Anthony was handling a tool as he spoke, and punching a hole in a bit of wood with as much force as if it had been Stephens’s head. Mrs Miles never liked to see her son “put out;” his face was quick to reflect his feelings, and he certainly did not look pleasantly upon what galled him. It was quite true that David was his present bugbear, and that he gave him credit for no motives except the lowest: his feelings had so much heat in them, that they deprived him in a great measure of the power of sympathy with that with which he had no agreement, and were always easily excited into prejudice.
Chapter Eleven.
“Like, but unlike, the sun that shone,
The waves that beat the shore,
The words we said, the songs we sung,
Like, unlike, evermore.”
A.F.C.K.
The summer was passing at Thorpe very much as other summers had passed, and yet with the difference that dogs our footsteps whether we will or no. The grass waves, the forget-me-nots look up from the brink of cool brown streams, the roses are as sweet as ever,—we wonder as we touch them how there can be a change and what it is, but we know in our hearts that it has come, and that things can never more be what they once have been.
As for Anthony, all things considered, he seemed to be leading a pleasant life enough. There was bright, settled weather, and the neighbourhood had taken one of those sudden freaks of gaiety with which such neighbourhoods are occasionally seized; dinners and picnics and cricket-matches succeeded one another rapidly, people came to stay with each other, glad to escape from the heat of London to these pretty country-places, where they could lie under the shadow of great elms, and pick dewy fruit in old-fashioned gardens. It was an easy, charming existence, with a busy idleness about it, which had an indescribable delight so long as the sun would shine. Anthony was wanted for all the little festivities, he was asked to stay here, to dine there; the Milmans, the Hunters, the Bennetts, the Davieses, had each some attraction to offer, and young ladies who were ready to encourage Mr Miles’s attentions. By and by little echoes of rumours began to be heard. At one picnic he had talked to no one but Miss Lovell, at another dinner-party he had devoted himself for the whole evening to Miss Milman. Winifred had been there, and had seen it for herself, and, indeed, Anthony, when he indulged in these flirtations, generally contrived to be near Winifred. Not that a spirit of mischief prompted him on such occasions, or anything beyond a light-hearted enjoyment of the present moment. He liked the pretty flatteries of manner, the little attentions, which the young girls were not unwilling to lavish upon him,—liked to feel himself courted and appealed to,—liked also, or something more than liked, that Winifred should be near him, that he might look at her, listen to her at the very moment he was turning away, touch something she had touched, unconsciously compare her with her companions. Unconsciously, I repeat, for, although many problems were puzzling him at this moment, he was thinking least of all about his own heart. He did very much what he liked, and if it pleased him to talk to Miss Milman and to sit near Winifred, he talked and he sat. That was all.
That was all, and no one could have said a word against it if it had been always so. He had no intention of neglecting Winifred; but to a girl who loves, unintentional neglect is more cruelly wounding than any other. Each day worked with a sort of slow torture upon her, the more so that her cheeks burnt with shame, when she even acknowledged it to herself. She was in high spirits,—or so it seemed. She fancied herself that all sweetness and gentleness had died out of her heart, leaving bitter ashes behind. When she spoke to Anthony it was laughingly and lightly, only every now and then there would descend a sharp cut, or one that she thought sharp, poor child, and would repeat over to herself with a dreary satisfaction, while she invented other sayings more terrible, which the time never came for uttering. After all, they were not so severe as she intended, for such weapons did not belong to her by nature, and she used them as tremblingly as a woman will fire off a gun that she expects to explode in her hands. As often as not, Anthony did not notice these little attacks; he noticed more what she did not say, the pleasant things which fell so trippingly from others’ lips, to Winifred’s disdain. Feeling as if Anthony were slipping away altogether from the pleasant, familiar intercourse which had been enough to satisfy her while it lasted, and which, therefore, she fancied would have satisfied her forever, these sweet summer days, in which all the world was making holiday, were to her full of restless misery, to which she dared neither give a name nor a cause, and over which she shed the bitterest tears that her life as yet had known.
No one saw the struggle. It would have added tenfold to her suffering if they had done so, for she had too much of her grandmothers undaunted spirit not to be at times fierce and impatient with herself, and her very prayers were not so often that she might be loved again, as that she might cease to love, and so have done with the pain. She had no mother. The Squire, when he was in his most jovial moods, would strike Anthony on the back and ask who was the last flame, but his own daughter’s name had never occurred to him. Mrs Miles was distracted between hopes and fears, represented by Miss Milman and Miss Davies. Marion was taken up with Marmaduke, who was at Thorpe, and who for his part was absorbed in thoughts of Mr Tregennas and Trenance. After this one step had been gained, he was greedy for a clearer declaration of the old man’s intentions, and waited restlessly for a repetition of the invitation to himself and Anthony. Yet when it arrived, he said jealously to Marion,—