style="font-size:15px;"> There, in his father’s room, at midnight, the fire was roaring, and the gas blazing; the papers, the sacred papers – to lay a hand on which was criminal – had all been taken off and piled along the floor; a cloth was spread, and a supper laid, upon the business table; and in his father’s chair a woman, habited like a nun, sat eating. As he appeared in the doorway, the nun rose, gave a low cry, and stood staring. She was a large woman, strong, calm, a little masculine, her features marked with courage and good sense; and as John blinked back at her, a faint resemblance dodged about his memory, as when a tune haunts us, and yet will not be recalled.
“Why, it’s John!” cried the nun.
“I daresay I’m mad,” said John, unconsciously following King Lear; “but, upon my word, I do believe you’re Flora.”
“Of course I am,” replied she.
And yet it is not Flora at all, thought John; Flora was slender, and timid, and of changing colour, and dewy-eyed; and had Flora such an Edinburgh accent? But he said none of these things, which was perhaps as well. What he said was, “Then why are you a nun?”
“Such nonsense!” said Flora. “I’m a sick-nurse; and I am here nursing your sister, with whom, between you and me, there is precious little the matter. But that is not the question. The point is: How do you come here? and are you not ashamed to show yourself?”
“Flora,” said John sepulchrally, “I haven’t eaten anything for three days. Or, at least, I don’t know what day it is; but I guess I’m starving.”
“You unhappy man!” she cried. “Here, sit down and eat my supper; and I’ll just run upstairs and see my patient; not but what I doubt she’s fast asleep, for Maria is a malade imadginaire.”
With this specimen of the French, not of Stratford-atte-Bowe, but of a finishing establishment in Moray Place, she left John alone in his father’s sanctum. He fell at once upon the food; and it is to be supposed that Flora had found her patient wakeful, and been detained with some details of nursing, for he had time to make a full end of all there was to eat, and not only to empty the teapot, but to fill it again from a kettle that was fitfully singing on his father’s fire. Then he sat torpid, and pleased, and bewildered; his misfortunes were then half forgotten; his mind considering, not without regret, this unsentimental return to his old love.
He was thus engaged when that bustling woman noiselessly re-entered.
“Have you eaten?” said she. “Then tell me all about it.”
It was a long and (as the reader knows) a pitiful story; but Flora heard it with compressed lips. She was lost in none of those questionings of human destiny that have, from time to time, arrested the flight of my own pen; for women, such as she, are no philosophers, and behold the concrete only. And women, such as she, are very hard on the imperfect man.
“Very well,” said she, when he had done; “then down upon your knees at once, and beg God’s forgiveness.”
And the great baby plumped upon his knees, and did as he was bid; and none the worse for that! But while he was heartily enough requesting forgiveness on general principles, the rational side of him distinguished, and wondered if, perhaps, the apology were not due upon the other part. And when he rose again from that becoming exercise, he first eyed the face of his old love doubtfully, and then, taking heart, uttered his protest.
“I must say, Flora,” said he, “in all this business I can see very little fault of mine.”
“If you had written home,” replied the lady, “there would have been none of it. If you had even gone to Murrayfield reasonably sober, you would never have slept there, and the worst would not have happened. Besides, the whole thing began years ago. You got into trouble, and when your father, honest man, was disappointed, you took the pet, or got afraid, and ran away from punishment. Well, you’ve had your own way of it, John, and I don’t suppose you like it.”
“I sometimes fancy I’m not much better than a fool,” sighed John.
“My dear John,” said she, “not much!”
He looked at her and his eye fell. A certain anger rose within him; here was a Flora he disowned: she was hard; she was of a set colour; a settled, mature, undecorative manner; plain of speech, plain of habit – he had come near saying, plain of face. And this changeling called herself by the same name as the many-coloured, clinging maid of yore; she of the frequent laughter, and the many sighs, and the kind, stolen glances. And to make all worse, she took the upper hand with him, which (as John well knew) was not the true relation of the sexes. He steeled his heart against this sick-nurse.
“And how do you come to be here?” he asked.
She told him how she had nursed her father in his long illness, and when he died, and she was left alone, had taken to nurse others, partly from habit, partly to be of some service in the world; partly, it might be, for amusement. “There’s no accounting for taste,” said she. And she told him how she went largely to the houses of old friends, as the need arose; and how she was thus doubly welcome, as an old friend first, and then as an experienced nurse, to whom doctors would confide the gravest case.
“And, indeed, it’s a mere farce my being here for poor Maria,” she continued; “but your father takes her ailments to heart, and I cannot always be refusing him. We are great friends, your father and I; he was very kind to me long ago – ten years ago.”
A strange stir came in John’s heart. All this while had he been thinking only of himself? All this while, why had he not written to Flora? In penitential tenderness, he took her hand, and, to his awe and trouble, it remained in his, compliant. A voice told him this was Flora, after all – told him so quietly, yet with a thrill of singing.
“And you never married?” said he.
“No, John; I never married,” she replied.
The hall clock striking two recalled them to the sense of time.
“And now,” said she, “you have been fed and warmed, and I have heard your story, and now it’s high time to call your brother.”
“O!” cried John, chapfallen; “do you think that absolutely necessary?”
“I can’t keep you here; I am a stranger,” said she. “Do you want to run away again? I thought you had enough of that.”
He bowed his head under the reproof. She despised him, he reflected, as he sat once more alone; a monstrous thing for a woman to despise a man; and, strangest of all, she seemed to like him. Would his brother despise him, too? And would his brother like him?
And presently the brother appeared, under Flora’s escort; and, standing afar off beside the doorway, eyed the hero of this tale.
“So this is you?” he said at length.
“Yes, Alick, it’s me – it’s John,” replied the elder brother feebly.
“And how did you get in here?” inquired the younger.
“O, I had my pass-key,” says John.
“The deuce you had!” said Alexander. “Ah, you lived in a better world! There are no pass-keys going now.”
“Well, father was always averse to them,” sighed John. And the conversation then broke down, and the brothers looked askance at one another in silence.
