Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 June 1894 — UNITED AT LAIST [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

UNITED AT LAIST

BY MISS M E BRADDON

CHAPTER Xf—Continued. From that time Constance Sinclair pbt aside all outward token of her grief. She wrote to the gayest and most pleasure-loving of her acquaintances—young married women, whose chief delight was to dress more expensively than their dearest friends, and to be seen at three parties on the same evening, and a few who were still spinsters, from no fault or foolishness of their own, since they had neglected neither plans nor art in the endeavor to secure an eligible partner for the dance of life. To these Constance wrote her letters of invitation, and the first sentence in each letter was sufficient to insure acceptance. “Dearest Ida —My husband is filling the house with men for the hunting season. Do come, and save me from being bored to death by their sporting talk. Be sure to bring your hunting habit. Gilbert can give' you a good mount,” etc., etc. Whereupon, dearest Ida, twisting about the little note, meditatively remarked to her last bosom friend and Aontidante, “Odd that they should ask people so soon after the death of Mrs. Sinclair’s baby—drowned, too —it was in all the papers. Davenant is a sweet house to stay at, quite liberty hall. Yet, I think I shall go, and if there are planty of people 1 can finish out my ball dresses in the evenings.” Before another Sunday came Davenant was full of peop e. tne attics noisy with strange ladies -maids, the stables and harness rooms full of life and bustle, not an empty stall or an unoccupied ioo.-,o box in the long range of buildings, the billiard-room and smok-ing-room resonaut with masculine laughter, unknown dogs pervading the outbuildings and chained up in every available corner. Constance Sinclair had put away her somber robes of crape and cashmere, and met her friends with welcoming smiles, radiant in black silk and lace, her graceful figure set off by the latest Parisian fashion, which, being the newest, was, of course, the best. "I thought she would have been in deeper mourning,” said one of Mrs. Sinclair’s dearest friends to another during a whispered chat in a dusky corner at afternoon tea. “The men were so noisy with their haw-haw talk, one could say what one liked,” remarked Mrs. Millamount afterward to Lady Loveall. “Looks rather heartless, doesn’t it?— ah only child, too. She might at least wear paramatta instead of that black silk —not even mourning silk. I suppose that black net trimmed with jet she wore last night was from Worth. ” “My dear, you couldn’t have looked at it properly. Worth wouldn’t have made her such a thing if she had gone down on her knees to him. The sleeve was positively antediluvian. Nice house, isn’t it? Everything in good style. What matches all these Clanyardes have made:” “Is it true that she was engaged to Sir Cyprian Davenant'?” “They say so. How sorry she must be! He has just come into.quite a heap of money. Some old man down in the Lincolnshire fens left it to him—quite a character, I believe. Never spent anything except on black-letter books, and those have been sold for a fortune at Sotheby’s. Ah, Mr. Wyatt, how d ye do?” as the solicitor, newly arrived that afternoon, threaded his way toward the quiet corner; “do come and sit here. Is it true that Sir Cyprian Davenant has come into a fortune?” “Nothing can be more true, unless it is that Mrs. Millamount looks younger and lovelier every season.” “You horrid flatterer. You are worse than a French milliner. And is it true that Mrs. Sinclair and Sir Cyprian were engaged? But no, it would hardly be fair to ask you about that. You are a friend of the family. ” “As a friend of the family, I am bound to inform you that rumor is false on that point. There was no engagement. ” “Really, now?” “But Sir Cyprian was madly in love with Miss Clanyarde.” “And she ” “I was not in the lady’s confidence; but I believe that it was only my friend’s poverty which prevented their marriage. ” ' “How horridly mercenary!” cried Mrs. Millamount, who came of an ancient Irish family, proud as Lucifer and poo as Lazarus, and had been sacrificed in the blossom of her days, like Iphigenia, to raise the wind—not to Diana, but to a rich stock-broker. Perhaps as that was a long time ago she may have forgotten how much more P utus had to do with her marriage than Cupid. CHAPTER XII. THIS SHACKLES OF AN OLD LOVE STRAITENED HIM. Cyprian Davenant had inherited a fortune. Common rumor had not greatly exaggerated the amount of his wealth, though there was the usual disposition to expatiate upon the truth. Needy men looked at him with envy as he went in and out of his club, or sat in a quiet corner reading the last “Quarterly” or “Edinburgh,” and almost wondered that he was so well able to contain his spirits, and wa3 not , tempted to perform a savage dance of / Choctaw character, or to give expression to his rapture in a war-whoop. “Hang it all, you know, ” remarked an impecunious younger son, “it aggravates a fellow to see Davenant take things so quietly. He doesn’t even look choerful. He does not invite the confidence of his necessitous friends. Such a knight of the rueful countenance would hardly stand a pony. And he won t play whist, or touch a billiardcue —quite an unapproachable beast. ” A man oannot be lucky in all things. Sir Cyprian had set his life upon a cast-, and the fortune of the game had been against him. The inheritance of this unexpected wealth seemed to him almost a useless and trivial stroke of fate. What could it avail him now? It could not give him Constance Clanyarde, or even restore the good old bouse in which his father and mother had lived and died. Time had set a

gulf between him and happiness, and the fortune that came too late seemed rather the stroke of some mocking and ironical Fate than the gift of a benevolent destiny. He came back from Africa like a man who lives a charmed life, escaping all manner of perils, from the gripe of marsh fever to the jaws of crocodiles; while men who had valued existence a great deal more than he had done had succumbed and left their bones to bleach upon the sands of the Gold Coast or to rot in a stagnant swamp. Cyprian Davenant had returned to find the girl he loved the wife of the man he m ist disliked. He heard of her marriage more in sorrow than in anger. Ho had not expected to find her free. His knowledge of Lord Clanyarde’s character had assured him that his lordship’s beautiful daughter would be made to marry well. No fair Circassian, reared by admiring and expectant relatives in the seclusion of her Caucasian home, fattened upon milk and almonds to the standard of Oriental beauty, and in due course to be carried to the slave-market, had ever been brought up with a more specific intention than that which had ruled Lord Clanyarde in the education of his daughters. They had all done welL He spent very little of his time at Marchbrooke nowadays, his wife having died shortly after Constance's marriage, but dawdled away his life agreeably at his daughters’ winter houses out of the season, and felt that his mission had been accomplished. No father had ever done more for his children, and they had cost him very little. What a comfort to have been blessed with lovely marriageable daughters instead of lubberly sons, squatting on a father's shoulders like the old man of the mountain, thought Lord Clanyarde, when he had leisure to reflect upon his lot. After that one visit in Park Lane, Sir Cyprian Davenant had studiously avoided Mrs. Sinclair. He had very little inclination for society, and although his friends were ready to make a fashionable lion of him upon the strength of his African explorations, he had strength of mind enough to refuse all manner of flattering invitations, and innumerable introductions to people who were dying to know him. He took a set of chambers in one of the streets between the Strand and the river, surrounded himself with the books he loved, and set about writing the history of his travels. He had no desire to achieve fame by book-mak-ing, but a man must do something with his life. Sir Cyprian felt himself too old or too unambitious to enter one of the learned professions, and he felt himself without motive for sustained industry. He had an income that sufficed for all his desires. He would write his book, tell the world the wonders he had seen, and then go back to Africa and see more wonders, and perhaps leave his bones along the road, as some of his fellow-travelers had done. He heard of Constance Sinclair heard of her as one of the lights in Fashion's sidereal system—holding her own against all competitors. He saw £er once or twice, between five and six on a June afternoon, when the carriages were creeping along the Lady's Mile, and the high-mettled horses champing their bits and tugging at their bearing-reins in sheer desperation at being compelled to this snail’s pace. He saw her looking her loveliest, and concluded that she was happy. She had all things that were reckoned good in her world. Why should he suppose there was anything wanting to her content? The lawyer's letter, which had told him of old Colonel Gryffin's death, and the will which bequeathed to him the bulk of the old man’s fortune, found Sir Cyprian in his quiet chambers near the river, smoking the cigar of peace over the last treatise on metaphysics by a German philosopher. Lady Davenant had been a Miss Gryffin, and the favorite niece of this ancient AngloIndian, Colonel Gryffin, who had lived and died a bachelor. Sir Cyprian had a faint recollection of seeing a testy old gentleman with a yellow complexion at Davenant in his nursery days, and having been told to call the old gentleman “uncle,” whereup n he had revolted openly, and had declined to confer that honor up n such a wizened and tawnycomplexioned anatomy as the little old gentleman in question. “My uncles are big,” he said. “You’re too little for an uncle.” Soon afterward the queer old figure had melted out of the home picture. Colonel Gryffin had gone back to the Lincolnshire fens and his ancient missals and incunabula, and had lived so remote an existence that the chief feeling caused by his death was astonishment at the discovery that he had been so long alive. Messrs. Dott & Gowunn, a respectable firm of family solicit irs in Lincoln s Inn. begged to inform Sir Cyprian Davenant that his great uncle, on the maternal side, Cob nel Gryffin, of Hobart Hall, near Hammerfie d, Lincolnshire, had appointed him residuary legatee and sole executor to his 'will. - Sir Cyprian was quite unmoved by the announcement. Residuary legatee might mean a great deal, or it might mean very little. He had a misty recollec tion of being tote that Colonel Gryffin was rich, and was sm posi d to squander untold sums on Guttenberg bibles and other amiable eccent icities of a bookish man. Be had never been taught to expect any inheritance from this ancient bachelor, and he supposed him for many years laid at rest under the daisies of his parish church-yard. The re iduary legateeship turned out to be a very handsome fortune. The missals and bibles and antique Books of Hours, the Decameron, and the fine old Shakspearc we . e put up at auction—ly desire of the testator — and were sola for twice and three times the sums the old Colonel had paid for thep. Ini a word, Sir Cyprian Daveriant,, who had esteemed himself passing rich upon four hundred a year, stood possessed of a hundred and twenty thou.-and pounds. .It came too late to buy him the desire of his heart, and, not being able to win for him this ofie blessing, it seemed almost useless. James Wvatt was one of the first to congratulate Sir Cyprian upon this change of fortune. “A pity the old gentleman did not die before you went to Africa,” he said, sympathetically. “It would have SQuared things for you and Miss Clanyarde." “Miss Clanyarde made a very good marriage,” an-we ed Cyprian, too proud 10 bare his old wound to friendly James Wyatt. “She is happy.” Mr. Wyatt shrugged his shoulders dubiously. “Who knows?” he said. “We see our friends’ lives from the out ide, and, like a show at a fair, the outside is always, the best of the performance." This, ha pened while Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair were at Schoenesthel. Soon came the tidings of Baby Christabel’s fate, briefly told in a newspaper paragraph, and .Cyprian Davenant's heart , bled for the woman he had once loved.

He was not a little surprised when James Wvatt called upon him one day in November, and told him he was going down to Davenant, where there was to be a houseful of company. “So soon after the little girl’s death,” exclaimed Sir Cyprian. “Yes, it is rather soon, no doubt But they would be moped to death at Davenant without people. Sack-cloth and ashes are quite out of the fashion, you see. People don’t go in for intense mourning nowadays." “People have hearts, I supposej even in the nineteenth century, said Sir Cyprian, somewhat bitterly. “I should have thought Mts. Sinclair would have felt the loss of her little girl very deeply.” “We don’t know what she may feel," returned Wyatt. “Gilbert likes his own way.” “You don’t mean to say that he illuses his wife?” asked Sir Cyprian, alarmed. “111-usage is a big word. We don't employ it nowadays,” replied Mr. Wyatt, with an imperturbable smile. “Gilbert Sinclair is my client, and an excellent one, as you know. It would ill become me to disparage him, but I must admit that he and Mrs. Sinclair are not the happiest couple whose domestic hearth I have ever sat by. She had some secret grief even before the death of her child and made hp for being very brilliant in society by being exceedingly dull at home, i don’t expect to find her very lively, now that she has lost the only being she really cared for. She absolutely worshiped that child.” This conversation gave Sir Cyprian Davenant material for much sad thought To know that Constance was unhappy seemed to bring her nearer to him. It brought back the thought of the old days when those innocent eyes had looked into his, eloquent with unconscious love; when Constance Clanyarde had given him her heart without thought of to-morrow, happy in the knowledge that she was loved, believing her lover strong to conquer fate and fortune. And he had brought the chilly light of worldly wisdom to bear on this dream of Arcady. He had been strong, self-denying, and had renounced his own happiness in the hope of securing hers. And now fate laughed him to scorn with this gift of vain riches, and he found that his worldly wisdom had been supreme folly. “What a self-sufficient fool, what an idiot, I have been!” he said to himself, in an agony of remorse. “And now what atonement can I make to her for my folly? Can I defend her from the purse-proud snob she has been sold to? Can I save her wounded heart one pang? Can Ibo near her in the hour of misery, or offer one drop of comfort from a soul overflowing with tenderness and pity? No; to approach her is to do her a wrong. But 1 can watch at a distance, perhaps. I must use other eyes. My money may be of some use in buying her faithful service from others. God bless her! I conseorate my days to her service; distant or near, I will be her friend and her defender.” Two days later Sir Cyprian met Lord Clanyarde at the nobleman’s club. It was a club which Cyprian rarely used, although he had been a member ever since his majority, and it may be that he went out out of his beaten track in the hope of encountering Constance Sinclair s father. Lord Clanyarde was very cordial and complimentary upon his friend’s altered fortune. “You must feel sorry for having parted with Davenant,” he said, “when you might so easily have kept it. ” “Davenant is rather too big for a confirmed bachelor. ” “True, it would have been a white elephant, I dare say. Sinclair has improved the place considerably. You ought to come down and have a look at it. I’m going to Marchbrook to shoot next week. Come and stay with me,” added Lord Clanyarde, with heartiness, not at all prepared to bo taken at his word. “I shall be charmed.” said Sir Cyprian, to his lordship’s infinite astonishment. People generally took his invitations for what they were worth, and declined them. But here was a man just from the center of Africa, who hardly understood the language of polito society. [to bb continued. |