OLIVIA’S first thought, as the door closed on Mrs. Warmington, was to follow her out and make a dash for freedom. But as she started up with this impulse, a sliding movement on the part of the garments she wore reminded her that she was not in walking trim; and a glance at the gilt-framed but mildewy glass which adorned the housekeeper’s mantelpiece showed her such a comical figure that the instincts of maidenly coquetry would never have allowed her to risk a meeting with Vernon Brander in that odd disguise.
Mrs. Warmington’s figure was of the straight-up-and-down sort—long in the body and short in the limbs. Being a lady of frugal bent and careful habits, she wore her dresses for so long a time that they acquired enough of the shape and character of the owner to impart the same characteristics to any subsequent wearer. Therefore, Olivia’s glance in the mirror showed her a woman in dark-brown stuff of slipshod fit, with a substantial square waist, and baggy sleeves too short in the wrist. After one despairing look out of the window at the rain, which went on falling in torrents, she sat down again disconsolately to listen and wait for her hostess’ return.
Mrs. Warmington had not met her master on her way upstairs, for Olivia had heard him go into the front room before the housekeeper left her; that she might be equally lucky on her way down was the girl’s inward prayer. For there were ominous sounds in the house suggesting that Mr. Brander was not minded to sit down quietly to the writing of a sermon or the reading of a good book, as one had a clear right to expect of a clergyman. Poor Olivia, sitting upright as a ramrod, with a scared expression of face, heard him come out of the dining-room into the hall. By the noise he made at the hat and coat stand, she guessed that he was changing his wet coat for a dry one. That business over, he ought plainly to have returned to his room; so it seemed to Olivia. But instead of that, he remained fumbling at the stand until the listening girl remembered, with a spasm of terror, that she had left there to dry, by the housekeeper’s directions, her little hand bag. Perhaps Mr. Brander would pass it over, taking it for granted that the flimsy little feminine thing belonged to Mrs. Warmington. No woman would have thought so; but, of course, men are not observant. Her worst fear was that he would remain there, not making enough noise to put the housekeeper on her guard, until that lady should come sailing down the stairs laden with a hat and cloak which evidently did not belong to her. The girl scarcely dared to draw breath in her intense anxiety. To be caught sneaking into a gentleman’s house in his absence, warming yourself at his fire, and even—as she discovered to her dismay on examining her feet—making free with his slippers, is an awkward situation at any time. But when you have just been told the secret of his life, and when your whole soul is warring about him, mercy struggling with horror, and conviction with doubt, the dilemma becomes well-nigh tragic.
Presently Olivia heard him drop some object, and the little crash it made caused her to shiver and almost to cry out. Then he began to cross the uncarpeted hall with very slow steps. Olivia strained her ears and held her breath. He was coming towards the room she was in. Had he guessed the presence of an intruder, or was he only coming with the prosaic intention of ordering something to eat? The girl remembered with remorse how he had been cheated out of his luncheon. But what should she do? Already she heard him calling, in a low and, as she fancied, tired voice, “Mrs. Warmington!” There was no time to escape by way of the kitchen—no corner of the room where she could hide herself. As she stood up to give one last hopeless look round, she again caught sight of her disguised figure in the glass. Seized by a happy thought, she snatched up from the top of one of the side cupboards, that filled the space between the fireplace and the walls, a small woollen shawl of rusty black, which Mrs. Warmington used to wrap round her head when she indulged in an afternoon doze. Olivia now blessed her fervently for this information. She had just time to wrap it round her head, to throw herself back in the rocking chair with her head turned away from the door, to cross her legs as Mrs. Warmington did, to fold her arms, and hide her hands in the folds of the baggy sleeves, when the door opened softly, and Mr. Brander put his head inside.
“Mrs. Warmington!” he called, very gently.
No answer, of course.
“Are you asleep?” more gently still.
His housekeeper’s afternoon doze was a very common occurrence apparently, for he uttered a little petulant sound, and disappeared into the kitchen. In the dusk of a wet afternoon the girl’s ruse had succeeded perfectly. But the obscurity which had favored her was not equally kind to him, for Olivia heard much chinking of china and clattering of plate before he re-entered the room. Instead of going through to his own domain, however, he stood still between the fireplace and the door, and Olivia, not daring to look, guessed that he was eating. Trembling as she was with the fear of discovery, it seemed to her a long time before she heard him take up the poker and proceed very noiselessly to break the red-hot coals. She seized the opportunity to turn her head a little, and to steal a frightened glance at him through her eyelashes. He had on the shabbiest of threadbare and ragged house coats, and was hungrily eating bread and cheese and a piece of dry and crumbling cake. When he had built up the fire to please him, he dragged an old church hassock from under the table, and seating himself on it, drew as near to the grate as possible, and went on with his improvised meal.
He was so close to Olivia that she could detect the coaly smell which constant contact with his mining parishioners had imparted to his old clothes; so close that she felt that he was cold as well as hungry; so close that his hair brushed Mrs. Warmington’s brown stuff gown as he bent forward, with his elbows on his knees, and looked into the fire.
And as they sat thus, in the darkening twilight, side by side, he unconscious of her presence, she grew less afraid that he should discover it, altogether less anxious for the safety of her disguise. Her thoughts turned instead to consideration of his loneliness. What a cheerless existence was implied in this creeping up to the side of a rather cold and cross-grained old woman for warmth and companionship! The close contact seemed to help Olivia to feel her way into the mind of the solitary man. She pictured him innocent, laboring under a charge which for some unaccountable reason he was unable to refute; she pictured him guilty, torn with remorse, and working out a weary expiation. In the latter case, she began to feel, even more strongly than before her interview with Mrs. Warmington, that the horror of the deed was swallowed up in compassion for the doer. When he had finished his very frugal dinner, he sat so still that she was able to open her eyes and so gain all the information concerning the state of his mind which a careful study of the back of his head could impart. He was dejected, weary, unhappy; probably smarting still, so she told herself, from the pain her step-mother’s treatment had caused him. Presently he rested his head on his left hand, and so came nearer still to her. She could feel that she was trembling from the force of an aching pity, and that her hands seemed to tingle with the wish to lie with consoling touch on his bent head. She had forgotten Mrs. Warmington and the dry clothes—forgotten to wonder how she was going to get out of the house and home again without discovering herself to Mr. Brander. She soon discovered, however, that her feelings were more acute than those of the object of her pity; for his head tilted slowly further and further in her direction until at last it rested on her knee. Mr. Brander, who, after a fierce battle with certain very unclerical feelings, had tried to subdue the mind to the flesh by a long stretch over the hills, had succeeded in tiring himself out.
He was fast asleep.
And if he had but known it, he might have had sweeter dreams than he was used to. For the resting-place he had found was the creature who cared most about him of any in the world.
Olivia had an inkling of this, and it made the touch of her hand almost motherly as she bent down and held it very, very gently just near enough to feel his hair against her fingers. Only thirty-four or thereabouts, and his hair so grey! She could dare now, as he slept, to bend right down, and to see by the firelight how thickly the white threads grew among the dark behind his ears and near the temples. So curly his hair was, she noticed; quite soft, too, and silky, like a child’s: quite out of keeping with the worn, lined face, that looked so sad and so old as the dancing flames threw deep shadows upon it. And her fingers moved involuntarily through the wavy mass, as she thought, as women will, that there had been a time, long ago, when he lay, a helpless child, depending on the kindness of a woman. And she tried to fancy what that poor mother would have felt if she had known what evil rumors would some day darken the name of her curly-haired boy. Olivia was by nature more impulsive and passionate than sentimental; therefore these unaccustomed feelings and fancies instead of finding vent in a gentle sigh, made her breast heave and her eyes fill, until a broken whisper slipped through her trembling lips—
“Poor mother—poor son!”
She was ashamed of her foolishness the next moment, and raised her head quickly with a start and a hot, tingling blush, anxious to jump up and run away, though still not daring to move. She took out her pocket handkerchief very carefully, dabbed it against her wet eyes with much fierceness, and then gave another glance, not at all sentimental this time, at the face against her knee. Horror and confusion! Was he asleep at all? The expression of his face had quite changed, and there was a wretched tear—her tear!—on his forehead. What should she do? Remove that tear, certainly. For she felt that it would leave a huge stain, unmistakable as ink. Very nervously she attempted to dry it with her handkerchief; but the moment the cambric touched his face, Mr. Brander raised his head and prevented her.
“Don’t!” he said, huskily. “Why should you? What is there to be ashamed of in your kindness to me? Do I get too much from anybody?”
Olivia did not answer. She felt as if a new acquaintance had suddenly been sprung upon her. This mood was so different from any she had seen Mr. Brander in before. The half-cynical self-reliance, the bright, somewhat bitter humor had disappeared, and given place to a humility so touching, so gentle, that she felt constrained to remain where she was rather than risk hurting his feelings by rising abruptly. But she could not answer his questions, and so she sat silently, with her head bent down and turned a little away, while he resumed the position he had first taken, with his arms on his knees, looking into the fire. After a few moments, during which the girl had time to wonder that she felt, under these rather awkward circumstances, so much at her ease, she broke the silence, in a low, hesitating voice.
“Mr. Brander,” she began, “I should like to say something to you about—about this morning—about Mrs. Denison.”
Her painfully apologetic tone made him turn his head at once, with a smile.
“You may say something to me—in fact anything—upon any other subject than those two,” he answered, in his usual kindly tone. “Say something to me about this afternoon and about yourself. Let this morning—and Mrs. Denison—be buried. Mind, I say, this is no unchristian spirit.”
“You are very good,” said Olivia, glancing at him timidly and gratefully.
“Do you mean that?” he asked, inquisitively. “You have heard a good deal to the contrary, you know.”
“Well, but is all that true?” she burst out boldly. “Now, you have brought that question upon yourself before, and now you deliberately bring it upon yourself again. Why don’t you satisfy me by a straightforward answer? I do deserve it; for I always take your part, to other people and to myself too.”
“Do you?” he asked, so eagerly, with such a flash of pleasure over his face that Olivia felt abashed again. Then he paused, and the light had gone quite out of his face before he went on: “You won’t be satisfied then with the consciousness that you are a poor beggar’s solitary champion?”
“I won’t be satisfied with that if I can get you to tell me any more,” she answered, simply. “I don’t pretend that I’m not anxious to know more; but it is not out of curiosity to learn other people’s affairs, but because there really must be something peculiarly interesting about a secret which causes your own relations to speak ill of you.”
Olivia had suddenly made up her mind for a bold stroke. It cannot be denied that there was a little malice in her heart; but it was a small matter compared with her real anxiety to put him on his guard against one whom she considered a treacherous friend.
“My relations!” he echoed, with a look of such bewilderment and incredulity that she began to think he would not believe her.
“Isn’t a sister-in-law a kind of relation?” asked Olivia, rather unsteadily, after a pause.
Mr. Brander’s expression changed to one of pain and fear; so that Olivia watched him in terror, not daring to go on. He looked at her without answering, and then, as she remained silent and fearful, he got up and walked to the other side of the little room, where, as her face was turned towards the fireplace, she could not see him; but she knew without the aid of her eyes, that he was much agitated; and when he came back and, standing by her chair, put his hand gently on her shoulder and spoke to her with calmness which might have passed for unconcern, she was not deceived by it.
“And what ill does my sister-in-law say of me?” he asked.
“She told my step-mother an old story, and said you were not a proper acquaintance for—young girls.”
“Oh, she said that, did she?” returned Mr. Brander, in a measured voice. Then he said, abruptly, after a silence, “You are sure of this?”
“Quite sure.”
Then it appeared to the girl that he stood beside her without a word for a very long time. For the fire seemed to die down, and the murky light outside to fade perceptibly, before he even changed his attitude. At last she found courage to look up timidly into his face, and saw that his eyes were staring towards the window with the blind look of a seer whose vision is only keen for the fancies and phantoms in his own mind. And Mr. Brander’s fancies must have been of the gloomiest kind, for his face startled the girl into uttering a little exclamation, which roused him from his abstraction, and woke him to the fact that his hand had been laying all this time on the young girl’s shoulder.
“I beg your pardon,” he muttered, as he withdrew it as hastily as if it had been red-hot iron.
The blood rushed to Olivia’s face. The touch of Mr. Brander’s hand had not offended her; the knowledge that it had been unconscious did. And a most acute pang shot through her heart, as she realized that it was because his mind was full of another woman’s treatment that he was oblivious of her. She was jealous. In such an impulsive, energetic girl as she was, vivid feeling found vent in hasty action. Rising from her chair, and quite forgetting that her odd costume made dignity impossible, she said, very coldly, that she must go home now; her father would be anxious about her, and the rain was less violent. Even as she spoke the wind dashed a clattering shower against the window in disproof of her words. She did not notice it herself; neither, apparently, did her host. For he opened the door for her at once without any semblance of a wish to detain her, and without seeming to remark her singular apparel.
Olivia darted out of the room and up the stairs in a tempest of excited feelings which found vent in an outburst of indignation against Mrs. Warmington for leaving her so long alone with Mr. Brander. The housekeeper met her at the top of the stairs, looking herself pale and frightened.
“Why didn’t you come down?” asked Olivia, impatiently.
The old woman glanced nervously down into the hall, and answered in a soothing tone of apology,
“I did not dare, Miss Denison. I did not want my employer to find me talking to you. He would have guessed what we were talking about. We get so sharp, we people who live much alone, and he would never have forgiven me. Ever since I heard him go into the room where you were I have been walking up and down the landing in a fever. You did not tell him what we had been talking about, did you?”
“No,” answered Olivia. “He didn’t ask me.”
“Thank goodness!” said the housekeeper with such a depth of relief that the girl’s curiosity was roused.
“Why should you mind so much?” she asked. “He seems quite used to having his affairs discussed, and takes it for granted that people should think the worst of him.”
This thought moved her as she spoke, and caused her voice to tremble sympathetically. The housekeeper examined her face narrowly as she answered, with great discretion—
“He wouldn’t have minded about any one else, Miss Denison: but it’s different with you.”
“Different—with me!” echoed the girl, very softly.
Without more words, Mrs. Warmington, after once more listening and glancing down into the hall to assure herself that they were not likely to be disturbed, crossed the landing on tiptoe, and beckoned Olivia to follow her. Then throwing open the door of one of the front bedrooms without noise, she said—
“That is Mr. Brander’s room. Do you see by his bedside a set of hanging shelves on the wall?”
“Yes.”
“And a box in the middle of the bottom shelf?”
As she spoke, the housekeeper was crossing the room. Taking down the box, she returned to the door with it, and, raising the lid, showed Olivia the tray of an old-fashioned workbox with well-worn fittings.
“It was his mother’s, I believe,” she whispered. Then, as the girl drew back, shocked at having been inveigled into prying among Mr. Brander’s treasures, she went on: “Have you ever seen this?” And lifting out the tray of the workbox, she thrust under Olivia’s reluctant but astonished eyes an indiarubber golosh, which Miss Denison instantly recognized as one she had lost on her way back from the Vicarage on the evening of her arrival at Rishton.
With a little cry of astonishment and annoyance, Olivia put out a hasty hand to recover her lost property. But Mrs. Warmington prevented her, shutting the box hastily, and restoring it to its place.
“I can’t take, or allow you to take, anything out of my employer’s boxes in his absence,” she said, drily.
“But it’s mine; it’s of no use to him, and I want it!”
“You will have to do without it, unless you care to go and fetch it yourself. But I think, on second thoughts, you will be satisfied that enough honor has been paid to your old shoe.”
Olivia blushed, and moved her shoulders with vexation.
“It was such a huge thing!” she exclaimed, impatiently. “They were always sizes and sizes too big for me.”
Mrs. Warmington’s thin lips relaxed into a smile.
“Oh!” she said; “perhaps you only wish to put a smaller one in its place.”
Olivia felt that she had, as her brothers would have termed it, “given herself away,” and she was glad to let the subject drop. Following her conductress into her bedroom, she put on her own, now dry, clothes, in silence and much meekness, thanked her in a subdued voice for her hospitality, and begged, as a final grace, the loan of an umbrella.
“It won’t be necessary. Mr. Brander will see you home.”
“Oh, no, indeed,” broke out Olivia, hastily. “I want to slip out of the house quietly without his seeing me again.”
“Do you really want that?” asked the old woman, with a searching look which set the younger blushing. “Because, if so, I can take you down this way by the back staircase. It is never used, but—”
“Then, perhaps, the stairs will creak,” interrupted Olivia, and without more delay she made, softly indeed but deliberately, for the front staircase.
“I can’t thank you enough for your kindness,” she whispered, when they both stood in the hall.
Mrs. Warmington shook her head with a drily amused smile.
“I had a motive,” she said. “I am too fond of my own comfort to put myself out of the way without one.”
“A motive!” echoed Olivia.
“Yes. I wanted to know you better, and I wanted you to know Mr. Brander better. Now nobody can deceive you about him, and nobody can deceive me about you.”
“Why, who would try?” asked Olivia.
“Nobody, perhaps. Good-bye.”
With one glance towards the open door of the front room, from which they both heard the sounds of a man’s tread, the housekeeper shook her guest’s hand, and, abruptly leaving her, disappeared into her own domain at the back of the house.
Olivia, who was highly offended at this discovery that she had been “managed” and made the victim of a little trick, walked to the front door with her head held high, and a firm intention of not even glancing in the direction of the study. But a sound inside the room, as she passed the door, broke her resolution, and she gave a swift glance that way. The look revealed Mr. Blander standing beside the black, empty fireplace. That was all. He saw her, and saw the proud turn of her head as she instantly averted her eyes. Then he heard the latch of the front door as her hands fumbled with it; he heard the door open, and shut again immediately, very softly. The next moment there was a hesitating step back across the hall, and the young girl’s face was looking into the dingy room.
“Please will you open the door for me, Mr. Brander? I—I don’t quite understand the lock.”
He came at once, and did the little service without a word. She looked out; it was still raining persistently, the heavy downpour having been succeeded by a fine drizzle.
“It hasn’t left off yet,” she said, timidly.
“No.”
They both stood still, looking out into the gathering darkness.
“Shall I lend you an umbrella?”
“Oh, if you would, I should be so glad. I will be sure to bring—send it back.”
He brought an umbrella from the stand, and opened it thoughtfully.
“If I lend you this one—it is the best, the lightest; the one I use when there’s a bishop about—I shall want it again early to-morrow morning—”
“I’ll be sure to—”
“Very early,” he continued, without heeding her.
“Then let me have the old one.”
“It’s full of holes. Besides, one of the ribs is broken.”
“Oh, never mind. I can quite well get back without one at all.”
“It might be managed,” suggested Vernon, guiltily, when he had produced and examined carefully the second best umbrella, which proved to be only a little better than its reputation. “If I were to walk part of the way back with you, it might clear up, and you might be able to get home without one; and I could bring it back, you see.”
“But I don’t like to trouble. I’m always imposing,” murmured Olivia.
However, the half permission had been enough for Mr. Brander, who was by this time slipping into his rough overcoat with the alacrity of the British workman at the sound of the first stroke of six.
Worse conditions for a pleasant walk through the fields and lanes can scarcely be imagined than a March evening after a pouring wet day, a fine rain falling, the ground ankle-deep in mud, and the darkness already so thick that an occasional slip into a puddle was unavoidable. They had to walk in most uneven, jolting fashion to find a path at all through the steepest part of the lane. Sometimes Olivia had to take Mr. Brander’s arm to keep her footing at all, and once he had to help her to jump over a miniature torrent. They scarcely talked at all, but a warm sense of human sympathy and mutual help grew so strong between them that when they came to a particularly ugly quagmire their eyes would meet with a smile and a nod, and they would go on again very happily. At last, when they got to the top of the hill, and both instinctively stopped for breath at the same moment, Olivia looked up and said, shyly and simply—
“Did you know it was I—all the time?”
“I knew it was you when I felt—something on my face. I was asleep, and it woke me.”
“I’m so sorry,” murmured she.
“Don’t apologize. You may cry over me just as much as you like.”
She laughed a little, and then they went on again, but without exchanging any more looks, until they came suddenly, without having realized that they were so near, to the bottom of the Vicarage hill. He glanced up it, and Olivia caught the expression of his eyes.
“You are not going there—to the Vicarage?” she burst out, impulsively.
“Yes, I am,” he answered, with a dogged look of anger and scorn on his face.
The girl, drawing a long, sobbing breath, retreated a step without speaking.
Vernon stopped and looked into her face almost with the boldness of a lover.
“Why not?” he asked, in a voice little above a whisper.
“Why not, indeed, Mr. Brander!” she said, coldly, but without succeeding in hiding a break in her voice; “if the friends you can’t trust are of more value than those you can.”
“It is not a question of that, Miss Denison.”
“Isn’t it?” she broke in, quickly. “I think it is. You will go in all cold indignation, and come out all hot remorse and repentance. And you will never see that lessons in patient self-sacrifice are all the good you will ever get out of the Vicarage!”
Vernon started violently, and fell to shivering.
Shocked at the strong effect of her bold words, Olivia remained silently and humbly waiting for the reproaches she expected.