“Yes,” she said, “I am going on a journey. You will perhaps guess where—or if not where, for I am not just clear on that point myself, you will at least know with what end. I have nothing to keep me back now”—a little moisture came into Helen’s eyes, but that did not affect her steady, small voice—“and only him in the world that needs me. I am going to Alick, Lily. You will tell me it’s rash, as every-body does, and maybe it is rash. If he has wearied at the last and given up all thoughts of me, I will never blame him; but that I cannot think, and it is borne in on my mind that he has more need of me than ever. So I am just taking my foot in my hand and going to him,” she said, looking at Lily, with a smile.
“Helen! oh, you will not do that! Go to him, to you know not where, to circumstances you are quite, quite ignorant of? Oh, Helen, you will not do that!”
“Indeed, and that will I,” said Helen, with the same calm and steady smile. “I am feared for nothing, but maybe that he might hear the news and start to come to me before I could get to him.”
“That is enough!” cried Lily. “Oh, wait till he comes; send for him! Rather any thing than go all that weary way across the sea alone.”
“I am feared for nothing,” Helen said, still smiling, “and who would meddle with me? I am not so very bonnie, and I am not so very young. I am just as safe, or safer, than half the women in the world that have to do things the other half do not understand.”
“Like myself, you think,” Lily said; and it was on her lips to add: “If you succeed no better than me!” But the bondage of life was upon her, and of the pride and the decorum of life. Ronald had taken no part in this conversation, but he was there all the time, standing against the window, looking out. He was very impatient that his conversation with his wife, so important in every way, should be interrupted. His own affairs were so full in his mind, as was natural, that any enforced pause in the discussion of them appeared to him as if the course of the world had been stopped. And this country girl’s insignificant little story, perfectly wild and foolish as it was, that it should take precedence of his own at so great a crisis! He turned round at last and said in a voice thrilling with impatience: “I hope, as Lily does, that you will do nothing rash, Miss Blythe. We have a great deal to do ourselves with our own arrangements.”
“And I am keeping Lily from you? You will excuse me,” cried Helen, wounded, “but I am going to do something very rash, as you say, and I may never come back; and I cannot leave a friend like Lily, and one my father was proud of, and thought upon on his death-bed, and one that knows where I am going and why, without a word. There is perhaps nobody but Lily in the world that knows what I mean, and what I am doing, and my reasons for it,” Helen said. She took her friend’s hands once more into her own. “But I will not keep you from him, Lily, when no doubt you have so much to say.”
“You shall not go,” said Lily, with something of her old petulance, “till you have seen what I have to show you, and till you have told me every thing there is to tell. Oil, my baby, my little bairn, my little flower! I could be angry that you have put him out of my head for a moment. Come, come, and see him now.”
Ronald paced up and down the room when he was left alone; his impatience was not, perhaps, without some excuse. He was very anxious to come to some ground of agreement with Lily, some basis upon which their life could be built. He had hoped much from the great coup of the morning, from the bringing back of the child, which he had intended to do himself, taking advantage of the first thrill of emotion, and identifying himself, its father, with the infant restored to her arms; but the women, with their folly, had spoiled that moment for him, and lost him the best of the opportunity, and now there was another woman thrusting her foolish story into the midst of that crisis in his life. Ronald was out of heart and out of temper. He began to see, as he had never done before, the difficulties that seemed to close up his path. He had feared, and yet not feared, the tempest of reproaches which no doubt Lily would pour upon him. He did not know her any better than this, but expected what the conventional woman would do in a book, or a malicious story, from his wife; and he had expected that there would be a great quarrel, a heaping up of every grievance, and then tears, and then reconciliation, as in every story of the kind that had ever been told. But even if she could resist the sight of him and of his pleading, Ronald felt a certainty that Lily could not resist the return of her child; for this she would forgive every thing. This link that held them together was one that never could be broken. He had calculated every thing with the greatest care, but he had not thought it necessary to go beyond that. When she had her child in her arms, Lily, he felt sure, would return to his, and no cloud should ever come between them more.
But now this delusion was over. She had not showered reproaches upon him. She had not done any thing he expected her to do. The dreadful, the astounding revelation that had been made to him was that this was not Lily any longer. It was another woman, older, graver, shaped by life and experience, without faith, with a mind too clear, with eyes too penetrating. Would she ever turn to him otherwise than with that look, which seemed to espy a new pretence, a new deception, in every thing he said? Ronald still loved his wife; he would have given a great deal, almost, perhaps, the half of Sir Robert’s fortune, to have his Lily back again as she had been; but he began now for the first time to feel that it would be necessary to give up that vision, to arrange his life on another footing. If she would but consent at least to fulfil the decorums of life, to remain under his roof, to be the mistress of his house, not to flaunt in the face of the world the division between these two who had made a love-marriage, who had not been able to keep apart when every thing was against their union, and now were rent asunder when every thing was in its favor! What ridicule would be poured upon him! What talk and discussion there would be! His mind flashed forward to a vision of himself alone in Sir Robert’s great house in George Square, and Lily probably here at Dalrugas with her child. Sir Robert’s house was his, and Sir Robert’s fortune was his. Except what he chose to give her, out of this much desired fortune—for which, indeed, it was he who had planned and suffered, not she—she had no right to any thing. There was so much natural justice in Ronald Lumsden’s mind that he did not like this, though, as it was the law, and he a lawyer, it cost him less than it might have done another man; but he meant to make the strongest and most effective use of it all the same. He meant to show her that she was entirely dependent upon him—she and her child; that she had nothing and no rights except what he chose to allow her: and that it was her interest and that of her child (whom, besides, he could take from her were he so minded) to keep on affectionate terms with him.