"Was not that Miss Hare?"
"Yes, my lady," was the man's reply. "She wanted master. I said your ladyship was at home, but she would not enter."
Isabel said no more; she caught the eyes of Francis Levison fixed on her with as much meaning, compassionate meaning, as they dared express. She clasped her hands in pain, and turned again to the window.
Barbara was slowly walking down the avenue, Mr. Carlyle was then in sight, walking quickly up it. Lady Isabel saw their hands meet in greeting.
"Oh, I am so thankful to have met you!" Barbara exclaimed to him, impulsively. "I actually went to your office to-day, and I have been now to your house. We have such news!"
"Ay! What? About Thorn?"
"No; about Richard," replied Barbara, taking the scrap of paper from the folds of her dress. "This came to me this morning from Anne."
Mr. Carlyle took the document, and Barbara looked over him whilst he read it; neither of them thinking that Lady Isabel's jealous eyes, and Captain Levison's evil ones, were strained upon them from the distant windows. Miss Carlyle's also, for the matter of that.
"Archibald, it seems to me that Providence must be directing him hither at this moment. Our suspicions with regard to Thorn can now be set at rest. You must contrive that Richard shall see him. What can he be coming again for?"
"More money," was the supposition of Mr. Carlyle. "Does Mrs. Hare know of this?"
"She does, unfortunately. I opened the paper before her, never dreaming it was connected with Richard--poor, unhappy Richard!--and not to be guilty."
"He acted as though he were guilty, Barbara; and that line of conduct often entails as much trouble as real guilt."
"You do not believe him guilty?" she most passionately uttered.
"I do not. I have little doubt of the guilt of Thorn."
"Oh, if it could but be brought home to him!" returned Barbara, "so that Richard might be cleared in the sight of day. How can you contrive that he shall see Thorn?"
"I cannot tell; I must think it over. Let me know the instant he arrives, Barbara."
"Of course I shall. It may be that he does not want money; that his errand is only to see mamma. He was always so fond of her."
"I must leave you," said Mr. Carlyle, taking her hand in token of farewell. Then, as a thought occurred to him, he turned and walked a few steps with her without releasing it. He was probably unconscious that he retained it; she was not.
"You know, Barbara, if he should want money, and it be not convenient to Mrs. Hare to supply it at so short a notice, I can give it to him, as I did before."
"Thank you, thank you, Archibald. Mamma felt sure you would."
She lifted her eyes to his with an expression of gratitude; a warmer feeling for an uncontrolled moment mingled with it. Mr. Carlyle nodded pleasantly, and then set off toward his house at the pace of a steam engine.
Two minutes in his dressing-room, and he entered the drawing-room, apologizing for keeping them waiting dinner, and explaining that he had been compelled to go to his office to give some orders subsequent to his return to Lynneborough. Lady Isabel's lips were pressed together, and she preserved an obstinate silence. Mr. Carlyle, in his unsuspicion, did not notice it.
"What did Barbara Hare want?" demanded Miss Carlyle, during dinner.
"She wanted to see me on business," was his reply, given in a tone that certainly did not invite his sister to pursue the subject. "Will you take some more fish, Isabel?"
"What was that you were reading over with her?" pursued the indefatigable Miss Corny. "It looked like a note."
"Ah, that would be telling," returned Mr. Carlyle, willing to turn it off with gayety. "If young ladies choose to make me party to their love letters, I cannot betray confidence, you know."
"What rubbish Archibald!" quoth she. "As if you could not say outright what Barbara wants, without making a mystery of it. And she seems to be always wanting you now."
Mr. Carlyle glanced at his sister a quick, peculiar look; it seemed to her to speak both of seriousness and warning. Involuntarily her thoughts--and her fears--flew back to the past.
"Archibald, Archibald!" she uttered, repeating the name, as if she could not get any further words out in her dread. "It--it--is never-- that old affair is never being raked up again?"
Now Miss Carlyle's "old affair" referred to one sole and sore point-- Richard Hare, and so Mr. Carlyle understood it. Lady Isabel unhappily believing that any "old affair" could only have reference to the bygone loves of her husband and Barbara.
"You will oblige me by going on with your dinner, Cornelia," gravely responded Mr. Carlyle. Then--assuming a more laughing tone--"I tell you it is unreasonable to expect me to betray a young woman's secrets, although she may choose to confide them professionally to me. What say you, Captain Levison?"
The gentleman addressed bowed, a smile of mockery, all too perceptible to Lady Isabel, on his lips. And Miss Carlyle bent her head over her plate, and went on with her dinner as meek as any lamb.
That same evening, Lady Isabel's indignant and rebellious heart condescended to speak of it when alone with her husband.
"What is it that she wants with you so much, that Barbara Hare?"
"It is private business, Isabel. She has to bring me messages from her mother."
"Must the business be kept from me?"
He was silent for a moment, considering whether he might tell her. But it was impossible he could speak, even to his wife, of the suspicion they were attaching to Captain Thorn. It would have been unfair and wrong; neither could he betray that a secret visit was expected from Richard. To no one in the world could he betray that, however safe and true.
"It would not make you the happier to know it, Isabel. There is a dark secret, you are aware, touching the Hare family. It is connected with that."
She did not put faith in a word of the reply. She believed he could not tell her because her feelings, as his wife, would be outraged by the confession; and it goaded her anger into recklessness. Mr. Carlyle, on his part, never gave a thought to the supposition that she might be jealous; he had believed that nonsense at an end years ago. He was perfectly honorable and true; strictly faithful to his wife, giving her no shadow of cause or reason to be jealous of him; and being a practical, matter-of-fact man, it did not occur to him that she could be so.
Lady Isabel was sitting, the following morning, moody and out of sorts. Captain Levison, who had accompanied Mr. Carlyle in the most friendly manner possible to the park gate on his departure, and then stolen along the hedgewalk, had returned to Lady Isabel with the news of an "ardent" interview with Barbara, who had been watching for his going by at the gate of the grove. She sat, sullenly digesting the tidings, when a note was brought in. It proved to be an invitation to dinner for the following Tuesday, at a Mrs. Jefferson's--for Mr. and Lady Isabel Carlyle and Miss Carlyle.
"Do you go?" asked Miss Carlyle.
"Yes," replied Isabel. "Mr. Carlyle and I both want a change of some sort," she added, in a mocking sort of spirit; "it may be well to have it, if only for an evening."
In truth this unhappy jealousy, this distrust of her husband, appeared to have altered Lady Isabel's very nature.
"And leave Captain Levison?" returned Miss Carlyle.
Lady Isabel went over to her desk, making no reply.
"What will you do with him, I ask?" persisted Miss Carlyle.
"He can remain here--he can dine by himself. Shall I accept the invitation for you?"
"No; I shall not go," said Miss Carlyle.
"Then, in that case, there can be no difficulty in regard to Captain Levison," coldly spoke Lady Isabel.
"I don't want his company--I am not fond of it," cried Miss Carlyle. "I would go to Mrs. Jefferson's, but that I should want a new dress."
"That's easily had," said Lady Isabel. "I shall want one myself."
"/You/ want a new dress!" uttered Miss Carlyle. "Why, you have a dozen!"
"I don't know that I could count a dozen in all," returned Lady Isabel, chafing at the remark, and the continual thwarting put upon her by Miss Carlyle, which had latterly seemed more than hard to endure. Petty evils are more difficult to support than great ones, take notice.
Lady Isabel concluded her note, folded, sealed it, and then rang the bell. As the man left the room with it, she desired that Wilson might be sent to her.
"Is it this morning, Wilson, that the dressmaker comes to try on Miss Isabel's dress?" she inquired.
Wilson hesitated and stammered, and glanced from her mistress to Miss Carlyle. The latter looked up from her work.
"The dressmaker's not coming," spoke she, sharply. "I countermanded the order for the frock, for Isabel does not require it."
"She does require it," answered Lady Isabel, in perhaps the most displeased tone she had ever used to Miss Carlyle. "I am a competent judge of what is necessary for my children."
"She no more requires a new frock than that table requires one, or that you require the one you are longing for," stoically persisted Miss Carlyle. "She has got ever so many lying by, and her striped silk, turned, will make up as handsome as ever."
Wilson backed out of the room and closed the door softly, but her mistress caught a compassionate look directed toward her. Her heart seemed bursting with indignation and despair; there seemed to be no side on which she could turn for refuge. Pitied by her own servants!
She reopened her desk and dashed off a haughty, peremptory note for the attendance of the dressmaker at East Lynne, commanding its immediate dispatch.
Miss Corny groaned in her wrath.
"You will be sorry for not listening to me, ma'am, when your husband shall be brought to poverty. He works like a horse now, and with all his slaving, can scarcely, I fear, keep expenses down."
Poor Lady Isabel, ever sensitive, began to think they might, with one another, be spending more than Mr. Carlyle's means would justify; she knew their expenses were heavy. The same tale had been dinned into her ears ever since she married him. She gave up in that moment all thought of the new dress for herself and for Isabel; but her spirit, in her deep unhappiness, felt sick and faint within her.
Wilson, meanwhile, had flown to Joyce's room, and was exercising her dearly beloved tongue in an exaggerated account of the matter--how Miss Carlyle put upon my lady, and had forbidden a new dress to her, as well as the frock to Miss Isabel.
And yet a few more days passed on.
CHAPTER XXIV.
RICHARD HARE AT MR. DILL'S WINDOW.
Bright was the moon on that genial Monday night, bright was the evening star, as they shone upon a solitary wayfarer who walked on the shady side of the road with his head down, as though he did not care to court observation. A laborer, apparently, for he wore a smock-frock and had hobnails in his shoes; but his whiskers were large and black, quite hiding the lower part of his face, and his broad-brimmed "wide- awake" came far over his brows. He drew near the dwelling of Richard Hare, Esq., plunged rapidly over some palings, after looking well to the right and to the left, into a field, and thence over the side wall into Mr. Hare's garden, where he remained amidst the thick trees.
Now, by some mischievous spirit of intuition or contrariety, Justice Hare was spending this evening at home, a thing he did not do once in six months unless he had friends with him. Things in real life do mostly go by the rules of contrary, as children say in their play, holding the corners of the handkerchief, "Here we go round and round by the rules of conte-rary; if I tell you to hold fast, you must loose; if I tell you to loose, you must hold fast." Just so in the play of life. When we want people to "hold fast," they "loose;" and when we want them to "loose," they "hold fast."
Barbara, anxious, troubled, worn out almost with the suspense of looking and watching for her brother, feeling a feverish expectation that night would bring him--but so had she felt for the two or three nights past--would have given her hand for her father to go out. But no--things were going by the rule of contrary. There sat the stern justice in full view of the garden and the grove, his chair drawn precisely in front of the window, his wig awry, and a long pipe in his mouth.
"Are you not going out, Richard?" Mrs. Hare ventured to say.
"No."
"Mamma, shall I ring for the shutters to be closed?" asked Barbara, by and by.
"Shutters closed?" said the justice. "Who'd shut out this bright moon? You have got the lamp at the far end of the room, young lady, and can go to it."
Barbara ejaculated an inward prayer for patience--for safety of Richard, if he did come, and waited on, watching the grove in the distance. It came, the signal, her quick eye caught it; a movement as if some person or thing had stepped out beyond the trees and stepped back again. Barbara's face turned white and her lips dry.
"I am so hot!" she exclaimed, in her confused eagerness for an excuse; "I must take a turn in the garden."
She stole out, throwing a dark shawl over her shoulders, that might render her less conspicuous to the justice, and her dress that evening was a dark silk. She did not dare to stand still when she reached the trees, or to penetrate them, but she caught glimpses of Richard's face, and her heart ached at the change in it. It was white, thin, and full of care; and his hair, he told her, was turning gray.
"Oh, Richard, darling, and I may not stop to talk to you!" she wailed, in a deep whisper. "Papa is at home, you see, of all the nights in the world."
"Can't I see my mother?"
"How can you? You must wait till to-morrow night."
"I don't like waiting a second night, Barbara. There's danger in every inch of ground that this neighborhood contains."
"But you must wait, Richard, for reasons. That man who caused all the mischief--Thorn--"
"Hang him!" gloomily interrupted Richard.
