CHAPTER LXII. THE QUARREL.
For a few weeks, things went smoothly enough. Not a jar occurred in the feeble harmony, not a questionable cloud appeared above the horizon. The home-weather seemed to have grown settled. Lady Ann was not unfriendly. Richard, having provided himself with tools for the purpose, bound her prayer-book in violet velvet, with her arms cut out in gold on the cover; and she had not seemed altogether ungrateful. Arthur showed no active hostility, made indeed some little fight with himself to behave as a brother ought to a brother he would rather not have found. Far from inseparable, they were yet to be seen together about the place. Vixen had not once made a face to his face; I will not say she had made none at his back. Theodora and he were fast friends. Miss Malliver, now a sort of upper slave to lady Ann, cringed to him.
Arthur readily sold him Miss Brown, and every day she carried him to Barbara. But he took the advice of Wingfold, and was not long from home any day, but much at hand to his father's call, who had many things for him to do, and was rejoiced to find him, unlike Arthur, both able and ready. He would even send him where a domestic might have done as well; but Richard went with hearty good will. It gladdened him to be of service to the old man. Then a rumour reached his father's ears, carried to lady Ann by her elderly maid, that Richard had been seen in low company; and he was not long in suspecting the truth of the matter.
Not once before since Richard's return, had sir Wilton given the Mansons a thought, never doubting his son's residence at Oxford must have cured him of a merely accidental inclination to such low company, and made evident to him that recognition of such relationship as his to them was an unheard-of impropriety, a sin against social order, a class-treachery.
Almost every day Richard went to Wylder Hall, he had a few minutes with Alice at the parsonage. Neither Barbara nor her lawless, great-hearted mother, would have been pleased to have it otherwise. Barbara treated Alice as a sister, and so did Helen Wingfold, who held that such service as hers must be recompensed with love, and the money thrown in. Their kindness, with her new peace of heart, and plenty of food and fresh air, had made her strong and almost beautiful.
It was Richard's custom to ride over in the morning, but one day it was more convenient for him to go in the evening, and that same evening it happened that Arthur Manson had gone to see his sister. When Richard, on his way back from the Hall, found him at the parsonage, he proposed to see him home: Miss Brown was a good walker, and if Arthur did not choose to ride all the way, they would ride and walk alternately. Arthur was delighted, and they set out in the dusk on foot, Alice going a little way with them. Richard led Miss Brown, and Alice clung joyously to his arm: but for Richard, she would not have known that human being ever was or could be so happy! The western sky was a smoky red; the stars were coming out; the wind was mild, and seemed to fill her soul with life from the fountain of life, from God himself. For Alice had been learning from Barbara—not to think things, but to feel realities, the reality of real things—to see truths themselves. Often, when Mrs. Wingfold could spare her, Barbara would take her out for a walk. Then sometimes as they walked she would quite forget her presence, and through that very forgetting, Alice learned much. When first she saw Barbara lost in silent joy, and could see nothing to make her look glad, she wondered a moment, then swiftly concluded she must be thinking of God. When she saw her spread out her arms as if to embrace the wind that flowed to meet them, then too she wondered, but presently began to feel what a thing the wind was—how full of something strange and sweet. She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena. She did not put it so to herself, I need hardly say; but she was, in a word, learning to feel that the world was alive. Of the three she was the merriest that night as they went together along the quiet road. A little way out of the village, Richard set her on the mare, and walked by her side, leading Miss Brown. Such was the tolerably sufficient foundation for the report that he was seen rollicking with a common-looking lad and a servant girl on the high road, in the immediate vicinity of Wylder Hall.
“He is his father's son!” reflected lady Ann.
“He's a chip of the old block!” said sir Wilton to himself. But he did not approve of the openness of the thing. To let such doings be seen was low! Presently fell an ugly light on the affair.
“By Jove!” he said to himself, “it's the damned Manson girl! I'll lay my life on it! The fellow is too much of a puritan to flaunt his own foibles in the public eye; but, damn him, he don't love his father enough not to flaunt his! Dead and buried, the rascal hauls them out of their graves for men to see! It's all the damned socialism of his mother's relations! Otherwise the fellow would be all a father could wish! I might have known it! The Armour blood was sure to break out! What business has he with what his father did before he was born! He was nowhere then, the insolent dog! He shall do as I tell him or go about his business—go and herd with the Mansons and all the rest of them if he likes, and be hanged to them!”