Robin Redbreast: A Story for Girls

This was too much. Frances at last dissolved into tears and flung herself upon her sister, entreating her 'not to say such things,' to believe that nobody in the world – not Bessie or Margaret or anybody– could ever make up to her for her own dear Jass.

'You're not selfish,' she said. 'You're far more unselfish, really, than I am. For I never think of things. I see I've never thought enough of poor papa and mamma, and how hard it's been for them in many ways, though I did say to Bessie the other day that, whatever troubles they'd had, they'd not been parted from each other the way we've been.'

'I'm glad you said that,' Jacinth condescended to say, 'just to let them see that they're not the only people in the world who have to bear things.'

'Oh, they don't think that,' said Frances. 'And Jass,' she went on, encouraged by her sister's softer tone, and encircling her neck fondly with her two arms as she sat, half on Jacinth's knee, half on the edge of her chair, 'I don't quite see why being sorry for the poor Harpers, and – and – wishing we could make Lady Myrtle feel so too, need make her leave off being kind to us too. That's how mamma sees it. I am not only thinking of the Harpers, Jass; indeed, I'm not. I'm looking forward more than I can tell you to what you said – that when papa and mamma come home, Lady Myrtle is going to invite us all to stay with her. Oh, it would be lovely!' and the little girl clasped her hands together. 'All the same,' she went on, 'I don't think I want ever to go to Robin Redbreast till that time comes. I can't feel natural there, and I'm afraid of vexing you or doing harm somehow.'

'It is not in our hands – not in mine, any way,' said Jacinth quietly. 'All you have told me makes no difference to me. I am not going to meddle, and I shall not mention the Harpers at all, if I can help it.'

'Not even in the way mamma says we might?' said Frances.

'No – not at all, if I can help it. I do not want to spoil the happiness of being with Lady Myrtle by bringing up disagreeable subjects. I shall tell mamma so when I write.'

Frances was silent. After all, she reflected, perhaps it did not much matter. Jacinth did not know Bessie and Margaret as she did, and now that her sister understood the whole – the near relationship and the whole story, perhaps it would be very difficult for her to come upon the subject naturally.

'Honor Falmouth says,' remarked Jacinth in a moment or two, 'that she has heard that perhaps the girls are not coming back to school after the Christmas holidays.'

'Oh,' exclaimed Frances, looking greatly troubled, 'oh, Jass, I do hope it's not true.'

'I should not be very sorry,' said Jacinth, 'except,' she added with some effort, 'except for your sake. And of course I have never said that they were not very nice girls. I know they are, only – it has been so tiresome and unlucky. I just wish we had never known them.'

'I wish sometimes we had never known Lady Myrtle,' said Frances. 'You and I have never been – like this – with each other before, Jass.'

'Well, we needn't quarrel about it,' said her sister. 'Let's try to keep off the subject of the Harper family. For I can do them no good.'

'Very well,' said Frances, though rather sadly. 'I wonder,' she went on thinking to herself – 'I wonder why Bessie and Margaret are perhaps to leave school; they are getting on so well.'

She was too unpractical to guess at the truth – which Jacinth had thought it useless to mention as a part of Miss Falmouth's information – that their parents could no longer afford to pay for them.

'For to be gentlepeople, as they undoubtedly are in every sense of the word,' the girl had said, 'they are really awfully poor. I have heard so from some people who know them at that place where they live. It is quite a little seaside place, where people who want to be quiet go for bathing in the summer. But the Harpers live there all the year round. It must be fearfully dull.'

'Yes,' Jacinth agreed, 'it can't be lively. Still, being poor isn't the only trouble in the world.'

'No,' Miss Falmouth replied, 'but I fear they have others too. Captain Harper is so delicate.'

Jacinth said no more. Honor Falmouth was a kind-hearted but not particularly thoughtful girl, and she forgot all about the Harpers in five minutes. Her visit to Robin Redbreast had never come to pass, and Jacinth did not very specially regret it. She liked best to be alone with Lady Myrtle. So the relationship of the young Harpers to the old lady had never come to Honor's knowledge, as it might perhaps have done if her attention had been drawn to Lady Myrtle by visiting at her house. And at Christmas Honor was leaving school.

CHAPTER X.

THE HARPERS' HOME

Southcliff was a very dull little place, especially so in winter, of course. In fine weather there is always a charm about the seaside, even on the barest and least picturesque coast. There are the endless varieties of sky panorama – the wonderful sunsets, if you are lucky enough to face seawards to the west; the constantly changing effects of light and colour reflected in the water itself. And on a wild or rugged coast, winter and stormy weather bring of course their own grand though terrible displays.

But Southcliff, despite its promising name, was tame in the extreme. The 'cliff' was so meagre and unimposing as to suggest the suspicion of being only an artificial or semi-artificial erection; the shore had no excitement about it, not even that of quicksands. It was the 'safest' spot all along the coast; even the most suicidally disposed of small boys could scarcely come to mischief there. The tides went out and came in with an almost bourgeois regularity and respectability; there was no possibility of being 'surprised' by the waves; no lifeboat, because within the memory of man no vessel of any description whatever had been wrecked there; no lighthouse, no smugglers' caves of ancient fame, no possibility of adventure of any kind – 'no nothing,' Bessie Harper was once heard to say, when she was very little, ''cept the sea and the sky.'

A grand exception those, however, as we have said. And dull though it was, there were some people who loved the little place as their home, and were most ready to be happy in it.

It had some few distinct advantages. It was very healthy, and for these days very cheap. There was a good church, venerable and well cared for; the few, very few residents were all estimable and some interesting. Such as it was, take it all in all, it had seemed a very haven of refuge to Captain Harper and his wife when, some eight or ten years ago, they had pitched their tent there, after the last hopes of recovering any of Mrs Harper's lost money – hopes which for long had every now and then buoyed them up only to prove again delusive – had finally deserted them.

'At anyrate,' the wife, with her irrepressibly sanguine nature, had said, 'we have the comfort of now knowing the worst. And Colin and Bertram are started. What a good thing the boys were the eldest! There is only Fitz to think about, and we'll manage him somehow. For of course the three girls will turn out well. Look at Camilla already.'

Fitz was then about five – the youngest son, the youngest of the family excepting delicate little Margaret. He was 'managed,' and not badly, though a public school was an impossibility; his destination proved to be the navy, and thither at the proper age he made his way in orthodox fashion. The girls, helped by their mother, and by their father too, did their best, and it was far from a bad best. They were naturally intelligent; intensely anxious to seize all opportunities of learning, so that a stray chance of half a dozen lessons in music or French did more for them than as many years will do for most ordinary girls; they were, the two elder ones at least, wonderfully healthy in mind and body, bright-tempered, faithful, unselfish, inheriting from their father the noble characteristics which in some mysterious way had in him so flourished as to oust all the reckless and contemptible qualities of the Bernard Harper who had half-broken his sister's heart, and brought down in sorrow to the grave his gray-haired father.

But alas! they had not known the worst, as the loving, brave-spirited wife and mother had believed. In some sense, it is true, they had not known the best, for the years had brought many satisfactions, many unlooked-for, though unimportant, mitigations of the poverty so hard to bear cheerfully – people had been 'very kind.' But the poverty itself had increased. There were literally unavoidable expenses for 'the boys,' if they were not to be stranded in their careers; there was an unexpected rising of the rent owing to their good landlord's sudden death by accident; there was, worst of all, the terrible strain of Captain Harper's ill-health. In itself this was sad enough for the wife and daughters who adored him: it became almost an agony when, joined to the knowledge that more money, and not so very much more, might both relieve his suffering and hold out a reasonable prospect of comparative restoration.

One operation – now some years ago – had succeeded for the time; but not being followed by the treatment at home and residence abroad prescribed, the improvement had not been lasting. Then it was that Mrs Lyle had written to her aunt, with the result that we know. Her letter was returned unopened.

Then there came a period of comparative comfort, and for two or three years the family at Hedge End (such was the not very euphonious name of the Harpers' house) took heart again, and began to be sure 'father was going to get well all of himself, after all.' And during this time some other cheering things came to pass. An old acquaintance of long-ago days between Mrs Harper and the Misses Scarlett was renewed by the ladies of Ivy Lodge coming to Southcliff one Midsummer holiday-time for sea-air, and this resulted in their offering to take Camilla, then almost grown-up, and later her younger sisters, on exceptionally moderate terms. The news from and of the far-away 'boys' was regular and good. The parents began to breathe freely, and to dare to hope that they had passed the worst of their troubles.

But alas! it was only an interlude. Scarcely had Bessie and Margaret been settled at Ivy Lodge when there came anxiety about Colin – tidings of his prostration by a bad attack of fever; then, when he was able to write of his recovery, little Fitz broke his leg, and had to be brought home at the cost of much expense as well as distress to be nursed well again. And worst of all, through these many weeks a terrible suspicion was dawning on poor Captain Harper – a suspicion all too soon to be changed into a certainty – that he himself was falling back again, that the very symptoms he had been warned of were reappearing, and that unless something were done he might find himself a hopeless and complete cripple.

He kept it to himself till Fitz was all right again; then it had to be told. And the painful journey to London, which Frances heard of at school, followed, with the great doctor's terribly perplexing verdict.

What was to be done? Every conceivable suggestion was made and discussed, but so far no definite scheme had been hit upon.

It was at this juncture that the mail which brought the letter from her mother so anxiously looked for by Frances Mildmay, brought also tidings from Mrs Lyle to her relations at Southcliff.

This letter came at breakfast-time; there was no mid-day post at the little bathing-place, but it was nearer London than Thetford.

'From Aunt Flora, mother,' said Camilla, the only one besides her young brother now at home. 'I do hope it is cheerful, otherwise – No, I suppose it would not do for you to read it first before giving it to father?'

Mrs Harper shook her head. She was a slight dark-haired woman, at first sight more like her youngest daughter than the others, but with a much more hopeful expression in her eyes, and far greater firmness and determination in all the lines of her face, so that, in spite of superficial dissimilarity, Bessie Harper really resembled her mother more nearly than either Camilla, calm, gentle, by nature possibly, a little indolent, or the nervous, anxious-minded Margaret.

'No,' she replied, 'it is no use keeping anything from your father. He has got an almost magic power of finding out things. Besides, your Aunt Flora always tries to cheer him if she can. Put the letter on the tray beside his breakfast, Camilla. I will take it up myself.'

Camilla and Fitz had almost finished their meal before Mrs Harper returned.

'I do hope there's nothing wrong,' said Camilla, with the apprehensiveness which reiterated experience of ill-tidings begets in even the calmest nature.

'It can't be my having broken my leg again,' said her brother, with a not very successful attempt at a joke; 'it was horrid, but I wouldn't mind breaking the other any day if it would save father's getting worse.'

But at that moment their mother came in. Her face was decidedly brighter than when she had left the room.

'Mother dear, do eat some breakfast. You'll be quite faint,' said Camilla, tenderly; 'I was nearly going after you to see if anything were the matter.'

'No dear, thank you,' replied her mother. 'Your aunt's letter is unusually interesting. Fancy! is it not a curious coincidence? – rather a pleasant one, indeed – the Lyles have just made acquaintance at this new place with Colonel and Mrs Mildmay, the parents of the two girls at Miss Scarlett's.'

Camilla looked up with a little misgiving.

'Aunt Flora is not very discreet always, mother,' she said; 'I hope she won't have confided too much to Mrs Mildmay. It might come round in some disagreeable way to – Robin Redbreast.'

'I think Mrs Mildmay must be particularly nice and sensible,' Mrs Harper replied. 'Of course your aunt has talked to her about Lady Myrtle and all the old story; it would scarcely have been in human nature, certainly not in Flora's nature, not to do so, when she found that her new friend was the daughter of Lady Jacinth Denison; but I don't see that it can do any harm. Mrs Mildmay has seen nothing of Lady Myrtle since she was a little child; it is only quite lately, as we know, that your great-aunt has come across the Mildmay girls, really by accident. Mrs Mildmay is pleased at it, for her mother's sake, but I am sure she is not a person to make any mischief. Indeed,' she added with some hesitation, 'it is just possible that indirectly it may do good. Not that your aunt suggests anything of the kind.'

Camilla's face flushed.

'I should hope not, indeed,' she said indignantly; 'when you think of the insult she exposed herself and us to, that time, mother, it would be impossible ever to accept any help from Lady Myrtle.'

But Mrs Harper did not at once reply. Her face had grown very grave, and her eyes seemed to be looking far into things.