"I only acted for the best," replied Jane. "Miss Laura was that unmanageable! For the future I won't try to look after her."
"That's all I require, Jane. I need not tell you that my confidence in you is severely shaken: I could never trust you with such an important charge again. I cannot even tell you whether I shall be able to make up my mind to remain in your house. But I shall narrowly watch your behavior, and may hope to be convinced that ignorance rather than downright badness of heart was the cause of your cruelty to my little daughter."
Jane's mouth was open to reply, but Margaret stopped her: "You have said quite enough; you may leave me now. Only remember this: I must never be forced to complain of you in this way again."
She turned to her writing-table as she spoke, and Jane with heightened color walked to the door.
She did not attempt to answer, for Margaret's severity of manner awed her; but if Mrs. Grey had looked her way she might have seen an ominous frown on her brow and a gleam of anger in her cold gray eye.
Jane prided herself on her spirit. It was next to respectability in her estimate of necessary virtues, but she seldom displayed it imprudently. When the door was between her and her mistress she clenched her fist and shook it at the senseless boards. "Her and her beggar's brat!" she muttered; "but mayhap I'll teach them yet." And with that she retired to the kitchen, leaving Margaret, very spent and sad, undisputed mistress of the field.
Perhaps it was a dear-bought victory. It might have been better for herself and Laura if she had acted upon her first determination, and left Jane Rodgers's house on the next day. But we cannot know all our kind, its varieties are so infinite, and Margaret believed in Jane still to a great extent; then the difficulties of a change of residence were very great.
Moving was an expensive business, one she could not well afford, and so far as that village was concerned (she had a certain repugnance to going elsewhere) she did not know of another place that would suit them; so the matter was decided. Margaret went to bed fully determined to remain where she was. Her bedroom window commanded the sea. She lifted the blind that night, as her habit was, and looked away wistfully over the waters. How she longed sometimes for the freedom of the white sea-gull, that skims those restless waves and passes on, on, through the light and through the darkness till it reaches the haven where it would be!
There was a haven for which she longed so passionately that at times the longing was a bitter pain: her haven was not in the heavenly country. In those days Margaret seldom thought of that, for even the passing away from things visible might not possibly put an end to her pain. It was a haven in which she had once rejoiced, but from which she had passed out into the black darkness of a dreary, shoreless ocean. The love and confidence of one poor human heart—that was the whole of her desire; and day by day, night by night, the wished-for haven seemed drifted farther away, till even hope died down, and she ceased to think she could ever reach it.