Of the visit to Earlston, this was all that came immediately; but yet,
if anybody had been there with clear-sighted eyes, there might have been
other results perceptible and other symptoms of a great change at hand.
Such little shadows of an event might have been traced from day to day
if that once possible lady of the house, whose ghost Aunt Agatha had met
with in all the rooms, had been there to watch over its master. There
being nobody but Hugh, everything was supposed to go on in its usual
way. Hugh had come to be fond of his uncle, and to look up to him in
many ways; but he was young, and nothing had ever occurred to him to put
insight into his eyes. He thought Mr. Ochterlony was just as usual--and
so he was; and yet there were some things that were not as usual, and
which might have aroused an experienced observer. And in the meantime
something happened at the Cottage, where things did not happen often,
which absorbed everybody's thoughts for the moment, and threw Earlston
and Mr. Ochterlony entirely into the shade.
It happened on the very evening after their return home. Aunt Agatha had
been troubled with a headache on the previous night--she said, from the
fatigue of the journey, though possibly the emotions excited at Earlston
had something to do with it--and had been keeping very quiet all day;
Nelly Askell had gone home, eager to get back to her little flock, and
to her mother, who was the greatest baby of all; Mary had gone out upon
some village business; and Aunt Agatha sat alone, slightly drowsy and
gently thoughtful, in the summer afternoon. She was thinking, with a
soft sigh, that perhaps everything was for the best. There are a great
many cases in which it is very difficult to say so--especially when it
seems the mistake or blindness of man, instead of the direct act of God,
that has brought the result about. Miss Seton had a meek and quiet
spirit; and yet it seemed strange to her to make out how it could be for
the best that her own life and her old lover's should thus end, as it
were, unfulfilled, and all through his foolishness. Looking at it in an
abstract point of view, she almost felt as if she could have told him of
it, had he been near enough to hear. Such a different life it might have
been to both; and now the moment for doing anything had long past, and
the two barren existences were alike coming to an end. This was what
Miss Seton could not help thinking; and feeling as she did that it was
from beginning to end a kind of flying in the face of Providence, it was
difficult to see how it could be for the best. If it had been her own
fault, no doubt she would have felt as Mr. Ochterlony did, a kind of
tender and not unpleasant remorse; but one is naturally less tolerant
and more impatient when one feels that it is not one's own, but
another's fault. The subject so occupied her mind, and her activity was
so lulled to rest by the soft fatigue and languor consequent upon the
ending of the excitement, that she did not take particular notice how
the afternoon glided away. Mary was out, and Will was out, and no
visitor came to disturb the calm. Miss Seton had cares of more immediate
force even at that moment--anxieties and apprehensions about Winnie,
which had brought of late many a sickening thrill to her heart; but
these had all died away for the time before the force of recollections
and the interest of her own personal story thus revived without any will
of her own; and the soft afternoon atmosphere, and the murmuring of the
bees, and the roses at the open windows, and the Kirtell flowing audible
but unseen, lulled Aunt Agatha, and made her forget the passage of time.
Then all at once she roused herself with a start. Perhaps--though she
did not like to entertain such an idea--she had been asleep, and heard
it in a dream; or perhaps it was Mary, whose voice had a family
resemblance. Miss Seton sat upright in her chair after that first start
and listened very intently, and said to herself that of course it must
be Mary. It was she who was a fantastical old woman to think she heard
voices which in the course of nature could not be within hearing. Then
she observed how late it was, and that the sunshine slanted in at the
west window and lay along the lawn outside almost in a level line. Mary
was late, later than usual; and Aunt Agatha blushed to confess, even to
herself, that she must have, as she expressed it, "just closed her
eyes," and had a little dream in her solitude. She got up now briskly to
throw this drowsiness off, and went out to look if Mary was coming, or
Will in sight, and to tell Peggy about the tea--for nothing so much
revives one as a cup of tea when one is drowsy in the afternoon. Miss
Seton went across the little lawn, and the sun shone so strongly in her
eyes as she reached the gate that she had to put up her hand to shade
them, and for the moment could see nothing. Was that Mary so near the
gate? The figure was dark against the sunshine, which shone right into
Aunt Agatha's eyes, and made everything black between her and the light.
It came drifting as it were between her and the sun, like the phantom
ship in the mariner's vision. She gazed and did not see, and felt as if
a kind of insanity was taking possession of her. "Is it Mary?" she said,
in a trembling voice, and at the same moment _felt_ by something in the
air that it was not Mary. And then Aunt Agatha gave such a cry as
brought Peggy, and indeed all the household, in alarm to the door.
It was a woman who looked as old as Mary, and did not seem ever to have
been half so fair. She had a shawl drawn tightly round her shoulders, as
if she were cold, and a veil over her face. She was of a very thin
meagre form, with a kind of forlorn grace about her, as if she might
have been splendid under better conditions. Her eyes were hollow and
large, her cheek-bones prominent, her face worn out of all freshness,
and possessing only what looked like a scornful recollection of beauty.
The noble form had missed its development, the fine capabilities had
been checked or turned in a false direction. When Aunt Agatha uttered
that great cry which brought Peggy from the utmost depths of the house,
the new-comer showed no corresponding emotion. She said, "No; it is I,"
with a kind of bitter rather than affectionate meaning, and stood
stock-still before the gate, and not even made a movement to lift her
veil. Miss Seton made a tremulous rush forward to her, but she did not
advance to meet it; and when Aunt Agatha faltered and was likely to
fall, it was not the stranger's arm that interposed to save her. She
stood still, neither advancing nor going back. She read the shock, the
painful recognition, the reluctant certainty in Miss Seton's eye. She
was like the returning prodigal so far, but she was not content with his
position. It was no happiness for her to go home, and yet it ought to
have been; and she could not forgive her aunt for feeling the shock of
recognition. When she roused herself, after a moment, it was not because
she was pleased to come home, but because it occurred to her that it was
absurd to stand still and be stared at, and make a scene.
And when Peggy caught her mistress in her arms, to keep her from
falling, the stranger made a step forward and gave a hurried kiss, and
said, "It is I, Aunt Agatha. I thought you would have known me better. I
will follow you directly;" and then turned to take out her purse, and
give a shilling to the porter, who had carried her bag from the
station--which was a proceeding which they all watched in consternation,
as if it had been something remarkable. Winnie was still Winnie, though
it was difficult to realize that Mrs. Percival was she. She was coming
back wounded, resentful, remorseful to her old home; and she did not
mean to give in, nor show the feelings of a prodigal, nor gush forth
into affectionateness. To see her give the man the shilling brought Aunt
Agatha to herself. She raised her head upon Peggy's shoulder, and stood
upright, trembling, but self-restrained. "I am a silly old woman to be
so surprised," she said; "but you did not write to say what day we were
to expect you, my dear love."
"I did not write anything about it," said Winnie, "for I did not know.
But let me go in, please; don't let us stay here."
"Come in, my darling," said Aunt Agatha. "Oh, how glad, how thankful,
how happy I am, Winnie, my dear love, to see you again!"
"I think you are more shocked than glad," said Winnie; and that was all
she said, until they had entered the room where Miss Seton had just left
her maiden dreams. Then the wanderer, instead of throwing herself into
Aunt Agatha's kind longing arms, looked all round her with a strange
passionate mournfulness and spitefulness. "I don't wonder you were
shocked," she said, going up to the glass, and looking at herself in it.
"You, all just the same as ever, and such a change in me!"
"Oh, Winnie, my darling!" cried Aunt Agatha, throwing herself upon her
child with a yearning which was no longer to be restrained; "do you
think there can ever be any change in you to me? Oh, Winnie, my dear
love! come and let me look at you; let me feel I have you in my arms at
last, and that you have really come home."
"Yes, I have come home," said Winnie, suffering herself to be kissed. "I
am sure I am very glad that you are pleased. Of course Mary is still
here, and her children? Is she going to marry again? Are her boys as
tiresome as ever? Yes, thank you, I will take my things off--and I
should like something to eat. But you must not make too much of me, Aunt
Agatha, for I have not come only for a day."
"Winnie, dear, don't you know if it was for your good I would like to
have you for ever?" cried poor Aunt Agatha, trembling so that she could
scarcely form the words.
And then for a moment, the strange woman, who was Winnie, looked as if
she too was moved. Something like a tear came into the corner of her
eye. Her breast heaved with one profound, unnatural, convulsive swell.
"Ah, you don't know me now," she said, with a certain sharpness of
anguish and rage in her voice. Aunt Agatha did not understand it, and
trembled all the more; but her good genius led her, instead of asking
questions as she was burning to do, to take off Winnie's bonnet and her
shawl, moving softly about her with her soft old hands, which shook yet
did their office. Aunt Agatha did not understand it, but yet it was not
so very difficult to understand. Winnie was abashed and dismayed to find
herself there among all the innocent recollections of her youth--and she
was full of rage and misery at the remembrance of all her injuries, and
to think of the explanation which she would have to give. She was even
angry with Aunt Agatha because she did not know what manner of woman her
Winnie had grown--but beneath all this impatience and irritation was
such a gulf of wretchedness and wrong that even the unreasonableness
took a kind of miserable reason. She did well to be angry with herself,
and all the world. Her friends ought to understand the difference, and
see what a changed creature she was, without exacting the humiliation of
an explanation; and yet at the same time the poor soul in her misery was
angry to perceive that Aunt Agatha did see a difference. She suffered
her bonnet and shawl to be taken off, but started when she felt Miss
Seton's soft caressing hand upon her hair. She started partly because it
was a caress she was unused to, and partly that her hair had grown thin
and even had some grey threads in it, and she did not like _that_ change
to be observed; for she had been proud of her pretty hair, and taken
pleasure in it as so many women do. She rose up as she felt that touch,
and took the shawl which had been laid upon a chair.
"I suppose I can have my old room," she said. "Never mind coming with me
as if I was a visitor. I should like to go upstairs, and I ought to know
the way, and be at home here."
"It is not for that, my darling," said Aunt Agatha, with hesitation;
"but you must have the best room, Winnie. Not that I mean to make a
stranger of you. But the truth is one of the boys---- and then it is too
small for what you ought to have now."
"One of the boys--which of the boys?" said Winnie. "I thought you would
have kept my old room--I did not think you would have let your house be
overrun with boys. I don't mind where it is, but let me go and put my
things somewhere and make myself respectable. Is it Hugh that has my
room?"
"No,--Will," said Aunt Agatha, faltering; "I could change him, if you
like, but the best room is far the best. My dear love, it is just as it
was when you went away. Will! Here is Will. This is the little one that
was the baby--I don't think that you can say he is not changed."
"Not so much as I am," said Mrs. Percival, under her breath, as turning
round she saw the long-limbed, curious boy, with his pale face and
inquiring eyes, standing in the open window. Will was not excited, but
he was curious; and as he looked at the stranger, though he had never
seen her before, his quick mind set to work on the subject, and he put
two and two together and divined who it was. He was not like her in
external appearance--at least he had never been a handsome boy, and
Winnie had still her remains of wasted beauty--but yet perhaps they were
like each other in a more subtle, invisible way. Winnie looked at him,
and she gave her shoulders a shrug and turned impatiently away. "It must
be a dreadful nuisance to be interrupted like that, whatever you may be
talking about," she said. "It does not matter what room I am to have,
but I suppose I may go upstairs?"
"My dear love, I am waiting for you," said poor Aunt Agatha, anxiously.
"Run, Will, and tell your mother that my dear Winnie has come home. Run
as fast as ever you can, and tell her to make haste. Winnie, my darling,
let me carry your shawl. You will feel more like yourself when you have
had a good rest; and Mary will be back directly, and I know how glad she
will be."
"Will she?" said Winnie; and she looked at the boy and heard him receive
his instructions, and felt his quick eyes go through and through her.
"He will go and tell his mother the wreck I am," she said to herself,
with bitterness; and felt as if she hated Wilfrid. She had no children
to defend and surround her, or even to take messages. No one could say,
referring to her, "Go and tell your mother." It was Mary that was well
off, always the fortunate one, and for the moment poor Winnie felt as if
she hated the keen-eyed boy.
Will, for his part, went off to seek his mother, leaving Aunt Agatha to
conduct her dear and welcome, but embarrassing and difficult, guest
upstairs. He did not run, nor show any symptoms of unnecessary haste,
but went along at a very steady, leisurely way. He was so far like
Winnie that he did not see any occasion for disturbing himself much on
account of other people. He went to seek Mrs. Ochterlony with his hands
in his pockets, and his mind working steadily on the new position of
affairs. Why this new-comer should have arrived so unexpectedly? why
Aunt Agatha should look so anxious, and helpless, and confused, as if,
notwithstanding her love, she did not know what to do with her visitor?
were questions which exercised all Will's faculties. He walked up to his
mother, who was coming quietly along the road from the village, and
joined her without disturbing himself. "Aunt Agatha sent me to look for
you," he said, and turned with her towards the Cottage in the calmest
way.
"I am afraid she thought I was late," said Mary.
"It was not that," said Will. "Mrs. Percival has just come, so far as I
could understand, and she sent me to tell you."
"Mrs. Percival?" cried Mary, stopping short. "Whom do you mean? Not
Winnie? Not my sister? You must have made some mistake."
"I think it was. It looked like her," said Will, in his calm way.
Mary stood still, and her breath seemed to fail her for the moment; she
had what the French call a _serrement du coeur_. It felt as if some
invisible hand had seized upon her heart and compressed it tightly; and
her breathing failed, and a chill went through her veins. The next
moment her face flushed with shame and self-reproach. Could she be
thinking of herself and any possible consequences, and grudging her
sister the only natural refuge which remained to her? She was incapable
for the moment of asking any further questions, but went on with a
sudden hasty impulse, feeling her head swim, and her whole intelligence
confused. It seemed to Mary, for the moment, though she could not have
told how, as if there was an end of her peaceful life, of her comfort,
and all the good things that remained to her; a chill presentiment,
confounding and inexplicable, went to her heart; and at the same time
she felt utterly ashamed and horrified to be thinking of herself at all,
and not of poor Winnie, the returned wanderer. Her thoughts were so busy
and full of occupation that she had gone a long way before it occurred
to her to say anything to her boy.
"You say it looked like her, Will," she began at last, taking up the
conversation where she had left off; "tell me, what did she look like?"
"She looked just like other women," said Will; "I didn't remark any
difference. As tall as you, and a sort of a long nose. Why I thought it
looked like her, was because Aunt Agatha was in an awful way."
"What sort of a way?" cried Mary.
"Oh, well, I don't know. Like a hen, or something--walking round her,
and looking at her, and cluck-clucking; and yet all the same as if she'd
like to cry."
"And Winnie," said Mrs. Ochterlony, "how did she look?--that is what I
want most to know."
"Awfully bored," said Will. He was so sometimes himself, when Aunt
Agatha paid any special attentions to him, and he said it with feeling.
This was almost all the conversation that passed between them as Mrs.
Ochterlony hurried home. Poor Winnie! Mary knew better than Miss Seton
did what a dimness had fallen upon her sister's bright prospects--how
the lustre of her innocent name had been tarnished, and all the
freshness and beauty gone out of her life; and Mrs. Ochterlony's heart
smote her for the momentary reference to herself, which she had made
without meaning it, when she heard of Winnie's return. Poor Winnie! if
the home of her youth was not open to her, where could she find refuge?
if her aunt and her sister did not stand by her, who would? and yet----
The sensation was altogether involuntary, and Mary resisted it with all
her might; but she could not help a sort of instinctive sense that her
peace was over, and that the storms and darkness of life were about to
begin again.
When she went in hurriedly to the drawing-room, not expecting to see
anybody, she found, to her surprise, that Winnie was there, reclining in
an easy chair, with Aunt Agatha in wistful and anxious attendance upon
her. The poor old lady was hovering about her guest, full of wonder, and
pain, and anxious curiosity. Winnie as yet had given no explanation of
her sudden appearance. She had given no satisfaction to her perplexed
and fond companion. When she found that Aunt Agatha did not leave her,
she had come downstairs again, and dropped listlessly into the easy
chair. She wanted to have been left alone for a little, to have realized
all that had befallen her, and to feel that she was not dreaming, but
was actually in her own home. But Miss Seton would have thought it the
greatest unkindness, the most signal want of love and sympathy, and all
that a wounded heart required, to leave Winnie alone. And she was glad
when Mary came to help her to rejoice over, and overwhelm with kindness,
her child who had been lost and was found.
"It is your dear sister, thank God!" she cried, with tears. "Oh, Mary!
to think we should have her again; to think she should be here after so
many changes! And our own Winnie through it all. She did not write to
tell us, for she did not quite know the day----"
"I did not know things would go further than I could bear," said Winnie,
hurriedly. "Now Mary is here, I know you must have some explanation. I
have not come to see you; I have come to escape, and hide myself. Now,
if you have any kindness, you won't ask me any more just now. I came
off last night because he went too far. There! that is why I did not
write. I thought you would take me in, whatever my circumstances might
be."
"Oh, Winnie, my darling! then you have not been happy?" said Aunt
Agatha, tearfully clasping Winnie's hands in her own, and gazing
wistfully into her face.
"Happy!" she said, with something like a laugh, and then drew her hand
away. "Please, let us have tea or something, and don't question me any
more."
It was then only that Mary interposed. Her love for her sister was not
the absorbing love of Aunt Agatha; but it was a wiser affection. And she
managed to draw the old lady away, and leave the new-comer to herself
for the moment. "I must not leave Winnie," Aunt Agatha said; "I cannot
go away from my poor child; don't you see how unhappy and suffering she
is? You can see after everything yourself, Mary, there is nothing to do;
and tell Peggy----"
"But I have something to say to you," said Mary, drawing her reluctant
companion away, to Aunt Agatha's great impatience and distress. As for
Winnie, she was grateful for the moment's quiet, and yet she was not
grateful to her sister. She wanted to be alone and undisturbed, and yet
she rather wanted Aunt Agatha's suffering looks and tearful eyes to be
in the same room with her. She wanted to resume the sovereignty, and be
queen and potentate the moment after her return; and it did not please
her to see another authority, which prevailed over the fascination of
her presence. But yet she was glad to be alone. When they left her, she
lay back in her chair, in a settled calm of passion which was at once
twenty times more calm than their peacefulness, and twenty times more
passionate than their excitement. She knew whence she came, and why she
came, which they did not. She knew the last step which had been too far,
and was still tingling with the sense of outrage. She had in her mind
the very different scene she had left, and which stood out in flaming
outlines against the dim background of this place, which seemed to have
stopped still just where she left it, and in all these years to have
grown no older; and her head began to steady a little out of the whirl.
If he ventured to seek her here, she would turn to bay and defy him. She
was too much absorbed by active enmity, and rage, and indignation, to be
moved by the recollections of her youth, the romance that had been
enacted within these walls. On the contrary, the last exasperation which
had filled her cup to overflowing was so much more real than anything
that followed, that Aunt Agatha was but a pale ghost to Winnie,
flitting dimly across the fiery surface of her own thoughts; and this
calm scene in which she found herself, almost without knowing how, felt
somehow like a pasteboard cottage in a theatre, suddenly let down upon
her for the moment. She had come to escape and hide herself, she said,
and that was in reality what she intended to do; but at the same time
the thought of living there, and making the change real, had never
occurred to her. It was a sudden expedient, adopted in the heat of
battle; it was not a flight for her life.
"She has come back to take refuge with us, the poor darling," said Aunt
Agatha. "Oh, Mary, my dear love, don't let us be hard upon her! She has
not been happy, you heard her say so, and she has come home; let me go
back to Winnie, my dear. She will think that we are not glad to see her,
that we don't sympathize---- And oh, Mary, her poor dear wounded heart!
when she looks upon all the things that surrounded her, when she was so
happy!----"
And Mary could not succeed in keeping the tender old lady away, nor
stilling the thousand questions that bubbled from her kind lips. All she
could do was to provide for Winnie's comfort, and in her own person to
leave her undisturbed. And the night fell over a strangely disquieted
household. Aunt Agatha could not tell whether to cry for joy or
distress, whether to be most glad that Winnie had come home, or most
concerned and anxious how to account for her sudden arrival, and keep up
appearances, and prevent the parish from thinking that anything
unpleasant had happened. In Winnie's room there was such a silent tumult
of fury, and injury, and active conflict, as had never existed before
near Kirtell-side. Winnie was not thinking, nor caring where she was;
she was going over the last battle from which she had fled, and
anticipating the next, and instead of making herself wretched by the
contrast of her former happiness, felt herself only, as it were, in a
painted retirement, no more real than a dream. What was real was her own
feelings, and nothing else on earth. As for Mary, she too was strangely,
and she thought ridiculously affected by her sister's return. She tried
to explain to herself that except for her natural sympathy for Winnie,
it affected her in no other way, and was indignant, with herself for
dwelling upon a possible derangement of domestic peace, as if that could
not be guarded against, or even endured if it came about. But nature was
too strong for her. It was not any fear for the domestic peace that
moved her; it was an indescribable conviction that this unlooked-for
return was the onslaught signal for a something lying in wait--that it
was the touch of revolution, the opening of the flood-gates--and that
henceforward her life of tranquil confidence was over, and that some
mysterious trouble which she could not at present identify, had been let
loose upon her, let it come sooner or later, from that day.