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Page 75
Charlotte spoke first. "What is to be done, mother? I cannot see you
insulted, meal after meal, in this way. Let us go at once. I have told
you it would come to this. We ought to have moved immediately,--just as
soon as Julius came here as master."
"My house in the village has been empty for three years. It is cold and
damp. It needs attention of every kind. If we could only stay here until
Stephen's house was finished: then you could be married."
"O mother dear, that is not possible! You know Steve and I cannot marry
until father has been dead at least a year. It would be an insult to
father to have a wedding in his mourning year."
"If your father knows any thing, Charlotte, he knows the trouble we are
in. He would count it no insult."
"But all through the Dales it would be a shame to us. Steve and I would
not like to begin life with the ill words or ill thoughts of our
neighbors."
"What shall I do? Charlotte, dear, what shall I do?"
"Let us go to our own home. Better to brave a little damp and discomfort
than constant humiliation."
"This is my home, my own dear home! It is full of memories of your
father and Harry."
"O mother, I should think you would want to forget Harry!"
"No, no, no! I want to remember him every hour of the day and night. How
could I pray for him, if I forgot him? Little you know how a mother
loves, Charlotte. His father forgave him: shall I be less pitiful?--I,
who nursed him at my breast, and carried him in my arms."
Charlotte did not answer. She was touched by her mother's fidelity, and
she found in her own heart a feeling much akin to it. Their conversation
reverted to their unhappy position, and to the difficulty of making an
immediate change. For not only was the dower-house in an untenantable
state, but the weather was very much against them. The gray weather, the
gloomy sky, the monotonous rains, the melting snow, the spiteful east
wind,--by all this enmity of the elements, as well as by the enmity in
the household, the poor bereaved lady was saddened and controlled.
The wretched conversation was followed by a most unhappy silence. Both
hearts were brooding over their slights and wrongs. Day by day
Charlotte's life had grown harder to bear. Sophia's little flaunts and
dissents, her astonishments and corrections, were almost as cruel as the
open hatred of Julius, his silence, his lowering brows, and insolence
of proprietorship. To these things she had to add the intangible
contempt of servants, and the feeling of constraint in the house where
she had been the beloved child and the one in authority. Also she found
the insolence which Stephen had to brave every time he called upon her
just as difficult to bear as were her own peculiar slights. Julius had
ceased to recognize him, had ceased to speak of him except as "that
person." Every visit he made Charlotte was the occasion of some petty
impertinence, some unmistakable assurance that his presence was
offensive to the master of Seat-Sandal.
All these things troubled the mother also, but her bitterest pang was
the cruelty of Sophia. A slow, silent process of alienation had been
going on in the girl ever since her engagement to Julius: it had first
touched her thoughts, then her feelings; now its blighting influence had
deteriorated her whole nature. And in her mother's heart there were sad
echoes of that bitter cry that comes down from age to age, "Oh, my son
Absalom, Absalom! My son, my son!"
"O Sophia! oh, my child, my child! How can you treat me so? What have I
done?" She was murmuring such words to herself when the door was opened,
and Sophia entered. It was characteristic of the woman that she did not
knock ere entering. She had always jealously guarded her rights to the
solitude of her own room; and, even when she was a school-girl, it had
been an understood household regulation that no one was to enter it
without knocking. But now that she was mistress of all the rooms in
Seat-Sandal, she ignored the simple courtesy towards others.
Consequently, when she entered, she saw the tears in her mother's eyes.
They only angered her. "Why should the sorrows of others darken her
happy home?" Sophia was one of those women whom long regrets fatigue. As
for her father, she reflected, "that he had been well nursed, decorously
buried, and that every propriety had been attended to. It was, in her
opinion, high time that the living--Julius and herself--should be
thought of." The stated events of life--its regular meals, its trivial
pleasures--had quite filled any void in her existence made by her
father's death. If he had come back to earth, if some one had said to
her, "He is here," she would have been far more embarrassed than
delighted. The worldly advantages built upon the extinction of a great
love! Sophia could contemplate them without a blush.
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