The next day was one of excitement for Clare. She began it with feelings
so changed from that of the previous morning, when life had seemed
nothing but tedium and heaviness to her, that it was difficult to
imagine that she was the same creature. The calm composure of her
earlier days, when no new incident was wanted to break the pleasant
blank of existence, was as different from this new exhiliration as it
was from the heavy, leaden dulness of the time which was just over. She
had wanted nothing in the first serenity of her youth. She had seemed to
want everything in the monotony of her loneliness after her brother and
her cousin had left her. And now, again, she wanted nothing--except----
Except---- She did not say to herself what it was; or if she did she
called it by other names. Something to do--something to interest her--a
little society in the midst of her solitude. She did not say, I am happy
because he is coming. A girl must have gone a long way on that path
before she will say as much to herself; but a sense that he was coming
seemed to be in the air--the sunshine was brighter for it, the morning
was sweeter, all kinds of lovely lights and gleams of life and movement
were upon the park--the very scene which yesterday had been so
unbearably still and motionless. The hours did not seem long till he
came, but glided past with the softest harmony. She rather felt disposed
to dwell upon them--to lengthen them out--for were they not all threaded
through with that thread of expectation which made their stillness rosy?
It fretted her a little to have this enchanted quiet broken by Mrs.
Murray, though she came according to an appointment which Clare had
forgotten. The girl’s brow clouded over with impatience when this
visitor was announced to her. “Yes, I remember,” she said sharply to
Wilkins. “Let her come upstairs. I told her to come.” But it was a
little relief to Clare’s mind to find that her visitor was alone, which
supplied her at once with a legitimate cause of offence.
“You have not brought Jeanie with you?” she said. “Is she ill, or what
is the matter? I so particularly wished her to come!”
“I had a reason for no bringing her; and in case it should be made known
to you after, and look like a falseness, I have come to tell you, Miss
Arden,” said Mrs. Murray. “Your house, no doubt, is full of pictures of
your father. It is but right. I saw one down the stair as I came in at
the door----”
“And what then? What has papa’s picture to do with it?” asked Clare in
amaze.
“You would think, little enough, Miss Arden,” said Mrs. Murray. “That is
just what I have to tell you. Ye’ll mind that my cousin Thomas Perfitt
has been long in the service of your house. And Jeanie has seen your
father, and it made her heart sore--”
“Seen my father!” said Clare, with wonder, which was not so great as her
visitor expected. “I did not know you had been here before.”
“We were never here before. Where we saw your father was at Loch Arroch
in our own place. I knew him before you were born, Miss Arden--when I
was--no to say young, but younger than I am now; and your mother, poor
lady, too----”
This she said sinking her voice, so that Clare with difficulty made it
out.
“My mother, too!” she cried, “how strange, how very strange, you should
never have told me this before!”
“I canna think you will say it’s strange, if ye consider,” said the
Scotchwoman; “plenty folk here must have seen your mother. It’s no as if
you were ignorant--and it’s no as if I had anything to say but as I’ve
been led to say it to others, I wouldna have you think there was a
falseness. She was young, and she was feeble, poor thing, when I saw
her. It’s more than five and twenty years ago, when him that’s now Mr.
Arden had but lately come into this weary world.”
“You speak in such a strange way,” said Clare--“him that’s now Mr.
Arden! Do you mean my brother Edgar? He is just twenty-five now.”
“He was but an infant, and well I mind it,” said the old woman, shaking
her head with mournful meaning. “It was a sore time to me--death and
trouble was in my house; and, oh, the trouble and the deaths I have had,
Miss Arden! To hear of them would frighten the like of you. But first I
must tell you why I canna bring Jeanie here. Two years ago, or may be
more--two months more, for it was in the month of April--your father
came to see me. Him and me, I told you, had met before. There were
things I kent that were of consequence to him, and things he kent that
were of consequence to me. Jeanie and her brother Willie--a bonnie
blythe laddie--were both about the house. Willie was a sailor, sore
against my will; and, oh, Miss Arden, so bonnie a boy! Your father was
real kind. It’s been hard, hard to bear--but he meant to be kind. He got
my Willie a ship out of Liverpool. The poor laddie went away from
us--it’s two years this June--as blythe as ony bridegroom; and, Miss
Arden, he’s never come back----”
“Never come back!” Clare’s wonder was so great that she repeated the
last words without any real sense of their meaning, as she would have
repeated anything that made a pause in this strange narrative. Her
father! She seemed to herself to possess his later life--to know its
every detail--to hold it, as it were, in her hands. He had never done
anything without telling her--without consulting her, she would have
said. Yet here was a secret of which she knew nothing. She was not
selfish, but her mind was not so readily open to the affairs of others
as was that of her brother. She never thought of the young sailor, or of
the old mother, who spoke so sadly. She thought only of her father and
his secret. What were the others to her? Of course she would have been
sorry for them had their sorrows been sufficiently impressed on her
imagination. But in the meantime it was her father she was thinking of,
with bewildering wonder and pain.
Mrs. Murray, on the other hand, was absorbed with her own part of the
tale. “He never came back,” she repeated, with a thrill of agitation in
her voice. “He was lost in the wild sea, far out of our reach. Oh! it
might have happened a’ the same. It might have come to the innocentest
woman as it came to me. Many a lad is lost, and many a family brought to
mourning, and naebody to blame. But when I think of all that’s been in
my life, and that the like of that should come by means o’ the one
man!---- That is how Jeanie knew your father, Miss Arden. She took your
cousin for him, and it made her wild. I daurna bring her here to pain
her with his picture. She was aye a strange bairn all her life, and
Willie’s loss made her all wrong. That’s what I came to tell you, to be
honest and clear o’ reproach. I’m no good or without guilt, that I
should say so--but, oh, I hate a lie!”
Clare scarcely heeded this exclamation. She did not realise it, nor
occupy herself about what her visitor felt. There was so much in this
revelation that concerned herself that she had no leisure for other
people’s feelings. “I do not see how you could blame papa,” she said,
almost coldly; “of course, he did it for the best. How was he to know
the ship would be lost? I am sorry, but I think it very strange that you
should suppose it was his fault. Jeanie ought to be told how foolish it
is. Papa would not have hurt any one--he would not have been cruel to--a
fly.”
Here Clare paused with a good deal of natural indignant feeling. Was
the woman trying to make some claim upon her, to establish a grievance?
It was a kind thing her father had done. He had taken the trouble to
interest himself about it without even telling his daughter. And then
they were discontented because the ship was lost. How unreasonable, how
preposterous it seemed! “Nothing must be said about my father which I
ought not to hear,” she said after a pause. “No words can say how fond I
was of papa. He was everything to me; he was so good to me. He never had
any--secrets from me. No, I am sure he had not! He did not speak of you,
because perhaps----For he was not one to blazon his own kindness, or----
And then he might forget. Why should he speak to me of you?”
“You think we are humble folk, no worthy to be thought upon,” said Mrs.
Murray with a half smile. It was not sneering, but pitying, very grave
and very sad. “And that’s true--that’s true. What was a life more or
less in a poor farmhouse so long as the grand race ran on? You are very
like your father, Miss Arden--that was the very way his thoughts
ran----”
“His thoughts were always kind and good,” said Clare, hastily; and it
was hard, very hard for her in the agitation of the moment to resist a
girlish inclination to burst into tears. It was so ungrateful, she
would have said--so cruel and unkind. What! because a kind service was
done, which brought on painful results, was it the benefactor that was
to be blamed? “If Jeanie were to be ill now, you might just as well say
it was my doing,” she added in her suppressed passion, and felt that she
disliked the very looks of this stranger and her monotonous Scotch
voice.
Then there was a long pause. Clare turned over all the books on the
table before her--took up and put down her work--twisted the wools about
her fingers till her anger had somewhat evaporated. Mrs. Murray sat at a
little distance from her, saying nothing. Her eyes were fixed on a
portrait of Clare, taken a year or two before, which hung on the wall.
She looked at it with a wondering interest, growing more and more
earnest in her attention. “You are like _her_, too,” she said at length,
with a certain astonishment. The portrait was not like Clare at that
moment. It was Clare in repose, when gentler thoughts were in her mind.
“You are like _her_, too,” Mrs. Murray resumed, with a little eagerness.
“I could not have thought it. But you’re no one to let your heart be
broken without a word, the Lord be praised.”
“What do you mean? If it is of mamma you are speaking, it is my brother
who is like her,” said Clare, haughtily, “and I should be glad if you
would not meddle any further with our affairs.”
“Eh, if I could but let them alone, and never think of them more!” The
Scotchwoman rose as she said this, with a deep and prolonged sigh.
Without another word she went to the door. “I will come to you if you
send for me, Miss Arden, if I’m ever wanted in this house,” she said,
“but no for any other reason. I would forget if I could that there ever
was man or woman bearing your name. But the past cannot be forgotten,
and I’ll come if I am ever wanted here.”
With these words she went away. Something solemn was in them, something
which was incomprehensible, which sounded real, and yet must be absolute
folly, Clare thought. Why should _she_ be wanted at Arden? What could
she ever do to affect the house? No doubt there were people still living
in the world who believed in revenge, and would hunt down (if they
could) a man who had injured them. But what revenge could this woman
carry out upon the Ardens? It was a piece of folly--a mere dream. Clare
laughed at the thought that Mrs. Murray could be wanted--that she could
be sent for to Arden. But her laugh sounded harsh to herself. She
resented the whole matter, the visit, the uncalled for narrative, the
almost threat, the interruption of her pleasant thoughts. And then the
question would come back--What had been the tie between her parents and
this woman? She remembered so clearly her father’s absence from home two
years ago. He had told her he had business in London--and he had gone to
Scotland instead! How very strange it was! The more Clare thought of it
the more angry she grew. If he had secrets--if he did things she was not
to know--what right had any one to come and tell her now, when he could
no longer explain the matter, and all his secrets were buried with him?
She had her hand on the bell, to send for Mr. Perfitt, and question him
what sort of woman this was whom he had brought to Arden to perplex and
vex everybody. And then she remembered Sally Timms’ gossip, and tried to
think evil thoughts. To some people it comes natural to think ill of
their neighbours; but Clare was too spotless and too proud for such a
tendency. She did not believe any harm of Mrs. Murray, and yet she tried
to believe it. And then she tried to laugh once more and dismiss the
whole matter from her mind; and then----
It was the clock striking two which roused her, and the entrance of
Wilkins with the little luncheon tray, which furnished her doleful,
solitary, little meal. This roused her out of her resentment and her
dreams--not that she was tempted by the chicken’s wing, or even the
strawberries among their cool green leaves; but that the morning was
over, and the second chapter of the day, as it were, about to commence.
And that second chapter had the hero in it, and all the nameless sweet
agitations that would come with him--the fancies and visions and
expectations which distinguish one phase of life, and make it more
enthralling than any other. After a while that other step would disturb
the silence, and all the world would brighten up and widen, she could
not tell why. Not because of Arthur Arden, surely. He was no prince of
romance, she said to herself. She entertained (she assured herself) no
delusions about him. He was very agreeable to her--a man who pleased
her--a true Arden; but she did not pretend to think him a king of men.
Therefore, it could not be her cousin whose coming was to change
everything. It must be the pleasant work she was about to begin with
him--the common family interest--the intercourse with one who almost
belonged to her--who was always ready to talk, and willing to discuss
anything that caught her interest. Very different from being alone, and
worrying over everything, as people do who have no one to confide their
troubles to. She would tell her cousin about Mrs. Murray, and thus get
rid of the thought. This was what lightened the cloud from about her,
and brought back the atmosphere to its original clearness. It was so
pleasant to have some one to talk to--one of the family, to whom she
could venture to say anything. Of course, this was all; and it was
enough for Clare.