The Laurel Bush: An Old-Fashioned Love Story Read online

  Chapter 3.

  What is a "wrecked" life? One which the waves of inexorable fate havebeaten to pieces, or one that, like an unseaworthy ship, is ready to godown in any waters? What most destroy us? the things we might well blameourselves for, only we seldom do, our follies, blunders, errors, notcounting actual sins? or the things for which we can blame nobody butProvidence--if we dared--such as our losses and griefs, our sicknesses ofbody and mind, all those afflictions which we call "the visitation ofGod?" Ay, and so they are, but not sent in wrath, or for ultimate evil.No amount of sorrow need make any human life harmful to man or unholybefore God, as a discontented, unhappy life must needs be unholy in thesight of Him who in the mysterious economy of the universe seems to haveone absolute law--He wastes nothing. He modifies, transmutes,substitutes, re-applies material to new uses; but apparently by Himnothing is ever really lost, nothing thrown away.

  Therefore, I incline to believe, when I hear people talking of a"wrecked" existence, that whosoever is to blame, it is not Providence.

  Nobody could have applied the term to Fortune Williams, looking ather as she sat in the drawing-room window of a house at Brighton, justwhere the gray of the Esplanade meets the green of the Downs--a ladies'boarding-school, where she had in her charge two pupils, left behindfor the holidays, while the mistress took a few weeks' repose. She satwatching the sea, which was very beautiful, as even the Brighton sea canbe sometimes. Her eyes were soft and calm; her hands were folded on herblack silk dress, her pretty little tender-looking hands, unringed, forshe was still Miss Williams, still a governess.

  But even at thirty-five--she had now reached that age, nay, passedit--she was not what you would call "old-maidish." Perhaps because themotherly instinct, naturally very strong in her, had developed more andmore. She was one of those governesses--the only sort who ought ever toattempt to be governesses--who really love children, ay, despite theirnaughtinesses and mischievousnesses and worrying ways; who feel that,after all, these little ones are "of the kingdom of heaven," and that thetask of educating them for that kingdom somehow often brings us nearer toit ourselves.

  Her heart, always tender to children, had gone out to them more and moreevery year, especially after that fatal year when a man took it and brokeit. No, not broke it, but threw it carelessly away, wounding it sosorely that it never could be quite itself again. But it was a true andwarm and womanly heart still.

  She had never heard of him--Robert Roy--never once, in any way, sincethat Sunday afternoon when he said, "I will write tomorrow," and did notwrite, but let her drop from him altogether like a worthless thing.Cruel, somewhat, even to a mere acquaintance--but to her?

  Well, all was past and gone, and the tide of years had flowed over it.Whatever it was, a mistake, a misfortune, or a wrong, nobody knew anything about it. And the wound even was healed, in a sort of a way, andchiefly by the unconscious hands of these little "ministering angels,"who were angels that never hurt her, except by blotting their copy-booksor not learning their lessons.

  I know it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess shouldbe comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true tonature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other innatural gradation--maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which,ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is neverthelessimpossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these,excepting, perhaps, her one six months' dream of love and spring. Thatbeing over, she fell back upon autumn days and autumn pleasures--whichare very real pleasures, after all.

  As she sat with the two little girls leaning against her lap--they wereIndian children, unaccustomed to tenderness, and had already grown veryfond of her--there was a look in her face, not at all like an ancientmaiden or a governess, but almost motherly. You see the like in thefaces of the Virgin Mary, as the old monks used to paint her, quaint, andnot always lovely, but never common or coarse, and spiritualized by alook of mingled tenderness and sorrow into something beyond all beauty.

  This woman's face had it, so that people who had known Miss Williams asa girl were astonished to find her, as a middle-aged woman, grown "sogood-looking." To which one of her pupils once answered, naively, "Itis because she looks so good."

  But this was after ten years and more. Of the first half of those yearsthe less that is said, the better. She did not live; she merely enduredlife. Monotony without, a constant aching within--a restless gnawingwant, a perpetual expectation, half hope, half fear; no human being couldbear all this without being the worse for it, or the better. But thebetterness came afterward, not first.

  Sometimes her cravings to hear the smallest tidings of him, only if hewere alive or dead, grew into such an agony that, had it not been forher entire helplessness in the matter, she might have tried some meansof gaining information. But from his sudden change of plans, she wasignorant even of the name of the ship he had sailed by, the firm he hadgone to. She could do absolutely nothing, and learn nothing. Here wassomething like the "Affliction of Margaret," that poem of Wordsworth'swhich, when her little pupils recited it--as they often did--made herready to sob out loud from the pang of its piteous reality:

  "I look for ghosts, but none will force Their way to me: 'tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Betwixt the living and the dead: For surely then I should have sight Of him I wait for day and night With love and longings infinite."

  Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead;for her finger was still empty of that ring--her mother's ring--which hehad drawn off, promising its return "when he was dead or she wasmarried." This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her. Nor,indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her,these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscurevillage in the south of England, where she had lived as governess--firstin the squire's family, then the rector's.

  From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped toremain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a fewmonths. At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son hadreturned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone backagain to India. There was now, for the first time for half a century,not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.

  But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city,her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with apersistency for which her conscience smote her sometimes, knowing it wasnot wholly for their sakes. But they had never been near her, and shehad little expectation of seeing any of them ever again, since by thistime she had lived long enough to find out how easily people do driftasunder, and lose all clue to one another, unless some strong firm willor unconquerable habit of fidelity exists on one side or the other.

  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 maybe called so, which had been the bitterest drop in her cup since the timeshe left St. Andrews.

  The rector--a widower, and a feeble, gentle invalid, to whom naturallyshe had been kind and tender, regarding him with much the same sort ofmotherly feeling as she had regarded his children--suddenly asked her tobecome their mother in reality.

  It was a great shock and a pang: almost a temptation; for they all lovedher, and wished to keep her. She would have been such a blessing, sucha brightness, in that dreary home. And to a woman no longer young, whohad seen her youth pass without any brightness in it, God knows whatan allurement it is to feel she has still the power of brighteningother lives. If Fortune had yielded--if she had said yes, and marriedthe 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--thoseforlorn, half-educated, but affectionate girls--entreating her to "marrypapa, and make us all happ
y." She could not--how could she? She feltvery kindly to him. He had her sincere respect, almost affection; butwhen she looked into her own heart, she found there was not in it oneatom of love, never had been, for any man alive except Robert Roy. Whilehe 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, whichmight never have proved real happiness, because founded on aninsincerity.

  But the pain this cost was so great, the wrench of parting from her poorgirls so cruel, that after it Miss Williams had a sharp illness, thefirst serious illness of her life. She struggled through it, quietly andalone, in one of those excellent "Governesses' Homes," where every bodywas very kind to her--some more than kind, affectionate. It was strange,she often thought, what an endless amount of affection followed herwherever she went. She was by no means one of those women who go aboutthe world moaning that nobody loves them. Every body loved her, and sheknew 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 quietrooms and green garden; of the gentle, kindly hearted father, and the twoloving girls whom she could have made so happy, and perhaps won happinessherself in the doing of it.

  "I am a great fool, some people would say," thought she, with a sadsmile; "perhaps rather worse. Perhaps I am acting absolutely wrong inthrowing away my chance of doing good. But I can not help it--I can nothelp it."

  So she kept to her resolution, writing the occasional notes she hadpromised to write to her poor forsaken girls, without saying a word ofher illness; and when she grew better, though not strong enough toundertake a new situation, finding her money slipping away--though, withher good salaries and small wants, she was not poor, and had alreadybegun to lay up for a lonely old age--she accepted this temporaryhome at Miss Maclachlan's, at Brighton. Was it--so strange are theunder-currents which guide one's outward life--was it because she hadfound 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 wasat 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 thesunshine glitter on the far-away ocean. The very smell of the sea-weed,the lap-lap of the little waves, brought back old recollections sovividly--old thoughts, some bitter, some sweet, but the sweetnessgenerally 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 notjoy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay andstronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appearedlittle better than a delusion, a dream. Once, and by one only, her wholenature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right entirely satisfied.And nothing had ever shattered this ideal. She clung to it, as we clingto the memory of our dead children, who are children forever.

  With a passionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy's goodness, hisrare and noble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she mighthave judged severely, had it happened to another person--his total,unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself. It was utterlyirreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless tounravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery inheaven and earth, with the humble cry, "I can not understand--I love."

  She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desertof despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost aconviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow. This day,even, when, after an hour's delicious idleness, she roused herself totake her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle whilethey played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividlyback that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiarstep, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtakeher on the St. Andrews shore--Robert Roy, a young man, with his life allbefore him, as was hers. Now she was middle-aged, and he--he must beover forty by this time. How strange!

  Stranger still that there had never occurred to her one possibility--thathe "was not," that God had taken him. But this her heart absolutelyrefused to accept. So long as he was in it, the world would never bequite empty to her. Afterward--But, as I said, there are some thingswhich can not be faced and this was one of them.

  All else she had faced long ago. She did not grieve now. As she walkedwith her children, listening to their endless talk with that patientsympathy which made all children love her, and which she often found wasa better help to their education than dozens of lessons, there was on herface that peaceful expression which is the greatest preservative ofyouth, the greatest antidote to change. And so it was no wonder that atall lad, passing and re-passing on the Esplanade with another youth,looked at her more than once with great curiosity, and advanced withhesitating politeness.

  "I beg your pardon, ma'am, if I mistake; but you are so like a lady Ionce knew, and am now looking for. Are you Miss Williams?"

  "My name is Williams, certainly; and you"--something in the curly lighthair, 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 shakeit off. "And I call myself very clever to have remembered you, though Iwas such a little fellow when you left us, and I have only seen yourphotograph since. But you are not a bit altered--not one bit. And as Iknew by your last letter to Archy that you were at Brighton, I thoughtI'd risk it and speak. Hurra! How very jolly!"

  He had grown a handsome lad, the pretty wee Davie, an honest-looking ladtoo, apparently, and she was glad to see him. From the dignity of hiseighteen years and five feet ten of height, he looked down upon thegoverness, and patronized her quite tenderly--dismissing his friend andwalking home with her, telling her on the way all his affairs and that ofhis 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. Iremember poor old grannie, and her cottage, and the garden, and theLinks, 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 totallysilent for so many years, made Fortune's heart throb till its beatingwas 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 yearor 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 amurmured excuse of being "tired." One of her little girls crept besideher, stealing a hand in hers. She held it fast, her own shook so; butgradually she grew quite herself again. "I have been ill," sheexplained, "and can not walk far. Let us sit down here a little. Youwere speaking about Mr. Roy, David?"

  "Yes. What a good fellow he was! We called him Rob Roy, I remember, butonly behind his back. He was strict, but he was a jolly old soul for allthat. I believe I should know him again any day, as I did you. Butperhaps he is dead; people die pretty fast abroad, and ten years is along 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 thecare of poor old grannie, as ours was. We thought it so odd, after shewas dead, you know."

  Thus the boy chattered on--his tongue had not shortened with hisincreasing inches--and every idle word sank down deep in his oldgoverness's heart.

  Then it was only her whom Robert Roy had forsaken. He had written to hisboys, probably would have gone on writing had they answered his letter.He was n
either faithless nor forgetful. With an ingenuity that mighthave brought to any listener a smile or a tear, Miss Williams led theconversation round again till she could easily ask more concerning thatone letter; but David, remembered little or nothing, except that it wasdated from Shanghai, for his brothers had had a discussion whetherShanghai was in China or Japan. Then, boy-like, they had forgotten thewhole matter.

  "Yes, by this time every body had forgotten him," thought Fortune toherself, when having bidden David good-by at her door and arranged tomeet him again--he was on a visit at Brighton before matriculating atOxford next term--she sat down in own room, with a strangely bewilderedfeeling. "Mine, all mine," she said, and her heart closed itself overhim, her old friend at least, if nothing more, with a tenacity oftenderness as silent as it was strong.

  From that day, though she saw, and was determined henceforward to see, asmuch as she could of young David Dalziel, she never once spoke to him ofMr. Roy.

  Still, to have the lad coming about her was a pleasure, a fond link withthe past, and to talk to him about his future was a pleasure too. He wasthe one of all the four--Mr. Roy always said so--who had "brains" enoughto 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 hadleft him few English friends. He was an affectionate, simple-heartedlad, and now that his mischievous days were done, was taking to thoroughhard work. He attached himself to his old governess with an enthusiasmthat a lad in his teens often conceives for a woman still young enough tobe sympathetic, and intelligent enough to guide without ruling the errantfancy of that age. She, too, soon grew very fond of him. It made herstrangely happy, this sudden rift of sunshine out of the never-forgottenheaven 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; butsometimes he spoke, and then she listened. It seemed to cheer her forhours, only to hear that name. She grew stronger, gayer, younger. Everybody said how much good the sea was doing her, and so it was; but notexactly in the way people thought. The spell of silence upon her lifehad been broken, and though she knew all sensible persons would esteemher in this, as in that other matter, a great "fool," still she could notstifle 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 thatlay between them two, seemed to carry a whispering message and lay it ather 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, andthrew a newspaper down at her door, where she was standing.

  "An Indian paper my mother has just sent. There's something in it thatwill interest you, and--"

  His horse galloped off with the unfinished sentence; and supposing it wassomething concerning his family, she put the paper in her pocket to readat leisure while she sat on the beach. She had almost forgotten it, asshe watched the waves, full of that pleasant idleness and dreamy peace sonew in her life, and which the sound of the sea so often brings topeaceful hearts, who have no dislike to its monotony, no dread of thosesolemn thoughts of infinitude, time and eternity, God and death and love,which it unconsciously gives, and which I think is the secret why somepeople say they have "such a horror of the sea-side."

  She had none; she loved it, for its sights and sounds were mixed up withall the happiness of her young days. She could have sat all thissunshiny morning on the beach doing absolutely nothing, had she notremembered David's newspaper; which, just to please him, she must lookthrough. She did so, and in the corner, among the brief list of names inthe obituary, she saw that of "Roy." Not himself, as she soon found, assoon as she could see to read, in the sudden blindness that came overher. 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 wasmarried. His "only and beloved daughter?" Oh! how beloved she couldwell 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 inthis woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her firstfew minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he wasmarried and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child andlost it--he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thoughtof his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief--thegrief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in anewspaper 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 doessometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. Shewas not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her asif 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 ofher 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 watchingover her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and ahalf old! Then he must have been married a good while--long and longafter she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can goon thinking of another woman's husband.

  One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteousdespair, which nobody heard but God--and she was not afraid of Hishearing--and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his childin his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totallydifferent man.

  She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it wasthe same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totallydifferent woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved onthis side the grave, but also something was found.

  "He is alive," she said to herself, with the same strange joy; for nowshe knew where he was, and what had happened to him. The silence of allthese years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, ina sense, was found.

  Fortune Williams rose up and walked, in more senses than one; went roundto fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly openeddelight of children, the Brighton Aquarium; staid a little with them,admiring the fishes; and when she reached home, and found David Dalzielin the drawing-room, met him and thanked him for bringing her thenewspaper. "I suppose it was on account of that obituary notice of Mr.Roy's child," said she, calmly naming the name now. "What a sad thing!But still I am glad to know he is alive and well. So will you be. Shallyou write to him?"

  "Well, I don't know," answered the lad, carelessly crumpling up thenewspaper and throwing it on the fire. Miss Williams made a faintmovement to snatch it out, then disguised the gesture in some way, andsilently watched it burn. "I don't quite see the use of writing. He's afamily man now, and must have forgotten all about his old friends. Don'tyou think so?"

  "Perhaps; only he was not the sort of person easily to forget."

  She could defend him now; she could speak of him, and did speak more thanonce afterward, when David referred to the matter. And then the ladquitted Brighton for Oxford, and she was left in her old loneliness.

  A loneliness which I will not speak of. She herself never referred tothat time. After it, she roused herself to begin her life anew in afresh home, to work hard, not only for daily bread but for that humbleindependence which she was determined to win before the dark hour whenthe most helpful become helpless, and the most independent are drivento fall a piteous burden into the charitable hands of friends orstrangers--a thing to her so terrible that to save herself from thepossibility of it, she who had never leaned upon any body, never had anybody to lean on, became her one almost morbid desire.

  She had no dread of a solitary old age but an old age beholden to eitherpublic or private charity was to her intol
erable; and she had now fewyears left her to work in--a governess's life wears women out very fast.She determined to begin to work again immediately, laying by as much aspossible yearly against the days when she could work no more; consultedMiss Maclachlan, who was most kind; and then sought and was just aboutgoing to another situation, with the highest salary she had yet earned,when an utterly unexpected change altered every thing.