"Very seldom. I am not one of those who are 'given to change.'"
"Nor I."
He stood a moment, lingering in the pleasant, lightsome warmth, as if loath to quit it, then took his little boys in either hand and went away. There was a grand consultation that night, for Miss Williams never did any thing without speaking to her girls; but still it was merely nominal. They always left the decision to her. And her heart yearned over the two little Roys, orphans, yet children still; while Helen and Janetta were growing up and needing very little from her except a general motherly supervision. Besides, he asked it. He had said distinctly that she was the only woman to whom he could thoroughly trust his boys. So—she took them.
After a few days the new state of things grew so familiar that it seemed as if it had lasted for months, the young Roys going to and fro to their classes and their golf-playing, just as the young Dalziels had done; and Mr. Roy coming about the house, almost daily, exactly as Robert Roy had used to do of old. Sometimes it was to Fortune Williams the strangest reflex of former times; only—with a difference.
Unquestionably he was very much changed. In outward appearance more even than the time accounted for. No man can knock about the world, in different lands and climates, for seventeen years, without bearing the marks of it. Though still under fifty, he had all the air of an "elderly" man, and had grown a little "peculiar" in his ways, his modes of thought and speech—except that he spoke so very little. He accounted for this by his long lonely life in Australia, which had produced, he said, an almost unconquerable habit of silence. Altogether, he was far more of an old bachelor than she was of an old maid, and Fortune felt this: felt, too, that in spite of her gray hairs she was in reality quite as young as he—nay, sometimes younger; for her innocent, simple, shut-up life had kept her young.
And he, what had his life been, in so far as he gradually betrayed it? Restless, struggling; a perpetual battle with the world; having to hold his own, and fight his way inch by inch—he who was naturally a born student, to whom the whirl of a business career was especially obnoxious. What had made him choose it? Once chosen, probably he could not help himself; besides, he was not one to put his shoulder to the wheel and then draw back. Evidently, with the grain or against the grain, he had gone on with it; this sad, strange, wandering life, until he had "made his fortune," for he told her so. But he said no more; whether he meant to stay at home and spend it, or go out again to the antipodes (and he spoke of those far lands without any distaste, even with a lingering kindliness, for indeed he seemed to have no unkindly thought of any place or person in all the world), his friend did not know.
His friend. That was the word. No other. After her first outburst of uncontrollable emotion, to call Robert Roy her "love," even in fancy, or to expect that he would deport himself in any lover-like way, became ridiculous, pathetically ridiculous. She was sure of that. Evidently no idea of the kind entered his mind. She was Miss Williams, and he was Mr. Roy—two middle-aged people, each with their different responsibilities, their altogether separate lives; and, hard as her own had been, it seemed as if his had been the harder of the two—ay, though he was now a rich man, and she still little better than a poor governess.
She did not think very much of worldly things, but still she was aware of this fact—that he was rich and she was poor. She did not suffer herself to dwell upon it, but the consciousness was there, sustained with a certain feeling called "proper pride." The conviction was forced upon her in the very first days of Mr. Roy's return—that to go back to the days of their youth was as impossible as to find primroses in September.
If, indeed, there were any thing to go back to. Sometimes she felt, if she could only have found out that, all the rest would be easy, painless. If she could only have said to him, "Did you write me the letter you promised? Did you ever love me"? But that one question was, of course, utterly impossible. He made no reference whatever to old things, but seemed resolved to take up the present a very peaceful and happy present it soon grew to be—just as if there were no past at all. So perforce did she.
But, as I think I have said once before, human nature is weak, and there were days when the leaves were budding, and the birds singing in the trees, when the sun was shining and the waves rolling in upon the sands, just as they rolled in that morning over those two lines of foot-marks, which might have walked together through life; and who knows what mutual strength, help, and comfort this might have proved to both?—then it was, for one at least, rather hard.