There and Back | Page 2

daughter-in-law with neither better nor worse
than civility. Sir Wilton, in fact, soon came to owe his wife a grudge
that he had married her, and none the less that at the time he felt
himself of a generosity more than human in bestowing upon her his
name. Creation itself, had he ever thought of it, would have seemed to
him a small thing beside such a gift!
That Robina Armour, after experience of his first advances, should
have at last consented to marry sir Wilton Lestrange, was in no sense in
her favour, although after a fashion she was in love with him--in love,
that is, with the gentleman of her own imagining whom she saw in the
baronet; while the baronet, on his part, was what he called in love with
what he called the woman. As he was overcome by her beauty, so was
she by his rank--an idol at whose clay feet is cast many a spiritual
birthright--and as mean a deity as any of man's device. But the
blacksmith's daughter was in many respects, notwithstanding, a woman
of good sense, with much real refinement, and a genuine regard for
rectitude. Although sir Wilton had never loved her with what was best
in him, it was not in spite of what was best in him that he fell in love
with her. Had his better nature been awake, it would have justified the
bond, and been strengthened by it.
Lady Lestrange's father was a good blacksmith, occasionally drunk in
his youth, but persistently sober now in his middle age; a long-headed
fellow, with reach and quality in the prudence which had long ceased to
appear to him the highest of virtues. At one period he had accounted it
the prime duty of existence to take care of oneself; and so much of this
belief had he communicated to his younger daughter, that she deported
herself so that sir Wilton married her--with the result that, when Death
knocked at her door, she welcomed him to her heart. The first cry of
her child, it is true, made her recall the welcome, but she had to go with
him, notwithstanding, when the child was but an hour old.
Not one of her husband's family was in the house when she died. Sir
Wilton himself was in town, and had been for the last six months,

preferring London and his club to Mortgrange and his wife. When a
telegram informed him that she was in danger, he did go home, but
when he arrived, she had been an hour gone, and he congratulated
himself that he had taken the second train.
There had been betwixt them no approach to union. When what sir
Wilton called love had evaporated, he returned to his mire, with a
resentful feeling that the handsome woman--his superior in everything
that belongs to humanity--had bewitched him to his undoing. The truth
was, she had ceased to charm him. The fault was not in her; it lay in the
dulled eye of the swiftly deteriorating man, which grew less and less
capable of seeing things as they were, and transmitted falser and falser
impressions of them. The light that was in him was darkness. The
woman that might have made a man of him, had there been the stuff,
passed from him an unprized gift, a thing to which he made Hades
welcome.
It was decent, however, not to parade his relief. He retired to the library,
lit a cigar, and sat down to wish the unpleasant fuss of the funeral over,
and the house rid of a disagreeable presence. Had the woman died of a
disease to which he might himself one day have to succumb, her death
might, as he sat there, have chanced to raise for an instant the watery
ghost of an emotion; but, coming as it did, he had no sympathetic
interest in her death any more than in herself. Lolling in the easiest of
chairs, he revolved the turns of last night's play, until it occurred to him
that he might soon by a second marriage take amends of his neighbours
for their disapprobation of his first. So pleasant was the thought that,
brooding upon it, he fell asleep.
He woke, looked, rubbed his eyes, stared, rubbed them again, and
stared. A woman stood in front of him--one he had surely seen!--no, he
had never seen her anywhere! What an odd, inquiring, searching
expression in her two hideous black eyes! And what was that in her
arms--something wrapt in a blanket?
The message in the telegram recurred to him: there must have been a
child! The bundle must be the child! Confound the creature! What did
it want?
"Go away," he said; "this is not the nursery!"
"I thought you might