Маргарет Олифант
Sir Robert's Fortune
CHAPTER XLVIII
Lily was very reluctant to let Helen go. She kept her on pretence of the child, who had to be exhibited and adored. A great event annihilates time. It seemed already to Lily that the infant had never been out of her arms, that he had always found his natural refuge pressed close to her, with his little head against her breast. She had at first, with natural but unreasonable feeling, ordered Margaret out of her sight, she who had been the instrument of so much suffering to her; but the woman had defended herself with justice. “It is me that have done every thing for him all this time,” she said. “It is me that have trained him up to look for his mammaw. Eh, it would have been easy to train the darlin’ to look to nobody but me in the world; but I have just made it his daily thought that he was to come to his mammaw, and summer and winter and night and day I have thought of nothing but that bairn.” Lily had yielded to that appeal, and Beenie had already made Margaret welcome. They sat in the little outer room, already established in all the old habits of their life, sitting opposite to each other, with their needle-work, and all its little paraphernalia of workboxes and reels of thread, brought out as if there had never been any interruption of their life, and the faint, half-whispered sound of their conversation making a subdued accompaniment; while Lily, with her child on her knee, pausing every moment to talk to him, to admire him, to respond to the countless little baby appeals to her attention, appeared to Helen an image of that perfect happiness which is more completely associated to women with the possession of a child than with any other circumstance in the world. Helen did not know, except in the vaguest manner, of any thing that lay below. She divined that there might be grievances between the two who had been so long parted. But Helen herself would have forgiven Ronald on the first demand. His sins would have been to her simply sins, to be forgiven, not a character with which her own was in the most painful opposition. She would have entered into no such question. Lily detained her as long as possible, enquiring into all her purposes, which it was far too late to attempt to shake. Helen, in her rustic simplicity and complete ignorance of the world, was going to America, to its most distant and rudest part, the unsettled and dubious regions of the West, the backwoods, as they were then called, which might have been in another planet for any thing this innocent Pilgrim knew of them, and, indeed, at that time, unless to those who had made it a special study, those outskirts of civilization were known scarcely to any. “There will aye be conveyances of some kind. I can ride upon a horse if it comes to that,” Helen said, with her tranquil smile. “And no doubt he will come to meet me, which will make it all easy.”
“And that is the whole of your confidence!” cried Lily.
“No, no! my confidence is in God, that knows every thing; and, Lily, you should bless his name that has brought you out of all your trouble, and given you that darlin’, God bless him, and a good man to stand by you, and your settled home. Oh, if I can but get Alick to come back, to settle, to work my bittie of land, and live an honest, quiet life like our forbears”—the tears stood for a moment in Helen’s eyes—“but I will think of you, a happy woman, my bonnie Lily, and it will keep my heart.”
What a strangely different apprehension of her own position was in Lily’s heart as she sat alone when Helen had gone. The baby had gone to sleep and had been laid on the bed, and she began to pace slowly about in her room, as Ronald was doing so near to her, with a heavy heart, notwithstanding her joy, wondering and questioning with herself what the life was to be that lay before her. A settled home, a good man to stand by her, a lovely child. What more could woman want in this world? The crisis could not continue as it was now; some ground of possibility must be come to, some foundation on which to build their future life. To think of accompanying her husband to Edinburgh, taking possession of her uncle’s house, establishing herself in it, he the master of every thing, made her heart sick. If they had stolen his money from old Sir Robert, it would have been less dreadful than thus to take every thing from him, in defiance of all his wishes, as soon as he was dead, when he could assert his own will no more. If she could remain where she was, Lily felt that she could bear it better. But this was only one part of the question before her which had to be settled. She—who had become Ronald’s wife in the fervor and enthusiasm of a foolish young love, who had lived on his coming, on the hope of his return, on the dream of that complete and perfect union before God and man in which nobody could shame them or throw a shadow on their honor—to find herself now, after being betrayed and deceived and outraged, her heart torn out of her breast, her child out of her arms, the truth out of her life, in the position of the happy woman, her home assured, her husband by her side, her child in her arms—to be called upon to thank God for it, to take up her existence as if no cloud had covered it, and face the world with a smiling face, forgetting all that interval of misery and deprivation and falsehood! Her steps became quicker and quicker as the tide of her thoughts rose. Amid all the surroundings, which were those of perfect peace—the child asleep in its cradle, the soft undertones of the attendant women—yet all that passion and agony within!
But Lily knew this could not be. Dreadful reason and necessity faced her like two dumb images of fate. Some way of living had to be found, some foundation on which to build the new, changed, disenchanted life. She had no desire to shame Ronald in the sight of his friends, to make her indignation, her disappointment, the property of the world. There would be critics enough to judge him and his schemes to secure Sir Robert’s money. It was hers, in the loyalty of a wife, to take her share of the burden, to let it be believed, at least, that all had been done with her consent; and obnoxious as this was to Lily, she forced her mind to it as a thing that had to be. That was, however, an outside matter; the worst of the question was within: how were they to live together side by side, to share all the trivialities of life, to watch over together the growth of their child, to decide together all the questions of existence, like two who were one, who were all in all to each other—these two who were so far and so fatally apart? But Lily did not disguise from herself that this must be done. She calmed herself down with a strong exertion of her will, and prepared herself to meet her husband, to discuss with him, as far as was possible, the future conditions of their life.
She had turned to leave her room in order to join Ronald and proceed to this discussion when the silence of the house was suddenly disturbed by a shriek of horror and dismay: no little cry, but one that pierced the silence like a knife, sharp, sudden, terrible, followed by a voice, in disjointed sentences, declaiming, praying, crying out like a prophet or a madman. The two women came rushing to Lily from the outer room, struck with terror. What was it? Who was it that was speaking? The voice was not known to any of them; the sound of the broken words, loud, as if close to their ears, gradually becoming intelligible, yet without any meaning they could understand, drove them wild with terror. “What is it?” they all cried. Was it some madman who had broken into the house? Lily cast a glance—the mother’s first idea—to see that all was safe with the child, and then hastened through the empty drawing-room, where she expected to find Ronald. The door was open, and through the doorway there appeared a tragic, awful figure, a woman with her hands sometimes lifted to her head, sometimes wildly flung into the air, her voice growing hoarser, giving forth in terrible succession those broken sentences, in wild prayer, exhortation, invective, it was impossible to say which. Some locks of her hair, disturbed by the motion of her hands, hung loose on her forehead, her eyes were wildly enlarged and staring, her lips loose and swollen with the torrent of passionate sound. For a moment Lily stood fixed, terrified, thinking it a stranger, some one she had never seen before, and the first words were like those of a prayer.
“Lord hae mercy! Lord hae mercy! Swear ye didna lay a finger on him, no a finger! Swear ye didna touch him, man! Oh, the bonnie lad! oh, the bonnie lad!” Then a shriek again, as from something she saw. “Tak’ him up gently, tak’ him softly! his head, his head! tak’ care of his head! Oh, the bonnie lad, the bonnie lad! Lord hae mercy, mercy! Say ye didna lay a finger on him! Swear ye didna touch him! Oh, his head, his head, it’s his head! Oh, men, lift him like a bairn! Lord hae mercy, hae mercy! Say ye didna lay a finger on him! Oh, the bonnie lad, the bonnie lad!” The wild figure clasped its hands, watching intently something going on below, which now became audible to the terrified watchers also—sounds of men’s footsteps, of hurried shuffling and struggling, audible through the broken shrieks and outcries of the woman at the top of the stairs.
“Who is it?” cried Lily, breathless with terror, falling back upon her attendants behind her.
“Katrin, Katrin, Katrin!” cried Beenie, carried away by the wild contagion of the moment; “she’s gone mad, she’s gone out of her senses! Mem, come back to your ain room; come back, this is nae place for you!”
Katrin! was it Katrin, this wild figure? Lily darted out and caught her by the arm.
“Katrin! what has happened? Is it you that have been crying so? Katrin, whatever it is, compose yourself. Come and tell me what has happened! Is it Dougal? What is it? We will do every thing, every thing that is possible.”
Katrin turned her changed countenance upon her mistress; her swollen lips hanging apart ceased their utterance with a gasp. She looked wildly down the stairs, then, putting her hands upon Lily’s shoulders, pushed her back into the room, signing to Robina behind. “Keep her away, keep her–” she seemed to them to say, making wild motions with her hands to the rooms beyond. Her words were too indistinct to be understood, but her gestures were clear enough.
“Oh, mem,” cried Beenie, “it will be something that’s no for your eyes! For mercy’s sake, bide here and let me gang and see!”
“Whatever has happened, it is for me to see to it,” said Lily. And then, disengaging herself from them, she said, for the first time very gravely and calmly: “My husband must have gone out. Go and look for him. Whatever has happened, it is he who ought to be here.”
She got down stairs in time to see the stumbling, staggering figures of the men carrying him into the library. But it was not till some time afterward that Lily had any suspicion what it was. She thought it was Dougal, who had met with some dreadful accident. She had the calmness in this belief to send off at once for a doctor in two different directions; and, having been begged by her uncle’s valet not to go into the room till the doctor came, obeyed him without alarm, and went out to the door to look for Ronald. It was strange he should have gone out at this moment, but how could he know that any thing would be wanted to make his presence indispensable? Most likely he was angry with her for keeping him waiting, for talking to Helen Blythe when there were things so much more important in hand. She went out to the door to look for him, not without a sense that to have him to refer to in such an emergency was something good, nor without the thought that it would please him to see her looking out for him over the moor.
Ronald never spoke again. If his death was not instantaneous in point of fact, it was so virtually, for he never recovered consciousness. He had fallen with great force down the stairs from the worn upper step, which had failed his foot as he made that recoil backward from Dougal’s threatening advance—the step of which he had so often spoken in half derision, half seriousness, as a danger for any old man. Neither he nor any one else could have supposed it was a danger for Ronald, so young, so full of energy and strength. And many were the reflections, it need not be said, upon the vicissitudes of life and the fate of the young man, just after long waiting come into possession of all that was best in life—fortune and happiness, and all the rest. The story was told all over the country, from one house to another, and in Edinburgh, where he was so well known. To have waited so long for the happiness of his life and then not to enjoy it for a week, to be seized by those grim fangs of fate in the moment of his victory, in the first hour of his joy! The papers were not as bold in those days as now. The fashion of personalities had not come in unless when something very scandalous, concealed under initials, was to be had. But there was nothing scandalous in Ronald Lumsden’s story.
In the enquiry that followed there was at first an attempt to suggest that Dougal, who was shown to have been always in opposition to him, and sometimes to have uttered half threats of what he would do if he could get his hands on that birky from Edinburgh, was instrumental in causing his death. And poor Katrin, changed into an old woman, with gray hair that would not be kept in order under her white cap, and lips that hung apart and could scarcely utter a word clearly, was examined before the procurator, especially as to what she meant by the words which she had been heard by all in the house to repeat as she stood screaming at the head of the stairs: “Swear you never lifted a finger upon him!” Were these directions she was giving to her husband in case of any future investigation? or was she adjuring him to satisfy her, to let her know the truth? But Katrin was in no condition to explain to any one, much less to the procurator in his court, what she had meant. But there was no proof against Dougal, and every evidence of truth in his story; and any doubt that might subsist in the minds of persons apt to doubt every thing, and to believe the worst in every case, died away into silence after a while. It is possible that the possibility harmed him, though, as he retained his place and trust in Dalrugas, even that was of no great consequence; but Katrin never was, as the country folk said, “her own woman” again. She never could get out of her eyes the horror of that sudden fall backward, the sound against the stone wall, on the stone steps. In the middle of the night, years after, she would wake the house, calling upon her husband, with pathetic cries, to swear he never laid a finger on him. This made their lives miserable, though they did not deserve it; for Katrin knew at the bottom of her heart, as Dougal knew—but having said it once, would not repeat—that he laid no finger on Ronald, nor ever, save in the emptiest of words, meant him any harm.
Lily was lost for a time in a horror and grief of which compunction was the sharpest part. Her heart-recoil from her husband, her sense of the impossibility of life by his side, her revulsion against him, overwhelmed her now more bitterly, more terribly, than the poignant recollections of happiness past which overwhelm many mourners. The only thing that gave her a little comfort in those heavy depths was the remembrance of the moment when, all unknowing that he could never again come to her, she had gone out to look for Ronald over the moor. There might have been comfort to her after a while in that moor, which had been the confidant of so many of her thoughts of him; but to go up and down, in all the common uses of life, the stairs upon which he died was impossible. She felt a compunction the more to leave the scene of all the happier days, the broken life which yet was often so sweet, which had been the beginning of all. It seemed almost an offence against him to leave a place so connected with his image, but still it was impossible to remain. There was a little mark upon the wall which made them all shudder. And Lily was terrified when her baby was carried up or down those stairs: the surest foot might stumble where he had stumbled, and it is not true that the catastrophes of life do not repeat themselves. Life is all a series of repetitions; and why not that as well as a more common thing?
It was this above all things else that made her leave the house of her fathers, the place where her tragedy had been played out, from its heedless beginning to its dreadful, unthought-of end. It was not so common then as now for the wrecked persons of existence to betake themselves over the world to the places where the sun shines brightest and the skies are most blue; but still, when the wars were all well over, it was done by many, and the young widow, with her beautiful child, and her two women attendants, was met with by many people who knew, or were told by those who knew, her strange story and pitied her with all their hearts. They pitied her for other sufferings than those which were really hers. Those that were attributed to her were common enough and belong to the course of nature; the others were different, but perhaps not less true. But it cannot be denied either that as there was a certain relief even in the first shock of Lily’s grief, a sense of deliverance from difficulties beyond her power to solve, so there was a rising of her heart from its oppression, a rebound of nature and life not too long delayed. Her child made every thing easy to her, and made, all the more for coming back to her so suddenly, a new beginning of life. And that life was not unhappy, and had many interests in it notwithstanding the fiery ordeal with which it began.
Helen Blythe came back to Kinloch-Rugas within the year, bringing her husband with her. He was not, perhaps, reformed and made a new man of, as he vowed he would be in her hands. Perhaps, except in moments of exaltation, she had not expected that. But she did what she had soberly declared to be the mission of many women—she “pulled him through.” They settled upon her little property and farmed it more or less well, more or less ill, according as Alick could be kept “steady,” and Helen’s patience. Two children came, both more or less pathetically careful, from their birth, of their father; and the household, though it bore a checkered existence, was happy on the whole. When Helen saw the Manse under the chill celibate rule of the new minister, she was very sorry for him, but entertained no regrets; and when, later in life, he married, the preciseness of the new establishment moved her to many a quiet laugh, and the private conviction, never broken, that, in her own troubled existence, always at full strain, with her “wild” Alick but partially reformed, and the many roughnesses of the farmer’s life, her ambitions for her boy, and her comfort in her girl, she was better off than in her old sphere. She did not make her husband perfect, but she “pulled him through.” Perhaps, had she taken the reins of that wild spirit into her hands at first, she might have made him all that could have been wished; but as it was she gave him a possible life, a standing-ground when he had been sinking in the waves, a habitation and a name.
Lily came back to the North to establish herself in a house more modern and comfortable, and less heavy with associations, than Dalrugas, some years after these events, and there was much friendship between her and the old minister’s daughter, who had been so closely woven with the most critical moments of her life. They were different in every possible respect, but above all in their view of existence. Helen had her serene faith in her own influence and power to shape the other lives which she felt to be in her charge, to support her always. But to Lily there seemed no power in herself to affect others at all. She, so much more vivacious, stronger, to all appearance of higher intelligence, had been helpless in her own existence, able for no potent action, swept by the movements of others into one fated path, loved, yet incapable of influencing any who loved her. She was now a great deal better off, her life a great deal brighter, with all manner of good things within her reach, than Helen, on her little bit of land, pushing her rough husband, with as few detours as possible, along the path of life, and smiling over her hard task. Lily was a wealthy woman, with a delightful boy, and all those openings of new hope and interest before her in him which give a woman perhaps a more vivid happiness than any thing strictly her own. But the one mother trembled a little, while the other looked forward serenely to an unbroken tranquil course of college prizes and bursaries, and at the end a good manse, and perhaps a popular position for her son. What should Lily have for hers? She had much greater things to hope for. Would it be hers to stand vaguely in the way of Fate, to put out ineffectual hands, to feel the other currents of life as before sweep her away? Or could she ever stand smiling, like simple Helen, holding the helm, directing the course, conscious of power to defeat all harm and guide toward all good? But that only the course of the years could show.
