Hathercourt

“He is a very good brother to her, mother. I cannot but confess that I was astonished at his devotion and tenderness to her, and they are deeply attached to each other,” said Mary, her colour rising a little as she spoke. “I am afraid, mother, I sometimes am too wholesale in my opinion of people. Once I take a dislike to them it is difficult for me to see any good in them. I want to correct this in myself.”

“You are so honest, dear,” said her mother.

“And as for my doing good to Alys Cheviott,” continued Mary, “it seems to me rather that she might do me good. She is so simple, so unselfish and unspoiled.”

“Anyway, I am glad they were considerate, and, I suppose, grateful,” said Mrs Western. “How, indeed, could they be otherwise?”

And Mary went off to her pupils.

But lessons seemed rather heavy work this morning. The fortnight’s interregnum had been far from salutary in its effects. Alexa was languid and uninterested, Josey pert and self-willed, Brooke and Francie quarrelsome and careless. And, lessons over, there was no Lilias to whom to resort for ever ready sympathy. Mary felt strangely dull and dispirited. She missed Alys’s bright yet gentle companionship, Mr Cheviott’s constant watchful attention, of which at the time she had hardly been conscious. She missed the quiet and refinement which had of late surrounded her even in the homely farm-house. Not that “home” was unrefined in the coarser sense of the word, but it seemed strangely full of small worries and irksomenesses and “fuss,” and Mary hated herself for feeling less heartily ready than usual to take her share in them. She looked round her with vague dissatisfaction and misgiving. How hard a thing it was, after all, to be poor! How difficult, increasingly difficult, it appeared to bring up these younger girls as could be desired! The boys must make their own way in the world; but with regard to Alexa and Josey, there was no doubt that they stood at a disadvantage both as to the present and the future.

“Lilias and I had our own places in the family even at their ages,” thought Mary; “but the third and fourth daughters of a poor clergyman – what are they to do? If it were possible to give them a couple of years’ training at some first-rate school they might be fitted to be governesses. But such a thing is not to be thought of,” and, with a sigh, she turned to the letter to Lilias which was costing her unusual pains from her excessive anxiety not to let it seem less cheerful in tone than usual. “What would Lilias say if she knew?” she said to herself as she wrote. “I do not think I need ever tell her, or any one, that is one comfort, and – oh, if only I could forget all about it myself!”

The next morning brought a letter from Lilias. It came, as the letters generally did, at breakfast-time, an hour at which there was but little possibility of privacy for any of the Rectory party. Mary opened, but merely glanced at it, and put it in her pocket to read when alone.

“From Lilias,” she said, calmly. “It is a long letter. I will read it afterwards. She begins by saying she is quite well, and sends her love to everybody, so no one need feel anxious about her.”

“You might read it now, Mary,” said Josey. “It would be something to talk about. You forget how dull it is for Alexa and me – never any change from year’s end to year’s end – while Lilias and you go about paying visits. The least you can do is to amuse us when you return, and you haven’t told us a thing about the Cheviotts.”

“Josephine, be quiet at once,” said Mr Western, severely, and to every one’s surprise. “That shrill voice of yours seems to stab my head through and through.”

“Have you a headache, father dear?” said Mary, with concern. Such an occurrence was a rare one.

“Not exactly, but my head seems oppressed and uneasy. I long for quiet,” said the Rector, nervously passing his hand across his forehead. “Lilias – did you say there was a letter from her? How is she? When does she return?”

“Return?” repeated Mary, in surprise. “Why, dear papa, she has not been away a fortnight yet! The London doctors cannot yet say how soon Mr Greville is to go to Hastings, and they mean to stay there a month at least.”

“Ah, yes, to be sure. I am glad she is enjoying herself, poor child, but I shall be glad to have her back again,” said Mr Western, vaguely, but with a slight confusion of manner which struck Mary as unlike his usual clear way of expressing himself. She put it all down to the “headache,” however, as her mother said he had been suffering a little from something of the kind lately. And by the afternoon he seemed quite like himself again.

It was not till after morning school hours that conscientious Mary felt herself free to read the precious letter. She had looked forward to it as a treat all the morning, and had, from the thoughts of it, gathered extra patience with which to deal with her somewhat unruly pupils. They got on rather better this morning, however.

“I shall get them into shape again in a little,” said Mary, to herself, as at last she sat down on the low window-seat in her own room at leisure to read all that Lilias had to say; “but it certainly does not do for me to leave home even for a few days. Even if I could have agreed to go to Romary sometimes, that is another reason against it. And, besides, the life there would spoil me for my home duties.”

A vision, a tempting vision, came over her for a moment of how pleasant a thing “the life there” must be. The quiet and regularity of a well-trained and well-managed household were in themselves a delightful thing to one of Mary’s naturally methodical and orderly nature; then the prettiness of the surroundings, the gardens, and the flowers, and the tastefully furnished rooms, the pictures, and the books, and the pleasant voices whose tones seemed still to ring in her ears. What pleasant talks they could have had, they three together; how kind and attentive to every wish or fancy of hers they would have been; how they would have fêted and made much of her in return for her easy task of nursing Alys, had she but “given in” and agreed to forsake her colours! Mary was by no means indifferent, in her own way, to the agreeableness of much that would have surrounded her position as a guest at Romary; she was a perfectly healthy-natured girl, well able to enjoy when enjoyment came in her way, and a girl too of barely one-and-twenty. She gave a little sigh as she re-opened her letter, hoping, in some vague, half-unconscious way, therein to find consolation and support and tacit approval – ignorant though Lilias was of all details of the sturdy stand she had made.

But she was disappointed.

The letter was a nice letter, a very nice letter, as affectionate, sympathising, and sister-like as a letter could be. Written too in very good spirits, it was evident to see; the very result that Mary had so hoped for from Lilias’s visit seemed already to be accomplished à merveille. Why was not Mary pleased?

“What an inconsistent, selfish creature I must be,” she said to herself, when she had finished it. “Why am I not glad, delighted, to see that Lilias is happy again? If she did not care much for Captain Beverley, if I was mistaken in imagining her whole heart to be given to him, should I not rejoice? It does not alter my position, it does not in the least condone the cruel interference that might have ruined her life.”

She turned again to a passage in which Lilias spoke of the Cheviotts.

“Now that you are at home again,” wrote Miss Western, “you will have more time – at least, you will feel freer to tell me all about the Cheviotts. For it always seems to me a mean sort of thing to sit down and write elaborate pulling to pieces of people whose hospitality one is in the act of receiving, even though in your case the receiving it was certainly enforced and not voluntary. I cannot help thinking Miss Cheviott an unusually lovable girl, and I shall not be at all sorry to hear that you have got rid of your terrible prejudice against the brother; I feel so sure that it is to a great extent undeserved.”

Mary turned over the page impatiently.

“I wish people would not write about what they don’t understand,” she said to herself. “How can Lilias’s ‘feeling sure’ affect the question one way or the other?”

Then glancing again at the letter, she saw that there was a long postscript on a separate sheet yet unread.

“I am forgetting to tell you,” it said, “that I do believe I have come across those cousins of mother of whom you heard something from those Miss Morpeths when you were staying at the Grevilles. It was at the doctor’s. I had gone there with Mr Greville, as he hated going alone, and Mrs Greville had a cold. While we were in the waiting-room, an elderly, very nice-looking lady came in with a tall, thin, dreadfully delicate-looking boy of about seventeen. As Mr Greville was first summoned to the doctor, he happened to say as he left the room, ‘I shall only be a very few minutes this morning, Miss Western.’ Immediately the lady turned to me and asked me very nicely if I happened to be any relation of the Westerns of Hathercourt, and did I know Miss Cheviott of Romary? I was so astonished, but, of course, answered civilly. She seemed so pleased, and so did the boy, poor fellow, when I told them who I was. Mr Greville was back before there was time for any more explanation. But she gave me her card – ‘Mrs Brabazon’ – and asked where I was staying, and said she would hope to see me before we left town. The boy’s name she said was Anselm Brooke, and her own maiden name was Brooke, so they must be mamma’s people. Use your own discretion as to telling mother or not. It may only revive painful associations with her if nothing more comes of it.”

“It is curious,” thought Mary. “I think I may as well tell mother about it. It will give them all something else to talk of besides my adventures at the farm.”

Mrs Western was interested, in her quiet way, in Lilias’s news. Mr Western, somewhat to Mary’s surprise, took it up much more eagerly.

“I should be very thankful, relieved I may say, if some renewal of intercourse could take place with your mother’s relations,” he said when alone with Mary, the subject happening to be alluded to.

“Would you, papa?” said Mary. “I don’t feel as if I cared to know them in the least. We have been very happy and content without them all our lives.”

“Ah, yes! Ah, yes!” said her father. “But who knows, my dear, how long the present state of things may last? Were anything happening to me, I should leave you all strangely friendless and unprotected. The thought of it comes over me very grievously sometimes, and yet I hardly see what I could have done. Basil is so young – a few years hence I trust he may be beginning to get on – but it will be up-hill work.”

“But Lilias and I are strong and ‘capable,’ father,” said Mary, encouragingly. “We could work if needs were, for mother and the younger ones. Besides, you are not an old, or even an elderly man yet, papa.”

“I am not as young and by no means as strong as I have been,” said Mr Western with a sigh. “I don’t like this feeling in my head. I have never had anything like it before, and it makes me fidgety, though I have not said anything to make your mother uneasy. Perhaps it will be better now that I have spoken of it; it may be more nervousness than anything else.”

“I trust so, dear father,” said Mary, anxiously. “Are you not glad to have me back again? Didn’t you miss me dreadfully?” she added, trying to speak more lightly.

“Very much indeed, my dear. I dare say it affected my spirits more than I realised at the time. Yet I could wish, as I was saying, that all of you, you and Lilias especially, had more friends, more outside interests. I hope we have not been selfish and short-sighted in the way we have brought you up – keeping you too much to ourselves, as it were;” again Mr Western sighed. “It is possible, I suppose, to be too devoid of social ambition. By the way,” he went on, “I think that Mr Cheviott must be a very fine fellow. People took up an unreasonable prejudice against him in the country at first from his manner, which, I believe, is cold and stiff. But they are finding themselves mistaken. He must be exceeding clever, and, what is better, thoroughly right-minded. I have been very much pleased by some things I have heard of him lately; he has shown himself so liberal and yet sensible in his dealings with his tenantry.”

“Indeed,” said Mary. She was pleased to see her father roused to his usual healthy interest in such matters, yet wished devoutly the model proprietor in question had not been the master of Romary.

“That place has been grossly mismanaged in the old days,” continued Mr Western. “But it will be a very different story now. How I wish we had a squire of that kind here, there would be some hope then of doing practical and lasting good.”

“Still no squire is better than a bad one,” said Mary. “True, very true. How did you like Mr Cheviott, Mary? I was just thinking I should be rather pleased to make friends with him. He might be a good friend to the boys some day, and no one could say we had courted the acquaintance in the way your mother and I have always so deprecated.”

“No,” said Mary, feebly.

“Coming in such an altogether unexpected way, you see,” pursued Mr Western, who seemed “by the rule of contrary,” thought Mary, to be working himself up to increasing interest on the subject she was so anxious to avoid, “I should not have, by any means, the objection I have always had to such an acquaintance. They are sure to call – in fact, they cannot possibly avoid doing so.”

“I don’t know,” Mary moved herself to say, “I hardly think they will.”

“It will be exceedingly, strangely uncourteous if they do not,” said her father, with unusual warmth. “Surely, my dear, you were not so ill-advised as to say anything to discourage their doing so,” he added, in a tone of most unwonted irritability.

“I am afraid what I said may have indirectly tended to do so,” said poor Mary, feeling as if she were ready on the spot to run all the way to Romary and back to beg Mr Cheviott to call on her father at once.

“You were very foolish, very foolish indeed,” said Mr Western, severely. “It is pride, and very false pride, that is at the root of such things, and I warn you that much future suffering is in store for you if you encourage such a spirit.”

“I can’t imagine any future suffering much worse than the present one of having displeased you,” said Mary, struggling hard to keep back the tears that would come. “But indeed, father, I thought I was doing what you and mamma would like.”

“Your mother has been mistaken before now in such matters,” said Mr Western. “However, there is no more to be said about it. I confess I should have enjoyed seeing more of a man of Mr Cheviott’s character and talents, and it is mortifying at my age to be placed in the position of being unable to receive a friendly call from a neighbour.”

“But I did not put it in that way, papa, indeed I did not,” said Mary. “Oh, papa, cannot you trust me? If there is anything I have thoroughly at heart it is that you should receive all the respect and consideration you so entirely deserve.”

“Ah, well, ah, well, my dear, say no more about it. You have made a mistake, that is all. Do not distress yourself any more about it,” said Mr Western, with some return to his ordinary equanimity. But he pressed his hand wearily against his head as he spoke with the action that was becoming habitual to him, and Mary’s heart felt very heavy. On all sides nothing but reproach. Where or how had she done wrong? Was it all personal pride and offended feeling that had actuated her conduct, under the guise of unselfish devotion? No, take herself to task sharply as she would, her conscience would not say so.

“Though there must have been a mingling of personal feeling and wounded pride, far more than I was conscious of,” she said, regretfully. “And now it is too late. I have myself placed a far more hopeless barrier between us by the scornful way I rejected what – what he said to me, what, indeed, I do not believe he ever would have said had I not in a way goaded him to it. Oh, yes, I must have been wrong – if only I could clearly see how!”

She was too young to have had much experience of that terrible longing, that anguish of yearning “to see how” we have been wrong; too young to understand that, were that cry answered at our entreaty, half our hard battle would be over; too young to have any but the vaguest conception of the bewildering complication of motive in ourselves, as in others, which at times makes “right and wrong” seem but meaningless jargon in our ears, idle words to be presumptuously discarded with other worn-out childishness. As if our childhood were ever over in this world! – as if the existence of eternal truth depended on our understanding of it!

Mr Western’s headache increased to severity that afternoon, and Mary took all the blame of it on to herself, notwithstanding her mother’s consolations and assurances that it would pass off again as it had done before.

Chapter Twenty Five

A Turn of the Wheel

“This changing, and great varianceOf earthly states, up and down,Is not but casualty and chance(As some men say is without ressown).”Robert Henrysoun.

It did “pass off” again. The next day Mr Western seemed nearly as well as usual, though to Mary’s eyes there was a tired and unrestful expression on his face with which she could not feel familiar.

“He is not looking well. He does not seem like his old self, I am certain,” she said in her own mind over and over again. But what could be done? He declared there was nothing really wrong; the very mention of sending for Mr Brandreth irritated him unaccountably, and he was most urgent with Mary to say nothing to arouse her mother’s anxiety. So the utmost Mary could do was to please him in all the small ways ready affection can always suggest, to exert herself to be even more cheerful and entertaining than her wont.

She wrote to Lilias, begging her to let most of her letters be to her father, and urging upon her the desirability of meeting with all possible cordiality Mrs Brabazon’s friendly overtures. But for some days Lilias had nothing more to tell of the new-found cousins.

A week passed, a week of pretty hard work for Mary. What with “the children’s” extra calls upon her patience and attention, her anxiety about her father, and unusual efforts to seem cheerful and light-hearted, its close found her really tired and dispirited.

“Far more tired than with nursing Alys,” she said to herself, when on Saturday afternoon she was taking Brooke and Francie a walk, thankful to know that the more troublesome members of her charge were safely disposed of for the rest of the day in a holiday expedition to old Mr Halkin’s farm. “That was play compared with the worry and fret of the last few days. And why should I feel it so? There is something not right about me just now. I am changed, though I blame the children. I have grown captious and discontented. I do believe that fortnight at the farm spoiled me – the being thanked and praised for everything I did. What a silly goose I am, after all! How I do wish I could hear how Alys is – I do think she might write again, but I suppose it is my own doing,” with a little sigh.

For two or three pencilled words from Miss Cheviott, saying merely that they had got safe to Romary, that she had borne the drive pretty well, but was woefully dull without Mary, were all the news Mary had had of her late patient.

Her thoughts were interrupted by little Francie. She had been running on in front of her brother, but turning suddenly, fled back to Mary in alarm.

“What’s the matter, dear?” her sister exclaimed, for the child was white and trembling.

“A horse,” whispered Francie, “another naughty horse coming so fast, Mary, and it makes me think of that dedful day.”

Francie’s fears had exaggerated facts. The horse, coming up behind them on the soft turf at the side of the path, which deadened the sound of its approach, was proceeding at an ordinary pace, which slackened somewhat when its rider caught sight of the little party in front of him. Slackened, but that was all. Mr Cheviott, for it was he, passed them at a gentle trot, just lifting his hat to Mary as he did so. Mary’s face flushed as she bowed in return.

“I do think,” she said to herself, “as we are not to be friends, it would be much better taste for him not to come our way at all. It will annoy poor father exceedingly, in his nervous state, to hear of Mr Cheviott almost, as it were, passing our door. But, of course, he may have business at the farm.”

And she called to Brooke and Francie, volunteering to tell them a story, and tried her best bravely to force her mind away from the sore subject. But a surprise was in store for her.

More than an hour later, when she and the children were close to the Rectory gate on their return home, little Brooke, who was of an observant turn of mind, called her attention to some fresh hoof marks on the gravel drive.

“See, Mary,” he said, “some one’s been here since we came out. I wonder if it was that horse we met, that the gentleman belonged to that bowed to you?”

“That belonged to the gentleman, you mean,” said Mary, laughing in spite of herself. “Oh! no, I am sure it has not been he, Brooke dear.”

But Mary was wrong. Her mother met her at the door, her face bright and interested, her hands filled with some lovely flowers.

“Mr Cheviott has been here,” she said, eagerly, “and it has done your father so much good. He stayed fully half an hour with him, and talked so pleasantly, your father says, and he brought these flowers for you from his sister with a note. What a pity you were out!”

“I dare say it was quite as well,” said Mary, calmly. “Papa has had him all to himself, and he enjoys a quiet talk with one person alone just now. I am really very glad Mr Cheviott called, as it has pleased papa.”

And in her heart she could not deny that this was behaving with “something like” generosity!

Alys’s note was but a few words – she was not yet allowed to write more, she said – but few as they were, the words were full of affection and gratitude. The London doctor had not yet been, but was expected next week. In the mean time she had to lie perfectly still, and it was rather dull, though “poor Laurence” did his best. And she ended by hoping that Mary would think of her while arranging the flowers. Mary certainly did so – and with feelings of increased affection, not unmingled however with the pain of the old vague self-reproach.

For some days Mr Western seemed quite to have recovered his usual strength and spirits, and Mary was glad to be able to write cheerfully to Lilias, who had been threatening a premature return home, had the news thence not improved.

“Papa is better,” she announced to Mrs Greville, two days after their arrival at Hastings, when the afternoon post brought Mary’s letter.

“It seems to me,” she went on, after receiving Mrs Greville’s congratulations on the good accounts, – “it seems to me that it is far more his spirits than anything else that are affected.”

“But at his age that is not a good sign,” said Mrs Greville.

“I suppose not,” said Lilias, thoughtfully. “Mary says he has begun to think and speak so anxiously about our future in case of anything happening to him.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mr Greville, complacently, “that’s the worst of a large family.”

“The worst and the best too,” said Lilias. “If papa’s health did break down he would have us all to work for him.”

Mr Greville smiled – a not unkindly but somewhat dubious smile.

“Easier said than done, my dear girl,” he said. He rather liked to provoke Lilias into a battle of words, she grew so eager and looked so pretty when she got excited; he would not have objected to a daughter, or even a couple of daughters like her, though the bare thought of all the younger Westerns in the overflowing Rectory made him shiver.

But before Lilias had time to take up her weapons there occurred a sudden diversion. A ring at the front door bell, which, while talking they had not noticed, was followed by the announcement, by Mrs Greville’s maid, that a lady was asking for Miss Western.