When Archie left his father’s house on the morning after the ball,
unrefreshed by sleep, half mad with excitement, bewildered by that last
interview with Mrs. Rowland, and the sensation of something supernatural
which had come over him, in the half-lighted hall, with the chill of the
desolate new day coming in, he was perhaps in as wretched plight as ever
a boy of twenty ever found himself in: and that is saying much, for, but
for the inalienable power of recovery in youth, how sharp would be the
pang of many a scene, in which the boy, guilty or not guilty, has
started up against parental wrath or reproof, and shaken the dust from
off his feet and gone forth, perhaps to dismay and ruin, perhaps to new
life and work. The sensation of turning the back upon home, in such
circumstances, is not very rare in human consciousness, and must have
left in many memories a poignant recollection, terrible, yet perhaps not
altogether painful to realise, in the long series of good or evil
fortune which has followed it. Archie, for the first hour or two, as he
sped up the side of the loch, like an arrow from a bow, walking five
miles an hour in his excitement, scarcely feeling the fatigue of his
condition, or any physical circumstances whatever, did not even know
where he was going, or what he would do. The home of his childhood, the
kind nurse and ruler of his docile youth, were not far off, it is true,
and in that he was better off than most of the young prodigals among
whom this guiltless boy found himself suddenly classed. But his aunt had
been prepossessed against him, she had all but forbidden him to return
the last time he left her door, and his heart was sore with injured
pride and innocence, misconstrued in that quarter as well as every
other. He had gone wildly out in the early grey of the morning, and
pursued the straight road before him rather because it was the straight
road than from any other circumstance, unable to form any decision, or
for a long time even to think of any conclusion to this forlorn walk out
into the world. It was, of course, hours too early for the early boat,
and had it not been so, Archie would not have exposed himself to
question or remark as to his departure, from the people who knew him.
The cottagers on the roadside who had noted with some surprise, on the
previous night, the carriage from Maryport, far on the other side of
the loch, which had driven rapidly by, coming and going, carrying the
messenger from the bank, might have found themselves--had they divined
who the pedestrian was who passed by their doors in the early morning,
treading the same long way--spectators of one of those human dramas
which take place in our midst every day, though we are seldom the wiser.
At the smithy at Lochhead, one man did indeed ask the other, “Was that
no young Rowland from Rosmore?” as Archie went by. But the powerful
reply of the other, “Man, it’s impossible!” quenched that one suspicion.
He had tied his old comforter, of Aunt Jane’s knitting, round his
throat, as much for a disguise as for the warmth. He had put on his old
clothes, with which he had first come to Rosmore, garments of which he
only now knew the unloveliness--and was as unlike in appearance as in
feeling to the millionaire’s only son, the young master of everything in
his father’s luxurious house. Archie had never indeed felt his elevation
very real: he scarcely ventured to accept and act upon it as if he were
himself a person of importance; he, to his own consciousness, always
Archie Rowland of the Westpark Football Club, and the Philosophers’
Debating Society, and of Sauchiehall Road. It was true that already
Sauchiehall Road had sustained the shock of disenchantment, and he had a
shamed and subdued feeling of having somehow gone beyond the circle to
which he had once been so pleased to belong, and being no longer at home
in it. But still less was he really at home on the moors with his
unaccustomed gun, or in the drawing-room with all its unfamiliar
necessities. He was now more a nobody than ever, belonging neither to
one life nor the other, cast out of both; and he walked along dreamily
as the morning broadened into the day, and all the world awoke, and the
family fires were lighted, and the family tables spread. He walked on,
and on getting beyond the range in which young Mr. Rowland of Rosmore
was known, faint, tired, without food or rest, an outcast who belonged
to nobody, till his progress began to be almost mechanical, his limbs
moving like those of an automaton, all volition gone, nothing possible
but to put one foot beyond the other in sheer monotony of movement, like
the wheels of a machine. He did not pause, because he felt that if the
machine were stopped, being human, it might not be able to go on again.
Wheels that are made of wood and iron have this great advantage over
flesh and blood.
At last he got to the railway, and stumbled into a carriage, and felt
the comparative well-being of rest, when he was able to begin to think a
little what he ought to do. And then it came back to Archie that he had
bound himself to a certain course of action. He had flung the intimation
at his father in the height of their passionate encounter, that there
should be no difficulty in finding him, that he would go to the old home
and wait there to be arrested, to stand his trial. It brought the most
curious quickening of feeling to remember that he had said that. To be
arrested, to be brought to trial!--he seemed to see the scene, himself
standing at the bar, his father giving evidence in the box, the forged
cheque handed round, and all the wise heads bent over it, all finding
signs to prove that he had done it--he that scorned it, that cared
nothing for money, that would have flung it all into the sea rather than
take a pin unjustly from any man. The fire blazed up in his dim eyes, so
dim with want of rest and excess of emotion. He accused of such a crime!
He laughed within himself at the futility of it, the foolishness! Had it
been anything else of which they had accused him--of murdering somebody,
for instance. Archie knew that he had a high temper (he who had always
been so docile and so gentle), and he thought it possible that, if much
irritated and provoked, he might have lifted his hand and given a sudden
blow. There would have been in that a possibility, a chance, that he
might have done it: but to forge a man’s name, for the sake of
money--money! The scorn with which he said the word over to himself in
the noise of the railway, nobody hearing, was tremendous. He laughed
aloud at the thought. But it decided him on one point, that there must
be no question as to where he went. It must be to his aunt’s house; the
policeman could come to arrest him there, and therefore there he must
go. It was true that it might be bringing shame upon her, innocent; but
at all events he must go there first, tell her the whole, and if she
desired that he should find another address, at least acquaint her with
it, that she might give it to the policemen when they came. This did him
good, as it settled the question, and brought him out of all
uncertainty. It fortified him even against Aunt Jane’s possibly grim
reception of him. He would go there, not for anything he wanted from
her, but to answer the claim of honour, which was the first necessity of
all.
Mrs. Brown saw him from her window when he came, sick and weary, up the
little path under the shadow of the elderberry tree, and ran and opened
the door to him with a cry of, “Archie! eh, my man, but you’re welcome
to me,” which thawed his heart a little. He threw himself down wearily
in the familiar parlour, on one of the chairs, where he was always
forbidden to sit lest he should discompose the antimacassar extended on
its back. He remembered this as he sat down with a dreary laugh.
“This is one of the chairs I was never to sit upon,” he said.
“Oh, my bonny man,” cried Mrs. Brown, “sit where ye please; dight your
feet upon the sofa, if you please; do anything you like! but eh,
whatever you do, dinna leave me to one side and cast me off as if I did
not belong to you: for that is what I canna bear.”
“I will not do that,” said Archie; “far from that: for I am come to ask
you to take me back, aunty, as if I had never been away.”
Mrs. Brown gave a shriek of dismay. “Oh, dinna say that, dinna say that!
for it looks as if things were going ill at the house at home.”
“Things are going as ill as they can: at their very worst,” he said.
“I’ve come home, Aunt Jane, because it’s a well-known place, where I’ve
lived all my life, so that if the policemen should be sent after
me----”
She interrupted him with another shriek. “The pollisman!” she cried.
“That is what it has come to,” he answered, “in four months’ time, no
more. I was to be a gentleman, never to want, Mr. Rowland’s son, the
great man that everybody knows: and now I’m cast out, charged with a
crime, with the thing flung in my face as if it were beyond doubt; and
I’m to be brought up before the judges, and tried--and hanged, for
anything I know. I promised,” said Archie, throwing back his tired head,
“that I would wait upon him here, that I would not stir a step but
bide--the worst that he or any man could do. But, Aunty Jane, to shame
you, an honest, upright woman, with policemen coming to your door, is
what I will not do. So, what I want is, that you should find a lodging
for me, any kind of a place, a little hole, what does it matter.”
“To hide you; oh, to hide you, Archie?” cried Mrs. Brown, wringing her
hands.
“To hide me!” he cried, with scorn; “it would be easy enough to do
that.”
“Oh, my laddie,” cried Aunty Jane, “do you think I would let anybody but
me do that? They shall never come at you, but o’er my body; they shall
never touch a hair of your head, if it was to cost me my last drop of
blood. Oh, Archie! it’s me that will hide you, my bonny man. There’s
little means in this house, but I’ll find a way. If it comes to heart’s
love and a woman’s wit against your muckle pollisman----”
“Aunty!” cried Archie, rising to his feet.
“Oh, whisht, whisht, my bairn! Come up the stair an’ we’ll settle it
a’. Ye’ll have the air of going away when the evening comes: and you’ll
just creep back, and I’ll make ye a hidin’ hole, where a’ the pollismen
in Glesgow shall not find ye. Whisht, we’ll have to take Bell into our
counsel; but she’s just an excellent lass, baith true and sure.”
“Aunty!” cried the young man; the tears bursting from his eyes, “Do you
think I’m guilty, then: you! you think I did it--you! Oh, Lord! who will
believe me, then?” he cried, stretching out despairing hands.
“Me?” cried Mrs. Brown; “me think ye did it, or any ill thing! I would
as soon, oh, far sooner, believe it of mysel!”
He burst into a low fit of hysterical laughter. “Then why should ye hide
me?” he said.
The good woman was taken aback for a moment. “What were ye meaning,
then, Archie, about the pollisman? and you to bide till he came? Ye
shall bide as lang as you please, my bonny boy; and everything we can do
to make you comfortable, Bell and me. Bless me! I’m speaking to my ain
lad as if he was a strange gentleman, and didna ken. What ails ye,
Archie? you are just as white as a sheet, and laughing and greeting like
a lassie.”
“I have had no breakfast,” he said, “and I’ve walked----”
But here he was interrupted by another shout from Mrs. Brown, who rushed
away to the kitchen, appearing again in a moment or two with a tray,
upon which was piled everything she could think of, from cold beef to
strawberry jam. He was not hungry: any such feeling had abandoned him
some time ago, but he was faint from want of food. And it was only when
he had eaten and rested, in the quiet of the afternoon, that he was able
to tell his tale coherently, and that she was sufficiently composed to
hear.
The exclamations with which that tale was accompanied and interrupted,
her dismay, her wrath--her triumph in Archie’s defiance of his father
and resolution to shake the dust of Rosmore from off his feet, were
endless; but when he came to his interview with Mrs. Rowland, Jane began
to shake her head.
“It would be her wyte all through,” she said. “Eh, I would not have you
lippen to her! It is just her that has been at the bottom of it a’
through.”
Archie’s momentary softness towards his stepmother was gone. He had
begun to remember his griefs, real or imaginary, against her, and to
persuade himself that her pity had been fictitious and theatrical. But
he made a protest against this view.
“She could not have forged the cheque, in order to get me into trouble,”
he said.
“Oh how do we ken what the like of her would do?” said Mrs. Brown; “a
woman that makes a marriage like yon, is just set upon everything she
can get out of the man. If he were to die, what would become of her? Oh,
he would aye leave her something, enough to keep her; but there would be
an awfu’ difference between that and Rosmore, and a’ her grand company
and her horses and carriages. They,” said Aunty Jane, cleverly changing
her ground, so that it was not Mrs. Rowland alone whom she could be
supposed to refer to, “will just do anything to get a little more
siller to lay up for that time. And if they can persuade the poor man
that his bairns, that are his natural kin, are no what he thinks
them--eh, Archie, the objeck’s just ower evident.”
“She was very kind to me,” he said. “She said she believed me.”
“Oh ay; it’s very easy to be kind when the harm’s done. After she had
got your father set against ye, and your life in her power, then was her
time to speak ye fair, my poor laddie, and make him think her the
kindest in the world. I’ve seen all that afore now,” said Mrs. Brown.
“It’s no half so uncommon as ye think. Just the invention of the deevil
to make their father think ill o’ them, and then a purrin’ and a
phrasin’ to pretend that she’s on their side: that’s just what I’ve seen
a score o’ times before.”
Archie was only half convinced, but he allowed himself to be silenced at
least. “Somebody must have done it,” he said. “I have thought of it a
great deal since--somebody that knew my father’s writing, and could get
a cheque, and had the opportunity of getting the money, without
suspicion.”
Mrs. Brown nodded her head at each detail, and said “Just that, just
that.”
“You are making a mistake,” he said. “She writes a little pretty hand,
like a lady. She could not do it, even if she were capable of a thing
which is a crime.”
“I tell you,” said Jane, “they are just capable of everything, to get
them that’s in their way out o’ their way. And what about the writing?
If they canna do a thing themselves, there’s aye others they can get to
do it. An ill person never missed an ill deed yet for want of a tool.”
“You speak nonsense!” he cried angrily; but he could not argue with a
woman strong in the panoply of ignorance and obstinacy. And by the oft
repetition of such arguments, Archie came, if not to believe, at least
to acquiesce, in that decision that Mrs. Rowland, somehow, was at the
bottom of it all; that it was contrary to her interests that a good
understanding should exist between Archie and his father, and that,
whoever had actually done this thing, the conception and execution of it
were in her hands. Sometimes he had a compunction, remembering her look,
her tears, her blessing. Was she such a hypocrite that she could bid God
bless him and not mean it--mean, indeed, the very reverse? And then that
thrill which he could never forget, that touch which came from no
visible hand. What was it? some witchcraft of hers, or a sign from
heaven, as he had thought it for a moment? He said nothing to Mrs. Brown
of this, and he tried himself not to think of it. The recollection
brought with it a pang of terror: he did not like to think of it at
night when he was alone. If it should come again, if he should see,
perhaps, his mother looking at him through the darkness--his mother, so
long dead, whom he did not remember! He had not courage to desire such a
visitor, and he tried to put this strange and wonderful sensation out of
his mind.
But Archie did not spend happy days in his old home. He found it so
changed, so unlike what it had once been: or was it only he who was
changed? He had no heart to return to the old football team, to renew
his acquaintance with the students, who were now returning daily to
resume their work at the College. He would not go to the room where the
Philosophers met. Had he become so low, so mean, he asked himself
sometimes, that for a little want of refinement, a difference of
clothes, he should shrink from his old friends? A want of refinement--as
if he had any refinement, or ever would have; he, to whom Miss Saumarez
had spoken so plainly, whom she had bidden not to be--such an ill-bred,
low-bred fellow! That was what she had meant, though the words she used
had been different. He never saw any one like Rosamond Saumarez now.
There were many nice good girls in the Sauchiehall Road, girls who
looked up to him, no one who would take him to task and show him how
inferior he was: there was none like her, none. And he never would meet
any one like her again. He never would see her as he remembered her so
well, sitting at the piano in the dim background of the great room,
scarcely visible, playing music which he did not understand, which
overawed him, and irritated and worried him, but never lost its
spell--not that it had any spell, except in the hands that called it
forth. And then suddenly the picture would change, and he would see her
walk out of the gloom in her white dress, tall and slim, coming up to
him, the fool, in his inaction, laying a hand upon his arm, like the
dropping of a rose leaf, carrying him off always in her composed, proud
way, with her head high, after Eddy and Marion. These two were full of
fun; they enjoyed it, as boys and girls enjoy dancing all the world
over. But Archie did not enjoy it. It was far more than fun to him, it
was as if some one lifted a curtain to him to reveal a new world. He
never got beyond the threshold, but hovered there, looking in. Had the
curtain fallen, and was the door closed now, for ever? Should he never
see Rosamond again? Never, never, some echo seemed to say. All that was
over. Rosmore had closed its doors, never to open them again. No, it had
not closed its doors. The door was still open when he turned his back
upon his father’s house--open, and with his father’s wife standing in
the doorway, crying, and bidding God bless him. Did she not mean that?
did she mean something quite the reverse? Was it she who had really
turned him forth, instead of doing her best to keep him there, as had
appeared? Archie never said a word of all this to his aunt. He had never
mentioned Rosamond to her. Sometimes she asked him about Mr. Adie, the
gentleman whom he had brought to see her, who seemed a fine lad, though
not much to look at, and would not he do something to set things right.
He of all people in the world! Eddy! who had accepted his money, and had
stood by and seen him suffer for that, and had not even uttered a word
of sympathy. He laughed when his aunt suggested this, and told her Mr.
Adie was not a man who would do anything. But of Rosamond he never said
a word.
And the days were more heavy than words could say. To have no companions
but Mrs. Brown after that house-full of people, all of them more or
less original and full of character--his father, who had so many
experiences which came into his daily talk; Mrs. Rowland, one of the
most wonderful of beings to an uneducated young man, with her easy
knowledge of so many things which, to him, were a study and labour to
know; and Rosamond, whose knowledge was of so different a kind, yet who,
in her self-possession and youthful, grave acquaintance with the world,
was almost the most astonishing of all; and Eddy, who was always so
bright, always full of spirits, so perfectly aware of his own
deficiencies, that they became qualities, and pleased the people about
him more than if he had been ever so clever and instructed. To leave all
these, and all the people who came and went, and talked and filled the
world with variety of life, even old Rankin in his cottage and Roderick
on the hill, and to have no companion but Aunty Jane! She was more kind
than words could say, but had so narrow a little round of being, and was
so inveterate, so determined in those certainties which he was almost
brought to believe, by dint of much talking, but which his spirit
rebelled against all the same. When he received Evelyn’s letters he
carried them off to his room to read them, and would not expose them to
her scrutiny: but he was too much influenced by her opinions and by the
tacit agreement in them, to which, in his sore and wounded condition he
had been brought, to reply. It would have been a certain disloyalty if,
in Mrs. Brown’s house, he had answered the appeal of the stepmother who,
he had agreed, or almost agreed, with his aunt, must be at the bottom
of it all. And what could he have replied? He had said that he would
abide whatever they chose to do to him--arrest, trial, whatever they
pleased. He had represented to himself and to his aunt that he expected
the policemen, and that from day to day they might come to take him. He
had, in fact, so simple was he, felt a tremor in his heart, when he saw
in the road, as happened every day, the honest sturdy form of the
policeman passing by. It was always possible that this simple
functionary might be coming, armed with all the majesty of the law, to
take him, though Archie had an internal conviction that, if it was to be
done, it would be done more quietly than this, with more precaution than
if he had been a housebreaker or stolen a watch. But such delicacies did
not enter into Mrs. Brown’s mind. She watched the policeman go past
daily with his heavy tread, with a trembling certainty that he was
coming to arrest her boy: and still more at midnight, when she heard his
heavy tread, did she hold her breath, thinking that now the dreaded
moment must have come, and on tiptoe of apprehension and anxiety waiting
for the sound of his nearer approach, ready to thrust Archie into her
bed or under, to conceal him till the danger was over. Mrs. Brown,
though she had all the horror of the police common to respectable women
of her class, was half disappointed when day after day passed, and no
attempt at an arrest was ever made.
“They will have found nae proof,” she said, “as how could they have
found any proof, there being nane. And they will just be in a puzzle
what to do--and yon leddy will either be concocting something, or else
she will be working upon your father, poor misguided man. Eh, when I
think what James Rowland might have been, with his bonnie dochter to sit
at the head of his table, and his son to stand for him before the world,
and everything just good nature and peace. But he had to have a grand
leddy to scare us a’ with her grand ways, and that was thinking of
nothing but how to get as much as she could out o’ him, and his ain that
were the right heirs, out of the way. Ye’ll see the next thing will be
trouble to Mey. She will not put up with Mey: now she’s gotten you
banished, the next thing in her head will be something against your
sister, till baith the ane and the ither o’ you is on the street. And
just let her do her worst,” said Mrs. Brown with a flush of war, “there
will be aye room here. I’m no wanting to see her fall into worse and
worse sin, but the sooner she lets out her plans the better for us. And
we’ll just have Mey back in her bonnie little room, and everything as it
was before.”
Would everything be as it was before? Alas, Archie feared not. They were
not as they had been before. For himself everything was changed. It was
vain to think of returning to his old existence as it had been, when
they were all so cheerful together in Sauchiehall Road. He thought of
the old suppers, when he would bring in with him two or three of his
Philosophers, whom Mrs. Brown would receive with a “Come away ben, come
in to the fire. I’m just very glad to see you,” and Marion would set
herself to tease and provoke: and who would be delighted to reply to
both the ladies, to meet Mrs. Brown with compliments upon her supper,
and to laugh with Marion to her heart’s content. These little parties
had been very pleasant. They had appeared to him sometimes, when
anything had gone wrong at Rosmore, as happy examples of natural ease
and enjoyment. But now he had ceased to have any taste for these
gatherings. And Marion: perhaps Marion would be more at home than he
was: for at Rosmore her social performances had been still a little in
the same kind, personal encounters of laughter and sharp speeches, what
Eddy called “chaff,” and in which style he was himself a master. Perhaps
she could still have made herself happy with the Philosophers. But
Archie’s day for that was over. The old home could never be what it had
been before. He scorned himself for seeing all its little defects, and
for feeling the disenchantment, even for the consciousness that Aunt
Jane, who was so kind, was scarcely a companion who could make life
sweet. She was as his mother. He had never known other care than her’s.
In the old days he had perhaps wished sometimes that she had not spoken
the language of Glasgow in quite so broad a tone. But this was so small
a defect; how he hated himself for perceiving much more than the broad
Glasgow speech which jarred upon him! But it is a very hard ordeal for
an old woman in any rank when she has to be the sole companion of a
young man; especially when long knowledge makes him acquainted with
every tale she has to tell, and all the experiences which might be
interesting to another, but have been familiar to him since ever he
began to listen and to understand.
The only relief which Archie had was in attempts, not carried out with
any energy, to get a situation in which he could earn his own living.
Nothing could have been more false than his present position. He had
scarcely any money left, and he had abandoned his father’s house for
ever. Yet he was supported by his aunt, who received her living from his
father, and so it was still by James Rowland’s money that his son was
nourished, though that son had totally rebelled against him. What if he
might cut short or take away altogether Jane Brown’s allowance, on
account of the rebel she was harbouring? What if he understood with
contempt that his son was thus living upon him still? Sometimes at night
these thoughts would so sting and madden Archie that he would jump out
of bed in the morning, resolved before night came again to have got
work, whatever it was, and to have made himself independent. But this
was so much easier said and thought than done. One man to whom he
applied, laughed in his face when he confessed that he was the son of
the great Rowland, the Indian Railway Man. “No, no, Mr. Rowland,” he
said, “the like of you in my office would revolutionise everything. You
have too much money to spend, you rich men’s sons. You lead away the
poor lads that cannot play fast and loose with life like you. Eh! you
have no money? Well, then, I suppose you have had a tiff with your
father and mean to be independent. That’s just as bad. You will be
diligent for a while and then you will go off like a firework. I have
known the sort of thing before. No, no, my young gentleman, the like of
you is not for an office like mine.” Then poor Archie tried the plan of
giving no account of himself at all, except that he was in want of a
situation, and could do a little bookkeeping, and was acquainted with
the axiom that two and two make four. And in this case he was asked for
his testimonials, but had no testimonials to offer, no previous
character or evidence as to what he could do. And again, but more
roughly, he was re-conducted, as the French say, to the simplest door,
and his hopes in that instance were over. He then began, as how many a
much disappointed man has done, to study the advertisements in the
newspapers, and to answer them sometimes half a dozen in the day. But
the sprawling large hand-writing which was so fatally like his father’s,
did not find favour in the eyes of men who advertised for clerks. It was
admired in Mr. Rowland, the great railway man, and said to mean
originality, daring, and a strong will, but in the young would-be clerk
it was sharply set down as a bad hand, and he was rejected on that and
other reasons again and again. This dismal play went on from day to day.
Perhaps he was not very earnest in it, perhaps he felt that in no
combination of circumstances could it be a matter of life and death. If
he was not arrested and brought to trial, he would be provided for. The
question was whether he would submit his pride to being supported by the
man who had flung that cheque in his face. When he asked himself such a
question, or rather, when it fluttered across his path, Archie would
spring to his feet again with an emphatic “No!” and redouble his
exertions.
But he was in a false position, crippled all round by disabilities. Mrs.
Brown advised that he should go to the minister, who had known him so
long, and could speak for him; but Archie knew what the minister would
say: he would remind him of his duty to his father, and that to leave
his father’s house and bury himself in a position unbecoming Mr.
Rowland’s son, was ungrateful and unkind. And if he told all his story,
and that of the forged cheque, what would the minister say? He would
shake his head, he would grow grave, a cloud would gather over his face,
he would make haste to end the interview. It would be impossible to
believe that Mr. Rowland would make such an accusation without certain
proof. Archie knew this was how it would happen, and he could not face
such a reception.
Mrs. Brown went herself privately to the foundry, where her own
connection with it as the widow of a foreman, and still more, her
connection with Rowland, who had risen from it to such unexampled
heights, made her still a person of consideration--to speak to the
manager. But the manager of the foundry was still more decided.
“If he really wants to learn the work, and his father will say a single
word, it will be easily managed.”
“But oh, Mr. Blyth, ye must not ask that; for it’s just in consequence
of two-three unlucky words with his father that he’s thinking of taking
a situation.”
“Then, Mrs. Brown, you should give the young man good advice. What does
he think he’ll gain by quarrelling with his father? He may be sure his
father is twice the man that he is, however clever he may be.”
“I was not saying he was very clever,” said Mrs. Brown; “but ye see he
has a stepmother, and that explains everything: for she just turns the
father against them, as is a common occurrence.”
“Well,” said the manager, “all the same, the best thing he can do is to
make it up with his father. Stepmothers are ill things, but they’re not
always as black as they’re painted; and those that are subject to them
must just put up with them.”
This was all the comfort that Jane got, though she kept part of the
report from her nephew.
“He says you will just have to make it up with your papaw: and then the
foundry will be open to you, and everything you please.”
“That means,” said Archie, “that when you don’t want a thing you can
always have it.”
“It’s just something like that,” Mrs. Brown said.
And thus it appeared there was nothing at all to be done. He went on
reading the advertisements, answering sometimes two or three in a day,
but never getting any further on. Now and then he would have a letter
asking for testimonials, but what testimonials could he obtain? Neither
as his father’s son, nor as nobody’s son, could he make any advance. His
father, in like circumstances, would have somehow forced the hand of
fate, and made it serve him. He would not have been kept by the want of
certificates, nothing would have stopped him in his career. But Archie
was not like his father. He was proud and timid, and sensitive, and
easily discouraged; he was even indolent, poor boy--the worst of
drawbacks--indolent in mind, though not in body, afraid of any great
resolution, hesitating, and unable to resist the course of events. Such
a spirit goes down in the struggle for life. He might have been the most
steady, careful, punctual of workmen, happy in the support of routine,
fixed hours, and a certain understood something to do: but had it been
he who had started in the foundry, instead of his father, then Archie
would have ended a good man, much respected, but with only a few more
shillings a week at the end of his life than at the beginning. And, as
was natural, his training had fostered all the weakness in him and none
of the strength.
It was strange and ludicrous, yet heart-breaking, to remember that he
had been invited by Lady Jean to the Castle, and urged by the
Marchbanks, who were ambitious people, and thought Mr. Rowland’s money
might do very well to increase their own importance in the district, to
go over to their grand new mansion, which was much more splendid than
Lord Clydesdale’s shabby old Castle. Would any of them recognize him, if
they could see the shabby young man in search of a situation, who went
up and down the Sauchiehall Road? Archie sometimes wondered what he
should do if he met Lady Jean. He was more sure that she would see him
and stop to speak to him, than he was of any of the others. And she
would, no doubt, try to interfere and reconcile him with his father. He
used to con little speeches in his mind to make to her, or any other
benevolent meddler who might attempt this. He would say “No; he has
accused me of a dreadful thing, without hearing me, without a doubt in
his mind but that I did it. I will never make a step, nor hold out a
finger to him!” Sometimes the words he put together were even stronger
than this. “My father and I are parted for ever. He never cared a
penny-piece that he had a son. He took no thought of us when we were
children, and he has always been unjust to me. It is better that I
should be no trouble to him; and I mean to be no more trouble to him,
whatever happens,” Archie would say. Sometimes, on the other hand, he
thought that it was more dignified to make no complaint, and a finer
thing altogether to say nothing that could injure Rowland in anybody’s
opinion. And then he would say, with a magnanimity which was a little
hurtful to his self-esteem, poor boy, “The life was not one that suited
me. I was brought up to think a great deal of work, and I have come back
here to do something for myself, as every man should. My father made his
own way, and so shall I.” Alas, it was very faltering, this proud
declaration of independence: he had no heart in it. He was not one of
the strenuous souls who make a gospel of work; on the contrary, Mrs.
Brown’s gospel had been all the other way, that to do nothing was far
the finer thing, and marked the gentleman all the world over. But Archie
had touched shoulders with the gentle folks long enough to be aware that
this profession of independence, though it depressed and disappointed
Mrs. Brown, was the kind of thing approved in higher circles, and it
was the only way in which he could exempt his father from blame.
He had got up very sad upon that November morning. It was not yellow as
in London, but grey with a leaden paleness, the houses and pavements and
looks of the people all grey, and to a spirit already depressed and
miserable, no spring or elasticity anywhere in the dim prospect within,
externally, or in the troubled mind. Had life come to an end altogether,
he asked himself; was there to be nothing in it more than this impatient
dullness, producing nothing? He was a little later for breakfast, as
usually happened, Mrs. Brown indulging him in every inclination or
disinclination, without the slightest sense of morality, or her old
fear, that over-indulgence was not good for him. Poor Jane had no longer
any thought of that. He was in trouble, poor fellow, and if he was more
easy in his mind in the morning before he got up, why disturb him? or if
he took a little comfort in reading a book at night, why urge him to go
to bed? If he was unpunctual for his meals, what did it matter? “There’s
naebody but me,” Mrs. Brown said, “and if I get my dinner at one o’clock
or at three, wha’s minding?” She had not shown this complacence in the
old days, when their good training and manners and desire to give little
trouble were her pride. Archie was dressing languidly, looking at the
shabby clothes about the room with a sort of disgust, the outcome of the
grey and miserable morning, and of his own heavy and troubled thoughts.
How shabby they were! and yet not so shabby as common--just fit for a
denizen of Sauchiehall Road, as he was. But he was a shabby denizen even
for Sauchiehall Road, not up early and out to his cheerful work as was
natural there, but coming down late with the habits that might not be
amiss in the faultlessly clothed Eddy, the young man of society, but
were disreputable, wretched in him, the Glasgow clerk--not even
that--the poor friendless lad, trying to be a Glasgow clerk. Poor Archie
had come to a depth in which all that was fantastic in wretchedness was
to be found. There seemed to be nothing good left in him. To be going
down to breakfast at ten o’clock was as bad, almost worse than the crime
with which he had been charged.
He did not notice the cab which had stopped at the door, though Mrs.
Brown did with an immense impulse of excitement; but Archie did hear
quite suddenly, so that he felt as if in a dream, the sound of a soft
voice--such a voice as was seldom heard in that locality--so clearly
toned, so correct in enunciation, so perfectly at the speaker’s
command--perhaps, however, not that so much as the rest, for there was a
tremor in it. He had just opened his door to go down, and his room was
exactly at the head of the staircase. He did not at first recognise this
voice in the shock of hearing, without preparation, such an organ at
all. It said all at once out of the silence, as Archie opened the
door--but not to him, to some one downstairs, “Is Mr. Archibald Rowland
here? May I come in? I think--” and here there seemed a pause, “you must
be Mrs. Brown.”
“And wha may ye be?” said Jane’s harsh, rough, uncultured voice.
Oh!--it could be as gentle as a dove, that rude voice--there were tones
in it sometimes of love and tenderness that music could not equal. Let
us do the poor woman no injustice. But when she answered Evelyn’s
question, no coal-heaver ever spoke in tones more forbidding. Mrs. Brown
divined, as she stood there with the door in her hand, who her visitor
was, and all the worst side of her nature turned to meet this
interloper, this stepmother, the woman who had secured James Rowland’s
love and his money, and was the enemy of his children. “She shall hear
the truth from me if she never heard it in her life before,” Jane said
to herself! And the torrent of her wrath rose up in a moment like the
waterspout of eastern seas.