WE visited France, Germany, and Italy; and we were absent from England nearly two years.
Had time and change justified my confidence in them? Was the image of Mrs. Van Brandt an image long since dismissed from my mind?
No! Do what I might, I was still (in the prophetic language of Dame Dermody) taking the way to reunion with my kindred spirit in the time to come. For the first two or three months of our travels I was haunted by dreams of the woman who had so resolutely left me. Seeing her in my sleep, always graceful, always charming, always modestly tender toward me, I waited in the ardent hope of again beholding the apparition of her in my waking hours—of again being summoned to meet her at a given place and time. My anticipations were not fulfilled; no apparition showed itself. The dreams themselves grew less frequent and less vivid and then ceased altogether. Was this a sign that the days of her adversity were at an end? Having no further need of help, had she no further remembrance of the man who had tried to help her? Were we never to meet again?
I said to myself: “I am unworthy of the name of man if I don’t forget her now!” She still kept her place in my memory, say what I might.
I saw all the wonders of Nature and Art which foreign countries could show me. I lived in the dazzling light of the best society that Paris, Rome, Vienna could assemble. I passed hours on hours in the company of the most accomplished and most beautiful women whom Europe could produce—and still that solitary figure at Saint Anthony’s Well, those grand gray eyes that had rested on me so sadly at parting, held their place in my memory, stamped their image on my heart.
Whether I resisted my infatuation, or whether I submitted to it, I still longed for her. I did all I could to conceal the state of my mind from my mother. But her loving eyes discovered the secret: she saw that I suffered, and suffered with me. More than once she said: “George, the good end is not to be gained by traveling; let us go home.” More than once I answered, with the bitter and obstinate resolution of despair: “No. Let us try more new people and more new scenes.” It was only when I found her health and strength beginning to fail under the stress of continual traveling that I consented to abandon the hopeless search after oblivion, and to turn homeward at last.
I prevailed on my mother to wait and rest at my house in London before she returned to her favorite abode at the country-seat in Perthshire. It is needless to say that I remained in town with her. My mother now represented the one interest that held me nobly and endearingly to life. Politics, literature, agriculture—the customary pursuits of a man in my position—had none of them the slightest attraction for me.
We had arrived in London at what is called “the height of the season.” Among the operatic attractions of that year—I am writing of the days when the ballet was still a popular form of public entertainment—there was a certain dancer whose grace and beauty were the objects of universal admiration. I was asked if I had seen her, wherever I went, until my social position, as the one man who was indifferent to the reigning goddess of the stage, became quite unendurable. On the next occasion when I was invited to take a seat in a friend’s box, I accepted the proposal; and (far from willingly) I went the way of the world—in other words, I went to the opera.
The first part of the performance had concluded when we got to the theater, and the ballet had not yet begun. My friends amused themselves with looking for familiar faces in the boxes and stalls. I took a chair in a corner and waited, with my mind far away from the theater, from the dancing that was to come. The lady who sat nearest to me (like ladies in general) disliked the neighborhood of a silent man. She determined to make me talk to her.
“Do tell me, Mr. Germaine,” she said. “Did you ever see a theater anywhere so full as this theater is to-night?”
She handed me her opera-glass as she spoke. I moved to the front of the box to look at the audience.
It was certainty a wonderful sight. Every available atom of space (as I gradually raised the glass from the floor to the ceiling of the building) appeared to be occupied. Looking upward and upward, my range of view gradually reached the gallery. Even at that distance, the excellent glass which had been put into my hands brought the faces of the audience close to me. I looked first at the persons who occupied the front row of seats in the gallery stalls.
Moving the opera-glass slowly along the semicircle formed by the seats, I suddenly stopped when I reached the middle.
My heart gave a great leap as if it would bound out of my body. There was no mistakingthatface among the commonplace faces near it. I had discovered Mrs. Van Brandt!
She sat in front—but not alone. There was a man in the stall immediately behind her, who bent over her and spoke to her from time to time. She listened to him, so far as I could see, with something of a sad and weary look. Who was the man? I might, or might not, find that out. Under any circumstances, I determined to speak to Mrs. Van Brandt.
The curtain rose for the ballet. I made the best excuse I could to my friends, and instantly left the box.
It was useless to attempt to purchase my admission to the gallery. My money was refused. There was not even standing room left in that part of the theater.
But one alternative remained. I returned to the street, to wait for Mrs. Van Brandt at the gallery door until the performance was over.
Who was the man in attendance on her—the man whom I had seen sitting behind her, and talking familiarly over her shoulder? While I paced backward and forward before the door, that one question held possession of my mind, until the oppression of it grew beyond endurance. I went back to my friends in the box, simply and solely to look at the man again.
What excuses I made to account for my strange conduct I cannot now remember. Armed once more with the lady’s opera-glass (I borrowed it and kept it without scruple), I alone, of all that vast audience, turned my back on the stage, and riveted my attention on the gallery stalls.
There he sat, in his place behind her, to all appearance spell-bound by the fascinations of the graceful dancer. Mrs. Van Brandt, on the contrary, seemed to find but little attraction in the spectacle presented by the stage. She looked at the dancing (so far as I could see) in an absent, weary manner. When the applause broke out in a perfect frenzy of cries and clapping of hands, she sat perfectly unmoved by the enthusiasm which pervaded the theater. The man behind her (annoyed, as I supposed, by the marked indifference which she showed to the performance) tapped her impatiently on the shoulder, as if he thought that she was quite capable of falling asleep in her stall. The familiarity of the action—confirming the suspicion in my mind which had already identified him with Van Brandt—so enraged me that I said or did something which obliged one of the gentlemen in the box to interfere. “If you can’t control yourself,” he whispered, “you had better leave us.” He spoke with the authority of an old friend. I had sense enough left to take his advice, and return to my post at the gallery door.
A little before midnight the performance ended. The audience began to pour out of the theater.
I drew back into a corner behind the door, facing the gallery stairs, and watched for her. After an interval which seemed to be endless, she and her companion appeared, slowly descending the stairs. She wore a long dark cloak; her head was protected by a quaintly shaped hood, which looked (onher) the most becoming head-dress that a woman could wear. As the two passed me, I heard the man speak to her in a tone of sulky annoyance.
“It’s wasting money,” he said, “to go to the expense of takingyouto the opera.”
“I am not well,” she answered with her head down and her eyes on the ground. “I am out of spirits to-night.”
“Will you ride home or walk?”
“I will walk, if you please.”
I followed them unperceived, waiting to present myself to her until the crowd about them had dispersed. In a few minutes they turned into a quiet by-street. I quickened my pace until I was close at her side, and then I took off my hat and spoke to her.
She recognized me with a cry of astonishment. For an instant her face brightened radiantly with the loveliest expression of delight that I ever saw on any human countenance. The moment after, all was changed. The charming features saddened and hardened. She stood before me like a woman overwhelmed by shame—without uttering a word, without taking my offered hand.
Her companion broke the silence.
“Who is this gentleman?” he asked, speaking in a foreign accent, with an under-bred insolence of tone and manner.
She controlled herself the moment he addressed her. “This is Mr. Germaine,” she answered: “a gentleman who was very kind to me in Scotland.” She raised her eyes for a moment to mine, and took refuge, poor soul, in a conventionally polite inquiry after my health. “I hope you are quite well, Mr. Germaine,” said the soft, sweet voice, trembling piteously.
I made the customary reply, and explained that I had seen her at the opera. “Are you staying in London?” I asked. “May I have the honor of calling on you?”
Her companion answered for her before she could speak.
“My wife thanks you, sir, for the compliment you pay her. She doesn’t receive visitors. We both wish you good-night.”
Saying those words, he took off his hat with a sardonic assumption of respect; and, holding her arm in his, forced her to walk on abruptly with him. Feeling certainly assured by this time that the man was no other than Van Brandt, I was on the point of answering him sharply, when Mrs. Van Brandt checked the rash words as they rose to my lips.
“For my sake!” she whispered, over her shoulder, with an imploring look that instantly silenced me. After all, she was free (if she liked) to go back to the man who had so vilely deceived and deserted her. I bowed and left them, feeling with no common bitterness the humiliation of entering into rivalry with Mr. Van Brandt.
I crossed to the other side of the street. Before I had taken three steps away from her, the old infatuation fastened its hold on me again. I submitted, without a struggle against myself, to the degradation of turning spy and following them home. Keeping well behind, on the opposite side of the way, I tracked them to their own door, and entered in my pocket-book the name of the street and the number of the house.
The hardest critic who reads these lines cannot feel more contemptuously toward me than I felt toward myself. Could I still love a woman after she had deliberately preferred to me a scoundrel who had married her while he was the husband of another wife? Yes! Knowing what I now knew, I felt that I loved her just as dearly as ever. It was incredible, it was shocking; but it was true. For the first time in my life, I tried to take refuge from my sense of my own degradation in drink. I went to my club, and joined a convivial party at a supper table, and poured glass after glass of champagne down my throat, without feeling the slightest sense of exhilaration, without losing for an instant the consciousness of my own contemptible conduct. I went to my bed in despair; and through the wakeful night I weakly cursed the fatal evening at the river-side when I had met her for the first time. But revile her as I might, despise myself as I might, I loved her—I loved her still!
Among the letters laid on my table the next morning there were two which must find their place in this narrative.
The first letter was in a handwriting which I had seen once before, at the hotel in Edinburgh. The writer was Mrs. Van Brandt.
“For your own sake” (the letter ran) “make no attempt to see me, and take no notice of an invitation which I fear you will receive with this note. I am living a degraded life. I have sunk beneath your notice. You owe it to yourself, sir, to forget the miserable woman who now writes to you for the last time, and bids you gratefully a last farewell.”
Those sad lines were signed in initials only. It is needless to say that they merely strengthened my resolution to see her at all hazards. I kissed the paper on which her hand had rested, and then I turned to the second letter. It contained the “invitation” to which my correspondent had alluded, and it was expressed in these terms:
“Mr. Van Brandt presents his compliments to Mr. Germaine, and begs to apologize for the somewhat abrupt manner in which he received Mr. Germaine’s polite advances. Mr. Van Brandt suffers habitually from nervous irritability, and he felt particularly ill last night. He trusts Mr. Germaine will receive this candid explanation in the spirit in which it is offered; and he begs to add that Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted to receive Mr. Germaine whenever he may find it convenient to favor her with a visit.”
That Mr. Van Brandt had some sordid interest of his own to serve in writing this grotesquely impudent composition, and that the unhappy woman who bore his name was heartily ashamed of the proceeding on which he had ventured, were conclusions easily drawn after reading the two letters. The suspicion of the man and of his motives which I naturally felt produced no hesitation in my mind as to the course which I had determined to pursue. On the contrary, I rejoiced that my way to an interview with Mrs. Van Brandt was smoothed, no matter with what motives, by Mr. Van Brandt himself.
I waited at home until noon, and then I could wait no longer. Leaving a message of excuse for my mother (I had just sense of shame enough left to shrink from facing her), I hastened away to profit by my invitation on the very day when I received it.
As I lifted my hand to ring the house bell, the door was opened from within, and no less a person than Mr. Van Brandt himself stood before me. He had his hat on. We had evidently met just as he was going out.
“My dear sir, how good this is of you! You present the best of all replies to my letter in presenting yourself. Mrs. Van Brandt is at home. Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted. Pray walk in.”
He threw open the door of a room on the ground-floor. His politeness was (if possible) even more offensive than his insolence. “Be seated, Mr. Germaine, I beg of you.” He turned to the open door, and called up the stairs, in a loud and confident voice:
“Mary! come down directly.”
“Mary”! I knew her Christian name at last, and knew it through Van Brandt. No words can tell how the name jarred on me, spoken by his lips. For the first time for years past my mind went back to Mary Dermody and Greenwater Broad. The next moment I heard the rustling of Mrs. Van Brandt’s dress on the stairs. As the sound caught my ear, the old times and the old faces vanished again from my thoughts as completely as if they had never existed. What hadshein common with the frail, shy little child, her namesake, of other days? What similarity was perceivable in the sooty London lodging-house to remind me of the bailiff’s flower-scented cottage by the shores of the lake?
Van Brandt took off his hat, and bowed to me with sickening servility.
“I have a business appointment,” he said, “which it is impossible to put off. Pray excuse me. Mrs. Van Brandt will do the honors. Good morning.”
The house door opened and closed again. The rustling of the dress came slowly nearer and nearer. She stood before me.
“Mr. Germaine!” she exclaimed, starting back, as if the bare sight of me repelled her. “Is this honorable? Is this worthy of you? You allow me to be entrapped into receiving you, and you accept as your accomplice Mr. Van Brandt! Oh, sir, I have accustomed myself to look up to you as a high-minded man. How bitterly you have disappointed me!”
Her reproaches passed by me unheeded. They only heightened her color; they only added a new rapture to the luxury of looking at her.
“If you loved me as faithfully as I love you,” I said, “you would understand why I am here. No sacrifice is too great if it brings me into your presence again after two years of absence.”
She suddenly approached me, and fixed her eyes in eager scrutiny on my face.
“There must be some mistake,” she said. “You cannot possibly have received my letter, or you have not read it?”
“I have received it, and I have read it.”
“And Van Brandt’s letter—you have read that too?”
“Yes.”
She sat down by the table, and, leaning her arms on it, covered her face with her hands. My answers seemed not only to have distressed, but to have perplexed her. “Are men all alike?” I heard her say. “I thought I might trust inhissense of what was due to himself and of what was compassionate toward me.”
I closed the door and seated myself by her side. She removed her hands from her face when she felt me near her. She looked at me with a cold and steady surprise.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I am going to try if I can recover my place in your estimation,” I said. “I am going to ask your pity for a man whose whole heart is yours, whose whole life is bound up in you.”
She started to her feet, and looked round her incredulously, as if doubting whether she had rightly heard and rightly interpreted my last words. Before I could speak again, she suddenly faced me, and struck her open hand on the table with a passionate resolution which I now saw in her for the first time.
“Stop!” she cried. “There must be an end to this. And an end there shall be. Do you know who that man is who has just left the house? Answer me, Mr. Germaine! I am speaking in earnest.”
There was no choice but to answer her. She was indeed in earnest—vehemently in earnest.
“His letter tells me,” I said, “that he is Mr. Van Brandt.”
She sat down again, and turned her face away from me.
“Do you know how he came to write to you?” she asked. “Do you know what made him invite you to this house?”
I thought of the suspicion that had crossed my mind when I read Van Brandt’s letter. I made no reply.
“You force me to tell you the truth,” she went on. “He asked me who you were, last night on our way home. I knew that you were rich, and thathewanted money. I told him I knew nothing of your position in the world. He was too cunning to believe me; he went out to the public-house and looked at a directory. He came back and said, ‘Mr. Germaine has a house in Berkeley Square and a country-seat in the Highlands. He is not a man for a poor devil like me to offend; I mean to make a friend of him, and I expect you to make a friend of him too.’ He sat down and wrote to you. I am living under that man’s protection, Mr. Germaine. His wife is not dead, as you may suppose; she is living, and I know her to be living. I wrote to you that I was beneath your notice, and you have obliged me to tell you why. Am I sufficiently degraded to bring you to your senses?”
I drew closer to her. She tried to get up and leave me. I knew my power over her, and used it (as any man in my place would have used it) without scruple. I took her hand.
“I don’t believe you have voluntarily degraded yourself,” I said. “You have been forced into your present position: there are circumstances which excuse you, and which you are purposely keeping back from me. Nothing will convince me that you are a base woman. Should I love you as I love you, if you were really unworthy of me?”
She struggled to free her hand; I still held it. She tried to change the subject. “There is one thing you haven’t told me yet,” she said, with a faint, forced smile. “Have you seen the apparition of me again since I left you?”
“No. Haveyouever seenmeagain, as you saw me in your dream at the inn in Edinburgh?”
“Never. Our visions of each other have left us. Can you tell why?”
If we had continued to speak on this subject, we must surely have recognized each other. But the subject dropped. Instead of answering her question, I drew her nearer to me—I returned to the forbidden subject of my love.
“Look at me,” I pleaded, “and tell me the truth. Can you see me, can you hear me, and do you feel no answering sympathy in your own heart? Do you really care nothing for me? Have you never once thought of me in all the time that has passed since we last met?”
I spoke as I felt—fervently, passionately. She made a last effort to repel me, and yielded even as she made it. Her hand closed on mine, a low sigh fluttered on her lips. She answered with a sudden self-abandonment; she recklessly cast herself loose from the restraints which had held her up to this time.
“I think of you perpetually,” she said. “I was thinking of you at the opera last night. My heart leaped in me when I heard your voice in the street.”
“You love me!” I whispered.
“Love you!” she repeated. “My whole heart goes out to you in spite of myself. Degraded as I am, unworthy as I am—knowing as I do that nothing can ever come of it—I love you! I love you!”
She threw her arms round my neck, and held me to her with all her strength. The moment after, she dropped on her knees. “Oh, don’t tempt me!” she murmured. “Be merciful—and leave me.”
I was beside myself. I spoke as recklessly to her as she had spoken to me.
“Prove that you love me,” I said. “Let me rescue you from the degradation of living with that man. Leave him at once and forever. Leave him, and come with me to a future that is worthy of you—your future as my wife.”
“Never!” she answered, crouching low at my feet.
“Why not? What obstacle is there?”
“I can’t tell you—I daren’t tell you.”
“Will you write it?”
“No, I can’t even write it—toyou. Go, I implore you, before Van Brandt comes back. Go, if you love me and pity me.”
She had roused my jealousy. I positively refused to leave her.
“I insist on knowing what binds you to that man,” I said. “Let him come back! Ifyouwon’t answer my question, I will put it tohim.”
She looked at me wildly, with a cry of terror. She saw my resolution in my face.
“Don’t frighten me,” she said. “Let me think.”
She reflected for a moment. Her eyes brightened, as if some new way out of the difficulty had occurred to her.
“Have you a mother living?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you think she would come and see me?”
“I am sure she would if I asked her.”
She considered with herself once more. “I will tell your mother what the obstacle is,” she said, thoughtfully.
“When?”
“To-morrow, at this time.”
She raised herself on her knees; the tears suddenly filled her eyes. She drew me to her gently. “Kiss me,” she whispered. “You will never come here again. Kiss me for the last time.”
My lips had barely touched hers, when she started to her feet and snatched up my hat from the chair on which I had placed it.
“Take your hat,” she said. “He has come back.”
My duller sense of hearing had discovered nothing. I rose and took my hat to quiet her. At the same moment the door of the room opened suddenly and softly. Mr. Van Brandt came in. I saw in his face that he had some vile motive of his own for trying to take us by surprise, and that the result of the experiment had disappointed him.
“You are not going yet?” he said, speaking to me with his eye on Mrs. Van Brandt. “I have hurried over my business in the hope of prevailing on you to stay and take lunch with us. Put down your hat, Mr. Germaine. No ceremony!”
“You are very good,” I answered. “My time is limited to-day. I must beg you and Mrs. Van Brandt to excuse me.”
I took leave of her as I spoke. She turned deadly pale when she shook hands with me at parting. Had she any open brutality to dread from Van Brandt as soon as my back was turned? The bare suspicion of it made my blood boil. But I thought ofher. In her interests, the wise thing and the merciful thing to do was to conciliate the fellow before I left the house.
“I am sorry not to be able to accept your invitation,” I said, as we walked together to the door. “Perhaps you will give me another chance?”
His eyes twinkled cunningly. “What do you say to a quiet little dinner here?” he asked. “A slice of mutton, you know, and a bottle of good wine. Only our three selves, and one old friend of mine to make up four. We will have a rubber of whist in the evening. Mary and you partners—eh? When shall it be? Shall we say the day after to-morrow?”
She had followed us to the door, keeping behind Van Brandt while he was speaking to me. When he mentioned the “old friend” and the “rubber of whist,” her face expressed the strongest emotions of shame and disgust. The next moment (when she had heard him fix the date of the dinner for “the day after to-morrow”) her features became composed again, as if a sudden sense of relief had come to her. What did the change mean? “To-morrow” was the day she had appointed for seeing my mother. Did she really believe, when I had heard what passed at the interview, that I should never enter the house again, and never attempt to see her more? And was this the secret of her composure when she heard the date of the dinner appointed for “the day after to-morrow”?
Asking myself these questions, I accepted my invitation, and left the house with a heavy heart. That farewell kiss, that sudden composure when the day of the dinner was fixed, weighed on my spirits. I would have given twelve years of my life to have annihilated the next twelve hours.
In this frame of mind I reached home, and presented myself in my mother’s sitting-room.
“You have gone out earlier than usual to-day,” she said. “Did the fine weather tempt you, my dear?” She paused, and looked at me more closely. “George!” she exclaimed, “what has happened to you? Where have you been?”
I told her the truth as honestly as I have told it here.
The color deepened in my mother’s face. She looked at me, and spoke to me with a severity which was rare indeed in my experience of her.
“Must I remind you, for the first time in your life, of what is due to your mother?” she asked. “Is it possible that you expect me to visit a woman, who, by her own confession—”
“I expect you to visit a woman who has only to say the word and to be your daughter-in-law,” I interposed. “Surely I am not asking what is unworthy of you, if I ask that?”
My mother looked at me in blank dismay.
“Do you mean, George, that you have offered her marriage?”
“Yes.”
“And she has said No?”
“She has said No, because there is some obstacle in her way. I have tried vainly to make her explain herself. She has promised to confide everything toyou.”
The serious nature of the emergency had its effect. My mother yielded. She handed me the little ivory tablets on which she was accustomed to record her engagements. “Write down the name and address,” she said resignedly.
“I will go with you,” I answered, “and wait in the carriage at the door. I want to hear what has passed between you and Mrs. Van Brandt the instant you have left her.”
“Is it as serious as that, George?”
“Yes, mother, it is as serious as that.”
HOW long was I left alone in the carriage at the door of Mrs. Van Brandt’s lodgings? Judging by my sensations, I waited half a life-time. Judging by my watch, I waited half an hour.
When my mother returned to me, the hope which I had entertained of a happy result from her interview with Mrs. Van Brandt was a hope abandoned before she had opened her lips. I saw, in her face, that an obstacle which was beyond my power of removal did indeed stand between me and the dearest wish of my life.
“Tell me the worst,” I said, as we drove away from the house, “and tell it at once.”
“I must tell it to you, George,” my mother answered, sadly, “as she told it to me. She begged me herself to do that. ‘We must disappoint him,’ she said, ‘but pray let it be done as gently as possible.’ Beginning in those words, she confided to me the painful story which you know already—the story of her marriage. From that she passed to her meeting with you at Edinburgh, and to the circumstances which have led her to live as she is living now. This latter part of her narrative she especially requested me to repeat to you. Do you feel composed enough to hear it now? Or would you rather wait?”
“Let me hear it now, mother; and tell it, as nearly as you can, in her own words.”
“I will repeat what she said to me, my dear, as faithfully as I can. After speaking of her father’s death, she told me that she had only two relatives living. ‘I have a married aunt in Glasgow, and a married aunt in London,’ she said. ‘When I left Edinburgh, I went to my aunt in London. She and my father had not been on good terms together; she considered that my father had neglected her. But his death had softened her toward him and toward me. She received me kindly, and she got me a situation in a shop. I kept my situation for three months, and then I was obliged to leave it.’”
My mother paused. I thought directly of the strange postscript which Mrs. Van Brandt had made me add to the letter that I wrote for her at the Edinburgh inn. In that case also she had only contemplated remaining in her employment for three months’ time.
“Why was she obliged to leave her situation?” I asked.
“I put that question to her myself,” replied my mother. “She made no direct reply—she changed color, and looked confused. ‘I will tell you afterward, madam,’ she said. ‘Please let me go on now. My aunt was angry with me for leaving my employment—and she was more angry still, when I told her the reason. She said I had failed in duty toward her in not speaking frankly at first. We parted coolly. I had saved a little money from my wages; and I did well enough while my savings lasted. When they came to an end, I tried to get employment again, and I failed. My aunt said, and said truly, that her husband’s income was barely enough to support his family: she could do nothing for me, and I could do nothing for myself. I wrote to my aunt at Glasgow, and received no answer. Starvation stared me in the face, when I saw in a newspaper an advertisement addressed to me by Mr. Van Brandt. He implored me to write to him; he declared that his life without me was too desolate to be endured; he solemnly promised that there should be no interruption to my tranquillity if I would return to him. If I had only had myself to think of, I would have begged my bread in the streets rather than return to him—‘”
I interrupted the narrative at that point.
“What other person could she have had to think of?” I said.
“Is it possible, George,” my mother rejoined, “that you have no suspicion of what she was alluding to when she said those words?”
The question passed by me unheeded: my thoughts were dwelling bitterly on Van Brandt and his advertisement. “She answered the advertisement, of course?” I said.
“And she saw Mr. Van Brandt,” my mother went on. “She gave me no detailed account of the interview between them. ‘He reminded me,’ she said, ‘of what I knew to be true—that the woman who had entrapped him into marrying her was an incurable drunkard, and that his ever living with her again was out of the question. Still she was alive, and she had a right to the name at least of his wife. I won’t attempt to excuse my returning to him, knowing the circumstances as I did. I will only say that I could see no other choice before me, in my position at the time. It is needless to trouble you with what I have suffered since, or to speak of what I may suffer still. I am a lost woman. Be under no alarm, madam, about your son. I shall remember proudly to the end of my life that he once offered me the honor and the happiness of becoming his wife; but I know what is due to him and to you. I have seen him for the last time. The one thing that remains to be done is to satisfy him that our marriage is impossible. You are a mother; you will understand why I reveal the obstacle which stands between us—not to him, but to you.’ She rose saying those words, and opened the folding-doors which led from the parlor into a back room. After an absence of a few moments only, she returned.”
At that crowning point in the narrative, my mother stopped. Was she afraid to go on? or did she think it needless to say more?
“Well?” I said.
“Must I really tell it to you in words, George? Can’t you guess how it ended, even yet?”
There were two difficulties in the way of my understanding her. I had a man’s bluntness of perception, and I was half maddened by suspense. Incredible as it may appear, I was too dull to guess the truth even now.
“When she returned to me,” my mother resumed, “she was not alone. She had with her a lovely little girl, just old enough to walk with the help of her mother’s hand. She tenderly kissed the child, and then she put it on my lap. ‘There is my only comfort,’ she said, simply; ‘and there is the obstacle to my ever becoming Mr. Germaine’s wife.’”
Van Brandt’s child! Van Brandt’s child!
The postscript which she had made me add to my letter; the incomprehensible withdrawal from the employment in which she was prospering; the disheartening difficulties which had brought her to the brink of starvation; the degrading return to the man who had cruelly deceived her—all was explained, all was excused now! With an infant at the breast, how could she obtain a new employment? With famine staring her in the face, what else could the friendless woman do but return to the father of her child? What claim had I on her, by comparison withhim? What did it matter, now that the poor creature secretly returned the love that I felt for her? There was the child, an obstacle between us—there washishold on her, now that he had got her back! What wasmyhold worth? All social proprieties and all social laws answered the question: Nothing!
My head sunk on my breast; I received the blow in silence.
My good mother took my hand. “You understand it now, George?” she said, sorrowfully.
“Yes, mother; I understand it.”
“There was one thing she wished me to say to you, my dear, which I have not mentioned yet. She entreats you not to suppose that she had the faintest idea of her situation when she attempted to destroy herself. Her first suspicion that it was possible she might become a mother was conveyed to her at Edinburgh, in a conversation with her aunt. It is impossible, George, not to feel compassionately toward this poor woman. Regrettable as her position is, I cannot see that she is to blame for it. She was the innocent victim of a vile fraud when that man married her; she has suffered undeservedly since; and she has behaved nobly to you and to me. I only do her justice in saying that she is a woman in a thousand—a woman worthy, under happier circumstances, to be my daughter and your wife. I feelforyou, and feelwithyou, my dear—I do, with my whole heart.”
So this scene in my life was, to all appearance, a scene closed forever. As it had been with my love, in the days of my boyhood, so it was again now with the love of my riper age!
Later in the day, when I had in some degree recovered my self-possession, I wrote to Mr. Van Brandt—asshehad foreseen I should write!—to apologize for breaking my engagement to dine with him.
Could I trust to a letter also, to say the farewell words for me to the woman whom I had loved and lost? No! It was better for her, and better for me, that I should not write. And yet the idea of leaving her in silence was more than my fortitude could endure. Her last words at parting (as they were repeated to me by my mother) had expressed the hope that I should not think hardly of her in the future. How could I assure her that I should think of her tenderly to the end of my life? My mother’s delicate tact and true sympathy showed me the way. “Send a little present, George,” she said, “to the child. You bear no malice to the poor little child?” God knows I was not hard on the child! I went out myself and bought her a toy. I brought it home, and before I sent it away, I pinned a slip of paper to it, bearing this inscription: “To your little daughter, from George Germaine.” There is nothing very pathetic, I suppose, in those words. And yet I burst out crying when I had written them.
The next morning my mother and I set forth for my country-house in Perthshire. London was now unendurable to me. Traveling abroad I had tried already. Nothing was left but to go back to the Highlands, and to try what I could make of my life, with my mother still left to live for.
THERE is something repellent to me, even at this distance of time, in looking back at the dreary days, of seclusion which followed each other monotonously in my Highland home. The actions of my life, however trifling they may have been, I can find some interest in recalling: they associate me with my fellow-creatures; they connect me, in some degree, with the vigorous movement of the world. But I have no sympathy with the purely selfish pleasure which some men appear to derive from dwelling on the minute anatomy of their own feelings, under the pressure of adverse fortune. Let the domestic record of our stagnant life in Perthshire (so far as I am concerned in it) be presented in my mother’s words, not in mine. A few lines of extract from the daily journal which it was her habit to keep will tell all that need be told before this narrative advances to later dates and to newer scenes.
“20th August.—We have been two months at our home in Scotland, and I see no change in George for the better. He is as far as ever, I fear, from being reconciled to his separation from that unhappy woman. Nothing will induce him to confess it himself. He declares that his quiet life here with me is all that he desires. But I know better! I have been into his bedroom late at night. I have heard him talking of her in his sleep, and I have seen the tears on his eyelids. My poor boy! What thousands of charming women there are who would ask nothing better than to be his wife! And the one woman whom he can never marry is the only woman whom he loves!
“25th.—A long conversation about George with Mr. MacGlue. I have never liked this Scotch doctor since he encouraged my son to keep the fatal appointment at Saint Anthony’s Well. But he seems to be a clever man in his profession—and I think, in his way, he means kindly toward George. His advice was given as coarsely as usual, and very positively at the same time. ‘Nothing will cure your son, madam, of his amatory passion for that half-drowned lady of his but change—and another lady. Send him away by himself this time; and let him feel the want of some kind creature to look after him. And when he meets with that kind creature (they are as plenty as fish in the sea), never trouble your head about it if there’s a flaw in her character. I have got a cracked tea-cup which has served me for twenty years. Marry him, ma’am, to the new one with the utmost speed and impetuosity which the law will permit.’ I hate Mr. MacGlue’s opinions—so coarse and so hard-hearted!—but I sadly fear that I must part with my son for a little while, for his own sake.
“26th.—Where is George to go? I have been thinking of it all through the night, and I cannot arrive at a conclusion. It is so difficult to reconcile myself to letting him go away alone.
“29th.—I have always believed in special providences; and I am now confirmed in my belief. This morning has brought with it a note from our good friend and neighbor at Belhelvie. Sir James is one of the commissioners for the Northern Lights. He is going in a Government vessel to inspect the lighthouses on the North of Scotland, and on the Orkney and Shetland Islands—and, having noticed how worn and ill my poor boy looks, he most kindly invites George to be his guest on the voyage. They will not be absent for more than two months; and the sea (as Sir James reminds me) did wonders for George’s health when he returned from India. I could wish for no better opportunity than this of trying what change of air and scene will do for him. However painfully I may feel the separation myself, I shall put a cheerful face on it; and I shall urge George to accept the invitation.
“30th.—I have said all I could; but he still refuses to leave me. I am a miserable, selfish creature. I felt so glad when he said No.
“31st.—Another wakeful night. George must positively send his answer to Sir James to-day. I am determined to do my duty toward my son—he looks so dreadfully pale and ill this morning! Besides, if something is not done to rouse him, how do I know that he may not end in going back to Mrs. Van Brandt after all? From every point of view, I feel bound to insist on his accepting Sir James’s invitation. I have only to be firm, and the thing is done. He has never yet disobeyed me, poor fellow. He will not disobey me now.
“2d September.—He has gone! Entirely to please me—entirely against his own wishes. Oh, how is it that such a good son cannot get a good wife! He would make any woman happy. I wonder whether I have done right in sending him away? The wind is moaning in the fir plantation at the back of the house. Is there a storm at sea? I forgot to ask Sir James how big the vessel was. The ‘Guide to Scotland’ says the coast is rugged; and there is a wild sea between the north shore and the Orkney Islands. I almost regret having insisted so strongly—how foolish I am! We are all in the hands of God. May God bless and prosper my good son!
“10th.—Very uneasy. No letter from George. Ah, how full of trouble this life is! and how strange that we should cling to it as we do!
“15th.—A letter from George! They have done with the north coast and they have crossed the wild sea to the Orkneys. Wonderful weather has favored them so far; and George is in better health and spirits. Ah! how much happiness there is in life if we only have the patience to wait for it.
“2d October.—Another letter. They are safe in the harbor of Lerwick, the chief port in the Shetland Islands. The weather has not latterly been at all favorable. But the amendment in George’s health remains. He writes most gratefully of Sir James’s unremitting kindness to him. I am so happy, I declare I could kiss Sir James—though heisa great man, and a Commissioner for Northern Lights! In three weeks more (wind and weather permitting) they hope to get back. Never mind my lonely life here, if I can only see George happy and well again! He tells me they have passed a great deal of their time on shore; but not a word does he say about meeting any ladies. Perhaps they are scarce in those wild regions? I have heard of Shetland shawls and Shetland ponies. Are there any Shetland ladies, I wonder?”