Flamsted quarries Part 49

This was the priest's problem.

He waited a moment to regain his own control. The ingrat.i.tude, the bitter injustice had shocked him out of it. Her mood seemed one of defiance only. The woman before him was one he had never known in the Aileen Armagh of the last fourteen years. He knew, moreover, that he must not speak--dare not, as a sacred obligation to his office, until he no longer felt the touch of anger he experienced upon hearing her unrestrained outburst. It was but a moment before that touch was removed; his heart softened towards her; filled suddenly with a pitying love, for with his mind's eye he saw the small blood-stained handkerchief in his hand, the initials A. A., the man on the cot from whose arm he had taken it more than six years before. Six years! How she must have suffered--and in silence!

"Aileen," he said at last and very gently, "whatever was done for you at that time was done with the best intentions for your good. Believe me, could Mr. Van Ostend and I have foreseen such resulting wretchedness as this for our efforts, we should never have insisted on carrying out our plan for you. But, like yourself, we are human--we could not foresee this any more than you could. There is, however, one course always open to you--"

"What?" she demanded; her voice was harsh from continued struggle with her complex emotions. She was past all realization of what she owed to the dignity of his office.

"You have long been of age; you are at liberty to leave Mrs. Champney whenever you will."

"I am going to." The response came prompt and hard.

"And what then?"

"I don't know--yet--;" her speech faltered; "but I want to try the stage. Every one says I have the voice for it, and I suppose I could make a hit in light operetta or vaudeville as well now as when I was a child. A few years more and I shall be too old."

"And you think you can enter into such publicity without protection?"

"Oh, I'm able to protect myself--I've done that already." She spoke with bitterness.

"True, you are a woman now--but still a young woman--"

Father Honore stopped there. He was making no headway with her. He knew only too well that, as yet, he had not begun to get beneath the surface.

When he spoke it was as if he were merely thinking aloud.

"Somehow, I hadn't thought that you would be so ready to leave us all--so many friends. Are we nothing to you, Aileen? Will you make better, truer ones among strangers? I can hardly think so."

She covered her face with her hands and began to sob again, but brokenly.

"Aileen, my daughter, what is it? Is there any new trouble preparing for you at The Bow?"

She shook her head. The tears trickled through her fingers.

"Does Mrs. Champney know that you are going to leave her?"

"No."

"Has it become unbearable?"

Another shake of the head. She searched blindly for her handkerchief, drew it forth and wiped her eyes and face.

"No; she's kinder than she's been for a long time--ever since that last stroke. She wants me with her most of the time."

"Has she ever spoken to you about remaining with her?"

"Yes, a good many times. She tried to make me promise I would stay till--till she doesn't need me. But, I couldn't, you know."

"Then why--but of course I know you are worn out by her long invalidism and tired of the fourteen years in that one house. Still, she has been lenient since you were twenty-one. She has permitted you--although of course you had the undisputed right--to earn for yourself in teaching the singing cla.s.ses in the afternoon and evening school, and she pays you something beside--fairly well, doesn't she? I think you told me you were satisfied."

"Oh yes, in a way--so far as it goes. She doesn't begin to pay me as she would have to pay another girl in my position--if I have any there. I haven't said anything about it to her, because I wanted to work off my indebtedness to her on account of what she spent on me in bringing me up--she never let me forget that in those first seven years! I want to give more than I've had," she said proudly, "and sometime I shall tell her of it."

"But you have never given her any love?"

"No, I couldn't give her that.--Do you blame me?"

"No; you have done your whole duty by her. May I suggest that when you leave her you still make your home with us here in Flamsted? You have no other home, my child."

"No, I have no other home," she repeated mechanically.

"I know, at least, two that are open to you at any time you choose to avail yourself of their hospitality. Mrs. Caukins would be so glad to have you both for her daughters' sake and her own. The Colonel desires this as much as she does and--" he hesitated a moment, "now that Romanzo has his position in the New York office, and has married and settled there, there could be no objection so far as I can see."

There was no response.

"But if you do not care to consider that, there is another. About seven months ago, Mrs. Googe--"

"Mrs. Googe?"

She turned to him a face from which every particle of color had faded.

"Yes, Mrs. Googe. She would have spoken to you herself long before this, but, you know, Aileen, how she would feel in the circ.u.mstances--she would not think of suggesting your coming to her from Mrs. Champney. I feel sure she is waiting for you to take the initiative."

"Mrs. Googe?" she repeated, continuing to stare at him--blankly, as if she had heard but those two words of all that he was saying.

"Why, yes, Mrs. Googe. Is there anything so strange in that? She has always loved you, and she said to me, only the other day, 'I would love to have her young companions.h.i.+p in my house'--she will never call it home, you know, until her son returns--'to be as a daughter to me'--"

"Daughter!--I--want air--"

She swayed forward in speaking. Father Honore sprang and caught her or she would have fallen. He placed her firmly against the chair back and opened the window. The keen night air charged with frost quickly revived her.

"You were sitting too near the fire; I should have remembered that you had come in from the cold," he said, delicately regarding her feelings; "let me get you a gla.s.s of water, Aileen."

She put out her hand with a gesture of dissent. She began to breathe freely. The room chilled rapidly. Father Honore closed the window and took his stand on the hearth. Aileen raised her eyes to him. It seemed as if she lifted the swollen reddened lids with difficulty.

"Father Honore," she said in a low voice, tense with suppressed feeling, "dear Father Honore, the only father I have ever known, don't you know _why_ I cannot go to Mrs. Googe's?--why I must not stay too long in Flamsted?"

And looking into those eyes, that were incapable of insincerity, that, in the present instance, attempted to veil nothing, the priest read all that of which, six years ago on that never to be forgotten November night in New York, he had had premonition.

"My daughter--is it because of Champney's prospective return within a year that you feel you cannot remain longer with us?"

Her quivering lips gave an almost inaudible a.s.sent.

"Why?" He dared not spare her; he felt, moreover, that she did not wish to be spared. His eyes held hers.

Bravely she answered, bracing soul and mind and body to steadfastness.

There was not a wavering of an eyelid, not a suggestion of faltering speech as she spoke the words that alone could lift from her overburdened heart the weight of a seven years' silence:

"Because I love him."

The answer seemed to Father Honore supreme in its sacrificial simplicity. He laid his hand on her head. She bowed beneath his touch.