And Aubrey remained in town disconsolately getting through the winter as best he could, neglecting all his duties of hospitality, keeping his house shut up, and leaving his game to be shot by the gamekeepers—indifferent to everything. He could not bear the place with which he had so many painful associations, sharpened now by the loss of all the hopes that had fallen so quickly of taking Bee to it, and beginning a real life of happiness and usefulness. What he wanted most in life was to fulfil all his duties—in the happiest way in which such duties can be fulfilled, after the methods of an English country gentleman with sufficient, but not too great position, money, and all that accompanies them. He was not anenragéfoxhunter, or sportsman, but he was quite disposed to follow all the occupations and recreations of country life, to maintain a hospitable house, to take his part of everything that was going on in the county, and above all, to efface the recollection of that first chapter of his life which had not been happy. But all these hopes and intentions seemed to have been killed in him by the cutting off of his new hopes. He kept up his confidence in his mother until he went to her at Christmas to spend with her those days of enforced family life which, when they are not more, are so much less happy than the ordinary course of life. He went down still full of hope, and though Mrs. Leigh received him with professions of unimpaired confidence, he was quick to see that she had in reality done nothing—for that best of all reasons, that there was nothing to do. “You don’t seem to have made progress, however,” he said, on the first night.
“No, perhaps I have not made much progress. I don’t know that I expected to make much progress—at this time of the year. You know in winter one only sees one’s neighbours, who know nothing. Later on, when the weather improves, when there is more coming and going, when I have more opportunities——”
This did not sound very cheerful, but it was still less cheerful when he saw how little even his mother’s mind was occupied with his affairs. It was not her fault; all the thinking in the world could not make Bee’s motives more clear to a woman living at a distance of three or four broad counties from Bee. And one of Aubrey’s married sisters was in some family difficulty which occupied all her mother’s thoughts. Aubrey did not refuse to be interested in his sister. He was willing to give anything he could, either of sympathy or help, to the solving of her problem; but, conscious of so much in his own fate that was harder than could fall to the lot of any comfortable, middle-aged person, it must be allowed that he got very tired of hearing of Mary’s troubles. He answered rather curtly on one or two occasions, and chilled his mother, whose heart was full of Mary, and who was already disposed to blame herself in respect to Aubrey, yet to be irritated by any suspicion of blame from him. On the last morning of his stay he had begged her, if she could abstract her thoughts for a moment from Mary, to think of him. “I don’t want to trouble you further, mother. I only want you to tell me if you think my whole business so hopeless that I had better give every expectation up?”
“Think your business hopeless, Aubrey? Oh, no; I don’t think that.”
“But we know just as much now as we did in October. I do not think we have advanced a step——”
“If you mean to reproach me with my want of success, Aubrey!”
“No—I don’t mean to reproach you with anything, mother. But I think it seems just as hopeless as ever—and not a step nearer.”
“Things cannot be done in a moment,” she said, hurriedly. “I never expected—When the summer comes round, when one sees more people, when one can really pursue one’s inquiries——.” Mrs. Leigh was very conscious that she had pursued few inquiries, and the thought made her angry. “Rome,” she added, “was not built in a day.”
Aubrey Leigh said no more—but he went back to London feeling that he was a beaten man, and the battle once more lost.
Thereis nothing more curious in life than the way in which it closes over those great incidents that shape its course. Like a stone disappearing in a pool, the slow circles of commotion widen and melt away, the missile sinks into the depths of the water, and tranquility comes back to its surface. Every ripple is gone, and yet the stone is always there.
This curious calm came into the life of Bee Kingsward after the incidents related above. The man with whom she had expected to share everything disappeared from her existence as if he had never entered into it, and a dead peace fell over her, and all things around her. It was at once better for Bee and worse that the mourning for her mother swept her away out of all the coming and going of ordinary life for a time—better because she was saved the torment of a perpetual struggle with her trouble, and worse because it shut her up to a perpetual recollection of that trouble. The Kingsward family remained at Kingswarden for the whole of that winter and spring. When the season began there was some question of removing to town, which Bee opposed strongly. “I have no wish to go out,” she said. “I could not, papa, so soon—— And we have no one to take us.”
“You will find plenty of people ready to take you,” he said.
And then Bee took refuge in tears. “Nobody—that we could endure to go with—so soon, so soon!—not yet a year,” she said. Betty followed her sister dubiously. It was natural that she should always echo what Bee said, but this time she was not quite so sure as usual. Not to balls? Oh, not to balls! was Betty’s secret comment, but—Betty felt that to speak occasionally to some one who was not of her own family—not the Rector or the Rector’s wife, the Curate or the Doctor—would be an advantage; but she did not utter that sentiment. After all, what was one season to the measureless horizon of eighteen? Bee renounced her season eagerly, and uttered exclamations of content when Colonel Kingsward announced that, in those circumstances, he had let their house in town. But I am not sure that she was so completely satisfied as she professed to be. She had dismissed Aubrey “for ever”—and yet, when the deed was done, a longing seized her sometimes to hear his name, that someone should speak of him in her presence, that she should hear accidentally where he was, and what he was doing. She had imagined little scenes to herself in which she had heard strangers saying to each other that Aubrey Leigh had soon got over his disappointment, that he was going to be married to So-and-So; or that he was going to make the tour of the world, or to shoot big game in Africa; or, anything in short, so long as it was about him. Even when she had been so determined against going out, there had been a hope in her mind that somehow, she did not know how, some news of him and what he was doing might be wafted her way accidentally. She did not want, she said to herself passionately, ever to hear his name again! Yet she had calculated on hearing as much as that, hearing quite accidentally, at the Royal Academy, perhaps, or somewhere where she might happen to be calling, that he was going to the ends of the earth, or that he was going to be married—things which the speakers might suppose were not of the slightest interest to her. She said all the same that she was delighted when Colonel Kingsward informed them that he had let the house in town—very glad! before it had time to get shabby, the poor old house; yet, when she retired to her room for the night, Bee cried, shedding many salt tears.
But nothing of this was apparent in her life. The circles had all melted away from the still bosom of the pool. The household resumed its former regularity, quickened a little, perhaps, by the energetic sweeping of the new broom. Mrs. Kingsward had been an easy mistress about many trifles, which Bee, new to authority, and more enterprising than her mother, exacted a rigid account of. At the beginning she set all the servants by the ears, each of them being anxious to show that their own conscientiousness was perfect, and their desire to consider their master’s interests; but, by degrees, matters settled down with an increased strictness of order. “As mamma would have wished it,” Bee said; and she herself changed in a way that would be almost miraculous were it not a transformation commonly visible from time to time, from a light-hearted girl, full of little amusing misdemeanours and mistakes, into that sweet serious figure of the eldest daughter, the mother-sister, so often visible in England when the mistress of the household has been removed in early life. There is no more beautiful or more tender vision; it is fine at all ages, but in the first bloom of youth it has a pathetic grace which goes to the heart. Bee underwent this change quite suddenly, after a period of trouble and agitation and over activity. It might not perhaps have come but for the letting for the season of the town house, which seemed to make so complete a severance between her and the ordinary current of life.
It was perhaps this that opened what might almost be called a new relationship between Bee and her brother Charlie, who was the nearest to her in the family, though there had not been hitherto an unusual sympathy between them. For one thing, Betty feeling herself a little forlorn in the country with all the echoes of London, which occasionally came to her ears, had been permitted to accept an invitation to Portman Square to visit a quiet elderly family, not likely to lead her into any dissipation out of keeping with her black frock, and Bee was virtually alone with the children, to whom she gave herself up with a devotion which was the very quintessence of motherhood. Colonel Kingsward also was in town—a man cannot shut himself up (this was what he said) whatever his private griefs may be. He must keep a calm face before the world, he must not allow himself to be hustled out of the way. For this reason, he remained in London, living in chambers, to which he had an official right, in the dingy official grandeur of Pall Mall, and coming to Kingswarden only now and then from Saturday to Monday. This sundered Bee still more completely from the world. And when Charlie came back from Oxford she was more eager to meet him, more pleased with his company than ever before. This was not perhaps entirely the young man’s mind. That he should choose to shut himself up in the country in June was perhaps scarcely to be expected. According to the curious rule which prevails in England he “did not mind” the country in January. But in June! However, it was soon apparent that there were other things than the season in Charlie’s mind. He began a series of lamentations to Bee upon the situation of the family and things in general, by the usual complaint of a young man in the country of having “nothing to do.”
“A man cannot sit at home and dot up the accounts like you,” he said, “though I don’t say but that it’s hard upon you, too. Still, women like to tie up children’s sashes and that sort of thing, and calculate how much their boots cost in a year. I say, mother can’t have had half such an easy life as we all thought.”
“I never thought she had an easy life,” said Bee, which was perhaps not exactly true, but the things that Bee had thought a year ago were so unlike the things she thought now that she did not believe life had ever appeared to her in a different light.
“Well,” said Charlie, “she had a way of making it appear so. Do you remember that last time at the Baths? What a little thing you seemed then, Bee, and now here I am talking to you quite seriously, as if you were mother. Look here, I want you to speak to the governor for me. I am doing no good here. In fact, there’s nothing to do—unless I am to drop into drinking and that sort of thing in the village.”
“Charlie!”
“Well,” he said, “I can’t sit and sew strings on pinafores like you. A man must do something at my age.”
“And what should you do at Oxford? And why do you want to go there when everybody is away?”
“Everybody away! That is all you know. The dons are away, if that is what you mean. There are no lectures going on. But lectures are a mere loss of time. There are lots of fellows up there reading. If you want to read hard, now is the best time.”
“How curious,” said Bee, in genuine surprise, “when all the people who teach are away! And I never knew that you wanted to read hard.”
“No. I never was made to think that I ought to,” said Charlie, with rising colour. “In this house nobody thinks of anything more than just getting through.”
Bee was a little angry as well as surprised by this censure upon the family. She said, “The rest of us may not be clever—but everybody says there are few men that know as much as papa.”
“Oh, in his special subjects, I suppose, but I am not going in for the army, Bee,” said Charlie, the colour rising higher on his young face, which was still an ingenuous face, though not of a very high order. “It is such a wonderful thing to have your duty set before you, and how you ought to make the best of your life. I, for one, never thought of it before. I was always quite satisfied to get through and to have plenty of time to amuse myself; but if you come to think of it that’s a very poor sort of ideal for a life.”
Bee looked up at Charlie with more and more surprise. He was pulling his young moustache nervously, and there was a great deal of emotion in his face. It seemed amazing to his sister that Charlie—Charlie who had always been on the unemotional side, should take this heroic tone, or do anything but laugh at the suggestion of an ideal in life. She gazed at him in some bewilderment. “What are you going to read?” she asked, with doubt and wonder in her voice.
“It is just like a girl to ask a man what he is going to read! Why, everything. I just pushed through my mods., you know—a pass—which it covers me with shame to think of now. I must do something better than that. I don’t know that I’m very good at anything, but work, after all, steady work, is the great thing; and if work can do it——!” cried Charley, breaking off, a little breathless, with a strange light in his eyes.
“You almost frighten me, Charlie. You were never meant for honours or a high degree, were you? Papa said you need not go in for honours, it would lose time; and you thought so, too.”
“I have changed my mind,” said Charlie, nervously. “I thought, like other asses, that in diplomacy you don’t want much; but now I think differently. How are you to understand how to conduct national affairs and all that, and reconcile conflicting claims, and so forth, and settle the real business of the world——”
“But Charlie, I thought it was languages, and great politeness, and—and even dancing, and that sort of thing, that was wanted in an attaché——”
“Attachés,” said the young man, with a gravity which, serious as she also was, almost made Bee laugh, “are the material out of which ambassadors are made. Of course, it takes time——”
Here Bee burst, without meaning it, into a nervous laugh.
“You are so dreadfully serious about it,” she cried.
“And what should a man be serious about, if not that?” the young man replied.
Here for the moment, in great impatience on his part, and in the call of some little household necessity on hers, the conversation closed; but it was resumed as soon as the brother and sister were together again. The big boys were still at school, the little ones engaged with their lessons, and baby walking up and down in his nurse’s arms, did not interrupt the talk which went on between the elders of the family. And there is nothing with which it is so easy to indoctrinate a girl than enthusiasm about an ideal, whatever that may be, or sympathy in a lofty view of duty such as this, which had dawned, it seemed, upon her brother. Bee took fire, as was so natural. She said to herself, that in the utter downfall of her own life, it would be a fine thing to be able to further his, and kept to the idea of Charlie as ambassador, settling all sorts of difficulties and deciding the fortunes of the world for war or for peace, as easily as if the question had been one of leading a cotillion. How splendid it would be! She thought of herself as an old lady, white-haired, in a cap and shawl—for, in an imagination of twenty, there are few gradations between youth and that pathetic, yet satisfactory ultimate period—seated in a particular corner of a magnificent room at the Embassy, looking on at her brother’s triumph. These sort of reflected successes were the only ones she thought that would ever come to Bee.
“Charliewishes to go up to Oxford to read. Why does he wish to go up to Oxford to read? And what reading is it necessary to do there?”
“He says, papa, that it is easier to get on when you have all your books about you—and when you can arrange all your way of living for that, instead of the interruptions at home.”
“Oh, there are too many interruptions at home? I should have thought you were quiet enough here. I hope you have not thrown yourself into lawn tennis parties, and tea parties, and that sort of thing—so soon, Bee.”
Her father looked at her with a seriously reproachful air. He had begun to dine out pretty freely, though only in serious houses, and where, he explained, it would be prejudicial to him in his profession not to appear.
The undeserved reproach brought quick tears to Bee’s eyes. “I have thrown myself into no parties,” she said, hastily. “Nobody has been here. What Charlie means is the meal times, and hours for everything, and all the children about. I have often heard you say that you couldn’t work when the children were playing about.”
“My work and Charlie’s are rather different,” Colonel Kingsward said, with a smile.
“Well, papa! but to read for a good degree, so that you may distinguish yourself, must want a great deal of application——”
“Oh, he wants a good degree, does he? He should have thought of it a little earlier. And what use will that be to him in the Foreign Office? Let him learn French and German—that’s what he has got to do.”
“But even for French and German,” said Bee. “German is dreadfully difficult, and Charlie does not pick up a language easily; and, besides,” she added, “he has nobody to teach him at home——”
“And who would he have at Oxford? Why, in the Long, even the shopkeepers go away!”
“But that is just the time for good, hard reading,” said Bee, acting on her instructions, “when there are no lectures or anything formal to interrupt you.”
“He means, I suppose, when he can do whatever he likes, and there are no proctors nor gate bills to keep him right.”
“Papa,” said Bee, earnestly, “I don’t think that is at all what Charlie means. I am sure that he has a real desire to get on. He says that he feels he has been wasting his time, and—and not—not responding properly to all you have done for him. He wants to make himself fit for anything that may happen. If you will think, papa,” she added, with the deepest gravity, “what a great deal of study and reading an ambassador must require——”
“An ambassador!” Colonel Kingsward was not given to laughter, but he laughed now. “He may think himself fortunate if he is anything but an unpaid attaché for the next ten years—which is an office which does not require a great deal of study.”
“But, papa——”
“Nonsense, Bee. He wants, I suppose, complete freedom, and to amuse himself as he pleases, with no control. I know what it means to stay up at Oxford to read during the Long. Oh, yes. I don’t doubt men who know how to grind, grind, but Charlie is not one of them. Let him stay at home. You are a great deal sharper than he is at languages; you can help him with his German as well as anyone.”
“Oh,” cried Bee, from the bottom of her heart, “not with German, not with German, papa!”
And there came over her a sudden vision of the gardens at the Baths, the murmur of talk in the air, the German officers with their spurs, and one Englishman coming forward among them, an Englishman without spurs, without uniform, so much more distinguished, it had been Bee’s pride to think, in his simplicity, than all these bedizened warriors—and now! A gush of hot tears came to her eyes. There was reason enough for them without Aubrey Leigh, and Colonel Kingsward, whose heart was still tender to every recollection of his wife, did not think of the other memory that thrilled poor Bee’s heart. He walked up and down through the room for a moment saying nothing, and then he paused by her side and put his hand with an unusual caress upon his daughter’s bowed head.
“You are right, you are right,” he said. “I could not ask that of you, Bee.”
Oh! if I had but known! Bee felt not only miserable, but guilty, when her father’s touch came upon her hair. To think how little the dear mother’s presence told in that picture, and how much, how much! that of the man—who had been vulgarly untrue to her, a man without sense of purity or honour! One whose name she never desired to hear again. She could hardly accept the imputation of so much higher and nobler feeling which her father’s touch conveyed. The dear mother! who never condemned, who was always kind. She was moved to cry out in self-abasement, “It was not mamma I was thinking of, it was him! him!” But she did not do this. She raised her head and took up her work again with a trembling hand.
“I suppose,” said Colonel Kingsward, as anxious as his daughter was to get away from a subject which was too moving for discussion, “that Charlie finds Kingswarden dull. It is not unnatural at his age, and I shall not object if he wishes to come to town for a week or so. His own good feeling, I hope, would keep him from anything unbecoming in the circumstances. But I must hear no more of this going to Oxford. It is quite out of the question. If he had shown any desire to go in for honours at the right time——. But now it is worse than folly. He must get through as quickly as he can, and take advantage of his nomination at once. Who can tell how soon it may be of no value? The Foreign Office may be thrown open, like all the rest, to every costermonger in the country, in a year or two, for anything one knows.”
Charlie received this conclusion with disappointment, rapidly turning into rage and rebellion. “I should have thought the most old-fashioned old fogey in the world would have known better,” he cried. “What, prevent a man from reading when he is at the University! Did you ever hear of such a thing, Bee? Why, even a military man, though they are the most obstinate in the world, must know that to be really educated is everything in these days. A week in town! What do I care for a week in town? It is exactly like the man in the Bible who, being asked for bread, gave a stone.”
Bee was greatly impressed by her brother’s anxiety to continue his studies. It filled her with a respect and admiration which up to this time she had never entertained for Charlie, and occupied her mind much with the question how, if her father were obdurate, he might be aided at home in those studies. She remembered suddenly that Mr. Burton’s curate had been spoken of as a great scholar when he came first to the parish. He had taken tremendous honours she had heard. And why might not he be secured as an aid to Charlie in his most laudable ambition? She thought this over a great deal as she moved about her household duties. Bee as a housekeeper was much more anxious than her mother had been for many years. She thought that everything that was done required her personal attention. She had prolonged interviews every morning with the cook, who had been more or less the housekeeper for a long time, and who (with a secret sense of humour) perplexed Bee with technicalities which she would not allow that she did not understand. The girl ordered everything minutely for dinner and lunch and breakfast, and decided what was to be for the nursery as if she knew all about it, and reproved cook gravely when she found that certain alterations had been made in the menu when those meals were served. “I assure you as that is what you ordered, miss,” cook said, with a twinkle in her eye. All this Bee did, not only because of her strong determination to do her duty, but also because preoccupation with all these details was her great salvation from thoughts which, do what she would, claimed her attention more than nursery puddings and the entrées that pleased papa. But while she pursued these labours there was still time for other thoughts, and she occupied herself very much with this question about Charlie. Why could not Mr. Delaine come to read with him? Mr. Delaine had shown an inclination to flirt with Betty, but Betty was now absent, so that no harm could be done in that direction. She thought it all out during the somewhat gloomy days which Colonel Kingsward spent with his family in the country. It rained all the Sunday, which is a doleful addition to the usual heaviness of a day in which all usual occupations are put away. Colonel Kingsward himself wrote letters, and was very fully occupied on Sunday afternoon, after the Church parade on Sunday morning, which was as vigorously maintained as if the lessening rows of little ones all marshalled for morning service had been a regiment—but he did not like to see Bee doing anything but “reading a book” on Sunday. And it had always been a rule in that well-ordered house that the toys should be put away on Saturday evening, so that the day hung rather heavily, especially when it rained, on the young ones’ heads. Colonel Kingsward did not mean to be a gloomy visitor. He was always kind to his children, and willing to be interested in what they did and said; but, as a matter of fact, those three days were the longest and the most severe of any that passed over the widowed and motherless house. When Bee came downstairs from the Sunday lesson, which she gave in the nursery, she found her brother at the writing-table in the drawing-room, composing what seemed a very long letter. His pen was hurrying over the page; he was at the fourth side of a sheet of large paper—and opened out on the table before him were several sheets of a very long, closely-written letter, to which he was evidently replying. When Bee appeared, Charlie snatched up this letter, and hastily folding it, thrust it into its envelope, which he placed in his breast pocket. He put the blotting paper hastily over the letter which he was himself writing, and the colour mounted to his very forehead as he turned half round. It was not any colour of guilt, but a glow of mingled enthusiasm and shamefacedness, beautiful upon the face of a youth. Bee was too young herself to admire and appreciate this flush of early feeling, but she was so far sympathetic in her own experience, that she divined something at least of what it meant.
“Oh, Charlie!” she said, “you are writing to someone——”
“Most assuredly, I am writing to someone,” he said, with the half pride, half shame of a young lover.
“Who is she?” cried Bee. “Oh, Charlie, tell me! Oh, tell me! Do I know who it is?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “what you are making such a fuss about. I am writing to—a friend.” He paused a moment, and then said with fervour—“the best friend that ever man had.”
“A friend,” cried Bee, a little disappointed. “But isn’t it a lady?” she asked.
“I hope,” he said, with a haughty air, “that you are not one of those limited people that think there can be no friendship between a man and a woman, for if that’s so I’ve got nothing to say.”
Bee was scarcely philosophical enough to take up this challenge. She looked at him, bewildered, for a moment, and then said, “Oh, tell me about her, Charlie! It would do me good—it would, indeed, to hear about somebody whom there could not be any objection to, who would be, perhaps, happier than me,” cried poor little Bee, the tears coming to her eyes.
“Happier than you? And why shouldn’t you be happy?” said the elder brother. He made an effort to turn away in dignified silence, but the effort was too much for the young man, longing to talk of the new thing in his life. “There is no comparison at all between a little thing like you and—and the lady I was writing to,” he said, holding his head high. “If you think it is any sort of nonsense you are very much mistaken. Why, she—she is as much above me as heaven is from earth. That she should take the trouble to show any interest in me at all, just proves what an angel she is. I, an idle, ordinary sort of fellow, and she!—the sort of woman that one dreams of. Bee, you can’t think what she has done for me already,” Charlie cried, forgetting his first defiance. “I’m another fellow ever since she began to take notice of me.”
Bee stole to her brother’s side and gave him a sympathetic stroke upon his shoulder. “Oh! Charlie! what is her name?”
“You wouldn’t know her name if I were to tell you,” he said. And then, after a moment’s hesitation: “Her name,” he went on, “her real name as I call it, is Laura, like Petrarch’s Laura, don’t you know, Bee? But I don’t suppose you do know.”
“Yes, indeed, I do,” said Bee, eagerly. She added in her turn, “I shouldn’t have thought you would know anything like that.”
“No; I’m not up to it,” said Charlie, with unexpected humility; “but I read it all up as soon as she said it. Don’t you think it’s a beautiful name?”
“Yes,” said Bee, yet not with enthusiasm. “But, oh!” she added, “I hope she is not married, Charlie; for that would not be nice at all.”
“Married!” cried Charlie. “I wish you were not such a horrid little—Philistine. But she is not married, if that is any satisfaction to you.”
“And is she—beautiful, Charlie? and are you very, very fond of her? Oh, Charlie!” Bee clasped his arm in both her hands and sobbed. It made her feel wretched, yet filled her with a delicious tender sense of fellow-feeling. If he would only tell her all! It would be hard upon her, and yet it would be a sort of heavenly pang to hear another, and, oh! surely, this time, a happy love tale. Bee sat down close by him, and clasped his arm, and sometimes leaned her head upon it in the warmth of her tenderness and sympathy. And Charlie was persuaded, by degrees, to speak. But his tale was not like Bee’s. It was a tale of a lady who had stooped as from her throne to the young fellow of no account—the ordinary young man, who could not understand how she had come to think of him at all. It was she who had inspired him with his new ambition, who had made him so anxious to distinguish himself, to make something of his life. She had taken the trouble to write to him, to keep him up to it since he had come “down.” She had promised to let him come to see her when he came “up” again, to inspire him and encourage him. “One look at her is better than a dozen coaches,” Charlie cried, in the fervour of his heart.
“Do you mean that you are going to see her—in town?” asked Bee, doubtfully.
“In town? No. She detests town. It’s all so vain and so hollow, and such a rush. She came to live in Oxford at the beginning of last term,” Charlie said.
“Oh,” said Bee, and she found no more to say. She did not herself understand how it was that a little chill came upon her great sympathy with Charlie and this unknown lady of his—friendship, if not love.
Colonel Kingsward, however, could not be moved either by Bee’s representations or by anything said by his son to grant to Charlie the permission, and the funds necessary, to pursue his studies in Oxford by going “up” to read “in the Long.” It was indeed very little that Charlie said to his father on the subject. He responded somewhat sullenly to the Colonel’s questions.
“So I hear you want to go back to Oxford to read?”
“Yes,” said the young man.
“You have generally found before this that by the end of the term you had had too much reading.”
No reply.
“I suppose you want to be free of supervision and do exactly what you please. And you find it dull at home?”
“I have never said so,” said Charlie.
“You ought to feel that in the circumstances it was appropriate that it should be dull. Good heavens! Were you contemplating amusing yourself, rioting with your comrades, when your poor mother—”
“I have never thought of rioting with comrades,” said Charlie, with averted head.
“One knows what that means—going up to read in the Long: boats and billiards and hotels, bands of young men in flannels lounging about, and every decorum thrown to the winds.”
The Colonel looked severely at his son, who stood before him turning over the pages of a book in his hand, with lowering brows and closed mouth.
“You think I don’t know,” he said, sharply; “but you are mistaken. What would have been best for you would have been the discipline of a regiment. I always thought so, but at least I’m not going to permit every decent bond to be broken through.”
“I think, sir,” said Charlie, “that it’s enough to say ‘No,’ without accusing me of things I never thought of.”
“I am the best judge of what is enough,” said the angry father. “If you want a week or so in town, I don’t object; but Oxford in the Long—No. I only hope,” he added severely, “that there’s no woman in the case.”
Charlie’s countenance flushed crimson. He gave his father a furious glance. “If that’s all,” he said, “I may now go, perhaps?”
“Yes, go,” said the Colonel, angrily. He was himself sorry for that last insinuation as soon as his son had left the room. His angry suspiciousness had carried him too far. Not that he blamed himself for the suspicion, but he was aware that to speak of it was a false step and could do no good. If there was a woman in the case, that flying dart would not move the young man to penitence or turn him from any dangerous way. Colonel Kingsward, however, quickly forgave himself for this inadvertence, and reflected with satisfaction that, at least, he had prevented the young fool from making an ass of himself for this summer. And in such cases absence is the best remedy and hinders much mischief. Charlie rejected with indignation the week in town which his father offered. “A week in town!” he said to Bee, contemptuously, “to waste my time and debase all my ideas! What does he think I want with a week in town? That’s the way a fellow’s father encourages him to do the best he can. Cuts off all inspiration, and throws one on the dregs of life! It’s enough to make a man kick over the traces altogether.”
“But, Charlie,” said Bee, with timidity, “don’t you think it’s very, very quiet here. We have nothing to disturb us. If you were to try to do your work at home?—you would have the library to sit in all the week while papa is in town.”
“Out of reach of books, out of reach of any coach—it’s like telling a mason to build a wall without any stone.”
“The library is full of books,” said Bee, with a little indignation.
“What kind of books? Military books, and travels, and things for reference—old peerages, and so forth—and some of the heavy old reviews, and a few novels. Much good a man who is going in for real reading would get out of those!”
“But you have your own books—all those that you carry about with you, Charlie.”
“Oh!” he said, with impatience, “What are they? Horrible cribs and things, that I promised not to use any more.”
“Does Laura,” said Bee, with a little awe, “say you are not to use cribs?”
“And as for the quiet,” said Charlie, continuing his strain of complaint, “if you call that quiet! When you never know that next moment there may not be a rush down the nursery stairs like wild horses let loose, and shrieks all over the house for Bee or for nurse, sending every idea out of a man’s head; or else baby screaming fit to bring down the house. You know nothing about it, to be sure; it is like talking to the wind to talk to a little thing like you. A man can’t work unless he’s in the right place for working. If any difficulty arises in a passage, for instance, what do you think I am to do here?”
“Do you go to—— Laura, when there is a difficulty about a passage, Charlie?”
“No, you little fool!” With a flush of anger and shame he begged her pardon next minute. “But it is so hard to explain things to you, Bee. You are so ignorant—naturally, for, of course, you never were taught anything. Don’t you know that Oxford is full of coaches?” he said.
“That was just what I was thinking of, Charlie—if you will not be angry, but let me speak.”
“Speak away,” he said. This was on Monday, after Colonel Kingsward had left. The days which he spent at Kingswarden were the heaviest, as has been said, to the young party; nevertheless when he went away the blank of that long world of a week, without any communication to speak of from without, closed down alarmingly upon the elders of the family. Even when papa was cross, when he was dissatisfied with his dinner or found fault with the noise of the children, it was more or less an event. But when he departed there was a sense of being cut off from all events, separated from the world altogether, shut out from the news and the hum of society, which was very blank and deadening. Bee and Charlie dined alone, and it was dreary; they spent the evening together, or else—one in the library, one in the garden, where the beauty of the summer evening was terrible to the one poor little girl with her recollections, incapable of shutting them out in that utter stillness, and trying very ineffectually not to be unhappy. When Charlie threw open the window of the library and strolled forth to join her, as he generally did, it was a little better. Bee had just done very conscientiously all her duties in the nursery—had heard the children say their prayers, in which they still, with a little pause of awe, prayed God to bless dear mother—and had made all the valorous little efforts she could to keep down the climbing sorrow. When she heard the sound of the library window she quickly dried her eyes and contrived to smile. And she was a very good listener. She suffered Charlie to talk about himself as much as he pleased, and was interested in all he said. She made those little allusions to Laura which pleased him, though he generally answered with a scornful word, as who should say that “a little thing like you” was incapable of comprehending that lady. But this was the sole diversion of these young people in the evening. People called in the afternoon, and there was occasionally a game of tennis. But in the evening they were almost invariably alone.
They were strolling about the garden on this occasion when the young man bewailed himself. Bee, though she made those allusions to Laura, had never got over that little chill in respect to her which had arisen in the most capricious, causeless way when she knew that Laura lived in Oxford. Nothing could be more unreasonable, but yet it was so. It suggested something fictitious in her brother’s eagerness to get back, and in his supposed devotion to his work. Had his Egeria been anywhere else Bee would not have felt this; but she did feel it, though she could not tell why. She was very anxious to please him, to content him, if possible, with his present life, to make her sympathy sweet to him, seeing that he had nobody but herself to console him, and must be separated from Laura until October. Poor Charlie! It was hard indeed that this should be the case, that he should have so dull a home and no companion but his sister. But it could not be helped; his sister, at least, must do what she could.
“You must not be angry,” said Bee, very humbly. “It is only an idea that has come into my head—there may be nothing at all in it—but don’t please shut me up as you do sometimes—hear me out. Charlie! there is Mr. Delaine.”
“Mister—what?” said Charlie, which indeed did not show a very complaisant frame of mind—but a curate in the country is of less importance in the horizon of the son of a house who is at Oxford than he is in that of the daughter at home.
“Mr. Delaine,” repeated Bee. “You don’t remember him, perhaps, at all. He is the curate. When he came first he was said to be a great scholar. He took a first class. You need not say, pooh! Everybody said so, and it is quite true.”
“A first in theology, I suppose,” said Charlie, disdainfully.
“No, not that—that’s not what people call a first. Mr. Burton, I have always heard, is a good scholar himself, and he said a first; of course you know better than I do what that means.”
“Well,” said Charlie, “and supposing for the sake of argument that he took a first—what then?”
“Why, Charlie dear! He is an Oxford man too; he must know all the things you want to know—difficult passages and all that. Don’t you think, perhaps——”
“Oh, a coach!” cried Charlie. Then he paused, and with withering satire, added “No doubt, for little boys—your curate might do very well, Bee.”
“He is not my curate,” said Bee, with indignation; “but I have always heard he was a great scholar. I thought that was what you wanted.”
“It is not to be expected,” said her brother, loftily, “that you should know what I want. It is not a coach that is everything. If that were all, there need be no such things as universities. What a man needs is the whole machinery, the ways of thinking, the arrangements, the very atmosphere.”
He strolled along the walk with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up to his ears.
“I do not think it is possible,” he added, turning to her with a softened tone, “that I could make you understand; for it is so different from anything you have ever known.”
“I hope I am not so dreadfully stupid!” said Bee, incensed. “If Laura understands, why should it be so impossible for me?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake talk of things you can know something about; as if there was any comparison between her and you.”
“I think you are very uncivil,” said Bee, ready to weep. “I may not be clever, but yet I am your sister, and it is only because I wanted to help you that I took the trouble to speak at all.”
“You are very well meaning, Bee, I am sure,” said Charlie, with condescension; “I do full justice to your good intentions. Another fellow might think you wanted to have Delaine here for yourself.”
“Me!” cried Bee, with a wild pang of injured feeling and a sense of the injustice, and inappropriateness, the cruel wrong of such a suggestion. And that Charlie could speak like that—who knew everything! It was almost more than she could bear.
“But I don’t say that,” he went on in his lofty tones. “I know you mean well. It is only that you don’t—that you can’t understand.” How should she? he said to himself with amusing superiority, and a nod of his head as if agreeing to the impossibility. Bee resented the tone, the assumption, the comparison that was implied in every word.
“I wonder,” she cried, “if you ever tell Laura that she doesn’t and can’t understand?”
He stopped short opposite to her, and grasped her arm. “Bee,” he said almost solemnly, “Don’t! If you knew her you would know what folly it is and presumption to compare yourself for one moment!—and do me the favour not to profane that name, as if it were only a girl’s name like your own.”
“Is she a princess, then?” cried Bee, “or an angel? Or what is she?”
“She is both, I think,” said Charlie, in a voice full of awe, “at least to me. I wish you wouldn’t talk of her in that way. I am sorry I ever told you her name. And please just let my affairs alone. You haven’t been able to do anything for me with my father, which is the only thing you might have done—and I don’t want to discuss other things with you. So please just let my concerns alone from this day.”
“It was not I that ever wished to interfere!” cried Bee, with great mortification and resentment, and after a few minutes’ silent walk together in much gloom and stateliness the brother and sister bade each other an offended and angry good-night.
Thismade, however, but a very temporary breach between Bee and her brother. They were a little stiff next morning at breakfast, and elaborately refrained from talking on any but the most trivial things, but by noon this reserve had broken down, and in the evening, though Bee proudly refrained from any reference to Laura, they were as confidential as ever. Bee’s mind had passed through various vicissitudes in respect to the object of Charlie’s adoration. Her first overwhelming interest had given way to a little doubt, and this was naturally strengthened by the overweaning estimate of the unknown which Charlie thrust upon her. A girl is very willing to admire at second-hand her brother’s love, but when she is told that it is presumption to compare herself with that divinity, her sympathy is strained too far. Bee began to have an uneasy feeling about this unknown Laura. It was one thing to stimulate Charlie to work, to stir up all that was best in him, to urge him to distinguish himself, for Charlie’s sake or for their joint sakes, if they married and became one—which was the only thing that could happen in Bee’s idea—but it was quite another thing to pretend an enthusiasm for this in order that Charlie should be kept within her reach and at her feet during that quiet time of the long vacation. Bee knew enough to know that severe work is not compatible with much love-making. She imagined her brother strolling away from his books to take Laura out on the river, or lie at her feet in the garden, which had become the habit of his life, as he betrayed to her accidentally. Bee thought, with a little indignation, that the lofty intentions which would probably end in these proceedings were of the nature of false pretences, and that the girl whom Charlie endowed with the most superlative qualities should not attempt to take him from his home for such reason; or, at least, if she did should do it frankly for love’s sake—which was always a thing to be forgiven—and not on any fictitious pretence.
For Charlie, being refused that heroic way of working, “going up to read,” did not read at all, as was apparent to his sister’s keen eyes. He did not attempt to do the best he could, being prevented from doing what he desired. He settled himself, it is true, in the library after breakfast, with his books, as if with the intention of working, but before Bee got through the little lesson which she gave every morning to the little ones, Charlie was out strolling about the garden, or lying on the grass in the shade with a book, which was usually a novel, or one which lay closed by his side while he abandoned himself to thought—to thought, not about his books it was to be feared, for Bee, with tremors of sympathy in her heart, recognised too well the dreamy look, the drooped eyelids, the air astray from anything going on around. From questions of study, as far as Bee had perceived in her short experience, the merest footstep on a path, the dropping of a leaf, was enough to rouse the student. Charlie’s thoughts were of a far more absorbing kind.
Colonel Kingsward suggested once more the week in town, when he came on another Saturday evening to Kingswarden. He was a man not very open to a perception of the wants of others, but as time went on, and he himself became more and more sensible of the ameliorating influences of society and occupation, the stagnant atmosphere at home, where his two elder children were vegetating, so much against all their previous habits, struck him with a sensation which he could not wholly get the better of. It was only right that Bee, at least, should remain in the country and in retirement the first summer after her mother’s death. It would have been most unbecoming had she been in town seeing people, and necessarily, more or less, been seen by the world. But yet he felt the stillness close round him like a sensible chill, and was aware of the great quiet—aggravated by his own presence, though of this he was scarcely aware—as if it had been a blight in the air. It made him angry for the moment. In other times his house in the country had always been refreshing and delightful to him. Now, the air, notwithstanding that it was full summer, chilled him to the bone.
When you are escaping from the atmosphere of grief, anything that draws you back to it feels like an injury. He was very cross, very impatient with the silence at table, the subdued looks of the young people, and that they had nothing to say. Was it not worse for him than for them? He was the one who had lost the most, and to whom all ministrations were due, to soften the smart of sorrow. But afterwards his thoughts towards his children softened. It was very dull for them. On the Sunday evening he took the trouble to press that week in town upon Charlie. “There’s a spare closet you can have at my rooms at the office,” he said. “It’s very central if not much else, and I daresay your friends will ask you out quietly as they do me. I think even you might bring up Bee for the day to see the pictures. She could stay the night with the Hammonds and see Betty.”
“Oh, don’t think of me, papa,” cried Bee. “I would rather, far rather, stay at home. I don’t care for the pictures—this year.”
“That is foolish, my dear,” said the Colonel. “There is nothing in the least unbecoming to your mourning in going there. Indeed, I wish you to go. You ought not to miss the pictures, and it will be a little change. Of course, I cannot go with you myself, but Charlie will take you, and you can go to Portman Square to sleep. You will see Betty, who must be thinking of coming home about now; indeed, it is quite necessary you should settle that with her. She can’t stay there all the season, and it is rather heartless leaving you like this alone.”
“Oh, no, papa. It is I that wish her to stay. She would have come back long ago but for me.”
Bee’s generous assumption of the blame, if there was any blame, excited her father’s suspicion rather than admiration. He looked at her somewhat severely. “I cannot conceive what object you can have in preferring to be alone,” he said. “It is either morbid, or—In either case it makes it more desirable that Betty should come back. You can arrange that. We will say Wednesday. I suppose you will not be nervous about returning home alone?”
“But, papa—”
“I consider the question settled, Bee,” said Colonel Kingsward, and after that there was nothing more to be said.
Poor Bee wept many tears over this compulsory first step back into the world—without her mother, without—— She did not mean (as she said in her inmost thoughts)anyone else; but it made the whole world vacant around her to think that neither on one side nor the other was there anyone to walk by her side, to take her hand, to make her feel that she was not alone. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that, in the morning, this was the first thought that came into her mind, with a faint expansion of her young being. The change, though it was not joyful, was still something; and when she set out with Charlie on Wednesday morning her heart, in spite of herself, rose a little. To see the pictures! The pictures are not generally very exciting, and there was not, as it happened, a sensation in any one of them in this particular year, even had Bee been capable of it, which she was not. But yet she had a sensation, and one of the most startling description. As she was going languidly along, looking at one picture after another, mechanically referring to the catalogue, which conveyed very little idea to her mind, her attention was suddenly attracted by a lady standing in front of one of the chief pictures of the year. She was talking with great animation to some friends who surrounded her, pointing out the qualities and excellencies (or non-excellencies, for Bee was not near enough to hear) of the picture. She was picturesquely dressed in black, a tall and commanding figure, with a great deal of lace about her, and a fine profile, clearly cut and impressive. Bee’s whole attention was called to her as by a charm. Where had she seen her before? She seemed acquainted with every detail of her figure, and penetrated by a vague reminiscence as of someone who had been of personal importance to herself, though she could not tell when or how. “Who is she? Oh, who is she?” Bee asked herself. She was very handsome—indeed Bee thought her a beautiful woman; not young, which is a thing always noted with a certain pain and compassion by a young girl—but full of grace and interest. While Bee gazed, open-eyed, forgetful of herself—a young figure, very interesting, too, to behold, in her deep mourning, and with the complete forgetfulness of herself involved in that wistful, inquiring, and admiring gaze—the lady turned round, presenting her full face to the girl’s troubled vision. Bee felt her breath come short, her heart beat. She fell back hurriedly upon a vacant place on one of the benches which someone had charitably left empty. Bee did not know who the woman was, nor what possible connections she could have with her own fate, and yet there was a conviction in the girl’s heart that she had to do with it, that somehow or other her life was in this woman’s hands. It was the lady whom she had met that autumn morning last year in the firwoods round the Baths, where Bee had gone to finish her sketch—the lady who had appeared suddenly from among the trees, who had sat down by her, and pointed out the errors in the little picture, and advised her how to put them right. The black lace which was so conspicuous in the stranger’s dress, seemed to sweep over Bee as she passed, with the same faint, penetrating odour, the same thrill of unaccountable sensation. Bee could not take her eyes from this figure as it moved slowly along, pausing here and there with the air of a connoisseur. Who was she? Who was she? Bee turned as she turned, following her with her eyes.
And then there occurred the most wonderful incident, so strange, so unsuspected, so unaccountable, that Bee could scarcely suppress a cry of astonishment. Charlie had been “doing” the pictures in his way, going faster than his sister, and had been roaming down the whole side of the long gallery while Bee occupied herself with one or two favourites. He appeared now at a little distance, having made the round of the room, and Bee was the involuntary, much surprised witness of the effect produced upon Charlie by the sudden appearance which had so much excited herself. He stopped short, with it seemed a sudden exclamation, let the book in his hands drop in his amazement, then, cleaving the crowd, precipitated himself upon the group in which the lady stood. Bee watched with consternation the hurried, eager greeting, the illumination of his boyish face, even the gesture—both hands put forth, and the quiver of his whole eager figure. She even heard a little cry of surprise from the lady, who presently separated herself from her friends and went on with Charlie in the closest conversation. It seemed to Bee as she watched, following them as well as she could through the crowd which got between her and these two figures, that there were no two heads so close together in all the throng. They seemed to drift into a corner where the pictures were of no importance, where they were comparatively undisturbed as if for the most confidential talk. It was not mere acquaintanceship, a chance meeting with some one he knew, it was utter forgetfulness of everything else, complete absorption in this new interest that seemed to move her brother. For a time Bee formed no conclusion, thought of no explanation, but watched them only with all her faculties. The catalogue which Charlie had dropped was shuffled and kicked to her feet by the passers by, a visible sign that something unusual had happened. What was it? Who was she?
And then there darted into Bee’s mind a suggestion, an idea which she could not, would not entertain. Laura! Was it possible that this could be Laura? The thought sent a thrill through and through her. But no! no! no! she cried within herself; impossible! This lady was years older than Charlie—of another generation altogether—not a girl at all. She gazed through the crowd at the two heads in the corner of the room, standing as if they were looking at the pictures. They had their backs to Bee, and she could see nothing but occasionally a side glimpse of Charlie’s cheek and the lace bonnet, with the unusual accompaniment of a floating veil, which covered his companion’s head. She had remembered the veil at once—not primly fastened over her face, as most ladies wore them, but thrown back and falling behind, a head-dress such as nobody else wore. It distinguished from every other head that of the woman who, Bee now felt sure, was like somebody in a tragedy of Fate—somebody who had to do, she could not tell how, with the shipwreck of her own life—for had she not appeared mysteriously, from she knew not where, on the very eve of misery and ruin?—and now was overshadowing Charlie’s, bringing him some calamity. Bee shivered and trembled among all the crowding people on the seat which so many people envied her, and felt that she was retaining far longer than her share. She was too much frightened to do as she could have wished to do, to rush after them, to draw her brother away, to break the spell. Such a dark lady had been known in story long before Bee was born. Could it be true that hateful beings were permitted to stray about even in the brightest scenes, bringing evil augury and all kinds of trouble with them? Many a time had Bee thought of this lady—of her sudden appearance, and of her questions about the Leighs; of something in her look, an air of meaning which even at the moment had confused the unsuspicious, unalarmed girl. And now, What was she? Who was she? Laura? Oh, no, no; a hundred times no. If Bee could have supposed that her respectable father or any member of her innocent family could have wronged anyone, she would have thought it was a ghost-lady ominous of trouble. Oh, what a silly thought in broad daylight, in the Academy of all places in the world! There was very little that was visionary or superstitious in such a place.
Charlie came back to join his sister after a considerable time with a glowing face. “Oh, you are there!” he cried. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I couldn’t think where you could have gone——”
“I should have seen you had you been looking for me,” said Bee.
“Well, never mind, now that I have found you. Have you seen as much as you wish? It’s time to be moving off if you mean to get to Portman Square in time for tea.”
“Charlie,” said Bee, very gravely, getting up and moving with him towards the door, “who is that lady you were talking to with the black lace about her head?”
“What lady?” said Charlie, with a very fictitious look of surprise, and the colour mounting all over his face. “Oh, the lady I met—that lady? Well, she is a lady—whom I have met elsewhere——”
“I have met her, too,” cried Bee, breathless, “down at the Baths just before—— Oh, who is she—who is she, Charlie? I think she is one of the Fates.”
“You little goose,” cried her brother, and then he laughed in an unsteady way. “Perhaps she is—if there was a good one,” he cried. “She is,” he added, in a different tone, and then paused again; “but I couldn’t tell you half what she is if I were to talk till next week—and never in such a noisy, vulgar place as this.”
Then Bee’s mind, driven from one thought to another, came suddenly back with a jar and strain of her nerves to the question about Laura; was it possible that this should be she?—for it was the tone sacred to Laura in which her brother now spoke. “Oh! tell me about her, tell me about her!” she cried, involuntarily clasping her hands—“she isn’t—is she? Oh, Charlie, you will have time to tell me when we get into the park. Didn’t she want to speak to me? Why didn’t you introduce me to her if she is such a great friend of yours?”
“Hush! for goodness’ sake, now; you are making people stare,” said Charlie. He hurried down the stairs and across the road outside, making her almost run to keep up with him. “I say, Bee,” he cried hurriedly, when he had signalled to a hansom, “should you mind going by yourself? I hate driving when I can walk. Why, you’ve been in a hansom by yourself before! You’re not going to be such a little goose as to make a fuss about it now.”
“Oh, but Charlie—I’d rather walk too, and then you can tell me—”
“Oh, nonsense,” he cried, “you’re tired already. It would be too much for you. Portman Square, No.—. Good-bye, Bee. I’ll look up later,” he cried, as, to Bee’s consternation, the wheels of the hansom jarred upon the curb and she felt herself carried rapidly away.
Portman Squarehad seemed to Bee the first step into the world, after all that had happened, but when she was there this gentle illusion faded. It was not the world, but only another dry and faded corner out of the world, more silent and recluse than even Kingswarden had become, for there were no voices of children within, and no rustle of trees and singing of birds without. The meeting with Betty was sweet, but the air of the little old-fashioned tea-table, the long, solemn dinner, with the butler and the footman stealing like ghosts about the table, which was laid out with heavy silver and cut glass, with only one small bunch of flowers as a sacrifice to modern ideas in the middle, and the silence of the great drawing-room afterwards, half lighted and dreary, came with a chill upon the girl who had been afraid of being dazzled by too much brightness. There were only the old lady and the old gentleman, Betty and herself, around the big table, and only the same party without the old gentleman afterwards. Mrs. Lyon asked Bee questions about her excellent father, and she examined Bee closely about her dear mother, wishing to know all the particulars of Mrs. Kingsward’s illness.
“I can’t get a nice serious answer from Betty. She is such a little thing; and she tells me she was not at home through the worst,” Mrs. Lyon said.
It was not a subject to inspire Bee, or enable her to rise above the level of her home thoughts. Betty did not seem to feel it in the same way. She was in a white frock with black ribbons, for Mrs. Lyon did not like to see her in black, “such a little thing, you know.” Bee wondered vaguely whether she herself, only a year-and-a-half the elder, was supposed to be quite middle-aged and beyond all the happier surroundings of life. Mrs. Lyon gave her a great deal of advice as to what she ought to do, and talked much of the responsibilities of the elder sister. “You must teach them to obey you, my dear. You must not let down the habit of obedience, you must be very strict with them; a sister has more need even than a mother to be very strict, to keep them in a good way.” Bee sat very still, while the old lady prosed. It was so silent but for that voice, that the ticking of the clock became quite an important sound in the large dim room. And Bee strained her ears for the sound of a hansom drawing up, for Charlie’s step on the pavement. Many hansoms stopped at neighbouring houses, and footsteps sounded, but Charlie did not make his appearance. “My brother said he would look in later,” she had told Mrs. Lyon when she arrived. “Well, my dear, we shall hope he will,” the old lady had said, “but a young man in London finds a hundred engagements.” And Betty, who had been so serious, who had been so sweet, a perfect companion at the time of their mother’s death, more deeply penetrated by all the influences of the time than Bee herself, now flitted about in her white frock, with all her old brightness, and sang her little song without faltering, to show Bee what progress she had made since she had been taking lessons. Bee could scarcely yet sing the hymns in church without breaking down, though to be sure a girl who was having the best lessons would be obliged to get over that. After the long evening when they were at last alone together, Betty did not respond warmly to Bee’s suggestion that she should now be thinking of returning home. “You seem to think of nothing but the children,” she said; “you can’t want me,” to which Bee could only reply that there were more things than the children to think of, and that she was very lonely and had no one to talk to——
“But you have Charlie,” said Betty.
“Charlie is very full of his own concerns. He has not much sympathy with me. All that he wants is to get back to Oxford.”
“To Oxford in the vacation? What would he do there?”
“He says he would work,” said Bee.
“Oh, Bee, how nice of Charlie! I know they do sometimes, Gerald Lyon tells me; but I never thought that Charlie——”
“No,” said Bee, “and I don’t feel very sure now, there is someone—— to whom he writes such long letters——”
“Oh, Bee! This is far, far more interesting than reading! Do you know who she is? Does he tell you about her?”
“Her name is Laura,” said Bee, “that is all I know.”
“Oh,” cried Betty, “Charlie too!” And then a flush came over the girl’s uplifted face. Bee, poor Bee, absorbed in the many things which had dawned upon her which were beyond Betty, did not observe the colour nor even that significant “too” which had come to Betty’s lips in spite of herself.
“I think he met her or someone belonging to her—at the Academy to-day; and that’s why he hasn’t come—— Oh, Betty, I am not happy about it—I am not happy at all!”
Betty put her arms round Bee and kissed her. She thought it was the remembrance of her own disappointment and disaster which made her sister cry out in this heart-broken way. Betty looked very wistfully in Bee’s eyes. She was more sorry than words could say. If she could have done anything in the world “to make it all come right” she would have done so, and in the bottom of her heart she still had a conviction that all would “come right.” “Oh, Bee, Bee!” she cried, “cannot anything be done? If only—only you would have listened to his mother!—Bee——”
Bee held up a warning finger. “Do you think it is myself I am thinking of?” she said, and then, wringing her hands, she added, “I don’t know what harm we have done to bring it on, but, oh! I think we are in the hands of fate.”
What did this mean? Betty thought her sister had gone out of her mind, and Bee would make no explanation. But I think this strange conversation made Betty rather less willing to return home. She was the darling of the house in Portman Square; though they did not go into society, they had all manner of indulgences for Betty, and took her to the Park, and encouraged the visits of their nephew, Gerald, who was a very merry companion for the girl. He was permitted to take her to see various sights, and the old people, as usual, did not perceive what was beginning to dawn under their very eyes. Betty was such a little thing. The consequence was that, though Bee thought Portman Square still duller than Kingswarden, her little sister was not of that opinion. Bee accordingly went back alone next day, Betty accompanying her to the railway station. Neither at Portman Square nor at the railway station did Charlie appear, and it was with a heavy heart that Bee went home. It seemed to her as she travelled alone, for, I think, the first time in her life—she was not yet quite twenty—that everyone was following his or her own way, and that only she was bearing the whole burden of the family. Her father had returned to his own world, his club, his dinners, official and otherwise. It was indispensable that he should do so. Bee had understood, it being impossible for a man in his position to withdraw from the world on account of any private feeling of his own. And Betty had flashed back again into her music, and her white frock, and was seeing everything as of old. And Charlie—oh, what was Charlie doing, drifting off into some tragic enchantment? The poor girl’s heart was very heavy. There seemed only herself to think of them all in their separate paths, one here and another there, going further and further off in so many different directions from the event which had broken the unity of the family, yet surely should have held them together in their common trouble. That event had gone into the regions of the past. The time of the mother was over, like a tale that is told. There were still the children in the nursery, and Bee, their guardian, watching over them—but the others all going off, each at their separate angle. It is hard enough to realise this, even when age has gained a certain insensibility, but to the girl, this breaking up of the family was terrible. “I—even I alone remain,” she was inclined to say with the prophet, and what could she do to stop the closing of these toils of Fate? Her mind gradually concentrated on that last and most alarming theme of all—the woman, the lady, without a name or history, or any evident link with the family, who had thus, for the second time, appeared in the path. Bee tried to fall back upon her reason, to represent to herself that she had no real cause for assuming that the stranger of whom she knew nothing, who might simply have been walking through that German wood, and have stopped by chance to speak to the little English girl with her stupid sketch, had anything to do with the disaster which so soon overtook that poor little English girl in the midst of her happy love. She had no reason, none, for thinking so. She tried to represent to herself how foolish she had been to entertain such a notion, how natural and without meaning the incident had been. And now again, for the second time, what reason had she to believe that anything fatal or even dangerous to Charlie was in this lady’s appearance now? She was a distinguished-looking woman, much older than Charlie. What was more likely than that such a woman, probably by her looks a married lady, a person of importance, should have a great deal of influence over a youth like Charlie if she took notice of him at all? All this was very reasonable. There was far more sense in it than in that foolish terror and alarm which had taken possession of her mind. She had almost persuaded herself that these apprehensions were foolish before she reached home, and yet the moment after she had succeeded in reasoning it all out, and convincing herself how foolish they had been, they had risen up in a crowd and seized her anxious mind again.
It was some days beyond the week which Charlie had been allowed in town when he came back. He was in agitated spirits, with a look of mingled excitement and exhaustion, which gave Bee many alarms, but which she was not sufficiently skilled or experienced to interpret. Colonel Kingsward had not come home in the interval, having gone somewhere else to spend his weekly holiday, and when he did come there were various colloquies between him and his son, which were evidently of a disturbing kind. Some of these were about money, as was to be made out by various allusions. Charlie had either been spending too much, or had set up a claim to more in the future, a claim which his father was reluctant to allow. But it seemed that he had come out triumphant in the end, to judge by their respective looks, when they issued from the library together, just before Colonel Kingsward left for town.
“I hope, at least, you’ll make good use of it,” were the father’s last words—and “you may trust me, sir,” said Charlie, with all the elation of victory.
He was in great spirits all day, teasing the children, and giving Bee half confidences as to the great things he meant to do.
“They shan’t put me off with any of their beastly Governorships at the end of the world,” said Charlie. “I shall play for high stakes, Bee, I can’t afford to be a mere attaché long, but they shan’t shelve me at some horrible African station, I can tell you. That’s not a kind of promotion that will suit me.”
“But you will have to go where you are sent,” said Bee.
“Oh, shall I?” cried Charlie, “that is all you know about it. Besides, when a man has a particularly charming wi——” He stopped and coughed over the words, and laughed and grew red.