A Life Sentence. Sergeant Adeline
admire it very much; for the first time he found it a trifle soulless and vapid.
"Poor Mary," he said, looking at it with a kind of wonder in his eyes—"what will she say when she finds that I do not go to her father's house any more? I do not think that she will care very much. She has seen little enough of me lately! I could not ask her now to link her fate with mine, poor child! She would hate me if she knew. Best to forget her, as she will forget me!"
He took the photograph out of its frame and deliberately tore it across; then he set himself to reduce it to the smallest possible fragments, until they lay in a little heap upon his writing-table. His face was grave and rigid as he performed the task, but it showed little trace of pain. His fancy for "Mary," the pretty daughter of an old professor, had taken no deep root. Henceforth it vanished from his life, his memory, his heart. "Mary," like all his other dreams, was dead to him.
A knock at the door startled him as he completed his work. A servant brought in a telegram, which he tore open hastily. As he expected, it was from Miss Vane.
"Marion died this evening at seven o'clock, from syncope of the heart. Funeral on Thursday."
"Another victim!" Hubert said to himself, laying down the pink paper with something like a groan. "Am I responsible for this too? A life sentence, did I say? It would take a hundred lives to compensate for all the harm that Florence and I have done!"
CHAPTER VIII.
"'Cynthia Westwood'—is that your name?" said Mrs. Rumbold. "Dear me, I always thought that it was just 'Jane' or 'Jenny!' Wouldn't it be better to change it, and call her something more appropriate to her station?"
"Perhaps," said the injudicious Rector, "she may not like to be called by a name that does not belong to her."
He was looking at Jenny—or Cynthia, as she had just informed them that she was called—a transformed and greatly altered Cynthia under Mrs. Rumbold's management—Cynthia with hair cut short, hands and face scrupulously clean, a neat but ugly print frock, and a coarse holland pinafore—a perfectly subdued and uninteresting Cynthia—uninteresting save for the melancholy beauty of her great dark wistful eyes.
"What she likes has nothing to do with it," said Mrs. Rumbold, rather sharply. "Besides, she has another name—she told me so herself—'Cynthia Janet'—that's what she was christened, she tells me. She can be called 'Jane Wood' at Winstead."
The Rector looked up in mild surprise.
"Why not 'Jane Westwood,' my dear? 'Westwood' is her name."
"She had much better not be known as Westwood's daughter," said Mrs. Rumbold, with decision, quite heedless of Cynthia's presence. "It will be against her all her life. I have told Sister Louisa about her, and she asked me to let her be called 'Wood.' 'Jane Wood' is a nice sensible name."
"Well, as you please. You will not mind being called 'Jane,' will you, my dear?" said the Rector, mindful of the red flush that was creeping into the little pale cheeks.
He was a kindly old gentleman, in spite of his slow, absent-minded ways; and there was a very benevolent light in his eyes as he sat in his elbow-chair, newspaper on knee, spectacles on nose, and surveyed the child who had been brought to his study for inspection.
Mrs. Rumbold fairly lost her patience at the question.
"How can you ask her such a thing, Alfred? As if it was her business to mind one way or another! She ought to be thankful that she is so well taken care of without troubling about her name. 'Jane Wood' is a very good name indeed, much better than that silly-sounding 'Cynthia'!"—and Mrs. Rumbold swept the child before her out of the room in a state of high indignation at the stupidity of all men.
So Cynthia Westwood—or Jenny Westwood, as the Beechfield people called her—was transformed into Jane Wood. She did not seem to object to the change. She was in a dazed, stunned state of mind, in which she understood only half of what was said to her, and when the scenes and faces around her made a very slight impression upon her memory. One or two things stood out clearly from the rest. One was Enid Vane's sweet childish face, as she thrust her shilling with the hole in it into the little outcast's hand. Cynthia had carefully hidden the coin away; she was resolved never to spend it. She took it out and looked at it sometimes, feeling, though she could not have put her feelings into words, that it was an actual visible sign of some one's kindness of heart, of some one's love and pity for her. And the other thing was the dark melancholy face of the man who had brought her to the Rectory, and told her to be good for her father's sake.
She liked to think of his face best of all. It was one that she was sure she would never forget. She brooded over it with silent adoration, with a simple faith and confidence in the goodness of its owner, which would have cut him to the heart if he had ever dreamed of it. He had been kind to her; that was all she knew. She rewarded him by the devotion of her whole being. It was surely a great reward for such a little act! She did not know that it was he who was to pay for her going to school, that it was he who had rescued her from the degradation of her outcast life.
Mrs. Rumbold kept her word to Hubert. She talked vaguely in Cynthia's presence of "kind friends" who were doing "so much" for her; but Cynthia associated the idea of "kind friends" with that of Mrs. Rumbold herself, and was not grateful. The child was not old enough, and had been too much stunned by the various experiences of her little life, to be very curious. She did not know Mr. Lepel by name, or why he should be at Beechfield at all. He did not often visit the Vanes, although he saw a good deal of his aunt Leonora in London. He was quite a stranger to half the people in the village.
Also, Cynthia's father, now in prison for the murder of Sydney Vane, had not lived long in Beechfield, and did not know the history and relationships of the Squire's family, as natives of Beechfield were supposed to do. He had been two years in the village, and had rented a tumbledown ruinous cottage by the side of a marshy pond, which no one else would occupy. Here he had lived a lonely life, gathering rushes from the pond and weaving baskets out of them, doing a day's work in the fields now and then, setting snares for rabbits, trapping foxes, and killing game—a man suspected by the authorities, shunned by the village respectabilities, avoided by even those wilder spirits who met at the "Blue Lion" to talk of bullocks and to drink small-beer. For he was not of a genial disposition. He was gruff and surly in speech, given neither to drink nor to conversation—just the sort of man, his neighbors said, to commit a terrible crime, to revenge himself upon a magistrate who had once sent him to gaol for poaching, and had threatened to turn him out of his wretched cottage by the pond.
And his little girl too—the villagers were indignant at the way in which Cynthia was brought up. She was seldom seen in the village school, never at church or in Mrs. Rumbold's Sunday-classes. She was rough, wild, ignorant. Careful village mothers would not let their children play with her, and district-visitors went out of their way to avoid her—for she had been known to fling stones at boys who had come too near, and she laughed in the faces of people who tried to lecture her. Jenny Westwood was thus very little in the way of hearing Beechfield gossip, or she would have known all about Mr. Lepel and his sister, who acted as Miss Enid's governess, and concerning whose moonlit walks with Miss Enid's "papa" there had already been a good deal of conversation. She knew nothing of all this. There was a big house a mile from the village, and in this big house lived a wicked cruel man who had sent her father to prison—so much she knew. And her father was now in prison for killing that wicked man. Why should one not kill the person who injures one? It did not seem so very terrible to Cynthia. Before her father had brought her to Beechfield, she remembered, they had travelled a good deal from place to place; and while they were "on the tramp," as her father expressed it, she had seen much of the rougher side of life. She had seen blows given and returned—fighting, violence, bloodshed. She had a vague idea that, if her father had killed Mr. Vane, it was perhaps not the first time that he had taken the life of a fellow-man.
Mrs. Rumbold certainly showed much kindliness and charity in taking this forlorn little