No Name - Wilkie Collins (free e books to read online .TXT) 📗

the sight of Norah both started, and both stopped. Frank confusedly raised his hat, and turned back in the direction of his father’s cottage. Magdalen advanced to meet her sister, carelessly swinging her closed parasol from side to side, carelessly humming an air from the overture which had preceded the rising of the curtain on the previous night.

“Luncheon-time already!” she said, looking at her watch. “Surely not?”

“Have you and Mr. Francis Clare been alone in the shrubbery since ten o’clock?” asked Norah.

“Mr. Francis Clare! How ridiculously formal you are. Why don’t you call him Frank?”

“I asked you a question, Magdalen.”

“Dear me, how black you look this morning! I’m in disgrace, I suppose. Haven’t you forgiven me yet for my acting last night? I couldn’t help it, love; I should have made nothing of Julia, if I hadn’t taken you for my model. It’s quite a question of art. In your place, I should have felt flattered by the selection.”

“In your place, Magdalen, I should have thought twice before I mimicked my sister to an audience of strangers.”

“That’s exactly why I did it⁠—an audience of strangers. How were they to know? Come! come! don’t be angry. You are eight years older than I am⁠—you ought to set me an example of good-humor.”

“I will set you an example of plain-speaking. I am more sorry than I can say, Magdalen, to meet you as I met you here just now!”

“What next, I wonder? You meet me in the shrubbery at home, talking over the private theatricals with my old playfellow, whom I knew when I was no taller than this parasol. And that is a glaring impropriety, is it? ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ You wanted an answer a minute ago⁠—there it is for you, my dear, in the choicest Norman-French.”

“I am in earnest about this, Magdalen⁠—”

“Not a doubt of it. Nobody can accuse you of ever making jokes.”

“I am seriously sorry⁠—”

“Oh, dear!”

“It is quite useless to interrupt me. I have it on my conscience to tell you⁠—and I will tell you⁠—that I am sorry to see how this intimacy is growing. I am sorry to see a secret understanding established already between you and Mr. Francis Clare.”

“Poor Frank! How you do hate him, to be sure. What on earth has he done to offend you?”

Norah’s self-control began to show signs of failing her. Her dark cheeks glowed, her delicate lips trembled, before she spoke again. Magdalen paid more attention to her parasol than to her sister. She tossed it high in the air and caught it. “Once!” she said⁠—and tossed it up again. “Twice!”⁠—and she tossed it higher. “Thrice⁠—” Before she could catch it for the third time, Norah seized her passionately by the arm, and the parasol dropped to the ground between them.

“You are treating me heartlessly,” she said. “For shame, Magdalen⁠—for shame!”

The irrepressible outburst of a reserved nature, forced into open self-assertion in its own despite, is of all moral forces the hardest to resist. Magdalen was startled into silence. For a moment, the two sisters⁠—so strangely dissimilar in person and character⁠—faced one another, without a word passing between them. For a moment the deep brown eyes of the elder and the light gray eyes of the younger looked into each other with steady, unyielding scrutiny on either side. Norah’s face was the first to change; Norah’s head was the first to turn away. She dropped her sister’s arm in silence. Magdalen stooped and picked up her parasol.

“I try to keep my temper,” she said, “and you call me heartless for doing it. You always were hard on me, and you always will be.”

Norah clasped her trembling hands fast in each other. “Hard on you!” she said, in low, mournful tones⁠—and sighed bitterly.

Magdalen drew back a little, and mechanically dusted the parasol with the end of her garden cloak.

“Yes!” she resumed, doggedly. “Hard on me and hard on Frank.”

“Frank!” repeated Norah, advancing on her sister and turning pale as suddenly as she had turned red. “Do you talk of yourself and Frank as if your interests were One already? Magdalen! if I hurt you, do I hurt him? Is he so near and so dear to you as that?”

Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the ground. “What right have you to question me?” she broke out on a sudden. “Whether I like Frank, or whether I don’t, what interest is it of yours?” As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her sister and return to the house.

Norah, turning paler and paler, barred the way to her. “If I hold you by main force,” she said, “you shall stop and hear me. I have watched this Francis Clare; I know him better than you do. He is unworthy of a moment’s serious feeling on your part; he is unworthy of our dear, good, kindhearted father’s interest in him. A man with any principle, any honor, any gratitude, would not have come back as he has come back, disgraced⁠—yes! disgraced by his spiritless neglect of his own duty. I watched his face while the friend who has been better than a father to him was comforting and forgiving him with a kindness he had not deserved: I watched his face, and I saw no shame and no distress in it⁠—I saw nothing but a look of thankless, heartless relief. He is selfish, he is ungrateful, he is ungenerous⁠—he is only twenty, and he has the worst failings of a mean old age already. And this is the man I find you meeting in secret⁠—the man who has taken such a place in your favor that you are deaf to the truth about him, even from my lips! Magdalen! this will end ill. For God’s sake, think of what I have said to you, and control yourself before it is too late!” She stopped, vehement and breathless, and caught