Midwinter's face darkened when the last trace of the carriage
had disappeared from view. "I have done my best," he said, as he
turned back gloomily into the house "If Mr. Brock himself were
here, Mr. Brock could do no more!"
He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his
hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the
steward's books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting
nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various
movables of the steward's office had been provisionally placed
after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and
tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the
business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result exposed
his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers
bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the
correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could
understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted
bitterly as he left the room again to his two years' solitary
self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller's shop. "If I
could only have worked at a business!" he thought. "If I could
only have known that the company of poets and philosophers was
company too high for a vagabond like me!"
He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell
heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it
exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. "Curse
the place!" he said, snatching up his hat and stick. "I like the
bleakest hillside I ever slept on better than I like this house!"
He impatiently descended the door-steps, and stopped on the
drive, considering, by which direction he should leave the park
for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the
carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting
him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own
nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the
dream without entering it again. But one other way remained: the
way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning. There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major's daughter now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.
Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was
full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable
self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous
and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the
poor. "The heather-bell costs nothing!" he thought, looking
contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that
surrounded him; "and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as
the best of you!" He followed the artfully contrived ovals and
squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the
symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design. "How many pounds a foot did you cost?" he said, looking back with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. "Wind away over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain side, if you can!"
He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him; crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached the major's cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion at the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate, to look at the trim little residence which would never have been empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan's ill-advised resolution to force the steward's situation on his friend.
The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and
still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the
windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the
sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park
as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden inclosure. The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining—a voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with nothing but the hard power of it left—was the discordantly predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow Midwinter to distinguish the words that were spoken, he felt the impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at once stepped forward to continue his walk.