"Perhaps neither you nor I are fair judges, Winifred. You naturally
think of Anthony, whom you have known all your life, and I think of
Margaret Hare. Remember that her child was in all justice the heir, and
remember what the poor mother has suffered."
"O, I remember!" said Winifred, recovering herself, and standing
upright, with the full light of the sky in her face; "and I remember,
too, who it was that spoke to old Mr Tregennas for the child. It is
only I who recollect at all, I think. And it seems to me that there is
little use in knowing people all one's life long, as you say, if that
knowledge falls away into doubt the instant our trust in them is tried.
If you believe this story, Mr Mannering, pray let me be the person to
tell him. I may meet him now; at any rate, I am sure to have an
opportunity."
"As you like," Mr Robert said, gravely. "Good by, my dear. I am
afraid there is pain in store for us all."
But, although he was the first to say good by, it was Winifred who left
him standing by the gate watching her, as she went resolutely along with
a quickened step, and the light still on her face.
"True woman, true woman, she will not fail him," said Mr Robert to
himself, shaking his head sadly. "Poor boy, I can't think of him
without being sorry from the bottom of my heart, and yet it was an evil
thing to do to Margaret Hare's child. I wish Pitt had not told us--I
wish--"
And then he turned and went back again.
Winifred walked swiftly on for about half a mile, slackening her pace as
she became aware that she was going too fast, and trying to lose the
consciousness that she had come here to meet Anthony Miles, for it was
only when the pitiful feeling was very strong in her heart that it
overcame a secret repugnance, and every now and then this last grew into
a kind of startled shyness.
Presently she heard wheels, and saw the pony-carriage coming towards her
with Anthony driving. Her first impulse was to nod and smile, and pass
on as if the meeting were accidental, but the next moment she was
ashamed of its prompting, and stood still bravely. Ah, how strange it
was that she should need any bravery where Anthony was concerned! It
evidently pleased him that she should have stopped, for it was with a
radiant countenance that he drew up and jumped out, and asked what had
brought her so far from Thorpe.
"He should not have asked," thought poor Winifred. Then she found he
was preparing to send oh James with the carriage, and to walk back with
her.
"If you will let me?" he said questioningly.
"I should like it," Winifred said, so eagerly that he brightened still
more. It struck both of them with a pleasant sense of warmth that they
two should be walking alone together through the lanes. It was winter,
but Anthony thought there was plenty of colour and brightness, and
perhaps Winifred's red cloak had something to do with it. As for her,
after the gleam of those few delicious moments, the dull weight of what
she had to say came back with depressing heaviness. Anthony's
good-humour and lightness of heart added a hundredfold to the difficulty
of her task; yet, time was passing, and she felt with terror that each
step brought them nearer to Thorpe. She was always deficient in the
feminine art of doubling upon her subject, and in this hour of need it
seemed as if she were duller than ever. Anthony, however, knowing
nothing of her inward strife, was quite content with Winifred's softness
and kindness; he talked gayly--more gayly than he had talked since the
Vicar's death--of what he had been doing in London.
"I think I see my way to some satisfactory work at last," he said.
"Shall you live in London, do you mean?" asked Winifred, thinking not of
London, but of nearer things.
"One must, you know," Anthony said slowly. And yet, although he had
been dissatisfied with Thorpe of late, he said these words with a
strange reluctance in his heart. "It is necessary to be in the midst of
things. This place is so far off."
"Trenance is let, is it not?" Winifred was plunging nervously into her
subject.
"Yes, and, oddly enough, to a relation of old Lucas. You remember old
Lucas, don't you? I wonder what this Sir Somebody Somebody is like, and
whether it runs in the family to wear your hat at the back of your
head."
And so he went on. It seemed to Winifred, poor child, as if he had
never talked so fast or so brightly, and all the while, though, as I
have said, that thing which she had to tell lay like a cruel weight upon
her heart, there was also a secret joy, a delight in this return of free
confidence, a feeling as though the happiness which had once seemed
possible were possible again. Anthony, too, had vague thoughts
stirring. He was pleased at Winifred's walking back with him, at her
little concession; for of late he had declared angrily that she was
cold, changed, variable. He was too much taken up with his satisfaction
to see her wistful looks, or to guess how her heart ached with the
thought that it was she herself who must embitter these quickly passing
moments. Already she was wasting time dangerously. They had reached
the gate where Winifred and Mr Robert had stood and looked across the
meadows. The transient glow which had so beautified the common things
was gone, a grey gloom had crept over the snowy clouds, everything lay
stretched in a bare, flat level; it seemed no more than a dull land of
hedges and ditches, with a few ugly poplars and insignificant hills.
Anthony laughed at Winifred a little for stopping to look at them, but
indeed she felt as if she needed the bar of the gate by which to hold,
so strange a tremor had seized upon her. She glanced at him with the
hope that he would see that something was wrong and question her, for it
seemed to her as if her face must tell the tale alone; but he talked on
happily, until Winifred interrupted him with sudden abruptness.
"Anthony," she said, "do you know that there is a cruel report abroad
about you?"
Her heart beat so fast that she could hardly speak, and yet her voice
sounded in her own ears harsh and unfeeling.
"A report?" said Anthony inquiringly. He began to wonder whether she
could have heard what had been told him a few days ago, that he was
engaged to Miss Milman. It might be unlike Winifred to speak in this
fashion, but a man is often egotist enough to forget these
impossibilities, and he folded his arms on the bar of the gate, and
laughed and looked round with a pleasant anticipation of fault-finding.
Winifred kept her face turned from him, and went on nervously.
"They say that Mr Tregennas wanted to have changed his will at the
last, and to have left half his fortune to his granddaughter--"
Something choked her voice. Anthony looked at her and gave a little
whistle of astonishment. "Then why on earth did he not?"
"They say that he wrote to you to tell you his desire, placing the
matter entirely in your hands, and requesting that if you decided
against it,"--she left out his father's name, fearing to seem irreverent
to the dead,--"you would take no notice of the letter; and they say--"
He interrupted her here sharply.
"They! Whom do you mean by they?"
"Mr Pitt," said Winifred in a low voice, after a moment's hesitation.
"Mr Pitt says that you sent Mr Tregennas no answer."
"So they believe that, do they?" he said in a jarred voice.
Winifred could not answer. Her heart was too full of pity and pain for
her to speak. She held by the bar of the gate, and saw blankly lying
before her the wintry fields, the tall, expressionless poplars. Anthony
put another question in a moment, in the same coldly restrained tone.
"How do they account for my sharing the property with Marmaduke?"
"Anthony, do not force me to repeat such folly."
"I must hear."
"It is so absurd!" said Winifred, keenly ashamed, and trying to laugh.
"They say Marmaduke discovered the secret, and to avoid its becoming
known you consented to--to--"
"Let him share the spoils. I see. Has Mr Pitt returned to London?"
"I believe so. A word from you will set it right."
"It should never have been wrong," he said bitterly. "After what you
have said I must get home to catch the post. Good by. You don't mind
walking back alone? Indeed, it doesn't seem as if my company would do
you much credit."
He was gone almost before she heard, and a cold desolation crept over
her as she stood still, turning her back upon the little network of
fields, and watched him striding away along the muddy lane. What a
fierceness there had been in his last words! What a sense of separation
he had left behind him! It had required all her resolution to take this
task upon her, and it was cruel that it should thus recoil upon herself;
a sense of injustice must have stirred her into indignation, had it not
been for the womanly tenderness which at once turned it aside with
compassionate excuses. No wonder that the very breath of such an
accusation should have angered him; no wonder that his first thought
should have been to hurry to refute it; no wonder, ah, no wonder, that
he should forget her.
She little thought that it was wrath instead of forgetfulness which was
uppermost in Anthony's mind as he splashed through little innocent pools
of water with angry steps. Like most reserved men, he was exceeding
impatient of reserve in others, and he wanted her to have protested her
disbelief in the slander which had met him, while such a protest would
have seemed a positive insult to Winifred, who had never dreamed of
doubting him. Her words had given him a terrible blow, and the charge
was quickly fermented by his imagination into a distorted form.
Conscious that he had not sought the old man's favour, that it had been
hateful to him to replace Marmaduke, that he was even now setting
inquiries after Ellen Harford on foot, he was accused, nevertheless, of
committing what he called a crime to gain this fortune to which he was
indifferent. I am not defending his manner of receiving the accusation.
If he had been a hero it would have been very different; but, so far as
one sees, heroes seldom leap into the world in complete armour; they are
more likely to grow out of trials and temptations, yes, out of many a
slip and fall, in which they seem to be beaten down and overwhelmed.
Anthony had the stuff in him which would bear the furnace, although
there were little overgrowths hiding its goodness; he had a ready
generosity, high imaginings, longings to better the world; but these
were the very feelings upon which such an accusation came like a stream
of icy water. If people ceased to believe in him, he felt as if he
could believe in nothing.
As he went quickly through Thorpe, he held aloof from the people, but
noticed them jealously, fancying he could read meanings in their faces
of which, it is needless to say, they were guiltless. Ill report of a
man flies fast, but this was not the sort of report to gain wings
quickly, for if any of the people heard it, to what did it amount? To
the fact that before Mr Tregennas died he put it to Mr Anthony whether
or not he should change his will. "A'd ha' bin a big fule for's pains
if a'd said a wudd," would have been the heaviest verdict that Anthony
could have received from their lips.
But we place our own thoughts in other people's hearts, and so Anthony
heard a hundred unspoken things on his way through Thorpe.