WHEN Archie left his father’s house on the morning after the ball, unrefreshed by sleep, half mad with excitement, bewildered by that last interview with Mrs. Rowland, and the sensation of something supernatural which had come over him, in the half-lighted hall, with the chill of the desolate new day coming in, he was perhaps in as wretched plight as ever a boy of twenty ever found himself in: and that is saying much, for, but for the inalienable power of recovery in youth, how sharp would be the pang of many a scene, in which the boy, guilty or not guilty, has started up against parental wrath or reproof, and shaken the dust from off his feet and gone forth, perhaps to dismay and ruin, perhaps to new life and work. The sensation of turning the back upon home, in such circumstances, is not very rare in human consciousness, and must have left in many memories a poignant recollection, terrible, yet perhaps not altogether painful to realise, in the long series of good or evil fortune which has followed it. Archie, for the first hour or two, as he sped up the side of the loch, like an arrow from a bow, walking five miles an hour in his excitement, scarcely feeling the fatigue of his condition, or any physical circumstances whatever, did not even know where he was going, or what he would do. The home of his childhood, the kind nurse and ruler of his docile youth, were not far off, it is true, and in that he was better off than most of the young prodigals among whom this guiltless boy found himself suddenly classed. But his aunt had been prepossessed against him, she had all but forbidden him to return the last time he left her door, and his heart was sore with injured pride and innocence, misconstrued in that quarter as well as every other. He had gone wildly out in the early grey of the morning, and pursued the straight road before him rather because it was the straight road than from any other circumstance, unable to form any decision, or for a long time even to think of any conclusion to this forlorn walk out into the world. It was, of course, hours too early for the early boat, and had it not been so, Archie would not have exposed himself to question or remark as to his departure, from the people who knew him. The cottagers on the roadside who had noted with some surprise, on the previous night, the carriage from Maryport, far on the other side of the loch, which had driven rapidly by, coming and going, carrying the messenger from the bank, might have found themselves—had they divined who the pedestrian was who passed by their doors in the early morning, treading the same long way—spectators of one of those human dramas which take place in our midst every day, though we are seldom the wiser. At the smithy at Lochhead, one man did indeed ask the other, “Was that no young Rowland from Rosmore?” as Archie went by. But the powerful reply of the other, “Man, it’s impossible!” quenched that one suspicion. He had tied his old comforter, of Aunt Jane’s knitting, round his throat, as much for a disguise as for the warmth. He had put on his old clothes, with which he had first come to Rosmore, garments of which he only now knew the unloveliness—and was as unlike in appearance as in feeling to the millionaire’s only son, the young master of everything in his father’s luxurious house. Archie had never indeed felt his elevation very real: he scarcely ventured to accept and act upon it as if he were himself a person of importance; he, to his own consciousness, always Archie Rowland of the Westpark Football Club, and the Philosophers’ Debating Society, and of Sauchiehall Road. It was true that already Sauchiehall Road had sustained the shock of disenchantment, and he had a shamed and subdued feeling of having somehow gone beyond the circle to which he had once been so pleased to belong, and being no longer at home in it. But still less was he really at home on the moors with his unaccustomed gun, or in the drawing-room with all its unfamiliar necessities. He was now more a nobody than ever, belonging neither to one life nor the other, cast out of both; and he walked along dreamily as the morning broadened into the day, and all the world awoke, and the family fires were lighted, and the family tables spread. He walked on, and on getting beyond the range in which young Mr. Rowland of Rosmore was known, faint, tired, without food or rest, an outcast who belonged to nobody, till his progress began to be almost mechanical, his limbs moving like those of an automaton, all volition gone, nothing possible but to put one foot beyond the other in sheer monotony of movement, like the wheels of a machine. He did not pause, because he felt that if the machine were stopped, being human, it might not be able to go on again. Wheels that are made of wood and iron have this great advantage over flesh and blood.
At last he got to the railway, and stumbled into a carriage, and felt the comparative well-being of rest, when he was able to begin to think a little what he ought to do. And then it came back to Archie that he had bound himself to a certain course of action. He had flung the intimation at his father in the height of their passionate encounter, that there should be no difficulty in finding him, that he would go to the old home and wait there to be arrested, to stand his trial. It brought the most curious quickening of feeling to remember that he had said that. To be arrested, to be brought to trial!—he seemed to see the scene, himself standing at the bar, his father giving evidence in the box, the forged cheque handed round, and all the wise heads bent over it, all finding signs to prove that he had done it—he that scorned it, that cared nothing for money, that would have flung it all into the sea rather than take a pin unjustly from any man. The fire blazed up in his dim eyes, so dim with want of rest and excess of emotion. He accused of such a crime! He laughed within himself at the futility of it, the foolishness! Had it been anything else of which they had accused him—of murdering somebody, for instance. Archie knew that he had a high temper (he who had always been so docile and so gentle), and he thought it possible that, if much irritated and provoked, he might have lifted his hand and given a sudden blow. There would have been in that a possibility, a chance, that he might have done it: but to forge a man’s name, for the sake of money—money! The scorn with which he said the word over to himself in the noise of the railway, nobody hearing, was tremendous. He laughed aloud at the thought. But it decided him on one point, that there must be no question as to where he went. It must be to his aunt’s house; the policeman could come to arrest him there, and therefore there he must go. It was true that it might be bringing shame upon her, innocent; but at all events he must go there first, tell her the whole, and if she desired that he should find another address, at least acquaint her with it, that she might give it to the policemen when they came. This did him good, as it settled the question, and brought him out of all uncertainty. It fortified him even against Aunt Jane’s possibly grim reception of him. He would go there, not for anything he wanted from her, but to answer the claim of honour, which was the first necessity of all.
Mrs. Brown saw him from her window when he came, sick and weary, up the little path under the shadow of the elderberry tree, and ran and opened the door to him with a cry of, “Archie! eh, my man, but you’re welcome to me,” which thawed his heart a little. He threw himself down wearily in the familiar parlour, on one of the chairs, where he was always forbidden to sit lest he should discompose the antimacassar extended on its back. He remembered this as he sat down with a dreary laugh.
“This is one of the chairs I was never to sit upon,” he said.
“Oh, my bonny man,” cried Mrs. Brown, “sit where ye please; dight your feet upon the sofa, if you please; do anything you like! but eh, whatever you do, dinna leave me to one side and cast me off as if I did not belong to you: for that is what I canna bear.”
“I will not do that,” said Archie; “far from that: for I am come to ask you to take me back, aunty, as if I had never been away.”
Mrs. Brown gave a shriek of dismay. “Oh, dinna say that, dinna say that! for it looks as if things were going ill at the house at home.”
“Things are going as ill as they can: at their very worst,” he said. “I’ve come home, Aunt Jane, because it’s a well-known place, where I’ve lived all my life, so that if the policemen should be sent after me——”
She interrupted him with another shriek. “The pollisman!” she cried.
“That is what it has come to,” he answered, “in four months’ time, no more. I was to be a gentleman, never to want, Mr. Rowland’s son, the great man that everybody knows: and now I’m cast out, charged with a crime, with the thing flung in my face as if it were beyond doubt; and I’m to be brought up before the judges, and tried—and hanged, for anything I know. I promised,” said Archie, throwing back his tired head, “that I would wait upon him here, that I would not stir a step but bide—the worst that he or any man could do. But, Aunty Jane, to shame you, an honest, upright woman, with policemen coming to your door, is what I will not do. So, what I want is, that you should find a lodging for me, any kind of a place, a little hole, what does it matter.”
“To hide you; oh, to hide you, Archie?” cried Mrs. Brown, wringing her hands.
“To hide me!” he cried, with scorn; “it would be easy enough to do that.”
“Oh, my laddie,” cried Aunty Jane, “do you think I would let anybody but me do that? They shall never come at you, but o’er my body; they shall never touch a hair of your head, if it was to cost me my last drop of blood. Oh, Archie! it’s me that will hide you, my bonny man. There’s little means in this house, but I’ll find a way. If it comes to heart’s love and a woman’s wit against your muckle pollisman——”
“Aunty!” cried Archie, rising to his feet.
“Oh, whisht, whisht, my bairn! Come up the stair an’ we’ll settle it a’. Ye’ll have the air of going away when the evening comes: and you’ll just creep back, and I’ll make ye a hidin’ hole, where a’ the pollismen in Glesgow shall not find ye. Whisht, we’ll have to take Bell into our counsel; but she’s just an excellent lass, baith true and sure.”
“Aunty!” cried the young man; the tears bursting from his eyes, “Do you think I’m guilty, then: you! you think I did it—you! Oh, Lord! who will believe me, then?” he cried, stretching out despairing hands.
“Me?” cried Mrs. Brown; “me think ye did it, or any ill thing! I would as soon, oh, far sooner, believe it of mysel!”
He burst into a low fit of hysterical laughter. “Then why should ye hide me?” he said.
The good woman was taken aback for a moment. “What were ye meaning, then, Archie, about the pollisman? and you to bide till he came? Ye shall bide as lang as you please, my bonny boy; and everything we can do to make you comfortable, Bell and me. Bless me! I’m speaking to my ain lad as if he was a strange gentleman, and didna ken. What ails ye, Archie? you are just as white as a sheet, and laughing and greeting like a lassie.”
“I have had no breakfast,” he said, “and I’ve walked——”
But here he was interrupted by another shout from Mrs. Brown, who rushed away to the kitchen, appearing again in a moment or two with a tray, upon which was piled everything she could think of, from cold beef to strawberry jam. He was not hungry: any such feeling had abandoned him some time ago, but he was faint from want of food. And it was only when he had eaten and rested, in the quiet of the afternoon, that he was able to tell his tale coherently, and that she was sufficiently composed to hear.
The exclamations with which that tale was accompanied and interrupted, her dismay, her wrath—her triumph in Archie’s defiance of his father and resolution to shake the dust of Rosmore from off his feet, were endless; but when he came to his interview with Mrs. Rowland, Jane began to shake her head.
“It would be her wyte all through,” she said. “Eh, I would not have you lippen to her! It is just her that has been at the bottom of it a’ through.”
Archie’s momentary softness towards his stepmother was gone. He had begun to remember his griefs, real or imaginary, against her, and to persuade himself that her pity had been fictitious and theatrical. But he made a protest against this view.
“She could not have forged the cheque, in order to get me into trouble,” he said.
“Oh how do we ken what the like of her would do?” said Mrs. Brown; “a woman that makes a marriage like yon, is just set upon everything she can get out of the man. If he were to die, what would become of her? Oh, he would aye leave her something, enough to keep her; but there would be an awfu’ difference between that and Rosmore, and a’ her grand company and her horses and carriages. They,” said Aunty Jane, cleverly changing her ground, so that it was not Mrs. Rowland alone whom she could be supposed to refer to, “will just do anything to get a little more siller to lay up for that time. And if they can persuade the poor man that his bairns, that are his natural kin, are no what he thinks them—eh, Archie, the objeck’s just ower evident.”
“She was very kind to me,” he said. “She said she believed me.”
“Oh ay; it’s very easy to be kind when the harm’s done. After she had got your father set against ye, and your life in her power, then was her time to speak ye fair, my poor laddie, and make him think her the kindest in the world. I’ve seen all that afore now,” said Mrs. Brown. “It’s no half so uncommon as ye think. Just the invention of the deevil to make their father think ill o’ them, and then a purrin’ and a phrasin’ to pretend that she’s on their side: that’s just what I’ve seen a score o’ times before.”
Archie was only half convinced, but he allowed himself to be silenced at least. “Somebody must have done it,” he said. “I have thought of it a great deal since—somebody that knew my father’s writing, and could get a cheque, and had the opportunity of getting the money, without suspicion.”
Mrs. Brown nodded her head at each detail, and said “Just that, just that.”
“You are making a mistake,” he said. “She writes a little pretty hand, like a lady. She could not do it, even if she were capable of a thing which is a crime.”
“I tell you,” said Jane, “they are just capable of everything, to get them that’s in their way out o’ their way. And what about the writing? If they canna do a thing themselves, there’s aye others they can get to do it. An ill person never missed an ill deed yet for want of a tool.”
“You speak nonsense!” he cried angrily; but he could not argue with a woman strong in the panoply of ignorance and obstinacy. And by the oft repetition of such arguments, Archie came, if not to believe, at least to acquiesce, in that decision that Mrs. Rowland, somehow, was at the bottom of it all; that it was contrary to her interests that a good understanding should exist between Archie and his father, and that, whoever had actually done this thing, the conception and execution of it were in her hands. Sometimes he had a compunction, remembering her look, her tears, her blessing. Was she such a hypocrite that she could bid God bless him and not mean it—mean, indeed, the very reverse? And then that thrill which he could never forget, that touch which came from no visible hand. What was it? some witchcraft of hers, or a sign from heaven, as he had thought it for a moment? He said nothing to Mrs. Brown of this, and he tried himself not to think of it. The recollection brought with it a pang of terror: he did not like to think of it at night when he was alone. If it should come again, if he should see, perhaps, his mother looking at him through the darkness—his mother, so long dead, whom he did not remember! He had not courage to desire such a visitor, and he tried to put this strange and wonderful sensation out of his mind.
But Archie did not spend happy days in his old home. He found it so changed, so unlike what it had once been: or was it only he who was changed? He had no heart to return to the old football team, to renew his acquaintance with the students, who were now returning daily to resume their work at the College. He would not go to the room where the Philosophers met. Had he become so low, so mean, he asked himself sometimes, that for a little want of refinement, a difference of clothes, he should shrink from his old friends? A want of refinement—as if he had any refinement, or ever would have; he, to whom Miss Saumarez had spoken so plainly, whom she had bidden not to be—such an ill-bred, low-bred fellow! That was what she had meant, though the words she used had been different. He never saw any one like Rosamond Saumarez now. There were many nice good girls in the Sauchiehall Road, girls who looked up to him, no one who would take him to task and show him how inferior he was: there was none like her, none. And he never would meet any one like her again. He never would see her as he remembered her so well, sitting at the piano in the dim background of the great room, scarcely visible, playing music which he did not understand, which overawed him, and irritated and worried him, but never lost its spell—not that it had any spell, except in the hands that called it forth. And then suddenly the picture would change, and he would see her walk out of the gloom in her white dress, tall and slim, coming up to him, the fool, in his inaction, laying a hand upon his arm, like the dropping of a rose leaf, carrying him off always in her composed, proud way, with her head high, after Eddy and Marion. These two were full of fun; they enjoyed it, as boys and girls enjoy dancing all the world over. But Archie did not enjoy it. It was far more than fun to him, it was as if some one lifted a curtain to him to reveal a new world. He never got beyond the threshold, but hovered there, looking in. Had the curtain fallen, and was the door closed now, for ever? Should he never see Rosamond again? Never, never, some echo seemed to say. All that was over. Rosmore had closed its doors, never to open them again. No, it had not closed its doors. The door was still open when he turned his back upon his father’s house—open, and with his father’s wife standing in the doorway, crying, and bidding God bless him. Did she not mean that? did she mean something quite the reverse? Was it she who had really turned him forth, instead of doing her best to keep him there, as had appeared? Archie never said a word of all this to his aunt. He had never mentioned Rosamond to her. Sometimes she asked him about Mr. Adie, the gentleman whom he had brought to see her, who seemed a fine lad, though not much to look at, and would not he do something to set things right. He of all people in the world! Eddy! who had accepted his money, and had stood by and seen him suffer for that, and had not even uttered a word of sympathy. He laughed when his aunt suggested this, and told her Mr. Adie was not a man who would do anything. But of Rosamond he never said a word.
And the days were more heavy than words could say. To have no companions but Mrs. Brown after that house-full of people, all of them more or less original and full of character—his father, who had so many experiences which came into his daily talk; Mrs. Rowland, one of the most wonderful of beings to an uneducated young man, with her easy knowledge of so many things which, to him, were a study and labour to know; and Rosamond, whose knowledge was of so different a kind, yet who, in her self-possession and youthful, grave acquaintance with the world, was almost the most astonishing of all; and Eddy, who was always so bright, always full of spirits, so perfectly aware of his own deficiencies, that they became qualities, and pleased the people about him more than if he had been ever so clever and instructed. To leave all these, and all the people who came and went, and talked and filled the world with variety of life, even old Rankin in his cottage and Roderick on the hill, and to have no companion but Aunty Jane! She was more kind than words could say, but had so narrow a little round of being, and was so inveterate, so determined in those certainties which he was almost brought to believe, by dint of much talking, but which his spirit rebelled against all the same. When he received Evelyn’s letters he carried them off to his room to read them, and would not expose them to her scrutiny: but he was too much influenced by her opinions and by the tacit agreement in them, to which, in his sore and wounded condition he had been brought, to reply. It would have been a certain disloyalty if, in Mrs. Brown’s house, he had answered the appeal of the stepmother who, he had agreed, or almost agreed, with his aunt, must be at the bottom of it all. And what could he have replied? He had said that he would abide whatever they chose to do to him—arrest, trial, whatever they pleased. He had represented to himself and to his aunt that he expected the policemen, and that from day to day they might come to take him. He had, in fact, so simple was he, felt a tremor in his heart, when he saw in the road, as happened every day, the honest sturdy form of the policeman passing by. It was always possible that this simple functionary might be coming, armed with all the majesty of the law, to take him, though Archie had an internal conviction that, if it was to be done, it would be done more quietly than this, with more precaution than if he had been a housebreaker or stolen a watch. But such delicacies did not enter into Mrs. Brown’s mind. She watched the policeman go past daily with his heavy tread, with a trembling certainty that he was coming to arrest her boy: and still more at midnight, when she heard his heavy tread, did she hold her breath, thinking that now the dreaded moment must have come, and on tiptoe of apprehension and anxiety waiting for the sound of his nearer approach, ready to thrust Archie into her bed or under, to conceal him till the danger was over. Mrs. Brown, though she had all the horror of the police common to respectable women of her class, was half disappointed when day after day passed, and no attempt at an arrest was ever made.
“They will have found nae proof,” she said, “as how could they have found any proof, there being nane. And they will just be in a puzzle what to do—and yon leddy will either be concocting something, or else she will be working upon your father, poor misguided man. Eh, when I think what James Rowland might have been, with his bonnie dochter to sit at the head of his table, and his son to stand for him before the world, and everything just good nature and peace. But he had to have a grand leddy to scare us a’ with her grand ways, and that was thinking of nothing but how to get as much as she could out o’ him, and his ain that were the right heirs, out of the way. Ye’ll see the next thing will be trouble to Mey. She will not put up with Mey: now she’s gotten you banished, the next thing in her head will be something against your sister, till baith the ane and the ither o’ you is on the street. And just let her do her worst,” said Mrs. Brown with a flush of war, “there will be aye room here. I’m no wanting to see her fall into worse and worse sin, but the sooner she lets out her plans the better for us. And we’ll just have Mey back in her bonnie little room, and everything as it was before.”
Would everything be as it was before? Alas, Archie feared not. They were not as they had been before. For himself everything was changed. It was vain to think of returning to his old existence as it had been, when they were all so cheerful together in Sauchiehall Road. He thought of the old suppers, when he would bring in with him two or three of his Philosophers, whom Mrs. Brown would receive with a “Come away ben, come in to the fire. I’m just very glad to see you,” and Marion would set herself to tease and provoke: and who would be delighted to reply to both the ladies, to meet Mrs. Brown with compliments upon her supper, and to laugh with Marion to her heart’s content. These little parties had been very pleasant. They had appeared to him sometimes, when anything had gone wrong at Rosmore, as happy examples of natural ease and enjoyment. But now he had ceased to have any taste for these gatherings. And Marion: perhaps Marion would be more at home than he was: for at Rosmore her social performances had been still a little in the same kind, personal encounters of laughter and sharp speeches, what Eddy called “chaff,” and in which style he was himself a master. Perhaps she could still have made herself happy with the Philosophers. But Archie’s day for that was over. The old home could never be what it had been before. He scorned himself for seeing all its little defects, and for feeling the disenchantment, even for the consciousness that Aunt Jane, who was so kind, was scarcely a companion who could make life sweet. She was as his mother. He had never known other care than her’s. In the old days he had perhaps wished sometimes that she had not spoken the language of Glasgow in quite so broad a tone. But this was so small a defect; how he hated himself for perceiving much more than the broad Glasgow speech which jarred upon him! But it is a very hard ordeal for an old woman in any rank when she has to be the sole companion of a young man; especially when long knowledge makes him acquainted with every tale she has to tell, and all the experiences which might be interesting to another, but have been familiar to him since ever he began to listen and to understand.
The only relief which Archie had was in attempts, not carried out with any energy, to get a situation in which he could earn his own living. Nothing could have been more false than his present position. He had scarcely any money left, and he had abandoned his father’s house for ever. Yet he was supported by his aunt, who received her living from his father, and so it was still by James Rowland’s money that his son was nourished, though that son had totally rebelled against him. What if he might cut short or take away altogether Jane Brown’s allowance, on account of the rebel she was harbouring? What if he understood with contempt that his son was thus living upon him still? Sometimes at night these thoughts would so sting and madden Archie that he would jump out of bed in the morning, resolved before night came again to have got work, whatever it was, and to have made himself independent. But this was so much easier said and thought than done. One man to whom he applied, laughed in his face when he confessed that he was the son of the great Rowland, the Indian Railway Man. “No, no, Mr. Rowland,” he said, “the like of you in my office would revolutionise everything. You have too much money to spend, you rich men’s sons. You lead away the poor lads that cannot play fast and loose with life like you. Eh! you have no money? Well, then, I suppose you have had a tiff with your father and mean to be independent. That’s just as bad. You will be diligent for a while and then you will go off like a firework. I have known the sort of thing before. No, no, my young gentleman, the like of you is not for an office like mine.” Then poor Archie tried the plan of giving no account of himself at all, except that he was in want of a situation, and could do a little bookkeeping, and was acquainted with the axiom that two and two make four. And in this case he was asked for his testimonials, but had no testimonials to offer, no previous character or evidence as to what he could do. And again, but more roughly, he was re-conducted, as the French say, to the simplest door, and his hopes in that instance were over. He then began, as how many a much disappointed man has done, to study the advertisements in the newspapers, and to answer them sometimes half a dozen in the day. But the sprawling large hand-writing which was so fatally like his father’s, did not find favour in the eyes of men who advertised for clerks. It was admired in Mr. Rowland, the great railway man, and said to mean originality, daring, and a strong will, but in the young would-be clerk it was sharply set down as a bad hand, and he was rejected on that and other reasons again and again. This dismal play went on from day to day. Perhaps he was not very earnest in it, perhaps he felt that in no combination of circumstances could it be a matter of life and death. If he was not arrested and brought to trial, he would be provided for. The question was whether he would submit his pride to being supported by the man who had flung that cheque in his face. When he asked himself such a question, or rather, when it fluttered across his path, Archie would spring to his feet again with an emphatic “No!” and redouble his exertions.
But he was in a false position, crippled all round by disabilities. Mrs. Brown advised that he should go to the minister, who had known him so long, and could speak for him; but Archie knew what the minister would say: he would remind him of his duty to his father, and that to leave his father’s house and bury himself in a position unbecoming Mr. Rowland’s son, was ungrateful and unkind. And if he told all his story, and that of the forged cheque, what would the minister say? He would shake his head, he would grow grave, a cloud would gather over his face, he would make haste to end the interview. It would be impossible to believe that Mr. Rowland would make such an accusation without certain proof. Archie knew this was how it would happen, and he could not face such a reception.
Mrs. Brown went herself privately to the foundry, where her own connection with it as the widow of a foreman, and still more, her connection with Rowland, who had risen from it to such unexampled heights, made her still a person of consideration—to speak to the manager. But the manager of the foundry was still more decided.
“If he really wants to learn the work, and his father will say a single word, it will be easily managed.”
“But oh, Mr. Blyth, ye must not ask that; for it’s just in consequence of two-three unlucky words with his father that he’s thinking of taking a situation.”
“Then, Mrs. Brown, you should give the young man good advice. What does he think he’ll gain by quarrelling with his father? He may be sure his father is twice the man that he is, however clever he may be.”
“I was not saying he was very clever,” said Mrs. Brown; “but ye see he has a stepmother, and that explains everything: for she just turns the father against them, as is a common occurrence.”
“Well,” said the manager, “all the same, the best thing he can do is to make it up with his father. Stepmothers are ill things, but they’re not always as black as they’re painted; and those that are subject to them must just put up with them.”
This was all the comfort that Jane got, though she kept part of the report from her nephew.
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