"My dear," said Mrs. Alwynn to her husband that morning, as they started
for church across the glebe, "if any of the Atherstone party are in
church, as they ought to be, for I hear from Mrs. Smith that they are
not at all regular at Greenacre--only went once last Sunday, and then
late--I shall just tell Ruth that she is to come back to me to-morrow. A
few days won't make any difference to her, and it will fit in so nicely
her coming back the day you go to the palace. After all I've done for
Ruth--new curtains to her room, and the piano tuned and everything--I
don't think she would like to stay there with friends, and me all by
myself, without a creature to speak to. Ruth may be only a niece by
marriage, but she will see in a moment--"
And in fact she did. When Mrs. Alwynn took her aside after church, and
explained the case in the all-pervading whisper for which she had
apparently taken out a patent, Ruth could not grasp any reason why she
should return to Slumberleigh three days before the time, but she saw at
once that return she must if Mrs. Alwynn chose to demand it; and so she
yielded with a good grace, and sent Mrs. Alwynn back smiling to the
lych-gate, where Mr. Alwynn and Mabel Thursby were talking with Dare and
Molly, while Charles interviewed the village policeman at a little
distance.
"No news of the tramp," said Charles, meeting Ruth at the gate; and they
started homeward in different order to that in which they had come, in
spite of a great effort at the last moment on the part of Dare, who
thought the old way was better. "The policeman has seen nothing of him.
He has gone off to pastures new, I expect."
"I hope he has."
"Mrs. Alwynn does not want you to leave Atherstone to-morrow, does she?"
"I am sorry to say she does."
"But you won't go?"
"I must not only go, but I must do it as if I liked it."
"I hope Evelyn won't allow it."
"While I am living with Mrs. Alwynn, I am bound to do what she likes in
small things."
"H'm!"
"I should have thought, Sir Charles, that this particularly feminine and
submissive sentiment would have met with your approval."
"It does; it does," said Charles, hastily. "Only, after the stubborn
rigidity of your--shall I say your--week-day character, especially as
regards money, this softened Sabbath mood took me by surprise for a
moment."
"You should see me at Slumberleigh," said Ruth, with a smile half sad,
half humorous. "You should see me tying up Uncle John's flowers, or
holding Aunt Fanny's wools. Nothing more entirely feminine and young
lady-like can be imagined."
"It must be a great change, after living with a woman like Lady
Deyncourt--to whose house I often went years ago, when her son was
living--to come to a place like Slumberleigh."
"It _is_ a great change. I am ashamed to say how much I felt it at
first. I don't know how to express it; but everything down here seems so
small and local, and hard and fast."
"I know," said Charles, gently; and they walked on in silence. "And
yet," he said at last, "it seems to me, and I should have thought you
would have felt the same, that life is very small, very narrow and
circumscribed everywhere; though perhaps more obviously so in Cranfords
and Slumberleighs. I have seen a good deal during the last fifteen
years. I have mixed with many sorts and conditions of men, but in no
class or grade of society have I yet found independent men and women.
The groove is as narrow in one class as in another, though in some it is
better concealed. I sometimes feel as if I were walking in a ball-room
full of people all dancing the lancers. There are different sets, of
course--fashionable, political, artistic--but the people in them are all
crossing over, all advancing and retiring, with the same apparent
aimlessness, or setting to partners."
"There is occasionally an aim in that."
Charles smiled grimly.
"They follow the music in that as in everything else. You go away for
ten years, and still find them, on your return, going through the same
figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the
world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who
don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and
die by rote, expecting to go straight up to heaven by rote afterwards?"
"I believe there are such people," said Ruth, earnestly; "I have had
glimpses of them, but the real ones look like the shadows, and the
shadows like the real ones, and--we miss them in the crowd."
"Or one thinks one finds them, and they turn out only clever imitations
after all. In these days there is a mania for shamming originality of
some kind. I am always imagining people I meet are real, and not
shadows, until one day I unintentionally put my hand through them, and
find out my mistake. I am getting tired of being taken in."
"And some day you will get tired of being cynical."
"I am very much obliged to you for your hopeful view of my future. You
evidently imagine that I have gone in for the fashionable creed of the
young man of the present day. I am not young enough to take pleasure in
high collars and cheap cynicism, Miss Deyncourt. Cynical people are
never disappointed in others, as I so often am, because they expect the
worst. In theory I respect and admire my fellow-creatures, but they
continually exasperate me because they won't allow me to do so in real
life. I have still--I blush to own it--a lingering respect for women,
though they have taken pains to show me, time after time, what a fool I
am for such a weakness."
Charles looked intently at Ruth. Women are so terribly apt in handling
any subject to make it personal. Would she fire up, or would she, like
so many women, join in abuse of her own sex? She did neither. She was
looking straight in front of her, absently watching the figures of Dare
and Molly in the next field. Then she turned her grave, thoughtful
glance towards him.
"I think respect is never weakness," she said. "It is a sign of
strength, even when it is misplaced. There is not much to admire in
cunning people who are never taken in. The best people I have known, the
people whom it did me good to be with, have been those who respected
others and themselves. Do not be in too great a hurry to get rid of any
little fragment that still remains. You may want it when it is gone."
Charles's apathetic face had become strangely earnest. There was a keen,
searching look in his tired, restless eyes. He was about to make some
answer, when he suddenly became aware of Dare and Molly sitting perched
on a gate close at hand waiting for them. Never had he perceived Molly's
little brown face with less pleasure than at that moment. She scrambled
down with a noble disregard of appearances, and tried to take his hand.
But it was coolly withdrawn. Charles fell behind on some pretence of
fastening the gate, and Molly had to content herself with Ruth's and
Dare's society for the remainder of the walk.
Ruth had almost forgotten, until Molly suggested at luncheon a picnic
for the following day, that she was returning to Slumberleigh on Monday
morning; and when she made the fact known, Ralph had to be "hushed"
several times by Evelyn for muttering opinions behind the sirloin
respecting Mrs. Alwynn, which Evelyn seemed to have heard before, and to
consider unsuited to the ears of that lady's niece.
"But if you go away, Cousin Ruth, we can't have the picnic. Can we,
Uncle Charles?"
"Impossible, Molly. Rather bread and butter at home than a mixed biscuit
in the open air without Miss Deyncourt."
"Is Mrs. Alwynn suffering?" asked Lady Mary, politely, down the table.
Ruth explained that she was not in ill-health, but that she did wish to
be left alone; and Ralph was "hushed" again.
Lady Mary was annoyed, or, more properly speaking, she was "moved in the
spirit," which in a Churchwoman seems to be the same thing as annoyance
in the unregenerate or unorthodox mind. She regretted Ruth's departure
more than any one, except perhaps Ruth herself. She had watched the girl
very narrowly, and she had seen nothing to make her alter the opinion
she had formed of her; indeed, she was inclined to advance beyond it.
Even she could not suspect that Ruth had "played her cards well;"
although she would have aided and abetted her in any way in her power,
if Ruth had shown the slightest consciousness of holding cards at all,
or being desirous of playing them. Her frank yet reserved manner, her
distinguished appearance, her sense of humor (which Lady Mary did not
understand, but which she perceived others did), and the quiet _savoir
faire_ of her treatment of Dare's advances, all enhanced her greatly in
the eyes of her would-be aunt. She bade her good-bye with genuine
regret; the only person who bore her departure without a shade of
compunction being Dare, who stood by the carriage till the last moment,
assuring Ruth that he hoped to come over to the rectory very shortly;
while Charles and Molly held the gate open meanwhile, at the end of the
short drive.
"I know that Frenchman means business," said Lady Mary wrathfully to
herself, as she watched the scene from the garden. Her mind, from the
very severity of its tension, was liable to occasional lapses of this
painful kind from the spiritual and ecclesiastical to the mundane and
transitory. "I saw it directly he came into the house; and with _his_
opportunities, and living within a stone's-throw, I should not wonder if
he were to succeed. Any man would fetch a fancy price at Slumberleigh;
and the most fastidious woman in the world ceases to be critical if she
is reduced to the proper state of dulness. He is handsome, too, in his
foreign way. But she does not like him now. She is inclined to like
Charles, though she does not know it. There is an attraction between the
two. I knew there would be. And he likes her. Oh, what fools men are! He
will go away; and Dare, on the contrary, will ride over to Slumberleigh
every day, and by the time he is engaged to her Charles will see her
again, and find out that he is in love with her himself. Oh, the folly,
the density, of unmarried men! and, indeed," (with a sudden recollection
of the deceased Mr. Cunningham), "of the whole race of them! But of all
men I have ever known, I really think the most provoking is Charles."
"Musing?" inquired her nephew, sauntering up to her.
"I was thinking that we had just lost the pleasantest person of our
little party," said Lady Mary, viciously seizing up her work.
"I am still here," suggested Charles, by way of consolation. "I don't
start for Norway in Wyndham's yacht for three days to come."
"Do you mean to say you are going to Norway?"
"I forget whether it was to be Norway; but I know I'm booked to go
yachting somewhere. It's Wyndham's new toy. He paid through the parental
nose for it, and he made me promise in London to go with him on his
first cruise. I believe a very charming Miss Wyndham is to be of the
party."
"And how long, pray, are you going to yacht with Miss Wyndham?"
"It is with her brother I propose to go. I thought I had explained that
before. I shall probably cruise about, let me see, for three weeks or
so, till the grouse-shooting begins. Then I am due in Scotland, at the
Hope-Actons', and several other places."
Lady Mary laid down her work, and rose to her feet, her thin hand
closing tightly over the silver crook of her stick.
"Charles," she said, in a voice trembling with anger, looking him full
in the face, "you are a fool!" and she passed him without another word,
and hobbled away rapidly into the house.
"Am I?" said Charles, half aloud to himself, when the last fold of her
garment had been twitched out of sight through the window.
"_Am I?_ Molly," with great gravity, as Molly appeared, "yes, you may sit
on my knee; but don't wriggle. Molly, what is a fool?"
"I think it's Raca, only worse," said Molly. "Uncle Charles, Mr. Dare is
going away too. His dog-cart had just come into the yard."
"Has it? I hope he won't keep it waiting."
"You are not going away, are you?"
"Not for three days more."
"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Why, they will be gone in a moment."
But to Charles they seemed three very long days indeed. He was annoyed
with himself for having made so many engagements before he left London.
At the time there did not seem anything better to be done, and he
supposed he must go somewhere; but now he thought he would have liked to
stay on at Atherstone, though he would not have said so to Lady Mary for
worlds. He was tired of rushing up and down. He was not so fond of
yachting, after all; and he remembered that he had been many times to
Norway.
"I would get out of it if I could," he said to Lady Mary on the last
morning; "and of this blue serge suit, too (you should see Miss Wyndham
in blue serge!); but it is not a question of pleasure, but of principle.
I don't like to throw over Wyndham at the last moment, after what you
said when I failed the Hope-Actons last year. Twins could not feel more
exactly together than you and I do where a principle is involved. I see
you are about to advise me to keep my engagement. Do not trouble to do
so; I am going to Portsmouth by the mid-day train. Brown is at this
moment packing my telescope and life-belt."