"I have been at the gate some time," she said. "It is so pleasant out of doors."

"I went to the top of the lane to look for you a long time ago, and saw you coming with, I thought, Mr. Percy."

"Yes. He met me. Mamma, I want to tell you something about--"

Mrs. Costello laid down her work.

"What?" she said almost sharply, as something in her child's soft caressing attitude, and broken words struck her with a new terror.

Lucia slid down to the floor, half kneeling at her mother's feet. "About myself--and him," she murmured.

Mrs. Costello raised her daughter's face to the light, and looked at it closely with an almost bitter scrutiny.

"Child," she said, "I thought you would have been safe from this. I did him injustice, it seems."

A new instinct in Lucia's mind roused her against her mother. She let her clinging arms fall, and raised her head.

"I do not understand you, mother," she answered, and half rose from where she had been kneeling.

"Stay, Lucia," and her mother's hand detained her. "I have tried to save you from suffering. I see now that I have been wrong. But tell me all."

Awed and startled out of the sweet dreams of a few minutes ago, Lucia tried to obey. She said a few almost unintelligible words, then came to a sudden pause. She had slipped back again to her old place after her little burst of anger, and now looked up pleadingly to her mother.

"But, indeed, I don't know how it was," she said; "only it was after the Indian went away."

Mrs. Costello started. "What Indian?" she asked.

And then the story came out, vivid enough, but broken up as it were by the newer, sweeter excitement of that other story which she could only tell in broken words and blushes. As she spoke her eyes were still raised to her mother's face, looking only for the reflection of her own terror and thankfulness; but she saw such deadly paleness and rigidity steal over it, that she started up in dismay.

Mrs. Costello signed to her to wait, and in a moment was again so far mistress of herself as to be able to say,

"Sit down again. Finish your story, and then describe this man if you can."

Her voice was forced and husky, but Lucia dared not disobey. She had only a few words to add, but her description had nothing characteristic in it, except the utterly degraded and brutal expression of the countenance, which had so vividly impressed her.

When she ceased speaking, both remained for some minutes silent and without moving. Then Mrs. Costello rose, and began to walk slowly up and down the room. She felt that she had made a mistake in the affair nearest to her heart. She knew that Lucia had a girl's fancy for Mr.

Percy; he had done all he could to awaken it, and it was not likely that the poor child would have been entirely untouched by his efforts; but she had believed that it was only for the amusement of his leisure that he had been so perseveringly blind to her own coldness, and that he was too thoroughly selfish to be guilty of such an imprudence as she now saw had been committed. That Lucia could ever be his wife, she knew was utterly impossible. She had thought that the worst which could happen, was that when he had left Cacouna his memory would have to be slowly and painfully eradicated from her heart, but now it had become needful to cause this beloved child a double share of the trouble, which she had so dreaded for her. All these thoughts, and with them the idea of an added horror overhanging herself, seemed to press upon her brain with unendurable weight. Yet, suffer as she might, time must not be suffered to pass. Night was advancing, and before morning Lucia must know all the story, which once told, would shadow her life, and throw her new-born happiness out of her very recollection.

She stopped at last in her restless walk. She went up to the chair where Lucia sat, and putting her arms round her, kissed her forehead.

"You are very happy, my child?" she said tenderly.

"Mamma, I don't know. I _was_ happy."

"You will be again--not yet, but later. Try to believe that, for it is time you should share my secret and my burden, and they are terrible for you now."

CHAPTER IX.

"You will be happy again!" Did any one of us in the first dull pain of a new, inexplicable suffering, ever believe such words as those? Lucia read her mother's face, tone, gestures too well to doubt that she regarded this long-kept secret as something which must separate her from Percy--must separate her, she therefore fancied, from all that was best and sweetest in life. It was hard that she should have been suffered to taste happiness, if it was instantly to be snatched from her. She felt this half resentfully, shrinking into herself, and cowering before the unknown trial, which, when fully understood, her natural courage would enable to meet with energy. She sat with her head resting on her hands, while Mrs. Costello left the room, and came back carrying a small, old-fashioned desk, which she placed upon the table. This desk, which she knew had been her mother's when a girl, and which contained many little treasures, attracted Lucia's attention. Obeying a sign from Mrs.

Costello, she came forward, and watched while it was opened, and the many familiar objects taken out. Underneath all, where she had always thought the desk remained empty, the pressure of a spring opened another compartment, in which lay a few papers and a likeness.

"You have often asked me to show you your father's likeness, Lucia,"

Mrs. Costello said with slow painful utterance. "There it is. Take it, and you will know my secret."

Lucia put out her hand, but as it touched the portrait lying there face downwards, she involuntarily drew it back, and glanced at her mother.

"Must I see it? Must I know?" she whispered tremblingly.

"You must."

She lifted the picture and looked, but the lines swam before her eyes.

As they steadied and came out clearly she saw a tall figure with black hair, dressed in a gaily striped shirt and blanket, and leaning on a spear--an Indian. She threw the likeness from her with a cry, "Impossible! It is _not_ true," and with clasped hands tried to shut out the hateful sight.

Shudder after shudder swept over her, and still she cried in her heart, "I will not believe it," but she said no more aloud. Her father! All her lifelong terror of his race, all that she had known of them up to the encounter of that very evening, which now seemed years ago, surged through her mind; and, as if mocking her, came above all, her own face with the dark traits which she had believed to be Spanish, but which she could now trace to such a different origin. In a moment, and for ever, her girlish vanity fell from her. She felt as if her beauty were but the badge of degradation and misery. And then there came the keen instinct of resentment--it was to her mother, whom she loved, that she owed this intolerable suffering. Crouching down and shivering, as if with cold, she yielded to the storm of thought which swept over her, yielded to it in a kind of blind despair, from which she had neither wish nor power to rouse herself.

But this mood, which seemed to paralyse her, lasted in reality but a few minutes; she was roused by her mother's voice and touch. She looked up for a moment, but with hard tearless eyes and set lips, and only to put away from her the hand that had been softly laid on her shoulder.

Mrs. Costello drew back; she returned to her chair, and sat down to wait, but the long deep sigh which unconsciously escaped her, as she did so, reached Lucia's heart. A strong impulse of love and pity seemed to break through all her misery; she felt that, at least, she did not suffer alone, and with a quick self-reproach she threw herself at her mother's feet, and encircled her waist with her arms. For a moment neither spoke. They held each other fast, and one, at least, thanked God silently that the most bitter pang was averted, since they could still so cling to each other.

But after a while, Mrs. Costello said, "I have much to tell you, my child. Can you bear to hear it now?"

"Yes, mother. I must know all now."

Lucia rose, and bringing a footstool, sat down in her old childish attitude at her mother's feet; only that her face, which was worn and pale, was quite hidden.

"I am ready," she said. "Explain all I cannot understand."

No human being, perhaps, could tell his or her own story with perfect truth; still less could tell it so to the hearer the most passionately loved, and whose love seems to hang in the balance. It would be apt to be a piece of special pleading, for or against, as egotism or conscience happened to be strongest. Best, then, not to try to reproduce the words spoken that night--spoken in the tuneless, level voice, which, in its dull monotony, is a truer indication of pain than any other; but to repeat only the substance of all that Lucia then heard for the first time.

To her, the old house by the Dee was already familiar ground; she knew, dimly, the figure of a lady who died there in her youth, and left a desolate child, well cared for, but little loved, to grow up alone; and she knew, more familiarly, but with a sense of awe which was almost dislike, the child's father, her own grandfather, a man saddened, silent, unsympathetic. These, and various relations and servants who had surrounded her mother in her childhood, she had already heard of a thousand times. The story, new to her, began in Mary Wynter's fifteenth year.

At that time Mr. Wynter's family consisted of four persons--himself, his daughter, her governess, and a nephew, George Wynter, who was, in fact, an adopted son. The governess had been lately and hastily added to the household, on the discovery of Mary's amazing ignorance; and her selection had been a mistake. She and her pupil were at open warfare, she endeavouring to teach, Mary determined not to learn. The poor lady was very conscientious, and very well instructed, but she was not judicious. She never found out that her pupil would have been an absolute slave to affection, but was altogether hardened to severity, and when she failed in herself enforcing her authority, she made the great and most unlucky mistake of appealing to George Wynter. Mary, up to that time, had had no dislike to her cousin. He was nearly twenty years older than herself, an excellent man, who took everything _au pied de la lettre_, and who, perceiving that what Miss Smith said was reasonable, thought duty and common sense required him to "speak to" her _un_reasonable pupil. He never discovered his mistake--nor Miss Smith hers; but things grew more and more uncomfortable. Miss Smith tired of her struggles, and sought more manageable pupils; and Mary, immediately after her fifteenth birthday, was sent to school.

Removed to a new atmosphere, no longer chilled by loneliness or embittered by the consciousness of perpetual disapproval, the girl began to bloom sweetly and naturally. For the first time she was fortunate in her surroundings. Companionship made her gay, and emulation woke keen and successful ambition. Nearly three years passed, and, in place of ignorance and insubordination, she had gained a bright intelligence and a becoming submission. At seventeen she returned home, a girl who would have brought to a mother both pride and anxiety.

But there was no mother to receive her. At the sight of her, her father was a little shaken out of his accustomed thoughts and habits. He tried to imagine what his wife would have done or counselled for their child's good, but his imagination was unpractised and would not help him much.

He made one great effort for her sake. He took her abroad, and for a whole year travelled about, showing her much that was best worth seeing in the south of Europe--but seeing _places_ chiefly, people seldom. In all this time she saw nothing of her cousin George--he had almost fallen out of her acquaintance, and taken the place of a disagreeable memory.

But when she and her father came home, he was there to receive them, and she began to realize that his presence was to be an essential part of her home life. More than that, she now perceived how distinctly he stood between her and her father--a fact she had forgotten while they were together without him. The acquaintance and sympathy between them, which had been slowly growing up during their year of travel, froze to death now that he was there; and Mary, at eighteen, found herself completely isolated.

It did not occur to her father that she ought to go into society, or that she needed a chaperone. Society had lost all its charms for him; and he intended to marry his daughter early, and so give her the best of protection. Neither did it seem necessary to him that she should be consulted in any way about her marriage. However insubordinate she might as a child have been to others, to him, whenever they were brought into direct contact, she had always been perfectly submissive, and he expected her to continue so. To such a length had his confidence in the success of his plans gone, that he had never in any way hinted them to his daughter--the thing was settled, and had become a part of the course of nature, in no way requiring to be discussed. Under these circumstances, Mary spent two years of grown-up life at home. They were very wearisome and depressing years, partly from her position, partly from her strong, and always growing, dislike to the cousin, who was so much more to her father than she was. She saw very few people; now and then she went with her father to a dinner-party where most of the guests were "grave and reverend seigniors" like himself; now and then to a dance, where people were civil to her, and where some stranger in the neighbourhood would occasionally show signs of incipient admiration, pleasantly exciting to a girl in her teens. And now and then she had to receive visitors at home, feeling constrained and annoyed while she did so, by the invariable presence of George. There were neighbours who would gladly have been good to her. It was common for mothers to say to each other, "Poor Mary Wynter! I should like to ask here more, but I really dare not, Mr. Wynter is _so_ odd,"--and Mary had even a certain consciousness of this goodwill and its suppression; but there were other sayings, common as household words, among these same people, of which she had no suspicion. It would, perhaps, have changed the whole story of her life, if she had known that the reason why she lived as much apart from the whole region of lovemaking or flirtation as if she had been a staid matron of fifty, was, the general belief that she was engaged, and before long to be married to the one man in the world whom she cordially hated. If she had known it then, she might, perhaps, have found a substitute for her cousin among her own equals and countrymen, but her entire unconsciousness, which they could not suspect, so deceived every possible lover as to make them believe her utterly out of their reach.

The only real enjoyment which brightened these dull years, came to Mary when she visited an old school-friend. There were two or three with whom she had kept up affectionate intercourse; and one, especially, whose house was her refuge whenever she could get permission to spend a week away from home. This girl had married at the very time of Mary's leaving school--she lived much in the world, and would have carried Mary into the whirl of dissipation if Mr. Wynter had allowed it. But he had restricted his daughter's visits to those times of the year when Helen Churchill and her husband were in the country, fatigued and glad of a few weeks of quiet; there Mary went to them, and found their quiet livelier than the liveliest of her home-life.

But in the spring of her twenty-first year, leave, often refused, was granted, and she joined the Churchills in London. The first week passed in a delightful confusion--whether her new dresses, or her unaccustomed liberty, or the opera, or the park, or the companionship of Helen, or the absence of George, were the most delightful, she would have been puzzled to say. The next week her head steadied a little--everything was delightful, but it was London, and not fairyland; it could not be denied that the rooms were hot, and that one came down rather tired in the morning. Mrs. Churchill, however, had a remedy for that. She had a pretty pair of ponies which carried her well out of London almost every morning, into fresh air and green lanes, and she took Mary with her.

After breakfast they used to start, and make their expedition long or short, according to the day's engagements.