BUT, though Mrs. Campbell’s heart relented towards Matty, and was filled with vague hopes which centred in her, it was very hard to find out what Colin’s thoughts were on the same subject. He scarcely spoke of the Franklands at all, and never named or referred to the ladies of the house. When his mother spoke, with natural female wiles to tempt him into confidence, of special inquiries made for him, Colin took no notice of the inference. She even went so far as to refer specially to Miss Matty with no greater effect. “There’s one in the house as anxious as me,” said the Mistress, with tender exaggeration, as she smoothed his pillow and made her morning inquiries; but her son only smiled faintly, and shook his head with an almost imperceptible movement of incredulity. He asked no questions, showed no pleasure at the thought, but lay most of the day in a silence which his mother could find no means of breaking.
The first horror, the first resistance, had gone out of Colin’s mind; but he lay asking himself inevitable questions, facing the great problem for which he could find no solution, which no man has been able to explain. Had the thoughts of his mind been put into words, the chances are that to most people who have never themselves come to such a trial Colin would have seemed a blasphemer or an infidel. But he was neither the one nor the other, and was indeed incapable by nature either of scepticism or of profanity. The youth had been born of a sternly-believing race, which recognised in all God’s doings an eternal right, beyond justice and beyond reason, a right to deal with them and theirs as he might please; but Colin himself was of the present age, and was fully possessed by all those cravings after understanding and explanation which belong to the time. Without any doubt of God, he was arrested by the wonderful mystery of Providence, and stood questioning, in the face of the unanswering silence, “Why?” The good God, the God of the Gospels, the Father of our Lord, was the Divine Ruler whom Colin recognised in his heart; but the young man longed and struggled to find reasonableness, coherence, any recognisable, comprehensible cause, for the baffling arrangements and disarrangements, the mysterious inequalities and injustices of life. He wanted to trace the thread of reason which God kept in His own hand; he wanted to make out why the Father who loved all should dispense so unequally, so differently, His gifts to one and another. This awful question kept him silent for days and nights; he could not make anything of it. Social inequalities, which speculatists fret at, had not much disturbed Colin. It had not yet occurred to him that wealth or poverty made much difference; but why the life of one should be broken off incomplete and that of another go on—why the purposes of one should end in nothing, why his hopes should be crushed and his powers made useless, while another flourished and prospered, confounded him, in the inexperience of his youth. And neither heaven nor earth gave him any answer. The Bible itself seemed to append moral causes, which were wanting in his case, to the perennial inequalities of existence. It spoke of the wicked great in power, nourishing like the green bay-tree, and of the righteous oppressed and suffering for righteousness’ sake; which was, in its way, a comprehensible statement of the matter. But the facts did not agree in Colin’s case. Harry Frankland could not, by any exertion of dislike, be made to represent the wicked, nor was Colin, in his own thinking, better than his neighbour. They were two sons of one Father, to whom that Father was behaving with the most woeful, the most extraordinary partiality; and nothing in heaven or earth was of half so much importance as to prove the proceedings of the Father of all to be everlastingly just and of sublime reason. What did it mean? This was what Colin was discussing with himself as he lay on his bed. It was not wonderful that such thoughts should obliterate the image of Miss Matty. When she came into his mind at all, he looked back upon her with a pensive sweetness as on somebody he had known a lifetime before. Sterner matters had now taken the place of the light love and hopes of bountiful and lavish youth. The hopes had grown few, and the abundance changed into poverty. If the author of the change had chosen to reveal the cause for it, the young soul thus stopped short in his way could have consented that all was well.
And then Lady Frankland came every day to pay him a visit of sympathy, and to express her gratitude. “It is such a comfort to see him looking so much better,” Lady Frankland said; “Harry would like so much to come and sit with you, dear Mr. Campbell. He could read to you, you know, when you feel tired; I am sure nothing he could do would be too much to show his sense of your regard——”
At which words Colin raised himself up.
“I should be much better pleased,” said Colin, “if you would not impute to me feelings which I don’t pretend to. It was no regard for Mr. Frankland that induced me——”
“Oh, indeed! I know how good you are,” said Harry’s mother, pressing his hand, “always so generous and disposed to make light of your own kindness; but we all know very well, and Harry knows, that there is many a brother who would not have done so much. I am sure I cannot express to you a tenth part of what I feel. Harry’s life is so precious,” said my Lady, with a natural human appreciation of her own concerns, and unconscious, unintentional indifference to those of others. “The eldest son; and Sir Thomas has quite commenced to rely upon him for many things—and I am sure I don’t know what I should do without Harry to refer to,” Lady Frankland continued, with a little smile of maternal pride and triumph. When she came to this point, it chanced to her to catch a side glimpse of Mrs. Campbell’s face. The Mistress sat by her son’s bedside, pale, with her lips set close, and her eyes fixed upon the hem of her apron, which she was folding and refolding in her hands. She did not say anything, nor give utterance in any way to the dumb remonstrance and reproach with which her heart was bursting; but there was something in her face which imposed silence upon the triumphant, prosperous woman beside her. Lady Frankland gave a little gasp of mingled fright and compunction. She did not know what to say to express her full sense of the service which Colin had done her; and there was nothing strange in her instinctive feeling, that she, a woman used to be petted and tended all her life, had a natural claim upon other people’s services. She was very sorry, of course, about Mr. Campbell; if any exertion of hers could have cured him, he would have been well in half-an-hour. But, as it was, it appeared to her rather natural than otherwise that the tutor should suffer and that her own son should be saved.
“I felt always secure about Harry when you were with him,” she said, with an involuntary artifice. “He was so fond of you, Mr. Campbell—and I always felt that you knew how important his safety was, and how much depended—”
“Pardon me,” said Colin; he was angry in his weakness at her pertinacity. “I have no right to your gratitude. Your son and I have no love for each other, Lady Frankland. I picked him out of the canal, not because I thought of the importance of his life, but because I had seen him go down, and should have felt myself a kind of murderer had I not tried to save him. That is the whole. Why should I be supposed to have any special regard for him? Perhaps,” said Colin, whose words came slowly and whose voice was interrupted by his weakness—“I would have given my life with more comfort for any other man.”
“Oh Mr. Campbell! don’t be so angry and bitter. After all, it was not our fault,” said Lady Frankland, with a wondering offence and disappointment—and then she hurriedly changed her tone, and began to congratulate his mother on his improved looks. “I am so glad to see him looking so much better. There were some people coming here,” said my lady, faltering a little; “we would not have them come so long as he was so ill. Neither Harry nor any of us could have suffered it. We had sent to put them off; but, now that he is so much better—” said Lady Frankland, with a voice which was half complaint and half appeal. She thought it was rather ill-tempered of the mother and son to make so little response. “When I almost asked their permission!” she said, with a little indignation, when she had gone downstairs; “but they seem to think they should be quite masters, and look as black as if we had done them an injury. Send to everybody, and say it is to be on Wednesday, Matty; for Henry’s interests must not be neglected.” It was a ball, for which Lady Frankland had sent out her invitations some time before the accident; for Harry Frankland was to ask the suffrages of the electors of Earie at the approaching election. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful to Mr. Campbell,” said the Lady of Wodensbourne, smoothing her ruffled plumes. “I am sure nobody can say I have not been grateful; but, at the same time, I can’t be expected to sacrifice my own son.” Such were the sentiments with which Lady Frankland came downstairs. As for the other mother, it would be hard to describe what was in her mind. In the bitterness of her heart she was angry with the God who had no pity upon her. If Harry Frankland’s life was precious, what was Colin’s? and the Mistress, in her anguish, made bitter comparisons, and cried out wildly with a woman’s passion. Downstairs, in the fine rooms which her simple imagination filled with splendour, they would dance and sing unconcerned, though her boy’s existence hung trembling in the balance: and was not Heaven itself indifferent, taking no notice? She was glad that twilight was coming on to conceal her face, and that Colin, who lay very silent, did not observe her. And so, while Lady Frankland, feeling repulsed and injured, managed to escape partially from the burden of an obligation which was too vast to be borne, and returned to the consideration of her ball, the two strangers kept silence in the twilight chamber, each dumbly contending with doubts that would not be overcome, and questions which could not be answered. What did God mean by permitting this wonderful, this incomprehensible difference between the two? But the great Father remained silent and made no reply. The days of revelation, of explanation were over. For one, joy and prosperity; for another, darkness and the shadow of death—plain facts not to be misconceived or contested—and in all the dumb heavens and silent observant earth no wisdom nor knowledge which could tell the reason why.