THE moon had set when Harry Joscelyn left the White House; and the night was very dark, as it is so often after the setting of the moon. The sky was cloudy, and scarcely a star was visible. The wind blew cold in his face when he got beyond the shelter of the walls. He looked up at the house as he passed it with a sensation of rage and contempt which it is only possible to reach when the object we thus hate and despise is one that ought to be beloved. He lifted a handful of gravel and threw it violently at his mother’s window. There was no softening of feeling, no wish to say a farewell, even if an angry one in this. It was done in boyish rage, with a simple desire to strike. He was glad to think the stones struck sharply, and might, perhaps, have broken a pane and fallen like shot upon the floor. This was what he would have wished. When he had discharged that parting volley, he pulled down his hat over his ears, and put up his coat-collar. It was all he could do against the wind, which blew through and through him. Not even an overcoat! They were determined that he should have nothing; that he should be expelled without even the poorest covering; that he should be exposed to everything dangerous, everything disagreeable. To be sure, that was what they wanted! Revenge filled the young fellow’s heart as he went along in the dark, shivering at first, till his rapid progress set his blood in motion. Not only without a home, without a roof to shelter him, or a bed to lie upon, but without even a coat. He turned his back upon his father’s house with a bitterness that was indescribable. He could remember the time when it was delightful to him to go home; but that was long ago, when he was a boy and knew no better. Even then, what had his father been to him? a terror even in his lighter moods, which might turn into fury at any moment. His mother? oh, his mother had been kind enough, poor soul! For a woman she had done what she could; but at the best what could a woman do? Poor thing! yes she had been kind. But it is very difficult for the young to see anyone, even when dear to them, systematically undervalued without getting to share the sentiment in one shape or another. Sometimes it rouses a generous mind to hot partizanship; but Harry had never got that length. He had been indignant sometimes and conscious, with a little pride, that he was the one who stood up for his mother—but he had not gone further. And now he could not help despising her as everybody else did. Just when it was essential she should stand by him, she had failed him. Call this the consequence of force which she could not resist, of natural bodily weakness—all that was very well to say; but a mother worth anything will never run the risk of bodily force in such an emergency. She will find some way of getting out of it. She will stand by her son when he needs her, whatever happens. And Harry’s mother had not done so—just at the critical moment when he had been driven wild by opposition, when his future career had been to all appearance cut short and his path shut in before him, she had failed him! She was as weak as water; there was no faith to be put in her. A woman like that, Harry reflected, is almost as bad as if she were not a good woman. Oh, yes; she was a good woman! but what advantage was it to anyone? What did it matter being good if you were of no use to those belonging to you? Being good just for yourself, selfishly, that was a poor sort of business. For her children she was no good. What had she ever done for any of them? Made a fuss, as Joan said. She was very good at doing that, was mother! But what more? These were the angry thoughts that were surging through his mind as he turned his back upon his home. His father’s image swept across him now and then, raising his angry despair into momentary rage; but it was not his father, who had always been hard upon him, but his mother, who had always been so tender to him, whom Harry assailed with all these bitter thoughts. In her silly dislike to the only poor little amusement he had, she had turned against him at the decisive moment. It was just like a woman! Because he would not tie himself to her apron-strings; because he would not spend his evenings sitting with her and Joan—a pretty sort of position for a young man, Harry said to himself, with a curl of his lip.
He went on shivering, straight before him as he happened to have turned his face when he came round the corner of the house. He was not aware that there was more choice in it than this, though all the while there was a dormant intention in his mind of going to Wyburgh after all, and trying, one last effort, what Uncle Henry would do for him. Uncle Henry had been kind to him, as kind as he knew how. He was only an old bachelor, not much good, a selfish old fellow, thinking most of his own comfort; but still he had been kind; and perhaps if he knew fully the state of the case, and how the people at White House had treated his pupil and godson—This was lying underneath as it were the current of Harry’s thoughts, and turned over and came uppermost for a moment now and then; but it did not become at all a principal idea until he had walked a long way, and had got warm with walking, and the sense of absolute misery, physical and mental, had been slightly modified. At first he kept to the side of the Fells, which was rough walking, and where now and then there was a dyke to jump over or a beck to cross; but by and by got down to the high road, almost groping the way with his feet, if not with his hands, so black lay the night over the irregular broken ground. He knew the road, every inch, he would have said; but when that darkness comes down like a pall, confounding everything in one gloom, there is little advantage in knowledge. Sometimes he found himself right up against the grey uncemented stones of a dyke before he was aware of any obstacle, and sometimes had almost plunged into an invisible hill-side stream, before the little warning trickle it made among the stones caught his ear. By the side of one of these little streams he made his way to the road, and there for the first time asked himself where he was going. What a strange walk it was, all blank about him, sometimes a lonely tree rustling, betraying itself in the dark by the wind in its spare branches, sometimes a cottage suggested on the roadside, or away among the fields, by the cry of a child or the bark of a dog. He knew he had passed through the first hamlet on his way, because the dogs all woke at the unusual sound of a footstep, and barked at him lustily. He was not a youth of much imagination, and yet this incident had the most curious effect upon him. He was more startled, more shocked and annoyed by it than by anything else that had happened to him. The very dogs! was he already to them a tramp, a wandering vagrant? At the very end of the “town” some one opened a window, and Harry heard a querulous question, not addressed to himself, but to some one inside, “Wha’s that wandering on the road in the dead o’ the night?” Harry slunk by, trying to keep his steps from making so much noise. A sense of disreputableness suddenly came over him, a recollection of what people would think. Nobody would believe he had been turned out of his home for no fault of his. And then in the midst of his fury and desire for vengeance, there suddenly came over Harry that family pride which so seldom abandons a Northcountryman. Was he going to let everybody know what disgrace there was in the White House, and how his father had turned him out of doors? Were all the tongues in the country-side to be set wagging on this subject? The Joscelyns—people so well known! Harry felt as if some one had struck him sharply with his hand in the darkness. It would be all over the country in twenty-four hours. Joscelyn of White House had turned his youngest son out of doors. There was no second family of the name to confuse gossip. Harry felt as if the barking of the dogs was but a foretaste of what was going to happen to him. He felt as if some one had grasped him, choked him, tried to strangle him in the dark.
Fortunately Wyburgh by this time showed, a long way off with its little lights twinkling. They were but four little rustic lights, not many of them—for when the moon shone the corporation felt itself at liberty to dispense with lamps; and but for the lights at the railway-station, and two or three which were indispensable, the little town would have been invisible in the darkness, like those sleeping villages which Harry had stumbled through almost without knowing. When he caught sight of the first of these lights, it gave him a keen pleasure; it seemed to deliver him from that world of blackness in which the only conscious and living thing was himself and the sea of thoughts which surged up and down within him, one wave sweeping over another, in a confusion and tumult indescribable. Harry’s soul caught at the glow of that tall solitary lamp, the first which marked the line of the railway, as at a guiding light directing him into a known country, to solid ground and a familiar shore. The darkness and the little inward world of thought were alike strange to him, and he had no guide to direct him through them; but now here was “kent ground,” a place which would be visible, where the dogs would not bark at him in the dark, where there were all the safeguards of an inhabited place. He was relieved beyond measure when he saw the lights, and said to himself what they were. That was the tall light on the line, that other lower one the lamp at the station, that the faint little flare seen over the housetops of the market square, and yonder the well-known lamp at the corner, which he had seen lit so often as he left the Grammar-school. It made his heart light to count them at a distance. But when he got to the outskirts of the town he was less happy. It was still quite dark, between three and four o’clock, and he could not go to Uncle Harry’s, or to any other house in which he was known at such an hour. Nobody was stirring in Wyburgh, nor would be for hours yet. As he went into the silent streets the sense of his desolate position came over him more strongly than ever. All the houses were shut up and silent, blinds drawn over the windows, feeble lamps burning here and there like night-lights in a sick-chamber, the whole place breathing low and noiselessly in its sleep. He met a policeman, the only one, making his rounds with steady tramp, and the policeman looked at Harry with suspicion, throwing the light of his dark lantern upon him as he passed. He knew John Armstrong very well, and had played him many a trick as a schoolboy; but he shrank from making himself known now; and John looked with suspicion at the wayfarer, without even an overcoat, buttoned up to the neck, and with his hat drawn over his eyes, who thus invaded the town in the middle of the night. Harry knew that he was but a tramp, all the more dangerous because better dressed than usual, in John’s eyes. He felt the light of the lantern come after him, making a long trail of light upon the pavement. And he did not know where to go. If he went wandering about, which was the only thing he could think of, no doubt he would meet John Armstrong again, and almost certainly be questioned as to what he was doing, and who he was. And then the story would run over Wyburgh, how young Harry Joscelyn, one of the Joscelyns of the White House, had come in to Wyburgh before four o’clock in the morning, walking like a vagrant, and was recognized by the policeman, roaming about the street without any place to go to. He might almost be taken up as a rogue and vagabond, Harry thought, with that exaggeration which misfortune delights in. If he were called upon to give an account of himself he could not do it, nor had he any place to go to, any home waiting for him. The Wyburgh folk might form their own conclusions, and so they would, could anyone doubt.
He walked straight through the town to the other end of it, as if he were going on somewhere else, ashamed of himself, though he had nothing to be ashamed of, avoiding the spots of feeble light round the lamps, and walking as softly as he could not to make so much noise upon the pavement. He had not felt this so much in the country, in the darkness, but here, where everybody knew him, he became suddenly ashamed and afraid of being seen. When the clock struck it made him jump as if it had been some one calling his name. “Harry Joscelyn is roaming about the country without a home to go to;” did he think that was what it was going to say? Alas! it was but four o’clock that struck; four o’clock! the night seemed to have been already twelve hours long; and here were two hours more at the least that he must get through somehow before he could hope that even Mrs. Eadie, Uncle Henry’s old housekeeper, would be astir. He would not mind presenting himself to her; and the thought of the kind unquestioning welcome she would give, the cheerful fire, the breakfast, the warm room in which he could sit down, gave him sudden encouragement. For it was very cold; those long, long hours of night, which pass so quickly in sleep, sliding out of consciousness altogether, how much goes on in them to those who are homeless! Harry had never thought of anything of the kind before; a night without rest, even, far less a night out of doors, had been unknown to him. The wretches who wander about the roads, and sleep under a hedge, and have no home, were out of his ken; they were poor wretches, and in all likelihood it was “their own fault.” People would think the same of him. To be ashamed of the position in which you find yourself, and yet to be quite innocent, is a curious misery, but it is very poignant. He had done nothing wrong; but the light of John Armstrong’s lantern made him shrink, and even those pale little prying lamps, each making a hole in the darkness. He went straight through Wyburgh, coming out at the further side. He walked till he was quite clear of the houses, and then he turned and looked back upon the spots of light which had cheered him so much when he first caught sight of them. How cold it was! nobody would believe that a spring morning could be so cold. It was like December. There was the clock again, like some one shouting in his ear—but only sounding the half after four; would the night never come to an end? He walked up and down on this bit of quiet road, just outside the town, to keep himself warm, pausing now and then to lean upon the wall and look at the lights; though he dared not go back to them lest they should betray him to the gossips, yet it was a kind of consolation to look at them still. They delivered him a little from that close presence and wretched company of himself.
An early cart from one of the neighbouring farms with vegetables for the market, lumbering along the road just as the day began to break, was the next thing that disturbed him. He fled from that too, wondering what the carter would think to see him standing there like a ghost in the dim dawn—and got over the wall into a field, to be out of the way, yet could not help feeling, as he listened, holding his breath, to the sound of the slow, jogging horses and the man’s heavy tread, that the carter must have spied him, and must be peeping over the wall and wondering who he could be. By this time Harry had got to feel very like a criminal. He felt sure that everybody would think he was a criminal and had done something desperate, to see him there in this guise. And how he was to get courage to go back to Wyburgh again in full daylight, in the sight of everybody, and knock at his uncle’s door, he did not know.
“Lord bless us! Master Harry!” the housekeeper cried. He came upon her suddenly as she opened the door to go out and feed her chickens, which was the first thing she did every morning. She was so scared that she let fall her apronful of seed, and held up her hands half to protect herself, for this worn, pale, wearied apparition, with coat-collar up to its ears, and hat drawn down over its brow, was like the ghost of Harry, not himself. “Lord bless us! Master Harry! it’s never you?”
“It is me, though: and dreadfully tired, and so cold I don’t know what to do with myself,” said Harry, with chattering teeth. “Let me come in and look at a fire.”
“Let you come in, my bonny boy! you shall come in, and welcome; and the kettle’s on, and I’ll soon make you some tea. Come into the kitchen, it’s the warmest place. Bless the lad! What hour did ye start at to get here so early? or has anything happened? You’ve not come for the doctor? I’m that surprised you might blow me over with a puff of your breath.”
“I shall not try,” said Harry, recovering himself a little as he felt the warmth of the fire. “There’s nothing wrong, Mrs. Eadie, they’re all well enough; but I want to see Uncle Henry, and I’m going back to Liverpool to-day.”
“Bless my heart! I thought you had come for a real holiday, and its no’ above a week; but whisht! laddie, dinna chatter with your teeth like that; come nearer to the fire. Dear, dear me, but you must be cold; not a great-coat upon your back, nor a comforter, nor one thing to keep the heat in ye. I hope you havena’ just gotten your death,” cried the housekeeper, pouring the steaming water, which it was good even to see, into her teapot; and in her anxiety to get him a comfortable meal she forgot to ask any more questions.
Mrs. Eadie’s help, who was a young girl, did not live in the house, and her late arrival in the mornings was one of the grievances of the housekeeper’s life. There was nobody, therefore, but this good woman, in whom Harry had perfect confidence, to witness his worn-out condition: and by-and-by he got thawed and comfortable. Once within this legitimate shelter too, his spirits came back to him. He forgot the painful miseries he had conjured up, or, at least, he did not forget them, but they went to his father’s account to swell his wrath. There were still several hours to wait before he could see Uncle Henry, and Harry lay down upon the bed where he had slept when he was a schoolboy, and returned to common life and respectable usages through the medium of a long sleep. It was a sort of moral bath to him, restoring him to creditable ways. To think that he should have feared John Armstrong’s lantern, and hid himself from the carter with his early vegetables! But all that, and a great deal more, went to his father’s account. His rage revived as the misery of the night ended. For those latter hours he had been too much occupied by his personal feelings to dwell upon the cause of them; now that he was comfortable once more the insult and the cruelty that had been inflicted upon him came back with double force. Turned from his father’s door, the key turned upon him, the house he was born in shut up against him; himself disowned, like a beggar, left to wander where he pleased, to die on the moors, if he liked, to get his death, as Mrs. Eadie had suggested; and all this his father’s doing! Harry clenched his fist with wild excitement, with a desire for vengeance which startled himself. He thought he would almost consent to have “got his death” if Joscelyn could be tried for manslaughter. He would have almost liked to punish, to convict his father by dying, so that the whole country might have pointed at him as the man who had killed his son. But then he reflected that probably his father would not care. “But I’ll make him care,” Harry said to himself. Few people venture to express such vindictiveness; but Harry Joscelyn’s heart was full of it; it was natural to his race.