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?