"Good night, Mattie--oh! I had nearly forgotten to ask you to dine with us on Sunday; you"ll be sure to come early?"
"Who told you to say that?"
"Why, my father, to be sure."
"I"m glad of it--I"m glad he thinks better of me," Mattie cried; "oh!
Miss Harriet, you don"t know how miserable I have been in my heart, lest he--lest he has thought differently of me lately!"
"More fancies! I have always said that they were fancies, Mattie."
"Ah! I guess pretty near to the truth sometimes."
"And tease yourself with a false idea more often--why, you will imagine that _I_ shall think differently of you presently."
"No--I don"t think you will."
"Never, Mattie."
"G.o.d bless you for that!--if ever I"m in trouble I shall look to you to defend me."
"And in my trouble, Mattie?" was the half-laughing rejoinder.
"I"ll think of you only, fight for you against all your enemies--die for you, if it will do any good. Oh! Miss Harriet, you are growing up a lady very far above me, getting out of my reach like, you won"t forget the little girl you were kind to, and shut her wholly from your heart?"
Harriet Wesden was touched; ever a sensitive girl, the sight of another"s sorrow struck home. She went back a step or two into the parlour.
"This isn"t like the old Mattie," she said, "the Mattie who always looked at the brightest side of life, and made the best of every difficulty. Is that silly affair of the robbery still preying on your mind?"
"On your father"s perhaps--not on mine."
"Then I"ll fight the battle for you to begin with--if there be really one doubt in my father"s heart, I"ll charge it from its hiding-place to-night. Perhaps I have been wrapped up too much lately in my own selfish thoughts when I might have helped you, Mattie. Will you forgive me?"
She stooped and kissed Mattie, whose arms closed round her for a minute with a loving clasp.
"I"m better now," said Mattie, "it was fancy, perhaps, a fancy that you, too, were going further away from me--perhaps thinking ill of me. For you were cold and distant when you came here first to-night."
"No, no."
"Well, that was my fancy, too, it"s very likely. I"ll say good night now, for it"s getting late."
"Good night, then."
At the door she paused and returned.
"Mattie, put on your bonnet and come with me to the end of the street where the omnibus pa.s.ses. I"m nervous to-night--I don"t care to walk alone about these streets again."
"Let me call Mr. Sid----"
"No, no; you--not him!" she interrupted.
"I never leave the shop, Miss Harriet; it"s my trust, and your father would not like it. Shall Ann----"
"Oh! it does not matter much; you have only made me nervous. I"m very wrong to seek to take you from the business, and father so particular and fidgety. I daresay no one will fly away with me. Good night, my dear."
She went away with a bright smile at her own nervousness. That was the last gleam of brightness there for awhile!
After that there settled on her face a confused expression, often a sad, always a thoughtful one, with a long look ahead, as it were from the depths of her blue eyes. From that night there was a change in her; Mattie, quick of observation, was the first to detect it. It was a face of trouble, and Mattie, seeing it now and then, could note the shadows deepen. Sidney observed it next, detected with a lover"s jealous scrutiny a difference in her manner towards him, a something new which was colder and less friendly, and yet not demonstrative enough for him to murmur against, even if his half engagement had permitted him.
He asked her once if he had offended her, and she replied in the negative, and was kinder towards him for that night; but the reserve, indifference, coldness, or whatever it was, came back, and perplexed Sidney Hinchford more than he cared to own. The year of his novitiate was approaching to an end, and he thought that he could afford to wait till then; she was not tiring of him and his attentions, he had too good an opinion of himself to believe that; at times he solaced himself with the idea that she was reflecting on the gravity of the next step, that formal engagement to be married in the future to him.
Mattie and Sidney were both observers of some power, for after all they saw through the bright side--the forced side--of her. For the father and mother was reserved Harriet Wesden with her mask off.
Fathers and mothers are strangely blind to the causes of their daughters" ailments--this humble pair formed no exception to the rule.
They were perplexed with her fits of brooding, her forced efforts to rally when taxed with them, her pallor, loss of appet.i.te, red eyes and restless looks in the morning. Mr. Wesden, a suspicious man to the world in general, was the most trustful and simple as regarded his daughter; he did not know the depth of his love for her until she began to look ill, and then he almost worried her into a real illness by his suggestions and anxiety.
Mr. and Mrs. Wesden had many secret confabulations concerning the change in Harriet; pottering over a hundred fusty ideas, with never a thought as to the true one.
Was Camberwell disagreeing with her?--was the house damp, or her room badly situated?--had not the dear girl change enough, society enough?--what _was_ the matter? Mr. Wesden set it down for "a low way"--an unaccountable complaint from which people suffer at times, and for which change of scene is good.
So he set to work studying the matter, originating small excursions for the day, submitting her to the healthy excitement of the winter course of lectures at the infant schools in the vicinity--lectures on artificial memory, on hydrostatics with experiments, on the poets with experiments also, and unaccountable ones they were--even once ventured into a box of the Surrey Theatre, and began to flatter himself and wife that at last Harriet was rapidly improving.
But Harriet Wesden was only learning rapidly to disguise that "something" which was perplexing her more and more with every day; learning to subdue her parents" anxiety, and sinking a little deeper all the new thoughts. But the whirl of events brought the secret uppermost, and betrayed her--she was forced to make a confidante, and she thought of Mattie, who had always loved her, and stood her friend--Mattie, in whom she was sure was the only one she could trust.
The confidence was placed suddenly, and at a time when Mattie was scarcely prepared for it--Mattie who yet, by some strange instinct, had been patiently waiting for it.
"I believe when that girl"s in trouble, she will come to me," Mattie thought, "for she knows I would do anything to serve her. Have I any one to love except her in the world?--is there any one who requires so much love to keep her, what I call, strong?"
Mattie had seen that Harriet Wesden was not strong--that she was tender-hearted, affectionate, and weak--that there were times when she might give way without a strong heart and a stout hand to a.s.sist her.
She had been a weak, impulsive, pa.s.sionate child--she had grown up a woman very different to Mattie, whose firmness, and even hardness, had made Harriet wonder more than once. And Mattie had often wondered at Harriet in her turn--at her vanity and romantic ideas, and made excuses for her, as we all do, for those we love very dearly. She had even feared for her, until the half engagement with Sidney Hinchford had taken place, and then she had noticed that Harriet had become more staid and womanly, and was glad in her heart that it had happened thus.
Then finally and suddenly the last change swept over the surface of things--all the worse for our characters perhaps, but infinitely better for our story, which takes a new lease of life from this page.
CHAPTER V.
MR. WESDEN TURNS ECCENTRIC.
The nights "drew in" more and more; and nearer and nearer with the shortest day approached the end of Sidney Hinchford"s probation. Only a week or two between the final explanations of Sid"s position--of his chances in the future perhaps--everything very quiet and still at Suffolk Street and Camberwell--a deceptive calm before the storm that was brewing.
Harriet Wesden called more frequently at the stationer"s shop; she was glad to escape from the long evenings at home, and the watchful, ever anxious eyes of her father, and it was easy to frame an excuse to repair to Great Suffolk Street. Occasionally Sidney Hinchford knew of her propinquity, and escorted her home--more often missed his chances of a _tete-a-tete_--three or four times, and greatly to his annoyance, crossed her in the journey, and reached Camberwell to spend the evening with a fidgety old man and his invalid spouse.
At this time it also happened that Sidney Hinchford fell into a dreamy absent way, for which there appeared no valid reasons, unless he had become alive to the doubts of Harriet"s affection for him; an absence of mind, and even an irritability, which was disguised well enough from the father--before whom Sidney was more or less an actor--but which Mattie, ever on the watch, was quick as usual to detect.
She had become puzzled by Harriet"s abstraction, and had looked for its reflex at once in Sidney Hinchford"s face--finding it there, as she thought, after a while.