“What next, I wonder? You meet me in the shrubbery at home, talking over the private theatricals with my old playfellow, whom I knew when I was no taller than this parasol. And that is a glaring impropriety, is it? ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ You wanted an answer a minute ago — there it is for you, my dear, in the choicest Norman-French.”
“I am in earnest about this, Magdalen — ”
“Not a doubt of it. Nobody can accuse you of ever making jokes.”
“I am seriously sorry — ”
“Oh, dear!”
“It is quite useless to interrupt me. I have it on my conscience to tell you — and I will tell you — that I am sorry to see how this intimacy is growing. I am sorry to see a secret understanding established already between you and Mr. Francis Clare.”
“Poor Frank! How you do hate him, to be sure. What on earth has he done to offend you?”
Norah’s self-control began to show signs of failing her. Her dark cheeks glowed, her delicate lips trembled, before she spoke again. Magdalen paid more attention to her parasol than to her sister. She tossed it high in the air and caught it. “Once!” she said — and tossed it up again. “Twice!” — and she tossed it higher. “Thrice — ” Before she could catch it for the third time, Norah seized her passionately by the arm, and the parasol dropped to the ground between them.
“You are treating me heartlessly,” she said. “For shame, Magdalen — for shame!”
The irrepressible outburst of a reserved nature, forced into open self-assertion in its own despite, is of all moral forces the hardest to resist. Magdalen was startled into silence. For a moment, the two sisters — so strangely dissimilar in person and character — faced one another, without a word passing between them. For a moment the deep brown eyes of the elder and the light gray eyes of the younger looked into each other with steady, unyielding scrutiny on either side. Norah’s face was the first to change; Norah’s head was the first to turn away. She dropped her sister’s arm in silence. Magdalen stooped and picked up her parasol.
“I try to keep my temper,” she said, “and you call me heartless for doing it. You always were hard on me, and you always will be.”
Norah clasped her trembling hands fast in each other. “Hard on you!” she said, in low, mournful tones — and sighed bitterly.
Magdalen drew back a little, and mechanically dusted the parasol with the end of her garden cloak.
“Yes!” she resumed, doggedly. “Hard on me and hard on Frank.”
“Frank!” repeated Norah, advancing on her sister and turning pale as suddenly as she had turned red. “Do you talk of yourself and Frank as if your interests were One already? Magdalen! if I hurt you, do I hurt him? Is he so near and so dear to you as that?”
Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the ground. “What right have you to question me?” she broke out on a sudden. “Whether I like Frank, or whether I don’t, what interest is it of yours?” As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her sister and return to the house.
Norah, turning paler and paler, barred the way to her. “If I hold you by main force,” she said, “you shall stop and hear me. I have watched this Francis Clare; I know him better than you do. He is unworthy of a moment’s serious feeling on your part; he is unworthy of our dear, good, kindhearted father’s interest in him. A man with any principle, any honour, any gratitude, would not have come back as he has come back, disgraced — yes! disgraced by his spiritless neglect of his own duty. I watched his face while the friend who has been better than a father to him was comforting and forgiving him with a kindness he had not deserved: I watched his face, and I saw no shame and no distress in it — I saw nothing but a look of thankless, heartless relief. He is selfish, he is ungrateful, he is ungenerous — he is only twenty, and he has the worst failings of a mean old age already. And this is the man I find you meeting in secret — the man who has taken such a place in your favor that you are deaf to the truth about him, even from my lips! Magdalen! this will end ill. For God’s sake, think of what I have said to you, and control yourself before it is too late!” She stopped, vehement and breathless, and caught her sister anxiously by the hand.
Magdalen looked at her in unconcealed astonishment.
“You are so violent,” she said, “and so unlike yourself, that I hardly know you. The more patient I am, the more hard words I get for my pains. You have taken a perverse hatred to Frank; and you are unreasonably angry with me because I won’t hate him, too. Don’t, Norah! you hurt my hand.”
Norah pushed the hand from her contemptuously. “I shall never hurt your heart,” she said; and suddenly turned her back on Magdalen as she spoke the words.
There was a momentary pause. Norah kept her position. Magdalen looked at her perplexedly — hesitated — then walked away by herself toward the house.
At the turn in the shrubbery path she stopped and looked back uneasily. “Oh, dear, dear!” she thought to herself, “why didn’t Frank go when I told him?” She hesitated, and went back a few steps. “There’s Norah standing on her dignity, as obstinate as ever.” She stopped again. “What had I better do? I hate quarreling: I think I’ll make up.” She ventured close to her sister and touched her on the shoulder. Norah never moved. “It’s not often she flies into a passion,” thought Magdalen, touching her again; “but when she does, what a time it lasts her! — Come!” she said, “give me a kiss, Norah, and make it up. Won’t you let me get at any part of you, my dear, but the back of your neck? Well, it’s a very nice neck — it’s better worth kissing than mine — and there the kiss is, in spite of you!”
She caught fast hold of Norah from behind, and suited the action to the word, with a total disregard of all that had just passed, which her sister was far from emulating. Hardly a minute since the warm outpouring of Norah’s heart had burst through all obstacles. Had the icy reserve frozen her up again already! It was hard to say. She never spoke; she never changed her position — she only searched hurriedly for her handkerchief. As she drew it out, there was a sound of approaching footsteps in the inner recesses of the shrubbery. A Scotch terrier scampered into view; and a cheerful voice sang the first lines of the glee in “As You Like It.” “It’s papa!” cried Magdalen. “Come, Norah — come and meet him.”
Instead of following her sister, Norah pulled down the veil of her garden hat, turned in the opposite direction, and hurried back to the house. She ran up to her own room and locked herself in. She was crying bitterly.
Chapter VIII
When Magdalen and her father met in the shrubbery Mr. Vanstone’s face showed plainly that something had happened to please him since he had left home in the morning. He answered the question which his daughter’s curiosity at once addressed to him by informing her that he had just come from Mr. Clare’s cottage; and that he had picked up, in that unpromising locality, a startling piece of news for the family at Combe-Raven.
On entering the philosopher’s study that morning, Mr. Vanstone had found him still dawdling over his late breakfast, with an open letter by his side, in place of the book which, on other occasions, lay ready to his hand at meal-times. He held up the letter the moment his visitor came into the room, and abruptly opened the conversation by asking Mr. Vanstone if his nerves were in good order, and if he felt himself strong enough for the shock of an overwhelming surprise.
“Nerves!” repeated Mr. Vanstone. “Thank God, I know nothing about my nerves. If you have got anything to tell me, shock or no shock, out with it on the spot.”
Mr. Clare held the letter a little higher, and frowned at