“Not a bit,” said the Doctor; “and you are as welcome home as flowers in May: the first time I have said that to you, my boy, but it won’t be the last. Miss Clare, my sister would be pleased if you told her of Edgar’s return. She will have to be prepared, and got up, and all sorts of things, to see him; but, if you were to tell her, she would think it kind. Ah, here’s the chocolate. Of course in this house everything must give place to that.”
“I will go over to Miss Somers for ten minutes,” said Clare, “thank you, Doctor, for reminding me; and, dear Mr. Fielding, don’t let Edgar go till I come back.”
“I should like to go too,” said Edgar. “No? Well, I won’t then; but tell Miss Somers I will come to-morrow, Clare. Tell her I have brought her something from Constantinople; and have never forgotten how kind she used to be—how kind you all were!” And the young man turned round upon them—“It is a strange sensation coming back and feeling myself at home among the faces I have known all my life. And thank you all for being so good to Clare.”
Clare was going out as he spoke, with a certain shade of reluctance and even of pride. She had been told to go, and she did not like it; it had been implied that she had forgotten a duty of neighbourship, and to Miss Somers, too, who could not move about, and ascertain things for herself; and Clare did not like to be reminded of her duties. She turned round, however, at the door, and looked back, and smiled her acknowledgment of what her brother said. These two old men had been very kind to her. They had done everything that the most attached old friends could do at the time of her father’s death. That was a whole year ago; for old Squire Arden had made a stipulation that his son was not to come back, nor enter upon the possession of his right, till he was five-and-twenty—a stipulation which, of course, counted for nothing in the eye of the law, but was binding on Edgar, much as he longed to be at his sister’s side. Thus, his father oppressed him down to the very edge of his grave. And poor Clare would have been very forlorn in the great house but for her old friends. Miss Somers, who was not then so great an invalid, had gone to the Hall, to be with the girl during that time of seclusion, and she had been as a child to all of them. A compunction smote Clare as she turned and looked round from the door, and she kissed her hand to them with a pretty gesture. But still it was with rather an ill grace that she went to Miss Somers, which was not her own impulse. Compulsion fretted the Arden soul.
“I brought Clare into the world, and Fielding has been her head nurse all his life,” said the Doctor, “no need for thanking us on that score. And now all’s yours, Edgar. I may say, and I’m sure Fielding will say, how thankful we both are to see you. You could not have been altogether disinherited, as the property’s entailed; but I never was easy in my mind about it during your father’s lifetime. The old Squire was a very peculiar man; and there was no telling–”
“Doctor,” said the young man, once more with a flush on his cheek, “would you mind leaving out my father’s name in anything that has to be said?—unless, indeed, he left any message for me. He liked Clare best, which was not wonderful, and he thought me a poor representative of the Ardens, which was natural enough. I have not a word to say against him. On the whole, perhaps, I have got as much good of my life as if I had been brought up in England. I have never been allowed to forget hitherto that my father did not care for me—let me forget it now.”
“Exactly,” said the Doctor, looking at him with a certain curious complacency; and he gave a nod at Mr. Fielding, who stood winking to get rid of a tear which was in the corner of his eye. “Exactly what I said! Now, can you deny it? By Jove! I wish he had been my son! It is what I knew he would say.”
“Edgar, my dear boy,” said the Rector, “every word does you credit, and this more than all. Your poor father was mistaken. I say your poor father, for he evidently had something on his mind just before he died, and would have spoken if time had been allowed him. I have no doubt it was to say how sorry he was. But the Ardens are dreadfully obstinate, Edgar, and he never could bring himself to do it. It is just like you to say this. Clare will appreciate it, and I most fully appreciate it. It is the best way; let us not dwell upon the past, let us not even try to explain. Your being like your mother’s family can never be anything against you—far from it. I agree in every word you say.”
This speech, flattering and satisfactory as it was, took the young man a little by surprise. “I don’t know what being like my mother’s family has to do with it,” he said, with momentary petulance; but then his brighter spirits gained the mastery. “It is best never to explain anything,” he continued, with a smile. “There is Clare calling me. I suppose I am to go to Miss Somers, notwithstanding your defence, Doctor.” And he waved his hand to Clare from the window, and went out, leaving the two old men behind him, following him with their eyes. He was glad to get away, if truth must be told; they were fighting some sort of undisclosed duel over his body, Edgar could see, and he did not like it. He went across the village street, which was very quiet at that end, to the Doctor’s great red brick house, and as he did so his face clouded over a little. “They have got some theory about me,” he said to himself; “am I never to be rid of it? And what right has any one to discuss me and my affairs now?” Then the shade gradually disappeared from his face, and in spite of himself there glided across his mind a sudden comparison between the last time he had been at Arden and the present. Then he had a boy’s keen sense of injustice and unkindness eating into him. It had not cut so deeply as it might have done if his temperament had been gloomy; but still it had galled him. He had felt himself contemned, disliked, thrust aside—his presence half clandestine—his wishes made of no account—his whole being thrust into a corner—a thing to hide, or at least to apologise for. Now, he was the master of all. The bells had rung for his home-coming; everything was changed. The thought made his head swim as he walked along in the serene stillness, with the swallows making circles about, and the bees murmuring round the blossomed trees. He had been living an uncertain wandering life, not always well supplied with money, not trained to do anything, an innocent vagabond. Now there was not a corner of his life upon which some one interest or another did not lay a claim. He had the gravest occupations on his hands. He might make for himself a position of high influence and importance in his county; and could scarcely be insignificant if he tried. And all this had come to him without any training for it. His very habits of mind were not English; even in the midst of these serious thoughts the village green, which was at his left hand, beyond the Church and the Rectory, caught his eye, and a momentary speculation came across him, whether the village people danced there on Sundays? whether the fairs were held there, or the tombola, or something to represent them? and then he stopped and laughed at himself. What would Mr. Fielding say? Thus Edgar had come to be Squire Arden without even the habit of being an Englishman. The sense of injustice which had weighed upon him all his life might have embittered his beginning now, had his mind been less elastic. But nature had been so good to him that he was able to toss these dreary thoughts aside, as he would have tossed a ball, before he went in to see Miss Somers. “Things will come right somehow,” he said to himself. Such was his light-hearted philosophy; while Clare stood grave and silent at the door to meet him, with a seriousness which would have been more in accordance with his difficulties than with hers. What troubled her was the question—Would he be a radical, and introduce innovations, ignore the mightiness of his family, conduct himself as if his name were anything else than Arden? This sufficed to plant the intensest seriousness, with almost a cast of severity in it, upon the brow of Clare.
“Didn’t I tell you exactly how it would happen?” said the Doctor, when Edgar was gone; “no sentiment to