Out in the Forty-Five Part 45

"Oh, the rest of being free again! Cary, I never expected you to be the heroine of the family."

"I think you are the heroine, Hatty."

"Most people would have thought I should be. But I have proved weak as water--yet not till after long suffering and hard pressure. You will never see the old Hatty again, Cary."

"Oh yes, dear!" said I. "Wait a few days, till you have had a good rest, and we have fed you up. You will feel quite different a week hence."

"My body will, I dare say, but me--that inside feeling and thinking machine--that will never be the same again. I want to tell you everything."

"And I want to hear it," I replied. "But don't talk now, Hatty; go to sleep, like a good girl. You will be much better for a long rest."

I drew the curtains, and asked Amelia to stay until Hatty was asleep. I knew she would not talk much, and Hatty would not care to tell her things as she would me. Going down-stairs, my Uncle Charles greeted me, laughing, with,--

"Here she comes, the good Queen Bess! Cary, you deserve a gold medal."

Grandmamma bade me come to her, and tell her all I knew. She exclaimed several times, and took ever so many pinches of snuff, till she had to call on my Aunt Dorothea to refill the box. At the end of it she called me a good child, and the Jesuits traitors and scoundrels, to which my Uncle Charles added some rather stronger language.

Charlotte seems to have known nothing of what was going on; or, I should rather say, to have noticed nothing. She is such a careless girl in every way that I am scarce surprised. Amelia did notice things, but she had a mistaken notion of what they meant. She fancied that Hatty was in love with Mr Crossland, and that she, not knowing of his engagement in marriage with Miss Marianne Newton, was very jealous of what she thought his double-dealing. Until after I spoke to her, she had no notion that there might be any sort of Popish treachery. Something which happened soon after that, helped to turn her mind in that direction. But Hatty says she knew next to nothing.

"But," says my Uncle Charles, "how could a Jesuit priest marry anybody?

It seems to be all in a muddle."

That I cannot answer.

Hatty is better to-day, after a quiet night's rest. She still looks woefully ill, and Grandmamma will not let her speak yet. Now that Grandmamma is roused about it, she is very kind to Hatty and me also. I do hope, now, that things have done happening! The poor Prince is a fugitive somewhere in Scotland, and everybody says, "the rebellion is quashed." They did not call it a rebellion until he turned back from Derby. My Uncle Bracewell has writ to my Uncle Charles again with news, and has asked him to see Amelia and Charlotte sent off homeward. Hatty will tarry here till we can return together.

At last our poor Hatty has told her story: and a sad, sad story it is.

It seems that Mr Crossland was pretending to make court to her at first, and she believed in him, and loved him. At that time, she says, she would not have brooked a word against him; and as to believing him to be the wretch he has turned out, she would as soon have thought the sun created darkness. There was no show of Popery at all in the family.

They went to church like other people, and talked just like others.

From a word dropped by Miss Theresa Newton, Hatty began to think that Mr Crossland's heart was not so undividedly her own as she had hoped; and she presently discovered that he was not to be trusted on that point. They had a quarrel, and he professed penitence, and promised to give up Miss Marianne; and for a while Hatty thought all was right again. Then, little by little, Mrs Crossland (whose right name seems to be Mother Mary Benedicta of the Annunciation--what queer names they do use, to be sure!)--well, Mrs Crossland began to tell Hatty all kinds of strange stories about the saints, and miracles, and so forth, which she said she had heard from the Irish peasantry. At first she told them as things to laugh at; then she began to wonder if there might be some truth in one or two of them; there were strange things in this world!

And so she went on from little to little, always drawing back and keeping silence for a while if she found that she was going too fast for Hatty to follow.

"I can see it all now, looking back," said Hatty. "It was all one great whole; but at the time I did not see it at all. They seemed mere pa.s.sing remarks, bits of conversation that came in anyhow."

Hatty felt sure that Mrs Crossland was a concealed Papist long before she suspected the young man. And when, at last, both threw the mask off, they had her fast in their toils. She was strictly warned never to talk with me except on mere trifling subjects; and she had to give an account of every word that had been said when she returned. If she hid the least thing from them, she was a.s.sured it would be a terrible sin.

"But you don't mean to say you believed all that rubbish?" cried I.

"It was not a question of belief," she answered. "I loved him. I would have done anything in all the world to win a smile from him; and he knew it. As to belief--I do not know what I believed: my brain felt like a chaos, and my heart in a whirl."

"And now, Hatty?" said I. I meant to ask what she believed now: but she answered me differently.

"Now," she said, in a low, hopeless voice, "the shrine is deserted, and the idol is broken, and the world feels a great wide, empty place where there is no room for me--a cold, hard place that I must toil through, and the only hope left is to get to the end as soon as possible."

Oh, I wish Flora or Annas were here! I do not know how to deal with my poor Hatty. Thoughts which would comfort me seem to fall powerless with her; and I have n.o.body to counsel me. I suppose my Aunt Kezia would say I must set the Lord before me; but I do not see how to do it in this case. I am sure I have prayed enough. What I want is an angel to whisper to me what to do again; and my angel has gone back into Heaven, I suppose, for I feel completely puzzled now. At any rate, I do hope things have done happening.

Note 1. Our forefathers thought colds a much more serious affair than we do. They probably knew much less about them.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

BOUGHT WITH A PRICE.

_Host._ "Trust me, I think 'tis almost day."

_Julia._ "Not so; but it hath been the longest night That e'er I watched, and the most heaviest."

SHAKESPEARE.

I am writing four days later than my last sentence, and I wonder whether things have finished beginning to happen.

Grandmamma's Tuesday was the day after I writ. The Newtons were there,--at least Mrs Newton and Miss Theresa,--and ever so many people whom I knew and cared nothing about. My Lady Parmenter came early, but did not stay long; and very late, long after every one else, Ephraim Hebblethwaite. Mr Raymond I did not see, and have not done so for several times.

I was not much inclined to talk, and I got into a corner with some pictures which I had seen twenty times, and turned them over just as an excuse for keeping quiet. All at once I heard Ephraim's voice at my side:

"Cary, I want to speak to you. Go on looking at those pictures: other ears are best away. How is Hatty?"

"She is better," I said; "but she is not the old Hatty."

"I don't think the old Hatty will come back," he said. "Perhaps the new one may be better. Are the Miss Bracewells gone home?"

"They start to-morrow," said I.

"Cary, I am going to ask you something. Don't show any surprise. Are you a brave girl?"

"I hardly know," said I, resisting the temptation to look up and see what he meant. "Why?"

"Because a woman is wanted for a piece of work, and we think you would answer."

"What piece of work?--and who are 'we'?" I asked, turning over some views of Rome with very little notion what they were.

"'We' are Colonel Keith, Raymond, and myself."

"And what 'piece of work'?" I asked again.

"To attempt the rescue of Angus."

"How?--what am I to do?"

"Did you ever try to personate anybody?"

"Well, we used to act little pieces sometimes at Carlisle, I and the Grandison girls and Lucretia Carnwath. There has never been anything of the sort here."