THE next day was one of excitement for Clare. She began it with feelings so changed from that of the previous morning, when life had seemed nothing but tedium and heaviness to her, that it was difficult to imagine that she was the same creature. The calm composure of her earlier days, when no new incident was wanted to break the pleasant blank of existence, was as different from this new exhiliration as it was from the heavy, leaden dulness of the time which was just over. She had wanted nothing in the first serenity of her youth. She had seemed to want everything in the monotony of her loneliness after her brother and her cousin had left her. And now, again, she wanted nothing—except——
Except—— She did not say to herself what it was; or if she did she called it by other names. Something to do—something to interest her—a little society in the midst of her solitude. She did not say, I am happy because he is coming. A girl must have gone a long way on that path before she will say as much to herself; but a sense that he was coming seemed to be in the air—the sunshine was brighter for it, the morning was sweeter, all kinds of lovely lights and gleams of life and movement were upon the park—the very scene which yesterday had been so unbearably still and motionless. The hours did not seem long till he came, but glided past with the softest harmony. She rather felt disposed to dwell upon them—to lengthen them out—for were they not all threaded through with that thread of expectation which made their stillness rosy? It fretted her a little to have this enchanted quiet broken by Mrs. Murray, though she came according to an appointment which Clare had forgotten. The girl’s brow clouded over with impatience when this visitor was announced to her. “Yes, I remember,” she said sharply to Wilkins. “Let her come upstairs. I told her to come.” But it was a little relief to Clare’s mind to find that her visitor was alone, which supplied her at once with a legitimate cause of offence.
“You have not brought Jeanie with you?” she said. “Is she ill, or what is the matter? I so particularly wished her to come!”
“I had a reason for no bringing her; and in case it should be made known to you after, and look like a falseness, I have come to tell you, Miss Arden,” said Mrs. Murray. “Your house, no doubt, is full of pictures of your father. It is but right. I saw one down the stair as I came in at the door——”
“And what then? What has papa’s picture to do with it?” asked Clare in amaze.
“You would think, little enough, Miss Arden,” said Mrs. Murray. “That is just what I have to tell you. Ye’ll mind that my cousin Thomas Perfitt has been long in the service of your house. And Jeanie has seen your father, and it made her heart sore—”
“Seen my father!” said Clare, with wonder, which was not so great as her visitor expected. “I did not know you had been here before.”
“We were never here before. Where we saw your father was at Loch Arroch in our own place. I knew him before you were born, Miss Arden—when I was—no to say young, but younger than I am now; and your mother, poor lady, too——”
This she said sinking her voice, so that Clare with difficulty made it out.
“My mother, too!” she cried, “how strange, how very strange, you should never have told me this before!”
“I canna think you will say it’s strange, if ye consider,” said the Scotchwoman; “plenty folk here must have seen your mother. It’s no as if you were ignorant—and it’s no as if I had anything to say but as I’ve been led to say it to others, I wouldna have you think there was a falseness. She was young, and she was feeble, poor thing, when I saw her. It’s more than five and twenty years ago, when him that’s now Mr. Arden had but lately come into this weary world.”
“You speak in such a strange way,” said Clare—“him that’s now Mr. Arden! Do you mean my brother Edgar? He is just twenty-five now.”
“He was but an infant, and well I mind it,” said the old woman, shaking her head with mournful meaning. “It was a sore time to me—death and trouble was in my house; and, oh, the trouble and the deaths I have had, Miss Arden! To hear of them would frighten the like of you. But first I must tell you why I canna bring Jeanie here. Two years ago, or may be more—two months more, for it was in the month of April—your father came to see me. Him and me, I told you, had met before. There were things I kent that were of consequence to him, and things he kent that were of consequence to me. Jeanie and her brother Willie—a bonnie blythe laddie—were both about the house. Willie was a sailor, sore against my will; and, oh, Miss Arden, so bonnie a boy! Your father was real kind. It’s been hard, hard to bear—but he meant to be kind. He got my Willie a ship out of Liverpool. The poor laddie went away from us—it’s two years this June—as blythe as ony bridegroom; and, Miss Arden, he’s never come back——”
“Never come back!” Clare’s wonder was so great that she repeated the last words without any real sense of their meaning, as she would have repeated anything that made a pause in this strange narrative. Her father! She seemed to herself to possess his later life—to know its every detail—to hold it, as it were, in her hands. He had never done anything without telling her—without consulting her, she would have said. Yet here was a secret of which she knew nothing. She was not selfish, but her mind was not so readily open to the affairs of others as was that of her brother. She never thought of the young sailor, or of the old mother, who spoke so sadly. She thought only of her father and his secret. What were the others to her? Of course she would have been sorry for them had their sorrows been sufficiently impressed on her imagination. But in the meantime it was her father she was thinking of, with bewildering wonder and pain.
Mrs. Murray, on the other hand, was absorbed with her own part of the tale. “He never came back,” she repeated, with a thrill of agitation in her voice. “He was lost in the wild sea, far out of our reach. Oh! it might have happened a’ the same. It might have come to the innocentest woman as it came to me. Many a lad is lost, and many a family brought to mourning, and naebody to blame. But when I think of all that’s been in my life, and that the like of that should come by means o’ the one man!—— That is how Jeanie knew your father, Miss Arden. She took your cousin for him, and it made her wild. I daurna bring her here to pain her with his picture. She was aye a strange bairn all her life, and Willie’s loss made her all wrong. That’s what I came to tell you, to be honest and clear o’ reproach. I’m no good or without guilt, that I should say so—but, oh, I hate a lie!”
Clare scarcely heeded this exclamation. She did not realise it, nor occupy herself about what her visitor felt. There was so much in this revelation that concerned herself that she had no leisure for other people’s feelings. “I do not see how you could blame papa,” she said, almost coldly; “of course, he did it for the best. How was he to know the ship would be lost? I am sorry, but I think it very strange that you should suppose it was his fault. Jeanie ought to be told how foolish it is. Papa would not have hurt any one—he would not have been cruel to—a fly.”
Here Clare paused with a good deal of natural indignant feeling. Was the woman trying to make some claim upon her, to establish a grievance? It was a kind thing her father had done. He had taken the trouble to interest himself about it without even telling his daughter. And then they were discontented because the ship was lost. How unreasonable, how preposterous it seemed! “Nothing must be said about my father which I ought not to hear,” she said after a pause. “No words can say how fond I was of papa. He was everything to me; he was so good to me. He never had any—secrets from me. No, I am sure he had not! He did not speak of you, because perhaps——For he was not one to blazon his own kindness, or—— And then he might forget. Why should he speak to me of you?”
“You think we are humble folk, no worthy to be thought upon,” said Mrs. Murray with a half smile. It was not sneering, but pitying, very grave and very sad. “And that’s true—that’s true. What was a life more or less in a poor farmhouse so long as the grand race ran on? You are very like your father, Miss Arden—that was the very way his thoughts ran——”
“His thoughts were always kind and good,” said Clare, hastily; and it was hard, very hard for her in the agitation of the moment to resist a girlish inclination to burst into tears. It was so ungrateful, she would have said—so cruel and unkind. What! because a kind service was done, which brought on painful results, was it the benefactor that was to be blamed? “If Jeanie were to be ill now, you might just as well say it was my doing,” she added in her suppressed passion, and felt that she disliked the very looks of this stranger and her monotonous Scotch voice.
Then there was a long pause. Clare turned over all the books on the table before her—took up and put down her work—twisted the wools about her fingers till her anger had somewhat evaporated. Mrs. Murray sat at a little distance from her, saying nothing. Her eyes were fixed on a portrait of Clare, taken a year or two before, which hung on the wall. She looked at it with a wondering interest, growing more and more earnest in her attention. “You are like her, too,” she said at length, with a certain astonishment. The portrait was not like Clare at that moment. It was Clare in repose, when gentler thoughts were in her mind. “You are like her, too,” Mrs. Murray resumed, with a little eagerness. “I could not have thought it. But you’re no one to let your heart be broken without a word, the Lord be praised.”
“What do you mean? If it is of mamma you are speaking, it is my brother who is like her,” said Clare, haughtily, “and I should be glad if you would not meddle any further with our affairs.”
“Eh, if I could but let them alone, and never think of them more!” The Scotchwoman rose as she said this, with a deep and prolonged sigh. Without another word she went to the door. “I will come to you if you send for me, Miss Arden, if I’m ever wanted in this house,” she said, “but no for any other reason. I would forget if I could that there ever was man or woman bearing your name. But the past cannot be forgotten, and I’ll come if I am ever wanted here.”
With these words she went away. Something solemn was in them, something which was incomprehensible, which sounded real, and yet must be absolute folly, Clare thought. Why should she be wanted at Arden? What could she ever do to affect the house? No doubt there were people still living in the world who believed in revenge, and would hunt down (if they could) a man who had injured them. But what revenge could this woman carry out upon the Ardens? It was a piece of folly—a mere dream. Clare laughed at the thought that Mrs. Murray could be wanted—that she could be sent for to Arden. But her laugh sounded harsh to herself. She resented the whole matter, the visit, the uncalled for narrative, the almost threat, the interruption of her pleasant thoughts. And then the question would come back—What had been the tie between her parents and this woman? She remembered so clearly her father’s absence from home two years ago. He had told her he had business in London—and he had gone to Scotland instead! How very strange it was! The more Clare thought of it the more angry she grew. If he had secrets—if he did things she was not to know—what right had any one to come and tell her now, when he could no longer explain the matter, and all his secrets were buried with him? She had her hand on the bell, to send for Mr. Perfitt, and question him what sort of woman this was whom he had brought to Arden to perplex and vex everybody. And then she remembered Sally Timms’ gossip, and tried to think evil thoughts. To some people it comes natural to think ill of their neighbours; but Clare was too spotless and too proud for such a tendency. She did not believe any harm of Mrs. Murray, and yet she tried to believe it. And then she tried to laugh once more and dismiss the whole matter from her mind; and then——
It was the clock striking two which roused her, and the entrance of Wilkins with the little luncheon tray, which furnished her doleful, solitary, little meal. This roused her out of her resentment and her dreams—not that she was tempted by the chicken’s wing, or even the strawberries among their cool green leaves; but that the morning was over, and the second chapter of the day, as it were, about to commence. And that second chapter had the hero in it, and all the nameless sweet agitations that would come with him—the fancies and visions and expectations which distinguish one phase of life, and make it more enthralling than any other. After a while that other step would disturb the silence, and all the world would brighten up and widen, she could not tell why. Not because of Arthur Arden, surely. He was no prince of romance, she said to herself. She entertained (she assured herself) no delusions about him. He was very agreeable to her—a man who pleased her—a true Arden; but she did not pretend to think him a king of men. Therefore, it could not be her cousin whose coming was to change everything. It must be the pleasant work she was about to begin with him—the common family interest—the intercourse with one who almost belonged to her—who was always ready to talk, and willing to discuss anything that caught her interest. Very different from being alone, and worrying over everything, as people do who have no one to confide their troubles to. She would tell her cousin about Mrs. Murray, and thus get rid of the thought. This was what lightened the cloud from about her, and brought back the atmosphere to its original clearness. It was so pleasant to have some one to talk to—one of the family, to whom she could venture to say anything. Of course, this was all; and it was enough for Clare.