Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Love stories; Somerset (England) -- Fiction
"But I shall. I won't have you go without seeing you out of the
door."
And on the following morning she was up before him. She hardly
understood, herself, why she was doing this. She knew that it should
be her object to avoid any further special conversation on that
subject which they had discussed up among the rocks. She knew that
she could give him no comfort, and that he could give none to her. It
would seem that he was willing to let the remembrance of the scene
pass away, so that it should be as though it had never been; and
surely it was not for her to disturb so salutary an arrangement!
But yet she was up to bid him Godspeed as he went. She could not
bear,--so she excused the matter to herself,--she could not bear to
think that he should regard her as ungrateful. She knew all that he
had done for them. She had perceived that the taking of the land, the
building of the sheds, the life which he had contrived in so short a
time to throw into the old place, had all come from a desire on his
part to do good to those in whose way he stood by family arrangements
made almost before his birth; and she longed to say to him one
word of thanks. And had he not told her,--once in the heat of
his disappointment; for then at that moment, as Clara said to
herself, she supposed that he must have been in some measure
disappointed,--had he not even then told her that when she wanted
a brother's care, a brother's care should be given to her by him?
Was she not therefore bound to do for him what she would do for a
brother?
She, with her own hands, brought the coffee into the little breakfast
parlour, and handed the cup into his hands. The gig, which had come
overnight from Taunton, was not yet at the door, and there was a
minute or two during which they must speak to each other. Who has not
seen some such girl when she has come down early, without the full
completeness of her morning toilet, and yet nicer, fresher, prettier
to the eye of him who is so favoured, than she has ever been in more
formal attire? And what man who has been so favoured has not loved
her who has so favoured him, even though he may not previously have
been enamoured as deeply as poor Will Belton?
"This is so good of you," he said.
"I wish I knew how to be good to you," she answered,--not meaning to
trench upon dangerous ground, but feeling, as the words came from
her, that she had done so. "You have been so good to us, so very good
to papa, that we owe you everything. I am so grateful to you for
saying that you will come back at Christmas."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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