XXVAT STAPYLTONIt was about a week before his encounter with Vaughan in the park—and on a fine autumn day—that the Honourable Bob, walking with Sir Robert by the Garden Pool, allowed his eyes to travel over the prospect. The smooth-shaven lawns, the stately, lichened house, the far-stretching park, with its beech-knolls and slopes of verdure, he found all fair; and when to these, when to the picture on which his bodily eyes rested, that portrait of Mary—Mary, in white muslin and blue ribbons, bowing her graceful head while Sir Robert read prayers—which he carried in his memory, he told himself that he was an uncommonly happy fellow.Beauty he might have had, wealth he might have had, family too. But to alight on all in such perfection, to lose his heart where his head approved the step, was a gift of fortune so rare, that as he strutted and talked by the side of his host, his face beamed with ineffable good-humour.Nevertheless for a few moments silence had fallen between the two; and gradually Sir Robert’s face had assumed a grave and melancholy look. He sighed more than once, and when he spoke, it was to repeat in different words what he had already said.“Certainly, you may speak,” he said, in a tone of some formality. “And I have little doubt, Mr. Flixton, that your overtures will be received as they deserve.”“Yes? Yes? You think so?” Flixton answered with manifest delight. “You really think so, Sir Robert, do you?”“I think so,” his host replied. “Not only because your suit is in every way eligible, and one which does us honour.” He bowed courteously as he uttered the compliment. “But because, Mr. Flixton, for docility—and I think a husband may congratulate himself on the fact——”“To be sure! To be sure!” Flixton cried, not permitting him to finish. “Yes, Sir Robert, capital! You mean that if I am not a happy man——”“It will not be the fault of your wife,” Sir Robert said; remembering with a faint twinge of conscience that the Honourable Bob’s past had not been without its histories.“No! By gad, Sir Robert, no! You’re quite right! She’s got an ank——” He stopped abruptly, his mouth open; bethinking himself, when it was almost too late, that her father was not the person to whom to detail her personal charms.But Sir Robert had not divined the end of the sentence. He was a trifle deaf. “Yes?” he said.“She’s an—an—animated manner, I was going to say,” Flixton answered with more readiness than fervour. And he blessed himself for his presence of mind.“Animated? Yes, but gentle also,” Sir Robert replied, well-nigh purring as he did so. “I should say that gentleness, and—and indeed, my dear fellow, goodness, were the—but perhaps I am saying more than I should.”“Not at all!” Flixton answered with heartiness. “Gad, I could listen to you all day, Sir Robert.”He had listened, indeed, during a large part of the last week; and with so much effect, that those histories to which reference has been made, had almost faded from the elder man’s mind. Flixton seemed to him a hearty, manly young fellow, a little boastful and self-assertive perhaps—but remarkably sound. A soldier, who asked nothing better than to put down the rabble rout which was troubling the country; a Tory, of precisely his, Sir Robert’s opinions; the younger son of a peer, and a West Country peer to boot. In fine, a staunch, open-air patrician, with good old-fashioned instincts, and none of that intellectual conceit, none of those cranks, and fads, and follies, which had ruined a man who also might have been Sir Robert’s son-in-law.Well that man, Sir Robert, perhaps because his conscience pricked him at times by suggesting impossible doubts, was still bitterly angry. So angry that, had the Baronet been candid, he must have acknowledged that the Honourable Bob’s main virtue was his unlikeness to Arthur Vaughan; it was in proportion as he differed from the young fellow who had so meanly intrigued to gain his daughter’s affections, that Flixton appeared desirable to the father. Even those histories proved that at any rate he had blood in him; while his loud good-nature, his positiveness, as long as it marched with Sir Robert’s positiveness, his short views, all gained by contrast. “I am glad he is a younger son,” the Baronet thought. “He shall take the old Vermuyden name!” And he lifted his handsome old chin a little higher as he pictured the honours, that even in a changed and worsened England, might cluster about his house. At the worst, and if the Bill passed, he had a seat alternately with the Lansdownes; and in a future, which would know nothing of Lord Lonsdale’s cat-o’-nine-tails, when pocket boroughs would be rare, and great peers and landowners would be left with scarce a representative, much might be done with half a seat.Suddenly, “Damme, Sir Robert,” Flixton cried, “there is the little beauty—hem!—there she is, I think. With your permission I think I’ll join her.”“By all means, by all means,” Sir Robert answered indulgently. “You need not stand on ceremony.”Flixton waited for no more. Perhaps he had no mind to be bored, now that he had gained what he wanted. He hurried after the slim figure with the white floating skirts and the Leghorn hat, which had descended the steps of the house, moved lightly across the lawns—and vanished. He guessed, however, whither she was bound. He knew that she had a liking for walking in the wilderness behind the house; a beech wood which was already beginning to put on its autumn glory. And sure enough, hastening to a point among the smooth grey trunks where three paths met, he discerned her a hundred paces away, walking slowly from him with her eyes raised.“Squirrels!” Flixton thought. And he made up his mind to bring the terriers and have a hunt on the following Sunday afternoon. In the meantime he had another quarry in view, and he made after the white-gowned figure.She heard his tread on the carpet of dry beech leaves, and she turned and saw him. She had come out on purpose that she might be alone, at liberty to think at her ease and orientate herself, in relation to her new environment, and the fresh and astonishing views which were continually opening before her. Or, perhaps, that was but her pretext: an easy explanation of silence and solitude, which might suffice for her father and possibly for Miss Sibson. For, for certain, amid sombre thoughts of her mother, she thought more often and more sombrely in these days of another; of happiness which had been forfeited by her own act; of weakness, and cowardice, and ingratitude; of a man’s head that stooped to her adorably, and then again of a man’s eyes that burned her with contempt.It is probable, therefore, that she was not overjoyed when she saw Mr. Flixton. But Sir Robert was so far right in his estimate of her nature that she hated to give pain. It was there, perhaps, that she was weak. And so, seeing the Honourable Bob, she smiled pleasantly on him.“You have discovered a favourite haunt of mine,” she said. She did not add that she spent a few minutes of every day there: that the smooth beech-trunks knew the touch of her burning cheeks, and the rustle of the falling leaves the whisper of her penitence. Daily she returned by way of the Kennel Path and there breathed a prayer for her mother, where a mother’s arms had first enfolded her, and a mother’s kisses won her love. What she did add was, “I often come here.”“I know you do,” the Honourable Bob answered, with a look of admiration. “I assure you, Miss Mary, I could astonish you with the things I know about you!”“Really!”“Oh, yes. Really.”There was a significant chuckle in his voice which brought the blood to her check. But she was determined to ignore its meaning. “You are observant?” she said.“Of those—yes, by Jove, I am—of those, I—admire,” he rejoined. He had it on his tongue to say “those I love,” but she turned her eyes on him at the critical moment, and though he was doing a thing he had often done, and he had impudence enough, his tongue failed him. There are women so naturally modest that until the one man who awakens the heart appears, it seems an outrage to speak to them of love. Mary Vermuyden, perhaps by reason of her bringing up, was one of these; and though Flixton had had little to do with women of her kind, he recognised the fact and bowed to it. He came, having her father’s leave to speak to her; yet he found himself less at his ease, than on many a less legitimate occasion. “Yes, by Jove,” he repeated. “I observe them, I can tell you.”Mary laughed. “Some are more quick to notice than others,” she said.“And to notice some than others!” he rejoined, gallantly. “That is what I mean. Now that old girl who is with you——”“Miss Sibson?” Mary said, setting him right with some stiffness.“Yes! Well, she isn’t young! Anyway, you don’t suppose I could say what she wore yesterday! But what you wore, Miss Mary”—trying to catch her eye and ogle her—“ah, couldn’t I! But then you don’t wear powder on your nose, nor need it!”“I don’t wear it,” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “But you don’t know what I may do some day! And for Miss Sibson, it does not matter, Mr. Flixton, what she wears. She has one of the kindest hearts, and was one of the kindest friends I had—or could have had—when things were different with me.”“Oh, yes, good old girl,” he rejoined, “but snubby! Bitten my nose off two or three times, I know. And, come now, not quite an angel, you know, Miss Mary!”“Well,” she replied, smiling, “she is not, perhaps, an angel to look at. But——”“She can’t be! For she is not like you!” he cried. “And you are one, Miss Mary! You are the angel for me!” looking at her with impassioned eyes. “I’ll never want another nor ask to see one!”His look frightened her; she began to think he meant—something. And she took a new way with him. “How singular it is,” she said, thoughtfully, “that people say those things in society! Because they sound so very silly to one who has not lived in your world!”“Silly!” Flixton replied, in a tone of mortification; and for a moment he felt the check. He was really in love, to a moderate extent; and on the way to be more deeply in love were he thwarted. Therefore he was, to a moderate extent, afraid of her. And, “Silly?” he repeated. “Oh, but I mean it, so help me! I do, indeed! It’s not silly to call you an angel, for I swear you are as beautiful as one! That’s true, anyway!”“How many have you seen?” she asked, ridiculing him. “And what coloured wings had they?” But her cheek was hot. “Don’t say, if you please,” she continued, before he could speak, “that you’ve seen me. Because that is only saying over again what you’ve said, Mr. Flixton. And that is worse than silly. It is dull.”“Miss Mary,” he cried, pathetically, “you don’t understand me! I want to assure you—I want to make you understand——”“Hush!” she said, cutting him short, in an earnest whisper. And, halting, she extended a hand behind her to stay him. “Please don’t speak!” she continued. “Do you see them, the beauties? Flying round and round the tree after one another faster than your eyes can follow them. One, two, three—three squirrels! I never saw one, do you know, until I came here,” she went on, in a tone of hushed rapture. “And until now I never saw them at play. Oh, who could harm them?”He stood behind her, biting his lip with vexation; and wholly untouched by the scene, which, whether her raptures were feigned or not, was warrant for them. Hitherto he had had to do with women who met him halfway; who bridled at a compliment, were alive to anéquivoque, and knew how to simulate, if they did not feel, a soft confusion under his gaze. For this reason Mary’s backwardness, her apparent unconsciousness that they were not friends of the same sex, puzzled him, nay, angered him. As she stood before him, a hand still extended to check his advance, the sunshine which filtered through the beech leaves cast a soft radiance on her figure. She seemed more dainty, more graceful, more virginal than aught that he had ever conceived. It was in vain that he told himself, with irritation, that she was but a girl after all. That, under her aloofness, she was a woman like the others, as vain, passionate, flighty, as jealous as other women. He knew that he stood in awe of her. He knew that the words which he had uttered so lightly many a time—ay, and to those to whom he had no right to address them—stuck in his throat now. He wanted to say “I love you!” and he had the right to say it, he was commissioned to say it. Yet he was dumb. All the boldness which he had exhibited in her presence in Queen’s Square—where another had stood tongue-tied—was gone.He took at last a desperate step. The girl was within arm’s reach of him; her delicate waist, the creamy white of her slender neck, invited him. Be she never so innocent, never so maidenly, a kiss, he told himself, would awaken her. It was his experience, it was a scrap drawn from his store of worldly wisdom, that a woman kissed was a woman won.True, as he thought of it, his heart began to riot, as it had not rioted from that cause since he had kissed the tobacconist’s daughter at Exeter, his first essay in gallantry. But only the bold deserve the fair! And how often had he boasted that, where women were concerned, lips were made for other things than talking!And—in a moment it was done.Twice! Then she slipped from his grasp, and stood at bay, with flaming checks and eyes that—that had certainly not ceased to be virginal. “You! You!” she cried, barely able to articulate. “Don’t touch me!”She had been taken utterly, wholly by surprise; and the shock was immensely increased by the facts of her bringing up and the restraints and conditions of school-life. In his grasp, with his breath on her cheek, all those notions about ravening wolves and the danger which attached to beauty in low places—notions no longer applicable, had she taken time to reason—returned upon her in force. The man had kissed her!“How—-how dare you?” she continued, trembling with rage and indignation.“But your father——”“How dare you——”“Your father sent me,” he pleaded, quite crestfallen. “He gave me leave——”She stared at him, as at a madman. “To insult me?” she cried.“No, but—but you won’t understand!” he answered, almost querulously. He was quite chapfallen. “You don’t listen to me. I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife. Your father said I might come to you, and—and ask you. And—and you’ll say ‘Yes,’ won’t you? That’s a good girl!”“Never!” she answered.He stared at her, turning red. “Oh, nonsense!” he stammered. And he made as if he would go nearer. “You don’t mean it. My dear girl! Listen to me! I do love you! I do indeed! And I—I tell you what it is, I never loved any woman——”But she looked at him in such a way that he could not go on. “Do not say those things!” she said. And her austerity was terrible to him. “And go, if you please. My father, if he sent you to me——”“He did!”“Then he did not,” she replied with dignity, “understand my feelings.”“But—but you must marry someone,” he complained. “You know—you’re making a great fuss about nothing!”“Nothing!” she cried, her eyes sparkling. “You insult me, Mr. Flixton, and——”“If a man may not kiss the girl he wants to marry——”“If she does not want to marry him?”“But it’s not as bad as that,” he pleaded. “No, by Jove, it’s not. You’ll not be so cruel. Come, Miss Mary, listen to me a minute. You must marry someone, you know. You are young, and I’m sure you have the right to choose——”“I’ve heard enough,” she struck in, interrupting him with something of Sir Robert’s hauteur. “I understand now what you meant, and I forgive you. But I can never be anything to you, Mr. Flixton——”“You can be everything to me,” he declared. It couldn’t, it really couldn’t be that she meant to refuse him! Finally and altogether!“But you can be nothing to me!” she answered, cruelly—very cruelly for her, but her cheek was tingling. “Nothing! Nothing! And that being so, I beg that you will leave me now.”He looked at her with a mixture of supplication, resentment, chagrin.But she showed no sign of relenting. “You really—you really do mean it?” he muttered, with a sickly smile. “Come, Miss Mary!”“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried, as if his words pained her. And that was all. “Please go! Or I shall go.”The Honourable Bob’s conceit had been so far taken out of him that he felt that he could make no farther fight. He could see no sign of relenting, and feeling that, with all his experience, he had played his cards ill, he turned away sullenly. “Oh, I will go,” he said. And he longed to add something witty and careless. But he could not add anything. He, Bob Flixton, the hero of so manybonnes fortunes, to be refused! He had laid his all, andpour le bon motifat the feet of a girl who but yesterday was a little schoolmistress. And she had refused him! It was incredible! But, alas, it was also fact.Mary, the moment his back was turned, hurried with downcast face towards the Kennels; to hide her hot cheeks and calm her feelings in the depths of the shrubbery. Oddly enough, her first thoughts were less of that which had just happened to her than of that suit which had been paid to her months before. This man might love her or not; she could not tell. But Arthur Vaughan had loved her: the fashion of this love taught her to prize the fashion of that.He had loved her. And if he had treated her as Mr. Flixton had treated her? Would she have held to him, she wondered. She believed that she would. But the mere thought set her knees trembling, made her cheeks flame afresh, filled her with rapture. So that, shamefaced, frightened, glancing this way and that, as one hunted, she longed to be safe in her room, there to cry at her ease.Doubtless it was natural that the incident should turn her thoughts to that other love-making; and presently to her father’s furious dislike of that other lover. She could not understand that dislike; for the Bill and the Borough, Franchise or No Franchise, were nothing to her. And the grievance, when Sir Robert had essayed to explain it, had been nothing. To her mind, Trafalgar and Waterloo and the greatness of England were the work of Nelson and Wellington—at the remotest, perhaps, of Mr. Pitt and Lord Castlereagh. She could not enter into the reasoning which attributed these and all other blessings of her country to a System! To a System which it seemed her lover was pledged to overthrow.She walked until the tumult of her thoughts had somewhat abated; and then, still yearning for the security of her own chamber, she made for the house. She saw nothing of Flixton, no one was stirring. Already she thought herself safe; and it was the very spirit of mischief which brought her, at the corner of the church, face to face with her father. Sir Robert’s brow was clouded, and the “My dear, one moment,” with which he stayed her, was pitched in a more decisive tone than he commonly used to her.“I wish to speak to you, Mary,” he continued. “Will you come with me to the library?”She would fain have postponed the discussion of Mr. Flixton’s proposal, which she foresaw. But her father, affectionate and gentle as he was, was still unfamiliar; and she had not the courage to make her petition. So she accompanied him, with a sinking heart, to the library. And, when he pointed to a seat, she was glad to sit down.He took up his own position on the hearth rug; whence he looked at her gravely before he spoke. At length:“My dear,” he said, “I’m sorry for this! Though I do not blame you. I think that you do not understand, owing to those drawbacks of your early life, which have otherwise, thank God, left so slight a mark upon you, that there are things which at your time of life you must leave to—to the decision of your elders.”She looked at him. And there was not that complete docility in her look which he expected to find. “I don’t think I understand, sir,” she murmured.“But you can easily understand this, Mary,” he replied. “That young girls of your age, without experience of life or of—of the darker side of things, cannot be allowed to judge for themselves on all occasions. There are sometimes circumstances to be weighed which it is not possible to detail to them.”She closed her eyes for an instant, to collect her thoughts.“But—but, sir,” she said, “you cannot wish me to have no will—no choice—in a matter which affects me so nearly.”“No,” he said, speaking seriously and with something approaching sternness. “But that will and that choice must be guided. They should be guided. Your feelings are natural—God forbid that I should think them otherwise! But you must leave the decision to me.”She looked at him, aghast. She had heard, but had never believed, that in the upper classes matches were arranged after this fashion. But to have no will and no choice in such a thing as marriage! She must be dreaming.“You cannot,” he continued, looking at her firmly but not unkindly, “have either the knowledge of the past,” with a slight grimace, as of pain, “or the experience needful to enable you to measure the result of the step you take. You must, therefore, let your seniors decide for you.”“But I could never—never,” she answered, with a deep blush, “marry a man without—liking him, sir.”“Marry?” Sir Robert repeated. He stared at her.She returned the look. “I thought, sir,” she faltered, with a still deeper blush, “that you were talking of that.”“My dear,” he said, gravely, “I am referring to the subject on which I understood that you requested Miss Sibson to speak to me.”“My mother?” she whispered, the colour fading quickly from her face.He paused a moment. Then, “You would oblige me,” he said, slowly and formally, “by calling her Lady Sybil Vermuyden. And not—that.”“But she is—my mother,” she persisted.He looked at her, his head slightly bowed, his lower lip thrust out. “Listen,” he said, with decision. “What you propose—to go to her, I mean—is impossible. Impossible, you understand. There must be an end of any thought of it!” His tone was cold, but not unkind. “The thing must not be mentioned again, if you please,” he added.She was silent a while. Then, “Why, sir?” she asked. She spoke tremulously, and with an effort. But he had not expected her to speak at all.Yet he merely continued, as he stood on the hearth rug, to look at her askance. “That is for me,” he said, “to decide.”“But——”“But I will tell you,” he said, stiffly. “Because she has already ruined part of your life!”“I forgive her, from my heart!” Mary cried.“And ruined, also,” he continued, putting the interruption aside, “a great part of mine. At your age I do not think fit to tell you—all. It is enough, that she has robbed me of you, and deceived me. Deceived me,” he repeated, more bitterly, “through long years when you, my daughter, might have been my comfort and—” he ended, almost inaudibly, “my joy.”He turned his back on her with the word and began to walk the room, his chin sunk on his breast, his hands clasped. It was clear to Mary, watching him with loving, pitying eyes, that his thoughts were with the unhappy past, with the short fever, the ignoble contentions of his married life, or with the lonely, soured years which had followed. She felt that he was laying to his wife’s charge the wreck of his life, and the slow dry-rot which had sapped hope, and strength, and development.Mary waited until his step trod the carpet less hurriedly. Then, as he paused to turn, she stepped forward.“Yet, sir—forgive her!” she cried. And there were warm tears in her voice.He turned and looked at her. Possibly he was astonished at her persistence.“Never!” he said in a tone of finality. “Never! Let that be the end.”But Mary had been dreaming of this moment for days. And she had resolved that, come what might, though he frown, though his tone grow hard and his eye angry, though he bring to bear on her the stern command of his eagle visage, she would not be found lacking a second time. She would not again give way to her besetting weakness, and spend sleepless nights in futile remorse. Diffidence in the lonely schoolmistress had been pardonable, had been natural. But now, if she were indeed sprung from those who had a right to hold their heads above the crowd, if the doffed hats which greeted her when she went abroad, in the streets of Chippinge as well as in the lanes and roads,—if these meant anything—shame on her if she proved craven.“It cannot be the end, sir,” she said, in a low voice. “For she is—still my mother. And she is alone and ill—and she needs me.”He had begun to pace the room anew, this time with an impatient, angry step. But at that he stood and faced her, and she needed all her courage to support the gloom of his look. “How do you know?” he said. For Miss Sibson, discharging an ungrateful task, had not entered into details. “Have you seen her?”She felt that she must judge for herself; and though her mother had said something to the contrary, and hitherto she had obeyed her, she thought it best to tell all. “Yes, sir,” she said.“When?”“A fortnight ago?” She trembled under the growing darkness of his look.“Here?”“In the grounds, sir.”“And you never told me!” he cried. “You never told me!” he repeated, with a strange glance, a glance which strove with terror to discern the mother’s features in the daughter’s face. “You, too—you, too, have begun to deceive me!”And he threw up his hands in despair.“Oh, no! no!” Mary cried, infinitely distressed.“But you have!” he rejoined. “You have kept this from me.”“Only, believe me, sir,” she cried, eagerly, “until I could find a fitting time.”“And now you want to go to her!” he answered, unheeding. “She has suborned you! She, who has done the greatest wrong to you, has now done the last wrong to me!”He began again to pace up and down the room.“Oh, no! no!” she sobbed.“It is so!” he answered, darting an angry glance at her. “It is so! But I shall not let you go! Do you hear, girl? I shall not let you go! I have suffered enough,” he continued, with a gesture which called those walls to witness to the humiliations, the sorrows, the loneliness, from which he had sought refuge within them. “I will not—suffer again! You shall not go!”She was full of love for him, and of pity. She understood even that gesture, and the past wretchedness to which it bore witness. And she yearned to comfort him, and to convince him that nothing that had gone before, nothing that could happen in the future, would set her against him. Had he been seated, she would have knelt and kissed his hand, or cast herself on his breast and his love, and won him to her. But as he walked she could not approach him, she did not know how to soften him. Yet her duty was clear. It lay beside her dying mother. Nevertheless, if he forbade her to go, if he withstood her, how was she to perform it?At length, “But if she be dying, sir,” she murmured. “Will you not then let me see her?”He looked at her from under his heavy eyebrows. “I tell you, I will not let you go!” he said stubbornly. “She has forfeited her right to you. When she made you die to me—you died to her! That is my decision. You hear me? And now—now,” he continued, returning in a measure to composure, “let there be an end!”She stood silenced, but not conquered; knowing him more intimately than she had known him before; and loving him not less, but more, since pity and sympathy entered into her love and drove out fear; but assured that he was wrong. It could not be her duty to forsake: it must be his duty to forgive. But for the present she saw that in spite of all his efforts he was cruelly agitated, that she had stirred pangs long lulled to rest, that he had borne as much as he could bear. And she would not press him farther for the time.Meanwhile he, as he stood fingering his trembling lips, was trying to bring the cunning of age to bear. He was silently forming his plan. She had been too much alone, he reflected; that was it. He had forgotten that she was young, and that change and movement and life and gaiety were needful for her. This about—that woman—was an obsession, an unwholesome fancy, which a few days in a new place, and amid lively scenes, would weaken and perhaps remove. And by and by, when he thought that he could trust his voice, he spoke.“I said, let there be an end! But—you are all I have,” he continued, with emotion, “and I will say instead, let this be for a time. I must have time to think. You want—there are many things you want that you ought to have—frocks, laces, and gew-gaws,” he added, with a sickly smile, “and I know not what, that you cannot get here, nor I choose for you. Lady Worcester has offered to take you with her to town—she goes the day after to-morrow. I was uncertain this morning whether to send you or not, whether I could spare you or not. Now, I say, go. Go, and when you return, Mary, we will talk again.”“And then,” she said, pleading softly, “you will let me go!”“Never!” he cried, lifting his head in a sudden, uncontrollable recurrence of rage. “But there, there! There! there! I shall have thought it over—more at leisure. Perhaps! I don’t know! I will tell you then. I will think it over.”She saw with clear eyes that this was an evasion, that he was deceiving her. But she felt no resentment, only pity. She had no reason to think that her mother needed her on the instant. And much was gained by the mere discussion of the subject. At least he promised to consider it: and though he meant nothing now, perhaps when he was alone he would think of it, and more pitifully. Yes, she was sure he would.“I will go, if you wish it,” she said, submissively. She would show herself obedient in all things lawful.“I do wish it,” he answered. “My daughter must know her way about. Go, and Lady Worcester will take care of you. And when—when you come back we will talk. You will have things to prepare, my dear,” he continued, avoiding her eyes, “a good deal to prepare, I dare say, since this is sudden, and you had better go now. I think that is all.”
It was about a week before his encounter with Vaughan in the park—and on a fine autumn day—that the Honourable Bob, walking with Sir Robert by the Garden Pool, allowed his eyes to travel over the prospect. The smooth-shaven lawns, the stately, lichened house, the far-stretching park, with its beech-knolls and slopes of verdure, he found all fair; and when to these, when to the picture on which his bodily eyes rested, that portrait of Mary—Mary, in white muslin and blue ribbons, bowing her graceful head while Sir Robert read prayers—which he carried in his memory, he told himself that he was an uncommonly happy fellow.
Beauty he might have had, wealth he might have had, family too. But to alight on all in such perfection, to lose his heart where his head approved the step, was a gift of fortune so rare, that as he strutted and talked by the side of his host, his face beamed with ineffable good-humour.
Nevertheless for a few moments silence had fallen between the two; and gradually Sir Robert’s face had assumed a grave and melancholy look. He sighed more than once, and when he spoke, it was to repeat in different words what he had already said.
“Certainly, you may speak,” he said, in a tone of some formality. “And I have little doubt, Mr. Flixton, that your overtures will be received as they deserve.”
“Yes? Yes? You think so?” Flixton answered with manifest delight. “You really think so, Sir Robert, do you?”
“I think so,” his host replied. “Not only because your suit is in every way eligible, and one which does us honour.” He bowed courteously as he uttered the compliment. “But because, Mr. Flixton, for docility—and I think a husband may congratulate himself on the fact——”
“To be sure! To be sure!” Flixton cried, not permitting him to finish. “Yes, Sir Robert, capital! You mean that if I am not a happy man——”
“It will not be the fault of your wife,” Sir Robert said; remembering with a faint twinge of conscience that the Honourable Bob’s past had not been without its histories.
“No! By gad, Sir Robert, no! You’re quite right! She’s got an ank——” He stopped abruptly, his mouth open; bethinking himself, when it was almost too late, that her father was not the person to whom to detail her personal charms.
But Sir Robert had not divined the end of the sentence. He was a trifle deaf. “Yes?” he said.
“She’s an—an—animated manner, I was going to say,” Flixton answered with more readiness than fervour. And he blessed himself for his presence of mind.
“Animated? Yes, but gentle also,” Sir Robert replied, well-nigh purring as he did so. “I should say that gentleness, and—and indeed, my dear fellow, goodness, were the—but perhaps I am saying more than I should.”
“Not at all!” Flixton answered with heartiness. “Gad, I could listen to you all day, Sir Robert.”
He had listened, indeed, during a large part of the last week; and with so much effect, that those histories to which reference has been made, had almost faded from the elder man’s mind. Flixton seemed to him a hearty, manly young fellow, a little boastful and self-assertive perhaps—but remarkably sound. A soldier, who asked nothing better than to put down the rabble rout which was troubling the country; a Tory, of precisely his, Sir Robert’s opinions; the younger son of a peer, and a West Country peer to boot. In fine, a staunch, open-air patrician, with good old-fashioned instincts, and none of that intellectual conceit, none of those cranks, and fads, and follies, which had ruined a man who also might have been Sir Robert’s son-in-law.
Well that man, Sir Robert, perhaps because his conscience pricked him at times by suggesting impossible doubts, was still bitterly angry. So angry that, had the Baronet been candid, he must have acknowledged that the Honourable Bob’s main virtue was his unlikeness to Arthur Vaughan; it was in proportion as he differed from the young fellow who had so meanly intrigued to gain his daughter’s affections, that Flixton appeared desirable to the father. Even those histories proved that at any rate he had blood in him; while his loud good-nature, his positiveness, as long as it marched with Sir Robert’s positiveness, his short views, all gained by contrast. “I am glad he is a younger son,” the Baronet thought. “He shall take the old Vermuyden name!” And he lifted his handsome old chin a little higher as he pictured the honours, that even in a changed and worsened England, might cluster about his house. At the worst, and if the Bill passed, he had a seat alternately with the Lansdownes; and in a future, which would know nothing of Lord Lonsdale’s cat-o’-nine-tails, when pocket boroughs would be rare, and great peers and landowners would be left with scarce a representative, much might be done with half a seat.
Suddenly, “Damme, Sir Robert,” Flixton cried, “there is the little beauty—hem!—there she is, I think. With your permission I think I’ll join her.”
“By all means, by all means,” Sir Robert answered indulgently. “You need not stand on ceremony.”
Flixton waited for no more. Perhaps he had no mind to be bored, now that he had gained what he wanted. He hurried after the slim figure with the white floating skirts and the Leghorn hat, which had descended the steps of the house, moved lightly across the lawns—and vanished. He guessed, however, whither she was bound. He knew that she had a liking for walking in the wilderness behind the house; a beech wood which was already beginning to put on its autumn glory. And sure enough, hastening to a point among the smooth grey trunks where three paths met, he discerned her a hundred paces away, walking slowly from him with her eyes raised.
“Squirrels!” Flixton thought. And he made up his mind to bring the terriers and have a hunt on the following Sunday afternoon. In the meantime he had another quarry in view, and he made after the white-gowned figure.
She heard his tread on the carpet of dry beech leaves, and she turned and saw him. She had come out on purpose that she might be alone, at liberty to think at her ease and orientate herself, in relation to her new environment, and the fresh and astonishing views which were continually opening before her. Or, perhaps, that was but her pretext: an easy explanation of silence and solitude, which might suffice for her father and possibly for Miss Sibson. For, for certain, amid sombre thoughts of her mother, she thought more often and more sombrely in these days of another; of happiness which had been forfeited by her own act; of weakness, and cowardice, and ingratitude; of a man’s head that stooped to her adorably, and then again of a man’s eyes that burned her with contempt.
It is probable, therefore, that she was not overjoyed when she saw Mr. Flixton. But Sir Robert was so far right in his estimate of her nature that she hated to give pain. It was there, perhaps, that she was weak. And so, seeing the Honourable Bob, she smiled pleasantly on him.
“You have discovered a favourite haunt of mine,” she said. She did not add that she spent a few minutes of every day there: that the smooth beech-trunks knew the touch of her burning cheeks, and the rustle of the falling leaves the whisper of her penitence. Daily she returned by way of the Kennel Path and there breathed a prayer for her mother, where a mother’s arms had first enfolded her, and a mother’s kisses won her love. What she did add was, “I often come here.”
“I know you do,” the Honourable Bob answered, with a look of admiration. “I assure you, Miss Mary, I could astonish you with the things I know about you!”
“Really!”
“Oh, yes. Really.”
There was a significant chuckle in his voice which brought the blood to her check. But she was determined to ignore its meaning. “You are observant?” she said.
“Of those—yes, by Jove, I am—of those, I—admire,” he rejoined. He had it on his tongue to say “those I love,” but she turned her eyes on him at the critical moment, and though he was doing a thing he had often done, and he had impudence enough, his tongue failed him. There are women so naturally modest that until the one man who awakens the heart appears, it seems an outrage to speak to them of love. Mary Vermuyden, perhaps by reason of her bringing up, was one of these; and though Flixton had had little to do with women of her kind, he recognised the fact and bowed to it. He came, having her father’s leave to speak to her; yet he found himself less at his ease, than on many a less legitimate occasion. “Yes, by Jove,” he repeated. “I observe them, I can tell you.”
Mary laughed. “Some are more quick to notice than others,” she said.
“And to notice some than others!” he rejoined, gallantly. “That is what I mean. Now that old girl who is with you——”
“Miss Sibson?” Mary said, setting him right with some stiffness.
“Yes! Well, she isn’t young! Anyway, you don’t suppose I could say what she wore yesterday! But what you wore, Miss Mary”—trying to catch her eye and ogle her—“ah, couldn’t I! But then you don’t wear powder on your nose, nor need it!”
“I don’t wear it,” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “But you don’t know what I may do some day! And for Miss Sibson, it does not matter, Mr. Flixton, what she wears. She has one of the kindest hearts, and was one of the kindest friends I had—or could have had—when things were different with me.”
“Oh, yes, good old girl,” he rejoined, “but snubby! Bitten my nose off two or three times, I know. And, come now, not quite an angel, you know, Miss Mary!”
“Well,” she replied, smiling, “she is not, perhaps, an angel to look at. But——”
“She can’t be! For she is not like you!” he cried. “And you are one, Miss Mary! You are the angel for me!” looking at her with impassioned eyes. “I’ll never want another nor ask to see one!”
His look frightened her; she began to think he meant—something. And she took a new way with him. “How singular it is,” she said, thoughtfully, “that people say those things in society! Because they sound so very silly to one who has not lived in your world!”
“Silly!” Flixton replied, in a tone of mortification; and for a moment he felt the check. He was really in love, to a moderate extent; and on the way to be more deeply in love were he thwarted. Therefore he was, to a moderate extent, afraid of her. And, “Silly?” he repeated. “Oh, but I mean it, so help me! I do, indeed! It’s not silly to call you an angel, for I swear you are as beautiful as one! That’s true, anyway!”
“How many have you seen?” she asked, ridiculing him. “And what coloured wings had they?” But her cheek was hot. “Don’t say, if you please,” she continued, before he could speak, “that you’ve seen me. Because that is only saying over again what you’ve said, Mr. Flixton. And that is worse than silly. It is dull.”
“Miss Mary,” he cried, pathetically, “you don’t understand me! I want to assure you—I want to make you understand——”
“Hush!” she said, cutting him short, in an earnest whisper. And, halting, she extended a hand behind her to stay him. “Please don’t speak!” she continued. “Do you see them, the beauties? Flying round and round the tree after one another faster than your eyes can follow them. One, two, three—three squirrels! I never saw one, do you know, until I came here,” she went on, in a tone of hushed rapture. “And until now I never saw them at play. Oh, who could harm them?”
He stood behind her, biting his lip with vexation; and wholly untouched by the scene, which, whether her raptures were feigned or not, was warrant for them. Hitherto he had had to do with women who met him halfway; who bridled at a compliment, were alive to anéquivoque, and knew how to simulate, if they did not feel, a soft confusion under his gaze. For this reason Mary’s backwardness, her apparent unconsciousness that they were not friends of the same sex, puzzled him, nay, angered him. As she stood before him, a hand still extended to check his advance, the sunshine which filtered through the beech leaves cast a soft radiance on her figure. She seemed more dainty, more graceful, more virginal than aught that he had ever conceived. It was in vain that he told himself, with irritation, that she was but a girl after all. That, under her aloofness, she was a woman like the others, as vain, passionate, flighty, as jealous as other women. He knew that he stood in awe of her. He knew that the words which he had uttered so lightly many a time—ay, and to those to whom he had no right to address them—stuck in his throat now. He wanted to say “I love you!” and he had the right to say it, he was commissioned to say it. Yet he was dumb. All the boldness which he had exhibited in her presence in Queen’s Square—where another had stood tongue-tied—was gone.
He took at last a desperate step. The girl was within arm’s reach of him; her delicate waist, the creamy white of her slender neck, invited him. Be she never so innocent, never so maidenly, a kiss, he told himself, would awaken her. It was his experience, it was a scrap drawn from his store of worldly wisdom, that a woman kissed was a woman won.
True, as he thought of it, his heart began to riot, as it had not rioted from that cause since he had kissed the tobacconist’s daughter at Exeter, his first essay in gallantry. But only the bold deserve the fair! And how often had he boasted that, where women were concerned, lips were made for other things than talking!
And—in a moment it was done.
Twice! Then she slipped from his grasp, and stood at bay, with flaming checks and eyes that—that had certainly not ceased to be virginal. “You! You!” she cried, barely able to articulate. “Don’t touch me!”
She had been taken utterly, wholly by surprise; and the shock was immensely increased by the facts of her bringing up and the restraints and conditions of school-life. In his grasp, with his breath on her cheek, all those notions about ravening wolves and the danger which attached to beauty in low places—notions no longer applicable, had she taken time to reason—returned upon her in force. The man had kissed her!
“How—-how dare you?” she continued, trembling with rage and indignation.
“But your father——”
“How dare you——”
“Your father sent me,” he pleaded, quite crestfallen. “He gave me leave——”
She stared at him, as at a madman. “To insult me?” she cried.
“No, but—but you won’t understand!” he answered, almost querulously. He was quite chapfallen. “You don’t listen to me. I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife. Your father said I might come to you, and—and ask you. And—and you’ll say ‘Yes,’ won’t you? That’s a good girl!”
“Never!” she answered.
He stared at her, turning red. “Oh, nonsense!” he stammered. And he made as if he would go nearer. “You don’t mean it. My dear girl! Listen to me! I do love you! I do indeed! And I—I tell you what it is, I never loved any woman——”
But she looked at him in such a way that he could not go on. “Do not say those things!” she said. And her austerity was terrible to him. “And go, if you please. My father, if he sent you to me——”
“He did!”
“Then he did not,” she replied with dignity, “understand my feelings.”
“But—but you must marry someone,” he complained. “You know—you’re making a great fuss about nothing!”
“Nothing!” she cried, her eyes sparkling. “You insult me, Mr. Flixton, and——”
“If a man may not kiss the girl he wants to marry——”
“If she does not want to marry him?”
“But it’s not as bad as that,” he pleaded. “No, by Jove, it’s not. You’ll not be so cruel. Come, Miss Mary, listen to me a minute. You must marry someone, you know. You are young, and I’m sure you have the right to choose——”
“I’ve heard enough,” she struck in, interrupting him with something of Sir Robert’s hauteur. “I understand now what you meant, and I forgive you. But I can never be anything to you, Mr. Flixton——”
“You can be everything to me,” he declared. It couldn’t, it really couldn’t be that she meant to refuse him! Finally and altogether!
“But you can be nothing to me!” she answered, cruelly—very cruelly for her, but her cheek was tingling. “Nothing! Nothing! And that being so, I beg that you will leave me now.”
He looked at her with a mixture of supplication, resentment, chagrin.
But she showed no sign of relenting. “You really—you really do mean it?” he muttered, with a sickly smile. “Come, Miss Mary!”
“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried, as if his words pained her. And that was all. “Please go! Or I shall go.”
The Honourable Bob’s conceit had been so far taken out of him that he felt that he could make no farther fight. He could see no sign of relenting, and feeling that, with all his experience, he had played his cards ill, he turned away sullenly. “Oh, I will go,” he said. And he longed to add something witty and careless. But he could not add anything. He, Bob Flixton, the hero of so manybonnes fortunes, to be refused! He had laid his all, andpour le bon motifat the feet of a girl who but yesterday was a little schoolmistress. And she had refused him! It was incredible! But, alas, it was also fact.
Mary, the moment his back was turned, hurried with downcast face towards the Kennels; to hide her hot cheeks and calm her feelings in the depths of the shrubbery. Oddly enough, her first thoughts were less of that which had just happened to her than of that suit which had been paid to her months before. This man might love her or not; she could not tell. But Arthur Vaughan had loved her: the fashion of this love taught her to prize the fashion of that.
He had loved her. And if he had treated her as Mr. Flixton had treated her? Would she have held to him, she wondered. She believed that she would. But the mere thought set her knees trembling, made her cheeks flame afresh, filled her with rapture. So that, shamefaced, frightened, glancing this way and that, as one hunted, she longed to be safe in her room, there to cry at her ease.
Doubtless it was natural that the incident should turn her thoughts to that other love-making; and presently to her father’s furious dislike of that other lover. She could not understand that dislike; for the Bill and the Borough, Franchise or No Franchise, were nothing to her. And the grievance, when Sir Robert had essayed to explain it, had been nothing. To her mind, Trafalgar and Waterloo and the greatness of England were the work of Nelson and Wellington—at the remotest, perhaps, of Mr. Pitt and Lord Castlereagh. She could not enter into the reasoning which attributed these and all other blessings of her country to a System! To a System which it seemed her lover was pledged to overthrow.
She walked until the tumult of her thoughts had somewhat abated; and then, still yearning for the security of her own chamber, she made for the house. She saw nothing of Flixton, no one was stirring. Already she thought herself safe; and it was the very spirit of mischief which brought her, at the corner of the church, face to face with her father. Sir Robert’s brow was clouded, and the “My dear, one moment,” with which he stayed her, was pitched in a more decisive tone than he commonly used to her.
“I wish to speak to you, Mary,” he continued. “Will you come with me to the library?”
She would fain have postponed the discussion of Mr. Flixton’s proposal, which she foresaw. But her father, affectionate and gentle as he was, was still unfamiliar; and she had not the courage to make her petition. So she accompanied him, with a sinking heart, to the library. And, when he pointed to a seat, she was glad to sit down.
He took up his own position on the hearth rug; whence he looked at her gravely before he spoke. At length:
“My dear,” he said, “I’m sorry for this! Though I do not blame you. I think that you do not understand, owing to those drawbacks of your early life, which have otherwise, thank God, left so slight a mark upon you, that there are things which at your time of life you must leave to—to the decision of your elders.”
She looked at him. And there was not that complete docility in her look which he expected to find. “I don’t think I understand, sir,” she murmured.
“But you can easily understand this, Mary,” he replied. “That young girls of your age, without experience of life or of—of the darker side of things, cannot be allowed to judge for themselves on all occasions. There are sometimes circumstances to be weighed which it is not possible to detail to them.”
She closed her eyes for an instant, to collect her thoughts.
“But—but, sir,” she said, “you cannot wish me to have no will—no choice—in a matter which affects me so nearly.”
“No,” he said, speaking seriously and with something approaching sternness. “But that will and that choice must be guided. They should be guided. Your feelings are natural—God forbid that I should think them otherwise! But you must leave the decision to me.”
She looked at him, aghast. She had heard, but had never believed, that in the upper classes matches were arranged after this fashion. But to have no will and no choice in such a thing as marriage! She must be dreaming.
“You cannot,” he continued, looking at her firmly but not unkindly, “have either the knowledge of the past,” with a slight grimace, as of pain, “or the experience needful to enable you to measure the result of the step you take. You must, therefore, let your seniors decide for you.”
“But I could never—never,” she answered, with a deep blush, “marry a man without—liking him, sir.”
“Marry?” Sir Robert repeated. He stared at her.
She returned the look. “I thought, sir,” she faltered, with a still deeper blush, “that you were talking of that.”
“My dear,” he said, gravely, “I am referring to the subject on which I understood that you requested Miss Sibson to speak to me.”
“My mother?” she whispered, the colour fading quickly from her face.
He paused a moment. Then, “You would oblige me,” he said, slowly and formally, “by calling her Lady Sybil Vermuyden. And not—that.”
“But she is—my mother,” she persisted.
He looked at her, his head slightly bowed, his lower lip thrust out. “Listen,” he said, with decision. “What you propose—to go to her, I mean—is impossible. Impossible, you understand. There must be an end of any thought of it!” His tone was cold, but not unkind. “The thing must not be mentioned again, if you please,” he added.
She was silent a while. Then, “Why, sir?” she asked. She spoke tremulously, and with an effort. But he had not expected her to speak at all.
Yet he merely continued, as he stood on the hearth rug, to look at her askance. “That is for me,” he said, “to decide.”
“But——”
“But I will tell you,” he said, stiffly. “Because she has already ruined part of your life!”
“I forgive her, from my heart!” Mary cried.
“And ruined, also,” he continued, putting the interruption aside, “a great part of mine. At your age I do not think fit to tell you—all. It is enough, that she has robbed me of you, and deceived me. Deceived me,” he repeated, more bitterly, “through long years when you, my daughter, might have been my comfort and—” he ended, almost inaudibly, “my joy.”
He turned his back on her with the word and began to walk the room, his chin sunk on his breast, his hands clasped. It was clear to Mary, watching him with loving, pitying eyes, that his thoughts were with the unhappy past, with the short fever, the ignoble contentions of his married life, or with the lonely, soured years which had followed. She felt that he was laying to his wife’s charge the wreck of his life, and the slow dry-rot which had sapped hope, and strength, and development.
Mary waited until his step trod the carpet less hurriedly. Then, as he paused to turn, she stepped forward.
“Yet, sir—forgive her!” she cried. And there were warm tears in her voice.
He turned and looked at her. Possibly he was astonished at her persistence.
“Never!” he said in a tone of finality. “Never! Let that be the end.”
But Mary had been dreaming of this moment for days. And she had resolved that, come what might, though he frown, though his tone grow hard and his eye angry, though he bring to bear on her the stern command of his eagle visage, she would not be found lacking a second time. She would not again give way to her besetting weakness, and spend sleepless nights in futile remorse. Diffidence in the lonely schoolmistress had been pardonable, had been natural. But now, if she were indeed sprung from those who had a right to hold their heads above the crowd, if the doffed hats which greeted her when she went abroad, in the streets of Chippinge as well as in the lanes and roads,—if these meant anything—shame on her if she proved craven.
“It cannot be the end, sir,” she said, in a low voice. “For she is—still my mother. And she is alone and ill—and she needs me.”
He had begun to pace the room anew, this time with an impatient, angry step. But at that he stood and faced her, and she needed all her courage to support the gloom of his look. “How do you know?” he said. For Miss Sibson, discharging an ungrateful task, had not entered into details. “Have you seen her?”
She felt that she must judge for herself; and though her mother had said something to the contrary, and hitherto she had obeyed her, she thought it best to tell all. “Yes, sir,” she said.
“When?”
“A fortnight ago?” She trembled under the growing darkness of his look.
“Here?”
“In the grounds, sir.”
“And you never told me!” he cried. “You never told me!” he repeated, with a strange glance, a glance which strove with terror to discern the mother’s features in the daughter’s face. “You, too—you, too, have begun to deceive me!”
And he threw up his hands in despair.
“Oh, no! no!” Mary cried, infinitely distressed.
“But you have!” he rejoined. “You have kept this from me.”
“Only, believe me, sir,” she cried, eagerly, “until I could find a fitting time.”
“And now you want to go to her!” he answered, unheeding. “She has suborned you! She, who has done the greatest wrong to you, has now done the last wrong to me!”
He began again to pace up and down the room.
“Oh, no! no!” she sobbed.
“It is so!” he answered, darting an angry glance at her. “It is so! But I shall not let you go! Do you hear, girl? I shall not let you go! I have suffered enough,” he continued, with a gesture which called those walls to witness to the humiliations, the sorrows, the loneliness, from which he had sought refuge within them. “I will not—suffer again! You shall not go!”
She was full of love for him, and of pity. She understood even that gesture, and the past wretchedness to which it bore witness. And she yearned to comfort him, and to convince him that nothing that had gone before, nothing that could happen in the future, would set her against him. Had he been seated, she would have knelt and kissed his hand, or cast herself on his breast and his love, and won him to her. But as he walked she could not approach him, she did not know how to soften him. Yet her duty was clear. It lay beside her dying mother. Nevertheless, if he forbade her to go, if he withstood her, how was she to perform it?
At length, “But if she be dying, sir,” she murmured. “Will you not then let me see her?”
He looked at her from under his heavy eyebrows. “I tell you, I will not let you go!” he said stubbornly. “She has forfeited her right to you. When she made you die to me—you died to her! That is my decision. You hear me? And now—now,” he continued, returning in a measure to composure, “let there be an end!”
She stood silenced, but not conquered; knowing him more intimately than she had known him before; and loving him not less, but more, since pity and sympathy entered into her love and drove out fear; but assured that he was wrong. It could not be her duty to forsake: it must be his duty to forgive. But for the present she saw that in spite of all his efforts he was cruelly agitated, that she had stirred pangs long lulled to rest, that he had borne as much as he could bear. And she would not press him farther for the time.
Meanwhile he, as he stood fingering his trembling lips, was trying to bring the cunning of age to bear. He was silently forming his plan. She had been too much alone, he reflected; that was it. He had forgotten that she was young, and that change and movement and life and gaiety were needful for her. This about—that woman—was an obsession, an unwholesome fancy, which a few days in a new place, and amid lively scenes, would weaken and perhaps remove. And by and by, when he thought that he could trust his voice, he spoke.
“I said, let there be an end! But—you are all I have,” he continued, with emotion, “and I will say instead, let this be for a time. I must have time to think. You want—there are many things you want that you ought to have—frocks, laces, and gew-gaws,” he added, with a sickly smile, “and I know not what, that you cannot get here, nor I choose for you. Lady Worcester has offered to take you with her to town—she goes the day after to-morrow. I was uncertain this morning whether to send you or not, whether I could spare you or not. Now, I say, go. Go, and when you return, Mary, we will talk again.”
“And then,” she said, pleading softly, “you will let me go!”
“Never!” he cried, lifting his head in a sudden, uncontrollable recurrence of rage. “But there, there! There! there! I shall have thought it over—more at leisure. Perhaps! I don’t know! I will tell you then. I will think it over.”
She saw with clear eyes that this was an evasion, that he was deceiving her. But she felt no resentment, only pity. She had no reason to think that her mother needed her on the instant. And much was gained by the mere discussion of the subject. At least he promised to consider it: and though he meant nothing now, perhaps when he was alone he would think of it, and more pitifully. Yes, she was sure he would.
“I will go, if you wish it,” she said, submissively. She would show herself obedient in all things lawful.
“I do wish it,” he answered. “My daughter must know her way about. Go, and Lady Worcester will take care of you. And when—when you come back we will talk. You will have things to prepare, my dear,” he continued, avoiding her eyes, “a good deal to prepare, I dare say, since this is sudden, and you had better go now. I think that is all.”