Chapter Fourteen.“Our life is but a chain of many deaths.”Young.For a few days things went on to all outward intents as if the letter which Marmaduke destroyed had never existed. Once or twice he had a feeling as if it were indeed nothing more than a dream through which he had passed, for the act struck himself as so unlike his usual languid easy-going nature, that even to him there was an unreality mingled with it, and he was inclined at all events to compassionate himself for the crisis which had forced anything so repugnant upon him. On the sixth day there arrived a telegram announcing Mr Tregennas’s death.Mr Miles, Anthony, and Marmaduke started at once. A sort of restraint had grown up between the two young men, which was, perhaps, although it began only by reflection, more perceptible in Anthony’s manner than in that of Marmaduke, for the former was at all times quickly conscious of the feelings of others towards himself, and apt to throw them back. He was sensitive, moreover, to external influences; there was heavy rain falling, a damp chill in the air, and, as they drove down the road towards Trenance through woods in which the wild garlic was beginning to scent the air, the mournfully heavy drip of the rain through scantily clothed trees, the coarse sodden grass, the dreary moss-grown little paths that led away as it seemed into some dismal wilderness, the house with its shut and blinded windows lying under a pall of low clouds, deepened the disturbed expression of his face. No one spoke after they left the station. The carriage that had been sent for them, with its old moth-eaten cushions, rolled slowly along, the coachman not thinking very kindly of his load: a probable heir can scarcely expect a welcome from old servants who have grown fat and masterful under the weakened hands of age. The place had always seemed oppressed with a weight of silence, but now, as they drove up, the very wheels jarred upon the excessive stillness, broken only by the ceaseless dripping of the rain. Nevertheless, Marmaduke’s spirits rose as soon as he found himself in the house; and while Anthony, with a pale and troubled face, flung himself down in the dreary drawing-room, which looked uglier and more uninviting than ever, he went about from room to room, only avoiding that which an awful Presence guarded. It was Mr Miles who went there first, and when he came down again he held a little miniature in his hand.“It was found under his pillow,” he said. “There is Margaret Hare, as she must have been in the old days before the unhappy quarrel. It makes me hope that he may, after all, have remembered her child.”“I shall go up to him,” said Anthony, starting up. He had a shrinking from the sight of death and all painful things, but at this moment he could only remember the old man who had been kind to him after his fashion. “Marmaduke, will you come?”“No,” said Marmaduke carelessly, “it can do no good now. You can tell me if anything has to be arranged, and I will see about it.”He spoke with an easy assumption of authority, which stirred Anthony’s anger. All that Marmaduke said or did seemed to jar upon him, upon the time, the quiet, the sadness; for, after all, although there is not so much to stir our sympathy, perhaps no death can be so sad as that of a forlorn and unlovely old age.There were no relations to come to the house; all the orders were given by Mr Pitt, Mr Tregennas’s lawyer, a little withered red-faced man with shrewd eyes, who was there when they arrived, and who kept himself in the library, away from them all, until the day of the funeral. Perhaps a more silent four could hardly have been found than the men who were gathered in the old damp house, although with Marmaduke the silence was rather compulsion than choice. Anthony was very grave and subdued. When the funeral came they were all together almost for the first time, rumbling along the desolate overgrown road, with two or three empty carriages crawling behind them, which had been sent by the neighbours with a vague belief that it was an easy method of doing honour to the dead. The rain was falling still as they all rumbled back again, and gathered in the library to hear Mr Pitt read the will. It was soon done. A few annuities were bequeathed to the old servants, five thousand pounds free of legacy duty to his great-nephew, Marmaduke Lee, and the remainder, half in entail and half unreservedly, to the great-nephew of his second wife, Anthony Miles. William Miles, clerk, was appointed executor.Mr Pitt’s monotonous reading was interrupted by Marmaduke Lee, with a white, quivering face,—“I protest against such a will as a fraud. I can prove it to be a fraud,” he cried, lifting his hand and letting it fall tremulously on the table.Anthony neither turned towards him nor moved. Mr Miles said, a little hurriedly,—“When Mr Pitt has finished, my son has something to say.”The lawyer, looking quietly from one to the other, took up his sing-song again, and went on as if there had been no break. Marmaduke had shrunk into his chair like a man who had received a heavy blow, his very passion was too weak to support him at this crisis, he scarcely heard the formal words running on in set rounded phrases: what he did hear at last was Mr Miles asking,—“Is there no mention whatever of Miss Harford in the will?”“There is nothing more than you have heard me read,” said Mr Pitt, in his dry voice.The name seemed to recall Marmaduke’s senses, and a rush of rage stimulated him to burst out again,—“It is false, and a lie! Anthony has taken advantage of his dotage. I will dispute every word of it.”Anthony looked at him with a contemptuous darkness in his face, which it was not pleasant to see, but he held his voice under repression as he bent forward, folding his arms on the table, and saying slowly,—“Dr Evans is the person to testify whether or not Mr Tregennas was in the full possession of his senses. It was only a fortnight before his death that I received a hint of his intentions, which were as unwelcome to me as to Lee. I had fixed this very day for coming here to urge my objections. No one could have thought it would all have ended so soon,” said the young fellow, with his lips quivering. “All that I can do is to make over to Lee that part of the property which is at my own disposal,—not because of his words, but because he has a better right to it than I.”Sometimes people get small thanks for large acts of generosity, and in this case it is possible that Marmaduke was too stupefied or too sullen for gratitude, Mr Pitt might have said something, but he only glanced at Anthony with his shrewd eyes, and gathered and tied up his packets silently. There was a chill about the whole business which struck keenly on Anthony, who liked to be generous, but who also liked acknowledgments, warm words, and hearty looks: he got up quickly and went out of the room, leaving his father to settle what remained.As for Marmaduke, it was not easy for his mind at that moment to grasp the fact that things were not so crushing as he had dreaded. What might have seemed much to him at another time now seemed nothing, and he hated Anthony so much that his gift was an intolerable load. Was it for this that he had done the wrong? For, after all, however cunningly a man may disguise his sin beforehand, the disguise is but a poor helpless thing that falls off when it has served the Devil’s turn, and leaves what it covered hideous. It was only before he opened the letter that he had tried to deceive himself with dreams of fairness to Anthony. Ever since it had been scourging him. And now a fierce rage was uppermost.He went back to Thorpe the next morning alone, Mr Miles and his son finding it necessary to remain and set matters in train, and before he went he forced himself to say some ungracious words to Anthony about his gift. Perhaps it would have been better had he gone away in silence, for the words were not likely to do much towards healing the breach: they were said, however, and the Vicar and Anthony stood at the door and watched the carriage toiling away up the drive. The sky was a soft dazzle of blue, everything was shooting and sprouting after the rain, colours seemed full of light, there were young creatures leaping and running, a spring glory brightening the ugly old house.“It is almost a pity that it should be let,” said Mr Miles, standing on the steps with his hands behind him.“I could not live here,” Anthony answered, shrugging his shoulders.There was a little silence. The Vicar was looking after the carriage, and not really thinking much about the house. He said at last, slowly,—“I don’t much like the spirit he has shown.”“It can’t be helped,” said Anthony, without much cordiality. “I don’t suppose he can do me any particular harm.”“Harm!” repeated Mr Miles, startled. Then, as his son did not reply, he said, sighing, “I am thinking of poor Marion.”“She can be married now as soon as she likes, I suppose,” said Anthony shortly, turning away and going into the house. He was not feeling much of that sweet sense of satisfaction which is held up to us as bringing a quick reward for our good actions: he had behaved more generously towards his cousin than ninety-nine men out of a hundred might have done, but his generosity did not tend to make him ignorant of this fact, and he had expected a certain reward which had not come. Mr Pitt’s manner had chilled him as much as Marmaduke’s. He would have resented the imputation that he was dependent upon external influences, yet there was a certain side of his character which seemed almost at their mercy, and a fortress is no stronger than its weakest point. If he made over the fortune to Marmaduke as an act of justice, it is certain that his mode of receiving it should have made no difference in Anthony’s determination; nevertheless, at this moment he half repented, and perhaps would have undone it if he could.Mr Miles stood where his son had left him, looking sadly up the road along which Marmaduke had but now driven. Something, which was so indefinable that only a woman might have noticed it, seemed to have changed his face and his whole bearing ever since the day in which he had spoken to Marion in his study: the shadow of a shade had now and then, as it were, just touched him and passed, but during the last few days it had rested longer. He was conscious of it himself, yet it was so little beyond a vague something that he was inclined to smile at his own fancifulness. Rousing himself at last, although with another sigh, he went slowly down the steps and round to the front of the house, instead of going into the library, where there were papers and accounts to be looked over. Anthony was right. Marion might marry if she pleased, now that there was enough money to make things easy to them. And yet with the thought the shadow deepened.For two days, however, he said nothing. But one evening when Anthony, who had cast off some of his vexation, was planning changes in the estate before it passed into the hands of tenants, his father remarked slowly,—“I think I shall go home to-morrow. Something ails me, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps your mother will find out.”“Do you mean that you feel ill?” Anthony asked, looking up hastily.“No, I don’t mean anything of the sort I have no more to say about it than just what I have said, so you need not alarm yourself. But I shall go, and you can either remain behind or run down again next week.”“My mother will set you to rights, sir,” said Anthony cheerfully.“Yes. And Marion. And Marion,” repeated the Vicar with a little absence of manner.“I’ll go back with you, and come down again, as you suggest,” his son went on. “I should like to put two or three things straight before the place is let. There must be a clean sweep of a good deal.”“Yes, yes,” said Mr Miles, half impatient, half smiling, “your young man’s idea of a reformer is a Briareus with a broom in each hand. It’s lucky we don’t all get treated in that fashion. Well, let me see your plans.”Father and son went home the next day, as the Vicar desired, and the shadow passed,—or so it seemed. It might have been Mrs Miles’s little doctorings, or the return to the old routine of habit, which had grown into a second self; at any rate, the Vicar was apparently as well as he had been during the long years of his residence at Thorpe Regis, nor was there anything to distract his wife’s interest from Marion’s wedding when that took place a little later. No one could give any reason for delay strong enough to weigh down the girl’s impetuous demand; that her father and Anthony felt a vague uneasiness was not sufficient to do more than perhaps excite her to a determined attitude of defiance. To outward eyes there was everything that a wedding should have, youth and love, sunshine, roses in the old garden, smiles, brightness. Yet it was not all smooth. Marmaduke was restless, and his easy temper every now and then broke down in fits of irritation, while there was a visible restraint between himself and Anthony. Mr Miles was grave and sad throughout the day. After it was over, and Anthony had walked up to Hardlands to dinner, taking with him the few Vicarage guests, his father stood in the drawing-room in a manner altogether unlike himself, and looked wistfully at his wife.“We have been happy together, Hannah,” he said slowly.Mrs Miles’s eyes filled with tears at this sudden appeal.“Very happy, William.”“You have been a good wife,—it would be better perhaps if poor Marion were more like you. Somehow, I don’t feel so sure about things now,—I forget—”“Forget? I am always forgetting,” said Mrs Miles consolingly. “I am sure you don’t lose your spectacles half so often as I do, and where they are now is more than I can really say. But it has all gone off as well as possible.”“I wish I knew Marmaduke better.”“My dear, when you have seen him since he was no higher than the table!”“Poor Marion! Poor child!”“She is quite happy,” said the mother, nodding her head sagaciously. “I only warned her to take care that he has plenty of beef-tea, for he is sadly thin.”The door was pushed open, and Sniff came running in, looking for Marion. Somebody had tied a white favour round his neck, of which nothing was left but a little ragged strip of ribbon. He had followed Anthony to Hardlands, and not finding Marion there or here, flung himself exhausted at Mr Miles’s feet, with a piteous look of entreaty in his faithful eyes. The Vicar stooped and patted him.“Is she gone, poor fellow—” he said.What stopped the words?—What spring of life suddenly failed?—Was it the shadow, after all, no longer shadowy, but a presence, a reality? Mrs Miles, running to him with a cry, caught him in her faithful arms, and held him by an almost supernatural strength from falling forward on his face.“William, William!”The servants in the kitchen heard the cry though he did not, and flocked in, Anthony was sent for, another messenger despatched to Underham for the doctor. All the doctors in the world could do him no good, but Mrs Miles would not believe it as she sat by the bed where he was lying.“He was so well, Anthony, all the morning. And I think Marion’s wedding made him remember our own, for do you know what he said just before? ‘We have been very happy together, Hannah,’ he said. I must tell him when he is better that I did not say half enough.”I think the words have been told by this time like so many other of those unspoken words which wait for our utterance, but he did not hear them then. No more sounds apparently reached his ear where he lay silent and motionless while the days passed slowly by, carrying his moments with them, until the last came, when they scarcely expected it, as quiet and gentle as his life had been throughout.
“Our life is but a chain of many deaths.”Young.
“Our life is but a chain of many deaths.”Young.
For a few days things went on to all outward intents as if the letter which Marmaduke destroyed had never existed. Once or twice he had a feeling as if it were indeed nothing more than a dream through which he had passed, for the act struck himself as so unlike his usual languid easy-going nature, that even to him there was an unreality mingled with it, and he was inclined at all events to compassionate himself for the crisis which had forced anything so repugnant upon him. On the sixth day there arrived a telegram announcing Mr Tregennas’s death.
Mr Miles, Anthony, and Marmaduke started at once. A sort of restraint had grown up between the two young men, which was, perhaps, although it began only by reflection, more perceptible in Anthony’s manner than in that of Marmaduke, for the former was at all times quickly conscious of the feelings of others towards himself, and apt to throw them back. He was sensitive, moreover, to external influences; there was heavy rain falling, a damp chill in the air, and, as they drove down the road towards Trenance through woods in which the wild garlic was beginning to scent the air, the mournfully heavy drip of the rain through scantily clothed trees, the coarse sodden grass, the dreary moss-grown little paths that led away as it seemed into some dismal wilderness, the house with its shut and blinded windows lying under a pall of low clouds, deepened the disturbed expression of his face. No one spoke after they left the station. The carriage that had been sent for them, with its old moth-eaten cushions, rolled slowly along, the coachman not thinking very kindly of his load: a probable heir can scarcely expect a welcome from old servants who have grown fat and masterful under the weakened hands of age. The place had always seemed oppressed with a weight of silence, but now, as they drove up, the very wheels jarred upon the excessive stillness, broken only by the ceaseless dripping of the rain. Nevertheless, Marmaduke’s spirits rose as soon as he found himself in the house; and while Anthony, with a pale and troubled face, flung himself down in the dreary drawing-room, which looked uglier and more uninviting than ever, he went about from room to room, only avoiding that which an awful Presence guarded. It was Mr Miles who went there first, and when he came down again he held a little miniature in his hand.
“It was found under his pillow,” he said. “There is Margaret Hare, as she must have been in the old days before the unhappy quarrel. It makes me hope that he may, after all, have remembered her child.”
“I shall go up to him,” said Anthony, starting up. He had a shrinking from the sight of death and all painful things, but at this moment he could only remember the old man who had been kind to him after his fashion. “Marmaduke, will you come?”
“No,” said Marmaduke carelessly, “it can do no good now. You can tell me if anything has to be arranged, and I will see about it.”
He spoke with an easy assumption of authority, which stirred Anthony’s anger. All that Marmaduke said or did seemed to jar upon him, upon the time, the quiet, the sadness; for, after all, although there is not so much to stir our sympathy, perhaps no death can be so sad as that of a forlorn and unlovely old age.
There were no relations to come to the house; all the orders were given by Mr Pitt, Mr Tregennas’s lawyer, a little withered red-faced man with shrewd eyes, who was there when they arrived, and who kept himself in the library, away from them all, until the day of the funeral. Perhaps a more silent four could hardly have been found than the men who were gathered in the old damp house, although with Marmaduke the silence was rather compulsion than choice. Anthony was very grave and subdued. When the funeral came they were all together almost for the first time, rumbling along the desolate overgrown road, with two or three empty carriages crawling behind them, which had been sent by the neighbours with a vague belief that it was an easy method of doing honour to the dead. The rain was falling still as they all rumbled back again, and gathered in the library to hear Mr Pitt read the will. It was soon done. A few annuities were bequeathed to the old servants, five thousand pounds free of legacy duty to his great-nephew, Marmaduke Lee, and the remainder, half in entail and half unreservedly, to the great-nephew of his second wife, Anthony Miles. William Miles, clerk, was appointed executor.
Mr Pitt’s monotonous reading was interrupted by Marmaduke Lee, with a white, quivering face,—
“I protest against such a will as a fraud. I can prove it to be a fraud,” he cried, lifting his hand and letting it fall tremulously on the table.
Anthony neither turned towards him nor moved. Mr Miles said, a little hurriedly,—
“When Mr Pitt has finished, my son has something to say.”
The lawyer, looking quietly from one to the other, took up his sing-song again, and went on as if there had been no break. Marmaduke had shrunk into his chair like a man who had received a heavy blow, his very passion was too weak to support him at this crisis, he scarcely heard the formal words running on in set rounded phrases: what he did hear at last was Mr Miles asking,—
“Is there no mention whatever of Miss Harford in the will?”
“There is nothing more than you have heard me read,” said Mr Pitt, in his dry voice.
The name seemed to recall Marmaduke’s senses, and a rush of rage stimulated him to burst out again,—
“It is false, and a lie! Anthony has taken advantage of his dotage. I will dispute every word of it.”
Anthony looked at him with a contemptuous darkness in his face, which it was not pleasant to see, but he held his voice under repression as he bent forward, folding his arms on the table, and saying slowly,—
“Dr Evans is the person to testify whether or not Mr Tregennas was in the full possession of his senses. It was only a fortnight before his death that I received a hint of his intentions, which were as unwelcome to me as to Lee. I had fixed this very day for coming here to urge my objections. No one could have thought it would all have ended so soon,” said the young fellow, with his lips quivering. “All that I can do is to make over to Lee that part of the property which is at my own disposal,—not because of his words, but because he has a better right to it than I.”
Sometimes people get small thanks for large acts of generosity, and in this case it is possible that Marmaduke was too stupefied or too sullen for gratitude, Mr Pitt might have said something, but he only glanced at Anthony with his shrewd eyes, and gathered and tied up his packets silently. There was a chill about the whole business which struck keenly on Anthony, who liked to be generous, but who also liked acknowledgments, warm words, and hearty looks: he got up quickly and went out of the room, leaving his father to settle what remained.
As for Marmaduke, it was not easy for his mind at that moment to grasp the fact that things were not so crushing as he had dreaded. What might have seemed much to him at another time now seemed nothing, and he hated Anthony so much that his gift was an intolerable load. Was it for this that he had done the wrong? For, after all, however cunningly a man may disguise his sin beforehand, the disguise is but a poor helpless thing that falls off when it has served the Devil’s turn, and leaves what it covered hideous. It was only before he opened the letter that he had tried to deceive himself with dreams of fairness to Anthony. Ever since it had been scourging him. And now a fierce rage was uppermost.
He went back to Thorpe the next morning alone, Mr Miles and his son finding it necessary to remain and set matters in train, and before he went he forced himself to say some ungracious words to Anthony about his gift. Perhaps it would have been better had he gone away in silence, for the words were not likely to do much towards healing the breach: they were said, however, and the Vicar and Anthony stood at the door and watched the carriage toiling away up the drive. The sky was a soft dazzle of blue, everything was shooting and sprouting after the rain, colours seemed full of light, there were young creatures leaping and running, a spring glory brightening the ugly old house.
“It is almost a pity that it should be let,” said Mr Miles, standing on the steps with his hands behind him.
“I could not live here,” Anthony answered, shrugging his shoulders.
There was a little silence. The Vicar was looking after the carriage, and not really thinking much about the house. He said at last, slowly,—
“I don’t much like the spirit he has shown.”
“It can’t be helped,” said Anthony, without much cordiality. “I don’t suppose he can do me any particular harm.”
“Harm!” repeated Mr Miles, startled. Then, as his son did not reply, he said, sighing, “I am thinking of poor Marion.”
“She can be married now as soon as she likes, I suppose,” said Anthony shortly, turning away and going into the house. He was not feeling much of that sweet sense of satisfaction which is held up to us as bringing a quick reward for our good actions: he had behaved more generously towards his cousin than ninety-nine men out of a hundred might have done, but his generosity did not tend to make him ignorant of this fact, and he had expected a certain reward which had not come. Mr Pitt’s manner had chilled him as much as Marmaduke’s. He would have resented the imputation that he was dependent upon external influences, yet there was a certain side of his character which seemed almost at their mercy, and a fortress is no stronger than its weakest point. If he made over the fortune to Marmaduke as an act of justice, it is certain that his mode of receiving it should have made no difference in Anthony’s determination; nevertheless, at this moment he half repented, and perhaps would have undone it if he could.
Mr Miles stood where his son had left him, looking sadly up the road along which Marmaduke had but now driven. Something, which was so indefinable that only a woman might have noticed it, seemed to have changed his face and his whole bearing ever since the day in which he had spoken to Marion in his study: the shadow of a shade had now and then, as it were, just touched him and passed, but during the last few days it had rested longer. He was conscious of it himself, yet it was so little beyond a vague something that he was inclined to smile at his own fancifulness. Rousing himself at last, although with another sigh, he went slowly down the steps and round to the front of the house, instead of going into the library, where there were papers and accounts to be looked over. Anthony was right. Marion might marry if she pleased, now that there was enough money to make things easy to them. And yet with the thought the shadow deepened.
For two days, however, he said nothing. But one evening when Anthony, who had cast off some of his vexation, was planning changes in the estate before it passed into the hands of tenants, his father remarked slowly,—
“I think I shall go home to-morrow. Something ails me, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps your mother will find out.”
“Do you mean that you feel ill?” Anthony asked, looking up hastily.
“No, I don’t mean anything of the sort I have no more to say about it than just what I have said, so you need not alarm yourself. But I shall go, and you can either remain behind or run down again next week.”
“My mother will set you to rights, sir,” said Anthony cheerfully.
“Yes. And Marion. And Marion,” repeated the Vicar with a little absence of manner.
“I’ll go back with you, and come down again, as you suggest,” his son went on. “I should like to put two or three things straight before the place is let. There must be a clean sweep of a good deal.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr Miles, half impatient, half smiling, “your young man’s idea of a reformer is a Briareus with a broom in each hand. It’s lucky we don’t all get treated in that fashion. Well, let me see your plans.”
Father and son went home the next day, as the Vicar desired, and the shadow passed,—or so it seemed. It might have been Mrs Miles’s little doctorings, or the return to the old routine of habit, which had grown into a second self; at any rate, the Vicar was apparently as well as he had been during the long years of his residence at Thorpe Regis, nor was there anything to distract his wife’s interest from Marion’s wedding when that took place a little later. No one could give any reason for delay strong enough to weigh down the girl’s impetuous demand; that her father and Anthony felt a vague uneasiness was not sufficient to do more than perhaps excite her to a determined attitude of defiance. To outward eyes there was everything that a wedding should have, youth and love, sunshine, roses in the old garden, smiles, brightness. Yet it was not all smooth. Marmaduke was restless, and his easy temper every now and then broke down in fits of irritation, while there was a visible restraint between himself and Anthony. Mr Miles was grave and sad throughout the day. After it was over, and Anthony had walked up to Hardlands to dinner, taking with him the few Vicarage guests, his father stood in the drawing-room in a manner altogether unlike himself, and looked wistfully at his wife.
“We have been happy together, Hannah,” he said slowly.
Mrs Miles’s eyes filled with tears at this sudden appeal.
“Very happy, William.”
“You have been a good wife,—it would be better perhaps if poor Marion were more like you. Somehow, I don’t feel so sure about things now,—I forget—”
“Forget? I am always forgetting,” said Mrs Miles consolingly. “I am sure you don’t lose your spectacles half so often as I do, and where they are now is more than I can really say. But it has all gone off as well as possible.”
“I wish I knew Marmaduke better.”
“My dear, when you have seen him since he was no higher than the table!”
“Poor Marion! Poor child!”
“She is quite happy,” said the mother, nodding her head sagaciously. “I only warned her to take care that he has plenty of beef-tea, for he is sadly thin.”
The door was pushed open, and Sniff came running in, looking for Marion. Somebody had tied a white favour round his neck, of which nothing was left but a little ragged strip of ribbon. He had followed Anthony to Hardlands, and not finding Marion there or here, flung himself exhausted at Mr Miles’s feet, with a piteous look of entreaty in his faithful eyes. The Vicar stooped and patted him.
“Is she gone, poor fellow—” he said.
What stopped the words?—What spring of life suddenly failed?—Was it the shadow, after all, no longer shadowy, but a presence, a reality? Mrs Miles, running to him with a cry, caught him in her faithful arms, and held him by an almost supernatural strength from falling forward on his face.
“William, William!”
The servants in the kitchen heard the cry though he did not, and flocked in, Anthony was sent for, another messenger despatched to Underham for the doctor. All the doctors in the world could do him no good, but Mrs Miles would not believe it as she sat by the bed where he was lying.
“He was so well, Anthony, all the morning. And I think Marion’s wedding made him remember our own, for do you know what he said just before? ‘We have been very happy together, Hannah,’ he said. I must tell him when he is better that I did not say half enough.”
I think the words have been told by this time like so many other of those unspoken words which wait for our utterance, but he did not hear them then. No more sounds apparently reached his ear where he lay silent and motionless while the days passed slowly by, carrying his moments with them, until the last came, when they scarcely expected it, as quiet and gentle as his life had been throughout.
Chapter Fifteen.When death brings other departures besides the one that is greatest, a hundred pangs may be added to its sadness. There is the leaving the old home, the uprooting of old ties,—a shock meets you at every turn. Mrs Miles felt so sharply the fear of these added troubles, that she implored Anthony with a wistful entreaty he could not resist to let her remain at Thorpe, and to move, at least for the present, into a house they called “the cottage,” about half a mile from the Vicarage. He agreed reluctantly, and because it seemed cruelty to his mother to oppose her at such a time. He himself disliked staying in the place, with their home no longer theirs; and his sorrow for his father was so great that he had almost an impatient longing to escape from a neighbourhood which was absolutely made up of associations. The Squire forgot all his little animosities with Anthony Miles, while the awe of standing by his old friends grave was fresh in his mind; but Anthony shrank from his homely attempts at consolation, as a man shrinks from the reopening of a wound. Even Winifred, whose sympathy was at once strong and delicate, found it difficult to show it. The little barrier which had reared itself between them did not fall away at her kind, womanly touch. Anthony was inclined to reject an attempt to share his sorrow,—almost to resent it. He wanted to escape, to try his wings, to make a career, and Mrs Miles promised to go with him to London; but her heart failed her, poor thing, whenever the time came, and he gave way to her wishes, meaning his own to have their way by and by.So one by one the new things which had seemed so strange subsided into ordinary life. Marmaduke and Marion were living in one of the midland counties. A new vicar came to Thorpe,—a short, bustling man, in all respects a contrast to Mr Miles. But it was a peculiarity of the place that even change seemed to lose its characteristics in the quiet little village; a certain dogged custom was too strong for it, or the climate was too sleepy. Little by little Mr Brent laid down his arms, accepted this anomaly, that habit, and things went on in much the same groove as in Mr Miles’s time, although Mr Brent was red-haired and energetic.In the winter a visitor came to Hardlands, an old friend of the Squire’s, and no less a person than Mr Pitt, Mr Tregennas’s lawyer. It took Anthony by surprise to meet him one day walking with the Squire, and the young man, who had been chafed by a certain dry, unsympathetic manner in the old lawyer, was not very cordial in his greeting.“So you knew Anthony Miles before?” said Mr Chester when they had parted. “Oh! ay! to be sure! I forgot you had to do with that queer affair of his uncle, or grandfather, or whoever he was, that died the other day.”“Who told you it was a queer affair?” said Mr Pitt, stopping short.“Who? Why, my own common-sense could do so much, I suppose. I always thought the boy a romantic young idiot, and it’s just the sort of thing I should have expected him to do,” replied the Squire with great pride.“Humph!”“I’ll say this for him, he hasn’t got any of those low mercantile notions half the young men of the present day bring out of their pockets cut and dried for use. They’ll be the ruin of the country, sir. Don’t talk to me about reductions and rotten administrations, and all the rest of it; the other’s the real evil, take my word.”“And you consider young Miles free from the prevailing passion?”“I consider he hasn’t that miserable, pettifogging spirit at his back, if that’s what you mean. You must have seen it for yourself. You haven’t many clients, I should say, that would knock off half a fortune to put things right, have you?”“No,” said Mr Pitt, thrusting his stick into a lump of red mud. “Certainly not many.”“There, that’s what I said. Generally there is some spur in the background before they do that sort of thing.”“Squire, you deserve to have been a lawyer.”“Ay, ay,” said Mr Chester, rubbing his hands in high glee, “that’s the way with you fellows; you think no one can see an inch before his nose, except he’s one of yourselves. The worst of your trade is the confounded low opinion you get of human nature. I dare say the best you would say for young Miles was that he was a fool for his pains.”“Certainly not,” said Mr Pitt dryly. “A fool is the last thing I should have called him.”“Eh, what?” said Mr Chester, stopping suddenly, and looking at his companion with an expression of bewilderment. “What do you mean? Can’t you speak out? What on earth would you call him?”“A very prudent—scoundrel would be nearer the mark.”The effect upon the Squire was electrical. His face became crimson with anger.“Do you know what you are talking about, sir? Anthony Miles a scoundrel! Why, you’ll be saying I’m a scoundrel next! Anthony Miles!—a young fellow I’ve known since he was that high! It’s an insult, an insult to us all.—Are you mad, Pitt?” said the Squire, pulling himself up with a sudden attempt at self-control which nearly choked him.“No, I’m not mad, and I know all you have to say against it; but there are such unfortunate things as facts which outweigh everything else in the way of evidence. I’ve known you longer than you’ve known him, remember, and I’ve spoken out because I’ve heard a rumour that Mr Anthony Miles is desirous of marrying your daughter.”Mr Chester stared at him incredulously, and then burst into a laugh.“O, that’s one of your facts too, I suppose! Anthony many Winifred! Mercy on us, man, what cock-and-bull stories have you been picking up? Winifred and Anthony? They’ve played like brother and sister pretty nearly all their lives, and that’s enough for the gossips, no doubt. You’d better ask Winifred, and see what she’ll say.”“It is new to you, then?”“New to me? Ay, as new as it is to them, I’ll be bound. I’ll tell you what, Pitt, you’d better not let it out, but some sly rascal has been hocusing you, and done it neatly, too, uncommon neatly. Come, come, isn’t there a little more as good to tell me?” And the Squire, with all his good-humour restored, walked on, nodding to the children who came running up to make their courtesies.“Well, if that part of my information isn’t true, I’m glad of it,” said Mr Pitt, coolly. “I told you, if you recollect, that it was no more than a rumour. But as to my opinion of young Miles, I am sorry to say it does not rest upon anything so doubtful.”“You had better speak out,” said Mr Chester, fuming again, and striding on savagely. It was a very different matter to fall foul of the young man himself, and to hear this said of him in sober earnest, especially when he thought of a grave by which they had stood side by side not very long ago.“I intend to speak out, now I have said so much. All my relations with Mr Anthony Miles date only from one time—”“When he behaved as few young fellows would have behaved,” interrupted the Squire warmly.“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr Pitt, pointedly misapplying the words. “You are acquainted with the external features of the case, the bequest to the young man and his own subsequent division of the property?”“I am proud to say I am.”“You are also probably aware that there is a granddaughter of Mr Tregennas living, or presumed to be living, for whom he had refused to make any provision whatever?”“To Anthony’s excessive regret,” said Mr Chester, marching on bravely.“Those are your words, not mine.”“Well, are you going to say they are a lie?” broke out the Squire in a white heat again. “His father told me with his own lips that they had done their utmost with the old curmudgeon, and he was the truest-hearted gentleman that ever breathed, sir!”“Did his father tell you that, a week before his death, Mr Tregennas wrote to Anthony Miles, asking whether the Vicar would agree to half the fortune being made over to the grandchild, and—mark this—desiring him if he would not consent to take no notice of the letter?”“Well?” said the Squire, stopping.“Well.”“Can’t you do anything but repeat one’s words?” growled Mr Chester with something else between his teeth.“That is all.”“What is all?”“What I say. Mr Tregennas wrote that letter, and there the matter ended.”“Ended! Do you pretend to tell me there was no answer from Anthony?”“Never a word more. And that was enough for Mr Tregennas. It had been all I could do to work him up so far, and I confess,—though I was a fool not to know the world better at my time of life,—I confess I hoped there was a chance for poor Margaret’s girl when we had got him to that point.”“A chance!” stammered Mr Chester, as red and discomfited as if he had been the person accused. “Anthony would have jumped to give it to her, as I’ve told you already.”“So it seemed,” said the lawyer, dryly.“Confound you, man, but I tell you he would!”“I can only answer you by the facts of the case.”“But—I’ll ask him—you don’t know what you’re saying—my word for it, he never had that letter.”“I posted it myself. Besides, where is it? If there had been a non-delivery we should have heard by this time from the Dead-Letter Office. Pooh, pooh, Chester, the temptation was a little too strong, that’s the long and short of it, and, after all, no one pretends that there was any fraud. Mr Tregennas put the choice into his hands, and he had no doubt an absolute right to choose.”The Squire, who had thrust his hands into his pockets, was striding on at a pace with which his friend found it difficult to keep up. He gave a sort of groan when Mr Pitt finished his deliberate speech, and then stopped and turned suddenly upon him.“I tell you what, Pitt,” he said, setting his teeth. “If you weren’t who you are, I should like to—to—”“To kick me,” said the lawyer, coolly finishing the sentence. “I should not wonder. But considering who I am, and considering that I have certainly no personal animus against the young man,—what can you make of the story?”“Do you want me to say I think my old friend’s lad a villain? Good heavens, sir, and he was so proud of him!”Mr Pitt’s manner changed a little, losing some of the hard ease with which he had talked, as he began to understand the pain it cost the loyal-hearted Squire to receive his impressions. He said earnestly,—“You think too harshly of it, Chester, and perhaps I spoke too strongly. There is no villainy in the matter. Few young men would have had strength of moral purpose sufficient to resist such a temptation, and give up half a valuable property.”“But that is exactly what he has done,” broke in Mr Chester, quickly. “We’re forgetting all that. He has voluntarily disposed of half. It is sheer nonsense, Pitt. How can you account for such an act?”“Well, it has gone to his sister, which is a different business from losing it altogether. But I own to you that my own convictions point to a certain pressure having been brought to bear. I suspect that the secret was scented, and that this was the price of silence,—in fact, I may say that I put a question or two to young Lee, which proved pretty decidedly that he was acquainted with the contents of the letter. No other theory would explain his manner of receiving the gift, for he absolutely expressed no gratitude whatever.”It was evident that Mr Pitt’s quiet persistence was producing the effect it usually does produce upon violent people. The Squire looked like a man who has received a blow. He walked on silently for some time, then stopping at a gate, said,—“I think I’ll go across to Sanders’s farm; there’s a little business I want to speak to him about. You can’t miss Mannering’s house if you go straight forward.” He turned away as he spoke, but had not gone many paces before he strode back. “The boy’s father did not know a word of the matter, sir; of that I’ll stake my existence,” he said positively, and went off again without giving Mr Pitt time to answer.As the lawyer walked thoughtfully on towards the Red House, he acknowledged to himself that this conviction of the Squire’s was probably well grounded. Even to the eyes of a suspicious man, and Mr Pitt was partly from nature and partly from profession suspicious, the Vicar had carried that about him which made it very difficult to doubt his honour. It was quite possible that the contents of the letter had been withheld from him. But the other affair had resolved itself almost into certainty. When Mr Tregennas read to him the words he had just written, Mr Pitt had felt that it was putting human virtue to too severe a test; he half smiled at himself now for having been such a fool as to cherish a hope that the young man would be generous to Margaret Hare’s child at his own expense.
When death brings other departures besides the one that is greatest, a hundred pangs may be added to its sadness. There is the leaving the old home, the uprooting of old ties,—a shock meets you at every turn. Mrs Miles felt so sharply the fear of these added troubles, that she implored Anthony with a wistful entreaty he could not resist to let her remain at Thorpe, and to move, at least for the present, into a house they called “the cottage,” about half a mile from the Vicarage. He agreed reluctantly, and because it seemed cruelty to his mother to oppose her at such a time. He himself disliked staying in the place, with their home no longer theirs; and his sorrow for his father was so great that he had almost an impatient longing to escape from a neighbourhood which was absolutely made up of associations. The Squire forgot all his little animosities with Anthony Miles, while the awe of standing by his old friends grave was fresh in his mind; but Anthony shrank from his homely attempts at consolation, as a man shrinks from the reopening of a wound. Even Winifred, whose sympathy was at once strong and delicate, found it difficult to show it. The little barrier which had reared itself between them did not fall away at her kind, womanly touch. Anthony was inclined to reject an attempt to share his sorrow,—almost to resent it. He wanted to escape, to try his wings, to make a career, and Mrs Miles promised to go with him to London; but her heart failed her, poor thing, whenever the time came, and he gave way to her wishes, meaning his own to have their way by and by.
So one by one the new things which had seemed so strange subsided into ordinary life. Marmaduke and Marion were living in one of the midland counties. A new vicar came to Thorpe,—a short, bustling man, in all respects a contrast to Mr Miles. But it was a peculiarity of the place that even change seemed to lose its characteristics in the quiet little village; a certain dogged custom was too strong for it, or the climate was too sleepy. Little by little Mr Brent laid down his arms, accepted this anomaly, that habit, and things went on in much the same groove as in Mr Miles’s time, although Mr Brent was red-haired and energetic.
In the winter a visitor came to Hardlands, an old friend of the Squire’s, and no less a person than Mr Pitt, Mr Tregennas’s lawyer. It took Anthony by surprise to meet him one day walking with the Squire, and the young man, who had been chafed by a certain dry, unsympathetic manner in the old lawyer, was not very cordial in his greeting.
“So you knew Anthony Miles before?” said Mr Chester when they had parted. “Oh! ay! to be sure! I forgot you had to do with that queer affair of his uncle, or grandfather, or whoever he was, that died the other day.”
“Who told you it was a queer affair?” said Mr Pitt, stopping short.
“Who? Why, my own common-sense could do so much, I suppose. I always thought the boy a romantic young idiot, and it’s just the sort of thing I should have expected him to do,” replied the Squire with great pride.
“Humph!”
“I’ll say this for him, he hasn’t got any of those low mercantile notions half the young men of the present day bring out of their pockets cut and dried for use. They’ll be the ruin of the country, sir. Don’t talk to me about reductions and rotten administrations, and all the rest of it; the other’s the real evil, take my word.”
“And you consider young Miles free from the prevailing passion?”
“I consider he hasn’t that miserable, pettifogging spirit at his back, if that’s what you mean. You must have seen it for yourself. You haven’t many clients, I should say, that would knock off half a fortune to put things right, have you?”
“No,” said Mr Pitt, thrusting his stick into a lump of red mud. “Certainly not many.”
“There, that’s what I said. Generally there is some spur in the background before they do that sort of thing.”
“Squire, you deserve to have been a lawyer.”
“Ay, ay,” said Mr Chester, rubbing his hands in high glee, “that’s the way with you fellows; you think no one can see an inch before his nose, except he’s one of yourselves. The worst of your trade is the confounded low opinion you get of human nature. I dare say the best you would say for young Miles was that he was a fool for his pains.”
“Certainly not,” said Mr Pitt dryly. “A fool is the last thing I should have called him.”
“Eh, what?” said Mr Chester, stopping suddenly, and looking at his companion with an expression of bewilderment. “What do you mean? Can’t you speak out? What on earth would you call him?”
“A very prudent—scoundrel would be nearer the mark.”
The effect upon the Squire was electrical. His face became crimson with anger.
“Do you know what you are talking about, sir? Anthony Miles a scoundrel! Why, you’ll be saying I’m a scoundrel next! Anthony Miles!—a young fellow I’ve known since he was that high! It’s an insult, an insult to us all.—Are you mad, Pitt?” said the Squire, pulling himself up with a sudden attempt at self-control which nearly choked him.
“No, I’m not mad, and I know all you have to say against it; but there are such unfortunate things as facts which outweigh everything else in the way of evidence. I’ve known you longer than you’ve known him, remember, and I’ve spoken out because I’ve heard a rumour that Mr Anthony Miles is desirous of marrying your daughter.”
Mr Chester stared at him incredulously, and then burst into a laugh.
“O, that’s one of your facts too, I suppose! Anthony many Winifred! Mercy on us, man, what cock-and-bull stories have you been picking up? Winifred and Anthony? They’ve played like brother and sister pretty nearly all their lives, and that’s enough for the gossips, no doubt. You’d better ask Winifred, and see what she’ll say.”
“It is new to you, then?”
“New to me? Ay, as new as it is to them, I’ll be bound. I’ll tell you what, Pitt, you’d better not let it out, but some sly rascal has been hocusing you, and done it neatly, too, uncommon neatly. Come, come, isn’t there a little more as good to tell me?” And the Squire, with all his good-humour restored, walked on, nodding to the children who came running up to make their courtesies.
“Well, if that part of my information isn’t true, I’m glad of it,” said Mr Pitt, coolly. “I told you, if you recollect, that it was no more than a rumour. But as to my opinion of young Miles, I am sorry to say it does not rest upon anything so doubtful.”
“You had better speak out,” said Mr Chester, fuming again, and striding on savagely. It was a very different matter to fall foul of the young man himself, and to hear this said of him in sober earnest, especially when he thought of a grave by which they had stood side by side not very long ago.
“I intend to speak out, now I have said so much. All my relations with Mr Anthony Miles date only from one time—”
“When he behaved as few young fellows would have behaved,” interrupted the Squire warmly.
“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr Pitt, pointedly misapplying the words. “You are acquainted with the external features of the case, the bequest to the young man and his own subsequent division of the property?”
“I am proud to say I am.”
“You are also probably aware that there is a granddaughter of Mr Tregennas living, or presumed to be living, for whom he had refused to make any provision whatever?”
“To Anthony’s excessive regret,” said Mr Chester, marching on bravely.
“Those are your words, not mine.”
“Well, are you going to say they are a lie?” broke out the Squire in a white heat again. “His father told me with his own lips that they had done their utmost with the old curmudgeon, and he was the truest-hearted gentleman that ever breathed, sir!”
“Did his father tell you that, a week before his death, Mr Tregennas wrote to Anthony Miles, asking whether the Vicar would agree to half the fortune being made over to the grandchild, and—mark this—desiring him if he would not consent to take no notice of the letter?”
“Well?” said the Squire, stopping.
“Well.”
“Can’t you do anything but repeat one’s words?” growled Mr Chester with something else between his teeth.
“That is all.”
“What is all?”
“What I say. Mr Tregennas wrote that letter, and there the matter ended.”
“Ended! Do you pretend to tell me there was no answer from Anthony?”
“Never a word more. And that was enough for Mr Tregennas. It had been all I could do to work him up so far, and I confess,—though I was a fool not to know the world better at my time of life,—I confess I hoped there was a chance for poor Margaret’s girl when we had got him to that point.”
“A chance!” stammered Mr Chester, as red and discomfited as if he had been the person accused. “Anthony would have jumped to give it to her, as I’ve told you already.”
“So it seemed,” said the lawyer, dryly.
“Confound you, man, but I tell you he would!”
“I can only answer you by the facts of the case.”
“But—I’ll ask him—you don’t know what you’re saying—my word for it, he never had that letter.”
“I posted it myself. Besides, where is it? If there had been a non-delivery we should have heard by this time from the Dead-Letter Office. Pooh, pooh, Chester, the temptation was a little too strong, that’s the long and short of it, and, after all, no one pretends that there was any fraud. Mr Tregennas put the choice into his hands, and he had no doubt an absolute right to choose.”
The Squire, who had thrust his hands into his pockets, was striding on at a pace with which his friend found it difficult to keep up. He gave a sort of groan when Mr Pitt finished his deliberate speech, and then stopped and turned suddenly upon him.
“I tell you what, Pitt,” he said, setting his teeth. “If you weren’t who you are, I should like to—to—”
“To kick me,” said the lawyer, coolly finishing the sentence. “I should not wonder. But considering who I am, and considering that I have certainly no personal animus against the young man,—what can you make of the story?”
“Do you want me to say I think my old friend’s lad a villain? Good heavens, sir, and he was so proud of him!”
Mr Pitt’s manner changed a little, losing some of the hard ease with which he had talked, as he began to understand the pain it cost the loyal-hearted Squire to receive his impressions. He said earnestly,—
“You think too harshly of it, Chester, and perhaps I spoke too strongly. There is no villainy in the matter. Few young men would have had strength of moral purpose sufficient to resist such a temptation, and give up half a valuable property.”
“But that is exactly what he has done,” broke in Mr Chester, quickly. “We’re forgetting all that. He has voluntarily disposed of half. It is sheer nonsense, Pitt. How can you account for such an act?”
“Well, it has gone to his sister, which is a different business from losing it altogether. But I own to you that my own convictions point to a certain pressure having been brought to bear. I suspect that the secret was scented, and that this was the price of silence,—in fact, I may say that I put a question or two to young Lee, which proved pretty decidedly that he was acquainted with the contents of the letter. No other theory would explain his manner of receiving the gift, for he absolutely expressed no gratitude whatever.”
It was evident that Mr Pitt’s quiet persistence was producing the effect it usually does produce upon violent people. The Squire looked like a man who has received a blow. He walked on silently for some time, then stopping at a gate, said,—
“I think I’ll go across to Sanders’s farm; there’s a little business I want to speak to him about. You can’t miss Mannering’s house if you go straight forward.” He turned away as he spoke, but had not gone many paces before he strode back. “The boy’s father did not know a word of the matter, sir; of that I’ll stake my existence,” he said positively, and went off again without giving Mr Pitt time to answer.
As the lawyer walked thoughtfully on towards the Red House, he acknowledged to himself that this conviction of the Squire’s was probably well grounded. Even to the eyes of a suspicious man, and Mr Pitt was partly from nature and partly from profession suspicious, the Vicar had carried that about him which made it very difficult to doubt his honour. It was quite possible that the contents of the letter had been withheld from him. But the other affair had resolved itself almost into certainty. When Mr Tregennas read to him the words he had just written, Mr Pitt had felt that it was putting human virtue to too severe a test; he half smiled at himself now for having been such a fool as to cherish a hope that the young man would be generous to Margaret Hare’s child at his own expense.
Chapter Sixteen.“A very pitiful lady, very young,Exceeding rich in human sympathies.”Rosetti’sDante.The Squire was more utterly cast down by Mr Pitt’s communication than those would have thought possible who knew that Anthony Miles had never been a favourite of his. Perhaps a little touch of jealousy had given the first warp when he looked at the Vicar’s son and his own daughters, and had made him always hard upon the young fellow; but it was not a jealousy which could take pleasure in such a discovery as this. He was so cross and miserable throughout the day that Winifred felt sure something was the matter. Mr Pitt had left them; the evening was cold and stormy, a southwest gale was blowing, and the wind tore at the windows and howled drearily round the house. Winifred only waited until Bessie had gone to bed—a concession to years of half an hour against which that young lady nightly rebelled—before she asked her father what had happened, and whether Mr Pitt had brought any bad news.“Yes, he has,” said the Squire doggedly; “very bad news. It’s well the poor old Vicar should be dead and gone.”And then he told her.As he went bluntly through Mr Pitt’s account he once or twice looked curiously at her, for, in spite of his disclaimer, he could not help remembering that other hint which the lawyer had let drop, that Winifred was dear to Anthony. “If it is so, she’ll have hysterics or something; that’s how girls always show it.”To his relief, however, Winifred did not so much as utter an exclamation. If he had been quick to notice, he might have observed a little proud up-drawing of her head, and a sudden light in her eyes; but we are all apt to read only those signs for which we are on the lookout, and the Squire drew a long breath of relief.“What do you think of this?” he said, when he had finished.“Did Mr Pitt really tell you such an absurd story?” said Winifred, smiling.Her treating the matter lightly was unfortunate, for her father had been made so wretched all day that it irritated him to have it supposed that he was throwing away his sympathies; and his love of contradiction was such that every instinct of his nature arrayed him on the side that was assailed, so that he began at once to adopt Mr Pitt’s opinion as his own, to hasten to its defence, to run his thoughts more keenly over its possibilities. He flustered a little directly.“It’s very well for you to laugh, since you don’t understand anything at all about it. Is Pitt a likely man to concoct a bundle of lies?”“I don’t know, I am sure,” she said, looking at him with astonishment. “But you do not mean that anything he could say would make you believe such a story of Anthony?”“Well, explain it, explain it,” said the Squire grimly, “that’s all.”Winifred sat forward, and began to speak with more impetuosity.“That Anthony should—” she began, and then suddenly broke off and laughed outright. “It is so very ridiculous!” she said.“I don’t see the absurdity,” growled Mr Chester. “I don’t see how Pitt can be mistaken, or how Anthony can get over the thing. You women run away with your own opinions, without ever stopping to hear reason; but other people will put two and two together. It is a very bad business.”“It is exceedingly wrong of Mr Pitt to have dared to say such a thing,” said Winifred, standing up quickly, and looking very tall and stately; “but it can hurt Anthony no more than—than it could hurt you. He could explain it, of course, but I hope he will never hear that anything so cruel and untrue has been suggested. Good-night, papa. I am glad there is nothing really the matter.”She walked out of the room with the smile still on her lips and the backward curve of her slender throat a little more apparent. But those few words of opposition had done Anthony’s cause no good with the Squire. He repeated to himself that women were so obstinate there was no dealing with them, and while he fancied himself as grieved as ever, in his heart, I think there lurked a secret hope that Winifred might be forced to acknowledge herself in the wrong. He was not in the least aware of the petty obstacle which had turned the current, nor indeed would he have acknowledged that the current had been turned at all, but, no doubt, as he went over the array of presumptive evidence against Anthony, he weighted it in a manner which he had not done until this moment.As for Winifred, the smile died out of her face before she reached her own room. A bright fire was burning; she went to the window, threw back the shutter, and stood looking out into the wild darkness. There were furious gusts, strange depths of blackness, lights gleaming and vanishing in the direction of Underham, a sawing of branches one against the other, now and then distant and mysterious sounds, as if the rush and roar of the great sea itself were swelling the tumult. Nothing but fancy could have brought such a sound, but Winifred caught at it, and would not let it go. The swoop of the wind upon the water, the jagged tossed waves hurling themselves against the sandy bar, the wild shrieks of the night, the blackness, the confusion, here and there, perhaps, a concentration of the horror, lives going out in a last cry... she pressed her face against the panes, shuddering and praying for the poor souls. All this while there was something nearer to her which she was shutting out and trying to overwhelm by a more terrible distress. It was the strongest of the two, after all. She softly closed the shutters, turning away from the window with pitiful compunction in her heart, as if she were leaving poor drowning men out in the cold, and came and sat before the fire to think of Anthony. For, though she might smile at her father’s story, and a little smile again stole over the sweet grave face as she thought of the accusation, she knew Anthony well enough to dread the idea of its reaching his ears. There was no room now in her heart for pride, or for anything except a kind tenderness. That he did not care for her any longer, if indeed he had ever cared, she felt assured, and at this moment it seemed to her that she would not have had him care in such a sense, so long as they might be friends. Perhaps the very storm and darkness had something to do with this persuasion. When skies were soft, and the sun shining, and things bright about her, she too might have cried out for some share in the brightness and softness; but the grim earnestness of the night, a night for wrecks and disasters, and big with struggle and suffering, utterly shut out such joy of fair visions.She could not but reflect what such a report would cost Anthony if it should reach him, and how he, of all men, would suffer and writhe under it. Kindliness, love, and praise seemed so completely his natural food, that if they were withdrawn it was certain that he would droop and flag. With the thought, her first impression came strongly back that the accusation should at any cost be kept from his knowledge, but her own nature was too brave and high-minded for such an impression to linger. Better the open wound than the secret calamity; better that he should taste the sharpness even of disappointment than be dogged by a suspicion to which he could give no tangible shape; better, a hundred times better, know, and meet, and repel.But who should tell him?As she put the question to herself, she trembled a little with a perception that the answer was fall of personal pain. Names floated before her,—her father, the Mannerings, Mrs Miles,—but each suggestion carried a negative with it, although she paused longest at the thought of Mr Robert. He was kind-heartedness itself; at the same time, she felt as if such a telling required more delicate care than he would give—who would give it?—who would give it except herself? Winifred shrank and flushed Pride put out its prickles; but, after all, there was something so much stronger than pride in her heart, that it failed to conquer. The little impalpable bar that had sprung up between them was the harder to pass for its very impalpability, yet—if she could help him, only as his friend, with no touch of love to mar it, as she thought, unconscious that it was the highest and most divine love which she was offering, then pain of her own should not withhold her, nor even the added estrangement which her words might cause.The next morning she awoke with her determination unweakened. She would seek an opportunity, and tell him what slander he had to kill.
“A very pitiful lady, very young,Exceeding rich in human sympathies.”Rosetti’sDante.
“A very pitiful lady, very young,Exceeding rich in human sympathies.”Rosetti’sDante.
The Squire was more utterly cast down by Mr Pitt’s communication than those would have thought possible who knew that Anthony Miles had never been a favourite of his. Perhaps a little touch of jealousy had given the first warp when he looked at the Vicar’s son and his own daughters, and had made him always hard upon the young fellow; but it was not a jealousy which could take pleasure in such a discovery as this. He was so cross and miserable throughout the day that Winifred felt sure something was the matter. Mr Pitt had left them; the evening was cold and stormy, a southwest gale was blowing, and the wind tore at the windows and howled drearily round the house. Winifred only waited until Bessie had gone to bed—a concession to years of half an hour against which that young lady nightly rebelled—before she asked her father what had happened, and whether Mr Pitt had brought any bad news.
“Yes, he has,” said the Squire doggedly; “very bad news. It’s well the poor old Vicar should be dead and gone.”
And then he told her.
As he went bluntly through Mr Pitt’s account he once or twice looked curiously at her, for, in spite of his disclaimer, he could not help remembering that other hint which the lawyer had let drop, that Winifred was dear to Anthony. “If it is so, she’ll have hysterics or something; that’s how girls always show it.”
To his relief, however, Winifred did not so much as utter an exclamation. If he had been quick to notice, he might have observed a little proud up-drawing of her head, and a sudden light in her eyes; but we are all apt to read only those signs for which we are on the lookout, and the Squire drew a long breath of relief.
“What do you think of this?” he said, when he had finished.
“Did Mr Pitt really tell you such an absurd story?” said Winifred, smiling.
Her treating the matter lightly was unfortunate, for her father had been made so wretched all day that it irritated him to have it supposed that he was throwing away his sympathies; and his love of contradiction was such that every instinct of his nature arrayed him on the side that was assailed, so that he began at once to adopt Mr Pitt’s opinion as his own, to hasten to its defence, to run his thoughts more keenly over its possibilities. He flustered a little directly.
“It’s very well for you to laugh, since you don’t understand anything at all about it. Is Pitt a likely man to concoct a bundle of lies?”
“I don’t know, I am sure,” she said, looking at him with astonishment. “But you do not mean that anything he could say would make you believe such a story of Anthony?”
“Well, explain it, explain it,” said the Squire grimly, “that’s all.”
Winifred sat forward, and began to speak with more impetuosity.
“That Anthony should—” she began, and then suddenly broke off and laughed outright. “It is so very ridiculous!” she said.
“I don’t see the absurdity,” growled Mr Chester. “I don’t see how Pitt can be mistaken, or how Anthony can get over the thing. You women run away with your own opinions, without ever stopping to hear reason; but other people will put two and two together. It is a very bad business.”
“It is exceedingly wrong of Mr Pitt to have dared to say such a thing,” said Winifred, standing up quickly, and looking very tall and stately; “but it can hurt Anthony no more than—than it could hurt you. He could explain it, of course, but I hope he will never hear that anything so cruel and untrue has been suggested. Good-night, papa. I am glad there is nothing really the matter.”
She walked out of the room with the smile still on her lips and the backward curve of her slender throat a little more apparent. But those few words of opposition had done Anthony’s cause no good with the Squire. He repeated to himself that women were so obstinate there was no dealing with them, and while he fancied himself as grieved as ever, in his heart, I think there lurked a secret hope that Winifred might be forced to acknowledge herself in the wrong. He was not in the least aware of the petty obstacle which had turned the current, nor indeed would he have acknowledged that the current had been turned at all, but, no doubt, as he went over the array of presumptive evidence against Anthony, he weighted it in a manner which he had not done until this moment.
As for Winifred, the smile died out of her face before she reached her own room. A bright fire was burning; she went to the window, threw back the shutter, and stood looking out into the wild darkness. There were furious gusts, strange depths of blackness, lights gleaming and vanishing in the direction of Underham, a sawing of branches one against the other, now and then distant and mysterious sounds, as if the rush and roar of the great sea itself were swelling the tumult. Nothing but fancy could have brought such a sound, but Winifred caught at it, and would not let it go. The swoop of the wind upon the water, the jagged tossed waves hurling themselves against the sandy bar, the wild shrieks of the night, the blackness, the confusion, here and there, perhaps, a concentration of the horror, lives going out in a last cry... she pressed her face against the panes, shuddering and praying for the poor souls. All this while there was something nearer to her which she was shutting out and trying to overwhelm by a more terrible distress. It was the strongest of the two, after all. She softly closed the shutters, turning away from the window with pitiful compunction in her heart, as if she were leaving poor drowning men out in the cold, and came and sat before the fire to think of Anthony. For, though she might smile at her father’s story, and a little smile again stole over the sweet grave face as she thought of the accusation, she knew Anthony well enough to dread the idea of its reaching his ears. There was no room now in her heart for pride, or for anything except a kind tenderness. That he did not care for her any longer, if indeed he had ever cared, she felt assured, and at this moment it seemed to her that she would not have had him care in such a sense, so long as they might be friends. Perhaps the very storm and darkness had something to do with this persuasion. When skies were soft, and the sun shining, and things bright about her, she too might have cried out for some share in the brightness and softness; but the grim earnestness of the night, a night for wrecks and disasters, and big with struggle and suffering, utterly shut out such joy of fair visions.
She could not but reflect what such a report would cost Anthony if it should reach him, and how he, of all men, would suffer and writhe under it. Kindliness, love, and praise seemed so completely his natural food, that if they were withdrawn it was certain that he would droop and flag. With the thought, her first impression came strongly back that the accusation should at any cost be kept from his knowledge, but her own nature was too brave and high-minded for such an impression to linger. Better the open wound than the secret calamity; better that he should taste the sharpness even of disappointment than be dogged by a suspicion to which he could give no tangible shape; better, a hundred times better, know, and meet, and repel.
But who should tell him?
As she put the question to herself, she trembled a little with a perception that the answer was fall of personal pain. Names floated before her,—her father, the Mannerings, Mrs Miles,—but each suggestion carried a negative with it, although she paused longest at the thought of Mr Robert. He was kind-heartedness itself; at the same time, she felt as if such a telling required more delicate care than he would give—who would give it?—who would give it except herself? Winifred shrank and flushed Pride put out its prickles; but, after all, there was something so much stronger than pride in her heart, that it failed to conquer. The little impalpable bar that had sprung up between them was the harder to pass for its very impalpability, yet—if she could help him, only as his friend, with no touch of love to mar it, as she thought, unconscious that it was the highest and most divine love which she was offering, then pain of her own should not withhold her, nor even the added estrangement which her words might cause.
The next morning she awoke with her determination unweakened. She would seek an opportunity, and tell him what slander he had to kill.
Chapter Seventeen.“When adversities flowThen love ebbs; but friendship standeth stifflyIn storms.”Lilly.People, women especially, make resolutions sometimes with no more to back them up than a vague hope that they will be able to carry them out in some haphazard fashion. Winifred had almost offended Mrs Miles by the slackness of her visits to the cottage, and hardly knew whether Anthony were in Thorpe or not. She persuaded Bessie, however, to ride with her father, and, putting on her red cloak, went across the meadows, making a little spot of brightness in the midst of the quiet winter colouring.She walked through the village, lingering a little at the post-office, and afterwards going on towards Underham, simply from not knowing where else to turn. The rain had reduced the roads to thick mud, and strewn them with little twigs and branches, whipped from the trees by the violence of the storm. But, as not infrequently happens after these fierce gales, there was an exquisite beauty shining where lately the hurly-burly had raged. Instinctively Winifred stopped at a gate in the hedge to look at what was generally dull and uninteresting enough, a long stretch of flat meadows with low hills beyond. But the meadow was transfigured with a depth of colour; there were rich patches of indigo and russet, poplars lighting up the sober background with streaks of brown light, breadths of freshly turned earth, infinite traceries springing from dark stems, a delicate sky broken by soft shadows and round masses of living light, little pools of shining beautiful water left by the rains, hedges ruddy with crimson berries, a white horse, an old man leaning on his stick,—the picture was full of simple, homely grace.She was still looking at it when some one came along the road behind her. It was Mr Robert Mannering, and his first words connected themselves with her own purpose.“Have you seen Anthony Miles?” he asked. “He was to come down by this train, and I am particularly desirous to meet him.” Something that he saw in Winifred’s face made him add immediately, “So you have heard it, too?”“Does Anthony know?” asked the girl, without answering directly.Mr Robert’s kindly face looked grave and worried. He began to brush imaginary dust from his coat-sleeve,—an action in which he always took refuge under any annoyance.“If you mean the report,” he said, laying a little stress upon the last word, “I imagine that he does not. To tell you the truth, that is why I am here; for his father’s sake I am inclined to let him hear what is said.”Winifred flushed a little.“I do not know why you should say for his father’s sake,” she said at once. “I do not suppose that Anthony’s friends can have allowed a breath of this horrible story to affect them, so that their one wish must be to stand by him for his own sake.”She stopped and looked at Mr Mannering, who was silent.“Surely,” said Winifred impetuously, “Mr Pitt has not influenced you!”“My dear,” said Robert Mannering, looking out towards the low hills, and speaking with a little hesitation, “I think that Anthony had a difficult duty to perform—”“Yes, yes, go on,” said Winifred, trying to govern her voice.“And that he shrank from it.”She could no longer laugh as she had laughed the night before. A sickening feeling came over her. Was this lie actually living, spreading, destroying? Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. She lifted her hand in mute indignation.“You—his friend!—you believe that!”He was silent again, and then said slowly,—“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.
“When adversities flowThen love ebbs; but friendship standeth stifflyIn storms.”Lilly.
“When adversities flowThen love ebbs; but friendship standeth stifflyIn storms.”Lilly.
People, women especially, make resolutions sometimes with no more to back them up than a vague hope that they will be able to carry them out in some haphazard fashion. Winifred had almost offended Mrs Miles by the slackness of her visits to the cottage, and hardly knew whether Anthony were in Thorpe or not. She persuaded Bessie, however, to ride with her father, and, putting on her red cloak, went across the meadows, making a little spot of brightness in the midst of the quiet winter colouring.
She walked through the village, lingering a little at the post-office, and afterwards going on towards Underham, simply from not knowing where else to turn. The rain had reduced the roads to thick mud, and strewn them with little twigs and branches, whipped from the trees by the violence of the storm. But, as not infrequently happens after these fierce gales, there was an exquisite beauty shining where lately the hurly-burly had raged. Instinctively Winifred stopped at a gate in the hedge to look at what was generally dull and uninteresting enough, a long stretch of flat meadows with low hills beyond. But the meadow was transfigured with a depth of colour; there were rich patches of indigo and russet, poplars lighting up the sober background with streaks of brown light, breadths of freshly turned earth, infinite traceries springing from dark stems, a delicate sky broken by soft shadows and round masses of living light, little pools of shining beautiful water left by the rains, hedges ruddy with crimson berries, a white horse, an old man leaning on his stick,—the picture was full of simple, homely grace.
She was still looking at it when some one came along the road behind her. It was Mr Robert Mannering, and his first words connected themselves with her own purpose.
“Have you seen Anthony Miles?” he asked. “He was to come down by this train, and I am particularly desirous to meet him.” Something that he saw in Winifred’s face made him add immediately, “So you have heard it, too?”
“Does Anthony know?” asked the girl, without answering directly.
Mr Robert’s kindly face looked grave and worried. He began to brush imaginary dust from his coat-sleeve,—an action in which he always took refuge under any annoyance.
“If you mean the report,” he said, laying a little stress upon the last word, “I imagine that he does not. To tell you the truth, that is why I am here; for his father’s sake I am inclined to let him hear what is said.”
Winifred flushed a little.
“I do not know why you should say for his father’s sake,” she said at once. “I do not suppose that Anthony’s friends can have allowed a breath of this horrible story to affect them, so that their one wish must be to stand by him for his own sake.”
She stopped and looked at Mr Mannering, who was silent.
“Surely,” said Winifred impetuously, “Mr Pitt has not influenced you!”
“My dear,” said Robert Mannering, looking out towards the low hills, and speaking with a little hesitation, “I think that Anthony had a difficult duty to perform—”
“Yes, yes, go on,” said Winifred, trying to govern her voice.
“And that he shrank from it.”
She could no longer laugh as she had laughed the night before. A sickening feeling came over her. Was this lie actually living, spreading, destroying? Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. She lifted her hand in mute indignation.
“You—his friend!—you believe that!”
He was silent again, and then said slowly,—
“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.