Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and lost it—he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thought of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief—the grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a newspaper that the man they loved was married to another—did not come. At least not at once. It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. She was not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her as if it had happened long ago—as if she had always known it must happen, and was not astonished.
His "only and beloved daughter!" The words sung themselves in and out of her brain, to the murmur of the sea. How he must have loved the child! She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and a half old! Then he must have been married a good while—long and long after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go on thinking of another woman's husband.
One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous despair, which nobody heard but God—and she was not afraid of His hearing—and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his child in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally different man.
She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was the same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totally different woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on this side the grave, but also something was found.
"He is alive," she said to herself, with the same strange joy; for now she knew where he was, and what had happened to him. The silence of all these years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, in a sense, was found.
Fortune Williams rose up and walked, in more senses than one; went round to fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly opened delight of children, the Brighton Aquarium; staid a little with them, admiring the fishes; and when she reached home, and found David Dalziel in the drawing-room, met him and thanked him for bringing her the newspaper. "I suppose it was on account of that obituary notice of Mr. Roy's child," said she, calmly naming the name now. "What a sad thing! But still I am glad to know he is alive and well. So will you be. Shall you write to him?"
"Well, I don't know," answered the lad, carelessly crumpling up the newspaper and throwing it on the fire. Miss Williams made a faint movement to snatch it out, then disguised the gesture in some way, and silently watched it burn. "I don't quite see the use of writing. He's a family man now, and must have forgotten all about his old friends. Don't you think so?"
"Perhaps; only he was not the sort of person easily to forget."
She could defend him now; she could speak of him, and did speak more than once afterward, when David referred to the matter. And then the lad quitted Brighton for Oxford, and she was left in her old loneliness.
A loneliness which I will not speak of. She herself never referred to that time. After it, she roused herself to begin her life anew in a fresh home, to work hard, not only for daily bread but for that humble independence which she was determined to win before the dark hour when the most helpful become helpless, and the most independent are driven to fall a piteous burden into the charitable hands of friends or strangers—a thing to her so terrible that to save herself from the possibility of it, she who had never leaned upon any body, never had any body to lean on, became her one almost morbid desire.