CHAPTER XLII.
That had been a weary morning in the new wing. Dick had gone to Edinburgh with his brother, half by way of seeing the beautiful town, half to console Val, who was very eager and anxious. With a curious interest he had walked about Moray Place, to which he had directed his letters in the strange old time when he was still Dick Brown,—a time which it gave him a certain vertigo to think of. And I am sorry to say that Val, in the heat of disappointment, when he came out from Mrs Pringle’s presence, forgot that his brother was walking about on the other side of the square waiting for him, and had rushed back to Lasswade without ever thinking of Dick. When he saw that he had been forgotten, Dick too made his way to the railway, and went back; but it was afternoon when he arrived at Rosscraig. He had never left his mother for so long a time before, and this, no doubt, had its effect upon her. She was alone in the beautiful rooms of the new wing all the morning. It was like a silent fairy palace, where everything was done by mysterious unseen hands; for the sight of servants fretted her, and she would not admit any personal attendance. She had grown feeble in that lonely splendour without any notice being taken of it; for Dick, with the inexperience of youth, made no observations on the subject, and to Lady Eskside, who visited her every day, she asserted always that she was quite well. More feeble than ever she had got up that morning, and dressed herself as usual, and taken her sparing breakfast with Dick. After the first few days, Lady Eskside had yielded to this arrangement, seeing it impossible, at least for the moment, to habituate the newcomer to the family table. “If it is such a distress to her, why should we force her to it?” said my lady, not without offence; and the poor soul was grateful for the exemption. “Don’t find fault with me, Dick,” she said to him faintly; “it can’t be for long. I’ll get used to it, and easy in my mind before long;”—and therefore she had been sorrowfully left to herself in the beautiful new rooms furnished for her three-and-twenty years before. When Dick left her she went to a little room in the front part of the wing, which looked out upon the great door and court, where she sat watching till the two young men went away, and waved her hand in answer to their salutations. Valentine had already paid her a visit in the morning, a visit which he never neglected; and wherever they were going, the young men never forgot to look up to that window from which it was her pleasure to watch their movements, one of the few pleasures she had.
When they had left the house she had no more interest in it. She wandered back again through various empty rooms to the great handsome sitting-room which had a light-some bow-window looking out upon the sloping bank of wood down to where the Esk foamed and tumbled below. Had she had any work to do, as in the days when she was Dick’s housekeeper, and kept all his treasures in order, and prepared his simple meals, she might have forgotten herself and got through the weary hours. But she had nothing to do, poor soul! She sat down in the window, and passed she did not know how long a time there, gazing vaguely out, sometimes thinking, sometimes quite vacant: in so hazy a state was her mind that it seemed to her sometimes that soft Thames flowed at her feet instead of the brawling Esk; and that she was waiting till Mr Ross’s boat should come down the gentle river. Poor bewildered soul! a haze of times and places, of the vacant present, and the gleams of interest which had been in the past, possessed her mind; she scarcely could have told where she was had any one asked her. The silence grew painful to her brain, and reeled and rustled round her in eddies of suppressed sound all centring in herself; and now and then the light swam in her eyes, and darkened, and there was an interval in which everything was black around her, and all that she was aware of was that rustle, overpowering in its intensity, of the silence, raying out in circles, like those in water, from her brain. I almost think she must have lapsed into some kind of faint, without knowing it, in those moments. About noon Lady Eskside came to see her, and did, as she always did, her very utmost to win some sort of hold upon her. She talked to her of the boys, of Val who must soon go to London, of trifles of every description, working hard to rouse her to some interest. “I wish you would come with me,” my lady said; and she was glad afterwards that she had said it. “I am alone, and we would be cheerier together, we two women, when all the others are away. Won’t you come with me, Myra? My woman, you look lonely here.” “I am used to be alone,” she said quite gently, but without moving; and half provoked, half sorry, the old lady had at last gone away, despairing in her mind, and wondering whether it had been kind to bring this wild creature here even in her subdued state, and whether she would ever find any comfort in her life. “Perhaps when Richard goes,” Lady Eskside said to herself; for Richard’s influence did not seem to be advantageous to his wife, though he was very careful, very anxious, not to step over the distance which she had tacitly placed between them, though strangely tantalised and excited by it, as his mother saw. What was to be done? The old lady shook her head, and took refuge with her old lord in the library, not saying anything to him to vex him, for what could he do? but finding a little consolation in her own vexation and perplexity in being near him. How different that silent support and society was from the solitude in the new wing, and even from Richard’s dainty and still retirement, where he wrote his letters, with his noiseless Italian servant close at hand to answer every call! It eased my lady’s old heart, which had felt so many pains, only to walk into the library where her old lord sat, and put up the window, or down the window, and look at the letters on his table, and say something about the weather or the garden—just as it eased Lord Eskside, when he was in any perplexity, to go into the drawing-room, and pronounce the novel on her table to be “some of your rubbish, my lady,” and let her know that the glass was falling, and that she had better take precautions about her drive. Lady Eskside wondered with a sigh whether it would ever be possible to bring her new guest—her strange daughter-in-law—into the household life. She meant nothing but kindness towards her; but there was—how could she help it?—a little impatience in the sigh.
After that visit the recluse in the new wing was left to herself again, and all kinds of strange thoughts came up into her heart. They were not so articulate as Lady Eskside’s; but somehow there arose in her, as the old lady went away, a curious reflection of her impatience, an incoherent desire to call her back again. She sat and listened to her steps going all the way along the corridor, and down the stair, and never opened her lips nor made a movement to detain her; and yet there rose in her mind a mute cry, could the dull air but have carried it without any action of hers. She caught the sound of Lady Eskside’s sigh, and, for the first time, a dim understanding of it seemed to dawn upon her mind. Why could not she go with her—make herself one with the others? The thought was very shadowy and vague, like a suggestion some unseen observer had made to her; but it raised a visionary ferment in her soul, a gasping for breath, as if she already felt herself confined within an atmosphere where she had no room to breathe.
Then she took refuge in her own room in this painful rush of new feeling. The curtains at the windows, the hangings of the bed, the draperies everywhere, seemed to shut her in and cut short her breath. The great glass which reflected her figure from head to foot, the other lesser ones which multiplied her face, glancing back resemblances at her as if she, in her solitude, had grown into half-a-dozen women, affected her imagination wildly. She left that room like one pursued—pursued by herself, always the worst ghost of solitude. Then she went to the little room with the window which commanded the great door. Perhaps by this time the boys might be come back; and the boys formed her bridge, as it were, into the world, her sole link of connection with life in this artificial phase. A little warmth, a little hope, came into her as she sat down there and strained her eyes to watch for some sign of their coming. After a while, the door opened and Richard came out. He stood on the great steps for a moment, putting on his gloves, then, looking up, saw her, and took off his hat to her; then he made a pause, as if in doubt, drew off the gloves again, and went back into the house. At this sight a sudden wild panic came upon her. She thought he was coming to see her, which indeed was the purpose with which he had turned back. She sprang up, her heart beating, and flying through the lonely rooms, seized a shawl which lay on a chair, and darted down a little stair in the turret which led into the woods. Her excitement carried her on for some distance before her breath failed her altogether, though her heart beat loud in her bosom, like some hard piston of iron, swinging and creaking in fierce unmanageable haste. She had got into the shrubberies, not knowing where she went, and sank down among the bushes to rest, when her strength failed. The thought of meeting her husband now, with nobody by, drove her wild. She had lived under the same roof with him for days at Oxford, and thought little of it, being occupied with other matters; but deadly panic, as of a wild deer flying from the hunter, had seized upon her now. She never asked herself what harm he could do her. She feared nothing actual, but, with overwhelming blind terror, she feared the future and the unknown.
Oh, how many thoughts came rushing upon her as she lay crouched together on the cool earth among the bushes!—thoughts half made out, not one altogether articulate—gleams of a consciousness that this was folly, that it was impossible, that she must get the better of herself, that the fever in her soul must be chased away, and could not be submitted to. “I must change—I must make a change!” she moaned to herself. A whole new being, a new creature, with dim evolutions of reason, dim perceptions of the impossible, seemed to be rising up in her, blotting out the old. Her faults, her follies, her wild impulses, the savage nature which could endure no restraint, had all come to a climax in her; and reason, which had struggled faintly in the old days, and won her to so many sacrifices, had at last got the balance in hand, I think, and the power to decide what could and what could not be. Yet, when she had got her breath a little, she stumbled to her feet, and went on.
When Dick came back she was not to be found in her rooms, which troubled him greatly; for she had never before gone out by herself. He searched through every corner, then went to the other parts of the house—to the drawing-room, to Lady Eskside’s rooms, to Val’s—hopeless of finding her, indeed, yet so confident that something must have happened, that no marvel would have surprised him. When he burst into the library he was in despair. And this new alarm, so suddenly introduced among them, diverted them at once from the other subject, which had lost its enthralling and exciting power now that the secret had been made known. Richard Ross had not been spending a pleasant afternoon. He was excited by Val’s defiance, and he had been excited before. He turned very pale as Dick spoke. He knew that his wife had fled out of the house to avoid him—a thing which, naturally enough, had tried his temper greatly. Where had she gone? He remembered that when he looked down the winding staircase in the turret, through which she had evidently fled, the fresh air blowing in his face had brought with it a sound of the Esk tumbling over its rocks. This had not alarmed him then, and he had scorned to follow the fugitive, or to force her into an interview she avoided, in this way; but now suddenly it returned to him with an indescribable shock of terror. He went out without saying a word to any one, moved by sudden panic. The others started to explore the woods; the idea of the river did not occur to either of the young men, who knew her better than Richard did. They set off both together; while Lord Eskside, with the servants, undertook to search the gardens and shrubberies nearer home. “Oh, God forgive her if she’s gone away again!” cried the old lady, wringing her hands. “I can’t think that she’s gone away,” said Dick. His face was very grave. He scarcely said a word to Val, who went with him, and who tried anxiously to ascertain from him what it was he really feared. Dick kept silent, his heart too strained and sore for speech.
As for Val, he was swept out of one excitement and plunged into another without a moment’s interval to take breath in, and the fresh air did him good. I need not say of a public-school boy and well-trained “man,” that he had picked himself up, to use an undignified but useful expression, ere now, and betrayed, neither in look nor tone, the sudden blow he had received. For that grace, if no other, let our English education be blessed. Val had no idea of contending, of “making a row,” or of bearing malice. If the right was Dick’s, why, then, the right was Dick’s,—and there was nothing more to be said. If his mind was momentarily weak and unable to seize all that was going on, he did not show it, except by a certain mental feebleness and want of his usual energy, which made him disposed to take Dick’s lead rather than to form any opinion of his own. But even this lasted only a short time. “Come,” said Val, drawing a long breath, “why should we be so downhearted? She has gone out to take the air—to enjoy the—good weather.”
He had meant to say the beautiful afternoon; but then it suddenly occurred to him that the day was dull and cloudy, and that the gleams of sunshine which had been so sweet were gone.
“She never took her walk without me before,” said Dick. “Oh, why did I stop away so long? I can’t tell you what a weight I have here at my heart.”