Itwas not possible, however, to remove Mrs. Kingsward to Kingswarden next day. She was too much fatigued even to leave her bed, and the doctor who came to see her, her own familiar doctor who had sent her to Germany to the celebrated bath, looked a little grave when he saw the condition in which she had come home. “No fatigue, no excitement,” was what he enjoined. She was to have nothing to excite, nothing to disturb her—to go to the country? Oh, yes, but not for some days. To see the children? Certainly, the children could not be kept from their mother; but all in moderation, with great judgment, not too long at a time, not too often. And above all she must not be worried. Nothing must be done, nothing said to cross or vex her. When he heard from the Colonel a very brief and studiously subdued version of a little family business which had disturbed her—“I need not keep any secrets from you, doctor. The fact is that someone wanted to marry my girl Bee, and that I made some discoveries about him which obliged me to withdraw my consent.” The doctor formed his lips into a whistle, to which he did not give vent. “That accounts for it,” he said.
“That accounts for—what?” cried Colonel Kingsward, not without irritation.
“For the state in which I find her. And mind my words, Kingsward, you’d better let your girl marry anybody that isn’t a blackguard than risk that sort of shock with your wife. Never forget that her life—— I mean to say that she’s very delicate. Don’t let her be worried—stretch a point—have things done as she wishes. You will find it pay best in the end.”
“For once you are talking nonsense, my dear fellow,” said Colonel Kingsward; “my wife is not a woman who has ever been set upon having her own way.”
“Let her have it this time,” said the doctor, “and you’ll never repent it. If she wants Bee to marry, let her marry. Bee is a dear little thing, but her mother, Kingsward, her mother—is of far more consequence to you than even she—”
“That is a matter of course,” said Colonel Kingsward. “Lucy is of more importance to me than all the world beside; but neither must I neglect the interests of my child.”
“Oh, bother the child,” cried the doctor, “let her have her lover; the mother is what you must think of now.”
“You seem tremendously in earnest, Southwood.”
“So I am—tremendously in earnest. And don’t you work your mind on the subject, but do what I say.”
“Do you mean to say that my wife is in a—state of danger?”
“I mean that she must be kept from worry—she must not be contradicted—things must not be allowed to go contrary to her wishes. Poor little Bee! I don’t say you are to let her marry a blackguard. But don’t worry her mother about it—that is the chief thing I’ve got to say.”
“No, I shan’t worry her mother about it,” said the Colonel, shutting his mouth closely as if he were locking it up. When Dr. Southwood was gone, however, he stopped the two girls who were lingering about to know the doctor’s opinion, and detaching Betty’s arm from about Bee’s waist drew his eldest daughter into his study and shut the door. “I want to speak to you, Bee,” he said.
“Yes, papa.” In this call to her alone to receive some communication, Bee, as may be imagined, jumped to a conclusion quite different from what her father intended, and almost for the moment forgot mamma.
“The doctor tells me that above everything your mother must be kept from worry. Do you understand? In the circumstances it is extremely important that you should know this.”
“Papa,” she cried, half in indignation half in disappointment, “do you think that I would worry her—in any circumstances?”
“I think that girls of your age often think that no affairs are so important as your own, and it is very likely that you may be of that opinion, and I wish you to know what the doctor says.”
“Is mamma—very ill?” Bee asked, bewildered.
“He does not say so—only that she is not to be fretted or contradicted, or disturbed about anything. I feel it necessary to warn you, Bee.”
“Why me above the rest?” she cried. “Am I likely to be the one to worry mamma?”
“The others have no particular affairs of their own to worry her with. There must be no private talks, no discussions, no endeavours to get her upon what you may suppose to be your side.”
Bee gave her father a glance of fire, but she felt that a little prudence was necessary, and kept the tumult of feeling which was within her as much as possible in her own breast. “I have always talked to mamma of everything that was in my mind,” she said, piteously. “I don’t know how I am to stop. She would wonder so if I stopped talking; and how can I talk to her except of things that are in my mind?”
“You must learn,” said the Colonel, “to think of her more than of yourself.” He did not at all mean to prescribe to her a course of conduct more elevated than that he meant to pursue himself, but then it was only in action that he meant to carry out his purposes, he was not afraid of committing himself in speech.
Bee looked at him again with a gaze that asked a great many questions, but she only answered, “I will try my very best, papa.”
“If you do, I am sure you will succeed, my dear,” he said, in a gentler tone.
“Is that all?” she asked, hesitating.
“That is all I want with you just now.”
Bee turned away towards the door, and then she paused and made a step back.
“Papa!”
“Yes, Bee.”
“Would you mind telling me—I will not say a word to her—but oh, please tell me—”
“What is it?” said the Colonel. He went to his writing table, and sitting down began to turn over his papers. His tone was slightly impatient, his eyebrows slightly raised, as if in surprise.
“Papa, you must know what it is. I know that you have seen—Mr. Leigh!”
“How do you know anything about it? What have you to do with whom I have seen? Run away. I do not mean to enter into any explanations on this subject with you.”
“Then with whom will you enter into explanations? You cannot speak to mamma; she must not be worried. Papa, I am not a little girl now, to be told to run away.”
“You seem to be determined not to lose a moment in telling me so.”
“I should not have told you so,” said Bee, looking at him over the high back of his writing-table, “if you had not told me I was not to talk to mamma.”
He looked up at her, and their eyes met; both of them keenly, fiercely blue, lit up with fires of combat. It is often imagined that blue eyes are the softest eyes—but not by those who are acquainted with the kind which belonged to the Kingswards, which might have been called sapphires, if sapphires ever flash and cut the air as diamonds do. They were not either so dark as sapphires—they were like nothing but themselves, two pairs of blue eyes that might have been made to order, so like were they to each other, and both blazing across that table as if they would have set the house on fire.
“That’s an excellent point,” he said. “I can’t deny it. What made you so terrifically clever all at once?”
There is nothing more stinging than to be called clever in the midst of a discussion. Bee’s eyes seemed to set fire to her face, at least, which flashed crimson upon her father’s startled sight.
“When one has someone else to think of, someone’s interests to take care of——”
“Which are your own interests—and vastly more important than anything which concerns your father and mother.”
“I never said so—nor thought so, papa—but if they are different from yours, that’s no reason,” said Bee, bold in words but faltering in manner, “is it, why I should not think of them, if, as you say, they’re my own interests, papa?”
“You are very bold, Bee.”
“What am I to do if I have no one to speak for me? Papa, Aubrey——”
“I forbid you to speak with such familiarity of a man whom you have nothing to do with, and whom you scarcely know.”
“Papa, Aubrey—” cried Bee, with astonishment.
Colonel Kingsward jumped up from his table in a fury of impatience. “How dare you come and besiege me here in my own room with your Aubrey?—a man whom you have not known a month; a stranger to the family.”
“Papa, you must let me speak. You allowed me to be engaged to him. If you had said ‘no’ at first, there might, perhaps, have been some reason in it.”
“Perhaps—some reason!” he repeated, with an angry laugh.
“Yes, for even then it was not your own happiness that was in question. It was I, after all, that was to marry him.”
“And you think that is a reason for defying me?”
“It is always said to be a reason—not for defying anybody—but for standing up for what you call my own interests, papa—when they are somebody else’s interests as well. You said we might be engaged—and we were. And how can I let anyone, even you, say he is a stranger? He is myfiancé. He is betrothed to me. We belong to each other. Whatever anyone may say, that is the fact,” cried Bee, very rapidly, to get it all out before she was interrupted.
“It is not at all a cheerful or pleasant fact—if it changes my little Bee, whom I thought I knew, to this flushed and brazen woman, fighting for her——. Go, child, and don’t make an exhibition of yourself. Your mother’s daughter! It is not credible—to assault me, your father, in my own room, for the sake of——”
“Papa! don’t you remember that it is said in the Bible you are not to provoke your children to wrath? Mamma would have stood up for you, I suppose, when she was engaged to you. I may be flushed,” cried Bee, putting her hands to her blazing cheeks, “how could I help it? Forced to talk to you, to ask you—on a subject that gives you a right to speak to me, your own child, like that——”
“I am glad you think I have a right to speak as the circumstances demand to my own child,” said the Colonel, cooling down; “but why you should be forced, as you say, to take up such an unbecoming and unwomanly position is beyond my guessing.”
“It is because I have no longer mamma to speak for me,” Bee said.
The creature was not without skill. Now she came back to the point that was not to be gainsaid.
“We have had quite enough of this,” Colonel Kingsward replied. “Your mother, as you are quite aware, never set up her will against mine. She was aware, if you are not, that I knew the world better than she did, and was more competent to decide. Your mother would never have stood up to me as you have done.”
“It would have been better, perhaps, sometimes, if she had,” cried Bee, carried away by the tide of her excitement. Colonel Kingsward was so astounded that he had scarcely power to be angry. He gazed at his excited child with a surprise that was beyond words.
“Oh, papa, papa! Forgive me! I never meant that; it came out before I was aware.”
“The thought must have been there or it could not have come out,” he said.
“Oh, no; there was no thought there. It may be so with you, but not with us, papa. Words come into our mouths. We don’t think them; we don’t mean to say—they only seem to—hook on to—something that went before; and then they come out with a crash. Oh, forgive me, forgive me, papa!”
“I suppose,” he said, with a half laugh, “that may be taken as a woman’s exposition of her own style of argument.”
“Don’t call me a woman,” she said, with her soft small voice, aggrieved and wounded, drawing closer to him. “Oh, papa! I am only your little girl after all.”
“A naughty little girl,” he said, shaking his head.
“And without mamma to speak for me,” added Bee.
The Colonel laughed aloud. “You wily little natural lawyer!” he said; but immediately became very grave, for underneath this burst of half angry amusement Bee had given him a shock she did not know of. All unaware of the edge of the weapons which she used with a certain instinctive deftness, it did not occur to her that these words of hers might penetrate not only deeper than she thought, but far deeper than her own thoughts had ever gone. His wife’s worn face seemed suddenly to appear before Colonel Kingsward’s eyes in a light which he had never seen before, and the argument which this child used so keenly, yet so ignorantly, pierced him like a knife. “Without mamma to speak for me!” These words sounded very simple to Bee, a mischievous expedient to trap him in the snare he had laid for her. But if the time should ever come when they should be true! The Colonel was struck down by that arrow flown at a venture. He went back to his table subdued, and sat down there. “That will do,” he said, “that will do. Now run away and leave me to my work, Bee.”
She came up to him and gave him a timid kiss, which the Colonel accepted quietly in the softening of that thought. She roamed about the table a little, flicking off an imperceptible speck of dust with her handkerchief, arranging some books upon the upper shelf of his bureau, sometimes looking at him over that row of books, sometimes lingering behind him as if doing something there. He did not interfere with her movements for a few minutes, in theattendrissementof his thoughts. Without a mother to speak for her! Poor little girl, if that should ever be so! Poor little children unconscious in their nursery crying for mamma; and, oh, worse than all, himself without his Lucy, who had made all the world sweet to him! He was a masterfull man, who would stand to his arms in any circumstances, who would not give in even if his heart was broken; but what a strange, dull, gloomy world it would be to him if the children had no mother to speak for them! He made a sudden effort to shake off that thought, and the first thing that recalled him to himself was to hear Bee, having no other mischief, he supposed, to turn her hand to, heaping coals upon the little bit of fire which had been lighted for cheerfulness only.
“Bee,” he cried, “are you still there? What are you doing? The room is like an oven already, and you are making up a sort of Christmas fire.”
“Oh, I am so sorry—I forgot,” cried Bee, putting down the shovel hastily. “I thought it wanted mending—for you always like a good fire.”
“Not in September,” he said, “and such weather; the finest we have had since July. Come, cease this fluttering about—you disturb me—and I have a hundred things to do.”
“Yes, papa.” Bee’s little figure stole from behind him in the meekest way. She stopped in her progress towards the door to give a touch to the flowers on a side table; and then she went slowly on, going out. She had got her hand upon the handle of the door, and Colonel Kingsward thanked heaven he had got rid of her for the moment, when she turned round, eyeing him closely again though keeping by that means of escape. “Papa,” she said, softly, “after all the talk we have been having—you perhaps don’t remember that—you have never—answered my question yet.”
“What question?” he said sharply.
Bee put her hands together like a child, she looked at him beseechingly, coaxingly, like that child returning to its point, and then she said still more softly, “About Aubrey, dear papa!”
I willnot attempt to follow in detail the course of that autumn. It was a fine season, and Mrs. Kingsward was taken to her home in the country and recovered much of her lost health in the serene ending of the month and the bright days of October, which was a model October—everything that month ought to be. The trees had scarcely begun to take any autumnal colouring upon them when they reached Kingswarden—a house which stood among the Surrey hills; an old house placed not as modern houses are, pitched upon hillsides, or at points where there is “a view.” The old Kingswards had been moved by no such ridiculous modern sentiments. They had planted their mansion in a sheltered spot, where it would be safe from the winds that range over the country and all the moorland heights. The gates opened upon a wild country road with an extravagant breadth of green pathway and grassy bank on either side—enough to have made a farmer swear, but very pleasant to the eye and delightful to a horse’s feet, as well as to the pedestrians, whether they were tramps or tourists, who walked or rode on bicycles—the latter class only—from London to Portsmouth. The house was old, red, and straggling, covered with multitudes of creepers. Sheets of purple clematis—the Jackmanni, if anybody wishes to know; intolerable name for such a royal garment of blossom—covered half-a-dozen corners, hanging down in great brilliant wreaths over old ivy and straggling Virginia creeper and the strong stalks of the climbing roses, which still bore here and there a flower. Other sheets of other flowers threw themselves about in other places as if at their own sweet will, especially the wild exuberance of the Traveller’s Joy; though I need not say that this wildness was under the careful eye of the gardener, who would not let it go too far. I cannot attempt to tell how many other pleasant and fragrant and flowery things there were which insisted on growing in that luxurious place, even to the fastidious Highland creeper, which in that autumn season was the most gay, luxuriant, and delightful of all. The flowers abounded like the children, not to be checked, as healthy and as brilliant, in the fine, peaty soil and pure air. The scent of the mignonette, which in this late season straggled anywhere, seemed to fill half the country round. The borders were crowned with those autumn flowers which make up as well as they can for their want of sweetness by lavish wealth of colour—the glowing single dahlias, which this generation has had the good sense to re-capture from Nature after the quilled and rosetted artificial things which the gardeners had manufactured out of them, and the fine scarlet and blue of the salvias, and the glory of all those golden tribes of the daisy kind that now make our borders bright, instead of the old sturdy red geranium, which once sufficed for all the supplies of autumn, an honest servant but a poor lord. I prefer the sweetness of the Spring, when every flower has a soul in it, and breathes it all about in the air, that is full of hope. But as it cannot always be Spring, that triumph of bright hues is something to mask the face of winter with until the time when the tortured and fantastic chrysanthemum reigns alone.
This was the sort of garden they had at Kingswarden; not shut off in a place by itself, but bordering all the lawns, which were of the velvet it takes centuries to perfect. The immediate grounds sloped a little to the south, and beyond them was a very extensive, if somewhat flat, prospect, ending on the horizon in certain mild blue shadows which were believed to be hills. There was not much that could be called a park at Kingswarden. The few farms which Colonel Kingsward possessed pressed his little circle of trees rather close; but as long as the farms were let the family felt they could bear this. It gave them a comfortable feeling of modest natural wealth and company; the yeomen keeping the squire warm, they in their farmsteadings, he in the hall.
And the autumn went on in its natural course, gaining colour as it began to lose its greenness and the days their warmth. The fruit got all gathered in after the corn, the apple trees that had been such a sight, every bough bent down with its balls of russet or gold, looked shabby and worn, their season done, the hedges ran over with their harvest, every kind of wild berry and feathery seedpod, wild elderberries, hips and haws, the dangerous unwholesome fruit of the nightshade, the triumphant wreaths of bryony of every colour, green, crimson, and purple. The robins began to appear about Kingswarden, hopping about the lawns, and coming very near the dining-room windows after breakfast, when the little tribe of the nursery children had their accustomed half-hour with mamma, and delighted in nothing so much as to crumble the bread upon the terrace and tempt the redbreasts nearer and nearer. When, quite satisfied and comforted about his wife’s looks, Colonel Kingsward went off to the shooting, this little flock of children trailed after mamma wherever she went, a little blooming troop. By this time Charlie had gone back to Oxford, and the little ones liked to have the run of the lawns outside and the sitting rooms within, with nothing more alarming than Betty to keep them in order. It is to be feared that the relaxation of discipline which occurred when papa was absent was delightful to all those little people, and neither was Mrs. Kingsward sorry now and then to feel herself at full ease—with no necessity anywhere of further restraint than her own softened perceptions of family decorum required. It was a moment in which, if that could be said, she was self-indulgent—sometimes not getting up at her usual hour, but taking her breakfast in her room, with clusters of little boys and girls all over her bed, and over the carpet, sharing every morsel, climbing over her in their play. And when she went out to drive she had the carriage full of them; and when she took her stroll about the grounds they were all about, shouting and racing, nobody suggesting that it would be “too much for her,” or sending them off because they disturbed mamma. She was disturbed to her heart’s content while the Colonel was away. She said, “You know this is very nice for a time, but it would not do always,” to her elder daughter: but I think that she saw no necessity, except in the return of her husband, why it should not do, and she enjoyed herself singing to them, dancing (a very little) with them, playing for them as only the mother of a large family ever can play, that simple dance music which is punctuated and kept in perfect time by her heart as much as by her ear. For myself, I know the very touch upon the piano of a woman who is the orchestra of the children, who makes their little feet twinkle to the music. There is no band equal to it for harmony, and precision, and go. They enjoyed the freedom of having no one to say, “Hush, don’t make such a noise in the house,” of the absence of all the disturbable people, “the gentlemen,” as the servants plainly said, “being away” more, Mrs. Kingsward sometimes thought, with a faint twinge of conscience, than it was right they should enjoy anything in the absence of papa. Charlie was quite as bad as papa, and declared that they made his head ache, and that no fellow could work with such a row going on; it made the little carnival all the more joyous that he was out of the way.
Bee had spent the six weeks since their return in a sort of splendour of girlish superiority and elation, of which her mother had not been unobservant, though nothing had been said between them. I am not sure that Bee did not enjoy the situation more than if Aubrey had been at Kingswarden wooing her all day long, playing tennis with her, riding with her—in every way appearing as her accepted lover. Circumstances had saved her from this mere vulgarity of beatitude, and she felt that in the very uncertainty of their correspondence, which was private—almost secret, and yet not clandestine—there was a wonderful charm, a romance and tinge of the unhappy and desperate, while yet everything within herself was happy and triumphant. It had never been said, neither by the Colonel nor by his wife (who had said nothing at all), that Bee was not to write letters to Aubrey nor to receive letters from him. I cannot imagine how Colonel Kingsward, in bidding her understand that all was over between Aubrey and herself, did not make a condition of this. But probably he thought her too young and simple to maintain any such correspondence, and her lover too little determined, too persuadeable, to begin it. When Bee had received her lover’s first letter it had been under her father’s very eyes. It had come at breakfast between two girl-epistles, and Colonel Kingsward would not have been guilty of the pettiness of looking at his daughter’s correspondence for any inducement yet before him. She had the tremendous thrill and excitement of reading it in his very sight, which she did not hesitate to do, for the sake of the bravado, feeling her ears tingle and the blood coursing in her veins, never imagining that he would not observe, and setting her young slight strength like a rock in momentary expectation of a question on the subject. But no question came. Colonel Kingsward was looking at the papers, and at the few letters which came to him at his house. The greater part of his correspondence went to the office. He took it very quietly, and he never remarked Bee at all, which was little less than a miracle, she thought. And it was very well for her that this was one of the mornings on which mamma did not come downstairs.
This immense excitement was a little too strong for ordinary use, and Bee so arranged it afterwards that her letters came by a later post, when she could read them by herself in her room. The servants knew perfectly well of this arrangement—the butler who opened the post bag at Kingswarden, and the maid who carried Miss Bee’s letters upstairs—but neither father nor mother thought of it. That is, I will not answer for Mrs. Kingsward. She perhaps had her suspicions; but, if her husband did not forbid correspondence, she said to herself that it was not her business to do so. It seemed to her that nothing else could keep Bee so bright. Her disappointment, the shock of the severance, must have affected her otherwise than appeared if she had not been buoyed up by some such expedient. As for the Colonel, he thought nothing about it. He thought that, as for love, properly so called, the thing was preposterous for a girl of her years, and that the foolish business had been all made up of imaginative novelty, and the charm of the position, which had flattered and dazzled the girl. Now that she had returned to all her old associations and occupations, the pretty bubble had floated away into the air. It had not been necessary even to burst it—it had dispersed of itself, as he said to himself he always knew it would. Thus he deceived himself with the easiest mind and did not interfere.
Mrs. Kingsward had come upon her daughter seated out on the lawn under the great walnut tree, reading one of these letters, one morning when she had gone out earlier than usual, on an exceptionally fine day. Bee had thrust it away hastily into her pocket and came forward with burning cheeks when she heard her mother’s voice—but it was not till some time later that Mrs. Kingsward spoke. The day had kept up its morning promise. It was one of those warm days that sometimes come in October, breathing the very spirit of that contented season, when all things have come to fruition and the work of the year is done, and its produce garnered into the barns. Now we may sit and rest, is the sentiment of the much toiling earth—all the labour being over, the harvest done, and no immediate need yet to rise again and plough. The world hangs softly swaying in space, the fields are fallow, the labourer rests. The sunshine lay warm upon the velvet grass, the foliage, thinned by one good blast a week ago, gave just shade enough, not too much; the tea-table was set out upon the lawn—the little horde had gone off shouting and skirmishing through the grounds, Betty at the head of them, supposed captain and controller, virtually ringleader, which comes to much the same thing. The air so hushed and silent in itself, half drowsy with profound peace, was just touched and made musical by their shouts, and Bee and her mother, with this triumphant sound of a multitude close by, were alone.
“Bee,” Mrs. Kingsward said, “I have long wanted an opportunity to speak to you.”
“Yes, mamma,” she said, looking up with a rush of blood to her heart, feeling that the moment had come. But she would not have been Bee if she had not put a little something of her own into the thick of the crisis. “There were plenty of opportunities—we have been together all day.”
“You know what I mean,” said Mrs. Kingsward. “Bee, I saw you reading a letter this morning.”
“Yes, mamma.”
“Who was it from?”
Bee looked her mother in the face. “I have never made any secret of it,” she said. “I have read them openly before papa—I never would pretend they were anything different. Of course it was from Aubrey, mamma.”
“Oh, Bee!” said her mother. “You have never told me what your father said to you that morning. He told me that it was all over and done with—that he would never listen to another word on the subject.”
“That was what he told me.”
“Oh, Bee, Bee! and yet——”
“Stop a moment, mamma! He never said I was not to write; he never said there was to be no correspondence. Had he said so, I should have, at least, considered what it was best to do.”
“Considered what was best! But you were not the judge. I hope you would have obeyed your father, Bee.”
“I cannot say, mamma. You must remember that it is my case and not his. I don’t know what I should have done. But it was not necessary, for he said nothing about it.”
“Bee, my dear child, he may have said nothing; but you know very well that when he said it was entirely broken off he meant what he said.”
“Papa is very capable of saying what he means,” said Bee. “I did not think it was any business of mine to inquire what might be his secret meaning. Mamma, dear, don’t be vexed; but, oh, that would have been too hard! And for Aubrey, too.”
“I think much less of Aubrey that he should carry on a clandestine correspondence with a girl like you.”
“Clandestine!” cried Bee, with blazing eyes. “No more clandestine than your letters that come by the post with your own name upon them. If Aubrey did not scorn anything that is clandestine, I should. There is nothing like that between him and me.”
“I never supposed you would be guilty of any artifice, Bee; but you are going completely against your father—making a fool of him, indeed—making it all ridiculous—when you carry on a correspondence, as if you were engaged, after he has broken everything off.”
“I am engaged,” said Bee, very low.
“What do you say? Bee, this is out of the question. I shall have to tell your father when he comes back. “Oh! child, child, how you turn this delightful time into trouble. I shall be obliged to tell your father when he comes back.”
“Perhaps it will be your duty, mamma,” said Bee, the colour going out of her face; “and then I shall have to consider what is mine,” she said.
“Oh, Bee, Bee! Oh! how hard you make it for me. Oh! how I wish you had never seen him, nor heard of him,” Mrs. Kingsward cried.
Thiscommunication made a little breach between Bee and her mother and planted a thorn in Mrs. Kingsward’s breast. She had been getting on so well; the quiet (which meant the riot of the seven nursery children and all their troublesome ways) had been doing her so much good, and the absence of every care save that Johnny should not take cold, and Lucy eat enough dinner—that it was hard upon her thus to be brought back in a moment to another and a more pressing kind of care. However, after an hour or two’s estrangement from Bee, which ended in a fuller expansion than ever of sympathy between them—and a morning or two in which Mrs. Kingsward remembered as soon as she awoke that it would be her duty to tell her husband and break up the pleasant peace and harmony of the household—the sweetness of thatdolce far nienteswept over her again and obliterated or at least blurred the outline of all such troublous thoughts. Colonel Kingsward sent a hasty telegram to say that he was going on somewhere else for another ten days’ shooting, and that, though she exclaimed at first with a countenance of dismay, “Oh, children, papa is not coming home for another week!” in reality gave a pang of relief to her mind. Gliding into her being, she scarcely knew how, was an inclination to take every day as it came without thinking of to-morrow—which was perfectly natural, no doubt, and yet was an unconscious realisation of the fact, which as yet she had never put into words, nor had suggested to her, that those gentle days were numbered. Her husband’s delay was in one way like a reprieve to her. She had, like all simple natures, a vague faith in accident, in something that might turn up—“perhaps the world may end to-night”—something at least might happen in another ten days to make it unnecessary for her to disturb the existing state of affairs and throw new trouble into the house. She did not waver at first as to her duty, though nothing in the world could be more painful; and Bee did not say a word to change her mother’s resolution. Bee had always been aware that as soon as it was known the matter must come to another crisis—and the scorn with which she regarded the idea of doing anything clandestine prevented her even from asking that her secret should be kept. It was not in her mind but in her mother’s that those faint doubtings at last arose—those half entertained thoughts that a letter or two could do no harm; that the correspondence would drop of itself when it was seen between the two that there was no hope in it; and that almost anything would be better than a storm of domestic dispeace and the open rebellion in which Mrs. Kingsward felt with a shudder Bee would place herself. How are you to break the will of a girl who will not be convinced, who says it is not your, but her affair?
No doubt that was true enough. It was Bee, not Colonel Kingsward, whose happiness was concerned. According to all the canons of poetry and literature in general, which in such matters permeate theoretically the general mind when there is no strong personal instinct to crush them, Bee had right on her side—and her mother’s instinct was all on the side of poetry and romance and Bee. She had not the courage to cut short that correspondence, not clandestine though unrevealed, which kept the girl’s heart alive, and was not without attractions to the mother also, into whose ear it might be whispered now and then (with always a faint protest on her part) that Aubrey had better hopes, that he had a powerful friend who was going to speak for him. If they really meant to be faithful to each other—and there was no doubt that was what they meant—they must win the day in the end; and what harm would it do in the meantime that they should hear of each other from time to time? Whereas, if she betrayed the secret, there would at once be a dreadful commotion in the house, and Bee would confront her father and tell him with those blazing eyes, so like his, that it was her affair. Mrs. Kingsward knew that her husband would never stoop to the manœuvre of intercepting letters, or keeping a watch upon those that his daughter received; and what can you do to a girl who says that? She shrank more than any words could say from the renewal of the conflict. She had been so thankful to believe that it had passed over and all things settled into peace while she was ill. Now that she was better her heart sank within her at the thought of bringing it all on again, which would also make her ill again she was convinced. Yet, at the same time, if she could not persuade Bee to give it up of herself (of which there was no hope whatever), then she must, it was her duty, inform her husband. But her heart rose a little at that ten days’ reprieve. Perhaps the world might end to-night. Something might happen to make it unnecessary in those ten days.
And something did happen, though not in any way what Mrs. Kingsward could have wished.
Colonel Kingsward’s return was approaching very near when on one of those bright October afternoons a lady from the neighbourhood—nay, it was the clergywoman of the parish, the Rector of Kingswarden’s wife, the very nearest of all neighbours—came to call. She had just returned from that series of visits which in the autumn is—with all who respect themselves—the natural course of events. Mrs. Chichester was a woman of good connection, of “private means,” and more or less “in society,” so that she carried out this programme quite as if she had been a great lady. She had an air of importance about her, which seemed to shadow forth from her very entrance something that she had to say—an unusual gravity, a look of having to make up her mind to a certain action which was not without difficulty. There passed a glance between Mrs. Kingsward and Bee, in which they said to each other, “What is it this time?” as clearly as words could have said; for, to be sure, they were well acquainted with this lady’s ways. She sat for a little, and talked of their respective travels since they had last met; and of the pleasant weeks she had passed at Homburg, where so many pleasant people were always to be met after the London season; and then she lightly touched on the fact that she had come over early in September, and since then had been staying at a number of country places, with the dear Bishop, and at Lady Grandmaison’s, and with old Sir Thomas down in Devonshire, and so on.
“Or,” she concluded, with a disproportionate emphasis on that apparently unimportant word, “I should have been to see you long ago.”
There was a significance in this which again made Mrs. Kingsward and Bee exchange a look—a laughing glance—as of those who had heard the phrase before. When, however, she had asked some questions about Mrs. Kingsward’s health, and expressed the proper feeling—sorry to hear she had been so poorly; delighted that she was so much better—Mrs. Chichester departed from her established use and wont. Instead of beginning upon the real object of her visit, after she had taken her cup of tea, with a “Now,” (also very emphatic) “I want to interest you in something I have very much at heart,”—which was generally a subscription, a society, a bazaar, a missionary meeting, or something of the sort—Mrs. Chichester bent forward and said, in a half whisper, “I have something I want very much to talk to you about. Could I speak to you for a moment—alone?”
Bee was much surprised, but took her part with promptitude. “You want to get rid of me,” she said. “I shall go out on to the terrace, mamma, and you can call me from the window when you want me. I shall be sure to hear.”
There was another look between them, always with a laugh in it, as she stepped out of the open window, with a book in her hand, a look which repeated, “What can it be, now?” with the same amusement as at first, but with more surprise. Bee made a circuit round the lawn with her book, one finger shut in it to mark the place; looking at the flowers, as one does who knows every plant individually, and notes each bud that is opening, and which are about to fall. She calculated within herself how long the dahlias would last, and that the Gloire de Dijon roses must be cut to-morrow, as she pursued her way towards the walnut tree, under which she meant to place herself. But Bee had not been there many minutes before she felt a little shiver creep over her. It was getting rather cold in this late October to sit out of doors, when the sun was already off the garden, and she had, as girls say, “nothing on.” She got up again, and made her way round to a garden bench which was set against the wall of the house, at the spot where the sunshine lasted longest. There was still a level ray of ruddy light pouring on that seat, and Bee forgot, or rather never thought, that it was close to the drawing-room window. Her mind was not much exercised about Mrs. Chichester’s secret, which probably concerned the mothers and babies of the parish, and which she certainly had no curiosity to hear. Besides, no doubt, the visitor had told by this time all the private details there were to tell. Bee sat down upon the bench, taking no precautions to disguise the sound of her footsteps, and opened her book. She was not an enthusiastic student, though she liked a novel as well as anyone; but her eyes strayed from it to the great width of the horizon in front of her, and the ruddy glory in the west, in which was just about to disappear that last long golden ray of the sun.
Then she heard a low cry—an exclamation, stifled, yet full of horror. Was it mamma? What could the clergywoman be saying to bring from mamma’s lips such a cry? Bee—I cannot blame her—pricked up her ears. Mrs. Kingsward was not strong enough to be disturbed by horrors with which she had nothing to do.
“Oh, I cannot believe it; I cannot believe it!” she said.
“But,” said the other voice, with that emphasis at which Bee had laughed so often, “I can assure you it is true. I saw him myself shaking hands with the woman at the station. I might not have believed Miss Tatham’s story, but I saw with my own eyes that it was Mr. Leigh. I had met him at Sir Thomas’s the year before—when he was still in deep mourning for his wife, you know.”
“Mr. Leigh! So it was something about Aubrey! Then it was Bee’s business still more than her mother’s, and she listened without any further thought.
“But,” said Mrs. Kingsward, as if taking courage, “you must be mistaken; oh, not about seeing him shake hands with a woman—why shouldn’t he shake hands with a woman? He is very friendly with everybody. Perhaps he knew her, and there is nothing to find fault with in that.”
“Now,” said Mrs. Chichester, solemnly, “should I have mentioned it had it been confined to that? I only told you of that as a proof. The thing is that he put in this woman—a common woman, like a servant—into a sleeping carriage—you know what those sleeping carriages cost; a perfect fortune; far too much for any comfort there is in them—in the middle of the night, with her two children. The woman behaved quite nicely, Miss Tatham says, and looked shocked to be put in with a lady, and blushed all over her face, and told that ridiculous story to account for it. Poor thing! One can only be sorry for her. Probably some poor thing deceived, and thinking she was to be made a lady of. But I know what you must think of the man, Mrs. Kingsward, who could do such a thing on his way from staying with your own family, even if there had been no more in it than that.”
“But Mr. Leigh is very kind—kind to everybody—it might have been nothing but charity.”
“Charity—in an express train sleeping carriage! Well, I confess I never heard of charity like that. Gentlemen generally know better than to compromise themselves for nothing in that sort of way. They are more afraid of risking themselves in railway carriages and that kind of thing than girls are—much more afraid. And if you remember, Mrs. Kingsward, what kind of reputation Mr. Leigh had in his poor wife’s time—keeping that Miss Lance all the time in her very house under her eyes.”
“I have always heard that it was Mrs. Leigh who insisted upon keeping Miss Lance——”
“Is it likely?” said Mrs. Chichester. “I ask you, knowing what you do of human nature? And then a thing to happen like this on his very way home—when he had just left you and poor little Bee. Oh, it is shameless, shameless! I could not contain myself when I heard of it. And then it was said that the Colonel had broken off the engagement, and I thought it would be a comfort to you to know that other things were occurring every day, and that it was the only thing to do.”
“It is no comfort to me—and I cannot—I cannot believe it!”
“Dear Mrs. Kingsward, you always take the best view; but if you had seen him, as I did, holding the woman’s hand, bending over her with such a look!—I was afraid he would kiss her, there, before everybody. And I, knowing of the engagement, and that he had just left you—before Miss Tatham said a word—I sat and stared, and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the tenth of September, and he had left Bee, hadn’t he, the night before?”
“I never remember dates,” said Mrs. Kingsward, querulously.
“I do,” replied the visitor, “and I took the trouble to find out. At least, I found out by accident, through someone who saw him at the club, and who had just discovered the rights of that story about Miss Lance. Oh, I trust you will not be beguiled by his being a goodparti, or that sort of thing, to trust dear Bee in such hands! Marriage is always rather a disenchantment; but think what it would be in such a case—a man that can’t be trusted to travel between Cologne and London without——”
“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” said Mrs. Kingsward; and Bee heard that her mother had melted into tears.
“That is as good as saying you don’t believe me, who saw it with my own eyes,” said the visitor, getting up. “Indeed, I didn’t mean at all to distress you, for I thought that, as everything was broken off—I thought only if you had any doubts, as one has sometimes after one has settled a thing—that to know he was a man like that, with no respect for anything, who could leave hisfiancée, and just plunge, plunge—there is no other word for it——”
It was evident that Mrs. Kingsward, reduced to helplessness, here made no effort either to detain her visitor or to contradict her further, or indeed to make any remark. There was a step or two across the room, and then Mrs. Chichester said again—“Good-bye, dear. I am very sorry to have distressed you—but I couldn’t leave you in ignorance of such a thing for dear Bee’s sake; that is the one thing to be thankful for in the whole matter, that Bee doesn’t seem to mind a bit! She looks just as bright and just as nice as if nothing had happened. She can’t have cared for him! Only flattered, I suppose, and pleased to have a proposal—as those little things are, poor things. We should all thank heaven on our knees that there’s no question of a broken heart in Bee’s case——”
She might not have been so sure of that had she seen the figure which came through the window the moment the door had closed upon her—Bee with her blue eyes blazing wildly out of her white face, and strange passion in every line both of features and form.
“What is the meaning of it?” she said, briefly, with dry lips.
“Oh, Bee, you have heard it all!”
“I have heard enough—what does it mean, mamma?”
Mrs. Kingsward roused herself, dried her eyes, and went forward to Bee with outstretched arms; but the girl turned away. “I don’t want to be petted. I want to know what—what it means,” she said.
“I don’t believe it,” cried Mrs. Kingsward.
“Give a reason; don’t say things to quiet me. Oh, keep your arms away, mamma! Don’t pet me as if I wanted that! Why don’t you believe it? And if you did believe it—what does it mean—what does it mean?”
Bee’slook of scared and horrified misery was something new in Mrs. Kingsward’s experience. The girl had not known any trouble. Her father’s rejection of her lover and the apparent break between them had been in reality only another feature in the romance. She had almost liked it better so. There had been no time to pine, to feel the pain of separation. It was all the more like a poem, like what every love story should be, that this breaking off should have come.
And now, all at once, without any warning! The worst of it was that Bee had only heard a part of the story, the recapitulation of it. Mrs. Chichester had given the accused more or less fair play. She had given an imperfect account of the explanation, the story the woman had told—as was almost inevitable to a third party, but she had given it to the best of her ability, not meaning to deceive, willing enough that he should have the benefit of the doubt, or perhaps that the judgment upon him should be all the more hard, because of his attempt to mingle deceit with his sin, and throw dust in the eyes of any possible spectators. This was the way in which it had appeared to herself, but she was not unfair. She told the story which had been told to the astonished lady upon whose solitude the little party had been obtruded in the middle of the night, and who had heard it perhaps even imperfectly at first hand mingled with the jolting and jarring of the train and the murmur of the children. And yet Mrs. Chichester had repeated it honestly.
But Bee had not heard that part of the tale. She had heard only the facts of the case which had presented to her inexperienced young mind the most wild and dreadful picture. Her lover, who had just left her, whom she had promised to stand by till death, suddenly appeared to her in the pale darkness of the midnight with a woman and children hanging on to him—belonging to him, as appeared. Where had he met them? How had he arranged to meet them? When her hand had been in his, when he had been asking from her that pledge till death, had he just been arranging all that—giving them that rendezvous—settling how they were to meet, and where? A horror and sickness came over poor Bee. It made her head swim and her limbs tremble. To leave her with her pledge in his ears, and to meet, perhaps at the very outset of his journey, the woman with the children—a common sort of woman, like a servant. As if that made any difference! If she had been a duchess it would have been all the same. He must have met her fresh from Bee’s presence, with his farewell to the girl whom he had pretended to love still on his lips. She could not think so clearly. Was this picture burnt in upon her mind? She seemed to see the dim, half-lighted carriage, and Aubrey at the door putting the party in. And then at Dover, in the daylight, shaking hands with his companion, bending over her as if he meant to kiss her! These two pictures took possession of Bee’s mind completely. And all this just when he had left Bee—between his farewell to her and his interview with her father! If she had heard of the story which the woman had told to the startled Miss Tatham in the dim sleeping carriage, from which, looking out, she had recognised Aubrey Leigh, it might have made a difference. But that story had not been told in Bee’s hearing. And Mrs. Kingsward did not know this, but supposed she had heard the whole from beginning to end.
Bee’s mother, to tell the truth, after the first shock, was glad of that unconscious eaves-dropping on Bee’s part; for how could she have told her? Indeed, the story was too gross, too flagrant to be believed by herself. She felt sure that there must be some explanation of it other than the vulgar one which was put upon it by these ladies; but she knew very well that the same interpretation would be put upon it by her husband, and many other people to whom Aubrey’s innocent interference in such a case would have seemed much less credible than guilt. Guilt is the thing that generally rises first as the explanation of everything, to the mind, both of the man and woman of the world. The impossibility of a man leaving a delicate flower of womanhood like Bee, whose first love he had won, in order to fall back at once into the bonds of a common intrigue, and provide for the comfort of his paramour, who had been waiting for him on the journey, would not prove so great to most people as the impossibility that he, as a stranger, would step out of his way to succour a poor little mother and children whom he had never seen before, and risk thereby a compromising situation.
The latter was the thing which would have seemed unutterably ridiculous and impossible to Colonel Kingsward. A first-class sleeping carriage secured for a mere waif upon his way, whom he had never seen before and never would see again! The fellow might be a fool, but he was not such a fool as that. Had the woman even been old and ugly the Colonel would have laughed and shrugged his shoulders at Aubrey’s bad taste; but the woman was pretty and young. A long-standing affair, no doubt; and, of course, it was quite possible, nay likely, that she was being sent, poor creature, to some retreat or other, where she would be out of the way with her children.
Mrs. Kingsward knew, as if she had heard him say these words, how her husband would speak. And who was she, with not half his experience of the world, to maintain a different opinion? Yet she did so. She thought it was like Aubrey to turn the poor woman’s lingering, melancholy journey into a quick and comfortable one, out of pure kindness, without thought of compromising himself any more than of having any recompense for what he did. But she did not know that Bee knew nothing of this explanation of the story. When she found that her child evidently thought nothing of that, but received at once the darker miserable tale into her mind, she was startled, but not perhaps astonished. Bee was young to think the worst of anybody, but at the same time it is by far the commonest way of thinking, and the offence was one against herself, which gives a sharper edge to everything. And then she knew what was going on in Bee’s mind chiefly by guesswork, for the girl said little. The colour went out of her face, her eyes sometimes gave a gleam of their old fire, but mostly had a strange set look, as if they were fixed on something not visible to the ordinary spectator. She sat all the evening through and never spoke. This was not so noticeable while the children were still about with their perpetual flow of observations and flood of questions; but when they went off in detachments to bed, and the two elder girls were left alone with their mother, Bee’s silence fell upon the others like a cloud. Betty, who knew nothing, after a few minutes rushed away upstairs to find refuge in the nursery, and then Mrs. Kingsward was left alone, face to face with this silent figure, so unlike Bee, which neither moved nor spoke. She had scarcely the courage to break the dreadful silence, but yet it had to be broken. Poor Mrs. Kingsward’s heart began to beat violently against her breast as it had not done since her return home.
“Bee!” she said. “Bee!”
Already the pumping of her heart had taken away her breath.
“Yes, mamma.”
“Oh! Bee, what—what are you going to do?”
“To do, mamma?”
“Oh! don’t repeat my words after me, but give me some sort of an answer. Betty may be back again in a moment. What are you going to do?”
“What can I do?” the girl said, in a low voice.
“I can’t suppose but that you have been thinking about it—what else could you be thinking of, poor child? For my part, I don’t believe it. Do you hear me, Bee?”
“Yes—I heard you say that before, mamma.”
“And that is all you think of what I say! My darling, you can’t remain like this. The first thing your father will ask will be, ‘What has happened?’ I cannot bear that you should give up—without a word.”
Mrs. Kingsward had disapproved of the correspondence, had felt that it would be incumbent upon her to tell her husband of it, but yet in this unforeseen emergency she forgot all that.
“Without a word! What words could I say? You don’t suppose I could discuss it with him—ask if it was true? If it’s true, there isn’t a word to say, is there? And if it isn’t true it would be an insult to ask him. And so one way or another it is all just done with and over. And I wish you would leave me quiet, mamma.”
“Done with and over! Without a word—on a mere story of something that took place on a journey!”
“Oh! leave me quiet, mamma. Do you think I need to be reminded of that journey? As if I did not see it, and the lamps burning, and hear the very wheels!”
“Bee, dear, how can I leave you quiet? Do you mean just to let it break off like that, without a word, without giving him the chance to explain?”
“I thought,” said Bee, with a faint satirical smile, for, indeed, her heart was capable of all bitterness, “that it was broken off completely by papa, and all that remained was only—what you called clandestine, mamma.”
“I did not call it clandestine. I knew you would do nothing that was dishonourable. And it is true that it was—broken off. But, Bee! Bee! you don’t seem to feel the dreadful thing this is. After all that has passed, to let it drop in a moment, without saying a word!”
“I thought it was what I ought to have done, as soon as papa’s will was made known.”
“Oh! Bee, you will drive me mad. And I have got no breath to speak. So you ought, perhaps—but you have not, when perhaps there was a reason. And now, for a mere chance story, and without giving him—an opportunity—to speak for himself.”
Bee raised her face, now crimson as it had before been pale.
“How could I put any questions on such a thing? How could it be discussed between him and me? To think of it is bad enough, but to speak of it—mamma! How do I know, even, what words to say?”
“In that case, every engagement would be at the mercy of any slanderer, if the girl never could bring herself to ask what it meant.”
“I am not any girl,” cried poor Bee, with a quiver of her lip. “I am just myself. I don’t think very much of myself any more than you do, but I can’t change myself. Oh, let me alone, let me alone, mamma!”
Mrs. Kingsward was very much excited. Her nostrils grew pinched and dilated in the struggle for breath; her lips were open and panting from the same cause. She was caught in that dreadful contradiction of sentiment and feeling which is worse than any unmingled catastrophe. She had been rent asunder before this by her desire to shield her daughter, yet the sense of her duty to her husband remained, and now it was the correspondence which she seemed to be called upon to defend almost at peril of her life; that actually clandestine, at least secret correspondence, of which she could not approve, which she was bound to cut short. And yet to cut it short like this was something which she could not bear. She threw aside the work with which she had been struggling and fixed her eyes on Bee, who did not look at her nor see how agitated her expression was.
“If you can do this, I can’t,” she said. “I will write to him. The other dreadful story may be true, for anything I know. And that, of course, is enough. But this one I don’t believe, if an angel from Heaven told it me. He shall at least have the chance of clearing himself!”
“I don’t know,” said Bee, “what the other dreadful story was. I thought it was only pretending to love—some other woman; and then—pretending to loveme”—she broke off into a little hoarse laugh. The offence of it was more than Bee could bear. The insult—to suffer (she said to herself) was one thing—but to be insulted! She laughed to think what a fool she had been; how she had been taken in; how she had said—oh, like the veriest credulous fool—“Till death.”
“He was not pretending to love you. What went before I know not, but with you he was true.”
“One before—and one after,” said Bee, rising in an irrepressible rage of indignation. “Oh, mamma, how can we sit quietly and discuss it, as if—as if it were a thing that could be talked about? Am I to come in between—two others—two—— I think it will make me mad,” the girl cried, stamping her foot. How does a man dare to do that—to insult a girl—who never sought him nor heard of him, wanted nothing of him—till he came and forced himself into her life!”
“Oh! Bee, my darling,” cried the mother, going up to her child with outstretched arms.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t pet me; I cannot bear it. Let me stand by myself. I am not a little thing like Lucy to be caught up and kissed till I forget. I don’t want to forget. There is nothing that can ever be done to me, if I were to live to an hundred, to put this out of my head.”
“Bee, be patient with me for a moment. I have lived longer than you have. What went before could be no offence to you, whatever it was. It might be bad, but it was no offence to you. And this—I don’t believe it——”
Bee was far too much self-absorbed to see the labouring breath, the pink spot on each cheek, the panting which made her mother’s fine nostrils quiver and kept her lips apart, or that she caught at the back of a chair to support herself as she stood.
“I don’t know why—you shouldn’t believe it. I don’t believe it; I see it, I hear it,” cried Bee. “It’s like a story—and I thought these things were always stories, things made up to keep up the interest in a book—— I’m the—deceived heroine, the one that’s disappointed, don’t you know, mamma? We’ve read all about her dozens of times. But she generally makes a fuss over it,” the girl said, with her suffocating laugh. “I shall make—no fuss—— Mamma! What is the matter, mamma?”
Nothing more was the matter than the doctor could have told Mrs. Kingsward’s family long ago—a spasm of the heart. She stumbled backward to the sofa, and flung herself down before consciousness forsook her. Did consciousness forsake her at all? Bee rushing to the bell, making its violent sound peal through the house, then flinging herself at her mother’s feet, and calling to her in the helplessness of utter ignorance, “Mamma, mamma!” did not think that she was unconscious. Broken words fell from her in the midst of her gasps for breath, then there was a moment of dread stillness. By this time the room seemed to be full of people—Bee did not know who was there—and then there suddenly appeared out of the mist Moulsey with a glass and teaspoon in her hands.
“Go away, all of you,” cried Moulsey, “she’ll be better directly—open all the windows and take a fan and fan her, Miss Bee.”
The blast of the cold October night air came in like a flood, Bee seemed to come out of a horrible dream in the waft of air brought by the fan which she was herself waving to and fro—and in a little time, as Moulsey said, Mrs. Kingsward was better. The labouring breath which had come back after that awful moment of stillness gradually calmed down and became softer with an occasional long drawn sigh, and then she opened her eyes and said, with a faint smile, “What is it? What is it?” She looked round her for a moment puzzled—and then she said, “Ah! you are fanning me,” with a smile to Bee, but presently, “How cold it is! I don’t think I want to be fanned, Moulsey.”
“No, ma’am, not now. And White is just a-going to shut all the windows. The fire was a bit too hot, and you know you never can bear it when the room gets too hot.”
“No, I never can bear it,” Mrs. Kingsward said, in a docile tone. She followed the lead of any suggestion given to her. “I must have got faint—with the heat.”
“That was just it,” said Moulsey. “When you have a fire in the drawing-room so early it looks so cheerful you’re apt to pile it too high without thinking—for it ain’t really cold in October, not cold enough to have a fire like that. You want it for cheerfulness, ma’am, more than for heat. A big bit of wood that will make a nice blaze, and very little coal, as is too much for the season, is what your drawing-room fire should be.”
Mrs. Kingsward gradually came to herself during this long speech, which no doubt was what Moulsey intended. But she said she felt a little weak, and that she would keep on the sofa until it was time to go to bed. The agitation she had gone through seemed to have passed from her mind. “Read me a little of that story,” she said, pointing to a book on the table. “We left off last night at a most interesting part. Read me the next chapter, Bee.”
Bee sat down beside her mother’s sofa and opened the book. It was not a book of a very exciting kind it may be supposed, when it was thus read a chapter at a time, without any one of the party opening it from evening to evening to see how things went on. But as it happened at this point of the story, the heroine had found out that her lover was not so blameless as she thought, and was making up her mind to have nothing to do with him. Bee began to read with an indignation beyond words for both hero and heroine, who were so pale, so colourless, beside her own story. To waste one’s time reading stuff like this, while the tide of one’s own passion was ten times stronger! She did not think very much of her mother’s faint. It was, no doubt, the too large fire, as Moulsey said.