ROWLAND went back to his hotel in the evening in much depression, yet excitement of mind. He had taken his two children out with him in the afternoon, with a remorseful desire to please them in any way he could, since he could not feel towards them as their father ought to feel. It was difficult at first to make out how he could please them best, and at last it was Marion’s indications of desire that were the rule of the party. He procured the smartest carriage the hotel could supply, with a pair of horses, and drove them about, Marion in the fullest rapture of satisfaction, increased by her father’s presents to her of various articles which she admired in the shop windows as they passed. It amused him, and yet hurt him to see the air with which she got down from the carriage and swept into the jewellers and the haberdashers. Her eyes swam in a rapture of light and happiness. She raised her little flowing skirt, which was more like Sauchiehall Road than the temples of fashion which she visited, with an air that suggested velvet. Poor little Marion! it was impossible to be more happy than she was, turning over the pretty things presented to her, and choosing whatever she pleased, while papa, with his pocket-book full of notes, stood by. She had taken him to Mr. MacColl’s “splendid shop” in Buchanan Street, with a sense that the school friends who had overwhelmed her with their grandeur might be thereby somewhat subdued in their pretensions; and it was ecstasy to her to buy the most expensive things, and to feel the superiority of the position of patron. “It is a very good shop,” she said, so that all the young gentlemen and young ladies behind the counter might hear, “and I will advise mamma, when she comes, to patronize Mr. MacColl.”
Archie, who dragged behind, much bored and ashamed of himself, opened wide eyes at the introduction of this name, and Rowland, for his part, had a sudden pang of anger to think that this vulgar little girl should venture to speak of his Evelyn so—before he recollected, poor man, that the vulgar little girl was his own child, and that it was most desirable that she should give that character and title to his wife. “Will I say the things are for Miss Rowland of Rosmore?” she whispered to him. “Certainly not,” he said with irritation. And yet he had no right to be angry with the poor little thing who knew no better. He encouraged her in her purchases by way of compensation to her for his unfatherly thoughts. “And now, don’t you think you might buy a silk dress or something for the poor aunty?” Marion tossed her little head.
“She got yon ruby silk just six months ago, and she’s got more in her drawers than she can ever wear;” and sinking her voice a little—“it’s all off us. She would never have had a silk—”
“Hush, child!” said Rowland imperatively; but Marion was not to be hushed.
“It’s quite true, papa. She has just dresses upon dresses, and last winter she made down one of hers for me—me that it all belonged to! She said I was too young to have silks for myself. I never put on the horrid old thing! I would have thought shame for your daughter, papa!”
“There are worse things than wearing old dresses that my daughter might be ashamed of,” he said hastily. But then he repeated to himself that it was not her fault: it was his fault—his alone, that he had neglected his children, and how could he ever make up to them for that unfortunate beginning? To please Archie they drove to a cricket match going on in a field in a remote part of the town, where Mr. Rowland’s carriage made a great sensation, with the coachman in the hotel livery. Rowland himself was a little ashamed of the turn-out. But even Archie, though much simpler than his sister, jumped down from the carriage with a swagger, and strolled across the ground with an ineffable air of splendour and superiority, which made his father—oh, his poor father!—so conscious of all these weaknesses, laugh. It was a rueful laugh; and to see Marion sit and bridle and plume herself, with little touches of re-arrangement to her hat and her tie and her gloves, looking as well as she knew how, as a fine lady and patroness of the humble but lively scene should look, was such a painful amusement as the poor man could never forget. He could not help being amused, but it was rueful fun. And then he said to himself, repressing at once the levity and the pain, that had he never left them, he would have been as proud of them as Jane was, and never would have found out the imperfections.
Archie brought several of his friends in their cricketting clothes up to the carriage to see his sister, and to be introduced to papaw. Poor Archie could not make up his mind to abandon that “papaw.” “Father” seemed almost disrespectful to so great a personage as the rich Rowland, the great engineer. He was very anxious, however, to explain, sotto voce, that several of the young men in their flannels who gathered round Marion, and to whom she dispensed smiles and small jokes, like a Duchess at Lord’s, were “students,” a description which slightly mollified Rowland. Students were better than shop-boys, which was what Archie himself was painfully like. Never had Mr. Rowland encountered a harder piece of work in his life than to smile and tolerate the small talk of his children and their friends. He could not help comparing them to the people he had been accustomed to in late years,—people, he said vehemently to himself, perhaps not worth half so much! These lads, if they were students, were probably maintaining themselves, living like Spartans, not to draw upon the limited resources at home. How much nobler and finer than the young officers and civilians he had been in the habit of seeing in that same guise, yet how different! That he, a man of the people himself, should so see the difference; that he should be so pained by it, and by the fact that his son was at home in the one strata of company, and would be quite out of the other! How painful, how miserable, how ridiculous, how wrong altogether it was! He exerted himself to talk to some of them, and said angrily to himself that they were much more conversible than the subalterns, at whom he would have thrown a jibe, whom he would not have taken the trouble to talk to! But what of that? Archie swaggered about the ground proud and inwardly uplifted because of the carriage, the pair of horses, the pretty sister, and papaw. Had he dared to ask them all to Rosmore, where they might see the family in their glory, his cup of triumph would have been full; but he did not quite venture upon such a strong step as that.
Then they drove home in triumph to the Sauchiehall Road, where the people next door and next again, looked out of their windows to see the splendid vehicle dash up to Mrs. Brown’s, and the baskets of fruit and of flowers that were lifted out. She herself came out to the door to meet them, with her dress rustling, and her gold chain tinkling, and her ruby ribbons floating behind her. “Weel!” she cried, “ye’ve gotten back! and have ye had a grand drive? and eh, the bonnie flowers; but what an extravagance, for they would cost just a fortune; and a handfu’ of sweetpeas is just so pleasant in a room. And the pine aipples! Jims, my man, you’re just a prodigal: but we cannot be severe on you, a man just new come home.” She was very anxious that he would come in “to his tea.” But poor Rowland had borne enough for one day. He made the excuse of business to do and letters to write. “Ou, ay, ye’ll just have Madam to write to, and tell her all about your bonnie bairns,” Mrs. Brown said, with a cloud upon her brow.
Yes, thank Heaven, he had madam to write to; but whether he would tell her or not about the children was a matter upon which he could not make up his mind. He drove back to his hotel in solitary splendour, still somewhat ashamed of the hotel carriage, the pretension of the showy vehicle, and the shabby horses. Should he tell Evelyn all about the children? It seemed almost a disloyalty to poor Mary who was gone, to confide his disappointment in her children to any one, above all to the wife who had taken her place, though at so long an interval of years that he felt no disloyalty in that. If Evelyn had been with him, her sympathy would have been his best solace, and she would have found something to say that would have been a comfort to him. He was certain of that—something that would prove to him that things were not so bad as they seemed, that they would mend. But to put it in black and white, to put the disappointment of his soul into words, was what he could not do. He did not even feel sure that he wanted her to know it. If he could only keep his opinions to himself, pretend that they were all he could desire, and leave her to find out! It was quite possible that she would be more tolerant than he; her pride would not be injured as his was by the shortcomings of those who were his own. She would not feel the mortification, the disappointment, and perhaps she would not even see so much to find fault with in them. She had finer insight than he had; she was more charitable. She would see all the good there was, and not so much of the vulgarity. What did she know about vulgarity? She would think, perhaps, it was characteristic, original, Scotch. Rowland had listened often grimly enough to such fashionable views of manner and deportment. He had heard a man, whom he considered a brute, explained away in this manner. Evelyn might take that view. So he locked up his chief trouble in his own mind, and wrote to her that delightful letter, telling her that whatever she did would be right, whether to stay in town or to set up at once at Rosmore. He was not sure himself that he did not look upon that suggestion of staying in town as a relief and postponement for which he would be grateful. Yet what did a little time matter, one way or another? Sooner or later the step would have to be taken; the permanent household formed. Indeed, he felt that it would be natural for the children to expect that their father should take them to London, and let them see something of the world, which was a suggestion at which he shivered more than ever.
Poor Rowland! being only an engineer, though a distinguished one, and a man of the people, though risen to great wealth, and sometimes even objected to in his own person as not a gentleman, it was very hard that he should be thus sensitive to the breeding of his children, and feel their imperfections as keenly as the most accomplished “smart” man could have done. Perhaps had he not married and learned to see through Evelyn’s eyes, this catastrophe might not have happened. And he had been so long parted from the children that there was little real love, only the vague instinct of partiality to counteract the shock: and that instinct of partiality often makes everything worse, giving a double clear-sightedness, and exigence of impossible perfection to the unfortunate parent whose fatherhood is mortifying and miserable to him, not a thing of pride but of shame. These were much too strong words to use—but they were not too strong from Rowland’s point of view. The only comfort he had was in his boy’s eyes, which were like his mother’s. And even that thought was not without a pang, for it thrust upon him the question whether the mother, had she lived, would not have been like Jane. Had it been so, it was evident that Rowland himself would not have been what he was. He would have stayed on in the foundry and become a foreman, and perhaps in course of time would have ascended the social scale to a house in the Sauchiehall Road: and his son would have been a clerk in an office, and he himself would have been very proud to think that Archie had friends who were “students” and was steady, and read papers at the Debating Society. His brain seemed to whirl round as he thought of all that which might have been. It is usually the better things which might have happened to us that we think of under that formula—but there is another side in this, as in all human matters. And when Rowland thought what might have been the natural course of his life had Mary lived, it gave him a giddiness which seemed to suspend all his powers. Would it perhaps have been happier so? He would have been very fond of his children, and proud to think that they were taking a step above himself in the world—and Mary would have grown stout like her sister, and would have had, perhaps, a rustling silken gown like Jane’s, and produced with pride a bottle of port-wine and a bottle of sherry-wine when she received a visitor. And he himself would have been proud of his family and contented with his moderate means. He would have taken Archie and May to the saut water, and pointed out to them the opening in the trees and the house upon the knoll with the white colonnade, and Mary would have said with a laugh, “Hoot, your father’s just doited about that white house on the brae.” What a difference, what a wonderful difference! And which would have been best?
James Rowland, tenant of Rosmore, with a name known over India, and his money in all manner of lucky investments, and Evelyn Ferrars for his wife, thought of all this with a curious strain of sensation. He was in many respects an imaginative man. He could realise it all as distinctly as if he saw it before him. He knew the kind of man he would himself have been—perhaps a better man than he was now—a straightforward, honourable man, limited in his horizon, but as trustworthy, as honest and true as a man could be. And he would have known all the real good there was in his children then, and they would have been free of the vulgarities and meanness they had acquired by their false position and mistaken training. It was very startling to think how different, how altered everything might have been. Was he thankful that poor Mary had died? That which had been such a blow to him, driving him out of the country, had been the foundation of all his fortune. It had been the most important event, the turning point in his life. He would never have seen Evelyn, or would have contemplated her afar off as a fine lady, a being to be admired or made light of, but neither understood nor known. How his head went round and round!
It was naturally the same subject that suggested itself to his mind when he woke next morning to a new day, a day not like the last in which everything was unassured, but one in which certainty had taken the place of doubt, and he had no longer vague and exciting possibilities to think of, but only how to nourish and adapt the drawbacks which he knew. These cost him thought enough, all the more that the practical part of the matter had now to be determined, and every decision of life was so close to him that the sense of perspective failed, and it was impossible to realise the relative importance of things: how he should manage to satisfy their Aunt Jane, being for the moment of as great consequence as how he should order the course of their future existence.
He was received in Sauchiehall Road with great eagerness, Archie hurrying to open the door for him, while both Mrs. Brown and Marion appeared at the window as soon as his step was heard, full of nods and becks and wreathed smiles. Mrs. Brown wore another and different “silk,” one that was brocaded, or flowered, as she called it, the foundation being brown and the flowers in various brilliant colours; and Marion had put on the trinkets he had bought to please her on the previous day in addition to those she had worn before, so that she too tinkled as she walked. Rowland received their salutations with as much heartiness as was possible. But he was scarcely prepared for the questions with which Marion assailed him, dumbly backed up by Archie from behind, with his mother’s eyes pleading for every indulgence. “Oh you’re walking, papa?” the girl cried with disappointment, “I thought you would have come in the carriage.”
“It would be a great nuisance for me to have always to move about in a carriage,” he said. “Besides I can’t say that I am proud to be seen behind such horses, a pair of old screws from a hotel.”
“Oh, you’re not pleased with them! I thought they were beautiful,” said Marion, “and they go so splendidly—far far better than a cab or a geeg. We were making up in our minds where we were to go to-day.”
“Where you were to go?”
“To show you everything, papa,” said Marion. “You must see all the sights now that you are here. Archie and me were thinking——”
“I knew the sights,” he said interrupting her, “before you were born—but if you want the carriage, Archie can go and order it and take you where you please—I have many things to consult your aunt about.”
“To consult—Aunty!” Marion opened her eyes wide, and elevated her brow, but this impertinence did not disconcert Mrs. Brown—
“They just take their fun out of me,” she said, with a broad smile; “they think I’m a’ of the old fashion, and ken naething. And deed it’s true. They’re far beyond me with their new fangled ways. But ye see your papaw is no altogether of your way of thinking, Mey.”
Marion nodded her little head again and again in astonished acquiescence; but by this time it had dawned upon her that to drive everywhere in “the carriage,” she and Archie alone, would perhaps be still more satisfactory than with the grave countenance beside her of a not altogether understood papa—who did not enter into their fun, or even understood their jokes. The brother and sister accordingly hurried out together well-pleased, and Marion established herself in Rowland’s room at the hotel while Archie ordered the carriage. The girl turned over all her father’s papers, and examined closely the photograph of Evelyn which stood on his mantelpiece. “That’ll be her,” she said, and took it up and carried it to the window to see it better—“but no great thing,” she added under her breath, “to have made such a catch as papa! Dear bless me, she’s a very ordinary woman—nothing to catch the eye. She’ll have plain brown hair, and no colouring to speak of, and not even a brooch or a locket round her neck. What could he see in a woman like that?”
“It’s a nice kind of a face,” said Archie.
“So is Aunty’s a nice kind of a face—and plenty other people—but to catch a man like papa!”
Mrs. Brown had no greater pleasure in life than to see her children go out together in their best clothes, bent upon enjoyment. She stood at the window and watched them, as she did on every such opportunity. It was her way, even of going to church and performing the weekly worship, which was all she thought of in the light of religious observance—to watch them going, dressed in their best, with their shining morning faces, and Marion’s ribbons fluttering in the air, and to laugh with pleasure, and dry her wet eyes, and say “the blessin’ of the Lord upon them!” The humble woman did not want a share in their grandeur, not even to see the sensation they made when they walked into church, two such fine young things. She was content with the sight of them walking away. It was only when she turned her eyes, full of this emotion and delight, upon James Rowland’s disturbed and clouded face, that she began to understand that all was not perfectly, gloriously well.
“Bless me! oh, Jims! a person would think you were not content.”
“If you mean with the children,” he said, “I don’t see any reason I have for being content.”
“Lord bless us!” said Jane, thunderstruck. She added after a moment, “I canna think but it’s just your joke. No to be satisfied, and far more than satisfied! If you’re no just as prood as a man can be of the twa of them—I would just like to know what you want, Jims Rowland. Princes and princesses? but so they are!”
“It is quite just what you say,” he replied, hanging his head. “It’s my fault or it’s the fault of circumstances, that makes a thing very good in one place that is not good at all in another. But never mind that; the thing to be considered is, what is the best way of transplanting them to so different a kind of life.”
“Oh, there is no fears of that,” said Mrs. Brown; “if you were transplanting them, as you say, from your grand life to be just in the ordinar’ as they’ve been with me, I wouldna say but that was hard; but it’s easy, easy to change to grandeur and delight; there’s few but’s capable of that.”
“If it was all grandeur and delight!” said Rowland; “but there is not very much of the first, and perhaps none at all of the other. No delight for them, I fear. A number of rules they will have to give in to, and talk, dull to them, that they will have to listen to, and no fun, as they call it, at all; I don’t know how they will like being buried in a country place.”
“They will have horses and carriages, and everything that heart can desire—and servants to wait on them, hand and foot.”
“Oh, yes, they will have horses, but, I suppose, they won’t be able to ride; and carriages they don’t know how to drive; and a road to take exercise upon, which to me is beautiful, but which leads to nothing but a view, and not half-a-dozen people to be seen all the way. Marion will not like that. I may get the boy broken in, but the girl—I don’t know what my wife will do with the girl!”
“Ye are no blate,” cried Mrs. Brown, “to speak of my Mey as the girrel! or what your wife would do with her. It’s that that’s ruined you, Jims Rowland—your wife! What had you ado with a wife, a strange woman, when your own dauchter was growing up, and old enough to sit at the head of your table and order your dinner to you! It sets you well to get a wife that will not know what to do with the girrel! What would my sister Mary say to think that was the way you spoke of her bonnie bairn. Man, I never knew ye had such a hard heart!”
“The question has nothing to do with my hard heart, if I have a hard heart,” said Rowland. “We’d better leave that sort of thing aside. The question is, how are they to be brought into their new life?”
Mrs. Brown wiped her eyes, and held up her head. “The thing is just this,” she said, “I see no other way, nor any difficulty, for my part: ye’ll just take them home.”
“Ah!” said the agitated father walking up and down the room, “it is very easy to speak. Take them home, but when, and how? without any breaking in? without any preparation to a life they don’t understand and won’t like?”
“Bless me! are you taking them to be servants, or to learn a trade!” cried Mrs. Brown.