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The Clever Woman of the Family

by Charlotte M. Yonge · English · Gutenberg #3292 · 1,026,489 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Clever Woman of the Family

Author: Charlotte M. Yonge


        
Release date: June 1, 2002 [eBook #3292]
                Most recently updated: August 4, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3292

Credits: Produced by Sandra Laythorpe, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY ***




THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY

by Charlotte M. Yonge

From the 1880 edition published by MacMillan and Co., London.




CHAPTER I. IN SEARCH OF A MISSION


 “Thou didst refuse the daily round
    Of useful, patient love,
 And longedst for some great emprise
    Thy spirit high to prove.”—C. M. N.

 “Che mi sedea con l’antica Rachele.”—DANTE.


“It is very kind in the dear mother.”

“But what, Rachel? Don’t you like it? She so enjoyed choosing it for
you.”

“Oh yes, it is a perfect thing in its way. Don’t say a word to her; but
if you are consulted for my next birthday present, Grace, couldn’t you
suggest that one does cease to be a girl.”

“Only try it on, Rachel dear, she will be pleased to see you in it.”

“Oh yes, I will bedizen myself to oblige her. I do assure you I am not
ungrateful. It is beautiful in itself, and shows how well nature can be
imitated; but it is meant for a mere girl, and this is the very day I
had fixed for hauling down the flag of youth.”

“Oh, Rachel.”

“Ah, ha! If Rachel be an old maid, what is Grace? Come, my dear, resign
yourself! There is nothing more unbecoming than want of perception of
the close of young-ladyhood.”

“Of course I know we are not quite young girls now,” said Grace, half
perplexed, half annoyed.

“Exactly, from this moment we are established as the maiden sisters of
Avonmouth, husband and wife to one another, as maiden pairs always are.”

“Then thus let me crown, our bridal,” quoth Grace, placing on her
sister’s head the wreath of white roses.

“Treacherous child!” cried Rachel, putting up her hands and tossing her
head, but her sister held her still.

“You know brides always take liberties. Please, dear, let it stay till
the mother has been in, and pray don’t talk before her of being so very
old.”

“No, I’ll not be a shock to her. We will silently assume our immunities,
and she will acquiesce if they come upon her gradually.”

Grace looked somewhat alarmed, being perhaps in some dread of
immunities, and aware that Rachel’s silence would in any one else have
been talkativeness.

“Ah, mother dear, good morning,” as a pleasant placid-looking lady
entered, dressed in black, with an air of feeble health, but of comely
middle age.

Birthday greetings, congratulations, and thanks followed, and the mother
looked critically at the position of the wreath, and Rachel for the
first time turned to the glass and met a set of features of an
irregular, characteristic cast, brow low and broad, nose retroussé, with
large, singularly sensitive nostrils quivering like those of a high-bred
horse at any emotion, full pouting lips, round cheeks glowing with
the freshest red, eyes widely opened, dark deep grey and decidedly
prominent, though curtained with thick black lashes. The glossy chestnut
hair partook of the redundance and vigour of the whole being, and the
roses hung on it gracefully though not in congruity with the thick
winter dress of blue and black tartan, still looped up over the dark
petticoat and hose, and stout high-heeled boots, that like the grey
cloak and felt hat bore witness to the early walk. Grace’s countenance
and figure were in the same style, though without so much of mark or
animation; and her dress was of like description, but less severely
plain.

“Yes, my dear, it looks very well; and now you will oblige me by not
wearing that black lace thing, that looks fit for your grandmother.”

“Poor Lovedy Kelland’s aunt made it, mother, and it was very expensive,
and wouldn’t sell.”

“No wonder, I am sure, and it was very kind in you to take it off their
hands; but now it is paid for, it can’t make much difference whether you
disfigure yourself with it or not.”

“Oh yes, dear mother, I’ll bind my hair when you bid me do it and really
these buds do credit to the makers. I wonder whether they cost them
as dear in health as lace does,” she added, taking off the flowers and
examining them with a grave sad look.

“I chose white roses,” proceeded the well-pleased mother, “because I
thought they would suit either of the silks you have now, though I own I
should like to see you in another white muslin.”

“I have done with white muslin,” said Rachel, rousing from her reverie.
“It is an affectation of girlish simplicity not becoming at our age.”

“Oh Rachel!” thought Grace in despair; but to her great relief in at
that moment filed the five maids, the coachman, and butler, and the
mother began to read prayers.

Breakfast over, Rachel gathered up her various gifts, and betook herself
to a room on the ground floor with all the appliances of an ancient
schoolroom. Rather dreamily she took out a number of copy-books, and
began to write copies in them in large text hand.

“And this is all I am doing for my fellow-creatures,” she muttered half
aloud. “One class of half-grown lads, and those grudged to me! Here is
the world around one mass of misery and evil! Not a paper do I take up
but I see something about wretchedness and crime, and here I sit with
health, strength, and knowledge, and able to do nothing, nothing—at the
risk of breaking my mother’s heart! I have pottered about cottages and
taught at schools in the dilettante way of the young lady who thinks it
her duty to be charitable; and I am told that it is my duty, and that
I may be satisfied. Satisfied, when I see children cramped in soul,
destroyed in body, that fine ladies may wear lace trimmings! Satisfied
with the blight of the most promising buds! Satisfied, when I know that
every alley and lane of town or country reeks with vice and corruption,
and that there is one cry for workers with brains and with purses!
And here am I, able and willing, only longing to task myself to the
uttermost, yet tethered down to the merest mockery of usefulness by
conventionalities. I am a young lady forsooth!—I must not be out late,
I must not put forth my views; I must not choose my acquaintance, I must
be a mere helpless, useless being, growing old in a ridiculous fiction
of prolonged childhood, affecting those graces of so-called sweet
seventeen that I never had—because, because why? Is it for any better
reason than because no mother can bear to believe her daughter no longer
on the lists for matrimony? Our dear mother does not tell herself that
this is the reason, but she is unconsciously actuated by it. And I have
hitherto given way to her wish. I mean to give way still in a measure;
but I am five and twenty, and I will no longer be withheld from some
path of usefulness! I will judge for myself, and when my mission has
declared itself, I will not be withheld from it by any scruple that does
not approve itself to my reason and conscience. If it be only a domestic
mission—say the care of Fanny, poor dear helpless Fanny, I would that
I knew she was safe,—I would not despise it, I would throw myself into
it, and regard the training her and forming her boys as a most sacred
office. It would not be too homely for me. But I had far rather become
the founder of some establishment that might relieve women from the
oppressive task-work thrown on them in all their branches of labour. Oh,
what a worthy ambition!”

“Rachel!” called Grace. “Come, there’s a letter, a letter from Fanny
herself for you. Make haste, mamma is so nervous till you read it.”

No exhortation was needed to make Rachel hurry to the drawing-room, and
tear open the black-edged letter with the Australian stamp.

“All is right, mamma. She has been very ill, but is fast recovering, and
was to sail by the Voluta. Why, she may be here any day.”

“Any day! My dear Grace, see that the nurseries are well aired.”

“No, mother, she says her party is too large, and wants us to take a
furnished house for her to come into at once—Myrtlewood if possible. Is
it let, Grace?”

“I think I saw the notice in the window yesterday.”

“Then, I’ll go and see about it at once.”

“But, my dear, you don’t really mean that poor dear Fanny thinks of
coming anywhere but to us?” said her mother, anxiously.

“It is very considerate of her,” said Grace, “with so many little
children. You would find them too much for you, dear mother. It is just
like Fanny to have thought of it. How many are there, Rachel?”

“Oh! I can’t tell. They got past my reckoning long ago. I only know they
are all boys, and that this baby is a girl.”

“Baby! Ah, poor Fanny, I feared that was the reason the did not come
sooner.”

“Yes, and she has been very ill; she always is, I believe, but there
is very little about it. Fanny never could write letters; she only just
says: ‘I have not been able to attempt a letter sooner, though my dear
little girl is five weeks old to-day. Think of the daughter coming at
last, too late for her dear father, who had so wished for one. She is
very healthy, I am thankful to say; and I am now so much better, that
the doctor says I may sail next week. Major Keith has taken our cabins,
in the Voluta, and soon after you receive this, I hope to be showing you
my dear boys. They are such good, affectionate fellows; but I am afraid
they would be too much for my dear aunt, and our party is so large, so
the Major and I both think it will be the best way for you to take a
house for me for six months. I should like Myrtlewood best, if it is to
be had. I have told Conrade all about it, and how pretty it is, and it
is so near you that I think there I can be happy as ever I can be again
in this world, and have your advice for the dear children.’”

“Poor darling! she seems but a child herself.”

“My age—five and twenty,” returned Rachel. “Well I shall go and ask
about the house. Remember, mother, this influx is to bring no trouble or
care on you; Fanny Temple is my charge from henceforth. My mission has
come to seek me,” she added as she quitted the room, in eager excitement
of affection, emotion, and importance, for Fanny had been more like a
sister than a cousin.

Grace and Rachel Curtis were the daughters of the squire of the
Homestead; Fanny, of his brother, an officer in the army. Left at home
for education, the little girl had spent her life, from her seventh to
her sixteenth year, as absolutely one with her cousins, until she was
summoned to meet her father at the Cape, under the escort of his old
friend, General Sir Stephen Temple. She found Colonel Curtis sinking
under fatal disease, and while his relations were preparing to receive,
almost to maintain, his widow and daughter, they were electrified by the
tidings that the gentle little Fanny, at sixteen, had become the wife of
Sir Stephen Temple, at sixty.

From that time little had been known about her; her mother had continued
with her, but the two Mrs. Curtises had never been congenial or
intimate; and Fanny was never a full nor willing correspondent, feeling
perhaps the difficulty of writing under changed circumstances. Her
husband had been in various commands in the colonies, without returning
to England; and all that was known of her was a general impression that
she had much ill-health and numerous children, and was tended like an
infant by her bustling mother and doting husband. More than half a year
back, tidings had come of the almost sudden death of her mother; and
about three months subsequently, one of the officers of Sir Stephen’s
staff had written to announce that the good old general had been killed
by a fall from his horse, while on a round of inspection at a distance
from home. The widow was then completely prostrated by the shock, but
promised to write as soon as she was able, and this was the fulfilment
of that promise, bringing the assurance that Fanny was coming back with
her little ones to the home of her childhood.

Of that home, Grace and Rachel were the joint-heiresses, though it was
owned by the mother for her life. It was an estate of farm and moorland,
worth some three or four thousand a year, and the house was perched on
a beautiful promontory, running out into the sea, and inclosing one side
of a bay, where a small fishing-village had recently expanded into a
quiet watering-place, esteemed by some for its remoteness from railways,
and for the calm and simplicity that were yearly diminished by its
increasing popularity. It was the family fashion to look down from
their crag at the new esplanade with pity and contempt for the ruined
loneliness of the pebbly beach; and as Mrs. Curtis had not health to go
often into society, she had been the more careful where she trusted her
daughters. They belonged to the county by birth and tradition, and were
not to be mixed up with the fleeting residents of the watering-place, on
whom they never called, unless by special recommendation from a mutual
friend; and the few permanent inhabitants chanced to be such, that a
visit to them was in some degree a condescension. Perhaps there was more
of timidity and caution than of pride in the mother’s exclusiveness, and
Grace had always acquiesced in it as the natural and established state
of affairs, without any sense of superiority, but rather of being
protected. She had a few alarms as to the results of Rachel’s new
immunities of age, and though never questioning the wisdom of her clever
sister’s conclusions, dreaded the effect on the mother, whom she
had been forbidden to call mamma. “At their age it was affecting an
interesting childishness.”

Rachel had had the palm of cleverness conceded to her ever since she
could recollect, when she read better at three years old than her sister
at five, and ever after, through the days of education, had enjoyed, and
excelled in, the studies that were a toil to Grace. Subsequently, while
Grace had contented herself with the ordinary course of unambitious
feminine life, Rachel had thrown herself into the process of
self-education with all her natural energy, and carried on her favourite
studies by every means within her reach, until she considerably
surpassed in acquirements and reflection all the persons with whom she
came in frequent contact. It was a homely neighbourhood, a society well
born, but of circumscribed interests and habits, and little connected
with the great progressive world, where, however, Rachel’s sympathies
all lay, necessarily fed, however, by periodical literature, instead of
by conversation or commerce with living minds.

She began by being stranded on the ignorance of those who surrounded
her, and found herself isolated as a sort of pedant; and as time went
on, the narrowness of interests chafed her, and in like manner left
her alone. As she grew past girlhood, the cui bono question had come to
interfere with her ardour in study for its own sake, and she felt the
influence of an age eminently practical and sifting, but with small
powers of acting. The quiet Lady Bountiful duties that had sufficed her
mother and sister were too small and easy to satisfy a soul burning at
the report of the great cry going up to heaven from a world of sin and
woe. The examples of successful workers stimulated her longings to be up
and doing, and yet the ever difficult question between charitable works
and filial deference necessarily detained her, and perhaps all the more
because it was not so much the fear of her mother’s authority as of her
horror and despair, that withheld her from the decisive and eccentric
steps that she was always feeling impelled to take. Gentle Mrs. Curtis
had never been a visible power in her house, and it was through their
desire to avoid paining her that her government had been exercised over
her two daughters ever since their father’s death, which had taken place
in Grace’s seventeenth year. Both she and Grace implicitly accepted
Rachel’s superiority as an unquestionable fact, and the mother, when
traversing any of her clever daughter’s schemes, never disputed either
her opinions or principles, only entreated that these particular
developments might be conceded to her own weakness; and Rachel generally
did concede. She could not act; but she could talk uncontradicted, and
she hated herself for the enforced submission to a state of things that
she despised.

This twenty-fifth birthday had long been anticipated as the
turning-point when this submissive girlhood ought to close, and the
privileges of acting as well as thinking for herself ought to be
assumed. Something to do was her cry, and on this very day that
something seemed to be cast in her way. It was not ameliorating the
condition of the masses, but it was educating those who might ameliorate
them; and Rachel gladly hailed the prospect of a vocation that might be
conducted without pain to her mother.

Young children of her own class were not exactly what her dream
of usefulness had devised; but she had already a decided theory of
education, and began to read up with all her might, whilst taking the
lead in all the details of house taking, servant hiring, &c., to which
her regular occupations of night school in the evening and reading to
the lacemakers by day, became almost secondary. In due time the arrival
of the ship was telegraphed, a hurried and affectionate note followed,
and, on a bright east-windy afternoon, Rachel Curtis set forth to take
up her mission. A telegram had announced the arrival of the Voluta, and
the train which would bring the travellers to Avonchester. The Homestead
carriage was sent to meet them, and Rachel in it, to give her helpless
cousin assistance in this beginning of English habits. A roomy fly had
been engaged for nurses and children, and Mrs. Curtis had put under the
coachman’s charge a parcel of sandwiches, and instructed him to offer
all the appliances for making her own into an invalid carriage.

Full of warm tenderness to those who were to be dependent on her
exertions, led by her good sense, Rachel paced the platform till the
engine rushed up, and she looked along the line of windows, suddenly
bewildered. Doors opened, but gentlemen alone met her disappointed eye,
until close to her a soft voice said, “Rachel!” and she saw a figure in
deep black close to her; but her hand had been hardly clasped before
the face was turned eagerly to a tall, bearded man, who was lifting out
little boy after little boy, apparently in an endless stream, till at
last a sleeping baby was brought out in the arms of a nurse.

“Good-bye. Thank you, oh, thank you. You will come soon. Oh, do come on
now.”

“Do come on now,” was echoed by many voices.

“I leave you in good hands. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. Conrade dear, see what Cyril is doing; never mind, Wilfred,
the Major will come and see us; run on with Coombe.” This last was a
respectable military-looking servant, who picked up a small child in one
hand and a dressing-case in the other, and awaited orders.

There was a clinging to the Major by all the children, only ended by his
finally precipitating himself into the carriage, and being borne off.
Then came a chorus—“Mamma, let me go with you;” “I’ll go with mamma;”
 “Me go with mamma;” according to the gradations of age.

While Coombe and mamma decided the question by lifting the lesser
ones into the fly, Rachel counted heads. Her mission exceeded her
expectations. Here was a pair of boys in knickerbockers, a pair in
petticoats, a pair in pelisses, besides the thing in arms. When the fly
had been nearly crammed, the two knickerbockers and one pelisse remained
for the carriage, quite against Rachel’s opinion, but “Little Wilfred
can sit on my lap, he has not been well, poor little man,” was quite
conclusive; and when Rachel suggested lying back to rest, there was a
sweet, low laugh, and, “Oh, no thank you, Wilfred never tires me.”

Rachel’s first satisfaction was in seeing the veil disclose the face of
eight years back, the same soft, clear, olive skin, delicate, oval face,
and pretty deep-brown eyes, with the same imploring, earnest sweetness;
no signs of having grown older, no sign of wear and tear, climate, or
exertion, only the widow’s dress and the presence of the great boys
enhancing her soft youthfulness. The smile was certainly changed; it was
graver, sadder, tenderer, and only conjured up by maternal affection or
in grateful reply, and the blitheness of the young brow had changed to
quiet pensiveness, but more than ever there was an air of dependence
almost beseeching protection, and Rachel’s heart throbbed with
Britomart’s devotion to her Amoret.

“Why wouldn’t the Major come, mamma?”

“He will soon come, I hope, my dear.”

Those few words gave Rachel a strong antipathy to the Major.

Then began a conversation under difficulties, Fanny trying to inquire
after her aunt, and Rachel to detail the arrangements made for her at
Myrtlewood, while the two boys were each accommodated with a window;
but each moment they were claiming their mother’s attention, or rushing
across the ladies’ feet to each other’s window, treating Rachel’s knees
as a pivot, and vouchsafing not the slightest heed to her attempts at
intelligent pointing out of the new scenes.

And Fanny made no apology, but seemed pleased, ready with answers and
with eyes, apparently ignorant that Rachel’s toes were less insensible
than her own, and her heavy three-years-old Wilfred asleep on her lap
all the time.

“She feeble, helpless, sickly!” thought Rachel, “I should have been less
tired had I walked the twenty miles!”

She gave up talking in despair, and by the time the young gentlemen had
tired themselves into quiescence, and began to eat the provisions, both
ladies were glad to be allowed a little silence.

Coming over the last hill, Conrade roused at his mother’s summons
to look out at “home,” and every word between them showed how fondly
Avonmouth had been remembered far away.

“The sea!” said Fanny, leaning forwards to catch sight of the long grey
line; “it is hard to believe we have been on it so long, this seems so
much more my own.”

“Yes,” cried Rachel, “you are come to your own home, for us to take care
of you.”

“I take care of mamma! Major Keith said so,” indignantly exclaimed
Conrade.

“There’s plenty of care for you both to take,” said Fanny, half-smiling,
half-sobbing. “The Major says I need not be a poor creature, and I will
try. But I am afraid I shall be on all your hands.”

Both boys drummed on her knee in wrath at her presuming to call herself
a poor creature—Conrade glaring at Rachel as if to accuse her of the
calumny.

“See the church,” said Lady Temple, glad to divert the storm, and
eagerly looking at the slender spire surmounting the bell-turret of a
small building in early-decorated style, new, but somewhat stained by
sea-wind, without having as yet acquired the tender tints of time. “How
beautiful!” was her cry. “You were beginning the collection for it when
I went away! How we used to wish for it.”

“Yes, we did,” said Rachel, with a significant sigh; but her cousin had
no time to attend, for they were turning in a pepper-box lodge. The boys
were told that they were arrived, and they were at the door of a sort
of overgrown Swiss cottage, where Mrs. Curtis and Grace stood ready to
receive them.

There was a confusion of embraces, fondlings, and tears, as Fanny clung
to the aunt who had been a mother to her—perhaps a more tender one than
the ruling, managing spirit, whom she had hardly known in her childhood;
but it was only for a moment, for Wilfred shrieked out in an access of
shyness at Grace’s attempt to make acquaintance with him; Francis was
demanding, “Where’s the orderly?” and Conrade looking brimful of wrath
at any one who made his mother cry. Moreover, the fly had arrived,
and the remainder had to be produced, named, and kissed—Conrade and
Francis, Leoline and Hubert, Wilfred and Cyril, and little Stephana the
baby. Really the names were a study in themselves, and the cousins felt
as if it would be hopeless to endeavour to apply them.

Servants had been engaged conditionally, and the house was fully ready,
but the young mother could hardly listen to her aunt’s explanations
in her anxiety that the little ones should be rested and fed, and she
responded with semi-comprehending thanks, while moving on with her
youngest in her arms, and as many hanging to her dress as could get hold
of it. Her thanks grew more emphatic at the sight of cribs in inviting
order, and all things ready for a meal.

“I don’t drink tea with nurse,” was Conrade’s cry, the signal for
another general outcry, untranquillized by soothings and persuasions,
till the door was shut on the younger half of the family, and those who
could not open it remained to be comforted by nurse, a soldier’s widow,
who had been with them from the birth of Conrade.

The Temple form of shyness seemed to consist in ignoring strangers,
but being neither abashed nor silenced, only resenting or avoiding all
attempts at intercourse, and as the boys rushed in and out of the rooms,
exploring, exclaiming, and calling mamma, to the interruption of all
that was going on, only checked for a few minutes by her uplifted hand
and gentle hush, Grace saw her mother so stunned and bewildered that she
rejoiced in the fear of cold that had decided that Rachel alone should
spend the evening there. Fanny made some excuses; she longed to see more
of her aunt, but when they were a little more settled,—and as a fresh
shout broke out, she was afraid they were rather unruly,—she must come
and talk to her at the dear Homestead. So kind of Rachel to stay—not
that the boys seemed to think so, as they went racing in and out,
stretching their ship-bound legs, and taking possession of the minute
shrubbery, which they scorned for the want of gum-trees and parrots.

“You won’t mind, Rachel dear, I must first see about baby;” and Rachel
was left to reflect on her mission, while the boys’ feet cantered up and
down the house, and one or other of them would look in, and burst away
in search of mamma.

Little more satisfactory was the rest of the evening, for the boys took
a great deal of waiting on at tea, and then some of the party would not
go to sleep in strange beds without long persuasions and comfortings,
till Fanny looked so weary that it was plain that no conversation could
have been hoped from her, even if the baby had been less vociferous. All
that could be done for her was to wish her good-night, and promise to
come down early.

Come early! Yes, Rachel might come, but what was the use of that when
Fanny was at the mercy of so many claimants? She looked much better
than the day before, and her sweet, soft welcome was most cordial and
clinging. “Dear Rachel, it is like a dream to have you so near. I felt
like the old life come back again to hear the surge of the sea all
night, and know I should see you all so soon again.”

“Yes, it is a great satisfaction to have you back in your old home,
under our wing. I have a great deal to tell you about the arrangements.”

“Oh yes; thank you—”

“Mamma!” roared two or three voices.

“I wanted to explain to you—” But Fanny’s eye was roaming, and just
then in burst two boys. “Mamma, nurse won’t undo the tin box, and my
ship is in it that the Major gave me.”

“Yes, and my stuffed duck-bill, and I want it, mamma.”

“My dear Con, the Major would not let you shout so loud about it, and
you have not spoken to Aunt Rachel.”

The boys did present their hands, and then returned to the charge.
“Please order nurse to unpack it, mamma, and then Coombe will help us to
sail it.”

“Excuse me, dear Rachel,” said Fanny, “I will first see about this.”

And a very long seeing it was, probably meaning that she unpacked the
box herself, whilst Rachel was deciding on the terrible spoiling of the
children, and preparing a remonstrance.

“Dear Rachel, you have been left a long time.”

“Oh, never mind that, but, Fanny, you must not give way to those
children too much; they will be always—Hark! was that the door-bell?”

It was, and the visitor was announced as “Mr. Touchett;” a small, dark,
thin young clergyman he was, of a nervous manner, which, growing more
nervous as he shook hands with Rachel, became abrupt and hesitating.

“My call is—is early, Lady Temple; but I always pay my respects at
once to any new parishioner—resident, I mean—in case I can be of any
service.”

“Thank you, I am very much obliged,” said Fanny, with a sweet, gracious
smile and manner that would have made him more at ease at once, if
Rachel had not added, “My cousin is quite at home here, Mr. Touchett.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “so—so I understood.”

“I know no place in England so well; it is quite a home to me, so
beautiful it is,” continued Fanny.

“And you see great changes here.”

“Changes so much for the better,” said Fanny, smiling her winning smile
again.

“One always expects more from improvements than they effect,” put in
Rachel, severely.

“You have a large young party,” said Mr. Touchett, looking uneasily
towards Lady Temple.

“Yes, I have half a dozen boys and one little girl.”

“Seven!” Mr. Touchett looked up half incredulous at the girlish contour
of the gentle face, then cast down his eyes as if afraid he had been
rude. “Seven! It is—it is a great charge.”

“Yes, indeed it is,” she said earnestly; “and I am sure you will be kind
enough to give your influence to help me with them—poor boys.”

“Oh! oh!” he exclaimed, “anything I can do—” in such a transport of
eager helpfulness that Rachel coldly said, “We are all anxious to assist
in the care of the children.” He coloured up, and with a sort of effort
at self-assertion, blurted out, “As the clergyman of the parish—,” and
there halted, and was beginning to look foolish, when Lady Temple took
him up in her soft, persuasive way. “Of course we shall look to you so
much, and you will be so kind as to let me know if there is any one I
can send any broth to at anytime.”

“Thank you; you are very good;” and he was quite himself again. “I shall
have the pleasure of sending you down a few names.”

“I never did approve the broken victual system,” began Rachel, “it
creates dependence.”

“Come here, Hubert,” said Fanny, beckoning a boy she saw at a distance,
“come and shake hands with Mr. Touchett.” It was from instinct rather
than reason; there was a fencing between Rachel and the curate that
made her uncomfortable, and led her to break it off by any means in her
power; and though Mr. Touchett was not much at his ease with the little
boy, this discussion was staged off. But again Mr. Touchett made bold to
say that in case Lady Temple wished for a daily governess, he knew of a
very desirable young person, a most admirable pair of sisters, who had
met with great reverses, but Rachel snapped him off shorter than ever.
“We can decide nothing yet; I have made up my mind to teach the little
boys at present.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“It is very kind,” said the perplexed Lady Temple.

“I beg your pardon, I only thought, in case you were wishing for some
one, that Miss Williams will be at liberty shortly.”

“I do not imagine Miss Williams is the person to deal with little boys,”
 said Rachel. “In fact, I think that home teaching is always better than
hired.”

“I am so much obliged,” said Fanny, as Mr. Touchett, after this defeat,
rose up to take leave, and she held out her hand, smiled, thanked, and
sent him away so much sweetened and gratified, that Rachel would have
instantly begun dissecting him, but that a whole rush of boys broke in,
and again engrossed their mother, and in the next lull, the uppermost
necessity was of explaining about the servants who had been hired for
the time, one of whom was a young woman whose health had given way over
her lace pillow, and Rachel was eloquent over the crying evils of the
system (everything was a system with Rachel) that chained girls to an
unhealthy occupation in their early childhood, and made an overstocked
market and underpaid workers—holding Fanny fast to listen by a sort
of fascination in her overpowering earnestness, and great fixed eyes,
which, when once their grasp was taken, would not release the victim;
and this was a matter of daily occurrence on which Rachel felt keenly
and spoke strongly.

“It is very sad. If you want to help the poor things, I will give
anything I can.”

“Oh, yes, thank you, but it is doleful merely to help them to linger out
the remnant of a life consumed upon these cobwebs of vanity. It is the
fountainhead that must be reached—the root of the system!”

Fanny saw, or rather felt, a boy making signs at the window, but durst
not withdraw her eyes from the fascination of those eager ones. “Lace
and lacemakers are facts,” continued Rachel; “but if the middle men
were exploded, and the excess of workers drafted off by some wholesome
outlet, the price would rise, so that the remainder would be at leisure
to fulfil the domestic offices of womanhood.”

There was a great uproar above.

“I beg your pardon, dear Rachel,” and away went Fanny.

“I do declare,” cried Rachel, when Grace, having despatched her
home-cares, entered the room a quarter of an hour after; “poor Fanny’s a
perfect slave. One can’t get in a word edgeways.”

Fanny at last returned, but with her baby; and there was no chance for
even Rachel to assert herself while this small queen was in presence.
Grace was devoted to infants, and there was a whole court of brothers
vying with one another in picking up her constantly dropped toys, and in
performing antics for her amusement. Rachel, desirous to be gracious and
resigned, attempted conversation with one of the eldest pair, but the
baby had but to look towards him, and he was at her feet.

On her departure, Rachel resumed the needful details of the arrangements
respecting the house and servants, and found Lady Temple as grateful and
submissive as ever, except that, when advised to take Myrtlewood for a
term of seven years, she replied, that the Major had advised her not to
bind herself down at once.

“Did you let him think we should quarrel?”

“Oh, no, my dear; but it might not agree with the children.”

“Avonmouth! Grace, do you hear what heresy Fanny has been learning? Why,
the proportion of ozone in the air here has been calculated to be five
times that of even Aveton!”

“Yes, dearest,” said poor Fanny, very humbly, and rather scared, “there
is no place like Avonmouth, and I am sure the Major will think so when
he has seen it.”

“But what has he to do with your movements?”

“Sir Stephen wished—” murmured Fanny.

“The Major is military secretary, and always settles our head-quarters,
and no one interferes with him,” shouted Conrade.

Rachel, suspicious and jealous of her rival, was obliged to let Fanny
pass on to the next item, where her eager acceptance of all that
was prescribed to her was evidently meant as compensation for her
refractoriness about the house.

Grace had meanwhile applied herself to keeping off the boys, and was
making some progress in their good graces, and in distinguishing between
their sallow faces, dark eyes, and crisp, black heads. Conrade was
individualized, not only by superior height, but by soldierly bearing,
bright pride glancing in his eyes, his quick gestures, bold, decided
words, and imperious tone towards all, save his mother—and whatever he
was doing, his keen, black eye was always turning in search of her, he
was ever ready to spring to her side to wait on her, to maintain her
cause in rough championship, or to claim her attention to himself.
Francis was thick-set, round-shouldered, bullet-headed and dull-eyed,
in comparison, not aggressive, but holding his own, and not
very approachable; Leoline, thin, white-cheeked, large-eyed and
fretful-lipped, was ready to whine at Conrade’s tyranny and Francis’s
appropriations, but was grateful for Grace’s protection, and more easy
of access than his elders; and Hubert was a handsome, placid child, the
good boy, as well as the beauty of the family. The pair in the nursery
hardly came on the stage, and the two elders would be quite sufficient
for Mrs. Curtis, with whom the afternoon was to be spent.

The mother, evidently, considered it a very long absence, but she was
anxious to see both her aunt and her own home, and set out, leaning
on Rachel’s arm, and smiling pleased though sad recognition of the
esplanade, the pebbly beach, bathing machines and fishing boats, and
pointing them out to her sons, who, on their side, would only talk of
the much greater extent of Melbourne.

Within the gates of the Homestead, there was a steep, sharp bit of road,
cut out in the red sandstone rock, and after a few paces she paused to
rest with a sigh that brought Conrade to her side, when she put her arm
round his neck, and leant on his shoulder; but even her two supporters
could not prevent her from looking pale and exhausted.

“Never mind,” she said, “this salt wind is delightful. How like old
times it is!” and she stood gazing across the little steep lawn at
the grey sea, the line of houses following the curve of the bay,
and straggling up the valley in the rear, and the purple headlands
projecting point beyond point, showing them to her boys, and telling
their names.

“It is all ugly and cold,” said Francis, with an ungracious shiver. “I
shall go home to Melbourne when I’m a man.”

“And you will come, mamma?” added Conrade.

He had no answer, for Fanny was in her aunt’s arms; and, like mother and
daughter, they clung to each other—more able to sympathize, more truly
one together, than the young widow could be with either of the girls.

As soon as Fanny had rested and enjoyed the home atmosphere downstairs,
she begged to visit the dear old rooms, and carried Conrade through a
course of recognitions through the scarcely altered apartments. Only one
had been much changed, namely, the schoolroom, which had been stripped
of the kindly old shabby furniture that Fanny tenderly recollected, and
was decidedly bare; but a mahogany box stood on a stand on one side;
there was a great accession of books, and writing implements occupied
the plain deal table in the centre.

“What have you done to the dear old room—do you not use it still?”
 asked Fanny.

“Yes, I work here,” said Rachel.

Vainly did Lady Temple look for that which women call work.

“I have hitherto ground on at after-education and self-improvement,”
 said Rachel; “now I trust to make my preparation available for others. I
will undertake any of your boys if you wish it.”

“Thank you; but what is that box?”—in obedience to a curious push and
pull from Conrade.

“It is her dispensary,” said Grace.

“Yes,” said Rachel, “you are weak and nervous, and I have just the thing
for you.”

“Is it homoeopathy?”

“Yes, here is my book. I have done great things in my district, and
should do more but for prejudice. There, this globule is the very thing
for your case; I made it out last night in my book. That is right, and I
wanted to ask you some questions about little Wilfred.”

Fanny had obediently swallowed her own globule, but little Wilfred was
a different matter, and she retreated from the large eyes and open book,
saying that he was better, and that Mr. Frampton should look at him; but
Rachel was not to be eluded, and was in full career of elucidation to
the meanest capacity, when a sharp skirmish between the boys ended
the conversation, and it appeared that Conrade had caught Francis
just commencing an onslaught on the globules, taking them for English
sweetmeats of a minute description.

The afternoon passed with the strange heaviness well known to those who
find it hard to resume broken threads after long parting. There was much
affection, but not full certainty what to talk about, and the
presence of the boys would have hindered confidence, even had they not
incessantly occupied their mother. Conrade, indeed, betook himself to
a book, but Francis was only kept out of mischief by his constantly
turning over pictures with him; however, at dark, Coombe came to convey
them home, and the ladies of the Homestead experienced a sense of
relief. Rachel immediately began to talk of an excellent preparatory
school.

“I was thinking of asking you,” said Fanny, “if there is any one here
who would come as a daily governess.”

“Oh!” cried Rachel, “these two would be much better at school, and I
would form the little ones, who are still manageable.”

“Conrade is not eight years old yet,” said his mother in an imploring
tone, “and the Major said I need not part with him till he has grown a
little more used to English ways.”

“He can read, I see,” said Grace, “and he told me he had done some Latin
with the Major.”

“Yes, he has picked up a vast deal of information, and on the voyage the
Major used to teach him out of a little pocket Virgil. The Major said it
would not be of much use at school, as there was no dictionary; but
that the discipline and occupation would be useful, and so they were.
Conrade, will do anything for the Major, and indeed so will they all.”

Three Majors in one speech, thought Rachel; and by way of counteraction
she enunciated, “I could undertake the next pair of boys easily, but
these two are evidently wanting school discipline.”

Lady Temple feathered up like a mother dove over her nest.

“You do not know Conrade. He is so trustworthy and affectionate, dear
boy, and they are both always good with me. The Major said it often
hurts boys to send them too young.”

“They are very young, poor little fellows,” said Mrs. Curtis.

“And if they are forward in some things they are backward in others,”
 said Fanny. “What Major Keith recommended was a governess, who would
know what is generally expected of little boys.”

“I don’t like half measures,” muttered Rachel. “I do not approve
of encouraging young women to crowd the overstocked profession of
governesses.”

Fanny opened her brown eyes, and awaited the words of wisdom.

“Is it not a flagrant abuse,” continued Rachel, “that whether she have
a vocation or not, every woman of a certain rank, who wishes to gain her
own livelihood, must needs become a governess? A nursery maid must have
a vocation, but an educated or half-educated woman has no choice;
and educator she must become, to her own detriment, and that of her
victims.”

“I always did think governesses often much to be pitied,” said Fanny,
finding something was expected of her.

“What’s the use of pity if one runs on in the old groove? We must
prevent the market from being drugged, by diverting the supply into new
lines.”

“Are there any new lines?” asked Fanny, surprised at the progress of
society in her absence.

“Homoeopathic doctresses,” whispered Grace; who, dutiful as she was,
sometimes indulged in a little fun, which Rachel would affably receive
unless she took it in earnest, as in the present instance.

“Why not—I ask why not? Some women have broken through prejudice, and
why should not others? Do you not agree with me, Fanny, that female
medical men—I mean medical women—would be an infinite boon?”

“It would be very nice if they would never be nervous.”

“Nerves are merely a matter of training. Think of the numbers that might
be removed from the responsibility of incompetently educating! I declare
that to tempt a person into the office of governess, instead of opening
a new field to her, is the most short-sighted indolence.”

“I don’t want to tempt any one,” said Fanny. “She ought to have been
out before and be experienced, only she most be kind to the poor boys. I
wanted the Major to inquire in London, but he said perhaps I might hear
of some one here.”

“That was right, my dear,” returned her aunt. “A gentleman, an officer,
could not do much in such a matter.”

“He always does manage whatever one wants.”

At which speech Rachel cast a glance towards her mother, and saw her
look questioning and perplexed.

“I was thinking,” said Grace, “that I believe the people at the Cliff
Cottages are going away, and that Miss Williams might be at liberty.”

“Didn’t I know that Grace would come out with Miss Williams?” exclaimed
Rachel. “A regular eruption of the Touchettomania. We have had him
already advertising her.”

“Miss Williams!” said Mrs. Curtis. “Yes, she might suit you very well.
I believe they are very respectable young women, poor things! I have
always wished that we could do more for them.”

“Who?” asked Fanny.

“Certain pets of Mr. Touchett’s,” said Rachel; “some of the numerous
ladies whose mission is that curatolatry into which Grace would lapse
but for my strenuous efforts.”

“I don’t quite know why you call them his pets,” said Grace, “except
that he knew their antecedents, and told us about them.”

“Exactly, that was enough, for me. I perfectly understand the meaning of
Mr. Touchett’s recommendations, and if what Fanny wants is a commonplace
sort of upper nursemaid, I dare say it would do.” And Rachel leant back,
applied herself to her wood carving, and virtually retired from the
discussion.

“One sister is a great invalid,” said Grace, “quite a cripple, and the
other goes out as a daily governess. They are a clergyman’s daughters,
and once were very well off, but they lost everything through some
speculation of their brother. I believe he fled the country under some
terrible suspicion of dishonesty; and though no one thought they had
anything to do with it, their friends dropped them because they would
not give him up, nor believe him guilty, and a little girl of his lives
with them.”

“Poor things!” exclaimed Lady Temple. “I should very much like to employ
this one. How very sad.”

“Mrs. Grey told me that her children had never done so well with any
one,” said Mrs. Curtis. “She wanted to engage Miss Williams permanently,
but could not induce her to leave her sister, or even to remove her to
London, on account of her health.”

“Do you know her, Grace?” asked Fanny.

“I have called once or twice, and have been very much pleased with the
sick sister; but Rachel does not fancy that set, you see. I meet the
other at the Sunday school, I like her looks and manner very much, and
she is always at the early service before her work.”

“Just like a little mauve book!” muttered Rachel.

Fanny absolutely stared. “You go, don’t you, Rachel? How we used to wish
for it!”

“You have wished and we have tried,” said Rachel, with a sigh.

“Yes, Rachel,” said Grace; “but with all drawbacks, all disappointments
in ourselves, it is a great blessing. We would not be without it.”

“I could not be satisfied in relinquishing it voluntarily,” said Rachel,
“but I am necessarily one of the idle. Were I one of the occupied,
laborare est orare would satisfy me, and that poor governess ought to
feel the same. Think of the physical reaction of body on mind, and tell
me if you could have the barbarity of depriving that poor jaded thing
of an hour’s sleep, giving her an additional walk, fasting, in all
weathers, and preparing her to be savage with the children.”

“Perhaps it refreshes her, and hinders her from being cross.”

“Maybe she thinks so; but if she have either sense or ear, nothing
would so predispose her to be cross as the squeaking of Mr. Touchett’s
penny-whistle choir.”

“Poor Mr. Touchett,” sighed Mrs. Curtis; “I wish he would not make such
ambitious attempts.”

“But you like the choral service,” said Fanny, feeling as if everything
had turned round. “When all the men of a regiment chant together you
cannot think how grand it is, almost finer than the cathedral.”

“Yes, where you can do it,” said Rachel, “but not where you can’t.”

“I wish you would not talk about it,” said Grace.

“I must, or Fanny will not understand the state of parties at
Avonmouth.”

“Parties! Oh, I hope not.”

“My dear child, party spirit is another word for vitality. So you
thought the church we sighed for had made the place all we sighed to see
it, and ourselves too. Oh! Fanny is this what you have been across the
world for?”

“What is wrong?” asked Fanny, alarmed.

“Do you remember our axiom? Build your church, and the rest will take
care of itself. You remember our scraping and begging, and how that good
Mr. Davison helped us out and brought the endowment up to the needful
point for consecration, on condition the incumbency was given to him.
He held it just a year, and was rich, and could help out his bad health
with a curate. But first he went to Madeira, and then he died, and
there we are, a perpetual curacy of £70 a year, no resident gentry but
ourselves, a fluctuating population mostly sick, our poor demoralized
by them, and either crazed by dissent, or heathenized by their former
distance from church. Who would take us? No more Mr. Davisons! There was
no more novelty, and too much smartness to invite self-devotion. So
we were driven from pillar to post till we settled down into this Mr.
Touchett, as good a being as ever lived, working as hard as any two, and
sparing neither himself nor any one else.”

Fanny looked up prepared to admire.

“But he has two misfortunes. He was not born a gentleman, and his mind
does not measure an inch across.”

“Rachel, my dear, it is not fair to prejudice Fanny; I am sure the poor
man is very well-behaved.”

“Mother! would you be calling the ideal Anglican priest, poor man?”

“I thought he was quite gentlemanlike,” added Fanny.

“Gentlemanlike! ay, that’s it,” said Rachel, “just so like as to delight
the born curatolatress, like Grace and Miss Williams.”

“Would it hurt the children?” asked Fanny, hardly comprehending the
tremendous term.

“Yes, if it infected you,” said Rachel, intending some playfullness. “A
mother of contracted mind forfeits the allegiance of her sons.”

“Oh, Rachel, I know I am weak and silly,” said the gentle young widow,
terrified, “but the Major said if I only tried to do my duty by them I
should be helped.”

“And I will help you, Fanny,” said Rachel. “All that is requisite is
good sense and firmness, and a thorough sense of responsibility.”

“That is what is so dreadful. The responsibility of all those dear
fatherless boys, and if—if I should do wrong by them.”

Poor Fanny fell into an uncontrollable fit of weeping at the sense of
her own desolation and helplessness, and Mrs. Curtis came to comfort
her, and tell her affectionately of having gone through the like
feelings, and of the repeated but most comfortable words of promise to
the fatherless and the widow—words that had constantly come before the
sufferer, but which had by no means lost their virtue by repetition, and
Fanny was soothed with hearing instances of the special Providence over
orphaned sons, and their love and deference for their mother. Rachel,
shocked and distressed at the effect of her sense, retired out of the
conversation, till at the announcement of the carriage for Lady Temple,
her gentle cousin cheered up, and feeling herself to blame for having
grieved one who only meant aid and kindness, came to her and fondly
kissed her forehead, saying, “I am not vexed, dear Rachel, I know you
are right. I am not clever enough to bring them up properly, but if I
try hard, and pray for them, it may be made up to them. And you will
help me, Rachel dear,” she added, as her readiest woe-offering for her
tears, and it was the most effectual, for Rachel was perfectly contented
as long as Fanny was dependent on her, and allowed her to assume her
mission, provided only that the counter influence could be averted,
and this Major, this universal referee, be eradicated from her foolish
clinging habits of reliance before her spirits were enough recovered to
lay her heart open to danger.

But the more Rachel saw of her cousin, the more she realized this peril.
When she went down on Monday morning to complete the matters of business
that had been slurred over on the Saturday, she found that Fanny had
not the slightest notion what her own income was to be. All she knew
was that her General had left everything unreservedly to herself, except
£100 and one of his swords to Major Keith, who was executor to the
will, and had gone to London to “see about it,” by which word poor Fanny
expressed all the business that her maintenance depended on. If an
old general wished to put a major in temptation, could he have found a
better means of doing so? Rachel even thought that Fanny’s incapacity to
understand business had made her mistake the terms of the bequest, and
that Sir Stephen must have secured his property to his children; but
Fanny was absolutely certain that this was not the case, for she said
the Major had made her at once sign a will dividing the property among
them, and appointing himself and her Aunt Curtis their guardians. “I did
not like putting such a charge on my dear aunt,” said Fanny, “but the
Major said I ought to appoint a relation, and I had no one else! And I
knew you would all be good to them, if they had lost me too, when baby
was born.”

“We would have tried,” said Rachel, a little humbly, “but oh! I am glad
you are here, Fanny!”

Nothing could of course be fixed till the Major had “seen about it.”
 After which he was to come to let Lady Temple know the result; but she
believed he would first go to Scotland to see his brother. He and his
brother were the only survivors of a large family, and he had been on
foreign service for twelve years, so that it would be very selfish to
wish him not to take full time at home. “Selfish,” thought Rachel; “if
he will only stay away long enough, you shall learn, my dear, how well
you can do without him!”

The boys had interrupted the conversation less than the previous one,
because the lesser ones were asleep, or walking out, and the elder ones
having learnt that a new week was to be begun steadily with lessons,
thought it advisable to bring themselves as little into notice as
possible; but fate was sure to pursue them sooner or later, for Rachel
had come down resolved on testing their acquirements, and deciding
on the method to be pursued with them; and though their mamma, with a
curtain instinctive shrinking both for them and for herself, had put
off the ordeal to the utmost by listening to all the counsel about her
affairs, it was not to be averted.

“Now, Fanny, since it seems that more cannot be done at present, let us
see about the children’s education. Where are their books?”

“We have very few books,” said Fanny, hesitating; “we had not much
choice where we were.”

“You should have written to me for a selection.”

“Why—so we would, but there was always a talk of sending Conrade
and Francis home. I am afraid you will think them very backward, dear
Rachel, especially Francie; but it is not their fault, dear children,
and they are not used to strangers,” added Fanny, nervously.

“I do not mean to be a stranger,” said Rachel.

And while Fanny, in confusion, made loving protestations about not
meaning that, Rachel stepped out upon the lawn, and in her clear voice
called “Conrade, Francis!” No answer. She called “Conrade” again, and
louder, then turned round with “where can they be—not gone down on the
beach?”

“Oh, dear no, I trust not,” said the mother, flurried, and coming to
the window with a call that seemed to Rachel’s ears like the roar of a
sucking dove.

But from behind the bushes forth came the two young gentlemen, their
black garments considerably streaked with the green marks of laurel
climbing.

“Oh, my dears, what figures you are! Go to Coombe and get yourselves
brushed, and wash your hands, and then come down, and bring your lesson
books.”

Rachel prognosticated that these preparations would be made the
occasion, of much waste of time; but she was answered, and with rather
surprised eyes, that they had never been allowed to come into the
drawing-room without looking like little gentlemen.

“But you are not living in state here,” said Rachel; “I never could
enter into the cult some people, mamma especially, pay to their
drawing-room.”

“The Major used to be very particular about their not coming to sit down
untidy,” said Fanny. “He said it was not good for anybody.”

Martinet! thought Rachel, nearly ready to advocate the boys making no
toilette at any time; and the present was made to consume so much time
that, urged by her, Fanny once more was obliged to summon her boys and
their books.

It was not an extensive school library—a Latin grammar an extremely
dilapidated spelling-book, and the fourth volume of Mrs. Marcet’s
“Little Willie.” The other three—one was unaccounted for, but Cyril
had torn up the second, and Francis had thrown the first overboard in
a passion. Rachel looked in dismay. “I don’t know what can be done with
these!” she said.

“Oh, then we’ll have holidays till we have got books, mamma,” said
Conrade, putting his hands on the sofa, and imitating a kicking horse.

“It is very necessary to see what kind of books you ought to have,”
 returned Rachel. “How far have you gone in this?”

“I say, mamma,” reiterated Conrade, “we can’t do lessons without books.”

“Attend to what your Aunt Rachel says, my dear; she wants to find out
what books you should have.”

“Yes, let me examine you.”

Conrade came most inconveniently close to her; she pushed her chair
back; he came after her. His mother uttered a remonstrating, “My dear!”

“I thought she wanted to examine me,” quoth Conrade. “When Dr. M’Vicar
examines a thing, he puts it under a microscope.”

It was said gravely, and whether it were malice or simplicity, Rachel
was perfectly unable to divine, but she thought anyway that Fanny had
no business to laugh, and explaining the species of examination that she
intended, she went to work. In her younger days she had worked much
at schools, and was really an able and spirited teacher, liking the
occupation; and laying hold of the first book in her way, she requested
Conrade to read. He obeyed, but in such a detestable gabble that she
looked up appealingly to Fanny, who suggested, “My dear, you can read
better than that.” He read four lines, not badly, but then broke off,
“Mamma, are not we to have ponies? Coombe heard of a pony this morning;
it is to be seen at the ‘Jolly Mariner,’ and he will take us to look at
it.”

“The ‘Jolly Mariner!’ It is a dreadful place, Fanny, you never will let
them go there?”

“My dear, the Major will see about your ponies when he comes.”

“We will send the coachman down to inquire,” added Rachel.

“He is only a civilian, and the Major always chooses our horses,” said
Conrade.

“And I am to have one too, mamma,” added Francis. “You know I have been
out four times with the staff, and the Major said I could ride as well
as Con!”

“Reading is what is wanted now, my dear, go on.”

Five lines more; but Francis and his mother were whispering together,
and of course Conrade stopped to listen. Rachel saw there was no hope
but in getting him alone, and at his mother’s reluctant desire,
he followed her to the dining-room; but there he turned dogged and
indifferent, made a sort of feint of doing what he was told, but whether
she tried him in arithmetic, Latin, or dictation, he made such ludicrous
blunders as to leave her in perplexity whether they arose from ignorance
or impertinence. His spelling was phonetic to the highest degree, and
though he owned to having done sums, he would not, or did not answer the
simplest question in mental arithmetic. “Five apples and eight apples,
come, Conrade, what will they make?”

“A pie.”

That was the hopeful way in which the examination proceeded, and when
Rachel attempted to say that his mother would be much displeased, he
proceeded to tumble head over heels all round the room, as if he knew
better; which performance broke up the seance, with a resolve on her
part that when she had the books she would not be so beaten. She tried
Francis, but he really did know next to nothing, and whenever he came to
a word above five letters long stopped short, and when told to spell
it, said, “Mamma never made him spell;” also muttering something
depreciating about civilians.

Rachel was a woman of perseverance. She went to the bookseller’s, and
obtained a fair amount of books, which she ordered to be sent to Lady
Temple’s. But when she came down the next morning, the parcel was
nowhere to be found. There was a grand interrogation, and at last it
turned out to have been safely deposited in an empty dog-kennel in
the back yard. It was very hard on Rachel that Fanny giggled like a
school-girl, and even though ashamed of herself and her sons, could
not find voice to scold them respectably. No wonder, after such
encouragement, that Rachel found her mission no sinecure, and felt at
the end of her morning’s work much as if she had been driving pigs to
market, though the repetition was imposing on the boys a sort of sense
of fate and obedience, and there was less active resistance, though
learning it was not, only letting teaching be thrown at them. All the
rest of the day, except those two hours, they ran wild about the house,
garden, and beach—the latter place under the inspection of Coombe,
whom, since the “Jolly Mariner” proposal, Rachel did not in the
least trust; all the less when she heard that Major Keith, whose
soldier-servant he had originally been, thought very highly of him.
A call at Myrtlewood was formidable from the bear-garden sounds, and
delicate as Lady Temple was considered to be, unable to walk or bear
fatigue, she never appeared to be incommoded by the uproar in which she
lived, and had even been seen careering about the nursery, or running
about the garden, in a way that Grace and Rachel thought would tire
a strong woman. As to a tete-a-tete with her, it was never secured by
anything short of Rachel’s strong will, for the children were always
with her, and she went to bed, or at any rate to her own room, when they
did, and she was so perfectly able to play and laugh with them that her
cousins scarcely thought her sufficiently depressed, and comparing her
with what their own mother had been after ten months’ widowhood, agreed
that after all “she had been very young, and Sir Stephen very old, and
perhaps too much must not be expected of her.”

“The grand passion of her life is yet to come,” said Rachel.

“I hope not,” said Grace.

“You may be certain of that,” said Rachel. “Feminine women always have
it one time or other in their lives; only superior ones are exempt. But
I hope I may have influence enough to carry her past it, and prevent her
taking any step that might be injurious to the children.”




CHAPTER II. RACHEL’S DISCIPLINE



 “Thought is free, as sages tells us—
    Free to rove, and free to soar;
 But affection lives in bondage,
    That enthrals her more and more.”
                             JEAN INGELOW.


An old friend lived in the neighbourhood who remembered Fanny’s father,
and was very anxious to see her again, though not able to leave the
house. So the first day that it was fine enough for Mrs. Curtis to
venture out, she undertook to convey Fanny to call upon her, and was off
with a wonderfully moderate allowance of children, only the two youngest
boys outside with their maid. This drive brought more to light about
Fanny’s past way of life and feelings than had ever yet appeared.
Rachel had never elicited nearly so much as seemed to have come forth
spontaneously to the aunt, who had never in old times been Fanny’s
confidante.

Fanny’s life had been almost a prolonged childhood. From the moment of
her marriage with the kind old General, he and her mother had conspired
to make much of her; all the more that she was almost constantly
disabled by her state of health, and was kept additionally languid
and helpless by the effects of climate. Her mother had managed her
household, and she had absolutely had no care, no duty at all but to be
affectionate and grateful, and to be pretty and gracious at the dinner
parties. Even in her mother’s short and sudden illness, the one thought
of both the patient and the General had been to spare Fanny, and she had
been scarcely made aware of the danger, and not allowed to witness the
suffering. The chivalrous old man who had taken on himself the charge of
her, still regarded the young mother of his children as almost as much
of a baby herself, and devoted himself all the more to sparing her
trouble, and preventing her from feeling more thrown upon her by her
mother’s death. The notion of training her to act alone never even
occurred to him, and when he was thrown from his horse, and carried
into a wayside-hut to die, his first orders were that no hurried message
might be sent to her, lest she might be startled and injured by the
attempt to come to him. All he could do for her was to leave her in the
charge of his military secretary, who had long been as a son to him.
Fanny told her aunt with loving detail all that she had heard from Major
Keith of the brave old man’s calm and resigned end—too full of trust
even to be distressed with alarms for the helpless young wife and
children, but committing them in full reliance to the care of their
Father in heaven, and to the present kindness of the friend who stood by
his pillow.

The will, which not only Rachel but her mother thought strangely
unguarded, had been drawn up in haste, because Sir Stephen’s family had
outgrown the provisions of a former one, which had besides designated
her mother, and a friend since dead, as guardians. Haste, and the
conscious want of legal knowledge, had led to its being made as simple
as possible, and as it was, Sir Stephen had scarcely had the power to
sign it.

It was Major Keith who had borne the tidings to the poor little widow,
and had taken the sole care of the boys during the sad weeks of care
utter prostration and illness. Female friends were with her, and tended
her affectionately, but if exertion or thought were required of her,
the Major had to be called to her sofa to awaken her faculties, and she
always awoke to attend to his wishes, as though he were the channel of
her husband’s. This state of things ended with the birth of the little
girl, the daughter that Sir Stephen had so much wished for, coming too
late to be welcomed by him, but awakening her mother to tearful joy and
renewed powers of life. The nine months of little Stephana’s life
had been a tone of continual change and variety, of new interests and
occupations, and of the resumption of a feeling of health which had
scarcely been tasted since the first plunge into warm climates. Perhaps
it was unreasonable to expect to find Fanny broken down; and she
talked in her own simple way with abundant overflowing affection of her
husband; but even Mrs. Curtis thought it was to her more like the loss
of her own father than of the father of her children; and though not in
the least afraid of anything unbecoming in her gentle, retiring Fanny,
still felt that it was more the charge of a girl than of a widow,
dreaded the boys, dreaded their fate, and dreaded the Major more.

During this drive, Grace and Rachel had the care of the elder boys, whom
Rachel thought safer in her keeping than in Coombe’s. A walk along
the cliffs was one resource for their amusement, but it resulted in
Conrade’s climbing into the most break-neck places, by preference
selecting those that Rachel called him out of, and as all the others
thought it necessary to go after him, the jeopardy of Leoline and Hubert
became greater than it was possible to permit; so Grace took them by the
hands, and lured them home with promises of an introduction to certain
white rabbits at the lodge. After their departure, their brothers became
infinitely more obstreperous. Whether it were that Conrade had some
slight amount of consideration for the limbs of his lesser followers, or
whether the fact were—what Rachel did not remotely imagine—that he was
less utterly unmanageable with her sister than with herself, certain
it is that the brothers went into still more intolerable places, and
treated their guardian as ducklings treat an old hen. At last they quite
disappeared from the view round a projecting point of rock, and when
she turned it, she found a battle royal going on over an old
lobster-pot—Conrade hand to hand with a stout fisher-boy, and Francis
and sundry amphibious creatures of both sexes exchanging a hail of
stones, water-smoothed brick-bats, cockle-shells, fishes’ backbones, and
other unsavoury missiles. Abstractedly, Rachel had her theory that young
gentlemen had better scramble their way among their poor neighbours,
and become used to all ranks; but when it came to witnessing an actual
skirmish when she was responsible for Fanny’s sons, it was needful to
interfere, and in equal dismay and indignation she came round the point.
The light artillery fled at her aspect, and she had to catch Francis’s
arm in the act of discharging after them a cuttlefish’s white spine,
with a sharp “For shame, they are running away! Conrade, Zack, have
done!” Zack was one of her own scholars, and held her in respect.

He desisted at once, and with a touch of his rough forelock,
looked sheepish, and said, “Please ma’am, he was meddling with our
lobster-pot.”

“I wasn’t doing any harm,” said Conrade. “I was just looking in, and
they all came and shied stones at us.”

“I don’t care how the quarrel began,” said Rachel. “You would not have
run into it if you had been behaving properly. Zack was quite right to
protect his father’s property, but he might have been more civil. Now
shake hands, and have done with it.”

“Not shake hands with a low boy,” growled Francis. But happily Conrade
was of a freer spirit, and in spite of Rachel’s interference, had sense
enough to know himself in the wrong. He held out his hand, and when the
ceremony had been gone through, put his hands in his pockets, produced
a shilling, and said, “There, that’s in case I did the thing any harm.”
 Rachel would have preferred Zachary’s being above its acceptance, but
he was not, and she was thankful that a wood path offend itself, leading
through the Homestead plantations away from the temptations and perils
of the shore.

That the two boys, instead of listening to her remonstrance, took to
punching and kicking one another, was a mitigated form of evil for
which she willingly compounded, having gone through so much useless
interference already, that she felt as if she had no spirit left to
keep the peace, and that they must settle their little affairs between
themselves. It was the most innocent diversion in which she could hope
to see them indulge. She only desired that it might last them past a
thrush’s nest, in the hedge between the park and plantation, a somewhat
treasured discovery of Grace’s. No such good luck. Either the thrush’s
imprudence or Grace’s visits had made the nest dangerously visible,
and it was proclaimed with a shout. Rachel, in hot haste, warned them
against taking birds’-nests in general, and that in particular.

“Nests are made to be taken,” said Francis.

“I’ve got an egg of all the Australian birds the Major could get me,”
 said Conrade, “and I mean to have all the English ones.”

“Oh, one egg; there’s no harm in taking that; but this nest has young
birds.”

The young birds must of course be seen, and Rachel stood by with
despairing frowns, commands, and assurances of their mother’s
displeasure, while they peeped in, tantalized the gaping yellow throats,
by holding up their fingers, and laid hands on the side of the nest,
peeping at her with laughing, mischievous eyes, enjoying her distress.
She was glad at last to find them coming away without the nest, and
after crossing the park, arrived at the house, tired out, but with
two hours of the boys still on her hands. They, however, were a little
tired, too; and, further, Grace had hunted out the old bowls, much to
the delight of the younger ones. This sport lasted a good while, but at
last the sisters, who had relaxed their attention a little, perceived
that Conrade and Hubert were both missing, and on Rachel’s inquiry where
they were, she received from Francis that elegant stock answer, “in
their skins.” However, they came to light in process of time, the two
mothers returned home, and Mrs. Curtis and Grace had the conversation
almost in their own hands. Rachel was too much tired to do anything but
read the new number of her favourite “Traveller’s Magazine,” listening
to her mother with one ear, and gathering additional impressions of Sir
Stephen Temple’s imprudence, and the need of their own vigilance. To
make Fanny feel that she could lean upon some one besides the military
secretary, seemed to be the great object, and she was so confiding and
affectionate with her own kin, that there were great hopes. Those boys
were an infliction, no doubt, but, thought Rachel, “there is always
an ordeal at the beginning of one’s mission. I am mastering them by
degrees, and should do so sooner if I had them in my own hands, and no
more worthy task can be done than training human beings for their work
in this world, so I must be willing to go through a little while I bring
them into order, and fit their mother for managing them.”

She spent the time before breakfast the next morning in a search
among the back numbers of the “Traveller’s Magazine” for a paper upon
“Educational Laws,” which she thought would be very good reading for
Fanny. Her search had been just completed when Grace returned home
from church, looking a good deal distressed. “My poor thrushes have not
escaped, Rachel,” she said; “I came home that way to see how they were
going on, and the nest is torn out, one poor little fellow lying dead
below it.”

“Well, that is much worse than I expected!” burst out Rachel. “I did
think that boy Conrade would at least keep his promises.” And she
detailed the adventure of the previous day, whence the conclusion was
but too evident. Grace, however, said in her own sweet manner that she
believed boys could not resist a nest, and thought it mere womanhood to
intercede for such lawful game. She thought it would be best to take no
notice, it would only distress Fanny and make “the mother” more afraid
of the boys than she was already, and she doubted the possibility of
bringing it home to the puerile conscience.

“That is weak!” said Rachel. “I received the boy’s word, and it is my
business to deal with the breach of promise.”

So down went Rachel, and finding the boys rushing about the garden,
according to their practice, before her arrival, she summoned Conrade,
and addressed him with, “Well, Conrade, I knew that you were violent
and disobedient, but I never expected you to fail in your honour as a
gentleman.”

“I’ll thrash any one who says I have,” hotly exclaimed Conrade.

“Then you must thrash me. You gave your word to me not to take your Aunt
Grace’s thrush’s nest.”

“And I didn’t,” said Conrade, boldly.

But Rachel, used to flat denials at the village-school, was not to be
thus set aside. “I am shocked at you, Conrade,” she said. “I know your
mamma will be exceedingly grieved. You must have fallen into very sad
ways to be able to utter such a bold untruth. You had better confess at
once, and then I shall have something to tell her that will comfort he.”

Conrade’s dark face looked set as iron.

“Come; tell me you are sorry you took the nest, and have broken your
word, and told a falsehood.”

Red colour flushed into the brown cheek, and the hands were clenched.

“There is not the smallest use in denying it. I know you took it when
you and Hubert went away together. Your Aunt Grace found it gone this
morning, and one of the poor little birds dead below. What have you done
with the others?”

Not a word.

“Then I grieve to say I must tell all to your mother.”

There was a sort of smile of defiance, and he followed her. For a moment
she thought of preventing this, and preparing Fanny in private, but
recollecting that this would give him the opportunity of preparing
Hubert to support his falsehood, she let him enter with her, and sought
Lady Temple in the nursery.

“Dear Fanny, I am very sorry to bring you so much vexation. I am afraid
it will be a bitter grief to you, but it is only for Conrade’s own sake
that I do it. It was a cruel thing to take a bird’s-nest at all, but
worse when he knew that his Aunt Grace was particularly fond of it; and,
besides, he had promised not to touch it, and now, saddest of all, he
denies having done so.”

“Oh, Conrade, Conrade!” cried Fanny, quite confounded, “You can’t have
done like this!”

“So, I have not,” said Conrade, coming up to her, as she held out her
hand, positively encouraging him, as Rachel thought, to persist in the
untruth.

“Listen, Fanny,” said Rachel. “I do not wonder that you are unwilling to
believe anything so shocking, but I do not come without being only too
certain.” And she gave the facts, to which Fanny listened with pale
cheeks and tearful eyes, then turned to the boy, whose hand she had held
all the time, and said, “Dear Con, do pray tell me if you did it.”

“I did not,” said Conrade, wrenching his hand away, and putting it
behind his back.

“Where’s Hubert?” asked Rachel, looking round, and much vexed when she
perceived that Hubert had been within hearing all the time, though to
be sure there was some little hope to be founded upon the simplicity of
five years old.

“Come here, Hubert dear,” said his mother; “don’t be frightened, only
come and tell me where you and Con went yesterday, when the others were
playing at bowls.” Hubert hung his head, and looked at his brother.

“Tell,” quoth Conrade. “Never mind her, she’s only a civilian.”

“Where did you go, Hubert?”

“Con showed me the little birds in their nest.”

“That is right, Hubert, good little boy. Did you or he touch the nest?”

“Yes.” Then, as Conrade started, and looked fiercely at him, “Yes you
did, Con, you touched the inside to see what it was made of.”

“But what did you do with it?” asked Rachel.

“Left it there, up in the tree,” said the little boy.

“There, Rachel!” said the mother, triumphantly.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Rachel, angrily, “only that Conrade
is a worse boy than I had thought him, end has been teaching his little
brother falsehood.”

The angry voice set Hubert crying, and little Cyril, who was very
soft-hearted, joined in chorus, followed by the baby, who was conscious
of something very disagreeable going on in her nursery. Thereupon, after
the apparently most important business of comforting Miss Temple had
been gone through, the court of justice adjourned, Rachel opening the
door of Conrade’s little room, and recommending solitary imprisonment
there till he should be brought to confession. She did not at all reckon
on his mother going in with him, and shutting the door after her. It was
not the popular notion of solitary confinement, and Rachel was obliged
to retire, and wait in the drawing-room for a quarter of an hour before
Fanny came down, and then it was to say—

“Do you know, Rachel dear, I am convinced that it must be a mistake.
Conrade assures me he never touched the nest.”

“So he persists in it?”

“And indeed, Rachel dear, I cannot help believing him. If it had been
Francie, now; but I never knew Conrade tell an untruth in his life.”

“You never knew, because you always believe him.”

“And it is not only me, but I have often heard the Major say he could
always depend on Conrade’s word.”

Rachel’s next endeavour was at gentle argument. “It must be dreadful
to make such a discovery, but it was far worse to let deceit go on
undetected; and if only they were firm—” At that moment she beheld two
knickerbocker boys prancing on the lawn.

“Didn’t you lock the door? Has he broken out? How audacious!”

“I let him come out,” said Fanny; “there was nothing to shut him up for.
I beg your pardon, dear Rachel; I am very sony for the poor little birds
and for Grace, but I am sure Conrade did not take it.”

“How can you be so unreasonable, Fanny—the evidence,” and Rachel went
over it all again.

“Don’t you think,” said Fanny, “that some boy may have got into the
park?”

“My dear Fanny, I am sorry for you, it is quite out of the question to
think so; the place is not a stone’s-throw from Randall’s lodge. It will
be the most fatal thing in the world to let your weakness be imposed
on in this way. Now that the case is clear, the boy must be forced to
confession, and severely punished.”

Fanny burst into tears.

“I am very sorry for you, Fanny. I know it is very painful; I assure you
it is so to me. Perhaps it would be best if I were to lock him up, and
go from time to time to see if he is come to a better mind.”

She rose up.

“No, no, Rachel!” absolutely screamed Fanny, starting up, “my boy
hasn’t done anything wrong, and I won’t have him locked up! Go away! If
anything is to be done to my boys, I’ll do it myself: they haven’t got
any one but me. Oh, I wish the Major would come!”

“Fanny, how can you be so foolish?—as if I would hurt your boys!”

“But you won’t believe Conrade—my Conrade, that never told a falsehood
in his life!” cried the mother, with a flush in her cheeks and a bright
glance in her soft eyes. “You want me to punish him for what he hasn’t
done.”

“How much alike mothers are in all classes of life,” thought Rachel, and
much in the way in which she would have brought Zack’s mother to reason
by threats of expulsion from the shoe-club, she observed, “Well Fanny,
one thing is clear, while you are so weak as to let that boy go on in
his deceit, unrepentant and unpunished, I can have no more to do with
his education.”

“Indeed,” softly said Fanny, “I am afraid so, Rachel. You have taken a
great deal of trouble, but Conrade declares he will never say a lesson
to you again, and I don’t quite see how to make him after this.”

“Oh, very well; then there’s an end of it. I am sorry for you, Fanny.”

And away walked Rachel, and as she went towards the gate two artificial
jets d’eau, making a considerable curve in the air, alighted, the one
just before her, the other, better aimed, in the back of her neck. She
had too much dignity to charge back upon the offenders, but she
went home full of the story of Fanny’s lamentable weakness, and
prognostications of the misery she was entailing on herself. Her
mother and sister were both much concerned, and thought Fanny extremely
foolish; Mrs. Curtis consoling herself with the hope that the boys would
be cured and tamed at school, and begging that they might never be
let loose in the park again. Rachel could not dwell much longer on the
matter, for she had to ride to Upper Avon Park to hold council on the
books to be ordered for the book-club; for if she did got go herself,
whatever she wanted especially was always set aside as too something or
other for the rest of the subscribers.

Mrs. Curtis was tired, and stayed at home; and Grace spent the afternoon
in investigations about the harrying of the thrushes, but, alas! without
coming a bit nearer the truth. Nothing was seen or heard of Lady Temple
till, at half-past nine, one of the midges, or diminutive flies used at
Avonmonth, came to the door, and Fanny came into the drawing-room—wan,
tearful, agitated.

“Dear Rachel, I am so afraid I was hasty, I could not sleep without
coming to tell you how sorry I am.”

“Then you are convinced? I knew you would be.”

“Oh, yes, I have just been sitting by him after he was gone to bed. He
never goes to sleep till I have done that, and he always tells me if
anything is on his mind. I could not ask him again, it would have been
insulting him; but he went over it all of himself, and owned he ought
not to have put a finger on the edge of the nest, but he wanted so to
see what it was lined with; otherwise he never touched it. He says, poor
boy, that it was only your being a civilian that made you not able to
believe him, I am sure you must believe him now.”

Mrs. Curtis began, in her gentle way, about the difficulty of believing
one’s children in fault, but Lady Temple was entirely past accepting the
possibility of Conrade’s being to blame in this particular instance. It
made her bristle up again, so that even Rachel saw the impossibility of
pressing it, and trusted to some signal confutation to cure her of her
infatuation. But she was as affectionate as ever, only wanting to be
forgiven for the morning’s warmth, and to assure dear Aunt Curtis, dear
Grace, and dearest Rachel in particular, that there was no doing without
them, and it was the greatest blessing to be near them.

“Oh! and the squirting, dear Rachel! I was so sorry when I found it out,
it was only Francie and Leo. I was very angry with them for it, and I
should like to make them ask pardon, only I don’t think Francie would.
I’m afraid they are very rude boys. I must write to the Major to find me
a governess that won’t be very strict with them, and if she could be an
officer’s daughter, the boys would respect her so much more.”




CHAPTER III. MACKAREL LANE



 “For I would lonely stand
  Uplifting my white hand,
  On a mission, on a mission,
  To declare the coming vision.”
                ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.


“Well, Grace, all things considered, perhaps I had better walk down with
you to Mackarel Lane, and then I can form a judgment on these Williamses
without committing Fanny.”

“Then you do not intend to go on teaching?”

“Not while Conrade continues to brave me, and is backed up by poor
Fanny.”

“I might speak to Miss Williams after church, and bring her in to
Myrtlewood for Fanny to see.”

“Yes, that might do in time; but I shall make up my mind first. Poor
Fanny is so easily led that we must take care what influences fall in
her way.”

“I always wished you would call.”

“Yes, and I would not by way of patronage to please Mr. Touchett, but
this is for a purpose; and I hope we shall find both sisters at home.”

Mackarel Lane was at right angles to the shore, running up the valley
of the Avon; but it soon ceased to be fishy, and became agricultural,
owning a few cottages of very humble gentility, which were wont to hang
out boards to attract lodgers of small means. At one of these Grace
rang, and obtained admittance to a parlour with crazy French windows
opening on a little strip of garden. In a large wheeled chair, between
the fire and the window, surrounded by numerous little appliances for
comfort and occupation, sat the invalid Miss Williams, holding out her
hand in welcome to the guests.

“A fine countenance! what one calls a fine countenance!” thought Rachel.
“Is it a delusion of insipidity as usual? The brow is good, massive, too
much for the features, but perhaps they were fuller once; eyes bright
and vigorous, hazel, the colour for thought; complexion meant to be
brilliant brunette, a pleasant glow still; hair with threads of grey.
I hope she does not affect youth; she can’t be less than one or two and
thirty! Many people set up for beauties with far less claim. What is
the matter with her? It is not the countenance of deformity—accident, I
should say. Yes, it is all favourable except the dress. What a material;
what a pattern! Did she get it second-hand from a lady’s-maid? Will
there be an incongruity in her conversation to match? Let us see. Grace
making inquiries—Quite at my best—Ah! she is not one of the morbid
sort, never thinking themselves better.”

“I was afraid, I had not seen you out for some time.”

“No; going out is a troublesome business, and sitting in the garden
answers the same purpose.”

“Of air, perhaps, but hardly of change or of view.”

“Oh! I assure you there is a wonderful variety,” she answered, with an
eager and brilliant smile.

“Clouds and sunsets?” asked Rachel, beginning to be interested.

“Yes, differing every day. Then I have the tamarisk and its inhabitants.
There has been a tom-tit’s nest every year since we came, and that
provides us with infinite amusement. Besides the sea-gulls are often so
good as to float high enough for me to see them. There is a wonderful
charm in a circumcribed view, because one is obliged to look well into
it all.”

“Yes; eyes and no eyes apply there,” said Rachel.

“We found a great prize, too, the other day. Rosie!”

At the call a brown-haired, brown-eyed child of seven, looking like a
little fawn, sprang to the window from the outside.

“My dear, will you show the sphynx to Miss Curtis?”

The little girl daintily brought a box covered with net, in which a huge
apple-green caterpillar, with dashes of bright colour on his sides,
and a horny spike on his tail, was feasting upon tamarisk leaves. Grace
asked if she was going to keep it. “Yes, till it buries itself,” said
the child. “Aunt Ermine thinks it is the elephant sphynx.”

“I cannot be sure,” said the aunt, “my sister tried to find a figure of
it at Villars’, but he had no book that gave the caterpillars. Do you
care for those creatures?”

“I like to watch them,” said Grace, “but I know nothing about them
scientifically; Rachel does that.”

“Then can you help us to the history of our sphynx?” asked Miss
Williams, with her pleasant look.

“I will see if I have his portrait,” said Rachel, “but I doubt it. I
prefer general principles to details.”

“Don’t you find working out details the best way of entering into
general principles?”

It was new to Rachel to find the mention of a general principle received
neither with a stare nor a laugh; and she gathered herself up to answer,
“Naming and collecting is not science.”

“And masonry is not architecture, but you can’t have architecture
without it.”

“One can have broad ideas without all the petty work of flower botanists
and butterfly naturalists.”

“Don’t you think the broad ideas would be rather of the hearsay order,
at least to most people, unless their application were worked out in the
trifle that came first to hand?”

“Experimental philosophy,” said Rachel, in rather a considering tone,
as if the notion, when presented to her in plain English, required
translation into the language of her thoughts.

“If you like to call it so,” said Miss Williams, with a look of arch
fun. “For instance, the great art of mud pie taught us the porous nature
of clay, the expansive power of steam, etc. etc.”

“You had some one to improve it to you?”

“Oh dear no. Only afterwards, when we read of such things we remembered
how our clay manufactures always burst in the baking unless they were
well dried first.”

“Then you had the rare power of elucidating a principle?”

“No, not I. My brother had; but I could only perceive the confirmation.”

“This reminds me of an interesting article on the Edgeworth system of
education in the ‘Traveller’s Review.’ I will send it down to you.”

“Thank you, but I have it here.”

“Indeed; and do you not think it excellent, and quite agree with it?”

“Yes, I quite agree with it,” and there was an odd look in her bright
transparent eyes that made Grace speculate whether she could have heard
that agreement with the Invalid in the “Traveller’s Review” was one of
the primary articles of faith acquired by Rachel.

But Grace, though rather proud of Rachel’s falling under the spell of
Miss Williams’ conversation, deemed an examination rather hard on her,
and took the opportunity of asking for her sister.

“She is generally at home by this time; but this is her last day at
Cliff Cottages, and she was to stay late to help in the packing up.”

“Will she be at home for the present?” asked Grace.

“Yes, Rose and I are looking forward to a festival of her.”

Grace was not at all surprised to hear Rachel at once commit herself
with “My cousin, Lady Temple,” and rush into the matter in hand as if
secure that the other Miss Williams would educate on the principles of
the Invalid; but full in the midst there was a sound of wheels and a
ring at the bell. Miss Williams quietly signed to her little attendant
to put a chair in an accessible place, and in walked Lady Temple, Mrs.
Curtis, and the middle brace of boys.

“The room will be too full,” was Grace’s aside to her sister, chiefly
thinking of her mother, but also of their hostess; but Rachel returned
for answer, “I must see about it;” and Grace could only remove herself
into the verandah, and try to attract Leoline and Hubert after her, but
failing in this, she talked to the far more conversible Rose about the
bullfinch that hung at the window, which loved no one but Aunt Ermine,
and scolded and pecked at every one else; and Augustus, the beloved
tame toad, that lived in a hole under a tree in the garden. Mrs. Curtis,
considerate and tender-hearted, startled to find her daughter in the
field, and wishing her niece to begin about her own affairs, talked
common-place by way of filling up the time, and Rachel had her eyes free
for a range of the apartment. The foundation was the dull, third-rate
lodging-house, the superstructure told of other scenes. One end of
the room was almost filled by the frameless portrait of a dignified
clergyman, who would have had far more justice done to him by greater
distance; a beautifully-painted miniature of a lady with short waist and
small crisp curls, was the centre of a system of photographs over the
mantel-piece; a large crayon sketch showed three sisters between the
ages of six and sixteen, sentimentalizing over a flower-basket; a pair
of water-colour drawings represented a handsome church and comfortable
parsonage; and the domestic gallery was completed by two prints—one of
a middle-aged county-member, the other one of Chalon’s ladylike matrons
in watered-silk aprons. With some difficulty Rachel read on the one the
autograph, J. T. Beauchamp, and on the other the inscription, the Lady
Alison Beauchamp. The table-cover was of tasteful silk patchwork, the
vase in the centre was of red earthenware, but was encircled with
real ivy leaves gummed on in their freshness, and was filled with wild
flowers; books filled every corner; and Rachel felt herself out of the
much-loathed region of common-place, but she could not recover from her
surprise at the audacity of such an independent measure on the part of
her cousin; and under cover of her mother’s civil talk, said to Fanny,
“I never expected to see you here.”

“My aunt thought of it,” said Fanny, “and as she seems to find the
children too much—”

She broke off, for Mrs. Curtis had paused to let her introduce the
subject, but poor Fanny had never taken the initiative, and Rachel did
it for her by explaining that all had come on the same errand, to ask
if Miss Williams would undertake the lessons of her nephews; Lady
Temple softly murmured under her veil something about hopes and too much
trouble; an appointment was made for the following morning, and Mrs.
Curtis, with a general sensation of an oppressive multitude in a small
room, took her leave, and the company departed, Fanny, all the way home,
hoping that the other Miss Williams would be like her sister, pitying
the cripple, wishing that the sisters were in the remotest degree
military, so as to obtain the respect of the hoys, and wondering what
would be the Major’s opinion.

“So many ladies!” exclaimed little Rose. “Aunt Ermine, have they made
your head ache?”

“No, my dear, thank you, I am only tired. If you will pull out the rest
for my feet, I will be quiet a little, and be ready for tea when Aunt
Ailie comes.”

The child handily converted the chair into a couch, arranging the dress
and coverings with the familiarity of long use, and by no means shocked
by the contraction and helplessness of the lower limbs, to which she had
been so much accustomed all her life that it never even occurred to
her to pity Aunt Ermine, who never treated herself as an object of
compassion. She was thanked by a tender pressure on her hair, and then
saying—

“Now I shall wish Augustus good night; bring Violetta home from her play
in the garden, and let her drink tea, and go to bed.”

Ah, Violetta, purchased with a silver groat, what was not your value
in Mackarel Lane? Were you not one of its most considered inhabitants,
scarcely less a child of Aunt Ermine and Aunt Alison than their Rosebud
herself?

Murmur, murmur, rippled the child’s happy low-toned monologue directed
to her silent but sufficient playmate, and so far from disturbing the
aunt, that more than one smile played on her lips at the quaint fancies,
and at the well of gladness in the young spirit, which made day after
day of the society of a cripple and an old doll, one constant song of
bliss, one dream of bright imaginings. Surely it was an equalization
of blessings that rendered little lonely Rose, motherless and well nigh
fatherless, poor, with no companion but a crippled aunt, a bird and a
toad, with scarcely a toy, and never a party of pleasure, one of the
most joyous beings under the sun, free from occasions of childish
troubles, without collisions of temper, with few contradictions, and
with lessons rather pleasure than toil. Perhaps Ermine did not take
into account the sunshiny content and cheerfulness that made herself
a delightful companion and playfellow, able to accept the child as her
solace, not her burthen.

Presently Rose looked up, and meeting the bright pleasant eyes,
observed—“Violetta has been very good, and said all her lessons quite
perfect, and she would like to sit up till her Aunt Ailie comes home. Do
you think she may?”

“Will she not be tired to-morrow?”

“Oh, then she will be lazy, and not get up when she is called, till I
pull all the clothes off, and that will be fun.”

“Or she may be fretful now?”

A series of little squeaks ensued, followed by “Now, my love; that is
taking a very unfair advantage of my promise. You will make your poor
Aunt Ermine’s head ache, and I shall have to send you to bed.”

“Would not a story pass away the time?”

“You tell it, Aunt Ermine; your stories are always the best. And let
there be a fairy in it!”

The fairy had nearly performed her part, when the arrival took place,
and Rose darted forward to receive Aunt Ailie’s greeting kiss.

“Yes, Rosie—yes, Violetta; what do you think I have got for you?”

And out came a doll’s chair with a broken leg, condemned by the
departing pupils, and granted with a laugh to the governess’s request
to take it to her little niece; but never in its best days had the chair
been so prized. It was introduced to Violetta as the reward of virtue
for having controlled her fretfulness, and the repair of its infirmity
was the first consideration that occupied all the three. After all,
Violetta’s sitting posture was, as Alison observed, an example of the
inclined plane, but that was nothing to Rose, and the seance would
have been indefinitely prolonged, but for considerations for Violetta’s
health.

The sisters were alike, and Alison had, like her elder, what is
emphatically called countenance, but her features were less chiselled,
and her dark straight brows so nearly met that, as Rose had once
remarked, they made a bridge of one arch instead of two. Six years
younger, in full health, and daily battling with the world, Alison had a
remarkable look of concentration and vigour, her upright bearing, clear
decided speech, and glance of kindness won instant respect and reliance,
but her face missed the radiant beamy brightness of her sister’s; her
face was sweet and winning, but it was not habitual with her, and there
was about her a look as if some terrible wave of grief or suffering
had swept over her ere yet the features were fully fixed, and had thus
moulded her expression for life. But playfulness was the tone that
reigned around Ermine’s couch at ordinary moments, and beside her the
grave Alison was lively, not with effort, but by infection.

“There,” she said, holding up a cheque; “now we’ll have a jubilee,
and take you down under the East cliff, and we’ll invest a shilling in
‘Ivanhoe,’ and Rose and Violetta shall open their ears!”

“And you shall have a respectable Sunday mantle.”

“Oh, I dare say Julia will send us a box.”

“Then you will have to put a label on your back, ‘Second-hand!’ or
her velvet will be a scandal. I can’t wear out that at home like this
flagrant, flowery thing, that I saw Miss Curtis looking at as rather
a disreputable article. There’s preferment for you, Ailie! What do you
think of a general’s widow with six boys? She is come after you. We
had a great invasion—three Curtises and this pretty little widow, and
various sons!”

“Will she stay?”

“Most likely, for she is a relation of Mrs. Curtis, and comes to be near
her. You are to call for inspection at eleven o’clock tomorrow, so I
fear your holiday will be short.”

“Well, the less play the less anxiety. How many drives will the six
young gentlemen be worth to you?”

“I am afraid it will be at the cost of tough work to you; she looked to
me too sweet a creature to have broken her sons in, but I should think
she would be pleasant to deal with.”

“If she be like Miss Curtis, I am sure she will.”

“Miss Curtis? My old friend you mean. She was rather suppressed today,
and I began to comprehend the reason of the shudder with which Mr.
Touchett speaks of the dogmatical young lady.”

“I hope she did not overwhelm you!”

“Oh, no! I rather liked her; she was so earnest and spirited, I could
fancy enjoying a good passage at arms with her if these were old times.
But I hope she will not take the direction of your school-room, though
she is an admirer of the educational papers in the ‘Traveller.’”

And here the discussion was ended by the entrance of little Rose with
the preliminaries of the evening meal, after which she went to bed, and
the aunts took out books, work, and writing materials.

Alison’s report the next day was—“Well, she is a very sweet creature.
There is something indescribably touching in her voice and eyes, so soft
and wistful, especially when she implores one not to be hard on those
great scrambling boys of hers.”

“So she is your fate?”

“Oh, yes, if there had been ten more engagements offered, I could not
have helped accepting hers, even if it had not been on the best terms I
have ever had.”

“What?”

“Seventy—for the hours between nine and five. Pretty well for a
journeyman hack, is it not? Indeed, the pretty thing’s only fear seemed
to be that she was requiring too much, and offering too little. No, not
her only fear, for there is some major in the distance to whose approval
everything must be subject—uncle or guardian, I suppose, but he seemed
to be rather an object of jealousy to the younger Miss Curtis, for
every hint of wishing to wait for the Major made her press on the
negotiations.”

“Seventy! I hope you will make it do, Ailie. It would be a great
relief.”

“And spare your brains not a little. Yes, I do trust to keeping it, for
Lady Temple is delightful; and as to the boys, I fancy it is only taming
they want. The danger is, as Miss Rachel told me, whether she can bear
the sight of the process. I imagine Miss Rachel herself has tried it,
and failed.”

“Part amateur work,” said Ermine, smiling. “It really is lucky you
had to turn governess, Ailie, or there would have been a talent thrown
away.”

“Stay till I have tried,” said Alison, who had, however, had experience
enough not to be much alarmed at the prospect. Order was wont to come
with her presence, and she hardly knew the aspect of tumultuous idleness
or insubordination to unenforced authority; for her eye and voice in
themselves brought cheerful discipline without constraint, and upheld
by few punishments, for the strong influence took away the spirit of
rebellion.

After her first morning’s work she came home full of good auguries; the
boys had been very pleasant with her after the first ten minutes, and
Conrade had gained her heart by his attention to his mother. He had,
however, examined her minutely whether she had any connexion with
the army, and looked grave on her disavowal of any relationship with
soldiers; Hubert adding, “You see, Aunt Rachel is only a civilian, and
she hasn’t any sense at all.” And when Francis had been reduced to the
much disliked process of spelling unknown words, he had muttered under
his breath, “She was only a civilian.” To which she had rejoined
that “At least she knew thus much, that the first military duty was
obedience,” and Francis’s instant submission proved that she had made a
good shot. Of the Major she had heard much more. Everything was referred
to him, both by mother and children, and Alison was the more puzzled as
to his exact connexion with them. “I sometimes suspect,” she said, “that
he may have felt the influence of those winsome brown eyes and caressing
manner, as I know I should if I were a man. I wonder how long the old
general has been dead? No, Ermine, you need not shake your head at me.
I don’t mean even to let Miss Curtis tell me if she would. I know
confidences from partisan relations are the most mischief-making things
in the world.”

In pursuance of this principle Alison, or Miss Williams, as she was
called in her vocation, was always reserved and discreet, and though
ready to talk in due measure, Rachel always felt that it was the upper,
not the under current that was proffered. The brow and eyes, the whole
spirit of the face, betokened reflection and acuteness, and Rachel
wanted to attain to her opinions; but beyond a certain depth there
was no reaching. Her ways of thinking, her views of the children’s
characters, her estimate of Mr. Touchett—nay, even her tastes as to the
Invalid’s letters in the “Traveller’s Review,” remained only partially
revealed, in spite of Rachel’s best efforts at fishing, and attempting
to set the example.

“It really seemed,” as she observed to Grace, “as if the more I talk,
the less she says.” At which Grace gave way to a small short laugh,
though she owned the force of Rachel’s maxim, that to bestow confidence
was the way to provoke it; and forbore to refer to a certain delightful
afternoon that Rachel, in her childhood, had spent alone with a little
girl whom she had never discovered to be deaf and dumb. Still Rachel had
never been able to make out why Grace, with no theories at all, got so
many more confidences than she did. She was fully aware of her sister’s
superior attractiveness to common-place people, and made her welcome to
stand first with the chief of their kindred, and most of the clergy and
young ladies around. But it was hard that where Rachel really liked and
met half-way, the intimate confidence should always be bestowed upon
Grace, or even the mother. She had yet to learn that the way to draw out
a snail is not to, grasp its horns, and that halfway meeting is not to
launch one’s self to the opposite starting point. Either her
inquiries were too point blank to invite detailed replies, or her own
communications absorbed her too much to leave room for a return. Thus
she told Miss Williams the whole story of the thrush’s nest, and all
her own reflections upon the characteristics it betokened; and only
afterwards, on thinking over the conversation, perceived that she had
elicited nothing but that it was very difficult to judge in such cases,
not even any decided assent to her own demonstrations. It was true that
riots and breaches of the peace ceased while Miss Williams was in the
house, and learning and good manners were being fast acquired; but until
Conrade’s duplicity should be detected, or the whole disposition of
the family discussed with herself, Rachel doubted the powers of the
instructress. It was true that Fanny was very happy with her, and only
regretted that the uncertainty of the Major’s whereabouts precluded his
being informed of the newly-found treasure; but Fanny was sure to be
satisfied as long as her boys were happy and not very naughty, and she
cared very little about people’s minds.

If any one did “get on” with the governess it was Grace, who had been
the first acquaintance in the family, and met her often in the service
of the parish, as well as in her official character at the Homestead.
It so chanced that one Sunday afternoon they found themselves
simultaneously at the door of the school-house, whence issued not the
customary hum, but loud sounds of singing.

“Ah!” said Grace, “Mr. Touchett was talking of getting the choir master
from Avoncester, and giving up an afternoon to practice for Easter, but
he never told me it was to be to-day.”

On inquiry, it appeared that notice had been given in the morning, but
not till after Miss Williams had gone home to fetch her little niece,
and while Rachel was teaching her boys in the class-room out of hearing.
It was one of the little bits of bad management that were sure to happen
wherever poor Mr. Touchett was concerned; and both ladies feeling it
easy to overlook for themselves, were thankful that it had not befallen
Rachel. Alison Williams, thinking it far to walk either to the Homestead
or Myrtlewood before church, proposed to Grace to come home with her, an
offer that was thankfully accepted, with merely the scruple whether she
should disturb the invalid.

“Oh, no, it would be a great pleasure; I always wish we could get more
change and variety for her on Sunday.”

“She is very self-denying to spare you to the school.”

“I have often wished to give it up, but she never will let me. She says
it is one of the few things we can do, and I see besides that it brings
her fresh interests. She knows about all my class, and works for them,
and has them to see her; and I am sure it is better for her, though it
leaves her more hours alone with Rose.”

“And the Sunday services are too long for her?”

“Not so much that, as that she cannot sit on those narrow benches unless
two are put close together so that she can almost lie, and there is
not room for her chair in the aisle on a Sunday. It is the greatest
deprivation of all.”

“It is so sad, and she is so patient and so energetic,” said Grace,
using her favourite monosyllable in peace, out of Rachel’s hearing.

“You would say so, indeed, if you really knew her, or how she has found
strength and courage for me through all the terrible sutfering.”

“Then does she suffer so much?”

“Oh, no, not now! That was in the first years.”

“It was not always so.”

“No, indeed! You thought it deformity! Oh, no, no! she was so
beautiful.”

“That she is still. I never saw my sister so much struck with any one.
There is something so striking in her bright glance out of those clear
eyes.”

“Ah! if you had only seen her bloom before—”

“The accident?”

“I burnt her,” said Alison, almost inaudibly.

“You! you, poor dear! How dreadful for you.”

“Yes, I burnt her,” said Alison, more steadily. “You ought not to be
kind to me without knowing about it. It was an accident of course, but
it was a fit of petulance. I threw a match without looking where it was
going.”

“It must have been when you were very young.”

“Fourteen. I was in a naughty fit at her refusing to go to the great
musical meeting with us. We always used to go to stay at one of the
canon’s houses for it, a house where one was dull and shy; and I could
not bear going without her, nor understand the reason.”

“And was there a reason?”

“Yes, poor dear Ermine. She knew he meant to come there to meet her, and
she thought it would not be right; because his father had objected so
strongly, and made him exchange into a regiment on foreign service.”

“And you did not know this?”

“No, I was away all the time it was going on, with my eldest sister,
having masters in London. I did not come home till it was all over, and
then I could not understand what was the matter with the house, or why
Ermine was unlike herself, and papa restless and anxious about her. They
thought me too young to be told, and the atmosphere made me cross and
fretful, and papa was displeased with me, and Ermine tried in vain to
make me good; poor patient Ermine, even then the chief sufferer!”

“I can quite imagine the discomfort and fret of being in ignorance all
the time.”

“Dear Ermine says she longed to tell me, but she had been forbidden, and
she went on blaming herself and trying to make me enjoy my holidays as
usual, till this dreadful day, when I had worried her intolerably about
going to this music meeting, and she found reasoning only made me worse.
She still wrote her note of refusal, and asked me to light the taper; I
dashed down the match in a frenzy of temper and—”

She paused for breath, and Grace squeezed her hand.

“We did not see it at first, and then she threw herself down and ordered
me not to come near. Every one was there directly, I believe, but it
burst out again and again, and was not put out till they all thought
she had not an hour to live. There was no pain, and there she lay,
all calmness, comforting us all, and making papa and Edward promise to
forgive me—me, who only wished they would kill me! And the next day he
came; he was just going to sail, and they thought nothing would hurt her
then. I saw him while he was waiting, and never did I see such a fixed
deathly face. But they said she found words to cheer and soothe him.”

“And what became of him?”

“We do not know. As long as Lady Alison lived (his aunt) she let us hear
about him, and we knew he was recovering from his wound. Then came her
death, and then my father’s, and all the rest, and we lost sight of the
Beauchamps. We saw the name in the Gazette as killed at Lucknow, but
not the right Christian name nor the same rank; but then, though the
regiment is come home, we have heard nothing of him, and though she has
never spoken of him to me, I am sure Ermine believes he is dead, and
thinks of him as part of the sunshine of the old Beauchamp days—the
sunshine whose reflection lasts one’s life.”

“He ought to be dead,” said Grace.

“Yes, it would be better for her than to hear anything else of him! He
had nothing of his own, so there would have been a long waiting, but his
father and brother would not hear of it, and accused us of entrapping
him, and that angered my father. For our family is quite good, and we
were very well off then. My father had a good private fortune besides
the Rectory at Beauchamp; and Lady Alison, who had been like a mother
to us ever since our own died, quite thought that the prospect was good
enough, and I believe got into a great scrape with her family for having
promoted the affair.”

“Your squire’s wife?”

“Yes, and Julia and Ermine had come every day to learn lessons with her
daughters. I was too young; but as long as she lived we were all like
one family. How kind she was! How she helped us through those frightful
weeks!”

“Of your sister’s illness? It must have lasted long?”

“Long? Oh longer than long! No one thought of her living. The doctors
said the injury was too extensive to leave any power of rallying; but
she was young and strong, and did not die in the torture, though people
said that such an existence as remained to her was not worth the anguish
of struggling back to it. I think my father only prayed that she might
suffer less, and Julia stayed on and on, thinking each day would be the
last, till Dr. Long could not spare her any longer; and then Lady
Alison nursed her night after night and day after day, till she had worn
herself into an illness, and when the doctors spoke of improvement,
we only perceived worse agony. It was eight months before she was even
lifted up in bed, and it was years before the burns ceased to be painful
or the constitution at all recovered the shock; and even now weather
tells on her, though since we have lived here she has been far better
than I ever dared to hope.”

“Then you consider her still recovering?”

“In general health she is certainly greatly restored, and has strength
to attempt more, but the actual injury, the contraction, can never be
better than now. When we lived at Richmond she had constantly the best
advice, and we were told that nothing more could be hoped for.”

“I wonder more and more at her high spirits. I suppose that was what
chiefly helped to carry her through?”

“I have seen a good many people,” said Alison, pausing, “but I never did
see any one so happy! Others are always wanting something; she never is.
Every enjoyment seems to be tenfold to her what it is to other people;
she sees the hopeful side of every sorrow. No burthen is a burthen when
one has carried it to her.”

As Alison spoke, she pushed open the narrow green door of the little
lodging-house, and there issued a weak, sweet sound of voices: “The
strain upraise of joy and praise.” It was the same that had met their
ears at the school-door, but the want of body in the voices was fully
compensated by the heartfelt ring, as if here indeed was praise, not
practice.

“Aunt Ailie! O Aunt Ailie!” cried the child, as the room-door opened and
showed the little choir, consisting of herself, her aunt, and the small
maid of the house, “you should not have come, you were not to hear us
till Trinity Sunday.”

Explanations were given, and Miss Curtis was welcomed, but Alison,
still too much moved for ordinary conversation, slipped into the
bedroom adjoining, followed by her sister’s quick and anxious eye, and
half-uttered inquiry.

“I am afraid it is my fault,” said Grace; “she has been telling me about
your accident.”

“Poor Ailie,” said Ermine, “she never will receive kindness without
having that unlucky story out! It is just one of the things that get so
cruelly exaggerated by consequences. It was one moment’s petulance that
might have caused a fright and been forgotten ever after, but for those
chemicals. Ah! I see, she said nothing about them, because they were
Edward’s. They were some parcels for his experiments, gun cotton and
the like, which were lying in the window till he had time to take them
upstairs. We had all been so long threatened with being blown up by his
experiments that we had grown callous and careless, and it served
us right!” she added, stroking the child’s face as it looked at her,
earnest to glean fresh fragments of the terrible half-known tale of the
past. “Yes, Rosie, when you go and keep house for papa on the top of the
Oural Mountains, or wherever it may be, you are to remember that if Aunt
Ermine had not been in a foolish, inattentive mood, and had taken his
dangerous goods out of the way, she might have been trotting to church
now like other people. But poor Ailie has always helped herself to the
whole blame, and if every childish fit of temper were the root of such
qualities, what a world we should have here!”

“Ah! no wonder she is devoted to you.”

“The child was not fifteen, had never known cross or care, but from that
moment she never was out of my room if it was possible to be in; and
when nurse after nurse was fairly worn out, because I could not help
being so distressing, there was always that poor child, always handy and
helpful, growing to be the chief dependence, and looking so piteously
imploring whatever was tried, that it really helped me to go through
with it. Poor Ailie,” she added with an odd turn of playfulness, “I
always fancied those frowns of anxiety made her eyebrows grow together.
And ever since we came here, we know how she has worked away for her old
cinder and her small Rosebud, don’t we?” she added, playfully squeezing
the child’s cheeks up into a more budding look, hiding deeper and more
overcoming feelings by the sportive action. And as her sister came back,
she looked up and shook her head at her, saying,—

“You gossiping Ailie, to go ripping up old grievances. I am going to ask
Miss Curtis not to let the story go any farther, now you have relieved
your mind of it.”

“I did tell Lady Temple,” said Alison; “I never think it right not to
let people know what sort of person they have to teach their children.”

And Grace, on feeling her way, discovered that Lady Temple had been told
the bare fact in Miss Williams’s reserved and business-like manner, but
with nothing of the affair that had led to it. She merely looked on it
in the manner fully expressed by—“Ah, poor thing; how sad for her!”
 as a shocking secret, never to be talked of or thought about. And that
voluntary detailed relation from Alison could only be regarded as drawn
forth by Grace’s own individual power of winning confidence, and the
friendliness that had so long subsisted between them. Nor indeed was the
reserve regarding the cause of the present reduced circumstances of the
sisters at all lessened; it was only known that their brother had ruined
them by a fraudulent speculation, and had then fled to the Continent,
leaving them burthened with the maintenance of his child, but that they
refused to believe in his guilt, and had thus incurred the displeasure
of other relatives and friends. Alison was utterly silent about him.
Ermine seemed to have a tender pleasure in bringing in a reference to
his ways as if all were well, and it were a matter of course to speak of
“Edward;” but it was plain that Ermine’s was an outspoken nature. This
might, however, be only because the one had been a guarded, sheltered
invalid, while the other had gone forth among strangers to battle for
a livelihood, and moreover, the elder sister had been fully grown and
developed before the shock which had come on the still unformed Alison.

At any rate, nobody but Grace “got on” with the governess, while the
invalid made friends with all who visited her, and most signally with
Rachel, who, ere long, esteemed her environment a good work, worthy of
herself. The charity of sitting with a twaddling, muffatee-knitting old
lady was indisputable, but it was perfectly within Grace’s capacity; and
Rachel believed herself to be far more capable of entertaining the sick
Miss Williams, nor was she mistaken. When excited or interested, most
people thought her oppressive; but Ermine Williams, except when unwell,
did not find her so, and even then a sharp debate was sometimes a cure
for the nervous ailments induced by the monotony of her life. They
seemed to have a sort of natural desire to rub their minds one against
the other, and Rachel could not rest without Miss Williams’s opinion of
all that interested her—paper, essay, book, or event; but often, when
expecting to confer a favour by the loan, she found that what was new
to her was already well known in that little parlour, and even the
authorship no mystery. Ermine explained this by her correspondence with
literary friends of her brother’s, and country-bred Rachel, to whom
literature was still an oracle unconnected with living agencies,
listened, yes, absolutely listened to her anecdotes of sayings and
doings, far more like clever memoirs than the experiences of the banks
of the Avon. Perhaps there was this immediate disadvantage, that hearing
of a more intellectual tone of society tended to make Rachel less
tolerant of that which surrounded her, and especially of Mr. Touchett.
It was droll that, having so long shunned the two sisters under the
impression that they were his protegees and worshippers, she found that
Ermine’s point of view was quite the rectorial one, and that to venerate
the man for his office sake was nearly as hard to Ermine as to herself,
though the office was more esteemed.

Alison, the reserved, had held her tongue on his antecedents; but Ermine
was drawn into explaining that his father had been a minor canon, who
had eked out his means with a combination of chaplaincies and parts
of curacies, and by teaching at the school where his son was educated.
Indignant at the hack estimation in which his father had been held, the
son, far more justly viewing both the dignity and duty of his office,
was resolved to be respected; but bred up in second rate society,
had neither weight, talent, nor manners to veil his aggressive
self-assertion, and he was at this time especially trying to the
Curtises.

Cathedral music had been too natural to him for the endurance of an
unchoral service, and the prime labour of his life was to work up his
choir; but he was musical by education rather than nature, and having
begun his career with such mortal offence to the native fiddlers and
singers as to impel them into the arms of dissent, he could only supply
the loss from the school by his own voice, of which he was not chary,
though using it with better will than taste. The staple of his choir
were Rachel’s scholars. Her turn had always been for boys, and her
class on Sunday mornings and two evenings in the week had long been
in operation before the reign of Mr. Touchett. Then two lads, whose
paternal fiddles had seceded to the Plymouth Brethren, were suspended
from all advantages by the curate, and Rachel was with difficulty
withheld from an explosion; but even this was less annoying than the
summons at the class-room door every Sunday morning, that, in the midst
of her lesson, carried off the chief of her scholars to practise their
chants. Moreover, the blame of all imperfect lessons was laid on the
“singing for the parson,” and all faults in the singing by the tasks for
Miss Rachel; and one night, the excellent Zack excused his failure in
geography by saying that Mr. Touchett had thrown away his book, and said
that it was no better than sacrilege, omitting, however, to mention that
he had been caught studying it under his surplice during the lessons.

At last, with his usual fatality, the curate fixed the grand practice
for the Saturday evenings that were Rachel’s great days for instruction
in the three R’s, and for a sort of popular lecture. Cricket was to
succeed the singing, and novelty carried the day, but only by the
desertion of her scholars did Rachel learn the new arrangement, and she
could hardly credit the assertion that the curate was not aware that it
was her day. In fact, it was the only one when the fisher lads were sure
not to be at sea, and neither party would yield it. Mr. Touchett was
determined not to truckle to dictation from the great house; so when
Rachel declared she would have nothing to do with the boys unless the
Saturdays were conceded to her, he owned that he thought the clergyman
had the first right to his lads, and had only not claimed them before
out of deference for the feelings of a well-meaning parishioner.

Both parties poured out their grievances to the same auditor, for Mr.
Touchett regarded Ermine Williams as partly clerical, and Rachel could
never be easy without her sympathy. To hear was not, however, to make
peace, while each side was so sore, so conscious of the merits of its
own case, so blind to those of the other. One deemed praise in its
highest form the prime object of his ministry; the other found the
performance indevotional, and raved that education should be sacrificed
to wretched music. But that the dissension was sad and mischievous,
it would have been very diverting; they were both so young in their
incapacity of making allowances, their certainty that theirs was the
theory to bring in the golden age, and even in their magnanimity of
forgiveness, and all the time they thought themselves so very old. “I
am resigned to disappointments; I have seen something of life.”—“You
forget, Miss Williams, that my ministerial experience is not very
recent.”

There was one who would have smoothed matters far better than any, who,
like Ermine, took her weapons from the armoury of good sense; but that
person was entirely unconscious how the incumbent regarded her soft
eyes, meek pensiveness, motherly sweetness, and, above all, the refined
graceful dignity that remained to her from the leading station she had
occupied. Her gracious respect towards her clergyman was a contrast as
much to the deferential coquetry of his admirers as to the abruptness of
his foe, and her indifference to parish details had even its charm in a
world of fussiness; he did not know himself how far a wish of hers would
have led him, and she was the last person to guess. She viewed him, like
all else outside her nursery, as something out of the focus of her eye;
her instinct regarded her clergyman as necessarily good and worthy, and
her ear heard Rachel railing at him; it sounded hard, but it was a pity
Rachel should be vexed and interfered with. In fact, she never thought
of the matter at all; it was only part of that outer kind of dreamy
stage-play at Avonmouth, in which she let herself he moved about at her
cousin’s bidding. One part of her life had passed away from her,
and what remained to her was among her children; her interests
and intelligence seemed contracted to Conrade’s horizon, and as to
everything else, she was subdued, gentle, obedient, but slow and obtuse.

Yet, little as he knew it, Mr. Touchett might have even asserted his
authority in a still more trying manner. If the gentle little widow had
not cast a halo round her relatives, he could have preached that sermon
upon the home-keeping duties of women, or have been too much offended
to accept any service from the Curtis family; and he could have done
without them, for he had a wide middle-class popularity; his manners
with the second-rate society, in which he had been bred, were just
sufficiently superior and flattering to recommend all his best
points, and he obtained plenty of subscriptions from visitors, and of
co-operation from inhabitants. Many a young lady was in a flutter at the
approach of the spruce little figure in black, and so many volunteers
were there for parish work, that districts and classes were divided and
subdivided, till it sometimes seemed as if the only difficulty was to
find poor people enough who would submit to serve as the corpus vile for
their charitable treatment.

For it was not a really poor population. The men were seafaring, the
women lacemaking, and just well enough off to make dissent doubly
attractive as an escape from some of the interfering almsgiving of the
place. Over-visiting, criticism of dress, and inquisitorial examinations
had made more than one Primitive Methodist, and no severe distress had
been so recent as to render the women tolerant of troublesome weekly
inspections. The Curtis sisters were, however, regarded as an exception;
they were viewed as real gentlefolks, not only by their own tenants, but
by all who were conscious of their hereditary claims to respect; they
did not care whether hair were long or short, and their benefits were
more substantial and reliable than could be looked for from the casual
visitors and petty gentry around, so that sundry houses that were
forbidden ground to district visitors, were ready to grant them a
welcome.

One of these belonged to the most able lacemaker in the place, a
hard-working woman, who kept seven little pupils in a sort of cupboard
under the staircase, with a window into the back garden, “because,” said
she, “they did no work if they looked out into the front, there were so
many gapsies;” these gapsies consisting of the very scanty traffic of
the further end of Mackarel Lane. For ten hours a day did these children
work in a space just wide enough for them to sit, with the two least
under the slope of the stairs, permitted no distraction from their
bobbins, but invaded by their mistress on the faintest sound of tongues.
Into this hotbed of sprigs was admitted a child who had been a special
favourite at school, an orphan niece of the head of the establishment.
The two brothers had been lost together at sea; and while the one
widow became noted for her lace, the other, a stranger to the art, had
maintained herself by small millinery, and had not sacrificed her little
girl to the Moloch of lace, but had kept her at school to a later age
than usual in the place. But the mother died, and the orphan was at once
adopted by the aunt, with the resolve to act the truly kind part by her,
and break her in to lacemaking. That determination was a great blow to
the school visitors; the girls were in general so young, or so stupefied
with their work, that an intelligent girl like Lovedy Kelland was no
small treasure to them; there were designs of making her a pupil teacher
in a few years, and offers and remonstrances rained in upon her aunt.
But they had no effect; Mrs. Kelland was persuaded that the child had
been spoilt by learning, and in truth poor Lovedy was a refractory
scholar; she was too lively to bear the confinement patiently; her mind
was too much awake not to rebel against the dulness, and her fingers had
not been brought into training early enough. Her incessant tears spoilt
her thread, and Mrs. Kelland decided that “she’d never get her bread
till she was broke of her buke;” which breaking was attempted by a
summary pawning of all poor Lovedy’s reward books. The poor child
confided her loss to her young lady teacher at the Sunday school; the
young lady, being new, young, and inflammable, reproached Mrs. Kelland
with dishonesty and tyranny to the orphan, and in return was nearly
frightened out of her wits by such a scolding as only such a woman as
the lace mistress could deliver. Then Mr. Touchett tried his hand, and
though he did not meet with quite so much violence, all he heard was
that she had “given Lovedy the stick for being such a little tod as to
complain, when she knew the money for the bukes was put safe away in
her money-box. She was not going to the Sunday schule again, not she,
to tell stories against her best friends!” And when the next district
visitor came that way, the door was shut in her face, with the tract
thrown out at the opening, and an intimation in Mrs. Kelland’s shrill
voice, that no more bukes were wanted; she got plenty from Miss Curtis.

These bukes from Miss Curtis were sanatory tracts, which Rachel was
constantly bestowing, and which on Sundays Mrs. Kelland spelt through,
with her finger under the line, in happy ignorance whether the subject
were temporal or spiritual, and feeling herself in the exemplary
discharge of a Sunday duty. Moreover, old feudal feeling made Rachel
be unmolested when she came down twice a week, opened the door of
the blackhole under the stairs, and read aloud something religious,
something improving, and a bit of a story, following it up by mental
arithmetic and a lesson on objects, which seemed to Mrs. Kelland the
most arrant nonsense in the world, and to her well-broken scholars was
about as interesting as the humming of a blue-bottle fly; but it was
poor Lovedy’s one enjoyment, though making such havoc of her work that
it was always expiated by extra hours, not on her pillow, but at it.

These visits of Rachel were considered to encourage the Kelland
refractoriness, and it was officially intimated that it would be wise to
discontinue them, and that “it was thought better” to withdraw from Mrs.
Kelland all that direct patronage of her trade, by which the ladies
had enabled her to be in some degree independent of the middle-men,
who absorbed so much of the profit from the workers. Grace and Rachel,
sufficiently old inhabitants to remember the terrible wreck that had
left her a struggling widow, felt this a hard, not to say a vindictive
decision. They had long been a kind of agents for disposing of her wares
at a distance; and, feeling that the woman had received provocation,
Grace was not disposed to give her up, while Rachel loudly averred that
neither Mr. Touchett nor any of his ladies had any right to interfere,
and she should take no notice.

“But,” said Grace, “can we run counter to our clergyman’s direct
wishes?”

“Yes, when he steps out of his province. My dear Grace, you grew up in
the days of curatolatry, but it won’t do; men are fallible even when
they preach in a surplice, and you may be thankful to me that you and
Fanny are not both led along in a string in the train of Mr. Touchett’s
devotees!”

“I wish I knew what was right to do,” said Grace, quietly, and she
remained wishing it after Rachel had said a great deal more; but
the upshot of it was, that one day when Grace and Fanny were walking
together on the esplanade, they met Mr. Touchett, and Grace said to him,
“We have been thinking it over, and we thought, perhaps, you would not
wish us not to give any orders to Mrs. Kelland. I know she has behaved
very ill; but I don’t see how she is to get on, and she has this child
on her hands.”

“I know,” said Mr. Touchett, “but really it was flagrant.”

“Oh,” said Lady Temple, gently, “I dare say she didn’t mean it, and you
could not be hard on a widow.”

“Well,” said Mr. Touchett, “Miss Brown was very much put out,
and—and—it is a great pity about the child, but I never thought myself
that such strong measures would do any good.”

“Then you will not object to her being employed?”

“No, not at all. From a distance, it is not the same thing as close at
home; it won’t be an example.”

“Thank you,” said Grace; and “I am so glad,” said Lady Temple; and
Mr. Touchett went on his way, lightened of his fear of having let his
zealous coadjutors oppress the hard-working, and far more brightened by
the sweet smile of requital, but all the time doubtful whether he had
been weak. As to the victory, Rachel only laughed, and said, “If it made
Grace more comfortable, it was well, except for that acknowledgment of
Mr. Touchett’s jurisdiction.”

A few days after, Rachel made her appearance in Mackerel Lane, and
announced her intention of consulting Ermine Williams under seal of
secrecy. “I have an essay that I wish you to judge of before I send it
to the ‘Traveller.’”

“Indeed!” said Ermine, her colour rising. “Would it not be better—”

“Oh, I know what you mean, but don’t scruple on that score. At my age,
with a mother like mine, it is simply to avoid teasing and excitement
that I am silent.”

“I was going to say I was hardly a fair—”

“Because of your different opinions? But those go for nothing. You are
a worthy antagonist, and enter into my views as my mother and sister
cannot do, even while you oppose them.”

“But I don’t think I can help you, even if—”

“I don’t want help; I only want you to judge of the composition. In
fact, I read it to you that I may hear it myself.”

Ermine resigned herself.

“‘Curatolatry is a species—’”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Curatolatry. Ah! I thought that would attract attention.”

“But I am afraid the scholars would fall foul of it.”

“Why, have not they just made Mariolatry?”

“Yes; but they are very severe on hybrids between Latin and Greek.”

“It is not worth while to boggle at trifles when one has an expressive
term,” said Rachel; “if it turns into English, that is all that is
wanted.”

“Would it not be rather a pity if it should turn into English? Might it
not be hard to brand with a contemptuous name what does more good than
harm?”

“That sickly mixture of flirtation and hero worship, with a religious
daub as a salve to the conscience.”

“Laugh it down, and what do you leave? In Miss Austen’s time silly girls
ran to balls after militiamen, now, if they run to schools and charities
more for the curate’s sake than they quite know, is not the alternative
better?”

“It is greater humbug,” said Rachel. “But I knew you would not agree, at
least beforehand, it is appreciation that I want.”

Never did Madame de Genlis make a cleverer hit than in the reading of
the Genius Phanor’s tragedy in the Palace of Truth. Comically absurd
as the inconsistency is of transporting the lecture of a Parisian
academician into an enchanted palace, full of genii and fairies of the
remotest possible connexion with the Arab jinn, the whole is redeemed
by the truth to nature of the sole dupe in the Palace of Truth being the
author reading his own works. Ermine was thinking of him all the time.
She was under none of the constraint of Phanor’s auditors, though she
carried a perpetual palace of truth about with her; she would not have
had either fears or compunctions in criticising, if she could. The paper
was in the essay style, between argument and sarcasm, something after
the model of the Invalid’s Letters; but it was scarcely lightly touched
enough, the irony was wormwood, the gravity heavy and sententious, and
where there was a just thought or happy hit, it seemed to travel in a
road-waggon, and be lost in the rumbling of the wheels. Ermine did
not restrain a smile, half of amusement, half of relief, at the
self-antidote the paper contained; but the smile passed with the
authoress as a tribute to her satire.

“In this age,” she said, “we must use those lighter weapons of wit, or
no one will attend.”

“Perhaps,” said Ermine, “if I approve your object, I should tell you you
don’t use them lightly.”

“Ah! but I know you don’t approve it. You are not lay woman enough to be
impartial, and you belong to the age that was trying the experiment of
the hierarchy modified: I to that which has found it will not do. But at
least you understand my view; I have made out my case.”

“Yes, I understand your view; but—”

“You don’t sympathize. Of course not; but when it receives its full
weight from the printer’s bands, you will see that it will tell. That
bit about the weak tea fumes I thought of afterwards, and I am afraid I
did not read it well.”

“I remember it; but forgive me if I say first I think the whole is
rather too—too lengthy to take.”

“Oh, that is only because manuscript takes long to read aloud. I counted
the words, so I can’t be mistaken, at least I collated twenty lines,
and multiplied; and it is not so long as the Invalid’s last letter about
systematic reading.”

“And then comes my question again, Is good to come of it?”

“That I can’t expect you to see at this time; but it is to be the
beginning of a series, exposing the fallacies of woman’s life as at
present conducted; and out of these I mean to point the way to more
consistent, more independent, better combined exertion. If I can make
myself useful with my pen, it will compensate for the being debarred
from so many more obvious outlets. I should like to have as much
influence over people’s minds as that Invalid for instance, and by
earnest effort I know I shall attain it.”

“I—I—” half-laughing and blushing, “I hope you will, for I know you
would wish to use it for good; but, to speak plainly, I doubt about the
success of this effort, or—or if it ought to succeed.”

“Yes, I know you do,” said Rachel. “No one ever can judge of a
manuscript. You have done all I wished you to do, and I value your
sincerity. Of course I did not expect praise, since the more telling
it is on the opposite side, the less you could like it. I saw you
appreciated it.”

And Rachel departed, while Rose crept up to her aunt, asking, “Aunt
Ermine, why do you look so very funny? It was very tiresome. Are not you
glad it is over?”

“I was thinking, Rose, what a difficult language plain English is
sometimes.”

“What, Miss Rachel’s? I couldn’t understand one bit of her long story,
except that she did not like weak tea.”

“It was my own that I meant,” said Ermine. “But, Rose, always remember
that a person who stands plain speaking from one like me has something
very noble and generous in her. Were you here all the time, Rosie? I
don’t wonder you were tired.”

“No, Aunt Ermine, I went and told Violetta and Augustus a fairy tale out
of my own head.”

“Indeed; and how did they like it?”

“Violetta looked at me all the time, and Augustus gave three winks, so I
think he liked it.”

“Appreciated it!” said Aunt Ermine.




CHAPTER IV. THE HERO.


 “And which is Lucy’s?  Can it be
  That puny fop, armed cap-a-pie,
  Who loves in the saloon to show
  The arms that never knew a foe.”—SCOTT.


“My lady’s compliments, ma’am, and she would he much obliged if you
would remain till she comes home,” was Coombe’s reception of Alison.
“She is gone to Avoncester with Master Temple and Master Francis.”

“Gone to Avoncester!” exclaimed Rachel, who had walked from church to
Myrtlewood with Alison.

“Mamma is gone to meet the Major!” cried three of the lesser boys,
rushing upon them in full cry; then Leoline, facing round, “Not the
major, he is lieutenant-colonel now—Colonel Keith, hurrah!”

“What—what do you mean? Speak rationally, Leoline, if you can.”

“My lady sent a note to the Homestead this morning,” explained Coombe.
“She heard this morning that Colonel Keith intended to arrive to-day,
and took the young gentlemen with her to meet him.”

Rachel could hardly refrain from manifesting her displeasure, and
bluntly asked what time Lady Temple was likely to be at home.

“It depended,” Coombe said, “upon the train; it was not certain whether
Colonel Keith would come by the twelve or the two o’clock train.”

And Rachel was going to turn sharply round, and dash home with the
tidings, when Alison arrested her with the question—

“And who is Colonel Keith?”

Rachel was too much wrapped up in her own view to hear the trembling of
the voice, and answered, “Colonel Keith! why, the Major! You have not
been here so long without hearing of the Major?”

“Yes, but I did not know. Who is he?” And a more observant person would
have seen the governess’s gasping effort to veil her eagerness under her
wonted self-control.

“Don’t you know who the Major is?” shouted Leoline. “He is our military
secretary.”

“That’s the sum total of my knowledge,” said Rachel, “I don’t understand
his influence, nor know where he was picked up.”

“Nor his regiment?”

“He is not a regimental officer; he is on our staff,” said Leoline,
whose imagination could not attain to an earlier condition than “on our
staff.”

“I shall go home, then,” said Rachel, “and see if there is any
explanation there.”

“I shall ask the Major not to let Aunt Rachel come here,” observed
Hubert, as she departed; it was well it was not before.

“Leoline,” anxiously asked Alison, “can you tell me the Major’s name?”

“Colonel Keith—Lieutenant-Colonel Keith,” was all the answer.

“I meant his Christian name, my dear.”

“Only little boys have Christian names!” they returned, and Alison was
forced to do her best to tame herself and them to the duties of the long
day of anticipation so joyous on their part, so full of confusion and
bewildered anxiety on her own. She looked in vain, half stealthily, as
often before, for a recent Army List or Peerage. Long ago she had
lost the Honourable Colin A. Keith from among the officers of the —th
Highlanders, and though in the last Peerage she had laid hands on he was
still among the surviving sons of the late Lord Keith, of Gowanbrae, the
date had not gone back far enough to establish that he had not died in
the Indian war. It was fear that predominated with her, there were many
moments when she would have given worlds to be secure that the newcomer
was not the man she thought of, who, whether constant or inconstant,
could bring nothing but pain and disturbance to the calm tenour of her
sister’s life. Everything was an oppression to her; the children, in
their wild, joyous spirits and gladsome inattention, tried her patience
almost beyond her powers; the charge of the younger ones in their
mother’s absence was burthensome, and the delay in returning to her
sister became well-nigh intolerable, when she figured to herself Rachel
Curtis going down to Ermine with the tidings of Colonel Keith’s arrival,
and her own discontent at his influence with her cousin. Would that
she had spoken a word of warning; yet that might have been merely
mischievous, for the subject was surely too delicate for Rachel to
broach with so recent a friend. But Rachel had bad taste for anything!
That the little boys did not find Miss Williams very cross that day was
an effect of the long habit of self-control, and she could hardly sit
still under the additional fret, when, just as tea was spread for the
school-room party, in walked Miss Rachel, and sat herself down, in spite
of Hubert, who made up a most coaxing, entreating face, as he said,
“Please, Aunt Rachel, doesn’t Aunt Grace want you very much!”

“Not at all. Why, Hubert?”

“Oh, if you would only go away, and not spoil our fun when the Major
comes.”

For once Rachel did laugh, but she did not take the hint, and Alison
obtained only the satisfaction of hearing that she had at least not been
in Mackarel Lane. The wheels sounded on the gravel, out rushed the boys;
Alison and Rachel sat in strange, absolute silence, each forgetful
of the other, neither guarding her own looks, nor remarking her
companion’s. Alison’s lips were parted by intense listening; Rachel’s
teeth were set to receive her enemy. There was a chorus of voices in
the hall, and something about tea and coming in warned both to gather up
their looks before Lady Temple had opened the door, and brought in upon
them not one foe, but two! Was Rachel seeing double? Hardly that, for
one was tall, bald, and bearded, not dangerously young, but on that very
account the more dangerously good-looking; and the other was almost a
boy, slim and light, just of the empty young officer type. Here, too,
was Fanny, flushed, excited, prettier and brighter than Rachel had seen
her at all, waving an introduction with head and hand; and the boys
hanging round the Major with deafening exclamations of welcome, in which
they were speedily joined by the nursery detachment. Those greetings,
those observations on growth and looks, those glad, eager questions and
answers, were like the welcome of an integral part of the family; it was
far more intimate and familiar than had been possible with the Curtises
after the long separation, and it was enough to have made the two
spectators feel out of place, if such a sensation had been within
Rachel’s capacity, or if Alison had not been engaged with the tea. Lady
Temple made a few explanations, sotto voce, to Alison, whom she always
treated as though in dread of not being sufficiently considerate. “I do
hope the children have been good; I knew you would not mind; I could not
wait to see you, or I should have been too late to meet the train, and
then he would have come by the coach; and it is such a raw east wind. He
must be careful in this climate.”

“How warm and sunshiny it has been all day,” said Rachel, by way of
opposition to some distant echo of this whisper.

“Sunshiny, but treacherous,” answered Colonel Keith; “there are cold
gusts round corners. This must be a very sheltered nook of the coast.”

“Quite a different zone from Avoncester,” said the youth.

“Yes, delightful. I told you it was just what would suit you,” added
Fanny, to the colonel.

“Some winds are very cold here,” interposed Rachel. “I always pity
people who are imposed upon to think it a Mentone near home. They are
choking our churchyard.”

“Very inconsiderate of them,” muttered the young man.

“But what made you come home so late, Fanny?” said Rachel.

Alison suspected a slight look of wonder on the part of both the
officers at hearing their general’s wife thus called to account; but
Fanny, taking it as a matter of course, answered, “We found that the-th
was at Avoncester. I had no idea of it, and they did not know I was
here; so I went to call upon Mrs. Hammond, and Colonel Keith went to
look for Alick, and we have brought him home to dine.”

Fanny took it for granted that Rachel must know who Alick was, but she
was far from doing so, though she remembered that the —th had been her
uncle’s regiment, and had been under Sir Stephen Temple’s command in
India at the time of the mutiny. The thought of Fanny’s lapsing into
military society was shocking to her. The boys were vociferating about
boats, ponies, and all that had been deferred till the Major’s arrival,
and he was answering them kindly, but hushing the extra outcry less by
word than sign, and his own lowered voice and polished manner—a manner
that excessively chafed her as a sort of insult to the blunt, rapid ways
that she considered as sincere and unaffected, a silkiness that no doubt
had worked on the honest, simple general, as it was now working on
the weak young widow. Anything was better than leaving her to such
influence, and in pursuance of the intention that Rachel had already
announced at home, she invited herself to stay to dinner; and Fanny
eagerly thanked her, for making it a little less dull for Colonel Keith
and Alick. It was so good to come down and help. Certainly Fanny was
an innocent creature, provided she was not spoilt, and it was a duty to
guard her innocence.

Alison Williams escaped to her home, sure of nothing but that her sister
must not be allowed to share her uncertainties; and Lady Temple and her
guests sat down to dinner. Rachel meant to have sat at the bottom and
carved, as belonging to the house; but Fanny motioned the Colonel to
the place, observing, “It is so natural to see you there! One only
wants poor Captain Dent at the other end. Do you know whether he has his
leave?”

Wherewith commenced a discussion of military friends—who had been heard
of from Australia, who had been met in England, who was promoted, who
married, who retired, &c., and all the quarters of the-th since its
return from India two years ago; Fanny eagerly asking questions and
making remarks, quite at home and all animation, absolutely a different
being from the subdued, meek little creature that Rachel had hitherto
seen. Attempts were made to include Miss Curtis in the conversation by
addressing anecdotes to her, and asking if she knew the places named;
but she had been to none, and the three old friends quickly fell into
the swing of talk about what interested them. Once, however, she
came down on them with, “What conclusion have you formed upon female
emigration?”


    “‘His sister she went beyond the seas,
      And died an old maid among black savagees.’


“That’s the most remarkable instance of female emigration on record,
isn’t it?” observed Alick.

“What; her dying an old maid?” said Colonel Keith. “I am not sure.
Wholesale exportations of wives are spoiling the market.”

“I did not mean marriage,” said Rachel, stoutly. “I am particularly
anxious to know whether there is a field open to independent female
labour.”

“All the superior young women seemed to turn nurserymaids,” said the
Colonel.

“Oh,” interposed Fanny, “do you remember that nice girl of ours who
would marry that Orderly-Sergeant O’Donoghoe? I have had a letter from
her in such distress.”

“Of course, the natural termination,” said Alick, in his lazy voice.

“And I thought you would tell me how to manage sending her some help,”
 proceeded Fanny.

“I could have helped you, Fanny. Won’t an order do it?”

“Not quite,” said Fanny, a shade of a smile playing on her lip. “It is
whether to send it through one of the officers or not. If Captain Lee is
with the regiment, I know he would take care of it for her.”

So they plunged into another regiment, and Rachel decided that nothing
was so wearisome as to hear triflers talk shop.

There was no opportunity of calling Fanny to order after dinner, for
she went off on her progress to all the seven cribs, and was only just
returning from them when the gentlemen came in, and then she made room
for the younger beside her on the sofa, saying, “Now, Alick, I do so
want to hear about poor, dear little Bessie;” and they began so low and
confidentially, that Rachel wondered if her alarms wore to be transfered
from the bearded colonel to the dapper boy, or if, in very truth,
she must deem poor Fanny a general coquette. Besides, a man must be
contemptible who wore gloves at so small a party, when she did not.

She had been whiling away the time of Fanny’s absence by looking over
the books on the table, and she did not regard the present company
sufficiently to desist on their account. Colonel Keith began to turn
over some numbers of the “Traveller” that lay near him, and presently
looked up, and said, “Do you know who is the writer of this?”

“What is it? Ah! one of the Invalid’s essays. They strike every one; but
I fancy the authorship is a great secret.”

“You do not know it?”

“No, I wish I did. Which of them are you reading? ‘Country Walks.’ That
is not one that I care about, it is a mere hash of old recollections;
but there are some very sensible and superior ones, so that I have heard
it sometimes doubted whether they are man’s or woman’s writing. For my
part, I think them too earnest to be a man’s; men always play with their
subject.”

“Oh, yes,” said Fanny, “I am sure only a lady could have written
anything so sweet as that about flowers in a sick-room; it so put me in
mind of the lovely flowers you used to bring me one at a time, when I
was ill at Cape Town.”

There was no more sense to be had after those three once fell upon their
reminiscences.

That night, after having betrayed her wakefulness by a movement in her
bed, Alison Williams heard her sister’s voice, low and steady, saying,
“Ailie, dear, be it what it may, guessing is worse than certainty.”

“Oh, Ermine, I hoped—I know nothing—I have nothing to tell.”

“You dread something,” said Ermine; “you have been striving for
unconcern all the evening, my poor dear, but surely you know, Ailie,
that nothing is so bad while we share it.”

“And I have frightened you about nothing.”

“Nothing! nothing about Edward?”

“Oh, no, no!”

“And no one has made you uncomfortable?”

“No.”

“Then there is only one thing that it can be, Ailie, and you need not
fear to tell me that. I always knew that if he lived I must be prepared
for it, and you would not have hesitated to tell me of his death.”

“It is not that, indeed it is not, Ermine, it is only this—that I found
to-day that Lady Temple’s major has the same name.”

“But you said she was come home. You must have seen him.”

“Yes, but I should not know him. I had only seen him once, remember,
twelve years ago, and when I durst not look at him.”

“At least,” said Ermine, quickly, “you can tell me what you saw to-day.”

“A Scotch face, bald head, dark beard, grizzled hair.”

“Yes I am grey, and he was five years older; but he used not to have a
Scotch face. Can you tell me about his eyes?”

“Dark,” I think.

“They were very dark blue, almost black. Time and climate must have left
them alone. You may know him by those eyes, Ailie. And you could not
make out anything about him?”

“No, not even his Christian name nor his regiment. I had only the little
ones and Miss Rachel to ask, and they knew nothing. I wanted to keep
this from you till I was sure, but you always find me out.”

“Do you think I couldn’t see the misery you were in all the evening,
poor child? But now you have had it out, sleep, and don’t be
distressed.”

“But, Ermine, if you—”

“My dear, I am thankful that nothing is amiss with you or Edward. For
the rest, there is nothing but patience. Now, not another word; you must
not lose your sleep, nor take away my chance of any.”

How much the sisters slept they did not confide to one another, but
when they rose, Alison shook her head at her sister’s heavy eyelids,
and Ermine retorted with a reproachful smile at certain dark tokens of
sleeplessness under Alison’s eyes.

“No, not the flowered flimsiness, please,” she said, in the course of
her toilette, “let me have the respectable grey silk.” And next she
asked for a drawer, whence she chose a little Nuremberg horn brooch for
her neck. “I know it is very silly,” she said, “but I can’t quite help
it. Only one question, Ailie, that I thought of too late. Did he hear
your name?”

“I think not, Lady Temple named nobody. But why did you not ask me last
night?”

“I thought beginning to talk again would destroy your chance of sleep,
and we had resolved to stop.”

“And, Ermine, if it be, what shall I do?”

“Do as you feel right at the moment,” said Ermine, after a moment’s
pause. “I cannot tell how it may be. I have been thinking over what you
told me about the Major and Lady Temple.”

“Oh, Ermine, what a reproof this is for that bit of gossip.”

“Not at all, my dear, the warning may be all the better for me,” said
Ermine, with a voice less steady than her words. “It is not what, under
the circumstances, I could think likely in the Colin whom I knew; but
were it indeed so, then, Ailie, you had better say nothing about me,
unless he found you out. We would get employment elsewhere.”

“And I must leave you to the suspense all day.”

“Much better so. The worst thing we could do would be to go on talking
about it. It is far better for me to be left with my dear little
unconscious companion.”

Alison tried to comfort herself with this belief through the long hours
of the morning, during which she only heard that mamma and Colonel Keith
were gone to the Homestead, and she saw no one till she came forth with
her troop to the midday meal.

And there, at sight of Lady Temple’s content and calm, satisfied look,
as though she were once more in an accustomed atmosphere, and felt
herself and the boys protected, and of the Colonel’s courteous attention
to her and affectionate authority towards her sons, it was an absolute
pang to recognise the hue of eye described by Ermine; but still Alison
tried to think them generic Keith eyes, till at length, amid the merry
chatter of her pupils, came an appeal to “Miss Williams,” and then came
a look that thrilled through her, the same glance that she had met for
one terrible moment twelve years before, and renewing the same longing
to shrink from all sight or sound. How she kept her seat and continued
to attend to the children she never knew, but the voices sounded like
a distant Babel; and she did not know whether she were most relieved,
disappointed, or indignant when she left the dining-room to take the
boys for their walk. Oh, that Ermine could be hid from all knowledge
of what would be so much harder to bear than the death in which she had
long believed!

Harder to bear? Yes, Ermine had already been passing through a heart
sickness that made the morning like an age. Her resolute will had
struggled hard for composure, cheerfulness, and occupation; but the
little watchful niece had seen through the endeavour, and had made her
own to the sleepless night and the headache. The usual remedy was a
drive in a wheeled chair, and Rose was so urgent to be allowed to go and
order one, that Ermine at last yielded, partly because she had hardly
energy enough to turn her refusal graciously, partly because she would
not feel herself staying at home for the vague hope and when the child
was out of sight, she had the comfort of clasping her hands, and ceasing
to restrain her countenance, while she murmured, “Oh, Colin, Colin, are
you what you were twelve years back? Is this all dream, all delusion,
and waste of feeling, while you are lying in your Indian grave, more
mine than you can ever be living be as it may,—


                  “‘Calm me, my God, and keep me calm
                      While these hot breezes blow;
                    Be like the night dew’s cooling balm
                      Upon earth’s fevered brow.
                    Calm me, my God, and keep me calm,
                      Soft resting on Thy breast;
                    Soothe me with holy hymn and psalm,
                      And bid my spirit rest.’”




CHAPTER V. MILITARY SOCIETY.



                         “My trust
 Like a good parent did beget of him
 A falsehood in its contrary as great
 As my trust was, which had indeed no limit.”—TEMPEST.


Rose found the wheeled chair, to which her aunt gave the preference, was
engaged, and shaking her little discreet head at “the shakey chair” and
“the stuffy chair,” she turned pensively homeward, and was speeding down
Mackarel Lane, when she was stayed by the words, “My little girl!” and
the grandest and most bearded gentleman she had ever seen, demanded,
“Can you tell me if Miss Williams lives here?”

“My aunt?” exclaimed Rose, gazing up with her pretty, frightened-fawn
look.

“Indeed!” he exclaimed, looking eagerly at her, “then you are the child
of a very old friend of mine! Did you never hear him speak of his old
school-fellow, Colin Keith?”

“Papa is away,” said Rose, turning back her neck to get a full view of
his face from under the brim of her hat.

“‘Will you run on and ask your aunt if she would like to see me?” he
added.

Thus it was that Ermine heard the quick patter of the child’s steps,
followed by the manly tread, and the words sounded in her ears, “Aunt
Ermine, there’s a gentleman, and he has a great beard, and he says he is
papa’s old friend! And here he is.”

Ermine’s beaming eyes as absolutely met the new comer as though she had
sprung forward. “I thought you would come,” she said, in a voice serene
with exceeding bliss.

“I have found you at last,” as their hands clasped; and they gazed into
each other’s faces in the untroubled repose of the meeting, exclusive of
all else.

Ermine was the first to break silence. “Oh, Colin, you look worn and
altered.”

“You don’t; you have kept your sunbeam face for me with the dear brown
glow I never thought to have seen again. Why did they tell me you were
an invalid, Ermine?”

“Have you not seen Alison?” she asked, supposing he would have known
all.

“I saw her, but did not hear her name, till just now at luncheon, when
our looks met, and I saw it was not another disappointment.”

“And she knows you are come to me?”

“It was not in me to speak to her till I had recovered you! One can
forgive, but not forget.”

“You will do more when you know her, and how she has only lived and
worked for me, dear Ailie, and suffered far more than I—”

“While I was suffering from being unable to do anything but live for
you,” he repeated, taking up her words; “but that is ended now—” and as
she made a negative motion of her head, “have you not trusted to me?”

“I have thought you not living,” she said; “the last I know was your
letter to dear Lady Alison, written from the hospital at Cape Town,
after your wound. She was ill even when it came, and she could only give
it to Ailie for me.”

“Dear good aunt, she got into trouble with all the family for our sake;
and when she was gone no one would give me any tidings of you.”

“It was her last disappointment that you were not sent home on sick
leave. Did you get well too fast?”

“Not exactly; but my father, or rather, I believe, my brother, intimated
that I should be welcome only if I had laid aside a certain foolish
fancy, and as lying on my back had not conduced to that end, I could
only say I would stay where I was.”

“And was it worse for you? I am sure, in spite of all that tanned skin,
that your health has suffered. Ought you to have come home?”

“No, I do not know that London surgeons could have got at the ball,”
 he said, putting his hand on his chest, “and it gives me no trouble in
general. I was such a spectacle when I returned to duty, that good old
Sir Stephen Temple, always a proverb for making his staff a refuge for
the infirm, made me his aide-de-camp, and was like a father to me.”

“Now I see why I never could find your name in any list of the officers
in the moves of the regiment! I gave you quite up when I saw no Keith
among those that came home from India. I did believe then that you were
the Colonel Alexander Keith whose death I had seen mentioned, though
I had long trusted to his not being honourable, nor having your first
name.”

“Ah! he succeeded to the command after Lady Temple’s father. A kind
friend to me he was, and he left me in charge of his son and daughter.
A very good and gallant fellow is that young Alick. I must bring him to
see you some day—”

“Oh! I saw his name; I remember! I gloried in the doings of a Keith; but
I was afraid he had died, as there was no such name with the regiment
when it came home.”

“No, he was almost shattered to pieces; but Sir Stephen sent him up the
hills to be nursed by Lady Temple and her mother, and he was sent home
as soon as he could be moved. I was astonished to see how entirely he
had recovered.”

“Then you went through all that Indian war?”

“Yes; with Sir Stephen.”

“You must show me all your medals! How much you have to tell me! And
then—?”

“Just when the regiment was coming home, my dear old chief was appointed
to the command in Australia, and insisted on my coming with him as
military secretary. He had come to depend on me so much that I could not
well leave him; and in five years there was the way to promotion and to
claiming you at once. We were just settled there, when what I heard made
me long to have decided otherwise, but I could not break with him then.
I wrote to Edward, but had my letter returned to me.”

“No wonder; Edward was abroad, all connexion broken.”

“I wrote to Beauchamp, and he knew nothing, and I could only wait till
my chief’s time should be up. You know how it was cut short, and how
the care of the poor little widow detained me till she was fit for the
voyage. I came and sought you in vain in town. I went home, and found
my brother lonely and dispirited. He has lost his son, his daughters are
married, and he and I are all the brothers left out of the six! He was
urgent that I should come and live with him and marry. I told him I
would, with all my heart, when I had found you, and he saw I was too
much in earnest to be opposed. Then I went to Beauchamp, but Harry knew
nothing about any one. I tried to find out your sister and Dr. Long, but
heard they were gone to Belfast.”

“Yes, they lost a good deal in the crash, and did not like retrenching
among their neighbours, so they went to Ireland, and there they have a
flourishing practice.”

“I thought myself on my way there,” he said, smiling; “only I had
first to settle Lady Temple, little guessing who was her treasure of
a governess! Last night I had nearly opened, on another false scent;
I fell in with a description that I could have sworn was yours, of the
heather behind the parsonage. I made a note of the publisher in case all
else had failed.”

“I’m glad you knew the scent of the thyme!”

“Then it was no false scent?”

“One must live, and I was thankful to do anything to lighten Ailie’s
burthen. I wrote down that description that I might live in the place in
fancy; and one day, when the contribution was wanted and I was hard up
for ideas, I sent it, though I was loth to lay open that bit of home and
heart.”

“Well it might give me the sense of meeting you! And in other papers of
the series I traced your old self more ripened.”

“The editor was a friend of Edward’s, and in our London days he asked me
to write letters on things in general, and when I said I saw the world
through a key-hole, he answered that a circumscribed view gained in
distinctness. Most kind and helpful he has been, and what began between
sport and need to say out one’s mind has come to be a resource for
which we are very thankful. He sends us books for reviewal, and that is
pleasant and improving, not to say profitable.”

“Little did I think you were in such straits!” he said, stroking the
child’s head, and waiting as though her presence were a restraint on
inquiries, but she eagerly availed herself of the pause. “Aunt Ermine,
please what shall I say about the chairs? Will you have the nice one and
Billy when they come home? I was to take the answer, only you did talk
so that I could not ask!”

“Thank you, my dear; I don’t want chairs nor anything else while I
can talk so,” she answered, smiling. “You had better take a run in the
garden when you come back;” and Rose replied with a nod of assent
that made the colonel smile and say, “Good-bye then, my sweet Lady
Discretion, some day we will be better acquainted.”

“Dear child,” said Ermine, “she is our great blessing, and some day I
trust will be the same to her dear father. Oh, Colin! it is too much to
hope that you have not believed what you must have heard! And yet you
wrote to him.”

“Nay, I could not but feel great distrust of what I heard, since I
was also told that his sisters were unconvinced; and besides, I had
continually seen him at school the victim of other people’s faults.”

“This is best of all,” exclaimed Ermine, with glistening eyes, and hand
laid upon his; “it is the most comfortable word I have heard since it
happened. Yes, indeed, many a time before I saw you, had I heard of
‘Keith’ as the friend who saw him righted. Oh, Colin! thanks, thanks for
believing in him more than for all!”

“Not believing, but knowing,” he answered—“knowing both you and Edward.
Besides, is it not almost invariable that the inventor is ruined by his
invention—a Prospero by nature?”

“It was not the invention,” she answered; “that throve as long as my
father lived.”

“Yes, he was an excellent man of business.”

“And he thought the concern so secure that there was no danger in
embarking all the available capital of the family in it, and it did
bring us in a very good income.”

“I remember that it struck me that the people at home would find that
they had made a mistake after all, and missed a fortune for me! It was
an invention for diminishing the fragility of glass under heat; was it
not?”

“Yes, and the manufacture was very prosperous, so that my father was
quite at ease about us. After his death we made a home for Edward in
London, and looked after him when he used to be smitten with some new
idea and forgot all sublunary matters. When he married we went to live
at Richmond, and had his dear little wife very much with us, for she was
a delicate tender creature, half killed by London. In process of time he
fell in with a man named Maddox, plausible and clever, who became a sort
of manager, especially while Edward was in his trances of invention; and
at all times knew more about his accounts than he did himself. Nothing
but my father’s authority had ever made him really look into them, and
this man took them all off his hands. There was a matter about the
glass that Edward was bent on ascertaining, and he went to study the
manufacture in Bohemia, taking his wife with him, and leaving Rose with
us. Shortly after, Dr. Long and Harry Beauchamp received letters asking
for a considerable advance, to be laid out on the materials that this
improvement would require. Immediately afterwards came the crash.”

“Exactly what I heard. Of course the letters were written in ignorance
of what was impending.”

“Colin, they were never written at all by Edward! He denied
all knowledge of them. Alison saw Dr. Long’s, most ingeniously
managed—foreign paper and all—but she could swear to the forgery—”

“You suspect this Maddox?”

“Most strongly! He knew the state of the business; Edward did not. And
he had a correspondence that would have enabled so ingenious a person
easily to imitate Edward’s letters. I do not wonder at their having been
taken in; but how Julia—how Harry Beauchamp could believe—what they do
believe. Oh, Colin! it will not do to think about it!”

“Oh, that I had been at home! Were no measures taken?”

“Alas! alas! we urged Edward to come home and clear himself; but that
poor little wife of his was terrified beyond measure, imagined prisons
and trials. She was unable to move, and he could not leave her; she
took from him an unhappy promise not to put himself in what she fancied
danger from the law, and then died, leaving him a baby that did not live
a day. He was too broken-hearted to care for vindicating himself, and no
one-no one would do it for him!”

Colonel Keith frowned and clenched the hand that lay in his grasp till
it was absolute pain, but pain that was a relief to feel. “Madness,
madness!” he said. “Miserable! But how was it at home—? Did this Maddox
stand his ground?”

“Yes, if he had fled, all would have been clear, but he doctored the
accounts his own way, and quite satisfied Dr. Long and Harry. He showed
Edward’s receipt for the £6000 that had been advanced, and besides,
there was a large sum not accounted for, which was, of course, supposed
to have been invested abroad by Edward—some said gambled away—as if he
had not had a regular hatred of all sorts of games.”

“Edward with his head in the clouds! One notion is as likely as the
other.—Then absolutely nothing was done!”

“Nothing! The bankruptcy was declared, the whole affair broken up; and
certainly if every one had not known Edward to be the most heedless of
men, the confusion would have justified them in thinking him a dishonest
one. Things had been done in his name by Maddox that might have made a
stranger think him guilty of the rest, but to those who had ever known
his abstraction, and far more his real honour and uprightness, nothing
could have been plainer.”

“It all turned upon his absence.”

“Yes, he must have borne the brunt of what had been done in his name,
I know; that would have been bad enough, but in a court of justice, his
whole character would have been shown, and besides, a prosecution for
forgery of his receipt would have shown what Maddox was, sufficiently to
exculpate him.”

“And you say the losers by the deception would not believe in it?”

“No, they only shook their heads at our weak sisterly affection.”

“I wish I could see one of those letters. Where is Maddox now?”

“I cannot tell. He certainly did not go away immediately after the
settlement of accounts, but it has not been possible to us to keep up a
knowledge of his movements, or something might have turned up to justify
Edward. Oh, what it is to be helpless women! You are the very first
person, Colin, who has not looked at me pityingly, like a creature to be
forborne with an undeniable delusion!”

“They must be very insolent people, then, to look at that brow and eyes,
and think even sisterly love could blind them,” he said. “Yes, Ermine,
I was certain that unless Edward were more changed than I could believe,
there must be some such explanation. You have never seen him since?”

“No, he was too utterly broken by the loss of his wife to feel anything
else. For a long time we heard nothing, and that was the most dreadful
time of all! Then he wrote from a little German town, where he was
getting his bread as a photographer’s assistant. And since that he
has cast about the world, till just now he has some rather interesting
employment at the mines in the Oural Mountains, the first thing he has
really seemed to like or care for.”

“The Oural Mountains! that is out of reach. I wish I could see him. One
might find some means of clearing him. What directed your suspicion to
Maddox?”

“Chiefly that the letters professed to have been sent in a parcel to him
to be posted from the office. If it had been so, Edward and Lucy would
certainly have written to us at the same time. I could have shown, too,
that Maddox had written to me the day before to ascertain where Edward
was, so as to be sure of the date. It was a little country village,
and I made a blunder in copying the spelling from Lucy’s writing. Ailie
found that very blunder repeated in Dr. Long’s letter, and we showed him
that Edward did not write it so. Besides, before going abroad, Edward
had lost the seal-ring with his crest, which you gave him. You remember
the Saxon’s head?”

“I remember! You all took it much to heart that the engraver had made it
a Saracen’s head, and not a long-haired Saxon.”

“Well, Edward had renewed the ring, and taken care to make it a Saxon.
Now Ailie could get no one to believe her, but she is certain that the
letter was sealed with the old Saracen not the new Saxon. But—but—if
you had but been there—”

“Tell me you wished for me, Ermine.”

“I durst not wish anything about you,” she said, looking up through a
mist of tears.

“And you, what fixed you here?”

“An old servant of ours had married and settled here, and had written to
us of her satisfaction in finding that the clergyman was from Hereford.
We thought he would recommend Ailie as daily governess to visitors, and
that Sarah would be a comfortable landlady. It has answered very well;
Rose deserves her name far more than when we brought her here, and it is
wonderful how much better I have been since doctors have become a mere
luxury.”

“Do you, can you really mean that you are supporting yourselves?”

“All but twenty-five pounds a year, from a legacy to us, that Mr.
Beauchamp would not let them touch. But it has been most remarkable,
Colin,” she said, with the dew in her eyes, “how we have never wanted
our daily bread, and how happy we have been! If it had not been for
Edward, this would in many ways have been our happiest time. Since the
old days the little frets have told less, and Ailie has been infinitely
happier and brighter since she has had to work instead of only to watch
me. Ah, Colin, must I not own to having been happy? Indeed it was very
much because peace had come when the suspense had sunk into belief that
I might think of you as—, where you would not be grieved by the sight
of what I am now—”

As she spoke, a knock, not at the house, but at the room door, made them
both start, and impel their chairs to a more ordinary distance, just
as Rachel Curtis made her entrance, extremely amazed to find, not Mr.
Touchett, but a much greater foe and rival in that unexpected quarter.
Ermine, the least disconcerted, was the first to speak. “You are
surprised to find a visitor here,” she said, “and indeed only now, did
we find out that ‘our military secretary,’ as your little cousins say,
was our clear old squire’s nephew.”

There was a ring of gladness in the usually patient voice that struck
even Rachel, though she was usually too eager to be observant, but she
was still unready with talk for the occasion, and Ermine continued:
“We had heard so much of the Major before-hand, that we had a sort of
Jupiter-like expectation of the coming man. I am not sure that I shall
not go on expecting a mythic major!”

Rachel, never understanding playfulness, thought this both audacious
and unnecessary, and if it had come from any one else, would have
administered a snub, but she felt the invalid sacred from her weapons.

“Have you ever seen the boys?” asked Colonel Keith. “I am rather proud
of Conrade, my pupil; he is so chivalrous towards his mother.”

“Alison has brought down a division or two to show me. How much alike
they are.”

“Exactly alike, and excessively unruly and unmanageable,” said Rachel.
“I pity your sister.”

“More unmanageable in appearance than in reality,” said the colonel:
“there’s always a little trial of strength against the hand over them,
and they yield when they find it is really a hand. They were wonderfully
good and considerate when it was an object to keep the house quiet.”

Rachel would not encourage him to talk of Lady Temple, so she turned to
Ermine on the business that had brought her, collecting and adapting
old clothes for emigrants.—It was not exactly gentlemen’s pastime, and
Ermine tried to put it aside and converse, but Rachel never permitted
any petty consideration to interfere with a useful design, and as
there was a press of time for the things, she felt herself justified in
driving the intruder off the field and outstaying him. She succeeded; he
recollected the desire of the boys that he should take them to inspect
the pony at the “Jolly Mariner,” and took leave with—“I shall see you
to-morrow.”

“You knew him all the time!” exclaimed Rachel, pausing in her unfolding
of the Master Temples’ ship wardrobe. “Why did you not say so?”

“We did not know his name. He was always the ‘Major.’”

“Who, and what is he?” demanded Rachel, as she knelt before her victim,
fixing those great prominent eyes, so like those of Red Riding Hood’s
grandmother, that Ermine involuntarily gave a backward impulse to her
wheeled chair, as she answered the readiest thing that occurred to
her,—“He is brother to Lord Keith of Gowan-brae.”

“Oh,” said Rachel, kneeling on meditatively, “that accounts for it. So
much the worse. The staff is made up of idle honourables.”

“Quoth the ‘Times!’” replied Ermine; “but his appointment began on
account of a wound, and went on because of his usefulness—”

“Wounded! I don’t like wounded heroes,” said Rachel; “people make such a
fuss with them that they always get spoilt.”

“This was nine years ago, so you may forget it if you like,” said
Ermine, diversion suppressing displeasure.

“And what is your opinion of him?” said Rachel, edging forward on her
knees, so as to bring her inquisitorial eyes to bear more fully.

“I had not seen him for twelve years,” said Ermine, rather faintly.

“He must have had a formed character when you saw him last. The twelve
years before five-and-forty don’t alter the nature.”

“Five-and-forty! Illness and climate have told, but I did not think it
was so much. He is only thirty-six—”

“That is not what I care about,” said Rachel, “you are both of you so
cautious that you tell me what amounts to nothing! You should consider
how important it is to me to know something about the person in whose
power my cousin’s affairs are left.”

“Have you not sufficient guarantee in the very fact of her husband’s
confidence?”

“I don’t know. A simple-hearted old soldier always means a very foolish
old man.”

“Witness the Newcomes,” said Ermine, who, besides her usual amusement
in tracing Rachel’s dicta to their source, could only keep in her
indignation by laughing.

“General observation,” said Rachel, not to be turned from her purpose.
“I am not foolishly suspicious, but it is not pleasant to see great
influence and intimacy without some knowledge of the person exercising
it.”

“I think,” said Ermine, bringing herself with difficulty to answer
quietly, “that you can hardly understand the terms they are on without
having seen how much a staff officer becomes one of the family.”

“I suppose much must be allowed for the frivolity and narrowness of
a military set in a colony. Imagine my one attempt at rational
conversation last night. Asking his views on female emigration,
absolutely he had none at all; he and Fanny only went off upon a
nursemaid married to a sergeant!”

“Perhaps the bearings of the question would hardly suit mixed company.”

“To be sure there was a conceited young officer there; for as ill luck
will have it, my uncle’s old regiment is quartered at Avoncester, and
I suppose they will all be coming after Fanny. It is well they are no
nearer, and as this colonel says he is going to Belfast in a day or two,
there will not be much provocation to them to come here. Now this great
event of the Major’s coming is over, we will try to put Fanny upon a
definite system, and I look to you and your sister as a great assistance
to me, in counteracting the follies and nonsenses that her situation
naturally exposes her to. I have been writing a little sketch of the
dangers of indecision, that I thought of sending to the ‘Traveller.’ It
would strike Fanny to see there what I so often tell her; but I can’t
get an answer about my paper on ‘Curatocult,’ as you made me call it.”

“Did I!”

“You said the other word was of two languages. I can’t think why they
don’t insert it; but in the meantime I will bring down my ‘Human Reeds,’
and show them to you. I have only an hour’s work on them; so I’ll come
to-morrow afternoon.”

“I think Colonel Keith talked of calling again—thank you,” suggested
Ermine in despair.

“Ah, yes, one does not want to be liable to interruptions in the most
interesting part. When he is gone to Belfast—”

“Yes, when he is gone to Belfast!” repeated Ermine, with an irresistible
gleam of mirth about her lips and eyes, and at that moment Alison made
her appearance. The looks of the sisters met, and read one another so
far as to know that the meeting was over, and for the rest they endured,
while Rachel remained, little imagining the trial her presence had been
to Alison’s burning heart—sick anxiety and doubt. How could it be well?
Let him be loveable, let him be constant, that only rendered Ermine’s
condition the more pitiable, and the shining glance of her eyes was
almost more than Alison could bear. So happy as the sisters had been
together, so absolutely united, it did seem hard to disturb that calm
life with hopes and agitations that must needs be futile; and Alison,
whose whole life and soul were in her sister, could not without a pang
see that sister’s heart belonging to another, and not for hopeful joy,
but pain and grief. The yearning of jealousy was sternly reproved and
forced down, and told that Ermine had long been Colin Keith’s, that the
perpetrator of the evil had the least right of any one to murmur
that her own monopoly of her sister was interfered with; that she was
selfish, unkind, envious; that she had only to hate herself and pray
for strength to bear the punishment, without alloying Ermine’s happiness
while it lasted. How it could be so bright Alison knew not, but so it
was she recognised by every tone of the voice, by every smile on the
lip, by even the upright vigour with which Ermine sat in her chair and
undertook Rachel’s tasks of needlework.

And yet, when the visitor rose at last to go, Alison was almost
unwilling to be alone with her sister, and have that power of sympathy
put to the test by those clear eyes that were wont to see her through
and through. She went with Rachel to the door, and stood taking a last
instruction, hearing it not at all, but answering, and relieved by the
delay, hardly knowing whether to be glad or not that when she returned
Rose was leaning on the arm of her aunt’s chair with the most eager
face. But Rose was to be no protection, for what was passing between her
and her aunt?

“O auntie, I am go glad he is coming back. He is just like the picture
you drew of Robert Bruce for me. And he is so kind. I never saw any
gentleman speak to you in such: a nice soft voice.”

Alison had no difficulty in smiling as Ermine stroked the child’s hair,
kissed her, and looked up with an arch, blushing, glittering face that
could not have been brighter those long twelve years ago.

And then Rose turned round, impatient to tell her other aunt her story.
“O aunt Ailie, we have had such a gentleman here, with a great brown
beard like a picture. And he is papa’s old friend, and kissed me because
I am papa’s little girl, and I do like him so very much. I went where I
could look at him in the garden, when you sent me out, aunt Ermine.”

“You did, you monkey?” said Ermine, laughing, and blushing again. “What
will you do if I send you out next time? No, I won’t then, my dear, for
all the time, I should like you to see him and know him.”

“Only, if you want to talk of anything very particular,” observed Rose.

“I don’t think I need ask many questions,” said Alison, smiling being
happily made very easy to her. “Dear Ermine, I see you are perfectly
satisfied—”

“O Ailie, that is no word for it! Not only himself, but to find him
loving Rose for her father’s sake, undoubting of him through all. Ailie,
the thankfulness of it is more than one can bear.”

“And he is the same?” said Alison.

“The same—no, not the same. It is more, better, or I am able to feel
it more. It was just like the morrow of the day he walked down the lane
with me and gathered honeysuckles, only the night between has been a
very, very strange time.”

“I hope the interruption did not come very soon.”

“I thought it was directly, but it could not have been so soon, since
you are come home. We had just had time to tell what we most wanted to
know, and I know a little more of what he is. I feel as if it were not
only Colin again, but ten times Colin. O Ailie, it must be a little bit
like the meetings in heaven!”

“I believe it is so with you,” said Alison, scarcely able to keep the
tears from her eyes.

“After sometimes not daring to dwell on him, and then only venturing
because I thought he must be dead, to have him back again with the same
looks, only deeper—to find that he clung to those weeks so long ago,
and, above all, that there was not one cloud, one doubt about the
troubles—Oh, it is too, too much.”

Ermine lent back with clasped hands. She was like one weary with
happiness, and lain to rest in the sense of newly-won peace. She said
little more that evening, and if spoken to, seemed like one wakened out
of a dream, so that more than once she laughed at herself, begged her
sister’s pardon, and said that it seemed to her that she could not hear
anything for the one glad voice that rang in her ear, “Colin is come
home.” That was sufficient for her, no need for any other sympathy,
felt Alison, with another of those pangs crushed down. Then wonder
came—whether Ermine could really contemplate the future, or if it were
absolutely lost in the present?

Colonel Keith went back to be seized by Conrade and Francis, and
walked off to the pony inspection, the two boys, on either side of him,
communicating to him the great grievance of living in a poky place like
this, where nobody had ever been in the army, nor had a bit of sense,
and Aunt Rachel was always bothering, and trying to make mamma think
that Con told stories.

“I don’t mind that,” said Conrade, stoutly; “let her try!”

“Oh, but she wanted mamma to shut you up,” added Francis.

“Well, and mamma knows better,” said Conrade, “and it made her leave off
teaching me, so it was lucky. But I don’t mind that; only don’t you see,
Colonel, they don’t know how to treat mamma! They go and bully her, and
treat her like—like a subaltern, till I hate the very sight of it.”

“My boy,” said the Colonel, who had been giving only half attention;
“you must make up your mind to your mother not being at the head of
everything, as she used to be in your father’s time. She will always
be respected, but you must look to yourself as you grow up to make a
position tor her!”

“I wish I was grown up!” sighed Conrade; “how I would give it to Aunt
Rachel! But why must we live here to have her plaguing us?”

Questions that the Colonel was glad to turn aside by moans of the
ponies, and by a suggestion that, if a very quiet one were found, and if
Conrade would be very careful, mamma might, perhaps, go out riding with
them. The motion was so transcendant that, no sooner had the ponies been
seen, than the boys raced home, and had communicated it at the top of
their voices to mamma long before their friend made his appearance. Lady
Temple was quite startled at the idea. “Dear papa,” as she always called
her husband, “had wished her to ride, but she had seldom done so, and
now—” The tears came into her eyes.

“I think you might,” said the Colonel, gently; “I could find you a quiet
animal, and to have you with Conrade would be such a protection to him,”
 he added, as the boys had rushed out of the room.

“Yes; perhaps, dear boy. But I could not begin alone; it is so long
since I rode. Perhaps when you come back from Ireland.”

“I am not going to Ireland.”

“I thought you said—” said Fanny looking up surprised; “I am very glad!
But if you wished to go, pray don’t think about us! I shall learn to
manage in time, and I cannot bear to detain you.”

“You do not detain me,” he said, sitting down by her; “I have found what
I was going in search of, and through your means.”

“What—what do you mean! You were going to see Miss Williams this
afternoon, I thought!”

“Yes, and it was she whom I was seeking.” He paused, and added slowly,
as if merely for the sake of dwelling on the words, “I have found her!”

“Miss Williams!” said Fanny, with perplexed looks.

“Miss Williams!—my Ermine whom I had not seen since the day after her
accident, when we parted as on her deathbed!”

“That sister! Oh, poor thing, I am so glad! But I am sorry!” cried the
much confused Fanny, in a breath; “were not you very much shocked?”

“I had never hoped to see her face in all its brightness again,” he
said. “Twelve years! It is twelve years that she has suffered, and of
late she has been brought to this grievous state of poverty, and yet the
spirit is as brave and cheerful as ever! It looks out of the beautiful
eyes—more beautiful than when I first saw them,—I could see and think
of nothing else!”

“Twelve years!” repeated Fanny; “is it so long since you saw her?”

“Almost since I heard of her! She was like a daughter to my aunt at
Beauchamp, and her brother was my schoolfellow. For one summer, when
I was quartered at Hertford, I was with her constantly, but my family
would not even hear of the indefinite engagement that was all we could
have looked to, and made me exchange into the —th.”

“Ah! that was the way we came to have you! I must tell you, dear Sir
Stephen always guessed. Once when he had quite vexed poor mamma by
preventing her from joking you in her way about young ladies, he told
me that once, when he was young, he had liked some one who died or was
married, I don’t quite know which, and he thought it was the same with
you, from something that happened when you withdrew your application for
leave after your wound.”

“Yes! it was a letter from home, implying that my return would be
accepted as a sign that I gave her up. So that was an additional
instance of the exceeding kindness that I always received.”

And there was a pause, both much affected by the thought of the good old
man’s ever ready consideration. At last Fanny said, “I am sure it was
well for us! What would he have done without you?—and,” she added, “do
you really mean that you never heard of her all these years?”

“Never after my aunt’s death, except just after we went to Melbourne,
when I heard in general terms of the ruin of the family and the false
imputation on their brother.”

“Ah! I remember that you did say something about going home, and Sir
Stephen was distressed, and mamma and I persuaded you because we saw he
would have missed you so much, and mamma was quite hurt at your thinking
of going. But if you had only told him your reason, he would never have
thought of standing in your way.”

“I know he would not, but I saw he could hardly find any one else just
then who knew his ways so well. Besides, there was little use in going
home till I had my promotion, and could offer her a home; and I had no
notion how utter the ruin was, or that she had lost so much. So little
did I imagine their straits that, but for Alison’s look, I should hardly
have inquired even on hearing her name.”

“How very curious—how strangely things come round!” said Fanny; then
with a start of dismay, “but what shall I do? Pray, tell me what you
would like. If I might only keep her a little while till I can find some
one else, though no one will ever be so nice, but indeed I would not for
a moment, if you had rather not.”

“Why so? Alison is very happy with you, and there can be no reason
against her going on.”

“Oh!” cried Lady Temple, with an odd sound of satisfaction, doubt, and
surprise, “but I thought you would not like it.”

“I should like, of course, to set them all at ease, but as I can do no
more than make a home for Ermine and her niece, I can only rejoice that
Alison is with you.”

“But your brother!”

“If he does not like it, he must take the consequence of the utter
separation he made my father insist on,” said the Colonel sternly. “For
my own part, I only esteem both sisters the more, if that were possible,
for what they have done for themselves.”

“Oh! that is what Rachel would like! She is so fond of the sick—I mean
of your—Miss Williams. I suppose I may not tell her yet.”

“Not yet, if you please. I have scarcely had time as yet to know what
Ermine wishes, but I could not help telling you.”

“Thank you—I am so glad,” she said, with sweet earnestness, holding out
her hand in congratulation. “When may I go to her? I should like for her
to come and stay here. Do you think she would?”

“Thank you, I will see. I know how kind you would be—indeed, have
already been to her.”

“And I am so thankful that I may keep Miss Williams! The dear boys never
were so good. And perhaps she may stay till baby is grown up. Oh! how
long it will be first!”

“She could not have a kinder friend,” said the Colonel, smiling, and
looking at his watch.

“Oh, is it time to dress? It is very kind of my dear aunt; but I do wish
we could have stayed at home to-night. It is so dull for the boys when
I dine out, and I had so much to ask you. One thing was about that poor
little Bessie Keith. Don’t you think I might ask her down here, to

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