Shadow in the North

Chapter Thirty-Four - Oh! To Start from the Beginning

The Crampton house was a sombre place over the following days. Mr Hale felt the loss of his oldest friend keenly, for now he had no one with whom he might reminisce about his early days with his wife. Margaret – anxious for her father – saw not how very withdrawn Isabel became, and so it fell to Dr Lyndhurst to offer her some small comfort.

'He told me,' said Dr Lyndhurst, as Mr Hale sat with his daughter, looking over a book which had once belonged to Mr Bell, 'when I returned from Milton, he told me you were his daughter. I believed he wished for me to know so that someone might offer you the comfort a daughter needs on losing a parent.' Isabel only nodded blandly. 'I think he feared that Mr Hale would have been disappointed in him, and Bell knows that I am not an especially pious man; nor had our friendship been of sufficient duration for me to feel betrayed by never having known of such a relationship existing between Mr Bell and your mother.'

'I understand.'

'He was very proud of you; exceedingly so! He told me of your speech at the Thornton's dinner; he quiet delighted in it,' smiled Dr Lyndhurst, softly. Isabel returned the gesture with a wry smile of her own.

'I can quite imagine!' And she certainly could, for his whole character was just as she had read, and she took solace in knowing that if she so wished, she could go up to her little attic room, take her munitions tin from the closet, open up that book, and read of her father and his playful ways. She had not done so, of course. She was afraid to even touch the book, now that she was in Milton, but it was a comfort to her all the same; to know that she had such a treasured reminder, if she should choose to look to it. 'I feel a little foolish,' admitted Isabel, 'to feel such an emptiness within me, when I knew him so little. My loss is insignificant to Mr Hale's.'

'But he was your father!' urged Dr Lyndhurst, in lowered tones. 'You thought yourself to be an orphan, Isabel. You had been parentless for the greatest part of your life. Having Mr Bell as your father – even if it had been for only one day! – was undoubtedly a treasure for you. Of course you should feel the loss, and keenly so!'

'How could he possibly be my father?' asked she, turning to Dr Lyndhurst with pleading eyes. 'This world; either it is not real or I am not real. How on earth can two such beings collide?'

'But it is real; it is the same world, looked at only through two different sets of eyes. And here – living in this new world – you are writing your own future, and to do so, you have to have a past. Mr Bell was your past; you wrote him, or I should say, he wrote himself for you. He was your father, as assuredly as you are living and sitting in this drawing room, before me.'

'I was born in Oxford. My father – I was told – did die when I was only a few months old – Darrow, he was called. My mother – she was Jane, as Mr Bell had told me – took me to Italy; she had an Italian grandfather, and she met a man there and re-married. Then she fell with child and both she and the babe were lost in childbirth. I came back to England, then, and lived in a children's home. I was placed with families who were paid to look after me, and when I was too old to be looked after, I had to leave and find a home for myself, so I worked and I travelled, and that is how I saw the world.'

'You see then! All of the particulars; they match. He was your father, and so saying, when the will is read, you will find yourself provided for. He wanted me to assure you.'

'He knew he would die.'

'He did; but perhaps with not such alacrity.'

'It does not matter; I knew that it would happen; it was in the book; I simply did not know quite when, for things have gone awry.'

'Not "gone awry",' chided Dr Lyndhurst. 'Simply changed, and I, for one, am gladdened.'

'Margaret?' asked Isabel, with a burgeoning smile.