‘Were you ever at the Hill, Oswald? You must come. It will soon be spring now! look at the crocuses! and in the primrose time the woods are lovely. I was almost brought up there, and I always think of it as home.’
‘But I must ask some more about this—about your father. It ought to be put a stop to——’
‘Oh, don’t say any more,’ cried Cara, hurriedly, with another blush. ‘You must let me know how your own affairs go on, and what happens; and, Oswald, oh! I hope you will take care and not let her get into trouble about you. If she was to lose her home and her comfort or even to get scolded——’
‘Getting scolded is not such a dreadful punishment, Cara.’
‘But it is to a girl,’ said Cara, very gravely, and she became so absorbed in the arrangement of her crocuses, setting them in the green moss, which had packed them, that he yielded to her preoccupation, being one of the persons who cannot be content without the entire attention of anyone to whom they address themselves. He did not make out how it was that he had failed with Cara on this special morning, but he felt the failure, and it annoyed him. For the first time he had lost her interest. Was it that she did not like his devotion to Agnes to go so far, that she felt the disadvantage of losing him? This idea excited and exhilarated Oswald, who liked to be first with everybody. Poor Cara, if it was so! he was very sorry for her. If she had shown any inclination to accept him, he would have been very willing to prove to her that he had not given her up, notwithstanding his love for the other; but she would not pay any attention to his overtures, and nothing was left for him but to go away.
Cara’s whole frame seemed to tingle with her blushing, her fancy fled from the subject thrust upon her attention even when excitement brought her back to it and whispered it again in her ears. Her father! Never since the scene which she had witnessed in her mother’s sick room, had Cara felt a child’s happy confidence in her father. She had never analysed her sentiments towards him, but there had been a half-conscious shrinking, a sense as of something unexplained that lay between them. She had gone over that scene a hundred times and a hundred to that, roused to its importance only after it was over. What had been the meaning of it? never to this day had she been quite able to make up her mind, nobody had talked to her of her mother’s death. Instead of those lingerings upon the sad details, upon the last words, upon all the circumstances which preceded that catastrophe, which are usual in such circumstances, there had been a hush of everything, which had driven the subject back upon her mind, and made her dwell upon it doubly. Time had a little effaced the impression, but the return to the Square had brought it back again in greater force, and in those lonely hours which the girl had spent there at first, left to her own resources, many a perplexed and perplexing fancy had crowded her mind. The new life, however, which had set in later, the companionship, the gentle gaieties, the new sentiment, altogether strange and wonderful, which had arisen in her young bosom, had quietly pushed forth all painful thoughts. But now, with the pang of parting already in her heart, and the sense, so easily taken up at her years and so tragically felt, that life never could again be what it had been—a certain pang of opposition to her father had come into Cara’s mind. Going away!—to break her heart and alter her life because he would not bear the associations of his home! was a man thus, after having all that was good in existence himself, to deprive others of their happiness for the sake of his recollections? but when this further revelation fell upon his conduct, Cara’s whole heart turned and shrank from her father. She could not bear the suggestion, and yet it returned to her in spite of herself. The shame of it, the wrong of it, the confused and dark ideas of suspicion and doubt which had been moving vaguely in her mind, all came together in a painful jumble. She put away her flowers, flinging away half of them in the tumult of her thoughts. It was too peaceful an occupation, and left her mind too free for discussion with herself. The girl’s whole being was roused, she scarcely knew why. Love! she had never thought of it, she did not know what it meant, and Oswald, whom her aunt supposed to entertain that wonderful occult sentiment for her, certainly did not do so, but found in her only a pleasant confidante, a friendly sympathiser. Something prevented Cara from inquiring further, from asking herself any questions. She did not venture even to think in the recesses of her delicate bosom, that Edward Meredith was anything more to her, or she to him, than was Miss Cherry. What was the use of asking why or wherefore? She had begun to be happy, happier certainly than she had been before; and here it was to end. The new world, so full of strange, undefined lights and reflections, was to break up like a dissolving view, and the old world to settle down again with all its old shadows. The thought brought a few hot, hasty tears to her eyes whenever it surprised her as it did now. Poor inconsistent child! She forgot how dull the Square had been when she came, how bitterly she had regretted her other home in those long dreary evenings when there was no sound in the house except the sound of the hall-door closing upon her father when he went out. Ah! upon her father as he went out! He who was old, whose life was over (for fifty is old age to seventeen), he could not tolerate the interruption of his habits, of his talk with his friend; but she in the first flush of her beginning was to be shut out from everything, banished from her friends without a word! And then there crept on Cara’s mind a recollection of those evening scenes over the fire: Aunt Cherry bending her brows over her needlework, and Edward reading in the light of the lamp. How innocent it was; how sweet; and it was all over, and for what? Poor little Cara’s mind seemed to turn round. That sense of falsehood and insincerity even in the solid earth under one’s feet, which is the most bewildering and sickening of all moral sensations, overcame her. It was for her mother’s sake, because of the love he bore her, that he could not be at ease in this room, which had been so specially her mother’s; all those years while he had been wandering, it was because the loss of his wife was fresh upon his mind, and the blow so bitter that he could not resume his old life; but now what was this new breaking up of his life? Not for her mother’s sake, but for Mrs. Meredith’s! Cara paused with her head swimming, and looked round her to see if anything was steady in the sudden whirl. What was steady? Oswald, whom everybody (she could see) supposed to be ‘in love,’ whatever that was, with herself, was, as she knew, ‘in love,’ as he called it, with somebody else. Cara did not associate her own sentiments for anyone with that feeling which Oswald expressed for Agnes, but she felt that her own position was false, as his position was false, and Mrs. Meredith’s and her father’s. Was there nothing in the world that was true?
The next day or two was filled with somewhat dolorous arrangements for breaking up again the scarcely-established household. Miss Cherry occupied herself with many sighs in packing away the silver, shutting up the linen, all the household treasures, and covering the furniture with pinafores. Cara’s clothes were in process of packing, Cara’s room was being dismantled. Mr. Beresford’s well-worn portmanteaux had been brought out, and John and Cook, half pleased at the renewed leisure which began to smile upon them, half-vexed at the cessation of their importance as purveyors for and managers of their master’s ‘establishment,’ were looking forward to the great final ‘cleaning up,’ which was to them the chief event of the whole. All was commotion in the house. The intercourse with the house next door had partially ceased; Oswald still came in the morning, and Edward in the evening; but there had been no communication between the ladies of the two houses since the evening when Mr. Beresford took final leave of Mrs. Meredith. To say that there were not hard thoughts of her in the minds of the Beresfords would be untrue, and yet it was impossible that anyone could have been more innocent than she was. All that she had done was to be kind, which was her habit and nature. ‘But too kind,’ Miss Cherry said privately to herself, ‘too kind! Men must not be too much encouraged. They should be kept in their place,’ and then the good soul cried at the thought of being hard upon her neighbour. As for Cara, she never put her thoughts on the subject into words, being too much wounded by the mere suggestion. But in her mind, too, there was a sense that Mrs. Meredith must be wrong. It could not be but that she must be wrong; and they avoided each other by instinct. After poor James was gone, Miss Cherry promised herself she would call formally and bid good-by to that elderly enchantress who had made poor James once more an exile. Nothing could exceed now her pity for ‘poor James.’ She forgot the darts with which she herself had slain him, and all that had been said to his discredit. He was the sufferer now, which was always enough to turn the balance of Miss Cherry’s thoughts.
When things had arrived at this pitch, a sudden and extraordinary change occurred all at once in Mr. Beresford’s plans. For a day no communications whatever took place between No. 7 and No. 8 in the Square. Oswald did not come in the morning—which was a thing that might be accounted for; but Edward did not appear in the evening—which was more extraordinary. Miss Cherry had brought out her art-needlework, notwithstanding the forlorn air of semi-dismantling which the drawing-room had already assumed, and Cara had her hemming ready. ‘It will only be for a night or two more,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘and we may just as well be comfortable; but she sighed; and as for Cara, the expression of her young countenance had changed altogether to one of nervous and impatient trouble. She was pale, her eyes had a fitful glimmer. Her aunt’s little ways fretted her as they had never done before. Now and then a sense of the intolerable seized upon the girl. She would not put up with the little daily contradictions to which everybody is liable. She would burst out into words of impatience altogether foreign to her usual character. She was fretted beyond her powers of endurance. But at this moment she calmed down again. She acquiesced in Miss Cherry’s little speech and herself drew the chairs into their usual places, and got the book which Edward had been reading to them. The ladies were very quiet, expecting their visitor; the fire sent forth little puffs of flame and crackles of sound, the clock ticked softly, everything else was silent. Cara fell into a muse of many fancies, more tranquil than usual, for the idea that he would not come had not entered her mind. At least they would be happy to-night. This thought lulled her into a kind of feverish tranquillity, and even kept her from rousing, as Miss Cherry did, to the sense that he had not come at his usual hour and might not be coming. ‘Edward is very late,’ Miss Cherry said at last. ‘Was there any arrangement made, Cara, that he was not to come?’
‘Arrangement? that he was not to come!’
‘My dear,’ said good Miss Cherry, who had been very dull for the last hour, ‘you have grown so strange in your ways. I don’t want to blame you, Cara; but how am I to know? Oswald comes in the morning and Edward in the evening; but how am I to know? If one has said more to you than the other, if you think more of one than the other, you never tell me. Cara, is it quite right, dear? I thought you would have told me that day that Oswald came and wanted to see you alone; of course, we know what that meant; but you evaded all my questions; you never would tell me.’