What is a "wrecked" life? One which the waves of inexorable fate have
beaten to pieces, or one that, like an unseaworthy ship, is ready to go
down in any waters? What most destroy us? the things we might well blame
ourselves for, only we seldom do, our follies, blunders, errors, not
counting actual sins? or the things for which we can blame nobody but
Providence--if we dared--such as our losses and griefs, our sicknesses of
body and mind, all those afflictions which we call "the visitation of
God?" Ay, and so they are, but not sent in wrath, or for ultimate evil.
No amount of sorrow need make any human life harmful to man or unholy
before God, as a discontented, unhappy life must needs be unholy in the
sight of Him who in the mysterious economy of the universe seems to have
one absolute law--He wastes nothing. He modifies, transmutes,
substitutes, re-applies material to new uses; but apparently by Him
nothing is ever really lost, nothing thrown away.
Therefore, I incline to believe, when I hear people talking of a
"wrecked" existence, that whosoever is to blame, it is not Providence.
Nobody could have applied the term to Fortune Williams, looking at
her as she sat in the drawing-room window of a house at Brighton, just
where the gray of the Esplanade meets the green of the Downs--a ladies'
boarding-school, where she had in her charge two pupils, left behind
for the holidays, while the mistress took a few weeks' repose. She sat
watching the sea, which was very beautiful, as even the Brighton sea can
be sometimes. Her eyes were soft and calm; her hands were folded on her
black silk dress, her pretty little tender-looking hands, unringed, for
she was still Miss Williams, still a governess.
But even at thirty-five--she had now reached that age, nay, passed
it--she was not what you would call "old-maidish." Perhaps because the
motherly instinct, naturally very strong in her, had developed more and
more. She was one of those governesses--the only sort who ought ever to
attempt to be governesses--who really love children, ay, despite their
naughtinesses and mischievousnesses and worrying ways; who feel that,
after all, these little ones are "of the kingdom of heaven," and that the
task of educating them for that kingdom somehow often brings us nearer to
it ourselves.
Her heart, always tender to children, had gone out to them more and more
every year, especially after that fatal year when a man took it and broke
it. No, not broke it, but threw it carelessly away, wounding it so
sorely that it never could be quite itself again. But it was a true and
warm and womanly heart still.
She had never heard of him--Robert Roy--never once, in any way, since
that Sunday afternoon when he said, "I will write tomorrow," and did not
write, but let her drop from him altogether like a worthless thing.
Cruel, somewhat, even to a mere acquaintance--but to her?
Well, all was past and gone, and the tide of years had flowed over it.
Whatever it was, a mistake, a misfortune, or a wrong, nobody knew any
thing about it. And the wound even was healed, in a sort of a way, and
chiefly by the unconscious hands of these little "ministering angels,"
who were angels that never hurt her, except by blotting their copy-books
or not learning their lessons.
I know it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should
be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to
nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in
natural gradation--maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which,
ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless
impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these,
excepting, perhaps, her one six months' dream of love and spring. That
being over, she fell back upon autumn days and autumn pleasures--which
are very real pleasures, after all.
As she sat with the two little girls leaning against her lap--they were
Indian children, unaccustomed to tenderness, and had already grown very
fond of her--there was a look in her face, not at all like an ancient
maiden or a governess, but almost motherly. You see the like in the
faces of the Virgin Mary, as the old monks used to paint her, quaint, and
not always lovely, but never common or coarse, and spiritualized by a
look of mingled tenderness and sorrow into something beyond all beauty.
This woman's face had it, so that people who had known Miss Williams as
a girl were astonished to find her, as a middle-aged woman, grown "so
good-looking." To which one of her pupils once answered, naively, "It
is because she looks so good."
But this was after ten years and more. Of the first half of those years
the less that is said, the better. She did not live; she merely endured
life. Monotony without, a constant aching within--a restless gnawing
want, a perpetual expectation, half hope, half fear; no human being could
bear all this without being the worse for it, or the better. But the
betterness came afterward, not first.
Sometimes her cravings to hear the smallest tidings of him, only if he
were alive or dead, grew into such an agony that, had it not been for
her entire helplessness in the matter, she might have tried some means
of gaining information. But from his sudden change of plans, she was
ignorant even of the name of the ship he had sailed by, the firm he had
gone to. She could do absolutely nothing, and learn nothing. Here was
something like the "Affliction of Margaret," that poem of Wordsworth's
which, when her little pupils recited it--as they often did--made her
ready to sob out loud from the pang of its piteous reality:
"I look for ghosts, but none will force
Their way to me: 'tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Betwixt the living and the dead:
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night
With love and longings infinite."
Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead;
for her finger was still empty of that ring--her mother's ring--which he
had drawn off, promising its return "when he was dead or she was
married." This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her. Nor,
indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her,
these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscure
village in the south of England, where she had lived as governess--first
in the squire's family, then the rector's.
From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped to
remain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a few
months. At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son had
returned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone back
again to India. There was now, for the first time for half a century,
not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.
But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city,
her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with a
persistency for which her conscience smote her sometimes, knowing it was
not wholly for their sakes. But they had never been near her, and she
had little expectation of seeing any of them ever again, since by this
time she had lived long enough to find out how easily people do drift
asunder, and lose all clue to one another, unless some strong firm will
or unconquerable habit of fidelity exists on one side or the other.
Since the Dalziels she had only lived in the two families before named,
and had been lately driven from the last one by a catastrophe, if it may
be called so, which had been the bitterest drop in her cup since the time
she left St. Andrews.
The rector--a widower, and a feeble, gentle invalid, to whom naturally
she had been kind and tender, regarding him with much the same sort of
motherly feeling as she had regarded his children--suddenly asked her to
become their mother in reality.
It was a great shock and a pang: almost a temptation; for they all loved
her, and wished to keep her. She would have been such a blessing, such
a brightness, in that dreary home. And to a woman no longer young, who
had seen her youth pass without any brightness in it, God knows what
an allurement it is to feel she has still the power of brightening
other lives. If Fortune had yielded--if she had said yes, and married
the rector--it would have been hardly wonderful, scarcely blamable.
Nor would it have been the first time that a good, conscientious,
tender-hearted woman has married a man for pure tenderness.
But she did not do it; not even when they clung around her--those
forlorn, half-educated, but affectionate girls--entreating her to "marry
papa, and make us all happy." She could not--how could she? She felt
very kindly to him. He had her sincere respect, almost affection; but
when she looked into her own heart, she found there was not in it one
atom of love, never had been, for any man alive except Robert Roy. While
he was unmarried, for her to marry would be impossible.
And so she had the wisdom and courage to say to herself, and to them all,
"This can not be;" to put aside the cup of attainable happiness, which
might never have proved real happiness, because founded on an
insincerity.
But the pain this cost was so great, the wrench of parting from her poor
girls so cruel, that after it Miss Williams had a sharp illness, the
first serious illness of her life. She struggled through it, quietly and
alone, in one of those excellent "Governesses' Homes," where every body
was very kind to her--some more than kind, affectionate. It was strange,
she often thought, what an endless amount of affection followed her
wherever she went. She was by no means one of those women who go about
the world moaning that nobody loves them. Every body loved her, and she
knew it--every body whose love was worth having--except Robert Roy.
Still her mind never changed; not even when, in the weakness of illness,
there would come vague dreams of that peaceful rectory, with its quiet
rooms and green garden; of the gentle, kindly hearted father, and the two
loving girls whom she could have made so happy, and perhaps won happiness
herself in the doing of it.
"I am a great fool, some people would say," thought she, with a sad
smile; "perhaps rather worse. Perhaps I am acting absolutely wrong in
throwing away my chance of doing good. But I can not help it--I can not
help it."
So she kept to her resolution, writing the occasional notes she had
promised to write to her poor forsaken girls, without saying a word of
her illness; and when she grew better, though not strong enough to
undertake a new situation, finding her money slipping away--though, with
her good salaries and small wants, she was not poor, and had already
begun to lay up for a lonely old age--she accepted this temporary
home at Miss Maclachlan's, at Brighton. Was it--so strange are the
under-currents which guide one's outward life--was it because she had
found a curious charm in the old lady's Scotch tongue, unheard for years?
That the two little pupils were Indian children, and that the house was
at the seaside?--and she had never seen the sea since she left St.
Andrews.
It was going back to the days of her youth to sit, as now, watching the
sunshine glitter on the far-away ocean. The very smell of the sea-weed,
the lap-lap of the little waves, brought back old recollections so
vividly--old thoughts, some bitter, some sweet, but the sweetness
generally over-coming the bitterness.
"I have had all the joy that the world could bestow;
I have lived--I have loved."
So sings the poet, and truly. Though to this woman love had brought not
joy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay and
stronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appeared
little better than a delusion, a dream. Once, and by one only, her whole
nature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right entirely satisfied.
And nothing had ever shattered this ideal. She clung to it, as we cling
to the memory of our dead children, who are children forever.
With a passionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy's goodness, his
rare and noble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she might
have judged severely, had it happened to another person--his total,
unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself. It was utterly
irreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless to
unravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery in
heaven and earth, with the humble cry, "I can not understand--I love."
She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desert
of despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost a
conviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow. This day,
even, when, after an hour's delicious idleness, she roused herself to
take her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle while
they played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividly
back that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiar
step, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtake
her on the St. Andrews shore--Robert Roy, a young man, with his life all
before him, as was hers. Now she was middle-aged, and he--he must be
over forty by this time. How strange!
Stranger still that there had never occurred to her one possibility--that
he "was not," that God had taken him. But this her heart absolutely
refused to accept. So long as he was in it, the world would never be
quite empty to her. Afterward--But, as I said, there are some things
which can not be faced and this was one of them.
All else she had faced long ago. She did not grieve now. As she walked
with her children, listening to their endless talk with that patient
sympathy which made all children love her, and which she often found was
a better help to their education than dozens of lessons, there was on her
face that peaceful expression which is the greatest preservative of
youth, the greatest antidote to change. And so it was no wonder that a
tall lad, passing and re-passing on the Esplanade with another youth,
looked at her more than once with great curiosity, and advanced with
hesitating politeness.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am, if I mistake; but you are so like a lady I
once knew, and am now looking for. Are you Miss Williams?"
"My name is Williams, certainly; and you"--something in the curly light
hair, the mischievous twinkle of the eye, struck her--"you can not be,
it is scarcely possible--David Dalziel?"
"But, I am, though," cried the lad, shaking her hand as if he would shake
it off. "And I call myself very clever to have remembered you, though I
was such a little fellow when you left us, and I have only seen your
photograph since. But you are not a bit altered--not one bit. And as I
knew by your last letter to Archy that you were at Brighton, I thought
I'd risk it and speak. Hurra! How very jolly!"
He had grown a handsome lad, the pretty wee Davie, an honest-looking lad
too, apparently, and she was glad to see him. From the dignity of his
eighteen years and five feet ten of height, he looked down upon the
governess, and patronized her quite tenderly--dismissing his friend and
walking home with her, telling her on the way all his affairs and that of
his family with the volubility of little David Dalziel at St. Andrews.
"No, I've not forgotten St. Andrews one bit, though I was so small. I
remember poor old grannie, and her cottage, and the garden, and the
Links, and the golfing, and Mr. Roy. By-the-by, what has become of Mr.
Roy?"
The suddenness of the question, nay, the very sound of a name totally
silent for so many years, made Fortune's heart throb till its beating
was actual pain. Then came a sudden desperate hope, as she answered:
"I can not tell. I have never heard any thing of him. Have you?"
"No--yet, let me see. I think Archy once got a letter from him, a year
or so after he went away; but we lost it somehow, and never answered it.
We have never heard any thing since."
Miss Williams sat down on one of the benches facing the sea, with a
murmured excuse of being "tired." One of her little girls crept beside
her, stealing a hand in hers. She held it fast, her own shook so; but
gradually she grew quite herself again. "I have been ill," she
explained, "and can not walk far. Let us sit down here a little. You
were speaking about Mr. Roy, David?"
"Yes. What a good fellow he was! We called him Rob Roy, I remember, but
only behind his back. He was strict, but he was a jolly old soul for all
that. I believe I should know him again any day, as I did you. But
perhaps he is dead; people die pretty fast abroad, and ten years is a
long time, isn't it?"
"A long time. And you never got any more letters?"
"No; or if they did come, they were lost, being directed probably to the
care of poor old grannie, as ours was. We thought it so odd, after she
was dead, you know."
Thus the boy chattered on--his tongue had not shortened with his
increasing inches--and every idle word sank down deep in his old
governess's heart.
Then it was only her whom Robert Roy had forsaken. He had written to his
boys, probably would have gone on writing had they answered his letter.
He was neither faithless nor forgetful. With an ingenuity that might
have brought to any listener a smile or a tear, Miss Williams led the
conversation round again till she could easily ask more concerning that
one letter; but David, remembered little or nothing, except that it was
dated from Shanghai, for his brothers had had a discussion whether
Shanghai was in China or Japan. Then, boy-like, they had forgotten the
whole matter.
"Yes, by this time every body had forgotten him," thought Fortune to
herself, when having bidden David good-by at her door and arranged to
meet him again--he was on a visit at Brighton before matriculating at
Oxford next term--she sat down in own room, with a strangely bewildered
feeling. "Mine, all mine," she said, and her heart closed itself over
him, her old friend at least, if nothing more, with a tenacity of
tenderness as silent as it was strong.
From that day, though she saw, and was determined henceforward to see, as
much as she could of young David Dalziel, she never once spoke to him of
Mr. Roy.
Still, to have the lad coming about her was a pleasure, a fond link with
the past, and to talk to him about his future was a pleasure too. He was
the one of all the four--Mr. Roy always said so--who had "brains" enough
to become a real student; and instead of following the others to India,
he was to go to Oxford, and do his best there. His German education had
left him few English friends. He was an affectionate, simple-hearted
lad, and now that his mischievous days were done, was taking to thorough
hard work. He attached himself to his old governess with an enthusiasm
that a lad in his teens often conceives for a woman still young enough to
be sympathetic, and intelligent enough to guide without ruling the errant
fancy of that age. She, too, soon grew very fond of him. It made her
strangely happy, this sudden rift of sunshine out of the never-forgotten
heaven of her youth, now almost as far off as heaven itself.
I have said she never spoke to David about Mr. Roy, nor did she; but
sometimes he spoke, and then she listened. It seemed to cheer her for
hours, only to hear that name. She grew stronger, gayer, younger. Every
body said how much good the sea was doing her, and so it was; but not
exactly in the way people thought. The spell of silence upon her life
had been broken, and though she knew all sensible persons would esteem
her in this, as in that other matter, a great "fool," still she could not
stifle a vague hope that some time or other her blank life might change.
Every little wave that swept in from the mysterious ocean, the ocean that
lay between them two, seemed to carry a whispering message and lay it at
her feet, "Wait and be patient, wait and be patient."
She did wait, and the message came at last.
One day David Dalziel called, on one of his favorite daily rides, and
threw a newspaper down at her door, where she was standing.
"An Indian paper my mother has just sent. There's something in it that
will interest you, and--"
His horse galloped off with the unfinished sentence; and supposing it was
something concerning his family, she put the paper in her pocket to read
at leisure while she sat on the beach. She had almost forgotten it, as
she watched the waves, full of that pleasant idleness and dreamy peace so
new in her life, and which the sound of the sea so often brings to
peaceful hearts, who have no dislike to its monotony, no dread of those
solemn thoughts of infinitude, time and eternity, God and death and love,
which it unconsciously gives, and which I think is the secret why some
people say they have "such a horror of the sea-side."
She had none; she loved it, for its sights and sounds were mixed up with
all the happiness of her young days. She could have sat all this
sunshiny morning on the beach doing absolutely nothing, had she not
remembered David's newspaper; which, just to please him, she must look
through. She did so, and in the corner, among the brief list of names in
the obituary, she saw that of "Roy." Not himself, as she soon found, as
soon as she could see to read, in the sudden blindness that came over
her. Not himself. Only his child.
"On Christmas-day, at Shanghai, aged three and a half years, Isabella,
the only and beloved daughter of Robert and Isabella Roy."
He was alive, then. That was her first thought, almost a joyful one,
showing how deep had been her secret dread of the contrary. And he was
married. His "only and beloved daughter?" Oh! how beloved she could
well understand. Married, and a father; and his child was dead.
Many would think it strange (it would be in most women, but it was not in
this woman) that the torrent of tears which burst forth, after her first
few minutes of dry-eyed anguish, was less for herself, because he was
married and he had lost him, than for him, because he had had a child and
lost it--he who was so tender of heart, so fond of children. The thought
of his grief brought such a consecration with it, that her grief--the
grief most women might be expected to feel on reading suddenly in a
newspaper that the man they loved was married to another--did not come.
At least not at once. It did not burst upon her, as sorrow does
sometimes, like a wild beast out of a jungle, slaying and devouring. She
was not slain, not even stunned. After a few minutes it seemed to her as
if it had happened long ago--as if she had always known it must happen,
and was not astonished.
His "only and beloved daughter!" The words sung themselves in and out of
her brain, to the murmur of the sea. How he must have loved the child!
She could almost see him with the little one in his arms, or watching
over her bed, or standing beside her small coffin. Three years and a
half old! Then he must have been married a good while--long and long
after she had gone on thinking of him as no righteous woman ever can go
on thinking of another woman's husband.
One burning blush, one shiver from head to foot, one cry of piteous
despair, which nobody heard but God--and she was not afraid of His
hearing--and the struggle was over. She saw Robert Roy, with his child
in his arms with his wife by his side, the same and yet a totally
different man.
She, too, when she rose up, and tried to walk, tried to feel that it was
the same sea, the same shore, the same earth and sky, was a totally
different woman. Something was lost, something never to be retrieved on
this side the grave, but also something was found.
"He is alive," she said to herself, with the same strange joy; for now
she knew where he was, and what had happened to him. The silence of all
these years was broken, the dead had come to life again, and the lost, in
a sense, was found.
Fortune Williams rose up and walked, in more senses than one; went round
to fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly opened
delight of children, the Brighton Aquarium; staid a little with them,
admiring the fishes; and when she reached home, and found David Dalziel
in the drawing-room, met him and thanked him for bringing her the
newspaper. "I suppose it was on account of that obituary notice of Mr.
Roy's child," said she, calmly naming the name now. "What a sad thing!
But still I am glad to know he is alive and well. So will you be. Shall
you write to him?"
"Well, I don't know," answered the lad, carelessly crumpling up the
newspaper and throwing it on the fire. Miss Williams made a faint
movement to snatch it out, then disguised the gesture in some way, and
silently watched it burn. "I don't quite see the use of writing. He's a
family man now, and must have forgotten all about his old friends. Don't
you think so?"
"Perhaps; only he was not the sort of person easily to forget."
She could defend him now; she could speak of him, and did speak more than
once afterward, when David referred to the matter. And then the lad
quitted Brighton for Oxford, and she was left in her old loneliness.
A loneliness which I will not speak of. She herself never referred to
that time. After it, she roused herself to begin her life anew in a
fresh home, to work hard, not only for daily bread but for that humble
independence which she was determined to win before the dark hour when
the most helpful become helpless, and the most independent are driven
to fall a piteous burden into the charitable hands of friends or
strangers--a thing to her so terrible that to save herself from the
possibility of it, she who had never leaned upon any body, never had any
body to lean on, became her one almost morbid desire.
She had no dread of a solitary old age but an old age beholden to either
public or private charity was to her intolerable; and she had now few
years left her to work in--a governess's life wears women out very fast.
She determined to begin to work again immediately, laying by as much as
possible yearly against the days when she could work no more; consulted
Miss Maclachlan, who was most kind; and then sought and was just about
going to another situation, with the highest salary she had yet earned,
when an utterly unexpected change altered every thing.