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