It would be difficult to imagine anything more uncomfortable than were
Edgar’s feelings as he drove home that evening. He had tried with much
simplicity to avoid his kinsman Arden, thinking, in his inexperience,
that if he did not repeat his invitation, or if no further conversation
took place between them as to that visit in June, that the other would
take it for granted, as he himself would have been quick to do, that
such a visit was undesirable. Edgar, however, had reckoned without his
guest, who was not a man to let any such trifling scruples stand in the
way of his personal comfort. He was on the lawn with some of the other
gentlemen when Edgar got into his dogcart, and shouted to him quickly,
“I shall see you in a few days,” as he drove past. Here was a pleasant
piece of news to take back to Clare. And Lord Newmarch was coming, who,
though a stranger to himself, was none to his sister, and might possibly
be, for anything Edgar knew, as distasteful to her as Arthur Arden
himself. He laughed at his own discomfiture, but still was discomfited;
for indifference to the feelings of anybody connected with him was an
impossibility to the young man. “Of course, I am master, as people say,”
he suggested to himself, with the most whimsical sense of the absurdity
of such a notion. Master--in order to please other people. Such was the
natural meaning of the term according to all the laws of interpretation
known to him. It was Clare who was queen at the present moment of her
brother’s heart and household; but even if there had been no Clare,
Edgar would still have been trying to please somebody--to defer his own
wishes to another’s pleasure, by instinct, as nature compelled him. It
is a disposition which gives its possessor a great deal of trouble, but
at least it is not a common one. And the curious thing was that he did
not blame Arthur Arden for pushing his society upon him, as anybody else
would have done. It was weakness on his own part, not selfishness on
that of his kinsman. Had he been driven to reason on the subject, Edgar
would have indeed manifested to you clearly how his own yielding temper
was the greatest of sins, as tempting others to be selfish. “Of course
it is my own fault” had been his theory all his life.
But he was very uncomfortable about it in this case. Up to this time,
when he had been injudiciously amiable he alone had been the sufferer;
but now it was Clare who must bear the brunt. When he reached the
village he threw the reins to the groom, and jumped out of the dogcart.
“If Miss Arden is downstairs let her know that I have gone for an hour’s
chat to Dr. Somers’,” he said; and so started on, with his cigar, in the
moonlight, feeling the stillness and solitude a relief to him. How free
his old life had been! and yet he had felt himself wronged and injured
to be left in enjoyment of so much freedom. Now he was hampered enough,
surrounded by duties and responsibilities which he understood but dimly,
with one of those terrible domestic critics by his side who had the
power which only love has to wound him, and who subjected him to that
terrible standard of family perfection which in his youth he had known
nothing of, and the rules of which even now he did not recognise. Edgar
sighed, and took his cigar from his lips, and looked at it as if he
expected the kind spirit of that soothing plant to step forth and
counsel him; but receiving no revelation, sighed and put it back again,
and thrust his hands into his pockets, and passed along the silent
village street with his disturbed thoughts. All was silent in Arden:
the doors closed which stood open all day long, and only here and there
a faint light twinkling. One in John Horsfall’s cottage, in the little
room where Lizzie, his eldest daughter, was dying of consumption; one in
old Simon the clerk’s window, downstairs, where his harsh-tempered but
conscientious Sally was busy with the needlework which she did, as all
Arden knew, “for the shop.” “The shop” meant a certain famous place for
baby-linen in Liverpool, which demanded exquisite work--and Sally alone
of all the neighbourhood was honoured with its commissions. In her aunt
Sarah’s cottage, next door, the upper window showed a faint
illumination, and stood open. These were all the signs of life which
were visible in Arden. The old people, and the hard-working out-door
people who began the day at five in the morning, were all safe in bed,
enjoying their well-won repose. The moon was shining brightly, with all
the soft splendour of the summer--shining over Arden woods, which looked
black under her silver, and making the little street, with its white
lines of broken pavement before each door, as bright as day. Edgar’s
footsteps rang upon the stones as he crossed those little strips of
white one by one. The sound broke the silent awe and mystery of the
night, and with his usual sympathetic feeling he did his best to
restrain it. He had thrown away his cigar, and had taken off his hat to
refresh himself with the cool sweet air, when he heard a cry from the
window above. It was the window of old Sarah’s Scotch lodger. He looked
up eagerly, for her aspect had awakened some curiosity in his mind. But
what he saw was a little white figure leaning out so far that its
balance seemed doubtful, spreading out its hands, he thought, towards
himself as he stood looking up. “My Willie! my Willie!” cried the voice;
“is it you at last? Oh, he’s here, he’s here, whatever you may say.
Willie! Willie! How could he rest in his grave, and me pining here?”
Edgar rushed forward in the wildest alarm. The little creature leaned
over the window-sill, with arms stretched out, and hair streaming about
her, till he felt that any moment she might be dashed upon the pavement
below. The cry of “Willie!” rang into the stillness with a wild
sweetness which went to the listener’s heart. It sounded like the very
voice of despair. “Take care, for God’s sake,” he cried, instinctively
rushing into the little garden below the window and holding out his arms
to catch her should she fall. Just then, however, she was caught from
behind. The grandmother’s face looked suddenly out, ghastly pale and
stern in its emotion. “I have her safe, sir, thanks to you,” said the
serious Scotch voice, every word of which sounded to Edgar like a chord
in music full of a hundred mingled modulations. “Willie, my Willie!”
cried the younger voice, rising wilder and shriller; and then there
followed a momentary rustle, as of a slight struggle, and then the sharp
decisive closing of the window. He could see nothing more. But it was
not possible to pass on calmly after such an incident. After a moment’s
indecision, Edgar tapped lightly at old Sarah’s window, which was dark.
The sounds upstairs died into a distant murmur of voices, and downstairs
all was still. Old Sarah, if she heard, took no notice of his summons;
but young Sarah, her niece, who was working in the next cottage, roused
herself and came to the door. “It’s best to take no notice, sir, if
you’ll take my advice,” said Sally, with a piece of white muslin wrapped
round her arm, which shone in the moonlight. “It’s nought but the mad
lass next door.”
“Mad! is she mad?” said Edgar eagerly.
“Poor lass! they do say as it’s a brother; but I don’t hold for making
all that fuss about brothers,” said Sally. “T’ou’d dame, she’s a proud
one, and never says nought she can help; and the poor wench ain’t
dangerous or that, but as mad as mad, in special when the moon’s at the
full. Don’t you take no notice, sir, for there never was a proud un
like t’ou’d dame. T’ poor lass had an only brother as died, and she’s
ne’er been hersel’ since. That’s what they say.”
“But she looks like a child,” said Edgar, not knowing what to do; for
already complete silence and darkness seemed to have fallen over the
cottage. Old Sarah did not wake, or if she waked, kept still and made no
sign, and the light had disappeared from the upper window. It was hard
to believe, to look at the perfect stillness of the summer night, that
any such interruption had ever been.
“She do, Squire,” said Sally; “but seventeen they say, and some thinks
her mortal pretty--t’ou’d Doctor for one, as was awful wild in his own
time, I’ve heerd say. But Mrs. Murray she watches her like a dragon.
It’s t’ou’d lady as is my sort. I don’t hold with prettiness nor fuss,
but them as takes that care of their own----”
Sally jumped aside with a sudden cry, as the door of the next house
softly opened, and Mrs. Murray herself suddenly appeared. In the
moon-light, which blanched even Sally’s dingy complexion, the old woman
looked white as death; but probably it was as much an effect of the
light as of the scene she had just gone through. She laid her hand very
gently, with a certain dignity, upon Edgar’s arm.
“Sir,” she said, “you’ll excuse my poor bairn. Willie was her brother,
that we lost a year back. He was lost at sea, and the poor thing looks
for him night and day. He was in a Liverpool ship; that’s why we’re
here. She took you for him,” the grandmother continued, and then made a
pause, as if to recover her voice. Tears were glistening in her eyes.
Her voice thrilled and changed even now, it seemed to Edgar, like
chords. She touched his arm again with her hand, a soft, yet firm,
momentary touch, which was like a caress. And then, all at once, “You’re
like him. Good night,” she said.
It was as if she could not trust herself to say more. And Edgar stood
gazing at the vacant spot where she had stood, while Sally peered round
the porch of her own house, straining to see and hear. “She’s a queer
’un, t’ou’d dame,” said Sally, with a little gasp of disappointed
excitement; and she stood at her door with the muslin twisted about her
hand, and gazed after him when he went away up the village with a hasty
good night. Edgar heard her close and bolt her door as he hurried on to
the Doctor’s. Poor rural fastenings, what could they shut out? not even
a clever thief, did any such care to enter--much less pain, trouble,
sorrow, madness, or death.
Dr. Somers’ study was a great contrast to the splendour and silence of
the night. It was lighted by a green reading-lamp, which threw its
illumination only on the table, and it was full of smoke from a
succession of cigars. The Doctor was seated in a large old-fashioned
elbow-chair, with a high back and sides, covered with dark leather,
against which his handsome head stood out. On the table stood a silver
claret-cup, and a rough brown bottle of seltzer-water--such were his
modest potations. He had a medical magazine before him on the table, but
it was a novel which was in his hand, and which he pitched away from him
as Edgar entered. “Some of Letty’s rubbish,” he explained, as he threw
it on the sofa in the shade, and welcomed his young guest. “Bravo,
Edgar! Now this is what I call emancipating yourself from petticoat
government. These sisters of ours are as bad as half-a-dozen wives.”
“You don’t seem to have suffered much under yours,” said Edgar; “and
mine, I assure you----”
“Oh, yes; yours, I assure you,” cried the Doctor, “is exactly like the
rest--would not curtail any of your pleasures for the world; in short,
would entreat you to amuse yourself, and be heartbroken at the thought
of keeping you at home for her; but once let her find out that you have
wings and can fly, and see what she says. I know them all.”
Edgar sat down, and cast a hurried glance round the room as the Doctor
spoke. He asked himself quite involuntarily whether, after all, a cigar
in Dr. Somers’ study was so much more delightful than Clare’s society
and her pretty surroundings, and was not by any means so certain on that
point as the Doctor was. But if he smiled within himself he suffered no
evidence of it to escape, and for this night, at least, he had a
definite object in his visit. “I did not know if I should find you,” he
said. “What has become of the old whist party, of which I used to hear
so much?”
“Ah, the whist party,” said the Doctor, with a sigh. “Poor Letty made an
end of that. She was always willing to do her best, though she never was
anything of a player; and she bore abuse like an angel. But that won’t
do now, you know. And young Denbigh is the most abject spoon I ever saw.
When he is not dangling after Alice Pimpernel, he is writing verses to
her, I believe. The boy is capable of any folly, and revokes as soon as
look at you. Croquet is the food of love; and that is what the
degenerate cub has abandoned whist for. No wonder the race deteriorates
day by day.”
“That is just what I wanted to speak to you about,” said Edgar; “I have
just come from the Pimpernel’s.”