I know it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in natural gradation—maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which, ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these, excepting, perhaps, her one six months' dream of love and spring. That being over, she fell back upon autumn days and autumn pleasures—which are very real pleasures, after all.
As she sat with the two little girls leaning against her lap—they were Indian children, unaccustomed to tenderness, and had already grown very fond of her—there was a look in her face, not at all like an ancient maiden or a governess, but almost motherly. You see the like in the faces of the Virgin Mary, as the old monks used to paint her, quaint, and not always lovely, but never common or coarse, and spiritualized by a look of mingled tenderness and sorrow into something beyond all beauty.
This woman's face had it, so that people who had known Miss Williams as a girl were astonished to find her, as a middle-aged woman, grown "so good-looking." To which one of her pupils once answered, naively, "It is because she looks so good."
But this was after ten years and more. Of the first half of those years the less that is said, the better. She did not live; she merely endured life. Monotony without, a constant aching within—a restless gnawing want, a perpetual expectation, half hope, half fear; no human being could bear all this without being the worse for it, or the better. But the betterness came afterward, not first.
Sometimes her cravings to hear the smallest tidings of him, only if he were alive or dead, grew into such an agony that, had it not been for her entire helplessness in the matter, she might have tried some means of gaining information. But from his sudden change of plans, she was ignorant even of the name of the ship he had sailed by, the firm he had gone to. She could do absolutely nothing, and learn nothing. Here was something like the "Affliction of Margaret," that poem of Wordsworth's which, when her little pupils recited it—as they often did—made her ready to sob out loud from the pang of its piteous reality:
"I look for ghosts, but none will force
Their way to me: 'tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Betwixt the living and the dead:
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night
With love and longings infinite."
Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead; for her finger was still empty of that ring—her mother's ring—which he had drawn off, promising its return "when he was dead or she was married." This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her. Nor, indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her, these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscure village in the south of England, where she had lived as governess—first in the squire's family, then the rector's.
From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped to remain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a few months. At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son had returned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone back again to India. There was now, for the first time for half a century, not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.
But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city, her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with a persistency for which her conscience smote her sometimes, knowing it was not wholly for their sakes. But they had never been near her, and she had little expectation of seeing any of them ever again, since by this time she had lived long enough to find out how easily people do drift asunder, and lose all clue to one another, unless some strong firm will or unconquerable habit of fidelity exists on one side or the other.
Since the Dalziels she had only lived in the two families before named, and had been lately driven from the last one by a catastrophe, if it may be called so, which had been the bitterest drop in her cup since the time she left St. Andrews.