“I was reasoning from analogy, Fan. Yes, I suppose they do it all the world over. And it is odd—isn’t it?—that, knowing what they are sure to say, we ask them to our houses, and put the keys of all our skeleton cupboards into their hands.”
“Do you think that is true, that dreadful idea about the skeleton? I am sure——”
“What are you sure of, my little dear?”
“I was going to say, oh Markham, that I was sure, at home, we had no skeleton; and then I remembered——”
“I understand,” he said kindly. “It was not a skeleton to speak of, Fan. There is nothing particularly bad about it. If you had met it out walking, you would not have known it for a skeleton. Let us say a mystery, which is not such a mouth-filling word.”
“Sir Thomas told me,” said Frances, with some timidity; “but I am not sure that I understood. Markham! what was it really about?”
Her voice was low and diffident, and at first he only shook his head. “About nothing,” he said; “about—me. Yes, more than anything else, about me. That is how—— No, it isn’t,” he added, correcting himself. “I always must have cared for my mother more than for any woman. She has always been my greatest friend, ever since I can remember anything. We seem to have been children together, and to have grown up together. I was everything to her for a dozen years, and then—your father came between us. He hated me—and I tormented him.”
“He could not hate you, Markham. Oh no, no!”
“My little Fan, how can a child like you understand? Neither did I understand, when I was doing all the mischief. Between twelve and eighteen I was an imp of mischief, a little demon. It was fun to me to bait that thin-skinned man, that jumped at everything. The explosion was fun to me too. I was a little beast. And then I got the mother to myself again. Don’t kill me, my dear. I am scarcely sorry now. We have had very good times since, I with my parent, you with yours—till that day,” he added, flinging away the end of his cigarette, “when mischief again prompted me to let Con know where he was, which started us all again.”
“Did you always know where we were?” she asked. Strangely enough, this story did not give her any angry feeling towards Markham. It was so far off, and the previous relations of her long-separated father and mother were as a fairy tale to her, confusing and almost incredible, which she did not take into account as matter of fact at all. Markham had delivered these confessions slowly, as they turned and re-turned up and down the lawn. There was not light enough for either to see the expression in the other’s face, and the veil of the darkness added to the softening effect. The words came out in short sentences, interrupted by that little business of puffing at the cigarette, letting it go out, stopping to strike a fusee and relight it, which so often forms the byplay of an important conversation, and sometimes breaks the force of painful revelations. Frances followed everything with an absorbed but yet half-dreamy attention, as if the red glow of the light, the exclamation of impatience when the cigarette was found to have gone out, the very perfume of the fusee in the air, were part and parcel of it. And the question she asked was almost mechanical, a part of the business too, striking naturally from the last thing he had said as sparks flew from the perfumed light.