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The English Library
No. 77
THE RAILWAY MAN AND
HIS CHILDREN
BY MRS. OLIPHANT
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
_VOLUMES BY THE SAME AUTHOR PUBLISHED IN_
The English Library
(_In the Press_)
THE MARRIAGE OF ELINOR 2 Vols.
_Copyright Edition_
THE RAILWAY MAN
AND HIS CHILDREN
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF
“_KIRSTEEN_,” “_WITHIN THE PRECINCTS_,” “_AT HIS GATES_,” _ETC._
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOLUME I.
LEIPZIG
HEINEMANN AND BALESTIER
_LIMITED, LONDON_
1892
THE RAILWAY MAN
AND HIS CHILDREN
CHAPTER I.
The news that Miss Ferrars was going to marry Mr. Rowland the engineer,
ran through the station like wildfire, producing a commotion and
excitement which had rarely been equalled since the time of the Mutiny.
Miss Ferrars! and Mr. Rowland!--it was repeated in every tone of wonder
and astonishment, with as many audible notes of admiration and
interrogation as would fill a whole page. “Impossible!” people said, “I
don’t believe it for a moment”--“You don’t mean to say----” But when
Mrs. Stanhope, who was Miss Ferrars’ friend, with whom she had been
living, answered calmly that this was indeed what she meant to say, and
that she was not very sure whether she was most sorry or glad--most
pleased to think that her friend was thus comfortably established in
life, or sorry that she was perhaps stepping a little out of her
sphere--there remained nothing for her visitors but a universal gape of
amazement, a murmur of deprecation or regret--“Oh, poor Miss Ferrars!”
the ladies cried. “A lady, of such a good family, and marrying a man who
was certainly not a gentleman.” “But he is a very good fellow,” the
gentlemen said; and one or two of the mothers who were conscious in
their hearts, though they did not say anything of the fact, that had he
proposed for Edie or Ethel, they would have pushed his claims as far as
legitimate pressure could go, held their tongues or said little, with a
feeling that they had themselves escaped the criticism which was now so
freely poured forth. They were aware indeed that it would have come upon
them more hotly, for it was they who would have been blamed in the case
of Ethel or Edie, whereas Miss Femurs was responsible for herself. But
the one of them who would have been most guilty, and who indeed had
thought a good deal about Mr. Rowland, and considered the question very
closely whether she ought not as a matter of duty to endeavour to
interest him in her Ethel, whose name was Dorothy, took up the matter
most hotly, and declared that she could not imagine how a lady could
make up her mind to such a descent “Not a gentleman: why, he does not
even pretend to be a gentleman,” said the lady, as if the pretention
would have been something in his favour. “He is not a man even of any
education. Oh I know he can read and write and do figures--all those
surveyor men can. Yes, I call him a surveyor--I don’t call him an
engineer. What was he to begin with? Why he came out in charge of some
machinery or something! None of them have any right to call themselves
engineers. I call them all surveyors--working men--that sort of thing!
and to think that a woman who really is a lady--”
“Oh come, Maria, come!” cried her husband, “you are glad enough of the
P.W.D. when you have no bigger fish on hand.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by bigger fish, Colonel Mitchell,”
said the lady indignantly; but if she did not know, all the rest of the
audience did. Matchmaking mothers are very common in fiction, but more
rare in actual life, and when one exists she is speedily seen through,
and her wiles are generally the amusement of her circle, though the
woman remains unconscious of this. And indeed poor Mrs. Mitchell was not
so bad as she was supposed to be. She was a great entertainer, getting
up parties of all kinds, which was the natural impulse of a fussy but
not unkindly personality, delighting to be in the midst of everything;
and it is certain that picnics and even dinner parties, much less
dances, cannot be managed unless you keep up your supply of young men.
There were times when her eagerness to keep up that supply and to assure
its regularity was put down quite wrongly to the score of her daughters,
which is an injustice which every hospitable woman with daughters must
submit to. A sort of half audible titter went round the little party
when Colonel Mitchell, with that cruel satisfaction so often seen in
men, gave over his wife to the criticism of society. A man never stands
by the women of his family in such circumstances; he deserts them even
when he does not, as in this instance, actually betray. There was one
young man, however, one of the staff of dancers and picnic men, who was
faithful to her--a poor young fellow who knew that he had no chance of
being looked upon as a _parti_, and who made a diversion in pure
gratitude, a quality greatly lacking among his kind.
“Rowland,” he said, “is one of the best fellows in the world. He does
not shine perhaps among ladies, but he’s good fun when he likes, and a
capital companion.”
“And Miss Ferrars, dear,” said one of the ladies soothingly, “is not
like my Ethel or your Dorothy. Poor thing, it is just as well, for she
has nobody to look after her: she is, to say the least, old enough to
manage matters for herself.”
“And to know that such a chance would never come again,” said one of the
men with a laugh--which is a kind of speech that jars upon women, though
they may perhaps say something very like it themselves. But to think of
Miss Ferrars making a last clutch of desperation at James Rowland the
engineer, as at a chance which might never occur again, was too much
even for an afternoon company making a social meal upon a victim, and
there was a feeling of compunction and something like guilt when some
one whispered almost with awe, “Look! there they are.”
The party in question were seated in a verandah in the cool of the day
when the sun was out of sight. They had all been gasping in
semi-darkness through the heat, and now had come to life again to enjoy
a little gossip, before entering upon the real business of dining and
the amusements of the evening. The ladies sat up in their chairs, and
the men put themselves at least in a moral attitude of attention as the
two figures went slowly across the square. One feels a little “caught”
in spite of oneself by the sudden appearance of a person who has been
under discussion at the moment he or she appears. There is a guilty
sense that walls have ears, and that a bird of the air may carry the
matter. It was a relief to everybody when the pair had passed and were
seen no more. They went slowly, for the lady had a couple of little
children clinging to her hands.
Miss Ferrars was of an appearance not to be passed over, even though she
was quite old enough, as her critic said, to manage matters for
herself--so old as to have no prospect of another chance did she reject
the one unexpectedly offered to her at present. She was a woman a little
more than the ordinary height, and a little less than the ordinary
breadth--a slim, tall woman, with a very pliant figure, which when she
was young had lent itself to all kinds of poetical similes. But she was
no longer young. She must have been forty at the least, and she was not
without the disadvantages that belong to that age. She did not look
younger than she was. Her complexion had faded, and her hair had been
touched, not to that premature whiteness which softens and beautifies,
but to an iron grey, which is apt to give a certain sternness to the
face. That there was no sternness about her, it was only necessary to
see her attitude with the children, who clung to her and swayed her
about, now to one side now to the other, with the restless tyranny
peculiar to their age, while still she endeavoured to give her
attention and a smile to the middle-aged person by her side, who, truth
to tell, was by no means so patient of the children’s presence as she
was. It was the little boy, who was next to Mr. Rowland, and who kicked
his legs and got in the way of his footsteps, that brought that colour
of anger to his face, and many exclamations which had to be repressed to
his lips. Those dreadful little Stanhopes! Miss Ferrars had been by way
of paying a visit to the friend of her childhood, and it was very kind,
everybody said, of Mrs. Stanhope to stretch such a point for a friend,
and to keep her so long. But there were many who knew very well what
Evelyn Ferrars had not said even to herself, that she was the most
useful member of the Stanhope household, doing everything for the
children, though not a word was said of any such duties as those which
had insensibly been thrown upon her. Nobody breathed such a word as
governess in respect to Mrs. Stanhope’s friend: but people have eyes,
and uncommonly sharp ones sometimes at an Indian station, and everybody
knew perfectly to what that long visit had come.
Mr. Rowland was a man of another order altogether. He was not tall, and
he was rather broad--a ruddy weatherbeaten man, much shone upon by the
sun, and blown about by all the winds. It was not difficult to see at a
glance the difference between the two, which the critics in Colonel
Mitchell’s verandah had pointed out so fully. He was dressed as well as
the gentlemen of the station, and had an air of prosperity and wealth
which was not often to be seen in the lean countenances of the soldiers;
but he was not like them. He was respectable beyond words, well off, a
sensible, responsible man: but he was not what is called a gentleman in
common parlance. You may say that he was much better, being a good and
upright and honest man; but after all that is but a begging of the
question, for he might have been all these things and yet a gentleman,
and this would have been in every way of the greatest advantage to him.
It would have done him good with the young men under him, and even with
the overseers and foremen of his works, as well as with the handful of
people who made society in the station. Fortunately, however, he was not
himself conscious of this deficiency, or if he was, accepted it as a
matter of fact that did no real harm. He did not, as Mrs. Mitchell said,
even pretend to be a gentleman. As he walked along by the side of the
lady who had accepted him as her future husband, a great satisfaction
betrayed itself in every look and movement. His face was lighted up with
a sort of illumination as he turned it towards her--not the transport of
a young man, or the radiance of that love-look which makes the most
homely countenance almost beautiful, for he was perhaps beyond the age
for such exaltation of sentiment; but a profound satisfaction and
content which seemed to breathe out from him, surrounding him with an
atmosphere of his own. Perhaps there was not the same expression upon
the face of his betrothed. It is true that she was disturbed by the
children, who hung upon her, dragging her now in one direction now in
another; but at least her face was quietly serene, untroubled--peaceful
if not glad.
This was the story of their wooing. Mr. Rowland, though he was not
looked upon by the Society of the station as quite their equal, was yet
invited everywhere, dining with everybody: and was treated with the
utmost hospitality, so that no one could have suspected that any
suspicion as to his worthiness was in the minds of these friendly people
whom such a sudden event as this threatened marriage had moved to
discussion of the claim to be one of them, which indeed he had never
made, but which they had all awarded in that ease of social arrangement
which herds together a little masterful alien community in the midst of
that vast continent peopled by races so different. To be an Englishman
is of itself in India a social grade, and thus Mr. Rowland the engineer
had many opportunities of seeing Mrs. Stanhope’s friend, both in Mrs.
Stanhope’s house and the houses of the other magnates of the station. He
had met her at all the entertainments given, and they were many, and he
had almost immediately singled her out, not because of her beauty nor of
the dependent position which touches the heart of some men, nor indeed
for any reason in particular, except that he did single her out. Such an
attraction is its own sole reason and explanation. It was not even
choice, but simple destiny, which made him feel that here, by God’s
grace, was the one woman for him. I do not deny that when this
middle-aged and perfectly honest and straightforward man asked her to
marry him, Evelyn Ferrars was taken very much by surprise. She opened
wide a pair of brown eyes which had not been without note in their day,
but which had long ceased to expect any homage, and looked at him as if
for the moment she thought him out of his senses. Did he know what he
was saying--did he by any strange chance mean it? She looked at him with
scarcely a blush, so great was her surprise, making these inquiries with
her startled eyes; and there can be no doubt that her first impulse was
to say no. But before she said it a sudden train of thought darted out
from her mind, one crowding after the other an endless succession of
ideas and reflections, presented to her in the twinkling of an eye, as
if they had been a line of soldiers on the march. And she paused. He was
scarcely aware of the hesitation, and resumed again after that moment of
silence, pleading his own cause, very modestly yet very earnestly, with
a seriousness and soberness which were much more effectual than greater
enthusiasm would have been. But by this time she was scarcely aware what
he said; it was her own mind that had come into action, saying to her a
hundred things more potent than what he was saying, and changing in a
moment all the tenor of her thoughts. Evelyn was not perhaps much more
of a free agent than Rowland was in this moment of fate. She felt
afterwards that she had been stopped and her attention attracted as by
the flash of one of those sun-signals of which she had been hearing. She
was altogether in a military atmosphere in the Stanhopes’ house, and
everybody had been explaining that process by which the sun’s rays are
made to communicate messages from one distant army to another. She was
stopped with the no on her lips by the flash and radiation through the
air of that message. She had not any code of interpretation to note in a
moment what it meant. But she paused, almost to her own astonishment;
and when she found her voice, it was to ask for a little time to think
before she gave her final reply.
When a woman does this, it is almost invariably the case that she
decides for the suitor, even the doubt being, I suppose, a point in his
favour, and increasing a disposition--a bias towards him rather than
away from him. Evelyn had, like most other Englishwomen, a lively and
wholesome feeling that love alone justified marriage, and that any less
motive was a desecration of that tremendous tie. It is an excellent
thing for a race that this superstition should exist, and I am far from
desiring to see any lower ground accepted as the basis of a connection
upon which the purity and character of all other affections depend. But
yet when reason is allowed time to speak, there are many other things
which may be permitted to have a voice, and a woman may at least be
allowed to take into consideration at forty, arguments which at twenty
would be indignantly refused a hearing. What Evelyn Ferrars felt as she
retired from that interview which had opened to her so many and such
extraordinary new suggestions for thought, it is difficult to describe.
She had become all at once a sort of battlefield--to keep up the
military simile--in which that “No,” which had been her first conception
of the situation, stood like a force entrenched and on the defensive,
somewhat sullen, holding fast upon the mere fact of its existence,
emitting a dull roar of artillery now and then, while the attacking
forces scoured the plain in endless evolution, pressing on and on. The
first flash of the sun-signal, which she had not been at first able to
interpret, turned out to mean a rapid identification of her own
position, which was a thing she had not allowed herself to think of,
while it was without remedy. It was not what she had anticipated when
she ventured in her loneliness to come up country in answer to her
friend’s warm invitation. She had come out to Calcutta with her brother,
the last survivor of her family after the breaking up of home at her
father’s death; and when he too died soon after, cut off by the sudden
stroke which ends so many promising careers in India, the despair of the
solitary woman left in a strange place with few friends and little
money, and nobody to come to her help, had been almost without a gleam
of light. And in that emergency the Stanhopes had been very kind. The
wife had written imploring her heart-broken friend to come to her,
offering her all that the affection of a sister could do to supply her
loss; the husband had come, what was even more kind, to do what he could
for her, and to take her, if she consented, home. They had been more
than kind. There had been no alloy of interested motives in that first
impulse of generous compassion. It was good to think how frank, how
full, how affectionate it had been.
But--oh what a pity, what a pity, that these beautiful impulses and
sincere moments of loving kindness should ever be shadowed by the cold
shade of after-thoughts! From the moment when Mrs. Stanhope weeping
received poor Evelyn into her arms, and lavished upon her the caresses
and endearments of the most devoted friendship, to that in which Miss
Ferrars became the unpaid governess, the useful dependent, and at the
same time a member of the family who was apt to be _de trop_, who was
not wanted between husband and wife, who was always there and could not
be kept to her schoolroom and out of the way as an ordinary governess
would have been--was unfortunately not very long. And indeed it was
nobody’s fault. The consciousness that she was getting a great deal out
of her friend, and that the tables were more or less turned, and it was
Evelyn who was conferring the benefit, did not make it easier to Mrs.
Stanhope to keep up the effusion and tenderness of the first welcome:
and Captain Stanhope was often cross, troubled by harassments of his
own, and wishing his wife’s friend anywhere but where she was,
notwithstanding the fact that her presence was “everything for the
children.” The situation had grown more and more strained, but there
seemed no issue out of it: for it takes a great deal of money to take
your passage from the centre of India to England, even when you know
where to go and have your living assured when there. And Evelyn had
nothing, neither a house to go to nor enough money for the journey.
There were moments when she would have given anything in the
world--which is a mere figure of speech, for she had nothing in the
world to give--to be able to go away, and relieve her friends of her
inconvenient presence; and there were moments when she felt that she was
of too much use in the house to deprive them of her services, as if she
grudged the expenditure. It was scarcely possible to imagine a position
more painful and trying. It was nothing to her that her whole life was
absorbed in the service of her friends and their children. Many women
are able to make this kind of sacrifice and to stave off all thoughts of
the future and what is to become of them after--with a heroic obedience
to the Gospel precept of taking no thought for the morrow. But that was
not all. For she was at the same time, as she felt, an inconvenience to
the very people for whom she was spending her strength: they wanted her
very room for other uses. They did not want her constantly between them
spoiling their _tête à tête_--always to be considered when there was
company, and to be invited with them when they went out. The very
children got to know that aunt Evelyn, as they called her, was _de trop_
in the house, and yet could neither go nor be sent away.
And here suddenly was the opening of a door which made all things
possible. When that mental heliograph flashed in her face, and she
became aware of what it meant, Evelyn, for almost the first time,
retired into her room and locked her door, and for a whole hour turned a
deaf ear to the demands made upon her. The children came and called in
every tone of impatience, Edith, the eldest, tap-tapping upon the closed
door for ten minutes continuously, and little Bobby kicking, to the
great derangement of the thoughts going on within; but for the first and
only time Evelyn held fast. She had plenty to do in that house, more
than ever she had done before in her life. In the previous crises of
that existence it had been other people who had done the thinking, and
there had been little left for her but to submit. Now, however, the
matter was in her hands, and no one else could help her. It was hard
work getting her head clear enough to put this and that together; for
the mere idea of marriage was very startling and indeed terrifying to
the middle-aged woman who had put it out of all her calculations years
ago, and who had retained merely the old youthful superstition that its
only warrant was love. But was that really so? After all it was not so
simple a thing that it could be thus dismissed and classified. It was a
very complicated thing and involved many duties. It was not merely an
emotional matter, but one full of practical necessities and exertions.
To be a true and helpful companion through all the chances of life: to
govern a household: to secure comfort and peace of mind and consolation
in all circumstances and occurrences for the partner of life: to care
for him and his interests as nobody else could do: to adopt his
obligations and help him to serve God and to serve men--Evelyn Ferrars
felt that she was capable of all that. It was a worthy office to fulfil,
and it was surely the chief part. As for the other side it was
undeniable that she shrank from it a little. But he was not young any
more than herself. The hour was scarcely over when Mrs. Stanhope herself
appeared at the door, half with the air of a mistress who has a right to
all her retainer’s time, and half with that of a friend anxious to know
what was the matter.
“The children tell me they cannot make you hear,” she said. “I came
myself to see if you were ill, or if anything is wrong.”
“You have come just when I wanted you,” said Evelyn, “if I may shut the
door on the children for ten minutes more. Helen, something very
wonderful has happened, and I have been trying to think what I must do.”
“What has happened?” said Mrs. Stanhope in alarm.
“Mr. Rowland has asked me to--to marry him,” said Evelyn. She did not
blush as women do, even when their feelings are but little stirred. She
was too anxious to learn what her friend’s verdict would be.
Mrs. Stanhope uttered a cry, and rising up hastily, caught Evelyn in her
arms. “Oh,” she said, “I shall lose you, Eve!” The words and the embrace
were full of compunction, of kindness, and remorse; but Evelyn felt the
relief, the thankfulness, that suddenly flooded her friend’s breast, and
her decision was no longer in any doubt.