第34章

Mr. Carlyle glanced over it as quickly as Mrs. Vane's illegible writing allowed him, and drew in his lips in a peculiar manner when he came to the signature. Perhaps at the same thought which had struck Isabel.

"Had Mrs. Vane been worth a rush, she would have come herself, knowing your lonely situation," he uttered, impulsively.

Isabel leaned her head upon her hand. All the difficulties and embarrassments of her position came crowding on her mind. No orders had been given in preparation for the funeral, and she felt that she had no right to give any. The earls of Mount Severn were buried at Mount Severn; but to take her father thither would involve great expense; would the present earl sanction that? Since the previous morning, she seemed to have grown old in the world's experience; her ideas were changed, the bent of her thoughts had been violently turned from its course. Instead of being a young lady of high position, of wealth and rank, she appeared to herself more in the light of an unfortunate pauper and interloper in the house she was inhabiting. It has been the custom in romance to present young ladies, especially if they be handsome and interesting, as being entirely oblivious of matter-of-fact cares and necessities, supremely indifferent to future prospects of poverty--poverty that brings hunger and thirst and cold and nakedness; but, be assured, this apathy never existed in real life. Isabel Vane's grief for her father--whom, whatever may have been the aspect he wore for others, /she/ had deeply loved and reverenced--was sharply poignant; but in the midst of that grief, and of the singular troubles his death had brought forth, she could not shut her eyes to her own future. Its blank uncertainty, its shadowed-forth embarrassments did obtrude themselves and the words of that plain-speaking creditor kept ringing in her ears: "You won't have a roof to put your head under, or a guinea to call your own." Where was she to go? With whom to live? She was in Mr. Carlyle's house now. And how was she to pay the servants? Money was owing to them all.

"Mr. Carlyle, how long has this house been yours?" she asked, breaking the silence.

"It was in June that the purchase was completed. Did Lord Mount Severn never tell you he had sold it to me?"

"No, never. All these things are yours?" glancing round the room.

"The furniture was sold with the house. Not these sort of things," he added, his eye falling on the silver on the breakfast table; "not the plate and linen."

"Not the plate and linen! Then those poor men who were here yesterday have a right to them," she quickly cried.

"I scarcely know. I believe the plate goes with the entail--and the jewels go also. The linen cannot be of consequence either way."

"Are my clothes my own?"

He smiled as he looked at her; smiled at her simplicity, and assured her that they were nobody's else.

"I did not know," she sighed; "I did not understand. So many strange things have happened in the last day or two, that I seem to understand nothing."

Indeed, she could not understand. She had no definite ideas on the subject of this transfer of East Lynne to Mr. Carlyle; plenty of indefinite ones, and they were haunting her. Fears of debt to him, and of the house and its contents being handed over to him in liquidation, perhaps only partial, were working in her brain.

"Does my father owe you any money?" she breathed in a timid tone.

"Not any," he replied. "Lord Mount Severn was never indebted to me in his life."

"Yet you purchased East Lynne?"