The meeting between the brother and sister was frankly affectionate; the renewal of their companionship was delightful to both. Margaret thought her brother wonderfully improved. He was a handsome, manly, soldierly fellow, who had no trace of likeness to his gentle, studious, feeble father, but whose face, despite its bronzed skin and its thick dark moustache, awakened strange memories in Mr. Carteret's placid breast.
A curious mental phenomenon took place in the experience of Haldane's father. A little while ago, and he was fretting for Mrs. Carteret--if he had said he was wretchedly uncomfortable it would have been a more correct description of his state of mind; but he chose to call himself, to himself, profoundly miserable--and now, since Haldane came home, he had almost forgotten her.
True, he still sat mopingly in his chair, and stared vacantly out of the window, when they left him alone; but the reverie which filled those hours was no longer what it had been. With his son in his bright strong manhood, with his daughter in her womanhood--early shadowed, indeed, but beautiful--beside him, his heart turned to the past, and a gentle figure, a fair delicate face, long since turned to dust, kept him ghostly company in his solitude.
Margaret was much surprised when, shortly after Haldane's return, Mr. Carteret began to talk to her one day about her mother, and spoke of her with a cheerful freshness of remembrance which she had never supposed him to entertain.
"The colours she preferred, the books she liked, the places they had visited together, certain fancies she had in her illness--the smallest things, I assure you--is it not wonderful?" Margaret had asked of Lady Davyntry, as she was telling her this strange circumstance. "I never was more surprised, and, I need not say, delighted; I don't think poor Mrs. Carteret's fancies and sayings remain so fresh in his memory. After so many years, too! The fact is, I don't believe she ever really filled my mother's place at all."
Margaret was seated on a cushion in the bay of a great window in the drawing-room at Davyntry as she spoke thus. Her heavy bonnet and veil were thrown on the floor beside her, her pale, clear, speaking face, the eyes bright and humid, the lips parted eagerly, and the flickering light, which emotion always diffused over her face, playing on her features. Lady Davyntry stood in the window, and looked down upon her.
"I am sure she never did," said the impulsive Eleanor; "how could she? It is all very well for a man to marry again, as your father did, when he has little children, and no one but servants to look after them; but, of course, a second marriage never can be the same thing. All the romance of life is over, you know, and one knows how much fancy there is in everything; and, in fact, I can't understand it myself--not for a woman, I mean, who has been happy. A man is different."
And then Lady Davyntry suddenly discovered that, in proclaiming her general opinion, she was saying exactly the opposite to what she thought in the particular case in which she was most deeply interested, and stopped, very abruptly and awkwardly, and blushing painfully. But Margaret did not seem to perceive her embarrassment. Her hands were pressed together; her eyes looked out strangely, eagerly; her words came as though she had no control of them.
"And do you think an unhappy woman--one who has found nothing in her marriage but misery and degradation--one who has nothing of the dreams and fancies of her youth left for retrospection but sickening deceit and a horrible cheating self-delusion--one who has no good, or pure, or gentle, or upright recollection to cherish of a past which was all a lie, a base infamous lie--do you think a woman with a story like that in her life ought to marry again? Do you think--you, Eleanor, who are truth and honour themselves, and who, I suppose, in all your life never said, or did, or saw, or heard anything for which you have a right to blush or ought to wish to forget--do you think that a woman with a story like that in her life ought to marry? Do you think she ought to link her life to that of any man, however he might love her and pity her, and be prepared to bear with her, while she had to look back upon such a past, however guiltless she might be in it--do you think this, Eleanor? Tell me plainly the truth."
She put her hand up, and caught one of her friend's hands in hers. Lady Davyntry still stood and looked at her, and, laying her disengaged hand on her shoulder, answered her passionate question.