“Is that all? Oh, then don't vex yourself about any old father dead and gone. I wouldn't! Though, to be sure, I never had the chance. Little I ever knew or cared about mine.”
Olive turned away, and was silent; but Christal, who seemed, for some reason best known to herself, to be in a particularly unreserved and benignant humour, said kindly, “You poor little trembling thing, how ill you have made yourself! You can scarcely stand alone; give me your hand, and I'll help you to the sofa.”
But Olive shrank as if there had been a sting in the slender fingers which lay on her arm. She looked at them, and a slight circumstance, long forgotten, rushed back upon her memory,—something she had noticed to her mother the first night that the girl came home. Tracing the beautiful hereditary mould of the Rothesay line, she now knew why Christal's hand was like her own father's.
A shiver of instinctive repugnance came over her, and then the mysterious voice of kindred blood awoke in her heart. She took and passionately clasped that hand—the hand of her sister.
“O Christal! let us love one another—we two, who have no other tie left to us on earth.”
But Christal was rarely in a pathetic mood. She only shrugged her shoulders, and then stroked Olive's arm with a patronising air. “Come, your journey has been too much for you, and you had no business to wander off that way with Mrs. Gwynne; you shall lie down and rest a little and then go to bed.”
But Olive was afraid of night and its solitude. She knew there was no slumber for her. When she was a little recovered, feeling unable to talk, she asked Christal to read aloud.
The other looked annoyed. “Pleasant! to be a mere lady's companion and reader! Miss Rothesay forgets who I am, I think,” muttered she, though apparently not meaning Olive to hear her.
But Olive did hear, and shuddered at the hearing.
Miss Manners carelessly took up the newspaper, and read the first paragraph which caught her eye. It was one of those mournful episodes which are sometimes revealed at the London police-courts. A young girl—a lady swindler—had been brought up for trial there. In her defence came out the story of a life, cradled in shame, nurtured in vice, and only working out its helpless destiny—that of a rich man's deserted illegitimate child. The report added, that “The convict was led from the dock in a state of violent excitement, calling down curses on her parents, but especially on her father, who, she said, had cruelly forsaken her mother. She ended by exclaiming that it was to him she herself owed all her life of misery, and that her blood was upon his head.”