The Laurel Bush Part 13

"This will never do. You must 'come under my plaidie,' as the children say, and I will take you home at once. Boys!" he called out to the figures now appearing like jackdaws at the top of the tower, "we are going straight home. Follow us as soon as you like. Yes, it must be so," he answered to the slight resistance she made. "They must all take care of themselves. I mean to take care of you."

Which he did, wrapping her well in the half of his plaid, drawing her hand under his arm and holding it there--holding it close and warm at his heart all the way along the Scores and across the Links, scarcely speaking a single word until they reached the garden gate. Even there he held it still.

"I see your girls coming, so I shall leave you. You are warm now, are you not?"

"Quite warm."

"Good-night, then. Stay. Tell me"--he spoke rapidly, and with much agitation--"tell me just one thing, and I will never trouble you again.

Why did you not answer a letter I wrote to you seventeen years ago?"

"I never got any letter. I never had one word from you after the Sunday you bade me good-by, promising to write."

"And I did write," cried he, pa.s.sionately. "I posted it with my own hands. You should have got it on the Tuesday morning."

She leaned against the laurel bush, that fatal laurel bush, and in a few breathless words told him what David had said about the hidden letter.

"It must have been my letter. Why did you not tell me this before?"

"How could I? I never knew you had written. You never said a word. In all these years you have never said a single word."

Bitterly, bitterly he turned away. The groan that escaped him--a man's groan over his lost life--lost, not wholly through fate alone--was such as she, the woman whose portion had been sorrow, pa.s.sive sorrow only, never forgot in all her days.

"Don't mind it," she whispered--"don't mind it. It is so long past now."

He made no immediate answer, then said,

"Have you no idea what was in the letter?"

"No."

"It was to ask you a question, which I had determined not to ask just then, but I changed my mind. The answer, I told you, I should wait for in Edinburgh seven days; after that, I should conclude you meant No, and sail. No answer came, and I sailed."

He was silent. So was she. A sense of cruel fatality came over her.

Alas! those lost years, that might have been such happy years! At length she said, faintly, "Forget it. It was not your fault."

"It was my fault. If not mine, you were still yourself--I ought never to have let you go. I ought to have asked again; to have sought through the whole world till I found you again. And now that I have found you--"

"Hush! The girls are here."

They came along laughing, that merry group--with whom life was at its spring--who had lost nothing, knew not what it was to lose!

"Good-night," said Mr. Roy, hastily. "But--to-morrow morning?"

"Yes."

"There never is night to which comes no morn," says the proverb. Which is not always true, at least as to this world; but it is true sometimes.

That April morning Fortune Williams rose with a sense of strange solemnity--neither sorrow nor joy. Both had gone by; but they had left behind them a deep peace.

After her young people had walked themselves off, which they did immediately after breakfast, she attended to all her household duties, neither few nor small, and then sat down with her needle-work beside the open window. It was a lovely day; the birds were singing, the leaves budding, a few early flowers making all the air to smell like spring.

And she--with her it was autumn now. She knew it, but still she did not grieve.

Presently, walking down the garden walk, almost with the same firm step of years ago--how well she remembered it!--Robert Roy came; but it was still a few minutes before she could go into the little parlor to meet him. At last she did, entering softly, her hand extended as usual. He took it, also as usual, and then looked down into her face, as he had done that Sunday. "Do you remember this? I have kept it for seventeen years."

It was her mother's ring. She looked up with a dumb inquiry.

"My love, did you think I did not love you?--you always, and only you?"

So saying, he opened his arms; she felt them close round her, just as in her dream. Only they were warm, living arms; and it was this world, not the next. All those seventeen bitter years seemed swept away, annihilated in a moment; she laid her head on his shoulder and wept out her happy heart there.

The little world of St. Andrews was very much astonished when it learned that Mr. Roy was going to marry, not one of the pretty Miss Moseleys, but their friend and former governess, a lady, not by any means young, and remarkable for nothing except great sweetness and good sense, which made every body respect and like her; though n.o.body was much excited concerning her. Now people had been excited about Mr. Roy, and some were rather sorry for him; thought perhaps he had been taken in, till some story got wind of its having been an "old attachment," which interested them of course; still, the good folks were half angry with him. To go and marry an old maid when he might have had his choice of half a dozen young ones! when, with his fortune and character, he might, as people say--as they had said of that other good man, Mr. Moseley--"have married any body!"

They forgot that Mr. Roy happened to be one of those men who have no particular desire to marry "any body;" to whom _the_ woman, whether found early or late--alas! in this case found early and won late--is the one woman in the world forever. Poor Fortune--rich Fortune! she need not be afraid of her fading cheek, her silvering hair; he would never see either. The things he loved her for were quite apart from any thing that youth could either give or take away. As he said one, when she lamented hers, "Never mind, let it go. You will always be yourself--and mine."

This was enough. He loved her. He had always loved her: she had no fear but that he would love her faithfully to the end.

Theirs was a very quiet wedding, and a speedy one. "Why should they wait? they had waited too long already," he said, with some bitterness.

But she felt none. With her all was peace.

Mr. Roy did another very foolish thing which I can not conscientiously recommend to any middle-aged bachelor. Besides marrying his wife, he married her whole family. There was no other way out of the difficulty, and neither of them was inclined to be content with happiness, leaving duty unfulfilled. So he took the largest house in St. Andrews, and brought to it Janetta and Helen, till David Dalziel could claim them; likewise his own two orphan boys, until they went to Oxford; for he meant to send them there, and bring them up in every way like his own sons.

Meantime, it was rather a heterogeneous family; but the two heads of it bore their burden with great equanimity, nay, cheerfulness; saying sometimes, with a smile which had the faintest shadow of pathos in it, "that they liked to have young life about them."

And by degrees they grew younger themselves; less of the old bachelor and old maid, and more of the happy middle-aged couple to whom Heaven gave, in their decline, a St. Martin's summer almost as sweet as spring. They were both too wise to poison the present by regretting the past--a past which, if not wholly, was partly, at least, owing to that strange fatality which governs so many lives, only some have the will to conquer it, others not. And there are two sides to every thing: Robert Roy, who alone knew how hard his own life had been, sometimes felt a stern joy in thinking no one had shared it.

Still, for a long time there lay at the bottom of that strong, gentle heart of his a kind of remorseful tenderness, which showed itself in heaping his wife with every luxury that his wealth could bring; better than all, in surrounding her with that unceasing care which love alone teaches, never allowing the wind to blow on her too roughly--his "poor lamb," as he sometime called her, who had suffered so much.

They are sure, humanly speaking, to "live very happy to the end of their days." And I almost fancy sometimes, if I were to go to St. Andrews, as I hope to do many a time, for I am as fond of the Aged City as they are, that I should see those two, made one at last after all those cruel divided years, wandering together along the sunshiny sands, or standing to watch the gay golfing parties; nay, I am not sure that Robert Roy would not be visible sometimes in his red coat, club in hand, crossing the Links, a victim to the universal insanity of St. Andrews, yet enjoying himself, as golfers always seem to do, with the enjoyment of a very boy.

She is not a girl, far from it; but there will always be a girlish sweetness in her faded face till its last smile. And to see her sitting beside her husband on the green slopes of the pretty garden--knitting, perhaps while he reads his eternal newspapers--is a perfect picture.

They do not talk very much; indeed, they were neither of them ever great talkers. But each knows the other is close at hand, ready for any needful word, and always ready with that silent sympathy which is so mysterious a thing, the rarest thing to find in all human lives. These have found it, and are satisfied. And day by day truer grows the truth of that sentence which Mrs. Roy once discovered in her husband's pocket-book, cut out of a newspaper--she read and replaced it without a word, but with something between a smile and tear--_"Young love is pa.s.sionate, old love is faithful; but the very tenderest thing in all this world is a love revived."