I. ALICE’S FATE
Alice Severn was very innocent and very young,--just over sixteen,--a child to all intents and purposes,--as everybody thought around her. Old Welby, who had taken to meddling in the padrona’s affairs, with that regard which the friends of a woman who is alone feel themselves entitled to display for her interests, had been pressing very earnestly upon Mrs. Severn’s attention the necessity of preparing her child, who had an evident and remarkable talent, to exercise it in public.
‘Few people, indeed, have their way so clear before them,’ he had said repeatedly. ‘It is the finest thing in the world to have a girl or boy with a decided turn. If you could but see the parents who come to me with sons who don’t know what they would be at; and the idiots think they may be made painters because they care for nothing in earth or heaven. But here is this child with a talent. Of course, if it were a talent for our own art, we might know better how to manage it; but such as it is, it is a gift. Never undervalue a gift, my dear madam. Providence itself points out the way for you. You have only got to train her for her work.’
‘But, Mr. Welby,’ pleaded the padrona, ‘she is such a child. How could I send my little maid out into the world to appear in public! I could not do it! It would drive me out of my senses. My child! You forget what kind of a creature she is.’
‘I don’t in the least forget,’ said the R.A. ‘She is very pretty, too, which is a pity; but you should be above foolish notions in that respect,--you who are so well known to the public yourself.’
‘Not so very well known,’ said the padrona, with a half smile; ‘and then it is only my name, not me. And even if it were my very self, why it would only be me still, not her. I am old, and what does it matter? But my lily, my darling! Mr. Welby, you are very kind, but you do not take the circumstances into consideration;--you do not realise to the full extent what the consequences would be.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by the full extent,’ said Mr. Welby; ‘but this I see as clear as daylight, that some time or other the child will probably have her bread to earn. I say probably. She may marry, of course, but the papers tell us people have given up marrying now-a-days. You can’t live for ever, ma’am; and still more certainly you can’t work for ever. And the child has actually something in her fingers by which she could earn money, and provide for herself with the greatest ease. Besides, a musician is not like a singer, or a dancer, or anything of that sort. She comes on and sits down before her piano, and never pays any attention to her audience. She need not even look at them unless she likes. She has only a little curtsey to make, and so is off again. It is positively nothing. She may marry, of course, but that would be no protection against poverty. And what’s the alternative? A lingering, idle sort of life at home; saving scraps, and making her own gowns and bonnets; or, perhaps, giving music-lessons to tiresome children whom she would hate. You should not, my dear Mrs. Severn, do such injustice to your child.’
‘Indeed, I am the last person to do her injustice,’ said the padrona, half angered, half saddened, with tears in her eyes. It was a very trenchant style of argument. ‘If I were to die, or if I were to fail in my work!’ Mrs. Severn said to herself, with one of those awful throbs of dread which come upon a woman who is the sole protector and bread-winner of her children. Such a thought was not unfamiliar to her mind. It came sometimes at chance hours, stealing upon her suddenly like an evil spirit, and wringing her heart. It set her now, for the hundredth time, to count up the little scraps of resource they would have in such a terrible contingency, the friends who would or might be kind to them. ‘If I might but live till Edie is twenty!’ was the silent prayer that followed. It did not seem possible that so long as she did live she would be unable to work. This frenzy of dread was but momentary. Had it lasted, so sharp and poignant was it, the life which was so important might have been put in jeopardy; but fortunately Mrs. Severn’s mind was as elastic as mind could be, and rose again like a flower after the heavy foot had pressed it down. Yet, Alice,--could she be doing injustice to Alice? These arguments had without doubt made a certain impression upon her. Let but this summer be over, she said to herself. It would be time enough certainly when the child was seventeen,--one more year of sweet childhood and leisure, and undisturbed girlish peace. And then the grateful thought came back upon the mother of Mr. Rich’s commission which she was working at, and her year’s work which was secure. Could there be comfort greater than that thought? And the morrow would care for the things of itself.
While such discussions went on,--for they were frequent,--Alice moved about the house, a soft, domestic spirit, with light steps and a face like a flower. Every day it became more like a flower. The sweetness expanded, the husks of the lovely blossom opened, the woman came gliding noiselessly, so that nobody around perceived it, out of the silken bud of the girl. She was clever at her needle, as her mother had boasted, and made and mended with the homely natural satisfaction of a worker who is conscious of working well; and she was housekeeper, and managed the accounts, and ordered the dinners, proud of her importance and the duties of her office; and she saw the children put to bed, and heard them say their prayers. The homeliest, most limited life,--and yet what could the world give that was better? Not Nelly Rich’s leisure, and gaiety, and luxury; not Mary Westbury’s tedious comforts and occupations. Alice for her part had everything,--and the piano, and the talk of nights added to all. And yet her mind was not undisturbed, as her mother fondly thought. A little secret, no bigger than a pin’s point, had sprung into being in the virgin heart;--not worth calling a secret,--not a thing at all, in short,--only a murmur of soft, musing recollections,--dreams that were not half tangible enough to be called hopes. As, for instance, what was it he meant when their eyes met that afternoon as she played to him? how was it that he remembered so well every time he had seen her,--even her dress?--questions which she asked and then retreated from, and eluded, and played with, and returned to them again. And would he go to India? Would he come back to Fitzroy Square? So misty was the sphere in which all this passed that the one question seemed to Alice as important as the other. What if he might come again some afternoon, flushing all the fading sky with new tints? What if he should go away and never be heard of more? All this was in the child’s mind when her mother resolved that this summer at least Alice should be left in undisturbed peace. The old story repeated itself, as everything does in this world,--the everlasting tale of individual identity, of isolation and separation of nature between those who are dearest and nearest to each other. The mother would have given her life cheerfully for her child, but could no more see into that child’s soul than if she had been entirely indifferent to her. And Alice, the most loving and dutiful of children, went sweetly on her way, shaping out her own individual life, and never suspecting in that any treason to her earliest loves, or any possible break in her existence. It all turned on the point whether a young Guardsman, who,--with all kindness towards Frank Renton be it said,--was not equal to either Alice or her mother, should call, or should not call, next time he might be in town. Certainly a very trifling matter, and almost concluded against Alice beforehand, as may have been perceived.
I cannot take it upon me to say if he had never come that Alice would have broken her heart. Her heart was too young, too fresh, too visionary, to be tragically moved. She could have gone on looking for him, wondering if he would come, quite as capable of expecting that he would suddenly appear out of the depths of India as that he would come from Royalborough. She had so much time to spare yet before beginning life for herself that the fanciful delight of wondering what he meant by a look or a word, was actually more sweet to her than anything tangible could have been; but yet if he had never come again, a pathetic chord would have sounded among the fresh harmonies of her being,--perhaps a deeper note than any which had yet been awakened in her, at least a sadder one. She would have looked for him and grown weary, and a certain languor and melancholy would have come into her life. Already she had more pleasure in thinking than she had ever been known to have,--or at least she called it thinking,--and would sit silent for hours wrapped in soft dreams, forgetting to talk, to the great disgust of little Edith, and wonder of Miss Hadley, who was the sharpest observer in the household, and guessed what it all meant. But still Alice could have no reason to complain had Frank Renton never more made his appearance in the Square. She would never have dreamt of complaining, poor child; she would have sighed, and a ray of light would have gone out of her life, and that would have been all;--and she had so many rays of light that there might well be one to spare!
It was not thus, however, that things turned out. Not much more than a week had elapsed when Frank again made his appearance in the Square. He had not said much to himself about it. He pretended to himself, indeed, that it was a sudden thought, as he had some time to spare. ‘One might as well go and bid them good-bye,’ he said aloud, the better to persuade himself that it was purely accidental. He had seen Montague, and had all but concluded with him about the exchange, though he had still been quite doubtful on the subject when he came up to town. Yet the sight of the other side, and the reality given to the matter by the actual discussion of it as a thing to be done, had an effect upon him which nothing else had yet had. It was made at once into a matter of fact by the first half-dozen words he exchanged with Montague of the 200th. And now it was all but settled, whatever other conclusions might follow. The suddenness with which this very serious piece of business had been concluded, or all but concluded, had filled Frank with a certain excitement. He did not know how he should announce it at home,--how he should tell it to his friends. But he had done it. No doubt his mother would weep, and other eyes would look on him reproachfully. Not that any eyes had a right,--an absolute right,--to reproach him; but still----! Frank’s mind had been very much agitated and beaten about for some days past. That interview with Nelly had been hard upon him. He had not said all, nor nearly all, that he had been expected to say; but still he had said something which had drawn the indefinite bond between them a little closer. He would owe to her, he felt, after what had passed, some sort of embarrassing explanation of the reasons which had induced him all at once to make up his mind and choose India and work, instead of what was vaguely called his good prospects at home. These good prospects he knew, and everybody knew, herself included, were,--Nelly and her fifty thousand pounds; and it would be as much as saying, ‘I have given up all thoughts of you,’ when he told her of his sudden determination. He had said nothing about going to India in that last interview. On the contrary, he had been rather eloquent on the subject of staying at home. And now he would have to explain to her that India and freedom had more charms for him than she had, even when backed by all her advantages. It was not a pleasant intimation to make; neither was the thought pleasant of telling his mother, who would have still more occasion to reproach him. ‘Go to India, when you might have fifty thousand for the asking, and heaven knows how much more!’ Mrs. Renton would say; and would feel herself deeply aggrieved by her son’s backsliding. He had been beguiled into all this by the talk of Montague of the 200th, and his own errant, foolish inclinations. It had seemed to him like an escape from himself, and he had taken advantage of the chance;--but it was terrible to contemplate the immediate results. And he had an hour or two to spare, and a little music had always so good an effect upon him! Besides, it would not be civil to go away without taking farewell of Laurie’s friends. The 200th were to go in three months. There would be little further time for anything but the business of his outfit. Frank turned his steps towards the Square with the resolution, declared,--to himself,--that this should be the last time. He would see them once more, as civility required, and then all would be over. He would put all such nonsense from his mind, the folly of thinking of either;--for was it not folly to entertain such an idea at his age?--and go away and enjoy his freedom. He would be twenty-one before the regiment set sail, which was no doubt a serious age, and the beginning of mature manhood; but still few men without money married so early. And Frank did not want a wife, though he had thus got himself into such difficulties with two girls at once. The clear course was evidently to set himself free from such premature entanglements, and take refuge in distance and novelty, and rejoice in his escape.
By what strange chance it was that the padrona should have gone out that special afternoon, taking Miss Hadley with her, is what I never could explain. Things do occur so sometimes in this curious world, where everything happens that ought not to happen. Alice was alone, all by herself in that shadowy, silent drawing-room. It was a thing which did not occur thrice in a year. And lo! Frank Renton’s visit to say good-bye must happen on one of these rare occasions! Alice was not playing when he was ushered in. She was sitting at work close to the piano, though that too was not usual to her. She had gone in with the intention of practising, but the charm of thinking had been too strong for her. Even her work had fallen on her knee in the soft, profound stillness and loneliness which of late had come to be so sweet to her. She was thinking of him, asking herself once more those sweet, vague, fanciful questions. It was so pleasant, in her new mood, to feel herself all alone, free to think as she pleased, and lose herself in dreams for a whole, long, enchanted afternoon. And just at that moment, as good or evil fortune decided, Frank Renton was shown into the room. He himself was struck dumb by the chance, as well as Alice. She looked up at him, poor child, with absolute consternation. ‘Oh, I am so sorry mamma is out!’ she said; and notwithstanding the stir and flutter of her heart at the sight of him, she was quite in earnest when she said so. Mamma being out, however, made all the difference between conscious safety and calm and the uneasy dread which she could not explain. What was she afraid of? Alice could not answer the question. Not of him, certainly, of whom she believed every good under heaven. Of herself, then? But she only repeated her little outcry of regret, and could give no reason for her shy shrinking and fears.
‘Is she?’ said Frank; ‘but I must not go away, must I?--though your tone seems somehow to imply it. Let me stay and wait for her. I have come to say good-bye.’
‘Good-bye?’ said Alice, faltering. The child grew cold all over in a moment, as if a chill had blown upon her. ‘Are you really, really going to India, after all?’
‘After all? after what?’ said Frank, turning upon her so quickly that she had no time to think.
‘Oh, I meant after----. I thought----. People said----. But, no, indeed; I am sure I never believed it, Mr. Renton; it is such stupid talk; only I was a little surprised,’ said Alice, recovering herself. ‘I mean, are you really going to India,--after all?’
Frank laughed. He was at no loss now as he had been with Nelly Rich. ‘I see that is what you mean,’ he said, looking at her with softened, shining eyes, and that delicious indulgence for her youth and simplicity which made him feel himself twice a man; ‘and you may say after all. There are some things I shall be glad to escape from, and there are other things,’ said Frank, rising and going close to her, ‘there are other things----’
He did not mean it,--certainly he did not mean it,--any more than he had meant going to India, when he came up that morning to town to talk the matter over in a vague, general way; but, somehow, as he stood in front of her, leaning over the high-backed chair on which she had placed her work, gazing into the sweet face lifted to him, which changed colour every moment, and was as full of light and shade as any summer sky, a sudden sense of necessity came over him. Leave her?--Was there anybody in the world but the two of them looking thus at each other? Did anything else matter in comparison? ‘What is the use of making any pretences?’ cried Frank; ‘if you will but come with me, Alice, going to India will be like going to heaven!’
She sat and gazed at him with consternation and wonder and dismay; growing pale to the very lips; straining her wistful eyes to make out what he meant. Was he mad? What was he thinking of? ‘Go with, you?’ she faltered, under her breath, incapable of any expression but that of amaze. Her wondering eye sank under his look, and her heart began to beat, and her brow to throb. The suggestion shook her whole being, though she had not quite fathomed what it meant. And then the crimson colour rose like a sudden flame, and flew over all her face. The change, the trouble, the surprise, were like so many variations in the sky, and they combined to take from the young lover what little wits he had left.
‘Would it be so dreadful?’ he said, bending down over her. ‘Alice, just you and I. What would it matter where we were so long as we were together? I know it would matter nothing to me. I would take such care of you. I should be as happy as the day was long. I want nothing but to have you by me, to look at you, and listen to you. I do not care if there were not another creature in the world’, cried the youth; ‘just you and I!’
‘Oh, don’t speak so!’ cried Alice, trembling in her agitation and astonishment. ‘Don’t, oh, don’t! You must not! How could I ever, ever leave mamma?’
‘Then it is not me you object to?’ cried the lover, in triumph, taking her hands, taking herself to him in a tender delirium.
This was how it came about. With no more preparation on either side, with everything against it,--friends, prudence, fortune, Nelly,--every influence you could conceive. And yet they did it without any intention of doing it,--on the mere argument of being left for half-an-hour alone together. True, it took more than half-an-hour to calm down the bewilderment of the girl’s mind, thus launched suddenly at a stroke into the wide waters of life. She looked back trembling upon her little haven, the harbour where she had lain so quietly a few minutes before. But we can never go back those few minutes. The thing was done, and nobody in the world could be more surprised at it than the two young, rash, happy creatures themselves, holding each other’s hands, and looking into each other’s faces, and asking themselves,--Could it be true?
II. A STRUGGLE
There are moments in life which are so sweet as to light up whole weeks of gloom; and there are moments so dreadful as to make the unfortunate actors in them tremble at the recollection to the end of their lives. Such a moment in the life of Frank Renton was that in which he suddenly heard the padrona’s knock at her own door. He had been as happy as a young man could be. He had felt himself willing, and over again willing, to give up everything without a regret, for the sake of the love he had won, and which was, he said to himself, of everything in earth and heaven the most sweet. This he had said to himself a hundred times over as he hung over Alice in the first ecstasy of their betrothal. He could not imagine how he ever could have doubted. Going to India would, as he had said, be going to heaven. Where he went, she would be with him. He should have her all to himself, free from any interference. They would be free to go forth together, hand in hand, like Adam and Eve. What was any advantage the world could give in comparison to such blessedness? He was in the full flush of his delight when that awful knock was heard at the door.
At the sound of it Alice started too. She clung to him first, and then she shrank from him. ‘Oh, it is mamma!’ she cried, with sudden dismay. Then there was a pause. Frank let go the hand he had been holding. Nature and the world stood still in deference to the extraordinary crisis. He turned his face, which had suddenly grown pale, to the door. And they heard her talking as she came up the stairs, unconcerned, laughing as if nothing had happened! ‘It will be a surprise to Alice,’ she said audibly, pausing in the passage, at the dining-room door. And Alice shuddered as she listened. A surprise! If the padrona could but know what a terrible surprise had been prepared for herself!
And then she came in upon them, smiling and blooming, her soft colour heightened by a little fresh breeze that was blowing, bright from the pleasant unusual intercourse with the outside world. ‘I am sorry you did not come with us, Alice,’ she said. ‘It is not so hot as we thought it was. Ah, Mr. Renton!’ and she held out her hand to him. Upon what tiny issues does life hang. If Alice had not thought it too hot to go out, all this might never have happened. And the mother to speak of it so lightly, thinking of nothing more important than the walk, ignorant what advantage had been taken of her absence! To the two guilty creatures who knew, every word was an additional stab.
‘I came up again to-day about the same business,’ said Frank, faltering.
Alice bent trembling over her work, and said nothing. She did not go, as was her wont, with soft, tender hands, to untie the bonnet and take off the shawl, taking pride in her office as ‘mamma’s maid.’ She put on an aspect of double diligence over her work, though her hands trembled so that she could scarcely hold her needle.
Even Mrs. Severn’s unsuspicious nature was startled. She turned to Miss Hadley, who had come in behind her, and said, half in dumb-show, with a certain impatience, ‘What does he mean by coming so often?’
‘No good,’ answered Miss Hadley, solemnly, under her breath; which laconic utterance amused the padrona so much, that her momentary uneasiness flew away. She sat down smiling, turning her kind face upon the trembling pair. ‘Poor Laurie’s brother!’ she said to herself. That was argument enough for tolerating him and showing him all kindness.
‘Alice, how is it you are so busy?’ she said. ‘I think you might order some tea. Though it is not so very hot, it is pleasant to get into the shade. I hope your business has made progress, Mr. Renton,’ she added, politely. As the padrona looked at them it became slowly apparent to her that something was wrong. Alice had not liked the task of entertaining a stranger all by herself; or----! But of course it must be that. It was ill-bred of him, even though he was Laurie’s brother, to insist on coming in when there was nobody but the child to receive him. Mrs. Severn began to feel uncharitably towards the young man. Alice flushed one moment, and the next was quite pale. She was reluctant to raise her eyes, and neglected all her usual petits soins. When she had to get up to obey her mother, it was with a shy avoidance of her look, which went to the padrona’s heart. What could be the matter? Was she ill? Had he been rude to her? But that was impossible. ‘Is there anything wrong, my darling?’ she said, half rising from her seat.
‘Oh, no, mamma!’ said Alice, breathlessly, in a fainting voice.
The padrona gave Miss Hadley a look which meant,--Go and see what is the matter; and then with a very pre-occupied mind turned towards Frank to play politeness and do her social duties. ‘I hope your business has made progress,’ she repeated, vaguely; and then it became apparent that he was agitated too.
‘Yes,’ he said; and then he came forward to her quite pale and with an air of mingled supplication and alarm which filled her with the profoundest bewilderment. ‘Oh, Mrs. Severn, forgive us!’ he cried. He would have gone down on his knees had he thought that would have been effectual; but he did not dare to go down on his knees. He stood before her like a culprit about to be sentenced; and she looked at him with eyes in which alarm and suspicion began to glow. There was something wrong; but even now the mother to whom her child was indeed a child did not guess what it was.
‘Us!’ she said; and somehow a thought of Laurie struck into the maze of her thoughts. He could not have done anything, poor fellow, in his exile, to call for forgiveness in this passionate way. ‘I cannot tell what you mean,’ she cried. ‘What have I to forgive? And who are the sinners?’ and she tried to laugh, though it was difficult enough.
‘Mrs. Severn,’ he said, ‘I would not, believe me, have taken advantage of your absence, not willingly. She is so young. I know I ought to have spoken to you first. I did not mean it when I came----’
‘She?’ cried the padrona, with a little cry. Not yet did she see what it was; but instinct told her what kind of a trenchant blow was coming, and all the blood seemed to rush back upon her heart.
‘Yes,’ said Frank, rising into the calm of passion, ‘I found her all by herself. And I loved her so! From that first moment I saw her,--when you called her, and she came and stood there,’ he cried, pointing vaguely at the door; ‘and I had come to tell you I was going away. And she was sorry. It all came upon us in a moment. How could I help telling her? I loved her so! Forgive me for Alice’s sake.’
The padrona sat gazing at him for some moments with dilated eyes; then suddenly she hid her face in her hands, and uttered a low, moaning cry as of a creature in pain. All at once it had come upon her what it meant. Frank standing there, full of anxiety, yet full of confidence, was bewildered, not knowing what this meant in reference to himself. But the truth was that Mrs. Severn was not thinking of him, had no room in her mind for him at that terrible moment. It was her child she was thinking of,--Alice, who was here half an hour ago, and now was not here, and could never again be, for ever. It all burst upon her in an instant, not anything remediable, as a thing might be which was independent of the child’s own will, but voluntary, her own doing, her choice! Something sung and buzzed in her ears; her eyes felt hot and scorched up; sharp pulsations of pain came into her temples. ‘My child!--my baby!--my first-born!’ she said to herself. It was as if the earth had shaken beneath her feet, and the house had crumbled down about her. Her whole fabric of happiness seemed to shrink up; and yet it was not so much--not so much that she asked; not anything for herself, not the ease, the comfort, the leisure, the pleasures, so many had. Was she not content, more than content to work late and early, to spare herself in nothing, to labour with both hands, as it were, never grudging? Only her children, that was all she asked to have! And here was the first of her children, the sweetest of all, her excellency and the beginning of her strength, her companion, and tender consoler, and sweet helper--gone! She gave a cry, a half-smothered moan, such as could not be put into words. And all this time Frank stood before her, pale, somewhat desperate, but courageous, knowing that however the mother might be against him, the daughter was for him,--and trusting in his fate.
When the padrona at last withdrew her hands from her face it struck her as with a sense of offence that he should still be standing there. Why did he, a stranger, stand and gaze at her misery? What right had he? And then she remembered that it was this boy whom her child had chosen out of the world, to give up her home for him. In her heart, at that moment, the padrona hated Frank. She raised her head, and even he, though he had no love in his eyes to enlighten him respecting the changes in her face, saw that the lines were drawn and haggard, the colour gone, and that a look of age and suffering had fallen upon her. But she commanded herself. She spoke after a minute with an effort. ‘Mr. Renton, this is a very serious matter you tell me.’ she said; ‘my daughter is a child,’ and then she had to stop and take breath, and moisten her dry lips. ‘She is too young,--to judge what is best,--for her life. And so are you,’ she added, looking at him with a certain pity for the boy who was so young too, and Laurie’s brother to boot; ‘you are both too young to know what you are doing. You should not have disturbed my Alice!’ she cried, suddenly, unable to keep in the reproach. ‘Such thoughts would never have come into my darling’s mind. You had no right to disturb my child!’
She got up as she spoke in a blaze of momentary excitement,--anger, grief’s twin brother, rising sudden into the place of grief. She made a step or two away from him, and began to collect Alice’s work and fold it up with her trembling hands, turning her back upon him, as if this sudden piece of business she had found was the most important matter in the world. Then she turned round, raising her hand, with an outburst of natural eloquence. ‘She was only a child,’ she cried; ‘as much a child as when she sat on my lap. She had not a thought that was not open to me. I have worked for her almost all her life, watched over her, nursed her, smiled for her when my heart was breaking,--and all in a moment, for a young man’s vanity, my child is to be mine no longer. Why did you not come to me fairly, like an honest enemy, and warn me what you meant to do?’
As she spoke, standing before him with her arm lifted in unconscious action, almost towering over him in the greatness of her suffering and indignation, Frank stood lost in astonishment. Mothers, so far as he knew, were glad to get their daughters off their hands. Such was the tradition in all regions he had ever frequented. He had expected difficulties, no doubt, but not of this kind. It was with a certain consternation that he gazed at her, asking himself what it meant. It was all real, there could be no doubt of that. But yet,--he was in Fitzroy Square. It was not a duke’s daughter he had ventured on engaging to himself, but a humble artist’s, who everybody would have thought would have been glad enough to have her child provided for. This Frank knew, or, at least, he believed he knew, was the light in which the matter would have been regarded by sensible people. And he, though Belgravia no doubt might have scorned him, was no such contemptible match for the daughter of the painter. He stood surprised and discomfited, not knowing how to reply to a woman who addressed him so strangely. Perhaps it would be best to let her have it all her own way, and exhaust her indignation without contradicting or opposing her; but then the passion in her face moved the young man.
‘I never thought of coming as an enemy,’ he said, with some heat. ‘I have loved her ever since I saw her. I am not to blame for that.’ How could he be to blame? He had done naught in hate, but all in honour. And thus the mother and the lover stood confronting each other, rivals; but in a conflict which for one of them was without hope.
Then there was an interval of silence,--a truce between the foes. Frank mechanically turned over and over the books which lay on a little table against which he was leaning, and the padrona threw herself into her chair trembling in her agitation. Again and again her lips forced themselves to speak, but the effort was a vain one. She had not the heart to speak. What was there to say? If Alice’s heart was gone from her, then everything was gone. It was not as in old days, when she could have forbidden an unsuitable indulgence with the certainty that after the pain of the first few minutes the smiles would come back, the little heart melt, and the child be herself again. Here was a serious trial now, and the padrona’s heart was sick. She sat, not even looking at him, with her head turned to one side, and her mind full of bitter thoughts. This silence was worse than anything for Frank. He bore it as long as he could, standing with his eyes fixed upon her, expecting the verdict which was to come. Then, as she did not speak, he summoned up all his courage. He made a few steps forward, so as to bring himself before her eyes, and thus addressed her, with as much steadiness and calm as he could command;--‘Mrs. Severn,’ he said, ‘could you not put yourself in my position? I did not mean to betray myself. I meant to say good-bye, and go away, and never trouble you more. But she was sorry, God bless her! She looked at me, and pitied me, and I did not know what I was saying. I will not tell you a lie, and say I regret,’ cried Frank, with excitement; ‘but I will say I am sorry I had not the chance of speaking to you first. Surely, surely, you will not refuse her to me for that!’
‘Refuse her to you!’ said the padrona, with an unconscious contempt; ‘refuse her to you! You cannot think it is you I am thinking of. Oh, young man, how little you know! There is the sting of it! I would give everything I have in the world she had never seen you; but you make me work out my own sorrow. Can you believe I would hesitate a moment if it were only refusing you?’ she cried, with a gesture unconsciously full of scorn, throwing, as it were, something from her. Frank had never been spoken to in such a tone before. He had been an important personage at Richmont. Not so would his prayer have been received there. The wounded amour propre of his youth made itself felt in his displeasure. He went to the nearest window, and stood staring out into the street, disgusted with himself, and half disgusted, if the truth must be told, with all the circumstances. He had been a fool in thus committing himself. He had behaved like a fool in every way, and this was his reward;--not rejection even, but scorn!
‘But I can’t refuse her anything!’ the padrona said with a sigh, that came out of the very bottom of her heart. There was the sting of it. She could not turn away, as impulse would have made her, the lover whom she felt to be her enemy. There was the child to be considered. It was no plain and easy matter to be decided upon in an arbitrary way. Fathers and mothers have refused their children’s wishes before now for their good. Daughters have been even shut up in their rooms, starved, imprisoned, bullied into giving up the undesirable suitor, as everybody knows. But these courses were not open to the padrona. She could no more have stood by and seen her child suffer than she could have flown. The one was as much an impossibility of nature as the other. She could not refuse Alice the desire of her heart. Oh, gentle heavens! to think it could be the desire of that tender creature’s heart to go away from her home where she had been cherished since ever she was born,--from her mother, who had loved and shielded her for all her sixteen years,--away to the end of the world with a young man, whom six months before she had never seen! And she not a woman with any weariness in her heart, nor a girl of adventurous instincts, curious and longing for the unknown, but, on the contrary, the purest womanly domestic child, caring little about all the noises of the great world without,--only sixteen, a soft, contented creature, happy in all the little business of her limited life! There was the wonder,--a thing not new, familiar every day;--and yet ever miraculous, a wonder and a portent to the padrona, as if it had never happened before.
It was just then that Alice came faltering into the room. She had cried and leaned her head on Miss Hadley’s breast when she was questioned what was the matter; but she would not tell even that faithful friend until mamma knew. Her faithful friend, indeed, was at no great loss. Her eyes were sharp enough to make up the lack of all suspicion in the innocent household. She divined the truth, and she also divined the scene that must be going on in the drawing-room. ‘I knew this was what would come of it,’ she allowed herself to say,--which was but natural; and she led Alice back to the door, though it was against her will. ‘My love, these two will never agree without you.’ she said, and stayed outside with that purest self-denial of the secondary spectator, burning with curiosity and interest, yet giving way to the chief personages concerned, which is so often seen among women. She would not even go into the dining-room, where she might have seen or heard something, but stayed outside in the passage, having carefully closed all the doors. So far as she herself was concerned, Miss Hadley was not Frank’s enemy. When a man spoke out she respected him, as she always said. It was only when he shilly-shallied that she had a contempt for him;--and to have one of them provided for would no doubt be a great matter. Such, taking Frank’s theory of what was proper and natural, was Miss Hadley’s way of thinking; but she knew only too well how impracticable Mrs. Severn could be.
Alice went in faltering, changing colour, ready to sink to the ground with innocent shame-facedness, but as much unaware of the struggle going on in her mother’s mind as if she had been a creature of a different species. When she had made a few steps into the room, she paused, and gave a quick timid glance at the two, who were both stirred by her approach. The padrona rose, and gazed at her child, who had thus left her side, while Frank started forward to place himself by her. This was the last touch, which the mother could not bear. She darted to Alice’s side, put him away with her hand, took the girl into her arms, and holding her fast, gazed into her face. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘is it true? Never mind any one but me. Look at me,--at your mother, Alice. Tell me the truth,--the truth, my darling! Can it be? Do you want to go with him, and leave us all,--the boys, and Edith, and all that love you? Is it true? Do you want to leave me, my child?’ cried the mother, in a voice of anguish. And she stood holding her fast, reading the answer before it came in her eyes, in the modulations of her lips,--elevated to such a height of passionate feeling as she had never known before in all her life.
Nor was it a less trial for the young inexperienced creature, knowing nothing of passion, who was held thus in the grip of despair. Fortunately, Alice could not understand the full force of the tempest in her mother’s heart. ‘Oh, mamma, how can you think I want to leave you?’ she cried, with tears; and Frank, listening, felt with a pang that he was cast aside. Then she paused. ‘But, oh, mamma, dear!’ said Alice, with a soft, pleading, breathless tone, melodious like the cooing of a dove,--‘oh, mamma, dear!’--and she slid her tender arm round her mother’s neck, changing her attitude to one of utter supplication,--‘you have Edie and the boys, and my dearest love for ever and ever. And he has nobody; and he says,---- Will you only hear what he says? It is not fancy. He wants me most.’
It was not more than a minute that they stood thus clinging together, but Frank thought it an hour. He was left out of the matter. It was they who had to decide a question so momentous to them. And then he became aware that the padrona had cast her arms round her child to support herself, and was weeping wildly upon Alice’s shoulder. No need for any further questions. They had changed characters for the moment. The girl’s slight figure tottered, swayed, steadied itself, supporting with a supreme effort the weight of the mother’s yielding and anguish; and Alice gave him a look over that burthen,--a look of such pain and sweetness and confidence, that Frank’s heart was altogether melted. ‘Look what I have to bear,--what I have to give up for you!’ it seemed to say;--a pathetic glance; and yet there was in it the triumph of the new love rooting and establishing itself upon the ruins of the old.
When the padrona came to herself she called Frank Renton to her. It was not that she had fainted or become unconscious; but that, when a woman,--or a man either for that matter,--is suddenly called upon to sound the profoundest depths of suffering within her,--or his,--own being, a mist comes upon external matters, confusing place and fact, and above all, time, which goes fast or slow according to our consciousness. It might have been years, so far as she could tell, since she came in cheerfully from her walk, fearing no evil. She had been engaged in some awful struggle against her spiritual enemies, principalities and powers, such as she had never yet encountered; and all unprepared, unarmed for the conflict! She came to herself, lying back in her chair exhausted as if with an illness, without strength enough left to feel the full force of any calamity. She called Frank Renton to her, holding out her hand. ‘Sit down here and let me speak to you,’ she said. ‘I am to listen to what you have to say. And I will listen,--but not now. Such a thing had never entered into my mind. I thought the child was safe for years. I thought she was all mine,--my consolation. I have had so much to do, it seemed but fair I should have a consolation. But there is nothing fair in this world. And now it is you who have her heart, and not me,--and I don’t know you even. To be sure you are Laurie’s brother. Mr. Renton, if you will come back to me another time, when I have got a little used to it, I will hear everything you have to say.’
‘Thanks!’ said Frank, not knowing what answer to make, being utterly confused in his own mind, and as much out of his depth in every way as a young man could be. And he would have taken the hand she held out to him in token of amity,--but Mrs. Severn was not equal to any such signs of friendship.
‘It will be for another time,’ she said, sitting upright in her chair, and drawing back a little. ‘If I had received any warning;--but you have only met two,--three times;--is that all?’ she said, with a sudden spasm in her voice.
‘And at Richmont,’ said Frank, divided between offence and humility. Alice had left the room again, and the two were alone.
‘And at Richmont,’ the padrona repeated with a heavy sigh. ‘I might have known. But you don’t know my child,’ she added, with sudden energy. ‘You have seen her pretty face and heard her music, and it is those you care for,--that is all. And there are others as pretty, and who play as well. You cannot know my child.’
‘Look here, Mrs. Severn,’ cried Frank, driven wild in his turn; ‘I have loved her since the first moment I saw her under those curtains. Was it my doing? I was listening to the music, not thinking of any one; and you called Alice, and she came. And I have been struggling against it ever since. I will tell you the truth. I was to marry money,--everybody had made up their minds to it. I was to have a rich wife and give up India, and live a life that would suit me much better at home. That is the truth. And I tried,--tried hard to carry it out. But I had seen Alice, and I could not. To-day when I came I meant to try to say good-bye. I meant it honestly, upon my life. And that other girl is prettier, if you will speak so,’ cried the young man, with a kind of brutality, ‘than Alice. Judge if it is only for that----’
‘Then you will repent,’ said the padrona, blazing up into an inconsistent jealousy and resentment. ‘Believe me, Mr. Renton, it is far better to carry out your intention, and leave my penniless girl alone.’
The young man started up with a muttered oath. The moment of passion was over, but that of mutual exasperation had come. The light of battle kindled in the padrona’s eyes. She would have been glad to be rid of him at any price; and yet,--inconsistent woman,--though she hated him for loving Alice, the thought that he had struggled against that love, the thought that her child had been put in competition with another, set her all a-flame. ‘By heaven, you do me injustice!’ cried Frank. ‘Why will you misunderstand what I say? Let me tell you everything from the beginning. Is it just to judge me unheard? I am Laurie’s brother, whom you are fond of; and Alice is mine as well as yours. She has no doubt of me. Why cannot we be friends, we two? I should be your son----’
‘It must be for another time,’ said the padrona, letting her voice relapse into languor.
The sense of exhaustion had been thoroughly real when she expressed it before; but now, it must be allowed, it was exasperating. The elastic soul had touched the ground, and rebounded ever so little. But she had rebounded in a perverse, and not an amiable way. It was not the calm of despair, but an active wretchedness in which there was hope. And Frank, too, got set on edge, as she was, and left the house with but one soft word from Alice to console him as he went, flaming with opposition and resentment. He could turn the tables on her yet, if he were to try. He could make her regret her interference, if he would. And then a visionary Alice glided into the young man’s imagination, holding out her soft arms. Vex her because her mother was vexatious to him? Ah, no! not for the world!
III. EXCHANGED INTO THE 200TH
Frank was not in spirits to go to his club, or anywhere else, after the events of the afternoon. He made a rush for the train instead, thirsting for the quiet of his quarters, in which, at least, he could lock himself in, and be free from intruders. With the same desire for solitude, he ensconced himself as usual in a corner of a railway-carriage, hoping there, at least, to be able to indulge his thoughts in peace. But it was a summer’s day, not yet dark, so that he could not hide himself; and his consternation may be imagined when, in two or three minutes, he heard the voice of Mrs. Rich asking for the Royalborough carriage. ‘Bless us, there is Mr. Renton, Nelly!’ she said, a minute after, for Frank had given a start at the sound of her, and probably caught her eye by the movement, though he had sunk the next minute into the profoundest shade. But, after this, there was nothing to be done but to jump out, and make himself useful to the ladies, and give up his hoped-for solitude. Nelly, of all people in the world, to face him at such a moment! To Frank it seemed as if fate were against him. He had to go through the usual round of salutations, and express his satisfaction at meeting them, while all the time he fretted and fumed. It was not even as if they had been three, which is a safe party. Mrs. Rich had a companion, a lady of about her own age, who was going to Richmont with them, so that Nelly was left to Frank. Neither her mother nor she thought it a bad arrangement. She made her way to the farther window, and seated herself, leaving Frank no alternative but the seat beside her. And she was very lively and full of animation,--a bright, smiling creature, pleasant to look upon. It would be impossible to describe Frank’s feelings as he seated himself beside her, with a gap of two vacant seats between him and the elder ladies at the other side, and the noise of the train to favour a tête-à-tête. ‘Come and tell me what you have been about,’ said Nelly. ‘Are you always running up and down to town, you idle Guardsmen? I never go but I see heaps of you. Tell me what you have been about.’
‘You had better tell me what you have been about,’ said Frank; ‘that would be more interesting. Shopping? or picture-seeing? or,--oh, I perceive, the flower-show. I had forgotten that.’
‘You were not there,’ said Nelly, quickly,--‘for I looked. There was Lord Edgbaston, and I don’t know how many more, who are always to be seen everywhere,--but not you.’
‘I was engaged on much less pleasant business,’ said Frank, to whom it suddenly occurred that here was an opportunity to tell some portion of his news. It could not be told too soon, especially considering all that had happened since.
‘Less pleasant!’ repeated Nelly. ‘They are very slow and stupid, I think, unless one has some one to talk to one likes. As for the flowers, one can see them anywhere. I had Lord Edgbaston, your charming friend, Mr. Renton; and he was not lively. I don’t suppose his talents lie in the way of talk.’
‘He is a very good fellow,’ said Frank, with a certain tenderness, thinking how soon he should have left all these pleasant companions. His heart melted to them, and his voice took a lugubrious tone.
‘How doleful you are!’ cried Nelly, laughing; ‘one would think you were going to cry. What has been going on? Tell me; has some one been unkind? And I declare you are quite pale. I am getting very, much interested;--do let me know.’
‘I don’t know that you will be at all interested when you hear,’ said Frank, with a certain desperation. ‘I have just been settling matters about my exchange into the 200th. They are to sail for India in three months, and it is not cheerful work.’
‘To sail for India in three months!’ said Nelly. The change that came over her face was indescribable. A half-amused incredulity, then the startled pause, with which she might have said, This is too serious a matter to joke about; and then consternation, anger, mortification. She grew pale, and then brilliantly crimson, till the colour dyed as much as could be seen of her clear, dark skin. She had a right to look at him with eyes of keen inquiry;--not a right to interfere or find fault,--but yet a right to ask the question. He had gone so far that she had, at least, that claim.
‘Yes,’ he said, with an exquisite discomfort, such as would have been punishment enough for worse treachery than he had perpetrated, ‘I have been putting it off and wasting my time, beguiled by pleasanter things. But to-day matters became urgent, and I settled it. I could delay no longer,’ he said, with apology in his tone; ‘it is not a cheerful piece of work, as I say.’
Nelly did not answer a word. She was struck dumb. That other day, under the lime-trees, he had certainly said not a word about India. He had not, indeed, said all which the opportunity might have justified him in saying. He had been unsatisfactory, and had made a very poor use of the opportunity. But still he had not so much as hinted at anything which could explain this. She sat in her corner, bending towards him a little, as she had been before he made this startling intimation. What could it mean? Could he intend to ask her to go there with him? Nelly’s heart gave a sudden bound at the thought. She was so adventurous and eager for change that India itself would not have frightened her. Could that be what he meant? She did not change her position, but sat still, turning towards him in a listening attitude, with her eyes cast down, and a certain sharpness of expectation in her face. The idea was quite new and startling, but it was not unpleasant. She waited, with a tingling in her ears, a sudden sense of quickened pulsation and tightened breath, for the next words he should say.
But at that moment dumbness, too, fell upon Frank. His lips grew dry; his tongue clave to his mouth. He turned a little away, and began to play unconsciously with the little cane in his hand, flicking his boot with it. It seemed to him as if all his powers of speech were exhausted and not a word would come. If only there might be a stoppage at some station, or an accident, or anything! He would have welcomed any incident that would have interrupted this horrible pause. And not a word would come to his lips. He tried to make up some ordinary question about the flower-show, but it would not do. He sat in a frightful consciousness,--afraid to look at her, wondering what she was thinking of it, how she would receive it. And the train was one of those nice, quick express trains, which stop only at Slowley junction. The poor young fellow thought he would have gone mad with that awful pause and stoppage of talk, and the everlasting iron murmur and clank of the wheels.
It was full five minutes before any one spoke, and that at such a time, of course, seemed as a year. Then it was Nelly who resumed the conversation, in a tone clear and distinct, with a modulation of contempt in it which set Frank’s nerves on edge. ‘I do not see why it should not be cheerful work,’ she said; ‘no doubt you like it or you would not have done it; but it is sudden surely, Mr. Renton?’ And Frank, who did not look at her, who was busy still with his cane and his boot, felt that she was looking steadily at him.
And he was aggravated at the tone. It was the second time that afternoon in which he had been contemptuously spoken to;--by Mrs. Severn, first of all, who had certainly no right to do it, and who had taken pains to make him understand how little importance he was to her, what small hesitation she would have had in cutting him off from all good offices. And now Nelly, who might have an excuse, adopted the same tone. Naturally, it was the one who had some justification for her scorn who bore the brunt of both offences. He looked up at her, and met full, as she had not expected him to meet, the look of restrained resentment, indignation, and wounded feeling, with which she regarded him. Though he was in the wrong, he met her eyes with more fortitude than she could exercise in meeting his. He it was who had been the traitor, and therefore he took the upper hand. ‘I am surprised you think it sudden,’ he said, fixing his eyes upon her so resolutely that Nelly’s could not bear the gaze. ‘I have been in negotiation about it more or less since ever I knew you. The opportunity has been sudden, but not the intention.’ Thus the man, being unmoved by anything but a passing compunction which he had overcome, got the better of the woman whose heart had been touched ever so little. He looked full at her, and he looked her down.
‘But I thought you had changed your mind,’ said Nelly softly, with an effort to preserve her calm.
‘Oh no, never!’ answered Frank, in his majestic way. And then she turned her face round to the window, and gazed steadily out. It was not that she was in love with him,--not much. But she was a girl who had had every toy she ever longed for in all her life, and now for the first time she was denied. She turned to the window, and sudden tears sprang into her eyes. Her own impression was that she was struck to the heart. Her lip quivered; there was a painful feeling in her throat. She had been so bright, so lively, so full of enjoyment,--and now the revulsion came! But she was proud enough not to make any very distinct self-betrayal. She did not mind showing him that she was offended. Even had it come to a little outbreak of passion and tears, she would not, perhaps, have very much minded. But all she did now was to turn away her face. Turning round and gazing very fixedly out of a window after a short interval of very lively and friendly conversation, is a sufficiently marked sign that something is wrong. But Nelly did not utter any reproach. He had faced her, and intimated to her, almost in so many words, that it was a matter she had nothing to do with; and she accepted the intimation. But she did not think it necessary to put an amiable face upon it, as so many girls would have done. She had turned almost her back upon him before they got to Slowley, where the gorgeous carriage of the Riches,--much the most splendid in the county, with a coat-of-arms as big as a soup-plate upon the panel,--was waiting for them. And when Frank got out and gave her his hand to alight, Nelly sprang past him without taking any notice. ‘Good-bye, Mr. Renton; I suppose we shall see you before you go,’ she said, without looking at him. Mrs. Rich thought her daughter must be out of her senses when she heard the news, which it cost Nelly an effort to tell with composure. She had lost all her colour, and looked black, and pale, and gleaming, and dangerous, when the Royalborough train glided on; and Mrs. Rich after an affectionate farewell to Frank, leisurely ascended into her carriage. ‘Have you quarrelled with Frank Renton, my dear?’ she said, with a little alarm.
‘Oh, dear no!’ said Nelly. ‘I told him to come and see us before he went away.’
‘Before he went away!’ said Mrs. Rich, surprised.
‘Yes. He has exchanged into the 200th, and they are going to India,’ said Nelly, following the train, as it swept along the curves, with an eye which was far from friendly. And Mrs. Rich’s conclusion was that the young man must be mad.
Nor must it be supposed that Frank Renton’s thoughts were particularly comfortable as he pursued his way. He was not vain enough to be gratified by Nelly’s mortification, and he could not conceal from himself the fact that he had not behaved quite as he ought to have done. He had not gone any great length, but still he had said and done enough to justify these kind people in thinking badly of him. He had made them an ungracious return for their hospitality and kindness. And when they should come to know that he was going to be married before he left, and that it was Alice Severn who was to be his bride, what would they think? Would it not look as if lie had gone to Richmont and pretended to pay court to Nelly for the sake of their visitor? Would it not be supposed that both he and his innocent Alice had been traitors;--his innocent Alice, to whom the very thought of evil was unknown? And then there was Alice’s mother,--though she did not like him,--who might be injured by this misconception. Mr. Rich was her patron, he had heard. All this maze of humiliating contingencies made Frank half frantic. He was angry with Mrs. Severn for being a painter,--angry with the Riches for buying her pictures,--angry that there should be any connexion, and that, above all, a connexion as of patron and dependant between the family of the girl he might have married and that of the girl he loved. Thinking it over, his very soul grew sick of the imbroglio. If he could but rush up to town and take his Alice to church, and be off to India the very same day,--seeing nobody, making explanations to nobody,--that was the only way of managing matters which could be in the least degree satisfactory; and that was impossible. Mothers of far higher pretensions than Mrs. Severn would, he knew, have received his suit much less cavalierly. He would have her susceptibilities to ménager as well as those of everybody else. There was not a point in the whole business, except Alice herself, upon which he could look with the least satisfaction; and indeed it said a great deal for Frank’s love that Alice herself retained his allegiance unbroken through it all.
Next morning Frank hurried over to Renton at an hour so early as to startle himself and everybody concerned. He met his cousin Mary as she made her habitual round of the flower-beds before breakfast. It had always been hard work to get him to be ready for breakfast at all, not to speak of sauntering in the garden. And yet he had come all the way from Royalborough. Mary held out her hand to him with a little cry of surprise.
‘Is it you, Frank, or your double?’ she asked in her amaze. ‘It does not seem possible it can be you.’
‘I wish I had a double who would be so obliging as to do half my work for me,’ said Frank, dolefully. ‘It is me, worse luck! and if you don’t stand my friend, Mary, I don’t know what I shall do.’
‘Of course I will stand your friend. But, Frank, what is it?’ cried Mary, gliding her arm within his with sisterly confidence. And he took breath for a few minutes without saying a word, leading her from the front of the house out of sight under the shadow of the trees.
‘I may as well tell you at once,’ he said, after this pause. ‘I could not stand it any longer. I have settled all about my exchange, and I am going to India in three months.’
‘To India!’ said Mary. But she had a brother in India, and perhaps it was not quite so appalling to her as Frank expected it to be. She made a little pause, however, and then she said, ‘Poor godmamma!’ with as much feeling as he could desire.
‘Well,’ said Frank; ‘could I help it? It is my father you must blame. How was it to be expected that I could get on in the most expensive regiment in the service after what has happened? It was my duty to do something, and this was the only thing I could do.’
‘I am not blaming you, Frank; I only said, “Poor godmamma!” she will feel it so,’ said Mary; ‘especially after what you gave us to understand last time, that--that there might be another way----’
‘That was folly,’ said Frank hotly; and then he added with humility, ‘But I have not told you half all. You must do more for me yet. Mary, I am going to get married before I go.’
‘To get married!’ Mary repeated with a start; and then she clasped his arm tight with both her hands, and looked up joyfully in his face. ‘Then you must have been fond of her after all,’ she cried. ‘It was not her money you were thinking of. Oh, Frank! don’t be angry. It made me so unhappy to think you were going to marry her for her money.’
‘Good heavens! this girl will drive me mad!’ cried Frank. ‘What nonsense are you thinking of now? Money! She has not a penny, and you never heard of her in your life.’
‘It is not Nelly Rich then?’ said Mary, faltering and withdrawing the clasping hands from his arm.
‘Nelly Rich! that was all your own invention, and my mother’s,’ said Frank,--‘not mine. I said she would have suited Laurie. If you chose to make up a story, that was not my fault.’
There was a pause after this, for Mary remembered but too distinctly the conversation about Nelly, and could not acknowledge that the story was of her invention. But she could hold her tongue, and did so steadily, making no remark, which Frank felt was as great an injury to him as if she had enlarged on the subject. He went along under the trees, quickening his pace in his agitation, without much thought of Mary, who had to change her steps two or three times to keep up with him.
‘I suppose you have no further curiosity?’ he said at length; ‘you don’t want to know who it really is.’
‘Yes, Frank,--when you will tell me,’ said Mary, holding her ground.
‘You are very provoking,’ said her cousin;--‘if it were not that I had such need of you! You should not aggravate a poor fellow that throws himself as it were on your assistance;--I will tell you who it is whether you care to hear or no. It is Alice Severn,--Mrs. Severn’s daughter, who was Laurie’s great friend.’
‘Laurie again!’ said Mary, amazed,--‘Mrs. Severn! Are we never to have an end of Laurie’s friends? You told me she had no daughters. You said something about a little girl. Ah, Frank! I am afraid it is some widow coquette that first made a victim of Laurie and now has done the same to you. I knew there was something mysterious about his going away.’
‘I wish you would talk of things you understand,’ said Frank, indignantly. ‘Alice is only sixteen. She is, I believe, the purest, simplest creature that ever lived. As for Laurie, she was a child to him;--he treated her like a child.’
‘Sixteen! Of course she is only a child,’ said Mary; ‘and the daughter of Mrs. Severn the painter! Frank, you must be mad.’
‘I think I shall be, unless you help me,’ said the young soldier. ‘Her mother is furious against me, Mary; and so will my own mother be, I suppose. But what does it matter when we are going to India? We shall be able to live on what we have. She has no expensive tastes, nor have I.’
‘You,--no expensive tastes?’ cried Mary. ‘Oh, Frank! do pause and think. I did not care for Nelly Rich, but this is far worse. Nelly Rich was of no family, but she had money; whereas this girl is----’
‘The creature I love best in the world,’ said Frank, interrupting her hastily, with a sudden glow upon his face. ‘It is of no use speaking. If I have to give up mother, and home, and friends, and all I have in the world, I shall still have Alice,--and Alice means everything. It is because you don’t know her. But I tell you there never was any one like her. And, Mary, if you don’t stand by us, I will throw up everything else I care for in the world.’
‘But not her?’ asked his cousin, raising her eyes to his face.
‘Never her!’ cried the young man. ‘Give up my Alice! Not for twenty mothers! I don’t mind what people choose to say. We are going to India, and it will not matter to us,--nor your objections, nor mamma’s objections, nor anything in the world. She shall go with me if I run away with her. You understand me now?’
‘Is she the kind of girl to run away with you?’ said Mary, still looking earnestly in his face.
‘No,’ said Frank, with a little outburst of impatience, ‘I wish she were. You may think how unpleasant it is to me to put myself at that woman’s feet, and plead as if I were a beggar. And she hates me; but Alice stands fast, bless her! And her mother can refuse her nothing,’ he added, with a sudden breath of satisfaction. He was flushed and excited with his story. Mary had never seen him look so manful, so bright, and full of energy. He had made up his mind;--that was something gained, at least.
And then there was another pause. Mary did not know how to reply. Frank was in love, and that was a great, the greatest recommendation in his favour. But this Alice, this creature of sixteen, a girl altogether out of his sphere! It was impossible for his cousin, brought up in the prejudices of her class, not to feel that there must have been some ‘artfulness,’ some design upon the innocent young Guardsman, some triumphant scheme, to lead away so guileless a member of society; and what if it were the same scheme which had wounded Laurie too, and sent him away with, perhaps, a broken heart! Such were Mary’s thoughts as she listened. And what could she do? Make herself a party to this artful plan? Countenance the girl, and help Frank to ruin himself? How could she do it? And there were all the speculations about Nelly Rich which had thus fallen to the ground,--and all her godmother’s hopes of the money Frank was to marry! Her mind was full of perplexity. ‘I do not see what I can do,’ she said, faltering. ‘I don’t understand it at all. There was first Miss Rich, and we had made up our minds to that; and now, all at once, it turns out not to be Miss Rich, but a girl no one ever heard of. I don’t know what to make of it, Frank. How can I stand your friend? You are scarcely one-and-twenty. You don’t want a wife at all, that I can see; and going to India too! And a girl of sixteen! I think you are quite unreasonable. As for poor godmamma, I don’t know how she is to bear it. I see nothing but folly in it myself, and what can I say?’
Frank made no answer. He turned with her towards the house, from which, some time before, they had heard the sound of the breakfast-bell. The old butler stood at the window with his napkin in his hand, looking anxiously about the flower-garden for Miss Mary, and much puzzled to divine whose was the figure which he saw in the distance by her side. Mary had dropped her cousin’s arm, and the two walked onward, side by side, like people who have quarrelled, or between whom, at least, some difficulty has arisen. ‘My mother does not get up to breakfast?’ Frank had said, and Mary had answered ‘No,’ and they had gone on again without further communication. But yet Frank was not so cast down as he might have been supposed to be. He was sure of Mary, though Mary was so doubtful of him. When they sat down together to breakfast in the sunshiny quiet of the great brown dining-room, they went over and over the subject again, and yet again. Frank was not aware that he had any skill in description, but, all unawares, he placed before his cousin such a picture of Alice and her curls as touched Mary Westbury’s heart. ‘If my mother once heard her play, she would never ask another question,’ Frank said, in his simplicity; and he confided to Mary more of his troubles in respect to Nelly Rich than he had ever thought to tell. ‘It is a sneaking sort of thing for a man to say,’ Frank admitted, with a flush on his face, ‘but it wasn’t all my doing. I declare I thought old Rich meant to offer her to me the first hour I was in the house. I should never have thought of it myself. And I met her to-day, Mary, and told her plainly I was going to India. She is sharp enough. You may be sure a fellow would never need to make long explanations to her.’
‘And did she understand this too?’ said Mary, from her judicial seat.
‘No, by Jove, I could not tell her that,’ said Frank. ‘That is the worst of it. They will think it was all made up then, and that Alice and I were laughing at them. They are sure to think that, but it is not true. Such an idea had never come into her innocent head; and as for me, I tried never to look at her, never to speak to her, to think of Nelly only,--like a cur,--for her money,’ said Frank, with a novel fervour of self-disgust. ‘And she’s not a bad sort of girl, I can tell you, Mary. I’d like her to know there was no treachery meant.’
‘I am glad you have so much feeling, at least,’ said Mary, the Mentor, looking at him with more charitable eyes.
‘Oh, feeling!’ cried Frank, ‘I wish you would not speak of feeling. And then there is her mother. She will consent for Alice’s sake; but she hates me. And mamma will go out of her senses, I suppose,’ said the young man, disconsolately. He looked so discouraged, so anxious, so boyish, amid all the serious complications he had gathered round him, that it was all Mary Westbury could do to restrain a momentary laugh. And yet there were few cases less laughable when you come to think of it. To be sure, there always remained the question,--a question which every sensible person might ask,--Why was it needful that a young man of one-and-twenty and a girl of sixteen should marry at all? Seven years later would be quite time enough. They had set their hearts upon it; but why should they more than other people have the desire of their hearts? Mary, for her own part, had set her heart repeatedly on things that had not come, and were very unlikely to come to her. And why Frank and his Alice should have their will at once out of hand she could not see. But, after all, it might be the best way of cutting the knot. It was better in her opinion that he should marry any how for love, than in the most favourable way for wealth. And before Frank quitted Renton, Mary had undertaken this all but impossible task.
IV. WHAT IT COSTS TO HAVE ONE’S WAY
Space forbids the historian to attempt any description of the difficulties which Mary had to encounter in her benevolent undertaking. By Frank’s urgent desire,--for his courage had altogether failed him,--nothing was said on the subject till he was gone; and the consequence was a very uncomfortable day, in which even Mrs. Renton perceived that there was something more going on than was revealed to her. ‘What are you always talking to Frank about?’ she said, pettishly. ‘I never turn my head but I find you whispering, or telegraphing, or something. If there is anything I ought to know, let me know it.’
‘Wait a little,--only wait a little, dear godmamma,’ Mary answered, pleading; and then, when the hero was gone, the tale was told.
‘Going to India,--going to be married!’ said Mrs. Renton, in her bewilderment; ‘but why should he go to India if he marries? Of course he will be provided for if he makes up his mind to that. Or why should he marry if he goes to India?--one thing is bad enough. Is he out of his senses? Fifty thousand pounds will give them, at least, two thousand a-year.’
‘But, godmamma, you are making a mistake,’ said Mary. ‘It is not Miss Rich Frank is going to marry. It is a young lady,--whom he met at Richmont.’
‘Not Miss Rich!’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Another girl! The boy must be mad to go on making acquaintance with such people. And how much has she?’ the mother added, with plaintive submission to a hard fate, folding her patient hands.
Mary, thus driven to the last admission of all, grew quite pale, but made a brave stand for her client. ‘Oh, godmamma,’ she cried, ‘you must not be hard upon him. He is so young; and isn’t it better he should marry her because he loves her than because she is rich? She has not a penny, he says.’
When this awful revelation was made, Mrs. Renton was excited to the length of positive passion. Words failed her at first. Her eyes, though they were worn-out eyes, retaining little lustre, flashed fire. Her faded cheeks grew red. She was inarticulate in her rage and indignation. It was Mary who received the first brunt of the onslaught, for encouraging a foolish boy in such nonsense, and for taking it upon her to defend him against all who wished him well. You would have thought it was Mary who had inspired him with this mad fancy, put it in his head, encouraged him in it, urged him to commit it, and compromise himself in the face of the strenuous, steady, invariable opposition of ‘all who wished him well.’ The poor lady made herself quite ill with indignation, and had to be taken to bed, and comforted with more tonics and arrowroot than ever. She lay there moaning all the evening, refusing to allow poor Mary to read to her, or to perform any of her usual ministrations. If it had not been that Frank had left his boat, having himself returned to Royalborough by the railroad, and thus afforded Mary the opportunity of getting easily across the river, and running all the way to the Cottage to be comforted by her mother for half-an-hour before returning to her charge, I don’t know what would have become of her. Mrs. Westbury did not look the sort of woman to seek comfort from, but she was Mary’s mother, which makes all the difference, and she had never got over her compunction about her nephews. This trial they were all going through was her doing, and though she sympathised much more with her sister-in-law than with Frank in the present case, she was not without a certain pity for the boy. ‘He must be mad,’ she said; ‘but if it can’t be put a stop to, it must be put up with; and your aunt will have got a little used to it by to-morrow.’ Thus comforted Mary went back, not without a little wondering comparison in her own mind between the people who could do rash things and have their will, and those who had ‘to put up with’ everything that might chance to come in their way, and never had it in their power to please themselves. She was a very good girl, full of womanly kindness and charity; but it is not to be supposed that close attendance upon a weariful invalid like her aunt, not ill enough to move any depth of sympathy, but requiring perpetual pettis soins, and endless consideration in every detail of life, was a kind of existence to be chosen by a lively girl of twenty. Poor Mary was the scapegoat and ransom for the sins of her family. The three ‘Renton boys’ were all going away on their own courses, comforting themselves about their mother,--when they thought of her at all,--by the reflection that Mary was with her. They could go away, but Mary could not budge. It was rather hard, when you came to think of it. And that Frank, not three months older than herself, should marry and set out in life, and go blithely off to all the novelty and all the brightness, and no one have any power to stop him; while she stayed at home, making excuses for him, and doing duty for all three! Mary was a comfortable kind of young woman, and went into no hysterics over her fate; neither did she rave to herself about the awful blank of routine and the want of excitement in her life. But she did feel a little envy of Frank, and pity for herself, as she glided across the silvery river in the summer twilight. Doing must be a pleasanter thing than ‘putting up with,’ even to a philosophical mind.
The next day Mrs. Renton had got a little used to it. She exerted herself to the unusual extent of writing Frank a letter, conjuring him by all his gods to repent ere it was too late, and to return to the paths of common sense and discretion; and when she had done this, she called Mary to her, and asked a hundred questions about ‘the girl.’ ‘Her mother was one of Laurie’s great friends,’ Mary said, trying to make the best of it.
‘All the doubtful people one knows of seem to be Laurie’s friends,’ said his mother, pathetically. And thus the crisis was over at Renton, for the moment at least.
At Richmont, however, affairs took a much more serious turn when the whole truth was known. Nelly’s intimation that Frank was going to India had not very much affected that sanguine household. ‘It will bring things to a point,’ Mrs. Rich had said to her husband. ‘He has done it in some little spirit of independence, not to be obliged to his wife, you know; but if he comes to an understanding with Nelly, we’ll make him exchange again.’
‘Ah! if he comes to an understanding with Nelly. But she shall never go to India with him,’ said the father. ‘No young fellow shall blow hot and cold with my daughter. I’d have done with him at once.’
‘Nonsense! It has been some little tiff between them,’ said the more genial woman. And even Nelly got by degrees to believe that it was not yet finally over. But when the whole truth was whispered at Richmont,--as it soon was by one of the officers who had learned the fact, no one knew how,--the family in general became frantic. Nelly kept her temper outwardly at least, and held her tongue, having some regard for her own dignity; but the father and mother were wild with rage. People whom they had patronised so liberally!--a woman to whom they had just given such a commission! When this thought occurred to them, they exchanged glances. Next day, without saying a word to any one, Mr. and Mrs. Rich went up to town. They bore no external signs of passion to the ordinary eye, but in their hearts they were breathing fire and flame against every Renton, every Severn, every creature even distantly connected with either. There was very little conversation between the two indignant parents as they made their way solemnly to Fitzroy Square. A certain judicial silence, and stern restraint of all the lighter manifestations of feeling, alone marked the importance of their mission. They were shown up to Mrs. Severn’s studio by their own request,--having peremptorily refused any such half-way ground as the drawing-room, as if they had come to treat with their equals. The workshop of the woman who was, as it were, in their employment, working to their order, was the more appropriate place.
They found the padrona standing at her work with looks very different from her usual aspect. Something spiritless and worn was in the very attitude of her arm, in the fall of her gown, and dressing of her hair. It was not that she was less neat, less carefully dressed, less busy. But the woman was in such unity with herself, that her unusual despondency communicated itself to every detail about her. She had no heart for Cinderella,--the little loving figure triumphing in its new life,--the sour, elder women standing by who were grudging,--what were they grudging? The child’s happiness, or her triumph, or the loss of her? She had not even heart enough to rouse her to the heights of artist-passion, and to work in her own heart into the picture, as doubtless she would yet do, some time when all was over. She stood with her sketches hung round the walls, and the whole room full of this commission of her rich patron,--the commission which made her living quite secure and above the reach of chance, and her mind easy for the year,--but listless, spiritless, mechanical, her heart gone out of her life.
Mrs. Severn was so much pre-occupied that she did not even notice, what at another time she would have been so ready to notice,--the changed tone of the Riches as they came in. Luckily for her own comfort, she had never heard that there was ‘anything between’ Nelly Rich and Frank Renton. Such a reason for having nothing to say to him would have been very welcome to the padrona. But she could not refuse to have anything to say to him without breaking her child’s heart; and, accordingly what did it matter? It was to Alice, not to him, that she had yielded. Therefore, she received very much as a matter of course Mrs. Rich’s pretended congratulations. ‘We hear that great things have been happening with you,’ she said. ‘I am sure I had no idea, when Alice was at Richmont, that she was such an advanced young lady. I suppose it was going on then, though we knew nothing about it.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the padrona. ‘I cannot give you any information. It is not a pleasant subject to me; but I don’t suppose it was going on then.’
‘Not a pleasant subject!’ cried Mrs. Rich, with not unjustifiable virulence. ‘Oh, my dear Mrs. Severn, you must not tell me that. We all know what a mother feels when she has succeeded in securing a charming parti like Mr. Frank Renton for her favourite child.’
‘Is he so?’ said the padrona. ‘Indeed, I should not have thought it. But I am not in charity with Mr. Frank Renton. I wish we had never seen him. I am like Cinderella’s sisters,’ she said, with an attempt at a smile;--‘I am spiteful;’ and there was a something in the droop and languor of her aspect which began to melt the hearts of the avengers. She looked so unlike herself.
‘Nay, nay,’ said Mrs. Severn’s patron. ‘Of course it is a fine thing for you to have your daughter settled so soon. And a fine thing for her too,--a girl without any fortune. Not many men, I can tell you, would have been so rash.’
‘Then I wish Mr. Frank Renton had not been so rash,’ cried the padrona, with rising spirit. ‘I would have thanked him on my knees had he kept away from this house. I cannot see any good in it. Forgive me! I have no right to trouble you with my vexations. I will show you my sketches, which are more to the purpose.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Rich, with hesitation. ‘It was principally about them,--we came to speak.’
The padrona, in her unsuspiciousness, became half apologetic. ‘I should have written to ask you to come and see them,’ she said; ‘but this business has put everything else out of my mind;’ and she began to collect her drawings in their different stages, and to rouse herself up, and show her work, as became her. The avengers, meanwhile, looked at each other, recruiting their failing courage from each other’s eyes.
‘Pray don’t give yourself any trouble,’ said Mr. Rich. ‘The fact is, Mrs. Severn,--I am very sorry,--my wife and I have been talking things over, and she,--I,--I mean we,--are not quite sure----. What I would say is, that if you could make a better bargain with any one,--a dealer, perhaps, or any of your private friends,--for these pictures,--why, you know I would not stand in your way.’
‘A better bargain!’ said the padrona in amaze, not perceiving in the least what he meant; ‘but I never should dream of a better bargain. I am painting the pictures for you.’
‘Yes; I know there was some understanding of that kind,’ said the uneasy millionnaire. ‘Some sort of arrangement was proposed,--but, you know, circumstances alter cases. I,--I don’t see,--and neither does my wife,--that we can go on with that arrangement now.’
The padrona had been standing by her great portfolio, taking some drawings out of it. She stood there still, motionless, as if she were paralysed. Every tinge of colour left her face; her eyes gazed out at them for one moment blankly, with a sudden pang which made itself somehow dimly apparent, though she did not say a word. It was a cruel blow to her. For a moment she could not speak, or even move, in the extremity of her astonishment. Before the echo of these extraordinary words had died in her ear, Mrs. Severn’s rapid mind had run over in a moment all there would be to do in the dreadful year which was coming,--Alice’s outfit, and the marriage which was such pain to think of, but which, nevertheless, must be planned and provided for, so that her child should have all due honour. As she stood and gazed at the two faces which were looking at her, it was all she could do to keep down two bitter tears that came to her eyes.
‘I thought it was more than an arrangement,’ she said; ‘perhaps because it was of more importance to me than it was to you. I thought it was a bargain. The price was settled, you know, and everything.’
‘Yes, oh yes,’ said both together. ‘I know there was a great deal said.’ ‘Mr. Rich was in a buying humour that day,’ said the wife. ‘But circumstances alter cases,’ said the husband. They had done their work more completely than they meant to do it; but yet they were not going to give in.
Mrs. Severn bowed her head. She could not speak. It was the cruellest aggravation of all her other troubles! ‘If that is the case,’ she said, after a long pause, ‘of course I must arrange otherwise;’ and then she came to a dead stop, turning over the drawings unconsciously with her agitated hands.
‘Oh, you will find no difficulty about it,’ said Mr. Rich, rubbing his hands; ‘you are so well known. There is Lambert will take as many of your pictures as you can give him, and there is that man in Manchester----’
‘Thanks,’ said the padrona. ‘I shall find a purchaser, I hope.’ And then there was a dead silence; and the two avengers felt inclined to drop through the floor and hide themselves. They were not cruel. They had taken no thought of what they were doing, and when they perceived the reality of it, could have bitten out their tongues for saying such words. And yet what were they to do? They could not unsay what they had that moment said.
As for Mrs. Severn, she was too much occupied with her own thoughts to exert herself to set at their ease the dealers of so cruel a blow. But yet, after a while, the instinct of courtesy, which is so strong in some natures, came to the surface. Those two tears which had wanted to come had been reabsorbed somehow, and she gave herself a little shake; and, with a curious smile about her mouth, went forward to the two embarrassed, uncomfortable people. ‘Perhaps you will look at the picture all the same, and tell me if you like it,’ she said. And then the startled pair, feeling very small and very angry with her for her magnanimity, made a few steps forward, huddled together for mutual support, and gazed in grave silence at Cinderella. She set it in the best light for them, and showed them how much was complete, and how much was still to do. The arrow they had sent at her was still sticking, quivering, in her heart. And she had not time to pluck it out, but she had time to be very civil, and smile upon the discomfited pair. Perhaps she overdid it just a little; but to such a brave spirit, confronting all the world, as it were, and standing alone in the fight, it is difficult to keep a certain glimmer of contempt out of the lofty forgiveness which it awards to its enemies. There was a touch of scorn in the padrona’s smile. But when Mr. and Mrs. Rich had crept down-stairs to their carriage, it is impossible to describe the state of downfall in which they found themselves. ‘She did not feel it a bit,’ said Mrs. Rich, trying to console herself. ‘And she has many friends among the dealers,’ said the millionnaire, a little ruefully. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if some fool gave a hundred or two more for the series,--and my idea!’ he added, with a certain indignation. And they went home very uncomfortable. He might be free to withdraw from his bargain, according to the letter of the law, but he could not charge his fee-rent for the idea, having rejected the pictures in which it was to be carried out.
When she had seen them safely out, the padrona dropped softly into her big chair, and hid her face in her hands. Alice’s outfit, and the wedding, and all the year’s expenses, which she had thought safely provided for, and her little triumph in being free of the dealers for once,--they were all gone! It was not such a moving spectacle, perhaps, as if she had been a young girl weeping for her lover. But those two tears that forced themselves out, womanish, against her clasped hands, what concentrated pain was in them! They were more bitter than many a summer torrent out of younger eyes. And then she sprang to her feet, and snatched at her palette, and went to work with flaming cheeks and a headache, and all her old fire in her eyes. She had been listless enough before, but she was not listless now.
When Nelly Rich, however, heard of this wonderful proceeding, their grand house became too hot to hold the unhappy pair. ‘Withdraw your commission! for what reason, in heaven’s name?’ cried Nelly, blazing at them in thunder and lightning. The girl was half crazy with shame and disgust. She brought her father almost to his knees before the day was over, and flew to London, post haste, by herself, in spite of everybody’s remonstrances, to make up the matter. ‘Papa had gone out of his senses, I suppose,’ she said, dissembling her fury, to Mrs. Severn. ‘Padrona mia, for the sake of old times, you will not mind? He is so sorry. They were both mad, I suppose.’ If Mrs. Severn had followed her first impulse, she would have held by the dealers, who were not liable to such madness; but she was her children’s mother, and had the bread and butter to think of, and was not able to afford such luxuries as revenge or pride. So that nobody was the worse for the patron’s ill-temper except himself; and two people were the better,--to wit, Nelly and Cinderella, the latter of whom had been undoubtedly languishing under the weight of Mrs. Severn’s heavy heart, until this violent pinch of apparent evil fortune came to sting her into life.
As for Nelly, setting her foot into the studio did her good. The smell of the pigments, and the sight of the rubbish about,--all the sketches, and unused bits of canvas, and bursting portfolios, were balm to the impetuous but not ungenerous girl. ‘I don’t want to see Alice,’ she said; ‘it was sly of her not to tell me. No, I don’t want to see her; but she is very happy, I suppose;’ and it was not possible that this could be said without a certain bitterness, considering all that had come and gone.
‘Nelly dear, don’t speak of it,’ said the padrona, who was ignorant of all the complications; and she went and gave the little messenger of consolation a kiss, and suffered herself to shed a tear or two out of her full heart. ‘I thought it would have killed me at first,’ she said, going back to her work with trembling hands. And the hand that shook so made a dreadful business of Cinderella’s white dress, and then the mother put away her tools, and sat down and cried. Nelly had been poor Severn’s pupil in the old, old days, and the sight of her brought nothing but softening thoughts to the padrona’s mind; and the fountain was opened that she kept so bravely shut. As for Nelly herself, every moment in that room was good for her. She cried too, and washed all her bitterness away in those tears, and turned Frank Renton and all his misdoings courageously out of her imagination. I doubt whether he had ever got so far as her heart.
‘I only want you to tell me one thing,’ she said, somewhat fiercely, to Alice, who came in, all unconscious, after the tears were dried, glad and wondering. ‘Was it going on when you were at Richmont?’
‘It?--what?’ said simple Alice, and then the child’s ready blush covered her face. ‘Oh, no, no! It never came on at all; it came into our minds in a moment, when we knew he was going away.’
And Nelly Rich was so magnanimous as to kiss Alice too.
‘Tell him I did it,--and that I bear no malice,’ she said, with a laugh; and then went away with Miss Hadley, who saw her safely to the railway station, and made the story still more plain to her. The governess thought it strange of Mrs. Rich to permit her daughter to run about alone in this way, but reflected that it might be one of the strange customs of ‘those sort of people,’ and did her duty by the young lady, putting her under the care of the guard, and keeping an eye on the carriage till the train started. The journey might be slightly indecorous, but it did more good than any tonic in the world.
And so it came about that in September Frank Renton sailed from Southampton to join his regiment, with his young wife,--the only one of the brothers who made anything like a practical conclusion to the little romance of their beginning. Though he had hesitated for some time as to whether he should follow interest or inclination, Frank was not the sort of man, when his choice was made, to care very much what he might tread upon in his way. He would have given no one pain willingly, but to have his way was the most important matter, and he had it accordingly. They were a couple of babies to set forth thus together, to face the world,--one-and-twenty and sixteen! but their very youth kept them from any consciousness of the gravity of the undertaking. They went forth with the daring ignorance of two children, hand in hand. There were several hearts that ached over the parting, and one had almost broke in the effort. And the bride shed a few soft tears, and the bridegroom kissed his hand to the people who stayed behind; and thus the last of the three Rentons carried out his father’s will, and launched himself upon the world.
V. THE FALLING OF THE WATERS
The readers of this history must be prepared to pass over an interval of something less than seven years from the end of the last chapter. I allow that it is a most undesirable break, but yet it has been involved from the beginning as a necessity of the narrative.
Nearly seven years had elapsed since Mr. Renton’s death at the moment when we again approach Renton Manor. He died in September, and it was the beginning of August when Mrs. Renton received a note from Mr. Ponsonby, the lawyer, announcing his intention of arriving at the Manor the next day. Mrs. Renton had not improved much in health, but she had laid aside her mourning, and wore grey and violet, and pretty caps, once more. Her existence had known very little change during all these years. Now and then the tonics had been changed, and she had substituted for a whole year the Revalenta Arabica for the arrowroot; but the difference was scarcely perceptible except to the maid and the cook, and I believe, on the whole, the arrowroot was found to agree with her best. She had taken her drive almost every day with a feeling that she was doing her duty. ‘My dear husband always made such a point of my drive,’ she said, plaintively, though for her own part she would have preferred her sofa; and so had lived on, very punctual in taking her medicine, a woman humbly conscious of fulfilling all the duties of her life. Mary Westbury had been generally her companion in these drives; and as she was younger and not so settled in mind, had sometimes, it must be allowed, felt as if life was no better than a leisurely promenade between two rows of hedgerows, sometimes green and sometimes brown. The carriage was very comfortable and the horses were very fat, and there were a great many charming points of view within a radius of fifteen miles round Renton; but still there were moments in which Mary was such an infidel as to wish herself jogging to market in the passing cart, or carrying a basket along the road, or anywhere rather than in that luxurious corner. If anything had happened to make Mrs. Renton ‘put down,’ as people say, her carriage, she would have regarded it as a calamity altogether immeasurable; but I think that both she and her niece would have felt a burden taken off their minds. She would have been left at peace on her sofa, and Mary could have taken needful exercise in her own way. But such a blessing in disguise was beyond praying for. Mr. Renton, though he had been so hard upon his sons, had provided very tenderly for his wife’s comfort.
Renton had been hers for these seven years, and had been kept precisely as it was when it was the home of the whole family,--not a servant dismissed nor a change made; and thus the height of comfort had been secured. Mary, too, was very comfortable,--no young woman could be more so. She had a maid of her own, which would have been an impossible luxury at home, and a liberal allowance for her dress, and a fire in her room, if she chose, from October to May, or indeed all the year through, if such was her pleasure; and the freedom of various libraries, and an excellent piano, and any amount of worsted work she chose. And then the drive every afternoon, wet and dry, ‘so that she has the air and the change, when we poor people, who have no carriage, must stay indoors,’ Mrs. Westbury said when she described her daughter’s happiness. And this felicity had gone on for nearly seven years.
‘I wonder what Mr. Ponsonby wants,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘He might have come without any intimation. I am sure he generally does. Why he should send word like this, as if he had some news to bring, I cannot conceive. I do hope it is nothing about the boys.’
‘It cannot be anything about them,’ said Mary. ‘Consider, godmamma, you had a letter from Ben just the other day, and Frank and Alice wrote by the last mail.’
‘That is all very true,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘but how can I tell that they may not have telegraphed or something? And then there is Laurie always wandering all over the world. He may have gone off, as he did the first time, without letting any one know.’
‘But he would never have dreamed of sending Mr. Ponsonby to tell you,’ said Mary; ‘he would have written direct. Laurie is the best correspondent of them all.’
‘Or he may be going to be married,’ said Mrs. Renton,--‘he or Ben. By the way, he says something about Ben; but all those business people write such bad hands. Perhaps you can make it out. I am sure it is too much for me.’
After this little introduction, Mary took the lawyer’s letter with some slight tremulousness. She was nearly seven-and-twenty by this time, and ought, she said to herself, to have been quite steady about such matters. Of course some day Ben would marry, and so long as it was any one who would make him happy she could only be glad. Many a wandering thought about Millicent Tracy had come into her mind. Had she been faithful to him? Had there been any intercourse between them? Had he kept steadfast to his imagination of her for all these years? For it was only an imagination, as Mary felt sure. Every letter that came from Ben had caused her a certain tremor,--not, as she said to herself, that it would make any difference to her; but if he were to bind himself to a woman unworthy of him! And now that he was coming back so soon, it was with a thrill of more intense expectation than usual that she took Mr. Ponsonby’s letter in her hand. But there was nothing about marrying or giving in marriage in that sober epistle. It intimated to Mrs. Renton, in the first place, that the time specified in her husband’s will had nearly expired; that he had received a letter from her son Ben, informing him that he intended to meet him at the Manor, along with the other members of the family, on the 15th of September; and that, accordingly, Mr. Ponsonby was coming to Renton next day to go over the property with the bailiff, and see with his own eyes the condition in which everything was, that there might be no delay, when the time came, in making everything over to the heir. All that Mrs. Renton had made of this very distinct letter was the fact that the lawyer was to pay her a visit, and that there was something about Ben. But indeed Mr. Ponsonby did not write a legible hand.
‘Then it is just what Ben told us about coming home,’ said Mrs. Renton, ‘though he was not so particular to me in naming the day. He said the beginning of September, if you recollect, Mary; and Frank and his wife are coming by the next mail. I am afraid the children will make a dreadful commotion in the house, and altogether it will be so odd to see Renton full of people again. Of course, Laurie is coming, too. I don’t know what I shall do with them all. They can’t expect me to have parties and that sort of thing for them, Mary, in my state of health?’
‘No, dear godmamma,’ said Mary, soothingly, ‘they will not expect anything of the kind; and you will never think of the trouble when you have all the boys at home. Fancy Frank having boys of his own!’ she cried, with a little laugh. The choice lay between laughing and crying, and the first was certainly the best.
‘I hope his wife has kept up her practice,’ said Mrs. Renton, still with a cloud on her brow, ‘since that was what he married her for.’
‘Godmamma!’ cried Mary, with consternation.
‘Well, my dear, I don’t know what else she had to recommend her. No family, nor connexions; not a penny,--not even expectations! If it was not for her music, what was it for? And so many women give up practice when they marry. I always forget,--is it three or four children they have?’
‘Two, godmamma,’ said Mary, gently; ‘don’t you remember the poor, dear, little baby died?’
‘Well, it is quite enough,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘with nothing but their pay to depend upon. And there will be a black nurse, you may be sure, driving the servants out of their senses. But if she has kept up her practice, it will be an amusement for the boys. And things might have been worse. There might have been three families instead of one, you know, Mary; and then I think I should certainly have run away.’
‘Yes,--perhaps it is selfish,’ said Mary; ‘but I am glad, too, that they are not all married. It will be more like old times.’
‘Selfish!’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I can’t see how it can be selfish. Of course Ben will have to marry some time or other, for the sake of the property. But I never can make out why young men marry, for my part. Haven’t they everything that heart can desire? and no care, and much more petted and taken notice of in society than if they were dragging a wife about with them everywhere? A girl is quite different. She has everything to gain, you see. I often wondered whether I have been doing my duty by you, Mary, keeping you out of the way of a good establishment in life.’
‘Pray don’t speak so, godmamma,’ said Mary, with a blush of indignation; ‘not to me at least.’
‘But I do, my dear. And I am sure no one ever deserved to be comfortably settled better than you do. However, I have always found, in my experience,’ said Mrs. Renton, with a profound look of wisdom, ‘that when these things are coming they come, however quietly you may be living; and, if they are not to come, they don’t, however much you may go into society. Look at Jane Sutton, who never was seen out of her father’s house, and now she’s Lady Egmont! I suppose we must expect Mr. Ponsonby to lunch.’
‘I should think he would come early,’ said Mary, with a smile; and, as it was Mrs. Renton’s hour for taking something, she went away to tell the housekeeper of the guest. And then she made a little tour of the house; peeping into the rooms, in some of which preparations had already begun. The west wing, in which the ‘boys’ rooms’ were, was all in commotion,--carpets taken up, women with pails and brooms in every corner. The only one as yet untouched was the little sitting-room, or dressing-room, attached to Ben’s chamber, where his old treasures were still hanging about,--his books and his pictures, and all his knicknacks. Into this oasis Mary strayed, with a strange thrill of expectation creeping over her. Seven years! what a slice it was out of a life; and how much had happened to the others and how little to herself! Mary felt as if she had done nothing but drive all these years in that most comfortable of family coaches, with her aunt by her side, and a bottle of medicine in the pocket of the carriage. And now they were all coming back! To what? What change should she find in them? and ah! what changes would they find in her? Ben must be thirty-two by this time; and Mary was seven-and-twenty, which, for a woman, is about twenty years older, as all the world knows!
As for ‘the Frank Rentons,’ they were not to be placed in the west wing at all, but in a suite of rooms over the great doorway, the guest-chambers of the house, as became their dignity as married people with children and nurses to be accommodated. How funny that was! Frank, who had always been the youngest in every way, whom they all,--even Mary herself in a manner,--had bullied and domineered over,--and here had he attained a point of social dignity to which none of the others had yet approached! Mary laughed to herself, and then she dried her eyes. It was an agitating crisis altogether, to which she looked forward with the strangest mixture of feelings. Laurie, it was true, had come home long since; and came to the Manor now and then, and had not drifted out of knowledge. But, then, one always knew exactly how Laurie would be, and it did not matter if he were in London or at the end of the world, so far as that went; but Ben---- And to think everything was going to be settled, and they were all coming home!
Mr. Ponsonby arrived next day; not, as they expected, to luncheon, but in the evening. He was an old friend of the family, and Mr. Renton, as people say, had no secrets from him. But that was a figure of speech, for the Ponsonbys had managed the Rentons’ affairs for generations, and there were no secrets to keep. ‘I shall want the whole day for what I have to do,’ he told Mary when he arrived; ‘so I thought it best to come overnight.’ And he dined with the two ladies, and did his best to make himself agreeable. His coming and his talk were the most tangible sign that they had yet had that their long vigil was over, and that the tide of life was about to flow back to them. He spoke in a very guarded way, betraying nothing of the secret he had kept those seven years; but when Mrs. Renton spoke of one thing and another which she wanted to have done, Mr. Ponsonby made answers which infinitely piqued Mary’s curiosity. ‘We must see what the will says about it,’ said the lawyer. ‘It is not worth while doing anything now till he is here to decide for himself. All that is the heir’s business, not mine.’
‘Do you mean Ben?’ said Mrs. Renton; for even she was moved to a little surprise.
‘I cannot tell whom I mean until the will is read,’ he said; ‘but, of course, whoever is the heir will be but too happy to do what you wish, my dear Mrs. Renton. It must be a great pleasure to you to have all your boys at home.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘but when one does not know whether they are coming to disappointment or to satisfaction! If they should have had to travel all this way for nothing, what a thing it would be,--if it were only for the expense!’
‘But I trust it will be satisfaction this time, and not disappointment,’ said the lawyer. ‘I am heartily glad, for my part, that the seven years are over. I hear the boys have all done so well, which is immensely to their credit, and, of course, is just what their excellent father meant.’
‘I never could think what he meant,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Lydia always says it was her fault; but he was not a man to follow anybody’s opinion but his own. As for doing well, I am not so sure about that. Ben has become a railway man;--think of that, Mr. Ponsonby! I never even approved of the railroad myself. I don’t see what use there is for so much hurry. I am sure I went a great deal oftener to town when we used to drive our own horses than now that there is a railway close to the gates. But he has pleased himself, which is always something. And Laurie has pleased himself, too. He paints very pretty pictures sometimes; but I don’t believe he will ever earn enough to keep him in gloves. And as for Frank,--a poor soldier with nothing but his pay and a family of little children! It is very different from what I had once hoped.’
‘But probably this is all over now,’ said Mr. Ponsonby,--‘or at least, we have every reason to believe so; and in the meantime they have had their struggles, and know what they are capable of. Let us hope, my dear madam, that everything will prove to have been for the best.’
‘I don’t doubt that everything is for the best,’ Mrs. Renton answered in plaintive tones. And then Mr. Ponsonby was left to his wine in the great old dining-room, which he had not been in since that dismal day when he read the will,--or rather the preface of the will,--to the startled family. It was a bright room enough in the morning when the sunshine came in, or on winter nights when the fire sparkled and glimmered in the wainscot; but it was very sombre in the dimness of a summer night, with one lamp on the table and the windows open, admitting the night with all its ghosts of sound and profound soft glooms. The family solicitor was not an imaginative man, and yet he could not help feeling that his old friend might come in any moment through the curtains, which hung half over the open window, and dictate to him some new condition in the will which had already wrought so much mischief. ‘Not a word more,’ Mr. Ponsonby caught himself saying; and then he roused up and went to Mary in the drawing-room, where she was seated alone in much the same magical half-darkness as that he had left.
‘I suppose it is the instinct of a Londoner,’ he said; ‘but I declare I don’t think this is safe. Sitting with windows open to the lawn, all alone at this hour! Suppose some one should walk in upon you before you had time to give an alarm?’
‘Who could walk in upon me?’ said Mary, laughing. ‘We are at Renton, you know, and not in Harley Street.’
‘Sure enough,’ said the townsman. ‘No, thanks; I prefer to face that window. Let me not be approached from behind; let me see what is coming, at least.’
‘How odd to think of such a thing!’ said Mary. ‘I sit here every evening after godmamma has gone to bed, and one cannot live unless all the windows are open. But oh, Mr. Ponsonby, do talk to me a little! Do you think,--do you really think,--that now, at last, things will be comfortable for the boys?’
‘Let us hope so,’ said the man of law, arranging himself comfortably in an easy-chair. ‘I suppose Mrs. Renton has gone to bed. Let us hope so, at least.’
‘Hope!’ cried eager Mary,--‘of course we all hope; but what do you think?’
‘My dear, I can’t tell you what I don’t know, and I must not tell you what I do know,’ said Mr. Ponsonby. ‘Do you never have any change from Renton? It is very fine air; but I don’t think it is exhilarating for young people. Do you ever go out?’
‘We drive every day,’ said Mary, with the faintest little grimace; and then she looked at her old friend, and permitted herself the relief of a laugh. ‘It is dismal sometimes,’ she said; ‘but when the boys are back I shall be free again, and go home.’
Mr. Ponsonby looked at her in silence as she spoke. ‘Home’ was a cottage, instead of a great house; but otherwise, in the eyes of the man accustomed to the world, there was not much difference between the one widow’s house and the other. ‘How do these women live?’ he said to himself. When the boys came home there might be a little movement, perhaps, and feeling of life about the old place,--and then she would go home! ‘That is just the time you ought to stay, I think, and see if they cannot make it a little more amusing for you,’ he said. ‘Do you never ride now?’
‘I have no one to ride with me. I could not go out alone, you know,’ Mary answered, without raising her eyes.
‘Well, I am not much of a man to ride with a young lady, but you shall come out with me to-morrow and go over the estate,--if there is anything you can ride in the stables. It will do you good. I must see that everything is in order for the heir. And you will not mind giving up the drive,--not for one day,--for the sake of an old friend?’ said the lawyer. ‘Good Lord! there’s a fellow coming in at the window, as I said. Ring the bell, my dear! Quick, and leave the rest to me!’
‘Why, it is Laurie!’ cried Mary, springing up, as Mr. Ponsonby seized the gilded stick which supported a little screen, and brandished it in the face of the new-comer. ‘That is just his way, frightening people out of their wits. Come in quickly, Laurie, if it is you, and not your ghost.’
‘It is not my ghost,’ said the figure at the window, advancing to shake hands with Mr. Ponsonby, who was still a little excited. ‘A ghost was never so dusty nor so thirsty. I have walked down from town all the way, to get a breath of air, and very much mystified I was to see a man in the dining-room from the end of the avenue as I came along. I thought at first it must be Ben.’
‘So there was some one about!’ said Mr. Ponsonby; ‘that explains my sensation. I had just been giving your cousin a lecture upon sitting alone with the windows open. Yes, Laurie, my boy, here I am, come to look over the ground for the last time, before it is given up to the heir.’
‘Ben will not be hard upon you,’ said Laurie, with a laugh; but as he spoke he looked fixedly at the solicitor, hoping,--which was like Laurie,--to beguile that astute practitioner into self-betrayal.
‘I don’t know any thing about Ben,’ he answered, smiling at the simple artifice; ‘but I know I must set my affairs in order, and be prepared to give up my trust. I want Mary to go with me over the estate. She is moping and pale, and a brisk canter will do her good. Will you see if there is anything she can ride?’
And then there ensued a little consultation as to whether Fairy was up to it. Fairy was a pet pony, as old as the hills, who had been eating herself into a plethoric condition for years; but Mary, who was not a very bold horsewoman, believed in the venerable animal, as did every soul about Renton. ‘She’s hold in years, but she’s young at ‘art, Miss; she’ll carry you like a bird,’ was the coachman’s opinion when he was called into the consultation. And then Laurie had a vast tankard brought to him, and refreshed himself after his long walk. When Mr. Ponsonby retired, the cousins stepped out again on to the lawn, and Mary looked on and talked while Laurie had his cigar. The moon, which was half over and late of rising, began to lighten slowly upwards, shining upon the river far below, while they were still left in darkness on the higher bank. ‘It is so strange to think we are all on the brink of a new life,’ Mary said, as she gazed down through an opening in the trees upon that silvery gleam, which was framed in by the dark, rustling branches. ‘Are we?’ said Laurie, with a kind of echo in his voice. Somehow he had taken his life awry, by the wrong corner, and there did not seem vigour enough left in him to care for a new beginning,--at least for himself.
‘Laurie,’ she said, encouraged by the darkness. He had thrown himself down in a garden-chair, and was visible only as a shadow, with a red point of cigar indicating his face; while she stood leaning on one of the lower branches of the lime-tree which framed in that glimpse of the light below. Their voices had the softened, mysterious sound which such a moment gives, and as neither of them was happy enough to draw new delight out of the influence of the night, both of them, by natural necessity, grew a little sad. ‘Laurie,’ Mary said, and faltered. ‘Sometimes I think I should like to know a little about you. I do know something about the others,--even Ben,--but you have always been a mystery to me since you first went away.’
‘I don’t think I am much of a mystery,’ said Laurie, not moving from his chair.
‘But you are a mystery,’ Mary repeated, with a little eagerness. ‘I don’t know what has come to you,--whether it is love, or whether it is loss,--don’t be angry, Laurie.’
‘It might be love and loss too,’ he said, with a little laugh, which was not cheerful, and then he rose and tossed away his cigar. ‘What if I were to say you were a mystery, too?’ he continued, not knowing how Mary’s cheeks burned in the darkness. ‘We all are, I suppose; and my poor old father that meant to do so well for us, and tossed us all abroad to scramble anyhow for life,--what do you say to that for a mystery, Mary? and here is the moment coming to prove which of us is preferred and which condemned. I am the poor fellow with one talent, who laid it up in the napkin. If he had not been so mean as to abuse his master, I think I should have sympathised with that poor wretch.’
‘I cannot say I sympathise with him,’ cried Mary, woman-like. ‘To be able to do, and not to do, that is what I cannot understand. But you have not hid your talent in a napkin, Laurie. I wish you had a better opinion of yourself.’
Upon which Laurie laughed, and drew her hand through his arm, and the two strayed together, silent, down under the shadow of the trees towards the opening which looked on the river. The moon creeping higher every moment, began to thread through the bewildering maze of branches with lines and links of silver; and there was always that one brilliant spot in the midst of the river, far below them, shining like burnished silver, scarcely dimpling under the moonbeams, which seemed to swell as well as glorify the rather scanty water. Their hearts were full of wistfulness and dreams. The world lay all as dark before them as those rustling, breathing woods, with, for one, a brightness in the future which might or might not,--most probably should not,--ever be attained; and for the other, only some fanciful, silvery thread twining through the sombre life. They paused, arm-in-arm, by that beech-tree at the corner where Ben and Mary had paused when he was last at home, and where he had shot that arrow at her,--as she said to herself,--of which she could still feel the point. But Laurie was very different from Ben. No spark of emotion went from one soul to the other as they stood so close and so kindly together. They were the parallel lines that never meet,--each thinking their own thoughts, each with a sigh that was not all pain, contemplating the well-known road behind them, the invisible path before;--and all the world around lying dark and light, stirring softly, breathing softly, in the long speechless vigil which we call night.
Next day Mr. Ponsonby went over the home-farm, and all the neighbouring land, inspecting everything, looking to farms, farm-buildings, drainage, timber,--all the necessities of the estate. Mary rode by his side on Fairy, who verified the coachman’s verdict, and carried her mistress like a bird,--at least as nearly like a bird as Mary wished. Laurie had gone back to town that morning by the train. When his cousin returned to luncheon, freshed and roused by her ride, it seemed to her almost as if the new life had already begun. The work-people who had been sent for from town had arrived with a van full of upholstery,--bales of fresh, pretty chintz for ‘the boys’ rooms,’ and new furniture for the extempore nursery. An air of movement was diffused about the whole house. The flood which had swept over Renton, almost engulfing the peace of the family, was almost over,--the waters were going down,--the household ark standing fast, and the saved ones beginning to appear at the long-closed windows. Such were Mary’s feelings as she went with her aunt for that inevitable drive. To-day the hedgerows were not so monotonous, the dust less stifling; and when they met Mr. Ponsonby on his cob, with the bailiff in attendance, the returning life rose into a sparkle and glow in Mary’s face. ‘Her ride has done her no end of good,’ Mr. Ponsonby cried, waving his hand as he rode past. ‘Good?’ said Mrs. Renton: ‘was there anything the matter with you, Mary? I am sure, if there is any good in riding, I wonder Dr. Mixton has never recommended it to me.’ And then the two drove on, as they had been driving, Mary thought, all these seven long years.
VI. THE RAVEN
Some days after Mr. Ponsonby’s visit, Mary Westbury saw from her room, where she happened to be sitting, a carriage drive up the avenue. It was only about twelve o’clock, an unusual hour for visitors; and the carriage was of the order known as a fly, with just such a white horse, and coachman in white cotton gloves, as had made an important feature in the landscape to Ben Renton seven years before in Guildford Street, Manchester Square; but there was not, of course, any connexion in Mary’s mind between such a vehicle and her cousin’s brief romance. She watched it, with a little surprise, as it came up. Who could it be? There was somehow, a greater than ordinary attempt to look like a private carriage about this particular vehicle, with, as might have been expected, a failure still more marked. And flys of any description were not well known at Renton. The lodge-keeper had looked at it disdainfully when she opened the gate; and the butler, who was standing at the door, received the card of the visitors with a certain mixture of condescension and contempt. ‘For Miss Westbury,’ he said, giving it to a passing maid to carry up-stairs, and only deigning, after an interval, to show the visitors into the drawing-room. The card which was brought to Mary had a very deep black border, and the name of Mrs. Henry Rich printed in the little square of white. Who was Mrs. Henry Rich? There had been very little intercourse between the Riches and the Rentons since Frank’s marriage; but Mary recollected with an effort, when she turned her mind that way, that one of the sons had died some time before, and that he turned out to have been married, and to have left an unknown widow to be provided for after he died. These facts came quite dimly to her mind as she pondered the name. But she had never heard who the widow was, and could not think what a stranger in such circumstances could want with her. ‘I don’t know them well enough to do her any good,’ Mary said to herself. The border was so black, and the fly had impressed her with such a feeling of poverty,--wrongly, to be sure, for of course had Mrs. Henry Rich possessed a dozen carriages she could scarcely have brought them with her to Cookesley,--that the idea of a weeping widow seeking something very like charity, was suggested to Mary by the name, and the deep mourning, and the hour of the visit. Civility demanded of her that she should see this unexpected visitor. ‘But I must tell her we see very little of them, and that I can do nothing,’ Mary said to herself as she went down-stairs. She was dressed in one of her fresh, pretty muslins, pink and white, with all the pretty, crisp bits of lace and bows of ribbon that makes up that toilette fraîche et simple, which is one of the greatest triumphs of millinery, and next to impossible to any but the rich. And a pleasant figure to behold was Mary amid the sunshine, in the calm of the stately, silent house which was so familiar to her, and in which her movements were never without a certain grace. The most awkward being in the world has an advantage in her own house over any new-comer. And Mary was never awkward. The worst that could be said of her was that she was in no way remarkable. You could not specially distinguish her among a crowd as ‘that girl with the bright eyes,’ or ‘with that lovely complexion,’ or ‘with the fine figure.’ Her eyes were very nice, and so was her colour, and so was her form; but, as she herself said, her hair was the same colour as everybody else’s; she was just the same height as other people; her hands and feet the same size; her waist the same measure round. ‘I have never any difficulty about my things,’ Mary would say, half laughing, half annoyed; ‘everybody’s things fit me;’ and though she had preserved a great deal of the first fresh bloom of youth, still it was a fact quite known and acknowledged by her that the early morning and the dews were over with her. Such was the pleasant household figure, full of everything that makes a woman sweet to her own people, and yet not beautiful, which went softly into the great Renton drawing-room, in the morning sunshine, to see her visitor, not having the least fear of the stranger, or anything but pity, and a regretful certainty that her own ministrations, which she supposed were going to be appealed to, could be of no use.
Mary went in so softly that she surprised the ladies,--for there were two of them,--in an investigation into some handsome cabinets which were in the room, and which, indeed, were perfectly legitimate objects of curiosity. But to be discovered in the midst of their researches discomposed the strangers. They stood still for a moment between her and the window,--two tall, sombre, black figures,--draped from head to foot in the heaviest mourning. They had their backs to the light, and Mary could not for the moment distinguish their faces. She went forward with her soft smile and bow; and then she made a bewildered, involuntary pause. It was many, many years since she had seen that face, and she could not remember whose it was; but yet it struck her, even in her ignorance, a curious paralysing blow. It was the kind of blow said to be given by that mysterious monster of the seas, which the great French novelist has introduced into literature. It jarred her all over, and yet seemed to numb and take all power from her. ‘Mrs. Rich?’ she faltered, with a wonderful mingling of recollection and ignorance; and then stood still, too much startled to say more.
‘Dearest Mary, have you forgotten me altogether?’ said the youngest of the two ladies, coming up to her with both hands outstretched. Still Mary did not remember whose face it was, and yet she grew faint and sick. The tall figure towered over her middle-sized head; the lovely blue eyes looked appealing into her heart. ‘Don’t you remember Millicent?’ said the sweet voice; and then her reluctant hand was taken, and those softest rose-lips touched her cheek. Mary was glad to point to a chair, and shelter her own weakness upon one beside it. ‘It is so unexpected,’ she said, making a feeble apology for her consternation; and then Mrs. Tracy came and shook hands with her, and they all sat down in a little circle, poor Mary feeling the room go round and round with her, and all her courage fail.
‘You did not know me under my changed name,’ said Millicent; ‘and I am so changed, dear Mary, and you are exactly as you were,--you are not a day older;--that is the difference between living such a quiet life and being out in the world.’
‘I should have known you anywhere, my dear,’ said Mrs. Tracy, coming a little closer to Mary’s chair.
‘That is very strange,’ said Mary, recovering herself, ‘for I think I only saw you once. But I am very much surprised. Millicent, was it you that married Mr. Henry Rich?’
‘Who else could it be?’ said Millicent, slowly shaking her head with a soft pity for herself, and then she pressed her handkerchief lightly to her eyes. She was dressed in profound black, in what it is common to call the most hideous of garbs--a widow’s mourning dress. Her bonnet was of crape, with a veil attached to it, which was thrown back, showing the lovely face, just surrounded by a single rim of white. Though it goes against all ordinary canons of taste to say so, I am obliged to add that her melancholy robes were very becoming to Millicent, as indeed they are to most women. Her dazzling whiteness of complexion, the soft rose-flush that went and came, the heavenly blue of her eyes, came forth with double force from the sombre background. Poor Mary was overwhelmed by her beauty, her quiet consciousness of it, her patronage, and tone of kindness. And to come here now, at such a moment, when the world was about to begin again! It was so much her natural instinct to be courteous, that she could not make any demonstration to the contrary, but her manner, in spite of herself, grew colder and colder. The only comfort in the whole matter was that Mrs. Renton had not yet come down-stairs.
‘Her happiness lasted but a very short time,’ said Mrs. Tracy, taking up her parable; ‘such a young man, too! But my poor dear child has been very badly used. It was not only that; he died just when he ought to have been making some provision for her.’
‘Oh, mamma dear, that was not poor Harry’s fault!’
‘But we found out afterwards,’ continued Mrs. Tracy, ‘that he had not anything like what he had given himself out to have. He had squandered his money in speculation,--that was the truth; and now his family, instead of appreciating the position of a poor young creature thus deprived of her natural protector----’
‘Oh, please,’ said Mary, interrupting her; ‘I know the Riches a little, and I’d rather not hear anything about their affairs.’
‘I am speaking of our affairs, my dear,’ said Mrs. Tracy, solemnly; ‘of Millicent’s affairs; for, alas! I can scarcely say I have any of my own. Since my poor boy died, seven years ago, I have not cared much what happened,--to myself.’
‘Poor mamma worries about me more than she ought,’ said Millicent. ‘But we do not come to trouble you about that, dear Mary. How nice you look in your pretty muslin! I wonder if I shall ever wear anything pretty again. I feel such an old woman in those hideous caps. Don’t I look like a perfect ghost?’
‘I think you look more beautiful than usual,’ said Mary, with a certain spitefulness. She intended no compliment. It was rather a reproach she meant, as if she had said, ‘You have no right to be beautiful. Why shouldn’t you look a perfect ghost like other people?’ It was sharply said, not without a touch of bitterness, though it sounded pleasantly enough; and Millicent shook back her veil a little further, and laid her fingers caressingly upon Mary’s hand.
‘Ah, it is you who are partial!’ she said, while Mary boiled with secret wrath. ‘But tell me about Thornycroft, and if it is still kept up; and our old Gorgon, you know, and all the people. There was that poor Mr. Thorny, too,’ said Millicent, with a little laugh; ‘tell me about them all.’
‘Mr. Thorny died,--as you must have heard,’ said Mary; ‘and it was your doing, everybody said; and then poor Miss Thorny gave up. I wonder you like to think of it. It might have been going on like old times but for you----’
‘Could I help it?’ said Millicent, with a little shrug of her shoulders. ‘If a man is a fool, is it my fault? You must know by this time, Mary, as well as I do, what fools they will make of themselves; but it is too bad to call it our fault.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Mary, fiercely, and then there was a pause.
‘This is such a lovely place,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘we have heard so much about it. We used to know your cousin, Mr. Benedict Renton, Miss Westbury,--at one time. I suppose he is still abroad?’
‘Yes, he is still abroad.’
‘What a sad thing for him, with his prospects! It must have upset all your calculations. But the time is up now, is it not?’ Mrs. Tracy said, with her most ingratiating smile.
Mary perceived in a moment what was their object, and hoping it might be but a voyage of inquiry, shut up all avenues of intelligence in her, and faced the inquisitor with a countenance blank of all meaning--or so at least she thought. ‘What time is up?’ she said.
‘Oh, the time,’ cried Millicent, breaking in impatiently,--‘the time, you know, for the will. As if you did not know all about it! Oh, you need not be afraid to trust us. Ben Renton was not so careful; he told me everything about it. I must tell you that we saw a great deal of Ben at one time,’ Millicent added, with one of her vain looks. Mary says it might have been called an arch look by a more favourable critic. ‘He was, in short, you know, a little mad--but you will say that was my fault.’
‘I have no more to do with my cousin’s private affairs than I have with Mr. Rich’s,’ said Mary; ‘indeed, I wish you would not tell me. My cousin is not a man to like to have his affairs talked about. I would rather not hear any more.’
‘Miss Westbury is quite right, Millicent,’ said Mrs. Tracy, ‘and shows a great deal of delicacy. She is always such a thoughtless child, my dear. She never stops to think what she is going to say. The harm it has done her, too, if she could only see it! Millicent, my darling, if you would but learn some of Miss Westbury’s discretion! But it will be pleasant for you to have your cousins home again, I am sure.’
To this artful question Mary gave no answer at all. Indignation began to strengthen her. She sat still, with an air which any well-bred woman knows how to assume when necessary,--an air of polite submission to whatever an unwelcome visitor may choose to say. It neither implies assent nor approbation, but,--it is not worth while to contradict you. Such was the expression on Mary’s face.
‘Ah, mamma, Mary has not such a warm heart for old friends as I have,’ said Millicent at last. ‘I have been raving about coming to see her for weeks back, but she does not care to see me. She is indifferent to her old friends.’
‘Were we ever old friends?’ said Mary. ‘I don’t remember. You were older than I was. I thought you were very pretty, as everybody did, but----’
‘But you did not like me. Oh, I am used to that from women,’ said Millicent, with a mocking laugh; and she actually rose to her feet to go away.
And the colour rushed into Mary’s face. Used to that from women! because of her beauty, which transcended theirs! The ordinary reader will think it was a self-evident proposition, but Mary was of a different opinion, being thus directly and personally accused.
‘I don’t know about women,’ she said, indignantly; ‘but I have never had any occasion,--to be jealous of you.’ This was said with a fierceness which Mary never could have attained to had it been simply true. ‘I admire you very much,’ she added, with a little vehemence. ‘I did so at school; but that does not alter the truth. We were never great friends.’
‘Well, it is kind of you to put me in mind of that,’ said Millicent. ‘Mamma, come. You see it is as I told you. We shall find no nice neighbours at Renton. It is best to go away.’
The word ‘neighbours’ made Mary start, and she had not time to realise that she was about to get rid of them, when the door was suddenly pushed open, and Mrs. Renton’s maid appeared with her shawls, and her cushions, and her knitting. ‘Mrs. Renton is coming down immediately,’ said the woman; and on this, to Mary’s bewilderment, her visitors sat down again. She was driven to her wits’ end. To leave them to encounter poor Mrs. Renton was like bringing the lamb to an interview with the wolf.
‘May I ask you to come to the library?’ she said, hurriedly. ‘My aunt is a great invalid, and sees no visitors. Pray forgive me for asking you;--this way,’ and rushed to the door before them. But the fates were against poor Mary on that unfortunate day.
‘We have made quite a visitation already,’ said Mrs. Tracy, and got up again to shake hands. As for Millicent, though she had been so angry, she took Mary’s two hands again; and, stooping over her, gave her another kiss. And all these operations took time, and, before they had made any progress towards their departure, Mrs. Renton came in, and received with some astonishment the curtsies and salutations of the unknown guests.
‘Pray don’t hurry away because I have come. I am always so glad when Mary has her friends to see her,’ Mrs. Renton said, with the sweetest amiability; ‘do sit down, pray.’ The mother and daughter waited for no second invitation. They put themselves on either side of Mrs. Renton, as they had done off Mary; and thus a kind of introduction had to be performed most unwillingly by the victim, who felt that her cause was lost.
‘Mrs. Rich!’ said the lady of the house, gathering up her wools,--‘that must be a relation of the Riches of Richmont. Oh, yes; we know them very well,--that is, they are very good sort of people, I am sure. When my son Frank was at Royalborough, he used to go to see them. All the officers do, I believe; and he made me call. Oh, yes, of course, I understand,--the son who died. Poor thing! your daughter is a very young widow.’ This was aside to Mrs. Tracy, who had already volunteered to arrange the cushions in Mrs. Renton’s chair.
‘Not much more than a child,’ said that astute mother; ‘and left so poorly off, after all! You may suppose, Mrs. Renton, if I had not thought it would be a very good marriage in point of money, I should never have sacrificed my child to the son of a man in the City. I would rather have starved. And then it turned out he had not half what he was supposed to have. People that do those sort of things should be punished,’ Mrs. Tracy said, with fire in her eye.
‘Indeed, that is my opinion,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘but I always thought the Riches were rolling in money.’ And then she made a little internal reflection that, perhaps, on the whole, Frank had not done so very much amiss.
‘So we thought,’ said Mrs. Tracy, confidentially; ‘or rather, so I thought, for my poor child is as innocent as a baby. But poor Harry had speculated, I believe, or done something with his money; and his father is as hard,--oh, as hard---- If I could but see justice done to my Millicent, I care for nothing more.’
‘And, dear me, we had thought they were such liberal kind of people!’ said Mrs. Renton, thinking more and more that Frank, on the whole---- ‘And your daughter is so very prepossessing,’ she added, in a lower tone. ‘Of course they knew all about it,--before----’
‘That is just it,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘the marriage took place abroad, and we were both so ignorant of business, and I fear the settlements were not quite en règle; I am so foolish about business; all I trust to is the heart.’
‘Dear, dear, what a sad thing! But I should always have looked over the settlements,’ said Mrs. Renton, who knew as much about it as her lap-dog, shaking her head and looking very wise. Millicent had pretended to talk to Mary while this was going on, but principally had employed herself in gazing round the room, noting all its special features. Furnished all anew, in amber satin, it would look very well, she thought; and, oh, what a comfort to have such a home, after all the wanderings of her life! And then she wondered what the house was like in Berkeley Square. Poor, dear Ben! what a surprise it would be to him to find that she was established at the Willows! She wondered whether he would be very angry about her marriage, or whether he would think, as a great many men did, that a young widow was very interesting; and how long a time it would be before they had made up their quarrels and he was at her feet again! These questions were so full of interest that Mary’s taciturn manner did not trouble her. ‘I daresay she would like to have him herself,’ Millicent said; and the desire seemed so natural that her respect for Mary rather increased than otherwise. If she had let such a prize slip through her hands without so much as an attempt to secure it, then Millicent would have thought her contemptible indeed.
At length there came a moment when it seemed expedient that she too should strike in to the conversation with Mrs. Renton. There was an audible pause. Millicent was not so clever as her mother; but in such a crisis as the present she was put upon her mettle. So long as there were only men to deal with there was no need for much exertion. Nature had provided her with the necessary weapons to use against such simpletons,--her eyes, the turn of her head, her smile, a soft modulation of her voice; but with a feminine audience it was a different matter. There, wit was more needful to her than beauty,--mother wit,--adroitness,--the faculty of adapting herself to her part and her listeners. Mrs. Tracy looked at her with an anxiety which she could not disguise. A statesman looking on while his son made his first speech in Parliament, could scarcely have experienced a graver solicitude. As it was, Millicent addressed herself to her mother with the softest of voices. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘does it not seem strange to find yourself here, after all Mr. Ben Renton used to tell us? How fond he was of his beautiful home!’
And then came the expected question from his mother,--‘Ben? my son Ben? Did you meet him abroad? Is it long since you saw him? Dear, dear, why I am looking for my boy home every day. They are all coming home about,--about----’ Here Mrs. Renton caught Mary’s warning eye, and paused, but immediately resumed again. ‘Why, of course, everybody knows! Why should not I say what it is about? It was an arrangement of my poor dear husband’s. They are coming to read the will. We don’t know how we are left, none of us, for it was a very odd arrangement; but I am sure he meant it for the best. We shall be together next month, and I am sure Ben will be charmed to resume his acquaintance with you. What a nice thing you should be in the neighbourhood! The only thing is, that I am afraid you will find The Willows damp.’
‘But what a pleasure for you to have all your family with you!’ said Millicent; ‘and oh! what a delight to your sons to return to you!’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Of course I shall be very glad to see them. And then, to be sure, shooting will have begun, and they will be able to amuse themselves. I am such an invalid, I tremble at the thought of any exertion.’
And when Mrs. Renton said this, Millicent rose, and declared she knew that she could put one of those cushions more comfortably in the chair.
It was quite late in the afternoon when they left the Manor at last, for Mrs. Renton insisted that they should stay to luncheon. She was distressed beyond measure when she heard of the fly which had been waiting for so long. ‘It will cost you a fortune,’ she cried; ‘and we could have set you down when we went for our drive.’
‘We are not very rich,’ Mrs. Tracy said in reply; ‘but to have made acquaintance with you is such a pleasure. And it is not often we indulge ourselves.’
Mrs. Renton declared, when they were gone, that it was years since she had seen any one who pleased her so much. ‘As for the daughter, she is perfectly beautiful!’ she cried, in rapture; ‘and to think that such a lovely creature should have married Harry Rich!’
‘But we don’t know anything about Harry Rich,’ said Mary, who was disposed to be misanthropical; ‘perhaps he was a lovely creature too.’
‘I don’t understand what has come to you, Mary,’ said her aunt. ‘Why should you be so disagreeable? Such a nice, pretty creature; one would have thought she was just the very companion you want. And your own old schoolfellow, too! I never like to give in to what people say of girls being jealous of each other, but it really looks more like that than anything else.’
‘Yes; I suppose I must be jealous of her,’ said Mary; and Mrs. Renton took the admission for irony, and read her a long lecture when they went for their drive. It is hard upon a young woman to be lectured when she is out driving, and can neither run away nor occupy herself with anything that may make a diversion. Poor Mary had to listen to a great many remarks about the evils of envy and self-estimation, and the curious want of sympathy she showed.
‘Poor thing!--a widow at such an early age, and badly left, and with such very sweet manners. And the mother such a very judicious person,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I am so glad they are at The Willows. It will be quite a resource to the boys.’
Then indeed something very like bitterness rankled in Mary Westbury’s heart. Envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. Yes, very likely it would be a resource for the boys. In all her own long and tedious fulfilment of their duties, Mary had never once proposed to herself any reward ‘when the boys came home,’ and yet, perhaps, there had been in her heart some hope of appreciation,--some idea that they would understand what abnegation of herself it had been. They would know that this long, monotonous stretch of duty,--which was not, after all, her first natural duty,--was not less, but perhaps more hard, than their own wanderings and labour. And now all at once a cloud had fallen over this prospect. One soweth and another reapeth. Mary had laboured and denied herself for their sakes; but it was this stranger who would be the great resource for the boys. And Ben! Mary’s heart contracted with a secret, silent pang as she thought of Ben coming defenceless, unprepared, to find the syren who had,--she did not doubt,--bewitched and betrayed him, seated at his very gates. Her last conversation with him rose up before her as clear as if it had but just occurred. Ben, too, had ventured to suggest that she,--that all women,--would be envious of Millicent. Her heart rose with an indignant swell and throb. Was there nothing then in the world better than blue eyes and lips like rose-leaves, and the syren’s voice and smile? If that was all a man cared for, was he worth thinking of? She had gone and married Henry Rich when Ben was poor. And now that the man whose name she bore had opportunely vanished from her path, she had returned now Ben was about to regain his fortune, to lie in wait for him, with a miserable pretence of old friendship and tender regard for his cousin, who was to be the victim, and scapegoat, and sacrifice for all! Perhaps it was not much wonder that Mary was bitter. And she had all a woman’s natural distrust in the man’s powers of resistance. It never occurred to her that the syren of his youth might now have no attraction for him. ‘They are like that,’ she said to herself, with a true woman’s feeling of half-impatient tolerance, and pity, and something like contempt,--not blame, as if he were a free agent. It was not he, but she, upon whom it was natural to lay the blame.
VII. THE DOVE
About a week after the arrival of the visitors from The Willows, an arrival of a very different kind happened at Renton;--and yet it could not be called an arrival. There had been no further news, and the Manor was still in the same state of pleasant confusion and preparation,--the maids sitting and chatting over their work in the west wing, and a roomful of seamstresses working at the new carpets and curtains for ‘the boys’ rooms,’--when one morning Mary was mysteriously called out from Mrs. Renton’s room, where she was reading the newspaper, her usual morning occupation. ‘It was a lady who wanted to see her,’ the maid said; and was stolid, and refused all further particulars. ‘A lady,--any one who has been here lately?’ Mary asked, stiffening into sudden offence. It could be nobody but Millicent, she thought, though Millicent had been at the house repeatedly since her first visit, and was already known. ‘I never saw her before, miss,--not at Renton,’ was the reply; and Mary, annoyed, went to see for herself who the unknown visitor was. She had been set on edge by the events of the last few days. ‘Wheresoever the carrion is, there will the eagles be gathered together,’ she said to herself, with a kind of spiteful misery. So long as nothing was going to happen in the family, no mysterious visitors, neither men nor women, came near Renton; and now here was the second in a week! Perhaps some other syren to put herself in Ben’s way; perhaps somebody who possessed Laurie’s secret, whatever that might be. As for Frank, he was a married man, and had his wife to take care of him, and, heaven be praised! could have no secrets,--at least, none in which Mary could be compelled to interfere.
She went to the drawing-room door discontented, with no comfortable expectation. But when she had opened it, the most unexpected scene burst upon her eyes. The first thing she saw was a Hindoo ayah holding in her arms one of those milk-white, blue-veined children whose delicacy of tint contrasts so strangely with the dusky arms that carry them,--the kind of child of which one says involuntarily that it is an Indian child. Her first glance was at that pearly, blue-eyed creature, and then she turned round with a start and cry of joy upon a lady who stood by smiling.
‘Is it Alice?’ she cried. The comfort it was to her, the relief and satisfaction and sense of strength it gave her, would be difficult to describe. Mary was not given to enthusiasm, but she clasped her arms about the new-comer with a warmth which brought tears to her eyes. ‘I thought it was some one disagreeable, and it is you!’ she cried in her delight. She had been looking for an enemy, and here was a natural assistant and ally.
And then ensued a flutter of explanation and welcome, as was natural. It was Alice who had thus come unaccompanied and unexpected,--or, rather, it was Mrs. Frank Renton, a young matron of six years’ standing, with one wistful, bright-eyed, wondering little girl by her side, and the child on the nurse’s knee.
‘We came to give mamma a surprise,’ said Alice; ‘not to keep her anxious till the last moment, thinking everything impossible must have happened to us. I know how she watches every day and thinks. And this was such a good opportunity for coming! We came when she had not the least expectation of us, and saved her all that. It was Frank’s idea,’ said the young wife, with a happy smile.
‘And where is Frank?’
‘Coming next mail. Yes, that is the worst of it; but, as he said, we could not have everything; and I came with Lady Sinclair, the Governor-General’s wife, you know. Think what an honour it is! And she was so kind to us. She has quite taken a fancy to us, which is odd. I don’t mean it is odd that they should all be fond of Frank, for everybody is. Don’t you think baby is like him? Come and look at baby. I am sure you have not had a good look at him yet. Mamma has done nothing but carry him about in her arms. It is so funny to see my baby in mamma’s arms,’ cried Alice, with a sudden gush of bright tears; ‘and, oh! so nice! I love him the more for it. She thinks he is rather pale. Well, perhaps he is a little pale. I suppose Indian babies generally are,--and then the journey, you know. Renton is not a bit changed. I stood just now, when you came in, on the very same pattern of the carpet that I stood on when Frank brought me here first; and I was so dreadfully frightened; and then you came and put your arms round my neck----’
‘You were such a child,’ said Mary; and the two kissed each other once more.
‘It was so good of you to put your arms round my neck. Not just a regulation kiss, as Frank says. I put myself on the very same square this time to see what you would do.’
‘Why you are a child still!’ said Mary, looking at her with that curious mixture of amusement and wonder and respect with which an unmarried woman looks upon the matron who is younger than herself. How many experiences Alice had gone through of which the home-dwelling girl knew nothing! And yet she was a child still!
‘So mamma says,’ said Alice. ‘But, oh! how nice and fresh and bright you look! Is that how dresses are made now? Am I a dreadful fright in my old things? For money does not go so far in India as one thinks; and what with the children and everything, I have had to be very economical. Mamma says I am about fifty years behind other people; and they all laugh so at poor baby’s things. But he has got on his new pelisse to-day, and I think he looks very nice. Is grandmamma up yet? Do you think she would like the children to go and see her in her room?’
‘I must let her know first,’ said Mary.
But she lingered, and this babble ran on, which was so pleasant; and the children’s hats were taken off, and Alice exhibited little Mary’s hair, which was pale gold, of the softest, silkiest kind; but would not crêper, nor stand out, as ‘the fashion’ was, to her despair.
‘You would not think she had half so much as she has,’ the mother said; ‘it is so soft. Look here, how thick it is! but it will not hang as it ought. Should I take her to Truefitt, or somebody? Frank thinks it is pretty as it is, but then he did not know what was the fashion; and he is silly,--he likes curls.’
‘And, by-the-bye, where are your curls?’ said Mary.
Alice laughed and shook her head with the pretty movement that these same curls had made habitual to her.
‘I put them up to come out,’ she said. ‘Fancy coming out with the children, and without Frank, with those things bobbing about my shoulders like a baby! I wish you would speak to him about it, Mary. Mamma agrees with me that I ought to put them up when I go out; but he is such an old goose. Don’t you think we ought to go to grandmamma? She may think that it is unnatural of us not to go to her at once.’
‘It will do by-and-by,’ said Mary. ‘You know what an invalid she is. How good the children are, Alice! I am sure she will be delighted with them, after all.’
‘After all?’ cried Alice, amazed. ‘But you must not think they are always good; you should see mamma with them. Mamma looks as if it was natural to her to have a baby in her arms. Wasn’t it good of Frank to make up the plan for me to come over and save her all the anxiety? I did not want to come till he was ready myself. It was all his consideration. And then Lady Sinclair wanted me so much to travel with her. Of course it was more comfortable. And as I am not a great lady myself, nor anybody particular, it was nice to have Lady Sinclair to take me up, you know, for Frank’s sake.’
‘Why, you are quite a little woman of the world!’
‘That is what mamma says; but so would you, if you were asked about your people, and all sorts of questions put to you. I always used to feel so ashamed, when the colonel’s wife began to talk to me, that I had not an uncle an earl, or even a baronet. That would have been better than nothing, for Frank’s sake. I do think he felt it sometimes, and was angry that his wife was a nobody; but then when Lady Sinclair took me up,’ Alice said, with a sparkle in her eyes,--‘and the Governor-General is baby’s godfather,--that made all the difference. It was quite absurd the difference it made.’
‘And I hope you have kept up your music,’ said Mary, thinking of Mrs. Renton. But to Alice the question had another meaning, and covered her soft face with a sudden blush.
‘I am so glad! Lady Sinclair does not care for music,’ she cried; ‘not one bit! She does not know Beethoven from Verdi. It was me she liked, and not my playing. Oh, if you knew how impertinent they used to be! saying I must have been professional, and such cruel things;--not that there would have been any harm in being professional,--but only you know men have such prejudices, and it made Frank furious. But it was me Lady Sinclair liked, though I dare say you are surprised,’ Alice added, with a laugh of pleasant girlish vanity. Her heart was thrown wide open by the excitement of the home-coming; all its envelopes of shyness and strangeness having been forgotten for the moment. Except with ‘mamma,’ she had never chattered so freely to any one in her life.
‘Very much surprised,’ Mary said, kissing the bright face which had come upon her like a revelation. They had jumped all at once into the tenderest intimacy. Frank’s bride had been a timid little stranger the last time she was at Renton, afraid to speak, carrying herself very gingerly among her unknown relations; but she was flushed by the delight of being among her own people this time, and confident of everybody’s regard.
‘I think really I ought to go to grandmamma now,’ she added, after that pleasant laugh. And Mary hastened to her godmother to prepare the way. Mrs. Renton had just finished dressing, and was lying on her sofa, to recover from the exertion, sipping her cup of arrowroot. She was in a pale grey dress, which, she flattered herself, was slightly mourning, but had some pretty pink ribbons in her cap, to which that description could scarcely be applied. They were not perhaps very suitable to her widowhood, but then they were very becoming; and when the sun is shining brightly, even an invalid lady upon a sofa is apt to feel an inclination towards such innocent vanities.
‘My mistress has taken a biscuit with her arrowroot this morning,’ said the maid, in a tone of exultation. ‘I always said as a little bit of company was the thing that would do her most good.’
Mrs. Renton gave a soft smile in acknowledgment of this commendation. She was aware that it was good of her to eat that biscuit, and a gentle self-approval filled her heart. ‘I quite enjoyed it,’ she said; and Mary had to pause and hear an account of what kind of biscuit it was, and to express her delight at the feat. ‘And I have something else to tell you, dear godmamma,’ she said; ‘if you are quite sure you will not be upset by the surprise. Some one has just arrived,--Alice and the children! She had an opportunity to come by this last mail, with Lady Sinclair, the Governor-General’s wife, who has taken a great fancy to her. Frank would not let her miss the opportunity. She arrived the day before yesterday, and she is with the children, looking so nice! I am sure you will be delighted to see them. Shall I bring them up here?’
Mary’s nervousness betrayed itself in the haste with which she delivered this long explanation, never pausing to take breath. And Mrs. Renton put down her arrowroot and sat upright on the sofa. ‘Bring them here!--Alice and the children! Good heavens, Mary! are you out of your senses?’ said the invalid, ‘when I have just this moment got out of bed!’
‘But she will wait as long as you please,’ said Mary, anxiously.
‘And you know I hate surprises,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘It may be all very well for you robust people who are never ill; but such a thing upsets my nerves altogether; and nothing is ready, you know; and why did Frank not come with her? But it just shows how dreadful it is to have to do with people who are out of society!’ cried Mrs. Renton, putting one foot to the ground. ‘I suppose I must go and see to things myself.’
‘Missis will make herself quite ill!’ cried the maid, in alarm. ‘Oh, please, ma’am,--if you would be so good, ma’am,--Dr. Mixton would never forgive me if you went and walked about after you’ve took your arrowroot.’
‘Don’t worry me, Davison!’ cried Mrs. Renton, ready to cry; ‘as if I had not enough to worry me! Couldn’t she write? or keep to her proper time? I don’t understand how you can countenance such a thing, Mary! As for walking about, I can’t do it. If all the house goes to sixes and sevens,--and there is no place for anybody to sleep in,--I can’t help it; I cannot do it. I have my duty to my children to think of, and I am not going to kill myself.’
At this moment Alice, who had become impatient, knocked at the door. Nobody conceived that such an invasion was possible, and therefore Davison opened the door, cautious, but unsuspecting, while Mrs. Renton put up her foot again, and lay back, the image of exhaustion, on the sofa. Davison gave a little cry of mingled horror and delight, if such a mixture may be. Alice stood in the doorway with a child in each hand. They were all lightly clad in white summer dresses, the young mother and the two children. Little Laurence tottered forward a step or two, holding by his mother’s hand, and Mary held back, gazing, with wistful blue eyes, at the strange scene. Mrs. Renton, as long as she was by herself, was an invalid given up to all sorts of indulgences; but when she was brought face to face with the outside world she was a lady, and knew how to adopt that gracious rôle. Before Mary Westbury could recover from her astonishment and consternation, the mistress of the house held out her hands to her daughter-in-law. ‘Ah, Alice, come in,’ she said; ‘bring them to me. I am not able, my dear, to go to you.’
And in five minutes more, the chatter and the laughter, the tumult of pleasant explanations and questions, and all the talk that belongs to an arrival, was in full course by the side of Mrs. Renton’s sofa. As for Alice, it had never occurred to her to be afraid of her mother-in-law. She was afraid of nobody in the present felicitous state of her affairs. She had forgotten altogether how little she had been at Renton, how small her personal knowledge was of the household there. Somehow, through those six years of correspondence, the Manor and the Square had got jumbled together in the mind of Mrs. Frank Renton. Had she come with any doubt of her reception, the chances were that things would not have gone so pleasantly. But she had not the least doubt of her reception. She could not be kept away even so long as was necessary to get grandmamma’s reply. She took it for granted that her husband’s mother belonged to her almost as much as her own. Who should go and ask admission for Frank’s children into the room their father was born in, but she? And this fearlessness vanquished the invalid, who felt all her tremors of anticipation quieted in a moment. The children did not scream, but only gazed at her in silence, with big, wide-open eyes,--and baby was like his father. And Mrs. Renton, though she had been so long accustomed to think of herself first, and watch over her own peace and comfort, was still Frank’s mother. After awhile old recollections came over her, and she cried a little over Frank’s boy. ‘I remember when his father was just like him,’ she began to tell Alice, and ran into a hundred little nursery stories, which roused her heart within her. ‘I might have talked to her for a hundred years before she would have thought of telling them to me,’ said Mary, with again an unmarried young woman’s admiration, and soft half-envy of the young mother’s privileges. Alice drew a low chair to the side of the sofa, and put the baby--most daring proceeding of all--on the very couch itself, that grandmamma might give her opinion of his little dimpled arms and legs, and say if she did not think he was stout enough, though perhaps not so fat as an English baby ought to be. ‘But mamma says she does not care for those very fat babies,’ Alice said, with eyes intent upon the face of the critic. ‘And neither do I,’ Mrs. Renton said with solemnity, holding her grandson’s little pink foot in her hand. ‘If I had done it, poor godmamma would have been quite ill all day,’ Mary said afterwards, describing the meeting to her mother. And for an hour or two there was nothing to be heard but that soft feminine talk, all full of bits of private history, and interspersed with every kind of digression, which women love. Alice gave them no narrative of her six years’ absence; but apropos of everything and nothing, there would come a little chapter out of the heart of it. ‘It was that time when I was rather ill--that Frank wrote to you about. He took me up to the hills, and we had to leave little Mary at the station. We went along with the General and his wife, and they were so friendly; and it was he, you remember, who recommended Frank for that appointment he has held ever since. To tell the truth, we had got into debt,’ said Alice, with a blush; ‘it was that that made me ill, as much as anything. We were determined not to tell you, but struggle out of it as best we could, and you can’t think how glad we were of that appointment. I thought you would all think me such a wretched little creature to have brought Frank nothing, and yet have let him get into debt. It was there I first saw a lady with a chignon. I could not tell what to make of it at first, and Frank thought it hideous; but then it was too big--it was as big as her head.’
‘Depend upon it, my dear, it was false hair; they say everybody wears false hair now-a-days,’ said Mrs. Renton, who was still holding in her hand the baby’s little dimpled foot.
‘But I don’t believe that,’ said Alice. ‘I like you in the chignon, Mary; it suits you much better than the other fashion; and what a comfort it must be not to have any curls to do when you are sleepy! Grandmamma dear, I wish you would tell me what to do with little Mary’s hair. It is so soft it will not crêper, nor anything. Lady Sinclair’s niece’s little girl looks to have a perfect bush of hair, and Mary has just as much, but it will not stand out.’
‘It must be plaited every night before she goes to bed,’ said Mrs. Renton, ‘and just damped a little before it is plaited. Have you an English nurse? Of course your ayah must be sent back. And, Alice, I hope you are quite sure about that debt.’
‘It was all paid, every penny! Don’t be afraid. I could never have come home and looked you in the face if it had not been paid. And I have taken such care ever since! Frank is,--too generous, you know. He asks people, and does not think. And then everybody that pleases comes and stays with you. India is such a funny place for that. When we were at Goine Ghurla, the Fentons lived with us for six weeks; they could not get a house to suit them, and we had a larger one than we wanted, and of course they came to us as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It is very nice, but it is rather expensive. Of course we could have gone to them in return had we wanted to go, but we never did. How nice it is to see you in your pink ribbons, grandmamma, after that dreadful widow’s cap!’
‘My dear, I am only in my own room; it is only something Davison made up for me,’ said Mrs. Renton, confused. ‘I never wear colours down-stairs. Indeed, my spirits will never be equal to it again.’
‘But they are so becoming to you,’ said Alice. And thus the talk ran on. And the children, awed by the novelty of everything, behaved themselves like little angels, not uttering a cry, nor shedding a tear. When the time of the afternoon drive came, little Mary, inspired by her good genius, made a petition to go in the carriage with grandmamma. And that day the marvellous sight might have been seen of Mrs. Renton with the ayah and the baby seated opposite her, and little Mary, in great state, by her side, perambulating the lanes. Mrs. Renton made the coachman stop when they passed the rector’s pony carriage, and explained, ‘My son Frank’s children, just come from India,’ with such pride as she had scarcely felt since Frank had been the baby. Already these sweet avant-couriers of return and restoration had loosened the prison bonds for the invalid in her unconscious selfishness. She forgot all about her medicine, and even her cup of tea, when she went in, and demanded to know instead if her favourite biscuits had been provided for the children. On the whole, it was pleasanter thus taking thought for others than thinking only of herself.
When they were left alone, Mary and Alice went out together to stray about the lawn and down the favourite haunt of the Rentons,--the path to the river. And they had a great deal of talk and consultation, confidential and serious, which was comforting to both. ‘Don’t you know in the very least how things are to be?’ Alice asked, with a certain wistfulness. ‘I don’t care about money, indeed; but, oh, it would be so nice to stay at home!’
‘Nobody knows,’ said Mary; ‘not even Mr. Ponsonby, I believe. It makes one very anxious when one thinks of it. If poor, dear uncle’s mind was touched, as some people think, he may have made some other stipulation. I don’t know,--but Renton ought to come to Ben.’
‘I have heard Frank say often that if the will did not do that, Laurie and he had both agreed to settle it so,’ said Alice. ‘Of course they could not take it. But if it is not wrong to say so,--and as poor Mr. Renton is dead I don’t think it can be wrong,--I should like if there was some money for us.’
‘There must be some money for you,’ said Mary; and thus speaking they moved down the bank, and, coming to the beech-tree at the corner, which was associated in Mary’s mind with so many tangles of the tale, stopped short to contemplate the view. A little to one side from that famous point of vision a peep could be obtained, through some branches, of a house close by the water’s edge,--a little house, with its trees dipping into the stream, lying under the shadow of a high, wooded bank. Mary’s mind was full of her special griefs and apprehensions, and she could not keep her eyes from that peaceful little place, which lay full in the afternoon sunshine. ‘That is The Willows,’ she said, pointing it out.
‘It looks very nice, but what is The Willows?’ said Alice. ‘I never heard Frank speak of it,’ which was her standard of interest for everything within her vision.
‘I dare say Frank never remembered it,’ said Mary; ‘it is not a place of any consequence; at least, it never was before. But two ladies have come to it now. They are a mother and a daughter, and they are both widows.’
‘Poor things! but that does not sound very important still. Are they nice?’ said Alice, in her ignorance. And Mary began to regret the suddenness of her confidence.
‘The daughter is very beautiful. She was a schoolfellow of mine once,’ said Mary; ‘and I’m afraid they are not very nice. If I tell you something, will you never, never say a word to any one,--not even Frank? Oh, it is nothing wrong. I think Ben met her once, and was fond of her. Beauty goes so far, you know, with men. I think he was very fond of her, and she must have deceived him. And think what it will be to him, poor fellow, if he finds her there when he comes home!’
‘But how did she deceive him?’ cried Alice. ‘Oh, tell me! It must be quite a romance.’
‘I don’t care for such romances,’ said Mary. ‘He loved her, I am sure, and she went away abroad, and must have married somebody else, for she is a widow I told you; and fancy what he will feel when he finds her here!’
‘Well, perhaps he might like it,’ said Alice. ‘Men are so queer. They are not the least like us. I know by Frank; when something happens that I think he will be in a dreadful way about, he takes it quite calmly; and then for the least little thing, that nobody in their senses would pay the least attention to, he will blaze up! Is Ben nice? Perhaps he will be quite pleased to find her here, to show her he does not care.’
‘I don’t know if you would think him very nice; but to us, you know,’ said Mary, turning away her head, ‘he is Ben: and, of course, there is no more to be said.’
‘Yes, of course, you are all fond of him,’ said simple Alice; and they went on, relapsing into other channels of talk. But though she understood so little the full meaning of what she had heard, Alice was such a relief and comfort to Mary as she had not had for years. Even to have said so much as this relieved her; and to nobody else could she have ventured to say even so much. Not to her own mother, who was too energetic, and might have thought it her duty to come into the field, and break a lance with Mrs. Tracy in defence of her nephew; not to Laurie, who might have seen deeper still, and detected certain secrets of Mary’s heart which she would not whisper even to herself. But Alice, who was ready to listen, and give her ignorant, shrewd opinion, was a comfort to speak to. Mary was exhilarated and consoled by her walk, as much as her aunt was by the drive, in which the soft pride and sense of property in Frank’s babies had warmed her dried-up soul. When the mother and her babies went back to town by the evening train, Mrs. Renton felt herself able to walk almost to the end of the avenue to see them off, a thing she had not been known to do for years; and Mary drove with them to the station, anticipating joyfully the time when ‘Frank’s family’ should come back to take possession of the apartments prepared for them. The family ark was settling upon the top of the mount. But a few days more, and the doors would open, and the wanderings be over, and the family fate be known.
VIII. BEN
The first who arrived of the family party was the eldest son.
It was on the 15th of September that Ben came home. The day appointed for reading the will was a week later, and none of the others had arrived when Ben’s letter came announcing his return for the next morning. Fortunately, the ‘boys’’ rooms were quite ready, and the house was so wound up to the height of excitement, that the first actual arrival was a godsend. The flutter and commotion of that day was indescribable. As for poor Mary she did not know what she was about. It was cruel on her that he should come alone,--that there should be nobody to break their inevitable tête-à-tête at breakfast and during the hours when Mrs. Renton would certainly be invisible. Busy as she was, looking after everything, she found time for a hurried note to Laurie, telling him of his brother’s coming. ‘He has been so long away that I feel as if it were a stranger who was coming,’ Mary wrote, in a panic quite unlike her usual character;--‘do come at once and help me to entertain him.’ ‘Help you to entertain Ben!’ was Laurie’s reply, with ever so many notes of interrogation. Perhaps the helplessness and fright which were visible in this demand threw some light to Laurie upon the state of affairs, but he either could not or would not help her in her trouble; and with a heart which beat very loudly in her breast, but with an outward aspect of the most elaborate quietness and composure, Mary stood on the lawn in the September sunset watching for the dog-cart to come from the station. The ladies from The Willows had been calling that very morning, and of course had heard what was going to happen, and a glance had passed between the mother and daughter when Mrs. Renton had hoped she would see a great deal of them while the ‘boys’ were at home. ‘I should think Mr. Renton must have forgotten us,’ Millicent had said, with a little pathos. Mary took very little part in all this, but noted everything, the most vigilant and clear-sighted of critics. It made her heart ache to look at that beautiful face. Was it possible that those blue eyes which looked so lustrous, and the smiling lips that were so sweet, could obliterate in Ben’s mind all sense of falsehood and treachery? And, indeed, Mary only took the treachery for granted. Perhaps there had been nothing of the kind; perhaps he was coming without any grievance against her to fall into this syren’s snares. How cunning it was of her to post herself there, on the edge of the river, where ‘the boys’’ boats would be passing continually, and where they could not escape her! And how deep-rooted the plan must have been which preserved the date for seven years, and made Millicent aware exactly when her victim was coming home! Mary’s thoughts were severe and uncompromising. She could not think of any possible tie between Millicent and her cousin but that of enchantress and victim. She did not know how good the adventuress had resolved to be if at last this last scheme of all should be successful; nor what a weary life of failure, and disappointment, and self-disgust, poor Millicent had gone through. Mary could not have believed in any extenuating circumstances. There could be no trace of womanly or natural feeling in the creature who thus came, visibly without the shadow of a pretext, to lie in wait for Ben.
She thought her heart would have stopped beating when the dog-cart dashed in at the gates. But her outward aspect was one of such fixed composure that Ben, as he made a spring out of it, almost without leaving the horse time to stop, and caught his cousin precipitately in his arms, felt as if he had committed a social sin in his sudden kiss. ‘I am sure I beg your pardon, Mary,’ he cried, half laughing, half horrified. ‘I forgot I had been away so long, and you had grown out of acquaintance with me; but still you need not look so shocked.’
‘I am not shocked,’ said Mary, who had scarcely voice enough to speak; ‘it was only the surprise; and, good heavens, what a beard!’
‘Well, yes, it is an alarming article, I suppose,’ said Ben, looking down with complacency upon one of those natural ornaments which men prize so much. It was an altogether new decoration. And it seemed to Mary that he had grown even taller while he had been away, so changed was the development of the mature man,--brown, bearded, and powerful,--from that of Ben, the young man of fashion, who had been as dainty in all his ways as herself. His frame had broadened, expanded, and acquired that air of activity and force which only occupation gives. His eye had no languor in it, but was full of active observation and thought. The change was so great that it took away her breath, and after the second glance Mary was not quite sure that it was so very satisfactory. He was more like the Rentons than he had been,--his lip curled a little at the corner, as if it might sneer on occasion. His manner had grown a little peremptory. ‘Where is my mother?’ he said immediately, without giving even a spare moment to look again at the companion of his childhood;--‘in her own room?’
‘Yes, she is waiting for you,’ said Mary. And he went off from her without another word. Of course it was very right he should do so, after an absence of six years and a half, and very nice of him to be so anxious to see his mother. But yet---- Mary went in after him, in two or three minutes, feeling somehow as if she had fallen from an unspeakable height of expectation; though she had not expected anything in reality,--and Ben had been very kind, very frank, and cordial, and cousinly. What a fool she was! And while she could hear the unusual roll of the man’s voice in Mrs. Renton’s room, running on in perpetual volleys of sound, Mary, in the silence of her own, sat down and cried,--folly for which she could have killed herself. Of course his first hour belonged to his mother. And what did she, Mary, want of him but his kindly regard, and,--esteem,--and,--respect! Respect was what a man would naturally give,--if she did not betray herself, and show how little she was deserving of it,--to a woman of her years. Seven-and-twenty! To be sure Ben was nearly five years older; but that does not count in a man. Moved by these thoughts, Mary went to the extreme of voluntary humility, and dressed herself in one of her soberest dresses for dinner. ‘I laid out the pink, ma’am, as Mr. Ben has come home,’ said her maid. ‘No, the grey,’ said Mary, obstinately. He should see at least that there was no affectation of juvenility about her,--that she fully acknowledged and understood her position as,--almost,--middle-aged. Poor Mary was considered a very sensible girl by all her friends, and she thought to herself, while committing this piece of folly, that she would justify their opinion. Sense as her grand quality,--and esteem and respect as the mild emotions which she might hope to inspire,--such were the reflections that passed through Mary Westbury’s mind as she put on her grey gown.
‘It don’t look so bad, Miss Mary, after all,’ said her maid encouragingly, as she gave the last twitch to the skirt. And certainly it did not look bad. The sensible young woman who wished her cousin Ben to respect her, had a little rose-flush going and coming on her cheeks, and a lucid gleam of emotion in her eyes, which might have justified a more marked sentiment. Her hand was a little tremulous, her voice apt,--if the expression is permissible,--to go into chords, the keys of half-a-dozen different feelings being struck at the same moment, and producing, if a little incoherence, at the same time a curious multiplicity of tone. The dining-room had more lights than usual, but still was not bright; and when Ben came in with his mother on his arm, he protested instantly against the great desert of a table, which, in deference to old custom, was always spread in the long-deserted place.
‘I can’t have you half-a-mile off,’ he said. ‘You must sit by me here, mamma, and you here, Mary. That is better. We are not supposed to be on our best behaviour, I hope, the very day I come home.’
‘Why, this is very nice,’ said Mrs. Renton, as she sipped her soup at her son’s right hand, and stopped from time to time to look at him. ‘And one does not feel as if one had any responsibility. I think I shall keep this seat, my dear; it will be like dining out without any of the trouble. And then, Ben, I shall not feel the change when you bring home a wife.’
Mary, who had been looking on, suddenly turned her eyes away; but all the same, she perceived that Ben’s obstinate Renton upper lip settled down a little, and that he grew stern to behold.
‘I don’t think that is a very likely event,’ he said.
‘But it must be,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘it must be some time. I don’t say directly, because this is very pleasant. And after being left seven years all alone, I think I might have my boy to myself to cheer me up a little. But it must be some time,--in a year or two,--when you have had time to look about you and make up your mind.’
‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ said Ben, with a short laugh; ‘if I am to judge of my effect upon English ladies by the impression I made on Mary,--it is not encouraging, I can tell you. I was afraid she would faint.’
‘Oh, Ben!’ Mary exclaimed, looking up at him with her lucid, emotional eyes; and the rose-flush went over all her face. It was a very pleasant face to look at. And, perhaps, even beauty herself is not more attractive than a countenance which changes when you look at it, and a voice full of chords. Yes; no doubt he had some respect for her, and even esteem, if you went so far as that.
‘Mary and I have been living so much out of the world,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘We have been quite alone, you know, my dear. My poor health was never equal to the exertion. It is always best for such an invalid as I am to give up everything, I believe. And except just our drives,--your poor dear papa always made such a point of my drives.’
‘But Mary was not an invalid,’ said Ben, and he looked full at her for a moment, lighting up once more the glow in her face. ‘I don’t know what you have been doing to yourself,’ he said. ‘Is it the way she has her hair, mother? It cannot be her dress, because I remember that gown. I suppose she has been asleep all these seven years, like the beauty in the wood.’
‘I think I have,’ said Mary; but her voice was scarcely audible. After all, the pink gown had not been necessary, and virtue had its reward.
‘Asleep for seven years? Indeed, you are unkind to Mary,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘You can’t think what a comfort she has been to me, Ben. She has always read to me, and driven with me, and talked when I could bear it, and got my worsted work straight, and given the housekeeper her orders. If she had been my own child she could not have been nicer. And never cared for going out or anything. I am sure it is not necessary for me to say it; but if anything should happen to me, I hope you will all be very kind to Mary. You can’t think what a good child she has been.’
‘Kind to Mary!’ said Ben, holding out his hand to her. Well, perhaps there might be something more than even respect and esteem,--affection,--that was the word:--family affection and brotherly-kindness. And what could a woman of seven-and-twenty desire or dream of more?
And when they retired to the drawing-room Mrs. Renton was very eloquent about the change of affairs. ‘Not to say that it is Ben, my dear,--whom of course it is a great happiness to see again,--there is always a pleasure in knowing that there is a man in the house,’ she said. ‘It rouses one up. I am sure there were many days that it was a great bore to go down to dinner. I should have liked a cup of tea in my own room so much better; but a man must always have his dinner. And then they have been about all day, and they have something to tell you, if it is only what is in the evening paper;--and there is always most news in the evening paper, Mary. I have remarked that all my life. And even now, you know, one feels that he will come in by-and-bye,--and that is something to look forward to. It is a great advantage, my dear, to have a man in the house.’
‘It is very pleasant, at least, to have Ben in the house,’ said Mary; but she quaked a little while she spoke; for what was she to do with him for the rest of the evening after Mrs. Renton went to bed? And if the world was coming to an end, it would not prevent Davison’s appearance at half-past nine to take her mistress up-stairs. And there was not much chance that Ben would be inclined for bed at that early hour. Mary tried hard to brace herself up for the evening’s work, as she made the tea, pondering whether she might retire in her turn about half-past ten or so, that being a proper young ladies’ hour,--though with Laurie she would not have minded how long she sat talking, or letting him talk; and yet Ben had been seeing more, doing more, and had more to tell than Laurie. Thus it sometimes happens that the greater the love the less is the kindness,--though such a word as love had not been breathed in the inmost recesses of Mary Westbury’s mind.
But when Ben joined them he was very talkative, and full of his own concerns, and was so interesting that his mother put Davison off, and it was ten o’clock before she actually left the drawing-room. After a little conflict with herself Mary prepared to follow. She would have liked to stay, but felt herself awkward, and uncomfortable, and full of a thousand hesitations.
‘Are you going too?’ Ben said, as he saw her gathering up her work; and there was a tone of disappointment in his voice that went to her heart.
‘I thought you might be tired,’ she said, faltering.
‘Tired! the first night at home! I suppose the poor dear mother has stayed as long as is good for her; but you are not an invalid, Mary,’ said Ben; ‘you don’t mean to say ten o’clock is the end of the evening for you? And I have a hundred things to tell you, and to ask you. Put on your shawl, and come out for a breath of fresh air. The moon always shines at Renton. I’ll ring for somebody to bring you a shawl.’
‘I’ll run and get one,’ said Mary; and she stayed up-stairs for a few moments to take breath and compose herself. It was very silly of her, of course, to be excited; but she reflected that it was not simply the innocent stroll with her cousin in the moonlight for which she was afraid, but the possibility of a return to the subject of Millicent, of which he had spoken to her last time he was at Renton. He was standing outside the window waiting for her when she came down, and they wandered away together, instinctively taking that path towards the river. So many moonlight walks on that same path glanced over Mary’s memory as they walked,--childish ones, when the cousins played hide-and-seek behind the great, smooth, shining boles of the beeches,--merry comings-home from water-parties when they were all boys and girls together. And then that walk, which was the last she had taken with Ben.
He did not say much for some minutes. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of all those old recollections. ‘When I went away the moon was shining,’ he said at last abruptly, ‘and I suppose it has been shining and the river running and the branches rustling all this time. How strange it seems! I wonder if I have been dreaming all these seven years?’
‘I daresay you have for a great part of the time,’ Mary said, with an effort to be playful. ‘I am sure I have at least----’
‘I hope so, considering my mother’s account of what you have been doing,’ said Ben. And then he made a pause, and said, as if he did it on purpose to stir up every possibility of discomfort in her, ‘Do you remember our last talk here?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, and then they went on, stumbling in the dark places, and now and then coming out like ghosts,--two weird figures,--into the silver light. Though he had brought her out on the pretence of having so much to say, in reality he scarcely talked at all. And she kept by his side, with her heart giving irregular thumps against her breast. She had not breath enough to bid him not to go any farther, and the sound of her own foot-steps and his in the utter stillness seemed to wake all kinds of curious echoes in the dark wood. Mary was half frightened, and yet rapt into a curious mysterious exaltation of feeling. What was he thinking of? Were they two the same creatures who had come down that same path together,--was it six years or six hours ago? The darkness among the trees around was not more profound than was the darkness in which Ben’s life had been enveloped during his absence. He had written home, it is true, and they had known where he went, and what, as people say, he was doing all the time; but of his real existence Mary knew as little,--just as little and as much, as he of hers. Thus they went on, until they came to the opening, and the green bank upon the river-side, which lay in a flood of moonlight all shut and bounded round by the blackness of the woods.
‘What a pity there is no boat!’ said Ben. ‘I might have taken you up the reach as far as the moonlight goes. We must have a boat. I did not think it was so sweet. And there is Cookesley Church across the fields. I remember so well looking at it the last time through the branches of the big beech. How high the river is! Whose boat is that, I wonder, on the other side?’
‘Oh, it is from The Willows, I suppose,’ said Mary, with a kind of desperation.
‘The Willows? that is something new. Is it old Peters and his sister? But you told me he was dead. What sort of people are at The Willows now?’
‘Two ladies,’ said Mary, succinctly. Was not this like the very hand of fate? Why The Willows should thus thrust itself quite arbitrarily into the conversation without any word or warning she could not tell. It was like the work of a malicious spirit.
‘Two ladies!’ said Ben. ‘You are very terse,--terser than I ever knew you. And who may the two ladies be who venture on the river in the moonlight?’
‘Oh, I do not think they are in the boat.’
‘But whether they are in the boat or not, who are they?’ said Ben, and there was a sound as of laughter in his voice.
Then there followed a dead pause. The boat lay in the fullest moonlight, and already they could hear the soft plash of the oars and distant sound of voices. It was not coming down the stream, but floating softly on the silvered water, just kept in its place against the current by the oars. Some one was out enjoying the beauty of the night in that magical fashion; and opposite was visible the little margin of lawn which belonged to The Willows, the trees dripping into the water, and the lights in the open windows. A subtle suggestion of happiness, and love, and rest, was in the scene. Was it a pair of lovers, or a young husband with his wife, or----
‘Tell me,--this becomes mysterious,--who are they?’ said Ben.
‘Oh, only some people,’ Mary said, with some breathlessness, ‘whom I think you once knew. Do you remember speaking to me, the last time we came down here together, about,--some one,--a school-fellow of mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘It is a very strange coincidence,’ Mary said, with a miserable attempt at a laugh. ‘It is Millicent, who has gone there with her mother for the summer. We are neighbours now.’
And then silence came again,--silence deeper than before. He started a little, that it was easy to see; but his face was quite in the shade. And after a while he said, with a steady and decided voice, ‘You mean Mrs. Henry Rich?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary; and then they both stood on the rustling grass and watched the boat, which lay caught, as it were, and suspended in the blaze of white radiance. No doubt she was there, enjoying that beautiful moment, not thinking what silent spectators were looking on so near. As for Mary, she stood spell-bound, and gazed full of a thousand thoughts. Since her cousins had been gone, Mary had had no one to row her about the shining river, every turn of which she knew so well; but Millicent had her boatman at once. And who was he? And what could Ben be thinking of that he stood thus on the brink of the full stream, filled more than full by the overflowing of the moonlight? All at once he turned on his heel, as if rousing himself, and drew Mary’s hand within his arm.
‘Let me help you up the bank,’ said Ben. ‘After all, the night grows cold. Have you ever walked as far before, so late as this?’
‘Never, I think,’ said Mary, going with him up the hill at a pace very unusual to her. Though he carried on some pretence at conversation, she was too breathless with the rapid ascent to answer otherwise than by an occasional monosyllable. But when they reached the great beech he permitted her to breathe. Perhaps he paused there only from habit, or perhaps he was curious to look back upon that picture on the river, and gain another glimpse in this strange, unlooked-for, unsuspected way into the life of the woman he had once loved. The boat had disappeared while they were mounting the bank, and on the lawn, before The Willows, stood a white figure, dwarfed by distance into the size of a fairy, but blazing white in the intense moonlight. No doubt Ben saw her, for his face was turned that way; but he went on again without a word. It was only when they had reached the lawn, and were approaching the lights and the open window by which they had come forth, that he alluded to what he had seen. Then he asked sharply, all at once, in the very middle of some other subject which had nothing to do with it, ‘How long have these people been here?’
‘Three weeks,’ said Mary. Not another word was said; but a certain constraint and embarrassment,--at least so she thought,--had come over him. When she lit her candle this time he made no attempt to detain her. She thought even that he gave a sigh of relief as he opened the door for her, and said good-night; and it was hard for Mary to think with any charity of the woman who had thus waylaid him,--waylaid his very imagination,--on the night even of his return. Possibly she was quite wrong in her estimate of Ben’s feelings. When she was gone he threw himself heavily into a chair, and sat for an hour or more, doing nothing, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. But no doubt he had enough to think about without that. It would have been strange had the coming home,--the approach of certainty after his long suspense,--the familiar life that seemed to have taken him up again after casting him out of its bosom,--produced no excitement in his mind. And then there was that curious sense of unreality which comes upon a man when, after an active life of his own, he returns to his father’s house, and finds everything, down to the minutest particular, just as it used to be. Is not this life such stuff as dreams are made of? To Ben, who was not a man of thought, this sentiment was bewildering; and the quiet of the house weighed upon him with an irritating heaviness. Talk of noise! There is no such babel as that of silence when it surges round you, when no living thing stirs, and the mysterious air rustles its wings in your ears, and the earth vibrates under your feet. The flutter of moths and invisible insects attracted by the light, the rustle of the leaves outside, the curtains waving in the night air, the mysterious thrills which ran through the furniture, the wavering of the flame of the lamp,--all affected Ben when he was left alone. His life had been so busy and full of action,--and now he had left that existence which was his own, and come back into the midst of those shadows to await the last sentence of a dead man’s voice, and have his whole destiny, perhaps, thrown once more into mistiness and darkness. Had there been any need for that boat softly rocking on the curve of the silvered water,--for that white solitary figure in the moonlight,--to complicate matters further? But whether that last incident did count for anything in the multiplicity of his thoughts, or whether it affected him as Mary supposed,--and as Millicent meant it to affect him,--who can tell? He sat a long time thinking, but he uttered none of his thoughts in the shape of soliloquy, which is unfortunate for this narrative; and I am obliged to wait, as most people are compelled to do, for the slow elucidation of events, to show the turn taken by Ben Renton’s thoughts.
Mary’s mind went more rapidly to a conclusion, as may be supposed. She could no more tell than I can what Ben was really turning over in his thoughts; but one thing was clear to her, that he had not heard of the neighbourhood of Millicent with indifference. It might be indignation, it might be disgust, it might be concealed and suppressed delight; but, at all events, the information had moved him. And at the same time, he had been very nice to herself,--very friendly, almost more than friendly--affectionate; not forgetting to help her even when she had just thrown that bombshell into the quiet. To be sure, he had hurried her up the hill, unconscious of the rapidity of his pace; but that was little in comparison with his kindness in remembering her at all when he had just heard such news. So Mary said to herself, thinking, like a romantic young woman, that Ben must have straightway forgotten everything but Millicent. Well! She was like a sister to him: he was ready to trust her, ready to rely upon her, ready even to admire and praise her in that frank, affectionate way as a brother might. Why should there be any heaviness or sense of disappointment in her heart? Mary said to herself that it was only because of its being Millicent, who was not worthy of him. If it had been almost anybody else,--if it had been half-a-dozen girls she could name to herself, who were good girls, and would have made him happy--but Millicent was no mate for Ben! That was the only reason of the blank, sense of pain and vacancy in her heart. For herself, she was more than content.
And thus the old house closed its protecting doors upon the first instalment of the restored family; and with that received agitation, disquiet, unrest, into the bosom of the stillness. Renton had been lying high and dry, like a stranded vessel, for all those years, and peace had dwelt in it; but now that the tide was creeping up, and life stealing back, the natural accompaniment returned. Sighs of impatience, disappointment, pain,--eager desires for the future, which came so slowly, counting the minutes,--a sense, overmastering everything, of the hardness and strangeness of life. Nobody had thought of life as hard, as troublous, or full of fatal mistakes, during all those years when Mrs. Renton had driven about the lanes, and taken care of her health. The blessed bonds of routine had kept things going, and nobody was either glad or miserable. But as soon as the bigger life came back with chances of happiness in it, then the balancing chances of pain also returned. As soon as it becomes possible that you may be blessed, it also becomes possible that you may fall into the lowest depths of anguish. This was the strange paradox which Mary Westbury contemplated as she heard Ben Renton’s unaccustomed step going to his room after midnight, through the profound stillness of the sleeping house.
IX. THE NEXT MORNING
Rising full of anxious thoughts of the excitement which must have taken possession of Ben from the revelations of the night, Mary was much taken aback to meet her cousin, in, to all appearance, an extremely cheerful state of mind, next morning. He had been up early, and had taken a long walk, and renewed,--he told her,--his acquaintance with the country. ‘If one had it in one’s own hands one could do a great deal more with it than has been done yet,’ he said, looking more like the portraits of the old Rentons than Mary liked to see.
‘I am sure I hope nobody will ever try to improve it as long as I am here,’ she said, with a little heat,--for Renton as a parish, and Berks as a county, were to Mary the perfection of the earth.
‘You don’t like stagnant ponds, I hope,’ said Ben, laughing at her vehemence,--‘nor cottages falling to pieces,--nor fields that are flooded with every heavy rain.’
‘But I like the broad turf on the roadsides, and the old hedges, and the old trees,’ said Mary, ‘and everything one has been used to all one’s life. Ah, Ben, whatever you do, don’t spoil Renton! I should break my heart----’
‘Probably I shall never have it in my power to spoil Renton,’ he said, with a short sigh of impatience. ‘I wish I had not come home until the very day fixed for this reading of the will. It is hard work hanging about here and kicking one’s heels and waiting. My father was very hard upon us, Mary. It was too much to ask from any set of men.’
‘I don’t think it has done you much harm,’ said Mary, whose natural impulse was to defend the ancient authorities, however much she might sympathise with the sufferers in her heart.
‘Don’t you?’ said Ben, walking away from the breakfast-table to the window, where he stood drawing up and down the blind with preoccupied looks. After a few minutes she, too, moved and went up to him. Her mind was full of anxiety to say something,--to give him to understand that she could enter into his feelings; but it was so difficult to enter upon such a subject with a man, and especially with such a man as Ben.
‘Ben, I think I know,--a little,--what you mean,’ she said, faltering; ‘and I can see how, in some things, it must have been very hard,--preventing you from,--often,--doing what you wished; but now that is over. You need not wait now----’
He turned round and looked at her with some surprise in his eyes. ‘You don’t know what you are saying, Mary,’ he said. ‘I am like most men, very glad now to have been prevented doing things which at one time I would fain have done. And you are right, too,--I am my own master now,--not because the will is to be read this day week, but because I have found a trade and can work at it;--but that was not what I meant.’
Mary sat down patiently and raised her eyes to him that he might tell her what he did mean. She was in the way of listening to a great many explanations, and thought them natural. Ben, for his part, stood and looked at her for a minute, and then turned away with a laugh.
‘Poor Mary!’ he said. ‘What wearisome talk you must have listened to all these years,--going into everything! You must have a special faculty for that sort of thing, you women; how have you managed to live through it all and keep your youth and your bloom?’
‘There has been nothing dreadful to live through,’ said Mary; ‘but as for the youth, I don’t pretend to that any longer. It is gone, like so many other pretty things; and I am not thinking of myself.’
‘Not now, nor ever,’ said her cousin; ‘but I don’t feel disposed to give up the matter as you do. I don’t feel very aged----’
‘But you are a man,’ said Mary, interrupting him, ‘which makes all the difference; and, besides, this sort of talk is quite nonsense. I must go and read the paper with godmamma. Have you done with it?’ And she took the “Times” from the table, and was about to leave the room.
‘I have not done with it,’ said Ben, ‘I have not begun it even. I am going to read it to my mother, and you shall come and listen, if you like. You have done our duty long enough. It is but fair I should take my spell now.’
Mary made a little protestation, but Ben was not disposed to give in. He was ennuyé for one thing, and did not want to be alone and give himself up to troublesome thoughts. There are times when it is better to do even the most humble of domestic duties than to be left to yourself. Mary thought, as she took her work and sat down near the window of her godmother’s room, at some distance from the reader and listener, that affairs were wonderfully changed indeed, and that Ben’s dutifulness was beyond all the traditions of good behaviour she had ever known. Mrs. Renton herself was a little overpowered by so sublime an act. Ben did not read steadily through as Mary did. He read not the bits of news which were her favourite study, but leading articles and speeches, which were not in her way. And then he would pause and talk in the middle of them, often turning his chair round towards Mary, and defrauding his mother both of the paper and his attention. It was pleasant, no doubt, to have a man in the house, and still more pleasant to have Ben at home; but the great and unexpected condescension of his morning visit to read the papers was not by any means so great a pleasure as it looked. But for the name of the thing she would really have preferred Davison; and Mary’s reading was infinitely more satisfactory. When Ben wound up by saying, as it is the proper formula to say, that there was nothing in it, Mrs. Renton could not but echo the words with a little querulousness in her tone. He threw the paper carelessly on to the bed, and the poor lady drew it towards her, and made a feeble search after her spectacles.
‘Indeed there seems very little,’ she said, ‘much less than on most days; but it was very kind of you to think of coming and reading to me, Ben.’
‘I mean to come ever morning, mother,’ he replied,--at which Mrs. Renton shivered,--‘and relieve Mary a little. By-the-bye, I want to know whether you will mind if I have Hillyard here. I told him he was to come on Saturday, if he did not hear from me to the contrary. He is not quite in your way, but he is a very good fellow. I thought you would not mind if I had him here.’
‘My dear boy, the house is yours,--or at least it will soon be yours,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘It is very nice of you to consult me, and you know I am not very able to receive strangers; but still Mary is there to do all that is necessary, and of course you must have your friends.’
‘Mother, I should like you to understand that it is not at all of course,’ said Ben. ‘The house is not mine,--I am not calculating that it will ever be mine. I want Hillyard, not so much because he is my friend, as because he is with me in business. He is my right-hand man----’
‘It was Mr. Hillyard you went to America with at first?’ said Mary, from her distant seat.
And Ben, relieved, walked across the room, finding she was easier to talk to than his mother. ‘Eh? Yes, it is the same Hillyard,’ he said, with a laugh which had some pleasure in it. ‘I was his right-hand man then, and now he is mine. That is all the difference; but we have always hung together all the same.’
‘Then you have done better than he has,’ said Mary, looking up at him with a smile.
And Ben came and stood by the side of the table she was working at, and looked down upon her as he spoke. ‘He’s a very good fellow,’ he said, ‘but he does not stick to his work. There are some people who do best to be masters, and some who do best to be subordinate. And when he is not master, poor fellow, he is worth a dozen ordinary men.’
‘When some one else is master?’ said Mary, with natural female gratification.
‘No compliments,’ said Ben. ‘A man needs to be as hard as iron, and as bold as brass;--though why brass should be the emblem of unpleasant boldness, by the way, I don’t know.’
When there had been as much of it as this, Mrs. Renton began to stir uneasily. ‘I cannot hear what you two are saying,’ she said. ‘You have light enough for your work generally at this window, Mary. Why should you go away so far to-day? And, Ben, I can see there are two or three things here you did not read to me. There is a dreadful burglary somewhere, in a country-house like this. It is dreadful to think we might be killed in our beds any nights,--and gives it such an interest;--and there is a great deal out of “Galignani” in the French article. “Galignani” is always amusing. But Mary will read it to me when you go out.’
‘I was not thinking of going out,--at present, mother. When is Laurie coming? He ought to be here,’ said Ben. ‘I don’t understand how a man can choose to shut himself up in London at this time of the year.’
‘But he is working at something,’ said Mary.
‘He is always working at something, and I don’t know what it is ever to come to. Laurie ought to be the eldest son,--if there is to be an eldest son among us,’ said Ben. ‘I think that would be the best solution. He could muse about his fields, and paint the trees, and make a very good country gentleman,--don’t you think so, Mary?--and marry and make everybody comfortable;--that is how it ought to be.’
‘Ben,’ said his mother, solemnly, ‘I hope you have not been led astray into Radical principles since you have been away. How could Laurie be the eldest son? Your poor dear papa did everything for the best. He thought it was good for you to wait, and no doubt it must have been good for you. But to speak as if he did not care for your rights! Why, you were called Benedict because you were the eldest son. I said to Mr. Renton, “I hate the name,--it is the ugliest name I know.” But he always said, “My dear, we can’t help ourselves; the Rentons have been Laurence and Benedict for hundreds of years,--and Laurence and Benedict they must continue to be; but you can call him Ben, you know,--or Dick, for that matter.” I had a good cry over it,’ Mrs. Renton said, dropping back fatigued upon her pillows; ‘for, if there is anything I hate, it is those short names like Ben and Dick; but he had his way. And now to think you should talk as if it had been all in vain!’
‘Miss Mary,’ said Davison with decision, ‘my missis has talked a deal more than she ought, and I don’t hold with excitement. If you and Mr. Ben was to go out for a walk now,--or something as would take him off his poor dear mamma,’ said the careful nurse, lowering her voice. Ben was too much for his mother. After seven years of soft, feminine glidings about her room, softened voices, perpetual consideration of her ailments, this ‘man in the house,’ thought pleasant at first, was too much for her powers. ‘And I don’t know how we’ll ever do when they’re all here,’ the faithful Davison murmured to herself, as she sprinkled eau-de-Cologne about the pillows, and mixed some port with the arrowroot. And Ben was banished forthwith from the room. ‘He is very nice at dinner, my dear,’ Mrs. Renton herself said, ‘but men never understand. And they should always have something to do, Mary. They are never happy without something to do.’
‘But poor Ben, this is his first day at home!’ said Mary, when she had read all about the burglary, and calmed the patient down.
‘But, my dear, they are always wretched themselves,’ said Mrs. Renton, ‘when they are quite unoccupied. You must find him something to do.’
Thus it will be seen that Mary’s labours were not much lightened by the arrival of the eldest son. When she went down-stairs after her newspaper-reading, she found him in the library yawning somewhat over a book. ‘Come and talk,’ he said, setting a chair for her; and then laughed a little over his unsuitableness in the hushed and soft-toned house.
‘It is because you have been so long away,’ said Mary. ‘You have gone off on one current, and we on another. I suppose it is always so when people are long parted. Is it not sad?’
‘I don’t think that it ought to be so,’ said Ben.
‘And Laurie has his current, too,--quite different. I should like to find out about Laurie. It is he I know least about,’ said Mary, with a little sigh.
And then Ben smiled. ‘I should like to hear,’ he said, ‘what you know about me?’
What did she know about him? Nothing,--and yet everything, Mary thought.
‘Sometimes one divines,’ she said.
‘And sometimes one divines all wrong,’ said Ben.
Then there followed a pause. It was a very exciting game of fence so far as she was concerned. But she felt instinctively it was not safe to keep it up.
‘Godmamma will not come down to luncheon,’ she said, ‘but in the evening I hope she will be all right again. And when Alice is here and the children they will be a great help. Alice is not clever, you know, but she harmonises things somehow. I wonder if it is because she is musical.’
‘You harmonise things, too, and you are not particularly musical,’ said Ben.
‘Oh, me!’ Mary turned away, not caring to discuss that subject. He was always so nice to her,--so frank and affectionate. ‘If he were to marry Ruth Escott now, or Helen Cookesley, how nice it would be to be a sister to her!’ Mary thought! but Millicent! Could he be thinking of Millicent now? He had got up from his chair, and was looking out with a certain wistfulness--or at least what would have been wistfulness in a woman, who has always to wait for any one she particularly wishes to see. A man can go forth and seek, and has no call to be wistful; but then it was only according to feminine rules that Mary, so long unaccustomed to anything else, could form her thoughts.
‘I have ordered up a boat from Cookesley,’ he said; ‘and remember, I mean to row you to the Swan’s Nest this afternoon. It is clearing up---- ’ for it had become cloudy, and rain had fallen during that period of newspaper-reading in Mrs. Renton’s room. And then Ben went out abruptly and left her. He stood upon no sort of ceremony, as if she were anything but his natural sister, but went away without any explanation. Going to the Swan’s Nest it would be necessary to pass The Willows; and at this moment he was taking the path to the river. Could he be going the very first morning to lay himself again at the syren’s feet? Could it be the mere pleasure of passing her house, being in the neighbourhood, that moved him? Mary, without pausing to think, flew up-stairs,--up beyond the servants’ floor to a little turret-room which commanded a view of the river. And when she had waited long enough to recover her breath, there, sure enough, was a boat shooting out from the green bank at Renton with one figure in it, which must be Ben. And the course he took was up the river. She covered her face for a moment when she saw it, and a hot, sudden tear brimmed just over, wetting her eyelashes. Mo more. Was it her business that she should weep over Ben’s folly? No man can redeem his brother, much less any woman, alas! However dreadful it might be, the man must go his own way.
Mrs. Renton rallied sufficiently that afternoon to go for her drive, and Mary’s services were wanted accordingly. But when she had got through that duty, there was still time for the Swan’s Nest, to which she had been looking forward with an excitement which was almost feverish. Ben was waiting for them at the door. He took his mother up to her room, subduing his big pace as best he could to quietness, and put her into Davison’s hands for her rest before dinner. It was an arrangement very grateful to all parties. While Mrs. Renton was taking her favourite refreshment and being comfortably tucked up on her sofa, the young people were making their way down to the bank with something of the gaiety of former days. ‘I once beat you, Ben, running down,’ Mary said, for a moment forgetting The Willows and all that was involved in it. ‘I defy you to beat me now,’ her cousin said, and Mary’s heart for one moment felt so light that she made a woman’s wild dash down one wind of the path, and stopped short breathless, catching at the great beech to support her. But between the branches of the beech Mary saw a sight which quickly sobered her. Could it be by previous arrangement, or was it by chance? A boat lay at the little steps before The Willows, and some one,--there could be no difficulty in guessing whom,--was getting into it. Mary’s heart sank away down to the lowest depths,--a sudden sickness of the light, and the brightness, and the river, and the day, came over her. She turned even from Ben, feeling sick of him too. A certain contempt of him rose up in her tender soul. Yes; there are many pangs in the sensation with which a woman recognises that another less worthy is preferred to herself; but not the least penetrating is that instinctive, involuntary contempt. He had gone and arranged with Millicent no doubt, and then he thought to please all parties by taking her, Mary, to meet the woman he loved. Ben, for his part, with the stupidity of a male creature, saw that some shadow had come over her, and thought she had struck her foot in her rapid descent against the roots of the beech. ‘Ah, you should not have gone in for it,’ he said in not triumph, but sympathy;--‘take my arm. I hope you have not twisted your foot.’ I twisted her foot!--when it was he who wrung her heart! But to be sure, Mary did not wish him to divine what was her real ailment; and it was so like a man! But the laughter and the fun were over. The two descended soberly to the river-side and got into the boat. And Mary gathered the cords of the little rudder into her hands, and Ben took up the sculls. They were face to face, and it was difficult for one to hide from the other what emotions might rise or what change come over them. ‘I am afraid you have hurt your foot badly,--you look quite pale,’ Ben said, bending forward to her with absolute anxiety. ‘Oh, no, I am all right,’ Mary replied, saying in her heart, What fools men are! How stupid they must be!--a threadbare sentiment which does not bear expression. And then she cried, ‘Remember I am strong,’ with a certain gleam of wicked glee. She could run him into the weeds if he showed too much interest in that other boat. She could keep him out of speaking distance to baulk Millicent’s wiles, or she could run into them to give her a fright. Mary began to feel herself when she pulled that cord which put some power into her hands, and saw the little skiff turn and dart about at her will from one side to another. ‘Take care what you are doing,’ cried Ben in dismay, thinking his coxswain had lost her wits; but she was only getting possession of them, and beginning to remember that there was no need to be passive, and that she, too, had arms in her hands.
And for a little they shot silently, vigorously, each attending to his work, up the shining river. Mary could not speak, and Ben did not, being moved by a thousand associations. The first break in the silence was made by voices not their own, coming from the boat which Mary kept her eye on with the fixedness of enmity. Distant sounds of conversation and laughter came first, at which Ben pricked up his ears. ‘Don’t run into any one,’ he said. ‘I hear voices;--there is somebody coming, and I hope you are keeping a look-out ahead----’
‘You need not fear for me,--I see them,’ said Mary, with emphasis, and he made no sign as if he knew what she meant, but kept on rowing so quietly that he either did not know who was coming, or thought she was a most accomplished hypocrite. On the contrary, he too began to talk softly like a man absorbed in thoughts and preoccupations of his own.
‘The last time you and I were here together was one of my last days in England,’ he said;--do you remember? I was full of my own affairs, and indifferent to everything; and, good life, what a fool I was!’ he added to himself,--and then paused and sighed. Mary, for her part, saw all, noted all, and in her rashness felt anxious to test his meaning.
‘You made me very curious,’ she said; ‘I was so anxious to know what you meant----’ And there was no telling how much further she might have gone had not the other boat suddenly glanced alongside, and some one called her by her name. Some one! Millicent, looking more lovely than she had ever seen her, she thought, with a scarlet cloak lightly thrown over her black dress, lying back upon the cushions, holding gingerly in her hands the steering cords.
‘Mary!’ Millicent called, softly,--‘is it you? Oh, I am sure one of your cousins must have come home! Stop and tell me! What a happy thing for Mrs. Renton! And are not you all in the seventh heaven?’
The picture was one which neither of the cousins ever forgot. She was in the full bloom of her beauty, increased rather than diminished, by the severity of her mourning dress. The river sparkled like a mirror all round the gay little painted boat in which she reclined. An unusual flush of colour was on her cheek, and the young Guardsman who was rowing her gazed with eyes of worship on the lovely creature. No doubt she was excited. It seemed to Mary that even the boy who was with her was part of a plan, the mise en scène which she had perfected for Ben’s sake; and that her cheek was flushed with the excitement of the meeting and with her unusual anxiety that success might follow. For the first time for seven years Ben and she looked each other in the face. The Guardsman had run the other boat so close that she was almost as near to him as Mary was, confronting him, in a position in which she could watch his face and all its changes. When he looked up her eye was upon him. It was the most curious meeting for those two, who had parted so differently. Was it possible she had forgotten how they parted? She looked at him with an unabashed, smiling, gracious countenance, while Ben, with some agitation, took off his hat.
‘Is it Mr. Ben Renton?’ Millicent said, softly. And Mary, looking on, saw the colour flash all over Ben’s face at the sound of her voice. Then, in her heart, his cousin acquitted him of having arranged this interruption. On the contrary, he was so moved by it that he did not seem capable of finding his voice.
‘Mr. Renton, Mrs. Henry Rich,’ Mary said, mechanically, attempting an introduction, though she knew how unnecessary that was.
‘Ah, we have met before!’ said Millicent. ‘Did I not tell you, Mary? We used to know each other, though your cousin seems to have forgotten me; but, to be sure, I had then a different name.’
‘No, I have not forgotten,’ said Ben; ‘that would be difficult under any name.’
And then there was a dead pause. Millicent put her arm over the edge of the boat and dipped her pretty hand into the water. She had a certain air of embarrassment, either real or assumed; and Ben looked at her with a curious openness and fixedness of gaze. ‘You have just come?’ she said at last, not raising her eyes.
‘Just come,’ said Ben; ‘and only for a few days.’
Then Millicent’s eyes rose, and turned to him curiously; and Mary, too, bewildered, gave him a frightened, anxious look. There was a whole drama in their glances, and yet the words were very constrained and very few which passed between them. ‘So soon?’ Millicent said, with a surprised, half-sorrowful tone.
‘So soon!’ he repeated, with a kind of decision, always looking at her, till Mary, hard-hearted as she thought herself, felt that he was uncivil, and was moved to interfere; but Millicent bore it bravely enough. Her colour grew higher, her composure was a little shaken, but yet she did not betray any symptoms of mortification or fear.
‘My mother would be glad to see you before you go,’ she said, faltering slightly. ‘We cannot forget our obligations to you,--though perhaps you have forgotten;’ and then she tried another half-supplicating, anxious look.
‘I have forgotten nothing,’ said Ben. ‘We Rentons have extraordinary memories. I will call on Mrs. Tracy if I can before we go.’
‘Then I will not detain you longer,’ Millicent said, with a look of relief. ‘What a pleasure it must be to you, Mary, to have your cousin to row you about! I am quite grateful to Mr. Horsman, who is so good as to bring me out. How delicious the river is, to be sure! Mr. Renton, it was you who used to tell me of it--first.’
‘Then I am glad to have added something to your pleasures,’ said Ben. He had adjusted his sculls, and did not manifest the least inclination to stay longer. On the contrary, Mary felt that he was anxious to go on, to get clear of this interruption. And not less anxious was the young Guardsman,--almost a boy,--who had taken his hat off sulkily, and waited his orders with eagerness. Millicent was the only one of the four who had any desire to linger. She gave Ben another long, searching look, to which he made no response, being busy, or appearing to be busy, with his sculls; and then she gave a little nod to her waterman.
‘I dare say we shall meet again,’ she said, gaily, ‘unless you are going a very long way;--au revoir.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Mary. And in another moment, with one pull of the steerage and one sweep of the oars, the Renton boat had shot wide of the other, darting off to one side with a nervous motion, for which Mary alone was responsible. Ben made no remark, which was symptom enough of his agitation too. Had he been as calm as he affected to be, Mary knew well that her illegitimate energy would not have passed without remark. And they went up the river for some time at a tremendous pace, devoting themselves to their work with the energy of professional people. Mary steered beautifully all the way to the Swan’s Nest. She steered as if her life depended on it, keeping the due course in every turn, avoiding, as she ought, the side where the current was strongest, which a steerswoman seldom remembers to do, and in every way justifying the old training which had been disused so long. And scarcely a word was spoken between them until they reached the end of their expedition. It was a sheltered little elbow of the river, a very bed of water-lilies in the season. And the green leaves still spread all round like a thick carpet upon the water. Then Ben took breath for the first time. He lay upon his oars and wiped his forehead, and drew a long breath. ‘That was hard work,’ he said, with a sigh. But which it was that was hard work,--whether the encounter with Millicent, or their long, breathless sweep against the current, Mary could not tell.