CHAPTER x.x.xV.

MILLICENT.

Next morning, Joseph Naylor was disturbed in the act of shaving by the intelligence that a lady desired to see him, and that she was waiting his coming down-stairs in one of the parlours.

"A lady? Who is it? What does she want?" he inquired of the black boy who brought the message.

"Princ.i.p.al of the Female College at Montpelier, sah."

"Never heard of the inst.i.tution. Some one drumming up for pupils, I suppose. My nieces are rather old to put to school. They would not go if I tried to put them. Why does she not apply to their mother? Susan never did allow me to interfere about the schools--or anything else, for that matter, when she could manage without me."

He finished his dressing quickly, however, and hastened down-stairs.

In the parlour stood a tall, grey woman, clad in black, awaiting him.

He advanced with a low bow and a look of inquiry. The lady looked earnestly in his face, coming forward to meet him with extended hand.

"You do not know me, Joseph?"

Joseph stared in surprise at so intimate a form of address; yet there was a tone in the voice which seemed not unfamiliar, though he could not connect it in his memory with any particular time, place, or person.

"I am changed, of course,"--it was still the lady who spoke,--"but so are you. Try if you cannot recall. It is five-and-twenty years since we last met."

"You have the advantage, ma'am."

"My name is Millicent Rolph. You know me now?"

"You? Do you mean that you are Lina's sister?"

"I am, Joseph--your sister-in-law. You cannot have forgotten our last meeting at the old home in New Orleans?"

"I can never forget the last time I met Millicent Rolph; but I trace no resemblance between you and her. She was a woman of thirty, dark-haired, large, handsome; you--do not resemble her."

"She was thirty twenty-five years ago, and you were twenty-two. The years have left their mark upon us both. I cannot but be changed. I have come through the troubles of a lifetime. There was the war, and mother's death, and the ruin of our affairs in New Orleans; and there have been trials and much hard work since then, to change me into the spare, elderly, white-haired woman you see now. You are changed too, though life has dealt less harshly, I should judge. Yet I recognised you at once, though I had prayed that I might not--that you might prove to be another man, bearing by accident the name of my brother-in-law.... We were such friends once, Joseph, in the long ago.

Sitting under the shade of the magnolias in the dear old garden, with Lina between us----"

"Have done, Millicent! I confess now that it is you. I recognise your voice. But do not stir up old memories. They haunted me like ghosts for more than twenty years. It is only recently that I have been able to lay them.... Let them lie. You weighed me down with misery enough when last we met. Do not refer to it. I had rather we had not met now.

It is like reopening a grave, even to hear you speak. It brings back all I would forget--all I have been cheating myself into believing that I had buried and got rid of at last."

"I can understand the feeling."

"What can I do to serve you? Tell me; but let us part at once. I will do anything, but I cannot stand here listening. Your voice is heavy with memories like forebodings; my heart sinks at the very sound.

Speak, and let me leave you. What do you want?"

"I want nothing, Joseph--nothing for myself. It is for your own sake I am come, and it tears my heart to say the things I have to tell you."

"You said something like that when you acted so cruelly before, you and your mother; but you did not spare me."

"I am come to warn you, Joseph, against this marriage you propose to make."

"You are? Have you not injured me enough in my affections already? Are five-and-twenty years of widowhood not enough to have inflicted on one who never knowingly offended you? What wrong have I done you, that you should persecute me like this?"

"Joseph, I always loved you like a sister. It crushes me to be made the herald of your disappointments; but I have no choice."

"I will not listen to you. You shall not put me from Rose as you did from Lina. Let me pa.s.s."

"You cannot marry Rose. You must stop and hear me;" and she planted herself between him and the door.

"Then I must escape by the window; and there she is, standing at the farther end of the gallery. How spirited and sweet she looks--how like our Lina!... Millicent, you will pity, and not come in between? Look, she sees us! She starts. She is coming to us with that pretty shyness which seems half defiance. One would think she knew you well, Millicent?"

"She does, Joseph. Listen to her when we meet; it will save a world of painful explanation."

Rose came forward, not very quickly, though pride forbade her faltering. She held her head erect, and her colour was heightened; but her eyes were far from steady, and for all her endeavours to outface the situation, betrayed an inclination to seek the ground.

"You here, Aunt Millicent? I did not know that you and Mr Naylor were acquainted."

"_Aunt_ Millicent? Are you two related, then?" gasped Joseph, his nether jaw falling.

"She is your own daughter, Joseph Naylor! It was to tell you so that I sought you out--to preserve you from the hideous mistake you were about to make. But oh! it breaks my heart that I should be your messenger of evil tidings again."

Joseph leant against the window-jamb, looking very pale, and uttering a sigh so deep that it sounded like a moan.

"Do you mean that she is Lina's child?" he said, after a pause.

"Yes; and yours."

"I never was told that I had a child. You might have told me that, when you told the rest."

"Would it have been easier, think you, to bear the loss of Lina, if you had been told that we were keeping you from your child? If we had told you of her birth, perhaps you might have claimed her. Lina must have learnt everything. She would have died of shame and remorse."

"When was the child born?"

"The day the news reached us of her father's loss at sea; her birth was hastened by the news. The mother nearly died. She fell out of one fainting-fit into another, till exhausted nature could endure no more.

For days her life hung trembling in the balance, and then the sight of the baby turned the scale. There was something to live for--something that seemed part of you. We took them North. The baby throve, and for her sake poor Lina took heart and tried to live."

"And you deprived the child even of its father's name?"

"Hillyard adopted her. Lina had no other family. She lived five years only after that marriage."

"Why did you not restore her to me when her mother died?"

"We could not, Joseph: the world is so big. Where were we to look for you? You came no more to New Orleans. By-and-by the war drove us North, and reduced us to poverty. Mother died. I went to live with Hillyard and bring up the child. He was devoted to her. They were everything to one another. It would have been cruelty to interfere."

"You seem to have had pity for every one but me, Millicent. Could this Hillyard's rights in the child compare with mine?"

"You had gone out of our lives, Joseph. We knew--that is, I knew--little about your family, except that they lived somewhere up in Canada. That was too far away for us, living in New Orleans, to take much interest in. Afterwards, when I lived with Hillyard in Canada, near Sarnia, I did not remember, or know how to set about inquiring."