“Yes, she knows,” said Arthur, quietly. “I met her yesterday; and I am going to call there now. I suppose, as Clare is my cousin, and I am old enough to be her father, I may be permitted to call——”
“Yes, I suppose you are old enough to be her father,” Mr. Fielding said, with most provoking acquiescence. Arthur could have knocked the Rector down, had he given way to his feelings. After all, though there was a good deal of difference in point of age, it would have been difficult for him to have been Clare’s father. And he did not feel like her father in the smallest degree. The Rector paused at the Hall gates, and looked at his watch to see if he had time also to pay a visit to Clare; but, to Arthur’s intense relief, the man-of-all-work came running across from the Rectory as Mr. Fielding hesitated. Some one who was ill had sent for the Rector—some one who lived two miles off—and who had sent so urgent an appeal that Jack had already put the saddle on his master’s sturdy old cob. “I shall have to put it off till to-morrow,” Mr. Fielding said, with a sigh. “Tell Clare I shall see her to-morrow.” But alas! (he thought to himself) an antidote given twenty-four hours after the poison, what good is it? And he could not forbid her own cousin to pay her a visit. So Mr. Fielding turned away with a bad grace to visit his sick parishioner; and Arthur, much relieved, opened the little postern gate, and took his way under the great elms and beeches to the Hall.
CHAPTER X.
Clare was all alone when Arthur reached the Hall. She had been all alone the whole day. She had not even received a letter from anybody, to help her through its long hours. She had looked after her accounts, and arranged something for the schools, and answered an application which some one in Liverpool had made in respect to one of the girls whom old Sarah had trained. And then she sat down and read for half-an-hour, and then rose and stood for ten minutes at the window, and then had taken her tapestry-work, and then gone to the window again. From that window the view was very fair. It would have lightened the burden off the shoulders of many a careworn man and woman only to have been able to go and look at it from time to time in the midst of their work. There were the woods, in all their summer wealth, stretching as far as the eye could see; and under their shade a gleam of water catching the sunshine—water which was one of the charms of Arden—a series of old fish-ponds threaded upon the thin silvery string of a little stream. It glimmered here, and it glimmered there, through the rich foliage—and now and then the elms and beeches stood apart, as it were, drawing their leafy skirts about them, to open a green glade, all brightened up with a flash of that fairy water; and between the window and the wood was the great wealthy stretch of immemorial turf, the park, with here and there a huge tree standing with modest consciousness by itself—a champion of the sylvan world. People had been heard to say that the mere sight of all that lordly, silent scene—so profuse in its verdure, so splendid in its space and freedom—was enough to drive care and pain far from Arden. Nothing knew Nature there of pain or evil. She lay and contemplated herself, wrapped in a holy, divine content, listening to the rustle of the leaves, taking thought for the innumerable tiny lives that buzzed and fluttered in the air, watching the grasses grow and the little fish leap. It was all very lovely, and to Clare it was dear, as only such a home can be. But when she went to the window her heart grew sick of the silence and the calm. Oh, only for a little movement and commotion! A storm would have been better than nothing; but still a storm would only have moved these great, strong, self-sufficing, unsympathetic trees. It could not have given the secousse she wanted to Clare herself, who, for the first time in her life, had ceased to be self-sufficing. No, not self-sufficing—longing for anything, it did not matter what, to disturb the stagnation about her. How different it had been before Edgar came home! Even when she was absorbed by her first grief for her father, time did not hang heavy on her hands. Once before, it is true, a similar feeling had come over her—after Arthur Arden went away the first time. Clare clasped her hands together and blushed crimson, with sudden shame, when she identified the previous moment at which she had felt lonely and weary of everything as she was now: violent shame seized upon her—though there was nobody to see, even if any one could have seen into her mind and surprised the unspoken thought. And then she turned her back upon the weary window, and represented to herself that the misery of that former time had passed away. Time had gone on, and other thoughts had come in, and it had passed away. A little patience, and again it would pass away now. Everything does in this world.
Clare’s experience was not great, but yet even she knew something of that terrible tranquillising force of time. How wretched she had been about Edgar, again and again, during those years when he had been absent, and her father never mentioned his name. But these wretchednesses had all floated away, one after another. And when the Squire died, it had seemed to Clare that she never could get beyond that sense of desolation which filled the house and all the familiar scenes in which he had been the first figure. But she had got over it. She had not forgotten her father; her memory of him was so vivid that she could think she saw him, could think she heard him, so clear in her recollection were his voice and his face. And yet the world was no longer desolate because he was not there. It was a curious train of thought for a girl of her age. But Clare was very reasonable, and she was very much alone, with nobody in the world to whom she could legitimately go for consolation. She had no mother into whose ear she could pour her woes; she had been compelled to be a mother to herself. And thus, as if she had been her own mother, she represented to herself that this pain also would pass away in time. Let her but occupy herself, keep doing something, bear it as patiently, and think as little about it as possible, and in time it would come to an end. This is a hard, painful, inhuman way of consoling one’s self; but yet when one is alone, and has nobody else to breathe a word of comfort, perhaps it is as good a way as any. “It will not last,” she said to herself. “It is miserable now, and shameful, and I hate myself. To think that I should feel like that! But one has only to be patient and put up with it. It cannot last.” And she had just fed herself with this philosophy, and taken what nourishment she could out of it, when all her loneliness, and miserableness, and philosophisings were put to flight in a moment. Arthur Arden was ushered in solemnly by Wilkins, who had half a mind to remain himself, to make sure that the rules of perfect propriety were observed; and all at once the tedium and the unprofitableness departed out of Clare’s life.
But she would have given her life, as was perfectly natural, rather than let him see that his arrival was anything to her. “I am taking advantage of Edgar’s absence to do quantities of things,” she said, looking into his face, “clearing away my old pieces of work. No, perhaps I was never very fond of work; I have always had so many other things to do.—— Thanks; I heard from him yesterday; Edgar is quite well.”
“I hope he is enjoying himself in town,” said Arthur, subduing himself to her tone.
“He talks only of the Thornleighs,” said Clare, with that familiar pucker in her brow. Pretending to be anxious about Edgar was so much more easy than adopting that air of absolute calm for herself. “Of course I know I ought to be very glad that he has chosen such nice friends. There is nothing to object to in the Thornleighs. Still, to go to town only to see them, when he can see them as much as he pleases at home——”
“Lady Augusta, I should think, likes to have such a captive at her chariot-wheels,” said Arthur. “How much anxiety it must cost you! Poor dear Arden! What a pity he knows so little of the world.”
“Oh, my brother will do very well,” said Clare, with a sensitive movement of offence; and then it occurred to her that it was safest to carry the war into the other camp. “I should like to know how you get on at the Red House?” she said. “Miss Pimpernel is quite pretty, I think. Is she always buttoning her glove? I hear they play croquet a great deal. Are you fond of croquet, Mr. Arden? If you are, it must have been so dull for you, never having it while you were here.”