Robert Dalyell stole forth from the house which was his own, yet could
never more be his, in what would have been the dead of night had it been
any other season but June and any place but a northern country. It was
already daylight, with a pearl-like radiance as of spiritual day, and
something more mystic and almost awful in the silence of night, combined
with this diffusion of lovely light, than any darkness could have been.
He seemed to see the great spreading landscape like a picture, with his
own single and solitary figure in it, with a momentary terror of himself
alone in that great surrounding silence. He was not afraid of being
seen, as he was when he had stolen under cover of the brief darkness
into the house; but it occurred to him that anybody who should look out
of a curtained window or from the crevice of a closed shutter, and see
him walking along at an hour when nobody was abroad, would be afraid of
him as an unnatural wanderer in the wide brightness which was night. He
was in point of fact a ghost, as he had been believed to be--a man with
no place or meaning in the world, with his name upon a funeral tablet,
and his place knowing him no more; and like a ghost he passed through
the pale diffused light which cast no shadow. Never man was in a
position more strange and cruel. He had made the sacrifice of his life,
not as his son and his friend had feared, by suicide, but in a more
dreadful way. He had put himself to death, and yet he lived. The man had
been in this living death for nearly two years. He had lost
everything--himself, his name, and his personal identity, as well as
wife and children, and home and living. And yet he had never fully
realised what it was till now. Something of the Bohemian, something of
the adventurer in the man, which had been hidden under the most decorous
exterior for nearly fifty years, had made that curious new start in
existence almost amusing to him in its absolute novelty and relief from
the long monotony of usual life.
Even his sudden going home, with the object of frightening his wife out
of a marriage which would have been no marriage, had something of the
character of a jest in it. But there was no longer any jest in the
matter. He had seen his wife, he had seen his son, and he was at last
aware of what it was he had done--the darker aspect of it--the dishonour
to others, the deadly extinction of himself, the end of everything which
he had accomplished, almost with a light heart. A ghost indeed,
offending the eyes and chilling the very soul of those who were most
near and dear to him. “A swindler,” the boy had said. Was he a swindler?
To be sure the insurance offices would never have paid that money had
they known; but surely he had paid the price for it. He had died to all
intents and purposes. He had given himself for his children--a living
sacrifice--not less, but more than if he had really died and been thrown
up by the sea, as everybody believed, on Portobello sands. It is hard to
see guilt in a transaction, not for your own advantage, for which you
have given your life. Robert Dalyell did not blame his son; he could
perceive that there was much in what Fred said, though his heart swelled
in his breast against that injustice. He was not angry with Fred, but
much impressed, and moved (strangely enough) to something like
satisfaction by his son’s demeanour. The boy was a good boy, wounded in
his honour, and therefore inexorable, but only as a good man would wish
his boy to be. He was glad Fred was an honourable fellow, feeling it
like that. Poor Dalyell himself had all the instincts and habits of mind
of an honourable man; he had not seen the dishonour in it; he had
thought that, giving his life for it as he had done, there was nothing
morally wrong in his act. Surely he had bought the money dear: it was
not for him; it was for them, and for their good. There they were, all
of them--the wife who was about to give him a successor within two
years, and the boy who was himself his successor--safe in Yalton,
honoured, respected, enjoying the position to which they were born:
while he was an outcast, without anything but what he made for himself,
and the boy called him a swindler! He was an honest boy for all that,
and Dalyell’s mind had a certain forlorn satisfaction in it: though a
more forlorn being than he, walking, walking like a ghost through that
morning light which began in its pearly paleness to warm to the rising
of the sun, could not be. It was wonderful at what leisure he was, in
the utter forlornness of his being, to think of them all. He was not
sorry that he had given himself to save them. The only thing he was
sorry for was that, being dead, he had interfered at all. He ought to
have gone upon his own way--married, too, as he might have done, and got
himself new ties in his new life. He believed now that there would have
been no harm in that. There would be no harm in it. He would get away as
quickly as it was practicable, and get back to his new world, and this
time he would feel himself really emancipated. He would think no more of
the bonds of the past. She should be free to marry if she liked, and so
would he. This old world and he had nothing to do with each other any
more.
The foolish thing was that he had come at all on this fool’s errand. It
was all the old woman’s fault. It had been weak of him to let her into
his secret, to keep himself up with news of home, to be moved by her
horror at this marriage. Why should not she marry if she wished to do
so? She had been a good wife to him, and he had made her a widow. He had
known that she was not a woman who could act for herself, that she was
one who must have a caretaker, a manager of external matters? Why should
he interfere with her? It was all that confounded old woman’s scruples.
But Dalyell decided that he would interfere no more, that he would go
back whence he came and marry too, and thus justify his wife. The man’s
heart was very heavy in his breast when he made this resolution; but yet
he had a great courage, and was determined to stand up against fate and
get a new life for himself, being thus horribly, hopelessly cut off from
the old. The boy would not carry out his threat if he disappeared thus,
and was heard of no more. And all would be well with them, all would go
right, as he had meant it should when he gave up his life.
By this time the sun had risen, the birds had begun to twitter and hold
their morning conversations about all the business of life before it was
time to tune up for the concert of the day. Where was he going? He had
left such things as he had brought with him at a little lonely wayside
public-house near the sea before he went to Yalton, but it was still too
early to get admittance there. He found himself on the shore before he
knew. Yalton was not above a few miles from the sea, or rather from the
Firth in its upper part, not far from the spot where that monstrous
prodigy of science, about which so many trumpets have been blown, the
Forth Bridge, now strides hideous across the lovely inlet--those golden
gates through which the westering sun was wont to stream unbroken from
the upper reaches of the great estuary upon the stronger tides below.
Dalyell came out upon it suddenly, forgetting in the intense
preoccupation of his thoughts where he was. The sun had risen beyond the
distant Grampians, touching the Fife villages all along the coast with
gold. The air was damp, yet sweet with the saltness of the sea in it,
and the breath of distance and the sensation of the vast unknown to
which this great, splendid ocean pathway was one of the ways. When
Dalyell came out thus upon the shore he was the one speck of animated
being in the whole still world. He sat down to rest for a little upon a
rock. At three o’clock in the morning there is nothing stirring, not
even the cattle, though they were waking and thinking of an early
breakfast in the fields. He sat there and noted, and thought over it all
again. He was very forlorn, but not angry with anybody, scarcely vexed
by the thought that he was so soon forgotten. He even laughed a little
at the thought of Pat Wedderburn. How had he got himself the length of
that idea of marrying? He divined old Pat’s thoughts, a little troubled
by the necessity, going bravely through it. He had no sense of
resentment towards any of them. As soon as there was any one stirring
about the “Dun Cow” he would steal in and get his things and some
breakfast, and take himself off at once and for ever--never, whatever
happened, to interfere again.
But in the meantime there was some time to wait, and the sun was growing
warmer every moment, and the tide was in, and the little wavelets
rippling along the shore. Baths were not luxuries known at the “Dun
Cow,” and here was the bath he liked best, ready before him. It would be
the last time he would ever bathe in his native waters. He slipped out
of his clothes, laid them in a little heap, without even thinking how on
one supreme occasion he had done that before, and plunging from the
nearest rock launched himself into the sea and sunshine. It would brace
him up for the journeys and troubles of the day.
Dalyell swam about for some time, and dived and sported in the water
like a boy, with a curious sudden lightness of heart. He could not make
up his mind to come out of the water. And the northern seas are cold at
three o’clock (getting on for four) in the morning, with the sun not yet
very strong, and but newly risen. What it was that happened there was no
one to tell. Perhaps it was the shock of the night’s proceedings, though
he had reasoned it away, which struck to his heart--perhaps it was the
cold of the water--it might be a cramp, which, had there been any one
near to help, would have been of little consequence. None of these
things would any one ever know. It was said afterwards that a cry was
heard, piercing the sober stillness of the morning, so that somebody
woke and got up at the “Dun Cow,” but finding no sign of harm, went to
bed again for another hour. And it is certainly true that the minister
woke in his manse, which is near the shore, and got up and opened his
window, and remarked upon the beauty of the morning, and the wonderful
delightful calm and brightness of the Firth. He thought after that it
must have been the drowning man’s cry that woke him, though he was not
conscious of the sound itself.
Thus, with the strangest repetition, all the incidents of Dalyell’s
fictitious drowning were reproduced; and it did not fail to be remarked
in the papers that the accident up the Firth was singularly like the
accident that had happened nearly two years before to Mr. Dalyell, of
Yalton, on Portobello sands. It was a remarkable coincidence: but the
sufferer in this case, it was added, was a stranger, who had arrived at
the “Dun Cow” the night before, and was supposed to be a foreigner. The
body was found among the rocks, as if he had made a despairing grip upon
the seaweeds that covered them to save himself, from which it was judged
that the misadventure was wholly accidental; but, naturally, all was
conjecture, and this was a thing that never could be known.