Mrs. Oliphant

“ Geoff, though he was so much more clever, did not understand the process by which in silence she arranged and perceived every point; but then Geoff had not the minute acquaintance with the subject nor the feeling which touched every point with interest. By and by Mary began to sob, her gentle breast heading with emotion. “Oh, Geoff,” she cried, “what a heart—what a heart! He is like our Saviour; he has given his life for his enemy. Not even his friend; he was not fond of him; he did not love him. Who could love him—a man who was ashamed of his own, his very own people? ”

“ Look you here, my young lord, your lordship’s a deal of consequence to some, but it’s nothing to her and me. Come, if you like to come; it’s your business, not our’s. If there’s danger it’s your own risk, if there’s any good it’s you that will have it, not us—— ”
“Danger!” said Geoff; “the danger of a walk up the fells! and good—to me? Yes, you can say it is to me if you like, but you ought to be more interested than I am. However, words don’t matter. Yes, let us say the good is mine, and the danger, if any, is mine—— ”
“Have it your own way,” said Bampfylde. ”

“ The like of you is contrary. I’ve little to do with men; but when you go, if you go, it might be early morning, the blue time, at the dawn. Then’s the time to see; when there’s all the business to be done afore the day, and after the night. Children is curious,” said Bampfylde, with a softening of his voice, which felt in the darkness like a slowly dawning smile; “but creatures is more curious yet. I like to watch them. You’ll see all the life that’s in the moors if it’s that time when you go.”
“I suppose if there is anything to tell me I cannot go sooner,” said Geoff. ”

“ He looked at Geoff with the very anguish of feebleness in his eyes. “Ah!” he faltered, “it is true—they are right. I am old—old—and good for nothing. Let them push me away, and take my place.” A few sobs, bitter and terrible, came with the words, and two or three tears dropped down the old man’s grey-pale cheeks. The depth of mortal humiliation was in this last cry.
Geoff almost wept too in the profound pity of his generous young soul—it went to his very heart. “Let me help you,” he cried, pouring out the cordial with anxious care. It was all the Squire could do to put it to his lips. ”

“ More serious, far more serious than when he was a young gentleman always about the house, but the same man—still the same man.
“Then send her to me at once. It is you, Martha, the same as ever,” he said, with a momentary smile in the midst of his anxiety. Just as Mr. John used to do—always a kind word for everybody and a smile. She made him another curtsey, crying and smiling together.
“And glad, glad, sir, to see you come home,” she said. There was this excuse for Miss Brown’s lingering, that Mary had rushed off at once to find Martuccia. John bowed his head gravely. ”

“ I shall ever marry any one but little Lily. Of course she is very little, and when she is grown up she will probably have nothing to say to me; but I shall never care for any one else. Why should you shake your head? I never saw any one like her,” said Geoff, growing solemn, and shaking off his blush as he saw himself opposed.
“Oh, Geoff!” Mary shook her head and contracted her beautiful brow, “I do not think anything good can come out of that family; but I must not speak. I am jealous, I suppose. How did you know I did not want you for Annie or Fanny?” ”

“ This was a thing which deeply affected the spirits and feelings of Eastwood, the only male functionary in the house—the most irreproachable of butlers. A door which opened straight into the lady’s favourite sitting-room was felt by him to be an insult to the family; it was more like a farmhouse than a castle; and as for Miss Musgrave, she was just as bad—too affable, a deal too affable, talking to any one that came to her, the tramps on the road as well as the ladies and gentlemen whose unwilling steeds pranced and curveted on the old slope of causeway. ”

“ The same world, and only a step between them: but one all pain and darkness, mortal anguish and confusion—the other all so clear, so sweet, so still, solemn with the serious beginning of the new day, and instinct with that great, still pressure of something more than what is seen, some soul of earth and sky which goes deeper than all belief, and which no sceptic of the higher kind, but only the gross and earthly, can disbelieve in. Young Geoff disbelieving nothing, his heart full of the faith and conviction of youth, came out into this wide purity and calm with an expansion of all his being. ”

“ The vagrant watched her with a keen scrutiny quite unlike his usual careless ways. “It’s not them as are a burden on the earth that dies,” he said. “You’ve said that long—let him die in peace; let him die in peace. Am I wishing him harm? There’s ne’er a one will hurt him. He’s safe enough. Whoever suffers, it will not be him.”
“Oh, lad, lad!” cried the mother, uncovering her face to look at him. At ’Lizabeth’s age there are no floods of tears possible. Her eyes were drawn together and full of moisture—that was all, She looked at him with a passion of reproach and pain. ”

“ After all, perhaps, she knows no more than we do,” she said, with an attempt at a smile. “The sight of her made me forget myself.”
“Where is she?” said the young man.
“Ah! that is just what overcame me,” said Mary, with a sob, and a strange smile at the irony of fate—“down-stairs in my husband’s room. I have seen her often in the road and in the village—but here, in my house! Never mind, Geoff; it was she that helped him to get out of prison. They were bold, they had no fear of anything; not like us, who are ladies, who cannot stir a step without being watched. Never mind, never mind! ”

“ Geoff rushed out of the room with a beating heart, feeling himself all at once thrust into a position of importance in this unknown house. He had never seen death or its approach, and in his inexperience did not know how difficult it was to shuffle off the coils of mortality. He thought the old man was dying. Accordingly, he rushed up the slope to the old hall like a whirlwind, where Mary and the children were. “Come, come,” he cried; “he is ill, very ill!” and snatching Nello’s reluctant hand, ran back, dragging the child with him, who resisted with all his might. ”

“ He felt like the man in the story who loved the fairy maiden—the young Immortal; would she give up her visionary paradise for his sake and learn to look at him, not as an angel but as a woman? but for that she must be a woman first, and at present she was but a child. When he kissed her hand it cost Lilias no blush. She accepted it with childish, angelical dignity. “She took the kiss sedately—” and the dark fountains of her eyes filled full, and two great tears tumbled over, and a piteous quiver came to her lips, and she said, “Oh, Mr. Geoff, I want papa!” ”

“ Time and the world are at once vaster, and vaguer, and more narrow at her age than at any other. He might come now, suddenly appearing at any moment; and Lilias could not but feel vaguely disappointed every moment that he did not appear. And yet there was no knowing when he would come, to-morrow, next year, she could not tell when. Meanwhile she kept her eyes fixed on the distance, watching for him. But Lilias was not thinking of herself in conjunction with “Mr. Geoff.” She was much too young for love; no flutter of even possible sentiment disturbed the serenity of her soul. ”

“ But oh, the anguish if Geoff should not be so true and so pure—if he should be weak, be tempted and fall, and stain the whiteness which his mother so deeply trusted in, yet so trembled for! Who can understand such paradoxes? She would have believed no harm of her boy—and yet in her horror of harm for him the very name of evil gave her a panic. Nothing wonderful in that. She sat and trembled to the very tyings of her shoe, and yet was sure, certain, ready to answer to the whole world for her son, who had done no evil. Other women who have sons know what Lady Stanton felt. ”

“ He took pains to console his sister.
“Don’t cry,” he said, “Lily I shall come back in the holidays, and sometimes I will write you letters; and there is always the white rabbit I gave you, and little Mary Pen for you to play with.”
“I don’t want to play,” said Lilias, with a burst of tears; “is play everything? I am too old for that. But oh, Nello, you are going to leave me, and you don’t care. You do not care for Mary, or Martuccia, or any one. Me, I should not mind—but you do not love any one. You care for nobody but yourself.” ”

“ Come, you’re not a baby to cry. Get up, and be a man.”
“I want to go home,” said Nello.
“I daresay you do; but you’re not going home. So your plan is to make the best of it,” said the schoolmaster. “Now come, I let you off yesterday; but I’ll send a man to take you out of bed if you don’t get up now. Come along, boy. I see you want to be a baby, as your uncle said.”
“I am no baby,” cried Nello, furious; but the schoolmaster only laughed.
“I give you half-an-hour,” he said; and in half-an-hour, indeed, Nello, giddy and weak, managed to struggle down to the schoolroom. ”

“ Musgrave! Speak no more o’ Musgrave to me!”
“Oh, mother,” said her son, with kindred impatience, as he walked towards her and seized her arm in sudden passion; “oh, ’Lizabeth Bampfylde! You do more than murder men, for you kill the pity in them! What’s all you have done compared to what John Musgrave has done? and me—am I nothing? Two—three of us! Lily, too, you’ve sacrificed Lily! And is it all to go on to another generation, and the wrong to last? ”

“ Lilias woke up, however, out of this other world, all in a moment, into the conscious existence of a lively, brave, fancifully-timid child, when she found herself suddenly confronted by a stranger, who did not pass on as strangers usually did, making a mere momentary jar and pause in the visionary atmosphere, but who made a decided pause, and stopped her. A little thrill of fear sprang up in the child’s breast, and she would have hurried on, or even run away, but for the pride of honour and courage in her little venturesome spirit which made it impossible to fly. ”

“ I can bear it all, say, even if he was dead.”
“’Lizabeth,” said Geoff, with tears in his eyes—and again everybody looked on as at a tragedy—“you are a brave woman; you have borne a great deal in your life. He is dead; but that is not all.”
She did not note, nor perhaps hear, the last words. How should she? The first was enough. She stood still in the midst of them, all gazing at her, with her hands clasped before her. For a moment she said nothing. The last drop of blood seemed to ebb from her brown cheeks. Then she raised her face upward, with a smile upon it. ”

“ Oh, why should he have looked at me like that, Geoff? No, I never did any one harm, much less him. I have always stood up for him, you know, since you first spoke to me. I have always said, always—even before this was found out: living people mistake each other continually; but the dead—the dead ought to know—— ”
“Who is dead?” said Geoff; “are you speaking of John Musgrave, who is as much alive as I am?”
“If he were a living man,” said Mary, solemnly, “how could I have seen him? Geoff, it is no mistake. ”

“ To this world of mountain and cloud—of rising sunshine and soft-breathing air, and serene delicious silence, pervaded by the soft indistinguishable hum of unseen water and rustling grasses, and minute living creatures unseen too beneath the mountain herbage—what is the noblest palace built with hands but a visible limitation and contraction of the world, an appropriation of a petty corner out of which human conceit makes its centre of the earth? Bampfylde, who had come out with him, and to whom the story Geoff had just heard was not new, felt the relief more simply. ”

“ Anxieties of every kind filled their minds—those which concerned life and the living coming uppermost and shutting out the solemn interest of the chamber over which death had been hovering. The Squire slept, but only his nurse, unmoved in professional calm, watched over him; and when he woke, still wrapped in a mist and haze of half-consciousness which subdued all his being, yet with an aspect less deathlike, Mary came and went to and from his room, in an enforced stillness almost beyond bearing, not daring to stay long in one place lest she should betray herself. ”

“ Papa said, ‘Lily, I trust him to you—you are to take care of him.’ What shall I say to papa if he comes home and asks me, ‘Where is my little Nello?’ Papa may come any day. That is his way, he never writes to tell us, but when he can, he comes. He might come to-day,” cried Lilias. “Mr. Pen, oh, send somebody for Nello. Will you not listen to me? What should I say to papa if he came home to-day?”
“My dear little Lilias,” said Mr. Pen, shaking his head mournfully, “your papa will not come to-day. Heaven knows if he will ever be able to come. You must not think it is such an easy matter. ”

“ Married life was not unmixed happiness always; it had its difficulties, he knew. But if she had married it was not possible that she could have been otherwise than happy. With her there could have been no drawbacks. Mr. Pennithorne looked upon the question from a husband’s point of view alone.
When he was gone, Miss Musgrave sat still without changing her place, at first with a smile, which gradually faded away from her face, like the last suffusion of the sunshine, which was going too. ”

“ Mary is a grown-up lady, old, not like us; it must be Mary’s copy. You should not touch it, you are too little.”
“I will try,” cried Nello, with his eyes upon the brushes. Already he had rubbed against something not yet dry, and had smudged the colour, to the horror of his sister. He had both his elbows upon it and the greater part of his small person.
“Oh, what have you done, you naughty boy!” cried Lilias; “you cannot do it. Let me!”
“Yes, I will do it, I will do it!” cried Nello, seizing the crackling vellum and dashing at it with a brush full of colour. ”

“ Is he much hurt?” cried Geoff, kneeling down by his side. The man did not say anything, but shook his head. The vagrant himself smiled, with a kind of faint amusement in the mournful glimmer of his eyes.
“Not hurt, my young gentleman; just killed,” he said; “but you’re back—and they’re safe?”
“Safe, Bampfylde; and listen!—with their father. He has come to take care of his own.”
A warmer gleam lighted up the vagrant’s face. “John Musgrave here! Ah, but it’s well timed,” he cried feebly. “My young lord, I’m grieved but for one thing,—the old woman. Who will take care of old ’Lizabeth’? ”

“ And all my trouble for nothing!”
“If I can be of any use to you I will,” said Geoff. Then he paused and added, “I want you to do something for me.”
“What is it that old ’Lizabeth Bampfylde could do for a fine young gentleman? Your fortune?—ay, I’ll give you your fortune easy; a kind tongue and a bright eye carries that all over the world. And you look as if you had a kind heart.”
“It is not my fortune,” he said with an involuntary smile.
“You’re no believer in the likes of that? May be you have never met with one that had the power. It runs in families; it runs in the blood. ”

“ I suppose you never played cricket?” said Randolph, with, though he was a man, a pleasurable sense of being thus able to humiliate the little creature beside him. Nello coloured to the roots of his hair.
“I do not like cricket. Must every one like the same things? It is too hot; and one cannot play by oneself,” the boy added with a sigh.
“You ought not to play by yourself, it is not good for you. Have you no one to play with, little boy?”
“Nobody,” said Nello, with emphasis; “not one person. There is Lily; but what does it matter about a girl? ”

“ Sir Henry thought her a good enough wife, a faithful creature, perfectly trustworthy, and so forth. It was in this light that all regarded her. Something better than an upper servant, a little dearer than a governess; something to be made use of, to do everything for everybody. She who, Geoff thought in his enthusiasm, was more lovely and sweet than the youngest of them, and ought to be held pre-eminent and sacred by everybody round her. This was not the lot that had fallen to her in life.
“So I am not the best judge, you see,” said Lady Stanton with a little sigh. ”

“ He was not very much surprised: but a bird that some day would turn into a young prince did not attract him so much as one that would hop on his shoulder without ulterior object. He looked down at it very seriously, with more respect perhaps, but not so warm an interest. His little face had lost its animation. How Lily would have glowed and brightened at the thought! But Nello was no idealist. He preferred a real pigeon to all the enchanted princes in the world.
“Nay,” said Bampfylde, with a gleam of a smile across his dark face, “it’s no fairy, but it’s a carrier. ”

“ The sun reached to the footpath behind the hedge, and warmed the little wayfarers through and through—that was the best thing that had happened to them—for how good it is to be warmed when one is chilled and weary; and what a rising of hope and courage there is when the misty dawn disperses before the rising of the brave sun!
Nello almost recovered his spirits when he got within the wood. There were side-aisles even to the highroad, and deep corners in its depths where shelter could be had, and the ground was all flaked with shadow and sunshine ”

“ There was no doubt now as to who was heir. When Randolph came to Penninghame, after spending a day and a half in vain researches for Nello, life having become too exciting at that moment at the Castle to leave any one free to send word of the children’s safety—he found all doubt and notion of danger over for John—- and he himself established in his natural place. Whether the Squire had forgotten everything in his illness, or whether he had understood the story which Mary took care to repeat two or three times very distinctly by his bedside, no one knew. ”

“ Nello had already been roused to that instinctive sense of harm which comes with the arrival of an aggrieved person. But he did not face his victim as Lilias did. He threw down his streaming pencil on the vellum, got down from his chair in the twinkling of an eye, and fled to take shelter with Martuccia, who, ever ready to defend, and yet unaware who was wrong, put an arm round him at once and faced Miss Musgrave with prompt defiance.
“Oh Mary!” cried Lilias, trembling, “Nello did not mean it. He is so little. Nello did not know.” ”

“ He said Nello was being ruined here, and so did Mr. Pen. It was against my will—against my wish.”
“Randolph!” he said. This alarmed him more than all the rest. “Both my children! I thought I should find them safe—happy in your hands, whatever happened to me—— ”
“Oh John, what can I say?” cried Mary, wringing her hands. No one could be more guiltless of any unkind intention, but, as was natural, it was she who bore the blame. A man may be pardoned if he is a little unjust in such circumstances. ”

“ Mary stood still where he left her, and watched him as he went slowly down the slope and round the corner of the house. He was shorter than John and stouter, with that amplitude of outline which a wealthy rural living and a small parish are apt to confer. A comfortable man, fond of good living, fond of his ease; yet taking the trouble to come here, for what?—to baffle some supposed wicked contrivances and plots against himself. Mary remembered that Randolph had taken the great family misfortune as a special wrong to him. ”