Book: A Noble Life

D >> Dinah Maria Mulock Craik >> A Noble Life




"Your faithful and loving friend,

"Helen Cardross."

Thus she had written, and thus he sat and read--these two, who had
been and were so dear to one another. Perhaps the good angels, who
watch over human lives and human destinies, might have looked with pity
upon both.

As for Helen's father, and Helen herself too, if (as some severe judges
may say) they erred in suffering themselves to be thus easily deceived
--in believing a man upon little more than his own testimony, and in
loving him as bad men are sometimes loved, under a strong delusion, by
even good women, surely the errors of unworldliness, unselfishness, and
that large charity which "thinketh no evil" are not so common in this
world as to be quite unpardonable. Better, tenfold, to be sinned
against than sinning.

"Better trust all, and be deceived,
And weep that trust and that deceiving,
Than doubt one heart which, if believed,
Had bless'd one's life with true believing."

Lord Cairnforth did not think this at the time, but he learned to do so
afterward. He learned, when time brought round its divine amende,
neither to reproach himself so bitterly, nor to blame others; and he
knew it was better to accept any sad earthly lot, any cruelty, deceit,
or wrong inflicted by others, than to have hardened his heart against
any living soul by acts of causeless suspicion or deliberate injustice.

Meanwhile, the marriage was accomplished. All that Helen's fondest
friend could do was to sit and watch the event of things, as the earl
determined to watch--silently, but with a vigilance that never slept.
Not passively neither. He took immediate steps, by means which his
large fortune and now wide connection easily enable him to employ, to
find out exactly the position of Helen's husband, both his present
circumstances, and, so far as was possible, his antecedents, at home or
abroad. For after the discovery of so many atrocious, deliberate lies,
every fact that Captain Bruce had stated concerning himself remained
open to doubt.

However, the lies were apparently that sort of falsehood which springs
from a brilliant imagination, a lax conscience, and a ready tongue--
prone to say whatever comes easiest and upper most. Also, because
probably following the not uncommon Jesuitical doctrine that the end
justifies the means, he had, for whatever reason he best knew,
determined to marry Helen Cardross, and took his own measures
accordingly.

The main facts of his self-told history turned out to be correct. He
was certainly the identical Ernest Henry Bruce, only surviving son of
Colonel Bruce, and had undoubtedly been in India, a captain in the
Company's service. His medals were veritable--won by creditable
bravery. No absolute moral turpitude could be discovered concerning him
--only a careless, reckless life; and utter indifference to debt; and
a convenient readiness to live upon other people's money rather than his
own--qualities not so rare, or so sharply judged in the world at
large, as they were likely to be by the little world of innocent, honest
Cairnforth.

And yet he was young--he had married a good wife--he might mend.
At present, plain and indisputable, his character stood--
good-natured, kindly--perhaps not even unlovable--but destitute of
the very foundations of all that constitutes worth in a man--or woman
either--truthfulness, independence, honor, honesty. And he was
Helen's husband--Helen, the true and the good; the poor minister's
daughter, who had been brought up to think that it was better to starve
upon porridge and salt than to owe any one a halfpenny! What sort of a
marriage could it possibly turn out to be?

To this question, which Lord Cairnforth asked himself continually, in an
agony of doubt, no answer came--no clue whatsoever, though, from even
the first week, Helen's letters reached the Manse as regularly as clock
work. But they were merely outside letters--very sweet and loving
--telling her father every thing that could interest him about foreign
places, persons, and things; only of herself and her own feelings saying
almost nothing. It was unlikely she should: the earl laid this comfort
to his soul twenty times a day. She was married now; she could not be
expected to be frank as in her girlhood; still, this total silence, so
unnatural to her candid disposition, alarmed him.

But there was no resource--no help. Into that secret chamber which
her own hand thus barred, no other hand could presume to break. No one
could say--ought to say to a wife, "Your husband is a scoundrel."

And besides, (to this hope Lord Cairnforth clung with a desperation
heroic as bitter), Captain Bruce might not be an irredeemable scoundrel;
and he might--there was still a chance--have married Helen not
altogether from interested motives. She was so lovable that he might
have loved her, or have grown to love her, even though he had slighted
her at first.

"He must have loved her--he could not help it," groaned the earl,
inwardly, when the minister and others stabbed him from time to time
with little episodes of the courting days--the captain's devotedness
to Helen, and Helen's surprised, fond delight at being so much "made of"
by the first lover who had ever wooed her, and a lover whom externally
any girl would have been proud of. And then the agonized cry of another
faithful heart went up to heaven--"God grant he may love her; that
she may be happy--anyhow--any where!"

But all this while, with the almost morbid prevision of his character,
Lord Cairnforth took every precaution that Helen should be guarded, as
much as was possible, in case there should befall her that terrible
calamity, the worst that can happen to a woman--of being compelled to
treat the husband and father, the natural protector, helper, and guide
of herself and her children, as not only her own, but their natural
enemy.

The earl did not cancel Helen's name from his will; he let every thing
stand as before her marriage; but he took the most sedulous care to
secure her fortune unalienably to herself and her offspring. This,
because, if Captain Bruce were honest, such precaution could not affect
him in the least: man and wife are one flesh--settlements were a mere
form, which love would only smile at, and at which any honorable man
must be rather glad of than otherwise. But if her husband were
dishonorable, Helen was made safe, so far as worldly matters went--
safe, except for the grief from which, alas! no human friend can protect
another--a broken heart!

Was her heart broken or breaking?

The earl could not tell nor even guess. She left them at home not a
loophole whereby to form a conjecture. Her letters came regularly, from
January until May, dated from all sorts of German towns, chiefly
gambling towns; but the innocent dwellers at Cairnforth (save the earl)
did not know this fact. They were sweet, fond letters as ever--
mindful, with a pathetic minuteness, of every body and every thing at
the dear old home; but not a complaint was breathed--not a murmur of
regret concerning her marriage. She wrote very little of her husband;
gradually, Lord Cairnforth fancied, less and less. They had not been to
the south of France, as was ordered by the physicians, and intended. He
preferred, she said, these German town, where he met his own family--
his father and sisters. Of these, as even the minister himself at
length noticed with surprise, Helen gave no description, favorable or
otherwise; indeed, did not say of her husband's kindred, beyond the bare
fact that she was living with them, one single word.

Eagerly the earl scanned her letters--those long letters, which Mr.
Cardross brought up immediately to the Castle and then circulated their
contents round the whole parish with the utmost glee and pride; for the
whole parish was in its turn dying to hear news of "Miss Helen." Still,
nothing could be discovered of her real life and feelings. And at last
her friend's fever of uneasiness calmed down a little; he contented
himself with still keeping a constant watch over all her movements--
speaking to no one, trusting no one, except so far as he was obliged to
trust the old clerk who was once sent down by Mr. Menteith, and who had
now come to end his days at Cairnforth, in the position of the earl's
private secretary--as faithful and fond as a dog, and as safely
silent.

So wore the time away, as it wears on with all of us, through joy and
sorrow, absence or presence, with cheerful fullness or aching emptiness
of heart. It brought spring back, and summer--the sunshine to the
hills, and the leaves, and flowers, and birds to the woods; it brought
the earl's birthday--kept festively as ever by his people, who loved
him better every year; but it did not bring Helen home to Cairnforth.





Chapter 12

Life, when we calmly analyze it, is made up to us all alike of three
simple elements--joy, sorrow, and work. Some of us get tolerably
equal proportions of each of these; some unequal--or we fancy so; but
in reality, as the ancient sage says truly, "the same things come alike
to all."

The Earl of Cairnforth, in his imperfect fragment of a life, had had
little enough of enjoyment; but he knew how to endure better than most
people. He had, however, still to learn that existence is not wholly
endurance; that a complete human life must have in it not only
submission but resistance; the fighting against evil and in defense of
good; the struggle with divine help to overcome evil with good; and
finally the determination not to sit down tamely to misery but to strive
after happiness--lawful happiness, both for ourselves and others. In
short, not only passively to accept joy or grief, but to take means to
secure the one and escape the other; to "work out our own salvation" for
each day, as we are told to do it for an eternity, though with the same
divine limitation--humbling to all pride, and yet encouraging to
ceaseless effort--"for it is God that worketh in us both to will and
to do of His good pleasure."

That self-absorption of loss, which follows all great anguish; that
shrinking up unto one's self, which is the first and most natural
instinct of a creature smitten with a sorrow not unmingled with cruel
wrong, is, with most high natures, only temporary. By-and-by comes the
merciful touch which says to the lame, "Arise and walk;" to the sick,
"Take up thy bed and go into thine house." And the whisper of peace is,
almost invariably, a whisper of labor and effort: there is not only
something to be suffered, but something to be done.

With the earl this state was longer in coming, because the prior
collapse did not come to him at once. The excitement of perpetual
expectation--the preparing for some catastrophe, which he felt sure
was to follow, and the incessant labor entailed by his wide enquiries,
in which he had no confidant but Mr. Mearns, the clerk, and him he
trusted as little as possible, lest any suspicion or disgrace should
fall upon Helen's husband--all this kept him in a state of unnatural
activity and strength.

But when the need for action died away; when Helen's letters betrayed
nothing; and when, though she did not return, and while expressing most
bitter regret, yet gave sufficiently valid reasons for not returning in
her husband's still delicate health--after June, Lord Cairnforth fell
into a condition, less of physical than mental sickness, which lasted a
long time, and was very painful to himself, as well as to those that
loved him. He was not ill, but his usual amount of strength--so
small always--became much reduced; neither was he exactly irritable
--his sweet temper never could sink into irritability; but he was, as
Malcolm expressed it, "dour," difficult to please; easily fretted about
trifles; inclined to take sad and cynical views of things.




This might have been increased by certain discoveries, which, during the
summer, when he came to look into his affairs, Lord Cairnforth made. He
found that money which he had entrusted to Captain Bruce for various
purposes had been appropriated, or misappropriated, in different ways
--conduct scarcely exposing the young man to legal investigation, and
capable of being explained away as "carelessness"--"unpunctuality in
money matters"--and so on, but conduct of which no strictly upright,
honorable person would ever have been guilty. This fact accounted for
another--the captain's having expressed ardent gratitude for a sum
which he said the earl had given him for his journey and marriage
expenses, which, though Mr. Cardross's independent spirit rather
revolted from the gift, at least satisfied him about Helen's comfort
during her temporary absence. And once more, for Helen's sake, the earl
kept silence. But he felt as if every good and tender impulse of his
nature were hardening into stone.

Hardened at the core Lord Cairnforth could never be; no man can whose
heart has once admitted into its deepest sanctuary the love of One who,
when all human loves fail, still whispers, "We will come in unto him,
and make our abode with him"--ay, be it the forlornest bodily
tabernacle in which immortal soul ever dwelt. But there came an outer
crust of hardness over his nature which was years before it quite melted
away. Common observers might not perceive it--Mr. Cardross even did
not; still it was there.

The thing was inevitable. Right or wrong, deservedly or undeservedly,
most of us have at different crises of our lives known this feeling--
the bitter sense of being wronged; of having opened one's heart to the
sunshine, and had it all blighted and blackened with frost; of having
laid one's self down in a passion of devotedness for beloved feet to
walk upon, and been trampled upon, and beaten down to the dust. And as
months slipped by, and there came no Helen, this feeling, even against
his will and his conscience, grew very much upon Lord Cairnforth. In
time it might have changed him to a bitter, suspicious, disappointed
cynic, had there not also come to him, with strong conviction, one truth
--a truth preached on the shores of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago
--the only truth that can save the wronged heart from breaking--
that he who gives away only a cup of cold water shall in no wise lose
his reward. Still, the reward is not temporal, and is rarely rewarded
in kind. He--and He alone--to whom the debt is due, repays it;
not in our, but in his own way. One only consolation remains to the
sufferers from ingratitude, but that one is all-sufficing: "Inasmuch as
ye have done it unto the least of these little ones, ye have done it
unto Me."

All autumn, winter, and during another spring and summer, Helen's
letters--most fond, regular, and (to her father) satisfactory--
contained incessant and eager hopes of return, which were never
fulfilled. And gradually she ceased to give any reason for their
non-fulfillment, simply saying, with a sad brevity of silence, which
one, at least, of her friends knew how to comprehend and appreciate,
that her coming home at present was "impossible."

"It's very true," said the good minister, disappointed as he was: "a man
must cleave to his wife, and a woman to her husband. I suppose the
captain finds himself better in warm countries--he always said so.
My bairn will come back when she can--I know she will. And the boys
are very good--specially Duncan."

For Mr. Cardross had now, he thought, discovered germs of ability in his
youngest boy, and was concentrating all his powers in educating him for
college and the ministry. This, and his growing absorption in his
books, reconciled him more than might have been expected to his
daughter's absence; or else the inevitable necessity of things, which,
as we advance in years, becomes so strange and consoling an influence
over us, was working slowly upon the good old minister. He did not seem
heart-broken or even heart-wounded--he did his parish work with
unfailing diligence; but as, Sunday after Sunday, he passed from the
Manse garden through the kirk-yard, where, green and moss-covered now,
was the one white stone which bore the name of "Helen Lindsay, wife of
the Reverend Alexander Cardross," he was often seen to glance at it less
sorrowfully than smilingly. Year by year, the world and its cares were
lessening and slipping away from him, as they had long since slipped
from her who once shared them all. She now waited for him in that
eternal reunion which the marriage union teaches, as perhaps none other
can, to realize as a living fact and natural necessity.

But it was different with the earl. Sometimes, in an agony of
bitterness, he caught himself blaming her--Helen--whom her old
father never blamed; wondering how much she had found out of her
husband's conduct and character; speculating whether it was possible to
touch pitch and not be defiled; and whether the wife of Captain Bruce
had become in any way different from, and inferior to, innocent Helen
Cardross.

Lord Cairnforth had never answered her letter--he could not, without
being a complete hypocrite; and she had not written again. He did not
expect it--scarcely wished it--and yet the blank was sore. More
and more he withdrew from all but necessary associations, shutting
himself up in the Castle for weeks together--neither reading, nor
talking much to any one, but sitting quite still--he always sat quite
still--by the fireside in his little chair. He felt creeping over him
that deadness to external things which makes pain itself seem
comparatively almost sweet. Once he was heard to say, looking wistfully
at Mrs. Campbell, who had been telling him with many tears, of a "freend
o' hers" who had just died down at the clachan, "Nurse, I wish I could
greet like you."

The first thing which broke up in his heart this bitter, blighting frost
was, as so often happens, the sharp-edged blow of a new trouble.

He had not been at the Manse for two or three weeks, and had not even
heard of the family for several days, when, looking up from his seat in
church, he was startled by the apparition of an unfamiliar face in the
pulpit--a voluble, flowery-tongued, foolish young assistant,
evidently caught haphazard to fill the place which Mr. Cardross, during
a long term of years, had never vacated, except at communion seasons.
It gave his faithful friend and pupil a sensation almost of pain to see
any new figure there, and not the dear old minister's, with his long
white hair, his earnest manner, and his simple, short sermon. Shorter
and simpler the older he grew, till he often declared he should end by
preaching like the beloved apostle John, who, tradition says, in his
latter days, did nothing but repeat, over and over again, to all around
him, his one exhortation--he, the disciple whom Jesus loved--

"Little children, love one another."

On inquiry after service, the earl found that Mr. Cardross had been
ailing all week, and had had on Saturday to procure in haste this
substitute. But, on going to the Manse, the earl found him much as
usual, only complaining of a numbness in his arm.

"And," he said, with a composure very different from his usual
nervousness about the slightest ailment, "Now I remember, my mother died
of paralysis. I wish Helen would come home."

"Shall she be sent for?" suggested Lord Cairnforth.

"Oh no--not the least necessity. Besides, she says she is coming."

"She has long said that."

"But now she is determined to make the strongest effort to be with us at
the New Year. Read her letter--it came yesterday; a week later than
usual. I should have sent it up to the Castle, for it troubled me a
little, especially the postscript; can you make it out? part of it is
under the seal. It is in answer to what I told her of Duncan; he was
always her pet, you know. How she used to carry him about the garden,
even when he grew quite a big boy! Poor Helen!"

While the minister went on talking, feebly and wanderingly, in a way
that at another time would have struck the earl as something new and
rather alarming, Lord Cairnforth eagerly read the letter. It ended
thus:

"Tell Dunnie I am awfully glad he is to be a minister. I hope all my
brothers will settle down in dear old Scotland, work hard, and pay their
way like honest men. And bid them, as soon as ever they can, to marry
honest women--good, loving Scotch lassies--no fremd (archaic:
strange, foreign) folk. Tell them never to fear for 'poortith cauld,'
as Mr. Burns wrote about; it's easy to bear, when it's honest poverty.
I would rather see my five brothers living on porridge and milk--
wives, and weans, and all--than see them like these foreigners,
counts, barons, and princes though they be. Father, I hate them all.
And I mind always the way I was brought up, and that I was once a
minister's daughter in dear and bonnie Cairnforth."

"What can she mean by that?" said Mr. Cardross, watching anxiously the
earl's countenance as he read.

I suppose, what Helen always means, exactly what she says."

"That is true. You know we used always to say Helen could hold her
tongue, though it wasn't easy to her, the dear lassie; but she could not
say what was not the fact, nor even give the impression of it.
Therefore, if she were unhappy, she would have told me?"

This was meant as a question, but it gained no answer.

"Surely," entreated the father, anxiously, "surely you do not think the
lassie is unhappy?"

"This is not a very happy world," said the earl, sadly. "But I do
believe that if any thing had been seriously wrong with her Helen would
have told us."

He spoke his real belief. But he did not speak of a dread far deeper,
which had sometimes occurred to him, but which that sad and even bitter
postscript now removed, that circumstances could change character, and
that Helen Cardross and Helen Bruce were two different women.

As he went home, having arranged to come daily every forenoon to sit
with the minister, and to read a little Greek with Duncan, lest the
lad's studies should be interrupted, he decided that, in her father's
state, which appeared to him the more serious the longer he considered
it, it was right Helen should come home, and somebody, not Mr. Cardross,
ought to urge it upon her. He determined to do this himself. And, lest
means should be wanting--though of this he had no reason to fear, his
information from all quarters having always been that the Bruce family
lived more than well--luxuriously--he resolved to offer a gift
with which he had not before dared to think of insulting independent
Helen--money.

With difficulty and pains, not intrusting this secret to even his
faithful secretary, he himself wrote a few lines, in his own feeble,
shaky hand, telling her exactly how things were; suggesting her coming
home, and inclosing wherewithal to do it, from "her affectionate old
friend and cousin," from whom she need not hesitate to accept any thing.
But though he carefully, after long consideration, signed himself her
"cousin," he did not once name Captain Bruce. He could not.

This done, he waited day after day, till every chance of Helen's not
having had time to reply was long over, and still no answer came. That
the letter had been received was more than probable, almost certain.
Every possible interpretation that common sense allowed Lord Cairnforth
gave to her silence, and all failed. Then he let the question rest. To
distrust her, Helen, his one pure image of perfection, was impossible.
He felt it would have killed him--not his outer life, perhaps, but
the life of his heart, his belief in human goodness.

So he still waited, nor judged her either as daughter or friend, but
contented himself with doing her apparently neglected duty for her--
making himself an elder brother to Duncan, and a son to the minister,
and never missing a day without spending some hours at the Manse.

For almost the first time since her departure, Helen's regular monthly
letter did not arrive, and the earl grew seriously alarmed. In the
utmost perplexity, he was resolving in his own mind what next step to
take--how, and how much he ought to tell of his anxieties to her
father--when all difficulties were solved in the sharpest and yet
easiest way by a letter from Helen herself--a letter so unlike
Helen's, so un-neat, blurred, and blotted, that at first he did not even
recognize it as hers.

"To the Right Honorable the Earl of Cairnforth:

"My Lord,--I have only just found your letter. The money inclosed
was not there. I conclude it had been used for our journey hither; but
it is gone, and I can not come to my dearest father. My husband is very
ill, and my little baby only three weeks old. Tell my father this, and
send me news of him soon. Help me, for I am almost beside myself with
misery!

"Yours gratefully,

"Helen Bruce

"---- Street, Edinburg."

Edinburg! Then she was come home!

The earl had opened and read the letter with his secretary sitting by
him. Yet, dull and not prone to notice things as the old man was, he
was struck by an unusual tone of something very like exultation in his
master's voice as he said,

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