FAREWELL
For a minute or two, I think she could not speak; she closed her lips tightly, and pressed two of her fingers on them, perhaps to hide some tremor there; and she went and placed one of her slender feet on the fender, and looked steadfastly on the macerated countenance of the Very Rev. the Dean of Crutch Friars, who in his oval frame, over the chimney-piece, seemed to hear and endure William’s perversities with the meekness of a good, sad, suffering Christian.
Aunt Dinah sighed twice, two deep, long, laborious sighs, and tapped the steel of her stays ferociously with her finger-tips. In his distress and confusion, William rose irresolutely. He would have approached her, but he feared that his doing so would but precipitate an explosion, and he remained standing, with his fingers extended on the table as if on the keys of a piano, and looking wan and sad over his shoulder on the back of Aunt Dinah’s natty old-fashioned cap.
“Well, young gentleman, you have made up your mind, and so have I,” said Aunt Dinah, abruptly returning to the table. “You go your own way. I shall not interfere in your concerns. I shall see your face no more—never! I have done with you, and depend upon it I shan’t change. I never change. I put you away from me. I wash my hands of you. I have done with you. I shall send a hundred pounds to Dr. Sprague, when you leave to-morrow, first to pay college expenses, and the balance you may take, and that ends all between us. I hate the world, ungrateful, stiff-necked, rebellious, heartless. All I have been to you, you know. What you would have been without me, you also know, a beggar—simply a beggar. I shall now find other objects. You are free, Sir, henceforward. I hope you may enjoy your liberty, and that you may never have reason to repent your perversity and ingratitude as bitterly as I now see my folly. Go, Sir, good-night, and let me see your face no more.”
William stood looking on his transformed aunt; he felt his ears tingle with the insult of her speech, and a great ball seemed rising in his throat.
Her face was darkened by a dismal anger; her look was hard and cold, and it seemed to him that the gates of reconciliation were closed against him for ever, and that he had come into that place of exclusion at whose entrance hope is left behind.
William was proud, too, and sensitive. It was no equal battle. His obligations had never before been weighed against his claims, and he felt the cruel truth of Aunt Dinah’s words beating him down into the dust.
With her chin in the air, and averted gaze, she sat stiff and upright in her accustomed chair by the fire. William stood looking at her for a time, his thoughts not very clear, and a great vague pain throbbing at his heart. There was that in her countenance which indicated something different from anger—a cold alienation.
William Maubray silently and softly left the room.