‘I am not false,’ said Cara, putting her arms round her. ‘Oh, Aunt Cherry, believe me. I did not know what he was going to do. It was to thank me, because he had been asking—my advice——’
‘Your advice! Ah, you will be fine guides to each other, if this is how you treat your best friends,’ said Miss Cherry. But she yielded a little to the girl’s caressing, and dried her eyes. ‘I am going away with a heavy heart,’ she added, after this partial making-up, shaking her head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know what it is all coming to. He is never at home—always there:—and you——. In my time we thought of what was right, not only what we liked best; but they tell us in all the books that the world is getting wiser, and knows better every day. I only hope you will find it so. Oh, Cara,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘it is thought a mean thing to say that honesty is the best policy, though it was the fashion once; but it is. I don’t mean to say that is the highest way of looking at it; but still it is so. For one vexation you may have by speaking the truth, you will find a dozen from not speaking it. I wish you would think of this. But I will not say any more.’
‘I am not a liar,’ said Cara, with a wild indignation in her heart which was beyond words; and she refused to speak again, and saw her aunt off with a throbbing heart, but neither tears nor words beyond what was absolutely needful; never had she parted with anyone in this way before. She came in and shut herself up in her room, directing them to say that she was ill, and could not drive when Mrs. Meredith came for her. Honesty the best policy! What breaking up of heaven and earth was it that placed her amid all these shadows and falsities, she whose spirit revolted from everything that was even doubtful? She lay down upon her little bed, and cried herself, not to sleep, but into the quiet of exhaustion. Aunt Cherry, who had been like her mother to her, had gone away wounded and estranged. Edward—what a countenance his had been as he turned and went out of the room! And Oswald, who had dragged her into this false position and would not clear her, laughed! Cara hid her eyes from the light in one of those outbursts of youthful despair, which are more intolerable than heavier sorrows. Such pangs have before now driven young souls to desperation. She was hemmed in, and did not know what to do. And where in all the world was she to find a friend now?
While she was lying there in her despair, Oswald, walking along lightly, could scarcely keep himself from laughing aloud when he thought of this quaint misadventure. How absurd it was! He hoped Miss Cherry would not be too hard upon Cara—but he took the idea of the scolding she would receive with a certain complacence as well as amusement. It was as good as a play; Miss Cherry’s look of horror, the blanched face of the virtuous Edward, and poor little Cara’s furious blush and overwhelming shame. What an innocent child it must be to feel such a trifle so deeply! But they were all rather tiresome people with their punctilios, Oswald felt, and the sooner he had emancipated himself, and settled independently, the better. Thanks to that sensible old governor, who, after all, could not have chosen a better moment to die in, there was no need for waiting, and nobody had any power to raise difficulties in respect to money. No, he could please himself; he could do what he liked without interference from anyone, and he would do it. He would win his little wife by his spear and his bow, without intervention of the old fogeys who spoil sport; and when the romance had been exhausted they would all live happy ever after like a fairy tale. As for any harm to be done in the meantime, any clouding of other lives, he puffed that into the air with a ‘Pshaw, nonsense!’ as he would have puffed away the smoke of his cigar.
But it surprised him when he returned home to find his mother in tears over Edward’s resolution, after all, to carry out his original plan and go out to India. Mrs. Meredith was broken-hearted over this change. ‘I thought it was all settled. Oh, Oswald, there are but two of you. How can I bear to part with one of my boys?’ she said.
‘Well, mother, but you had made up your mind to it; and, to tell the truth, it is a shame to sacrifice such prospects as his,’ said the elder son, with exemplary wisdom. ‘I am very sorry, since you take it so to heart; but otherwise one can’t deny it’s the best thing he could do.’
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE CRISIS APPROACHING.
While Oswald went about the streets so lightly, and thought so pleasantly of his prospects, another mind, still more agitated than that of Cara, was turning over and over all he had done for the last five or six weeks, and all that he might be about to do in the future. Agnes in her convent, with all her routine of duties—with the little tinkling bell continually calling her to one thing or another, to matins or evensong, to ‘meditation,’ to this service or that, to choir practice, to dinner and tea and recreation—carried a tumult of fancies about with her, which no one, except perhaps Sister Mary Jane, guessed. Oswald would have stood aghast could he have seen into that little ocean of excited feeling, where the waves rose higher and higher as the hours went on, and sometimes a swelling tide almost swept the thinker herself away—though indeed he would have been so unable to understand it that the inspection would probably have taught him little. How easily he took all this, which was so tremendous to her! and that not only because of the difference between man and woman, but because of the fundamental difference in temperament, which was greater still. Agnes had known but little that was lovely or pleasant in her life. Her rectory-home was neither; her father and mother and brothers and sisters were all vulgar and commonplace, struggling for existence, and for such privileges as it contained, one against another, and against the world, each grumbling at the indulgences the other managed to secure. The parish and its poor—and its rich, who were not much more attractive—had been all the world she had known; and the only beings who had crossed her horizon, who were not struggling like her own people, in the sordid race of existence, to get something, whatever it might be, were the Sisters in the House, and such a gentle retired person as Miss Cherry, who was not fighting for anything, who was ready to yield to anyone, and whose mild existence was evidently not pervaded by that constant recollection of self which filled up all the life of the others. This was what had brought the visionary girl into the House, which was sordid, too, in its details, though not in its spirit. Then there had been suddenly presented to her, just as she settled down to the work of the House, an image of something new, something more spontaneous, more easy in generosity, more noble in liberality than anything she had ever encountered. What did it matter that this type of nobleness was a handsome young man? Visionary Agnes, in the daring of her youth, saw no harm, but rather a beautiful fitness, in the fact that this revelation of the ideal should have all that was best in external as well as in more important things. He had stopped short—no doubt with all the brilliant world, which she did not know, waiting for him, arrested till he should rejoin it—to carry the wounded child to the hospital. He had left those mysterious glories of life, day after day and week after week, to go and ask for little Emmy. How wonderful this was! The devotion of Sister Mary Jane, the loving-kindness of Miss Cherry, faded before such an example; for they had not the world at their feet as this young paladin evidently had.
This was how the first chapter of the story came about. It opened her eyes (Agnes thought) to nobleness undreamed of, and for the first few weeks the universe itself had grown more bright to her. Could it be possible, then, that in ‘the world’ itself, which the Sisters had abjured—in that splendid glorious ‘society’ which even ascetic books spoke of as something too full of enhancements and seductions to be resisted by any but the most heroic, there were still opportunities of living the highest unselfish life, to the glory of God and the comfort of man? When Agnes found that this ideal hero of hers had thoughts less exalted in his bosom—that so small a motive as the wish to see herself and talk to her, had something to do with his devotion to the orphan, her visionary mind received a shock. Probably, had Oswald’s enthusiasm been for another, she would have been permanently disquieted by the discovery; but there is something strangely conciliatory in the fact that it is one’s self who is admired and followed. Such trivial emotions detract from the perfection of an ideal character; but still it is a much more easy thing to forgive your own lover than anyone else’s. And the more he sought her, the more Agnes’s heart, in spite of herself, inclined towards the man who could be thus moved. The ideal stole away, but so insensibly, in rose-coloured clouds, that she had not discovered the departure of her first admiration and wonder before something else stole in. It was not all goodness, nobleness, Christian charity, perhaps, that moved him; but what was it? Love, which in its way is divine too. Only after this altogether new influence had made itself felt did doubts appear, making a chaos in her mind. Were his sentiments as true as she had first thought? Was it right to counterfeit goodness, even in the name of love? Was not, after all, the life of the Sisters, the life of sacrifice, more noble than the other smiling life, of which he was the emblem? Was it not a mean thing to go back from that, and all one’s high thoughts of it, to the common romance of a story-book? Might not this romance lead back again to those vulgar beaten paths out of which Agnes had supposed herself to have escaped? And, ah! was it true after all? this was the refrain which kept coming back. Was it love and not levity? Was he seeking her seriously, in honour and truth; or was it possible that he was not noble at all, seeking her only for his own amusement? These thoughts shook Agnes to the bottom of her soul. They were like convulsions passing over her, tearing her spirit asunder. She went on with her work and all her religious exercises, and nobody found out how curiously unaware of what she was doing the girl was; living in a dream, performing mechanically all outside functions. Who does know, of those who are most near to us, what is going on in our minds? And not a calm Sister, not a little orphan in the House, would have been more incapable of comprehending, than was Oswald—to whom it would have seemed impossible—that anything in the world could produce so much emotion. Not only was it incomprehensible to him, but he could not even have found it out; and that his conduct should move either Agnes or Cara to this passionate suffering was an idea out of his grasp altogether. He would have been astounded, and more than astounded, had he been able to see into these two strange phases of unknown existence, which he could not have realised; but yet he was interested as warmly as his nature permitted. He was ‘in love;’ he was ready to do a great deal to secure to himself the girl he loved. He was ready to proceed to the most unmistakable conclusions, to commit himself, to blazon his love to the eyes of day. Perhaps even the sense that it was in his power to do this, without waiting for a keynote from anyone else, had something to do with his perfect calm.