And when Sir Edward came home, he found the lawyer’s dog-cart still at the door, and the young man, surrounded by the three anxious ladies, laying down his plan to them as one who was master of the situation. “I will go at once if you will let me; I’ll get hold of him easier than any one who has a right to find fault,” young Rochford was saying, when, cold and hungry and discouraged, and with a smoldering fury against all the world in his heart, Sir Edward pushed the door open and found him there.
CHAPTER XL.
THE POOR BOY.
Walter had plunged into London as a diver plunges into the sea. He was in search of but one thing: to find her again who had eluded him, who had drawn him after her by the strongest chains that can draw the imagination at his age, by all the tantalizing of vague promises, avoiding fulfillment, of vague engagements which came to nothing, and last of all by this sudden flight, a provocation more audacious than any that went before. Could he ever have expected that she would go with him, to wait all the preliminaries which (as she knew so much better than he did) must precede any possible marriage? When he came to think of it by the light of the morning, which alters the aspect of so many things, he saw quite plainly that this was not a thing he could have expected of her. She was very daring, he thought, and frank, and secure in her own innocence, but this was not a thing which she could be expected to do. He had been foolishly miserable, disappointed to the bottom of his soul, when he heard that she had gone away. The night he had spent trying to sleep, trying to get through the black hours that made any enterprise impossible, had been terrible to him; but with the morning there had come a better cheer. Of course, he said to himself! How could he be so imbecile, so silly, as to think differently. Of course she would not go with him under such circumstances; and it was delicacy on her part that prevented her from saying so. There are times when it is a failure of modesty even to suggest that modesty requires certain precautions. Therefore she had not said it. Impossible for her pure lips, for her pure mind, to put into words the idea that he and she, like any noble knight and maiden, might not have gone together blameless to the end of the world. But she had felt that in the present artificial state of the world it was better not to do this, and she had acted without saying anything, confident that he would understand. There is no limit to the ingenuity of a lover in framing excuses for the actions of the person beloved. Instead of being blamable, was not this another proof of her perfection, of the sensitive delicacy of all her thoughts, she who was so little bound by conventional laws? The mixture of freedom and of reserve, Walter said to himself, was what he had above all admired and adored in her. It was his own stupidity, not any fault of hers, that had given him so wretched a night, such a sense of desertion and abandonment. He remembered now that he had caught the address of the box which stood half packed in the room where she had talked to him, in Crockford’s cottage.
He comprehended everything now. She had taken him there that he should see it, that he should be able to follow her, without the need of saying a word. Oh, how well he understood it all! Had they gone together every circumstance would have been embarrassing; the mere payments to be made, the railway tickets, the cabs, everything would have been awkward. How well (he thought to himself) her fine sense had divined this, perceived it when he saw nothing! That was no doubt the woman’s part, to divine what could and could not be done—to settle it all swiftly, silently, without any need of talk, which would have been more embarrassing still.
These thoughts carried him as on fairy wings to the railway station on the dark and cold morning of his flight from home. He had Rochford’s fifty pounds in his pocket, which seemed to his inexperience a fortune, a sum he would never get through, and which was his own, not taken from his father, or lessening the means at home, but his, to do what he liked with. With that in his pocket, and the delightful confidence that Emmy had not abandoned him—that, on the contrary, she had done what was ideally right, the very thing that if he had understood, if he had not been dull beyond example, he would have liked her to do—Walter rushed from his father’s house with not too much thought of the wretchedness he was leaving behind. He would not think of that, nor did he feel himself at all constrained to do so. Why should they be miserable? He was old enough to know how to take care of himself. A man did get helpless, almost effeminate, living so much at home; but, after all, he could not be made a fuss over as if he were a lost child. They would understand at least that he could take care of himself. And then he reflected, with a smile about the corners of his mouth, they would soon know why it was. If at the bottom of his heart there might be a thrill of alarm as to how they would take it, yet on the surface he felt sure that Emmy’s beauty and charm would overcome all objections; and then it was not as if he were a boy dependent on his father’s bounty. That ten thousand pounds made all the difference! He had thought at first that it was a mean thing to suppose that it made any difference or disturbed any of the bonds of duty: but now his mind was changed, and he perceived that a man has his own career to think of, that nature forbids him to be always in a state of subordination to his father—nature, and the consciousness that he has enough of his own to live upon without troubling his father. Yes, it made a difference, not only on the surface, but fundamentally, a difference which was real; and then the present matter was not one of a day. It concerned, he said to himself with tremendous gravity, the happiness of his life. How could a little anxiety on the part of his parents, a little quite groundless anxiety, be compared to that? Even to be brutal, he said to himself, as he must live longer than they could, his happiness was of the most importance, even if it should affect permanently their peace of mind; and it was only for a time, a few weeks, a few days. What comparison was there? Even father himself, who was a just man, would see and acknowledge this. And as for his mother—oh, mother would forgive! That was easily settled. She might be unhappy for a moment, but she would rather be unhappy than condemn him to life-long misery. That he was very sure of; if the choice were given she would accept that which was best for him. Thus Walter completely vindicated to himself what he was doing; and before he got to the railway, which was a long way off, and gave time for all these elaborations of thought, he was convinced that what he was doing was what, on the whole, if they knew all the circumstances, they would like him to do.
An ordeal which he had not calculated upon met him when he reached London. The address which he had seen on Emmy’s box was in an out-of-the-way and poor place, though Walter, knowing nothing of town, did not know how much out of the way it was. He left his bag at a hotel, and then he went on in a hansom through miles and miles of squalid streets, until at length he reached the goal of his hopes. The goal of his hopes! Was it so? As he stood at the poor little narrow door the ideas with which he had contemplated Crockford’s cottage came into his mind. He had persuaded himself into thinking that Crockford’s cottage was in its way as venerable as Penton; but this No. 37 Albert Terrace, what was there to be said for it? He could not restrain a little shudder, nor could he, when he was shown into the little parlor on the ground-floor, look round him without a gasp of dismay. The only consolation he could get out of it was that he could take Emmy away, that this was indeed his object here, to take her away, to separate her from everything that was squalid and miserable, to surround her with the graces and luxuries of a very different kind of life. But even the aspect of the house, and of the little parlor, which was full of dirty finery and hung round with photographs and colored pictures of a woman in various theatrical dresses, with whom he never associated the object of his affections, was nothing to the shock which Walter sustained when the door opened and the original of these portraits presented herself, a large faded woman, very carelessly dressed, and with the smile which was beaming around him from all the walls, the stereotyped smile of the stage, upon her face. To realize, as he did by and by, that this was her mother, to feel that she had a right to ask him questions, and consider him with a judicial air, as one who had in her greasy hands, which were so disagreeably soft, and felt as if they were pomaded, the thread of his life, gave poor young Wat such a shock as took the words from his lips. He stared at her without knowing what to say to her in a dismay which could find no expression. No, Emmy was not there. Her occupation required that she should live in another part of London. No, she did not know that she could give him her daughter’s address—but if he returned in the evening he might perhaps see her.
“You are Mr. Penton? Oh, yes, she has spoken of you. She feared that perhaps you would take this step. But, Mr. Penton, my daughter is a girl of the highest principle. She can see you only under her mother’s roof.”
“I wish nothing else!” cried poor Wat. “I—I am ready to do whatever she pleases. She knows I am ready—she knows—”
“Yes,” said the mother, nodding her terrible head, upon which was banded and braided and plaited more hair than ever grew, and smiling her terrible smile, and putting forth that odious hand to give a little confidential pressure to his. “I also know a great deal, Mr. Penton. I have heard about you—your chivalry and your magnificent position, and your many, many qualities. But, as you know, a mother’s duty is to guard her child. I know the snares of life better than she; I have trodden the thorny way before her, young gentleman. I have myself experienced much which—I would save her from,” added the woman, with the imposing gesture of a mère noble, turning away her head and extending her hand as if to hold the gay deceiver at a distance.
He was the wolf at the gate of the sheepfold, it appeared. Alas, poor Wat! he did not recognize himself from that point of view. Was not he more like the poor strayed lamb, straying in ignorantly into the midst of the slayers? He was glad to get away, to bring this alarming, unexpected interview to an end: all the more that it had begun to be apparent to him, in a way that made his heart sick, that in the face of this woman, with all its traces of paint and powder, and in the little gestures and tricks of tone and movement, there were resemblances, frightful resemblances, suggestive of his Emmy; that it was possible she might some day—oh, horrible thought!—be like her mother. But no, he cried to himself! the marks which her profession had left—the lines under her eyes, the yellow stains of the rouge, the unwholesome softness of her pomaded hands—from all those he had come to deliver Emmy; these artificial evils never need to be hers. She should smile upon people who loved her, not upon the horrible public staring at her and her beauty. As he turned away from the place he even said to himself that this poor woman was not to blame for all those blemishes of self-decoration. It had been her trade; she had been compelled to do it. Who had any right to blame her? These might be as honorable scars as those which a soldier gets in battle. Perhaps she had to do it to get bread for herself and her child—to bring up Emmy and make her what he knew her. If that should be so, were not the traces of what she had gone through, of what she had had to bear, to be respected, venerated even, like any other marks of painful toil? He made these representations hotly to himself, but he did not find that any ingenuity of thought delivered him from that honor and repulsion. To see the rouge and the powder on the face of a young woman still playing her part was one thing; to mark the traces of them on the vulgarized and faded countenance of one whose day was over was quite another. It was unjust, but it was natural. And this was Emmy’s mother, and Emmy was like her. Oh, that such a thing should be!