The Laurel Bush Part 2

Just at this moment the sound of distant carriage wheels was heard.

"That must be Mrs. Dalziel and the boys."

"Then I had better go. Good-by"

The daydream was over. It had all come back again--the forlorn, dreary, hard-working world.

"Good-by, Mr. Roy." And they shook hands.

"One word," he said hastily. "I shall write to you--you will allow me?--and I shall see you several times, a good many times before I go?"

"I hope so."

"Then, for the present, good-by. That means," he added, earnestly, "'G.o.d be with you!' And I know he always will."

In another minute Fortune found herself standing beside the laurel bush, alone, listening to the sound of Mr. Roy's footsteps down the road--listening, listening, as if, with the exceeding tension, her brain would burst.

The carriage came, pa.s.sed by; it was not Mrs. Dalziel's after all. She thought he might discover this, and come back again; so she waited a little--five minutes, ten--beside the laurel bush. But he did not come.

No footstep, no voice; nothing but the faint, far-away sound of the long waves washing in upon the sands.

It was not the brain that felt like to burst now, but the heart. She clasped her hands above her head. It did not matter; there was no creature to see or hear that appeal--was it to man or G.o.d?--that wild, broken sob, so contrary to her usual self-controlled and self-contained nature. And then she learned her forehead against the gate, just where Robert Roy had accidentally laid his hand in opening it, and wept bitterly.

Chapter 2.

The "every day" on which Mr. Roy had reckoned for seeing his friend, or whatsoever else he considered Miss Williams to be, proved a failure. Her youngest pupil fell ill, and she was kept beside him, and away from the school-room, until the doctor could decide whether the illness was infectious or not. It turned out to be very trifling--a most trivial thing altogether, yet weighted with a pain most difficult to bear, a sense of fatality that almost overwhelmed one person at least. What the other felt she did not know. He came daily as usual; she watched him come and go, and sometimes he turned and they exchanged a greeting from the window. But beyond that, she had to take all pa.s.sively. What could she, only a woman, do or say or plan? Nothing. Women's business is to sit down and endure.

She had counted these days--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sat.u.r.day--as if they had been years. And now they were all gone, had fled like minutes, fled emptily away. A few fragmentary facts she had had to feed on, communicated by the boys in their rough talk.

"Mr. Roy was rather cross today."

"Not cross, d.i.c.k--only dull."

"Mr. Roy asked why David did not come in to lessons, and said he hoped he would be better by Sat.u.r.day."

"Mr. Roy said good-by to us all, and gave us each something to remember him by when he was out in India. Did Miss Williams know he was going out to India? Oh, how jolly!"

"Yes, and he sails next week, and the name of his ship is the _Queen of the South_, and he goes by Liverpool instead of Southampton, because it costs less; and he leaves St. Andrews on Monday morning."

"Are you sure he said Monday morning?" For that was Sat.u.r.day night.

"Certain, because he has to get his outfit still. Oh, what fun it must be!"

And the boys went on, greatly excited, and repeating everything Mr. Roy had told them--for he had made them fond of him, even in those few months--expatiating with delight on his future career, as a merchant or something, they did not quite know what; but no doubt it would be far nicer and more amusing than stopping at home and grinding forever on horrid books. Didn't Miss Williams think so?

Miss Williams only smiled. She knew how all his life he had loved "those horrid books," preferring them to pleasure, recreation, almost to daily bread; how he had lived on the hope that one day he--born only a farmer's son--might do something, write something. "I also am of Arcadia." He might have done it or not--the genius may or may not have been there; but the ambition certainly was. Could he have thrown it all aside? And Why?

Not for mere love of money; she knew him too well for that. He was a thorough book-worm, simple in all his tastes and habits--simple almost to penuriousness; but it was a penuriousness born of hard fortunes, and he never allowed it to affect any body but himself. Still, there was no doubt he did not care for money, or luxury, or worldly position--any of the things that lesser men count large enough to work and struggle and die for. To give up the pursuits he loved, deliberately to choose others, to change his whole life thus, and expatriate himself, as it were, for years--perhaps for always--why did he do it, or for whom?

Was it for a woman? Was it for her? If ever, in those long empty days and wakeful nights, this last thought entered Fortune's mind, she stifled it as something which, once to have fully believed and then disbelieved would have killed her.

That she should have done the like for him--that or any thing else involving any amount of heroism or self-sacrifice--well, it was natural, right; but that he should do it for her? That he should change his whole purpose of life that he might be able to marry quickly, to shelter in his bosom a poor girl who was not able to fight the world as a man could, the thing--not so very impossible, after all--seemed to her almost incredible! And yet (I am telling a mere love story, remember--a foolish, innocent love story, without apologizing for either the folly or the innocence) sometimes she was so far "left to herself," as the Scotch say, that she did believe it: in the still twilights, in the wakeful nights, in the one solitary half hour of intense relief, when, all her boys being safe in bed, she rushed out into the garden under the silent stars to sob, to moan, to speak out loud words which n.o.body could possibly hear.

"He is going away, and I shall never see him again. And I love him better than any thing in all this world. I couldn't help it--he couldn't help it. But, oh! It's hard--hard!"

And then, altogether breaking down, she would begin to cry like a child.

She missed him so, even this week, after having for weeks and months been with him every day; but it was less like a girl missing her lover--who was, after all, not her lover--than a child mourning helplessly for the familiar voice, the guiding, helpful hand. With all the rest of the world Fortune Williams was an independent, energetic woman, self-contained, brave, and strong, as a solitary governess had need to be; but beside Robert Roy she felt like a child, and she cried for him like a child,

"And with no language but a cry."

So the week ended and Sunday came, kept at Mrs. Dalziel's like the Scotch Sundays of twenty years ago. No visitor ever entered the house, wherein all the meals were cold and the blinds drawn down, as if for a funeral.

The family went to church for the entire day, St. Andrews being too far off for any return home "between sermons." Usually one servant was left in charge, turn and turn about; but this Sunday Mrs. Dalziel, having put the governess in the nurse's place beside the ailing child, thought shrewdly she might as well put her in the servant's place too, and let her take charge of the kitchen fire as well as of little David. Being English, Miss Williams was not so exact about "ordinances" as a Scotch woman would have been; so Mrs. Dalziel had no hesitation in asking her to remain at home alone the whole day in charge of her pupil.

Thus faded, Fortune thought, her last hope of seeing Robert Roy again, either at church--where he usually sat in the Dalziel pew, by the old lady's request, to make the boys "behave"--or walking down the street, where he sometimes took the two eldest to eat their "piece" at his lodgings. All was now ended; yet on the hope--or dread--of this last Sunday she had hung, she now felt with what intensity, till it was gone.

Fortune was the kind of woman who, were it given her to fight, could fight to the death, against fate or circ.u.mstances; but when her part was simply pa.s.sive, she could also endure. Not, as some do, with angry grief or futile resistance, but with a quiet patience so complete that only a very quick eye would have found out she was suffering at all.

Little David did not, certainly. When hour after hour, she sat by his sofa, interesting him as best she could in the dull "good" books which alone were allowed of Sundays, and then pa.s.sing into word-of-mouth stories--the beautiful Bible stories over which her own voice trembled while she told them--Ruth, with her piteous cry, "Whither thou goest, I will go; where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried;"

Jonathan, whose soul "clave to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul"--all these histories of pa.s.sionate fidelity and agonized parting--for every sort of love is essentially the same--how they went to her heart.

Oh, the awful quietness of that Sunday, that Sabbath which was not rest, in which the hours crawled on in sunshiny stillness, neither voices nor steps nor sounds of any kind breaking the death-like hush of everything.

At length the boy fell asleep; and then Fortune seemed to wake up for the first time to the full consciousness of what was and what was about to be.

All of a sudden she heard steps on the gravel below; then the hall bell rang through the silent house. She knew who it was even before she opened the door and saw him standing there.

"May I come in? They told me you were keeping house alone, and I said I should just walk over to bid you and Davie good-by."

Roy's manner was grave and matter-of-fact--a little constrained, perhaps, but not much--and he looked so exceedingly pale and tired that; without any hesitation, she took him into the school-room, where they were sitting, and gave him the arm-chair by Davie's sofa.

"Yes, I own to being rather overdone; I have had so much to arrange, for I must leave here tomorrow, as I think you know."

"The boys told me."

"I thought they would. I should have done it myself, but every day I hoped to see you. It was this fellow's fault, I suppose," patting Davie's head. "He seems quite well now, and as jolly as possible. You don't know what it is to say 'Good-by,' David, my son." Mr. Roy, who always got on well with children, had a trick of calling his younger pupils "My Son."

"Why do you say 'good-by' at all, then!" asked the child, a mischievous but winning young scamp of six or seven, who had as many tricks as a monkey or a magpie. In fact, in chattering and hiding things he was nearly as bad as a magpie, and the torment of his governess's life; yet she was fond of him. "Why do you bid us good-by, Mr. Roy? Why don't you stay always with Miss Williams and me?"

"I wish to G.o.d I could."

She heard that, heard it distinctly, though it was spoken beneath his breath; and she felt the look, turned for one moment upon her as she stood by the window. She never forgot either--never, as long as she lived. Some words, some looks, can deceive, perhaps quite unconsciously, by being either more demonstrative than was meant, or the exaggeration of coldness to hide its opposite; but sometimes a glance, a tone, betrays, or rather reveals, the real truth in a manner that nothing afterward can ever falsify. For one instant, one instant only, Fortune felt sure, quite sure, that in some way or other she was very dear to Robert Roy.

If the next minute he had taken her into his arms, and said or looked the words which, to an earnest-minded, sincere man like him, const.i.tute a pledge for life, never to be disannulled or denied, she could have hardly have felt more completely his own.

But he did not say them; he said nothing at all; sat leaning his head on his hand, with an expression so weary, so sad, that all the coaxing ways of little Davie could hardly win from him more than a faint smile. He looked so old, too, and he was but just thirty. Only thirty--only twenty-five; and yet these two were bearing, seemed to have borne for years, the burden of life, feeling all its hardships and none of its sweetnesses. Would things ever change? Would he have the courage (it was his part, not hers) to make them change, at least in one way, by bringing about that heart-union which to all pure and true natures is consolation for every human woe?

"I wonder," he said, sitting down and taking David on his knee--"I wonder if it is best to bear things one's self, or to let another share the burden?"