Girlhood and Womanhood Part 19

Why had none stepped in between her and this cruel mockery and temptation? "Mother, mother, how could you be false to your trust? Were you, too, cheated and bereft of your due? left a cold, shrinking woman, withering, not suddenly, but for a whole lifetime?"

Leslie sat long weighing her burden, until a tap at the door and Bridget Kennedy's voice disturbed her. "Earlscraig is gone, madam; Master Hector is sitting alone with his thoughts in your room. May be, he is missing his cup of tea, or, if you please, madam, his lady's company that he is used to at this hour."

Leslie rose mechanically, walked out, and entered her drawing-room. What did he there, his eyes fixed on the broken turret of Earlscraig, defined clearly on the limited horizon, his memory hovering over the fate of fair Alice Boswell?

Was it horrible to be jealous of a dead woman? to wish herself in that ever-present grave, sacred to him as the holiest, though no priest blessed it, no house of G.o.d threw over it the shadow of the finger pointed to heaven--the cross that bore a world's Saviour? But that swift and glowing pa.s.sage from life and light and love, such as his to darkness, forgetfulness--eternity. How could she have faced it? Bridget, her old enemy, had prayed she might be delivered from it, whatever her trials.

"Nigel Boswell is gone at last; he was an old playfellow, and fortune and he have been playing a losing game ever since," he said, in unsuspecting explanation, as he joined her where she sat in her favourite window.

She did not answer him; she was stunned, and sat gazing abstractedly on the wallflowers rendering golden the mossy court wall, or far away on the misty Otter sea. She thought he had relapsed into his reveries, was with the past, the spring-tide of his life, the pa.s.sion of his early manhood, while she was a little school-girl tripping demurely and safely along the crowded Glasgow streets. If she had looked up at him she would have seen that he was observing her curiously--wondering where his young wife had acquired that serious brow, those fixed eyes.

"What are you thinking of, Leslie?"

"Nothing; I cannot tell," hastily and resolutely.

"That sounds suspicious." He put his hand on her head, as he had a habit of doing, but she recoiled from him.

"A shy little brain that dreads a finger of mine on its soft covering must discover its secrets. Are they treasures, Leslie?"

Oh, blind, absent, reckless man, what treasure-keeper kept such ward!

Lightly won, was lightly held.

Leslie struggled with her oppression for several dull feverish days; then, driven by her own goading thoughts, her sense of injury, her thirst for justice and revenge, she left the house and wandered out on the beach to breathe free air, to forget herself in exertion, fatigue, stupor. It was evening, dark with vapour--gloomy, with a rising gale, and the sea was beginning to mutter and growl. Leslie sat shivering by the water's edge, fascinated by the sympathy of nature with her bitter hopelessness. A voice on the banks and meadows, even in the chill night air, whispered of spring advancing rapidly, with buds and flowers, with sap, fragrance, and warmth, and the tender grace of its flood of green; but here, by the waves, a pa.s.sing thunder-cloud, a stealthy mist, a whistling breeze, darkened the scene, and restored barren, dismal winter in a single hour. The night drooped down without moon or star, and still Leslie sat listless, drowsy with sorrow, until as she rose she sank back sick and giddy; and then the idea of premature death, of pa.s.sing away without a sign, of hiding her pain under the silent earth that has covered so many sins and sorrows, first laid hold of her.

The notion was not fairly welcome: she was young; her heart had been recently wrung; she had been listless and disappointed--but she had loved her few isolated engagements, her country life, her household dignity, the protection of her husband. She could not divest herself of these feelings at once. She feared the great unknown into which she should enter; but still death did not appal her as it might have done: it was something to be scanned, waited for, and submitted to, as a true sovereign.

The cold wind pierced her through and through; the rain fell; she could not drag herself from the shelving rock, though the tide was rising. She felt frozen, her limbs were like lead, and her mind was wandering, or lapsing into unconsciousness.

She did not hear a call, an approaching foot; but her sinking pulses leapt up with sudden power and pa.s.sion when Hector Garret stooped over her, and endeavoured to raise her.

"Here, Bridget, she is found! Leslie, why have you remained out so late?

You have been sleeping; you have made yourself ill. How can you be so rash, so imprudent? It is childish--wrong. You have made us anxious--distressed us. Poor old Bridget has stumbled further in search of you, this squally night, than she has ventured on the sunniest morning for many a year."

He was excited, aggrieved; he upbraided her. He had sympathy for old Bridget's infirmities; he knew nothing of his wife's misery.

Leslie resisted him as she had done since that day, slipped from his clasp, strove to steady herself, and to walk alone in her weakness.

Bridget put her feeble arm around her.

"Lean on me, madam, and I will lean on you, for I am frail, and the road is rough, and the wind is blowing fresh, besides the darkness." "I knew that would quiet her," she muttered. "Poor old Bridget indeed! said Master Hector. Poor colleen! misled, misguided. Cruel makes cruel. St.

Patrick could not save himself from the hard necessity."

Hector Garret was content since he saw Leslie safe; he accused her of captiousness and nervousness, but it was the waywardness and perversity of illness. He had tried her simple nature with too much alienation from her kind; she had grown morbid on the baneful diet, tutored though she had been to self-dependence. He had been to blame; but her merry temper would come back, and the rose to her cheek, and the spring to her foot, with other ties, other occupations--dearer, more sufficient.

V.--THE MOTHER AND CHILD.

"How is the poor child, Bridget Kennedy? Does she fare as she should do?"

"The child is as fine a child, Master Hector, as if she had been a boy, and a Garret, on both sides of the house, and will thrive if her mother will let her. There are mothers that would hinder their bairns in the death-rattle, and there are others that so watch their little ones that the angels of G.o.d are displaced from their cradles; and the weary human care haunts and hara.s.ses the infant, and stops its growth."

"I am not learned in these matters, Bridget. You brought me up; I trust you to rear my children."

"None shall rear them but their mother, Master Hector; none shall come between her and them. I have ruled long at Otter, but I dare not dispute with her there."

"Settle it as you like. I did not mean them--I was not thinking of them at all. I asked for their mother. You have experience. Is she well--happy as she should be?"

"I wish you would not provoke such mistakes, Master Hector," said Bridget, pettishly; "I wish you would find some other name for your wife. You should know best, but is it suitable to term the nursling and the parent by the same t.i.tle? I am a foolish old woman, but it seems strange to me. Your father did not confound them."

"Ah! I dare say not. We will find a Christian name for the new comer, and end the Comedy of Errors, since you dislike it, and Leslie too, doubtless; for women are nice on these points."

"Leslie, what shall we call the baby?" inquired Hector Garret the next time he stood by his wife's side, wishing to divert her by a pleasant difficulty, and to vary the expression of those large eyes--larger now than ever--which, he knew not why, fascinated him by the intensity of their gaze. "I cause Bridget to blunder oddly between you two; so set her at rest by fixing as soon as you can the momentous question."

"I have fixed," answered Leslie, quietly.

"I commend your foresight; a man, now, would have left the alternative open to the last."

"Mrs. Garret's first daughter must be named after Mrs. Garret's mother,"

declared Bridget, authoritatively.

"No," said Leslie, hastily; "I have named her after myself--if you do not object," she added, with a flush, half shame, half pride.

"I? Oh, no; do as you will. It will not solve Bridget's puzzle; but I am content. Leslie is a bonnie name."

Leslie compressed her lip.

"My mother's name is bonnier," she said, abruptly; "my mother's name is Alice."

He started, and gazed at her keenly while she continued, falteringly, but with a stubborn will in her speech:--

"I wish my baby to be mine in everything, particularly as she is a girl. I am neither wise nor clever, nor strong now. I fear I am often peevish; but you will excuse me, because I am a weak, ignorant woman.

Such defects are not fatal in a mother; hundreds have overcome them for their children. I trust that I will be, if not what a better woman might have been, at least more to my child than any other can be. Her mother!--so holy a tie must confer some peculiar fitness. Yes; my baby is mine, and must lie on my knees, and learn to laugh in my poor face.

And so I wish her to have my name also, that there may be a complete union between us."

Hector Garret knew now what intelligence had reached his wife, and while the old wound burnt afresh, the shyness of his still but sensitive nature, the pride of the grave strong man, were offended and injured.

But with regard to his wife he was only conscious of the petulant, unreasonable, unkind surface; he did not sound her deep resentment and jealousy; he did not dream of the anguish of the secret cry whose outward expression struck upon his vexed ears; he did not hear her inner protest: "I will not have my baby bear his love's name, recall her to him, be a memorial of her--be addressed with fondness as much for the sake of old times as for her own, the innocent!--be brought up to resemble Alice, trained to follow in her footsteps, until, if I died, my child would be more Alice Boswell's than mine. Never, never!"

Hector Garret little knew Leslie Bower; slowly he arrived at the discovery. First a troubled suspicion, then a dire certainty. Not the transparent, light-hearted, humble girl, whom a safe, prosperous country home, an honourable position, a kindly regard, left more than satisfied--happy: but the visionary, enthusiastic woman, confiding, but claiming confidence for confidence; tender and true, but demanding like sincerity, constancy, purity, and power of devotion. Had he but known her the first! But a man's fate lies in one woman. Had he but left her in her girlish sweetness and gaiety; had he never approached her with his cold overtures--his barren, artificial expediency and benevolence!

She erred in ignorance and inexperience; but he against the bitter fruit of knowledge, in wilful tampering with truth--reluctantly, misgivingly--selfishly cozening his conscience, hardening himself in unbelief, applying salve to the old vital stab to his independence. He had erred with an egotistical and presumptuous conceit of protecting and defending the young full life which would have found for itself an outlet, and flown on rapid, free, and rejoicing, had he only refrained from diverting its current into a dull, dark, long-drained channel, where it was dammed up, or oozed out sluggishly, gloomily, despairingly--without natural spring-time, sunshine, abundance, gladness, until lost in the great sea.

He had viewed but the soft silken bud, whose deep cup was drunk with dew,--its subtle, spicy fragrance pervading, lingering after the leaves were drooping and the bloom fled, but its rich, royal hues were yet to come. In his blind coa.r.s.e blundering, he had mistaken the bud for the flower, the portal for the church; he had entered with heedless, profane foot, and blighted the blossom and rifled the altar. For the leaves had been unclosed, the gates unbarred under his neglect; and Leslie, with a n.o.ble woman's frankness, generosity, and meekness--that true meekness which oftenest cleaves and melts the ringing metal of a high spirit--Leslie had begun to love him, to fix her heart upon him, to grow to him--stolid, sardonic statue that he was!--until that shock exposed his flaws and wrenched her from her hold. Better to be thus rudely dissevered, perhaps, than to waste her womanliness, puny and pale from its vague bald nourishment, on a fraud and a farce.

Hector Garret awoke from his delusion, from his scholarly reveries, his active enterprise. "He that provideth not for his own house is worse than an infidel." So he watched Leslie: he saw her rise up with her thoughtful face, very individual it appeared now, and go up and down carrying her baby. He was aware that she was appropriating it as her treasure; that she was saying to herself some such words--"Silver and gold have I none, but this is my pearl beyond price; she will be enough for me; she must be so; I will make her so. She and I will waste no more silly tears on hard, changeable men. They are not like us, little daughter; they pa.s.s us by, or they love us once with fierce desire; and when satiated or balked, they turn to us again to please their eye, flatter their ear, vary their leisure; to anatomize and torture like other favourites of an hour. We will have none of them, save to do our duty. We will live for each other."

Not that she deprived him of his rights as a father; she was too magnanimous to be unjust, and she would not have balked that puppet, to whose service she consecrated herself, of one privilege which any pangs of hers could purchase.

She presented their child to him with a serious stateliness, as if it was so very solemn a ceremony that its performance emanc.i.p.ated her from ordinary emotion; she came and consulted him on the small questions that concerned its welfare with the same absorbing care. If he came near her when she bore the child in her arms, she offered it to him immediately: she was righteous as well as valiant--yes, very valiant. He contemplated her stedfastness with wonder. After the blow which overcame her, when a compensation was given her--a blessing to atone for the gall in her cup, she accepted it and cherished it, and set herself to be grateful for it and worthy of it immediately. The fort.i.tude which, after the involuntary, inevitable rebellion, would permit no more idle repining, the decent pride that hid its own disease and bore it bravely, even the sternness that set its teeth against reaction--he recognised them all; it was studying the reflection of his own lofty features in the fragile, quivering flesh of a girl.