“Why, my little one!” said the deep voice at her side; “you have no sorrow you are hiding?”
“Oh, no, no,” said Perdita, trembling. “Only — weddings — any great change in anything — always unnerves me. I am so easily moved. I am not like you — strong like men are. I have no trouble hidden. I am not unhappy.”
“No? I thought not, my little one,” said Claverhouse, bending to look into her eyes. “You must have no troubles. They are not for lives like yours.”
He laid his hand for a moment on her quivering frail one; and then looked away, and seemed to sink into thought. His vain searching of her eyes had been less a look of anxious question, than of eagerness to meet them dimmed by tears. His love had brought him no knowledge of her. She had yet to give him a glimpse of the self, that was a needing, suffering self like other selves. She was almost a shadowy creature to him — a creature of surface life and elusive being, to be left to her own light lot without watching or question. From toil for her bread, unfitted for her tenderness, he had taken her to comfort unbought of weariness. For himself, in his empty hours, there would be the filling of newly-felt, natural needs. It was well for them both.
As they drove to the dwelling in the narrow street, which had not the power to strike him as it was, for its sufficing through the years to his mother and himself — he grasped her hand.
“We are home — at the home we are to share together,” he said. “Welcome, my little one.”
Poor Perdita! Her pliant nature had been bending in the last hour to the lot that was at hand. She had been picturing with dawning of hope the untried experience of ordering a household, and knowing herself the mark of glances as the mate of the genius. Her eyes, gazing through the dusk as the wheels slackened, took on a half-frightened look; and remained fastened on the scene before them. Her husband’s touch and tones recalled her to the moment’s needs.
As one in a dream, she felt her feet on the narrow pavement. As one in a dream, she saw a bent figure hasten down the steps, with eyes that seemed to miss herself for their rivetted gaze on the figure in the carriage. As one in a dream, she stood, and looked, and was silent. Claverhouse stooped from the carriage gropingly, with his hands on the sides of its doorway; but missed the step, and violently stumbled as he gained a footing on the pavement. Perdita felt herself pushed aside; and saw the old servant spring to support his staggering form; while, still as through a dream, she heard a startled utterance.
“Ah! — See! — move, madam. He is not safe without watching.”
It was only the happening of a moment. The next, her husband was standing at her side; and Julia was speaking some words of respectful greeting, as if the disturbance had been unreal. But Perdita, as she walked up the jagged steps into the narrow dwelling, felt a sense of being jarred so deep and complex, that she could hardly sustain it; and in the dim passage she stood with the eyes of a tortured dumb creature, speaking no word, and making no movement towards chamber or staircase. Her husband, though his eyes were turned to her face, saw nothing in it that was not well. But other eyes saw.
“You are tired, madam,” said Julia. “You will be glad of some rest.”
“Yes, yes, she is weary,” said Claverhouse. “Come upstairs with us, Julia, and show your mistress how things are done for her. Come, little one. We shall not have you weary long.”
He mounted the staircase with the ungainly quickness which marked his movements on ground he knew, and which brought another change to Perdita’s eyes, as they saw it for the first time. She followed slowly, and without words. As she entered the room prepared for them, she found him standing just within the door, turning his head with eager groping.
“Ah! this room!” he was saying. “It has seen much, Julia! Where my mother was lying a year ago! A year ago.”
Julia made no reply, but her face said much; and Perdita, in hearing these words of an unmeaning past, felt the pang of a sufferer awaking from darkened days with memory dead. She was jarred by an intuitive knowledge, that the silence of the old servant was considerate feeling for herself.
“Perhaps you will show me what is needful, Julia; and then we will not trouble you further,” she said; speaking with courteous, cold authority, but with a knowledge that the sentence was to be numbered in her store of memories, as the first she had uttered under her own roof.
Julia gave one glance at the wan young face; and then spoke with respectful brevity, put some keys into Perdita’s hand, and left the room. As she moved about the kitchen, her face was as neutral as if she felt herself watched. Her thoughts would have borne any searching in their worthiness of the years behind her. No unloving feeling assailed her for this young creature, who was to straiten her world in straitening her place in her master’s lot. In her faithfulness she closed her heart against it; and even had pity not come to her with help, would have held it closed. But the pity did not only help. As she attended the husband and wife at their evening meal, noted their words and their silence, and watched the sharpened face of the bride of a day, her heart misgave her for both. And there came a different pity, with a different, deeper pang. It was only her eyes that saw that the face was sharpened. Her long dread was growing surely into a swift and certain sorrow.
“Well, Julia,” said Claverhouse, as the meal went its way, “I see you are still a good housewife. I am bringing my little one into safe keeping. I can trust you to care for her, when I am earning the bread?”
Julia’s mute signs of submission were ready and full. No service for her master was hard.
“Well, my pretty one,” said Claverhouse to Perdita, “you are weary to-night. You are a tender nursling for us to care for. Julia, it is the second charge you will have fulfilled for me.”
Julia’s face showed momentary lighting; but she moved about in silence.
Perdita made an effort to lay aside her weary unresponsiveness. She leaned from her place at the table’s head, and laid her hand in her husband’s.
“Ah, my little one,” he said, returning the caress. “There is only one whom I could see in that place. I could say no more to you.”
The tone was too much for Perdita’s overwrought feelings. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled; and she sat with her eyes bent on her plate. Her husband smiled into her face, but could not mark its change, and Julia seemed not to see it. Till the end of the meal the silence was unbroken — the silence that was an easy, daily thing to the one — so different to the other.
When Julia was clearing the table, there was a knock at the outer door.
Claverhouse sprang to his feet, and was about to answer the summons; but Julia was before him in the passage, with unconscious eagerness to be spared his groping for the fastenings. The tall, grey-headed figure hesitated to cross the threshold.
“I–I—Mr Claverhouse wrote and asked me to come to-night; but — but I know it is his first evening at home with — with Mrs Claverhouse. Perhaps—”
“Ah, Soulsby! I was thinking you had forgotten,” said the deep voice from the inner doorway. “Come in, come in. This is a different picture from what you are used to seeing here — and a prettier one, is it not so? I am glad for you to know my wife. I have told her much of you.”
Soulsby gave Perdita a swift glance, and greeted her with a nervous uneasiness, which somehow left him his full distinction of bearing; his habit of silence on his own experience holding him from giving any sign, beyond his look into her face, that he did not meet her as a stranger. Then, seating himself, as he was bidden, he looked from one face to the other.