LADY CONNIE.BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the United States of America.
BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.
Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the United States of America.
Constance Bledlow stepped out of the Bletchley train into the crowded Oxford station. Annette was behind her. As they made their way towards the luggage van, Connie saw a beckoning hand and face. They belonged to Nora Hooper, and in another minute Connie found herself taken possession of by her cousin. Nora was deeply sunburnt. Her colour was more garishly red and brown, her manner more trenchant than ever. At sight of Connie her face flushed with a sudden smile, as though the owner of the face could not help it. Yet they had only been a few minutes together before Connie had discovered that, beneath the sunburn, there was a look of tension and distress, and that the young brown eyes, usually so bright and bold, were dulled with fatigue. But to notice such things in Nora was only to be scorned. Connie held her tongue.
‘Can’t you leave Annette to bring the luggage, and let us walk up?’ said Nora.
Connie assented, and the two girls were soon in the long and generally crowded street leading to the Corn-market. Nora gave rapidly a little necessary information. Term had just begun, and Oxford was ‘dreadfully full.’ She had got another job of copying work at the Bodleian, for which she was being paid by the University Press, and what with that and the work for her coming exam., she was ‘pretty driven.’ But she liked it; that was what suited her. Alice and her mother were ‘all right.’
‘And Uncle Ewen?’ said Connie.
Nora paused a moment.
‘Well, you won’t think he looks any the better for his holiday,’ she said at last, with an attempt at a laugh. ‘And of course he’s doing ten times too much work. Hang work! I loathe work: I want to “do nothing for ever and ever.”’
‘Why don’t you set about it, then?’ laughed Connie.
‘Because⸺’ Nora began impetuously; and then shut her lips. She diverged to the subject of Mr. Pryce. They hadnot seen or heard anything of him for weeks, she said, till he had paid them an evening call, the night before—the first evening of the new term.
Connie interrupted.
‘Oh, but that reminds me,’ she said eagerly. ‘I’ve got an awfully nice letter—to-day—from Lord Glaramara. Mr. Pryce is to go up and see him.’
Nora whistled.
‘You have! Well, that settles it. He’ll now graciously allow himself to propose. And then we shall all pretend to be greatly astonished. Alice will cry, and mother will say, “She never expected to lose her daughter so soon”—etc. What a humbug everybody is!’ said the child, bitterly, with more emphasis than grammar.
‘But suppose he doesn’t get anything!’ cried Connie, alarmed at such a sudden jump from the possible to the certain.
‘Oh, but he will! He’s the kind of person that gets things,’ said Nora contemptuously. ‘Well, we wanted a bit of good news!’
Connie jumped at the opening.
‘Dear Nora!—have things been going wrong? You look awfully tired. Do tell me!’
Nora checked herself at once. ‘Oh, not much more than usual,’ she said repellently. ‘And what about you, Connie? Aren’t you very bored to be coming back here, after all your grand times?’
They had emerged into the Corn. Before them was the old Church of St. Mary Magdalen, and the modern pile of Balliol. In the distance stretched the Broad, over which the October evening was darkening fast; the Sheldonian in the far distance, with its statued railing; and the gates of Trinity on the left. The air was full of bells, and the streets of undergraduates; a stream of young men taking fresh possession, as it were, of the grey city, which was their own as soon as they chose to come back to it. The Oxford damp, the Oxford mist was everywhere, pierced by lamps, and window-lights, and the last red of a stormy sunset.
Connie drew in her breath.
‘No, I am not sorry. I am very glad to be back—though my aunts have been great dears to me.’
‘I’ll bet anything Annette isn’t glad to be back—after the Langmoors!’ said Nora, grimly.
Connie laughed.
‘She’ll soon settle in. What do you think?’ She slipped her arm into her cousin’s. ‘I’m coming down to breakfast!’
‘You’re not! I never heard such nonsense! Why should you?’
Connie sighed.
‘I think I must begin to do something.’
‘Do something! For goodness’ sake, don’t!’ Nora’s voice was fierce. ‘I did thinkyoumight be trusted!’
‘To carry outyourideals? So kind of you!’
‘If you take to muddling about with books and lectures and wearing ugly clothes, I give you up,’ said Nora, firmly.
‘Nora, dear, I’m the most shocking ignoramus. Mayn’t I learn something?’
‘Mr. Sorell may teach you Greek. I don’t mind that.’
Connie sighed again, and Nora stole a look at the small pale face under the sailor hat. It seemed to her that her cousin had somehow grown beautiful in these months of absence. On her arrival in May, Connie’s good looks had been a freakish and variable thing, which could be often and easily disputed. She could always make a certain brilliant—or bizarre—effect, by virtue of her mere slenderness and delicacy—combined with the startling beauty of her eyes and hair. But the touch of sarcasm, of a half-hostile remoteness, in her look and manner, were often enough to belie the otherwise delightful impression of first youth, to suggest something older and sharper than her twenty years had any right to be. It meant that she had been brought up in a world of elder people, sharing from her teens in its half amused, half sceptical judgments of men and things. Nothing was to be seen of it in her roused moments of pleasure or enthusiasm; at other times it jarred, as though one caught a glimpse of autumn in the spring.
But since she and Nora had last met, something had happened. Some heat of feeling or of sympathy had fused in her the elements of being; so that a more human richness and warmth, a deeper and tenderer charm breathed from her whole aspect. Nora, though so much the younger, had hitherto been the comforter and sustainer of Connie; now for the first time, the tired girl felt an impulse—firmly held back—to throw her arms round Connie’s neck, and tell her own troubles.
She did not betray it however. There were so many things she wanted to know. First—how was it that Connie had come back so soon? Nora understood there were invitations—to the Tamworths’ and others. Mr. Sorell had reported that the Langmoors wished to carry their niece with them on a round of country-house visits in the autumn, and that Connie had firmly stuck to it that she was due at Oxford for the beginning of term.
‘Why didn’t you go?’ said Nora, half scoffing—‘with all those frocks wasting in the drawers!’
Connie retorted that as for parties, Oxford had seemed to her in the summer term the most gay and giddy place she had ever been in, and that she had always understood that in the October and Lent terms people dined out every night.
‘But all the same—one canthinka little here,’ she said, slowly.
‘You didn’t care a bit about that when you first came!’ cried Nora. ‘You despised us because we weren’t soldiers, or diplomats, or politicians. You thought we were a little priggish provincial world where nothing mattered. You were sorry for us because we hadonlybooks and ideas!’
‘I wasn’t!’ said Connie, indignantly. ‘Only I didn’t think Oxford was everything—and it isn’t! Nora!’—she looked round the Oxford street with a sudden ardour, her eyes running over the groups of undergraduates hurrying back to hall—‘do you think these English boys could ever—well,fight—anddie—for what you call ideas—for their country—as Otto Radowitz could die for Poland?’
‘Try them!’ The reply rang out defiantly. Connie laughed.
‘They’ll never have the chance. Who’ll ever attack England? If we had only something—something splendid, and not too far away!—to look back upon, as the Italians look back on Garibaldi—or to long and to suffer for, as the Poles long and suffer for Poland!’
‘We shall some day!’ said Nora, hopefully. ‘Mr. Sorell says every nation gets its turn to fight for its life. I suppose Otto Radowitz has been talking Poland to you?’
‘He talks it—and helivesit,’ said Connie, with emphasis. ‘It’s marvellous!—it shames one.’
Nora shrugged her shoulders.
‘But what can hedo—with his poor hand! You know Mr. Sorell has taken a cottage for him at Boar’s Hill—above Hinksey?’
Yes, Connie knew. She seemed suddenly on her guard.
‘But he can’t live alone?’ said Nora. ‘Who on earth’s going to look after him?’
Connie hesitated. Down a side street she perceived the stately front of Marmion, and at the same moment a tall man emerging from the dusk crossed the street and entered the Marmion gate. Her heart leapt. No! Absurd! He and Otto had not arrived yet. But already the Oxford dark, and the beautiful Oxford distances were peopled for her with visions and prophecies ofhope. The old and famous city that had seen so much youth bloom and pass, spoke magic things to her with its wise, friendly voice.
Aloud, she said—
‘You haven’t heard? Mr. Falloden’s going to live with him.’
Nora stopped in stupefaction.
‘What?’
Connie repeated the information—adding—
‘I daresay Mr. Sorell didn’t speak of it to you, because—he hates it.’
‘I suppose it’s just a theatricalcoup,’ said Nora, passionately, as they walked on—‘to impress the public.’
‘It isn’t!—it isn’t anything of the kind. And Otto had only to say No.’
‘It’s ridiculous!—preposterous! They’ll clash all day long.’
Connie replied with difficulty, as though she had so pondered and discussed this matter with herself that every opinion about it seemed equally reasonable.
‘I don’t think so. Otto wishes it.’
‘But why—butwhy?’ insisted Nora. ‘Oh, Connie!—as if Douglas Falloden could look after anybody but himself!’
Then she repented a little. Connie smiled, rather coldly.
‘He looked after his father,’ she said, quietly. ‘I told you all that in my letters. And you forget how it was—that he and Otto came across each other again.’
Nora warmly declared that she had not forgotten it, but that it did not seem to her to have anything to do with the extraordinary proposal that the man more responsible than anyone else for the maiming—possibly for the death—of Otto Radowitz, if all one heard about him were true, should be now installed as his companion and guardian during these critical months.
She talked with obvious and rather angry common sense, as one who had not passed her eighteenth birthday for nothing.
But Connie fell silent. She would not discuss it, and Nora was obliged to let the subject drop.
Mrs. Hooper, whose pinched face had grown visibly older, received her husband’s niece with an evident wish to be kind. Alice, too, was almost affectionate, and Uncle Ewen came hurrying out of his study to greet her. But Connie had not been an hour in the house before she had perceived that everybody in it was preoccupied and unhappy; unless, indeed, it were Alice, who hadevidently private thoughts of her own, which, to a certain extent, released her from the family worries.
What was the matter? She was determined to know.
It happened that she and Alice went up to bed together. Nora had been closeted with her father in the little school-room on the ground-floor, since nine o’clock, and when Connie proposed to look in and wish them good-night, Alice said uncomfortably—
‘Better not. They’re—they’re very busy.’
Connie ruminated. At the top of the stairs, she turned—
‘Look here—do come in to me, and have a talk!’
Alice agreed, after a moment’s hesitation. There had never been any beginnings of intimacy between her and Connie, and she took Connie’s advance awkwardly.
The two girls were however soon seated in Connie’s room where a blazing fire defied the sudden cold of a raw and bleak October. The light danced on Alice’s beady black eyes and arched brows, on her thin but very red lips, on the bright patch of colour in each cheek. She was more than ever like a Watteau sketch in black chalk, heightened with red, and the dress she wore, cut after the pattern of an eighteenth century sacque, according to an Oxford fashion of that day, fell in admirably with the natural effect. Connie had very soon taken off her tea-gown, loosened and shaken out her hair, and put on a white garment in which she felt at ease. Alice noticed, as Nora had done, that Connie was fast becoming a beauty; but whether the indisputable fact was to be welcomed or resented had still to be decided.
Connie had no sooner settled herself on the small sofa she had managed to fit into her room than she sprang up again:—
‘Stupid!—Wherearethose letters!’ She rummaged in various drawers and bags, hit upon what she wanted, after an impetuous hunt, and returned to the fire.
‘Do you know I think Mr. Pryce has a good chance of that post? I got this to-day.’
She held out a letter, smiling. Alice flushed and took it. It was from Lord Glaramara, and it concerned that same post in the Conservative Central Office on which Herbert Pryce had had his eyes for some time. The man holding it had been ‘going’ for months, but was now, at last, gone. The post was vacant, and Connie, who had a pretty natural turn for wire-pulling, fostered by her Italian bringing up, had been trying her hand, both with the Chancellor and her Uncle Langmoor.
‘You little intriguer!’ wrote Lord Glaramara—‘I will do whatI can. Your man sounds very suitable. If he isn’t, I can tell you plainly, he won’t get the post. Neither political party can afford to employ fools just now. But if he is what you say—well, we shall see! Send him up to see me, at the House of Lords, almost any evening next week. He’ll have to take his chance, of course, of finding me free. If I cotton to him, I’ll send him on to somebody else. And—don’t talk about it! Your letter was just like your mother. She had an art of doing these things!’
Alice read and re-read the note. When she looked up from it, it was with a rather fluttered face.
‘Awfully good of you, Connie! May I show it—to Mr. Pryce?’
‘Yes—but get it back. Tell him to write to Lord Glaramara—to-morrow. Well, now then’—Connie discovered and lit a cigarette, the sight of which stirred in Alice a kind of fascinated disapproval,—‘now then, tell me what’s the matter!—why Uncle Ewen looks as if he hadn’t had a day’s rest since last term, and Nora’s so glum—and why he and she go sitting up at night together when they ought to be in their beds?’
Connie’s little woman-of-the-world air—very evident in this speech—which had always provoked Alice in their earlier acquaintance, passed now unnoticed. Miss Hooper sat perplexed and hesitating, staring into the fire. But with that note in her pocket, Alice felt herself at once in a new and detached position towards her family.
‘It’s money, of course,’ she said at last, her white brow puckering. ‘It’s not only bills—they’re dreadfully worrying!—we seem never to get free from them, but it’s something else—something quite new—which has only happened lately. There was an old loan from the bank, that has been going on for years. Father had almost forgotten it, and now they’re pressing him. It’s dreadful! They know we’re so hard up.’
Connie in her turn looked perplexed. It was always difficult for her to realise financial trouble on a small scale. Ruin on the Falloden scale was intelligible to one who had heard much talk of the bankruptcies of some of the great Roman families, owing to the building speculations of Rome, after 1870. But the carking care that may come from lack of a few hundred pounds, this the Risboroughs’ daughter had to learn; and she put her mind to it, eagerly.
She propped her small chin on her hands, while Alice told her tale. Apparently the improvement in the family finance, caused by Connie’s three hundred, had been the merest temporary thing.The Reader’s creditors had been held off for a few months; but the rain of tradesmen’s letters had been lately incessant. And the situation had been greatly worsened by a blow which had fallen just before the opening of term.
In a former crisis, five years before this date, a compassionate cousin, one of the few well-to-do relations that Mrs. Hooper possessed, had come to the rescue, and had given his name to the Hoopers’ bankers as guarantee for a loan of £500. The loan was to have been repaid by yearly instalments. But the instalments had not been paid, and the cousin had most unexpectedly died of apoplexy during September, after three days’ illness. His heir would have nothing to say to the guarantee, and the bank was pressing for repayment, in terms made all the harsher by the existence of an over-draft, which the local manager knew in his financial conscience ought not to have been allowed. His letters were now so many sword-thrusts; and post-time was a time of terror.
‘Father doesn’t know what to do,’ said Alice despondently. ‘He and Nora spend all their time trying to think of some way out. Father got his salary the other day, and never put it into the bank at all. We must have something to live on. None’—she hesitated—‘none of the tradesmen will give us any credit.’ She flushed deeply over the confession.
‘Goodness!’ said Connie, opening her eyes still wider.
‘But if Nora knows that I’ve been telling you’—cried Alice-‘she’ll never forgive me. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you. But how can you help knowing? If Father’s made a bankrupt, it wouldn’t be very nice for you! How could you go on living with us? Nora thinks she’s going to earn money—that Father can sell two wretched little books—and we can go and live in a tiny house on the Cowley Road—and—and—all sorts of absurd things!’
‘But why is it Nora that has to settle all these things?’ asked Connie in bewilderment. ‘Why doesn’t your mother⸺’
‘Oh, because mother doesn’t know anything about the bills,’ interrupted Alice. ‘She never can do a sum—or add up anything—and I’m no use at it either. Nora took it all over last year, and she won’t let even me help her. She makes out the most wonderful statements—she made out a fresh one to-day—that’s why she had a headache when she came to meet you. But what’s the good of statements? They won’t pay the bank.’
‘But why—why⸺’ repeated Connie, and then stopped, lest she should hurt Alice’s feelings.
‘Why did we get into debt? I’m sure I don’t know!’ Aliceshook her head helplessly. ‘We never seemed to have anything extravagant.’
These things were beyond Connie’s understanding. She gave it up. But her mind impetuously ran forward.
‘How much is wanted—altogether?’
Alice, reluctantly, named a sum not much short of a thousand pounds.
‘Isn’t it awful?’
She sighed deeply. Yet already she seemed to be talking of other people’s affairs!
‘We can’t ever do it. It’s hopeless. Papa’s taken two little school-books to do. They’ll kill him with work, and will hardly bring in anything. And he’s full up with horrid exams and lectures. He’ll break down, and it all makes him so miserable, because he can’t really do the work the University pays him to do. And he’s never been abroad—even to Rome. And as to Greece! It’s dreadful!’ she repeated mechanically.
Connie sprang up and began to pace the little room. The firelight played on her mop of brown hair, bringing out its golden shades, and on the charming pensiveness of her face. Alice watched her, thinking—‘Shecould do it all, if she chose!’ But she didn’t dare to say anything, for fear of Nora.
Presently Connie gave a great stretch.
‘It’s damnable!’ she said, with energy.
Alice’s instinct recoiled from the strong word. It wasn’t the least necessary, she thought, to talk in that way.
Connie made a good many more enquiries—elicited a good many more facts. Then suddenly she brought her pacing to a stop.
‘Look here—we must go to bed!—or Nora will be after us.’
Alice went obediently. As soon as the door had shut upon her, Connie went to a drawer in her writing-table, and took out her bank-book. It had been returned that morning and she had not troubled to look at it. There was always enough for what she wanted.
Heavens!—what a balance. She had quite forgotten a windfall which had befallen her lately—some complicated transaction relating to a great industrial company in which she had shares—which had lately been giving birth to other subsidiary companies, and somehow the original shareholders, of whom Lord Risborough had been one, or their heirs and representatives, had profited greatly by the business. It had all been managed for her by her father’s lawyer, and of course by Uncle Ewen. The money had been paidtemporarily into her own account, till the lawyer had made some further enquiries about a fresh investment they recommended.
But it was her own money. She was entitled—under the terms of her father’s letter to Uncle Ewen—to do what she liked with it. And even without it, there was enough in the bank. Enough for this—and for another purpose also, which lay even closer to her heart.
‘I don’t want any more new gowns for six months,’ she decided peremptorily. ‘It’s disgusting to be so well off. Well, now,—I wonder—I wonder where Nora keeps those statements that Alice talks about?’
In the school-room of course. But not under lock and key. Nobody ever locked drawers in that house. It was part of the general happy-go-luckishness of the family.
Connie made up the fire, and sat over it, thinking hard. A new cheque-book, too, had arrived with the bank-book. That was useful.
She waited till she heard the study door open, and Nora come upstairs, followed soon by the slow and weary step of Uncle Ewen. Connie had already lowered her gas before Nora reached the top landing.
The house was very soon silent. Connie turned her light on again, and waited. By the time Big Ben had struck one o’clock, she thought it would be safe to venture.
She opened her door with trembling, careful fingers, slipped off her shoes, took a candle and stole downstairs. The school-room door creaked odiously. But soon she was inside and looking about her.
There was Nora’s table, piled high with the books and note-books of her English literature work. Everything else had been put away. But the top drawer of the table was unlocked. There was a key in it, but it would not turn, being out of repair, like so much else in the house.
Connie, full of qualms, slowly opened the drawer. It was horrid—horrid—to do such things!—but what other way was there? Nora must be presented with thefait accompli, otherwise she would upset everything—poor old darling!
Some loose sheets lay on the top of the papers in the drawer. The first was covered with figures and calculations that told nothing. Connie lifted it, and there, beneath, lay Nora’s latest ‘statement,’ at which she and her father had no doubt been working that very night. It was headed ‘List of liabilities,’ and in it every debt, headed by the Bank claim which had broken the family back, wasaccurately and clearly stated in Nora’s best hand. The total at the foot evoked a low whistle from Connie. How had it come about? In spite of her luxurious bringing up, there was a shrewd element—an element of competence—in the girl’s developing character, which was inclined to suggest that there need be no more difficulty in living on seven hundred a year than seven thousand, if you knew you had to do it. Then she rebuked herself fiercely for a prig—‘You just try it!—you Pharisee, you!’ And she thought of her own dressmakers’ and milliners’ bills, and became in the end quite pitiful over Aunt Ellen’s moderation. After all it might have been two thousand instead of one! Of course it was all Aunt Ellen’s muddling, and Uncle Ewen’s absent-mindedness.
She shaded her candle, and in a guilty hurry copied down the total on a slip of paper lying on the table, and took the address of Uncle Ewen’s bank, from the outside of the pass-book lying beside the bills. Having done that, she closed the drawer again, and crept upstairs like the criminal she felt herself. Her small feet in their thin stockings seemed to her excited ears to be making the most hideous and unnatural noise on every step. If Nora heard!
At last she was safe in her own room again. The door was locked and the more agreeable part of the crime began. She drew out the new cheque-book lying in her own drawer, and very slowly and deliberately wrote a cheque. Then she put it up, with a few covering words—anxiously considered—and addressed the envelope to the Oxford branch of a well-known banking firm, her father’s bankers, to which her own account had been transferred on her arrival at Oxford. Ewen Hooper had scrupulously refrained from recommending his own bank, lest he should profit indirectly by his niece’s wealth.
‘Annette shall take it,’ she thought—‘first thing. Oh, what a row there’ll be!’
And then, uneasily pleased with her performance, she went to bed.
And she had soon forgotten all about her raid upon Uncle Ewen’s affairs. Her thoughts floated to a little cottage on the hills, and its two coming inhabitants. And in her dream she seemed to hear herself say—‘I oughtn’t to be meddling with other people’s lives like this. I don’t know enough. I’m too young! I want somebody to show me—Ido!’
The following day passed heavily in the Hooper household. Nora and her father were closeted together all the morning; andthere was a sense of brooding calamity in the air. Alice and Connie avoided each other, and Connie asked no questions. After luncheon Sorell called. He found Connie in the drawing-room alone, and gave her the news she was pining for. As Nora had reported, a cottage on Boar’s Hill had been found. It belonged to the head of an Oxford College, who had spent the preceding winter there for his health, but had now been ordered abroad. It was very small, pleasantly furnished, and had a glorious view, over Oxford in the hollow, the wooded lines of Garsington and Nuneham, and the distant ridges of the Chilterns. Radowitz was expected the following day, and his old college servant, with a woman to cook and do housework, had been found to look after him. He was working hard, at his symphony, and was on the whole much the same in health,—very frail and often extremely irritable; with alternations of cheerfulness and depression.
‘And Mr. Falloden?’ Connie ventured.
‘He’s coming soon—I didn’t ask,’ said Sorell shortly. ‘That arrangement won’t last long.’
Connie hesitated.
‘But don’twishit to fail!’ she said, piteously.
‘I think the sooner it is over the better,’ said Sorell, with rather stern decision. ‘Falloden ought never to have made the proposal, and it was mere caprice in Otto to accept it. But you know what I think. I shall watch the whole thing very anxiously; and try to have someone ready to put into Falloden’s place—when it breaks down. Mrs. Mulholland and I have it in hand. She’ll take Otto up to the cottage to-morrow and means to mother Radowitz as much as he’ll let her. Now then’—he changed the subject with a smile—‘are you going to enjoy your winter term?’
His dark eyes, as she met them, were full of an anxious affection.
‘I have forgotten all my Greek!’
‘Oh no—not in a month. Prepare me a hundred lines of the “Odyssey,” Book VI! Next week I shall have some time. This first week is always a drive. Miss Nora says she’ll go on again.’
‘Does she? She seems so—so busy.’
‘Ah, yes—she’s got some work for the University Press. Plucky little thing! But she mustn’t overdo it.’
Connie dropped the subject. These conferences in the study, which had gone on all day, had nothing to do with Nora’s work for the Press—that she was certain of. But she only said—holding out her hands, with the free gesture that was natural to her—
‘I wish someone would give me the chance of “overdoing it”! Do set me to work—hard work! The sun never shines here.’
Her eyes wandered petulantly to the rainy sky outside, and the high-walled college opposite.
‘Southerner! Wait till you see it shining on the Virginian creeper in our garden quad. Oxford is a dream in October!—just for a week or two, till the leaves fall. November is dreary, I admit. All the same—try and be happy!’
He looked at her gravely and tenderly. She coloured a little as she withdrew her hands.
‘Happy? That doesn’t matter—does it? But perhaps for a change—one might try⸺’
‘Try what?’
‘Well!’—she laughed, but he thought there were tears in her eyes—‘to do something—for somebody—occasionally.’
‘Ask Mrs. Mulholland! She has a genius for that kind of thing. Teach some of her orphans!’
‘I couldn’t! They’d find me out.’
Sorell, rather puzzled, suggested that she might become a Home Student like Nora, and go in for a Literature or Modern History Certificate. Connie, who was now sitting moodily over a grate with no fire in it, with her chin in her hands, only shook her head.
‘I don’t know anything—I never learnt anything. And everybody here’s soappallinglyclever!’
Then she declared that she would go and have tea with the Master of Beaumont, and ask his advice. ‘He told me to learn something,’—the tone was one of depression, passing into rebellion—‘but I don’t want to learn anything!—I want to dosomething!’
Sorell laughed at her.
‘Learning is doing!’
‘That’s what Oxford people think,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t agree with them.’
‘What doyoumean by “doing”?’
Connie poked an imaginary fire.
‘Making myself happy’—she said slowly, ‘and—and a few other people!’
Sorell laughed again. Then rising to take his leave, he stooped over her.
‘Makemehappy—by undoing that stroke of yours—at Boar’s Hill!’
Connie raised herself, and looked at him steadily.
Then gravely and decisively she shook her head.
‘Not at all! I shall keep an eye on it!—so must you!’
Then, suddenly, she smiled—the softest, most radiant smile, as though some hope within, far within, looked out. It was gone in a moment, and Sorell went his way; but as one who had been the spectator of an event.
After his departure Connie sat on in the cold room, thinking about Sorell. She was devoted to him—he was the noblest, dearest person. She wished dreadfully to please him. But she wasn’t going to let him—
Well, what?
—to let him interfere with that passionate purpose which seemed to be beating in her, and through her, like a living thing, though as yet she had but vaguely defined it, even to herself.
After tea, which Mrs. Hooper dispensed with red eyes, and at which neither Nora nor Dr. Hooper appeared, Constance found a novel, and established herself in the deserted school-room. She couldn’t go out. She was on the watch for a letter that might arrive. The two banks were only a stone’s throw apart. The local post should deliver that letter about six.
Once Nora looked in to find a document, and was astonished to see Connie there. But she was evidently too harassed and miserable to talk. Connie listened uneasily to the opening and shutting of a drawer, with which she was already acquainted. Then Nora disappeared again. What were they trying to do, poor dears!—Nora, and Uncle Ewen? What could they do?
The autumn evening darkened slowly. At last!—a ring and a double knock. The study door opened, and Connie heard Nora’s step, and the click of the letter-box. The study door closed again.
Connie put down her novel and listened. Her hands trembled. She was full indeed of qualms and compunctions. Would they be angry with her? She had meant it well.
Footsteps approaching—not Nora’s.
Uncle Ewen stood in the doorway—looking very pale and strained.
‘Connie, would you mind coming into my study? Something rather strange has happened.’
Connie got up and slowly followed him across the hall. As she entered the study, she saw Nora, with blazing eyes and cheeks, standing by her father’s writing-table, aglow with anger orexcitement—or both. She looked at Connie as at an enemy, and Connie flushed a bright pink.
Uncle Ewen shut the door, and addressed his niece. ‘My dear Connie, I want you, if you can—to throw some light on a letter I have just received. Both Nora and I suspect your hand in it. If so, you have done something I—I can’t permit.’
He held out a letter, which Connie took like a culprit. It was a communication from his Oxford bankers to Professor Hooper, to the effect that, a sum of £1100 having been paid in to his credit by a person who desired to remain unknown, his debt to them was covered, and his account showed a balance of about six hundred pounds.
‘My dear!’—his voice and hand shook—‘is that your doing?’
‘Of course it is!’ interrupted Nora passionately. ‘Look at her, father! Howdaredyou, Connie, do such a thing without a word to father! It’s ashame—adisgrace! Wecouldhave found a way out—we could!’
And the poor child, worn out with anxiety and lack of sleep, and in her sensitive pride and misery ready to turn on Connie and rend her, for having dared thus to play Lady Bountiful without warning or permission, sank into a chair, covered her face with her hands, and burst out sobbing.
Connie handed back the letter, and hung her head. ‘Won’t you—won’t you let the person—who—sent the money remain unknown, Uncle Ewen?—as they wished to be?’
Uncle Ewen sat down before his writing-table and he also buried his face in his hands. Connie stood between them—as it were a prisoner at the bar—looking now very white and childish.
‘Dear Uncle Ewen⸺’
‘How did you guess?’ said Nora vehemently, uncovering her face—‘I never said a word to you!’
Connie gave a tremulous laugh.
‘Do you think I couldn’t see—that you were all dreadfully unhappy about something? I—I made Alice tell me⸺’
‘Alice is a sieve!’ cried Nora. ‘I knew, Father, we could never trust her.’
‘And then’—Connie went on—‘I—I did an awful thing. I’d better tell you. I came and looked at Nora’s papers—in the school-room drawer. I saw that.’ She pointed penitentially to a sheet of figures lying on the study table.
Both Nora and her uncle looked up in amazement, staring at her.
‘It was at night,’ she said hurriedly—‘last night. Oh, I putit all back!’—she turned, pleading, to Nora—‘just as I found it. You shouldn’t be angry with me—you shouldn’t indeed!’
Then her own voice began to shake. She came and laid her hand on her uncle’s shoulder.
‘Dear uncle Ewen—you know, I had that extra money! What did I want with it? Just think—if it had been Mamma! Wouldn’t you have let her help? You know you would! You couldn’t have been so unkind—Well then, I knew it would be no good, if I came and asked you—you wouldn’t have let me. So I—well, I just did it!’
Ewen Hooper rose from his table in great distress of mind.
‘But, my dear Connie—you are my ward—and I am your guardian! How can I let you give me money?’
‘It’s my own money,’ said Connie firmly. ‘You know it is. Father wrote to you to say I might spend itnow, as I liked—all there was, except the capital of my two thousand a year, which I mayn’t spend—till I’m twenty-five. This has nothing to do with that. I’m quite free—and so are you.Doyou think’—she drew herself up indignantly—‘that you’re going to make me happy—by turning me out, and all—all of you going to rack and ruin—when I’ve got that silly money lying in the bank? I won’t have it! I don’t want to go and live in the Cowley Road! I won’t go and live in the Cowley Road! You promised Father and Mother to look after me, Uncle Ewen, and it isn’t looking after me⸺’
‘You can’t reproach me on that score as much as I do myself!’ said Ewen Hooper, with emotion. ‘There’s something in that I admit—there’s something in that.’
He began to pace the room. Presently, pausing beside Connie, he plunged into an agitated and incoherent account of the situation—of the efforts he had made to get even some temporary help—and of the failure of all of them. It was the confession of a weak and defeated man; and as made by a man of his age to a girl of Connie’s, it was extremely painful. Nora hid her eyes again, and Connie got paler and paler.
At last she went up to him, holding out again appealing hands.
‘Pleasedon’t tell me any more! It’s all right. I just love you, Uncle Ewen—and—and Nora! I want to help! It makes me happy. Oh, why won’t you let me?’
He wavered.
‘You dear child!’ There was a silence. Then he resumed—as though feeling his way—
‘It occurs to me—that I might consult Sorell. If he thought it right—if we could protect you from loss⸺!’
Connie sprang at him and kissed him in delight.
‘Of course!—that’ll do splendidly! Mr. Sorell will see, at once, it’s the right thing for me, and my happiness. I can’t be turned out—I really can’t! So it’s settled. Yes—it’ssettled!—or it will be directly—and nobody need bother any more—need they? But—there’s one condition.’
Ewen Hooper looked at her in silence.
—‘That you—you and Nora—go to Rome this Christmas, this very Christmas, Uncle Ewen! I think I put in enough—and I can give you such a lot of letters!’
She laughed joyously, though she was very near crying.
‘I have never been able to go to Rome—or Athens—never!’ he said, in a low voice, as he sat down again at his table. All the thwarted hopes, all the sordid cares of years were in the quiet words.
‘Well, now you’re going!’ said Connie, shyly. ‘Oh, that would be ripping! You’ll promise me that—youmust, please!’
Silence again. She approached Nora, timidly.
‘Nora!’
Nora rose. Her face was stained with tears.
‘It’s all wrong,’ she said heavily—‘it’s all wrong. But—I give in. What I said was a lie. There is nothing else in the world that we could possibly do.’
And she rushed out of the room without another word. Connie looked wistfully after her. Nora’s pain in receiving had stirred in her the shamefaced distress in giving that lives in generous souls. ‘Why should I have more than they?’
She stole out after Nora. Ewen Hooper was left staring at the letter from his bankers, and trying to collect his thoughts. Connie’s voice was still in his ears. It had all the sweetness of his dead sister’s.
Connie was reading in her own room before dinner. She had shut herself up there, feeling rather battered by the emotions of the afternoon, when she heard a knock that she knew was Nora’s.
‘Come in!’
Nora appeared. She had had her storm of weeping in private and got over it. She was now quite composed, but the depression,the humiliation even, expressed in her whole bearing dismayed Connie afresh.
Nora took a seat on the other side of the fire. Connie eyed her uneasily.
‘Are you ever going to forgive me, Nora?’ she said, at last.
Nora shrugged her shoulders.
‘You couldn’t help it. I see that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Connie meekly.
‘But what Ican’tforgive is that you never said a word⸺’
—‘To you? That you might undo it all? Nora, you really are an absurd person!’ Connie sprang up, and came to kneel by the fire, so that she might attack her cousin at close quarters. ‘We’re told it’s “more blessed to give than to receive.” Not when you’re on the premises, Nora! I really don’t think you need make me feel such an outcast! I say—how many nights have you been awake lately?’
Nora’s lip quivered a little.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said shortly.
‘Yes, but it does matter! You promised to be my friend—and—you have been treating meabominably!’ said Connie, with flashing eyes.
Nora feebly defended herself, but was soon reduced to accept a pair of arms thrown round her, and a soft shoulder on which to rest an aching head.
‘I’m no good,’ she said, despairingly. ‘I give up—everything.’
‘That’s all right!’ Connie’s tone was extremely cheerful. ‘Which means, I hope, that you’ll give up that absurd copying in the Bodleian. You get about twopence-halfpenny for it, and it’ll cost you your first-class. How are you going to get a First I should like to know, with your head full of bills, andnosleep at nights!’
Nora flushed fiercely.
‘I want to earn my living—I mean to earn my living! And how do you know—after all’—she held Connie at arm’s length—‘that Mr. Sorell’s going to approve of what you’ve done? And Father won’t accept, unless he does.’
Connie laughed.
‘Mr. Sorell will do—exactly what pleases me. Mr. Sorell’—she began to search for a cigarette—‘Mr. Sorell is an angel.’
A silence. Connie looked up, rather surprised.
‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Yes,’ said Nora in an odd voice.
Connie observed her. A flickering light began to play in the brown eyes.
‘H’m. Have you been doing some Greek already?—stealing a march on me?’
‘I had a lesson last week.’
‘Had you? The first I’ve heard of it!’ Connie fluttered up and down the room in her white dressing-gown, occasionally breaking into a dance-step, as though to work off a superfluity of spirits.
Finally she stopped in front of Nora, looking her up and down.
‘I dare you to hide anything again from me, Nora!’
Nora sat up.
‘There is nothing to hide,’ she said stiffly.
Connie laughed aloud; and Nora suddenly sprang from her chair, and ran out of the room.
Connie was left panting a little. Life in Medburn Hall seemed certainly to be running faster than of old!
‘I never gave him leave to fall in love with Nora!’ she thought, with an unmistakable pang of common ordinary jealousy. She had been so long accustomed to take her property in Sorell for granted!—and the summer months had brought her into such intimate contact with him. ‘And he never made love to me for one moment!—nor I to him. I don’t believe he’s made love to Nora—I’m sure he hasn’t—yet. But why didn’t he tell me of that Greek lesson?’
She stood before the glass, pulling down her hair, so that it fell all about her.
‘I seem to be rather cut out for fairy-godmothering!’ she said pensively to the image in the glass. ‘But there’s a good deal to do for the post!—one must admit there’s a good deal to do: Nora’s got to be fixed up—and all the money business. And then—then!’
She clasped her hands behind her head. Her eyelids fell, and through her slight figure there ran a throb of yearning—of tender, yet despairing passion.
‘If I could only mend thingsthere, I might be some use. I don’t want him to marry me—but just—just⸺’
Then her hands fell. She shook her head angrily.
‘You humbug!—youhumbug! Who are you posing for now?’
(To be continued.)