Mrs. Oliphant

“ James Rowland, tenant of Rosmore, with a name known over India, and his money in all manner of lucky investments, and Evelyn Ferrars for his wife, thought of all this with a curious strain of sensation. He was in many respects an imaginative man. He could realise it all as distinctly as if he saw it before him. He knew the kind of man he would himself have been—perhaps a better man than he was now—a straightforward, honourable man, limited in his horizon, but as trustworthy, as honest and true as a man could be. ”

“ At the smithy at Lochhead, one man did indeed ask the other, “Was that no young Rowland from Rosmore?” as Archie went by. But the powerful reply of the other, “Man, it’s impossible!” quenched that one suspicion. He had tied his old comforter, of Aunt Jane’s knitting, round his throat, as much for a disguise as for the warmth. He had put on his old clothes, with which he had first come to Rosmore, garments of which he only now knew the unloveliness—and was as unlike in appearance as in feeling to the millionaire’s only son, the young master of everything in his father’s luxurious house. ”

“ Rowland, one of the most wonderful of beings to an uneducated young man, with her easy knowledge of so many things which, to him, were a study and labour to know; and Rosamond, whose knowledge was of so different a kind, yet who, in her self-possession and youthful, grave acquaintance with the world, was almost the most astonishing of all; and Eddy, who was always so bright, always full of spirits, so perfectly aware of his own deficiencies, that they became qualities, and pleased the people about him more than if he had been ever so clever and instructed. ”

“ And in the evening, to sit at the head of the table with perhaps a statesman, perhaps a poet, somebody of whom the whole world has heard, at her right hand, penetrating even the society chatter with a thread of meaning! Evelyn forgot for the moment various things that would not be so pleasant—that her husband would like to entertain a lord, but would not probably know much more about him, however great he might be—that he might be inclined to tell the price of his wine, and laugh the rich man’s laugh of satisfaction at the costliness of everything, and the ruin that awaited him in London. ”

“ She drew back from the window, and wrapped herself in a shawl, with the shudder of a cold which was not physical but spiritual. In the midst of all that ceaseless loudness of life and movement and pleasure, and of the vision which had visited her own brain of lighted rooms, and animated faces, and brilliant talk—to drop back to that wreck of existence, the helpless man leaning upon his servant’s arm, bundled up like a piece of goods, unresisting, compelled to submit to those cares which were an indignity, yet which were necessary to very existence! The echo came back to Evelyn’s heart. ”

“ It is terrible at all times to enter the empty room of any one whom we love, especially when its owner is sick or in trouble. The unused bed cold, as if it were never to be employed more; the air of vacancy; the emptiness and silence, have an effect of suggestion more overwhelming than any simple fact. And Archie’s room was not only empty, it was abandoned. His father turned over the things upon the table in the miserable preoccupation of his mind, not knowing what he did, and then lifted a handful of papers, including Archie’s cheque-book, which was lying there. ”

“ It was safer not to investigate what it was that made the strong man’s eyes so wet and sore. Evelyn did not attempt any such prying, but let him hide himself—he so much stronger than she was—in her soft hold, and swallow the sob that was in his capacious heart. No one ever guessed but in that moment, what it was to James Rowland to have lost his ideal children, the little things with all their sweetness whom he remembered, and to have found the common-place young man and woman whom he now knew. ”

“ I have heard of men—not like you, who are a great engineer and a genius, everybody says—but mere nobodies, with shops and things, people one would not like to touch—” Rosamond made a slight gesture of disgust, as if she had drawn the folds of her dress away from contact with some millionaire. “But that is not WORK,” said the girl, throwing back her head. “I know people in society—well, perhaps not quite in society—who have gone on working for a whole lifetime, gentlemen, yes, and women too, working from morning to night, and even have been successful, yet have never made money. ”

“ Archie said.
He went down over the shoulder of the hill to Rosmore, never feeling for a moment the roughness of the way, laughing at himself as he stuck in a bog or stumbled over a rock, elated, happy, twice the man he was when he threaded slowly through the harsh bushes of the ling to where Eddy awaited him. What a half-hour that had been! He had never been able to be of use to any one all his life. ”

“ It was Evelyn who was the little girl, and Rosamond the sage, acquainted with the world and life.
“Father says so; but then, he thinks all people are humbugs. He says we really can think of no one but ourselves, whatever we may pretend.”
“But you mustn’t believe in that,” said Evelyn. “It is a dreadful way of looking at the world. Nobody can tell how much kindness and goodness there is unless they have been in circumstances to try it, which I have. You must not enter upon life with that idea, for it is quite false.” ”

“ And then suddenly the picture would change, and he would see her walk out of the gloom in her white dress, tall and slim, coming up to him, the fool, in his inaction, laying a hand upon his arm, like the dropping of a rose leaf, carrying him off always in her composed, proud way, with her head high, after{v.2-303} Eddy and Marion. These two were full of fun; they enjoyed it, as boys and girls enjoy dancing all the world over. But Archie did not enjoy it. It was far more than fun to him, it was as if some one lifted a curtain to him to reveal a new world. ”

“ I’m always in a hurry and always late—though I have nothing to do.”
“I suppose it’s according to a man’s nature,” said Archie.
“Everything is that if you go to the bottom of things. You’re one of the restless fellows that want to be doing—I don’t. I love idleness,” said Eddy, stretching himself back over the ling, with his arms extended over his head and his eyes on the sky. The sky was covered with clouds, yet there was a break of blue just over Eddy’s head, which he regarded complacently as if it had been made for his special use. ”

“ James, do you remember a story I told you when you first spoke to me, when you asked me first, in Helen Stanhope’s house?”
“About?”—He paused and added, “Yes: you have seen him again?”
“I have seen a man paralysed, in a Bath chair, moved, dressed, fed, ordered about by a servant. The ghost, or far worse than the ghost, the wreck of a man.”
“And that was he?” A certain gleam—was it of satisfaction?—was for a moment in James Rowland’s eyes. But it was only for a moment, and the next they were subdued by the most genuine sympathy. “My poor dear!” ”

“ Madeline’s resources were generally supposed by her friends to be unlimited: she had a suggestion for everything. But in this case she was silenced—for at least a whole minute. Then she resumed, as if throwing off a load.
“You should have the boy sent to Eton, and the girl to a good school. You can’t be expected to take them out of the nursery. And for their sakes, Evelyn, if for nothing else, it is most important that you should know people and take your place in society. It makes all my arguments stronger instead of weaker: you must bring Miss Rowland out—when she grows up.” ”

“ I just study her and take a lesson by her, and I can see if we are to get on in the world that she is the one to help us most.”
“I don’t want her help,” cried Archie, “and if that’s what you call getting on in the world——”
“Oh,” cried Marion, with a sigh of impatience, “you are just like a bairn. To think that you cannot see for yourself, you that are a man! What are we to do if we don’t get into society? You would rather be back in the Sauchiehall Road, with your football and your friends, than in a grand house like this, with nobody that cares for you, and nothing that you can do.” ”

“ The sensation of turning the back upon home, in such circumstances, is not very rare in human consciousness, and must have left in many memories a poignant recollection, terrible, yet perhaps not altogether painful to realise, in the long series of good or evil fortune which has followed it. Archie, for the first hour or two, as he sped up the side of the loch, like an arrow from a bow, walking five miles an hour in his excitement, scarcely feeling the fatigue of his condition, or any physical circumstances whatever, did not even know where he was going, or what he would do. ”

“ Lord forgive ye, Jims Rowland! How dare ye say it’s a mistake to me, that has been a mother to them—and mair!”
Rowland, like other men, was made very uncomfortable by the sight of the woman crying, but he held his ground. “I am very sorry to seem ungrateful, Jane. I am not ungrateful. You’ve given them a happy childhood, which is everything. But we must try a different system now. I can’t have a young man stumbling and stammering before me, as if he had something on his conscience. ”

“ That was just what he was, a sham with nothing in his pocket, combining all the defects of the Glesco great people with an absolute want of that real foundation on which they stood. He had no education, no manners, nothing upon which any claim of superiority could be put forth. Superiority! he did not mean that. Poor Archie felt himself the equal of nobody, not even of Sandy the groom, who, at least, had an occupation of his own and knew how to do it. And no money in his pocket! that was perhaps the worst of all. He had always heard a great deal about money all his life. ”

“ They stood a little apart, Archie with his hands in his pockets, Marion drawing lines in the ground with the end of her parasol. They were not even looking at “the view.” The air of caring for nothing, finding no interest in anything, was so strong in them both that they might have been taken as impersonations of ennui, that most hopeless of all the immoralities. They did not know what to do with themselves—they would never know what to do with themselves, Rowland thought in despair. ”

“ I have no desire to learn,” he said.
“Oh, that’s silly,” said Rosamond “Why shouldn’t you learn? Why shouldn’t you make yourself a little agreeable, Mr. Rowland? No, of course it is nothing to me. I see you for a few weeks, a great deal of you, and then perhaps I never see you again. It does not matter to me in the very least. Still it is a pity to see a man sitting as you do—not speaking, not taking an interest in anything. What is the good of being a man at all?”
Archie was very much taken aback by this onslaught. ”

“ Rowland, my dear lady,” Saumarez said. “I have wanted to make his acquaintance ever since I heard—how lucky a man he was.”
“You may say that,” said Rowland heartily, “the luckiest man, I think, in the whole world.”
“You say so,” said the invalid, “to the man who can perhaps best understand you in the whole world, being the unluckiest man in it, I should think; a failure in everything beside you, who are a success in everything. ”

“ I have always been a lucky man; but never so much as when you made up your mind to have me, little as I deserve a woman like you. I’ve that good in me that I know it when I see it: a good woman from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. There’s nothing in the world so good as that. Now, I’ll tell you something, and I hope it will please you, for it’s chiefly meant to please you. I am very well off. I can settle something very comfortable on you, and I can provide for the young ones. If it pleases you, my dear, we’ll turn our backs on this blazing India altogether, and go home. ”

“ When Archie appeared in great haste and for once glowing with pleasure, he found her seated in the centre of a great rug on the floor of the hall with the two little dogs in convulsions of delight beside her, barking, biting, rolling and struggling upon the soft carpet, and undaunted with the something so unknown to them—a lady in a soft silken dress to play with. Perhaps the little things recognised only this of Evelyn’s many excellences, that she wore an exceptionally soft gown—not like Jenny Rankin’s rough homespun. Dogs are very susceptible to this superiority of texture. ”

“ CHAPTER XXXIX. Eddy had gone, and a silence, that seemed to radiate round the house like a special atmosphere, fell upon Rosmore. Winter, which had been only threatening, dropped all at once in torrents of sweeping rain{v.2-217} and wild winds that shook the house. It requires a lively spirit at any time to stand up against the pale downpour which falls in sheets from the colourless sky between the large dull windows and the cowering trees, and shuts out every other prospect: but when there is misery within, the climax afforded by that dismal monotony without is appalling. ”

“ He might not have required so much from his little Marion, poor child, if it had not been for Evelyn. So much the greater, then, was her responsibility who had accustomed him to a different standard, and so unintentionally brought to him an acute pang. Evelyn said to herself that, however desillusioné her husband might be, she must try to keep a motherly glamour in her own eyes. She must endeavour to suffer long and be kind, to think no evil—neither to be disgusted nor discouraged. ”

“ For a fellow of your age, you are the oldest fellow and the most artful I ever knew. I do believe it’s only to gain time, and that there’s nothing in it. Carrying on with a girl is nothing to you; you can get ‘em to believe you when another fellow hasn’t even the chance to have a hearing. There’s that tall one, your sister, looks at me as if I was the dirt under her feet. I’ll tell you what, if you’ll make her give me a dance at this thundering ball of yours, I’ll do it—whatever the Governor may say.”
“Well you can ask her,” said Eddy, in lightness of heart, “like any other gentleman. ”

“ If Evelyn had been a weak or unreasoning woman, had she been without trust in her husband or herself, had she been apt to concealment, or to believe, as so many do, that an evil motive is always the most readily believed in—it is possible that she might at this odious moment, a moment she could never bear to think of after—have been lost one way or other, bound as a miserable thrall under this man’s power, whose malignant mouth could have done her such vile and frightful injury. ”

“ It is always a difficult matter for a man who has led a busy life, full of work and its excitements, to settle down in the country, especially if he has no estate to manage,—nothing to do, as people say, but enjoy himself. And no doubt this first setting in of winter and the virtual separation from the world caused by the persistent bad weather, would have been, under any circumstances, a trial of James Rowland’s cheerfulness and patience. ”

“ Evelyn declared to herself that she would have no house in Chester Street. To cover up the old faded carpets with pretty Persian rugs, and make the dingy rooms fine with temporary fittings up which did not belong to them, was, like all the rest, a deception and disgust. The pretty things should be for her own house, where they would be placed to remain as long as she lived, where they would be like herself, at home. ”

“ To be in Glasgow without going to see his aunt would be, he was aware, an unpardonable and heartless thing. It would wound her deeply if she knew, and even if she never knew, it would be no less a mean and abominable thing to do. Nevertheless the presence of Eddy had been enough to make him put this from his mind as an impossibility. “I was not thinking of calling anywhere,” he said.
“But you must have people that you want to see.{v.2-80} Let’s go and see somebody,” Eddy said. “I like people. I’m not a fellow for seeing sights.” ”