CHAPTER X.
No hope--no hope! let calm lips say, No hope, To whom hope never was; but as for me, This possible is life-- And if you say it is impossible, Yet up, up to your highest cliffs of ice I go to light my watchfire--so perchance, As he may see it from afar. No hope! There never is but hope where there is love.--OLD PLAY.
Land! our voyage is just ending, and softly before us in the dawn of the morning rise the shores of India; the mighty, impotent, fabulous, golden East.
But I was in no mood to indulge in the pleasant excitement and curiosity of a stranger. My anxiety, like other torments, became intolerable as it approached its end, and in feverish haste I hurried to seek the Mr Churchill who had written to me of Hew.
He was a civilian, with something of that stiff, well-drilled military look, which such officials acquire from their contact, I suppose, with their warlike brethren. He was a middle-aged man of indefinite years, endowed largely with the grave politeness of tone and manner which belongs to your sober, retired major or captain; perfectly urbane, and not without its considerable mixture of kindliness, but presenting to a stranger an unimpressible blank of courteous gravity, which to your shy man is, in most cases, an invincible barrier. I was very much agitated--I told Mr Churchill my name. He looked politely puzzled and at a loss. “He was not aware--” I interrupted him with a statement of my errand, and an anxious inquiry for Hew.
The polite, grave man was melted; the muscles of his face moved. “Ah, poor Murray!” he said, in a tone which told me there was no more to hope.
And so it was. Every exertion had been made to ascertain the fate of my unfortunate friend, and it was now certain, Mr Churchill said, that all hope or chance that he survived was at an end. Nothing had been left undone, for in Bombay Hew had many friends; but there could be no doubt that he had fallen by the hands of these assassins, and now lay in some unknown desert grave. It was now certain, there could be no doubt. I eagerly asked if this was all; if they had no positive information of Hew’s death.
Mr Churchill did not comprehend the extreme agitation of my grief. He thought me excited in my intense anxiety, and became again as blankly polite as before. They had no positive information; but the want of it, to those who knew India, was quite enough, he said, and all further search was hopeless.
I was not sufficiently indifferent to be content with this. I left him to seek Hew’s servant, and to make another desperate effort to discover his fate. The man Doolut was a Parsee, and professed attachment to his master too extravagantly to satisfy me, but I took him into my service and immediately began my search.
How long I remained engaged in it, and the travels and perils, and vain hopes, and blank disappointments, which I passed through while pursuing it, I cannot record. I become faint again, as I recall that time, when day by day the deferred hope sickened my very soul within me--I failed; most sadly and utterly failed; yet though the shadows of some thirty years have darkened over Hew Murray’s fate, and increased its mystery, I cannot think of it yet without a flicker of hope, a throbbing sickness of desire, that has well-nigh power to send me forth on the vain quest again. Living or dead, in earth or in heaven, Hew Murray, no man has ever filled your place in your old companion’s heart; and though I have had darkness enough in my own life to make me think an early deliverance from these earthly cares a blessing, yet would I give almost all that remains to me to know that you yet lived and breathed upon this lower world--to hope that I might look upon your face and hear the voice of your brotherhood again!
For years after that I wandered about the face of the earth, in all lands and countries, a solitary man; snatching here and there the solace of congenial companionship for a brief space, but only passing forth again to be forgotten. Murrayshaugh and Lucy I never could discover though I have lingered on the outskirts of many a little French and German town, vainly endeavouring to find some trace of them. Once only have I had any communication with the family, and that was immediately after Hew’s mysterious disappearance, when a few hurried blotted incoherent words came to me from Lucy, bidding me pity her in her misery; she had no one in the wide world, she said, to tell it to but me--and then in her generous gentleness, as if the words of her complaint had burst from her unawares, she essayed to comfort me, and spoke of consolation and hope. Hope and consolation! yes, so wonderful is the fabric of this humanity, that there is no sky too dark for those stars; and our sorrows lie softly on us when they have grown old with us, and become a part of our lives.
With Charlie Graeme I had no more intercourse. He took guilt to himself and never attempted to renew our former intimacy--but the sin that he had clogged his course withal, found him out ere it was far spent. He married the daughter of a Glasgow merchant reputed to be rich, whose great pretensions collapsed immediately after Charlie became connected with his family. This wife had the expensive tastes of her class, I have heard, but it happens singularly that all unsuccessful men have wives with extravagant tastes, so I give little credence to that rumour: however it happened, or whatever were the procuring causes, it is certain that Charlie Graeme, with all his gifts, was in a very short time a shipwrecked man. He died young, in poverty, and debt, and discomfort--his helpless wife did not long survive him, and they left one child--a boy--on the world’s hands and mine.
This child I left, during his infancy, under the care of a servant of his mother’s, and some ten years ago I had him sent to a school in Aberdeenshire, a private place of respectable standing conducted by a pragmatical Aberdeenish man, called Monikie, who was with us at college. The boy’s name is Halbert, our most famous family name. He must have nearly arrived at man’s estate, but I have never seen him.
I am drawing near the end of my course. I earnestly desire to have my mind preserved from the resentment and pain of being again brought into immediate contact with those who have so deeply injured me, or with their representatives. For this reason I have never seen Halbert Graeme, and am firmly resolved not to see him. The lad shall have full justice; I will refuse him no needful help in any profession he may choose; but though he is the last representative of our ancient name, he shall not be the heir of Mossgray. I have given Monikie all freedom in providing for him, in a way becoming his father’s son--but he is not mine. I do this with no feeling of revenge towards the dead, but I cannot adopt or cherish the son of Charlie Graeme.
And Lilias--I have heard that she too has one child--a girl called by her own name--but these also I cannot dare ever to look upon. Edward Maxwell is dead; he has lived the life of a weakling, and his widow remains in England where he died. I have learned now, in my old age, to think of the Lilias of my imagination as of one who died in the early fragrance of youth, and almost to dream that her gentle, shadowy presence hovers near me, in the twilight of summer nights, when the stately flowers which bear her name shine like gleams of moonlight in the dim borders of my garden. I can bear the neighbourhood of these lilies now; their pensive beauty soothes me; but though the softening shadows of memory and years have enshrined this lily of my youth, in that radiance of tender melancholy with which we surround those who have gone down early to peaceful graves, I yet cannot and dare not enter the presence of that Lilias who has made me a solitary, joyless man. Let me be kept from them and from their children. I cannot endure the pain which their very names inflict upon me--I must always avoid and shun them. I wish them well--all health, and peace, and happiness be with them, and a brighter lot than mine; but let me be left with my dreams; the sole remaining companions, which are with me in my old age, and were with me in my youth.
Walter Johnstone is the only surviving member of our joyous boyish party. He is struggling still in the Maelstrom of care and business, maintaining his place well, as I hear, among his compeers, and training, as he can, a large family of sons and daughters. He still retains Greenshaw, but never visits it; for Walter’s wife and children are fashionables in their degree, and think it expedient, as my good friend Mrs Oswald tells me, to leave the gentle enchantment of distance and ignorance about the very minute property from which their father acquires the landed designation to which we attach a considerable share of importance in Scotland.
Greenshaw is let to strangers--I hear it is greatly altered; but I avoid it in my limited walks, the last association of deadly pain it has having obliterated in my mind all the former ones of youthful joy and sunshine. It is not in my way indeed, for the water and I travel together--I seldom leave the green line of its banks; I pursue its windings up and down with constant interest and pleasure. We never weary of each other; those ripples which I have heard all my life have an articulate tongue to me--they are connected with all the gladness I have dreamt, with all the grief I have undergone; and there are creeks and sunny promontories there which recall the shining thread of youthful visions till I can almost think I am weaving them again--
“My eyes are filled with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears As in those days I heard.”
This spell of local association has always been strong upon me. As I pass along the banks of my ancient and well-beloved companion, the wan water, the changes of my life rise up before me, each with its separate scene and dwelling-place--these dells and pensive glens--these broad glades, and grouped brotherhoods of old trees--they are peopled with the things that have been; they bear upon them, as upon so many several pages, the story of my life.
And so I dwell among them, and at my pleasure am again a solitary child, a dreaming youth, a stricken man--I feel myself of kin to myself in all these changes. Swiftly these years have carried me over the world’s broad highway, but with this white hair upon my head I am still the child to whose first dreams this water murmured its plaintive symphony. I know myself little wiser, and in nothing more thoughtful. It is the things around us that change--it is not we.
For I confess myself as credulous still of ideal generosity and truth, as I was when I had counted only twenty summers. I have not been able yet to tutor myself to suspicion--the vision splendid has not quite departed--I cannot put the lustre of that celestial light, which once apparelled all things, away out of my eyes, even when those eyes are old; and Nature in her grave nobleness is not less, but more dear now, when I remember that I shall soon bid her good even, to enter into the presence of her Lord and mine. New heavens and a new earth--I cannot sever my human heart from mine own land; and who shall say that those noble countries, casting off all impurity in the fiery trial that awaits them, shall not be our final heaven?
I love to think that it may be so; I love to think that the Lord, in His humanity, looks tenderly upon the mortal soil on which He sojourned in His wondrous life, and that here, perchance, in these very lands, made holy by His grace and power, our final rest shall be. It may be but a fancy; but it comes upon me with gentle might, like the whispered comfort of an angel. A new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness--a glorified humanity which, remaining human, is mortal no longer! with the judgment, and the condemnation, and the wars of the Lord over-past, and the earth and the heaven one fair broad country, and Himself over all, blessed for ever. These are the old man’s dreams; and they shed new glory over the pleasant places in which my lines have fallen--
“Oh, ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves! Forbode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might. I only have relinquished one delight, To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the brooks that down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped, lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet-- The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.”
END OF BOOK I.
BOOK II.
RESOLUTIONS.