No Name, Wilkie Collins [reading the story of the TXT] 📗

as she crossed the hall. She turned and confronted her sister. Before she could ask any questions, Norah confusedly addressed her, in these words: “I beg your pardon; I beg you to forgive me.”

Magdalen looked at her sister in astonishment. All memory, on her side, of the sharp words which had passed between them in the shrubbery was lost in the new interests that now absorbed her; lost as completely as if the angry interview had never taken place. “Forgive you!” she repeated, amazedly. “What for?”

“I have heard of your new prospects,” pursued Norah, speaking with a mechanical submissiveness of manner which seemed almost ungracious; “I wished to set things right between us; I wished to say I was sorry for what happened. Will you forget it? Will you forget and forgive what happened in the shrubbery?” She tried to proceed; but her inveterate reserve⁠—or, perhaps, her obstinate reliance on her own opinions⁠—silenced her at those last words. Her face clouded over on a sudden. Before her sister could answer her, she turned away abruptly and ran upstairs.

The door of the library opened, before Magdalen could follow her; and Miss Garth advanced to express the sentiments proper to the occasion.

They were not the mechanically-submissive sentiments which Magdalen had just heard. Norah had struggled against her rooted distrust of Frank, in deference to the unanswerable decision of both her parents in his favor; and had suppressed the open expression of her antipathy, though the feeling itself remained unconquered. Miss Garth had made no such concession to the master and mistress of the house. She had hitherto held the position of a high authority on all domestic questions; and she flatly declined to get off her pedestal in deference to any change in the family circumstances, no matter how amazing or how unexpected that change might be.

“Pray accept my congratulations,” said Miss Garth, bristling all over with implied objections to Frank⁠—“my congratulations, and my apologies. When I caught you kissing Mr. Francis Clare in the summerhouse, I had no idea you were engaged in carrying out the intentions of your parents. I offer no opinion on the subject. I merely regret my own accidental appearance in the character of an obstacle to the course of true love⁠—which appears to run smooth in summerhouses, whatever Shakespeare may say to the contrary. Consider me for the future, if you please, as an obstacle removed. May you be happy!” Miss Garth’s lips closed on that last sentence like a trap, and Miss Garth’s eyes looked ominously prophetic into the matrimonial future.

If Magdalen’s anxieties had not been far too serious to allow her the customary free use of her tongue, she would have been ready on the instant with an appropriately satirical answer. As it was, Miss Garth simply irritated her. “Pooh!” she said⁠—and ran upstairs to her sister’s room.

She knocked at the door, and there was no answer. She tried the door, and it resisted her from the inside. The sullen, unmanageable Norah was locked in.

Under other circumstances, Magdalen would not have been satisfied with knocking⁠—she would have called through the door loudly and more loudly, till the house was disturbed and she had carried her point. But the doubts and fears of the morning had unnerved her already. She went downstairs again softly, and took her hat from the stand in the hall. “He told me to put my hat on,” she said to herself, with a meek filial docility which was totally out of her character.

She went into the garden, on the shrubbery side; and waited there to catch the first sight of her father on his return. Half an hour passed; forty minutes passed⁠—and then his voice reached her from among the distant trees. “Come in to heel!” she heard him call out loudly to the dog. Her face turned pale. “He’s angry with Snap!” she exclaimed to herself in a whisper. The next minute he appeared in view; walking rapidly, with his head down and Snap at his heels in disgrace. The sudden excess of her alarm as she observed those ominous signs of something wrong rallied her natural energy, and determined her desperately on knowing the worst. She walked straight forward to meet her father.

“Your face tells your news,” she said faintly. “Mr. Clare has been as heartless as usual⁠—Mr. Clare has said no?”

Her father turned on her with a sudden severity, so entirely unparalleled in her experience of him that she started back in downright terror.

“Magdalen!” he said; “whenever you speak of my old friend and neighbor again, bear this in mind: Mr. Clare has just laid me under an obligation which I shall remember gratefully to the end of my life.”

He stopped suddenly after saying those remarkable words. Seeing that he had startled her, his natural kindness prompted him instantly to soften the reproof, and to end the suspense from which she was plainly suffering. “Give me a kiss, my love,” he resumed; “and I’ll tell you in return that Mr. Clare has said⁠—Yes.”

She attempted to thank him; but the sudden luxury of relief was too much for her. She could only cling round his neck in silence. He felt her trembling from head to foot, and said a few words to calm her. At the altered tones of his master’s voice, Snap’s meek tail reappeared fiercely from between his legs; and Snap’s lungs modestly tested his position with a brief, experimental bark. The dog’s quaintly appropriate assertion of himself on his old footing was the interruption of all others which was best fitted to restore Magdalen to herself. She caught the shaggy little terrier up in her arms and kissed him next. “You darling,” she exclaimed, “you’re almost as glad as I am!” She turned again to her father, with a look of tender reproach. “You frightened me, papa,” she said. “You were so unlike yourself.”

“I shall be right again tomorrow, my dear. I am a little upset today.”

“Not by me?”

“No, no.”

“By something you have heard at Mr. Clare’s?”

“Yes⁠—nothing you need alarm yourself