The Laurel Bush Part 4

She was saved that and some few other things by being only a governess, instead of one of Fate's cherished darlings, nestled in a family home.

She had no time to grieve, except in the dead of night, when "the rain was on the roof." It so happened that, after the haar, there set in a season of continuous, sullen, depressing rain. But at night-time, and for the ten minutes between post hour and lesson hour--which she generally pa.s.sed in her own room--if her mother, who died when she was ten-years old, could have seen her, she would have said, "My poor child."

Robert Roy had once involuntarily called her so, when by accident one of her rough boys hurt her hand, and he himself bound it up, with the indescribable tenderness which the strong only know how to show or feel.

Well she remembered this; indeed, almost every thing he had said or done came back upon her now--vividly, as we recall the words and looks of the dead--mingled with such a hungering pain, such a cruel "miss" of him, daily and hourly, his companions.h.i.+p, help, counsel, every thing she had lacked all her life, and never found but with him and from him. And he was gone, had broken his promise, had left her without a single farewell word.

That he had cared for her, in some sort of way, she was certain; for he was one of those who never say a word too large--nay, he usually said much less than he felt. Whatever he had felt for her--whether friends.h.i.+p, affection, love--must have been true. There was in his nature intense reserve, but no falseness, no insincerity, not an atom of pretense of any kind.

If he did not love her, why not tell her so? What was there to hinder him? Nothing, except that strange notion of the "dishonorableness" of asking a woman's love when one has nothing but love to give her in return. This, even, he had seemed at the last to have set aside, as if he could not go away without speaking. And yet he did it.

Perhaps he thought she did not care for him? He had once said a man ought to feel quite sure of a woman before he asked her. Also, that he should never ask twice, since, if she did not know her own mind then, she never would know it, and such a woman was the worst possible bargain a man could make in marriage.

Not know her own mind! Alas, poor soul, Fortune knew it only too well.

In that dreadful fortnight it was "borne in upon her," as pious people say, that though she felt kindly to all human beings, the one human being who was necessary to her--without whom her life might be busy, indeed, and useful, but never perfect, an endurance instead of joy--was this young man, as solitary as herself, as poor, as hard-working; good, gentle, brave Robert Roy.

Oh why had they not come together, heart to heart--just they two, so alone in the world--and ever after belonged to one another, even though it had been years and years before they were married?

"If only he had love me, and told me so!" was her bitter cry. "I could have waited ever so hardly, and quite alone, if only I might have had a right to him, and been his comfort, as he was mine. But now--now--"

Yet still she waited, looking forward daily to that dreadful post hour; and when it had gone by, nerving herself to endure until tomorrow. At last hope, slowly dying, was killed outright.

One day at tea-time the boys blurted out, with happy carelessness, their short-lived regrets for him being quite over, the news that Mr. Roy had sailed.

"Not for Calcutta, but Shanghai, a much longer voyage. He can't be heard of for a year at least, and it will be many years before he comes back.

I wonder if he will come back rich. They say he will: quite a nabob, perhaps, and take a place in the Highlands, and invite us all--you too, Miss Williams. I once asked him, and he said, 'Of course.' Stop, you are pouring my tea over into the saucer."

This was the only error she made, but went on filling the cups with a steady hand, smiling and speaking mechanically, as people can sometimes.

When the tea was quite over, she slipped away into her room, and was missing for a long time.

So all was over. No more waiting for that vague "something to happen."

Nothing could happen now. He was far away across the seas, and she must just go back to her old monotonous life, as if it had never been any different--as if she had never seen his face nor heard his voice, never known the blessing of his companions.h.i.+p, friends.h.i.+p, love, whatever it was, or whatever he had meant it to be. No, he could not have loved her; or to have gone away would have been--she did not realize whether right or wrong--but simply impossible.

Once, wearying herself with helpless conjectures, a thought, sudden and sharp as steel, went through her heart. He was nearly thirty; few lives are thus long without some sort of love in them. Perhaps he was already bound to some other woman, and finding himself drifting into too pleasant intimacy with herself, wished to draw back in time. Such things had happened, sometimes almost blamelessly, though most miserably to all parties. But with him it was not likely to happen. He was too clear sighted, strong, and honest. He would never "drift" into anything. What he did would be done with a calm deliberate will, incapable of the slightest deception either toward others or himself. Besides, he had at different times told her the whole story of his life, and there was no love in it; only work, hard work, poverty, courage, and endurance, like her own.

"No, he could never have deceived me, neither me nor any one else," she often said to herself, almost joyfully, though the tears were running down. "What ever it was, it was not that. I am glad--glad. I had far rather believe he never loved me than that he had been false to another woman for my sake. And I believe in him still; I shall always believe in him. He is perfectly good, perfectly true. And so it does not much matter about me."

I am afraid those young ladies who like plenty of lovers, who expect to be adored, and are vexed when they are not adored, and most n.o.bly indignant when forsaken, will think very meanly of my poor Fortune Williams. They may console themselves by thinking she was not a young lady at all--only a woman. Such women are not too common, but they exist occasionally. And they bear their cross and dree their weird (i.e., endure); but their lot, at any rate, only concerns themselves, and has one advantage, that it in no way injures the happiness of other people.

Humble as she was, she had her pride. If she wept, it was out of sight.

If she wished herself dead, and a happy ghost, that by any means she might get near him, know where he was, and what he was doing, these dreams came only when her work was done, her boys asleep. Day never betrayed the secrets of the night. She set to work every morning at her daily labors with a dogged persistence, never allowing herself a minute's idleness wherein to sit down and mourn. And when, despite her will, she could not conquer the fits of nervous irritability that came over her at times--when the children's innocent voices used to pierce her like needles, and their incessant questions and perpetual company were almost more than she could bear--still, even then, all she did was to run away and hide herself for a little, coming back with a pleasant face and a smooth temper. Why should she scold them, poor lambs? They were all she had to love, or that loved her. And they did love her, with all their boyish hearts.

One day, however--the day before they all left St. Andrews for England, the two elder to go to school, and the younger ones to return with her to their maternal grand-mother in London--David said something which wounded her, vexed her, made her almost thankful to be going away.

She was standing by the laurel bush, which somehow had for her a strange fascination, and her hand was on the letter-box which the boys and Mr.

Roy had made. There was a childish pleasure in touching it or any thing he had touched.

"I hope grandmamma won't take away that box," said Archy. "She ought to keep it in memory of us and Mr. Roy. How cleverly he made it! Wasn't he clever now, Miss Williams?"

"Yes," she answered and no more.

"I've got a better letter-box than yours," said little Davie, mysteriously. "Shall I show it to you, Miss Williams? And perhaps,"

with a knowing look--the mischievous lad! and yet he was more loving and lovable than all the rest, Mr. Roy's favorite, and hers--"perhaps you might even find a letter in it. Cook says she has seen you many a time watching for a letter from your sweetheart. Who is he?"

"I have none. Tell cook she should not talk such nonsense to little boys," said the governess, gravely. But she felt hot from head to foot, and turning, walked slowly in-doors. She did not go near the laurel bush again.

After that, she was almost glad to get away, among strange people and strange places, where Robert Roy's name had never been heard. The familiar places--hallowed as no other spot in this world, could ever be--pa.s.sed out of sight, and in another week her six months' happy life at St. Andrews had vanished, "like a dream when one awaketh."

Had she awaked? Or was her daily, outside life to be henceforth the dream, and this the reality?

Chapter 3.

What is a "wrecked" life? One which the waves of inexorable fate have beaten to pieces, or one that, like an unseaworthy s.h.i.+p, is ready to go down in any waters? What most destroy us? the things we might well blame ourselves for, only we seldom do, our follies, blunders, errors, not counting actual sins? or the things for which we can blame n.o.body but Providence--if we dared--such as our losses and griefs, our sicknesses of body and mind, all those afflictions which we call "the visitation of G.o.d?" Ay, and so they are, but not sent in wrath, or for ultimate evil.

No amount of sorrow need make any human life harmful to man or unholy before G.o.d, as a discontented, unhappy life must needs be unholy in the sight of Him who in the mysterious economy of the universe seems to have one absolute law--He wastes nothing. He modifies, trans.m.u.tes, subst.i.tutes, re-applies material to new uses; but apparently by Him nothing is ever really lost, nothing thrown away.

Therefore, I incline to believe, when I hear people talking of a "wrecked" existence, that whosoever is to blame, it is not Providence.

n.o.body could have applied the term to Fortune Williams, looking at her as she sat in the drawing-room window of a house at Brighton, just where the gray of the Esplanade meets the green of the Downs--a ladies'

boarding-school, where she had in her charge two pupils, left behind for the holidays, while the mistress took a few weeks' repose. She sat watching the sea, which was very beautiful, as even the Brighton sea can be sometimes. Her eyes were soft and calm; her hands were folded on her black silk dress, her pretty little tender-looking hands, unringed, for she was still Miss Williams, still a governess.

But even at thirty-five--she had now reached that age, nay, pa.s.sed it--she was not what you would call "old-maidish." Perhaps because the motherly instinct, naturally very strong in her, had developed more and more. She was one of those governesses--the only sort who ought ever to attempt to be governesses--who really love children, ay, despite their naughtinesses and mischievousnesses and worrying ways; who feel that, after all, these little ones are "of the kingdom of heaven," and that the task of educating them for that kingdom somehow often brings us nearer to it ourselves.

Her heart, always tender to children, had gone out to them more and more every year, especially after that fatal year when a man took it and broke it. No, not broke it, but threw it carelessly away, wounding it so sorely that it never could be quite itself again. But it was a true and warm and womanly heart still.

She had never heard of him--Robert Roy--never once, in any way, since that Sunday afternoon when he said, "I will write tomorrow," and did not write, but let her drop from him altogether like a worthless thing.

Cruel, somewhat, even to a mere acquaintance--but to her?

Well, all was past and gone, and the tide of years had flowed over it.

Whatever it was, a mistake, a misfortune, or a wrong, n.o.body knew any thing about it. And the wound even was healed, in a sort of a way, and chiefly by the unconscious hands of these little "ministering angels,"

who were angels that never hurt her, except by blotting their copy-books or not learning their lessons.

I know it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in natural gradation--maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which, ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these, excepting, perhaps, her one six months' dream of love and spring. That being over, she fell back upon autumn days and autumn pleasures--which are very real pleasures, after all.

As she sat with the two little girls leaning against her lap--they were Indian children, unaccustomed to tenderness, and had already grown very fond of her--there was a look in her face, not at all like an ancient maiden or a governess, but almost motherly. You see the like in the faces of the Virgin Mary, as the old monks used to paint her, quaint, and not always lovely, but never common or coa.r.s.e, and spiritualized by a look of mingled tenderness and sorrow into something beyond all beauty.

This woman's face had it, so that people who had known Miss Williams as a girl were astonished to find her, as a middle-aged woman, grown "so good-looking." To which one of her pupils once answered, naively, "It is because she looks so good."

But this was after ten years and more. Of the first half of those years the less that is said, the better. She did not live; she merely endured life. Monotony without, a constant aching within--a restless gnawing want, a perpetual expectation, half hope, half fear; no human being could bear all this without being the worse for it, or the better. But the betterness came afterward, not first.

Sometimes her cravings to hear the smallest tidings of him, only if he were alive or dead, grew into such an agony that, had it not been for her entire helplessness in the matter, she might have tried some means of gaining information. But from his sudden change of plans, she was ignorant even of the name of the s.h.i.+p he had sailed by, the firm he had gone to. She could do absolutely nothing, and learn nothing. Here was something like the "Affliction of Margaret," that poem of Wordsworth's which, when her little pupils recited it--as they often did--made her ready to sob out loud from the pang of its piteous reality:

"I look for ghosts, but none will force Their way to me: 'tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Betwixt the living and the dead: For surely then I should have sight Of him I wait for day and night With love and longings infinite."

Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead; for her finger was still empty of that ring--her mother's ring--which he had drawn off, promising its return "when he was dead or she was married." This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her. Nor, indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her, these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscure village in the south of England, where she had lived as governess--first in the squire's family, then the rector's.

From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped to remain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a few months. At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son had returned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone back again to India. There was now, for the first time for half a century, not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.

But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city, her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with a persistency for which her conscience smote her sometimes, knowing it was not wholly for their sakes. But they had never been near her, and she had little expectation of seeing any of them ever again, since by this time she had lived long enough to find out how easily people do drift asunder, and lose all clue to one another, unless some strong firm will or unconquerable habit of fidelity exists on one side or the other.