The Laurel Bush Part 7

The young fellow blushed all over his kindly eager face, and then frankly owned he had a motive. His grandmother's cottage, which she had left him, the youngest and her pet always, was now unlet. He meant, perhaps, to go and live at it himself when--he was of age and could afford it; but in the mean time he was a poor solitary bachelor, and--and--

"And you would like me to keep your nest warm for you till you can claim it? You want us for your tenants, eh, Davie?"

"Just that. You've hit it. Couldn't wish better. In fact, I have already written to my trustees to drive the hardest bargain possible."

Which was an ingenious modification of the truth, as she afterward found; but evidently the lad had set his heart upon the thing. And she?

At first she shrank back from the plan with a shiver almost of fear. It was like having to meet face to face something--some one--long dead. To walk among the old familiar places, to see the old familiar sea and sh.o.r.e, nay, to live in the very same house, haunted, as houses are sometimes, every room and every nook, with ghosts--yet with such innocent ghosts--Could she bear it?

There are some people who have an actual terror of the past--who the moment a thing ceases to be pleasurable fly from it, would willingly bury it out of sight forever. But others have no fear of their harmless dead--dead hopes, memories, loves--can sit by a grave-side, or look behind them at a dim spectral shape, without grief, without dread, only with tenderness. This woman could.

After a long wakeful night, spent in very serious thought for every one's good, not excluding her own--since there is a certain point beyond which one has no right to forget one's self, and perpetual martyrs rarely make very pleasant heads of families--she said to her girls next morning that she thought David Dalziel's brilliant idea had a great deal of sense in it; St. Andrews was a very nice place, and the cottage there would exactly suit their finances, while the tenure upon which he proposed they should hold it (from term to term) would also fit in with their undecided future; because, as all knew, wherever Helen or Janetta married, each would take her fortune and go, leaving Miss Williams with her little legacy, above want certainly, but not exactly a millionaire.

These and other points she set before them in her practical fashion, just as if her heart did not leap--sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with pain--at the very thought of St. Andrews, and as if to see herself sit daily and hourly face to face with her old self, the ghost of her own youth, would be a quite easy thing.

The girls were delighted. They left all to Auntie, as was their habit to do. Burdens naturally fall upon the shoulders fitted for them, and which seem even to have a faculty for drawing them down there. Miss Williams's new duties had developed in her a whole range of new qualities, dormant during her governess life. n.o.body knew better than she how to manage a house and guide a family. The girls soon felt that Auntie might have been a mother all her days, she was so thoroughly motherly and they gave up every thing into her hands.

So the whole matter was settled, David rejoicing exceedingly, and considering it "jolly fun," and quite like a bit out of a play, that his former governess should come back as his tenant, and inhabit the old familiar cottage.

"And I'll take a run over to see you as soon as the long vacation begins, just to teach the young ladies golfing. Mr. Roy taught all us boys, you know; and we'll take that very walk he used to take us, across the Links and along the sands to the Eden. Wasn't it the river Eden, Miss Williams? I am sure I remember it. I think I am very good at remembering."

Other people were also "good at remembering." During the first few weeks after they settled down at St. Andrews the girls noticed that Auntie became excessively pale, and was sometimes quite "distrait" and bewildered-looking, which was little wonder, considering all she had to do and arrange. But she got better in time. The cottage was so sweet, the sea so fresh, the whole place so charming. Slowly, Miss Williams's ordinary looks returned--the "good" looks which her girls so energetically protested she had now, if never before. They never allowed her to confess herself old by caps or shawls, or any of those pretty temporary hindrances to the march of Time. She resisted not; she let them dress her as they please, in a reasonable way, for she felt they loved her; and as to her age, why, _she_ knew it, and knew that nothing could alter it, so what did it matter? She smiled, and tried to look as nice and as young as she could for her girls' sake.

I suppose there are such things as broken or breaking hearts, even at St.

Andrews, but it is certainly not a likely place for them. They have little chance against the fresh, exhilarating air, strong as new wine; the wild sea waves, the soothing sands, giving with health of body wholesomeness of mind. By-and-by the busy world recovered its old face to Fortune Williams--not the world as she once dreamed of it, but the real world, as she had fought it through it all these years.

"I was ever a fighter, so one fight more!" as she read sometimes in the "pretty" poetry her girls were always asking for--read steadily, even when she came to the last verse in that pa.s.sionate "Prospice:"

"Till, sudden, the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute's at end: And the elements rage, the fiend voices that rave Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy, Then a light--then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with G.o.d be the rest!"

To that life to come, during all the burden and heat of the day (no, the afternoon, a time, faded, yet hot and busy still, which is often a very trying bit of woman's life) she now began yearningly to look. To meet him again, even in old age, or with death between, was her only desire.

Yet she did her duty still, and enjoyed all she could, knowing that one by one the years were hurrying onward, and the night coming, "in which no man can work."

Faithful to his promise, about the middle of July David Dalziel appeared, in overflowing spirits, having done very well at college. He was such a boy still, in character and behavior; though--as he carefully informed the family--now twenty-one and a man, expecting to be treated as such.

He was their landlord too, and drew up the agreement in his own name, meaning to be a lawyer, and having enough to live on--something better than bread and salt--"till I can earn a fortune, as I certainly mean to do some day."

And he looked at Janetta, who looked down on the parlor carpet--as young people will. Alas! I fear that the eyes of her anxious friend and governess were not half wide enough open to the fact that these young folk were no longer boy and girls, and that things might happen--in fact, were almost certain to happen--which had happened to herself in her youth--making life not quite easy to her, as it seemed to be to these two bright girls.

Yet they were so bright, and their relations with David Dalziel were so frank and free--in fact, the young fellow himself was such a thoroughly good fellow, so very difficult to shut her door against, even if she had thought of so doing. But she did not. She let him come and go, "miserable bachelor" as he proclaimed himself, with all his kith and kin across the seas, and cast not a thought to the future, or to the sad necessity which sometimes occurs to parents and guardians--of shutting the stable door _after_ the steed is stolen.

Especially, as not long after David appeared, there happened a certain thing to all but her, and yet to her it was, for the time being, utterly overwhelming. It absorbed all her thoughts into one maddened channel, where they writhed and raved and dashed themselves blindly against inevitable fate. For the first time in her life this patient woman felt as if endurance were _not_ the right thing; as if wild shrieks of pain, bitter outcries against Providence, would be somehow easier, better: might reach His throne, so that even now He might listen and hear.

The thing was this. One day, waiting for some one beside the laurel bush at her gate--the old familiar bush, though it had grown and grown till its branches, which used to drag on the gravel, now covered the path entirely--she overheard David explaining to Janetta how he and his brothers and Mr. Roy had made the wooden letter-box, which actually existed still, though in very ruinous condition.

"And no wonder, after fifteen years and more. It is fully that old, isn't it Miss Williams? You will have to superannuate it shortly, and return to the old original letter-box--my letter-box, which I remember so well. I do believe I could find it still."

Kneeling down, he thrust his hand through the thick barricade of leaves into the very heart of the tree.

"I've found it; I declare I've found it; the identical hole in the trunk where I used to put all my treasures--my 'magpie's nest,' as they called it, where I hid every thing I could find. What a mischievous young scamp I was!"

"Very," said Miss Williams, affectionately, laying a gentle hand on his curls--"pretty" still, though cropped down to the frightful modern fashion. Secretly she was rather proud of him, this tall young fellow, whom she had had on her lap many a time.

"Curious! It all comes back to me--even to the very last thing I hid here, the day before we left, which was a letter."

"A letter!"--Miss Williams slightly started--"what letter?"

"One I found lying under the laurel bush, quite hidden by its leaves. It was all soaked with rain. I dried it in the sun, and then put it in my letter-box, telling n.o.body, for I meant to deliver it myself at the hall door with a loud ring--an English postman's ring. Our Scotch one used to blow his horn, you remember?"

"Yes," said Miss Williams. She was leaning against the fatal bush, pale to the very lips, but her veil was down--n.o.body saw. "What sort of a letter was it, David? Who was it to? Did you notice the handwriting?"

"Why, I was such a little fellow," and he looked up in wonder and slight concern, "how could I remember? Some letter that somebody had dropped, perhaps, in taking the rest out of the box. It could not matter--certainly not now. You would not bring my youthful misdeeds up against me, would you?" And he turned up a half-comical, half-pitiful face.

Fortune's first impulse--what was it? She hardly knew. But her second was that safest, easiest thing--now grown into the habit and refuge of her whole life--silence. "No, it certainly does not matter now."

A deadly sickness came over her. What if this letter were Robert Roy's, asking her that question which he said no man ought ever to ask a woman twice? And she had never seen it--never answered it. So, of course, he went away. Her whole life--nay, two whole lives--had been destroyed, and by a mere accident, the aimless mischief of a child's innocent hand. She could never prove it, but it might have been so. And, alas! alas! G.o.d, the merciful G.o.d, had allowed it to be so.

Which is the worst, to wake up suddenly and find that our life has been wrecked by our own folly, mistake, or sin, or that it has been done for us either directly by the hand of Providence, or indirectly through some innocent--nay, possibly not innocent, but intentional--hand? In both cases the agony is equally sharp--the sharper because irremediable.

All these thoughts, vivid as lightning, and as rapid, darted through poor Fortune's brain during the few moments that she stood with her hand on David's shoulder, while he drew from his magpie's nest a heterogeneous ma.s.s of rubbish--pebbles, snail sh.e.l.ls, bits of gla.s.s and china, fragments even of broken toys.

"Just look there. What ghosts of my childhood, as people would say! Dead and buried, though." And he laughed merrily--he in the full tide and glory of his youth.

Fortune Williams looked down on his happy face. This lad that really loved her would not have hurt her for the world, and her determination was made. He should never know any thing. n.o.body should ever know any thing. The "dead and buried" of fifteen years ago must be dead and buried forever.

"David," she said, "just out of curiosity, put your hand down to the very bottom of that hole, and see if you can fish up the mysterious letter."

Then she waited, just as one would wait at the edge of some long-closed grave to see if the dead could possibly be claimed as our dead, even if but a handful of unhonored bones.

No, it was not possible. n.o.body could expect it after such a lapse of time. Something David pulled out--it might be paper, it might be rags.

It was too dry to be moss or earth, but no one could have recognized it as a letter.

"Give it me," said Miss Williams, holding out her hand.

David put the little heap of "rubbish" therein. She regarded it a moment, and then scattered it on the gravel--"dust to dust," as we say in our funeral service. But she said nothing.

At the moment the young people they were waiting for came, to the other side of the gate, clubs in hand. David and the two Miss Moseleys had by this time become perfectly mad for golf, as is the fashion of the place.

The proceeded across the Links, Miss Williams accompanying them, as in duty bound. But she said she was "rather tired," and leaving them in charge of another chaperon--if chaperons are ever wanted or needed in those merry Links of St. Andrews--came home alone.

Chapter 5

"Shall sharpest pathos blight us, doing no wrong?"

So writes our greatest living poet, in one of the n.o.blest poems he ever penned. And he speaks truth. The real canker of human existence is not misery, but sin.

After the first cruel pang, the bitter wail; after her lost life--and we have here but one life to lose!--her lost happiness, for she knew now that though she might be very peaceful, very content, no real happiness ever had come, ever could come to her in this world, except Robert Roy's love--after this, Fortune sat down, folded her hands, and bowed her head to the waves of sorrow that kept sweeping over her, not for one day or two days, but for many days and weeks--the anguish, not of patience, but regret--sharp, stinging, helpless regret. They came rolling in, those remorseless billows, just like the long breakers on the sands of St.