Thelittle old gentleman had withdrawn from the apartment of the Mannerings very quietly, leaving all that excitement and commotion behind him; but he did not leave in this way the house in Bloomsbury. He went downstairs cautiously and quietly, though why he should have done so he could not himself have told, since, had he made all the noise in the world, it could have had no effect upon the matter in hand in either case. Then he knocked at Miss Bethune’s door. When he was bidden to enter, he opened the door gently, with great precaution, and going in, closed it with equal care behind him.
“I am speaking, I think, to Mrs. Gordon Grant?” he said.
Miss Bethune was alone. She had many things to think of, and very likely the book which she seemed to be reading was not much more than a pretence to conceal her thoughts. It fell down upon her lap at these words, and she looked at her questioner with a gasp, unable to make any reply.
“Mrs. Gordon Grant, I believe?” he said again, then made a step farther into the room. “Pardon me for startling you, there is no one here. I am a solicitor, John Templar, of Gray’s Inn. Precautions taken with other persons neednot apply to me. You are Mrs. Gordon Grant, I know.”
“I have never borne that name,” she said, very pale. “Janet Bethune, that is my name.”
“Not as signed to a document which is in my possession. You will pardon me, but this is no doing of mine. You witnessed Mrs. Bristow’s will?”
She gave a slight nod with her head in acquiescence.
“And then, to my great surprise, I found this name, which I have been in search of for so long.”
“You have been in search of it?”
“Yes, for many years. The skill with which you have concealed it is wonderful. I have advertised, even. I have sought the help of old friends who must see you often, who come to you here even, I know. But I never found the name I was in search of, never till the other day at the signing of Mrs. Bristow’s will—which, by the way,” he said, “that young fellow might have signed safely enough, for he has no share in it.”
“Do you mean to say that she has left him nothing—nothing, Mr. Templar? The boy that was like her son!”
“Not a penny,” said the old gentleman—“not a penny. Everything has gone the one way—perhaps it was not wonderful—to her own child.”
“I could not have done that!” cried the lady. “Oh, I could not have done it! I would have felt it would bring a curse upon my own child.”
“Perhaps, madam, you never had a child ofyour own, which would make all the difference,” he said.
She looked at him again, silent, with her lips pressed very closely together, and a kind of defiance in her eyes.
“But this,” he said again, softly, “is no answer to my question. You were a witness of Mrs. Bristow’s will, and you signed a certain name to it. You cannot have done so hoping to vitiate the document by a feigned name. It would have been perfectly futile to begin with, and no woman could have thought of such a thing. That was, I presume, your lawful name?”
“It is a name I have never borne; that you will very easily ascertain.”
“Still it is your name, or why should you have signed it—in inadvertence, I suppose?”
“Not certainly in inadvertence. Has anything ever made it familiar to me? If you will know, I had my reasons. I thought the sight of it might put things in a lawyer’s hands, would maybe guide inquiries, would make easier an object of my own.”
“That object,” said Mr. Templar, “was to discover your husband?”
She half rose to her feet, flushed and angry.
“Who said I had a husband, or that to find him or lose him was anything to me?” Then, with a strong effort, she reseated herself in her chair. “That was a bold guess,” she said, “Mr. Templar, not to say a little insulting, don’t you think, to a respectable single lady that has never had a finger lifted upon her? I am of a well-knownrace enough. I have never concealed myself. There are plenty of people in Scotland who will give you full details of me and all my ways. It is not like a lawyer—a cautious man, bound by his profession to be careful—to make such a strange attempt upon me.”
“I make no attempt. I only ask a question, and one surely most justifiable. You did not sign a name to which you had no right, on so important a document as a will; therefore you are Mrs. Gordon Grant, and a person to whom for many years I have had a statement to make.”
She looked at him again with a dumb rigidity of aspect, but said not a word.
“The communication I had to make to you,” he said, “was of a death—not one, so far as I know, that could bring you any advantage, or harm either, I suppose. I may say that it took place years ago. I have no reason, either, to suppose that it would be the cause of any deep sorrow.”
“Sorrow?” she said, but her lips were dry, and could articulate no more.
“I have nothing to do with your reasons for having kept your marriage so profound a secret,” he said. “The result has naturally been the long delay of a piece of information which perhaps would have been welcome to you. Mrs. Grant, your husband, George Gordon Grant, died nearly twenty years ago.”
“Twenty years ago!” she cried, with a start, “twenty years?” Then she raised her voice suddenly and cried, “Gilchrist!” She was verypale, and her excitement great, her eyes gleaming, her nerves quivering. She paid no attention to the little lawyer, who on his side observed her so closely. “Gilchrist,” she said, when the maid came in hurriedly from the inner room in which she had been, “we have often wondered why there was no sign of him when I came into my fortune. The reason is he was dead before my uncle died.”
“Dead?” said Gilchrist, and put up at once her apron to her eyes, “dead? Oh, mem, that bonnie young man!”
“Yes,” said Miss Bethune. She rose up and began to move about the room in great excitement. “Yes, he would still be a bonnie young man then—oh, a bonnie young man, as his son is now. I wondered how it was he made no sign. Before, it was natural: but when my uncle was dead—when I had come into my fortune! That explains it—that explains it all. He was dead before the day he had reckoned on came.”
“Oh, dinna say that, now!” cried Gilchrist. “How can we tell if it was the day he had reckoned on? Why might it no’ be your comfort he was aye thinking of—that you might lose nothing, that your uncle might keep his faith in you, that your fortune might be safe?”
“Ay, that my fortune might be safe, that was the one thing. What did it matter about me? Only a woman that was so silly as to believe in him—and believed in him, God help me, long after he had proved what he was. Gilchrist, go down on your knees and thank God that he did not live to cheat us more, to come when you andme made sure he would come, and fleece us with his fair face and his fair ways, till he had got what he wanted,—the filthy money which was the end of all.”
“Oh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, again weeping, “dinna say that now. Even if it were true, which the Lord forbid, dinna say it now!”
But her mistress was not to be controlled. The stream of recollection, of pent-up feeling, the brooding of a lifetime, set free by this sudden discovery of her story, which was like the breaking down of a dyke to a river, rushed forth like that river in flood. “I have thought many a time,” she cried,—“when my heart was sick of the silence, when I still trembled that he would come, and wished he would come for all that I knew, like a fool woman that I am, as all women are,—that maybe his not coming was a sign of grace, that he had maybe forgotten, maybe been untrue; but that it was not at least the money, the money and nothing more. To know that I had that accursed siller and not to come for it was a sign of grace. I was a kind of glad. But it was not that!” she cried, pacing to and fro like a wild creature,—“it was not that! He would have come, oh, and explained everything, made everything clear, and told me to my face it was for my sake!—if it had not been that death stepped in and disappointed him as he had disappointed me!”
Miss Bethune ended with a harsh laugh, and after a moment seated herself again in her chair. The tempest of personal feeling had carried heraway, quenching even the other and yet stronger sentiment, which for so many years had been the passion of her life. She had been suddenly, strangely driven back to a period which even now, in her sober middle age, it was a kind of madness to think of—the years which she had lived through in awful silence, a wife yet no wife, a mother yet no mother, cut off from everything but the monotonous, prolonged, unending formula of a girlhood out of date, the life without individuality, without meaning, and without hope, of a large-minded and active woman, kept to the rôle of a child, in a house where there was not even affection to sweeten it. The recollection of those terrible, endless, changeless days, running into years as indistinguishable, the falsehood of every circumstance and appearance, the secret existence of love and sacrifice, of dread knowledge and disenchantment, of strained hope and failing illusion, and final and awful despair, of which Gilchrist alone knew anything,—Gilchrist, the faithful servant, the sole companion of her heart,—came back upon her with all that horrible sense of the intolerable which such a martyrdom brings. She had borne it in its day—how had she borne it? Was it possible that a woman could go through that and live? her heart torn from her bosom, her baby torn from her side, and no one, no one but Gilchrist, to keep a little life alive in her heart! And it had lasted for years—many, many, many years,—all the years of her life, except those first twenty which tell for so little. In that rush of passion she did not know how time passed,whether it was five minutes or an hour that she sat under the inspection of the old lawyer, whom this puzzle of humanity filled with a sort of professional interest, and who did not think it necessary to withdraw, or had any feeling of intrusion upon the sufferer. It was not really a long time, though it might have been a year, when she roused herself and took hold of her forces, and the dread panorama rolled away.
Gradually the familiar things around her came back. She remembered herself, no despairing girl, no soul in bondage, but a sober woman, disenchanted in many ways, but never yet cured of those hopes and that faith which hold the ardent spirit to life. Her countenance changed with her thoughts, her eyes ceased to be abstracted and visionary, her colour came back. She turned to the old gentleman with a look which for the first time disturbed and bewildered that old and hardened spectator of the vicissitudes of life. Her eyes filled with a curious liquid light, an expression wistful, flattering, entreating. She looked at him as a child looks who has a favour to ask, her head a little on one side, her lips quivering with a smile. There came into the old lawyer’s mind, he could not tell how, a ridiculous sense of being a superior being, a kind of god, able to confer untold advantages and favours. What did the woman want of him? What—it did not matter what she wanted—could he do for her? Nothing that he was aware of: and a sense of the danger of being cajoled came into his mind, but along with that, which was ridiculous, though he could not help it, a sense ofbeing really a superior being, able to grant favours, and benignant, as he had never quite known himself to be.
“Mr. Templar,” she said, “now all is over there is not another word to say: and now the boy—my boy——”
“The boy?” he repeated, with a surprised air.
“My child that was taken from me as soon as he was born, my little helpless bairn that never knew his mother—my son, my son! Give me a right to him, give me my lawful title to him, and there can be no more doubt about it—that nobody may say he is not mine.”
The old lawyer was more confused than words could say. The very sense she had managed to convey to his mind of being a superior being, full of graces and gifts to confer, made his downfall the more ludicrous to himself. He seemed to tumble down from an altitude quite visionary, yet very real, as if by some neglect or ill-will of his own. He felt himself humiliated, a culprit before her. “My dear lady,” he said, “you are going too fast and too far for me. I did not even know there was any—— Stop! I think I begin to remember.”
“Yes,” she said, breathless,—“yes!” looking at him with supplicating eyes.
“Now it comes back to me,” he said. “I—I—am afraid I gave it no importance. There was a baby—yes, a little thing a few weeks, or a few months old—that died.”
She sprang up again once more to her feet, menacing, terrible. She was bigger, stronger, farmore full of life, than he was. She towered over him, her face full of tragic passion. “It is not true—it is not true!” she cried.
“My dear lady, how can I know? What can I do? I can but tell you the instructions given to me; it had slipped out of my mind, it seemed of little importance in comparison. A baby that was too delicate to bear the separation from its mother—I remember it all now. I am very sorry, very sorry, if I have conveyed any false hopes to your mind. The baby died not long after it was taken away.”
“It is not true,” Miss Bethune said, with a hoarse and harsh voice. After the excitement and passion, she stood like a figure cut out of stone. This statement, so calm and steady, struck her like a blow. Her lips denied, but her heart received the cruel news. It may be necessary to explain good fortune, but misery comes with its own guarantee. It struck her like a sword, like a scythe, shearing down her hopes. She rose into a brief blaze of fury, denying it. “Oh, you think I will believe that?” she cried,—“me that have followed him in my thoughts through every stage, have seen him grow and blossom, and come to be a man! Do you think there would have been no angel to stop me in my vain imaginations, no kind creature in heaven or earth that would have breathed into my heart and said, ‘Go on no more, hope no more’? Oh no—oh no! Heaven is not like that, nor earth! Pain comes and trouble, but not cruel fate. No, I do not believe it—I will not believe it! It is not true.”
“My dear lady,” said the old gentleman, distressed.
“I am no dear lady to you. I am nothing to you. I am a poor, deserted, heartbroken woman, that have lived false, false, but never meant it: that have had no one to stand by me, to help me out of it. And now you sit there calm, and look me in the face, and take away my son. My baby first was taken from me, forced out of my arms, new-born: and now you take the boy I’ve followed with my heart these long, long years, the bonnie lad, the young man I’ve seen. I tell you I’ve seen him, then. How can a mother be deceived? We’ve seen him, both Gilchrist and me. Ask her, if you doubt my word. We have seen him, can any lie stand against that? And my heart has spoken, and his heart has spoken; we have sought each other in the dark, and taken hands. I know him by his bonnie eyes, and a trick in his mouth that is just my father over again: and he knows me by nature, and the touch of kindly blood.”
“Oh, mem,” Gilchrist cried, “I warned ye—I warned ye! What is a likeness to lippen to? And I never saw it,” the woman said, with tears.
“And who asked ye to see it, or thought ye could see it, a serving-woman, not a drop’s blood to him or to me? It would be a bonnie thing,” said Miss Bethune, pausing, looking round, as if to appeal to an unseen audience, with an almost smile of scorn, “if my hired woman’s word was to be taken instead of his mother’s. Did she bear him in pain and anguish? Did she wait for him,lying dreaming, month after month, that he was to cure all? She got him in her arms when he was born, but he had been in mine for long before; he had grown a man in my heart before ever he saw the light of day. Oh, ask her, and there is many a fable she will tell ye. But me!"—she calmed down again, a smile came upon her face,—“I have seen my son. Now, as I have nobody but him, he has nobody but me: and I mean from this day to take him home and acknowledge him before all the world.”
Mr. Templar had risen, and stood with his hand on the back of his chair. “I have nothing more to say,” he said. “If I can be of any use to you in any way, command me, madam. It is no wish of mine to take any comfort from you, or even to dispel any pleasing illusion.”
“As if you could!” she said, rising again, proud and smiling. “As if any old lawyer’s words, as dry as dust, could shake my conviction, or persuade me out of what is a certainty. It is a certainty. Seeing is believing, the very vulgar say. And I have seen him—do you think you could make me believe after that, that there is no one to see?”
He shook his head and turned away. “Good-morning to you, ma’am,” he said. “I have told you the truth, but I cannot make you believe it, and why should I try? It may be happier for you the other way.”
“Happier?” she said, with a laugh. “Ay, because it’s true. Falsehood has been my fate too long—I am happy because it is true.”
Miss Bethune sat down again, when her visitor closed the door behind him. The triumph and brightness gradually died out of her face. “What are you greetin’ there for, you fool?” she said, “and me the happiest woman, and the proudest mother! Gilchrist,” she said, suddenly turning round upon her maid, “the woman that is dead was a weak creature, bound hand and foot all her life. She meant no harm, poor thing, I will allow, but yet she broke one man’s life in pieces, and it must have been a poor kind of happiness she gave the other, with her heart always straying after another man’s bairn. And I’ve done nothing, nothing to injure any mortal. I was true till I could be true no longer, till he showed all he was; and true I have been in spite of that all my life, and endured and never said a word. Do you think it’s possible, possible that yon woman should be rewarded with her child in her arms, and her soul satisfied?—and me left desolate, with my very imaginations torn from me, torn out of me, and my heart left bleeding, and all my thoughts turned into lies, like myself, that have been no better than a lie?—turned into lies?”
“Oh, mem!” cried Gilchrist—“oh, my dear leddy, that has been more to me than a’ this world! Is it for me to say that it’s no’ justice we have to expect, for we deserve nothing; and that the Lord knows His ain reasons; and that the time will come when we’ll get it all back—you, your bairn, the Lord bless him! and me to see ye as happy as the angels, which is all I ever wanted or thought to get either here or otherwhere!”
Therewas nothing more said to Mr. Mannering on the subject of Mr. Templar’s mission, neither did he himself say anything, either to sanction or prevent his child from carrying out the strange desire of her mother—her mother! Dora did not accept the thought. She made a struggle within herself to keep up the fiction that it was her mother’s sister—a relation, something near, yet ever inferior to the vision of a benignant, melancholy being, unknown, which a dead mother so often is to an imaginative girl.
It pleased her to find, as she said to herself, “no likeness” to the suffering and hysterical woman she had seen, in that calm, pensive portrait, which she instantly secured and took possession of—the little picture which had lain so long buried with its face downward in the secret drawer. She gazed at it for an hour together, and found nothing—nothing, she declared to herself with indignant satisfaction, to remind her of the other face—flushed, weeping, middle-aged—which had so implored her affection. Had it been her mother, was it possible that it should have required an effort to give that affection? No! Dora at sixteen believed very fully in the voice of nature. It would have been impossible, her heart at once would have spoken, she wouldhave known by some infallible instinct. She put the picture up in her own room, and filled her heart with the luxury, the melancholy, the sadness, and pleasure of this possession—her mother’s portrait, more touching to the imagination than any other image could be. But then there began to steal a little shadow over Dora’s thoughts. She would not give up her determined resistance to the idea that this face and the other face, living and dying, which she had seen, could be one; but when she raised her eyes suddenly, to her mother’s picture, a consciousness would steal over her, an involuntary glance of recognition. What more likely than that there should be a resemblance, faint and far away, between sister and sister? And then there came to be a gleam of reproach to Dora in those eyes, and the girl began to feel as if there was an irreverence, a want of feeling, in turning that long recluse and covered face to the light of day, and carrying on all the affairs of life under it, as if it were a common thing. Finally she arranged over it a little piece of drapery, a morsel of faded embroidered silk which was among her treasures, soft and faint in its colours—a veil which she could draw in her moments of thinking and quiet, those moments which it would not be irreverent any longer to call a dead mother or an angelic presence to hallow and to share.
But she said nothing when she was called to Miss Bethune’s room, and clad in mourning, recognising with a thrill, half of horror, half of pride, the crape upon her dress which proved herright to that new exaltation among human creatures—that position of a mourner which is in its way a step in life. Dora did not ask where she was going when she followed Miss Bethune, also in black from head to foot, to the plain little brougham which had been ordered to do fit and solemn honour to the occasion; the great white wreath and basket of flowers, which filled up the space, called no observation from her. They drove in silence to the great cemetery, with all its gay flowers and elaborate aspect of cheerfulness. It was a fine but cloudy day, warm and soft, yet without sunshine; and Dora had a curious sense of importance, of meaning, as if she had attained an advanced stage of being. Already an experience had fallen to her share, more than one experience. She had knelt, troubled and awe-stricken, by a death-bed; she was now going to stand by a grave. Even where real sorrow exists, this curious sorrowful elation of sentiment is apt to come into the mind of the very young. Dora was deeply impressed by the circumstances and the position, but it was impossible that she could feel any real grief. Tears came to her eyes as she dropped the shower of flowers, white and lovely, into the darkness of that last abode. Her face was full of awe and pity, but her breast of that vague, inexplainable expansion and growth, as of a creature entered into the larger developments and knowledge of life. There were very few other mourners. Mr. Templar, the lawyer, with his keen but veiled observation of everything, serious and businesslike; the doctor, withprofessional gravity and indifference; Miss Bethune, with almost stern seriousness, standing like a statue in her black dress and with her pale face. Why should any of these spectators care? The woman was far the most moved, thinking of the likeness and difference of her own fate, of the failure of that life which was now over, and of her own, a deeper failure still, without any fault of hers. And Dora, wondering, developing, her eyes full of abstract tears, and her mind of awe.
Only one mourner stood pale with watching and thought beside the open grave, his heart aching with loneliness and a profound natural vacancy and pain. He knew that she had neglected him, almost wronged him at the last, cut him off, taking no thought of what was to become of him. He felt even that in so doing this woman was unfaithful to her trust, and had done what she ought not to have done. But all that mattered nothing in face of natural sorrow, natural love. She had been a mother to him, and she was gone. The ear always open to his boyish talk and confidence, always ready to listen, could hear him no more; and, almost more poignant, his care of her was over, there was nothing more to do for her, none of the hundred commissions that used to send him flying, the hundred things that had to be done. His occupation in life seemed to be over, his home, his natural place. It had not perhaps ever been a natural place, but he had not felt that. She had been his mother, though no drop of her blood ran in his veins; and now he was nobody’s son, belonging to no family. The other people round lookedlike ghosts to Harry Gordon. They were part of the strange cutting off, the severance he already felt; none of them had anything to do with her, and yet it was he who was pushed out and put aside, as if he had nothing to do with her, the only mother he had ever known! The little sharp old lawyer was her representative now, not he who had been her son. He stood languid, in a moment of utter depression, collapse of soul and body, by the grave. When all was over, and the solemn voice which sounds as no other voice ever does, falling calm through the still air, bidding earth return to earth, and dust to dust, had ceased, he still stood as if unable to comprehend that all was over—no one to bid him come away, no other place to go to. His brain was not relieved by tears, or his mind set in activity by anything to do. He stood there half stupefied, left behind, in that condition when simply to remain as we are seems the only thing possible to us.
Miss Bethune had placed Dora in the little brougham, in rigorous fulfilment of her duty to the child. Mr. Templar and the doctor had both departed, the two other women, Mrs. Bristow’s maid and the nurse who had accompanied her, had driven away: and still the young man stood, not paying any attention. Miss Bethune waited for a little by the carriage door. She did not answer the appeal of the coachman, asking if he was to drive away; she said nothing to Dora, whose eyes endeavoured in vain to read the changes in her friend’s face; but, after standing there for a few minutes quite silent, she suddenlyturned and went back to the cemetery. It was strange to her to hesitate in anything she did, and from the moment she left the carriage door all uncertainty was over. She went back with a quick step, treading her way among the graves, and put her hand upon young Gordon’s arm.
“You are coming home with me,” she said.
The new, keen voice, irregular and full of life, so unlike the measured tones to which he had been listening, struck the young man uneasily in the midst of his melancholy reverie, which was half trance, half exhaustion. He moved a step away, as if to shake off the interruption, scarcely conscious what, and not at all who it was.
“My dear young man, you must come home with me,” she said again.
He looked at her, with consciousness re-awakening, and attempted to smile, with his natural ready response to every kindness. “It is you,” he said, and then, “I might have known it could only be you.”
What did that mean? Nothing at all. Merely his sense that the one person who had spoken kindly to him, looked tenderly at him (though he had never known why, and had been both amused and embarrassed by the consciousness), was the most likely among all the strangers by whom he was surrounded to be kind to him now. But it produced an effect upon Miss Bethune which was far beyond any meaning it bore.
A great light seemed suddenly to blaze over her face; her eyes, which had been so veiled and stern, awoke; every line of a face which could beharsh and almost rigid in repose, began to melt and soften; her composure, which had been almost solemn, failed; her lip began to quiver, tears came dropping upon his arm, which she suddenly clasped with both her hands, clinging to it. “You say right,” she cried, “my dear, my dear!—more right than all the reasons. It is you and nature that makes everything clear. You are just coming home with me.”
“I don’t seem,” he said, “to know what the word means.”
“But you will soon learn again. God bless the good woman that cherished you and loved you, my bonnie boy. I’ll not say a word against her—oh, no, no! God’s blessing upon her as she lies there. I will never grudge a good word you say of her, never a regret. But now"—she put her arm within his with a proud and tender movement, which so far penetrated his languor as to revive the bewilderment which he had felt before—“now you are coming home with me.”
He did not resist; he allowed himself to be led to the little carriage and packed into it, which was not quite an easy thing to do. On another occasion he would have laughed and protested, but on this he submitted gravely to whatever was required of him, thankful, in the failure of all motive, to have some one to tell him what to do, to move him as if he were an automaton. He sat bundled up on the little front seat, with Dora’s wondering countenance opposite to him, and that other inexplicable face, inspired and lighted up with tenderness. He had not strength enough toinquire why this stranger took possession of him so; neither could Dora tell, who sat opposite to him, her mind awakened, her thoughts busy. This was the almost son of the woman who they said was Dora’s mother. What was he to Dora? Was he the nearer to her, or the farther from her, for that relationship? Did she like him better or worse for having done everything that it ought, they said, have been her part to do?
These questions were all confused in Dora’s mind, but they were not favourable to this new interloper into her life—he who had known about her for years while she had never heard of him. She sat very upright, reluctant to make room for him, yet scrupulously doing so, and a little indignant that he should thus be brought in to interfere with her own claims to the first place. The drive to Bloomsbury seemed very long in these circumstances, and it was indeed a long drive. They all came back into the streets after the long suburban road with a sense almost of relief in the growing noise, the rattle of the causeway, and sound of the carts and carriages—which made it unnecessary, as it had been impossible for them, to say anything to each other, and brought back the affairs of common life to dispel the influences of the solemn moment that was past.
When they had reached Miss Bethune’s rooms, and returned altogether to existence, and the sight of a table spread for a meal, it was a shock, but not an ungrateful one. Miss Bethune at once threw off the gravity which had wrapped her like a cloak, when she put away her black bonnet.She bade Gilchrist hurry to have the luncheon brought up. “These two young creatures have eaten nothing, I am sure, this day. Probably they think they cannot: but when food is set before them they will learn better. Haste ye, Gilchrist, to have it served up. No, Dora, you will stay with me too. Your father is a troubled man this day. You will not go in upon him with that cloud about you, not till you are refreshed and rested, and have got your colour and your natural look back. And you, my bonnie man!” She could not refrain from touching, caressing his shoulder as she passed him; her eyes kept filling with tears as she looked at him. He for his part moved and took his place as she told him, still in a dream.
It was a curious meal, more daintily prepared and delicate than usual, and Miss Bethune was a woman who at all times was “very particular,” and exercised all the gifts of the landlady, whose other lodgers demanded much less of her. And the mistress of the little feast was still less as usual. She scarcely sat down at her own table, but served her young guests with anxious care, carving choice morsels for them, watching their faces, their little movements of impatience, and the gradual development of natural appetite, which came as the previous spell gradually wore off. She talked all the time, her countenance a little flushed and full of emotion, her eyes moist and shining, with frequent sallies at Gilchrist, who hovered round the table waiting upon the young guests, and in her excitement making continualmistakes and stumblings, which soon roused Dora to laugh, and Harry to apologise.
“It is all right,” he cried, when Miss Bethune at last made a dart at her attendant, and gave her, what is called in feminine language, “a shake,” to bring her to herself.
“Are you out of your wits, woman?” Miss Bethune exclaimed. “Go away and leave me to look after the bairns, if ye cannot keep your head. Are you out of your wits?”
“Indeed, mem, and I have plenty of reason, Gilchrist said, weeping, and feeling for her apron, while the dish in her hand wavered wildly; and then it was that Harry Gordon, coming to himself, cried out that it was all right.
“And I am going to have some of that,” he added, steadying the kind creature, whose instinct of service had more effect than either encouragement or reproof. And this little touch of reality settled him too. He began to respond a little, to rouse himself, even to see the humour of the situation, at which Dora had begun to laugh, but which brought a soft moisture, in which was ease and consolation, to his eyes.
It was not until about an hour later that Miss Bethune was left alone with the young man. He had begun by this time to speak about himself. “I am not so discouraged as you think,” he said, “I don’t seem to be afraid. After all, it doesn’t matter much, does it, what happens to a young fellow all alone in the world? It’s only me, anyhow. I have no wife,” he said, with a faint laugh, “no sister to be involved—nothing but my ownrather useless person, a thing of no account. It wasn’t that that knocked me down. It was just the feeling of the end of everything, and that she was laid there that had been so good to me—so good—and nothing ever to be done for her any more.”
“I can forgive you that,” said Miss Bethune, with a sort of sob in her throat. “And yet she was ill to you, unjust at the last.”
“No, not that. I have had everything, too much for a man capable of earning his living to accept—but then it seemed all so natural, it was the common course of life. I was scarcely waking up to see that it could not be.”
“And a cruel rousing you have had at last, my poor boy.”
“No,” he said steadily, “I will never allow it was cruel; it has been sharp and effectual. It couldn’t help being effectual, could it? since I have no alternative. The pity is I am good for so little. No education to speak of.”
“You shall have education—as much as you can set your face to.”
He looked up at her with a little air of surprise, and shook his head. “No,” he said, “not now. I am too old. I must lose no more time. The thing is, that my work will be worth so much less, being guided by no skill. Skill is a beautiful thing. I envy the very scavengers,” he said (who were working underneath the window), “for piling up their mud like that, straight. I should never get it straight.” The poor young fellow was so near tears that he was glad from time totime to have a chance of a feeble laugh, which relieved him. “And that is humble enough! I think much the best thing for me will be to go back to South America. There are people who know me, who would give me a little place where I could learn. Book-keeping can’t be such a tremendous mystery. There’s an old clerk or two of my guardians"—here he paused to swallow down the climbing sorrow—“who would give me a hint or two. And if the pay was very small at first, why, I’m not an extravagant fellow.”
“Are you sure of that?” his confidante said.
He looked at her again, surprised, then glanced at himself and his dress, which was not economical, and reddened and laughed again. “I am afraid you are right,” he said. “I haven’t known much what economy was. I have lived like the other people; but I am not too old to learn, and I should not mind in the least what I looked like, or how I lived, for a time. Things would get better after a time.”
They were standing together near the window, for he had begun to roam about the room as he talked, and she had risen from her chair with one of the sudden movements of excitement. “There will be no need,” she said,—“there will be no need. Something will be found for you at home.”
He shook his head. “You forget it is scarcely home to me. And what could I do here that would be worth paying me for? I must no more be dependent upon kindness. Oh, don’t think I do not feel kindness. What should I havedone this miserable day but for you, who have been so good to me—as good as—as a mother, though I had no claim?”
She gave a great cry, and seized him by both his hands. “Oh, lad, if you knew what you were saying! That word to me, that have died for it, and have no claim! Gilchrist, Gilchrist!” she cried, suddenly dropping his hands again, “come here and speak to me! Help me! have pity upon me! For if this is not him, all nature and God’s against me. Come here before I speak or die!”
Itwas young Gordon himself, alarmed but not excited as by any idea of a new discovery which could affect his fate, who brought Miss Bethune back to herself, far better than Gilchrist could do, who had no art but to weep and entreat, and then yield to her mistress whatever she might wish.A quelque chose malheur est bon.He had been in the habit of soothing and calming down an excitable, sometimes hysterical woman, whoseaccès des nerfsmeant nothing, or were, at least, supposed to mean nothing, except indeed nerves, and the ups and downs which are characteristic of them. He was roused by the not dissimilar outburst of feeling or passion, wholly incomprehensible to him from any other point of view, to which his new friend had given way. He took it very quietly, with the composure of use and wont. The sight of her emotion and excitement brought him quite back to himself. He could imagine no reason whatever for it, except the sympathetic effect of all the troublous circumstances in which she had been, without any real reason, involved. It was her sympathy, her kindness for himself and for Dora, he had not the least doubt, which, by bringing her into those scenes of pain and trouble, and associating her so completely with the complicated and intricate story, had broughton this “attack.” What he had known to be characteristic of the one woman with whom he had been in familiar intercourse for so long a period of his life seemed to Harry characteristic of all women. He was quite equal to the occasion. Dr. Roland himself, who would have been so full of professional curiosity, so anxious to make out what it was all about, as perhaps to lessen his promptitude in action, would scarcely have been of so much real use as Harry, who had noarrière pensée, but addressed himself to the immediate emergency with all his might. He soothed the sufferer, so that she was soon relieved by copious floods of tears, which seemed to him the natural method of getting rid of all that emotion and excitement, but which surprised Gilchrist beyond description, and even Miss Bethune herself, whose complete breakdown was so unusual and unlike her. He left her quite at ease in his mind as to her condition, having persuaded her to lie down, and recommended Gilchrist to darken the room, and keep her mistress in perfect quiet.
“I will go and look after my things,” he said, “and I’ll come back when I have made all my arrangements, and tell you everything. Oh, don’t speak now! You will be all right in the evening if you keep quite quiet now: and if you will give me your advice then, it will be very, very grateful to me.” He made a little warning gesture, keeping her from replying, and then kissed her hand and went away. He had himself pulled down the blind to subdue a little of the garish July daylight,and placed her on a sofa in the corner—ministrations which both mistress and maid permitted with bewilderment, so strange to them was at once the care and the authority of such proceedings. They remained, Miss Bethune on the sofa, Gilchrist, open-mouthed, staring at her, until the door was heard to close upon the young man. Then Miss Bethune rose slowly, with a kind of awe in her face.
“As soon as you think he is out of sight,” she said, “Gilchrist, we’ll have up the blinds again, but not veesibly, to go against the boy.”
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, between laughing and crying, “to bid me darken the room, and you that canna abide the dark, night or day!”
“It was a sweet thought, Gilchrist—all the pure goodness of him and the kind heart.”
“I am not saying, mem, but what the young gentleman has a very kind heart.”
“You are not saying? And what can you know beyond what’s veesible to every person that sees him? It is more than that. Gilchrist, you and all the rest, what do I care what you say? If that is not the voice of nature, what is there to trust to in this whole world? Why should that young lad, bred up so different, knowing nothing of me or my ways, have taken to me? Look at Dora. What a difference! She has no instinct, nothing drawing her to her poor mother. That was a most misfortunate woman, but not an ill woman, Gilchrist. Look how she has done by mine! But Dora has no leaning towards her, no tender thought; whereas he, my bonnie boy——”
“Mem,” said Gilchrist, “but if it was the voice of nature, it would be double strong in Miss Dora; for there is no doubt that it was her mother: and with this one—oh, my dear leddy, you ken yoursel’——”
Miss Bethune gave her faithful servant a look of flame, and going to the windows, drew up energetically the blinds, making the springs resound. Then she said in her most satirical tone: “And what is it I ken mysel’?”
“Oh, mem,” said Gilchrist, “there’s a’ the evidence, first his ain story, and then the leddy’s that convinced ye for a moment; and then, what is most o’ a, the old gentleman, the writer, one of them that kens everything: of the father that died so many long years ago, and the baby before him.”
Miss Bethune put up her hands to her ears, she stamped her foot upon the ground. “How dare ye—how dare ye?” she cried. “Either man or woman that repeats that fool story to me is no friend of mine. My child, that I’ve felt in my heart growing up, and seen him boy and man! What’s that old man’s word—a stranger that knows nothing, that had even forgotten what he was put up to say—in comparison with what is in my heart? Is there such a thing as nature, or no? Is a mother just like any other person, no better, rather worse? Oh, woman!—you that are a woman! with no call to be rigid about your evidence like a man—what’s your evidence to me? I will just tell him when he comes back. ‘My bonnie man,’ I will say, ‘you have been drivenhere and there in this world, and them that liked you best have failed you; but here is the place where you belong, and here is a love that will never fail!’”
“Oh, my dear leddy, my own mistress,” cried Gilchrist, “think—think before you do that! He will ask ye for the evidence, if I am not to ask for it. He’s a fine, independent-spirited young gentleman, and he will just shake his head, and say he’ll lippen to nobody again. Oh, dinna deceive the young man! Ye might find out after——”
“What, Gilchrist? Do you think I would change my mind about my own son, and abandon him, like this woman, at the last?”
“I never knew you forsake one that trusted in ye, I’m not saying that; but there might come one after all that had a better claim. There might appear one that even the like of me would believe in—that would have real evidence in his favour, that was no more to be doubted than if he had never been taken away out of your arms.”
Miss Bethune turned round quick as lightning upon her maid, her eyes shining, her face full of sudden colour and light. “God bless you, Gilchrist!” she cried, seizing the maid by her shoulders with a half embrace; “I see now you have never believed in that story—no more than me.”
Poor Gilchrist could but gape with her mouth open at this unlooked-for turning of the tables. She had presented, without knowing it, the strongest argument of all.
After this, the patient, whom poor Harry had left to the happy influences of quiet and darkness, with all the blinds drawn up and the afternoon sunshine pouring in, went through an hour or two of restless occupation, her mind in the highest activity, her thoughts and her hands full. She promised finally to Gilchrist, not without a mental reservation in the case of special impulse or new light, not to disclose her conviction to Harry, but to wait for at least a day or two on events. But even this resolution did not suffice to reduce her to any condition of quiet, or make the rest which he had prescribed possible. She turned to a number of things which had been laid aside to be done one time or another; arrangement of new possessions and putting away of old, for which previously she had never found a fit occasion, and despatched them, scarcely allowing Gilchrist to help her, at lightning speed.
Finally, she took out an old and heavy jewel-box, which had stood untouched in her bedroom for years; for, save an old brooch or two and some habitual rings which never left her fingers, Miss Bethune wore no ornaments. She took them into her sitting-room as the time approached when Harry might be expected back. It would give her a countenance, she thought; it would keep her from fixing her eyes on him while he spoke, and thus being assailed through all the armour of the heart at the same time. She could not look him in the face and see that likeness which Gilchrist, unconvincible, would not see, and yet remain silent. Turning over the old-fashionedjewels, telling him about them, to whom they had belonged, and all the traditions regarding them, would help her in that severe task of self-repression. She put the box on the table before her, and pulled out the trays.
Nobody in Bloomsbury had seen these treasures before: the box had been kept carefully locked, disguised in an old brown cover, that no one might even guess how valuable it was. Miss Bethune was almost tempted to send for Dora to see the diamonds in their old-fashioned settings, and that pearl necklace which was still finer in its perfection of lustre and shape. To call Dora when there was anything to show was so natural, and it might make it easier for her to keep her own counsel; but she reflected that in Dora’s presence the young man would not be more than half hers, and forbore.
Never in her life had those jewels given her so much pleasure. They had given her no pleasure, indeed. She had not been allowed to have them in that far-off stormy youth, which had been lightened by such a sweet, guilty gleam of happiness, and quenched in such misery of downfall. When they came to her by inheritance, like all the rest, these beautiful things had made her heart sick. What could she do with them—a woman whose life no longer contained any possible festival, who had nobody coming after her, no heir to make heirlooms sweet? She had locked the box, and almost thrown away the key, which, however, was a passionate suggestion repugnant to common sense, and resolved itself naturallyinto confiding the key to Gilchrist, in whose most secret repositories it had been kept, with an occasional furtive interval during which the maid had secretly visited and “polished up” the jewels, making sure that they were all right. Neither mistress nor maid was quite aware of their value, and both probably exaggerated it in their thoughts; but some of the diamonds were fine, though all were very old-fashioned in arrangement, and the pearls were noted. Miss Bethune pulled out the trays, and the gems flashed and sparkled in a thousand colours in the slant of sunshine which poured in its last level ray through one window, just before the sun set—and made a dazzling show upon the table, almost blinding Janie, who came up with a message, and could not restrain a little shriek of wonder and admiration. The letter was one of trouble and appeal from poor Mrs. Hesketh, who and her husband were becoming more and more a burden on the shoulders of their friends. It asked for money, as usual, just a little money to go on with, as the shop in which they had been set up was not as yet producing much. The letter had been written with evident reluctance, and was marked with blots of tears. Miss Bethune’s mind was too much excited to consider calmly any such petition. Full herself of anticipation, of passionate hope, and visionary enthusiasm, which transported her above all common things, how was she to refuse a poor woman’s appeal for the bare necessities of existence—a woman “near her trouble,” with a useless husband, who was unworthy, yet whom the poor soul loved?She called Gilchrist, who generally carried the purse, to get something for the poor little pair.
“Is there anybody waiting?” she asked.
“Oh ay, mem,” said Gilchrist, “there’s somebody waiting,—just him himsel’, the weirdless creature, that is good for nothing.” Gilchrist did not approve of all her mistress’s liberalities. “I would not just be their milch cow to give them whatever they’re wanting,” she said. “It’s awful bad for any person to just know where to run when they are in trouble.”
“Hold your peace!” cried her mistress. “Am I one to shut up my heart when the blessing of God has come to me?”
“Oh, mem!” cried Gilchrist, remonstrating, holding up her hands.
But Miss Bethune stamped her foot, and the wiser woman yielded.
She found Hesketh standing at the door of the sitting-room, when she went out to give him, very unwillingly, the money for his wife. “The impident weirdless creature! He would have been in upon my leddy in another moment, pressing to her very presence with his impident ways!” cried Gilchrist, hot and indignant. The faithful woman paused at the door as she came back, and looked at her mistress turning over and rearranging these treasures. “And her sitting playing with her bonnie dies, in a rapture like a little bairn!” she said to herself, putting up her apron to her eyes. And then Gilchrist shook her head—shook it, growing quicker and quicker in the movement, as if she would have twisted it off.
But Miss Bethune was “very composed” when young Gordon came back. With an intense sense of the humour of the position, which mistress and maid communicated to each other with one glance of tacit co-operation, these two women comported themselves as if the behests of the young visitor who had taken the management of Miss Bethune’saccès des nerfsupon himself, had been carried out. She assumed, almost unconsciously, notwithstanding the twinkle in her eye, the languid aspect of a woman who has been resting after unusual excitement. All women, they say (as they say so many foolish things), are actors; all women, at all events, let us allow, learn as the A B C of their training the art of taking up a rôle assigned to them, and fulfilling the necessities of a position. “You will see what I’m reduced to by what I’m doing,” she said. “As if there was nothing of more importance in life, I am just playing myself with my toys, like Dora, or any other little thing.”
“So much the best thing you could do,” said young Harry; and he was eager and delighted to look through the contents of the box with her.
He was far better acquainted with their value than she was, and while she told him the family associations connected with each ornament, he discussed very learnedly what they were, and distinguished the old-fashioned rose diamonds which were amongst those of greater value, with a knowledge that seemed to her extraordinary. They spent, in fact, an hour easily and happily over that box, quite relieved from graver considerations bythe interposition of a new thing, in which there were no deep secrets of the heart or commotions of being involved: and thus were brought down into the ordinary from the high and troublous level of feeling and excitement on which they had been. To Miss Bethune the little episode was one of child’s play in the midst of the most serious questions of the world. Had she thought it possible beforehand that such an interval could have been, she would, in all likelihood, have scorned herself for the dereliction, and almost scorned the young man for being able to forget at once his sorrow and the gravity of his circumstances at sight of anything so trifling as a collection of trinkets. But in reality this interlude was balm to them both. It revealed to Miss Bethune a possibility of ordinary life and intercourse, made sweet by understanding and affection, which was a revelation to her repressed and passionate spirit; and it soothed the youth with that renewing of fresh interests, reviving and succeeding the old, which gives elasticity to the mind, and courage to face the world anew. They did not know how long they had been occupied over the jewels, when the hour of dinner came round again, and Gilchrist appeared with her preparations, still further increasing that sense of peaceful life renewed, and the order of common things begun again. It was only after this meal was over, the jewels being all restored to their places, and the box to its old brown cover in Miss Bethune’s bedroom, that the discussion of the graver question was resumed.
“There is one thing,” Miss Bethune said,“that, however proud you may be, you must let me say: and that is, that everything having turned out so different to your thoughts, and you left—you will not be offended?—astray, as it were, in this big unfriendly place——”
“I cannot call it unfriendly,” said young Gordon. “If other people find it so, it is not my experience. I have found you.” He looked up at her with a half laugh, with moisture in his eyes.
“Ay,” she said, with emphasis, “you have found me—you say well—found me when you were not looking for me. I accept the word as a good omen. And after that?”
If only she would not have abashed him from time to time with those dark sayings, which seemed to mean something to which he had no clue! He felt himself brought suddenly to a standstill in his grateful effusion of feeling, and put up his hand to arrest her in what she was evidently going on to say.
“Apart from that,” he said hurriedly, “I am not penniless. I have not been altogether dependent; at least, the form of my dependence has been the easiest one. I have had my allowance from my guardian ever since I came to man’s estate. It was my own, though, of course, of his giving. And I am not an extravagant fellow. It was not as if I wanted money for to-morrow’s living, for daily bread.” He coloured as he spoke, with the half pride, half shame, of discussing such a subject. “I think,” he said, throwing off that flush with a shake of his head,“that I have enough to take me back to South America, and there, I told you, I have friends. I don’t think I can fail to find work there.”
“But under such different circumstances! Have you considered? A poor clerk where you were one of the fine gentlemen of the place. Such a change of position is easier where you are not known.”
He grew red again, with a more painful colour. “I don’t think so,” he said quickly. “I don’t believe that my old friends would cast me off because, instead of being a useless fellow about town, I was a poor clerk.”
“Maybe you are right,” said Miss Bethune very gravely. “I am not one that thinks so ill of human nature. They would not cast you off. But you, working hard all day, wearied at night, with no house to entertain them in that entertained you, would it not be you that would cast off them?”
He looked at her, startled, for a moment. “Do you think,” he cried, “that poverty makes a man mean like that?” And then he added slowly: “It is possible, perhaps, that it might be so.” Then he brightened up again, and looked her full in the face. “But then there would be nobody to blame for that, it would be simply my own fault.”
“God bless you, laddie!” cried Miss Bethune quite irrelevantly; and then she too paused. “If it should happen so that there was a place provided for you at home. No, no, not what you call dependence—far from it, hard work. I knowone—a lady that has property in the North—property that has not been well managed—that has given her more trouble than it is worth. But there’s much to be made of it, if she had a man who would give his mind to it as if—as if it were his own.”
“But I,” he said, “know nothing about the North. I would not know how to manage. I told you I had no education. And would this lady have me, trust me, put that in my hands, without knowing, without——”
“She would trust you,” said Miss Bethune, clasping her hands together firmly, and looking him in the face, in a rigid position which showed how little steady she was—“she would trust you, for life and death, on my word.”
His eyes fell before that unfathomable concentration of hers. “And you would trust me like that—knowing so little, so little? And how can you tell even that I am honest—even that I am true? That there’s nothing behind, no weakness, no failure?”
“Don’t speak to me,” she said harshly. “I know.”
Theevening passed, however, without any further revelations. Miss Bethune explained to the young man, with all the lucidity of a man of business, the situation and requirements of that “property in the North,” which would give returns, she believed, of various kinds, not always calculated in balance sheets, if it was looked after by a man who would deal with it “as if it were his own.” The return would be something in money and rents, but much more in human comfort and happiness. She had never had the courage to tackle that problem, she said, and the place had been terrible to her, full of associations which would be thought of no more if he were there. The result was, that young Gordon went away thoughtful, somewhat touched by the feeling with which Miss Bethune had spoken of her poor crofters, somewhat roused by the thought of “the North,” that vague and unknown country which was the country of his fathers, the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, the country of Scott, which is, after all, distinction enough for any well-conditioned stranger. Should he try that strange new opening of life suddenly put before him? The unknown of itself has a charm—