There was something so winning in his voice and manner as he said these last words that I felt for the moment even more sorry for him than for her, and I took the hand he held out as he rose to go, and looked up with all the frank sympathy I felt. He seemed touched by it, for, as if by a sudden impulse, he stooped and let his lips lightly touch my hand; then, pressing it once more in his, with a look of almost grateful kindliness, he left the room.
I was a little surprised by this demonstration, which I thought rather out of place to a dependant. But he was an impulsive man, the very opposite in all things to his cold statuesque wife, and the union between them seemed sometimes like a bond between the dead and the living.
When I thought over all that he had told me, after he had left the room, it was impossible, even setting apart my natural inclination as a woman to put the blame on the woman, not to come to the conclusion that the fault in this most uncomfortable household was chiefly on the side of Mrs. Rayner. I had never seen a more attentive, long-suffering husband, nor a more coldly irritating wife. From all I had seen, I judged that Mr. Rayner was a sociable man, particularly alive to sympathy, fond of conversation and the society of his fellow-men. To such a man the sort of exile his wife’s obstinate reserve and dislike to society condemned him to must have been specially hard to bear with patience. It was true he scoffed at the society the neighborhood afforded, and made me laugh by his description of a country dinner-party, where one could almost predict with certainty what each lady would wear, and where more than half the gentlemen were clergymen, and how the talk would drift after dinner into clerical “shop,” and one of the ladies would play a colorless drawing-room piece on the piano, and one of the gentlemen—a curate nearly always—would sing an unintelligible song, in a husky voice, and, when told—by a lady—how well it suited his style, would reply modestly that Santley’s songs always did.
But I fancied that, dull as it might be, Mr. Rayner would have been glad of more of even such society as the neighborhood afforded; and, from the bitterness with which he laughed at the paltry pride of small country gentlemen, I soon began to imagine that he must have been snubbed by some among them.
The first Sunday after my arrival was so wet that we could not go to church, so that I had been there a fortnight before I saw a general gathering of the inhabitants. But on the very day previous to this event I had an encounter with two of the ladies of the neighborhood which left a most unpleasant impression upon my mind. Haidee and I were taking our morning walk, when a big Newfoundland dog rushed through a gap in the hedge and frightened my poor little pupil so much that she began to scream. Then a young girl of about fourteen or fifteen, to whom the dog belonged, came up to the hedge, and said that she was sorry he had frightened the child, but that he would not hurt her. And she and I, having soothed Haidee, exchanged a little talk about the fields and her dog, and where the first blackberries were to be found, before we parted, my pupil and I going on by the road while the girl remained in the field. We were only a few steps away when I heard the voice of another girl addressing her rather sharply.
“Who was that you were talking to, Alice?”
The answer was given in a lower voice.
“Well,” the other went on, “you should not have spoken to her. Don’t you know she comes from the house on the marsh?”
CHAPTER III.
The shock given me by those few overheard words—“You should not have spoken to her. Don’t you know she comes from the house on the marsh?”—was so great that I lay awake half the night, at first trying to reconcile Mr. Rayner’s pathetic story with the horror of everything connected with the Alders expressed by the girl to her companion, and then asking myself whether it would be wise to stay in a house to which it was plain that a mystery of some sort was clinging. At last, when my nerves were calmed somewhat and I began to feel sleepy, I made up my mind to set down those unlucky words as the prejudiced utterance of some narrow-minded country-girl, to whom the least touch of unconventionality seemed a dreadful thing. However, I could not dismiss the incident at once from my mind, and the remembrance of it sharpened my attention to the manner of the salutations that Mr. Rayner exchanged with his neighbors the next day.