CHAPTER IV

Then there ensued a period of total stillness in my life. It seemed to me as if all interest had gone out of it. I resumed my old occupations, such as they were, and they were not very engrossing. I had enough, which is perhaps of all conditions of life, if the most comfortable, the least interesting. If it was a disciple of Solomon who desired that state, it must have been when he was like his master, blasé, and had discovered that both ambition and pleasure were vanity. There was little place or necessity for me in the world. I pleased myself, as people say. When I was tired of my solitary chambers, I went and paid visits. When I was tired of England, I went abroad. Nothing could be more agreeable, or more unutterably tedious, especially to one who had even accidentally come across and touched upon the real events and excitements of life. Needless to say that I thought of the household at Ellermore almost without intermission. Charlotte wrote to me now and then, and it sometimes seemed to me that I was the most callous wretch on earth, sitting there watching all they were doing, tracing every step and vicissitude of their trouble in my own assured well-being. It was monstrous, yet what could I do? But if, as I have said, such impatient desire to help were to come now and then to those who have the power to do so, is political economy so infallible that the world would not be the better for it? There was not a word of complaint in Charlotte’s letters, but they made me rage over my impotence. She told me that all the arrangements were being completed for the sale of Ellermore, but that her father’s condition was still such that they did not know how to communicate to him the impending change. “He is still ignorant of all that has passed,” Charlotte wrote, “and asks me the most heartrending questions; and I hope God will forgive me all that I am obliged to say to him. We are afraid to let him see anyone lest he should discover the truth; for indeed falsehood, even with a good meaning, is always its own punishment. Dr. Maxwell, who does not mind what he says when he thinks it is for his patient’s good, is going to make believe to send him away for change of air; and this is the artifice we shall have to keep up all the rest of his life to account for not going back to Ellermore. She wrote another time that there was every hope of being able to dispose of it by private bargain, and that in the meantime friends had been very kind, and the “Works” were going on. There was not a word in the letter by which it would have been divined that to leave Ellermore was to the writer anything beyond a matter of necessity. She said not a word about her birthplace, the home of all her associations, the spot which I knew was so dear. There had been no hesitation, and there was no repining. Provided only that the poor old man, the stricken father, deprived at once of his home and firstborn, without knowing either, might be kept in that delusion—this was all the exemption Charlotte sought.

And I do not think they asked me to go to them before they left the place. It was my own doing. I could not keep away any longer. I said to Charlotte, and perhaps also to myself, by way of excuse, that I might help take to care of Mr. Campbell during the removal. The fact was that I could not stay away from her any longer. I could have risked any intrusion, thrust myself in anyhow, for the mere sake of being near her and helping her in the most insignificant way.

It was, however, nearly Christmas before I yielded to my impatience. They were to leave Ellermore in a week or two. Mr. Campbell had been persuaded that one of the soft and sheltered spots where Scotch invalids are sent in Scotland would be better for him. Charlotte had written to me, with a half despair, of the difficulties of their removal. “My heart almost fails me,” she said; and that was a great deal for her to say. After this I could hesitate no longer. She was afraid even of the revival of life that might take place when her father was brought out of his seclusion, of some injudicious old friend who could not be staved off, and who might talk to him about Colin. “My heart almost fails me.” I went up to Scotland by the mail train that night, and next day, while it was still not much more than noon, found myself at Ellermore.

What a change! The heather had all died away from the hills; the sunbright loch was steely blue; the white threads of water down every crevice in the mountains were swollen to torrents. Here and there on the higher peaks there was a sprinkling of snow. The fir-trees were the only substantial things in the nearer landscape. The beeches stood about all bare and feathery, with every twig distinct against the blue. The sun was shining almost as brightly as in summer, and scattered a shimmer of reflections everywhere over the wet grass, and across the rivulets that were running in every little hollow. The house stood out amid all this light, amid the bare tracery of the trees, with its Scotch-French tourelles, and the sweep of emerald lawn, more green than ever, at its feet, and all the naked flower-beds; the blue smoke rising peacefully into the air, the door open as always. There was little stir or movement, however, in this wintry scene. The out-door life was checked. There was no son at home to leave traces of his presence. The lodge was shut up, and vacant. I concluded that the carriage had been given up, and all luxuries, and the coachman and his family were gone. But this was all the visible difference. I was received by one of the maids, with whose face I was familiar. There had never been any wealth of male attendants at Ellermore. She took me into the drawing-room, which was deserted, and bore a more formal look than of old. “Miss Charlotte is mostly with her papa,” the woman said. “He is very frail; but just wonderful contented, like a bairn. She’s always up the stair with the old gentleman. It’s no good for her. You’ll find her white, white, sir, and no like herself.” In a few minutes Charlotte came in. There was a gleam of pleasure (I hoped) on her face, but she was white, white, as the woman said, worn and pale. After the first greeting, which had brightened her, she broke down a little, and shed a few hasty tears, for which she excused herself, faltering that everything came back, but that she was glad, glad to see me! And then she added quickly, that I might not be wounded, “It has come to that, that I can scarcely ever leave my father; and to keep up the deception is terrible.”

“You must not say deception.”

“Oh, it is nothing else; and that always punishes itself. It is just the terror of my life that some accident will happen; that he will find out everything at once.” Then she looked at me steadily, with a smile that was piteous to see, “Mr. Temple, Ellermore is sold.”

“Is it so—is it so?” I said, with a sort of groan. I had still thought that perhaps at the last moment something might occur to prevent the sacrifice.

She shook her head, not answering my words, but the expression of my face. “There was nothing else to be desired,” she said; and, after a pause, “We are to take him to the Bridge of Allan. He is almost pleased to go; he thinks of nothing further—oh, poor old man, poor old man! If only I had him there safe; but I am more terrified for the journey than I ever was for anything in my life.”

We talked of this for some time, and of all the arrangements she had made. Charley was to come to assist in removing his father; but I think that my presence somehow seemed to her an additional safeguard, of which she was glad. She did not stay more than half an hour with me. “It will be dull, dull for you, Mr. Temple,” she said, with more of the lingering cadence of her national accent than I had perceived before—or perhaps it struck me more after these months of absence. “There is nobody at home but the little ones, and they have grown far too wise for their age, because of the many things that they know must never be told to papa; but you know the place, and you will want to rest a little.” She put out her hand to me again—“And I am glad, glad to see you!” Nothing in my life ever made my heart swell like those simple words. That she should be “glad, glad” was payment enough for anything I could do. But in the meantime there was nothing that I could do. I wandered about the silent place till I was tired, recalling a hundred pleasant recollections; even to me, a stranger, who a year ago had never seen Ellermore, it was hard to give it up; and as for those who had been born there, and their fathers before them, it seemed too much for the cruellest fate to ask. But Nature was as indifferent to the passing away of the human inhabitants, whose little spell of a few hundred years was as nothing in her long history, as she would have been to the falling of a rock on the hillside, or the wrenching up of a tree in the woods. For that matter, of so small account are men, the rock and tree would both have been older dwellers than the Campbells; and why for that should the sun moderate his shining, or the clear skies veil themselves?

My mind was so taken up by these thoughts that it was almost inadvertence that took me, in the course of my solitary rambles about, to the Lady’s Walk. I had nearly got within the line of the beech-trees, however, when I was brought hurriedly back to the strange circumstances which had formed an accompaniment to this family history. To hear once more the footsteps of the guardian of Ellermore had a startling effect upon me. She had come back then! After that first thrill of instinctive emotion this gave me a singular pleasure. I stood between the trees and heard the soft step coming and going with absolute satisfaction. It seemed to me that they were not altogether abandoned so long as she was here. My heart rose in spite of myself. I began to speculate on the possibility even yet of saving the old house. I asked myself how it could be finally disposed of without Mr. Campbell’s consent and signature; and tried to believe that at the last moment some way might open, some wonderful windfall come. But when I turned back to the house, this fantastic confidence naturally failed me. I began to contemplate the other side of the question—the new people who would come in. Perhaps “some Englishman,” as Charley had said with a certain scorn; some rich man, who would buy the moors and lochs at many times their actual value, and bring down, perhaps, a horde of Cockney sportsmen to banish all quiet and poetry from Ellermore. I thought with a mingled pity and anger of what the Lady would do in such hands. Would she still haunt her favourite walk when all whom she loved were gone? Would she stay there in forlorn faithfulness to the soil, or would she go with her banished race? or would she depart altogether, and cut the tie that had bound her to earth? I thought—for fancy once set out goes far without any conscious control from the mind—that these were circumstances in which the intruders into the home of the Campbells might be frightened by noises and apparitions, and all those vulgarer powers of the unseen of which we hear sometimes. If the Lady of Ellermore would condescend to use such instruments, no doubt she might find lower and less elevated spirits in the unseen to whom this kind of play would be congenial. I caught myself up sharply in this wandering of thought, as if I were forming ideas derogatory to a dear friend, and felt myself redden with shame. She connect her lovely being with tricks of this kind! I was angry with myself, as if I had allowed it to be suggested that Charlotte would do so. My heart grew full as I pursued these thoughts. Was it possible that some mysterious bond of a kind beyond our knowledge connected her with this beloved soil? I was overawed by the thought of what she might suffer, going upon her solitary watch, to see the house filled with an alien family—yet, perhaps, by-and-by, taking them into amity, watching over them as she had done over her own, in that sweetness of self-restraint and tender love of humankind which is the atmosphere of the blessed. All through this spiritual being was to me a beatified shadow of Charlotte. You will say all this was very fantastic, and I do not deny that the sentence is just.

Next day passed in something the same way. Charlotte was very anxious. She had wished the removal to take place that afternoon, but when the moment came she postponed it. She said “To-morrow,” with a shiver. “I don’t know what I am afraid of,” she said, “but my heart fails me—my heart fails me.” I had to telegraph to Charley that it was deferred: and another long day went by. It rained, and that was an obstacle. “I cannot take him away in bad weather,” she said. She came downstairs to me a dozen times a day, wringing her hands. “I have no resolution,” she cried. “I cannot—I cannot make up my mind to it. I feel that something dreadful is going to happen.” I could only take her trembling hand and try to comfort her. I made her come out with me to get a little air in the afternoon. “You are killing yourself,” I said. “It is this that makes you so nervous and unlike yourself.” She consented, though it was against her will. A woman who had been all her life in their service, who was to go with them, whom Charlotte treated, as she said, “like one of ourselves,” had charge of Mr. Campbell in the meantime. And I think Charlotte got a little pleasure from this unusual freedom. She was very tremulous, as if she had almost forgotten how to walk, and leant upon my arm in a way which was very sweet to me. No word of love had ever passed between us; and she did not love me, save as she loved Charley and Harry, and the rest. I think I had a place among them, at the end of the brothers. But yet she had an instinctive knowledge of my heart; and she knew that to lean upon me, to show that she needed me, was the way to please me most. We wandered about there for a time in a sort of forlorn happiness; then, with a mutual impulse, took our way to the Lady’s Walk. We stood there together, listening to the steps. “Do you hear them?” said Charlotte, her face lighting up with a smile. “Dear lady! that has always been here since ever I mind!” She spoke as the children spoke in the utter abandonment of her being, as if returning for refreshment to the full simplicity of accent and idiom, the soft native speech to which she was born. “Will she stay after us, do ye think?” Charlotte said; and then, with a little start, clinging to my arm, “Was that a sound—was that a cry?”

Not a cry, but a sigh. It seemed to wander over all the woods and thrill among the trees. You will say it was only the wind. I cannot tell. To me it was a sigh, personal, heart-rending. And you may suppose what it was to her. The tears dropped from her full eyes. She said, speaking to the air, “We are parting, you and me. Oh, go you back to Heaven, and let us trouble you no more. Oh, go back to your home, my bonnie lady, and let us trouble you no more!’