“Dear Bee, what will you say when I tell you that this delightful woman is Miss Lance? You will say I have no heart, or no spirit, and am not sticking to you through thick and thin as I ought; but you must hear first what I have got to say. Had I known it was Miss Lance I should have shut myself close up, and whatever she had done or however nice she had been, I should have had nothing to say to her. If she had been an angel under that name I should have remembered what you had said, and I should not have seen any good in her. But I never heard what her name was till we were all in Mr. Revel’s studio, quite a long time after. Papa did as he always does, introduced me to her, but not her to me. He said: “My daughter Betty,” as if I must have known by instinct who she was. And, dear Bee, though I acknowledge you have every reason not to believe it, she is delightful, she is, she is! She may have done wrong. I can’t tell, of course; but I don’t believe she ever meant it, or to harm you, or Charlie, or anyone. Everybody is delighted with her. Mrs. Lyon, who you know is very particular, says she has the manners of a duchess—and that she is such a handsome, distinguished-looking woman. She is coming to dine here next Saturday. The only one who does not seem to be quite charmed with her is Gerald, who is prejudiced like you.
“Do try to get over your prejudice, Bee, dear—she is, she is, indeed delightful! You only want to know her. By the way, about the Mackinnons: papa has got it firmly into his head that Charlie is there; he says his mind is quite relieved about him, and that the more he thinks of it, the more he is certain it is so; now I know that it is not so. I got a letter from Helen Mackinnon the day I came here, and there is not a word about Charlie—and she would have been certain to have mentioned him had he been there. I tried to say this to papa, but his head was so full of the other idea that he did not hear me at first, and I couldn’t go on. I whispered to Miss Lance in the studio, and asked her what I should do? She was so troubled and distressed about Charlie that the tears came into her eyes, but, after thinking a moment, she said, ‘Oh, dear child, don’t say anything. Your young friend might have been in a hurry, she might not have thought it necessary to speak of your brother. Oh, don’t let us worry him now! Bad news always comes soon enough, and, of course, he will find it out if it is so.’ Do you think she was right? But, oh Bee, dear Bee, I am afraid you will not think anything she says is right; and yet she isdelightful. If only you knew her! Write directly, and tell me all you think.”
Bee was not excited on this second reading. She did not spring to her feet, nor stamp on the floor, or feel inclined to call upon all the infernal gods. But her heart sank down as if it would never rise again, and a great pain took possession of her. Who was this witch, this magician, that everyone who belonged to Bee should be drawn into her toils—even Betty. What could she want with Betty, who was only a little girl, who was her sister’s natural second and support? Bee sat a long time with her head in her hands, letting the fire go out, feeling cold and solitary and miserable, and frightened to death.
Inthe afternoon of the next day, Bee was again alone. The old aunt had come down for lunch, but gone up to her room again to rest after that meal. It was a little chilly outside. The children, of course, wrapped up in their warm things, and in the virtue of the English nursery, which shrinks from no east wind, were out for their various walks. The big boys, attended by such of the little boys as could be trusted with these athletes, were taking violent exercise somewhere, and Bee sat by the fire, alone. It is not a place for a girl of twenty. The little pinafore, half made, was on the table beside her. She had a book in her hand. Perhaps had she been a young wife looking for the return of her young husband in the evening, with all the air of the bigger world about him and an abundance of news, and plans, and life, a pretty enough picture might have been made of that cosy fireside retirement.
But even this ideal has ceased to be satisfactory to the present generation. And Bee’s spirits and heart were very low. She had despatched a fiery letter to Betty, and with this all her anger had faded away. She had no courage to do anything. She seemed to have come to an end of all possibilities. She had no longer anyone to fall back upon as a supporter and sympathiser—not even Betty. Even this closest link of nature seemed to have been broken by that enemy.
To have an enemy is not a very common experience in modern life. People may do each other small harms and annoyances, but to most of us the strenuous appeals and damnations of the Psalmist are quite beyond experience. But Bee had come back to the primitive state. She had an enemy who had succeeded in taking from her everything she cared for. Aubrey her betrothed, Charlie, her father, her sister, one after the other in quick succession. It was not yet a year and a half since she first heard this woman’s name, and in that time all these losses had happened. She was not even sure that her mother’s death was not the work of the same subtle foe; indeed, she brought herself to believe that it was at least accelerated by all the trouble and contention brought into the family by her own misery and rebellion—all the work of that woman! Why, why, had Bee been singled out for this fate? A little girl in an English house, like other girls—no worse, no better. Why should she alone in all England have this bitterness of an enemy to make her desolate and break her heart?
While she was thus turning over drearily those dismal thoughts, there was a messenger approaching to point more sharply still the record of these disasters and their cause. Bee had laid down her book in her lap; her thoughts had strayed completely from it and gone back to her own troubles, when the door of the drawing-room opened quietly and a servant announced “Mrs. Leigh.” Mrs. Leigh! It is not an uncommon name. A Mrs. Lee lived in the village, a Mrs. Grantham Lea was the clergyman’s wife in the next parish. Bee drew her breath quickly and composed her looks, but thought of no visitor that could make her heavy heart beat. Not even when the lady came in, a more than middle-aged matron, of solid form and good colour, dressed with the subdued fashionableness appropriate to her age. It was not Mrs. Lee from the village, nor Mrs. Grantham Lea, nor—— Yet Bee had seen her before. She rose up a little startled and made a step or two forward.
“You do not know me, Miss Kingsward? I cannot wonder at it, since we met but once, and that in circumstances—— Don’t start nor fly, though I see you have recognised me.”
“Indeed I did not think of flying. Will you—will you—sit down.”
“You need not be afraid of me, my poor child,” said Mrs. Leigh.
Aubrey’s mother seated herself and looked with a kind yet troubled look at the girl, who still stood up in the attitude in which she had risen from her chair. “I scarcely saw you the other time,” she said. “It was in the garden. You did not give me a good reception. I should like much, sometime or other, if you would tell me why. I have never made out why. But don’t be afraid; it is not on that subject I have come to you now.”
Bee seated herself. She kept her blue eyes, which seemed expanded and larger than usual, but had none of the former indignant blaze in them, fixed on the old lady’s face.
“Your father is not here, the servant tells me—”
“No—he is in town,” she answered, faltering, almost too much absorbed by anticipation to reply.
“And you are alone—nobody with you to stand by you?”
“Mrs. Leigh,” said Bee, catching her breath, “I don’t know why you should ask me such questions, or—or be sorry for me. I don’t need anybody to be sorry for me.”
“Poor little girl! We needn’t go into that question. I am sorry for any girl who is motherless, who has to take her mother’s place. I would much rather have spoken to your father had he been here.”
“After all,” said Bee, “my father could say nothing. It is I who must decide for myself.”
She said this with an involuntary betrayal of her consciousness that there could be but one subject between them, and it was not in the power of Aubrey Leigh’s mother, however strongly aware she was of another theme on which she had come to speak, not to note how different was Bee’s reception of her from the other time, when the girl had fled from her presence and would not even hear what she had to say. Bee’s eyes were large and humid and full of an anxiety which was almost wistful. She had the air of refusing to hear with her lips, but eagerly expecting with her whole heart what was about to be said. And she looked so young, so solitary, in her mother’s chair, with a mother’s work lying about, the head of this silent house—that the heart of the elder woman was deeply touched. If little Betty had been like a rose, Bee was almost as white as the cluster of fragrant white narcissus that stood on the table. Poor little girl, so subdued and changed from the little passionate creature who would not hear a word, and whose indignation was stronger than even the zeal of the mother who had come to plead her son’s cause!
Mrs. Leigh drew a little nearer and took Bee’s hand. The girl did not resist, but kept her eyes upon her steadily, watching, her mind in a great turmoil, not knowing what to expect.
“My dear,” said the old lady, “don’t be alarmed. I have not come to speak about Aubrey. I cannot help hoping that one day you will do him justice; but, in the meantime, it is something else that has brought me here. Miss Kingsward—your brother—”
Bee’s hand, in this lady’s clasp, betrayed her in spite of herself. It became limp and uninterested when she was assured that Aubrey was not in question; and then, at her brother’s name, was snatched suddenly away.
“My brother?” she cried, “Charlie!” Then, subduing herself, “What do you know about him? Oh,” clasping her hands as new light seemed to break upon her, “you have come to tell me some bad news?”
“I hope not. My son found him some time ago, disheartened and unhappy about leaving Oxford. He persuaded him to come and share his rooms. He has been with him more or less all the time, which I hope may be a comfort to you. And then he fell ill. My dear Aubrey has tried to see your father, but in vain, and poor Charlie is not anxious, I fear, to see his father. Yes, he has been ill, but not so seriously that we need fear anything serious. He has shaken off the complaint, but he wants rousing—he wants someone whom he loves. Aubrey sent for me a fortnight ago. He has been well taken care of, there is nothing really wrong. But we cannot persuade him to rouse himself. It is illness that is at the bottom of it all. He would not have left you without news of him, he would not shrink from his father if he were not ill. Bee, I will confess to you that it is Aubrey who has sent me; but don’t be afraid, it is for Charlie’s sake—only for Charlie’s sake. He thinks if you would but come to him—if you would have the courage to come—to your brother, Bee.”
“He—he thinks? Not Charlie—you don’t mean Charlie?” Bee cried.
“Charlie does not seem to wish for anything. We cannot rouse him. We think that the sight of someone he loves——”
Bee was full of agitation. Her lips quivered; her hands trembled. “Oh, me!” she said; “I am no one. It is not for his sister a boy cares. I do not think I should do him any good. Oh, Charlie, Charlie! all this time that we have been blaming him so, thinking him so cruel, he has been lying ill! If I could do him any good!” she cried, wringing her hands.
“The sight of you would do him good. It is not that he wants a nurse—I have seen to that; but no nurse could rouse him as the sight of some of his own people would. Do not question, my dear, but come—oh, come! He thinks he is cut off from everybody, that his father will never see him, that you must all have turned against him. Words will not convince him, but to see you, that would do so. He would feel that he was not forsaken.”
“Oh, forsaken! How could he think it? He must know that we have been breaking our hearts. It was he who forsook us all.”
Bee had risen again, and stood leaning upon the mantelpiece, too much shaken and agitated to keep still. Though she had thought herself so independent, she had in reality never broken the strained band of domestic subjugation. She had never so much as gone, though it was little more than an hour’s journey, to London on her own authority. The thought of taking such a step startled her. And that she should do this on the word and in the company of Aubrey’s mother—Aubrey, for whom she had once been ready to abandon everything, from whom she had been violently separated, whom she had cast off, flung away from her without hearing a word he had to say! How could she put herself in his way again—go with his mother, accept his services? Bee had acted quickly on the impulse of passion in all that had happened to her before. But she had not known the conflict, the rending asunder of opposite emotions. In the whirl of her thoughts her lover, whom she had cast off, came between her and the brother whom he had succoured. It was to Aubrey’s house, to his very dwelling where he was, that she must go if she went to Charlie. And Charlie wanted her, or at least needed her, lying weak and despairing, waiting for a sign from home. It was difficult to realise her brother so, or to believe, indeed, that he could want her very much, that there was any yearning in his heart towards his own flesh and blood. But Mrs. Leigh thought so, and how could she refuse? How could she refuse? The problem was too much for her. She looked into Mrs. Leigh’s face with an appeal for help.
“My dear,” her companion said, leaving a calm and cool hand upon Bee’s arm, which trembled with nervous excitement, “If you are afraid of meeting Aubrey, compose yourself. Aubrey would rather go to the end of the world than give you any pain, or put himself in your way. We are laying no trap for you—I should not have come if the case had not been urgent. Never would I have come had it been a question of my son; I would not beguile you even for his sake. It is for your brother, Bee; not for Aubrey, not for Aubrey!”
Not for Aubrey! Was that any comfort, was there any strength in that assurance? At all events, these were the words that rang through Bee’s head, as she made her hurried preparations. She had almost repeated them aloud in the hasty explanations she made to Moss upstairs, who was now at the head of the nursery, and to the housekeeper below. To neither of these functionaries did it seem of any solemn importance that Bee should go away for a day or two. There was no objection on their part to being left at the head of affairs. And then Bee felt herself carried along by the whirl of strange excitement and feeling which rather than the less etherial methods of an express train seemed to sweep her through the air of the darkening spring night by Mrs. Leigh’s side. A few hours before she had felt herself the most helpless of dependent creatures, abandoned by all, incapable of doing anything. And now, what was she doing? Rushing into the heart of the conflict, assuming an individual part in it, acting on her own responsibility. She could scarcely believe it was herself who sat there by Mrs. Leigh’s side.
But not for Aubrey, not for Aubrey! This kept ringing in her ears, like the tolling of a bell, through all the other sounds. She sat in one corner of the carriage, and listened to Mrs. Leigh’s explanations, and to the clang of the engine and rush of the train, all mingled together in bewildering confusion. But the other voice filled all space, echoing through everything. Bee felt herself trembling on the edge of a crisis, such as her life had never known. All the world seemed to be set against her, her enemy, perhaps her father, and all the habitual authorities of her young and subject life, now suddenly rising into rebellion. She would have to do and say things which she would not have ventured so much as to think of a little time ago; but whatever she might have to encounter there was to be no renewal to Bee of her own story and meaning. It was not for Aubrey that she was called or wanted—for the succour of others, for sisterly help, for charity and kindness; but not for her own love or life.
Itwas to a house in one of the streets of Mayfair that Mrs. Leigh conveyed her young companion; one of those small expensive places where persons within the circle of what is called the world in London contrive to live with as little comfort and the greatest expenditure possible. It is dark and often dingy in Mayfair; nowhere is it more difficult to keep furniture, or even human apparel, clean; the rooms are small and the streets shabby; but it is one of the right places in which to live, not so perfect as it was once, indeed, but still furnishing an unimpeachable address.
It had half put on the aspect of the season by this time; some of the balconies were full of flowers, and the air of resuscitation which comes to certain quarters of London after Easter, as if, indeed, they too had risen from the dead, was vaguely visible. To be sure, little of this was apparent in the dim lamplight when the two ladies arrived at the door. Bee was hurried upstairs through the narrow passage, though she had been very keenly aware that someone in the lower room had momentarily lifted the blind to look out as they arrived—someone who did not appear, who made no sound, who had nothing to do with her or her life.
The rooms, which are usually the drawing-rooms of such a house, were turned evidently into the apartments of the sufferer. In the back room which they entered first was a nurse who greeted the ladies in dumb show, and whose white head-dress and apron had the strangest effect in the semi-darkness. She said, half by gesture, half with whispered words more visible than audible, “He is up—better—impatient—good sign—discontented with everything. Is this the lady?”
Mrs. Leigh answered in the same way, “His sister—shall I go with her?—you?—alone?”
“By herself,” said the nurse, laconic; and almost inaudible as this conversation was, it occasioned a stirring and movement in the inner room.
“What a noise you make,” cried a querulous, unsteady voice, “Who’s there—who’s there?”
The nurse took Bee’s hat from her head, with a noiseless swift movement, and relieved her of the little cloak she was wearing. She took her by the arm and pushed her softly forward. “Nothing to worry. Soothe him,” she breathed, holding up a curtain that Bee might pass. The room was but badly lighted, a single lamp on a table almost extinguished by the shade, a fire burning though the night was warm, and one of the long windows open, letting in the atmosphere and sounds of the London street. Bee stole in, an uncertain shadow into the shaded room, less eager than frightened and over-awed by this sudden entrance into the presence of sickness and misery. She was not accustomed to associate such things with her brother. It did not seem anyone with whom she was acquainted that she was about to see.
“Oh, Charlie!” the little cry and movement she made, falling down on her knees beside him, raised a pale, unhappy face, half covered with the down of an irregular fledgling beard from the pillow.
“Hallo!” he said, and then in a tone of disappointment and disdain, “You!”
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie dear! You have been ill and we never knew.”
“How do you know now? They knew I never wanted you to know,” he said.
“Oh, Charlie—who ought to know but your own people? We have been wretched, thinking all sorts of dreadful things—but not this.”
“Naturally,” he said, “my own people might be trusted never to think the right thing. Now you do know you may as well take yourself off. I don’t want you—or anybody,” he added, with an impatient sigh.
“Charlie—oh, please let me stay with you. Who should be with you but your sister? And I know—a great deal about nursing. Mamma——”
“I say—hold your tongue, can’t you? Who wants you to talk—of anything of that sort?”
Bee heard a slight stir in the curtains, and looking back hastily as she dried her streaming eyes saw the laconic nurse making signs to her. The sight of the stranger was more effectual even than her signs, and restored Bee’s self-command at once.
“Why did they bring you here?” said Charlie. “I didn’t want you; they know what I want, well enough.”
“What is it you want, oh, Charlie dear? Papa—and all of us—will do anything in the world you want.”
“Papa,” he said, and his weakened and irregular voice ran through the gamut from a high feeble tone of irritation to the quaver of that self-pity which is so strong in all youthful trouble. “Yes, he would be pleased to get me out of the way, and be done with me now.”
“Oh, Charlie! You know how wrong that is. Papa has been—miserable—”
Charlie uttered a feeble laugh. He put his hand upon his chin, stroking down the irregular tufts of hair; even in his low state the poor boy had a certain pride in what he believed to be his beard.
“Not much,” he said. “I daresay you’ve made a fuss—Betty and you. The governor will crack up Arthur for the F. O. and let me drop like a stone.”
“No, Charlie, no. He has no such thought—he has taken such trouble not to let it be known. He would not advertise or anything.”
“Advertise!” A sudden hot flush came over the gaunt face. “For me!” It did not seem that such a thought had ever occurred to the young man. “Like the fellows in the newspapers that steal their master’s money—‘All is arranged and you can return to your situation.’ By George!”
There was again a faint rustle in the curtains. Bee sprang up with her natural impatience, and went straight to the spot whence this sound had come.
“If I am not to speak to my brother alone and in freedom, I will not speak to him at all,” she said.
The laconic nurse remonstrated violently with her lips and eyes.
“Don’t excite him. Don’t disturb him. He’ll not sleep all night,” she managed to convey, with much arching of the eyebrows and mouth, then disappeared silently out of the bedroom behind.
“What’s that?” said Charlie, sharply. He moved on his sofa, and turned his head round with difficulty. “Are there more of you to come?”
There seemed a kind of hope and expectation in the question, but when Bee answered with despondency, “There’s only me, Charlie,” he broke out harshly:
“I don’t want you—I want none of you; I told them so. You can go and tell my father, as soon as they let me get out I’m going off to New Zealand or somewhere—the furthest-off place I can get to.”
“Oh, Charlie!” cried Bee, taking every word as the sincerest utterance of a fixed intention, “what could you do there?”
“Die, I suppose,” he said, with again that quaver of self-compassion in his voice, “or go to the dogs, which will be easy enough. You may say, why didn’t I die here and be done with it? I don’t know—I’m sure I wanted to. It was that doctor fellow, and that woman that talks with her eyebrows, and that confounded cad, Leigh—they wouldn’t let me. And I’ve got so weak; if you don’t go away this moment I’ll cry like a dashed baby!” with a more piteous quaver than ever in the remnant of his once manly voice.
All that Bee could do was to throw her arms round his neck and draw his head upon her shoulder, which he resisted fiercely for a moment, then yielded to in the abandonment of his weakness. Poor Charlie felt, perhaps, a momentary sweetness in the relaxation of all the bonds of self-control, and all the well-meaning attempts to keep him from injuring himself by emotion; the unexpected outburst did him good, partly because it was a breach of all the discipline of the sick room. Presently he came to himself and pushed Bee away.
“What do you come bothering about?” he said; “you ought to have left me alone. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got to lie on it. I don’t suppose that anyone has taken the trouble to—ask about me?” he added, after a little while, in what was intended for a careless tone.
“Oh, Charlie, everyone who has known; but papa would let nobody know: except at Oxford. We—went to Oxford——”
He got up on his pillow with his eyes shining out of their hollow sockets, his long limbs coming to the ground with a faint thump. Poor Charlie was young enough to have grown during his illness, and those gaunt limbs seemed unreasonably long.
“You went to Oxford!” he said, “and you saw—”
“Dear Charlie, they will say I am exciting you—doing you harm——”
“You saw?” he cried, bringing down his fist upon the table with a blow that made the very floor shake.
“Yes,” said Bee, trembling, “we saw—or rather papa saw——”
He pushed up the shade of the lamp with his long bony fingers, and fixed his eyes, bright with fever, on her face.
“Oh, Charlie, don’t look at me so!—the lady whom you used to talk to me about—whom I saw in the academy——”
“Yes?”—he grasped her hand across the table with a momentary hot pressure.
“She came and saw papa in the hotel. She told him about you, and that you had—oh, Charlie, and she so old—as old as——”
“Hold your tongue!” he cried, violently, and then with a long-drawn breath, “What more? She told him—and he was rude, I suppose. Confound him! Confound—confound them all!”
“I will not say another word unless you are quiet,” said Bee, her spirit rising; “put up your feet on the sofa and be quiet, and remember all the risk you are running—or I will not say another word.”
He obeyed her with murmurs of complaint, but no longer with the languid gloom of his first accost. Hope seemed to have come into his heart. He subdued himself, lay back among his pillows, obeyed her in all she stipulated. The light from underneath the raised shade played on his face and gave it a tinge of colour, though it showed more clearly the emaciation of the outlines and the aspect of neglect, rather than, as poor Charlie hoped, of enhanced manly dignity, conveyed by the irregular sick man’s growth of the infant beard.
“Papa was not rude,” said Bee, “he is never rude; he is a gentleman. Worse than that—”
“Worse—than what?”
“Oh, I cannot understand you at all, you and—the rest,” cried the girl; “one after another you give in to her, you admire her, you do what she tells you—that woman who has harmed me all she can, and you all she can, and now—Charlie!” Bee stopped with astonishment and indignation. Her brother had raised himself up again, and aimed a furious but futile blow at her in the air. It did not touch her, but the indignity was no less on that account.
“Well,” he cried, again bringing down that hand which could not reach her, on the table, “How dare you speak of one you’re not worthy to name? Ah! I might have known she wouldn’t desert me. It is she who has kept the way open, and subdued my father, and——” An ineffable look of happiness came upon the worn and gaunt countenance, his eyes softened, his voice fell. “I might have known!” he said to himself, “I might have known!”
And what could Bee say? Though she did not believe in—though she hated and feared with a child’s intensity of terror the woman who had so often crossed her path—she could not contradict her brother’s faith, though she considered it an infatuation, a folly beyond belief; it seemed, after all, in a manner true that this woman had not deserted him. She had subdued his father’s displeasure somehow, made everything easier. Bee looked at him, the victim of those wiles, yet nevertheless indebted to them, with the same exasperation which her father’s subjugation had caused her. What could she say, what could she do, to reveal to them that enchantress in her true colours? But Bee knew that she could do nothing, and there began to rise in her heart a dreadful question, Was it so sure that she herself was right? Was this woman, indeed, an evil Fate, or was she, was she——? And the first story of all, the story of Aubrey, was it perhaps true?
The nurse came in noiselessly, hurrying, while Bee’s mind ran through those thoughts—evidently with the conviction that she would find the patient worse. But Charlie was not worse. He turned his face towards his attendant, still with something of that dreamy rapture in it.
“Oh, you may speak out,” he said; “I don’t mind noises to-night. Supper? Yes, I’ll take some supper. Bring me a beefsteak or something substantial. I’m going to get well at once.”
Nurse nodded at Bee, with much uplifting of her eyelids. “Put no faith in you,” she said, working the machinery of her lips; “was wrong; done him no end of good. Beefsteak; not exactly; but soon, soon, if you’re good.”
Beesaw no more of Charlie that night. When she came out of his room, where there was a certain meaning in her presence, she seemed to pass into the region of dreams. She was taken upstairs to refresh herself and rest, into the smaller of two bedrooms which were over Charlie’s room, the other of which was occupied by Mrs. Leigh. And she was taken downstairs to dine with that ladytête-à-têteat the small shining table. There was something about the little house altogether, a certain conciseness, an absence of drapery, and of the small elegant litter which is so general nowadays, which gave it a masculine character—or, at least, Bee, not accustomed to æsthetic young men, accustomed rather to big boys and their scorn of the decorative arts, thought so with a curious flutter of her being. This perhaps was partly because the ornamental part of the house was devoted to Charlie, and the little dining-room below seemed the sole room to live in. It had one or two portraits hung on the walls, pictures almost too much for its small dimensions. The still smaller room behind was clothed with books, and had for its only ornament a small portrait of Mrs. Leigh over the mantel-piece. Whose rooms were these? Who had furnished them so gravely, and left behind an impression of serious character which almost chilled the heart of Bee? He was nowhere visible, nor any trace of him. No allusion was made as to an absent master of the house, and yet it bore an air so individual that Bee’s sensitive being was moved by it, with all the might of something stranger than imagination. She stood trembling among the books, looking at the mother’s portrait over the mantel-piece, feeling as if the very mantel-shelf on which she rested her arm was warm with the touch of his. But not a word was said, not an allusion made to Aubrey.
What had she to do with Aubrey? Nothing—less than with any other man in the world—any stranger to whom she could speak with freedom, interchanging the common coin of ordinary intercourse. He was the only man in the world whom she must not talk of, must not see—the only one of whose presence it was necessary to obliterate every sign, and never to utter the name where she was. Poor Bee! Yet she felt him near, his presence suggested by everything, his name always latent in the air. She slept and waked in that strange atmosphere as in a dream. In Aubrey’s house, yet with Aubrey obliterated—the one person in existence with whom she had nothing, nothing to do.
It was late before she was allowed to see her brother next day, and Bee, in the meantime, left to her own devices, had not known what to do. She had taken pen and paper two or three times to let her father know that Charlie was found, but her mind revolted, somehow, from making that intimation. What would happen when he knew? He would come here immediately; he would probably attempt to remove Charlie; he would certainly order Bee away at once from a place so unsuitable for her. It was unsuitable for her, and yet—She scarcely saw even Mrs. Leigh after breakfast, but was left to herself, with the door open into that sanctuary which was Aubrey’s, with all his books and the newspapers laid out upon the table. Bee sat in the dining-room and looked into that other secluded place. In the light of day she dared not go into it. It seemed like thrusting herself into his presence who had no thought of her, who did not want her. Oh, not for Aubrey! Aubrey would not for the world disturb her, or bring any embarrassment into her mind. Aubrey would rather disappear from his own house, as if he had never existed, than remind her that he did exist, and perhaps sometimes thought of her still. Did he ever think of her? Bee knew that it would be wrong and unlike Aubrey if he kept in these rooms the poor little photograph of her almost childish face which he had once prized so much. It would have been indelicate, unlike a gentleman; and yet she made a hasty and furtive search everywhere to see if, perhaps, it might be somewhere, in some book or little frame. She would have been angry had she found it, and indignant; yet she felt a certain desolate sense of being altogether out of the question, steal into her heart, when she did not find it—in the inconsistencies of which the heart is full.
It was mid-day when she was called upstairs, to find Charlie established in the room which should have been the drawing-room, and round which she threw another wistful look as she came into it in full daylight. Oh, not a woman’s room in any way, with none of those little photograph frames about which strew a woman’s table—not one, and consequently none of Bee. She took this in at the first glance, as she made the three or four little steps between the door and Charlie’s couch. He was more hollow-eyed and worn in the daylight than he had been even on the night before, his appearance entirely changed from that of the commonplace young Oxford man to an eager, anxious being, with all the cares of a troubled soul concentrated in his eyes. Mrs. Leigh sat near him, and the nurse was busy with cushions and pillows arranging his couch.
“My dear, you will be thankful to hear that the doctor gives a very good report to-day. He says that, though he would not have sanctioned it, my remedy has done wonders. You are my remedy, Bee. I am proud of so successful an idea—though, to be sure, it was a very simple one. Now you must go on and complete the cure, and I give youcarte blanche. Ask anyone here, anyone you please, so long as it is not too much for Charlie. He may see one or two people if nurse sanctions it. I am going out myself for the day. I shall not return till late in the afternoon, and you are mistress in the meantime—absolute mistress,” said Mrs. Leigh, kissing her. Bee felt that Aubrey’s mother would not even meet her eyes lest she should throw too much meaning into these words. Oh, there was no meaning in them, except so far as Charlie was concerned.
And then she was left alone with her brother, the most natural, the only suitable arrangement. Nurse gave the last pat to his cushions, the last twist to the coverlet, which was over his gaunt limbs, appealed to him the last time in dumb show whether he wanted anything, and then withdrew. It was most natural that his sister, whose appearance had done him so much good, should be left with him as his nurse; but she was frightened, and Charlie self-absorbed, and it was some time before either found a word to say. At last he said, “Bee!” calling her attention, and then was silent again for some time, speaking no more.
“Yes, Charlie!” There was a flutter in Bee’s voice as in her heart.
“I say, I wasn’t, perhaps, very nice to you last night; I couldn’t bear to be brought back; but they say I’m twice as well since you came. So I am. I’ve got something to keep me up. Bee, look here. Am I dreadful to look at? I know I haven’t an ounce of flesh left on my bones, but some don’t mind that; and then, my beard. I’ve heard it said that a beard that never was shaved was—was—an embellishment, don’t you know. Do you think I’m dreadful to look at, Bee?”
“Oh, Charlie,” said the girl, from the depths of her heart, “what does it matter how you look? The more ill you look the more need you have for your own people about you, who never would think twice of that.”
Charlie’s gaunt countenance was distorted with a grin of rage and annoyance. “I wish you’d shut up about my own people. The governor, perhaps, with his grand air, or Betty, as sharp as a needle—as if I wanted them!—or to be told that they would put up with me.”
“Charlie,” said Bee, trembling, “I don’t want to vex you, you are a little—but couldn’t you have a barber to come, and perhaps he could take it off.”
There came a flash of fire out of Charlie’s eyes; he put up his hand to his face, as if to protect that beard in which he at least believed—“I might have known,” he said, “that you were the last person! A fellow’s sister is always like that: just as we never think anything of a girl’s looks in our own families. Well, you’ve given your opinion on that subject. And you think that people who care for me wouldn’t think twice of that?”
“Oh, no,” said Bee, clasping her hands, “how should they? But only feel for you far, far more.”
Charlie took down his hand from his young beard. He looked at her with his hollow eyes full of anxiety, yet with a certain complacence. “Interesting?”—he said, “is that what you meant to say?”
“Oh, yes,” cried Bee, her eyes full of pity, “for they can see what you have gone through, and how much you have been suffering,—if there was any need of making you more interesting to us.”
Charlie stroked down his little tufts of wool for some time without speaking, and then he said in a caressing tone unusual to him, “I want you to do me a favour, Bee.”
“Anything—anything, whatever you wish, Charlie.”
“There is just one thing I wish, and one person I want to see. Sit down and write a note—you need not do more than say where I am,” said Charlie, speaking quickly. “Say I am here, and have been very ill, but that the hope she’d come, and to hear that she had forgiven me, was like new life. Well! what is the meaning of your ‘anything, anything,’ if you break down at the first thing I ask you? Look here, Bee, if you wish me to live and get well you’ll do what I say.”
“Oh, Charlie, how can I?—how can I?—when you know what I feel—about——”
“What you feel—about? Who cares what you feel? You think perhaps it was you that did me all that good last night. That’s all conceit, like the nonsense in novels, where a woman near your bed when you’re ill makes all the difference. Girls,” said Charlie, “are puffed up with that folly and believe anything. You know I didn’t want you. It was what you told me aboutherthat did me good. And your humbug, sitting there crying, ‘anything, anything!’ Well, here’s something! You need not write a regular letter, if you don’t like it. Put where I am—Charlie Kingsward very ill; will you come and see him? A telegram would do, and it would be quicker; send a telegram,” he cried.
“Oh, Charlie!”
“Give me the paper and pencil—I’m shaky, but I can do that much myself——”
“Charlie, I’ll do it rather than vex you; but I don’t know where to send it.”
“Oh, I can tell you that—Avondale, near the Parks, Oxford.”
“She is not there now—she is in London,” said Bee, in a low tone.
“In London?” Again the long, gaunt limbs came to the ground with a thump. “Bee, if you could get me a hansom perhaps I could go.”
The nurse at this moment came in noiselessly, and Charlie shrank before her. She put him back on the sofa with a swift movement. “If you go on like this I’ll take the young lady away,” she said.
“I’ll not go on—I’ll be as meek as Moses; but, nurse, tell her she mustn’t contradict a man in my state. She must do what I say.”
Nurse turned her back upon the patient, and made the usual grimaces; “Humour him,” her lips and eyebrows said.
“Charlie, papa knows the address, and Betty—and I ought, oh, I ought to let them know at once that you are here.”
“Betty!” he said, with a grimace, “what does that little thing know?”
“She knows—better than you think I do; and papa—— Papa is never happy but when he is with that lady. He goes to see her every day; she writes to him and he writes to her; they go out together,” cried Bee, thinking of that invitation to Portman Square which had seemed the last insult which she could be called on to bear.
Charlie smiled—the same smile of ineffable self-complacence and confidence which had replaced in a moment the gloom of the previous night; and then he grew grave. He was not such a fool, he said to himself, as to be jealous of his own father; but still he grudged that anyone but himself should have her company. He remembered what it was to go to see her every day, to write to her, to have her letters, to be privileged to give her his arm now and then, to escort her here or there. If it had been another fellow! But a man’s father—the governor! He was not a rival. Charlie imagined to himself the conversations with him for their subject, and how, perhaps for the first time, the governor would learn to do him justice, seeing him through Laura’s eyes. It was true that she had rejected him, had almost laughed at him, had sent him away so completely broken down and miserable that he had not cared what became of him. But hope had sprung within him, all the more wildly from that downfall. It was like her to go to the old gentleman (it was thus he considered his father) to explain everything, to set him right. She would not have done so if her heart had not relented—her heart was so kind. She must have felt what it was to drive a man to despair—and now she was working for him, soothing down the governor, bringing everything back.
“Eh?” he said, vaguely, some time after; he had in the meantime heard Bee’s voice going on vaguely addressing somebody, in the air, “are you speaking to me?”
“There is no one else to speak to,” cried Bee, almost angrily. And then she said, “Charlie—how can you ask her to come here?”
“Why not here? She’ll go anywhere to do a kind thing.”
“But not to this house—not here, not here!”
“Why not, I should like to know—what’s here?” Then Charlie stared at her for a moment with his hollow eyes, and broke into a low, feeble laugh.
“Oh,” he said, “I know what you’ve got in your head—because of that confounded cad, Aubrey Leigh? That is just why she will come, to show what a lie all that was—as if she ever would have looked twice at a fellow like Leigh.”
“He seems to have saved your life,” said Bee, confused, not knowing what to think.
“You mean he gave me house-room when I was ill, and sent for a doctor. Why, any shop-keeper would have done that. And now,” said Charlie, with a grin, “he shall be fully paid back.”
Betty Kingswardlived in what was to her a whirl of pleasure at Portman Square, where everybody was fond of her, and all manner of entertainments were devised for her pleasure. And her correspondence was not usually of an exciting character. Her morning letters, when she had any, were placed by her plate on the breakfast-table. If any came by other posts, she got them when she had a spare moment to look for them, and she had scarcely a spare moment at this very lively and very happy moment of her young career. Besides, that particular evening when Bee’s note arrived was a very important one to Betty. It was the evening on which Miss Lance was to dine with the Lyons. And it was not a mere quiet family dinner, but a party—a thing which in her newness and inexperience still excited the little girl, who was not to say properly “out,” in consequence of her mourning; still wearing black ribbons with her white frocks, and only allowed to accept invitations which were “quiet.” A dinner of twenty people is not exactly an entertainment for a girl of her years, but Betty’s excitement in thedebûtof Miss Lance was so great that no ball could have occupied her more. There was an unusual interest about it in the whole house, even Mrs. Lyon’s maid, the most staid of confidential persons, had begged Betty to point out to her over the baluster “the lady, Miss Betty, that is coming with your papa.”
“Oh, she’s not coming with papa,” Betty had cried, with a laugh at Hobbs’ mistake, “she is only a great, great friend, Hobbs. You will easily know her, for there is nobody else so handsome.”
“Handsome is as handsome does,” said the woman, and she patted Betty on the shoulder under pretence of arranging her ribbon.
Betty had not the least idea why Hobbs looked at her with such compassionate eyes.
Miss Lance, however, did come into the room, to Betty’s surprise, closely followed by Colonel Kingsward, as if they had arrived together. She was like a picture, in her black satin and lace, dressed not too young but rather too old for her age, as Mrs. Lyon pointed out, who was as much excited about her new guest as Betty herself; and the unknown lady had the greatest possible success in a party which consisted chiefly, as Betty did not remark, of old friends of Colonel Kingsward, with whom she had been acquainted all her life. Betty did not remark it, but Gerald Lyon did, who was more than ever her comrade and companion in this elderly company.
“Why all these old fogies?” he had asked irreverently, as the gentlemen with stars on their coats and the ladies in diamonds came in.
Betty perceived that it was an unusually solemn party, but thought no more of it. It was the evening of the first levee, and that, perhaps, was the reason why the old gentlemen wore their orders. Old gentlemen! They were the flower of the British army. Generals This and That, heads of departments; impossible to imagine more grand people—in the flower of their age, like Colonel Kingsward. But eighteen has its own ideas very clearly marked on that subject. Betty and Gerald stood by, lighting up one corner with a blaze of undeniable youth, to see them come in. The young pair were like flowers in comparison with the substantial size and well worn complexions of their seniors, and they were the only little nobodies, the sole representatives of undistinguished and ordinary humanity round the table. They were not by any means daunted by that. On the contrary, they felt themselves, as it were, soaring over the heads of all those limited persons who had attained, spurning the level heights of realisation. They did not in the least know what was to become of them in life, but naturally they made light of the others who did know, who had done all they were likely to do, and had no more to look to. The dignity of accomplished success filled the young ones with impulses of laughter; their inferiority gave them an elevation over all the grizzled heads; they felt themselves, nobodies, to be almost ludicrously, dizzily above the heads of the rest. Only one of the company seemed to see this, however; to cast them an occasional look, even to make them the confidants of an occasional smile, a raising of the eyebrows, a sort of unspoken comment on the fine company, which made Betty still more lively in her criticisms. But this made almost a quarrel between the two.
“Oh, I wish we were nearer to Miss Lance, to hear what she thinks of it all,” Betty said.
“I can’t think what you see in that woman,” cried Gerald. “I, for one, have no desire to know her opinion.”
Betty turned her little shoulder upon him with a glance of flame, that almost set the young man on fire.
“You prejudiced, cynical, uncharitable, malicious, odious boy!” And they did not say another word to each other for five minutes by the clock.
Miss Lance, however, there was no doubt, had a distinguished success. She captivated the gentlemen who were next to her at table, and, what was perhaps more difficult, she made a favourable impression upon the ladies in the drawing-room. Her aspect there, indeed, was of the most attractive kind. She drew Betty’s arm within her own, and said with a laugh, “You and I are the girls, little Betty, among all these grand married ladies;” and then she added, “Isn’t it a little absurd that we shouldn’t have some title to ourselves, we old maids?—for Miss means eighteen, and it’s hard that it should mean forty-two. Fancy the disappointment of hearing this juvenile title and then finding that it means a middle-aged woman.”
She laughed so freely that some of the other ladies laughed too. The attention of all was directed towards the new comer, which Betty thought very natural, she was so much the handsomest of them all.
“You mean the disappointment of a gentleman?” said one of the guests.
“Oh, no, of ladies too. Don’t you think women are just as fond of youth as men are, and as much disgusted with an elderly face veiling itself in false pretences? Oh, more! We think more of beauty than the men do,” said Miss Lance, raising her fine head as if to expose its features to the fire of all the glances bent upon her.
There was a little chorus of cries, “Oh, no, no,” and arguments against so novel a view.
But Miss Lance did not quail; her own beauty was done full justice to. She was so placed that more than one mirror in the old-fashioned room reflected her graceful and not unstudied pose.
“I know it isn’t a usual view,” she said, “but if you’ll think of it a little you’ll find it’s true. The common thing is to talk about women being jealous of each other. If we are it is because we are always the first to find out a beautiful face—and usually we much exaggerate its power.”
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Lyon in her quavering voice, “I almost think Miss Lance is right? Mr. Lyon instantly says ‘Humph!’ when I point out a pretty person to him. And Gerald tells me, ‘You think every girl pretty, aunt.’ ”
“That is because there is one little girl that he thinks the most pretty of all,” said Miss Lance, with a sort of soft maternal coo in Betty’s ear.
The subject was taken up and tossed about from one to another, while she who had originated it drew back a little, listening with an air of much attention, turning her head to each speaker, an attitude which was most effective. It will probably be thought the greatest waste of effort for a woman thus to exhibit what the newspapers call her personal advantages to a group of her own sex; but Miss Lance was a very clever woman, and she knew what she was about. After a time, when the first fervour of the argument was over, she returned to her first theme as to the appropriate title that ought to be invented for old maids.
“I have thought of it a great deal,” she said. “I should have called myself Mrs. Laura Lance, to discriminate—but for the American custom of calling all married ladies so, which is absurd.”
“I have a friend in New York who writes to me as Mrs. Mary Lyon,” said the mistress of the house.
“Yes, which is ridiculous, you know; for you are not Mrs. Mary Lyon, dear lady. You are Mrs. Francis Lyon, if it is necessary to have a Christian name, for Lyon is your husband’s name, not yours. You are Mrs. Mary Howard by rights—if in such a matter there are any rights.”
“What!” cried old Mr. Lyon, coming in after the long array of gentlemen, “are you going to divorce my wife from me, or give her another name, or what are you going to do? We thought it was we only who could change the ladies’ names, Kingsward, eh?”
Colonel Kingsward had placed himself immediately in front of Miss Lance, and Betty, looking on all unsuspicious, saw a glance pass between them—or rather, she saw Miss Lance look up into her father’s face. Betty did not know in the least what that look meant, but it gave her a little shock as if she had touched an electric battery. It meant something more than to Betty’s consciousness had ever been put into words. She turned her eyes away for a moment to escape the curious thrill that ran through her, and in that moment met Gerald Lyon’s eyes, full of something malicious, mocking, disagreeable, which made Betty very angry. But she could not explain to herself what all these looks meant.
This curious sensation somehow spoiled the rest of the evening for Betty. Everybody it seemed to her after this meant something—something more than they said. They looked at her father, they looked at Miss Lance, they looked even at Betty’s little self, embracing all three, sometimes in one comprehensive glance. And all kinds of significant little speeches were made as the company went away. “I am so glad to have seen her,” one lady said in an undertone to Mrs. Lyon. “One regrets, of course, but one is thankful it is no worse.” “I think,” said another, “it will do very well—I think it will do very well; thank you for the opportunity.” And “Charming, my dear Mrs. Lyon, charming,” said another. They all spoke low and in the most confidential tone. What was it they were all so interested about?
The last of the party to go were Miss Lance and Colonel Kingsward. They seemed to go away together as they had seemed to come together.
“Your father is so kind as to see me home,” Miss Lance said, by way of explanation. “I am not a grand lady with a carriage. I am old enough to walk home by myself, and I always do it, but as Colonel Kingsward is so kind, of course I like company best.”
She too had a private word with Mrs. Lyon, at the head of the stairs. Betty did not want to listen, but she heard by instinct the repeated “Thank you, thank you! How can I ever express how much I thank you?” Betty was so bewildered that she could not think. She paid no attention to her father, who put his hands on her shoulders when he said “Good-night,” and said, “Betty, I’ll see you to-morrow.” Oh, of course, she should see him to-morrow—or not, as circumstances might ordain. What did it matter? She was not anxious to see her father to-morrow, it could not be of the least importance whether they met or not; but what Betty would really have liked would have been to find out what all these little whisperings could mean.
Mrs. Lyon came up to her when the last, to wit, Colonel Kingsward following Miss Lance, had disappeared, and put her arms round the little girl. “You are looking a little tired,” she said, “just this last hour. I did not think they would stay so late. It is all Miss Lance, I believe, setting us on to argue with her metaphysics. Well, everybody likes her very much, which will please you, my dear, as you are so fond of her. And now, Betty, you must run off to bed. There’s hardly time for your beauty sleep.”
“Mrs. Lyon,” said Betty, very curious, “was it to meet Miss Lance that all those grand people came?”
“I don’t know what you call grand people. They are all great friends of ours and also of your father’s, and I think you know them every one. And they all know each other.”
“Except Miss Lance,” said Gerald, who was always disagreeable—always, when anyone mentioned Miss Lance’s name.
“I know her, certainly, and better than any of them! And there is nobody so delightful,” Betty cried, with fervour, partly because she believed what she said, and partly to be disagreeable in her turn to him.
“And so they all seemed to think,” said old Mr. Lyon, “though I’m not so fond of new people as the rest of you. Lay hands suddenly on no man is what I say.”
“And I say the same as my uncle,” said Gerald, “and it’s still more true of a woman than a man.”
“You are such an experienced person,” said the old lady; “they know so much better than we do, Betty. But never you mind, for your friend has made an excellent impression upon all these people—the most tremendously respectable people,” Mrs. Lyon said, “none of your artists and light-minded persons! Make yourself comfortable with that thought, and good night, my little Betty. You must not stay up so late another night.”
What nonsense that was of staying up late, when it was not yet twelve o’clock! But Betty went off to her room with a little confusion and bewilderment of mind, happy on the whole, but feeling as if she had something to think about when she should be alone. What was it she had to think about? She could not think what it was when she sat down alone to study her problem. There was no problem, and what the departing guests had said to Mrs. Lyon was quite simple, and referred to something that was their own business, that had nothing to do with Betty. How could it have anything to do with Betty?
Around the corner of the Park, Bee, too, was sitting alone and thinking at the same time, and the two sets of thoughts, neither very clear, revolved round the same circle. But neither of the sisters knew, concerning this problem, whereabouts the other was.
Andyet all this time there lay upon Betty’s table, concealed under the pretty laced handkerchiefs which she had pulled out of their sachet to choose one for the party, Bee’s little tremulous letter, expressing a state of mind more agitated than that of Betty, and full of wonderings and trouble. It was found there by the maid who put things in order next morning, when she called the young visitor.
“Here’s a letter that came last night, and you have never opened it,” said the maid, half reproachfully. She, at least, she was anxious to note, had not been to blame.
Betty took it with greatsang froid. She saw by the writing it was only Bee’s—and Bee’s news was never imperative. There could not be much to disclose to her of the state of affairs at Kingswarden that was new, since the night before last.
But the result was that Betty went downstairs in her hat and gloves, and that Mr. Lyon and Gerald, who were both sitting down to that substantial breakfast which is the first symbol of good health and a good conscience in England, had much ado to detain her long enough to share that meal.
Mrs. Lyon did not come downstairs in the morning, so that they used the argument of helplessness, professing themselves unable to pour out their own tea.
“And what business can Betty have of such importance that she must run out without her breakfast?” said the old gentleman.
“Oh, it is news I have heard which I must take at once to papa!”
The two gentlemen looked at each other, and Mr. Lyon shook his big, old head.
“I would not trouble your papa, my dear, with anything you may have heard. Depend upon it, he will let you know anything he wishes you to know—in his own time.”
“But it is news—news,” said Betty; “news about Charlie!”
Then she remembered that very little had been said even to the Lyons about Charlie, and stopped with embarrassment, and her friends could not but believe that this was a hasty expedient to conceal from them that she had heard something—some flying rumour which had set her little impetuous being on fire. When she had escaped from their sympathetic looks and Gerald’s magnanimous proposal to accompany her—without so much as an egg to fortify him for the labours of the day!—Betty set out, crossing the Park in the early glory of the morning, which feels at nine o’clock what six o’clock feels in the country, to carry the news to her father.
Charlie found, and ill; and demanding to see Miss Lance, his health and recovery depending upon whether he should see her or not! Betty’s first instinct had been to hasten at once to George Street, Hanover Square, but then she remembered that papa presumably was the one who was most anxious about Charlie and had the best right to know, and it was perhaps better not to explain to the friends in Portman Square why Miss Lance should go to Charlie. Indeed, when she had set out, a great many questions occurred to Betty, circulating through her lively little mind without any possibility of an answer to them. Why should Charlie be so anxious to see Miss Lance? Why had he been so long there, ill, and nobody come to tell his people of it? And what was Bee doing in Curzon Street, in Aubrey Leigh’s house, which was the last house in the world where she had any right to be? But she walked so fast, and the sunny air with all its movement and lightness so carried her on and filled her with pleasant sounds and images, that these thoughts, blowing like the wind through her little intelligence, had not much effect on Betty now—though there was incipient trouble in them, as even she could see.
Colonel Kingsward was seated at his breakfast when his little girl burst in upon him in all the freshness of the morning. Her youth and her bloom, and her white frock, notwithstanding its black accoutrements, made a great show in the dark-coloured, solemn, official-looking room, with its Turkey carpets and morocco chairs. The Colonel was evidently startled by the sight of her. He said, “Well?” in that tone of self-defence, and almost defiance, with which a man prepares for being called upon to give an account of himself; as if anything so absurd could be possible as that Betty, little Betty, could call upon her father to give an account of himself! But then it is very true that when there is something to be accounted for, the strongest feel how “conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
“Oh,” she cried, breathless, “Papa—Charlie! Bee has found Charlie, and he’s been very ill—typhoid fever; he’s getting better, and he’s in London, and she’s with him; and he wants but to see Miss Lance. Oh, papa, that’s what I came about chiefly—he wants to see Miss Lance.”
Colonel Kingsward’s face changed many times during this breathless deliverance. He said first, “He’s at Mackinnon’s, I know;” then, “In London!” with no pleasure at all in his tone; and finally, “Miss Lance!” angrily, his face covered with a dark glow.
“What is all this?” he cried, when she stopped for want of breath. “Charlie—in town? You must be out of your senses. Why, he is in Scotland. I heard from—, eh? Well, I don’t know that I had any letter, but—. And ill—and Bee with him? What is the meaning of all this? Are you both mad, or in a conspiracy to make yourselves disagreeable to me?”
“Papa!” cried Betty, very ready to take up the challenge; but on the whole the news was too important to justify a combat of self-defence. She produced Bee’s note out of its envelope, and placed it before him, running on with a report of it while the Colonel groped for his eyeglass and arranged it upon his nose.
“A lady came and fetched her,” cried Betty, hurriedly, to forestall the reading, “and brought her up to town and took her to him—oh, so bad—where he had been for weeks; and she told him you had been to Oxford, and something about Miss Lance; and he wants to see Miss Lance, and calls and calls for her, and won’t be satisfied. Oh, papa!”
Colonel Kingsward had arranged hispince-nezvery carefully; he had taken up Bee’s note, and went over it word by word while Betty made her breathless report. When he came to the first mention of Miss Lance he struck his hand upon the table like any other man in a passion, making all the cups and plates ring.
“The little fool!” he said, “the little fool! What right had she to bring in that name? It was this that called forth Betty’s exclamation, but no more was said by either till he read it out to the end. Then he flung the letter from him, and getting up, paced about the room in rage and dismay.
“A long illness,” said the Colonel, “was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to him to sweep all that had passed before out of his mind; and here does this infernal little idiot, this little demon full of spite and malice, get at the boy at his worst moment and bring everything back. What right had she, the spiteful, envious little fool, to bring in the name of a lady—of a lady to whom you all owe the greatest respect?”
“Papa!” cried Betty, overwhelmed, “Bee couldn’t have meant any harm.”
Colonel Kingsward was out of himself and he uttered words which terrified his daughter, and which need not be recorded against him—for he certainly did not in cold blood wish Bee to fall under any celestial malediction. He stormed about the room, saying much that Betty could not understand; that it was just the thing of all others that should not have happened, and the time of all others; that if it had been a little later, or even a little earlier, it would not have mattered; that it was enough to overturn every arrangement, increase every difficulty. He was not at all a man to give way to his feelings so. His children, indeed, until very lately, had never seen him excited at all, and it was an astonishment beyond description to little Betty to be a spectator of this scene. Indeed, Colonel Kingsward awoke presently to a sense of the self-exposure he had been making, and calmed down, or, at least, controlled himself, upon which Betty ventured to ask him very humbly what he thought she had better do.
“May I go to Miss Lance and tell her? She is not angry now, nor unhappy about him like—likeus,” said Betty, putting the best face upon it with instinctive capacity, “and she might know what to do. She is so very kind and understanding, don’t you know, papa?—and she would know what to do.”
For the first time Colonel Kingsward gave his agitated little visitor a smile. “You seem to have some understanding, too, for a little girl,” he said, “and it looks as if you would be worthy of my confidence, Betty. When I see you this afternoon I shall, perhaps, have something to tell you that——”
There came over Colonel Kingsward’s fine countenance a smile, a consciousness, which filled Betty with amaze. She had seen her father look handsome, commanding, very serious. She had seen him wear an air which the girls in their profanity had been used in their mother’s happy days to call that of thepère noble. She had seen him angry, even in a passion, as to-day. She had heard him, alas! blaspheme, which had been very terrible to Betty. But she had never, she acknowledged to herself, seen him looksillybefore. Silly, in a girl’s phraseology, was what he looked now, with that fatuity which is almost solely to be attributed to one cause; but of this Betty was not aware. It came over his countenance, and for a moment Colonel Kingsward let himself go on the flood of complacent consciousness, which healed all his wounds. Then he suddenly braced himself up and turned to Betty again.
“Perhaps,” he said, in his most fatherly tone, for it seemed to the man in this crisis of his life that even little Betty’s support was something to hold by, “my dear child, your instinct is right. Go to Miss Lance and tell her how things are. Don’t take this odious letter, however,” he said, seizing Bee’s note and tearing it across with indignant vehemence, “with all its prejudices and assumptions. Tell her in your own words; and where they are—and—— Where are they, by the way?” he said, groping for the fragments of the letter in his waste-paper basket. “I hope you noted the address.”
He had not then, it was evident, noted the address, nor the name of Mrs. Leigh, nor in whose house Charlie was. Betty’s heart beat high with the question whether she should call his attention to these additional facts, but her courage failed her. He had cooled down, he was himself again: and after a moment he added, “I will write a little note which you can take,” with once more the smile that Betty thought silly floating across his face. She was standing close by the writing-table, and Betty was not aware that there was any harm in the natural glimpse which her keen eyes took, before she was conscious of it, of the note he was writing. It was not like a common note. It did not begin “Dear Miss Lance,” as would have been natural. In short, it had no beginning at all, nor any signature—or rather it was signed only with his initial “F.” How very extraordinary that papa should sign “F.” and should not put any beginning to his letter. A kind of wondering consternation enveloped the little girl. But still she did not in the least understand what it meant.
Betty walked away along Pall Mall and Piccadilly, and by the edge of the Park to George Street, Hanover Square. It is not according to the present fashion that a girl should shrink from walking along through those busy London streets, where nobody is in search of adventures, at least at that hour of the morning. Her white morning frock and her black ribbons, and her early bloom, like the morning, though delightful to behold, did not make all the passers by stand and stare as the movements of a pretty girl used to do, if we are to credit the novels, in the beginning of the century. People, perhaps, have too much to do nowadays to give to that not unusual sight the attention which the dandies and the macaroni bestowed upon it, and Betty was so evidently bent on her own little business, whatever it was, that nothing naturally occurred to detain her.
It was so unusual for her to have a grave piece of business in hand that she was a little elated by it, even though so sorry for Charlie who was so ill, and for Bee who was so perturbed about everything. Betty herself was not perturbed; she was full of the pleasure of the morning and the long, interesting walk, and the sense of her own importance as a messenger. If there did occasionally float across her mind the idea that her father’s demeanour was strange, or that it was odd that he should have signed his note to Miss Lance with an F., it was merely a momentary idea and she did not question it or detain it. And poor Charlie! Ill—not able to get out this fine weather; but he was getting better, so that there was really nothing to be troubled about.
Miss Lance was up, but had not yet appeared when Betty was shown into her little drawing-room. She was not an early riser. It was one of her vices, she frankly allowed. Betty had to wait, and had time to admire all her friend’s knick-knacks, of which there were many, before she came in, which she did at last, with her arms put out to take Betty maternally to her bosom. She looked in the girl’s face with a very intent glance before she took her into this embrace.
“My little Betty, so early,” she said, and kissed the girl, and then looked at her again, as if in expectation of something; but as Betty could not think of anything that Miss Lance would be expecting from her, she remained unconscious of any special meaning in this look.
“Yes, I am early,” she said; “it is because I have something to tell you, and something to ask of you, too.”
“Tell, my dear little girl, and ask. You may be sure I shall be at your service. But what is this in your hand—a note for me?”
“Yes, it is a note for you, but may I tell you first what it is about?” Betty went on quickly with her story, though Miss Lance, without waiting for it, took the note and opened it. “Miss Lance, Charlie is found; he has been very ill, and he wants to see you.”
“To see me?” Miss Lance looked with eyes of sympathy, yet great innocence, as if at an impossible proposal, at the breathless girl so anxious to get it out. “But, Betty, if he is with your friends, the Mackinnons, in Scotland—?”