CHAPTER XVII.
SHUTTING UP.
TO say nothing of it, to frighten the house! Hetty had never encountered in her own youthful person such a difficulty before. To keep the secret of something which had happened, which now it was very clear to her was not accidental—something perhaps that might be important, to keep the secret from those whom it might concern! In a moment her little fiction about the gardener disappeared, and she felt that she had never truly believed it. Something of far greater meaning lay beneath. She confronted it vaguely with frightened eyes; the conditions of her coming, and of the life here, and of Miss Hofland’s wonder and questioning, all flashing upon her in a moment. Everything went to prove that there was a mystery involved, something connected with the family that probably ought not to be concealed. She looked at Mr. Darrell with eyes which woke from a sort of stupefaction of fear and wonder into intelligence and acute anxiety. She did not speak, having scarcely regained sufficient possession of herself to trust her voice, but examined him with those awakened eyes.
“There is nothing wrong,” he said, with a slight tremulousness. “I would not deceive you. Whatever may be the rights of the matter, nothing could be gained by disturbing the house.”
“Oh, what is it?” cried Hetty, in spite of herself.
He shook his head with a smile. “Nothing,” he said, “that can affect you, nothing indeed. You have seen or heard me going to my patient?”
“Oh, Mr. Darrell,” said Hetty, with the indignation of sincerity, “it was not you.”
He shrank a little from her look. “I think you are mistaken,” he said; “how can you tell in the night who it is? I have to be about at all hours. I go through the park, or even across the garden, as the shortest way.”
Hetty eyed him once more with the superiority of fact over fiction. She looked at him as if she saw through him, he thought, and, what was worse, undervalued him, and set him down as a deceiver. In reality Hetty was far too much perplexed and disturbed in her mind to come to any such decided conclusion. She was looking at him instinctively to try to make him out. And in this look a great many things were communicated by the one to the other which did not at all involve the immediate question. Hetty saw a face which was full of anxiety, and perhaps of desire to veil a certain secret, but which at the same time was open and true, the countenance of a man in whom guile was not. The true recognise the true, however different may be their mental altitude or position. She thought he was deceiving her, and yet by instinct she believed in him. And he saw, in the young face lifted to him with such troubled questioning, the look of a judge before whose decision he trembled. If she should judge him from the surface, as it was so natural she should—if she took the fiction on his lips for the indication of his character, the young doctor in a moment felt that the work in which he was engaged, and which already his conscience disapproved, would cost him dear.