IT was a very curious breakfast party: for this of course was what had to follow, neither father nor son having yet had any breakfast, notwithstanding all the agitations of the morning. And Mr. Rowland and his son, their minds being relieved, had a very different idea of what was implied in the word breakfast from that entertained by Evelyn, whose cup of tea and morsel of “bap” had satisfied all her needs. They meant other things, and their meaning was more promptly understood by Mrs. Brown than anything that had gone before. It had gone to her heart to see the eggs, the marmalade, and the scones, all neglected upon the tray which she had brought for Mrs. Rowland with the hospitality of a savage woman to her enemy: but now the opportunity was within reach of distinguishing herself in the most lavish way. She was continually on the road between the kitchen and parlour, hurrying, with one dish after another, eggs, finnan haddocks, fried ham, everything that her substantial system of cooking understood. It was Evelyn’s turn to sit and watch the progress of a meal which was so very different from her own, which she did with mingled amusement and amazement, and something of that feminine mixture of pleasure and laughing disdain for the men whose appetites are not interfered with by emotion, which is so common. She liked to see them eat with a certain maternal satisfaction in their well-being, though not so marked as that of Mrs. Brown, who ran to and fro supplying them, with tears of delight in her eyes—but with little jibes and jests at the ease of the transition from all their excitement to that excellent meal, which Archie, always afraid of being laughed at, was uncertain how to accept, though satisfied by seeing that they did not affect his father’s equanimity. Presently, however, these little jests began to slacken, the tone of her voice changed, and when, after a moment or two of silence, Rowland looked up to say something, he perceived, with the most unexpected sudden rush of emotion to his own eyes, and feeling to his heart, that his wife had fallen asleep. He had not understood Jane’s signals, who stood by with her finger on her lip, and who was drying her eyes with the big white apron which she had slipped on to save her gown, as she ran to and fro with the dishes which Bell in the kitchen was fully occupied in preparing.
“She’s just wearit to death,” Jane whispered with a small sob, “and vexed wi’ the contradictions o’ sinners, after a’ she’s done for you. Just hold your tongues now, and let her get a little peace, ye twa greedy men.” The elaborate pantomime in which the rest of the meal was carried on; the care of both to subdue the sound of their knives and forks, and suppress the little jar of the cups and saucers; and the super-careful clearing away, performed on tiptoe by Bell, as being less heavy in her movements than her mistress, aided by Archie, would have been very amusing to Evelyn could she have seen through her closed eyelids what was going on: but her sleep was very sincere, the involuntary and profound slumber of exhaustion, from which relief of mind, and the delightful ease of success, took every sting. When she came to herself it was in the quiet of a room given up to her repose, the blind drawn down, every sound hushed, and a large shawl—Mrs. Brown’s best, a real Indian shawl sent by Rowland in former days, of which the good woman was more proud than of anything she possessed—carefully arranged over her. Her husband sat near, not moving a finger, watching over her repose. Evelyn woke with a slight start, and it was a minute or two before she realised that she was not in the corner of a railway carriage nor the forlorn solitude of the London hotel, but that her mission was accomplished, and all hostilities vanquished. It was perhaps Jane’s shawl that made this most clearly apparent to her. It was a beautiful shawl, the colours like nothing but those fine tints of Cashmere with which her Indian experiences had made her fully acquainted, the texture so soft, the work so delicate. The first intimation that Rowland had of his wife’s waking, were the words, said to herself with a little sigh of pleasure, “He must have sent her this.”
“What did you say, my darling?” he said, getting up quickly.
“Oh, you are there, James! I said you must have sent it to her, and I meant she must approve of me at last, or she would not have covered me with her beautiful shawl.”
“Do you care for her approval, Evelyn?”
“Care!” she said, “of course I care,” then added with a laugh, “A woman can never bear to be disapproved of. I suppose I must have been asleep.”
“Like a baby,” said her husband, with his laugh of emotion, “and very nice you looked, my dear, but utterly tired out.”
“Yes, I was very tired,” she acknowledged. “I have done nothing but run about, and then wait, which was still worse. And then—” She sat up suddenly throwing off her coverings. “James! you know—how did you know?”
“Tell me first,” he said. “It is very little I know—and then I will tell you.”
“That is a bargain,” she answered smiling, and then with many interruptions of remark and commentary, she told him her story: Rankin’s hint, and Marion’s first of all.
“Marion! Marion told you that?” he cried in amazement.
“She told me nothing. I do not for a moment suppose that she knew anything,” cried Evelyn, scenting another danger, “but she is very keen-witted, and must have felt that if there was a mystery—”
“A great deal too keen-witted, the little—” The substantive intended to come in here was a profane one, and Rowland felt on his side a danger too.
“And then I had all the trouble in the world to see him. I almost forced an entrance at last, and by the threat of invading him in his own room—indeed,” said Evelyn, “it was not a threat only, I should have gone to his room, as I could find him no other where. But the threat sufficed and he came. James! the boy has committed a great crime, but oh my heart is sore for Eddy. He has no mother.”
“You think you might have been his mother, Evelyn?”
“I don’t know how you should have divined it—but I do: thank God that I am not! but sometimes I cannot help thinking what a terrible fate I might have had, but for the goodness of God—”
“Working through the wickedness of man.”
“Don’t raise such questions, James! Don’t make me think of it at all. I have been spared that fate, thank God, and saved for a very different one. It is very fantastic, but it gives me a feeling to the children—”
She had put out her hand to him, and he held it in his own. He gave it a grip, now, more loving than tender. “It gives me,” he said, “a feeling too.”
“Not of—dislike—not of——”
“What do you take me for, Evelyn? A man like me is often very fantastic, I allow, though nobody would think it. I am so touched by the thought that they might have been your children, and so glad of the escape we have had that they aren’t; and so sorry for them, poor things, for losing the best chance they could have had.”
At this curiously mixed statement of what was so real and true to the speakers, Evelyn laughed, with tears in her voice, pressing her husband’s hand. And then she said, “Now tell me, James, how you know?”
This was not so easy as her task. The middle-aged man of business blushed as youths and maidens are alone considered capable of doing. “Is it not enough that I might have guessed like Marion, or that Marion might have communicated her guess to me?”
“Anything is enough that you tell me,” she said.
“That drives all fiction out of my mouth. The reason I knew, Evelyn, was that I was there.”
“There!” she cried in amazement, raising herself upright.
“There! more or less. I thought you must have seen me when you came out as you did, with a bounce, not like you. I was, I am ashamed to tell you, like a wretched spy, on the other side of the road, watching where you had gone.”
She turned her face to him with such a look of wide-eyed astonishment that his countenance fell. “I have to beg your pardon, Evelyn. Hear my story first, and then you can say what you please. I was just wild with disappointment and misery when I found you gone. Then—it was on a hint—I guessed where you were. I got up to London on Friday morning—was it only yesterday?—and they told me at the hotel you had just gone out, that if I followed you—. I did follow you, and came up to you. But I couldn’t speak to you. How could I ask an account from my wife of where she was going, or tell her I had followed her? I just followed still, and then I saw that you went in, and guessed that you had an interview upstairs, and then an interview downstairs. And then—Well, when we both got back to the hotel I was more certain than ever that I could not show that I was spying upon you, Evelyn, and was ashamed even to say that I wondered what you were doing. I knew whose house it was, by instinct I suppose. And then, Eddy came to you in the afternoon. And I could think of nothing else but that—when I thought you had been occupied about my boy, it was this other boy that was filling your mind. And then you came back, and I with you in the next carriage, though you never saw me. And then to my wonder and astonishment I watched you come here. So that when you said you had seen the man who—committed that forgery—I knew at once who it was.”
Rowland concluded his narrative with his head bent down, the words coming slowly from his lips. He did not meet the eyes which he felt sure must be full of wrath, and every moment he feared that the hand which held his (his own had become too limp with alarm to hold anything) should drop it, or fling it away in indignation. Evelyn held it tight, giving it a fierce little pressure from time to time. No doubt presently she would fling it from her. And there was a silence which was awful to the penitent.
“I never,” she said at last, “could have recognised you in the rôle of a detective, James.”
“No,” he said, with a furtive glance at her, slightly encouraged by the sound of her voice, though doubtful that the tightness with which she held his hand was preliminary to the sudden tossing away from her, which he expected and feared. “No, it is not exactly my kind of way.”
“But I recognise you,” she said, “very well, when you were not able to say to your wife that you suspected her, when you were ashamed to let me know that you wondered what I was doing. Of what did you suspect me, James?”
She did not loose his hand, but he freed it unconsciously, rising to his feet in overwhelming agitation at this question. Of what did he suspect her? Good heavens! Rowland’s forehead grew cold and wet, his eyes rose, troubled, to meet those with which she was regarding him—large, clear, wide open. It was cruel of Evelyn: the man was so intimidated that he could scarcely reply, though indeed he had been all the time dans son droit.
“I—did not suspect you of anything. Tut!” he said, recovering himself, “why shouldn’t I say the worst? I suspected you of going to consult that man about your husband’s affairs.”
“Did you indeed, James? You supposed I was going to consult a man—of whom I have a right to think everything that is worst in a woman’s eyes, whom I neither trust, nor esteem, nor believe a word that he says—upon the concerns of my honourable husband, which are my concerns, and more than mine, just so much more than mine that I am trusted with them? You could suppose that, James?”
“No,” said the unfortunate man, moving from one leg to the other in the extremity of his perplexity and distress. “No, you’re right, Evelyn, I didn’t. I suspected nothing. I was ashamed, bitterly ashamed of the whole affair. It was nothing but the suggestion of that little—I mean it was the madness of my disappointment at finding you not there. What I meant to say,” he added, taking a little courage, “was that perhaps if it had been anybody but you—”
“No,” she said. “No sophistry, James: whoever it had been, it would have been the same thing. You would have been ashamed to ask an honest woman any such question. You are not the kind of man to believe in any shameful thing. Most men believe in every shameful thing—that man, for instance, whom you thought I was going to consult.”
He hung his head a little under this taunt, but then he said in a certain self-justificatory tone, “You saw him after all.”
“I saw him,” she said, a slight flush for the first time rising on her face, “against my will. I was not aware he was there. I had heard from Rosamond that he was still abroad: not that I mean you to think,” she added at once, “that it would have made the least difference had I known he was there. I should have gone—to throw light upon this trouble—anywhere in the world—had the devil himself and not Edward Saumarez been there. I don’t know which is the worst,” she said impulsively. “I think the other one’s perhaps belied, but not he.”
Evelyn’s strong speech made her falter for a moment and be silent, which encouraged Rowland to say, putting out his hand again, “Devil he may be, but I’m cutting a poor enough figure. Do you think you will be able to forgive me, Evelyn? I will never do it again.”
The rueful humility of the tone restored Mrs. Rowland to herself. She laughed putting her hand in his. “Yes, do it again,” she said, “for there never was anything so delightful in the world as a man who follows his wife off to London, where she is perhaps going astray, and is ashamed to ask her what she is doing when he finds her there. You make me proud of my Othello: for he is quite a new one, better than Shakespeare’s. Oh, James! what a difference, what a difference! To think you should both be men of the same race, that hideous satyr, and you!”
To say that good James Rowland had any very clear idea what she was raving about would be untrue. He knew no resemblance he could possibly have to Othello, nor what Shakespeare had to do with it. Neither was he clear who was the hideous satyr. But he knew that this trust on Evelyn’s part was to his own credit and praise, and he was pleased, as the best of men may be.
“Well,” he said, recovering himself entirely, “we will consider that incident over, Evelyn, and me the most happy man in Scotland, be the other who he may. I owe Archie some amends for suspecting him, but you will allow—”
“I will allow nothing,” said Evelyn. “Had you treated him as you treat me, and been ashamed to suggest such a thing to your son as you own you were to your wife, we might all have been spared a great deal of pain. But now it’s all over, thank God, and you will know better another time.”
“Don’t fall upon me and slay me on another ground after you’ve forgiven me on your own,” he said. And then he grew suddenly grave and asked, “Did he give you any details—did he tell you why he did it, the unhappy boy?”
“He asked me only that the cheque might be destroyed. I thought you would think Archie’s exculpation cheaply purchased at that cost.”
“Of course, of course,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“And gave me this, which he said would to you be proof enough.”
Mr. Rowland took the scrap of paper, with his own name written upon it, in different degrees of perfection. He looked at it intently for a minute, then threw it into the smouldering fire, where it made a momentary blaze and flickered away.
“If the thing could be destroyed like that!” he said. Then after a pause, “The question is, what is to be done with that unhappy boy.”
“James! I promised him exemption, safety. He was never to hear of it again.”
“Tut, tut!” he said. “It’s you now, Evelyn, that shows a want of understanding. Do you think anything in the world would make me bring to disgrace and ruin that boy! The creature’s not of age,” he cried. “What are we to do with him, to make it still possible that he should live his life?”
“James,” cried Evelyn, after a pause, “I must tell you. There are such curious differences. I don’t think that Eddy is—very unhappy. He has his moments of seriousness, but generally he takes it lightly enough.”
“I don’t see that that makes it any better. Are we to leave him among his debts and his follies, to be tempted to do such a thing again? He should be separated from that horrible,—what do you call it—society life of his, and set to work.”
“I don’t think you would ever get him to work, James!”
“He should be taken, anyhow, out of that whirl of wretched life.”
“He could not live out of it, James!”
“Yet he managed to exist for a whole month at Rosmore.”
“Oh, my dear James, he was born in it, and he will die in it. He could not manage to exist out of that atmosphere of society.”
“I have a great mind to try,” Rowland said, walking about the room. “What is the good of saving a man from drowning with one hand, if ye pitch him back into the water with the other? I like radical measures. I would send him right away to some sort of work.”
She said nothing but shook her head.
“By George, I will try!” cried her husband, “if you were to shake your head off, my dear. I won’t let the laddie perish without a try to save him. He’s saved me, and the peace of my house. You may say he put it in jeopardy first: but it took some pluck, Evelyn, to put that, and his life, so to speak, in your hands. He must have good meanings in him. I will send for the lad—I will—”
“I must tell you something first, James, and then you shall act as you please. He said to me, ‘This means that I shall never see any of you again. And I was fond of little Marion—though she doesn’t deserve it any more than I do.’ It was a curious thing to say.”
Rowland gave a long whistle, and a twinkle of fun arose in his eye. “She doesn’t deserve it any more than he does!” he said. The speech did not make him angry, as Evelyn had feared. It made him laugh, and his laugh was not ungenial. “By Jove!” he said to himself: but he did not explain to Evelyn the idea which was veiled by that exclamation. There was, indeed, no need that there should be any meaning at all.