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A House in Bloomsbury
“It was the man, her husband, that she thought loved her, that brought the news. He said everything was lost if it should be known. He bid her to be brave and put a good face upon it, for his sake and the boy’s. Keep her fortune and cling to her inheritance she must, whatever happened, for their sake. And while she was dazed in her weakness, and could not tell what to think, he took the baby out of her arms, and carried him away.
“Harry Gordon, that’s five and twenty years ago, and man or bairn I have never seen since, though I did that for them. I dreed my weird for ten long years—ten years of mortal trouble—and never said a word, and nobody knew. Then my uncle died, and the money, the terrible money, bought with my life’s blood, became mine. And I looked for him then to come back. But he never came back nor word nor sign of him. And my son—the father, I had discovered what he was, I wanted never to hear his name again—but my son—Harry Gordon, that’s you! They may say what they will, but I know better. Who should know, if not the mother who bore you? My heart went out to you when I saw you first, and yours to me. You’ll not tell me that your heart did not speak for your mother? It is you, my darling, it is you!”
He had staggered to his feet, pale, trembling, and awe-stricken. The sight of her emotion, the pity of her story, the revolt and resistance in his own heart were too much for him. “I!” he cried.
CHAPTER XXIII
Harry Gordon passed the night upon the sofa in Miss Bethune’s sitting-room. It was his opinion that her nerves were so shaken and her mind so agitated that the consciousness of having some one at hand within call, in case of anything happening, was of the utmost consequence. I don’t know that any one else in the house entertained these sentiments, but it was an idea in which he could not be shaken, his experience all tending in that way.
As a matter of fact, his nerves were scarcely less shaken than he imagined hers to be. His mother! Was that his mother who called good-night to him from the next room? who held that amusing colloquy with the doctor through the closed door, defying all interference, and bidding Dr. Roland look after his patient upstairs, and leave her in peace with Gilchrist, who was better than any doctor? Was that his mother? His heart beat with a strange confusion, but made no answer. And his thoughts went over all the details with an involuntary scepticism. No, there was no voice of nature, as she had fondly hoped; nothing but the merest response to kind words and a kind look had drawn him towards this old Scotch maiden lady, who he had thought, with a smile, reminded him of something in Scott, and therefore had an attraction such as belongs to those whom we may have known in some previous state of being.
What a strange fate was his, to be drawn into one circle after another, one family after another, to which he had no right! And how was he to convince this lady, who was so determined in her own way of thinking, that he had no right, no title, to consider himself her son? But had he indeed no title? Was she likely to make such a statement without proof that it was true, without evidence? He thought of her with a kind of amused but by no means disrespectful admiration, as she had stood flinging from her the miserable would-be thief, the wretched, furtive creature who was no match for a resolute and dauntless woman. All the women Harry had ever known would have screamed or fled or fainted at sight of a live burglar in their very bed-chamber. She flung him off like a fly, like a reptile. That was not a weak woman, liable to be deceived by any fancy. She had the look in her eyes of a human creature afraid of nothing, ready to confront any danger. And could she then be so easily deceived? Or was it true, actually true? Was he the son—not of a woman whom it might be shame to discover, as he had always feared—but of a spotless mother, a person of note, with an established position and secure fortune? The land which he was to manage, which she had roused him almost to enthusiasm about, by her talk of crofters and cotters to be helped forward, and human service to be done—was that land his own, coming to him by right, his natural place and inheritance? Was he no waif and stray, no vague atom in the world drifting hither and thither, but a man with an assured position, a certain home, a place in society? How different from going back to South America, and at the best becoming a laborious clerk where he had been the young master! But he could not believe in it.
He lay there silent through the short summer night, moving with precaution upon the uneasy couch, which was too short and too small, but where the good fellow would have passed the night waking and dosing for anybody’s comfort, even were it only an old woman’s who had been kind to him. But was she his mother—his mother? He could not believe it—he could not, he could not! Her wonderful speeches and looks were all explained now, and went to his heart: but they did not convince him, or bring any enlightenment into his. Was she the victim of an illusion, poor lady, self-deceived altogether? Or was there something in it, or was there nothing in it? He thought of his father, and his heart revolted. His poor father, whom he remembered with the halo round him of childish affection, but whom he had learned to see through other people’s eyes, not a strong man, not good for very much, but yet not one to desert a woman who trusted in him. But of the young man’s thoughts through that long uneasy night there was no end. He heard whisperings and movements in the next room, subdued for his sake as he subdued his inclination to turn and toss upon his sofa for hers, during half the night. And then when the daylight came bright into the room through the bars of the venetian blind there came silence, just when he had fully woke up to the consciousness that life had begun again in a new world. A little later, Gilchrist stole into his room, bringing him a cup of tea. “You must come upstairs now; there’s a room where ye will get some sleep. She’s sound now, and it’s broad daylight, and no fear of any disturbance,” she said.
“I want no more sleep. I’ll go and get a bath, and be ready for whatever is wanted.” He caught her apron as she was turning away, that apron on which so many hems had been folded. “Don’t go away,” he said. “Speak to me, tell me, Gilchrist, for heaven’s sake, is this true?”
“The Lord knows!” cried Gilchrist, shaking her head and clasping her hands; “but oh, my young gentleman, dinna ask me!”
“Whom can I ask?” he said. “Surely, surely you, that have been always with her, can throw some light upon it. Is it true?”
“It is true—true as death,” said the woman, “that all that happened to my dear leddy; but oh, if you are the bairn, the Lord knows; he was but two days old, and he would have been about your age. I can say not a word, but only the Lord knows. And there’s nothing—nothing, though she thinks sae, that speaks in your heart?”
He shook his head, with a faint smile upon his face.
“Oh, dinna laugh, dinna laugh. I canna bear it, Mr. Harry; true or no’ true, it’s woven in with every fibre o’ her heart. You have nae parents, my bonnie man. Oh, could you no’ take it upon ye, true or no’ true? There’s naebody I can hear of that it would harm or wrong if you were to accept it. And there’s naebody kens but me how good she is. Her exterior is maybe no’ sae smooth as many; but her heart it is gold—oh, her heart it is gold! For God’s sake, who is the Father of all of us, and full of mercy—such peety as a father hath unto his children dear—oh, my young man, let her believe it, take her at her word! You will make her a happy woman at the end of a’ her trouble, and it will do ye nae harm.”
“Not if it is a fiction all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
“Who is to prove it’s a fiction? He would have been your age. She thinks you have your grandfather’s een. I’m no’ sure now I look at you but she’s right. She’s far more likely to be right than me: and now I look at you well I think I can see it. Oh, Mr. Harry, what harm would it do you? A good home and a good inheritance, and to make her happy. Is that no’ worth while, even if maybe it were not what you would think perfitly true?”
“It can’t be half true, Gilchrist; it must be whole or nothing.”
“Weel, then, it’s whole true; and I’ll gang to the stake for it. Is she not the one that should know? And if you were to cast her off the morn and break her heart, she would still believe it till her dying day. Turn round your head and let me look at you again. Oh, laddie, if I were to gang to the stake for it, you have—you have your grandfather’s een!”
CHAPTER XXIV
The house in Bloomsbury was profoundly agitated by all these discoveries. Curiously enough, and against all the previsions of his friends, Mr. Mannering had not been thrown back by the excitement. The sharp sting of these events which had brought back before him once more the tragic climax of his life—the time when he had come back as out of the grave and found his home desolate—when his wife had fled before his face, not daring to meet his eye, although she had not knowingly sinned against him, and when all the triumph of his return to life, and of his discoveries and the fruit of his dreadful labours, had become bitterness to him and misery—came back upon him, every incident standing out as if it had been yesterday. He had fallen into the dead calm of failure, he had dropped his tools from his hands, and all his ambition from his heart. He had retired—he who had reappeared in existence after all his sufferings, with the consciousness that now the ball was at his foot, and fame if not fortune secured—into the second desert, more impenetrable than any African forest, of these rooms in Bloomsbury, and vegetated there all these years, forgetting more or less all that had happened to him, and all that might have happened to him, and desiring only to linger out the last of his life unknowing and unknown. And now into his calm there had come back, clear as yesterday, all that terrible climax, every detail of his own tragedy.
It ought to have killed him: that would have seemed the most likely event in his weakness, after his long illness; and perhaps,—who could say?—the best thing that could have happened, in face of the new circumstances, which he could not accept and had no right to refuse. But no, it did not kill him. It acted upon him as great trouble acts on some minds, like a strong stimulant. It stung him back into life, it seemed to transfuse something, some new revivifying principle, into his veins. He had wanted, perhaps, something to disperse the mists of illness and physical dejection. He found it not in soothing influences or pleasure, but in pain. From the day when he stumbled downstairs to Miss Bethune’s room on the dreadful report that she was dying, he began at once to resume his usual habits, and with almost more than his usual strength. Was it possible that Death, that healer of all wounds, that peacemaker in all tumults, had restored a rest that was wanting to the man’s secret heart, never disclosed to any ear? She was dead, the woman who unwittingly, without meaning it, had made of his life the silent tragedy it had been. That she was guiltless, and that the catastrophe was all a terrible mistake, had made it worse instead of better. He had thought often that had she erred in passion, had she been carried away from him by some strong gale of personal feeling, it would have been more bearable: but the cruel fatality, the network of accident which had made his life desolate, and hers he knew not what—this was what was intolerable, a thing not to bear thinking of.
But now she was dead, all the misery over, nothing left but the silence. She had been nothing to him for years, torn out of his heart, flung out of his life, perhaps with too little pity, perhaps with little perception of the great sacrifice she had made in giving up to him without even a protest her only child: but her very existence had been a canker in his life; the thought that still the same circle of earth enclosed them—him and the woman who had once been everything to him, and then nothing, yet always something, something, a consciousness, a fever, a jarring note that set all life out of tune. And now she was dead. The strong pain of all this revival stung him back to strength. He went out in defiance of the doctor, back to his usual work, resuming the daily round. He had much to meet, to settle, to set right again, in his renewed existence. And she was dead. The other side of life was closed and sealed, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre. Nothing could happen to bring that back, to renew any consciousness of it more. Strange and sad and disturbing as this event was, it seemed to settle and clear the turbid current of a spoiled life.
And perhaps the other excitement and climax of the life of his neighbour which had been going on under the same roof, helped Mr. Mannering in the renewal of his own history. When he heard Miss Bethune’s story, the silent rebellion against his own, which had been ever in his mind, was silenced. It is hard, in the comparison of troubles, which people who have been more or less crushed in life are so fond of making, when brought into sufficiently intimate relation with each other, to have to acknowledge that perhaps a brother pilgrim, a sister, has had more to bear than oneself. Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others. But yet, when Mr. Mannering heard, as she could tell him, the story of the woman who had lived so near him for years with that unsuspected secret, he did not deny that her lot had been more terrible than his own. Miss Bethune was eager to communicate her own tale in those days of excitement and transition. She went to him of her own accord after the first day of his return to his work, while the doctor hovered about the stairs, up and down, and could not rest, in terror for the result. Dr. Roland could not believe that his patient would not break down. He could not go out, nor even sit quietly in his own room, less he should be wanted, and not ready at the first call. He could not refrain from a gibe at the lady he met on the stairs. “Yes, by all means,” he said, “go and tell him all about your own business. Go and send him out to look after that wretched Hesketh, whom you are going to keep up, I hear, all the same.”
“Not him, doctor. The poor unhappy young creature, his wife.”
“Oh, yes; that is how these miserable villains get hold upon people of weak minds. His wife! I’d have sent him to gaol. His wife would have been far better without a low blackguard like that. But don’t let me keep you. Go and give the coup de grace to Mannering. I shall be ready, whatever happens, downstairs.”
But Miss Bethune did not give Mannering the coup de grace. On the contrary, she helped forward the cure which the climax of his own personal tragedy had begun. It gave both these people a kind of forlorn pleasure to think that there was a kind of resemblance in their fate, and that they had lived so long beside each other without knowing it, without suspecting how unlike other people their respective lives had been. The thought of the unhappy young woman, whose husband of a year and whose child of a day had been torn from her, who had learnt so sadly to know the unworthiness of the one, and whose heart and imagination had for five and twenty years dwelt upon the other, without any possible outlet, and with a hope which she had herself known to be fantastic and without hope, filled Mannering with a certain awe. He had suffered for little more than half that time, and he had not been deprived of his Dora. He began to think pitifully, even mercifully, of the woman who had left him that one alleviation in his life.
“I bow my head before her,” Miss Bethune said. “She must have been a just woman. The bairn was yours, and she had no right to take her from you. She fled before your appearance, she could not look you in the face, but she left the little child that she adored to be your comfort. Mr. Mannering, you will come with me to that poor woman’s grave, and you will forgive her. She gave you up what was most dear to her in life.”
He shook his head. “She had others that were more dear to her.”
“I could find it in my heart, if I were you, to hope that it was so; but I do not believe it. How could she look you in the face again, having sinned against you? But she left you what she loved most. ‘Dora, Dora,’ was all her cry: but she put Dora out of her arms for you. Think kindly of her, man! A woman loves nothing on this earth,” cried Miss Bethune with passion, “like the little child that has come from her, and is of her, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: and she gave that over to you. She must have been a woman more just than most other women,” Miss Bethune said.
Mr. Mannering made no reply. Perhaps he did not understand or believe in that definition of what a woman loves best; but he thought of the passion of the other woman before him, and of the long hunger of her heart, with nothing to solace her, nothing to divert her thoughts from that hopeless loss and vacancy, nothing to compensate her for the ruin of her life. She had been a spirit in prison, shut up as in an iron cage, and she had borne it and not uttered even a cry. All three, or rather all four, of these lives, equally shipwrecked, came before him. His own stricken low in what would have been the triumph of another man; his wife’s, turned in a moment from such second possibilities of happiness as he could not yet bear to think of, and from the bliss of her child, into shame and guilt such as did not permit her to look her husband in the face, but drove her into exile and renunciation. And then this other pair. The woman with her secret romance, and long, long penitence and punishment. The man (whom she condemned yet more bitterly, perhaps with better cause than he had condemned his wife), a fugitive too, disappearing from country and home with the infant who died, or who did not die. What a round of dreadful mistake, misapprehension, rashness, failure! And who was he that he should count himself more badly treated than other men?
Miss Bethune thus gave him no coup de grace. She helped him after the prick of revival, to another more steadfast philosophy, in the comparison of his fate with that of others. He saw with very clear eyes her delusion—that Harry Gordon was no son of hers, and that she would be compelled to acknowledge this and go back to the dreariness and emptiness of her life, accepting the dead baby as all that ever was hers: and he was sorry for her to the bottom of his heart; while she, full of her illusions, went back to her own apartment full of pity for him, to whom Dora did not make up for everything as Harry, she felt triumphantly, did to herself.
Dr. Roland watched them both, more concerned for Mannering, who had been ill, than for Miss Bethune, who had all that curious elasticity which makes a woman generally so much more the servant of her emotions than a man, often, in fact, so much less affected by them. But there still remained in the case of the patient another fiery trial to go through, which still kept the doctor on the alert and anxiously watching the course of events. Mannering had said nothing of Dora’s fortune, of the money which he had refused vehemently for her, but which he had no right to refuse, and upon which, as Dr. Roland was aware, she had already drawn. One ordeal had passed, and had done no harm, but this other was still to come.
It came a day or two after, when Dr. Roland sat by Mannering’s side after his return from the Museum, holding his pulse, and investigating in every way the effect upon him of the day’s confinement. It was evening, and the day had been hot and fatiguing. Mr. Mannering was a little tired of this medical inspection, which occurred every evening. He drew his wrist out of the doctor’s hold, and turned the conversation abruptly to a new subject.
“There are a number of papers which I cannot find,” he said, almost sharply, to Dora, with a meaning which immediately seemed to make the air tingle. He had recovered his usual looks in a remarkable degree, and had even a little colour in his cheek. His head was not drooping, nor his eye dim. The stoop of a man occupied all day among books seemed to have disappeared. He leaned back in his chair a little, perhaps, but not forward, as is the habit of weakness, and was not afraid to look the doctor in the face. Dora stood near him, alarmed, in the attitude of one about to flee. She was eager to leave him with the doctor, of whom he could ask no such difficult questions.
“Papers, father? What papers?” she said, with an air of innocence which perhaps was a little overdone.
“My business affairs are not so extensive,” he said, with a faint smile; “and both you, doctor, who really are the author of the extravagance, and Dora, who is too young to meddle with such matters, know all about them. My bills!—Heaven knows they are enough to scare a poor man: but they must be found. They were all there a few days ago, now I can’t find them. Bring them, Dora. I must make a composition with my creditors,” he said, again, with that forced and uncomfortable smile. Then he added, with some impatience: “My dear, do what I tell you, and do it at once.”
It was an emergency which Dora had been looking forward to, but that did not make it less terrible when it came. She stood very upright, holding by the table.
“The bills? I don’t know where to find them,” she said, growing suddenly very red, and then very pale.
“Dora!” cried her father, in a warning tone. Then he added, with an attempt at banter: “Never mind the doctor. The doctor is in it; he ought to pay half. We will take his advice. How small a dividend will content our creditors for the present? Make haste, and do not lose any more time.”
Dora stood her ground without wavering. “I cannot find them, father,” she said.
“You cannot find them? Nonsense! This is for my good, I suppose, lest I should not be able to bear it. My dear, your father declines to be managed for his good.”
“I have not got them,” said Dora firmly, but very pale. “I don’t know where to find them; I don’t want to find them, if I must say it, father,—not to manage you, but on my own account.”
He raised himself upright too, and looked at her. Their eyes shone with the same glow; the two faces bore a strange resemblance,—his, the lines refined and softened by his illness; hers, every curve straightened and strengthened by force of passionate feeling.
“Father,” said Dora almost fiercely, “I am not a child!”
“You are not a child?” A faint smile came over his face. “You are curiously like one,” he said; “but what has that got to do with it?”
“Mannering, she is quite right. You ought to let her have her own way.”
A cloud crossed Mr. Mannering’s face. He was a mild man, but he did not easily brook interference. He made a slight gesture, as if throwing the intruder off.
“Father,” said Dora again, “I have been the mistress of everything while you have been ill. You may say the doctor has done it, or Miss Bethune has done it,—they were very kind friends, and told me what to do,—but it was only your own child that had the right to do things for you, and the real person was me. I was a little girl when you began to be ill, but I am not so now. I’ve had to act for myself, father,” the girl cried, the colour flaming back into her pale cheeks, “I’ve had to be responsible for a great many things; you can’t take that from me, for it had to be. And you have not got a bill in the world.”
He sat staring at her, half angry, half admiring, amazed by the change, the development; and yet to find her in her impulsive, childish vehemence exactly the same.
“They’re all gone,” cried Dora, with that dreadful womanish inclination to cry; which spoils so many a fine climax. “I had a right to them—they were mine all through, and not yours. Father, even Fiddler! I’ve given you a present of that big book, which I almost broke my arm (if it had not been for Harry Gordon) carrying back. And now I know it’s quarter day, and you’re quite well off. Father, now I’m your little girl again, to do what you like and go where you like, and never, never hear a word of this more,” cried Dora, flinging herself upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, in a paroxysm of tenderness and tears.
What was the man to do or say? He had uttered a cry of pain and shame, and something like fury; but with the girl clinging round his neck, sobbing, flung upon his mercy, he was helpless. He looked over Dora’s bright head at Dr. Roland with, notwithstanding his impatience of interference, a sort of appeal for help. However keen the pang was both to his heart and his pride, he could not throw off his only child from her shelter in his arms. After a moment his hand instinctively came upon her hair, smoothing it down, soothing her, though half against his will. The other arm, with which he had half put her away, stole round her with a softer pressure. His child, his only child, all of his, belonging to no one but him, and weeping her heart out upon his neck, altogether thrown upon him to be excused and pardoned for having given him all the tendance and care and help which it was in her to give. He looked at Roland with a half appeal, yet with that unconscious pride of superiority in the man who has, towards the man who has not.
“She has the right,” said the doctor, himself moved, but not perhaps with any sense of inferiority, for though he was nearly as old as Mr. Mannering, the beatitude of having a daughter had not yet become an ideal bliss to him—“she has the right; if anybody in the world has it, she has it, Mannering, and though she is a child, she has a heart and judgment as good as any of us. You’ll have to let her do in certain matters what seemeth good in her own eyes.”
Mr. Mannering shook his head, and then bent it in reluctant acquiescence with a sigh.
