It was old Reuben again—sitting by the chimney-corner crippled with rheumatism, or, as he himself expressed it, with all his constitution run into his legs—it was poor old Reuben who had told me the truth. Shrewd Deb knew it and was silent, but Reuben—too shrewd or not shrewd enough to be silent, told me the tale: if squire had not bought in all the stock and the furniture before it ever came to the hammer, we shouldn't have been in the Grange now, living practically very much the same life as we had always lived.
Ah me! I knew well enough why the squire had taken such pains to conceal from us all that he had done anything more than effect a compromise with the creditors. But I ought to have guessed. If I had not been so much wrapped up in my own personal pains and feelings I should have guessed it, and when I next met him I nerved myself to speak on the subject. How well I recall his explanation! "Folk in the country grow to depend so on one another that I couldn't do with strangers at the Grange while I'm alive," he had said; "so you must forgive me if I played a game to serve my own ends. The place might have stood empty ever so long. Farms do nowadays."
We must have been riding eastward over the downs, for I can remember that the wind blew keen in our faces, and that the sky was leaden overhead, almost as dull as the wide, dull marsh below it: it was winter. I know that, even at the time, I recalled another night when I had ridden with the squire; then the west was raging crimson behind us, and the moon rose yellow out of the sea; it had been summer.
"There is no one else in the world who would have done for us what you have done for us, nor any one else in the world from whom we could take it," I had murmured, in a trembling voice. "It is for father's sake."
"It is not all for your father's sake," the squire had answered, softly, with grave and tender face, his blue eyes shining down on me with a deep, bright light.
By a sudden impulse I recollect holding out my hand to him. "I know you are my friend and I am your friend," I had said. "We shall always be friends till we die."
And all through the dreary days that followed, that friendship, that needed no words to tell and that no parting could weaken, warmed my empty heart at a time when the world seemed to hold no further joy nor even such comparative content as a respite from remorse.
For, alas! Joyce slowly faded and saddened before my eyes, and all my passionate love for her came back, making the thought of her wasted youth, her tarnished loveliness, her happiness uselessly spoiled through my fault, almost heavier than I could bear.
For it was spoiled though she spoke no word. At first the tall, slim figure—more Quakerly neat than ever in its straight black gown—went about the household duties just as serenely as before, and the face, so dazzlingly fair a flower on the dark stem, shone as innocently content as of yore. I could scarcely believe that she could have seen that cruel letter, with its upright, rugged characters, that seemed to have sent away the last drop of blood from my heart. Her hope must have been high or she could never have kept so patient a countenance.
But however high it may have been, it began to fade. I had said to myself that Joyce could not feel, but—ah me, how little can we know how much other people feel! I could see her feeling through the tremulous sensitiveness of the face that once seemed to me so impossible to ruffle—I could hear it through the thin sound of her timid voice, in her rare speech and rarer laughter—and I knew that my loved sister was unhappy. Yes, she was unhappy; life was as dead to her as it was to me, and it was I—I, loving her—who had killed her joy for her, and killed it wilfully. May no one whom I love ever know, what it is to feel remorse!