THE conduct of affairs in the house of the Harwoods was very dreary during the whole of this day. It was, to begin with, a very dreary day, not fog, which can be borne, but one of those dark days which are the scourge of London, when everything is dull and without color without and within, the skies gray, the earth gray, the leafless branches rising like a black tracery upon the colorless background, the light scarcely enough to swear by, to make it seem unnatural to shut the shutters and light the lamp, which is what every well-constituted mind desires to do in the circumstances.
And in the moral atmosphere the same thing reigned. Gussy had a countenance like the day. She, who had at no time much color, had now none. She was like the landscape: hair, eyes, and cheeks seemed the same. Every glimmer of light seemed to have been suppressed in her eyes. She kept them down, or she turned their gaze inward, or she veiled them with some film which is at the command of those who are angry, whether with or without cause. She made no inquiry even after the health of Meredith, which had been hitherto her chief preoccupation, except in so far as was implied in the conventional “How d’you do?” with which they met. Even he was daunted by the determined indifference of her aspect. When he talked of the drive which the doctor had suggested to him as a preliminary to getting out on foot, Gussy never lifted her eyes or made the least inquiry. Yesterday this step of decided progress would have been the most exciting event in the world to her. She took no notice of it now. There was scarcely anything said at table when they took their midday meal, with a candle or two lit on the mantelpiece, “to add a little cheerfulness,” as Mrs. Harwood said.
“For certainly we are not a very cheerful party,” added the mother, who was more full of life than all the rest put together.
She it was who took the lead in the conversation till Gussy retired. She talked to Meredith and a little to Janet, whom this curious aspect of the family interested greatly, though she did not quite understand it. But Gussy and Dolff both sat bolt upright and said nothing. They ate nothing, too, which, perhaps, was a more effectual weapon against their mother’s heart, and, when luncheon was over, they separated gloomily, Dolff disappearing no one knew where, Gussy to her room, where she said she had something to do while Mrs. Harwood retired with Meredith, between whom and herself a curious intimacy seemed to have struck up, to the dining-room, his room as it was called, to talk there.
In this universal gloom and strangeness Julia drew Janet out into the garden. The day grew darker as it approached its end, the atmosphere became more yellow, signs as of a fog appeared in the air. The governess and the pupil put on their ulsters, and began to walk up and down the garden walks, Julia hanging with all her might upon the arm of her companion, dragging down Janet almost to the ground.
“Did you ever know,” Julia said, “such a detestable day?”
“It is turning to fog,” said Janet, trying to keep to what was commonplace. “It was better that we did not go out.”
“Oh, was I thinking of the fog?” said Julia. “I would rather see a dozen fogs than Gussy shut up like that, pursing up her lips as if she were afraid something would drop out when she spoke. And poor Dolff, so dismal, not knowing what to do with himself. Janet, do you think there could be any truth in all that story about Dolff?”
“My dear,” said Janet, “how should I have any opinion? I cannot be supposed to know about your brother, what he is likely to do.”
“Oh,” said Julia, “I did not ask you what you know, but what you think; everybody must have an opinion. Besides, after all, it is not so very little that you know about Dolff. He has been at home for six weeks, and you have always seen a great deal of him; at least I am sure he has always tried to see as much as he could of you.”
“I think,” said Janet, “that it is very bad taste for us to discuss people, especially for you to talk with me about your own family. You forget that I am the governess, Julia.”
“I think you are very nasty, and not nice at all. Whoever thinks of you as the governess! I wonder what you mean, saying such unkind things.”
“They are not unkind, they are true. Your mother and Gussy have been very good to me, but——”
“Oh, Janet, when you know we were very fond of you, and we thought you were fond of us!”
Here Janet was suddenly visited by a great compunction which changed at once her countenance and her feelings.
“Julia,” she said, “don’t speak to me. I feel so horrible sometimes, I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t think I am nice or good at all. Perhaps,” she added with a faint revulsion of self-defence after this impulsive confession, “it is not quite my fault.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Julia. “I ask you a question, quite a simple question, and you go off into reproaching yourself and saying you are not nice. What I want to know is whether you think it was Dolff that knocked Charley Meredith down? If it was, he has not had the strength of mind to stick to it, as I should have done. And what do you think that man meant who came to identify him, and then said it wasn’t he? And do you think that man last night really meant anything about Dolff, or did they only pretend to find out about the wing? And, oh, Janet, did you ever know, did you ever suspect anything about the wing? Please don’t run away to other subjects, but tell me what you think.”
“Where am I to begin? I can’t answer all those questions at once.”
“Oh,” said Julia, with impatience, “how tiresome you are to-day! You don’t want to answer me at all. Do you remember that first night when you heard that cry, and were so frightened? I had heard it before, but mamma told me it was nothing, it was the wind in the empty rooms. One thinks it strange,” said Julia, “but at first one is stupid, you know, and just believes anything. But you see you were right; and you didn’t look surprised at all, not even to see mamma walking upstairs, she who never moves. Or, do you think she only pretends not to be able to move, to take us all in?” Julia added, after a pause.
“Oh, Julia, hush! How dare you say such a thing of your mother?”
“It is because she has deceived us about things,” said Julia, hanging her head. “It was Dolff that said so, not me. She has deceived us in one thing, and how are we to believe her in another. Both Dolff and Gussy think so, though Gussy says nothing; to think she has kept it secret all this time, and never let even the elder ones know: and how can we tell if it is not a deceit about the chair, too?”
“If you had seen how she tore herself out of it last night! It was only her misery and anxiety that gave her power to do it. It is very hard to judge any one like that. I daresay,” said Janet, indignantly, “that the other was done for your sakes, too, not to trouble you, when you were still so young, with knowing what was a great secret, I suppose?”
“Ah, but why was it a secret? and who do you think the man is, Janet?” said Julia, clinging ever and ever closer to her arm.
“Julia, what have I to do with the secrets of your family?”
“Why, you are one of the family,” said Julia; “you can’t help knowing; and again I tell you, Janet, it isn’t what you know, it’s what you think I am asking. Why don’t you give me your opinion? every one must have an opinion. Dolff and I, we don’t know what to think.”
Dolff himself came hurriedly up behind the girls at this moment. He had not gone out after all.
“Why do you trouble Miss Summerhayes, Ju? It is very interesting for us, but not for—a stranger——”
“That is what I have just been saying, Mr. Harwood.”
“—Who can’t take any particular interest, except just as a wonder and a thing to talk about, in what happens to us?”
Dolff’s hands were thrust to the very bottom of his pockets, his shoulders were up to his ears, his head upon his breast. Gloom and anger and misery were on Dolff’s face. As for Janet, she had stiffened more and more with every word he said, and Julia, who had been clinging, with all a child’s affection, to the arm of her governess, felt herself repulsed and detached, she could not tell how, and protested loudly:
“Janet, because Dolff is disagreeable that’s no reason for shaking me off!”
“I have no intention of being disagreeable,” said Dolff, walking slowly with them. “I only say what every one must perceive to be the fact. We have all supposed there was a miracle to be performed, and Miss Summerhayes was to think of us as if—as if—she was, as you say, Ju, one of the family; but she does not feel like that; our affairs are nothing to her—only something that is odd and makes a story to talk about, as they would be to any other stranger.”
“Oh, if you are going to quarrel!” said Julia, “you had better get it over between yourselves. I don’t like people who are quarrelling. You had better have it out with him, Janet, and then perhaps he will not be so dreadful as he has been all these days.”
“There is nothing for us to quarrel about. I am, as Mr. Harwood says, only a stranger,” said Janet, endeavoring to hold the girl’s hand upon her arm.
But Julia slipped it out and ran indoors, not without a thought that she had managed matters well. Julia had long ago made up her mind that a romantic attachment between Dolff and Janet would add great interest to her own life, and that the probable struggles of a love that would not run too smooth would be very desirable for a young lady to witness. And Dolff, under Janet’s influence, had been so much “nicer” than Dolff without that. He had stayed at home; he had been ready for anything (though there was always too much of that horrid music), he had not objected even to a round game. It was true that all these domestic pleasures had come to an end since Charley Meredith’s accident. But Julia, in her inexperience, could not see why they might not come to an explanation and “get over it,” and everything go on as before.
Janet did not follow her pupil as she would have liked to do. She consented to the explanation as it seemed necessary, but she neither hoped nor intended that everything should go on as before.
“Yes,” said Dolff, “you are only a stranger, Miss Summerhayes. My mother, I think, took to you as if you had been her own, and everybody was at your feet, but you did not respond—that is to say, you were very kind, and the things you could not help but see, being in the house with us, though we never saw them who belonged to it, you told—as amusing incidents, I suppose, to——”
“What did I tell, Mr. Harwood?”
“Oh, I have not been taken into anyone’s confidence. You gave information—you heard him say it—which made a secret meeting necessary, and—all that followed. One might say,” said Dolff, with a cheerless laugh, “that everything had followed. I went mad, I suppose, for a little while; and you know as well as I do what I did. Oh, I am very well aware that you know. You saved me in your way after you had ruined me. Fellows say that women are like that—driving you mad first, and then—— But I never was one that talked about women—till I knew you.”
“I am very sorry,” said Janet, “to have given you a bad opinion of women; but I don’t know why Mr. Meredith——” Here her voice faltered a little in spite of herself.
“Ah!” cried Dolff, fiercely, “you have found out that fellow is not worth his salt, yet you could cry when you say his name.”
“It is nothing of the sort,” exclaimed Janet. “I cry—for any man in the world! You don’t know me, Mr. Harwood. Mr. Meredith, I remember, walked home a part of the road with me, as it was a dark night. There are some men who think that is a right thing when they meet a lady alone; and, though I am the governess, I am not very old. I think it very old-fashioned, and unnecessary, and I am not afraid to go anywhere alone.”
“You know very well if you had wished for an escort, Miss Summerhayes——”
“Yes, Mrs. Harwood would have liked her son to be at the command of the governess! Mr. Meredith walked home with me out of a civility which is old-fashioned, and he stood talking, which it seems is his way—with ladies. A man like that,” said Janet, almost fiercely, “will never learn that all girls are not alike, and that some detest these old-fashioned ways of being polite. But there was not in all that any reason for knocking the man down. I supposed when I saw it that you were, perhaps, working out some old quarrel.”
“You thought,” said Dolff, grinding his teeth, “that I had watched him, and flew at him, by premeditation, to take him at a disadvantage—not because I was driven mad to see him holding you by the hands.”
“How could I know one thing or another? There was no reason for anyone being mad about me: I can take care of myself without anyone interfering. But I did not want any scandal, I do not want to be mixed up in it; when a girl’s name is mentioned it is always she that gets the whole blame. You know what they say, ‘Oh, there was a woman at the bottom of it.’ Now, I had done nothing wrong, I was not at the bottom of it. Whatever you choose to say, it was no doing of mine.”
“One of the things that fellow says,” said Dolff, “is that a woman has always reasons to show she is never wrong.”
“They say everything that is brutal and cruel,” said Janet, with a sound of tears in her voice, “and therefore I was determined not to be mixed up in it: and I did my best to save you from what was—not a very fine action, Mr. Harwood. You did take him at a disadvantage. I don’t doubt that you were very angry, though you had no reason——”
“If you think it was all for you!” cried Dolff, transported with boyish passion and anxious to give a blow in his turn. “But to think of that fellow, jeering and laughing at everybody, those who trusted in him——”
“You see,” said Janet, with a smile, “that I was right when I said I was not at the bottom of it!”
Dolff gave her a look which might have killed her where she stood, had the fire which passion struck even from his dull eyes been effectual, and yet which had in it a strange mixture of love and hate. He was not clever enough, however, to note that in Janet’s smile there was a mixture, too, of malicious triumph and of mortification; for, notwithstanding all that she had said, it would no doubt have been more agreeable to Janet’s pride to have been told that the sudden assault was entirely on her own account from fierce jealousy and passion. She was a little girl who was full of reason, and understood the complication of things, yet there was enough of the primitive in her to have been pleased, even had she not fully believed it, by such an asseveration as that.
“In that case,” she said, “I don’t know what you have to find fault with me. I did my best to smooth it all away that nobody might have known anything. What use is there in telling things that are so easily misrepresented? If it would shock anyone who trusted in him to know that Mr. Meredith had walked home with the governess——”
“Oh,” cried Dolff, “you will drive me out of my senses! who calls you the governess, Miss Summerhayes?”
“I do myself,” said Janet, “it is my right title. I never have been one of those who despise it; but if it would vex anyone—who trusted in him—to hear that Mr. Meredith had walked home because it was dark and late with the——”
“You are very anxious to defend Meredith,” said Dolff, bitterly.
“Am I?” cried Janet. There was a dart out of her eyes at that moment that was more powerful than any dull spark that could come from Dolff’s. “If I am,” she added, with a laugh, “it is only for the sake of those who, as you say, trust in him, Mr. Harwood. For me I find those old-fashioned ways of his intolerable. He is like a man in an old novel,” cried Janet, “who kisses the maid and gives her half-a-crown, and is what is called civil to every girl. It is eighteenth-century—it is mock Lovelace—it is the most antiquated vanity and conceit. And he thinks that he takes people in by it, which shows how foolish and imbecile it is, besides being the worst taste in the world!”
Dolff stared open-eyed at this tirade. He had a faint idea that Lovelace meant a seductive villain, but what Meredith had to do with the eighteenth century, or how he was old-fashioned, this young man, devoid of literature, understood not at all. He did understand, however, that Janet was angry with Meredith, and this went to his heart. The dull yellow sky began to look a little clearer. It became a possibility that things might brighten, that a new world might arise, that these misty shadows might blow away.
“If I could think,” he said, “that you ever could forget all this, Miss Summerhayes. I heard you taking my mother’s part with Ju: and you are thinking of Gussy, who doesn’t deserve it very much, perhaps, and you have saved me: for I never could have faced it out but for what you said to me—though I have seemed so ungrateful: and if you think it possible that we could all forget what has happened—in time——”
“No,” said Janet, “I think there are several things in it which neither you nor I could ever forget.”
“I am not so sure,” said Dolff. “It would depend upon you. If you would promise never to see or speak to——”
“Whom?” said Janet, rising several inches out of her shoes, and looking down upon him with a glance that froze Dolff; and then she added, interrogatively, “For you?” and, turning round upon her heel, walked away into the house without a glance behind.