“It means our ain private affairs, that neither you nor any stranger has aught to do with,” said Mrs. Murray, looking up with an air as proud as Clare’s own. And then she returned in a moment to her natural tone. “I am no anxious because she has fainted. She will come out of her faint, poor bairn; but it’s sore, sore work, when you think it’s all passing away, that the look of a man she never saw before should bring it back again. I canna tell ye my private history, Miss Arden. I may have done wrong in my day, and I may be suffering for it; but I canna tell it a’ to a stranger; and that is what it means—no an accident, but our ain private affairs that are between me and my Maker, and no one beside.”
“But she knew Mr. Arden!” said Clare.
“The man she took him for is dead; he was a man that did evil to me and mine, and brought us to evil,” said the grandmother, solemnly. “The life is coming back to her; and oh, if ye would but go away, and keep yon gentleman away! If we were to bide here for a year, I could tell ye no more.”
Wretched with suspicion, unbelieving and unhappy, Clare turned away. Had she been capable of feeling any additional blow to her pride, that dismissal would have given it; but her pride was in abeyance for the moment, swallowed up in wonder and anxious curiosity. “The man she took him for is dead”—was that true, or a lie invented to screen one who had betrayed poor Jeanie. The girl herself could not surely be deceived. And if Arthur Arden had wrought this ruin, what remained for Clare?
CHAPTER XXIV.
Mrs. Murray was left alone with her grandchild, and she was glad. Though she was old, she was full of that patient strength which shows itself without any ostentation whenever the emergency which requires it arises. She was not sorry for herself, nor did she think much of her own age, or of what was due to her. She had long got over that phase of life in which a woman has leisure to think of herself. And there was no panic of alarm about her, such as might have come to the inexperienced. She knew her work, and all about it, and did not overwhelm herself with unnecessary excitements. She laid her child down in the grass, in the shade, laying her head upon a folded shawl. Jeanie had come out of her faint, but she lay in a state of exhaustion, with her eyes closed, unable to move or speak. The grandmother knew it was impossible to take her home in such a state of prostration. She seated herself so as to screen her charge from passers by, and resumed her knitting—a picture of calm and thoughtful composure—serious, yet with no trace of mystery or panic about her. What had happened to Jeanie was connected with their own affairs. It was a thing which nobody but themselves had anything to do with. She sat and watched the young sufferer with all that grave power of self-restraint which it is always so impressive to witness, asking neither help nor pity, knitting on steadily, with sometimes a tender glance from her deep eyes at the young fair creature lying at her side, and sometimes a keen look round to guard against intrusion. The work went on through all, and those thoughts which nobody knew of, which no one suspected. What was she thinking about? She had a breadth of sixty years to go back upon, and memories to recall with which nothing here had any connection. Or could it be possible that there might be a certain connection between her thoughts and this unknown place? Sometimes she paused in her work, and dropped her hands, and turned her face towards the house, which was invisible from where she sat, and fell into a deeper musing. “Would I do it over again if it were to do?” she said half aloud to herself, with an instinctive impulse to break the intense stillness; and then, making no answer to her own question, sat with her head dropped on her hand, gazing into the shadowy distance. What was it she had done? It was something which touched her conscience—touched her heart; but she had not repented of it as a positive wrong, and could yet, it was clear, bring forth a hundred arguments to justify herself to herself. She paused, and leant her head upon her hand, and fixed her eyes on the distance, in which, unseen, lay the home of the Ardens. Her thoughts had strayed away from Jeanie. She mused, and she sighed a sigh which was very deep and long drawn, as if it came from the depths of her being. “The ways of ill-doers are hard,” she murmured to herself; and then, after a pause, “Would I do it again?” It was not remorse that was in her face; it was not even penitence; it was pain subdued, and a great doubt which it was very hard to solve. But there was no clue to her musing, either in her look or her tones. She took up her knitting with another sigh, when she had apparently exhausted, or been exhausted by that thought, and changed the shawl under Jeanie’s head, making her more comfortable, and looked at her with the tenderest pity. “Poor bairn!” she said to herself; “Poor bairn!” and then, after a long pause, “That she should be the first to pay the price!” The words were said but half aloud, a murmur that fell into the sound of the wind in the trees and the insects all about. Then she went to work again, knitting in the deepest quiet—a silence so intense that she looked like a weird woman knitting a web of fate.
It was a curious picture. The girl with her bonnet laid aside, and her hair a little loosened from its smoothness, lying stretched out in the deep cool grass which rose all round her, and shaded by a great bough of hawthorn, laden with the blossom which was still so sweet. The white petals lay all about upon the grass, lying motionless like Jeanie, who was herself like a great white flower, half buried in the soft and fragrant verdure; while the old mother sat by doing her work, watching with every sense, ear and eye on the alert to catch any questionable sound. The girl fell asleep in her weakness; the old woman sat motionless in her strength and patience; and the trees waved softly over them, and the summer blue filled up all the interstices of the leafage. This was the scene upon which Arthur Arden came back as he returned from the house with aid and promises of aid. He had been interested before, and now, when he perceived that Clare was not to be seen, his interest grew more manifest. He came up hurriedly, half running, for he was not without natural sympathy and feeling. “Is she better?” he asked. “Miss Arden’s maid is coming, and the carriage to take her home; and, in the meantime, here is something.” And he hastily produced a bottle of smelling-salts and some eau-de-cologne.
“She is better,” said Mrs. Murray, stiffly. “I thank ye, sir, for all your trouble; but there’s no need—no need! She is resting, poor lamb, after her attack. It’s how she does always. But I would fain be sure that she would never see you again. Dinna think I’m uncivil, Mr. Arden; for I know you are Mr. Arden by your looks. You are like one that brought great pain and trouble to our house a year or two since. I would be glad to think that she would never see ye more.”
“But that is a little hard,” said Arthur Arden. “To ask me to go away and make a martyr of myself, without even telling me why. I must say I think that harsh. I would do a great deal for so pretty a creature,” he added, carelessly drawing near the pretty figure, and stooping over her. Mrs. Murray half rose with a quick sense of the difference in his tone.
“My poor bairn is subject to a sore infirmity,” she said, “and for that she should be the more pitied of all Christian folk. A gentleman like you will neither look at her nor speak to her but as you ought. I am asking nothing of you. It’s my part to keep my own safe. All I pray is that if you should meet her in the road you would pass on the other side, or turn away your face. That’s little to do. I can take care of my own.”