Not Without Thorns

Sydney grew crimson.

“No, Gerald,” she said, with immense indignation in her voice. “I certainly never for an instant supposed him capable of such baseness. I am surprised at you, Gerald. It is well you never hinted at anything of this kind before – or perhaps it is a pity you did not. I am exceedingly sorry I ever discussed the matter with you at all.”

“You are unjust and unreasonable, Sydney, and unkind too,” exclaimed Gerald, with a good deal of wounded feeling. “Don’t you see how painful it is to me to suggest such a thing to you, who know what you do about me? But I am in earnest, Sydney. It is well you, at least, should be prepared for such a possibility. You cannot suppose that I have any selfish motive in suggesting it. You don’t think that, selfishly speaking, I should wish it to turn out so? If Captain Chancellor disappeared to-day, and was never heard of again, that would do me no good. How could it?”

“I didn’t think you had any selfish motive,” answered Sydney, gently. “I only thought that – that – naturally perhaps you saw him worse than he is.”

“Frank has said the same,” replied Mr Thurston, in a but half mollified tone.

“Frank!” repeated Sydney, “Frank! Oh, no, Gerald! He likes Captain Chancellor; he thinks well of him.”

“Well, I didn’t say he disliked him. He, only looking at the thing in a careless, superficial, way, does not seem to think any blame could be attached to this man if – oh, how I hate these vulgar expressions! – if he simply does go away without, as it is called, ‘coming to the point’ at all. Frank cannot see that he pays Eugenia any particular attentions. He only thinks her very likely to deceive herself in this sort of thing.” Sydney looked dreadfully startled. If Frank thought so, must there not be some ground for this new anxiety? But if so, how despicably false Captain Chancellor must be! How false and how hatefully worldly-wise to have thus, as it were, screened himself beforehand by securing Frank’s favourable opinion! For that he had not deliberately set himself to gain Eugenia’s affections from the first, Sydney could not for an instant allow. What on Eugenia would be the effect of the discovery of such treachery, poor Sydney dared not allow herself to imagine. But no, it could not be. After all, no man could be so coldblooded, so selfish, so wicked, as to crush the happiness out of a fair young life for the sake of a few weeks’ amusement. Sydney had read of such things, but was loth to believe in them. Gerald’s troubles had made him morbidly suspicious. Frank had spoken hastily, and, after all, Frank was far from being in a position to judge. So she endeavoured to reassure herself, and fancied she had done so.

She was unusually quiet, however, for the rest of the afternoon. The others – Frank and the boys, Eugenia and Captain Chancellor, that is to say – were in the highest spirits. Only Sydney and Mr Thurston seemed uninfluenced by the fresh keen air, the exhilarating amusement.

“I thought your sister could skate too – at least, that she was learning, like you,” said Beauchamp to Eugenia, who was just beginning to feel a little at home on the ice. “Doesn’t she like it?”

“She skates better than I, a good deal,” replied the girl. “I don’t know what has come over her this afternoon. She looks so tired and out of spirits!” And as she spoke, she looked anxiously in Sydney’s direction.

Captain Chancellor noticed the quick change of expression that came over her face. Five minutes before, he had thought nothing could be lovelier than Eugenia, laughing and merry; now it seemed to him this tenderly anxious expression showed the sweetness of her eyes to greater advantage. What a fascinating face the child had! – never two minutes the same, and each change bringing out some new beauty. He stood watching her, till he almost forgot where he was. She turned suddenly, and caught his gaze; blushed a little, and looked away again. Something in his face puzzled her – a perplexed, uneasy look, that she had never seen there before. Suddenly Bob Dalrymple wheeled up to where they were standing, and came to a halt.

“What a brilliant colour that ribbon of yours is, Miss Laurence!” said Captain Chancellor, abruptly. “Is scarlet your favourite colour? You generally have some of it about you.”

“Only in winter,” answered Eugenia, lightly. “In summer I can’t bear it. My tastes change altogether with the seasons.”

“So if you come back next summer, you’d better look out,” said Bob, addressing Captain Chancellor, and grinning maliciously. “She won’t like you then. It’s a good thing you’re going before the weather changes.” And so saying, he skimmed off again.

“What does he mean?” exclaimed Eugenia, not disguising the shock the boy’s words had given her. “You are not going away, Captain Chancellor?”

There was an unconscious entreaty in her voice, that gave Beauchamp a sudden thrill of pain and self-reproach.

“Not just yet, I hope. But my plans are a little – are not quite decided at present,” he answered, confusedly. Then, notwithstanding his resolutions, the look in Eugenia’s face tempted him to say more.

“You must know, Miss Laurence, how painful, how unendurable it will be to me to leave Wareborough,” he said, in a low, hurried voice.

“Will you not come back again?” she asked, very quietly, striving hard to force back the intense eagerness with which she awaited his reply.

“I hope so. I earnestly hope I may be able to do so,” he answered; and for the time the hope was sincere. “But I am not my own master. I can’t explain all I mean. I am hampered in every direction. But some day, perhaps – No, it is no use – ”

He stopped.

Eugenia stood beside him without speaking. He glanced half timidly at her face. Its expression puzzled him. It was getting late now; the rest of the party had taken off their skates, and were coming towards them across the pond, prepared evidently for the walk home. Beauchamp felt desperate. He might not have another opportunity of saying what he now felt he must say.

“Miss Laurence – Eugenia,” he exclaimed. She started a little. “I must ask you one thing: Will you think as well as you can of me, even if others may blame me? Will you not judge me by appearances more than you can help? My position is full of difficulty. As I said just now, I am not in any sense my own master; but – if I may hope for nothing else – I would at least like to think you would judge me leniently, even if I hardly seem to deserve it.”

He was quite in earnest now. He had never spoken so to any woman before. When he had left home this afternoon, he had not the slightest idea he should speak so to this woman to-day. He got his answer.

“You need not ask me to judge you leniently. I do not think it would be possible for me ever to judge you at all. Nothing – no one but yourself could ever make me think ill of you.”

She looked up at him with a light in her beautiful eyes as she said these words, that made Beauchamp Chancellor feel strangely unlike his usual equable, comfortable self. Why did she trust him so? Why did she take things so deeply, so in earnest? Why was she not like the ninety-and-nine other girls he had flirted with, and thought pretty, and talked nonsense to, and left none the worse? He felt half provoked with her for being so different, yet a vague instinct whispered to him, that in this very difference lay her peculiar charm.

There were no more têtes-à-têtes. It was getting dusk as they walked home, and they all kept together, and the conversation was general. Sydney wondered a little why Eugenia was so quiet, but supposed she must be suffering from some amount of reaction from her high spirits earlier in the day.

Captain Chancellor bade them good-night at their own door. Sydney fancied his manner a little odd – more abrupt, less self-possessed than usual, when he shook hands with her. He did not call the next day, as she somehow half expected, nor the day after, and Eugenia did not seem surprised. She did not look well, Sydney fancied; and when urged by her sister to tell what was wrong, she confessed, to having felt over fatigued since Saturday’s long walk.

“She has many and many a time walked to Ayclough and back without being tired,” thought Sydney. “There must be something wrong. Can they have quarrelled?”

Possessed with this idea, she watched eagerly for Captain Chancellor’s next appearance, and thought it doubly unlucky that Frank’s absence from home for a day or two should have happened at this crisis, when through him she might have learnt something of what was the matter, and if anything lay within her power to do for her sister. To a superficial observer, poor Sydney, during these few days, would have looked the more anxious and unhappy of the two. It was as sad as strange to her to believe Eugenia in suffering, and to be in ignorance of the cause.

On Thursday evening the sisters were sitting by themselves in the drawing-room, their father busy writing in his own little room, when there came a ring at the front door bell. Up jumped Sydney, her heart beating considerably faster than its wont, her face full of eagerness.

“That must be Frank,” observed Eugenia, quietly.

For the time being, the sisters seemed to have changed characters.

“Frank!” exclaimed Sydney; and though it was five days since she had seen her fiancé, at the supposition, her face fell. “Oh, no, it can’t be Frank! He was not to return till Friday – that’s to-morrow.”

But Frank it was. No trace of disappointment was legible in Eugenia’s countenance as she welcomed him rather more cordially than usual, whereas Sydney’s manner was preoccupied and almost cold. Frank was tired, however, and very glad to be home again; and not being gifted with the quickest perception in the world, discovered nothing amiss. Eugenia rang for tea for him, and he drew in his chair near the fire, and sat there drinking it in comfortable content, telling them all about his journey and adventures, and what a charming little country parsonage he had been staying at – “The very place for you and me, Sydney, when we get old, and past hard work.” And Sydney smiled, without seeming to hear what he was saying. Then a new thought struck Frank.

“Oh, by-the-bye,” he exclaimed, “did you see Chancellor before he left? He went off quite in a hurry at the end. He told me on Saturday evening he was expecting to go soon, but he thought he would be here through this week. And this evening I got a letter from him from some place or other – Wins – something – his home, I suppose – saying how sorry he was not to have seen me, to say good-bye – some family arrangements, he said, had called him off in a hurry at the last.”

“I saw a note in his handwriting addressed to papa on the hall-table. It came by this evening’s post. No doubt, it was saying the same thing,” said Eugenia.

She almost overdid it; even Frank looked up, struck by the strange unfamiliar monotone in which she spoke.

“But he is coming back again. He is certain to come back again, Frank? Tell me, isn’t he quite certain to come back again?” asked Sydney, with a quick, painful eagerness in her voice, as if entreating Frank not to answer no.

He stared at her for a moment, he did not understand her. Had he done so, he might have softened the bluntness of his reply, for he was far from callous or hardhearted to suffering in any shape.

“How interested you seem in his movements, Sydney. I have always thought you didn’t particularly like him. You’ve changed your opinion rather suddenly, surely? Come back again? No, it is very unlikely indeed that he will ever come back again. The 203rd is sure to leave Bridgenorth before Captain Chancellor’s leave is over, and, of course, the Wareborough detachment will go too. The regiment has been quite its time here. Chancellor was aide-de-camp to his cousin, General Conyers, somewhere in Ireland, till he came here – that’s how he happened to be so short a time here.”

“And where will the regiment go to?” inquired Sydney. The words seemed to form themselves mechanically on her lips; a strange feeling came over her that it was really Eugenia, not herself, who was speaking.

“Goodness knows,” answered Frank. “Oh, yes, by-the-bye, I remember Chancellor saying they were next on the roster for foreign service. He said, a few months would see him in India, unless he sold out. I shouldn’t much wonder if he did. I shouldn’t much wonder if – ” he hesitated. For the first time a slight misgiving seemed to come over him; he looked up in some little embarrassment. Eugenia was sitting perfectly still, looking just as usual. He felt reassured.

“If what?” asked Sydney, again with the same feeling of being forced by the intensity of her sister’s anxiety to continue putting these questions against her own will.

“Oh, nothing,” said Frank. “That is to say, it is only a fancy of mine that there may be something between Chancellor and that handsome Miss Eyrecourt. His cousin, isn’t she? I never saw her, but he had rather a constrained way of alluding to her, I noticed, and he had half-a-dozen photographs of her in different attitudes and dresses.”

“I should think it very likely,” said somebody – for the moment Sydney actually did not recognise the voice as her sister’s. “I wonder if papa wants any tea, Sydney. I think I’ll go and see.”

She rose from her seat almost as she spoke, walked quietly to the door, and left the room.

Five minutes later, on some pretext, Sydney followed her – not to Mr Laurence’s study, up to Eugenia’s own room. It was quite dark. Sydney had to feel her way across the floor.

“Eugenia,” she said, softly.

No one answered. She groped her way to the bed. Down at one end a figure was kneeling or crouching, she could not tell which. She felt it was her sister. Round the poor child’s quivering frame stole two clinging, clasping arms; all over her eyes and cheeks and mouth fell tears and kisses.