[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
AN INTERVIEW AND ITS SEQUEL.
Evening was beginning to close in--the evening of the day following that of the interview between Barney Dale and Hermia--when the latter, accompanied by Aunt Charlotte and Clement, alighted from a fly at the gates by the ruined lodge, and walked through the park to Broome, where they were admitted by Barney at the side entrance. It had been deemed best by the old man that Hermia should be introduced to Miss Pengarvon when he took in the lighted candles, which of itself made a little interruption, sufficing to break the current of his mistress's sombre meditations and bringing her back, if only for a few minutes, to a sense of time and place.
Since the fit, or seizure, of which Barney had made mention to Clement, although to all seeming she was now as well bodily as she had previously been, her nervous system had become even more acutely irritable than before her attack. She seemed to live almost entirely in the past, and to talk more and more with the shadows that kept her company in the Green Parlor--Sir Jasper, Lady Pengarvon, Miss Letitia, and Isabel, with others whom Barney was unable to identify with anyone whom he had known.
Barney trembled inwardly for the result of the experiment he was about to venture upon, but having once given his promise, he was determined to abide by it, come what might.
So, when the proper moment had come, Barney, carrying the stately silver candlesticks, opened the door of the Green Parlor and went in, followed by Hermia, who was bareheaded and dressed with quaker-like simplicity, in a gown of some softly-clinging grey material. Even the two candles scarcely sufficed to dissipate the shadows which seemed to have their natural gathering-place in the gloomy old room; but when Miss Pengarvon proceeded to extinguish one of them, which she did at once, a number of the shadows came trooping back on the instant, as though they had known beforehand what she would do, and were only waiting for it. Hermia could readily have fancied that the intervening years were nothing but a dream, and that she was standing there again, a three-year-old mite, with her hands behind her, only she had then been confronted by two stern-faced ladies, whereas now there was only one. But there, close to the table, in the place where it had stood when she was alive, was the empty chair of the dead and gone Miss Pengarvon--she who had crept into Hermy's room at midnight and had kissed her in her sleep.
Despite the changes which eighteen years had brought about, Hermia knew Miss Pengarvon at once. The chilly, unsympathetic, blue-grey eyes, and the heavy brows were there as of old, but the once dark locks were now nearly snow white, and although her face had always been long and thin, the bones now stood out with startling prominence, with the shrunken, yellow-ivory skin stretched tightly over them. But in the steel-cold eyes there now shone something which caused Hermia's heart to beat faster even than it had beat on entering the room. It was the gleam of incipient insanity which she saw there, although she knew it not.
Notwithstanding the warmth of the weather, a few embers were burning in the grate, and it was not till Barney moved aside and proceeded to rake them together that Miss Pengarvon's eyes fell on Hermia. Not even by as much as the flicker of an eyelid did she evince the slightest surprise at sight of the girl.
"So you have come at last," she said, speaking in the hard, measured tones of an icy displeasure. "How many times have I had to tell you of late that I will not have you wandering in the park at this late hour of the afternoon? You see, Letitia, how utterly unbiddable the girl is." Here she was evidently addressing the unseen occupant of the vacant chair. "You choose to plead for her, and to urge this and that in her favor, although I have told you over and over again that Isabel's is one of those disobedient and ungrateful dispositions on which kindness is absolutely thrown away." Then, turning to Hermia, she added, frowningly, "I have nothing more to say to you. Go to your room, and stay there till I give you permission to leave it."
Who was the Isabel for whom Miss Pengarvon evidently mistook her? Hermia could not help asking herself; could it be her mother?