第35章 THE MARCHIONESS OF STONEHENGE(5)

In a few minutes these two poor young women felt,as so many in a strait have felt before,that union was their greatest strength,even now;and they consulted calmly together.The result of their deliberations was that Milly went home as usual,and Lady Caroline also,the latter confessing that very night to the Countess her mother of the marriage,and to nobody else in the world.And,some time after,Lady Caroline and her mother went away to London,where a little while later still they were joined by Milly,who was supposed to have left the village to proceed to a watering-place in the North for the benefit of her health,at the expense of the ladies of the Manor,who had been much interested in her state of lonely and defenceless widowhood.

Early the next year the widow Milly came home with an infant in her arms,the family at the Manor House having meanwhile gone abroad.

They did not return from their tour till the autumn ensuing,by which time Milly and the child had again departed from the cottage of her father the woodman,Milly having attained to the dignity of dwelling in a cottage of her own,many miles to the eastward of her native village;a comfortable little allowance had moreover been settled on her and the child for life,through the instrumentality of Lady Caroline and her mother.

Two or three years passed away,and the Lady Caroline married a nobleman--the Marquis of Stonehenge--considerably her senior,who had wooed her long and phlegmatically.He was not rich,but she led a placid life with him for many years,though there was no child of the marriage.Meanwhile Milly's boy,as the youngster was called,and as Milly herself considered him,grew up,and throve wonderfully,and loved her as she deserved to be loved for her devotion to him,in whom she every day traced more distinctly the lineaments of the man who had won her girlish heart,and kept it even in the tomb.

She educated him as well as she could with the limited means at her disposal,for the allowance had never been increased,Lady Caroline,or the Marchioness of Stonehenge as she now was,seeming by degrees to care little what had become of them.Milly became extremely ambitious on the boy's account;she pinched herself almost of necessaries to send him to the Grammar School in the town to which they retired,and at twenty he enlisted in a cavalry regiment,joining it with a deliberate intent of making the Army his profession,and not in a freak of idleness.His exceptional attainments,his manly bearing,his steady conduct,speedily won him promotion,which was furthered by the serious war in which this country was at that time engaged.On his return to England after the peace he had risen to the rank of riding-master,and was soon after advanced another stage,and made quartermaster,though still a young man.

His mother--his corporeal mother,that is,the Marchioness of Stonehenge--heard tidings of this unaided progress;it reawakened her maternal instincts,and filled her with pride.She became keenly interested in her successful soldier-son;and as she grew older much wished to see him again,particularly when,the Marquis dying,she was left a solitary and childless widow.Whether or not she would have gone to him of her own impulse I cannot say;but one day,when she was driving in an open carriage in the outskirts of a neighbouring town,the troops lying at the barracks hard by passed her in marching order.She eyed them narrowly,and in the finest of the horsemen recognized her son from his likeness to her first husband.

This sight of him doubly intensified the motherly emotions which had lain dormant in her for so many years,and she wildly asked herself how she could so have neglected him?Had she possessed the true courage of affection she would have owned to her first marriage,and have reared him as her son!What would it have mattered if she had never obtained this precious coronet of pearls and gold leaves,by comparison with the gain of having the love and protection of such a noble and worthy son?These and other sad reflections cut the gloomy and solitary lady to the heart;and she repented of her pride in disclaiming her first husband more bitterly than she had ever repented of her infatuation in marrying him.

Her yearning was so strong,that at length it seemed to her that she could not live without announcing herself to him as his mother.