第11章 FOR CONSCIENCE'SAKE(5)

Frances,sitting beside her mother's husband,with Mr.Cope opposite,was naturally enough much regarded by the curate during the tedious sail home;at first with sympathetic smiles.Then,as the middle-aged father and his child grew each gray-faced,as the pretty blush of Frances disintegrated into spotty stains,and the soft rotundities of her features diverged from their familiar and reposeful beauty into elemental lines,Cope was gradually struck with the resemblance between a pair in their discomfort who in their ease presented nothing to the eye in common.Mr.Millborne and Frances in their indisposition were strangely,startlingly alike.

The inexplicable fact absorbed Cope's attention quite.He forgot to smile at Frances,to hold her hand;and when they touched the shore he remained sitting for some moments like a man in a trance.

As they went homeward,and recovered their complexions and contours,the similarities one by one disappeared,and Frances and Mr.

Millborne were again masked by the commonplace differences of sex and age.It was as if,during the voyage,a mysterious veil had been lifted,temporarily revealing a strange pantomime of the past.

During the evening he said to her casually:'Is your step-father a cousin of your mother,dear Frances?'

'Oh,no,'said she.'There is no relationship.He was only an old friend of hers.Why did you suppose such a thing?'

He did not explain,and the next morning started to resume his duties at Ivell.

Cope was an honest young fellow,and shrewd withal.At home in his quiet rooms in St.Peter's Street,Ivell,he pondered long and unpleasantly on the revelations of the cruise.The tale it told was distinct enough,and for the first time his position was an uncomfortable one.He had met the Franklands at Exonbury as parishioners,had been attracted by Frances,and had floated thus far into an engagement which was indefinite only because of his inability to marry just yet.The Franklands'past had apparently contained mysteries,and it did not coincide with his judgment to marry into a family whose mystery was of the sort suggested.So he sat and sighed,between his reluctance to lose Frances and his natural dislike of forming a connection with people whose antecedents would not bear the strictest investigation.

A passionate lover of the old-fashioned sort might possibly never have halted to weigh these doubts;but though he was in the church Cope's affections were fastidious--distinctly tempered with the alloys of the century's decadence.He delayed writing to Frances for some while,simply because he could not tune himself up to enthusiasm when worried by suspicions of such a kind.

Meanwhile the Millbornes had returned to London,and Frances was growing anxious.In talking to her mother of Cope she had innocently alluded to his curious inquiry if her mother and her step-father were connected by any tie of cousinship.Mrs.Millborne made her repeat the words.Frances did so,and watched with inquisitive eyes their effect upon her elder.

'What is there so startling in his inquiry then?'she asked.'Can it have anything to do with his not writing to me?'

Her mother flinched,but did not inform her,and Frances also was now drawn within the atmosphere of suspicion.That night when standing by chance outside the chamber of her parents she heard for the first time their voices engaged in a sharp altercation.

The apple of discord had,indeed,been dropped into the house of the Millbornes.The scene within the chamber-door was Mrs.Millborne standing before her dressing-table,looking across to her husband in the dressing-room adjoining,where he was sitting down,his eyes fixed on the floor.

'Why did you come and disturb my life a second time?'she harshly asked.'Why did you pester me with your conscience,till I was driven to accept you to get rid of your importunity?Frances and Iwere doing well:the one desire of my life was that she should marry that good young man.And now the match is broken off by your cruel interference!Why did you show yourself in my world again,and raise this scandal upon my hard-won respectability--won by such weary years of labour as none will ever know!'She bent her face upon the table and wept passionately.

There was no reply from Mr.Millborne.Frances lay awake nearly all that night,and when at breakfast-time the next morning still no letter appeared from Mr.Cope,she entreated her mother to go to Ivell and see if the young man were ill.

Mrs.Millborne went,returning the same day.Frances,anxious and haggard,met her at the station.

Was all well?Her mother could not say it was;though he was not ill.

One thing she had found out,that it was a mistake to hunt up a man when his inclinations were to hold aloof.Returning with her mother in the cab Frances insisted upon knowing what the mystery was which plainly had alienated her lover.The precise words which had been spoken at the interview with him that day at Ivell Mrs.Millborne could not be induced to repeat;but thus far she admitted,that the estrangement was fundamentally owing to Mr.Millborne having sought her out and married her.

'And why did he seek you out--and why were you obliged to marry him?'

asked the distressed girl.Then the evidences pieced themselves together in her acute mind,and,her colour gradually rising,she asked her mother if what they pointed to was indeed the fact.Her mother admitted that it was.

A flush of mortification succeeded to the flush of shame upon the young woman's face.How could a scrupulously correct clergyman and lover like Mr.Cope ask her to be his wife after this discovery of her irregular birth?She covered her eyes with her hands in a silent despair.