“But,” said Grace, “there is one great mistake you make. Our name, it is not Crosthwaite—oh, nothing like it; we never heard that name before. Papa was not a man to go by a false name. Oh, no, no; he was true in everything. There must still be some mistake.”
Miss Anna, who had turned her chair away, turned round again at this. “I told you,” she said; “this young fellow wants to prove you to be the daughters of an impostor or a madman. Of course, your father was not a man to go by a false name. Nobody would do that who was, as you say, a respectable person, a man thought well of in his own place. You know better than to think so. Of course: that is exactly what I said.”
But this support sent Grace instantly into opposition. She paused to consider, when she found herself suddenly embarrassed by this unexpected backing up. Miss Anna’s eyes fixed upon her seemed to have a baneful influence, and oppressed her soul.
“Does it make any difference to you,” she said, with the trenchant simplicity of ignorance, “what was my father’s name?”
The question was so entirely unexpected that each of the three showed its effect in a different, yet characteristic way. Miss Anna, listening with the complacency and satisfaction with which Grace’s denial of the name had filled her, received this stray shot full in her breast, and without any preparation. She wavered, drew back, contracted her features involuntarily in the effort to preserve her perfect calm. Mrs Underwood gasped as if some one had seized her by the throat. As for Geoffrey, he was the only one who replied.
“If,” he said, “you are Leonard Crosthwaite’s daughters, as I believe, it will make a great deal of difference to us all.”
“The question was addressed to me,” said Miss Anna, with a slight trembling that ran over all her person; “and it is for me to answer it. Young lady, whoever you are, if you are Leonard Crosthwaite’s daughter, which I don’t believe for a moment—I have no doubt your father was a much more respectable man: but if you are, and can prove it, you will be able to give rise to a great lawsuit, which will be fought out on both sides for years; which will cost you every penny you have, if you have anything, and ruin everybody belonging to you: besides bringing out a great many things about the family you claim to belong to, which we would all much rather keep to ourselves; and in all likelihood it would be a failure at the end. That is the true state of the case, whatever that boy may tell you—or anyone else,” she added after a moment, with a glance at her sister, “or any one else. This world is full of fools.”
“Oh, Grace, come—come away!” cried Milly in her sister’s ear.
But Grace was less easily moved. She was bewildered, and confused, and alarmed. It seemed to her that the rights of her family were in her hand, and her mind leaped to great things—far greater than this simple house and its riches. Perhaps Lenny—yes, certainly, she remembered now, though it had not occurred to her before, her father had Leonard in his name, and her boy-brother was also Leonard—might be the heir of some great property, and only she to defend his rights. Grace stood and looked at them all with a swelling of her breast, yet a dazzled dimness in her eyes, as if she were about to faint. She never had done such a thing in her life; but then she never had been in such an extraordinary strait, and with nobody to advise her. No wonder the light which she wanted so much within to clear up the way before her, should seem to fail without.
“I can’t see my way,” she said faintly. “I cannot tell what to do. Yes, Milly, we will go away; but for all that, it is not finished,” she said, turning to Miss Anna with a gleam of dim defiance in her eyes.