IT was 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 perceived this 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 someone to 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 known it, 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 the tea-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 your patience. 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 night concealed 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 to live 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 were yet 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 meant to 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 she sat 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, for Susie, 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 the greatest 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 to him. 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 to him. 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 had gone 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 saw again, 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 reputation and 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 smiled no 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 gazing with 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, the ideal 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.”