The Laurel Bush Part 9

"Very seldom. I am not one of those who are 'given to change.'"

"Nor I."

He stood a moment, lingering in the pleasant, lightsome warmth, as if loath to quit it, then took his little boys in either hand and went away.

There was a grand consultation that night, for Miss Williams never did any thing without speaking to her girls; but still it was merely nominal.

They always left the decision to her. And her heart yearned over the two little Roys, orphans, yet children still; while Helen and Janetta were growing up and needing very little from her except a general motherly supervision. Besides, _he_ asked it. He had said distinctly that she was the only woman to whom he could thoroughly trust his boys. So--she took them.

After a few days the new state of things grew so familiar that it seemed as if it had lasted for months, the young Roys going to and fro to their cla.s.ses and their golf-playing, just as the young Dalziels had done; and Mr. Roy coming about the house, almost daily, exactly as Robert Roy had used to do of old. Sometimes it was to Fortune Williams the strangest reflex of former times; only--with a difference.

Unquestionably he was very much changed. In outward appearance more even than the time accounted for. No man can knock about the world, in different lands and climates, for seventeen years, without bearing the marks of it. Though still under fifty, he had all the air of an "elderly" man, and had grown a little "peculiar" in his ways, his modes of thought and speech--except that he spoke so very little. He accounted for this by his long lonely life in Australia, which had produced, he said, an almost unconquerable habit of silence. Altogether, he was far more of an old bachelor than she was of an old maid, and Fortune felt this: felt, too, that in spite of her gray hairs she was in reality quite as young as he--nay, sometimes younger; for her innocent, simple, shut-up life had kept her young.

And he, what had his life been, in so far as he gradually betrayed it?

Restless, struggling; a perpetual battle with the world; having to hold his own, and fight his way inch by inch--he who was naturally a born student, to whom the whirl of a business career was especially obnoxious.

What had made him choose it? Once chosen, probably he could not help himself; besides, he was not one to put his shoulder to the wheel and then draw back. Evidently, with the grain or against the grain, he had gone on with it; this sad, strange, wandering life, until he had "made his fortune," for he told her so. But he said no more; whether he meant to stay at home and spend it, or go out again to the antipodes (and he spoke of those far lands without any distaste, even with a lingering kindliness, for indeed he seemed to have no unkindly thought of any place or person in all the world), his friend did not know.

His friend. That was the word. No other. After her first outburst of uncontrollable emotion, to call Robert Roy her "love," even in fancy, or to expect that he would deport himself in any lover-like way, became ridiculous, pathetically ridiculous. She was sure of that. Evidently no idea of the kind entered his mind. She was Miss Williams, and he was Mr.

Roy--two middle-aged people, each with their different responsibilities, their altogether separate lives; and, hard as her own had been, it seemed as if his had been the harder of the two--ay, though he was now a rich man, and she still little better than a poor governess.

She did not think very much of worldly things, but still she was aware of this fact--that he was rich and she was poor. She did not suffer herself to dwell upon it, but the consciousness was there, sustained with a certain feeling called "proper pride." The conviction was forced upon her in the very first days of Mr. Roy's return--that to go back to the days of their youth was as impossible as to find primroses in September.

If, indeed, there were any thing to go back to. Sometimes she felt, if she could only have found out that, all the rest would be easy, painless.

If she could only have said to him, "Did you write me the letter you promised? Did you _ever_ love me"? But that one question was, of course, utterly impossible. He made no reference whatever to old things, but seemed resolved to take up the present a very peaceful and happy present it soon grew to be--just as if there were no past at all. So perforce did she.

But, as I think I have said once before, human nature is weak, and there were days when the leaves were budding, and the birds singing in the trees, when the sun was shining and the waves rolling in upon the sands, just as they rolled in that morning over those two lines of foot-marks, which might have walked together through life; and who knows what mutual strength, help, and comfort this might have proved to both?--then it was, for one at least, rather hard.

Especially when, bit by bit, strange ghostly fragments of his old self began to re-appear in Robert Roy: his keen delight in nature, his love of botanical or geological excursions. Often he would go wandering down the familiar sh.o.r.e for hours in search of marine animals for the girls'

aquarium, and then would come and sit down at their tea-table, reading or talking, so like the Robert Roy of old that one of the little group, who always crept in the background, felt dizzy and strange, as if all her later years had been a dream, and she were living her youth over again, only with the difference aforesaid: a difference sharp as that between death and life--yet with something of the peace of death in it.

Sometimes, when they met at the innocent little tea parties which St.

Andrews began to give--for of course in that small community every body knew every body, and all their affairs to boot, often a good deal better than they did themselves, so that there was great excitement and no end of speculation over Mr. Roy--sometimes meeting, as they were sure to do, and walking home together, with the moonlight shining down the empty streets, and the stars out by myriads over the silent distant sea, while the nearer tide came washing in upon the sands--all was so like, so frightfully like, old times that it was very sore to bear.

But, as I have said, Miss Williams was Miss Williams, and Mr. Roy Mr.

Roy, and there were her two girls always besides them; also his two boys, who soon took to "Auntie" as naturally as if they were really hers, or she theirs.

"I think they had better call you so, as the others do," said Mr. Roy one day. "Are these young ladies really related to you?"

"No; but I promised their father on his death-bed to take charge of them.

That is all."

"He is dead, then. Was he a great friend of yours?"

She felt the blood flashing all over her face, but she answered, steadily: "Not a very intimate friend, but I respected him exceedingly.

He was a good man. His daughters had a heavy loss when he died, and I am glad to be a comfort to them so long as they need me."

"I have no doubt of it."

This was the only question he ever asked her concerning her past life, though, by slow degrees, he told her a good deal of his own. Enough to make her quite certain, even if her keen feminine instinct had not already divined the fact, that whatever there might have been in it of suffering, there was nothing in the smallest degree either to be ashamed of or to hide. What Robert Roy of Shanghai had written about him had continued true. As he said one day to her, "We never stand still. We either grow better or worse. You have not grown worse."

Nor had he. All that was good in him had developed, all his little faults had toned down. The Robert Roy of today was slightly different from, but in no wise inferior to, the Robert Roy of her youth. She saw it, and rejoiced in the seeing.

What he saw in her she could not tell. He seemed determined to rest wholly in the present, and take out of it all the peace and pleasantness that he could. In the old days, when the Dalziel boys were naughty, and Mrs. Dalziel tiresome; and work was hard, and holidays were few, and life was altogether the rough road that it often seems to the young, he had once called her "Pleasantness and Peace." He never said so now; but sometimes he looked it.

Many an evening he came and sat by her fireside, in the arm-chair, which seemed by right to have devolved upon him; never staying very long, for he was still nervously sensitive about being "in the way," but making himself and them all very cheerful and happy while he did stay. Only sometimes, when Fortune's eyes stole to his face--not a young man's face now--she fancied she could trace, besides the wrinkles, a sadness, approaching to hardness, that never used to be. But again, when interested in some book or other (he said it was delicious to take to reading again, after the long fast of years), he would look around to her for sympathy, or utter one of his dry drolleries, the old likeness, the old manner and tone would come back so vividly that she started, hardly knowing whether the feeling it gave her was pleasure or pain.

But beneath both, lying so deep down that neither he nor any one could ever suspect its presence, was something else. Can many waters quench love? Can the deep sea drown it? What years of silence can wither it?

What frost of age can freeze it down? G.o.d only knows.

Hers was not like a girl's love. Those two girls sitting by her day after day would have smiled at it, and at its object. Between themselves they considered Mr. Roy somewhat of an "old fogy;" were very glad to make use of him now and then, in the great dearth of gentlemen at St. Andrews, and equally glad afterward to turn him over to Auntie, who was always kind to him. Auntie was so kind to every body.

Kind? Of course she was, and above all when he looked worn and tired.

He did so sometimes: as if life had ceased to be all pleasure, and the constant mirth of these young folks was just a little too much for him.

Then she ingeniously used to save him from it and them for a while. They never knew--there was no need for them to know--how tenfold deeper than all the pa.s.sion of youth is the tenderness with which a woman cleaves to the man she loves when she sees him growing old.

Thus the days went by till Easter came, announced by the sudden apparition, one evening, of David Dalziel.

That young man, when, the very first day of his holidays, he walked in upon his friends at St. Andrews, and found sitting at their tea-table a strange gentleman, did not like it at all--scarcely even when he found out that the intruder was his old friend, Mr. Roy.

"And you never told me a word about this," said he, reproachfully, to Miss Williams. "Indeed, you have not written to me for weeks; you have forgotten all about me."

She winced at the accusation, for it was true. Beyond her daily domestic life, which she still carefully fulfilled, she had in truth forgotten every thing. Outside people were ceasing to affect her at all. What _he_ liked, what _he_ wanted to do, day by day--whether he looked ill or well, happy or unhappy, only he rarely looked either--this was slowly growing to be once more her whole world. With a sting of compunction, and another, half of fear, save that there was nothing to dread, nothing that could affect any body beyond herself--Miss Williams roused herself to give young Dalziel an especially hearty welcome, and to make his little visit as happy as possible.

Small need of that; he was bent on taking all things pleasantly. Coming now near the end of a very creditable college career, being of age and independent, with the cozy little fortune that his old grandmother had left him, the young fellow was disposed to see every thing _couleur de rose_, and this feeling communicated itself to all his friends.

It was a pleasant time. Often in years to come did that little knot of friends, old and young, look back upon it as upon one of those rare bright bits in life when the outside current of things moves smoothly on, while underneath it there may or may not be, but generally there is, a secret or two which turns the most trivial events into sweet and dear remembrances forever.

David's days being few enough, they took pains not to lose one, but planned excursions here, there, and every where--to Dundee, to Perth, to Elie, to Balcarras--all together, children, young folks, and elders: that admirable _melange_ which generally makes such expeditions "go off" well.

Theirs did, especially the last one, to the old house of Balcarras, where they got admission to the lovely quaint garden, and Janetta sang "Auld Robin Gray" on the spot where it was written.

She had a sweet voice, and there seemed to have come into it a pathos which Fortune had never remarked before. The touching, ever old, ever new story made the young people quite quiet for a few minutes; and then they all wandered away together, Helen promising to look after the two wild young Roys, to see that they did not kill themselves in some unforeseen way, as, aided and abetted by David and Janetta, they went on a scramble up Balcarras Hill.

"Will you go too?" said Fortune to Robert Roy. "I have the provisions to see to; besides, I can not scramble as well as the rest. I am not quite so young as I used to be."

"Nor I," he answered, as, taking her basket, he walked silently on beside her.

It was a curious feeling, and all to come out of a foolish song; but if ever she felt thankful to G.o.d from the bottom of her heart that she had said "No," at once and decisively, to the good man who slept at peace beneath the church-yard elms, it was at that moment. But the feeling and the moment pa.s.sed by immediately. Mr. Roy took up the thread of conversation where he had left it off--it was some bookish or ethical argument, such as he would go on with for hours; so she listened to him in silence. They walked on, the larks singing and the primroses blowing.

All the world was saying to itself, "I am young; I am happy;" but she said nothing at all.

People grow used to pain; it dies down at intervals, and becomes quite bearable, especially when no one see it or guesses at it.

They had a very merry picnic on the hilltop, enjoying those mundane consolations of food and drink which Auntie was expected always to have forth-coming, and which those young people did by no means despise, nor Mr. Roy neither. He made himself so very pleasant with them all, looking thoroughly happy, and baring his head to the spring breeze with the eagerness of a boy.

"Oh, this is delicious! It makes me feel young again. There's nothing like home. One thing I am determined upon: I will never quit bonnie Scotland more."

It was the first clear intimation he had given of his intentions regarding the future, but it thrilled her with measureless content. If only he would not go abroad again, if she might have him within reach for the rest of her days--able to see him, to talk to him, to know where he was and what he was doing, instead of being cut off from him by those terrible dividing seas--it was enough! Nothing could be so bitter as what had been; and whatever was the mystery of their youth, which it was impossible to unravel now--whether he had ever loved, or loved her and crushed it down and forgotten it, or only felt very kindly and cordially to her, as he did now, the past was--well, only the past!--and the future lay still before her, not unsweet. When we are young, we insist on having every thing or nothing; when we are older, we learn that "every thing" is an impossible and "nothing" a somewhat bitter word. We are able to stoop meekly and pick up the fragments of the children's bread, without feeling ourselves to be altogether "dogs".

Fortune went home that night with a not unhappy, almost a satisfied, heart. She sat back in the carriage, close beside that other heart which she believed to be the truest in all the world, though it had never been hers. There was a tremendous clatter of talking and laughing and fun of all sorts, between David Dalziel and the little Roys on the box, and the Misses Moseley sitting just below them, as they had insisted doing, no doubt finding the other two members of the party a little "slow."

Nevertheless Mr. Roy and Miss Williams took their part in laughing with their young people, and trying to keep them in order; though after a while both relapsed into silence. One did at least, for it had been a long day and she was tired, being, as she had said, "not so young as she had been." But if any of these lively young people had asked her the question whether she was happy, or at least contented, she would have never hesitated about her reply. Young, gay, and prosperous as they were, I doubt if Fortune Williams would have changed lots with any one of them all.