CHAPTER XL

‘AMIDST THE BLAZE OF NOON’

Michael took his brother home, and so true is it that time and life can and do, if not wipe out, yet blur and deface the recollection of the sternest and most terrible past scenes, that Michael never once thought, as he opened the door, and ushered Gilbert in, of how that door had last closed upon his companion. Gilbert, however, remembered it—remembered many other things too, as he entered the familiar square hall, and looked furtively round at the well-known things which still furnished it. When they got into the library, some recollection of it all seemed to come to Michael too. Perhaps something in his brother’s attitude, and in the slow, stiff way in which he moved and gazed about him, recalled past scenes to his mind. He turned to Gilbert, took his hand into one of his, and laid the other upon his shoulder.

‘Gilbert, we have little time for going into old troubles, in the midst of these new ones; but, I say, let bygones be bygones. I am more glad than I can tell you to see you here; and I would like you to feel it your home again, if you can.’

Gilbert’s only present reply—though he had more to say, at some future date—was to wring the hand that held his. They understood each other again, at last—or, perhaps, for the first time; and as Michael said, there was no time for further explanations. He rang the bell, and ordered refreshments for his brother; and while Gilbert ate and drank, Michael sat conning over a railway guide, and jotting down memoranda.

‘How long can you stay, Gilbert? Over to-morrow?’

‘I could manage till the day after, if I wire to my head man to-morrow morning.’

‘That is well. Then to-morrow, I will leave you in charge here, and go over to Leeds, and tell Roger of this. If I began to write it, I should make a mess of it, I know; besides, writing is cold-blooded work, in such a case.’

‘It was all off between them, was it not?’

‘Ay. But it never need have been, but for that d—d scoundrel philandering round the girl, and putting her out of conceit with Roger. It is his doing from beginning to end, and I must say I should glory in seeing him punished as he deserves. I think he wants tearing to pieces. But don’t talk to me about it, or I shall lose all my self-control, and I want it every bit.’

With which he returned to the study of Bradshaw, trying to make out how he could soonest get himself conveyed to Leeds, see Roger, and return to Bradstane. And as he searched in the railway guide, to see how the trains were connected on the different lines, there came into his mind a keen sense of the grimness of the contrast between his errand, and the means by which he was going to hurry to Roger with his budget of ill-news, and back again.

Our modern contrivances, indeed, for speedily moving about from place to place, and for darting news hither and thither, have a certain appearance of haste and want of dignity when tragedy comes in question. And yet, it is surely a proof of the intrinsic might, of the victorious power of great elementary human emotions, that when they are every now and then called into play, in this decorous age, it is they that triumph, and not the comfortable arrangements which only take into account ease of mind and plenty of purse. Love and hate and despair go striding grimly or gloriously on, and live their lives, and strike their strokes, and sway the minds and souls of those possessed by them, and override the obstacles in their course, as potently now as they did in more picturesque days. Bradshaw and the penny post come in in a parenthesis, and the system of electric telegraphy powerfully supports them, so that we can send the news of our own catastrophes, or of those of our neighbours, with a speed unheard of a century ago, though even before then there was a saying that ‘ill news travels fast.’ Nay, these things, if rightly considered, appear conducive to privacy rather than, as might appear from a superficial glance, to publicity. For any one who reads a startling announcement in letter or newspaper, has the habit, nowadays, of calling it a _canard_, and of saying that it is sure to be contradicted to-morrow. And so it often is. But even if it be not, this beautiful system of Bradshaw, penny post and Co., has no sooner certified the truth of one calamity, than it is ready and to the fore with another, and a worse than the former one; which second tragedy an intelligently interested public devours, even if incredulous, with never-satiated delight; and thus the immediate actors in the events chronicled are in reality left almost as much to themselves and their own devouring emotions, as they would have been before the steam-engine was invented. The world has heard of your domestic drama, that is true; and its details have been printed in every daily paper throughout the kingdom. But the day after, it is provided with something much more remarkable than your twopenny-halfpenny calamity, and has forgotten in a week that it ever heard your name.

Some such train of thought was in Michael’s mind, as he paused to consider the sequence in which he should arrange his different tasks on the morrow. Gilbert’s voice broke in upon his reverie. He had risen, and stood with his back against the mantelpiece.

‘Michael, it seems that you and Miss Askam “understand each other,” as the phrase goes.’

‘Yes, we do,’ said Michael.

‘I’ll make a clean breast of it. Last year, I came down here with some curiosity to see this girl who had come and planted herself down with Otho. Knowing what he was, I was undecided whether she was very fast, or very silly. So I came prepared for a good deal of amusement. You need not glare at me in that way. I would bet something you had your own private bit of astonishment in the matter, too. Well, the very first time I saw her, I understood one thing—that she was neither fast nor silly, and the more I saw of her the more lost in astonishment I was. Do you remember that knight in “The Faery Queene”—I forget which he was—who came across a woman of her sort, and was struck dumb by her goodness, till

‘“He himself, long gazing thereupon, At last fell humbly down upon his knee, And of his wonder made religion.”

It was something like that with me; and in a very short time I had made up my mind that she was the woman I would marry, if I could only get her to take me. And I had the best hopes in the world, for Otho had begun to conduct himself like a maniac, even then, and she speedily found out that I was the only person who had any control over him. Well, then came that night of the concert; a good many things came about that night, it seems to me. And when I saw you and her in the same room together, and you speaking to her, and her to you, I was certain there was something of the kind going on. Michael, I gave her up from that moment.... And yet, when time went on—it is nearly a year ago—and I heard of nothing between you, I began to think that, perhaps, after all, you had decided to have nothing to do with one who belonged to _us_, and I began to have a little hope again. When I got her telegram this morning, I felt a good deal of hope, and I frankly confess I was not sorry to hear that she was in trouble. I hoped that I could so serve her that I should be able to ask for a reward; and the shape I proposed to give it was, that we should pension off Otho with her money,—some of it, you know,—and that she should come to me, and never be troubled any more—if she only would. But you had forestalled me; and since it is you, I submit; but if it had been anybody else——’

He paused expressively. Michael was looking earnestly at him, a crowd of new emotions in his heart. This, then, was the secret of Gilbert’s conduct which had so puzzled Eleanor.

‘I should have told her long ago that I loved her,’ observed Michael; ‘but there was her money, and her connections. They were too much for me.’

‘As far as money goes, you will be her equal,’ said Gilbert. ‘I don’t suppose she will let Otho starve, and I can assure you there will not be a great superfluity of means when his affairs are wound up; and now that this girl and this child will have to be provided for——’

‘If they live,’ put in Michael.

‘If they live—yes. Well, that will make a hole in her income, I can assure you. While, on your part, there is that money—Michael——’ he hesitated, stammered—‘that money that——’

‘I know,’ said Michael, quietly. ‘What about it?’

‘Why, I have done well with it. I have always hoped that some day you would not reject it. It is six years ago, and I have made the most of it. It is a good large sum now—larger than if——’

Michael gave a short laugh.

‘I can well believe that.’

‘And if I am to believe that you have forgiven,’ he added earnestly, ‘you will not refuse any longer to take your share—ay, and as much more as you like—so that you can go to her and fear nothing, even if she loses every penny she has.’

There was a pause. Michael at last said—

‘You must let me think about it. I cannot decide such a thing all in a minute.’

Indeed, he felt that he could not. And he was beginning to feel that six years ago he had been hard—as hard as some pagan or puritan, whose creed relentlessly demands an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Quite a new feeling came over him with regard to Gilbert, who, it seemed, had worked for him for many years, and patiently bided till circumstances should allow him to offer the fruits of his work. Sweeping condemnations, he reflected, would be comfortable, very comfortable, to the carnal heart of offended man; but reasonable man must confess that scarcely ever are they just.

* * * * *

The months dragged on. Autumn fled by; winter had passed from off the face of the earth, and disappeared from the skies, but not from the soul and the mind of Ada. Gradually, after a long and terrible illness, her bodily health began to be restored. The death for which she had prayed, and which she had wildly begged Michael to procure for her, had stayed his hand. She was uplifted from the bed of sickness, but arose a changed being, altered and transformed apparently in her very nature. A melancholy, deep, black, and profound as the grave itself, had settled upon her—a melancholy which nothing ever seemed to move or change. She was not mad now, if she could still hardly be called sane, just because of this black cloud which rolled between her and other persons. She had no craze, and no delusion, properly speaking; she was simply dead to hope and joy, to every amelioration of the present, to every hope in the future. Eleanor studied her with awe and wonder, realising the mysterious nature of the human creature in her. For if Ada had lost great things, if she had fallen from a high ideal, had been dashed from a great height of purity and loftiness of soul, and so had felt herself irreparably stained and polluted, her present condition of apathetic despair would have been comprehensible to Eleanor, and she would have sympathised as well as pitied. But the things she had lost, and the loss of which had reduced her to what she was, were so small; at least, they appeared so to the other. It was not for moral and spiritual degradation that she mourned and refused to be comforted, but for material trouble,—vanity crushed, great hopes of advancement and aggrandisement shattered; her social position, such as it was, gone for ever, and humbler women who had been clever enough to take care of themselves, exalted above her. When they showed her her child, who was a healthy and beautiful boy, though not robust, she turned away in horror, with hatred in her eyes—the nearest approach to an active emotion which she had shown since her calamity. It was what Michael had expected to see, and he noted it down in his mind.

‘I wish he was dead, and me too!’ she said, looking coldly at Michael. ‘I think you might have put us both out of the way, Dr. Langstroth, if you had had as much kind feeling as people talk about.’

Michael told Eleanor that the child must be removed from Ada’s vicinity. Therefore, while the latter remained at the farm, in Mrs. Nadin’s care, Eleanor charged herself with the baby, and took it and its nurse into her house. She could have devised no surer means of healing the wounds, sweetening the bitterness, soothing the angriness of her own thoughts. The utter helplessness of the child, the terrible circumstances of its birth, its clouded future, appealed irresistibly to her nature. She grew to love the little creature with an intensity which surprised herself. She hushed it to sleep in her arms, or interrogated its large mournful eyes as they stared upwards, with long, vacant gaze into her absorbed face. And in this occupation she had time to ponder over all that had happened, and to try to shape her course in accordance, not with the dictates of anger and passion, however just, but with the laws of mercy and forgiveness. The helpless figure in her arms, whose warm and clinging dependence seemed to make everything more human and more endurable, softened her, calmed her, so that sometimes she spoke to Michael of what had happened, and of what might happen, with an insight and a depth of thought and feeling which surprised him, ready as he was to credit her with all manner of goodness and nobleness.

Her great desire, during the period in which the boy was under her care, was to get a marriage performed between Otho and Ada. Thorsgarth was not an entailed property, though it had always been the practice in the Askam family to arrange it and the succession to it as if it had been. If Otho and Ada were married, and he could be forced to do justice to this child, though he could never give him the name he ought to have borne, yet much evil would be removed, and great sorrow and heart-burning averted.

Strange to say, the difficulties in the way of this scheme arose, not with Otho, but with Ada. When the latter was well enough to leave the farm, Eleanor brought her to her own house, since Ada utterly refused to go home, saying she would kill herself if they took her there.

Through Gilbert, she and Michael had word that Otho was subdued, cowed, and changed; that it had become a sort of superstitious wish with him to have the marriage legalised. This gave hope to Eleanor. But Ada, when questioned, merely said, with profound melancholy, and profound indifference, ‘What does it matter? If he married me fifty times, he cannot give me back any of the things that made me happy. I do not care what any one thinks or says. Father says he will remove from here, and let me live with him. That will do as well as anything.’

So firmly was she planted in this mind, that after a time they ceased to press it upon her, trusting to time to work a change. At the end of March she was still at the Dower House, seeing only Eleanor, Michael, and her father, who sometimes came to visit her. Mr. Dixon was a broken man now. His wife’s anger took a different shape from his; she would have had him sell his business and retire altogether from a place where they could never hold up their heads again. But the poor old man was not thus to be torn away from his child, or from the place where she was. Mrs. Dixon indignantly refused to see the baby; but her husband frequently stole up to the Dower House of an afternoon or evening, creeping timidly into the room where his daughter sat, and taking a place beside her. And here he used to nurse his little grandchild upon his knee, trying to disguise from Ada the delight he could not help taking in its looks and ways, as, when he had once or twice called her attention to them, she had looked at him and at the child, too, in a strange way, of which Eleanor took more notice than he did; and, warned by Michael, she was ever on her guard. But it was not written that Ada was to fulfil her lot in any way such as they sometimes dimly dreaded. Her thoughts strayed within her darkened mind, and as she saw the spring outside breaking around her, and beheld also the looks and gestures by which Michael and Eleanor sometimes betrayed, amidst all the gloom, that they loved, and were happy, Ada might have cried also—

‘Oh, dark, dark, dark, amidst the blaze of noon!’

Most likely, the intelligence of a certain order which her woe seemed to have developed in her, read their fears, and smiled at them. They thought she planned nothing for the future, any more than she revived at any sign in the present; but in this they were mistaken.