Had she awaked? Or was her daily, outside life to be henceforth the dream, and this the reality?
Chapter 3.
What is a "wrecked" life? One which the waves of inexorable fate have beaten to pieces, or one that, like an unseaworthy ship, is ready to go down in any waters? What most destroy us? the things we might well blame ourselves for, only we seldom do, our follies, blunders, errors, not counting actual sins? or the things for which we can blame nobody but Providence—if we dared—such as our losses and griefs, our sicknesses of body and mind, all those afflictions which we call "the visitation of God?" Ay, and so they are, but not sent in wrath, or for ultimate evil. No amount of sorrow need make any human life harmful to man or unholy before God, as a discontented, unhappy life must needs be unholy in the sight of Him who in the mysterious economy of the universe seems to have one absolute law—He wastes nothing. He modifies, transmutes, substitutes, re-applies material to new uses; but apparently by Him nothing is ever really lost, nothing thrown away.
Therefore, I incline to believe, when I hear people talking of a "wrecked" existence, that whosoever is to blame, it is not Providence.
Nobody could have applied the term to Fortune Williams, looking at her as she sat in the drawing-room window of a house at Brighton, just where the gray of the Esplanade meets the green of the Downs—a ladies' boarding-school, where she had in her charge two pupils, left behind for the holidays, while the mistress took a few weeks' repose. She sat watching the sea, which was very beautiful, as even the Brighton sea can be sometimes. Her eyes were soft and calm; her hands were folded on her black silk dress, her pretty little tender-looking hands, unringed, for she was still Miss Williams, still a governess.
But even at thirty-five—she had now reached that age, nay, passed it—she was not what you would call "old-maidish." Perhaps because the motherly instinct, naturally very strong in her, had developed more and more. She was one of those governesses—the only sort who ought ever to attempt to be governesses—who really love children, ay, despite their naughtinesses and mischievousnesses and worrying ways; who feel that, after all, these little ones are "of the kingdom of heaven," and that the task of educating them for that kingdom somehow often brings us nearer to it ourselves.
Her heart, always tender to children, had gone out to them more and more every year, especially after that fatal year when a man took it and broke it. No, not broke it, but threw it carelessly away, wounding it so sorely that it never could be quite itself again. But it was a true and warm and womanly heart still.
She had never heard of him—Robert Roy—never once, in any way, since that Sunday afternoon when he said, "I will write tomorrow," and did not write, but let her drop from him altogether like a worthless thing. Cruel, somewhat, even to a mere acquaintance—but to her?
Well, all was past and gone, and the tide of years had flowed over it. Whatever it was, a mistake, a misfortune, or a wrong, nobody knew any thing about it. And the wound even was healed, in a sort of a way, and chiefly by the unconscious hands of these little "ministering angels," who were angels that never hurt her, except by blotting their copy-books or not learning their lessons.
I know it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in natural gradation—maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which, ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these, excepting, perhaps, her one six months' dream of love and spring. That being over, she fell back upon autumn days and autumn pleasures—which are very real pleasures, after all.
As she sat with the two little girls leaning against her lap—they were Indian children, unaccustomed to tenderness, and had already grown very fond of her—there was a look in her face, not at all like an ancient maiden or a governess, but almost motherly. You see the like in the faces of the Virgin Mary, as the old monks used to paint her, quaint, and not always lovely, but never common or coarse, and spiritualized by a look of mingled tenderness and sorrow into something beyond all beauty.
This woman's face had it, so that people who had known Miss Williams as a girl were astonished to find her, as a middle-aged woman, grown "so good-looking." To which one of her pupils once answered, naively, "It is because she looks so good."
But this was after ten years and more. Of the first half of those years the less that is said, the better. She did not live; she merely endured life. Monotony without, a constant aching within—a restless gnawing want, a perpetual expectation, half hope, half fear; no human being could bear all this without being the worse for it, or the better. But the betterness came afterward, not first.
Sometimes her cravings to hear the smallest tidings of him, only if he were alive or dead, grew into such an agony that, had it not been for her entire helplessness in the matter, she might have tried some means of gaining information. But from his sudden change of plans, she was ignorant even of the name of the ship he had sailed by, the firm he had gone to. She could do absolutely nothing, and learn nothing. Here was something like the "Affliction of Margaret," that poem of Wordsworth's which, when her little pupils recited it—as they often did—made her ready to sob out loud from the pang of its piteous reality:
"I look for ghosts, but none will force
Their way to me: 'tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Betwixt the living and the dead:
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night
With love and longings infinite."
Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead; for her finger was still empty of that ring—her mother's ring—which he had drawn off, promising its return "when he was dead or she was married." This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her. Nor, indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her, these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscure village in the south of England, where she had lived as governess—first in the squire's family, then the rector's.
From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped to remain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a few months. At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son had returned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone back again to India. There was now, for the first time for half a century, not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.
But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city, her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with a persistency for which her conscience smote her sometimes, knowing it was not wholly for their sakes. But they had never been near her, and she had little expectation of seeing any of them ever again, since by this time she had lived long enough to find out how easily people do drift asunder, and lose all clue to one another, unless some strong firm will or unconquerable habit of fidelity exists on one side or the other.
Since the Dalziels she had only lived in the two families before named, and had been lately driven from the last one by a catastrophe, if it may be called so, which had been the bitterest drop in her cup since the time she left St. Andrews.
The rector—a widower, and a feeble, gentle invalid, to whom naturally she had been kind and tender, regarding him with much the same sort of motherly feeling as she had regarded his children—suddenly asked her to become their mother in reality.
It was a great shock and a pang: almost a temptation; for they all loved her, and wished to keep her. She would have been such a blessing, such a brightness, in that dreary home. And to a woman no longer young, who had seen her youth pass without any brightness in it, God knows what an allurement it is to feel she has still the power of brightening other lives. If Fortune had yielded—if she had said yes, and married the rector—it would have been hardly wonderful, scarcely blamable. Nor would it have been the first time that a good, conscientious, tender-hearted woman has married a man for pure tenderness.
But she did not do it; not even when they clung around her—those forlorn, half-educated, but affectionate girls—entreating her to "marry papa, and make us all happy." She could not—how could she? She felt very kindly to him. He had her sincere respect, almost affection; but when she looked into her own heart, she found there was not in it one atom of love, never had been, for any man alive except Robert Roy. While he was unmarried, for her to marry would be impossible.
And so she had the wisdom and courage to say to herself, and to them all, "This can not be;" to put aside the cup of attainable happiness, which might never have proved real happiness, because founded on an insincerity.
But the pain this cost was so great, the wrench of parting from her poor girls so cruel, that after it Miss Williams had a sharp illness, the first serious illness of her life. She struggled through it, quietly and alone, in one of those excellent "Governesses' Homes," where every body was very kind to her—some more than kind, affectionate. It was strange, she often thought, what an endless amount of affection followed her wherever she went. She was by no means one of those women who go about the world moaning that nobody loves them. Every body loved her, and she knew it—every body whose love was worth having—except Robert Roy.
Still her mind never changed; not even when, in the weakness of illness, there would come vague dreams of that peaceful rectory, with its quiet rooms and green garden; of the gentle, kindly hearted father, and the two loving girls whom she could have made so happy, and perhaps won happiness herself in the doing of it.
"I am a great fool, some people would say," thought she, with a sad smile; "perhaps rather worse. Perhaps I am acting absolutely wrong in throwing away my chance of doing good. But I can not help it—I can not help it."
So she kept to her resolution, writing the occasional notes she had promised to write to her poor forsaken girls, without saying a word of her illness; and when she grew better, though not strong enough to undertake a new situation, finding her money slipping away—though, with her good salaries and small wants, she was not poor, and had already begun to lay up for a lonely old age—she accepted this temporary home at Miss Maclachlan's, at Brighton. Was it—so strange are the under-currents which guide one's outward life—was it because she had found a curious charm in the old lady's Scotch tongue, unheard for years? That the two little pupils were Indian children, and that the house was at the seaside?—and she had never seen the sea since she left St. Andrews.
It was going back to the days of her youth to sit, as now, watching the sunshine glitter on the far-away ocean. The very smell of the sea-weed, the lap-lap of the little waves, brought back old recollections so vividly—old thoughts, some bitter, some sweet, but the sweetness generally over-coming the bitterness.
"I have had all the joy that the world could bestow;
I have lived—I have loved."
So sings the poet, and truly. Though to this woman love had brought not joy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay and stronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appeared little better than a delusion, a dream. Once, and by one only, her whole nature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right entirely satisfied. And nothing had ever shattered this ideal. She clung to it, as we cling to the memory of our dead children, who are children forever.
With a passionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy's goodness, his rare and noble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she might have judged severely, had it happened to another person—his total, unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself. It was utterly irreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless to unravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery in heaven and earth, with the humble cry, "I can not understand—I love."
She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desert of despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost a conviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow. This day, even, when, after an hour's delicious idleness, she roused herself to take her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle while they played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividly back that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiar step, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtake her on the St. Andrews shore—Robert Roy, a young man, with his life all before him, as was hers. Now she was middle-aged, and he—he must be over forty by this time. How strange!
Stranger still that there had never occurred to her one possibility—that he "was not," that God had taken him. But this her heart absolutely refused to accept. So long as he was in it, the world would never be quite empty to her. Afterward—But, as I said, there are some things which can not be faced and this was one of them.
All else she had faced long ago. She did not grieve now. As she walked with her children, listening to their endless talk with that patient sympathy which made all children love her, and which she often found was a better help to their education than dozens of lessons, there was on her face that peaceful expression which is the greatest preservative of youth, the greatest antidote to change. And so it was no wonder that a tall lad, passing and re-passing on the Esplanade with another youth, looked at her more than once with great curiosity, and advanced with hesitating politeness.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am, if I mistake; but you are so like a lady I once knew, and am now looking for. Are you Miss Williams?"
"My name is Williams, certainly; and you"—something in the curly light hair, the mischievous twinkle of the eye, struck her—"you can not be, it is scarcely possible—David Dalziel?"
"But, I am, though," cried the lad, shaking her hand as if he would shake it off. "And I call myself very clever to have remembered you, though I was such a little fellow when you left us, and I have only seen your photograph since. But you are not a bit altered—not one bit. And as I knew by your last letter to Archy that you were at Brighton, I thought I'd risk it and speak. Hurra! How very jolly!"
He had grown a handsome lad, the pretty wee Davie, an honest-looking lad too, apparently, and she was glad to see him. From the dignity of his eighteen years and five feet ten of height, he looked down upon the governess, and patronized her quite tenderly—dismissing his friend and walking home with her, telling her on the way all his affairs and that of his family with the volubility of little David Dalziel at St. Andrews.
"No, I've not forgotten St. Andrews one bit, though I was so small. I
remember poor old grannie, and her cottage, and the garden, and the
Links, and the golfing, and Mr. Roy. By-the-by, what has become of Mr.
Roy?"
The suddenness of the question, nay, the very sound of a name totally silent for so many years, made Fortune's heart throb till its beating was actual pain. Then came a sudden desperate hope, as she answered:
"I can not tell. I have never heard any thing of him. Have you?"
"No—yet, let me see. I think Archy once got a letter from him, a year or so after he went away; but we lost it somehow, and never answered it. We have never heard any thing since."
Miss Williams sat down on one of the benches facing the sea, with a murmured excuse of being "tired." One of her little girls crept beside her, stealing a hand in hers. She held it fast, her own shook so; but gradually she grew quite herself again. "I have been ill," she explained, "and can not walk far. Let us sit down here a little. You were speaking about Mr. Roy, David?"
"Yes. What a good fellow he was! We called him Rob Roy, I remember, but only behind his back. He was strict, but he was a jolly old soul for all that. I believe I should know him again any day, as I did you. But perhaps he is dead; people die pretty fast abroad, and ten years is a long time, isn't it?"
"A long time. And you never got any more letters?"
"No; or if they did come, they were lost, being directed probably to the care of poor old grannie, as ours was. We thought it so odd, after she was dead, you know."
Thus the boy chattered on—his tongue had not shortened with his increasing inches—and every idle word sank down deep in his old governess's heart.
Then it was only her whom Robert Roy had forsaken. He had written to his boys, probably would have gone on writing had they answered his letter. He was neither faithless nor forgetful. With an ingenuity that might have brought to any listener a smile or a tear, Miss Williams led the conversation round again till she could easily ask more concerning that one letter; but David, remembered little or nothing, except that it was dated from Shanghai, for his brothers had had a discussion whether Shanghai was in China or Japan. Then, boy-like, they had forgotten the whole matter.
"Yes, by this time every body had forgotten him," thought Fortune to herself, when having bidden David good-by at her door and arranged to meet him again—he was on a visit at Brighton before matriculating at Oxford next term—she sat down in own room, with a strangely bewildered feeling. "Mine, all mine," she said, and her heart closed itself over him, her old friend at least, if nothing more, with a tenacity of tenderness as silent as it was strong.
From that day, though she saw, and was determined henceforward to see, as much as she could of young David Dalziel, she never once spoke to him of Mr. Roy.
Still, to have the lad coming about her was a pleasure, a fond link with the past, and to talk to him about his future was a pleasure too. He was the one of all the four—Mr. Roy always said so—who had "brains" enough to become a real student; and instead of following the others to India, he was to go to Oxford, and do his best there. His German education had left him few English friends. He was an affectionate, simple-hearted lad, and now that his mischievous days were done, was taking to thorough hard work. He attached himself to his old governess with an enthusiasm that a lad in his teens often conceives for a woman still young enough to be sympathetic, and intelligent enough to guide without ruling the errant fancy of that age. She, too, soon grew very fond of him. It made her strangely happy, this sudden rift of sunshine out of the never-forgotten heaven of her youth, now almost as far off as heaven itself.
I have said she never spoke to David about Mr. Roy, nor did she; but sometimes he spoke, and then she listened. It seemed to cheer her for hours, only to hear that name. She grew stronger, gayer, younger. Every body said how much good the sea was doing her, and so it was; but not exactly in the way people thought. The spell of silence upon her life had been broken, and though she knew all sensible persons would esteem her in this, as in that other matter, a great "fool," still she could not stifle a vague hope that some time or other her blank life might change. Every little wave that swept in from the mysterious ocean, the ocean that lay between them two, seemed to carry a whispering message and lay it at her feet, "Wait and be patient, wait and be patient."
She did wait, and the message came at last.
One day David Dalziel called, on one of his favorite daily rides, and threw a newspaper down at her door, where she was standing.
"An Indian paper my mother has just sent. There's something in it that will interest you, and—"
His horse galloped off with the unfinished sentence; and supposing it was something concerning his family, she put the paper in her pocket to read at leisure while she sat on the beach. She had almost forgotten it, as she watched the waves, full of that pleasant idleness and dreamy peace so new in her life, and which the sound of the sea so often brings to peaceful hearts, who have no dislike to its monotony, no dread of those solemn thoughts of infinitude, time and eternity, God and death and love, which it unconsciously gives, and which I think is the secret why some people say they have "such a horror of the sea-side."
She had none; she loved it, for its sights and sounds were mixed up with all the happiness of her young days. She could have sat all this sunshiny morning on the beach doing absolutely nothing, had she not remembered David's newspaper; which, just to please him, she must look through. She did so, and in the corner, among the brief list of names in the obituary, she saw that of "Roy." Not himself, as she soon found, as soon as she could see to read, in the sudden blindness that came over her. Not himself. Only his child.
"On Christmas-day, at Shanghai, aged three and a half years, Isabella, the only and beloved daughter of Robert and Isabella Roy."
He was alive, then. That was her first thought, almost a joyful one, showing how deep had been her secret dread of the contrary. And he was married. His "only and beloved daughter?" Oh! how beloved she could well understand. Married, and a father; and his child was dead.
Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and lost it—he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thought of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief—the grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a newspaper that the man they loved was married to another—did not come. At least not at once. It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. She was not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her as if it had happened long ago—as if she had always known it must happen, and was not astonished.
His "only and beloved daughter!" The words sung themselves in and out of her brain, to the murmur of the sea. How he must have loved the child! She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and a half old! Then he must have been married a good while—long and long after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go on thinking of another woman's husband.
One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous despair, which nobody heard but God—and she was not afraid of His hearing—and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his child in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally different man.
She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was the same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totally different woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on this side the grave, but also something was found.
"He is alive," she said to herself, with the same strange joy; for now she knew where he was, and what had happened to him. The silence of all these years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, in a sense, was found.
Fortune Williams rose up and walked, in more senses than one; went round to fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly opened delight of children, the Brighton Aquarium; staid a little with them, admiring the fishes; and when she reached home, and found David Dalziel in the drawing-room, met him and thanked him for bringing her the newspaper. "I suppose it was on account of that obituary notice of Mr. Roy's child," said she, calmly naming the name now. "What a sad thing! But still I am glad to know he is alive and well. So will you be. Shall you write to him?"
"Well, I don't know," answered the lad, carelessly crumpling up the newspaper and throwing it on the fire. Miss Williams made a faint movement to snatch it out, then disguised the gesture in some way, and silently watched it burn. "I don't quite see the use of writing. He's a family man now, and must have forgotten all about his old friends. Don't you think so?"
"Perhaps; only he was not the sort of person easily to forget."
She could defend him now; she could speak of him, and did speak more than once afterward, when David referred to the matter. And then the lad quitted Brighton for Oxford, and she was left in her old loneliness.
A loneliness which I will not speak of. She herself never referred to that time. After it, she roused herself to begin her life anew in a fresh home, to work hard, not only for daily bread but for that humble independence which she was determined to win before the dark hour when the most helpful become helpless, and the most independent are driven to fall a piteous burden into the charitable hands of friends or strangers—a thing to her so terrible that to save herself from the possibility of it, she who had never leaned upon any body, never had any body to lean on, became her one almost morbid desire.
She had no dread of a solitary old age but an old age beholden to either public or private charity was to her intolerable; and she had now few years left her to work in—a governess's life wears women out very fast. She determined to begin to work again immediately, laying by as much as possible yearly against the days when she could work no more; consulted Miss Maclachlan, who was most kind; and then sought and was just about going to another situation, with the highest salary she had yet earned, when an utterly unexpected change altered every thing.
Chapter 4.
The fly was already at the door, and Miss Williams, with her small luggage, would in five minutes have departed, followed by the good wishes of all the household, from Miss Maclachlan's school to her new situation, when the postman passed and left a letter for her.
"I will put it in my pocket and read it in the train," she said, with a slight change of color. For she recognized the handwriting of that good man who had loved her, and whom she could not love.
"Better read it now. No time like the present," observed Miss
Maclachlan.
Miss Williams did so. As soon as she was fairly started and alone in the fly, she opened it, with hands slightly trembling, for she was touched by the persistence of the good rector, and his faithfulness to her, a poor governess, when he might have married, as they said in his neighborhood, "anybody." He would never marry any body now—he was dying.
"I have come to feel how wrong I was," he wrote, "in ever trying to change our happy relations together. I have suffered for this—so have we all. But it is now too late for regret. My time has come. Do not grieve yourself by imagining it has come the faster through any decision of yours, but by slow, inevitable disease, which the doctors have only lately discovered. Nothing could have saved me. Be satisfied that there is no cause for you to give yourself one moment's pain." (How she sobbed over those shaky lines, more even than over the newspaper lines which she had read that sun-shiny morning on the shore!) "Remember only that you made me very happy—me and all mine—for years; that I loved you, as even at my age a man can love; as I shall love you to the end, which can not be very far off now. Would you dislike coming to see me just once again? My girls will so very glad, and nobody knows any thing. Besides, what matter? I am dying. Come, if you can within a week or so; they tell me I may last thus long. And I want to consult with you about my children. Therefore I will not say good-by now, only good-night, and God bless you."
But it was good-by, after all. Though she did not wait the week; indeed, she waited for nothing, considered nothing, except her gratitude to this good man—the only man who had loved her—and her affection for the two girls, who would soon be fatherless; though she sent a telegram from Brighton to say she was coming, and arrived within twenty-four hours, still—she came too late.
When she reached the village she heard that his sufferings were all over; and a few yards from his garden wall, in the shade of the church-yard lime-tree, the old sexton was busy re-opening, after fourteen years, the family grave, where he was to be laid beside his wife the day after to-morrow. His two daughters, sitting alone together in the melancholy house, heard Miss Williams enter, and ran to meet her. With a feeling of nearness and tenderness such as she had scarcely ever felt for any human being, she clasped them close, and let them weep their hearts out in her motherly arms.
Thus the current of her whole life was changed; for when Mr. Moseley's will was opened, it was found that, besides leaving Miss Williams a handsome legacy, carefully explained as being given "in gratitude for her care of his children," he had chosen her as their guardian, until they came of age or married, entreating her to reside with them, and desiring them to pay her all the respect due to "a near and dear relative." The tenderness with which he had arranged every thing, down to the minutest points, for them and herself, even amidst all his bodily sufferings, and in face of the supreme hour—which he had met, his daughters said, with a marvelous calmness, even joy—touched Fortune as perhaps nothing had ever touched her in all her life before. When she stood with her two poor orphans beside their father's grave, and returned with them to the desolate house, vowing within herself to be too them, all but in name, the mother he had wished her to be, this sense of duty—the strange new duty which had suddenly come to fill her empty life—was so strong, that she forgot every thing else—even Robert Roy.
And for months afterward—months of anxious business, involving the leaving of the Rectory, and the taking of a temporary house in the village, until they could decide where finally to settle—Miss Williams had scarcely a moment or a thought to spare for any beyond the vivid present. Past and future faded away together, except so far as concerned her girls.
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might," were words which had helped her through many a dark time. Now, with all her might, she did her motherly duty to the orphan girls; and as she did so, by-and-by she began strangely to enjoy it, and to find also not a little of motherly pride and pleasure in them. She had not time to think of herself at all, or of the great blow which had fallen, the great change which had come, rendering it impossible for her to let herself feel as she had used to feel, dream as she used to dream, for years and years past. That one pathetic line
"I darena think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin," burned itself into her heart, and needed nothing more.
"My children! I must only love my children now," was her continual thought, and she believed she did so.
It was not until spring came, healing the girls' grief as naturally as it covered their father's grave with violets and primroses, and making them cling a little less to home and her, a little more to the returning pleasures of their youth, for they were two pretty girls, well-born, with tolerable fortunes, and likely to be much sought after—not until the spring days left her much alone, did Fortune's mind recur to an idea which had struck her once, and then been set aside—to write to Robert Roy. Why should she not? Just a few friendly lines, telling him how, after long years, she had seen his name in the papers; how sorry she was, and yet glad—glad to think he was alive and well, and married; how she sent all kindly wishes to his wife and himself, and so on. In short the sort of letter that any body might write or receive, whatever had been the previous link between them. And she wrote it on an April day, one of those first days of spring which make young hearts throb with a vague delight, a nameless hope; and older ones—but is there any age when hope is quite dead? I think not, even to those who know that the only spring that will ever come to them will dawn in the world everlasting.
When her girls, entering, offered to post her letter, and Miss Williams answered gently that she would rather post it herself, as it required a foreign stamp, how little they guessed all that lay underneath, and how, over the first few lines, her hand had shaken so that she had to copy it three times. But the address, "Robert Roy, Shanghai"—all she could put, but she had little doubt it would find him—was written with that firm, clear hand which he had so often admired, saying he wished she could teach his boys to write as well. Would he recognize it? Would he be glad or sorry, or only indifferent? Had the world changed him? or, if she could look at him now, would he be the same Robert Roy—simple, true, sincere, and brave—every inch a man and a gentleman?
For the instant the old misery came back; the sharp, sharp pain; but she smothered it down. His dead child, his living, unknown wife, came between, with their soft ghostly hands. He was still himself; she hoped absolutely unchanged; but he was hers no more. Yet that strange yearning, the same which had impelled Mr. Moseley to write and say, "Come and see me before I die," seemed impelling her to stretch a hand out across the seas—"Have you forgotten me: I have never forgotten you." As she passed through the church-yard on her way to the village, and saw the rector's grave lie smiling in the evening sunshine, Fortune thought what a strange lot hers had been. The man who had loved her, the man whom she had loved, were equally lost to her; equally dead and buried. And yet she lived still—her busy, active, and not unhappy life. It was God's will, all; and it was best.
Another six months went by, and she still remained in the same place, though talking daily of leaving. They began to go into society again, she and her girls, and to receive visitors now and then: among the rest, David Dalziel, who had preserved his affectionate fidelity even when he went back to college, and had begun to discover somehow that the direct road from Oxford to every where was through this secluded village. I am afraid Miss Williams was not as alive as she ought to have been to this fact, and to the other fact that Helen and Janetta were not quite children now, but she let the young people be happy, and was happy with them, after her fashion. Still, hers was less happiness than peace; the deep peace which a storm-tossed vessel finds when kindly fate has towed it into harbor; with torn sails and broken masts, maybe, but still safe, never needing to go to sea any more.
She had come to that point in life when we cease to be "afraid of evil tidings," since nothing is likely to happen to us beyond what has happened. She told herself that she did not look forward to the answer from Shanghai, if indeed any came; nevertheless, she had ascertained what time the return mail would be likely to bring it. And, almost punctual to the day, a letter arrived with the postmark, "Shanghai." Not his letter, nor his handwriting at all. And, besides, it was addressed to "Mrs. Williams."
A shudder of fear, the only fear which could strike her now—that he might be dead—made Fortune stand irresolute a moment, then go up to her own room before she opened it.
"Madam,—I beg to apologize for having read nearly through your letter before comprehending that it was not meant for me, but probably for another Mr. Robert Roy, who left this place not long after I came here, and between whom and myself some confusion arose, till we became intimate, and discovered that we were most likely distant, very distant cousins. He came from St. Andrews, and was head clerk in a firm here, doing a very good business in tea and silk, until they mixed themselves up in the opium trade, which Mr. Roy, with one or two more of our community here, thought so objectionable that at last he threw up his situation and determined to seek his fortunes in Australia. It was a pity, for he was in a good way to get on rapidly, but everybody who knew him agreed it was just the sort of thing he was sure to do, and some respected him highly for doing it. He was indeed what we Scotch call 'weel respeckit' wherever he went. But he was a reserved man; made few intimate friends, though those he did make were warmly attached to him. My family were; and though it is now five years since we have heard anything of or from him, we remember him still."
Five years! The letter dropped from her hands. Lost and found, yet found and lost. What might not have happened to him in five years? But she read on, dry-eyed: women do not weep very much or very easily at her age.
"I will do my utmost, madam, that your letter shall reach the hands for which I am sure it was intended; but that may take some time, my only clue to Mr. Roy's whereabouts being the branch house at Melbourne. I can not think he is dead, because such tidings pass rapidly from one to another in our colonial communities, and he was too much beloved for his death to excite no concern.
"I make this long explanation because it strikes me you may be a lady, a friend or relative of Mr. Roy's, concerning whom he employed me to make some inquiries, only you say so very little—absolutely nothing—of yourself in your letter, that I can not be at all certain if you are the same person. She was a governess in a family named Dalziel, living at St. Andrews. He said he had written to that family repeatedly, but got no answer, and then asked me, if any thing resulted from my inquiries, to write to him to the care of our Melbourne house. But no news ever came, and I never wrote to him, for which my wife still blames me exceedingly. She thanks you, dear madam, for the kind things you say about our poor child, though meant for another person. We have seven boys, but little Bell was our youngest, and our hearts' delight. She died after six hours' illness.
"Again begging you to pardon my unconscious offense in reading a stranger's letter, and the length of this one, I remain your very obedient servant, R. Roy
"P.S.—I ought to say that this Mr. Robert Roy seemed between thirty-five and forty, tall, dark-haired, walked with a slight stoop. He had, I believe, no near relatives whatever, and I never heard of his having been married."
Unquestionably Miss Williams did well in retiring to her chamber and locking the door before she opened the letter. It is a mistake to suppose that at thirty-five or forty—or what age?—women cease to feel. I once was walking with an old maiden lady, talking of a character in a book. "He reminded me," she said, "of the very best man I ever knew, whom I saw a good deal of when I was a girl." And to the natural question, was he alive, she answered, "No; he died while he was still young." Her voice kept its ordinary tone, but there came a slight flush on the cheek, a sudden quiver over the whole withered face—she was some years past seventy—and I felt I could not say another word.
Nor shall I say a word now of Fortune Williams, when she had read through and wholly taken in the contents of this letter.
Life began for her again—life on a new and yet on the old basis; for it was still waiting, waiting—she seemed to be among those whose lot it is to "stand and wait" all their days. But it was not now in the absolute darkness and silence which it used to be. She knew that in all human probability Robert Roy was alive still some where, and hope never could wholly die out of the world so long as he was in it. His career, too, if not prosperous in worldly things, had been one to make any heart that loved him content—content and proud. For if he had failed in his fortunes, was it not from doing what she would most have wished him to do—the right, at all costs? Nor had he quite forgotten her, since even so late as five years back he had been making inquiries about her. Also, he was then unmarried.
But human nature is weak, and human hearts are so hungry sometimes.
"Oh, if he had only loved me, and told me so!" she said, sometimes, as piteously as fifteen years ago. But the tears which followed were not, as then, a storm of passionate despair—only a quiet sorrowful rain.
For what could she do? Nothing. Now as ever, her part seemed just to fold her hands and endure. If alive, he might be found some day; but now she could not find him—oh, if she could! Had she been the man and he the woman—nay, had she been still herself, a poor lonely governess, having to earn every crumb of her own bitter bread, yet knowing that he loved her, might not things have been different? Had she belonged to him, they would never have lost one another. She would have sought him, as Evangeline sought Gabriel, half the world over.
And little did her two girls imagine, as they called her down stairs that night, secretly wondering what important business could make "Auntie" keep tea waiting fully five minutes, and set her after tea to read some "pretty poetry," especially Longfellow's, which they had a fancy for—little did they think, those two happy creatures, listening to their middle-aged governess, who read so well that sometimes her voice actually faltered over the line, how there was being transacted under their very eyes a story which in its "constant anguish of patience" was scarcely less pathetic than that of Acadia.
For nearly a year after that letter came the little family of which Miss Williams was the head went on in its innocent quiet way, always planning, yet never making a change, until at last fate drove them to it.
Neither Helen nor Janetta were very healthy girls, and at last a London doctor gave as his absolute fiat that they must cease to live in their warm inland village, and migrate, for some years at any rate, to a bracing sea-side place.
Whereupon David Dalziel, who had somehow established himself as the one masculine adviser of the family, suggested St. Andrews. Bracing enough it was, at any rate: he remembered the winds used almost cut his nose off. And it was such a nice place too, so pretty, with such excellent society. He was sure the young ladies would find it delightful. Did Miss Williams remember the walk by the shore, and the golfing across the Links?
"Quite as well as you could have done, at the early age of seven," she suggested, smiling. "Why are you so very anxious we should go to live at St. Andrews?"
The young fellow blushed all over his kindly eager face, and then frankly owned he had a motive. His grandmother's cottage, which she had left him, the youngest and her pet always, was now unlet. He meant, perhaps, to go and live at it himself when—he was of age and could afford it; but in the mean time he was a poor solitary bachelor, and—and—
"And you would like me to keep your nest warm for you till you can claim it? You want us for your tenants, eh, Davie?"
"Just that. You've hit it. Couldn't wish better. In fact, I have already written to my trustees to drive the hardest bargain possible."
Which was an ingenious modification of the truth, as she afterward found; but evidently the lad had set his heart upon the thing. And she?
At first she shrank back from the plan with a shiver almost of fear. It was like having to meet face to face something—some one—long dead. To walk among the old familiar places, to see the old familiar sea and shore, nay, to live in the very same house, haunted, as houses are sometimes, every room and every nook, with ghosts—yet with such innocent ghosts—Could she bear it?
There are some people who have an actual terror of the past—who the moment a thing ceases to be pleasurable fly from it, would willingly bury it out of sight forever. But others have no fear of their harmless dead—dead hopes, memories, loves—can sit by a grave-side, or look behind them at a dim spectral shape, without grief, without dread, only with tenderness. This woman could.
After a long wakeful night, spent in very serious thought for every one's good, not excluding her own—since there is a certain point beyond which one has no right to forget one's self, and perpetual martyrs rarely make very pleasant heads of families—she said to her girls next morning that she thought David Dalziel's brilliant idea had a great deal of sense in it; St. Andrews was a very nice place, and the cottage there would exactly suit their finances, while the tenure upon which he proposed they should hold it (from term to term) would also fit in with their undecided future; because, as all knew, wherever Helen or Janetta married, each would take her fortune and go, leaving Miss Williams with her little legacy, above want certainly, but not exactly a millionaire.
These and other points she set before them in her practical fashion, just as if her heart did not leap—sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with pain—at the very thought of St. Andrews, and as if to see herself sit daily and hourly face to face with her old self, the ghost of her own youth, would be a quite easy thing.
The girls were delighted. They left all to Auntie, as was their habit to do. Burdens naturally fall upon the shoulders fitted for them, and which seem even to have a faculty for drawing them down there. Miss Williams's new duties had developed in her a whole range of new qualities, dormant during her governess life. Nobody knew better than she how to manage a house and guide a family. The girls soon felt that Auntie might have been a mother all her days, she was so thoroughly motherly and they gave up every thing into her hands.
So the whole matter was settled, David rejoicing exceedingly, and considering it "jolly fun," and quite like a bit out of a play, that his former governess should come back as his tenant, and inhabit the old familiar cottage.
"And I'll take a run over to see you as soon as the long vacation begins, just to teach the young ladies golfing. Mr. Roy taught all us boys, you know; and we'll take that very walk he used to take us, across the Links and along the sands to the Eden. Wasn't it the river Eden, Miss Williams? I am sure I remember it. I think I am very good at remembering."
Other people were also "good at remembering." During the first few weeks after they settled down at St. Andrews the girls noticed that Auntie became excessively pale, and was sometimes quite "distrait" and bewildered-looking, which was little wonder, considering all she had to do and arrange. But she got better in time. The cottage was so sweet, the sea so fresh, the whole place so charming. Slowly, Miss Williams's ordinary looks returned—the "good" looks which her girls so energetically protested she had now, if never before. They never allowed her to confess herself old by caps or shawls, or any of those pretty temporary hindrances to the march of Time. She resisted not; she let them dress her as they please, in a reasonable way, for she felt they loved her; and as to her age, why, she knew it, and knew that nothing could alter it, so what did it matter? She smiled, and tried to look as nice and as young as she could for her girls' sake.
I suppose there are such things as broken or breaking hearts, even at St. Andrews, but it is certainly not a likely place for them. They have little chance against the fresh, exhilarating air, strong as new wine; the wild sea waves, the soothing sands, giving with health of body wholesomeness of mind. By-and-by the busy world recovered its old face to Fortune Williams—not the world as she once dreamed of it, but the real world, as she had fought it through it all these years.
"I was ever a fighter, so one fight more!" as she read sometimes in the "pretty" poetry her girls were always asking for—read steadily, even when she came to the last verse in that passionate "Prospice:"
"Till, sudden, the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end:
And the elements rage, the fiend voices that rave
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
Then a light—then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!"
To that life to come, during all the burden and heat of the day (no, the afternoon, a time, faded, yet hot and busy still, which is often a very trying bit of woman's life) she now began yearningly to look. To meet him again, even in old age, or with death between, was her only desire. Yet she did her duty still, and enjoyed all she could, knowing that one by one the years were hurrying onward, and the night coming, "in which no man can work."
Faithful to his promise, about the middle of July David Dalziel appeared, in overflowing spirits, having done very well at college. He was such a boy still, in character and behavior; though—as he carefully informed the family—now twenty-one and a man, expecting to be treated as such. He was their landlord too, and drew up the agreement in his own name, meaning to be a lawyer, and having enough to live on—something better than bread and salt—"till I can earn a fortune, as I certainly mean to do some day."
And he looked at Janetta, who looked down on the parlor carpet—as young people will. Alas! I fear that the eyes of her anxious friend and governess were not half wide enough open to the fact that these young folk were no longer boy and girls, and that things might happen—in fact, were almost certain to happen—which had happened to herself in her youth—making life not quite easy to her, as it seemed to be to these two bright girls.
Yet they were so bright, and their relations with David Dalziel were so frank and free—in fact, the young fellow himself was such a thoroughly good fellow, so very difficult to shut her door against, even if she had thought of so doing. But she did not. She let him come and go, "miserable bachelor" as he proclaimed himself, with all his kith and kin across the seas, and cast not a thought to the future, or to the sad necessity which sometimes occurs to parents and guardians—of shutting the stable door after the steed is stolen.
Especially, as not long after David appeared, there happened a certain thing to all but her, and yet to her it was, for the time being, utterly overwhelming. It absorbed all her thoughts into one maddened channel, where they writhed and raved and dashed themselves blindly against inevitable fate. For the first time in her life this patient woman felt as if endurance were not the right thing; as if wild shrieks of pain, bitter outcries against Providence, would be somehow easier, better: might reach His throne, so that even now He might listen and hear.
The thing was this. One day, waiting for some one beside the laurel bush at her gate—the old familiar bush, though it had grown and grown till its branches, which used to drag on the gravel, now covered the path entirely—she overheard David explaining to Janetta how he and his brothers and Mr. Roy had made the wooden letter-box, which actually existed still, though in very ruinous condition.
"And no wonder, after fifteen years and more. It is fully that old, isn't it Miss Williams? You will have to superannuate it shortly, and return to the old original letter-box—my letter-box, which I remember so well. I do believe I could find it still."
Kneeling down, he thrust his hand through the thick barricade of leaves into the very heart of the tree.
"I've found it; I declare I've found it; the identical hole in the trunk where I used to put all my treasures—my 'magpie's nest,' as they called it, where I hid every thing I could find. What a mischievous young scamp I was!"
"Very," said Miss Williams, affectionately, laying a gentle hand on his curls—"pretty" still, though cropped down to the frightful modern fashion. Secretly she was rather proud of him, this tall young fellow, whom she had had on her lap many a time.
"Curious! It all comes back to me—even to the very last thing I hid here, the day before we left, which was a letter."
"A letter!"—Miss Williams slightly started—"what letter?"
"One I found lying under the laurel bush, quite hidden by its leaves. It was all soaked with rain. I dried it in the sun, and then put it in my letter-box, telling nobody, for I meant to deliver it myself at the hall door with a loud ring—an English postman's ring. Our Scotch one used to blow his horn, you remember?"
"Yes," said Miss Williams. She was leaning against the fatal bush, pale to the very lips, but her veil was down—nobody saw. "What sort of a letter was it, David? Who was it to? Did you notice the handwriting?"
"Why, I was such a little fellow," and he looked up in wonder and slight concern, "how could I remember? Some letter that somebody had dropped, perhaps, in taking the rest out of the box. It could not matter—certainly not now. You would not bring my youthful misdeeds up against me, would you?" And he turned up a half-comical, half-pitiful face.
Fortune's first impulse—what was it? She hardly knew. But her second was that safest, easiest thing—now grown into the habit and refuge of her whole life—silence. "No, it certainly does not matter now."
A deadly sickness came over her. What if this letter were Robert Roy's, asking her that question which he said no man ought ever to ask a woman twice? And she had never seen it—never answered it. So, of course, he went away. Her whole life—nay, two whole lives—had been destroyed, and by a mere accident, the aimless mischief of a child's innocent hand. She could never prove it, but it might have been so. And, alas! alas! God, the merciful God, had allowed it to be so.
Which is the worst, to wake up suddenly and find that our life has been wrecked by our own folly, mistake, or sin, or that it has been done for us either directly by the hand of Providence, or indirectly through some innocent—nay, possibly not innocent, but intentional—hand? In both cases the agony is equally sharp—the sharper because irremediable.
All these thoughts, vivid as lightning, and as rapid, darted through poor Fortune's brain during the few moments that she stood with her hand on David's shoulder, while he drew from his magpie's nest a heterogeneous mass of rubbish—pebbles, snail shells, bits of glass and china, fragments even of broken toys.
"Just look there. What ghosts of my childhood, as people would say! Dead and buried, though." And he laughed merrily—he in the full tide and glory of his youth.
Fortune Williams looked down on his happy face. This lad that really loved her would not have hurt her for the world, and her determination was made. He should never know any thing. Nobody should ever know any thing. The "dead and buried" of fifteen years ago must be dead and buried forever.
"David," she said, "just out of curiosity, put your hand down to the very bottom of that hole, and see if you can fish up the mysterious letter."
Then she waited, just as one would wait at the edge of some long-closed grave to see if the dead could possibly be claimed as our dead, even if but a handful of unhonored bones.
No, it was not possible. Nobody could expect it after such a lapse of time. Something David pulled out—it might be paper, it might be rags. It was too dry to be moss or earth, but no one could have recognized it as a letter.
"Give it me," said Miss Williams, holding out her hand.
David put the little heap of "rubbish" therein. She regarded it a moment, and then scattered it on the gravel—"dust to dust," as we say in our funeral service. But she said nothing.
At the moment the young people they were waiting for came, to the other side of the gate, clubs in hand. David and the two Miss Moseleys had by this time become perfectly mad for golf, as is the fashion of the place. The proceeded across the Links, Miss Williams accompanying them, as in duty bound. But she said she was "rather tired," and leaving them in charge of another chaperon—if chaperons are ever wanted or needed in those merry Links of St. Andrews—came home alone.
Chapter 5
"Shall sharpest pathos blight us, doing no wrong?"
So writes our greatest living poet, in one of the noblest poems he ever penned. And he speaks truth. The real canker of human existence is not misery, but sin.
After the first cruel pang, the bitter wail; after her lost life—and we have here but one life to lose!—her lost happiness, for she knew now that though she might be very peaceful, very content, no real happiness ever had come, ever could come to her in this world, except Robert Roy's love—after this, Fortune sat down, folded her hands, and bowed her head to the waves of sorrow that kept sweeping over her, not for one day or two days, but for many days and weeks—the anguish, not of patience, but regret—sharp, stinging, helpless regret. They came rolling in, those remorseless billows, just like the long breakers on the sands of St. Andrews. Hopeless to resist, she could only crouch down and let them pass. "All Thy waves have gone over me."
Of course this is spoken metaphorically. Outwardly, Miss Williams neither sat still nor folded her hands. She was seen every where as usual, her own proper self, as the world knew it; but underneath all that was the self that she knew, and God knew. No one else. No one ever could have known, except Robert Roy, had things been different from what they were—from what God had apparently willed them to be.
A sense of inevitable fate came over her. It was now nearly two years since that letter from Mr. Roy of Shanghai, and no more tidings had reached her. She began to think none ever would reach her now. She ceased to hope or to fear, but let herself drift on, accepting the small pale pleasures of every day, and never omitting one of its duties. One only thought remained; which, contrasted with the darkness of all else, often gleamed out as an actual joy.
If the lost letter really was Robert Roy's—and though she had no positive proof, she had the strongest conviction, remembering the thick fog of that Tuesday morning, how easily Archy might have dropped it out of his hand, and how, during those days of soaking rain, it might have lain, unobserved by any one, under the laurel branches, till the child picked it up and hid it as he said—if Robert Roy lad written to her, written in any way, he was at least not faithless. And he might have loved her then. Afterward, he might have married, or died; she might never find him again in this world, or if she found him, he might be totally changed: still, whatever happened, he had loved her. The fact remained. No power in earth or heaven could alter it.
And sometimes, even yet, a half-superstitious feeling came over her that all this was not for nothing—the impulse which had impelled her to write to Shanghai, the other impulse, or concatenation of circumstances, which had floated her, after so many changes, back to the old place, the old life. It looked like chance, but was it? Is any thing chance? Does not our own will, soon or late, accomplish for us what we desire? That is, when we try to reconcile it to the will of God.
She had accepted His will all these years, seeing no reason for it; often feeling it very hard and cruel, but still accepting it. And now?
I am writing no sensational story. In it are no grand dramatic points; no Deus ex machina appears to make all smooth; every event—if it can boast of aught so large as an event—follows the other in perfectly natural succession. For I have always noticed that in life there are rarely any startling "effects," but gradual evolutions. Nothing happens by accident; and, the premises once granted, nothing happens but what was quite sure to happen, following those premises. We novelists do not "make up" our stories; they make themselves. Nor do human beings invent their own lives; they do but use up the materials given to them—some well, some ill; some wisely, some foolishly; but, in the main, the dictum of the Preacher is not far from the truth, "All things come alike to all."
A whole winter had passed by, and the spring twilights were beginning to lengthen, tempting Miss Williams and her girls to linger another half hour before they lit the lamp for the evening. They were doing so, cozily chatting over the fire, after the fashion of a purely feminine household, when there was a sudden announcement that a gentleman, with two little boys, wanted to see Miss Williams. He declined to give his name, and said he would not detain her more than a few minutes.
"Let him come in here," Fortune was just about to say, when she reflected that it might be some law business which concerned her girls, whom she had grown so tenderly anxious to save from any trouble and protect from every care. "No, I will go and speak to him myself."
She rose and walked quietly into the parlor, already shadowed into twilight: a neat, compact little person, dressed in soft gray homespun, with a pale pink bow on her throat, and another in her cap—a pretty little fabric of lace and cambric, which, being now the fashion, her girls had at last condescended to let her wear. She had on a black silk apron, with pockets, into one of which she had hastily thrust her work, and her thimble was yet on her finger. This was the figure on which the eyes of the gentleman rested as he turned around.
Miss Williams lifted her eyes inquiringly to his face—a bearded face, thin and dark.
"I beg your pardon, I have not the pleasure of knowing you; I—"
She suddenly stopped. Something in the height, the turn of the head, the crisp dark hair, in which were not more than a few threads of gray, while hers had so many now, reminded her of—someone, the bare thought of whom made her feel dizzy and blind.
"No," he said, "I did not expect you would know me; and indeed, until I saw you, I was not sure you were the right Miss Williams. Possibly you may remember my name—Roy, Robert Roy."
Faces alter, manners, gestures; but the one thing which never changes is a voice. Had Fortune heard this one—ay, at her last dying hour, when all worldly sounds were fading away—she would have recognized it at once.
The room being full of shadow, no one could see any thing distinctly; and it was as well.
In another minute, she had risen, and held out her hand.
"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Roy. How long have you been in England?
Are these your little boys?"
Without answering, he took her hand—a quiet friendly grasp, just as it used to be. And so, without another word, the gulf of fifteen—seventeen years was overleaped, and Robert Roy and Fortune Williams had met once more.
If anybody had told her when she rose that morning what would happen before night, and happen so naturally, too, she would have said it was impossible. That, after a very few minutes, she could have sat there, talking to him as to any ordinary acquaintance, seemed incredible, yet it was truly so.
"I was in great doubts whether the Miss Williams who, they told me, lived here was yourself or some other lady; but I thought I would take the chance. Because, were it yourself, I thought, for the sake of old times, you might be willing to advise me concerning my two little boys, whom I have brought to St. Andrews for their education."
"Your sons, are they?"
"No. I am not married."
There was a pause, and then he told the little fellows to go and look out of the window, while he talked with Miss Williams. He spoke to them in a fatherly tone; there was nothing whatever of the young man left in him now. His voice was sweet, his manner grave, his whole appearance unquestionably "middle-aged."
"They are orphans. Their name is Roy, though they are not my relatives, or so distant that it matters nothing. But their father was a very good friend of mine, which matters a great deal. He died suddenly, and his wife soon after, leaving their affairs in great confusion. Hearing this, far up in the Australian bush, where I have been a sheep-farmer for some years, I came round by Shanghai, but too late to do more than take these younger boys and bring them home. The rest of the family are disposed of. These two will be henceforward mine. That is all."
A very little "all", and wholly about other people; scarcely a word about himself. Yet he seemed to think it sufficient, and as if she had no possible interest in hearing more.
Cursorily he mentioned having received her letter, which was "friendly and kind;" that it had followed him to Australia, and then back to Shanghai. But his return home seemed to have been entirely without reference to it—or to her.
So she let all pass, and accepted things as they were. It was enough. When a ship-wrecked man sees land—ever so barren a land, ever so desolate a shore—he does not argue within himself, "Is this my haven?" he simply puts into it, and lets himself be drifted ashore.
It took but a few minutes more to explain further what Mr. Roy wanted—a home for his two "poor little fellows."
"They are so young still—and they have lost their mother. They would do very well in their classes here, if some kind woman would take them and look after them. I felt, if the Miss Williams I heard of were really the Miss Williams I used to know, I could trust them to her, more than to any woman I ever knew."
"Thank you." And then she explained that she had already two girls in charge. She could say nothing till she had consulted them. In the mean time—
Just then the bell sounded. The world was going on just as usual—this strange, commonplace, busy, regardless world!
"I beg your pardon for intruding on your time so long," said Mr. Roy, rising. "I will leave you to consider the question, and you will let me know as soon as you can. I am staying at the hotel here, and shall remain until I can leave my boys settled. Good evening."
Again she felt the grasp of the hand: that ghostly touch, so vivid in dreams for these years, and now a warm living reality. It was too much. She could not bear it.
"If you would care to stay," she said—and though it was too dark to see her, he must have heard the faint tremble in her voice—"our tea is ready. Let me introduce you to my girls, and they can make friends with your little boys."
The matter was soon settled, and the little party ushered into the bright warm parlor, glittering with all the appendages of that pleasant meal—essentially feminine—a "hungry" tea. Robert Roy put his hand over his eyes as if the light dazzled him, and then sat down in the arm-chair which Miss Williams brought forward, turning as he did so to look up at her—right in her face—with his grave, soft, earnest eyes.
"Thank you. How like that was to your old ways! How very little you are changed!"
This was the only reference he made, in the slightest degree, to former times.
And she?
She went out of the room, ostensibly to get a pot of guava jelly for the boys—found it after some search, and then sat down.
Only in her store closet, with her house-keeping things all about her.
But it was a quiet place, and the door was shut.
There is, in one of those infinitely pathetic Old Testament stories, a sentence—"And he sought where to weep: and he entered into his chamber and wept there."
She did not weep, this woman, not a young woman now: she only tried during her few minutes of solitude to gather up her thoughts, to realize what had happened to her, and who it was that sat in the next room—under her roof—at her very fireside. Then she clasped her hands with a sudden sob, wild as any of the emotions of her girlhood.
"Oh, my love, my love, the love of all my life! Thank God!"
The evening passed, not very merrily, but peacefully; the girls, who had heard a good deal of Mr. Roy from David Dalziel, doing their best to be courteous to him, and to amuse his shy little boys. He did not stay long, evidently having a morbid dread of "intruding," and his manner was exceedingly reserved, almost awkward sometimes, of which he seemed painfully conscious, apologizing for being "unaccustomed to civilization and to ladies' society," having during his life in the bush sometimes passed months at a time without ever seeing a woman's face.
"And women are your only civilizers," said he. "That is why I wish my motherless lads to be taken into this household of yours, Miss Williams, which looks so—so comfortable," and he glanced round the pretty parlor with something very like a sigh. "I hope you will consider the matter, and let me know as soon as you have made up your mind."
"Which I will do very soon," she answered.
"Yes, I know you will. And your decision once made, you never change."
"Very seldom. I am not one of those who are 'given to change.'"