All this time he kept himself carefully away from speech or look of Janet, who had been, strange as it was, less affected by the calamity than any one in the house, and had a look in her dry eyes which Fred could not understand. His heart revolted against her; a woman without feeling, who had no tears for the man who had surrounded her with comforts and ensured her well-being for her life—the man who was her child, whom she had nursed, but never mourned.A sort of hatred sprang up in the lad’s mind towards this old woman. He felt it a wrong and almost insult that he should have been bidden to take her advice—and avoided her as if she had been the plague. Janet, on the contrary, seemed to seek opportunities of encountering him, appearing suddenly about the house, as she had never hitherto done, in all kinds of unlikely places. Her unobtrusiveness had been one of her great qualities in former times. She had never been seen on the stairs or in the corridor, scarcely at all, except at the opening of the passage leading to her own room, or sitting in the sun by the laundry door, or about the servants’ part of the house. But now old Janet seemed to be everywhere. Fred met her in the hall, lingering about the library, in the gallery above which encircled the hall, everywhere save in his mother’s drawing-room. And whenever she met him, though she did nothing to stop him, she gave him a look full of significance. It seemed to say, “When are you coming to consult me? I want to be consulted,” till the young man became exasperated, and fled from her with an ever-growing sense of trouble or fear. Her apparition in her largewhite mutch, with a black ribbon round it, tied in a great bow on the top of her head, with her black and white shepherd’s plaid shawl, which she had adopted, instead of the old red and green tartan, in compliment to the family mourning—gave him a sensation of shivering, as if old Janet had included in her own person the properties of all the Fates. He was afraid of what she might have to say to him—afraid lest there should be something to tell which would be hateful to hear; afraid for his father’s good name and his own peace.
Mr. Wedderburn had no such addition to the many cares which this catastrophe had introduced into his placid life. He knew nothing about Janet, or any secret she might have in her keeping, nor had he any idea of that last interview which lay so heavily upon Fred’s mind; but he was not at ease. The public mind had been entirely reassured on the subject of Dalyell’s embarrassed circumstances by the announcement that Pat Wedderburn had taken upon him all the responsibility and was indeed the principal in Dalyell’s speculations, using him only as an agent, which was what Wedderburn’s statement on the subject had now grown to. But Wedderburn knew very well thathe had only intended to make this offer to his friend, and that Dalyell’s troubles about money were weighing very heavily upon him when he went down to Portobello for his swim. And he knew that the very opportune cramp or failure of heart which caused his death accomplished at the same time the complete deliverance from all those cares, of his children and his wife. Everything was appropriate, perfectly convenient to the moment and to the needs of the man who gave his life for his family as much as if he had defended them to the death on the ramparts of some besieged city—with this only exception, that the weapons with which he fought were equivocal, if not dishonest. For the insurance money would never have been paid to the representatives of a suicide. Poor Bob! poor Bob! it was unworthy, it was dreadful to associate that title with his honest name. And yet—if it had been a planned thing, it was not an honest thing, although he had paid for it by the sacrifice of his life. This thought rankled in Mr. Wedderburn’s mind. Dalyell had been, so to speak, absolved by public opinion from that guilt. The payment of the insurances was in itself a full acquittal, and noone ventured to say or even think that the catastrophe on the Portobello sands was anything but a fatal accident. But Wedderburn’s mind was haunted by this doubt. It was not for him to bring it forward, to hint a suspicion which could never be proved, which would be ruinous to the prospects of those whose interests were in his hands. No, never to any soul would he hint such a doubt. But yet—he said to himself that poor Bob would have been capable of it. A thing that you are willing to give your life to purchase—it is difficult to believe that what is bought at such a sacrifice could be wronging any one, or a sin against the commonwealth. The suicide would be a sin before God, but many a desperate creature is ready to encounter that, with a pathetic trust in the understanding and pity of the great Father. But to die dishonestly for the good of your family, that was a different thing. Bob Dalyell, perhaps, was not a man who would attach any idea of guilt to this way of cheating the insurance companies, even his own office; but Wedderburn, who might have been capable of the sacrifice, would have stood at that. His idea of honour and probity was perhaps more abstract than that of a manwho was involved in sharp business transactions, in speculation and commercial adventure, and who was, besides, a man with a family, bent upon saving them from ruin. He shook his head and acknowledged to himself that poor Bob was capable of not having taken that divergence from strict integrity into account. Had he made up his mind to die for his family he would not have considered the ease of the insurance companies. The thought of wronging them would have sat lightly on his soul.
Mr. Wedderburn took from this self-discussion a habit which remained with him for all the rest of his life, the habit of shaking his head, slowly, sadly to himself, as it were, as if in the course of some remark. It was while he questioned, and doubted, and laid things together, excusing his friend even while he judged him, that this habit was acquired. It was not a bad habit for a lawyer who was consulted by his clients on many delicate questions. It gave an air of regretful decision, of compassion and sympathy, when he had conclusions to announce that were not pleasant to his clients. And he never lost this gesture of reflection and compassion, which was as sacred toBob Dalyell as his tombstone. It was thus, with many a vexing doubt and fear, that he mourned the friend of his youth.
The female members of the party were happily exempted from all these discussions. It does not often happen that the women have the lightest part to bear in any such calamity. But in this case it was so. Mrs. Dalyell mourned her husband most sincerely and deeply, forgetting every little flaw in his character, and gradually elevating him into the position of a perfect man—the best husband, the kindest father! And the girls mourned him with torrents of youthful tears, with a conviction that they never could smile again, never get beyond the blackness of the first grief, the awful sensation of the catastrophe. But there was nothing but pure sorrow in their minds. They thought no more of the insurance companies than the birds in the garden think of the crumbs miraculously provided for them when snow is on the ground. Neither had the slightest doubt ever entered their minds as to what they were told of his death. They knew every detail, laying it up in their hearts. How he had parted smiling from his friend at the corner of the street, and gone offto the sands with his buoyant step, in such health and strength, in such good-will and good-humour with all the world. This was what the girls said to themselves, trying to picture his last look upon life. And they hoped it was some unsuspected failure of the heart, which the doctor said was most likely—a thing which would give no pain, which would be over in a moment, so that he would never know he was dying, or have any pang of anxiety for those he was leaving behind. This was how the girls realised their father’s death: and their mother’s picture of it was not dissimilar. She felt that there must have been a moment in which he thought of her and of “the bairns.” Mrs. Dalyell added that to the imaginary scene—a moment in which, as people said was the case in drowning, all his life would rush through his brain, and he would think of her as he died. They had the best of it. Their innocent thoughts conceived no ulterior scheme, no darkness of doubt. Had they realised that any such doubt existed, it is probable that they would have canonised poor Robert Dalyell on the spot as a hero and martyr, dying for those he loved, and still never have thought of the insurance companies; but, happily,no such imagination entered at all into their simple thoughts.
The household had settled down completely into the habits of its new life, when Fred Dalyell came home from a long wandering tour he had made about Europe, not so much for love of travelling or desire to see beautiful things and places, as to distract his mind from the miserable thoughts that had gained so complete an empire over him. He had succeeded very well in that, for the most persistent trouble yields to such treatment at twenty; but the first return to Yalton, and all the recollections that were waiting for him under those familiar trees, brought back on the first coming much of the old trouble to the lad’s sensitive mind. It was now May, and Yalton was almost as cheerful as ever, though in a subdued way. The girls, “poor things,” as their mother said, had recovered their spirits. They were so young!—and Fred’s coming home had been a thing much looked for, like the beginning of a new era to the young creatures over whom the winter of gloom was naturally passing away. Susie and Alice were much disappointed by the cloud that came over Fred after the first joy of their greetings. Insteadof sitting with them and telling them everything, he disappeared on the first evening, with a sort of impatient, almost angry, resistance of their blandishments.
“Oh, let me alone; I have a thousand things to think of,” he said, pushing them away as the manner of big brothers is. Susie and Alice forgave Fred when they saw the little red tip of his cigar on the terrace, and realised that he had gone there “to think of father.” For a moment it was debated between them whether one of them should not go to him to share his solitude and thoughts; but they decided, with a better inspiration, to leave him alone, and even withdrew delicately from the drawing-room window, not to seem to spy upon his sacred thoughts.
“Oh, do you mind how papa used to go up and down, up and down?” said Alice to Susie.
“Do I mind?” said Susie, half indignant. “Could I ever forget?” And they shed a few tears together, then hurried off to the table in the full light of the lamps, where Fred’s curiosities which he had brought home, and all his little presents, were laid out for inspection, and began to laughand twitter over them, and compare this with that, like two birds.
Yes, this was just the place where father had stood when he had suddenly changed the conversation about the bump-suppers, and all the joys of Oxford, to that strange and sober talk about the vicissitudes of life, and what a difference a day might make in the position of a happy lad at college, thinking of nothing but fun and frolic. Fred remembered every word, every look—the wail of the autumnal wind, the clear break of sky among the clouds towards the west, the half shock, half amusement, with which he had felt that sudden change into what in those days of levity he had called the didactic in his father’s tone. It had seemed to him a sermon at the time; and then it had seemed to him—he knew not what—an awful advertisement of what was coming: a prophecy conscious or unconscious. He walked up and down, up and down under the trees, hearing the same sounds, the tinkle of the half-choked fountain, the rustling of the wind among the branches. The sentiment of the night was different, for that had been in September, and this was full of the soft and hopeful stir of May. The leaves were fallingthen; now they were but just opened, hanging in clusters of vivid young green, which almost forced colour upon the paleness of the wistful night. But nothing else was as it had been then. His father was gone, swept from the earth as though he had never been. Yet this great change had not brought the other changes which Mr. Dalyell anticipated. Fred had not been forced into the premature development of a young head of the family. He had not been plunged into care and trouble, into work and anxiety. If anything, he had been more free than before. He was still only a youth dallying upon the edge of life, not a man entering into serious duties. The contrast struck him strangely. This was not what his father had foreseen. It gave him a vague new trouble in his mind to perceive that this was so. He ought to be less free, perhaps more occupied, more responsible. He could not all at once decide what the difference was.
Here he was suddenly disturbed by the sound of a step upon the gravel—and it is to be feared that Fred uttered within himself an impatient exclamation, as he threw away the end of his cigar. “Here is one of those bothering girls,” he saidto himself, though we know with what high reason and feeling Susie and Alice had withdrawn, even from the window, not to seem to spy upon their brother. He got up to meet them, remembering that he had just come home and that it would be brutal to show any impatience of their affection. But Fred might have known that the heavy, slow step which approached him was not that of either of the girls. A tall figure shaped itself out of the darkness—the white mutch, the bow of black ribbon, the checked shawl, became dimly visible.
“Eh, Mr. Fred,” said old Janet, “but I’m blythe to see you home!”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s you!” in a tone which was not encouraging. He had forgotten old Janet, happily, and it was with anything but pleasure that he felt her image thus thrust upon him again.
“Who should it be but me?” she said. “There is none that can take such an interest. And, Mr. Fred, it is time you should be taking your ain place. This house of Yalton should go into no other hands but them it belongs to. Oh, I canna speak more plain; but you must rouse yourself up, and you must take your ain place.”
“I don’t know what you have to do with it,” cried Fred angrily, “nor why you should thrust your advice upon me. I am here in my own place. What do you mean? I ought to be at Oxford, that would be my own place.”
“Na, na! that would be just more schooling,” said Janet, “and it’s no schooling you want, but to stand up like a man, and be maister of your father’s house, as is your right. Oh, laddie, I tell you I canna speak more plain; but take you my word, it’ll save more trouble, and worse trouble, if you will just grip the reins in your hands and take your ain place!”
He laughed contemptuously in his impatience and anger. “You had better save your advice for things you understand,” he said. “Don’t you know the law considers me an infant, and that I can do nothing till I’m of age—if there was anything to do? But all is going as well as can be—almost too well—as if he were not missed,” the young man cried abruptly with a movement of feeling, which indeed was momentary and had not come into his mind before. Perhaps it was an influence from the brain of the old woman beside him which sent it there now.
“That’s just what I wanted to say,” said old Janet—“as ifhewere not missed. All settled for her, and smoothed down and made fair and easy, as ifhimsel’ were to the fore. There’s trouble in the air, Mr. Fred, and if you dinna bestir yourself, and take your ain place, and get a grip of the reins in your ain hand——”
“Rubbish!” said Fred. “How can I get the reins, till I come of age? If there was any need, which there is not, my mother knows better than half a dozen of me.”
“Your mother!” said old Janet, with the natural contempt of an old servant for the mistress; then she added in a different tone: “if it was only your mother”—shaking her old head.
“Who else?” said Fred with indignation. But Janet made no reply. She turned her back upon him and went off along the terrace, always shaking her head, which was slightly palsied and had a faint nodding motion besides. Something in this confirmed movement which was comic, and the jealousy of his mother, which had always been a well-known feature in old Janet, tended to give a ludicrous character to her appeal. Instead of deepening the sadness of his thoughts, it lightenedthem with a curious sense of relief. It seemed to take away at once the gravity of the recollection of his father’s reference to her, and the painful suggestion in it which had caused Fred so much trouble, when old Janet thus displayed herself in an absurd rather than a tragical light.
Mr. Wedderburnentered very naturally into the charge of his friend’s affairs. He had been Dalyell’s counsellor already on many occasions in his life, and knew much about his concerns, the resources of the estate, and all the original sources of income which Dalyell had increased, yet fatally risked, by his speculations. No one was better fitted than he to apply the welcome aid of the insurance moneys to the relief of Yalton from all the encumbrances which the dead man’s other affairs had imported into his life. A man so familiar with the household and all its affairs, nobody could know so well as he how to guide the revenues of the household so as to afford their usual comforts to Mrs. Dalyell and the girls without injuring Fred’s interests, or forgetting the very near approach of the time when he should take the control into his own hands. It was evident that changes were inevitable then; either that Mrs. Dalyell should retire to a house of her own, or that she should remain as Fred’shousekeeper, with her authority contingent upon his plans, and liable to be destroyed whenever the young man should think of marriage—a position in which the faithful friend of the house was unwilling to contemplate the mistress of Yalton. It was not a thing that would have affected Mrs. Dalyell. It would not have occurred to her to think that the house was less hers by being Fred’s. But Mr. Wedderburn was jealous of her dignity, and it wounded a certain imaginative sense of fitness for which no one would have given the dry old lawyer credit—the notion that the woman whom he had so long admired and liked should be dependent on her boy’s caprice and whether it should please him or not to marry. The event which would make another change, so great, in her position, troubled him more than he could say. Was it not enough, he asked himself, that she should have had this shock to bear, and her life rent in two, that she should now have to yield all authority to Fred, and be dependent upon him for her home and dignity? The thought did not disturb Mrs. Dalyell, who felt it as natural to continue as before at the head of a house, which was no less hers because her son was now its formal head, as to perform any other actof life. But it did disturb her champion and guardian, who made it more and more his office from day to day to watch over her comfort and spare her trouble.
It was astonishing how Pat Wedderburn, who had not for many years, indeed for all his independent life, known more of the sweets of domesticity than those which he shared at second-hand in the houses of his friends, and especially at Yalton, fell into the ways of the head of a family. He did not, indeed, come out to Yalton every night as poor Dalyell had done, but he spent at least half of his evenings there, and gave his mind to the consideration of what was wanted in the house, and what would be agreeable to both mother and girls, with a curious familiar devotion which was at once amusing and touching. No father probably ever was so mindful of the tastes of his children as Mr. Wedderburn was of Susie and Alice. He remembered what they liked, and noted every expression of a wish with an affectionate vigilance and thoughtfulness which surprised even the girls, though they were well accustomed to have their little caprices considered. As for Mrs. Dalyell, no wife ever had her likings more sedulously consulted,her suggestions more carefully carried out, than were hers by her co-executor, her trustee, and fellow-guardian of the children. She had but to speak to Mr. Wedderburn about any trifling obstacle and it was immediately removed out of their way. He regarded her wants and wishes as things which were sacred; not as a husband does, whose natural impulse it is to contest, if not to deny. Life had never been made so easy for the ladies of Yalton. When he came out it was almost certain that some pleasant surprise accompanied him—a book, a present, something that either girls or mother had wished for. And they all took Mr. Wedderburn as completely for granted as if this devotion had been the most natural thing in the world.
And it would be impossible to describe the sweetness that came into the life of old Pat Wedderburn (as Edinburgh profanely called him) from this amateur performance, so to speak, of the duties of husband and father. He had long been in the habit of considering Yalton as a sort of home. But yet his visits there, though he was always so welcome, were more or less at the pleasure of his hosts, and he had kept up the form, though it was not much more than a form,of being invited. Now no such restraint (though it had never been much of a restraint) existed. He put a certain limit upon himself, but save for that the house of his wards was to him as his own, always open, always ready. They were all his wards, the mother not less than the children. It is true she was joined with him in the trust, and that she was a woman, as he said to himself, of a great deal of sense, who could give him advice upon many subjects, and even took or appeared to take an intelligent interest in investments, and knew whether the claims of the farmers were just, and what was right in respect to repairs, &c., better than Mr. Wedderburn himself. But she had never been accustomed to do anything for herself, to act independently, to take any step without advice and active help. It is impossible to say how pleasant it was to the middle-aged bachelor to be thus referred to at every moment asked about everything, consulted in every domestic contingency. He would not have minded even had he been called upon to settle difficulties with the servants, or subdue a refractory cook, nor would it have bored him to have a housekeeper’s afflictions in this way poured into his ears.
Happily, however, in the large easy-going household at Yalton there were few difficulties of that kind. Mrs. Dalyell was an excellent manager, but she was not exacting, and her servants were chiefly old servants, who ruled the less permanent kitchen-maids, footboys, &c., under them with rods of iron, but did not trouble the mistress with their imperfections. When a house has been long established on such a footing, and there is no overwhelming necessity for economy, or interfering dispositions on the part of its head, it is wonderful how smoothly it will roll on, notwithstanding all human weaknesses. And the shadow of grief glided away. There could not have been a more desirable house, or a more pleasant routine of life. The very neighbourhood breathed peace into Wedderburn’s being. Before he had reached the gates the atmosphere of content enveloped him. He had something in his pocket for the girls—he had something to consult their mother about, generally her own business, but sometimes even his, so great a confidence was he acquiring in her common-sense. To think that the loss of poor Bob Dalyell should have brought so great an acquisition of happiness into his life! He wasashamed when he came to think of it, and felt a compunction as if he had profited by his friend’s disaster. But it was no fault of his.
And there was no doubt that Mr. Wedderburn enjoyed Yalton and the life there a great deal more than if he had been really the father whose office as far as possible he had taken upon himself. He was not responsible for the faults or aggrieved by the imperfections of the children, as a man is to whom they belong. The very distance between them increased the charm. Although it would have been death to him to have been thrust out of that paradise, it would perhaps have lessened its charm had he been absolutely swept into it, bound to it, by law and necessity. The freedom of the voluntary tie added sweetness to the bond. He was far more at the orders of his adopted family than any father would have been; but that shyness of old bachelorhood, which is as real as the reserve of old maidenhood and very similar, though it is little remarked, was in no way ruffled or wounded by the present arrangement. And thus good came out of all the evil, to one at least of the little circle who had been so deeply affected by it. Poor Bob D’yell!—to think thathe should have lost all this, and that his most devoted friend should have acquired it by his loss! This gave Mr. Wedderburn a compunction which was of course entirely fictitious and visionary—for had he not taken that position it would have been much worse for the family as well as for himself.
This state of affairs was scarcely interrupted by Fred’s majority, for Fred, no more than any other member of the household, considered that it made any difference. Of course, in the progress of time he would marry, and probably desire to be as his father had been. But, in the meantime, he felt himself no less a boy on the morning after his twenty-first birthday than he had done the morning before; and the idea of taking the reins out of his mother’s hands or desiring more freedom than he actually possessed, especially the freedom of turning her out of the house which was now legally his, or disturbing any of her arrangements, never occurred to Fred. Young people brought up under such an easy sway as that of Mrs. Dalyell do not feel the temptation of rushing wildly into freedom as soon as it is legally their own. Fred had always been free, and he could not be more so,because his name was now at the head of all the family affairs, and Frederick Dalyell, Esq., was now the official proprietor at Yalton. What difference did it make? The family generally said none. Of course, Fred, as the only son and the eldest, would have been paramount in the house under any circumstances; he could not be more than paramount now. But it was not to Fred that Mrs. Dalyell looked for help and advice, any more than it had been before; this birthday did not add experience or wisdom to the boy. And Mr. Wedderburn came and went just the same, looking after Fred’s interests, spoiling the girls, always ready to be referred to. It made no difference, nor did anybody wish that it should, except perhaps old Janet, whose opinion was not thought much of, whom Fred avoided carefully, and whose very existence was scarcely realised by the adviser of the house. As for Fred himself, his troubled thoughts had worn themselves out. Whatever trouble there may be in the mind respecting a man who has been in his grave for more than a year, it dies away under the progress of gentle time. To keep up the pressure of such misery there must be new events occurring or to bedreaded. What is altogether past affects the spirit in a different way. If there was a tragic secret unrevealed in the story of Robert Dalyell’s death, it was hidden for ever in the bitter waves that had swallowed him up: and the course of his young life had gradually swept from Fred’s mind the burden of his father’s tragedy. He had decided to go back to Oxford at the end of the first year, and he was still continuing his unlaborious studies there when the second had ended, and October, with its shortening days and windy skies, returned again. The vacation had been a lively one to Fred, and Mrs. Dalyell had been obliged to come out of the seclusion of her widowhood on account of Susie, whose introduction to the world could not be postponed any longer. Mrs. Dalyell herself was not unwilling that it should be so. She was entirely contented in her home-life, yet pleased to vary it when need was, and the more smiling and brilliant side of things no longer jarred upon her feelings. And Susie, in all the fervour of her first season (though it was only in Edinburgh), was as happy as the day.
Thus it was, upon a household as cheerful as could be seen, that the shadows began to lengthenin that October, a little before the end of the vacation, when Fred, who had exhausted his own covers with the assistance of his friends, was flitting about the country in a series of “last days” before he went back to his college. Fred’s friends of the shooting parties had made the house very gay for the girls, and Mr. Wedderburn had thought it expedient to “put in an appearance,” as he said, even more frequently than usual, to support Mrs. Dalyell and help to preserve the balance of the house. He came “out” four or five nights in the week to the house which became daily more and more like his home, and found a continually increasing charm in the sight of the pleasure of the young ones and in the company of their mother. While they were carrying on their amusements, he considered it only his duty to sit by Mrs. Dalyell and keep her as far as possible from feeling the blank of the empty place. They could talk to each other, as only old friends can—of the people and places they had mutually known all their lives, of the different dispositions of the children, of Robert, how pleased he would have been to see them so happy, of the beasts in the little home-farm; and of the new leases, andthe new Lord of Session, and the Queen’s visit to Edinburgh, and everything indeed that came within the range of their kindly world. It was very pleasant: Mrs. Dalyell found it so, who was thus able to relieve her mind of any remark that occurred to her, which the young ones were too hasty or too much occupied to listen to; and Mr. Wedderburn liked it still better, feeling that he himself, who had never ventured to risk any of the great undertakings of life, had thus come to have the cream and perfection of quiet social comfort, without paying for it, without cost to himself or wrong to any one in life.
On one such evening Mrs. Dalyell had been called away on some domestic errand, and Mr. Wedderburn, feeling thus a little left to himself, strolled out upon the terrace to look at the rising moon and to enjoy the softness of the evening, one of the last perhaps before the winter came on. It was a still night, and the temperature was high for the time of year. The country had been blazing in the sunlight with all the colours of the autumn, and even the moon brought out the yellow lightness in the waving birches, if not the russet reds and browns of the deeper foliage.Nothing could be more still: the sky resplendent, with here and there a puff of ethereal whiteness, a cloud scarcely to be called a cloud, imperceptibly floating upon a breeze that was scarcely to be called a breeze—a soft sigh of night air. It was so warm that he did not hesitate to sit down, though at fifty-seven one is cautions about sitting down in the open-air in October, even in the day. But the night was very soft, and so were Mr. Wedderburn’s thoughts. It cannot be said they were sentimental, much less impassioned. He wanted no more than he possessed, the loving kindness of this house, the affection of the children, the friendship and trust of their mother. He was entirely satisfied to come and go, to feel that he was of use to them, to enjoy their society. A great sense of well-being filled his mind as he sat there and heard the sound of their young voices gay and sweet coming from the billiard-room, where Fred and a friend or two were amusing the girls. There was something like a suggestion that more might come of that partnership of jest and play which was springing up between pretty Susie and one of these young men—dear little Susie!—who had given up her big words, but whom herfather’s friend still corrected and petted with fatherly tenderness. If it were possible to feel more fatherly than old Pat Wedderburn, the dry old Edinburgh lawyer, felt as he sat there and smiled in the dark at the sound of Susie’s voice, I do not know what that quintessence of paternity could be.
He was thus sitting in quiet enjoyment of the solitude (which is so much sweeter a thing with the sense of the near vicinity of those we love than when we are really alone) and his own thoughts, when he saw, as Fred had done on a previous occasion, a tall figure rise as it were out of the soil and approach through the dark—a shadow, but with that independent movement of a living creature which is so instantly distinguishable from any combination of shadows. Mr. Wedderburn was not superstitious, but the figure as it came slowly towards him was one which he did not recognise, and he was astonished at its intrusion here. He rose up to intercept it—whether it was an unlawful visitor prowling round perhaps to see the handiest way of entry into an unsuspicious house, or some lover bound for a rendezvous, or some servant come out unconscious of observationto take the air. But the new-comer was not afraid of his observation, and he now made out that it was a large old woman in her checked shawl and white cap. Even then Mr. Wedderburn did not recognise the old woman, with whose appearance he was but slightly acquainted. She stopped when they met and made him a slow curtsey, leaning upon a stick. It was too dark for him to see her face.
“Did you want anything with me, my woman?” said Mr. Wedderburn.
“Ay, sir,” she said, “I just do that. You’ll maybe not know me. I’m Janet Macalister, that was nurse to Mr. Robert D’yell.”
“I have often heard of you,” said Mr. Wedderburn, “and I am glad to see you, Janet; not that I do see you, for the night’s dark. And this is not an hour for you to be out at your years. If you have anything to say to me we would be better in the library or the hall.”
“Sir,” said Janet, “what I have to say is not for any place where we can be seen. I came out here that naebody might suspect I took such a thing upon me; and yet I’m forced to it—though I canna tell you why.”
“This sounds very mysterious,” said Mr. Wedderburn; “but I hope there’s nothing very wrong.”
“Mr. Wedderburn,” said Janet, “you’re very often at our house.”
“Eh!” cried Mr. Wedderburn, in amazement, “at your house? Oh, you mean at Yalton, I suppose. And have you any objections to that?”
“Yes, sir,” said Janet firmly, “the greatest of objections. Do you not know, Mr. Wedderburn, that the mistress is still but a young woman (to have such a family), and that she is a widow with naebody to defend her good name—and here are you, a marriageable man, haunting her house every night of your life. Bide a moment, sir, and listen to me. Oh, it’s nothing to laugh at—it’s just very serious. You are here morning, noon, and night”—(here there was a murmur from the unfortunate man of “No, no! not so bad as that”)—“and I ask ye to take your ain sense and judgment to your help and tell me what folk will think that sees that?”
“Think!” faltered Mr. Wedderburn. “Woman, you must have taken leave of your senses. What is it you mean?—and what should they thinkbut that I’m the friend of the family and a very attached one, and that it’s my business to be here?”
“Oh, sir, ye’ll not content your ain judgment with that, far less the rest of the world! It’s no business that brings ye here. Ye come because you’re fain and fond to come. I am the oldest person about the house, and it would ill become me to see my bairn’s wife put in a wrong position, and never say a word. Sir, the mistress is a bonnie and a pleasant woman.”
“I have nothing to say against that.”
“And no age to speak of. And you yoursel’ what are ye? Comparatively speaking, a young man.”
“Comparatively in the furthest sense. I am much obliged to you, Janet.”
“Don’t think, sir,” said Janet, solemnly, “that you can carry it off with a laugh. I will not see the mistress put in a wrong position, and never say a word. It may be want of thought; but you must see, if you consider, that she’s not like a young lass to be courted and married. And still less is she one to be made a talk of in all the country side. I will not have my mistress exposedto detractions, and none to the fore to put a stop to them!” said Janet with excitement, striking her staff on the gravel.
Mr. Wedderburn stood, feeling the old woman tower over him with her palsied head and threatening air; he was half angry, half amused, wholly discomfited and startled. The situation was ludicrous, and yet it was embarrassing. To be startled out of the happiness of his thoughts by such an interruption, brought to book by an old servant, warned as it were off the premises by the nurse, was almost too whimsical and absurd a position to be treated as serious; and yet there was an uncomfortable reality at the bottom which he could not elude.
“Janet,” he said, “my woman—do you not think you are going a little too far? I was just as often at this house when Robert D’yell himself was here.”
“No, Mr. Wedderburn, not half so often.”
“Nonsense, woman, much more often! and in any way I am not answerable to you. The last thing I could think of,” he added in a troubled tone, “would be to—would be—— You are daft, Janet! I’m their trustee and the nearest of theirfriends; how dare you say a word about my visits? I will say nothing to your mistress, but I must request you to refrain from such remarks, or else——”
“Sir,” cried Janet, “you needna threaten me, for you’re not the master here!”
“No, I am not the master here,” said Mr. Wedderburn; “but if you think anybody will have encouragement to set up ill stories about—— No,” he said, checking himself, “I will not blame you with that. You’ve made a mistake; but no doubt your meaning was good—only never let me hear it any more.”
“Oh, sir,” cried Janet, “the human heart’s an awfu’ deceitful thing. I could find it in my heart to go down on my knees, and beg you—oh, for the Lord’s sake!—to go away before there’s any harm done from this misfortunate house.”
“The woman’s daft!” cried Mr. Wedderburn.
But it gave him a dazed and troubled look when he appeared in the drawing-room some time later. He was very silent all the rest of the evening, sometimes casting an almost furtive look round him from one face to another; sometimes red, sometimes pale. Once or twice he broke out intoa curious laugh when there seemed little occasion for it. “I am afraid you have taken cold, Mr. Wedderburn; it was too late to be sitting out on an October night,” said Mrs. Dalyell.
“I don’t think I’ve taken cold—but I think I’ll return to my room, with your kind permission, for I have some things to plan out,” said the lawyer. It was so unlike him that they all agreed something must be the matter. Had he got bad news? Had he been troubled about business? “Perhaps he had taken something that had disagreed with him,” Mrs. Dalyell suggested. Whatever it was, he was not like himself.
No, he was very unlike himself. He gave a shame-faced look in the glass when he went to his room, and burst out into a low, long laugh. “I’m a pretty person!” he said to himself. And then he became suddenly grave—graver, almost, than he had ever been in all his serious life.
Itwas not until Fred Dalyell’s return from Oxford in the spring that he became aware of the rumour which had already begun to spread through the neighbourhood and to be discussed in the Edinburgh drawing-rooms, that his mother was about to marry again. He had seen when he returned home that the girls were a little overcast and subdued, and that there was a little flush as of uneasiness and embarrassment on Mrs. Dalyell’s face. It is difficult at first for a long absent member of a family coming back, to find such a cloud in the air, to discover whether this is only the moment of a storm, whether it means some trifling disagreement—for trifles become great in the inclosure of the household walls—or whether something important and fundamental is intimated by these restrained phrases and averted looks. He thought that perhaps there had been a “breeze,” that Susie was getting into the wilful stage, and, distracted by hopes and prospects of her own,had been opposing or defying her mother; that the tenants had been troublesome, backward on rent-day, or bothering about those eternal repairs, which he wondered that old Wedderburn could allow to worry his mother. But this did not seem enough to account for the visible but unexplained trouble in the house. When he caught Susie by the arm and drew her aside to ask, “What’s the matter?” she shook off his hand with a cry of “Oh, don’t ask me, Fred,” and escaped from him, leaving him more bewildered than ever. What could it mean? It seemed to the young man that they all avoided him on this first evening of his return. His mother did not call him into her room to ask those minute and repeated questions with which mothers are so apt to tease their boys. “Oh, confound it! Now I am going to be put through my catechism!” he said usually, when he was called to one of these examinations; but its omission gave him a shock which was still more disagreeable. Could it be possible that his mother did not want to see him alone, and that the girls were afraid to be questioned by him? Fred felt very uncomfortable, without the faintest notion what could be the cause of it, when he perceivedthis constrained condition of the house. Then it suddenly occurred to him that old Pat Wedderburn, as he was generally and profanely called, had not come to meet him as had invariably been the case till now.
“By the by,” he cried, “I felt that something was wanting, but I couldn’t make out what it was. What has become of old Pat?”
“You should speak a little more respectfully, Fred, of our oldest friend,” said his mother reproachfully; but she did not look at him, and the flush grew deeper on her face, which was bent over her work. As for Susie, she pushed her chair away, and almost turned her back upon her mother. Fred immediately divined that old Pat had been objecting to some of Susie’s flirtations, which was odd, as Susie was known to be his favourite of all.
“Oh, I’m respectful enough,” he said. “I don’t mean any harm. The house doesn’t seem natural without him. Why isn’t he here to-night?”
“He has not been with us quite so much of late,” said Mrs. Dalyell, never lifting her eyes from her work; “but he is coming out to-morrow, and he will tell you himself, Fred.”
“Has anything gone wrong?” he asked amazed; for the girls, whose voices generally ran chattering through everything, and who on an ordinary occasion would have thrown in half-a-dozen remarks, sat still as two stone images, Susie with her head averted, Alice buried in a book, which she held between her and the light.
“I request,” said Mrs. Dalyell, in a voice somewhat high-pitched and imperative, as if she expected to encounter opposition, “that there be no more about it till to-morrow night.”
“Oh, if it is me you mean, mamma, you may be sure there will be no more about it—till Doomsday—from me!”
“Susie!” cried her brother in amazement. But Susie’s only reply was to burst from the room in a flush of rage and opposition, such as Fred had never seen in his quiet home before. Alice followed her quickly, and the young man thought that now at last there was some chance of having it out. “I suppose,” he said, “that old Pat has been at her for flirting—the little pussy that she has grown.”
But before he had finished his little speech Mrs. Dalyell, too, had risen from her chair, and,standing with her back to him, was putting her work away.
“You must excuse me,” she said, “my dear boy, if I don’t enter into it to-night. I’m—a little tired and put out. I must go and look after those girls; and though it’s your first night at home, it’s late, and I don’t think I shall come down again. After your journey, Fred, you should go early to bed.”
“After my journey!” he cried with angry dismay. “What has my journey to do with it? But never mind, mother, if you’re tired. I’ll come to your room, and have a talk over the fire.”
“Not to-night,” she said, and kissed him. She lingered a moment, patting him on the shoulder with her hand. “I know it must seem strange to you, Fred—but not to-night, not to-night.”
As a matter of fact, the least imaginative of lookers-on will allow that the position of a middle-aged mother who has to tell her grown-up son that she is going to marry again must be an embarrassing one. Mrs. Dalyell was not like a girl expecting ecstatic happiness in the union with the man she loves. It was an arrangement which had come to seem natural, partly because she wanted someoneto lean upon, and ill-natured gossips (as she heard) objected to that constant, easy, unembarrassing presence of the household friend, which she and her children had found so comfortable—without the existence of some closer bond. She would rather honestly have had Mr. Wedderburn on his old footing; but, if she could not have him on his old footing, it was better to marry him than to lose him. This had been the unimpassioned fashion of Mrs. Dalyell’s thoughts. And he wished it. A man, it appeared, even at fifty-seven, could not content himself with the friendship which was quite enough for a woman. Perhaps she was a little flattered to know that this was so, and that in her mature matronhood she still had charms. And she had thought, as he assured her, that it would draw the family bonds closer and make so little difference. The chief difference would be that he would come of right, instead of only for love, and that the interests of her family would be his own, not only much more than his own, as they were at present. It had seemed very plausible, as he set all the advantages forth, which indeed Pat Wedderburn had done, not only to calm her scruples, but also his own; for, had she but knownit, he too was very well contented with the existing position of affairs. But if Mrs. Dalyell had known the trouble it would have given her—the wild vexation of the girls, and the horrible necessity of having to tell Fred! No, that last was what she could not do. She had intended to do it on his return, but her courage had failed her. Tell your grown-up son that you are going to marry! No, no, she could not do it. And when two years had not yet elapsed from his father’s death! “Oh,” she said to herself, “it was no wrong to Robert! Oh, no, no wrong to Robert! It was a different thing, not to be thought of in the same way.” But still, when it came to the point, she could not do it, it was beyond her power.
Fred could not tell what to think: he was angry and vexed and cast down by the strange reception he had received. The first night at home, which was always so pleasant, the girls hanging about him with a hundred things to ask and to tell, his mother beaming with affection and pleasure on her united family. And here he was left alone, the lamps burning with a sort of calm intelligence as if they knew all about it, the clock chuckling at him on the mantel-piece. Foggo came in with thetea-tray, and looked round in astonishment for the ladies, then shook his head solemnly and went away, leaving the little silver kettle boiling over its spirit-lamp. Foggo knew too. The very kettle puffed out its steam in Fred’s face like a mockery. Everybody knew—except the forlorn young master of the house, who knew nothing, and could not even form a guess what the mystery could be.
He was not however destined to spend that night in uncertainty. As he went upstairs, passing with a sense of injury the closed doors of his mother’s and his sisters’ rooms, Fred heard himself called in a whisper from the end of the corridor. Had he reflected for a moment he would have known who it must be. But with his mind full of his present trouble he did not reflect; he turned round quickly, hoping to see one of his sisters, and it was not till he found himself in the clutches of old Janet that he recognised the danger of her interference. “Has she told ye, Mr. Fred?” whispered the old woman, approaching her formidable head in the big mutch, and with its little palsied movement, to the young man’s face. “Told me what?” he cried with impatience. “Oh, my bonnie lad, dinna lose your temper—you’ll have need of all yourpatience. That she’s going to be married upon Pat Wedderburn!”
Fred gave a hoarse cry, which ran along the whole corridor into his mother’s closed room, who heard it and trembled—and to Susie’s, who sat half desperate over her fire longing for her brother. Not for a moment did Fred doubt the news: it explained everything; but he fled from the creature of ill-omen, the woman who gave it, with a sense of hatred and rage, for which indeed there was no warrant so far as she was concerned. “This is your doing!” he cried with fantastic bitterness. Why should he hate Janet, and how could it be her doing? he asked himself afterwards. But at the moment it seemed to the distracted young man as if this old retainer was one of the Fates, the enemy, not the friend of the house. He would not wait to hear another word, but rushed upstairs and shut himself in his room, as if some evil thing had been at his heels. Married!—his mother, his father’s wife, the first authority of his life—the woman without reproach—mamma! With that last baby-cry the cup was filled. The young man flung himself upon his face on his bed. And what an unhappy house it was which the darkness held that nightconcealed in its outer mantle of peace! Unhappy without any cause, for there was no evil going to be done—no harm: so far as any of these troubled people knew.
Mr. Wedderburn, who came “out” next day with an embarrassment not less than that of Mrs. Dalyell, was roused a little by the desperate self-repression with which Fred received the official announcement. “My boy,” he said, “it may vex you that there should be any change, but what we are doing is no wrong to you—nor to any man.”
“I have not said it was,” said Fred sullenly.
“No, you have not said it was—but you seem to think it’s an unpardonable step. It is nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Wedderburn, indignant. “The time will come when you will think fit to marry, and then your mother will be turned out of her house; and that will seem the most natural thing in the world. Why should she not have one by her side that will make her comfort his care? Your father would have wished it. She’s not a person to stand alone to fight with the world.”
“She has her children.”
“Her children! Susie, who will have a husband of her own as soon as the lad has enough tolive on; and Alice, who will follow her sister’s example; and you—when are you here to keep your mother company? A month in the vacations when the house is full—and a marriage whenever it strikes your fancy, with her turned adrift. No, no, my young man! You may not like it, you may scorn both her and me for it. But that face!—as if you were wronged and shamed. Come, come, Fred, that’s not an air to put on with an old and faithful friend like me.”
“I know you are a faithful friend,” cried the young man resentfully. “I never doubted you for a moment.”
“But never dreamed that I would push my devotion so far? Well, I have done it, you see. And it’s your business, my young man, to make the best of it, and accept what all the powers on earth shall not prevent, I promise you,” cried the old lawyer with some heat. There were many people throughout Scotland who were aware that it was not a safe thing to go too far with old Pat Wedderburn.
Mrs. Dalyell, however, insisted upon one thing—that the marriage should not take place until two years after her husband’s death, so that there wereyet several months of discomfort to get through. However it might end, there could be little doubt that in the meantime an element of extreme discomfort was brought into the house. Mr. Wedderburn, whose happiness had been to spend half the evenings of his life at Yalton, came less frequently and was not happy when he came. Susie had turned into a little firebrand, all the more disdainful and offended by her mother’s intentions that she was on the eve of a similar change in her own person. Little Alice swayed from one party to the other, sometimes impertinent, sometimes mournful. The step which was to bring additional happiness in the end (or so it is the conventional necessity to suppose) in the meantime brought nothing but discord, division and doubt, and made the entire party unhappy. How much better, even the two principals secretly thought in their hearts, to have gone on in the old happy routine as things were!
Fred came home again in June after various wanderings, visits here and there. He intended to go away before the marriage, and in the existing state of circumstances to make as short a stay as he could at Yalton, from which his mother meantto remove after this event, leaving the house to be taken possession of by her son. Naturally it was not a very joyful visit: the mother held her domestic place with a kind of unsmiling composure, doing everything as before, ignoring as much as possible the difference in her children’s faces; and a little polite conversation went on between those who had been so happily united, and twittered and chattered like the birds a few months before. Mrs. Dalyell would not allow herself to be moved, would not show the impatience which possessed her, kept firm with an immovable steadiness, letting the young ones go and come without remark. It was more difficult for them, who could not ignore her, and whose foolish young hearts were eagerly bent on sending little darts into her, saying things between themselves which she could scarcely resent, yet which went to her heart. And the girls would drag their brother to the other end of the long drawing-room, hanging one on each arm, talking low in his ear, while their mother sat at the table by the lamp, apparently taking no notice. They were very cruel to her, chiefly in ignorance, resenting the fact that she did not mind, and unable to feel any human charity for her, as shesat there isolated, conscious of their conspiracy against her. Mrs. Dalyell’s spirit was roused a little by this persecution. She had been doubtful enough of the expediency of what she was about to do from the first, but she became more and more determined to hold to her resolution as they thus united against her: and—what she never thought could have been the case—began to long for the day when she should be delivered from this domestic tyranny and once more breathe freely in an atmosphere where she would not be constrained. Thus it may be supposed there was little comfort one way or another in the troubled house; and it became the order of the day to make the evening as short as possible, to go to bed early, to finish upon any terms, at the earliest moment, the dreary, unattractive evening hours.
Fred was following the little line of ladies with their candles up the stairs, when he was once more stopped, but this time openly, by old Janet. She came to the edge of the great staircase in her nodding mutch and checked shawl. “Will you give me two or three minutes, Mr. Fred,” she said.
“For what do you want two or three minutes? I have no time at present,” he said quickly, forSusie, who was nearest to him in the procession, had stopped upon the stairs, holding up her candle and looking back upon him. She was like a picture, with her light held up and falling upon her white dress.
“But you must come,” said Janet in a shrill whisper. “You must come. Remember what your father said—and this time it’s a matter of life and death.”
“How do you know what my father said?”
“Ay, that’s a question. Come with me, my bonnie man—oh, come with me and you shall know all.”
Susie stood like a little light-bearer holding up the candle. “Who are you talking to there, Fred, in the dark?”
“No one,” he said, with the prompt unconscious impulse of a child accused.
“No one! Why, it’s Janet. Oh, is that all?” said Susie. She lowered her light at once and turned away with the profoundest indifference. The sight of Janet conveyed no sense of excitement or mystery to the girl who saw her every day.
Fred obeyed the old woman sulkily and with thegreatest reluctance. He would not have done so at all had not Susie seen her. But he could not show to Susie that he had any reluctance to speak to old Janet, whom the younger members of the family had always held by against all the objections of the younger servants. He went mechanically after her, with a strong return of that resentment which he had felt against his father for the recommendation to consult her. It was grievous to be made to think of that at such a moment, when his father had become more sacred to him than ever, in face of the desecrating change that was about to take place, the injury to that beloved memory. It was the only grievance Fred had against his father. He tried to force it from his mind, to have patience with the old woman as he followed her. She belonged tohim. She had been faithful to him all his life. Perhaps she wanted to make sure that she should be provided for when his mother left the place, when Yalton was in his possession alone. Oh, certainly she should be provided for, till her last hour! The only one that was faithful tohim. Neither friend nor wife had been faithful to him, but his old nurse was faithful. She was sacred to his son for his sake.
Fred made his heart soft with these thoughts; he overcame his own opposition almost altogether, partly with the sentiment of the nurse’s faithfulness, partly with his resentment against the others; and he was ready when he found himself in Janet’s room, face to face with her in the light of her lamp, to offer her any assurance of his protection and certainty she might require as to her living and her home. Janet, however, put no question to him on any such score. She shut the door and came up close to him in the lamp-light. “Mr. Fred,” she said, “you maun take courage, my bonnie man. There are dreadful things to be said to you to-night. Just summon all your strength and read that.”
Fred started at the sight of the paper she put before his eyes. “I see,” he said, “it is my father’s writing. But you need not show me any letter. He told me himself, the day before he died——”
“Oh, laddie, laddie! take it and read it before I go out o’ my senses,” Janet cried.
He took the paper into his hands. His father’s handwriting, there could be no doubt; but no suspicion of the truth was in Fred’s mind. He glanced over it, and thought to himself that he hadgone out of his senses, as Janet said, or had lost himself in some incoherent dream. “My wife’s marriage must be stopped.” What did that mean? A man who died two years ago, how could he write about an event of to-day? Was he going mad? Was he in a dream? Was it some delusion which she had put by witchcraft before his eyes? “My wife’s marriage must be stopped.” “How could he know?” he asked with blanched lips. “How could he tell there would be a marriage?” He turned upon her a face blank of all expression, pale, in a horror of enlightenment about to come.
“Oh, boy, boy! cannot ye see?” cried Janet. She put forth a long trembling finger and thrust it at the paper, pointing to the date. Fred looked and read. He read it a second time aloud, a strange terror growing upon him: “June 3, 18—.” “Why,” he said, “why——.” Then, stammering and stumbling over the words, broke down. “Why, why,” he began again with a laugh, “we cannot all be mad and going to Bedlam! It’s this year: June 3, 18—.”
The old woman grasped him by both his hands. “It’s this year—and we’re no mad, though often, often I’ve felt on the edge of it. We’re no mad,”she repeated, “and it’s this year, and the man that wrote that is in the house this blessed night, Mr. Fred!”
God help the lad! He had but turned his black and terrible countenance upon her, holding the letter helplessly in his hands, when there sounded through the house, cutting the silence like a knife, a sudden wild cry, a shriek, lasting only for a second, but piercing to the heart of the night, to the heart of the house, like some sudden horrible event. It was followed almost immediately after by a rush of muffled feet along the passage: the door was pushed open violently, yet silently, and someone came in like a shot from a pistol, as sudden and unexpected. Fred felt himself shrink towards the wall in his horror and amaze. It was a man who had come in—a man with a beard which covered half his face, yet showed a curious kind of smile coming out of the midst of it, though the eyes were full of an almost tragic seriousness. Fred had fallen back against the wall as this new-comer appeared. The room swam round and round in his eyes, a darkness came over him, he saw nothing for a moment: then slowly came to himself, and sawagain, within reach of him, so near that he could have touched him, this man—whom he had never seen before. Oh, could he but have been sure that he had never seen him before! His heart stopped beating—and then with a flutter and a spring went on again, as if it would have leaped out of his breast. The shock of the supernatural, the horror of an awful discovery, came into the young man’s brain and almost paralysed it as they clashed together. Ah, had it been but the supernatural! But as that face emerged out of the mist, Fred saw that it was that of a living man—and that he heard it talking—it—as living men do.
“You have told him, Janet?”
“No a moment too soon—just as you were coming. Let the laddie be, let him come to himself. And what was it you were doing? Did she—or you——?”
“I have given her a fright that will put a stop to that,” he said, with a strange laugh, hard and harsh: and then he flung himself into a chair, throwing off a dark cloak in which he had been wrapped from head to foot. He added after a moment with a groan, “The way of transgressors is hard!” and hid his face in his hands.
Fred had not moved nor said a word, neither had this strange intruder, save for one glance, taken any notice of him. The young man stood up against the wall, supporting himself by it in a sort of conscious swoon and suspense of being. A moment is like an hour in such a horror of discovery; the idea that was too dreadful to entertain becomes possible, certain, familiar, before you have had time to draw a second breath. His father not dead—not a shameful suicide to cheat the insurance companies as his son had once feared—but a still more shameful survivor, having cheated them, having saved his family and cleared his name by the most dreadful, the most false of frauds, the most tremendous of lies. Fred’s whole being surged up like a stormy sea in fierce and violent reaction as soon as he got command again of his stunned faculties—he who had suffered so much misery from the thought that his father had taken his own life in his despair, but who had of late become so tender of his memory, so indignant with those who forgot or were faithless to him! And lo, all his pangs were unnecessary, all his love deceived, and here was the man, living!—a swindler, and a cheat, worse than a bankrupt—having saved his reputationand the comfort of his family by a cheat, the worst of frauds, the most disgraceful. Fred had been ready to defy the world for his father when he came upstairs that evening. He turned now with loathing from the name. Father! What did the word mean?—a cheat, a swindler, the most prodigious and incredible of liars. The youth was hard, as youth is, stern and inexorable. He took nothing into account, neither the motive nor the tremendous sacrifice involved, nor least of all the thought that he himself had profited by this dreadful act. Profited?—he?—Fred? His first act must be to denounce the fraud, to offer restitution. The man should escape first—that he would allow, but no more.
Old Janet came up to him and laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Oh, Mr. Fred, are you not going to say a word to him?—not a word of kindness? Oh, Mr. Fred, your father! that has sacrificed just everything in the world.”
“I have no father,” said Fred hoarsely. “My father is dead.”
The unfortunate man raised his head from his hands, and the familiar eyes, the eyes that had smiled upon the boy’s childhood, but which smiledno more, tragic in the misery of a renunciation which was more bitter—but, alas! not honourable like death—turned towards the stern and angry boy with a strange look, not of appeal, but of surprise. The offender knew very well all that was involved to himself in what he had done. He knew that it cut him off as a living man from all knowledge of his family, from all possibility of reunion—that he was dead and worse, so far as old surroundings were concerned; but he was not prepared for his son’s stern condemnation. He had anticipated wonder, consternation—but, oh, surely some touch of pleasure in seeing him restored from the dead, some burst of welcome from Fred! He uncovered his face and looked with a ghastly astonishment at the son who thus cast him off without a word.
“Maister Freddie, for God’s sake! think what you are saying. Speak a word to him!”
“I have nothing to say,” said Fred. “I will make the truth known in a week from this time—if it is the truth. I will be no party to a fraud. I loved my father that died, and his memory, but I can be no party to a fraud. In a week’s time——”
The stranger never said a word; he sat gazingwith things unutterable in his eyes, wonder above all. His boy! it was cruel, barbarous, inhuman; but—this strange visitor did not condemn the youth. He looked at him with an inconceivable surprise—his boy—Fred! He did not make any protest, but sat up, strangely awakened—wondering: even the object of his visit fading in comparison with this shock for which he was not prepared.
All this time there had been sounds of rushing footsteps and ringing of bells through the house, the commotion of some sudden event breaking into the quiet of the night. And then came a distant sound of Susie’s voice, calling: “Fred! Fred!” The young man’s heart was rent with passionate emotion, such as he had never known in his life before.
“Nobody must come in here,” he said, “to find a stranger in the house. If my mother has been frightened, I will tell her. But not if I can help it. Now, the only thing remaining for me is to make the truth known—when——” He paused. He could not address that dreadful spectre directly; his heart was bitter within him at the man who had thus killed for ever his father’s memory, theideal which he had cherished in his father’s name. “When——he has decided what to do.”
There was a dreadful pause in Janet’s room when the young man went away. Then the stranger said in a musing tone: “So that’s what Fred has come to in a couple of years. You see, Janet, you have not been so successful as you thought.”
“Oh, my man, oh, my bonnie man! the callant is just distracted with wonder and fear.”
“There’s more in it than that—and he’s right, Janet. We were wrong, you and I. And I must just abide the consequences. I’ll lie down on your bed for an hour or two, if you’re sure it’s safe. And then I’ll take the gate. It will be for ever this time, you can tell that boy. I’ll neither make nor meddle more; and if he’s wise he’ll let sleeping dogs lie.”