The Solitary House (22 page)

I remember everything about that day—the weather, the circumstances, exactly where I was, and what I was doing. I even remember the little paisley shawl I had gone to fetch for Clara from my own room. We had been sitting together working, and I observed that her fingers were blue, even though the fire was lit and burning brightly. I was returning with the shawl and had my hand on the door, when I heard the key turn in the lock on the other side. I was concerned at once, for never, in all our time together, had either of us ever fastened our doors against each other. I called to Clara at once to let me in. My apprehension was only augmented when I received a reply not from my darling, but from Miss Darby.

“Not now, Hester,” she called. “There’s nothing the matter; I will come to you presently. You will be with Miss Clara soon.”

But it was long, very long before my darling pet and I were to see each other again.

Within a few short hours Clara had become very ill. Miss Darby moved her to a chamber upstairs, on the other side of the house,
and though I begged on my knees to be allowed to nurse her, my Guardian would not even permit me to enter her room, saying I might catch the contagion of her disease. So I wrote her a letter telling her that I loved her, and Rick loved her, and she had to get well for both our sakes. But despite all this, my poor darling grew worse and worse, and for many days we almost despaired that she would ever recover. How much I reproached myself then for not taking more care of my darling! How much I would have given to have taken her place, and restored her to the sunlight, and the sweet dreams of happy love!

My only comfort was my Guardian’s tenderness and affection, which never failed, all that terrible time. Never had he been more protective of me or more assiduous of my comfort; never had I needed his care and kindness more. He would sit with me, and hold my hand, and I would cling to him as he kissed and consoled me. Nor was this the only instance of my Guardian’s love, at this time, and I should not let it pass without gratitude and recognition. One evening, while Clara was still very ill, there came a gentle knock at my door. I said, “Come in!” and there on the threshold was a pretty girl, dressed in a starched white cap and grey dress.

“If you please, Miss Hester,” said the girl, “I am Carley.”

“And what brings you here so late, Carley?” said I, in some surprise.

“If you please, miss,” she replied, “I’m to attend you, at your Guardian’s request.”

I put my hand to my heart, it beat so fast, so overcome was I by this new instance of his solicitude for me.

“There’s no need to cry, miss,” said Carley, helping me to my chair.

“I can’t help it, Carley.”

“All will be well now,” she said with a smile, and patting my hand. “You will soon recover your strength, and before you know it, you will be able to join Miss Clara once again.”

She smoothed my hair, then set about her functions, going about
the room putting things to rights, and finally she folded my camisole and took it away.

You will wonder how I occupied my days, all the time that poor Clara was away from me. I had my duties, of course, and all the little tasks I took on to make myself useful about the house; indeed I re-doubled my efforts, in an attempt to distract my thoughts and alleviate—in my own small way—the burden Clara’s illness placed on the maids. Likewise I would often see Miss Flint in the garden. Soon after Clara fell ill Mr Jarvis encouraged me to seek her out and talk to her. He knew I had always done my best to humour her poor distracted mind, and I think he hoped that in doing so now I might be brought to think less of my own sorrows, and gain a juster appreciation of all the blessings I still possessed. The first time Miss Flint saw me walking alone, without my pet, she came running towards me, her bonnet and shawl all awry, crying aloud in the utmost distress, “Oh my dear Miss Hester, what sad news!”

I do not know if she wept more or if I did, but I do know that she soon had to put her hand in her little reticule and search among the paper matches and dry lavender for a pocket-handkerchief, and I had to take out my own. I led her to a little bench, where she sat holding the cloth to her eyes with both hands, shedding tears.

“Be so good as to let me have my cry out, my dear,” she said. “I am a little rambling today, I fear, but if you will forgive me and not mind my tears, then I will be quite recovered presently.”

So I let Miss Flint cry, and I let myself cry, and it did us both good.

In a little while I composed myself and attempted to lead Miss Flint to talk a little about her own history, and how she came to be with us, which would, I thought, quiet her mind and draw her from sad thoughts. But I was much mistaken. She immediately became quite distressed, and looked about her in the most pitiful way.

“Oh I must not talk of that! Do not press me, my dear!”

I seized her agitated hands and held them fast in my own, doing my best to soothe her, saying I would never have raised the subject had I known the effect it would have. But she became ever more fretful, and I began to wonder whether my darling was not right when she pronounced Miss Flint to be a little mad. It happened to be at that moment that I perceived Miss Darby wheeling Augusta towards us down the gravel path, at which sight poor Miss Flint became quite irrationally distraught, and seizing her little reticule, quite ran away. I worried very much about this for some hours and spoke to Mr Jarvis about it that very evening, but he assured me that the poor thing was often given to such sudden and absurd flights of fancy, and would be quite her old self when next I saw her, and would probably have no recollection of the incident at all. And so, to my immense relief, it proved.

I also, of course, found myself spending rather more time than I usually did with the other girls during my darling’s illness. My pretty room had become a source of pain to me; I could not bear to sit there on my own in the evenings, thinking of what Clara and I would have been doing together at that moment if she were there. So when my Guardian was not with me, I would sit in the drawing-room with Caroline and Augusta and the others, with good Miss Darby in attendance. Caroline was not nearly as reserved as she had been when I first arrived; indeed Miss Darby told me she had made considerable progress, and could nowadays often be permitted to sew by herself and cut out her own work. Miss Darby was good enough to ascribe much of this encouraging improvement to my own influence, but I am sure that very little of it was due to anything I had done. At first Amy was not supposed to know (and indeed did not know) why Clara was not among us, but as the days lengthened to weeks she was eventually told what the matter was. She was always such a sprightly child, and I suppose it was unreasonable
of me to expect such news to dampen her girlish chatter, or quiet her constant skipping about. It is as well that we hardly saw Rick during all that dreadful time—I imagine he was as anxious about Clara as I was—I am sure of that!—but Mr Jarvis told us he had a great deal of study to do and had no time to devote to anything else. Little time, as I said, for conversing with us and I cannot say I am sorry. Not for my own sake—oh no!—but because one might almost have thought Amy saw Clara’s illness as an opportunity to ingratiate herself with him. I know there was nothing in it—that it was only Amy’s way—but she became rather insistently vivacious; one might almost have said flirtatious, if that were not such an incongruous, not to say unpleasant, idea.

It seemed many sad weeks before they finally told me that all my desperate prayers had been answered, and God had spared my darling. She was still very ill, still very weak, but she would live, and she would—at last—be restored to my side.

Then it was several long slow days more before they finally let my pet come and stand behind the window-curtain and talk to me where I stood in the garden, looking up towards her blinded casement, and loving her beautiful voice even more than when I used to hear it every day, and there was not a minute of the hour when we were not together.

And then at last there was that longed-for afternoon when I was finally allowed to go upstairs and see my dear girl, sitting up in bed for the first time, and propped by soft pillows. She looked well, my Clara, but not, perhaps, as lovely as she once was. There were hollows now beneath her pretty eyes, and a thinness to her pale cheeks. I had hoped that we would return to our old ways and our usual confidential manner, but as her strength slowly returned, I began to notice a change in my darling. I cannot say what it was that first
made me think of this, and even now I find it hard to lay my finger on this word, or that gesture, but sure I was all the same, that what Clara had suffered had altered her in some way I could not define. She loved me as much as she ever did, I knew that, but there was a secret sorrow about her now, which she did not speak of. And one day, when I stole to her room and found her sleeping, it seemed to me as I watched her that even her always beautiful face—that face I knew and loved so well—was different now in some strange new way, and not the same as once it was.

FOURTEEN

Springing a Mine

Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think about him at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration of his happiness to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to thinking, as they broke and changed, of the principal vicissitudes and separations that had marked my life. I had not seen a coal fire, since I had left England three years ago: though many a wood fire had I watched, as it crumbled into hoary ashes, and mingled with the feathery heap upon the hearth, which not inaptly figured to me, in my despondency, my own dead hopes. I could think of the past now, gravely, but not bitterly; and could contemplate the future in a brave spirit. Home, in its best sense, was for me no more. She in whom I might have inspired a dearer love, I had taught to be my sister. She would marry, and would have new claimants on her tenderness; and in doing it, would never know the love for her that had grown up in my heart. It was right that I should pay the forfeit of my headlong passion. What I reaped, I had sown
.

“F
OR HEAVEN
’
S SAKE
, let me hear no more of this sentimental claptrap! Can you not find something decent to read in that great stock of books of yours?”

Maddox aims a swipe of his walking-stick at his great-nephew’s ankle, which very nearly meets its mark. He is lucid today, if a trifle cantankerous; Charles’s idea of reading
David Copperfield
to him started auspiciously enough but as time has gone by Maddox has become increasingly restless, first muttering occasionally under his breath, and now breaking out in open rebellion.

“Don’t you like Dickens, Uncle?” says Charles. “They were queuing at the bookseller’s for this last instalment—I very nearly didn’t get one. Everybody wants to know if there’s going to be a happy ending.”

Maddox snorts and looks at him with undisguised contempt. “Life rarely provides what you so tritely term a ‘happy ending’, and certainly not in the mawkish fashion to which this fellow seems so attached.”

“What would you prefer? I think I have a Miss Austen somewhere.”

Maddox sniffs. “At least that woman could write decent prose, which is more than I can say for this hack of yours.”

Another swing of the stick, which this time succeeds in knocking the pages out of Charles’s hands.

“Though even
she
seemed to consider a wedding an ending, rather than a beginning. It is usually quite the opposite way around, in my opinion. And in my experience.”

Charles frowns. “I didn’t think you ever—”

“No, no, of course not,” Maddox snaps, “I was not talking about
myself
—I was referring to the observations I have made of other people. Marriage is at best a hazard, my boy; at worst, a snare from which there is no relief, and no escaping. So you mind my words, next time you find yourself following a well-cut spencer down the Strand.”

It’s doubtful any woman has worn such an out-moded article these last twenty years, but Charles knows what he means. The next moment
Maddox is wiping his hand clumsily across his eyes, and banging his cane heavily on the wooden floor.

“Where is that wretched girl? It must be well past noon. What’s got into her lately?”

Charles gets to his feet, feeling more than a little responsible; he’s been trying not to notice, but Molly has become uncharacteristically unreliable ever since the incident in the attic. “I’ll go and see what’s keeping her.”

Down in the kitchen the delay is quickly explained. The air is full of steam and there’s a tray overturned on the table, and something leaking from under it that looks suspiciously like Maddox’s lunch. Molly is doing her best to clear up the mess, while Billy is standing nervously in the corner of the room, looking red-faced and awkward.

“What’s going on here?” says Charles quickly, addressing himself—ridiculously, in the circumstances—to the girl.

Molly looks up quickly, then resumes her scrubbing. He can see the tension in her pale rigid knuckles. He turns to Billy. “What happened? Come on—out with it—I haven’t got all day.”