'I don't know what I wanted to say to you after all. Only it's
dull enough to sit in a room where everything speaks to you of a
dead friend. Yet Margaret and her aunt must have the drawing-room
to themselves!' 'Is Mrs.--is her aunt come?' asked Mr. Thornton.
'Come? Yes! maid and all. One would have thought she might have
come by herself at such a time! And now I shall have to turn out
and find my way to the Clarendon.' 'You must not go to the Clarendon. We have five or six empty
bed-rooms at home.' 'Well aired?' 'I think you may trust my mother for that.' 'Then I'll only run up-stairs and wish that wan girl good-night,
and make my bow to her aunt, and go off with you straight.' Mr. Bell was some time up-stairs. Mr. Thornton began to think it
long, for he was full of business, and had hardly been able to
spare the time for running up to Crampton, and enquiring how Miss
Hale was.
When they had set out upon their walk, Mr. Bell said: 'I was kept by those women in the drawing-room. Mrs. Shaw is
anxious to get home--on account of her daughter, she says--and
wants Margaret to go off with her at once. Now she is no more fit
for travelling than I am for flying. Besides, she says, and very
justly, that she has friends she must see--that she must wish
good-bye to several people; and then her aunt worried her about
old claims, and was she forgetful of old friends? And she said,
with a great burst of crying, she should be glad enough to go
from a place where she had suffered so much. Now I must return to
Oxford to-morrow, and I don't know on which side of the scale to
throw in my voice.' He paused, as if asking a question; but he received no answer
from his companion, the echo of whose thoughts kept repeating-'Where she had suffered so much.' Alas! and that was the way in
which this eighteen months in Milton--to him so unspeakably
precious, down to its very bitterness, which was worth all the
rest of life's sweetness--would be remembered. Neither loss of
father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr. Thornton,
could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the
hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was
pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to
her sweet presence--every step of which was rich, as each
recurring moment that bore him away from her made him recall some
fresh grace in her demeanour, or pleasant pungency in her
character. Yes! whatever had happened to him, external to his
relation to her, he could never have spoken of that time, when he
could have seen her every day--when he had her within his grasp,
as it were--as a time of suffering. It had been a royal time of
luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to
the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the
future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of
either hope or fear.