CHAPTER IV.
“Threemore weeks pass away; the harvest is garnered, and the pears are growing soft and mellow. Mother’s and my outward life goes on in its silent regularity, nor do we talk much to each other of the tumult that rages—of the heartache that burns, within each of us. At the end of the three weeks, as we are sitting as usual, quietly employed, and buried each in our own thoughts, in the parlour, towards evening we hear wheels approaching the hall-door. We both run out as in my dream I had run to the door, and arrive in time to receive my father as he stepsout of the carriage that has brought him. Well! at leastoneof our wanderers has come home, but where is the other?
“Almost before he has heartily kissed us both—wife and child—father cries out, ‘But where is Bobby?’
“‘That is just what I was going to ask you,’ replies mother quickly.
“‘Is not heherewith you?’ returns he anxiously.
“‘Not he,’ answers mother, ‘we have neither seen nor heard anything of him for more than six weeks.’
“‘Great God!’ exclaims he, while his face assumes an expression of the deepest concern, ‘whatcanhave become of him? whatcanhave happened to the poor fellow?’
“‘Has not he been with you, then?—has not he been in theThunderer?’ asks mother, running her words into one another in her eagerness to get them out.
“‘I sent him home three weeks ago in a prize, with a letter to you, and told him to stay with you till I came home, and what can have become of him since, God only knows!’ he answers with a look of the profoundest sorrow and anxiety.
“There is a moment of forlorn and dreary silence; then I speak. I have been standing dumbly by, listening, and my heart growing colder and colder at every dismal word.
“‘It is all my doing!’ I cry passionately, flinging myself down in an agony of tears on the straight-backed old settle in the hall. ‘It is my fault—no one else’s! The very last time that I saw him, I told him that he would have to thank me for his death, and he laughed at me, but it has come true. If I had not writtenyou, father, that accursed letter, we should have had him herenow, thisminute, safe and sound, standing in the middleof us—as we never,never, shall have him again!’
“I stop, literally suffocated with emotion.
“Father comes over, and lays his kind brown hand on my bent prone head. ‘My child,’ he says, ‘my dear child,’ (and tears are dimming the clear grey of his own eyes), ‘you are wrong to make up your mind to what is the worst at once. I do not disguise from you that there is cause for grave anxiety about the dear fellow, but still God is good; He has kept both him and me hitherto; into His hands we must trust our boy.’
“I sit up, and shake away my tears.
“‘It is no use,’ I say. ‘Why should I hope? There is no hope! I know it for a certainty! He isdead’ (looking round at them both with a sort of calmness); ‘he died on the night that I had that dream—mother, I told you so at the time. Oh, my Bobby!I knew that you could not leave me for ever without coming to tell me!’
“‘And so speaking, I fall into strong hysterics and am carried upstairs to bed. And so three or four more lagging days crawl by, and still we hear nothing, and remain in the same state of doubt and uncertainty; which to me, however, is hardly uncertainty; so convinced am I, in my own mind, that my fair-haired lover is away in the land whence never letter or messenger comes—that he has reached the Great Silence. So I sit at my frame, working my heart’s agony into the tapestry, and feebly trying to say to God that He has done well, but I cannot. On the contrary, it seems to me, as my life trails on through the mellow mist of the autumn mornings, through the shortened autumn evenings, that, whoever has done it, it is most evilly done. One night we are sitting round the little crackling wood fire that one does notneed for warmth, but that gives a cheerfulness to the room and the furniture, when the butler Stephens enters, and going over to father, whispers to him. I seem to understand in a moment what the purport of his whisper is.’
“‘Why does he whisper?’ I cry, irritably. ‘Why does not he speak out loud? Why should you try to keep it from me? I know that it is something about Bobby.’
“Father has already risen, and is walking towards the door.
“‘I will not let you go until you tell me,’ I cry wildly, flying after him.
“‘A sailor has come over from Plymouth,’ he answers hurriedly; ‘he says he has news. My darling, I will not keep you in suspense a moment longer than I can help, and meanwhile pray—both of you pray for him!’
“I sit rigidly still, with my cold handtightly clasped, during the moments that next elapse. Then father returns. His eyes are full of tears, and there is small need to ask for his message; it is most plainly written on his features—death, and not life.
“‘You were right, Phœbe,’ he says, brokenly, taking hold of my icy hands; ‘you knew best. He is gone! God has taken him.’
“My heart dies. I had thought that I had no hope, but I was wrong. ‘I knew it!’ I say, in a dry stiff voice. ‘Did not I tell you so? But you would not believe me—go on!—tell me how it was—do not think I cannot bear it—make haste!’
“And so he tells me all that there is now left for me to know—after what manner, and on what day, my darling took his leave of this pretty and cruel world. He had had his wish, as I already knew, and had set off blithely home in the last prize they had captured. Father had taken the precaution ofhaving a larger proportion than usual of the Frenchmen ironed, and had also sent a greater number of Englishmen. But to what purpose? They were nearing port, sailing prosperously along on a smooth blue sea, with a fair strong wind, thinking of no evil, when a great and terrible misfortune overtook them. Some of the Frenchmen who were not ironed got the sailors below and drugged their grog; ironed them, and freed their countrymen. Then one of the officers rushed on deck, and holding a pistol to my Bobby’s head bade him surrender the vessel or die. Need I tell you which he chose? I think not—well” (with a sigh) “and so they shot my boy—ah me! how many years ago—and threw him overboard! Yes—threw him overboard—it makes me angry and grieved even now to think of it—into the great and greedy sea, and the vessel escaped to France.”
There is a silence between us: I will ownto you that I am crying, but the old lady’s eyes are dry.
“Well,” she says, after a pause, with a sort of triumph in her tone, “they never could say again that Bobby Gerard wasafraid!
“The tears were running down my father’s cheeks, as he told me,” she resumes presently, “but at the end he wiped them and said, ‘It is well! He was as pleasant in God’s sight as he was in ours, and so He has taken him.’
“And for me, I was glad that he had gone to God—none gladder. But you will not wonder that, for myself, I was past speaking sorry. And so the years went by, and, as you know, I married Mr. Hamilton, and lived with him forty years, and was happy in the main, as happiness goes; and when he died I wept much and long, and so I did for each of my sons when in turn they went. But looking back on all my long life, the eventthat I think stands out most clearly from it is my dream and my boy-lover’s death-day. Itwasan odd dream, was not it?”