Richard Ross had not visited his parents for years. He had scarcely been at home at all since the miserable catastrophe which had so fatally enlightened the world as to the folly of his marriage; and perhaps the certainty that he must come now contributed something to his mother’s rapture in the recovery of his child: for the instinct of nature overcomes all its unlikenesses; and Richard, though a man whom she would have laughed at and scorned had he not been her son, was, being her son, dearer than all the world to Lady Eskside. The new event which had happened was important enough, and his mother’s appeal was still more urgent and imperative; but I doubt if it would be true to say that there was any excitement of feeling, any happiness of anticipation in Richard’s mind as he travelled home in obedience to the call. Nearly seven years had elapsed since his children were taken from him, and they had been too young to take any permanent hold on his affections. That they were his children was all that could be said; and in Richard’s mind, as time went on and he began to regard his misfortunes with a kind of hopeless apathy, they had come to be more like shadows of their mother than independent beings possessing rights and claims of their own. The first effect of the news was to rouse him to a painful sense of his own dismal shipwreck and hopeless failure in life, rather than to any excitement of a more tender kind. Those great personal misfortunes which change the complexion of our lives may fall into the background, they may cease to render us actively and always wretched; but they lie in wait, keeping, as it were, ever within reach, to wake into hot recollection at a touch. Most of us prefer to avoid that touch when we can, and Richard had done this more persistently and with greater success than most people; but yet they lay there ready, the shame and the pain, wanting nothing but a jog to bring them out in full force.

I would not go the length of saying that he was touched by no feeling of thankfulness that his child was restored; but his pleasure was infinitely less than the suffering he went through by means of this revival of all that was most painful in his life. He had long outgrown the boyish passion which led to his strange marriage; and as he had nothing to look back upon in connection with that marriage which was not miserable and humiliating, it was not wonderful that shame and self-disgust were his most lively sensations when it was recalled to him. He could not understand how he could have been guilty of folly so supreme and so intense; how he could have bartered his credit, his comfort, all the better part of life, not to speak of that hot love of youth, which in calmer years often looks so much like folly, even when it is happy and fortunate—for what? Nothing. He had not even, so far as he knew, touched the heart of the woman for whom he had made so extraordinary a sacrifice. At best she had but accepted and submitted to his love; she had never loved him; his influence had not wrought any change in her. He had not even affected her being so much as to induce her to give up the habits of her former life, or show any inclination to learn the habits of his. She had humiliated him in every way, and in no way so much as by allowing him to perceive his own impotence in regard to herself. This gave the last sting of bitterness to his recollections. A man can bear the outer annoyances which result from a foolish marriage; he can put up, patiently or otherwise, with much that would revolt him in any other less close and binding connection; but when, in addition to these, he is made to feel that he himself is nothing and less than nothing to the creature for whom he has made such sacrifices, it is inevitable, or almost inevitable, that the early infatuation should change into a very different feeling. Sometimes, it is true, the victim of passion, notwithstanding all enlightenment, continues in his subjection, and goes on adoring even where he despises; but such cases are rare, and Richard’s was not one of them. I cannot understand any more than his mother could, how “a son of hers” could have ever made so extraordinary a mistake in life; but now that his existence was permanently ruined and devastated by this great blunder, Richard had felt that his best policy was to ignore it utterly. He had lived a celibate and blameless life during all those years of enforced widowhood. Society knew vaguely that he had been married, and most people thought him a widower; but though much in the world, he had lived so as to avoid all disagreeable inquiries into the actual facts of the case. He had never betrayed even to his friends the blight which had stopped all progress in life for him. According to all precedent of fiction, some other woman ought to have stepped across his path and learned his secret, as Mr Thackeray’s Laura does by George Warrington. But Richard Ross had indulged in no Laura. He had friends enough and to spare, but never any close enough or dear enough to warrant scandal. Instead of Platonic affections he had taken to china, a safer weakness; and it was to this tranquil gentleman in the midst of his collections that the mother’s letter came, thrusting back upon his recollection the dismal and humiliating melodrama of which he had been the hero. It is not difficult to imagine in the circumstances with what bitter annoyance he bore this revival of all his miseries, and girded himself up to answer the summons, and for the first time appear at home.

He arrived on a spring night as mild as the former one I have described had been boisterous. The sun had just set, and the rosy clouds hung above the trees of Rosscraig, and over the hillside, just tinged here and there with the bursting of the spring buds, but still for the most part brown and leafless, which sloped to the brawling Esk. I do not know a fairer scene anywhere. Some old turrets of the older part of the house, belonging to that style of domestic architecture which is common to France and to Scotland, peeped forth above the lofty slope of the bank. Had winter been coming, the brown, unclothed trees might have conveyed an impression of sadness; but as spring was coming they were all hopeful, specially where the green breaks of new foliage, big chestnut buds, and silken leaves still creased and folded, threw a wash of delicate colour upon the landscape. Richard’s heart was somewhat touched by the feeling that he was approaching home; but the more his heart was touched the less he was inclined to show it; for had not he himself injured the perfection of that home, which was surrounded by people who knew, and who could not but comment and criticise? He heaved an impatient sigh, even while his heart was melting to the dear familiar place, and wished himself away again among people who knew nothing about him, even though he felt the many charms of home steal into his heart.

Richard Ross was a year or two over thirty—a young man, though he did not feel young—tall and fair, with a placid temper and the gentlest manners; a man to all appearance as free from passion and as prone to every virtuous and gentle affection as man could be. His aspect, indeed, was that of a very model of goodness and English domestic perfection—a man who would be the discreetest of guides to his household, the best of fathers, an example to all surrounding him. This was what he ought to have been. Had he married Mary Percival this is what he would have been; though I think it very likely that Mary would have wearied of him without knowing why, and found life—had she had him—a somewhat languid performance. But, unfortunately, she was quite unconscious of what would have happened had the might have been ever come to pass, and did not know that she missed some evil as well as some good. On the contrary, her heart beat far more than she would have wished it to beat when the roll of the carriage-wheels which conveyed Richard was heard in the avenue. She stole out by the conservatory-door to be out of the way, and hid herself in the woods which slope downward to Eskside. She scarcely heard the brawl of Esk, so loud was her heart beating. Poor Mary! it was not Richard alone who had come back and had to be met with tranquilly, as one stranger meets another—but her youth and all her fancies, and those anticipations long past which were so different from the reality. Mary stayed under the budding trees till almost the last ray of daylight had faded, and the bell from the house, calling all stragglers, tinkled from the height among the evening echoes. This bell of itself was a sign that something had happened: Lord and Lady Eskside were homely in their ways, and it was never rung when they were alone.

Lady Eskside received her son with the child by her side, going forward to meet him with little Val clinging to her hand; but when she forgot Val and threw her arms round her own boy whom she had not seen for so long, the child, bewildered, shifted his grasp to her gown, which he held fast, somewhat appalled as well as jealous at the appearance of this new-comer. It was not until after Richard had received his father’s less effusive greeting that even Lady Eskside bethought herself of the occasion of the visit—the little silent spectator, who, half buried in the folds of her gown, watched everything with keen eyes. “Ah!” she cried; then with a self-reproach for her own carelessness, “I think of my boy first, without minding that you are thinking of yours. Come, Val, and speak to your papa. Oh, Richard! oh, my dear! here is the child——”

“Oh!—this is the child, is it?” said Richard, with a momentary faintness coming over him. He did not snatch the little fellow into his arms, as his mother expected he would. He did something very different, for the poor man was short-sighted, a thing which none of us can help. He took up nervously that double eyeglass which the French call a pince-nez, and put it on his nose. He could not have seen otherwise had his heart been ever so tender; but it would be impossible to describe the shock, the chill, which this simple proceeding brought upon Lady Eskside. Was there, then, no paternal instinct in her son’s heart—none of the feeling which had made her own expand and glow towards the boy? Was her impulse of nature wrong, or his deadened? The old lord looked on curiously too, but with less vehement feeling, for Lady Eskside had a deeper stake in the matter. She felt that to find herself mistaken, and to have to give up the child whom she had adopted into her warmest affections, would be her death-blow.

“Richard! you don’t think—your father and I—have been wrong?” she cried.

It was on Lord Eskside’s lip to say that this rash adoption was none of his doing, and thus give up his wife to her fate; but he was sorry for her, and held his tongue, watching the man and the child as they stared at each other with gradually growing interest. The boy stood, holding by Lady Eskside’s gown, with a baby scowl upon his soft little forehead, half raising one arm with instinctive suspicion, as he had done on the night of his arrival, to ward off an imaginary blow. Richard sat opposite and gazed at him intently through his pince-nez. Something pathetic, tragic, terrible, yet ludicrous, was in the scene.

“Richard,” faltered Lady Eskside, “don’t keep me in this suspense. Do you suppose—do you think—it is not him?”

“What is your name?” said Richard, looking at his son. “Val?—you are sure you are Val and not the other? Yes. I suppose, then, he’s the eldest,” he said hurriedly, getting up and walking away to the window at the other end of the room. The old couple were too much surprised to say anything. They gave a wondering glance at each other, and Lord Eskside, putting up his hand, stopped the crowd of wondering questions which was about to pour from his wife’s lips. Richard stood perhaps two minutes (it seemed an hour), with his back to them, looking out from the window. When he returned, his voice was husky and his face paler. “You have done quite right, mother, to take him in,” he said, in low tones, “so far as I can judge.” Then, with a suddenly heightened colour, “He is like—his mother. No one who has ever seen her could fail to recognise him.”

“Richard! oh, take him in your arms and give your child a kiss!” cried Lady Eskside, with tears in her eyes. “Oh, take your own mother’s word, it is you the darling is like—you, and none but you!”

“Is that like me?” said Richard, touching his son’s dark hair, with a harsh laugh; “or could we be mixed up, we two, in anything, even a child’s face? No; one of them was hers—all hers. Don’t you recollect, mother? I was pleased then, like an idiot as I was. The other,” he added, with a softened voice, “was like me.”

And then there was silence again. He had not touched the child or spoken to him, except that unfriendly touch; and little Val stood by his grandmother’s knee, still clutching her dress, looking on with a bewildered sense of something adverse to himself which was going on over his head, but which he did not understand. Richard threw himself into a chair, his fair, amiable face flushed with unusual emotion; he swung back in his seat, with an uneasy smile on his face, and an expression of assumed carelessness and real excitement totally unlike his usual aspect. As for Lady Eskside, she was struck dumb; she put her arms round the child, petting and consoling him. “My bonnie man!” she said, pressing him close to her side, comforting the little creature, who was nothing more than perplexed in his baby mind—as if he had shared the distinct pain in her own.

“Enough of this, Richard,” said Lord Eskside, coming to the rescue. “Whatever has happened, it is not the boy’s fault. Your mother and I have the property to think of, and the succession. It is necessary that you should give an opinion one way or another——”

“Father, I beg your pardon,” said Richard, rising to his feet with a sudden flush of shame. “I allowed my feelings to get the better of me. I acknowledge the child. He is too like to be denied. Valentine was the eldest, and had dark hair, like—— I have no doubt on the subject. If my mother chooses to use her eyes, she can see the resemblance——”

“To you, Richard! Oh, do not be bitter against the bairn; he is like you!”

Richard smiled—a painful smile, which sat ill on a countenance of which very nature demanded gentleness. “You may bring him up, sir, as your heir; I acknowledge him. There, mother, what do you want more of me? I can’t be a hypocrite, even for you.”

“You should remember that you are his father,” said the old lady, half indignant, half weeping; “whatever may have happened, as your father says, the child is not to blame.”

“No,” said the young man. “Do you mean me to go, now that I have done what you wanted? Am I to be dismissed, my business being over——”

“What do you mean, sir?” said Lord Eskside, hotly; “you forget that you are speaking to your mother——”

“My mother has not a word nor a look for me!” cried Richard. “She wants me for nothing but this gipsy brat, that I may own him, and advance him to my own place. I say it is hard on a man. I come back here, after years; and the first words that are said to me are—not to welcome me home—but to upbraid me that I do not grow maudlin all in a moment over this child.”

“Richard!” cried the old lady, with a sharp tone of pain in her voice; “do you want me to think that though I have got your son I have lost mine?”

“That must be as you will, mother; you seem to prefer him,” said Richard, in high offence. It was the first quarrel they had ever had in their lives; for through all his youthful errors she had stood by him always. I do not know what demon of perversity, vexation, and personal annoyance worked in him; but I do know the intense and silent disappointment with which his mother’s heart closed its open doors—wide open always to him—and she turned away, all her joy changed into bitterness. When she came to think of it, she blamed herself, saying to herself that she had been injudicious in thrusting the strange little new-comer upon him the very moment of his arrival; but then she had judged him by herself—what can mortal do more?—and had believed that the boy would be his first thought.

In this way a cloud fell on the house from the very moment of Richard’s return. His was not the prodigal’s return, notwithstanding his long banishment and his great error. He had done more harm to his father’s house than many a profligate son could have done; yet he was not wicked, but virtuous, and could not be received as a prodigal. And he, for his part, was warmly conscious of personal blamelessness, though his position, so far as other people knew, was that of one to whom much had been forgiven—a complication which was very productive of irritating feelings. I do not mean to say that the cloud lasted, or that Richard went to his room that night unreconciled with his mother. On the contrary, when Lady Eskside followed him there, with a woman’s yearning, to wipe out every trace of the misunderstanding, her boy fell upon her neck as when he had been really a boy, and kissed her, and did all but lift up his voice and weep, according to the pathetic language of Scripture. Even yet, after the recollection of his petulance was thus effaced, the shock she had received tingled through his mother’s heart, and indeed through her physical frame, which was beginning to be more sensitive by reason of age, vigorous woman though she was. Even without any painful occurrences in the interval, a visit like this, paid after years of separation, is often a painful experiment. The son of Lord Eskside, a homely Scots lord, with few interests which were not national, or even local, was a very different person from the Hon. Richard Ross, senior attachÉ of the British Legation at Florence, whose life had fallen into grooves entirely different from those of home. Though he returned to all the soft kindness of his natural manner, the keen observation of the two women who were watching him (for Mary was little less interested than Lady Eskside) soon made out that Richard took little interest in his father’s talk, and was quickly fatigued by his mother’s questions. He did not care for the parties of country neighbours who were asked to meet him. “Of course, my dear mother, whoever you please,” he would say, with a faint little contraction in his smooth forehead; but then probably that was because those country neighbours knew all about him, and understood that they were invited to eat the fatted calf, and celebrate a prodigal’s return.