“Which makes me,” said Fanshawe, feeling abashed even in the gloom, “have all the more confidence that you are right, Miss Heriot. Had it been a—nothing, a—a mere levity—I don’t know what words to use—he would have spoken of it; but not a serious and honourable love.”
“Indeed, I am sure you do yourself injustice,” said Marjory, even in her languor of grief, discovering, with surprise, that she was capable of a blush.
“No,” he said, humbly; “men are ashamed of what is good oftener than of what is evil.”
They were speaking low, that Milly might not share any more of the secret than was inevitable, a precaution which was vain. Milly took in every word, along with the gloom of the room and the lines of strange, pale eerie light, and the heavy, sad, and painful excitement of the moment. The scene and the story never went out of her mind; but it did not make her much wiser.
There was something about poor Tom, and something about some one called Isabell, and partial darkness and transverse lines of light, themselves so pale and dark, that they made the gloom rather heavier. Milly sat close to Marjory’s knee, holding by her dress. The child could not bear to be without a hold upon something. When she let go, she seemed to sail away through some dark world of shadows and misery, full of sounds of the distant wheels of the mourning coaches, and that solemn, dreary bustle which attends the last exit of every mortal from his earthly home. Twice in a few weeks this had occurred, and it gave a confused sense of permanency to the wretchedness, so far as the child was concerned.
To Marjory there was, perhaps—who can say?—a certain sense of fellowship and comfort in the companion with whom she could talk freely, and upon whose sympathy she could reckon, which made up for something. Little Milly, perhaps, who could not in reality feel all that happened half so deeply as her sister, was for the moment more cast down, enveloped in that vague dreariness of childhood which, while it lasts, is more deeply depressing than any maturer grief.
A very different scene was going on upstairs in the west wing, where the strangers were being clothed in their new mourning, in preparation for a solemn appearance at the reading of the will. Poor Matilda, covered with crape, and drowned in the big widow’s cap, was as woe-begone as her sister could have desired, and cried more and more every time she looked in the glass.
“It is hideous with light hair,” she said. “Oh! Verna, how cruel you are! They will think me eighty; they will not feel for me a bit. You know very well, when you have an unbecoming dress, men always find it out, though they never know what makes it unbecoming. And when everything depends on the impression I make, for the poor children—”
“Oh! you little fool!” said Verna, to whom it must be allowed the deep mourning, with the delicate broad hems of her collar and wrists, was very becoming; “the only impression you have to make is that you are a wretched widow, able to think of nothing but your poor dead husband. If you had the heart of a mouse, you would be thinking of him to-day, and not of anything else.”
“And so I am,” said Matilda, with real tears. “He would never have made me wear this horrible thing. He liked to see me look my best, and always thought of me, and what I would like, before everything. You may be sure that so long as I am with you, who are a little tyrant to me, I shall never, never forget poor dear Charlie. And, of course, I want to look decent, for his sake. What are they to think of him, dear fellow, when they see me look such a dowdy, and with no money, nor anything. It is for Charlie’s sake!”