She raised her eyes to him, wondering. I think she scarcely understood what he could mean. Her mind was so deeply occupied with other thoughts, that the tide of feeling which encountered hers was driven back by the meeting. “I’m not clever,” she said, in a very low voice. “I’m ignorant—not fit to talk to you.”
“But you know me?” he said, driven to his wits’ end. She looked up at him quickly, with a strange suffusion in her eyes, a momentary dilation. She did not mean it to be reproachful this time. Then she said quickly—“We’ll trouble no one, Dick and me. He’s well off, and doing well. If you will let the other stay till he’s better—who could nurse him as I would?—and leave Dick alone. I’ll trouble nobody, nobody!”
“Myra,” said Richard, more moved than he could say. It was not love so much as a strange reluctance to be so powerless—a curious longing to get some sign of feeling from her. He could not bear the composure in her eyes.
She gave a low cry, and made a step backwards, withdrawing from him; and at that moment a faint sound from within the sick-room caught her ear. Her expression, which had changed for the moment, came back again to that of the patient sick-nurse, the anxious watcher. “He’s stirring,” she said. “He wants me. I mustn’t leave him. I’ve been too long away.”
To describe the feelings of Richard Ross when she left him outside the door of the room in which his son lay ill is more than I am able for. Not since she had fled from him at first, three-and-twenty years ago, had there been such a tumult in his mind;—not the sharp tumult of passion and grief, but the strangest maze of embarrassment, pain, defeat, surprise—and yet for the moment relief. Passion was altogether out of his way nowadays—I don’t know that he was capable of it; but all the secondary emotions were warm in him. He had been playing with the thought of this woman for a long time, saying maladetta, yet scarcely meaning it—wondering, half attracted in spite of himself, and beyond measure curious to know what changes time had wrought in her, and how far Valentine’s unconscious judgment was true. During this long succession of thoughts, his semi-hatred of her as the curse of his life had strangely evaporated, he could not have told how. And from the moment when he had received that first sudden shock which was given him by the little photograph, down to the present time when she left him standing outside the door, Richard had been the subject of a mental process of the most complicated and mysterious kind. From that first simple introduction of the idea of her, not as a past curse, but as a living and known human being, his thoughts had gone through a long dramatic course, picturing her, realising her, following the unknown line of her existence—making acquaintance with her image, so to speak. She had never been quite absent from his mind since Valentine had reintroduced her to it. He had imagined (in spite of himself) how she would look, what she would say and do—had even pictured to himself how she would meet him, perhaps with terror, perhaps with penitence, with a developed sense of the grievous harm she had done him, and capacity at last to understand how much he had sacrificed for her. If she had grown into an intelligent being, with that look Valentine described, “as if she had once been a lady,”—which was so curious, so bewildering a travesty of all fact—this was how she must have learned to feel; and no doubt Richard thought her first meeting with him would be trying for both, but most trying for her as the one most certain to betray emotion—the wrong-doer in whose awakened mind all feeling must be more strong. He had opened the very door of the room in which she sat with this expectation—nay certainty—in his mind. Now she had left him, and he stood bewildered, confounded, excited, not knowing what to think, and still less what to do. Was it possible that she had not a thought for him, this woman who had destroyed his life?—no feeling that she had destroyed it?—no desire for his forgiveness, no eagerness to make up, no tremulous impassioned anxiety as to what he would think of her? For all these feelings he had given her credit, and curiously, with an interest which attracted him in spite of himself, had speculated how she would show them. But now!
After a little pause, Richard Ross, Secretary of Legation at Florence, her Majesty’s future representative to some crowned head, went quite humbly down the little creaking staircase. He knew how to deal with Prime Ministers, and would not have allowed himself to be put down by Prince Bismarck himself; but he was utterly discomfited by Dick Brown’s mother, and stole down-stairs with his heart beating, and the most unexampled commotion in his whole being. When he thought of it, he even laughed at himself feebly, so confounded was he. What was to be done now? He could not steal away as he had come, with no result to his visit. Now that they had met, and looked each other in the face again, they could not part simply with nothing further said. Was it for him to make advances? to propose some ground of meeting? though he was the wronged person, and though she ought in reality to approach him on her knees. When he got down-stairs, he paused again to think what he would do. And it was only then that it occurred to him that his mission here was not to reconcile himself to her, but to inquire after Valentine. Strange! He had seen Valentine lying ill—he had even asked questions about him—and yet his son’s state, or his son’s existence, had made no impression whatever on his mind. In the curious ferment and tumult of his feelings, it occurred to him to remember the half amusement, half pain, with which he had felt two days ago that his mother hustled him off, scarcely having patience to let him eat and rest, in order that he might see after Val; and here was his wife treating him in the same way—thrusting him aside, postponing him altogether! There was a whimsical aggravation in this double slight which made him laugh even now; and then a sudden heat flamed all over his frame, like a sudden blaze scorching him; his wife! He had used the words unconsciously, unawares—not maladetta!—not the woman who had been his curse. In the curious excitement of that thought, he went in once more to the little parlour, and sat down instinctively to get quiet and calm himself; and then, catching at the first straw of reason which blew his way in this strange tempest of feeling, he decided that he must wait there, now that he was there, till the doctor came.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
One nail strikes out another, the Italians say. It was not wonderful that Richard Ross should feel this, seeing that the subject which concerned his own individual life most closely was that which drove out of his mind all immediate recollection of the other which was the object of his journey. But that the strange and startling apparition of the new figure which suddenly confronted her should have driven the recollection of Valentine out of Lady Eskside’s head, was much more wonderful—for her heart was rent with anxiety about Val; whereas Richard was only vaguely, lightly affected by that anxiety; and there was no such magic of old associations, old passions, curiosity, and that baffled sense of impotence which provokes the mind to put forth its whole powers, in her mind as in his. But for the moment Lady Eskside forgot her beloved boy, and her devouring anxiety; forgot everything but the shock and startling sensation produced upon her by this face which suddenly looked at her, meeting her gaze calmly, unaware of its own power. When she brought Dick Brown to a stop in his explanations by her eager, almost wild question, “Who are you?” the subject which up to that moment had been engrossing her whole mind departed wholly out of it. Poor Val, lying upon his mother’s bed! He was wronged even by those who loved him best—he was forgotten, if only for a moment, in the strain and stress of affairs more urgent; but happily did not know it. Dick was very much embarrassed, good fellow, to find himself suddenly elevated into a place of such importance, and to be asked so passionately, so urgently, who he was. Nothing in the world more easy than to give an account of himself. He smiled, involuntarily, at the anxiety in Lady Eskside’s face.
“It is very easy to tell you that, ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t send my name, thinking you wouldn’t know. I’m Richard Brown, head man now at Mr Styles’s, the boat-builder at Oxford, and for three years at Goodman’s, at Eton. That is all about me.”
“What is it?” said the old lady. “No, I am not deaf—you need not speak loud; but say it again. Richard? Yes, yes; of course it could be nothing but Richard. And you came to tell me that? Is your mother living? is she still living? and where is she? Was it she that sent you here?”