While Miss Somers was discoursing thus with Mrs. Murray under the trees,
Arthur Arden had pursued Clare to the village. He had lost the best
possible opportunity, he felt. Just as he had been beginning to make an
impression! He sped after her between the long lines of trees, swearing
softly under his breath at the intruders. “Confound them!” he was
saying; and yet in his secret thoughts there was a lurking determination
to see that pretty little thing again, although the pretty little thing
was nothing to him in comparison with Clare. He skimmed along, devouring
the way, planning to himself how he should recover the ground he must
have lost by his benevolent errand. “Putting one’s self out of the way
for other people is a deuced mistake,” he said to himself. It was not a
habitual weakness of his, so that he could identify the moment and
recognise the results with undoubting accuracy, and a clear perception
of the weakness and folly which had produced them. He must get over
this kind of impulse, he thought, and prove himself superior to all such
frivolous distractions. A mere pretty face! with probably nothing in it.
Arthur Arden remembered Clare, who was not pretty, but beautiful; whose
face had a great deal in it, not to speak of her purse; who was to have
Old Arden, the cradle of the race. If he could but secure Clare
everything would come right with him; and accordingly no pretty
face--nothing frivolous or foolish--must be allowed to intercept or
block up his way.
Clare was going towards the village school when Arthur overtook her. She
had been walking very fitfully, sometimes with great haste, sometimes
slow and softly, losing herself in thought. He came up to her when she
had fallen into one of these lulls of movement, and Arthur was satisfied
to see that he was recognised with a start, and that the little shock of
thus suddenly perceiving him brought light to her eyes and colour to her
face.
“You, Mr. Arden!” she said, with a kind of forced steadiness. “I thought
you were still occupied about--that--girl. I am so sorry, it seems
uncivil, but I don’t really know her name. Was she better? It was good
of you to interest yourself so much.”
“I did no more than any man must have done,” said Arthur. “Your maid
promised to go, and gave me salts, &c. But she was better, I think. The
old woman seemed quite used to it. She was lying asleep in the grass--a
very pretty picture. But the old woman is an old dragon. She fairly
drove me away.”
“Indeed!” said Clare feebly, with white lips, feeling that the crisis of
her fate might be near.
“I only looked at the child--pretty she is, you know, but a little
dwarf--when the mother got up and drove me away. I dared not stay a
moment longer; and she gave me my orders, to turn my head away if I met
them, and never to show my face again. Droll, is it not? One surely
should be permitted a little property in one’s own head and face.”
“Yes; but it is not every head and face that have the same effect.” And
then Clare paused a little to collect her energy. She had the fortitude
of a young princess and ruling personage, accustomed (for their good) to
speak very freely to the persons under her, and even to ask questions
which would have covered her with confusion had she looked at them in
another point of view; but the queen of a community, however small, is
not permitted to blush and hesitate like other girls. She made a pause,
and collected all her energies, and looked her cousin in the face, not
with any shyness, but pale, with a passionate sense of her duty. She
was so simple at bottom, notwithstanding all her stateliness, that she
thought she could assume over him the same authority which she had over
the lads of the village. “Mr. Arden,” she said, with tremulous firmness,
“you may think it is a matter with which I have nothing to do--you may
think even that it is unwomanly in me to ask anything about it,” and
here a sudden violent blush covered her face; “but I have always
considered myself responsible for the village, and--and entitled to
interfere. One’s position is of no use unless one can do that. I wish to
know what you have to do with these people--what is--your business--with
that poor girl?”
Clare’s courage almost gave way before she concluded. She faltered and
stumbled in her words; her face burned; her courage fled. If she could
have sunk into the earth she would gladly have done it. This was very
different from a village lad. She felt his eye upon her; she imagined
the curious gleam that was passing over his countenance; she was almost
conscious of putting herself in his power. And yet she made her speech,
going on to the end, though her excitement was such that she felt quite
incapable of paying any attention to the answer. She did not look at
him, and yet she divined the look of mingled wonder and offence and
partial amusement that was in his face. There was something else
besides--a look of less innocent meaning--the significant glance which
such a man gives to the woman who has committed herself; but Clare was
too innocent, too void of evil thought to divine that.
“My dear Miss Arden, you surprise me very much,” he said. “What could be
my business with the girl? What could I have to do with such people?
Your imagination goes more quickly than mine. I do not know what
connection there could possibly be between us. Do you? I am at a loss to
understand----”
Poor Clare felt herself ready to sink to the ground with shame and
mortification; and then her pride blazed up in sudden fury. “How _can_
you ask me? How dare you ask me?” she said, at the height of passion;
and he was so quiet, so entirely in command of himself.
“Why should not I dare?” he said softly. “My cousin has always been very
good to me, except once, when she mistook my meaning, as she does now.
There is nothing I dare not tell you about myself at this moment.” He
winced a little when he had said this, not intending to make so explicit
a declaration; but yet went on courageously. “About these poor people,
there is really nothing in the world to say. I never saw them in my life
before. The old woman said so, if you remember. I was like somebody who
had disturbed their peace--very unlucky indeed for me, for I feel I
shall be subject to all manner of false construction. But my cousin
Clare can understand me, I think. Should I be likely to venture into her
presence while carrying on a vulgar---- Such things should never so much
as be mentioned in her hearing. I am ashamed to seem to imply----”
Clare had been driven to such a pitch of shame and passion that she
could no longer endure herself. “I did not imply,” she said, “I
asked--plainly---- I am the protector of everybody here. It is not for me
to shut my eyes to things, though they may be a horror and shame to
think of. I asked you--plainly--what you had been doing--why the sight
of you had such an effect upon that poor girl?”
“I will answer the Princess, not the young lady,” said Arden, with
mocking calm. “Your young subject has taken no scathe by me. I never saw
her until this morning in your presence. I never should have known of
her existence but for you; is that enough? or shall I appear in your
Highness’s Court and swear to it? Such a question could scarcely be put
by you to me; but from a Sovereign to a stranger is a different matter.
Have I cleared myself to the Princess Clare of Arden? Then let me be
acquitted, and let it be forgotten. It wounds me to suppose----”
“You are to suppose nothing,” said Clare, with averted face. “I have
asked you because I thought it was my duty, Mr. Arden, in my
position---- I have spoken quite plainly--and---- I am going to visit
the school. You will not find it at all amusing. I am sorry to have said
anything--I mean I am sorry if I have been unjust. I am grieved---- Good
morning. I will not trouble you more just now----”
“Mayn’t I wait for you?” said Arthur, in his gentlest tone. “If you
could know how much higher I think of you for your straightforwardness,
how much nobler---- No, please don’t stop me; there are some things that
must be said----”
“And there are some things that cannot be listened to,” said Clare,
waving her hand as she entered the porch. She escaped from him without
another word, plunging into the midst of the children and the monotonous
hum of their lessons with a sense that everything about it was simply
intolerable, that she could bear no more, and must fall down at his feet
or their feet, it did not much matter which. She could not see the trim
little schoolmistress, her own special _protegée_ and pupil, who came
forward curtesying and smiling. A haze of agitation and bewilderment was
about her. The rows of pinafored children rising and bobbing their
little curtseys to the young lady of the manor were visible to her as
through a mist. “My head aches so,” she said faintly. “Let me sit down
for a little in the quiet; and oh, couldn’t you keep them quite still
for two minutes? The sun is so hot outside.”
“Won’t you go and sit down in my room, Miss Clare?” said the
schoolmistress. “The children will be moving and whispering. It is so
cool in my room. You have never been there since you had it built for
me; and the jasmine has grown so, you would not know it. Please come
into my room.”
Clare followed mechanically into the little sitting-room, a tiny cottage
parlour, with jasmine clustering about the window, and some monthly
roses in a little vase on the table. “It is so sweet and so quiet here.
I am so happy in my little room,” said the schoolmistress; “and it is
all your doing, Miss Clare: everything is so convenient. And then the
garden. I am so happy here.”
“Are you, indeed?” said Clare, sitting down in the little wickerwork
chair, covered with chintz, which creaked under her, but which was at
once soft and splendid in the eyes of her companion. “Never mind me,
please; go on with your work, and as soon as I am rested I will follow
you to the school. Please leave me by myself, I want nothing now.”
And there she sat for half an hour all alone in that little homely quiet
place. The window was open, the white curtain fluttered in the wind, the
white stars of the jasmine gleamed--just one or two early
blossoms--among the darkness of the foliage. And the roses were faintly
sweet, and the atmosphere warm and balmy; and in the distance a faint
hum like that of the bees betrayed the neighbourhood of the school.
Clare, who had all Arden at her command, and to whom the great rooms and
stately passages of her home were a matter of necessity, felt grateful
for this balmy, homely stillness. She took off her hat, and pushed her
hair off her forehead, and gradually got the mist out of her eyes, and
saw things clearly. Oh, how foolish she had been! She, who prided
herself upon her good sense. Edgar would not have committed himself so,
she thought, though she was continually finding fault with him; but she,
who had so good an opinion of her own wisdom, she who was so proudly
pure, and above the breath of evil, that she should have thus betrayed
and made apparent her evil suspicions and wicked thoughts! What must
anyone think of her? “Your imagination goes faster than mine;” that was
what he had said. And her imagination had jumped at something which
should never be named in maidenly ears. Clare’s confusion and
self-horror were so great that the longer she mused over them the more
insupportable they grew. Her cheeks blazed with a hot permanent blush,
though she sat alone. What could he think of her? what could anybody
think of her? Such thoughts would never have entered Miss Budd’s head,
whose life was spent between the noisy school and this quiet parlour,
who was a good little creature, never interfering with anybody, doing
her work and smiling at the world. “Why cannot I do that?” Clare said to
herself, with the wild shame of youth, which feels its little sins to be
indelible. She, Clare, did not seem to be able to help interfering with
her brother, who knew better than she did--with everybody, down to this
little Scotch girl, and even with Arthur Arden! Oh, how she hated
herself, and what a fool she had been!
Clare was very lowly in her tone when she went into the school, with a
bad headache and a pale face, and a spirit more subdued probably than it
had ever been in her life before. It is very dreadful to make one’s self
ridiculous, to show one’s self in a bad light, when one is young. The
sense of shame is so intense, the certainty that nobody will ever
forget it. She passed a great many false notes in the singing, and big
stitches in the needlework, and was altogether so subdued and gentle
that Miss Budd was filled with astonishment. “She must be going to be
married,” sighed the schoolmistress, with a glow of sympathy and
admiration in her eyes; for she was romantic, like so many young persons
in her position, and full of interest, and a wistful, half-envying
curiosity what that state of mind could be like. Miss Budd had seen a
gentleman lingering about the school door; she had seen him pass and
repass when she came back from the little parlour in which she had left
Clare. She could not but volunteer one little timid observation, when
Miss Arden’s duties were over, and she attended her to the door. “The
gentleman went that way, Miss Clare,” said the schoolmistress, timidly
stealing a glance from under her eyelashes. “What gentleman?” said
Clare, with a start; and her self-control was not sufficient to keep the
telltale blush from her cheeks. “Oh, my cousin, Mr. Arden,” she went on,
coldly. “He has gone back to the Hall, I suppose.” And she pointedly
went the other way when she left the school, taking a path which could
only lead to Sally Timms’ cottage, a woman who was quite out of Clare’s
good graces. “Can it be a quarrel?” Miss Budd asked herself anxiously,
as she went back to her scholars. And Clare went hurriedly, seeing there
was nothing else for it, to visit Sally Timms. Nothing could well be
imagined more utterly unsatisfactory than Sally Timms’s house, and her
children, and her personal character. She was the favourite pest of the
village, though she did not originally belong to it, or even to the
neighbourhood. Her boys thieved and played tricks, and took every malady
incident to boys, and were generally known to have brought measles and
whooping-cough, not to say small-pox, into Arden. The two former
maladies had passed through all the children of the place, in
consequence of the wandering propensities of Johnny and Tommy, and their
faculty for catching everything that was going. And the latter had been
only kept off by the prompt removal of Sally herself to the hospital in
Liverpool, from whence she had come back white and swollen, and seamed
and scarred, to the utter destruction of the remnant of good looks which
she had once possessed. She was a widow, as such people always manage to
be, and had no established means of livelihood. She took in washing when
she could get it. She would go messages to Liverpool when her boys were
doing something else, always ready for any piece of variety. She had
some boxes of matches and bunches of twigs in her window for lighting
fires, by which she sometimes turned a penny. Now and then she had been
seen with a basket furnished with tapes and buttons, which she sold
about the country, enjoying that, too, as a relief from the monotony of
ordinary existence. In short, she was one of those wild nomads to be met
in all classes of society, who cannot confine themselves to routine--who
must have change and movement, and hold in less than no estimation the
cleanliness and good order and decorums of life. She was very fond of
gadding about, not very particular as to the laws of property, and
utterly indifferent to ordinary comfort. It would be impossible for one
person to disapprove more entirely of another than Clare disapproved of
Sally Timms. And yet she was on her way to see her--there being only her
cottage at the end of the village street which could lead her in an
opposite direction from that taken by Arthur Arden--which was only too
clear a sign, had she but known it, how important Arthur Arden was
becoming to Clare.
How long the conversation lasted Miss Arden could not have told any
one--nor indeed what it was about. Sally was saucy and she was penitent;
but she was not hopeful; and Clare shook her head as she went away. She
gave a little nod to John Hesketh’s wife, who was the model woman of
the village, as she passed her cottage. “I have been talking to Sally
Timms, but I fear there is nothing to be done with her,” she said,
stopping a second at the garden gate. “She’s a bad one, Miss Clare, is
Sally Timms,” said Mrs. Hesketh, disapprovingly. But neither of them
were aware that Clare’s visit was totally irrespective of Sally’s
welfare, spiritual or bodily; and was only a pretext to avoid Arthur
Arden, who, nevertheless, was patiently waiting for her all this time at
the great gate.