XIII.
Reuben Ackroyd roared, as his daughter had promised. He roared in the library for most of an hour, and the whole house heard him. Then the roaring stopped, quite suddenly, and there was a long silence, and when Mrs. Thewlis took in the tea-tray at four she found Mr. Ackroyd sitting on the sofa beside his daughter with one of her hands in both of his, and his face wet, saying over and over in a low voice, "Why did you never tell me, Thea? Why did you never tell me?"
"Because you'd have thought me stupid, Papa."
"Stupid. You. You that could tell me the price of a tod of wool in the year eight." He wiped his face with the back of his hand like a boy. "I'd have—I'd have thought you—" And he could not find what he would have thought, and never did find it, though he went on looking for it, in his loud way, for the rest of his life.
They left Carrowby two days afterward, on a morning of thin sun. Dorothea said good-bye to the Earl on the steps with perfect composure, and gave her hand to Lady Anne, and held it a moment, and said, "You've a beautiful hand, Lady Anne. I meant it the first time, you know. It was only that someone else had said it first."
To Thomasin she said, in the hall, with the trunks going out past them: "I've written to Mrs. Ludgate in Bath for a reader. She knows a widow who wants the work. I'll pay your wages to Midsummer and give you a character, and it will be a true one, every word: that you are honest and clever and kind, and have been my right hand eleven years." She paused. "I'll get Mrs. Ludgate's widow to write it. You'll understand why I can't ask you."
"Thea," said Thomasin. "I would give anything—"
"I know you would. That's the trouble with you, Tam. You'd give anything, and then you'd take something, and never notice the difference until it was in the drawer." Dorothea's eyes were dry. "I don't want you near me for a while. I don't know how long. When I know, I'll send. I'll send in my own hand, if it kills me."
She did not embrace her. She went out to the carriage, and her father handed her in, and the carriage went down the wet track to the bridge, and over it, and Thomasin stood on the steps and watched it out of sight and did not go in until the bell struck the hour, flat, behind her.
It was Lady Anne who found her a place. She did not offer; she simply came to Thomasin's room that evening with a letter already written—to a canon's widow at Durham, a Mrs. Mossop, an old friend of her mother's, who had three grandchildren in her charge and a son in India and wanted a governess who could teach French and keep her temper. "It's a respectable house and a dull one," said Lady Anne. "You'll have Sundays. You'll be sixty miles from here. I thought you would want both." She laid the letter on the table. "I wrote it in my own name. I find I've got very particular about that."
"Lady Anne." Thomasin did not take it up. "The coat. The boots. The dark. Were they—did you mean them? Or only mean them for whoever I was?"
Lady Anne stood a moment at the door with her hand on the latch.