Mr. Scarsdale had left his room and the house in a sudden flush of
impatience beyond bearing, as his son had imagined. The very idea of the
will to which Colonel Sutherland referred plainly in his letter was
maddening to the solitary man. He could not bear the name, much less any
discussion of this fatal document; and when he found himself constrained
to mention it in his own person, a violent and angry petulance
overpowered him; he dashed his pen to the ground, threw his paper into
the desk, and rushed out of doors into the spring air, which had no
softening effect upon him. Half consciously to himself, he had lived
with more freedom since the departure of his son, and felt himself
relieved of a certain clog upon his movements; and it was not now so
extraordinary an event as Horace had supposed that he should be out of
doors in daylight and sunshine. Mr. Scarsdale had strayed deep into the
moor in an opposite direction to Tillington, with thoughts even more
bitter than those of Horace--thoughts which the well-meant intervention
of the Colonel only raised to a passionate virulence. He, too, like his
son, scorned, with a deep contempt, the tender simplicity of the old
soldier, which neither of them comprehended; and coming back over that
desolate waste of moorland to see his own desolate house standing out
solitary and wistful in the bosom of the wilderness, Mr. Scarsdale
realized, with a bitter superiority, the kind of house which was likely
to call his brother-in-law master--the house full of warmth and
kindliness, at which he sneered dismally, with the disgust of an evil
spirit. The very desire which her uncle showed to have Susan with him
increased the scorn of Susan's father. What did he want the girl for? To
make an old man's pet of her, and amuse himself with the fondness of
dotage? Thus the recluse returned to his house to conclude his letter,
and to intimate, in words few and strong, as befitted his present
temper, his desire to receive no further "favours" in correspondence
from Colonel Sutherland. He went in unsuspicious, where there seemed
nothing to suspect, seeing, as he passed, Susan seated near the window
with her work on her knee, and her wistful young eyes gazing across the
moor. She had come in from her walk and her stolen interview with the
one sole companion whom she ever had any intercourse with. She was
leaning her head upon the pretty hand, which had dimpled into womanly
roundness and softness, thinking over some stray thoughts put into her
mind by the romantic Letty, and dispersing, with her own honest womanly
good sense, the boarding-school absurdities of the half-educated girl
whom Susan so devoutly believed to be her own superior; and perhaps
wondering a little wistfully, as girls will, when, if ever, her fate and
fortune would come to her over that blank of moorland. She was not
discontented, little as she had to content her; she was only a domestic
woman--a household creature; word of flattery or voice of compliment had
never sounded in her ears all her life. She could still brighten her
dull firmament not a little with a new pattern for her muslin work, or a
new story privately borrowed from Letty, though perhaps only out of the
Sunday School library, and nothing remarkable in point of literature;
but still wandering ideas will float into minds of nineteen, and eyes
that have grown weary even over a new pattern might be pardoned if they
searched the horizon with a little wistfulness, and wondered if nobody
ever would appear again on the purple blank of Lanwoth Moor.
Susan, at least, was thinking so secretly to herself when her father
entered, running over in her own mind the few, very few, people she had
ever known. She did not count the turnpikeman and his wife and children
upon the road, nor the chance cottager whom she knew by sight. But who
were the others? The Rector, and Letty's father, the poor Presbyterian
minister, the first of whom she had heard preach, and the latter had
spoken to her when she gave him a chance, which was seldom; Letty
herself, who was older now, and had ideas of lovers, and made Susan, a
little to her own confusion, shame, and amusement, her chosen
confidante; Uncle Edward, dearest of friends, whom, alas, it was like
enough she might never see again; and, yes--among so few it was
impossible to omit him--Mr. Roger, who had thrown the gipsy's husband
over the hedge, and had taken off his hat to her, and who was lost in
the distant world and unknown mists of life. Which of them had Susan a
chance of seeing across that moor? Nobody, poor child; not even the
postman, the one messenger of brightness to her life; for it was too
late for that emissary; but she sat at the window, with her work in one
hand, leaning her head upon the other; perhaps dreaming of some figure
which it would have lightened her heart to see, appearing in the evening
light on the road across the moor.
She was still seated thus, and the light was failing, giving an excuse
for her sweet wistful idleness and half melancholy mood of thought,
when Mr. Scarsdale suddenly flung open the door, and appeared, as he had
once appeared to his daughter before, swift and sudden as a wind, white
with passion, and lost in a fiery, silent excitement, which terrified
and shocked her. He came close up to her, with a long, noiseless stride,
and grasped her arm furiously: but for that grasp the man might have
been a ghost, with his shadowy, attenuated form, his long open
dressing-gown streaming behind him, his noiseless step, and face of
speechless passion. Not entirely speechless either, though he might as
well have been so for any meaning which she could comprehend in the
words which fell hissing and sharp on Susan's ears.
"Where is it?" he cried, shaking her whole frame with the fury of his
grasp--"where is it?--what have you done with it? Restore it instantly,
dishonourable fool! Do you think it is anything to you?"
"What, papa?" cried Susan, trembling, and drawing back unawares with a
shrinking of terror. It was a strange interruption of her innocent
girlish dreams.
"What!" he cried, holding her tighter--"what! Do you dare to ask me?
Restore it at once, or I shall be tempted to something beyond reason.
Child! idiot! do you think you can cheat me?"
Susan stood still in his hold, shaken by it, and trembling from head to
foot--but she shrank no more. "I have never cheated you in all my life,"
she said, raising her honest blue eyes to his face--that face which
scowled over hers with a devilish force of passion; was it possible that
there could be kindred or connection between the two?
He looked at her with a baffled rage, incomprehensible to Susan. "There
is neither man nor woman in the world, nor child either, who does not
lie to me and deceive me!" said Mr. Scarsdale. "Do you suppose I do not
know--do you think I have no eyes to see you smile over that old fool's
fondling letters? Give it up this moment, or I swear to you I will cast
you out of my house, and leave you to find your way to him as you can!
Give it up at once, I say!"
"Do you mean Uncle Edward's letter, papa?" asked Susan. "I will get it
this moment, if you will let me go; all of them, if you please."
But instead of letting her go, he grasped her pained arm more fiercely.
"You know what letter I mean," he said; "that letter which only a fool
could have written, and which I was a fool to think of answering. What
would you call the child who takes advantage of her father's absence to
go into his room and rob him of it? Was it for love of the writer?--was
it for your miserable brother's information?--or is it a common
amusement, which I have only found out because this was done too soon?
Thief! have you nothing to say?"
Susan drew herself out of her father's grasp with a boldness and force
altogether unprecedented in her, and grew red over brow, neck, and face.
"I am no thief--I will not be called so!" she said, in sudden
provocation; then falling as suddenly out of that unusual
self-assertion, she continued, trembling, "Papa, I have never entered
your room; I never went into it in my life except when you were there; I
never robbed you; I know nothing even of what you mean."
Her father looked at her closely, with a smile of disbelief and a fixed
offensive stare, which she could not tolerate. He did not attempt to lay
hands upon her, but stood only looking at her with eyes which were
incapable of perceiving truth or honesty, and saw only fraud and
falseness. "Where is the letter?" he said. Those sincere young eyes,
which everybody else in the world would have trusted, conveyed no
security to him.
Susan turned away from him, with a sudden outbreak of tears--tears of
mortified and passionate impatience. He was her father, in spite of the
small tenderness he showed her, and had a certain hold upon her habit of
domestic affection. She felt the injustice keenly enough, and she felt
still more keenly that his eyes were intolerable, and that she could not
bear them.
"I have no letter save those my uncle has sent me," she said,
indignantly, when she had overcome her emotion; "they are all here in
this box--I have no other. I can only repeat the same thing, papa, if
you should ask me a hundred times--I have no letter but these."
And Susan opened the pretty inlaid box, with its key hanging to it by a
bit of ribbon, which Uncle Edward had brought her, and which she had
appropriated, with a fanciful girlish affection, to hold his
letters--opened it hastily and threw out the little store upon the table
with trembling hands. Some trifling circumstance, perhaps the mere odour
of the sandal-wood which lined the box, recalling some subtle
association to him, produced a start and flush of angry colour on Mr.
Scarsdale's face. He thrust the little casket away with some muttered
words which Susan could not hear, but, even in spite of that touch of
nature, turned over with a cold suspicion the letters which it had
contained. Nothing like what he sought was there, of course; but he was
not convinced. No one else was in the house, or had been here--so far
as his knowledge went--save Peggy; even Susan did not know of her
brother's hurried visit, and Peggy was beyond suspicion, even to Mr.
Scarsdale;--his daughter, and she only, could be to blame.
"I know," he said, coldly, when he had scattered the good Colonel's
letters over the table, throwing them scornfully from him, "that my desk
has been opened and my papers stolen. You are clever in hiding, like all
women; but such an artifice cannot deceive me, when my loss is so
evident. Take this detestable thing away! the smell is suffocating," he
cried, with an interjection of rage, and once more pushing violently
from him the pretty box with its pungent odour. "But stay, understand me
first; it is late, and you are young; I will not turn you out upon the
moor to-night, little as you deserve my consideration; but if this
letter is not restored to me before to-morrow, nothing in the world will
prevent me expelling you from this house--do you hear? I will have no
thief under my roof. I perceive you are ready to cry, like all your
kind. Crying is a very good weapon with some people, but I assure you it
has no effect whatever on me."
Susan could not have answered for her life. She stood still, gazing at
him with her eyes dilated, a convulsive effort of pride keeping in her
tears, but a sob bursting in spite of her, from her suffocating breast.
There she still stood after he had left the room, speechless, labouring
to contain herself, even after the necessity for that effort was over.
But when she dropped at length into a chair, and yielded to the
hysterical passion of tears and sobbing which overpowered her, beneath
all her shame, mortification, and terror, a guilty gleam of joy which
frightened her shot through poor Susan's heart. She thought it guilty,
poor child. She was dismayed to feel that sudden pang of hope and
comfort breaking the sense of this calamity. To be expelled from her
father's house, cast out upon the moor and upon the world, with the
stigma upon her of having robbed and deceived him! She repeated over to
herself that accumulation of horrors, to extinguish this furtive and
unpermissible glow of secret hope, and cried bitterly over her own
wickedness when she found it inextinguishable; but even with that secret
and unsanctioned solace, the thought was miserable enough to her youth
and ignorance. To be turned away like a bad servant; to be called a
thief; to be driven from her father's house; Heaven preserve her! a
young girl alone and penniless--what could she do?