“WHAT is the meaning of it?” said Archie. He was so tired and pleased and sleepy, that he did not even now feel sure that anything was wrong. A faint idea struck his mind that his father, though he did not look amiable, might yet be making him another present, as he had done before. He caught it this time as it whirled towards him, and looked at it puzzled, but without any alarm. “It is a cheque,” he said, looking up from it, with again that vague, slumbrous smile creeping about the corners of his mouth.
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What should I say?” asked the young man. “Is it—another present you are making me?—but it’s a great sum,” he added, waking up more and more; “it can’t be that.”
He was so simple as he stood, almost so childish, taking the awful missive, of the nature of which he had no understanding, which meant ruin, shame, everything that was dreadful, into his hand so innocently, that there came from the breast of the spectator standing by—the only being whom the boy feared—a suppressed but irrestrainable groan of emotion. Yet Evelyn felt that to her husband his son’s ignorance meant nothing but acting, a consummate deceit, got up beforehand, the result of guilty expectation, not of innocent ignorance.
“Mind, how you drive me wild!” Rowland said hoarsely. “I give you yet a place of repentance. For your mother’s sake, and for my wife’s sake, who is not your mother—own to it like a man even now—and I’ll forgive you yet.”
Archie’s unconsciousness was almost foolish, as he stood there with the thing in his hand. Evelyn, trembling from head to foot in her own impatience and anxiety, could scarcely bear it. “Oh speak, speak!” she cried under her breath.
“Own to what?” the boy said. “A place of repentance—for what?” His consternation and amazement were clear enough; only to his father they seemed the deepest deceit.
“Down upon your knees!” he cried, springing to his feet. “Do you know what that means?—not mere cheating of your father, which perhaps was all you thought of; it means the ruin of your whole life; it means penal servitude—a little while ago it meant death. Go down on your knees and ask my pardon. I will never trust you again, nor will I ever have a happy moment, knowing what you are; but I will forgive you, as far as the world is concerned, and hide your shame.”
Evelyn, whom her husband had thrown off in his hurried movement, stood wringing her hands, her tears dropping upon them, her countenance convulsed with terror and pity. “Oh speak to him, Archie, tell him, tell him!” she said.
Then the poor young fellow came fully to life, though even now he did not quite understand what it was he was accused of. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said; “for there is nothing in the world that can mean penal servitude to me. You are mad, I think, father. I have done nothing to ruin my life—Me! what could I have done—what has been in my power? If I were as bad in nature as you think me—what, what has been in my power?”
“Archie,” said Rowland, recovering his composure by a great effort; “I want no useless talk. Let’s understand all that as said. Self-defence is out of the question. If you will tell me as humbly as you can what led you to such a crime as forgery, perhaps—God forgive you, I’ll try to think the best—thinking less of it because it was your father——”
“Forgery!” cried Archie with a great shout, as if to earth and heaven.
“You need not proclaim your shame and mine—Forgery. What is the money to me? I would rather than ten thousand pounds, than all I have in the world, that you had come to me and told me—oh, any story you pleased—if it were gambling, if it were some wretched woman—whatever it was. Man,” cried the father in his anguish, “you are my only son. It was my fault, perhaps, that I was disappointed in you. But if you had come to me and said, ‘I have been a fool, I have need of a thousand pounds to clear me of my folly,’—do you think I would have refused? I might have been angry then—not knowing what was in store—but if I know myself, I would not have been hard upon you. I would have thought you were but young—I would have felt you were like your mother. God forgive you, boy, you’re like your mother there where you stand, a felon, a criminal, subject to the law. And my only son, my only son!”
He turned away with a loud sob, that came from his heart like the report of a pistol, and throwing himself in his chair, covered his face with his hands.
“A felon and a criminal,” said Archie, in his turn half mad with passion, and having made a dozen efforts to break in. “Oh, I knew you hated me; but I never thought it would go so far.—— Me a felon—me subject to the law! It’s just a damned cursed lie!” cried the boy, tears of rage in his eyes. “Ay! I never swore in my life, but I’ll swear now. It’s a damned lie! It’s a cursed lie! Oh, publish it to the whole world, if you like; what do I care? it’s all over between you and me. You may call me your son if you like, but no more will I call you father. Oh, get a trumpet and tell it all over the world, and see if one will believe you that ever knew Archie Rowland. Shame!” cried the lad; “father! do you not think shame to say it? do you not think shame?”
The innocent face was gone—the look, that almost seemed like imbecility in its unawakened ignorance. His features were distorted and quivering with fury, his eyes full of great hot tears of pain, which splashed upon that paper in his hand in round circles, making the boy’s passion wilder still with the shame that he had been made to cry like a girl! But these fierce drops were not the easy tears of a child. He flung the cheque upon the table with a laugh that was more painful still.
“Put it up in a frame,” he said, “in your hall, or in the bank, or where folk can see it best; and write on it, ‘Forged by Archie Rowland.’ And send your policeman out to take me, and bring me to trial, and get me condemned. You’re a rich, rich man, and maybe you will be able to do it: for there’s nobody will believe that you invented all that to ruin your son, your only son. Oh, what grand words to say! Or maybe it was her invention!” cried Archie, as a movement caught his ear, which drew his wild eyes to Evelyn. He stood staring at her for a moment in silence. “It would not be so unnatural if it were her invention,” he said.
There was a moment of awful silence—for great though the passion was in Rowland’s accusation, the fury of the unjustly accused was greater. It was a storm against which no lesser sentiment could stand. The slight untrained figure of the lad rose to strange might and force, no softness in it or pliancy. He stood fiercely at bay, like a wild animal, panting for breath. And the father made no reply. He sat staring, silenced by the response, which was a kind of fiercer echo of his own passion.
“You have nothing to say, it appears,” said Archie, with quick breathing, “and I will say nothing. I will go to the place I was brought up in. I will not run away. And then ye can send your warrant, or whatever you call it, to arrest me. I will bide the worst you can do. Not a step will I move till you send to take me. You will find me there night or day. Good-bye to ye,” he said abruptly. A momentary wavering, so slight that it was scarcely perceptible, moved him, one of those instantaneous impulses which sometimes change the whole character of life—a temptation he thought it—to cry “father! father,” to appeal against this unimaginable wrong. But he crushed it on the threshold of his mind, and turned to the door.
“Archie!” cried Evelyn in despair, rushing after him. “Archie! I believe every word you say.”
He took no notice of her, nor of the hand with which she grasped his sleeve, but pausing, looked round for a moment at his father, then he flung open the door: disdaining even to close it after him, and walked quickly away.
“James!—for God’s sake go after him, stop him. James! James! for the love of God——”
“Ye mean the devil!” said Rowland, quickly, “that put all that into his head.”
He rose up and took the cheque from the table, but, perceiving the stain of the tear, threw it down again, as if it had stung him. There are some things that flesh and blood cannot bear, and the great blot of moisture upon that guilty paper was one of them. It all but unmanned this angry father. “Put that thing away, lock it up, put it out of my sight,” he said, with a quivering in his throat.
He had no doubt of his son’s guilt. He had known other cases in which a fury of injured innocence had been the best way of meeting an accusation. And yet there was something in Archie’s passion which, while it roused his own, penetrated him with another strange contradictory feeling—was it almost approval, of the bearing of the boy? But not on so slight an argument as that was he shaken in his foregone conclusion. He walked up and down the room, curiously made into a sort of public, comfortless, unprotected place by the flinging open of the door, and presently began to speak, flinging broken sentences from him. The hall, with its decorations, the waxed and shining floor, with a broken flower, a fallen card, a scrap of ribbon, dropped upon it here and there, that air of the banquet hall deserted which is always so suggestive, formed the background to his moving figure. And even Evelyn, in her absorption in the wild tragic excitement of this domestic drama, did not think of the stealthy servants moving about, and the eager ears so intent upon picking up some indication of what the trouble might be.
“He knows very well,” said Rowland. “Oh, he knows very well that I will never have him arrested or do anything to disgrace my own name. It’s cheap, cheap all that bravado about waiting till I send to take him; he might wait till doomsday, as he well knows. Hold your tongue, Evelyn. It’s well your part to defend him, when he had the grace to say it was your invention.”
“Poor boy, poor boy! he did not know what he was saying.”
“Are you so sure of that? He knew what he was saying, every word. He’s a bold hand—it’s a superior way when the artist can do it—I’ve seen the thing before. Injured pride, and virtue—oh, virtue rampant! That never had a thought, nor could understand what wickedness meant. I have seen it before. And cheap, cheap all yon about waiting till I sent the policeman, when he knows I would not expose my name, not for more than he’s worth a thousand times over. Worth! he’s worth nothing; and my name, my name that is known over two continents—and more! That’s what you would call irony, isn’t it?” said Rowland, with his harsh laugh. “Irony! I’m not a man of much reading, but I’ve seen it in books. Irony!—a name known over half the world; though, perhaps, I shouldn’t be the man to say it. And forged! forged by the man’s own son that made it.”
“James, for God’s sake! It was not Archie. I believe every word he said.”
“That the whole thing was your invention?” said Rowland. “That’s what he said; the rest was rubbish, I remember that. And you believe every word? You are a fool, like most women—and many men too. That old sage, as ye call him, was right, though people cry out. Mostly fools! It was said before him though. Men walk in a vain show, and disquiet themselves in vain. They lay up riches, and know not who is to gather them. Was there ever such a fool as me to keep thinking of my boy, my little callant, as I thought, and never once to remember that he was growing up into a low-lived lout all the time.”
“Archie is not so,” said Evelyn. “He is not so; his faults are on the outside. He did not do this. I never believed he did it. James, you will never have been a fool till now if you let the boy go.”
“Bah! he has no intention of going. You take the like of that in earnest. He will go to his bed and sleep it off, and then—to-morrow’s a new day. I am dead-tired myself,” said Rowland, stretching his arms; “as tired as a dog. I’ll sleep till one, though I’ve had enough to murder sleep. No, no, he’ll not go; yon’s all cheap, cheap, because he knows I will do nothing against him. You are a fine creature, Evelyn, but you are no wiser than the rest. Good-night, my dear, I am going to bed.”
“Without a word of comfort to him, James?”
“Comfort! he wants no comfort. And if he did,” said Rowland, with a smile of misery, “it would be hard to come to me for it, who have none to give. If you know anybody that has that commodity to part with, send them to that boy’s father,—send them to the man that has had the heart taken out of him. I am going to my bed.”
He went slowly upstairs, and then, for the first time, Evelyn saw the butler, Saunders, within hearing, though busily employed, with one or two subordinates, in putting out the lights and closing the shutters. She watched her husband, with his slow, unelastic step, going one by one up the long flight of steps. He had never learned to subdue his energetic step, and take them less than two together before. She was almost glad to see those signs of exhaustion. The fervour of his passion had dropped. He would, perhaps, turn aside, she thought, to Archie’s room, and would understand his son, and the two might meet heart to heart at last.
Evelyn waited a long time, shivering and chill in those dismal hours of the morning. She saw the servants conclude their work and go away unwillingly to their rest. She sat down in the library, with the room open to the dark, desolated hall, in which only a faint light was left burning, and listened to all the creakings and rustlings that seemed to run through the still and sleeping house. No one came. Had his father, after all, gone to his door and made peace? Had the tired boy fallen asleep in spite of himself? Had it all been vapouring, as James said? She waited in her ball dress, with a rough woollen shawl, the first she could find, wrapped about her; and the lamp, burning with a steady, monotonous light, throwing a lengthened gleam upon the dark curtains of the glass door.
It had all been almost as she thought. Rowland had paused, his feet had almost carried him, his heart, yearning, had almost forced him to Archie’s room to make a last appeal, perhaps to listen, perhaps to understand. But he would not allow himself to be moved by impulse, and turned heavily in the other direction to his own room, where he fell, as he had prophesied, heavily asleep. And Archie, tired beyond description, his very passion unable to resist the creeping languor in his brain, had almost gone to sleep too, leaning his head against the bed, in the attitude in which he had thrown himself down in order that he might try to understand this new mystery. But in this he was not successful, for after a minute or two, the sound of the heavy step, which was his father’s, startled him, and he became more wide awake than ever, listening with a beating heart, wondering would he come. He heard the pause, and wondered more and more. When Rowland took the other direction, Archie sprang to his feet and began hurriedly to change his dress. It took him a considerable time to do this for his fingers were trembling, and his whole being shaken. He had to pull everything out of his drawers to find the old shabby coat which he had worn when he first came to Rosmore. The room looked as if it had been scattered in scorn or frenzy with everything he possessed. But that was not Archie’s meaning. He got his old suit at last, and put it on, tossing his evening clothes into a corner. He took off the watch his father had given him, and denuded himself of everything that had come to him since Rowland returned home. Poor Archie, his humiliation was complete. The old clothes seemed to bring back the old mien, and it was the lad of the Sauchiehall road, and not the young gentleman of Rosmore, who, seeing that the lights were out and all the house silent, stepped out of the chaos of his desolated bedchamber and took his way downstairs.
There was a jar upon the great staircase, the sound thrilling through the silence, of a slip upon some hardened plank, and Evelyn awoke with a start from a troubled doze. She drew her shawl close round her, for it was very cold, the coldest moment of the night just before dawn. She had drawn the curtain half over the library door, that the light might not betray her, and it was only by the dim rays of the night lamp in the hall that she could distinguish the dark figure going softly towards the door. He had his hand upon it when she stole out quietly and caught his arm in her hands.
“Archie! where are you going? You are not going out at this hour of the night?”
“Is it you, Mrs. Rowland?” he said with a start. “If I had known that anybody was up, I should not have come this way.”
“Thank God you did not know. Archie, where are you going out of your father’s house?”
“My father’s house!” he said with a faint laugh. “But why go over it again? you were there and you heard the whole.”
“And you heard me?”
“You! I was not thinking of you,” he said with a contempt which was purely matter of fact and natural, meaning no offence.
“Nevertheless you heard what I said.”
He paused a little and then said, “Yes, I suppose I did. I remember something, but what does all that matter now?”
“It matters having a friend always at hand, to note everything. Oh my boy, don’t go. Stay and work it out—stay and prove who has done it. Archie, take my advice.”
“Why should I, Mrs. Rowland? I have always thought you were my enemy.”
“Very falsely, very falsely!” she cried. “Archie, I promised to your mother I would do all to you that a woman who was not your mother could do.”
“You promised to my mother! What do you know about my mother? It is getting late and I should be on the road: let me go.”
She was holding his arm with both her hands. And she was not his enemy. His heart was charged with wrath, and grievious against her, but he would not think she was his enemy any more—and his mother—the name startled him, and there was something in the close contact with this beautiful lady and the pressure of her hands, that gave Archie a bewildered new sensation in the midst of his rage and misery. The very sense of her superiority—that superiority that had been so humiliating, so sore a subject, and her beauty which he had never appreciated, but which somehow came in to amaze yet touch him, as with the deep curves round her anxious eyes, pale with watching and trouble, she held him and kept him back on the threshold of the friendless world, all evident in the surprise which penetrated through Archie’s wretchedness. Was it a promise of something better at the bottom of the deepest wrong of them all?
“I don’t know what you mean—about my mother—” he said.
“I promised her,” said Evelyn, the tears dropping from her eyes, “when I first caught sight of this house, which should have been hers,—I promised her, that you should be cared for, as if she were here.”
“What was that?” he said, “something touched me—what was that? Who is it? Is there some one playing tricks here?”
He worked himself out of her grasp, turning to the other side, where there was no one nor anything to be seen. It was the darkest hour of the night, and the coldest and most dreary, though indeed, it was already morning, and in many a humble house about the inhabitants were already awake and stirring. But there was a stillness in the deserted hall, as if some one had died there, and all the revellers had fled from the deserted place. He searched about the side of the hall, peering and groping in the feeble miserable light, but came back to where Evelyn stood, coming close to her, shivering, with a scared and blanched face.
“Somebody touched me, on my shoulder,” he said in a very low voice.
“You have had no sleep. Your nerves are excited. Go back, go back, my poor boy, to your bed and sleep.”
“No, never when that has been said against me—never—if there was not another house in the world.”
“Archie, my dear, we must keep our sense and our heads clear. Whoever has done it, must know and be on the watch to escape, and you must see that you must be cleared: it must be made quite plain as the light of day.”
“I will never be cleared,” he said shaking his head. “My father will never say that he was wrong, and how should I find out? I am not clever to be a detective. There are things that are never found out. No, there’s no light of day for me. Aunt Jane will take me in, and I will go to the foundry and work, as he did. But I will never be the man he was,” the boy said with a sort of forlorn pride in the father who had thrown him off. “Mark you, I think maybe you are good as well as bonnie, and far better than the like of us. If I had known sooner, it might have been different. Let me go.”
“Oh boy, boy! you must be cleared, and you won’t stay and do it,” she cried, grasping his arm again.
He unloosed her hands with a certain roughness yet tenderness. “Let me go,” he said. “I will go, there is nobody on earth that can stop me.” He undid the iron bar that held the door with fierce haste, paying no attention to her pleadings, and flung the big door open, letting in the chill morning air, which sped like a messenger unseen swiftly through the hall and up the stairs, and driving Mrs. Rowland back with a chill that went to her heart.
Archie stepped out into the dark world. Over the mouth of the loch where the current of the great river swept its waters in, there was a faint trembling of whiteness, which meant a new day. He did not feel the cold or any shock from it, but instead of hurrying forth as might have been looked for, lingered, standing outside a moment, with his face turned towards that lightness in the east. Evelyn wrapped her shawl more closely round her and followed him, standing upon the step of the door to make a last effort. But he paid no attention to what she said. He stood lingering on the gravel absorbed in his own thoughts. Then he came up to her again close, as if he had for the first time remarked her presence. “Do you think,” he said, “it could be her, to give me heart?” and then without waiting for a reply, he turned away.
Cold and startled and shivering, Evelyn watched his retiring figure till it was lost in the darkness, and then closed the door, with a heart that was fluttering and sick in her breast. He had said many strange things—things which almost made it possible that he was not so innocent as she thought, and yet he was innocent, he must be innocent! She crossed the dark hall with a tremor in her weariness and exhaustion. It needed not the darkness to veil an ethereal spirit. Had Mary been there?