I AM afraid I cannot tell any one “which” it was that poor Val had, not having any medical knowledge. He was very ill, and lay there for the week during which Dick was absent on his master’s affairs, knowing nobody, often delirious, never himself, unable to send any message, or even to think of those he had left behind, who knew nothing of him. He talked of them, raved about them when his mind wandered, sometimes saying things which conveyed some intelligence to the mind of the anxious woman who watched over him, and often uttering phrases which she listened to eagerly, but which were all blank and dark to her. Poor soul! how she watched, how she strained her ear for every word he said. Her own, thus, once more; thus at last in her hands, with none to come between them; dependent on her—receiving from her the tendance of weary days and sleepless nights. Receiving from her, not she from him—eating her bread even, so to speak, though he could eat nothing—living under her roof—dependent on her, as a son should be on a mother. I cannot describe the forlorn sweetness there was to her in this snatch of nature, this sudden, unexpected, impossible crisis which, for the time, gave her her son. I do not know if it ever occurred to her mind that the others who had a right to him might be wondering what had become of their boy. Even now her mind was not sufficiently developed to dwell upon this. She thought only that she had him—she, and no other. She closed her doors, and answered all questions sparingly, and admitted nobody she could help; for what had anybody to do with him but she? When the doctor asked if she had written to his friends, she nodded her head or said “Yes, yes,” impatiently. His friends! who were they in comparison to his mother? They had had him all his life—she had him for so short a time, so very, very short a time!—why should any one come and interfere? She could get him everything he wanted, could give up all her time to watch him and nurse him. Once she said, when the doctor pressed her, “I have let his mother know;” and he was satisfied with the reply. “If his mother knows, of course it is all right,” he said. “Oh yes, yes,” she cried, “his mother knows;” and what more was necessary? She had not the faintest intention of revealing herself to him afterwards, of taking the advantage of all she was doing for him. No! it seemed to her that she could die easier than say to Val, “I am your mother;” a subtle instinct in her—delicacy of perception communicated by love alone—made her feel that Val would receive the news with no delight—that to be made aware that she was his mother would be no joy to him; and she would have died rather than betray herself. But to have him there, unconscious as he was, “wandering in his mind,” not knowing her, or any one—but yet with her as if he had been a baby again, dependent on her, receiving everything from her! No words can say what this was. She passed the time in a strange trance of exquisite mingled pleasure and pain; suffering now and then to see him ill, to feel that he did not know her, and if he knew her, would not care for her; suffering, too, from the sleepless nights to which she was totally unaccustomed, and the close confinement to one room, though scarcely realising what it was that made her head so giddy and her sensations so unusual; but all the time and through all the suffering rapt in a haze of deep enjoyment—a happiness sacred and unintelligible, with which no one could intermeddle; which no one even knew or could understand but herself. She had no fear for Valentine’s life; though the doctor looked very grave, it did not affect her; and though her brain was keen and clear to understand the instructions he gave, and to follow them with pertinacious, unvarying, almost unreasoning exactitude, she did not study his looks, or ask with brooding anxiety his opinion, as most other women in her circumstances would have done. She never asked his opinion, indeed, at all. She was merely anxious, not at all afraid; or if she was afraid, it was rather of her patient getting well than dying. The doctor, who was the only one who beheld this strange sickbed, was more puzzled than tongue could tell. What did the woman mean? she was utterly devoted to the sick man—devoted to him as only love can be; but she was not anxious, which love always is. It was a puzzle which he could not understand.
In a week Dick came back. He had been away on his master’s business, being now a trusted and confidential servant, with the management of everything in his hands. It was Easter week, too, and his business had been combined with a short holiday for himself. His mother was not in the habit of writing to him, though she did, in some small degree at least, possess the accomplishment of writing—so that he came home, utterly ignorant of what had happened, on one of those chilly March evenings when the light lengthens and the cold strengthens, according to the proverb. Dick was tired, and the landscape, though it was home, looked somewhat dreary to him as he arrived; the river was swollen, and muddy, and rapid; the east wind blanching colour and beauty out of everything; a pale sunset just over, and a sullen twilight settling down, tinting with deep shadows and ghastly white gleams of light the cold water. He shivered in spite of himself. The door was not standing open as usual, nor was there any light in the little parlour. He had to stand and knock, and then, when no one answered, went round to the back door (which was his usual entrance, though he had chosen the other way to-night) to get in. The kitchen was vacant, the maid having gone to the doctor’s for poor Val’s medicine. Dick went into the parlour, and found it dreary and deserted, looking as if no one had been there for months. Finally, he went up-stairs, and found his mother at the door of a bedroom coming to meet him. “I thought it must be you,” she said, “but I could not leave him.” “Leave him? Leave whom, mother? what do you mean?” he said, bewildered. “Hush, hush,” she cried, looking back anxiously into the room she had just left; then she came out closing the door softly after her. “Come in here,” she said, opening the next door, which was that of his own room. “I can speak to you here; and if he stirs I’ll hear him.” Dick followed her with the utmost astonishment, not knowing what his mother meant, or if she had gone out of her wits. But when he heard that it was Mr Ross who lay there ill, and that his mother had saved his young patron’s life, and was now nursing him, with an absorbing devotion that made her forget everything else, Dick’s mind was filled with a strange tumult of feeling. He showed his mother nothing but his satisfaction to be able to do something for Mr Ross, and anxiety that he should have everything he required; but in his heart there was a mixture of other sentiments. He had not lost in the least his own devotion to the young man to whom (he always felt) he owed all his good fortune; but there was something in his mother’s tremulous impassioned devotion to Valentine that had disturbed his mind often, and her looks now, engrossed altogether in her patient, thinking of nothing else, not even of Dick’s comfort, though she knew he was to return to-day, affected him, he could scarcely tell how. When he had heard all the story, he laid his hand kindly on her shoulder, looking at her. “You are wearing yourself out,” he said; “you are making yourself ill. But it’s all right; to be sure, when he was taken ill like this, he could go nowhere but here.”
“Nowhere,” she said with fervour. “Here it’s natural; but never mind me, boy, I’m happy. I want nothing different. It’s what I like best.”
“I’ll just step in and look at him, mother.”
“Not now,” she said quickly, with an instinct of jealous reserve. She did not want any one to interfere—not even her boy. Then she added—“He’s sleeping. You might wake him if he heard another step on the floor. Go and get your supper, Dick; you’re tired—and maybe after, if he wakes up——”
“Is there any supper for me?” said Dick, half laughing, but with a momentary sensation of bitterness. He felt ashamed of it the moment after. “Go in, go in to him, mother dear,” he said. “You’re in the right of it. I’ll go and get my supper; and after that, if he wakes I’ll see him—only don’t wear yourself out.”
“I do nothing but sit by him—that’s all; doing nothing, how could I wear myself out?” she said. “But oh, I’m glad you’re home, Dick; very glad you’re home!”
“Are you, mother?” Dick said, with a vague smile, half gratified, half sceptical. Perhaps she did not hear him, for she was already in Val’s room, watching his breathing. Dick went down-stairs with the smile still upon his face, determined to make the best of it—for after all Mr Ross had the best right to everything that was in the house, since, but for him, that house would never have belonged to Dick at all. He called the maid, who had come back, to get him his supper, and stepped outside while it was getting ready, to take counsel of the river and the skies, as he had done so often. It was now almost dark, and the river gleamed half sullen, under skies which were white and black, but showed no warmer tinge of colour. Heavy clouds careered over the blanched and watery firmament—a dreary wind sighed in the willows on the eyot. They did not give cheery counsel, that river and those trees. But Dick soon shook off this painful jealousy, which was not congenial to his nature. What so natural, after all, as that she should give her whole mind to the sufferer she was nursing, even at the risk of momentarily neglecting her son, who was quite well, and could shift for himself? Dick laughed at his own foolishness, and felt ashamed of himself that he could have any other feeling in his mind but pity and interest. He stole up, after his meal, to look into the sickroom, and then the tenderest compassion took possession of him. Val was lying awake with his eyes open but seeing nothing—noticing no one. Dick had never seen him otherwise than in the full flush of strength and health. A pang of terror and love took possession of him. He thought of all Val had done for him, since they met, boys, on the river at Eton, generously exaggerating all his boy-patron’s goodness, and putting his own out of sight. The tears came to his eyes. He asked himself with awe, and a pang of sudden pain and terror, could Valentine be going to die? His mother sat quite motionless by the bedside, with her eyes fixed on the patient. There was in her face no shadow of the cloud which Dick felt to be hanging over the room, but only a curious dim beatitude—happiness in being there—which the young man divined but could not understand.
Dick stole down again quietly to the little parlour, where his lamp gave a more cheerful light to think by than the eerie river. It would be absurd were I to deny that his mind had been troubled by many painful and anxious thoughts touching the connection of his mother with the Rosses. He thought he had come to a solution of it at last. In his class, as I have already said, people accept with comparative calm many things which in higher regions would be considered very terrible. Dick had made up his mind, after many thoughts, to a conclusion such as would have horrified and driven desperate a man differently brought up. He concluded that most likely Val’s father was his own father—that his mother had been very young, beautiful, and easily deceived, and that he himself was the son of this unknown “gentleman.” Dick was not ashamed of the supposed paternity. It had given him a pang when he thought it out at first; but to a lad who has been born a tramp, things show differently, and have other aspects from that which they bear to the rest of the world. Putting feeling aside, this was what he thought the most probable solution of the mystery; and Val, she knew, was this man’s son, and therefore he had a fascination for her. Probably, Dick thought, with a little pang, Val was like his father, and reminded her of him; and it did wound the good fellow to think that his mother could forget and set aside himself for the stranger who was nothing to her, who merely reminded her of a lover she had not seen for years and years. When he thought of his own problematical relationship to Valentine, his heart softened immensely. To think that it was to his brother he owed so much kindness—a brother who had no suspicion of the relationship, but was good to him out of pure generosity of heart and subtle influence of nature, was a very affecting idea, and brought a thrill to his breast when it came into his mind.
These were the conclusions he had hammered out by hard thinking from the few and very misty facts he knew. Some connection there clearly was, and this seemed so much the most likely explanation. Dick thought no worse of his mother for it; he knew her spotless life as long as he could remember—a life remarkable, even extraordinary, in her class—and his heart swelled with pity and tenderness at thought of all she must have come through. He had too much natural delicacy to ask her any questions on such a subject; but since he had (as he thought) found out, or rather divined this secret, it had seemed to account for many peculiarities in her. It explained everything that wanted explanation—her extraordinary interest in Val, her fear of encountering the lady who had been with him, her strange lingerings of manner and look that did not belong to her class. Dick thought this all over again, as he sat in the little parlour gazing steadily into the lamp; and, with a strange emotion in which pain, and wonder, and pity, and the tenderest sympathy, were all mingled together, tried to make himself master of the position. His lip quivered as he realised that in reality it might be his brother, his father’s son, who lay unconscious in the little room up-stairs. No doubt Val was like his father—no doubt he recalled to the woman, who had once been proud (who could doubt?) of being loved by a “gentleman,” the handsome, noble young deceiver who had betrayed her. But Dick did not use such hard words; he did not think of any betrayal in the case. He knew how tramp-girls are brought up, and only pitied, did not blame, or even defend, his mother. It seemed to him natural enough; and Val no doubt recalled his handsome father as homely Dick never did and never could do. Poor Dick! if there was a little pang in this, it was merely instinctive and momentary. The thought that Val might be—nay, almost certainly was—his father’s son, half his brother, melted his heart entirely. He would have sat up all night, though he was tired, if his mother had permitted him. His brother! and in his ignorance, in his youthful kind-heartedness, how good he had been! They had taken a fancy to each other the moment they set eyes upon each other, Dick remembered; and no wonder if they were brothers, though they did not know. The good fellow overcame every less tender feeling, and felt himself Val’s vassal and born retainer when he thought of all that had come and gone between them. He scarcely slept all night, making noiseless pilgrimages back and forward to the sick-room, feeling, unused as he was to illness, as if some change might be taking place for better or worse at any moment; and though he had as yet no real clue to the devotion with which his mother watched the sufferer, he shared it instinctively, and felt all at once as if the central point of the universe was in that uneasy bed, and there was nothing in the world to be thought of but Val.
“Mother, you’ve sent word to—his friends?” Dick had some feeling he could not explain which prevented him from saying “his father.” This was early next morning, when she had come out to say that Val was asleep, and had spent a better night.
She looked at him with a look which was almost an entreaty, and shook her head. “No—don’t be vexed, Dick; I’m bad at writing—and besides, I didn’t want no one to come.”
“But they must be anxious, mother. Think! if it had been yourself; and you know who they are. If it wasn’t far off in the north, I’d go.”
“Ah,” she said, with a gasping, long-drawn breath—“If it must be done, that’s the way, Dick. I’m bad at writing, and a letter would frighten ’em, as you say.”
“I didn’t say a letter would frighten. Mother, I can write well enough. It’s Lord Eskside—I recollect the name. Tell me where, and I’ll write to-day.”
“No,” she said, “no; a letter tells so little—and oh! I don’t want ’em to come here. There’s things I can’t tell you, boy—old things—things past and done with. You’ve always been a good son, the best of sons to me——”
“And I’ll do anything now, mother dear,” said poor Dick, moved almost to tears by the entreaty in her face, and putting his arm round her to support her; “I’ll do anything now to give you a bit of ease in your mind. You’ve been a good mother if I’ve been a good son, and never taught me but what was good and showed me an example. I’ll do whatever you would like best, mother dear.”
He said this, good fellow, to show that he found no fault with her if it was shame that kept her from speaking to him more openly. But she who had no shame upon her, no burden of conscious wrong, did not catch this subtle meaning. She was not clear enough in her mind to catch hidden meanings at any time. She took him simply at his word.
“Dick,” she said softly, entreating still, “he’s better—he’ll get well—why shouldn’t he get well? he’s young and strong, the same age as you are—a bit of an illness is nothing when you’re young. He’ll get well fast enough; and then,” she said, with a sigh, “he’ll go and tell his people himself. What is the use of troubling you and me?”
Dick shook his head. “They must be told, mother,” he said. “I’ll write; or if you like, I’ll go.”
She gave a long weary sigh. She was reluctant, he thought, to have any communication with those unknown people, Val’s father, and perhaps his mother, some great lady who would have no pity for the woman thus strangely thrown in her son’s path. This was quite natural, too, and Dick, in his tender sympathy with her, entered into the feeling. His tenderness and compassion made a poet of him; he seemed to see every shade of emotion in her disturbed soul.
“Mother, dear,” he said again, still more gently, “you don’t want to have aught to do with them? I can understand. Tell me where it is and I’ll go. The master will let me go easy. We’re not busy yet. I’ll see the doctor, and go off directly; for whether you like it or not, it’s their right, and they ought to know.”
“Well, well,” she said, after a pause, “if it must be, it must be. I’ve never gone against you, Dick, and I won’t now; and maybe my head’s dazed a bit with all the watching. It makes you stupid like.”
“You’ll be ill yourself, mother, if you don’t mind.”
“And if I was!” she cried. “If they take him, what does it matter? and they’re sure to take him. Dick, it’s like taking the heart out of my bosom. But go, if you will go.”
“I must go, mother,” he said, sorrowfully. This passion was strange to him—hurt him even in spite of himself. Because Val was like his father! The depth of the passionate interest she had in him seemed so disproportionate to the cause.
But when Dick saw the doctor, he was more and more determined to go. The doctor told him that in another week the crisis of the fever might come—one week had passed without any change, and the sufferer was embarked upon the dark uncertain tideway of another, which might be prolonged into another still; but this no one could tell. “I thought your mother had let his friends know—she told me so,” he said. “They ought to be made aware of the state he is in,—they ought to be here before the week is out, when the crisis may come.”
“But you don’t think badly of him, doctor?” said Dick, with tears in his eyes. The mother had never asked so much, the doctor reflected; and he felt for the young man who felt so warmly, and was interested in the whole curious mysterious business, he could scarcely tell why.
“Your mother is a capital nurse,” he said, assuming a confidence he scarcely felt, “and please God, he’ll pull through.”
“Oh, thank you, doctor!” cried honest Dick, drying his eyes, and feeling, as do all simple souls, that it was the doctor who had done it, and that this vague assurance was very sure. He went to see Valentine after, who, he thought, gave him a kind of wan smile, and looked as if he knew him, which Dick interpreted, knowing nothing about it, to be a capital sign; and then he extorted from his mother directions for his journey. Reluctantly she told him where to go.
“Oh, Dick,” she said, “you’ll do it, whether I will or not—and there’s things will come of it that you don’t think of, and that I don’t want to think of; but don’t you name me, boy, nor let ’em know about me. Say your mother—I’m just your mother, that’s all. And if they come, I’ll not see ’em, Dick. No, I’m not going away; don’t look scared at me. I haven’t it in me now to go away.”
“Take care of yourself, mother,” he said; “don’t watch too long, nor neglect your food. I’ll not be long gone; and I’ll take care of you whoever comes; you needn’t be afraid.”
She shook her head, and followed him with mournful eyes. She did not know what she feared, nor what any one could do to her; but yet in her ignorance she was afraid. And Dick went away still more ignorant, determined to keep her secret, but feeling in his superior knowledge of the world that it was a secret which no one would care to penetrate. “Gentlemen” seldom try, he knew, to find out a woman thus abandoned, or to burden themselves with her, or any others that might belong to her. He smiled even at the idea. “They”—and Dick did not even know who they were—would think of Val only, he felt sure, and inquire no further. He was still more completely set at rest when he discovered that it was Val’s grandmother he was going to see—the old lady who had sent him a present when he was a boy, by Valentine’s hands. Dick somehow had no notion that this old lady was in any way connected with himself, even assuming, as he did, that his own divinations were true. She was a stranger, and he went quite calmly into her presence, not doubting anything that might befall him there.