MR. CAMPBELL was not to be moved. He was very anxious, angry, and ill at ease; but whether it was that he would not betray to me that the message, which he viewed as an anonymous statement, could cause him any uneasiness, or whether it was perplexity and confusion of mind, or if he really felt a confidence which neither his son nor daughter shared, I cannot tell. But he refused to be influenced in any way by this strange communication. It would be some intrusive woman, he said; some busybody—there were many about—who, thinking she could escape being found out in that way, had thought it a grand opportunity of making mischief. He made me a great many apologies for his first hasty words. It was very ill-bred, he said; he was ashamed to think that he had let himself be so carried away; but he would hear nothing of the message itself. It appeared that Miss Campbell had both written and telegraphed to her brother. To the letter there was as yet no reply; but Colin had answered the telegram by a somewhat angry one, declaring that he was all right. “What more would you have him to do?” Mr. Campbell said, with a sort of restrained fury. Charlotte said nothing more in my presence, but I divined that she was anxiously endeavouring to induce him, if not to go himself, yet to permit her to go to her brother. The position was a very embarrassing one, especially when all the brothers left for their business, which they did by the morning boat. It seemed out of all character that a stranger should remain in the circumstances; so I contrived to have a letter by the midday post summoning me back to town. They were, of course, quite well aware that letters do not come from London on a Monday; but Charlotte at least made no remark. Her father looked at me rather fiercely, being irritated and susceptible, and disposed to take offence at anything that seemed to attach importance to this curious episode; and the children made a great outcry and lamentation; but they did not make any serious attempt to change my resolution. It was even agreeable to Miss Campbell I saw, and this gave me a pang, anxious as I was to be agreeable to her in every way. The last boat would get me to the nearest station in time for the night train, or it was suggested that I might be driven there, which would give me still more time. I had made all my arrangements, and had come downstairs again, somewhat forlorn, to have my last talk with the woman whose sweet company during these two or three weeks past had been more to me than I could say. I found her with her hat on, waiting for me in the hall. “I thought you would like to take one turn more,” she said, with a smile, in which (I hoped) there was some sadness. There was certainly excitement in her eyes, in her movements a sort of eagerness and almost impatience. We went out and walked across the lawn to the side of the loch. The sun was beginning to sink; the sky was all aglow, putting on by degrees the gorgeous hues of a northern sunset. She said nothing till we were clear of all possibility of listeners—too far off for the children to rush out upon us, as they so often did. Then she paused suddenly, and looked up into my face. “Mr. Temple,” she said, “you will think me heartless, letting you go without a word, though well I know the reason why. You think you are a trouble to us at such a time. Oh no, you are no trouble. But I am selfish; I don’t wish to detain you—I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything,” I cried, “anything—whatever man can.”
“I knew you would say so; that is why I have scarcely said I am sorry. I have not tried to stop you. Mr. Temple, I am not shutting my eyes to it like my father. I am sure that, whoever it was that spoke to you, the warning was true. I want you to go to Colin,” she said abruptly, after a momentary pause, “and let me know the truth.”
“To Colin?” I cried. “But you know how little acquainted we are. It was not he who wrote to me, but Charley”—
“And I. You don’t leave me out, I hope,” she said, with a faint smile. “But what could make a better excuse than that you have been here? Mr. Temple, you will go when I ask you? Oh, I do more—I entreat you! Go, and let me know the truth.”
“Of course I shall go—from the moment you ask me, Miss Campbell; but what if I offend, and make him angry? He may think me a spy upon him. He may think”—
“Oh, Mr. Temple, never mind. You have been so friendly to us. Think what a comfort it will be to me. You have been mixed up in it all. You are not like a stranger; and yet if you knew the comfort, the satisfaction it is that you are a stranger! Do you know what I mean? I can speak to you. It is not like exposing my poor Colin to somebody who has known him all his life, and who will say, ‘I knew this was what would happen.’ Do you know what I mean?” she asked, with the tears in her eyes.
And I hope I was man enough to understand without either offence or thinking too much of the confidence thus given to me. I perceived that I was a sort of forlorn hope; that I was like a rope thrown out to a drowning man; all the more prized because I was not of them—perhaps because I would disappear—my use being served—and be seen no more. But this was not—oh, surely not—what she meant! She was not a woman to throw anyone over who had served her. We walked up and down the side of the water, which every moment grew more and more into a blazing mirror, a burnished shield decked with every imaginable colour, though our minds had no room for its beauty, and it only touched my eyesight in coming and going. There she told me much about Colin, which I had not known or guessed—about his inclinations and tastes, which were not like any of the others, and how his friends and his ways were unknown to them. “But we have always hoped this would pass away,” she said, “for his heart is good; oh, his heart is good! You remember how kind he was to me when we met you first? He is always kind.” Thus we walked and talked until I had seen a new side at once of her character and life. The home had seemed to me so happy and free from care; but the dark shadow was there as everywhere, and her heart often wrung with suspense and anguish. We then returned slowly towards the house, still absorbed in this conversation, for it was time that I should go in and eat my last meal at Ellermore.
We had come within sight of the door, which stood open as always, when we suddenly caught sight of Mr. Campbell posting towards us with a wild haste, so unlike his usual circumspect walk that I was startled. His feet seemed to twist as they sped along, in such haste was he. His hat was pushed back on his head, his coat-tails flying behind him—precipitate, like a man pursued, or in one of those panics which take away breath and sense, or, still more perhaps, as if a strong wind were behind him, blowing him on. When he came within speech of us, he called out hurriedly, “Come here! come here, both of you!” and turning, hastened back with the same breathless hurry, beckoning with his hand. “He must have heard something more,” Charlotte said, and rushed after him. I followed a few steps behind. Mr. Campbell said nothing to his daughter when she made up to him. He almost pushed her off when she put her hand through his arm. He had no leisure even for sympathy. He hurried along with feet that stumbled in sheer haste till he came to the Lady’s Walk, which lay in the level sunshine, a path of gold between the great boles of the trees. It was a slight ascent, which tried him still more. He went a few yards along the path, then stopped and looked round upon her and me, with his hand raised to call our attention. His face was perfectly colourless. Alarm and dismay were written on every line of it. Large drops of perspiration stood upon his forehead. He seemed to desire to speak, but could not; then held up his finger to command our attention. For the first moment or two my attention was so concentrated upon the man and the singularity of his look and gesture, that I thought of nothing else. What did he want us to do? We stood all three in the red light, which seemed to send a flaming sword through us. There was a faint stir of wind among the branches overhead, and a twitter of birds; but in the great stillness the faint lap of the water upon the shore was audible, though the loch was at some distance. Great stillness—that was the word; there was nothing moving but these soft actions of nature. Ah! this was what it was! Charlotte grew perfectly pale too, like her father, as she stood and listened. I seem to see them now: the old man with his white head, his ghastly face, the scared and awful look in his eyes, and she gazing at him, all her faculties involved in the art of listening, her very attitude and drapery listening too, her lips dropping apart, the life ebbing out of her, as if something was draining the blood from her heart.
Mr. Campbell’s hand dropped. “She’s away,” he said, “she’s away,” in tones of despair; then, with a voice that was shaken by emotion, “I thought it was maybe my fault. By times you say I am getting stupid.” There was the most heart-rending tone in this I ever heard—the pained humility of the old confessing a defect, lit up with a gleam of feverish hope that in this case the defect might be a welcome explanation.
“Father dear,” cried Charlotte, putting her hand on his arm—she had looked like fainting a moment before, but recovered herself—“it may be only a warning. It may not be desperate even now.”
All that the old man answered to this was a mere repetition, pathetic in its simplicity. “She’s away, she’s away.” Then, after a full minute’s pause, “You mind when that happened last?” he said.
“Oh, father! oh, father!” cried Charlotte. I withdrew a step or two from this scene. What had I, a stranger, to do with it? They had forgotten my presence, and at the sound of my step they both looked up with a wild, eager look in their faces, followed by blank disappointment. Then he sighed, and said, with a return of composure, “You will throw a few things into a bag, and we’ll go at once, Chatty. There is no time to lose.”
They went down to the house together, arm in arm, and I remained alone in the Lady’s Walk. My head was turning round. Was it the most superstitious folly? What was it? Common sense, which will come in at inconvenient moments and drive one into a corner, stalked forth and looked me, with cynical eyes, in the face. Well! were they mad, or idiots, or what was it? I stood still and listened till my sense of the incongruous and absurd was too much for me. The footsteps which I had once heard so clearly going along this way, and which had in my hearing turned and gone back, were no longer audible. The wind in the branches, the stir of a bird on the bough, the blackbirds singing clear and high in the shrubberies, even, as I have said, the lap of the water on the shore, were audible, but nothing else. I walked along to the end and back again. There was not a sound. Well, I said to myself, I suppose the sound that caused it must be stilled for some reason or other; and I laughed. But next moment I felt the skin creep upon me, a sort of cold shiver rising under the roots of my hair. I was too much, I suppose, under the influence of the family to regard it in a robust and sensible way. Certain it is, that however the science of acoustics might account for it, as a matter of fact those mysterious sounds had ceased and could be heard no more.
The next hour was to me so confused and incoherent that I could make nothing of it. I was left alone. Only a servant came to tell me that the carriage would be at the door at a certain time. Both Charlotte and her father had disappeared, and whether they were going with me, or meant to let me depart without further notice, I could not tell. When the carriage drove to the door, however, they both appeared. Mr. Campbell was carefully wrapped up, though the evening was not cold. He looked more feeble than I had supposed him to be, and older; there was a quiver and twitching about his face, and he tottered as he got with difficulty into the carriage. We drove to the station with scarcely a word. “Have you got the bags right, Chatty? Have you a rug for the journey? Are you sure you brought money enough?”
“Yes, father, yes,” Charlotte said. He was evidently altogether dependent upon her. She directed me with a look to give him my arm when we arrived at the railway station, and ran to and fro herself, taking the tickets and doing all that was needful.
“Let me do it,” I said; “I cannot bear to see you doing such work.”
“You are serving me much better as it is,” she said. And then came the long journey, swinging through the night with that great clang of movement and vibration of the separated air, which seems to deafen the mind as well as the body and crush down anxious thought. Mr. Campbell slept a little, with his fine white head relieved against the cushions, and then Charlotte came closer to me and talked. I asked her instructions humbly as to what I should do, and she begged me, with a certain terror in her face, to stay with them, to go with them to Colin’s lodgings. She talked a great deal to me in soft tones during the night, with a confidence and familiarity that touched me deeply. It seemed to help her to get through the dreary hours. She told me that it was when her mother died that the steps had been inaudible before. She did not use this phraseology. She said, “When the lady went away before.” “Dear Miss Campbell,” I said, “you who are so reasonable, so full of sense and thought, what could those sounds have to do with matters so serious? It was a holiday, and the people were away from the farm. No doubt that was the cause. There was no echo from the other road, wherever it may be.”
She looked at me with a pitying air. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “And don’t you feel the world poor, poor,”—her voice suspended itself a moment on that little national peculiarity, the repetition which gives force—“when, instead of being a good guardian, a kind soul, it is only a vulgar echo, a thing that is nothing?” The water shone in her eyes when she lingered in the slight chant of her speech upon the good and kind, but dried up and they shone upon me with defiance when she scorned the vulgar, the material. Then she added, with a low voice touched with awe, “And who was it, Mr. Temple, that came to you, that gave you that warning?”
“I have asked myself the question, Miss Campbell.”
“Yes, and you have answered it too. Who else? It is that that makes my heart fail,” she said.
“If,” said I, “we find your brother, as I hope we shall, well and happy”—
Her countenance changed. “In that case—God grant it! oh, God grant it!—you may say what you please, Mr. Temple.” Then after a moment she said quickly, “What is that the French say about the unforeseen being always the thing that happens? In that case”—But she did not tell me what it was that she had foreseen.
To have Charlotte there, altogether a thing so far beyond hope, travelling with me, perhaps to owe something to me, and certainly without any doubt to find myself woven in with the web of her life, was so unexpected and so delightful that I could not perhaps be so deeply affected by their troubles as I might have been otherwise. If it was pain to them, it was good to me—I could not but feel the heart rise in my breast, notwithstanding the pathos there was in the old man’s feebleness, in the broken sleep into which he fell, and the unprotected openness of his slumbering countenance, all revealed in the pain, the anxiety, the irritation of his misery under the wavering lamp. And yet by moments the pity of it would touch me in spite of myself. An old man, a good man, whose life had been full of kindness done to others—I had seen that and heard of it on all sides. He had given every kind of aid to his dependants. At the “works,” to be an orphan was to be the child of the master; and all round him in the country his hand was ever ready—his heart, like his door, always open. And yet this man, who had done so much for others, this was his reward. His own firstborn, the apple of his eye!—I did not know, in so many words, what they feared, but it was not disease or death—it was evil in some shape or other—vice, perhaps crime. God help us all! if justice had been the rule in this world, he must have been defended from every harm by the most spotless, the most devoted of children; his own good deeds would have been returned to him in gratitude and blessing; he would have been the happy man of the Psalms, unashamed in the gates. Alas! and now his grey hairs, his white head was bent low.
We reached London in the fresh early daylight, which made us look all the more fatigued and worn; and then they had a consultation what to do. The decision at last was to postpone for an hour or two the visit to Colin, that Mr. Campbell might get a little rest. I went with them to the hotel. Charlotte said nothing, but she gave me an imploring look, and her father’s weakness seemed to grow upon him every hour. He wanted my arm to go upstairs. He looked for me, and called me to his side with a little querulous movement. Perhaps, by some confusion in his mind, he seemed to consider that he had somehow a right to my services. But, though he felt his weakness, he would not suffer Charlotte to go to her brother alone. “I am all right,” he said; “I am all right. It is because I have not slept. You young people who sleep, that makes all the difference.” He was in reality the only one of us who had slept at all. Breakfast was prepared for us in one of those bare rooms in the great new caravanserai for travellers which are so associated with fatigue and vacancy, with hurried, painful recollections, and melancholy meetings and partings. When I went into it, Charlotte was standing at the window. She called me hastily as soon as I came in. She seized my arm when I came up to her, and drew me close by the window. “Look! was that she?” she cried wildly. “Look! look! or she will be gone.” She pointed to the street below, which was alive with a constant succession of passers-by. To make out one from another was difficult enough. They moved and recrossed in front of us, a stream of men and women, never ending. “Is that she?” I looked blankly, now here, now there. “No, no; not that way—to the left,” said Charlotte—“there—there!” I saw nothing but a stream of people following and crossing each other, all equally commonplace and unknown. I made her sit down, for she was trembling. “It is impossible,” I said, “to distinguish any individual in such a crowded street.”
“Oh, not so! not so! I saw her as plainly as I do you now. She was in the midst of a group which seemed to open and let her be seen. She was in a grey cloak and veil, exactly as you described her. She shook her head at me. I almost thought I could hear her speak.”
“It is your imagination that is excited. How could you see at that distance, much less hear?”
“I thought,” said Charlotte solemnly, “that she said, ‘Too late, too late!’ I know I could not hear. Do not find fault with me. I am very unhappy. There! there! you can see her now?”
Somebody in a cloak indeed disappeared in the crowd as I looked out, but who it was, how could I tell? Perhaps a workwoman going to her work, or careful manager out to make her market. I took Charlotte’s hand, which was trembling, and held it in mine. She was sobbing under her breath. “All this is too much for you,” I said. “Find fault with you? Oh that I could take this trouble on my own shoulders, whatever it is!”
She tried to smile as she looked up. “Perhaps,” she said, “it was imagination, as you say. What is imagination? Does it make any difference?” She was not aware how much meaning was in her words, but spoke as one bewildered, not knowing what was real and what unreal about her.
It was about eleven o’clock when they set out. I put Mr. Campbell into a cab, where he sat very square, with his staff between his knees, leaning upon it, and his face like that of a benignant old judge, wound up to make a painful decision. Charlotte took her place beside him. For my own part, I sprang into a hansom, and desired the man to follow. It seemed impossible to predict what might happen. I had begun to be superstitious and fanciful myself, and a dozen times over fancied that I saw a woman in a cloak following our course with wistful looks, or shaking her head, as Charlotte had seen her. Had she seen it, or only imagined it? And if the latter, I asked myself in her own words, What difference did it make?