It was in vain that Mr Robins by turns entreated and commanded her to give him up, her father's distress or anger alike seemed indifferent to her; and when he forbade Martin to come near the place, and kept her as much as possible under his eye to prevent meetings between them, it only roused in her a more obstinate determination to have her own way in spite of him. She was missing one morning from the little bedroom which Mrs Sands loved to keep as dainty and pretty as a lady's, and from the garden where the roses and geraniums did such credit to her care, and from her place in the little church where her prayer-book still lay on the desk as she had left it the day before.
She had gone off with Martin Blake to London, without a word of sorrow or farewell to the father who had been so foolishly fond of her, or to the home where her happy petted childhood had passed. It nearly broke her father's heart; it made an old man of him and turned his hair white, and it seemed to freeze or petrify all his kindliness and human sympathy.
He was a proud, reserved man, and could not bear the pity that every one felt for him, or endure the well-meant but injudicious condolences, mixed with 'I told you so,' and 'I 've thought for a long time,' which the neighbours were so liberal with. Even Mr Clifford's attempts at consolation he could hardly bring himself to listen to courteously, and Jane Sands' tearful eyes and quivering voice irritated him beyond all endurance. If there had been anyone to whom he could have talked unrestrainedly and let out all the pent-up disappointment and wounded love and tortured pride that surged and boiled within him, he might have got through it better, or rather it might have raised him, as rightly borne troubles do, above his poor, little, pitiful self, and nearer to God; but this was just what he could not do.
He came nearest it sometimes in those long evenings of organ playing, of the length of which poor little Jack Davis, the blower, so bitterly complained, when the long sad notes wailed and sobbed through the little church like the voice of a weary, sick soul making its complaint. But even so he could not tell it all to God, though he had been given that power of expression in music, which must make it easier to those so gifted to cry unto the Lord.
But the music wailed itself into silence, and Jack in his corner by the bellows waited terror-struck at the 'unked' sounds and the darkening church, till he ventured at last to ask: 'Be I to blow, mister? I 'm kinder skeered like.'
So the organist's trouble turned him bitter and hard, and changed his love for his daughter into cold resentment; he would not have her name mentioned in his presence, and he refused to open a letter she sent him a few weeks after her marriage, and bid Jane Sands send it back if she knew the address of the person who sent it.
On her side, Edith was quite as obstinate and resentful. She had no idea of humbling herself and asking pardon. She thought she had quite a right to do as she liked, and she believed her father would be too unhappy without her to bear the separation long. She very soon found out the mistake she had made—indeed, even in the midst of her infatuation about Martin Blake, I think there lurked a certain distrust of him, and they had not been married many weeks—I might almost say days—before this distrust was more than realised.
His feelings towards her, too, had been mere flattered vanity at being preferred by such a superior sort of girl than any deeper feeling, and vanity is not a sufficiently lasting foundation for married happiness, especially when the cold winds of poverty blow on the edifice, and when the superior sort of girl has not been brought up to anything useful, and cannot cook the dinner, or iron a shirt, or keep the house tidy.
When his father, the old blacksmith at Bilton, died six months after they were married, Martin wished to come back and take up the work there, more especially as work was hard to get in London and living dear; but Edith would not hear of it, and opposed it so violently that she got her way, though Martin afterwards maintained that this decision was the ruin of him, occasionally dating his ruin six months earlier, from his wedding. Perhaps he was right, and he might have settled down steadily in the old home and among the old neighbours in spite of his fine-lady wife; but when he said so, Edith was quick to remember and cast up at him the stories which she had disbelieved and ignored before, to prove in their constant wranglings that place and neighbourhood had nothing to do with his idleness and unsteadiness. No one ever heard much of these five years in London, for Edith wrote no more after that letter was returned.
Those five years made little difference at Downside, except in Mr Robins' white hair and set lined face; the little house behind the yew-hedge looked just the same, and Jane Sands' kind, placid face was still as kind and placid. Some of the girls had left school and gone to service; some of the lads had developed into hobbledehoys and came to church with walking-sticks and well-oiled hair; one or two of the old folks had died; one or two more white-headed babies crawled about the cottage floors; but otherwise Downside was just the same as it had been five years before, when, one June morning, a self-willed girl had softly opened the door under the honeysuckle porch and stepped out into the dewy garden, where the birds were calling such a glad good-morning as she passed to join her lover in the lane.
But the flame of life burns quicker and fiercer in London than at Downside, for that same girl, coming back after only five years in London, was so changed and aged and altered that—though, to be sure, she came in the dusk and was muffled up in a big shawl—no one recognised her, or thought for a moment of pretty, coquettish, well-dressed Edith Robins, when the weary, shabby-looking woman passed them by. She had lingered a minute or two by the churchyard gate, though tramps, for such her worn-out boots and muddy skirts proclaimed her, do not, as a rule, care for such music as sounded out from the church door, where Mr Robins was consoling himself for the irritation of choir-practice by ten minutes' playing. It was soon over, and Jack Davis, still blower, and not much taller than he was five years before, charged out in the rebound from the tension of long blowing, and nearly knocked over the woman standing by the churchyard gate in the shadow of the yew-tree, and made the baby she held in her arms give a feeble cry.
'Now then, out of the way!' he shouted in that unnecessarily loud voice boys assume after church, perhaps to try if their lungs are still capable of producing such a noise after enforced silence.
The woman made no answer, but after the boy had run off, went in and waited in the porch till the sound of turning keys announced that the organist was closing the organ and church for the night. But as his footsteps drew near on the stone pavement she started and trembled as if she had been afraid, and when he came out into the porch she shrank away into the shadow as if she wished to be unobserved. He might easily have passed her, for it was nearly dark from the yew-tree and the row of elms that shut out, the western sky, where the sunset was just dying away. His mind, too, was occupied with other things, and he was humming over the verse of a hymn the boys had been singing—'Far from my heavenly home.' There was no drilling into them the proper rendering of the last pathetic words—
O guide me through the desert here,
And bring me home at last.
He quite started when a hand was laid upon his arm, and a voice, changed indeed, and weak, but still the voice that in old days—not so very old either—was the one voice for him in all the world, said: 'Father!'
I think just for one minute his impulse was to take her in his arms and forget the ingratitude and desertion and deceit, like the father in the parable whose heart went out to the poor prodigal while he was yet a long way off; but the next moment the cold, bitter, resentful feelings quenched the gentler impulse, and he drew away his arm from her detaining hold, and passed on along the flagged path as if he were unconscious of her presence, and this on the very threshold of His house, who so pitifully forgives the debts of His servants, forasmuch as they have not to pay.
But he had not reached the churchyard gate before she was at his side again.
'Stop,' she said; 'you must hear me. It's not for my own sake, it's the child. It's a little girl; the others were boys, and I didn't mind so much; if they 'd grown up, they might have got on somehow—but there! they 're safe anyhow—both of them in one week,' wailed the mother's voice, protesting against her own words that she did not mind about them. 'But this is a girl, and not a bit like him. She 's like me, and you used to say I was like mother. She's like mother, I 'm sure she is. There, just look at her. It's so dark, but you can see even by this light that she's not like the Blakes.' She was fumbling to draw back the shawl from the baby's head with her disengaged hand, while with the other she still held a grip on his arm that was almost painful in its pressure; but he stood doggedly with his head turned away, and gave no sign of hearing what she said.
'He left me six months ago,' she went on, 'and I 've struggled along somehow. I don't want ever to see him again. They say he's gone to America, but I don't care. I don't mind starving myself, but it's the little girl—Oh! I 've not come to ask you to take me in, though it wouldn't be for long,' and a wretched, hollow cough that had interrupted her words once or twice before, broke in now as if to confirm what she said; 'if you'd just take the child. She's a dear little thing, and not old enough at two months to have learnt any harm, and Jane Sands would be good to her, I know she would, for the sake of old times. And I'll go away and never come near to trouble you again—I 'll promise it. Oh! just look at her! If it wasn't so dark you'd see she was like mother. Why, you can feel the likeness if you just put your hand on her little face; often in the night I 've felt it, and I never did with the boys. She's very good, and she's too little to fret after me, bless her!—and she 'll never know anything about me, and needn't even know she has a father, and he 's not ever likely to trouble himself about her.'
Her voice grew more and more pleading and entreating as she went on, for there was not the slightest response or movement in the still figure before her, less movement even than in the old yew-tree behind, whose smaller branches, black against the sky where the orange of the sunset was darkening into dull crimson, stirred a little in the evening air.
'Oh! you can't refuse to take her! See, I'll carry her as far as the door so that Jane can take her, and then I 'll go clear away and never come near her again. You 'll have her christened, won't you? I 've been thinking all the weary way what she should be called, and I thought, unless you had a fancy for any other name' (a little stifled sigh at the thought of how dear one name used to be to him), 'I should like her to be Zoe. Just when she was born, and I was thinking, thinking of you and home and everything, that song of yours kept ringing in my head, "Maid of Athens," and the last line of every verse beginning with Zoe. I can't remember the other words, but I know you said they meant "My life, I love you;" and Zoe was life, and I thought when I'm gone my little girl would live my life over again, my happy old life with you, and make up to you for all the trouble her mother's been to you.'
She stopped for want of breath and for the cough that shook her from head to foot, and at last he turned; but even in that dim light she could see his face plainly enough to know that there was no favourable answer coming from those hard set lips and from those cold steady eyes, and her hand dropped from his arm even before he spoke.
'You should have thought of this five years ago,' he said. 'I do not see that I am called upon to support Martin Blake's family. I must trouble you to let me pass.'
She fell back against the trunk of the yew-tree as if he had struck her, and the movement caused the baby to wake and cry, and the sound of its little wailing voice followed him as he walked down the path and out into the road, and he could hear it still when he reached his own garden gate, where through the open door the light shone out from the lamp that Jane Sands was just carrying into his room, where his supper was spread and his armchair and slippers awaited him.
In after days, remembering that evening, he fancied he had heard 'Father' once more mingling with the baby's cry; but he went in and shut the door and drew the bolt and went into the cheerful, pleasant room, leaving outside the night and the child's cry and the black shadow of the church and the yew-tree.
It was only the beginning of the annoyance, he told himself; he must expect a continued course of persecution, and he listened, while he made a pretence of eating his supper, for the steps outside and the knock at the door, which would surely renew the unwarrantable attempt to saddle him with the charge of the child. He listened too, as he sat after supper, holding up the newspaper in front of his unobservant eyes; and he listened most of the night as he tossed on his sleepless pillow—listened to the wind that had risen and moaned and sobbed round the house like a living thing in pain—listened to the pitiless rain that followed, pelting down on the ivy outside and on the tiles above his head, as if bent on finding its way in to the warm comfortable bed where he lay.