The Story of Valentine and His Brother by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XLIII.

I DO not mean to pretend to the reader that, after that one moment of complicated anguish, swelling of the heart almost too great for a man’s bosom who was too proud to show any sign, Richard sorrowed long or deeply for his wife, or that this strange blow was profoundly felt as a grief by the awed and saddened household. That was scarcely possible: though the sorrowful pity for a life thus wasted, and which had caused the waste of another, was more deep and less unmingled in the minds of the old people after the death of Richard’s wife than it could be while she was living, and proving still how impossible it was by any amount of kindness to bring her to share their existence. Neither could Val grieve as Dick did. He grieved with his imagination, seeing all the sadness of this catastrophe, and touched with tender compunctions, and thoughts of what he might have done but did not, as every sensitive soul must be when the gate of death has closed between it and those who have claims upon its affection. He was very, very sorry for poor Dick, whose grief was real and profound; and deeply touched by the memory of his mother whom he had known so little. But what more could he feel? and soon life took its usual course again. The house was saddened and stilled in its mourning—but it was relieved also. “She never could have been happy here; and where, poor soul, would she have been happy?” Lady Eskside said, dropping a natural tribute of tears to her memory. It was sad beyond measure, but yet it was a relief as well.

Very soon, too, after this, it became necessary for Val to go to London, and for the whole system of the family affairs to be rearranged. Dick had not taken the slightest notice of the revelation which he had heard that day at the library door, if, indeed, he had heard it at all. A day or two, however, before the time fixed for Val’s departure, he appeared in the library, where once more his grandparents were seated together, leading his brother with him. It was about a month after the mother’s death, getting towards the end of June; and the windows were all open. Lady Eskside had come in from the lawn where she had been walking, with a white shawl over her cap (the old lady disliked black—but white is always suitable with mourning, as well as very becoming to a fair old face, soft with pearly tints of age, yet sweet with unfading bloom); on a garden-seat within sight Richard sat reading, looking out now and then from his book on the lovely familiar landscape. The old lord, I need not say, was seated at his writing-table, with the last number of the ‘Agricultural Journal’ near him, and a letter, just begun, on his desk, to the editor, in which he was about to give very weighty advice to the farming world on the rotation of crops. Thus, when the two young men came in, the whole family was within reach, all stilled and quieted, as a family generally is after a domestic loss, even when there is no profound grief. Dick was the most serious of all. There was that expression about his eyes which tears leave behind, and which sad thoughts leave—a look that comes naturally to any mourner who has strained his eyes gazing after some one who has gone. Val was the only exception to the generally subdued look of the party. He was excited; two red spots were on his cheeks, his eyes were shining with animation and energy; he went to the window, said a few half-whispered words to Lady Eskside, then beckoned to his father, who came slowly in and joined them. Dick sat listlessly down near the old lady. He was the only one who seemed indifferent to what was coming, and indeed suspected nothing of any special importance in this family meeting.

“Grandfather,” said Val, “I have something to say. I am going away soon, you know, and I should like everything to be settled first. There have been so many changes lately, some of them sad enough,” and he laid his hand caressingly on Dick’s shoulder, by whom he stood. “We can’t get back what has gone from us,” said Val, his eyes glistening, “or make up for anything that might have been done differently; but at least we must settle everything now.” Then there was a little pause, and he added with a smile half frank, half embarrassed, “It seems very worldly-minded, but I should like to know what I am to have and how things are to be.”

“It is very reasonable,” said Lord Eskside.

“First of all,” said Val, “I want to keep my seat now I’ve got it. I don’t grudge anything to Dick—it isn’t that; but as there was a great deal of trouble in getting it, and expense—no, I don’t mean to be a humbug; that isn’t the reason. There’s nothing to prevent the younger son being member for Eskshire, is there, sir? and I want it—that’s the short and long of the matter—unless you say no.”

“He ought to have the seat,” said Richard. “It is a little compensation for the disappointment; besides, Val is better qualified——”

“And again,” said Val, hurriedly, to prevent the completion of this sentence, “I want to know, sir, and Dick ought to know——”

Dick interrupted him, raising his head. “What is this about?” he asked; “has it anything to do with me?”

“It has everything to do with you,” said his father. “He knows, does not he? Dick, I was told you were present and heard what I said—which perhaps was foolishly said at that moment. We had always thought your brother was the eldest and you the youngest. Now it turns out the other way. You are the eldest son. Of course this changes Valentine’s prospects entirely; and it is well that you, too, should look your new position in the face as my father’s heir.”

“I!—Lord Eskside’s heir?” said Dick, rising to his feet, not startled or wondering, but with a smile. “No, no, you are mistaken; that is not what you mean.”

“Unfortunately there is no possibility of being mistaken,” said Richard. “Yes, Val, it is unfortunate; for you have been brought up to it and he has not. But, my boy,” he said, turning to Dick kindly, though it was with an effort, “we none of us grudge it to you; you have behaved in every way so well, and so like a gentleman.”

“Perfectly well—as if I had trained him myself,” said my lady, drying her eyes, “notwithstanding that we feel the disappointment to Val.” The old lord did not say anything, but he watched Dick very closely from under his shaggy brows.

Dick looked round upon them for a moment, quiet and smiling softly as if to himself at some private subject of amusement. Then he looked at Lady Eskside. “Do you believe it too, you, my lady,” he said in an undertone, with a half reproach. After this, turning to the others again, his aspect changed. He grew red with rising excitement, and addressed them as if from some platform raised higher than they were. “I am a very simple lad,” he said; “I don’t know how your minds work, you that are gentlemen. In my class it would be as plain as daylight—at least I think so, unless I’m wrong. What do you mean, in the name of heaven, you that are gentlemen? Me to come in and take Val’s name and place and fortune! me, Forest Myra’s son—Dick Brown!—that he took off the road and made a man of when we were both boys. What have I done that you should name such a thing to me?”

The men all looked at him, abashed and wondering. Lady Eskside alone spoke. “Oh, Dick, my boy!” she said, holding out her hand to him, “that was what I said; that was what I knew you would say.”

“And that is just what must not be said,” said the old lord, rising from his seat. “My man, you speak like a man; and don’t think you are not understood. But it cannot be. There are three generations of us here together. A hardship is a hardship, meant to be endured; and I would not say but to bear it well was as great an honour to the family as to win a battle. We are three generations here, Dick, and we can’t put the house in jeopardy, or trust its weal to a hasty generosity, that your son, if not you, would repent of. No, no. God bless you, my man! you are the eldest, and everything will be yours.”

This time Dick laughed aloud. “When two noes meet,” he said, “one must give in, sir. I’ll not give in. I say it to your face; and yours, sir; and yours, Val. You may speak till Doomsday, but I’ll not give in; not if the world was to come to an end for it. Look here: I am her son as well as Val. I can go further off, more out of your reach, than ever she did—God bless her! And I’m a man, and you can’t stop me. If there’s another word about me taking Val’s place, (a farce! as if I ever would do it!) that day I’ll go!—that moment I’ll go! and, do what you please, you can’t bring me back. But I don’t want to go,” Dick said, after a pause, in a softened voice; “I ain’t one to wander; I’m fond of a home. What I’d like would be to stay quiet, and stand by the old folks, and be of some use to Val. Father and grandfather! I’ve never made bold to call you so before; don’t drive me away! Val, speak for me! for God’s sake, don’t make a Cain of me—an outcast—a tramp!”

“It is not in your nature,” said Richard, with a smile.

“You don’t know what’s in my nature. You didn’t know what was in her nature,” said Dick, with sudden passion. “I’ll not do this, so help me God!” He snatched up Lady Eskside’s big Bible with the large print, from the table, and kissed it, tremulous with excitement. Then, putting it reverently down again, went and threw himself at the feet of the old lady. “Put your hand on my head,” said Dick, softly, “my lady, as she used to do.”

“I will—I will, my dear!” said Lady Eskside.

And to be sure this was how it ended. All the more for their wish that it should be so, the family, in its three generations, struggled against Dick’s persistence, calling in external testimony—as that of Willie Maitland—to prove how impossible any such arrangement was. Dick never allowed himself to be excited again; but he held by his vow, and nothing that could be said moved him. Sometimes he would get up in the midst of a discussion, and go away, crying out impatiently that they were tiring him to death,—the only time he was disrespectful in word or look to the elders of the party. Sometimes he bore it all, smiling; sometimes he threatened to go away. I think it was by the interposition of Sandy Pringle’s good sense that it was settled at last—Sandy Pringle the younger, a very rising young lawyer, much thought of in the Parliament House. Val had sought Sandy out almost as anxiously as he sought Violet, to beg his pardon for that unadvised blow, and to secure his interest (for is not a friend, once alienated, then recovered, twice a friend?) with his parents. Sandy was the first of the Pringle family reintroduced after the quarrel to Rosscraig. He took Dick’s side energetically and at once, with that entire contempt for the law which I believe only great lawyers venture to entertain. I don’t pretend to understand how he managed it, or how far the bargain which was ultimately made was justifiable, or whether it would stand for a moment if any one contested it. Such arrangements do exist, they say, in many great families, and Sandy had a whole list of them at his fingers’-ends, with which he silenced Lord Eskside. One enormous point in his favour was that Valentine, being already known and acknowledged as Lord Eskside’s eldest grandson and heir, active measures would have been necessary on Dick’s part to establish his own claims—measures which Dick not only would not take, but refused all sanction to. And howsoever it was brought about, this I know, that Val is the eldest son, and Dick the youngest, de facto, if not de jure, to the absolute contentment of everybody concerned; and that this secret, like every other honest secret, is known to a dozen people at least, and up to this time has done nobody any harm.

And I will not attempt to linger at this advanced period of my story, or to tell all the means by which the Pringles, on one side, and the Rosses on the other, were brought to consent to that unalterable decision of the young people, which both Val and Vi believed themselves to have held to with resolution heroical through trials unparalleled. Reflect with yourself, kind reader, how long, if you have an only daughter, your middle-aged, sternness could hold out against the tears in her sweet eyes?—reflect how long you could stand out against your boy—the fine fellow who is your pride and glory? There are stern parents, I suppose, in the world, but I fully confess they are beings as much beyond my comprehension as megatheriums. If the young people hold out, tenderly and dutifully as becomes them, the old people must give in. Is it not a law of nature? I do not advise you, boys and girls, to flout and defy us all the same; for that brings into action a totally different order of feelings,—a different set of muscles, so to speak, producing quite different results. But as my boy and girl, in the present case, heartily loved their fathers and mothers, and were incapable of disrespect towards them, the natural consequence came about in time, as how should it not? Lord and Lady Eskside and Mr and Mrs Pringle, and even the Honourable Richard Ross, in Florence, gave in accordingly, and consented at last. This process occupied the time until the beginning of the next summer from these events; and then, on the first day in June (not May, the virgin month, which is, as everybody in Scotland knows, fatally unlucky for marriages) Valentine and Violet were made one, and all their troubles (they thought, like a pair of babies) came to an end. The wedding feast, out of consideration for the old people, was held at Rosscraig; but I will tell the reader of only one incident which occurred at that feast, or after it, and which has no particular connection either with the bridegroom or the bride.

Richard Ross had come from Florence to be present at his son’s marriage; and there, too, was Miss Percival, who had been much longer absent from her old friend than was usual, the episode of Richard’s wife having interposed a visionary obstacle between them which neither could easily break. At this genial moment, however, Mary forgot herself, and returned to all her old habits in the familiar house. It was she and Dick—who immediately fell in love with each other—who arranged everything, and made the wedding party so completely successful. After the bridal pair had gone, when the guests were dispersing, and Mary’s cares over, she came out on the terrace before the windows to breathe the fresh air, and have a moment’s quiet. Here Richard joined her after a while. Richard Ross was fifty, but his appearance was exactly what it had been ten years before, and I am not sure that he was not handsomer then than at five-and-twenty. Mary was a few years younger—a pretty woman of her age—with hair inclining towards grey, and eyes as bright as they had ever been. I do not think it failed to strike either of them with a curious thrill of half sympathy, half pain, that they two might have been—nay, almost, ought to have been—the father and mother, taking a conjugal stroll in the quiet, after their son had departed in his youthful triumph, feeling half sad, half glad that his time had begun and theirs was over—yet so far from really feeling their day to be over, that the sadness was whimsical, and amused them. I think they both felt this, more or less, and that Mary’s secret grudge at having been, as it were, cheated out of the mothering of Val, had been strong in her mind all day. They looked together over the lovely woods, all soft with the warmth of June, down to where the Esk, never too quiet, played like a big baby with the giant boulder which lay mid-stream, just as he turned round the corner of the hill. The two figures on the terrace were in shade, but all the landscape was shining in the June sunshine. It was a moment to touch the heart.

“You and I have looked at these woods often together, Mary, in many different circumstances,” said Richard, with a touch of sentiment in his voice.

“Yes, indeed—often enough,” she said, compelling herself to laugh.

“And now here have the young ones set out, and we remain. I often wonder if you and I had come together a quarter of a century ago, as seemed so natural—as I suppose everybody wished——”

“Except ourselves,” said Mary, her heart fluttering, but putting forth all her most strenuous powers of self-command.

“Except—ourselves? Well, one never knows exactly what one did wish at that time,” said Richard; “everything that was least good, I suppose. We are very reasonable at our present age, Mary; and I think we suit each other. Suppose you have me now?”

“Suppose—what?” she asked, with surprise.

“I think we suit each other; and my mother would be more pleased than words can tell. Suppose you have me, now?”

He held out his hand to her, standing still; and she turned and looked at him steadily, gravely, the flutter utterly stilled in her heart.

“No, Richard, thank you,” she said. “It is too late for that sort of thing now.”

He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at her. “Well—if you think so,” he said; and they walked together once more to the end of the terrace. I suppose he could have gone on quite steadily, as if nothing had happened; but Mary was not capable of this. When they turned again, she broke away from him, saying something incoherent about my lady calling her—which was not the case, of course. Mary found it unpleasant to be near him all day after this; and in the languor of the waning afternoon, when all the guests were gone, she escaped to the woods, where Dick followed her, anxious too to escape from his own thoughts. But yet what kind thoughts these were!—what an exquisite, gentle melancholy it was that moved poor Dick, infinitely sad, yet sweeter than being happy! He had a feeling for Violet which he had never had for any woman—which he believed he never would have again for any woman—and she was his brother’s wife, God bless her! Dick was right in that last thought. He would never think of any other again as he had thought of Vi; but for all that his wound was not a deadly wound, and his love was of the imagination rather than the heart. He did not mean to tell Miss Percival about it in so many words; but she was an understanding woman, and could make a great deal out of a very little. She read him as clearly as if she had seen into his heart. And so, I think, she did; and Dick’s heart was so soft that a great deal came out of it which he had never known to be there. Once only she startled him greatly by an abrupt exclamation. In the very midst of something he was saying she broke out, interrupting him, in words of which he could not tell what they meant, or to whom they referred.

“This is the one I used to think I knew!” cried Mary to herself. “I was not deceived, only too early for him. This is the one I knew!”

Was she going out of her wits, the kind woman? But years after Dick had a glimmering of understanding as to what she meant.

Before Richard went away he told his mother what had happened. He was too much a man of the world to believe for a moment that such a secret could be kept or that Mary would not tell; and it was one of his principles, when anything unpleasant could be said about you, to take care to say it yourself. Just before he bade her good-bye, he told Lady Eskside: “Don’t say I never try to please you, mother,” he said; “I asked Mary to have me on Val’s wedding-day——”

“Richard! Lord bless us! and Mary said——”

“No, thank you,” said Richard, with a laugh: and kissed his mother, and went away.

Lady Eskside, very full of this strange intimation, walked down the avenue to meet the old lord on his return from the station whither he had accompanied his son. She took his arm and they walked up together. “The train was in time, for a wonder, and he’s off, Catherine,” said the old lord. “So now you and me must settle down, as it’s all over; and be thankful we have Dick to ‘stand by the old folks,’ as he says.”

“Yes,” said my lady, a little distraite; “but I’ve something to tell you. Richard asked Mary before he went away——”

“Asked Mary? What? And she told you, my lady? She should not have told you; unless she consented, and I doubt that,” said the old lord.

“He told me, and she refused him. She was not blate to refuse my Richard. Should I say anything about it?” asked my lady, leaning heavily on her old lord’s arm, for the path was steep and tried them both.

Lord Eskside laughed, his eyes twinkling under his eyebrows. “They’re quits now, or more,” he said; “and I would not say but something might come of it yet.”

The avenue was very steep; it tried them both as they went up slowly leaning on each other. When they stopped to take breath, they both spoke, the same thought coming to their minds at the same moment. “The house will be dull without Val,” Lady Eskside said with a sigh. “When the bairns are gone, the house grows quiet,” said her husband. Then they set forth again and climbed the last turn to their own door, holding each other up with kind mutual pressure of their old arms. Both of them were beyond the measure of man’s years on earth. “The bairns come and the bairns go—but, thank God, you and me are still together, Catherine,” said the old lord.

THE END.