“Hout, no!” said Aunt Jean, disturbed a little, yet confident; “fha would tell the like of Patricia or Joan—fuils and bairns! and as for the like of my niece herself, she’s muckle taken up with her ain bits of troubles; she might hear of it at the time, but she would forget the day after; naebody minds but me.”
“And—Oswald?” cried Desirée, sharply, once again.
“Eh! ay—I wasna thinking upon him; he’s the heir,” said Aunt Jean, turning her eyes sharp and keen upon her young questioner. “I canna tell fhat for you ask me so earnest, bairn; you maunna think mair of Oswald Huntley than becomes baith him and you; ay, doubtless, you’re right, whatever learned ye—he kens.”
Desirée did not say another word, but she clasped her hands tightly together, sprang out of the room with the pace of a deer, and before Aunt Jean had roused herself from her amazement, had thrown her cloak over her shoulders, and rushed out into the gathering night.
CHAPTER L.
The sunset glory of this January evening still shone over the tops of the trees upon the high bank of Tyne, leaving a red illumination among the winter clouds; but low upon the path the evening was gathering darkly and chilly, settling down upon the ice-cold branches, which pricked the hasty passenger like thorns, in the black dryness of the frost. The Kelpie itself was scarcely recognizable in the torpid and tiny stream which trickled down its little ravine; only the sharp sound of its monotone in the tingling air made you aware of its vicinity; and frozen Tyne no longer added his voice to make the silence musical. The silence was dry, hard, and harsh, the sounds were shrill, the air cut like a knife. No creature that could find shelter was out of doors; yet poor little Desirée, vehement, willful, and passionate, with her cloak over her shoulders, and her pretty uncovered head, exposed to all the chill of the unkindly air, went rushing out, with her light foot and little fairy figure, straight as an arrow over Tyne, and came up the frozen path, into the wood and the night.
One side of her face was still scorched and crimsoned with the fervor of Aunt Jean’s fire, before which she had been bending; the other, in comparison, was already chilled and white. She ran along up the icy, chilly road, with the night-wind cutting her delicate little ears, and her rapid footsteps sliding upon the knots of roots in the path, straight up to that height where the Kelpie trickled, and the last red cloud melted into gray behind the trees. The dubious, failing twilight was wan among those branches, where never a bird stirred. There was not a sound of life anywhere, save in the metallic tinkle of that drowsing waterfall. Desirée rushed through the silence and the darkness, and threw herself down upon the hard path, on one of the hard knots, beneath a tree. She was not sorry, in her passionate abandon, to feel the air prick her cheek, to see the darkness closing over her, to know that the cold pierced to the bone, and that she was almost unprotected from its rigor. All this desolation was in keeping with the tumult which moved the willful heart of the little stranger. The prick of the wind neutralized somewhat the fiery prick in her heart.
Poor little Desirée! She had, indeed, enough to think of—from her morning’s flush of happiness and dawning love to plunge into a cold profound of treachery, deceit, and falsehood like that which gaped at her feet, ready to swallow her up. For the moment it was anger alone, passionate and vivid as her nature, which burned within her. She, frank, child-like, and unsuspicious, had been degraded by a pretended love, a false friendship; had been warned, “for her own sake,” by the treacherous host whom Desirée hated, in her passion, to say nothing of her descent or of her mother. For her own sake! and not a syllable of acknowledgment to confess how well the wily schemer knew who that mother was. Yet, alas, if that had but been all!—if there had been nothing to do but to confound Melmar, to renounce Joanna, to shake off the dust of her indignant feet against the house where they would have kept her in bondage!—if that had but been all! But Desirée clenched her little hands with a pang of angry and bitter resentment far more overpowering. To think that she should have been insulted with a false love! Bitter shame, quick, passionate anger, even the impulse of revenge, came like a flood over the breast of the girl, as she sat shivering with cold and passion at the foot of that tree, with the dark winter night closing over her. She could almost fancy she saw the curl of Oswald Huntley’s lip as he heard to-day, on this very spot, that she had a sister; she could almost suppose, if he stood there now, that she had both strength and will to thrust him through the rustling bushes down to the crackling, frozen Tyne, to sink like a stone beneath the ice, which was less treacherous than himself. Poor little desolate, solitary stranger! She sat in the darkness and the cold, with the tears freezing in her eyes, but passion burning in her heart; she cried aloud in the silence with an irrepressible cry of fury and anguish—the voice of a young savage, the uncontrolled, unrestrained, absolute violence of a child. She was half crazed with the sudden downfall, the sudden injury; she could think of nothing but the sin that had been done against her, the vengeance, sharp and sudden as her passion, which she would inflict if she could.
But as poor little Desirée crouched beneath the tree, not even the vehemence of her resentment could preserve her from the influences of Nature. Her little feet seemed frozen to the path; her hands were numb and powerless, and ice-cold as the frozen water beneath. The chill stole to her heart with a sickening faintness, then a gradual languor crept over her passion; by degrees she felt nothing but the cold, the sharp rustle of the branches, the chill gloom of the night, the harsh wind that blew in at her uncovered ears. Her hair fell down on her neck, and her fingers were too powerless to put it up. She had no heart to return to the house from which she fled in so violent an excess of insulted feeling—it almost seemed that she had no place in the world to go to, poor child, but this desolate winter woodland, which in its summer beauty she had associated with her mother. The night blinded her, and so did the growing sickness of extreme cold. Another moment, and poor little Desirée sank against the tree, passionless and fainting—the last thought in her heart a low outcry for her mother, who was hundreds of miles away and could not hear.
The cold was still growing sharper and keener as the last glimmer of daylight faded out of the skies. She might have slid down into the frozen Tyne, as she had imagined her enemy, or she might have perished in her favorite path, in the cold which was as sharp as an Arctic frost. But Providence does not desert those poor, suffering, wicked children who fly to death’s door at the impulse of passion as Desirée did. A laborer, hastening home by the footpath through the Melmar woods, wandered out of his way, by chance, and stumbled over the poor little figure lying in the path. When the man had got over his first alarm, he lifted her up and carried her like a child—she was not much more—to Melmar, where he went to the side door and brought her in among the servants to that great kitchen, which was the most cheerful apartment in the house. The maids were kind-hearted, and liked the poor little governess—they chafed her hands and bathed her feet, and wrapped her in blankets, and, at last, brought Desirée to her senses. When she came alive again, the poor, naughty child looked round her bewildered, and did not know where she was—the place was strange to her—and it looked so bright and homely that Desirée’s poor little heart was touched by a vague contrasting sense of misery.