The Railway Man and His Children

by Mrs. Oliphant

Rowland had scarcely gone through such a time of self-contention in all his life as during the hour or two that elapsed between Eddy’s departure and the time of the train. Eddy went away with a sort of faux air of satisfaction, which imposed upon the unaccustomed, inexperienced detective. He at least seemed to be satisfied, whoever was distressed. He had his hat over his brows, but he swung his stick lightly in his hand, and began to hum an opera air as he went down the stairs. She must have liberated him from some scrape, settled his affairs for him somehow—the young reprobate, who was always in trouble! Rowland would not have refused to help the boy himself: he would have treated Eddy very gently had he appealed to him; but that his wife should put herself so much out of the way for Eddy, was intolerable to him. He sat there within his half-open door, angry, miserable, and heard her give her orders about her departure. She was going by the night train, and wanted some tea, and her bill and a cab got for her in time. “It is only six now,” he heard her say with a sigh, as the waiter stood at the open door. She was longing to get home, was she? glad to be done with it, though she had come all this way to do it, whatever it was. He went downstairs then and got some dinner for himself, and arranged his own departure at the same hour. It was the strangest journey. She in one carriage, altogether unconscious of his vicinity, he in another, so deeply conscious of her’s. He sprang out of his compartment at every station, to steal past the window of the other, to catch a passing glimpse of her. There was another lady in the corner nearest the door, but in the depths of the carriage he could see her profile, pale against the dark cushions, her eyes sometimes shut, and weariness and lassitude in every line of her figure and attitude as she lay back in her corner. He did not think she was asleep. She would be thinking over what she had done for Eddy; thinking not of her husband and his trouble, but of that other—the other man’s boy. And bitter and sore were Rowland’s thoughts. The fury with which he had started was not so heavy as this; for then he had thought that she was fully occupied with his troubles, though so unwise, so little judicious as to confide them to the last man in the world whose sympathy he could have desired. But now to think that it was not his trouble at all that had occupied his wife, nothing about him, though, heaven knew, he had enough to bear—but the well-deserved discomfort of another, the needs of the trifling boy, ill-behaved and untrustworthy, for whom his own father had little to say. Less and less did James Rowland feel himself able to make himself known to his wife, to upbraid or reproach her. Why should he? he had no reason. She was spotless, if ever woman was. She had not even offended against him in the way he had feared. She had left home only to do a good action; to be kind. He was well aware of this; and to assail her, to take her to task, to accuse her even of carelessness towards him, was more than he could permit himself to do: it was impossible. But still it seemed to Rowland, as he travelled home, with unspeakable, suppressed anger and pain, that this was the most unsupportable of all, and that Eddy’s shuffling, inconsiderable figure would stand between them now for ever and ever. Not that he was jealous of Eddy: it was disappointment, disenchantment, the failure of his trust in her. To leave the boy, in whom she had professed so much interest, and whose well-being, greatly as he had sinned, involved his father’s, without lifting a hand to help him, though she led her husband to believe that she would do something, work a miracle, bring him back; and go off to the end of the earth, secretly, without telling anybody, to the succour of Eddy! It was intolerable, though there might not be a word to say.

Then came the arrival, jaded and chilled, at Glasgow, in the cold gray of the morning, scarcely light. He kept about and watched what she would do, nothing doubting that her next step would be to the other railway which would take her to the banks of the loch, in time for the early boat to Rosmore. But Evelyn did not carry out this part of the programme, to his great surprise. She lingered at the station, performing such a toilet as was possible; waiting, it appeared, until the morning was a little more advanced. It was more and more difficult to keep out of her sight, yet keep her in sight in this familiar place where everybody knew him. He pulled up his greatcoat to his ears, his travelling cap down upon his forehead. He could not even copy her and add to his comfort by a wash, lest in that moment she should disappear. He could not even get a cup of coffee, and his outer man stood more in need of restoratives and support than hers, and could ill bear the want of them. But at length the morning became sufficiently advanced, as it seemed, for her purpose, and she got into a cab with her small bag, which was all her baggage. He could not tell what orders she gave to the driver, but he ordered the man, into whose cab he jumped without more delay than he could help, to follow that in which Evelyn was. At this moment all the excitement of those bewildering twenty-four hours culminated. He felt as though he could scarcely breathe: he could not bear his travelling-cap on his head, though it was light enough, or his coat across his chest, though it was a cold morning to ordinary persons, people who felt cold and heat, and had no fiery furnace within them. He kept his uncovered head out of the window of his cab, watching the slow progress of the one before him. How slow it was, creeping along the dark streets as if she had told the man to go slowly to postpone some crisis, some climax of excitement to which she was bound! Rowland’s heart thumped like a steam-engine against his labouring breast. Where was she going? Who could there be in Glasgow to whom it was of the slightest consequence what happened to Eddy Saumarez, who would even know of his existence? She must be deep in the boy’s secrets indeed, he said to himself, with scornful wrath, to know in all this strange town who could have anything to do with him. He seemed to recognise the turns she was taking with a bewildered perception of the unsuspected, of something that might be coming quite different to anything he had thought. Where was she going? The dingy streets are like each other everywhere, few features of difference to distinguish them, and yet he seemed to be going over ground he knew. That shop at the corner he had surely seen before—of course he must have seen it before! Where could a stranger go in Glasgow that he had not been before, he who was to the manner born, who had spent his childhood in Glasgow, and gone to his daily work by these very ways? Yes, of course, he knew it all very well, every turn, not only from the old times of his youth, but—Where was she going? His heart beat louder than ever, the veins on his temples set up independent pulses, something fluttered in his bosom like a bird, making him sick with wonder and expectancy. Where was she going? What, what could she mean? What did she want here?

The Sauchiehall Road—full of the greyness of the November morning: children playing on the pavement, women going about with their baskets to get their provisions, a lumbering costermonger’s cart trundling along noisily over the stones, with a man crying “caller codfish prime; caller haddies!” all incised into this man’s beating brain as if done with a knife. He stopped his cab hurriedly, jumped out, dismissed it, and walked slowly along, with his eyes upon the other lumbering vehicle in front. The buzzing in his brain was so wild that everything was confused, both sound and sights, and he stumbled over the children on the pavement as he went along, not seeing where he went. At last it stopped, and his heart stopped too with one sudden great thump like a sledge-hammer. A flash of sudden light seemed to come from something, he knew not what, whether in his eyes or outside of them, showing like a gleam from a lantern the well-known house, the big elderberry bush, with its dusty, black clusters of fruit. And she came out of her cab and went quickly up to the door.

Rowland stood quite still in the midst of the passengers on the pavement, the children knocking against him as they hopped about on one foot, propelling the round piece of marble, with which they were playing, from one chalked compartment to another. It hit him on the shin, but did not startle him from his amazement, from his pause of wonder, and the blank of incapacity to understand. What was she doing here of all places in the world? What did she want there? What had that house to do with Eddy Saumarez? Eddy Saumarez—Eddy! It got into a sort of rhyme in his brain. What had that house to do with it? What did she want there? What—what was the meaning of it all?

CHAPTER XLIV.

When Archie left his father’s house on the morning after the ball, unrefreshed by sleep, half mad with excitement, bewildered by that last interview with Mrs. Rowland, and the sensation of something supernatural which had come over him, in the half-lighted hall, with the chill of the desolate new day coming in, he was perhaps in as wretched plight as ever a boy of twenty ever found himself in: and that is saying much, for, but for the inalienable power of recovery in youth, how sharp would be the pang of many a scene, in which the boy, guilty or not guilty, has started up against parental wrath or reproof, and shaken the dust from off his feet and gone forth, perhaps to dismay and ruin, perhaps to new life and work. The sensation of turning the back upon home, in such circumstances, is not very rare in human consciousness, and must have left in many memories a poignant recollection, terrible, yet perhaps not altogether painful to realise, in the long series of good or evil fortune which has followed it. Archie, for the first hour or two, as he sped up the side of the loch, like an arrow from a bow, walking five miles an hour in his excitement, scarcely feeling the fatigue of his condition, or any physical circumstances whatever, did not even know where he was going, or what he would do. The home of his childhood, the kind nurse and ruler of his docile youth, were not far off, it is true, and in that he was better off than most of the young prodigals among whom this guiltless boy found himself suddenly classed. But his aunt had been prepossessed against him, she had all but forbidden him to return the last time he left her door, and his heart was sore with injured pride and innocence, misconstrued in that quarter as well as every other. He had gone wildly out in the early grey of the morning, and pursued the straight road before him rather because it was the straight road than from any other circumstance, unable to form any decision, or for a long time even to think of any conclusion to this forlorn walk out into the world. It was, of course, hours too early for the early boat, and had it not been so, Archie would not have exposed himself to question or remark as to his departure, from the people who knew him. The cottagers on the roadside who had noted with some surprise, on the previous night, the carriage from Maryport, far on the other side of the loch, which had driven rapidly by, coming and going, carrying the messenger from the bank, might have found themselves—had they divined who the pedestrian was who passed by their doors in the early morning, treading the same long way—spectators of one of those human dramas which take place in our midst every day, though we are seldom the wiser. At the smithy at Lochhead, one man did indeed ask the other, “Was that no young Rowland from Rosmore?” as Archie went by. But the powerful reply of the other, “Man, it’s impossible!” quenched that one suspicion. He had tied his old comforter, of Aunt Jane’s knitting, round his throat, as much for a disguise as for the warmth. He had put on his old clothes, with which he had first come to Rosmore, garments of which he only now knew the unloveliness—and was as unlike in appearance as in feeling to the millionaire’s only son, the young master of everything in his father’s luxurious house. Archie had never indeed felt his elevation very real: he scarcely ventured to accept and act upon it as if he were himself a person of importance; he, to his own consciousness, always Archie Rowland of the Westpark Football Club, and the Philosophers’ Debating Society, and of Sauchiehall Road. It was true that already Sauchiehall Road had sustained the shock of disenchantment, and he had a shamed and subdued feeling of having somehow gone beyond the circle to which he had once been so pleased to belong, and being no longer at home in it. But still less was he really at home on the moors with his unaccustomed gun, or in the drawing-room with all its unfamiliar necessities. He was now more a nobody than ever, belonging neither to one life nor the other, cast out of both; and he walked along dreamily as the morning broadened into the day, and all the world awoke, and the family fires were lighted, and the family tables spread. He walked on, and on getting beyond the range in which young Mr. Rowland of Rosmore was known, faint, tired, without food or rest, an outcast who belonged to nobody, till his progress began to be almost mechanical, his limbs moving like those of an automaton, all volition gone, nothing possible but to put one foot beyond the other in sheer monotony of movement, like the wheels of a machine. He did not pause, because he felt that if the machine were stopped, being human, it might not be able to go on again. Wheels that are made of wood and iron have this great advantage over flesh and blood.

At last he got to the railway, and stumbled into a carriage, and felt the comparative well-being of rest, when he was able to begin to think a little what he ought to do. And then it came back to Archie that he had bound himself to a certain course of action. He had flung the intimation at his father in the height of their passionate encounter, that there should be no difficulty in finding him, that he would go to the old home and wait there to be arrested, to stand his trial. It brought the most curious quickening of feeling to remember that he had said that. To be arrested, to be brought to trial!—he seemed to see the scene, himself standing at the bar, his father giving evidence in the box, the forged cheque handed round, and all the wise heads bent over it, all finding signs to prove that he had done it—he that scorned it, that cared nothing for money, that would have flung it all into the sea rather than take a pin unjustly from any man. The fire blazed up in his dim eyes, so dim with want of rest and excess of emotion. He accused of such a crime! He laughed within himself at the futility of it, the foolishness! Had it been anything else of which they had accused him—of murdering somebody, for instance. Archie knew that he had a high temper (he who had always been so docile and so gentle), and he thought it possible that, if much irritated and provoked, he might have lifted his hand and given a sudden blow. There would have been in that a possibility, a chance, that he might have done it: but to forge a man’s name, for the sake of money—money! The scorn with which he said the word over to himself in the noise of the railway, nobody hearing, was tremendous. He laughed aloud at the thought. But it decided him on one point, that there must be no question as to where he went. It must be to his aunt’s house; the policeman could come to arrest him there, and therefore there he must go. It was true that it might be bringing shame upon her, innocent; but at all events he must go there first, tell her the whole, and if she desired that he should find another address, at least acquaint her with it, that she might give it to the policemen when they came. This did him good, as it settled the question, and brought him out of all uncertainty. It fortified him even against Aunt Jane’s possibly grim reception of him. He would go there, not for anything he wanted from her, but to answer the claim of honour, which was the first necessity of all.

Mrs. Brown saw him from her window when he came, sick and weary, up the little path under the shadow of the elderberry tree, and ran and opened the door to him with a cry of, “Archie! eh, my man, but you’re welcome to me,” which thawed his heart a little. He threw himself down wearily in the familiar parlour, on one of the chairs, where he was always forbidden to sit lest he should discompose the antimacassar extended on its back. He remembered this as he sat down with a dreary laugh.

“This is one of the chairs I was never to sit upon,” he said.

“Oh, my bonny man,” cried Mrs. Brown, “sit where ye please; dight your feet upon the sofa, if you please; do anything you like! but eh, whatever you do, dinna leave me to one side and cast me off as if I did not belong to you: for that is what I canna bear.”