The Laurel Bush | Page 9

think so?
Miss Williams only smiled. She knew how all his life he had loved "those horrid books," preferring them to pleasure, recreation, almost to daily bread; how he had lived on the hope that one day he--born only a farmer's son--might do something, write something. "I also am of Arcadia." He might have done it or not--the genius may or may not have been there; but the ambition certainly was. Could he have thrown it all aside? And Why?
Not for mere love of money; she knew him too well for that. He was a thorough book-worm, simple in all his tastes and habits--simple almost to penuriousness; but it was a penuriousness born of hard fortunes, and he never allowed it to affect any body but himself. Still, there was no doubt he did not care for money, or luxury, or worldly position--any of the things that lesser men count large enough to work and struggle and die for. To give up the pursuits he loved, deliberately to choose others, to change his whole life thus, and expatriate himself, as it were, for years--perhaps for always--why did he do it, or for whom?
Was it for a woman? Was it for her? If ever, in those long empty days and wakeful nights, this last thought entered Fortune's mind, she stifled it as something which, once to have fully believed and then disbelieved would have killed her.
That she should have done the like for him--that or any thing else involving any amount of heroism or self-sacrifice--well, it was natural, right; but that he should do it for her? That he should change his whole purpose of life that he might be able to marry quickly, to shelter in his bosom a poor girl who was not able to fight the world as a man could, the thing--not so very impossible, after all--seemed to her almost incredible! And yet (I am telling a mere love story, remember--a foolish, innocent love story, without apologizing for either the folly or the innocence) sometimes she was so far "left to herself," as the Scotch say, that she did believe it: in the still twilights, in the wakeful nights, in the one solitary half hour of intense relief, when, all her boys being safe in bed, she rushed out into the garden under the silent stars to sob, to moan, to speak out loud words which nobody could possibly hear.
"He is going away, and I shall never see him again. And I love him better than any thing in all this world. I couldn't help it--he couldn't help it. But, oh! It's hard--hard!"
And then, altogether breaking down, she would begin to cry like a child. She missed him so, even this week, after having for weeks and months been with him every day; but it was less like a girl missing her lover--who was, after all, not her lover--than a child mourning helplessly for the familiar voice, the guiding, helpful hand. With all the rest of the world Fortune Williams was an independent, energetic woman, self-contained, brave, and strong, as a solitary governess had need to be; but beside Robert Roy she felt like a child, and she cried for him like a child,
"And with no language but a cry."
So the week ended and Sunday came, kept at Mrs. Dalziel's like the Scotch Sundays of twenty years ago. No visitor ever entered the house, wherein all the meals were cold and the blinds drawn down, as if for a funeral. The family went to church for the entire day, St. Andrews being too far off for any return home "between sermons." Usually one servant was left in charge, turn and turn about; but this Sunday Mrs. Dalziel, having put the governess in the nurse's place beside the ailing child, thought shrewdly she might as well put her in the servant's place too, and let her take charge of the kitchen fire as well as of little David. Being English, Miss Williams was not so exact about "ordinances" as a Scotch woman would have been; so Mrs. Dalziel had no hesitation in asking her to remain at home alone the whole day in charge of her pupil.
Thus faded, Fortune thought, her last hope of seeing Robert Roy again, either at church--where he usually sat in the Dalziel pew, by the old lady's request, to make the boys "behave"--or walking down the street, where he sometimes took the two eldest to eat their "piece" at his lodgings. All was now ended; yet on the hope--or dread--of this last Sunday she had hung, she now felt with what intensity, till it was gone.
Fortune was the kind of woman who, were it given her to fight, could fight to the death, against fate or circumstances; but when her part was simply passive,