THE husband and wife met with perhaps a greater sense of satisfaction and pleasure than either had anticipated feeling when they parted. Marriage is a curious thing notwithstanding all the ill that is said of it. They had not been long married; they had not been exactly what people call in love with each other; nor was James Rowland at all a sentimental person. Yet there is something in that old-fashioned expression which speaks of making two persons one flesh, which has a most powerful influence. They meet as people only can meet whose interests are one, who are fain to confide everything that affects them to the bosom of the other, who is theirself. The thing is indescribable; it is simple as a b c to those who have experienced it. It would probably be impossible without the other circumstances of the union, yet it is superior to all the rest—the most essential, the most noble. Both these persons had been disturbed and troubled by various matters peculiar to themselves; Rowland by the problem of his children, Evelyn by other problems not unlike, yet so different from his. When they met, there seemed an instant lull in these disturbances. The two-fold being was now complete, and was able to deal with all problems.
Rowland had travelled by night, as busy men so often get the habit of doing, and Evelyn superintended the excellent breakfast he always made, and looked on at the satisfaction of that admirable appetite with much complacency, before she asked any questions. She was not a woman who was fond of asking questions. She awaited confidences, and did not press them; which is a very good way for those who can do it, but not perhaps very easy to an anxious mind. The difference of her position from that of a mother was, that she was interested without being anxious, and this made her also more charitable in judging, and probably would make her less hard upon the shortcomings of the children. She was very much interested, but she was calm, and it was not to her a question of life and death. It was not till he had eaten the very last spoonful of marmalade and piece of roll, of which he was capable, that she said “Well?” looking with a smile into his eyes.
“Well—,” he said with satisfaction, pushing back his seat from the table, “you’re ready to hear all about my troubles, Evelyn?”
“I hope they are not very bad troubles.”
“That will be very much as you take them, my dear. They might be bad enough, but I’ve great confidence in my wife. In the first place, the house is, I think, perfection; but you may not agree with me—you know I have not your refinement. It stands on a green knoll overlooking the Clyde, with a background of the most beautiful hills in the world, and for the foreground the grand Firth—and all the wealth and life that pass over it—— But,” he said pausing, and with a half shamefaced laugh, “I’ve told you all that before.”
“Yes, you have told me before; but that does not take away my interest. Tell me more.”
He took her hand with a grateful pressure, and so began to tell her about the arrangement of the house, and other matters on which she was not informed before, to all of which she listened with much grace and satisfaction, nodding her head as one thing was reported to her after another. I do not say that Mrs. Rowland did not exercise a natural privilege, and suspend her judgment on one or two points. It was only natural that she should know better what the internal arrangements of a great house should be than he did. But she received it all as if in every way he had done well; which was the case so far as she yet knew. “There is one thing, however, I must tell you of, Evelyn,” he said, “and your feeling about that will of course make all the difference. You may not feel inclined to put up with it. And in that case it matters very little about anything else. It is you that must be the judge.”
“What is this great thing?” she said with a smile.
“It is a great thing, my dear. I dare say even I might not like it, though, having your society, I’m very indifferent. It is that I’m afraid there is very little society at Rosmore.”
She burst out into a pleasant laugh. “Society—is that all? Dear James, I thought you were going to say there was no good water, or that the drainage was bad, or something of that sort.”
“We’d soon have managed that,” he said, laughing too with relief, “sunk a well or turned the whole place upside down; that would have presented no difficulty. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me that you take it so easily, Evelyn. It was—it was—Marion who put it into my head. She said, ‘There will be nobody that mamma will like to associate with here.’ That was all her own doing—not suggested in any way by me: for I did not know whether you would like it, if a little girl you never saw before called you, right out—”
“Like it!” said Evelyn—Perhaps, to tell the truth, she had winced a little. “Of course I should like it. It shows an inclination to adopt me, which is the very best thing I could have hoped for. Tell me about her, James. The house is very interesting, but the children are more interesting than the house.”
“You take a load off my mind when you say so. I would give a thousand pounds that the first was over—that you had met them and made acquaintance with them. She’s eighteen, and he’s twenty. The boy is rather a cub—and the girl—”
“My dear James! it’s very likely they are not made up exactly to your taste: how could they be? They are very young, and it will be quite exciting to put them a little into shape—into our shape. Society, indeed!—Society, whatever it was, would not be nearly so interesting as that. Tell me everything about them, James.”
Encouraged by this, Mr. Rowland began to tell her his experiences with the children; but by some means it came about that, he could not tell how, their faults got slurred over, and their good qualities magnified in his hand. How did it happen? He could not tell. He had Marion’s impertinent little minois before him every word he said, yet he managed to give an inoffensive saucy look to Marion—a saucy look which fathers do not dislike, though mothers may object to it. And then the boy—
“Archie disarms me,” he said, “because I can’t help seeing in him his mother’s eyes. I’m afraid he’s a dour fellow and sullen, and you can’t be expected to be mollified as I am. It takes away my anger when I look at him. And yet I had cause to be angry.”
“Tell me,” she said.
And then Mr. Rowland told the story, beginning at the apparition of the groom with his question about the dougs, and ending with Archie’s defence of his aunt, who had taken his money from him, against the father who had given it. As he told this, it seemed to himself less bad as an indictment against Archie than he had supposed. What was it, after all, that the boy had done? The enormity disappeared as it was put into words. And Evelyn sat smiling, from time to time shaking her head.
“It appears to me,” she said, “that if Archie was wrong, as no doubt he was, Archie’s father was also a little to blame.”
“Do you think so?” he said eagerly. He was glad to think that perhaps this might be so.
“You would not like him to be disloyal, not for twenty bank-notes? He might have swallowed the injury to himself of having that money flung in his face—”
“Injury!”—Mr. Rowland’s countenance fell.
She put her hand upon his, smiling—“Yes, Sir Stern Father. That’s not your rôle, James: you were born to be a most indulgent father, giving in to them in everything. And you must henceforward take up your right rôle, and let me be the repressive influence.”
He took her hands between both his. It was not a very strong support, so far as physical force went, and yet for the first time James Rowland felt their soft fingers close upon his in a way that expressed not their usual soft gentleness, but strength. He felt himself suddenly holding on to that hand as if it were his sheet anchor, which indeed it was.
“To tell the truth,” he said, “I think perhaps I looked at them through what I supposed were your eyes, Evelyn, seeing how unlike they were to you, how little worthy to live with you, to have the rank of your children. It was that, at all events, made me hard upon poor little May. It’s not her fault if she is more like Jane Brown than she is like a lady, or anything that had even been near you.”
“Whom should she be like but the person who has brought her up? I am delighted to hear that they are so loyal. I would not have that changed for anything in the world.”
“I am not so sure about their loyalty,” said Rowland, recalling to mind Marion’s strict impartiality in respect to her aunt and detachment from her. But he felt sure that Evelyn would be able to explain that away also; and put his foot upon it. No need to make the child out worse than she was; and a rush of paternal kindness came over him now that the two were out of his sight. It was not their fault. He said, “I don’t doubt you’ll do wonders with Marion, my dear. The little thing is very quick. Even in the day or two I was with them, a change came over her. She kept her eye upon me, and without a word just adopted manners. No, I don’t think I am partial. Indeed I found that I was quite the reverse.”
I am afraid that a cold shudder, unsuspected by her husband, passed over Evelyn, in which, if there was horror, there was also a distinctly comic element. What sort of a wonderful creature must the girl be who “adopted manners” from good James, the most excellent man, but not a model of refinement. She could not but laugh, yet shivered a little as well.
“I am more afraid of Marion than of Archie,” she said, “for he will chiefly be your concern. I shall have only the consoling part, the petting to do with him. I hope your little May is a magnanimous little person, who will not mind being pulled to pieces for her good; for I suppose I shall have to do that—if you are right.”
She added these last words with a little quick awakening to possible danger. He had not been at all complimentary to his little girl. Yet was it possible that there was a faint little cloud, a suspicion of a cloud on his face, to be taken at his word, and to have even his wife express, nay repeat what was his own opinion? She was very quick to see these almost imperceptible changes of countenance, and with a little start and catching of her breath, awoke to a sense of risk, which she had never realised before.
“I have a story of my own to tell you,” she said hastily, “in which I shall have to crave a great deal of forbearance on your part, James, and pardon for what I have taken upon myself to do, or rather to consent to. I thought of asking your permission first, but then I felt that anything of this kind might seem a want of confidence in you.”
His face had changed in a moment to the widest of smiles, and brightest of aspects. “Fancy!” he said, “anything for which you should have to ask my permission, any wish of yours that it would not be my highest pleasure to do.”
“Thank you,” she said, “dear. I felt sure you would back me up: and now I have got this pretty speech to the boot, to make me happy. James, do you remember a story I told you when you first spoke to me, when you asked me first, in Helen Stanhope’s house?”
“About?”—He paused and added, “Yes: you have seen him again?”
“I have seen a man paralysed, in a Bath chair, moved, dressed, fed, ordered about by a servant. The ghost, or far worse than the ghost, the wreck of a man.”
“And that was he?” A certain gleam—was it of satisfaction?—was for a moment in James Rowland’s eyes. But it was only for a moment, and the next they were subdued by the most genuine sympathy. “My poor dear!” he said.
“It was a great shock to see him, you may suppose: but that is a small matter. He has two children, like ourselves.”
The light sprang up in his eyes, and he thanked her with a sudden kiss upon her hand.
“A boy and a girl, about the same ages. The girl I have seen—a strange specimen to me of a new generation I have no knowledge of; the boy, I fear, a very careless boy. Of all things in the world it has occurred to Mr. Saumarez, of all people in the world, to desire to confide these children to me.”
“It shows that he has more sense than I could have thought.”
“Their mother, of course, is dead, and he thinks he will die soon. I hear from others that how he lives at all is a wonder, though they think him likely to go on living; but he wishes me to take the guardianship of his children——”
“And you have accepted?”
“No, I have not accepted. That was too much to do, without your approval at least: even with it I doubt if I could take such a responsibility. It is not so bad as that. But I have pledged myself to ask them to Rosmore, for a long visit, to make their acquaintance thoroughly. They are young people who are, according to their slang, up to everything. I have been in great doubt since, whether it would be a good thing for—our two.”
James Rowland’s eyes flashed again. After all there are some things which the experiences of a lifetime cannot do away with. As a point of fact, he knew well enough that the higher classes as he had seen them, chiefly in India, were fundamentally not a bit superior to the lower classes as he knew them by more intimate experience; and yet, risen from the ranks as he was, it gave him the strangest sensation of pleasure to hear that two young aristocrats, children of Society, “up to everything,” were about to become his guests. Even the flavour of something a little wrong which was conveyed in these words, rather heightened than diminished the pleasure. A good thing for—our two. Surely it would be a good thing: it would teach them manners far more effectually than if they were to observe their father’s ways to the end of the chapter. It would smarten up Archie, and let him see what a young man should look like in his new sphere.
“My dear,” he said, “if that is all you are in doubt about, I think you may set your mind at rest. Two young people who are up to everything, will probably find it very dull at Rosmore; but so far as we are concerned, and the two—it can be nothing but an advantage. Ask as many people as you like: there is plenty of room in the house, and there will be plenty of carriages and horses, and plenty of things to see, though there is nothing to do, as Archie says.”
“That is a very advanced thing for Archie to say: it is the fashionable complaint.”
“Is it?” said Rowland, brightening more and more. He began to think that perhaps he had been too severe upon the young people, that his anxiety had made him see blemishes which perhaps did not exist. It was quite possible that well-made clothes, and a little money in his pocket, would make entirely a different figure of Archie; and little May—well perhaps little May wanted still less. She was as sharp as a needle. She would pick up everything without letting it be seen that she did not know it to begin with. The thought flashed through his mind that in a week she would have made herself an exact copy of Evelyn, and what could a girl do better than that? Marion was not like her own mother at all; she had not those eyes which gave Archie, though he did not know it, so much power. But she was very clever: she could make herself whatever she wanted to be.
The Rowlands had a great deal before them in the few days which they were to spend in London, before going, as Mr. Rowland proudly said, home. There were a great many things still to buy, which could be got only in town, though the Glasgow people had been indignantly sure that nothing was to be had in London (to call London town, was an arrogance which was not to be endured) which could not be much better procured in Glasgow. Rowland, however, was precisely the man to be of a contrary opinion, and he had a list as long as his arm of things that were still wanted. Plate, for one inconsiderable item, and carriages on which Evelyn’s judgment was necessary, and for which orders had to be given at once. He approved of her purchases, but thought them far too few and unimportant. “I believe you are afraid of spending money,” he said, with a long rich laugh. This rich laugh of contempt at all small economies and insignificant expenditure is offensive in many people, but it was not offensive in James Rowland—perhaps, indeed, to the wives of the millionaires, who are thus allowed carte blanche, and egged on in the way of pleasant extravagance, it is never offensive. Evelyn entered into the joke of being niggardly, of spending too little. “As if there was not enough to come and go upon,” he said, with perfect satisfaction. When any one was by, especially any one who was not rich, who could not afford these liberalities, she might blush a little and restrain with a look, or a touch upon his arm, the large utterances of her good man; but when they were alone, she did not find it offensive. She went with him from one shop to another, quite pleased with herself and him. He was really a satisfactory person to go shopping with. He found nothing too costly so long as it was good, and threw over cheap things with a fine contempt that was refreshing to behold, especially to one who for a long time had been obliged to take cheapness much into consideration. One day he took her into Christie’s, and bade her look if there was anything good enough for her boudoir at home, and stood by smiling with pride in his wife’s taste and superior knowledge, while she was inspecting those treasures which he declared he did not understand. But he did understand bric-a-brac, it turned out, much better than Evelyn did, though perhaps his taste in pictures was not so pure.
Thus the days passed by; and though those pleasures depended very much on the depth of Mr. Rowland’s purse, they could scarcely be called vulgar pleasures, although Evelyn sometimes at the end of the day blushed to think how she had enjoyed herself. Was it the fact of spending money, an operation which in itself seemed to give pleasure to her husband, or was it the acquisition of so many valuable and beautiful things which was delightful? It was complicated, as everything human is, with the contrast of previous life, with the pleasure of pleasing him by being pleased herself, even perhaps a little by the obsequious respect by which their progress was attended. This was a poor view, and we are poor creatures, the best of us—for there was something even in that. As for the purchases themselves, Evelyn knew that a cracked pot, a scrap of an old picture, a bit of clumsy carving, was capable of giving quite as much pleasure as all the treasures of art which accumulated in their rooms at the hotel. Happily there is compensation in all things, and the highest of all delights, in bric-a-brac at least, is not to him who buys whatever strikes his fancy, regardless of expenses, but to him who “picks up” an unexpected gem, for a few pence or shillings, in some ignoble corner where no such treasure could be suspected to be.
And they dined out in the evenings, at the Leightons, of course, and at other places where the great railway man found himself a sort of lion, to his great astonishment, where he expected modestly to be received, chiefly on his wife’s account, in spheres which were not his. In this point of view Mr. Rowland was delighted, and Evelyn was as proud of her husband as he could be of her, which was saying a great deal. Like many other people in this world, Rowland was not in the least vain of the real work he had done. He was aware that he had been very lucky in many things, in the means he had employed, in the curious natural facilities which always came in his way; but his own skill and patience and thought did not seem to come into his mind as deserving of special distinction. “Oh, of course, since it was my business, I tried to do it the best I could,” he said, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. It was his assistants who were the wonderful fellows; he was so fortunate in always getting hold of the best men; no man but had been true to him, as Brutus says. Evelyn sat by and listened with such light in her eyes that her friend, Lady Leighton, looked at her in wonder. “Why, you are in love with him!” said that woman of the world.
There was one meeting, however, in which Evelyn’s feelings were exercised in a more complicated and difficult way. She had kept safe from all encounter with Saumarez, whose invalid chair she had seen repeatedly in the distance with a sense of an escape, until the very last day, which Rowland had insisted upon devoting to amusement alone. “Why shouldn’t we begin with this ‘Row’ which I hear everybody speaking of?”
“Oh, it is too early for the Row.”
“Never mind; it seems to be pretty, and to have pretty people about it. I want to sit down on a chair and look at them.”
“As if you were a man to sit long quiet on a chair!”
“Come along, Evelyn. I believe you’re jealous of the pretty girls,” he said with his big laugh. How well she had known how it would be! Saumarez had no objection at any time to be seen of the crowd. He had grown to feel his helplessness a distinction as he would have felt anything else that belonged to him. But his time for his promenade was before the fashionable hour, and the Rowlands had not gone half the way along before the well-known chair became visible slowly approaching. Evelyn gripped her husband’s arm.
“James, I see an invalid chair there in front of us, with three ladies standing round it. I rather think it must be Mr. Saumarez. He is sure to see us; he will ask to be introduced to you.”
“Well, my dear: if you would rather not let’s turn back; otherwise, it makes no difference to me. Yes, I might almost say I have a kind of curiosity—but not if it trouble you.”
“How should it trouble me?” said Evelyn. But yet it did, though there was no reason for it. What was her reason? A half vexation that her husband should see him so humiliated, so helpless and pitiful a spectacle; a half terror to see her husband reflected through his eyes. But there was no help for it now.
“Make me acquainted with Mr. Rowland, my dear lady,” Saumarez said. “I have wanted to make his acquaintance ever since I heard—how lucky a man he was.”
“You may say that,” said Rowland heartily, “the luckiest man, I think, in the whole world.”
“You say so,” said the invalid, “to the man who can perhaps best understand you in the whole world, being the unluckiest man in it, I should think; a failure in everything beside you, who are a success in everything. You must let me congratulate you, as one of your wife’s earliest friends. I am just sufficiently older than she is to have held her in my arms as an infant.”
“For heaven’s sake, none of that!” Evelyn exclaimed under her breath, with a flash of overpowering offence. He eyed her with a smile in those two brilliant eyes.
“To have petted her as a little girl, to have—admired her as a woman: nobody can know so well as I what a prize you have got, Mr. Rowland.”
James was a little surprised, and slightly, faintly disturbed. “I hope I know that,” he said, “and my great good fortune.”
“And I hope,” said Evelyn, “that I am not considered likely to enjoy all this, listening to those mutual compliments. I, for my part, am fully alive to my own good fortune. James, I think we must go on. We have to be at Madeline’s.”
“Madeline,” said Saumarez with a laugh, “is always Mrs. Rowland’s excuse. She is constantly going to Madeline’s if one tries to detain her for a moment. But you must wait till I tell you how kind she has been to my children. It cannot but do a young girl good to be in Mrs. Rowland’s society; and I am doubly grateful for my motherless Rose. I hear you’ve got Lord Clydesdale’s place at Rosmore.”
Mr. Rowland did not like to hear it called Lord Clydesdale’s place. “Until the moment when we can get him to sell it to us,” he said.
“Ah, will he sell? That’s a different matter. A rich tenant paying a good rent, that’s one thing—but Clydesdale won’t sell. I hope you are not calculating upon that.”
“We shall see,” said Rowland, not well pleased.
“Yes, we shall see. And must you really go—to Madeline? Lay me at her ladyship’s feet. I will go and give her ladyship my opinion of—things in general, one day very soon.”
“My dear,” said Mr. Rowland to his wife, “I don’t think much of that—old friend of yours. Cripple or no cripple, he’s got a devil in his eye.”
“You cannot think less of him than I do, James,” said Evelyn, holding fast by her husband’s arm. She knew very well what he had meant when he had said he would give Madeline his opinion on—things in general; and she knew what barbed arrow he had intended to place in her heart when he spoke of holding her in his arms as an infant. To think that she should have been in that man’s arms a happy girl, considering herself happy in his love! She shuddered as the thought passed through her mind.
“Are you cold, Evelyn?” Rowland said with surprise.
“Only with the moral cold that is in that man’s horrible atmosphere,” she said.