The Lions Skin | Page 6

aid. And that aid he rendered
like the noble-hearted gentleman he was. He had contrived to save his
fortune from the wreck of James' kingship, and this was safely invested
in France, in Holland and elsewhere abroad. With a portion of it he
repurchased the chateau and estates of Maligny, which on the death of
Antoinette's father had been seized upon by creditors.
Thither he sent her and her child - Rotherby's child - making that noble
domain a christening-gift to the boy, for whom he had stood sponsor at
the font. And he did his work of love in the background. He was the
god in the machine; no more. No single opportunity of thanking him
did he afford her. He effaced himself that she might not see the sorrow
she occasioned him, lest it should increase her own.
For two years she dwelt at Maligny in such peace as the broken-hearted
may know, the little of life that was left her irradiated by Everard's
noble friendship. He wrote to her from time to time, now from Italy,
now from Holland. But he never came to visit her. A delicacy, which
may or may not have been false, restrained him. And she, respecting
what instinctively she knew to be his feelings, never bade him come to
her. In their letters they never spoke of Rotherby; not once did his name
pass between them; it was as if he had never lived or never crossed
their lives. Meanwhile she weakened and faded day by day, despite all
the care with which she was surrounded. That winter of cold and want
in the Cour des Miracles had sown its seeds, and Death was sharpening
his scythe against the harvest.
When the end was come she sent urgently for Everard. He came at once
in answer to her summons; but he came too late. She died the evening
before he arrived. But she had left a letter, written days before, against
the chance of his not reaching her before the end. That letter, in her fine
French hand, was before him now.
"I will not try to thank you, dearest friend," she wrote. "For the thing
that you have done, what payment is there in poor thanks? Oh, Everard,
Everard! Had it but pleased God to have helped me to a wiser choice
when it was mine to choose!" she cried to him from that letter, and poor

Everard deemed that the thin ray of joy her words sent through his
anguished soul was payment more than enough for the little that he had
done. "God's will be done!" she continued. "It is His will. He knows
why it is best so, though we discern it not. But there is the boy; there is
Justin. I bequeath him to you who already have done so much for him.
Love him a little for my sake; cherish and rear him as your own, and
make of him such a gentleman as are you. His father does not so much
as know of his existence. That, too, is best so, for I would not have him
claim my boy. Never let him learn that Justin exists, unless it be to
punish him by the knowledge for his cruel desertion of me."
Choking, the writing blurred by tears that he accounted no disgrace to
his young manhood, Everard had sworn in that hour that Justin should
be as a son to him. He would do her will, and he set upon it a more
definite meaning than she intended. Rotherby should remain in
ignorance of his son's existence until such season as should make the
knowledge a very anguish to him. He would rear Justin in bitter hatred
of the foul villain who had been his father; and with the boy's help,
when the time should be ripe, he would lay my Lord Rotherby in ruins.
Thus should my lord's sin come to find him out.
This Everard had sworn, and this he had done. He had told Justin the
story almost as soon as Justin was of an age to understand it. He had
repeated it at very frequent intervals, and as the lad grew, Everard
watched in him - fostering it by every means in his power - the growth
of his execration for the author of his days, and of his reverence for the
sweet, departed saint that had been his mother.
For the rest, he had lavished Justin nobly for his mother's sake. The
repurchased estates of Maligny, with their handsome rent roll, remained
Justin's own, administered by Sir Richard during the lad's minority and
vastly enriched by the care of that administration. He had sent the lad to
Oxford, and afterwards - the more thoroughly to complete his education
- on