LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1420, 3 September 1878, Page 3

LITERATURE.

NOTHING MOKE! A Story in Four Chapters. [“ All the Year Kouud.”] CHAPTER i. i It is one of Lord Burleigh’s pithy sayings, that if a man marry a fool, it shall, for the remainder of his dava, ‘ylyke him, to, hear her talk.’ Now iberq are varieties of the fool feminine. A woman may be a fool ‘ pure and simple,;■ or she may be a ‘fond fool,’ and in either case, a loyal man and true may make tho best of matters ; but he who is yoked to a ‘vain. fool,’ shall assuredly pay to the uttermost that penalty with which Lord Burleigh so quaintly threatens him. Yet a vain fool may easily lead a man captive, and for this reason Vanity, during tho honeyed days of courtship, is ready to take the form and semblance of true love. The desire to shine in a man’s eyes teaches a vain woman cunning ; she adapts herself to his tgptes, Hatters his foibles, and then, dreaming comes the waking, and bp realises that it was not for hipself, but fop the adulation which he could, give, that he was loved. She i has won, but she has no longing to keep his I love i the festfulness of assured affection, ! thp quiet companionship of home life, have for her no charms ; the only craving she has, is to outshine, other fools like herself. ]u saying all this, I have been telling the story of Keith Falconer’s married life. Ho had fallen madly in love with a beautiful woman ; he bad made her his wife in haste, and had repented himself of that rash act at leisure, aud it ‘ yirked him to hear* her talk.’ He hated petty gossip, and itg blacker sister, scandal; and yet in suck, despicable mental garbage did \':,o a<ml of HI .nche, his wife, delight., jie disliked and disapproved of thp :;rsnd.i she made, yet never would, 4,0. permit 1 hat dislike to keep hiv; r.bsgnt mom her vide, or give the world 14 vuanco of saying that they ‘ did not get on well together.’ Consequently, in spite of the overweening vanity rhat blighted her whole nature, never the faintest breath o£ scandal had gathered round Blanohp coner's name. Whether she was grateful for this careful guardinnqqip on Keith a part, may bo doubted, Falconer’s mother was a v/onmw both wise and loving. From days ot his childhood, in this mother flcith had found his best and truest friend ; his closest sympathiser, his most loving comf rtrr, but now Well, slowly but surely, as some lovely landscape is obscured by rising mist, aud its

beauties hidden from our eyes, this loving mother had drifted from him ; not because he grew to love her less, but because, for the first time in their lives, something lay between them that neither could touch upon.

What anguish of soul Mrs Falconer had endured in this severance, what prayers, what tears, what hours of lonely thought it had cost her, none but God and her own heart knew ! Yet how could she rightly still cling to her place in her boy’s heart and life, when her woman’s instinct told her that she dared not trust herself to keep silent when silence would bo wisdom? Was it not then the nobler part to hold herself aloof? Keith was not one to fall into the meanness of taking his mother into his counsel against his wife. Silence therefore reigned between them on the things most present to the thoughts of each. And rarely indeed was this silence broken. Between two noble natures an unspoken covenant may exist, and it was so with this mother and son. Only once was the full bitterness of Keith’s unhappiness revealed to her. She had been paying a visit to them in their London home. It had been a time of mingled joy and pain, and now it was over. She was going back to Glonluna; to that lovely home among the heather-clad hills, where she best loved to be, and now, waiting for the north train, with Keith by her side, she paced slowly up and down the platform of Euston Station.

Poor mother ! her heart was very full—it is so hard for all of us, when we have to leave one whom we love, to bear sorrow alone ; and so, at last, * out of the fulness of her heart, her mouth spake,’ She had noted the weariness on Keith’s face ; the deepened lines round the lips, the tired look in the grey eyes, the silver lines mingling all too soon in the dark locks that had been her pride in days gone by ; and she thought, in her loving tenderness, that he sorely needed rest. ‘ When the session is over, do you think you and Blanche can come to me at Glenluna, dear?’ She spoke almost timidly, and unconsciously her fingers closed closer on his arm. ‘ I hardly think we can, mother,’ he answered quietly, as it was ever his wont to speak, but with a subtle ring of pain in his voice that hurt her cruelly. ‘My wife prefers Paris, or Florence, when I can get away; you remember, she does not like Glonluna ’ ‘Yes, yea; I remember,’ she put in hurriedly, with a catch in her breath that was almost a sob.. Not ‘like’ Glenluna ; not ‘like’ that stately home on the lovely western coast; not * like’ to watch the hills sleeping in the sunshine, and the cloud-shadows chasing each other over the ever changeful sea! The very words sounded like treason to all the traditions of her life, and yet she knew they were true. There was a stir upon the platform, a bell rang loudly, and she know that the time was short. ‘ Keith, Keith ! ’ she said, losing for a moment the calmness that was so seldom ruffied. ‘ Oh, my dear, how sorry lam that you and Blanche have no children ; it might be better, it might make things so different. Do not bo angry with me, my son; parting makes one weak, you know,’ ‘I am not angry,’ he said very gently, * but you are mistaken; I thank Heaven that things are as they are.’ She had given utterance to the thought of her heart, in an all-true womanly hope that little hands might draw two hearts together; and the look on Keith’s face, as he answered her, struck home to her like the stab of a knife. A kiss, a long hand-clasp, a longer look, and mother and son had parted. If Keith Falconer had known that never again in this world should he see those sweet sad eyes look into his, that never again should he touch that frail white hand, until he kissed and clasped it with passionate tears as it lay dead and cold, and unresponsive to the pressure of his own—think you that he would have stood so quietly to watch the northern train gliding from his sight ?

Ah « ia well for us all that we know not what even the day that is coming may bring forth! When Keith Falconer, two short mouths after that parting at the station, returned home from his duties at the house, to find a telegram awaiting him, and read the few terse sentences that told him that his mother was dead, he laughed aloud. Such strange things are human norves, and so passing strange the way that they are acted upon by the sudden stroke of joy or pain I

In a moment of despairing, overwhelming sorrow, weak humanity clings to the nearest stays and Keith, stunned and dazed by grief, turned to his wife for comfort. Ho threw his arm about her shoulders, and laid his face against her breast, and Blanche, in a certain cold-blooded fashion of her own, was sorry for him ; but all the same she looked upon his bowed head, and wondered uneasily if, perchance, the ‘burning tears of sorrow” might not, mar and blur the delicately-tinted robe, that bad been pronounced the triumph of a man-dressmaker’s a,rt. She also wondered if, now that Mrs Falconer was dead, she and Keith, would have to go and live in that dullest of all dull places—Oleuluna. Most wives would have pleaded to go with a husband on such ajouruey as that on which Keith had to start that night; but not so Blanche Falconer. In her creed, sickness and death were things to bo avoided by every known means. And so it came about that she was lying disconsolately on a lounge in her pretty morning-room, now decorously darkened, when her husband sought her to say good-bye. Blanche was not jdoae. Her chosen friend, Mrs Leslie Vernon, had flown to her side oi\ hearing of the calamity that had befallen and just as Keith reached the yelyet portieres, and was about to enter the room, his wife was plaintively bemoaning herself to this sympathising listener. . . ‘And just now, too; when I have a card for the royal hall, and have set my heart on going !’ Mrs Vernon make a quick gesture of caution. She had chanced to look up, and in a mirror opposite the door, had seen Mr Falconer come in. Even her world-hardened heart was touched with the grave, sad, reproachful face, the set white lips, that told of cruel pain ; and with a fow hurried words she beat a hasty retreat, leaving the husband and wife together, ‘Well, well,, what matter, after all?, thought i<eiih bitterly, as ten minutes later bp. sprang into a hansom, and quitted the | home that was to him but an empty name. : ‘ I knew it all before ; why should I let her heartless word wound me—fool that 1 am V

To travel over a familiar road, to pass by well-known land-marks, each of which once took you nearer to a loving greeting, and then to realise with a sickening pang that the feet that once hurried so gladly to meet you on the threshold of your home, will come to meet you aovstf no more; what an ordeal of pain ! The sight, 03- hii mother’s empty chair by thc'ip.lw nook’ was the first thing that seemed to give a reality to the thought oi ;j he? loss in Kerb's heart; ho had been ioM she was dead, hut he had not felt lint she was gone until then. And in tlvat moment the knowledge came upon Muv, that in losing her, he had lost all id (.viking himself upon the couch, crushing hjs face against the pillow where her head had oftm lain. . . Ho was, ioa loft quite without com fortera ;i,u Lis abandonment of grief. Markin the old deer-hound, crawled to his master’s feet and laid his rough head upon his knee, and a woman’s baud, light as a snowflake, touched his shoulder, while a woman’s voice said pityingly : ‘You must not grievo too bitterly, Mr Falconer; she dold me to tell you this, and to say th-ali you were her ceaseless thought ; it was all so sudden ; there was not much tuna ’ And hero the sweet voice broke in tears, {To bo continued.)