Neighbours on the Green

by Mrs. Oliphant

In a moment I had him by the arm. ‘John,’ I said in my excitement; ‘John Ridgway! we have found you.’ For the moment, I believe, he thought it was Ellen who had touched him; his white face seemed to leap into light; then paled again. He took off his hat with his old formal, somewhat shy politeness—‘I thought it must be you, madame,’ he said. He said ‘madame’ instead of the old English madam, which he had always used: this little concession to the changed scene was all the difference. He made no mystery about himself, and showed no reluctance to come in with me, to talk as of old. He told me he had a situation in an office in Genoa, and that his health was bad. ‘After that fiasco in the Levant, I had not much heart for anything. I took the first thing that was offered,’ he said, with his old vague smile; ‘for a man must live—till he dies.’ ‘There must be no question of dying—at your age,’ I cried. This time his smile almost came the length of a momentary laugh. He shook his head, but he did not continue the subject He was very silent for some time after. Indeed, he said nothing, except in reply to my questions, till Chatty left, the room and we were alone. Then all at once, in the middle of something I was saying—‘Is she—married again?’ he said.

‘Married—again!’

‘It is a foolish question. She was not married to me; but it felt much the same: we had been as one for so long. There must have been some—strong inducement—to make her cast me off so at the end.’

This he said in a musing tone, as if the fact were so certain, and had been turned over in his mind so often that all excitement was gone from it. But after it was said, a gleam of anxiety came into his half-veiled eyes. He raised his heavy, tired eyelids and looked at me. Though he seemed to know all about it, and to be resigned to it when he began to speak, yet it seemed to flash across him, before he ended, that there was an uncertainty—an answer to come from me which would settle it, after all. Then he leaned forward a little, in this sudden sense of suspense, and put his hand to his ear as if he had been deaf, and said ‘What?’ in an altered tone.

‘There is some terrible mistake,’ I said. ‘I have felt there was a mistake all along. She has lost her hold on life altogether because she believes you to be changed.’

‘Changed!’ His voice was quite sharp and keen, and had lost its languid tone. ‘In what way—in what way? how could I be changed?’

‘In the only way that could matter between her and you. She thought, before you left the Levant, that you had got to care for some one else—that you had ceased to care for her. Your letter,’ I said, ‘your letter!’—half frightened by the way in which he rose, and his threatening, angry aspect—‘would bear that interpretation.’

‘My letter!’ He stood before me for a moment with a sort of feverish, fierce energy; then he began to laugh, low and bitterly, and walk about as if unable to keep still. ‘My letter!’ The room was scarcely lighted—one lamp upon the table, and no more; and the half-darkness, as he paced about, made his appearance more threatening still. Then he suddenly came and stood before me as if it had been I that had wronged him. ‘I am a likely man to be a gay Lothario,’ he cried, with that laugh of mingled mockery and despair which was far more tragical than weeping. It was the only expression that such an extreme of feeling could find. He might have cried out to heaven and earth, and groaned and wept; but it would not have expressed to me the wild confusion, the overturn of everything, the despair of being so misunderstood, the miserable sum of suffering endured and life wasted for nothing, like this laugh. Then he dropped again into the chair opposite me, as if with the consciousness that even this excitement was vain.

‘What can I say? What can I do? Has she never known me all along?—Ellen!’ He had not named her till now. Was it a renewal of life in his heart that made him capable of uttering her name?

‘Do not blame her,’ I cried. ‘She had made up her mind that nothing could ever come of it, and that you ought to be set free. She thought of nothing else but this; that for her all change was hopeless—that she was bound for life; and that you should be free. It became a fixed idea with her; and when your letter came, which was capable of being misread——’