But before the week was over, Mrs. Clavering—for we will still call her so—had broken Lady Ongar’s spirit by her kindness; and the poor woman who had so much to bear had brought herself to speak of the weight of her burden. Julia had, on one occasion, called her Lady Clavering, and for the moment this had been allowed to pass without observation. The widowed lady was then present, and no notice of the name was possible. But soon afterwards Mrs. Clavering made her little request on the subject. “I do not quite know what the custom may be,” she said, “but do not call me so just yet. It will only be reminding Hermy of her bereavement.”
“She is thinking of it always,” said Julia.
“No doubt she is; but still the new name would wound her. And, indeed, it perplexes me also. Let it come by-and-by, when we are more settled.”
Lady Ongar had truly said that her sister was as yet always thinking of her bereavement. To her now it was as though the husband she had lost had been a paragon among men. She could only remember of him his manliness, his power—a dignity of presence which he possessed—and the fact that to her he had been everything. She thought of that last and vain caution which she had given him, when with her hardly permitted last embrace she had besought him to take care of himself. She did not remember now how coldly that embrace had been received, how completely those words had been taken as meaning nothing, how he had left her not only without a sign of affection, but without an attempt to repress the evidences of his indifference. But she did remember that she had had her arm upon his shoulder, and tried to think of that embrace as though it had been sweet to her. And she did remember how she had stood at the window, listening to the sounds of the wheels which took him off, and watching his form as long as her eye could rest upon it. Ah! what falsehoods she told herself now of her love to him, and of his goodness to her; pious falsehoods which would surely tend to bring some comfort to her wounded spirit.
But her sister could hardly bear to hear the praises of Sir Hugh. When she found how it was to be, she resolved that she would bear them—bear them, and not contradict them; but her struggle in doing so was great, and was almost too much for her.
“He had judged me and condemned me,” she said at last, “and therefore, as a matter of course, we were not such friends when we last met as we used to be before my marriage.”
“But, Julia, there was much for which you owed him gratitude.”
“We will say nothing about that now, Hermy.”
“I do not know why your mouth should be closed on such a subject because he has gone. I should have thought that you would be glad to acknowledge his kindness to you. But you were always hard.”
“Perhaps I am hard.”
“And twice he asked you to come here since you returned—but you would not come.”
“I have come now, Hermy, when I have thought that I might be of use.”
“He felt it when you would not come before. I know he did.” Lady Ongar could not but think of the way in which he had manifested his feelings on the occasion of his visit to Bolton Street. “I never could understand why you were so bitter.”
“I think, dear, we had better not discuss that. I also have had much to bear—I, as well as you. What you have borne has come in no wise from your own fault.”
“No, indeed; I did not want him to go. I would have given anything to keep him at home.”
Her sister had not been thinking of the suffering which had come to her from the loss of her husband, but of her former miseries. This, however, she did not explain. “No,” Lady Ongar continued to say. “You have nothing for which to blame yourself, whereas I have much—indeed everything. If we are to remain together, as I hope we may, it will be better for us both that bygones should be bygones.”
“Do you mean that I am never to speak of Hugh?”
“No;—I by no means intend that. But I would rather that you should not refer to his feelings towards me. I think he did not quite understand the sort of life that I led while my husband was alive, and that he judged me amiss. Therefore I would have bygones be bygones.”
Three or four days after this, when the question of leaving Clavering Park was being mooted, the elder sister started a difficulty as to money matters. An offer had been made to her by Mrs. Clavering to remain at the great house, but this she had declined, alleging that the place would be distasteful to her after her husband’s death. She, poor soul, did not allege that it had been made distasteful to her forever by the solitude which she had endured there during her husband’s lifetime! She would go away somewhere, and live as best she might upon her jointure. It was not very much, but it would be sufficient. She did not see, she said, how she could live with her sister, because she did not wish to be dependent. Julia, of course, would live in a style to which she could make no pretence.
Mrs. Clavering, who was present—as was also Lady Ongar—declared that she saw no such difficulty. “Sisters together,” she said, “need hardly think of a difference in such matters.”
Then it was that Lady Ongar first spoke to either of them of her half-formed resolution about her money, and then too, for the first time, did she come down altogether from that high horse on which she had been, as it were, compelled to mount herself while in
