Chapter VII. A New Era.

The servant-women escaped safely. The half-caste, also, had gotten off scot-free of all consequences of the mournful tragedy he had helped to bring about but for the intervention of that enemy of mankind of whom it is written that the seed of the woman should bruise its head, but it should bruise his heel. Into Jimmy's dusky heel the venomous fangs entered without the lad's knowing any more than that he perhaps had trodden on a thorn, until at last he fell, dizzy and gasping, to the earth.

The women stooped over him, trying to rouse and drag him up.

'Baal mine run along no more, mine get em sleep very fast,

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I think it,' he muttered heavily; and then the frightened women sped along and left him, and he never woke again.

There was light enough now to illuminate the track and all the country about, for every building and hut at Morven was burning, and the blaze in the sky made everything plain as noon-day. Presently the women and the rescue-party met. Philiberta was leader of the latter, and when she heard what the women had left behind them at Morven, she lost her mind completely. King Lowrie tore along with his shrieking rider, right to the very flames, and there she would have cast herself into them headlong but that the men who followed her kept her back. At last she fainted, and in that condition was borne back to Emuville by some of the men, while the others remained to do what they could at Morven. But that was very little. Two badly scalded blacks were all they caught alive; the others escaped. The fire was but the commencement of a conflagration that devastated all the country for miles, and caused a stampede and total loss of all the Morven live stock. When Philiberta came back to life after many days of worse than death, Morven was but a black scar on the face of the earth, and John Campbell and Rosamond were sleeping their long last sleep together in the Emuville cemetery. The girl, owing to her own merciful illness, was spared the horror of seeing them; and such awful details as her friends knew were kept carefully from her for ever.

These friends were the Hugills of Emuville. Mr. Hugill was the magistrate of that district. He had known John Campbell very well; that is to say, the two had met every time the latter had visited Emuville, and had discovered that they had many ideas in common. And John Campbell had made his will one day in the magistrate's private chamber in the court-house; had had it properly witnessed, attested, sealed, and locked in the magistrate's little iron safe. That will assigned everything that John Campbell might die possessed of to Rosamond, his wife, unconditionally; after her, to Philiberta Tempest, on condition that she adopted the name of Campbell. There was no difficulty about this condition, for Philiberta had so long been page 50called Campbell that she had almost forgotten her own name. So now, in the nineteenth year of her age, Philiberta was sole mistress of some fifteen thousand pounds, and would have had almost as much more but for the destruction of Morven.

But for a long time she did not even know this. When she came slowly back to life, a mere shadow of the old Philiberta, between whom and her present self a great wide gulf and a wall of mist seemed eternally fixed, nothing mattered to her, nothing interested her. She was a pitiable object, truly and utterly overwhelmed by the terrible sorrow that she could scarcely, in her dazed helplessness, yet realize. Mrs. Hugill, the angelic woman who had foregone food and rest, day and night, for sake of this stranger that was within her gates, feared for the girl's reason. And indeed there must have been a cloud upon it, else how account for the mad impulses, strange temptations, above all, the fits of profound silent melancholy that at times possessed her in the after-years of her life?

'My child, my child, I want to see you strong again,' said Mrs. Hugill, softly stroking the shaven head one day when the girl's weakness and dejection were more than usually apparent. Philiberta's face grew peaceful, as it always did under that caressing magnetic touch.

'You must strive against this melancholy, Berta,' continued Mrs. Hugill. She knew that the girl had always been called Phil at Morven, and she wilfully and wisely changed the name, 'Else you will never get well, child.'

'And why should I get well? Why should I try to get well, Mrs. Hugill?

'Berta!'

'Why should anyone who is quite tired make effort to travel on again? When driven sheep are overcome by thirst and heat and weariness, they sink down by the roadside, and the drovers let them be. It would be better to let me be,' said Philiberta.' There are sheep enough in the flock without the sick and weary ones. There are people enough in the world without those who are altogether tired of it.'

All that is very easy to say, Berta, but there's no common-page 51sense in it. The sheep which fall by the wayside are left to die because the many must not be sacrificed for the few, and the drovers have their hands overfull with the management of the many. And then the weak sheep might not be worth the trouble anyhow. Weak sheep would make poor mutton. With humanity it is different. They that almost go under in time of great trouble like this of yours show a capacity of feeling that proves strength as well as weakness. And so such weaklings as you are worth saving, and must not be left by the wayside, however they desire it. And putting aside figures of speech, Berta, and coming back to distinct personalities, is it not a little ungrateful of you to set yourself so obstinately against recovery? Is it not rather hard upon me, after all these weeks that I have allowed myself no other thought or occupation beyond getting you well and strong again?

It was an appeal to the girl's heart and gratitude, uttered with no other motive than to rouse her from the selfishness of grief. She looked up tearfully.

'You have been very good to me,' she said.

'Have I? Then reward me. Get well.'

'Am I not getting well? Does not every day make me stronger? Oh, Mrs. Hugill, don't think me sinful or ungrateful in wishing not to get well. Everything that I cared for is gone.'

'There are many things to live for yet, child.'

'How can we know that? The shadow of death is all over my life,' said Philiberta. 'How can anyone know that it is not better that I should die now?'

Mrs. Hugill was crying by this time; and it took her a long while to get the tears out of her eyes, and the lump in her throat choked down. When she had quite succeeded she began to talk again, pitching her voice in a hard high key to take the tremble out of it.

'My dear Berta,' she began, 'a girl like you—a woman, indeed, for you are eighteen—has no business to get into this state of feeling. It is irreligious, to begin with. We are all in the hands of a Higher Power, which does all things for our ultimate good.'

'Don't talk like that to me,' said Philiberta, with a touch of page 52her old fire; 'I don't believe a word of it. Do you think my life would be even tolerable now if I had been believing in a personal God—a God of love—and if I thought now that He had brought this thing about?'

There was a certain sorrowful majesty in her defiance and denial of orthodox deity that quieted Mrs. Hugill.

'My dear, I was wrong to attempt preaching,' she said, 'and I have thought for myself for a few years too, and it does seem improbable that God—but we will change the subject, Berta, Dear Berta, promise me you will try to get well.'

'Dear friend, I am getting well. The process goes on without my trying, thanks to your constant tender care. I shall live a long time yet, never fear.'

'And what I ought to have said just now was that a girl in your position, mistress of a large fortune, possessing an unusually high order of intellect' (Mrs. Hugill had dabbled a little in the study of Phrenology), 'much practical knowledge, and some beauty, should try to live and make the best of her life. A woman such as you will be when you have recovered your health and strength and looks should make a mark in the world, should achieve something great.'

'In what way, Mrs. Hugill?'

'How is one to know in what way, my child? Perhaps you will become a great philanthropist, perhaps a female speculator or reformer—a strong-minded woman——'

'Now Heaven forbid!' said Philiberta.

'I echo that, my dear, from my heart. But women drift into strange grooves sometimes. Perhaps yours will be literature. You may—I should not at all wonder—write poetry.'

Philiberta smiled as she remembered sundry fragments and scribblings of rhyme that had already proved a relief for deep emotion in her.

'If,' continued Mrs. Hugill, 'the right man happens along at the right time, you will find your mission in matrimony, as I, for instance, did; and there will be an end of you.'

'Did matrimony make an end of you, then, Mrs. Hugill?'

'Of my individuality—yes. And it does of every woman's, page 53I think, if she meets with the right man, the man calculated to be her master. And it is to her happiness that it should be so. My life—(my thinking life, I mean—the years that I have lived to study and ponder) has been spent in wild colonial places, where there has been little facility for proving one's theories, and I have formed divers theories of my own in respect to humanity and its tendencies. But from the little I have seen I have gathered one definite and firm conclusion—that every woman has her other half in the world, and if she fails to find him, her life is but a chapter of black discontent. I don't advance that theory as original, you know, because Plato and a hundred others have talked about it before ever I was thought of; but it is sometimes given to humbler souls to think out and realize the discoveries that great souls have made. It is a fortunate thing for the world, mind you, that women often do fail to find the other half of themselves, for out of the vague void comes often work of the noblest kind; and trouble and disappointment have brought into the world's light some of the grandest of our sex. Shall I get you some beef-tea, child?'

'No, thanks. Go on talking,' said Philiberta.

'Well, believe me, dear, that but for trouble there would be little that is really good and glorious in this world.'

'Little that is bad too, perhaps,' said Philiberta.

'Perhaps,' said Mrs. Hugill passively. 'It is a poor theory that won't work two ways. There's Leslie passing the window. Shall I call him in to play for us?'

'Pray do. I love to hear him.'

Leslie was Mrs. Hugill's one child; handsome as a Greek god, clever, accomplished, good; so perhaps there was some excuse for the little mother's utterly passionate idolatry of him. Had Mrs. Hugill quoted her son, instead of her husband, as 'her master,' her 'other half,' the 'fulfilment of her being,' she would have been much nearer the true mark. For whatever James Hugill, her husband, might have been to her in the old days, now twenty years agone, there is no question that his position now, and for a long time back, was that of prime minister, not king, in this small monarchy. But I dare say page 54neither he nor the little woman herself ever realized the true condition of affairs, and no awkward contingencies of circumstances ever came about to enlighten them. Leslie Hugill played the fiddle; what is more, he played it well, the gift of music being his in a large degree. And his mother, no mean performer on the piano, had kept up her practice when other women would have let it lapse in the worry of household cares, in order that she might accompany Leslie's fiddle. So the little concerts every evening were a musical treat very rarely to be experienced in districts like the district of Emuville.

To Philiberta music was a new experience. She had never had a piano, seldom heard one. She could sing, because nature had given her a voice of rarely beautiful quality, and she had learned the Scotch ballads and Irish ones. The only musical instrument at Morven was the bagpipes, on which John Campbell, in some of the insane moments that afflict every man, I suppose, used occasionally to perform. He might have been guilty of it oftener if the performance had not always made Rosamond grow hysterical, and declare that she would take to drink.

If there was one thing in the world likely to soothe the sad desolate heart of Philiberta just now, it was music, and seeing the effect of it upon her, Mrs. Hugill administered the new medicine readily.

In homœopathic doses at first, though, because it wrought too excitingly upon the passionate high-strung nature. When the girl grew stronger, she had music without stint, and when she entreated to be allowed to learn, she found two very willing and able instructors. And so a new interest crept into her life, and won her back gradually from the darkness that had overshadowed her.