With a sudden impulse of indomitable rage, she stepped back, and
raising her right hand quickly, flung something at his face.—Page 134.
Mr. Biron uttered a piercing shriek, as shrill as a woman’s.
“Fiend! She-devil! She’s killed me! Help! Oh, I’m on fire!”
Bram, who hardly knew what had happened, caught Theodore as the latter fell shrieking into his arms. Meg, with a wild laugh, picked up the remains of her broken bottle, and ran out of the farmyard.
CHAPTER XVII. BRAM SPEAKS HIS MIND.
Meg Tyzack had hardly left the farmyard before Bram knew what she had done, and realized the full extent of the danger Claire had escaped. The bottle Meg had carried, and which she had thrown at the head of Theodore Biron, had contained vitriol. Luckily for Mr. Biron, he had moved aside just in time to escape having the bottle broken on his face, but part of the contents had fallen on his head, on the side of his face, and on his left hand before the bottle itself was dashed into two pieces as it fell on the ground.
Bram wiped Theodore’s face and hands as quickly as he could, but the effeminate man had so entirely lost his self-control that he could not keep still; and by his own restlessness he hindered the full effect of Bram’s good offices.
The young man saw that his best chance with the hysterical creature was to get him into the house as quickly as he could. But Theodore objected to this. He wanted Bram to go in pursuit of the woman, to bring her back, to have her taken up. And as his cries had by this time caused a little crowd to assemble from the cottages round about, he began to harangue them on the subject of his wrongs, and to try to stir them up to resent the outrage to which he had been subjected.
It is needless to say that his efforts were ineffectual. Mr. Biron had succeeded in establishing a thoroughly bad reputation among his neighbors, who knew all about his selfish treatment of his daughter. He found not one sympathizer, and at last he was fain to allow himself to be led indoors by Bram, who was very urgent in his persuasions, being indeed afraid that Theodore’s curses upon the bystanders for their supineness would bring upon him some further chastisement. He prevailed upon a lad in the crowd to go for a doctor, assuring him that it was the pain from which the gentleman was suffering that made him so irritable.
Once inside the house, Bram found that his difficulties with his unsympathetic patient had only just begun. Mr. Biron was not used to pain, and had no idea of suffering in silence. He raved and he moaned, he cursed and he swore, and Bram was amazed and disgusted to find that this little, well-preserved, middle-aged gentleman was quite as much concerned by the injury which he should suffer in appearance as by the pain he had to bear.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that the marks will ever go away? Oh, good heavens, I know they won’t,” he cried, as with his uninjured eye he surveyed himself in the glass over the dining-room sideboard by the light of a couple of candles. “Oh, oh, the wretch! The hag! I’ll get her six months for this!”
And the little man, trembling with rage, shook his fist and gnashed his teeth, presenting in his anger and disfigurement a hideous spectacle.
The left side of his face was already one long patch of inflammation. His left eye was shut up; the hair on that side of his head had already begun to come away in tufts from the burnt skin.
Bram was disgusted. Mr. Biron’s grief over the loss of his daughter, keen as it had been, could not be compared to that which he felt now at the loss of his remaining good looks. There was a note of absolute sincerity in his every lament which had been conspicuously lacking in his grief of the morning. The young man could scarcely listen to him with patience. He tried, however, out of humanity, to remain silent, since he could give no comfort. But silence would not do for his garrulous companion, who insisted on having an answer.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that I shall be disfigured for life?” he asked with tremulous anxiety.
“I’m afraid so,” answered Bram rather gruffly. “But I don’t think I’d worry about that when you have worse things than that to trouble you.”
Unluckily, Mr. Biron was so much absorbed in the loss of his own beauty that he fell into the mistake of being absolutely sincere for once.
“Worse troubles than that! Worse than to go about like a scarecrow, a repulsive object, all the years of one’s life! What can be worse?” groaned he.
Bram, who was standing solemnly erect, answered at once, in a deep voice, out of the fulness of his heart—
“Well, Mr. Biron, if you don’t know of anything worse, I suppose there is nothing worse—for you!”
But Mr. Biron was impervious to sneers. He walked up and down the room in feverish anxiety until the arrival of the doctor, whom he interrogated at once with as much solicitude as if he had been a young beauty on the eve of her first ball.
The doctor, a stolid, hard-working country practitioner, with a dull red face and dull black eyes, showed Theodore much less mercy than Bram had done. He knew his patient well, having been called in to him on several occasions when that gentleman’s excesses had brought on the attacks of dyspepsia to which he was subject; and the more he saw of him the less he liked him. Theodore’s anxiety about his appearance he treated with cruel bluntness.
“No, you’ll never be the same man again to look at, Mr. Biron,” he said quite cheerfully. “And you may be thankful if we can save you the sight of the left eye.”
“You think the scar will never go away? Nor the hair grow again?” asked Theodore piteously.
“The scar won’t go away certainly. But that’s not much to trouble about at your time of life, I should think,” returned the doctor bluntly. “There’s a greater danger than that to concern ourselves with. Unless you are very careful, you will have erysipelas. You must get that little daughter of yours to nurse you very carefully. Where is she?”
Theodore burst out fretfully with a new grievance—
“My daughter! She’s not here to nurse me. I’ve no one to nurse me now. She’s gone away, gone away and left me all by myself!”
The doctor stared at him with the unpleasant fixity of eyes which have to look hard before they see much.
“You told her to go, I suppose?” said he at last, abruptly.
Taken by surprise, Theodore, to the horror of Bram, who was standing in the background, confessed—
“Well, I told her she could go if she liked; but I never meant her to take me at my word.”
Bram was thunderstruck. Such a simple solution of the mystery of the disappearance of the dutiful daughter had never entered his mind. In a fit of passion, perhaps of partial intoxication, Theodore had bade his daughter get out of the house. And the long-suffering girl had taken him at his word.
The doctor nodded.
“I thought so,” said he. “I thought there was no end to what the child would put up with at your hands. So you have driven her away? Well, then you’ll have to suffer for it, I’m afraid. I don’t know of anybody else who would come to nurse you.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Bram in a hollow voice from the background.
It needed an effort on his part to make this offer. He felt that he loathed the little wretch who had himself driven his daughter into the arms of her untrustworthy lover. Only the thought that Claire would wish him to do so enabled him to undertake the distasteful task of ministering to such a patient. Theodore thanked him in a half-hearted sort of way, feeling that there was something not altogether grateful to himself in the spirit in which this offer was made. The doctor was far more cordial.
He told Bram he was doing a fine thing.
“But then,” he added in his rough way, “fine things are what one expects of you, Mr. Elshaw.”
And then he went out, leaving Theodore in much perplexity as to what the fellow could see in Elshaw to make such a fuss about.
Bram spent the night with him, doing his best to soothe and to comfort the unfortunate man, whose sufferings, both of mind and body, grew more acute as the hours wore on. His own worry about himself was the chief cause of this. Long before morning he had lost sight of the shame of his daughter’s flight, and looked upon it solely as a wicked freak which had resulted in his own most cruel misfortune.
“Why, surely, man,” broke out Bram at last, losing patience at his long tirades of woe and indignation, “it’s better that you should be disfigured than her, at any rate.”
“No, it isn’t,” retorted Theodore sharply. “Claire never cared half as much about her appearance as I did about mine. And, besides,” he went on, with a sudden feeling that he had got hold of a strong argument, “if she had been disfigured, she would have had no temptation to do wrong!”
Bram jumped up, clenching his fist. He could bear no more. With a few jerked-out words to the effect that he would send Joan to get his breakfast, he rushed out of the house.
Poor Claire! Poor little Claire! Was this the creature she had wronged in going away? This shallow, selfish wretch who had turned her out, and who regretted the ministrations of her gentle hands far more than he did the shame her desperate act had drawn down upon her!
Bram went down to the works that morning a different man from what he had been the day before. He was waking from the dull lethargy of grief into which the first discovery of Claire’s flight had thrown him. A smouldering anger against the Cornthwaites, father and son, was taking the place of sullen misery in his breast. He had gathered from Theodore that the elder Mr. Cornthwaite had taken his remonstrances not only coolly, but with something like relief, as if he felt glad of an excuse for getting rid of the relations whose vicinity had been a continual annoyance.
But Bram did not mean to be put off. Josiah, who had not been at the office at all on the previous day, should see him, and answer his questions. And Bram, maturing a grave resolution, strode down into the town with a steady look in his eyes.
Mr. Cornthwaite saw him as soon as he himself arrived, and, evidently with the intention of taking the bull by the horns, spoke to him at once.
“Ah, Elshaw, good-morning. Come in here a moment, please. I want to speak to you.”
Bram followed in silence, and stood within the room with his back to the door, with a stern expression on his pale face.
Mr. Cornthwaite broached the unpleasant subject at once.
“Nice business this, eh? Nice thing Chris has done for himself now! Brought a hornet’s nest about his ears and mine too! Old Hibbs and his wife have been down to my house blackguarding me; Minnie herself is fit for a lunatic asylum, and, to complete the business, the girl’s rascally father has been to my house, trying to levy blackmail. But I’ve made up my mind to make short work of the thing! I start for London to-night; find out Master Chris (luckily he gave his address to no one but me, or he’d have had his wife’s family about his ears already), and bring the young man back to his wife’s feet—bring him by the scruff of the neck if necessary!”
“And—Claire—Miss Biron?” said Bram hoarsely.
“Oh, she must shift for herself. She knew what she was doing, running off with a married man. I’ve no pity for her; not the least. I wash my hands of the pair of them, father and daughter, now. He must just pack up his traps and be off after her. What becomes of her is his affair, not ours!”
“Mr. Christian can’t get rid of the responsibility like that, sir,” said Bram, with a note of sombre warning in his voice.
“I take upon myself the responsibility for him,” retorted Mr. Cornthwaite coldly. “My son is dependent upon me, and he can do nothing without my approval. I am certainly going to give him no help towards the maintenance of a baggage like that. You know what my opinion of her always has been. Circumstances have confirmed it most amply. A young man is not much to blame if he gets caught, entangled, by a girl as artful and as designing as she is.”
“I don’t think you will find yourself and Mr. Christian in agreement upon that point, sir,” said Bram steadily.
“Well, whether he agrees or not, he’ll come back with me to-morrow,” replied Mr. Cornthwaite hotly.
“Then, Mr. Cornthwaite, you’ll please take my notice now, and I’ll be out of this to-day. For,” Bram went on, with a rising spot of deep color in his cheek, and a bright light in his eye, “I couldn’t trust myself face to face with such a d——d scoundrel as Mr. Christian is if he leaves the girl he loves, the girl he’s betrayed, and comes sneaking back at your heels like a cur, when he ought to stand up for the woman who loves him!”
“Upon my word, yours is very singular morality for a young man who goes in for such correctness of conduct as you do. Where does the wife come in, the poor, injured wife, in your new-fangled scheme of right and wrong? Is she to be left out in the cold altogether?”
“Where else can she be left, poor thing?” cried Bram with deep feeling. “Do you think if you brought Mr. Christian back ‘by the scruff of the neck,’ as you say, that you’d ever be able to patch matters up between ’em so as to make ’em live anything but a cat-and-dog’s-life? No, Mr. Cornthwaite, you couldn’t. The wife won’t come to so much hurt; she wouldn’t have come to none if you hadn’t forced on this cursed marriage. Let her get free, and make him free; and let Mr. Christian put the wrong right as far as he can by marrying the girl he wants, the girl who knows how to make him happy!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s black eyes blazed. He hated even a semblance of contradiction; and Bram’s determined and dogged attitude irritated him beyond measure. He rose from his arm-chair, and clasping his hands behind his back with a loud snap, he assumed towards the young man an air of bland contempt which he had never used to him before.
“Your notions are charming in the abstract, Elshaw. I have no doubt, too, that there are some sections of society where your ideas might be carried out without much harm to anybody. But not in that in which we move. If my son were to commit such an unheard-of folly as you suggest I would let him shift for himself for the rest of his days. And perhaps you know enough of Christian to tell whether he would find life with any young woman agreeable under those conditions.”
Bram remained silent. There was a pause, rather a long one. Then Mr. Cornthwaite spoke again——
“Of course, you are sensible enough to understand that this is my business, and my son’s; that it is a family matter, a difficulty in which I have to act for the best. And I hope,” he went on in a different tone, “for your own sake, more than for mine, that you will not take any step so rash as leaving this office would be. Without notice, too!”
“As to that, sir, you had better let me go—and without notice,” said Bram with a sullen note in his voice which made Mr. Cornthwaite look at him with some anxiety, “if it’s true that you’re going to make Mr. Christian leave Miss Claire in the lurch. For I tell you, sir,” and again he looked up, with a steely flash in his gray eyes and a look of stubborn ferocity about his long upper lip and straight mouth, “if I was to come face to face wi’ him after he’d done that thing I couldn’t keep my fists off him; Ah couldn’t, sir. That’s what comes of my being born in a different section of society, sir, I suppose. And so, as Ah’ve loved Mr. Christian, and as Ah’ve had much to thank you and him for, sir, you’d best let me go back—to my own section of society, where a man has to stand by his own deeds, like a man!”
Mr. Cornthwaite’s attitude, his tone, changed insensibly as he looked and listened to the man who told him his views so honestly, and stood by them so firmly. He saw that Bram was in earnest, and he began to walk up and down the room, thinking, planning, considering. He did not want to lose this clever young man; he could not afford to do so. Bram had something like a genius for the details of business, and was besides as honest as the day; not a too common combination.
The young man waited, but at last, as Mr. Cornthwaite made no sign of addressing him, he turned to touch the handle of the door. Then Mr. Cornthwaite suddenly stopped in his walk, and made a sign to him to stay.
“Well, Elshaw,” said he in a more genial tone, “will you, if you must go, promise me one thing? Will you see Mr. Christian in my presence first, and hear what he has to say for himself?”
Bram hesitated.
“I don’t want to hear anything,” said he sullenly. “I’d rather go, sir.”
“No doubt you would, but you wouldn’t like to treat us in any way unfairly, would you, Bram? You acknowledge that we’ve not treated you badly, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, you can hardly refuse to hear what the culprit has to say in his own defence. If, after hearing him, you are not satisfied, you can have the satisfaction of telling him what you think of him in good round terms before you go. Now, is that a bargain? You stay here until I come back from town—at least—with or without (for, of course, you may be right, and he may not come) my son?”
Bram hesitated; but he could not well refuse.
“All right, sir. I’ll stay till you come back,” he answered sullenly.
And, without another word or another look, he accepted his employer’s satisfied motion of assent as a dismissal, and left the room.
CHAPTER XVIII. FACE TO FACE.
Doggedly, sullenly, with a hard mouth and cold eyes, Bram went about his day’s work in the office. His fellow-clerks knew that something of deep import had happened during that half-hour while he was shut up with Mr. Cornthwaite in the inner room; but so well did they know him by this time that no one made any attempt to learn from him what it was that had passed.
Quietly, unostentatiously, without any apparent effort, Bram had made himself a unique position, with his office companions as well as with his employers. Very taciturn, very stolid of manner, never giving an unasked opinion on any subject, he always seemed to be too much absorbed in the details of work to have time or inclination for the discussions, the idle chatter, with which the rest beguiled the monotonous hours on every opportunity.
But they had long since ceased to “chaff” him on his attitude, not through any distaste on his part for this form of attack, but as a natural result of the respect he inspired, and of the position he held with “the guv’nor” and his son. There was a feeling that he would be “boss” himself some day, and a consequent disposition to leave him alone.
But when the day’s work was done, and Bram started on the walk back to Hessel, the look of dogged attention which his face had worn during office hours relaxed into one of keen anxiety. He had been able, by force of will, to thrust into the background of his mind the one subject which was all-important to him. Now that he was again, for fifteen hours, a free man, his thoughts fastened once more on Claire and on the question—Would Christian, obedient to his father and to self-interest, abandon her, or would he not?
Bram felt a dread of the answer. He would not allow to himself that he believed Christian capable of what he looked upon as an act of inconceivable baseness; but down at the bottom of his heart there was a dumb misgiving, an unacknowledged fear.
And Bram, his thoughts stretching out beyond the limits he imposed upon them, asked himself what he should do for the best for the poor child, if she were left stranded, as Mr. Cornthwaite made no secret of intending. He had unconsciously assumed to himself, now that the image of Claire had been deposed from the high pedestal of his ideal, the attitude of guardian to this most helpless of creatures, taking upon himself in advance the position which her father ought to have held.
If she were abandoned by her lover, it was he who would find her out, and care for her, and settle her in some place of safety. That she would never come back to the neighborhood of her own accord Bram felt sure.
When Bram got back to Hessel, he called at once at the farm, with a lingering hope that something might have been heard of Claire, that she might have sent some message, written some letter to her father or to Joan.
But she had not. He found Mr. Biron in the care of Joan, whose patience he tried severely by his fretfulness and irritability. The doctor had called again, and had expressed a growing fear of erysipelas, which had only increased the patient’s ill-temper, without making him any more careful of himself. He was drinking whisky and water when Bram came in, and Joan reported that he had been doing so all day, and that there was no reasoning with him or stopping him, even by using the authority of the doctor.
Theodore was by this time in a maudlin and tearful condition, bewailing now the flight of his daughter, and now his own wounds, without ceasing.
Bram did what he could to cheer him, and to persuade him to a more reasonable course of conduct, but the effect was hardly more than momentary. And on the following day his condition had undoubtedly become worse. Bram, however, was obliged to leave him to go to the office, where the day passed without incident. Mr. Cornthwaite had gone up to town on the previous night, and had not returned. Bram began to hope that Christian had refused to come back.
Two more days passed, during which Mr. Biron’s symptoms grew worse. The erysipelas had not only declared itself on the wounded part of the face, but was spreading rapidly. No attempt had been made to bring Meg Tyzack to book for the assault, in spite of Mr. Biron’s frenzied adjurations. Bram could not bear to have the name of Claire dragged through the mire, as it must be if the jealous woman were brought into Court; and although Mr. Biron troubled himself less about this than he did about the revenge he wanted for his own injuries, Joan was so bluntly outspoken on the subject that even he had to give up the idea.
“You’d best tak’ it quiet, sir,” said the good woman coolly. “You see you couldn’t coom into Coort wi’ clean hands yourself, wi’ the Joodge and everybody knowin’ the life as Miss Claire led with you. Happen ye’d get told it served you roight!”
And Bram concurring, though less outspokenly, the indignant Theodore found himself obliged to wait for his revenge until he could see about it himself. This period promised to be a long time in coming, as the erysipelas continued to spread, and threatened to attack the membranes of the brain.
In the meantime, on the fourth day after the departure of Mr. Josiah Cornthwaite for London, Bram learned that father and son had returned home together.
Bram’s heart sank. What of Claire? His mind was filled with anxious thoughts of her, as he awaited the expected summons to meet Christian face to face.
But the day passed, and the next. Neither father nor son appeared at the office at the works; and all that Bram could hear was that Mr. Christian was not very well. Bram looked upon this as a ruse, a trick. His sympathies were to be appealed to on behalf of the scoundrel of whose conduct he had spoken so openly.
Another day passed, and another. Still the work of the head of the firm was done by deputy; still the elder Mr. Cornthwaite remained at home, and his son, so Bram understood, with him.
So at last Bram, not to be put off any longer, wrote a short note to Mr. Cornthwaite, senior, reminding him of the latter’s wish that he should see Christian before leaving the firm.
The answer to this note, which Bram posted to Holme Park on his way to the works, reached him by hand the same evening before he left the office. It contained only these words:—
“Dear Elshaw,—You can come up and see my son at any time you like.—Yours faithfully,
“Josiah Cornthwaite.”
Bram started off to Holme Park at once, full of sullen anger against father and son. That this was the end he felt sure, the abrupt termination of a connection which had done so much for him, which had promised so much for his employers. Bram was not ungrateful. It was the feeling that this act had been committed by the man he loved and admired above all others, to whom he was indebted for his rise in life, which made the meeting so hard to him.
It was the knowledge that it was Christian, who had been so good to himself, who had ruined the life of the woman he loved, that made Bram shrink from this interview. He was torn, as he went, between memories of the pleasant walks he and Christian had had together, of the talks in which he had always opposed a rigorous and perhaps narrow code of morals to his companion’s airy philosophy of selfishness, on the one hand; and thoughts of Claire, brave, friendless, little Claire, on the other. And the more he thought, the more he shrank from the meeting.
He knew by heart all Christian’s irresponsible speeches about women and the impossibility of doing them any harm except by their express desire and invitation; knew that Christian always spoke of himself as a weak creature who yielded too readily to temptation, although he avoided it when he could. He knew every turn of the head, every trick of the voice, which could be so winning, so caressing, with which Christian would try to avert his wrath, as he had done many times before. He knew also that Christian had stronger weapons than these, in appeals to his affection, to the bond which Christian’s own generosity and discernment had been the first to forge.
And knowing all this, Bram, determined to make one last appeal for justice and mercy for Claire, and if unsuccessful to pour out such fiery indignation as even Christian should quiver under, steeled himself and set his teeth, and strode up to the big house at dusk with an agitated heart.
In the gloom of the foggy night the lamp in the hall shone with a yellow light through the evergreens, and the whole place had a desolate look, which struck Bram as he went up. To his inquiry for Mr. Cornthwaite the servant who opened the door said, “Yes, sir,” with an odd, half-alarmed look, and showed him into the study, where Mr. Cornthwaite sprang up from a chair at the sight of him.
“Ah, Elshaw,” said he in a troubled voice, without holding out his hand, “you have come to see Christian. Well, you shall see him.”
Without another word, without listening to Bram’s renewed expostulations, he went out of the room, with a gesture of curt invitation to Bram to follow.
Up the stairs they went in silence. The fog seemed to have got into the house, to have shrouded every corner with gloom. On the first floor Mr. Cornthwaite opened a door, and beckoned Bram to come in. As the young man entered the room a shriek of wild laughter, in a voice which was like and yet unlike that of Chris, met his ears. A figure sprang up in a bed which was opposite the door, and a woman, in the dark gown and white cap and apron of a sick nurse, stood up beside the bed, trying to hold the sick man down. Bram stood petrified. There was the man of whom he was in search, unconscious of his presence, though he stared at him with bright eyes.
Christian was raving in the delirium of fever.
In a moment Bram experienced a revulsion of feeling so strong that he felt he could scarcely stand. Christian’s follies, faults, vices, all were forgotten; there lay, dangerously ill, the lovable companion, the staunch friend. In that moment Bram, staring at the man he knew so well, who knew him not, felt that he would have laid down his own life to save that of Christian.
Suddenly he felt a hand laid gently on his arm. Mr. Cornthwaite, who had been watching him narrowly, saw the effect the sight had had upon the young man, and promptly drew him back, and shut the door behind them.
“Typhoid,” said he, in answer to an imploring look from Bram. “He must have been sickening for it when he went away. I brought him back very ill, and the fever declared itself yesterday.”
Bram did not ask anything for some minutes. He knew that Christian’s life was in danger.
“His wife? She has forgiven him? She is with him?” asked Bram.
“Thank goodness no,” replied Mr. Cornthwaite energetically. “I begin to hate the little canting fool. She offered to nurse him, I will say that; but we thought it better to refuse, and she was content.”
“And—Claire?” said Bram.
Mr Cornthwaite grew impatient directly.
“I know nothing about her,” said he coldly.
Bram straightened himself, as if at a challenge.
“You did not see her in London?” he asked.
“No.”
“Nor trouble yourself about her?”
“No. And I sincerely hope, Elshaw, you are going to give up all thoughts of doing so either.”
Bram smiled grimly.
“Not while I have a hand or a foot left, Mr. Cornthwaite.”
“At any rate, you will not think of marrying her?”
There was a silence. Then Bram said, in a very low voice, very sadly—
“No.”
He did not know whether he was not cruel, hard, in this decision. But he could not help himself. The feeling he had for Claire, for his first love, for his ideal, could never die; but it had changed sadly; greatly changed. It was love still, but with a difference.
Mr Cornthwaite, however, was scarcely satisfied.
“You will not think of leaving us, at least yet?” he said presently. Then, as he saw a look he did not like in Bram’s face he hastened to add—“You are bound to wait until my son is better—or worse; until I am free to go to the office. I cannot be making changes now.”
“Very well, Mr. Cornthwaite. But I must have a holiday, perhaps a two or three days’ holiday, to start from to-morrow morning.”
“All right. Good-night.”
They were in the hall, and Bram, who had refused to re-enter the study, had his fingers upon the outer door.
“Good-night,” said he.
And he went out. He was full of a new idea, which had suddenly struck him even while he was talking to Mr. Cornthwaite. He would not go to London; poor little Claire, abandoned by her lover, or rather by his father, would not have stayed there. It had flashed into his mind that there was one spot in the world to which she would direct her wandering steps if left all alone in the world. It was the little Yorkshire town of Chelmsley, where her mother lay buried.
On the following morning, therefore, Bram took train northwards, and, reaching before noon the pretty country town, went straight from the station to the big, square, open market-place, which, with the little irregular old-fashioned dwellings which surrounded it, might be called, not only the heart, but the whole of the town.
It was market-day, and at the primitive stalls which were ranged in neat rows, stood the farmers’ wives and daughters before their tempting wares.
It was a cold but not unpleasant day, and the sight was a pretty one. But Bram had no eyes, no heart for any sight but one. He went to the principal inn, ordered some bread and cheese, and asked if there were any persons living in the town bearing the name of Cornthwaite; this he knew to have been the maiden name of Claire’s mother.
The innkeeper knew of none. There had been a family of that name living at a big house outside the town; but that was years before.
Still Bram did not give up hope. It was something stronger than instinct which told him that to this, the spot where her mother’s childhood had been passed, Claire would make her way. Disappointed in his inquiries, Bram set about what was almost a house-to-house search.
And towards the evening, when the lights began to appear in the houses, he was successful. He was searching the cottages on the outskirts of the town, and in one of them, crouching before the fire in a tiny room, where geraniums in pots formed a screen before the window, he saw Claire.
He stared at her for some seconds, until the tears welled up into his eyes.
Then he tapped at the window-pane, and she started up with a low cry.
CHAPTER XIX. SANCTUARY.
With his heart in his mouth Bram waited. Would she come out to him? She stood up, with the firelight shining on her figure, but leaving her face in shadow, so that he could not tell what expression she wore.
He wondered whether she knew him. After waiting for a few moments he tapped again at the window, advancing his face as close as possible to the glass. Then, as she still did not move, he stepped back, and was going towards the door, when by a quick gesture she checked him, and seemed to intimate that he was to wait for her to come out to him.
At the same moment she left the room.
Bram waited.
When some minutes had passed, and still she did not come out, he began to feel alarmed, to wonder whether she had given him the slip. He walked round to the back, and saw that the cottage, which was one of a row of three, had a good garden behind it, and that there was a path which led from the garden across the fields.
Presently he went round to the front again, and knocked at the door. It was opened after the second knock, by a very respectable-looking old woman, with a kindly, pleasant face.
“Is Miss Biron staying here?” asked Bram, wondering whether Claire was using her own name or passing under another.
But the answer put to flight any doubts.
“Yes, sir,” said the woman at once. “She is staying here, but she isn’t in at present. She’s just this minute gone out.”
Bram felt his blood run cold. Claire was avoiding him then! The woman seemed to know of no reason for this sudden disappearance, and went on to ask—
“You are a friend of hers, sir?”
“Oh, yes, a very old friend of hers and her father’s.”
“And do you come from her father, sir?”
“Yes, I saw him this morning.”
“Ah,” cried she sharply. “And I hope he’s ashamed of himself by this time for turning his daughter, his own daughter, out of his house!”
Bram said nothing. He did not know how much this woman knew, nor who she was, nor anything about her.
“I suppose he wants her back again?” she went on in the same tone.
“He does indeed. He’s very ill. He has erysipelas all over his face and one of his hands, and is even in danger of his life. It has led to serious inflammation internally. He wants a great deal of care, such care as only his daughter can give him.”
“Dear me! Dear me! Well, we must hope it’ll soften his hard heart!” said the woman, coming out a step to listen. “He was always a light-minded, careless sort of a man. But I never thought he’d turn out so bad as he has done—never. He was a taking sort of a gentleman in the old days when he came courting Miss Clara, and married her and carried her off.”
A light broke in upon Bram. This was some old servant of the family of Claire’s mother, who had lived out her years of service, settled down, and “found religion” within sight of the old house, within the walls of which her girlhood had been passed. He had seen from the outside, as he looked in through the window at Claire, the framed texts of Scripture which hung on the walls, the harmonium in the corner, with a large hymn-book open upon it—the usual interior of the English self-respecting cottager.
“You lived in the family,” said Bram, “did you not?”
“Why, yes, sir. I was under housemaid, and right through upper-housemaid to housekeeper with them in the old gentleman’s and lady’s time. Mr. Biron’s told you about me, no doubt, sir,” she added, with complacent belief that she was still fresh in that gentleman’s mind. “And I don’t suppose he had many a good word for me. I never did like the idea of his being half-French. I was always afraid it would turn out badly, always. I suppose he thought of me at once when he wanted his daughter back, sir?”
Bram thought this suggestion would do very well as an explanation of his own appearance at the cottage, so he did not contradict her. He asked if she knew where Claire had gone to.
“Well, no, sir, I don’t. She ran upstairs, and put on her things all in a hurry, and went out at the back. I suppose she remembered something she’d forgotten this morning when she went out to do my little bit of marketing for me. And yet—no—she’d have gone out the front way for that.” The old woman stared at the young man with wakening intelligence. She perceived some signs of agitation in him. “Maybe she saw you through the window, sir, and didn’t want to speak to you,” she suggested shrewdly.
Bram did not contradict her.
“Where does the path at the back lead to?” he asked, “I must see her. I think it’s very likely, as you say, that she doesn’t want to; but she would never forgive herself if her father were to die, would she?”
“Lord, no, sir. Well, she may have gone out that way and then turned to the left back into the town. Or she may—though I don’t think it’s likely—she may have gone on towards Little Scrutton. She’s fond of a walk to the old abbey, that runs down to the left past Sir Joseph’s plantation. But I should hardly think she’d go that far so late, and by herself too!”
“Thanks. Well, if she’s gone that way I can catch her up, or meet her as she comes back,” said Bram. “Thank you. Good-evening.”
He hid as well as he could the anxiety which was in his heart, and set off, passing, by the woman’s invitation, through the cottage kitchen, by the footpath across the fields.
He was half-mad with fear lest Claire, in an access of shame, should have fled from the shelter she had found under the good woman’s roof, determined not to return to a hiding-place which had been discovered. It seemed clear to him that the old woman knew nothing but the fact that Theodore had sent his daughter away, and for one brief, splendid moment Bram asked himself whether that were indeed the whole truth, and the story of her flight with Christian an ugly nightmare, dishonoring only to the brains which had conceived it.
But then, like a black pall, there descended on his passionate hopes the remembrance of Claire’s look when he last saw her at the farm; of the horror, the shame in her face; of her abrupt flight then; or her flight now. What other explanation could there be of all this? Was he not mad to entertain a hope in the face of overwhelming evidence?
But for all this he did hug to his heart a ray of comfort, of hope, as he reached the high-road, and quickly making up his mind to try the way into the country instead of that which led into the town started along between the bare hedges in the darkness with a quick step and an anxious heart.
The road was easy to follow, lying as it did, between hedges all the way. The plantation of which the old woman had spoken was some two miles out. Then Bram found a road dipping sharply down to the left, as she had said; and, after a few moments’ hesitation, he turned into it. For some distance he went down the steep hill in the shadow of the fir trees of the plantation. At the bottom he came to a little group of scattered cottages, and following the now winding road he came suddenly upon a sight that made him pause.
The moon, clear, frosty, nearly at the full, shone down on a wide valley, shut in with gentle, well-wooded slopes, a very garden of peace and beauty. Close under the nearest hill stood the ruined abbey, perhaps even more imposing in its majestic decay than it had been in the old days when a roof hid its lofty arches and tall clustered pillars from the gaze of the profane.
Coming upon it suddenly, Bram was struck by its massive beauty, its solitary grandeur. The walls, far out of the reach of the smoke of the town, were still of a glaring whiteness; the moon shone through the pointed clerestory windows, and cast long, black shadows upon the grass, and the broken white stones which lay strewn about within the walls. Here and there a mass of ivy, sturdy, thick, and bushy, broke the hard outline of tall white wall; or a clump of hawthorn, now bare, half-hid the small, round-headed tower windows of the transepts.
Bram went forward slowly, fascinated by the sight, and seized strongly by the conviction that little Claire would have found the stately old walls as magnetic in their attraction as he did. He came to the fence which surrounded the ruin, and climbed over it without troubling himself to look for a gate.
The ground was rough and uneven, encumbered with loose stones. He wandered about the transepts and the long choir, which were all that were left of the church itself, hunting in every corner and in the deep shadow of every bush. But he found no trace of Claire. Yet still he was haunted by the thought that it was here, within walls which had once been held holy, that the little fugitive would have taken shelter, would have hidden from him. So strongly did this idea possess him that he at last sat down on a stone in the ruined choir, determined to keep vigil there all night, and to make a further search when morning broke.
It was a cold night, and sleep in the circumstances was out of the question. He walked up and down and sat down to rest upon the flat stone alternately until dawn came. A long, weary night it was undoubtedly. Yet through it all he never lost for more than a few moments at a time the feeling that Claire was near at hand, that when daylight came he should find her.
The dwellers in the cottages outside the ruin were early astir, and one or two perceived Bram, and came up to the railings to look at him. But as none of them seemed to feel that his intrusion was any business of theirs he was left alone until the light was strong enough for him to renew his search. Then, not within the walls of the church itself, but in the refectory, which was choked up and encumbered with broken stones and rubbish which had made search difficult in the night, he found her.
There was a little stone gallery, with a broken stone staircase leading up to it, at one end of the refectory. And here crouched in a corner, fast asleep, with her head against the stone wall, was Claire. Her small face looked pinched and gray with the cold. He took off his overcoat and covered her with it very gently. But soft as his touch was she awoke, stared at him for a moment as if she scarcely knew him, and then sprang to her feet.
She was so stiff and cramped and chilled that she staggered. Bram caught her arm, but she wrenched herself away with a sound like a sob, and in her eyes there came a fear, a shame so deep, so terrible, that Bram looked away from her, unable to meet it with his own mournful eyes.
“Why did you run away from me?” asked he, so kindly, with such a brave affectation of rough cheerfulness that the tears came rushing into the girl’s eyes. “You might have known I didn’t want to do you any harm, mightn’t you? I only wish I’d brought you some better news than I do.”