They reached the island. It had become a coaling station. The bay where she remembered exquisite groves coming down to the white beach, was a wharf, ringing with the discordant shouts of negroes and cries of sailors. The old nurse was dead, and fictitious foster brothers and sisters were constantly turning up with extravagant claims.
"Oh, I longed never to have come," said Elvira; "and then I began to get homesick, but they would not let me come!"
No doubt Lisette had feared the revival of the Brownlow influence if her charge were once in England, for she had raised every obstacle to a return. Poor Gould and his niece had both looked forward to Elvira's coming of age as necessarily bringing them to England, but her uncle's health had suffered from the dissipation he had found his only resource. Liquor had become his consolation in the life to which he was condemned, and in the hotel life of America was only too easily attainable.
His death deprived Elvira of the last barrier to the attempts of an unscrupulous woman, who was determined not to let her escape. Elvira's longing to return home made her spread her toils closer. She kept her moving from one fashionable resort to another, still attended by Gilbert, who was beginning to grow impatient to secure his prize.
"How I hated it," said Elvira. "I knew she was false and cruel by that time, but it was just like being in a trap between them. I loathed them more and more, but I couldn't get away."
Nurtured as she had been, she was helpless and ignorant about the commonest affairs of life, and the sight of American independence never inspired her with the idea of breaking the bondage in which she was spellbound. Still, she shrank back with instinctive horror from every advance of Gilbert's, and at last, to pique her, Lisette brought forward the intelligence that Allen Brownlow was married.
The effect must have surprised them, for Elvira turned on her aunt in one of those fits of passion which sometimes seized her, accused her vehemently of having poisoned the happiness of her life, and taken her from the only man she could ever love. She said and threatened all sorts of desperate things; and then the poor child, exhausted by her own violence, collapsed, and let herself be cowed and terrified in her turn by her aunt's vulgar sneers and cold determination.
Yet still she held out against the marriage. "I told them it would be wicked," she said. "And when I went to Church, all the Psalms and everything said it would be wicked. Then Lisette said it was wicked to love a married man, and I said I didn't know, I couldn't help it, but it would be more wicked to vow I would love a man whom I hated, and should hate more every day of my life. Then they said I might have a civil marriage, and not vow anything at all, and I told them that would seem to me no better than not being married at all. Oh! I was very very miserable!"
"Had you no one to consult or help you, my poor child ?"
"They watched me so, and whenever I was making friends with any nice American girl, they always rattled me off somewhere else. I never did understand before what people meant when they talked about God being their only Friend, but I knew it then, for I had none at all, none else. And I did not think He would help me, for now I knew I had been hard, and horrid and nasty, and cruel to you and Allen, the only people who ever cared for me for myself, and not for my horrid, horrid money, though I was the nastiest little wretch. Oh! Mother Carey, I did know it then, and I got quite sick with longing for one honest kiss-or even one honest scolding of yours. I used to cry all Church-time, and they used to try not to let me go-and I felt just like the children of Israel in Egypt, as if I had got into heavy bondage, and the land of captivity. O do speak, and let me hear your voice once more! Your arm is so comfortable."
Still it seemed that Elvira had resisted till another attempt was made. While she was at a boarding-house on the Hudson a large picnic party was arranged, in which, after American fashion, gentlemen took ladies "to ride" in their traps to and from the place of rendezvous. In returning, of course it had been as easy as possible for her chaperon to contrive that she should be left alone with no cavalier but Gilbert Gould, and he of course pretended to lose his way, drove on till night-fall, and then judgmatically met with an accident, which hurt nobody; but which he declared made the carriage incapable of proceeding.
After walking what Elvira fancied half the night, shelter was found in a hospitable farmhouse, where the people were wakened with difficulty. They took care of the benighted wanderers, and the farmer drove them back to the hotel the next morning in his own waggon. They were received by Mrs. Gould with great demonstrations both of affection, pity and dismay, and she declared that the affair had been so shocking and compromising that it was impossible to stay where they were. She made Elvira take her meals in her room rather than face the boarding-house company, paid the bills (all of course with Elvira's money) and carried her off to the Saratoga Springs, having taken good care not to allow her a minute's conversation with anyone who would have told her that the freedom of American manners would make an adventure like hers be thought of no consequence at all.
The poor girl herself was assured by Mrs. Gould that this "unhappy escapade" left her no alternative but a marriage with Gilbert. She would otherwise never be able to show her face again, for even if the affair were hushed up, reports would fly, and Mrs. Lisette took care they should fly, by ominous shakes of the head, and whispered confidences such as made the steadier portion of the Saratoga community avoid her, and brought her insolent attention from fast young men. It was this, and a cold "What can you expect?'" from Lisette that finally broke down her defences, and made her permit the Goulds to make known that she was engaged to Gilbert.
Had they seized their prey at that moment of shame and despair, they would have secured it, but their vanity or their self-esteem made them wish to wash off the mire they had cast, or to conceal it by such magnificence at the wedding as should outdo Fifth Avenue. The English heiress must have a wedding-dress that would figure in the papers, and, even in the States, be fabulously splendid. It must come from Paris, and it must be waited for. All the bridesmaids were to have splendid pearl lockets containing coloured miniature photograph portraits of the beautiful bride, who for her part was utterly broken-hearted. "I thought God had forgotten me, because I deserved it; and I only hoped I might die, for I knew what the sailors said of Gilbert."
Listless and indifferent, she let her tyrants do what they would with her, and it was in Gilbert's company that she first saw Janet at the photographer's. Fortunately he had never seen Miss Brownlow, and Elvira had grown much too cautious to betray recognition; but the vigilance had been relaxed since the avowal of the engagement, and the colouring of the photographs from the life, was a process so wearisome, that no one cared to attend the sitter, and Elvira could go and come, alone and unquestioned.
So it was that she threw herself upon Janet. Whatever had been their relations in their girlhood, each was to the other the remnant of the old home and of better days, and in their stolen interviews they met like sisters. Janet knew as little as Elvira did of her own family, rather less indeed, but she declared Mrs. Gould's horror about the expedition with Gilbert to have been pure dissimulation, and soon enabled Elvira to prove to herself that it had been a concerted trick. In America it would go for nothing. Even in England, so mere an accident (even if it had really been an accident) would not tell against her. But then, Elvira hopelessly said Allen was married!