Clementina really seemed so much more communicative and even cheerful after those untimely confidences that Lucy, fearing that she had not been considerate enough to a lonely and possibly land-sick woman, tried more persistently than ever to draw her into some conversation. But Lucy was careful that the name of Charlie—Clementina’s unknown master—should never get into the talk. She dreaded associating it with Clementina’s sighs and shakings of the head. She had a nervous horror lest Clementina should make it a point about which visions and dreams and omens should crystallise. If this should happen, Lucy felt that she herself was not now strong enough to shake off the gloomy impressions.
Tom, too, was evidently struck by the general bent of Clementina’s remarks, generally made when she was setting out the supper-table or removing it. He used to ask her why “second sight” could not foresee marriages as well as deaths, comings home as well as goings away, future occasions for joy as clearly as future woes?
Lucy was rather afraid Clementina might be hurt by Tom’s questions, but though she sighed and shook her head over his words, she smiled indulgently on the speaker.
Clementina seemed so unwilling to go out to take exercise in the open air that Lucy determined to suspend her usual orders to her tradespeople, and to send her servant out to shop in the evening, when she herself could keep guard at home.
She told Clementina why she made this new arrangement, remarking that she could not understand how one who had lived all her life in pure bracing mountain air could persist in being so much confined in a London kitchen. Clementina answered, shrewdly enough,
“There’s little bracing air to be had here, ma’am, however much one may go out for it, and on our hills we didn’t need to go out for the air, it came to us at our doors. That is why our people can live in such low, dismal houses. They have but to go to the threshold, and God Almighty’s glory meets them spread over earth and sky.”
Since Clementina had been with Mrs. Challoner she had not seen much of Rachel. For Mr. Bray was seriously ill, and he and his wife and their faithful attendant had gone to Bath, and communication between the two women was limited to one or two brief notes. Clementina showed Rachel’s notes to Mrs. Challoner, because they had tidings of the mistress’s friends. Clementina once opened one of her prim little screeds to add a message from Lucy in the postscript. Clementina was very lugubrious over her old acquaintance’s master. Perhaps it was this which first warned Lucy to give her no encouragement to weave fateful spells round the absent Charlie. That “the master” would be at home about Christmas time was all Clementina knew from Lucy herself. Of course Rachel might have made confidences, but the Highland woman was too well-bred either to trade on these or to ask any questions. Probably she but thought the more. Lucy posted her own letters, but Clementina saw her writing them, saw them lying addressed on the hall-table, waiting for Lucy’s out-going. And as Clementina took in all the letters, she must have known that no trans-Atlantic letters came. Undoubtedly she puzzled herself over this mystery, for once she ventured to say to Lucy—
“It’s sore, ma’am, to see you writing so much and so often. Sending letters across the world seems so like writing to the dead.”
“Oh, no, Clementina,” Lucy answered, “for we get answers.” And Clementina smiled an inscrutable smile.