Called Home.
The September wind blew cold and keen as Mr. Grinnell and Harold drove
along the quays to Carlisle Bridge, and the man that had so strongly
excited Mr. Pryor’s disapproval drew the borrowed rug closer round the
boy, who shivered and trembled as the blast swept by.
It was better when they entered the south side; there they were
sheltered from the cutting wind, and Harold grew quieter and calmer as
the car bore him nearer and nearer home. He asked Mr. Grinnell not to
drive up to the door, but to set him down at the end of the street where
his mother resided; and then they had a quarrel as to which should pay
the man, that resulted in Harold, as usual, having it all his own way.
On one point, however, Mr. Grinnell was firm—he would not let the sick
lad walk up the street alone, neither would he allow him to throw aside
Birdley’s rug. “I will take it back with me,” he said. “I am resolved to
see you safe and sound to your own door.”
Which he did, and then bidding Harold a cheery “good-night,” left Harold
as Brian admitted him.
“Who was that came with you?” the elder brother asked.
“A friend of mine, a man who brought me home. I have been ill, Brian—I
have indeed,” and Harold dropped into a chair and put out his white thin
hand deprecatingly towards his brother.
“I am going to be good,” he said. “I am. If you all will only do what I
ask you, I will never get drunk again. I will try to be a credit to
everybody belonging to me yet. It is not too late, I think, is it?” and
with a gesture which was unspeakably touching, he put Brian’s hand on
the table, and laid his cheek upon it.
Brian had persuaded his mother and Geraldine to go to bed. The servant,
however, was still up, and now stood in the doorway. She came to ask if
anything more were needed; but seeing Harold’s head bent down and his
brother leaning over him, she remained silent.
Brian saw her and whispered the one word “Doctor.”
In a moment, Mary was running down the street, and late though the hour
was, returned in five minutes with a surgeon.
“My brother is not very well,” said Brian, after the first greetings
were over. “Can you suggest any little thing that will set him to
rights?”
“I would rather not see a doctor. I do not want any medicine,” remarked
Harold, lifting his head, and looking with his great dark eyes straight
in the face of the surgeon who was feeling his pulse, and counting its
beats with the greatest apparent indifference. “I am quite well,” he
went on, pettishly, trying to wrench away his wrist; and then he dropped
his face again on Brian’s hand, and his brother knew it was to hide the
hot tears, that were falling thick and fast as rain.
“Hysterical,” said the doctor, calmly; and Harold gave Brian a push, as
a hint that he should contradict the medical statement.
“His strength has been greatly tried lately, as most probably you know,”
answered the elder brother; and his low, full voice had a great virtue
of quietness in it. “He has suffered much, both mentally and bodily; but
we hope rest and change may do wonders for him. Don’t we, Harold?”
The boy made no reply, but he pressed his lips on Brian’s hand.
“Is this the young gentleman, then, who was charged with a crime that
some one else committed?” asked the surgeon; and for those words Harold
turned round and thanked him.
“Nobody would believe me, sir,” he said. “Nobody, that is, out of my own
home. But I did not do it. I did not, indeed.”
“That I am sure you did not!” answered the surgeon, heartily; and
immediately he and Harold became good friends; and the boy, pushing back
the mass of black hair that had fallen forward over his face, answered
all the doctor’s questions, and told all his symptoms, so far as he knew
them himself.
“It is the nights I dread,” he finished. “If you could only give me
something to prevent my being so frightened. It is horrible to be all
alone in the dark, like that;” and he clutched Brian’s hand, and held it
fast while he spoke.
“Why did you never tell any one of these attacks before?” asked Brian.
“I told Mr. Pryor. The first of them I ever had at night was the time I
was staying at Durrow; and he tipped me a five-pound note, and made me
promise him to go to some of the great guns here, and ask them about it;
and I meant to go, only, you know, they took me up the very day I came
back—they did.”
“Poor lad!” said the surgeon, compassionately.
“I was a poor lad, I think,” answered Harold. “There’s nobody ever can
know what it was—to be like what I have been to-night, in that horrid
place. Another week of it would have killed me; I am sure it would.”
“Well, we must try to set you up again now,” observed the surgeon,
cheerfully. “If your servant can come with me,” he added, addressing
Brian, “I will send back some medicine with her, and see your brother
early to-morrow morning;” and he stretched out his hand, which the two
youths shook gratefully and departed.
“You won’t leave me to-night, Brian, will you?” pleaded Harold; and
Brian was just saying that he would not, when Mrs. Drewitt, who had got
up and dressed herself at the sound of a strange voice, came
down-stairs, asking what was the matter.
“I did not feel up to the mark,” Harold answered; “and that obstinate
Brian must needs go disturb the whole neighbourhood by fetching a doctor
to see me. What a shame it is to have roused you up! but now that you
are here, I want to ask you a favour. I want you and Brian to do
something for me.”
“What is it, dear?” She was sitting on a chair, drawn close up to his;
her arms were about him, and his head was resting on her breast.
“I want to go away. I want you to leave Dublin, and take me where I
shall not be known—where I shall not be called a thief and a liar at
every turn.”
“Who dares call you either the one or the other?” and Brian’s hand
clenched, and his mouth was drawn tight as he asked the question.
Harold laughed out.
“Who killed Kildare? who dared Kildare to kill?—
I killed Kildare, and dare kill whom I will,”
he repeated. “He would go out and fight for me, I do believe,” he said,
turning to his mother; “but he would have to fight all Dublin if he took
up that quarrel. I have found out to-day,” Harold went on, as he kept
curling and uncurling the broad strings of the widow’s cap that fitted
so closely to Mrs. Drewitt’s face, “that there is no place like home,
after all, and that there are no people like our own people, when they
are true to us.”
“Come up to bed, Harold,” interposed Brian, who dreaded another fit of
weeping. “Come along;” and he lifted his brother off his chair.
“Wait a moment,” entreated Harold, standing with his arm round Brian’s
neck, and Brian’s arm supporting him. “Wait a moment; will you do what I
say? Will you leave Dublin?”
Mrs. Drewitt’s glance wandered for a moment round the room. It was not
large; it was not well furnished; but it had been a shelter, and it had
seemed like home. For the instant it appeared hard to have to turn out
once more into the world; to be in middle age a wanderer on the face of
the earth; but the feeling only lasted for a moment; then she said—
“I will do whatever may be best for my children, and the child that has
most need of me I must consider first.”
The last few words were addressed to Brian, who answered—
“Harold has most need of you, mother. Do what he asks. Leaving Ireland
may be the making of him yet.”
“Do you wish to leave Ireland, Harold?” Mrs. Drewitt inquired, and the
boy nodded.
“I should like to go to London,” he said; “I want to be lost; I want to
be able to be a good boy. I am tired and sick of being bad and foolish.”
“Then God forbid we should keep you in the way of temptation!” exclaimed
Brian: “but now come to bed; if you are to travel to London you must
make haste and get strong.”
“Oh! I shall be all right enough,” answered the lad as he crawled up the
staircase, with Brian’s arm still encircling him, with his right hand
still twined round Brian’s neck.
And thus it came to pass that, instead of going to the Dargle, or to the
Seven Churches, or to the meeting of the waters, or any of the lovely
places to which Mr. Gyton had planned little excursions, the Drewitts
set about packing up their effects forthwith and removing to London.
“You can do as you please about it, of course,” said the surgeon to
Brian; “but——”
“It is his fancy,” the elder brother answered; “and I would not baulk it
for any consideration. And do not tell my mother, Mr. Ross; she will
find it out for herself in time. I know what you mean. I have been
afraid of it from the first.”
And there was another person who knew also; upon whom the feeling that
he was dying came slowly but surely; who day by day clung to his mother
with a more despairing attachment, with a more passionate love.
After they removed to London he and she were never separate. In the dull
winter days he sat at the windows of their lodgings, looking out on the
constantly-changing panorama that was passing below. For the sake of her
boy, Mrs. Drewitt had rented apartments in a house that commanded the
view of a crowded thoroughfare; and it was Harold’s delight to sit from
noon to dusk, and from dusk to nightfall, watching the people passing
and repassing, the endless conveyances, the lights, the bustle, the
noise, the excitement.
Hand clasped in hand, mother and son spent the days thus together. It
was a fearful winter, that of 1854–5, but Harold lived through it. The
spring of 1855 was late, and the season ungenial; but Harold lived to
smell the violets which Geraldine bought for him, and to see the
primrose-roots hawked in baskets about the streets.
It was a lovely summer, and Harold lived to take many a drive and many a
walk through the great Babylon. He loved the parks—he liked to go where
there were hundreds and hundreds of people, and not a face he knew among
them save one, his mother’s; while she—it was impossible for her not to
know that to Harold’s life there could be but one sequel—an early death:
and when at last, in the September following their arrival in London,
the heart that had once throbbed so high with youth and hope and courage
was cold and quiet, Mrs. Drewitt, alone with her dead, fell on her knees
and thanked God that her boy—her frail, erring, unfortunate boy—belonged
at last solely to Him and her.
She made no mourning for her child, she raised no cry of grievous
lamentation, of unutterable woe, but she lay through the night thinking
of how he had come home at last—home to the one sure shelter to die in
peace. The touch of his hand seemed never to depart from her; she could
not forget how day after day he had pillowed his head on her bosom; she
could not shut her ears to the “mother—mother” that he kept repeating
towards the last if she left his side for a moment.
“God has been very good to me, Brian,” she said. “He gave my boy back to
me before he died, and I am content.”
With some difficulty Brian at last found a resting-place for Harold: not
in one of the great cemeteries, but in a quiet churchyard in one of the
northern suburbs, where the evening sun falls aslant over the graves,
where great trees throw a pleasant shade across the grass, where the
grey church-tower flings its shadow over the tombs, where the bells ring
out Sunday after Sunday, where there is quiet without loneliness, rest
without desertion.
There Brian laid his brother down to sleep, himself the solitary
mourner.
Mr. Pryor and Mr. Gyton were both out of town; and in the vast city
Brian Drewitt had no other friend.
As he left the grave, his thoughts went back to another funeral, at
which he had been chief mourner likewise: where, under the shadow of the
mountains, within sound of the sea, he had seen the mortal remains of
his father placed in the vault of the Drewitts.
He would have felt better satisfied had Harold slept there likewise. He
would have liked a train of mourners, and a procession such as had wound
down the avenue at Kincorth, and under the trees, and round the bay, and
over Duranmore Hill, and down into the hollow.
Each man has his special weakness, and this was Brian’s. He had never
felt so fully that they were Drewitts of Kincorth no longer, as when he
followed his brother to the grave alone.
What did the words graven on his headstone, “Harold Drewitt,” imply to
the men and the women who passed through that churchyard Sunday after
Sunday? Nothing. They only served to show that there a stranger had laid
him down to rest.
What guess could they make about how the nineteen years of his young
life had been spent? What could they know of his story—his errors—his
repentance—his wrongs?
But as though it had been all contained in a single page, Brian read the
tale which was now finished over again—over and over again.
He could see the boy riding round and round the meadows; he could see
the proud glances which both father and mother directed towards their
youngest born; he could see the daring imp taking his leaps, bearing his
tosses, laughing advice to scorn, and mocking at all grave counsels. He
could see him walking about with Maxwell; looking defiantly across the
dinner-table, at the Headlands, at his more prudent brother, and then
draining off his bumper out of mere bravado. He thought of him that
night at Regan’s: he saw him disappear through the darkness on Madcap;
he remembered his life in Dublin, and the great trial which had, so far
as any human being could see, saved his soul, while it destroyed his
life; and then—then there came the days when Harold was tractable as a
child—when he clung to his mother—when he turned back home to die.
The short story was finished—the tale told—the book closed in this world
for ever.
It was with the life of Harold Drewitt “as it is with a ship that
passeth over the waves of the sea, which, when it is gone by, the trace
thereof cannot be found, neither the pathway of the keel in the waves;
or, as when a bird hath flown through the air, there is no token of the
way to be found; or, as when an arrow is shot at a mark, it parteth the
air, which immediately cometh together again.” He had “passed away like
a shadow, or as a post that hasteth by.”
Maxwell Drewitt had been right. It was a young body that Brian left,
with an exceeding bitter and sorrowful heart, to sleep in the grave
until the Judgment-day.