CHAPTER XLIV.
WHEN THE NIGHT’S DARKEST IT’S NEAREST THE DAWNING.
Not a word could Lucy say all the way home. She was flushed and agitated, her hand burning, which grasped Jock’s, her eyes dim with moisture. When she got home she made no reply to Mrs. Ford, who came out to meet her; but, dropping Jock’s hand, ran upstairs to the quiet of that still, pink sitting-room, where the “Heroes” still lay open on the rug, and her chair stood as she had thrust it back. The afternoon was fading into twilight, the lamps were lighted outside, throwing a strange one-sided sort of chilly illumination into the room, though mingled with the daylight. Lucy shut the door behind her, as if it had been the door of a hermitage. No one would come to disturb her there, unless it might be Mrs. Ford, to persuade her to go down to tea. How could Lucy go and sit at the homely table, and listen to all the potterings of the pair, over their bread and butter? She could not do it. Agitation had driven away all trace of appetite; she wanted nothing, she thought, but to be let alone. She sat down upon the sofa, and gazed out wistfully at the bit of blue sky that appeared between the white curtains. There was not so much as that bit of blue sky in all Lucy’s world. Not one true to her, not one who did not see something in her quite different from herself. Her other suitors had startled Lucy; but this last application for her love had driven her to bay. She did injustice to poor Bertie in the vehemence of her feelings. Though he had spoken in high-flown language, he was not in reality worse than the others, nor had he a worse meaning. They all of them had known that Lucy was the most desirable thing within their reach. They had recognized with the truest sincerity that she could make them happy, that no one could make them so happy; they had aspired to her with all the fervor of heartfelt sentiment; and Bertie had not been behind the others in this very earnest and unquestionable feeling. Why then should he have made her so angry—he, and not the others? She could not tell; but she came in, feeling a universal sickening of distrust, which took all the heart out of her. She sat down dismally upon her pink sofa. Nobody to trust to. What fate in the world could be so terrible? The cold gleaming of the lamps outside were a kind of symbol of all her life had to sustain it; faint reflections of the outside light of the world but no warmth of a household lamp or hearth within. She sat down forlorn, and began to cry. “Nobody, nobody!” said poor Lucy. She did her best to survey the situation calmly, dismal as it was. What was she to do? All her friends had forsaken her; but she had Jock left, and those duties which her father had trusted to her hands. She must go on with her trust whatever happened. She kept hold of a kind of reality in her life, by grasping at this resolution. Yes, she would do her duty; whoever failed she would hold on, she would do what her father had said. It was still something that was left in life.
It seemed to Lucy, all at once, as if a new light had come upon this duty. It was in love to her as well as in justice to others that her father had charged her to give it back. Oh, if it could all be given back—got rid of, her life delivered from it, and she herself left free like other girls! Lucy’s sky seemed to her all gloomy and charged with clouds of wealth, which had risen out of the earth, and only by dispersion to earth again would leave her free. She understood what her father meant—rain to relieve the clouds, tears to relieve the heat in her forehead, the gasp in her throat. But at present the clouds were hanging suspended over her, hiding all the blueness of the heavens, and her tears were few and hot, not enough to relieve either head or heart. Nobody faithful—not one! the women conspiring, even Katie, the men paying false court, making false professions, and every one maligning the other, accusing the others of that falsehood which they knew to be in themselves. “Not one,” she repeated to herself, “not one;” and then a cry was forced out of Lucy’s poor little wrung heart. “Not even Sir Tom!” she said aloud, with a sudden torrent of tears. Was this, though she did not know it, the worst of all? Certainly the name opened those flood-gates against which her passion of wounded feeling had been straining; her tears came in a violent thunder-shower. “Not even Sir Tom!” It was the hardest of all.
Something stirred in the dimness behind her. She had taken no notice of anything in the room when she came in, blind with those tears which she was not able to shed until she found that talisman. Some one seemed to make a step forward. Was she then not alone? or was it her imagination only which made her heart jump? No, for Lucy’s imagination never went so far as this. It could not have created the voice which said, with that familiar tone, “What has Sir Tom done?” with a touch of emotion and a little touch of laughter in it, just over her head as she sat and sobbed. The sudden cry with which Lucy replied told all her little secret, even to herself. She got up and turned round, transformed, her innocent lips apart, her eyes all wet and blinded, yet seeing— But what she saw was not very clear, a big shadow, a something that was very real, not false at all, a figure that somehow—why? Lucy could not tell—put the world right again, and stopped the giddiness, and made the ground solid under her feet. She put out her hands, yet more in meaning than in action, half groping, half appealing.
“Who is it? is it you?” she said.
“Lucy, what has Sir Tom done to make you cry?” he asked, taking her hands into his. Was it possible that she did not feel any longer this most poignant stab of all? She could not in the least recollect what it was. She thought of it no more. It sailed away from her firmament as a cloud sails on a steady breeze.
“Oh, I am so glad you have come home,” she cried.
Sir Tom was touched almost to tears. No one could see it, but he felt the moisture steal into the corners of his eyes. This was not a congenial place for him, this bourgeois room, nor had this little girl, in her simplicity, any right to greet him so. And Sir Thomas had by no means made up his mind, when he came to see his aunt’s protégée, notwithstanding her heiress-ship, that he was going to give up his freedom and independence, and subject himself to all manner of vulgar comments for her sake. But these words sealed his fate. He could no more have resisted their modest, simple appeal, so unconscious as it was, than he could have denied his own nature. He did what he had done when he left her, but with a very different meaning; he stooped over her and kissed her seriously on the forehead; he had done it half paternally, half in jest, when he went away.
“Yes, my dear, I have come home,” with a little quiver in his voice, Sir Thomas said; and after an interval, “I think my little Lucy must have missed me. What is the matter? who has been vexing you? and even Sir Tom; did I do something amiss too?”
“We will speak of that after,” Lucy said, with a relief which was beyond all comprehension. She could talk again, her tongue was loosened and her heart opened. She had not been able to confide in any one for so long, and now all at once some door seemed opened, some lock undone. “It does not seem anything now you are here. I am sure it was right, quite right,” she cried, with a sob and a laugh together. “I knew underneath that it must be right all the time.”