recognized the truth of Lady Denzil’s words. I had nobody to restrain me: no husband at home to find fault with anything I might do; nobody to wonder, or fret, or be annoyed by the burden I had taken upon me. The recollection made my heart swell a little, not with pleasure. And yet it was very true. Poor Mr. Mulgrave, had he been living, was a man who would have been sure to find fault. It is dreary to think of one’s self as of so little importance to any one; but perhaps one ought to think more than one does, that if the position is a dreary one, it has its benefits too. One is free to do what one pleases. I could answer to myself; I had no one else to answer to. At such a moment there was an advantage in that.
At the station I met the rector, who was going to town by the same train. ‘Bless my soul, Mrs. Mulgrave,’ he said, ‘what a dreadful day you have chosen for travelling. I thought there was no one afloat on the world but me.’
‘There was no choice, Mr. Damerel,’ I said. ‘I am going about business which cannot be put off.’
He was very kind: he got my ticket for me, and put me into a carriage, and did not insist that I should talk to him on the way up. He talked enough himself it is true, but he was satisfied when I said yes and no. Just before we got to town however he returned to my errand. ‘If your business is anything I can do for you,’ he said, ‘if there is anything that a man could look after better than a lady—you know how glad I should be to be of any use.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. My feelings were not mirthful, but yet I could have burst out laughing. I wonder if there is really any business that a man can do better than a lady, when it happens to be her business and not his? I have never got much help in that way from the men that have belonged to me. And to think of putting my delicate, desperate business into Mr. Damerel’s soft, clerical hands, that had no bone in them! He got me a cab, which was something—though to be sure a porter would have done it quite as well—and opened his eyes to their utmost width when he heard me tell the coachman to go to the Tower.
What a drive it was! our thirty miles of railway was nothing to it: through all those damp, dreary, glistening London streets—streets narrow and drearily vicious; streets still more drearily respectable; desert lines of warehouses and offices; crowded thoroughfares with dreary vehicles in a lock, and dreary people crowding about surmounted with umbrellas—miles upon miles, streets upon streets, from Paddington to the Tower. I think it was the first drive of the kind I ever took, and if you can suppose me wrapped up in my waterproof cloak, a little excited about the unknown man I was going to see; trying to form my sentences, what I was to say; pondering how I should bring in my arguments best; wondering where I should have to go to find the mother and the child. Poor little Mary! after the little gleam of love and of luxury that had opened upon her, to be snatched off into the dreary world of poverty, with a violent mother whom it was evident she feared! And poor mother too! She might be violent and yet might love her child; she might be wicked and yet might love her child. To go and snatch the little creature back, at all hazards, was an act which to the popular mind would always look like a much higher strain of virtue than dear Lady Denzil’s abandonment. I could not defend Lady Denzil, even to myself; and what could I say for her to her son, who knew her not?
At least an hour was lost before I got admittance to Sergeant Gray. As it happened, by a fortunate chance, Robert Seymour was colonel of the regiment, and came to my assistance. But for that I might have failed altogether. Robert was greatly amazed by the request I made him, but of course he did what I wanted. He told me Sergeant Gray was not in prison, but simply confined to his quarters, and that he was a very strange sort of man. ‘I should like to know what you can want with him,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course, I am dreadfully curious—men are—you know it is our weakness. You may as well tell me what you want with Gray.’
‘It is nothing to laugh about,’ said I; ‘it is more tragic than comical. I have a message to him from his mother. And there is not a moment to lose.’
‘I understand,’ said Robert, ‘I am to take myself off. Here is the door; but you must tell me anything you know about him when you have seen him. He is the strangest fellow in the regiment. I never can make him out.’
And in two minutes more I was face to face with Sergeant Gray.
He must have been like his father. There was not a feature in his face which recalled Lady Denzil’s. He was an immensely tall, powerful man, with strong chestnut brown hair, and vigour and life in every line of his great frame. I expected to find a prisoner partially sentimental; and I found a big man in undress marching freely about his room, with a long pipe by the fire, and his beer and glasses on the table. I had expected a refined man, bearing traces of gentleman written on him, and the fine tastes that became Lady Denzil’s son. There was something about him, when one came to look at him a second time—but what was it? Traces of dissipation, a look of bravado, an instant standing to his arms in self-defence, whatever I might have come to accuse him of; and the insufferable coxcomb air which comes naturally to the meanest member of the household troops. Such was the rapid impression I formed as I went in. He took off his cap with an air of amazement yet assurance, but put it on again immediately. I stood trembling before this big, irreverent, unknown man. If the door had been open I think I should have run away. But as it was I had no resource.
‘Mr. Gray,’ I said all at once, half from cowardice, half to get it over, ‘I have come to you—from your mother.’
The man actually staggered as he stood before me—he fell back and gazed at me as if I had been a ghost. ‘From my—mother?’ he said, and his lips seemed to refuse articulation. His surprise vanquished him; which was more than with my individual forces I could have hoped to do.
‘From your mother,’ I repeated. ‘I have come direct from her, where she is lying ill and much shaken. She has told me all her story—and I love her dearly—that is why she sent me to you.’
All the time I was speaking he stood still and stared at me; but when I stopped, he appeared gradually to come to himself. He brought forward, from where it stood against the wall, very deliberately, another chair, and sitting down looked at me intently. ‘If she has told you all her story,’ he said, ‘you will know how little inducement I have to listen to anything she may say.’
‘Yes,’ said I, feeling not a fictitious but a real passion swelling up into my throat, ‘she has told me everything, more than you can know. She has told me how for forty years—is it forty years?—she has watched over you in secret, spent her days in thinking of you, and her nights in praying for you. Ah, don’t smile! if you had seen her pale and broken in all her pride, lying trembling and telling me this, it would have touched your heart.’
And I could see that it did touch his heart, being so new and unusual to him. He was not a cynical, over-educated man, accustomed to such appeals, and to believe them nonsense. And it touched him, being so unexpected. Then he made a little effort to recover himself, and the natural bravado of his character and profession. ‘In all her pride!’ he said bitterly. ‘Yes, that’s very well said; she liked her pride better than me.’
‘She liked your life better than you,’ said I—and heaven forgive me if I spoke like a sophist—‘and your comfort. To secure bread to you and education she made that vow. When she had once made it, she had to keep it. But I tell you what she told me not three hours ago. “There has never been a day I have not followed him in my heart.” That is what she said. She and her old maid who used to see you and watch over you talked of nothing else. Fancy! you a young man growing up, taking your own way, going against the wishes of your best friends; and your mother, who dared not go to you, watching you from far off, weeping over you, praying on her knees, thinking of nothing else, talking of nothing else when she was alone and dared do it. At other times she had to go into the world to please her husband, to act as if you had no existence. And all the time she was thinking of nothing but you in her heart.’
He had got
