Grace was, however, soon in her own room, getting ready for the encounter she dreaded. From the first Mrs. Dorriman should be taught the place she was to have; outwardly she might be mistress, order dinner, and keep the servants in their places, but, as regarded interference with her and Margaret, it was not to be, and she was thirsting to make this evident to her and settle it all at once.
As usual she was rehearsing the words and the manner in which she should speak when Mr. Sandford called her. He had his own notion of what was respectful to his sister, and before she had time to make a stand or say a word she had intended to say he was hurrying her downstairs with no very gentle grip upon her arm, having made up his mind that, as the proper thing to do was to go downstairs to the front door to receive Mrs. Dorriman, there she should go.
The carriage was not in sight even, but he had seen the train come in; and as Grace, standing beside him at the open hall-door, felt the cold wind blowing in upon her, she added this to the other wrongs, and almost hated him.
CHAPTER IV.
The last afternoon of her stay at Inchbrae had come. Mrs. Dorriman, under the impression she was working very hard, carried several things upstairs that ought to have remained down, and wandered about helplessly, a terrible sense of having an enormous deal to do and to arrange pressing upon her; mixed with that ever constant and depressing feeling which distinguished her, of not being up to the mark. Can anything be more dreadful than a consciousness that strength is not there whatever "the day" may be? and is it not as much a sin to crush and murder a spirit as to destroy a body? and her spirit had been crushed. She sat down upstairs in the favourite corner from where she could see the river rushing into the sea; she took her Bible from a hope of finding comfort—but her spirits were so fluttered that she read the words without taking in their sense.
The river suggested to her, as it does to all—the resistlessness of fate—she was inexpressibly affected by this new and terrible disappointment. After having known so little happiness she had got into so quiet a haven; and once more, after feeling safe and happy, she was dragged out into the rough waves of life to commence a battle again. It crossed her mind that there might be some appeal—some one might help her to avert this; she was a widow and no longer a girl; how was it that she was so much in her brother's hands? Could Mr. Macfarlane not unravel it. She had a secret dread giving up her husband's papers—perhaps something might be found in them that might harm his memory, and since his death she thought so much more tenderly of him, and remembered him with so much more affection than she had done during his life, in spite of her contempt for his abilities.
But still she blamed him for not having kept her safe out of this position of dependence which had been her great hope when she had married him. She forgave him now his want of success, but that—it was so hard and it was so unfair to her.
She was deep in these thoughts when she was roused by the crunching of the gravel under her window, and she went down to the room looking so bare and desolate, stripped of its flowers, its quaint bits of china, of everything that made it homelike—to receive Mr. and Mrs. Macfarlane. Mrs. Macfarlane was a cheerful and a pleasant woman, but was much too warm-hearted to be overpoweringly and oppressively cheerful when it would have been hard for another to respond. She had the tact of a kind-hearted woman, which is a much more reliable thing than the tact acquired from the constant friction of society.
In a few moments they were all three having tea, the fire was making up for other deficiencies, and, though Jean made an apology about the best cups, no one had thought of anything as missing. Mrs. Dorriman had been very greatly troubled about the papers; she herself had never dared to go into them thoroughly as we know—she was afraid of seeing something in those records that might distress her, about her husband. But for this dread, she felt sometimes curious to know how these papers affected her brother, and she did not know what to do about them. She did not dare take them with her because she knew that if she did her brother would soon make himself master of them; she could not lock them up as the place was sold, and when she thought of that she always had a lump in her throat.