Fred could not tell what to think: he was angry and vexed and cast down by the strange reception he had received. The first night at home, which was always so pleasant, the girls hanging about him with a hundred things to ask and to tell, his mother beaming with affection and pleasure on her united family. And here he was left alone, the lamps burning with a sort of calm intelligence as if they knew all about it, the clock chuckling at him on the mantel-piece. Foggo came in with the tea-tray, and looked round in astonishment for the ladies, then shook his head solemnly and went away, leaving the little silver kettle boiling over its spirit-lamp. Foggo knew too. The very kettle puffed out its steam in Fred’s face like a mockery. Everybody knew--except the forlorn young master of the house, who knew nothing, and could not even form a guess what the mystery could be.
He was not however destined to spend that night in uncertainty. As he went upstairs, passing with a sense of injury the closed doors of his mother’s and his sisters’ rooms, Fred heard himself called in a whisper from the end of the corridor. Had he reflected for a moment he would have known who it must be. But with his mind full of his present trouble he did not reflect; he turned round quickly, hoping to see one of his sisters, and it was not till he found himself in the clutches of old Janet that he recognised the danger of her interference. “Has she told ye, Mr. Fred?” whispered the old woman, approaching her formidable head in the big mutch, and with its little palsied movement, to the young man’s face. “Told me what?” he cried with impatience. “Oh, my bonnie lad, dinna lose your temper--you’ll have need of all your patience. That she’s going to be married upon Pat Wedderburn!”
Fred gave a hoarse cry, which ran along the whole corridor into his mother’s closed room, who heard it and trembled--and to Susie’s, who sat half desperate over her fire longing for her brother. Not for a moment did Fred doubt the news: it explained everything; but he fled from the creature of ill-omen, the woman who gave it, with a sense of hatred and rage, for which indeed there was no warrant so far as she was concerned. “This is your doing!” he cried with fantastic bitterness. Why should he hate Janet, and how could it be her doing? he asked himself afterwards. But at the moment it seemed to the distracted young man as if this old retainer was one of the Fates, the enemy, not the friend of the house. He would not wait to hear another word, but rushed upstairs and shut himself in his room, as if some evil thing had been at his heels. Married!--his mother, his father’s wife, the first authority of his life--the woman without reproach--mamma! With that last baby-cry the cup was filled. The young man flung himself upon his face on his bed. And what an unhappy house it was which the darkness held that night concealed in its outer mantle of peace! Unhappy without any cause, for there was no evil going to be done--no harm: so far as any of these troubled people knew.