The Ways of Life: Two Stories

by Mrs. Oliphant

All this time there had been sounds of rushing footsteps and ringing of bells through the house, the commotion of some sudden event breaking into the quiet of the night. And then came a distant sound of Susie’s voice, calling: “Fred! Fred!” The young man’s heart was rent with passionate emotion, such as he had never known in his life before.

“Nobody must come in here,” he said, “to find a stranger in the house. If my mother has been frightened, I will tell her. But not if I can help it. Now, the only thing remaining for me is to make the truth known—when——” He paused. He could not address that dreadful spectre directly; his heart was bitter within him at the man who had thus killed for ever his father’s memory, the ideal which he had cherished in his father’s name. “When——he has decided what to do.”

There was a dreadful pause in Janet’s room when the young man went away. Then the stranger said in a musing tone: “So that’s what Fred has come to in a couple of years. You see, Janet, you have not been so successful as you thought.”

“Oh, my man, oh, my bonnie man! the callant is just distracted with wonder and fear.”

“There’s more in it than that—and he’s right, Janet. We were wrong, you and I. And I must just abide the consequences. I’ll lie down on your bed for an hour or two, if you’re sure it’s safe. And then I’ll take the gate. It will be for ever this time, you can tell that boy. I’ll neither make nor meddle more; and if he’s wise he’ll let sleeping dogs lie.”

CHAPTER VIII.

Robert Dalyell stole forth from the house which was his own, yet could never more be his, in what would have been the dead of night had it been any other season but June and any place but a northern country. It was already daylight, with a pearl-like radiance as of spiritual day, and something more mystic and almost awful in the silence of night, combined with this diffusion of lovely light, than any darkness could have been. He seemed to see the great spreading landscape like a picture, with his own single and solitary figure in it, with a momentary terror of himself alone in that great surrounding silence. He was not afraid of being seen, as he was when he had stolen under cover of the brief darkness into the house; but it occurred to him that anybody who should look out of a curtained window or from the crevice of a closed shutter, and see him walking along at an hour when nobody was abroad, would be afraid of him as an unnatural wanderer in the wide brightness which was night. He was in point of fact a ghost, as he had been believed to be—a man with no place or meaning in the world, with his name upon a funeral tablet, and his place knowing him no more; and like a ghost he passed through the pale diffused light which cast no shadow. Never man was in a position more strange and cruel. He had made the sacrifice of his life, not as his son and his friend had feared, by suicide, but in a more dreadful way. He had put himself to death, and yet he lived. The man had been in this living death for nearly two years. He had lost everything—himself, his name, and his personal identity, as well as wife and children, and home and living. And yet he had never fully realised what it was till now. Something of the Bohemian, something of the adventurer in the man, which had been hidden under the most decorous exterior for nearly fifty years, had made that curious new start in existence almost amusing to him in its absolute novelty and relief from the long monotony of usual life.

Even his sudden going home, with the object of frightening his wife out of a marriage which would have been no marriage, had something of the character of a jest in it. But there was no longer any jest in the matter. He had seen his wife, he had seen his son, and he was at last aware of what it was he had done—the darker aspect of it—the dishonour to others, the deadly extinction of himself, the end of everything which he had accomplished, almost with a light heart. A ghost indeed, offending the eyes and chilling the very soul of those who were most near and dear to him. “A swindler,” the boy had said. Was he a swindler? To be sure the insurance offices would never have paid that money had they known; but surely he had paid the price for it. He had died to all intents and purposes. He had given himself for his children—a living sacrifice—not less, but more than if he had really died and been thrown up by the sea, as everybody believed, on Portobello sands. It is hard to see guilt in a transaction, not for your own advantage, for which you have given your life. Robert Dalyell did not blame his son; he could perceive that there was much in what Fred said, though his heart swelled in his breast against that injustice. He was not angry with Fred, but much impressed, and moved (strangely enough) to something like satisfaction by his son’s demeanour. The boy was a good boy, wounded in his honour, and therefore inexorable, but only as a good man would wish his boy to be. He was glad Fred was an honourable fellow, feeling it like that. Poor Dalyell himself had all the instincts and habits of mind of an honourable man; he had not seen the dishonour in it; he had thought that, giving his life for it as he had done, there was nothing morally wrong in his act. Surely he had bought the money dear: it was not for him; it was for them, and for their good. There they were, all of them—the wife who was about to give him a successor within two years, and the boy who was himself his successor—safe in Yalton, honoured, respected, enjoying the position to which they were born: while he was an outcast, without anything but what he made for himself, and the boy called him a swindler! He was an honest boy for all that, and Dalyell’s mind had a certain forlorn satisfaction in it: though a more forlorn being than he, walking, walking like a ghost through that morning light which began in its pearly paleness to warm to the rising of the sun, could not be. It was wonderful at what leisure he was, in the utter forlornness of his being, to think of them all. He was not sorry that he had given himself to save them. The only thing he was sorry for was that, being dead, he had interfered at all. He ought to have gone upon his own way—married, too, as he might have done, and got himself new ties in his new life. He believed now that there would have been no harm in that. There would be no harm in it. He would get away as quickly as it was practicable, and get back to his new world, and this time he would feel himself really emancipated. He would think no more of the bonds of the past. She should be free to marry if she liked, and so would he. This old world and he had nothing to do with each other any more.

The foolish thing was that he had come at all on this fool’s errand. It was all the old woman’s fault. It had been weak of him to let her into his secret, to keep himself up with news of home, to be moved by her horror at this marriage. Why should not she marry if she wished to do so? She had been a good wife to him, and he had made her a widow. He had known that she was not a woman who could act for herself, that she was one who must have a caretaker, a manager of external matters? Why should he interfere with her? It was all that confounded old woman’s scruples. But Dalyell decided that he would interfere no more, that he would go back whence he came and marry too, and thus justify his wife. The man’s heart was very heavy in his breast when he made this resolution; but yet he had a great courage, and was determined to stand up against fate and get a new life for himself, being thus horribly, hopelessly cut off from the old. The boy would not carry out his threat if he disappeared thus, and was heard of no more. And all would be well with them, all would go right, as he had meant it should when he gave up his life.

By this time the sun had risen, the birds had begun to twitter and hold their morning conversations about all the business of life before it was time to tune up for the concert of the day. Where was he going? He had left such things as he had brought with him at a little lonely wayside public-house near the sea before he went to Yalton, but it was still too early to get admittance there. He found himself on the shore before he knew. Yalton was not above a few miles from the sea, or rather from the Firth in its upper part, not far from the spot where that monstrous prodigy of science, about which so many trumpets have been blown, the Forth Bridge, now strides hideous across the lovely inlet—those golden gates through which the westering sun was wont to stream unbroken from the upper reaches of the great estuary upon the stronger tides below. Dalyell came out upon it suddenly, forgetting in the intense preoccupation of his thoughts where he was. The sun had risen beyond the distant Grampians, touching the Fife villages all along the coast with gold. The air was damp, yet sweet with the saltness of the sea in it, and the breath of distance and the sensation of the vast unknown to which this great, splendid ocean pathway was one of the ways. When Dalyell came out thus upon the shore he was the one speck of animated being in the whole still world. He sat down to rest for a little upon a rock. At three o’clock in the morning there is nothing stirring, not even the cattle, though they were waking and thinking of an early breakfast in the fields. He sat there and noted, and thought over it all again. He was very forlorn, but not angry with anybody, scarcely vexed by the thought that he was so soon forgotten. He even laughed a little at the thought of Pat Wedderburn. How had he got himself the length of that idea of marrying? He divined old Pat’s thoughts, a little troubled by the necessity, going bravely through it. He had no sense of resentment towards any of them. As soon as there was any one stirring about the “Dun Cow” he would steal in and get his things and some breakfast, and take himself off at once and for ever—never, whatever happened, to interfere again.