Since the Dalziels she had only lived in the two families before named, and had been lately driven from the last one by a catastrophe, if it may be called so, which had been the bitterest drop in her cup since the time she left St. Andrews.
The rector--a widower, and a feeble, gentle invalid, to whom naturally she had been kind and tender, regarding him with much the same sort of motherly feeling as she had regarded his children--suddenly asked her to become their mother in reality.
It was a great shock and a pang: almost a temptation; for they all loved her, and wished to keep her. She would have been such a blessing, such a brightness, in that dreary home. And to a woman no longer young, who had seen her youth pa.s.s without any brightness in it, G.o.d knows what an allurement it is to feel she has still the power of brightening other lives. If Fortune had yielded--if she had said yes, and married the rector--it would have been hardly wonderful, scarcely blamable.
Nor would it have been the first time that a good, conscientious, tender-hearted woman has married a man for pure tenderness.
But she did not do it; not even when they clung around her--those forlorn, half-educated, but affectionate girls--entreating her to "marry papa, and make us all happy." She could not--how could she? She felt very kindly to him. He had her sincere respect, almost affection; but when she looked into her own heart, she found there was not in it one atom of love, never had been, for any man alive except Robert Roy. While he was unmarried, for her to marry would be impossible.
And so she had the wisdom and courage to say to herself, and to them all, "This can not be;" to put aside the cup of attainable happiness, which might never have proved real happiness, because founded on an insincerity.
But the pain this cost was so great, the wrench of parting from her poor girls so cruel, that after it Miss Williams had a sharp illness, the first serious illness of her life. She struggled through it, quietly and alone, in one of those excellent "Governesses" Homes," where every body was very kind to her--some more than kind, affectionate. It was strange, she often thought, what an endless amount of affection followed her wherever she went. She was by no means one of those women who go about the world moaning that n.o.body loves them. Every body loved her, and she knew it--every body whose love was worth having--except Robert Roy.
Still her mind never changed; not even when, in the weakness of illness, there would come vague dreams of that peaceful rectory, with its quiet rooms and green garden; of the gentle, kindly hearted father, and the two loving girls whom she could have made so happy, and perhaps won happiness herself in the doing of it.
"I am a great fool, some people would say," thought she, with a sad smile; "perhaps rather worse. Perhaps I am acting absolutely wrong in throwing away my chance of doing good. But I can not help it--I can not help it."
So she kept to her resolution, writing the occasional notes she had promised to write to her poor forsaken girls, without saying a word of her illness; and when she grew better, though not strong enough to undertake a new situation, finding her money slipping away--though, with her good salaries and small wants, she was not poor, and had already begun to lay up for a lonely old age--she accepted this temporary home at Miss Maclachlan"s, at Brighton. Was it--so strange are the under-currents which guide one"s outward life--was it because she had found a curious charm in the old lady"s Scotch tongue, unheard for years?
That the two little pupils were Indian children, and that the house was at the seaside?--and she had never seen the sea since she left St.
Andrews.
It was going back to the days of her youth to sit, as now, watching the sunshine glitter on the far-away ocean. The very smell of the sea-weed, the lap-lap of the little waves, brought back old recollections so vividly--old thoughts, some bitter, some sweet, but the sweetness generally over-coming the bitterness.
"I have had all the joy that the world could bestow; I have lived--I have loved."
So sings the poet, and truly. Though to this woman love had brought not joy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay and stronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appeared little better than a delusion, a dream. Once, and by one only, her whole nature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right entirely satisfied.
And nothing had ever shattered this ideal. She clung to it, as we cling to the memory of our dead children, who are children forever.
With a pa.s.sionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy"s goodness, his rare and n.o.ble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she might have judged severely, had it happened to another person--his total, unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself. It was utterly irreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless to unravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery in heaven and earth, with the humble cry, "I can not understand--I love."
She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desert of despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost a conviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow. This day, even, when, after an hour"s delicious idleness, she roused herself to take her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle while they played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividly back that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiar step, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtake her on the St. Andrews sh.o.r.e--Robert Roy, a young man, with his life all before him, as was hers. Now she was middle-aged, and he--he must be over forty by this time. How strange!
Stranger still that there had never occurred to her one possibility--that he "was not," that G.o.d had taken him. But this her heart absolutely refused to accept. So long as he was in it, the world would never be quite empty to her. Afterward--But, as I said, there are some things which can not be faced and this was one of them.
All else she had faced long ago. She did not grieve now. As she walked with her children, listening to their endless talk with that patient sympathy which made all children love her, and which she often found was a better help to their education than dozens of lessons, there was on her face that peaceful expression which is the greatest preservative of youth, the greatest antidote to change. And so it was no wonder that a tall lad, pa.s.sing and re-pa.s.sing on the Esplanade with another youth, looked at her more than once with great curiosity, and advanced with hesitating politeness.
"I beg your pardon, ma"am, if I mistake; but you are so like a lady I once knew, and am now looking for. Are you Miss Williams?"
"My name is Williams, certainly; and you"--something in the curly light hair, the mischievous twinkle of the eye, struck her--"you can not be, it is scarcely possible--David Dalziel?"
"But, I am, though," cried the lad, shaking her hand as if he would shake it off. "And I call myself very clever to have remembered you, though I was such a little fellow when you left us, and I have only seen your photograph since. But you are not a bit altered--not one bit. And as I knew by your last letter to Archy that you were at Brighton, I thought I"d risk it and speak. Hurra! How very jolly!"
He had grown a handsome lad, the pretty wee Davie, an honest-looking lad too, apparently, and she was glad to see him. From the dignity of his eighteen years and five feet ten of height, he looked down upon the governess, and patronized her quite tenderly--dismissing his friend and walking home with her, telling her on the way all his affairs and that of his family with the volubility of little David Dalziel at St. Andrews.
"No, I"ve not forgotten St. Andrews one bit, though I was so small. I remember poor old grannie, and her cottage, and the garden, and the Links, and the golfing, and Mr. Roy. By-the-by, what has become of Mr.
Roy?"
The suddenness of the question, nay, the very sound of a name totally silent for so many years, made Fortune"s heart throb till its beating was actual pain. Then came a sudden desperate hope, as she answered:
"I can not tell. I have never heard any thing of him. Have you?"
"No--yet, let me see. I think Archy once got a letter from him, a year or so after he went away; but we lost it somehow, and never answered it.
We have never heard any thing since."
Miss Williams sat down on one of the benches facing the sea, with a murmured excuse of being "tired." One of her little girls crept beside her, stealing a hand in hers. She held it fast, her own shook so; but gradually she grew quite herself again. "I have been ill," she explained, "and can not walk far. Let us sit down here a little. You were speaking about Mr. Roy, David?"
"Yes. What a good fellow he was! We called him Rob Roy, I remember, but only behind his back. He was strict, but he was a jolly old soul for all that. I believe I should know him again any day, as I did you. But perhaps he is dead; people die pretty fast abroad, and ten years is a long time, isn"t it?"
"A long time. And you never got any more letters?"
"No; or if they did come, they were lost, being directed probably to the care of poor old grannie, as ours was. We thought it so odd, after she was dead, you know."
Thus the boy chattered on--his tongue had not shortened with his increasing inches--and every idle word sank down deep in his old governess"s heart.
Then it was only her whom Robert Roy had forsaken. He had written to his boys, probably would have gone on writing had they answered his letter.
He was neither faithless nor forgetful. With an ingenuity that might have brought to any listener a smile or a tear, Miss Williams led the conversation round again till she could easily ask more concerning that one letter; but David, remembered little or nothing, except that it was dated from Shanghai, for his brothers had had a discussion whether Shanghai was in China or j.a.pan. Then, boy-like, they had forgotten the whole matter.
"Yes, by this time every body had forgotten him," thought Fortune to herself, when having bidden David good-by at her door and arranged to meet him again--he was on a visit at Brighton before matriculating at Oxford next term--she sat down in own room, with a strangely bewildered feeling. "Mine, all mine," she said, and her heart closed itself over him, her old friend at least, if nothing more, with a tenacity of tenderness as silent as it was strong.
From that day, though she saw, and was determined henceforward to see, as much as she could of young David Dalziel, she never once spoke to him of Mr. Roy.
Still, to have the lad coming about her was a pleasure, a fond link with the past, and to talk to him about his future was a pleasure too. He was the one of all the four--Mr. Roy always said so--who had "brains" enough to become a real student; and instead of following the others to India, he was to go to Oxford, and do his best there. His German education had left him few English friends. He was an affectionate, simple-hearted lad, and now that his mischievous days were done, was taking to thorough hard work. He attached himself to his old governess with an enthusiasm that a lad in his teens often conceives for a woman still young enough to be sympathetic, and intelligent enough to guide without ruling the errant fancy of that age. She, too, soon grew very fond of him. It made her strangely happy, this sudden rift of sunshine out of the never-forgotten heaven of her youth, now almost as far off as heaven itself.
I have said she never spoke to David about Mr. Roy, nor did she; but sometimes he spoke, and then she listened. It seemed to cheer her for hours, only to hear that name. She grew stronger, gayer, younger. Every body said how much good the sea was doing her, and so it was; but not exactly in the way people thought. The spell of silence upon her life had been broken, and though she knew all sensible persons would esteem her in this, as in that other matter, a great "fool," still she could not stifle a vague hope that some time or other her blank life might change.
Every little wave that swept in from the mysterious ocean, the ocean that lay between them two, seemed to carry a whispering message and lay it at her feet, "Wait and be patient, wait and be patient."
She did wait, and the message came at last.
One day David Dalziel called, on one of his favorite daily rides, and threw a newspaper down at her door, where she was standing.
"An Indian paper my mother has just sent. There"s something in it that will interest you, and--"
His horse galloped off with the unfinished sentence; and supposing it was something concerning his family, she put the paper in her pocket to read at leisure while she sat on the beach. She had almost forgotten it, as she watched the waves, full of that pleasant idleness and dreamy peace so new in her life, and which the sound of the sea so often brings to peaceful hearts, who have no dislike to its monotony, no dread of those solemn thoughts of infinitude, time and eternity, G.o.d and death and love, which it unconsciously gives, and which I think is the secret why some people say they have "such a horror of the sea-side."
She had none; she loved it, for its sights and sounds were mixed up with all the happiness of her young days. She could have sat all this sunshiny morning on the beach doing absolutely nothing, had she not remembered David"s newspaper; which, just to please him, she must look through. She did so, and in the corner, among the brief list of names in the obituary, she saw that of "Roy." Not himself, as she soon found, as soon as she could see to read, in the sudden blindness that came over her. Not himself. Only his child.
"On Christmas-day, at Shanghai, aged three and a half years, Isabella, the only and beloved daughter of Robert and Isabella Roy."
He was alive, then. That was her first thought, almost a joyful one, showing how deep had been her secret dread of the contrary. And he was married. His "only and beloved daughter?" Oh! how beloved she could well understand. Married, and a father; and his child was dead.
Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and lost it--he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thought of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief--the grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a newspaper that the man they loved was married to another--did not come.
At least not at once. It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. She was not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her as if it had happened long ago--as if she had always known it must happen, and was not astonished.
His "only and beloved daughter!" The words sung themselves in and out of her brain, to the murmur of the sea. How he must have loved the child!
She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and a half old! Then he must have been married a good while--long and long after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go on thinking of another woman"s husband.
One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous despair, which n.o.body heard but G.o.d--and she was not afraid of His hearing--and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his child in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally different man.
She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was the same sea, the same sh.o.r.e, the same earth and sky, was a totally different woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on this side the grave, but also something was found.