Hathercourt

“Very well,” said Mary, meekly enough to outward hearing, though, in her heart, a vow was registered that, short of feeling herself falling bodily out of the carriage, nothing should induce her to resort to such assistance.

“I shall drive slowly, at first,” said Mr Cheviott, “as the mare is already a little excited. But it will not really lose any time to speak of. I was driving foolishly fast when I met you, but then I had only my own neck to think of.”

“And Andrew’s,” suggested Mary.

“And Andrew’s,” he repeated. “But Andrew is experienced in the art of taking care of his neck. I never saw any one with a greater knack of keeping out of damage than he has.”

Was he talking for talking’s sake, or with the intention of setting her at her ease by showing her how completely so he was himself? Mary felt a little puzzled. Thoroughly at ease he certainly was, and, more than this, he seemed to her to be in remarkably good spirits, yet his next observation showed her how far from indifferent he was feeling to the anxiety that she was suffering.

“I fancy we shall just catch Brandreth,” he said, “and you will find no time has been lost. This is his whist club night, and it was to be at old Admiral Maxton’s. They break up at nine, I know – the Admiral is so very old – so the doctor will be just about getting home.”

“Are you going to take me all the way to Withenden?” said Mary, half timidly.

“Certainly,” replied Mr Cheviott, decidedly. “Now, Andrew, let her go. All right.”

But just at first it seemed to Mary more like “all wrong.” With a plunge and a dash that nearly took her breath away, the impatient animal darted forward. How Andrew managed to scramble into his seat was a mystery to Mary. It was all she could do to keep hers; the same giddy feeling came over her, her head reeled, and, with a vague remembrance of Mr Cheviott’s injunction, she caught hold of his arm to steady herself. He was prepared for the movement, and by no means discomposed by it. In a minute or two the mare settled down into a steady pace, and Mary’s head grew steady.

She quietly withdrew her hand.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, somewhat stiffly.

“Not at all,” replied Mr Cheviott, “it’s what I told you to do. But don’t be frightened of Madge – it’s only a little show-off; we quite understand each other.”

“Thank you,” said Mary, imagining a patronising shade in his tone. “I was not the least frightened; I am not nervous.”

“No, you are not, but you are human, Miss Western, and what you have gone through to-night has been enough to try any one’s nerves,” said Mr Cheviott, gravely.

Mary did not reply, though she felt herself ungracious for not doing so. In a minute he went on again.

“I have been thinking,” he said, “of what you told me about your father. Of course I am no doctor, but I believe I can give you a little comfort. This sort of seizure is not so alarming when it comes on, as in his case, gradually; it is not like a man in too good health – a great full-blooded fellow like Squire Cleave, for instance – do you know him? – being struck down suddenly. Your father, as a rule, is so equable, is he not? and lives so quietly and regularly. I fancy he will get over it, and be much the same as usual again. Of course it is serious, but I have a friend at this moment who had an attack of this kind ten years ago, and is now fairly well and able to enjoy life; of course he is obliged to be careful.”

What a load was lifted from Mary’s heart! To be allowed to hope– what a relief! The tears rushed to her eyes, they were in her voice as she replied:

“Oh, how good you are! Thank you, thank you for telling me that,” and in his turn Mr Cheviott made no reply.

“Freedom from anxiety, from daily worry – he has had too much of that – would be greatly in his favour, would it not?” Mary added, after a little pause.

“Undoubtedly, I should say,” said Mr Cheviott, recalling as he spoke the careworn expression of the Rector’s face as he had last seen him. “Peculiarly so in his case, I should say. He is a very sensitive man, is he not?”

“Very,” said Mary, “but not in the sense of being irritable. He is very sweet-tempered. Poor father,” she went on, with a sudden burst of confidence which amazed herself, “he has had far too much anxiety; but if only he gets well, I think and believe that that can be, is going to be, cured.”

“What can she mean?” thought Mr Cheviott, one or two possible solutions of her words darting through his mind. But what she did not tell he of course could not ask, only just then a sudden and unnecessary touch of the whip made Madge start again.

They were close to Withenden by now. Dr Brandreth’s house stood a little out of the town on the side by which they were entering it. Mr Cheviott drew up.

“Suppose we wait here,” he said. “Andrew can be thoroughly trusted to deliver exactly any message you give him, and it might be – perhaps you would not care about clambering up and down again from that high seat?”

Mary’s cheeks grew hot, dark as it was. She did not know whether to be angry or grateful, whether indignantly to declare her indifference to Withenden gossip or to choose, as her conductor evidently wished to suggest, “discretion as the better part of valour.” A moment’s reflection decided her that, considering all he had done and was doing, she had no right to reject the suggestion.

“Thank you,” she said, and, turning to the groom, gave a distinct message, short and to the point. “My letter will be at Dr Brandreth’s before now,” she added to Mr Cheviott, “and that will explain a little. It was asking him to come early to-morrow.”

“That message is all you have to give,” said Andrew’s master as the man was hastening off. “You need not say who brought it, or anything.”

“But, Mr Cheviott,” said Mary, half timidly, half indignantly, “I would not mind all Withenden knowing I had brought it. And – and your driving me here was really an act of pure humanity; no one could say I had done anything in the least not – not nice.”

Her voice quivered a little.

“Certainly not. But don’t you think sometimes – we must take the world as we find it, you know – sometimes it is just as well to give ‘no one’ the power to say good, bad, or indifferent about what we do?” said Mr Cheviott, very gently.

“Perhaps,” said Mary, more humbly than was usual with her. Then she added, “It was not nice of me to say that – about your kindness being an act of pure humanity. I didn’t mean – I only meant – I don’t know what I meant, but I am very, very much obliged to you.”

“But you have no reason to be. It was, as you said, just an act of common humanity,” said Mr Cheviott, with slight bitterness.

”‘Pure,’ I said, not ‘common’,” corrected Mary.

“Well, it’s all the same. How can I think you will consider it even an act of friendliness? You won’t have us for your friends. And even if I were ten times the unmitigated ruffian you believe me to be,” he added, with a slight laugh, “would it not be an immense pleasure to me to return in the slightest degree your goodness to Alys? You do believe I care for her, I think? I am grateful, most grateful, to you and to the dark night, and to the chance that made me choose that way home, for making it possible for me to be of the least service to you.”

“Mr Cheviott,” said Mary, impulsively, “whatever you are, you have behaved most generously to me. It was very good of you to come to papa – after – after all I said.”

“Thank you,” he said in a low voice.

“I wish,” she added, as if speaking to herself, “I wish I could understand you. I hate to do any one injustice.”

“And what if you found that you had done such to me?” he asked, eagerly.

“Of course I would own myself in the wrong, if I saw that I had been,” she replied, proudly, and Mr Cheviott could feel that her head was thrown back with the gesture peculiar to her at times.

“And then?”

“You would – you would forgive me, I suppose,” she said, lightly, but with a slight nervousness in her voice. Mr Cheviott was silent. Mary seemed impelled to go on speaking. “On the whole,” she said, “I think I shall register your kindness to-night as an act of great generosity. Will that do better?”

“As you please,” Mr Cheviott replied, dryly, but, it seemed to Mary, sadly too. And she was right.

“How can she ever see that she did me injustice?” he was saying to himself. “I can never explain things – it is madness to imagine I can ever be cleared.”

Andrew’s report was most satisfactory. Dr Brandreth had just come in and would start at once. The order for his dog-cart had been sent out while the man stood at the door.

“Then,” said Mr Cheviott, “the faster we get back to Hathercourt the better. You would like to be there before Brandreth arrives?”

“Very much,” said Mary.

“Will not your mother have been very uneasy about you?” he added.

“I hope not. I think not,” said Mary, anxiously. “She may have been too absorbed about papa to think of me. And she knows the difficulty. Very likely she thought I was waiting at the Edge till Wills came back again. But, Mr Cheviott, you are not meaning to take me home all the way?”

“What else, what less could I possibly do?” he replied, bluntly.

“Will not your sister be dreadfully uneasy at your being so late?” she asked.

“No, she does not expect me to-night at all – at least, I left it uncertain,” Mr Cheviott replied. “I have been hunting over near Farkingham to-day. It is nearly the last meet of the season, and Alys begged me not to miss it. Then I dined at Cleavelands, half intending to sleep there. But I found there was going to be a dance after dinner, and – somehow I don’t care for that sort of thing, especially without Alys. So I came away.”

No one certainly could have to-night accused Mr Cheviott of stiffness or uncommunicativeness.

“How is Alys?” asked Mary.

“Better, on the whole, better, but it is slow work,” said Mr Cheviott, with a little sigh. A sigh partly of brotherly anxiety, partly of regret for the additional complications this accident of his sister’s had brought into his own and others’ lives. “It may be years before she is thoroughly well again,” he added, and Mary, feeling that there was little she could say in the way of comfort, was silent.

“Can your horse take you all the way home again tonight?” she said, presently.

“I think so. If not, I dare say I can put up for the night at Beverley’s farm,” he said, carelessly, adding, with a slight change of tone, “our old quarters.”

The allusion, somehow, made Mary feel nervous again. In her eagerness to change the subject she flung herself off Scylla into Charybdis – in homelier terms, “out of the frying-pan into the fire.”

“Do you know what came into my head when I first saw you driving so fast up that lane?” she said with a slight laugh.

“No,” he replied. “You did not know who it was. I think you first fancied I was Dr Brandreth, did you not?”

“I thought it just possible. But that is not what I meant. I could not help having a foolish wild sort of fancy that perhaps you were Sir Ingram de Romary – you know the story?”

“The fellow that pitched himself over the Chaldron Falls,” said Mr Cheviott. “Yes, I remember. Your fancies about me are the reverse of complimentary, do you know, Miss Western? The last time you had any such, if I remember right, you took me for the ghost of that other still more disreputable Romary, the fellow that forced an unfortunate ‘heathen Chinee’ girl to marry him, and then abused her so that she threw herself out of the window of the haunted room.”

“Mr Cheviott!” said Mary, reproachfully, her cheeks glowing at the remembrance of that day.

And Mr Cheviott was merciful enough to say no more.

They drove back to Hathercourt very fast. So fast that when they drew up at the Rectory gates there was as yet no sound of Dr Brandreth’s wheels in the distance.

“Will you let me get down here, please?” said Mary. “I don’t want to make them think it is the doctor, as they would only feel disappointed.”

Mr Cheviott got down and helped Mary out of the carriage.

“Would you mind my waiting here an instant?” he said with some hesitation. “Dr Brandreth cannot be here for five or ten minutes yet, and I should be so glad to hear how your father is, and if I can be of any more use.”

“I will run back and tell you – in a moment,” said Mary.

There was no need for her to ring or knock at the hall door. It was on the latch as she had left it, and in a moment, at the sound of her opening it, Alexa, George, and Josey appeared.

“Oh! Mary, we have been so frightened about you,” they began.

“But first tell me how papa is,” she interrupted.

“Better, a little better. He opened his eyes and smiled at mamma, and now he seems to be sleeping, really sleeping, not in that dreadful sort of way,” said Alexa.

Mary gave a sigh of thankfulness.

“Run in and tell mamma Dr Brandreth will be here in five minutes. Has she been very frightened about me?”

“No, dear, we wouldn’t let her,” said Alexa, re-assuringly. “We told her you might have to wait at the Edge till Wills came back, it was raining so.”

“That was very good and sensible of you,” said Mary, at which commendation poor Alexa’s white face grew rosy with pleasure.

“But aren’t you coming in to mamma, Mary?” she said, seeing that her sister, after disentangling herself from a mysterious fluffy shawl in which she was wrapped, was turning away to the door.

“Immediately,” said Mary. “I am only running back to the gate with this rug, to return it to the – the person that lent it me, and who drove me to Withenden.”

“All the way? How very good-natured! What a way you have been! And what a lovely rug. Is that Mrs Wills’s? Surely not,” they all said at once. But Mary wisely paid no heed, she ran to the gate and back again almost before she was missed.

“This is your rug, Mr Cheviott,” she said, breathlessly, “and thank you for it so much, and thank you for everything. And papa is already a very little better, they think.”

“I am so glad,” he said, cordially. “But, Miss Western, how exceedingly foolish of you to have taken off the rug and run out again into the cold without it!”

Mary laughed.

“I am very hardy,” she said, as she ran off again. “Good-night, and thank you again.”

But Mr Cheviott stopped her for an instant.

“Is there nothing I can do to help you?” he asked.

“Nothing – nothing more, I should say,” she replied.

“And – Miss Western, you are not going to sit up all night,” he went on – “promise me you will not; you are not fit for it, and that is not the way to prepare yourself for, perhaps, weeks of nursing.”

“I am truly quite rested and fresh,” she said. “It is very kind of you to think of it. I shall not do anything foolish. Good-night again.”

He did not and had not attempted to shake hands, nor had Mary offered to do so.

“He refused my hand the last time I offered it,” she said to herself. “But on the whole, perhaps, what wonder?”

Dr Brandreth, approaching Hathercourt some ten minutes later, was surprised to meet a dog-cart driving off in an opposite direction. But it passed too quickly for even his quick eyes to identify it.

“Whose trap can that be?” he said to his boy.

“Dunno, sir. Not so very onlike the Romary dogcart neither,” was the reply.

“Impossible!” said the doctor. And in his own mind he wondered why Mary Western had not prosecuted the acquaintanceship with the Cheviotts, so strangely begun.

“It would be a good thing for those girls to make some friends for themselves,” he thought to himself. “Nice as they are, I don’t altogether understand them; they don’t give themselves airs – the very reverse, yet for all that I suspect they are too proud for their own advantage. And if poor Western is really breaking up, goodness only knows what is to become of them!”

Early, very early the next morning, Mr Cheviott’s groom made his appearance at the Rectory to make inquiry, with his master’s compliments, for Mr Western. At the door he was met by “the young lady herself,” coming out for the refreshment of a breath of the sweet spring air, all the sweeter for the last night’s heavy rains.

“And she told me to tell you, sir, with Mrs Western’s compliments, as how the Rector was better than might have been expected, and as how the doctor gives good hopes.”

So “Sir Ingram de Romary” drove home again, and sympathising Alys heard with eager interest of her friend’s new troubles, and longed more than ever to see Mary Western again.

Chapter Twenty Eight

Alys Puts Two and Two Together

“I shall as now do more for youThan longeth to womanhede.”The Nut-brown Mayd.

“Mr Western is not so well, I hear,” said Mr Cheviott to his sister one afternoon, a fortnight or so after the Rector of Hathercourt’s first seizure.

Alys started up from the invalid couch on which she was lying. The brother and sister were in a small morning-room which Alys sometimes called her “boudoir,” though its rather heterogeneous furniture and contents hardly realised the ideas suggested by the word.

“I am so dreadfully sorry,” she exclaimed. “I had a note from Mary yesterday saying he was so much better.”

“These cases are sadly deceptive,” said Miss Winstanley, who was knitting by the window, consolingly. “At Mr Western’s age I should think it extremely doubtful if he recovers. I know two or three almost similar cases that ended fatally, though just at first the doctors thought hopefully of them.”

“How did you hear it, Laurence?” said Alys. “You didn’t send over to-day to inquire, did you?”

“No. Arthur told me. He said that he had met Brandreth on the road somewhere on his way back from the Edge,” said Mr Cheviott, strolling to the window, where he remained standing, looking out.

“I wish you would ask him to come and tell me exactly what Dr Brandreth says,” Alys asked.

“He is not in – he went over to the stables a few minutes ago. I’ll tell him to come and speak to you when he comes back. But I feel sure that was all he heard,” replied Mr Cheviott, without manifesting any surprise at Alys’s extreme interest in the matter.

“I wonder if they have sent for Miss Western – Lilias, the eldest one, I mean,” soliloquised Alys. “Mary said they hoped not to need to do so, as there was some difficulty about her coming home sooner than had been fixed. Poor Mary, how much she must have had to do, and she never thinks of herself or takes any rest. I wish I could do anything to help her!”

Mr Cheviott turned from the window to the fire, and began poking it vigorously.

“Excuse me, Laurence,” said Miss Winstanley, plaintively. “I think the fire’s quite hot enough; it is such a very close evening for April.”

Mr Cheviott laughed and desisted.

“I am out of place in this room,” he said. “I am always doing something clumsy. I’ll send Arthur instead – he’s a much better tame cat than I.”

He turned to leave the room.

“By-the-bye, Alys,” he said, putting his head in at the door again, “you had better make much of Arthur while you have him. He says he must leave the day after tomorrow.”

“And he only came yesterday,” said Alys, regretfully. “It’s too bad – only two days.”

“Three, my dear,” corrected her aunt. “We arrived the day before yesterday. Arthur left Cirencester on Tuesday, and slept Tuesday night in my house, and this is Friday.”

“Well, it’s much the same,” said Alys. “He might stay a little longer. He’s always so busy now. Why should he have such a craze for hard work? It doesn’t suit him at all.”

“My dear!” said Miss Winstanley, reprovingly. “How can you say such a thing? In his circumstances his friends cannot be too thankful that he has taken to some useful employment, which will do him no harm either way, however things turn out.”

Alys pricked up her ears.

“How do you mean ‘in his circumstances,’ aunt? How are his circumstances different from Laurence’s, or any other man’s who has a place and a good income?”

“Oh! I don’t know, my dear,” said Miss Winstanley, evasively. “I told you once before, I don’t know all about Arthur’s affairs. One, two, three – I am so afraid I have got a row too much – by-the-bye, my dear, I wish you wouldn’t talk so much about those Westerns. I warned you of it last year. Laurence does not like them, and the mention of them always irritates him.”

“It was Laurence himself who first mentioned them, as it happens,” said Alys, not too respectfully, it must be confessed.

“Ah, yes, but you said a great deal more, and, as I said last year – ”

“Last year and this are very different, aunt,” said Alys. “Have you forgotten all that Mary Western did for me? No one has recognised it more fully than Laurence.”

“Ah, well, perhaps so. But still he does not like them. Did you not see how he made some excuse for going away, when you would go on talking about them?”

“It was no such thing. It was you fidgeting him about the fire when he was really concerned about Mr Western,” muttered Alys, but too low for her aunt to catch the words. And Miss Winstanley relapsed into her “one, two, three, four,” and for a few minutes there was silence. Then Alys returned to the charge.

“By what you said just now about Arthur’s uncertain circumstances, did you mean the peculiar terms of his father’s will?” she said, demurely.

“Oh, yes, of course, I suppose so, but I wish you would not ask me. I am very stupid about wills and all sorts of law things,” said Miss Winstanley, floundering about helplessly beneath her niece’s diplomatic cross-questioning. “I only meant that for a man who can’t marry and settle down it is an excellent thing to have some employment.”

“And why shouldn’t he marry and settle down?” said Alys. “He will come into his property in two years, when I am twenty-one – I always remember it by that – and till that he could have a good allowance to live on. Why shouldn’t he marry, poor fellow? I think it very hard lines that he shouldn’t.”

“But – ” began Miss Winstanley.

“But, aunt,” said Alys, who was “working herself up” on a subject she was at all times inclined to grow rather hot about, “I really mean what I say. It is the only one thing I have ever really felt inclined to quarrel with Laurence for I can tell you that Arthur has been much nearer marrying than you have any idea of, and – ”

It was Miss Winstanley’s turn to interrupt. “My dear!” she exclaimed, letting her knitting-needles fall on her lap in her excitement, “you don’t mean to say that he – that you – you won’t be twenty-one for two years.”

“What do you mean, aunt?” said Alys. “What has my being or not being twenty-one to do with Arthur’s marrying?”

Miss Winstanley looked as if she were going to cry.

“Why will you always begin about this subject, Alys?” she said, pathetically. “I thought you meant – ”

“Well, tell me that, any way,” said Alys. “You must tell me what you thought I meant.”

“Oh, nothing. I must have mistaken you. It was only when you said that about his having thought of marrying – before your accident, of course – and I knew he took it so much to heart, but of course that was natural on all accounts,” said Miss Winstanley, confusedly.

Alys sat bolt up on her couch, thereby setting all her doctor’s orders at defiance. A red spot glowed on each cheek, her eyes were sparkling. Miss Winstanley could see that she was growing very excited – the thing of all others to be avoided for her! – and the poor lady’s alarm and distress added to her nervousness and confusion.

“Now, aunt,” said Alys, calmly, “you must tell me what I want to know. I am not so blind and childish as you have all imagined. I have known for a good while that there was some strange complication which was putting everything wrong, in which, somehow, I was concerned. Don’t make yourself unhappy by thinking it has been all your doing that I have come to know anything about it. It has been no one person’s doing; it has just been that I have ‘put two and two together’ for myself.”

“Alys,” ejaculated her aunt, “what an expression for you to use!”

“It expresses what I mean,” said Alys, pushing back the hair off her throbbing temples. “And since I have been ill I have had so much time for thinking and wondering and puzzling out things – and I think I have become quicker, cleverer, in a way than I used to be. I seem as if I could almost guess at things by magic, sometimes. Now, aunt, what I want to know is this– is Arthur’s future in any way dependent on me, or anything I may or may not do?”