“I can forgive him easier,” said Lily, with the tears now coming freely, “than if it had been true. Oh, Beenie! if it had been true!”
“Whisht, whisht, my darling leddy! but no, my dear, just greet your fill. Eh, mem, how little a man kens! They’re so grand with their wisdom, and never to think that a woman would send a scart of a pen whatever to let us ken the dear lamb was well. I’ve often heard the ministers say that the deevil’s no half as clever as he seems, and now I believe it this day. But you’ll just go to your bed and I’ll give you the draught, as he said, for this has been an awfu’ day.”
“Yes, I’ll go, to be strong for to-morrow,” said Lily, and then she turned back and caught Beenie again, throwing her arms round her. “But first,” she cried, “we’ll give God thanks on our bended knees that my baby is safe. Oh, if it had been true!”
They both felt the baby’s life to be more certain and more assured because his father had sworn he was dead, and they knew that was not true.
Next morning they were both up betimes and had changed their lodging early, going not to Portobello nor to the Bridge of Allan, but to a village on the seaside, very obscure and little thought of, where, late as the season was, they could still spend a week or two without being remarked; and when she had settled her mistress there, Beenie went back to Edinburgh to search again and again through every corner that could be thought of, where Marg’ret might be heard of, but in vain.
They went again next day, and every day, together, and I think traversed Edinburgh almost street by street on a quest so hopeless that both had given it up in their heart before either breathed a word of her despair. Then they did what seemed even to Lily (and still more to Beenie) a most terrible and unparalleled thing to do, and to which she had great difficulty in bringing her mind. This was to apply to the police on the subject, what we should call putting it into the hands of the detectives. Perhaps even now there are innocent persons to whom the idea of “sending the police after” an innocent wanderer still seems a dreadful thing to do. And these were days in which the idea of the detective was little developed and still less understood. They are not always still the most successful of functionaries, but they have at least become heroes of the popular imagination, and a certain class of fiction is full of the wonderful deeds they have succeeded in doing, when all things were arranged to their hand. I do not know that there was a single individual of the order at that time in Edinburgh under the present title and conditions, but the thing must have existed more or less always; and when, with many hesitations and much trouble of mind, Lily made her appeal to the ingenuity of the police service to find the missing woman, it was with a little flutter of hope that she saw Margaret Bland’s name and description taken down. Beenie would not even be present when this was done. She lifted up her testimony, declaring that nothing would induce her to send the police after a decent honest woman that had never done any body any harm. “Oh, mem, you may say what you like,” Beenie cried. “She has had no ill intention. Send the pollisman after Anither if you will. It wasna her contrivancy, it wasna her contrivancy! I would sooner die myself than harry a woman to her ruin and take away her good name!” This had been the peroration with which Beenie had broken away, slamming the door in the face of the official who came to take Miss Ramsay’s orders. Lily was very unhappy and deeply depressed. She had no one to stand by her. “It is for no harm. You will understand she is to come to no harm. Her address only—that is all I want,” she cried. “We’ll put it,” said the man, writing down his notes in his little book, “that it will be something to her advantage. That or a creeminal chairge is the only way of dealing with yon kind of folk.”
“Yes, yes—let it be something to her advantage,” Lily cried. “And it will,” she said, “it will! it will be more to her advantage than any thing she has ever known. You will take care that she is not frightened, not harmed in any way, not in any way!”
“How should it harm an innocent person, if this person is an innocent person?” the functionary said, and left Lily trembling for what she had done, and unable to bear the eye of Beenie, who would scarcely for a whole day after forgive her mistress. They themselves lived in terror of being found, perhaps, in their turn, hunted down by the pollis, Beenie cried—“for if you can do it for her, mem, what for no him that has nae scruples for you?” Lily in her heart trembled too at this thought. It seemed to her that if such means were set in action against herself she would die of misery and shame.
Ten days later she returned to Dalrugas, a little stronger, for her youth and vigor, and the distraction of her thoughts, even though so painfully, from all preoccupation with herself, had given her elastic vitality its chance of recovery: but a changed and saddened woman, never again to be the Lily of the past. Her husband had not sought her, at least had not found her, nor had she wished him to do so; but yet that he should not have penetrated so very easy a mystery seemed to prove to her that he had not wished to do so, and, despite of all that had come and gone, that was a very different matter. Lily’s heart was as heavy as a woman’s heart could be as she went home. The whole secret of her existence, the mystery in which she had been wrapped, which she had felt to be so guilty a secret, and a mystery so oppressive, seemed now to be about to melt away, leaving her for her life long a false and empty husk of being, an appearance and no reality. All this tremendous wave of existence seemed to have passed over her head and to be gone, leaving her, as she was, Lily Ramsay, her uncle’s companion, the daughter of the desolate house, and no more, neither wife nor mother, nothing but a false pretence, a pitiful ghost, the fictitious image of something that she was not, and never again could be.