Chapter Seventeen.
“When adversities flow
Then love ebbs; but friendship standeth stiffly
In storms.”
Lilly.
People, women especially, make resolutions sometimes with no more to back them up than a vague hope that they will be able to carry them out in some haphazard fashion. Winifred had almost offended Mrs Miles by the slackness of her visits to the cottage, and hardly knew whether Anthony were in Thorpe or not. She persuaded Bessie, however, to ride with her father, and, putting on her red cloak, went across the meadows, making a little spot of brightness in the midst of the quiet winter colouring.
She walked through the village, lingering a little at the post-office, and afterwards going on towards Underham, simply from not knowing where else to turn. The rain had reduced the roads to thick mud, and strewn them with little twigs and branches, whipped from the trees by the violence of the storm. But, as not infrequently happens after these fierce gales, there was an exquisite beauty shining where lately the hurly-burly had raged. Instinctively Winifred stopped at a gate in the hedge to look at what was generally dull and uninteresting enough, a long stretch of flat meadows with low hills beyond. But the meadow was transfigured with a depth of colour; there were rich patches of indigo and russet, poplars lighting up the sober background with streaks of brown light, breadths of freshly turned earth, infinite traceries springing from dark stems, a delicate sky broken by soft shadows and round masses of living light, little pools of shining beautiful water left by the rains, hedges ruddy with crimson berries, a white horse, an old man leaning on his stick,—the picture was full of simple, homely grace.
She was still looking at it when some one came along the road behind her. It was Mr Robert Mannering, and his first words connected themselves with her own purpose.
“Have you seen Anthony Miles?” he asked. “He was to come down by this train, and I am particularly desirous to meet him.” Something that he saw in Winifred’s face made him add immediately, “So you have heard it, too?”
“Does Anthony know?” asked the girl, without answering directly.
Mr Robert’s kindly face looked grave and worried. He began to brush imaginary dust from his coat-sleeve,—an action in which he always took refuge under any annoyance.
“If you mean the report,” he said, laying a little stress upon the last word, “I imagine that he does not. To tell you the truth, that is why I am here; for his father’s sake I am inclined to let him hear what is said.”
Winifred flushed a little.
“I do not know why you should say for his father’s sake,” she said at once. “I do not suppose that Anthony’s friends can have allowed a breath of this horrible story to affect them, so that their one wish must be to stand by him for his own sake.”
She stopped and looked at Mr Mannering, who was silent.
“Surely,” said Winifred impetuously, “Mr Pitt has not influenced you!”
“My dear,” said Robert Mannering, looking out towards the low hills, and speaking with a little hesitation, “I think that Anthony had a difficult duty to perform—”
“Yes, yes, go on,” said Winifred, trying to govern her voice.
“And that he shrank from it.”
She could no longer laugh as she had laughed the night before. A sickening feeling came over her. Was this lie actually living, spreading, destroying? Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. She lifted her hand in mute indignation.
“You—his friend!—you believe that!”
He was silent again, and then said slowly,—
“Perhaps neither you nor I are fair judges, Winifred. You naturally think of Anthony, whom you have known all your life, and I think of Margaret Hare. Remember that her child was in all justice the heir, and remember what the poor mother has suffered.”
“O, I remember!” said Winifred, recovering herself, and standing upright, with the full light of the sky in her face; “and I remember, too, who it was that spoke to old Mr Tregennas for the child. It is only I who recollect at all, I think. And it seems to me that there is little use in knowing people all one’s life long, as you say, if that knowledge falls away into doubt the instant our trust in them is tried. If you believe this story, Mr Mannering, pray let me be the person to tell him. I may meet him now; at any rate, I am sure to have an opportunity.”
“As you like,” Mr Robert said, gravely. “Good by, my dear. I am afraid there is pain in store for us all.”
But, although he was the first to say good by, it was Winifred who left him standing by the gate watching her, as she went resolutely along with a quickened step, and the light still on her face.
“True woman, true woman, she will not fail him,” said Mr Robert to himself, shaking his head sadly. “Poor boy, I can’t think of him without being sorry from the bottom of my heart, and yet it was an evil thing to do to Margaret Hare’s child. I wish Pitt had not told us—I wish—”
And then he turned and went back again.
Winifred walked swiftly on for about half a mile, slackening her pace as she became aware that she was going too fast, and trying to lose the consciousness that she had come here to meet Anthony Miles, for it was only when the pitiful feeling was very strong in her heart that it overcame a secret repugnance, and every now and then this last grew into a kind of startled shyness.
Presently she heard wheels, and saw the pony-carriage coming towards her with Anthony driving. Her first impulse was to nod and smile, and pass on as if the meeting were accidental, but the next moment she was ashamed of its prompting, and stood still bravely. Ah, how strange it was that she should need any bravery where Anthony was concerned! It evidently pleased him that she should have stopped, for it was with a radiant countenance that he drew up and jumped out, and asked what had brought her so far from Thorpe.
“He should not have asked,” thought poor Winifred. Then she found he was preparing to send oh James with the carriage, and to walk back with her.
“If you will let me?” he said questioningly.
“I should like it,” Winifred said, so eagerly that he brightened still more. It struck both of them with a pleasant sense of warmth that they two should be walking alone together through the lanes. It was winter, but Anthony thought there was plenty of colour and brightness, and perhaps Winifred’s red cloak had something to do with it. As for her, after the gleam of those few delicious moments, the dull weight of what she had to say came back with depressing heaviness. Anthony’s good-humour and lightness of heart added a hundredfold to the difficulty of her task; yet, time was passing, and she felt with terror that each step brought them nearer to Thorpe. She was always deficient in the feminine art of doubling upon her subject, and in this hour of need it seemed as if she were duller than ever. Anthony, however, knowing nothing of her inward strife, was quite content with Winifred’s softness and kindness; he talked gayly—more gayly than he had talked since the Vicar’s death—of what he had been doing in London.
“I think I see my way to some satisfactory work at last,” he said.
“Shall you live in London, do you mean?” asked Winifred, thinking not of London, but of nearer things.
“One must, you know,” Anthony said slowly. And yet, although he had been dissatisfied with Thorpe of late, he said these words with a strange reluctance in his heart. “It is necessary to be in the midst of things. This place is so far off.”
“Trenance is let, is it not?” Winifred was plunging nervously into her subject.
“Yes, and, oddly enough, to a relation of old Lucas. You remember old Lucas, don’t you? I wonder what this Sir Somebody Somebody is like, and whether it runs in the family to wear your hat at the back of your head.”
And so he went on. It seemed to Winifred, poor child, as if he had never talked so fast or so brightly, and all the while, though, as I have said, that thing which she had to tell lay like a cruel weight upon her heart, there was also a secret joy, a delight in this return of free confidence, a feeling as though the happiness which had once seemed possible were possible again. Anthony, too, had vague thoughts stirring. He was pleased at Winifred’s walking back with him, at her little concession; for of late he had declared angrily that she was cold, changed, variable. He was too much taken up with his satisfaction to see her wistful looks, or to guess how her heart ached with the thought that it was she herself who must embitter these quickly passing moments. Already she was wasting time dangerously. They had reached the gate where Winifred and Mr Robert had stood and looked across the meadows. The transient glow which had so beautified the common things was gone, a grey gloom had crept over the snowy clouds, everything lay stretched in a bare, flat level; it seemed no more than a dull land of hedges and ditches, with a few ugly poplars and insignificant hills. Anthony laughed at Winifred a little for stopping to look at them, but indeed she felt as if she needed the bar of the gate by which to hold, so strange a tremor had seized upon her. She glanced at him with the hope that he would see that something was wrong and question her, for it seemed to her as if her face must tell the tale alone; but he talked on happily, until Winifred interrupted him with sudden abruptness.
“Anthony,” she said, “do you know that there is a cruel report abroad about you?”
Her heart beat so fast that she could hardly speak, and yet her voice sounded in her own ears harsh and unfeeling.
“A report?” said Anthony inquiringly. He began to wonder whether she could have heard what had been told him a few days ago, that he was engaged to Miss Milman. It might be unlike Winifred to speak in this fashion, but a man is often egotist enough to forget these impossibilities, and he folded his arms on the bar of the gate, and laughed and looked round with a pleasant anticipation of fault-finding. Winifred kept her face turned from him, and went on nervously.
“They say that Mr Tregennas wanted to have changed his will at the last, and to have left half his fortune to his granddaughter—”
Something choked her voice. Anthony looked at her and gave a little whistle of astonishment. “Then why on earth did he not?”
“They say that he wrote to you to tell you his desire, placing the matter entirely in your hands, and requesting that if you decided against it,”—she left out his father’s name, fearing to seem irreverent to the dead,—“you would take no notice of the letter; and they say—”
He interrupted her here sharply.
“They! Whom do you mean by they?”
“Mr Pitt,” said Winifred in a low voice, after a moment’s hesitation. “Mr Pitt says that you sent Mr Tregennas no answer.”
“So they believe that, do they?” he said in a jarred voice.
Winifred could not answer. Her heart was too full of pity and pain for her to speak. She held by the bar of the gate, and saw blankly lying before her the wintry fields, the tall, expressionless poplars. Anthony put another question in a moment, in the same coldly restrained tone.
“How do they account for my sharing the property with Marmaduke?”
“Anthony, do not force me to repeat such folly.”
“I must hear.”
“It is so absurd!” said Winifred, keenly ashamed, and trying to laugh. “They say Marmaduke discovered the secret, and to avoid its becoming known you consented to—to—”
“Let him share the spoils. I see. Has Mr Pitt returned to London?”
“I believe so. A word from you will set it right.”
“It should never have been wrong,” he said bitterly. “After what you have said I must get home to catch the post. Good by. You don’t mind walking back alone? Indeed, it doesn’t seem as if my company would do you much credit.”
He was gone almost before she heard, and a cold desolation crept over her as she stood still, turning her back upon the little network of fields, and watched him striding away along the muddy lane. What a fierceness there had been in his last words! What a sense of separation he had left behind him! It had required all her resolution to take this task upon her, and it was cruel that it should thus recoil upon herself; a sense of injustice must have stirred her into indignation, had it not been for the womanly tenderness which at once turned it aside with compassionate excuses. No wonder that the very breath of such an accusation should have angered him; no wonder that his first thought should have been to hurry to refute it; no wonder, ah, no wonder, that he should forget her.
She little thought that it was wrath instead of forgetfulness which was uppermost in Anthony’s mind as he splashed through little innocent pools of water with angry steps. Like most reserved men, he was exceeding impatient of reserve in others, and he wanted her to have protested her disbelief in the slander which had met him, while such a protest would have seemed a positive insult to Winifred, who had never dreamed of doubting him. Her words had given him a terrible blow, and the charge was quickly fermented by his imagination into a distorted form. Conscious that he had not sought the old man’s favour, that it had been hateful to him to replace Marmaduke, that he was even now setting inquiries after Ellen Harford on foot, he was accused, nevertheless, of committing what he called a crime to gain this fortune to which he was indifferent. I am not defending his manner of receiving the accusation. If he had been a hero it would have been very different; but, so far as one sees, heroes seldom leap into the world in complete armour; they are more likely to grow out of trials and temptations, yes, out of many a slip and fall, in which they seem to be beaten down and overwhelmed. Anthony had the stuff in him which would bear the furnace, although there were little overgrowths hiding its goodness; he had a ready generosity, high imaginings, longings to better the world; but these were the very feelings upon which such an accusation came like a stream of icy water. If people ceased to believe in him, he felt as if he could believe in nothing.
As he went quickly through Thorpe, he held aloof from the people, but noticed them jealously, fancying he could read meanings in their faces of which, it is needless to say, they were guiltless. Ill report of a man flies fast, but this was not the sort of report to gain wings quickly, for if any of the people heard it, to what did it amount? To the fact that before Mr Tregennas died he put it to Mr Anthony whether or not he should change his will. “A’d ha’ bin a big fule for’s pains if a’d said a wudd,” would have been the heaviest verdict that Anthony could have received from their lips.
But we place our own thoughts in other people’s hearts, and so Anthony heard a hundred unspoken things on his way through Thorpe.