The Mistress rose up in the fervor of her indignant disappointment; vexation and mortified feeling brought the water to her eyes. She felt aggrieved and wronged, not only in this setting aside of Huntley, but in the very fact that Mary of Melmar was about to return. This Mary, for whose unthankful sake her husband had neglected her honest love and faithful heart, had at last lured even her son, her youngest and best beloved, away from her, and was coming back triumphant to the inheritance which might have been Huntley’s. The Mistress’s heart rose in a tumult of pride, love, indignation, and bitterness. She said “my son,” and “my Huntley,” with a proud and tender emphasis, an involuntary, anxious impulse to make amends to him for the hope he had lost—yet with an equally natural feeling rejected indignantly all sympathy for him, and would not permit even his brothers to speak of disappointment or loss to Huntley in this new event. She went away across the room, breaking up the fireside circle by the hasty movement, to seek out in her basket the stocking which she was knitting—for the Mistress’s eyes began to fail her in candlelight with all her more delicate industries—and coming back to the table, began to knit with absorbed attention, counting the loops in the heel as if she had no care for the further particulars which Cosmo, encouraged by Patie, proceeded to tell. Yet she did hear them notwithstanding. But for the presence of Patie’s practical good sense, Cosmo and his mother might have had painful recollections of that night; but his brother’s steady look and sober attention kept Cosmo from indulging the irritation and wounded feeling which he might have felt otherwise. He went on with his story, gradually growing interested in it, and watching—as a dramatist might watch his first audience—the figure of the Mistress, who sat almost with her back to him, knitting assiduously, the light of the candle throwing a great shadow of her cap upon the wall, and her elbow moving slightly with the movement of her wires. Cosmo watched how the elbow moved irregularly at certain points of his tale, how it was still for an instant now and then, as the interest grew, and the boy-poet was pleased and forgave his mother. At last the stocking fell from the Mistress’s hand—she pushed back her chair, and turned round upon him with a half-scream.
“Desirée!” cried the Mistress, as she might have exclaimed at the crisis of a highly interesting novel, “it’s her that’s at Melmar—whisht!—dinna speak to me—I’m just as sure as that we’re a’ here—it’s her ain very bairn!”
After this, Cosmo’s tale ended with a great success; he had excited his mother—and the truth began to glide into her unwilling heart, that Mary of Melmar was, like herself, the mother of fatherless children, a widow, and poor. She heard all the rest without a word of displeasure; she became grave, and said nothing, when her sons discussed the matter; she nodded her head approvingly when Patie repeated rather more strongly than before his satisfaction that Cosmo had found the lost Mary, since she was to be found. The Mistress was thinking of something—but it was only after she had said good night to them that the youths discovered what it was.
“Bairns,” said the Mistress then, abruptly pausing upon the stair, with her candle in her hand, “that bit lassie at Melmar is in the dwelling of the enemy—and if it were not so, the mother canna make war on the house where her bairn has shelter. You’re her nearest kinsmen that I ken of, to be friends as well—she’ll have to come here.”
“Mother!” cried Cosmo, in delight and surprise, and compunction, “can you ask her here?”
“Ay, laddie—I can do mony things, mair than the like of you ken of,” said the Mistress; and, saying so, she went slowly up stairs, with the light in her hand, and her shadow climbing the wall after her, leaving no unkindness in the echo of her motherly good night.
CHAPTER LX.
During all these months Desirée had led a strange life at Melmar. She had never told any one of the revelation, painful and undesired, the miserable enlightenment which Aunt Jean’s story had brought. What Cosmo told Madame Roche months after, Madame Roche’s little daughter knew on that winter night by the Kelpie, when the tale of Aunt Jean, and all its confirming circumstances, stung her poor little heart with its first consciousness of falsehood and social treachery. After that she was ill, and they were kind to her at Melmar, and when she recovered Desirée still did not tell her mother. People did not write so many letters then as they do now, in these corresponding days—Madame Roche certainly did not hear oftener than once a fortnight, sometimes not more than once a month from her daughter, for Melmar was nearly as far from St. Ouen in those days as India is now. Many a painful thought it cost poor Desirée as she stole out by herself, avoiding every one, to the side of Tyne. Oswald Huntley, after her recovery, had resumed his manner of devotion toward her—but Desirée’s eyes were no longer touched with the fairy glamour of her first dream. She had not been “in love,” though the poor child imagined she had—she had only been amused by that dream of romantic fancy to which seventeen is subject, and touched into gratitude and pleasure by the supposed love she had won—yet, even while she scorned his false pretense of tenderness, that very disdain made Desirée shrink from the thought of injuring Oswald. She was sadly troubled between the two sentiments, this poor little girl, who was French, and Madame Roche’s child, and who consequently was much tempted by the dangerous intoxications of feeling. What was barely, simply, straightforwardly right might have satisfied Joanna; but Desirée could not help thinking of self-sacrifice and suffering for others, and all the girlish heroics common to her age. She could not live in their house and betray the family who had sheltered and were kind to her. She seemed to be tempted to avenge herself on Oswald by righting her mother at his expense; so for feeling’s sake Desirée kept herself very unhappy, saying nothing to her mother of the discovery she had made, unable to resume her old cordiality with the Huntleys, ill at ease in her own mind, and sadly solitary and alone. If it had been any mere piece of information—or had the injury to be done been her own, Desirée would have seen what was right, plainly enough—but as it was, she only thought of the cruel difference to the family of Melmar, which a word of hers might make, and of the selfish advantage to herself; and feeling conscious of the sacrifice she made for them—a sacrifice which nobody knew or appreciated, and which her conscience told her was even wrong—Desirée’s mind grew embittered against them and all the world; and her poor little heart, uneasy, cross, and restless, consumed itself. As the struggle continued it made her ill and pale, as well as disturbed in mind; nobody could tell what ailed her—and even Aunt Jean, with her keen black eyes, could not read Desirée. She had “something on her mind.”
When one day she was startled by the arrival of a visitor, who asked to see her, and was put into a little waiting-room—a cold little room, without a fire, into which the March sunshine came chill, with no power of warmth in it—to wait for the little governess. Desirée was much amazed when she entered here to see the ruddy and comely face of the Mistress looking down upon her, out of that black bonnet and widow’s cap. It was a face full of faults, like its owner, but it was warm, bright, kind, full of an unsubduable spirit and intelligence, which had long ago attracted the eye of the vivacious little Frenchwoman, who, however, did not know Mrs. Livingstone, except by sight. They looked at each other in silence for the first moment—one amazed, and the other thoughtful—at last the Mistress spoke.
“Maybe I may not name you right,” she said; “I have nae knowledge of your tongue, and no’ much of strangers, whatever place they come from; but my son Cosmo has seen your mother, in foreign parts, and that is the reason that brings me here.”