“Yes; if Musgrave saw him at all, it was not till after. And Bampfield was the brother of the girl John was going to marry, and had saved his life.”
“My God!” This was no profane exclamation in Mary’s mouth. She said it low to herself, clasping her hands together, her face utterly colourless, her eyes wild with wonder and excitement. The shock of this disclosure had driven away the rising tears: and yet Geoff did not mean it as a disclosure. He had trusted in the gentle slowness of her understanding. But there are cases in which feeling supplies all, and more than all, that intellect could give. She said nothing, but sat there silent, with her hands clasped, thinking it over, piecing everything together. No one like Mary had kept hold of every detail; she remembered everything as clearly as if (God forbid!) it had happened yesterday. She put one thing to another which she remembered but no one else did: and gradually it all became clear to her. Geoff, though he was so much more clever, did not understand the process by which in silence she arranged and perceived every point; but then Geoff had not the minute acquaintance with the subject nor the feeling which touched every point with interest. By and by Mary began to sob, her gentle breast heading with emotion. “Oh, Geoff,” she cried, “what a heart—what a heart! He is like our Saviour; he has given his life for his enemy. Not even his friend; he was not fond of him; he did not love him. Who could love him—a man who was ashamed of his own, his very own people? I—oh, how little and how poor we are! I might have done it perhaps for my friend; but he—he is like our Saviour.”
“Don’t say so. It was not just—it was not right; he ought not to have done it,” cried Geoff. “Think, if it saved something, how much trouble it has made.”
“Then it is all true!” she cried, triumphant. In perfect good faith and tender feeling Mary had made her comment upon this strange, sad revelation; yet she could not but feel all the same the triumph of having thus caught Geoff, and of establishing beyond all doubt that it was true. She fell a-crying in the happiness of the discovery. The moment it was certain, the solemnity of it blew aside, as do the mists before the wind. “Then he will come home again; he will have his poor little children, and all will be well,” she said; and cried as if her heart would break. It was vain for Geoff to tell her that nothing was as yet proved, that he did not know how to approach the subject; no difficulties troubled Mary. Her heart was delivered as of a load; and why should not everything at once be told? But she wept all the same, and Geoff had no clue to the meaning of her tears. She was glad beyond measure for John Musgrave; but yet while he was an exile, who had (secretly) stood up for him as she had done? But when he came home, what would Mary have to do with him? Nothing! She would never see him, though she had always taken an interest, and he would never know what interest she had taken. How glad she was! and yet how the tears poured down!
Geoff had a long ride home. He was half alarmed that he had allowed so much to be known, but yet he had not revealed Lizabeth’s secret. Mary had required no particulars, no proof. The suggestion was enough for her. She was not judge or jury—but one to whom the slightest outlet from that dark maze meant full illumination. Geoff could not but speculate a little on the surface of the subject as he rode along through the soft evening, in that unbroken yet active solitude which makes a long ride or walk the most pleasant and sure moment for “thinking over.” Geoff’s thoughts were quite superficial, as his knowledge was. He wondered if John Musgrave had “taken an interest” in Mary as she had done in him; and how it was that Mary had been his brother’s betrothed, yet with so warm a sympathy for his brother’s supposed slayer? And how it was that John Musgrave, if he had responded at all to the “interest” she took in him, could have loved and married Lily? All this perplexed Geoff. He did not go any deeper; he did not think of the mingled feelings of the present moment, but only of the tangled web of the past.
It grew dark before he got home. No moon, and a cloudy night disturbed by threatenings or rather promise of rain, which the farmers were anxious for, as they generally are when a short break of fine weather bewilders their operations, in the north. As he turned out of the last cross road, and got upon the straight way to Stanton, he suddenly became aware of some one running by him on the green turf that edged the road and in the shadow of the hedgerow. Geoff was startled by the first sight of this moving shadow running noiselessly by his side. It was a safe country, where there was no danger from thieves, and a “highwayman” was a thing of the last century. But still Geoff shortened his whip in his hand with a certain sense of insecurity. As he did so a voice came from the shadow of the hedge. “It is but me, my young lord.” “You!” he cried. He was relieved by the sound, for a close attendant on the road in the dark, when all faces are alike undiscernible, is not pleasant. “What are you doing here, Bampfylde? Are you snaring my birds, or scaring them, or have you come to look after me?”
“Neither the one nor the other,” said Wild Bampfylde. “I have other thoughts in my mind than the innocent creatures that harm no one. My young lord, I cannot tell you what is coming, but something is coming. It’s no you, and it’s no me, but it’s in the air; and I’m about, whatever happens. If you want me, I’ll aye be within call. Not that I’m spying on you; but whatever happens, I’m here.”
“And I want you. I want to ask you something,” cried Geoff; but he was slow in putting his next question. It was about his cousin; and what he wanted was some one who would see, without forcing him to put them into words, the thoughts that arose in his mind. Therefore it was a long time before he spoke again. But in the silence that ensued it soon became evident to Geoff that the figure running along under the shadow of the bushes had disappeared. He stopped his horse, but heard no footfall. “Are you there, Bampfylde?” but his own voice was all he heard, falling with startling effect into the silence. The vagrant had disappeared, and not a creature was near. Geoff went on with a strange mixture of satisfaction and annoyance. To have this wanderer “about” seemed a kind of aid, and yet to have his movements spied upon did not please the young man. But Bampfylde was no spy.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE SQUIRE AT HOME.
The Squire went home after his game of ducks and drakes in the most curious, bewildered state of mind. The shock of all these recent events had affected him much more than any one was aware, and Randolph’s visit and desire to make sure about “family arrangements,” had filled up the already almost overflowing measure of secret pain. It had momentarily recalled, like a stimulant too sharp and strong, not only his usual power of resistance, but a force of excitement strong enough to overwhelm the faculties which for the time it invigorated; and while he walked about his woods after his first interview with his son, the Squire was on the edge of a catastrophe, his brain reeling, his strained powers on the verge of giving way. The encounter with little Nello on the lake-side had exercised a curious arresting power upon the old and worn edifice of the mind which was just then tottering to its fall. It stopped this fall for the moment. The trembling old walls were not perhaps in a less dangerous state, but the wind that had threatened them dropped, and the building stood, shaken to its foundation, and at the mercy of the next blast, but yet so far safe—safe for the moment, and with all the semblance of calm about it. To leave metaphor, the Squire’s mind was hushed and lulled by that encounter with the soft peacefulness of childhood, in the most curious, and to himself, inexplicable way. Not, indeed, that he tried to explain. He was as unconscious of what was going on in himself as most of us are. He did not know that the various events which had shaken him had anything more than pain in them—he was unaware of the danger. Even Randolph’s appearance and the thought of the discussions which must go on when his back was turned, as to the things that would happen after his death—he was not aware that there was more in them than an injury against which his whole spirit revolted. He did not know that this new annoyance had struck at the very stronghold of vitality, the little strength left to him. Which of us does know when the coup-de-grâce is given? He only knew the hurt—the wound—and the forlorn stand he had made against it, and the almost giddy lightness with which he had tried to himself to smile it down, and feel himself superior. Neither did he know what Nello had done for him. His meeting with the child was like the touch of something soft and healing upon a wound. The contact cooled and calmed his entire being. It seemed to put out of his mind all sense of wounding and injury. It did more; it took all distinctness at once from the moral and the physical landmarks round him. The harsher outlines of life grew blurred and dim, and instead of the bitter facts of the past, which he had so long determined to ignore, and the facts of the present which had so pushed themselves upon him, the atmosphere fell all into a soft confusion. A kind of happiness stole over him. What had he to be happy about? yet he was so. Sometimes in our English summers there is a mist of heat in the air, confusing all the lines of the landscape as much as a fog in winter—in which the hills and lakes and sky are nothing but one dazzle and faint glory of suppressed light and warmth—light confusing but penetrating: warmth perhaps stifling to the young and active, but consolatory to those whose blood runs chill. This was the mental condition in which the Squire was. His troubles seemed to die away, though he had so many of them. Randolph, his middle-aged son, ceased to be an assailant and invader, and dropped into the dark like other troublesome things—not a son to be proud of, but one to put up with easily enough. John? he did not remember much about John; but he remembered very distinctly his old playfellow little Johnny, his little brother. “Eighteen months—only eighteen months between them:” he almost could hear the tone in which his mother said that long ago. If Johnny had lived he would have been—how old would he have been now? Johnny would have been seventy-four or so had he lived—but the Squire did not identify the number of years. There was eighteen months between them, that was all he could remember, and of that he sat and mused, often saying the words over to himself with a soft dreamy smile upon his face. He was often not quite clear that it was not Johnny himself, little Johnny, with whom he had been playing on the water-side.