“My dear,” he said gently, “I think it will be best not to discuss the question. If there is something new in it, it will develop soon enough. God forbid! I am little disposed, Rosalind, to think that there is anything new.”
She did not make any reply. Her heart was sore with doubt and suspicion; the more strange these sentiments, all the more do they scorch and sting. In the whirl which they introduced into her mind she had been trying in vain to get any ground to stand upon. There might have been explanations; but then how easy to give them, and settle the question. It is terrible, in youth, to be thrown into such a conflict of mind, and all the more to one who has never been used to think out anything alone, who has shared with another every thought that arose in her, and received on everything the interchanged ideas of a mind more experienced, wiser, than her own. She was thus suddenly cut off from her anchors, and felt herself drifting on wild currents unknown to her, giddy, as if buffeted by wind and tide—though seated there within the steadfast walls of an old house which had gone through all extremities of human emotion, and never quivered, through hundreds of troublous years.
“I think,” said John Trevanion, after a pause, “that it would be good for you to have a little change. Home, of course, is the best place for a girl. Still, it is a great strain upon young nerves. I wonder we none of us have ever thought of it before. Your aunt Sophy would be glad to have you, and I could take you there on my way. I really think, Rosalind, this would be the best thing you could do. Winter is closing in, and in present circumstances it is almost impossible to have visitors at Highcourt. Even young Hamerton, how much he is in the way; though he is next to nobody, a young fellow! Come! you must not stay here to wear your nerves to fiddlestrings. I must take you away.”
She looked up at him with an earnest glance which he was very conscious of, but did not choose to meet. “Why at this moment above all others?” she said.
“Why? that goes without saying, Rosalind. Your father, to my mind, has never been so bad; and your— I mean Madam—”
“You mean my mother, Uncle John. Well! is she not my mother? I have never known any other. Poor dear little mamma was younger than I am. I never knew her. She is an angel in heaven, and she cannot be jealous of any one on earth. So you think that because papa has never been so ill, and my mother never had so much to bear, it would be the right thing for me, the eldest, the one that can be of most use, to go away?”
“She has her own children, Rosalind.”
“Yes, to be sure. Rex, who is at school, and knows about as much of what she needs as the dogs do; and little Sophy, who is barely nine. You must think very little of Rosalind, uncle, if you think these children can make up for me.”
“I think a great deal of Rosalind; but we must be reasonable. I thought a woman’s own children, however little worth they may be in themselves, were more to her than any one else’s. Perhaps I am wrong, but that’s in all the copybooks.”
“You want to make me believe,” said Rosalind, with passion, “that I am nobody’s child, that I have no right to love or any home in all the world!”