“It is not because of this only, papa—I wanted before to speak to you. I was waiting in the loggia for you, when Constance came.”
“What did you want, Frances? Oh, I quite acknowledge that you have a right to inquire. I hoped, perhaps, I might be spared to-night; I am rather exhausted—to-night.”
Frances dropped the hand which she had laid upon his arm. “It shall be exactly as you please, papa. I seem to know a great deal—oh, a great deal more than I knew at dinner. I don’t think I am the same person; and I thought it might save us all trouble if you would tell me—as much as you think I ought to know.”
She had sat down in her usual place, in her careful little modest pose, a little stiff, a little{v1-139} prim—the training of Mariuccia. After Constance, there was something in the attitude of Frances which made her father smile, though he was in no mood for smiling; and it was clear that he could not, that he ought not to escape. He would not sit down, however, and meet her eye. He stood by the table for a few minutes, with his eyes upon the books, turning them over, as if he were looking for something. At last he said, but without looking up, “There is nothing very dreadful to tell; no guilty secret, though you may suppose so. Your mother and I——”
“Then I have really a mother, and she is living?” the girl cried.
He looked at her for a moment. “I forgot that for a girl of your age that means a great deal—I hadn’t thought of it. Perhaps if you knew—— Yes; you have got a mother, and she is living. I suppose that seems a very wonderful piece of news?”
Frances did not say anything. The water came into her eyes. Her heart beat loudly, yet softly, against her young bosom. She had {v1-140}known it, so that she was not surprised. The surprise had been broken by Constance’s careless talk, by the wonder, the doubt, the sense of impossibility, which had gradually yielded to a conviction that it must be so. Her feeling was that she would like to go now, without delay, without asking any more questions, to her mother. Her mother! and he hadn’t thought before how much that meant to a girl—of her age!
Mr Waring was a little disconcerted by having no answer. Of course it meant a great deal to a girl; but still, not so much as to make her incapable of reply. He felt a little annoyed, disturbed, perhaps jealous, as Frances herself had been. It was with difficulty that he resumed again; but it had to be done.
“Your mother and I,” he said, taking up the books again, opening and shutting them, looking at the title-page now of one, now of another, “did not get on very well. I don’t know who was in fault—probably both. She had been married before. She had a son whom you hear Constance speak of as Markham. Markham has been at the bottom of all the trouble. He drove me out of my senses when he was a{v1-141} boy. Now he is a man: so far as I can make out it is he that has disturbed our peace again—hunted us up, and sent Constance here. If you ever meet Markham—and of course now you are sure to meet him—beware of him.” Here he made a pause again, and looked with great seriousness at the book in his hand, turning the leaf to finish a sentence which was continued on the next page.
“I beg your pardon, papa,” said Frances; “I am afraid I am very stupid. What relation is Markham to me?”
He looked at her for a moment, then threw down the book with some violence on the table, as if it were the offender. “He is your step-brother,” he said.
“My—brother? Then I have a brother too?” After a little pause she added, “It is very wonderful, papa, to come into a new world like this all at once. I want—to draw my breath.”
“It is my fault that it comes upon you all at once. I never thought—— You were a very small child when I brought you away. {v1-142}You forgot them all, as was natural. I did not at first know how entirely a child forgets; and then—then it seemed a pity to disturb your mind, and perhaps set you longing for—what it was impossible for you to obtain.”
It surprised him a little that Frances did not breathe a syllable of reproach. She said nothing. In her imagination she was looking back over these years, wondering how it would have been had she known. Would life ever be the same, now that she did know? The world seemed to open up round her, so much greater, wider, more full than she had thought. She had not thought much on the subject. Life in Bordighera was more limited even than life in an English village. The fact that she did not belong to the people among whom she had spent all these years, made a difference; and her father’s recluse habits, the few people he cared to know, the stagnation of his life, made a greater difference still. Frances had scarcely felt it until that meeting with the Mannerings, which put so many vague ideas into her mind. A child does not naturally inquire into the circumstances which have surrounded it all its life. It was natural to her to live in this{v1-143} retired place, to see nobody, to make amusements and occupations for herself—to know no one more like herself than Tasie Durant. Had she even possessed any girl-friends living the natural life of youth, that might have inspired a question or two. But she knew no girls—except Tasie, whose girlhood was a sort of fossil, and who might almost have been the mother of Frances. She saw indeed the village girls, but it did not occur to her to compare herself with them. Familiar as she was with all their ways, she was still a forestière—one of the barbarous people, English, a word which explains every difference. Frances did not quite know in what the peculiarity and eccentricity of the English consisted; but she, too, recognised with all simplicity that, being English, she was different. Now it came suddenly to her mind that the difference was not anything generic and general, but that it was her own special circumstances that had been unlike all the rest. There had been a mother all the time; another girl, a sister, like herself. It made her brain whirl.
She sat quite silent, thinking it all over, not{v1-144} perceiving her father’s embarrassment—thinking less of him, indeed, than of all the wonderful new things that seemed to crowd about her. She did not blame him. She was not thinking enough of him to blame him; her mind was quite sufficiently occupied by her discoveries. As she had taken him all her life without examination, she continued to take him. He was her father; that was enough. It did not occur to her to ask herself whether what he had done was right or wrong. Only, it was all very strange. The old solid earth had gone from under her feet, and the old order of things had been overthrown. She was looking out upon a world not realised—a spectator of something like the throes of creation, seeing the new landscape tremble and roll into place, the heights and hollows all changing; there was a great deal of excitement in it, both pain and pleasure. It occupied her so fully, that he fell back into a secondary place.
But this did not occur to Waring. He had not realised that it could be possible. He felt himself the centre of the system in which his{v1-145} little daughter lived, and did not understand how she could ignore him. He thought her silence—the silence of amazement, and excitement, and of that curious spectatorship—was the silence of reproach, and that her mind was full of a sense of wrong, which only duty kept in check. He felt himself on his trial before her. Having said all that he had to say, he remained silent, expecting her response. If she had given vent to an indignant exclamation, he would have been relieved; he would have allowed that she had a right to be indignant. But her silence was more than he could bear. He searched through the recesses of his own thoughts; but for the moment he could not find any further excuse for himself. He had done it for the best. Probably she would not see that. Waring was well enough acquainted with the human mind to know that every individual sees such a question from his or her own point of view: and he was prepared to find that his daughter would be unable to perceive what was so plain to him. But still he was aware that he had done it for the best. After a while the silence became so irksome to him that he felt compelled to break it{v1-146} and resume his explanations. If she would not say anything, there were a number of things which he might say.
“It is a pity,” he said, “that it has all broken upon you so suddenly. If I could have divined that Constance would have taken such a step—— To tell you the truth, I have never realised Constance at all,” he added, with an impulse towards the daughter he knew. “She was of course a mere child: to see her so independent, and with so distinct a will of her own, is very bewildering. I assure you, Frances, if it is wonderful to you, it is scarcely less wonderful to me.”
There was something in his tone that made her lift her eyes to him; and to see him stand there so embarrassed, so subdued, so much unlike the father who, though very kind and tender, had always been perhaps a little condescending, patronising, towards the girl, whom he scarcely recognised as an independent entity, went to her heart. She could not tell him not to be frightened—not to look at her with that guilty, apologetic look, which altogether reversed their ordinary relationship; but it added a pang{v1-147} to her bewilderment. She asked hastily, by way of concealing this uncomfortable change, a question which she thought he would have no difficulty in answering—“Is Constance much older than I am, papa?”
He gave a sort of furtive smile, as if he had no right to smile in ............