Chapter 19

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_ CHAPTER XIX

"Missing"--"Lost"--"To--"--all the initials of the alphabet--we read these sort of advertisements in the newspapers; and unless there happens to be in them something intensely pathetic, comical, or horrible, we think very little about them. Only those who have undergone all that such an advertisement implies can understand its depth of misery: the sudden missing of the person out of the home circle, whether going away in anger or driven away by terror or disgrace; the hour after hour and day after day of agonized suspense; the self-reproach, real or imaginary, lest any thing might have been said or done that was not said or done--any thing prevented that was not prevented; the gnawing remorse for some cruel, or careless, or bitter word, that could so easily have been avoided.

Alas! if people could only be made to feel that every word, every action carries with it the weight of an eternity; that the merest chance may make something said or done quite unpremeditatedly, in vexation, sullenness, or spite, the last action, the last word; which may grow into an awful remembrance, rising up between them and the irredeemable past, and blackening the future for years!

Selina was quite sure her unhappy nephew had committed suicide, and that she had been the cause of it. This conviction she impressed incessantly on her two sisters as they waited upon her, or sat talking by her bedside during that long Saturday, when there was nothing else to be done.

That was the misery of it. There was nothing to be done. They had not the slightest clew to Ascott's haunts or associates. With the last fingering of honest shame, or honest respect for his aunts, he had kept all these things to himself. To search for him in wide London was altogether impossible.

Two courses suggested themselves to Hilary--one, to go and consult Miss Balquidder; the other--which came into her mind from some similar case she had heard of--to set on foot inquiries at all police stations. But the first idea was soon rejected: only at the last extremity could she make patent the family misery--the family disgrace. To the second, similar and even stronger reasons applied. There was something about the cool, matter-of-fact, business-like act of setting a detective officer to hunt out their nephew, from which these poor women recoiled. Besides, impressed as he was--he had told his Aunt Johanna so--with the relentlessness of Mr. Ascott, might not the chance of his discovering that he was hunted drive him to desperation?

Hardly to suicide. Hilary steadfastly disbelieved in that. When Selina painted horrible pictures of his throwing himself off Waterloo Bridge: or being found hanging to a tree in one of the parks; or locking himself in a hotel bed chamber and blowing out his brains, her younger sister only laughed--laughed as much as she could--if only to keep Johanna quiet.

Yet she herself had few fears. For she knew that Ascott was, in a sense, too cowardly to kill himself. He so disliked physical pain, physical unpleasantness of all kinds. She felt sure he would stop short, even with the razor or the pistol in his hand, rather than do a thing so very disagreeable.

Nevertheless, in spite of herself, while she and her sisters sat together, hour after hour, in a stillness almost like that when there is a death in the house, these morbid terrors took a double size. Hilary ceased to treat them as ridiculous impossibilities, but began to argue them out rationally. The mere act of doing so made her recoil; for it seemed an acknowledgment that she was fighting not with chimeras but realities.

"It is twenty-four hours since he went," she reasoned. "If he had done anything desperate he would have done it at once, and we should have heard of it long before now; ill news always travels fast. Besides, his name was marked on all his clothes in full. I did it myself. And his coat pockets were always stuffed with letters; he used to cram them in as soon as he got them, you know."

And at this small remembrance of one of his "ways," even though it was an unkind way, and had caused them many a pain, from the want of confidence it showed, his poor, fond aunts turned aside to hide their starting tears. The very phrase "he used to," seemed such an unconscious admission that his life with them was over and done; that he never would either please them or vex them any more.

Yet they took care that during the whole day every thing should be done as if he were expected minute by minute; that Elizabeth should lay the fourth knife and fork at dinner, the fourth cup and saucer at tea. Elizabeth, who throughout had faithfully kept her pledge; who went about silently and unobservantly, and by every means in her power put aside the curiosity of Mrs. Jones as to what could be the reason that her lodgers had sat up all night, and what on earth had become of young Mr. Leaf.

After tea, Johanna, quite worn out, consented to go to bed; and then Hilary, left to her own responsibility, set herself to consider how long this dreadful quietness was to last, whether nothing could be done. She could endure whatever was inevitable, but it was against her nature as well as her conscience to sit down tamely to endure any thing whatsoever till it did become inevitable.

In the first place, she determined on that which a certain sense of honor, as well as the fear of vexing him should he come home, had hitherto prevented the examining of Ascott's room, drawers, clothes, and papers. It was a very dreary business--almost like doing the like to a person who was dead, only without the sad sanctity that belongs to the dead, whose very errors are forgotten and forgiven, who can neither suffer nor make others suffer any more.

Many things she found, and more she guessed at--things which stabbed her to the heart, things that she never told, not even to Johanna; but she found no clew whatever to Ascott's whereabouts, intentions, or connections. One thing, however, struck her--that most of his clothes, and all his somewhat extensive stock of jewelry were gone; every thing, in short, that could be convertible into money. It was evident that his flight, sudden as it was, had been premeditated as at least a possibility.

This so far was satisfactory. It took away the one haunting fear of his committing suicide; and made it likely that he was still lingering about, hiding from justice and Mr. Ascott, or perhaps waiting for an opportunity to escape from England--from the fear that his godfather, even if not prosecuting him, had the power and doubtless the will completely to crush his future, wherever he was known.

Where could he go? His Aunt tried to think over every word he had ever let fall about America, Australia, or any other place to which the hopeless outlaws of this country fly; but she could recollect nothing to enable her to form any conclusion. One thing only she was sure of--that if once he went away, his own words would come true; they would never see his face again. The last tie, the last constraint that bound him to home and a steady, righteous life would be broken; he would go all adrift, be tossed hither and thither on every wave of circumstance--what he called circumstance--till Heaven only knew what a total wreck he might speedily become, or in what forlorn and far off seas his ruined life might go down. He, Ascott Leaf, the last of the name and family.

"It can not be; it shall not be!" cried Hilary. A sharp, bitter cry of resistance to the death; and her heart seemed to go out to the wretched boy and her hands to clutch at him, as if he were drowning, and she were the only one to save him. How could she do it?

If she could only get at him, by word or letter! But that seemed impossible, until, turning over scheme after scheme, she suddenly thought of the one which so many people had tried in similar circumstances, and which she remembered they had talked over and laughed over, they and Ascott, one Sunday evening not so very long ago. This was--a Times advertisement.

The difficulty how to word it, so as to catch his attention and yet escape publicity, was very great, especially as his initials were so common. Hundreds of "A. L.'s" might be wandering away from home, to whom all that she dared say to call Ascott back would equally apply. At last a bright thought struck her.

"A. leaf" (will a small l) "will be quite safe wherever found. Come. Saturday. 15."

As she wrote it--this wretched double-entendre--she was seized with that sudden sense of the ludicrous which sometimes intrudes in such a ghastly fashion in the very midst of great misery. She burst into uncontrollable laughter, fit after fit; so violent that Elizabeth, who came in by chance, was terrified out of her wits, and kneeling beside her mistress, implored her to be quiet. At last the paroxysm ended in complete exhaustion. The tension of the last twenty-four hours had given way, and Hilary knew her strength was gone. Yet the advertisement ought to be taken to the Times office that very night, in order to be inserted without fail on Monday morning.

There was but one person whom she could trust--Elizabeth.

She looked at the girl, who was kneeling beside the sofa, rubbing her feet, and sometimes casting a glance round, in the quiet way of one well used to nursing, who can find out how the sufferer is without "fussing" with questions. She noticed, probably because she had seen little of her of late, a curious change in Elizabeth. It must have been gradual, but yet its result had never been so apparent before. Her brusqueness had softened down, and there had come into her and shone out of her, spite of all her natural uncomeliness of person, that beautiful, intangible something, common alike to peasant and queen, as clear to see and as sad to miss in both--womanliness. Added thereto was the gentle composure of mein which almost invariably accompanied it, which instinctively makes you fell that in great things or small, whatever the woman has to do, she will do it in the womanliest, wisest, and best way.

So thought Miss Hilary as she lay watching her servant, and then explained to her the errand upon which she wished to send her.

Not much explanation, for she merely gave her the advertisement to read, and told her what she wished done with it. And Elizabeth, on her part, asked no questions, but simply listened and obeyed.

After she was gone Hilary lay on the sofa, passive and motionless. Her strength and activity seemed to have collapsed at once into that heavy quietness which comes when one has endured to the utmost limit of endurance when one feels as if to speak a word or to lift a finger would be as much as life was worth.

"Oh, if I could only go to sleep!" was all she thought.

By-and-by sleep did come, and she was taken far away out of these miseries. By the strange peculiarity of dreams that we so seldom dream about any grief that oppresses us at the time but generally of something quite different, she thought she was in some known unknown land, lovely and beautiful, with blue hills rising in the distance, and blue seas creeping and curling on to the shore. On this shore she was walking with Robert Lyon, just as he used to be, with his true face and honest voice. He did not talk to her much; but she felt him there, and knew they had but "one heart between them." A heart which had never once swerved, either from the other; a heart whole and sound, into which the least unfaith had never come--that had never known, or recognized even as a possibility, the one first doubt, the ominous --

"Little rift within the lute,
That by-and-by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all."

Is it ever so in this world? Does God ever bring the faithful man to the faithful woman, and make them love one another with a righteous, holy, persistent tenderness, which dare look in His face, nor be ashamed; which sees in this life only the beginning of the life to come; and in the closest, most passionate human love something to be held with a loose hand, something frail as glass and brittle as straw, unless it is perfected and sanctified by the love divine?

Hilary at least believed so. And when at Elizabeth's knock she woke with a start, and saw--not the sweet sea-shore and Robert Lyon, but the dull parlor, and the last flicker of the fire, she thanked God that her dream was not all a dream--that, sharp as her misery was, it did not touch this--the love of her heart: she believed in Robert Lyon still.

And so she rose and spoke quite cheerfully, asking Elizabeth how she had managed, and whether the advertisement would be sure to be in on Monday morning.

"Yes, Miss Hilary; it is sure to be all right."

And then the girl hung about the room in an uneasy way, as if she had something to tell, which was the fact.

Elizabeth had had an adventure. It was a new thing in her monotonous life; it brightened her eyes, and flushed her cheeks, and made her old nervousness of manner return. More especially as she was somewhat perplexed, being divided in her mind between the wish she had to tell her mistress every thing, and the fear to trouble her, at this troublous time, with any small matter that merely concerned herself.

The matter was this. When she had given in her advertisement at the Times office, and was standing behind the counter waiting for her change and receipt, there stood beside her a young man, also waiting. She had hardly noticed him, till on his talking to the clerk about some misprint in his advertisement, apparently one of the great column of "Want Places," her ear was caught by the unmistakable Stowbury accent.

It was the first time she had heard it since she left home, and to Elizabeth's tenacious nature home in absence had gained an additional charm, had grown to be the one place in the world about which her affections clung. In these dreary wilds of London, to hear a Stowbury tongue, to catch sight of a Stowbury person, or even one who might know Stowbury, made her heart leap up with a bound of joy. She turned suddenly, and looked intently at the young man, or rather the lad, for he seemed a mere lad, small, slight, and whiskerless.

"Well, Miss. I hope you'll know me again next time." said the young fellow. At which remark Elizabeth saw that he was neither so young nor so simple as she had at first thought. She drew back, very much ashamed, and coloring deeply.

Now, if Elizabeth ever looked any thing like comely, it was when she blushed; for she had the delicate skin peculiar to the young women of her district; and when the blood rushed through it, no cheek of lady fair ever assumed a brighter rose. That, or the natural vanity of man in being noticed by woman, caught the youth's attention.

"Come now, Miss, don't be shy or offended. Perhaps I'm going your way? Would you like company home?"

"No, thank you," said Elizabeth, with great dignity.

"Well, won't you even tell a fellow your name? Mine's Tom Cliffe, and I live--"

"Cliffe! Are you little Tommy Cliffe, and do you come from Stowbury?"

And all Elizabeth's heart was in her eyes.

As has been said, she was of a specially tenacious nature. She liked few people, but those she did like she held very fast. Almost the only strong interest of her life, except Miss Hilary, had been the little boy whom she had snatched from under the horse's heels; and though he was rather a scape-grace, and cared little for her, and his mother was a decidedly objectionable woman, she had clung to them both firmly till she lost sight of them.

Now it was not to be expected that she should recognize in this London stranger the little lad whose life she had saved--a lad, too, from her beloved Stowbury--without a certain amount of emotion, at which the individual in question broadly stared.

"Bless your heart, I am Tommy Cliffe from Stowbury, sure enough. Who are you?"

"Elizabeth Hand."

Whereupon ensued a most friendly greeting. Tom declared he should have known her any where, and had never forgotten her--never! How far that was true or not, he certainly looked as if it were; and two great tears of pleasure dimmed Elizabeth's kind eyes.

"You've grown a man now, Tommy," said she, looking at him with a sort of half-maternal pride, and noticing his remarkably hand some and intelligent face, so intelligent that it would have attracted notice, though it was set upon broad, stooping shoulders, and a small, slight body. "Let me see; how old are you?"

"I'm nineteen, I think."

"And I'm two-and-twenty. How aged we are growing!" said Elizabeth, with a smile.

Then she asked after Mrs. Cliffe, but got only the brief answer, "Mother's dead," given in a tone as if no more inquiries would be welcome. His two sisters, also, had died of typhus in one week, and Tom had been "on his own hook," as he expressed it, for the last three years.

He was extremely frank and confidential; told how he had begun life as a printer's "devil," afterward become a compositor, and his health failing, had left the trade, and gone as servant to a literary gentleman.

"An uncommon clever fellow is master; keeps his carriage, and has dukes to dinner, all out of his books. Maybe you've heard of them, Elizabeth?" and he named a few, in a patronizing way; at which Elizabeth smiled, for she knew them well. But she nevertheless regarded with a certain awe the servant of so great a man, and "little Tommy Cliffe" took a new importance in her eyes.

Also, as he walked with her along the street to find an omnibus, she could not help perceiving what a sharp little fellow he had grown into; how, like many another printer's boy, he had caught the influence of the atmosphere of letters, and was educated, self-educated, of course, to a degree far beyond his position. When she looked at him, and listened to him, Elizabeth involuntarily thought of Benjamin Franklin, and of many more who had raised themselves from the ink-pot and the compositor's desk to fame and eminence, and she fancied that such might be the lot of "little Tommy Cliffe." Why not? If so, how excessively proud she should be!

For the moment she had forgotten her errand; forgotten even Miss Hilary. It was not till Tom Cliffe asked her where she lived, that she suddenly recollected her mistress might not like, under present circumstances, that their abode or any thing concerning them should be known to a Stowbury person.

It was a struggle. She would have liked to see the lad again; have liked to talk over with him Stowbury things and Stowbury people; but she felt she ought not, and she would not.

"Tell me where you live, Tom, and that will do just as well; at least till I speak to my mistress. I never had a visitor before, and my mistress might not like it."

"No followers allowed, eh?"

Elizabeth laughed. The idea of little Tommy Clifie as her "follower," seemed so very funny.

So she bade him good-by; having, thanks to his gay frankness, been made acquainted with all about him, but leaving him in perfect ignorance concerning herself and her mistress. She only smiled when he declared contemptuously, and with rather a romantic emphasis, that he would hunt her out, though it were half over London.

This was all her adventure. When she came to tell it, it seemed very little to tell, and Miss Hilary listened to it rather indifferently, trying hard to remember who Tommy Cliffe was, and to take an interest in him because he came from Stowbury. But Stowbury days were so far off now--with such a gulf or pain between.

Suddenly the same fear occurred to her that had occurred to Elizabeth.

"The lad did not see the advertisement, I hope? You did not tell him about us?"

"I told him nothing." said Elizabeth. speaking softly, and looking down. "I did not even mention any body's name."

"That was right; thank you."

But oh, the bitterness of knowing, and feeling sure Elizabeth knew too, the thing for which she thanked her; and that not to mention Ascott's name was the greatest kindness the faithful servant could show toward the family. _

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