Hathercourt

“I don’t exactly know, my dear,” he replied. “Possibly the sight of those strangers in church set me considering things. I should like you girls to have a few more – well, advantages I suppose they are in a sense, after all – I should like to see Lilias and you as nicely dressed as that pretty girl this morning, eh, Mary?”

“Dear father?” said Mary, affectionately. “But we’re very happy, papa. I am, at least, and Lilias tries to be anyway. But I dare say it’s harder for her than for me – she might get so very much admiration, and all that sort of thing, you know.”

Mr Western smiled – there were people in the world, he thought to himself, who would see something to admire in the eager face beside him too; but he said nothing, and just then the dinner-bell rang, and a hurry of approaching footsteps told that to some at least of the Rectory party it was not an unwelcome sound. Mary fled up-stairs, her father followed the hungry flock into the dining-room. And the Sunday meal that day was considerably enlivened by discussions about the mysterious strangers. Who were they? – whence had they come, and wherefore? – and, “Will they come again next Sunday?” said little Frances, a question which her eldest sister very summarily answered in the negative.

“They have given you all something to talk about, children, anyway,” said Mrs Western.

“Yes,” said Basil, who, on the strength of having left school three months ago, considered himself a man of the world, “it’s ridiculous how people get excited about nothing at all, when they live such shut-up lives. I bet you the whole neighbourhood’s full of it. All the old women will be discussing these unfortunate people over their tea-tables at this very moment.”

“Not over their tea, Basil,” said little Brooke. “They don’t have tea till four o’clock.”

Chapter Three

The Colour of the Spectacles

“Mais, il faut bien le reconnaître, tout est relatif en ce monde, et les choses nous affectent toujours dans la mesure de l’éducation que nous avons reçue et du milieu social où nous avons été élevés.”

Enault.

Mrs Western’s views of life differed considerably from those of her husband – she had quite another stand-point. She was not ambitious, nothing in her experience had ever tended to make her so, and though by nature she was far less “easy-going” than the Rector, yet her thoughts concerning the future of her children were not by any means so harassing and dissatisfied as his. Had she seen anything to worry about, she would have worried about it, but she did not see that there was. Her boys and girls were infinitely better off, better cared for, better educated than she had been, and happier far than she ever remembered herself before her marriage, and she saw no reason why, if they turned out good and sensible, as they mostly promised to do, they should not all get on fairly well in life, without feeling that their start in the great race had been weighted with undue disadvantages.

Yet the Rector’s wife was not a peculiarly reasonable woman; circumstances mainly had made her appear so, or rather, perhaps, had never called forth the latent unreasonableness which we are told, by authority we dare not question, is a part of every feminine character. When she married Mr Western, she was only a governess in a family where she was not unkindly treated, but where no special thought was bestowed upon her. She was not discontented, however; for the kindness she received she was sincerely grateful, and considered herself, on the whole, a fortunate girl. She was not remarkably pretty, but pleasing and gentle, and with a certain sedateness of air and manner not without a charm of its own. People spoke of her, when they did speak of her, which was not often, as “a very sensible girl;” in point of fact, she was more than sensible; she had both intellect and originality, neither of which was ever fully developed – in one sense, indeed, hardly developed at all. For her youth had been a depressing one; from her earliest years she had been familiar with poverty and privation, and she only was not altogether crushed by them because personally she had had experience of nothing else.

Her father had been one of the several younger sons of a rich and well-born man. But neither the riches nor the good birth had helped him on in life. He quarrelled with his parents by refusing to enter the profession designed for him; he made bad worse by a hasty and imprudent marriage; he hopelessly widened the breach by choosing to resent on his own people his young wife’s speedy death, and declining to accept any help in the bringing up of his motherless little daughter. And then his old parents died, and the brothers and sisters, married and scattered, and absorbed in their individual interests, learned to forget, or to remember but with a sore reproach worse than forgetting, this hot-headed, ungrateful “Basil,” who had not condoned by success in his self-sought career the follies of his youth. And before many more years had passed, poor Basil Brooke died himself, nursed, and comforted, and sorrowed for by but one little solitary being, his thirteen-years-old Margaret, for whom at the last he had managed to scrape, together a tiny sum that left her not absolutely destitute, but was enough to pay for her schooling till, at eighteen, she went out into the world on her own small account as one of the vast army of half-educated girls who call themselves governesses.

But if Margaret Brooke’s pupils obtained no very great amount of so-called “book-learning” from their young teacher, at least they learned no harm, and indirectly no small amount of good. For she herself was good – good, and true, and healthy-minded, perfectly free from self-consciousness, or morbid repining after what had not fallen to her lot. Once in her governess life she came across some members of her dead father’s family. Being really gentlefolks, though self-absorbed and narrow-minded, it did not occur to them to ignore their poor relations. They even went out of their way to show her some little kindness, which the girl accepted pleasantly and without bitterness; for, young as she was at the time of her father’s death, she had yet been able to discern that the family estrangement had been mainly, if not altogether, of his own causing. So the rich Brookes spoke favourably of poor Margaret, and though it was taken for granted among them that the fact of her existence was a mistake, she was, on the whole, regarded with approval as doing her part towards making the best of an unfortunate business. And when, two or three years later, Margaret, to her own inexpressible astonishment, found herself actually fallen in love with by the most charming and unexceptionable of young curates, a curate too with every prospect of before long becoming a rector, and when this prospect was ere long fulfilled, and Margaret, in consequence, became Mrs Western, her Brooke cousins approved of her still more highly, to the extent even of sending her a tea-pot, cream-jug, and sugar-basin of the best electro-plate as a wedding present.

But all that was now nearly a quarter of a century ago – the generation of Brookes who had seen Margaret in her youth, who had some of them been contemporaries of her father, had mostly died out – they were not a long-lived race – and the old relationship had grown to seem more of a legend than a fact. A legend, however, which, little as the young Westerns knew of the far-off cousins who now represented their mother’s people, was not likely to be allowed by them to sink into oblivion. They were too well-bred and right-minded to be ashamed of their mother’s position when their father wooed and won her, but, nevertheless, half unconsciously to themselves, perhaps, the knowledge of this fact made it all the more agreeable to be able to say to each other, with dignity and satisfaction, “Though mamma was poor when she was a girl, her family was quite as good, if not, indeed, better than papa’s.”

And “papa” himself was the first always, on the rare occasions when such subjects came under discussion, to remind his girls and boys of the fact, but Mrs Western herself thought little about it. She lived in the present, even her lookings forward to the future were but a sort of transference of her own life and experience to others. She hoped that her daughters, if they married at all, would marry as happily as she had done, and beyond this she was not ambitious for them, and conscientiously tried to check Lilias’s good-tempered murmurings at the monotony of their life by platitudes, in which she herself so entirely believed that they sometimes carried with them a certain weight.

Mrs Western was less interested than the rest of the Rectory party in the mysterious strangers who had so disturbed the Hathercourt devotions this Sunday morning. She did not like strangers; she had a vague fear of them – not from shyness, but from a sort of apprehensiveness which her early life, probably, had caused to become chronic with her. When Lilias snubbed little Frances’s inquiry as to whether these ladies and gentlemen would come to church again next Sunday, in her heart the mother hoped the elder sister’s “no, of course not,” would be justified by the event, and, secretly, she chafed at the talk that went on round the table, talk in which even Mr Western was interested, as she could see.

“You remember Romary, Margaret?” he said, across the table, “that splendid place near Withenden?”

“Yes, I remember it,” replied Mrs Western, “but I don’t like splendid places,” she added, with a little smile.

“Nor splendid people?” said Lilias, half mischievously. “Isn’t mother funny – odd I mean, in some ways – difficult to understand?” she said afterwards to Mary, “she seems so afraid of our ever going the least out of the jog-trot, stupid way.”

“She is over-anxious, perhaps,” said Mary.

“No, I don’t think it is that exactly,” said Lilias. “I think papa is the more anxious of the two. I sometimes wish mamma were a little more, not anxious exactly – I don’t know what to call it – a little more worldly, perhaps.” Mary laughed.

“You would have liked her to invite those fine people to luncheon last Sunday, and then, perhaps, they would have taken a fancy to us, and invited us to go to see them?” she said, inquiringly.

“Nonsense, Mary! Do leave off talking about those people. I am tired to death hearing about them,” replied Lilias, impatiently. “Invite them to luncheon – to roast mutton and rice pudding, and a dozen children round the table! – Mary, I wish you wouldn’t say such silly things.”

“You are difficult to please, Lilias. Only the other day you told me, if I would be silly sometimes I should be almost perfect,” said Mary, dryly.

And then Lilias kissed her, and called herself “cross,” and there was peace again. But somehow, after this, the subject of the strangers was scarcely alluded to.

And “next Sunday” came and went, and if Mary descried some little attempt at extra self-adornment on Lilias’s part, she was wise enough not to take notice of it; and if Mr Western preached his new sermon in the morning instead of the afternoon, I question if any one discovered the fact. For, with these possible exceptions, the day was not a marked one in any way, and with a little sigh, and a smile too at her own folly, Lilias decided, as she fell asleep, that as yet there was little prospect of a turning-point in her life being at hand.

The week that followed this uneventful Sunday was a date to be remembered, and that had been tremulously anticipated by one heart, at least, among those of the Rectory party. It was to see the eldest son started on his career in life, and calm enough though she kept herself to outward appearance, to the mother this parting was a painful crisis. Her “boy Basil” was leaving her forever, for “boy” she could not expect him to return. He was going up to town for a few months in the first place, having been lucky enough to obtain a junior clerkship in a great mercantile firm, with a prospect – the few months over – of being transferred to the branch house abroad, where his chances of success, said the authorities, “if he behaved himself,” were pretty certain in the long run, though not, in the mean time, bewilderingly brilliant. He was a good sort of a boy in his way, and family affection among the Westerns was fairly and steadily developed; but nevertheless, with the exception of his mother, none of the household lost a night’s rest on account of his approaching departure, and Lilias openly avowed her conviction that Basil was greatly to be envied, and that it would be far pleasanter for him to pay home visits now and then, when he knew something of the world, and could make himself entertaining, than to have a great hulking hobbledehoy always hanging about, and getting into mischief. Mary, too, agreed that “it was a very good thing for Basil,” and nobody cried when he said good-bye except poor Francie, whose seven years were innocent of philosophy or common sense, and who only realised that her big brother was going “far, far away.”

But still, when he was fairly gone, there fell over them all a certain depression – a sort of blank and flatness, which every one was conscious of, though no one would own it to another. It was a dull afternoon, too, threatening to rain, if not actually doing so, and, to suit Basil’s convenience, they had had dinner at half-past twelve, a whole hour earlier than usual, so that by four o’clock Lilias declared she felt ready to go to bed.

“You are suffering from suppressed excitement, after all, I suspect,” said Mary, looking up from Alexa’s German translation, which she was correcting. “There is a sort of excitement in thinking poor Basil is really started, though we are glad of it.”

“I am not excited; I wish I were,” said Lilias, listlessly. “I am only idle and stupid!”

“Get something to do then,” replied Mary. “There, I have finished the school-room affairs for to-day. I wonder if mamma has anything she would like us to do – I can’t ask her; she is up in her own room, and I don’t like to disturb her yet. It is too dull to go out. Supposing we practice that duet, Lilias?”

“Supposing in the first place we make this room tidy,” said Lilias, looking round her reflectively. “Supposing now, Mary – just supposing any one were to come to call, what would they think of this room?”

“They wouldn’t think ill of the poor room,” answered Mary, laughing, and setting to work energetically as she spoke to “tidy up;” “they would probably reserve their thoughts for the careless people who lived in it. There now, that looks better; let us poke up the fire a little, and draw the sofa near it for poor mother when she comes down, and I’ll tell you what – I’ve got a thought, Lilias. Supposing we make the children have tea by themselves in the dining-room for once, and we have it in here for mother on a little table?”

“Yes, do,” said Lilias, heartily; “it would be quite a treat for her.”

“And I know the children will be good,” said Mary; “they understand that mother is dull about Basil’s going. We are to have a light supper at eight, you know, as papa will be back by then, so we can have tea earlier than usual.”

“If there is any meal I dislike more than an early dinner,” said Lilias, as she stood on the hearth-rug surveying the room, which, thanks to her own and her sister’s efforts, now looked neat and comfortable, “it is ‘a light supper.’ The room doesn’t look so bad now, Mary; somebody may come to call if he or she likes.”

It was really a pretty room; it was prettily shaped, and the look-out upon the old church through a long, rather narrow window at one end, evidently purposely designed, was striking and picturesque. Pretty and graceful, too, was the wide, low bow-window at the other end with a cushioned seat running all round, and in summer a pleasant view of the best kept bit of the Rectory garden. Even now in late autumn there was a bright, fresh look about the room, notwithstanding the extreme simplicity of the furniture and its unmistakable evidences of age; and when Mary had stirred up the fire into a brisk little blaze, and with her own hands arranged the tea-things on a small table beside the sofa, she felt very fairly satisfied with the aspect of the whole.

“Won’t mamma be pleased, Lilias, when she comes down?” she exclaimed. “I have made the tea; it’s all ready. Will you go up-stairs and ask her to come down, or shall I?”

“You deserve to go; it was your idea,” Lilias was beginning, when an unexpected sound made her suddenly stop short “Mary,” she exclaimed, “that’s the front door bell! What a bother – just as we have got all so comfortable for mamma! It must be old Miss Bury – nobody else would come to call on such a day; it seems like a judgment upon me for joking about visitors.”

“We can’t help it,” said Mary. “I only hope Ann will hear the bell and answer it quickly. She is sometimes so slow, and Miss Bury doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“There she is,” exclaimed Lilias, as the sound of feet crossing the hall was heard. “Who can it be, Mary? It doesn’t seem like Miss Bury’s voice.”

“Some one for papa, perhaps,” replied Mary; but almost as she spoke the door was thrown open, and Ann, muttering something too indistinct to be understood, ushered a gentleman into the quickly gathering darkness of the room.

He came in quietly, evidently not expecting to find any one in the room, for in fact he believed himself to be entering Mr Western’s study, there to await the result of Ann’s inquiries as to the hour at which her master was expected home. Nevertheless, in one respect he had the advantage of the two girls, for the hall whence he emerged was even darker than the drawing-room, whereas the sisters, standing together on the hearth-rug in the full light of the newly-stirred fire, were by him at once and easily recognised.

“I am afraid I am disturbing you – I must really apologise,” he began, his face, had they been able to see it, lighting up with pleasure as he spoke. “I only asked for Mr Western, and I am sorry – ” he hesitated.

“Papa is out,” said Mary, though quite in the dark physically and mentally as to whom she was addressing; “but if it is anything we can tell him – ” she turned to her sister, surprised at her silence, but her appeal was disregarded – “if it is anything we can tell him – or – or would you like to see mamma? Won’t you sit down, and I will get a light?” she went on, without giving him time to answer.

“Thank you,” said the gentleman, coming forward a little; “but I am really ashamed – ” he was repeating, with increased hesitation, when Mary again interrupted him.

“It is Captain Beverley,” she exclaimed. “I had not the least idea who you were, for I did not recognise your voice. Lilias,” she continued, turning to her sister, this time so pointedly that Miss Western was obliged to come to her assistance, “you generally recognise voices more quickly than I do – did you not know that it was Captain Beverley?”

“You give me credit for greater acuteness than I possess, Mary,” said Lilias calmly, bowing with dignified ease to the intruder; “it is not easy to recognise a voice one has not heard more than once or twice. But if you will come nearer the fire, Captain Beverley, we shall feel less mystified; and, Mary, do ring for lights.”

The calmness, and the dignity, and the ease were all lost upon the young man, and Lilias, had she been able to read his thoughts, would have been saved a good deal of constraint. He was only thinking how very pretty, how beautiful she was – this tall, fair, lily-like girl, as she stood in the firelight, her face and bright hair thrown into strong relief by the dusk of the rest of the room; and had she allowed herself simply at once to acknowledge her recognition, he would have been conscious of nothing but honest gratification. As it was, he really did feel awkward and uncomfortable; it seemed to him he had intruded without proper justification, and somehow this disagreeable sensation was increased by all he saw about him. It was not in the least what he had expected; the pretty, graceful-looking room, whose deficiencies the friendly gloom concealed, and whose best points were shown to advantage by the flickering, dancing light, the little tea-table so neatly set out, and the two girls themselves – the one with the bearing of a princess, and the other with a sort of straightforward unconsciousness worth all the “manners” ever taught or talked about – it was not in the least what he had expected, and he felt that he had been guilty of gross presumption in thus making his way into Mrs Western’s drawing-room. Once he had seen Lilias before, and admired her more than he had ever admired any one in his life, and when he had suddenly decided that, for the local information he was in quest of, there was no one to whom he could so fitly apply as to the Rector of Hathercourt, he had been conscious in the very bottom of his heart that, if he went over to see Mr Western, there would be a chance of seeing his daughter too. But he had not fancied he would see her in this sort of way – so he felt all his former ideas confused and unsettled.