HER OWN PEOPLE
Half an hour had gone by—the very longest half hour in Sydney’s happy
life; and there was silence in the drawing-room.
Father had been speaking, but he was silent now, standing with his face
turned towards the shuttered windows. On the floor knelt Sydney, her head
on mother’s knee. She was not crying—this calamity seemed too great for
tears—tears such as had been shed over the untimely fate of Prissie’s
bullfinch, or the sewing up by father of that dreadful cut in Ronald’s
cheek. Her shoulders shook with suppressed sobs, but no tears came.
“My little girl,” mother was speaking, with a gentle hand on the untidy
brown head on her knee, “my poor little girl!”
Sydney lifted up her piteous face.
“Oh, mother, you will let me stay your little girl! I can’t go away. Oh,
mother, you always said I was given to you!”
Dr. Chichester blew his nose violently, and came and sat down beside his
wife.
“See here, my little Sydney,” he said. “God knows you can’t cease to
be our child to us, as you have been for these seventeen years. If it
were acting rightly to keep you, do you suppose your mother and I could
consent to let our little girl go from us? Still, we have got to do the
right thing; and when your poor young father gave you to us, he had no
idea of your ever coming near the title. But now this accident to your
cousin, Lord St. Quentin, makes you heiress to it, so your cousin’s man
of business writes to tell me. Lord St. Quentin wants you, and, my little
girl, you _must_ go.”
“Couldn’t I say I don’t want to be a marchioness?” poor Sydney asked
despairingly; “isn’t there anybody else to be one instead?”
Dr. Chichester shook his grey head sadly; Mr. Fenton’s letter had been
clear enough on that point. There was a complete failure of heirs male:
and, in the House of Lisle, the female had the power, in such a case, to
inherit land and title.
Dr. Chichester knew this as a fact, though he had thought about it very
little. There had been nothing to bring it very prominently before him in
the seventeen years that had passed since he promised to be a father to
the little motherless daughter of his dying patient, Lord Francis Lisle.
The doctor had come across many sad things in the course of his
professional experience, but nothing much sadder than the sight he had
seen one cold December day in the little bare bedroom of a miserable
lodging-house off Pentonville. He was attending the more urgent cases
of a sick friend, and in this way came across Lord Francis and his girl
wife. She was lying in the meagre bed, with her young husband fanning
her, and a tiny wailing baby at her side.
It was not the first time that Doctor Chichester’s wife had come to bring
help to her husband’s poorer patients: she went daily to the little dingy
lodging off Pentonville, while the young wife lingered, as though loth to
leave the boy-husband who stood watching her with great, sad eyes. The
good doctor and his wife soon heard their pitiful little story.
Sydney Henderson had but just left school when she went as governess
to the little boy and girl of Lady Braemuir, niece to the Marquess of
St. Quentin. It was a big, gay house; but the little governess, playing
nursery games with her charges, saw little of the company till Lady
Braemuir’s youngest cousin, Lord Francis, came to shoot the Braemuir
grouse before joining his regiment.
The children were full of “Tousin Fwank” before he came. He had stayed
at Braemuir six months previously. When he came, the reason of their
interest in his arrival became speedily apparent. Francis Lisle was
perfectly devoted to children, with a genuine devotion that made mothers
beam upon him.
He was known in the nurseries of many a big house: he made himself at
home in the school-room of his little cousins.
Lady Braemuir laughed at him and his “childish tastes,” but never said
a word upon the subject to the little governess, hardly more than a
child herself, until a day when, coming home from a tennis-party tired
and cross, she heard laughter issuing from the school-room, where Lord
Francis, who had declined going to the party, was found sharing his
little cousins’ tea.
Forgetful of everything but irritation, Lady Braemuir spoke cruelly to
the girl, who knew so little of the duties of a governess. Lord Francis
bore her remarks in silence for a minute, then the frightened appeal in
the childish eyes overcame his prudence.
He went across to the girl and took her hand.
“Excuse me, Gwenyth,” he said sternly; “there is no need to say any more
upon this subject. I am going to ask Miss Henderson if she will be my
wife.” And he did.
“I wash my hands of the whole business!” Lady Braemuir said. “Frank must
explain as best he can to Uncle St. Quentin.”
Until that time his fourth and youngest son had been Lord St. Quentin’s
favourite—this bright, handsome boy, who had made half the sunshine of
his home. He was proud of him, too, and looked to see him do well in
the army, and prove an honour to the name he bore. The pride of the old
marquess was far greater than his love.
“Going to marry a clergy-orphan and a governess!” Frank’s father cried.
“Then you won’t get a penny of mine to help you make a fool of yourself!
Do it, if you choose; but in that case never darken my doors again!”
“Good-bye, then, father,” said Lord Francis; and he took his hat and went.
The little governess had no near relations, and the young couple were
married almost immediately. He was twenty-two and she was eighteen.
He gave up the army and obtained a clerkship in a house of business in
London. But the salary was small, and, strive as they would, they could
not live within their income.
She tried to do a little teaching to add to it; but her health was
delicate and pupils hard to get. Their small reserve fund melted fast,
though Lord Francis worked long after office hours at odd jobs for the
sake of the few extra shillings that they brought him.
Hard work and poor living brought their usual consequence. When Dr.
Chichester broke it very gently to the young husband that there was no
getting better for Sydney, he was aware that the two would not probably
be parted long.
When the young mother died one grey December morning, with her head upon
her husband’s shoulder, Mrs. Chichester carried home the baby to her own
fast-filling nursery, where sturdy seven-year-old Hugh took at once to
“his baby,” as he called her, to distinguish her from red-faced Ronald in
the cradle, whose advent had meant so many “hushings” at times when he
wished to make a noise.
Under Mrs. Chichester’s tender care the little wizened baby girl grew fat
and merry, crowing courageously even when Hugh staggered round the room
with her held in too tight a clasp.
Her young father used to come round to the tall dingy house in the dull
old square, when office hours were over, and sit beside the nursery
fire, watching Mrs. Chichester, as she put the babies to bed, with an
oft-repeated game with the ten bare pink toes of the child upon her knee.
His little daughter learned to know him, and to crow and laugh when he
came into the nursery and held out his arms for her. He began to look
forward to the time when she would learn to call him “Father,” but that
was not to be.
Easter came late, in the spring following little Sydney’s birth, with hot
sun and bitter winds.
Dr. Chichester had never had so many cases of pneumonia to attend, and
one day a scrawl from Lord Francis’s lodgings told of illness there. He
hurried round to find little Sydney’s father in high fever. There was
from the first small chance of his recovery, as his strength was not
sufficient to fight illness. He would have been altogether glad to go, if
it had not been for the thought of his baby girl.
“My people cast me off completely,” he said, one day, when the end was
near, “and they are not at all likely to receive my child.”
“My dear boy,” said the doctor, “don’t you worry. We couldn’t part with
the little lassie now; if I would, my wife wouldn’t. Give her to us, and
she shall be our child. She has our love already, and, God helping us!
she shall have a happy home.”
“I can’t thank you,” Lord Francis had said hoarsely; and the doctor had
said “Don’t!”
It was in his arms that Lord Francis died three days later.
Dr. Chichester had written to the poor boy’s eldest brother, who had now
become the marquess, telling him that Frank was dying; but no notice had
been taken of the letter. Lord Francis was laid beside his wife in the
cemetery, and little Sydney grew from babyhood to childhood and from
childhood to girlhood, with nothing but the difference of surname and the
occasional telling of an old story with the saddest parts left out, to
remind her that she was not a Chichester by birth.
That unknown mother and father, of whom this real living, loving mother
told her at times seemed part of a story, not her own life, and the story
always ended with the comfortable words: “Your father gave our dear
little girl to us, to be our child for always!”
I think perhaps Dr. and Mrs. Chichester forgot too very often that
Sydney bore another name from theirs, for though the doctor certainly
read in the papers of the tragic death while mountain-climbing of Lord
Herbert Lisle, “second son of the late Marquess of St. Quentin,” he
hardly realised Lord Herbert to be little Sydney’s uncle; nor did her
relationship occur to him when, some four years later, Lord Eric, “the
third son, etc., etc.,” fell a victim to malarial fever when travelling
in Italy.
The papers took considerably more interest in the matter, and there were
discreetly hinted fears expressed in them lest the old title should die
out for lack of heirs. The present marquess was in feeble health, and his
only child, Lord Lisle, unmarried. Lord Herbert had been also unmarried,
and Lord Eric a childless widower. Regret was expressed that Lord Lisle
possessed neither brother nor sister. It was then the doctor realised
that in this House, in default of heirs male of the direct line, females
had the power to inherit land and title.
He looked at long-legged, short-frocked Sydney with a sudden anxiety, and
for a few weeks actually glanced down the “Personal and Social” column
of _The Standard_ in the hope of his eye falling on—“A marriage has been
arranged and will shortly take place between Viscount Lisle, only son of
the Marquess of St. Quentin, and ...,” some damsel of high degree. But
before long he forgot the matter in the press of daily life, and five
years had passed peacefully away without anything happening to remind him
of the House of Lisle or its connection with his little Sydney.
And now, without warning, the blow had fallen.
Lord St. Quentin, as Lord Lisle had become through his father’s death
four years ago, had met with a fearful motor-accident, in which he had
sustained some internal injury, from which the doctors feared there was
no recovery. He might linger on for months, but the end was certain, and
he was unmarried.
Sydney Lisle had been ignored by her father’s family for nearly eighteen
years; but their man of business had known where to find her. It was
he who wrote to Dr. Chichester, requesting that he would resign his
guardianship of Miss Lisle into the hands of the cousin whose heir she
had now become, the Marquess of St. Quentin.
“We shall have to let her go,” the doctor had said, as he and Mrs.
Chichester read Mr. Fenton’s letter together. “The child was never put
legally into my charge: I only took her at that poor boy’s expressed
wish. Mr. Fenton writes very sensibly, and tells me that Lord St.
Quentin’s maternal aunt, Lady Frederica Verney, is to be at St. Quentin
Castle, and will take care of the child. And of course she will have
advantages we have no power to give her.”
Mr. Fenton proposed calling upon Dr. Chichester that evening, and, if
quite convenient, would be glad to see Miss Lisle. Hence the speed with
which the news had been broken to the girl.
But when the lawyer came, an elderly man with old-fashioned grey whiskers
and keen, kindly eyes, he had to do without a sight of the poor little
heiress to the title of St. Quentin. For Sydney had gone to bed with an
overpowering headache, and was fit for nothing but to lie still in the
dark, with eau-de-cologne on her forehead and mother’s hand, idle for
once, clasped tightly in both hers.
Perhaps it was as well, for she was spared not only the lawyer’s visit,
but the telling of the dreadful story to the others—the children’s
questions, and what she would have minded more, the sight of Hugh’s face,
first fierce and then very white.
But she cried herself to sleep upstairs, while Mr. Fenton in the
drawing-room was inflicting on the silent doctor a description of the
“splendid position” to which his little Sydney, the child who had been as
his own for nearly eighteen long years, had been called.
He suddenly broke in upon the lawyer’s well-turned phrases, leaning
forward and speaking almost roughly to him.
“You tell me of the age of the title—of the magnificence of the castle—I
don’t want to hear all that! There is only one thing that I want to
know—my little girl, will they be good to her? Will she be happy?”
Mr. Fenton considered this question for some minutes before answering it.
When he came to think of it, it was not such a very easy one to answer.
“Miss Lisle will have, I trust, every reason to be happy,” he replied at
length; “every advantage will be hers, and a splendid, yes, undoubtedly,
a splendid position.”