Annie did not find life at the Elms such a miserable affair as she
had expected. That first evening the key-note was struck of the
conduct of each member of the family toward her. Lady Braithwaite
continued to treat her with distant coldness, or affected to ignore her
entirely. Lilian followed suit, except at odd moments of capricious
good humor, when she would treat her like a pretty child to be
teased and caressed. George was kind, but instinct made her shun
_tête-à-têtes_ with him. She did not see much of Wilfred,
who used to tell her that she made him ashamed of himself and promise
to reform. He even went so far as to attend a temperance-meeting in the
village, where, he declared afterward, that he heard a lot of things
which were very true, and where he signed the pledge without being
asked, in the hope of pleasing her; he was not quite sober at the time.
When on his return home he went straight to the sideboard and mixed
himself some whisky-and-water, Stephen reminded him of his vow; but
Wilfred only said, softly: “Hang the pledge!” and went to bed in the
same state as usual.
Stephen scarcely spoke to her. She soon found out that his admiration
of Lilian, which she had noticed on her first visit to Garstone Grange,
had grown into a mad passion which the object of it was not slow to
make use of. He was her slave; she might snub him, torment him, hurt
his sensitive feelings; nothing could change his devotion to her, which
was very touching to Annie, who knew how hopeless his passion was,
and that the handsome girl used her crippled lover only as a tool and
a toy. For Lilian was a headstrong, willful girl, more difficult to
manage than her mother and brothers guessed.
She had commissions to give her cousin which nobody else knew of,
letters which she had to coax him to post, and answers to them which
had to come under cover to him. And the poor young fellow never
faltered in his allegiance, but, after a stormy war of words with her,
which she knew how to end with a careless kiss brushed across his
burning forehead, he always gave way; and her little secrets, whatever
they might be, remained as safe as if no one but herself in the
household knew of them.
One of these secrets, and perhaps the most important, had a narrow
escape of being revealed one evening, however, when Annie and her
constant companion, William, were standing still as statues in the
large, wire-faced house where the rabbit-hutches were kept, amusing
themselves by watching the mice play about, and finally run into the
traps they had prepared for them.
This was a very favorite pastime, always ending in a friendly squabble,
as William wanted to “drown the little pets” and Annie insisted upon
letting “the dear little things have their liberty again.” Finally half
used to be drowned or given to the cat, and half let loose again; and,
if there was an odd one, William tossed up for it.
It was about six o’clock on a November evening that they were standing
breathless with excitement, straining their eyes in the dusk to see
one cautious little mouse running round and round and all but into
the trap, when they heard footsteps outside, but were far too deeply
interested to look round. Presently they heard another sound, and knew
by the noise of the crutches on the ground that it was Stephen who was
approaching. They heard the footsteps of the first comer going to meet
him, and Lilian’s voice saying impatiently:
“What a long time you have been! I thought you were never coming! Is
there one? Give it me--quick, quick!”
“There it is,” said Stephen, sullenly. “What--aren’t you going to give
me a word of thanks, when I went out all the way to Beckham for you
when I was in such pain? Oh, Lilian, have you no heart?”
William and Annie could not see the speakers, though they could hear
every word--could hear too the impatient tearing of an envelope. Then
Lilian’s voice, in a soft, cooing, but only half-attentive tone, said:
“Yes, you are a dear, dear good boy, and my best--friend--in the
world.” Then more quickly. “Just let me finish reading this, there’s a
dear, kind fellow!”
There was a pause, and a heavy sigh from the cripple. Then Lilian spoke
again more brightly:
“Now, I can thank you as you deserve. I feel as happy as a bird, and
all thanks to you,” she added, caressingly.
But Stephen was sullen.
“It is not thanks to me; it is thanks to the man who wrote that
infernal letter! I wish I had died before I brought it to you!”
“Why did you bring it then? Why have you brought me a dozen from the
same person, all under cover to you?”
“Because--because I couldn’t help it--because I must do what you tell
me, in spite of myself. Oh, Lilian, can you reproach me with what I do
for you?”
“I am not reproaching you, you dear old, silly boy! I was thanking you,
when you suddenly began to scold me. I trust you more than anybody else
in the world; you know I do.”
“Then why don’t you trust me entirely, and tell me whom the letters are
from? You know I would never betray you. You know that, whoever it was,
I would do for you then all that I do now, and more--if that could be.”
“Why don’t you tear them open and see? They all pass through your
hands.”
“I would if they were any one’s letters but yours. But your wishes are
sacred to me--they are, indeed, and, if I were to do that, you would
never speak to me again.”
“Well, to judge from the way you reproach me, that would be a very good
thing.”
“No, Lilian, no, no! Be cruel to me as you like; but don’t talk of
casting me aside like that. What more can I do for you than I have
done? What----”
They heard his voice in passionate protest long after the words
themselves were lost, as the sound of the crutches, following Lilian
toward the house, grew fainter on the pathway. The interest Annie and
William had taken in the mice was quite gone. They still stood opposite
to each other in the deepening dusk; but for some minutes after the
voices had become inaudible they could not find a word to say. At last
William broke the silence.
“I say, Annie, what on earth do you think Lilian is up to?”
“I don’t know; I can’t think!”
“It can’t be all square, you know. I wonder who it is that is writing
to her? However, she always was full of tricks, and it is no good
saying anything. I shall just hold my tongue about it; wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, certainly. We can’t do anything to stop it, and we heard it all
by accident. We should only make everybody angry with her and she----”
“Would swear we have told lies, and Stephen would back her up.”
“And we shouldn’t prevent her getting her own way even then,” said
Annie, sorrowfully.
She had a shrewd suspicion who the unknown correspondent was, and an
incident which occurred a little later confirmed it.
Meanwhile the quiet outdoor country life she led, always driving, or
walking, or playing some game of their own invention with William,
had rapidly restored to her beauty the bloom that unhappiness and
_ennui_ had begun to rob it of. George took the most notice of this
improvement, and Harry the least. Yet even the latter was not quite
insensible to the change for the better in his wife’s good looks, and
told her one day, with rough good-humor, that married life seemed to
agree with her, though she did not seem to appreciate what it had done
for her. Annie answered with a rather ironical laugh. It seemed to her
that the appreciation ought to be on the other side.
For he remained one of the most careless and selfish of husbands, while
she fulfilled her duty to him with an exactness which got no thanks
from him. She was his slave in little things, and never asked for the
smallest service or attention in return. Perhaps Wilfred was right when
he suggested that she would rather be without it. However that might
he, he was as free to go where he pleased and do as he pleased as in
his bachelor days, while he alone, of all these young men, never had
to hunt for things he had mislaid, never had to cry out for a missing
button, and had his scanty correspondence done for him much better than
he could have done it for himself.
William once humbly expressed a wish that she would get the servants
to look after his hunting-things as she did for Harry. But she only
laughed at him.
“Well,” said William, rather aggrieved, swinging his legs backward and
forward from the gate on which they were sitting together, “I do ever
so many more things for you than Harry does.”
“Ah, but then he is my husband!” returned she, offering him an apple.
“I say, Annie, you don’t like Harry, do you?” he asked, mysteriously,
after a pause.
“Of course I do! How can you ask me such a question?” said the outraged
wife indignantly.
“Oh, well, I don’t believe you do, all the same!” said he, obstinately.
“And I don’t wonder! If I were you, I would let him run away, and then
you could get rid of him and marry somebody nicer.”
“Do you know what you are talking about?” asked Annie, haughtily,
drawing herself up with as much dignity as the maintenance of her
balance on the top rail of a five-barred gate would allow.
“Yes, quite well, Annie dear; I am saying it only for your good,” said
he, his boyish sense of humor peeping out in spite of his being really
half in earnest.
And then they laughed themselves off the gate.
For this was how the _regime_ of coldness and neglect on the part
of her husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law had turned out. It
had thrown Mrs. Harold Braithwaite upon the society of her youngest
brother-in-law, and made of her a melancholy statue in the house,
a happy hoiden out of it. The only thing she was careful of was to
avoid the scenes of the daily walks of her late pupils during their
out-of-school hours, as she told William it might have a bad moral
effect upon them to see their late governess scrambling up banks, and
in other undignified situations.
She was out of doors nearly all day, it not having yet occurred to Lady
Braithwaite to torment her daughter-in-law, who was very submissive to
her, by making her stay in to help to entertain chance visitors. She
got two invitations, however, with the other ladies, and endured with
them and George a dull dinner-party, and with them, without George, a
duller afternoon tea, at both of which she was much admired and looked
upon as a pretty child. Her style of beauty led to this mistake; she
was so small, so low-voiced, had such fresh-colored, rounded cheeks,
and such timid though pretty manners that nobody suspected the strength
of will, and ambition, and other deep-seated qualities, of which their
young possessor was herself scarcely aware. They lay dormant indeed
just now. The uppermost side of her many-sided nature at present was
a buoyancy of spirit which made a lad scarcely sixteen her favorite
companion, and a wild delight in having escaped from the shackles of
the schoolroom on the one hand, and of lodging alone with a sulky,
ignorant husband on the other.
And, just when her heart began to cry out for something more than this,
she made a discovery which sent her to her knees in utter joy and
thankfulness to Heaven. No more _ennui_, no more repining now; even in
the house the gravity of her little face gave place to an expression
full of hope and sweetness, while, once escaped from silent submission
and Lady Braithwaite, her eyes would dance and her lips break into soft
song, till William declared he did not know what had come over her,
and confessed one day, with a lump in his throat when she stopped to
rest on a felled tree, that he believed she was going to die and go to
heaven.
“And--and you seem to be glad; and--and it is beastly of you when you
know how fond I----”
Here the lad gave way; and she laughed at him and made him sit by her,
and told him he was talking nonsense.
“If I look ‘so sweet’ as you say, that marvelous effect is due, not to
my being dying of consumption, but to the Garstone air, which is making
another woman of me.”
“Then why do you always want to stop and rest? You never used to.”
“Because--because the cold weather is coming on, and that always tries
me.”
“But it oughtn’t to; it ought to brace you up.”
“Here come the Mainwarings! Let us get through the hedge,” interrupted
Annie.
And an undignified exit put a stop to the conversation. Annie told her
secret to no one living.
That very day, when these two returned home just in time for dinner,
they found that an unexpected guest had arrived. It was Colonel
Richardson. Beckham was not in a hunting-country, but a journey of
an hour and a half by train took the Braithwaites within an easy
distance of the meets of a very good pack of fox-hounds; and it was at
a hunt-breakfast that day that the three eldest Braithwaites had met
him. Harry, delighted to see his idol again, had introduced him to his
brothers, and Sir George had invited him to return with them to the
Grange, to break the journey to Scotland, where the colonel was due.
He scarcely recognized Annie, she was so much changed for the better.
Lilian received him with an indifference which, to Annie’s observant
eyes, seemed rather overdone.
That evening, after dinner, when the ladies went into the drawing-room,
Annie went as usual straight to the piano, while Lilian lounged upon
a low seat in the corner near the entrance to the conservatory; her
favorite retriever came to rub his head against her hand, and Annie
thought, as she looked from the dog to its mistress, that she had never
seen such a lovely woman. For Lilian had taken the utmost pains with
her dress that evening; her black gown, cut square at the neck, set off
the fairness of her complexion. She habitually despised ornaments, and
could afford to do so; but to-night a few sprays of white azalea and
white heath and delicate maiden-hair fern relieved the somber dress,
and a very small bunch of azalea and fern was fastened by a gold-headed
pin in her chestnut hair. And Annie saw the girl’s face flush when they
heard the dining-room door open and the gentlemen’s voices across the
hall; but when they all entered the room, Colonel Richardson came, in a
few minutes, not to that seat near the conservatory, but to the piano,
and told Annie that Schubert was his favorite composer. For it was a
song from the “Schwanengesang,” arranged for the piano, that she was
playing.
Annie looked up with irrepressible surprise that he should recognize
it. She was so used to an audience who considered all music above the
level of Offenbach as a not unpleasant noise that her face beamed with
pleasure at his very simple remark.
“I will play you another--my favorite,” said she.
And, in her delight at being with an appreciative listener, she played
better than usual, and at the end looked up naively for his approval.
He gave it without stint; and she went on from these to other favorite
pieces, which she knew well enough to be able to talk at the same time.
“You must lead an isolated life here, I should think, with no one to
talk to?”
“So I don’t talk,” said she, smiling; “I run wild in the fields with
William.”
“Do you like the life?”
“Yes and--no. I like it when I don’t think. I like walking so far and
running so fast and jumping over so many ditches that I am too tired at
night to do anything but long for bed-time.”
“But you can’t pass all your life like that.”
“That is the worst of it. I hate the thought of coming back to
semi-civilization when I am too old for my savage pastimes.”
“You used to write a little, I think you told me. Have you given it up!”
“Quite. I could never make a great author now, and nothing less would
content me.”
He smiled; there was something of the simplicity of a child about
this matron. To be a great author one had but to wish it and to be
unmarried. And he lingered about the piano a long time, discussing
authors and authorship, and now and then hazarding a remark made
expressly to bring the indignant fire into her eyes and some speech to
her pretty lips piquant in its severity.
At last Lilian could bear it no longer; she rose and, with heightened
color, and a dangerous light in her eyes, walked to the piano.
“Won’t you sing something, Annie?”
Her sister-in-law at once complied, and, before she had finished the
first verse, Lilian had diverted the colonel’s attention from all but
herself. The song ended, Annie rose, and, her cheeks still flushed with
the excitement of playing her best, slipped into the cool conservatory,
murmuring the last words of her song still softly to herself. She had
not been there two minutes before George joined her.
“You don’t mind smoke, Annie, do you?”
“No; besides, I am going back into the drawing-room.”
“Don’t go yet. It is much nicer out here. And Harry has a quarrelsome
fit on and would disgust you.”
That instantly checked her steps. Harry’s bursts of childish petulance
were among her greatest trials. She turned with an impatient sigh again
to the flowers.
“You played beautifully to-night, much better than you ever play for
any of us.”
“Colonel Richardson understands music.”
“While we understand only drinking and fighting; that is what you mean,
isn’t it?”
“Oh, no, it is not! You understand a great many things which I know
nothing about--how to tease a person to death, for instance,” said she,
with weary petulance.
“That is unkind,” said George, quietly. “Never mind; I won’t reproach
you now, when you are tired and excited by your own playing.”
She looked up at him with some surprise.
“It is astonishing that such a boor as I should have noticed
that, isn’t it, and that I should know the difference between the
half-mechanical playing of pretty tunes and music full of passion and
feeling, like that you gave Colonel Richardson to-night.”
“I did not know you liked music,” said she, in a low, troubled voice.
“You never took the trouble to inquire; did you? But even among the
‘semi-civilized’--to quote some words I heard you use to-night--there
may be capabilities for something better, may there not?”
Annie hung her head in confusion. He spoke quite gently, and looked
down at her as if he were hurt, not angry.
“I am sorry--I spoke without thinking,” she said, in an unsteady voice.
“You were right; I am very tired, and that makes me cross and--and
foolish. But I won’t play mechanically to you again. I will find out
what you like best, and learn to play that as well as I possibly can;
and I’m so sorry you were hurt by my rude speech!”
She held out her hand to him, to see whether he had forgiven her; he
took it, held it in the warm pressure of his, and finally kissed the
little fingers two or three times before letting them go.
“You are a dear little creature, and I should like you to insult me
every day for the pleasure of forgiving you. But that is too much to
hope for; you won’t do more than ignore me.”
“Is that fair? You pretend to forgive me, and then bring another
accusation against me in the same breath,” protested Annie, who did,
indeed, habitually avoid _tête-à-têtes_ with him, but who, as usual,
once brought to bay, was perfectly at her ease and able to defend
herself.
“Well, I thought I had better state all my grievances at once, as
I know it will be a long time before you give me another chance.
Seriously, it gives me great pain to see you sitting silent in my house
or slipping through the rooms like a snubbed and neglected child, only
waking up into life and brightness when you are out of sight of--those
who are longing to see you happy.”
The tears were in her eyes. She was touched by the kindness of his
words; but how could she tell him that his own mother and sister cast,
by their coldness, a chill upon her from which, in their presence, it
was impossible for her to escape?
“I will try to be more cheerful,” said she humbly, and rather dismally.
“No, that won’t do,” declared George, impatiently. “I don’t want you to
pump up liveliness that you don’t feel, or laugh when you feel inclined
to cry.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“Well, when anything amuses you, and you look stealthily at William
with a perfectly stolid face but a laugh in your eyes, will you look at
me, too? I can enjoy a joke as well as he.”
“Did you notice that?” said Annie, wonderingly.
“Yes; you exaggerate my dullness enormously. Now, will you promise to
share the joke with me?”
“But William is only a boy. If I were to laugh with you as I do with
him, Harry would think himself shunted and be horribly unpleasant,
as usual. I don’t mean to say anything against Harry,” she added,
hastily. “He is your brother----”
“Do you think I feel so tenderly toward him, that I cannot hear a word
of truth about him?” said George passionately. “Do you think I cherish
any deep affection for the brute who first robbed me of the treasure I
would have died to win, and then neglected her, crushed the brightness
out of her youth by his boorish ignorance, insulted and disgusted her
by his tastes and habits?”
Annie was frightened by his vehemence--moved too in spite of herself.
He saw this, and seized his advantage.
“Annie,” said he, bending down over her with his handsome face full of
passionate tenderness, “it is too late now; but didn’t you care for me
a little once?”
With a long sobbing breath which was almost a cry, Annie bent her head
instinctively to hide her face, and, springing away before he could
detain her, went back into the drawing-room.
Sir George drew himself up again to his full height, and mechanically
put his long-since-extinguished cigar to his lips. He was answered.