An Isle of Surrey: A Novel

CHAPTER XXXII.

BRAMWELL FINDS A SISTER

The sound of the voices had awakened the child, and he sat up in the bed, looking with wide-open eyes from father to mother, from mother to father.

Bramwell stood with his back against the wall, staring at his wife and breathing hard. He was stunned, overwhelmed. He felt uncertain of his own identity, of the place around him, and of the child. The only thing of which he felt sure was that he stood face to face with his wife, who had risen from the tomb.

"I did not come," she said, moving out from her position between the bed and the wall, "to see you or to ask mercy or forgiveness of you. You need not reproach me for being alive; because only I fainted, you should not have seen me to-night; you should never have seen me again, for I was on my way to my grave, where I could not go without looking on my child once more. The announcement of my death came only a little while before its time. I shall not see another day."

Her voice was dull and hoarse, the features wasted and pinched, and mottled with marring blotches of scorbutic red.

"This is no place for us to talk," he said, pointing to the child on the bed. "Follow me."

She hesitated.

"I do not want to talk with you; I wish to spare you. I know you would be justified in killing me. But I would not have you suffer because you wish me dead. I shall not trouble you or the world with another day of my wretched life. Cover your face, and let me kiss the boy again, and I will go. I know my way to the river, and I would spare you any harm that might come to you of my dying here-at your hands."

"This is no place, I say, for such a scene or for such words. Follow me."

"You will not kill me?"

"I will not harm you, poor soul."

"Your pity harms me worse than blows."

"Then I will not pity you. Come."

"May I kiss the child once more before I leave the room? You may cover your eyes, so that you may not see your child polluted by my touch."

"You will be free to kiss him when we have done our talk. I shall not hinder you."

He held the door open for her, and with tottering steps and bent head, she went out into the dark and waited for him.

"Lie down now, my child, and try to go to sleep. Mother will come to you later."

The child, overawed, covered himself up and closed his eyes. Bramwell took the lamp off the window-sill, and led the way into the sitting-room.

He shut the door behind them, put the lamp on the table, and, setting a chair for her by it, bade her sit down. She complied in silence, resting her elbow on the table, and covering her face with her hand.

"You said you fainted," he said, "do you feel weak still?"

"A little."

"I keep some brandy in case of sudden illness, for this is a lonely place." It was a relief to him to utter commonplaces. "And there are, or at least were until lately, no neighbours of whom I could borrow."

He poured some out of a pocket-flask, and added water, and handed the glass to her. "Drink that."

"What! you will give me aid under your roof?"

"Under the roof of Heaven. Drink."

She raised the glass to her lips, and swallowed a small quantity.

"All. Drink it all. You have need of it."

She did as she was told.

He began walking up and down the room softly.

"You sent me the boy when you believed you were dying, and when the crisis turned in favour of life you inserted the announcement of your death in order that I might believe myself free of you for ever?"

"Yes. I intended you should never see me or hear of me again."

"That I might be free to marry again if I chose?"

"That was my idea."

"And then you came to bid good-bye to your child before going to the river?"

"Yes; they never would have found out who I was. I left all papers behind me, and cut the marks off my clothes."

"But the love of your child was so strong, you risked everything to bid him a last farewell?"

"I am his mother, and all that is left to me of a heart is in my child. I do not ask you to forgive me for the past. I do not ask your pardon for what I did three years ago; but I do entreat you, as you are a just and merciful man, to forgive me for coming to see my innocent little child!"

"She took her hand from before her face, and, clasping both her hands together, raised them in passionate supplication to him as he passed her in his walk. Her thick, dull voice was full of unutterable woe.

"I forgive you the past and the present utterly. Say no more in that strain. My head is very heavy, and I am trying to think. Do not excite yourself about forgiveness. I am endeavouring to see my way. This has come suddenly and unexpectedly, and my brain seems feeble, and it will not work freely. In a little while all will be plain to me. In the meantime keep quiet."

He spoke very gently.

She groaned and covered her face again. She would have preferred the river to this, but the manner of the man compelled obedience as she had never felt obedience compelled before, and it was obvious he did not wish her to go to the river-yet, at all events.

"It was a terrible risk to run-a terrible risk. Suppose I had married?"

"But I never would have interfered with you, or come near you, or let you know I was alive. You were the last being on earth I wanted to see." She took her hand down from before her face and looked at him earnestly.

"I am sure of that, but you see what has fallen out to-night."

"O, forgive me, and let me go! My lot is bitter enough for what has happened, without reproaches for something that has not occurred. You have not married again? Have you?"

He shook his head, and said with a mournful smile, "No. I have not married again. Well, let that pass. Let that pass. Mentioning it helps me to clear up matters-enables me to see my way."

"May I go now?"

"Not yet. Stay awhile."

"I would rather be in the river than here."

"So would I; but I must not go, for many reasons. There is the child, for example, to go no Higher."

"But I can be of no use to the child. Your coldness is killing me. Why don't you rage at me or let me go? Are you a man of stone? or do you take me for a woman of stone?" she cried passionately, writhing on her chair.

He waved her outburst aside with a gentle gesture. "Nothing can be gained by heat or haste."

"Let me say good-bye to my child and go," she cried vehemently.

"The child and the river can bide awhile; bide you also awhile. It is a long time since we last met."

She grasped her throat with her hand. She was on the point of breaking down. His last words pierced her to the soul. With a superhuman effort she controlled herself and sat silent.

For a minute there was silence. He continued his walk up and down. Gradually his footfalls, which had been light all along, grew fainter and fainter until they became almost inaudible. Gradually his face, which had been perplexed, lost its troubled look and softened into a peaceful smile. It seemed as though he had ceased to be aware of her presence. He looked like a solitary man communing with himself and drawing solace from his thoughts. He looked as though he beheld some beatific vision that yielded heavenly content-as though a voice of calming and elevating melody were reaching him from afar off. When he spoke his tones were fine and infinitely tender, and sounded like a benediction. He saw his way clearly now.

"You risked everything to-night to get a glimpse of your child, a final look, to say a last farewell. You were willing to risk everything here; you were willing to risk hereafter everything that may be the fate of those who lay violent hands upon their own lives. Why need you risk anything at all, either for the boy's sake or in the hereafter, because of laying violent hands upon your life?"

"I do not understand you," she whispered, looking at him in awe. His appearance, his manner, his voice, did not seem of earth.

"Why not stay with your boy and fill your heart with him?"

"What?" she whispered, growing faint and catching the table for support.

"Why not stay with your boy and fill your heart with ministering to him?"

"What? Here? In this place?" she cried in a wavering voice, still no louder than a whisper.

"In this place. Why should you not stay with your child? There is no one so fit to tend and guard a little child as a mother."

"And you?" she asked in a wild intense whisper. "Will you go to the river to hide the head I have dishonoured?"

"No. I too will stay and help you to shield and succour the child. Mother and father are the proper guardians of little ones."

"Frank Mellor, are you mad?" she cried out loud, springing to her feet and dashing her hand across her face to clear her vision.

"No; there isn't substance enough in me now to make a madman."

"And," she cried, starting up and facing him, "Frank Mellor, do you know who I am? Do you know that three years ago I left your house under infamous circumstances, and that I brought shame and sorrow and destruction upon your home and you? Do you know that I have made you a byeword in Beechley and London, and wherever you have been heard of? Do you know that I am your wife?"

She had raised her hoarse voice to its highest pitch. Her eyes flashed. She brandished her arms. Her face blazed red in the undisfigured parts, and the red spots turned purple and livid. She was frantically defending the magnanimity of this man against the baseness of her former self, against the evil of her present reputation, against contact with the leprosy of her sin.

"All that needs to be known, I know," he said, in the same calm, gentle voice. "Years ago I lost my wife. I lost sight of her for a long time. To-night I find a sister."

"Sister!" she cried in a whisper, sinking on a chair, and losing at once all her fierce aspect and enhanced colour.

"To-night I find a sister who is in despair because of the loss of her child. I restore her child to her empty arms, and I say, 'My roof is your roof, and my bread is your bread.'" He lit a candle, and handed it to her. "Go to your room where the boy is, and take him in your arms, for it comforts a mother to have her child in her arms. I shall stay here. It is dawn already, and I have work to do. Good-night."

CHAPTER XXXIII.

"I MUST GO TO FETCH HER HOME."

When Philip Ray left Crawford's House that night he felt anything at all but the elation supposed to be proper in the accepted suitor of a beautiful girl. He had, indeed, a great many troubles in his mind, and as he walked home to his lonely lodgings in Camberwell he was nearly a miserable man. It would not be true to say he was out and out miserable, but he was perilously close to it.

In the first place, he had to leave Hetty behind him, a thing almost beyond endurance. Then, when removed from the intoxicating influence of her presence and undistracted by the magic of her beauty, he began to turn his eyes inward upon himself, and investigate his own unworthiness with brutal candour-nay, with gross injustice.

What on earth was he that a faultless, an exquisite creature like Hetty should give herself to him? That was a question he asked himself over and over again, without being able to find any reason whatever for her sacrifice. More than once he felt inclined to go back, make a clean breast of it by telling her that as a friend he would recommend her to have nothing whatever to do with himself. The words of love and devotion she had spoken to him on the island were a source of intense pain to him. A nice kind of fellow he was indeed for her to say she would follow round all the world! He was obtaining love under false pretences, that's what he was doing. And such love! and from such a perfect creature! It was simply a monstrous fraud! There was something underhand and dishonourable about it; for if she had only known him for what he was, she would flee out of the very parish away from him. He must have been mad to ask her to marry him.

It had all come on him suddenly. When he suggested that she should go to the island with him on the excuse of seeing how the boy got on, he had no intention of proposing to her; and, nevertheless, no sooner had he set foot on the Ait than he must retain her hand and ask her to give it to him for ever! Could he have meant the whole thing as a joke, or was the Master of all Evil at the bottom of it?

But the full turpitude of his act did not appear until he considered ways and means. At present his salary was barely enough to keep himself in the strictest economy. He could not, after paying for food, lodgings, and clothes all on the humblest scale, save five pounds a year. It is true he had a yearly increase of salary, and by-and-by would have the chance of promotion. But at the most favourable estimate he could not hope to have an income on which he might prudently marry sooner than between twenty and thirty years. Say, in twenty-five years, when his salary would be sufficient, he would be fifty-two and she forty-five! If he had any hair left on his head then it would be snow-white, and he would be sure to have rheumatism and most likely a touch of asthma as well. He would have confirmed bachelor habits and exacting notions about his food and an abject horror of the east wind. He would tell old stories as new, and laugh at them, and the younger men in the office would laugh at him for laughing at these old tales, and mimic him behind his back, and call him an old fossil and other endearing names, indicative of pity in them and senility in him! What a poor idiot he had been to speak to the girl!

It was true the Layards were not very well off themselves now; but they had once been rich, and naturally Hetty ought to be raised by marriage far up above their present position. She was a lady and a beauty, and the most enchanting girl that ever the sun shone on, and ought to wear a coronet if such things went by charm; and here was he, a pauper junior clerk in one of the most miserably-paid branches of the Civil Service, coolly asking her to be his wife! His conduct had been criminal, nothing short of it.

What on earth would Frank say when he told him of it? If Frank was an honourable man he would go over to Layard, and advise the brother to forbid the suitor his house.

Suitor, indeed! Pretty suitor he was to go wooing such a girl as Hetty!

But then Hetty had told him she loved him and would follow him to the ends of the earth, and he'd just like to hear any man in his presence say Hetty wasn't to do what she pleased, even if her pleasure took such a preposterous form as love for him. Now that he came to think of it in that way, if it pleased Hetty to love him she should love him, in spite of all the Franks and all the brothers in Christendom; for wasn't Hetty's happiness and pleasure dearer to him than the welfare of empires? And if he hadn't quite a hundred a year, he could make it more by coaching fellows for the Civil Service and in a thousand other ways.

Philip Ray having arrived at this more hopeful and wholesome view of his affairs went to bed, and lay awake some time trying to compose a poem in his sweetheart's praise. Having found, however, that he could not keep the lines of equal length, and that the rhymes came in now at the wrong places and anon not at all, he abandoned poetry as an occupation with which he had no familiarity, and took to one in which he had experience-sleep.

When he awoke next morning all his troubles and doubts had cleared away. The lead of the night before had been transmuted into gold by the alchemy of sleep. He seemed to himself really a fairly good fellow (which was no egotistical over-estimate, but a very fair appraisement of his value). No insuperable difficulties presented themselves in his mind to the making thirty, forty, fifty pounds a year more than his salary. He knew Hetty loved him, and he simply adored his exquisite jocund Hebe with the rich heart and frank avowal of love. A fig for obstacles with such a prize before him! If any considerable sum of money was attached to the setting of the Thames on fire here was your man able and willing to undertake the feat.

When the afternoon came, and he found himself released from the drudgery of his desk, he hastened to Welford. Alfred Layard did not get home in the evening until eight o'clock, and, of course, Ray could not call at Crawford's House until after that hour. But he could go to the Ait, and who could say but Hetty might appear at the window, or even come out on Crawford's Quay? In any case he wanted to see Frank and tell him what he had done, for he would as soon have thought of picking a pocket as of keeping a secret from his brother-in-law.

Philip Ray hastened along the canal with long quick strides, swinging his arms as he went. Now that the prospect of seeing Hetty again was close upon him he had not only lost all his gloom, but was in a state of enthusiastic hopefulness. He hailed the island three times before Bramwell answered.

"I thought you were never coming," said he, as the two shook hands upon his landing.

"I was busy when you hailed," said Bramwell, "and I could not believe it was you so early." Then noticing the excitement of his brother-in-law, he said, "What is the matter? Has anything happened?"

"Yes. Let us go in. I want to talk to you most particularly," said Ray. Then in his turn noticing the appearance and manner of the other, he said, "What is the matter with you?You too look as if something had happened."

"I have been up all night at work," he answered, as they entered the cottage.

Ray's sister had gone to Mrs. Pemberton's to get the luggage she had left there.

They went into the sitting-room. Frank was playing by himself in the old timber-yard.