“You must not think I am blaming you. I see all the difficulty, but now—now you will have them with you, will you not, and take them back into your life?”
He looked at her with eyes full of admiration and content. “Is that the first thing you want me to do,” he said, “the first thing you have at heart?”
“Yes,” she said simply, “and the most natural thing. Your children. What could they be but my first interest? They are old enough—that is one good thing—to come to India without pause.”
He rose from her side again and returned to his habitual action of walking about the room. “I knew,” he said, “from the first moment, that I was a lucky man, indeed, to meet with you. I have always been a lucky man; but never so much as when you made up your mind to have me, little as I deserve a woman like you. I’ve that good in me that I know it when I see it: a good woman from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. There’s nothing in the world so good as that. Now, I’ll tell you something, and I hope it will please you, for it’s chiefly meant to please you. I am very well off. I can settle something very comfortable on you, and I can provide for the young ones. If it pleases you, my dear, we’ll turn our backs on this blazing India altogether, and go home.”
“Go home!” she said, with startled eyes.
“You’d like it? A country place in England or Scotland—better still, a house that would be your own—that you could settle in your own way, with all the things that please ladies now-a-days. I’ll bring you home a cartload of curiosities that will set you up in that way. And then you could have the children, and put them through their facings. Eh, my lady dear? You’d like that? Well, I can afford it,” he said with subdued exultation, with his hands in those pockets which metaphorically contained all that heart of man could desire. His eyes glowed with pleasure, with triumph, with a consciousness that he was making her happy. Yes! this was what every English lady banished in India must desire. A house in her own country, with every kind of greenness round, and every comfort within—with beautiful Indian stuffs and carpets, and curious things—and the children to pet and guide as she pleased. He was again the spectator, so to speak, of a picture of life, which rose before him, more beautiful than that of old—himself, indeed, the least lovely part of it, yet not so much amiss for an old fellow who had made all the money, and who could give her everything that could please her, everything her heart could wish for. His eyes, though they were not in themselves remarkable, grew liquid and lustrous in the pleasure of that thought.
As for Evelyn, she sat startled holding her hands clasped in her lap, with many things beyond the satisfaction he imagined in her eyes. Home in England meant something to her which could never be again. She said somewhat faintly—“In Scotland, if you would please me most of all.” At which words, for Rowland was a Scotsman, he came to her in a glow of pleasure and took both her hands and ventured, for the first time, to touch her forehead with his lips. The touch gave this elderly pair a little shock, a surprise, which startled her still more.
CHAPTER III.
Those two people had both a good deal to think about when they parted.
As for Evelyn the agitation of telling her own story and the extraordinary commotion which had been produced in her mind by the suggestion of going home, affected her like an illness. As she escaped from the inroad of the Stanhope children, all much surprised and indignant at being kept out, a thing which had never happened in their experience before, and made her way almost like a fugitive to the seclusion of her own room, she felt all the languor and exhaustion of a patient who had gone through a severe bodily crisis. It was over and she felt no pain—on the contrary that sensation of relief which is one of the most beatific in nature, had stolen through her relaxed limbs and faintly throbbing head. The ordeal was over, and it had been less terrible than she had feared. The man whom she had consented to marry, and with whose life her own would henceforward be identified, had not disappointed her, as it was possible he might have done. He was not a perfect man. He had been careless, very careless of those children who ought (she thought) to have been his first care. But otherwise he was true. There was no fictitious show about him, no pretension. He had been, she felt sure, as good a husband to that poor young creature who was dead as any man could be. Poor Mary! her story was so simple, so pretty and full of tenderness as he told it. Evelyn had liked him better for every word. Had she lived!—ah, had she lived! That would have been a different matter altogether. In that case James Rowland would probably have become foreman at the foundry, and remained a highly respectable working man all his life, bringing up his children in the natural way to follow his own footsteps. Would it have been perhaps better so? It would have been more natural, far more free of complications, without any of the difficulties which she could not help foreseeing. These difficulties would be neither few nor small. Two children brought up by their aunt Jane, in an atmosphere strongly shadowed by the foundry, to be suddenly transplanted to a large country house full of luxury and leisure, and the habits of an altogether different life—and not children either but grown up, eighteen and twenty! She drew a long breath, and put her hands together with an involuntary drawing together of her forces. Here was a thing to look forward to! But as for Rowland himself he had come through that ordeal, which was in one sense a trial of his real mettle, carried on before the most clear-sighted tribunal, before a judge whose look went through and through him, though not a word was said to put him on his guard, most satisfactorily, a sound man and true, with his heart in the right place and no falseness about him. It was true that in one respect he was very wrong. He had neglected the children: on this subject there could be no doubt. He had no right to forget that they were growing up, that their homely aunt, who was as good to them as if they were her own, was not all they wanted, though it might have been sufficient when they were little children. Miss Ferrars did not excuse him for this, but she forgave him, which was perhaps better.