Hathercourt

“Of course not,” her cousin interrupted. “Everything is to go to him eventually – old Brooke not having any one to provide for, and not wishing to cut up the property – but Mrs Western will, for life, be very well off indeed, and so will the whole family. Each daughter and younger son will have what is really a comfortable little fortune. The Marshover Brookes are very rich, you know.”

“And to think how poor the Westerns have been!” said Alys, regretfully.

“Yes; but a few years ago nothing could have seemed more remote than their chance of succession. And, after all, even very rich people can’t look after all their poor relations.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Alys, with a sigh. “Will they leave Hathercourt?”

“Sure to, I should think. Mr Brooke wants them to go to Marshover, Mrs Western says, and keep it up for him, as he will be most of the year abroad. He is not obliged to do anything for them during his life, you see, but he has already settled an ample income on Mrs Western, and Basil is to go into the army, and George to college.”

“I shall never see Mary again, all the same.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, but I am certain she will never come here. Arthur, I think she dislikes Laurence too much ever to come here.”

Arthur opened his eyes.

“Dislikes Laurence!” he repeated. “Why should she?”

“She does,” persisted Alys, “and Laurence knows it.”

“Well, we’ll see. Perhaps Lilias may help us to overcome Mary’s prejudice,” said Arthur, with a smile. “And failing Mary, Alys, you won’t be sorry to have Lilias for – for a sister– will you, Alys?”

Alys smiled, and her smile was enough.

All this happened in spring. Early in the autumn of that same year Lilias and Arthur were married. They were married at Hathercourt – in the old church which had seen the bride grow up from a child into a woman, and had been associated with all the joys and sorrows of her life – the old church beneath whose walls had lain for many long years the mortal remains of Arthur Beverley’s far-back ancestress, the “Mawde” who had once been a fair young bride herself.

“As fair perhaps, as happy and hopeful as Lilias,” thought Mary, as her eyes once more wandered to the well-known tablet on the wall, with a vague wonder as to what “Mawde” would think of it all could she see the group now standing before the altar. Then there came before her memory, like a dream, the thought of the Sunday morning, not, after all, so very long ago, when the little party of strangers had invaded the quiet church, and so disturbed her own and her sister’s devotions. And again she seemed to see herself looking up into Mr Cheviott’s face in the porch, while she asked him to come into the Rectory to rest.

“He smiled so kindly, I remember,” thought Mary, “and there was something in his face that made me feel as if I could trust him. And so I might have done – ah! how hasty and prejudiced I have been – thank Heaven, I have injured no one else by my folly, however!”

And then she repeated to herself a determination she had come to – there was one thing, be the cost to her pride what it might, that she would do, and to-day, she said to herself should, if possible, see it done.

It was a very quiet marriage – for every reason it had seemed best to have it so. There were the considerations of Mr Western’s still uncertain health, of the mourning in the Brooke family with which that of Lilias was now identified, of Alys Cheviott’s invalid condition, and even of Captain Beverley’s own anomalous position, as still, by his father’s will, a minor, and at present, therefore, far from a wealthy man, though every hope was now entertained that before long he would be in legal possession of his own. There were no strangers present – only the Grevilles and Mrs Brabazon, besides the large group of brothers and sisters, and Mr Cheviott as “best man,” and Lilias and her husband drove off in no coach and four, but in the quiet little brougham now added to the Rectory establishment, for Mr Western’s benefit principally, when he was at Hathercourt. For Hathercourt was not to be deserted, though only a part of the year was now spent there by the Rector’s family, and to the curate, whose services he now could well afford, was deputed the more active part of the work. They had all been at Marshover for some months past, and had only returned to Hathercourt a few weeks before the marriage.

“I could hardly believe in any family event of great importance happening to us anywhere else – we seem so identified with our old home. I like to think I shall end my days here, after all,” Mr Western was saying, with inoffensive egotism, to Mr Cheviott, as they stood together in the window after the hero and heroine of the day had gone, when Mary came up and joined them.

“Yes, father,” she said, gently. “I remember your saying so, ever so long ago. I think,” she added, turning to Mr Cheviott, “it was the afternoon of that Sunday you all drove over to church here – do you remember?”

Mr Cheviott smiled slightly.

“I remember,” he said, quietly. “I have never been inside the church since, till to-day. If it is still open I would like to look round it, if I may?” turning to Mr Western for permission.

“It is not open,” said Mary, answering for her father, “but I can get the key in an instant, and, if you like,” she went on, considerably to Mr Cheviott’s surprise, “I will go with you.”

He thanked her, and they went. But, before fitting the great key into the old lock, as they stood once again by themselves in the church porch, Mary turned to her companion.

“Mr Cheviott,” she said, “I offered to come with you because I wanted an opportunity for saying something to you that I did not wish any one else to hear. I have never seen you alone since – since a day several months ago, when Lilias, by Arthur’s wish, explained everything to me, and I want just to tell you simply, once for all, that I am honestly ashamed of having misjudged you as I did, and – and – I hope you will forgive me.”

Mr Cheviott looked at her for a moment without speaking – her face was slightly flushed, her eyes bright and with a touch of appeal in them – half shy, half confident, which carried his thoughts, too, back to the last time they had stood there together. She looked not unlike what she had done then, but he – There was no smile in his face as he replied.

“Thank you,” he said. “It is kind and brave of you to say this, but I cannot say I forgive you. I have nothing to forgive. If I were not afraid of reviving what to you must be a most unpleasant memory, I would rather ask if you can forgive me for my much graver offences against you?”

“How? What do you mean?” said Mary, startled and chilled a little by his tone.

“My inconsideration and presumption are what I refer to,” he said. “I cannot now imagine what came over me to make me say what I did – but you will forgive and forget, will you not, Miss Western? We are connections now, you see – it would never do for us to quarrel. I once said – you remember – that speech is the one which I think I must have been mad to utter – that in other circumstances, had I had fair play, I could have succeeded in what I was then insane enough to dream of. Now my aspirations are surely reasonable enough to deserve success – all I ask is that you will forget all that passed at that time, and believe that, in a general way, I am not an infatuated fool.”

Mary had grown deadly pale. She drew herself back against the wall, as if for support.

“No,” she said, in a hard, constrained tone, “no, that I cannot do. You ask too much. I can never forget.”

Mr Cheviott gazed at her in astonishment. For one instant, for the shadow of an instant, a gleam darted across his face —could it be? —could she mean? – he asked himself, but, before his thought had taken form, Mary dashed it to the ground.

“I am ashamed of myself for being so easily upset,” she said, almost in her ordinary tone, “but I have had a good deal to tire me lately. We needn’t say any more, Mr Cheviott, about forgiving and forgetting, and all such sentimental matters. I have made my amende, and you have made yours, and it’s all right.”

Mr Cheviott’s voice was at its coldest and hardest when he spoke again.

“As you please,” was all he said, and Mary, foolish Mary, turned from him to hide the scorching tears that were beginning to come, and fumbled with the key till she succeeded in opening the door.

“There now,” she said, lightly. “I must run home. I don’t think you will require a cicerone for this church, Mr Cheviott,” and before he could reply, she was gone. Gone – to try to smile when she thought her heart was breaking, to seem cheerful and merry when over and over again there rang through her brain the cruel words – “He never cared for me, he says himself it was an infatuation. He is ashamed to remember it; oh no, he never really cared for me, or else my own words turned his love into contempt and dislike – and what wonder!”

Two or three days after Lilias’s marriage Mary heard from Alys Cheviott. She and her brother were leaving England almost immediately, she said, for several months. The letter was kind and affectionate, but it did not even allude to the possibility of her seeing Mary before they left.

“Good-bye, Alys,” said Mary, as she folded it up and one or two hot tears fell in the envelope. “Good-bye, dear Alys; and good-bye to the prize I threw from me, when it might have been mine – surely the best chance of happiness that ever woman was offered!”

Chapter Thirty One

A Farewell Visit to Romary

“He desired in a wife an intellect that, if not equal to his own, could become so by sympathy – a union of high culture and noble aspiration, and yet of loving womanly sweetness which a man seldom finds out of books; and when he does find it perhaps it does not wear the sort of face that he fancies.”

The Parisians.

The Westerns were not to spend this winter at Marshover. It was too cold for Mr Western, and so was Hathercourt. A house, therefore, for the worst of the season had been taken at Bournemouth, and there old Mr Brooke had promised to spend with them his otherwise solitary Christmas.

“I’m so glad you are going to Bournemouth,” said Mrs Greville one day, a few weeks after Lilias’s marriage, when she had driven over to say good-bye to her old friends before they left; “it is such a nice cheerful place, and plenty going on there. Quite a pleasant little society. It will be an advantage for the girls if, as Mrs Brabazon tells me, they are to be in town next year.”

“But Alexa and Josephine will not be at Bournemouth except for a week at Christmas,” said Mary. “They will be at school.”

“And Alexa is too young to go out at least for another year,” said Mrs Western.

“But there is Mary. You are not going to school again, are you, Mary?” said Mrs Greville, laughingly, turning to her.

“I almost wish I were!” she replied, “excepting that I should not like to leave mother. But I shall not go out at all, dear Mrs Greville, either at Bournemouth or in town. I don’t care for society.”

“How can you tell till you have tried?” said her friend.

“That’s just it. I don’t know anything at all about it, and I feel too old to get into the way of it.”

“Mary!” exclaimed Mrs Greville; “what an idea! At one-and-twenty,” and even Mrs Western looked slightly surprised.

“I can understand your thinking you will never care for things of the kind much, and I dare say you never will,” Mary’s mother observed. “But if not for your own, it may for others’ sakes – for your younger sisters’ – be necessary for you to go a little into society.”

“Ah, well – not at present, any way, and possibly never,” said Mary. “Alexa would make a much better Miss Western than I.”

Mrs Greville smiled.

“Are you tired of your honours already, Mary?” she said. “Well, who knows!”

“I didn’t mea – ” began Mary, flushing slightly, “besides, it has always been settled that I was the old maid of the family.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs Greville. “That reminds me, you will find some old friends at Bournemouth – the Morpeths; you don’t know, Mary, what an impression you made on Vance Morpeth.”

Mary looked annoyed. “That boy!” she exclaimed, hastily, “my dear Mrs Greville – ”

“He isn’t a boy – he is five-and-twenty,” interrupted Mrs Greville, slightly ruffled. “Of course I don’t mean to say that now, with your present prospects you might not be justified in – well, to use a common phrase, though not a very refined one, in ‘looking higher’.”

“Dear Mrs Greville!” exclaimed both Mary and her mother together. “Don’t say things like that, please,” Mary went on. “You don’t really think that I would be influenced by that kind of consideration? – you don’t think so poorly of me?”

“No, my dear, I do not. I think you and all of you a great deal too unworldly; I wish, for your own sakes, you were a little more influenced by considerations of that kind,” said Mrs Greville, nodding her head sagaciously, and just then, some one calling Mrs Western from the room, she went on in a lower voice, “Why are you so desperately cold to Mr Cheviott, my dear? Do you really dislike him so hopelessly?”

“Who said I disliked him?” exclaimed Mary, sharply, and the slight extra colour on her cheeks deepened now into hot, angry crimson.

“My dear! Don’t be so fierce. Surely you can’t have forgotten all the things you yourself said against him. Why, you would not even go to see through Romary till I coaxed you into it – just because it was his house. I assure you your aversion to him became quite a joke among us – Vance Morpeth always speaks of him as your bête noire.”

Mary was silent. What else could she be?

“I only wish you had not expressed your dislike to or before me,” continued Mrs Greville. “I should have been only too glad to have been able to say that I had never heard of it when Alys Cheviott told me how it had distressed and disappointed her.”

“Did Alys speak of it?” said Mary, surprised and a little annoyed.

“Yes, to me – not to any one else. You need not be indignant at it, Mary. It came about quite naturally. You know I have seen a good deal of her this summer while you were all at Marshover. She seemed to like my going over there, and she has been very lonely, poor girl. That aunt of hers is such a goose! And one day she was asking me all about you, and she added quite naturally how much she wished you would sometimes go to see her.”

“But I was away,” pleaded Mary, not quite honestly.

“Yes, just then; but you had been at home quite long enough to go if you had wished, and that was Alys’s disappointment. She told me that almost her first thought, when everything was cleared up between Lilias and Captain Beverley, was, ‘And now I shall be able to see Mary,’ thinking, of course, that when you understood that Mr Cheviott’s dread had been altogether unselfish – fear of Arthur’s ruining himself by disobeying the will – you would at once lose your dislike to him.”

“And what does she now think?” asked Mary.

“She doesn’t know what to think. She fears that in some way Mr Cheviott has so deeply offended you that your dislike – prejudice – whatever it is – to him, is incurable.”

Again, for a moment, Mary was silent. Then she said, hesitatingly.

“Has she – do you think, Mrs Greville – said anything of this to Mr Cheviott?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs Greville. “But of course, my dear Mary, you cannot pretend to be so modest as to fancy that your staying away from them – from Alys, at least – in this marked way, cannot have attracted attention. After the service you did them – the great obligation you put them under to you, and Alys’s constantly expressed affection and gratitude – your refusing to go to her, when she couldn’t come to you, was a very strong measure. And, to speak plainly, unless you had the very strongest reasons for it, I think it was very unkind to that poor girl.”

Mary, for some little time past, had been believing her punishment complete. Now, as Mrs Greville spoke, she realised that it had not been so. She had been cruel to Alys; she had allowed her own feelings – her mortification at the past, her proud terror of possible misapprehension in the future – to override what was the clearest and plainest of duties. “I am not worthy to be called a friend,” she said to herself, and tears filled her eyes as she turned to Mrs Greville.

“Thank you,” she said, gently, “for what you have said. It will not have been in vain.”

And Mrs Greville kissed and told her if she were proud and prejudiced, she was also honest and magnanimous. And then the good lady drove herself home in her pony-carriage with a comfortable feeling of self-satisfaction, and a vague, not unpleasing suspicion that she might turn out to have been a sort of “Deus ex machinâ,” or “benevolent fairy god-mother, we’ll say,” she added to herself, not feeling quite sure of the Latin of the first phrase, or that it did not savour a little of profanity, “just to give a little shove to affairs at the right moment.”

All day Mary thought and thought over what she should do. Could she get to see Alys, now at the eleventh hour, for the Cheviotts, if they had not already done so, must be on the eve of quitting Romary for the winter? Should she write to Mrs Greville and ask her to convey some message? Should she – so many months had passed since she had seen Alys that a little further delay could be of small consequence – should she wait for an opportunity of seeing Lilias, and asking her to explain? To explain what, and how? Ah! no. Explanation of any kind was impossible, and the necessity for it she had nothing but her own foolish conduct to thank for. At last – “I will attempt no explanation, no excuse, or palliation,” she decided, “Alys is generosity itself. I will trust her by asking her to trust me.” And that same evening she wrote to her a few simple words, which she felt to be all she could say.

“My dear Alys,” she said, “will you forgive me? I see now that I have made a grievous mistake, done a wrong and cruel thing in never going to see you all this time. This knowledge has come to me suddenly and startlingly, and I cannot rest till I write to you. I cannot explain to you what has distorted my way of seeing things, but I ask you to forgive me, and to believe that, selfishly and unkindly as I have acted, there has not been a day, scarcely an hour, since we were together in which I have not thought of you.

“Yours affectionately, —

“Mary Western.”

And when this letter was written and sent, Mary felt happier than she had done for a long time. Was it all “the reward of a good conscience?” Was there not deep down, unrecognised, in a corner of her “inner consciousness,” wherever that debatable land may be, a hope, a possibility of a hope rather, that Mrs Greville’s statement, to some extent, explained the change in Mr Cheviott’s manner? What if Alys, after all, had been the innocent marplot – suggesting to her brother in her disappointment that the “all coming right” of Lilias’s affairs had not resulted in a complete change of attitude on Mary’s part; that her dislike to him must be even deeper founded than could be explained by her misjudgment of his conduct towards her sister? What if they had both been at cross-purposes – each attributing to the other a prejudice that no longer existed – which, indeed, Mary had done nothing to remove his belief in on her part – which, as existing on his side towards her, she had imagined to have yielded temporarily to what he himself had described as an “infatuation,” but to return with tenfold strength?

All this she did not say to herself in distinct words, but the suggestion had taken root in her heart, and was not to be dislodged. And though days grew into weeks before there came from Alys an answer to her letter, Mary went about through those weeks with lightened steps and hopeful eyes. She could not distrust Alys, she told herself; and her mother, seeing her so cheerful, congratulated herself that Mary was “getting over” the loss of Lilias, which she had been beginning to fear had greatly depressed her.

Alys’s letter, when it did come, was all that Mary had expected and more, much more than she felt herself to have deserved.

“I will not ask you to explain anything,” wrote Alys, “I am more than satisfied. I cannot tell you what a change it makes in my life to be able to look forward to seeing you as much and as often as you can be spared to me. It will help me to be patient, and to try to get strong again. I am likely to be much alone when we return to England, for Laurence is thinking of letting Romary and taking a house for me somewhere not very far from town. He seems to have taken a dislike to a country life, and says he thinks he would be better if he had ‘more to do.’ I cannot agree with him that such a thing is possible, for I have never known him idle for half an hour.”

Mary gave a little sigh as she folded up the letter – that was all. And soon after came on the time for the family move to Bournemouth, and with a strange feeling of regret she again said good-bye to Hathercourt.

The winter passed, uneventfully enough on the whole. There was a flying visit from Lilias and her husband on their way back from Italy to the small country-house that was to be their home for the next two years; there were old Mr Brooke and Mrs Brabazon and the two schoolgirls, Alexa and Josey, for Christmas; there were, for Mary, very occasional glimpses of Bournemouth society; but with these exceptions her daily life was what many girls of her age would have considered very monotonous. She did not seem to find it so, however; she appeared, indeed, what Lilias called so “aggravatingly contented” that she owned to Arthur, with a sigh, that, after all, she greatly feared that the family prophecy about Mary was going to turn out true.

“At one-and-twenty,” she said, lugubriously, “she really seems to be steadily developing into an old maid.”

“Wait a little,” said Arthur. “Mrs Brabazon is determined to have her in town for some weeks. There is still hope of Mary’s proving to be not altogether superior to youthful vanities and frivolities.”

“Very little, I fear,” said Lilias, half smiling, half provoked.

Mrs Brabazon had her way – Mary did go to town, and, after her own fashion, enjoyed herself. She was generally liked, in some cases specially admired, but that was all. She gently repulsed all approach to anything more, and, though grateful to Mrs Brabazon, perplexed her by her calm equability in the midst of a life novel and exciting enough to have turned a less philosophical young head. If, indeed, it were “all philosophy,” thought Mary’s shrewd cousin, and not, to some extent, preoccupation?

One day towards the end of April – Mary had been six weeks in town – there came a letter from Bournemouth, asking her, if possible, to go to Hathercourt for a day or two, to make some arrangements preparatory to Mr and Mrs Western’s return there, “which,” wrote her mother, “no one but you, dear Mary, can see to satisfactorily, sorry as I am to interrupt your pleasant visit.”

Mrs Brabazon was somewhat put out. She had two or three specially desirable engagements for the next few days; but, though Mary heartily expressed her regret at the summons being, from her hostess’s point of view, thus ill-timed, she owned to herself rather enjoying the prospect than otherwise.

“I am an incurable country cousin, dear Mrs Brabazon,” she said; “you will have more satisfaction in every way with Alexa, if you are kind enough to take charge of her next year.”

“And where do you intend to be then?” said Mrs Brabazon, amused, in spite of herself, at Mary’s tone.

“I shall have retired to my own corner. I have always been told I should be an old maid,” said Mary, laughingly.

And two days later found her at Uxley. She was not to stay at Hathercourt, the Rectory being just released from the hands of painters and decorators, and unfit for habitation, and Mrs Greville delighted to seize the chance of a visit from one of her old favourites.

The day before that fixed for Mary’s return to town Mrs Greville came into the drawing-room with a note in her hand.