The Interloper

by Violet Jacob

He was face to face with the secret of his own life, and, in an instant, he understood the impression of familiarity produced upon him by the picture, for the ‘R. F.’ told him all that he had not known. There was no drop in his veins of the blood of the race whose name he bore, for he was no Speid. Now all was plain. He was Robert Fullarton’s illegitimate son.

He sat in the sleeping house looking at the little box which had wrecked his hopes more effectually than anything he had experienced that day. Now he understood Lady Eliza; now he realized how justifiable was her opposition. How could he, knowing what he knew, and what no doubt every soul around him knew, stand up before his neighbours and take Cecilia by the hand? how ask her to share the name which everyone could say was not his own? how endure that she should face with him a state of affairs which, for the first time, he clearly understood? He had been morally certain, before, that the bar sinister shadowed him, but, though he could have asked her to live under it with him when its existence was only known to herself and to him, the question being a social, not an ethical one, it would be an impossibility when the whole world was aware of it; when the father who could not acknowledge him was his neighbour. Never should she spend her life in a place where she might be pointed at as the wife of the nameless man. Ah, how well he understood Lady Eliza!

But, thoroughly as he believed himself able to appreciate her motives, he had no idea of the extraordinary mixture of personal feeling in which they were founded, and he credited her with the sole desire to save Cecilia from an intolerable position. Though he never doubted that those among whom he lived were as enlightened as he himself now was, the substance of the posthumous revival of rumours, attributed by many to gossip arising from Mr. Speid’s actions after his wife’s death, was, in reality, the only clue possessed by anyone.

By an act the generosity of which he admired with all his soul, his so-called father had legitimized him as far as lay in his power. No person could bring any proof against him of being other than he appeared, and in the eyes of the law he was as much Speid of Whanland as the man he had succeeded. He admired him all the more when he remembered that it was not an overwhelming affection for himself which had led him to take the step, but pure, abstract justice to a human being, who, through no fault of his own, had come into the world at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, whatever his legal position, he was an interloper, a pretender. He had identified himself with Whanland and loved every stick and stone in it, but he had been masquerading, for all that. What a trick she had played him, that beautiful creature upon the wall!

That the initials painted on the box and engraved on the frame inside were C. L. and not C. S. proved one thing. However guilty she had been, it was no transient influence which had ruined Clementina. Had any chance revealed the miniature’s existence to Mr. Speid, it would have explained the letter he had received from her father after his own refusal by her, and it would have shown him an everyday tragedy upon which he had unwittingly intruded, to his own undoing and to hers. Like many another, she had given her affections to a younger son—for Robert, in inheriting Fullarton, had succeeded a brother—and, her parents being ambitious, the obstacle which has sundered so many since the world began had sundered these two also. Mr. Lauder was a violent and determined man, and his daughter, through fear of him, had kept secret the engagement which she knew must be a forlorn hope so soon as he should discover it. When chance, which played traitor to the couple, brought it to light, the sword fell, and Robert, banished from the presence of the Lauder family, returned to Fullarton and to the society of his devoted elder brother, who asked no more than that the younger, so much cleverer than himself, should share all he had. The miniature, which he had gone to Edinburgh to sit for, and for which he had caused the little box to be contrived, was conveyed to Clementina with much difficulty and some bribery. He had chosen Italian words to surround it, for he had made the ‘grand tour’ with his brother, and had some knowledge of that language. There is a fashion, even in sentiment, and, in those days, Italian was as acceptable a vehicle for it to the polite world as French would be now. She yielded to circumstances which she had no more strength to fight and married Mr. Speid a couple of years later; and she kept the relic locked away among her most cherished treasures. She had not changed, not one whit, and when, at her husband’s desire, she sat for her portrait to David Martin, then in the zenith of his work in the Scottish capital, she held the little box in her hand, telling the painter it was too pretty to go down to oblivion, and must be immortalized also. Martin, vastly admiring his sitter, replied gallantly, and poor Clementina, who never allowed her dangerous treasure to leave her hand, sat in agony till it was painted, and she could return it to the locked drawer in which it was kept. There was a vague hope in her mind that the man she had not ceased to love might, one day, see the portrait and understand the silent message it contained.

Meanwhile, at Fullarton, Robert, who had been absent when Clementina came to Whanland as a bride, was trying to cure his grief, and, superficially, succeeding well enough to make him think himself a sounder man than he was.

He went about among the neighbours far and near, plunged into the field-sports he loved, and, in so doing, saw a great deal of Mr. Lamont, of Morphie, and his sister, a rather peculiar but companionable young woman, whose very absence of feminine charm made him feel an additional freedom in her society.

At this time his elder brother, who had a delicate heart, quitted this world quietly one morning, leaving the household awestruck and Robert half frantic with grief. In this second sorrow he clung more closely to his friends, and was more than ever thrown into the company of Lady Eliza. To her, this period was the halcyon time of her life, and to him, there is no knowing what it might have become if Clementina Speid had not returned from the tour she was making with her husband, to find her old lover installed a few miles from her door. Was ever woman so conspired against by the caprices of Fate?

Afterwards, when her short life ended in that stirring of conscience which opened her lips, she confessed all. She had now lain for years expiating her sin upon the shore by Garviekirk.

And that sin had risen to shadow her son; he remembered how he had been moved to a certain comprehension on first seeing her pictured face, without even knowing the sum of the forces against her. Little had he thought how sorely the price of her misdoing was to fall upon himself. It would be a heavy price, involving more than the loss of Cecilia, for it would involve banishment too. He could not stay at Whanland. In time, possibly, when she had married—he ground his teeth as he told himself this—when she was the wife of some thrice-fortunate man whose name was his own, he might return to the things he loved and finish his life quietly among them. But not this year nor the next, not in five years nor in ten. He had no more heart for pretence. This was not his true place; he should never have come to take up a part which the very gods must have laughed to see him assume. What a dupe, what a fool he had been!