A True Friend Part 51

Janetta was silent and went on with some needle-work.

"You don't like that, do you?" said Mrs. Brand, peering into her face.

"You think I'd be better away."

"No," said Janetta. But she could not say more.

"Do you know where he is?"

"He? Wyvis?"

"Yes, my husband."

"I have an address. I do not know whether he is there or not, but he would no doubt get a letter if sent to the place. Do you wish to write to him?"

"No. But I want you to write. Write and say that I am here. Ask him to come back."

"You had better write yourself."

"No. He would not read it. Write for me."

Janetta could not refuse. But she felt it one of the hardest tasks that she had ever had to perform in life. She was sorry for Juliet Brand, but she shrank with all her heart and soul from writing to Wyvis to return to her. Yet what else could she do?

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

THE FRUITS OF A LIE.

When she told old Mrs. Brand what she had done, she was amazed to mark the change which came over that sad and troubled countenance. Mrs.

Brand's face flushed violently, her eyes gleamed with a look as near akin to wrath as any which Janetta had ever seen upon it.

"You have promised to write to Wyvis?" she cried. "Why? What is it to you? Why should you write?"

"Why should I not?" asked Janetta, in surprise.

"He will never come back to her--never. And it is better so. She spoiled his life with her violence, her extravagance, her flirtations. He could not bear it; and why should he be brought back to suffer all again?"

"She is his wife still," said the girl, in a low tone.

"They are separated. She tried to get a divorce, even if she did not succeed. I do not call her his wife."

Janetta shook her head. "I cannot think of it as you do, then," she said, quietly. "She and Wyvis are married; and as they separated only for faults of temper, not for unfaithfulness, I do not believe that they have any right to divorce each other. Some people may think differently--I cannot see it in that way."

"You mean," said Mrs. Brand, with curious agitation of manner; "you mean that even if she had divorced him in America, you would not think him free--free to marry again?"

"No," Janetta answered, "I would not."

She felt a singular reluctance to answering the question, and she hoped that Mrs. Brand would ask her nothing more. She was relieved when Wyvis'

mother moved away, after standing perfectly still for a moment, with her hands clasped before her, a strange ashen shade of color disfiguring her handsome old face. Janetta thought the face had grown wonderfully tragic of late; but she hoped that when Juliet had left the house the poor mother would again recover the serenity of mind which she had gained during the past few months of Janetta's gentle companionship.

She wrote her letter to Wyvis, making it as brief and business-like as possible. She dwelt a good deal on Juliet's weakness, on her love for the boy, and her desire to see him once again. At the same time she added her own conviction that Mrs. Wyvis Brand was on the high road to recovery, and would soon be fairly strong and well. She dared not give any hint as to a possible reconciliation, but she felt, even as she penned her letter, that it was to this end that she was working. "And it is right," she said steadily to herself; "there is nothing to gain in disunion: everything to lose by unfaithfulness. It will be better for Julian--for all three--that father and mother should no longer be divided."

But although she argued thus, she had a somewhat different and entirely instinctive feeling in her heart. To begin with, she could not imagine persons more utterly unsuited to one another than Wyvis and his wife.

Juliet had no principles, no judgment, to guide her: she was impulsive and pa.s.sionate; she did not speak the truth, and she seemed in her wilder moments to care little what she did. Wyvis had faults--who knew them better than Janetta, who had studied his character with great and loving care?--but they were nor of the same kind. His mood was habitually sombre; Juliet loved pleasure and variety: his nature was a loving one, strong and deep, although undisciplined; but Juliet's light and fickle temperament made her shrink from and almost dislike characteristics so different from her own. And Janetta soon saw that in spite of her open defiance of her husband she was a little afraid of him; and she could well imagine that when Wyvis was angry he was a man of whom a woman might very easily be afraid.

Yet, when the letter was despatched, Janetta felt a sense of relief. She had at least done her duty, as she conceived of it. She did not know what the upshot might be; but at any rate, she had done her best to put matters in train towards the solving of the problem of Wyvis' married life.

She was puzzled during the next few days by some curious, indefinable change in Mrs. Brand's demeanor. The poor woman had of late seemed almost distraught; she had lost all care, apparently, for appearances, and went along the corridors moaning Wyvis' name sadly to herself, and wringing her hands as if in bitter woe. Her dress was neglected, and her hair unbrushed: indeed, when Janetta was too busy to give her a daughter's loving care, as it was her custom and her pleasure to do, poor Mrs. Brand roamed about the house looking like a madwoman. Her madness was, however, of a gentle kind: it took the form of melancholia, and manifested itself chiefly by continual restlessness and occasional bursts of weeping and lament.

In one of these outbreaks Janetta found her shortly after she had sent her letter to Wyvis, and tried by all means in her power to soothe and pacify her.

"Dear grandmother," she began--for she had caught the word from Julian, and Mrs. Brand liked her to use it--"why should you be so sad? Wyvis is coming home, Juliet is better, little Julian is well, and we are all happy."

"_You_ are not happy," said Mrs. Brand, throwing up her hands with a curiously tragic gesture. "You are miserable--miserable; and I am the most unhappy woman living!"

"No," I said Janetta, gently. "I am not miserable at all. And there are many women more unhappy than you are. You have a home, sons who love you, a grandson, friends--see how many things you have that other people want! Is it right to speak of yourself as unhappy?"

"Child," said the older woman, impressively, "you are young, and do not know what you say. Does happiness consist in houses and clothes, or even in children and friends? I have been happier in a cottage than in the grandest house. As for friends--what friends have I? None; my husband would never let me make friends lest I should expose my ignorance, and disgrace him by my low birth and bringing up. I have never had a woman friend."

"But your children," said Janetta, putting her arms tenderly round the desolate woman's neck.

"Ah, my children! When they were babies, they were a pleasure to me. But they have never been a pleasure since. They have been a toil and a pain and a bondage. That began when Wyvis was a little child, and Mr. Brand took a fancy to him and wanted to make every one believe that he was _his_ child, not John's. I foresaw that there would be trouble, but he would never listen to me. It was just a whim of the moment at first, and then, when he saw that the deceit troubled me, it became a craze with him. And whatever he said, I had to seem to agree with. I dared not contradict him. I hated the deceit, and the more I hated it, the more he loved it and practiced it in my hearing, until I used to be sick with misery. Oh, my dear, it is the worst of miseries to be forced into wrong-doing against your will."

"But why did you give way?" said Janetta, who could not fancy herself in similar circ.u.mstances being forced into anything at all.

"My dear, he made me, I dared not cross him. He made me suffer, and he made the children suffer if ever I opposed him. What could I do?" said the poor woman, twisting and untwisting her thin hands, and looking piteously into Janetta's face. "I was obliged to obey him--he was my husband, and so much above me, so much more of a gentleman than I ever was a lady. You know that I never could say him nay. He ruled me, as he used to say, with a rod of iron--for he made a boast of it, my dear--and he was never so happy, I think, as when he was torturing me and making me wince with pain."

"He must have been----" when Janetta stopped short: she could not say exactly what she thought of Mrs. Brand's second husband.

"He was cruel, my dear: cruel, that is, to women. Not cruel amongst his own set--among his equals, as he would have said--not cruel to boys. But always cruel to women. Some woman must have done him a grievous wrong one day--I never knew who she was; but I am certain that it was so; and that soured and embittered him. He was revenging himself on that other woman, I used to think, when he was cruel to me."

Janetta dared not speak.

"I did not mind his cruelty when it meant nothing but bodily pain, you know, my dear," Mrs. Brand continued patiently. "But it was harder for me to bear when it came to what might be called moral things. You see I loved him, and I could not say him nay. If he told me to lie, I had to do it. I never forgave myself for the lies I told at his bidding. And if he were here to tell me to do the same things I should do them still. If he had turned Mohammedan, and told me to trample on the Bible or the Cross, as I have read in missionary books that Christians have sometimes been bribed to do, I should have obeyed him. I was his body and soul, and all my misery has come out of that."

"How?" Janetta asked.

"I brought Wyvis up on a lie," the mother answered, her face growing woefully stern and rigid as she mentioned his name, "and it has been my punishment that he has always hated lies. I have trembled to hear him speak against falsehood--to catch his look of scorn when he began to see that his father did not speak truth. Very early he made me understand that he would never be likely to forgive us for the deception we practiced on him. For his good, you will say; but ah, my dear, deception is never for anybody's good. I never forgave myself, and Wyvis will never forgive me. And yet he is my child. Now you see the happiness that lies in having children."

Janetta tried to dissipate the morbid terror of the past, the morbid dread of Wyvis' condemnation, which hung like a shadow over the poor woman's mind, but she was far from being successful.

"You do not know," was all that Mrs. Brand would say. "You do not understand." And then she broke out more pa.s.sionately--

"I have done him harm all his life. His misery has been my fault. You heard him tell me so. It is true: there is no use denying it. And he knows it."

"He spoke in a moment of anger: he did not know what he said."