George MacDonald - There & Back

One stormy winter night, as Richard was returning from a house in Park Crescent, to which he had carried home a valuable book restored to strength and some degree of aged beauty, from one of the narrow openings on the east side of Regent Street, came a girl, fighting with the wind and a weak-ribbed umbrella, and ran buffeted against him, notwithstanding his endeavour to leave her room. The collision was very slight, but she looked up and begged his pardon. It was Alice. Before he could speak, she gave a cry, and went from him in blind haste as fast as she could go; but with the fierce wind, her perturbation, and the unruliness of the umbrella, which she was vainly trying to close that she might run the better, she struck full against a lamp-post, and stood like one stunned and on the point of falling. Richard, however, was close behind her, and put an arm round her. She did not resist; she was indeed but half-conscious. The same moment he saw a cab and hailed it. The man heard and came. Richard lifted her into it, and got in after her. But Alice came to herself, got up, and leaning out of the cab on the street side, tried to open the door. Richard caught her, drew her back, and made her sit down again.

“Richard! Richard!” she cried, as she yielded to his superior strength, and burst into tears, “where are you taking me?”

“Wherever you like, Alice. You shall tell the cabman yourself. What is the matter with you? Don’t be angry with me. It is not my fault that I have not been to see you and Arthur. You went away, and nobody could tell me where to find you! Give the cabman your address, Alice.”

“I’m not going home,” sobbed Alice.

“Where are you going, then? I will go with you. You’re not fit to go anywhere alone! I’m afraid you’re badly hurt!”

“No, no! Do let me out. Indeed, indeed, you must!”

“Well, then, I won’t! You’ll drop down and be left to the police! It’s horrible to think of you out in such a night! Come home with me. If you are in any trouble, my mother will help you.”

Here Alice, who had yielded to the pressure with which Richard held her, broke from him, and pushed him away. Richard put his other arm across, and laid hold of the door of the cab, telling the man to get up on his box, and have a little patience. He obeyed, and Richard turned again to Alice.

“Richard,” she said, “your mother would kill me!”

“Nonsense!” he rejoined; “what a fancy! My mother!”

“I’ve seen her since you went. She made me promise—”

But there Alice stopped, and Richard could get from her nothing but entreaties to be let out.

“If you don’t,” she said at last, growing desperate, “I will scream.”

“Let me take you at least, then, a little nearer where you want to go,” pleaded Richard.

“No! no I set me down.”

“Tell me where you live.”

“I daren’t.”

“I must see my old friend, Arthur! and why shouldn’t I see his sister? My father and mother ain’t tyrants! They know what that would make of me! They let me go where I please, or give a good reason why I should not.”

“Oh, they’ll do that fast enough!” returned Alice, in a tone of mingled despair and scorn. “But,” she added immediately, “the worst of it is, they’ll be in the right. Let me out, Richard, or I shall hate you!”

But with the word she dropped her head on his shoulder, and sobbed as if her heart would sob its last.

He made repeated attempts to soothe her, but, as he made them, he felt them foolish, for he saw that nothing would alter her determination to be set down.

“Must I leave you, then, on this very spot?” he said.

“Yes, yes! here—here!” she answered, and rose with apparent eagerness to get away from him.

He got out, and turned to her, but she did not accept his offered help.

“Won’t you shake hands with me?” he said. “I did not mean to offend you!”

She answered nothing, but hurried away a step or two, then turned and lifted her arms as if to embrace him, but turned again instantly, and fled away among the shadows of the wildly flickering lamps. By the time he had paid the cabman, he saw it would be useless to follow, for she was out of sight.

The wide street was almost deserted; its lamps shuddered flaring and streaming and darkening in the fierce gusts of the wind. A vague army of evil things seemed to start up and come crowding between him and Alice. He turned homeward, with a sense of loss and a great sadness at his heart, unable even to speculate as to the cause of Alice’s behaviour. All he knew was, that his mother had something to do with it. For the first time since childhood, he felt angry with his mother.

“She fancies,” he said to himself, “that I am in love with the girl, and she thinks her not good enough for me! I’m not in love with her; but any good girl I cared for, I should count good enough! When my mother’s turn comes, off she goes to the rest of the social tyrants that look down on a brother because he can do twenty things they can’t! If the world went out of gear, would they make it go! I’ll be fair whatever I be! It’ll be my mother’s own fault if I fall in love with Alice! She has made me pity her with all my heart—the poor, white thing!—so thin and pinched, and such big eyes! It would be just bliss to have a creature like that to trust you, so that you could comfort her! What can my mother have said to her? She has made her awfully miserable, anyhow! Perhaps her mother drinks!—What if she do! Alice don’t!”

He was determined to have some explanation from his mother. But she foiled him. The moment she saw what he meant, she turned away, listened in silence, and spoke with a decision that savoured of anger.

“They’re not people your father and I will have you know,” she said, without looking at him.

“But why, mother?” asked Richard.

“We’re not bound to explain everything to you, Richard. It ought to be enough that we have a good reason.”

“If it be a good reason, why shouldn’t I know it, mother?” he persisted. “Good things don’t require to be hidden.”

“That’s very true; they do not.”

“Then why hide this one?”

“Because it is not good.”

“You said it was a good reason!”

“So it is.”

“Good and not good! How can that be?” said Richard, with a great lack of logic. By this time he ought to have been able to see that the worst of facts may be the best of reasons.

His mother held her peace, knowing she was right, but not knowing how to answer what she thought his cleverness.

“I mean to go and see them, mother,” he said.

“You’ll repent it, Richard. The woman is not respectable!”

“She won’t bite me!”

“There’s worse than biting!”

“I allow,” pursued Richard, “she may take a drop too much; her nose does look a little suspicious! But if she ain’t what she should be, it’s hard lines Arthur and Alice should suffer for the sins of their mother.”

“The Bible says the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.”

“The Bible! If the Bible says what ain’t right, are we to do it?”

“Richard, I’ll have no such word spoken again in my house!” exclaimed his mother.

“Are you going to turn me out, mother, because I say we should not do what is wrong, whoever tells us to?”

“No, Richard! You said the Bible said what was wrong; and that’s blasphemy!”

“Didn’t you say, mother, that the Bible said we ought to visit the sins of the fathers on the children?”

“God forbid!” cried the poor woman, driven almost to distraction; “I said nothing of the kind! That would be awful! What the Bible says is, that God does so.”