Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1894 — UNITED AT LAST [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

UNITED AT LAST

MISS M E BBADDON

He had declined to visit Dave nan t with Lord Clanyaree, owning frankly that there was no friendly feeling between Gilbert Sinclair and himself. Lord Clanyarde perfectly understood the state of the case, but affected to be supremely ignorant. He was a gentleman whose philosophy was to take things easy. Not to dlaiurtrCanierina, or any other social lake beneath whose tranquil water there might lurk a foul and muddy bottom, was a principle with Lord Clanyarde. But the nobleman, though philosophic and easytempered, was not without a heart. There was a strain of humanity in the Sybarite and worldling, and when at a great dinner at Davenant he saw the impress of a broken heart upon the statuesque beauty of his daughter's face, he was touched with pity and alarm. To sell his daughter to the highest bidder had not kerned to him in any wise a crime; but he would not have sold her to age or deformity, or to a man of notoriously evil life. Gilbert Sinclair had appeared to him a very fair sample of the average young Englishman. Not stainless, perhaps. Lord Clanyarde did not inquire too closely into details. The suitor was good-looking, good-nafpred, openhanded and rich. Whai more could any dowerless young woman require? Thus had Lord Clanyarde reasoned with himself when he hurried on his youngest daughter's marriage; and having, secured for her this handsome establishment, he had given himself no lurther concern about her destiny. No daughter of the house of Clanyarde had ever appeared in the divorce court. Constance was a girl of high principles, always went to church on saints’ days, abstained in Lent, and would be sure to go on all right. But at Davenant, on th£s particular evening, Lord Clanyarde saw a change in his daughter that chilled his heart. He talked to her, and she answered him absently, with the air of one who only half understands. Surely this argued something more than grief for her dead child. He spoke to Gilbert Sinclair, and gave frank utterance to his alarm. “Yes, she is very low-spirited, ” answered Gilbert, carelessly; “still fretting for the little girl. I thought it would cheer her to have people about her—prevent her dwelling too much upon that unfortunate event. But I really think she gets worse. It's rather hard upon me. I didn’t marry to be miserable. ” “Have you had a medical opinion about her?” asked Lord Clanyarde, anxiously. “Oh, yes, she has her own doctor. The little old man who used to attend her at Marchbrook. He knows her constitution, no doubt. He prescribes tonics, and so on, and recommends change of scene by and by, when she gets a little stronger; but my own opinion is that if she would only make an effort, and not brood upon the past, she'd soon get round again. Oh, by the way, I hear you have Sir Cyprian Davenant staying with you.” “Yes, he has come down to shoot some of my pheasants.” “I didn't know you and he were so thick. ” “I have known him ever since he was a boy, and knew his father before him.” “I wonder, as your estates joined, you did not knock uo a match between him and Constance." “That would not have been much good, as he couldn t keep his estate.” “No. It’s a pity that old man in Linco’nshire didn’t take it into his head t die a little sooner.” “I find no fault with destiny for giving me you as a son-in-law, and I hope you are not tired of the position,” said Lord Clanyarde, with a look that showed Gilbert that he must pursue his insinuations no further. Lord Clanyarde went home and told Sir Cyprian what he had seen, and his fears about Constance. He reproached himself bitterly for his share in bringing about the marriage, being all the more induced to regret that act now that change of fortune had made Cyprian as good a parti as Gilbert Sinclair. “How short-sighted we mortals are!” thought the anxious father. “I did not even know that Cyprian had a rich bachelor unc e. ” Sir Cyprian heard Lord Clanyarde’s account in grave silence. “What do you mean to do?” he asked. “What can I do? Poor child, she is ' alone and must bear her burden unaided. I cannot come between her and her husband, it would take very little to make me quarrel with Sinclair, and then where should we be? If she had a mother living it would be different.” “She has sisters, ” suggested Cyprian. “Yes, women who are absoroed by the care of their own families, and who would not go very- far out of the way to help her. With pragmatical husbands, too, who would make no end of mischief if they were allowed to interfere. No: we must not make a family row of the business. After all, there is no specific ground for comp’aint. She does not complain, poor child. I’ll go to Davenant early tomorrow and see her alone. Perhaps I cm persuade her to be frank with me.” ‘"You might see the doctor, and hear his account of her,” said Cyprian. “Yes, f by the way, little Dr. Webb, who attended my girls from their cradles. An excellent little man. I'll send for him to-morrow and consult him about my rheqmatism. He must know a good deal about my poor child. ” Lord Clanyarde was witn his daughter soon after breakfast next morning. Constance received her father with affection, but he could not win her confidence. It might be that she had nothing to confide. She made no complaint against her husband. “Why do I find you sitting here alone, Constance, while the hou.-e is full of cheerful people?” asked Lord Clanya-’de. “I heard the billiard-balls going as I came through the hall, early a it is.” > j “Gilbert likes company, and I do not, ” answe ed Constance, quietly. 'We each take our own way.”

“That does not sound like a happy union, pet," said her father. “Did you expect me to be happy—with Gilbert Sinclair?” “Yes, my love, or I would never have asked you to marry him. No, Constance. Of course, it was an understood thing with me that vou must marry well, as your sisters had done before you; but I meant you to marry a man who would make you happy; and if I find that Sinclair ill-uses you or slights you, egad, he shall have no easy reckoning with me. ” “My dear father, pray be calm. He is very good to me. I have never complained—l never shall complain. I try to do my duty, for I know that I have done him a wrong for which a life of duty and obedience can hardly atone.” “Wronged him, child? How have you wronged him?" “By marrying him when my heart was giyen to another.” “Nonsense, pet; a mere school-girl penchant If that kind of thing were to count, there's hardly a wife living who has net wronged her husband. Every romantic girl begins by falling in love with a detrimental;’ but the memory of that juvenile attachment has no more influence on her married life than the recollection of her favorite doll. You must get such silly notions out of your head. And you should try to lie a little more lively; join Sinclair's amusements. No man likes a gloomy wife. And remember, love, the past is past—no tears can bring back our losses. If they could, hope would prevent our crying, as somebody judiciously observes.” Constance sighed and was silent, whereupon Lord Clanyarde embraced his daughter tenderly and departed, feeling that he had done his duty. She was much depressed, poor child, but no doubt tftno would set things right; and as to Sinclair’s ill-treating her, that was out of the question. No man above the working classes ill-uses his wife nowadays. Lord Clanyarde made quite light of his daughter’s troubles when he met Sir Cyprian at lunch. Sinclair was a good fellow at bottom, he assured Sir Cyprian; a little too fond of pleasure,.perhaps, but with no barm in him, dpd Constance was inclined to make rather too much fuss about the loss of her little girl. Sir, Cyprian heard this change of tone in silence, apd,was not convinced. He contrived to “see Dr. Webb, the Maidstone supgeon, that afternoon. He remembered the good-natured little doctor as his attendant in .many a childish ailment, and was not afraid of asking him a question or two. From him he heard a very bad account of Constance Sinclair. Dr. Webb professed himself fairly baffled. There was no bodily ailment, except want of strength; but there was a settled melancholy, a deep and growing depression for which medicine was of no avail.

“You’ll ask why I don't propose getting a better opinion than my own,” said Dr. Webb, “and I'd tell you why. I might call in half the great men in London and be no wiser than I am now. They would only make Mrs. Sinclair more nervous, and she is very nervous already. I am a faithful watchdog, and at the first indication of danger I shall take measures. “You don’t apprehend any danger to the mind?” asked Sir Cyprian, anxiously. “There is no immediate cause for fear. But it this melancholy continues, if the nervousness increases, I cannot answer for the result.” “You have told Mr. Sinclair as much as this?” “Yes, I have spoken to him very frankly. ” It would have been difficult to imagine a life more solitary than that which Constance Sinclair contrived to lead in a house full of guests. For the first two weeks she had bravely tried to sustain her part as hostess; she had pretended to be amused by the amusements of others, or, when unable to support even that poor simulation, had sat at her embroidery frame and given the grace of her presence to the assembly. But now she was fain to hide herself all day long in her own rooms, or to walk alone in the fine old park, restricting her public appearance to the evening, when she took her place at the head of the dinner-table, and' endured the frivolities of the drawingroom after dinner. Gilbert secretly resented this withdrawal, and refused to believe that the death of Baby Christabel was his wife's soul cause of grief. There was something deeper—a sorrow for the past—a regret that was intensified by Sir Cyprian's presence in the neighborhood. “She knows of his being at Marchbrook, of course,” he told himself. “How do I know they have not met. She lives her own life, almost as much apart from me as if we were in separate houses. She has had time and opportunity for seeing him, and in all probability he is at Marchbrook only for the sake of being near her.” But Sir Cyprian had been at Marchbrook a week, and had not seen Constance Sinclair. How the place would have reminded him of her, had not her image been always present with him in all times and places! Every grove and meadow had its memory, every change in the fair pastoral landscape its bittersweet association. Marchbrook and Davenant were divided in some parts by an eight-foot wall, in others by an oak fence. The Davenant side of the land adjoining Marchbrook was copse and wilderness, which served as a covert for game. The Marchbrook side, a wide stretch of turf, which Lord Clanyarde let off a i grazing land to one of his tenants. A railed-in plantation here and there supported the fiction that this meadow land was a park, and for his own part Lord Clanyarde decla ed that he would just as soon look at oxen as at deer. The one only feature of Marchbrook Park was its avenues. One of these, known as the Monks’ avonue, and supposed to have been planted in the days when March breok was the site of a Benedictine monastery, was a noble arcade of tall elms planted sixty feet apart, with a grassy road between them. The monastery had long vanished, leaving not a wrack behind, and the avenue now led only from wall to wall. The owners of'Davenant had built a classic temple or summer-house close against the boundary wall between the two estates, in order to secure the enjoyment of this vista, as it was called in the days of Horace Walpole. The windows of this sum-mer-hou e looked down the wide avenue to the high-road, a distance of a little more than a quarter of a mile. This summer-house had always been a favorite resort of Mrs. Sinclair’s. It overlooked the home of her youth, and she liked it on that account, for although Davenant was by far the more beautiful estate, she loved Marchbrook best. Ito ok continubd. i Adversity is the first path to truth. —Byron. |

CHAPTER XV—Continued.