THE bustle of this afternoon’s occupation, which left her no time to think before she was deposited at her hotel for her late dinner, put serious thoughts out of Evelyn’s mind; and even when that hasty meal, over which she had no inclination to linger, was ended, and she had relapsed into the comfort of a dressing gown, and lay extended in an easy chair beside the open windows, hearing all the endless tumult of town, half with a sense of being left out, and half with self-congratulations over her quiet, she was little inclined to reflection. The echo of all that she had been doing hung about her, and that pleasant little commotion of choice, of arrangement and organization, which is involved in a new house and new settlement, absorbed her thoughts. They went very fast, setting a thousand things stirring. There is nothing that moves the woman of to-day more than the task of making a house pretty and harmonious, and forming a version of home out of any spare hired dwelling. Evelyn had anticipated having this to do for Rosmore. But James had somehow taken it out of her hands. He had gone to prepare it for her, not thinking that she would have liked much better to have a share in the doing. And now to think of having her little essay for herself, and setting up a temporary home out of her own fancy, turning a few bare rooms into a place full of fragrance and brightness, pleased her fancy. She listened to the carriages flying past with an endless roll of sound, so many of them conveying society to its favourite haunts, to one set of brilliant rooms after another, to new combinations of smiling faces and beautiful toilettes, with a half melancholy half pleasing excitement. To be above, and listen to that sound, is always slightly melancholy, and Evelyn could not but think a little of the pleasure of emerging from the silence of solitude, of seeing and being seen, of finding friends from whom she had been long parted, and a dazzling vision of life which was all the brighter from being partially forgotten, and never very perfectly known. From where she sat she could see the glare of the carriage lamps, and now and then some glimpses of the persons within—a lady’s white toilette surging up at the window or a brilliant shirt front looking almost like another lamp inside. It amused her to watch that stream flow on.
And then there came over her a dark shadow, the vision of the man who had been so young and so full of life when she saw him last, and who was so death-like and fallen now. The thought chilled her suddenly to the heart. She drew back from the window, and wrapped herself in a shawl, with the shudder of a cold which was not physical but spiritual. In the midst of all that ceaseless loudness of life and movement and pleasure, and of the vision which had visited her own brain of lighted rooms, and animated faces, and brilliant talk—to drop back to that wreck of existence, the helpless man leaning upon his servant’s arm, bundled up like a piece of goods, unresisting, compelled to submit to those cares which were an indignity, yet which were necessary to very existence! The echo came back to Evelyn’s heart. If there was in her mind, who in reality cared for none of these things, a little sentiment of loneliness as she saw the stream of life go by, what must there be in his, to whom society was life, and who was cut off from all its pleasures? Her imagination followed him to the prison of his weakness, his melancholy home, with this imperative servant who tended and ruled all his movements, for his sole society. God help him! What a condition to come to, after all the experiences of his life!
Should she ever meet him again, she had asked herself, partly with a vaguely formed wish of saying some word of kindness to so great a sufferer, partly with a shrinking reluctance to give herself the pain of looking upon his humiliation again? But it was almost as great a shock as on the first meeting to see him coming along the park as she walked to Lady Leighton’s next day. He was being drawn along in his wheeled chair by the man who had bundled him up so summarily on the previous occasion. Evelyn would have hurried on, but he held out his hand appealingly, and even called her name as she endeavoured to pass. “Won’t you stop and speak to me?” he said. It was impossible to resist that appeal. She stood by him looking down upon his ashy countenance, the loose lips and half-open mouth which babbled rather than talked, and which it required an effort at first to understand. “Will you sit down a little and talk?” he said. “It’s a pleasure I don’t often have, a talk with an old friend. Sit there, and I’ll have my chair drawn beside you. I hope you won’t think yourself a victim, as I fear some of my friends do——”
“Oh no,” she said anxiously, “don’t think so: I—was going to see Madeline—but it will not matter——”
“Oh, she can spare you for half an hour.”
It was with dismay that Evelyn heard this, but how could she resist the power of his weakness and fallen estate? He had his chair drawn up in front of the one she had taken, very near her, and with a gesture dismissed his servant, who went and took up his position with his back against a tree, and his eyes upon the master who was also his patient. The sight of this reminder of his extreme weakness and precarious condition was almost more than Evelyn’s nerves could bear.
“We are a wonderful contrast, you and I,” he said; “you so young and fair, just entering upon life, and I leaving it, a decrepid old man.”
“You know,” she said, “that I am not young and fair any more than you are old. I am grieved to see you so ill; but I hope——”
“There is no room for hope. To go on like this for many years, which they say is possible, is not much worth hoping for, is it? Still, I would bear it for various reasons. But I am not likely to be tried. I am a wreck—and my wife only lived two years—I suppose you knew that.”
“I had heard that Mrs. Saumarez died.”
“Yes—I’d have come to you for consolation had I dared.”
“It was better not,” said Evelyn, while a subdued flash of indignation shot out much against her will from her downcast eyes.
“That was what I thought. When a thing does not succeed at first it is better not to try to get fire out of the ashes,” he said didactically; “but between us two, there is no difficulty in seeing which has the best of it. I should like to call and make Mr. Rowland’s acquaintance. But you see the plight in which I am. It is almost impossible for me to get up a stair——”
“My husband—does not mean to remain in London,” she said hurriedly. “We are going to Scotland at once.”
“To a place he has bought, I suppose? I hear that he has a great fortune—and I am most heartily glad of it for your sake.”
She replied hurriedly, with a slight bow of acquiescence. It was the strangest subject to choose for discussion: but yet it was very difficult to find any subject. “You told me the other day,” she said, “about your children.”
“I am very thankful to you for asking. I wanted to speak of them. I have a boy and girl, with only a year between them—provided for more or less; but who is to look after them when I am gone? Their mother’s family I never got on with. They are the most worldly-minded people. I should not like my little Rosamond to fall into their hands.”
There was a pause: for Evelyn found that she had nothing to say. It was so extraordinary to sit here, the depositary of Edward Saumarez’s confidences, listening to the account of his anxieties—she who was so little likely to be of any help.
“How old is she?” she managed to ask at last.
“Rosamond? How long is it since we were—so much together? A long time. I dare say more than twenty years.”
“Something like that.”
“Ah well,” he said with a sigh, “I married about a year after. They’re nineteen and twenty, or thereabouts. Rosamond, they tell me, ought to be brought out; but what is the good of bringing out a girl into the world who has no one to protect her? Nobody but a worldly-minded aunt who will sell her for what she will bring—marry her off her hands as quickly as possible; that is all she will think of. It may seem strange to you, but my little girl is proud of me, dreadful object as I am.”
“Why should it seem strange? It would be very unnatural if she was not.”
“She is the only one in the world who cares a brass farthing whether I live or die.” As Evelyn raised her eyes full of pity, she was suddenly aware that he was watching her, watching for some tell-tale flush or gesture which should give a tacit denial to what he said. He, like Lady Leighton, was of opinion that a woman never forgets, and dreadful object as he allowed himself to be, the man’s vanity would fain have been fed by some sign that the woman beside him, whom he had abandoned so basely, whose heart he had done his best to break, still cherished something of the old feeling, and was his still. He was disconcerted by the calm compassion in her eyes.
“Eddy is as cold as a stone,” he said; “he is like his mother’s people. He doesn’t see why an old fellow like me should keep dragging on. He minds no more than Jarvis does—less, for I am Jarvis’s living, and to keep me alive is the best thing for him. But it would be better for Eddy, he thinks, if I were out of the way.”
“Please do not speak so; I don’t believe that any son really entertains such thoughts.”
“Ah, that shows how little you know. You have not been in society all these years. Eddy is philosophical, and thinks that I have very little good of my life, which is true enough, and that he would have a great deal, which is quite as true.”
“Even if it were so, he would not be his own master—at nineteen,” Evelyn said.
“Twenty—he is the eldest. Of course he would be better off in that case. He would have more freedom, and a better allowance; and he would be of more importance, not the second but the first.”
“Oh,” she cried with horror, “do not impute such dreadful motives to your own child.”
He shook his head, looking at her with an air of cynical wisdom—a look which made the countenance, so changed and faded with disease, almost diabolical to contemplate. Evelyn turned her eyes away with a movement of horrified impatience. And this was not at all the feeling with which Saumarez meant to inspire the woman who had once loved him. He was unwilling even now to believe that she had entirely escaped out of his power.
“Evelyn,” he said, putting forth again that large nerveless hand, from the touch of which she shrank—“let me call you so, as in the old days. It can do no one any harm now.”
“Surely not,” she said; “it could do no one any harm.”
He had not expected this reply; if she had shrank from the familiarity and refused her permission, he would have been better pleased. Helpless, paralytic, dreadful to behold, he would fain have considered himself a danger to her peace of mind still.
“I have to accept that,” he said, “like all the rest. That it doesn’t matter what I say, no man could be jealous of me. Evelyn!—I like to say the name—there’s everything that’s sweet and womanly in it. I wish I had called my little girl by that name. I thought of it, to tell the truth.”
“Nothing could have been more unsuitable,” cried Evelyn, with a flush of anger. “I hope you did not think of it, for that would have been an insult, not a compliment to me. Mr. Saumarez, I think I must go on. Madeline expected me at——”
“Oh, let Madeline wait a little! She has plenty of interests, and I have something very serious to say. You may think I am trying to lead you into recollections—which certainly would agitate me, if not you. You are very composed, Evelyn. I ought to be glad to see you so, but I don’t know that I am. I remember everything so well—but you—seem to have passed into another world.”
“It is true. The world is entirely changed for me. I can scarcely believe that it was I who lived through so many experiences twenty-two years ago.”
“I feel that there is a reproach in that—and yet if I could tell you everything—but you would not listen to me now.”
“I am no longer interested,” she said gently, “so many things have happened since then: my father’s death, and Harry’s. How thankful I was to be able to care for them both! All these things are between me and my girlhood. It has died out of my mind. If there is anything you want to say to me, Mr. Saumarez, I hope it is on another subject than that.”
The attempt in his eyes to convey a look of sentiment made her feel faint. But fortunately his faculties were keen enough to show him the futility of that attempt. “Yes,” he said, “it is another subject—a very different subject. I shall not live long, and I have no friends. I care for nobody, and you will say it is a natural consequence of this that nobody cares for me.”
She made a movement of dissent in her great pity. “It cannot be so bad as that.”
“But it is. My sister’s dead, you know, and there is really nobody. Evelyn, I have a great favour to ask you. Will you be the guardian of my boy and girl?”
“The guardian—of your children!” She was so startled and astonished that she could only gaze at him, and could not find another word to say.
“Why should you be so much surprised? I never thought so much of any woman as I do of you. I find you again after so many years, unchanged. Evelyn, you are changed. I said so a little while ago: but yet you are yourself, and that’s the best I know. I’d like my little Rosamond to be like you. I’d like Eddy, though he’s a rascal, to know some one that would make even him good. Evelyn, they are well enough off, they would not be any trouble in that way. Will you take them—will you be their guardian when I am gone?”
Evelyn was not only astonished but frightened by what he asked of her. She rose up hastily. “You must not think of it—you must not think of it! What could I do for them? I have other duties of my own.”
“It would not be so much trouble,” he said, “only to give an eye to them now and then; to have them with you when you felt inclined to ask them—nothing more. For old friendship’s sake you would not object to have my children on a visit once a year or so. I am sure you would not refuse me that?”
“But that is very different from being their guardian.”
“It would not be, as I should arrange it. You would give them your advice when they wanted it. You would do as much as that for any one, for the gamekeeper’s children, much more for an old friend’s—and see them now and then, and inquire how they were getting on? I should ask nothing more. Evelyn, you wouldn’t refuse an old friend, a disabled, unhappy solitary man like me?”
“Oh, Mr. Saumarez!” she cried. He had tried to raise himself up a little in the fervour of his appeal, but fell back again in a sort of heap, the exertion and the emotion being too much for his strength. The servant appeared in a moment from where he had been watching. “He oughtn’t to be allowed to agitate himself, ma’am,” said the man reproachfully. Evelyn, alarmed, walked humbly beside the chair till they came to the gate of the Park, terrified to think that perhaps he had injured himself, that perhaps she ought to humour him by consenting to anything. He was not allowed to say any more, nor did she add a word, but he put out his hand again and pressed hers feebly as they parted. “Can I do anything?” she had asked the servant in her compunction. “Nothing but leave him quite quiet,” said the man. “It might be as much as his life is worth. I don’t hold with letting ‘em talk.” Saumarez was one of a class, a mere case, to his attendant. And Evelyn felt as if she had been guilty of a kind of murder as she hurried away.
She found Lady Leighton waiting for her for lunch, and slightly disturbed by the delay. “I have a thousand things to do, and the loss of half-an-hour puts one all out,” she said, with a little peevishness; “but I’m sure you had a reason, Evelyn, for being so late.”
“A reason which was much against my will,” said Evelyn, telling the story of her distress, to which her friend listened very gravely. “I should take care not to meet him again,” said Lady Leighton, with a cloud on her brow. “You listen to him out of pure pity, but weak and ailing as he is, it would be sweet to his vanity to compromise a woman even now.”
“I do not understand what you mean,” said Evelyn; “he could not compromise me, if that is it, by anything he could do, were he all that he has ever been.”
“You don’t know what your husband might think,” said her friend; “he wouldn’t like it. He might have every confidence in you—but a man of Ned Saumarez’s character, and an old lover, and all that—he might say——”
“My husband,” said Mrs. Rowland, feeling the blood mount to her head, “has no such ideas in his mind. He neither knows anything about Mr. Saumarez’s character, nor would he even if he did know. You mistake my feeling altogether. It is not anything about my husband that distresses me—it is the trust he wants me to undertake of his children.”
“Oh, you may make yourself easy about that, Evelyn. That was only a blind. It is little he thinks about his children. He’ll get you to meet him and to talk to him, professedly about them—oh, I don’t doubt that! but that’s not what he means. You don’t know Ned Saumarez so well as I do,” cried Lady Leighton, putting out her hand to stop an outcry of indignation; “you don’t know the world so well as I do; you have been out of it for years, and you always were an innocent, and never did understand—”
“Understand! that a man who is dying by inches should have—such ideas. A man on the edge of the grave—with a servant, a nurse, looking after him as if he were a child.”
“It’s very sad, my dear, especially the last, which is incredible, I allow. How a man like that can think that a woman would—But they do all the same. You might be led yourself by pity, or perhaps by a little lingering feeling—or—well, well, I will not say that, I don’t want to make you angry—perhaps by a little vanity then, if I may say such a word.”
“Madeline, I think you know far too much of the world.”
“Perhaps,” said Lady Leighton, not without a little self-complacence. “I have had a great deal of experience in life.”
“And too little,” said Evelyn, “of honest meaning and truth.”
“Oh, as for that! but if you think you will find truth or honest meaning, my dear, in Ned Saumarez, you will be very far wrong; and if he can lead you into a mess with your husband, or get you talked about——”
“He will never get me into a mess with my husband, you may be certain of that, Madeline.”
“Oh, if you will take your own way, I cannot help it,” cried Lady Leighton. “I have done all I can. And now come down to lunch. At all events we must not quarrel, you and I.”
The lunch, however, was not a very successful one, and Evelyn refused to take any further action about Chester Street, and was so determined in her resistance that her friend at last gave up the argument, and with something very like the quarrel she had deprecated, allowed Mrs. Rowland to depart alone for her hotel, which she did in great fervour of indignation and distress. But as she walked quickly along the long line of the park, she perceived with a pang of alarm and surprise, the invalid’s chair being drawn across the end of the ride, into the same path where she had met Saumarez an hour or two before. Was it possible that Madeline could be right? Was he going back to wait for her there? She stood but for a moment and watched the slow mournful progress of the chair, the worn-out figure lying back in it, the ashen face amid the many wraps. A certain awe came over her. She had been long out of the world, and had never been very wise in such matters: and who could believe that a man in the last stage of life should be able to amuse himself by schemes at once so base and so frivolous? She turned back half-ashamed of herself for doing so, and went home another way. It might be, she said to herself with a compunction, that all he meant was after all what he thought his children’s interest: then with a thrill of self-suspicion asked herself, was this the vanity by which Madeline, too clear sighted, had suggested she might be moved? Oh, clearly the world was not a place for her! The mere discussion of such possibilities abashed and shamed her. Her simple husband, who could not cope with these fine people, and upon whom probably they would look down—her home, far from all such ignoble suggestions, her own difficulties, which might be troublesome enough, but not like these—how much better they were! Her heart had been a little caught by the aspect of the old life from which she had been separated so long, and she had begun to think that with all the advantages her new position gave her, it might be pleasant to resume those of the old one, and venture a little upon the sea of society, which looked so bright at the first glance. Had she yielded to this temptation no doubt the good Rowland would have followed her guidance, pleased with anything she suggested, delighted for a time with the fine company, giving up his chosen life for her sake. And it is very probable that, had Lady Leighton foreseen the disgust with which her warning would fill her friend’s mind, she would have been chary about giving it, and would have preferred to let Evelyn take her chance of compromise and danger. The worst of society is, that it deadens the mind to the base and vile, taking away all horror of things unclean, by inculcating a perpetual suspicion of their existence. But no such deadening influence had ever been in Evelyn’s mind. She sent another letter to her husband by that afternoon’s post, which, in the midst of various tribulations of his own, made that good man’s heart leap. She told him that she had changed her mind about staying in London, that it was odious to her: that she counted the hours till he should return, that she longed for Rosmore, and to see the Clyde and the lochs, and the children, and “our own home.” James Rowland, though he was not a sentimental man, kissed this letter; for he was in great need of consolation, having in full measure his own troubles too.