Her father looked at her closely, with a smile of disbelief and a fixed offensive stare, which she could not tolerate. He did not attempt to lay hands upon her, but stood only looking at her with eyes which were incapable of perceiving truth or honesty, and saw only fraud and falseness. “Where is the letter?” he said. Those sincere young eyes, which everybody else in the world would have trusted, conveyed no security to him.
Susan turned away from him, with a sudden outbreak of tears—tears of mortified and passionate impatience. He was her father, in spite of the small tenderness he showed her, and had a certain hold upon her habit of domestic affection. She felt the injustice keenly enough, and she felt still more keenly that his eyes were intolerable, and that she could not bear them.
“I have no letter save those my uncle has sent me,” she said, indignantly, when she had overcome her emotion; “they are all here in this box—I have no other. I can only repeat the same thing, papa, if you should ask me a hundred times—I have no letter but these.”
And Susan opened the pretty inlaid box, with its key hanging to it by a bit of ribbon, which Uncle Edward had brought her, and which she had appropriated, with a fanciful girlish affection, to hold his letters—opened it hastily and threw out the little store upon the table with trembling hands. Some trifling circumstance, perhaps the mere odour of the sandal-wood which lined the box, recalling some subtle association to him, produced a start and flush of angry colour on Mr. Scarsdale’s face. He thrust the little casket away with some muttered words which Susan could not hear, but, even in spite of that touch of nature, turned over with a cold suspicion the letters which it had contained. Nothing like what he sought was there, of course; but he was not convinced. No one else was in the house, or had been here—so far as his knowledge went—save Peggy; even Susan did not know of her brother’s hurried visit, and Peggy was beyond suspicion, even to Mr. Scarsdale;—his daughter, and she only, could be to blame.
“I know,” he said, coldly, when he had scattered the good Colonel’s letters over the table, throwing them scornfully from him, “that my desk has been opened and my papers stolen. You are clever in hiding, like all women; but such an artifice cannot deceive me, when my loss is so evident. Take this detestable thing away! the smell is suffocating,” he cried, with an interjection of rage, and once more pushing violently from him the pretty box with its pungent odour. “But stay, understand me first; it is late, and you are young; I will not turn you out upon the moor to-night, little as you deserve my consideration; but if this letter is not restored to me before to-morrow, nothing in the world will prevent me expelling you from this house—do you hear? I will have no thief under my roof. I perceive you are ready to cry, like all your kind. Crying is a very good weapon with some people, but I assure you it has no effect whatever on me.”
Susan could not have answered for her life. She stood still, gazing at him with her eyes dilated, a convulsive effort of pride keeping in her tears, but a sob bursting in spite of her, from her suffocating breast. There she still stood after he had left the room, speechless, labouring to contain herself, even after the necessity for that effort was over. But when she dropped at length into a chair, and yielded to the hysterical passion of tears and sobbing which overpowered her, beneath all her shame, mortification, and terror, a guilty gleam of joy which frightened her shot through poor Susan’s heart. She thought it guilty, poor child. She was dismayed to feel that sudden pang of hope and comfort breaking the sense of this calamity. To be expelled from her father’s house, cast out upon the moor and upon the world, with the stigma upon her of having robbed and deceived him! She repeated over to herself that accumulation of horrors, to extinguish this furtive and unpermissible glow of secret hope, and cried bitterly over her own wickedness when she found it inextinguishable; but even with that secret and unsanctioned solace, the thought was miserable enough to her youth and ignorance. To be turned away like a bad servant; to be called a thief; to be driven from her father’s house; Heaven preserve her! a young girl alone and penniless—what could she do?
CHAPTER XXV.
IN this stupefied condition of mind, stunned by the change which seemed about to happen, yet moved now and then by a strange intolerance and passionate inclination to resist and protest, Peggy found her young mistress when she came to spread the table for that hateful dinner, the thought of which made Susan’s heart ache. The poor girl still sat listlessly by the table on which her letters, the treasures of her affectionate disposition, were still carelessly scattered, and where the pretty box stood open and empty, as Mr. Scarsdale had thrust it away from him. Susan was by no means above a fit of crying, and had her disappointments and vexations like another, little as there seemed to wish or hope for within her limited firmament; but this listless attitude of despair was new to Peggy, who was somehow frightened to see it. What had happened? Had she expected a letter, and falling into a fit of passion not to receive any, had she thrown out recklessly on the table that cherished correspondence, the comfort of her life? But fits of passion were very unlike Susan. Peggy had come upstairs early, that she might have some private, confidential talk, and inform her of her brother’s hurried visit; but she paused in anxiety and compassion before entering upon that subject. “Hinny, what ails you?” asked Peggy, with the kindly, local term of caressing, laying her hand softly on Susan’s shoulder. The girl started, gazed in her face, and then suddenly recollecting this one, long, faithful friend, whom she must lose, hid her face upon Peggy’s shoulder, and burst again into passionate tears.
“What is it then, hinny?—aye trouble, and nought but trouble. Bless us all, has the master been upon ye again? And what did ye know, poor innocent?” cried Peggy, caressing the young head that leaned upon her; “has he found it out, for all the watch I made? Hauld up your head, and let me hear—it was none of your blame.”
“Found out what?” cried Susan, grasping her suddenly by the hand.