In the same spirit of kindness, Mrs. Shaw journeyed to Milton, occasionally dreading the first meeting, and wondering how it would be got over; but more frequently planning how soon she could get Margaret away from 'that horrid place,' and back into the pleasant comforts of Harley Street.
'Oh dear!' she said to her maid; 'look at those chimneys!
My poor sister Hale!
I don't think I could have rested at Naples, if I had known what it was!
I must have come and fetched her and Margaret away.'
And to herself she acknowledged, that she had always thought her brother-in-law rather a weak man, but never so weak as now, when she saw for what a place he had exchanged the lovely Helstone home.
Margaret had remained in the same state; white, motionless, speechless, tearless.
They had told her that her aunt Shaw was coming; but she had not expressed either surprise or pleasure, or dislike to the idea.
Mr. Bell, whose appetite had returned, and who appreciated Dixon's endeavours to gratify it, in vain urged upon her to taste some sweetbreads stewed with oysters; she shook her head with the same quiet obstinacy as on the previous day; and he was obliged to console himself for her rejection, by eating them all himself But Margaret was the first to hear the stopping of the cab that brought her aunt from the railway station.
Her eyelids quivered, her lips coloured and trembled.
Mr. Bell went down to meet Mrs. Shaw; and when they came up, Margaret was standing, trying to steady her dizzy self; and when she saw her aunt, she went forward to the arms open to receive her, and first found the passionate relief of tears on her aunt's shoulder.
All thoughts of quiet habitual love, of tenderness for years, of relationship to the dead,—all that inexplicable likeness in look, tone, and gesture, that seem to belong to one family, and which reminded Margaret so forcibly at this moment of her mother,—came in to melt and soften her numbed heart into the overflow of warm tears.
Mr. Bell stole out of the room, and went down into the study, where he ordered a fire, and tried to divert his thoughts by taking down and examining the different books.
Each volume brought a remembrance or a suggestion of his dead friend.
It might be a change of employment from his two days' work of watching Margaret, but it was no change of thought.
He was glad to catch the sound of Mr. Thornton's voice, making enquiry at the door.
Dixon was rather cavalierly dismissing him; for with the appearance of Mrs. Shaw's maid, came visions of former grandeur, of the Beresford blood, of the 'station' (so she was pleased to term it) from which her young lady had been ousted, and to which she was now, please God, to be restored.
These visions, which she had been dwelling on with complacency in her conversation with Mrs. Shaw's maid (skilfully eliciting meanwhile all the circumstances of state and consequence connected with the Harley Street establishment, for the edification of the listening Martha), made Dixon rather inclined to be supercilious in her treatment of any inhabitant of Milton; so, though she always stood rather in awe of Mr. Thornton, she was as curt as she durst be in telling him that he could see none of the inmates of the house that night.
It was rather uncomfortable to be contradicted in her statement by Mr. Bell's opening the study-door, and calling out:
'Thornton! is that you?
Come in for a minute or two; I want to speak to you.'
So Mr. Thornton went into the study, and Dixon had to retreat into the kitchen, and reinstate herself in her own esteem by a prodigious story of Sir John Beresford's coach and six, when he was high sheriff.
'I don't know what I wanted to say to you after all.
Only it's dull enough to sit in a room where everything speaks to you of a dead friend.
Yet Margaret and her aunt must have the drawing-room to themselves!'
'Is Mrs.—is her aunt come?' asked Mr. Thornton.
'Come?
Yes! maid and all.
One would have thought she might have come by herself at such a time!
And now I shall have to turn out and find my way to the Clarendon.'
'You must not go to the Clarendon.
We have five or six empty bed-rooms at home.'
'Well aired?'
'I think you may trust my mother for that.'
'Then I'll only run up-stairs and wish that wan girl good-night, and make my bow to her aunt, and go off with you straight.'
Mr. Bell was some time up-stairs.
Mr. Thornton began to think it long, for he was full of business, and had hardly been able to spare the time for running up to Crampton, and enquiring how Miss Hale was.
When they had set out upon their walk, Mr. Bell said:
'I was kept by those women in the drawing-room.
Mrs. Shaw is anxious to get home—on account of her daughter, she says—and wants Margaret to go off with her at once.
Now she is no more fit for travelling than I am for flying.
Besides, she says, and very justly, that she has friends she must see—that she must wish good-bye to several people; and then her aunt worried her about old claims, and was she forgetful of old friends?
And she said, with a great burst of crying, she should be glad enough to go from a place where she had suffered so much.
Now I must return to Oxford to-morrow, and I don't know on which side of the scale to throw in my voice.'
He paused, as if asking a question; but he received no answer from his companion, the echo of whose thoughts kept repeating—
'Where she had suffered so much.'
Alas! and that was the way in which this eighteen months in Milton—to him so unspeakably precious, down to its very bitterness, which was worth all the rest of life's sweetness—would be remembered.
Neither loss of father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr. Thornton, could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to her sweet presence—every step of which was rich, as each recurring moment that bore him away from her made him recall some fresh grace in her demeanour, or pleasant pungency in her character.
Yes! whatever had happened to him, external to his relation to her, he could never have spoken of that time, when he could have seen her every day—when he had her within his grasp, as it were—as a time of suffering.
It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.