“Yes,” she said, smiling; “what of it, you unruly boy?”
“I am not a proper subject for such epithets,” said Val. “I have attained my majority, and made a speech to the tenantry. I say, Mary, do you know, that’s a lovely spot, that linn. I was there to-day——”
“Oh, you were there to-day?”
“Yes, I was there. Is there anything wonderful in that?” said Val, not sure whether he ought not to take offence at the laughing tone, which seemed to imply something. “Tell Violet, when you see her, that it was uncommonly shabby of her not to come this year. We’d have gone again.”
“There’s a virtue in three times, Val,” said Mary. “If you go again, it will be more than a joke; and I don’t think I’ll give your message to Vi.”
“Why should it be more than a joke? Or why should it be a joke at all?” said Val, reddening, he scarcely knew why. He withdrew after this, slightly confused, feeling as if some chance touch had got at his heart, giving it a dinnle which was half pleasure and half pain. Do you know what a dinnle is, dear English reader? It means that curious sensation which you, in the poverty of your language, call “striking the funny bone.” You know what it is in the elbow. Valentine had that kind of sensation in his heart; and I think if this half-painful jar of the nerve lasted, and suggested quite new thoughts to the boy, it was all Mary Percival’s fault. I am happy to say that her widower got at her on Val’s withdrawal, and made himself most overpoweringly agreeable for the rest of the night.
And then the boy went away on his grand tour, leaving the old people at home rather lonely, longing after him; though Lord Eskside was too much occupied to take much notice of Val’s departure. My lady was very busy, too, paying visits all over the country, and paying court to great and small. She promised the widower her interest with Mary, but judiciously put him off till Miss Percival’s next visit, saying, cunningly, that she must have time to prepare her young friend for the idea, and trusting in Providence that the election might be over before an answer had to be given. It was gratifying to the Esksides to find a devoted canvasser for Valentine in the person of Lord Hightowers, the only possible competitor who could have “divided the party” in the county. Hightowers, however, was not fond of politics, and had no ambition for public life; it would have suited him better to be a locksmith, like Louis Seize. And among them all, they got the county into such a beautiful state of preparation that Lord Eskside could scarcely contain his rapture—and having laid all his trains, and holding his match ready, sat down, in a state of excitement which it would be difficult to describe, to wait until the moment of explosion came.
In other places, too, Valentine’s departure had caused far more excitement than he was at all aware of. He had seen and said good-bye to Dick with the most cordial kindness, on the day he left Oxford. But Val had not failed to remark a gravity and preoccupation about his humble friend which troubled him in no small degree. When he recounted to Dick the failure of Lady Eskside and himself on the day before, the young man had received the information with a painful attempt to seem surprised, which made Val think for a moment that Dick’s mother had avoided the visit of set purpose. But as he knew of no hidden importance in this, the idea went lightly out of his head; and a few days after he remembered it no more. Very much more serious had been the effect upon Dick. His mother’s flight and her panic were equally unintelligible to him. The thought that there must be “something wrong” involved, in order to produce such terror, was almost irresistible; and Dick’s breeding, as I have said, had been of that practical kind which makes the mind accustomed to the commoner and vulgarer sorts of wrong-doing. He did not insist upon knowing what it was that made his mother afraid of Val’s grandmother; but her abject terror, and the way in which she dragged him too, out of sight, as if he had been a partner of her shame, had the most painful effect upon the young man. In the rudimentary state of morals which existed among the class from which he sprang, and where all his primitive ideas had been formed, dishonesty was the one crime short of murder which could bring such heavy shame along with it. He who steals is shunned in all classes, except among the narrow professional circles of thieves themselves; and Dick could not banish from his thoughts a painful doubt and uncertainty about his mother’s relations with “Mr Ross’s people.” She herself was so stunned and petrified by the great danger which she seemed to herself to have escaped, that she was very little capable of giving a rational explanation of her conduct. “You knew this lady before, mother?” said Dick to her, half pitifully, half severely, as he took her back to the parlour and placed her in a chair after the visitors were gone. “Yes,” she answered, but no more. And though he asked her many other questions, nothing more than repeated Yes and No could he get in reply.
I do not know what wild sense of peril was in the poor creature’s heart. She feared, perhaps, that they could have taken her up and punished her for running away from her husband; she felt sure that they would separate her from her remaining boy—though had they not the other, whom she had given up to them? and in her panic at the chance of being found out, all power of reasoning (if she ever had any) deserted her. Ah, she thought to herself, only a tramp is safe! As soon as you have a settled habitation, and are known to neighbours, and can be identified by people about, all security leaves you: only on the tramp is a woman who wishes to hide herself safe. In her first panic, the thought of going away again, of deserting everything, of taking refuge on those open roads—those outdoor bivouacs which are full in the eye of day, yet better refuges than any mysterious darkness—came so strongly over her, that it was all she could do to withstand its force. But when she looked at her son, active and trim, in his boat-building yard, or saw him studying the little house at night, with his tools in his hand, to judge where he could put up something or improve something—his mother felt herself for the first (or perhaps it was the second) time in her life, bound as it were by a hundred minute threads which made it impossible for her to please herself. It was something like a new soul which had thus developed in her. In former times she had done as the spirit moved her, obeying her impulses whenever they were so strong as to carry everything else before them. Now she felt a distinct check to the wild force of these impulses. The blood in her veins moved as warmly as ever, impelling her to go, and she knew that she was free to go if she would, and that Dick too could be vanquished, and would come with her, however unwillingly. She was free to go, and yet she could not. For the first time in her life she had learned consciously to prefer another to herself. She could not ruin Dick. The struggle that she maintained with her old self was violent, but it was within herself, and was known to nobody; and finally, the new woman, the higher creature, vanquished the old self-willed and self-regarding wanderer. She set herself to meet the winter with a dogged resolution, feeling less, perhaps, the absence of that visionary solace which she had found in the sight of Val, in consequence of the hard and perpetual battle she had to fight with herself. And, to make it harder, she had not the cheery gratitude and tender appreciation of the struggle, which had rewarded her much less violent effort before. Dick was gloomy, overcast, pondering upon the strange thing that had happened. He could not get over it: it stood between him and his mother, making their intercourse constrained and unhappy. Had she robbed the old lady from whom she had fled in so strange a panic? Short of that, or something of that kind, why, poor Dick thought, should one woman be so desperately afraid of another? He did not, it is true, say, or even whisper to himself, this word so terrible to one in his insecure position, working his way in the world with slow and laborious advances; but the suspicion rankled in his heart.
All this time, however, his mother neither thought of setting herself right by telling him what her mystery was, nor once felt that she was wronging Dick by keeping the secret of his parentage so closely hidden from him. It did not occur to her that by doing this she was doing an injury to her boy. The life of gentlefolks—the luxurious and elegant existence into which her husband had tried to tame her, a wild creature of the woods—had been nothing but misery to her; and I doubt whether she was capable of realising that Dick, so different from herself in nature, would have felt differently in respect to those trammels from which she had fled. Had she been able to think, she would have seen how—unconsciously, with the instinct of another race than hers—the boy had been labouring all his life to manufacture for himself such a poor imitation of those trammels as was possible to him; but she was little capable of reasoning, and she did not see it. Besides, he was hers absolutely, and she had a right to him. She had given up the other, recognising a certain claim of natural justice on the part of the father of her children; and in so doing she had gone as far as nature could go, giving up half, with a rending of her heart which had never healed; but no principle of which she had ever heard called upon her to give up the whole. The very fact of having made a sacrifice of one seemed to enhance and secure her possession of the other—and how could she do better for Dick than she had done for herself? But this question had not even arisen in her mind as yet. She feared that they had hidden emissaries, who, if they found her out, might take her remaining child from her; but that he was anyhow wronged by her silence, or had any personal rights in the matter, had not yet entered into her brooding, slowly working, confused, and inarticulate soul.