AN EVIL TIME.
And now was an evil time for Dorothy. She retired to her chamber
more than disheartened by lord Worcester's behaviour to her, vexed
with herself for doing what she would have been more vexed with
herself for having left undone, feeling wronged, lonely, and
disgraced, conscious of honesty, yet ashamed to show herself--and
all for the sake of a presumptuous boy, whose opinions were a
disgust to her and his actions a horror! Yet not only did she not
repent of what she had done, but, fact as strange as natural, began,
with mingled pleasure and annoyance, to feel her heart drawn towards
the fanatic as the only one left her in the world capable of doing
her justice, that was, of understanding her. She thus unknowingly
made a step towards the discovery that it is infinitely better to
think wrong and to act right upon that wrong thinking, than it is to
think right and not to do as that thinking requires of us. In the
former case the man's house, if not built upon the rock, at least
has the rock beneath it; in the latter, it is founded on nothing but
sand. The former man may be a Saul of Tarsus, the latter a Judas
Iscariot. He who acts right will soon think right; he who acts wrong
will soon think wrong. Any two persons acting faithfully upon
opposite convictions, are divided but by a bowing wall; any two, in
belief most harmonious, who do not act upon it, are divided by,
infinite gulfs of the blackness of darkness, across which neither
ever beholds the real self of the other.
Dorothy ought to have gone at once to lady Margaret and told her
all; but she naturally and rightly shrank from what might seem an
appeal to the daughter against the judgment of her father; neither
could she dare hope that, if she did, her judgment would not be
against her also. Her feelings were now in danger of being turned
back upon herself, and growing bitter; for a lasting sense of injury
is, of the human moods, one of the least favourable to sweetness and
growth. There was no one to whom she could turn. Had good Dr. Bayly
been at home--but he was away on some important mission from his
lordship to the king: and indeed she could scarcely have looked for
refuge from such misery as hers in the judgment of the rather
priggish old-bachelor ecclesiastic. Gladly would she have forsaken
the castle, and returned to all the dangers and fears of her lonely
home; but that would be to yield to a lie, to flee from the devil
instead of facing him, and with her own hand to fix the imputed
smirch upon her forehead, exposing herself besides to the suspicion
of having fled to join her lover, and cast in her lot with his
amongst the traitors. Besides, she had been left by lord Herbert in
charge of his fire-engine and the water of the castle, which trust
she could not abandon. Whatever might be yet to come of it, she must
stay and encounter it, and would in the meantime set herself to
discover, if she might, the secret pathway by which dog and man came
and went at their pleasure. This she owed her friends, even at the
risk, in case of success, of confirming the marquis's worst
suspicions.
She was not altogether wrong in her unconscious judgment of lady
Margaret. Her nature was such as, its nobility tinctured with
romance, rendered her perfectly capable of understanding either of
the two halves of Dorothy's behaviour, but was not sufficient to the
reception and understanding of the two parts together. That is, she
could have understood the heroic capture of her former lover, or she
could have understood her going to visit him in his trouble, and
even, what Dorothy was incapable of, his release; but she was not
yet equal to understanding how she should set herself so against a
man, even to his wounding and capture, whom she loved so much as,
immediately thereupon, to dare the loss of her good name by going to
his chamber, so placing herself in the power of a man she had
injured, as well as running a great risk of discovery on the part of
her friends. Hence she was quite prepared to accept the solution of
her strange conduct, which by and by, it was hard to say how, came
to be offered and received all over the castle--that Dorothy first
admitted, then captured, and finally released the handsome young
roundhead.
Her first impressions of the affair, lady Margaret received from
lord Charles, who was certainly prejudiced against Dorothy, and no
doubt jealous of the relation of the fine young rebel to a loyal
maiden of Raglan; while the suspicion, almost belief, that she knew
and would not reveal the flaw in his castle, the idea of which had
begun to haunt him like some spot in his own body of which pain made
him unnaturally conscious, annoyed him more and more. To do him
justice, I must not omit to mention that he never made a
communication on the matter to any but his sister-in-law, who would
however have certainly had a more kindly as well as exculpatory
feeling towards Dorothy, had she first heard the truth from her own
lips.
For some little time, not perceiving the difficulties in her way,
and perhaps from unlikeness not understanding the disinclination of
such a girl to self-defence, lady Margaret continued to expect a
visit from her, with excuse at least, if not confession and apology
upon her lips, and was hurt by her silence as much as offended by
her behaviour. She was yet more annoyed, when they first met, that,
notwithstanding her evident suffering, she wore such an air of
reticence, and thence she both regarded and addressed her coldly; so
that Dorothy was confirmed in her disinclination to confide in her.
Besides, as she said to herself, she had nothing to tell but what
she had already told; everything depended on the interpretation
accorded to the facts, and the right interpretation was just the one
thing she had found herself unable to convey. If her friends did
not, she could not justify herself.
She tried hard to behave as she ought, for, conscious how much
appearances were against her, she felt it would be unjust to allow
her affection towards her mistress to be in the least shaken by her
treatment of her, and was if possible more submissive and eager in
her service than before. But in this she was every now and then
rudely checked by the fear that lady Margaret would take it as the
endeavour of guilt to win favour; and, do what she would, instead of
getting closer to her, she felt every time they met, that the hedge
of separation which had sprung up between them had in the interval
grown thicker. By degrees the mistress had assumed towards the poor
girl that impervious manner of self-contained dignity, which,
according to her who wears it, is the carriage either of a
wing-bound angel, the gait of a stork, or the hobble of a crab.
Of a different kind was the change which now began to take place
towards her on the part of another member of the household.
While she had been intent upon Richard as he stood before the
marquis, not Amanda only but another as well had been intent upon
her. Poor creature as Scudamore yet was, he possessed, besides no
small generosity of nature, a good deal of surface sympathy, and a
ready interest in the shows of humanity. Hence as he stood regarding
now the face of the prisoner and now that of Dorothy, whom he knew
for old friends, he could not help noticing that every phase of the
prisoner, so to speak, might be read on Dorothy. He was too shallow
to attribute this to anything more than the interest she must feel
in the results of the exploit she had performed. The mere suggestion
of what had afforded such wide ground for speculation on the part of
Amanda, was to Scudamore rendered impossible by the meeting of two
things--the fact that the only time he had seen them together,
Richard was very plainly out of favour, and now the all-important
share Dorothy had had in his capture. But the longer he looked, the
more he found himself attracted by the rich changefulness of
expression on a countenance usually very still. He surmised little
of the conflict of emotions that sent it to the surface, had to
construct no theory to calm the restlessness of intellectual
curiosity, discovered no secret feeding of the flame from behind.
Yet the flame itself drew him as the candle draws the moth. Emotion
in the face of a woman was enough to attract Scudamore; the prettier
the face, the stronger the attraction, but the source or character
of the emotion mattered nothing to him: he asked no questions any
more than the moth, but circled the flame. In a word, Dorothy had
now all at once become to him interesting.
As soon as she found a safe opportunity, Amanda told him of
Dorothy's being found in the turret chamber, a fact she pretended to
have heard in confidence from mistress Watson, concealing her own
part in it, But as Amanda spoke, Dorothy became to Rowland twice as
interesting as ever Amanda had been. There was a real romance about
the girl, he thought. And then she LOOKED so quiet! He never thought
of defending her or playing the true part of a cousin. Amanda might
think of her as she pleased: Rowland was content. Had he cared ever
so much more for her judgment than he did, it would have been all
the same. How far Dorothy had been right or wrong in visiting
Heywood, he did not even conjecture, not to say consider. It was
enough that she who had been to him like the blank in the centre of
the African map, was now a region of marvels and possibilities,
vague but not the less interesting, or the less worthy of beholding
the interest she had awaked. As to her loving the roundhead fellow,
that would not stand long in the way.
In this period then of gloom and wretchedness, Dorothy became aware
of a certain increase of attention on the part of her cousin. This
she attributed to kindness generated of pity. But to accept it, and
so confess that she needed it, would have been to place herself too
much on a level with one whom she did not respect, while at the same
time it would confirm him in whatever probably mistaken grounds he
had for offering it. She therefore met his advances kindly but
coldly, a treatment under which his feelings towards her began to
ripen into something a little deeper and more genuine.
During the next ten days or so, Dorothy could not help feeling that
she was regarded by almost every one in the castle as in disgrace,
and that deservedly. The most unpleasant proof she had of this was
the behaviour of the female servants, some of them assuming airs of
injured innocence, others of offensive familiarity in her presence,
while only one, a kitchen-maid she seldom saw, Tom Fool's bride in
the marriage-jest, showed her the same respect as formerly. This
girl came to her one night in her room, and with tears in her eyes
besought permission to carry her meals thither, that she might be
spared eating with the rude ladies, as in her indignation she called
them. But Dorothy saw that to forsake mistress Watson's table would
be to fly the field, and therefore, hateful as it was to meet the
looks of those around it, she did so with unvailed lids and an
enforced dignity which made itself felt. But the effort was as
exhausting as painful, and the reflex of shame, felt as shame in
spite of innocence, was eating into her heart. In vain she said to
herself that she was guiltless; in vain she folded herself round in
the cloak of her former composure; the consciousness that, to say
the least of it, she was regarded as a young woman of questionable
refinement, weighed down her very eyelids as she crossed the court.
But she was not left utterly forsaken; she had still one refuge--the
workshop, where Caspar Kaltoff wrought like an 'artificial god;' for
the worthy German altered his manner to her not a whit, but
continued to behave with the mingled kindness of a father and
devotion of a servant. His respect and trustful sympathy showed,
without word said, that he, if no other, believed nothing to her
disadvantage, but was as much her humble friend as ever; and to the
hitherto self-reliant damsel, the blessedness of human sympathy,
embodied in the looks and tones of the hard-handed mechanic, brought
such healing and such schooling together, that for a long time she
never said her prayers by her bedside without thanking God for
Caspar Kaltoff.
Ere long her worn look, thin cheek, and weary eye began to work on
the heart of lady Margaret, and she relented in spirit towards the
favourite of her husband, whose anticipated disappointment in her
had sharpened the arrows of her resentment. But to the watery dawn
of favour which followed, the poor girl could not throw wide her
windows, knowing it arose from no change in lady Margaret's judgment
concerning her: she could not as a culprit accept what had been as a
culprit withdrawn from her. The conviction burned in her heart like
cold fire, that, but for compassion upon the desolate state of an
orphan, she would have been at once dismissed from the castle.
Sometimes she ventured to think that if lord Herbert had been at
home, all this would not have happened; but now what could she
expect other than that on his return he would regard her and treat
her in the same way as his wife and father and brother?