Clare’s condemnation of her cousin was, of course, unjust. He had not
done anything to deserve so harsh a judgment. At least, what he had
really done to deserve it was unknown to her. He had not attempted to
deceive her in that special point. His note was true to the letter: the
fault he had committed was but of two minutes’ duration, and was simply
the result of a sudden temptation, which probably he would have avoided
had he been at all prepared for it--avoided, be it understood, not out
of any distaste for the pleasant folly, but for prudential motives. But
he had not been prepared for it; and he had seen a pretty, defenceless
creature in his way, poor enough and of sufficiently small consideration
to have violent pseudo-love made to her, and an attempt at least at
familiarity; and he had not been able to resist the opportunity. Arthur
Arden would not have ventured to address Jeanie so had she been even
Perfitt’s daughter. He was not cowardly in the ordinary sense of the
word; but there was so much of the craven in him, as in most men moved
by similar impulses, that his passions were only irrestrainable when the
object of them could be safely assailed. Even with all this, and
allowing that could he have done it he would have tried his best to make
a victim of Jeanie, still there had not been time enough, nor
opportunity enough, to raise any such purpose seriously in his mind.
When he spoke to her, he only half meant, or perhaps did not mean at
all, what he said. It was mere levity and spontaneous, instinctive, not
intentional, wickedness. How far this would have mended matters with a
really just critic I will not pretend to ask; but it would have mended
matters with Clare. She, however, had formed a very different opinion of
the whole transaction. It was most serious, and full of elaborate plan
and purpose in her eyes--the basest purpose of which man could be
guilty, and the most mortifying to herself. She made the fact which
Perfitt had disclosed to her into a whole drama of evil intention. She
did not know in what self-denial her kinsman had spent the morning, in
what self-sacrifice he was about to spend the afternoon. She did not
know how much he was suffering in order chiefly to prolong his stay in
her neighbourhood. It is true that his other sins richly deserved the
condemnation she had pronounced. He was employing her as a shield,
while he attempted to do the greatest possible injury to her brother. He
was plotting secretly under her protection and in her very shadow
against the honour and good fame of the family, and even against herself
personally; for her own fortune was involved in Edgar’s, so far, at
least, as Old Arden was concerned. For all this she could have better
pardoned him than for the supposed deception he had just practised upon
her. Thus his doom was just, but it was not given on just grounds.
But it happens often enough, as many women could testify, that the doom
pronounced by virtue upon vice, by the true upon the false, bears very
often much more heavily upon the judge than upon the condemned. The
culprit bears up under the blow, while she who sits on the throne of
Justice is shaken to pieces by the reverberation. Clare, who felt
herself both judge and executioner in one, and whose mind was full of
wild plans of vengeance, was herself at the same time the immediate
victim. Drearily, more dreary than ever before, the day closed upon her,
leaving her all alone in the solitude of those stately rooms, dimly
lighted and all so silent. Night was coming--night which, if it brought
forgetfulness, would be her best comforter; but it seemed utterly
impossible that it could bring forgetfulness, or that sleep should ever
come again to her burning, weary, yet wakeful eyelids. She could not
read, she could not work; she could think but of one subject, and that
was not one which she could exercise any free will about, discussing it
reasonably with herself; but one which pursued her, forcing itself into
supremacy, driving her thoughts wildly into one channel, whether she
would or not. She sat by the table, with her head supported in her two
hands, and gazed into the white flame of the lamp till her eyes were
almost scorched, while a thousand wild fancies pursued each other
through her mind. The moths circled about and about the light, and so
did her thoughts about the fatal centre which they had formed for
themselves; until the flimsy suicides wove themselves in with her
imaginations, and became somehow a part of her and them. She had not
energy enough left to save them. “There is another,” she would say to
herself; “are they all mad, I wonder? Can’t they feel that it kills
them? I wonder where he is now. Oh, I hope he is beginning to feel what
a false step he has taken! There is many a woman that will put up with
being deceived, but not me--never me. To think he should have known me
so little, and he an Arden! I wonder what Edgar will say when he knows:
he shall never know. I hate him, but I will never, never betray to any
one---- And yet I promised I would interfere. I said it should never
occur again. There is another, and another. I wonder why they like it so
much. It can’t be for the warmth, for it is warm everywhere to-night. I
said it should never occur again---- I was a fool to take any part; what
have I to do with--with--that girl? She is not even a village girl, to
have a claim upon me. If she likes to be ruined and shamed, that is not
my affair. Perhaps she thinks he--loves her, forsooth! Oh, what fools,
what fools people are--people and moths! The lamp is choked up with
them; what strange, strange, silly creatures! I can’t stop them; and how
can I stop her? And why should I!--it is her business, it is not mine.
If she had been a girl in the village---- But then I said it should not
occur again.”
Thus Clare mused: and as the slow moments went on, her musing grew into
a kind of rhythm of broken fancies, all bound together by the continued
burden--“I said it should not occur again.” It was like a song which she
thus murmured to herself, or rather which murmured in her ears without
any will of hers, rising and falling, with its refrain--“I said it
should not occur again.” At length the refrain gained upon the rest, and
repeated and repeated itself till her brain grew dizzy. At all events
she had to keep her word--and what should she do? Should she interpose
authoritatively, as was her right as the natural protectress of every
girl in Arden? Should she write to him herself, and warn him that his
evil designs were known, and she, the champion and shield of her
maidens, in arms against him? Should she act imperiously and with a high
hand, by sending Jeanie and her grandmother out of her territory? She
was so used to think as well as act _en princesse_ that neither of those
plans seemed quite impracticable to Clare. They were, on the contrary,
quite natural, things which had she been less concerned she would not
have hesitated to do. But, alas, she was intimately concerned, and her
arm seemed paralysed. She gave forth the sentence without hesitation,
but as for the manner of executing it, she seemed only capable of
thrusting the sword into herself.
Then a sudden thought struck her. As it came to her all at once, so she
executed it all at once, with the impatient and irritable haste of
suffering. Half the mad things that people do when they are in trouble
are done in this way. Their brain grows dizzy over deep-laid plans and
long-nursed impossible conceptions, and then a sudden suggestion comes
across them and they obey it on the moment. She started up and brought
her blotting-book from the writing-desk where it was, to the ring of
light round the lamp. And she wrote the following note hastily, without
even pausing to draw breath:--
“DEAR MR. FIELDING,--I have just heard, to my great pain, that your
little friend Jeanie has been annoyed by my cousin Arthur Arden.
There are difficulties in the way of my direct interference which I
need not explain. One ought to be above all secondary motives, but
unfortunately one is not. I do not know who is most to blame, if
she has been trying to attract him, thinking, perhaps, he was less
experienced in such matters than he is, or if it is entirely his
fault. He is staying at the Red House with the Pimpernels, which of
itself, of course, is a reason why I do not desire to have more
intercourse with him than I can help; and, of course, this affair
is a double reason. I do not advise you to communicate with him,
for gentlemen, I believe, do not like to be called to account for
their actions; but I think you should do something at once in
respect to the girl. You might put her on her guard, that he is not
at all the sort of man to be made a victim of, or taken in in any
way. He must either be simply amusing himself, or his object
cannot be a good one. I speak freely, because you know I have
always felt that in my position false delicacy would be a crime. I
have always considered myself responsible for the girls in the
village, and my motive is, I think, quite enough to justify me. I
think if I were in your place--not being able to act in my
own--that I should have the girl removed at once from Arden. There
seems no reason why she and her grandmother should have chosen this
place to live in. And there is nothing particular that ever I heard
of in Arden air. Any other fresh country air would, no doubt, do
quite as well.
“I should be glad if you would let me know what you do, and as soon
as possible. Edgar being away makes one feel it all the more.
“Yours affectionately,
“CLARE ARDEN.”
Poor Clare! she wrote this at a stretch, scarcely lifting her head from
the paper, with a philosophy which surprised herself, and which was not
in the least philosophy, but only the very highest strain of excitement.
But she could not help hanging up that one little flag of distress at
the end--“Edgar being away makes one feel it all the more.” She had not
said a word about feeling it till then; but now her head fell upon her
clasped hands, and she wept a few very bitter, very scalding tears,
hiding them even from herself, so to speak, in the handkerchief which
she crushed against her hot, scorched eyes. And then she rose up and put
her note in an envelope, and sent it off--for it was only about nine
o’clock still, though it felt to Clare as if it must have been the
middle of the night.
Immediately after she went upstairs, and went to bed, to the great
amazement of her maid, for Clare did not usually keep early hours. She
wanted the darkness, the stillness, the quiet, she said to herself; but
the fact was, she wanted a change--anything that would be different from
what she had been before doing. She could not sleep, of course; and when
she had borne that as long as it was possible to bear it, she got up and
partially dressed herself, and went down in her dressing-gown to the
library, to see if some novelty or distraction could be found there. By
this time the whole house was asleep--dark, motionless, and silent, like
a house of the dead. Her candle was ghostly beyond description in the
great, dim library. It even occurred to Clare’s mind, as a kind of hope,
that she might see something unearthly, and thus be driven legitimately
mad, and a reason given to herself and others for the change in her,
which no doubt others would see. But nothing unearthly was to be
seen--nothing but a vast expanse of darkness--her father’s chair
standing by the table--the walls clothed with books, glimmering faintly
in the corner nearest the light, from out the tarnished brass of the
lattice-work which enclosed them. Nothing to see, nothing to hear,
nothing but herself--the one thing of which no change could rid her.
Clare sat down at the bureau in her misery, and opened it with the key
which she had left in it. The little inner door which she had unlocked
in the morning, and which now it suddenly occurred to her she had never
seen unlocked before, swung in her face as she opened the outer
enclosure. In mere sickness of heart she thrust her hand into the corner
where that afternoon she had thrown the bundle of letters which had
prevented one of the drawers from opening. Indifferently she had thrown
it down; indifferently she took it up. One end of it was singed and
brown, as if it had been thrown into the fire, and the outside corner
was slightly torn, with a black mark on it of something by which it had
evidently been fished out again. Somebody’s letters which her father had
almost made up his mind to burn, and then had repented. This did her a
little good. A languid interest--too languid almost to be called
interest--came into her mind--a faint wonder breathed across her why he
who burned nothing should have thought of burning that. She turned it
over indifferently to read the endorsing. And even after she had read
it, it was some time before the words produced any effect upon Clare’s
mind. “Papers concerning the boy.” Papers concerning the boy! “Who is
the boy? What does it mean? she said to herself. Then she came, as it
were, to life, as she gazed at it. Through the broken envelope two or
three words caught her eye. She raised herself quite upright, seized it
tremulously, and put her hand upon the seals. But even while she did so
her mind changed. Instead of breaking open the packet, she snatched up
another piece of paper, and hastily re-covered it, then taking her
handkerchief, which was the first thing she could find, tied it round
the parcel. Then she sat for half the night stupefied, with a new
subject for her thoughts.