From this menace, Elsa went straight to her Aunt Ellen, to ask if it was true that all her father's fortune was left to Godfrey. In great concern at her having been told, Miss Ellen was obliged to own that it was so, though she still concealed the fact that flagrant injustice had been done, the money so bequeathed having all come to Colonel Brabourne through his first wife. This part of the story, however, was gleefully supplied by Godfrey, who had been lying in ambush outside the door to jeer at her as she came out.
"Well, ain't it true? Eh? I don't tell so many crackers as you, you see. And the joke of it is that all the money came from your mother, and now my mother's son has got it. My! weren't the old aunts in a state, too? You should hear my Uncle Fred on the subject! But if your mother was like these old cats I'm sure my papa must have been jolly glad to be quit of her!"
Elsa darted at him with a cry of rage, but he saved himself by flight. If anything had been wanting to fill the cup of her hatred to the brim, here it was. Had it not been for this child, she would have been rich—very rich. She would have been able to marry Osmond, to have a large fine house in London, to have her gowns cut like Lady Mabel's, and to possess necklaces, lace, jewels, and all things beautiful in profusion.
He had stolen her fortune, insulted her mother, humiliated herself. The violence of her wrath and rancour were beyond all limits, and she had never been taught self control. She loathed Godfrey; the very sight of him choked her; she could scarcely swallow food when he was at the table; yet she had no thought of appealing to her aunts. She had never received sympathy in all her life—why should she expect it now?
Such was the state of things at Edge Willoughby. The stagnant days of yore, when existence merely flowed quietly on from hour to hour, were no more. The spell was broken, the prince had kissed and wakened the sleeping beauty—human passion had rushed in upon the passionless calm, the tide of life from the outer world was flowing, flowing in the fresh breeze.
Partly on all these changes was Mr. Cranmer meditating as they drove back to Lower House in the dulness of an autumn afternoon.
The weather was threatening, the sea of that strange, thick, lurid tinge, which suggests a disturbance somewhere under the surface. The gulls skimmed low, with strange cries, over the sluggish heaving water. He thought of the hot bright day of the picnic, when the young gulls were not yet flown, and when their wild laughter echoed along the nest-riddled cliff walls.
A melancholy feeling was upon him, that the year was broken and gone, that there would be no more fair weather, no more violet and amber and crimson in the west.
To-morrow he was to leave the valley and go north to shoot over a friend's moor in Scotland. It was the best thing he could do, he told himself. There would be plenty of society, such different society from that he had known of late. There would be women of his set, women who spoke the social shibboleths he knew. There would be bleak moorland and dark grey rock, which would not seem so horribly at variance with cold weather as did this Valley of Avilion; for the whole party, taking their cue from Osmond, had been wont to speak of Edge always as Avilion.
At Ardnacruan he felt certain that he would regain his normal serenity, his cheerful from-day-to-day enjoyment of life; but this afternoon all influences seemed combined to make him experience that nameless feeling of misery and loss which the Germans call katzenjammer. The first verse of "James Lee's Wife" was saying itself over and over in his head, and he could not forget it. The mare's feet, in their even trot, kept time to it, the rolling of the wheels formed a sad, monotonous accompaniment.