CHAPTER XXXIV

FALSE AND TRUE

’Truth will fail thee never, never! 
Though thy bark be tempest-driven,
Though each plank be rent and riven,
Truth will bear thee on for ever!’
Anon.

The ‘bearing up better than likely’ was a terrible strain upon Margaret.  Sometimes she thought she must give way, and cry out with pain, as the sudden sharp thought came across her, even during her apparently cheerful conversations with her father, that she had no longer a mother.  About Frederick, too, there was great uneasiness.  The Sunday post intervened, and interfered with their London letters; and on Tuesday Margaret was surprised and disheartened to find that there was still no letter.  She was quite in the dark as to his plans, and her father was miserable at all this uncertainty.  It broke in upon his lately acquired habit of sitting still in one easy chair for half a day together.  He kept pacing up and down the room; then out of it; and she heard him upon the landing opening and shutting the bed-room doors, without any apparent object.  She tried to tranquillise him by reading aloud; but it was evident he could not listen for long together.  How thankful she was then, that she had kept to herself the additional cause for anxiety produced by their encounter with Leonards.  She was thankful to hear Mr. Thornton announced.  His visit would force her father’s thoughts into another channel.

He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word—­holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.  Then he turned to Margaret.  Not ‘better than likely’ did she look.  Her stately beauty was dimmed with much watching and with many tears.  The expression on her countenance was of gentle patient sadness—­nay of positive present suffering.  He had not meant to greet her otherwise than with his late studied coldness of demeanour; but he could not help going up to her, as she stood a little aside, rendered timid by the uncertainty of his manner of late, and saying the few necessary common-place words in so tender a voice, that her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away to hide her emotion.  She took her work and sate down very quiet and silent.  Mr. Thornton’s heart beat quick and strong, and for the time he utterly forgot the Outwood lane.  He tried to talk to Mr. Hale:  and—­his presence always a certain kind of pleasure to Mr. Hale, as his power and decision made him, and his opinions, a safe, sure port—­was unusually agreeable to her father, as Margaret saw.

Presently Dixon came to the door and said, ’Miss Hale, you are wanted.’

Dixon’s manner was so flurried that Margaret turned sick at heart.  Something had happened to Fred. She had no doubt of that.  It was well that her father and Mr. Thornton were so much occupied by their conversation.