The Vicar of Wrexhill. Frances Milton Trollope
would marry within a year.
As soon as he had got rid of his warm-hearted but passionate old friend, Mowbray hastened to repair the neglect he had been forced into committing, and sought his mother in the drawing-room. But she was no longer there.
The room, indeed, appeared to be wholly untenanted, and he was on the point of leaving it to seek his mother elsewhere, when he perceived that Miss Torrington was seated at the most distant corner of it, almost concealed by the folds of the farthest window-curtain.
"Rosalind!" … he exclaimed, "are you hid there? … Where are all the rest? and how come you to be left alone?"
"I am left alone, Mr. Mowbray … because I wished it. Helen and Fanny are with your mother, I believe, in her room."
Charles wished to see them all, and to see them together, and had almost turned to go; but there was something in the look and manner of Rosalind that puzzled him, and going up to her, he said kindly, "Is anything the matter, Rosalind? You look as if something had vexed you."
To his great astonishment she burst into tears, and turning from him as if to hide an emotion she could not conquer, she said, "Go, go, Mr. Mowbray—go to your mother—you ought to have gone to her instantly."
"Instantly? … When? … What do you mean, Miss Torrington?"
"Miss Torrington means, Mr. Mowbray, that it would in every way have been more proper for you to have announced to your mother yourself the strange will it has pleased your father to leave, instead of sending a stranger to do it."
"Who then has told her of it, Rosalind? Was it the lawyer? was it Mr. Humphries?"
"No sir—it was Mr. Cartwright."
"But why should you be displeased with me for this, dear Rosalind? Sir Gilbert led me out of the library by force, and would not let me go to my mother, as I wished to do, and I have but this instant got rid of him; but I did not commission either Mr. Cartwright or any one else to make a communication to her which I was particularly desirous of making myself."
"You did not send Mr. Cartwright to her?" said Rosalind colouring, and looking earnestly in his face.
"No, indeed I did not. Did he say I had sent him?"
"How very strange it is," she replied after a moment's consideration, "that I should be perfectly unable to say whether he did or did not! I certainly do not remember that he explicitly said 'Madam, your son has sent me here;' but this I do remember—that somehow or other I understood that you had done so."
"And how did he announce to my mother that she. … I mean, how did he communicate to her the purport of my father's will?"
"Charles Mowbray!" exclaimed Rosalind passionately, clenching her small hands and stamping her little foot upon the ground—"I may be a very, very wicked girl: I know I am wilful, headstrong, obstinate, and vain; and call me also dark-minded, suspicious, what you will; but I do hate that man."
"Hate whom, Rosalind?" said Charles, inexpressibly astonished at her vehemence. "What is it you mean? … Is it Mr. Cartwright, our good friendly clergyman, that you hate so bitterly?"
"Go to your mother, Mr. Mowbray. I am little more than seventeen years old, and have always been considered less instructed, and therefore sillier of course than was to be expected even from my age and sex; then will it not be worse than waste of time to inquire what I mean—especially when I confess, as I am bound to do, that I do not well know myself? … Go to your mother, Charles, and let her know exactly all you feel. You, at least, have no cause to hide your faults."
"I will go—but I wish I knew what has so strangely moved you."
"Ask your sisters—they saw and heard all that I did; at least, they were present here, as I was;—ask them, examine them, but ask me nothing; for I do believe, Charles, that I am less to be depended on than any other person in the world."
"And why so, my dear Rosalind?" replied Mowbray, almost laughing. "Do you mean that you tell fibs against your will?"
"Yes … I believe so. At least, I feel strangely tempted to say a great deal more than I positively know to be true; and that is very much like telling fibs, I believe."
"Well, Rosalind, I will go, for you grow more mysterious every moment; only, remember that I should greatly like to know all the thoughts that come into that strange little head of yours. Will you promise that I shall?"
"No," was the ungracious reply; and turning away, she left the room by a door that led into a conservatory.
On entering his mother's dressing-room, Mowbray found her seated between her two daughters, and holding a hand of each.
She looked up as he entered: the traces of tears were on her cheeks, and her eyes rested on him with an expression of melancholy reproach such as he had never read in them before.
"My dear, dear mother!" he exclaimed as he approached her, "has my absence then vexed you so grievously? … I could not help it, mother; Sir Gilbert literally made me his prisoner."
"Sir Gilbert, Charles, might have shown more respect to the memory of the friend he has lost, than by keeping his son to listen to his own wild invectives against the wife that friend so loved and trusted."
"Whoever has repeated to you the hasty expressions of Sir Gilbert, my dear mother, in such a manner as to leave a painful impression on your mind against him, has not acted well. You know his temper, but you know his heart also; and I should not have thought that it could have been in the power of any one to make you doubt the real friendship of Sir Gilbert for us all."
"Surely, Charles, it was no symptom of friendship to me, to say that your dear father had made an accursed will!"
"Good heavens! … what a strange misrepresentation, mother! … and all hanging, as it should seem, upon one little syllable! … Our friend, as you well know, is what Rosalind calls a manish man; he denies the supremacy of woman, and might, and I verily believe did say, that a will which vested power in her must be a cursed will. But we know too well his long-licensed coarseness of expression to greatly marvel at that; but for the solemn and most awful word ac-cursed, believe me, mother, he never said it."
"It matters little, my dear son, what particular words of abuse Sir Gilbert uttered against me, provided that your heart did not echo them."
"Mother! dearest mother!" cried Helen, rising and going towards her brother, who seemed petrified at the words he heard, "how for a single moment could you believe that Charles's heart could echo any word that spoke not honour and love towards you!"
"He might have been mistaken, Helen," replied her mother with a heavy sigh: "Charles could not indeed suspect that the mother his dear father so fully trusted should prove unworthy of the trust.—But let us quit this painful theme; and believe me, my children, that the first wish of my heart is to prove myself worthy of his trust and your love."
"Such words are just what we might expect to hear from you, mother," said Mowbray, "were any profession from you to us necessary; but I would gladly forget that you have ever thought such an assurance called for."
He bent down and kissed her fervently; and then making a sign to Helen, who seemed about to follow him, that she should remain where she was, he walked out for a couple of hours among the darkest thickets he could find, with more of melancholy feeling than had ever before rested on his spirits.
CHAPTER V.
THE ARISTOCRACY OF WREXHILL.
There was no longer any thing to prevent Charles Mowbray's return to Oxford, and the