WHEN ALL WAS OVER.
The night dropped over Mount very darkly, as dark a November night as
ever fell, fog and damp heaviness over everything outside, gloom and
wonder and bewilderment within. Mr. Loseby stayed all night and dined
with Heathcote, to his great relief. Nobody else came downstairs. Mrs.
Mountford, though she felt all the natural and proper grief for her
great loss, was not by any means unable to appear, and Rose, who was
naturally tired of her week’s seclusion, would have been very glad to do
so; but her mother was of opinion that they ought not to be capable of
seeing anyone on the funeral day, and their meal was brought up to their
rooms as before. They played a melancholy little game of bézique
together afterwards, which was the first symptom of returning life which
Mrs. Mountford had permitted herself to be able for. Anne had joined
them in Mrs. Mountford’s sitting-room, and had shared their dinner,
which still was composed of some of the delicacies from the ball supper.
In winter everything keeps so long. There had been very little
conversation between them there, for they did not know what to say to
each other. Mrs. Mountford, indeed, made a little set speech, which she
had conned over with some care and solemnity. ‘Anne,’ she had said, ‘it
would not become me to say a word against what dear papa has done; but I
wish you to know that I had no hand in it. I did not know what it was
till to-day: and, for that matter, I don’t know now. I was aware that he
was displeased and meant to make some change, and I entreated him not to
do so. That was all I knew----’
‘I am sure you had nothing to do with it,’ Anne said gently; ‘papa spoke
to me himself. He had a right to do as he pleased. I for one will not
say a word against it. I crossed him, and it was all in his hands. I
knew what the penalty was. I am sure it has been a grief to you for some
time back.’
‘Indeed, you only do me justice, Anne,’ cried her stepmother, and a kiss
was given and received; but perhaps it was scarcely possible that it
should be a very warm caress. After they had eaten together Anne went
back to her room, saying she had letters to write, and Rose and her
mother played that game at bézique. It made the evening pass a little
more quickly than if they had been seated on either side of the fire
reading good books. And when the bézique was over Mrs. Mountford went to
bed. There are many people who find in this a ready way of getting
through their superfluous time. Mrs. Mountford did not mind how soon she
went to bed; but this is not an amusement which commends itself to
youth. When her mother was settled for the night, Rose, though she had
promised to go too, felt a little stirring of her existence within her
roused, perhaps, by the dissipation of the bézique. She allowed that she
was tired; but still, after her mother was tucked up for the night, she
felt too restless to go to bed. Where could she go but to Anne’s room,
which had been her refuge all her life, in every trouble? Anne was still
writing letters, or at least one letter, which looked like a book, there
was so much of it, Rose thought. She came behind her sister, and would
have looked over her shoulder, but Anne closed her writing-book quickly
upon the sheet she was writing. ‘Are you tired, dear?’ she said--just,
Rose reflected, like mamma.
‘I am tired--of doing nothing, and of being shut up. I hope mamma will
let us come downstairs to-morrow,’ said Rose. Then she stole a caressing
arm round her sister’s waist. ‘I wish you would tell me, Anne. What is
it all about, and what does it mean?’
‘It is not so easy to tell. I did not obey papa----’
‘Are you sorry, Anne?’
‘Sorry? very sorry to have vexed him, dear. If I had known he would be
with us only such a little time--but one never knows.’
‘I should have thought you would have been too angry to be sorry----’
‘Angry--when he is dead?’ said Anne, with quick rising tears. ‘Oh, no!
if he had been living I might have been angry; but now to think he
cannot change it, and perhaps would do anything to change it----’
Rose did not understand this. She said in a little, petulant voice, ‘Is
it so dreadfully wrong to give it to me instead of you?’
‘There is no question of you or me,’ said Anne, ‘but of justice. It was
my mother’s. You are made rich by what was hers, not his or anyone
else’s. This is where the wrong lies. But don’t let us talk of it. I
don’t mean to say a word against it, Rose.’
Then Rose roamed about the room, and looked at all the little familiar
pictures and ornaments she knew. The room was more cheerful than her
mother’s room, with all its heavy hangings, in which she had been living
for a week. After a few minutes she came back and leaned upon Anne’s
shoulder again.
‘I wish you would tell me what it means. What is In Trust? Have you a
great deal to do with me?’ she said.
Anne’s face lighted up a little. ‘I have everything to do with you,’ she
said; ‘I am your guardian, I think. I shall have to manage your money
and look after all your interests. Though I am poor and you are rich,
you will not be able to do anything without me.’
‘But that will not last for ever,’ said Rose, with a return of the
little, petulant tone.
‘No; till you come of age. Didn’t you hear to-day what Mr. Loseby said?
and look, Rosie, though it will break your heart, look here.’
Anne opened her desk and took out from an inner drawer the sealed packet
which Mr. Mountford had himself taken to the lawyer on the day of his
death. The tears rose to her eyes as she took it out, and Rose, though
curiosity was so strong in her as almost to quench emotion, felt
something coming in her throat at the first sight of her father’s
writing, so familiar as it was. ‘For my daughter Anne, not to be opened
till Rose’s twenty-first birthday.’ Rose read it aloud, wondering. She
felt something come in her throat, but yet she was too curious, too full
of the novelty of her own position, to be touched as Anne was. ‘But that
may change it all over again,’ she said.
‘It is not likely; he would not have settled things one day and
unsettled them the next; especially as nothing had happened in the
meantime to make him change again.’
Rose looked very curiously, anxiously, at the letter. She took it in her
hand and turned it over and over. ‘It must be about me, anyhow, I
suppose----’
‘Yes,’ said Anne, with a faint smile, ‘or me; perhaps he might think,
after my work for you was over, that I might want some advice.’
‘I suppose you will be married long before that?’ said Rose, still
poising the letter in her hands.
‘I don’t know--it is too early to talk of what is going to be done. You
are tired, Rosie--go to bed.’
‘Why should I be tired more than you? You have been doing a great deal,
and I have been doing nothing. That is like mamma’s way of always
supposing one is tired, and wants to go to bed. I hate bed. Anne, I
suppose you will get married--there can be nothing against it, now--only
I don’t believe he has any money: and if you have no money either----’
‘Don’t let us talk on the subject, dear--it is too early, it hurts
me--and I want to finish my letter. Sit down by the fire--there is a
very comfortable chair, and a book--if you don’t want to go to bed.’
‘Are you writing to Mr. Douglas, Anne?’
Anne answered only with a slight nod of her head. She had taken her pen
into her hand. She could not be harsh to her little sister this day
above all others, in which her little sister had been made the means of
doing her so much harm--but it cost her an effort to be patient. Rose,
for her part, had no science to gain information from the inflections of
a voice. ‘Why wasn’t he here to-day?’ was the next thing she said.
‘Rosie, dear, do you know I have a great deal to do? Don’t ask me so
many questions,’ Anne said, piteously. But Rose was more occupied by her
own thoughts than by anything her sister said.
‘He ought to have been at the funeral,’ she said, with that calm which
was always so astonishing to her sister. ‘I thought when you went to the
grave you must have known you were to meet him there. Mamma thought so,
too.’
These words sank like stones into Anne’s heart; but there was a kind of
painful smile on her face. ‘You thought I was thinking of meeting anyone
there? Oh, Rose, did you think me so cold-hearted? I was thinking only
of him who was to be laid there.’
‘I don’t mean that you are cold-hearted. Of course we were all wretched
enough. Mamma said it would have been too much either for her or me; but
you were always the strongest, and then of course we expected Mr.
Douglas would be there.’
‘You do not know him,’ cried Anne, with a little vehemence; ‘you do not
know the delicacy, the feeling he has. How was he to come intruding
himself the moment that my father was gone--thrusting himself even into
his presence, after being forbidden. A man of no feeling might have done
it, but he----. Rosie, please go away. I cannot talk to you any more.’
‘Oh, was that how it was?’ Rose was silenced for the moment. She went
away to the seat by the fire which her sister had pointed out to her.
Anne had not noticed that she had still the letter in her hands. And
then she was quiet for some time, while her sister resumed her writing.
Cosmo’s conduct soon went out of Rose’s head, while she occupied herself
with the other more important matter which concerned herself. What might
be in this letter of papa’s? Probably some new change, some new will,
something quite different. ‘If I am not to be the heiress after all,
only have the name of it for three years, what will be the use?’ Rose
said to herself. She was very sensible in her limited way. ‘I would
rather not have any deception or have the name of it, if it is going to
be taken away from me just when I should want to have it.’ She looked at
the seals of the packet with longing eyes. If they would only melt--if
they would but break of themselves. ‘I wonder why we shouldn’t read it
now?’ she said. ‘It is not as if we were other people, as if we were
strangers--we are his own daughters, his two only children--he could not
have meant to hide anything from us. If you will open and read it, and
tell me what it is, we need not tell anyone--we need not even tell
mamma.’
‘What are you talking of, Rose?’
‘I am talking of papa’s letter, of course. Why should you keep it, not
knowing what harm it may be going to do---- Anne! you hurt me--you hurt
me!’ Rose cried.
Anne sprang to her feet with the natural impetuosity which she tried so
hard to keep under, and seized the letter out of her sister’s hands.
‘You must never speak nor think of anything of the kind,’ she cried; ‘my
father’s wish, his last charge to us----’
‘I am sure,’ said Rose, beginning to cry, ‘you need not speak--it is you
that refused to do what he told you, not I? This is quite innocent; what
could it matter? It can’t vex him now, whatever we do, for he will
never know. I would not have disobeyed him when he was living--that is,
not in anything serious, not for the world--but now, what can it matter,
when he will never, never know?’
The utter scepticism and cynicism of the little childish creature,
crying by the fire, did not strike Anne. It was only a naughtiness, a
foolishness upon the child’s part, nothing more. She restored the packet
to the private drawer and locked it with energy, closing down and
locking the desk, too. It was herself she blamed for having shown the
packet, not Rose, who knew no better. But now it was clear that she must
do, what indeed she generally had to do, when Rose claimed her
attention--give up her own occupation, and devote herself to her sister.
She came and sat down by her, leaving the letter in which her heart was.
And Rose, taking advantage of the opportunity, tormented her with
questions. When at last she consented to retire to her room, Anne could
do nothing but sit by the fire, making a vain attempt to stifle the more
serious questions, which were arising, whether she would or no, in her
own heart. ‘Rose = prose,’ she had tried hard to say to herself, as so
often before; but her lips quivered, so that a smile was impossible. She
sat there for a long time after, trying to recover herself. She had
arrived at a crisis of which she felt the pain without understanding the
gravity of it. And indeed the sudden chaos of confusion and wonder into
which she had wandered, she could not tell how, had no doubt so deadened
the blow of the strange will to her, as to give her a heroism which was
half stupidity, as so many heroisms are. She, too, had expected, like
all the world, that Cosmo would have come to her at once--if not to
Mount, yet to the rectory, where his friends would have received him.
She had taken it for granted--though she had not said a word on the
subject to anyone, nor even to herself, feeling that to see him and
feel him near her would be all the greater consolation if she had never
said she looked for it, even in her own heart. She had not given his
name to Charley Ashley as one of those to be informed by telegraph, nor
had she mentioned his name at all, though she seemed to herself to read
it in a continual question in the Curate’s eyes. A chill had stolen over
her when she heard nothing of him all the first long day. She had not
permitted herself to ask or to think, but she had started at every
opening door, and listened to every step outside, and even, with a pang
which she would not acknowledge, had looked out through a crevice of the
closed shutters, with an ache of wondering anguish in her heart, to see
the Curate coming up the avenue alone on the second morning. But when
Cosmo’s letter came to her, by the ordinary return of post, Anne tried
to say to herself that of course he was right and she was wrong--nay
more than that--that she had known exactly all through which was the
more delicate and noble way, and that it was this. How could he come to
Mount, he who had been turned away from it (though this was not quite
true), who had been the cause of her disinheritance? How could he
present himself the moment the father, who had objected to him so
strenuously, was dead? Cosmo laid the whole case before her with what
seemed the noblest frankness, in that letter. ‘I am in your hands,’ he
said. ‘The faintest expression of a wish from you will change
everything. Say to me, “Come,” and I will come, how gladly I need not
say--but without that word, how can I intrude into the midst of a grief
which, believe me, my dearest, I shall share, for it will be yours, but
which by all the rest of the world will seem nothing but a deliverance
and relief to me.’ Anne, who had not allowed herself to say a word, even
to her own soul, of the sickening of disappointment and wonder in her,
who had stood bravely dumb and refused to be conscious that she had
expected him, felt her heart leap up with a visionary triumph of
approval, when this letter came. Oh, how completely and nobly right he
was! How superior in his instinctive sense of what it was most
delicately honourable and fit to do, in such an emergency, to any other,
or to herself even, who ought to have known better!
She wrote instantly to say, ‘You are right, dear Cosmo. You are more
than right; how could anyone be so blind as not to see that this is what
you ought to, what you must have done, and that nothing else was
possible?’ And since then she had said these words over to herself again
and again--and had gone about all her occupations more proudly, more
erect and self-sustaining, because of this evident impossibility that he
should have been there, which the heavier people about, without his fine
perceptions and understanding, did not seem to see. As a matter of fact,
she said to herself, she wanted no help. She was not delicate or very
young, like Rose, but a full-grown woman, able for anything, worthy of
the confidence that had been placed in her. Nevertheless, there had been
a moment, when Heathcote had put out his arm to support her at the side
of the grave, when the sense of Cosmo’s absence had been almost more
than she could bear, and his excuse had not seemed so sufficient as
before. She had rejected the proffered support. She had walked firmly
away, proving to all beholders that she was able to do all that she had
to do, and to bear all that she had to bear; but, nevertheless the pang
and chill of this moment had shaken Anne’s moral being. She had read in
Heathcote’s eyes some reflection of the indignant question, ‘Where is
_that_ fellow?’ She had discerned it in Charley Ashley’s every look and
gesture--and there had been a dull anticipation and echo of their
sentiments in her heart. She had, as it were, struck against it, and her
strength and her nerves were shaken by the encounter. The after thrill
of this, still going through and through her, had made her almost
indifferent to the shock given by the reading of the will. She had not
cared the least about that. She had been dulled to it, and was past
feeling it--though it was not in the least what she had expected, and
had so much novelty and individuality of vengeance in it as to have
given a special blow had she been able to receive it. Even now when her
intelligence had fully taken it in, her heart was still untouched by
it--_Un chiodo caccia un’ altro_. But she had slowly got the better of
the former shock. She had re-read Cosmo’s letters, of which she received
one every day, and had again come to see that his conduct was actuated
by the very noblest motives. Then had come Rose’s visit and all those
questionings, and once more Anne had felt as if she had run against some
one in the dark, and had been shaken by the shock. She sat trying to
recover herself, trembling and incapable for a long time, before she
could go and finish her letter. And yet there was much in that letter
that she was anxious Cosmo should know.
While all this was going on upstairs, the two gentlemen were sitting
over their dinner, with still a little excitement, a little gloom
hovering over them, but on the whole comfortable, returning to their
usual ways of thinking and usual calm of mind. Even to those most
intimately concerned, death is one of the things to which the human mind
most easily accustoms itself. Mr. Loseby was more new than Heathcote was
to the aspect of the house, from which for the time all its usual
inhabitants and appearances had gone. He said ‘Poor Mountford!’ two or
three times in the course of dinner, and stopped to give an account of
the claret on which the late master of the house had much prided
himself. ‘And very good it is,’ Mr. Loseby said. ‘I suppose, unless the
widow reserves it for her own use--and I don’t believe she knows it from
Gladstone claret at 12_s._ a dozen--there will be a sale.’ This intruded
a subject which was even more interesting than the will and all that
must flow from it. ‘What do you intend to do?’
Now Heathcote Mountford was not very happy, any more than the other
members of the household. He had gone through a disappointment too.
Heathcote had but one person in the world who had been of any importance
in his past life, and that was his young brother Edward, now at
Sandhurst. It had been settled that Edward and a number of his comrades
should come to Mount for the dance, but when Heathcote had signified his
wish, after all this was over, that Edward should come for the funeral,
the young man had refused. “Why should I? You will all be as dull as
ditch-water; and I never knew our kinsman as you call him. You are
dismal by nature, Heathcote, old boy,’ the young man had said, ‘but not
I--why should I come to be another mute? Can’t you find enough without
me?’ Edward, who was very easily moved when his own concerns were in
question, was as obstinate as the rest of the Mountfords as to affairs
which did not concern himself. He paid no attention to his brother’s
plea for a little personal consolation. And Heathcote, who regarded the
young fellow as a father regards his spoiled child, was disappointed. To
be sure, he represented to himself, Edward too had been disappointed; he
had lost his ball, which was a thing of importance to him, and the
settlement of his affairs, for which he had been looking with such
confidence, was now indefinitely postponed. Edward had not been an easy
boy to manage; he had not been a very good boy. He had been delicate
and wayward and spoiled--spoiled as much by the elder brother who was
thoroughly aware how wrong it was, as by the mother who had been foolish
about Edward, and had died when he was still so young that spoiling did
not matter much. Heathcote had carried the process on, he had vowed to
himself that, so far as was possible, the delicate boy should not miss
his mother’s tenderness; and he had kept his word, and ruined the boy.
Edward had got everything he wanted from his brother, so long as he
wanted only innocent things; and afterwards he had got for himself, and
insisted on getting, things that were not so innocent; and the result
was that, though still only twenty, he was deeply in debt. It was for
this that Heathcote had made up his mind to sacrifice the succession to
Mount. Sacrifice--it was not a sacrifice; he cared nothing for Mount,
and Edward cared less than nothing. Even afterwards, when he had begun
to look upon Mount with other eyes, he had persevered in his intention
to sacrifice it; but now all that had come to an end. Whether he would
or not, Heathcote Mountford had become the possessor of Mount, and
Edward’s debts were very far from being paid. In these circumstances
Heathcote felt it specially hard upon him that his brother did not come
to him, to be with him during this crisis. It was natural; he did not
blame Edward; and yet he felt it almost as a woman might have felt it.
This threw a gloom over him almost more than the legitimate gloom,
which, to be sure, Heathcote by this time had recovered from. It was not
in nature that he could have felt it very deeply after the first shock.
His own vexations poured back upon his mind, when Mr. Loseby said, ‘What
do you intend to do?’
‘You will say what have I to do with that?’ the old lawyer said. ‘And
yet, if you will think, I have to do with it more or less. We have to
get the family out on our side. It’s early days--but if you should wish
an early settlement----’
‘I don’t mind if it is never settled,’ said Heathcote; ‘what should I do
with this great place? It would take all my income to keep it up. If
they like to stay, they are very welcome. I care nothing about it. Poor
St. John had a handsome income from other sources. He was able to keep
it up.’
‘Good Lord, Mr. Heathcote!’ said the lawyer, ‘why didn’t you come a year
ago? A young man should not neglect his relations; it always turns out
badly. If you had come here a year ago, in the natural course of events,
I could have laid a thousand pounds upon it that you and Anne would have
taken a fancy to each other. You seem to me exactly cut out for each
other--the same ways, a little resemblance even in looks----’
‘You pay me too great a compliment,’ said Heathcote, with an uneasy
laugh, colouring in spite of himself; ‘and you must let me say that my
cousin’s name is sacred, and that, old friend as you are, you ought not
to discuss her so.’
‘I--oughtn’t to talk of Anne? Why, she has sat upon my knee,’ said Mr.
Loseby. ‘Ah! why didn’t you come a year ago? I don’t say now that if it
was to your mind to make yourself comfortable as poor Mountford did, in
the same way, there’s still the occasion handy. No, I can’t say that,’
said the old lawyer, ‘I am too sick of the whole concern. Anne treated
like that, and Rose, little Rose, that bit of a girl!---- However,’ he
said, recovering himself, ‘I ought to remember that after all you can’t
take the same interest in them as I do, and that we were talking of your
own concerns.’
‘I take a great interest in my cousins,’ said Heathcote gravely. ‘Do you
know I believe poor St. John meant to buy my interest, to accept my
proposal, and leave Mount to his eldest daughter.’
‘No; you don’t think so? Well, that might have been a way out of
it--that might have been a way out of it--now that you recall it to me
the same thought struck myself; at least I thought he would take
advantage of that to make a new settlement, after he had taken his fling
and relieved his mind with this one. Ah, poor man, he never calculated
on the uncertainty of life--he never thought of that rabbit-hole. God
help us, what a thing life is! at the mercy of any rolling stone, and
any falling branch, of a poor little rabbit’s burrowing, or even a glass
of water. And what a thing is man! as Hamlet says; it’s enough to make
anyone moralise: but we never take a bit of warning by it--never a bit.
And so you really think he meant to take Mount off your hands and settle
it on Anne? I don’t think he had gone so far as that--but I’ll tell you
what we’ll do, we’ll tell her so, and that will make her happy. She’s
not like other people, she is all wrong here,’ said Mr. Loseby,
laughing, with the tears in his eyes, and tapping his forehead. ‘She has
a bee in her bonnet, as the Scotch say. She is a fool, that is what Anne
is--she will be as pleased as if he had left her a kingdom. The worst
thing of it all to that girl is, that her father has made himself look
like a tyrant and a knave--which he wasn’t, you know--he wasn’t, poor
Mountford! though he has done his best to make himself appear so. Once
give her something to build up his character again upon, some ground, it
doesn’t matter how fanciful it is, and she’ll be happy. She won’t mind
her own loss, bless you,’ said the old lawyer, half crying, ‘she is such
a fool!’
‘Mr. Loseby,’ said Heathcote with an emotion which surprised him, ‘I
think you are giving my cousin Anne the most beautiful character that
ever was.’
‘Sir,’ cried Mr. Loseby, not ashamed to dry his eyes, ‘whoever said
anything different? Did you ever hear anything different? As long as I
have known the world I have never known but one Anne Mountford. Oh, Mr.
Heathcote, Mr. Heathcote,’ he added, his voice turning into tremulous
laughter, ‘what a thousand pities that you did not make your appearance
a year before!’
Heathcote got up from his chair with a start, and walked about the room
in a nervous impatience, for which he could give no reason to himself.
Was it that he, too, wished he had come to Mount a year sooner? He left
the old man to finish his wine, and roamed about, now pausing a moment
with his back to the fire, now extending his walk into the dark corners.
He had lit his cigarette, which furnished him with an excuse--but he was
not thinking of his cigarette. What he was thinking was--What the devil
did that fellow mean by staying away now? Why didn’t he come and stand
by her like a man? What sort of a pitiful cur was he that he didn’t
come, now he was free to do it, and stand by her like a man? He disposed
of Charley Ashley’s mild plea with still greater impatience. Perhaps she
had forbidden him to come. ‘Would I have been kept away by any
forbidding?’ Heathcote said to himself without knowing it. Then he came
back from the corners in which such suggestions lay, feeling uneasy,
feeling wroth and uncomfortable, and took his stand again before the
fire. ‘Perhaps you will give me a little advice about the money I
wanted,’ he said to Mr. Loseby. This was safer on the whole than
suffering himself to stray into foolish fancies as to what he would have
done, or would not have done, supposing an impossible case--supposing he
had made his appearance a year sooner; before there was any complication
of any unsatisfactory ‘fellow’ with the image of his cousin Anne.