THERE is nothing more curious in life than the way in which it closes
over those great incidents that shape its course. Like a stone
disappearing in a pool, the slow circles of commotion widen and melt
away, the missile sinks into the depths of the water, and tranquility
comes back to its surface. Every ripple is gone, and yet the stone is
always there.
This curious calm came into the life of Bee Kingsward after the
incidents related above. The man with whom she had expected to share
everything disappeared from her existence as if he had never entered
into it, and a dead peace fell over her, and all things around her. It
was at once better for Bee and worse that the mourning for her mother
swept her away out of all the coming and going of ordinary life for a
time--better because she was saved the torment of a perpetual struggle
with her trouble, and worse because it shut her up to a perpetual
recollection of that trouble. The Kingsward family remained at
Kingswarden for the whole of that winter and spring. When the season
began there was some question of removing to town, which Bee opposed
strongly. “I have no wish to go out,” she said. “I could not, papa, so
soon---- And we have no one to take us.”
“You will find plenty of people ready to take you,” he said.
And then Bee took refuge in tears. “Nobody--that we could endure to go
with--so soon, so soon!--not yet a year,” she said. Betty followed her
sister dubiously. It was natural that she should always echo what Bee
said, but this time she was not quite so sure as usual. Not to balls?
Oh, not to balls! was Betty’s secret comment, but--Betty felt that to
speak occasionally to some one who was not of her own family--not the
Rector or the Rector’s wife, the Curate or the Doctor--would be an
advantage; but she did not utter that sentiment. After all, what was one
season to the measureless horizon of eighteen? Bee renounced her season
eagerly, and uttered exclamations of content when Colonel Kingsward
announced that, in those circumstances, he had let their house in town.
But I am not sure that she was so completely satisfied as she professed
to be. She had dismissed Aubrey “for ever”--and yet, when the deed was
done, a longing seized her sometimes to hear his name, that someone
should speak of him in her presence, that she should hear accidentally
where he was, and what he was doing. She had imagined little scenes to
herself in which she had heard strangers saying to each other that
Aubrey Leigh had soon got over his disappointment, that he was going to
be married to So-and-So; or that he was going to make the tour of the
world, or to shoot big game in Africa; or, anything in short, so long as
it was about him. Even when she had been so determined against going
out, there had been a hope in her mind that somehow, she did not know
how, some news of him and what he was doing might be wafted her way
accidentally. She did not want, she said to herself passionately, ever
to hear his name again! Yet she had calculated on hearing as much as
that, hearing quite accidentally, at the Royal Academy, perhaps, or
somewhere where she might happen to be calling, that he was going to the
ends of the earth, or that he was going to be married--things which the
speakers might suppose were not of the slightest interest to her. She
said all the same that she was delighted when Colonel Kingsward informed
them that he had let the house in town--very glad! before it had time to
get shabby, the poor old house; yet, when she retired to her room for
the night, Bee cried, shedding many salt tears.
But nothing of this was apparent in her life. The circles had all melted
away from the still bosom of the pool. The household resumed its former
regularity, quickened a little, perhaps, by the energetic sweeping of
the new broom. Mrs. Kingsward had been an easy mistress about many
trifles, which Bee, new to authority, and more enterprising than her
mother, exacted a rigid account of. At the beginning she set all the
servants by the ears, each of them being anxious to show that their own
conscientiousness was perfect, and their desire to consider their
master’s interests; but, by degrees, matters settled down with an
increased strictness of order. “As mamma would have wished it,” Bee
said; and she herself changed in a way that would be almost miraculous
were it not a transformation commonly visible from time to time, from a
light-hearted girl, full of little amusing misdemeanours and mistakes,
into that sweet serious figure of the eldest daughter, the
mother-sister, so often visible in England when the mistress of the
household has been removed in early life. There is no more beautiful or
more tender vision; it is fine at all ages, but in the first bloom of
youth it has a pathetic grace which goes to the heart. Bee underwent
this change quite suddenly, after a period of trouble and agitation and
over activity. It might not perhaps have come but for the letting for
the season of the town house, which seemed to make so complete a
severance between her and the ordinary current of life.
It was perhaps this that opened what might almost be called a new
relationship between Bee and her brother Charlie, who was the nearest to
her in the family, though there had not been hitherto an unusual
sympathy between them. For one thing, Betty feeling herself a little
forlorn in the country with all the echoes of London, which occasionally
came to her ears, had been permitted to accept an invitation to Portman
Square to visit a quiet elderly family, not likely to lead her into any
dissipation out of keeping with her black frock, and Bee was virtually
alone with the children, to whom she gave herself up with a devotion
which was the very quintessence of motherhood. Colonel Kingsward also
was in town--a man cannot shut himself up (this was what he said)
whatever his private griefs may be. He must keep a calm face before the
world, he must not allow himself to be hustled out of the way. For this
reason, he remained in London, living in chambers, to which he had an
official right, in the dingy official grandeur of Pall Mall, and coming
to Kingswarden only now and then from Saturday to Monday. This sundered
Bee still more completely from the world. And when Charlie came back
from Oxford she was more eager to meet him, more pleased with his
company than ever before. This was not perhaps entirely the young man’s
mind. That he should choose to shut himself up in the country in June
was perhaps scarcely to be expected. According to the curious rule which
prevails in England he “did not mind” the country in January. But in
June! However, it was soon apparent that there were other things than
the season in Charlie’s mind. He began a series of lamentations to Bee
upon the situation of the family and things in general, by the usual
complaint of a young man in the country of having “nothing to do.”
“A man cannot sit at home and dot up the accounts like you,” he said,
“though I don’t say but that it’s hard upon you, too. Still, women like
to tie up children’s sashes and that sort of thing, and calculate how
much their boots cost in a year. I say, mother can’t have had half such
an easy life as we all thought.”
“I never thought she had an easy life,” said Bee, which was perhaps not
exactly true, but the things that Bee had thought a year ago were so
unlike the things she thought now that she did not believe life had ever
appeared to her in a different light.
“Well,” said Charlie, “she had a way of making it appear so. Do you
remember that last time at the Baths? What a little thing you seemed
then, Bee, and now here I am talking to you quite seriously, as if you
were mother. Look here, I want you to speak to the governor for me. I am
doing no good here. In fact, there’s nothing to do--unless I am to drop
into drinking and that sort of thing in the village.”
“Charlie!”
“Well,” he said, “I can’t sit and sew strings on pinafores like you. A
man must do something at my age.”
“And what should you do at Oxford? And why do you want to go there when
everybody is away?”
“Everybody away! That is all you know. The dons are away, if that is
what you mean. There are no lectures going on. But lectures are a mere
loss of time. There are lots of fellows up there reading. If you want to
read hard, now is the best time.”
“How curious,” said Bee, in genuine surprise, “when all the people who
teach are away! And I never knew that you wanted to read hard.”
“No. I never was made to think that I ought to,” said Charlie, with
rising colour. “In this house nobody thinks of anything more than just
getting through.”
Bee was a little angry as well as surprised by this censure upon the
family. She said, “The rest of us may not be clever--but everybody says
there are few men that know as much as papa.”
“Oh, in his special subjects, I suppose, but I am not going in for the
army, Bee,” said Charlie, the colour rising higher on his young face,
which was still an ingenuous face, though not of a very high order. “It
is such a wonderful thing to have your duty set before you, and how you
ought to make the best of your life. I, for one, never thought of it
before. I was always quite satisfied to get through and to have plenty
of time to amuse myself; but if you come to think of it that’s a very
poor sort of ideal for a life.”
Bee looked up at Charlie with more and more surprise. He was pulling his
young moustache nervously, and there was a great deal of emotion in his
face. It seemed amazing to his sister that Charlie--Charlie who had
always been on the unemotional side, should take this heroic tone, or do
anything but laugh at the suggestion of an ideal in life. She gazed at
him in some bewilderment. “What are you going to read?” she asked, with
doubt and wonder in her voice.
“It is just like a girl to ask a man what he is going to read! Why,
everything. I just pushed through my mods., you know--a pass--which it
covers me with shame to think of now. I must do something better than
that. I don’t know that I’m very good at anything, but work, after all,
steady work, is the great thing; and if work can do it----!” cried
Charley, breaking off, a little breathless, with a strange light in his
eyes.
“You almost frighten me, Charlie. You were never meant for honours or a
high degree, were you? Papa said you need not go in for honours, it
would lose time; and you thought so, too.”
“I have changed my mind,” said Charlie, nervously. “I thought, like
other asses, that in diplomacy you don’t want much; but now I think
differently. How are you to understand how to conduct national affairs
and all that, and reconcile conflicting claims, and so forth, and settle
the real business of the world----”
“But Charlie, I thought it was languages, and great politeness, and--and
even dancing, and that sort of thing, that was wanted in an attaché----”
“Attachés,” said the young man, with a gravity which, serious as she
also was, almost made Bee laugh, “are the material out of which
ambassadors are made. Of course, it takes time----”
Here Bee burst, without meaning it, into a nervous laugh.
“You are so dreadfully serious about it,” she cried.
“And what should a man be serious about, if not that?” the young man
replied.
Here for the moment, in great impatience on his part, and in the call
of some little household necessity on hers, the conversation closed; but
it was resumed as soon as the brother and sister were together again.
The big boys were still at school, the little ones engaged with their
lessons, and baby walking up and down in his nurse’s arms, did not
interrupt the talk which went on between the elders of the family. And
there is nothing with which it is so easy to indoctrinate a girl than
enthusiasm about an ideal, whatever that may be, or sympathy in a lofty
view of duty such as this, which had dawned, it seemed, upon her
brother. Bee took fire, as was so natural. She said to herself, that in
the utter downfall of her own life, it would be a fine thing to be able
to further his, and kept to the idea of Charlie as ambassador, settling
all sorts of difficulties and deciding the fortunes of the world for war
or for peace, as easily as if the question had been one of leading a
cotillion. How splendid it would be! She thought of herself as an old
lady, white-haired, in a cap and shawl--for, in an imagination of
twenty, there are few gradations between youth and that pathetic, yet
satisfactory ultimate period--seated in a particular corner of a
magnificent room at the Embassy, looking on at her brother’s triumph.
These sort of reflected successes were the only ones she thought that
would ever come to Bee.