“Nor to me either,” said Evelyn, “as he knows: but proofs are good things. If you will not let me in,” she added, with a smile, which was very near the other manifestation of feeling—tears, “I must sit down on the steps, and he can hear my story here.”
“You can come in,” said Mrs. Brown, opening the door wide. “I will have nae play-acting on my doorsteps. Archie, ye can take this leddy into the parlour. It’s easy for the like of such a woman to get over a laddie like you. Ye ken nothing of their wiles; how should ye?” She followed as she spoke into the parlour, where she pulled forward an easy-chair violently, talking all the time. “They just get ye back under their thumb when it pleases them, until the time comes when your downfa’s doomed. Here’s a footstool till ye. It’ll no doubt be a great satisfaction to feel that Jane Brown’s house is but a poor place, no a chair good enough for the like of you to sit down——”
“Indeed, it is very comfortable, and a great ease to sit down and be quiet for a moment. Thank you kindly,” said Evelyn. “I have been travelling, I may say, for four days. On Tuesday night I went up to town—to London, I mean—and there I have been to and fro all the time, and came up again here during the night. So I have an excuse for being very tired.”
“Lord bless us,” said Mrs. Brown, with wide open eyes, “and what was the need of that? I’m thinking with Jim Rowland’s money in your pouch ye have little need to weary yourself in ainy way.”
Going down to the Kyles of Bute for a day’s holiday was the most exhausting experience Mrs. Brown had ever had, and she had not got the better of that fatigue for several days. She was a little overawed by this description, as indeed Evelyn, with pardonable guile, had intended her to be.
She darted out of the room as she spoke, perhaps that she might not yield more to the influence of this soft-spoken woman (“but they can speak soft enough, and sweet enough, when it’s for their ain ends,” she said to herself) leaving Evelyn alone with Archie. She held out her hand to him with a smile. “I am so tired,” she said, “that I am scarcely capable of telling you my story. I feel the wheels going in my head, and a sort of perpetual movement. Now, some people travel by night constantly, and are never the worse.”
She spoke thus, partly because she was indeed very tired, and partly to accustom Archie to the shock of seeing her, speaking with her, being thus brought back to all the stormy emotions of that last eventful night. She half understood him and the reluctance with which, now that his aunt’s violent opposition was taken away, he touched her hand, and accepted her confidence. Archie was not amiable though he might be weak. At the sight of her seated there, and no longer held at bay, all the hard things that had been said, and which he himself had united in saying, against her and her power over his father, surged up into his mind. For anything he knew she might be the malign influence that Jane Brown believed her to be. She might be, for some occult reason of her own, trying to draw him again within her power, to represent herself as his benefactress, only that she might more fully and completely ruin him the next time. This had been suggested to him so often that he almost believed it: and it came back with all that force of hostility which replaces remorse, in the reaction from a momentary softness, which is in itself a reaction too. He had been ready to pluck his aunt away—to bid her stand aside for shame, while she held this woman at bay: but now that the woman was there enthroned, without opposition, holding out her hand to him, with that grace of profoundest, unapproachable superiority, all his rebellious feelings started forth again. He felt no curiosity to know what she had been doing, or what was the result of which she seemed so proud. How could it affect him? He represented to himself that even to speak to him of being cleared was an insult, and her brag of her fatigue and exertions revolted him. What did it matter to him if she was tired or not? What did he care if the wheels were going in her head? He touched her hand because it would be uncivil, and show his bad breeding, if he refused it—and then he turned his back and stood looking out of the window. It was the same attitude as Eddy had assumed, though for a different reason, and Evelyn, in her exhaustion, smiled over the resemblance. She said to herself that boys of that age were very much alike, though so different, and that after all the most accomplished young man of the world had only the same ways of showing emotion as were patent to the simplest of his kind. She said after a moment: “You don’t seem to have much curiosity as to what I have been doing, Archie?”
“No,” he said curtly; “why should I? You were so polite as to say it had something to do with me: but I don’t see what you could have to do with me?”
“Come,” she said, “you must not be cross, Archie. Your aunt is, but I excuse her—for she does not know, and perhaps may even think I don’t know—that there is no virtue in being uncivil.”
“She is not uncivil,” he said, rudely. “She is the kindest woman in the world.”