IT was a very little, homely lodging in which Lily was, the little parlor of an old-fashioned poor little house, intended at its best to receive an Edinburgh lawyer’s clerk, or perhaps a poor minister or teacher, on his promotion. Ronald had never seen his wife in such surroundings. He gave a cry of surprise and dismay as he pushed open the door. How often had she said that she would share any poverty with him, and yet it hurt him to see her here, out of her natural sphere, like a princess banished into a sordid world of privation and ugliness. At the sound of his voice Lily sprang up from the slippery black hair-cloth sofa on which she had been reposing. He thought at first it was to meet him as of old with open arms and heart to heart, but of this she showed no sign, nor even when he rushed forward to take her into his arms did she make any movement. She had seated herself on the sofa again, drawing back in an attitude of repulsion which could not be mistaken. “Lily!” he cried, “Lily! Is this the way you receive me? Have you nothing to say to me?”
“Oh, yes, I have a great deal to say to you. Give Mr. Lumsden a chair, Beenie. It is as I thought; you were going out to dinner,” said Lily, with a gleam of exasperation at the sight of his evening dress, which was of course wholly unreasonable. “Why should you have broken your engagement for me?”
“You know well I would break any engagement for you,” he said. “You must know all that I have suffered during the past two months, unable to see you, even to hear of you, and not a word, not a word from yourself all that time.”
“What hindered you coming to see me?” she asked. “What prevented you? If I had died, as seemed likely, it could have done you no harm in the world, for with me every hope of Uncle Robert’s money, which is what has been my destruction, would have fallen to the ground.”
“Lily, you never will understand! I did go to Kinloch-Rugas. I was once under your windows, but got no satisfaction. A man has to be silent and endure where a woman cries out. I did what I could to——”
“That is enough,” said Lily, waving her hand. “Between you and me there need be no more talking. I sent for you for one thing, to ask you one question—where is my baby? You took him out of my arms; bring him back again to me, and then there may be ground to speak.”
“He is my baby as well as yours, Lily. I have the responsibility of the family. I did what I felt to be best both for him and you.”
“What was best?” she cried. “Are you a god to judge what is best? But I will not argue with you. Give me my baby back! His mother’s arms—that is his natural place! Give me back my child, and then, perhaps, I may hear you speak.”
He had thought this matter over as he came along with the rapidity of highly stimulated thought, and a sudden great necessity for decision; he had thought of it often before, looking at the subject from every point of view. To give her back the baby was to ruin every thing for which he had fought. He had not deprived himself of the company of a wife he loved, he said to himself, for a small motive; not for nothing had he encountered all the difficulties of the position in the past, and all her reproaches, tacit and expressed. Her very look at him had often been very hard to bear, and yet he paused now before making his last stroke. Once more, like lightning, the question passed through his mind, what other way was there? Was there any other way in which her mind could be satisfied and her foolish search made an end of? Could he in any other way secure her return to her home, and the carrying out to the end of his scheme? But on the other hand would she ever forgive him for what he must now do? He had not more than a moment to carry on that controversy, to make his final decision. And she was looking at him all the time: Lily’s eyes, which so often had smiled upon him, so often followed him with tenderness and met him with the sudden flash of love and delight, were fixed upon him steadily now, shaded by curved brows, regarding him sternly without indulgence, without wavering or softening. He was no longer to Lily covered with the glamour of love. She saw him as he was, nay, worse than he was, with a look that took no account of his real feeling toward herself, or of what was in fact a perverted desire to do the best, as he saw it, for her as well as for himself. Would these eyes ever soften, whatever he might do or say? Would she ever forgive him even now?
“Lily,” he said with an effort, overcoming the dryness of his throat, trying still to gain a little time. “I am your husband, I am your natural head and guide; it is my part to judge what is wisest, what is the best thing for you. I am older than you, I am more experienced in the world. I know what can be done, and what cannot be done. Whatever you may wish and whatever you may say, it is for me to judge what is the best.”
It is not often that a woman hears an uncompromising statement of this kind with patience, and Lily was little likely to have done so in her natural condition of mind, but at present she had no thought but one. “I have told you,” she cried, “that you can speak after, and that I will hear. But in the meantime bring me back my little baby. I ask nothing but that, I’ve no mind for reasoning now. Give me back my baby, my little bairn; that’s all I am asking. My baby, my baby! Ronald, if ever in your life you had a kind thought of me, a thought that was not all interest and money, and for the love of God, if ever you knew that, give me back my baby! and then,” she cried with a gasp—“then we can talk!”
His mind was made up now; there was nothing else for it. His face assumed an air of the deepest gravity; that was not difficult, for, indeed, his situation was grave enough. He put out his hand and laid it upon hers for a moment. “Lily,” he said, “I’ve been endeavoring to put off this blow. It was perhaps foolish, but I thought you would feel it less were you kept in ignorance than if all your hopes were cut off. Fain, fain would I bring back your baby and lay him in your arms again! You think I am a harsh man with no softness for a mother and a child, but you are mistaken, Lily. All that I am worth in this world I would give to bring him back. But there is but one hand that could do that.”
She raised herself up with a start, flinging off his hand, which again had touched hers. “What do you mean? What do you mean?” she cried, with wild staring eyes, eyes that seemed to be bursting from her head. She had been leaning back on the hard sofa in her weakness. Now she sat upright, her hands raised before her as if to push off some dreadful fate.
“You know what I mean, Lily,” he said, looking at her with a determined steadiness of gaze. “What is the life of an infant like that? It is like a new-lighted candle that every breath can blow out. Oh! blame me, blame me; I will not say a word. Tell me it was the night journey, the plunge into the cold, after the warm bosom of his mother. I thought it was the only thing I could do, but I will not say a word if you tell me I was to blame. Anyhow, whosever blame it was, the baby, poor little thing——”
“You mean he is dead!” said Lily, with a great cry.
He thought she had fainted: they all were in the way of thinking she had fainted when all her life went from her, except pain, which is the strongest life of all. Every thing was black before Lily’s eyes; her heart leaped with a wild movement and then seemed to die and become still in her breast; her lips dropped apart, as if the last breath had passed there with that cry. Ronald thought she had fainted for the first moment, and then he thought she had died. He sprang up with anguish in his heart; he had done it, braving all the risks, knowing her weakness, yet Beenie, rushing in at the sound of Lily’s cry, with all her battery of remedies, forgave him whatever he might have done at the sight of his face. “I have killed her! I have killed her!” he cried; “it is my fault!”
“Oh, sir, you should mind how weak she is!” cried Beenie, bringing forth her essences, her salts, her aromatic vinegar. Their words came faintly to Lily’s brain. She struggled up again from the sofa, on which she had fallen back, beating the air with her hands, as if to find and clutch at something that would give her strength. “My baby is dead!” she cried, stumbling over the words. “My baby, my baby is dead, my baby is dead!” It seemed as if the wail had become mechanical in the completeness of her downfall and misery, body and soul.
“Oh, sir!” cried Beenie again. She looked at him once more with another light in her eyes. She was but a simple woman, but to such there comes at times a kind of divination. But Ronald’s look was fixed upon Lily, his eyes were touched with moisture, the deepest pain was in his face. Could it be that a man could look like that and yet lie?
“Say nothing to her!” she cried almost with authority; “let her get her breath. But tell you me, sir, when was it that this came about? I heard you tell her to blame you if she pleased. What for were you to blame? Tell me that I may explain after. Mr. Lumsden, she has a right to ken. When did it happen and what was the cause? For all so little as a bairn is, it’s no without a cause when the darlings die.”
“You take too much upon you, Beenie,” he said. “You have no right to demand explanations. And yet, why should not I give them?” he said, with a tone of resignation. “I fear the poor little thing never got the better of that night journey. What could I do? I could not stay there to face Sir Robert on his first arrival. I could not leave Lily to bear the brunt. I had but little time to think, but what was there else to do? I felt even that to snatch him away at a stroke would be better for her than a lingering parting with him, and the anticipation of it. There was every cause. Beenie, you’re a reasonable woman.”
“I will not say, sir,” said Beenie, “that it was without reason; me and Katrin have said as much as that between ourselves, seeing a’ that had gone before.”
“Seeing all that had gone before,” Ronald repeated with readiness. “But Providence,” he added, “turns all our wisest plans sometimes to nought. I know nothing about children——”
“But Marg’ret kent weel about children!”
“Yes, she was perhaps the more to blame, if any one is to blame. Anyhow, the poor little thing—I can’t explain it, you should see her, she would tell you—caught cold or something. How could I send you word when she was so ill? I would have kept it from her now, at least till she was stronger and better able to bear it.”
“It would, maybe, have been better,” Beenie said, with a brevity that surprised Ronald and made him slightly uneasy. The woman did not break forth into lamentations, as he had expected, but that might be for Lily’s sake, who, lying back again upon the white pillow which Beenie had placed behind her head, with the effect of making her almost transparent countenance, with its faint but deepened lines, look more fragile than ever, was coming gradually to herself. Tears were slowly welling forth under her closed eyelids, but she was very still. Whether she was listening, or whether she was absorbed in her own sorrow and careless of what was going on, he could not tell. Anyhow, it was a relief to him that she was silent, and that the woman who was her closest attendant and confidant was so easily satisfied. He began to question her anxiously as to where Lily should go for her convalescence now that her object in coming there was so sadly ended. Portobello, Bridge of Allan, wherever it was, he would go at once and look for rooms. He would come when she was settled and spend as much time as possible with her. He took the whole matter at once into his own hands. And it was with a sensation of relief that he concluded after all this was said that he could now go away. “You will do well to get her to bed and give her a sleeping-draught if you have one,” he said, bending over Lily with a most anxious and tender countenance as she lay, still with her eyes closed, against the pillow. It was not how he had expected her to take this dreadful news which he had brought: he had expected a passion of grief, almost raving; he had expected violent weeping, a storm of lamentation. He had, on the contrary, got through very easily; the tears even had ceased to hang upon Lily’s closed eyelids. He bent down over her and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. She shrank from the touch, indeed, but yet he felt that he must expect so much as that.
“There is but one thing, sir,” said Beenie: “the woman Marg’ret, that does not seem to me to be such a grand nurse as we heard she was—you say we should see her and she would tell us a’. And that is just what I’m wanting, to see her, if you could tell me where to find her.”
“I tell you! How should I know?” he said. “She will be in the same place where we found her before, I suppose.”
“No, sir, she is not there.”
“Then she will have gone off to nurse somebody else. That’s her way of living, isn’t it? No, I can tell you nothing about her. You may suppose the sight of her was not very pleasant to me after—— But she is a well-known person. You will find no difficulty in finding her out.”
“If that’s your real opinion, Mr. Lumsden——”
“Of course it is my opinion. I will take a run to the Bridge of Allan to-morrow, and in the evening I will bring you word.”
With this, and with careful steps, not to disturb Lily, but yet with an uneasy soul and no certainty that he had succeeded in his bold stroke, Lumsden went away, Beenie respectfully accompanying him to the door. But when it was closed upon him, Beenie, though no light-footed girl, flew up the stairs, and rushing into the room with her hands outstretched, was met by Lily, who fell upon her maid’s shoulder, both of them saying together: “It is not true! it’s no true!”
“The Lord forgive him!” said Beenie. “And, oh, I hope you’ll be able to do it, but no me! I’m not a good woman, I’m just a wild Highlander, and I could have put a pistol to his head as he stood there!”
“I can forgive him easier,” said Lily, with the tears now coming freely, “than if it had been true. Oh, Beenie! if it had been true!”
“Whisht, whisht, my darling leddy! but no, my dear, just greet your fill. Eh, mem, how little a man kens! They’re so grand with their wisdom, and never to think that a woman would send a scart of a pen whatever to let us ken the dear lamb was well. I’ve often heard the ministers say that the deevil’s no half as clever as he seems, and now I believe it this day. But you’ll just go to your bed and I’ll give you the draught, as he said, for this has been an awfu’ day.”
“Yes, I’ll go, to be strong for to-morrow,” said Lily, and then she turned back and caught Beenie again, throwing her arms round her. “But first,” she cried, “we’ll give God thanks on our bended knees that my baby is safe. Oh, if it had been true!”
They both felt the baby’s life to be more certain and more assured because his father had sworn he was dead, and they knew that was not true.
Next morning they were both up betimes and had changed their lodging early, going not to Portobello nor to the Bridge of Allan, but to a village on the seaside, very obscure and little thought of, where, late as the season was, they could still spend a week or two without being remarked; and when she had settled her mistress there, Beenie went back to Edinburgh to search again and again through every corner that could be thought of, where Marg’ret might be heard of, but in vain.
They went again next day, and every day, together, and I think traversed Edinburgh almost street by street on a quest so hopeless that both had given it up in their heart before either breathed a word of her despair. Then they did what seemed even to Lily (and still more to Beenie) a most terrible and unparalleled thing to do, and to which she had great difficulty in bringing her mind. This was to apply to the police on the subject, what we should call putting it into the hands of the detectives. Perhaps even now there are innocent persons to whom the idea of “sending the police after” an innocent wanderer still seems a dreadful thing to do. And these were days in which the idea of the detective was little developed and still less understood. They are not always still the most successful of functionaries, but they have at least become heroes of the popular imagination, and a certain class of fiction is full of the wonderful deeds they have succeeded in doing, when all things were arranged to their hand. I do not know that there was a single individual of the order at that time in Edinburgh under the present title and conditions, but the thing must have existed more or less always; and when, with many hesitations and much trouble of mind, Lily made her appeal to the ingenuity of the police service to find the missing woman, it was with a little flutter of hope that she saw Margaret Bland’s name and description taken down. Beenie would not even be present when this was done. She lifted up her testimony, declaring that nothing would induce her to send the police after a decent honest woman that had never done any body any harm. “Oh, mem, you may say what you like,” Beenie cried. “She has had no ill intention. Send the pollisman after Anither if you will. It wasna her contrivancy, it wasna her contrivancy! I would sooner die myself than harry a woman to her ruin and take away her good name!” This had been the peroration with which Beenie had broken away, slamming the door in the face of the official who came to take Miss Ramsay’s orders. Lily was very unhappy and deeply depressed. She had no one to stand by her. “It is for no harm. You will understand she is to come to no harm. Her address only—that is all I want,” she cried. “We’ll put it,” said the man, writing down his notes in his little book, “that it will be something to her advantage. That or a creeminal chairge is the only way of dealing with yon kind of folk.”
“Yes, yes—let it be something to her advantage,” Lily cried. “And it will,” she said, “it will! it will be more to her advantage than any thing she has ever known. You will take care that she is not frightened, not harmed in any way, not in any way!”
“How should it harm an innocent person, if this person is an innocent person?” the functionary said, and left Lily trembling for what she had done, and unable to bear the eye of Beenie, who would scarcely for a whole day after forgive her mistress. They themselves lived in terror of being found, perhaps, in their turn, hunted down by the pollis, Beenie cried—“for if you can do it for her, mem, what for no him that has nae scruples for you?” Lily in her heart trembled too at this thought. It seemed to her that if such means were set in action against herself she would die of misery and shame.
Ten days later she returned to Dalrugas, a little stronger, for her youth and vigor, and the distraction of her thoughts, even though so painfully, from all preoccupation with herself, had given her elastic vitality its chance of recovery: but a changed and saddened woman, never again to be the Lily of the past. Her husband had not sought her, at least had not found her, nor had she wished him to do so; but yet that he should not have penetrated so very easy a mystery seemed to prove to her that he had not wished to do so, and, despite of all that had come and gone, that was a very different matter. Lily’s heart was as heavy as a woman’s heart could be as she went home. The whole secret of her existence, the mystery in which she had been wrapped, which she had felt to be so guilty a secret, and a mystery so oppressive, seemed now to be about to melt away, leaving her for her life long a false and empty husk of being, an appearance and no reality. All this tremendous wave of existence seemed to have passed over her head and to be gone, leaving her, as she was, Lily Ramsay, her uncle’s companion, the daughter of the desolate house, and no more, neither wife nor mother, nothing but a false pretence, a pitiful ghost, the fictitious image of something that she was not, and never again could be.