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CHAPTER XLIII
THE PRICE

 
‘With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go
   Athwart the foaming brine.’
 

Lord Byron.

Clarence would not tell me his purpose, he said, till he had considered it more fully; nor could we have much conversation on the way home, as my mother had arranged that we should bring an old friend of hers back with us to pay her a visit.  So I had to sit inside and make myself agreeable to Mrs. Wrightson, while Clarence had plenty of leisure for meditation outside on the box seat.  The good lady said much on the desirableness of marriage for Clarence, and the comfort it would be to my mother to see Emily settled.

We had heard much in town of railway shares; and the fortunes of Hudson, the railway king, were under discussion.  I suspected Clarence of cogitating the using his capital in this manner; and hoped that when he saw his way, he might not think it dishonourable to come into further contact with Anne, and reveal his hopes.  He allowed that he was considering of such investments, but would not say any more.

My mother and Emily had, in the meantime, been escorted home by Martyn.  The first thing Clarence did was to bespeak Emily’s company in a turn in the garden.  What passed then I never knew nor guessed for years after.  He consulted her whether, in case he were absent from England for five, seven, or ten years, she would be equal to the care of my mother and me.  Martyn, when ordained, would have duties elsewhere, and could only be reckoned upon in emergencies.  My mother, though vigorous and practical, had shown symptoms of gout, and if she were ill, I could hardly have done much for her; and on the other hand, though my health and powers of moving were at their best, and I was capable of the headwork of the estate, I was scarcely fit to be the representative member of the family.  Moreover, these good creatures took into consideration that poor mamma and I would have been rather at a loss as each other’s sole companions.  I could sort shades for her Berlin work, and even solve problems of intricate knitting, and I could read to her in the evening; but I could not trot after her to her garden, poultry-yard, and cottages; nor could she enter into the pursuits that Emily had shared with me for so many years.  Our connecting link, that dear sister, knew how sorely she would be missed, and she told Clarence that she felt fully competent to undertake, conjointly with us, all that would be incumbent on Chantry House, if he really wanted to be absent.  For the rest, Clarence believed my mother would be the happier for being left regent over the estate; and his scheme broke upon me that very forenoon, when my mother and he were settling some executor’s business together, and he told her that Mr. Castleford wished him to go out to Hong Kong, which was then newly ceded to the English, and where the firm wished to establish a house of business.

‘You can’t think of it,’ she exclaimed, and the sound fell like a knell on my ears.

‘I think I must,’ was his answer.  ‘We shall be cut out if we do not get a footing there, and there is no one who can quite answer the purpose.’

‘Not that young Frith—’

‘Ten to one but he is on his way home.  Besides, if not, he has his own work at Canton.  We see our way to very considerable advantages, if—’

‘Advantages!’ she interrupted.  ‘I hate speculation.  I should have thought you might be contented with your station; but that is the worst of merchants,—they never know when to stop.  I suppose your ambition is to make this a great overgrown mansion, so that your father would not know it again.’

‘Certainly not that, mamma,’ said Clarence smiling; ‘it is the last thing I should think of; but stopping would in this case mean going backward.’

‘Why can’t Mr. Castleford send one of his own sons?’

‘Probably Walter may come out by and by, but he has not experience enough for this.’

Clarence had not in the least anticipated my mother’s opposition, for he had come to underestimate her affection for and reliance on him.  He had us all against him, for not only could we not bear to part with him; but the climate of Hong-Kong was in evil repute, and I had become persuaded that, with his knowledge of business, railway shares and scrip might be made to realise the amount needed, but he said, ‘That is what I call speculation.  The other matter is trade in which, with Heaven’s blessing, I can hope to prosper.’

He explained that Mr. Castleford had received him on his coming to London with almost a request that he would undertake this expedition; but with fears whether, in his new position, he could or would do so, although his presence in China would be very important to the firm at this juncture; and there would be opportunities which would probably result in very considerable profits after a few years.  If Clarence had been, as before, a mere younger brother, it would have been thought an excellent chance; and he would almost have felt bound by his obligations to Mr. Castleford to undertake the first starting of the enterprise, if it had not been for our recent loss, and the doubt whether he could he spared from home.

He made light of the dangers of climate.  He had never suffered in that way in his naval days, and scarcely knew what serious illness meant.  Indeed, he had outgrown much of that sensibility of nerve which had made him so curiously open to spiritual or semi-spiritual impressions.

‘Any way,’ he said, ‘the thing is right to be done, provided my mother does not make an absolute point of my giving it up; and whether she does or not depends a good deal on how you others put it to her.’

‘Right on Mr. Castleford’s account?’ I asked.

‘That is one side of it.  To refuse would put him in a serious difficulty; but I could perhaps come home sooner if it were not for this other matter.  I told him so far as that it was an object with me to raise this sum in a few years, and he showed me how there is every likelihood of my being able to do so out there.  So now I feel in your hands.  If you all, and Edward chiefly, set to and persuade my mother that this undertaking is a dangerous business, and that I can only be led to it by inordinate love of riches—’

‘No, no—’

‘That’s what she thinks,’ pursued Clarence, ‘and that I want to be a grander man than my father.  That’s at the bottom of her mind, I see.  Well, if you deplore this, and let her think the place can’t do without me, she will come out in her strength and make it my duty to stay at home.’

‘It is very tempting,’ said Emily.

‘We all undertook to give up something.’

‘We never thought it would come in this way!’

‘We never do,’ said Clarence.

‘Tell me,’ said Martyn, ‘is this to content that ghost, poor thing?  For it is very hard to believe in her, except in the mullion room in December.’

‘Exactly so, Martyn,’ he answered.  ‘Impressions fade, and the intellect fails to accept them.  But I do not think that is my motive.  We know that a wicked deed was done by our ancestor, and we hardly have the right to pray, “Remember not the sins of our forefathers,” unless, now that we know the crime, we attempt what restitution in us lies.’

There was no resisting after this appeal, and after the first shock, my mother was ready to admit that as Clarence owed everything to Mr. Castleford, he could not well desert the firm, if it were really needful for its welfare that he should go out.  We got her to look on Mr. Castleford as captain of the ship, and Clarence as first lieutenant; and when she was once convinced that he did not want to aggrandise the family, but to do his duty, she dropped her objections; and we soon saw that the occupations that his absence would impose on her would be a fresh interest in life.

Just as the decision was thus ratified, a packet from Canton arrived for Clarence from Bristol.  It was the first reply of young Frith to the tidings of the bequest which had changed the poor clerk to a wealthy man, owning a large proportion of the shares of the prosperous house.

I asked if he were coming home, and Clarence briefly replied that he did not know,—‘it depended—’

‘Is he going to wed a fair Chinese with lily feet?’ asked Martyn, to which the reply was an unusually discourteous ‘Bosh,’ as Clarence escaped with his letter.  He was so reticent about it that I required a solemn assurance that poor Lawrence’s head had not been turned by his fortune, and that there was nothing wrong with him.  Indeed, there was great stupidity in never guessing the purport of that thick letter, nor that it contained one for Emily, where Lawrence Frith laid himself, and all that he had, at her feet, ascribing to her all the resolution with which he had kept from evil, and entreating permission to come home and endeavour to win her heart.  We lived so constantly together that it is surprising that Clarence contrived to give the letter to Emily in private.  She implored him to say nothing to us, and brought him the next day her letter of uncompromising refusal.

He asked whether it would have been the same if he had intended to remain at home.

‘As if you were a woman, you conceited fellow,’ was all the answer she vouchsafed him.

Nor could he ascertain, nor perhaps would she herself examine, on which side lay her heart of hearts.  The proof had come whether she would abide by her pledge to him to accept the care of us in his absence.  When he asked it, it had not occurred to him that it might be a renunciation of marriage.  Now he perceived that so it had been, but she kept her counsel and so did he.  We others never guessed at what was going on between those two.

CHAPTER XLIV
PAYING THE COST

 
‘But oh! the difference to me.’
 

Wordsworth.

So Clarence was gone, and our new life begun in its changed aspect.  Emily showed an almost feverish eagerness to make it busy and cheerful, getting up a sewing class in the village, resuming the study of Greek, grappling with the natural system in botany, all of which had been fitfully proposed but hindered by interruptions and my father’s feebleness.

On a suggestion of Mr. Stafford’s, we set to work on that History of Letter Writing which, what with collecting materials, and making translations, lasted us three years altogether, and was a great resource and pleasure, besides ultimately bringing in a fraction towards the great purpose.  Emily has confessed that she worked away a good deal of vague, weary depression, and sense of monotony into those Greek choruses: but to us she was always a sunbeam, with her ever ready attention, and the playfulness which resumed more of genuine mirth after the first effort and strain of spirits were over.

Then journal-letters on either side began to bridge the gulf of separation,—those which, minus all the specially interesting portions, are to be seen in the volume we culled from them, and which had considerable success in its day.

Martyn worked in the parish and read with Mr. Henderson till he was old enough for Ordination, and then took the curacy of St. Wulstan’s, under a hardworking London vicar, and thenceforth his holidays were our festivals.  Our old London friends pitied us for what they viewed as a fearfully dull life, and in the visits they occasionally paid us thought they were doing us a great favour by bringing us new ideas and shooting our partridges.

We hardly deserved their compassion: our lives were full of interest to ourselves—that interest which comes of doing ever so feeble a stroke of work in one great cause; and there was much keen participation in the general life of the Church in the crisis through which she was passing.  We found that, what with drawing pictures, writing little books, preparing lessons for teachers, and much besides which is now ready done by the National Society and Sunday School Institute, we could do a good deal to assist Martyn in his London work, and our own grew upon us.

For the first year of her widowhood, my mother shrank from society, and afterwards had only spasmodic fits of doubt whether it were not her duty to make my sister go out more.  So that now and then Emily did go to a party, or to make a visit of some days or weeks from home, and then we knew how valuable she was.  It would be hard to say whether my mother were relieved or disappointed when Emily refused James Eastwood, in spite of many persuasions, not only from himself, but his family.  I believe mamma thought it selfish to be glad, and that it was a failure in duty not to have performed that weighty matter of marrying her daughter; feeling in some way inferior to ladies who had disposed of a whole flock under five and twenty, whereas she had not been able to get rid of a single one!

Of Clarence’s doings in China I need not speak; you have read of them in the book for yourselves, and you know how his work prospered, so that the results more than fulfilled his expectations, and raised the firm to the pitch of greatness and reputation which it has ever since preserved, and this without soiling his hands with the miserable opium traffic.  Some of the subordinates were so set on the gains to be thus obtained, that he and Lawrence Frith had a severe struggle with them to prevent it, and were forced conjointly to use all their authority as principals to make it impossible.  Those two were the greatest of friends.  Their chief relaxation was one another’s company, and their earnest aim was to support the Christian mission, and to keep up the tone of their English dependants, a terribly difficult matter, and one that made the time of their return somewhat doubtful, even when Walter Castleford was gone out to relieve them.  Their health had kept up so well that we had ceased to be anxious on that point, and it was through the Castlefords that we received the first hint that Clarence might not be as well as his absence of complaint had led us to believe.

In fact he had never been well since a terrible tempest, when he had worked hard and exposed himself to save life.  I never could hear the particulars, for Lawrence was away, and Clarence could not write about it himself, having been prostrated by one of those chills so perilous in hot countries; but from all I have heard, no resident in Hong-Kong would have believed that Mr. Winslow’s courage could ever have been called in question.  He ought to have come home immediately after that attack of fever; for the five years were over, and his work nearly done; but there was need to consolidate his achievements, and a strong man is only too apt to trifle with his health.  We might have guessed something by the languor and brevity of his letters, but we thought the absence of detail owing to his expectation of soon seeing us; and had gone on for months expecting the announcement of a speedy return, when an unexpected shock fell on us.  Our dear mother was still an active woman, with few signs of age about her, when, in her sixty-seventh year, she was almost suddenly taken from us by an attack of gout in the stomach.

I feel as if I had not done her justice, and as if she might seem stern, unsympathising, and lacking in tenderness.  Yet nothing could be further from the truth.  She was an old-fashioned mother, who held it her duty to keep up her authority, and counted over-familiarity and indulgence as sins.  To her ‘the holy spirit of discipline was the beginning of wisdom,’ and to make her children godly, truthful, and honourable was a much greater object than to win their love.  And their love she had, and kept to a far higher degree than seems to be the case with those who court affection by caresses and indulgence.  We knew that her approval was of a generous kind, we prized enthusiastically her rare betrayals of her motherly tenderness, and we depended on her in a manner we only realised in the desolation, dreariness, and helplessness that fell upon us, when we knew that she was gone.  She had not, nor had any of us, understood that she was dying, and she had uttered only a few words that could imply any such thought.  On hearing that there was a letter from Clarence, she said, ‘Poor Clarence!  I should like to have seen him.  He is a good boy after all.  I’ve been hard on him, but it will all be right now.  God Almighty bless him!’

That was the only formal blessing she left among us.  Indeed, the last time I saw her was with an ordinary good-night at the foot of the stairs.  Emily said she was glad that I had not to carry with me the remembrance of those paroxysms of suffering.  My dear Emily had alone the whole force of that trial—or shall I call it privilege?  Martyn did not reach home till some hours after all was over, poor boy.

And in the midst of our desolateness, just as we had let the daylight in again upon our diminished numbers round the table, came a letter from Hong-Kong, addressed to me in Lawrence Frith’s writing, and the first thing I saw was a scrawl, as follows:—

‘Dearest Ted—All is in your hands.  You can do it.  God bless you all.  W. C. W.’

When I came to myself, and could see and hear, Martyn was impressing on me that where there is life there is hope, though indeed, according to poor Lawrence’s letter, there was little of either.  He feared our hearing indirectly, and therefore wrote to prepare us.

He had been summoned to Hong-Kong to find Clarence lying desperately ill, for the most part semi-delirious, holding converse with invisible forms, or entreating some one to let him alone—he had done his best.  In one of his more lucid intervals he had made Lawrence find that note in a case that lay near him, and promise to send it; and he had tried to send some messages, but they had become confused, and he was too weak to speak further.

The next mail was sure to bring the last tidings of one who had given his life for right and justice.  It was only a reprieve that what it actually brought was the intelligence that he was still alive, and more sensible, and had been able to take much pleasure in seeing the friend of his youth, Captain Coles, who was there with his ship, the Douro.  Then there had been a relapse.  Captain Coles had brought his doctor to see him, and it had been pronounced that the best chance of saving him was a sea-voyage.  The Douro had just received orders to return to England, and Coles had offered to take home both the friends as guests, though there was evidently little hope that our brother would reach any earthly home.  As we knew afterwards, he had smiled and said it was like rehabilitation to have the chance of dying on board one of H.M. ships.  And he was held in such respect, and was so entirely one of the leading men of the little growing colony, and had been known as such a friend to the naval men, and had so gallantly aided a Queen’s ship in that hurricane, that his passage home in this manner only seemed a natural tribute of respect.  A few last words from Lawrence told us that he was safely on board, all unconscious of the silent, almost weeping, procession that had escorted his litter to the Douro’s boat, only too much as if it were his bier.  In fact, Captain Coles actually promised him that if he died at sea he should be buried with the old flag.

We could not hope to hear more for at least six weeks, since our letter had come by overland mail, and the Douro would take her time.  It was a comfort in this waiting time that Martyn could be with us.  His rector had been promoted; there was a general change of curates; and as Martyn had been working up to the utmost limits of his strength, we had no scruple in inducing him to remain with us, and undertake nothing fresh till this crisis was past.  Though as to rest, not one Sunday passed without requests for his assistance from one or more of the neighbouring clergy.

CHAPTER XLV
ACHIEVED

 
‘And hopes and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng,
And gentle wishes long subdued—
Subdued and cherished long.’
 

S. T. Coleridge.

The first that we did hear of our brother was a letter with a Falmouth postmark, which we scarcely dared to open.  There was not much in it, but that was enough.  ‘D. G.—I shall see you all again.  We put in at Portsmouth.’

There was no staying at home after that.  We three lost no time in starting, for railways had become available, and by the time we had driven from the station at Portsmouth the Douro had been signalled.

Martyn took a boat and went on board alone, for besides that Emily did not like to leave me, her dress would have been a revelation that all were no longer there to greet the arrival.  The precaution was, however, unnecessary.  There stood Clarence on deck, and after the first greeting, he laid his hand on Martyn’s arm and said, ‘My mother is gone?’ and on the wondering assent, ‘I was quite sure of it.’

So they came ashore, Clarence lying in the man-of-war’s boat, in which his friend insisted on sending him, able now to give a smiling response and salute to the three cheers with which the crew took leave of him.  He was carried up to our hotel on a stretcher by half-a-dozen blue jackets.  Indeed he was grievously changed, looking so worn and weak, so hollow-eyed and yellow, and so fearfully wasted, that the very memory is painful; and able to do nothing but lie on the sofa holding Emily’s hand, gazing at us with a face full of ineffable peace and gladness.  There was a misgiving upon me that he had only come back to finish his work and bid us farewell.

Kindly and considerately they had sent him on before with Martyn.  In a quarter of an hour’s time his good doctor came in with Lawrence Frith, a considerable contrast to our poor Clarence, for the slim gypsy lad had developed into a strikingly handsome man, still slender and lithe, but with a fine bearing, and his bronzed complexion suiting well with his dark shining hair and beautiful eyes.  They had brought some of the luggage, and the doctor insisted that his patient should go to bed directly, and rest completely before trying to talk.

Then we heard that his condition, though still anxious, was far from being hopeless, and that after the tropics had been passed, he had been gradually improving.  The kind doctor had got leave to go up to London with us, and talk over the case with L–, and he hoped Clarence might be able to bear the journey by the next afternoon.

Presently after came Captain Coles, whom we had not seen since the short visit when we had idolised the big overgrown midshipman, whom Clarence exhibited to our respectful and distant admiration nearly twenty years ago.  My mother used to call him a gentlemanly lad, and that was just what he was still, with a singularly soft gentle manner, gallant officer and post-captain as he was.  He cheered me much, for he made no doubt of Clarence’s ultimate recovery, and he added that he had found the dear fellow so valued and valuable, so useful in all good works, and so much respected by all the English residents, ‘that really,’ said the captain, ‘I did not know whether to deplore that the service should have lost such a man, or whether to think it had been a good thing for him, though not for us, that—that he got into such a scrape.’

I said something of our thanks.

‘To tell you the truth,’ said Coles, ‘I had my doubts whether it had not been a cruel act, for he had a terrible turn after we got him on board, and all the sounds of a Queen’s ship revived the past associations, and always of a painful kind in his delirium, till at last, just as I gave him up, the whole character of his fancies seemed to change, and from that time he has been gaining every day.’

We kept the captain to dinner, and gathered a good deal more understanding of the important position to which Clarence had risen by force of character and rectitude of purpose in that strange little Anglo-Chinese colony; and afterwards, I was allowed to make a long visit to Clarence, who, having eaten and slept, was quite ready to talk.

It seemed that the great distress of his illness had been the recurrence—nay, aggravation—of the strange susceptibility of brain and nerve that had belonged to his earlier days, and with it either imagination or perception of the spirit-world.  Much that had seemed delirium had belonged to that double consciousness, and he perfectly recollected it.  As Coles had said, the sights and sounds of the ship had been a renewal of the saddest time in his life; he could not at night divest himself of the impression that he was under arrest, and the sins of his life gathered themselves in fearful and oppressive array, as if to stifle him, and the phantom of poor Margaret with her lamp—which had haunted him from the beginning of his illness—seemed to taunt him with having been too fainthearted and tardy to be worthy to espouse her cause.  The faith to which he tried to cling would seem to fail him in those awful hours, when he could only cry out mechanical prayers for mercy.  Then there had come a night when he had heard my mother say, ‘All right now; God Almighty bless him.’  And therewith the clouds cleared from his mind.  The power of feeling, as well as believing in, the blotting out of sin, returned, the sense of pardon and peace calmed him, and from that time he was fully himself again, ‘though,’ he said, ‘I knew I should not see my mother here.’

If she could only have seen him come home under the Union Jack, cheered by sailors, and carried ashore by them, it would have been to her like restoration.  Perhaps Clarence in his dreamy weakness had so felt it, for certainly no other mode of return to Portsmouth, the very place of his degradation, could so have soothed him and effaced those memories.  The English sounds were a perfect charm to him, as well as to Lawrence, the commonest street cry, the very slices of bread and butter, anything that was not Chinese, was as water to the thirsty!  And wasted as was his face, the quiet rest and joy were ineffable.

Still Portsmouth was not the best place for him, and we were glad that he was well enough to go up to London in the afternoon; intensely delighting in the May beauty of the green meadows, and white blossoming hedgerows, and the Church towers, especially the gray massiveness of Winchester Cathedral.  ‘Christian tokens,’ he said, instead of the gay, gilded pagodas and quaint crumpled roofs he had left.  The soft haze seemed to be such a rest after the glare of perpetual clearness.

We were all born Londoners, and looked at the blue fog, and the broad, misty river, and the brooding smoke, with the affection of natives, to the amazement of Lawrence, who had never been in town without being browbeaten and miserable.  That he hardly was now, as he sat beside Emily all the way up, though they did not say much to one another.

He told us it was quite a new sensation to walk into the office without timidity, and to have no fears of a biting, crushing speech about his parents or himself; but to have the clerks getting up deferentially as soon as he was known for Mr. Frith.  He had hardly ever been allowed by his old uncle to come across Mr. Castleford, who was of course cordial and delighted to receive him, and, without loss of time, set forth to see Clarence.

The consultation with the physician had taken place, and it was not concealed from us that Clarence’s health was completely shattered, and his state still very precarious, needing the utmost care to give him any chance of recovering the effects of the last two years, when he had persevered, in spite of warning, in his eagerness to complete his undertaking, and then to secure what he had effected.  The upshot of the advice given him was to spend the summer by the seaside, and if he had by that time gathered strength, and surmounted the symptoms of disease, to go abroad, as he was not likely to be able as yet to bear English cold.  Business and cares were to be avoided, and if he had anything necessary to be done, it had better be got over at once, so as to be off his mind.  Martyn and Frith gathered that the case was thought doubtful, and entirely dependent on constitution and rallying power.  Clarence himself seemed almost passive, caring only for our presence and the accomplishment of his task.

We had a blessed thanksgiving for mercies received in the Margaret Street Chapel, as we called what is now All Saints; but he and I were unfit for crowds, and on Sunday morning availed ourselves of a friend’s seat in our old church, which felt so natural and homelike to us elders that Martyn was scandalised at our taste.  But it was the church of our Confirmation and first Communion, and Clarence rejoiced that it was that of his first home-coming Eucharist.  What a contrast was he now to the shrinking boy, scarcely tolerated under his stigmatised name.  Surely the Angel had led him all his life through!

How happy we two were in the afternoon, while the others conducted Lawrence to some more noteworthy church.

‘Now,’ said Clarence, ‘let us go down to Beachharbour.  It must be done at once.  I have been trying to write, and I can’t do it,’ and his face lighted with a quiet smile which I understood.

So we wrote to the principal hotel to secure rooms, and set forth on Tuesday, leaving Frith to finish with Mr. Castleford what could not be settled in the one business interview that had been held with Clarence on the Monday.