The Three Brothers; Complete

by Mrs. Oliphant

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘you are not to think I did not like Millicent, or that she was not very nice. I daresay it was not her fault. Everybody made a fuss about her wherever she went;—she was so very pretty. I don’t think it could have been her fault.’

‘Being pretty?’ said Ben, with the sneer that women hate.

‘You know I did not mean that,’ said Mary, injured. ‘I think it must have been the gentlemen’s own doing. Mr. Thorny was very silly to think she would ever have had him. I am sure that must have been his foolishness. She so pretty and so clever, and he only a common curate, you know;—just like other curates, nothing particular about him. It must have been his own fault.’

‘I have not the advantage of knowing what you refer to,’ said Ben, with the haughtiest assumption of indifference, though his temper had taken fire and his pride was all in arms. A curate,—a common curate,—to have been associated anyhow, by any means whatever, with Millicent! In his heart he was furious, though he managed to keep some outward calm.

‘Oh, it was nothing,’ said Mary, faltering, and feeling that her attempt at making up had not been successful,—‘only they said it was that that threw him into a consumption. But it was not her fault,—it might have happened to any of us,’ said Mary, with a sudden blush; for had it not fallen to her lot, though she was no flirt and not even a beauty like Millicent, to inflict a passing wound without knowing it on a curate of her own?

Then Ben laughed, but it was a very unpleasant laugh. ‘When a lady frowns a man can but die,’ he said. ‘How could he do less? I suppose that is what you mean?’

‘Oh, Ben!’ cried Mary, with a hopeless appeal to his sense of justice. But he only shrugged his shoulders and began to whistle, and walked the rest of the way at such a pace that it was all she could do to keep up with him. Not another word did he say to her on the subject, nor did he pay any attention to her little faltering speeches. He whistled, which was very rude of him; and, after a while, Mary, who had a spirit of her own, grew indignant, and, if she did not whistle, did what was equivalent,—she took up the air he was whistling, and sang it softly with a pretty little voice. ‘I did not know you had been fond of music, Ben,’ she said with a laugh; but it cost her a good cry when she got into her own room. Ben, who was so superior, who had borne his trial so nobly, who was going to work like a hero,—Ben, who had always been, more than she knew, her own ideal of man,—to think that Millicent Tracy with her pretty face——! ‘Why, even Laurie would have seen through her!’ Mary said to herself, and wept with the poignant prick of self-knowledge, which gives the chief bitterness to such a discovery,—not self-esteem, but that indignant, sorrowful, honest insight which, on such a provocation, reveals one’s worth to oneself in pain and not in vanity. ‘Having known me, to decline on a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!’ Mary did not say this, any more than Ben had said of whose image his heart was full; but she felt it with a sharp mingling of pride and humiliation. ‘Not that it can be anything to me,’ she added aloud, to save her own credit, as it were, with herself; and put on her prettiest dress, and was very cheerful and amusing at dinner, when the mother was rather melancholy and had need of enlivenment. Ben’s spirits had flagged, partly with the shock his pride had received, and partly with the associations which began to creep over him. The dinner-room, in which it was so strange to take his father’s place; the old servants, who were connected so completely with the old time; all the routine of the house, in which nothing was changed but one thing,—affected the young man in spite of himself. He had been defrauded, as it were, out of his natural grief for his father; and now the mute eloquence of the vacant place seized upon him. So good a father up to the last moment; so kind,—even at the last moment filled with special compunction for Ben! Mr. Renton’s son felt, almost for the first time, how much wisdom, and support, and guidance, how much tender affection and watchful care, were lost to him. When his mother, faltering, spoke, as to the boy she still felt him to be, of ‘your dear papa,’ Ben fell back into the boy she thought him, and soft tears came into his eyes. Perhaps the sadness did him more good than his former mood of satisfaction; but it somewhat defeated his cousin Mary, who meant to be gay, and prove to him that his enthusiasm for Millicent Tracy was nothing to her. On the contrary, the soft-hearted, sympathetic creature turned her pleasant eyes upon him, all shining with tears when his change of mood became visible, and forgave him his Millicent, and comforted herself that it was but a fancy; and they were all very affectionate together, and somewhat pathetic, with that common grief behind them and the common pang of parting before them, for the rest of the night.

Yet when Ben went to his room, he paused on his way at the great window on the staircase, from which all the noble gardens of the manor, and the west wing, and the line of trees which overhung the river, were visible, all ghostly and mysterious in the moonlight, and stood looking out with a sudden flutter at his heart. His thoughts were not at home, nor of the past. The question which suddenly flashed across his mind was, Should he ever bring her here to be the mistress of it all? It was the first time he had ever allowed himself to speculate upon the distant future at the end of his seven years’ probation. Mrs. Renton had gone to bed weeping, yet consoled by her son’s presence and sympathy; and Mary was taking herself to task, in her maiden retirement, for having been hard upon poor Ben; while Ben stood at the window looking out on the moonlight, forgetting the very existence of these two, and asking himself, with a thrill that ran through all his veins, Should he ever bring her here? Mary’s hesitating story, her faint praise, her deprecation of all intention to blame, even the curate,—contemptible shadow!—angry as they had made him at the moment, had faded from his thoughts. He seemed to see her in her stately beauty coming across the lordly lawn. How lovely she was! Even the silly school-girls, unimpassioned, feminine creatures, impervious to that influence, were compelled to acknowledge it. What if she might stand with him here by this very window, and look out on the moonlight some other night?

This was how Ben Renton went out upon the world,—in charity with his own people, even with his father who had been so hard upon him; and feeling, after all, that at five-and-twenty a man, even when disinherited, with work in his hands to occupy him, fresh air to breathe, and novel scenes to see, and energies to exercise in a big spacious world where there was room to do something, had no particular occasion to quarrel with life or fate. The thread of actual work, as soon as he got it into his hands, had enabled him to trace his way out of all the morbid labyrinths of solitary musing. Armida’s garden was left behind for ever; but the witch, who had enchanted him and possessed herself of his life, was so far from suffering by the change, that she had developed in his imagination into a white angelic woman, worthy reward of all labour. Poor, foolish Ben! And yet it could not have been anything but a high nature which emerged from that six months’ mist of self-inspection, bitterness, idleness, and insane passion, with at least a true sense of the realities of his position, and a true love in his heart.

And thus equipped he disappears from us for seven years into the vast and troubled world.