Now, however, all at once, so great a change had happened to her, that Mary could no longer understand, or even believe in, this state of mind which had been hers for so many years. Perfectly still, tranquil, fearing nothing—when her own flesh and blood were in such warfare in the world! How was it possible? Wondering pangs of self-reproach seized her; mysteries of death and of birth, such as had never touched her maidenly quiet, seemed to surround her, and mock at her former ease. All this time the gates of heaven had been opening and shutting to John. Hope sometimes, sometimes despair, love, anguish, want, pain, had struggled for him, while she had sat and looked on so calmly, and reasoned so placidly about the general equality of life. How could she have done it? The revelation was as painful as it was overwhelming. Nature seized upon her with a grip of iron, and avenged upon her in a moment all the indifferences of her previous life. The appeal of these frightened children, the solemn charge laid upon her by her brother, awoke her with a start and shiver. How had she dared to sit and look throughcalm windows, or on the threshold by her tranquil door, upon the struggles, pangs, and labours of the other human creatures about her? Was it excuse enough that she was neither wife nor mother? had she therefore nothing to do in guarding, and continuing, and handing down the nobler successions of life? Mary was startled altogether out of the state of mind habitual to her. Instead of remaining the calm lady of the manor, the female Squire, the lawgiver of the village which she had hitherto been—a little above the problems that were brought to her, a little wanting in consideration of motives and meaning, perhaps now and then too decided in her judgment, seeing the distinction between right and wrong too clearly, and entertaining a supreme, though gentle contempt for the trimmings and compromises, as well as for the fusses and agitations of the ordinary world—she felt herself to have plunged all at once into the midst of those agitations at a single step. She became anxious, timorous, yet rash, faltering even in opinion, hesitating, vacillating—she who had been so decided and so calm. Her feelings were all intensified, the cords of her nature tightened, as it were, vibrating to the lightest touch. And at the same time, which was strange enough, while thus the little circle, in which she stood, became full of such intense, unthought-of interest, the world widened around her as it had never widened before; into darknesses and silences indeed—but still with an extended horizon which expanded her heart. John was there in the wide unknown, which stretched round this one warm, lighted spot, wandering she knew not where, a solitary man. She had never realized him so before; and not only John, but thousands like him, strangers, wanderers, strugglers with fate. This sudden breath of novelty, of enlightenment, expanded her heart like a sob. Her composure, her satisfaction, her tranquillity fled from her; but how much greater, more real and true, more penetrating and actual, became her existence and the world! And all this was produced, not by any great mental enlightenment, any sudden development of character, but by the simple fact that two small helpless creatures had been put into her hands and made absolutely dependent upon her. This was all; but the whole world could not have been more to Mary. It changed her in every way. She whohad been so rooted in her place, so absorbed in her occupations, would have relinquished all, had it been necessary, and gone out solitary into the world for the children. Could there be any office so important, any trust so precious? This, which sounded like the vulgarest commonplace, and at the same time most fictitious high-flown sentiment, on the lips of Mrs. Pennithorne, became all at once, in a moment, the leading principle of Miss Musgrave’s life.
But she had to undergo various petty inconveniences from the curiosity of her neighbours, and their anxiety to advise her as to what she should do in the “trying circumstances.” What could she know about children? Mrs. Pen, for one, thought it very important to give Miss Musgrave the benefit of her advice. She made a solemn visit to inspect them, and tell her what she ought to do. The little boy, she felt sure, was delicate, and would require a great deal of care; but the thing that troubled Mrs. Pennithorne the most was that Miss Musgrave could not be persuaded to put on mourning for her brother’s wife. Notwithstanding that it was, as Mary pleaded, five years since she died, the vicar’s wife thought that crape would be a proof that all “misunderstandings” were over, and would show a Christian feeling. And when she could not make this apparent to the person principally concerned, she did all she could to impress it upon her husband, whom she implored to “speak to”—both father and daughter—on the subject. Most people would have been all the more particular to put on crape, and to wear it deep, because there had been “misunderstandings.” “Misunderstandings!” cried Mr. Pen. It was not, however, he who spoke to Miss Musgrave, but she who spoke to him on this important subject; and what she said somewhat bewildered the vicar, who could not fathom her mind in this respect.
“Emily thinks we should put on mourning,” she said. “And, do you know, I really believe that is the reason that poor John is so much more in my thoughts?”
“What—the mourning?” the vicar asked faltering.
“Herdeath. Hitherto the idea of one has been mingled with that of the other. Now he is just John; everything else has melted away; there is nothing but himself to think of. He hasnever been only John before. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Pen?”
The vicar shook his head. He wondered if this could be a touch of feminine jealousy, knowing that even Mary was not perfect; and this gave him a momentary pang.
“I don’t suppose that I should feel so;—I was very fond of John—but I, of course, could not be jealous—I mean of his love for one unworthy—— ”
“How do you know even that she was unworthy? It is not that, Mr. Pen. But she was nothing to us, and confused him in our minds. Now he is himself—and where is he?” said Miss Musgrave, with tears in her eyes.
“In God’s hands—in God’s hands, Miss Mary! and God bless him wherever he is—and I humbly beg your pardon,” cried Mr. Pen, with an excess of compunction which she scarcely understood. His feelings were almost too warm Mary thought.
And as the news got spread through those invisible channels which convey reports all over a country, many were the visitors that came to the Castle to see what the story meant, though they did not announce this as the object of their visit. Among these visitors the most important was Lady Stanton, who had been Mary’s rival in beauty when the days were. They had not been rivals indeed to their own consciousness, but warm friends, in their youth and day of triumph; but events had separated the two girls, and the two women rarely met, and had outgrown all acquaintance; for Lady Stanton had been involved, almost more immediately than Mary Musgrave, in the tragedy which had so changed life at Penninghame, and this had changed their relations like everything else. This lady arrived one day to the great surprise of everybody, and came in with timid eagerness and haste, growing red and growing pale as she held out her hands to her old friend.
“We never quarrelled,” she said; “why should we never see each other? Is there any reason?”
“No reason,” said Miss Musgrave, making room upon the sofa beside her. But such an unexpected appeal agitated her, and for the moment she could not satisfy herself as to the object ofthe visit. Lady Stanton, however, was of a very simple mind, and could not conceal what that object was.
“Oh, Mary,” she said, the tears coming into her eyes, “I heard that John’s children had come home. Is it true? You know I always took an interest—— ” And here she stopped, making a gulp of some emotion which, to a superficial spectator, might have seemed out of place in Sir Henry Stanton’s wife. She had grown stout, but that does not blunt the feelings. “I should like to see them,” she said, with an appeal in her eyes which few people could withstand. And Mary was touched too, partly by this sudden renewal of an old love, partly by the thought of all that had happened since she last sat by her old companion’s side, who was a Mary too.
“I cannot bring them here,” she said, “but I will take you to the hall to see them. My father likes them to be kept—in their own part of the house.”
“Oh, I hope he is kind to them!” said Lady Stanton, clasping her white dimpled hands. “Are they like your family? I hope they are like the Musgraves. But likenesses are so strange—mine are not like me,” said the old beauty, plaintively. Perhaps the trouble in her face was less on account of her own private trials in this respect than out of alarm lest John Musgrave’s children should bear the likeness of another face of which she could not think with kindness. There was so little disguise in her mind, that this sentiment also found its way into words. “Oh Mary,” she cried, “you and I were once the two beauties, and everybody was at our feet; but that common girl was more thought of than either you or me.”
“Hush!” said Mary Musgrave, putting up her hand; “she is dead.”
“Is she dead?” Lady Stanton was struck with a momentary horror; for it was a contemporary of whom they were speaking, and she could not but be conscious of a little shiver in her own well-developed person, to think of the other who was clay. “That is why they have come home?” she said, half under her breath.
“Yes; and because he cannot carry them about with him wherever he goes.”
“You have heard from him, Mary? I hope he is doing well. I hope he is not—very—heart-broken. If you are writing you might say I inquired. He might like to know that he was remembered; and you know I always took—an interest—— ”
“I know you always had the kindest heart.”
“I always took an interest, notwithstanding everything; and—will he come home? Now surely he might come home. It is so long ago; and surely now no one would interfere.”
“I cannot say anything about that, for I don’t know,” said Miss Musgrave; “he does not say. Will you come and see the children, Lady Stanton?”
“Oh, Mary, what have I done that you should call me Lady Stanton? I have never wished to stand aloof. It has not been my doing. Do you remember what friends we were? and I couldn’t call you Miss Musgrave if I tried. When I heard of the children I thought this was an opening,” said Lady Stanton, faltering a little. She told her little fib, which was an innocent one; but she was true at bottom and told it ill; and what difference did it make whether she sought the children for Mary’s sake, or Mary for the children’s? Miss Musgrave accepted her proffered embrace with kindness, yet with a smile. She was touched by the emotion of her old friend, and by the remnants of that “interest” which had survived fifteen years of married life, and much increase of substance. Perhaps a harsher judge might have thought the emotion slightly improper. But poor John had got but hard measure in the world; and a little compensating faithfulness was a salve to his sister’s feelings. She led her visitor downstairs and through the narrow passage, in all her wealth of silk and amplitude of shadow. Mary herself was still as slim as when they had skimmed about these passages together; and she was Mary still; for once in a way she felt herself not without some advantage over Sir Henry’s wife.
Nello was standing full in the light when the ladies went into the hall, and he it was who came forward to be caressed by the pretty lady, who took to him all the more warmly that she had no boys of her own. Lady Stanton fairly cried over his fair head, with its soft curls. “What a little Musgrave he is!” she cried; “how like his father! I cannot help being glad he islike his father.” But when this vision of splendour and beauty, which Lilias came forward to admire, saw the little girl, she turned from her with a slight shiver. “Ah!” she cried, retreating, “is that—the little girl?” And the sight silenced her, and drove her away.
Lady Stantondrove home from that visit with her heart and her eyes full. She was not intellectual, nor even clever, but a soft creature, made up of feelings easily touched, not perhaps very profound, nor likely to obscure to her the necessary course of daily living, but still true enough and faithful in their way. She might have been able to make sacrifices had she come in the way of them or found them necessary, but no such chance of moral devotion had come to her; nor had any teachings of experience or philosophy of middle age, such as works upon the majority of us, hardened her soft heart, or swept away the little romantic impulses, the quick sensibilities of youth. A nature so fresh indeed was scarcely compatible with much exercise of the intellectual faculties at all. Lady Stanton rarely read, and never under any circumstances read anything (of her own will and impulse) which rose above the most primitive and familiar elements; but on the other hand, the gentle sentimentalities which she did read went straight to her heart. She thought Mrs. Hemans the first of poets, and cried her eyes out over Mr. Dickens’s “Little Nell.” Anything about an unhappy love, or about a dead child, would move her more than Shakespeare; and she shed tears as ready as the morning dew. Practically, it is true, she had gone through a certain amount of experience like other people, and her everyday life was more or less affected by it; but in her heart Lady Stanton was still the same Mary Ridley whose gentle being had been involved in the wildest of tragicstories, even though she had come down to so commonplace a daily routine now. That story, so long past, took the place in her being of all the poetry and romance which the most of us get glorified from the hands of genius; and all her associations were attached to that one personal episode, which was unparalleled in life as she knew life. When she read one of the novels which pleased her, she would compare the situations in it with this; when she lingered over the vague melodious verses which represented poetry to her, there was always a little appropriation in her heart of their soft measures to the dim long past emergency. And now, here it was brought back upon her by every circumstance that could bring the past near. Her love—was it her love that was recalled to her? But then there was no love in it properly so called. She had taken an interest in John Musgrave, her friend’s brother—always had taken an interest in him; but she had no right to do so at any time, being betrothed to young Lord Stanton, who, for his part, had forgotten her for the sake of that dressmaker’s girl at Penninghame, to whom John Musgrave too had given his heart. What a complication it was! Mary Ridley, who had a pretty property close to his, had been destined for Lord Stanton from the beginning of time, and the boy and girl had lightly acquiesced, and had been happy enough in the parental arrangement. They had liked each other—well enough; they had been as gay as possible in the lightheartedness of their youth, and had taken this for happiness. Why should not they be happy? they were exactly suited to each other. She was the prettiest girl in the county (except the other Mary), and he was proud of her sweet looks, and fond of her, certainly fond of her; whereas she, unawakened, undisturbed, notwithstanding the interest she had always taken in John Musgrave, would have made him the most affectionate and charming wife in the world. Thus the early story had flowed on all smoothness and sunshine, the flowers blooming, the sun shining; until, one fatal day, young Lord Stanton, riding through Penninghame village on his way to the old Castle, had seen Lily, Miss Price’s assistant, at the window of the dressmaker’s parlour. Fatal day! full of all the issues of death.
It is needless to inquire what manner of woman this Lily was, for whom these two men lost themselves and their existence. She did not know of any tragedy likely to be involved, but brushed about in her homely village way through these webs of fate, twisting the threads innocently enough, and throwing the weaving into endless confusion. Whether Lord Stanton was murdered by John Musgrave, as many people thought at first, or killed accidentally in a hot, sudden encounter, as most people believed now, was a thing which perhaps would never be cleared up. The guilty man (if he was guilty) had paid the penalty of his deed in exile, in poverty, in misery, ever since. His life had been as much broken off at that point as Stanton’s was who died—and the two families had been equally plunged into woe and mourning; though indeed it was the Musgraves who suffered most, by reason of the stigma put upon them, by the shame of John’s flight and of his marriage, and by the fact that he was still a criminal pursued by justice, though justice had long slackened her pursuit. As for the Stantons, there was nobody to mourn much. Aunts and uncles and cousins console themselves sooner than fathers and mothers, and the boy brother, who had succeeded to the title, had been too young to be capable of sustained sorrow. Everybody at that time had sympathized with the young bride who had lost her future husband, and her coronet, and all the joys of life in this sudden and miserable way, for there was no concealing what the cause of the quarrel was, and that Lord Stanton had been unfaithful to the beautiful Mary. Nobody knew, however, the complication which gave her a double pang, the knowledge that not only the man who was her own property, her betrothed husband, but the man in whom, innocently in girlish simplicity, she had avowed herself to “take an interest,” had preferred to her the village Lily, who was nobody and nothing, who had not been blameless between them, and whom everybody condemned. Everybody condemned: buttheyloved her. Both of them! this secret and poignant addition to her trial Mary Ridley never confided to any one, but it still thrilled through and through her at any allusion to that old long past tragedy. Both of them!—the man whose best love was due to her, and the man who had caught her own girlishshy eyes, all unaware to either, somehow, innocently, unavowedly, in such a visionary way as harmed no one; both! It was hard. She wept for them both tenderly, abundantly, for the one not less than the other; and a little—with a cry in her heart of protestation and appeal—for herself, put aside, thrown over for this woman who was nothing, who was nobody, yet who was better beloved than she. All this had welled up in Lady Stanton’s heart when she saw the little girl who had Lily’s face. She had been unable to restrain the sting of old wonder and pain; the keen piercing of the old wound which she had felt to her heart. Both of them! and now a little ghost of this Lily, her shadow, her representative, had come back again to look her in the face. She cried as she drove back that long silent way by herself to Elfdale. It was seldom she had the chance of being so long alone, and there was a kind of luxury about it, not unmingled with compunction and a sense of guilt.
For it still remains to be told how Mary Ridley came to be Lady Stanton, although Lord Stanton, who was the betrothed husband of her youth, had been killed, and all that apparently smooth and straightforward story had ended in grief and separation. She had married after some years a middle-aged cousin of her dead lover, Sir Henry Stanton, who had not long before come back from India where he had spent most of his life. It was but a poor fate for the beautiful Mary. Sir Henry had left his career and a full accomplished life behind him, when he first came to settle at Elfdale to the passive existence of a gentleman in the country, who could scarcely be called a country gentleman. He had been married and had children, a family of sons and daughters, and had only a second chapter of less vivid meaning, a sort of postscriptal life, to offer her. Why she had accepted him nobody could well say,—but she made him a good wife, kind, smiling, always gentle, though sadly put to it now and then to preserve unbroken the sweet good-temper with which nature had gifted her. So fair and sweet as she was, to get only the remains of a man’s heart after all, to be made use of as their chaperon and caretaker by his big, unlovely daughters; to have her own children, two dainty, lovely, fairy girls, kept in the background,—no more than “the little ones”—of no accountin the house—all these things were somewhat trying, and a strange reversal of all that life had seemed to promise her, and all that had been indicated by the early worship which surrounded her youth. But perhaps few women could have carried this inappropriate fate as well. All those contradictions of circumstances, all those travesties of what might have been, met with no gloom or sourness of disappointment in her. The very fact that she was Lady Stanton carried with it a certain aggravation, a parrot-like adhesion to the letter and change of the spirit, such as had been in the promises made to Macbeth. Mary might have thought herself the victim of a perverse fate, keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the heart, had she been perversely disposed—but instead of that, all her thoughts at the present moment were occupied with the fact that she had taken an unfair advantage of Laura and Lydia, in not telling them where she was going, that they might have come with her had they been so disposed. She had stolen a march upon them; they would think it unkind. But then she could not have gone to Penninghame had Laura and Lydia been with her. Though they were so much less concerned than she had been, they kept up the Stanton feud with the Musgraves. They had no “interest” in John—on the contrary, they were of the few who still believed that he had “murdered” Lord Stanton—and would have had him hanged if he ever returned to England. They would not have entered the house, or permitted any kind inquiries in their presence. And therefore it was that she had stolen away without letting them know, and was at present conscious—in addition to all the jumble of emotions in her heart—of a certain prick of guilt.
The Stantons were a great county family as well as the Musgraves, but in a very different way. When the Musgraves had been at their greatest, the Stantons had been nobody. They were nothing more than persistent, thrifty folk at first, adding field to field, building on ever a new addition to their old house. Then wealth had come, and then local importance; and last of all celebrity. The first who brought anything like fame to the name, and introduced the race to the knowledge of the world, was a soldier, a general under the Duke of Marlborough, whogot a baronetcy and a reputation, and had a handsome new coat of arms invented for him—very appropriately gained indeed, on the field of battle, just as the augmentation of the Musgraves’ blazon had been gained, but a few hundred years too late unfortunately, and therefore not telling for nearly so much as if it had been won in the fifteenth century. The next man was a lawyer, who so cultivated that profession that it brought his son, in the reign of the Georges, to the bench, and a peerage—and since that time the family had taken their place among the magnates of the north country. Young Walter Lord Stanton was a much greater man than John Musgrave, though not half so great a man in one sense of the word. Two or three generations, however, tell just as much upon the individual mind as twenty, and the young peer was conscious of all his advantages over the commoner, without any sense of inferiority in point of race. And now the other Lord Stanton, Geoffrey, who had succeeded that unfortunate young man, was the greatest personage of his years in the district, regarded with interest by all his neighbours and with more than interest by some; for was it not in his power to make one of his feminine contemporaries, however humble she might be by birth, and however poor in this world’s goods, a great lady?—and so long as human nature remains as it is, this cannot cease to be a very potent attraction. Indeed the wonder is that young women should not be altogether demoralized by the perpetual recurrence of such chances of undeserved, unearned elevation. Young Lord Stanton could do this. He could give fine houses and lands, a title, and all the good things of this earth to his cousin Laura, or his cousin Lydia, or any other girl in the county that pleased him. Therefore it cannot be wondered at if his appearance fluttered the dovecotes with sentiments as powerful and more pleasant than those which fill the nests at the appearance of predatory hawk or eagle. But any such flutter of feeling was held in Elfdale to be an unwarrantable impertinence on the part of the other ladies of the county. Long ago, at the time when at six years old he had succeeded to his stepbrother, there had been a tacit family understanding to the effect that one of Sir Henry’s daughters should be the young lord’s wife. Sir Henry, thoughold enough to have been the father of his murdered cousin would have been his heir but for Geoff—and it was universally allowed to be hard upon him that when such an unlikely chance happened, as that young Lord Stanton should die, there should be this boy coming in the way forestalling his claim. Nobody had wanted that child who was suddenly turned into a personage of so much importance—not even his father, who had married with a single-minded idea of being comfortable in his own person, and who was much annoyed by the prospect of “a second family”—a prospect which was happily, however, cut short by his own speedy death. When therefore Walter Lord Stanton was killed, it was very generally felt that Sir Henry had a real grievance in the existence of the little stepbrother, who was in the way of everybody except his poor mother, whom the old lord had married to nurse him, and who had taken the unwarrantable liberty of adding little Geoffrey to the family. Poor little Geoff! he was bullied on all hands so long as his brother lived; and then, what a change came over his life and that of his mother, who was as pale and shy as her boy! Great good fortune may change even complexion, and Geoff as he grew to be a man was no longer pale. But Sir Henry never quite got over the blow dealt him by this succession. He had not resented Walter. Walter was so to speak the natural heir—and nobody expected him to die; but when he did die, so out of all calculation, to think there should be that boy! Sir Henry did not get over it for years—it was a positive wrong not to be forgotten.
Accordingly, as a small compensation to his injured feelings, all the family had tacitly decided that Geoff should marry one of his cousins. This, it is true, was but a very small compensation, for Sir Henry was not the kind of parent who lives in his children and is indifferent to his own glory and greatness. Even now, fifteen years after the event, he was not an old man, and it made up very poorly for his personal disappointment that Laura or Lydia should share the advancement of which he had been deprived. Still it was so understood. Geoff paid many holiday visits at Elfdale, though there was no particular friendship between Sir Henry and the widowed Lady Stanton, who was Geoff’s guardian as well as his mother, and things were goingsmoothly enough between the young people. They liked each other, and had no objection to be together as much as was possible, and already the sisters had settled between them “which of us it is to be.” This Lydia, who was the most strong-minded, had thought desirable from the moment when she had become aware what was intended. “It does not matter at present,” she said, “we are none of us in love, and one is just as good as another, but we had better draw lots, or something—or toss up, as the boys do.” And what the mystic ordeal had been which decided this question we are unable to say, but decided it was in favour of Laura, who was the prettiest, and only a year younger than Geoff. Lydia, as soon as the die was cast, constituted herself the guardian of her sister’s fortunes so far as the young lord was concerned, and made herself into a quaint and really pretty version of a matchmaking mother on Laura’s behalf. Thus it will be seen that it was into the very heart of the opposite faction that Lady Stanton drove home with those tears in her soft eyes, and all that commotion of old thoughts in her heart. If they could have seen into it and known that it was the image of John Musgrave that had roused that commotion, what would these girls have said, towards whom she felt so guilty as having stolen a march upon them? “The murderer!” they would have cried with a shriek of horror. Lady Stanton could not, it is clear, have taken them to Penninghame with her, and surely she had a right to use her own horses and carriage; but still she felt guilty as she subdued, with all the effort she could make, the excitement in her heart.
When she went in, she retired at once upstairs, and announced herself, through her maid, to have a headache, and had a cup of tea in her own room, to which her own children, little Fanny and Annie, a pair of inseparables, came noiselessly like two doves on the wing. Annie and Fanny liked nothing in the world so much as to get mamma to themselves like this, in the stillness of her room, with everybody else shut out. One was ten and the other eleven; they were about the same height, had the same flowing curly locks of light brown hair, the same rose-tinted faces, walked in each other’s steps, or rather flew about their little world of carpeted stairs and passages, together, always in suddensoft flights—like doves, as we have said, on the wing. “Is your head very bad, mamma?” they said; and the gentle hypocrite blushed as she replied. No, it was not very bad; a little quiet would make it quite well. They took off her “things” for her, and brought her her soft white dressing-gown, in which she looked like the mother of all the doves, and let down her hair, which was not much darker, and quite as abundant as their own—and gave her her cup of tea, thus soothing every tingling nerve; and by this time Lady Stanton’s head was not bad at all, though now and then one of them would administer eau-de-cologne or rosewater. She told them of the children she had seen—little orphans who had no mother—and the two crept closer to her, to hear of that awful, incomprehensible desolation, each clasping an arm of hers with two small, eager hands. To be without a mother! Annie and Fanny held their breath in reverential silence and pity; but wondered a little that it was the little boy (“called Nello—what a funny name!”) that mamma spoke of, not the girl, who was ten (“just the same age as me”).
But not even the sympathy of her children, and the trance of interest which kept them breathless, could make Lady Stanton speak of the little girl. Her mother’s face! that face which had taken the best of everything in existence from Mary Ridley—how could Lady Stanton speak of it? She made some efforts to get over the feeling, but not with much success. But the rest restored her, and enabled her to appear, her headache quite charmed away, and her nerves still, at dinner. She took a little more care with her toilette than usual, by way of propitiation to the angry gods. And though Laura and Lydia were not much short of twenty years younger than their stepmother, it would have been an indifferent judge who had turned from her to them even in the fresh bloom of their youth. She came downstairs very conciliatory, ready to make the best of everything, and to make amends to them for all disloyal thoughts, and for having cheated them of their drive.
“I hope your head is better, my Lady,” said Laura. “We have been wondering all the afternoon wherever you had gone.”
The girls had a certain strain of vulgarity in them somehow, which could not be quite eradicated from their speech.
“I went out for a drive as usual,” said Lady Stanton. “I thought I heard you say that you meant to walk.”
“Oh yes; we wanted to walk to the village to settle about the school children,” said Laura; and Lydia added, “But I am sure we never said so,” and looked suspiciously at her stepmother.
“I went by the Langdale woods, and all the way to Penninghame water,” said the culprit, very explanatory. “The lake looked so cold. I should not like to live near it. It chills all the landscape, and I am sure puts dreary thoughts into people’s heads. And as I was there, Henry,” she added, addressing her husband, “I did what you will think an odd thing.” Lady Stanton’s bosom heaved a little, and her breath came quick. It would have been far easier to say nothing about it; but then she knew by experience that everything gets found out. She made a momentary pause before the confession which she tried to treat so lightly. “I ran in for a moment to the old Castle and saw Mary—Mary, you know. We were great friends, she and I, when we were young, and it was such a temptation passing the old place.”
“What whim took you near the old place?” said Sir Henry, gruffly. “I cannot think of any place in the world that should lie less in your way.”
“Well, that is true,” she said, breathing a little more freely now that the worst was told, “and the proof of it is that I have not been there for years.”
“I hope it will be still longer before you go again,” said her husband.
He did not say any more because of the servants, and because he had too much good sense to do or say anything that would lessen his wife’s importance; but he was not pleased, and this troubled her, for she had a delicate conscience. She looked at him wistfully, and was imprudent enough in her anxiety to pursue the subject, and make bad worse.
“It is strange to see an old friend whom you have known when you were young, after so many years,” she said; “though Mary is not so much altered as I am. You remember her, Henry? She was always so pretty; handsomer than—any one I know.”
It was on her lips to say “handsomer than ever I was,” which was the real sentiment in her mind—a sentiment partly originating in the semi-guilt and humility produced by the consciousness of having grown stout, a kind of development which troubles women. She was very deeply aware of this, and it silenced all the claims of vanity. She had lost her figure; whereas Mary was still slim and straight as an arrow. Whatever might have been once, there was now no comparison between the two.
“Do you mean Miss Musgrave?” cried the girls, one after the other. “Miss Musgrave! that old creature—that old maid—that man’s sister?”
“She is no older than I am,” said Lady Stanton, with a flush on her face; “she was my dear friend in the old days. She is beautiful still, as much as she ever was, I think, and good; she has always been good.”
“That will do,” said Sir Henry interposing. “We need not discuss the family; but I think you will see, my dear, that there could not be much pleasure in any intercourse at this time of day—whatever might have been the case when you were young.”
“Intercourse—there could never be any intercourse,” cried Lydia, coming to the front. “Fancy, papa! intercourse with such people—after all that has happened! That would be tempting Providence; and it would be an insult to Geoff.”
“Let Geoff take care of his own affairs,” said Sir Henry, angrily; and he gave a forcible twist to the conversation, and threw it into another channel; but Lady Stanton was very silent all the evening afterwards. She had wanted to conciliate, and she had not succeeded; and how indeed could she, among her hostile family, keep up any intercourse with her old friend?
Neverthelessthis meeting could not be got out of Lady Stanton’s mind. She thought of it constantly; and in the stillness of her own room, when nobody but the little girls were by, she talked to them of the children, especially of little Nello, who had attracted her most. What a place of rest and refreshment that was for her, after all her trials with Laura and Lydia, and the seriousness of Sir Henry, who was displeased that she should have gone to Penninghame, and showed it in the way most painful to the soft-hearted woman, by silence, and a gravity which made her feel her indiscretion to her very heart. But notwithstanding Sir Henry’s annoyance, she could not but relieve her mind by going over the whole scene with Fanny and Annie, who knew, without a word said, that these private talks in which they delighted—in which their mother told them all manner of stories, and took them back with her into the time of her youth, and made them acquainted with all her early friends—were not to be repeated, but were their own special privilege to be kept for themselves alone. They had already heard of Mary Musgrave, and knew her intimately, as children do know the early companions of whom an indulgent mother tells them, to satisfy their boundless appetite for narrative. “And what are they to Mary?” the little girls asked, breathless in their interest about these strange children. They had already been told; but the relationship of aunt did not seem a very tender one to Annie and Fanny, who knew only their father’s sisters, old ladies to whom the elder girls, children of the first marriage, seemed the only legitimate and correct Stantons, and who looked down upon these little interlopers as unnecessary intruders. “Only their aunt!—is that all?”
They were not in Lady Stanton’s room this time, but seated on an ottoman in the great bow-window, one on either side of her. Laura and Lydia were out; Sir Henry was in his library; the coast was clear; no one was likely to come in and dismiss thechildren with a sharp word, such as—“Go away, little girls—there is no saying a word to your mother while you are there!” or “The little ones again! When we were children we were kept in the nursery.” The children were aware now that when such speeches were made, it was better for them not to wait for their mother’s half-pained, half-beseeching look, but to run away at once, not to provoke any discussion. They were wise little women, and were, by nature, of their mother’s faction in this house, where both they and she, though she was the mistress of it, were more or less on sufferance. But at present everybody was out of the way. They were ready to fly off, with their pretty hair fluttering like a gleam of wings, should any of their critics appear; but the girls had gone a long way, and Sir Henry was very busy. It was a chance such as seldom occurred.
“All? when children have not a mother, their aunt is next best; sometimes she is even better—much better,” said Lady Stanton, thinking in her heart that John’s wife was not likely to have been of any great service to her children. “And Mary is not like any one you know. She is a beautiful lady—not old, like Aunt Rebecca—though Aunt Rebecca is always very kind. I hope you have not forgotten those beautiful sashes she gave you.”
“I don’t think very much of an aunt,” said Fanny, who was the saucy one, with a shrug of her little shoulders.
“It must be different,” said Annie, hugging her mother’s arm. They were not impressed by the happiness of those poor little stranger children in being with Mary. “Has the little girl got no name, mamma—don’t you know her name? You say Nello; but that is the boy; though it is more like a girl than a boy.”
“It is German—or something—I don’t remember. The little girl is called Lilias. Oh yes, it is a pretty name enough, but I don’t like it. I once knew one whom I did not approve of—— ”
“We knew,” said Fanny, nodding her head at Annie, who nodded back again; “Mamma, we knew you did not like the little girl.”
“I! not like her! Oh, children, how can you think me so unjust? I hope I am not unjust,” cried Lady Stanton, almost with tears. “Mary is very proud of her little niece. And sheis very good to little Nello. Yes, perhaps I like him best, but there is no harm in that. He is a delightful little boy. If you could have had a little brother like that—— ”
“We have only—big brothers,” said Annie, regretfully; “that is different.”
“Yes, that is different. You could not imagine Charley with long, fair curls, and a little tunic, could you?” This made the children laugh, and concealed a little sigh on their mother’s part; for Charlie was a big dragoon, and Lady Stanton foresaw would not have too much consideration, should they ever require his help, for the little sisters whom he undisguisedly felt to be in his way.
“I wonder if she wishes he was a little girl.”
“I wonder! How she must want to have a sister! A little brother would be very nice, too; we used to play at having a little brother; but it would not be like Fanny and me. Does she like being at the Castle, mamma?”
It troubled Lady Stanton that they should think of nothing but this little girl. It was Lilias that had won their interest, and she could not tell them why it was that she shrank from Lilias. “They have left their poor papa all alone and sad,” she said, in a low voice. “I used to know him too. And it must make them sad to think of him so far away.”
Once more the children were greatly puzzled. They were not on such terms of tender intimacy with their father as were thus suggested, but, on the whole, were rather pleased than otherwise when he was absent, and did not follow him very closely with their thoughts. They were slightly humbled as they realized the existence of so much greater susceptibility and lovingness on the part of the little girl in whom they were so much interested, than they themselves possessed. How she surpassed them in this as well as in other things! She talked German as well as English (if it was German; their mother was not clear what language it was)—think of that! So perhaps it was not wonderful that she should be so much fonder of her papa. And a moment of silence ensued. Lady Stanton did not remark the confused pause in the minds of her children, because her own mind was filled with wistful compassion for the lonely man whom she had beenthinking of more or less since ever she left Penninghame. Where was he, all alone in the world, shut out from his own house, an exile from his country—even his children away from him, in whom perhaps he had found some comfort?
This momentary silence was interrupted abruptly by the sound of a voice. “Are you there, Cousin Mary? and what are you putting your heads together about?”
At this sound, before they found out what it was, the children disengaged themselves suddenly each from her separate clinging to her mother’s arm, and approached each other as if for flight; but, falling back to their places when they recognized the voice, looked at each other, and said both together, with tones of relief, “Oh, it’s only Geoff!”
Nothing more significant of the inner life of the family, and the position of these two little intruders, could have been.
Geoff came forward with his boyish step and voice in all the smiling confidence of youth. “I thought I should startle you. Is it a story that is being told, or are you plotting something? Fanny and Annie, leave her alone for a moment. It is my turn now.”
“O Geoff! it is about a little girl and a boy—mamma will tell you too, if you ask her; and there’s nobody in. We thought at first you were papa, but he’s so busy. Come and sit here.”
Geoff came up, and kissed Lady Stanton on her soft, still beautiful cheek. He was a son of the house, and privileged. He sat down on the stool the children had placed for him. “I am glad there’s nobody in,” he said. “Of course the girls will be back before I go; but I wanted to speak to you—about something.”
“Shall the children go, Geoff?”
“Fancy! do you want them to hate me? No, go on with the story. This is what I like. Isn’t it pleasant, Annie and Fanny, to have her all to ourselves? Do you mind me?”
“Oh, not in the least, Geoff—not in the very least. You are like—what is he like, Annie?—a brother, not a big brother, like Charley: but something young, something nice, like what mamma was telling us of—alittlebrother—grown up—— ”
“Is this a sneer at my height?” he said; “but go on, don’t let me stop the story. I like stories—and most other pleasant things.”
“It was no story,” said Lady Stanton. “I was telling them only of some children:—you are very good and forgiving, Geoff—but I fear you will be angry with me when you know. I was—out by myself—and notwithstanding all we have against them, I went to see Mary Musgrave. There! I must tell you at once, and get it over. I shall be sorry if it annoys you; but Mary and I,” she said, faltering, “were such friends once, and I have not seen her for years.”
“Why should I be annoyed—why should I be angry? I am not an avenger. Poor Cousin Mary! you were out—by yourself!—was that your only reason for going?”
“Indeed it is true enough. It is very seldom I go out without the girls: and they—feel strongly, you know, about that.”
“What have they to do with it? Yes, I know: they areplus royalistes que le roi. But this is not the story.”
“Yes, indeed it is, my dear boy. I was telling Annie and Fanny of two poor children. They belong to a man who is—banished from his own country. He did wrong—when he was young—oh so many, so many years ago!—and he is still wandering about the world without a home, and far from his friends. He was young then, and now—it is so long ago;—ah, Geoff, you must not be angry with me. The little children are with Mary. She did not tell me much, for her heart did not soften to me as mine did to her. But there they are; the mother dead who was at the bottom of it all; and nobody to care for them but Mary; all through something that happened before they were born.”
Lady Stanton grew red as she spoke, her voice trembled, her whole aspect was full of emotion. The young man shook his head—
“I suppose a great many of us suffer from harm done before we were born,” he said, gravely. “This is no solitary instance.”
“Ah, Geoff, it is natural, quite natural, that you should feel so. I forgot how deeply you were affected by all that happened then.”
“I did not mean that,” he said, gravely. His youthful face had changed out of its light-hearted calm. “Indeed I had heard something of this, and I wanted to speak to you—— ”
“Run away, my darlings,” said Lady Stanton; “go and see what—nurse is about. Make her go down with you to the village and take the tea and sugar to the old women in the almshouses. This is the day—don’t you remember?”
“So it is,” said Annie. “But we did not want to remember,” said Fanny; “we liked better to stay with you.”
However, they went off, reluctant yet obedient. They were used to being sent away. It was seldom their mother who did it, willingly—but everybody else did it with peremptory determination—and the little girls were used to obey. They untwined themselves from her arms, to which they had been clinging, and went away close together, with a soft rush and sweep as of one movement.
“There go the doves,” said Geoff, looking after them with kind admiration like that of a brother. It pleased Lady Stanton to see the friendly pleasure in them which lighted the young man’s eyes. Whoever married him, he would always, she thought, be a brother to her neglected children, who counted for so little in the family. She looked after them with that mother-look which, whether in joy or sorrow, is close upon tears. Then she turned to him with eyes softened by that unspeakable tenderness:
“Whatever you wish,” she said. “Tell me, Geoff; I am ready to hear.”
“I am as bad as the rest. You have to send them away for me too.”
“There is some reason in it this time. If you have heard about the little Musgraves you know how miserable it all is,” said Lady Stanton. “The old man will have nothing to say to them. He lets them live there, but takes no notice—his son’s children! And Mary has everything upon her shoulders.”
“Cousin Mary, will it hurt you much to tell me all about it?” said the young man. “Forgive me, I know it must be painful; but all that is solong over, and everything is so changed—— ”
“You mean I have married and forgotten,” she said, her lips beginning to quiver.
“I scarcely remember anything about it,” said Geoff, looking away from her that his eyes might not disturb her more, “only a confused sort of excitement and wretchedness, and then a strange new sense of importance. We had been nobodies till then—my mother and I. But I have heard a few things lately. Walter,—will it pain you if I speak of him?”
“Poor Walter!—no. Geoff, you must understand that Walter loved somebody else better than me.”
She said this half in honest avowal of that humiliation which had been one of the great wonders of her life, partly in excuse of her own easy forgetfulness of him.
“I have heard that too, Cousin Mary, with wonder; but never mind. He paid dearly for his folly. The other—— ”
“Geoff,” said Lady Stanton, with a trembling voice, “the other is living still, and he has paid dearly for it all this time. We must not be hard upon him. I do not want to excuse him—it would be strange if I should be the one to excuse him; but only—— ”
“I am very sorry for him, Cousin Mary. I am glad you feel as I do. Walter may have been in the wrong for anything I know. I do not think it was murder.”
“That I am sure it was not! John Musgrave was not the man to do a murder—oh, no, no; Geoff! he was not that kind of man!”
Geoff looked up surprised at her eager tone and the trembling in her voice.
“You knew him—well?” he said, with that indifferent composure with which people comment upon the past, not knowing what depths those are over which they skim so lightly. Could he have seen into the agitation in Lady Stanton’s heart! But he would not have understood nor realized the commotion that was there.
“I always—took an interest in him,” she said, faltering; and then she felt it her duty to do her best for him as an old friend. “I had known him all my life, Geoff, as well as I knew Walter. He was hasty and high-spirited, but so kind—he would havegone out of his way to help any one. Before he saw that young woman everybody was fond of John.”
“Did you knowhertoo?”
“No, no; I did not know her. God forbid! She was the destruction of every one who cared for her,” said Lady Stanton with a little outburst. Then she made an effort to subdue herself. “Perhaps I am not just to her,” she said with a faint smile. “She was preferred to me, you know, Geoff; and they say a woman cannot forget that—perhaps it is true.”
“How could he? was he mad?” Geoff said. Geoff was himself tenderly, filially in love with his cousin Mary. He thought there was nobody in the world so beautiful and so kind. And even now she was not understood as she ought to be. Sir Henry thought her a good enough wife, a faithful creature, perfectly trustworthy, and so forth. It was in this light that all regarded her. Something better than an upper servant, a little dearer than a governess; something to be made use of, to do everything for everybody. She who, Geoff thought in his enthusiasm, was more lovely and sweet than the youngest of them, and ought to be held pre-eminent and sacred by everybody round her. This was not the lot that had fallen to her in life.
“So I am not the best judge, you see,” said Lady Stanton with a little sigh. “In those days one felt more strongly perhaps. It all seems so vivid and clear,” she added half apologetically, though without entirely realizing how much light these half-confessions threw on her present state of less lively feeling, “that is the effect of being young—— ”
“I think you will always be young,” he said tenderly; then added after a pause, “Was it a quarrel about—the woman?—” He blushed himself as he said so, feeling the wrong to her—yet only half knowing the wonder it was in her thoughts, the double pain it brought.
“I think so. They were both fond of her; and Walter ought not to have been fond of her. John—was quite free. He was in no way engaged to any one. He had a right to love her if he pleased. But Walter interfered, and he was richer, greater, a far better match. So I suppose she wavered. This is my own explanation of it. They met then when their hearts were wildagainst each other, and there was a struggle. Ah, Geoff! Has it not cost John Musgrave his life as well as Walter? Has he ever ventured to show himself in his own country since? And now their poor little children have come home to Mary; but he will never be able to come home.”
“It is hard,” said Geoff thoughtfully. “I wish I knew the law. Fifteen years is it? I was about six then. Could anything be done? I wonder if anything could be done.”
She put her hand on his shoulder with an affectionate caressing touch, “Thanks for the thought, my dear boy—even if nothing could be done.”
“You take a great deal of interest in him, Cousin Mary?”
“Yes,” she said quickly; “I told you we were all young people together; and his sister was my dear friend. We were called the two Maries in those days. We were thought—pretty,” she said with a vivid blush and a little laugh. “You may have heard?”
Geoff kissed the pretty hand which had been laid on his shoulder, and which was perhaps a little fuller and more dimply than was consistent with perfection. “I have eyes,” he said, with a little of the shyness of his years, “and I have always had a right as a Stanton to be proud of my cousin Mary. I wonder if Miss Musgrave is as beautiful as you are; I don’t believe it for my part.”
“She is far prettier—she is not stout,” said Lady Stanton with a sigh; and then she laughed, and made her confession over again with a half-jest, which did not make her regret less real, “and I have lost my figure. I have developed, as people say. Mary is as slim as ever. Ah, you may laugh, but that makes a great difference; I feel it to the bottom of my heart.”
Geoff looked at her with tender admiration in his eyes. “There has never been a time when I have not thought you the most beautiful woman in all the world,” he said, “and that all the great beauties must have been like you. You were always the dream of fair women to me—now one, now the other—all except Cleopatra. You never could have been like that black-browed witch—— ”
“Hush! boy. I am too old to be flattered now; and Iam stout,” she said, with that faint laugh of annoyance and humiliation just softened by jest. Geoff’s honest praise brought no blush to her soft matronly cheeks, but she liked it, as it pleased her when the children called her “Pretty Mamma.” They lovedherthe best, though people had not always done so. The fact that she had grown stout did not affect their admiration. Only those who have known others to be preferred to themselves can realize what this is. After a moment’s hesitation, she added in a low voice: “I wonder—will you go and see them? It would have a great effect in the neighbourhood. Oh, Geoff, forgive me if I am saying too much; perhaps it would not be possible, perhaps it might be wrong in your position. You must take the advice of somebody more sensible, less affected by their feelings. Everybody likes you, Geoff, and you deserve it, my dear; and you are Lord Stanton. It would have a great effect upon the county; it would be almost like clearing him—— ”
“Then I will go—at once—this very day,” said Geoff, starting up.
“Oh no, no, no,” she said, catching him by the arm; “first of all you must speak to—some one more sensible than me.”
WhileLady Stanton spread the news of the arrival of the Musgrave children among the upper classes, this information was given to the lower, an equally or perhaps even more important influence in their history, by an authority of a very different kind, to whom, indeed, it would have been bitter to think that she was the channel of communication with the lower orders. But such is the irony of circumstances that it was Mrs. Pennithorne, who prided herself upon her gentility, and who would have made any sacrifice rather than descend to a sphere beneath her, who conveyed the report, which ran through the village likewildfire, and which spread over the surrounding country as rapidly and effectually as if it had been made known by beacons on the hill-tops. The village was more interested in the news than any other circle in the county could be, partly because the reigning house in a village is its standing romance, the drama most near to it, and most exciting when there is any drama at all; and partly for still more impressive personal reasons. The Castle had done much for the district in this way, having supplied it with more exciting food in the way of story and incident than any other great house in the north country. There had been a long interval of monotony, but now it appeared to all concerned that the more eventful circle of affairs was about to begin again. The manner in which the story fully reached the village was simple enough. Mrs. Pennithorne had, as might have been expected, failed entirely with Mary’s frock. It would not “come” as she wanted it to come, let her do what she would; and when all her own efforts had failed, and the stuff was effectually spoiled, soiled, and crumpled, and incapable of ever looking better than second-hand under any circumstances, she called in the doctor, as people are apt to do when they have cobbled at themselves in vain. The dress doctor in Penninghame and the neighbourhood, the rule of fashion, the grand authority for everything in the way ofchiffons, was a certain Miss Price, a lively little old woman, who had one of the best houses in the village, where she let lodgings on occasion, but always made dresses. She had been in business for a great many years, and was an authority both up and down the water. It was not agreeable to Miss Price to be called in at the last moment, as it were, to heal the ailments of Mary’s frock; but partly because it was the clergyman’s house, and partly because of the gossip which was always involved, she obeyed the summons, as she had done on many previous occasions. And she did her best, as Mrs. Pennithorne had done her worst, upon the little habiliment. “Ladies know nothing about such things,” the little dressmaker said, pinning and unpinning with energetic ease and rapidity. And the Vicar’s wife, who looked on helpless but admiring, accepted the condemnation because of the flattery involved; for Mrs. Pen was elevated over Miss Price by so brief an intervalthat this accusation was a kind of acknowledgment of her gentility, and did her good, though it was not meant to be complimentary. She liked to feel that hers was that ladylike uselessness which is only appropriate to high position. She simpered a little, and avowed that indeed she had never been brought up to know about such things; and while Miss Price put the spoiled work to rights the Vicar’s wife did her best to entertain the beneficent fairy who was bringing the chaos into order. She did not blurt out suddenly the news with which she was overbrimming, but brought it forth cunningly in the course of conversation in the most agreeable way.
“Is there any news, Miss Price?” she said; “but I tell the Vicar that nothing ever happens here. The people don’t even die.”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. There’s two within the last three months; but to be sure they were long past threescore and ten.”
“That is what I say. It’s so healthy at Penninghame. Look at the old Squire now, how hale and hearty he is—and after all he has come through.”
“Yes, he has come through a deal,” said Miss Price, putting her pins in her mouth, “and that’s too true.”
“Poor old man; and still more and more to put up with. Have you seen the children, Miss Price? Oh dear! didn’t you know? Perhaps I ought not to have mentioned it; but people cannot hide up children as they hide secrets. I have been living here for ten years, and I scarcely know the rights of the story about John Musgrave yet.”
“Children!” said Miss Price, with a start which shook the pins out of her fingers. “To be sure—that came in a coach from Pennington with a play-acting sort of a woman? But what has that to do with Mr. John?”
The dressmaker dropped Mary’s frock upon her knees in the excitement of her feelings. There was more than curiosity involved. “To be sure,” she said. “To be sure!” going on with her own thoughts, “where should they come but to the Castle? and who should have them but his family? ’Lizabeth Bampfylde is an honest woman, but not even me, I wouldn’t trust the children to her. His children! though they would be herstoo—— ”
“What do you mean, Miss Price?” said Mrs. Pen, half offended; “are you going out of your senses? I tell you something about the Squire’s family, and you get into a way about it as if it could be anything to you.”
Miss Price recovered her composure with a rapid effort, but her little pale countenance reddened.
“Nothing to me, ma’am,” she said, with what she felt to be a proper pride. “But if Mr. John has children, they had a mother as well as a father; and there was a time when that was something to me.”
“Oh!” cried the Vicar’s wife, “then you knew Mrs. John? tell me about her. She was a low girl, that is all I know.”
“She was no low girl, whoever told you,” cried the little dressmaker. “She was one as folks were fond of, as fond as if she had been a princess. She was no more low than—I am; she was—— ”
“Oh, I did not mean to offend you, Miss Price. Of course I know how respectable you are—but not the equal of the Squire, you know, or of—— ”
Miss Price looked at the woman who had spoiled Mary’s frock. There she stood, limp, and faded, and genteel, with no capacity in her fingers and not much in her head, with a smile of conscious superiority yet condescension. Miss Price was not her equal. “Good Lord! as if I would be that useless,” she said to herself, “for all the money in the world! or to be as grand as the Queen!” But though she was at once exasperated and contemptuous, politeness and policy at once forbade her to say anything. She would not “set up her face to a lady,” even when so very unimpressive as Mrs. Pennithorne; and it did not become the dressmaker in the village to be openly scornful of the Vicar’s wife. She saved herself by taking up again with energy and devotion the scattered pins and the miserable little spoiled bodice of Mary’s frock.
“I am glad you know about this girl,” said Mrs. Pen, satisfied to have subdued her opponent, “for I want so much to hear about her. One cannot get much information from a gentleman, Miss Price. They tell you, ‘Oh yes, she was a pretty creature!’ as if that is all you cared to know.”
“It’s what tells most with the gentlemen, ma’am,” said Miss Price, recovering her composure. “Yes, that she was. I’ve looked at her many a time and said just the same to myself. ‘Well, you are a pretty creature!’ I don’t wonder if their heads get turned when they are as pretty as that; though it isn’t only the pretty ones that get their heads turned. The girls that I’ve had through my hands! and not one in ten that went through with the business and kept it up as it ought to be kept up.”
“Was Mrs. John Musgrave in the business? Was she in your hands? I declare! Did he marry her from your house?”
“She was come of wild folks,” said Miss Price; “there was gipsy blood in them. They had a little bit of a sheep farm up among the hills in their best days, and a lone house, where there wasn’t a stranger to be seen twice in a year. ’Lizabeth Bampfylde, that’s her mother, comes about the village still. I can’t tell you what she does, she sells her eggs and chickens, and maybe she does tell fortunes. I won’t say. She never told me mine. I took a fancy to the lass, and I said, ‘Bring her to me. I’ll take her; I’ll train her a bit. Oh, how little we know! If I had but let her bide on the fells!—but what a pretty one she was! Such eyes as she had; and a skin that wasn’t to say dark—it was brown, but so clear! like the water when the sun is in it.”
“You seem to think a great deal of people being pretty.”
“So I do, ma’am, more than I ought. A woman should have more sense. I’m near as easy led away as the gentlemen. But there’s different kinds of beauty, and that is what they never see as want it most. There’s pretty faces that I can’t abide. They seem to give me a turn. Now that’s where the men fails,” said the little dressmaker; “all’s one to them, good or bad, they never see any difference. Lily was never one of the bad ones, poor dear. Lily? yes, that was the young woman; but she’s not such a young woman, not a girl now. She’ll be thirty-seven or eight, close upon that, if she’s living this day.”
“She is not living—she died five years ago; and Miss Musgrave won’t believe me that she ought to go into black for her,” said Mrs. Pennithorne.
“Ah!” said Miss Price with a sharp cry. She dropped her work at her feet with an indifference to it which deeply aggrievedMrs. Pen. The announcement took her altogether by surprise, and went to her heart. “Dead! oh my poor Lily, my poor Lily! Was I thinking ill o’ thee? Dead! and so many left—and her in her prime!” Sudden sobs stopped the good little woman’s speech, with which she struggled as she went on, making a brave effort to recover herself as she picked up the little dress. “I beg your pardon, ma’am, but it was so sudden; it took me unprepared. Oh, ma’am, that’s the worst of it when you have to do with girls. Few of them go through with the business, though it would be best for them; they turn every one to her own way; that’s Scripture, but I mean it. They marry, and they think themselves so grand with their children, and it kills ’em. Oh, if I had but left her on the fells! or if she had stuck by the business like me!”
“I did not think you took so much interest in her,” said Mrs. Pen, feeling guilty. “If I had known you cared, I would have been more careful what I said. But nobody seemed to think much ofher. It is always the Musgraves the Vicar speaks of.”
“The Vicar thought of nothing but Miss Mary,” said Miss Price hastily; then she corrected herself, “I mean of womanfolk,” she said; “the Musgraves, ma’am, as you say, that was all he thought of. And that’s always the way, as far as I can judge. The gentry thinks of their own side, and we that are but small folks, we think of ours; it’s natural. Miss Musgrave was not much to me. I never made her but one thing, and that was a cotton, a common morning frock; she was too grand to have her things made by the likes of me; but Lily, she sat by my side and sewed at the same seam. And she’s dead! the bonniest lass on all the water, as the village folks say.”
“You don’t talk like the village folks, Miss Price.”
“No. I’m from the south, as they call it—except when a word creeps in now and again through being so long here. It’s all pinned and straight, ma’am, now. It was done almost before I heard the news—and I’m glad of it, for my eyesight goes when I begin to cry. I don’t think you can go wrong now,” said Miss Price with a sigh, knowing the powers of her patroness in that direction. “It’s as well as I can make it—pinned and basted, and straight before your hand. No, thank you kindly, nothingfor me. I’m that put out that the best thing I can do is to get home.”
“But dear me, Miss Price—as she is not even a relation!”
“A relation, what’s that? A girl that you’ve brought up is more than a relation,” cried the dressmaker, forgetting her manners. And she made up her patterns tremulously in a little bundle, and hurried out with the briefest leavetaking, which was not civil, Mrs. Pennithorne said indignantly. But Miss Price, in her way, was as important as the Vicar’s wife herself, being alone in her profession, and enjoying a monopoly. It is possible to be rude, when you are a monopolist, without damage to your trade; but this, to do her justice, was not the motive which actuated the little dressmaker, who, in her nature, was anxiously polite, and indisposed to offend any one; but the news she had heard was too much for all her little decorums. She made a long round out of her way to pass by the Castle, though she could scarcely tell why she did so—nor it was not the children that were most in her mind. Indeed she scarcely remembered them at all, in her excitement of pain and hot grief which took the shape of a kind of fiery resentment against life and nature. Children! what was the good of the children—helpless things that took a woman’s life, and made even the rest of death bitter to her, wringing her heart with misery to leave them after costing her her life! She was an old maid not by accident, but by nature; and what were a couple of miserable little children in exchange for the life of Lily! But when, not expecting to see them, not thinking of them save in this bitter way, Miss Price saw the two children at the door of the hall, another quick springing sensation rose suddenly in her hasty soul. She went slowly past, gazing at them, trying to say to herself that she hated the sight of them, Lily’s slayers! But her kind heart was too much for her quick temper, and as soon as they were out of sight, the little dressmaker sat down by the wayside and cried, sobbing like a child. Little dreadful creatures, who had worn their mother to death, and killed her in her prime! Poor little forlorn orphans, without a mother! She did not know which feeling was the warmest and strongest. But she reached home so shaken between the two emotions, that her present assistant,who filled the place to which Miss Price had hoped to train Lily, and who was a good girl with no nonsense in her head, fully intending to go through with the business, was frightened by the appearance of her principal, who stumbled into the little parlour all garlanded with paper patterns, with tremulous step and blanched cheeks, as if she had seen a ghost.