It was not very delicately put, but neither were the times very delicate, and the upshot was that Helen’s father, weak and selfish, agreed to use his influence towards bringing the marriage about.  The stranger did not tell—­and perhaps it would have made little difference if he had told—­his full history; how as a boy in London, the son of a petty tradesman, he had been kidnapped and sold to the Plantations (a common enough fate in those days); how in the West Indies, after a varied and not over reputable career, in which buccaneering played no small part, he had at length persuaded the wealthy old widow of a planter to marry him; and how, when she had suddenly ended her days, in a way which gave rise to more than a little talk in the island, he had sold the estate and the slaves without haggling much over the price, and had abruptly left for England, where—­the talk ran—­he meant to settle down and found a family.

Helen’s scornful rejection of the proposal at first was scathing, and little less her scorn of a parent who could urge it.  “It’s to save me from want, and from worse than want,” he whimpered.  Finally, ere many days had passed, wearied by her father’s importunity, she gave her consent.

A pair more ill-matched could not have been found; the man by nature coarse, brutal, and cowardly; the woman, insolent, fearless, and of ungoverned temper.  From the first things went badly, and when, within a week of the wedding, Helen’s father was drowned in attempting to ford the Tweed on horseback, she chose to consider that her part of the bargain was ended.  Henceforward she was a wife only in name.  Bluster and storm as he might, she was more than the master of her husband, and after one wild outburst he cringed before her.  And as, before her marriage, the wife had insisted on reinstating the greater number of the old servants, who to fidelity to the old line added hostility to a master whom they looked on as an interloper, the husband soon found it to his advantage to conciliate the household by giving way to the whims of his wife.  Thereafter, the two met, if at all, only at meals.

For something over a year things continued on this unpleasant footing.  Then there came a day in spring, when Tweedside was tender with the bursting of buds and the lush green of young grass, when birds sang gaily from every thicket, and the hurrying brown water was dimpled into countless rings by the rising trout.  To Helen, listless and indifferent even to Tweed’s charm in springtime, came one of the younger servants saying that a gentleman, desiring to speak to her, waited below.  A gentleman to see her?  Nay, there must certainly be some mistake, thought Helen.  It must assuredly be one of the useless hangers-on of her husband come to ask her to plead for him in regard to some trumpery loan.  Well! anything for a novelty, and to take her thoughts away from herself.  In this frame of mind she entered the lower room, where the visitor stood with his back to the door, gazing from the window, beside him a large deerhound.