CHAPTER XXV.
‘Dear, if you knew what tears they shedWho live apart from home and friend,To pass my house, by pity led,Your steps would tend.’
‘Dear, if you knew what tears they shedWho live apart from home and friend,To pass my house, by pity led,Your steps would tend.’
‘Dear, if you knew what tears they shedWho live apart from home and friend,To pass my house, by pity led,Your steps would tend.’
‘Dear, if you knew what tears they shed
Who live apart from home and friend,
To pass my house, by pity led,
Your steps would tend.’
It is the face that had peeped out of the branches of the sycamore-tree a little while ago. A charming face! The eyes glance down the little lane, and then, suddenly seeing Susan, rest with a frightened expression on her. As this is the first time in all Susan’s experience that anyone has ever betrayed the smallest fear of her, she naturally gives herself up to the contemplation of her new-born slave. Her eyes and those of the mysterious stranger meet.
‘Oh, how pretty!’ thinks Susan to herself,but she says nothing, being lost in wonder and admiration; and the girl, peeping out of the doorway, as if disheartened, draws back again, and will in another minute disappear altogether, but for Carew.
He makes a sharp gesture.
‘Wait!’ cries he, in a low tone, though hardly conscious that he is speaking at all. And again the pretty frightened head comes into sight between the leaves of the luxuriant ivy that frames the gate.
‘Susan!’ says Carew, in a voice of low and hurried entreaty; and Susan, responding to it, speeds quickly up the road and into the little gateway.
‘Oh, come in—come in!’ breathes the stranger in a whisper, putting out her hands and catching Susan’s in a soft grasp. ‘I have seen you so often; I’—flushing and smiling timidly—‘have watched you from the sycamore many a day. And it’s very lonely here. You will come in for a moment, won’t you?’
Susan smiles back at her, and passesthrough the small green gate. Ella, pleased and palpitating, glances back, to see Carew looking after them like a young culprit at the door of a forbidden paradise.
‘Won’t you come too?’ cries she, beneath her breath, in that soft, curiously frightened sort of a way that seems to belong to her. ‘Hurry! hurry!’ She looks anxious, and it is only, indeed, when Carew has come inside the gate, and she has with her own fingers fastened and secured it, that the brightness returns to her face.
‘It’s very good of you,’ says she, smiling rather shyly at Susan.
‘Oh no!’ cries Susan, with a charming courtesy that belongs to her; ‘it is very good of you to let us come and see you. You know’—softly—‘we had heard—understood—that you did not wish to be intruded on. That is’—stammering faintly—‘that you didn’t wish to see people, and so—’
‘It is all quite true,’ says the girl distinctly. ‘I don’t want to see people—not everyone, you know. But sometimes whenI hear your voices over there’—pointing towards the Rectory garden—‘laughing and talking, I have felt a little lonely.’ She is looking at Susan, and Susan can see that her eyes now are a little misty. ‘To-day’—wistfully—‘you were laughing a great deal.’
‘Yes, yes; I wish we hadn’t been,’ says Susan, who is beginning to feel distinctly contrite, until she remembers that, after all, some tears were mingled with her mirth. ‘But now that we have met, you will come and join us sometimes, won’t you?—and, indeed, to-day? I wish you had come to-day. We should all have been glad to see you—shouldn’t we, Carew?’
‘I am sure you know that,’ says Carew to Ella. A warm colour is dyeing his handsome young face, and there is the tenderest, most reverential expression in his voice. Carew is of that age when ‘the light that lies in a lady’s eyes’ can mean heaven to him.
‘I shall never leave this place,’ says Ellaquickly. ‘All I want is to stay here, in this lovely garden, by myself.’
‘Yet you said you felt lonely,’ says Susan anxiously.
‘Yes—I know.’ She looks down, as if puzzled, uncertain how to go on. ‘Still, I would rather be lonely than go out into the world again.’
‘Poor thing!’ thinks Susan. ‘I was right; no doubt she has just lost everyone that was dear to her.’ She glances at Ella, as if in search of crape, but Ella’s navy-blue skirt and pretty pale-blue linen blouse seem miles away from woe; and, yes, Betty had seen that blue bow near her neck.
‘I know this garden so well,’ says Susan, with a view to changing the sad subject. ‘We used to come here often before you came. Mr. Wyndham sometimes stayed here for weeks at a time, but now, of course, that is all changed. Oh, I see you have planted out some asters in the round bed. They will be lovely later on. I suppose’—thoughtfully—‘you like gardening?’
‘I love it!’ says Ella, with enthusiasm. ‘Only I don’t know anything about it. Mrs. Denis gives me hints.’
‘I love it, too,’ says Susan, ‘but for all that’—as if a little ashamed of herself—‘I like to see people sometimes. I couldn’t live on gardening alone, and you’ll find you can’t, either. In fact’—gaily—‘you have found it out already. That’s why you called us in. Oh, you’ll have to come over to our place. Do you like tennis?’
‘I have never played it.’
‘Golf, then?’
‘No.’ Her tone is very sad, and Carew turns sharply upon poor Susan, who had only meant to do her best.
‘There are other things in the world besides golf and tennis,’ says he.
‘Oh, of course—of course,’ says Susan hastily. ‘It is only people who live in the country who ever really care about things like that, and no doubt you—’
‘I don’t believe I know anything at all,’ says Ella, very gently.
‘Well, you know us now, at all events,’ says Carew very happily, with the light and ready manner that belongs to all large families. His tone is a little shy, perhaps—the tone of the boy to the lovely girl, when first love’s young dream dawns upon him; but Susan and Ella take the joke very kindly, and the laughter that follows on it clears the atmosphere.
‘You are Mr. Wyndham’s tenant, aren’t you?’ says Susan.
‘Yes, now’—in a glad and eager voice—‘though at first I wasn’t.’ She pauses here, drawing back, as it were. Has she said too much? Susan, however, has evidently seen nothing in the small admission.
‘I like Mr. Wyndham,’ says she. ‘We all do, indeed. What we are afraid of now is that, as you have the Cottage, we shan’t see so much of him. But perhaps’—gaily—‘you will put him up sometimes, and then we can renew our acquaintance with him.’
Here Carew turns an awful crimson, andcasts a glance, meant to annihilate, upon the innocent Susan.
‘I don’t know; I’m not sure,’ says Ella dejectedly. Evidently she has seen as little in Susan’s suggestion as Susan herself. ‘He has only been here once since I came, and Mrs. Denis seems to think he won’t come very often. I wish he would come, and I’m glad you like him, because I like him too.’
Carew here begins to wonder if he ever had liked Wyndham, and on the whole thinks not.
Ella has taken a step towards Susan.
‘What is your name?’ asks she timidly, but very sweetly.
‘Susan Barry.’
‘That sounds like the beginning of the Catechism,’ says Carew, who is, as we know, a clergyman’s son, and therefore up to little points like this.
‘I knew it,’ says Ella, still very shyly, to Susan—‘I knew it in a way. Mrs. Denis told me. But I wanted to be quite sure. You are Miss Barry?’
‘Oh no; only Susan,’ says the pretty proprietor of that name. ‘My aunt is Miss Barry. But I hope you will call me Susan. It is’—mournfully—‘a dreadfully ugly name, isn’t it?’
‘No, no; indeed, I like it.’
‘I hope you will like mine,’ says Carew, breaking into the conversation. ‘It is Carew. Susan and the others call it Crew, but that’s an abbreviation of me to which I object. But your name,’ says he. ‘We should like to know that.’
Has he thrown a bomb into the assembly? Something, at all events, has stricken the stranger dumb. She shrinks backwards, playing with a branch of the Wigelia rosea near her, as if to hide her embarrassment. What is her name? She tells herself that she does not know, that she disbelieves in the name forced upon her by those dreadful people she had lived with after—After what? Even that is vague to her. Was it after her mother’s death? Hints and innuendoes from the Moores had given herto believe that Moore, at all events, was not her real name. But beyond that she knows nothing.
‘My name is Ella,’ says she, in a miserable tone. ‘Call me that if—you will.’
‘Such a pretty name!’ says Susan. ‘Why did you think we shouldn’t like it? So much nicer than Susan. Isn’t mine horrid? But what is your other name?’
Here they all start. A loud ring at the big gate over there has taken them from their own immediate concerns—to another. Ella turns deadly white, and shows a distinct desire to get behind Susan. Mrs. Denis is to be seen in the distance, flying towards the entrance-gate.
Presently it is opened by her, and Wyndham walks in.