At His Gates: A Novel. Vol. 1 (of 3)

by Mrs. Oliphant

'I canna do it, I canna do it—don't ask me,' he said, for John was a north-country-man, and when his heart was moved fell back upon his old idiom.

'Maybe the lady would eat a bit herself, poor soul,' the cook said in insinuating tones. 'I've known folks eat in a strange house, for the strangeness of it like, when they couldn't swallow a morsel in their own.'

'Don't ask me!' said John, and he seized a stray teapot and began to polish it in the trouble of his heart. There was silence in the kitchen for ten minutes at least, for the cook was a mild woman till driven to extremities; but to see fish growing into wool and potatoes to lead was more than any one could be expected to bear.

'Do you see that?' she said in despair, carrying the dish up to him, and thrusting it under his eyes. John threw down his teapot and fled. He went and sat on the stairs to be out of reach of her remonstrances. But the spectre of that fish went with him, and would not leave his sight; the half-hour chimed, the three-quarters—

'I canna stand this no longer!' John said in desperation, and rushing up to the dining-room, sounded the dinner-bell.

Its clang disturbed the little party in the next room who were so differently occupied. Helen was seated by the table with a pile of papers before her; her hands trembled as she turned from one to another, but her attention did not swerve. She was following through them every scrap that bore upon that one subject. Dr Maurice had procured them all for her. He had felt that one time or other she must know all, and that then her information must be complete. He himself was walking about the room with his hands in his pocket, now stopping to point out or explain something, now taking up a book, unsettled and unhappy, as a man generally looks when he has to wait, and has nothing to do. He had sought out a book for Norah, to the attractions of which the poor child had gradually yielded. At first she had stood close by her mother. But the contents of those papers were not for Norah's eye, and Helen herself had sent her away. She had put herself in the window, her natural place; the ruddy evening light streamed in upon her, and found out between the black of her dress and that of her hat, a gleam of brown hair, to which it gave double brightness by the contrast; and gradually she fell into her old attitude, her old absorption. Dr Maurice walked about the room, and pondered a hundred things. He would have given half he possessed for that fatherless child who sat reading in the light, and forgetting her childish share of sorrow. The mother in her mature beauty was little to him—but the child—a child like that! And she was not his. She was Robert Drummond's, who lay drowned at the bottom of the river, and whose very name was drowned too in those bitter waters of calumny and shame. Strange Providence that metes so unequally to one and to another. The man did not think that he too might have had a wife and children had he so chosen; but his heart hankered for this that was his neighbour's, and which no magic, not even any subtle spell of love or protecting tenderness, could ever make his own.

And Helen, almost unconscious of the presence of either, read through those papers which had been preserved for her. She read Golden's letter, and the comment upon it. She read the letter which Dr Maurice had written, contradicting those cruel assertions. She read the further comments upon that. How natural it was; how praiseworthy was the vehemence of friends in defence of the dead—and how entirely without proof! The newspaper pointed out with a cold distinctness, which looked like hatred to Helen, that the fact of the disappearance of the books told fatally against 'the unhappy man.' Why did he destroy those evidences which would no doubt have cleared him had he acted fairly and honestly? Day by day she traced the course of this controversy which had been going on while she had shut herself up in the darkness. It gleamed across her as she turned from one to another that this was why her energy had been preserved and her strength sustained. She had not broken down like other women, for this cause. God had kept her up for this. The discussion had gone on down to that very morning, when a little editorial note, appended to a short letter—one of the many which had come from all sorts of people in defence of the painter—had announced that such a controversy could no longer be carried on 'in these pages.' 'No doubt the friends of Mr Drummond will take further steps to prove the innocence of which they are so fully convinced,' it said, 'and it must be evident to all parties that the columns of a newspaper is not the place for a prolonged discussion on a personal subject.' Helen scarcely spoke while she read all these. She did not hear the dinner-bell. The noise of the door when Dr Maurice rushed to it with threatening word and look, to John's confusion, scarcely moved her. 'Be quiet, dear,' she said unconsciously, when the doctor's voice in the hall, where he had fallen upon his servant, came faintly into her abstraction. 'You rascal! how dare you take such a liberty when you knew who was with me?' was what Dr Maurice was saying, with rage in his voice. But to Helen it seemed as if little Norah, forgetting the cloud of misery about her, had begun to talk more lightly than she ought. 'Oh, my child, be quiet,' she repeated; 'be quiet!' all her soul was absorbed in this. She had no room for any other thought.

Dr Maurice came back with a flush of anger on his face. 'These people would think it necessary to consider their miserable dishes if the last judgment were coming on,' he said. He was a kind man, and very sorry for his friend's widow. He would have given up much to help her; but perhaps he too was hungry, and the thought of the spoilt dishes increased his vehemence. She looked at him, putting back her veil with a blank look of absolute incomprehension. She had heard nothing, knew nothing. Comfort, and dinners, and servants, and all the paraphernalia of ordinary life, were a hundred miles away from her thoughts.

'I have read them all,' she said in a tone so low that he had to stoop to hear her. 'Oh, that I should have lost so much time in selfish grieving! I thought nothing more could happen after. Dr Maurice, do you know what I ought to do?'

'You!' he said. There was something piteous in her look of appeal. The pale face and the gleaming eyes, the helplessness and the energy, all struck him at a glance—a combination which he did not understand.