“Well, you must come and tell us about it when it’s all settled. There’s nobody who takes more interest in you and your affairs than my daughter and I—eh, Claire?”
But Claire affected to be too busy to hear; she was engaged in making the fire burn up, and at the first opportunity she stole out of the room, unseen by her father. So that Bram, who soon after took his departure, did not see her again.
He went back to his lodging in a fever. This new turn of affairs, this anxiety of Theodore’s to make him come forward in the place of Christian, filled him with dismay. On the very first signs of this disposition in her father Claire had shrunk back into herself and had refused to give him so much as another look. But then that was only the natural resentment of a modest girl; it proved, it disproved nothing but that she refused to be thrown at any man’s head. That look she had given him just before her father’s entrance, on the other hand, had been eloquent enough to set him on fire with something more definite than dreamy hope. If it had not betrayed the very love and trust for which he was longing, it had expressed something very near akin to that feeling. Bram lived that night in alternate states of fever and frost.
He dared not, however, for fear of giving pain to Claire, go to the farm again for the next fortnight. He would linger about the farmyard gate, and sometimes he would catch sight of Claire. But on these occasions she turned her back upon him with so cold and decided a snub that it was impossible for him to advance in face of a repulse so marked. And even when Theodore lay in wait for him, and tried to induce him to go home with him, Bram had to refuse for the sake of the very girl he was longing to see.
Meanwhile the date of Christian’s marriage with Miss Hibbs was rapidly approaching. Chris maintained an easy demeanor with Bram, but that young man was stiff, reserved, and shy, and received the confidences, real or pretended, of the other without comment or sympathy. When Chris lamented that he could not make a match to please himself, Bram looked in front of him, and said nothing. When he made attempts to sound Bram on the subject of Claire, the young clerk parried his questions with perfect stolidity.
The day of the wedding was a holiday at the works, and Bram, who dared not spend the day at the farm, as he would have liked to do, and who had refused to take any part in the festivities, paid another visit to old Abraham Elshaw at East Grindley as an excuse for staying away.
He returned, however, early in the evening, and was on his way up the hill by way of the fields, when, to his unbounded amazement, he saw a side-gate in the wall of the farmhouse garden open quickly, and a man steal out, and run hurriedly down across the grass in the direction of the town.
Bram felt sure that there was something wrong, but he had hardly gone a few steps with the intention of intercepting the man, when he stopped short. Something in the man’s walk, even at this distance, struck him. In another moment, in spite of the fact that the stealthy visitor wore a travelling cap well over his eyes, Bram recognized Chris Cornthwaite.
Stupefied with dread, Bram glanced back, and saw Claire standing at the little gate, watching Chris as he ran. Shading her eyes with her hand, for the glare of the setting sun came full upon her face, she waited until he was out of sight behind a stone wall which separated the last of the fields he crossed from the road. Then she shut the gate, locked it, and went indoors.
Bram stared at the farmhouse, the windows of which were shining like jewels in the setting sun. He felt sick and cold.