YOUNG MUSGRAVE.

“Touching sacrifice: of thy worldly possessions give all, even to the spoiling of thy goods; for thus teaches our Lord Christ, and our blessed master San Francesco. If a poor person, more poor than thou, would have thy habit, which it is not permitted by the rule of the order to give, let him take it from thee: so wilt thou do no wrong; but thy life, which is not thine, give not: it is but given to thee for God’s service; thou canst not take it up, neither canst thou lay it down. This rule obey if thou wouldest be free from presumption. For our Lord Christ alone, whose life was His own, hath power and privilege to give it away.”—Sermons, BB. Frati Ginepro e Lausdeo, dei Frati Minori.

YOUNG MUSGRAVE

BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF “THE CURATE IN CHARGE” ETC.
“No man can redeem his brother.”—Ps. xlix. 7
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894

Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.
First Edition (3 Vols. Crown 8vo.) 1877. Second Edition (1 Vol. Crown 8vo.)
1878. Reprinted (Globe 8vo.) 1883, 1886, (Crown 8vo.) 1894.

CONTENTS.

YOUNG MUSGRAVE.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.
THE FAMILY.

It would be difficult to say how Penninghame Castle had got that imposing name. It was an old house standing almost on the roadside, at least at the termination of a rough country road leading from the village, which widened into a square space at the side of the house. The village road was lined with trees, and it pleased the Musgraves to believe that it had been in happier days the avenue to their ancient dwelling, while the rough square at the end had been the courtyard. The place itself consisted of a small mansion not important enough to be very distinctive in architecture, built on to the end of an old hall, the only remaining portion of a much older and greater house. This hall was entered directly by a great door of heavy oak, from which a slope of ancient causeway descended into the road below—an entrance which was the only thing like a castle in the whole ensemble, though it ought to have led to an ancient gateway and portcullis rather than to the great door generally wide open, through which, according to the story, a horseman once entered to scare the guests at their feast and defy the master at the head of the table. The hall was not used for such festive purposes now, nor threatened by such warlike intruders. It had known evil fortune in its day and had been degraded into a barn, its windows blocked up, its decorations destroyed—but had come to life again for the last fifty years and had come back to human use, though no longer as of old. Round the corner was the front of the old mansion, built in that pallid grey stone, which adds a sentiment of age, like the ashy paleness of very old people, to the robust antiquity of mason-work more lasting than any that is done now. Successive squires had nibbled at this old front, making windows there and doorways here: windows which cut through the string-courses above, and a prim Georgian front door, not even in the centre of the old arched entrance which had been filled up, which gave a certain air of disreputable irregularity to the pale and stern old dwelling-place. Ivy and other clinging growths fortunately hid a great deal of this, and added importance to the four great stacks of chimneys, which, mantled in its short, large leaves and perpetual greenness, looked like turrets, and dignified the house. A lake behind somewhat coldly blue, and a great hill in front somewhat coldly green, showed all the features of that north country which was not far enough north for the wild vigour and vivifying tints of brown bracken and heather. The lake came closely up in a little bay behind the older part of the house where there was a rocky harbour for the boats of the family; and between this little bay and the grey walls was the flower-garden, old-fashioned and bright, though turned to the unkindly east. Beyond this was a kind of broken park with some fine trees and a great deal of rough underwood, which stretched along the further shore of the lake and gave an air of dignity to the dwelling on that side. This was still called “the Chase” as the house was called the Castle, in memory it might be supposed of better days. The Musgraves had been Cavaliers, and had wasted their substance in favour of the Charleses, and their lands had been ravaged, their park broken up into fields, their avenue made a common road, half by hostile neighbours, half by vulgar intrusion, in the days when the Revolutionists had the upper hand. So they said, at least, and pleas of this kind are respected generally, save by the very cynical. Certainly the present occupants of the house believed it fervently, and so did the village; and if it was nothing more it was a great comfort and support to the family, and made them regard the rude approach to “the Castle” with forbearance. The public right of way had been established in those stormy times. It was a sign even of the old greatness of the house. It was better than trim lawns and smiling gardens, which would have required a great deal of keeping up. It was, however, a family understanding that the first Musgrave who made a rich marriage, or who in any other way became a favourite of fortune, should by some vague means—an act of parliament or otherwise—reclaim the old courtyard and avenue, and plant a pair of magnificent gates between the castle and the village: also buy back all the old property; also revive the title of Baron of Penninghame, which had been in abeyance for the last two hundred years; and do many other things to glorify and elevate the family to its pristine position; and no Musgrave doubted that this deliverer would come sooner or later, which took the bitterness out of their patience in the meantime and gave them courage to wait.

Another encouraging circumstance in their lot was that they were fully acknowledged as the oldest family in the county. Other and richer persons pushed in before them to its dignities, and they were no doubt very much left out of its gaieties and pleasures; but no one doubted that they had a right to take the lead, if ever they were rich enough. This, however, did not seem likely, for the moment at least. The family at Penninghame had, what is much to be avoided by families which would be happy, a history, and a very recent one. There were two sons, but neither of them had been seen at the Castle for nearly fifteen years, and with the name of the elder of these there was connected a dark and painful story, not much known to the new generation, but very well remembered by all the middle-aged people in the county. Young Musgrave had been for a year or two the most popular young squire in the north country, but his brightness had ended in dismal clouds of misfortune and trouble and bloodshedding, with perhaps crime involved, and certainly many of the penalties of crime. He had not been seen in the north country since the crisis which made all the world acquainted with his unfortunate name; and his younger brother had re-appeared but once in their father’s house, which was thus left desolate, except for the one daughter, who had been its delight before and was now its only stay. So far as the county knew, young Musgrave still lived, though he was never mentioned, for there had been no signs of mourning in the house, such as must have intimated to the neighbours the fact of John’s death—which also of course would have made Randolph the heir. And save that once, not even Randolph had ever come to break the monotony of life in his father’s house. Squire Musgrave and his daughter lived there alone now. They had been alone these fifteen years. They had little society, and did not keep up a large establishment. He was old, and she was no longer young enough to care for the gaieties of the rural neighbourhood. Thus they had fallen out of the current of affairs. The family was “much respected,” but comparatively little heard of after the undesired and undesirable notoriety it had once gained.

Thus abandoned by its sons, and denuded of the strongest elements of life, it may well be supposed that the castle at Penninghame was a melancholy house. What more easy than to conjure up the saddest picture of such a dwelling? The old man, seated in his desolate home, brooding over perhaps the sins of his sons, perhaps his own—some injudicious indulgence, or untimely severity which had driven them from him; while the sister, worn out by the monotony of her solitary life, shut herself out from all society, and spent her life in longing for the absent, and pleading for them—a sad, solitary woman, with no pleasure in her lot, except that of the past. The picture would have been as appropriate as touching, but it would not have been true. Old Mr. Musgrave was not the erring father of romance. He was a well-preserved and spare little man, over seventy, with cheeks of streaky red like winter apples, and white hair, which he wore rather long, falling on the velvet collar of his old-fashioned coat. He had been an outdoor man in his day, and had farmed, and shot, and hunted, like others of his kind, so far as his straitened means and limited stables permitted; but when years and circumstances had impaired his activity he had been strong enough to retire, of his own free will, while graceful abdication was still in his power. He spent most of his time now in his library, with only a constitutional walk, or easy ramble upon his steady old cob, to vary his life, except when quarter sessions called him forth, or any other duty of the magistracy, to which he still paid the most conscientious attention. The Musgraves were not people whom it was easy to crush, and Fate had a hard bargain in the old squire, who found himself one occupation when deprived of another with a spirit not often existing in old age. He had committed plenty of mistakes in his day, and some which had been followed by tragical consequences, a practical demonstration of evil which fortunately does not attend all the errors of life; but he did not brood over them in his old library, nor indulge unavailing compunctions, nor consider himself under any doom; but on the contrary studied his favourite problems in genealogy and heraldry, and county history, and corresponded with Notes and Queries, and was in his way very comfortable. He it was who first pointed out that doubtful blazoning of Marmion’s shield, “colour upon colour,” which raised so lively a discussion; and in questions of this kind he was an authority, and thoroughly enjoyed the little tilts and controversies involved, many of which were as warm as their subjects were insignificant. His family was dropping, or rather had dropped, into decay; his eldest son was virtually lost to his family and to society; his youngest son alienated and a stranger; and some of this at least was the father’s fault. But neither the decay of the house, nor the reflection that he was at least partially to blame, made any great difference to the squire. There had no doubt been moments, and even hours, when he had felt it bitterly; but these moments, though perhaps they count for more than years in a man’s life, do not certainly last so long, and age has a way of counterfeiting virtue, which is generally very successful, even to its personal consciousness. Mr. Musgrave was generally respected, and he felt himself to be entirely respectable. He sat in his library and worked away among his county histories, without either compunction or regret—who could throw a stone at him? He had been rather unfortunate in his family, that was all that could be said.

And Mary Musgrave, his daughter, was just as little disposed to brood upon the past. She had shed many tears in her day, and suffered many things. Perhaps it was in consequence of the family troubles which had come upon her just at the turning-point in her life that she had never married; for she had been one of the beauties of the district—courted and admired by everybody, and wooed by many: by some who indeed still found her beautiful, and by some who had learned to laugh at the old unhappiness of which she was the cause. Miss Musgrave did not like these last, which was perhaps natural; and even now there would be a tone of satire in her voice when she noted the late marriage of one or another of her old adorers. Women do not like men whose hearts they have broken, to get quite healed, and console themselves; this is perhaps a poor feeling, but it is instinctive, and though it may be stoutly struggled against in some cases, and chidden into silence in many, it still maintains an untolerated yet obstinate life. But neither the failure of the adorations she once inspired nor the family misfortunes had crushed her spirit. She lived a not unhappy life, notwithstanding all that had happened. It was she who did everything that was done at Penninghame. The reins which her father had dropped almost unawares she had taken up. She managed the estate; kept the bailiff in order; did all business that was necessary with the lawyer; and what was a greater feat still, kept her father unaware of the almost absolute authority which she exercised in his affairs. It had to be done, and she had not hesitated to do it; and on the whole, she, too, though she had suffered many heartaches in her day, was not unhappy now, but lived a life full of activity and occupation. She was forty, and her hair began to be touched by grey—she who had been one of the fairest flowers of the north country. A woman always has to come down from that eminence somehow; whether she does it by becoming some one’s wife or by merely falling back into the silence of the past and leaving the place free for others, does not much matter. Perhaps, indeed, it is the old maid who has the best of it. A little romance continues to encircle her in the eyes of most of those who have worshipped her youth. She has not married; why has she not married—that once admired of all admirers? Has it been that she, too, sharing the lot which she inflicted on so many, was not loved where she loved? or was it perhaps that she had made a mistake—sent away some one, perhaps, who knows, the very man who thought of her thus kindly and regretfully—whom she was afterwards sorry to have sent away? Nobody said this in words, but Mary Musgrave at forty was more tenderly thought of than Lady Stanton, who had been the rival queen of the county. Lady Stanton was stout now-a-days; in men’s minds, when they met her sailing into a ball-room, prematurely indued with the duties of chaperon to her husband’s grown-up daughters, there would arise a half-amused wonder how they could have worshipped at her feet as they once did. “Can this muckle wife be my true love Jean?” they said to themselves. But Miss Musgrave, who was slim as a girl in her unwedded obscurity, and whose eyes some people thought as bright as ever, though her hair was grey, gave rise to no such irreverent thoughts. There were men scattered through the world who had a romantic regard, a profound respect still, for this woman whom they had loved, and who had preserved the distinction of loving no one in return. Nobody had died for love of her, though, some had threatened it; but this visionary atmosphere of past adoration supplied a delicate homage, such as is agreeable even to an old maiden’s heart.

And Miss Musgrave’s life was spent chiefly in the old hall, as her father’s was spent in his library. She had been full of gay activity in her youth, a bold and graceful horsewoman, ready for anything that was going; but, with the same sense of fitness that led the squire to his retirement, she too had retired. She had put aside her riding-habits along with, her muslins, and wore nothing but rich neutral-tinted silk gowns. Her only extravagance was a pair of ponies, which she drove into the county town when she had business to do, or to pay an occasional visit to her friends: but by far the greater part of her life was spent in the old hall, where all her favourites and allies came, and all her poor people from the village, who found her seated like a scriptural potentate in the gate, ready to settle all quarrels and administer impartial justice. The hall was connected with the house by a short passage and two doors, which shut out all interchange of sound. There was nothing above it but the high-pitched roof, the turret chimneys, and the ivy, nor was any interposition of servants necessary to usher in visitors by that ever-open way. This was a thing which deeply affected the spirits and feelings of Eastwood, the only male functionary in the house—the most irreproachable of butlers. A door which opened straight into the lady’s favourite sitting-room was felt by him to be an insult to the family; it was more like a farmhouse than a castle; and as for Miss Musgrave, she was just as bad—too affable, a deal too affable, talking to any one that came to her, the tramps on the road as well as the ladies and gentlemen whose unwilling steeds pranced and curveted on the old slope of causeway. This was a standing grievance to the butler, whoso complaint was that the “presteedge” of the family was in hourly jeopardy; and his persistent complaint had thrown a shade of dissatisfaction over the household. This, however, did not move the lady of the house. Eastwood and the rest did not know, though some other people did, that it was the proudest woman in the county whom they accused of being too affable, and who received all the world in the old hall without the assistance of any gentleman usher. There were no windows in the side of the hall which fronted the road, but only this huge oaken door, all studded with bars and elaborate hinges of iron. On the other side there was a recess, with a large square window and cushioned seats, “restored” by village workmen in a not very perfect way, but still preserving the ample and noble lines of its original design. This windowed recess was higher than the rest of the hall, the walls of which were low, though the roof was lofty. But towards the front the only light was from the doorway, which looked due west, and beheld all the sunsets, flooding the ancient place with afternoon light and glories of evening colour. The slanting light seemed to sweep in like an actual visitor in all its sheen of crimson and purple, when the rest of the house was in the still and hush of the grey evening. This was where Miss Musgrave held her throne.

Thus Penninghame Castle stood at the moment this story begins. The lake gleaming cold towards the north, rippling against the pebbles in the little inlet which held the two boats, the broken ground and ancient trees of the Chase, lying eastward, getting the early lights of the morning, as did the flower-garden, which lay bright under the old walls. A little genial hum of the kindly north-country women-servants, who had been there for a lifetime, or who were the daughters and cousins of those who had been there for a lifetime, with Eastwood strutting important among them—the one big cock among this barndoor company—made itself audible now and then, a respectful subdued human accompaniment to the ripple of the lake and the whispering of the wind among the trees: and now and then a cheerful cackle of poultry, the sound of the ponies in the stable, or the squire’s respectable cob: the heavy steps of the gardener walking slowly along the gravel paths. But for these tranquil sounds, which made the stillness more still, there was nothing but quiet in and about the old house. There had been a time when much had happened there, when there had been angry dissensions, family convulsions, storms of mutual reproach and reproof, outbursts of tears and crying. But all that was over. Nothing had happened at Penninghame for fifteen years. The old squire in his library and Mary in her favourite old chamber lived as though there were no breaks in life, no anguishes, no convulsions, as quietly as their trees, as steadily as their old walls, as if existence could neither change nor end. Thus they went on from day to day and from year to year, in a routine which occupied and satisfied, and kept the sense of living in their minds, but in a lull and hush of all adventure, of all commotion, of all excitement. Time passed over them and left no trace, save those touches imperceptible at the moment which sorrow or passion could surpass in effect in one day, yet which tell as surely at the end. This was how things were at Penninghame when this story begins.

CHAPTER II.
MARY.

It was not one of Mary Musgrave’s fancies to furnish her hall like a drawing-room. She had collected round her a few things for use, but she was not rich enough to make her favourite place into a toy, as so many people do, nor had she the opportunity of “picking up” rarities to ornament it, as she might have liked to do had she been in the way of them. The room had been a barn fifty years before. Then it became a family storeroom, was fitted up at one end with closets and cupboards, and held the household linen, and sometimes the winter supply of fruit. It was Mary who had rescued it back again to gentler use; but she had not been able to re-decorate or renew it with such careful pretence at antiquity as is common nowadays. All that she could do for it was to collect her own doings there, and all the implements for her work. The windowed recess which got the morning sun was her business-room. There stood an old secretaire, chosen not because of its age or suitability, but because it was the only thing she had available, a necessity which often confers as much grace as the happiest choice. Opposite the doorway was an old buffet, rough, yet not uncharacteristic, which had been scrubbed clean by a generous housemaid when Miss Musgrave first took to the hall. And much it had wanted that cleansing; but the soap and the water and the scrubbing-brush had not agreed very well, it must be allowed, with the carved mahogany, which ought to have been oak. Between the open door and this big piece of furniture was a square of old Turkey carpet, very much faded, yet still agreeable to the eye, and a spindle-legged table of Queen Anne’s days, with drawers which held Miss Musgrave’s knitting and a book, and sometimes homelier matters, mendings which she chose to do herself, calculations which were not meant for the common eye.

She was seated here, on an afternoon of October, warm with the shining of that second summer which comes even in the north. The sunshine came so far into the room that it caught the edges of the carpet, and made a false show of gold upon the faded wool; and it was so warm that Miss Musgrave had drawn her chair farther into the room than usual, and sat in the shade to escape the unusual warmth. At this moment she was not doing anything. She was sitting quite silent, the book she had been reading laid open upon her knee, enjoying the sun, as people enjoy it to whom it suddenly reveals itself after date when it is past expectation. In the end of October in the north country, people have ceased to think of warmth out of doors, or any blaze of kindly light from the skies—and the morning had been grey though very mild. The sudden glow had caught Mary as she sat, a little chilly, close to her opened door, thinking of a shawl, and had transfigured the landscape and the heavens and her own sentiments all at once. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, and the open book on her knee, thinking of it, surprised by the sweetness of it, feeling it penetrate into her very heart, though she had drawn her chair back out of the sun. No, not thinking—people do not think of the sunshine; but it went into her heart, bringing back a confused sweetness of recollection and of anticipation—or rather of the anticipations which were recollections—which had ceased to exist except in memory. Just so does youth expect some sudden sweetness to invade its life; and sometimes the memory of that expectation, even when unfulfilled, brings a half sad, half sweet amusement to the solitary. It was so with this lady seated alone in her old hall. She was Mary again, the young daughter of the house; and at the same time she was old Miss Musgrave smiling at herself.

But as she did so a footstep sounded on the rough pavement of the ascent. No one could come unheard to her retreat, which was a safeguard. She gave a little shake to her head, and took up the open book, which was no old favourite to be dreamed over, but a modern book; and prepared herself for a visitor with that smoothing of the brow and closing up of mental windows which fits us to meet strange eyes. “It is only I,” said the familiar voice of some one who knew and understood this slight movement: and then she dropped the book again, and let the smile come back into her eyes.

“Only you! then I may look as I please. I need not put on my company garb,” she said, with a smile.

“I should hope not,” said the new-comer, reaching the door with that slight quickening of the breath which showed that even the half-dozen steps of ascent was a slight tax upon him. He did not even shake hands with her—probably they had met before that day—but took off his hat as he crossed the threshold, as if he had been going into a church. He was a clergyman, slim and slight, of middle size, or less than middle size, in somewhat rusty grey, with a mildness of aspect which did not promise much strength, bodily or mental. The Vicarage of Penninghame was a poor one, too poor to be worth reserving for a son of the family, and it had been given to the tutor of Mr. Musgrave’s sons twenty years ago. What had happened was natural enough, and might be seen in his eyes still, notwithstanding lapse of time and change of circumstances. Mr. Pennithorne had fallen in love, always hopelessly and mildly, as became his character, with the Squire’s daughter. He had always said it did not matter. He had no more hope of persuading her to love him than of getting the moon to come out of heaven, and circumstances having set marriage before him, he had married, and was happy enough as happiness goes. And he was the friend, and in a measure the confidant, of this lady whom he had loved in the superlative poetical way—knew all about her, shared her life in a manner, was acquainted with many of her thoughts and her troubles. A different light came into his eyes when he saw her, but he was not at all unhappy. He had a good wife and three nice children, and the kind of life he liked. At fifty, who is there who continues to revel in the unspeakable blisses of youth? Mr. Pennithorne was very well content: but still when he saw Mary Musgrave—and he saw her daily—there came a different kind of light into his eyes.

“I was in mental déshabille,” she said, “and did not care to be caught; though after all it is not everybody who can see when one is not clothed and in one’s right mind.”

“I never knew you out of your right mind, Miss Mary. What was it?—no new trouble?”

“You are always a flatterer, Mr. Pen. You have seen me in all kinds of conditions. No, we don’t have any troubles now. Is that a rash speech? But really I mean it. My father is in very good health and enjoys himself, and I enjoy myself—in reason.”

“You enjoy yourself! Yes, in the way of being good to other people.”

“Hush!” she said, putting up her hand to stop him in his little speech, sincere as it was. “Shall I tell you what it was that put me out of order for any one’s eyes but an old friend’s? Nothing more than this sunshine, Mr. Pen. Don’t you recollect when we were young how a sudden thought of something that was coming would seize upon you, and flood you with delight—as the sun did just now?”

“I recollect,” he said, fixing his mild eyes upon her, and shaking his head, with a sigh: “but it never came.”

“That may be true enough; but the thought came, and ‘life is but thought,’ you know; the thing might not follow. However, we are all quite happy all the same.”

He looked at her, still shaking his head.

“I suppose so,” he said; “I suppose so; quite happy! but not as we meant to be; that was what you were thinking.”

“I did not go so far. I was not thinking at all. I think that I think very seldom. It only caught me as the old thought used to do, and brought so many things back.”

She smiled, but he sighed.

“Yes, everything is very different. Yourself—to see you here, offering up your life for others—making a sacrifice—— ”

“I have made no sacrifice,” she said, somewhat proudly, then laughed. “Is that because I am unmarried, Mr. Pen? You wedded people, you are so sure of being better off than we are. You are too complacent. But I am not so sure of that.”

He did not join in her laugh, but looked at her with melting eyes—eyes in which there was some suspicion of tears. It was perhaps a trifle unkind of her to call him complacent in his conjugality. There were a hundred unspeakable things in his look—pity, reverence, devotion, not the old love perhaps, but something higher; something that was never to end.

“On the whole, we are taking it too seriously,” she said, after a pause. “It is over now, and the sun is going down. And you came to talk to me?—perhaps of something in the parish that wants looking to?”

“No—I came in only to look at you, and make sure that you were well. The children you were visiting the other day have the scarlet fever; and besides, I have had a feeling in my mind about you—a presentiment. I should not have been surprised to hear that there had been—letters—or some kind of advances made—— ”

“From whom?”

“Well,” he said, after a slight pause; “they are both brothers—both sons—but they are not the same to me, Miss Mary. From John; he has been so much in my mind these two or three days, I have got to dreaming about him. Yes, yes, I know that is not worth thinking of; but we were always in such sympathy, he and I. Don’t you believe in some communication between minds that were closely allied? I do. It is a superstition if you like. Nothing could happen to any of you but, if I were at ever so great a distance, I should know.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, Mr. Pen. Sometimes the dearest to us perish, and we know nothing of it; but I prefer your view. You dreamt of poor John? What did you see? Alas! dreams are the only ways of divining anything about him now!”

“And your father is as determined as ever?”

“We never speak on the subject. It has disappeared like so many other things. Why continue a fruitless discussion which only embittered him and wore me out? If any critical moment should come, if—one must say it plainly—my father should be like to die—then I should speak, you need not fear.”

“I never feared that you would do everything the best sister, the bravest friend, could do.”

“Do not praise me too much. I tell you I am doing nothing, and have done nothing for years; and sometimes it strikes me with terror. If anything should happen suddenly! My father is an old man; but talking to him now is of no use; we must risk it. What did you see in your dream?”

“Oh, you will laugh at me,” he said with a nervous flutter; “nothing—except that he was here. I dreamt of him before, that time that he came home—after—— ”

“Don’t speak of it,” said Miss Musgrave, with a corresponding shiver. “To think that such things should happen, and be forgotten, and we should all go on so comfortably—quite comfortably! I have nothing particular to make me happy, and yet I am as happy as most people—notwithstanding all that I have come through, as the poor women say.”

“That is because you are so unselfish—so—— ”

“Insensible—more like. I am the same as other people. What the poor folk in the village come through, Mr. Pen!—loss of husbands, loss of children, one after another, grinding poverty, and want, and anxiety, and separation from all they care for. Is it insensibility? I never can tell; and especially now when I share it myself. I am as happy sometimes as when I was young. That sunshine gave me a ridiculous pleasure. What right have I to feel my heart light?—but I did somehow—and I do often—notwithstanding all that has happened, and all that I have ‘gone through.’”

Mr. Pennithorne gave a vague smile, but he made no reply; for either she was accusing herself unjustly, or this was a mood of mind which perhaps derogated a little from Mary Musgrave’s perfection. He had a way himself of keeping on steadfastly on the one string of his anxiety, whatever it might be, and worrying everybody with it—and here he lost the object of his faithful worship. It might—nay, must—be right since so she felt; but he lost her here.

“And speaking of happiness,” she went on after a pause, “I want the children to come with me to Pennington to see the archery. It is pretty, and they will like it. And they like to drive behind my ponies. They are quite well?—and Emily?”

“Very well. Our cow has been ill, and she has been worrying about it—not much to worry about you will say, you who have so much more serious anxieties.”

“Not at all. If I had a delicate child and wanted the milk, I should fret very much. Will you send up for some of ours? As usually happens, we, who don’t consume very much, have plenty.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but you must not think that little Emmy is so delicate. She has not much colour—neither has her mother, you know.” He was a very anxious father, and looked up with an eager wistfulness into her face. Little Emmy was so delicate that it hurt him like a foreboding to hear her called so. He could not bear Miss Musgrave, whose word had authority, to give utterance to such a thought.

“I spoke hastily,” she said; “I did not think of Emmy. She is ever so much stronger this year. As for paleness, I don’t mind paleness in the least. She has such a very fair complexion, and she is twice as strong as last year.”

“I am so glad you think so,” he said, with the colour rising to his face. “That is true comfort—for eyes at a little distance are so much better than one’s own.”

“Yes, she is a great deal stronger,” said Miss Musgrave, “but you must send down for the milk. I was pale too, don’t you remember, when you came first? When I was fifteen.”

“I remember—everything,” he said; “even to the dress you wore. I bought my little Mary something like it when I was last in town. It was blue—how well I remember! But Mary will never be like you, though she is your godchild.”

“She is a great deal better; she is like her mother,” said Miss Musgrave promptly; “and Johnny is like his father, the best possible distribution. You are happy with your children, Mr. Pen. I envy people their children, it is the only thing; though perhaps they would bore me if I had them always on my hands. You think not? Yes, I am almost sure they would bore me. We get a kind of fierce independence living alone. To be hampered by a little thing always wanting something—wanting attention and care—I don’t think I should like it. But Emily was born for such cares. How well she looks with her baby in her arms—all was the old picture over again—the Madonna and the child.”

“Poor Emily,” he said, though why he could not have told, for Emily did not think herself poor. Mr. Pennithorne always felt a vague pity for his wife when he was with Miss Musgrave, as for a poor woman who had many excellent qualities, but was here thrown into the shade. He could not say any more. He got up to go away, consoled and made comfortable he could not quite tell why. She was always sweet he said to himself as he went home. What she had said about being bored by children was a mere delusion, or perhaps a little conscious effort of self-deception, persuading herself that to have no children and to be independent was the best. What a wife she would have made! What a mother! he said this to himself quite impartially, knowing well that she never could have been wife for him, and feeling a pang at his heart for the happiness she had lost. Married life was not unmixed happiness always; it had its difficulties, he knew. But if she had married it was not possible that she could have been otherwise than happy. With her there could have been no drawbacks. Mr. Pennithorne looked upon the question from a husband’s point of view alone.

When he was gone, Miss Musgrave sat still without changing her place, at first with a smile, which gradually faded away from her face, like the last suffusion of the sunshine, which was going too. She smiled at her fast friend, to whom she knew, notwithstanding his legitimate affection for his Emily, she herself stood first of created beings. It was a folly, but it did not hurt him, she reflected with a faint amusement; and Emily and the children, notwithstanding this sentiment, were first and foremost really in his heart. Poor Mr. Pen! he had always been like this, mildly sentimental, offering up an uninterrupted gentle incense. But he was not in the least unhappy, though perhaps he liked by times to think that he was. Few people were really unhappy. By moments life was hard; but the struggle itself made a kind of happiness, a strain of living which it was good to feel by times. This was her theory. Most people when they come to forty have some theory or another, some settled way of getting through their existence, and adapting themselves for it. Hers was this: that evil was very much less than good in every way, and that people suffered a great deal less than they gave themselves credit for. Life had its compensations, daily and hourly, she thought. Her own existence had no exciting source of joy in it, but how far it was from being unhappy! Had she been unhappy she would have scoffed at herself. What! so many things to enjoy, so many good and pleasant circumstances around, and not happy! Would not that have been a disgrace to any woman? So she was apt to think Mr. Pennithorne extracted a certain cunning enjoyment from that vain love for herself which had been so visionary at all times, and which he persuaded himself had saddened his life. She thought it had been a harmless delusion: a secret advantage rather; something to fall back upon; a soft and visionary grievance of which he never wearied. And perhaps she was right. She sat looking after him with a smile on her face.

The sun had crept away from her open doorway as they had talked. It was stealing further and further off, withdrawing from the line of the road, from the village roofs, from the gleam of the lake—and like the sun her smile stole away, from her eyes first, and then from the lingering curves about her mouth. Why was it that he could think he felt some action upon him of John’s mind in the far distance, while she felt none? No kind of presentiment or premonition had come to her. It must be foolishness she was sure—superstition; for if sympathy could thus communicate even a vague thrill of warning from one to another through the atmosphere of the mind, surely she was a more likely object to receive it than Mr. Pennithorne! John knew her,—could not doubt her, surely. Therefore to her, if to any one, this secret communication must have come. The smile disappeared altogether from her mouth as she entered upon this subject, and her whole face and eyes became grave and grey, like the dull coldness of the east, half-resentful of the sunset which still went on upon the other edge of the horizon, dispersing all those vain reflections to every quarter except that from which the sun rose. Could it be possible after all that John might trust Mr. Pennithorne with a more perfect confidence, as one unconnected and unconcerned with all that had passed, than he could give to herself? The thought, even though founded on such visionary grounds, hurt her a little; yet there was a kind of reason in it. He might think that she, always at her father’s side, and able to influence him in so many ways, might have done more for her brother; whereas with Mr. Pennithorne, who could do nothing, the sentiment of trust would be unbroken. She sat thus idly making it out to herself, making wondering casts of thought after her brother in the darkness of the unknown, as inch by inch the light stole out of the sky. It was not a fine sunset that night. The sun was yellow and mournful; long lines of cloud broke darkly upon his sinking, catching only sick reflections of the pale light beneath. At last he was all gone, except one streaming yellow sheaf of rays that seemed to strike against and barb themselves into the damp green outline of the hill.

Her eyes were upon this, watching that final display, which, somehow in the absorption of her thoughts, kept her from observing an object near at hand, an old hackney-coach from Pennington town—where there was a railway station—which came along the road, a black, slow, lumbering vehicle, making a dull roll of sound which might have been a country cart. It came nearer and nearer while Miss Musgrave watched the bundle of gold arrows flash into the hill-side and disappear. Her eyes were dazzled by them, and chilled by their sudden disappearance, which left all the landscape cold and wrapped in a greyness of sudden evening. Mary came to herself with a slight shiver and shock. And at that moment the dull roll of the cab ceased, and the thing stood revealed to her. She rose to her feet with a thrill of wonder and expectation. The hackney carriage had drawn up at the foot of the slope opposite to and beneath her. What was coming? Had Mr. Pennithorne been warned after all, while she had been left in darkness? Her heart seemed to leap into her throat, while she stood clasping her hands together to get some strength from them, and waiting for the revelation of this new thing, whatever it might be.

CHAPTER III.
THE NEW-COMERS.

The cab was loaded with two boxes on the roof, foreign trunks, of a different shape from those used at home; and a woman’s face, in a fantastic foreign head-dress, peered through the window. Who could this be? Mary stood as if spell-bound, unable to make a movement. The driver, who was an ordinary cab-driver from Pennington, whose homely everydayness of appearance intensified the strangeness of the others, opened the door of the carriage, and lifted out, first a small boy, with a scared face and a finger in his mouth, who stared at the strange place, and the figures in the doorway, with a fixed gaze of panic, on the eve of tears. Then out came with a bound, as if pushed from behind as well as helped a little roughly by the cabman, the foreign woman, at whose dress the child clutched with a frightened cry. Then there was a pause, during which some one inside threw out a succession of wraps, small bags, and parcels; and then there stepped forth, with a great shawl on one arm, and a basket almost as large as herself on the other, clearly the leading spirit of the party, a little girl who appeared to be about ten years old. “You will wait a moment, man, till we get the pay for you,” said this little personage in a high-pitched voice, with a distinctness of enunciation which made it apparent that the language, though spoken with very little accent, was unfamiliar to her. Then she turned to the woman and said a few words much more rapidly, with as much aid of gesture as was compatible with the burdens. Mary felt herself look on at all this like a woman in a dream. What was it all—a dream or reality? She felt incapable of movement, or rather too much interested in the curious scene which was going on before her, to think of movement or interference of any kind. When she had given her directions, whatever they were, the little girl turned round and faced the open door and the lady who had not moved. She gave these new circumstances a long, steady, investigating look. They were within a dozen yards of each other, but the chatelaine stood still and said nothing, while the little invader inspected her, and prepared her assault. The child, who looked the impersonation of life and purpose between her helpless companion and the wondering stranger whom she confronted, was dark and pale, not like the fair English children to whom Mary Musgrave was accustomed. Her dark eyes seemed out of proportion to her small, colourless face, and gave it an eager look of precocious intelligence. Her features were small, her dark hair falling about her in half-curling masses, her head covered with a little velvet cap trimmed with fur, as unlike anything children wore in England at the time as the anxious meaning of her face was different from ordinary baby prettiness. She made a momentary pause—then put down the basket on the stones, threw the shawl on the top of it, and mounted the breach with resolute courage. The stones were rough to the little child’s feet; there was a dilation in her eyes that looked like coming tears, and as she faced the alarming stranger, who stood there looking at her, a burning red flush came momentarily over her face. But she neither sat down and cried as she would have liked to do, nor ran back again to cling to the nurse’s skirts like her little brother. The small thing had a duty to do, and did it with a courage which might have put heroes to shame. Resolutely she toiled her way up to Miss Musgrave at the open door.

“Are you—Mary?” she said; the little voice was strange yet sweet, with its distinct pronunciation and unfamiliar accent. “Are you—Mary?” Her big eyes seemed to search the lady all over, making a rapid comparison with some description she had received. There was doubt in her tone when she repeated the name a second time, and the tears visibly came nearer, and got with a shake and tremor into her voice.

“What do you want with Mary?” said Miss Musgrave; “who are you, little girl?”

“I do not think you can be Mary,” said the child. “He said your hair was like Nello’s, but it is more like his own. And he said you were beautiful—so you are beautiful, but old—and he never said you were old. Oh, if you are not Mary, what shall we do? what shall we do?”

She clasped her little hands together, and for a moment trembled on the edge of a childish outburst, but stopped herself with a sudden curb of unmistakable will. “I must think what is to be done,” she cried out sharply, putting her little hands upon her trembling mouth.

“Who are you? who are you?” cried Mary Musgrave, trembling in her turn; “child, who was it that sent you to me?”

The little thing kept her eyes fixed upon her, with that watchfulness which is the only defence of weakness, ready to fly like a little wild creature at any approach of danger. She opened a little bag which hung by her side and took a letter from it, never taking her great eyes all the time from Miss Musgrave’s face. “This was for you, if you were Mary,” she said; holding the letter jealously in both hands. “But he said, when I spoke to you, if it was you, you would know.”

“You strange little girl!” cried Miss Musgrave, stepping out upon the stones and holding out her hands eagerly; but the child made a little move backward at the moment, in desperation of fear, yet courage.

“I will not give it you! I will not give it! it is everything we have—unless you are Mary,” she cried, with the burst of a suppressed sob.

“Who are you then, child? Yes, I am Mary, Mary Musgrave—give me the letter. Is not this the house you were told of? Give me the letter—the letter!” said Miss Musgrave, once more holding out her hands.

And once more the child made her jealous mental comparison between what the lady was, and what she had been told to look for. “I cannot do what I please,” she said, with little quivering lips. “I have Nello to take care of. He is only such a little, little child. Yes, it is the house he told me of; but he said if you were Mary—Ah! he said you would know us and take us into your arms, and be so kind, so kind!”

“Little girl,” said Miss Musgrave, the tears dropping from her cheeks. “There is only one man’s child that you can be. You are John’s little girl, my brother John, and I am his sister Mary. But I do not know your name, nor any thing about you. Give me John’s letter—and come to me, come to me, my child!”

“I am Lilias,” said the little girl; but she held back, still examining with curious though less terrified eyes. “You will give it me back if you are not Mary?” she went on, at length holding out the letter; but she took no notice of the invitation to come nearer, which Mary herself forgot in the eagerness of her anxiety to get the letter, the first communication from her brother—if it was from her brother—for so many years. She took it quickly, almost snatching it from the child’s reluctant fingers, and leaning against the doorway in her agitation, tore it hastily open. Little Lilias was agitated too, with fear and desolate strangeness, and that terrible ignorance of any alternative between safety and utter destruction which makes danger insupportable to a child. What were they to do if their claims were not acknowledged? Wander into the woods and die in the darkness like the children in the story? Little Lilias had feared nothing till that first doubt had come over her at the door of the house, where, her father had instructed her, she was to be made so happy. But if they were not taken in and made happy, what were she and Nello to do? A terror of darkness, and cold, and starvation came upon the little girl. She would wrap the big shawl about her little brother, but what if wild beasts or robbers should come in the middle of the dark? Her little bosom swelled full, the sobs rose into her throat. Oh where could she go with Nello, if this was not Mary? But she restrained the sobs by a last effort, like a little hero. She sat down on the stone edge of the causeway, and held her hands clasped tight to keep herself together, and fixed her eyes upon the lady with the letter. The lady and the letter swam and changed, through the big tears that kept coming, but she never took those great dark, intense eyes from Miss Musgrave’s face. The Italian nurse was bending over Nello, fully occupied in hushing his little plaints. Nello was tired, hungry, sleepy, cold. He had no responsibility upon him, poor little mite, to overcome the weakness of nature. He looked no more than six, though he was older, a small and delicate child; and he clung to his nurse, holding her desperately, afraid of he knew not what. She had plenty to do to take care of him without thinking of what was going on above; though the woman was indignant to be kept waiting, and cast fierce looks, in the intervals of petting Nello, upon the lady, the cold Englishwoman who was so long of taking the children to her arms. As for the cabman, emblem of the general unconcern which surrounds every individual drama, he stood leaning calmly upon his horse, waiting for the dénoûment, whatever it might be. Miss Musgrave would see him paid one way or another, and this was the only thing for which he needed to care.

“Lilias,” said Miss Musgrave, going hastily to the child, with tears running down her cheeks, “I am your aunt Mary, my darling, and you will soon learn to know me. Come and give me a kiss, and bring me your little brother. You are tired with your long journey, my poor child.”

“No, no—I am not tired—only Nello; and he is h-hungry. Ah! Kiss Nello, Nello—come and kiss him; he is the baby. And are you Mary—real, real Mary?” cried the little girl, bursting out into sobs; “oh; I cannot h-help it. I did not mean it; I was fr-frightened. Nello, come, come, Mary is here.”

“Yes, Mary is here,” said Miss Musgrave, taking the child into her arms, who, even while she sobbed against her shoulder, put out an impatient little hand and beckoned, crying, “Nello! Nello!” But it was not so easy to extract Nello from his nurse’s arms. He cried and clung all the faster from hearing his sister’s outburst; their poor little hearts were full; and what chokings of vague misery, the fatigue and discomfort infinitely deepened by a dumb consciousness of loneliness, danger, and strangeness behind, were in these little inarticulate souls! something more desperate in its inability to understand what it feared, its dim anguish of uncomprehension, than anything that can be realized and fathomed. Mary signed eagerly to the nurse to bring the little boy indoors into the hall, which was not a reassuring place, vast and dark as it was, in the dimness of the evening, to a child. But she had too many difficulties on her hands in this strange crisis to think of that. She had the boxes brought in also, and hastily sent the carriage away, with a desperate sense as of burning her ships, and leaving no possible way to herself of escape from the difficulty. The gardener, who had appeared round the corner, attracted by the sound, presented himself as much out of curiosity as of goodwill to assist in carrying in the boxes, “though it would be handiest to drive round to the front door, and tak’ them straight oop t’ stair,” he said, innocently enough. But when Miss Musgrave gave authoritative directions that they were to be brought into the hall, naturally the gardener was surprised. This was a proceeding entirely unheard of, and not to be understood in any way.

“It’ll be a deal more trouble after,” he said, under his breath, which did not matter much. But when he had obeyed his mistress’s orders, he went round to the kitchen full of the new event. “There’s something oop,” the gardener said, delighted to bring so much excitement with him, and he gave a full account of the two pale little children, the foreign woman with skewers stuck in her hair, and finally, most wonderful of all, the boxes which he had deposited with his own hands on the floor of the hall. “I ken nothing about it,” he said, “but them as has been longer aboot t’ house than me could tell a deal if they pleased; and Miss Brown, it’s her as is wanted,” he added leisurely at the end.

Miss Brown, who was Mary Musgrave’s maid, and had been standing listening to his story with frequent contradictions and denials, in a state of general protestation, started at these words.

“You great gaby,” she said, “why didn’t you say so at first?” and hurried out of the kitchen, not indisposed to get at the bottom of the matter. She had been Miss Musgrave’s favourite attendant for twenty years, and in that time had, as may be supposed, known about many things which her superiors believed locked in the depths of their own bosoms. She could have written the private history of the family with less inaccuracy than belongs to most records of secret history. And she was naturally indignant that Tom Gardener, a poor talkative creature, who could keep nothing to himself, should have known this new and startling event sooner than she did. She hurried through the long passage from the kitchen, casting a stealthy glance in passing at the closed door of the library, where the Squire sat unconscious. A subdued delight was in the mind of the old servant; certainly it is best when there are no mysteries in a family, when all goes well—but it is not so amusing. A great event of which it was evident the squire was in ignorance, which probably would have to be kept from him, and as much as possible from the household—well, it might be unfortunate that such things should be, but it was exciting, it woke people up.

Miss Brown obeyed this summons with more genuine alacrity than she had felt for years.

Very different were the feelings of her mistress standing there in the dimness of the old hall, her frame thrilling and her heart aching with the appeal which her brother had made to her, out of a silence which for more than a dozen years had been unbroken as that of the grave. She could scarcely believe yet that she had seen his very handwriting and read words which came straight from him and were signed by his now unfamiliar name. The children, who crouched together frightened by the darkness, were as phantoms to her, like a dream about which she had just got into the stage of doubt. Till now it had been all real to her, as dreams appear at first. But now, she stood, closing the door in the stillness of the evening, which, still as it was, was full of curiosity and questioning and prying eyes, and asked herself if these little figures were real, or inventions of her fancy. Real children of her living brother—was it true, was it possible? They were awe-stricken by the gathering dusk, by the strange half-empty room, by the dim circle of the unknown which surrounded them on every side. The nurse had put herself upon a chair on the edge of the carpet, where she sat holding the little boy on her knee, while little Lilias, who had backed slowly towards this one familiar figure, stood leaning against her, clutching her also with one hand, though she concealed instinctively this sign of fear. The boy withdrew the wondering whiteness of his face from the nurse’s shoulder now and then to give a frightened, fascinated look around, then buried it again in a dumb trance of dismay and terror, too frightened to cry. What was to be done with these frightened children and the strange woman to whom they clung? Mary could not keep them here to send them wild with alarm. They wanted soft beds, warm fires, cheerful lights, food and comfort, and they had come to seek it in the only house in the world which was closed by a curse and a vow against them. Mary Musgrave was not the kind of woman who is easily frightened by vows or curses; there was none of the romantic folly in her which would believe in the reality of an unjust or uncalled-for malediction. But she was persuaded of the reality of a thing which involved no supernatural mysteries, the obstinancy of her father’s mind, and his determination to hold by the verdict he had given. Years move and change everything, even the hills and the seas—but not the narrow mind of an obstinate and selfish man. She did not call him by these names; he was her father and she did not judge him; but no more did she hope in him. And in this wonderful moment a whole circle of possibilities ran through her mind. She might take them to the village; but there were other dangers there; or to the Parsonage, but Mr. Pen was weak and poor Emily a gossip. Could she dare the danger that was nearest, and take them somehow upstairs out of the way, and conceal them there, defying her father? In whatever way it was settled she would not desert them—but what was she to do? Miss Brown coming upon her suddenly in the dusk frightened her almost as much as the children were frightened. The want of light and the strangeness of the crisis combined made every new figure like a ghost.

“Yes, I sent for you. I am in—difficulty, Martha. These children have just come—the children of a friend—— ” Her first idea was to conceal the real state of the case even from her confidential and well-informed maid.

“Dear me,” said Miss Brown, with seeming innocence. “How strange! to bring a little lady and gentleman without any warning. But I’ll go and give orders, ma’am; there are plenty of rooms vacant, there need not be any difficulty—— ”

Miss Musgrave caught her by the arm.

“What I want for the moment is light, and some food here. Bring me the lamp I always use. No, not Eastwood; never mind Eastwood. I want you to bring it, they will be less afraid in the light.”

“There is a fire in the dining-room, ma’am, it is only a step, and Eastwood is lighting the candles; and there you can have what you like for them.”

It was confidence Miss Brown wanted—nothing but confidence. With that she was ready to do anything; without it she was Miss Musgrave’s respectable maid, to whom all mysteries were more or less improper. She crossed her hands firmly and waited. The room was growing darker and darker every minute, and the foreign nurse began to lose patience. She called “Madame! madame!” in a high voice; then poured forth into a stream of words, so rapid and so loud as both mistress and maid thought they had never heard spoken before. Miss Musgrave was not a great linguist. She knew enough to be aware that it was Italian the woman was speaking, but that was all.

“I do not understand you,” she said in distress, going up to the little group. But as she approached a sudden accession of terror, instantly suppressed on the part of the little girl but irrepressible by the younger boy, and which broke forth in a disjointed way, arrested her steps. Were they afraid of her, these children? “Little Lilias,” she said piteously, “be a brave child and stand by me. I cannot take you out of this cold room yet, but lights are coming and you will be taken care of. If I leave you alone for a little while will you promise me to be brave and not to be afraid?”

There was a pause, broken only by little flutterings of that nervous exhaustion which made the children so accessible to fear. Then a small voice said, dauntless, yet with a falter—

“I will stay. I will not be afraid.”

“Thank God,” said Mary Musgrave, to herself. The child was already a help and assistance. “Martha,” she said hastily, “tell no one; they are—my brother’s children—”

“Good Lord!” said Martha Brown, frightened out of her primness. “And it’s dark, and there’s two big boxes, and master don’t know.”

“That is the worst of all,” said Miss Musgrave sadly. She had never spoken to any one of her father’s inexorable verdict against John and all belonging to him. “The heir! and I must not take him into the house of his fathers! Take care of them, take care of them while I go—— And, Martha, say nothing—not a word.”

“Not if they were to cut me in pieces, ma’am!” said Miss Brown fervently. She was too old a servant to work in the dark; but confidence restored all her faculties to her. It was not, however, in the nature of things that she should discharge her commission without a betrayal more or less of the emergency. “I want some milk, please,” she said to the cook, “for my lady.” It was only in moments of importance that she so spoke of her mistress. And the very sound of her step told a tale.

“I told ye there was somethink oop,” said Tom Gardener, still lingering in the kitchen.

And to see how the house brightened up, and all the servants grew alert in the flutter of this novelty! Nothing had happened at the castle for so long—they had a right to a sensation. Cook, who had been there for a long time, recounted her experience to her assistants in low tones of mystery.

“Ah, if ye’d known the place when the gentlemen was at home,” said cook; “the things as happened in t’auld house—such goings on!—coming in late and early—o’er the watter and o’er the land—and the strivings, that was enough to make a body flee out of their skin!” She ended with a regretful sigh for the old times. “That was life, that was!” she said.

Meanwhile Mary Musgrave came in out of the dark hall into the lighted warmth of the dining-room, where the glass and the silver shone red in the firelight. How cosy and pleasant it was there! how warm and cheerful! Just the place to comfort the children and make them forget their miseries. The children! How easily her mind had undertaken the charge of them—the fact of their existence; already they had become the chief feature in her life. She paused to look at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, to smooth her hair, and put the ribbon straight at her neck. The Squire was “very particular,” and yet she did not remember to have had this anxious desire to be pleasant to his eyes since that day when she had crept to him to implore a reversal of his sentence. She had obtained nothing from him then; would she be more fortunate now? The colour had gone out of her face, but her eyes were brighter and more resolute than usual. How her heart beat when Mr. Musgrave said, “Come in,” calmly from the midst of his studies, as she knocked trembling at the library door!

PART II.

CHAPTER IV.
AFTER THE SILENCE OF YEARS.

“Come in,” said the Squire. He was sitting among his books, working with such a genuine sense of importance as was strange to see. Mary did not know that she thought anything in the world (except this present mission of hers) so important as he thought his search into the heraldic fortunes of the family. He was in full cry after a certain “augmentation” which had got into the Musgrave arms no one well knew how. It was only the Musgraves of Penninghame who bore this distinction, and how did they come by it? It appeared in the thirteenth century—in the age of the Crusades. Was it in recollection of some feat of a Crusader?—that was the question. He put down his pen and laid one open book upon another as she came in. He had no consciousness in his mind to make him critical or inquiring. He did not observe her paleness, nor the special glitter in her eyes. “I am busy,” he said, “so you must be brief. I think I have got hold of that ‘chief’ at last. After years of search it is exciting to find the first trace of it; but perhaps it is best to wait till I have verified my guesses—they are still not much more than guesses. What a satisfaction it will be when all is clear!”

“I am glad you are to have this satisfaction, papa.”

“Yes, I know you take little interest in it for itself. Ladies seldom do; though I can’t tell why, for heraldry ought to be an interesting science to them and quite within their reach. Nothing has happened about the dinner, I hope? I notice that is your general subject when you come into my room so late. Law business in the morning, dinner in the evening—a very good distribution. But I want a good dinner to-night, my dear, to celebrate my success.”

“It is not about dinner. Father, we have been living a very quiet life for many years.”

“Thank Heaven!” said the old man. “Yes, a quiet life. A man of my age is entitled to it, Mary. I never shrank from exertion in my time, nor do I now, as this will testify.” He laid his hand with a genial complaisance upon the half-written paper that lay before him. Then he said with a smile, “But make haste, my dear. There is still an hour before dinner, and I am in the spirit of my work. We need not occupy our time, you and I, with general remarks.”

“I did not mean it for a general remark,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “It is that I have something important—very important to speak of, and I don’t know how to begin.”

“Important—very important!” he said, with the indulgence of jocular superiority for a child’s undue gravity. “I know what these important matters are. Some poaching rascal that you don’t know how to manage, or a quarrel in the village? Bring them to me: but bring them to-morrow, Mary, when my mind is at rest—I cannot give my attention now.”

“It is neither poaching nor quarrelling,” she said. “I can manage the village. There are other things. Father, though we have been quiet for so many years, it is not because there has been nothing to think of—no seeds of trouble in the past—no anxieties—— ”

“I don’t know what you are thinking of,” he said, pettishly. “No anxieties? A man has them as long as he is in the world. We are mortal. Seeds of trouble? I have told you, Mary, that you may spare me general remarks.”

“Oh, nothing was further from my mind than general remarks,” she cried. “I don’t know how to speak. Father—look here—read it; it will tell its own story best. This is what, after the silence of years, I have received to-day.”

“The silence of years!” said the Squire. He had to fumble for his spectacles, which he had taken off, though he carefully restrained himself from betraying any special interest. A red colour had mounted to his face. Perhaps his mind did not go so far as to divine what it was; but still a sudden glimmering, like the tremble of pale light before the dawn, had come into his mind.

And this was the thunderbolt that suddenly fell upon him in his quietness after the silence of years:—

“My dear Sister Mary,—This will be given to you by my little daughter Lilias. The sight of my handwriting and of the children will be enough to startle you, so that I need not try to soften the shock which you must have already received. I claim from my father shelter for my children. Their mother is dead; so are the others of my family whose very names will never be known to my nearest relations. Never mind that now. I am a man both sick and sorry, worn by the world, lonely, and not much better than an adventurer. These children are the last of our race, and the boy, however reluctant you may be, is my father’s heir. I claim for them the shelter of the family roof. I have no home to give them, nor can I give them the care they require. Mary, you are a good woman: you are blameless one way or another. I charge you with my children. God do so to you and more also, according as you deal with them. Some time or other before I die I will drag myself home. That you may be sure of, unless God cuts short my life by the way, of which, if He will, I shall not complain.

“Your brother,
“John Musgrave.”

This was the letter which the Squire placed upon his mouldy books, over the statement he had been writing. He did not speak, but read it steadily to the end, betraying no emotion except by the glow of colour that rose over his weather-beaten face. Who that has sat by, anxious, watching the effect of such a letter, needs to be told with what intense observation Mary Musgrave noted every sign of the rigid control he kept upon himself—the tight clutch of one hand upon the table, the tremor of the other which held the letter? But the Squire said nothing, not even when he had visibly come to the end. He held it before him still for some minutes; then he began to fold it elaborately—but said nothing still. The shadow of his head with its falling locks of white hair shook a little upon the wall. There is a peculiar tremble which shows the very severity of restraint, and this was of that kind.

“Father! have you nothing to say?”

“I thought it was a subject put aside, not to be mentioned between us,” he said. “I may be wrong—if I am wrong you can inform me; but I supposed this and all cognate subjects to be closed between us—— ”

“How can this be closed; I have ceased to importune you, but this is a new opening. And there is more than the letter—the children—— ”

“Ah!” He gave a slight cry. If he could it would have been an exclamation of scorn, but this was too much for him; the cry was sharp with impatient pain.

“I could not keep them a secret from you, father.”

“I hate secrets,” he said; “nevertheless there are few families in which they are not necessary. When he had said this he pushed the letter towards her, drew forward his heraldry books, and took his pen in his hand.

“Will you say nothing to me?” she cried. “Will you give me no answer? What am I to do?”

“Do! It seems to me quite an unnecessary question. It is a long time since I have given up exercising any control over you, Mary,” he said.

“But, father, have a little pity. The house is not mine to do as I like with.”

“That is unfortunate,” he said with a cold precision which made it doubtful whether he spoke satirically or in earnest. “But it is not my fault. You cannot expect me to make place voluntarily for another; and even if I did, as you are a woman, it would be of very little use to you. You cannot be the heir—— ”

“And this boy is!” she said with a gesture of appeal.

Mr. Musgrave said nothing. He shook his head impatiently, pushed the letter to her with an energy that flung it into her lap, and resumed his writing. She stood by while he deliberately returned to his description of the “chief,” turning up a page in his heraldry book, where all the uses and meanings of that “augmentation” were discussed. According to all appearance his mind took up this important question exactly where he had left it; and he resumed his writing steadily, betraying agitation only by a larger, bolder, and firmer handwriting than usual. His daughter stood for a moment by his side, and watched him speechless—then went out of the room without another word. The Squire went on writing for a full minute more. The lines he wrote had not been so bold, so firm, so well-defined for years. Was it because he had to put forth the whole force that remained in him, soul and body, to get them upon the paper at all? When all sound of her departing steps had died out, he stopped suddenly, and, putting down his pen, let his head drop upon the open book and its figured page. An augmentation of honour! The days were over in which such gifts came from heralds and kings. And instead, here were struggles of a very different kind from those which won new blazons. But the most insensible, the most self-controlled of men, could not take such an interruption of his studies with absolute calm. He had never been in such desperate conflict with any man as with this son, and here his enemy, whom nature forbade to be his enemy, his antagonist, had come again after the silence of years and confronted him. To see such a one pass by could not but excite a certain emotion; but to meet him thus as it were face to face! The passion of parental love has been often portrayed. There is no passion more fervent, none perhaps even that can equal it; but there is another passion scarcely less intense—that which rises involuntarily in the bosom of a man between whom and his son there are no ties of mutual dependence, when the younger has become as the elder, knowing good and evil, and all the experiences of life; when there is no longer any question of authority and obedience, and natural affection yields to a strain of feeling which is too strong for it. Many long years had passed now since young Musgrave ceased to be his father’s pride and boyish second in everything. He had grown a man, his equal, and had resisted and held his own in the conflict half a lifetime ago. All the embitterment which close relationship gives to a deadly quarrel had been between them, and though the father had so far got the better as to drive the rebel out of his sight, he had not crushed his will or removed him from his standing-ground. He was the victor, though the vanquished. His son had not yielded, nor would ever yield. When Mr. Musgrave raised his head his face was pale, and his head shook with a nervous tremor; all the broken redness of his cheeks shone like pencilled lines through his pallor, increasing it. “This will never do,” he said to himself, and rising, went to an old oak cupboard in the corner, and poured himself a small glass of the strongest of liqueurs. Not for all that remained of the Musgrave property would he have shown himself so broken, so overcome. This other man who was no younger, but only stronger than himself, was at the same time his successor, ready to push him out of his seat; waiting for a triumph that must come sooner or later. He had been able to forget all about him for years; to thrust out the thought of him when it recurred; but here the man stood once more confronting him. The Squire was wise in his way, and knew that there was nothing in the world so bad for the health, or so likely to give his antagonist an advantage, as the indulgence of emotion—therefore he crushed it “upon the threshold of the mind.” He would not give him so much help towards the inevitable eventual triumph. He went back to his writing-table when he had fortified himself with that potent mouthful; but, knowing himself, tried his pen upon a stray bit of paper before he would resume his writing. What he wrote was in the quivering lines of old age. He tore it into pieces. No one should see such a sign of agitation in the manuscript which was to last longer than he. He took up the most learned of his books, and began to read with close attention. Here, at all events, the adversary should not get the better of him; or, at least, if thoughts did surge and rise, obliterating the old escutcheon altogether and the lion on its “chief,” nobody should be the wiser.

Thus the old man sat, with a desperate courage worthy a better object, and mastered the furious excitement in his mind. But he was not thinking of the children as perhaps the reader of this story may suppose. He was not resisting the thrill of natural interest, the softening of heart which might have attended that sudden arrival. He did not even realize the existence of the children. His thoughts were of conflicts past, and of the opponent against whom he had striven so often: the opponent whom he could not altogether dismiss or get rid of, his rival, his heir, his successor, his son. There was nothing he had wished as a father, as a Musgrave, as the head of a great county family, which this man had not done his best to undo: and as he had by ill-fortune thirty years the advantage of his father, there was no doubt that he would, some time or other, undo and destroy to an extent of which he was incapable now; unless indeed he was prevented in the most disgraceful way, incapacitated by public conviction of crime—conviction, which was only too probable, which hung over his banished head and prevented his return home. What would there be but pain in the thought of such a son—an opponent if he were innocent, if he were guilty a disgrace to the family name? The more completely the Squire could banish this thought from his mind, the happier he was; and he had banished it with wonderful success for many years past. He had done all he could to evade the idea that he himself would one day be compelled to die. Many men do this who have no painful consciousness of the heir behind who is waiting to dispossess them; and Mr. Musgrave had, to a great degree, attained tranquillity on this point. The habit of living seems to grow stronger with men as they draw near the end of their lives. It has lasted so long; it has been so steady and uninterrupted, why should it ever cease? But here was the death’s-head rising at the feast; the executioner giving note of his presence behind backs. John! he had dismissed him from his mind. He had exercised even a kind of Christianity in forgetting him. But here he was again, incapable of being forgotten. What a tremor in his blood—what undue working of all that machinery of the heart which it was so essential to keep in calm good order had this interruption caused! he who had no vital energy to spare; who wanted it all for daily comfort and that continuance which with younger people is so lightly taken for granted. How much of that precious reserve had been consumed by this shock! It had been done on purpose, perhaps, to try what the effect of such a shock upon his nerves and fibres would be.

Mr. Musgrave pushed back his chair again from the table, and gave all his faculties to the task of calming himself down. He would not allow himself to be overcome by John. But it took him a long time to accomplish this, to get his pulse back to its usual rate of beating. When he relaxed for a moment in his watch over himself, old recollections would come back, scenes of the long warfare, words that were as swords and smote him over again with burning and stinging wounds. He had to calm it all down and still memory altogether if he would recover his ordinary composure. It wanted about an hour of dinner when he began this process. Up to that time it did not so much matter except for wearing him out and diminishing his strength. But it was his determination that no one should know or see this agitation which he had not been able to master. His daughter thought she had a harder task before her when she left him and hurried back to the ghostly half-lighted hall where she had left the children; but what was her work, or the commotion of her thoughts, in comparison to that which raged within the bosom of the old man in his solitude, defying Heaven and nature, and all gentler influences—whose conflict was for himself only, as it was carried on unhelped and unthought of by himself alone?

CHAPTER V.
WAKING UP.

Miss Musgrave went back to her visitors with a heightened colour and assured step. Her alarm had departed along with her wistful and hopeful ignorance as to what her father might do. Now that she knew, her courage came back to her. When she opened the door which led out of the little passage into the hall, the scene before her was striking and strange enough to arrest her like a picture. The great ancient room, with its high raftered roof and wide space, lay in darkness—all but one bright spot in the midst where the lamp stood on the table. Miss Brown had hastily arranged a kind of homely meal, a basket of oatcakes, some white bread in a napkin, biscuits, home-made gingerbread, and a jug of fresh milk. The white and brown bread, the tall white jug, the cloth upon the tray, all helped to increase the whiteness of that spot in the gloom. In the midst of this light sat the Italian nurse, dark and vigorous, with the silver pins in her black hair, and red ribbons at her breast. The pale little boy sat on her knee; he had a little fair head like an angel in a picture, light curling hair, and a delicate complexion, white and red, which was fully relieved against that dark background. The child’s alarm had given way a little, but still, in the intervals of his meal, he would pause, look round him into the gloom, and clutch with speechless fright at his attendant, who held him close and soothed him with all the soft words she could think of. Little Lilias stood by her on the further side, sufficiently recovered to eat a biscuit, but securing herself also, brave as she was, by a firm grasp of the nurse’s arm to which she hung, tightly embracing it with her own. Miss Brown was flitting about this strange little group, talking continuously, though the only one among them who was disposed to talk could not understand her, and the children were too worn out to pay any attention to what she said.

There was a little start and thrill among the three who held so closely together when the lady returned. Little Lilias put down her biscuit. She became the head of the party as soon as Miss Musgrave came back—the plenipotentiary with whom to conduct all negotiations. Nello, on the other hand, buried his head in his nurse’s shoulder. In the midst of all her agitation and confusion it troubled Miss Musgrave that the child should hide his face from her. The boy who was like herself and her family was the one to whom her interest turned most. Lilias bore another resemblance, which was no passport to Mary Musgrave’s heart. Yet it was hard to resist the fascination of this child’s sense and courage; the boy, as yet, had shown himself capable of nothing but fear.

“Go, and have fires lighted at once in the two west rooms—make everything ready,” Mary said, sending Miss Brown away peremptorily. It was not a worthy feeling perhaps, but it vexed her, agitated as she was, to see that her maid woke no alarm in the children, while she, their nearest relation, she who, if necessary, had made up her mind to sacrifice everything for them, was an object of fear. She thought even that the children clung closer to their nurse and shrank more from herself when Martha was sent away. Miss Musgrave stood at the other side of the table and looked at them with many conflicting thoughts. It was altogether new to her, this strange mixture of ignorance and wonder, and almost awe, with which she felt herself contemplating these unknown little creatures, henceforward to be wholly dependent upon her. They were afraid of her, but she was scarcely less afraid of them, wondering with an ache in her heart whether she would be able to feel towards them as she ought, to bring her middle-aged thoughts into sympathy with theirs, to be soft and gentle with them as their helplessness demanded. Love does not always come with the first claim upon it; how was she to love them, little unknown beings whose very existence she had never heard of before? And Mary thought of herself with a certain pity in this strange moment, remembering almost with a sense of injury that the fountain of mother’s love had never been awakened in her at all. Was it thus to be awakened? She was not an angelic woman, as poor Mr. Pen imagined her to be. She knew this well enough, though he did not know it. She had been young and full of herself when the family misfortunes happened, and since then what had there been in her life to warm or awaken the heart? Was she capable of loving? she asked herself; was there not a chill atmosphere about her which breathed cold upon the children and drove them away? This thought gave her a pang, as she stood and looked at the two helpless creatures before her, too frightened now to munch their biscuits, one gazing at her with big pathetic eyes, the other hiding his face. An ache of helplessness and pain not less great than theirs came into her mind. She was as helpless as they were, looking at them across the table, as if across a world of separation which she did not know how to bridge over, with not only them to vanquish, but herself. At last she put out her hands with the sense of weakness, such as perhaps she had never felt before. She had not been able, indeed, to influence her father, but she had not felt helpless before him; on the contrary, his hardness had stirred her to determination on her side, and a sense of power which quickened the flowing of her blood. But before these children she felt helpless; what was she to do with them, how bring herself into communication with them? She put out her hands—hands strong to guard, but powerless she thought to attract. “Lilias, will you come to me?” she said with a tremulous tone in her voice.

The weariness, the strangeness, the darkness had been almost too much for Lilias; her mouthful of biscuit and draught of milk had been too quickly interrupted by the return of the strange, beautiful lady, with whom she alone, she was aware, could deal. And she could not respond to that appeal without quitting hold of Martuccia, who, though powerless to treat with the lady, was still a safeguard against the surrounding blackness, a something to cling to. But the child was brave as a hero, notwithstanding the nervous susceptibility of her nature. She disengaged her arm slowly from her one stay, keeping her eyes all the time fixed upon Miss Musgrave, half attracted by her, half to keep herself from seeing those dark corners in which mysterious dangers seemed to lurk; and came forward, repressing the sob that rose in her throat, her little pale face growing crimson with the strain of resolution which this effort cost her. It was all Lilias could do to move round the table quietly, not to make a rush of fright and violent clutch at the hand held out to her—even though it was the hand of a stranger, from which in itself she shrank. Mary put her arm round the little trembling figure, and smoothing away the dark hair from her forehead, kissed the little girl with lips that trembled too. She would do her duty by her; never would she forsake her brother’s child; and with the warmth of this resolution tears of pity and tenderness came into her eyes. But when Lilias felt the protection of the warm soft arm about her, and the tenderness of the kiss, her little heart burst forth with a strength of impulse which put all laws at defiance. With a sobbing cry she threw herself upon her new protector, caught at her dress, clung to her waist, nestled her head into her bosom, with a close pressure which was half gratitude, half terror, half nervous excitement. Mary was taken by storm. She did not understand the change that came over her. A sudden warmth seemed to come into her veins, tingling to her very finger-points. She too, mature and self-restrained as she was, began to weep, a sudden flood of tears rushing to her eyes against her will. “My child, my brave little girl!” she said almost unawares, recognising in her heart a soft surprise of feeling which was inexplicable; was this what nature did, sheer nature? she had never felt anything like it before. She held the child in her arms and cried over her, the tears falling over those dark curls which had nothing to do with the Musgraves, which even resembled another type with which the Musgraves would have nothing to do!

As she stood thus overcome by the double sensation of the child’s nestling and clinging, and by the strange, sudden development of feeling in herself, Mary Musgrave felt two soft touches upon her hand which were not mistakable, and which made her start and flush, with the decorum of an Englishwoman surprised. It was Martuccia, who, moved like all her race by quick impulses of emotion, had risen hastily to her feet in sympathy, and had kissed the lady’s hand, and put forward her little charge to perform the same act of homage. This roused Mary from her momentary breaking down. She took the little boy by the hand whom she found at her feet, not quite so frightened as at first, but still holding fast by the nurse’s skirts, and led them both into the house. They were too much awed to make any noise, but went with her, keeping close to her, treading in her footsteps almost, closer and closer as they emerged into one unknown place after another. Wonder kept them still as she took them through the cheerful lighted dining-room, and up the stairs. Eastwood was busy about his table, putting it in that perfect order which it was his pride to keep up (“For who is more to me nor my family? what’s company?” said Eastwood; “it’s them as pays me as I’m bound to please”); but Eastwood was too good a servant to manifest any feeling. He had, of course, heard all about the arrival, not only from the gardener, but from every one in the kitchen; and he was aware, as nobody else was, that there had been a private interview between the father and daughter, to which she had gone with a pale face, and come back with nostrils expanded, and a glow of resolution upon her. Eastwood was not an old servant, but he had learned all that there was to learn about the family, and a little more. His interest in the Musgraves was not so warm as that of cook for instance, who had been born in the place, and had known them from their cradles; but he had the warm curiosity which is common to his kind. He gave a glance from beneath his eyebrows at the new-comers, wondering what was to become of them. Would they be received into the house for good; and if so, would that have any effect upon himself, Eastwood? would it, by and by, be an increase of trouble, a something additional to do? He was no worse than his neighbours, and the thought was instinctive and natural, for no one likes to have additional labour. “But he’s but a little chap; it’ll be long enough before he wants valeting—if ever,” Mr. Eastwood said to himself. What would be wanted would be a nurse, not a valet; and if that black-eyed foreigner didn’t stay, Eastwood knew a nice girl from the village whom the place would just suit. So he cast no unkindly eye upon the children as he went noiselessly about in his spotless coat, putting down his forks, which were quite as spotless. The sight of the table with its bouquet of autumn flowers excited Lilias. “Who is going to dine there?” she said, with a pretty childish wile, drawing down Miss Musgrave towards her to whisper in her ear.

“I am, Lilias.”

“May we come too?” said the little girl. “Nello is very good—he does not ask for anything; we know how to behave.”

“There will be some one else besides me,” said Mary, faltering slightly.

“Then we do not want to come,” said Lilias with decision. “We are not fond of strangers.”

“I am a stranger, dear—— ”

“Oh no, you are Mary!” said the child, embracing Miss Musgrave’s arm with her own two arms clasped round it, and raising her face with the confidence of perfect trust. These simple actions made Mary’s heart swell as it had not done for years—as indeed it had never done in her life. Other thrills there might have been in her day, but this fountain had never been opened before, and the new feeling was almost as strangely sweet to her as is the silent ecstasy in the bosom of the new mother, whose baby has just brought into the world such an atmosphere of love. It was like some strange new stream poured into her heart, filling up all her veins.

The firelight had already begun to sparkle pleasantly in the bedrooms, and Mary found herself suddenly plunged into those pleasant cares of a mother which make time fly so swiftly. She had found so much to do for them, getting them to bed and making the weary little creatures comfortable, that the bell rang for dinner before she was aware. She left them hastily, and put herself into her evening gown with a speed which was anxiously seconded by Miss Brown, who for her part was just as eager to get back to the children as was her mistress. Miss Musgrave did not know what awaited her when she went down-stairs, or what battles she might have to fight. She had another duty now in the world beyond that claimed by her father. He had no such need of her as these children, who in all the wide world had no protector or succour but herself. Her heart beat a little louder and stronger than usual; her bearing was more dignified. The indifference which had been in her life this morning had passed away. How strange it seemed now to think of that calm which nothing affected much, in which she had been comparatively happy, but which now appeared so mean and poverty-stricken. The easy quiet had gone out of her life;—was it for ever?—and instead there had come in a commotion of anxieties, hopes, and doubts and questions manifold; but yet how miserable to her in comparison seemed now that long loveless tranquillity! She was another woman, a living woman, she thought to herself, bearing the natural burden of care, a burden sweetened by a hundred budding tendernesses and consolations. It is well to have good health and enough to do; these had been the bare elements of existence, out of which she had managed to form a cold version of living; but how different was this vivid existence, new-born yet eternal, of love and care! She was like one inspired. If she had been offered the alternative, as she almost expected, of leaving the house or giving up the children, with what pride would she have drawn her cloak round her and left her father’s house! This prospect seemed near enough and likely enough as she walked into the dining-room, with her head high, and a swell of conscious force in her bosom. Whatever might be coming she was prepared for any blow.

Mr. Musgrave, too, was late. He who was the soul of punctuality did not enter the room for a minute or more after his daughter had hastened there, knowing herself late—but whereas she had hurried her toilet, his had never been more careful and precise. He took his seat with deliberate steadiness, and insisted upon carving the mutton and partridge which made their meal, though on ordinary occasions he left this office to Eastwood. It gratified him, however, to-day, to prove to himself and to her how capable he was and how steady were his nerves. And he talked while he did this with unusual energy, going over again all the history of the “chief.”

“I hope it will interest the general reader,” he said. “Not many family questions do, but this is really an elucidation of history. It throws light upon a great many things. You scorn heraldry, Mary, I am aware.”

“No, I do not think I scorn it.”

“Well, at all events you are little interested; the details are not of much importance, you think. In short, I suspect,” he added, with a little laugh, “that if the truth were told, you and a great many other ladies secretly look upon the science as one of those play-sciences that keep men from being troublesome. You don’t say so, but I believe you think we fuss and make work for ourselves in this way while you are carrying on the real work of the world.”

“I am not so self-important,” she said; but there was a great deal of truth in the suggestion if her mind had been free enough to think of it. What was it else but a play-science to keep country gentlemen too old for fox-hunting out of mischief? This is one of the private opinions of the gynecæum applying to many grave pursuits, an opinion which circulates there in strictest privacy and is not spoken to the world. Mary would have smiled at the Squire’s discrimination had her mind been free. As it was, she could do nothing but wonder at his liveliness and composure, and say to herself that he must be waiting till Eastwood went away. This, no doubt, was why he talked so much, and was so genial. He did not wish to betray anything to the man, and her heart began to beat once more with renewed force as the moment came for his withdrawal. No doubt the discussion she feared would come, and most likely come with double severity then. She had seen all this process gone through before.

But when Eastwood went away the Squire continued smiling and conversational. He told her of a poacher who had been brought to him, a bumpkin from a distant farm, to whom he meant to be merciful; and of some land which was likely to be in the market, which would, if it could be got, restore an old corner of the estate and rectify the ancient boundary.

“I do not suppose there is any hope of such a thing,” he said, with a sigh. “And besides, what does it matter to me that I should care? my time cannot be very long.”

“The time of the family may be long enough,” she said, with a throb of rising excitement, for surely now he would speak; “one individual is not all.”

“That is a sound sentiment, though perhaps it may seem a little cold-hearted when the individual is your father, Mary.”

“I did not mean it to be cold-hearted; you have always taught me to consider the race.”

“And so you ought,” he said, “though you don’t care so much for the blazon as I could wish. I should like to talk to Burn and to see what the lawyers would think of it. I confess I should like to be Lord of the Manor at Critchley again before I die.”

“And so you shall, father, so you shall!” she cried. “We could do it with an effort: if only you would—if only you could—— ”

He interrupted her hastily.

“When Burn comes to-morrow let me see him,” he said. “This is no question of what I could or would. If it can be done it ought to be done. That is all I have to say. Is it not time you were having tea?”

This was to send her away that he might have his evening nap after dinner. Mary rose at the well-known formula, but she came softly round to his end of the room to see that the fire was as he liked it, and lingered behind his chair, not knowing whether to make another appeal to him. Her presence seemed to make him restless; perhaps he divined what was floating in her mind. He got up quickly before she had time to speak.

“On second thoughts,” he said, “as I was disturbed before dinner, I had better resume my work at once. You can send me a cup of tea to the library. It is not often that one has such a satisfactory piece of work in hand; that charms away drowsiness. Be sure you send me a cup of tea.”

“You will not—over-fatigue yourself, father?” said Mary, faltering. “I—hope you will not do too much.”

This was not what she meant to say, but these were the only words that she could manage to form out of her lips.

“Oh, no; do not be uneasy. I shall not overwork myself,” said the Squire once more, with a laugh.

And he went out of the room before her, erect and steady, looking younger and stronger in the force of that excitement which he was so careful to conceal. Mary did not know what to think. Was he postponing his sentence to make it more telling? or was he, happier thought, moved by the new event as she herself had been, warmed into forgiveness, into relenting, into the happiness of old age in children’s children? Could this be so? She stood over the fire in her agitation holding her hands out to the ruddy blaze, though she was not cold. Her heart beat violently against her breast. How uneasy a thing this life was, how restless and full of change and commotion! Yet so much more, so much greater than the gentler stagnation which was gone.

CHAPTER VI.
AT THE VICARAGE.

The vicarage was stilled in the quiet of the evening, the children in bed, the house at rest. It was not the beautiful and dignified old house which in England is the ideal dwelling of the gentleman parson, the ecclesiastical squire of the parish. And indeed Mr. Pennithorne was not of that order. Though there had been many jokes when he first entered upon the cure as to the resemblance between his name and that of the parish, Pennithorne of Penninghame was a purely accidental coincidence. Mr. Musgrave was the patron, but the living was not wealthy enough or important enough to form that appropriate provision for a second son which, according to the curious subordination and adaptation of public wants to family interests, has become the rule in England, unique, as are so many others. Randolph Musgrave had his rectory in one of the midland counties, in the district which was influenced by his mother’s family, where there was something more worth his acceptance; and his old tutor had got the family living. Mr. Pennithorne was not a distinguished scholar with chances of preferment through his college, and it had been considered a great thing for him when, after dragging the young Musgraves through a certain proportion of schooling and colleging, he had subsided into this quiet provision for the rest of his life. He was a clergyman’s son, with no prospects, and whatsoever glimmerings of young ambition there might have been in him, there was no coming down involved when he accepted the small rural vicarage where his heart was. We have already said that in his wildest hopes a vision of the possibility of bringing Mary Musgrave to the vicarage to share his humble circumstances with him had never entered into Mr. Pennithorne’s mind; but to be near her was something, and to be her trusted and confidential friend seemed the best that life could give him. Here he had remained ever since, being of some use to her, as he hoped, from time to time, and some comfort at least, if nothing more, in the convulsions of the family. During the first years of his incumbency, Mr. Pennithorne’s own mind had been subject to many convulsions as one suitor after another came to the Castle; but as they had all ridden away again with what grace they could after their rejection, comfort had come back. It was a curious passion, and one which we do not pretend to explain. After a while, impelled by friends, by convenience, and by the soft looks of Emily Coniston, the daughter of the clergyman in his native place, to which he had gone on a visit, he had himself found it possible to marry, without any failure of his allegiance to his visionary love; but still to this day though he had been Emily’s husband for ten years, it troubled the good vicar when any stranger came to the Castle whose society seemed specially pleasant to Miss Musgrave. He would hang about the place at such times like an alarmed hen when something threatens the brood, nor ceased to cluck and flutter his wings till the danger was over. Did he not wish her happiness? Ah, yes, and would, he thought, have given his life to procure it; but was it necessary that happiness should always be got in that one vulgar way? Marriage was well enough for the vulgar, but not for Mary. It would have been a descent from her maiden dignity, a lowering of her position. He was willing that everybody should love her and place her on a pedestal above all women; but it wounded his finest feelings to think that she too, in her turn, might love. There was no man good enough or great enough to be worthy of awakening such a sentiment in Mary Musgrave’s breast.

As is not unusual in such cases, Mr. Pennithorne, the chief inspiration of whose life was a visionary passion of the most exalted and exalting kind for a woman, had married a woman for whom no one could entertain any very exalted or impassioned feelings. Perhaps the household drudge is a natural double or attendant of the goddess. They “got on” very well together, people said, and Mr. Pen put up with his wife’s little foolishnesses and fretfulnesses, as perhaps a man could not have done whose heart was fortified by no ideal passion. Emily was a good housekeeper of the narrow sort, caring very little for comfort, and very proud of her economy; and she was a good mother of the troublesome kind, whose children are always in the foreground, always wanting something, always claiming her attention. Mr. Pen adored them, and yet he was glad when they were got to bed, when his wife could be spoken to without one child clinging to her skirts, or another breaking in upon everything with plaintive appeals to mamma. But he took it for granted that this was how it must be, and that a more lovely course of life was impracticable. One woman excepted, all women, he thought, were like this; it is thus that the dogmatisms of common opinion are formed and kept up; and what could be done but to shrug his shoulders at the inevitable, escaping from it into his study, or with a sigh into that world of the ideal where imagination is never ruffled by the incidents of common life. The children were in bed on this October night, and everything was still. The vicarage was not a handsome house, nor was it old, but merely modern, badly built, and common-place, redeemed by nothing but its garden, which was large, and gave a pretty surrounding to the place in summer. But the night had become stormy, and the wind was raving in the trees, making their close neighbourhood anything but an advantage. Mrs. Pennithorne thought it extravagant to use two sitting-rooms, so the family ate and lived in the dining-room—a dark room papered and furnished as, in the days when Mr. Pen was married, it was thought right to decorate such places, with a red flock paper of a large pattern, which relieved the black horsehair of the furniture. The room was not very large. It had a black marble mantel-shelf, with a clock upon it, and some vases of Bohemian glass, and a red and blue table-cover upon the table, about which there lingered always a certain odour of food, especially in cold weather, when the windows were closed. Mrs. Pennithorne sat between the fire and the table. She had some dressmaking in hand, which made a litter about—dark winter stuff for little Mary’s frock; and as she had no genius for this work, it was a lingering and confusing business with her, and made her less amiable than usual. The reason why her husband was there at all instead of being in his study was that the evening was cold; but it had not yet become, according to Mrs. Pen’s code, time for fires. There was one in the dining-room, for she had not been well; but to light a second so early in October was against all her traditions, and Mr. Pen had been driven out of his study, where he had been sitting in his great-coat, and now stood with his back to the fire, warming himself, poor man, in preparation for another spell of work at his sermon. He was thin, and felt the cold. It was this, she had just been saying, that had brought him, and not any regard for her loneliness—which indeed was quite true.

“No, Emily,” he said, meekly, “for I have my work to do, you know; but while I am here, I hope you are not sorry to see me. The children were rather late to-night.”

“I am glad to keep them up a little for company,” she said. “It is not so cheerful sitting here all alone, hearing the wind roaring in the trees; and my nerves are quite gone. I never used to fear anything when I was a young girl, but now I start at every sound. I don’t mean to blame you—but it is lonely sitting by one’s self after being one of a large family.”

“No doubt—no doubt,” he said, soothingly. “I suppose we gain something as years go on, but we do lose something. That must be taken for granted in life.”

“I don’t like your philosophy, Mr. Pennithorne,” said Emily; “the way you have of always making out that things have to be! I don’t see it, for my part. I think a married woman should have a great deal to cheer her up that a girl can’t have—— ”

“My dear,” he said, “perhaps I am not much—and you know the parish is my first duty; but have you not the children?—dear children they are. I do not think there can be any greater pleasure than one’s children—— ”

“You have nothing to do but enjoy them,” said Mrs Pennithorne, slightly softened; “but if you had to work and slave like me! There is never a day that I have not something to do for them; mending, or making, or darning, or something. Fathers have an easy time of it; they play with the baby now and then, take out the elder ones for a walk, and that is all. That is nothing but pleasure; but to sit for days and work one’s fingers to the bone—— ”

“I wish you would not, Emily. I have heard you say that Miss Price in the village was a very good dressmaker—— ”

“For those who can afford her,” said Mrs. Pennithorne. “But,” she added, with a better inspiration, “you make me look as if I were complaining, and I don’t want to complain. Though it is dull, William, you must allow, sitting all the evening by one’s self—— ”

“But I have to do the same,” he said, with gentle hypocrisy. “You know, Emily, if I wrote my sermon here, we should fall to talking, which no doubt is far pleasanter—but it is not duty, and duty must come before all—— ”

“There is more than one kind of duty,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, who was tearing her fingers with pins putting together two sides of Mary’s frock. While she was bending over this, the maid came into the room with a note. There was something in the “Ah!” with which he took it which made his wife raise her head. She was not jealous of Miss Musgrave, who was nearly ten years older than herself, an old maid, and beneath consideration; but she did think that William thought a great deal too much of the Castle. “What is it now?” she said pettishly. Perhaps once more—they had done it several times already—it was an invitation to dinner for Mr. Pennithorne alone. But he was so much interested in what he was reading that he did not even hear her. She sat with her scissors in her hand, and looked at him while he read the note, his face changing, his whole mind absorbed. He did not look like that when their common affairs were discussed, or the education of his children, which ought to be more interesting to him than anything else. This was other people’s business—and how it took him up! Mrs. Pennithorne was a good woman, and did her duty to her neighbours when it was very clearly indicated; but still, of course, nothing could be of such consequence as your own family, and your duty to them. And to see how he was taken up, smiling, looking as if he might be going to cry! Nothing about Johnny or Mary ever excited him so. Mrs. Pennithorne was not only vexed on her own account, but felt it to be wrong.

“Well, life is a wonderful thing,” he said suddenly. “I went to the Castle this afternoon—— ”

“You are always going to the Castle,” she said, in a fretful voice.

“—Expressly to tell Miss Musgrave how much my mind had been occupied about her brother John. You never knew him, Emily; but he was my pupil, and I was very fond of him—— ”

“You are very fond of all the family, I think,” she said, half-interested, half-aggrieved.

“Perhaps I was,” he said, with a little sigh, which, however, she did not notice; “but John particularly. He was a fine fellow, though he was so hot-headed. The other night I kept dreaming of him, all night long—over and over again.”

“That was what made you so restless, I suppose,” Mrs. Pennithorne put in, in a parenthesis. “I am sure you have plenty belonging to yourself to dream of, if you want to dream.”

“—And I went to ask if they had heard anything, smiling at myself—as she did, for being superstitious. But here is the wonderful thing: I had scarcely left, when the thing I had foreseen arrived. A carriage drew up containing John Musgrave’s children—— ”

“Did you know John Musgrave’s children? I never knew he had any children—— ”

“Nor did I, or any one!—that is the wonder of it. I felt sure something was happening to him or about him—and lo! the children arrived. It was no cleverness of mine,” said Mr. Pennithorne with gentle complacency, “but still I must say it was a wonderful coincidence. The very day!”

Mrs. Pennithorne did not make any reply. She was not interested in a coincidence which had nothing to do with her own family. If Mr. Pen had divined when Johnny was to break his arm, so that they might have been prepared for that accident! but the Musgraves had plenty of people to take care of them, and there seemed no need for a new providential agency to give them warning of unsuspected arrivals. She put some more pins into little Mary’s frock—the two sides of the little bodice never would come the same. She pulled at them, measured them, repinned them, but could not get them right.

“I have heard a great deal about John Musgrave,” she said with a pin in her mouth. “What was it he did that he had to run away?”

“My dear Emily! don’t do that, for heaven’s sake—you frighten me; and besides, it is not—pretty—it is not becoming—— ”

“I think I am old enough by this time to know what is becoming,” said Mrs. Pennithorne with some wrath, yet growing red as she took out the pins. She was conscious that it was not ladylike, and felt that this was the word her husband meant to use. “If you knew the trouble it is to get both sides the same!” she added, forgetting her resentment in vexation.

It was a troublesome job. There are some people in whose hands everything goes wrong. Mrs. Pen shed a tear or two over the refractory frock.

“My dear! I hope it is not my innocent remark—— ”

“Oh no, it is not any innocent remark. It is so troublesome. Just when I thought I had got it quite straight! But what do you know about such things? You have nothing to say to Mary’s frock. You never would notice, I believe, if she had not one to her back, or wore the same old rag year after year—— ”

“Yes, Emily, I should notice,” said Mr. Pen with some compunction; “and I am very sorry that you should have so much trouble. Send for Miss Price to-morrow, and I will pay her out of my own money. You must not take it off the house.”

“Oh, William! William!” said his wife, “who is it that will suffer if your own money, as you call it, runs out? Do you think I am so inconsiderate as only to think of what I have for the house! Isn’t it all one purse, and will it not be the children that will suffer eventually whoever pays? No, your money shall not be spent to save me trouble. What is the good of us but to take trouble?” said Mrs. Pen with heroic fortitude.

Mr. Pen sighed. Perhaps he was more conscious of the litter of dressmaking than of this fine sentiment. But anyhow he did not give any applause to the heroine. He left indeed this family subject altogether, and after a momentary pause, said, half to himself, “John Musgrave’s children! Who could have thought it! And how strange it all is—— ”

“Really, Mr. Pennithorne,” said his wife, offended, “this is too much. I don’t believe you think one half so much of your own children as of those Musgraves. What did they ever do for us?”

“They did this for us, my dear, that but for them I should not have had a home to offer you—nor a family at all,” said the vicar with a little warmth. “I might have been still travelling with boys about the world—— ”

“Oh, William, not with your talents,” said his wife, looking at him with admiration. With all her fretfulness and insensibility to those fine points of internal arrangement for which he had a half-developed, half-subdued taste, Emily had still a great admiration for her husband. Now Mary Musgrave, who was, unknown to either, her spiritual rival, had no admiration for good Mr. Pen at all. This gave the partner of his life an infinite advantage. His voice softened as he replied, shaking his head:

“Unfortunately, my love, other people do not appreciate my talents as you do.”

“That is because they don’t know you so well,” she said with flattering promptitude. Mr. Pennithorne drew a chair to the fire and sat down. It was but rarely that he received this domestic adulation; but it warmed him, and did him good.

“Ah, my dear, I fear I must not lay that flattering unction to my soul,” he said.

“You are too modest, William; I have always said you were too modest,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, returning good for evil. How little notice he had taken of her fine heroic feeling and self-abnegation! Women are more generous; she behaved very differently to him. And the fact was, he very soon began to think that old Mr. Musgrave had made use of him, and given him a very poor return. The vicarage was not much—and the Squire had never attempted to do anything more. It is sweet to be told that you are above your fate—that Providence owes you something better. He roused himself up, however, after a time out of that unwholesome state of self-complacency. “What a strange state of affairs it is, Emily,” he said. He was not in the habit of making his wife his confidant on matters that concerned the Musgraves, but in a moment of weakness his resolution was overcome. “What a painful state of affairs! Mr. Musgrave knows of the coming of these children, but he takes no notice, and whether she is to be allowed to keep them or not—— ”

“Dear me, think of having to get permission from your father at her time of life,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, with a naïve pity. “And whom did he marry, William, and what sort of person was their mother? I don’t think you ever told me that.”

“Their mother was—John’s wife; I must have told you of her. She was not the person his family wished. But that often happens, my dear. It is no sign that a man is a bad man because he may make what you may call a mistaken choice.”

“My dear William,” said Mrs. Pen, with authority, “there is nothing that shows a man’s character so much as the wife he chooses; my mother always said so. It is the best test if he is a nice feeling man or not,” the vicar’s wife said blandly, with a little conscious smile upon her face.

Mr. Pennithorne made no reply. There was something humorous in this innocent little speech, considering who the speaker was, to any one who knew. But then nobody knew; scarcely even Mr. Pennithorne himself, who at this moment was so soothed by his wife’s “appreciation,” that he felt himself the most devoted of husbands. He shook his head a little, deprecating the implied condemnation of his old pupil; for the moment he did not think of himself.

“Now that we are sitting together, and really comfortable for once in a way,” said Mrs. Pennithorne, dropping Mary’s bodice with all the pins, and drawing her chair a little nearer to the fire—“it does not happen very often—tell me, William, what it is all about, and what John Musgrave has done.”

Again the vicar shook his head. “It’s a long story,” he said, reluctantly.

“You tell things so nicely, William, I sha’n’t think it long; and think how strange it is, knowing so much about people, and yet not knowing anything. And of course I shall have to see the children. Poor little things, not to be sure of shelter in their grandfather’s house! but they will always have a friend in you.”

“They will have Mary; what can they want more if they have her?” he said suddenly, with a fervour which surprised his wife; then blushed and faltered as he caught her eye. What right had he to speak of Miss Musgrave so? Mrs. Pennithorne stared a little, but the slip did not otherwise trouble her, for she saw no reason for the exaggerated respect with which the Squire’s daughter was treated. Why should not she be called Mary—was it not her name?

“Mary, indeed! what does she know about children? But, William, I am waiting, and this is the question—What did John Musgrave do?”

PART III.

CHAPTER VII.
THE CHILDREN AT THE CASTLE.

The arrival of the children was an era at Penninghame from which afterwards everything dated; but the immediate result was a very curious and not very comfortable one. As they had been introduced into the house, so they lived in it. Mr. Musgrave never mentioned them, never saw them or appeared to see them, ignored their existence, in short, as completely as if his faculties had been deadened in respect to them. His life was in no way changed indeed; the extraordinary revolution which had been made to every one else in the house by this change showed all the more strongly from the absence of all effect upon him. He read, he wrote, he studied, he took his usual quiet exercise exactly as he did before, and never owned by a word or look that he was conscious of any alteration in the household. For a little while the children were hushed not to make a noise, and huddled away into corners to keep them out of sight and hearing; but that arrangement was too unnatural to continue, and it very soon happened that their presence was forced upon him by unmistakable signs, by both sight and hearing. But the Squire took not the slightest notice. He looked over their heads and never saw them. His ear was engaged with other sounds and he did not hear them. By this system of unconsciousness he deprived himself indeed of some evident advantages; for how can you interfere with the proceedings of those whose very existence you ignore? He could not give orders that the children should make less noise, because he professed not to be aware of their presence; nor send them out of his sight, when he was supposed not to see them; and in consequence this blindness and deafness on his part was perhaps a greater gain to them than to himself. The mental commotion into which he had been thrown by their arrival had never been known to any one but himself. He had a slight illness a few days after—his liver out of order, the doctor said; and so worked off his excitement without disclosing it to any one. After this he resumed his serenity, and completed his heraldic study. The history of the augmentation granted to the Musgraves in the year 1393 in remembrance of the valour of Sir Egidio, or Giles, Musgrave in the Holy Land made rather a sensation among students in that kind. It was a very interesting monograph. Besides being a singularly striking chapter of family history, it was, everybody said, a most interesting contribution to the study of heraldic honours—how and why they were bestowed; especially as concerning “augmentations” bestowed on the field for acts of valour—a rare and exceptional distinction. The Squire made a little collection of the notices that appeared in the newspapers of his “Monograph” pasting them into a pretty little book, as is not unusual with amateur authors. He enjoyed them a great deal more than if he had been the author of a great history, and resented criticism with corresponding bitterness. He was very proud of Egidio, or Giles, who died in the fifteenth century; and it did not occur to him that there was any incongruity between this devotion to his ancestors and the fact that he persisted in ignoring the little boy upstairs.

And yet day by day it grew more hard to ignore him. Mr. Musgrave in his study, after the enthusiasm of his monograph was over, could not help hearing voices which it was difficult to take no notice of. The enthusiasm of composition did a great deal for him: it carried him out of the present; it filled him with a delightful fervour and thrill of intellectual excitement. People who are always writing get used to it, and lose this sense of something fine and great which is the inheritance of the amateur. Even after the shock of renewed intercourse with the son, who had brought shame upon his name, and whom he had cast off, Mr. Musgrave, so long as his work lasted, found himself able to forget everything in the happiness it gave. When he woke in the morning his first thought was of this important occupation which awaited him, and he went to bed with the fumes of his own paragraphs in his head; he was carried away by it. But when all this intellectual commotion was over, and when the ennui of having nothing further to do had swallowed up the satisfaction of having finished a great piece of work, as it so soon does, then there came a very difficult interval for the Squire. He had no longer anything to absorb him and keep him comfortably above the circumstances of ordinary life; and as he sat in his library, only reading, only writing a letter, no longer absorbed by any special study, or by the pride and delight of recording in fine language the results of that study, ordinary life stole back, as it has a way of doing. He began to hear the knocks at the door, the ringing of bells, and to wonder what they meant; to hear steps going up and down the stairs, to be aware of Eastwood in the dining-room, and the rustle of Mary’s dress as she went about the house in the morning, and in the afternoon passed with a soft boom of the swinging door into her favourite hall. The routine of the house came back to the old man. He heard the servants in the kitchen, the ticking of that measured, leisurely old clock in the hall which took about five minutes to spell out the hour. He was not consciously paying any attention to these things. On the contrary, he was secluded from them, rapt in his books, knowing nothing of what was going on; yet he heard them all; and as he sat there through the long winter days and the still longer winter evenings, when there was rain or storm out of doors, and nothing to break the long, still blank of hours within, a sound would come to him now and then, even before the care of the household relaxed—the cry of a little voice, a running and pattering of small feet, sometimes an outburst of laughter, a small voice of weeping, which stirred strangely in the air about him and vaguely called forth old half-extinct sensations, as one might run over the jarred and half-silent keys of an old piano in the dark. This surprised him at first in his loneliness—then, when he had realized what it was, hurt him a little, rousing old wrath and bitterness, so that he would sometimes lay down his pen or close his book and all the past would come before him—the past, in which John his son had disappointed, mocked, insulted, and baffled his father. He would not allow himself to realize the presence of these children in the house, but he could not avoid thinking of the individual who stood between him and them, who was so real while they were so visionary. Always John! He had tried to live for years without thought of him and had been tranquil; it was grievous to be compelled thus to think of him again. This all happened, however, in the seclusion of his own mind, in the quiet of his library, and no one knew anything of it; not his daughter, who thought she knew his looks by heart; nor his servant, who had spelled him out by many guesses in the dark—as servants generally do—and imagined that he had his master at his fingers’ ends. But during all this time while these touches were playing upon him, bringing out ghosts of old sensations, muffled sounds and tones forgotten, Mr. Musgrave publicly ignored the fact that there were any children in the house, and contrived not to see them, nor to hear them, with a force of self-government and resolution which, in a nobler cause, would have been beyond all praise.

The effect of the change upon Miss Musgrave was scarcely less remarkable though very different. Her mental and moral education had been of a very peculiar kind. The tragedy which swallowed up her brother had interrupted the soft flowing current of her young life. All had gone smoothly before in the natural brightness of the beginning. And Mary, who had little passion in her temperament, who was more thoughtful than intense, and whose heart had never been awakened by any strong attachment beyond the ties of nature, had borne the interruption better than most people would have borne it, and had done her duty between her offending brother and her enraged father with less strain and violence of suffering than might have been imagined. And she had got through the more quiet years since without bitterness, with a self-adaptation to the primitive monotony of existence which was much helped, as most such virtues are, by temperament. She had formed her own theory of life, as most people do by the time they reach even the earliest stages of middle age; and this theory was the philosophical one that happiness, or the calm which does duty for happiness in most mature lives, was in reality very independent of events; that it came from within, not from without; and that life was wonderfully equal, neither bringing so much good, nor so much evil, as people of lively imaginations gave it credit for doing. Thus she had herself lived, not unhappy, except at the very crisis of the family life. She had suffered then. Who could hope (she said to herself) to do other than suffer one time or another in their life? But since then the calm and regularity of existence had come back, the routine which charms time away and brings content. There had no doubt been expectations in her mind which had come to nothing—expectations of more active joy, more actual well-being, than had ever fallen to her lot; but these expectations had gradually glided away, and no harm had been done. If she had no intensity of enjoyment, neither had she any wretchedness. She had enough to do; her life was full, and she was fairly happy. So she said to herself; so she had said many a day to Mr. Pen, who shook his mildly melancholy head and dissented—as far as he ever dissented from anything said by Miss Mary. Her brother was lost—away—wandering in the darkness of the great world as in a desert. But if he had been near at hand, absorbed in his married life, his wife, who was not of her species, and his unknown children, would not he have been just as much lost to Mary? So she persuaded herself at least; and so lived tranquilly, happy enough—certainly not unhappy;—and why should an ordinary mortal, youth being over, wish for more?

Now, however, all at once, so great a change had happened to her, that Mary could no longer understand, or even believe in, this state of mind which had been hers for so many years. Perfectly still, tranquil, fearing nothing—when her own flesh and blood were in such warfare in the world! How was it possible? Wondering pangs of self-reproach seized her; mysteries of death and of birth, such as had never touched her maidenly quiet, seemed to surround her, and mock at her former ease. All this time the gates of heaven had been opening and shutting to John. Hope sometimes, sometimes despair, love, anguish, want, pain, had struggled for him, while she had sat and looked on so calmly, and reasoned so placidly about the general equality of life. How could she have done it? The revelation was as painful as it was overwhelming. Nature seized upon her with a grip of iron, and avenged upon her in a moment all the indifferences of her previous life. The appeal of these frightened children, the solemn charge laid upon her by her brother, awoke her with a start and shiver. How had she dared to sit and look through calm windows, or on the threshold by her tranquil door, upon the struggles, pangs, and labours of the other human creatures about her? Was it excuse enough that she was neither wife nor mother? had she therefore nothing to do in guarding, and continuing, and handing down the nobler successions of life? Mary was startled altogether out of the state of mind habitual to her. Instead of remaining the calm lady of the manor, the female Squire, the lawgiver of the village which she had hitherto been—a little above the problems that were brought to her, a little wanting in consideration of motives and meaning, perhaps now and then too decided in her judgment, seeing the distinction between right and wrong too clearly, and entertaining a supreme, though gentle contempt for the trimmings and compromises, as well as for the fusses and agitations of the ordinary world—she felt herself to have plunged all at once into the midst of those agitations at a single step. She became anxious, timorous, yet rash, faltering even in opinion, hesitating, vacillating—she who had been so decided and so calm. Her feelings were all intensified, the cords of her nature tightened, as it were, vibrating to the lightest touch. And at the same time, which was strange enough, while thus the little circle, in which she stood, became full of such intense, unthought-of interest, the world widened around her as it had never widened before; into darknesses and silences indeed—but still with an extended horizon which expanded her heart. John was there in the wide unknown, which stretched round this one warm, lighted spot, wandering she knew not where, a solitary man. She had never realized him so before; and not only John, but thousands like him, strangers, wanderers, strugglers with fate. This sudden breath of novelty, of enlightenment, expanded her heart like a sob. Her composure, her satisfaction, her tranquillity fled from her; but how much greater, more real and true, more penetrating and actual, became her existence and the world! And all this was produced, not by any great mental enlightenment, any sudden development of character, but by the simple fact that two small helpless creatures had been put into her hands and made absolutely dependent upon her. This was all; but the whole world could not have been more to Mary. It changed her in every way. She who had been so rooted in her place, so absorbed in her occupations, would have relinquished all, had it been necessary, and gone out solitary into the world for the children. Could there be any office so important, any trust so precious? This, which sounded like the vulgarest commonplace, and at the same time most fictitious high-flown sentiment, on the lips of Mrs. Pennithorne, became all at once, in a moment, the leading principle of Miss Musgrave’s life.

But she had to undergo various petty inconveniences from the curiosity of her neighbours, and their anxiety to advise her as to what she should do in the “trying circumstances.” What could she know about children? Mrs. Pen, for one, thought it very important to give Miss Musgrave the benefit of her advice. She made a solemn visit to inspect them, and tell her what she ought to do. The little boy, she felt sure, was delicate, and would require a great deal of care; but the thing that troubled Mrs. Pennithorne the most was that Miss Musgrave could not be persuaded to put on mourning for her brother’s wife. Notwithstanding that it was, as Mary pleaded, five years since she died, the vicar’s wife thought that crape would be a proof that all “misunderstandings” were over, and would show a Christian feeling. And when she could not make this apparent to the person principally concerned, she did all she could to impress it upon her husband, whom she implored to “speak to”—both father and daughter—on the subject. Most people would have been all the more particular to put on crape, and to wear it deep, because there had been “misunderstandings.” “Misunderstandings!” cried Mr. Pen. It was not, however, he who spoke to Miss Musgrave, but she who spoke to him on this important subject; and what she said somewhat bewildered the vicar, who could not fathom her mind in this respect.

“Emily thinks we should put on mourning,” she said. “And, do you know, I really believe that is the reason that poor John is so much more in my thoughts?”

“What—the mourning?” the vicar asked faltering.

“Her death. Hitherto the idea of one has been mingled with that of the other. Now he is just John; everything else has melted away; there is nothing but himself to think of. He has never been only John before. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Pen?”

The vicar shook his head. He wondered if this could be a touch of feminine jealousy, knowing that even Mary was not perfect; and this gave him a momentary pang.

“I don’t suppose that I should feel so;—I was very fond of John—but I, of course, could not be jealous—I mean of his love for one unworthy—— ”

“How do you know even that she was unworthy? It is not that, Mr. Pen. But she was nothing to us, and confused him in our minds. Now he is himself—and where is he?” said Miss Musgrave, with tears in her eyes.

“In God’s hands—in God’s hands, Miss Mary! and God bless him wherever he is—and I humbly beg your pardon,” cried Mr. Pen, with an excess of compunction which she scarcely understood. His feelings were almost too warm Mary thought.

And as the news got spread through those invisible channels which convey reports all over a country, many were the visitors that came to the Castle to see what the story meant, though they did not announce this as the object of their visit. Among these visitors the most important was Lady Stanton, who had been Mary’s rival in beauty when the days were. They had not been rivals indeed to their own consciousness, but warm friends, in their youth and day of triumph; but events had separated the two girls, and the two women rarely met, and had outgrown all acquaintance; for Lady Stanton had been involved, almost more immediately than Mary Musgrave, in the tragedy which had so changed life at Penninghame, and this had changed their relations like everything else. This lady arrived one day to the great surprise of everybody, and came in with timid eagerness and haste, growing red and growing pale as she held out her hands to her old friend.

“We never quarrelled,” she said; “why should we never see each other? Is there any reason?”

“No reason,” said Miss Musgrave, making room upon the sofa beside her. But such an unexpected appeal agitated her, and for the moment she could not satisfy herself as to the object of the visit. Lady Stanton, however, was of a very simple mind, and could not conceal what that object was.

“Oh, Mary,” she said, the tears coming into her eyes, “I heard that John’s children had come home. Is it true? You know I always took an interest—— ” And here she stopped, making a gulp of some emotion which, to a superficial spectator, might have seemed out of place in Sir Henry Stanton’s wife. She had grown stout, but that does not blunt the feelings. “I should like to see them,” she said, with an appeal in her eyes which few people could withstand. And Mary was touched too, partly by this sudden renewal of an old love, partly by the thought of all that had happened since she last sat by her old companion’s side, who was a Mary too.

“I cannot bring them here,” she said, “but I will take you to the hall to see them. My father likes them to be kept—in their own part of the house.”

“Oh, I hope he is kind to them!” said Lady Stanton, clasping her white dimpled hands. “Are they like your family? I hope they are like the Musgraves. But likenesses are so strange—mine are not like me,” said the old beauty, plaintively. Perhaps the trouble in her face was less on account of her own private trials in this respect than out of alarm lest John Musgrave’s children should bear the likeness of another face of which she could not think with kindness. There was so little disguise in her mind, that this sentiment also found its way into words. “Oh Mary,” she cried, “you and I were once the two beauties, and everybody was at our feet; but that common girl was more thought of than either you or me.”

“Hush!” said Mary Musgrave, putting up her hand; “she is dead.”

“Is she dead?” Lady Stanton was struck with a momentary horror; for it was a contemporary of whom they were speaking, and she could not but be conscious of a little shiver in her own well-developed person, to think of the other who was clay. “That is why they have come home?” she said, half under her breath.

“Yes; and because he cannot carry them about with him wherever he goes.”

“You have heard from him, Mary? I hope he is doing well. I hope he is not—very—heart-broken. If you are writing you might say I inquired. He might like to know that he was remembered; and you know I always took—an interest—— ”

“I know you always had the kindest heart.”

“I always took an interest, notwithstanding everything; and—will he come home? Now surely he might come home. It is so long ago; and surely now no one would interfere.”

“I cannot say anything about that, for I don’t know,” said Miss Musgrave; “he does not say. Will you come and see the children, Lady Stanton?”

“Oh, Mary, what have I done that you should call me Lady Stanton? I have never wished to stand aloof. It has not been my doing. Do you remember what friends we were? and I couldn’t call you Miss Musgrave if I tried. When I heard of the children I thought this was an opening,” said Lady Stanton, faltering a little. She told her little fib, which was an innocent one; but she was true at bottom and told it ill; and what difference did it make whether she sought the children for Mary’s sake, or Mary for the children’s? Miss Musgrave accepted her proffered embrace with kindness, yet with a smile. She was touched by the emotion of her old friend, and by the remnants of that “interest” which had survived fifteen years of married life, and much increase of substance. Perhaps a harsher judge might have thought the emotion slightly improper. But poor John had got but hard measure in the world; and a little compensating faithfulness was a salve to his sister’s feelings. She led her visitor downstairs and through the narrow passage, in all her wealth of silk and amplitude of shadow. Mary herself was still as slim as when they had skimmed about these passages together; and she was Mary still; for once in a way she felt herself not without some advantage over Sir Henry’s wife.

Nello was standing full in the light when the ladies went into the hall, and he it was who came forward to be caressed by the pretty lady, who took to him all the more warmly that she had no boys of her own. Lady Stanton fairly cried over his fair head, with its soft curls. “What a little Musgrave he is!” she cried; “how like his father! I cannot help being glad he is like his father.” But when this vision of splendour and beauty, which Lilias came forward to admire, saw the little girl, she turned from her with a slight shiver. “Ah!” she cried, retreating, “is that—the little girl?” And the sight silenced her, and drove her away.

CHAPTER VIII.
LADY STANTON.

Lady Stanton drove home from that visit with her heart and her eyes full. She was not intellectual, nor even clever, but a soft creature, made up of feelings easily touched, not perhaps very profound, nor likely to obscure to her the necessary course of daily living, but still true enough and faithful in their way. She might have been able to make sacrifices had she come in the way of them or found them necessary, but no such chance of moral devotion had come to her; nor had any teachings of experience or philosophy of middle age, such as works upon the majority of us, hardened her soft heart, or swept away the little romantic impulses, the quick sensibilities of youth. A nature so fresh indeed was scarcely compatible with much exercise of the intellectual faculties at all. Lady Stanton rarely read, and never under any circumstances read anything (of her own will and impulse) which rose above the most primitive and familiar elements; but on the other hand, the gentle sentimentalities which she did read went straight to her heart. She thought Mrs. Hemans the first of poets, and cried her eyes out over Mr. Dickens’s “Little Nell.” Anything about an unhappy love, or about a dead child, would move her more than Shakespeare; and she shed tears as ready as the morning dew. Practically, it is true, she had gone through a certain amount of experience like other people, and her everyday life was more or less affected by it; but in her heart Lady Stanton was still the same Mary Ridley whose gentle being had been involved in the wildest of tragic stories, even though she had come down to so commonplace a daily routine now. That story, so long past, took the place in her being of all the poetry and romance which the most of us get glorified from the hands of genius; and all her associations were attached to that one personal episode, which was unparalleled in life as she knew life. When she read one of the novels which pleased her, she would compare the situations in it with this; when she lingered over the vague melodious verses which represented poetry to her, there was always a little appropriation in her heart of their soft measures to the dim long past emergency. And now, here it was brought back upon her by every circumstance that could bring the past near. Her love—was it her love that was recalled to her? But then there was no love in it properly so called. She had taken an interest in John Musgrave, her friend’s brother—always had taken an interest in him; but she had no right to do so at any time, being betrothed to young Lord Stanton, who, for his part, had forgotten her for the sake of that dressmaker’s girl at Penninghame, to whom John Musgrave too had given his heart. What a complication it was! Mary Ridley, who had a pretty property close to his, had been destined for Lord Stanton from the beginning of time, and the boy and girl had lightly acquiesced, and had been happy enough in the parental arrangement. They had liked each other—well enough; they had been as gay as possible in the lightheartedness of their youth, and had taken this for happiness. Why should not they be happy? they were exactly suited to each other. She was the prettiest girl in the county (except the other Mary), and he was proud of her sweet looks, and fond of her, certainly fond of her; whereas she, unawakened, undisturbed, notwithstanding the interest she had always taken in John Musgrave, would have made him the most affectionate and charming wife in the world. Thus the early story had flowed on all smoothness and sunshine, the flowers blooming, the sun shining; until, one fatal day, young Lord Stanton, riding through Penninghame village on his way to the old Castle, had seen Lily, Miss Price’s assistant, at the window of the dressmaker’s parlour. Fatal day! full of all the issues of death.

It is needless to inquire what manner of woman this Lily was, for whom these two men lost themselves and their existence. She did not know of any tragedy likely to be involved, but brushed about in her homely village way through these webs of fate, twisting the threads innocently enough, and throwing the weaving into endless confusion. Whether Lord Stanton was murdered by John Musgrave, as many people thought at first, or killed accidentally in a hot, sudden encounter, as most people believed now, was a thing which perhaps would never be cleared up. The guilty man (if he was guilty) had paid the penalty of his deed in exile, in poverty, in misery, ever since. His life had been as much broken off at that point as Stanton’s was who died—and the two families had been equally plunged into woe and mourning; though indeed it was the Musgraves who suffered most, by reason of the stigma put upon them, by the shame of John’s flight and of his marriage, and by the fact that he was still a criminal pursued by justice, though justice had long slackened her pursuit. As for the Stantons, there was nobody to mourn much. Aunts and uncles and cousins console themselves sooner than fathers and mothers, and the boy brother, who had succeeded to the title, had been too young to be capable of sustained sorrow. Everybody at that time had sympathized with the young bride who had lost her future husband, and her coronet, and all the joys of life in this sudden and miserable way, for there was no concealing what the cause of the quarrel was, and that Lord Stanton had been unfaithful to the beautiful Mary. Nobody knew, however, the complication which gave her a double pang, the knowledge that not only the man who was her own property, her betrothed husband, but the man in whom, innocently in girlish simplicity, she had avowed herself to “take an interest,” had preferred to her the village Lily, who was nobody and nothing, who had not been blameless between them, and whom everybody condemned. Everybody condemned: but they loved her. Both of them! this secret and poignant addition to her trial Mary Ridley never confided to any one, but it still thrilled through and through her at any allusion to that old long past tragedy. Both of them!—the man whose best love was due to her, and the man who had caught her own girlish shy eyes, all unaware to either, somehow, innocently, unavowedly, in such a visionary way as harmed no one; both! It was hard. She wept for them both tenderly, abundantly, for the one not less than the other; and a little—with a cry in her heart of protestation and appeal—for herself, put aside, thrown over for this woman who was nothing, who was nobody, yet who was better beloved than she. All this had welled up in Lady Stanton’s heart when she saw the little girl who had Lily’s face. She had been unable to restrain the sting of old wonder and pain; the keen piercing of the old wound which she had felt to her heart. Both of them! and now a little ghost of this Lily, her shadow, her representative, had come back again to look her in the face. She cried as she drove back that long silent way by herself to Elfdale. It was seldom she had the chance of being so long alone, and there was a kind of luxury about it, not unmingled with compunction and a sense of guilt.

For it still remains to be told how Mary Ridley came to be Lady Stanton, although Lord Stanton, who was the betrothed husband of her youth, had been killed, and all that apparently smooth and straightforward story had ended in grief and separation. She had married after some years a middle-aged cousin of her dead lover, Sir Henry Stanton, who had not long before come back from India where he had spent most of his life. It was but a poor fate for the beautiful Mary. Sir Henry had left his career and a full accomplished life behind him, when he first came to settle at Elfdale to the passive existence of a gentleman in the country, who could scarcely be called a country gentleman. He had been married and had children, a family of sons and daughters, and had only a second chapter of less vivid meaning, a sort of postscriptal life, to offer her. Why she had accepted him nobody could well say,—but she made him a good wife, kind, smiling, always gentle, though sadly put to it now and then to preserve unbroken the sweet good-temper with which nature had gifted her. So fair and sweet as she was, to get only the remains of a man’s heart after all, to be made use of as their chaperon and caretaker by his big, unlovely daughters; to have her own children, two dainty, lovely, fairy girls, kept in the background,—no more than “the little ones”—of no account in the house—all these things were somewhat trying, and a strange reversal of all that life had seemed to promise her, and all that had been indicated by the early worship which surrounded her youth. But perhaps few women could have carried this inappropriate fate as well. All those contradictions of circumstances, all those travesties of what might have been, met with no gloom or sourness of disappointment in her. The very fact that she was Lady Stanton carried with it a certain aggravation, a parrot-like adhesion to the letter and change of the spirit, such as had been in the promises made to Macbeth. Mary might have thought herself the victim of a perverse fate, keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the heart, had she been perversely disposed—but instead of that, all her thoughts at the present moment were occupied with the fact that she had taken an unfair advantage of Laura and Lydia, in not telling them where she was going, that they might have come with her had they been so disposed. She had stolen a march upon them; they would think it unkind. But then she could not have gone to Penninghame had Laura and Lydia been with her. Though they were so much less concerned than she had been, they kept up the Stanton feud with the Musgraves. They had no “interest” in John—on the contrary, they were of the few who still believed that he had “murdered” Lord Stanton—and would have had him hanged if he ever returned to England. They would not have entered the house, or permitted any kind inquiries in their presence. And therefore it was that she had stolen away without letting them know, and was at present conscious—in addition to all the jumble of emotions in her heart—of a certain prick of guilt.

The Stantons were a great county family as well as the Musgraves, but in a very different way. When the Musgraves had been at their greatest, the Stantons had been nobody. They were nothing more than persistent, thrifty folk at first, adding field to field, building on ever a new addition to their old house. Then wealth had come, and then local importance; and last of all celebrity. The first who brought anything like fame to the name, and introduced the race to the knowledge of the world, was a soldier, a general under the Duke of Marlborough, who got a baronetcy and a reputation, and had a handsome new coat of arms invented for him—very appropriately gained indeed, on the field of battle, just as the augmentation of the Musgraves’ blazon had been gained, but a few hundred years too late unfortunately, and therefore not telling for nearly so much as if it had been won in the fifteenth century. The next man was a lawyer, who so cultivated that profession that it brought his son, in the reign of the Georges, to the bench, and a peerage—and since that time the family had taken their place among the magnates of the north country. Young Walter Lord Stanton was a much greater man than John Musgrave, though not half so great a man in one sense of the word. Two or three generations, however, tell just as much upon the individual mind as twenty, and the young peer was conscious of all his advantages over the commoner, without any sense of inferiority in point of race. And now the other Lord Stanton, Geoffrey, who had succeeded that unfortunate young man, was the greatest personage of his years in the district, regarded with interest by all his neighbours and with more than interest by some; for was it not in his power to make one of his feminine contemporaries, however humble she might be by birth, and however poor in this world’s goods, a great lady?—and so long as human nature remains as it is, this cannot cease to be a very potent attraction. Indeed the wonder is that young women should not be altogether demoralized by the perpetual recurrence of such chances of undeserved, unearned elevation. Young Lord Stanton could do this. He could give fine houses and lands, a title, and all the good things of this earth to his cousin Laura, or his cousin Lydia, or any other girl in the county that pleased him. Therefore it cannot be wondered at if his appearance fluttered the dovecotes with sentiments as powerful and more pleasant than those which fill the nests at the appearance of predatory hawk or eagle. But any such flutter of feeling was held in Elfdale to be an unwarrantable impertinence on the part of the other ladies of the county. Long ago, at the time when at six years old he had succeeded to his stepbrother, there had been a tacit family understanding to the effect that one of Sir Henry’s daughters should be the young lord’s wife. Sir Henry, though old enough to have been the father of his murdered cousin would have been his heir but for Geoff—and it was universally allowed to be hard upon him that when such an unlikely chance happened, as that young Lord Stanton should die, there should be this boy coming in the way forestalling his claim. Nobody had wanted that child who was suddenly turned into a personage of so much importance—not even his father, who had married with a single-minded idea of being comfortable in his own person, and who was much annoyed by the prospect of “a second family”—a prospect which was happily, however, cut short by his own speedy death. When therefore Walter Lord Stanton was killed, it was very generally felt that Sir Henry had a real grievance in the existence of the little stepbrother, who was in the way of everybody except his poor mother, whom the old lord had married to nurse him, and who had taken the unwarrantable liberty of adding little Geoffrey to the family. Poor little Geoff! he was bullied on all hands so long as his brother lived; and then, what a change came over his life and that of his mother, who was as pale and shy as her boy! Great good fortune may change even complexion, and Geoff as he grew to be a man was no longer pale. But Sir Henry never quite got over the blow dealt him by this succession. He had not resented Walter. Walter was so to speak the natural heir—and nobody expected him to die; but when he did die, so out of all calculation, to think there should be that boy! Sir Henry did not get over it for years—it was a positive wrong not to be forgotten.

Accordingly, as a small compensation to his injured feelings, all the family had tacitly decided that Geoff should marry one of his cousins. This, it is true, was but a very small compensation, for Sir Henry was not the kind of parent who lives in his children and is indifferent to his own glory and greatness. Even now, fifteen years after the event, he was not an old man, and it made up very poorly for his personal disappointment that Laura or Lydia should share the advancement of which he had been deprived. Still it was so understood. Geoff paid many holiday visits at Elfdale, though there was no particular friendship between Sir Henry and the widowed Lady Stanton, who was Geoff’s guardian as well as his mother, and things were going smoothly enough between the young people. They liked each other, and had no objection to be together as much as was possible, and already the sisters had settled between them “which of us it is to be.” This Lydia, who was the most strong-minded, had thought desirable from the moment when she had become aware what was intended. “It does not matter at present,” she said, “we are none of us in love, and one is just as good as another, but we had better draw lots, or something—or toss up, as the boys do.” And what the mystic ordeal had been which decided this question we are unable to say, but decided it was in favour of Laura, who was the prettiest, and only a year younger than Geoff. Lydia, as soon as the die was cast, constituted herself the guardian of her sister’s fortunes so far as the young lord was concerned, and made herself into a quaint and really pretty version of a matchmaking mother on Laura’s behalf. Thus it will be seen that it was into the very heart of the opposite faction that Lady Stanton drove home with those tears in her soft eyes, and all that commotion of old thoughts in her heart. If they could have seen into it and known that it was the image of John Musgrave that had roused that commotion, what would these girls have said, towards whom she felt so guilty as having stolen a march upon them? “The murderer!” they would have cried with a shriek of horror. Lady Stanton could not, it is clear, have taken them to Penninghame with her, and surely she had a right to use her own horses and carriage; but still she felt guilty as she subdued, with all the effort she could make, the excitement in her heart.

When she went in, she retired at once upstairs, and announced herself, through her maid, to have a headache, and had a cup of tea in her own room, to which her own children, little Fanny and Annie, a pair of inseparables, came noiselessly like two doves on the wing. Annie and Fanny liked nothing in the world so much as to get mamma to themselves like this, in the stillness of her room, with everybody else shut out. One was ten and the other eleven; they were about the same height, had the same flowing curly locks of light brown hair, the same rose-tinted faces, walked in each other’s steps, or rather flew about their little world of carpeted stairs and passages, together, always in sudden soft flights—like doves, as we have said, on the wing. “Is your head very bad, mamma?” they said; and the gentle hypocrite blushed as she replied. No, it was not very bad; a little quiet would make it quite well. They took off her “things” for her, and brought her her soft white dressing-gown, in which she looked like the mother of all the doves, and let down her hair, which was not much darker, and quite as abundant as their own—and gave her her cup of tea, thus soothing every tingling nerve; and by this time Lady Stanton’s head was not bad at all, though now and then one of them would administer eau-de-cologne or rosewater. She told them of the children she had seen—little orphans who had no mother—and the two crept closer to her, to hear of that awful, incomprehensible desolation, each clasping an arm of hers with two small, eager hands. To be without a mother! Annie and Fanny held their breath in reverential silence and pity; but wondered a little that it was the little boy (“called Nello—what a funny name!”) that mamma spoke of, not the girl, who was ten (“just the same age as me”).

But not even the sympathy of her children, and the trance of interest which kept them breathless, could make Lady Stanton speak of the little girl. Her mother’s face! that face which had taken the best of everything in existence from Mary Ridley—how could Lady Stanton speak of it? She made some efforts to get over the feeling, but not with much success. But the rest restored her, and enabled her to appear, her headache quite charmed away, and her nerves still, at dinner. She took a little more care with her toilette than usual, by way of propitiation to the angry gods. And though Laura and Lydia were not much short of twenty years younger than their stepmother, it would have been an indifferent judge who had turned from her to them even in the fresh bloom of their youth. She came downstairs very conciliatory, ready to make the best of everything, and to make amends to them for all disloyal thoughts, and for having cheated them of their drive.

“I hope your head is better, my Lady,” said Laura. “We have been wondering all the afternoon wherever you had gone.”

The girls had a certain strain of vulgarity in them somehow, which could not be quite eradicated from their speech.

“I went out for a drive as usual,” said Lady Stanton. “I thought I heard you say that you meant to walk.”

“Oh yes; we wanted to walk to the village to settle about the school children,” said Laura; and Lydia added, “But I am sure we never said so,” and looked suspiciously at her stepmother.

“I went by the Langdale woods, and all the way to Penninghame water,” said the culprit, very explanatory. “The lake looked so cold. I should not like to live near it. It chills all the landscape, and I am sure puts dreary thoughts into people’s heads. And as I was there, Henry,” she added, addressing her husband, “I did what you will think an odd thing.” Lady Stanton’s bosom heaved a little, and her breath came quick. It would have been far easier to say nothing about it; but then she knew by experience that everything gets found out. She made a momentary pause before the confession which she tried to treat so lightly. “I ran in for a moment to the old Castle and saw Mary—Mary, you know. We were great friends, she and I, when we were young, and it was such a temptation passing the old place.”

“What whim took you near the old place?” said Sir Henry, gruffly. “I cannot think of any place in the world that should lie less in your way.”

“Well, that is true,” she said, breathing a little more freely now that the worst was told, “and the proof of it is that I have not been there for years.”

“I hope it will be still longer before you go again,” said her husband.

He did not say any more because of the servants, and because he had too much good sense to do or say anything that would lessen his wife’s importance; but he was not pleased, and this troubled her, for she had a delicate conscience. She looked at him wistfully, and was imprudent enough in her anxiety to pursue the subject, and make bad worse.

“It is strange to see an old friend whom you have known when you were young, after so many years,” she said; “though Mary is not so much altered as I am. You remember her, Henry? She was always so pretty; handsomer than—any one I know.”

It was on her lips to say “handsomer than ever I was,” which was the real sentiment in her mind—a sentiment partly originating in the semi-guilt and humility produced by the consciousness of having grown stout, a kind of development which troubles women. She was very deeply aware of this, and it silenced all the claims of vanity. She had lost her figure; whereas Mary was still slim and straight as an arrow. Whatever might have been once, there was now no comparison between the two.

“Do you mean Miss Musgrave?” cried the girls, one after the other. “Miss Musgrave! that old creature—that old maid—that man’s sister?”

“She is no older than I am,” said Lady Stanton, with a flush on her face; “she was my dear friend in the old days. She is beautiful still, as much as she ever was, I think, and good; she has always been good.”

“That will do,” said Sir Henry interposing. “We need not discuss the family; but I think you will see, my dear, that there could not be much pleasure in any intercourse at this time of day—whatever might have been the case when you were young.”

“Intercourse—there could never be any intercourse,” cried Lydia, coming to the front. “Fancy, papa! intercourse with such people—after all that has happened! That would be tempting Providence; and it would be an insult to Geoff.”

“Let Geoff take care of his own affairs,” said Sir Henry, angrily; and he gave a forcible twist to the conversation, and threw it into another channel; but Lady Stanton was very silent all the evening afterwards. She had wanted to conciliate, and she had not succeeded; and how indeed could she, among her hostile family, keep up any intercourse with her old friend?

CHAPTER IX.
AT ELFDALE.

Nevertheless this meeting could not be got out of Lady Stanton’s mind. She thought of it constantly; and in the stillness of her own room, when nobody but the little girls were by, she talked to them of the children, especially of little Nello, who had attracted her most. What a place of rest and refreshment that was for her, after all her trials with Laura and Lydia, and the seriousness of Sir Henry, who was displeased that she should have gone to Penninghame, and showed it in the way most painful to the soft-hearted woman, by silence, and a gravity which made her feel her indiscretion to her very heart. But notwithstanding Sir Henry’s annoyance, she could not but relieve her mind by going over the whole scene with Fanny and Annie, who knew, without a word said, that these private talks in which they delighted—in which their mother told them all manner of stories, and took them back with her into the time of her youth, and made them acquainted with all her early friends—were not to be repeated, but were their own special privilege to be kept for themselves alone. They had already heard of Mary Musgrave, and knew her intimately, as children do know the early companions of whom an indulgent mother tells them, to satisfy their boundless appetite for narrative. “And what are they to Mary?” the little girls asked, breathless in their interest about these strange children. They had already been told; but the relationship of aunt did not seem a very tender one to Annie and Fanny, who knew only their father’s sisters, old ladies to whom the elder girls, children of the first marriage, seemed the only legitimate and correct Stantons, and who looked down upon these little interlopers as unnecessary intruders. “Only their aunt!—is that all?”

They were not in Lady Stanton’s room this time, but seated on an ottoman in the great bow-window, one on either side of her. Laura and Lydia were out; Sir Henry was in his library; the coast was clear; no one was likely to come in and dismiss the children with a sharp word, such as—“Go away, little girls—there is no saying a word to your mother while you are there!” or “The little ones again! When we were children we were kept in the nursery.” The children were aware now that when such speeches were made, it was better for them not to wait for their mother’s half-pained, half-beseeching look, but to run away at once, not to provoke any discussion. They were wise little women, and were, by nature, of their mother’s faction in this house, where both they and she, though she was the mistress of it, were more or less on sufferance. But at present everybody was out of the way. They were ready to fly off, with their pretty hair fluttering like a gleam of wings, should any of their critics appear; but the girls had gone a long way, and Sir Henry was very busy. It was a chance such as seldom occurred.

“All? when children have not a mother, their aunt is next best; sometimes she is even better—much better,” said Lady Stanton, thinking in her heart that John’s wife was not likely to have been of any great service to her children. “And Mary is not like any one you know. She is a beautiful lady—not old, like Aunt Rebecca—though Aunt Rebecca is always very kind. I hope you have not forgotten those beautiful sashes she gave you.”

“I don’t think very much of an aunt,” said Fanny, who was the saucy one, with a shrug of her little shoulders.

“It must be different,” said Annie, hugging her mother’s arm. They were not impressed by the happiness of those poor little stranger children in being with Mary. “Has the little girl got no name, mamma—don’t you know her name? You say Nello; but that is the boy; though it is more like a girl than a boy.”

“It is German—or something—I don’t remember. The little girl is called Lilias. Oh yes, it is a pretty name enough, but I don’t like it. I once knew one whom I did not approve of—— ”

“We knew,” said Fanny, nodding her head at Annie, who nodded back again; “Mamma, we knew you did not like the little girl.”

“I! not like her! Oh, children, how can you think me so unjust? I hope I am not unjust,” cried Lady Stanton, almost with tears. “Mary is very proud of her little niece. And she is very good to little Nello. Yes, perhaps I like him best, but there is no harm in that. He is a delightful little boy. If you could have had a little brother like that—— ”

“We have only—big brothers,” said Annie, regretfully; “that is different.”

“Yes, that is different. You could not imagine Charley with long, fair curls, and a little tunic, could you?” This made the children laugh, and concealed a little sigh on their mother’s part; for Charlie was a big dragoon, and Lady Stanton foresaw would not have too much consideration, should they ever require his help, for the little sisters whom he undisguisedly felt to be in his way.

“I wonder if she wishes he was a little girl.”

“I wonder! How she must want to have a sister! A little brother would be very nice, too; we used to play at having a little brother; but it would not be like Fanny and me. Does she like being at the Castle, mamma?”

It troubled Lady Stanton that they should think of nothing but this little girl. It was Lilias that had won their interest, and she could not tell them why it was that she shrank from Lilias. “They have left their poor papa all alone and sad,” she said, in a low voice. “I used to know him too. And it must make them sad to think of him so far away.”

Once more the children were greatly puzzled. They were not on such terms of tender intimacy with their father as were thus suggested, but, on the whole, were rather pleased than otherwise when he was absent, and did not follow him very closely with their thoughts. They were slightly humbled as they realized the existence of so much greater susceptibility and lovingness on the part of the little girl in whom they were so much interested, than they themselves possessed. How she surpassed them in this as well as in other things! She talked German as well as English (if it was German; their mother was not clear what language it was)—think of that! So perhaps it was not wonderful that she should be so much fonder of her papa. And a moment of silence ensued. Lady Stanton did not remark the confused pause in the minds of her children, because her own mind was filled with wistful compassion for the lonely man whom she had been thinking of more or less since ever she left Penninghame. Where was he, all alone in the world, shut out from his own house, an exile from his country—even his children away from him, in whom perhaps he had found some comfort?

This momentary silence was interrupted abruptly by the sound of a voice. “Are you there, Cousin Mary? and what are you putting your heads together about?”

At this sound, before they found out what it was, the children disengaged themselves suddenly each from her separate clinging to her mother’s arm, and approached each other as if for flight; but, falling back to their places when they recognized the voice, looked at each other, and said both together, with tones of relief, “Oh, it’s only Geoff!”

Nothing more significant of the inner life of the family, and the position of these two little intruders, could have been.

Geoff came forward with his boyish step and voice in all the smiling confidence of youth. “I thought I should startle you. Is it a story that is being told, or are you plotting something? Fanny and Annie, leave her alone for a moment. It is my turn now.”

“O Geoff! it is about a little girl and a boy—mamma will tell you too, if you ask her; and there’s nobody in. We thought at first you were papa, but he’s so busy. Come and sit here.”

Geoff came up, and kissed Lady Stanton on her soft, still beautiful cheek. He was a son of the house, and privileged. He sat down on the stool the children had placed for him. “I am glad there’s nobody in,” he said. “Of course the girls will be back before I go; but I wanted to speak to you—about something.”

“Shall the children go, Geoff?”

“Fancy! do you want them to hate me? No, go on with the story. This is what I like. Isn’t it pleasant, Annie and Fanny, to have her all to ourselves? Do you mind me?”

“Oh, not in the least, Geoff—not in the very least. You are like—what is he like, Annie?—a brother, not a big brother, like Charley: but something young, something nice, like what mamma was telling us of—a little brother—grown up—— ”

“Is this a sneer at my height?” he said; “but go on, don’t let me stop the story. I like stories—and most other pleasant things.”

“It was no story,” said Lady Stanton. “I was telling them only of some children:—you are very good and forgiving, Geoff—but I fear you will be angry with me when you know. I was—out by myself—and notwithstanding all we have against them, I went to see Mary Musgrave. There! I must tell you at once, and get it over. I shall be sorry if it annoys you; but Mary and I,” she said, faltering, “were such friends once, and I have not seen her for years.”

“Why should I be annoyed—why should I be angry? I am not an avenger. Poor Cousin Mary! you were out—by yourself!—was that your only reason for going?”