A Widow's Tale, and Other Stories

by Mrs. Oliphant

"I will go with you, Roger," said the old vicar, hastily. "Perhaps I have sinned against my brother. But no—no, I would but hamper you. Be you the messenger of mercy, and God bless you, my boy! Go! go! before it is too late."

Thus he was pushed out of the room, Charley Landale going after him. "I'll not leave him," the good-natured fellow said quickly in Mary's ear as he passed.

Featherstonhaugh made no attempt to follow. He waited almost ostentatiously to give the other full time to be out of the way, and then he went home.

But neither Roger nor his companion could find any trace of Murray. No one had seen him or could discover where he had gone. Charley Landale went home, disconsolate and feeling half-guilty, to watch and wait for his friend's return, and to give what account of it he could to his family, such as would least prejudice them against their visitor, though even the little he said threw the house into confusion and agitation indescribable. The girls cried over poor Mr Murray; the kind mother, half-horrified at the risk her daughters had run of perhaps falling in love with a nobody, and half-sorry for the nobody himself, whose "feelings" must have been terribly "hurt," sat and talked it over, neglecting the dressing-bell, and scarcely conscious even of dinner. Dinner! ought they to wait for their guest, who had never come back? Charley went out wandering about the grounds, looking for him; and even old Mr Landale himself, though indignant with "the fellow" at first, had come to be anxious too, and stared from the only window that commanded the road. But Murray never came. They ate their dinner at last when it was cold, and everything was wretched, listening to every sound outside, and starting at every footstep as if it was one of themselves who was in deadly peril and trouble. When night came, Charley, good fellow, would not go to bed, but sat and dozed, keeping a light burning in the window which was visible from the road. But, notwithstanding all their cares for him, and all the sympathy and kindness that dictated them, Murray never appeared; His things lay about his room as he had left them when he went out, light of heart, expecting to return for dinner; but he himself entered these hospitable doors no more.

The object of all these anxieties lurked somewhere among the woods in one of the shady nooks he had known when he was a boy, and which probably no one but himself and his old rustic companions knew, in the very madness of misery, while the daylight lasted. He hid himself like the first sinners—he could not bear the calm eye of the day, the cold unpitying light, that would show him and point him out to the scrutiny of men. He lay thus panting on the earth, hidden by the bushes, his mind and all his being in so wild a turmoil that, after a while, the very cause of it got obscure in his mind, and he knew only that he was a fugitive, heart-broken, ruined, and disgraced, without knowing why. He had no sooner reached a covert in the copse than there seemed to gleam before him another, better hiding-place, a cool nook by a little stream, where nobody could ever find him, where he could have a draught of water when he pleased, and the trickle of the brook to bear him company. As soon as it was dark he made his way out of the chase, and fled along the most unfrequented paths, under hedgerows and across fields, to reach this place. The country was very still, Sunday night, no one about, no one stirring anywhere. Here and there he made a detour to escape the lighted windows of a roadside cottage, whence some one might look out and see him: sometimes shrank aside into a ditch or under a tree when he saw some solitary passenger in the distance—but met no one, saw no one, and at last came to the shelter he had thought of. It was deep down among thick brushwood, heather, and whins, and young birch-trees, by the side of a little stream which flowed from the hills to the lake. The ground was damp, but he did not care. He dipped his burning brow in the stream, and drank long draughts of it. This gave him a little relief, a little physical ease; and the walk had been long, and he was unused to so much exertion. Finally, he fell asleep, with his head, like Jacob's, on a stone. The shock he had sustained seemed to take from Abel all consciousness of any claims upon him or duties to the outside world. He remembered nothing about the Landales, thought nothing of where he was to go when the morning should come, again betraying him. He thought indeed of no morning, only of safety from some immediate danger, though he could not tell what that was.

It was a very lonely place, but abounding with wild creatures—rabbits and squirrels, every kind of grasshopper and harmless insect, water-rats, moorfowl, and myriads of existences too small for names. He was woke by them as he lay, early—very early, before any human thing was stirring. He had slept feverishly, by intervals, through the night, and he woke up to a less confused sense of his misery in the morning. Gradually it broke upon him as the light came disclosing the landscape, creeping on and on. Oh, the horror of the remembering, the misery of shame, the intolerable sense of weakness, wrong, resentment, and impotence! Why was it so? Why was he born a cotter's son? Why was it a disgrace to him? How horrible! that he should be banished from the company of men, driven out into the wilds, aching every nerve of him, body and soul, miserable, abandoned, troubled, all because he was a cotter's son! Oh, wrong at which earth and heaven should cry out! Abel was not capable of realising that nothing but his own falsehood, his own cowardice, could have made his birth a shame to him—he was far beyond such an exercise of reason. He looked down from among his ferns and bushes to where the peaceful house of the Landales, where he should have been sleeping now in safety but for this, lay among the trees, and beyond it, on the banks of the shining water, saw the old Castle, whence he had been driven out, "to eat grass with the beasts of the field." That was what the old Eastern potentate had been sentenced to: was it to be his fate too? Somehow it gave the poor fugitive, half-distraught, a kind of forlorn comfort to remember that old story. His thoughts went back to the old Bible lessons he remembered long ago. What had the king done to have such a fate? and what had he done? But it gave him a little ease to realise that this had happened to some one else before.

And where was he to go? He could not show his face in this familiar place, which had again grown so dear. He would go back—back to his lonely rooms in Oxford, where he ought to be safe, he thought. But how to get there, how to stir in that garish, lavish day, which flooded every dark corner with light, so that the water-newts and earth insects had much ado to get themselves into some covert place, and how was he to walk unseen, a man? He was faint for want of food, aching with the unusual exposure, his clothes wet and torn, his hat he did not know where, his head throbbing and buzzing and all confused. But yet he might have come round out of the painful bewilderment he was in; his thoughts began to take a little shape, his mind began to occupy itself with a practical question—how to get home unseen, how to get to the road and the railway, and go back whence he had come. All might have come again to something like nature—nature sore and bleeding and wounded to the heart, but yet able to command herself, able to be restored.

But just as he had worked to this hopeful point, a jar and rustling in the branches woke every pulse in his frame again. Who was it? He peered through his covert with his bloodshot eyes, and at first saw nothing. Then gradually he distinguished something moving among the copsewood and tall bushes of heather. Who was it? What was it? A man, coming towards his hiding-place, pushing his way through the trees, leaping across the rivulets in the bog, here sinking in the marshy places, then reappearing, coming ever nearer and nearer. Abel stretched up across his little stream to watch this advancing figure, fascinated. Was it some one in search of him? Then he sat down, pulling the heather and brushwood over him to escape detection. The sounds came on, then stopped, quite close,—so close that Abel felt his very breathing would betray him. "Are you there, Ridley?" said a voice close to his ear. "So you have kept tryst. I scarcely expected you would. Get up, wherever you are, and come out." Then, after a pause, in an angry tone he added, "Is this a time for fooling? Come out, wherever you are. I can't wait here."

Abel was like one of the branches quivering over him, one moment blown this way, another that way, as different impulses swept across him. He had covered himself with the bushes, shrinking into the very earth for safety. Now, with a sudden change of idea, he sprang out from his lair, suddenly confronting Featherstonhaugh with his wild looks and haggard face. "My God!" cried the new-comer, springing backward in consternation and alarm. He did not recognise at first the extraordinary figure. Abel was very pale, his head was uncovered, his eyelids red as blood, his clothes all wet and soiled and torn. With a sudden fierceness he pursued after the other, keeping his wild eyes fixed upon him with a glare of passion and madness in them. No wonder Featherstonhaugh was afraid. "Is it you, Murray?" he said, faltering. "I—beg your pardon. I thought it was Ridley; he was to meet me here, this morning, about the boundary line. The two estates—march. We had—words yesterday, and I scarcely expected him. I am afraid you have not spent a—comfortable night?"

"Yes, I have," said Abel, hoarsely; "better than among men—better than with the false and cruel——"