Chapter VIII: Faith And Science Of Progress (7)

“I confess I was rather disappointed. I had expected that everything would happen as it does in a play—it had looked so like one hitherto. I thought I was going to meet a woman—young, beautiful, in distress, perhaps in want of a champion—but it was only a bed‐ridden old man after all! Well, it might lead to an act of charity, that true chivalry of the soul, higher far than mere personal homage to accidental beauty. I entered a darkened room, scantily and shabbily furnished, and the old woman laid the candlestick on the table. The bed was in a corner near the fire; the uneven _parquet_ floor was covered here and there with faded rugs, and books and papers lay on a desk on the old man’s bed. At first I could hardly distinguish his features, but, as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw that he was a martial‐looking man, with eyes so keen that sickness could hardly dull them, and a bearing that indicated the stern will, the clear intellect, and the lofty _bonhomie_ of an old Flemish _gentilhomme_. He looked at me with curious and prolonged interest, then said, in a voice full of bygone courtesy:

“ ‘Will monsieur be seated? I have made no mistake in the name?’

“ ‘No,’ I answered, wondering what the question meant.

“ ‘Then, monsieur, I have important news for you. The daughter of your brother—’

“I was already bewildered, and looked up. He continued, taking my surprise for interest: ‘The daughter of your poor brother is now a great heiress, and I hold her fortune in trust for her—do not interrupt me,’ he said, eagerly preventing me from speaking, ‘it tires me, and I must say all this at once. I do not know if you knew of her being taken from her parents when a child; of course you recollect that, after her mother’s marriage with your brother, there was a great fracas, and poor Marie’s father disinherited her at once. When the child was born—I was her god‐father, by the bye—her parents being in great poverty, I begged of the grandfather to help and forgive them, the more so as your brother was making his poor wife very unhappy. He refused, and, though he generally took my advice (he was an an old college friend of mine), he was obstinate on this point. The child grew, and the parents were on worse terms every year. Marie’s father held out against every inducement; your poor brother—forgive me, monsieur!—fell into bad company, and made his home a perfect hell; his wife was broken‐hearted, but would not hear of a separation, and her only anxiety was for her child. I proposed to her to take the responsibility myself of putting the little one out of reach of this dreadful example of a divided household, and she consented. The father stormed and raved when he found the child was gone, but for once his wife opposed him, and refused to let him know her whereabouts. Every year I interceded with the grandfather, who consented to support the little girl, but would never promise to leave her a competency at his death. One day, suddenly, your poor brother died.’

“I could not help starting; he saw my surprise.

“ ‘Oh!’ he resumed, ‘did you not know how he died? Pardon me, monsieur, I remember now that none of his English kin followed him to the grave, but I had heard your name before.’

“ ‘Monsieur,’ I began, fearing that he might be led on to talk of family secrets such as he might not wish to share with a stranger, ‘you have told me a strange tale; but allow me to undeceive you—’

“ ‘How did you deceive me?’ he asked impatiently, and I, remembering the old dame’s warning not to excite him, was puzzled how to act. In the meanwhile, he went on.

“ ‘_Eh bien!_ The mother then went to England, to the school where her child was, and saw her, but she did not long survive the wear and tear of her wretched life, and the grief her husband’s death caused her—for, poor woman, she loved him, you see.’

“ ‘Just like a woman, God bless her!’ I murmured involuntarily. The old man bent his head in cordial assent, but immediately resumed: ‘Her father blessed her before she died, and promised to care for the little girl. He then drew up this will’—here he laid his hand on a thick packet on the desk—‘and entrusted it me. The child was nine years old then, and that was fifteen years ago. She was to be told nothing till her twenty‐first birthday, and to be brought up in England, unconscious of anything save that she was the child of honest parents. This went on for some years, and then my old friend died. I continued to send regular remittances to the little girl’s temporary guardians; the bulk of the fortune I kept in the house—there in that chest; perhaps it was a foolish fancy, but I did not care to have it in a common bank. The war came and passed over the flower of our land, and you see, monsieur, what it has left of my former self. Well, after a time, five or six years ago, I ceased hearing from my little ward; I was unable to get up and search for her; all that advertisements and correspondence could do I did, and my chief endeavor was to find you. I thought, if anything were likely, this was; she would go to you, her father’s step‐brother, a different man, as I always heard her mother say, from what her own unhappy parent had been.’

“ ‘But,’ I said, ‘allow me to correct a mistake, monsieur; I never had a step‐brother, or a brother either.’

“ ‘What!’ the old man exclaimed nervously—‘what do you mean? Do not joke about such things. Your name is ——. Your hair is fair and wavy, your figure tall and stalwart—that was the portrait of my poor little ward’s uncle, a different man, of different blood, as well as different name, from her father.’

“ ‘Do not tell me any names, monsieur,’ I here insisted, ‘until I have told you who I am.’

“He looked at me, still agitated, his brows knitted, and his lips quivered. I told him my name, birth, country, profession, and assured him that I, an only son, had never heard of any story like his. He seemed thunderstruck, and could hardly take in the idea; but, recollecting himself, said: ‘Pardon me, monsieur, but I have, then, caused you great inconvenience.’

“His politeness now seemed overwhelming; he was in despair; he was _désolé_. What could he do? How could he apologize? I quieted him as best I could by professing the utmost indifference about the delay, and begged him, though I would solicit no further confidence, to consider my lips as sealed, and, if he wished it, my services as entirely at his disposal.

“He smiled curiously, then said: ‘The best apology I can make is to tell you the whole. Your name and initials misled me. Having heard that you were in Bruges, I sent my messenger, who, it seems, only reached you as you were on the point of starting for Ostend. I thought it was my ward’s uncle I had found, and, never having seen him, I could not tell if you were the wrong man. I must continue to try and find him; if I fail—never mind, I want to tell you her name. She is Philippa Duncombe, and, when I saw her last, she was a dark child, quick, peculiar, and resolute. It is so long ago that I could give you no idea of her exterior as she is now. I think she must have suspected her dependence upon a supposed charity, and have left school without the knowledge of any one. Anyhow, I must still try to find your namesake; as for you, monsieur, I cannot thank you enough for your forbearance.’

“I left Bruges the next day, but, as you may suppose, the story of the Baron Van Muyden never ceased to haunt me, and a few months after I was glad and flattered to receive a letter from the old veteran saying that he had now ascertained that my namesake, the child’s half‐uncle, had been dead some years, and that he felt that to none other but myself would he now wish to transfer the task of searching for the lost heiress. Of course I accepted.”

Our friend paused here, and looked thoughtfully at the fire. The Yule‐logs were burning so merrily that a ruin seemed imminent, and while the silence was yet unbroken a sound of distant singing came towards the house. It was the gay company of Christmas carollers, singing their old, old ditties through the frosty night, in commemoration of the Angel‐songs heard by the watching shepherds so many long centuries ago on the hills of Judæa. But the company was too much absorbed in the traveller’s tale to heed the faint echo. Miss Houghton sat with her dark eyes fixed on the speaker, and every vestige of color gone in the intensity of her excitement; Mrs. Burtleigh, tapping the fender with her tiny gray satin slipper, seemed strangely excited, and glanced uneasily at her cousin; the rest of us were clasping our hands in our unrestrainable curiosity, and the provoking narrator actually had the coolness to hold his peace!

At last some one spoke, unable to control his goaded curiosity.

“Well?”

“Well?” repeated the artful “Jim.”

“Did you find her?” was the question that now broke from all lips, in a gamut of increasing impatience.

“I told you a story, as we agreed,” he answered; “but, if I tell you the _dénoûment_, we shall fall into what we wish to avoid—the commonplace.”

“Never mind, go on,” was shouted on all sides. Miss Houghton was silent, but she seemed to hang on his words. He had calculated on this emotion, the wretch, and was making the most of his points!

At last he resumed in a slow, absent way:

“Yes, I accepted the search; I made it; I did all I could think of—but I failed.”

The bomb had burst, but we all felt disappointed. This was _not_ commonplace, not even enough to our minds. “He had cheated us,” we cried.

“I can only tell you the truth; remember this was all real, no got‐up Christmas tale, to end in a wedding, bell‐ringing, and carol‐singing. Hark! do you hear the carollers outside?”

No one spoke, and he went on, still meditatively: “I do not mean to give it up, though.”

Miss Houghton, who, till now, had said nothing, opened a small locket attached to one of her bracelets, and, keeping her eyes fixed on “Cousin Jim,” passed it to him, saying:

“Did you ever see this face before?”

He took it up, and looked puzzled. “No,” he said; “why do you ask?”

We all looked at her as if she had been a young lunatic, her interest in the story being apparently of no very lasting nature. She then unfastened a companion bracelet, the hanging locket of which she opened and handed to her friend again.

“This face you have seen?” she asked confidently.

He started, and a rush of color came over his bronzed cheeks.

“Yes, yes, that is the Baron Van Muyden—younger, but the same. And here is his writing, ‘To Marie Duncombe, her sincere and faithful friend.’ Miss Houghton?”

“Yes,” she answered calmly, as if he had asked her a question.

“Then what I have been looking for for three years I have found tonight?” he said, looking up at her, while we were all stupefied and silent.

“And what I have never dreamt of,” she answered in a low voice, “I have suddenly learned to‐night.”

The carollers were now close under the windows, and the words of a simple chorus came clearly to our hearing—

The snow lay on the ground,
The stars shone bright,
When Christ our Lord was born
On Christmas night.

After a few moments’ silence, our curiosity, like water that has broken through thin ice, flowed into words again. Many questions and a storm of exclamations rang through the room, and the concussion was such that the Yule‐logs crashed in two, and broke into a race across the wide hearth, splinters flying to the side, and sparks flying up the chimney. Then Miss Houghton spoke with the marvellous self‐possession of her nature.

“I knew my own name and my mother’s from the beginning,” she said, “and Monsieur Van Muyden, and the old house, and the Flemish _bonne_ in the Rue Neuve. I remember them all when a child. I used often to sleep there, and the night before I left Bruges I still remember playing with the baron’s old sword. I remember my mother coming to see me at school in England, a convent‐school, where I was very happy, and giving me these bracelets. She told me never to part with them; she said she would not be with me long. They told me of her death some months afterwards. The other portrait is that of my grandfather, given by him to my mother on her _fête_ day, just before her marriage, with a lock of his hair hidden behind. She always wore it. M. Van Muyden’s was done for her when I was born, and was meant to be mine some day, as he was my god‐father. The remittances he spoke of used to come regularly; but, when I grew older, my pride rebelled (just as he guessed, you say), and I hated to be dependent on those who, kind as they were, were not my blood‐relations. I ran away from school, and lived by myself for a long time in poverty, yet not in absolute need, for I worked for my bread, and worked hard. I had a great deal to go through because I dared not refer any one to the school where I had lived. Mrs. Burtleigh was very kind to me; I told her my story, as far as I knew it, and somehow she found out that we were cousins through my father; so she made me take her maiden name, Houghton, instead of the one I had adopted before. She, of course, thought as I did, that the child of the disinherited Marie Duncombe and the unhappy Englishman, my poor father, could be naught but a beggar. She was kindness itself to me, and, though I was too proud to accept all she offered me, I _did_ accept her companionship and her home. Many little industries of my own, pleasant now because no longer imperatively necessary, help me to support myself, as far as pecuniary support can be called such; my _home_ has been a generous gift—the gift I prize most.”

She stopped, and Mrs. Burtleigh looked up in impatient confusion, perhaps conscious that her feelings and motives had been too mixed to warrant such frank, unbounded gratitude. “Jim” said nothing, and Miss Houghton seemed so calm that it was almost difficult to congratulate her. She was asked if she had recognized herself from the first in the story.

“Yes,” she said; “I knew it must be me.”

“You took it coolly,” some one ventured to observe.

“I have seen too much of the _revers de la médaille_ to be much excited about this,” she said; but, if she was outwardly calm, her feelings were certainly aroused, for her strange eyes had a far‐away look, and the color came and went in her cheek.

Our friend seemed almost crestfallen; we thought he would have been elated. Presently she said to him, giving him the bracelets:

“You must take these to Bruges, and I think you had better take me, too.”

He stared silently at her. Just then the bell began to ring for the midnight Mass. What followed Miss Houghton told us herself.

The guests hurried to the chapel, rather glad to get rid of their involuntary embarrassment. Those two remained behind alone. She was the first to speak.

“I think you are sorry you have found me.”

“Yes,” he answered slowly, “sorry to find it is you: Miss Houghton was poor, and Miss Duncombe is an heiress.”

“What matter! If you like, Miss Duncombe will give up the fortune, or, if you want it, she will give it to you.”

He looked offended and puzzled.

“You do not understand me,” she said, half laughing: “Miss Duncombe will let you settle everything for her, and say anything you like to Miss Houghton.”

“You do not mean—” he began excitedly.

“I do,” she answered composedly.

And they were engaged then and there. He wanted to be married before they left England, but she refused, saying their wedding must be in a Flemish cathedral, and their wedding breakfast in a Flemish house. And so it was; and No. 20 Rue Neuve is now their headquarters, while the household of the Belgian heiress is under the control of the old Flemish woman who once shut that door in the face of the heiress’ husband.

M. Van Muyden is happy and contented, and a merrier Christmas day was never spent at Aldred than the day of this unexpected recognition.

Midnight Mass, Christmas‐tree, school‐feast, and all succeeded each other to our perfect satisfaction; the health of the heroine of “Cousin Jim’s” tale was drunk in the “wassail‐bowl” on Christmas night, and, as the happy, excited, and tired Christmas party separated on the day following New Year’s day, every one agreed that it was a pity such things so very seldom happened in real life.

Fleurange.

By Mrs. Craven, Author Of “A Sister’s Story.”

Translated From The French, With Permission.