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CHAPTER I.

COMETHUP ENTERS LIFE DISASTROUSLY.

“My dear” had looked her last upon a troublesome world. She had taken life sighingly, in little frightened gasps, as it were, with the fear upon her, even from childhood, that unknown horrors lurked for her in each day to which she was awakened. It can scarcely be said that she had clung to life with any tenacity—rather with the instinct of living; and she had fluttered out of it resignedly enough, a little sorry, perhaps, that she had left any one behind to grieve for her. And yet, with the inconsistency which had marked her life, she had died at the very moment when life had actually begun to be worth living for her.
“My dear” was one of those who wait long for the happiness, if any, that is to come to them, and find it a little tasteless when it is at last given to them. She had been the younger child of a stern and unbending man, who bent or broke to his code of rules those who were weak enough to be bent or broken, and thrust sternly aside those whose strength opposed itself to his. He had found in his little daughter one who smilingly and timidly obeyed in everything, and worshipped him without question—up to a certain point. That point was determined by the arrival of David Willis.
It was an old and a very ordinary story; such stories are played out to their bitter end day after day around us. David Willis was poor, and had absolutely no expectations; so far as old Robert Carlaw was concerned he simply did not exist—except as many other people existed, as a part of the world with which he had nothing to do. David, for his part, was as patient and long-suffering as the girl who loved him; and so they solemnly and pitifully plighted their troth, and agreed to wait. Boldness or resource of action was not in either of them; the girl, despite her love for the man, and the sort of humble, patient faithfulness with which she was endowed, would not have risked her father’s anger on any account. So, in a poor, half-ridiculous, half-heroic fashion, they parted and waited.
They waited, strange as it may seem, for nearly twenty years; until the man had entered the forties and the woman was nearing them. She was still a pretty woman, soft-eyed and gentle of voice, with a great mine of tenderness hidden away in her which no one had been able to discover. When, on her father’s death, she married David Willis, there seemed a prospect that the mine would be discovered, but the time had gone past; life had been so long a flat and stale and unprofitable thing that the old fierce heart-beats at the thought of her lover, the old hunger of love for him, had died away into a mere tremulous wonder as to whether he would be good to her, or whether he might have moments of harshness and sternness, like her father. She had hung too long expectant on hope to believe that the world was going to be very good to her now; she was only a little glad, for her lover’s sake, that his time of waiting was ended.
David Willis was a musician and a dreamer; not a very great musician, and certainly a dreamer whose dreams brought him no profit. He had filled the place of organist in one or two minor churches, living simply and contentedly. By the very irony of things, when the woman he loved was able to come to him and put her hands in his, and tell him that there was no further bar to their happiness, he was out of an engagement, and had scarcely a penny in the world. But, with a childlike faith which, even at their years, came near to the sublime, they married first and tried to be worldly afterward. Fortunately for them, her brother was a man of property in a small, old-fashioned town near the coast of Kent; and, having considerable influence in the place, he offered, through the clergyman of the parish, the vacant post of organist in the parish church to David Willis, after first roundly abusing his sister for having married a pauper.

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