PAGE 30
Trent’s Trust
by
Miss Eversleigh, dignifiedly tall, but youthfully frank, as he remembered her, was waiting to drive him in a pony trap to the rectory. A little pink, with suppressed consciousness and the responsibilities of presenting a stranger guest to her guardian, she seemed to Randolph more charming than ever.
But her first word of news shocked and held him breathless. Bobby, the little orphan, a frail exotic, had succumbed to the Northern winter. A cold caught in New York had developed into pneumonia, and he died on the passage. Miss Avondale, although she had received marked attention from Sir William, returned to America in the same ship.
“I really don’t think she was quite as devoted to the poor child as all that, you know,” she continued with innocent frankness, “and Cousin Bill was certainly most kind to them both, yet there really seemed to be some coolness between them after the child’s death. But,” she added suddenly, for the first time observing her companion’s evident distress, and coloring in confusion, “I beg your pardon–I’ve been horribly rude and heartless. I dare say the poor boy was very dear to you, and of course Miss Avondale was your friend. Please forgive me!”
Randolph, intent only on that catastrophe which seemed to wreck all Captain Dornton’s hopes and blunt his only purpose for declaring himself, hurriedly reassured her, yet was not sorry his agitation had been misunderstood. And what was to be done? There was no train back to London for four hours. He dare not telegraph, and if he did, could he trust to his strange patron’s wise conduct under the first shock of this news to his present vacillating purpose? He could only wait.
Luckily for his ungallant abstraction, they were speedily at the rectory, where a warm welcome from Mr. Brunton, Sibyl’s guardian, and his family forced him to recover himself, and showed him that the story of his devotion to John Dornton had suffered nothing from Miss Eversleigh’s recital. Distraught and anxious as he was, he could not resist the young girl’s offer after luncheon to show him the church with the vault of the Dorntons and the tablet erected to John Dornton, and, later, the Hall, only two miles distant. But here Randolph hesitated.
“I would rather not call on Sir William to-day,” he said.
“You need not. He is over at the horse show at Fern Dyke, and won’t be back till late. And if he has been forgathering with his boon companions he won’t be very pleasant company.”
“Sibyl!” said the rector in good-humored protest.
“Oh, Mr. Trent has had a little of Cousin Bill’s convivial manners before now,” said the young girl vivaciously, “and isn’t shocked. But we can see the Hall from the park on our way to the station.”
Even in his anxious preoccupation he could see that the church itself was a quaint and wonderful preservation of the past. For four centuries it had been sacred to the tombs of the Dorntons and their effigies in brass and marble, yet, as Randolph glanced at the stately sarcophagus of the unknown ticket of leave man, its complacent absurdity, combined with his nervousness, made him almost hysterical. Yet again, it seemed to him that something of the mystery and inviolability of the past now invested that degraded dust, and it would be an equal impiety to disturb it. Miss Eversleigh, again believing his agitation caused by the memory of his old patron, tactfully hurried him away. Yet it was a more bitter thought, I fear, that not only were his lips sealed to his charming companion on the subject in which they could sympathize, but his anxiety prevented him from availing himself of that interview to exchange the lighter confidences he had eagerly looked forward to. It seemed cruel that he was debarred this chance of knitting their friendship closer by another of those accidents that had brought them together. And he was aware that his gloomy abstraction was noticed by her. At first she drew herself up in a certain proud reserve, and then, perhaps, his own nervousness infecting her in turn, he was at last terrified to observe that, as she stood before the tomb, her clear gray eyes filled with tears.