CHAPTER XIX
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
When the bishop and his daughter met at the breakfast-table the next morning, the air was full of unpleasant possibilities. She came in by way of the kitchen with the news that Lena had gone home on a plea of illness, and though he was concerned for the girl, the necessity of breaking in a new maid to his ways added to his evident irritation of mind.
There was none of the bright-eyed vitality and serene spiritual tone that follows nights free from care. Felicity observed that her father omitted his customary inquiries in regard to her rest, that the morning paper, the usual basis of comment at breakfast, lay unopened beside his plate, and guessed correctly that the explanation she must make could no longer be postponed. His bewilderment and suspicions had reached a point that would drive him to take the initiative, and he was only waiting for a favourable opening.
The crafty expression of his eyes filled her with irritation and resentment. How well she knew the trend of his thoughts! Others might find him inscrutable, but she knew him through and through. In their long and subtle struggle concerning the disposition of her property, in the question whether she would or would not help him to build up the college, she had always been sustained by a peculiar loyalty to her mother, who had passed her fortune on to her daughter unimpaired. This was a practical declaration of her own will in the matter, and Felicity accepted it as she might have accepted a sacred trust. She barely remembered her mother as a shadowy and benign being floating through the great rooms of the house. During her childhood, a certain angel in one of the windows of St. George's Church had somehow been confused in her mind with that figure, and had inspired her with vague awe. These dim memories and childish fancies had crystallised in later years into an appreciation of the common interests that would doubtless have been theirs, had her mother lived.
No hint of this hidden psychological drama had ever reached the bishop's ken. His daughter's attitude seemed her mother's obstinacy and worldliness reincarnated, and he was distressed also by more dangerous elements, by inexplicable sympathies, antipathies, and rebellions, until the whole fabric of his careful plans seemed destined to fall in ruins.
As the sunlight came stealing in across the table, striking prismatic colours from the glassware, he shaded his eyes with his hand and sharply ordered the maid to draw the curtain.
"What is the matter with you this morning, father?" Felicity asked severely. "Are you ill?"
The corners of her mobile lips were curled slightly upward, with just a suggestion of scorn. Unhappiness is no great promoter of the courtesies of life, and if she was conscious of wrong-doing, she was far from being on the defensive.
"Yes," he answered, "I am ill. I am sick at heart."