“Good gracious!” whispered Frances to the lengthening shadows. “What—on earth—did he mean by that?”
But there was only the queer uneven beating of her heart to answer her in the silence.
CHAPTER VII
THE PATH THROUGH THE WILDERNESS
Frances slept badly that night. There were a good many things to trouble her and keep her brain at work. The thought of Maggie’s clandestine love affair worried her most, though why this should have been so she could not have said. There seemed to be a league among the sisters against their brother’s authority, and she felt that against her will she had been drawn into it. She would have given anything not to have overheard that talk in the kitchen, but she found it impossible to forget it. And yet to interfere in any way seemed to her impossible. Maggie was of an age to direct her own affair, as surely Arthur ought to recognize. Her love for young Oliver was evidently of long standing, and, however unsuitable it might appear, no third person had the right to attempt to frustrate it. To Frances, who had guarded her own independence so jealously for so long, such a course was inexcusable. But the secret worried her. There seemed to be forces at work at Tetherstones of which she had no knowledge—sinister forces with which Maggie obviously felt unable to cope. And Arthur was so strange, so headlong, so impossible to manage.
Arthur! The thought of Arthur held her in a kind of breathless wonder. The man amazed her at every turn, but he never awaked in her that palpitating doubt with which she had always regarded Rotherby. He might possess violent impulses, but he was upright, he was honourable. What he said, he meant. There was even something terrible in his simplicity. He was a man who would suffer the utmost torture sooner than betray a friend. He was also a man who might inflict it without scruple upon an enemy who had incurred his vengeance.
His attitude towards herself had a curious effect upon her. She was aware of a strong bond of sympathy between them. They were rebels together. They had eaten stones for bread. They could not remain as strangers. There was that about him that made her wonder if he had ever had a friend before. He stood out above and beyond the rest with a kind of solitary grandeur that strangely moved her—a man who should have made his mark in the world of men, but condemned to till the soil to give them bread—a slave who had been fashioned for a conqueror. The irony of it stirred her strangely. She wondered if anyone else saw in him aught but a tiller of the ground. The old man, his father, perhaps? But no! He had spoken of him with contempt. She had been aware of a hostility scarcely veiled between them. The old man evidently despised him for the very servitude that so plainly galled his soul. Did no one understand him, she wondered? And then the memory of the mother, white-haired and patient, came to her, and by a flash of intuition she realized that here lay the explanation of many things. He had harnessed himself to the plough for her sake. She could not doubt it. Though she had never seen them together, she knew that she had discovered the truth, and she was conscious, poignantly conscious, of a feeling akin to indignation. How could any woman accept such a sacrifice?
Of her own affairs, of Montague Rotherby, she thought but little that night. The inner voice that had so urgently warned her no longer spoke within her soul. The need was past. Inexplicably, the attraction of the man had gone with it. The loss of her letter had vexed her temporarily, but now she had almost forgotten it. By her silence she would sever all connection with him. She judged him as not ardent enough to follow up the quest. The madness was over and would never return. Once again, and this time with a sense of comfort, she reflected that she was not the type of woman to appeal to such a man for long. That last letter of his had probably been one of farewell. On the whole she was not sorry that she had not read it. She wanted to forget him as soon as possible and with him the bitter humiliation he had made her suffer. It was better to forget than to hate. No; decidedly it was not on his account that Frances passed a restless night.
With the early morning came sleep that lasted till the sun was high, and Ruth came in to perch on her bed while she breakfasted. She had been out in the cornfields, she said. They were cutting the corn in the field below the Stones. Next week, when Frances was strong enough, they would go and sit among the sheaves. Or perhaps they might go to-day if Uncle Arthur would take them in the dog-cart. The idea attracted Frances though she only smiled. The day was hot, and she was feeling better. She had a desire to go out into the sunshine, away from the old grey house and its secrets, of which already she felt she knew too much.
She did not know that the child had read acquiescence in her silence till later, when Dolly suddenly announced that the cart would be round in half-an-hour, and they must hurry.
“It would do you good to spend the whole day out to-day,” said the practical Dolly, whom Frances suspected of being secretly a little tired of a job that had ceased to be interesting. “Elsie and Lucy and Nell will all be to and fro if you should want anything. And no one could possibly catch cold on a day like this. Milly and I are going to Wearmouth to do some shopping, but I shall be back in good time to get you to bed. Dr. Square said he might not come to-day. If he does, it won’t hurt him to ride as far as the cornfield to see you.”