LILY had an agitating and troubled day between this strange pair, which had the good effect upon her, however, of turning her thoughts entirely away from her own affairs, the struggle and trouble of which seemed of so little importance beside this conflict which had the air of being for life or death. She did not understand either of the combatants: the man who so fearlessly owned his weaknesses, and put the weight of his soul upon the woman who ought to have saved him; or the woman who did not deny that responsibility, nor claim independence or a right irrespective of him to follow her own way. Helen Blythe had ideas of life, it was evident, very different from those that had ever come into Lily’s mind. In those days there were no discussions of women’s rights; but in those days, alas! as in all other periods, the heart of a high-spirited young woman here and there swelled high with imagination, wrath, and indignation at the thought of those indignities which all women had to suffer. That it should be taken as a simple thing that any man, after he had gone through all the soils and degradations of a reckless life, should have a spotless girl given to him to make him a new existence, was one of those bitter thoughts that rankled in the minds of many women, though nothing was said on the subject in public, and very little even among themselves. For those were subjects which girls shrank from and blushed to hear of. The knowledge was horrible, and made them feel, when any chance fact came their way, as if their very souls were soiled by the hearing. Not that the elder women, especially those inconceivably experienced and impartial old ladies of society, who see every thing with the sharpest eyesight, and discuss every thing with words that cut and glance like steel, and who have surmounted all that belongs to sex, except a keen dramatic interest in its problems, did not talk of these matters after their kind, as in all the ages. But the girls were not told, they did not know, they shrank from information which they would not have understood had it been conveyed to them, except, indeed, a few principles that were broad and general: that to marry a girl to an old man or a wicked man was a hideous thing, and that the old doctrine of a reformed rake, which had been preached to their mothers, was a scorn to womankind, and no longer to be suggested to them. For the magic of the Pamelas was over, and Sir Walter had arisen in the sky, which cleared before him, all noisome things flying where he made his honest, noble way. Not much these heroes of his, people say, not worth a Tom Jones with his stress and storm of life; but bringing in a new era, the young and pure with the young and true, and not a whitewashed Lovelace in the whole collection. Lily was of Scott’s age; and when she saw this wolf approaching the lamb, or rather this black sheep, as every-body called him, demanding a maiden sacrifice to clean him from his guilt, her heart burned with indignation and the rage of innocence. She could not understand Helen’s strange acquiescence, nor her sense of possible guilt in not having accepted that part which was offered to her. The very atmosphere which surrounded Duff was obnoxious to Lily: the roughness of his tones and his clothes, his large, noisy movements and vehemence and gestures. He had lost, she thought, that air of a gentleman which is the last thing a man loses who is born to it, and never, as she believed, loses innocently.
She was glad beyond description when, after much more conversation, and a meal to which his excitement and passion did not prevent him from doing a certain justice, Duff was got out of the house, leaving Helen behind, for whom the cart with the black pony had to be brought out once more. Helen was greatly exhausted by all the agitations of the day. He had left her without bringing her to any change of mind, yet vowing he would see her once again and make her come with him still, that he would not yet abandon all hope, while she sat tired out, shaking her head softly, with a melancholy smile on her face—a smile more pitiful than many complaints. She did not rise from her chair to see him go away, but followed him with wistful eyes to the door—eyes that were full of a dew of pain that flooded them, but did not fall. She did not say any thing for a long time after he had gone. Was she listening to his steps as he went away, leaving on the air a lingering sound, measured and heavy? Helen had thought that footstep like music. She had watched for it many a day, and heard it, as she thought, miles off, in the stillness of the long country roads, and again, in imagination, many and many a day when he was far out of hearing. She heard it now, long after it had been lost by every ear but her own. Her face had a strained look, as if that sound drew her after him, yet stronger resolution kept her behind.
“You did not mean that, Helen—oh, not that!” Lily said, encircling her friend with her arm.
“My bonnie Lily! but that I did, with all my heart!”
“That you, a good woman, would go away out into the world with an ill man, knowing he was an ill man, and thinking that you could turn him and mend him! Oh, Helen, Helen! take him to your heart, that is pure as snow, knowing he was an ill man?”
“Lily, you are very young—you are little more than a bairn. What are our small degrees of good and ill—or rather of ill and worse—before our Maker? Do you think he judges as we judge? They say my poor Alick is wild, and well I wot he is wild, and has taken many, many a wrong step on the road. Oh, if you think it presumptuous of me to believe I could have held him fast so that he should not fall, that would be more true! But, Lily, if ye were long in this countryside, you would see it with your own e’en. The women long ago were not so feared as we were. They just married the lad they liked, and if he were wild, forgave him; and I’ve known goodwives that have just pushed them through—oh, just pushed them through!—till they came to old age with honor on their heads and a fine family about them, that would have sunk into the miry pit and the horrible clay if the woman had not had the heart to do it. I am not saying I had not the heart,” said Helen, with a melancholy shake of her head, “but I was young and knew nothing, and the moment passed away.”
“It can never be right,” cried Lily, “to run such a dreadful risk! Oh, if they cannot guide themselves, who are we that we should guide them? I am not like you, Helen. I know for myself I could guide no man.”
No! well she knew that! Not so much as for the taking of a little house—not so much as the simplest duty as ever lay in a man’s road. Helen was not so clever as Lily, she had no such pretensions in any way; every thing—blood and breeding, and the habit of carrying out her own projects and holding her head high—was in the favor of the younger. But Lily had no such confidence as Helen. She did not believe in any influence she could exert. Her opinion, her entreaties, were of no use. They did not move Ronald. He dismissed them with a kiss and a smile. “I could guide no man,” she repeated with a bitter conviction in her heart.
“It would, maybe, not be a perfect life,” said Helen; “far from that; there would be many an ill moment. The goodwife has her cross to carry, and it’s not light; but, oh, Lily, better that than ruin to the man, and a lonely life, with little use in it, to her; and there is aye the hope of the bairns that will do better another day.”
“The bairns,” said Lily, “that would be the worst of all. An ill man’s bairns—to carry on the poison in the blood.”
“You are a hard judge,” said Helen, pausing to look at her, “for one so young; but it’s because you are so young, my bonnie dear. We are all ill men and women, too. There’s a line of poetry that comes into my head, though it’s a light thing for such a heavy subject, and I cannot mind it exact to a word. It says we were all forfeit once, but he that might have best took the advantage found out the remedy. It is bonnier than that, and it is just the truth. The Lord said: ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Ye will mind that at least, Lily.”
“I mind them both,” cried Lily, piqued to have her knowledge doubted, “but yet——”
“And you must not speak of my poor Alick as an ill man. Oh, if I could but let you see how little he is an ill man! His heart is just as innocent as a bairn’s in some things, I’m not saying in all things. He is wild, poor lad, the Lord forgive him! He does a foolish thing, and then he thinks after that he shouldn’t have done it. If I were there, I would make him think first, I would think for him; and then, if the thing was done, there would be me to try to mend it and him, too. But why should I speak as if that was in my power?” cried Helen, with a sudden soft momentary rush of tears, “for I cannot, I cannot, go with Alick and leave my father! I will have to stand by and see my poor lad go out again without a friend by his side into the terrible, terrible world.”
Lily put her arm round her friend, kneeling beside her, giving a warm clasp of sympathy if nothing more. Helen’s heart was beating sadly, with a suppressed passion, but Lily felt as if her slim young frame was all one desperate pulse, clanging in her ears and tingling to her fingers’ ends. Was it her fault that in all her veins there burned this sense of impotence, this dreadful miserable consciousness that she could do nothing, move no one, and was powerless to shape her own fate? Helen was powerless too, but in how different a way! sure that she would have been able to fulfil that highest purpose if only her steps had been free, whereas Lily was humiliated by the certainty that there was no power at all in her, that to everybody with whom she was connected she was a creature without individual potency, whose fate was to be decided for her by the will of others. The contrast of Helen’s feeling, which was so different, gave a bitterness to her pain.
“It was all very simple,” said Helen. “My father—you have never seen him at his best, Lily; there is not a cleverer man, nor a better learned, in all this countryside—was tutor to Mr. Duff when they were both young, and the boys, as they grew up, used to come to him for lessons. Alick was the youngest, just two years older than me, that am the last of all. They were great friends with our own boys, who are both out in the world, and, oh, alack! not doing so very well that we should cast a stone at other folk. Eh but he was a bonnie boy! dark, always dark, like his mother, but the flower of the flock, and courted and petted wherever he went. He was a wild boy, and wild he was, I will not deny it, in his youth, and began by giving me a very sore heart; for, from the first that I can mind of, I have never thought of any man but him. And then he was sent away abroad—oh, not for punishment—to do better and make up the lost way. He came to my father and he said: ‘Let Helen go with me and I’ll do well.’ I was but nineteen, Lily, and him twenty-one. They just laughed him to scorn. ‘It would be the Babes in the Wood over again,’ they said, and what was I, a little lass at home, that I could be of any help to a man? Lily!” cried Helen, her mild eyes shining, her cheeks aglow, “I knew better myself, though I dared not say it, and he, poor laddie, he knew best of all. I should have gone with him then! that very moment! if I had but seen it; and, oh, I did see, but I was so young, and no boldness in my heart. My father said: ‘Work you your best for five years and wipe out all the old scores, and come back and ye shall have her, whether it pleases your father or no.’ For the family would not have it. I was not good enough for them. But little was my father minding for that. He never thought upon the old laird but as a boy he had given palmies to, and kept in for not knowing his lessons. He did not care a snap of his fingers for the old laird.”
“At nineteen, and him twenty-one!” Lily said.
“Oh, yes—they all said it was folly, and maybe I would say so, too, if I saw another pair. But for all that it was not folly, Lily. He wanted me to run away with him and say no word. And, oh, but I was in a terrible swither what to do. It’s peetiful to be so young: you have no experience; you cannot answer a word when they preach you down with their old saws. I thought upon my mother that was weakly, and Tom and Jamie giving a good deal of trouble. And at the last I would not. It was my moment,” she said softly, with a sigh, “and I had a perception of it; but I was frightened, Lily, and, oh, so silly and young!”
“Helen, you could not, you should not, have done it. It would have been impossible! It would have been wrong!”
Helen only shook her head with a melancholy smile. “And then he came back,” she said, “at the end of the five years. Never, never, Lily, may you have the feeling I had when I saw Alick Duff again. Something said in me: ‘Eelen, Eelen, that is your work!’ The light had gone from his eyes, and the open look; his bonnie brow was all lined. He had grown to be the man you saw to-day. But what would that have mattered to me? He had but the more need of me. Alas, alas! my mother was dead, the boys all adrift, and my father taken with his illness, and what could I do then? He pleaded sore and my heart went with him. Oh, I fear he had been wild, wild! He came back without a shilling in his pocket or a prospect before him. The old laird was still living and went about with a brow like thunder. He looked as if he hated every man that named Alick’s name; but them that knew best said he was the favorite still of all the sons. And Mrs. Duff, that had been so proud, that would not have the minister’s daughter for her bonnie boy, she came to me herself, Lily. You see, it was not me only that thought it. She said: ‘Eelen, if you will marry him, you will save my bonnie lad yet.’ But I could not, I could not, Lily. How could I leave my own house, that had trouble in it, and nobody to make a stand but me?”
“They were selfish and cruel!” cried Lily; “they would have sacrificed you for the hope of saving an ill man!”
“Oh, whisht, whisht,” cried Helen again. “And now he has come back. And every thing is changed. The old laird is dead and gone, and John Duff, that was never very kind, is laird in his stead, and there’s no home for him there in his father’s house. And he’s a far older man—eight years it was this time that he was away. And you will wonder to hear me say a bonnie lad when you look at that black-browed man. But I see my bonnie lad in him still, Lily; he is aye the same to me. And, oh, if you knew how it drags my heart out of my bosom when he bids me come with him and I cannot! He says we might save the fragments that remain—but there’s more than that, more than that! He has wasted his youth, but he has not yet lived half his life. And there’s that to save, Lily; and him and me together we could stand. Oh, Lily, there’s neither man nor devil that I would fear for Alick’s sake, and at Alick’s side, to save him—before it is too late!”
“Helen,” cried Lily, “what do I know? I dare not speak; but what if after all you could not save him? If he cannot stand by himself, how could you make him? You are but a little delicate woman; you are not fit to fight. Oh, Helen, Helen, what if you could not save him when all is done!”
“I am not feared,” Helen said with a serene countenance. And then there suddenly came a cloud over her, and tears came to her eyes. “What is the use of speaking,” she said, throwing up her hands with an impatience unlike her usual calm, “when I can do nothing? when he must just go away again without hope, my poor Alick! and come back no more? And that will be the end both of him and me,” she went on, “two folk that might have made a home, and served God in our generation, and brought up children and received strangers and held our warm place in the cold world. One of us will perish away yonder, among wild beasts and ill men, and one of us will just fade away on the roadside like a flower thrown away when its sweetness is gone—and it will be no better for any mortal, but maybe worse, that Alick Duff and Helen Blythe were born into this weary world.”
“Oh, Helen, Helen!” cried Lily, “I think Alick Duff must have been the cloud that has come over your life and turned its brightness to dark. If you had not always been thinking of him, you would have had another home and a brighter life. And even now—can I not see myself?—don’t you know very well there is a good man——”
“Oh,” cried Helen, rising up with sudden animation, almost pushing Lily’s kneeling figure from her, “go away from me with your good man! It is enough to make a person unjust, to make ye hate the name of good! How do you know whether they are good or no, one of them? Were they ever tempted like him? Had they ever the fire of hot thoughts in their head, or the struggle in their hearts? Was nature ever in them running free and wild like a great river, carrying the brigs and the dams away? or just a drumlie quiet stream, aye content in its banks, and asking no more? Oh, dinna speak to me of your good man! It’s blasphemy, it’s sacrilege, it’s the sin that will never be pardoned! There is but one man, be he good or bad, and one woman that is bound to do her best for him; and ill be her lot if she fails to do it, for it is not herself she will ruin,—that would matter little—the feckless creature, no worth her salt,—but him, too, but him, too!”
She sat down again after this little outburst and dried her eyes. Lily, who had risen hurriedly to her feet, too, startled and almost angry, stood irresolute, not knowing how to reply, when Helen put out to her a trembling hand. “You are not to be troubled about me,” she said; “you are not to be angry at what I say. It is a comfort to speak out my mind. Who can I speak to, Lily? Not to my father, who stands between me and my life; not to him, that rages at me as you have heard because I cannot arise and follow him, as I would do if I could, to the end of the world. Oh, Lily, it is good for the heart, when it is full like mine, to speak. It takes away a little of the burden. ‘I leant my back until an aik’—do you mind the old song? You are not an oak, you’re only a lily-plant, but, oh! the comfort to lean on you, Lily, just for a moment, just till I get my breath.”
“Say to me whatever you like, Helen; say any thing. I may not agree——”
“I am not asking you to agree—how should you agree, you that know nothing? Oh, Lily, my bonnie Lily,” cried Helen, suddenly looking in her face, “am I speaking blasphemy, too? You may know more than I think; there is that in your face that was not there six months ago.”
The color changed in Lily’s cheek, but she did not flinch. “If I know any thing,” she said, “it is not in your way, Helen. I am not the kind of woman that can change a man’s thoughts or his life. I am one that has no power. If I tried your way, I would fail. No one has changed a thought or a purpose in all my life for me. I am useless, useless. I have to do what other folk tell me, and wait other folk’s pleasure, and blow here and blow there like a straw in the wind. And I love it not, I love it not!” she cried. “It is as bad for me as for you.”
Helen thought she knew what the girl meant. She was here in durance, bound by her uncle’s hard will; prevented, too, from carrying out the choice of her heart. It had not yet dawned upon the elder woman that Lily’s experience had gone further than this. And it is possible that the gentle Helen, used all her life to an influence over others far stronger than seemed natural to her character, and believing fully and strongly in that power, could not have understood the higher trial of the far more vivacious and vigorous nature beside her, which flung itself in vain against the rock of another mind inaccessible to any power it possessed, and, clear-sighted and strong-willed, had yet to submit and do nothing but submit.