“It has blighted his life, Alice,” said I.
“Your papa is my master, Miss Hester,” said Alice, with some pride, “and you and I can only speak of him as his servant and his daughter should—but I would have you think upon your mamma sometimes—your dear, sweet, innocent young mother; she never did harm to any living creature; she was always a delight to look upon till—”
“Till what, Alice?”
“My dear, till her heart broke.”
Alice moved away without saying another word; this was a perplexing new light upon my meditations, but I was very reluctant to receive it. If it should happen that my mother had been misconceived and misinterpreted—that she, after all, was the wronged person, and that my father was to blame, it might have made a great difference in the influences which just then were moulding my mind and life; but I rejected this unwelcome conclusion—I would not permit myself to be convinced of it. I clung over again to my father, and made my stand by him, and so went on, unconsciously determining and ripening for my fate.
“Don’t take it ill of me, Miss Hester,” said Alice, coming back, and I thought her voice trembled slightly, “but never distrust one that cares for you, dear—don’t do it—you can’t tell what ill comes of it in a house; and when any one speaks to you of a blighted life, be you sure it’s his own doing more or less, and not another’s. Take heed to your way, darling, there’s not a speck on your life yet; but the cloud rises like a man’s hand, Miss Hester. Pray that it may never come to you.”
“Alice, how can it come to me?” cried I, trying to smile at her earnestness, yet I was angry for her implied blame of my father, and at the moment Edgar Southcote’s rejected overtures flashed upon my mind. Yes! if by any chance these had been accepted, the curse of my father’s life would have come to me. I was silent, oppressed by a vague discomfort; it was foolish, but I could not overcome it, and Alice did not answer my question, but returned to her work once more.
When Mary came back with the novel I wanted, I confess that I ran up stairs with it, and that there ensued an immediate dispersion of my thoughts—nor did I recal them much till the evening when I had galloped through the three volumes, and was left sitting by the fire in the sudden reaction of excitement, to cogitate upon the disagreeable necessity common to stories, of coming to an end. My father, who, from habit and punctilio, never returned to the library in the evening, sat at the table as usual with his book, and after a little pause of impatience at the conclusion of my tale, I resumed the thread of my previous meditations. I had been a little startled and shaken to-day in my thoughts. To say that I was inclined to scoff at the youthful notion of a life determined once and for ever by the misfortune which Alice mentioned as being “crossed in love,” would be to say what was not true—for my ideal belief in this extraordinary and all-powerful unknown influence was as devout as that of any girl or boy of my years, and I had an equal admiration for that melancholy constant faithful lover, doomed to be unrequited, and never to overcome his disappointment, of whose existence many a romance had made me aware. But I was misanthropical to-night from the abrupt ending of my novel—and there was still the greater part of the evening left vacant with no new story to begin—so I speculated with a more sceptical mind than usual upon my great problem. Was it my mother, so many years ago—twenty years or more, a fabulous and unappreciable period, before I was born—whose rejection of him had fixed Mr. Osborne in his rooms at Corpus, and made the records of his life little better than a library catalogue? Was it my mother, and his disappointment in her, which had cast my father into his existence of aimless and sombre dignity? Was all this the single work of a young girl who died nearly seventeen years ago, and who was not much more than twenty when she died?
I was much perplexed to answer this question; though it flattered my pride as a woman shortly to enter upon the field myself, and perhaps make decisions of equally momentous result to somebody, it sadly bewildered my perceptions of right and wrong. I felt humbled rather than exalted in my own self-opinion by the idea, that anything I said or did could produce such consequences; and I could not understand about Mr. Osborne. He, with his shrewd merry eyes, his regard for all his own comforts and luxuries, his want of sentiment and melancholy—that he should be the disappointed lover, almost exceeded my powers of belief. I was glad to think that he must have “got over it,” but I was greatly puzzled to make the conclusion whether it could be this that decided the manner of his life.
My father was extremely absorbed in his book to-night—more than usually so I thought; and I am afraid that circumstance made me still more disposed to question him, unoccupied and idle as I was. I had disturbed him two or three times already by stirring the fire, and moving my seat, and had perceived his quick upward glance of impatience, but I was not deterred from beginning my investigations.