If the pass were dangerous known,The danger’s self were lure alone.
If the pass were dangerous known,The danger’s self were lure alone.
If the pass were dangerous known,The danger’s self were lure alone.
He went back to his hotel with at least a new project fully occupying all his thoughts.
On the next evening, in the dusk of the summer night, Miss Bethune was in her bed-chamber alone. She had no light, though she was a lover of the light, and had drawn up the blinds as soon as the young physician who prescribed a darkened room had disappeared. She had a habit of watching out the last departing rays of daylight, and loved to sit in the gloaming, as she called it, reposing from all the cares of the day in that meditative moment. It was a bad sign of Miss Bethune’s state of mind when she called early for her lamp. She was seated thus in the dark, when young Gordon came in audibly to the sitting-room, introduced by Gilchrist, who told him her mistress would be with him directly; but, knowing Miss Bethune would hear what she said, did not come to call her. The lamps were lighted in that room, and showed a little outline of light through the chinks of the door. She smiled to herself in the dark, with a beatitude that ought to have lighted it up, as she listened to the big movements of the young man in the lighted room next door. He had seated himself under Gilchrist’s ministrations; but when she went away he got up and moved about, looking, as Miss Bethune divined, at the pictures on the walls and the books and little silver toys on the tables.
He made more noise, she thought to herself proudly, than a woman does: filled the space more, seemed to occupy and fill out everything.Her countenance and her heart expanded in the dark; she would have liked to peep at him through the crevice of light round the door, or even the keyhole, to see him when he did not know she was looking, to read the secrets of his heart in his face. There were none there, she said to herself with an effusion of happiness which brought the tears to her eyes, none there which a mother should be afraid to discover. The luxury of sitting there, holding her breath, hearing him move, knowing him so near, was so sweet and so great, that she sat, too blessed to move, taking all the good out of that happy moment before it should fleet away.
Suddenly, however, there came a dead silence. Had he sat down again? Had he gone out on the balcony? What had become of him? She sat breathless, wondering, listening for the next sound. Surely he had stepped outside the window to look out upon the Bloomsbury street, and the waving of the trees in the Square, and the stars shining overhead. Not a sound—yet, yes, there was something. What was it? A faint, stealthy rustling, not to be called a sound at all, rather some stealthy movement to annihilate sound—the strangest contrast to the light firm step that had come into the room, and the free movements which she had felt to be bigger than a woman’s.
Miss Bethune in the dark held her breath; fear seized possession of her, she knew not why; her heart sank, she knew not why. Oh, his father—his father was not a good man!
The rustling continued, very faint; it might have been a small animal rubbing against thedoor. She sat bolt upright in her chair, motionless, silent as a waxen image, listening. If perhaps, after all, it should be only one of the little girls, or even the cat rubbing against the wall idly on the way downstairs! A troubled smile came over her face, her heart gave a throb of relief. But then the sound changed, and Miss Bethune’s face again grew rigid, her heart stood still.
Some one was trying very cautiously, without noise, to open the door; to turn the handle without making any sound required some time; it creaked a little, and then there was silence—guilty silence, the pause of stealth alarmed by the faintest noise; then it began again. Slowly, slowly the handle turned round, the door opened, a hair’s breadth at a time. O Lord above! his father—his father was an ill man.
There was some one with her in the room—some one unseen, as she was, swallowed up in the darkness, veiled by the curtains at the windows, which showed faintly a pale streak of sky only, letting in no light. Unseen, but not inaudible; a hurried, fluttering breath betraying him, and that faint sound of cautious, uneasy movement, now and then instantly, guiltily silenced, and then resumed. She could feel the stealthy step thrill the flooring, making a jar, which was followed by one of those complete silences in which the intruder too held his breath, then another stealthy step.
A thousand thoughts, a very avalanche, precipitated themselves through her mind. A mandid not steal into a dark room like that if he were doing it for the first time. And his words last night, “How do you know even that I am honest?” And then his father—his father—oh, God help him, God forgive him!—that was an ill man! And his upbringing in a country where lies were common, with a guardian that did him no justice, and the woman that cut him off. And not to know that he had a creature belonging to him in the world to be made glad or sorry whatever happened! Oh, God forgive him, God help him! the unfortunate, the miserable boy! “Mine all the same—mine all the same!” her heart said, bleeding—oh, that was no metaphor! bleeding with the anguish, the awful, immeasurable blow.
If there was any light at all in the room, it was a faint greyness, just showing in the midst of the dark the vague form of a little table against the wall, and a box in a brown cover—a box—no, no, the shape of a box, but only something standing there, something, the accursed thing for which life and love were to be wrecked once more. Oh, his father—his father! But his father would not have done that. Yet it was honester to take the trinkets, the miserable stones that would bring in money, than to wring a woman’s heart. And what did the boy know? He had never been taught, never had any example, God help him, God forgive him! and mine—mine all the time!
Then out of the complete darkness came into that faint grey where the box was, an arm, a hand. It touched, not calculating the distance, the solid substance with a faint jar, and retired like a ghost,while she sat rigid, looking on; then more cautiously, more slowly still, it stole forth again, and grasped the box. Miss Bethune had settled nothing what to do, she had thought of nothing but the misery of it, she had intended, so far as she had any intention, to watch while the tragedy was played out, the dreadful act accomplished. But she was a woman of sudden impulses, moved by flashes of resolution almost independent of her will.
Suddenly, more ghostlike still than the arm of the thief, she made a swift movement forward, and put her hand upon his. Her grasp seemed to crush through the quivering clammy fingers, and she felt under her own the leap of the pulses; but the criminal was prepared for every emergency, and uttered no cry. She felt the quick noiseless change of attitude, and then the free arm swing to strike her—heaven and earth! to strike her, a woman twice his age, to strike her, his friend, his—— She was a strong woman, in the fulness of health and courage. As quick as lightning, she seized the arm as it descended, and held him as in a grip of iron. Was it guilt that made him like a child in her hold? He had a stick in his hand, shortened, with a heavy head, ready to deal a blow. Oh, the coward, the wretched coward! She held him panting for a moment, unable to say a word; and then she called out with a voice that was no voice, but a kind of roar of misery, for “Gilchrist, Gilchrist!”
Gilchrist, who was never far off, who alwayshad her ear open for her mistress, heard, and came flying from up or down stairs with her candle: and some one else heard it, who was standing pensive on the balcony, looking out, and wondering what fate had now in store for him, and mingling his thoughts with the waving of the trees and the nameless noises of the street. Which of them arrived first was never known, he from the other room throwing wide the door of communication, or she from the stairs with the impish, malicious light of that candle throwing in its sudden illumination as with a pleasure in the deed.
The spectators were startled beyond measure to see the lady in apparent conflict with a man, but they had no time to make any remarks. The moment the light flashed upon her, Miss Bethune gave a great cry. “It’s you, ye vermin!” she cried, flinging the furtive creature in her grasp from her against the wall, which half stunned him for the moment. And then she stood for a moment, her head bent back, her face without a trace of colour, confronting the eager figure in the doorway, surrounded by the glow of the light, flying forward to help her.
“O God, forgive me!” she cried, “God, forgive me, for I am an ill woman: but I will never forgive myself!”
The man who lay against the wall, having dropped there on the floor with the vehemence of her action, perhaps exaggerating the force that had been used against him, to excite pity—for Gilchrist, no mean opponent, held one door, and that unexpected dreadful apparition of the youngman out of the lighted room bearing down upon him, filled the other—was Alfred Hesketh, white, miserable, and cowardly, huddled up in a wretched heap, with furtive eyes gleaming, and the heavy-headed stick furtively grasped, still ready to deal an unexpected blow, had he the opportunity, though he was at the same time rubbing the wrist that held it, as if in pain.
Young Gordon had made a hurried step towards him, when Miss Bethune put out her hand. She had dropped into a chair, where she sat panting for breath.
“Wait,” she said, “wait till I can speak.”
“You brute!” cried Harry; “how dare you come in here? What have you done to frighten the lady?”
He was interrupted by a strange chuckle of a laugh from Miss Bethune’s panting throat.
“It’s rather me, I’m thinking, that’s frightened him,” she said. “Ye wretched vermin of a creature, how did ye know? What told ye in your meeserable mind that there was something here to steal? And ye would have struck me—me that am dealing out to ye your daily bread! No, my dear, you’re not to touch him; don’t lay a finger on him. The Lord be thanked—though God forgive me for thanking Him for the wickedness of any man!”
How enigmatical this all was to Harry Gordon, and how little he could imagine any clue to the mystery, it is needless to say. Gilchrist herself thought her mistress was temporarily out of her mind. She was quicker, however, torealise what had happened than the young man, who did not think of the jewels, nor remember anything about them. Gilchrist looked with anxiety at her lady’s white face and gleaming eyes.
“Take her into the parlour, Master Harry,” she said: “she’s just done out. And I’ll send for the police.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind, Gilchrist,” said Miss Bethune. “Get up, ye creature. You’re not worth either man’s or woman’s while; you have no more fusion than a cat. Get up, and begone, ye poor, weak, wretched, cowardly vermin, for that’s what ye are: and I thank the Lord with all my heart that it was only you! Gilchrist, stand away from the door, and let the creature go.”
He rose, dragging himself up by degrees, with a furtive look at Gordon, who, indeed, looked a still less easy opponent than Miss Bethune.
“I take that gentleman to witness,” he said, “as there’s no evidence against me but just a lady’s fancy: and I’ve been treated very bad, and my wrist broken, for aught I know, and bruised all over, and I——”
Miss Bethune stamped her foot on the floor. “Begone, ye born liar and robber!” she said. “Gilchrist will see ye off the premises; and mind, you never come within my sight again. Now, Mr. Harry, as she calls ye, I’ll go into the parlour, as she says; and the Lord, that only knows the wickedness that has been in my mind, forgive me this night! and it would be a comfortto my heart, my bonnie man, if you would say Amen.”
“Amen with all my heart,” said the young man, with a smile, “but, so far as I can make out, your wickedness is to be far too good and forgiving. What did the fellow do? I confess I should not like to be called a vermin, as you called him freely—but if he came with intent to steal, he should have been handed over to the police, indeed he should.”
“I am more worthy of the police than him, if ye but knew: but, heaven be praised, you’ll never know. I mind now, he came with a message when I was playing with these wretched diamonds, like an old fool: and he must have seen or scented them with the creeminal instinct Dr. Roland speaks about.”
She drew a long breath, for she had not yet recovered from the panting of excitement, and then told her story, the rustling without, the opening of the door, the hand extended to the box. When she had told all this with much vividness, Miss Bethune suddenly stopped, drew another long breath, and dropped back upon the sofa where she was sitting. It was not her way; the lights had been dazzling and confusing her ever since they blazed upon her by the opening of the two doors, and the overwhelming horror, and blessed but tremendous revulsion of feeling, which had passed in succession over her, had been more than her strength, already undermined by excitement, could bear. Her breath, her consciousness, her life, seemed to ebb away in amoment, leaving only a pale shadow of her, fallen back upon the cushions.
Once more Harry was the master of the situation. He had seen a woman faint before, which was almost more than Gilchrist, with all her experience, had done, and he had the usual remedies at his fingers’ ends. But this was not like the usual easy faints, over in a minute, to which young Gordon had been accustomed, and Dr. Roland had to be summoned from below, and a thrill of alarm had run through the house, Mrs. Simcox herself coming up from the kitchen, with strong salts and feathers to burn, before Miss Bethune came to herself. The house was frightened, and so at last was the experienced Harry; but Dr. Roland’s interest and excitement may be said to have been pleasurable. “I have always thought this was what was likely. I’ve been prepared for it,” he said to himself, as he hovered round the sofa. It would be wrong to suppose that he lengthened, or at least did nothing to shorten, this faint for his own base purposes, that he might the better make out certain signs which he thought he had recognised. But the fact was, that not only Dora had come from abovestairs, but even Mr. Mannering had dragged himself down, on the alarm that Miss Bethune was dead or dying; and that the whole household had gathered in her room, or on the landing outside; while she lay, in complicity (or not) with the doctor, in that long-continued swoon, which the spectators afterwards said lasted an hour, or two, or even three hours, according to their temperaments.
When she came to herself at last, the scene upon which she opened her eyes was one which helped her recovery greatly, by filling her with wrath and indignation. She lay in the middle of her room, in a strong draught, the night air blowing from window to window across her, the lamp even under its shade, much more the candles on the mantelpiece, blown about, and throwing a wavering glare upon the agitated group, Gilchrist in the foreground with her apron at her eyes, and behind her Dora, red with restrained emotions, and Janie and Molly crying freely, while Mrs. Simcox brandished a bunch of fuming feathers, and Mr. Mannering peered over the landlady’s head with his “pince-nez” insecurely balanced on his nose, and his legs trembling under him in a harmony of unsteadiness, but anxiety. Miss Bethune’s wrist was in the grasp of the doctor; and Harry stood behind with a fan, which, in the strong wind blowing across her from window to window, struck the patient as ludicrously unnecessary. “What is all this fuss about?” she cried, trying to raise herself up.
“There’s no fuss, my dear lady,” said the doctor; “but you must keep perfectly quiet.”
“Oh, you’re there, Dr. Roland? Then there’s one sane person. But, for goodness’ sake, make Mr. Mannering sit down, and send all these idiots away. What’s the matter with me, that I’ve to get my death of cold, and be murdered with that awful smell, and even Harry Gordon behaving like a fool, making an air with a fan, when there’s a gale blowing? Go away, go away.”
“You see that our friend has come to herself,” said the doctor. “Shut that window, somebody, the other will be enough; and, my dear woman, for the sake of all that’s good, take those horrid feathers away.”
“I am murdered with the smell!” cried Miss Bethune, placing her hands over her face. “But make Mr. Mannering sit down, he’s not fit to stand after his illness; and Harry, boy, sit down, too, and don’t drive me out of my senses. Go away, go all of you away.”
The last to be got rid of was Dr. Roland, who assured everybody that the patient was now quite well, but languid. “You want to get rid of me too, I know,” he said, “and I’m going; but I should like to see you in bed first.”
“You shall not see me in bed, nor no other man,” said Miss Bethune. “I will go to bed when I am disposed, doctor. I’m not your patient, mind, at all events, now.”
“You were half an hour since: but I’m not going to pretend to any authority,” said the doctor. “I hope I know better. Don’t agitate yourself any more, if you’ll be guided by me. You have been screwing up that heart of yours far too tight.”
“How do you know,” she said, “that I have got a heart at all?”
“Probably not from the sentimental point of view,” he replied, with a little fling of sarcasm: “but I know you couldn’t live without the physical organ, and it’s over-strained. Good-night, since I see you want to get rid of me. But I’ll be handy downstairs, and mind you come for me,Gilchrist, on the moment if she should show any signs again.”
This was said to Gilchrist in an undertone as the doctor went away.
Miss Bethune sat up on her sofa, still very pale, still with a singing in her ears, and the glitter of fever in her eyes. “You are not to go away, Harry,” she said. “I have something to tell you before you go.”
“Oh, mem,” said Gilchrist, “for any sake, not to-night.”
“Go away, and bide away till I send for you,” cried the mistress. “And, Harry, sit you down here by me. I am going to tell you a story. This night has taught me many things. I might die, or I might be murdered for the sake of a few gewgaws that are nothing to me, and go down to my grave with a burden on my heart. I want to speak before I die.”
“Not to-night,” he cried. “You are in no danger. I’ll sleep here on the sofa by way of guard, and to-morrow you will send them to your bankers. Don’t tire yourself any more to-night.”
“You are like all the rest, and understand nothing about it,” she cried impatiently. “It is just precisely now that I will speak, and no other time. Harry, I am going to tell you a story. It is like most women’s stories—about a young creature that was beguiled and loved a man. He was a man that had a fine outside, and looked as good as he was bonnie, or at least this misfortunate thing thought so. He had nothing, and she had nothing. But she was the last of her family,and would come into a good fortune if she pleased her uncle that was the head of the name. But the uncle could not abide this man. Are you listening to me? Mind, it is a story, but not an idle story, and every word tells. Well, she was sent away to a lonely country place, an old house, with two old servants in it, to keep her free of the man. But the man followed; and in that solitude who was to hinder them seeing each other? They did for a while every day. And then the two married each other, as two can do in Scotland that make up their minds to risk it, and were living together in secret in the depths of the Highlands, as I told you, nobody knowing but the old servants that had been far fonder of her father than of the uncle that was head of the house, and were faithful to her in life and death. And then there came terrible news that the master was coming back. That poor young woman—oh, she was a fool, and I do not defend her!—had just been delivered in secret, in trouble and misery—for she dared not seek help or nursing but what she got at home—of a bonnie bairn,"—she put out her hand and grasped him by the arm,—“a boy, a darling, though she had him but for two or three days. Think if you can what that was. The master coming that had, so to speak, the power of life and death in his hands, and the young, subdued girl that he had put there to be in safety, the mother of a son——” Miss Bethune drew a long breath. She silenced the remonstrance on the lips of her hearer by a gesture, and went on:—
“It was the man, her husband, that she thought loved her, that brought the news. He said everything was lost if it should be known. He bid her to be brave and put a good face upon it, for his sake and the boy’s. Keep her fortune and cling to her inheritance she must, whatever happened, for their sake. And while she was dazed in her weakness, and could not tell what to think, he took the baby out of her arms, and carried him away.
“Harry Gordon, that’s five and twenty years ago, and man or bairn I have never seen since, though I did that for them. I dreed my weird for ten long years—ten years of mortal trouble—and never said a word, and nobody knew. Then my uncle died, and the money, the terrible money, bought with my life’s blood, became mine. And I looked for him then to come back. But he never came back nor word nor sign of him. And my son—the father, I had discovered what he was, I wanted never to hear his name again—but my son—Harry Gordon, that’s you! They may say what they will, but I know better. Who should know, if not the mother who bore you? My heart went out to you when I saw you first, and yours to me. You’ll not tell me that your heart did not speak for your mother? It is you, my darling, it is you!”
He had staggered to his feet, pale, trembling, and awe-stricken. The sight of her emotion, the pity of her story, the revolt and resistance in his own heart were too much for him. “I!” he cried.
Harry Gordonpassed the night upon the sofa in Miss Bethune’s sitting-room. It was his opinion that her nerves were so shaken and her mind so agitated that the consciousness of having some one at hand within call, in case of anything happening, was of the utmost consequence. I don’t know that any one else in the house entertained these sentiments, but it was an idea in which he could not be shaken, his experience all tending in that way.
As a matter of fact, his nerves were scarcely less shaken than he imagined hers to be. His mother! Was that his mother who called good-night to him from the next room? who held that amusing colloquy with the doctor through the closed door, defying all interference, and bidding Dr. Roland look after his patient upstairs, and leave her in peace with Gilchrist, who was better than any doctor? Was that his mother? His heart beat with a strange confusion, but made no answer. And his thoughts went over all the details with an involuntary scepticism. No, there was no voice of nature, as she had fondly hoped; nothing but the merest response to kind words and a kind look had drawn him towards this old Scotch maiden lady, who he had thought, with a smile, reminded him of something in Scott, andtherefore had an attraction such as belongs to those whom we may have known in some previous state of being.
What a strange fate was his, to be drawn into one circle after another, one family after another, to which he had no right! And how was he to convince this lady, who was so determined in her own way of thinking, that he had no right, no title, to consider himself her son? But had he indeed no title? Was she likely to make such a statement without proof that it was true, without evidence? He thought of her with a kind of amused but by no means disrespectful admiration, as she had stood flinging from her the miserable would-be thief, the wretched, furtive creature who was no match for a resolute and dauntless woman. All the women Harry had ever known would have screamed or fled or fainted at sight of a live burglar in their very bed-chamber. She flung him off like a fly, like a reptile. That was not a weak woman, liable to be deceived by any fancy. She had the look in her eyes of a human creature afraid of nothing, ready to confront any danger. And could she then be so easily deceived? Or was it true, actually true? Was he the son—not of a woman whom it might be shame to discover, as he had always feared—but of a spotless mother, a person of note, with an established position and secure fortune? The land which he was to manage, which she had roused him almost to enthusiasm about, by her talk of crofters and cotters to be helped forward, and human service to be done—was that land his own, coming to himby right, his natural place and inheritance? Was he no waif and stray, no vague atom in the world drifting hither and thither, but a man with an assured position, a certain home, a place in society? How different from going back to South America, and at the best becoming a laborious clerk where he had been the young master! But he could not believe in it.
He lay there silent through the short summer night, moving with precaution upon the uneasy couch, which was too short and too small, but where the good fellow would have passed the night waking and dosing for anybody’s comfort, even were it only an old woman’s who had been kind to him. But was she his mother—his mother? He could not believe it—he could not, he could not! Her wonderful speeches and looks were all explained now, and went to his heart: but they did not convince him, or bring any enlightenment into his. Was she the victim of an illusion, poor lady, self-deceived altogether? Or was there something in it, or was there nothing in it? He thought of his father, and his heart revolted. His poor father, whom he remembered with the halo round him of childish affection, but whom he had learned to see through other people’s eyes, not a strong man, not good for very much, but yet not one to desert a woman who trusted in him. But of the young man’s thoughts through that long uneasy night there was no end. He heard whisperings and movements in the next room, subdued for his sake as he subdued his inclination to turn and toss upon his sofa forhers, during half the night. And then when the daylight came bright into the room through the bars of the venetian blind there came silence, just when he had fully woke up to the consciousness that life had begun again in a new world. A little later, Gilchrist stole into his room, bringing him a cup of tea. “You must come upstairs now; there’s a room where ye will get some sleep. She’s sound now, and it’s broad daylight, and no fear of any disturbance,” she said.
“I want no more sleep. I’ll go and get a bath, and be ready for whatever is wanted.” He caught her apron as she was turning away, that apron on which so many hems had been folded. “Don’t go away,” he said. “Speak to me, tell me, Gilchrist, for heaven’s sake, is this true?”
“The Lord knows!” cried Gilchrist, shaking her head and clasping her hands; “but oh, my young gentleman, dinna ask me!”
“Whom can I ask?” he said. “Surely, surely you, that have been always with her, can throw some light upon it. Is it true?”
“It is true—true as death,” said the woman, “that all that happened to my dear leddy; but oh, if you are the bairn, the Lord knows; he was but two days old, and he would have been about your age. I can say not a word, but only the Lord knows. And there’s nothing—nothing, though she thinks sae, that speaks in your heart?”
He shook his head, with a faint smile upon his face.
“Oh, dinna laugh, dinna laugh. I canna bearit, Mr. Harry; true or no’ true, it’s woven in with every fibre o’ her heart. You have nae parents, my bonnie man. Oh, could you no’ take it upon ye, true or no’ true? There’s naebody I can hear of that it would harm or wrong if you were to accept it. And there’s naebody kens but me how good she is. Her exterior is maybe no’ sae smooth as many; but her heart it is gold—oh, her heart it is gold! For God’s sake, who is the Father of all of us, and full of mercy—such peety as a father hath unto his children dear—oh, my young man, let her believe it, take her at her word! You will make her a happy woman at the end of a’ her trouble, and it will do ye nae harm.”
“Not if it is a fiction all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
“Who is to prove it’s a fiction? He would have been your age. She thinks you have your grandfather’s een. I’m no’ sure now I look at you but she’s right. She’s far more likely to be right than me: and now I look at you well I think I can see it. Oh, Mr. Harry, what harm would it do you? A good home and a good inheritance, and to make her happy. Is that no’ worth while, even if maybe it were not what you would think perfitly true?”
“It can’t be half true, Gilchrist; it must be whole or nothing.”
“Weel, then, it’s whole true; and I’ll gang to the stake for it. Is she not the one that should know? And if you were to cast her off the morn and break her heart, she would still believe it tillher dying day. Turn round your head and let me look at you again. Oh, laddie, if I were to gang to the stake for it, you have—you have your grandfather’s een!”
Thehouse in Bloomsbury was profoundly agitated by all these discoveries. Curiously enough, and against all the previsions of his friends, Mr. Mannering had not been thrown back by the excitement. The sharp sting of these events which had brought back before him once more the tragic climax of his life—the time when he had come back as out of the grave and found his home desolate—when his wife had fled before his face, not daring to meet his eye, although she had not knowingly sinned against him, and when all the triumph of his return to life, and of his discoveries and the fruit of his dreadful labours, had become bitterness to him and misery—came back upon him, every incident standing out as if it had been yesterday. He had fallen into the dead calm of failure, he had dropped his tools from his hands, and all his ambition from his heart. He had retired—he who had reappeared in existence after all his sufferings, with the consciousness that now the ball was at his foot, and fame if not fortune secured—into the second desert, more impenetrable than any African forest, of these rooms in Bloomsbury, and vegetated there all these years, forgetting more or less all that had happened to him, and all that might have happened to him, and desiring only to lingerout the last of his life unknowing and unknown. And now into his calm there had come back, clear as yesterday, all that terrible climax, every detail of his own tragedy.
It ought to have killed him: that would have seemed the most likely event in his weakness, after his long illness; and perhaps,—who could say?—the best thing that could have happened, in face of the new circumstances, which he could not accept and had no right to refuse. But no, it did not kill him. It acted upon him as great trouble acts on some minds, like a strong stimulant. It stung him back into life, it seemed to transfuse something, some new revivifying principle, into his veins. He had wanted, perhaps, something to disperse the mists of illness and physical dejection. He found it not in soothing influences or pleasure, but in pain. From the day when he stumbled downstairs to Miss Bethune’s room on the dreadful report that she was dying, he began at once to resume his usual habits, and with almost more than his usual strength. Was it possible that Death, that healer of all wounds, that peacemaker in all tumults, had restored a rest that was wanting to the man’s secret heart, never disclosed to any ear? She was dead, the woman who unwittingly, without meaning it, had made of his life the silent tragedy it had been. That she was guiltless, and that the catastrophe was all a terrible mistake, had made it worse instead of better. He had thought often that had she erred in passion, had she been carried away from him by some strong gale of personal feeling, it would have been more bearable:but the cruel fatality, the network of accident which had made his life desolate, and hers he knew not what—this was what was intolerable, a thing not to bear thinking of.
But now she was dead, all the misery over, nothing left but the silence. She had been nothing to him for years, torn out of his heart, flung out of his life, perhaps with too little pity, perhaps with little perception of the great sacrifice she had made in giving up to him without even a protest her only child: but her very existence had been a canker in his life; the thought that still the same circle of earth enclosed them—him and the woman who had once been everything to him, and then nothing, yet always something, something, a consciousness, a fever, a jarring note that set all life out of tune. And now she was dead. The strong pain of all this revival stung him back to strength. He went out in defiance of the doctor, back to his usual work, resuming the daily round. He had much to meet, to settle, to set right again, in his renewed existence. And she was dead. The other side of life was closed and sealed, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre. Nothing could happen to bring that back, to renew any consciousness of it more. Strange and sad and disturbing as this event was, it seemed to settle and clear the turbid current of a spoiled life.
And perhaps the other excitement and climax of the life of his neighbour which had been going on under the same roof, helped Mr. Mannering in the renewal of his own history. When he heardMiss Bethune’s story, the silent rebellion against his own, which had been ever in his mind, was silenced. It is hard, in the comparison of troubles, which people who have been more or less crushed in life are so fond of making, when brought into sufficiently intimate relation with each other, to have to acknowledge that perhaps a brother pilgrim, a sister, has had more to bear than oneself. Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others. But yet, when Mr. Mannering heard, as she could tell him, the story of the woman who had lived so near him for years with that unsuspected secret, he did not deny that her lot had been more terrible than his own. Miss Bethune was eager to communicate her own tale in those days of excitement and transition. She went to him of her own accord after the first day of his return to his work, while the doctor hovered about the stairs, up and down, and could not rest, in terror for the result. Dr. Roland could not believe that his patient would not break down. He could not go out, nor even sit quietly in his own room, less he should be wanted, and not ready at the first call. He could not refrain from a gibe at the lady he met on the stairs. “Yes, by all means,” he said, “go and tell him all about your own business. Go and send him out to look after that wretched Hesketh, whom you are going to keep up, I hear, all the same.”
“Not him, doctor. The poor unhappy young creature, his wife.”
“Oh, yes; that is how these miserable villains get hold upon people of weak minds. His wife! I’d have sent him to gaol. His wife would have been far better without a low blackguard like that. But don’t let me keep you. Go and give thecoup de graceto Mannering. I shall be ready, whatever happens, downstairs.”
But Miss Bethune did not give Mannering thecoup de grace. On the contrary, she helped forward the cure which the climax of his own personal tragedy had begun. It gave both these people a kind of forlorn pleasure to think that there was a kind of resemblance in their fate, and that they had lived so long beside each other without knowing it, without suspecting how unlike other people their respective lives had been. The thought of the unhappy young woman, whose husband of a year and whose child of a day had been torn from her, who had learnt so sadly to know the unworthiness of the one, and whose heart and imagination had for five and twenty years dwelt upon the other, without any possible outlet, and with a hope which she had herself known to be fantastic and without hope, filled Mannering with a certain awe. He had suffered for little more than half that time, and he had not been deprived of his Dora. He began to think pitifully, even mercifully, of the woman who had left him that one alleviation in his life.
“I bow my head before her,” Miss Bethune said. “She must have been a just woman. The bairn was yours, and she had no right to take her from you. She fled before your appearance, shecould not look you in the face, but she left the little child that she adored to be your comfort. Mr. Mannering, you will come with me to that poor woman’s grave, and you will forgive her. She gave you up what was most dear to her in life.”
He shook his head. “She had others that were more dear to her.”
“I could find it in my heart, if I were you, to hope that it was so; but I do not believe it. How could she look you in the face again, having sinned against you? But she left you what she loved most. ‘Dora, Dora,’ was all her cry: but she put Dora out of her arms for you. Think kindly of her, man! A woman loves nothing on this earth,” cried Miss Bethune with passion, “like the little child that has come from her, and is of her, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: and she gave that over to you. She must have been a woman more just than most other women,” Miss Bethune said.
Mr. Mannering made no reply. Perhaps he did not understand or believe in that definition of what a woman loves best; but he thought of the passion of the other woman before him, and of the long hunger of her heart, with nothing to solace her, nothing to divert her thoughts from that hopeless loss and vacancy, nothing to compensate her for the ruin of her life. She had been a spirit in prison, shut up as in an iron cage, and she had borne it and not uttered even a cry. All three, or rather all four, of these lives, equally shipwrecked, came before him. His own strickenlow in what would have been the triumph of another man; his wife’s, turned in a moment from such second possibilities of happiness as he could not yet bear to think of, and from the bliss of her child, into shame and guilt such as did not permit her to look her husband in the face, but drove her into exile and renunciation. And then this other pair. The woman with her secret romance, and long, long penitence and punishment. The man (whom she condemned yet more bitterly, perhaps with better cause than he had condemned his wife), a fugitive too, disappearing from country and home with the infant who died, or who did not die. What a round of dreadful mistake, misapprehension, rashness, failure! And who was he that he should count himself more badly treated than other men?
Miss Bethune thus gave him nocoup de grace. She helped him after the prick of revival, to another more steadfast philosophy, in the comparison of his fate with that of others. He saw with very clear eyes her delusion—that Harry Gordon was no son of hers, and that she would be compelled to acknowledge this and go back to the dreariness and emptiness of her life, accepting the dead baby as all that ever was hers: and he was sorry for her to the bottom of his heart; while she, full of her illusions, went back to her own apartment full of pity for him, to whom Dora did not make up for everything as Harry, she felt triumphantly, did to herself.
Dr. Roland watched them both, more concerned for Mannering, who had been ill, than for MissBethune, who had all that curious elasticity which makes a woman generally so much more the servant of her emotions than a man, often, in fact, so much less affected by them. But there still remained in the case of the patient another fiery trial to go through, which still kept the doctor on the alert and anxiously watching the course of events. Mannering had said nothing of Dora’s fortune, of the money which he had refused vehemently for her, but which he had no right to refuse, and upon which, as Dr. Roland was aware, she had already drawn. One ordeal had passed, and had done no harm, but this other was still to come.
It came a day or two after, when Dr. Roland sat by Mannering’s side after his return from the Museum, holding his pulse, and investigating in every way the effect upon him of the day’s confinement. It was evening, and the day had been hot and fatiguing. Mr. Mannering was a little tired of this medical inspection, which occurred every evening. He drew his wrist out of the doctor’s hold, and turned the conversation abruptly to a new subject.
“There are a number of papers which I cannot find,” he said, almost sharply, to Dora, with a meaning which immediately seemed to make the air tingle. He had recovered his usual looks in a remarkable degree, and had even a little colour in his cheek. His head was not drooping, nor his eye dim. The stoop of a man occupied all day among books seemed to have disappeared. He leaned back in his chair a little, perhaps, but notforward, as is the habit of weakness, and was not afraid to look the doctor in the face. Dora stood near him, alarmed, in the attitude of one about to flee. She was eager to leave him with the doctor, of whom he could ask no such difficult questions.
“Papers, father? What papers?” she said, with an air of innocence which perhaps was a little overdone.
“My business affairs are not so extensive,” he said, with a faint smile; “and both you, doctor, who really are the author of the extravagance, and Dora, who is too young to meddle with such matters, know all about them. My bills!—Heaven knows they are enough to scare a poor man: but they must be found. They were all there a few days ago, now I can’t find them. Bring them, Dora. I must make a composition with my creditors,” he said, again, with that forced and uncomfortable smile. Then he added, with some impatience: “My dear, do what I tell you, and do it at once.”
It was an emergency which Dora had been looking forward to, but that did not make it less terrible when it came. She stood very upright, holding by the table.
“The bills? I don’t know where to find them,” she said, growing suddenly very red, and then very pale.
“Dora!” cried her father, in a warning tone. Then he added, with an attempt at banter: “Never mind the doctor. The doctor is in it; he ought to pay half. We will take his advice. How small a dividend will content our creditorsfor the present? Make haste, and do not lose any more time.”
Dora stood her ground without wavering. “I cannot find them, father,” she said.
“You cannot find them? Nonsense! This is for my good, I suppose, lest I should not be able to bear it. My dear, your father declines to be managed for his good.”
“I have not got them,” said Dora firmly, but very pale. “I don’t know where to find them; I don’t want to find them, if I must say it, father,—not to manage you, but on my own account.”
He raised himself upright too, and looked at her. Their eyes shone with the same glow; the two faces bore a strange resemblance,—his, the lines refined and softened by his illness; hers, every curve straightened and strengthened by force of passionate feeling.
“Father,” said Dora almost fiercely, “I am not a child!”
“You are not a child?” A faint smile came over his face. “You are curiously like one,” he said; “but what has that got to do with it?”
“Mannering, she is quite right. You ought to let her have her own way.”
A cloud crossed Mr. Mannering’s face. He was a mild man, but he did not easily brook interference. He made a slight gesture, as if throwing the intruder off.
“Father,” said Dora again, “I have been the mistress of everything while you have been ill. You may say the doctor has done it, or Miss Bethune has done it,—they were very kind friends,and told me what to do,—but it was only your own child that had the right to do things for you, and the real person was me. I was a little girl when you began to be ill, but I am not so now. I’ve had to act for myself, father,” the girl cried, the colour flaming back into her pale cheeks, “I’ve had to be responsible for a great many things; you can’t take that from me, for it had to be. And you have not got a bill in the world.”
He sat staring at her, half angry, half admiring, amazed by the change, the development; and yet to find her in her impulsive, childish vehemence exactly the same.
“They’re all gone,” cried Dora, with that dreadful womanish inclination to cry; which spoils so many a fine climax. “I had a right to them—they were mine all through, and not yours. Father, even Fiddler! I’ve given you a present of that big book, which I almost broke my arm (if it had not been for Harry Gordon) carrying back. And now I know it’s quarter day, and you’re quite well off. Father, now I’m your little girl again, to do what you like and go where you like, and never, never hear a word of this more,” cried Dora, flinging herself upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, in a paroxysm of tenderness and tears.
What was the man to do or say? He had uttered a cry of pain and shame, and something like fury; but with the girl clinging round his neck, sobbing, flung upon his mercy, he was helpless. He looked over Dora’s bright head at Dr. Roland with, notwithstanding his impatience ofinterference, a sort of appeal for help. However keen the pang was both to his heart and his pride, he could not throw off his only child from her shelter in his arms. After a moment his hand instinctively came upon her hair, smoothing it down, soothing her, though half against his will. The other arm, with which he had half put her away, stole round her with a softer pressure. His child, his only child, all of his, belonging to no one but him, and weeping her heart out upon his neck, altogether thrown upon him to be excused and pardoned for having given him all the tendance and care and help which it was in her to give. He looked at Roland with a half appeal, yet with that unconscious pride of superiority in the man who has, towards the man who has not.
“She has the right,” said the doctor, himself moved, but not perhaps with any sense of inferiority, for though he was nearly as old as Mr. Mannering, the beatitude of having a daughter had not yet become an ideal bliss to him—“she has the right; if anybody in the world has it, she has it, Mannering, and though she is a child, she has a heart and judgment as good as any of us. You’ll have to let her do in certain matters what seemeth good in her own eyes.”
Mr. Mannering shook his head, and then bent it in reluctant acquiescence with a sigh.
Thehouse in Bloomsbury became vacant and silent.
The people who had given it interest and importance were dispersed and gone. Dr. Roland only remained, solitary and discontented, feeling himself cast adrift in the world, angry at the stillness overhead, where the solid foot of Gilchrist no longer made the floor creak, or the lighter step of her mistress sent a thrill of energy and life through it; but still more angry when new lodgers came, and new steps sounded over the carpet, which, deprived of all Miss Bethune’s rugs, was thin and poor. The doctor thought of changing his lodging himself, in the depression of that change; but it is a serious matter for a doctor to change his abode, and Janie’s anæmia was becoming a serious case, and wanted more looking after than ever would be given to it were he out of the way. So he consented to the inevitable, and remained. Mrs. Simcox had to refurnish the second floor, when all Mr. Mannering’s pretty furniture and his books were taken away, and did it very badly, as was natural, and got “a couple” for her lodgers, who were quite satisfied with second-hand mahogany and hair-cloth. Dr. Roland looked at the new lodgers when he met them with eyes blank, and a totalabsence of interest: but beginning soon to see that the stock market was telling upon the first floor, and that the lady on the second had a cough, he began to allow himself a little to be shaken out of his indifference. They might, however, be objects of professional interest, but no more. The Mannerings were abroad. After that great flash in the pan of a return to the Museum, Nature had reclaimed her rights, and Mr. Mannering had been obliged to apply for a prolonged leave, which by degrees led to retirement and a pension. Miss Bethune had returned to her native country, and to the old house near the Highland line which belonged to her. Vague rumours that she was not Miss Bethune at all, but a married lady all the time, had reached Bloomsbury; but nobody knew, as Mrs. Simcox said, what were the rights of the case.
In a genial autumn, some years after the above events, Dr. Roland, who had never ceased to keep a hold upon his former neighbours, whose departure had so much saddened his life, arrived on a visit at that Highland home. It was a rambling house, consisting of many additions and enlargements built on to the original fabric of a small, strait, and high semi-fortified dwelling-place, breathing that air of austere and watchful defence which lingers about some old houses, though the parlours of the eighteenth century, not to say the drawing-rooms of the nineteenth, with their broad open windows, accessible from the ground, were strangely unlike the pointed tall gable with its crow steps, and the high postof watchfulness up among the roofs, the little balcony or terrace which swept the horizon on every side. There Miss Bethune, still Miss Bethune, abode in the fulness of a life which sought no further expansion, among her own people. She had called to her a few of the most ancient and trusted friends of the family on her first arrival there, and had disclosed to them her secret story, and asked their advice. She had never borne her husband’s name. There had been no break, so far as any living person except Gilchrist was aware, in the continuity of her life. The old servants were dead, and the old minister, who had been coaxed and frightened into performing a furtive ceremony. No one except Gilchrist was aware of any of those strange events which had gone on in the maze of little rooms and crooked passages. Miss Bethune was strong in the idea of disclosing everything when she returned home. She meant to publish her strange and painful story among her friends and to the world at large, and to acknowledge and put in his right place, as she said, her son. A small knot of grave county gentlemen sat upon the matter, and had all the evidence placed before them in order to decide this question.
Harry Gordon himself was the first to let them know that his claims were more than doubtful—that they were, in fact, contradicted by his own recollections and everything he really knew about himself; and Mr. Templar brought his report, which made it altogether impossible to believe in the relationship. But Miss Bethune’s neighbourssoon came to perceive that these were nothing to her own fervid conviction, which they only made stronger the oftener the objections were repeated. She would not believe that part of Mr. Templar’s story which concerned the child; there was no documentary proof. The husband’s death could be proved, but it was not even known where that of the unfortunate baby had taken place, and nothing could be ascertained about it. She took no notice of the fact that her husband and Harry Gordon’s father had neither died at the same place nor at the same time. As it actually happened, there was sufficient analogy between time and place to make it possible to imagine, had there been no definite information, that they were the same person. And this was more than enough for Miss Bethune. She was persuaded at last, however, by the unanimous judgment of the friends she trusted, to depart from her first intention, to make no scandal in the countryside by changing her name, and to leave her property to Harry, describing him as a relation by the mother’s side. “It came to you by will, not in direct inheritance,” the chief of these gentlemen of the county said. “Let it go to him in the same way. We all respect the voice of nature, and you are not a silly woman, my dear Janet, to believe a thing that is not: but the evidence would not bear investigation in a court of law. He is a fine young fellow, and has spoken out like a gentleman.”
“As he has a good right—the last of the Bethunes, as well as a Gordon of no mean name!”
“Just so,” said the convener of the county; “there is nobody here that will not give him his hand. But you have kept the secret so long, it is my opinion you should keep it still. We all know—all that are worth considering—and what is the use of making a scandal and an outcry among all the silly auld wives of the countryside? And leave him your land by will, as the nearest relation you care to acknowledge on his mother’s side.”
This was the decision that was finally come to; and Miss Bethune was not less a happy mother, nor Harry Gordon the less a good son, that the relationship between them was quite beyond the reach of proof, and existed really in the settled conviction of one brain alone. The delusion made her happy, and it gave him a generous reason for acquiescing in the change so much to his advantage which took place in his life.
The Mannerings arrived at Beaton Castle shortly after the doctor, on their return from the Continent. Dora was now completely woman-grown, and had gradually and tacitly taken the command of her father and all his ways. He had been happy in the certainty that when he left off work and consented to take that long rest, it was his own income upon which they set out—an income no longer encumbered with any debts to pay, even for old books. He had gone on happily upon that conviction ever since; they had travelled a great deal together, and he had completely recovered his health, and in a great degree his interest, both in science and life. He hadeven taken up those studies which had been interrupted by the shipwreck of his happiness, and the breaking up of his existence, and had recently published some of the results of them, with a sudden lighting up once again of the fame of the more youthful Mannering, from whom such great things had been expected. The more he had become interested in work and the pursuits of knowledge, the less he had known or thought of external affairs; and for a long time Dora had acted very much as she pleased, increasing such luxuries as he liked, and encouraging every one of the extravagances into which, when left to himself, he naturally fell. Sometimes still he would pause over an expensive book, with a half hesitation, half apology.
“But perhaps we cannot afford it. I ought not to give myself so many indulgences, Dora.”
“You know how little we spend, father,” Dora would say,—“no house going on at home to swallow up the money. We live for next to nothing here.” And he received her statement with implicit faith.
Thus both the elder personages of this history were deceived, and found a great part of their happiness in it. Was it a false foundation of happiness, and wrong in every way, as Dr. Roland maintained? He took these two young people into the woods, and read them the severest of lessons.
“You are two lies,” he said; “you are deceiving two people who are of more moral worth than either of you. It is probably not your fault,but that of some wicked grandmother; but you ought to be told it, all the same. And I don’t say that I blame you. I daresay I should do it also in your case. But it’s a shame, all the same.”
“In the case of my—mistress, my friend, my all but mother,” said young Gordon, with some emotion, “the deceit is all her own. I have said all I could say, and so have her friends. We have proved to her that it could not be I, everything has been put before her; and if she determines, after all that, that I am the man, what can I do? I return her affection for affection cordially, for who was ever so good to any one as she is to me? And I serve her as her son might do. I am of use to her actually, though you may not think it. And why should I try to wound her heart, by reasserting that I am not what she thinks, and that she is deceived? I do my best to satisfy, not to deceive her. Therefore, do not say it; I am no lie.”
“All very well and very plausible,” said the doctor, “but in no wise altering my opinion. And, Miss Dora, what have you got to say?”
“I say nothing,” said Dora; “there is no deceit at all. If you only knew how particular I am! Father’s income suffices for himself; he is not in debt to any one. He has a good income—a very good income—four hundred a year, enough for any single man. Don’t you think so? I have gone over it a great many times, and I am sure he does not spend more than that—not so much; the calculation is all on paper. Do you remember teaching me to do accounts long ago?I am very good at it now. Father is not bound to keep me, when there are other people who will keep on sending me money: and he has quite enough—too much for himself; then where is the deceit, or shame either? My conscience is quite clear.”
“You are two special pleaders,” the doctor said; “you are too many for me when you are together. I’ll get you apart, and convince you of your sin. And what,” he cried suddenly, taking them by surprise, “my fine young sir and madam, would happen if either one or other of you took it into your heads to marry? That is what I should like to know.”
They looked at each other for a moment as it were in a flash of crimson light, which seemed to fly instantaneously from one to another. They looked first at him, and then exchanged one lightning glance, and then each turned a little aside on either side of the doctor. Was it to hide that something which was nothing, that spontaneous, involuntary momentary interchange of looks, from his curious eyes? Dr. Roland was struck as by that harmless lightning. He, the expert, had forgotten what contagion there might be in the air. They were both tall, both fair, two slim figures in their youthful grace, embodiments of all that was hopeful, strong, and lifelike. The doctor had not taken into consideration certain effects known to all men which are not in the books. “Whew-ew!” he breathed in a long whistle of astonishment, and said no more.
THE END.