Clare Avery | Page 7

marry again. Not for love this time, of course; no, indeed!--but she thought it was her duty. Sir Thomas Enville--a widower with three children--had been very kind; and he would make such a good father for Clare. He had a beautiful estate in the North. It would be a thousand pities to let the opportunity slip. Once for all, she thought it her duty; and she begged that no one would worry her with opposition, as everything was already settled.
Kate Avery, Walter's elder and only surviving sister, was exceedingly indignant. Her gentle, unsuspicious mother was astonished and puzzled. But Mr Avery, after a momentary look of surprise, only smiled.
"Nay, but this passeth!" [surpasses belief] cried Kate.
"Even as I looked for it," quietly said her father. "I did but think it should maybe have been somewhat later of coming."
"Her duty!" broke out indignant Kate. "Her duty to whom?"
"To herself, I take it," said he. "To Clare, as she counteth. Methinks she is one of those deceivers that do begin with deceiving of themselves."
"To Clare!" repeated Kate. "But, Father, she riddeth her of Clare. The babe is to 'bide here until such time as it may please my good Lady to send for her."
"So much the better for Clare," quietly returned Mr Avery.
And thus it happened that Clare was six years old, and her mother was still an utter stranger to her.
The family at Bradmond, however, were not without tidings of Lady Enville. It so happened that Mr Avery's adopted son, Robert Tremayne, was Rector of the very parish in which Sir Thomas Enville lived; and a close correspondence--for Elizabethan days--was kept up between Bradmond and the Rectory. In this manner they came to know, as time went on, that Clare had a little sister, whose name was Blanche; that Lady Enville was apparently quite happy; that Sir Thomas was very kind to her, after his fashion, though that was not the devoted fashion of Walter Avery. Sir Thomas liked to adorn his pretty plaything with fine dresses and rich jewellery; he surrounded her with every comfort; he allowed her to go to every party within ten miles, and to spend as much money as she pleased. And this was precisely Orige's beau ideal of happiness. Her small cup seemed full--but evidently Clare was no necessary ingredient in the compound.
If any one had taken the trouble to weigh, sort, and label the prejudices of Barbara Polwhele, it would have been found that the heaviest of all had for its object "Papistry,"--the second, dirt,--and the third, "Mistress Walter." Lieutenant Avery had been Barbara's darling from his cradle, and she considered that his widow had outraged his memory, by marrying again so short a time after his death. For this, above all her other provocations, Barbara never heartily forgave her. And a great struggle it was to her to keep her own feelings as much as possible in the background, from the conscientious motive that she ought not to instil into Clare's baby mind the faintest feeling of aversion towards her mother. The idea of the child being permanently sent to Enville Court was intensely distasteful to her. Yet wherever Clare went, Barbara must go also.
She had promised Mrs Avery, Clare's grandmother, on her dying bed, never to leave the child by her own free will so long as her childhood lasted, and rather than break her word, she would have gone to Siberia-- or to Enville Court. In Barbara's eyes, there would have been very little choice between the two places. Enville Court lay on the sea-coast, and Barbara abhorred the sea, on which her only brother and Walter Avery had died: it was in Lancashire, which she looked upon as a den of witches, and an arid desert bare of all the comforts of life; it was a long way from any large town, and Barbara had been used to live within an easy walk of one; she felt, in short, as though she were being sent into banishment.
And there was no help for it. Within the last few weeks, a letter had come from Lady Enville,--not very considerately worded--requesting that if what she had heard was true, that Mr Avery's health was feeble, and he was not likely to live long--in the event of his death, Clare should be sent to her.
In fact, there was nowhere else to send her. Walter's two sisters, Kate and Frances, were both dead,--Kate unmarried, Frances van Barnevelt leaving a daughter, but far away in Holland. The only other person who could reasonably have claimed the child was Mr Tremayne; and with what show of justice could he do so, when his house lay only a stone's throw from the park gates of Enville Court? Fate seemed to determine that Clare should go to her mother.