Charley, for whom I had telegraphed, came next day, very anxious and
miserable, with a horror of the shame and exposure which struck me in
the strangest way. To be sure it was not my name which was thus held up
to everybody’s observation, as connected with such a catastrophe; but
the catastrophe itself was so pitiful, that I scarcely could understand
this special aspect in which he viewed it. He shrank even from going
about the necessary business, and drew back from everybody that might by
possibility recognise him. The first thing he had seen coming into
London was the report in the morning paper of the inquest; and the
horror of this, and the certainty that it would circulate everywhere,
and make all possibility of concealment impossible, was almost more than
he could bear. It was from him that I heard the whole state of the case.
Colin’s expenditure had been for some years back the trouble and terror
of the family, and it appeared that he had plunged into speculation by
way of mending this. The letters that were found half read upon his
table showed of themselves how the coils of fate were closing around
him. It was evident from Charley’s half revelations that the case was
clearly desperate for the offender, and not much less so for the family,
whose name had been made use of on all hands. This came upon the young
man not all in a moment, but by degrees, as Colin’s letters, and various
business representations from one side and another, came flowing in. On
the eve of the funeral he came to me with the paleness of despair in
his face. “What am I to do?” he cried. “My father is not able to pay any
attention--they tell me any new shock might kill him.” “Is it so very
bad?” I said. “Bad? we’re ruined; that is all,” cried Charley. He was,
as I found out afterwards, a very good man of business; but he had never
had occasion to take the responsibility on his shoulders, and now,
suddenly left alone, suddenly brought face to face with unexampled
calamity, his self-command forsook him for the moment. Little by little
he opened out to me the state of affairs. The “works” were so profitable
and the business so good, that eventually everything might come right;
but in the meantime he was paralysed, and did not know what to do. Mr.
Campbell was in a sort of tranquil, half-childish state, not suffering
much, and quite unconscious of what had happened. To consult him was
impossible, and Tom and Jack were but boys, who knew little as yet of
the ramifications of the business, or anything beyond the department of
which they had charge. “Have you said anything to your sister?” I asked;
and then poor Charley broke down. “How can I speak to Chatty?” he said;
“he was always _her_ brother. I cannot bide to break her heart. It is
bad enough as it is--Colin gone, and all this misery--and my father
knowing nothing. If she finds out all he’s brought upon us, what will
she do?”
“Do you think she does not know?” I said. “It was not for nothing that
your brother took such dreadful means of escape. You may be sure she
suspects the worst, even if she does not know.”
“If I could think that!” he said. It gave him a little composure. The
mere idea that there was someone to whom he could speak freely was a
support. Even to talk it over with me was something. We had been to the
house of death to see that all was ready for next day’s melancholy
business, and the sight of Mrs. Colin done up in new crape, with the
white streamers of a coquettish widow’s cap setting off her commonplace
comeliness, had been almost more than either of us could bear. For my
part, everything seemed more mysterious to me in the light of this wife.
Had Colin squandered the family substance in luxurious chambers, at the
feet of one of those beautiful harpies who are never satisfied with
luxury, it would have been more comprehensible. But the lodgings in
Bloomsbury and the landlady’s daughter seemed to throw an air of
burlesque upon the tragedy. The accessories ought to have been bad and
vicious, not respectable and commonplace. But it seems there are many
ways of courting ruin; and there must have been other unknown chapters
in his life before he came to this. Perhaps, indeed, the hasty marriage,
the retirement into this shabby retreat, were of themselves efforts to
get back into a better way. I walked along with Charley to the house of
the doctor, in which his father and sister still were, meaning to leave
him there; but he clutched at my arm. “You’ve been through it all,” he
said, in a broken voice. Charlotte came down to us in the dining-room of
the doctor’s house, the one corresponding to that in which the first
chapter of our tragedy had been enacted. She was very pale, yet greeted
us with a smile. Her father was always the same--quite comfortable,
suspecting nothing, now and then asking if Colin had gone home. “‘The
best place for him, Chatty, the best place for him,’ he says to me,” she
said, the tears springing to her eyes, “and we must let him think so,
the doctor says. He says, ‘You must do the London business, Charley. We
must keep it up as long as we can.’”
“If there is any business to do--or if anybody will ever trust us
more,” Charley said.
She had been pale enough before, but she seemed to me to grow paler,
almost ghastly. “Trust us!” she said, in a faint voice. “Is it so bad as
that--have we broken trust?”
“Chatty, I don’t know how you’ll bear it. We are ruined, I think,” the
young man cried.
She waved her hand as if this was nothing. “What do you mean about
trust?” she asked. “Is there anything that we cannot fulfil?”
“I don’t know how the ‘works’ are to go on. I don’t know how we are to
live. We are pledged and bound on every side, and I am not clever, like
my father. We will have to sacrifice everything.”
Chatty drew a long breath. “Then let us sacrifice everything, Charley.
That is what my father would do. There need be no hesitation about that;
but no, not the ‘works’--we must keep the ‘works.’ Cannot you think of
anything that will keep them going for the children’s sake?” she cried.
“And then think of all the poor men thrown out of work in the middle of
winter!”
“We must think of ourselves, Chatty,” her brother said, with a certain
indignation.
“I do. They would recover in time. They are your life,” she said. “Save
them, if it is possible. Don’t give away our life into other hands.”
“Then,” said Charley, drawing a long breath--he propped himself up
against the mantelshelf with a sort of despairing action--“then,” he
said, “there is but one thing else for it, Chatty. We must sell
Ellermore.”
She stood and gazed at him for a moment with dilating eyes; then she
suddenly sat down on the nearest chair. She wanted support of a
mechanical kind, as he did. No doubt a vision of her home and all its
pleasantness--the place where they had all been born, the centre of
their family pride and importance and all their traditions--flashed
across her. For a few minutes she made no reply. Then she made an effort
to command her voice. “Well,” she said faintly, “well, then, we must
make up our minds to it. We must sell Ellermore.”
“Chatty,” cried the young man, with the tears in his eyes, “how good it
is to have you to talk to! Is that what you say? Keep the ‘works’ and
sell Ellermore? It will bring a fancy price, you know. It’s not just
like so many acres. Some Englishman”--
“Oh, Charley, don’t torture me!” she cried, in a voice of anguish; then
faintly, “The ‘works’ are your life. And there are so many of us--still.
We must think of the boys and the little ones--next after our honour and
my father’s name.”
“That was what I thought,” said Charley, “but I was afraid to say it. I
thought you would cry out, Ellermore! Ellermore! and let the ‘works’
take care of themselves.”
She looked up at him with a faint smile. “I never knew you took me for a
fool before. I suppose it is because I am a woman.”
“Chatty, don’t say that!” cried the young man loudly. Such a suggestion
begins to rouse the wrath of young men. He almost forgot the gravity of
the position in his annoyance.
She went on musingly: “Ellermore means happiness, but the ‘works’ mean
life. Life we must have, till--till it is taken away,” she added, with a
shiver; “but happiness! oh yes, it will come back. I am not so young or
so ignorant as not to know that it will come back, and for all the young
ones, soon, soon! There will be you and me will think a little longer,
Charley, and me longest of all, but not for ever. But at present we are
not happy. We will escape something--the pitying, and the sympathy, and
the inquiries--at least we shall escape all that. I am sure my father
would think so. But how we are to tell him I don’t know,” she cried
again. “He is quite cheerful; he is like a child; but if we take him
home, and it is not Ellermore, he will know.”
They had both dried their tears as they contemplated this difficulty,
which neither knew how to deal with. I had been naturally left outside
of this discussion; but to hear them thus debating, consulting each
other, arguing on the main thing to be done, was more than I could bear.
I could not but remember the happy house, with all its advantages and
homely wealth--the boats on the loch, the grouse on the hills, the
luxury and abundance. That door had never been shut upon the stranger or
the poor. And they were so entirely to the manner born, seated in their
old house among their native hills, it seemed impossible to conceive of
them in another place in other circumstances. This made it all the more
wonderful to perceive that neither of them hesitated a moment. The
thought of how to tell their father, how to keep him in his present
state of cheerful unconsciousness, moved them indeed with a pang of
bewilderment; but no irresolution, no clinging to what they liked best,
no outcry against the cruel fate which deprived them of their home, was
in the thoughts of either. There may be people to whom this choice would
seem want of feeling. To me the quiet heroism was far more touching than
any heroics. I knew the wrench it would be, and I respected them all the
more that neither of them made anything of this, or even paused over it,
as if the sacrifice were too much. I went home, leaving them together,
with a pang in my heart of powerlessness to help them. I wonder whether
the very rich are ever worked upon by those burning desires to help, to
step forth and act as the providence of the suffering, which so often
flame up in the bosoms of the comparatively poor. I had enough for my
own wants, and desired riches little, but when I thought of stepping in
to their aid, of becoming their surety and helper, my heart burned
within me. I thought almost hungrily of an inheritance which was coming
to me, which up to this moment I had been very well content to wait for.
I wonder, I repeat, if such longings never come to the very rich who
could indulge them with ease and without any personal struggle. Perhaps
not; or one would hear something of it. As it is, the Quixotes of
private life are seldom millionaires. I could do nothing; and perhaps it
was for this reason that I desired with such painful yearning what was
thus absolutely out of my power.
I have to admit, amid all these most serious thoughts, a curious
delusion, as I suppose I must call it, which accompanied me wherever I
went. It seemed to me that I constantly met the same figure which had
encountered me in the grounds at Ellermore and warned me of Colin’s
danger. I took myself to task about it in every way, trying to find out
some unsteadiness of nerve, some functional derangement, which could
account for it. But I was quite well--my mind was far too much occupied
and excited to leave me any time to consider the body, which went along
swiftly and easily, occupied with everything rather than itself. These,
I think, are the conditions of perfect health; and I was as well as ever
I had been in my life. Yet constantly I was conscious of meeting about
the streets this veiled and shadowy woman. She would come towards me, so
that we encountered each other, face to face, or she would go softly
past me, brushing me with her dress, making all my pulses beat wildly.
This occurred chiefly in the neighbourhood in which the tragedy had
happened; but there were other places far enough from that in which the
same strange apparition was visible. Sometimes I could perceive in her
that familiar custom, the wringing of the hands, which reminded me of
Charlotte. Sometimes I seemed almost to penetrate the obscurity of the
veil, and recognise a face not unlike Charlotte’s. I got used to this
imagination. I persuaded myself that it was nothing but an impression on
my brain, which I could not get rid of, but which was altogether
illusory. Though why my heart should leap up in me, and all my pulses
throb, because of a thing which was nothing, I could not understand. The
last time I thought I saw her was by the grave in which, with a silent
misery beyond words, we laid poor Colin. Charley and I alone
accompanied him to that last resting-place. Our friend the doctor had
managed, I cannot tell how, to keep the wife and her family from
attending, as they had all intended to do, in full panoply of woe. He
told them, I don’t know what--that it was a thing ladies of social
importance never did, a point upon which Mrs. Colin was very
susceptible--or some other argument of this description. Anyhow, he
succeeded in keeping any such vulgarising element away from the simple
ceremonial of the funeral. We followed him alone, Charley and I.
Charlotte did not dare to leave her father for so long a time without
explanation, and Charley shrank with a painful susceptibility from the
sight of everybody he knew. Without any of that mocking garniture of
flowers which has become a matter of fashion and vanity, without any
indifferent retinue, we two stood by the grave, the young brother with a
heart-breaking control of grief, and I with all the reverence of a pity
scarcely less heart-rending. When I lifted my eyes from the
“deep-delved” bed of utter silence and quiet, I thought I saw her
standing by the edge of it, wringing her hands. The sound of a stifled
sob from Charley called my attention away for a moment, and when I
looked again she was gone. The face--the gesture was like Charlotte. It
is impossible for me to describe the mingled tenderness and terror with
which I perceived this--as if it might have been Charlotte herself in
the spirit who had come forth in sheer longing to her brother’s grave.
“Did you see that lady?” I asked Charley, as we went home.
“What lady?” he said fretfully. He was irritable with grief, and misery,
and shame; for he had never been able to get over this accessory of the
terrible family misfortune, and his mind, poor fellow, was distracted
with thinking what to do, and how to manage the complicated business
which had come into his hands. Then he begged my pardon piteously. “I
don’t know what I’m doing. To think yon was Colin, and that’s all over
with him--him that had more head than us all put together; and if he had
only held his hand might have put all right. I would have set my
strength to his,” cried the young fellow, unable to restrain himself,
“shoulder to shoulder; and we would have redeemed everything.” Then,
after a pause, during which he turned away his head to dash off the hot,
quick gathering tears, “Did you say there was a lady? I took no notice.
It would be his wife.”
I did not say anything more; but I knew very well it was not Colin’s
wife. Who was it? or was it nothing more than a delusion, the offspring
of my own overwrought and excited brain?
In a few days after I went to the railway with them to see them go away.
Mr. Campbell had never mended more than he did the first night. His
hand and one side were almost without power, and his mind had fallen
into a state which it would be cruel to call imbecility. It was more
like the mind of a child recovering from an illness, pleased with, and
exacting constant attention. Now and then he would ask questions
innumerable. What had become of Colin, if he was ill, if he had gone
home? “The best place for him, the best place for him, Chatty,” he would
repeat; “and if you got him persuaded to marry, that would be fine.” All
this Charlotte had to bear with a placid face, with gentle agreement;
and now that Charley was here, I had passed altogether from his mind.
When he saw me he made me little apologies about not being in a state to
receive strangers. “You see, I am recovering from a severe illness,” he
would say. “Tell Mr. Temple, Chatty, how ill I have been.” He was in
this condition when I took leave of him in the invalid carriage they had
secured for the journey. They had all the habits of luxury, and never
hesitated, as people accustomed to the daily sacrifices of poverty would
have done, at this expense. He told me that he was glad to go home; that
he would have left London some time before but for Chatty, who “wanted
to see a little of the place.” “I am going to join my son Colin, who has
gone home before us--isn’t that so, Chatty?” “Yes, father,” she said.
“Yes, yes; I have grown rather doited, and very, very silly,”[B] the old
man said, in a tone of extraordinary pathos. “I am sometimes not sure of
what I am saying; but Chatty keeps me right. Colin has gone on before;
he has a grand head for business; he will soon set everything
right--connected,” he added, with a curious sense which seemed to have
outlived his other powers, that explanation of Colin’s actions was
necessary--“connected with my retirement. I am past business; but we’ll
still hope to see you at Ellermore.”
At Ellermore! Charlotte raised her eyes to mine with a look of anguish,
of self-control, and steadfast patience, which was almost sublime. While
she spoke thus her hands sought and clasped each other with the same
movement I had noted in another. In another--in whom?