“She has had troubles enough of other kinds to make her grave and sad. Though, indeed, her face always had that look when in repose,” he said thoughtfully. “Bessie,” he went on, with a sudden impulse of communicativeness, born of a yearning for sympathy, “do you remember one night, nearly two years ago, when I had to go out into the country beyond Haverstock—a very cold night?”
“Yes,” said Bessie, “I remember it—a little child was very ill. It died, I think.”
“That night was the first time I saw Miss Methvyn.”—“Standing with that crimson dress on,” he murmured to himself softly. “Yes,” he went on aloud, “the child died. He was her nephew. And since then she has lost father and mother and her home too.”
“Poor girl!” said Mrs. Crichton, with the ready tears in her eyes. “By the bye,” she added in a brisker tone, “was she Miss Methvyn of Something Abbey? I never can remember names.”
“Greystone?” suggested her brother.
“Yes, to be sure. I knew it was a colour, black or white or something. Oh! then, I know about them a little. Some friends of the Lubecks bought Blackstone, and are living there now. It was sold because when the father died, they found he had lost a lot of money—in horse-racing, wasn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Guildford, smiling. “The poor man had been paralysed for some years. But he did lose money by speculation—that was true enough. What else did you hear?”
Bessie’s brain was not the best arranged repository of facts in the world, but by dint of diving into odd corners, and bringing to light a vast mass of totally irrelevant matter, she managed to give her brother a pretty clear idea of what she had learnt about the Methvyns’ affairs. And joining this to what he already knew, Mr. Guildford arrived at a fair enough understanding of the actual state of the case. “I don’t believe it was her loss of fortune that separated them,” he said to himself; “she is not the sort of girl to have allowed that to influence her. And he—if it had been that—would not have married a completely penniless girl immediately after. No, it could not have been that. He must have deceived her—how she must have suffered! Yet, as Bessie says, I don’t think she does look broken-hearted.”
He fell to thinking of how she did look. He was silent and abstracted, but Bessie asked no more questions. Her curiosity was so far set at rest, but it is to be doubted if her brother’s carefully considered communicativeness had satisfied her of the non existence of her “something mysterious.” But she was loyal and womanly, despite her inquisitiveness; her brother’s secret, if he had one, was safe.
During the rest of the day, Mr. Guildford was restless and ill at ease. . He was constantly acting over again the morning’s interview with Cicely, and wishing that he had said or done differently. Sometimes it seemed to him that his manner must have appeared almost rudely repellent and ungracious; at others, he reproached himself with having behaved with unwarrantable freedom.