CHAPTER IX.
‘DON’T FRET.’
August was verging slowly towards September; the hues of the flowers were more gorgeous and more autumnal; the foliage of the trees had taken a soberer, more mature tinge. The weather was sultry and still, as it is wont at that time of the year to be.
One afternoon, Nita Bolton, book in hand, and Speedwell by her side, paced slowly up and down the river walk, looking a little pale and drooping. Always soon and easily tired; never of the strong, robust temperament, she had looked of late more delicate than usual, and when questioned as to the reason of her heavy eyes and pale cheeks, had replied that ‘it was the heat—the sultry weather; the Abbey stood so low; and the end of the summer was, she was convinced, the most tiring and trying time of the whole year.’ She pooh-poohed all attempts to make her neglect any of her usual duties, and attended to both her outdoor and indoor tasks with unabated diligence; but the zeal, the pleasure in them was gone. Then her father proposed that they should go away on one of their usual tours—she and he and John—but Nita thought she would prefer to wait until later in the year: Wellfield was so beautiful now. When they did go away, she wished, she said, to go to the Italian lakes, and in a month later it would be time enough for that. Her word at home was a mandate, and her injunction was obeyed, though John, in his slow and deliberate manner, did remind her that there was a little touch of inconsistency between her two statements: first, that the Abbey lay so low, and that this was the most tiring and trying time of the whole year; and, second, that Wellfield was nicer now than at any other season. To which she answered, a little wearily, ‘How you quibble about things! I don’t want to go away from home. I hate changes.’
Nita had always led a remarkably quiet life. Her friends in or about Wellfield were very few; she had not a single intimate girlfriend. Her father, and still more her cousin, John Leyburn, had always been her greatest confidants. All things that a sister may say to and confide in a brother whom she esteems and loves, and in whom she has the most boundless trust and confidence, Nita had always been in the habit of saying to and confiding in John Leyburn. His image was inseparable from her scheme of life. She never saw him without a feeling of contented pleasure—much the same feeling as that she experienced when Speedwell, with a great sigh, came up to her, laid his great nose on her lap, and looked with his honest brown eyes intently into her face. The idea of life without John in it had never occurred to her. She was usually on excellent terms with her father’s cousin, Miss Shuttleworth, knowing her sterling worth; but her nature had not much real sympathy with the sternly disciplinarian one of Aunt Margaret. Their terms were neutral. The gaieties at Wellfield might be said to be—none. The Boltons visited with none of the old families residing near the place; they were looked upon, and they knew it, somewhat in the light of interlopers, which fact had not troubled them much.
It sounds, in description, a dull life; but Nita had never found it so, hers being essentially one of those natures to which ‘peace at home’ is the one thing needful. She did not care to seek distractions outside, and no amount of distractions could have filled up the ache which would have been there if she had felt that at home, in the background, there was a jar, a quarrel, a dissension of any kind. Indeed, I am not sure that there may not be duller things for a girl than to live in a beautiful home which she loves, with human interests around her, not many, but deep, with a good father, a good friend, and a good dog as her chief and almost her only associates. Such a life Nita Bolton had led now for seven years—a silent, still, uneventful life, but one which she had always found sufficient, nay, delightful. Vague yearnings after lovers, and devotion, and romance, had been singularly absent from her thoughts. She had literally wandered
‘In maiden meditation, fancy free.’
Sometimes, after reading some very noble or beautiful poem, some very striking and powerful novel, she had, it is true, wondered a little if life was ever to contain any romance for her, and had thought that such a romance would be pleasant. Then, being well endowed with a certain shrewd, homely, common sense, she had often observed her own reflection in the looking-glass, and had said to herself, ‘Nita, my child, don’t flatter yourself that any man will ever fall in love with you for your beauty; and if he should tell you he does, don’t believe him. He might like you for some of your other qualities, if he ever took the trouble to find them out, and no doubt many persons might be found to love your money, and take you with it as a necessary appendage; but I think you would do best to keep heart-whole, and not marry anyone at all.’
She had been very contented in this prospect, though it must be owned she had never contemplated the future without placing in it the figure of John Leyburn in the character of ‘guide, philosopher, and friend.’ Then her father had appeared one afternoon, with Jerome Wellfield at his side, and from that hour Nita’s fixed and settled plans for life were upset.
That she should have cast aside her crude, untried schemes and fancies when the man appeared whom she loved, in spite of all efforts not to love him, was perhaps not surprising; indeed, there was perhaps nothing very surprising in the whole matter. But, in every deep, intense, and powerful love there are tragic elements, and those elements were present in this love of Nita’s. Not the least tragic one was, that though, as time went on, Wellfield said many tender things to her, and looked unutterable ones; though she loved him as her life, and would have hailed as a foretaste of heaven the conviction that he loved her, yet she never had that conviction. She did not feel that he loved her; she only felt that the things which she had seen she now could see no more, that her peace and repose of mind were gone, and that thus it must be, until he or she were no more. She felt that she was living in an unnatural manner—in a dream; that the equilibrium between outward and inward things had received a shock. She knew, though she would not have put it in those words, that, sooner or later, that equilibrium must be readjusted—that something would come to restore it, that the restoration might take many shapes. There was the equilibrium which means happiness, the continuous adjustment of outer to inner conditions; there was the imperfect adjustment of those conditions, which meant more or less of sorrow and suffering; there is the final equilibrium—that great adjustment of outward conditions to inward ones, which we call death. Any of these things might come to her she vaguely felt as she paced beside the river walk, with Speedwell beside her, and saw the swirling eddies of the river, and heard its gurgle, and saw the dull, hazy, sultry blue of the sky above her, and felt the warmth of perfect summer in every vein.
Turning and raising her eyes, she saw Wellfield coming from the great gateway towards her. He was on his way from Burnham, where he had been trying to learn how to become a business man in her father’s office.
‘Good-afternoon, Miss Bolton. I have brought you good news.’
‘Have you? What kind of news?’
‘The news that I am at last going to relieve you of my presence here, which you must have thought lately was to become a permanent infliction. I have just been down to Monk’s Gate. The men wish to persuade me that it is not nearly what it ought to be, but I told them it would do very well for me, and that I should have no money to pay them with if they did anything else. I showed them exactly what I would have done. They are to finish to-night, by working an hour overtime, and I shall go there to-morrow.’
He had taken his place by her side, as if he were accustomed to walk there; had deprived her of the book, which she had shut up, and of the sunshade that she had been carrying, and now he looked down at her and waited for her to speak.
‘It—you—I think you have rather hurried them. Is it not rather a sudden resolve?’
‘Sudden action, perhaps. But for more than a week I have been chafing at the delay, and at the way in which I have been obliged to quarter myself upon you here—a proceeding for which I have not the least justification.’
‘Except that of having been often invited to remain as long as you liked, or felt it convenient,’ said Nita, in a low voice.
‘I know you and Mr. Bolton have been kindness itself, and I can never be grateful enough to you.’
‘I don’t see why, I am sure. Who has so good a right as you to be here?’
He laughed. ‘If I were obliged to bring a lawsuit for the restitution of my property, I should like you to be the defendant,’ he said. ‘I should win in a canter.’
Nita was silent.
‘At least, I shall not be far away from the Abbey,’ he went on, ‘and I am glad of it. You will let me come up and see you, I hope, sometimes, though I don’t hope for such privileges as Leyburn enjoys.’
‘John is like one of ourselves,’ said Nita, originally.
‘And I am not. I know that, and am constantly reminded of it.’
‘Shall you send for your sister now?’ asked Nita.
‘Not at once. I must wait till things are a little more certain. I am getting on in my lessons at Burnham. I know how to do book-keeping now, and your father has so much foreign correspondence that he says I shall be of use to him.’
‘Do not speak in that way!’ exclaimed Nita; ‘you know I hate it.’
‘I only do it in the hope of making you see how reasonable it all is, and how absurd it would be in me to expect anything else, and how lucky I may feel myself.’
‘And how unlucky you feel yourself in reality,’ she replied. ‘Don’t try to deceive me by talking in that way. Well, I hope you will like Monk’s Gate, and that you will be—happy there.’
‘And I may come here sometimes?’
‘Of course.’
‘I shall invite you and Miss Shuttleworth to come and have tea with me. I know Miss Shuttleworth honours that repast more than any other.’
Nita laughed a little dry laugh.
‘We will be sure to come,’ she said, ‘and we shall expect toast and teacakes, and then bread and butter. I hope you will see that the tea is strong enough, and that your servant puts a clean cloth on the table. I hope you like housekeeping on that scale.’
She spoke rather savagely, as if she took a delight in saying something almost insulting to him.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Only that I wonder you can talk in such a manner. I wonder you can submit to such an arrangement. It is monstrous!’ she answered, indignantly.
It was Wellfield’s turn to laugh.
‘You are hopeless—so unpractical—so heroic in your ideas!’ he said. ‘And there is your father coming. Pray don’t favour him with such remarks as you have just made to me, or he may say that if I am too good for my place I can leave it, and then I wonder where I should be.’
Nita was silent, her breast heaving. Mr. Bolton came up, and Jerome repeated his news to him too. He received it with a calmness which his daughter thought barbarous. They all three went into the house. That evening ‘as it is the last,’ both Nita and Jerome said, he sang for them again. John was not there, nor Miss Shuttleworth. The visits of both had become less frequent. Jerome was not sorry, and Nita, carried onwards by her changed state of mind, was hardly conscious of it.
She sat quite alone in the drawing-room, on the following evening. It was Friday—a busy day with her father, who was in Manchester, attending a meeting, and who would not return till the last train at night. She had heard John promise to go to Monk’s Gate and sit an hour with Wellfield—‘by way of a housewarming,’ the latter had said, with a sarcastic little laugh. Miss Shuttleworth had a class of village girls on this particular evening. Nita therefore found herself in the strange and unwonted position of being absolutely alone.
The stillness of the house grew oppressive to her, as the hours passed by. It grew dark, and she sat alone. The day had been chilly and dull, for the weather had suddenly changed, and the sun had not once during the whole day shone out. Speedwell couched at her feet, and the lamp was lighted and the shutters closed, to shut out the dark trees and the shadowy garden.
As she sat thus alone, feeling her heart very desolate, the door was opened, and John Leyburn came in.
‘John, you!’ she exclaimed, springing up and running to meet him—‘I thought you were going to Monk’s Gate.’
‘So I am: on my way there now. But you didn’t think I should go without looking in upon you—and your father away. You look remarkably desolate.’
‘Do I? Everyone has gone, and it is dull.’
‘If I had thought of it, I wouldn’t have gone to see Wellfield to-night. I would have come and sat with you, my dear. Are you cold, Nita? What’s the matter? Where’s your little red shawl? and why don’t you have a fire?’
‘I think it is rather chilly this evening,’ said Nita, letting him fold the little shawl round her shoulders. ‘Autumn will soon be here; and then a day in Lancashire without sun is always cold, no matter what the time of the year may be.’
‘So it seems,’ replied John, who had gone on his knees before the grate, and removing a bowl filled with peacock’s feathers, disclosed what is known, in Lancashire at any rate, as ‘a cold fire,’ laid ready in the grate.
‘Where are the matches?’ he asked, finding them. He struck one, watched the flame, and then came and sat down beside Nita.
‘I will stay till it has burned up,’ said he. ‘Nothing is more cheerful than a good fire, and nothing more dismal than one just struggling into existence.’
‘How kind you are, John,’ said Nita, looking up at him gratefully.
‘Pooh! Who would be otherwise to such a desolate-looking little person as you are? I suppose your father will come by the ten o’clock train?’
‘I expect so. Oh, how nice that blaze is! I shall be quite happy now, with this novel. It is one of those which you brought me from London.’
‘Which I understood you were not going to read.’
‘Oh, but I am. I am very much interested in it; and—don’t you think Mr. Wellfield will be expecting you? He will be lonely in his new house.’
‘It will do him no harm if he is. But I see you want me to be off. Now, look here, Nita, don’t fret; there’s nothing in this life worth fretting about.’
‘People fret because they can’t help it, not because things are worth it or not worth it,’ said Nita, wearily. ‘Good-night! Thank you for coming to cheer me up.’
‘Good-night,’ said John, kindly and gravely; and he stooped and touched her forehead with his lips. Nita smiled faintly.
‘That is only for Christmas Days and birthdays,’ said she. ‘Three a year, John; so the next one is forfeited.’
‘How do I know where we may both be when the next one falls due?’ he replied, with a look in his eyes and a line upon his brow which she did not quite understand. ‘Well good-night!’