CHAPTER XIV.
MR. SANDFORD’S DAUGHTER.
‘OH!’ cried Mrs. Egerton.
This was so entirely unexpected after she had given up all thought of it. She decided within herself in a moment that the curate was right when he said that the stranger looked like a lady. Yes, she looked like it; but—there was something in the dress of Mr. Sandford’s daughter, in her look, in the gravity of her manners, which gave a sudden enlightenment to the inquirer. She wore a peculiar bonnet closely encircling her face; a long cloak, a black heavy gown which was not newly got for mourning, but evidently her habitual dress. The experienced half-clerical lady of the parish perceived in a moment with whom she had to do.
‘I am so glad to have met you before you go,’ she said, putting out her hand, ‘although glad is scarcely a word to use—in the present sad circumstances.’
‘How do you do?’ Emily said, with a grave movement of her head. It was more disconcerting than if she had reproved the undue warmth of the visitor in so many words. Mrs. Egerton felt herself obliged to be conciliatory, to make herself agreeable if possible to this serious woman with her pale handsome face.
‘I may call myself an old friend,’ she said, with a feeble smile, ‘though I have never seen you before. I have been away, unfortunately, during—all that has happened. I was so grieved to hear—and that you were just too late.’
‘No one need be grieved to hear that suffering is over,’ said Mr. Sandford’s daughter; ‘for my part I could not but be glad. I would not have had her suffer an hour or a moment longer, for me——’
‘But you might have been called sooner—before the illness had gone so far. These, however, are vain things to say. No doubt,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘everything is for the best.’
To this general statement Emily made no reply. She did not ask the visitor to sit down again. She did not even come into the room herself, but stood in the little passage outside the open door.
‘I am glad to see your father so well,’ Mrs. Egerton said.
‘Yes, he is very well. The health does not suffer from distress of mind so much as people think.’
‘That is true, though it is very strange to think that it should be so.’
‘Oh, no, not at all strange,’ said Emily, with the calm of superior knowledge. ‘The more your mind is taken off yourself, the less you suffer physically—except, perhaps, in the case of actual disease, and I am not sure that the rule does not apply there too. It is always good to have the mind carried away from the contemplation of itself.’
‘You have experience in such cases.’
‘Yes, I have great experience. I am matron of a hospital, and see it every day.’
‘Ah, that explains,’ said Mrs. Egerton, who had known this fact from the first glance. ‘Of course, with such a responsible post, you cannot give much time to—your relations.’
‘I can give none,’ said this calm, inscrutable woman. ‘I am going away to-night.’
‘To-night!’
‘Yes. I have been ten days here, and I think I’ve arranged everything comfortably. John, until a place has been found for him, will stay with his grandfather.’
‘John—oh, I suppose your—nephew. It is, no doubt, a good thing that he should be with his grandfather; but isn’t it a pity he should lose a good opening just for this; he must leave, one time or another.’
‘We did not feel, on thinking it over, that it was a very good opening,’ said Emily, with the same unalterable gravity. ‘The boy wishes to be a civil engineer; and this was an engine-foundry, mechanical engineering, not what he wants——’
‘But it was Mr. Cattley’s brother, a man who would have taken an interest——’
‘The interest which the head of a great foundry can take in one of his apprentices is not much to rely upon. We preferred that he should not go.’
‘Then there is nothing to be said, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Egerton, with something like indignation.
It seemed so extraordinary that the Sandfords, or any people in their position, should not pause, and weigh what she might have to say. It was ridiculous, besides.
‘Nothing, I think,’ said this Emily, quite seriously. ‘We have gone over it carefully, and our minds are quite made up.’
She stood in the passage, without any regret or apology, without any sign of yielding, not impatient, and yet, perhaps, a little tired, as might be seen in her eyes, of being thus stopped as she came into the house.
‘Then, perhaps, there is nothing better for me to do than to take my leave,’ said Mrs. Egerton, smiling as best she could, yet feeling, if truth must be told, very little inclination to smile.
Emily made no protest, nor any effort to detain the visitor. She turned round politely, and, opening the door, made room for the lady in her satin draperies to pass. And presently the rector’s sister, the chief personage in Edgeley, found herself in the street again, feeling, she knew not how, that old Sandford’s daughter, the matron of a hospital, a woman with a mystery about her, a stranger unknown in the place, had overcome and proved herself the better woman. Mrs. Egerton felt angry, humiliated, astonished. She felt, too, which was more remarkable, that she was herself in fault, that her attempted interference had been an unjustifiable intrusion, that she had no right to thrust herself into their house and dictate to them what they should do. Old Sandford was a lonely old man, over whom it might have been easy enough to domineer, but was it possible that she had really tried to do it? She was angry, first with them, then with herself. She met Mrs. Box’s perambulator again, with the baby hanging out of it, in imminent risk of dislocating its neck; but Mrs. Egerton was so subdued that she let the little unfortunate pass, and never said a word. Finally, she met the curate, whose undoubting faith in her was her best consolation at such a moment.
‘I have been beaten,’ she said to him, ‘horse and foot—defeated all along the line.’
Meanwhile, Emily went into the parlour where her father sat, a little tremulous, glad to be out of it, leaving the women to struggle, if they pleased. The voices had been quite soft, and all had passed with the perfect decorum of good breeding, notwithstanding that Mrs. Egerton had been so conscious of her defeat. Mr. Sandford, though he had been listening anxiously, had heard no sound of any quarrel. He gave Emily a questioning look as she came in.
‘I hope she was not uncivil to you, my dear? She seems to think I want taking care of, now my poor dear’s gone. She’s a good woman, and a kind woman, Emily, and I’m glad you said nothing that was disagreeable to her, my dear.’
‘She is like many parish ladies,’ said his daughter, who was not without experience of such. ‘She thinks she should be allowed to meddle with everything, because her motives are good. I don’t doubt that she’s good and kind in her way, but she has nothing to do with you and me.’
‘Still she was always very nice to your mother; and when you are gone I may be thankful to have her come to see me. There are times when we have both been very glad to see her coming in. Sometimes she would bring the papers, or Punch, or a new book—especially in the winter afternoons it was a pleasure—and if I am to be left without even John——’
‘But you are not to be left without John. And nothing has passed that need keep her from coming to see you. She will like to come and be kind. It is as good a way of filling up vacant time as any other,’ said Emily, with an experience of such matters which probably justified a little harshness of speech.
‘I shall be left very lonely,’ said the old man, with the break in his voice which was his substitute for weeping. ‘There is Mr. Cattley too. He was always very kind: but now you’ve gone and made me break with him—after giving him all that trouble with his brother about the boy.’
‘Father,’ she said, ‘I thought we had settled that question. I have never interfered with the boy. All his life, at least since he was a child, he has been with you: and you saw last night what it has come to, and what ideas he has on the subject. I don’t complain—I am not saying a word. Wait till I complain before you speak. But so it is: there is only one subject on which I am determined, and you know what that is too. I will not have the past made known to him. I will not have him find out—no, not for the world.’
‘And how should he have found out by going to Liverpool?’ said old Sandford, querulously, ‘a boy serving his time in a foundry, is it likely that he would go raking up old stories in such a very different sphere?’
‘Everything is likely that we don’t want to happen,’ she said.
‘And now,’ cried the old man, ‘all’s undone that was settled before she left me, my poor dear. She has gone to heaven carrying a false idea with her; thinking of things that were never going to happen. Do you call that keeping faith with those that are gone? I will never be able to explain it to her, without putting the blame upon you.’
‘I hope it will be long before you have to explain it to her—and I don’t mind about the blame. I can bear it, father; put it upon me.’
‘It is all very easy for you to speak,’ he said, in his broken voice, ‘but you put me all in a muddle, and I’m growing old, as Mrs. Egerton said.’
‘What has she to do with your age? You are not old—to speak of. Most probably you will see us all out.’
This did not seem an unpleasant consideration at first, but afterwards he said, in his complaining voice,
‘The longer I live the worse it will be for me, if you take away all my friends.’
To this she made no reply, but after a while sat down beside him, endeavouring to turn his thoughts to other subjects.
‘I have settled everything I can for you,’ she said, ‘it will not be so comfortable as in mother’s time. She was very comfortable, without having any method in particular or settled ways. If I don’t make any fuss, yet I feel that all the same. But after a while you’ll fall into the new method. Sarah’s a good girl. She will do everything for you that she knows. And new customs creep up, and you will get on more comfortably than you think. The only question that there is any anxiety about is the boy.’
‘You had better take him back, Emily, into your own hands.’
‘How can I do that?’ Her face changed a little out of its fixed gravity and calm. ‘You can’t undo ten years in a day. By all the habits of his mind he’s your boy. It was a risk, but you took it. I ought to have thought, but I didn’t then, that in the course of nature I should most probably live the longest, and that, before he was fully set out in the world, you might——’
She paused, reflecting that this was the very contrary of what she had said a few minutes before.
‘What?’ he said, fretfully. ‘If you think that in consequence of what has happened I will make any change—of any kind—you are much mistaken, Emily. I’ll neither form new ties, nor change in any way. Half is left to you and half to him, as we always settled, and there shall be no alteration.’
‘I was not thinking of that,’ she said, gently; but she did not say any more. It is difficult, unless as a matter of business, to speak to any man of what will happen when he dies, and if he does not care to contemplate that idea it is so much the worse. Emily let the subject drop. She had said he might see them all out, which indeed might happen, as such things happen every day; but though she said this she perceived with her experienced eyes that her father was a man unlikely to live long. The loss of the companion of his life, who had been his prop, though his mind had never been sensible to the fact, was not a thing likely to be got over so easily as seemed. Though she spoke of Sarah’s faithfulness and the new ways, she had no real faith in the apparent composure with which he had accepted the change in his life. In many ways this was to her a painful conclusion, and hard to face. Something no doubt of natural feeling had survived the long separation, the great difference between her ways of thinking and his. To have that house swept from the face of the earth in which there was always a refuge whatever might happen; and still worse to have on her hands a responsibility from which she had shaken herself free; to have it back again with all its difficulties increased, and every kind of new complication, was a most unwelcome thought. But her mind was a very clear and cool one in its peculiar way, and she foresaw everything that could possibly occur to make her arrangements vain, even while in the act of making those arrangements. How could she help seeing the extreme probability of another visit to that little house ere long, of a final winding up of all things, and the absolute necessity of regulating all future movements in her own person? People of very tender feelings conceal these prognostications from themselves, and think of them, if think they must, only with previsions of sorrow, not the clear arrangements of a foregone conclusion. But Emily Sandford had been separated from her parents for many years. She was not affectionate in the ordinary sense of the word. She was compelled to a system of rigid plans and rules by the necessities of her life, and she could not help giving a serious eye to the eventualities which she felt might be so near.
John accompanied her to the train as he had accompanied her from the train ten days before. It was again night, and to sit by her side during that short drive, which still afforded opportunity for so many things to be said, was about as exciting to him as on the previous occasion; but it was a different kind of excitement. His heart was no longer quivering on the balance between love and opposition. It had taken strongly the latter poise; his very ears seemed to thrill with eagerness to hear every word she said, which his mind instantly construed in a sense offensive to himself. When this impulse seizes upon us, it is astonishing how much bitterness can be extracted from the very simplest phrases. She had no disposition to offend the boy that night. On the contrary, there was in her voice a softness, and in her words a tremulous feeling such as a week since would have gone to John’s heart. She had an appearance of emotion about her altogether which, not even in the moment when they stood together beside the bed of death, had been in her before. And now it was she who was the most ready to speak.
‘It is only now,’ she said, ‘when I am gone, that you will settle down to your changed life—you will only realise it fully now.’
‘Oh! I have realised it,’ said John, ‘since the first day. It will be less strange—less—when grandfather and I are alone.’
‘Less?’ she said, with a question unexpressed, ‘you don’t leave me room to think very much of myself.’
To this he made no reply: and there was the faint quiver of a laugh in the air, which, the speaker’s face being unseen, was more suggestive of pain than any other sound could have been.
‘I need not recommend your grandfather to your care, John. You will be as good to him and watchful of him as you can. He is not so strong as he thinks he is. You will write to me at once, if you see anything to be anxious about.’
‘It didn’t do much good,’ said John, ‘writing to you before.’
‘You did not tell me the true state of the case,’ she said, exercising evident control over herself. ‘You wrote as if it was entirely from yourself——’
‘I know better now,’ he said, bitterly. ‘You may be sure I will never do that again.’
He turned his head away from her, and stared out of the window at the lights in the cottages which skirted the common—lights which twinkled at him many a time afterwards in his dreams.
‘Boy,’ she said, suddenly grasping his arm with her hand, ‘you don’t know what you say.’
‘That is no fault of mine,’ said John.
He would not yield even so much as to turn his head to her. It was, indeed, all he could do to keep himself from shaking off the hand on his arm. She took it away after a moment, and then resumed:
‘This is the last time I shall have the chance of saying anything to you. John, you’ve set your heart against me without any cause.’
‘Isn’t it cause enough that you’re taking both father and mother from me,’ cried the boy. ‘Isn’t that enough? But no, I’m saying too much, for you’ve given me back my mother, my faith in a mother. I had always been thinking you were my mother—till now.’
She gave a little, low cry as if some one had struck her, and paused for some time to recover herself, putting her hand up to her throat as if she were suffocating. He never looked round nor moved, but, with his heart on flame, kept his shoulder towards her, looking out fixedly into the darkness of the night.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘well, if you feel so: I—I have nothing to say if you feel so. One thing I would ask of your honourable feeling, John. If it has been thought best by everyone, my mother included, not to enter into our family circumstances at your early age, I ask you to respect our decision. We know better than you. We must know better than you. Don’t try to surprise your poor old grandfather, in his loneliness, into saying—what he will regret. Don’t try——’
‘I’ll do nothing dishonourable, I hope,’ cried the boy, ‘but I’ll make no promises. I’ll find out, if I can. I’ll do all I can to find out—— ’
‘And when you have done so,’ she said, with an audible quiver in her voice, ‘what will you discover? Nothing that is of any consequence to you or anyone—only that we wanted you, all of us, to respect and reverence your family until you were old enough to understand how things come about. That is all. And it was my mother’s wish as well as——’
‘Don’t say that,’ exclaimed John. ‘She died saying, “Tell him—tell him——”’
‘This is madness,’ she said, with a start, as if she would have sprung out of the carriage: then recovering herself. ‘Like every young and heated imagination you make mountains out of molehills,’ she said, in a very slow and measured voice. ‘A mere matter of family expediency, and you turn it into some dreadful secret. This shows how little you are to be treated with confidence. What a child you are still!’
He turned round upon her with all the fierceness of boyish wrath.
‘If it isn’t a dreadful secret, what is it? You’ve taken my father and my mother from me, both, both.’
She gave a little, quivering cry.
‘And what am I, then?’ she said.
The boy turned away with a sorrowful movement. They were drawing up at the little station, and there was time for no more.