It was the beginning of May when the party went home, and everything was green on Eskside. Were I to describe all that happened before they left Oxford, so strange a family group as they were—the old Lady Eskside with the tramp-woman, the high-bred Secretary of Legation, along with Styles’s head man—and how they managed to exist together, the lion with the lamb—I should require a volume. But this would weary the reader, who can easily imagine for himself that any happiness which might be produced by this reunion of the divided family was counterbalanced by many circumstances which were not happy. The grandparents, I think, would have been really happy in the removal of all mystery from their family story, the complete establishment of the rights and heirship of their beloved Val, and the winning qualities of Dick, but for the sudden chaos into which they were replunged by the mother’s calm declaration of Dick’s seniority. Its effect upon them was indescribable. Richard, with his diplomatic instincts, seeing that his sons had not paid any attention to, or even heard, this extraordinary statement, hushed it up with an impetuous and peremptory promptitude which took even his father and mother by surprise, and silenced them. “Not another word,” he whispered to them; “not a word! the boys have heard nothing; for the present let nothing more be said;” and the old couple, in the suddenness of this strange juncture, let themselves be overruled, and left the guidance in his hands. As for the mother herself, she attached no weight to the circumstance. She was too ignorant to know, and too much abstracted in her mind to think, that it made any difference which was the eldest. She had not kept Dick for that reason, nor had she left Val at Rosscraig with any intention of avenging herself upon the family by thus substituting the youngest for the just heir, which was the first thought that crossed Lady Eskside’s mind. No; she had been guided by mere chance, as we say, snatching up the one boy instead of the other in her despair, for the most trivial reason, as the reader may recollect. And even now it did not occur to her that what she had said was of any consequence, though she saw it affected the others in some incomprehensible way. Her mind had no capacity for entering upon such a question. She was far more deeply moved by the chance that Valentine might be tired out—more solicitous to know whether it was time for his beef-tea. Richard kept his parents quiet until Val had gone to bed, and Dick to sit by him and read to him, when the three had an anxious consultation; and the packet of papers which Richard had brought from Italy, and which up to this moment had remained unopened, was examined, and found to confirm, with frightful accuracy, the statements of the mother. There it was incontestable, Dick was set down as the eldest, notwithstanding the impression upon Richard’s mind which, on Val’s first appearance, had led to the mistake.

This confirmation subdued them all into a kind of despair. Lord and Lady Eskside, both at different times, had received Dick into their affections, as they thought, and acknowledged, with a certain pride, his natural worthiness. But when it appeared possible that this new and unknown boy (though they liked him) might put himself in the place of their Valentine—the child of their old age, the light of their eyes—their hearts sank within them. All their satisfaction and enthusiasm was chilled, nay, frozen; they sat and looked at each other blankly, their gladness turned into dire disappointment and heaviness. Then it was that Richard urged upon them the necessity of silence. “Let us take time to think,” he said; “time is everything. Val, it is clear, can bear no further excitement; it might be fatal to him; nor can it be good for the other boy. He is an honest, kind fellow; but how can we tell if his head is strong enough to bear such a change of fortune? Let him get used to the part of younger brother first. For heaven’s sake, let us hold our tongues, and say nothing more about it now.”

Lord Eskside shook his head; but my lady seconded her son, alarmed at the idea he had skilfully brought forward of danger to Val. “Yes, he is a good honest fellow,” they both said, but with an involuntary grudge against Dick, as if it could be his fault; and the papers were put up carefully in Lord Eskside’s despatch-box, and the news still more closely locked in the bosoms of the three who knew the secret. But it is astonishing how their knowledge of this took all heart out of their conscientious effort to adapt themselves to the new state of things. Valentine, whatever his internal difficulties were, accepted the position much more easily. His illness softened it to him, and had already produced that familiar intercourse with his mother and brother, which the mere discovery that they were his mother and brother could not have brought about; and the happiness of convalescence which glorified all the circumstances about him, made it still more easy. He lived a life of delightful idleness, feeling nothing but benevolence and kindness for every created thing, how much more for his tender nurses and companions?—getting well, eating and sleeping, and loving idle talk, and to have all his people about him. He was so much a child in this, that even his father, whom Val had never been familiar with, came in for a share of his sociable affectionate desire to be always surrounded by the group of those who belonged to him. He called for everybody, with that regal power which is never possessed in such perfection as by an invalid, to whom all who love him are bound by a hundred ties of gratitude and admiration for having been so good and so clever as to get well. He could not bear a look too serious, a clouded face, and was himself as cheerful as the day, enjoying everything. Dick, I need not say, had told him of that meeting with Violet, and of his letters to her, and by this means Val had got up a spring of private delight for himself—carrying on a limited but charming correspondence, which, indeed, was all on one side, but which still gave him infinite pleasure. “Keep up the Brown delusion, Dick,” he said, with infinite relish of the fun, “till we go home; and then we’ll tell her. What a joke, to be sure, that you should ever have been Brown!” And indeed this was already the aspect the past had taken to both the young men; and it was the strangest absurd thing, scarcely comprehensible, how they could ever have believed it. The two had no share in the perturbation of their elders. Good Dick was, as he had said, more the servant of that young demigod and hero than if he had not been his brother. He did everything for him—read to him, talked to him, brought him the news, and lived over again every day of their intercourse since that day when they first “took a liking to each other.” How strange it all seemed—how extraordinary, and yet how natural—in face of this broad and obvious explanation, which made everything plain!

I need not say that it was also the idea of Richard Ross to put into the Edinburgh paper that cunning intimation that the young member for Eskshire had been taken ill at the house of his mother, the Hon. Mrs Richard Ross, at Oxford. Scarcely a soul who read that intimation ever thought of anything but the luxurious and dignified dwelling which an Hon. Mrs Ross would ordinarily inhabit; and the people who knew Oxford tried hard to recollect whether they had ever met her, and where her house was. The county in general was much perplexed and much affected by this notice. It seemed impossible to believe that there was any specious falsehood in so matter-of-fact a paragraph. “The old stories must all be false,” one said to another; “Richard’s wife has been living separate from her husband, that is all.” “But no one ever heard who she was,” the doubting ones said; though even the greatest sceptic added, “I will ask my son if he has ever met her in society.” Thus Richard’s diplomacy had full success. He followed it up by other delicate touches, bulletins of Valentine’s recovery, and tantalising hints such as only local gossip can permit, and which were reserved for the pages of the ‘Castleton Herald’—of the happy domestic rapprochements which the Editor was delighted to hear Mr Ross’s illness, otherwise so regrettable, was likely to bring about. All this made a great commotion in the district. You may think it was beneath the dignity of a man of Richard Ross’s pretensions to descend to such means of breaking to the public a great family event, which might otherwise have been differently interpreted; but your great man, and especially your diplomate and courtier, is always the one most disposed to make use of flunkeyism and the popular love of gossip. It is a sign, perhaps, of the cynical disregard of this elevated class of mortals for ordinary people; anyhow, they rarely hesitate to avail themselves of means which would wound the pride of many less exalted persons. Life, like dreams (to which, heaven knows, it bears in all matters so close a resemblance), goes by contraries. What the poor and simple scorn, the rich and wise employ.

The Eskshire people, however, were destined to yet another sensation more startling than this. It was in the nature of a recantation, and few recantations have excited more local interest. I will not attempt to describe all the motives and influences which were supposed to have brought it about—for the reader is better informed, and knows that it was brought about very simply, as perhaps some of his own good deeds are, by the intervention and pertinacity of a slim girl with a soft voice and a pair of pleading eyes. Nobody on Eskside knew that Violet, at the point of the sword as it were, had extracted an apology from her father. It appeared on the walls in the shape of a placard, about the middle of April, and was sent by post to all the influential persons in the district. Lasswade was white with it, every bit of fence possessing the paper. It was addressed, like another notable letter, to the Electors of Eskshire; but it was much shorter than the former one. What it said was as follows:—

This was the first thing that met the eyes of the travelling party when—duly heralded by the Castleton paper, which in its last issue had announced the approaching return of “Lord and Lady Eskside, the Hon. Richard and Mrs Ross, Mr Valentine Ross, M.P. for Eskshire, and Mr Richard Ross the younger”—they arrived at Lasswade. The old lord himself was the first to read it when they got out at the little railway station on the new branch line, which, as everybody knows, is still a mile or two distant from the village. There were two carriages waiting—the great barouche, which was Lady Eskside’s favourite, and a vehicle of the genus dog-cart for “the boys;” and the usual little commotion which always attends an arrival left a few minutes to spare while the carriage drew up. Lord Eskside came and took his old wife by the arm, and led her to the place where this address, blazoned in great letters, “To the Electors of Eskshire,” held a prominent position. “Is it something new?” she asked with a sickness at her heart; “oh, don’t let Val see it!” When she had read it, however, the old pair looked at each other and laughed with tremulous enjoyment. I am afraid it did not occur to them to look at this as a high-minded atonement, or to see any generosity in the confession. “Sandy Pringle is worsted at last,” the old lord said, with a gleam of light from under his eyebrows. But the exhilaration of unquestionable victory filled their hearts, and made them forget for the moment the other drawbacks which attended their return.

With this sense of having beaten their adversary strong in their minds, they no longer hesitated to drive home through Lasswade, which they had not intended to do; where they had a most flattering reception. What with the curiosity excited by this probable Éclaircissement of a romantic story and the eagerness of everybody to see Richard Ross’s wife, and the new excitement produced by that placard on the walls—which most people, I fear, received as Lord Eskside received it—every one was agog. It was not a formal entrance with triumphal arches, &c., for this is not a kind of demonstration very congenial to the natural independence of the Lowland Scotch mind, which is much disposed to be friendly towards its great neighbours, but very little disposed to feudal notions of the respect due to a superior. Willie Maitland, it is true, had once thought of suggesting something of the sort, but he had fortunately forborne; and accordingly, though there was an absence of flags and decorations, a very warm spontaneous welcome was given to the travellers. They stopped at the door of the Bull, and the carriage was instantly surrounded by a genial crowd, attracted, it is true, quite as much by a desire for information, as by a wish to do honour to Lord Eskside’s family; and there, sure enough, by my lady’s side sat the unknown Mrs Ross, looking out with large eyes, in which a certain terror and wonder combated the look of abstraction which was habitual to them. She had been here before—how well she remembered how! not in the chief street, honoured of everybody, but dragging through the muddy roads, dull and despairing, with her two crying children. The cold wild March night of her recollection was not more unlike the soft sunshine of this May-day, than was her own position now and then. Was she more happy? She did not ask herself the question. Only people in a more or less artificial state of self-consciousness do ever ask themselves if they are happy or not; the uninstructed soul takes life as it comes. But her aspect impressed the people of Lasswade. They concluded that she was “not very happy with her husband;” and as Richard was not popular in the county he despised, this rather prepossessed the popular mind in her favour; but that this woman had ever been the “beggar-wife” of the popular legend, the county ever after refused to believe.

The Dowager-Duchess had driven into Lasswade, of course “by accident,” on that afternoon, and so had Sir John and his lady; and it is astonishing how many other carriages of lesser potentates the Eskside party met on their way home. It was a fine day to be sure; everybody was out; and every separate detachment of anxious neighbours had its own remarks to make. “The second son looks a fine lad,” the good people said; for indeed Dick had beamed with grateful smiles upon every one who had a welcome for Val. And thus the family, at last united, with glad welcome of all their neighbours, and retractation of their enemy’s slanders, made their way home. “You see we’ve brought Sandy Pringle to his marrow-bones, my lord!” cried Willie Maitland the factor, my lord’s right-hand man, as they drove away from the door of the Bull. “Ay, ay, the auld sneck-drawer!” said Lord Eskside in his glee. This was all Mr Pringle made by his apology. Val, I am happy to say, was otherwise disposed—he took it generously touched by the confession, not triumphing in it, as extorted from his assailant; and his explanation of the placard, which he too had read eagerly to his brother and confidant, was made in a very different tone. “I knew old Pringle was a good fellow,” said Val; “he was forced to it by his party; but the moment he hears the truth he comes forward and owns it like a man. Our fathers and mothers think differently from us, Dick, old fellow. They think because old Pringle is out of it so long as you and I are to the fore, that therefore he must be our enemy. I always knew it was nothing of the sort, but only a party move,” said Valentine, flourishing his whip with that delicious sense of generous superior wisdom which dwells in the bosom of youth; and then he added, softly, “After this, surely they can’t make any more row about Violet and me.”

“I should think not,” said Dick, with a sigh; the sight of those Eskside woods, where he had seen her, came back to his mind with a strange thrill. What a moment of enchantment that had been! He had never hoped it would come back again. How could he wish it to come back, when only by injury to Val it could ever bring any happiness to him? And, to be sure, he had only seen Violet twice, never long enough to——“What a lucky fellow you are!” was what he said.

“Am I not?” cried Val, in his frank happiness; “I should think this was the very last stone rolled out of my way.”

There had been a great commotion in Rosscraig, preparing everything for the family party; the new wing had been opened, the carpets put down, the curtains up, and everything arranged according to Lady Eskside’s orders. The new wing had all kinds of conveniences in it—sitting-rooms for the young couple for whom it was prepared, nurseries for the children, everything that could help to make it agreeable to a son’s family under the same roof with his father and mother. But as it happened now, both Richard and Valentine preferred to keep their old rooms; and the new wing was given up to Dick and his mother, to whom it appeared a wilderness of grandeur, confusing and blank in its extent and wealth. It had windows which looked down upon the wooded bank of the Esk, and windows which looked to the great door and court-yard, and a suite of rooms through which you could wander from one side to another, for it ran all the breadth of the house. I am not sure that these two, transported into that luxurious place, did not feel the change more painfully and strangely than its natural occupants would have done had they been suddenly dismissed to Styles’s river-side cottage. The mother felt it most of all. She sat in her own rooms almost all the day, patiently receiving the visits of her sons and of Lady Eskside, but never seeking them in the other portions of the house—brightening to see Val, but saying little even to him. She was chilled and stifled by all these fine surroundings. Often she would rise and fling the windows open, or pull at the curtains instinctively, as if to pull them down. “I can’t breathe,” she would sometimes say to Dick, with a plaintive tone in her voice. Her life, such as it was, was gone from her. She was quite submissive, doing all that was asked of her, attempting no resistance. I cannot explain the entire cessation now of the struggle which she had kept up so long, any more than she could. Fate was too strong for her, and her strength was waning; but when she yielded, she yielded altogether, unreasoning and unreasonably, as she had struggled—her mind was not capable of compromise, or of making the best of a position. When she gave in she dropped her arms entirely, and with her arms her strength.

And strangely enough, Val, the sight of whom had kept her alive, lost his power now over his mother, and Dick, who was her own, became all in all to her. She was happy only when her familiar companion was by her, and could not be persuaded to go out except with Dick. Sometimes when they wandered into the woods a gleam of something like pleasure would come upon her face. There was one knoll which they found out by chance in the very heart of the trees, a little bank which, when they discovered it first, was covered with late primroses. The trees were very thick round, and the sun came late, and penetrated but a short time through the heavy boughs; and this, I suppose, kept them later in blooming than their rustic neighbours. It is long, long since I have seen these flowers; and perhaps it is the misty glory of that morning-time of childhood that makes me feel there never were any such primroses before or after in this commonplace world—so large, so spotless, so full of sweetness, instinct with a lovely life of their own, friends rather than flowers. Their long stalks thrilled with a youthful force of existence, their green cool leaves overlapped each other, glistening with heavenly dew, their celestial petals were not like pale gold or soft velvet, which are the first vulgar images one thinks of, but like themselves only—primroses, the very essence of spring and fragrance and everlasting youth. When I shut my eyes I can see them still, lifting up their lovely heads out of their leaves, looking you and heaven in the face with all the candour of innocence, though it is, oh, so many years since they and I saw each other! When Dick and his mother, wandering through the woods, came to this bank, it seemed to touch her heart as nothing had done. She sat down on the grass and gazed at the flowers in a transport. “If we were as we used to be,” she said, “oh, Dick, my lad, how you would have run to the cart for a basket! It seems no more than waste to gather them now. What would we do with them? there’s grander flowers in all the rooms; they’d be like you and me, Dick, out of our place. Flowers were always what I liked. I never was one for saying much,” she went on, reflectively, “but a basket of primroses, that speaks for itself.”

“How you go back upon the old days, mother! said Dick, regretfully, and perhaps with a slight reproach.

“Yes, lad; I liked them best. It’s heavy on me to be shut up in houses. I was never used to it,” she said, with a sigh.

“But you can put up with it, mother?—you will put up with it?—for the sake of Val—and me.”

A gleam came from her eyes—a sparkle of tenderness and light. “I’ll do what’s best,” she said—“whatever is best:” then with a sudden rush of tears, “You may let me think of the old days, Dick; for my strength’s changed, and my mind’s changed, and I never can go back to them—never no more—even if I would.”

“But, mother,” said Dick, “it used to keep you happy to see Val only on the river, once a-day or twice a-day, in his boat. I did not know why it was then; but I saw it; and now you’ve got him altogether——”

“Ah, it’s different, it’s different!” she cried; “can’t you see, lad? Then he was none o’ mine—he was his father’s; it was more than I could have hoped for to see him like that—it kept me alive. Now he’ll come to me when I like, Dick; and kind he looks and kind he speaks, God bless him! He’d do himself an injury to please me; but ah, it’s different! If I could take them to the market in a basket, and sell a bunch here and a bunch there, that’s what I would like,” she went on with a sudden change of tone, drawing the flowers through her thin hands.

It was with a kind of despair that Dick took her home. She was getting thin visibly, he thought. She would sit at the window for hours together, gazing, seeing nothing. For the first few days she suffered herself to be taken to the family meals, but this evidently agitated her beyond endurance, and had to be given up. What was to be done? Not one of them could tell, or indeed form an idea; the only thing that could be trusted in was time, which might possibly bring back a subdued harmony to those chords which at present were all ajar; but for the moment there seemed little hope even of that. All the restlessness of old came back to her. When the active habits of her life at Oxford became unnecessary, the self-restraint she had learnt there failed her also. She took to talking (when she did talk) of nothing but the tramp-life, which seemed to have suddenly come into prominence in her mind. Now and then she dozed in the long afternoons, and Dick heard her murmuring in her sleep about the long road, and how far it was, and the lad that was tired. Poor Dick’s satisfaction in his new circumstances was suddenly subdued by this. It did not occur to him that she was ill; he thought it was one of the old fits coming on, in which he had always felt the dreadful risk there was that she might go secretly away from him, and never be heard of more. To be sure, he comforted himself by thinking these fits had always gone off again, and so perhaps would this one now.

Thus the family life recommenced under its changed circumstances. I doubt whether any one in the great house was happy. The old people had a secret in their keeping, which destroyed their peace, and which must produce further troubles still; and Dick had his mother, whose state alarmed him: and Richard Ross was in a position very difficult for a man to bear, totally ignored by his wife, yet feeling a curious secret attraction towards her, and a half-whimsical half-tragical wonder whether they were ever to be drawn closer, or if all was over between them. Valentine, the happiest of the party, was not without his troubles too, for he had written to Violet, and received no reply, and at the Hewan there was no intelligence to be obtained of her. Thus they had all enough to do to carry on the possibilities of living; and the great happiness and good fortune which had come to them, scarcely looked for the moment like good fortune at all.