“They would not know me in the Lewis any more, Mairi. I have been too long away, and I am quite changed. It is many a time I will think of going back; but when I left the Lewis I was married, and now—. How could I go back to the Lewis, Mairi? They would look at me. They would ask questions. My father would come down to the quay, and he would say: ‘Sheila, have you come back alone?’ And all the story of it would go about the island, and every one would say I had been a bad wife, and my husband had gone away from me.”
“There is not any one,” said Mairi, with the tears starting to her eyes again—“not from one end of sa island to sa other—would say that of you, Miss Sheila; and there is no one would not come to meet you, and be glad sat you will come again to your own home. And as for going back, I will be ferry glad to go back whatever, for it was you I was come to see, and not any town; and I do not like this town, what I hef seen of it, and I will be ferry glad to go away wis you, Miss Sheila.”
Sheila did not answer. She felt that it was impossible she could go back to her own people with this disgrace upon her, and did not even argue the case with herself. All her trouble now was to find some harbor of refuge into which she could flee, so that she might have quiet and solitude, and an opportunity of studying all that had befallen her. The noise around her—the arrival of travelers, the transference of luggage, the screaming of trains—stunned and confused her; and she could only vaguely think of all the people she knew in London, to see to whom she could go for advice and direction. They were not many. One after the other she went over the acquaintances she had made, and not one of them appeared to her in the light of a friend. One friend she had who would have rejoiced to be of the least assistance to her, but her husband had forbidden her to hold communication with him, and she felt a strange sort of pride, even at this moment, in resolving to obey that injunction. In all this great city that lay around her there was no other to whom she could frankly and readily go. That one friend she had possessed before she came to London: in London she had not made another.
And yet it was necessary to do something, for who could tell but that her husband might come to this station in search of her? Mairi’s anxiety, too, was increasing every moment, insomuch that she was fairly trembling with excitement and fatigue. Sheila resolved that she would go down and throw herself on the tender mercies of that terrible old lady in Kensington Gore. For one thing, she instinctively sought the help of a woman in her present plight; and perhaps this harshly-spoken old lady would be gentle to her when all her story was told. Another thing that prompted this decision was a sort of secret wish to identify herself even yet with her husband’s family—to prove to herself, as it were, that they had not cast her off as being unworthy of him. Nothing was farther from her mind at this moment than any desire to pave the way for reconciliation and reunion with her husband. Her whole anxiety was to get away from him, to put an end to a state of things which she had found to be more than she could bear. And yet if she had had friends in London called respectively Mackenzie and Lavender, and if she had been equally intimate with both, she would at this moment have preferred to go for help to those bearing the name of Lavender.
There was doubtless something strangely inconsistent in this instinct of wifely loyalty and duty in a woman who had just voluntarily left her husband’s house. Lavender had desired her not to hold communication with Edward Ingram; even now she would respect his wish. Lavender would prefer that she should in any great extremity go to his aunt for assistance and counsel; and to his aunt, despite her own dislike of the woman, she would go. At this moment, when Sheila’s proud spirit had risen up in revolt against a system of treatment that had become insufferable to her, when she had been forced to leave her home and incur the contemptuous compassion of friends and acquaintances, if Edward Ingram himself had happened to meet her, and had begun to say sharp things of Lavender, she would have sharply recalled him to a sense of discretion that one must use in speaking to a wife of her husband.
The two homeless girls got into another cab, and were driven down to Kensington Gore. Sheila asked if she could see Mrs. Lavender. She knew that the old lady had had another bad fit; but she was supposed to be recovering rapidly. Mrs. Lavender would see her in her bedroom, and so Sheila went up. The girl could not speak.
“Yes, I see it—something wrong about that precious husband of yours,” said the old lady, watching her keenly. “I expected it. Go on. What is the matter?”
“I have left him,” Sheila said, with her face very pale, but no sign of emotion about the firm lips.
“Oh, good gracious, child! Left him? How many people know it?”
“No one but yourself and a young Highland girl, who has come up to see me.”