“No, Dulcibella, indeed,” said Alice, smiling, very pale, and her eyes filled up with tears.
“I’ll frighten her no more; and that you may be sure on; and if what I told her be frightful, ’tisn’t me as made it so. Thankless work it be; but ’tisn’t her nor you I sought to please, but just to take it off my shoulders, and leave her none to blame but herself if she turns a deaf ear. It’s ill offering counsel to a wilful lass. Ye’ll excuse me, ma’am, for speaking so plain, but better now than too late,” she added, recollecting herself a little. “And can I do anything, please, ma’am, below stairs? I should be going, for who knows what that child may be a-doing all this time?”
“Thanks, very much; no, not anything,” said Alice.
And Mildred Tarnley, with a hard, dark glance at her, dropped another stiff little courtesy, and withdrew.
“Well, I never see such a one as that,” said old Dulcibella, gazing after her, as it were through the panel of the door. “You must not let her talk that way to you, my darling. She’s no business to talk up to her mistress that way. I don’t know what sort o’ manners people has in these here out o’ the way places, I’m sure; but I think ye’ll do well, my dear, to keep that one at arm’s length, and make her know her place. Nothing else but encroaching and impudence, and domineering from such as her, and no thanks for any condescension, only the more affable you’ll be, the more saucy and conceited she’ll grow, and I don’t think she likes you, Miss Alice, no more I do.”
It pains young people, and some persons always, to hear from an impartial observer such a conclusion. There is much mortification, and often some alarm.
“Well, it doesn’t much matter,” said Alice. “I don’t think she can harm me much. I don’t suppose she would if she could, and I don’t mind such stories.”
“Why should you, my dear? No one minds the like nowadays.”
“But I wish she liked me; there are so few of us here. It is such a little world, and I have never done anything to vex her. I can’t think what good it can do her hating me.”
“No good, dear; but she’s bin here so long—the only hen in the house, and she doesn’t like to be drove off the roost, I suppose; and I don’t know why she told you all that, if it wasn’t to make your mind uneasy; and, dear knows, there’s enough to trouble it in this moping place without her riggamarolin’ sich a yarn.”
“Hush, Dulcibella; isn’t that a horse? Perhaps Charles is coming home.”
She opened the window, which commanded a view of the stable-yard.
“And is he gone a-riding?” asked old Dulcibella.
“No; there’s nothing,” said Alice, gently. “Besides, you remind me he did not take a horse; he only walked a little way with Mr. Henry; and he’ll soon be back. Nothing is going wrong, I hope.”
And, with a weary sigh, she threw herself into a great chair by the fire; and thought, and listened, and dreamed away a long time, before Charlie’s step and voice were heard again in the old house.
XVIII
The Brothers’ Walk
When the host and his guest had gone out together, to the paved yard, it was already night, and the moon was shining brilliantly.
Tom had saddled the horse, and at the first summons led him out; and Harry, with a nod and a grin, for he was more prodigal of his smiles than of his shillings, took the bridle from his fingers, and with Charlie by his side, walked forth silently from the yard gate, upon that dark and rude track which followed for some distance the precipitous edge of the ravine which opens upon the deeper glen of Carwell.
Very dark was this narrow road, overhung and crossed by towering trees, through whose boughs only here and there an angular gleam or minute mottling of moonlight hovered and floated on the white and stony road, with the uneasy motion of the branches, like little flights of quivering wings.
There was a silence corresponding with this darkness. The clank of the horse’s hoof, and their own more muffled tread were the only sounds that mingled with the sigh and rustle of the boughs above them. The one was expecting, the other meditating, no very pleasant topic, and it was not the business of either to begin, for a little.
They were not walking fast. The horse seemed to feel that the human wayfarers were in a sauntering mood, and fell accommodatingly into a lounging gait like theirs.
If there were eyes there constructed to see in the dark, they would have seen two countenances, one sincere, the other adjusted to that sort of sham sympathy and regret which Hogarth, with all his delicacy and power, portrays in the paternal alderman who figures in the last picture of Marriage à la Mode.
There was much anxiety in Charles’ face, and a certain brooding shame and constraint which would have accounted for his silence. In that jolly dog, Harry, was discoverable, as I have said, quite another light and form of countenance. There was a face that seemed to have discharged a smile, that still would not quite go. The eyelids drooped, the eyebrows raised, a simulated condolence, such as we all have seen.
In our moral reviews of ourselves we practise optical delusions even upon our own self-scrutiny, and paint and mask our motives, and fill our ears with excuses and with downright lies. So inveterate is the habit of deceiving, and even in the dark we form our features by hypocrisy, and scarcely know all
