CHAPTER I.

HOMEWARD BOUND.

"Good-bye, again; good-bye!"

"Good-bye, my dear; perhaps not for ever, though: I may make my way back to the old country once more. You will tell my old friend I kept my word to him:" and then the speaker kissed the woman to whom he addressed these parting words tenderly, went quickly away, and was hidden from her in a moment by all the bewildering confusion of "board ship" at the hour of sailing.

He had not waited for words in reply to his farewell; she could not have spoken them, and he knew it; and while she tried to make out his figure among the groups upon the deck, formed of those who were about to set forth upon the long perilous ocean voyage, and those who had come to bid them good-bye, some with hearts full of agony, a few careless and gay enough, a suffocating silence held her.

But when at length she saw him for one brief moment as he went over the side to the boat waiting to take him to the shore so long familiar to her, but already, under the wonderful action of change, seeming strange and distant, the spell was lifted off her, and a deep gasping sob burst from her lips.

A very little longer, and the boat, with its solitary passenger, was a speck upon the water; and then she bowed her head, unconsciously, and slightly waved her hand, and went below.

There was no one person in all the crowd upon the deck of the good ship Boomerang sufficiently disengaged from his or her own cares to take any notice of the little scene which had just passed—only one amid a number in the great drama which is always being acted, and for which a ship with its full complement of passengers, at the moment of beginning a long voyage, is a capacious and fine theatre. Selfishness and self-engrossment come out strongly in such a scene, and are as excusable under such circumstances as they ever can be.

She was quite alone in the little world of the ship; in the great world of England, to which she was going, she might find herself alone too, for who could say what tidings might await her there? in the inner world of her heart she was still more surely and utterly alone. In the slight shiver, in the forlorn glance around, which had accompanied her gesture of farewell to the man who had escorted her on board, there was something expressive of a suddenly deepened sense of this solitude.

In the cabin, which she shared with her maid only, she found this sole and newly-selected companion making such preparation as she could for the comfort of her mistress. The girl's face was kind and pleasant and handsome; but the sight of it did not lessen the sense of her solitude to Margaret Hungerford, for the kind and handsome face was also strange.

Rose Moore, whom she had engaged to act as her servant during the voyage, was an orphan girl, who wished to return to Ireland to her "friends," as the Irish people, with striking inaccuracy of speech and touching credulity, designate their relatives.

When Margaret Hungerford had lain down upon the little crib, which was to serve her for a bed during a period which would sound appalling in duration in the ears of a world so much accelerated in everything as our world of to-day is, she thought of Rose Moore, and of the difference between her own position and that of the girl who was to be her companion.

"She is going home to friends," she thought, "to a warm welcome, to a kindly fireside, and she is bringing money with her to gild the welcome, to gladden the hearth; while I—I am returning alone—O, how utterly alone!—and destitute—ah, how destitute!—I, to whom not even the past is left; I, who do not possess even the right to grieve; I, to whom life has been only a mistake, only a delusion. I am returning to a home in which I was regarded rather as a trouble than anything else in my childhood, and which I was held to have disgraced in my girlhood. Returning to it, to feel that the judgment I set aside, the wisdom I derided, was right judgment and true wisdom, and that the best I can hope is to keep them from ever finding out how terribly right they were. The only real friend I now possess I am leaving behind me here; and I am glad it is so, because he knows all the truth. Surely no one in the world can be more lonely than I."

Margaret Hungerford lay quietly in her narrow bed, while the ship resounded with all the indescribable and excruciating noises which form a portion of the tortures of a sea-voyage.

She did not suffer from them, nor from the motion. She was tired, too tired in body and mind to care about discomfort, and she did not dislike the sea. So she lay still, while Rose Moore moved about in the little space allotted to the two, and which she regarded as a den rather than a "state-room," looking now and then curiously at her mistress, whom she had not had much previous opportunity of observing.

The girl looked at a face which was not less remarkable for its beauty than for its expression of weariness and sorrow, at a figure not more noticeable for its grace and suppleness than for the languor and listlessness which every movement betrayed.

Margaret Hungerford was tall, but not so tall as to be remarked for her height; and her figure, rounded and lithe, had still much of the slightness of girlhood remaining. Her face was not perfect; the forehead was too high and too heavy for ideal beauty; there was not enough colour in the clear pale cheek; there was not enough richness in the outline of the delicate mouth. Her face was one in which intellect ruled, and thus its beauty served a master which is pitiless in its exactions, and wears out the softness and the fineness and the tinting in a service which is not gentle.

But it was a beautiful face for all that, more than beautiful for those who looked beyond the deep dark colouring of the large gray eyes, deep-set under the finely-marked brows; who looked for the spirit in their light, for the calm and courage which lent them the limpid placid beaming which was their ordinary characteristic. It was not a perfect face; but it had that which very few perfect faces possess—the capacity for expressing feeling, intelligence, the nobler passions, and utter forgetfulness of self.

To look at Margaret Hungerford was to feel that, however faulty her character might be, it at least was noble, and to know that vanity had no share in an organisation which had no place for anything small, whether good or evil. It was a magnanimous resolute face—not strong, in any sense implying roughness, hardness, or self-assertion, but evincing a large capacity of loving and working and suffering.

And she had loved and worked and suffered. The bloom that was wanting to her pure fair cheek, which touched too faintly and grudgingly her small, well-curved, but ascetic lips, had vanished from her heart as well; the slight white fingers, too thin for beauty,—though the hands, clasped over her breast as she lay still with closed eyes, were curiously small and perfectly shaped,—had been unsparingly used in many and various kinds of toil in the new land, which had been wild and rough indeed when she had come there.

The girl looked at her admiringly, and with a sort of pity, for which she had no reason to give to herself except that her mistress was a widow. Explanation enough, she would have said, and naturally; and still, there was something in the face which Rose Moore felt, in her untaught, instinctive, but very acute fashion, had been there longer than three months, which was the exact period since Mrs. Hungerford's husband had died.

Who was she going to? she thought; and did she like going home? and what was she leaving behind? Not her husband's grave, the girl knew, and felt the knowledge as an Irish peasant would feel it. No, she had not even that consolation; for her husband, who had been a member of one of the earliest-formed exploring parties who had undertaken to investigate the capacities of the unknown new continent, had been killed in the Australian bush. It was better not to think what the fate of his remains had been, better that it was not known.

What, then, was this pale young widow, who looked as though her sorrow far antedated her weeds, leaving behind her? Rose Moore was not destined to know. What was she going to? the girl wondered. In the short time she had been with her, Mrs. Hungerford's kindness had been accompanied with strict reserve, and Rose had learned no more than that she was returning, probably, to her father's home; but of even that she was not certain.

Thus the "lone woman" seemed pitiable to the gay and handsome Irish girl, and the thought of it interfered with her visions of "home," and her exultation in the money she had to take thither, and the love she was going to find.

Pitiable indeed she was.

As the long low banks of Port Phillip faded from the sight of the passengers on board the "homeward bound," not a heart among the number but yearned with some keen and strong regret, too keen and strong to be overborne by the gladness of hope and the relief of having really begun the long voyage. Not a heart, not even that of Margaret Hungerford; for she had looked her last on the land where she had left her youth, and all its dreams and hopes; where love had died for her, and truth had failed; where she had been rudely awakened, and had never again found rest.

At such a time, at such a crisis in life, retrospection is inevitable, however undesirable; however painful and vain, it must be submitted to. The mind insists on passing the newly-expired epoch in review; in repeating, in the full and painful candour of its reverie, all the story so far told; in returning to the old illusions, and exposing their baselessness; in summoning up the defeated hopes, which, gauged by the measure of disappointment, appear so unreasonable—weighed in the balance of experience, seem so absurd.

Can I ever have been such a fool as to have believed that life held such possibilities? is the question we all ask at such times; and the self-contempt which inspires it is only as real, and no more, as the pain which no scorn or wonder can decrease.

So, like one performing an enforced task, with what patience it is possible to command, but wearily, and longing for the end, and for release, Margaret Hungerford, during the early days of the long voyage from Australia to England, gazed into her past life as into a mirror, and it gave her back a succession of images, of which the chief were these which follow.

CHAPTER II.

PAGES FROM THE PAST.

The woman who was now returning to her native land after a long and painful exile looked back, in her retrospective fancy, upon a home which had external beauty, calm, and comfort to recommend it. She was the daughter of a gentleman named Carteret, a man of small but independent fortune, and whose tastes, which had been too extensively and exclusively cultivated for the happiness of his son and daughter, led him to prefer a life of quietness and seclusion, in which he devoted himself to study, and to the pursuit of natural history in particular.

Mr. Carteret, who is an old man now, might have been the original of "Sir Thomas the Good," whose wife, "the fair Lady Jane," displayed such becoming resignation on his death. Mr. Carteret, like the worthy knight, "whose breath was short, and whose eyes were dim," would "pore for an hour over a bee or a flower, or the things that come creeping out after a shower:" but he was sadly blind to the subtle processes of the human heart in the development of the human beings under his own roof, which were taking place around him.

He had lost his wife very soon after the birth of his daughter, and when his son was three years old; and within little more than a year, a resolute young woman, who had long made up her mind that a pretty little country place within easy distance of London,—for Mr. Carteret lived in Reigate,—a fair position in the county society, and a comfortable income, were desirable acquisitions, married him.

People said Miss Hartley made all the preliminary arrangements, including even the proposal, herself; and though that statement was probably exaggerated, there can be little doubt that the suggestion, that it would be an advisable and agreeable circumstance that Miss Martley should become Mrs. Carteret, originated with the lady.

She was rather young, and rather pretty; and there really was not so much to be said against the match, except by Mr. Carteret's servants, who naturally did not like it. They liked it still less when the new mistress of the establishment, emulating the proverbial new broom, swept them all away, and replaced them by domestics of her own selection.

The novel state of things was not a happy condition for Mr. Carteret. He was a gentle-natured man, indifferent, rather cold, and indolent, except where his particular tastes were concerned; he pursued his own avocations with activity and energy enough, but his easy-going selfishness rendered him a facile victim to a woman who managed him by the simple and effectual expedient of letting him have his own way undisturbed, in one direction,—that one the most important to him,—and never consulting his opinion or his wishes in any other respect whatever.

Mr. Carteret might spend time and money on "specimens," on books, and on visits to naturalists and museums; he might fill his own rooms with stuffed monkeys and birds, and indulge in the newest form of cases for impaled insects, and even display very ghastly osteological trophies if he pleased; his wife in nowise molested him. But here his power was arrested—here his freedom stopped. Mrs. Carteret ruled in everything else; and he knew it, and he suffered it "for the sake of a quiet life." He had a conviction that if he tried opposition, his life would not be quiet; therefore he never did try opposition.

The new Mrs. Carteret did not actually ill-treat the children of the former Mrs. Carteret; she only neglected them—neglected them so steadily and systematically that never was she betrayed into accidentally taking them, their interests or their pleasure, into consideration in anything she chose to do or to leave undone.

The servants understood quickly and thoroughly that if they meant to retain their places they must keep the children from annoying Mrs. Carteret, from incommoding her by their presence, or intruding their wants upon her. They understood as distinctly, that if this fact were impressed by any misplaced zeal upon the attention of Mr. Carteret, the imprudence would be as readily repaid by dismissal; and as they liked and valued their places,—for Mrs. Carteret, provided her own comfort was secured in every particular, was a liberal and careless mistress,—the imprudent zeal never was manifested.

Thus the two young children grew up, somehow, anyhow, well-fed and well-clothed, by the care of servants; but in every particular, apart from their mere animal wants, utterly neglected. People talked about it, of course; and just at first the neglect of her husband's children threatened to be a little detrimental to the popularity which Mrs. Carteret ardently desired to attain. But she gave pleasant garden-parties, at which neither husband nor children "showed:" she dressed very well; she was very kind to the young ladies of the neighbourhood who were still on their preferment; her well-trained household were discreetly silent; and she had no children of her own.

This last was readily accepted as a very valid excuse; no one thought of the total absence of wifely sympathy and womanly tenderness which the argument conveyed. Mrs. Carteret could not be expected to care about children—no one really did who had not children of their own "to arouse the instinct," as a foolish female, who fancied the phrase sounded philosophical, remarked. So the neighbourhood consented to forget Mr. Carteret's children, and that contemplative gentleman consented to remember them very imperfectly, and things were very comfortable at Chayleigh for some years.

But Haldane and Margaret Carteret grew older with those years; the little children, who had been easily stowed away in a nursery and a playroom,—judiciously distant from drawing-room, boudoir, and study,—were no longer of an age to be so disposed of. The boy must either be sent to school or have a tutor,—he and his sister had passed beyond the rule of the nursery governess,—the girl's education must be attended to.

The latter case was especially disagreeable to Mrs. Carteret. It forced upon her attention the fact that she was no longer in the first bloom of her youth. A rather young and rather pretty stepmother is capable of being made interesting, if the situation be judiciously treated; but Mrs. Carteret had never treated it judiciously, and now it could not avail.

She had nearly exhausted her rôle of young matronhood at thirty-seven, and Margaret was then twelve years old. True, there would be a revival of its material pleasures, its gaieties and dissipations, when Margaret should be "brought out:" but Mrs. Carteret found feeble consolation in the anticipation of the pleasures and importance of chaperonage. They can only be reflected at the best; and Mrs. Carteret cared little to shine with a borrowed light.

In the mean time, she had no notion of having a gawky girl, as she called Margaret in her thoughts, always about her at home, growing old enough to interfere, and perhaps to attract her father's attention unduly and put absurd ideas into his head. Margaret Carteret was not at all gawky; but even then, at the least beautiful period of life, gave promise of the grace and distinction which, afterwards characterised her.

Mrs. Carteret made up her mind, and then informed her husband of the resolution she had taken, and the arrangements she had made. He acquiesced, as he always did; and when Margaret, startled, confused, not knowing whether to be frightened at or pleased with the novelty which the prospect offered, asked him if it was really true that she was going to school at Paris, and was not to return for a whole year, he said placidly,

"Certainly, my dear. Mrs. Carteret has arranged it all; and I have told her to be sure and ask the school people to take you to the Jardin des Plantes."

Then Mr. Carteret, who never perceived that his daughter was no longer a baby, sent her away with a pat on the head, and turned his attention to investigating the structure of a "trap-door spider's abode," which had reached him the day before, having been sent by a friend and fellow-naturalist from Corfu.

The education of Haldane Carteret had been differently provided for. It chanced that the one human being besides herself for whom Mrs. Carteret entertained a sentiment of affection was her cousin, James Dugdale, a young man who had no chance of success in any active career in life, being deformed and in delicate health—anything but a desirable tutor for a delicate retiring boy, like Haldane Carteret, people said—a boy who needed encouragement and companionship to rouse him up and make him more like other boys. But Mrs. Carteret evinced her usual indifference to the opinion of "people" on this occasion. She chose to provide for her cousin a mode of life suitable to his mental and physical constitution.