Chapter Nineteen.
“Those have most power to hurt us that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms.”
Beaumont and Fletcher.
There is a curious likeness in the yesterdays and to-days of our lives, a likeness so strong that it conceals the greater differences from us until we have gone far enough to look back and compare them dispassionately. We eat and drink, talk and sleep, more or less; certain things seem to hold us in chains to which we move obediently. If it were not so, life would be unendurable, the calls upon our sympathy would harden our hearts or wear them out, joy and sorrow would jostle each other too openly in the high road. The mechanism hurts us sometimes, but it is good discipline nevertheless.
And so at Thorpe Regis the many changes were gradually covered with the old dress of routine and habit. It is almost sad how soon people become reconciled to them. A year ago it would have seemed the strangest thing in the world for anything to have broken through the daily intercourse between Hardlands and the Vicarage, and here was an alienation so great that it almost amounted to total estrangement. Not that the Squire desired it. Unused to keep a very close control over himself, he allowed his feelings to be seen, and affronted Anthony; but he would gladly have had everything as of old with Mrs Miles, and was too autocratic not to be puzzled when he found this not the case.
“It was not her fault. The girls may go to her as much as they please. The poor woman’s to be pitied,—I pity her from the bottom of my heart,” he would say.
Mrs Miles on her part had no very clear conception of what had happened, for she had lived in close retirement since her husband’s death, and the few friends who entered that solitude were not likely to be cruelly communicative. But she was aware that unkind reports had been set afloat about the will, and, while really too sad and crushed in spirit to do more than reiterate her assurance that it would not have happened had the Vicar been alive, she was vaguely willing to take up cudgels against all the world on Anthony’s behalf; in comparison with whom what was Hardlands, what was the Squire, what even were motherless Bessie and Winifred?
And so, and so, and so,—a hundred little obstacles magnified themselves indefinitely, the two sets of lives that had been so blended with each other fell apart, the little brook widened into a river. Many people thought that it would have been better if Anthony had left the neighbourhood for a time, and allowed the exaggerated reports of his conduct to settle quietly. But perhaps the idea of this sediment of black mud, only requiring a chance stone to be stirred into turbid activity, was more hateful to Anthony than the knowledge that the waters all about him were kept in constant disturbance. He made no pretence of concealing that he was unhappy, or at least no one could fail to see it in his face; and his irritation and soreness against all the world were marked so acutely that it was impossible not to foresee a reaction from so abrupt a closing of his heart. He remained at Thorpe, partly from yielding to his mothers clinging desire to do so, partly from pride which forbade flight from disagreeables, and partly from a failure in those springs of action which had hitherto urged him forward. But he could not long endure the position of solitude he had taken up, and some consciousness of this added to his discomfort.
When the thing of which he was accused had first grown into form, Winifred had reproached herself for the warm glow with which her heart assured her that Anthony would never feel her friendship fail him; but this had long ago faded away under the keen chill of his manner, keener because her generous spirit had never wavered in its faithfulness and was enduring all the pangs which he believed himself to be bearing alone. She would not suffer one throb of resentment to answer his coldness, but it cost her a daily and bitter struggle to learn her powerlessness, and to understand that he was himself making it impossible for her to put out so much as a hand to help him in his trouble.
She was in the village one day, and just turning out of it towards the Hardlands meadows when she met old Araunah Stokes and his daughter-in-law, Faith’s mother. It was not very often the old man got so far from his house, and he was now walking on with a kind of feeble vigour, as if bent upon making the most of what small strength remained to him. His daughter-in-law—who had evidently been crying, and now and then wiped her eyes—gave Miss Chester to understand that it was Faith who caused their trouble by her persistence in her engagement.