THE evening passed on, Colin could not very well tell how; and he began to see a prospect of escaping a little, and gaining a moment’s breathing time, to realize, if he could, the astonishing revolution which had taken place. Alice, who was an invalid, retired early; and after that the conversation flagged, and the three men who had so little in common, and who had been, on the sole occasion which had brought them into contact with each other before, so entirely in opposition, found it hard to know what to say, so as to cultivate all the friendly feelings that were possible and dissipate the disagreeable reminiscences. Mr. Meredith betook himself to the only subject that seemed to him practicable—his son’s book, which Colin had edited so carefully; but then it is already known to the readers of this history that Colin’s opinions were by no means those of the “Voice from the Grave.” And then the young man was burning to escape—to get out of doors and feel the wind on his face, and endeavour in the silence and darkness to realize his position. He had to escape not only from Mr. Meredith, who watched him with the anxiety of a man who fears to see his last hope escape him, but also from Lauderdale, who was concerned less for Alice than for Colin, and whose anxiety, now that his mind had been fully awakened, was as great that Colin should not risk his own happiness, as was Mr. Meredith’s anxiety that the happiness of Alice should be secured. Of the two, it was the latter whom Colin could meet with most ease; for it was in no way necessary that he should open his heart to a man who sought him only as he might have sought a physician; and, indeed, there was a certain relief to his mind in the expression of some irritation and resentment towards Mr. Meredith, who had once insulted him, and was friendly now only from the most interested motives. When he at last found it possible to leave the room, and had actually opened the door to escape into the open air, it was Mr. Meredith who detained him. “Pardon me,” he said; “but, if you would but give me five minutes in my own room—I have a great deal to say to you.” Colin was obliged to yield, though his impatience was unspeakable; and he followed Mr. Meredith into the library, which, like all the other rooms in the house, was but partially lighted. Here Alice’s father gave his guest a chair with solemnity, as for an important conference; and this was more than Colin’s powers of self-restraint could bear.
“I must ask you to pardon me,” he said, putting his hand on the back of the chair. “You will, perhaps, understand that all that has happened to-day has disturbed my calculations a little. A man cannot go back four years of his life in so unexpected a way without feeling a little off his equilibrium. May I ask you to postpone till to-morrow what you have to say?”
“Only a moment—only three words,” said Mr. Meredith; “I hope you have forgiven me for the mistake which I have regretted ever since. I meant no slight to you, whom I did not know. I was naturally excited to find my daughter in such circumstances; and, Mr. Campbell, I am sure you are generous; you will not let a mere mistake prejudice you against me.”
“It was not a mistake,” said Colin coldly; “you were right enough in everything but the motives you imputed to me; and I am almost as poor a man now as I was then, with very little chance of being richer—I may say with no chance,” he went on, with a certain pleasure in exaggerating his disadvantages. “A Scotch minister can make no advance in his profession. Instead of finding fault with what you did then, I feel disposed to bid you weigh well the circumstances now.”
Mr. Meredith smiled, with a little air of protection, and drew a long breath of relief. “Alice will have enough for both,” he said; “and Providence has taught me by many severe lessons the vanity of riches. She will have enough for both.”
It was at this moment that all the bitterness of the sacrifice he was making rushed upon Colin’s mind—rushed upon him like a flood, quenching even the natural courtesy of his disposition, and giving him a certain savage satisfaction in wreaking his vengeance upon the rich man, whose riches he despised, and whose money smelt of spoliation and wrong. All the silent rage against his fate which possessed Colin—all the reluctance and disappointment which a higher principle kept in abeyance in presence of the innocent Alice—blazed up against her father in a momentary glare which appalled the victim. Colin might give up his ideal and his dreams for tender friendship and honour and compassion; but the idea of any sordid inducement mingled with these motives drove him the length of passion. It was, however, not with any noisy demonstration, but in a white heat of bitterness and angry resistance that he spoke.
“It will be better that we should understand each other clearly on this point,” said Colin. “I am not your judge, to say you have done well or ill; but it is a matter on which I may be permitted to have my own opinion. I will not accept a shilling of your fortune. If Alice is content to have me as I am, she shall have all the care, all the tenderness that I can give her; but—pardon me, it is necessary to speak plainly—I will take nothing from you.”
Colin stood up with his hand on the back of his chair, and delivered his charge full into the breast of his unsuspecting opponent. Perhaps it was cruel; but there are circumstances under which it is a relief to be cruel to somebody, and the pain in his soul found for itself a certain expression in these words. As for the unhappy victim who received them, the sense of surprise almost deadened the effect for the moment; he could not believe that he had heard rightly. Mr. Meredith was of the Low Church, and was used to say every day that wealth was vanity, and that the true treasure had to be laid up above; but still experience had not shown him that poor young priests of any creed were generally so far moved by these sentiments as to despise the fortune which a wife might bring them. He was so much amazed that he gave a gasp of consternation at the young man who thus defied him, and grew not pale but grey with an emotion which was more wonder than anger. Mr. Meredith was not a bad man, notwithstanding that he had ruined several households, and made himself rich at other people’s expense; and, even had he felt the full force of the insult personally, his anxiety about Alice would have made him bear it. That fatherly dread and love made him for the moment a great deal more Christian than Colin, who had thus assaulted him in the bitterness of his heart.
“Mr. Campbell,” he replied, when he had sufficiently recovered himself to speak, “I don’t know what you have heard about me. I don’t mean to enter upon any defence of myself. My poor boy, I know, misunderstood some transactions, not knowing anything about business. But, so far as I can see, that matters very little between you and me. I have explained to you that my conduct in reference to yourself was founded on a mistake. I have expressed my gratitude to you in respect to my son; and now, if we are to be more closely connected——”
“That depends upon Miss Meredith,” said Colin, hastily. “You have opened your doors to me voluntarily, and not by my solicitation; and now it is to her that I have a right to address myself. Otherwise it would have been better if you had not asked me to come here.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Meredith. He thought he saw a doubtful gleam in Colin’s eye, and an accent of repugnance in his voice, and he trembled to the bottom of his heart lest perhaps, after all, he might lose this chance of preserving his daughter. “Yes, yes,” he said with a smile, which it cost him a little trouble to assume, and which looked horribly out of place to Colin; “I ought to have learned by this time that it does not do to interfere between lovers. I allow that it lies entirely between her and you.”
He might have said a great deal more if his young hearer would have given him time; but Colin was only too glad to escape. The word “lovers” which Mr. Meredith used, the smile which he was so far from meaning, the lighter tone which belied his feelings quite as much as Colin’s, drove the young man half frantic with impatience and disgust. At last he managed to get his will, and escaped out of doors, with the cigar which was an excuse for his thoughts. The night was dark, and agitated by a ghostly wind, and the country, utterly unknown, which lay round the house in the darkness, and which neither memory nor imagination presented to the mind of the stranger, increased the natural effect of the gloom and the solitude. He went down through the long straight opening of the avenue, which was a little less black than the surrounding world, with a sensation of loneliness which was as strange as it was painful. He did not seem to know himself or his life henceforward any more than he knew the wild, strange country over which the night and the wind ruled supreme. It seemed to him as if the solace of friendship, the consolation of sympathy, were all ended for ever; he could not talk, even to those who were most dear to him, of his betrothed, or of his marriage—if, indeed, that was what it must come to. He had walked up and down the avenue two or three times, from one end to another, before even a little coherence came to his thoughts. All was so strange and unbelievable as yet; so like a trick of magic played upon him by some malign magician. He was not capable of thinking; but everything passed before him like a vision, appearing and disappearing out of the darkness. His old freedom, his impulses of revolution, the force and fulness of life with which he was young enough to sport, even in its most serious strength, and all the sweet wealth of imagination that had lain hoarded up for him among the clouds—these were things that belonged to yesterday. To-night it was another world that seemed to lie before him in the gloom, a separate sphere from the actual world in which he was standing. Vague limitations and restrictions which he could not identify were awaiting him; and he saw no way of escaping, and yet did not know how he was to bear the future thraldom.
As this ferment calmed down a little, Colin began to think of Alice, sweet and patient, and dutiful as she always was. He even resented, for her sake, his own indifference and repugnance, and said bitterly to himself that it was hard that such a woman should be accepted as a necessary burden, and not longed for as a crown of blessing; but yet, with all that, he could not cheat his own heart, or persuade himself that he wanted to marry her, or that it was less than the sacrifice of all his individual hopes to enter again upon the old relationship, and fulfil the youthful bond. When, however, he attempted to ask himself if he could escape, the same heart which sank at the thought of this bond baffled and stopped him in his question. He would not harm her, should it kill him.
“He loved her with all love, except the love
Of men and women when they love the best.”
And it was he himself who had knitted in youthful generosity and indiscretion the chain that now lay on his limbs like iron. Alice had done nothing unmaidenly, nothing that in all honour and delicacy she ought not to have done. To be sure, another man as honourable as Colin might have given her to understand, or permitted her to find out, the change which had taken in his sentiments. But Colin could not even assert with any truth that his sentiments had changed. For he was almost as conscious that she was not the woman of his imagination when he led her home from the ilex avenue on the day which determined their fortunes as he was now after the long separation which had not broken the link between them. He had known in his heart that it was not broken, even when he had most felt his freedom; and now what could he do? Perhaps that morning, after the carriage had passed him, after the little cry of recognition which convinced his heart, but which his mind could still have struggled against, he might have turned back as he had once thought of doing, and fled ignominiously. But that moment was past, and there was nothing to be done but accept the results of his own youthful rashness. Such were the thoughts that went through his mind as he walked up and down the avenue between the two long lines of trees, hearing the wind roar among the branches overhead, and feeling that henceforward there must always be a secret in his heart, something which nobody must discover, a secret which neither now nor any time could be breathed into any sympathetic ear. This sense of something to conceal weighed harder upon Colin than if it had been a crime—for there is no crime so terrible but a human creature may entertain the hope some time of relieving his mind of it, and breathing it into the ear of some confidant, consecrated either by love or religion, who will not shrink from him in consequence of that revelation. The sting of Colin’s burden was that he could never relieve himself of it, that all the questions raised by it must absolutely confine themselves to his own mind, and must lie unnamed and even unsuggested between him and those friends from whom he had never hidden anything but this.
All this he revolved in his mind as he contemplated his position. So far from seeking sympathy, it would be his business to refuse and ignore it, should it be given by any implication, and to seek congratulations, felicitations, instead. All this he was going to do for Alice’s sake; and yet he did not love Alice. He looked up at a faintly-lighted window, where there seemed to be a shaded light as in an invalid’s room, and thought of her with a mixture of bitterness and sweetness, of tender affection and unconquerable reluctance, of loyalty almost fantastic and the most painful sense of hardship, which it would be impossible to describe. She, for her part, was lying down to rest with her heart full of the sweetest content and thankfulness, thinking with thoughts so different from his how her life had changed since the morning, and how the almost-forgotten sunshine had come back again, to remain for ever. This was how Alice was looking at the matter, and Colin knew it in his heart. If she could but wake out of that soft paradise to see the darkness and the turmoil in his mind! But that was what she must never find out.
And thus Colin made up his mind, if he could ever be said to have had any doubt in his mind, as to what was to be done. He did not even cheat himself by the hope that anything could happen to deliver him. It was Providence, as Alice had said. Perhaps it might come darkly into the young man’s mind to wonder whether those severe lessons which Mr. Meredith said he had had in his family—whether all those fatal losses and sorrows which Alice regarded with awe, yet with a certain devout admiration as God’s mysterious way of bringing about her own happiness, could be designed to effect an end which did not make him happy; for, in such a question, personal content or dissatisfaction has a great deal to do with the way in which a man regards the tenor of Providence. Had he been as happy as Alice was, perhaps he too would have concluded that this was but another instance how all things work together for good. But, as he was not happy, he plunged into a world of more painful questions, and returned again as before, after his favourite speculations had beguiled him for a little out of the immediate matter in hand, to realize, as if by a flash of lightning, all the facts of the case, and all the necessities before him. There may be many people who will condemn Colin both for remaining indifferent to Alice, and for remaining faithful to her in his indifference. But this is not a defence nor eulogium of him, but simply a history. It was thus his mind acted under the circumstances. He could conduct himself only according to his own nature; and this is all that there is to say.
All this time Lauderdale was standing at his window, watching in the darkness for an occasional glimpse of something moving among the trees. He had put out his light by instinct, that Colin might not think he was being watched. He kept looking out upon the wild tree-tops swaying about in the wind, and upon the wilder clouds, dashed and heaped about the sky, with a great sadness in his heart. Colin’s nature was not like his; yet by dint of a sympathy which had been expanding and growing with the young man’s growth, and a knowledge of him and his ways, which no one in the world possessed to the same extent, Lauderdale had very nearly divined what was in his friend’s heart. He divined at the same time that he must never divine it, nor betray by word or look that such an idea had ever entered his mind. And that was why he put his light out, and, watching long till Colin had come in, said his prayers in the dark, and went to rest without seeking any communication with him, though his heart was yearning over him. It was Colin, and not Lauderdale, who was the hero of that silent struggle. Yet perhaps there was no single pang in the young man’s suffering so exquisite as that which thrilled through his companion as he resigned himself to an appearance of repose, and denied himself so much as a look at his friend, to whom he had been like a father. At such a moment a look might have been a betrayal; and now it was Lauderdale’s business to second Colin’s resolution—to avoid all confidence, and to save him even from himself.