FRANCES went to Portland Place next day. She went with great reluctance, feeling that to be thus plunged into the atmosphere of the other side was intolerable. Had she been able to feel that there was absolute right on either side, it would not have been so difficult for her. But she knew so little of the facts of the case, and her natural prepossessions were so curiously double and variable, that every encounter was painful. To be swept into the faction of the other side, when the first impassioned sentiment with which she had felt her mother’s arms around her had begun to sink inevitably into that silent judgment of another individual’s ways and utterances which is the hindrance of reason to every enthusiasm—was doubly hard. She was resolute indeed that not a word or insinuation against her mother should be permitted in her presence. But she herself had a hundred little doubts and questions in her mind, traitors whose very existence no one must suspect but herself. Her natural revulsion from the thought of being forced into partisanship gave her a feeling of strong opposition and resistance against everything that might be said to her, when she stepped into the solemn house in Portland Place, where everything was so large, empty, and still, so different from her mother’s warm and cheerful abode. The manner in which her aunt met her strengthened this feeling. On their previous meeting, in Lady Markham’s presence, the greeting given her by Mrs Clarendon had chilled her through and through. She was ushered in now to the same still room, with its unused look, with all the chairs in their right places, and no litter of habitation about; but her aunt came to her with a different aspect from that which she had borne before. She came quickly, almost with a rush, and took the shrinking girl into her arms. “My dear little Frances, my dear child, my brother’s own little girl!” she cried, kissing her again and again. Her ascetic countenance was transfigured, her grey eyes warmed and shone.
Frances could not make any eager response to this warmth. She did her best to look the gratification which she knew she ought to have felt, and to return her aunt’s caresses with due fervour; but in her heart there was a chill of which she felt ashamed, and a sense of insincerity which was very foreign to her nature. All through these strange experiences, Frances felt herself insincere. She had not known how to respond even to her mother, and a cold sense that she was among strangers had crept in even in the midst of the bewildering certainty that she was with her nearest relations and in her mother’s house. In present circumstances, “How do you do, aunt Caroline?” was the only commonplace phrase she could find to say, in answer to the effusion of affection with which she was received.
“Now we can talk,” said Mrs Clarendon, leading her with both hands in hers to a sofa near the fire. “While my lady was here it was impossible. You must have thought me cold, when my heart was just running over to my dear brother’s favourite child. But I could not open my heart before her,—I never could do it. And there is so much to ask you. For though I would not let her know I had never heard, you know very well, my dear, I can’t deceive you. O Frances, why doesn’t he write? Surely, surely, he must have known I would never betray him—to her, or any of her race.”
“Aunt Caroline, please remember you are speaking of——”
“Oh, I can’t stand on ceremony with you! I can’t do it. Constance, that had been always with her, that was another thing. But you, my dear, dear child! And you must not stand on ceremony with me. I can understand you, if no one else can. And as for expecting you to love her and honour her and so forth, a woman whom you have never seen before, who has spoiled your dear father’s life——”
Frances had put up her hand to stay this flood, but in vain. With eyes that flashed with excitement, the quiet still grey woman was strangely transformed. A vivacious and animated person, when moved by passion, is not so alarming as a reserved and silent one. There was a force of fury and hatred in her tone and looks which appalled the girl. She interrupted almost rudely, insisting upon being heard, as soon as Mrs Clarendon paused for breath.
“You must not speak to me so; you must not—you shall not! I will not hear it.”
Frances was quiet too, and there was in her also the vehemence of a tranquil nature transported beyond all ordinary bounds.
Mrs Clarendon stopped and looked at her fixedly, then suddenly changed her tone. “Your father might have written to me,” she said—“he might have written to me. He is my only brother, and I am all that remains of the family, now that Minnie, poor Minnie, who was so much mixed up with it all, is gone. It was natural enough that he should go away. I always understood him, if nobody else did; but he might have trusted his own family, who would never, never have betrayed him. And to think that I should owe my knowledge of him now to that ill-grown, ill-conditioned—— O Frances, it was a bitter pill! To owe my knowledge of my brother and of you and everything about you to Markham—I shall never be able to forget how bitter it was.”
“You forget that Markham is my brother, aunt Caroline.”
“He is nothing of the sort. He is your half-brother, if you care to keep up the connection at all. But some people don’t think much of it. It is the father’s side that counts. But don’t let us argue about that. Tell me how is your father? Tell me all about him. I love you dearly, for his sake; but above everything, I want to hear about him. I never had any other brother. How is he, Frances? To think that I should never have seen or heard of him for twelve long years!”
“My father is—very well,” said Frances, with a sort of strangulation both in heart and voice, not knowing what to say.
“‘Very well!’ Oh, that is not much to satisfy me with, after so long! Where is he—and how is he living—and have you been a very good child to him, Frances? He deserves a good child, for he was a good son. Oh, tell me a little about him. Did he tell you everything about us? Did he say how fond and how proud we were of him? and how happy we used to be at home all together? He must have told you. If you knew how I go back to those old days! We were such a happy united family. Life is always disappointing. It does not bring you what you think, and it is not everybody that has the comfort we have in looking back upon their youth. He must have told you of our happy life at home.”
Frances had kept the secret of her father’s silence from every one who had a right to blame him for it. But here she felt herself to be bound by no such precaution. His sister was on his side. It was in his defence and in passionate partisanship for him that she had assailed the mother to the child. Frances had even a momentary angry pleasure in telling the truth without mitigation or softening. “I don’t know whether you will believe me,” she said, “but my father told me nothing. He never said a word to me about his past life or any one connected with him; neither you nor—any one.” Though she had the kindest heart in the world, and never had harmed a living creature, it gave Frances almost a little pang of pleasure to deliver this blow.
Mrs Clarendon received it, so to speak, full in the face, as she leaned forward, eagerly waiting for what Frances had to say. She looked at the girl aghast, the colour changing in her face, a sudden exclamation dying away in her throat. But after the first keen sensation, she drew herself together and regained her self-control. “Yes, yes,” she cried; “I understand. He could not enter into anything about us without telling you of—others. He was always full of good feeling—and so just! No doubt, he thought if you heard our side, you should hear the other. But when you were coming away—when he knew you must hear everything, what message did he give you for me?”
In sight of the anxiety which shone in her aunt’s eyes, and the eager bend towards her of the rigid straight figure not used to any yielding, Frances began to feel as if she were the culprit. “Indeed,” she said, hesitating, “he never said anything. I came here in ignorance. I never knew I had a mother till Constance came—nor any relations. I heard of my aunt for the first time from—mamma; and then to conceal my ignorance, I asked Markham; I wanted no one to know.”
It was some minutes before Mrs Clarendon spoke. Her eyes slowly filled with tears, as she kept them fixed upon Frances. The blow went very deep; it struck at illusions which were perhaps more dear than anything in her actual existence. “You heard of me for the first time from—— Oh, that was cruel, that was cruel of Edward,” she cried, clasping her hands together—“of me for the first time—and you had to ask Markham! And I, that was his favourite sister, and that never forgot him, never for a day!”
Frances put her own soft young hands upon those which her aunt wrung convulsively together in the face of this sudden pang. “I think he had tried to forget his old life altogether,” she said; “or perhaps it was because he thought so much of it that he could not tell me—I was so ignorant! He would have been obliged to tell me so much, if he had told me anything. Aunt Caroline, I don’t think he meant to be unkind.”
Mrs Clarendon shook her head; then she turned upon her comforter with a sort of indignation. “And you,” she said, “did you never want to know? Did you never wonder how it was that he was there, vegetating in a little foreign place, a man of his gifts? Did you never ask whom you belonged to, what friends you had at home? I am afraid,” she cried suddenly, rising to her feet, throwing off the girl’s hand, which had still held hers, “that you are like your mother in your heart as well as your face—a self-contained, self-satisfying creature. You cannot have been such a child to him as he had a right to, or you would have known all—all there was to know.”
She went to the fire as she spoke and took up the poker and struck the smouldering coals into a blaze with agitated vehemence, shivering nervously, with excitement rather than cold. “Of course that is how it is,” she said. “You must have been thinking of your own little affairs, and not of his. He must have thought he would have his child to confide in and rely upon—and then have found out that she was not of his nature at all, nor thinking of him; and then he would shut his heart close—oh, I know him so well! that is so like Edward—and say nothing, nothing! That was always easier to him than saying a little. It was everything or nothing with him always. And when he found you took no interest, he would shut himself up. But there’s Constance,” she cried after a pause—“Constance is like our side. He will be able to pour out his heart, poor Edward, to her; and she will understand him. There is some comfort in that, at least.”
If Frances had felt a momentary pleasure in giving pain, it was now repaid to her doubly. She sat where her aunt had left her, following with a quiver of consciousness everything she said. Ah, yes; she had been full of her own little affairs. She had thought of the mayonnaises, but not of any spiritual needs to which she could minister. She had not felt any wonder that a man of his gifts should live at Bordighera, or any vehemence of curiosity as to the family she belonged to, or what his antecedents were. She had taken it all quite calmly, accepting as the course of nature the absence of relations and references to home. She had known nothing else, and she had not thought of anything else. Was it her fault all through? Had she been a disappointment to her father, not worthy of him or his confidence? The tears gathered slowly in her eyes. And when Mrs Clarendon suddenly introduced the name of Constance, Frances, too, sprang to her feet with a sense of the intolerable, which she could not master. To be told that she had failed, might be bearable; but that Constance—Constance!—should turn out to possess all that she wanted, to gain the confidence she had not been able to gain, that was more than flesh and blood could bear. She sprang up hastily, and began with trembling hands to button up to her throat the close-fitting outdoor jacket which she had undone. Mrs Clarendon stood, her face lit up with the ruddy blaze of the fire, shooting out sharp arrows of words, with her back turned to her young victim; while Frances behind her, in as great agitation, prepared to bring the conference and controversy to a close.
“If that is what you think,” she said, her voice tremulous with agitation and pain, pulling on her gloves with feverish haste, “perhaps it will be better for me to go away.”
Mrs Clarendon turned round upon her with a start of astonishment. Through the semi-darkness of that London day, which was not much more than twilight through the white curtains, the elder woman looked round upon the girl, quivering with indignation and resentment, to whom she had supposed herself entitled to say what she pleased without fear of calling forth any response of indignation. When she saw the tremor in the little figure standing against the light, the agitated movement of the hands, she was suddenly brought back to herself. It flashed across her at once that the sudden withdrawal of Frances, whom she had welcomed so warmly as her brother’s favourite child, would be a triumph for Lady Markham, already no doubt very triumphant in the unveiling of her husband’s hiding-place and the recovery of the child, and in the fact that Frances resembled herself, and not the father. To let that enemy understand that she, Waring’s sister, could not secure the affection of Waring’s child, was something which Mrs Clarendon could not face.
“Go—where?” she said. “You forget that you have come to spend the day with me. My lady will not expect you till the evening; and I do not suppose you can wish to expose your father’s sister to her remarks.”
“My mother,” said Frances with an almost sob of emotion, “must be more to me than my father’s sister. Oh, aunt Caroline,” she cried, “you have been very, very hard upon me. I lived as a child lives at home till Constance came, I had never known anything else. Why should I have asked questions? I did not know I had a mother. I thought it was cruel, when I first heard; and now you say it was my fault.”
“It must have been more or less your fault. A girl has no right to be so simple. You ought to have inquired; you ought to have given him no rest; you ought——”
“I will tell you,” said Frances, “what I was brought up to do: not to trouble papa; that was all I knew from the time I was a baby. I don’t know who taught me—perhaps Mariuccia, perhaps, only—everything. I was not to trouble him, whatever I did. I was never to cry, nor even to laugh too loud, nor to make a noise, nor to ask questions. Mariuccia and Domenico and every one had only this thought—not to disturb papa. He was always very kind,” she went on, softening, her eyes filling again. “Sometimes he would be displeased about the dinner, or if his papers were disturbed. I dusted them myself, and was very careful; but sometimes that put him out. But he was very kind. He always came to the loggia in the evening, except when he was busy. He used to tell me when my perspective was wrong, and laugh at me, but not to hurt. I think you are mistaken, aunt Caroline, about papa.”
Mrs Clarendon had come a little nearer, and turned her face towards the girl, who stood thus pleading her own cause. Neither of them was quick enough in intelligence to see distinctly the difference of the two pictures which they set before each other—the sister displaying her ideal of a delicate soul wounded and shrinking from the world, finding refuge in the tenderness of his child; the daughter making her simple representation of the father she knew, a man not at all dependent on her tenderness, concerned about the material circumstances of life, about his dinner, and that his papers should not be disturbed—kind, indeed, but in the easy, indifferent way of a father who is scarcely aware that his little girl is blooming into a woman. They were not clever enough to perceive this; and yet they felt the difference with a vague sense that both views, yet neither, were quite true, and that there might be more to say on either side. Frances got choked with tears as she went on, which perhaps was the thing above all others which melted her aunt’s heart. Mrs Clarendon gave the girl credit for a passionate regret and longing for the father she loved; whereas Frances in reality was thinking, not so much of her father, as of the serene childish life which was over for ever, which never could come back again, with all its sacred ignorances, its simple unities, the absence of all complication or perplexity. Already she was so much older, and had acquired so much confusing painful knowledge—that knowledge of good and evil, and sense of another meaning lurking behind the simplest seeming fact and utterance, which, when once it has entered into the mind, is so hard to drive out again.
“Perhaps it was not your fault,” said Mrs Clarendon at last. “Perhaps he had been so used to you as a child, that he did not remember you were grown up. We will say no more about it, Frances. We may be sure he had his reasons. And you say he was busy sometimes. Was he writing? What was he doing? You don’t know what hopes we used to have, and the great things we thought he was going to do. He was so clever; at school and at college, there was nobody like him. We were so proud of him! He might have been Lord Chancellor. Charles even says so, and he is not partial, like me; he might have been anything, if he had but tried. But all the spirit was taken out of him when he married. Oh, many a man has been the same. Women have a great deal to answer for. I am not saying anything about your mother. You are quite right when you say that is not a subject to be discussed with you. Come down-stairs; luncheon is ready; and after that we will go out. We must not quarrel, Frances. We are each other’s nearest relations, when all is said.”
“I don’t want to quarrel, aunt Caroline. Oh no; I never quarrelled with any one. And then you remind me of papa.”
“That is the nicest thing you have said. You can come to me, my dear, whenever you want to talk about him, to ease your heart. You can’t do that with your mother; but you will never tire me. You may tell me about him from morning to night, and I shall never be tired. Mariuccia and Domenico are the servants, I suppose? and they adore him? He was always adored by the servants. He never gave any trouble, never spoke crossly. Oh, how thankful I am to be able to speak of him quite freely! I was his favourite sister. He was just the same in outward manner to us both,—he would not let Minnie see he had any preference; but he liked me the best, all the same.”
It was very grateful to Frances that this monologue should go on: it spared her the necessity of answering many questions which would have been very difficult to her; for she was not prepared to say that the servants, though faithful, adored her father, or that he never gave any trouble. Her recollection of him was that he gave a great deal of trouble, and was “very particular.” But Mrs Clarendon had a happy way of giving herself the information she wanted, and evidently preferred to tell Frances a thousand things, instead of being told by her. And in other ways she was very kind, insisting that Frances should eat at lunch, that she should be wrapped up well when they went out in the victoria, that she should say whether there was any shopping she wanted to do. “I know my lady will look after your finery,” she said,—“that will be for her own credit, and help to get you off the sooner; but I hope you have plenty of nice underclothing and wraps. She is not so sure to think of these.”
Frances, to save herself from this questioning, described the numberless unnecessaries which had been already bestowed upon her, not forgetting the turquoises and other ornaments, which, she remembered with a quick sensation of shame, her mother had told her not to speak of, lest her aunt’s liberalities should be checked. The result, however, was quite different. Mrs Clarendon grew red as she heard of all these acquisitions, and when they returned to Portland Place, led Frances to her own room, and opened to her admiring gaze the safe, securely fixed into the wall, where her jewels were kept. “There are not many that can be called family jewels,” she said; “but I’ve no daughter of my own, and I should not like it to be said that you had got nothing from your father’s side.”
Thus it was a conflict of liberality, not a withholding of presents because she was already supplied, which Frances had to fear. She was compelled to accept with burning cheeks, and eyes weighed down with shame and reluctance, ornaments which a few weeks ago would have seemed to her good enough for a queen. Oh, what a flutter of pleasure there had been in her heart when her father gave her the little necklace of Genoese filigree, which appeared to her the most beautiful thing in the world. She slipped into her pocket the cluster of emeralds her aunt gave her, as if she had been a thief, and hid the pretty ring which was forced upon her finger, under her glove. “Oh, they are much too fine for me. They are too good for any girl to wear. I do not want them, indeed, aunt Caroline!”
“That may be,” Mrs Clarendon replied; “but I want to give them to you. It shall never be said that all the good things came from her, and nothing but trumpery from me.”
Frances took home her spoils with a sense of humiliation which weighed her to the ground. Before this, however, she had made the acquaintance of Mr Charles Clarendon, the great Q.C., who came into the cold drawing-room two minutes before dinner in irreproachable evening costume—a well-mannered, well-looking man of middle age, or a little more, who shook hands cordially with Frances, and told her he was very glad to see her. “But dinner is a little late, isn’t it?” he said to his wife. The drawing-room looked less cold by lamplight; and Mrs Clarendon herself, in her soft velvet evening-gown with a good deal of lace—or perhaps it was after the awakening and excitement of her quarrel with Frances—had less the air of being like the furniture, out of use. The dinner was very luxurious and dainty. Frances, as she sat between husband and wife, observing both very closely without being aware of it, decided within herself that in this particular her aunt Caroline again reminded her of papa. Mr Clarendon was very agreeable at dinner. He gave his wife several pieces of information indeed which Frances did not understand, but in general talked about the things that were going on, the great events of the time, the news, so much of it as was interesting, with all the ease of a man of the world. And he asked Frances a few civil and indeed kindly questions about herself. “You must take care of our east winds,” he said; “you will find them very sharp after the Riviera.”
“I am not delicate,” she said; “I don’t think they will hurt me.”
“No, you are not delicate,” he replied, with what Frances felt to be a look of approval; “one has only to look at you to see that. But fine elastic health like yours is a great possession, and you must take care of it.” He added with a smile, a moment after: “We never think that when we are young; and when we are old, thinking does little good.”
“You have not much to complain of, Charles, in that respect,” said his wife, who was always rather solemn.
“Oh, nothing at all,” was his reply. And shortly after, dinner by this time being over, he gave her a significant look, to which she responded by rising from the table.
“It is time for us to go up-stairs, my dear,” she said to Frances.
And when the ladies reached the drawing-room, it had relapsed into its morning aspect, and looked as chilly and as unused as before.
“Your uncle is one of the busiest men in London,” said Mrs Clarendon with a scarcely perceptible sigh. “He talked of your health; but if he had not the finest health in the world, he could not do it; he never takes any rest.”
“Is he going to work now?” Frances asked with a certain awe.
“He will take a doze for half an hour; then he will have his coffee. At ten he will come up-stairs to bid me good-night; and then—I dare not say how long he will sit up after that. He can do with less sleep than any other man, I think.” She spoke in a tone that was full of pride, yet with pathos in it too.
“In that way, you cannot see very much of him,” Frances said.
“I am more pleased that my husband should be the first lawyer in England, than that he should sit in the drawing-room with me,” she answered proudly. Then, with a faint sigh: “One has to pay for it,” she added.
The girl looked round upon the dim room with a shiver, which she did her best to conceal. Was it worth the price, she wondered? the cold dim house, the silence in it which weighed down the soul, the half-hour’s talk (no more) round the table, followed by a long lonely evening. She wondered if they had been in love with each other when they were young, and perhaps moved heaven and earth for a chance hour together, and all to come to this. And there was her own father and mother, who probably had loved each other too. As she drove along to Eaton Square, warmly wrapped in the rich fur cloak which aunt Caroline had insisted on adding to her other gifts, these examples of married life gave her a curious thrill of thought, as involuntarily she turned them over in her mind. If the case of a man were so with his wife, it would be well not to marry, she said to herself, as the inquirers did so many years ago.
And then she blushed crimson, with a sensation of heat which made her throw her cloak aside, to think that she was going back to her mother, as if she had been sent out upon a raid, laden with spoils.