would cut off that corner, and save a little time.” So Ellin took that route.
“Ellin!”
“William!”
They had met face to face under the church walls. He explained that he was sparing a few minutes to say farewell to his friends at the Rectory. The moon, coming out from behind a swiftly passing cloud, for it was rather a rough night, shone down upon them and upon the graves around them. Wildly enough beat the heart of each.
“You saw papa to-day,” she whispered unevenly, as though her breath were short.
“Yes, I saw him. I cannot say that he gave me hope, Ellin, but he certainly did not wholly deny it. I think — I believe — that — if I can succeed in getting on, all may be well with us yet.”
William Brook spoke with hesitation. He felt trammelled; he could not in honour say what he would have wished to say. This meeting might be unorthodox, but it was purely accidental; neither he nor Ellin had sought it.
“Good-bye, my darling,” he said with emotion, clasping her hands in his. “As we have met, there cannot be much wrong in our saying it. I may not write to you, Ellin; I may not even ask you to think of me; I may not, I suppose, tell you in so many words that I shall think of you; but, believe this: I go out with one sole aim and end in view — that of striving to make a position sufficiently fair to satisfy your father.”
The tears were coursing down her cheeks; she could hardly speak for agitation. Their hearts were aching to pain.
“I will be true to you always, William,” she whispered. “I will wait for you, though it be to the end of life.”
To be in love with a charming young lady, and to have her all to yourself in a solitary graveyard under the light of the moon, presents an irresistible temptation for taking a kiss, especially if the kiss is to be a farewell kiss for days and for years. William Brook did not resist it; very likely did not try to. In spite of Mr. Delorane and every one else, he took his farewell kiss from Ellin’s lips.
Then they parted, he going one way, she the other. Only those of us — there are not many — who have gone through this parting agony can know how it wrings the heart.
But sundry superstitious gossips, hearing of this afterwards, assured Ellin that it must be unlucky to say farewell amidst graves.
The time went on. William Brook wrote regularly to his people, and Minty whispered the news to Ellin Delorane. He would send kind remembrances to friends, love to those who cared for it. He did not dislike the work of a mercantile life, and thought he should do well — in time.
In time. There was the rub, you see. We say “in time” when we mean next Christmas, and we also say it when we mean next century. By the end of the first year William Brook was commanding a handsome salary; but the riches that might enable him to aspire to the hand of Miss Delorane loomed obscurely in the distance yet. Ellin seemed strong and well, gay and cheerful, went about Timberdale, and laughed and talked with the world, just as though she had never had a lover, or was not waiting for somebody over the water. Mr. Delorane thought she must have forgotten that scapegrace, and he hoped it was so.
It was about this time, the end of the first year, that a piece of good luck fell to Mr. St. George. He came into a fortune. Some relative in the West Indies died and left it to him. Timberdale put it down at a thousand pounds a-year, so I suppose it might be about five hundred. It was thought he might be for giving up his post at Mr. Delorane’s to be a gentleman at large. But he did nothing of the kind. He quitted his lodgings over Salmon’s shop, and went into a pretty house near Timberdale Court, with a groom and old Betty Huntsman as housekeeper, and set up a handsome gig and a grey horse. And that was all the change.
As the second year went on, Ellin Delorane began to droop a little. Aunt Hester did not like it. One of the kindest friends Ellin had was Alfred St. George. After the departure of young Brook, he had been so tender with Ellin, so considerate, so indulgent to her sorrow, and so regretful (like herself) of William’s absence, that he had won her regard. “It will be all right when he comes back, Ellin,” he would whisper: “only be patient.”
But in this, the second year, Mr. St. George’s tone changed. It may be that he saw no hope of any happy return, and deemed that, for her own sake, he ought to repress any hope left in her.
“There’s no more chance of his returning with a fortune than there is of my going up to the moon,” he said to Tod confidentially one day when we met him striding along near the Ravine.
“Don’t suppose there is — in this short time,” responded Tod.
“I’m afraid Ellin sees it, too: she seems to be losing her spirits. Ah, Brook should have done as I advised him — gone a little farther and dug in the gold-fields. He might have come back a Crœsus then. As it is — whew! I wouldn’t give a copper sixpence for his chance.”
“Do you know what I heard say, St. George? — that you’d like to go in for the little lady yourself.”
The white eye-balls surrounding St. George’s dark orbs took a tinge of yellow as they rolled on Tod. “Who said it?” he asked quietly.
“Darbyshire. He says you are in love with her as much as ever Brook was.”
St. George laughed. “Old Darbyshire? Well, perhaps he is not far wrong. Any way, love’s free, I believe. Were I her father, Brook should prove his eligibility to propose for her, or else give her up. Good-day, Todhetley; good-day, Johnny.”
St. George went off at a quick pace. Tod, looking after him, made his comments. “Should not wonder but he wins her. He is the better man of the two — —”
“The better man!” I interrupted.
“As to means, at any rate: and see what a fine upright free-limbed fellow he is! And where will you find one more agreeable?”
“In tongue, nowhere; I admit that. But I wouldn’t give up William Brook for him, were I Ellin Delorane.”
That St. George was in love with her grew as easy to be seen as is the round moon in harvest. Small blame to him. Who could be in the daily companionship of a sweet girl like Ellin Delorane, and not learn to love her, I should like to know? Tod told St. George he wished he had his chance.
At last St. George spoke to her. It was in April, eighteen months after Brook’s departure. Ellin was in the garden at sunset, busy with the budding flowers, when St. George came to join her, as he sometimes did, on leaving the office for the day. Aunt Hester sat sewing at the open glass-doors of the window.
“I have been gardening till I am tired,” was Ellin’s greeting to him, as she sat down on a bench near the sweetbriar bush.
“You look pale,” said Mr. St. George. “You often do look pale now, Ellin: do you think you can be quite well?”
“Pray don’t let Aunt Hester overhear you,” returned Ellin in covert, jesting tones. “She begins to have fancies, she says, that I am not as well as I ought to be, and threatens to call in Mr. Darbyshire.”
“You need some one to take care of you; some one near and dear to you, who would study your every look and action, who would not suffer the winds of heaven to blow upon your face too roughly,” went on St. George, plunging into Shakespeare. “Oh, Ellin, if you would suffer me to be that one — —”
Her face turned crimson; her lips parted with emotion; she rose up to interrupt him in a sort of terror.
“Pray do not continue, Mr. St. George. If — if I understand you rightly, that you — that you — —”
“That I would be your loving husband, Ellin; that I would shelter you from all ill until death us do part. Yes, it is nothing less than that.”
“Then you must please never to speak of such a thing again; never to think of it. Oh, do not let me find that I have been mistaking you all this time,” she added in uncontrollable agitation: “that while I have ever welcomed you as my friend — and his — you have been swayed by another motive!”
He did not like the agitation; he did not like the words; and he bit his lips, striving for calmness.
“This is very hard, Ellin.”
“Let us understand each other once for all,” she said— “and oh, I am so sorry that there’s need to say it. What you have hinted at is impossible. Impossible: please not to mistake me. You have been my very kind friend, and I value you; and, if you will, we can go on still on the same pleasant terms, caring for one another in friendship. There can be nothing more.”
“Tell me one thing,” he said: “we had better, as you intimate, understand each other fully. Can it be that your hopes are still fixed upon William Brook?”
“Yes,” she answered in a low tone, as she turned her face away. “I hope he will come home yet, and that — that matters may be smoothed for us with papa. Whilst that hope remains it is simply treason to talk to me as you would have done,” she concluded with a spurt of anger.
“Ellin,” called out Aunt Hester, putting her head out beyond the glass-doors, “the sun has set; you had better come in.”
“One moment, Ellin,” cried Mr. St. George, preventing her: “will you forgive me?”
“Forgive and forget, too,” smiled Ellin, her brow smoothing itself. “But you must never recur to the subject again.”
So Mr. St. George went home, his accounts settled — as Tod would have said: and the days glided on.
“What is it that ails Ellin?”
It was a piping-hot morning in July, in one of the good old hot summers that we seem never to get now; and Aunt Hester sat in her parlour, its glass-doors open, adding up the last week’s bills of the butcher and the baker, when she was interrupted by this question from her brother. He had come stalking upon her, rattling as usual, though quite unconsciously, the silver in his trousers pockets. The trousers were of nankeen: elderly gentlemen wore them in those days for coolness.
“What ails her!” repeated Aunt Hester, dropping the bills in alarm. “Why do you ask me, John?”
“Now, don’t you think you should have been a Quaker?” retorted Mr. Delorane. “I put a simple question to you, and you reply to it by asking me another. Please to answer mine first. What is it that is the matter with Ellin?”
Aunt Hester sighed. Of too timid a nature to put forth her own opinion upon any subject gratuitously in her brother’s house, she hardly liked to give it even when asked for. For the past few weeks Ellin had been almost palpably fading; was silent and dispirited, losing her bright colour, growing thinner; might be heard catching her breath in one of those sobbing sighs that betoken all too surely some secret, ever-present sorrow. Aunt Hester had observed this; she now supposed it had at length penetrated to the observation of her brother.
“Can’t you speak?” he demanded.
“I don’t know what to say, John. Ellin does not seem well, and looks languid: of course this broiling weather is against us all. But — —”
“But what?” cried the lawyer, as she paused. “As to broiling weather, that’s nothing new in July.”
“Well, John — only you take me up so — and I’m sure I shouldn’t like to anger you. I was about to add that I think it is not so much illness of body with Ellin as illness of mind. If one’s mind is ransacked with perpetual worry — —”
“Racked with perpetual worry,” interrupted Mr. Delorane, unconsciously correcting her mistake. “What has she to worry her?”
“Dear me! I suppose it is about William Brook. He has been gone nearly two years, John, and seems to be no nearer coming home with a fortune than he was when he left. I take it that this troubles the child: she is losing hope.”
Mr. Delorane, standing before the open window, his back to his sister, turned the silver coins about in his pockets more vehemently than before. “You say she is not ailing in body?”
“Not yet. She is never very strong, you know.”
