Chapter XI: Called Home

The September wind blew cold and keen as Mr. Grinnell and Harold drove along the quays to Carlisle Bridge, and the man that had so strongly excited Mr. Pryor’s disapproval drew the borrowed rug closer round the boy, who shivered and trembled as the blast swept by.

It was better when they entered the south side; there they were sheltered from the cutting wind, and Harold grew quieter and calmer as the car bore him nearer and nearer home. He asked Mr. Grinnell not to drive up to the door, but to set him down at the end of the street where his mother resided; and then they had a quarrel as to which should pay the man, that resulted in Harold, as usual, having it all his own way.

On one point, however, Mr. Grinnell was firm—he would not let the sick lad walk up the street alone, neither would he allow him to throw aside Birdley’s rug. “I will take it back with me,” he said. “I am resolved to see you safe and sound to your own door.”

Which he did, and then bidding Harold a cheery “good-night,” left Harold as Brian admitted him.

“Who was that came with you?” the elder brother asked.

“A friend of mine, a man who brought me home. I have been ill, Brian—I have indeed,” and Harold dropped into a chair and put out his white thin hand deprecatingly towards his brother.

“I am going to be good,” he said. “I am. If you all will only do what I ask you, I will never get drunk again. I will try to be a credit to everybody belonging to me yet. It is not too late, I think, is it?” and with a gesture which was unspeakably touching, he put Brian’s hand on the table, and laid his cheek upon it.

Brian had persuaded his mother and Geraldine to go to bed. The servant, however, was still up, and now stood in the doorway. She came to ask if anything more were needed; but seeing Harold’s head bent down and his brother leaning over him, she remained silent.

Brian saw her and whispered the one word “Doctor.”

In a moment, Mary was running down the street, and late though the hour was, returned in five minutes with a surgeon.

“My brother is not very well,” said Brian, after the first greetings were over. “Can you suggest any little thing that will set him to rights?”

“I would rather not see a doctor. I do not want any medicine,” remarked Harold, lifting his head, and looking with his great dark eyes straight in the face of the surgeon who was feeling his pulse, and counting its beats with the greatest apparent indifference. “I am quite well,” he went on, pettishly, trying to wrench away his wrist; and then he dropped his face again on Brian’s hand, and his brother knew it was to hide the hot tears, that were falling thick and fast as rain.

“Hysterical,” said the doctor, calmly; and Harold gave Brian a push, as a hint that he should contradict the medical statement.

“His strength has been greatly tried lately, as most probably you know,” answered the elder brother; and his low, full voice had a great virtue of quietness in it. “He has suffered much, both mentally and bodily; but we hope rest and change may do wonders for him. Don’t we, Harold?”

The boy made no reply, but he pressed his lips on Brian’s hand.

“Is this the young gentleman, then, who was charged with a crime that some one else committed?” asked the surgeon; and for those words Harold turned round and thanked him.

“Nobody would believe me, sir,” he said. “Nobody, that is, out of my own home. But I did not do it. I did not, indeed.”

“That I am sure you did not!” answered the surgeon, heartily; and immediately he and Harold became good friends; and the boy, pushing back the mass of black hair that had fallen forward over his face, answered all the doctor’s questions, and told all his symptoms, so far as he knew them himself.

“It is the nights I dread,” he finished. “If you could only give me something to prevent my being so frightened. It is horrible to be all alone in the dark, like that;” and he clutched Brian’s hand, and held it fast while he spoke.

“Why did you never tell any one of these attacks before?” asked Brian.

“I told Mr. Pryor. The first of them I ever had at night was the time I was staying at Durrow; and he tipped me a five-pound note, and made me promise him to go to some of the great guns here, and ask them about it; and I meant to go, only, you know, they took me up the very day I came back—they did.”

“Poor lad!” said the surgeon, compassionately.

“I was a poor lad, I think,” answered Harold. “There’s nobody ever can know what it was—to be like what I have been to-night, in that horrid place. Another week of it would have killed me; I am sure it would.”

“Well, we must try to set you up again now,” observed the surgeon, cheerfully. “If your servant can come with me,” he added, addressing Brian, “I will send back some medicine with her, and see your brother early to-morrow morning;” and he stretched out his hand, which the two youths shook gratefully and departed.

“You won’t leave me to-night, Brian, will you?” pleaded Harold; and Brian was just saying that he would not, when Mrs. Drewitt, who had got up and dressed herself at the sound of a strange voice, came down-stairs, asking what was the matter.

“I did not feel up to the mark,” Harold answered; “and that obstinate Brian must needs go disturb the whole neighbourhood by fetching a doctor to see me. What a shame it is to have roused you up! but now that you are here, I want to ask you a favour. I want you and Brian to do something for me.”

“What is it, dear?” She was sitting on a chair, drawn close up to his; her arms were about him, and his head was resting on her breast.

“I want to go away. I want you to leave Dublin, and take me where I shall not be known—where I shall not be called a thief and a liar at every turn.”

“Who dares call you either the one or the other?” and Brian’s hand clenched, and his mouth was drawn tight as he asked the question.

Harold laughed out.

“Who killed Kildare? who dared Kildare to kill?—
I killed Kildare, and dare kill whom I will,”

he repeated. “He would go out and fight for me, I do believe,” he said, turning to his mother; “but he would have to fight all Dublin if he took up that quarrel. I have found out to-day,” Harold went on, as he kept curling and uncurling the broad strings of the widow’s cap that fitted so closely to Mrs. Drewitt’s face, “that there is no place like home, after all, and that there are no people like our own people, when they are true to us.”

“Come up to bed, Harold,” interposed Brian, who dreaded another fit of weeping. “Come along;” and he lifted his brother off his chair.

“Wait a moment,” entreated Harold, standing with his arm round Brian’s neck, and Brian’s arm supporting him. “Wait a moment; will you do what I say? Will you leave Dublin?”

Mrs. Drewitt’s glance wandered for a moment round the room. It was not large; it was not well furnished; but it had been a shelter, and it had seemed like home. For the instant it appeared hard to have to turn out once more into the world; to be in middle age a wanderer on the face of the earth; but the feeling only lasted for a moment; then she said—

“I will do whatever may be best for my children, and the child that has most need of me I must consider first.”

The last few words were addressed to Brian, who answered—

“Harold has most need of you, mother. Do what he asks. Leaving Ireland may be the making of him yet.”

“Do you wish to leave Ireland, Harold?” Mrs. Drewitt inquired, and the boy nodded.

“I should like to go to London,” he said; “I want to be lost; I want to be able to be a good boy. I am tired and sick of being bad and foolish.”

“Then God forbid we should keep you in the way of temptation!” exclaimed Brian: “but now come to bed; if you are to travel to London you must make haste and get strong.”

“Oh! I shall be all right enough,” answered the lad as he crawled up the staircase, with Brian’s arm still encircling him, with his right hand still twined round Brian’s neck.

And thus it came to pass that, instead of going to the Dargle, or to the Seven Churches, or to the meeting of the waters, or any of the lovely places to which Mr. Gyton had planned little excursions, the Drewitts set about packing up their effects forthwith and removing to London.

“You can do as you please about it, of course,” said the surgeon to Brian; “but——”

“It is his fancy,” the elder brother answered; “and I would not baulk it for any consideration. And do not tell my mother, Mr. Ross; she will find it out for herself in time. I know what you mean. I have been afraid of it from the first.”

And there was another person who knew also; upon whom the feeling that he was dying came slowly but surely; who day by day clung to his mother with a more despairing attachment, with a more passionate love.

After they removed to London he and she were never separate. In the dull winter days he sat at the windows of their lodgings, looking out on the constantly-changing panorama that was passing below. For the sake of her boy, Mrs. Drewitt had rented apartments in a house that commanded the view of a crowded thoroughfare; and it was Harold’s delight to sit from noon to dusk, and from dusk to nightfall, watching the people passing and repassing, the endless conveyances, the lights, the bustle, the noise, the excitement.

Hand clasped in hand, mother and son spent the days thus together. It was a fearful winter, that of 1854–5, but Harold lived through it. The spring of 1855 was late, and the season ungenial; but Harold lived to smell the violets which Geraldine bought for him, and to see the primrose-roots hawked in baskets about the streets.

It was a lovely summer, and Harold lived to take many a drive and many a walk through the great Babylon. He loved the parks—he liked to go where there were hundreds and hundreds of people, and not a face he knew among them save one, his mother’s; while she—it was impossible for her not to know that to Harold’s life there could be but one sequel—an early death: and when at last, in the September following their arrival in London, the heart that had once throbbed so high with youth and hope and courage was cold and quiet, Mrs. Drewitt, alone with her dead, fell on her knees and thanked God that her boy—her frail, erring, unfortunate boy—belonged at last solely to Him and her.

She made no mourning for her child, she raised no cry of grievous lamentation, of unutterable woe, but she lay through the night thinking of how he had come home at last—home to the one sure shelter to die in peace. The touch of his hand seemed never to depart from her; she could not forget how day after day he had pillowed his head on her bosom; she could not shut her ears to the “mother—mother” that he kept repeating towards the last if she left his side for a moment.

“God has been very good to me, Brian,” she said. “He gave my boy back to me before he died, and I am content.”

With some difficulty Brian at last found a resting-place for Harold: not in one of the great cemeteries, but in a quiet churchyard in one of the northern suburbs, where the evening sun falls aslant over the graves, where great trees throw a pleasant shade across the grass, where the grey church-tower flings its shadow over the tombs, where the bells ring out Sunday after Sunday, where there is quiet without loneliness, rest without desertion.

There Brian laid his brother down to sleep, himself the solitary mourner.

Mr. Pryor and Mr. Gyton were both out of town; and in the vast city Brian Drewitt had no other friend.

As he left the grave, his thoughts went back to another funeral, at which he had been chief mourner likewise: where, under the shadow of the mountains, within sound of the sea, he had seen the mortal remains of his father placed in the vault of the Drewitts.

He would have felt better satisfied had Harold slept there likewise. He would have liked a train of mourners, and a procession such as had wound down the avenue at Kincorth, and under the trees, and round the bay, and over Duranmore Hill, and down into the hollow.

Each man has his special weakness, and this was Brian’s. He had never felt so fully that they were Drewitts of Kincorth no longer, as when he followed his brother to the grave alone.

What did the words graven on his headstone, “Harold Drewitt,” imply to the men and the women who passed through that churchyard Sunday after Sunday? Nothing. They only served to show that there a stranger had laid him down to rest.

What guess could they make about how the nineteen years of his young life had been spent? What could they know of his story—his errors—his repentance—his wrongs?

But as though it had been all contained in a single page, Brian read the tale which was now finished over again—over and over again.

He could see the boy riding round and round the meadows; he could see the proud glances which both father and mother directed towards their youngest born; he could see the daring imp taking his leaps, bearing his tosses, laughing advice to scorn, and mocking at all grave counsels. He could see him walking about with Maxwell; looking defiantly across the dinner-table, at the Headlands, at his more prudent brother, and then draining off his bumper out of mere bravado. He thought of him that night at Regan’s: he saw him disappear through the darkness on Madcap; he remembered his life in Dublin, and the great trial which had, so far as any human being could see, saved his soul, while it destroyed his life; and then—then there came the days when Harold was tractable as a child—when he clung to his mother—when he turned back home to die.

The short story was finished—the tale told—the book closed in this world for ever.

It was with the life of Harold Drewitt “as it is with a ship that passeth over the waves of the sea, which, when it is gone by, the trace thereof cannot be found, neither the pathway of the keel in the waves; or, as when a bird hath flown through the air, there is no token of the way to be found; or, as when an arrow is shot at a mark, it parteth the air, which immediately cometh together again.” He had “passed away like a shadow, or as a post that hasteth by.”

Maxwell Drewitt had been right. It was a young body that Brian left, with an exceeding bitter and sorrowful heart, to sleep in the grave until the Judgment-day.