Sainty declined to stay and lunch and see Miss de Vere. ‘I want to get home this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Mother’ll be so glad to know that you are going to work and do your best to pass; and also that you’ll come home for a bit. You haven’t been at Belchamber since November, and this is May; I don’t think you’ve ever been away for so long at a stretch before.’
He travelled down to the country that same afternoon with a lighter heart than he had carried for many months, pleased to find he still had some influence over his brother, glad to be reconciled to Claude, and rejoicing in the pleasure he should be able to give his mother in the announcement of Arthur’s visit and his promise of industry and reformation. He pondered anxiously on the question how much he need say of the temptations and distractions of London life, to explain Arthur’s desire to leave Monkton’s and once more try a country crammer’s, and concluded that there was no necessity to breathe a word of the nature of the occupation that had kept his brother from working in town. He only trusted other people might be equally reticent. He had telegraphed, before leaving London, to his mother that he would be back to dinner, and as soon as he arrived at Belchamber he was met by a message that she would like to see him at once in her own room. It was in vain that he told himself she was naturally impatient to hear what news he brought; it was with an uneasy foreboding that he approached her door, and he had to pause and brace himself before he summoned courage to turn the handle.
His first glance at his mother confirmed his worst anticipations. She was walking up and down the room, so that her back was towards him as he entered; but the white set face she turned on him as he closed the door showed him at once that she knew everything. It was terrible to see this silent, dignified woman so ravaged and shaken out of her habitual self-control. Even at that moment he noticed with surprise the curious staginess of her movements and method of speech. It was true, then, that people in times of strong emotion did really behave in this way; and these gestures and phrases which he had always supposed to be pure literary and theatrical conventions derived from something in nature after all.
‘So,’ she cried, sweeping round upon him, ‘I find what I have long suspected was true: my boy, who, if he was thoughtless and a little idle, I thought was a pure-minded, healthy boy, has been degrading himself with loose women; and this has been going on for a year past; it has been common talk; every one has known it; every one but his poor blind idiot of a mother. We must never know anything, of course; our sons may be drifting to perdition, but there is no one who will come and tell a poor woman. People stand by and laugh; I suppose they think it funny; all the godless, indecent, modern books say so. No one, no one will say a word till it’s too late, too late to do any good.’
She was in a white heat of rage, tearless, tragic, almost distraught, all the mother and the puritan in her crying out in revolt against the eternal mystery of the flesh, the triumph of the senses in the young male. Yes, in the abstract she knew of it, recognised that men were sinners and full of carnal appetites; but that her boy, her child whom she had nursed and tended, whom but a few years back she had held upon her knee, that this pure, bright young creature should voluntarily turn from her to smirch its white raiment in the slough of sensuality—it was not to be believed. If sacred art represented the mother of the one sinless son with seven swords in her heart, what symbol can adequately depict the woes of the mothers of men?
Sainty, with his quick sympathy, divined something of all this in the awful moments that he stood for the first time face to face with his mother. His curious, guarded, sheltered youth, his unhealthy, abnormal perception of other people’s feelings, as well as the something feminine and maternal in his relation to his robuster brother, combined to give him a vision of an agony vouchsafed to few of his sex. He saw his mother, his cold, chaste, proud mother, stricken at once in her motherhood, her pride, her chastity, and yet he understood the situation as she could never understand it, as it could never be possible for him to make her understand. His whole heart yearned over her with a pity he seemed to have been specially created to feel in its full force. He made a step towards her with his arms held out, but she turned on him as if she would have struck him.
‘And you,’ she cried, blazing with denunciation, ‘you come to me with a lying pretence of sympathy; you who have talked to me a dozen times of your anxiety about your brother, and seemed at one with me, so unselfishly, nobly distressed about him. You have known of this all along, have aided and abetted him in his infamy. You, who are too sexless and poor a creature to have known his temptations, have helped him in cold blood to his undoing, and with this in your heart have come to me to consult what was best to be done for him. Oh! you were always subtle and sly when you were hardly more than a baby.’
‘Mother, mother! for God’s sake stop; you don’t know what you’re saying. What do you mean?’
‘Oh! you don’t know, do you? Do you deny that you have known this all along? A year ago, didn’t you go up and sup and carouse in this creature’s company and that of her vile companions? Answer me that. Yes or no? Did you, or did you not? You see, you can’t deny it. For all I know, you have been with them often. Is it from her house you have come to me now? to me, the mother of you both!’
‘Perhaps I have been wrong, mother, but I don’t deserve this at your hands. I have done what I could. I have just come from Arthur. You know he is not very manageable; I have not had an easy part to play. And I have got him to promise to come away; he will come home and——’
‘Has he said he won’t go back?’ She flashed it at him like a whiplash, and her gesture spoke impatient contempt as he answered—
‘No, I can’t make him say that, but I hope much from home influences; when we get him here, surrounded by all that will speak to him of his childhood, of all he owes to you——’
She cut him short. ‘You temporise with evil. Your arguments are those of the worldly wise.’ She was regaining her calm; argument was steadying her, and the old habit of rebuke brought back the judicial tone to her voice. ‘There are only two ways,’ she said, ‘right and wrong. You cannot palter and hold diplomatic parleys with vice. I am willing—I should like—to believe that your motives have been good, but I hope you see the harm you have done by your attempts at compromise. Why, oh why,’ she broke out again, ‘knowing all this, haven’t you told me? Surely I was the person to know, to be consulted on the subject.’
‘I wanted to spare you, to save you pain. I may have been mistaken; I haven’t seen very clearly what was best, but I hoped to get him away, and that perhaps you might never have the sorrow of knowing. I knew how bitter it would be to you.’
‘Oh! this eternal deceit! When will you learn that there can be no question of “not seeing what was best”? My early training of you must have been strangely defective, if at your age you can’t tell good from evil. How can it ever be anything but right to tell the truth?’
‘It is no new burthen I’ve had to bear,’ Sainty answered, ‘to be alone in my knowledge of what was going on. For years I’ve stood between Arthur and your knowledge of the scrapes he was in.’
‘You have, have you! So there has been a conspiracy between you to keep me in the dark. I don’t want to be unjust to you; you have not a strong or courageous character; you may have honestly believed you were being kind; but see what has come of your duplicity. Had I known, I might have said a word in season. Arthur would always listen to me.’
Sainty thought of the tempests that had raged when Lady Charmington had said a word in season in the autumn on a much less ticklish subject, but he forebore to press this home.
‘Well,’ his mother resumed, with a certain grim ferocity, ‘I’ve written now. I am not subtle or diplomatic, I have borne my testimony quite simply and faithfully.’
Sainty’s heart sank. He thought of his long and anxious contest, of how hardly at length he had prevailed. Of his mother’s methods of plain dealing he had just had a specimen; he knew, none better, Arthur’s impatience of the smallest interference, and the spirit in which he would receive even the tenderest animadversion on Cynthia.
‘Mother!’ he cried, ‘what have you said?’
‘Said! What should I say? I haven’t temporised and beat about the bush. I have said plainly that he was living in mortal sin, and imperilling his soul; and I’ve bidden him leave that woman at once, or never see me again.’
Sainty sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. He saw all he had striven for, all he had effected, swept away at a touch; he saw too that the mischief was done, and irrecoverable; there was no good in saying a word. The despair his attitude expressed must have touched some tenderer chord in his mother. She came across to him, and laid her hand, not unkindly, on his shoulder.
‘Pray,’ she said sternly. ‘Pray to God for help; He alone can turn this wretched boy from his evil courses. Vain is the help of man.’
Sainty never knew how he got through the next two days. He had put a strain upon himself far beyond his feeble strength; the two railway journeys would in themselves have told on him, but the unresting hurrying hither and thither in London, the emotion of meeting Claude again, the terrible nervous excitement of his long argument with his brother, and then, on the top of all, when he was worn out in body and mind, the shock of seeing his mother as he had never seen her, the bitter disappointment of finding all he had done rendered useless at a blow, crushed him utterly. He was glad to take refuge in physical stupor and exhaustion from the bitterness of his own reflections.
In the morning of the third day, when he was gradually coming back to a sense of what had happened, his mother came to his room with an open letter in her hand. Her face was grey and drawn, and she seemed suddenly to have become an old woman. Her voice was hollow and unnaturally quiet. ‘Read that,’ she said, and tossed the letter on to his bed. Then raising her hand, which shook as she held it up, ‘I curse him,’ she said, still in that same even, horrible tone. ‘Remember that you have heard me curse my son’; and she went slowly out of the room.
With trembling hand Sainty drew the paper to him; he recognised Arthur’s schoolboy scrawl. The letter was meant to be very dignified.
‘My dear mother,’ the boy wrote, ‘I have received your letter; I will not notice your insults to a woman I love. You say I am living in sin. Very well, then—so be it. I will do so no longer. I came of age last week and am my own master, and curse me if I’ll take it from you or any one. I have to announce to you that I was married yesterday at the registry office in Mount Street to Miss Cynthia de Vere.’ He had begun another sentence, ‘Till you are prepared,’ but apparently thinking anything more would weaken the effect of what he had said, he had run his pen through the words. The letter wound up, ‘I am your son,
‘Arthur Wellesley Chambers.’
CHAPTER XIII
No one can live at the height of great crises. After the storm, when the wind has sobbed itself to sleep, the sun comes peeping shyly to count the damage done, the draggled, flattened flowers begin to lift themselves and look about, the fallen trees are sawn up and carted away.
Sainty might take to his bed, and lie there groaning at the wreck of all his hopes and plans for his brother. Lady Charmington might say dreadful violent things, and indulge in the cheap gratification of cursing her son. But sooner or later Sainty must get up and dress, must come downstairs and see the agent and the butler, and his mother must wash her hot eyes and flatten down her hair, must order dinner, and scold the maids, and sit at the head of the table as though nothing were amiss. And it is just this that saves us from madness; the more we have to do, the less time we can afford for sitting down with our sorrow in darkened rooms, the better for us. Kings and business men, and the labouring classes generally, whose work must be done no matter what happens, have a great advantage over leisured mourners. Sainty crept out, battered and disheartened, to face a new world which yet had a great deal in common with the old one. He had to provide himself with a new set of motives, desires, objects in life. But outwardly nothing was changed. The very book he had put down when he left the library to find the letters for Arthur in crossing the hall, was still on the same table with his paperknife laid between the leaves to mark the place.
He never knew how his mother had come by her information. Sometimes he thought of Lady Eccleston, sometimes of the duchess. Her reference to the supper and his own presence at it had suggested a sickening suspicion of a new treachery on the part of Claude, but he finally decided that this was unlikely. A dozen other people might have seen him going in, and gossiped about his presence. Claude had mentioned that he was supping with Johnny Trafford; it might have come round through his aunt Susie. He did not want to think any worse of his cousin than he need, and he did Claude the justice to recollect that if he never shrank from doing a mean action when he had anything to gain by it, mere purposeless mischief was not in his traditions; indeed, he would rather take trouble to keep things straight. He was not one of those who turned explosive truths loose in the world—who ‘thought people ought to know’; on the contrary, on general principles he was all for people not knowing, especially awkward facts about their own relatives. On the whole, the causes of the catastrophe seemed to Sainty far less important than the consideration of what, under the circumstances, was left for him to do for his brother.
Lady Charmington, on his screwing up courage to ask if she had any views on the subject, forbade him peremptorily to mention Arthur’s name to her.
Lord Firth said the young ass had done for himself irretrievably, but agreed that he couldn’t be left to starve. He was much inclined to think, however, that the younger brother’s £500 a year, which was all to which he had a legal claim under his grandfather’s will, was quite enough for him. ‘If you give him any more, he’ll only chuck it away.’
‘Uncle Cor,’ Sainty said, ‘what’s the good of talking like that? You know as well as I do that Arthur will never live on £500 a year. I see nothing to be gained by pretending that he will. I could easily, but he never will. And do you suppose I could serenely sit in this huge house, and spend £50,000 a year, and know my brother was in want?’
‘Whatever you give him, you may be sure he’ll spend double,’ said Lord Firth; ‘so I should recommend your not beginning with too large a sum; you had better keep something for the debts you will assuredly be called on to pay from time to time.’
‘I’d so much rather give him a decent allowance to start with, one that he could live on and not get into debt.’
‘You rebuked me just now,’ his uncle replied blandly, ‘for not looking facts in the face. Might I suggest that the aspiration you have just put forward is based on a hypothesis quite as visionary as my proposal that Arthur should live on £500 a year.’
Sainty was forced to admit the contention. He wrote, therefore, a letter from which he tried as far as possible to banish all useless recrimination, offering to pay his brother’s debts if he would send him the bills, and to allow him a thousand a year; to which Arthur in due course returned a most characteristic reply, beginning with a magnificent declaration that he wanted nothing of people who were not prepared to recognise or receive his wife, and repetitions of his readiness to ‘work his fingers to the bone for her,’ and ending with a bitter complaint of his brother’s meanness in not making him a larger allowance. In due course, however, the bills arrived, and made Sainty gasp; nor did he find when he placed the first quarter’s allowance to his brother’s credit that it was returned to his own.
There is a certain repose in the fact that the worst which one has dreaded has happened. To some temperaments anxiety is far harder to bear than sorrow, and the mother who killed her baby because she was so dreadfully afraid that it would die, presented only an extreme case of a not uncommon frame of mind.
The sun shone, the birds sang, the early and late summer were not less glorious than usual on the great well-kept lawns and terraces of Belchamber. The places that have known us do not put on mourning for our departure unless it withdraws from them some fostering care, and Arthur’s effect upon a garden was mostly written in broken branches and footprints on the flower-beds. When people have been more than usually disappointing, we turn with an added tenderness to things, and Sainty, whose regard for his beautiful inheritance had always been sentimentally great, began to take a more intelligent interest in the possessions he had been so anxious to renounce. Since it seemed that he could not shake off his responsibilities, he would embrace them with fervour. He found himself wandering about the great historic house and eagerly learning all he could of the treasures it contained; and he started to rearrange and catalogue the huge library, which had been much neglected and had got sadly out of order. Soon finding this a task utterly beyond him without expert help, he imported as librarian a young protégé of Gerald Newby from the library of his college, with whom he spent long mornings exploring chests and closets where dusty folios had been ruthlessly heaped together and left to rats and spiders. They made the most wonderful finds of whole boxes of manuscripts, family papers, parchments, letters. Among other things, they discovered one day the original plans on which the grounds had been laid out, signed by Perrault, and though there had been many subsequent alterations, Sainty was delighted to find how much the main lines had remained intact. The orangery with its enclosed garden, the bowling-green by the canal with its formal pleached alleys, and the whole system of waterworks, ponds, cascades, and fountains, were all more or less as the great Frenchman had designed them. Here and there his long sweeping vistas across the park had been cut by stupid little plantations of conifers, coverts for game, and these Sainty was eager to remove, reopening the grand perspectives. He planned, too, to restore the dignified simplicity of the forecourt, with its great oval expanse of turf and five statues of Flora and the Seasons, according to the original drawing. The statues had been removed and dotted without method up and down the long shrubbery, the great wrought-iron grille and gates carried away to one of the lodges, the turf broken up with flower-beds and terracotta baskets. It would be delightful to put everything back in its proper place.
To these and many other schemes his mother lent an indulgent ear. She had that curious instinctive taste in gardens and houses which so many of her countrywomen combine with an utter absence of the æsthetic sense in all that concerns the fine arts or their own personal adornment; she was quite incapable of real sympathy with his joy in musty old documents and letters, but alterations in the garden were more in her line, and if she did not always think what he proposed an improvement, at least it was natural and normal that a man should take pleasure in his own possessions, instead of wishing to give them away and live in the East End. Sainty consulted her about everything, not merely from long habit of deference, but from real respect for her judgment.
A more powerful bond of union than any alterations in house or garden were certain schemes for the benefit of their fellow-creatures. In their more radical youth Lady Charmington and her brother had started many such, a co-operative dairy-farm, settlements of model cottages, schools, benefit clubs, and a system of old-age pensions that should not lessen the self-respect of the recipients. Sainty’s interest in all these matters was no new thing, though he had formerly rather carefully repressed it. Now he took them up with a zeal not even second to Lady Charmington’s own. It was not to be expected that he and she should be always in absolute agreement, but on the whole they worked surprisingly well together. There were concessions on both sides. On his they had the ease of long habit, and he was astonished by a quite new tendency in his mother to consult his wishes and defer to his opinions.
Though she never mentioned his brother’s name, Sainty had a conviction that she knew by some means or other what he had done for Arthur, and was silently grateful to him for defying her resentment. She helped him to establish himself in the west pavilion, now become uninterruptedly his own, and to arrange his few personal possessions that had come from Cambridge. The old schoolroom became his study; he turned Claude’s room into a workroom and place for extra books, with a writing-table for the librarian if he wanted him near him; but Arthur’s chamber was left by a tacit agreement as it had always been, and sometimes Sainty would wander in there and look disconsolately on the sporting prints, the school groups, the faded blue cap dangling from a nail, the old Eton bureau decorated by a red-hot poker with its owner’s name, a very large ‘Chamb’ and a very small ’ers,’ owing to the artist’s miscalculation of the space at his command. Sainty did not want Claude in the old schoolboy quarters, and explained to that accommodating person that he needed more space for his books, and thought his cousin would be more comfortable in one of the many guest-rooms.
By and by other people besides Claude began to occupy these apartments again. There were no regular parties during the year after Arthur’s marriage, but gradually Lady Charmington took to asking a few people at a time; his Aunt Susan and her sons, the Rugbies, the Ecclestons, Alice de Lissac and her step-daughters. His mother even suggested that Sainty should invite some of his own friends, and Newby came several times and was satisfactorily interested in his many undertakings.
‘I like to see you taking your proper place,’ he said complacently, with the air of an artist contemplating his own work; but the old spring of grateful devotion no longer gushed responsive to Newby’s lightest word of commendation. To begin to grow away from a friend is a terrible experience, and few things are harder than to keep up the pretence that no such change is taking place; but when the friend in question has been less the equal comrade than the Gamaliel at whose feet one has sat, the strain of preserving the old attitude is increased to infinity. There is no furniture so encumbering as a fallen idol; we trip over it a dozen times a day. Already the blush of shame had tinged the corner of Sainty’s smile at Parsons’ lampoon, and now he was constantly to experience similar compunctions. Gerald took a great fancy to Claude and held forth to him unsparingly on many subjects.
‘Your cousin is a real Prince Charming,’ he would say to Sainty; ‘very refreshing, and such quaint views of things, without the university flavour one gets so sick of; he is of immense use to me.’
Morland listened to Newby’s lucubrations with an air of grave sympathy, but made fun of him behind his back. Sainty was exasperated all round; he hated Gerald’s making an ass of himself, hated Claude’s gibes at his expense, hated himself for being amused by them against his will. Cissy Eccleston, on the contrary, was always ecstatically giggling at the young man’s witticisms.
The Ecclestons had begun to be a great deal at Belchamber; Lady Charmington seemed to have endless philanthropic projects to discuss with her friend, which needed the latter’s constant presence.
‘I have asked Lady Eccleston to run down for a few days,’ became a recognised formula; ‘I want to ask her about the G.F.S. meeting’; or, ‘She has got to consult me about the concert at Middlesex House for Lady Stepney’s Home for Inebriates; she wants the duchess to be a patroness.’ And Lady Eccleston ‘ran down,’ always taking care to thank Sainty effusively for ‘letting her come’; ‘I had heaps to talk over with your mother, and it saves such a lot of tiresome letter-writing; it is good of you to have us.’ In Lady Eccleston’s train came Lady Eccleston’s daughter, and sometimes a son or two. Sainty had come to have quite a friendly feeling for Tommy; he was such a good soul, so reposefully commonplace, and so unfeignedly happy and grateful at Belchamber.
‘You don’t know what it is to a chap to get out of that damned London,’ he said fervently. Poor Tommy, not being very good at examinations, had had to bow his neck under the yoke of a house of business, for which, after the manner of English boys, his whole previous training had most elaborately unfitted him. Sainty was glad to give him the pleasures which would be no pleasures to himself, and Tommy responded with a sort of wondering gratitude made up in about equal parts of admiration and contempt. Once he rather tactlessly tried to express his regret over Arthur. The Ecclestons were at the moment the only guests, and Sainty said something about its being very dull for him having to go out shooting alone.
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Thomas; ‘though, of course, I miss your brother. Awfully good chap, your brother. I was deuced sorry he went and muckered the whole show like that. Hard luck on all of you.’
Sainty winced, but he liked the boy for liking Arthur, and silently pressed his arm.
‘Beg pardon,’ said Tommy, getting very red.’ Stupid of me to say that. The mater would comb my hair if she knew.’
Lady Eccleston indeed was almost distressingly tactful on the subject, stepping round it on elaborate tiptoe, as some people go about a death-chamber.
She and Cissy were full of interest in all Sainty’s undertakings. They watched with breathless excitement the works for reinstating the grille and the statues, and allowed themselves to be patiently bored by long readings from some of the old documents which Sainty was editing for publication by the Historical Society.
When there were no other young people in the house, Sainty felt it no less than his duty as host to try and entertain the young lady, and she was always ready to accompany him on his drives about the place and visits to the outlying farms and cottages. He thought of himself so little in the light of a young man for whom a girl could possibly entertain a warmer feeling than friendship, that it never occurred to him to imagine any possibility of objection to these long expeditions, practically tête-à-tête with only a stolid little groom as chaperon; and indeed the two mammas smiled very indulgently on them as they drove off. He showed Cissy all over the co-operative dairy-farm and explained the system of its working, and if her remarks did not display a very thorough grasp of its aims, she listened with the politest attention to his explanations. Whether the two widowed mothers, when left alone, confined their conversation exclusively to topics of external benevolence may be doubted; but anyway they always seemed to have plenty to talk about, and to be quite able to spare their children; and meanwhile Sainty drove along the avenues of the park, or the roads and lanes of the countryside, with Cissy tucked in beside him and chattering like a sparrow. The girl had a certain sense of humour, strictly limited in scope, but diverting as far as it went. It is true that it mostly took the form of personal ridicule, and Sainty was rather scandalised at the frequency with which it was turned upon her mother, but he couldn’t help laughing at some of the revelations. ‘And, after all,’ he thought, ‘she would not make fun of her if she did not love her; it is the light-hearted thoughtlessness of a child.’
‘Mamma is very low to-day,’ Cissy said, bursting with laughter. ‘You know, she takes the Exchange and Mart and is always swopping something or other. I don’t think she does very good business, but she likes the fun of writing to people she don’t know, and the bargaining. Well, she’s got an old black silk gown, quite good still, it was a good silk; she bought it at Woolland’s at a sale (she goes to all the sales), but she’s worn it three seasons and it’s old fashioned, and every creature we know is sick of the sight of it, so she has been trying to get rid of it in the Exchange, and what do you think she was offered for it this morning? A goat! Think of us in Chester Square with a goat! Tommy says we can keep it in the back-yard and he’ll milk it, and it will save the dairy bill; but mamma is not amused.’ And Cissy went off into peals of laughter in which Sainty could not help joining.
This power of making him laugh was the great secret of his pleasure in her society. At most times they might not have had much in common, but after all he had been through, her irresponsible frivolity was very restful. His morbid conscientiousness seemed overstrained and absurd by comparison, and he was ashamed to be frightened by life in the presence of a creature who took it so lightly, displaying such a careless front to the slings and arrows of a quite insufficient fortune. With more humour than delicacy she gave him glimpses of many of her parent’s little economies and contrivances. ‘I’ve got to be turned out smart, you know, and we give awfully nice teas, lots of teas—even the little Sunday dinners ain’t badly done; but no one dropping in unexpectedly to lunch—no thank you! and if she and I dine out it’s cold mutton for the boys and none too much of it. You’re awfully good to Tommy; it’s just heaven for him being here, poor boy!’
‘It’s delightful being able to give any pleasure to any one. I have never been able to make any one happy though I’ve tried.’
‘Oh, come, cheer up! I assure you, you are giving a lot of pleasure to the Eccleston family at this moment; it really is ripping of you asking the whole family. Did you know, by the way, that your mother has said the two boys could come next week when Harrow breaks up, and that we might all stay over Christmas?’
‘Yes, of course I knew, seeing that it was I who suggested it. I thought if you had your little brothers here it would not be so dull for you, and my friend Newby will be here, and Claude——’ The vivid colour came and went so quickly under the fair skin that Sainty could not be sure if it were Claude’s name that called up the faint flush. It might have been caused by the pleasure Cissy’s next words expressed.
‘Oh, it was you! How angelic of you! As for me, I don’t think my young brothers add much to my enjoyment of life, nor I to theirs; besides, I am quite happy in this dear, beautiful place, and going all about your improvements and things with you is so jolly; but I’m awfully grateful to you all the same, and you will be more in mamma’s good books than ever; and with mamma, you must know, “good books” is not a mere phrase. She has a red book in which she enters all her friends according to what they have done for her; not an ordinary visitor’s-list. She puts down “Lady So-and-So—asked us to her squash, but gave a dance and did not ask us”; or “Mrs. Snooks—dined with us, but didn’t ask us back: Mem.—not again till she does,” and so on. It’s capital reading; if I can get hold of it some day I’ll show it to you.’
‘Do you mind if we get out at the end of the shrubbery and walk home?’ Sainty asked; ‘I want to see how they are getting on with moving one of the statues.’
‘Oh, do let’s! I should love to see Spring (isn’t she Spring, the fat woman with the sort of trumpet with the apples? Oh no, of course, Autumn) swinging in mid-air. They had just got the thing rigged up yesterday afternoon when I walked my parent round there. I do hope they haven’t got her into the cart yet.’
They visited poor Autumn, whose head was reposing in rather a ghastly manner in a heap of straw on a trolly, while her trunk and cornucopia hung perilously from the pulleys, and her legs still graced a florid Dutch pedestal.
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Cissy said. ‘I do think it’s so clever of you putting them all back where they belong. I should never have had the energy to take all this trouble once they were here and established.’
‘The worst of it is,’ Sainty admitted, ‘that now the thing is decreed, I feel almost sacrilegious tearing them from the places where I have always known them. If I had known what a business it was going to be, and what a lot it would cost, I should never have had the courage to undertake it.’
‘It must be lovely to have lots of money to spend,’ Cissy interjected almost under her breath.
‘What I can’t understand,’ Sainty went on, ‘is the frame of mind of the person who spent such sums on destroying a good design; he must have disturbed his own early associations as much as I am doing, yet without the same reason for doing so.
‘I suppose he thought he was improving things, just as you do,’ said Cissy cheerfully. ‘All the things people give such heaps for nowadays are what our grandmothers put in the garrets. Probably the people who come after you will think Faith, Hope, and Charity, or whoever the ladies are, would look much nicer in the park, or on the roof, or at the bottom of the big pond.’
‘The people who came after him!’ The phrase struck cold upon his ear. Who was there to ‘come after’ him? Lady Arthur? Good heavens! Sainty shuddered to think what her notions of the æsthetic might involve. He had a fleeting vision of Belchamber rearranged according to the standard of taste suggested by the plush piano drapery so fatally baptized in champagne.
This question of who was to enter into his labours and gather the fruits of all that he was doing contained within itself the germ of paralysis. The works for the outward beautifying of the place were the smallest of his preoccupations; but what would his successor care for all his other hopes, his projects for bettering the condition of the ‘poor about his lands’? The thought that whatever he might effect would pass with his own feeble and precarious life, and leave no trace behind it, was one of the sharpest darts in the quiver of his familiar fiend.
They walked back to the house almost in silence, Sainty revolving these unhappy thoughts, Cissy, for once, not chattering. Sainty stole an occasional glance at his companion, wondering at her unusual quiet. Her eyes had a far-away look, which gave a great sweetness to her face; he feared to intrude on some tender maiden thoughts which he felt tolerably sure had little to do with him or his concerns. As they came out upon the lawn they saw Lady Charmington approaching from the village, bearing a small tin-lined basket in which she conveyed cold slabs of pudding to some of her dependants. Cissy waved her muff and ran forward, insisting on relieving her from the burthen which she was perfectly capable of carrying on one stalwart finger. Miss Eccleston’s manner to her hostess was the perfection of pretty girlish deference and service, and Lady Charmington’s grim countenance relaxed at sight of her.
‘Have you had a pleasant drive?’ she asked. ‘I hope Sainty has taken good care of you.’
‘Lord Belchamber has been delightful,’ Cissy answered, ‘and shown me all sorts of interesting things. We came back by the shrubbery, to look at one of the poor ladies who has had her head cut off. Now I must go and tell mamma we are back. I will leave your basket in the little hall for you, dear Lady Charmington, I know just where it lives.’
Lady Charmington turned to Sainty as the girl skipped away. ‘Give me your arm, my son, I am a little tired,’ she said. Now Sainty was well aware that his mother was never tired, and would rather have died than own it if she had been. ‘Good heavens, mother, aren’t you well?’ he asked in alarm.
‘Oh yes, dear, quite well; but I am getting an old woman. It is a good thing that you have begun to look after things yourself. What you ought to do for me now is to give me a nice young daughter-in-law to look after me, and some dear little grandchildren to pet and spoil.’
Sainty was startled; it seemed almost as if Lady Charmington were answering the thoughts that had oppressed him on the way home. He smiled parenthetically at the vision of his capable energetic mother in the character of the feeble old lady cared for by pious children; nor did he see her ‘petting and spoiling’ any one.
‘I am not likely to marry,’ he said. ‘With the best will in the world, I might find it difficult. Fairy princesses do not marry the yellow dwarf!’
Lady Charmington’s unwonted mildness fell from her miraculously. ‘You are almost bound to marry—now,’ she said, the last word pronounced with a sudden sharp inspiration that told how much the reference cost her.
‘Dear mother,’ Sainty said gently, ‘who could possibly fill your place here? Who would do all that you do, or do it nearly as well?’
‘I can’t live for ever. As I tell you, I am getting old; already I can’t do all that I could. The thought of that woman in my place gives me fever. Do you want her to succeed me—do you?’ And Sainty felt the hand on his arm tighten to a clutch.
‘We have both got to die before that happens, mother. If you are not in your first youth, you are very strong, and if I am not a tower of strength, at least I have youth on my side; we may both have more vitality than many younger or stronger people.’ Alas! that his chances of long life, once so fiercely resented, should have come to be the buckler on which he counted to interpose against the speedy succession of his brother, which in those days he had so ardently desired!
CHAPTER XIV
It was natural that with other people in the house Sainty should see less of Cissy; he told himself so several times a day, yet the thought was not altogether a pleasant one that she only welcomed his society as a refuge from solitude or Lady Eccleston. The frost had put a stop to the works in front of the house, and a bad chill and sharp attack of neuralgia warned Sainty to discontinue his drives until milder weather. Skating on the big pond became the amusement of the moment, a pastime in which his lameness prevented his joining. Gerald Newby, in a straw hat, spent hours upon the ice, and fell down with Spartan perseverance in his determination to accomplish figures of eight.
‘Why is it a necessary part of the make-up of the good young man to wear a straw hat in the winter?’ Claude asked; ‘I notice that serious youths always do, curates and schoolmasters. Is it a mark of asceticism, as being obviously not the comfortable thing to do, or to give the impression that their brains are overheated with excess of thought?’
Claude, who skated, as he did everything else that he attempted, with elegance and precision, had undertaken to instruct Cissy in the art, and Sainty had to watch them gliding about together, both her hands tightly clasped in his, and even a sustaining arm occasionally flung out when the maiden was more than usually wobbly. It was all perfectly natural; there was not the smallest ground for objecting. Lady Susan Trafford and her sons, Claude’s mother, Newby, and Cissy’s three brothers were all on the ice the whole time; the pond, though a good-sized sheet of water, was visible from end to end; there were no corners or islands behind which the flirtatiously-inclined could disappear; yet the sight of those perpetually clasped hands became a constant irritation to Belchamber, and it was quite vain for him to reiterate that with her mother and brothers in the house, it was less than no business of his how Miss Eccleston amused herself. ‘Had it been any one else but Claude,’ he thought, ‘he should not have minded.’
It soon became evident to him that he was not alone in the apprehension with which he watched the growing intimacy between Cissy and his cousin. Lady Eccleston, it was plain, viewed it with quite as little favour as he did. Swathed in furs, and with a blue nose, the poor lady fluttered on the bank, in a manner strongly suggestive of a hen whose ducklings have taken to the water. One day, having invited him to take her for a walk, while the hoar frost crackled under their feet in the winding mazes of the shrubbery, she quite unexpectedly unburthened herself to him on the subject.
‘I can talk to you, dear Lord Belchamber,’ she said, ‘as I would to an older man; you are so good, so pure, so unlike the others, and I am so sorely in need of advice.’
‘Good gracious! Lady Eccleston,’ said Sainty, with hypocritical surprise, ‘what’s the matter? How can I help you?’
‘I’m so afraid you’ll think it strange of me to talk to you on such a subject, but, as I say, you are not like an ordinary young man; you have always been so serious for your age, and then, you know your cousin better than any one; you have been boys together.’
‘Claude?’
‘Yes, Mr. Morland. How kind of you to understand and help me out; but you are so sympathetic, more like a woman in some ways, I always say.’
Sainty was only partially pleased by this equivocal compliment. ‘What about Claude?’ he asked.
‘I will be quite frank with you; you won’t misunderstand me, I know. A mother’s solicitude; and, after all, what can be more natural? Left so early a widow, and with these young ones to guide and bring up. If my dear husband had lived it would all have been so different; but I have no one to turn to. Tom is a mere boy, really no more help than the young ones. Ah! Lord Belchamber, children are a sad responsibility.’
‘Yours seem to be very good ones,’ said Sainty.
‘You do think so? I am so glad. Yes, I think they are, but of course I feel a mother is not a judge—her great love blinds her; but they are good children, I must say they give me very little trouble. Only the high spirits of youth are always a pitfall. And Cissy—she’s a dear, good girl, and we haven’t a secret from one another; we are more like sisters. Yet it is for her that I sometimes feel the greatest anxiety.’
‘Yes?’
‘Some people think her pretty; again, of course, my partiality prevents my judging; but lots of people have told me she was pretty. Do you think her pretty?’
‘I should think no one could help admiring Miss Eccleston,’ said Sainty.
‘Ah! that’s it. There’s no denying it. I can’t help seeing it; why should I pretend I don’t? The girl does have a lot of admiration; I do hope it won’t turn her head. She’s as good as gold, but London’s an awful place. I’ve done all I can to keep her from all knowledge of evil, and so far, thank God! the child is a thoroughly healthy-minded, pure girl. Doesn’t she strike you so?’
‘Oh, certainly; but what——’
‘You were going to say “What has all this to do with Mr. Morland?” You won’t mind my talking to you quite frankly? it is such a comfort. Well—any one can see your cousin admires Cissy immensely. And of course she’s pleased by his attentions. I must admit he is charming; but is he the kind of young man a mother would like to give her daughter to?’
‘Have you any reason to suppose your daughter cares at all for Claude?’
‘Oh no, no, no! don’t misunderstand me; I’m quite sure she doesn’t. But girls are so thoughtless; the more innocent they are, the more imprudent. If I so much as try to venture a hint to her to be a little more circumspect, she says, “I don’t know what you mean, mother,” and she looks at me in such a way I’m quite ashamed, I really am.’
‘Of course Miss Eccleston is all that is delicate and refined, but if you are certain she does not at all return my cousin’s partiality——’
‘Oh, of that I’m sure; she’s such a mirror of candour—if she had the very smallest feeling she would have told me—but your cousin is most fascinating, that I must admit, and she might get to think she cared. Now, I ask you, who know him so well, is he just the sort of man in whose hands a very pure-minded girl with high ideals would be happy? I know my child so well; if she were ever to find out that the man she married had been at all fast, it would simply kill her. And the young men of the day are so wicked, or so they tell me. One can’t help hearing things de temps en temps in London, no matter how much one hates gossip, and no one hates it as I do.’
Sainty thought he knew some one who hated it at least as much as her ladyship. He was wondering what Claude really felt for Cissy. In the light of their conversation about Miss Winston, he found it difficult to believe that his cousin was courting a portionless girl with a view to marriage; but he could not catechise him as to his intentions towards every young woman with whom he ever saw him, especially after the scanty encouragement he had met with on that occasion. Were he to answer Lady Eccleston truthfully, there could be little doubt of what he must say; but the thought of acting secret police in this fashion was not agreeable to him.
‘You must see——’ he began.
‘Oh! I do, I do,’ cried the lady; ‘I see just how unpleasant it would be for you to have to say a word against your cousin, and, dear Lord Belchamber, do let me say how much it makes me like you, though, to be sure, that wasn’t necessary, for I’ve always said you were my ideal young man. Cissy and I have so often agreed in talking over some of the young men we know, Tom’s friends, and the men we see at balls, and others, that there is no one quite like you.’
‘No, I’m well aware that I am not like other young men——’
‘Ah! be thankful you’re not, dear Lord Belchamber; the young men of the day, I’m sorry to say, are not nice. And thank you so much for listening to me so patiently, and telling me just what I wanted to know. I can’t tell you the comfort this little talk has been to me. You see, I have no one to turn to, and I do think it so sweet of you not to want to say a word against Mr. Morland.’
Sainty wondered a little afterwards just what the information was for which Lady Eccleston was so grateful, for though the interview was nominally sought with a view to consulting him, while he had received a number of interesting confidences, he could not recollect having expressed any opinion at all. Lady Eccleston, however, had apparently found him a satisfactory counsellor, for the next day she returned to the subject.
‘You remember what I said to you yesterday about Cissy and Mr. Morland,’ she whispered, dropping down beside him on one of the seats in the winter-garden after lunch. ‘I’m more than ever convinced she doesn’t care for him; it is foolish of me to take fright as I do, but there is just one point I do want to put myself right with you about. I was so afraid afterwards you might think—and yet—no, come to think of it, I’m sure you wouldn’t; but I should like just to say that I hope you didn’t think what I said had anything to do with Mr. Morland being poor, or what the world would call not a good match. As long as he was a good man, and a man of principle, and some one in her own monde, I’ve always said I didn’t care who my girl married. No one can say I’m mercenary. My poor dear husband and I married on next to nothing, and there never was a happier marriage. I wish you had known Sir Thomas, you would have loved him,’
Sainty expressed a suitable regret at having missed the pleasure of Sir Thomas’s acquaintance. ‘Some people,’ Lady Eccleston continued pensively, ‘some people think I’m wrong. Only last week a dear friend of mine said to me that it was all very well to despise money, but that other things being equal, it was a great power, and that in this age of the world it was impossible to get on without it. I said “You may be right, dear, and I don’t deny that for my children’s sake I’ve sometimes wished I had a little more of it, but money isn’t everything. It can’t give happiness.”’ And her ladyship raised her eyes to a statuette of Venus in a cluster of palms, with the expression of a dying martyr regarding a crucifix.
‘No, Lord Belchamber, if a man’s a gentleman and a good man, for me, he may be as poor as—as he pleases—that isn’t what I fear; but though Cissy seems such a child, she has a very strongly marked character, and intensely deep feelings, and were she to marry a man she could not respect, she would never know a moment’s happiness. What she needs above all is a man of strict principles, of high ideals, and with a pure mind and life, and where is such a man to be found? But forgive me for boring you with all this; it can’t interest you. George, dear,’ to her second son, who passed at the moment, ‘are you going skating? Do you know where Cissy is? Is she going with you? I want to speak to her’; and with a little nod of good understanding to her host, Lady Eccleston skipped with her usual amazing agility off the ottoman, and departed with her arm twined about the boy’s waist.
Belchamber pondered much on these conversations. ‘The ordinary clever man,’ he thought, ‘who prides himself on knowledge of human nature, would be sure that Lady Eccleston was trying to “hook him” for her daughter, and would, as usual, be wrong. If the lady is not, a monument of wisdom, at least I give her credit for not being so obvious as that. No; she is treating me, as women always do, as a creature removed from all thoughts and hopes of love, a sexless being set apart like the priest in Catholic countries to be the safe recipient of tender confidences in which he can have no personal concern.’ Still he sometimes dreamed (as who may not at twenty-three?) of what life might come to mean if Love should breathe on its dry bones and bid them live; if it were possible that some maid more discerning than her fellows should see with the eye of the soul, beneath his dreary, unattractive exterior, the wealth of love that was waiting like the sleeping princess for the awakening kiss! ‘Perhaps I might even have the luck of the unhappy monster in L’Homme qui rit, and meet with a blind girl!’ Hideousness, even deformity, was no bar to the love of woman, that he knew. He thought of Wilkes, of Mirabeau, of many others who had been more passionately loved than your pretty fellows. Deep in his heart he knew his real disability; it was not his lack of personal beauty, nor even his lameness that was the bar, but his miserable inherent effeminacy. A man might be never so uncouth, so that the manhood in him cried imperiously to the other sex and commanded surrender. ‘More like a woman in some ways.’ Had not Lady Eccleston said it? There lay the sting. And yet—who could tell? Might not a miracle be worked? Might he not some day find himself face to face with this stupendous, unhoped-for happiness?
He wrote many poems at this time, poems not addressed to any concrete personality, but to that ‘not impossible she,’ the divine abstraction who should recognise and respond to what lay hidden in his heart. He felt very sure that Cissy Eccleston, with her frank pagan enjoyment of life and the moment, was not the lady of his dreams. Those little curved lips of hers might seek the red mouth of a lover, but would never bestow the heroic salute that should cleanse the leper, or restore his true form to the enchanted beast. Yet, forasmuch as he had seen so few girls, his Beatrice sometimes came to him clad in something of the outward semblance, the virginal candour and freshness of this sojourner within his gates. He found himself wondering if Lady Eccleston’s account of her daughter’s ermine-like recoil from all contact with moral impurity had any foundation in fact, or whether this fancy portrait of the girl dying of a stain on the premarital robe of her husband were not as purely fallacious as some of his mother’s theories about Arthur. It had been borne in on him that mothers were not always infallible in what concerned their children’s characters; he was farther rendered a little sceptical as to the young lady’s excessive innocence by some of her own conversation, and notably a certain curiosity displayed with what seemed to him a lack of delicacy on more than one occasion as to his unfortunate sister-in-law.
‘Of course one knew all those girls by sight,’ she remarked, with engaging candour, ‘but I’m not sure just which was Cynthia de Vere; it was the tall one with the beautiful legs and the rather big mouth, wasn’t it? I told Tom so, and he said it wasn’t; but I’m sure I’m right, ain’t I?’
On another occasion she startled him by the plainest possible reference to the relations of Charley Hunter and Miss Baynes.
‘I didn’t know young ladies knew anything about such things,’ Sainty said rather severely.
‘They do now,’ said Cissy, ‘whatever they used to; but I suspect they always knew more than they let on. There was a friend of mine who married Teddie Hersham last season; I was one of her bridesmaids; she was awfully proud of taking him away from Totty Seymour; she used to boast of it to all her friends.’
‘I can’t bear to hear you talk like that,’ Sainty answered. ‘It would give people who didn’t know you such a wrong idea of you.’
‘I’ll try not to, if you don’t like it; but it isn’t easy for me to pretend to be different to what I am.’
‘I don’t want you to. I only ask you to be true to yourself, and not say things that I am sure are quite foreign to you for the sake of startling people.’
‘Well, I must own I do enjoy shocking you. You are so awfully proper, you know; but why should you care what I do or say?’ she added, with a little arch glance.
‘I don’t know, I’m sure, but I do. I suppose I—I like you too well not to mind your behaving in a way I don’t think worthy of you.’
What wonder if Miss Eccleston found Claude Morland a more amusing companion than his cousin? Sainty was the first to admit the likelihood. He was well aware that Claude would not have offended her by championing her innocence against herself, or have made any difficulties about gratifying her girlish curiosity as to that other world of which she knew so little. The thought of Morland’s long, deft fingers delicately removing the bloom from this young creature irritated him unaccountably. Oh no! it was not jealousy; that, again, was what the stupid, knowing people would think; he could never care for this empty-headed little thing in that way, and knew only too well how much more impossible it was that she should care for him. Only, he did not want her to suffer, nor to coarsen and deteriorate.
He was revolving some such thoughts as these as he walked by himself one day, perhaps a week after his conversation with Lady Eccleston, when he was startled by loud cries from the neighbourhood of the pond, and made all the haste he was able in that direction. The air was certainly milder; there had been unmistakable premonitions of a thaw. He remembered the discussion at breakfast as to whether the ice would still bear, and the eager affirmations of the young Traffords and Ecclestons that it was as sound as ever. Bertie Trafford and Randolph Eccleston had been sliding all over it, and had even stamped in places to see if it would give way; but Mr. Danford, the agent, had come in in the course of the morning to say that it had a damp look about the edges he did not like, and to advise them to keep off it. Sainty had not been greatly interested; the pond, though large, was mostly artificial, and nowhere more than three or four feet deep, and if the boys liked to risk a wetting, it did not seem to him to matter much. Now his thoughts flew to Cissy; he wondered he had not thought of her before, and the next moment he turned a corner, and found himself one of an excited group, the centre of which was Claude, hatless, dishevelled, and very wet, bearing in his arms the inanimate form of Miss Eccleston. Her eyes were closed, and every trace of colour was gone from her face; her lips were blue, and the water ran in streams from her clothing. The boys crowded round, all talking at once, and making a number of foolish suggestions.
‘Is she drowned? Is she dead?’ wailed little Randolph, and was sternly bidden by George not to be an ass unless he wanted to get kicked.
‘What is the matter? What has happened?’ asked Sainty, and was conscious of saying the silly thing even before Claude answered with studied politeness, ‘Don’t you see? Miss Eccleston has caught fire, but we have luckily extinguished the flames.’
Claude was seldom cross, but he hated scenes and emotions and spoilt clothes. ‘If some one would help me to get her up to the house it would be some use,’ he added; ‘and can’t any one lend a dry coat to wrap round her? Mine’s no good, it’s as wet as a sponge. Oh! not you, Sainty, you’ll catch cold.’
A little way from the house they encountered Lady Eccleston, who had got wind of the catastrophe, and was hurrying to meet them; and Sainty was struck by the change in her manner in face of emergency. Her foolish flightiness seemed to have dropped from her like a garment that an athlete throws off. She had all her wits about her, and gave the most sensible directions. She had her daughter upstairs and in bed between warm blankets in less time than it takes to write it down, and by the afternoon she was able to report to them that Cissy was quite comfortable, only a little feverish and upset by the shock; but she did not think she would be much the worse for her wetting.
Cissy, however, was a most unaccountable time in getting over that shock. Lady Eccleston expressed herself as amazed that her daughter should take so long to recover from so small a thing.
‘Really, Lord Belchamber, I’m ashamed; you’ll think you are never going to get rid of us; but the doctor says positively that the child mustn’t come down yet. I can’t understand it at all, for the chill she has quite got over. Of course she had a dreadful feverish cold, and at first we thought it would settle on her lungs, but, thank God! all danger of that seems at an end. Then I ask what is the matter? and Dr. Lane says, “It’s the shock to the nervous system.” But I’m mortified. I really am. Do you know how long we’ve been here?’
‘I don’t want to know, Lady Eccleston. I only know we are too glad to keep you as long as you can stay, and I am sure my mother feels as I do about it.’
‘Oh! you are too kind about it, both of you! But one has some compunctions, you know. And after all your goodness about the boys and all!’
George and Randolph had returned to Harrow, and Tom to his hated office in Throgmorton Avenue, Claude’s presence had been once more required by his respected chief, and the rest of the party had melted like the snow that had followed the long frost; but still Cissy lay in a most becoming pink dressing-gown in a small boudoir that had been arranged for her next her bedroom. It took Lady Eccleston days of modest trepidation to bring herself to admit Sainty to these sacred precincts. ‘Was she very unconventional? Well, she supposed she was—people always said so—but she was weak where her children were concerned, and Cissy had said, “Why shouldn’t Lord Belchamber come to see me, mamma?” Not for worlds would she have introduced the ordinary young man’; and then Sainty was once more assured of his ‘difference,’ his purity, the perfect confidence an anxious mother could repose in him.
‘Her brothers are gone, you see, and she misses them so, poor child. And though we are such friends, an old woman is dull company pour tout potage; and then my wretched throat gives out; I am no good for reading aloud. Now it would be angelic of you, if you would read to her a little; would you? Oh! how kind! She is a perfect baby about being read to; and you are so clever; you will know just what to read; you have such literary taste; everybody says so.’
Thus Sainty found himself installed as reader to the invalid, and spent many hours a day by her sofa. At first Lady Eccleston was always there; then, when they were deep in their book, she would sometimes slip away to her voluminous correspondence or long consultations with her maid over the endless transmutations of her wardrobe. Sometimes Lady Charmington would look in, with a few words of grim tenderness, and lay a large cool hand on Cissy’s hair. Gradually the young people came to be left alone for longer and longer intervals. Belchamber rather wondered, himself, at the relaxation of all watchfulness on the part of their chaperons. ‘It is the old story,’ he told himself gloomily; ‘I am certainly not considered dangerous.’
One day Lady Eccleston was much perturbed at breakfast over her letters.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she cried, ‘it is most unfortunate; do advise me, dear Lady Charmington. There are a dozen things I ought to be in London for. I have a committee on Tuesday; they say they can’t do without me; and things seem to be all at sixes and sevens at home: poor Tommy writes that he is most uncomfortable; he says the maids are always out, and he believes the cook gives parties; that there are—what is it? Oh! yes, here—“sounds of revelry by night”; he is always so absurd, poor dear; but it is hard on him. I really feel we ought to go, and Cissy is just beginning at last to be a little better.’
‘Why don’t you run up for a day or two, and do what you have to, attend to your committee, and give an eye to things in Chester Square?’ said Lady Charmington. ‘Leave Cissy to us, if you will trust us; we will take every care of her.’
‘O dear Lady Charmington, I couldn’t; that would be an imposition. Of course she would be ever so much better here, and she is so happy, poor child; Chester Square is so noisy, and of course directly she gets back to London, people will begin to want her to do things, and I shall never keep her quiet. But I simply couldn’t; it would be monstrous to put on you to such an extent.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Lady Charmington. ‘It is a thousand pities to take her back to town just when she is getting on so well; a few weeks more of good air and rest will do everything for her; she must come downstairs first, go out for a few drives, before she thinks of a journey. Don’t you agree with me, Sainty?’
‘Of course we shall be only too glad, if you think Miss Eccleston would not be dull——’ Sainty began.
‘Ah! dear Lord Belchamber! dear Lady Charmington! how good you both are!’ cried the tender mother. ‘I am ashamed, positively ashamed, but what can I say? She will be overjoyed. She had to gulp down a big lump in her throat when I told her we must go home; she was so good, she wouldn’t say anything, but I could see; love sharpens our wits when it is a question of our children’s happiness, doesn’t it, dear?’
‘It is generally not difficult to see through young people,’ said Lady Charmington. Sainty was wondering if the necessity for Lady Eccleston’s presence in London had arisen out of the letters she had received since she came downstairs, when she could have had the conversation on the subject which had brought the lump into her daughter’s throat, but he was too polite to inquire.
The conclusion of the whole matter, as might have been foreseen, was that Lady Eccleston departed to London, leaving Cissy at Belchamber, and the readings were continued with even less supervision than before.
Cissy’s literary taste was decidedly undeveloped, and it may be doubted if some of her host’s finest reading was not merely an accompaniment to the thinking out of new hats; but Sainty enjoyed immensely introducing a novice to his best beloved authors, and the new sensation of being able to minister to a sufferer, and lighten the long hours of some of their dullness and depression. He wasted an immense amount of care and thought on the selection of suitable gems, passages that should be characteristic and of the highest beauty, and yet milk to the intellectual babe. Sometimes he almost forgot his listener in the pleasure of voicing things long dear to himself, especially poetry, and he read a good deal of poetry. Cissy displayed but little enthusiasm; she always thanked him very prettily when he finished, if she was not asleep, and ‘hoped it didn’t bore him awfully,’ but she made few comments, and listened for the most part in silence and often with her eyes closed. Sainty put down her apparent indifference to the languor of convalescence. Once, indeed, she startled him by the energy of her appreciation. He was reading Maud to her, and she had several times disappointed him with a calm ‘very pretty’ when he had paused after some exquisite lyric that left him vibrating like a harpstring. When, however, he came to—