Sir Robert's Fortune

“To you!” Katrin said, with a sort of shriek, pushing him from her, the strange women for once being out of the way.

“She might do waur,” said Dougal, pushing his bonnet to his other ear. “But, my faith! if I ever lay my hand on that birky frae Edinburgh, him or me shall ken the reason!” he cried, bending his shaggy brows, and swinging his clenched fist through the air.

“You’re a bonnie person to interfere in my mistress’s affairs,” Katrin cried, “your pownies and you! If she’s mair distant and mair grand, it’s just what’s becoming, and the house full of gentlemen and ladies, no to speak o’ thae strange women, that are at a person’s tails, spying every movement, day and night. For gudeness’ sake, gang away and let me be quit of ye, man! If you come in on the top o’ a’ to take up ony moment’s peace I have, I will just gang clean out of the sma’ sense that’s left me, and pison ye all in your broth!” cried Katrin, with flashing eyes.

Dougal withdrew to the place in which he was most at home in the altered house, Rory’s stable, where he and his favorite rubbed their shaggy heads together in mutual consolation. Rory, too, had fallen from his high estate. Never now did he carry the young lady of the house (which, truth to tell, was not an honor he had ever appreciated much), never convey a guest to the coach or the market. Rory went to the hill for peat; he was ridden into the town, helter-skelter, by a reckless young groom, for the letters; instead of the gentleman of the stable, with the black pony under him to do all the rough work, it was he who had become, as it were, the black pony, the pony-of-all-work of the establishment. Yet what things he had known! What scenes he had seen! There was a consciousness of it all, and a choking, no doubt, of honest merit undervalued in his throat, too, as he rubbed his nose against Dougal’s shoulder. He had been even “further ben” than Dougal in the secrets of the life that was past.

And Lily did not console Katrin, said nothing to Robina, did not even attempt to save the pony from his hard fate. She was as hard as Fate herself, wrapped up as in robes of ice or stone, smiling as if from a pinnacle of chill unconsciousness upon all those spectators of her past existence, the conspirators who had helped out every contrivance, the accomplices. And yet it was not the rage which sometimes silently devoured her which separated her from her humble friends. She was angry with them, as with all the world, and herself most of all. But sometimes her heart yearned, too, for a kind word, for a look from eyes which knew all that had been and was no more. But I think she dared not let it be seen, lest the flood-doors, once opened, should give forth the whole tide and could never close again.

When all this came to an end, I do not think Lily was aware how long it had been: if it had been two years or three years, I believe she never quite knew; the dates, indeed, established the course of time, but when did she think of dates, as the monotonous seasons followed each other, day by night, and summer by winter, and meal by meal? Routine was very strong in Sir Robert’s house, where every hour was measured, and every repast as punctual as clockwork, and there was nothing which happened to-day which did not happen to-morrow, and would so continue, unwavering, unending, till time was over. Such a routine makes one forget that time will ever be over: it looks as if it might go on forever, as if no breach were possible, still less any conclusion; and yet, in the course of time, the conclusion must always come at last.

One of these winters was a bad one for the old folk; something ungenial was in the air. It was not actually that the temperature was much lower than usual, but the cold lasted long, without breaks or any intervals of rest: always cold, always gray, with no gleams in the sky. The babies felt it first, and then the old people; every-body had bronchitis, for influenza was not in those days. There was coughing in every cottage, and by degrees the old fathers and mothers began to disappear. There were not enough of them to startle people in the newspapers as with any record of an epidemic, but only the old people who were ripe for falling, and wanted only a puff of wind to blow them away like the last leaves on a tree, felt that puff, and dropped noiselessly, their time being come. It began to appear of more decided importance when Mr. Blythe was known to be very ill, not in his usual quiet chronic manner, but with bronchitis, too, like all the rest. There had not been very much intercourse between Dalrugas and the Manse since Sir Robert’s arrival. He had been eager to see the old minister, who was almost the only relic of the friends of his youth, and they had found a great deal to say to each other on the first and even on the second visit. But Sir Robert liked his visitors to come to him, and Mr. Blythe was incapable of moving from his chair, so that their intercourse gradually lessened even in the first year, and in the second came almost to nothing at all. There was an embarrassment, too, between the two old gentlemen. Mr. Blythe felt it, and would stop short even in the midst of one of his best stories, struck by some sudden suggestion, and grow portentously grave, just where the laugh came in. Sometimes he would look round at Lily, half angry, half enquiring. He could not be at ease with his old friend when so great a secret lay between them, and though Sir Robert knew nothing about any secret, nor even suspected the existence of such a thing, he yet felt also that there was something on Blythe’s mind. “What is it he wants to speak to me about?” he would say to Lily. “I am certain there is something. Is it about his girl? He should be able to leave his girl pretty well off, or at least to provide for her according to her station. Does he want me to take the charge of his girl?” “Helen will want nobody to take care of her,” said Lily. “Then what is it he has on his mind?” Sir Robert asked, but got no reply. Thus it was that their intercourse had been checked. And there was a cloud between Lily and Helen, who was deeply troubled in her mind by the complete disappearance of Lumsden from the scene. There were many things about him, and her friend’s connection with him, that had disturbed Helen in the past. She had not known how to account for many circumstances in the story: his constant reappearance, the mystery of an intercourse which never came to any thing further, yet never slackened, had troubled her sorely. She had not asked, nor wished to hear, any explanation which might be, in however small a degree, derogatory to Lily. She would rather bear the pain of doubt than the worse pain of knowing that her doubts were justified. And there were a host of minor circumstances which had added to her confusion and trouble just before Sir Robert’s arrival, when Lily had, as she thought, withdrawn from her society, and even made pretexts not to see her, to Helen’s astonishment and dismay. And then there came Lily’s illness, and Ronald’s anxious visit, and then—nothing more: a curtain falling, as it were, on the whole confused drama; an end, which was no end. Ronald’s name had never been mentioned since; he had never been seen in the country; he had gone out of Lily’s life, so far as appeared, totally without reason given or word said. And Helen had not continued to question Lily, whom she, like every-body else, found to be so much changed by her illness. There was something in the face which had been so sweet and almost child-like a little time before which now stopped expansion. Helen looked into it wistfully, and was silent. And thus the veil which had fallen between the two old men came down still more darkly between the other two, and the intercourse had grown less and less, until, in the cold wintry weather of this miserable season, it had almost died away.

But it was a great shock to hear, one gray, dull morning when every thing seemed more miserable than ever, the sky more heavy, the frost more bitter, that the minister had died in the night. This news came to them with the letters and the early rolls, for which every morning now a groom rode into Kinloch-Rugas upon the humiliated Rory. The minister dead! Sir Robert was more impressed by it than could have been imagined possible. “Old Blythe!” he said to himself, with a shock which paled his own ruddy countenance. Why should he have died? The routine of his life was as fixed and certain as that of Sir Robert himself. There seemed no necessity that it should ever be broken. He was part of the landscape, like one of the hills, like the gray steeple of his church, a landmark, a thing not to be removed. Yet he was removed, and Mr. Douglas, the assistant and successor, was now minister of Kinloch-Rugas. In a little while the place which had known him so long would know him no more. Sir Robert ate very little breakfast that morning; he had himself a bad cold which he could not shake off; he got up and walked about the room, almost with excitement. “Old Blythe!” he repeated, and began to recall audibly to himself, or at least only half to Lily, the time when old Blythe was young, as young as other folk, and a very cheery fellow and a good companion and no nonsense about him. And now he was dead! It was probably the fault of that dashed drunken doctor, who fortunately was not Sir Robert’s doctor, who had let him die. Lily on her part was scarcely less moved. Dead! The man who had held so prominent a place in that dream, who had never forgotten it, in whose eyes she had read her own history, at least so far as he knew it, the last time she met his look, with so living a question in them, too, almost demanding, was that secret never to be told? ready to insist, to say: “Then I must tell it if you will not!” She had read all that in his look the last time she had seen him, and in her soul had trembled. And now he was dead and could never say a word. She had a vague sense, too, that she had one less now among the few people who would stand by her. But she wanted no one to stand by her, she was in no trouble. The mystery of her existence would never now be revealed.

“I think I ought to go and see Helen, uncle,” she said.

“Certainly, certainly!” he cried, more eager than she was. “Order the brougham at once, and be sure you take plenty of wraps. Is there any thing we could send? Think, my dear: is there any thing I could do? I would like—to show every respect.”

He made a movement as if he would go to the escritoire in which he kept his money; for checks were not, or at least were not for individual purposes, in those days.

“Uncle,” she said, “they are not poor people; you cannot send money—they are like ourselves.”

“Let me tell you,” he said, with a little irritation, “that there are many families even like ourselves, as you say, which the Blythes are not, who would be very thankful for a timely present at such a moment. But, however– Is there nothing you can take—no cordial, or a little of the port, or—or any thing?”

“Helen wants nothing, uncle—but perhaps a kind word.”

“Helen! Ah, that’s true: the auld man’s gone that would have known the good of it. Well, tell her at least that if I can be of any use to her– I always thought,” he cried, with a little evident but quickly suppressed emotion, “that he had something he wanted to say to me, something that was on his mind.”

How little he thought what it was that the old minister had on his mind! and how well Lily knew!

Helen was very calm, almost calmer than Lily was, when they met in the old parlor where the great chair was already set against the wall. “You are not to cry, Lily. He was very clear in his mind, though sore wearied in his body. He was glad at the last to get away. He said: ‘I’ve had my time here, and no a bad time either, the Lord be praised for all his mercies, and I’ll maybe find a wee place to creep into that She will have keepit for me: not a minister,’ he said, oh, Lily! ‘but maybe a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord.’ Is that not all we could wish for, that his mind should have been like that?” said Helen, with eyes too clear for tears. She was arranging every thing in her quiet way, requiring no help, quite worn out with watching, but incapable of rest until all that was needful had been done. The darkened room where so much had happened, isolated now from the common day by the shutting out of the light, seemed like a sort of funereal, monumental chamber in all its homely shabbiness, a gray and colorless vault, not for him who had gone out of it, but for the ghosts and phantoms of all that had taken place there. Lily’s heart was more oppressed by the gray detachment of that room, in which her own life had been decided, than either by the serene death above or the serene sorrow by her side.

When she got back, Sir Robert, very fretful, was sitting over the fire. He was hoarse and coughing, and more impatient than she had seen him. “If it goes on like this, I’ll not stay here,” he said, “not another week, let them say what they like! Four weeks of frost, a measured month, and as much more in that bitter sky. No. I will not stay; and, however attached you are to the place, you’ll come with me, Lily. Yes, you’ll come with me! We’ll take up my old travelling carriage and we’ll get away to the South, if I were but free of this confounded cold!”

“We must take care of you, uncle. You must let us take care of you, and your cold will soon go.”

“You think so?” he said eagerly. “I thought you would think so. I never was a man for catching cold. I never had a bronchitis in my life; that’s not my danger. If that doctor man would but come, for I thought it as well to send for him?”

He looked up at her with an enquiring look. He was anxious to be approved in what he had done. “It was the only thing to do,” she said, and he was as glad she thought so as if she had been the mistress of his actions.

But by the evening Sir Robert was very ill. He fought very hard for his life. He was several years over seventy, and there did not seem much in life to retain him. But nevertheless he fought hard for it, and was very unwilling to let it go. He made several rallies from sheer strength of will, it appeared. But in the end the old soldier had to yield, as we must all do. The long frost lasted, the bitter winds blew, no softening came to the weather or to Fate. Sir Robert died not long after the old minister had been laid in the grave. It was a dreadful year for the old folk, every-body said; they fell like the leaves in October before every wind.

CHAPTER XLIV

I do not think that Lily in the least realized what had happened to her when her uncle died. She grieved for him with a very natural, not excessive, sorrow, as a daughter grieves for an old father whose life she is aware cannot be long prolonged. He was more to her than it was to be expected he could have been. These two years of constant intercourse, and a good deal of kindness, which could scarcely be called unselfish, yet was more genuine on that very account, had brought them into real relationship with each other; and Lily, who never had known what family ties were, had come to regard the careless Uncle Robert of her youth, to whom she had been a troublesome appendage, as he was to her the representative of a quite unaffectionate authority, as a father, who, indeed, made many demands, but made them with a confidence and trust in her good feeling which were quite natural and quite irresistible, calling forth in her the qualities to which that appeal was made. Sir Robert had all unawares served Lily, though it was his coming which was the cause of the great catastrophe in her life. She did not blame him for that—it was inevitable; in one way or other it must have come—but she was grateful to him for having laid hands upon her, so to speak, in the failure of all things, and given her duties and a necessity for living. And now she was sorry for him, as a daughter for a father, let us say a married daughter, with interests of her own, for a father who had been all that was natural to her, but no more.

She was a little dazed and confused, however, with the rapidity of the catastrophe, the week’s close nursing, the fatigue, the profound feeling which death, especially with those to whom his presence is new, inevitably calls forth; and very much subdued and sorrowful in her mind, feeling the vacancy, the silence, the departure of the well-known figure, which had given a second fictitious life to this now doubly deserted place. And it did not occur to Lily to think how her own position was affected, or what change had taken place in her life. She was not an incapable woman, whom the management of her own affairs would have frightened or over-burdened, but she never had possessed any affairs, never had the command of any money, never arranged, except as she was told, where or how she had to live. Until her uncle had given her, when she went to Edinburgh, the sum which to her inexperience was fabulous, and which she had spent chiefly in her vain search after her child, she had never had any money at all. She did not even think of it in this new change of affairs, nor of what her future fate in that respect was to be.

This indifference was not shared by the household, or at least by those two important members of it Katrin and Robina, who had been most attentive and careful of Sir Robert in his illness, but who, after he was dead, having little tie of any kind to the old gentleman, who had been a good enough master and no more, dropped him as much as it was possible to drop the idea of one who lay solemnly dead in the house, the centre of all its occupations still, though he could influence them no more. “What will happen now?” they said to each other, putting their heads together, when the “strange women,” subdued by “a death in the house,” were occupied with their special businesses, and Sir Robert’s man, his occupation gone, had retired to his chamber, feeling himself in want of rest and refreshment after the labors of nursing, which he had not undergone. “What will happen noo?” said Katrin. “And what will we do with her?” Beenie said, shaking her large head. “I’ll tell you,” said Katrin, “the first thing that will happen: Before we ken where we are we’ll hae him here!”

“No, no,” said Beenie; “no, no! I am not expecting that.”

“You may expect what ye like, but that is what will happen. He will come in just as he used to do, with a fib about the cauld of the Hielands, and a word about the steps that are so worn and no safe. Woman, he has the ball at his fit now. Do you no ken when a man’s wife comes into her siller it’s to him it goes? She will have every thing, and well he kens that, and it’s just the reason of all that has come and gone.”

“He’ll never daur,” said Beenie, “after leaving her so long to herself, and after a’ that’s come and gone, as you say.”

“It’s none of his fault leaving her to hersel’. He has written to her and written to her, for I’ve seen the letters mysel’; and if she has taken no notice, it is her wyte, and not his. She will have a grand fortune, a’ auld Sir Robert’s money, and this place, that is the home o’ them all.”

“I never thought so much of this place. She’ll not bide here. Her and me will be away as soon as ever it’s decent, I will assure you o’ that, to seek the bairn over a’ the world.”

“You’ll never find him,” said Katrin.

“Ay, will we! Naebody to say her nay, and siller in her pouch, and the world before her. We’ll find him if he were at its other end!”

“Ye’ll never find him without the father of him!” cried Katrin, becoming excited in her opposition.

“That swore he was dead!” cried Beenie, flushing, too, with fight and indignation, “that stood up to my face, me that kent better, and threepit that the bairn was dead! And her that was his mother sitting by, her bonnie face covered in her hands!”

“Woman!” cried Katrin, “would you keep up dispeace in a house for any thing a man may have said or threepit? I’m for peace, whatever it costs. What is a house that’s divided against itsel’? Scripture will tell ye that. Even if a man is an ill man, if he belongs to ye, it’s better to have him than to want him. It’s mair decent. Once you’ve plighted him your word, ye must just pit up with him for good report or evil report. If the father’s in one place and the mother’s in another, how are ye to bring up a bairn? And a’ just for a lie the man has told when he was in desperation, and for taking away the bairn when we couldna have keepit him, when it was as clear as daylight something had to be done. Losh! Dougal might tear the hair out o’ my head, or the claes frae my back, he would be my man still.”

“Seeing he is little like to do either the one thing or the other, it’s easy speaking,” Beenie said.

Lily did not come so far as this in her thoughts till a day or two had passed, and then there came upon her, as Beenie had divined, the sudden impulse, which nevertheless had been lying dormant in her mind all this time, to get up and go at once in pursuit of her baby. All the people she had employed, all the schemes she had tried, had come to nothing. At first her ignorant efforts had been balked by that very ignorance itself, by not knowing what to do or whom to trust, and then by distance and time and agents who were not very much in earnest. To look for a great criminal—that was a thing which might waken all the natural detective qualities even before detectives were. But to look for a baby, with no glory, no notoriety, whatever might be one’s success! Lily saw all this now with the wisdom that even a very little practical experience gives. But his mother—that would be a very different matter. His mother would find him wheresoever he was hidden. And after the first day of consternation, of confusion and fatigue, this resolution flashed upon her, as it had done at times through all the miserable months that were past. She had been obliged to crush it then, but now there was no occasion to crush it any longer. She was free; no one had any right to stop her; she was necessary to nobody, bound to nobody. So she thought, rejecting vehemently in her mind the idea of her husband, who had robbed her, who had lied to her, but who should not restrain her now, let the law say what it would. Lily did not even know how much the property of her husband she was. Even in the old bad times it was only when evil days came that the women learned this. The majority of them, let us hope, went to their graves without ever knowing it, except in a jibe, which was to the address of all women. She did not think of it. Ronald had robbed her, had lied to her, and was separated from her forever; but that he would even now attempt to control her did not enter into Lily’s mind. He was a gentleman, though these were not the acts of a gentleman. She did not fear him nor suspect him of any common offence against her. He had been guilty of these crimes—that was the only word to use for them—but to herself, Lily, he could do nothing. She had so much confidence in him still. Nor, indeed (she thought at first), would he have any thing to do with it. He would know nothing; she would go after her child at once, as was natural, his mother’s right. And he surely would not be the man to interfere.

Then as she began to wait, to feel herself waiting, every nerve tingling and excitement rising in her veins every hour, in the enforced silence of the shadowed house, until the funeral should set her free, Lily came to life altogether, she could not tell how, in a moment, waking as if from the past, the ice, the paralysis that had bound her. She had lived with her uncle these two years, and she had not lived at all. She had not known even what was the passage of time. Her existence had been mechanical, and all her days alike, the winter in one fashion, the summer in another. The child, the thought of the child, had been a thread which kept her to life; otherwise there had been nothing. But now, when that thought of the child became active and an inspiration, her whole soul suddenly came to life again. It was as when the world has been hid by the darkness of night, and we seem to stand detached, the only point of consciousness with nothing round us, till between two openings of the eyelids there comes into being again a universe that had been hidden, the sky, the soil, the household walls, all in a moment visible in that dawn which is scarcely light, which is vision, which recreates and restores all that we knew of. To Lily there came a change like that. She closed her eyes in the wintry blackness of the night, and when she opened them, every thing had come back to her. It was not that she had forgotten: it was all there all the time; but her heart had been benumbed, and darkness had covered the face of the earth. It was not the light or warmth of the sunrise that came upon her; it was that revelation of the earliest dawn that makes the hidden things visible, and fills in once more the mountains and the moors, the earth and the sky.