“I may stay five minutes longer,” she thought, but somehow the sense of repose and comfort had been disturbed; in spite of herself, a very slight sensation of eeriness began to creep over her. It was in the evening that Eira had been so frightened. Could that be the favourite time for her troubled, old, great-grand-aunt’s visit to the church? “I wish I could feel sure,” she went on thinking, “that it is not true, that she does not really wander about in that sad, lonely restlessness! I can’t bear to think of it! Poor soul! Perhaps, after all, she was not to blame.”
What was that? Frances started, as again the long-drawn, all but inaudible breath, rather than sigh—which she and Ryder Morion had been conscious of that evening several weeks ago when standing at the end of the Laurel Walk—made itself felt rather than heard.
“It must be the draught from the open door,” she thought. “But I am getting fanciful; I had better go,” and she rose to her feet with decision.
But—now came a shock, a real shock, which could not be put down to fancy or an accidental draught of air. For as she stood up, Frances felt herself caught back, jerked back almost, by a sharp sudden catch at the little mantle she wore; it was all she could do to suppress a scream—perhaps, indeed, she did scream. She could not afterwards say. The shock, under the circumstances and with her already overstrained nerves, was really dreadful; no one who had seen her just then, white to the very lips, shivering and breathless, would have recognised poor Frances.
But the terror was not for long: the strange incident was quickly explained. “Thank God!” murmured the girl, as she discovered its cause; “I could not have stood any supernatural experience. I believe it would have nearly killed me. I have been too self-confident,” with a rather piteous smile, as she disengaged the fold of her cloak from the crevice where it had caught.
For that was all that had happened. In the corner of the pew, the old panels, as Eira had already noticed, seemed to fit less well than elsewhere. Time, doubtless, had made the wood shrink; there was a line of interstice all but in the corner, giving the look of an intended opening—a small cupboard door, as it were, of which the narrow strip of space might be either the closing or the opening side. It was a little above this that a splinter had been partly broken off, the point of which had hooked, in the extraordinarily clever way in which, in similar cases, such things do hook or catch, the silk frill of her cape. It was freed in a moment; in fact, if the tiny accident had happened elsewhere, Frances would scarcely have perceived it, except, perhaps, for the sound of some slight fracture of stuff or stitches, though, as things were, the tug, apparently from invisible fingers, had caused her a sensation of real horror. And for a minute or two, anxious though she was to get out into the cheerful daylight again, she felt too shaken to move. But by degrees this feeling passed off, and with but small trace of her recent agitation she made her way home again, devoutly wishing that the evening were over and she herself free to rest and think in the solitude of her own room.
All passed off, however, more easily than she had feared. She thought it best to own to being a little tired, and was pleased to find Betty coming about her more in the old caressing way than had been the case for long; and there was a look in the girl’s face which Frances was glad to see, not so much of actual happiness as of freedom from constraint—of hopefulness.
“It will be all right,” thought Frances. “I can see already that it is going to be all right. I shall have nothing to reproach myself with as regards the effect on them of my deplorable mistake. It is only I—and how thankful I should be for this—that will have any suffering to bear, and I shall be able to hide it. And as for Betty, perhaps the child needed the training of what I now feel convinced she has gone through.”
Nevertheless, it was a relief, and a great one to Frances, as the days went on, to perceive that Betty sought, and intended to seek, no further confidence or explanation of her elder sister’s undisguised hints. More than this, Eira had evidently been tutored to take the same line, though in both instances it was done with affectionate delicacy, so as to give rise to no misgiving on Frances’ part that for any reason she was less trusted than heretofore.
Just one word in allusion to what had passed between the sisters that afternoon when they were sitting on the garden bench came from Eira: