Mr. Brownlow was totally taken by surprise. He had not been able to read what was going on in his daughter’s heart. He could not believe now that she understood him. He put his hand upon her arm and drew her back. “You mistake me, my darling,” he said; “I mean that you are quite free, Sara—quite free. It was wrong of me to ask any promise from you, and it was foolish of you to give it. But Providence, thank God, has settled that. It is all over. There is no more necessity. Can’t you forgive me? You have not suffered so much from it as I have done. Before I could have come to the point of sacrificing you—”
“Sacrificing me!” cried Sara, suddenly, flashing back upon him in a storm of passion and indignation, her cheeks scorching yet wet with tears, her big eyes swimming. “Is that all you think of? You had a right to sacrifice me if you liked—nobody would have said a word. They did it in the Bible. You might have cut me into little pieces if you liked. But oh, what right had you, how dared you to make a sacrifice of him?”
“Him!” cried Mr. Brownlow, and he took a step back in consternation and gazed at his child, who was transfigured, and a different creature. Her cheeks blazed under her tears, but she did not shrink. Weeping, blushing, wounded, ashamed, she still confronted him in the strength of some new feeling of which he had never dreamed.
“You never say a word about him!” cried Sara. “You speak of me, and you had a right to do whatever you like with me; but it is him whom you have sacrificed. He never would have thought of it but for you. He never would have come back after that time but for you. And then you expect me to think only of myself, and to be glad when you say I am free! How can I be free? I led him on and made him speak when he knew better. Oh, papa, you are cruel, cruel! He was doing you no harm, and you have made him wretched; and now you think it doesn’t matter; but that is not the way with me!”
“Sara, are you mad?” cried Mr. Brownlow in his dismay; but Sara made him no answer. She sat down on the nearest chair, and turning round away from him, leaned her arms on the back of it, and put down her head on her arms. He could see that she was crying, but that was all; and nothing he could say, neither consolations, nor excuses, nor reproofs, would induce her to raise her head. It was the first quarrel she had ever had with the father who had been father and mother both to her; and the acuteness of her first disappointment, the first cross in her pleasant life, the unexpected humiliating end of her first dreams, roused a wild rebellion in her heart. She was wroth, and her heart was sore, and outraged. When he was called away by Willis about some business, he left her there, still twisted round upon her chair, with her face upon her folded arms, spending her very soul in tears. But the moment he was gone she sprang up and fled to the shelter of her own room. “They shall find that it is not the way with me!” she said to herself, and gave herself up willfully to thoughts of the banished lover who had been treated so cruelly. On that day at least, Sara avenged poor Powys’s wrongs upon the company in general. She had a headache, and could not join in their excursion. And her eyes were still red with crying when next she was seen down stairs. Mr. Brownlow tried to persuade himself it was too violent to last, and thought it prudent to take no more notice, but was very obsequious and conciliatory all the evening to his naughty child. Even when it was thus brought before him, he did not make much account of the sacrifice of Powys. And he thought Sara would come round and see things by and by in their true light. But all the same the shock had a great effect upon him, and damped him strangely in the first effusion of his joy.
But he was kind, kinder to every body in his gratitude to Providence. Except that he had no pity for Powys, who seemed to him to have been all this time a kind of impostor, his good fortune softened his heart to every other creature. When he met Pamela on the road, though Pamela was the one other individual in the world with whom Jack’s father was not in perfect charity, he yet stopped kindly to speak to her. “I hope your mother has not gone upon a long journey. I hope she is coming back,” he said in a fatherly way. “She should not have left you by yourself alone.”
“It was on business,” said Pamela, not daring to lift her eyes. “She said she would be soon back.”
“Then you must take great care of yourself while she is away,” Mr. Brownlow said, and took off his hat as he left her, with the courtesy which was natural to him. He was so kind to every body, and that day in particular he looked after the pretty creature with a pang of compunction. He did not care much for Powys, but he was sorry for Pamela. “Poor little thing!” he said to himself—for while he said it he thought of launching Jack, as it was Jack’s ambition to be launched, upon public life, getting him into the House of Commons, sending him out to the world, where he would soon forget his humble little love. Mr. Brownlow felt that this was what would happen, and his heart for the moment ached over poor Pamela. She was so pretty, and soft, and young, and then she reminded him—though of whom he could not quite say.
Thus the day went on; and the next day Mr. Brownlow went to the office, where every thing was as usual. He saw by his first glance that Powys was at his desk, and he was pleased, though he took no notice. Perhaps a certain unacknowledged compunction, after all, was in his mind. He even sent for Mr. Wrinkell and consulted him as to the fitness of the junior clerk for a more responsible post. Mr. Wrinkell was a cautious man, but he could not conceal a certain favoritism. “Ever since that first little cloud that passed over him, he has been worth any two in the office,” he said—“any two, sir; but I don’t think he is happy in his mind.”
“Not happy?” said Mr. Brownlow; “but you know, Wrinkell, we can not be expected to remedy that.”