Chapter XXVIII: Homesickness

From this first break in the perfect union of their home Margaret suffered less than she would have done but for the companionship of Dorothy. The girl's nature was one of strong, simple, and pure impulses; and her mind, though uncultivated in the ordinary acceptation of the word, was clear and intelligent. Margaret could speak to her, more fully than to anyone else, of the exceptional spiritual life she was living. There were thoughts and feelings in her soul, inmost impressions, to which she found it was impossible to give utterance. It was a life hid with Christ in God. But Dorothy seemed able to comprehend something of these workings of her mind, if only she caught a syllable here and there, which told of Margaret's profound realization of the love in which all men lived and moved. Probably Dorothy's long years of solitary childhood spent on the open moors, in contact with simple and grand aspects of nature, had kept her spirit open to such impressions as Margaret's mysticism, if it could be called mysticism, produced upon her. These two, like exiles in a strange land, clung to one another with an intense sympathy and love.

But this attachment to Margaret did not diminish Dorothy's devotion to Sidney. There was a touch of romance in this devotion. He seemed to her to be the deliverer who had opened her prison doors and brought her out into a happy freedom. In these first hours of his disappointment in Philip, her presence in his home tended to soften the bitterness of his vexation. Laura thought that she kept Phyllis out of her proper place; but it was, in fact, due to Dorothy that Phyllis continued to visit at the Hall. She would not let Philip's future wife be banished from his parents' house. The girlish acquaintance which had hitherto existed between them ripened into a girlish intimacy; and Phyllis was almost as often at the Hall as formerly. It was a comfort to Margaret that it should be so; and even Sidney felt it was wiser to maintain a certain degree of intercourse with his future daughter-in-law. He could not blame her as he blamed Laura.

In all this Laura felt that her schemes so far had not miscarried. She had never expected Sidney to welcome an engagement between his son and her daughter; it was too poor a match, and here Laura sympathized with him. But his opposition to it was less violent than she might have anticipated. All was going well with Phyllis; and now if Dick would only woo and win the young heiress she would be perfectly content. Dick was quite willing to fall into her plans. She spent many really happy hours in forecasting and arranging for them. Though Margaret was younger than herself, and in perfect health, and Sidney no older than her husband, and more likely than not to outlive all his contemporaries, she frequently thought of them both as dead, and Philip possessing the estates, and Phyllis reigning in Margaret's place. She expected to behold these things with her own eyes, and share in the glory of them. That she herself might grow old and die, while Philip and her daughter were still in comparative poverty and dependent upon Sidney, very seldom occurred to her. It was a contingency she could not bear to think of.

It was a much quieter winter at Apley than usual. There was no political excitement to occupy Sidney, and Hugh was visiting some of his Oxford friends during the short Christmas vacation. A few guests, staying two or three days each, came to Apley Hall. But there was no special festivity at which Laura could have made an open display of her daughter as betrothed to the son and heir. The few friends who came were fully aware of the circumstance, and sympathized very cordially with the disapprobation felt by Sidney and Margaret. Philip was wandering about Italy, and wrote frequently to Phyllis. The opposition to his love, of which he had never dreamed, naturally deepened it. He felt aggrieved and amazed that his father and mother should see any defect in her; and this made him exaggerate her charms and good qualities, until she seemed perfect in his eyes. Yet her letters were poor and meager, betraying an empty head, and an almost equally empty heart.

In spite of the novelty of the impressions crowding upon him, especially in Rome, this winter was, on the whole, a dreary--a very dreary--time to him. For the first time he was separated from everybody whom he loved; even Dick could not spare a year of his life to travel about with him. He saw no one but strangers, until he longed to see some one familiar face. He began to feel himself banished; and at times he suffered from genuine homesickness. His mother wrote long letters to him; letters as precious in his eyes as Phyllis's; to any other eyes as gold to tinsel. But his father did not write; it was the only sign of his displeasure. The checks sent out to him were liberal beyond his requirements; but no message came with them. There was a silent strife between his father and himself, a warfare of their wills, both of them strong and unyielding. It was as great a grief to Philip as to Sidney.

The spring came in early, and with unusual heat, in Italy. Much rain had fallen in February and March, and with the sudden outburst of heat there was an unwholesome season and a good deal of fever. Down in Sicily, and even in Naples, there were some fatal cases of cholera. A few of the English visitors, thronging to Rome for Easter, died of malaria; probably not a larger number than usual, but they happened to be persons of some note, whose deaths were reported in the daily papers, with a few lines of comment. Sidney read the notes from the Italian correspondents before looking at any other column of the Times. Laura and Phyllis grew anxious, and professed their anxiety loudly. But Philip wrote regularly, though in his now wonted strain of low spirits; and Sidney could see no reason for shortening his term of banishment. He had not been away four months yet; and there was no sign of any decrease of his infatuation.

Philip sent word he was going north to Venice, where the weather was reported as cool and fine. But about the end of April there came a letter from him complaining of low fever; and after that there was silence for a few days, a silence which filled them with apprehension. Then arrived a note from an American doctor, living in Venice, saying that he was attending Mr. Philip Martin, and that he was suffering from a combined attack of nostalgia and malaria, which might, not improbably, take a serious turn, and which could be best counteracted by the presence of his father or mother, or one equally dear to him.

"I must go to him, at once," cried Margaret. "I was expecting this. I knew it would come sooner or later; and, O Sidney, it is I who must go. He fancies he loves Phyllis best, but his love for me will be strongest now, for a time at least. And Phyllis cannot nurse him as I can; his own mother! I can be ready in an hour."

"You shall go," answered Sidney, "and I will take you. I would give my life for his. Is not he my first-born child as well as yours?"

As he made the hurried arrangements--looking out the trains, giving orders at home, and sending telegrams up to the City--his brain was full of remembrances of his son. It seemed but yesterday that he was a boy at school, idolizing his father; not longer than the day before yesterday that he was a little child, venturing on its first perilous journey across the floor from its mother's arms to its father's. He felt that the fibers of his heart were all interwoven with his son's life; and there was a new and terrible pain there. What if Philip should cut the knot of their estrangement by dying?

The carriage was ready to take them to the station, and Margaret was seated in it, when the rector and his wife came breathlessly up to it. Laura was wringing her hands in excitement and terror.

"Oh! you must wait for Phyllis!" she exclaimed. "You cannot go without her; and she went only this morning to Leamington on a short visit. She will be back to-night, in time to start first thing to-morrow morning. It will break her heart if you go without her."

"We cannot wait ten minutes," answered Sidney, "it is impossible. But I will telegraph as soon as we reach Venice; and if there is any danger," and his voice faltered as he uttered the word, "George must bring her out at once."

"Oh! if she could only go with you!" cried Laura.

At this moment Dorothy appeared in a traveling dress. For some years past Rachel Goldsmith had been too old to travel, and Margaret, who was always independent of a maid, had not engaged anyone in her place. There was a smile on Dorothy's face as she ran down the steps to the carriage.

"I am coming to take care of my lady," she said. "Rachel quite approves of it. She was almost beside herself till I said I would go. You must let me come. Perhaps Phyllis ought to go instead, but she could not wait on Mrs. Martin as I can. Besides, I am ready."

She looked pleadingly into Sidney's face; and he stood aside for her to enter the carriage where Margaret was sitting.

"Yes, yes," he said, "jump in; there's no time to lose. Good-by, George. I will telegraph if Phyllis is wanted."

Laura watched the carriage rolling out of sight, with a new and unwelcome misgiving. She had not been afraid of Dorothy before; but she could not be blind to the great improvement in her since she had been under Margaret's care. And now she was going out to share in nursing Philip as an invalid, and amusing him as a convalescent. But this must not be. George should start immediately in their wake; and Phyllis with him.

Here, however, Laura was doomed to disappointment. The rector would not listen to reason. When he had once made up his mind upon any worldly matter he was an obstinate man; and he was irrevocably resolved that he would play no part in furthering the marriage of his daughter to Sidney's son and heir. When Sidney telegraphed "Bring Phyllis," then he would take her; but not till then.

It was well for both Sidney and Margaret that Dorothy was with them. Unlike her usual self, Margaret was despondent, and convinced that they could not reach Venice in time to find Philip alive; and Sidney, seeing her so lost to hope, was stricken with a miserable dread. They made no pause for rest on the long journey; and, but for Dorothy, they would hardly have taken food. It was an immense relief to her when, after many hours of traveling, she saw afar off, in the midst of its shallow sea, the white domes and towers of Venice glistening in the sunlight. Sidney and Margaret had been there before; and for them there was but one point of interest, their son lying ill, perhaps dying, under one of those glittering roofs. But Dorothy gazed out of the windows at the lagoons over which the strange railway was carrying her. She was very weary, and her eyelids were heavy and swollen with long wakefulness; but the stretches of silvery water, with its low banks of soft sea-green weeds, were too beautiful not to arouse her. There were no trees or fields in sight: all around her lay a pale, tremulous plain of water, quivering under a clear vault of sky, and reflecting on its surface the deep blue, flecked with little clouds, which over-arched it.

They had telegraphed beforehand to Daniele's, where Philip was staying, and a servant awaited the arrival of the train. The young English signore was better; he had begun to recover as soon as he heard that his father and mother were on their way to come to him. The message was delivered in the hurry of passengers descending from the train; but the relief it brought was instantaneous. They were led through a common-place station; but as soon as they had passed through the great gates and stood on the top of a flight of broad steps, Dorothy could not restrain a cry of pleasure. Below them lay a busy crowd of gondolas, swinging and floating lightly on the water, and passing to and fro with the swiftness and accuracy of so many carriages, with neither collision or delay. There was no noise of wheels or the trampling of horses' feet, only the cries of the gondoliers and the shouts of the officials who overlooked them. As soon as she found herself seated in one of them it threaded its way out of the throng with a skill that delighted her. Margaret sat back in the shelter of the awning, with tears of thankful gladness stealing now and then down her cheeks; but Sidney, with the load suddenly rolled off his heart, took a place beside Dorothy, and pointed out to her the palaces and churches he knew so well.

Dorothy was left alone when they reached Daniele's, and she stood leaning on the cushioned window-sill of her room, and looked out on the gay and busy quay below her, with all sense of weariness gone from her vigorous young frame. The air was very fresh and sweet, and the sparkling water-roads stretched before her, with black gondolas flitting noiselessly to and fro, bringing to her ears the merry chatter of voices, in other cities drowned by the noise of wheels. Opposite to her a church of white marble delicately veined seemed to float upon the water, and beyond it stretched a shallow sea, rippling under the sunshine. It looked like a city of enchantment to her.

Presently Margaret came in, pale and weary with the long journey, but with the light of happiness in her eyes. Philip was better than she could have hoped; there would be no real danger, the doctor said, now that she was there to satisfy his longing to look upon some dear, familiar face.

"He is not even grieved that Phyllis is not come," she said gladly, "he is just satisfied, with a perfect satisfaction, to see his father and me. After all there are seasons when no love contents us save a father's love. We are but children, every one of us."

Late in the evening, after a long rest, Margaret sat beside Philip's bed again, holding his nerveless hand in her own. She could hardly believe that this pale, almost wasted face and languid frame was her strong young son, who had said farewell to her only a few months ago. He seemed to have grown years older. He was graver and more thoughtful. His manner toward her and his father was at once more independent and more full of a manly deference. His smile, as he looked into her face, was that of one who was more her equal than he had been when he parted from her. He had suffered, and suffering had lifted him nearer to her level.

"I understand you and my father better than I did," he said. "I see why you wonder at my love for Phyllis; yes, and I see why I love her. Possibly I should not love her now, if I saw her for the first time. But it has grown with my growth, and been secretly fostered and cherished, unknown to you both. Still I thought you knew; and I love her, and she loves me. We must venture upon life together, and if it is not as perfect a union as yours and my father's, why, it is the most perfect I can make. I could not sacrifice Phyllis now, even to your reasonable objections."

"You love her enough to make you ill when you are away from her," said his mother, sighing, "so we must withdraw our objections."

"Yes, I love her," he replied; "but that is not so much the question as whether she loves me as much as ever. Think, dear mother. She has regarded herself as mine ever since we were little children together; and with all her vivacity and charming spirits she has never even thought of attracting anyone else, or of being loved by any other man. She is all my own. If I could give up my engagement out of love and obedience to you, I could not run the risk of breaking Phyllis's high spirit--perhaps her heart. I dare not act like a scoundrel, even to please my father."

"Your father would never wish you to act like a scoundrel," said Margaret in a pained tone; "but he withdraws his objections, and says you must come home again. Only we wish you not to marry for three years longer. But oh, my boy! surely you can be happy at home as you were before, seeing her as you used to see her. You will yield to us this much? You will not force us to consent to an earlier marriage?"

Philip drew his mother's hand to his lips, and kissed it in silence. This was no moment of triumph to him, because he knew it to be one of pain to her. She had not demanded a great concession from him, and she had asked it doubtingly, almost humbly. It was amazing that his mother should petition him for anything, and he not to be able to rejoice in granting it.

"Yes, we will wait," he said; "we are both young enough to wait, but three years is a long time."