“Father,” said Dora again, “I have been the mistress of everything while you have been ill. You may say the doctor has done it, or Miss Bethune has done it,—they were very kind friends, and told me what to do,—but it was only your own child that had the right to do things for you, and the real person was me. I was a little girl when you began to be ill, but I am not so now. I’ve had to act for myself, father,” the girl cried, the colour flaming back into her pale cheeks, “I’ve had to be responsible for a great many things; you can’t take that from me, for it had to be. And you have not got a bill in the world.”
He sat staring at her, half angry, half admiring, amazed by the change, the development; and yet to find her in her impulsive, childish vehemence exactly the same.
“They’re all gone,” cried Dora, with that dreadful womanish inclination to cry; which spoils so many a fine climax. “I had a right to them—they were mine all through, and not yours. Father, even Fiddler! I’ve given you a present of that big book, which I almost broke my arm (if it had not been for Harry Gordon) carrying back. And now I know it’s quarter day, and you’re quite well off. Father, now I’m your little girl again, to do what you like and go where you like, and never, never hear a word of this more,” cried Dora, flinging herself upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, in a paroxysm of tenderness and tears.
What was the man to do or say? He had uttered a cry of pain and shame, and something like fury; but with the girl clinging round his neck, sobbing, flung upon his mercy, he was helpless. He looked over Dora’s bright head at Dr. Roland with, notwithstanding his impatience of interference, a sort of appeal for help. However keen the pang was both to his heart and his pride, he could not throw off his only child from her shelter in his arms. After a moment his hand instinctively came upon her hair, smoothing it down, soothing her, though half against his will. The other arm, with which he had half put her away, stole round her with a softer pressure. His child, his only child, all of his, belonging to no one but him, and weeping her heart out upon his neck, altogether thrown upon him to be excused and pardoned for having given him all the tendance and care and help which it was in her to give. He looked at Roland with a half appeal, yet with that unconscious pride of superiority in the man who has, towards the man who has not.
“She has the right,” said the doctor, himself moved, but not perhaps with any sense of inferiority, for though he was nearly as old as Mr. Mannering, the beatitude of having a daughter had not yet become an ideal bliss to him—“she has the right; if anybody in the world has it, she has it, Mannering, and though she is a child, she has a heart and judgment as good as any of us. You’ll have to let her do in certain matters what seemeth good in her own eyes.”
Mr. Mannering shook his head, and then bent it in reluctant acquiescence with a sigh.
CHAPTER XXV.
The house in Bloomsbury became vacant and silent.
The people who had given it interest and importance were dispersed and gone. Dr. Roland only remained, solitary and discontented, feeling himself cast adrift in the world, angry at the stillness overhead, where the solid foot of Gilchrist no longer made the floor creak, or the lighter step of her mistress sent a thrill of energy and life through it; but still more angry when new lodgers came, and new steps sounded over the carpet, which, deprived of all Miss Bethune’s rugs, was thin and poor. The doctor thought of changing his lodging himself, in the depression of that change; but it is a serious matter for a doctor to change his abode, and Janie’s anæmia was becoming a serious case, and wanted more looking after than ever would be given to it were he out of the way. So he consented to the inevitable, and remained. Mrs. Simcox had to refurnish the second floor, when all Mr. Mannering’s pretty furniture and his books were taken away, and did it very badly, as was natural, and got “a couple” for her lodgers, who were quite satisfied with second-hand mahogany and hair-cloth. Dr. Roland looked at the new lodgers when he met them with eyes blank, and a total absence of interest: but beginning soon to see that the stock market was telling upon the first floor, and that the lady on the second had a cough, he began to allow himself a little to be shaken out of his indifference. They might, however, be objects of professional interest, but no more. The Mannerings were abroad. After that great flash in the pan of a return to the Museum, Nature had reclaimed her rights, and Mr. Mannering had been obliged to apply for a prolonged leave, which by degrees led to retirement and a pension. Miss Bethune had returned to her native country, and to the old house near the Highland line which belonged to her. Vague rumours that she was not Miss Bethune at all, but a married lady all the time, had reached Bloomsbury; but nobody knew, as Mrs. Simcox said, what were the rights of the case.
In a genial autumn, some years after the above events, Dr. Roland, who had never ceased to keep a hold upon his former neighbours, whose departure had so much saddened his life, arrived on a visit at that Highland home. It was a rambling house, consisting of many additions and enlargements built on to the original fabric of a small, strait, and high semi-fortified dwelling-place, breathing that air of austere and watchful defence which lingers about some old houses, though the parlours of the eighteenth century, not to say the drawing-rooms of the nineteenth, with their broad open windows, accessible from the ground, were strangely unlike the pointed tall gable with its crow steps, and the high post of watchfulness up among the roofs, the little balcony or terrace which swept the horizon on every side. There Miss Bethune, still Miss Bethune, abode in the fulness of a life which sought no further expansion, among her own people. She had called to her a few of the most ancient and trusted friends of the family on her first arrival there, and had disclosed to them her secret story, and asked their advice. She had never borne her husband’s name. There had been no break, so far as any living person except Gilchrist was aware, in the continuity of her life. The old servants were dead, and the old minister, who had been coaxed and frightened into performing a furtive ceremony. No one except Gilchrist was aware of any of those strange events which had gone on in the maze of little rooms and crooked passages. Miss Bethune was strong in the idea of disclosing everything when she returned home. She meant to publish her strange and painful story among her friends and to the world at large, and to acknowledge and put in his right place, as she said, her son. A small knot of grave county gentlemen sat upon the matter, and had all the evidence placed before them in order to decide this question.