“Go—where?” she said. “You forget that you have come to spend the day with me. My lady will not expect you till the evening; and I do not suppose you can wish to expose your father’s sister to her remarks.”
“My mother,” said Frances with an almost sob of emotion, “must be more to me than my father’s sister. Oh, aunt Caroline,” she cried, “you have been very, very hard upon me. I lived as a child lives at home till Constance came, I had never known anything else. Why should I have asked questions? I did not know I had a mother. I thought it was cruel, when I first heard; and now you say it was my fault.”
“It must have been more or less your fault. A girl has no right to be so simple. You ought to have inquired; you ought to have given him no rest; you ought——”
“I will tell you,” said Frances, “what I was brought up to do: not to trouble papa; that was all I knew from the time I was a baby. I don’t know who taught me—perhaps Mariuccia, perhaps, only—everything. I was not to trouble him, whatever I did. I was never to cry, nor even to laugh too loud, nor to make a noise, nor to ask questions. Mariuccia and Domenico and every one had only this thought—not to disturb papa. He was always very kind,” she went on, softening, her eyes filling again. “Sometimes he would be displeased about the dinner, or if his papers were disturbed. I dusted them myself, and was very careful; but sometimes that put him out. But he was very kind. He always came to the loggia in the evening, except when he was busy. He used to tell me when my perspective was wrong, and laugh at me, but not to hurt. I think you are mistaken, aunt Caroline, about papa.”
Mrs Clarendon had come a little nearer, and turned her face towards the girl, who stood thus pleading her own cause. Neither of them was quick enough in intelligence to see distinctly the difference of the two pictures which they set before each other—the sister displaying her ideal of a delicate soul wounded and shrinking from the world, finding refuge in the tenderness of his child; the daughter making her simple representation of the father she knew, a man not at all dependent on her tenderness, concerned about the material circumstances of life, about his dinner, and that his papers should not be disturbed—kind, indeed, but in the easy, indifferent way of a father who is scarcely aware that his little girl is blooming into a woman. They were not clever enough to perceive this; and yet they felt the difference with a vague sense that both views, yet neither, were quite true, and that there might be more to say on either side. Frances got choked with tears as she went on, which perhaps was the thing above all others which melted her aunt’s heart. Mrs Clarendon gave the girl credit for a passionate regret and longing for the father she loved; whereas Frances in reality was thinking, not so much of her father, as of the serene childish life which was over for ever, which never could come back again, with all its sacred ignorances, its simple unities, the absence of all complication or perplexity. Already she was so much older, and had acquired so much confusing painful knowledge—that knowledge of good and evil, and sense of another meaning lurking behind the simplest seeming fact and utterance, which, when once it has entered into the mind, is so hard to drive out again.
“Perhaps it was not your fault,” said Mrs Clarendon at last. “Perhaps he had been so used to you as a child, that he did not remember you were grown up. We will say no more about it, Frances. We may be sure he had his reasons. And you say he was busy sometimes. Was he writing? What was he doing? You don’t know what hopes we used to have, and the great things we thought he was going to do. He was so clever; at school and at college, there was nobody like him. We were so proud of him! He might have been Lord Chancellor. Charles even says so, and he is not partial, like me; he might have been anything, if he had but tried. But all the spirit was taken out of him when he married. Oh, many a man has been the same. Women have a great deal to answer for. I am not saying anything about your mother. You are quite right when you say that is not a subject to be discussed with you. Come down-stairs; luncheon is ready; and after that we will go out. We must not quarrel, Frances. We are each other’s nearest relations, when all is said.”
“I don’t want to quarrel, aunt Caroline. Oh no; I never quarrelled with any one. And then you remind me of papa.”
“That is the nicest thing you have said. You can come to me, my dear, whenever you want to talk about him, to ease your heart. You can’t do that with your mother; but you will never tire me. You may tell me about him from morning to night, and I shall never be tired. Mariuccia and Domenico are the servants, I suppose? and they adore him? He was always adored by the servants. He never gave any trouble, never spoke crossly. Oh, how thankful I am to be able to speak of him quite freely! I was his favourite sister. He was just the same in outward manner to us both,—he would not let Minnie see he had any preference; but he liked me the best, all the same.”
It was very grateful to Frances that this monologue should go on: it spared her the necessity of answering many questions which would have been very difficult to her; for she was not prepared to say that the servants, though faithful, adored her father, or that he never gave any trouble. Her recollection of him was that he gave a great deal of trouble, and was “very particular.” But Mrs Clarendon had a happy way of giving herself the information she wanted, and evidently preferred to tell Frances a thousand things, instead of being told by her. And in other ways she was very kind, insisting that Frances should eat at lunch, that she should be wrapped up well when they went out in the victoria, that she should say whether there was any shopping she wanted to do. “I know my lady will look after your finery,” she said,—“that will be for her own credit, and help to get you off the sooner; but I hope you have plenty of nice underclothing and wraps. She is not so sure to think of these.”
Frances, to save herself from this questioning, described the numberless unnecessaries which had been already bestowed upon her, not forgetting the turquoises and other ornaments, which, she remembered with a quick sensation of shame, her mother had told her not to speak of, lest her aunt’s liberalities should be checked. The result, however, was quite different. Mrs Clarendon grew red as she heard of all these acquisitions, and when they returned to Portland Place, led Frances to her own room, and opened to her admiring gaze the safe, securely fixed into the wall, where her jewels were kept. “There are not many that can be called family jewels,” she said; “but I’ve no daughter of my own, and I should not like it to be said that you had got nothing from your father’s side.”