“I am glad to see you out so early,” he answered, confused.
“This is an exception,” she said, smiling and really looking beautiful. “Goodbye, I have thought over what passed yesterday, and I believe we are more agreed than perhaps I gave you reason to think.”
There was a queenly air of dignified exchange of pardon in her manner of giving her hand and bending her head as she again said “Goodbye,” and signed to her driver to move on.
Lord Keith could only say “Goodbye;” then, looking after her, muttered, “After all, that is a remarkable woman.”
VIII
Woman’s Mission Discovered
“But O unseen for three long years,
Lord of the Isles
Dear was the garb of mountaineers
To the fair maid of Lorn.”
“Only nerves,” said Alison Williams, whenever she was pushed hard as to why her sister continued unwell, and her own looks betrayed an anxiety that her words would not confess. Rachel, after a visit on the first day, was of the same opinion, and prescribed globules and enlivenment; but after a personal administration of the latter in the shape of a discussion of Lord Keith, she never called in the morning without hearing that Miss Williams was not up, nor in the afternoon without Alison’s meeting her, and being very sorry, but really she thought it better for her sister to be quite quiet.
In fact, Alison was not seriously uneasy about Ermine’s health, for these nervous attacks were not without precedent, as the revenge for all excitement of the sensitive mind upon the much-tried constitution. The reaction must pass off in time, and calm and patience would assist in restoring her; but the interview with Lord Keith had been a revelation to her that her affection was not the calm, chastened, mortified, almost dead thing of the past that she had tried to believe it; but a young, living, active feeling, as vivid, and as little able to brook interference as when the first harsh letter from Gowanbrae had fallen like a thunderbolt on the bright hopes of youth. She looked back at some verses that she had written, when first perceiving that life was to be her portion, where her own intended feelings were ascribed to a maiden who had taken the veil, believing her crusader slain, but who saw him return and lead a recluse life, with the light in her cell for his guiding star. She smiled sadly to find how far the imaginings of four and twenty transcended the powers of four and thirty; and how the heart that had deemed itself able to resign was chafed at the appearance of compulsion. She felt that the right was the same as ever; but it was an increased struggle to maintain the resolute abstinence from all that could bind Colin to her, at the moment when he was most likely to be detached, and it was a struggle rendered the more trying by the monotony of a life, scarcely varied except by the brainwork, which she was often obliged to relinquish.
Nothing, however, here assisted her so much as Lady Temple’s new pony carriage which, by Fanny’s desire, had been built low enough to permit of her being easily lifted into it. Inert, and almost afraid of change, Ermine was hard to persuade, but Alison, guessing at the benefit, was against her, and Fanny’s wistful eyes and caressing voice were not to be gainsaid; so she suffered herself to be placed on the broad easy seat, and driven about the lanes, enjoying most intensely the new scenes, the peeps of sea, the distant moors, the cottages with their glowing orchards, the sloping harvest fields, the variety that was an absolute healing to the worn spirits, and moreover, that quiet conversation with Lady Temple, often about the boys, but more often about Colonel Keith.
Not only Ermine, but other inhabitants of Avonmouth found the world more flat in his absence. Rachel’s interest was lessened in her readings after she had lost the pleasure of discussion, and she asked herself many times whether the tedium were indeed from love, or if it were simply from the absence of an agreeable companion. “I will try myself,” she said to herself; “if I am heartily interested in my occupations by the end of the next week, then I shall believe myself my own woman!”
But in going back to her occupations, she was more than ordinarily sensible of their unsatisfactoriness. One change had come over her in the last few months. She did not so much long for a wider field, as for power to do the few things within her reach more thoroughly. Her late discussions had, as it were, opened a second eye, that saw two sides of questions that she had hitherto thought had only one, and she was restless and undecided between them, longing for some impulse from within or without, and hoping, for her own dignity and consistency’s sake, that it was not only Colonel Keith’s presence which had rendered this summer the richest in her life.
A test was coming for her, she thought, in the person of Miss Keith. Judging by the brother, Rachel expected a tall fair dreamy blonde, requiring to be taught a true appreciation of life and its duties, and whether the training of this young girl would again afford her food for eagerness and energy, would, as she said to herself, show whether her affections were still her own. Moreover, there was the great duty of deciding whether the brother were worthy of Fanny!
It chanced to be convenient that Rachel should go to Avoncester on the day of the arrival, and call at the station for the traveller. She recollected how, five months previously, she had there greeted Fanny, and had seen the bearded apparition since regarded, with so much jealousy, and now with such a strangely mixed feeling. This being a far more indifferent errand, she did not go on the platform,
