When he reached the old house, Ralph was prepared for the results of
any further disaster, for disaster had few further results for which
it was needful to prepare. A light burned in the kitchen, and another
in that room above it where lately his father had lain. When Ralph
entered, Willy Ray was seated before the fire, his hand in the hand of
Rotha, who sat by his side. On every feature of his pallid face were
traces of suffering.
“What of mother?” said Ralph huskily, his eyes traversing the kitchen.
Willy rose and put his hand on Ralph's shoulder. “We will go
together,” he said, and they walked towards the stair that led to the
floor above.
There she lay, the mother of these stricken sons, unconscious of their
sufferings, unconscious of her own. Yet she lived. Since the terrible
intelligence had reached her of what had happened on the pass she had
remained in this state of insensibility, being stricken into such
torpidity by the shock of the occurrence. Willy's tears fell fast as
he stood by the bed, and his anguish was subdued thereby to a quieter
mood. Ralph's sufferings were not so easily fathomable. He stooped and
kissed the unconscious face without relaxing a muscle in the settled
fixity of his own face. Leaving his brother in the room, he returned
to the kitchen. How strange the old place looked to him now! Had
everything grown strange? There were the tall clock in the corner, the
big black worm-eaten oak cabinet, half-cupboard, half-drawers; there
was the long table like a rock of granite; there was the spinning
wheel in the neuk window; and there were the whips and the horns on
the rafters overhead--yet how unfamiliar it all seemed to be!
Rotha was hastily preparing supper for him. He sat on the settle that
was drawn up before the fire, and threw off his heavy and sodden
shoes. His clothes, which had been saturated by the rain of the
preceding night, had dried upon his back. He was hungry; he had hot
eaten since yesterday at midday; and when food was put upon the table
he ate with the voracious appetite that so often follows upon a long
period of mental distress.
As he sat at his supper, his eyes followed constantly the movements of
the girl, who was busied about him in the duties of the household. It
were not easy to say with what passion or sentiment his heart was
struggling with respect to her. He saw her as a hope gone from him, a
joy not to be grasped, a possible fulfilment of that part of his
nature which was never to be fulfilled. And she? Was she conscious of
any sentiment peculiar to herself respecting this brave rude man,
whose heart was tender enough to be drawn towards her and yet strong
enough to be held apart at the awful bidding of an iron fate? Perhaps
not. She in turn felt drawn towards him; she knew the force of a
feeling that made him a centre of her thoughts, a point round which
her deeper emotions insensibly radiated. But this was associated in
her mind with no idea of love. If affection touched her at all,
perhaps at this moment it went out where her pity--rather, her
pride--first found play. Perhaps Ralph seemed too high above her to
inspire her love. His brother's weaker, more womanly nature came
closer within her range.
There was now a long silence between them.
“Rotha,” said Ralph at length, “this will be my last night at the
Moss; the last for a long time, at least--I didn't expect to be here
to-night. Can you promise one thing, my girl? It won't be hard for you
now--not very hard _now_.” He paused.
“What is it, Ralph?” said Rotha, in a voice of apprehension.
“Only that you won't leave the old house while my mother lives.”
Rotha dropped her head. She thought of the lonely cottage at Fornside,
and of him who should live there. Ralph divined the thought that was
written in her face.
“Get him to come here if you can,” he said. “He could help Willy with
the farm.”
“He would not come,” she said. “I'm afraid he would not.”
“Then neither will he return to Fornside. Promise me that while she
lives--it can't be long, Rotha, it may be but too short--promise me
that you'll make this house your home.”
“My first duty is to him,” said Rotha with her hand to her eyes.
“True--that's true,” said Ralph; and the sense that two homes were
made desolate silenced him with something that stole upon him like
stifling shame. There was only one way out of the difficulty, and that
was to make two homes one. If she loved his brother, as he knew that
his brother loved her, then--
“Rotha,” said Ralph, with a perceptible tremulousness of voice,
“I will ask you another question, and, perhaps--who knows
rightly?--perhaps it is harder for me to ask than for you to answer;
but you will answer me--will you not?--for I ask you solemnly and with
the light of Heaven on my words--on the most earnest words, I think,
that ever came out of my heart.”
He paused again. Rotha sat on the end of the settle, and with fingers
intertwined, with eyelids quivering and lips trembling, she gazed in
silence into the fire.
“This is no time for idle vanities,” he said; “it's no time to indulge
unreal modesties; and you have none of either if it were. God has laid
His hand on us all, Rotha; yes, and our hearts are open without
disguise before Him--and before each other, too, I think.”
“Yes,” said Rotha. She scarcely knew what to say, or whither Ralph's
words tended. She only knew that he was speaking as she had never
heard him speak before. “Yes, Ralph,” she repeated.
“Perhaps, as I say, it's harder for me to ask than for you to answer,
Rotha,” he continued, and the strong man looked into the girl's eyes
with a world of tenderness. “Do you think you have any feeling for
Willy--that is, more than the common? I saw how you sat together as I
came in to you. I've marked you before, when he has been by. I've
marked him, too. You've been strength and solace to him in this
trouble. Do you think if he loved you, Rotha--do you think, then, you
could love him? Wait,” he added, as she raised her eyes, and with
parted lips seemed prepared to speak. “It is not for him I ask. God
knows it is as much for you as for him, and perhaps--perhaps, I say,
most of all--for myself.”
With a frank voice and face, with luminous eyes in which there was
neither fear nor shame, Rotha answered,--
“Yes, I could love him; I think I do so now.”
She spoke to Ralph as she might have spoken to a father whom she
reverenced, and from whom no secret of her soul should be hid. He
heard her in silence. Not until now, not until he had heard her last
word, had he realized what it would cost him to hear it. The agony of
a lifetime seemed crushed into that short moment. But he had made it
for himself, and now at length it was over. To yield her up--perhaps
it was a link in the chain of retribution. To say nothing of his own
love--perhaps it would be accepted as a dumb atonement. To see her win
the love and be won by the love of his brother--perhaps it would
soften his exile with thoughts of recompense for a wrong that it had
been his fate to do to her and hers, though she knew it not. There was
something like the white heat of subdued passion in his voice when he
spoke again.
“He _does_ love you, Rotha,” he said quietly, “and he will ask you to
be his wife. But he cannot do so yet, and, meantime, while my mother
lives--while I am gone--God knows where--while I am away from the old
home--I ask you now once more to stay.”
The great clock in the corner ticked out loud in the silence of the
next minute; only that and the slow breathing of the dog sleeping on
the hearth fell on the ear.
“Yes, I will stay,” said the girl; and while she spoke Willy Ray
walked into the kitchen.
Then they talked together long and earnestly, these three, under the
shadow of the terrible mystery that hung above them all, of life and
death. Ralph spoke as one overawed by a sense of fatality. The world
and its vicissitudes had left behind engraven on his heart a message
and lesson, and it was not altogether a hopeful one. He saw that fate
hung by a thread; that our lives are turned on the pivot of some mere
chance; that, traced back to their source, all our joys and all our
sorrows appear to come of some accident no more momentous than a word
or a look. In solemn tones he seemed to say that there is a
plague-spot of evil at the core of this world and this life, and that
it infects everything. We may do our best--we should do our best--but
we are not therefore to expect reward. Perhaps that reward will come
to us while we live. More likely it will be the crown laid on our
grave. Happy are we if our loves find fulfilment--if no curse rests
upon them. Should we hope on? He hardly knew. Destiny works her own
way!
Thus they talked in that solitary house among the mountains. They sat
far into the night, these rude sons and this daughter of the hills,
groping in their own uncertain, unlearned way after solutions of
life's problems that wiser heads than theirs ages on ages before and
since have never compassed, shouting for echoes into the voiceless
caverns of the world's great and awful mysteries.