The Railway Man and His Children. Mrs. Oliphant
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advantage to him. It would have done him good with the young men under him, and even with the overseers and foremen of his works, as well as with the handful of people who made society in the station. Fortunately, however, he was not himself conscious of this deficiency, or if he was, accepted it as a matter of fact that did no real harm. He did not, as Mrs. Mitchell said, even pretend to be a gentleman. As he walked along by the side of the lady who had accepted him as her future husband, a great satisfaction betrayed itself in every look and movement. His face was lighted up with a sort of illumination as he turned it towards her—not the transport of a young man, or the radiance of that love-look which makes the most homely countenance almost beautiful, for he was perhaps beyond the age for such exaltation of sentiment; but a profound satisfaction and content which seemed to breathe out from him, surrounding him with an atmosphere of his own. Perhaps there was not the same expression upon the face of his betrothed. It is true that she was disturbed by the children, who hung upon her, dragging her now in one direction now in another; but at least her face was quietly serene, untroubled—peaceful if not glad.
This was the story of their wooing. Mr. Rowland, though he was not looked upon by the Society of the station as quite their equal, was yet invited everywhere, dining with everybody: and was treated with the utmost hospitality, so that no one could have suspected that any suspicion as to his worthiness was in the minds of these friendly people whom such a sudden event as this threatened marriage had moved to discussion of the claim to be one of them, which indeed he had never made, but which they had all awarded in that ease of social arrangement which herds together a little masterful alien community in the midst of that vast continent peopled by races so different. To be an Englishman is of itself in India a social grade, and thus Mr. Rowland the engineer had many opportunities of seeing Mrs. Stanhope’s friend, both in Mrs. Stanhope’s house and the houses of the other magnates of the station. He had met her at all the entertainments given, and they were many, and he had almost immediately singled her out, not because of her beauty nor of the dependent position which touches the heart of some men, nor indeed for any reason in particular, except that he did single her out. Such an attraction is its own sole reason and explanation. It was not even choice, but simple destiny, which made him feel that here, by God’s grace, was the one woman for him. I do not deny that when this middle-aged and perfectly honest and straightforward man asked her to marry him, Evelyn Ferrars was taken very much by surprise. She opened wide a pair of brown eyes which had not been without note in their day, but which had long ceased to expect any homage, and looked at him as if for the moment she thought him out of his senses. Did he know what he was saying—did he by any strange chance mean it? She looked at him with scarcely a blush, so great was her surprise, making these inquiries with her startled eyes; and there can be no doubt that her first impulse was to say no. But before she said it a sudden train of thought darted out from her mind, one crowding after the other an endless succession of ideas and reflections, presented to her in the twinkling of an eye, as if they had been a line of soldiers on the march. And she paused. He was scarcely aware of the hesitation, and resumed again after that moment of silence, pleading his own cause, very modestly yet very earnestly, with a seriousness and soberness which were much more effectual than greater enthusiasm would have been. But by this time she was scarcely aware what he said; it was her own mind that had come into action, saying to her a hundred things more potent than what he was saying, and changing in a moment all the tenor of her thoughts. Evelyn was not perhaps much more of a free agent than Rowland was in this moment of fate. She felt afterwards that she had been stopped and her attention attracted as by the flash of one of those sun-signals of which she had been hearing. She was altogether in a military atmosphere in the Stanhopes’ house, and everybody had been explaining that process by which the sun’s rays are made to communicate messages from one distant army to another. She was stopped with the no on her lips by the flash and radiation through the air of that message. She had not any code of interpretation to note in a moment what it meant. But she paused, almost to her own astonishment; and when she found her voice, it was to ask for a little time to think before she gave her final reply.
When a woman does this, it is almost invariably the case that she decides for the suitor, even the doubt being, I suppose, a point in his favour, and increasing a disposition—a bias towards him rather than away from him. Evelyn had, like most other Englishwomen, a lively and wholesome feeling that love alone justified marriage, and that any less motive was a desecration of that tremendous tie. It is an excellent thing for a race that this superstition should exist, and I am far from desiring to see any lower ground accepted as the basis of a connection upon which the purity and character of all other affections depend. But yet when reason is allowed time to speak, there are many other things which may be permitted to have a voice, and a woman may at least be allowed to take into consideration at forty, arguments which at twenty would be indignantly refused a hearing. What Evelyn Ferrars felt as she retired from that interview which had opened to her so many and such extraordinary new suggestions for thought, it is difficult to describe. She had become all at once a sort of battlefield—to keep up the military simile—in which that “No,” which had been her first conception of the situation, stood like a force entrenched and on the defensive, somewhat sullen, holding fast upon the mere fact of its existence, emitting a dull roar of artillery now and then, while the attacking forces scoured the plain in endless evolution, pressing on and on. The first flash of the sun-signal, which she had not been at first able to interpret, turned out to mean a rapid identification of her own position, which was a thing she had not allowed herself to think of, while it was without remedy. It was not what she had anticipated when she ventured in her loneliness to come up country in answer to her friend’s warm invitation. She had come out to Calcutta with her brother, the last survivor of her family after the breaking up of home at her father’s death; and when he too died soon after, cut off by the sudden stroke which ends so many promising careers in India, the despair of the solitary woman left in a strange place with few friends and little money, and nobody to come to her help, had been almost without a gleam of light. And in that emergency the Stanhopes had been very kind. The wife had written imploring her heart-broken friend to come to her, offering her all that the affection of a sister could do to supply her loss; the husband had come, what was even more kind, to do what he could for her, and to take her, if she consented, home. They had been more than kind. There had been no alloy of interested motives in that first impulse of generous compassion. It was good to think how frank, how full, how affectionate it had been.
But—oh what a pity, what a pity, that these beautiful impulses and sincere moments of loving kindness should ever be shadowed by the cold shade of after-thoughts! From the moment when Mrs. Stanhope weeping received poor Evelyn into her arms, and lavished upon her the caresses and endearments of the most devoted friendship, to that in which Miss Ferrars became the unpaid governess, the useful dependent, and at the same time a member of the family who was apt to be de trop, who was not wanted between husband and wife, who was always there and could not be kept to her schoolroom and out of the way as an ordinary governess would have been—was unfortunately not very long. And indeed it was nobody’s fault. The consciousness that she was getting a great deal out of her friend, and that the tables were more or less turned, and it was Evelyn who was conferring the benefit, did not make it easier to Mrs. Stanhope to keep up the effusion and tenderness of the first welcome: and Captain Stanhope was often cross, troubled by harassments of his own, and wishing his wife’s friend anywhere but where she was, notwithstanding the fact that her presence was “everything for the children.” The situation had grown more and more strained, but there seemed no issue out of it: for it takes a great deal of money to take your passage from the centre of India to England, even when you know where to go and have your living assured when there. And Evelyn had nothing, neither a house to go to nor enough money for the journey. There were moments when she would have given anything in the world—which is a mere figure of speech, for she had nothing in the world to give—to be able to go away, and relieve her friends of her inconvenient presence; and there were moments when she felt that she was of too much use in the house to deprive them of her services, as if she grudged the expenditure. It was scarcely possible to imagine a position more painful and trying. It was nothing to her that her whole life was absorbed in the service of her friends and their children. Many women are able to make this kind of sacrifice and to stave off all thoughts of the future and what is to become of them after—with a heroic obedience to the Gospel precept of taking no thought for