CHAPTER XIII. AN ILL-MATCHED PAIR.
Nobody but simple-hearted Bram Elshaw, perhaps, would have been able to doubt any longer after what he had seen that there was something stronger than cousinly affection between Christian Cornthwaite and Claire. But even this wild visit of Chris to his cousin on his very wedding day did not create more than a momentary doubt, a flying suspicion, in the heart of the devoted Bram.
Had he not looked into her dark eyes not many days before, and read there every virtue and every quality which can make womanhood sweet and noble and dear?
Unluckily, Chris had been seen on this mysterious visit by others besides Bram.
It was not long after the wedding day that Josiah Cornthwaite found occasion, when Bram was alone with him in his office, to break out into invective against the girl who, so he said, was trying to destroy every chance of happiness for his son. Bram, who could not help knowing to what girl he referred, made no comment, but waited stolidly for the information which he saw that Mr. Cornthwaite was anxious to impart.
“I think even you, Elshaw, who advocated this young woman so warmly a little while ago, will have to alter your opinion now.” As Bram still looked blank, he went on impatiently—“Don’t pretend to misunderstand. You know very well whom I mean—Claire Biron, of Duke’s Farm.
“It has come to my ears that my son had a meeting with her on his wedding day——”
Bram’s countenance looked more blank than ever. Mr. Cornthwaite went on—
“I know what I am talking about, and I speak from the fullest information. She sent him a note that very morning; everybody knows about it; my daughter heard her say it was to be given to Mr. Christian at once, and that it was from his cousin Miss Biron. Is that evidence enough for you?”
Bram trembled.
“There must be some other explanation than the one you have put upon it, sir,” said he quietly but decidedly. “Miss Biron often had to write notes on behalf of her father,” he suggested respectfully.
“Pshaw! Would any message of that sort, a mere begging letter, an attempt to borrow money, have induced my son to take the singular, the unprecedented action that he did? Surprising, nay, insulting, his wife before she had been his wife two hours.”
Bram heard the story with tingling ears and downcast eyes. That there was some truth in it no one knew better than he. Had he not the confirmatory evidence of his own eyes? Yet still he persisted in doggedly doubting the inference Mr. Cornthwaite would have forced upon him. His employer was waiting in stony silence for some answer, some comment. So at last he looked up, and spoke out bravely the thoughts that were in his mind.
“Sir,” said he steadily, “the one thing this visit of Mr. Christian’s proves beyond any doubt is that he was in love with her at the time you made him marry another woman. It doesn’t prove anything against Miss Biron, until you have heard a great deal more than you have done so far, at least. You must excuse me, sir, for speaking so frankly, but you insisted on my telling you what I thought.”
Mr. Cornthwaite was displeased. But as he had, indeed, forced the young man to speak, he could not very well reproach him for obeying. Besides, he was used to Bram’s uncompromising bluntness, and was prepared to hear what he really thought from his lips.
“I can’t understand the young men of the present generation,” he said crossly, with a wave of the hand to intimate to Bram that he had done with him. “When I was between twenty and thirty, I looked for good looks in a girl, for a pair of fine eyes, for a fine figure, for a pair of rosy cheeks. Now it seems that women can dispense with all those attributes, and bowl the men over like ninepins with nothing but a little thread of a lisping voice and a trick of casting down a pair of eyes which are anything but what I should call fine. But I suppose I am old-fashioned.”
Bram retired respectfully without offering any suggestion as to the reason of this surprising change of taste.
He was in a tumult of secret anxiety. He felt that he could no longer keep away from the farm, that he must risk everything to try to get an explanation from Claire. If she would trust him with the truth, and he believed her confidence in himself to be great enough for this, he could, he thought, clear her name in the eyes of the angry Josiah. It was intolerable to him that the girl he worshipped as devotedly as ever should lie under a foul suspicion.
So that very evening, as soon as he had left the office, he went straight to the farm. It was his last day before starting on the mission with which he was to be intrusted in the place of Chris, who was on his honeymoon. This was an excellent excuse for a visit, which might not, he feared, be well received.
He was more struck than ever as he approached the farmyard gate with a fact which had been patent to all eyes of late. The tenants of Duke’s Farm had fallen on evil days. Everything about the place betrayed the fact that a guiding hand was wanting; while Bram had kept an eye on the farm bailiff things had gone pretty smoothly, fences had been repaired, the stock had been well looked after. Now there were signs of neglect upon everything. The wheat was still unstacked; the thatch at one end of the big barn was broken and defective; a couple of pigs had strayed from the farmyard into the garden, and were rooting up whatever took their fancy.
Bram leaned on the gate, and looked sorrowfully around.
Was it by chance that the back door opened, and Joan, the good-humored Yorkshire servant, peeped out? She looked at him for a few minutes very steadily, and then she beckoned him with a brawny arm. He came across the yard at once.
“Look here, mister,” said she in her broadly familiar manner, “what have ye been away so long for? Do ye think there’s nought to be done here now? Or have ye grown too grand for us poor folks?”
He laughed rather bitterly.
“No, Joan, I’ve only kept away because I’m not wanted.”
“Hark to him!” she cried ironically, as she planted her hands on her hips, and glanced up at him with a shrewd look in her gray-green clever eyes. “He wants to be pressed now, when he used to be glad enoof to sneak in and take his chance of a welcome! Well, Ah could tell a tale if Ah liked, and put the poor, modest fellow at his ease, that Ah could!”
Bram’s face flushed.
“Do you mean she wants me?” he asked so simply that Joan burst into a good-humored laugh.
“Go ye in and see,” said she with a stupendous nod. “And if ye get the chuck aht, blame it on to me!”
Bram took the hint, and went in. Joan followed, and pointed to a chair by the table, where Claire sat bending over some work by the light of a candle. The evening was a gray one, and the light was already dim in the big farm kitchen.
“Here’s a friend coom to see ye who doan’t coom so often as he might,” cried Joan, following close on the visitor’s heels. Claire was looking up with eyes in which Bram, with a pang, noted a new look of fear and dismay. For the first time within his recent memory she did not seem glad to see him. He stopped.
“I’ve only come, Miss Claire,” said he in a very modest voice, “to tell you I’m going to London to-morrow on business for the firm. I shall be away ten days or a fortnight; and I came to know whether there was anything I could do for you, either before I go or while I’m there. But if there’s nothing, or if I’m in the way——”
“You’re never in anybody’s way, Mr. Elshaw,” said she quite cordially, but without the hearty ring there used to be in her welcome. “Please, sit down.”
She offered him a chair, and he took it, while Joan, round about whose wide mouth a malicious smile was playing, disappeared into her own precincts of scullery and back-kitchen.
For some minutes there was dead silence, not the happy silence of two friends so secure in their friendship that they need not talk—the old-time silence which they had both loved, but a constrained, uncomfortable taciturnity, a leaden, speechless pause, during which Bram watched with feverish eyes the little face as it bent over her work, and noted that the outline of her cheek had grown sharper.
He tried to speak, to break the horrid silence which weighed upon them both. But he could not. It seemed to him that there was something different about this meeting from any they had ever had, that the air was heavy with impending disaster.
He spoke suddenly at last in a husky voice.
“Miss Claire, I want you to tell me something.”
She looked up quickly, with anxiety in her eyes. But she said nothing.
“I want you to tell me,” he went on, assuming a tone which was almost bullying in his excitement, “why Mr. Christian came to see you the day he was married?”
To his horror she stood up, pushing back her chair, moving as if with no other object than to hide the frantic emotion she was seized with at these words. There passed over her face a look of anguish which he never forgot as she answered in a low, breathless voice.
“Hush, I cannot tell you. You must not ask. You must never ask. And you must never speak about it again, never, never!”
Bram leaned over the table, and looked straight into her eyes. In every line of her face he read the truth.
“He asked you to—to go away with him!” he growled, hardly above his breath.
“Hush!” cried she. “Hush! I don’t know how you know; I hope, oh, I pray that nobody else knows. I want to forget it! I will forget it! If I had to go through it again it would kill me!”
And, dry-eyed, she fell into a violent fit of shuddering, and sank down in her chair with her head in her hands.
“The scoundrel!” said Bram in a terrible whisper.
And there came into his face that look, that fierce peep out of the primitive north country savage, which had startled Chris himself one memorable night.
Claire saw it, and she grew white as the dead.
“Bram,” cried she hoarsely, “don’t look like that; don’t speak like that. You frighten me!”
But he looked at her with eyes which did not see. This fulfilment of his fears, of his doubts of Chris, was a shock she could not understand.
There was a pause before he was able to speak. Then he repeated vaguely—
“Frightened you, Miss Claire! I didn’t mean to do that!”
But the look on his face had not changed. Claire leaned across the table, touched his sleeve impatiently, timidly.
“Bram,” said she in a shrill voice, sharpened by alarm, “you are to forget it too! Do you hear?”
He turned upon her suddenly.
“No,” said he, “you can’t make me do that!”
“But I say you must, you shall. Oh, Bram, if you had been here, if you had heard him, you would have been sorry for him, you would have pitied him, as I did!”
Bram leaped up from his chair. All the fury in his eyes seemed now to be concentrated upon her.
“You pitied him! You were sorry for him! For a black-hearted rascal like that!”
“Oh, Bram, Bram, don’t you know that those are only words! When you see a man you’ve always liked, been fond of, who has always been happy and bright, and full of fun and liveliness, quite suddenly changed, and broken down, and wretched, you don’t stop to ask yourself whether he’s a good man or a bad one. Now, do you, Bram?”
“You ought to!” rejoined Bram in fierce Puritanism militant. “You ought to have used your chance of showing him what a wicked thing he was doing to his poor wife as well as you!”
“Oh, Bram, I did. I said what I could!”
“Not half enough, I’ll warrant!” retorted he, clenching his fist. “You didn’t tell him he was a blackguard who ought to be kicked from one end of the county to the other! And that you’d never speak to him again as long as you lived!”
“No, I certainly didn’t.”
“Then,” almost shouted Bram, bringing his fist down on the table with a threatening, sounding thump, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself! You good women do as much harm as the bad ones, for you are just as tender and sweet to men when they do wrong as when they do right. You encourage them in their wicked ways, when you should be stand-off and proud. I do believe, God forgive me for saying so, you care more for Mr. Chris now than you did before!”
Claire, who was very white, waited a moment when he had come to the end of his accusation. Then she said in a weak, timid, little voice, but with steadiness—
“It is true, I believe, that I like him better than I did before. You are too hard, Bram; you make no allowance for anything.”
“There are some things no allowance should be made for.”
“Well, there’s one thing you forget, and that is that I’ve not been used to good people, so that I am not so hard as you are. I’ve never known a good man except you, Bram, but then I’ve never known one so severe upon others either.”
“You shouldn’t say that, Miss Claire; I’m not hard.”
“Oh!”
“Or if I am, it’s only so as I shouldn’t be too soft!” cried he, suddenly breaking down into gentleness, and forgetting his grammar at the same time. “It’s only because you’ve got nobody to take care of you, nobody to keep harm away from you, that I want you to be harder yourself!”
There was a pause. Claire was evidently touched by his solicitude. Presently she spoke, persuasively, affectionately, but with caution.
“Bram, if I promise to be hard, very hard, will you give me a promise back?”
“What’s that?”
“Will you promise me that you will forget”—Bram shook his head, and at once began a fierce, angry protest—“well, that you will say nothing about this. Come, you are bound in honor, because I told you in confidence——”
“No, you didn’t; I found out!”
“You can’t deny that I have told you some things in confidence. Now, listen. You can do no good, and you may do harm by speaking about this. You must behave to Christian as if you knew nothing. It is of no use for you to shake your head. I insist. And remember, it is the only way you have of proving to me that you are not hard. Why, what about the poor wife you pretended to be so anxious about just now? Isn’t it for her advantage as well as mine that this awful, dreadful mistake should be forgotten?”
There was no denying this. Bram hung his head. At last he looked up, and said shortly—
“If I promise to behave as if I hadn’t heard will you promise me not to see Mr. Christian again?”
Claire flushed proudly. But when she answered it was in a gentle, kind voice.
“You won’t trust me, Bram?”
“I think it will be better for the wife, for you, for him, for everybody, if you promise.”
“Very well. I promise to do my best not to see him again.”
She was looking very grave. Bram stared at her anxiously. She got up suddenly, and looked at him as if in dismissal. He held out his hand.
“Good-bye, Miss Claire. You forgive my rough manners, don’t you? If only you had somebody better than me to take care of you, I wouldn’t be so meddlesome. Good-bye. God bless you!”
He wanted to say a great deal more; he wanted to know a great deal more; but he dared not risk another word. Giving her hand a quick, firm pressure, which she returned without looking up, and with a restraint and reserve which warned him to be careful, he hurried out of the house.