ors and
governors had come and gone under an almost Carthusian vow of
silence, except as to their lessons; and now with seventeen
years of inexperience on his hands, Mr. Falkirk's sensations
were those of the man out West, who wanted to move off
whenever another man came within twenty miles of him.
Thus, in the forlorn hope of a retreat which yet he knew must
prove useless, Mr. Falkirk let the first March winds blow him
out of town; and at this present time was snugly hid away in a
remote village which nobody ever heard of, and where nobody
ever came.
So far so good: Mr. Falkirk rested and took breath.
Nevertheless the spring came, even there; and following close
in her train, the irrepressible conflict. Whoever succeeded in
running away from his duties--or his difficulties? There was a
flutter of young life within doors as without, and Mr. Falkirk
knew it: there were a hundred rills of music, a thousand
nameless flowers to which he could not close his senses. There
was a soft, indefinable stir and sweetness, that told of the
breaking of Winter bonds and the coming of Summer glories; and
he could not stay the progress of things in the one case more
than in the other.
Mr. Falkirk had always taken care of this girl--the few years
before his guardianship were too dim to look back to much.
From the day when she, a suddenly orphaned child, stood
frightened and alone among strangers, and he came in and took
her on his knee, and bade her "be a woman, and be brave." That
was his ideal of womanhood,--to that combination of strength
and weakness he had tried to bring Wych Hazel.
Yet though she had grown up in Mr. Falkirk's company, she
never thoroughly understood him: nature and circumstances had
made him a reserved man,--and her eyes were young. Of a piece
with his reserve was the peculiar fence of separation which he
built up between all his own concerns and those of his ward.
He was poor--she had a more than ample fortune; yet no
persuading would make him live with her. Had he been rich,
perhaps she might have lived with him; but as it was, unless
when lodgings were the rule, they lived in separate houses;
only his was always close at hand. Even when his ward was a
little child, living at Chickaree with her nurses and
housekeeper, Mr. Falkirk never spent a night in the house. He
formally bought and paid for a tiny cottage on the premises,
and there he lived: nothing done without his knowledge,
nothing undone with
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