The thoughts which held Mrs. Carteret's eyes waking that night were anything but agreeable. She did not exactly know how she stood with regard to her stepdaughter. If she determined on making the house too unpleasant for her to bear it, she might find herself in collision with her husband and her cousin at once, unless she could contrive that the unpleasantness should be of a kind which Margaret's pride--which she detected to be little, if at all, subdued by the experiences of her married life--would induce her to hide from the observation of both.
Margaret should not live at Chayleigh if Mrs. Carteret could prevent it; but whatever means she used to carry her purpose into effect must be such as James Dugdale could not discover or thwart. The thing would be difficult to do; but Mrs. Carteret had well-grounded confidence in her own power of carrying a point, and this was one which must be held over for the present. It was agreeable to be able to decide that, at all events, Margaret was no beauty, that she was decidedly much less handsome than she had been as what Mrs. Carteret called "a raw girl."
And this was true, to the perception of a superficial observer. Margaret looked very far from handsome as she sat in a corner of the bow-window of the drawing-room, her small thin hands folded and motionless, her head, with its hideous covering, bent down; her pale face, sharpened by the angle at which the light struck it, and her whole figure, in its deep black dress, unrelieved by the slightest ornament or grace of form, pervaded by an expression of weariness and defeat. She might have been a woman of thirty years old, and who had never been handsome, to the perception of any stranger who had then and thus seen her.
But, three hours later in the night, when Margaret Hungerford was alone in the room which had been the scene of her girlish dreams and hopes, of the fond and beautiful delusion so terribly dissipated--in the room where her dead mother had watched her in her sleep, where she had read and yielded to the lover's prayer which lured her from her home--when she was quite alone, and was permitting the waves of memory to rush over her soul;--no one would have said, who could then have seen her, that Margaret was not handsome. Her face was one capable of intensity of expression in every mood of feeling, and as mobile as it was powerful. The wakeful hours of that night passed over her while another crisis in her life was lived through--another crisis somewhat resembling, and yet differing from, that which had marked the first hours of her voyage.
She had sent Rose Moore away as soon as she could, but not before the girl had imparted to her her conviction that English people, always excepting Margaret, were "square." She could not understand the tranquillity of the widowed daughter's reception at Chayleigh. The reception awaiting her in the "ould country" would be of a very different kind, "plase God," she added internally; and the extent and importance of the business of eating and drinking among the servants had gone nigh to exasperate her.
Rose was devoted to Margaret, but she thought the sooner she and her mistress turned their back on a place where servants sat down to four regular meals a day, and did not as much as know the meaning of the "Mass," the better.
"She'll never do for these people," the girl thought, as she waited for Margaret in her room; "she's restless with sorrow, and it's not a nice nate place, like this, with the back parlour full of spiders laid out in state, as if they were wakin' them, and little boxes full of bones--nor yet the drawin'-room, all done out with bades, and a mother, by way of, sittin' in it that 'ud think more of one of her tay-cups bein' chipped than of the young crayture's heart bein' broken--that'll ever bring comfort or consolation to the likes of her."
The thoughts which had put themselves into such simple words in the Irish girl's mind had considerable affinity with Margaret's own, but in her they took more tumultuous form. The strong purpose, half remorse, half vain-longing, which had brought her home, was fulfilled. She had seen the place she had left, and thoroughly realised that her former self had been left with it.
The few hours which had passed had made her comprehend that her life, her nature, were things apart from Chayleigh; she could not, if she would, take up the story of her girlhood where she had closed the book. Between her and every former association, the dark and miserable years of her married life--unreal as they seemed now--almost as unreal as the illusion under which she had entered upon them--had placed an impassable gulf.
Wrapped in a dressing-gown, and with her dark hair loose upon her shoulders, Margaret paced her room from end to end, and strove with her thoughts. She was a puzzle to herself. What discord there was between her--a woman who had suffered such things, seen such sights, heard such words as she had seen, and heard, and suffered--and the calm, well-regulated, comfortable household here! If she had ever contemplated remaining an inmate of her father's house, this one night's commune with herself would have forced her to recognise the impossibility of her doing so. The stain and stamp of her wanderings were upon her; she could not find rest here, or yet.