THAT day was an important one to Roger Musgrave. To live in that Grange, a great, empty, deserted house, where every desolate apartment echoed to his footstep as if he were a dozen men, and which contained through all its ample rooms nothing but a rude table and chair in the library, where he took his solitary food, a truckle bed where he slept, and some homely implements for poor old Sally in the kitchen, which the unfortunate young man had redeemed out of his mother’s twenty pounds—became at last and once for all impossible to him. That day, setting out for the only refuge of his idleness, a long walk, it had occurred to him to turn his steps in the direction of Marchmain, more from a passing caprice than a serious intention. His kind old Colonel had been there—and there was the Colonel’s niece, the pretty frank little girl, who had clapped her hands at his boyish exploit a year ago. The gratified vanity of that moment, his former curiosity to see Susan again, and her friendly mention of him to her uncle, warmed the young man into more earnestness as he approached the house. Seeing no one, and amazed at its utter solitude and sadness, he had turned away disappointed, when their meeting took place. Then, as we have already said, the young man hurried home. When he arrived there he kept walking up and down the empty library, till the old house rung again, and old Sally believed the young squire was “a-gooin’ out of his mind.” But he was not doing any such thing; he was only repeating to himself that it was impossible!—impossible! that it was against nature, and a discredit to his own character; that he could no longer wait for what other people were doing for him; that this very day he must leave the Grange. What his meeting with Susan had to do with hastening this resolution it is quite impossible to tell; he did not know himself; but the conclusion was beyond disputing. He felt a feverish restlessness possess him—he could not remain even another night, though the morning certainly would have seemed a wiser time for setting out upon his journey. He pushed aside the chop which old Sally, with much care and all the skill her old hands retained, had prepared for him, and began to write. He wrote to his mother, who had recovered all her original place in his affections, a short cheerful note, to say that he was going to London, and would write to her from thence. Then he indited less easily a letter to the Colonel, in which, with all the eloquence he possessed, he represented the impossibility of remaining where he was. He described, with natural pathos, the empty house, the desecrated home, the listless life of idleness he was leading. He said, with youthful inconsequence, strong in the feeling of the moment, that, thrown back upon himself as he had been all these lonely days, he no longer cared for rank, nor desired to keep up a pretence of superior station, which he could not support. “In what am I better than a private soldier?” he wrote, with all the swell and impulse of his full young heart: “worse, in so far that I am neither trained to my weapons, nor used to obedience—better in nothing but an empty name!” And with all that facile philosophy with which young men comfort the bitterness of their disappointments, the lad wrought himself up to a heroical pitch, by asking himself and the Colonel why he should not serve his country as well in the ranks as among their commanders. Why, indeed? The fever of his excitement mounted into his brain. When he finished his letter he was in all the fervour of that self-sacrificing sentiment which is so dear to youth. He went upstairs and packed his clean linen—a goodly store, all unlike the equipment of a private soldier—with some few other necessaries, into a travelling-bag. Then he went down to the great deserted kitchen, where poor old Sally sat “like a crow in the mist” by the chimney corner, her morsel of attenuated fire gleaming faintly across the cold floor. Sally got up and curtseyed when the young master entered. She was a little old woman, bent and feeble, but she had lived there almost all her life, and it would have broken Sally’s heart to be sent away from the Grange. She stood before him with her withered hands crossed upon her white apron, wondering in her dim thoughts whether there might be something to complain of in the dinner she had prepared. Behind her spread all the hospitable provisions of the rich man’s kitchen, the arrangements which spoke of liberal entertainment, assembly of guests above and crowd of servants below; all black, cold, and desolate, unlighted save by the early wintry twilight from the windows and the superannuated glimmer of Sally’s fire; and the emptiness and vacancy went with a chill and an ache to Roger’s heart.
“Sally,” said the young man, courageously, “I shall not give you any more trouble for a long time. You must keep the house as well as you can, and make yourself as comfortable as possible. Don’t make the old place a show for strangers, now that it’s desolate. See, Sally, here’s for your present needs, and when I am settled I will send you more.”
“I allays said it,” said the old woman, “ye can ask Betty Gilsland. I said, says I, ‘the young maister, take my word, ’ll no bide here.’ Ay, ay, ay, I allays said it—and you see it’s coomed true.”
Saying these words, Sally went off into a feeble little outburst of tears, and repeated her affirmation a third time, holding the money he had given her in her hand as if she did not know what to do with it. At last her ideas, such as they were, collected themselves. She made another curtsey.
“And where are you a-gooing, maister?” she said, looking earnestly into his face.
“To make my fortune, Sally,” said the young man, with a smile which trembled between boldness and tears.
“And Amen—and grit may the fortin’ be!” cried the old woman. “Have ye eaten your dinner?”
This was too much for the young man; he burst into a hysterical laugh, grasped her withered hand, shook it rapidly, and hurried away. The poor old body toiled up the stairs after him, to make sure that “the sneck was in the door—for them young things are that careless!” said poor old Sally; then she went back again to her kitchen, and looked at the money, and, after an interval, perceiving what had happened, fell a-sobbing and crying in her solitude, and praying “the Lord bless him!” and “the Lord be gude to him!” as she rocked herself in her wooden chair. He who, out of all that poverty and sadness, and stupor of old age, heard these ejaculations, is no respecter of persons, and it was not without a true benediction that Roger Musgrave left his home.
When he was out upon the high road he turned back to look at the Grange. The evening was dark and favoured him. The day had been mild, and early spring quickened and rustled among those trees, warming to the very tips of their branches with that invisible and silent life which should shortly make them green. There they stood clustering in mutual defence against the night wind, with the high-pitched gable-roof of the old house looking out from among them, and the black belt of firs behind filling up the breaks in their softer outline. By-and-bye, as Roger lingered in that last wistful look, he could see a small, unsteady light wandering from window to window. It was poor old Sally shutting the shutters, murmuring to herself that it was always so when the family were from home. There was something in the action symbolical and significant to Roger; it was the shutting up of the old house, the closing of the old refuge, the audible and visible sentence forbidding the return which up to that moment had been possible: he turned away with tears in his eyes, slung his travelling-bag over his strong shoulders, and setting his face to the wind, sped away through the dark country roads to the little new-built railway town, with its inns and labourers’ cottages. It was quite dark when he got there; the lights dazzled him, and the noise of the coffee-room into which he went filled him with disgust in his exalted and excited state of feeling. Strangely enough as it appeared to him, a recruiting party had possession of the inn; a swaggering sergeant with parti-coloured ribbons went and came between the coffee-room and the bar, where a batch of recruits were drowning their regrets and compunctions in oceans of beer. Roger went out, with a strange mixture of disgust and curiosity, to look at them. He could not observe, and criticize, and despise as Horace Scarsdale could have done; he found no amusement in the coarse self-reproach of one, the sullen obstinacy of another, the reckless gaiety with which a third put off his repentance till to-morrow. The din of their pretended enjoyment was pathetic and melancholy to Roger; but, amid all, he could not help the thought which occurred to him again and again—“Am I to be the comrade of these unfortunate blockheads?—are these my brothers-in-arms?”
And then, quick as thought, another picture presented itself to him. He thought of the Colonel, with his kind solicitous face, his stoop of attention, and the smile which lighted up his fatherly eyes when he spoke of his boy, whom he should hope to see Roger’s brother-in-arms. For the moment he saw before him, not the flaring lights and clumsy figures of this rude company, but the dim inn-parlour, with its poor candles, and the benign old stranger with his paternal smile. The young man could not bear it. He said to himself sternly, “This must not be!” and dismissed the contrast which distracted him from his mind with a violent effort. Then he made his way into the half-lighted railway-station, where everything lay dark and silent, a stray porter making ghostly appearance across the rails, and an abysm of darkness on either side, out of which, and into which, now and then plunged the red-eyed ogre of a passing train. In answer to his inquiries, he found that the night-train to London stopped here to take up passengers in the middle of the night. He made a homely supper in the inn, and then came outside, to the station, to wait for it. There he paced up and down, watching the coming and going of short trains here and there, the hurried clambering up, and the more leisurely descent of rural passengers, upon whom the light fell coldly as they went and came. The roar and rustle with which some one-eyed monster, heard long before seen, came plunging and snorting out of the darkness, and all the rapid, shifting, phantasmagoria, of that new fashion of the picturesque which belongs to modern times. The wind blew chill from the open country, with a shrill and piercing concentration of cold through the narrow bar of the little station. By-and-bye the lights diminished, the noises stilled, nobody was left in the place but himself, a drowsy clerk in the little office, and some porters sleeping on the benches. Roger, for his part, could not sleep; he kept in motion, marching up and down the short, resounding, wooden platform, urged by the midnight cold, and by his thoughts, until his weary vigil was concluded by the arrival of his train. Then he, too, plunged like everybody else into darkness, into the mysterious midnight road, with dark London throbbing and shouting at the end; into life and his fate.