Mistress and Maid Part 43

"Now, Robert, may I talk to you?"

"Yes. Preach away, my little conscience."

"It shall not be preaching, and it is not altogether for conscience,"

said she smiling. "You would not like me to tell you I did not love Johanna?"

"Certainly not. I love her very much myself, only I prefer you, as is natural. Apparently you do not prefer me, which may also be natural."

"Robert!"

There are times when a laugh is better than a reproach; and something else, which need not be more particularly explained, is safer than either. It is possible Hilary tried the experiment, and then resumed her "say."

"Now, Robert put yourself in my place, and try to think for me. I have been Johanna's child for thirty years; she is entirely dependent upon me. Her health is feeble; every year of her life is at least doubtful. If she lost me I think she would never live out the next three years. You would not like that?"

"No."

"In all divided duties like this somebody must suffer; the question is, which can suffer best? She is old and frail, we are young; she is alone, we are two; she never had any happiness in her life, except, perhaps me; and we--oh how happy we are! I think, Robert, it would be better for us to suffer than poor Johanna."

"You little Jesuit," he said: but the higher nature of the man was roused; he was no longer angry.

"It is only for a short time, remember--only three years."

"And how can I do without you for three years?"

"Yes, Robert, you can." And she put her arms round his neck, and looked at him, eye to eye. "You know I am your very own, a piece of yourself, as it were; that when I let you go it is like tearing myself from myself; yet I can bear it, rather than do, or let you do, in the smallest degree, a thing which is not right."

Robert Lyon was not a man of many words; but he had the rare faculty of seeing a case clearly, without reference to himself, and of putting it clearly also, when necessary.

"It seems to me, Hilary, that this is hardly a matter of abstract right or wrong, or a good deal might be argued on my side of the subject. It is more a case of personal conscience. The two are not always identical, though they look so at first; but they both come to the same result."

"And that is--"

"If my little woman thinks it right to act as she does, I also think it right to let her. And let this be the law of our married life, if we ever are married," and he sighed, "that when we differ each should respect the other's conscience, and do right in the truest sense, by allowing the other to do the same."

"Oh, Robert! how good you are."

So these two, an hour after, met Johanna with cheerful faces; and she never knew how much both had sacrificed for her sake. Once only, when she was for a few minutes absent from the parlor, did Robert Lyon renew the subject, to suggest a medium course.

But Hilary resolutely refused. Not that she doubted him--she doubted herself. She knew quite well by the pang that darted through her like a shaft of ice, as she felt his warm arm round her, and thought of the time when she would feel it no more, that, after she had been Robert Lyon's happy wife for three months, to let him go to India without her would be simply and utterly impossible.

Fast fled the months; they dwindled into weeks, and then into days. I shall not enlarge upon this time. Now, when the ends of the world have been drawn together, and every family has one or more relatives abroad, a grief like Hilary's has become so common that nearly every one can, in degree, understand it. How bitter such partings are, how much they take out of the brief span of mortal life, and, therefore, how far they are justifiable, for any thing short of absolute necessity, Heaven knows.

In this case it was an absolutely necessity. Robert Lyon's position in "our firm," with which he identified himself with the natural pride of a man who has diligently worked his way up to fortune, was such that he could not, without sacrificing his future prospects, and likewise what he felt to be a point of honor, refuse to go back to Bombay until such time as his senior partner's son, the young fellow whom he had "coached" in Hindostanee, and nursed through a fever years ago, could conveniently take his place abroad.

"Of course," he said, explaining this to Hilary and her sister, "accidental circ.u.mstances might occur to cause my return home before the three years were out, but the act must be none of mine; I must do my duty."

"Yes, you must," answered Hilary, with a gleam lighting up her eyes.

She loved so in him this one great principle of his life--the back-bone of it, as it were--duty before all things.

Johanna asked no questions. Once she had inquired, with a tremulous, hardly concealed alarm, whether Robert wished to take Hilary back with him, and Hilary had kissed her, smilingly, saying, "No, that was impossible." Afterward the subject was never revived.

And so these two lovers, both stern in what they thought their duty, went on silently together to the last day of parting.

It was almost as quiet a day as that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday at s...o...b..ry. They went a long walk together, in the course of which Mr.

Lyon forced her to agree to what hitherto she had steadfastly resisted, that she and Johanna should accept from him enough, in addition to their own fifty pounds a year, to enable them to live comfortably without her working any more.

"Are you ashamed of my working?" she asked, with something between a tear and a smile. "Sometimes I used to be afraid you would think the less of me because circ.u.mstances made me an independent woman, earning my own bread. Do you?"

"My darling, no. I am proud of her. But she must never work any more.

Johanna says right; it is a man's place, and not a woman's. I will not allow it."

When he spoke in that tone Hilary always submitted.

He told her another thing while arranging with her all the business part of their concerns, and to reconcile her to this partial dependence upon him, which, he urged, was only forestalling his rights; that before he first quitted England, seven years ago, he had made his will, leaving her, if still unmarried, his sole heir and legatee, indeed in exactly the position that she would have been had she been his wife.

"This will exists still; so that in any case you are safe. No further poverty can ever befall my Hilary."

His--his own--Robert Lyon's own. Her sense of this was so strong that it took away the sharpness of the parting, made her feel, up to the very last minute, when she clung to him--was pressed close to him--heart to heart and lip to lip--for a s.p.a.ce that seemed half a life-time of mixed anguish and joy--that he was not really going; that somehow or other, next day or next week he would be back again, as in his frequent re-appearances, exactly as before.

When he was really gone--when, as she sat with her tearless eyes fixed on the closed door--Johanna softly touched her, saying, "My child" then Hilary learned it all.

The next twenty-four hours will hardly bear being written about. Most people know what it is to miss the face out of the house--the life out of the heart. To come and go, to eat and drink, to lie down and rise, and find all thing the same, and gradually to recognize that it must be the same, indefinitely, perhaps always. To be met continually by small trifles--a dropped glove, a book, a sc.r.a.p of handwriting that yesterday would have been thrown into the fire, but to-day is picked up and kept as a relic; and at times, bursting through the quietness which must be gained, or at least a.s.sumed, the cruel craving for one word more--one kiss more--for only one five minutes of the eternally ended yesterday!

All this hundreds have gone through; so did Hilary. She said afterward it was good for her that she did; it would make her feel for others in a way she had never felt before. Also, because it taught her that such a heart-break can be borne and lived through when help is sought where only real help can be found; and where, when reason fails, and those who, striving to do right irrespective of the consequences, cry out against their torments and wonder why they should be made so to suffer, childlike faith comes to their rescue. For, let us have all the philosophy at our fingers' ends, what are we but children? We know not what a day may bring forth. All wisdom resolves itself into the simple hymn which we learned when we were young:

"Deep in unfathomable mines Of never-failing skill.

He treasures up His vast designs, And works His sovereign will.

"Blind unbelief is sure to err.

And scan His work in vain: G.o.d is His own interpreter.

And He will make it plain."

The night after Robert Lyon left, Hilary and Johanna were sitting together in their parlor. Hilary had been writing a long letter to Miss Balquidder, explaining that she would now give up in favor of the other young lady, or any other of the many to whom it would be a blessing, her position in the shop; but that she hoped still to help her--Miss Balquidder--in any way she could point out that would be useful to others. She wished, in her humble way, as a sort of thank offering from one who had pa.s.sed through the waves and been landed safe ash.o.r.e, to help those who were still struggling, as she herself had struggled once. She desired, as far as in her lay, to be Miss Balquidder's "right hand" till Mr. Lyon came home.

This letter she read aloud to Johanna, whose failing eye sight refused all candle light occupation, and then came and sat beside her in silence. She felt terribly worn and weary, but she was very quiet now.

"We must go to bed early," was all she said.

"Yes, my child."

And Johanna smoothed her hair in the old, fond way, making no attempt to console her, but only to love her--always the safest consolation.

And Hilary was thankful that never, even in her sharpest agonies of grief, had she betrayed that secret which would have made her sister's life miserable, have blotted out the thirty years of motherly love, and caused the other love to rise up like a cloud between her and it, never to be lifted until Johanna sank into the possibly not far-off grave.

"No, no," she thought to herself, as she looked on that frail, old face, which even the secondary, grief of this last week seemed to have made frailer and older. "No, it is better as it is; I believe I did right. The end will show."

The end was nearer than she thought. So, sometimes--not often, lest self-sacrifice should become a less holy thing than it is--Providence accepts the will for the act, and makes the latter needless.

There was a sudden knock at the hall door. "It is the young people coming in to supper."