“I shall always hate your aunt;” cried Sara—“I did before by instinct: did she put it all into your head about matches and things? You were ten thousand times better when you had only me. As if I would marry a man because he would be a good marriage! I wonder what you take me for, that you speak so to me!”
“Then what should you marry him for!” said little Fanny, with a toss of her pretty head.
“For!” cried Sara, “not for any thing! for nothing at all! I hate marrying. To think a girl can not live in this world without having that thrust into her face! What should I marry any body for? But I shall do what I like, and walk when I like, and talk to any body that pleases me,” cried the impetuous young woman. Her vehemence brought a flush to her face and something like tears into her eyes; and Fanny, for her part, looked on very gravely at an appearance of feeling of which she entirely disapproved.
“I dare say you will take your own way,” she said—“you always did take your own way; but at least you can’t say I did not warn you; and I hope you will never be sorry for not having listened to me, Sara. I love you all the same,” said Fanny, giving her friend a soft little kiss. Sara did not return this salutation with the warmth it deserved. She was flushed and angry and impatient, and yet disposed to laugh.
“You don’t hope any thing of the sort,” she said; “you hope I shall live to be very sorry—and I hate your aunt.” This was how the warning ended in the drawing-room. It was more elegantly expressed than it had been by Mrs. Swayne and old Betty; but yet the burden of the prophecy was in some respects the same.
When Sara thought over it at a later period of the night, she laughed a little in her own mind at poor Fanny’s ignorance. Could she but know that the poor clerk was an enchanted prince! Could she but guess that it was in pure obedience to her father’s wishes that she had given him such a reception! When he appeared in his true shape, whatever that might be, how uncomfortable little Fanny would feel at the recollection of what she had said! And then Sara took to guessing and wondering what his true shape might be. She was not romantic to speak of in general. She was only romantic in her own special case; and when she came to think of it seriously, her good sense came to her aid—or rather not to her aid—to her hindrance and confusion and bewilderment. Sara knew very well that in those days people were not often found out to be princes in disguise. She knew even that for a clerk in her father’s office to turn out the heir to a peerage or even somebody’s son would be so unusual as to be almost incredible. And what, then, could her father mean? Neither was Mr. Brownlow the sort of man to pledge his soul on his daughter in any personal emergency. Yet some cause there must be. When she had come this length, a new sense seemed suddenly to wake up in Sara’s bosom, perhaps only the result of her own thoughts, perhaps suggested, though she would not have allowed that, by Fanny Hardcastle’s advice—a sudden sense that she had been coming down from her natural sphere, and that her father’s clerk was not a fit mate for her. She was very generous, and hasty, and high-flown, and fond of her father, and fond of amusement—and moved by all these qualities and affections together she had jumped at the suggestion of Mr. Brownlow’s plan; but perhaps she had never thought seriously of it as it affected herself that night. Now it suddenly occurred to her how people might talk. Strangely enough, the same thought which had been bitterness to her father, stung her also, as soon as her eyes were opened. Miss Brownlow of Brownlows, who had refused, or the same thing as refused, Sir Charles Motherwell—whom young Keppel had regarded afar off as utterly beyond his reach—the daughter of the richest man, and herself one of the most popular (Sara did not even to herself say the prettiest; she might have had an inkling of that too, but certainly she did not put it into articulate thought) girls in the county—she bending from her high estate to the level of a lawyer’s clerk; she going back to the hereditary position, reminding every body that she was the daughter of the Masterton attorney, showing the low tastes which one generation of higher culture could not be supposed to have effaced! How could she do it? If she had been a duke’s daughter it would not have mattered. In such a case nobody could have thought of hereditary low tastes; but now—As Sara mused, the color grew hotter and hotter in her cheeks. To think that it was only now, so late in the day, that this occurred to her, after she had gone so far in the way of carrying out her father’s wishes! To think that he could have imposed such a sacrifice upon her! Sara’s heart smarted and stung her in her breast as she thought of that. And then there suddenly came up a big indignant blob of warm dew in either eye, which was not for her father nor for her own dignity, but for something else about which she could not parley with herself. And then she rushed at her candles and put them out, and threw herself down on her bed. The fact was that she did sleep in half an hour at the farthest, though she did not mean to, and thus escaped from her thoughts; but that was not what she calculated upon. She calculated on lying awake all night and saying many very pointed and grievous things to her father when in the morning he should ask her the meaning of her pale face and heavy eyes; but unfortunately her cheeks were as fresh as the morning when the morning duly came, and her eyes as bright, and Mr. Brownlow, seeing no occasion for it, asked no questions, but had himself to submit to inquiries and condolences touching a bad night and a pale face. He too had been moved by Mr. Hardcastle’s warning—moved, not of course to any sort of acceptance of the rector’s advice, but only to the length of being uncomfortable, while he took his own way, which is at all times the only one certain result of good advice. And he was depressed too about Jack’s communication which had been made to him only two nights before, and of which he had spoken to nobody. The thought of it was a humiliation to him. His two children whom he had brought up so carefully, his only ones, in whom he had expected his family to make a new beginning—and yet they both meant to descend far below the ancestral level which he had hoped to see them leave utterly behind! He was not what is called a proud man, and he had never been ashamed of his origin or of his business. But yet, two such marriages in one family, and one generation—! It was a bitter thought.
As for Sara, she would have said, had she been questioned, that she thought of nothing else all day; and in fact it was her prevailing pre-occupation. All the humiliations involved in it came gleaming across her mind by intervals. Her pride rose up in arms. She did not know as yet about the repetition or rather anticipation of her case which her brother had been guilty of. But she did ponder over the probable consequences. The hardest thing of all was that they would say it was the fault of her race, that she was only returning to her natural level, and that it was not wealth nor even admiration which could make true gentlefolks; all which were sentiments to which Sara would have subscribed willingly in any but her own case. When Powys arrived with Mr. Brownlow in the evening, she received him with a stateliness that chilled the poor young fellow to his heart. And he too had so many thoughts, and just at that moment was wondering with an intensity which put all the others to shame how it could possibly end, and what his honor required of him, and what sort of a grey and weary desert life would be after this dream was over. It seemed to him absolutely as if the dream was coming to an end that night. Jack, who was never very courteous to the visitor, left them immediately after dinner, and Mr. Brownlow retired to the library for some time, and Powys had no choice but to go where his heart had gone before him, up to the drawing-room where Sara sat alone. Of course she ought to have had a chaperone; but then this young man, being only a clerk from the office, did not count.
She was seated in the window, close to the Claude, which had been the first thing that brought these two together; but to-night she was in no meditative mood. She had provided herself with work, and was laboring at it fiercely in a way which Powys had never seen before. And he did not know that her heart too was beating very fast, and that she had been wondering and wondering whether he would have the courage to come up stairs. He had really had that courage, but now that he was there, he did not know what to do. He came up to her at first, but she kept on working and did not take any notice of him, she who up to this moment had always been so sweet. The poor young fellow was cast down to the very depths; he thought they had but taken him up and played upon him for their amusement, and that now the end had come. And he tried, but ineffectually, to comfort himself with the thought that he had always known it must come to an end. Almost, when he saw her silence, her absorbed looks, the constrained little glance she gave him as he came into the room, it came into his mind that Sara herself would say something to bring the dream to a distinct conclusion. If she had told him that she divined his presumption, and that he was never more to enter that room again, he would not have been surprised. It had been a false position throughout—he knew that, and he knew that it must come to an end.
But, in the mean time, a fair face must be put upon it. Powys, though he was a backwoodsman, knew enough of life, or had sufficient instinct of its requirements, to know that. So he went up to the Claude, and looked at it sadly, with a melancholy he could not restrain.
“It is as you once said, Miss Brownlow,” said Powys—“always the same gleam and the same ripples. I can understand your objections to it now.”