“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I fear this is an intrusion for which there is no excuse. I am looking for a gentleman who has been long in Canada—Robert Leonard Crosthwaite was his name: but I have some reason to suppose——”
“We never heard the name,” said Grace. “We are very sorry. We came from Quebec. Canada is a large place. It might be in another part.”
“He had been a very long time out of England. He came back only a few weeks ago. We weresure—we thought we were sure—that he came to this hotel.”
The girls both shook their heads. “If there had been any other Canadian person here we must have heard. They would have come to us,” said Grace, with a sob only half concealed.
“It is very important,” said the young man. “There is property concerned, and the comfort of several people. Everybody thought he was dead. It will upset the arrangements of a family—and make those poor who were well off,” he said in an undertone, to himself, rather than to them.
The girls looked at him with interest. There seemed a story involved, and that gave them a sensation that, if not pleasure, was, at least, relief from the pressure of their own continuously painful thoughts. Milly even ventured a little “Oh!” of wistful interest. Then he went on hastily—
“Pardon me: I ought not to disturb you. You can give me no clue? This gentleman must have arrived about the same time as I hear you did. I know—I know how painfully your time has been occupied. I am ashamed to trouble you: but do you not think you could give me a clue——”
“We never heard the name,” said Grace. “We could write home and ask, but that would not be of much use. We are going back,” she added with an explanatoriness which perhaps was not necessary, “as soon as——” But here her littlestrength broke down, and she could not say any more.
“I beg your pardon, I beg a thousand pardons,” the young man cried. “Forgive me for intruding upon you.” And he turned with a respectful bow; and opened the door; but when he had done this he turned again and looked at them once more. “You will excuse me,” he said in a voice which was full of emotion, “but I have a mother. If she could be of any use to you——”
Here the girls, being so weeping-ripe, again lost their self-control altogether. Milly began to sob audibly, throwing herself upon her sister’s shoulder, and the tears dropped heavily one by one from Grace’s eyes. She put one arm round poor Milly, and turned, with a tremulous smile through her tears, to the stranger.
“Thank you for being so kind,” she said. “You are very kind; but we are not quite so miserable as perhaps you think. We have got our mother too. We are waiting till she tells us what to do.”
He said nothing but “Oh!” and stood for a moment uncertain, not knowing what to say. But what could a stranger say? He was obliged to turn again and go away, after a great many fumblings with the door.
Next morning they began, sadly, the necessary work of putting away their father’s papers and his little personal possessions. In his writing-bookthere was a letter half written to their mother, which they put aside carefully as a sacred thing, not looking, for love, at his last words. But on one of the pages of the blotting-book they found once more the address which had excited their curiosity before, “3 Grove Road, Hampstead,” written obliquely across the page. It was repeated on a scrap of paper which marked his place in the book which they remembered he had been reading, and on which, besides, there were some jottings of dates and names which they did not understand. These were—“Left July ’45—— U. A. died ’55—— due with interest for 20 years——.” The word “interest” discouraged the girls; it must be something about business, they thought. This perpetually recurring address, however, bewildered them. They went on with their sad occupation without saying much to each other, but when they sat down to rest and to take the food which their youthful appetites began to demand, notwithstanding their trouble, Grace suddenly broke the silence.
“It must be some old friend, who lives there,” she said.
Milly made no reply in words, but she looked up with instant response and comprehension.
“I think,” said Grace, “we ought to go and see who it is. It might be a relation. It might be some one who would stand by us: we are so very lonely here. It might be some—lady. I think weshould go—directly—as soon as you are ready, Milly.”
“Oh, I am ready,” Milly said, starting up. The new idea gave them a little spring and energy. They almost ran to put on their little crape bonnets and their out-door jackets—which had been made for them at the pleasure of the dressmaker, hastily summoned and allowed to work her will—and which were heavy and laden with crape. They were like monuments of woe, from head to foot, in these garments; their two little pale faces, so white and so small, looking out with increased pallor from their heavy black. Milly had a good deal of gold and a good deal of curl in her light brown hair, which shone out with double force from these gloomy surroundings, like a protest of nature. Grace’s locks were darker and smoother. She was the least pretty of the two, but her eyes were larger and more expressive than those fawn eyes of Milly’s, which at present wore but one look, that of startled wistfulness and pleading—an entreaty to all the world to be pitiful. They went off upon their new mission, however, with a little consolation in the relief of the novelty, stealing quietly downstairs that nobody might come out upon them to ask questions or offer help.
IT did not occur to the girls in their inexperience to make any attempt to find out who lived at No. 3, Grove Road. They got out of their cab at the door of the house with a flutter of anxious and excited feeling, but still without any thought that the stranger or strangers they were about to see were anonymous, and that their only warrant in thus invading an unknown house was the scrap of paper which they had brought with them as their credentials. The house was a kind of villa, such as abound in the suburbs, with shrubberies around it, and high hedges, and a green door, between two smooth green lines of privet. They stood for a moment and looked round them at the bare tree-tops rising all round against the chilly blue sky; and the unfrequented road all overgrown with grass; and the houses nearly hidden by these jealous hedges. The girls did not understand this jealous privacy of suburban life, and they shivered a little as they looked round, hearing nothing and seeing nothing. In the morning Grove Road was alive with tradesmen’s carts, with nursery-maids and children setting out for their walk on the heath, but in the afternoon adead silence fell upon it. The rooms in which the inmates lived were on the other side, and here nothing was visible except a blank range of windows over those green lines of hedge, broken only by the still more absolute enclosure of the shut door. They looked at each other, and thought of their father coming out here into the dark, into the rain on that fatal night. They understood now how impossible it would be for him to get either shelter or a carriage to bring him back.
“You would think there was spite in those dreadful doors,” said Grace, “wouldn’t you, Milly? As if it would give them pleasure to shut themselves tight and refuse all shelter; not a porch that any one could stand under. Oh, when we used to hear of the English liking to be private, we never thought of this!”
Milly looked at them mournfully too, and they both thought of the different scenes they had been used to, with that comparison which it is almost impossible for strangers not to make. Then Grace turned round with a sudden impulse and pulled the bell, which they could hear make a long but subdued tinkle just over the green door. But they had to wait still for some minutes before there was any response. The moment the deed was done, the bell rung and entrance demanded, Milly turned to her sister with her usual “Oh!” of appeal.
“Who will you ask for?” she said.
It was a difficulty that never had occurred to them before; and in their sense of this extraordinary deficiency they had almost fled, shyness taking possession of them, and a sense of being altogether wrong and out of all respectable use and wont. But, on the other hand, it was shabby to run away, a trick not worthy of girls—a schoolboy crime. So they stood trembling, half with cold, half with terror, and by-and-by heard the opening of an inner door and steps approaching. If it had been a solemn butler who had opened to them, even at that moment they would have run away; but it was a pretty, smiling maid, with a white cap and white apron, over whose countenance there passed an indefinable sympathetic change as she saw first the two young faces, and then the deep crape of their dresses. They were cheered and encouraged by this mute sign, the freemasonry of youth and kindness.
“Is —— at home?” said Grace falteringly.
The maid was too intent upon the aspect of the young creatures before her to note that no name was uttered, but only a tremulous counterfeit of sound.
“Missis is not at home, miss,” said the girl, with an air of sympathetic regret. Then she added, “But Miss Anna is, and Mr Geoffrey, if one of them would do.”
The girls looked at each other again with a swift mutual consultation. “We should like to see Miss Anna, if you please,” said Grace.
And next moment they were within the house. They went along the shadowy green passage into the hall, and through another corridor to the drawing-room at the other side of the house, feeling as if they were in a dream. This, then, was an English home—the first they had ever penetrated into. It was an old house, not fresh and bright like those to which they were accustomed; a house full of old furniture, old hangings, old books. One or two doors were open, and they could not help glancing in as they passed, with a spring of youthful curiosity not yet quenched. When they got to the drawing-room they could scarcely restrain a cry of surprise. It had three long windows opening to a garden at the other side of the house. In front of them lay—all the world, as Grace thought—a great blue distance, in the centre of which rose a smoke, and a vision of distant towers and roofs—great London lying far below; and close at hand a slope of green lawn, with further slopes beyond of heath, and gorse, and dotted trees forming the foreground. This wonderful panorama quite unreasonably lightened their hearts. They had a long time to wait, but it was so full of curiosity and interest that it did not seem long. At length they became aware of the sound of a step coming slowly along the passages, a step accompanied by a little tap as of a stick on the door. It kept them in tantalising expectation for a minute—then turned aside, and there was again a pause.Finally the little maid came again to the door and led the way into another room.
It was a smaller room, with the same extended landscape before the window—a room very daintily furnished, lighted up with pretty china, pictures, everything full of delicate colour and glimmers of reflection; little mirrors hidden away in corners, shelves upon the dim walls with dainty vases and cups, everything delicate, everything bright. They took this in with one startled glance before their attention concentrated upon the occupant of the room—a lady who rose slowly, supporting herself with a stick, from a large easy-chair beside the fire. She rose with difficulty, yet there was a sort of slow stately grace in the very stiffness with which she moved. Was this Miss Anna? The hearts of Grace and Milly leaped into their throats: they were awed, and dared scarcely draw their breath. Ah, certainly this was England, the old country where queens and princesses were possible. They almost forgot themselves, and their trouble, and their sorrow, and all the strangeness of their circumstances, as they gazed upon this unexpected sight.
Miss Anna was a woman about sixty, with perfectly white hair, and keen, large, dark eyes. She was pale, but with a little evanescent colour, the colour of weakness, as if the slight movement she had made had set the blood in motion, and brought a faint rose tint to her cheeks; otherwise she waslike ivory finely cut, her nose a little aquiline, her forehead softly shaded with the white, silvery lines of her hair. She was dressed in soft satin, clinging to her in long folds, which was not the fashion at the time, and, therefore, all the more impressive, and had on her head a sort of lace veil, half shrouding her hair and falling over her shoulders. Her dress had all the air of being studied and thought of, though the faint, yellowish tinge of the lace, and the dark sheen of the satin, wine-colour or plum-colour, were all the elements out of which this effect was produced. But the simple girls who stood before her had never seen anything like her, and the wonderful apparition took away their breath. She, on her part, looked at them keenly with her penetrating eyes—then she waved her hand towards two chairs set out in front of her throne.
“You asked for me,” she said. “Sit down; I fear I have kept you waiting.”
Grace and Milly were far too much excited to notice it—but, as a matter of fact, this stately lady was excited too, and the look with which she perused them, their faces, their mourning dresses, their whole appearance, was unquestionably anxious—though this would have seemed to them incredible, impossible. It was only when they sat down that they perceived some one behind at the other end of the room—a man leaning over a writing-table with his head turned away fromthem. Miss Anna sat full in the light between the window and the fire. She repeated, with a faint tremour of impatience, “You asked for me?”
“No,” said Grace—she would have liked to say madame, or my lady, or something that would have shown her reverence; but was too shy, with all her self-possession, to venture out of the beaten way. She sat down timidly and folded her hands, and looked at her questioner with that wistful, propitiating look, a faint smile quivering about her lips, her eyes cast upwards with a shy but earnest appeal, which sits so prettily upon extreme youth. “No,” she said, “indeed we did not even know your name. We are very unfortunate girls in great trouble, and we found your address among papa’s papers.”
“Who is your papa?”
Grace saw nothing but the old lady who gazed at her fixedly and riveted her eyes; but Milly, who had no responsibility of speech, saw more than her sister. She saw the man at the writing-table turn hastily round at the sound of Grace’s voice, then rise and approach nearer. When he came into the light she recollected that it was he who had come to them at the hotel the day before.
“Ah,” said Grace, her mouth all quivering; “papa is——. We came over from Canada——” Here, even she, absorbed in her story andthe emotion it occasioned, made an involuntary pause, seeing the lady start and look over her head as if at some one behind with a curious look of alarm and trouble. Was it only sympathy? Grace paused while you might count ten, and then went on again—“only a fortnight since; and on Monday he died, and left us all alone, all alone in this strange place. We thought—we imagined that it was you he went to see the first night he was in England——”
Here she stopped again; the lady’s mouth seemed to quiver too. “Many people come to see me,” she said. “What was his name?”
“His name was Robert Yorke. We are his daughters; I am Grace, and this is Milly—we are the two eldest,” said the girl, still with the same pathetic smile about her mouth, and a look which appealed unconsciously for help and pity.
Miss Anna eyed them all the time with eyes that seemed to pierce them through and through. “This is a very sad story,” she said. There was a quiver in her voice which meant real suffering, not mere pity; but her words were not so tender as this emotion might have indicated; there was no effusiveness of kindness in them. “You are left, then, without friends, without resources? I feel for you very much; but I have a great many applicants——”
Grace started to her feet, pressing her hands together almost with violence. “Oh!” shesaid, “If you think we are coming to you for charity——”
“Aunt Anna,” said the young man, coming forward, “these are the young ladies whom I saw yesterday; if they are so kind, in their own trouble, as to bring us some information, some clue——”
Miss Anna made him an almost imperceptible sign, in which an anxious desire to keep him silent was mingled with the utmost intolerance of impatience. The young man stopped short suddenly; and Milly, who was the spectator of all, taking no other part, saw vaguely this transaction carried on over their heads, and wondered, though she did not know what it could mean.
But Grace perceived nothing at all: for once her perceptions were dulled; the tears in her eyes blinded her, scalding as they were with indignation, and the quick passionate shame with which so young a creature is apt to feel and resent a humiliating judgment. She continued vehemently, “We are not asking anything—we have money enough; we are rich enough: if that is what you mean.”
“I did not mean to be unkind,” said the stately lady. “Sit down, do not be impatient. Geoffrey, I think we can dispense with your presence. These young ladies will be more at their ease with me alone.”
He had pressed forward, in spite of her prohibition. He was a little like her, though not sohandsome; but there was no mistaking the honest sympathy and feeling in his eyes. Both the girls turned to him with a conviction that here at least was a friend. A sort of faint half-smile of recognition passed between them. “Oh, is it you?” said Grace unawares. They seemed in this enchanted house, in this strange audience-chamber, to have encountered at last some one of their own species, some one who would stand by them. They looked at him with an anxious, unspoken entreaty not to go away; and he reassured them by the faintest movement of his head.
“I think,” he said, “it will be better if I stay.”
“I think otherwise,” said Miss Anna; but she said no more to him, and made no further objection. “Sit down,” she said, touching the chair from which Grace had risen, with her stick. “You must not be offended; I meant no harm. I should not have thought any worse of you had you come to me for help, and I don’t think any better of you for being well off. I am sorry for you all the same. But tell me why you came to me. No, wait a little, you can tell me presently. In the meantime, Geoffrey, you can ring for tea.”
He did it without a word, standing before the fire contemplating the group. The girls did not know what it all meant; but gradually it dawned upon them with a strange sensation that they were not the principals here, but that a veiled and hidden conflict was going on between the twostrangers, who appeared to share this luxurious home, and who were somehow, they could not tell how, connected with themselves and their concerns. The innocent commonplace request to ring for the tea had, they felt, if they could but understand it, a much more serious meaning than appeared. Geoffrey obeyed, but they felt very grateful to him that he showed no intention of going away.
And then there was a curious pause.
OF all innocent domestic entertainments there is none more innocent, not to say tame, than the recent institution which is now so universally popular, of afternoon tea. The virtuous dulness, the gentle talk, is seldom enlivened by any dramatic interest going on under the surface. Now and then, indeed, a mild love affair will give a little excitement to the circle round the tea-table: but this is the utmost stretch to which the imagination can reach as connected with that mild entertainment. And among all the pretty suburban houses, surrounding London with endless circles of comfort and brightness, there could not have been found a more attractive group than that which occupied Miss Anna’s pretty sitting-room in Grove Road. But underneath this innocent seeming how many elements of tragedy were working! Miss Anna’s motive was known to none of them; but, whatever it was, it was strong enough to make her exert herself in a way which startled her nephew and gave him the watchful, suspicious, gloomy air which entirely changed the character of his face. Grace and Milly for their part soon began to feel the strange fascination exercisedover them to be intolerable, yet what with their shyness, and strangeness, and bewilderment, suddenly plunged into a scene so new to them, did not know how to break the spell—though Grace became every moment more sensible of the false position, and even felt it a reproach to her in her sorrow to be turned aside out of her serious course by the light and graceful current of Miss Anna’s recollections and anecdotes. Geoffrey, who kept a sort of neutral place between them, was not really aware, save by the instinct which made him divine something wrong underneath the surface, of half the seriousness of the situation. It had not yet occurred to him to identify the dead father of the girls with the visitor who had caused so much commotion in the house some time before. He thought nothing more now than that they had generously come, though in grievous trouble, to convey some information respecting that stranger; and he saw clearly enough that the same motive which had induced his aunt to disown and dismiss the visitor then, was impelling her now to refuse to listen to anything about him.
“I have a great deal of fine Sèvres,” Miss Anna said. “Many people tell me I should exhibit it. There are continual exhibitions nowadays to which people send their treasures. There is South Kensington, you know; there is always something of the kind going on there. What! you have not been at South Kensington? Oh,that is very great negligence on the part of your friends. You must really make them take you before you go away. Yes, I was very much urged to send my china there.”
It was Milly who murmured the little response which civility demanded; for Grace’s impatience was getting the better of her. She felt that she must speak, though the words were taken out of her mouth. But still the old lady went smoothly on.
“Now that I cannot walk I take a great deal of pleasure in having all my pretty things about me. If you ever should be in such a position—which I trust may never be the case—you will understand what a pleasure it is to have bright surroundings. What, going? It is really quite dark. You must let Geoffrey get a cab for you. Geoffrey, go, dear, and look for a cab.”
Grace had got up with an irrestrainable impulse. She came forward a step with her hands tightly clasped. “It is not that we are going,” she said. “It is that I must talk to you about the thing that brought us here. I—I—do not know your name—except Miss Anna, as the maid said. Oh, will you please for a moment listen to me? The last night my father was well, before he took his illness, he was, so far as we can tell, here. We found your address among his papers; and he went out and left us for a long time that afternoon saying he was going to see old friends. We cannot think of any other interpretation; we feel sure that he musthave been here. If you are our dearest father’s friend—anything to him—we should like—to know you,” said Grace, once more unconsciously clasping her hands. “We do not want anything from—we only want to know you, if you were dear papa’s friend.”
There was another pause, for the fervour of strong emotion with which the girl spoke, her clasped hands and wet eyes, impressed even the vigilant woman who was prepared for everything. It required a moment’s resolution even on her part before she could crush the hopes of the young forlorn creature who thus appealed to her. She made a pause, and drew a long breath. Then she said, “Who was your father? You forget that I know nothing about him——”
“Robert Leonard Yorke,” said Grace. The familiar dear name almost overcame her courage, but she held herself up by main force with her hands clasped. “There is nobody better known where we come from—Robert Leonard Yorke, of Quebec——”
“My dear young lady,” said Miss Anna—and she sank back in her chair with a certain relief—a relaxation of the strain with which she had kept herself up to be ready for any emergency, which was not lost upon her nephew at least—“you have made some mistake. I never heard the name in my life. I never knew any one, or, to my knowledge, saw any one of that name.”
“A fortnight ago, on Tuesday: and it rainedvery much in the evening,” Grace said eagerly. “He told us he could not get a cab, it was so far out of town; and he got very wet.”
“He caught cold—and it was that—it was that——” Milly added her contribution to what her sister said: but her voice broke, and she could not conclude her sentence.
Miss Anna sat and looked on politely attentive, but at the same time ostentatiously indifferent. “It is very sad,” she said. “It is impossible to tell you how sorry I am; but I never heard of Mr Yorke in my life. Geoffrey, that is true, it is very difficult to get a cab; go and look for one. I cannot permit these young ladies to wander away alone in a strange place. Go, Geoff, go!”
She was very anxious to be rid of him; her voice took the imperious tone, which he had obeyed so often, but he did not seem disposed to obey now.
“A fortnight ago,” he said, “on a dark afternoon, turning to rain?”
“Yes, yes! you remember—oh, do you remember?—and afterwards we saw you at the hotel.” The two girls spoke both together, one saying the former part, the other the latter of the sentence, both turning upon him with the most anxious eyes, gazing, trying to penetrate into his inmost soul.
“Geoff, why do you stand there?” cried Miss Anna. She, too, became energetic, and more and more imperious. “Go, I tell you, and get a cab for them. Two strangers, and far from where they areliving. You know what your mother will think of such visitors. Go, directly, as I tell you.” She stamped as she spoke, first her stick and then her foot, impatiently on the floor.
“This cannot be settled so summarily,” said Geoffrey; “there is more in it. It is not necessary that we should stay in your room, Aunt Anna, if you dislike it; but I wish these ladies to remain till my mother sees them——”
“Your mother, who always believes everything that is said to her! Let there be an end to this folly at once, Geoff; go and get a cab.”
“Aunt Anna, there had better be no struggle between us—yet. What I ask is very simple—that they should see my mother.”
“Do you want to see his mother?” she said, suddenly turning upon the astonished girls. “You have made acquaintance with him, I can see; but mothers have sharp eyes, and his mother thinks every girl she sees is in love with her fascinating son. Can’t he see you at some other place? I warn you my sister will give you no pleasant reception if she finds you here.”
“Grace, Grace, let us go away,” cried Milly, rising to her feet, scarlet with shame; but Grace had other things to think of, and paid no attention to this assault.
“I don’t want to be harsh,” continued Miss Anna; “but if you are good girls it will be much better for you to go away at once. I don’tsay you are not good girls, far from it. I don’t pretend to judge; but girls of your age should not be going about to strange houses without invitation, especially where there is a young man. It has a strange look—your people would not like it. I advise you as your friend to go away.”
Here Milly clasped Grace by the arm, and drew her back a little; perhaps some passing communication from Geoffrey’s eyes had made the younger sister the more keen-sighted of the two for once. Grace turned round a little, moved by her earnestness, and there was the usual consultation by looks between them; the result of which was that Grace’s pale countenance became also suffused with colour; but she held her ground, though her sister drew her back.
“I do not think, if you were kind,” she said, “that you would speak so to two girls like us. You would protect us rather from every evil thought. We came here because we have no friends, thinking that they must have been friends to whom papa went on his first day in England: thinking, perhaps, you were relations—somebody who would take a little interest in us. If it is not so, there can be no reason why we should stay.”
Geoffrey put out his hand with an eager gesture. “Till my mother comes,” he said.
“Young ladies,” cried Miss Anna, “I will tell you what that boy means; he wants to make you out to be the children of a sort of madman whowas here some time ago—an impostor: a fellow who gave himself out as—who represented himself to be—a man who has been dead for years. Would you like to have a slur put upon your father, who appears to have been a respectable person?” she added more calmly. She had yielded to an impulse of anger, and had flushed passionately. But at the last words she calmed down, and spoke with distinct and slow utterance, with a slight curl of contempt about her mouth.
“Grace, Grace,” cried Milly, “let us go away!”
Grace’s face varied every moment as one emotion after another swept over it. “I don’t know what to do,” she said piteously, “Milly”: “But I think there is something to find out,” she added—“I think there is something more!”
“If you wish to have your father’s character taken away, and the cheat he attempted found out——” cried Miss Anna, with sudden fury. Then she stopped, seeing the mistake she had made. “I beg your pardon, I am sure,” she went on, with fictitious amiability. “You are making me identify this respectable person from Canada, poor man, for whom I am very sorry—with a wretched impostor, a fellow that never came back, or made the slightest effort to support his ridiculous claim. Of course, if you like to stay till my sister comes back,” she added, “I can have no objection. She is a silly, credulous woman; she will believe any story you like to tell her, so you may give the reinto your invention. But one caution I will give you: say nothing about her son. Make believe, at all events, that you know nothing about her son.”
“Oh, Grace, why should we be insulted? What can it matter to us? Let us go away,” Milly cried.
But if there was one thing better known among the young Yorkes than another, it was that Grace was obstinate. Nothing, the boys said, would make her give in, even when she was beaten. She turned round to Geoffrey, even while her sister was speaking.
“Sir,” she said, “we don’t know you, not even your name; but if you think your mother will understand better—if you think she will know anything about us, I would rather wait till she comes. We do not want money, or help, if that is what Miss Anna supposes; we want nothing except to know——”
“Then why in heaven’s name do you insist on staying? against my will, who am the mistress of the house? I say I will not have you here. I will have no adventurers here. I do not believe there is a word of truth in your story. That man is not dead. Impostors never die. It is all a got-up affair from beginning to end. Look here!” cried Miss Anna, striking her stick on the floor, “as I don’t want to have the whole story raked up in a court of justice, where you would not have a chance, not a leg to stand upon, you or yourprecious father—I’d rather come to terms with you, and let it go no further. How much will you take to give up your claims altogether? They are false, utterly false; but I don’t want to be made a talk of. I would rather settle it and be done with it, if you will say how much you will take, and start by the next steamboat. There is a steamboat every week, every day perhaps, for anything I know.”
The girls stood close together listening aghast, Milly thinking nothing less than that Miss Anna must be a mad woman, and that now her insanity was becoming visible. But to Grace’s more active mind, this strange proposal conveyed an impression quite different. She looked at Geoffrey, whose turn it now seemed to be to blush. He had made an effort to interfere, and stop Miss Anna, but, failing in that, had drawn a step back, and stood with a painful flush on his face listening to her. As she ended, he stepped forward again.
“With this proposal,” he said, “please to remark, neither I nor my mother have anything to do.”
“There is something, then, upon which we have a claim,” Grace cried; “and we are not mistaken after all!”
“Oh, Grace,” cried Milly, “come away—come away! What does it matter to us? We don’t understand this country, or its ways. Oh, how we used to think of England, how delightful it was to be! but now it is dreadful. If you went to thepoorest house in Canada,” cried the girl, “and said, We are in trouble, we are all alone, our father is dead, they would take you in, they would be kind to you; but here they say we are impostors, and offer us money. Oh, Grace, Grace, come away!”
With her eyes sparkling through her tears, her soft cheeks flushed with resentment and shame, her hands clasping her sister’s arm, whom she endeavoured to draw away, Milly turned towards the door. It was not often she took the initiative, or even gave utterance to so many words; but Milly was not quick enough to divine any secret meaning, or to see anything but offence and insult in what had been said. Her only thought was to escape—all the more as she had felt a secret confidence that they had fallen among friends on seeing Geoffrey; and the disappointment made her revulsion of feeling more complete.
The door opened behind as she spoke, and another lady came in. The newcomer had her bonnet on, and brought with her a waft of fresh air from out of doors. She was not beautiful, like Miss Anna, but she had the same white hair and dark eyes—eyes not so penetrating, but kinder. She came in with an untroubled air, as a woman comes into her own house, expecting nothing but the ordinary domestic calm. She stopped short, however, when she saw the visitors, and uttered a little exclamation, “Oh!” somewhat tremulous, like Milly’s own. She was a shy woman for onething, and for another, having been so lately excited by an unusual visitor, she felt slightly nervous of every new figure. “I did not know you had visitors, Anna,” she said.
“These are not my visitors,” said Miss Anna; “if they are anybody’s visitors, they are your son’s.”
Then the friendly face before them clouded over. She cast one reproachful look at Geoffrey, and turned her back upon the two dark figures in their depth of crape. This was her weakness, but it was a weakness which was full of compunctions. Her son was all she had in the world; and though she would say now and then that to see him married was the height of her ambition, yet this good mother feared and almost hated every feminine creature under thirty, and turned her back upon the whole race lest Geoffrey’s future wife might be found among them. When she had done this, however, her heart always melted, as now. She was, in reality, one of the most womanly of women, and liked nothing so well as feminine companions when she could put confidence in them that they would not take her son from her. The two faces, however, upon which she cast a remorseful glance now, after she had turned her back upon them, were of the most dangerous type. They were the faces of two predatory creatures against whom she felt she had no means of defence. Either of them was capable under her very eyes of sweepingGeoff away from her for ever and ever. Never did hen look upon fox with more dismay; but Mrs Underwood was not a consistent or firm woman. She looked and trembled; but then looked again, and was touched in spite of herself. They were very young; they were in deep mourning; andthey were not paying the slightest attention to Geoffrey. Perhaps that last was the most moving circumstance of all.
“Visitors of my son’s? That means, I suppose,” said Mrs Underwood, with a little gasp, yet a heroic effort, “Visitors to me?”
“I am glad you think so, Mary. It is no concern of mine,” said Miss Anna, turning pointedly away.
And then politeness compelled Mrs Underwood to offer civilities she had very little mind to. “Won’t you sit down?” she said. “Geoff, you will perhaps introduce me to your friends.”
She sighed; there was something half-ludicrous in the pathos of her tone.
“I hope we may be friends hereafter,” said Geoffrey; “but at present there is something to be settled which is more than friendship. Mother, you remember your cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite, and his sudden visit here a fortnight ago?”
“Leonard Crosthwaite?” she said the name trembling, and turned involuntarily with a frightened look to where her sister sat.
“He means,” said Miss Anna, without turningher head, “the impostor, or madman, who assumed the name of—our relation who died twenty years ago.”
“Mother, listen,” said Geoffrey. “It is a terrible story, so far as I can make it out. He went from you, to die: and these are his daughters.”
Mrs Underwood turned from one to another as her son spoke, now reading his face, now Miss Anna’s, now throwing an anxious glance at the sisters who stood together in the centre of the room, not knowing what new turn their affairs might be about to take.
At this an exclamation burst from all three at once. The girls said, “No, no!” while Mrs Underwood cried out, “Leonard’s daughters!” “No, no, no, no!” the others said.
“So far as I can see,” repeated the young man, “he is dead, and cannot tell us how it stands. These are the young ladies whom I found at the hotel to which I went in search of him—his hotel, the address he gave you. And their father came out on a wintry afternoon a fortnight ago, a Tuesday, to visit friends—old friends of whom he told them nothing. He went home drenched—you remember how it rained, mother?—and took to his bed. Now that he is dead, they found our address among his papers. This is the story, and what can you want more? It seems to me that it is clear enough!”
“But,” said Grace, “there is one great mistakeyou make. Our name, it is not Crosthwaite—oh, nothing like it; we never heard that name before. Papa was not a man to go by a false name. Oh, no, no; he was true in everything. There must still be some mistake.”
Miss Anna, who had turned her chair away, turned round again at this. “I told you,” she said; “this young fellow wants to prove you to be the daughters of an impostor or a madman. Of course, your father was not a man to go by a false name. Nobody would do that who was, as you say, a respectable person, a man thought well of in his own place. You know better than to think so. Of course: that is exactly what I said.”
But this support sent Grace instantly into opposition. She paused to consider, when she found herself suddenly embarrassed by this unexpected backing up. Miss Anna’s eyes fixed upon her seemed to have a baneful influence, and oppressed her soul.
“Does it make any difference to you,” she said, with the trenchant simplicity of ignorance, “what was my father’s name?”
The question was so entirely unexpected that each of the three showed its effect in a different, yet characteristic way. Miss Anna, listening with the complacency and satisfaction with which Grace’s denial of the name had filled her, received this stray shot full in her breast, and without any preparation. She wavered, drewback, contracted her features involuntarily in the effort to preserve her perfect calm. Mrs Underwood gasped as if some one had seized her by the throat. As for Geoffrey, he was the only one who replied.
“If,” he said, “you are Leonard Crosthwaite’s daughters, as I believe, it will make a great deal of difference to us all.”
“The question was addressed to me,” said Miss Anna, with a slight trembling that ran over all her person; “and it is for me to answer it. Young lady, whoever you are, if you are Leonard Crosthwaite’s daughter, which I don’t believe for a moment—I have no doubt your father was a much more respectable man: but if you are, and can prove it, you will be able to give rise to a great lawsuit, which will be fought out on both sides for years; which will cost you every penny you have, if you have anything, and ruin everybody belonging to you: besides bringing out a great many things about the family you claim to belong to, which we would all much rather keep to ourselves; and in all likelihood it would be a failure at the end. That is the true state of the case, whatever that boy may tell you—or anyone else,” she added after a moment, with a glance at her sister, “or any one else. This world is full of fools.”
“Oh, Grace, come—come away!” cried Milly in her sister’s ear.
But Grace was less easily moved. She was bewildered,and confused, and alarmed. It seemed to her that the rights of her family were in her hand, and her mind leaped to great things—far greater than this simple house and its riches. Perhaps Lenny—yes, certainly, she remembered now, though it had not occurred to her before, her father had Leonard in his name, and her boy-brother was also Leonard—might be the heir of some great property, and only she to defend his rights. Grace stood and looked at them all with a swelling of her breast, yet a dazzled dimness in her eyes, as if she were about to faint. She never had done such a thing in her life; but then she never had been in such an extraordinary strait, and with nobody to advise her. No wonder the light which she wanted so much within to clear up the way before her, should seem to fail without.
“I can’t see my way,” she said faintly. “I cannot tell what to do. Yes, Milly, we will go away; but for all that, it is not finished,” she said, turning to Miss Anna with a gleam of dim defiance in her eyes.
THE girls were now as eager to go away as they had been to come; they would scarcely wait for the cab which was sent for, and they paid very little attention to the anxious civilities of Mrs Underwood and Geoffrey, who conducted them to the door and put them into the carriage, making every kind of wistful endeavour to obliterate the impression made upon their minds by the other member of the family. Grace and Milly were in too great haste to consult each other, to compare notes, and to realise this strange new complication in their lives, to have their ears open to Mrs Underwood’s apologies.
“You must not mind Anna,” she said in an undertone, as she led them into the hall, with its dark oaken furniture and scanty light, out of the warm and softened brightness of Miss Anna’s room. “She has always been used to having her own way; she cannot bear to be contradicted. When she takes anything into her head it is so difficult to convince her; oh, she is a great deal cleverer than I am, that is true; but she will not be convinced when she has taken a thing into her head.”
This little explanatory stream of talk seemed to flow round them as they went to the door, but they paid very little attention to it. They scarcely heard Mrs Underwood’s promise to go and see them at their hotel next day; and they submitted with a little surprise rather than accepted with any pleasure her offer of kindness, when she took each in succession by the hand and kissed her, with a mixture of nervous timidity and affection. “If it is so, we are relations,” she said almost under her breath; “and if it is not so, my poor dears, my poor children, my heart bleeds for you all the same.” The water trembling in her eyes and the quaver of her voice showed the good woman’s sincerity; but the girls were scarcely moved by it, so full were their minds of this discovery, which they did not understand. As for Geoffrey, he said nothing at all; he shut the door of the cab and lingered for a moment looking at them wistfully, but that was all. There was in his face a pained consciousness of the difference between his own position and theirs. He, with his home behind him, and all the long-established household gods which had protected him all his life; while the other two, so much younger, feebler, and less able to shift for themselves, had nothing but the cold foreign shelter of a hotel to go back upon. He stood bareheaded in the rain, which, to complete the resemblance with their father’s visit to this place, began to drizzle down continuously out ofthe dim persistent skies; and his face was the last thing they saw, gazing compassionately after them as they disappeared into the darkness. They were too much preoccupied even to notice this—at least Grace was too much preoccupied. Milly for her part saw him very well, but said nothing. Her mind too was full of other thoughts—yet not so full but that she could remark this quietly to herself.
But though they thus left Grove Road in great excitement they were not disappointed. If they had found themselves simply mistaken, and that nothing was known there of their father or his visit, they would have fallen from an eminence of hope, which in present circumstances they had by no means lost. Had they been received with kind indulgence as strangers, rousing no hostile or any other kind of feeling, but simply a little surprise, they would have been cruelly disappointed; but the excitement of seeing themselves regarded with alarm as dangerous intruders, so important as to be perilous to family peace, flattered them in the most subtle way. As they went slowly down the hill, jolting over the stones, their hearts were fluttered by a sense of dignity which they had never felt before. They laid their girlish heads together as they had been longing to do since ever they set foot in that strange enchanted place. What could it be? what solemn inheritance, what great fortune, tojustify the panic which they had seen by movements beneath all the glitter and bravado of Miss Anna’s words? Between that exciting and wonderful idea and the associations with their father of which the darkling road seemed full, their minds were transported altogether out of their own trouble and raised into an atmosphere of high interest and responsibility. It would depend, they thought, upon how they now behaved whether their whole position might be changed. They were well off enough; there was no want in their house, nor had they any reason to suppose that their father’s death would leave them destitute. But there was a great difference between that state of ordinary and commonplace comfort, and this dazzling probability. It might have been a vacant principality, almost a throne, from the way in which Grace and Milly contemplated it. They felt as if their former life had been stopped, and that something new, altogether unrealised and unrealisable, awaited them in the future. “If we only knew what to do; if we could only decide on what is best,” Grace said. That was the difficulty now. This morning there had seemed nothing before them but a patient, melancholy waiting for their mother’s sad letter, and the news of her arrangements for their return to her; now they thought no longer of the voyage home or of anything connected with it, but of what to do and say as representatives of their father, and heads, so tospeak, of the family, working on their behalf. “It will change everything,” Grace said again thoughtfully. “Instead of all of us being alike, Lenny—Lenny will be the heir. That is one thing that gives a likelihood to it,” she added, sinking her voice as if the cab-driver might perhaps hear and report the matter. “His name, Milly! I never thought of it till a few minutes ago. Lenny; of course he is Leonard; and when you think of it, papa had Leonard in his name too.”
“I thought of it directly,” said Milly, with a little satisfaction.
Grace, in her excitement, threw her arms round her sister. “It is you who ought to be the first of us two,” said Grace admiringly. “It is true that I am the eldest—but so many things occur to you that never come into my head.”
“It is because I have the time to think while you are talking,” Milly said with modesty; but she was not displeased with this testimony to her superior insight. She added, with a little awe: “Gracie, I wonder ifthat—is our real name?”
This was a question that took away the breath of both. They looked at each other almost with an inclination to laugh, then stopped short and mutually contemplated the impulse with horror. “It is dreadful,” said Milly, “isn’t it, to have a false name?”
“I don’t know,” said Grace, who had been so indignant an hour ago at the suggestion; “it cannotbe so very dreadful if papa did it. He must have had his reasons for taking another name. There are reasons that account for everything.” Her momentary humility had disappeared by this time, and she felt equal to explaining all mysteries to her sister in her usual way. “He must have been wronged somehow when he left home. I suspect that Miss Anna, Milly; I am sure she is at the bottom of everything. She must have told lies of him, or invented stories; and then perhaps he was disinherited, and the money given to her. It would not be money; it would be lands or an estate—perhaps a fine old house.” Then they paused and looked at each other for a moment. “If that was how it was, and we got it back, mamma would certainly have to come homethen.”
“But it could not be for all of us; it would only be for Lenny,” said Milly doubtfully.
“Lenny is only fifteen; he would not be of age for ever so long. And then it is always stipulated,” said Grace, “that when people have estates, what is called a great stake in the country, they should be educated in the country and made to understand it.” Insensibly she drew herself up, holding her head higher at the thought—“Mamma would not like it; but she would do what was best for Lenny——”
“Then I suppose—” Milly said, and now in spite of herself the smallest little laugh, instantly repented of, burst from her. She looked at hersister in great alarm, with a portentously serious countenance. “I suppose,” she repeated, as if, instead of something ridiculous, this had been the most solemn suggestion in the world, “that Lenny—will be the one of us that will be important now.”
So full was Grace of the seriousness of this thought, that she replied, without taking any notice of that guilty laugh, only by an inclination of her head: “We will have to learn all about the English laws, and how things are managed, for Lenny’s sake,” she said seriously. “He will be a magistrate, you know, and most likely in Parliament; and he will be rather behind by losing so much time in Canada. We will have to coach him up.”
“Oh but, Gracie, I don’t know things myself; I never was able to do that.”
“I must begin directly,” said Grace with a little sigh—the sigh of the self-devoted. “It was such a business—don’t you remember, Milly?—to coach him for school; and England—England is a great deal more difficult. I think I must begin Greek directly, and law—or he will never know his lessons. I hope mamma will see that it is her duty, Milly, to come at once,” she added still more seriously. Milly for one second was inclined to laugh again at the portentous and preposterous importance of her young brother, but then she recollected herself, and the tears filled her eyes.
“Oh, poor mamma!” she cried, “poor mamma! to come now!”
This turned once more the current of their thoughts. But when they got back to their hotel the argument was resumed: for it soon became an argument maintained with great heat on one side, with an unimaginable gentle obstinacy on the other. Milly, who never went against her sister’s will, was for once in opposition, and though she was not strong enough to subdue Grace, she did not yield to her.
They had begun languidly and mournfully to arrange their father’s papers in the morning. Now Grace betook herself to this pursuit with passion. She found nothing: some fragments of torn letters, torn up into very small pieces, on one of which the name of “Anna” occurred, lay in the bottom of his dressing bag; but Grace was not sufficiently skilled in the art of detection to join them together as a more experienced investigator might have done. And it revolted her to pry into what the dead man had thus wished to conceal. In all his other stores there was not a word which even suggested any information. He had scrawled, “3 Grove Road,” on a page of his blotting-paper, and twice over in other places, as if afraid of forgetting it. When she came to a little diary he had kept she paused with a sensation of awe. She had seen it a hundred times—had seen it lying open, and knew that no special sanctity was attributed to it. It was nothing but a little record of events and engagements; but when the hand is still that hasscribbled these careless memoranda, how strangely their character changes! She took it to where Milly sat, and placed herself on the sofa beside her. “I cannot read this by myself,” she said.
“Oh, why should we read it at all, Grace? If papa had wanted us to know he would have told us.”
“Hush! even papa shall not make me suffer injustice!” cried the excited girl. But when the little book was opened it gave but the scantiest information. There was one entry since the landing in England, and no more; and this was all it contained:—
“Same name in directory, at old address; to go first thing and inquire.”
Grace gave a little cry when she read this; it seemed to her to tell all she wanted—and yet it told nothing. “It is quite clear,” she cried in her mistaken little triumph. Milly looked at it too with all the feeling that it was an important revelation. Then they cried a little over the foolish little events of the voyage, all set down there, with that strange unconsciousness of what was coming, which makes death so doubly terrible to the survivors. If he had but known, surely he would have put something in that little record to console, to elevate, to calm the survivors, to whom his every word was so soon to be sacred! But he did not know, and put down nothing except “Wind so-and-so; a little fog in the morning. Captain’s birthday; champagne at dinner,” and such other trifles.They folded it carefully away in paper and sealed it, with an ache at their hearts. Oh, if he had but known! and so told them something, left them some information, if it had only been a task to do! “But there is something to do!” Grace cried; “this that he began; and I will never, never give it up till Lenny has his rights! He is papa’s heir.”
THESE vague gropings after an unknown fact were very different from the discussions which took place in Grove Road when the girls were gone. Mrs Underwood and her son lingered together for a moment in the hall. She took hold of Geoffrey’s arm with both her hands, and leaned for a moment upon his shoulder and shed a few tears of agitation and distress.
“You must not be frightened, mother. We can get on together, whatever happens,” he said in her ear.
“Oh, Geoff, how can I help being frightened? I would not wrong anybody—not by the value of a straw.”
“I am sure you would not, mother. I know you would not.”
“But what a difference it will make—oh, what a difference!” cried poor Mrs Underwood.
She cried for a moment on her son’s shoulder. Was it to be expected that she could give up the greater part of her living without a sigh?
“And then Anna,” she said, “Anna!” in a tone of mingled fright and pain.
It would seem almost as if her sister haddivined, for she could not hear, this reference to herself; for she called sharply in a keen voice which penetrated through the closed door. Mrs Underwood started immediately, dropping her son’s arm.
“Must you always fly the moment she calls, as if you were her maid?” said Geoff indignantly.
His mother put up her hand to his mouth.
“I have always done it: and could I stop it now when perhaps she is going to lose everything? Oh, hush! hush! I am coming, I am coming, Anna,” she cried.
“She will never lose you, mother,” he said, detaining her. “I can see already what will happen. You will make yourself her slave, and give up every comfort in your life.”
“What can I do? What can I do? I have you, but she has nobody. I am coming, Anna, I am coming,” she said.
Miss Anna still sat in her easy chair, with the tea-table before her. Her forehead was slightly contracted, her lips parted with a quickened breath; but these faint indications were all that showed any agitation in her. She addressed her sister when she appeared in a sharper tone than usual. “You two have been having a little consultation,” she said. “Oh, quite right; quite right. Two heads are better than one. It might be considered a little ungenerous, perhaps, to the other who has no one to consult with—but I am used to it.I know what a single woman has to expect in life.”
“Oh, Anna!” her sister said, with a faint remonstrance, “when you know that you are always our first thought.”
“Your first thought! I did not know I was of so much importance,” said Miss Anna with a laugh. “One would scarcely think it to see how little attention you pay to me—either you or Geoff. But I must not complain: for it is your money as well as mine that he is so anxious to make a present of to the new claimants. And I can see very well what his motive is—very well. Oh, I know men and their motives, though I have never married. I can see through them well enough.”
“My motive! what motive can I have but justice?” the young man said.
“Oh, Geoffrey! hush, my dear. When you know it is your aunt’s way. Why should there be any quarrelling, to make everything worse?”
“Yes, it is his aunt’s way. I am not the sort of fool that accepts everything,” said Miss Anna. “I can read him like a book. He has had to have his living doled out to him through you and me, and now he sees a way of getting the better of us—of turning the tables upon us. Oh, it is clear enough. Two girls—two silly creatures that will believe every word he says; but take my advice, Geoffrey, and choose the little one. She is the one that you can turn round your little finger; the other has awill of her own. Though it is against my own interest, you see, I can still give you good advice.”
Geoffrey made no reply to this speech. His mother fluttered between him and Miss Anna with her hands spread out like the wings of a protecting bird, ready to burst in and forestall him had he attempted to reply; but he did not speak for some minutes. Then he said coldly, “We must not quarrel, as my mother says. We are all threatened with a great danger. For anything we can tell, the girls you are talking of so lightly can take the greater part of our living from us. The question not only is, have they a real claim? but can they establish it? and how far are we ready to go in the way of resistance? Rather, how far areyouready to go? Will moral certainty be enough for you, or do you demand legal proof?”
“Moral fiddlestick!” said Miss Anna. “Morals have nothing to do with it. We were always as near in blood as Leonard was; we had as good a right as he had; indeed, we had a better right, being girls, to be provided for. Uncle Abraham thought of the name when he chose his nephew instead of his nieces. And that showed his folly—for the nephew seems to have thrown off the name the moment he left the country: and of all the claimants there is only one Crosthwaite, and that is me. I do not care a brass farthing for your moral certainty. All it means is, that you have made up your mind to stand by your opinionthrough thick and thin. It is your opinion that the man who came here the other night was Leonard. Well! you think so, and he said so—but that is no proof.”
“Oh, Anna!” cried her sister, “speak of him kindly. Poor Leonard! when you have just heard that he is dead——”
“What is his dying to me?” she cried, with a glance of fury. “That’s the man that was held up to us all as the image of faithfulness. Not one of you but has told me if I had not treated him so badly, this and that would not have happened; and the hound had changed his name, and married, and been happy all the time!” Then she stopped and looked at Geoffrey with a contemptuous laugh. “Mind you, I don’t acknowledge that he was Leonard Crosthwaite. It suits my purpose a great deal better to believe that he was the pink of fidelity, and died of a broken heart.”
“Very few people, they say,” said Mrs Underwood, in a reluctant voice, “die of broken hearts.”
Miss Anna’s bright eyes seemed to give out gleams of malice and scorn and indignant ridicule. “But I believe in them,” she said. “I am romantic, not prosaic like you. When you know it’s for your sake, then, naturally, you believe in it.” She stopped to laugh, her bosom panting with a mixture of contempt and fury. “If Leonard did not die for me as he promised he would, he was apoor creature. Heirs! what had he to do with heirs? If he did not die he was a traitor and a liar. Geoff, there is no poetry in you; you are a commonplace being; that is why you are capable of believing that Leonard Crosthwaite lived, and throve, and married, and had heirs. I do not believe a word of it,” she said. And again she laughed. After all, there was something behind the self-interest that determined her resistance—something which the more honourable people who gazed at her with so much wonder and alarm did not understand. Her laugh was not of merriment but of that last scorn of humanity which is despair. It made her furious, it transported her beyond all limits of nature. She had believed in this one man as true and faithful beyond all question; and he had been the greatest deceiver of all. This put such fierce scorn into her breast that she could not contain herself. The more selfish a nature is the more is it lacerated by desertion. This was a woman who had put herself above others all her life, and had been punished by the gradual failure of all whose worship she had once believed in. It was the final blow to her self-esteem, and she resented it with wild wrath and frantic ridicule of the traitor. But nobody knew the tragic element in it, or that her belief in the possibility of honour and truth went with this discovery. She appeared to the others like an unscrupulous woman, firmly determined to hold by her inheritance against allclaimants—which she was: but also something more.
“All that is beyond the question,” said Geoffrey; “it is very possible that legal proof may be hard to get. We might fight it out at law for years; we might ruin them and ourselves too in the effort to make it quite clear. The question is for you, mother, as well as Aunt Anna. If you are sure these are the heirs, though they cannot prove it in law, what will you do?”
Poor Mrs Underwood was taken entirely without preparation. She turned to her son with a gasp, clasping her hands together in dismay. She was a woman who had always been told what to do by somebody—her husband, her sister, her son, had managed her mind for her. When she knew what was expected of her she did it faithfully, holding by herconsignewhatever happened. She had kept steadily to her orders under the most trying circumstances already: struggling against the glimmerings of right judgment in her own breast, even while silenced by Anna’s casuistry. Since Geoffrey grew up her course had been easier, though even with his support her sister’s older influence was sometimes too much for her. But now to be asked instead of being told—to have a decision demanded from her instead of made for her, took away her breath.
“Oh, Geoff,” she said, “my dear! how can you expect me to understand anything about the law? I should like to be kind to the girls, poor things.Of course I should like to be kind to them. I would not ruin them, poor fatherless children, for all the world. How could you think such a thing of me?”
“That is not what I am asking you, mother. If you are sure they ought to have the money, though they cannot prove it legally, what will you do?”
Mrs Underwood turned a frightened look towards her sister, who laughed; then her eyes returned to the face of her son, which was very serious, and gave her no guidance. “Do?” she murmured faintly, “I will do—whatever is thought right, Geoff.”
“But what doyouthink right, mother?”
Geoffrey felt that if he had not put a powerful control upon himself, he might have turned round upon the laughing spectator behind him and taken her by the throat.
“Poor Geoff!” said Miss Anna; “between his mother, who cannot understand, and I who understand better than a woman ought, he is in a hard case. You had better have it out with me. What shall we do in case there is no legal proof? You know very well there is but one thing to do. Keep ourselves on our guard and refuse any concession. What else? Fancy is one thing, but property is another. You can’t go chucking that about like a ball. It must stay in the hands it is in, until others have proved a right to it. You who were brought up for the bar, and you need me to tell you that?”
“This is how the case stands, mother,” said Geoffrey. “The money which is the greater part of our living was left to your cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite, and only to you failing him and his heirs. You thought he was dead, without heirs, and you have enjoyed it all this time with an easy mind. But a fortnight ago Leonard Crosthwaite appeared. You did not know him at first, but before he went away you were convinced it was he. Is not this all true?”
“She fancied it was he, being a silly woman who believes everybody’s story, and never knew a lie from the truth all her days.”
“And you, Aunt Anna,” said Geoffrey, turning upon her with quick impatience, “did you always know the truth from a lie?”
“I have had no practice to speak of,” she answered; “lies have been told me ever since I can remember. The other is a great deal more uncommon. Don’t puzzle your mother with sophistries. Tell her what you want, that is the shortest way.”
“Indeed, dear,” said Mrs Underwood, with deprecating looks, “your Aunt Anna is right; it would be better just to tell me what I am to do. I would have done anything for poor Leonard. Poor fellow! to die among strangers, far from his poor wife and everybody that knew him! My heart bleeds forher, Geoff. If they had sent for me I would have gone in a moment to nurse himand take care of him. You don’t suppose I would have been so cruel as to let him die by himself if I had known? And now these poor girls. Oh, what a change for them! to come here for pleasure, and to have all their amusement, poor things, turned into misery and sorrow!” Here the kind woman’s voice was choked with tears.
“Mother! mother!” said Geoffrey, “you are the best woman in the world: but I think you will drive me out of my senses all the same.”
Mrs Underwood dried her eyes after a moment and looked up in his face with a tremulous little smile. “That is what your poor father used to say,” she replied with great simplicity. “I am not one to see the rights of everything at a glance like Anna; but if you will explain to me what it is best to do, you will see I will always do it, Geoff. You may trust me for that.”
What was Geoffrey to do? He did his best to shut his ears to Miss Anna’s laugh and her remark, “You perceive it is always a great deal better to talk things over with me.” It was quite true, though he never would own it: and to discuss this matter with her was impossible to him. He stood for a little while by the fire, staring into the mirror, where his own troubled countenance appeared in the centre of all the little carved shelves covered with china, which were reflected on every side. He felt himself, as he had done so many times before, altogether out of place in the house,where he was sometimes the master and sometimes of less account than the dog. So far Geoffrey was always the master. His tastes, his comforts, and even his convenience were the subjects of endless study. But between his mother’s incapacity for any mental exertion, and his aunt’s too keen and casuistical intelligence, it often happened that Geoffrey was driven to the end of his patience, and felt himself no better than a puppet between them, vainly struggling against Miss Anna’s false logic and his mother’s shifty feebleness. At these moments a sort of sickness of despair came over the young man. He thought with longing of any wild scene of emigrant life, any diggings, or sheep-walks, into which he could escape, to encounter the grosser elements of life, and be free of this feminine atmosphere. To plant him here between these two ladies seemed a freak of fate which was unaccountable. Their motives, their ideas, were all different from his. Geoffrey stood for a few minutes staring at himself, thinking what a gloomy ruffian he looked, and how much out of keeping with all those dainty surroundings; then he went hastily out, notwithstanding the appeal of both ladies to him. “You are not going out in the rain, Geoff?” cried his mother; while Miss Anna bade him recollect that it was past six o’clock. Geoffrey paid no attention to either. It would be almost a satisfaction, he felt, to make her wait for her dinner. Not his mother, who cared as little for her dinneras any woman could do, but Miss Anna, who wasgourmande, and could not bear to wait. He was glad, too, of the sting of the rain, blown in his face as he stepped out from all the comfort and warmth of the too warm, luxurious house. The chill air and the darkness refreshed him—they were such a contradiction to all the conditions of his life.