‘Three weeks,’ said Mary. Not another word was said; but a certain constraint and embarrassment,—at least so she thought,—had come over him. When she lit her candle this time he made no attempt to detain her. She thought even that he gave a sigh of relief as he opened the door for her, and said good-night; and it was hard for Mary to think with any charity of the woman who had thus waylaid him,—waylaid his very imagination,—on the night even of his return. Possibly she was quite wrong in her estimate of Ben’s feelings. When she was gone he threw himself heavily into a chair, and sat for an hour or more, doing nothing, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. But no doubt he had enough to think about without that. It would have been strange had the coming home,—the approach of certainty after his long suspense,—the familiar life that seemed to have taken him up again after casting him out of its bosom,—produced no excitement in his mind. And then there was that curious sense of unreality which comes upon a man when, after an active life of his own, he returns to his father’s house, and finds everything, down to the minutest particular, just as it used to be. Is not this life such stuff as dreams are made of? To Ben, who was not a man of thought, this sentiment was bewildering; and the quiet of the house weighed upon him with an irritating heaviness. Talk of noise! There is no such babel as that of silence when it surges round you, when no living thing stirs, and the mysterious air rustles its wings in your ears, and the earth vibrates under your feet. The flutter of moths and invisible insects attracted by the light, the rustle of the leaves outside, the curtains waving in the night air, the mysterious thrills which ran through the furniture, the wavering of the flame of the lamp,—all affected Ben when he was left alone. His life had been so busy and full of action,—and now he had left that existence which was his own, and come back into the midst of those shadows to await the last sentence of a dead man’s voice, and have his whole destiny, perhaps, thrown once more into mistiness and darkness. Had there been any need for that boat softly rocking on the curve of the silvered water,—for that white solitary figure in the moonlight,—to complicate matters further? But whether that last incident did count for anything in the multiplicity of his thoughts, or whether it affected him as Mary supposed,—and as Millicent meant it to affect him,—who can tell? He sat a long time thinking, but he uttered none of his thoughts in the shape of soliloquy, which is unfortunate for this narrative; and I am obliged to wait, as most people are compelled to do, for the slow elucidation of events, to show the turn taken by Ben Renton’s thoughts.
Mary’s mind went more rapidly to a conclusion, as may be supposed. She could no more tell than I can what Ben was really turning over in his thoughts; but one thing was clear to her, that he had not heard of the neighbourhood of Millicent with indifference. It might be indignation, it might be disgust, it might be concealed and suppressed delight; but, at all events, the information had moved him. And at the same time, he had been very nice to herself,—very friendly, almost more than friendly—affectionate; not forgetting to help her even when she had just thrown that bombshell into the quiet. To be sure, he had hurried her up the hill, unconscious of the rapidity of his pace; but that was little in comparison with his kindness in remembering her at all when he had just heard such news. So Mary said to herself, thinking, like a romantic young woman, that Ben must have straightway forgotten everything but Millicent. Well! She was like a sister to him: he was ready to trust her, ready to rely upon her, ready even to admire and praise her in that frank, affectionate way as a brother might. Why should there be any heaviness or sense of disappointment in her heart? Mary said to herself that it was only because of its being Millicent, who was not worthy of him. If it had been almost anybody else,—if it had been half-a-dozen girls she could name to herself, who were good girls, and would have made him happy—but Millicent was no mate for Ben! That was the only reason of the blank, sense of pain and vacancy in her heart. For herself, she was more than content.
And thus the old house closed its protecting doors upon the first instalment of the restored family; and with that received agitation, disquiet, unrest, into the bosom of the stillness. Renton had been lying high and dry, like a stranded vessel, for all those years, and peace had dwelt in it; but now that the tide was creeping up, and life stealing back, the natural accompaniment returned. Sighs of impatience, disappointment, pain,—eager desires for the future, which came so slowly, counting the minutes,—a sense, overmastering everything, of the hardness and strangeness of life. Nobody had thought of life as hard, as troublous, or full of fatal mistakes, during all those years when Mrs. Renton had driven about the lanes, and taken care of her health. The blessed bonds of routine had kept things going, and nobody was either glad or miserable. But as soon as the bigger life came back with chances of happiness in it, then the balancing chances of pain also returned. As soon as it becomes possible that you may be blessed, it also becomes possible that you may fall into the lowest depths of anguish. This was the strange paradox which Mary Westbury contemplated as she heard Ben Renton’s unaccustomed step going to his room after midnight, through the profound stillness of the sleeping house.
CHAPTER IX.
THE NEXT MORNING.
Rising full of anxious thoughts of the excitement which must have taken possession of Ben from the revelations of the night, Mary was much taken aback to meet her cousin, in, to all appearance, an extremely cheerful state of mind, next morning. He had been up early, and had taken a long walk, and renewed,—he told her,—his acquaintance with the country. ‘If one had it in one’s own hands one could do a great deal more with it than has been done yet,’ he said, looking more like the portraits of the old Rentons than Mary liked to see.
‘I am sure I hope nobody will ever try to improve it as long as I am here,’ she said, with a little heat,—for Renton as a parish, and Berks as a county, were to Mary the perfection of the earth.
‘You don’t like stagnant ponds, I hope,’ said Ben, laughing at her vehemence,—‘nor cottages falling to pieces,—nor fields that are flooded with every heavy rain.’
‘But I like the broad turf on the roadsides, and the old hedges, and the old trees,’ said Mary, ‘and everything one has been used to all one’s life. Ah, Ben, whatever you do, don’t spoil Renton! I should break my heart——’
‘Probably I shall never have it in my power to spoil Renton,’ he said, with a short sigh of impatience. ‘I wish I had not come home until the very day fixed for this reading of the will. It is hard work hanging about here and kicking one’s heels and waiting. My father was very hard upon us, Mary. It was too much to ask from any set of men.’
‘I don’t think it has done you much harm,’ said Mary, whose natural impulse was to defend the ancient authorities, however much she might sympathise with the sufferers in her heart.