The Story of Valentine and His Brother

by Mrs. Oliphant

“I beg your pardon,” said the young man, turning sharply round. Good God! who was it? The old lady fell back as far as the wall would let her, with a loud cry. She held out her hands, half holding him off, half inviting his approach. “Who are you? who are you?” she cried, her heart leaping to her throat.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said the youth. He did not know whether he ought to have said “my lady,” and hesitated. “I hope I have not frightened you. I came to say that Mr Ross——”

Was it possible that Val, her darling, had gone out of her mind in that moment of wonder? She scarcely heard what he said, though they were words which would have raised her to the height of excitement had any one else said them. She came forward to him with the same wild wonder in her eye, with her hands uplifted. “For God’s sake, boy, who are you? who are you?” she said.

Richard had gone away from her only an hour before, a middle-aged man for whom her feelings were scarcely those of a mother’s impassioned love; yet here Richard stood before her, her true Richard, the boy who had been her adoration and her pride a quarter of a century ago. Her head reeled; the light swam in her eyes; life seemed to turn round with her; and everything became a dream. “For the love of God! who are you?” she cried.

CHAPTER XXXI.

When Valentine disappeared in the moonlight from the Hewan, his mind was in a state happily very unusual to youth, but to which youth adds all the additional bitterness of which it is capable. He was not only outraged, wounded to the quick, every comfort and consolation taken from him for the moment, but his heart and imagination had no refuge to fall back upon, no safe shelter which he could feel behind him whatever might happen. Everything he was familiar with and every being he loved was involved in the catastrophe that had overwhelmed him. In other circumstances, had anything equally dreadful befallen him at home, he would have had his young love to fall back upon, and his tender, sympathising Violet, whose soft eyes would have given a certain sweetness even to misery itself; or had Violet failed him, he might have had at least the tender peacefulness of the old home, the old people who adored him, and to whom he was all in all. But in this horrible crisis everything seemed gone from him. The very thought of home made his heart sick; he had been shamed in it, and made a shame to it; and poor Lord Eskside’s kind mistaken assurance, so tenderly and solemnly made, that in his own mind there was not a doubt of Val’s identity, had almost broken the poor young fellow’s heart. Heaven above! what must his condition be, when his grandfather, the old lord himself, whose idol he was, had to say this to him? When the recollection recurred to Val, it was with all the fainting sickness of soul with which a deathblow is received. It was not a deathblow, but in his misery this was how he felt it. And Violet was separated from him, it seemed for ever, by her father’s enmity and unprovoked assault; and if that had not been enough, by his own mad assault upon Sandy, who, he knew well enough, was his friend, and would never have harmed him. This completed, he felt, his isolation and miserable loneliness; he had nowhere to turn to for relief. Once indeed he thought of his father; but had not his father prophesied to him how it would be? and could he go now and tell him all had happened as he prophesied, and yet expect consolation?

Thus poor Val felt the ground cut from under his feet; he had nowhere to turn to, no one to fall back upon. For my part, I think this makes all the difference between the bearable and the unbearable in human trouble. This is what clothes in armour of proof a man who has a wife, a woman who has a child. Something to fall back upon, something to turn to, whatever your ill is, to find support, backing, consolation. Poor boy! he gazed round him with hot eyes, hopeless and unrefreshed, and saw nowhere to go, no one to throw himself on. It was not that he doubted the love of his grandparents, who had never given him a moment’s cause to distrust them; but there it was that his wound had been given him, and he wanted to get away, to get away! to look at it from a distance and see if perhaps it might be bearable—but found nowhere to go to, no one to receive him. And the kind reader must remember what blood Val had in his veins before he condemns him—wild blood, oftentimes almost more than he could struggle against even in his calmest moments, and a heart full of chaotic impulses, now fired by misery and left to torment him like a pack of demons. He did not know what to do, nor what he wanted to do; but something must be done, and at once, for to keep still was impossible. Therefore as movement was the best thing for him at all events, he walked to Edinburgh through the moonlight, through the tranquil country roads, on which he met no one, through still villages where all the world was asleep. Now and then a watchful dog, roused by the passing step, barked at him as he went along, which seemed somehow to give him an additional conviction of being a castaway, abandoned by all the world—but that was all. Deep silence surrounded him, a still, soft night, but chill with a cold that went to his heart; and the moon was cold and the world slept, and nobody cared what Valentine might do with himself—Val, who had been so loved, so cared for, and who was so sure three days ago that the whole world took an interest in him, and, in its heart, was on his side!

I do not know precisely why he went to Oxford—probably because he was accustomed to go there, and it gave him less trouble to think of that place than of anywhere else when the moment came to decide where he was going—for I don’t think it was any conscious recurrence of mind to friendly Dick and his mother. He was too unhappy to remember them. Anyhow he went to Oxford—where he arrived half dead with fatigue and misery. He had not eaten, he had not slept, since Lord Eskside gave him that paper in the library, and he had been subject to all the excitement of the election while in this state. He went to bed when he got to the hotel, to the astonishment of the inn people, for he had not even a bag with him, no change of dress, or any comfort—and spent the night in a confused stupor, full of dreams, which was not sleep. Next morning he got up late, went down to the river side, hardly knowing what he was about, and got into a boat mechanically, and went out upon the river. As it happened, of all days in the year this was Easter Monday, a day when many rude holiday parties are about, and when the Thames is generally avoided by well-informed persons. It was crowded with boats and noisy parties, heavy boatloads, with rowers unfit for the responsibility they had undertaken—the kind of people who cause accidents from one year’s end to another. Val did not think of them, nor, indeed, of anything. I doubt even whether he was capable of thought: his pulse was galloping, his head throbbing, his eyes dull and red, and with an inward look, seeing nothing around.

Unfortunately, as it happened, Dick was not on the wharf at the moment to notice who was going or coming, and was quite unaware of the presence of his young patron. Dick’s mother, however, was standing in her little garden, looking out over the wall. She had no one to look for now, but still her eyes kept their wistful habit, and the even flow of the stream and perpetual movement seemed to soothe her. She was standing in her abstracted way, one arm leaning upon the little gate, gazing without seeing much,—not at the familiar Thames, but into the unknown. She came to herself all at once with a start, which made the gate quiver: came to herself? nay—for herself, poor soul, had not much share in her thoughts then—but came back to consciousness of the one thing which seemed to give life a certain reality for her. All in a moment, as if he had dropped from the skies, she saw Valentine stepping into his boat; how he had come there, where he was going, she could not tell; but there he stood, wavering slightly as he stepped into the light outrigger, swaying it dangerously to one side, in a way very unlike Val. Her heart sprang up in her breast, her whole nature came to life at the sight of him, and at something, she could not tell what, in the look of him—something uncertain, helpless, feeble. Her figure lost its droop, her head its musing attitude. She stood alert, in the intensest eager attention and readiness for everything, watching her boy.

Val paddled out into the stream, poising his long oars, I cannot tell how, in a vague uncertain way, as if he did not well know which end of them was in his grasp. Then he let himself float down past her, feebly steering himself, but doing little more; and then some sudden idea seemed to come to him—or was it rather a cessation of ideas, a trance, a faint? He stopped his boat in the middle of the crowded river, and lay there with long oars poised over the water—wavering, reflected in it like the long dragon-fly wings—his figure bent a little forward, his face, so far as she could see it, blank and without expression. There he came to a dead stop, of all places in the world—in the middle of the stream, in the middle of the crowd—taking no notice of passing boatmen who shouted to him, “Look ahead!” and had all the trouble in the world to steer their course about him and keep out of his way. A thrill of strong anxiety came into the woman’s mind—anxiety such as had never moved her before. Heretofore she had been passive, doing nothing, taking no active part in any one’s affairs. This stir of life was such that it set her into sudden energetic movement almost unawares. She went outside her gate, and closed it behind her, watching intently, her heart beating high in her breast, and a sense as of some coming emergency upon her. There he sat in his boat, lying still upon the shining water, the long oars with a faint flutter in them as if held in unsteady hands, not straight and motionless as they ought to be—and crowds of unwary boats, ignorantly managed, stumbling about the stream, boats all ripe and ready for an accident, with people in them shouting, singing, jumbled together. There was a small green eyot, a bundle of waving willows, nothing more, just in front of Valentine’s boat, which was a partial shield to him; but what had happened to Val that he lay thus, taking no precaution, with the long oars trembling in his hands?