Chapter VII

The description given of Henry by the strange gentleman was a true one. He was not in reality as much altered as he appeared; but on the surface of his character there was a great change. Its lightness and brightness had faded; its volatile caprice and giddiness was gone; and, such being the case, the more practical parts of his nature had come in to play--were, in fact, what was chiefly seen. He was, in his inner being, so remorseful and penitent and sad; and, for the time being, so given up to these feelings that he had no desire for diversion, no heart to be otherwise than sober and grave.

His life in Australia had been a hard one. On the voyage out, he had been supported by many thoughts and many dreams. The thoughts chiefly his own wrongs; the dreams, dreams of proving what he could do, which might make England regret him. England--a large word to express at once Nora, Mr. Powderham, and James Field.

To assist in these dreams, he, with the common sense he certainly possessed, made the best use of his time on board. From a kind teacher or professor of mathematics and arithmetic he took lessons in arithmetic, &c. From a surveyor who was on his way to an employment he took lessons and received hints in all matters appertaining to the surveyor’s business; and, working with a good heart, he pleased his kind instructors by his progress. Very valuable knowledge was thus stored for future use in his head.

But, while devoting a part of his days to these sensible duties, another part was as regularly devoted to the consideration of his wrongs. Could we fancy a calm spirit, studying as a curiosity the mind of man, there is, perhaps, no other thing which would cause a greater surprise than the unwearied manner in which man’s mind can dwell on certain subjects; and among all subjects none more astonishing than the way in which it can dwell un-tired on its wrongs. Day by day, and day by day, the same words can be repeated, the same scenes re-acted, the same indignant, impotent passion stirred within. So it was with Henry. He was never tired in recalling the painful past; the years of neglected childhood; the wrongs he had received from Stephen Fanshawe; the misery of his home; the false hopes on which his youth had been fed, up to the last painful time--his wrongs from James Field and Mr. Powderham, and Nora herself.

But, having stirred himself to passion during the earlier years, he rarely dwelt on the last item of all--on Nora; something warned him off from that track. “If I think of _her_ I shall go mad!” was the usual conclusion to his reveries; and then he would stamp about the deck, and drive the insanity away.

On his arrival at Melbourne, in his haste to find employment, he bound himself to remain for six months in the office of a land-surveyor. One day of ill success had stirred him to impatience, and he made his engagement in his usual thoughtless way. His master was a hard-working, rough, and hard-tempered man; and Henry had a weary time of it. Until that was over he wrote no letter home. No sooner was he free from this employment than, tired and cramped in spirit by his labours at a desk, he accepted a situation with a large sheep farmer up the country. He longed for air and freedom; but his dreams were failing him, he was undecided as to his future life, and it was then, before leaving Melbourne for the open country, that he wrote to his mother.

The wild life pleased him for a time, but his heart was growing sad, and he was longing even for that unsoft home which had been his. Again he resorted to that contemplation of his wrongs which had driven him from home, country, comfort, love, and happiness; which had forced from him a vow to return to England no more until his innocence was made clear.

He had been about six months in his wild life when Letitia’s letter, reporting the death of his mother, and the insanity of his father, reached and paralyzed him. He loved his mother, and knew she loved him. The thought of her last embrace had been at once a torment and a consolation in his exile, and the hope of her smiling caress when he returned, if he ever did return, was the one hope of the future which was all bright, and had no darkness in it. Of death making an invasion into his home he had never thought. When in a passion he often wished himself and others dead; he often had seen and heard of the mournful emblems of man’s mortality; but he had never met with death in his private life, and had certainly never pictured it as seizing _his_ mother--the one being of whose love he was secure. But she was dead, and when he heard the news he would not be comforted.

Yet in this first woe, sad as it might be, there was sweetness compared with the feelings which consideration brought upon him. When he came to study, as an exile does, Letitia’s letter, a horror of remorse came over him. Letitia was not of a soft or pitiful nature, neither to herself nor to others, and she said in plain words, “Your going first, and then my marriage, killed her.” “Your going killed her.” These four words took hold of Henry’s brain and maddened him. He had killed her, his mother; the only being who loved him.

He threw up his situation, he hardly knew wherefore, and travelled night and day in sultry weather, he knew not why, to Melbourne, and there fell ill of a fever, as might have been expected.

He fell into kind hands, and in the calm of convalescence for the first time came to think.

All his wild dreams of doing great things in Australia were over. He had only just money enough to take him home. But to this he was indifferent. He must go home; go to that country which had so wronged him--that country where as an innocent man he never could appear--that country in which the only being who cared for him lay sleeping in the grave. He must go. He must retract his vow; he could not resist Letitia’s appeal; he must go, but he wished he was dead and laid beside his mother.

He said this one day to a grave, motherly woman who had attended him in his illness.

“It would certainly be better for many of us,” she replied calmly, and without rebuke, “if we are certain that we are fit to meet God.”

Henry stared at her. Not that he had not often heard such words, but they had never before come home to him. He made her no answer; but he shivered, and his eyes went into himself, as they had never done before. Was _he_ fit to meet God, if his wild words and prayers were granted? No great results ensued from this scrutiny; nothing that would have satisfied those who on such an occasion expect a definite and apparent change. Yet his self-questioning did effect a change. He no longer wearily wished to die, but wished to live. He no longer dreaded a return to England, but wished to reach it, and by his new life to redeem the past. He no longer dwelt on his wrongs, but, humbled in spirit, owned his own miserable failures; and in fact, if not in word, said, “Lord, have mercy upon me, and incline my heart to keep Thy laws.”

So far he was changed; and he went home with a steadfast purpose in his soul. If his father was indeed insane, _he_ was the head of the house from which father and mother had been taken. He would do his duty to them, acting for Letitia and the rest as a father would do--for Letitia, even though married to “that man,” at whom his very flesh recoiled. Perhaps this last resolve more than aught else cheered him. It was something to feel that he _could_ call Letitia sister still, although her name was Field.

So far he was changed. Over the upper crust of his character a breath of manliness and energy had passed, which sobered and quieted him, while deeper within a new and higher principle had begun to stir and act.

Yet he was Henry still. There was the same nature, impulsive, unreasoning, more under control, because he was more conscious of weakness, but liable to be blown with every blast of caprice or fancy or passion still.

On his arrival in London he went to his old home, now the habitation of others, and heard at the door that Letitia lived far away eastward, and that the rest of his family were at Riddlemere.

“Where?” he cried, with a crimson glow on his cheek, which astonished the quiet maid who answered his inquiries.

“A place called Riddlemere,” she said. “We have been sometimes asked, so I remember the name; but I don’t know the family.”

He turned away, and a little cloud began to arise and to shadow his intellect. What was the meaning of this? He walked on, feeling very desolate, and could not decide which way to turn. To visit Letitia at James Field’s house was beyond that full forgiveness he had purposed. That was a step he could not take. After some hesitation he went eastward, and took a lodging for himself in a respectable street not very far from where she lived. There he established himself, and sent for his luggage. He then wrote to Letitia, telling her where he was, and asking her to come to him.

Letitia obeyed with alacrity. Though given up heart and soul to her husband, she was not so happy with him as not to feel a certain joy in the sight of Henry’s face again. Only, as she entered his room she said,

“I come, Henry, and willingly; but I am a wife, and I will not hear one word against my marriage.”

“You shall not,” he said sadly; “there is misery enough for us to talk about.”

Then she looked into his sorrowful, changed face, and kissed him.

Their meeting was sad and quiet, but satisfactory so far as their own future relations were concerned. He listened to all Letitia had to tell; blamed her for nothing; owned that, in accepting Nora’s proposal, she had done the best for the children, and, in fact shewed himself, as he intended to do, the future father of the family. With a face quiet though careworn he listened to all the painful details of his mother’s illness and his father’s growing insanity, and only once shed a tear. It was when he heard for the first time of the little child’s death. It had been a soft little gentle thing, and Henry, in imagination, had had her hands around his neck, and his lips on her cheek, and had felt comforted about his mother. In her letter Letitia had forgotten this event, and when he heard of it a large tear rolled down his cheek. But he did not dwell on it. He felt so sad that nothing greatly affected him.

Nothing, except that one thought of Riddlemere. When he turned his thoughts in that direction, there was a cloud upon his brain.

He told Letitia of the agency that had been offered him.

She advised him to accept it. “If,” she added, with emphasis, “you _must_ go to work again.”

“Of course I must work,” he replied. “Even if the affairs were in a better state than it seems from what you tell me they are, I should be a fool as regards myself, and worse than a fool as regards the family, if I did not work.”

“Yes, I did not mean that,” she said.

“Then what did you mean?” He controlled himself, speaking with a quietness that deceived her.

“I mean, Henry, that in your position anything of hard work is a mistake and a folly. You are the next heir to great wealth, and, as far as appears, Miss Smythe has no wish to marry. Of course she may marry, but if she does, I think, as I have always done, that you are the person she would choose.”

Considering the raging storm that was in Henry’s mind, the effort with which he kept it in check was truly heroic.

“Letitia,” he said, without apparent passion, but with solemnity, “if you and I are to remain friends, such words must never pass your lips again. You, of all people, ought to know,” he went on, with a tremble in his voice, “that the cloud under which I live, and which even here in London, where I am scarcely known, makes me afraid to lift up my head, has fixed a great gulf between Miss Smith and me. And were it not so, the thoughts you suggest are unseemly and unfitting.”

Letitia’s mind was not formed in the mould which thinks much of the unseemly. Of that part of Henry’s reply she thought nothing; but she had been affected by another part. When he said, “you of all people,” there came a bright spot on her cheek. She thought he was going to attack her husband, and that she was resolved not to bear. She was touched by his reticence.

“I beg your pardon, Henry,” she cried. “I really at the moment had forgotten that ridiculous folly.”

And it was true. Even in the midst of the excitement she had felt only the ridicule of the charge made against Henry, and had never believed that it was that charge which had driven him away.

“It was no folly,” he sadly said, but said no more; and they parted in peace, and with a promise on Letitia’s part to come again.

But, as was usual with Letitia, she had ruffled instead of soothing his spirits; and when she left him he laid his head on his hands and thought.

The subject of his thoughts was how to conduct himself with regard to Nora; how to take or to bear the benefits she poured on his family. With the mere effort to think about her, there returned something of old irritation and bitterness; the sad but natural effect of long habit upon the mind. Then came also that flood of vague passionate thoughts and feelings which always disordered him, and which he never dared to face. There was also, on this occasion, the pride of Henry, and the natural pride of man; the humiliation of accepting this unceasing return of good for evil.

He thought till he was weary. Then he went out in search of dinner, and, glad to escape from that portion of his thoughts which regarded Nora, he endeavoured to arrange his plans for the few next days. As he strolled home from a clean tavern, where he had found a clean dinner, he passed a church, where, in this poor district, an evening service was being celebrated, with choral music, and all the care and beauty a Queen might have commanded. He went in, and knelt, and listened with the poor congregation; and while the sweet and soothing sounds fell on his ear and stole into his heart, he felt, as many have done in like circumstances, that the cares and worries of this life were not everything; that there was a life of man which might be in a higher region--above the smoke and stir of this dim spot--where the peace of God was the only wind that blew.

He did not consciously think much of this. He only felt it, but, as he walked home, he said in his heart that he would do his duty, and not be tossed about as he had been, with the oppositions and contradictions of this vexing world.

The following morning he went to the asylum in which his father had been placed. He hoped to be allowed to see him, but this request was refused, and refused with decision.

“They had few cases in the asylum,” was the observation of the person to whom Henry was speaking, “more desperate, and, as far as yet appeared, more hopeless.”

The concern in Henry’s face softened the words the gentleman was about to use; but even softened, the account was a painful one. The malignant passions Mr. Devereux had cherished, now in the failure of mental power lorded over him, and there were times when it seemed as if a fiend possessed him. There were other and gentler moods, the gentleman said; and the hope was that they would in time be the prevailing ones.

After hearing this hopeless account, and feeling more than ever that it had become his business to watch over his family, Henry went to the lawyer in whose hands were the family affairs, and mastered the general state of things.

On his return home he wrote to accept the agency that had been so opportunely offered; and when Letitia came to him, he begged her to accompany him in his search for a small house, which he wished to take at once.

“But is there not a house in Hertfordshire, where you are going?”

“I believe there is, but all that will take time to settle. I want to have Simon and Bella at home with me at once. We can make our plans afterwards.”

He found the house he required somewhere towards Kensington. His affectionate nature turned lovingly to the old home he had once so hated, and he chose to bend his steps in that direction. It was not till the following day that he wrote to Nora.