In answer to this Luke protested that he had not thought of Rachel when he was making that speech, and tried to explain that all that was “soft sawder” as he called it, for the election. But the words were too apposite to the event, and the sentiment too much in accordance with Mrs. Sturt’s chivalric views to allow of her admitting the truth of any such assurance as this.
“I know,” she said; “I know. And when I read them words in the newspaper I said to the gudeman there, we shall have bridecake from the cottage now before Christmas.”
“For the matter of that, so you shall,” said Luke, shaking hands with her as he went, “or the fault will not be mine.”
Rachel, as she followed her mother out from the farmyard gate, had not a word to say. Could it have been possible she would have wished to remain silent for the remainder of the evening and for the night, so that she might have time to think of this thing which she had done, and to enjoy the full measure of her happiness. Hitherto she had hardly had any joy in her love. The cup had been hardly given to her to drink before it had been again snatched away, and since then she had been left to think that the draught for which she longed would never again be offered to her lips. The whole affair had now been managed so suddenly, and the action had been so quick, that she had hardly found a moment for thought. Could it be that things were so fixed that there was no room for further disappointment? She had been scalded so cruelly that she still feared the hot water. Her heart was sore with the old hurt, as the head that has ached will be still sore when the actual malady has passed away. She longed for hours of absolute quiet, in which she might make herself sure that her malady had also passed away, and that the soreness which remained came only from the memory of former pain. But there was no such perfect rest within her reach as yet.
“Will you tell her or shall I?” said Mrs. Ray, pausing for a moment at the cottage gate.
“You had better tell her, mamma.”
“I suppose she won’t set herself against it; will she?”
“I hope not, mamma. I shall think her very ill-natured if she does. But it can’t make any real difference now, you know.”
“No; it can’t make any difference. Only it will be so uncomfortable.”
Then with half-frightened, muffled steps they entered their own house, and joined Mrs. Prime in the sitting-room.
Mrs. Prime was still reading the serious book; but I am bound to say that her mind had not been wholly intent upon it during the long absence of her mother and sister. She had struggled for a time to ignore the slight fact that her companions were away gossiping with the neighbouring farmer’s wife; she had made a hard fight with her book, pinning her eyes down upon the page over and over again, as though in pinning down her eyes she could pin down her mind also. But by degrees the delay became so long that she was tantalized into surmises as to the subject of their conversation. If it were not wicked, why should not she have been allowed to share it? She did not imagine it to be wicked according to the world’s ordinary wickedness;—but she feared that it was wicked according to that tone of morals to which she was desirous of tying her mother down as a bond slave. They were away talking about love and pleasure, and those heart-throbbings in which her sister had so unfortunately been allowed to indulge. She felt all but sure that some tidings of Luke Rowan had been brought in Mrs. Sturt’s budget of news, and she had never been able to think well of Luke Rowan since the evening on which she had seen him standing with Rachel in the churchyard. She knew nothing against him; but she had then made up her mind that he was pernicious, and she could not bring herself to own that she had been wrong in that opinion. She had been loud and defiant in her denunciation when she had first suspected Rachel of having a lover. Since that she had undergone some troubles of her own by which the tone of her remonstrances had been necessarily moderated; but even now she could not forgive her sister such a lover as Luke Rowan. She would have been quite willing to see her sister married, but the lover should have been dingy, black-coated, lugubrious, having about him some true essence of the tears of the valley of tribulation. Alas, her sister’s taste was quite of another kind!
“I’m afraid you will have been thinking that we were never coming back again,” said Mrs. Ray, as she entered the room.
“No, mother, I didn’t think that. But I thought you were staying late with Mrs. Sturt.”
“So we were—and really I didn’t think we had been so long. But, Dorothea, there was someone else over there besides Mrs. Sturt, and he kept us.”
“He! What he?” said Mrs. Prime. She had not even suspected that the lover had been over there in person.
“Mr. Rowan, my dear. He has been at the farm.”
“What! the young man that was dismissed from Mr. Tappitt’s?”
It was ill said of her—very ill said, and so she was herself aware as soon as the words were out of her mouth. But she could not help it. She had taken a side against Luke Rowan, and could not restrain herself from ill-natured words. Rachel was still standing in the middle of the room when she heard her lover thus described; but she would not condescend to
