“Don’t say that,” she stammered hastily; “if—if it will make you happier, be sure I shall not ever think hardly of you. It has been what I said—a mistake—that is all. And there is one thing more,” she went on in a stronger voice. “In these matters, I don’t know, but I suppose the world always thinks that some one is to blame. I am that one, remember. It is I who have done it. Only, would you mind saying this to your sister yourself, and telling her that I must—I must go away to-day?”
He had turned from her, and was leaning against the mantelpiece, his head buried in his arms. Claudia stood and looked at him for one yearning moment, her face troubled, her eyes full of tears.
Before he had time to answer she was gone.
Fenwick neither spoke nor stirred. For a moment he was shaken by a strange rush of feeling, pricked by an involuntary shame, conscious of something higher and better than himself. But the moment did not last. Other thoughts crowded thickly, and leapt into prominence. The habit of constantly appealing to his own personality, and measuring all things by their relation to it, the invariable dwarfing question which strangled nobler impulses, and could only ask, “How will this affect me?” rose up strong and strangling as ever. They made him hesitate, when generosity would have rushed the words, lest in their utterance he might say more than he would—later—find convenient. Self had through these instruments dominated his nature, checked his expansion, left him cold and self-conscious, made the nobler side of him hate himself. While Claudia spoke, something within him urged quick response, words which should at least answer more adequately to the sweetness of her farewell, more bravely own his fault. But he had crushed the whisper, from a base dread of saying too much, and with the opportunity gone, the poorer part of him began to dominate again. She had voluntarily given him up, and an irritable vanity, fastening upon this offence, swelled and fumed around it until all other issues were blotted from view. More than once in these latter days, he had been conscious of a wish that he could live over again those days at Huntingdon, but this was an altogether different matter from supposing that Claudia might also desire to reconsider them. He left his position, and, crossing to the window, stood staring blackly out of it, foreseeing many awkwardnesses, but without a thought for poor Claudia, who had flung herself face downwards upon her bed upstairs, and was sobbing passionately. Whatever pressure was put upon the wind bag of his vanity only forced it out on another side. He was standing, immovable, in the same place when his sister came in.
“Oh, Arthur!” she exclaimed, stopping in the doorway.
He did not look round.
“Well, why ‘Oh, Arthur!’?”
“Something has happened. I was certain something was going to happen. I wish I had not gone out. You and Claudia have quarrelled.”
“Certainly not.” He laughed shortly.
“If you like, we have agreed to differ.” He broke off, and added with the same abruptness, “You’ve got to know, and you may as well know at once that it’s all over—amicably, and probably for the best. Claudia goes back to Elmslie to-day, and the only thing for you and Lawrence to do is to hold your tongues.”