Christian's Mistake Part 15

"Evidence," repeated Dr. Grey. "You have my wife's word, and my daughter's."

"Your daughter is the most arrant little liar I ever knew!"

The poor father shrank back. Perhaps he knew, by sad experience, that Aunt Henrietta's condemnation was not altogether without foundation.

His look expressed such unutterable pain that Christian came forward and spoke out strongly, almost angrily.

"It is fear that makes a liar, even as harshness and injustice create deceit and underhandedness. Love a child and trust it, and if it does wrong, punish it neither cruelly nor unfairly, and it will never tell falsehoods.

t.i.tia will not--she shall not, as long as I am alive to keep her to the truth."

Dr. Grey looked fondly at his wile's young, glowing face and even Miss Gascoigne, the hard, worldly woman, viewing all things in her narrow, worldly way, was silenced for the time. Then she began again, pouring out a torrent of explanations and self-exculpations, which soon resolved themselves into the simple question, What was to be done? There--she ended.

"Don't ask me to do any thing. I will not. I wash my hands of the whole matter. If the story be true, and Miss Bennett can be guilty of conduct so indecorous, it would never do for me to be mixed up in such an improper proceeding and if untrue, and I accused her of it, I should find myself in a very unpleasant position. So, Mrs. Grey, since you have interfered in this matter, you must carry it out on your own responsibility. If you have taken a grudge against Miss Bennett--which I did not expect, considering your own antecedents--you must just do as you like concerning her. But, bless me! how the evening is slipping by.

Come, Maria, I shall hardly have time to dress for the vice chancellor's."

So saying, Miss Gascoigne swept away, her silk skirts flowing behind her. Aunt Maria followed with one pathetic glance at "dear Arnold;"

and the husband and wife were left alone.

Dr. Grey threw himself into his arm-chair, and there came across his face the weary look, which Christian had of late learned to notice, indicating that he was no more a young man, and that his life had been longer in trials than even in years.

"My dear, I wish you women-kind could settle these domestic troubles among yourselves. We men have so many outside worries to contend with. It is rather hard."

It was hard. Christian reproached herself almost as if she had been the primary cause of this, the first complaint she had ever heard him make, and which he seemed immediately to regret having allowed to escape him.

"I don't mean, my dear wife, that you should not have told me this; indeed, it was impossible to keep it from me. It all springs from Aunt Henrietta. I wish she--But she is Aunt Henrietta, and we must just make the best of her, as I have done for nearly twenty years."

"And why did you?" rose irrepressibly to Christian's lips. The sense of wild resistance to injustice and wrong, so strong in youth, was still not beaten down. It roused in her something very like fierceness--these gentle creatures can be fierce sometimes--to see a good man like Dr.

Grey trodden down and domineered over by this narrow-minded, bad- tempered woman. "I often wonder at your patience, and at all you forgive."

"Seventy times seven," was the quick answer. And Christian became silenced and grave. "Still," he added, smiling, "a sin against one's self does not include a sin against another. The next time Henrietta speaks as she spoke to you just now, she and I will have a very serious quarrel."

"Oh no, no! Not for my sake. I had rather die than bring dissension into this house."

"My poor child, people can not die so easily. They have to live on and endure. But what were we talking about; for I forget: I believe I do forget things sometimes;" and he pa.s.sed his hand over his forehead. "I am not so young as you, my dear; and, though my life has looked smooth enough outside; there has been a good deal of trouble in it. In truth,"--he added, "I have had some vexatious things perplexing me today, which must excuse my being so dull and disagreeable."

"Disagreeable!" echoed Christian, with a little forced sort of laugh, adding, in a strange, soft shyness, "I wish you would tell me what those vexatious things were. I know I am young, and foolish enough too; still, if I could help you--"

"Help me!" He looked at her eagerly, then shook his head and sighed.

"No, my child, you can not help me. It is other people's business, which I am afraid I have no right to tell even to you. It is only that a person has come back to Avonsbridge, who, if I could suppose I had an enemy in the world--But here I am telling you."

"Never mind, you shall tell me no more," said Christian, cheerily, "especially as I do not believe that in the wide world you could have an enemy. And now give me your opinion as to this matter of Miss Bennett?"

"First, what is yours?"

Christian pondered a little. "It seems to me that the only thing is for me to speak to her myself, quite openly and plainly, when she comes tomorrow."

"And then dismiss her?"

"I fear so."

"For having a lover?" said Dr. Grey, with an amused twinkle in his eye.

"Not exactly, but for telling t.i.tia about it, and making use of the child for her own selfish needs. Do you consider me hard? Well, it is because I know what this ends in. Miss Gascoigne does not see it, but I do. She only thinks of 'propriety.' I think of something far deeper--a girl's first notions about those sort of things. It is cruel to meddle with them before their time--to take the bloom off the peach and the scent off the rose; to put worldliness instead of innocence, and conceited folly instead of simple, solemn, awful love. I would rather die, even now--you will think I am always ready for dying--but I would rather die than live to think and feel about love like some women--ay, and not bad women either, whom I have known."

Mrs. Grey had gone on, hardly considering what she was saying or to what it referred, till she was startled to feel fixed upon her her husband's earnest eyes.

"You need not be afraid," said he smiling. "Christian, shall I tell you a little secret? Do you know why I loved you? Because you are unlike all other women--because you bring hack to me the dreams of my youth. And here," suddenly rising, as if he feared he had said too much, "we must put dreams aside, and arguments likewise, for Aunt Henrietta will never forgive us if we are late at this terrible evening party."

Chapter 8.

_"Down, pale ghost!

What doest thou here?

The sky is cloudless overhead, The stream runs clear._

_"I drowned thee, ghost, In a river of bitter brine: With whatever face thou risest up, Meet thou not mine!_

_"Back, poor ghost!

Dead of thy own decay Let the dead bury their dead!

I go my way."_

While she was dressing for it, the evening party ceased to be terrible even in Christian's imagination. She kept thinking over and over the talk she had had with Dr. Grey; what he had said, and what she had said, of which she was a little ashamed that her impetuous impulse had faded. Yet why? Why should she not speak out her heart to her own husband? It began to be less difficult to do; for, though he did not answer much, he never misunderstood her, never responded with those sharp, cold, altogether wide-of-the-mark observations which, in talking with Miss Gascoigne or Miss Grey, made her feel that they and she looked at things from points of view as opposite as the poles.

"They can't help that; neither, I am sure, can I," she often thought.

And yet how, thus diverse, they should all live under the same roof together for months and years to come, was more than Christian could conceive.

Besides, now, she had at times a new feeling--a wish to have her husband all to herself. She ceased to need the "shadowy third"--the invisible barricade against total dual solitude made by aunts or children.

She would have been glad sometimes to send them all away, and spend a quiet evening hour, such as the last one, alone with Dr. Grey. It was so pleasant to talk to him--so comfortable. The comfort of it lasted in her heart all through her elaborate dressing, which was rather more weariness to her than to most young women of her age.

Let.i.tia a.s.sisted thereat--poor t.i.tia who, being sent for, had crept down to her step-mother's room, very humble and frightened, and received a few tender, serious words--not many, for the white face was sodden with crying, and there was a sullen look upon it which not all Christian's gentleness could chase away. Phillis had discovered her absence, and had punished her; not with whipping, that was forbidden, but with some of the innumerable nursery tyrannies which Phillis called government. And t.i.tia evidently thought, with the suspiciousness of all weak, cowed creatures, that Mrs. Grey must have had some hand in it--that she had broken her promise, and betrayed her to this punishment.

She stood aloof, poor little girl, tacitly doing as she was bidden, and acquiescing in every thing, with her thin lips pressed into that hopeless line, or now and then opening to give vent to sharp, unchildlike speeches, so exceedingly like Aunt Henrietta's.

"Those are very pretty bracelets, but yours are not nearly so big as poor mamma's, and you don't wear half so many."

Was it that inherent feminine quality, tact or spite, according as it is used, which teaches women to find out, and either avoid or wound one another's sore places, which made the little girl so often refer to "poor mamma?" Or had she been taught to do it?

Christian could not tell. But it had to be borne, and she was learning how to bear it, she answered kindly.

"Probably I do wear fewer ornaments than your mamma did, for she was rich, and I was poor. Indeed, I have no ornaments to wear except what your papa has given me."

"He gives you lots of things, doesn't he? Every thing you have?"

"Yes."