RICHARD ROSS left Lasswade as Dick Brown entered it, totally unconscious of him or his errand. They passed each other on the bridge,—the father in the carriage, with his servant on the box, and a hundred delicate comforts about him; the son trudging along the muddy road, somewhat tired from jolting all night in a third-class carriage, but refreshed by the “good wash” which, almost more than his breakfast, had set him up again to encounter strangers. He was well dressed, in something of the same mode as Val, whose coats he had worn when he was a lad, and whom he unconsciously copied; and though there was a something about him which indicated his lower position, or rather an absence of something which externally marks “a gentleman,” his open countenance and candid straightforward look gave the merest stranger who looked at him a confidence in Dick, and conferred upon him a distinction of his own. Richard Ross, however, did not so much as notice the young man as he drove to the railway. He was not anxious about Val in the sense in which his mother was anxious; but his mind was strangely disturbed and jumbled—turned upside down, so to speak. All the common conditions of life had changed for him;—his repose of twenty years was broken, and his thoughts sent back upon the early beginning of his career, when he was so different a man. To be driven back at forty-five to the thoughts and feelings of twenty-five, how strange it is!—and stranger to some men than to others. To those who have lived but little in this long stretch of existence the return costs less; but Richard Ross had not changed by the action of years only—he was another man; everything in him was altered. And yet he was going back, as it were, to twenty-five, to look at the passion and folly and infatuation of that period of his existence; but with the interval so clearly marked, not only in himself, but in all the others concerned.
Richard was not old, nor did he feel old: in himself he was conscious, not of decay, but of progress. He looked back upon himself at that early age, not with envy, as so many men of the world do, but with a wondering contempt. What a fool he had been! Was it possible that he could ever have been such a fool? Or must it not rather have been some brother, some cousin, some other, not himself, who had been such an idiot?—some visionary man, whose faults somehow had fallen upon his shoulders? This was the feeling in his mind, though, of course, he knew very well that it was an absurd feeling. And then, with a curious wonder and bewildering sense of suppressed agitation, he remembered that he was going to see her. Should he know her after three-and-twenty years?—he had recognised her picture, which was strange enough;—and would she know him? And must they meet, and what would they say to each other? There had never been very much to say, for she was incapable of what he called conversation; and, except words of fondness and attempts at instruction, it had been impossible for him, a cultivated and fastidious man, to have any real intercourse with the wild creature of the woods whom he never even succeeded in taming. What should he find to say to her now, or she to him? The inquiry thrilled him strangely, giving him that bewildering sense of unreality which mixes so deeply in all human emotion. His brain seemed to turn round when he thought of this possible interview. Was she a real being at all, or was he real who was thinking? Had that past ever been? Was it not an imagination, a dream? Ah! it does not even require such a long interval as twenty years to bring this strange giddiness on the soul. That which we have lost, did we ever have it?—the happiness, the life, the other who made life and happiness? I know some houses now, occupied by strange people, whose very names I can’t tell you, where yet I feel my own old life must be in full possession of the familiar place, while this dim ghost of me outside asks, Did it ever exist at all? Richard felt this all the more strongly that he was not an imaginative man by nature. He felt his head swim and the world go round with him, and would not believe that the young fool who had borne his name three-and-twenty years before, was or could have been him. But yet he was going to see her, the other dream, in whom there was not, nor ever had been, any reality. On the whole, instead of perplexing himself with such thoughts it is better for a man to read in the railway, if he can manage it, even at the risk of hurting his eyes, which require to be ménagés at forty-five; or if that will not do, to close his eyes and doze, which is perhaps, where it is practicable, the best way of all.
He got to Oxford the next day in the afternoon—another pale, somewhat dreary afternoon of March, typical day of a reluctant spring, with dust in the streets, and east wind spreading a universal grey around, ruffling the river into pale lines of livid light and gloomy shade, and pinching all the green buds spitefully back to winter again. Heavy clouds were rolling over the heavens when he made his way down to the wharf. His old Oxford recollections and Val’s indications guided him. He knew the boating wharf of old, though he had never himself been aquatic in his tastes. And there was the little house with its narrow strip of garden towards the river, in which a few sickly primroses were trying to flower. No one had thought of the garden since Val’s accident, and already it had a neglected look. “Who lives there?” he asked of a bargeman who was lounging by. “It’s Brown’s, as is head man at Styles’s,” was the answer. “Head man at Styles’s! I thought a woman lived there,” said Richard. Then he suddenly recollected himself. “I had forgotten the boy,” he added, under his breath. How strange it was! and this was his son too—his son as well as Val! But, to tell the truth, for the moment he had forgotten the boys, the known and the unknown. He had forgotten that Val was lost, and that he had come here in search of him. He was only conscious, in a strange suppressed haze of excitement, that probably she was within these walls—she—the woman of whom he had said maladetta; of whom Val had said that she looked as if she had been a lady. This strange notion made him laugh within himself even now.
It was about five in the afternoon, still good daylight, though the day was a dim one. The maid, who was but a maid-of-all-work, and no better than her kind, had taken advantage of the entire absence of supervision, and was out somewhere, leaving the garden-gate and front-door both open. Richard went up to the door with a certain hesitation, almost diffidence, and knocked softly. He did not want to have any one come, and it was a relief to him when a sufficient interval had elapsed without any response, to justify him, as he thought, in going into the house. Then he stepped across the threshold, casting a glance behind to see if any one outside observed him; and seeing no one, he went in—first to the little parlour, which had been “cleaned up,” fortunately, that morning. It was a strange little room, as I have already said, with tokens in it of instinctive good taste struggling against circumstances. Richard closed the door behind him, and looked round it with a curious irregularity in his heart’s beats. He sat down, somehow not feeling equal to anything more, and gazed at those little familiar evidences of the kind of being who had been living here. It was, in reality, Dick who had left his traces all about, but Richard Ross knew nothing about Dick, and had at the present moment very little curiosity as to that unknown and unrealised person. He thought only of her: somehow Val’s description, at which he had laughed within himself so often, and at which still he tried to laugh feebly, seemed less impossible here. A lady might have lived within these four walls, at the little window which looked out upon the river. The arrangements of the room—its books (which no one read), its pretty carvings and nicknacks (for which Dick alone was responsible)—fitted into the conventional idea of a poor gentlewoman’s tastes, which even Richard, though he ought to have known better, had received into his mind. The embroidered shawl which covered the little table caught his eye as it had caught his mother’s—he, too, remembered it; and that undoubted sign of her made his heart beat loudly once more.
He seemed to be all alone in the solitary house—there was not a sound: he had come in and taken possession, and nobody offered to interfere with him. After a little time, however, he began to realise that the position was rather a strange one; and recovering himself from the curious spell under which he had fallen, he opened the door softly and listened. Then it seemed to him that he heard some faint stir up-stairs. Accordingly he went up the narrow winding staircase, feeling somehow that in this place he could go where he would, that it was not the house of a stranger. He went up, wondering at himself, half bold, half hesitating, and opened the first door he came to. It was the room in which Valentine lay sick—his boy whom he sought. Richard opened the door softly. Everything was very still in it. The patient slept; the watcher, poor soul, in her exhaustion, perhaps was dozing by him, lulled by the profound quiet; or else her brain was confused by the long nursing, and was not easily roused except by the patient, whose lightest movement always awakened her attention. And the light was dim, the blind drawn down, every possibility of disturbance shut out. Richard stood like one spellbound, and looked at them. His heart gave a wild leap, and then, he thought, stood still. He recognised Val in a moment, and so perhaps had some anxiety set at rest; but indeed I doubt whether, in the strange excitement in which he found himself, anxiety for Val told for much. She sat by the bedside in a large old-fashioned chair, high-backed and square-elbowed, which made a frame to her figure. Her eyes were closed, but the intent look in her face, which gave it an interest even to the mere passer-by, was there in a softened form, giving a pure and still gravity, almost noble, to its fine lines; the hair was smoothed off her forehead; the white kerchief, which was her usual head-dress, tied loosely about her head; her hands, glimmering white in the partial darkness, crossed upon her lap. Richard stood still, not daring to breathe, yet catching his breath and hearing his heart beat in spite of himself, afraid to disturb her, yet wondering what she would say to him, how she would look at him when she was roused, as she must be. He was much and strangely agitated; but the reader must not suppose that it was any wild renewal of old love, any passion, or even the agitation of longing and tenderness, which so moved him. He was curious beyond anything he could say—troubled by the sight of her, strangely eager to know what kind of being this was. She was another from the girl he had known, though the same. She of time past had been a wild thing out of the woods, not much above the birds or other woodland creatures. All her humanity, all her development of mind and heart, had come since then; and of this human soul, this developed being, he knew nothing, absolutely nothing; and a thirst came upon him to find out, the intensest curiosity to know, what manner of woman she was.
All at once she opened her eyes and saw him; but did not start or cry, for, waking or sleeping, Valentine was her first object, and she would not have disturbed him had all heaven and earth melted and given way round about her. She opened her eyes and saw a man looking at her. She raised her head, and knew who it was. The blood rushed back to her heart in a sudden flood, making it beat hard and loud against her side, taking away her breath; but she did nothing more than rise softly to her feet and look at him. Yes, it was he. She knew him, as he had known her, at once. She had expected him. Without any knowledge where he was, or how he could hear, she had yet felt sure that he must come. And therefore she was scarcely surprised; she had the advantage of him so far. She knew him, though to him she was an unknown creature—knew him ignorantly, not having been able to form any judgment of his character; yet had as much acquaintance with him as her mind was capable of; while he had no acquaintance with her. She rose up to meet him, and stood wistful, humble, yet with something which looked like pride in her erect figure, and that face which had changed so strangely since he knew it. They stood on either side of the bed upon which their son was lying, scrutinising each other in that strange pathetic gaze. Were there things to be repented of, even in her dim soul?—I cannot tell. She did not think of judging herself. What she felt was that he was here, that she was in his power, and all that was hers; that she was not strong enough to resist him, whatever he might do; that the known and actual had come to an end for her, and all the future was dark in his hands. A dim anguish of fear and impotence came over her. He might send her away from the boy; he might change her life all at once as by the waving of a wand. She looked at him piteously, putting her hands together unawares; but while she was thus startled into painful life, plunged into the anxious disquietude of ignorance, roused to fear and uncertainty, not knowing what was to be done with her, she was at the same time incapacitated from any evidence of emotion, silenced, kept still, though her heart beat so; speechless, though the helpless cry of appeal was on her lips—because she would not wake Val, who was sleeping, and, whatever she might be capable of otherwise, could not, would not disturb the weary rest of the boy.
At length he waved his hand to her impatiently, calling her to follow him out of the room. He did not know what to say to her. Words had gone from him too, though from other reasons; but he could not stand there, however bewildering were his feelings, looking at this woman, who was so familiar to him and so unknown. She followed him noiselessly, not resisting, and they stood together on the narrow landing outside, close to each other, her dress almost touching him, her quick breath crossing his. What were they to say to each other? She was not capable of embarrassment in the simplicity of her emotions. But Richard standing by her, man of the world as he was, was totally helpless in this emergency. His gaze faltered; he turned his eyes from her; he trembled, though only he himself was conscious of it. To be so close to her affected him with a hundred complicated feelings. What could he say? Faltering, his lips scarcely able to form the confused words, he asked faintly, “How long has he been ill? how long has he been here?”
“Ten days,” she answered, briefly. She did not hesitate, nor cast down her eyes. She answered with a kind of despairing calm; for to be sure it was certain he would take the boy away, and she had nothing else in her mind. Her own standing in respect to him—the attitude of his mind towards her—her position in the world as it depended on him—all these were nothing to her. She was thinking of the boy, of nothing else.
“He has been very ill; what is it? Have you a doctor for him?” said Richard, getting used to the suppressed sound of his own voice. He was speaking like a man in a dream, struggling against some necessity which forced him to say this. It was not what he wanted to say. Had he been able to manage himself, to do as he wished, he would have said something to her very different—something kind—something to show her that he was not sorry he had seen her again—that he was not angry, but came to her with friendly feelings. But he could not. The only words he could manage to get out were these bare business-like questions, which he might have put to a nurse—only that if she had been a mere nurse, a stranger who had been kind to his boy, Richard would have been full of gratitude and thanks. He felt all this, but he could not help it; and the more he wished to say, the less he said.
He felt this to the bottom of his heart; but she did not feel it all. She took the questions quite naturally, and answered them with calm simplicity. “The doctor comes twice a-day. He’ll be here soon. I cannot keep the name of it in my mind. Sitting up of nights makes me stupid like; but when he comes, you’ll hear.”
Then there was a pause. She stood before him, with her hands clasped, waiting for what he was going to say. She had no thought of resisting or standing on her rights, for had she not given up the boy long ago?—and waited with keen but secret anguish for the sentence which she believed he must be about to pronounce. The door was open behind her. While she stood waiting for Richard’s words, her ear was intent upon Val, ready to hear if he made the slightest movement. Between these two things which absorbed her, she was completely occupied. She had no leisure to think of herself.
But he who was alive to all the strange troubles of the position, at what a disadvantage he was! His embarrassment and overwhelming self-consciousness were painful beyond description, while she was free from self altogether, and suffered nothing in comparison. While she stood so steadily, a tremulous quiver ran through his every limb. He was as superior to her as it is possible to conceive, and yet he was helpless and speechless before her. At last he made out, faltering, the confused words, “Do you know who he is?”
“Yes, I know,” she said, with a panting breath. A gleam of light came over her face. “I have known him ever since he was a boy. He’s been Dick’s friend. No lad had ever a better friend. They took a fancy to each other the first day. I heard his name—it’s seven years since—and knew.”
“And you told—Val——”
She gave a slight start, and looked at him reproachfully, appealingly, but made no other reply. This look disturbed Richard more and more. There was in it a higher meaning than any he seemed capable of. He felt that from some simple eminence of virtue, impossible to him to conceive, she looked down upon him, quietly indignant of, yet half pitying, his suspicions of her. And, in fact, though she was not capable of any sentiments so articulate, these, in a rudimentary confusion, were the feelings in her mind.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, humbly. “Then he knows nothing? And the other, the younger—he who is with you——”
How he faltered! man of the world, and highbred gentleman as he was; he did not know how to put the inquiry into words.
“Oh,” she said, roused from her stillness of expectation, “don’t meddle with Dick! Oh! sir, leave my boy alone! You don’t know—no one knows but me—how good he is. He’s put up with all my wild ways. He’s been willing to give up all he likes best for me; but God’s given me strength, and I’ve mastered myself. I’ve stayed quiet, though it went near to kill me,” she said, clasping her hands tightly; “I wouldn’t shame him, and take his home from him. Oh, don’t meddle with Dick! He’s happy now.”
Her entreating look, her appeal to his generosity, her absolute detachment from all emotion except in connection with her children, worked upon Richard in the strangest way. They moved him as he had never thought to be moved. His heart swelled, and filled with a novel emotion. “Is this all you think of?” he said, with, in his turn, a strange tone of reproach in his voice—“only of the children! when we meet like this after so many—so many years!”
She raised her eyes to him, wondering. I think she scarcely understood what he could mean. Her mind was so deeply occupied with other thoughts, that the tide of feeling which encountered hers was driven back by the meeting. “I’m not clever,” she said, in a very low voice. “I’m ignorant—not fit to talk to you.”
“But you know me?” he said, driven to his wits’ end. She looked up at him quickly, with a strange suffusion in her eyes, a momentary dilation. She did not mean it to be reproachful this time. Then she said quickly—“We’ll trouble no one, Dick and me. He’s well off, and doing well. If you will let the other stay till he’s better—who could nurse him as I would?—and leave Dick alone. I’ll trouble nobody, nobody!”
“Myra,” said Richard, more moved than he could say. It was not love so much as a strange reluctance to be so powerless—a curious longing to get some sign of feeling from her. He could not bear the composure in her eyes.
She gave a low cry, and made a step backwards, withdrawing from him; and at that moment a faint sound from within the sick-room caught her ear. Her expression, which had changed for the moment, came back again to that of the patient sick-nurse, the anxious watcher. “He’s stirring,” she said. “He wants me. I mustn’t leave him. I’ve been too long away.”
To describe the feelings of Richard Ross when she left him outside the door of the room in which his son lay ill is more than I am able for. Not since she had fled from him at first, three-and-twenty years ago, had there been such a tumult in his mind;—not the sharp tumult of passion and grief, but the strangest maze of embarrassment, pain, defeat, surprise—and yet for the moment relief. Passion was altogether out of his way nowadays—I don’t know that he was capable of it; but all the secondary emotions were warm in him. He had been playing with the thought of this woman for a long time, saying maladetta, yet scarcely meaning it—wondering, half attracted in spite of himself, and beyond measure curious to know what changes time had wrought in her, and how far Valentine’s unconscious judgment was true. During this long succession of thoughts, his semi-hatred of her as the curse of his life had strangely evaporated, he could not have told how. And from the moment when he had received that first sudden shock which was given him by the little photograph, down to the present time when she left him standing outside the door, Richard had been the subject of a mental process of the most complicated and mysterious kind. From that first simple introduction of the idea of her, not as a past curse, but as a living and known human being, his thoughts had gone through a long dramatic course, picturing her, realising her, following the unknown line of her existence—making acquaintance with her image, so to speak. She had never been quite absent from his mind since Valentine had reintroduced her to it. He had imagined (in spite of himself) how she would look, what she would say and do—had even pictured to himself how she would meet him, perhaps with terror, perhaps with penitence, with a developed sense of the grievous harm she had done him, and capacity at last to understand how much he had sacrificed for her. If she had grown into an intelligent being, with that look Valentine described, “as if she had once been a lady,”—which was so curious, so bewildering a travesty of all fact—this was how she must have learned to feel; and no doubt Richard thought her first meeting with him would be trying for both, but most trying for her as the one most certain to betray emotion—the wrong-doer in whose awakened mind all feeling must be more strong. He had opened the very door of the room in which she sat with this expectation—nay certainty—in his mind. Now she had left him, and he stood bewildered, confounded, excited, not knowing what to think, and still less what to do. Was it possible that she had not a thought for him, this woman who had destroyed his life?—no feeling that she had destroyed it?—no desire for his forgiveness, no eagerness to make up, no tremulous impassioned anxiety as to what he would think of her? For all these feelings he had given her credit, and curiously, with an interest which attracted him in spite of himself, had speculated how she would show them. But now!
After a little pause, Richard Ross, Secretary of Legation at Florence, her Majesty’s future representative to some crowned head, went quite humbly down the little creaking staircase. He knew how to deal with Prime Ministers, and would not have allowed himself to be put down by Prince Bismarck himself; but he was utterly discomfited by Dick Brown’s mother, and stole down-stairs with his heart beating, and the most unexampled commotion in his whole being. When he thought of it, he even laughed at himself feebly, so confounded was he. What was to be done now? He could not steal away as he had come, with no result to his visit. Now that they had met, and looked each other in the face again, they could not part simply with nothing further said. Was it for him to make advances? to propose some ground of meeting? though he was the wronged person, and though she ought in reality to approach him on her knees. When he got down-stairs, he paused again to think what he would do. And it was only then that it occurred to him that his mission here was not to reconcile himself to her, but to inquire after Valentine. Strange! He had seen Valentine lying ill—he had even asked questions about him—and yet his son’s state, or his son’s existence, had made no impression whatever on his mind. In the curious ferment and tumult of his feelings, it occurred to him to remember the half amusement, half pain, with which he had felt two days ago that his mother hustled him off, scarcely having patience to let him eat and rest, in order that he might see after Val; and here was his wife treating him in the same way—thrusting him aside, postponing him altogether! There was a whimsical aggravation in this double slight which made him laugh even now; and then a sudden heat flamed all over his frame, like a sudden blaze scorching him; his wife! He had used the words unconsciously, unawares—not maladetta!—not the woman who had been his curse. In the curious excitement of that thought, he went in once more to the little parlour, and sat down instinctively to get quiet and calm himself; and then, catching at the first straw of reason which blew his way in this strange tempest of feeling, he decided that he must wait there, now that he was there, till the doctor came.