For some minutes after he had made the announcement of his daughter’s flight Mr. Biron gave himself up openly and without restraint to the expression of a sorrow which, while it might be selfish, was certainly profound.
“My daughter! My daughter!” he sobbed. “My little Claire! My little, bright-faced darling! Oh, I can’t believe it! It must be a dream, a nightmare! Do you think, Elshaw,” and he suddenly drew himself up, with a quick change to bright hope, in the midst of his distress, “that she can have gone up to the Park to stay at her uncle’s for the night?”
But Bram shook his head.
“I don’t think it’s likely,” he said in a hollow voice. “They were none so kind to her that she should do that.” A pause. “When did you miss her?”
“This morning when I got back,” replied Theodore, who looked blue with cold and misery. “I went out with the hounds yesterday as you know. And we got such a long way out that I couldn’t get back, and I put up at an inn for the night. Don’t you think,” and again his face brightened with one of those volatile changes from misery to hope which made him seem so womanish, “that she may have been afraid to spend a night in the house by herself, and that she may have gone down to Joan’s place to sleep? I’ll go there and see. Will you come? Yes, yes, you’d better come. I don’t care for Joan; she’s a rough, unfeeling sort of person. I should like you to come with me.”
“I’ll come—in a minute,” said Bram shortly.
He knew very well that there was nothing in Mr. Biron’s idea. He spoke as if this were the first time that Claire had been left to spend the night alone in the farmhouse; but, as a matter of fact, Bram knew very well that it had been Theodore’s frequent custom to spend the night away from home, and that his daughter was too much used to his vagaries to trouble herself seriously about his absence.
He went upstairs, finished dressing, came out of the house, and rejoined Mr. Biron; and that gentleman noticed no change in him, thought, indeed, that he was taking the matter with heartless coolness. Certainly, if behavior which contrasted strongly with that of the injured father gave proof of heartlessness, then Bram was a very stone.
All the way down the hill Mr. Biron lamented and moaned, sobbed, and even snivelled, loudly cursed the wretches at Holme Park who had made an outcast of his daughter, and, above all, Chris himself, who had stolen and ruined his daughter.
But Bram cut him short.
“Hush, Mr. Biron,” said he sternly. “Don’t say words like that till you are sure. For her sake hold your tongue. It’s not for you to cast the first stone at her, or even at him.”
Even in his most sincere grief Mr. Biron resented being taken to task like this; and by Bram, of all people, whom he secretly disliked, as well as feared, although the young man’s strong character attracted him instinctively when he was in want of help. He drew himself up with all his old airy arrogance.
“Do you think I would doubt her for a single moment if I were not cruelly sure?” cried he indignantly. “My own child, my own darling little Claire! But I understand it all now. I see how thoroughly I was deceived in Chris. But he shall smart for it! I’ll thrash him within an inch of his life! I won’t leave a whole bone in his body! I’ll strangle him! I’ll tear him limb from limb!”
And Mr. Biron made a gesture more violent with every threat, until at last it seemed as if his frantic gesticulations must dislocate the bones in his own slim and fragile little body.
As for Bram, he seemed to be past the stage of acute feeling of any sort. He was benumbed with the great blow that had fallen upon him; overwhelmed, in spite of the foreshadowings which had of late broken his peace. With the fall of his ideal there seemed to have crumbled away all that was best in his life, leaving only a cold automaton to do his daily work of head and hand. He was astonished himself, if the pale feeling could be called astonishment, to find that he could laugh at the antics of his companion; not openly, of course, but with secret and bitter gibes at the careless, selfish father, and the frantic gestures by which he sought to impress his companion.
When Theodore’s energies were exhausted they walked on in silence. And then Theodore felt hurt at Bram’s blunt, stolid apathy.
“I thought I should find you more sympathetic, Elshaw,” he said in an offended tone. “You always pretended to think so much of my daughter!”
“It wasn’t pretence,” said Bram shortly. “But I’m thinking, Mr. Biron, though I don’t like to say it now, that she must have been very unhappy before she went away like that.”
Quite suddenly his voice broke. Mr. Biron, surprised in the midst of his theatrical display of emotion into a momentary pang of real compunction and of real remorse, was for a few moments entirely silent. Then he said in a quiet voice, more dignified and more touching than any of his loud outbursts—
“It’s true, I’ve not been a good father to her. But she was such a good girl—I never guessed it would come to this.”
Bram said nothing. He felt as hard as nails. Theodore was really suffering now; but it served him right. What had the poor little creature’s life been but a long and terrible struggle between temptation on the one side, worry and difficulty on the other? She had held out long and bravely. She had struggled with a bright face, bearing her father’s burdens for him, and her own as well. What wonder that human nature had been too weak to hold out forever?
Bram’s heart was like a great open sore. He dared not look within himself, he dared not think, he dared not even feel. He tried to stupefy himself to the work of the moment, to stifle all sense but that of sight, and to fix his eyes upon Joan’s cottage, which they were now approaching, as if upon the mere reaching of it all his hopes depended.
But if Theodore had found Bram unsympathetic, what must he have thought of Joan? She heard his inquiries with coldness, and after saying that Claire had not been with her since she left the farmhouse on the previous evening, she asked shortly whether she had gone away.
“I—I am afraid so. Oh, my child, my poor child!” cried Theodore.
Joan grew very red, and clapping her hands on her hips, nodded with compressed lips.
“You’ve got no one but yourself to thank for this, Mr. Biron,” she said. “T’ poor young lady’s had a cruel time these many months through yer wicked ways! God help her, poor little lady!”
And the good woman turned sharply away from him, and slamming the door in his face, disappeared, sobbing bitterly.
Theodore was very white; he trembled from head to foot, and was even for a little while too angry and too much perturbed to speak.
At last, when Bram had put a hand within his arm to lead him away, he stammered out—
“You heard that, Elshaw! You heard the woman! That’s what these —— North country —— are like; they haven’t a scrap of feeling, even for the sacred grief of a father! But I don’t care a hang for the whole ---- lot of them! I’ll go up to the Park, and I’ll tell Mr Cornthwaite, the purse-proud old humbug, who thinks money can buy anything—I’ll tell him what I think of him and his scoundrel of a son! And then I’ll go up to town, and I’ll find him out, I’ll hunt out Christian himself, and I’ll avenge my child.”
Bram said nothing.
“And I’ll make him provide for her. I’ll bring out an action against him, and make him shell out, him and his skinflint of a father. Chris is nothing but a chip off the old block, and I’ll make them suffer together, in the only way they can suffer—through the money-bags.”
Bram was disgusted, sickened. He scented through this new turn of Mr. Biron’s thoughts that feeling for the main chance which was such a prominent feature of that gentleman’s character. And quite unexpectedly he stopped short, and said bluntly—
“That may comfort you, Mr. Biron, but it will never do aught for her! If—if,” he had to clear his throat to make himself heard at all, “if she—comes back, she’ll never touch their money! Poor, poor child!”
“You think she’ll come back?” asked Theodore almost wistfully.
But Bram could not answer. He did not know what to think, what to wish. He shrugged his shoulders without speaking, and with a gesture of abrupt farewell turned from his companion, who had now nearly reached his own door, and walked rapidly back in the direction of his lodging.
He could not bear to come near the farm, the place which had been hallowed in his eyes by thoughts of her who had been his idol.
Theodore called out to him.
“You’ll give me a look in to-night, won’t you, when you come back from the office? Think how lonely I shall be.”
Bram, without turning round, made a gesture of assent. He felt with surprise to himself that he was half-drawn to this contemptible creature by the fact that, underneath all his theatrical demonstrations of regret and grief, there was some very strong and genuine feeling. It was chiefly a selfish feeling, as Bram knew; indeed, a resentful feeling, that Claire had treated him shabbily and ungratefully in leaving him to shift for himself without any warning, after so many years of patient slavery, of tender care for him.
But still Bram felt that he had at last some emotion in common with this man, whom he had so far only despised. Theodore even felt the disgrace, the moral shame of this awful disaster to his daughter more keenly than any one would have given him credit for.
As for Bram himself, he went home, he ate his breakfast, he started for the town almost in his usual manner. No one who passed him detected any sign in his look or in his manner of the blow which had fallen upon him. But, for all that, he was suffering so keenly, so bitterly, that the very intensity of his pain had a numbing effect, reducing him to the level of a brute which can see, and hear, and taste, and smell, but in which all sense of anything higher is dead and cold.
It was not until he had nearly passed the garden of the farm, keeping his eyes carefully turned in the opposite direction, that a bend in the road caught his eye, where not many evenings before he had seen Claire standing with a letter in her hand, waiting for some one to pass who would take it to the post for her.
And his face twitched; from between his closed teeth there came a sort of strangled sob, the sound which in Theodore had roused his contempt. He remembered the smile which had come into her eyes when he came by, the word of thanks with which she had slipped the letter into his hand, and run indoors. He remembered that a scent of lavender had come to him as she passed, that he had felt a thrill at the sound, the sight of her flying skirts as she fled into the house.
Oh! it was not possible that she could have done this thing, she who was so proud, so pure, so tender to her friends!
And Bram stopped in the middle of the road, with an upward bound of the heart, and told himself that the thing was a lie.
What a base wretch he was to have harbored such a thought of her! She was gone; but what proof had they but their own mean and base suspicions that she had not gone alone?
And Bram by a strong effort threw off the dark cloud which was pressing down upon his soul, or at least lifted one corner of it, and strode down towards the office resolved to trust, to hope, in spite of everything.
At the office everything was reassuringly normal in the daily routine. And, by a great and unceasing effort, Bram had really got himself to hold his opinions on the one great subject in suspense, when a carriage drove up to the door, and a few minutes later young Mrs. Christian, with a face which betrayed that she was suffering from acute distress, came into the office.
As soon as she saw Bram, she stopped on her way through.
“No,” she said quickly to the clerk who was leading her through to the private office of Mr. Cornthwaite, “it is Mr. Elshaw I want to see. Please, can I speak to you?”
Bram felt the heavy weight settling at once on his heart again. He followed her in silence into the office. Mr. Cornthwaite had not yet arrived.
As soon as the door was shut, and they were alone, she broke out in a tremulous voice, not free from pettishness—
“Mr. Elshaw, I wanted to see you because I feel sure you will not deceive me. And all the rest try to. Mr. and Mrs. Cornthwaite, and my sister-in-law, and my own people, and everybody. You live near Duke’s Farm? Tell me, is Miss Claire Biron at home with her father, or—or has she gone away?”
“I believe, Mrs. Christian, she has gone away.”
The young wife did not cry; she frowned.
“I knew it!” she said sharply. “They pretended they did not know; but I knew it, I felt sure of it. Mr. Elshaw, she has gone away with my husband!”
“Oh, but how can you be sure? How——”
“Mr. Elshaw, don’t trifle with me. You know the truth as well as I do. Not one day has passed since our marriage without Christian’s flaunting this girl and her perfections in my face; not one day has passed since our return from abroad without his either seeing her or making an effort to see her. Oh, I daresay you will say it was mean; but I have had him watched, and he has been at the farm at Hessel every day!”
“But what of that? He is her cousin, you know. He has always been used to see a great deal of her and of her father.”
“Oh, I know all about her father!” snapped Minnie. “And I know how likely any of the family are to go out to Hessel to see him! Don’t prevaricate, Mr. Elshaw. I had understood you never did anything of the kind. Can you pretend to doubt that they have gone away together?”
Bram was silent. He hung his head as if he had been the guilty person.
“Of course, you cannot,” went on the lady triumphantly. “Where has she got to go to? What friends has she to stay with? Who would she leave her father for except Christian? It seems she has never had the decency to hide that she was fond of him!”
“Don’t say that,” protested Bram gently. “Why should she hide it in the old days before he was married? There was no reason why she should. They were cousins; they were believed to be engaged. They would have been married if Mr. Cornthwaite had allowed it. Didn’t you know that?”
“Not in the way I’ve known it since, of course,” said Minnie bitterly. “Everything was kept from me. I heard of a boy-and-girl affection; that was all. The whole family are deceitful and untrustworthy. And Christian is the worst of them all. He doesn’t care for me a bit; he never, never did!”
And here at last she broke down, and began to cry piteously.
Bram, usually so tender-hearted, felt as if his heart was scorched up within him. He looked at her; he tried to speak kindly, tried to say reassuring things, to express a doubt, a hope, which he did not feel.
But she stopped him imperiously, snappishly.
“Don’t talk nonsense, Mr. Elshaw, please. And don’t say you are sorry. For I know you are sorry for nobody but her. Miss Biron is one of those persons who attract sympathy; I am not. But you can spare yourself the trouble of pretending.” She drew herself up, and hastily wiped her eyes. “I know what to do. I shall go back to my father’s house, and I shall have nothing more to do with him. I am not going to break my heart over an unprincipled man, or over a creature like this Claire Biron.”
Bram offered no remonstrance. He knew that he ought to be sorry for this poor little woman, whose only and most venial fault had been a conviction that she possessed the power to “reform” the man she married. Unhappily, it was true, as she said, that she was not one of those persons who attract sympathy. Her hard, dry, snappish manner, the shrewish light in her blue eyes, repelled him as they had repelled Christian himself. And Bram, though far from excusing or forgiving Christian, felt that he understood how impossible it would have been for a man of his easy, genial temperament to be even fairly, conventionally happy with a nature so antipathetic to his own.
In silence, in sorrow, he withdrew, with an added burden to bear, the burden of what was near to absolute certainty, of extinguished hope.
The farmhouse looked desolate in the dusk of the November evening when Bram, in fulfilment of his promise to Theodore, crossed the farmyard to the back door and tapped at it lightly.
It was opened by Joan, who looked as if she had been interrupted in the middle of “a good cry.”
“Ay, coom in, sir,” said she, “coom in. But you’ll find no company here now.”
“Isn’t Mr. Biron back yet?”
“No, sir,” she answered with a sudden change to aggressive sullenness, “and he’s welcome to stay away, he is! If it hadn’t been for that miserable auld rascal, poor Miss Claire ’ud never been took away from us. Ah wouldn’t have on my conscience what yon chap has, no, not for a kingdom.”
Bram, sombre and stern, sat down by the fire, staring at the little wooden stool on which he had so often seen Claire sitting in the opposite corner, with her sewing in her hand. The big chimney-corner which they had both loved—how bare it looked without her! Joan, alone of all the people he had met that day, seemed to understand what had taken place in him, to realize the sudden death, the total, irremediable decay, of what had been the joy of his life. She put down the plate she had been wiping, and she came over to look at him in the firelight. There was no other light in the room.
“Poor lad! Poor chap!” she murmured in accents so tender, so motherly, that her rough voice sounded like most sweet, most touching music in his dull ears.
For the first time since the horrible shock he had received that morning his features quivered, became convulsed, and a look of desperate anguish came into his calm gray eyes.
Her strong right hand came down upon his shoulder with a blow which was meant to be inspiriting in its violent energy.
“Well, lad, ye must bear oop; ye must forget her! Ay, there’s no two ways about it. It’s a sad business, an’ Ah’m broken oop abaht it mysen, but she’s chosen to go, an’ there’s no help for it, an’ no grieving can mend it! It was only you, an’ her liking for you, that stopped her from going before, I reckon. Look at yon auld spend-t’-brass and the life she’s led wi’ him, always having to beg, beg, beg for him from folks as didn’t pity her as they should!”
Bram moved impatiently.
“Yes, that’s what I cannot forgive him!” growled he.
Joan stared at him in the dusk.
“Have you heard,” said she, peering mysteriously into his face, “if anything ’as happened while you were away?”
Bram shook his head.
“Well, summat did happen. Mr. Biron got money from some one, an’ began to spend it loike one o’clock. You must have heard o’ that?”
Bram nodded, remembering the new hunter and Theodore’s smart appearance.
“Well,” went on Joan, leaning forward, and dropping her voice, “it was summat to do wi’ that as broke oop poor Miss Claire. Ay, lad, don’t shiver an’ start; it’s best you should know all, and forget all if you can. Well, it was after that, after t’ auld man had gotten t’ brass, that I saw a change coom over her. She went abaht loike one as warn’t right, an’ she says to ’im one day—Ah were in t’ kitchen yonder an’ Ah heard her—‘Papa,’ says she, ‘Ah can never look Bram Elshaw in t’ face again.’ That’s what she said, my lad; Ah heard her.”
Bram got up, and began to pace up and down the tiled floor without a word. Joan went on, quickening her pace, a little anxious to get the story over and done with.
“You know his way. But there was summat in her voice told me it were no laughin’ matter wi’ her. An’,” went on the good woman in a voice lower still, “when Mr. Christian coom that evening, says she, says Miss Claire—‘Ah mun see ’im to-neght.’ An’ he came in, an’ they went in through to the best parlor, and they had a long talk together. That were t’ day before yesterday. She must have gone last neght, as soon as Ah left t’ house.”
Still Bram said nothing, pacing up and down, up and down, on the red tiles which he had trodden so often with something like ecstasy in his heart.
Joan was shrewd enough and sympathetic enough to understand why he did not speak. She finished her plate-washing, disappeared silently into the outhouse, and presently returned with her bonnet on.
“Are ye going to stay here, sir?” she asked, as she laid her hands on the door to go out.
“Yes; I promised I’d look in.”
“Friendly loike? You aren’t going for to do him any hurt?”
“No, oh, no.”
“Well,” said Joan, as she turned the handle and took her portly person slowly round the door, “if so be you had, you might ha’ done it an’ welcome! Ah wouldn’t have stopped ye. Good-neght, sir.”
“Good-night, Joan.”
She went out, and Bram was left alone. The sound of her footsteps died away, until he felt as if he was the only living thing about the farm. Even the noises that usually came across from the sheds and the stables where the animals were kept seemed to be hushed that evening. No sound reached his ears but the moaning of the rising wind, and the scratching of the mice in the old wainscotting.
Never before had he felt so utterly, hopelessly miserable and castdown. In the old days, when he had lived one of a wretched, poverty-stricken family in a squalid mean way, ill-kept, half-starved, he had had his daydreams, his vague ambitions, to gild the sorry present. Now, on the very high-road to the fulfilment of those ambitions, he was suddenly left without a ray of hope, without a rag of comfort, to bear the most unutterable wretchedness, that of shattered ideals.
Not Claire alone, but Chris also had fallen from the place each had held in his imagination, in his heart, and Bram, who hid a spirit-world of his own under a matter-of-fact manner and a blunt directness of speech, suffered untold anguish.
While he watched the embers of the fire in profound melancholy, with his hands on his knees, and his eyes staring dully into the red heart of the dying fire, he heard something moving outside. He raised his head, expecting to hear the sound of Mr. Biron’s voice.
But a shadow passed before the window in the faint daylight that was left; and with a wild hope Bram sat up, his heart seeming to cease to beat.
The shadow, the step were those of a woman.
The next moment the door was softly, stealthily opened, and away like a dream went joy and hope again.
The woman was not Claire.
He could see that the visitor was tall, broad-shouldered, of well-developed figure, and that she was of the class that wear shawls round their heads, and clogs on their feet in the daytime.
She stood in the room, just inside the door, and seemed to listen. Then she said in a voice which was coarse and uncultivated, but which was purposely subdued to a pitch of insincere civility, as Bram instantly felt sure—
“Miss Biron! Is Miss Claire Biron here?”
Now, Bram had never, as far as he knew, met this girl before; he did not even know her name. But, with his sense of hearing made sharper, perhaps, by the darkness, he guessed at once something which was very near the truth. He knew that this woman came with hostile intent of some kind or other.
He at once rose from his seat, and said—“No; Miss Biron is not in.”
And he put his hand up to the high chimney-piece, found a box of matches, and lit a candle which was beside it. Meanwhile the visitor stood motionless, and was so standing when the light had grown bright enough for him to see her by. She was a handsome girl, black-haired, blacked-eyed, with cheeks which ought to have been red, but which were now pale and thin, showing a sharp outline of rather high cheek-bone and big jaw. Bram recognized her as a girl whom he had often seen about Hessel, and who lived at a little farm about a mile and a half away. Her name was Meg Tyzack. She was neatly dressed, without any of the flaunting, shabby finery which the factory girls usually affect when they leave their shawl and clogs. Her lips were tightly closed, and in her eyes there was an expression of ferocious sullenness which confirmed the idea Bram had conceived at the first sound of her voice. Her black cloth jacket was buttoned only at the throat, and her right hand was thrust underneath it as if she was hiding something.
“Not in, eh?” she asked scoffingly, as she measured Bram from head to foot with a look of ineffable scorn. Then, with a sudden, sharp change of tone to one of passionate anxiety, she asked, “Where’s she gone to then?”
Bram hesitated. This woman’s appearance at the farm, her look, her manner, betrayed to him within a few seconds a fact he had not guessed before, though now a dozen circumstances flashed into his mind to confirm it. This was one of the many girls with whom Chris had had relations of a more or less questionable character. Bram had seen her with him in the lane leading to her home, and on the hill above Holme Park; had seen her waiting about in the town near the works. But to see Chris talking to a good-looking girl was too common a thing for Bram to have given this particular young woman much attention. Now, however, he divined in an instant that it was jealousy which had brought her to the farmhouse, and a feeling of sickening repulsion came over him at the thought of the words which he might have to hear directed by this virago at Claire. If the idol was broken, it was an idol still.
As he did not reply at once, Meg Tyzack stepped quickly across the floor, and glared into his eyes with a look terrible in its fierce eagerness, its deadly anxiety.
“Where has she gone? Ye can’t keep t’ truth from me.” Then, as he was still silent, she burst out with an overwhelming torrent of passion. “Ah know what they say! Ah know they say he’s taken her away wi’ him, Mr. Christian of t’ works, Cornthwaite’s works. But it’s a lie. Ah know it’s a lie. He’d never take her wi’ him; he’d never dare take any one but me. He care for her? Not enoof for that! She’s here, Ah know she is; only she’s afraid to coom out, afraid to meet me! But Ah’ll find her; Ah’ll have her aht. What ’ud you be doin’ here if she wasn’t here? Oh, Ah know who Christian was jealous of; Ah know she was artful enough to keep the two of ye on. Ah know it was her fault he used to coom here and——” Her eyes flashed, and her voice suddenly dropped to a fierce whisper. “Ah mean to have her aht.”
As she suddenly swung round and made for the inner door leading into the hall, Bram saw that she held under her jacket a bottle. There was mischief in the woman’s eyes, worse mischief even than was boded by her tongue. For one moment, as he sprang after her, Bram felt glad that Claire was not there. Meg laughed hoarsely in his face as she eluded him, and disappeared into the hall, slamming the door.
Bram did not follow her. Claire being gone, she could do little harm. He opened the outer door, and went out into the farmyard. In a few minutes he saw a light flickering in room after room upstairs. Meg Tyzack was searching, hunting in every nook and every corner, searching for her rival with savage, despairing eagerness. Bram shivered. It was a relief to him when he heard footsteps approaching the farm, and a few moments later the voice of Theodore calling to him.
“Yes, Mr. Biron, it’s me.”
“Then who’s that in the house? Is it Joan?” asked Theodore fretfully, testily.
He was dispirited, dejected; evidently he had met with neither comfort nor sympathy at Holme Park. He had been trying to comfort himself on the way back, as Bram discovered by his unsteady gait and husky utterance.
“It’s a girl, Meg Tyzack,” answered Bram.
Mr. Biron started.
“That vixen!” cried he. “That horrible virago! Why did you let her get in?”
“I couldn’t help it,” replied Bram simply.
“What is she up to?”
“She’s looking for Miss Claire,” said Bram in a low voice.
Theodore made no answer. But he shuddered, and leaning against the wall of the farmyard began to cry.
“Come, Mr. Biron,” said Bram impatiently, “it’s no use giving way like that. It’s just something to be thankful for that this mad woman can’t get hold of her.”
Mr. Biron did not answer. A moment later, attracted probably by the voices, Meg came rushing out of the house like a fury, and made straight for the two men.
“Ah!” cried she shrilly, when she made out who the newcomer was, thrusting her angry face close to his in the gloom. “So it’s you, is it? You, the father of that——”
“Hold your tongue.”
“Hush!” cried Bram, seizing her arm.
There was a sound so impressive in his voice, short and blunt as his speech was, that the woman turned upon him sharply, but for a moment was silent. Then she said with coarse bravado—
“And who are you to talk to me? Why, t’ very mon as ought to take my part, if you had any spirit? But you leave it to me to pay out t’ pair on ’em. An’ Ah’ll do it. Ah’ll made ’em both smart for it, if Ah swing for it! Ah’ll show him the price he has to pay for treatin’ a woman like me the way he’s done. When Ah loved him so! Ay, ten times more’n than that little hussy could! Oh, my God, my God!”
Bram, child of the people that he was, was moved in the utmost depths of his heart by the woman’s mad, passionate despair. He felt for her as he could never feel for the cool, prim, little wife Christian had served so ill. He would have comforted her if he could. But as no words strong enough or suitable enough to the occasion came to his lips, he just put a gentle hand upon the woman’s shoulder as she bowed herself down and sobbed.
But Mr. Biron’s refinement was shocked by this scene. Seeing the woman less ferocious, now that she was more absorbed in her grief, he ventured to come a little nearer, and to say snappishly—
“But, my good woman, though we may be sorry for you, you have no right to force yourself into my house. Nor have you any right to speak in such terms of my daughter.”
Meg was erect in a moment, her eyes flashing, her nostrils quivering. With a wild, ironical laugh, she faced about, pointing at his mean little face a scornful finger.
“You!” cried she in a very passion of contempt. “You dare to speak to me! You as would have sold your daughter a dozen times over if t’ price had been good enoof! Why, mon, your hussy of a daughter’s a pearl to you! You’re a rat, a cur! Ah could almost forgive her when Ah look at you! It’s you Ah’ve got to blame for it all, wi’ your black heart an’ your mean, white face! You more’n her, more’n him!”
With a sudden impulse of indomitable rage, she stepped back, and raising her right hand quickly, flung something at his face.
With a sudden impulse of indomitable rage, she stepped back, and
raising her right hand quickly, flung something at his face.—Page 134.
Mr. Biron uttered a piercing shriek, as shrill as a woman’s.
“Fiend! She-devil! She’s killed me! Help! Oh, I’m on fire!”
Bram, who hardly knew what had happened, caught Theodore as the latter fell shrieking into his arms. Meg, with a wild laugh, picked up the remains of her broken bottle, and ran out of the farmyard.
Meg Tyzack had hardly left the farmyard before Bram knew what she had done, and realized the full extent of the danger Claire had escaped. The bottle Meg had carried, and which she had thrown at the head of Theodore Biron, had contained vitriol. Luckily for Mr. Biron, he had moved aside just in time to escape having the bottle broken on his face, but part of the contents had fallen on his head, on the side of his face, and on his left hand before the bottle itself was dashed into two pieces as it fell on the ground.
Bram wiped Theodore’s face and hands as quickly as he could, but the effeminate man had so entirely lost his self-control that he could not keep still; and by his own restlessness he hindered the full effect of Bram’s good offices.
The young man saw that his best chance with the hysterical creature was to get him into the house as quickly as he could. But Theodore objected to this. He wanted Bram to go in pursuit of the woman, to bring her back, to have her taken up. And as his cries had by this time caused a little crowd to assemble from the cottages round about, he began to harangue them on the subject of his wrongs, and to try to stir them up to resent the outrage to which he had been subjected.
It is needless to say that his efforts were ineffectual. Mr. Biron had succeeded in establishing a thoroughly bad reputation among his neighbors, who knew all about his selfish treatment of his daughter. He found not one sympathizer, and at last he was fain to allow himself to be led indoors by Bram, who was very urgent in his persuasions, being indeed afraid that Theodore’s curses upon the bystanders for their supineness would bring upon him some further chastisement. He prevailed upon a lad in the crowd to go for a doctor, assuring him that it was the pain from which the gentleman was suffering that made him so irritable.
Once inside the house, Bram found that his difficulties with his unsympathetic patient had only just begun. Mr. Biron was not used to pain, and had no idea of suffering in silence. He raved and he moaned, he cursed and he swore, and Bram was amazed and disgusted to find that this little, well-preserved, middle-aged gentleman was quite as much concerned by the injury which he should suffer in appearance as by the pain he had to bear.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that the marks will ever go away? Oh, good heavens, I know they won’t,” he cried, as with his uninjured eye he surveyed himself in the glass over the dining-room sideboard by the light of a couple of candles. “Oh, oh, the wretch! The hag! I’ll get her six months for this!”
And the little man, trembling with rage, shook his fist and gnashed his teeth, presenting in his anger and disfigurement a hideous spectacle.
The left side of his face was already one long patch of inflammation. His left eye was shut up; the hair on that side of his head had already begun to come away in tufts from the burnt skin.
Bram was disgusted. Mr. Biron’s grief over the loss of his daughter, keen as it had been, could not be compared to that which he felt now at the loss of his remaining good looks. There was a note of absolute sincerity in his every lament which had been conspicuously lacking in his grief of the morning. The young man could scarcely listen to him with patience. He tried, however, out of humanity, to remain silent, since he could give no comfort. But silence would not do for his garrulous companion, who insisted on having an answer.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that I shall be disfigured for life?” he asked with tremulous anxiety.
“I’m afraid so,” answered Bram rather gruffly. “But I don’t think I’d worry about that when you have worse things than that to trouble you.”
Unluckily, Mr. Biron was so much absorbed in the loss of his own beauty that he fell into the mistake of being absolutely sincere for once.
“Worse troubles than that! Worse than to go about like a scarecrow, a repulsive object, all the years of one’s life! What can be worse?” groaned he.
Bram, who was standing solemnly erect, answered at once, in a deep voice, out of the fulness of his heart—
“Well, Mr. Biron, if you don’t know of anything worse, I suppose there is nothing worse—for you!”
But Mr. Biron was impervious to sneers. He walked up and down the room in feverish anxiety until the arrival of the doctor, whom he interrogated at once with as much solicitude as if he had been a young beauty on the eve of her first ball.
The doctor, a stolid, hard-working country practitioner, with a dull red face and dull black eyes, showed Theodore much less mercy than Bram had done. He knew his patient well, having been called in to him on several occasions when that gentleman’s excesses had brought on the attacks of dyspepsia to which he was subject; and the more he saw of him the less he liked him. Theodore’s anxiety about his appearance he treated with cruel bluntness.
“No, you’ll never be the same man again to look at, Mr. Biron,” he said quite cheerfully. “And you may be thankful if we can save you the sight of the left eye.”
“You think the scar will never go away? Nor the hair grow again?” asked Theodore piteously.
“The scar won’t go away certainly. But that’s not much to trouble about at your time of life, I should think,” returned the doctor bluntly. “There’s a greater danger than that to concern ourselves with. Unless you are very careful, you will have erysipelas. You must get that little daughter of yours to nurse you very carefully. Where is she?”
Theodore burst out fretfully with a new grievance—
“My daughter! She’s not here to nurse me. I’ve no one to nurse me now. She’s gone away, gone away and left me all by myself!”
The doctor stared at him with the unpleasant fixity of eyes which have to look hard before they see much.
“You told her to go, I suppose?” said he at last, abruptly.
Taken by surprise, Theodore, to the horror of Bram, who was standing in the background, confessed—
“Well, I told her she could go if she liked; but I never meant her to take me at my word.”
Bram was thunderstruck. Such a simple solution of the mystery of the disappearance of the dutiful daughter had never entered his mind. In a fit of passion, perhaps of partial intoxication, Theodore had bade his daughter get out of the house. And the long-suffering girl had taken him at his word.
The doctor nodded.
“I thought so,” said he. “I thought there was no end to what the child would put up with at your hands. So you have driven her away? Well, then you’ll have to suffer for it, I’m afraid. I don’t know of anybody else who would come to nurse you.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Bram in a hollow voice from the background.
It needed an effort on his part to make this offer. He felt that he loathed the little wretch who had himself driven his daughter into the arms of her untrustworthy lover. Only the thought that Claire would wish him to do so enabled him to undertake the distasteful task of ministering to such a patient. Theodore thanked him in a half-hearted sort of way, feeling that there was something not altogether grateful to himself in the spirit in which this offer was made. The doctor was far more cordial.
He told Bram he was doing a fine thing.
“But then,” he added in his rough way, “fine things are what one expects of you, Mr. Elshaw.”
And then he went out, leaving Theodore in much perplexity as to what the fellow could see in Elshaw to make such a fuss about.
Bram spent the night with him, doing his best to soothe and to comfort the unfortunate man, whose sufferings, both of mind and body, grew more acute as the hours wore on. His own worry about himself was the chief cause of this. Long before morning he had lost sight of the shame of his daughter’s flight, and looked upon it solely as a wicked freak which had resulted in his own most cruel misfortune.
“Why, surely, man,” broke out Bram at last, losing patience at his long tirades of woe and indignation, “it’s better that you should be disfigured than her, at any rate.”
“No, it isn’t,” retorted Theodore sharply. “Claire never cared half as much about her appearance as I did about mine. And, besides,” he went on, with a sudden feeling that he had got hold of a strong argument, “if she had been disfigured, she would have had no temptation to do wrong!”
Bram jumped up, clenching his fist. He could bear no more. With a few jerked-out words to the effect that he would send Joan to get his breakfast, he rushed out of the house.
Poor Claire! Poor little Claire! Was this the creature she had wronged in going away? This shallow, selfish wretch who had turned her out, and who regretted the ministrations of her gentle hands far more than he did the shame her desperate act had drawn down upon her!
Bram went down to the works that morning a different man from what he had been the day before. He was waking from the dull lethargy of grief into which the first discovery of Claire’s flight had thrown him. A smouldering anger against the Cornthwaites, father and son, was taking the place of sullen misery in his breast. He had gathered from Theodore that the elder Mr. Cornthwaite had taken his remonstrances not only coolly, but with something like relief, as if he felt glad of an excuse for getting rid of the relations whose vicinity had been a continual annoyance.
But Bram did not mean to be put off. Josiah, who had not been at the office at all on the previous day, should see him, and answer his questions. And Bram, maturing a grave resolution, strode down into the town with a steady look in his eyes.
Mr. Cornthwaite saw him as soon as he himself arrived, and, evidently with the intention of taking the bull by the horns, spoke to him at once.
“Ah, Elshaw, good-morning. Come in here a moment, please. I want to speak to you.”
Bram followed in silence, and stood within the room with his back to the door, with a stern expression on his pale face.
Mr. Cornthwaite broached the unpleasant subject at once.
“Nice business this, eh? Nice thing Chris has done for himself now! Brought a hornet’s nest about his ears and mine too! Old Hibbs and his wife have been down to my house blackguarding me; Minnie herself is fit for a lunatic asylum, and, to complete the business, the girl’s rascally father has been to my house, trying to levy blackmail. But I’ve made up my mind to make short work of the thing! I start for London to-night; find out Master Chris (luckily he gave his address to no one but me, or he’d have had his wife’s family about his ears already), and bring the young man back to his wife’s feet—bring him by the scruff of the neck if necessary!”
“And—Claire—Miss Biron?” said Bram hoarsely.
“Oh, she must shift for herself. She knew what she was doing, running off with a married man. I’ve no pity for her; not the least. I wash my hands of the pair of them, father and daughter, now. He must just pack up his traps and be off after her. What becomes of her is his affair, not ours!”
“Mr. Christian can’t get rid of the responsibility like that, sir,” said Bram, with a note of sombre warning in his voice.
“I take upon myself the responsibility for him,” retorted Mr. Cornthwaite coldly. “My son is dependent upon me, and he can do nothing without my approval. I am certainly going to give him no help towards the maintenance of a baggage like that. You know what my opinion of her always has been. Circumstances have confirmed it most amply. A young man is not much to blame if he gets caught, entangled, by a girl as artful and as designing as she is.”
“I don’t think you will find yourself and Mr. Christian in agreement upon that point, sir,” said Bram steadily.
“Well, whether he agrees or not, he’ll come back with me to-morrow,” replied Mr. Cornthwaite hotly.
“Then, Mr. Cornthwaite, you’ll please take my notice now, and I’ll be out of this to-day. For,” Bram went on, with a rising spot of deep color in his cheek, and a bright light in his eye, “I couldn’t trust myself face to face with such a d——d scoundrel as Mr. Christian is if he leaves the girl he loves, the girl he’s betrayed, and comes sneaking back at your heels like a cur, when he ought to stand up for the woman who loves him!”
“Upon my word, yours is very singular morality for a young man who goes in for such correctness of conduct as you do. Where does the wife come in, the poor, injured wife, in your new-fangled scheme of right and wrong? Is she to be left out in the cold altogether?”
“Where else can she be left, poor thing?” cried Bram with deep feeling. “Do you think if you brought Mr. Christian back ‘by the scruff of the neck,’ as you say, that you’d ever be able to patch matters up between ’em so as to make ’em live anything but a cat-and-dog’s-life? No, Mr. Cornthwaite, you couldn’t. The wife won’t come to so much hurt; she wouldn’t have come to none if you hadn’t forced on this cursed marriage. Let her get free, and make him free; and let Mr. Christian put the wrong right as far as he can by marrying the girl he wants, the girl who knows how to make him happy!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s black eyes blazed. He hated even a semblance of contradiction; and Bram’s determined and dogged attitude irritated him beyond measure. He rose from his arm-chair, and clasping his hands behind his back with a loud snap, he assumed towards the young man an air of bland contempt which he had never used to him before.
“Your notions are charming in the abstract, Elshaw. I have no doubt, too, that there are some sections of society where your ideas might be carried out without much harm to anybody. But not in that in which we move. If my son were to commit such an unheard-of folly as you suggest I would let him shift for himself for the rest of his days. And perhaps you know enough of Christian to tell whether he would find life with any young woman agreeable under those conditions.”
Bram remained silent. There was a pause, rather a long one. Then Mr. Cornthwaite spoke again——
“Of course, you are sensible enough to understand that this is my business, and my son’s; that it is a family matter, a difficulty in which I have to act for the best. And I hope,” he went on in a different tone, “for your own sake, more than for mine, that you will not take any step so rash as leaving this office would be. Without notice, too!”
“As to that, sir, you had better let me go—and without notice,” said Bram with a sullen note in his voice which made Mr. Cornthwaite look at him with some anxiety, “if it’s true that you’re going to make Mr. Christian leave Miss Claire in the lurch. For I tell you, sir,” and again he looked up, with a steely flash in his gray eyes and a look of stubborn ferocity about his long upper lip and straight mouth, “if I was to come face to face wi’ him after he’d done that thing I couldn’t keep my fists off him; Ah couldn’t, sir. That’s what comes of my being born in a different section of society, sir, I suppose. And so, as Ah’ve loved Mr. Christian, and as Ah’ve had much to thank you and him for, sir, you’d best let me go back—to my own section of society, where a man has to stand by his own deeds, like a man!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s attitude, his tone, changed insensibly as he looked and listened to the man who told him his views so honestly, and stood by them so firmly. He saw that Bram was in earnest, and he began to walk up and down the room, thinking, planning, considering. He did not want to lose this clever young man; he could not afford to do so. Bram had something like a genius for the details of business, and was besides as honest as the day; not a too common combination.
The young man waited, but at last, as Mr. Cornthwaite made no sign of addressing him, he turned to touch the handle of the door. Then Mr. Cornthwaite suddenly stopped in his walk, and made a sign to him to stay.
“Well, Elshaw,” said he in a more genial tone, “will you, if you must go, promise me one thing? Will you see Mr. Christian in my presence first, and hear what he has to say for himself?”
Bram hesitated.
“I don’t want to hear anything,” said he sullenly. “I’d rather go, sir.”
“No doubt you would, but you wouldn’t like to treat us in any way unfairly, would you, Bram? You acknowledge that we’ve not treated you badly, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, you can hardly refuse to hear what the culprit has to say in his own defence. If, after hearing him, you are not satisfied, you can have the satisfaction of telling him what you think of him in good round terms before you go. Now, is that a bargain? You stay here until I come back from town—at least—with or without (for, of course, you may be right, and he may not come) my son?”
Bram hesitated; but he could not well refuse.
“All right, sir. I’ll stay till you come back,” he answered sullenly.
And, without another word or another look, he accepted his employer’s satisfied motion of assent as a dismissal, and left the room.
Doggedly, sullenly, with a hard mouth and cold eyes, Bram went about his day’s work in the office. His fellow-clerks knew that something of deep import had happened during that half-hour while he was shut up with Mr. Cornthwaite in the inner room; but so well did they know him by this time that no one made any attempt to learn from him what it was that had passed.
Quietly, unostentatiously, without any apparent effort, Bram had made himself a unique position, with his office companions as well as with his employers. Very taciturn, very stolid of manner, never giving an unasked opinion on any subject, he always seemed to be too much absorbed in the details of work to have time or inclination for the discussions, the idle chatter, with which the rest beguiled the monotonous hours on every opportunity.
But they had long since ceased to “chaff” him on his attitude, not through any distaste on his part for this form of attack, but as a natural result of the respect he inspired, and of the position he held with “the guv’nor” and his son. There was a feeling that he would be “boss” himself some day, and a consequent disposition to leave him alone.
But when the day’s work was done, and Bram started on the walk back to Hessel, the look of dogged attention which his face had worn during office hours relaxed into one of keen anxiety. He had been able, by force of will, to thrust into the background of his mind the one subject which was all-important to him. Now that he was again, for fifteen hours, a free man, his thoughts fastened once more on Claire and on the question—Would Christian, obedient to his father and to self-interest, abandon her, or would he not?
Bram felt a dread of the answer. He would not allow to himself that he believed Christian capable of what he looked upon as an act of inconceivable baseness; but down at the bottom of his heart there was a dumb misgiving, an unacknowledged fear.
And Bram, his thoughts stretching out beyond the limits he imposed upon them, asked himself what he should do for the best for the poor child, if she were left stranded, as Mr. Cornthwaite made no secret of intending. He had unconsciously assumed to himself, now that the image of Claire had been deposed from the high pedestal of his ideal, the attitude of guardian to this most helpless of creatures, taking upon himself in advance the position which her father ought to have held.
If she were abandoned by her lover, it was he who would find her out, and care for her, and settle her in some place of safety. That she would never come back to the neighborhood of her own accord Bram felt sure.
When Bram got back to Hessel, he called at once at the farm, with a lingering hope that something might have been heard of Claire, that she might have sent some message, written some letter to her father or to Joan.
But she had not. He found Mr. Biron in the care of Joan, whose patience he tried severely by his fretfulness and irritability. The doctor had called again, and had expressed a growing fear of erysipelas, which had only increased the patient’s ill-temper, without making him any more careful of himself. He was drinking whisky and water when Bram came in, and Joan reported that he had been doing so all day, and that there was no reasoning with him or stopping him, even by using the authority of the doctor.
Theodore was by this time in a maudlin and tearful condition, bewailing now the flight of his daughter, and now his own wounds, without ceasing.
Bram did what he could to cheer him, and to persuade him to a more reasonable course of conduct, but the effect was hardly more than momentary. And on the following day his condition had undoubtedly become worse. Bram, however, was obliged to leave him to go to the office, where the day passed without incident. Mr. Cornthwaite had gone up to town on the previous night, and had not returned. Bram began to hope that Christian had refused to come back.
Two more days passed, during which Mr. Biron’s symptoms grew worse. The erysipelas had not only declared itself on the wounded part of the face, but was spreading rapidly. No attempt had been made to bring Meg Tyzack to book for the assault, in spite of Mr. Biron’s frenzied adjurations. Bram could not bear to have the name of Claire dragged through the mire, as it must be if the jealous woman were brought into Court; and although Mr. Biron troubled himself less about this than he did about the revenge he wanted for his own injuries, Joan was so bluntly outspoken on the subject that even he had to give up the idea.
“You’d best tak’ it quiet, sir,” said the good woman coolly. “You see you couldn’t coom into Coort wi’ clean hands yourself, wi’ the Joodge and everybody knowin’ the life as Miss Claire led with you. Happen ye’d get told it served you roight!”
And Bram concurring, though less outspokenly, the indignant Theodore found himself obliged to wait for his revenge until he could see about it himself. This period promised to be a long time in coming, as the erysipelas continued to spread, and threatened to attack the membranes of the brain.
In the meantime, on the fourth day after the departure of Mr. Josiah Cornthwaite for London, Bram learned that father and son had returned home together.
Bram’s heart sank. What of Claire? His mind was filled with anxious thoughts of her, as he awaited the expected summons to meet Christian face to face.
But the day passed, and the next. Neither father nor son appeared at the office at the works; and all that Bram could hear was that Mr. Christian was not very well. Bram looked upon this as a ruse, a trick. His sympathies were to be appealed to on behalf of the scoundrel of whose conduct he had spoken so openly.
Another day passed, and another. Still the work of the head of the firm was done by deputy; still the elder Mr. Cornthwaite remained at home, and his son, so Bram understood, with him.
So at last Bram, not to be put off any longer, wrote a short note to Mr. Cornthwaite, senior, reminding him of the latter’s wish that he should see Christian before leaving the firm.
The answer to this note, which Bram posted to Holme Park on his way to the works, reached him by hand the same evening before he left the office. It contained only these words:—
“Dear Elshaw,—You can come up and see my son at any time you like.—Yours faithfully,
“Josiah Cornthwaite.”
Bram started off to Holme Park at once, full of sullen anger against father and son. That this was the end he felt sure, the abrupt termination of a connection which had done so much for him, which had promised so much for his employers. Bram was not ungrateful. It was the feeling that this act had been committed by the man he loved and admired above all others, to whom he was indebted for his rise in life, which made the meeting so hard to him.
It was the knowledge that it was Christian, who had been so good to himself, who had ruined the life of the woman he loved, that made Bram shrink from this interview. He was torn, as he went, between memories of the pleasant walks he and Christian had had together, of the talks in which he had always opposed a rigorous and perhaps narrow code of morals to his companion’s airy philosophy of selfishness, on the one hand; and thoughts of Claire, brave, friendless, little Claire, on the other. And the more he thought, the more he shrank from the meeting.
He knew by heart all Christian’s irresponsible speeches about women and the impossibility of doing them any harm except by their express desire and invitation; knew that Christian always spoke of himself as a weak creature who yielded too readily to temptation, although he avoided it when he could. He knew every turn of the head, every trick of the voice, which could be so winning, so caressing, with which Christian would try to avert his wrath, as he had done many times before. He knew also that Christian had stronger weapons than these, in appeals to his affection, to the bond which Christian’s own generosity and discernment had been the first to forge.
And knowing all this, Bram, determined to make one last appeal for justice and mercy for Claire, and if unsuccessful to pour out such fiery indignation as even Christian should quiver under, steeled himself and set his teeth, and strode up to the big house at dusk with an agitated heart.
In the gloom of the foggy night the lamp in the hall shone with a yellow light through the evergreens, and the whole place had a desolate look, which struck Bram as he went up. To his inquiry for Mr. Cornthwaite the servant who opened the door said, “Yes, sir,” with an odd, half-alarmed look, and showed him into the study, where Mr. Cornthwaite sprang up from a chair at the sight of him.
“Ah, Elshaw,” said he in a troubled voice, without holding out his hand, “you have come to see Christian. Well, you shall see him.”
Without another word, without listening to Bram’s renewed expostulations, he went out of the room, with a gesture of curt invitation to Bram to follow.
Up the stairs they went in silence. The fog seemed to have got into the house, to have shrouded every corner with gloom. On the first floor Mr. Cornthwaite opened a door, and beckoned Bram to come in. As the young man entered the room a shriek of wild laughter, in a voice which was like and yet unlike that of Chris, met his ears. A figure sprang up in a bed which was opposite the door, and a woman, in the dark gown and white cap and apron of a sick nurse, stood up beside the bed, trying to hold the sick man down. Bram stood petrified. There was the man of whom he was in search, unconscious of his presence, though he stared at him with bright eyes.
Christian was raving in the delirium of fever.
In a moment Bram experienced a revulsion of feeling so strong that he felt he could scarcely stand. Christian’s follies, faults, vices, all were forgotten; there lay, dangerously ill, the lovable companion, the staunch friend. In that moment Bram, staring at the man he knew so well, who knew him not, felt that he would have laid down his own life to save that of Christian.
Suddenly he felt a hand laid gently on his arm. Mr. Cornthwaite, who had been watching him narrowly, saw the effect the sight had had upon the young man, and promptly drew him back, and shut the door behind them.
“Typhoid,” said he, in answer to an imploring look from Bram. “He must have been sickening for it when he went away. I brought him back very ill, and the fever declared itself yesterday.”
Bram did not ask anything for some minutes. He knew that Christian’s life was in danger.
“His wife? She has forgiven him? She is with him?” asked Bram.
“Thank goodness no,” replied Mr. Cornthwaite energetically. “I begin to hate the little canting fool. She offered to nurse him, I will say that; but we thought it better to refuse, and she was content.”
“And—Claire?” said Bram.
Mr Cornthwaite grew impatient directly.
“I know nothing about her,” said he coldly.
Bram straightened himself, as if at a challenge.
“You did not see her in London?” he asked.
“No.”
“Nor trouble yourself about her?”
“No. And I sincerely hope, Elshaw, you are going to give up all thoughts of doing so either.”
Bram smiled grimly.
“Not while I have a hand or a foot left, Mr. Cornthwaite.”
“At any rate, you will not think of marrying her?”
There was a silence. Then Bram said, in a very low voice, very sadly—
“No.”
He did not know whether he was not cruel, hard, in this decision. But he could not help himself. The feeling he had for Claire, for his first love, for his ideal, could never die; but it had changed sadly; greatly changed. It was love still, but with a difference.
Mr Cornthwaite, however, was scarcely satisfied.
“You will not think of leaving us, at least yet?” he said presently. Then, as he saw a look he did not like in Bram’s face he hastened to add—“You are bound to wait until my son is better—or worse; until I am free to go to the office. I cannot be making changes now.”
“Very well, Mr. Cornthwaite. But I must have a holiday, perhaps a two or three days’ holiday, to start from to-morrow morning.”
“All right. Good-night.”
They were in the hall, and Bram, who had refused to re-enter the study, had his fingers upon the outer door.
“Good-night,” said he.
And he went out. He was full of a new idea, which had suddenly struck him even while he was talking to Mr. Cornthwaite. He would not go to London; poor little Claire, abandoned by her lover, or rather by his father, would not have stayed there. It had flashed into his mind that there was one spot in the world to which she would direct her wandering steps if left all alone in the world. It was the little Yorkshire town of Chelmsley, where her mother lay buried.
On the following morning, therefore, Bram took train northwards, and, reaching before noon the pretty country town, went straight from the station to the big, square, open market-place, which, with the little irregular old-fashioned dwellings which surrounded it, might be called, not only the heart, but the whole of the town.
It was market-day, and at the primitive stalls which were ranged in neat rows, stood the farmers’ wives and daughters before their tempting wares.
It was a cold but not unpleasant day, and the sight was a pretty one. But Bram had no eyes, no heart for any sight but one. He went to the principal inn, ordered some bread and cheese, and asked if there were any persons living in the town bearing the name of Cornthwaite; this he knew to have been the maiden name of Claire’s mother.
The innkeeper knew of none. There had been a family of that name living at a big house outside the town; but that was years before.
Still Bram did not give up hope. It was something stronger than instinct which told him that to this, the spot where her mother’s childhood had been passed, Claire would make her way. Disappointed in his inquiries, Bram set about what was almost a house-to-house search.
And towards the evening, when the lights began to appear in the houses, he was successful. He was searching the cottages on the outskirts of the town, and in one of them, crouching before the fire in a tiny room, where geraniums in pots formed a screen before the window, he saw Claire.
He stared at her for some seconds, until the tears welled up into his eyes.
Then he tapped at the window-pane, and she started up with a low cry.