YOUNG Gordon went into Miss Bethune’s sitting-room next morning so early that she was still at breakfast, lingering over her second cup of tea. His eyes had the look of eyes which had not slept, and that air of mingled fatigue and excitement which shows that a great crisis which had just come was about his whole person. His energetic young limbs were languid with it. He threw himself into a chair, as if even that support and repose were comfortable, and an ease to his whole being.
“She rallied for a moment after you were gone,” he said in a low voice, not looking at his companion, “but not enough to notice anything. The doctor said there was no pain or suffering—if he knows anything about it.”
“Ay, if he knows,” Miss Bethune said.
“And so she is gone,” said the young man with a deep sigh. He struggled for a moment with his voice, which went from him in the sudden access of sorrow. After a minute he resumed: “She’s gone, and my occupation, all my reasons for living, seem to be gone too. I know no more what is going to happen. I was her son yesterday, and did everything for her; now I don’t know what I am. I am nobody, with scarcely the right even to be there.”
“What do you mean? Everybody must know what you have been to her, and her to you, all your life.”
The young man was leaning forward in his chair bent almost double, with his eyes fixed on the floor. “Yes,” he said, “I never understood it before: but I know now what it is to have no rightful place, to have been only a dependent on their kindness. When my guardian died I did not feel it, because she was still there to think of me, and I was her representative in everything; but now the solicitor has taken the command, and makes me see I am nobody. It is not for the money,” the young man said, with a wave of his hand. “Let that go however she wished. God knows I would never complain. But I might have been allowed to do something for her, to manage things for her as I have done—oh, almost ever since I can remember.” He looked up with a pale and troubled smile, wistful for sympathy. “I feel as if I had been cut adrift,” he said.
“My poor boy! But she must have provided for you, fulfilled the expectations——”
“Don’t say that!” he cried quickly. “There were no expectations. I can truly say I never thought upon the subject—never!—until we came here to London. Then it was forced upon me that I was good for nothing, did not know how to make my living. It was almost amusing at first, I was so unused to it; but not now I am afraid I am quite useless,” he added, with again a piteous smile. “I am in the state of the poor fellow in the Bible. ‘I can’t dig, and to beg I am ashamed.’ I don’t know,” he cried, “why I should trouble you with all this. But you said I was to come to you in the morning, and I feel I can speak to you. That’s about all the explanation there is.”
“It’s the voice of nature,” cried Miss Bethune quickly, an eager flush covering her face. “Don’t you know, don’t you feel, that there is nobody but me you could come to?—that you are sure of me whoever fails you—that there’s a sympathy, and more than a sympathy? Oh, my boy, I will be to you all, and more than all!”
She was so overcome with her own emotion that she could not get out another word.
A flush came also upon Harry Gordon’s pale face, a look abashed and full of wonder. He felt that this lady, whom he liked and respected, went so much too far, so much farther than there was any justification for doing. He was troubled instinctively for her, that she should be so impulsive, so strangely affected. He shook his head. “Don’t think me ungrateful,” he cried. “Indeed, I don’t know if you mean all that your words seem to mean—as how should you indeed, and I only a stranger to you? But, dear Miss Bethune, that can never be again. It is bad enough, as I find out, to have had no real tie to her, my dear lady that’s gone—and to feel that everybody must think my grief for my poor aunt is partly disappointment because she has not provided for me. But no such link could be forged again. I was a child when that was made. It was natural; they settled things for me as they pleased, and I knew nothing but that I was very happy there, and loved them, and they me. But now I am a man, and must stand for myself. Don’t think me ungracious. It’s impossible but that a man with full use of his limbs must be able to earn his bread. It’s only going back to South America, if the worst comes to the worst, where everybody knows me,” he said.
Miss Bethune’s countenance had been like a drama while young Gordon made this long speech, most of which was uttered with little breaks and pauses, without looking at her, in the same attitude, with his eyes on the ground. Yet he looked up once or twice with that flitting sad smile, and an air of begging pardon for anything he said which might wound her. Trouble, and almost shame, and swift contradiction, and anger, and sympathy, and tender pity, and a kind of admiration, all went over her face in waves. She was wounded by what he said, and disappointed, and yet approved. Could there be all these things in the hard lines of a middle-aged face? And yet there were all, and more. She recovered herself quickly as he came to an end, and with her usual voice replied:—
“We must not be so hasty to begin with. It is more than likely that the poor lady has made the position clear in her will. We must not jump to the conclusion that things are not explained in that and set right; it would be a slur upon her memory even to think that it would not be so.”
“There must be no slur on her memory,” said young Gordon quickly; “but I am almost sure that it will not be so. She told me repeatedly that I was not to blame her—as if it were likely I should blame her!”
“She would deserve blame,” cried Miss Bethune quickly, “if after all that has passed she should leave you with no provision, no acknowledgment——”
He put up his hand to stop her.
“Not a word of that! What I wanted was to keep my place until after—until all was done for her. I am a mere baby,” he cried, dashing away the tears from his eyes. “It was that solicitor coming in to take charge of everything, to lock up everything, to give all the orders, that was more than I could bear.”
She did not trust herself to say anything, but laid her hand upon his arm. And the poor young fellow was at the end of his forces, worn out bodily with anxiety and want of sleep, and mentally by grief and the conflict of emotions. He bent down his face upon her hand, kissing it with a kind of passion, and burst out, leaning his head upon her arm, into a storm of tears, that broke from him against his will. Miss Bethune put her other hand upon his bowed head; her face quivered with the yearning of her whole life. “Oh, God, is he my bairn?—Oh, God, that he were my bairn!” she cried.
But nobody would have guessed what this crisis had been who saw them a little after, as Dora saw them, who came into the room pale too with the unusual vigil of the previous night, but full of an indignant something which she had to say. “Miss Bethune,” she cried, almost before she had closed the door, “do you know what Gilchrist told father about last night?—that I was tired when I came in, and had a headache, and she had put me to bed! And now I have to tell lies too, to say I am better, and to agree when he thanks Gilchrist for her care, and says it was the best thing for me. Oh, what a horrible thing it is to tell lies! To hide things from him, and invent excuses, and cheat him—cheat him with stories that are not true!”
Her hair waved behind her, half curling, crisp, inspired by indignation: her slim figure seemed to expand and grow, her eyes shone. Miss Bethune had certainly not gained anything by the deceptions, which were very innocent ones after all, practised upon Mr. Mannering: but she had to bear the brunt of this shock with what composure she might. She laughed a little, half glad to shake off the fumes of deeper emotion in this new incident. “As soon as he is stronger you shall explain everything to him, Dora,” she said. “When the body is weak the mind should not be vexed more than is possible with perplexing things or petty cares. But as soon as he is better——”
“And now,” cried Dora, flinging back her hair, all crisped, and almost scintillating, with anger and distress, her eyes filled with tears, “here comes the doctor now—far, far worse than any bills or any perplexities, and tells him straight out that he must ask for a year’s holiday and go away, first for the rest of the summer, and then for the winter, as father says, to one of those places where all the fools go!—father, whose life is in the Museum, who cares for nothing else, who can’t bear to go away! Oh!” cried Dora, stamping her foot, “to think I should be made to lie, to keep little, little things from him—contemptible things! and that then the doctor should come straight upstairs and without any preface, without any apology, blurt out that!”
“The doctor must have thought, Dora, it was better for him to know. He says all will go well, he will get quite strong, and be able to work in the Museum to his heart’s content, if only he will do this now.”
“If only he will do this! If only he will invent a lot of money, father says, which we haven’t got. And how is the money to be invented? It is like telling poor Mrs. Hesketh not to walk, but to go out in a carriage every day. Perhaps that would make her quite well, poor thing. It would make the beggar at the corner quite well if he had turtle soup and champagne like father. And we must stop even the turtle soup and the champagne. He will not have them; they make him angry now that he has come to himself. Cannot you see, Miss Bethune,” cried Dora with youthful superiority, as if such a thought could never have occurred to her friend, “that we can only do things which we can do—that there are some things that are impossible? Oh!” she said suddenly, perceiving for the first time young Gordon with a start of annoyance and surprise. “I did not know,” cried Dora, “that I was discussing our affairs before a gentleman who can’t take any interest in them.”
“Dora, is that all you have to say to one that shared our watch last night—that has just come, as it were, from her that is gone? Have you no thought of that poor lady, and what took place so lately? Oh, my dear, have a softer heart.”
“Miss Bethune,” said Dora with dignity, “I am very sorry for the poor lady of last night. I was a little angry because I was made to deceive father, but my heart was not hard. I was very sorry. But how can I go on thinking about her when I have father to think of? I could not be fond of her, could I? I did not know her—I never saw her but once before. If she was my mother’s sister, she was—she confessed it herself—father’s enemy. I must—I must be on father’s side,” cried Dora. “I have had no one else all my life.”
Miss Bethune and her visitor looked at each other,—he with a strange painful smile, she with tears in her eyes. “It is just the common way,” she said,—“just the common way! You look over the one that loves you, and you heap love upon the one that loves you not.”
“It cannot be the common way,” said Gordon, “for the circumstances are not common. It is because of strange things, and relations that are not natural. I had no right to that love you speak of, and Dora had. But I have got all the advantages of it for many a year. There is no injustice if she who has the natural right to it gets it now.”
“Oh, my poor boy,” cried Miss Bethune, “you argue well, but you know better in your heart.”
“I have not a grudge in my heart,” he exclaimed, “not one, nor a complaint. Oh, believe me!—except to be put away as if I were nobody, just at this moment when there was still something to do for her,” he said, after a pause.
Dora looked from one to the other, half wondering, half impatient. “You are talking of Mr. Gordon’s business now,” she said; “and I have nothing to do with that, any more than he has to do with mine. I had better go back to father, Miss Bethune, if you will tell Dr. Roland that he is cruel—that he ought to have waited till father was stronger—that it was wicked—wicked—to go and pour out all that upon him without any preparation, when even I was out of the way.”
“Indeed, I think there is reason in what you say, Dora,” said Miss Bethune, as the girl went away.
“It will not matter,” said Gordon, after the door was closed. “That is one thing to be glad of, there will be no more want of money. Now,” he said, rising, “I must go back again. It has been a relief to come and tell you everything, but now it seems as if I had a hunger to go back: and yet it is strange to go back. It is strange to walk about the streets and to know that I have nobody to go home to, that she is far away, and unmoved by anything that can happen to me.” He paused a moment, and added, with that low laugh which is the alternative of tears: “Not to say that there is no home to go back to, nothing but a room in a hotel which I must get out of as soon as possible, and nobody belonging to me, or that I belong to. It is so difficult to get accustomed to the idea.”
Miss Bethune gave a low cry. It was inarticulate, but she could not restrain it. She put out both her hands, then drew them back again; and after he had gone away, she went on pacing up and down the room, making this involuntary movement, murmuring that outcry, which was not even a word, to herself. She put out her hands, sometimes her arms, then brought them back and pressed them to the heart which seemed to be bursting from her breast. “Oh, if it might still be that he were mine! Oh, if I might believe it (as I do—I do!) and take him to me whether or no!” Her thoughts shaped themselves as their self-repression gave way to that uncontrollable tide. “Oh, well might he say that it was not the common way! the woman that had been a mother to him, thinking no more of him the moment her own comes in! And might I be like that? If I took him to my heart, that I think must be mine, and then the other, the true one—that would know nothing of me! And he, what does he know of me?—what does he think of me?—an old fool that puts out my arms to him without rhyme or reason. But then it’s to me he comes when he’s in trouble; he comes to me, he leans his head on me, just by instinct, by nature. And nature cries out in me here.” She put her hands once more with unconscious dramatic action to her heart. “Nature cries out—nature cries out!”
Unconsciously she said these words aloud, and herself startled by the sound of her own voice, looked up suddenly, to see Gilchrist, who had just come into the room, standing gazing at her with an expression of pity and condemnation which drove her mistress frantic. Miss Bethune coloured high. She stopped in a moment her agitated walk, and placed herself in a chair with an air of hauteur and loftiness difficult to describe. “Well,” she said, “were you wanting anything?” as if the excellent and respectable person standing before her had been, as Gilchrist herself said afterwards, “the scum of the earth".
“No’ much, mem,” said Gilchrist; “only to know if you were"—poor Gilchrist was so frightened by her mistress’s aspect that she invented reasons which had no sound of truth in them—“going out this morning, or wanting your seam or the stocking you were knitting.”
“Did you think I had all at once become doited, and did not know what I wanted?” asked Miss Bethune sternly.
Gilchrist made no reply, but dropped her guilty head.
“To think,” cried the lady, “that I cannot have a visitor in the morning—a common visitor like those that come and go about every idle person,—nor take a thought into my mind, nor say a word even to myself, but in comes an intrusive serving-woman to worm out of me, with her frightened looks and her peety and her compassion, what it’s all about! Lord! if it were any other than a woman that’s been about me twenty years, and had just got herself in to be a habit and a custom, that would dare to come with her soft looks peetying me!”
Having come to a climax, voice and feeling together, in those words, Miss Bethune suddenly burst into the tempest of tears which all this time had been gathering and growing beyond any power of hers to restrain them.
“Oh, my dear leddy, my dear leddy!” Gilchrist said; then, gradually drawing nearer, took her mistress’s head upon her ample bosom till the fit was over.
When Miss Bethune had calmed herself again, she pushed the maid away.
“I’ll have no communication with you,” she said. “You’re a good enough servant, you’re not an ill woman; but as for real sympathy or support in what is most dear, it’s no’ you that will give them to any person. I’m neither wanting to go out nor to take my seam. I will maybe read a book to quiet myself down, but I’m not meaning to hold any communication with you.”
“Oh, mem!” said Gilchrist, in appeal: but she was not deeply cast down. “If it was about the young gentleman,” she added, after a moment, “I just think he is as nice a young gentleman as the world contains.”
“Did I not tell you so?” cried the mistress in triumph. “And like the gracious blood he’s come of,” she said, rising to her feet again, as if she were waving a flag of victory. Then she sat down abruptly, and opened upside down the book she had taken from the table. “But I’ll hold no communication with you on that subject,” she said.