LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 445, 17 November 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

GERTRUDE ERLE. [From Tinsley's Magazine.] PART I. ‘ Shall I see you this evening, Claud ?’ ‘No, I think not,’ with a soupcon of impatience in the tone, and the shadow of a frown furrowing the broad forehead. ‘ I have a business appointment, you know,’ was added more graciously, as if an excuse for absence was deemed necessary. ‘ And to-morrow, Claud ?’ ‘ To-morrow I run down to Wales for a little fishing. ’ ‘Give my love to Alice Darner.’ ‘I am not likely to see her. Good bye, Gertrude ;’ and without further adieux the individual addressed as ‘ Claud ’ lounged slowly down the stairs and out of the house. ‘ I cannot understand him,’ Gertrude Erie murmured sadly, as she rushed to the balcony for a last view of the riddle, the unpuzzling of which cost her so many heartburnings and anxious moments. ‘ If he cared for me, he surely could not speak as he does sometimes ; and yet he says he loves me.’ As she leant over the balcony, with her brows knitted in perplexed thought, she looked pretty and graceful enough to justify Claud Wilton’s protestations—a tall slight girl, with wild-rose tints in her fair face, and large eyes of liquid brown, and lips slightly apart, with a gleam of white teeth between them. The balcony belonged to a Bclgravian mansion, and Gertrude Erie was the only child and heiress of John Erie, of the Erles’ of Cheshire, and reported a millionaire. Claud was fairly out of sight, and the girl turned slowly away from her watch-tower, and sat down wearily in the drawingroom.

‘Sometimes he can he so nice,’ she soliloquised dreamily, her thoughts still running on the man to whom her hand was pledged and her heart freely yielded ; and as she thought of his ‘ niceness, ’ a soft smile played on her mouth and irradiated her face into perfect beauty ; but it was a changeful mobile face, grave and gay, sparkling and drooping by turns, and the radiant smile soon died away, to give place to a troubled expression as she rose and began pacing the room restlessly. A knock at the door made her pause. ‘ Mr Erie wishes to see you, missand she noticed at once that the man, who had been valet to her father for years, wore an anxious look on his features. She followed him with a sinking heart. She loved her father dearly, and the fear, that he was fast ebbing away into the terrible land of shadows pressed heavily on her. Mr Erie, propped upon a high head of pillows, turned a pallid emaciated countenance towards her as she entered ; but even through the ravages of illness his face seemed to light up as his haggard eyes fell on Gertrude. It was easy to perceive that she was his all in all. ‘ No better, papa ?’ she asked, in a low dreary tone that betokened a sad lack of hope in her heart as to the reply ; and, stooping over him, she pressed a kiss on his cheek. ‘ No better, my child,’ Mr Erie said wistfully, as he saw the great glittering drops on her lashes. ‘Sit down, Gertrude; I want to speak to you.’ She obeyed in silence, taking a chair close beside him, and holding his thin nerveless fingers in her own warm firm clasp, as if to give him strength. ‘ Is Claud here ?’ ‘ No, papa.’ ‘ Is he coming back to-day ?’ ‘I believe not,’ she replied quietly, trying to steady her voice. Claud’s movements were such a sore subject to her. ‘ He was not here yesterday at all, Gertrude ?’ ‘ No, papa. ’ How could she answer, save in monosyllables ? for she had no excuse to offer for Claud’s shortcomings to any one else, although to herself her heart was ready to make plentiful excuses for his conduct. ‘ I wish you did not care for Claud. If it was 11 alph Hamer, now, I should die easy,’ Mr Erie cried fractiously. ‘ Ralph is very nice, but we cannot speak of him and Claud in the same breath, papa,’ the girl remarked proudly, a little hurt that her father should dream of drawing comparisons between the two men. ‘ As far as good looks arc concerned, we certainly cannot. Claud is handsome, but worthless ; and Ralph is only passable, but sterling.’ ‘ Don’t say that Claud is worthless, she asked, in soft imploring accents. It wounded her very soul to think that her father condemned Claud—Claud who was to be her husband, and who was her lover. ‘ Yes, but he is, Gertrude,’ the weak voice reiterated, with all the force it could call up; ‘ Claud Wilton is a spendthrift, and a miser to boot. He loves to enjoy the good things of this life, and yet he would sell his soul for gold, and, when he got it, gloat over it. ’ ‘ Surely Claud is not mercenary, poor Gertrude gasped. The thought that he might be so struck her for the first time, and she shrank from it as if it had been a knife-thrust. Mr Erie turned himself slowly round on his pillows and faced her. Every drop of blood seemed to have deserted his veins, and even his lips were ashen-hued. ‘Gertrude,’ he whispered in a broken voice, ‘ call up all the bravery you can ; we shall prove whether Claud is mercenary or not, for you and I are beggars !’ She stared at him for a moment, fancying that illness had dazed his brain; but she saw he was sane enough. She was brave. By a mighty effort she crushed down the shock to her feelings with an almost supernatural calmness, and smiled —yes, smiled—as she passed her hand fondly over the poor wan cheek near her, and said, ‘ Never mind if we are beggars, so long as you and I are together, papa !’ A feeble, fluttering, almost inaudible term of endearment was his response. Then father and daughter were silent for a while, mutually struggling to hide their suffering from each other. At last Mr Erie began,

slowly and with difficulty, to explain how it was that Gertrude, the supposed heiress of thousands, should be only a pauper,, and on the eve of a life in which her own exertions would have to gain her dailj bread. ‘ My uncle, John Eric, was an eccentric as well as a peculiarly cold man, and to his brother and his two sisters he always maintained a reserve that lasted to the hour o f his death. I was the only son of his brother. I was named after him, and credited with being his favourite relative. Of the children of his two sisters he took no notice, and when he died, without leaving a will, I stepped into the property as his natural heir. ‘ For twenty years I have believed myself a rich man, and now, at the eleventh hour, when my days are numbered, and I must leave you, Gertrude, to tight your way through life alone, I find that I have been the usurper of another man's rights. That man is Claud Wilton ! At the name Gertrude started as if she had been shot, and the excessive pallor that stole over her features argued ill for her faith and trust in her affianced husband. ‘ There, ’ Mr Erie continued, pointing with a trembling finger to a small Japanese cabinet that stood on a table at the foot of the bed, ‘is the last will and testament of my uncle, John Erie, bequeathing every penny and all his lands to Louisa Wilton, his sister, and, in case of her death, to her son.’ * How long have you known of this ?’ ‘ Since three mouths.’ ‘ You have known this for three months, papa, and kept poor Claud out of his rights all that time ?’ ‘ I have kept silence for your sake, Gertrude. It is better that Claud should know nothing of this till after your marriage to him. ’ ‘ What, let him marry me in ignorance of the truth ? Never !’ she cried vehemently. ‘ Tell him the truth, and he will never marry you, Gertrude !’ She pressed down her hand on her heart; such a pain thrilled it as she thought these words might* be true ; but she was young and sanguine, and she loved, and her eyes grey bright like stars as she said, ‘ I believe in Claud, papa. ’ A quick gleam of sarcasm flashed across Mr Erie’s face, but he did not attempt to deride her credulity. * Shall I tell him, or will you ?’ she questioned eagerly. She longed to put Claud to the test, and to bring him forth unblemished from the fiery furnace of trial. ‘ Neither of us at present. You must wait till I am dead, Gertrude, before you say a word to Claud. ’ ‘ It will not be honest,’ she murmured in a low voice. ‘ Honest or dishonest, you must promise to be obey me, Gertrude, ’ he said excitedly; and the girl, who had been brought up all her life in habits of strict obedience, was perforce obedient now. The days wore on, with Mr Erie lingering between life and death, and Gertrude on the rack. It was torture to her frank open nature to deceive and to play an unworthy part, before Claud especially. And if he had been really interested in her, he could not have failed to remark her unnatural manner and forced spirits. But Claud was too much engrossed with his own grievances to trouble himself about other people’s. An officer in an expensive regiment, in which his expenditure trebled his receipts, beset by Jewish cormorants as insatiable almost as Shylock himself, at at his wits’ ends how to find the El Dorado that could relieve him, the idea of a marriage with the rich Miss Erie had come like manna in the wilderness. It was the only event that could wrest him from the gulf of trouble and poverty that yawned at his feet. But he looked on it with a distaste that he was barely able to conceal. Gertrude’s grace and beauty were nil. If she had worn Medusa’s head she would have found equal favour in his sight, for all the heart Claud could boast of, and it was not much, was not hers. He looked on her as an unpleasant but necessary appendage to the £ s. d. that he was in search of, and thus it was that, in spite of a certain amount of love-making which he forced himself to go through, he was minus all those trivial but delicious attentions that only real feeling 'can prompt. But Claud was handsome as Antinous, with crisp chesnut curls crowning his head, soft eyes whose iris was of deep violet, and a mouth peerless in shape, though weak as a woman’s. And Gertrude was a born artist —a slave to her eye. Claud’s face had reached her heart through the medium of her fancy, and she had persuaded herself that he was perfection both inside and out. It had been a desire of her father’s that her engagement should be kept secret. Perhaps Mr Erie had cherished a notion that some one else, whom he would prefer as a son-in-law, might come forward, believing Gertrude to be free. Claud had willingly assented for reasons of-his own ; and as for Gertrude herself, so long as Claud was hers in prospective, she was perfectly content to keep the blissful fact locked in her breast for her own special gratification. So it happened that not even the nearest relatives of the family were cognisant of the matter, * I wish I was poor, Claud,’ Gertrude remarked energetically some days after her father’s revelation. They were together in a tete-a-tete that had grown to be a usual occurrence, with Mr Erie ill up-stairs and no one to disturb them; nevertheless, Claud, as if to put all possible distance that the limits of the room allowed between them, stood at a window, gazing out vacantly on the empty square, while Gertrude occupied one corner of a capacious lounge. ‘ Just the wish people always have when they possess more money than they know what to do with,’ he answered curtly, giving the cord of the blind a vicious pull, as though he was in want of a subject to vent his spleen on. ‘ But I have a very good reason for my wish,’ Gertrude asserted gently. Claud turned a face towards her on which irony could be read. (To be continued,')