His movements were not recorded.
“Not there, at any rate. Millie, I told you you were a goose. But I have no patience with Miss Dalrymple! That poor man just dead, and here she is, amusing herself. Oh, yes, that explains! I know Milborough. But how can she turn from one to the other? Tell me quickly, Millie, is she the girl to marry him just for the position? Because—a marriage without love—I never before knew how horrible it must be! And poor Milborough, he isn’t very good, I know, but I do hope he will never have that fate.” Millie felt faithless to her friend—cruel—for the glad throb in her heart, and the instantaneous wish to extol Miss Dalrymple. She briskly argued that with the choice which lay before her, there was not the temptation to snatch at this world’s prizes which might beset an older or less beautiful woman. Besides—she smoothed over the fact of their being in the same house as possibly a mere coincidence. Fanny listened, shrewd enough to see something of the forces which pulled her friend’s reasons, and set the active puppets dancing, yet with her imagination captivated, as it had been all along, by dreams of Anne Dalrymple.
Elsewhere the notice in the World was remarked and commented upon. Wareham was still at Firleigh, with old Sir Michael. There he had taken Hugh, and there the young heir was laid by the side of old forefathers, youth stepping in to sleep between them as quietly as they. For centuries Forbes’ had lived and died there; they lay, cross-legged and mailed, in niches; knelt stiffly on brasses, with children in graduated rows behind; their names stared down from marble tablets, vaults held them closely; a few, Hugh’s young mother one, had prayed to be laid under the daisied grass of the churchyard, where the larks sang, and showers and sunshine fell. Wareham often thought of it as the most peaceful place he knew.
The Hall itself had suffered many transformations. It stood, as always, in a cup of land, sheltered by ground and trees, but the demon of damp had only been exorcised by late generations at the cost of architectural beauty, and instead of the fine old red stone house, up rose a solid, substantial square. On one side a terrace flanked it, while the garden was out of sight of the windows, lying behind, and a little higher than the house. Through it the family passed to church, always on foot, for weddings and funerals alike; through it, with the summer flowers massed in gorgeous colour all round, Hugh was carried, three white wreaths lying on his breast, and Sir Michael watching from a bedroom window.
The old man was very ill, so ill that they all knew there would be a second, what—from the ancient custom—the people round Firleigh called “carrying,” before long. But his spirit was still masterful, and his fingers clasped the reins he could not use. He was keen that Wareham should stay.
“When you’re gone, I shall think of twenty questions I had to ask,” he said. “There’s no one but you, Dick, to answer them. Your room’s always kept for you. What d’ye want? Paper, ink, books? Miles will order down anything. And you’ll never need to come again. Stop two or three weeks, till—till it doesn’t all seem so raw.”
Of course Wareham stopped.
A sister of Sir Michael’s was there, a kindly woman, but a little precise, and Ella, Hugh’s only sister, a girl who required to be well-known before you could even in thought extract her from a crowd of other girls. Anything distinctive she appeared to shun. Hugh she adored, and Wareham admired the self-command which crushed back outward manifestations of grief, but it made conversation difficult, since one subject was uppermost in their hearts, and that Ella shrank from, as from a touch on a wound. Sir Michael tolerated no other. Wareham sat for hours in the window, the old man in a great chair by the fire, for fire was necessary for his chilled blood; long silences between them, then perhaps a dozen questions strung on end, each harping on the same note. Miss Dalrymple’s name was like a match to powder.
“She’s the cause,” Sir Michael would violently burst out. “Without that woman, Hugh would have been living still. She should be branded as a jilt. Mark you, Dick, so sure as there’s a God above, it’ll come home to her one of these days. I shan’t forget my poor boy when he came down to tell his old dad that he’d got her to say she’d marry him. I heard him on the stairs. Up he came, three at a time, and into my room with a whoop.” He rambled away into details, where failing memory lost itself as bewilderingly as a traveller in a wood. But he never let go his clutch upon Anne’s sin. Wareham, whose heart smarted to hear her blamed, tried in vain to soften judgment.
“Remember, sir, that if she had made a mistake, she went the best way to mend it.”