by Grant Allen
Three times a year ‘Mrs. Wells’ returned by permission to the castle, to visit once more her own lost darling. Lord Remenham was touched by her constant attachment to ‘Hughie,’ and even the Countess admitted in her cold way that ‘Wells had behaved throughout in the most exemplary manner’; there was no denying the reality of her attachment to her foster-son. But as little Lord Hurley reached seven and eight, Janet was aware of a painful element, which grew more and more marked in these occasional visits. It was clear each time that Hugh cared less and less to see her. To say the truth, these four-monthly outbursts of spasmodic affection on the part of a stranger distinctly bored the child. He didn’t care twopence himself about Mrs. Wells, whom he was told by his father he ought to love ‘because she was his foster-mother’ — a phrase which conveyed to him about as much information as if he had been told that Janet was his residuary legatee or his feudal suzerain. At first he merely felt the stated visits a vague nuisance; they interfered with his playing: but as time went on, he learned to hate them, and to shrink from being ‘slobbered over,’ as he expressed it, by a woman for whom he had not any feeling on earth save one of mild though growing aversion. At last, he flatly refused to see Mrs. Wells at all; and when Lord Remenham interfered, and insisted, in his honest, stiff-necked way, that Hugh must ‘show some gratitude to the woman who had saved his life,’ the boy showed it by receiving her with marked ungraciousness, and audibly exclaiming, in a voice of relief, ‘Well, thank goodness, that’s over!’ as she left his presence.
Had this happened when he was two years old, or even three, it would have broken Janet’s heart by its cruel irony. But happening when he was ten, it affected her far less poignantly than she could herself have anticipated. She had grown meanwhile to be fonder and fonder of Willie— ‘My own dear boy,’ as she now called him to herself; she took less and less notice, thought less and less meanwhile, of the arrogant young aristocrat whom she had brought into the world to be the Countess’s plaything. Willie was so sweet and good, and so deeply attached to her; while Hugh had rapidly developed what she could not but consider the haughtiness of his class, and seemed to think his real mother ‘like the dirt beneath his feet,’ as she said to herself bitterly. Moreover, she had another cause of grievance against the sturdy little viscount. He was strong and vigorous, with the robust constitution inherited from a peasant father and mother; while Willie, her own dear Willie, was weak and ailing, and often required her most tender nursing. When he was only two years old, indeed, he had a terrible attack of croup, which nearly carried him off; and as Janet sat up all night, with clasped hands and streaming eyes, watching by the couch of the other woman’s son, it came home to her all at once that to lose Willie now would be ten thousand times worse for her than to lose her own boy, the false Lord Hurley.
So things went on for several years: though after the little episode of ‘Thank goodness, that’s over!’ Janet went back no more on her formal visits to the castle. She wrote Lord Remenham a most dignified and sensible letter upon the subject — just a trifle marred by her housemaidenly handwriting. ‘I could not help seeing, my lord,’ she said, with simple eloquence, ‘on my last visit to the castle, that my dear foster-child no longer regards me with any affection. As that is so, much as it grieves me, I think I had better discontinue my visits. I love him as deeply and as dearly as ever; but I love him too well to desire to hurt him, by inflicting myself upon him when he doesn’t want me.’
Remenham read the letter aloud as a penance to Hugh; who responded with effusion, ‘Well, that’s one good thing, anyhow!’ He was deaf to his father’s expressions of regret that he should have so alienated the feelings of a good woman, who loved him. ‘What right had she to call me “my Hughie”?’ he asked, with warmth. ‘Why, Charlie says she’s nothing at all but a common lodging-house woman.’ Charlie was Hugh’s friend, a boy-groom at the stables.
Remenham felt this conduct on Hurley’s part so bitterly, that he actually went across to the neighbouring town to call upon Janet, and apologise to her for his son’s coldness. But he chanced on a day when Willie was ill and kept home from school. The boy’s delicacy struck him. ‘Is he often so?’ he asked, with a heart-pang.
‘Well, he’s never been strong, my lord,’ Janet answered truthfully; ‘having been brought up by hand, you know — it never does suit them.’ And as she spoke a sudden dagger went through her heart all at once, to think she should have starved that dear boy of the nourishment his father the Earl had bought and paid for — in order to feed that strong and healthy and ungrateful young aristocrat, her boy, Hugh Seymour Plantagenet, Viscount Hurley.
The Earl recounted it all at length to his wife that night. ‘Gwen,’ he said seriously, ‘we had no right to do it. I must provide better for that boy. I shall allow his mother a hundred a year for his education. He’s a most intelligent child, with excellent faculties; and I’m sure he’d do credit to any pains bestowed upon him.’
‘My dear,’ the Countess answered, ‘you shall do nothing so quixotic.’
The natural result of which was that the Earl did it, and said no more about it.
This princely allowance for her boy’s education stirred up in Janet’s mind a fresh ambition. Like all dwellers in the Thames valley, she knew well the name and the fame of Oxford. It loomed large in her eyes, as the metropolis of the river. ’Twas not so much as a great university, however, that Oxford appealed to her, but as a place where men lived and learned to be gentlemen — real waterside gentlemen, in white sweaters and red blazers and straw hats with banded ribbons. Oxford men came often to her lodgings in the summer — with the cardinal’s hat or the red cross embroidered on their jerseys, — and she recognised the fact that there was a Something about them. Why should not her boy, her own dear Willie, be sent to Oxford, and there manufactured into a real gentleman? Manufactured? Why, he was a gentleman born — and a nobleman too, if it came to that, and the real Lord Hurley! If she sent him to Oxford, she might undo some part of the terrible wrong she had done him long since in depriving him of his birthright — a wrong which, brought home to her now she loved him, was beginning to weigh upon her soul not a little; for with our peasant class, incapable of any broad abstract ideas, you must have a personal substratum of emotional feeling to work upon in every case, before there can be any real recognition of right and wrong in their wider aspects. It was a wild ambition, perhaps, for a lodging-house keeper to entertain; but there was a good grammar-school in the town, where the boys wore square college caps; and with Lord Remenham’s hundred a year, a great deal was possible. She would begin saving it up, for it was to be paid to her quarterly at once; and by the time her boy was of an age to go to Oxford, she would have enough to send him there — and to live herself in such a way as not to disgrace him.
Thenceforth she saved with the petty, penurious, argus-eyed saving of the lesser bourgeoisie. Not so far as Willie was concerned, however. For him, she spent all she could afford, to keep him neat and well dressed, and to let him associate with other boys who were fit companions for a destined Oxford man. Nay, more: hard as it was for her to refuse them, she took no more big schoolboys or Oxford men as lodgers in summer: no undergraduate henceforth should ever be able to say, ‘I know that man — I lodged with his mother a couple of years ago.’ Year after year she saved up, and sent Willie to the grammar-school, and dressed him well, and took every fond care of him. And year after year she loved him more and more, with the ardent love one lavishes on those for whom one has worked and endured and suffered. Yet ever amidst it all came the gnawing thought, ‘All I can do for him is as nothing now, compared to what I have taken from him. I deprived him of an earldom; and I can educate him, perhaps, to be a curate or a schoolmaster.’
As for Willie, he loved and admired his mother — as he naturally called her. He was fond of her and proud of her; for she was tall and handsome; she ‘held her head up’; and he could see how hard she worked to keep the family ‘respectable.’ He honoured her
for that wish; for he had inherited the Earl’s conscientious, conventional, honest, doctrinaire nature. He was prouder of her by far than he would have been of the Countess. When he was getting to be seventeen, it began to strike Janet that her occasional lapses in grammar, though more and more infrequent as she got on in the world, were a source of pain or humiliation to her boy; and she said to him frankly, ‘Correct me, Willie, and explain why to me.’ He corrected and explained; and Janet, who was naturally clear-headed, sensible, and logical, understood and grasped the principles he expounded to her. She took pains with her English. As he got on at school — he was head of his class always, and took all the prizes, especially in classics — she felt still more of a desire not to shame her boy when he should go to Oxford; and with this intent she made him read her books, and read them herself — Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the current novelists — so that she might at least avoid putting her foot in it when she heard them talked of. And being a woman of remarkable mother-wit and quickness, she found very soon, to her immense surprise, that she could talk of many such things a great deal better than some silly ‘real ladies.’
It was a glorious day when, soon after Willie was nineteen, her boy returned from a week’s visit to that marvellous Oxford one day, with the incredibly great news that he had won a junior studentship at Christ Church. (That is the name at ‘the House’ for what anywhere else would be called a scholarship.) It was worth eighty pounds a year, and, with Lord Remenham’s allowance, it would enable him to live like a gentleman at Oxford. Janet made a rapid calculation in her own mind. Yes, yes; she could allow him seventy pounds more herself, which would give him an income of £250; and yet, by expending all her little savings in one wild burst, she would be able to live at Oxford herself, in quiet lodgings, for three years, like a lady, so as not to disgrace him!
One thing alone poisoned her happiness in this hour of triumph. Willie added at last, with a touch of not unnatural pleasure, ‘And I beat some fellows from the biggest schools — from Eton and Harrow; amongst others, Lord Hurley.’
A stab went straight through the mother’s heart, or rather, the foster-mother’s — for it was not Hugh she was thinking of. ‘Will he go to Christ Church with you?’ she asked, trembling.
‘Yes, mother dear, but without a studentship.’
Strange thoughts coursed quickly through Janet’s head. That young aristocrat, her own son, might be rude to her dear boy. How much did he know? How much did he remember? It was fortunate she had left off going to see him at the castle when he was ten years old. Perhaps the whole episode might have faded from his memory. But the Earl would know. And the Earl might tell him.
At that moment, if she didn’t hate Hugh, at least she feared him. And such fear as hers was not far from hatred.
October term came. It was the hour of freshmen. And when Lord Hurley set out from the castle, his father (or rather his reputed father) said to him as his last word, ‘You know your foster-mother’s boy, young Wells, gained that junior studentship that you missed, Hurley. Be sure, my boy, for our sake, that you are kind to him.’
‘All right, father,’ Hurley answered, as he jumped into the dogcart which was to take him to the station. But he added to himself, with a smile, ‘Just like my father! Wants to make me polite to every deserving young cad who happens to interest him.’
Three days later Janet was walking down the High, with her boy in cap and gown, proud and delighted as she had never been before in that strange varied life of hers. It was a moment of pure triumph. All at once, from a window overhead, she heard a murmur of voices. They came from a first-floor window of a club of undergraduates, which was gay even then with flowers in boxes.
‘Why, that’s the woman we lodged with three or four years ago when we stopped by the river!’ — one voice exclaimed — the voice of an Oriel commoner. ‘How awfully odd! And she’s walking with a ‘Varsity man!’
‘Yes,’ a second voice drawled. ‘Devilish odd, isn’t it? That’s my old foster-mother, Mrs. Wells; and she’s walking with her son. He’s a protégé of my father’s; and he’s got a junior studentship at the House. Rum combination, ain’t it?’
Janet glanced at Willie. He had not a mother’s ears, like hers; and he had not heard them. He walked on smiling, unaware of this calamity.
Janet Wells went home to her lodgings that night in an agony of misery. The Nemesis of her wrong-doing had come home to her indeed. She was paying her penalty. To think there was a day when she fancied she would like to strangle her Willie, because he had taken Hugh from her! Why, she hated Hugh now! Hated him even more profoundly and fiercely, by far, than she had ever loved him. That baseborn son of a drunken soldier to scorn her own boy — her good, gentle Willie!
The drunken soldier’s son had deprived her Willie of his birthright and his earldom! And, worse than all, she had helped him to do it!
She did not undress that night. She lay upon her bed in her clothes, and tossed and turned, and moaned and suffered. It was irrevocable now — quite, quite irrevocable. If she went to Lord Remenham and told him her tale to-morrow, how could he believe her? it was all too stale, too strange, too romantic — and hackneyed romantic at that — for any one to accept it. People would say she had been reading the Family Herald tales; or that her head was full of Lady Clare and Lord Ronald. What on earth could be more improbable, at our own time of day, than a tale of a changeling? and who on earth would swallow it on her unaided evidence?
She had dispossessed her boy, and, more terrible than all, she had laid him open to Lord Hurley’s cruel condescensions — the cruel condescensions of the soldier’s bastard.
Early next morning she rose, dressed her tumbled hair carefully, made herself as neat as she could with a flower in her bodice, and despatched a hurried note to Willie at Christ Church. ‘Come at once,’ it said, ‘to your heartbroken mother.’
Willie rushed round, wondering. Then, pale of face and haggard of eye, Janet began to confess to him. She did not even sob: it was far beyond sobbing. She told him first what she had heard Lord Hurley say at the window the night before. Then she made a dramatic pause: ‘And that boy,’ she added, ’is my own son, Willie.’
For a second Willie thought she was mad. Then he looked in her face, her white, bloodless face, and saw she was speaking the truth under strong emotion.
‘How do you mean, mother?’ he gasped.
Janet told him the whole tale, simply, in a few strong words, with peasant brevity and peasant absence of self-justification. She had done it, that was all — for ample reason at the time; and now she was paying for it.
When she had finished she looked him in the face.
‘You don’t believe it?’ she cried defiantly.
He took her hands in his.
‘Dear mother,’ he said, ‘I believe it. I believe you always. You never deceived me. I believe it; and I am sorry — for one thing only. If I am not your son, you take from me a thing I valued most of all — for I was proud to be the son of such a mother.’
Those words repaid her for years of anguish. She strained him to her bosom. ‘My boy, my boy,’ she cried, ‘I have robbed you of your inheritance!’
‘The inheritance of your blood,’ Willie answered, ‘yes. The other, I don’t care about.’
She clasped him again. At least she would die happy.
‘What can we do?’ she cried. ‘Can I confess to Lord Remenham?’
He shook his head.
‘Oh no,’ he answered. ‘It would do no good. We should both be regarded as absurd impostors. Nobody would believe it — except myself. All the rest would think it was a foolish lie — and I had egged you on to tell it.’
She held him tight against her breast.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘I will hold my tongue. I will not again destroy your prospects.’
They sat together in her rooms all that day, for the most part in silence, holding one another’s hands in mute sympathy. On the stroke of midnight he left h
er, as he must, to return to college.
‘Good-night, dearest!’ he said, with a strange foreboding. ‘Remember, I do not blame you in anything. I understand all; and a French proverb says, “To understand all is to pardon all.”’
She kissed him hysterically and let him go at once, without one word of leave-taking.
By the first post next morning he received two notes from her. One was formal, and intended only for the inspection of the coroner. It spoke of nothing but sleeplessness, depression, narcotics. The other ran thus: —
‘My own, own Darling,
‘I do not wish to murder the son I bore. But if I remain alive I feel I must rush upon Hurley, wherever I meet him, and stab him. I am not even sure it is because he is my own child that I want to spare him — is it not rather because I do not wish people to say your mother was a murderess? So, good-bye for ever. Willie, my Willie, I have wronged you deeply; I will wrong you no more. They will think it was merely an overdose of morphia.
‘Your loving
Mother.’
The jury returned it ‘Death by Misadventure.’
INTERMEZZO. LANGALULA
Langalula was a great chief. The people he ruled were numerous and warlike: his assegais were ten thousand: his tribe had many cattle. So the Missionary at his kraal was glad indeed when he felt he had touched Langalula’s heart; for it meant the conversion of a whole heathen nation.
