“Miss Arden, I’m afraid you’re feeling poorly,” said Barbara. “Do now, there’s a dear young lady, take this glass of wine. I made Mrs. Fillpot give it me for you, and I’ve kept it cool in the bottom of the basket. Do, Miss, there’s a dear.”
“I don’t want anything, Barbara,” said Clare; and in the greatness of her misery, she who had made up her mind for the rest of her life to be self-sufficing, to hide her secret in the depths of her being, and ask no one for sympathy, had all the difficulty in the world to keep from throwing her arms round Barbara’s neck, and weeping on her breast. She restrained the impulse, however, and kept her head away, and preserved her pride for the moment. This was, alas, how her heart treated Clare, after she had made up her mind that one decision was all that was necessary. She made her decision, expecting henceforward everlasting sadness, but calm; whereas, on the contrary, she was a prey to shock after shock, her heart melting, her resolution giving way, a hundred struggles going on within her. Her very determination made everything worse instead of better. “If you had not thrust everybody from you, if you had not condemned unheard, if you had not come away, and insulted, and abandoned him, all might yet have been well,” said the traitor within. And thus poor Clare waded in the very deepest of waters all that long miserable day.
It was nightfall when she returned to the house. Time had gone imperceptibly, as it goes when there is nothing tangible in it. Long threads of reverie linked themselves into each other, going on and on as if they need never end, and coming back after all manner of digressions to the same central subject. “Don’t you think it’s time to be going, Miss?” the maid would say timidly from time to time. “Presently,” Clare would reply, hopelessly opening or shutting the book she had taken into her hands; but at length the sun began to sink, and it was evident they must begin their walk if they were to reach Arden before night. Clare swallowed Barbara’s glass of wine, and then set out upon the weary way. “It has been a nice quiet day,” she said, mechanically, fibbing with the instinct of good society, as she got up. “I hope it has done you good, Miss,” said Barbara, doubtfully. “Oh, all the good in the world,” said Clare. And with this forlorn fiction she walked home again; so much less sure of her own constancy; so much more doubtful of the possibility of shutting up secrets in a silence as of the grave, and living a perpetual life of sacrifice, without hope or call for sympathy, than she had been in the morning. She was very weary when she got home, weary in body and mind, and could only answer with a faint smile to the message which Wilkins gave her from her cousin. Jeanie had not kept him back to-day; only one day had he been kept back by all the united influences which could be brought to bear upon him. Had not she been hard upon him, sending him summarily away from her for one offence, he who perhaps all his life had been wronged so bitterly? Had he been wronged? Or was it a dream? And had he wronged her--or was this but a cloud that might pass away? When Clare had got rid of the servants, who worried her, and had also got rid of the poor pretence of dining which she went through in order not to reveal to them too clearly the commotion in her mind, she had another struggle with herself. Whether he had wronged her or had been wronged, surely it was best now to keep him at arm’s length. Better not to see him again, never to attempt to lean her cares upon him, to confide her difficulties to him. Oh, no, no! He must never come again. And Clare said to herself that she must live and die alone.