Hathercourt

Still it was very pleasant to find himself in the Rectory drawing-room; the outside chill and dreariness made the cheerful indoors all the more attractive, and, though feeling by no means sure that he had any business to be where he was, he had not the strength of mind to tear himself away, to get up from his low chair by the fire and the prospect of a cup of tea, and, with a proper amount of apology for his intrusion, to leave a message with the girls for their father and set off on his solitary, uncomfortable walk back again to Hathercourt Edge. So he sat still, and by thus doing, little though he knew it, passed the Rubicon.

Mary had disappeared, to return in a minute with a lighted lamp which she placed on a little table, her way of obeying her sister’s injunction to “ring for lights.” Then she stopped for a moment, hesitating, and Captain Beverley half rose from his chair.

“Shall I tell mamma tea is ready, Lilias?” she said, “and that Captain Beverley is here?”

“Yes, please do,” replied her sister, graciously. “My mother is not very well to-day,” she continued, turning to the young man, and almost for the first time directly addressing him, “at least, she has been rather upset by my brother’s going away, but I have no doubt she will come down, if you would like to see her.”

“Thank you,” said Captain Beverley, growing uncomfortable again, and yet feeling increasingly reluctant to take his departure. “I should be very sorry to disturb Mrs Western, but if she is coming down in any case,” he glanced at the tea-table, “perhaps – I should like to explain to her what I wanted to see Mr Western about. – I should like you to understand that I did not mean to come forcing my way here without a proper reason,” was the real thought in his mind, and somehow Lilias instinctively half divined it, and her dignity abated a little.

“Mary, please go and ask mamma to come down, if she can,” she said to her sister, and Mary went off on her errand.

“I have been leading a very lonely life the last few days,” said Captain Beverley, when he found that Miss Western was in no hurry to start a subject of conversation.

“Indeed,” said Lilias.

“Yes,” he continued, “very lonely and not particularly comfortable, as you can fancy, when I tell you where my present quarters are. I am living in the farm-house at Hathercourt Edge, with an old woman to ‘do for me,’ and she does ‘do for me’ I can assure you,” he added, with a hearty, boyish laugh.

In spite of her grand resolutions, Lilias could not help laughing too.

“I know that old-woman, I think,” she said; “we often see her when we pass that way. She was old John Birley’s housekeeper, wasn’t she? – at least, she ‘did for him.’ I do pity you, but I wonder you stay there.”

“Needs must,” replied Captain Beverley, “and there is good in everything, they say. My uncomfortable life makes me appreciate civilisation doubly when I return to it. You don’t know what a treat it is to find myself in this cheery room, and how much I shall enjoy – ” he stopped short.

“What?” said Lilias.

“A cup of good tea, if you will give it me, I was going to say, only it suddenly struck me it was a very impertinent suggestion to be made by a stranger who has no business to be in your drawing-room at all, Miss Western. The fact of the matter is, I find it difficult to recollect I am a stranger, for ever since I met you that evening two years ago, I have remembered you so distinctly that I could fancy I have seen you often since. It was your first ball, was it not?”

“No,” said Lilias, “I had been at two before.”

“Ah, well,” he replied, “that’s much the same thing,” – little understanding that to poor Lilias a ball counted for a year, and that therefore, having made her début at Brocklehurst at nineteen, she already numbered twenty-one summers, or winters, when he first met her. “It’s much the same thing,” he went on, without giving her time for the explanation which her honesty was on the point of volunteering; “it has always seemed like my first ball to me, for I had only returned from India the week before, and I wasn’t much in the way of balls there.”

“Yes, I remember your speaking of India,” said Lilias, “but I think you said you were going back there again, did you not?”

“I did think so then,” he replied, “but things have changed. I sold out a few months ago, otherwise I should not be here now. And an unexpected piece of good luck befell me just then. You may have heard of old John Birley’s strange will?”

Before Lilias could reply, the door opened, and Mrs Western and Mary made their appearance.

Chapter Four

A Cup of Tea

“I have no ambition to see a goodlier man.”

    Tempest.

“I am so very much obliged to you for seeing me. I am afraid it is very inconvenient and uncomfortable for you – in fact, as I have been telling your daughters, I am altogether ashamed of myself,” was the apology with which Captain Beverley met Mrs Western.

“But you need not be so, I assure you,” she answered, quietly, as she sat down on the sofa by the fire. “I have been a clergyman’s wife too many years not to be quite accustomed to act as my husband’s deputy when he is out of the way; and Mary – my daughter, I mean,” she added, glancing towards the girls, “tells me you wanted particularly to see Mr Western. Is it anything in which I can do instead of him, or will you leave a message? I fear he will not be home till late.”

Notwithstanding the perfect courtesy of this speech, there was something in it which made Captain Beverley regret again what he had done. He grew hot when he remembered that not two minutes ago he had been making interest with the beautiful Miss Western for a cup of tea, and now her mother made him feel that he was expected to give his message and take his departure – the sooner the better.

“How completely Cheviott has been mistaken about these people!” he thought to himself; but though Mary, who was standing nearest him, could not read this reflection, she perceived the quick change of expression in his open, good-tempered face, and she felt sorry – sorry for him, and a little tiny bit vexed with her mother.

“Mamma,” she broke in, before Mrs Western had time to say any more, “you must really have tea at once; it will be getting cold. Shall I pour it out, Lilias, or will you?”

“I will, thank you,” said Lilias, not quite sure if she appreciated her sister’s tactics, but seating herself before the tea-table as she spoke. “Mother, dear, stay where you are, do,” seeing that Mrs Western was getting up from her seat.

“I was only looking to see if there were cups enough, my dear. Captain Beverley, you will have a cup of tea?” said Mrs Western, her natural instinct of hospitality asserting itself in defiance of her dislike to strangers.

“Thank you,” he replied, gratefully; “I really cannot resist the chance of a cup of good tea. My old woman has been giving me such a horrible decoction. What do people do to tea to make it taste so fearful, I wonder?” he continued, seriously. “It seems the simplest thing in the world just to pour hot water over a spoonful or two, and let it stand for a few minutes.”

The girls laughed, and Mrs Western smiled.

“It is evident you are a bachelor, Captain Beverley,” she said. “There is nothing that depend more on how it is made than tea. For instance, hot water is not necessarily boiling water as it should be, and the ‘standing a few minutes’ should not mean brewing by the fire for half an hour or more.”

“I see,” said Captain Beverley. “I wonder if it would be any use trying to teach old Mrs Bowker how to make tea properly.”

“Mrs Bowker!” repeated Mrs Western in surprise.

Lilias laughed again at the bewilderment in her mother’s face.

“How prettily she laughs,” thought Captain Beverley, “I wish Laurence could see her. He declares not one woman in a hundred can laugh becomingly.”

“Captain Beverley is staying at old Mrs Bowker’s, mamma,” she exclaimed – “at least, at John Birley’s farm.”

“Or, to be perfectly correct,” said Captain Beverley, “old Mrs Bowker is staying with me, though I am quite sure she does not see the arrangement in that light at all. I was just telling Miss Western,” he continued, turning to the mother, “that Hathercourt Edge – that is to say, the old farm-house and, what is of more importance, a considerable amount of land – has just become my property; the last owner, John Birley, left it to me as the oldest lineal descendant of the name– of the Beverleys of Hathercourt. He had no near relations, and had always been proud of his own descent from the Beverleys; he came straight down from a John Beverley who owned all the land about here early in the seventeenth century, I believe, but whose eldest son sold a lot of it, so that in process of time they came to be only farmers.”

“That John Beverley must have been ‘Mawde’s’ husband, Lilias,” said Mary.

Captain Beverley looked up with interest.

“Do you mean the ‘Mawde’ about whom there is a tablet in the church here?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Mary. “Mawde Mayne, who married John Beverley of Hathercourt.”

“Ah! yes, that’s the same Mawde,” said Captain Beverley. “She is our common ancestress – poor old John Birley’s and mine, I mean. I come from another of her sons, who left these parts and married an heiress, I believe, but his descendants have had nothing to do with this place from that time to this. Isn’t it strange that Hathercourt, a part of it at least, should come back to me after all these generations?”

“It is very nice, I think,” said Mary. “I should be so proud of it, if I were you.”

Her eyes sparkled, and her face brightened up eagerly. For the first time it struck Captain Beverley that there was something very “taking” about the second Miss Western. But his glance did not rest on her; it travelled on to where Lilias sat behind the tea-tray, with a half-unconscious appeal to her for sympathy in what he was telling. Lilias, looking up, smiled.

“Yes,” she said, softly, “it is very strange.”

“Then,” began Mrs Western, with some little hesitation, “are you, may I ask, Captain Beverley, going to live altogether at Hathercourt Edge? You can hardly do so, though, in the house as it is at present. It is barely habitable, is it?”

“Very barely,” replied the young man. “You never saw such a place. But I must not grumble; poor old John kept the land up to the mark, though he spent nothing on the house. I don’t mean to settle here,” (Mrs Western breathed a sigh of relief), “I have another place which is let just now, but will soon be free again, and my cousin advises me to live there and farm it myself. All I mean to do here is to build a good farm-house, and establish some trusty man as bailiff, and then I can easily run down now and then – I am often at Romary – and see how things are going on. And this brings me to what I wanted to see Mr Western about. I want to ask his opinion of a young man here who has been recommended to me for my situation.”

“Mr Western will be very glad to tell you all he can, I am sure,” said the Rector’s wife. “I dare say he will be able to walk over to Hathercourt Edge to-morrow to see you, for about such a matter it would be better for you to speak to himself.”