Meanwhile little Loo, with another pair of big tears in her brown eyes,
had been driven home in the wintry twilight over the frosty road, which
rang to every stamp of her ponies’ heels in a way which would have
excited the little thing into positive enjoyment of the exhilarating
sounds and sensations of rapid motion, had things been as usual. As it
was, she sat wrapped up in a fur cloak, with her little veil over her
face, watching the great trees glide past in the darkening, and turning
her wistful looks now and then to the young winterly moon, which had
strayed like a lost child into the midst of a whole covey of clouds,
still crimsoned with reflections from the sunset. Loo’s little heart
ached so, and she was so steadfastly determined not to admit that it was
aching, that she was almost glad to feel how chill her little feet were
getting, and how benumbed the hand which was outside of the fur cloak.
She kept her little stiff fingers exposed to the frosty breeze all the
same, and was rather glad of that sensation of misery which gave her a
little excuse to herself for feeling unhappy. As the tinges of crimson
stole out of the clouds, and the sky grew so wistfully, coldly clear
around the moon, Fontanel came in sight, with lights in all its windows,
twinkling through the trees in the long avenue, now one gleam, now
another, as the little carriage drove on. There first of all was the
great nursery window blazing with firelight, where Loo meant to hold a
little committee as soon as she got in, and where she could so well
picture “all of them” in all their different occupations, populating all
the corners of the familiar room. A little further on it was the window
of mamma’s room, which lightened brightly out behind the bare branches
of the great chestnut tree. What would the house be without mamma? the
little girl asked herself, and the great blobs of hot dew in her eyes
fell upon her cold fingers. “Aren’t you well, Miss Loo?” asked the old
groom who drove her, and Loo made him a very sharp answer in the
irritation of her troubled little heart. She ran into the light and
comfort of the house with a perverse, childish misery which she did not
understand. She would not let old William take her cloak from her, but
threw it down, and stumbled over it, and stamped her little foot, and
could have cried. Poor little Loo! she was sick at heart, and did not
know what it meant. Instead of going to her mother, as she usually did,
she hastened up to the nursery where “all of them” were in a highly
riotous condition at the moment, and where the darkness of her little
face was unnoted by all but nurse, who took off her boots and warmed her
feet, and did away with the only physical reason Loo dared to pretend to
as an excuse for looking wretched. It was not very easy to look wretched
in that room. By the side of the fire where a great log blazed was
Harry, aged ten, with a great book clasped in his arms, and his cheeks
and hair equally scorched and crimsoned with near vicinity to the flame.
Little Mary, and Alf, the baby, were playing at the other end of the
room. Alf was six, though he was the baby; but Mrs Clifford was the kind
of woman to love a pet, and the little fellow’s indignant manhood was
still smothered in long curls and lace tuckers. He avenged himself by
exercising the most odious tyranny over his next little sister, who was
Baby’s slave. All this little company Loo looked round upon with
mysterious looks. She herself was twelve, little and pale, with nothing
particular about her but her eyes, and her temper, which had already
made itself, unfortunately, felt through the house. She sat maturing her
plans till she heard the clock strike, and saw that it would shortly be
time to go to her mother in her dressing-room, as the Fontanel children
always did before dinner. She immediately bestirred herself to her task.
“Nurse,” said Loo, “will you take these things down to mamma’s
dressing-room, please, and tell her we will all come presently; and if
you wish to go down-stairs, you may. I will take care of the children,
and take them down to mamma.”
“Thank you, Miss Loo; but there’s nobody to be at dinner but Mr
Summerhayes and Mademoiselle, and you’re all to go down,” said Nurse;
“you’re too little to have the charge of Master Alf, and you’ve all got
to be dressed, dears, for dessert.”
“Then you can come up when I ring. I want the children by themselves,”
said little Loo, with her imperious air. “You can go away.”
“You’re a deal too forward for such a little thing. I’ll speak to your
ma, Miss, I will,” said the offended nurse. “At least I would if it was
any good; but as long as Missis encourages her like this;—oh children
dear, there’s changed times coming! You won’t have the upper hand
always; it’s a comfort to a poor servant anyhow, whatever it may be to
other folks. I’m going, Miss Loo; and you’ll come up directly the very
minute you leave your ma to be dressed.”
Loo watched her to the door, and, skipping off her chair, closed it
behind the dethroned guardian of the nursery. “Now, children, come here,
I want to speak to you all,” said the little princess. “Mary, don’t be
as great a baby as Alf; you are eight—you are almost a woman. Alf, come
here and stand by me like a gentleman. Harry——”
But Harry was not so easily roused. He had been lectured so long about
scorching his face that he was now proof to all appeals. He had to be
hunted up out of his corner, and the book skilfully tilted up and thrown
out of his arms, which operation surprised Loo into a momentary laugh,
of which she was much ashamed. “Harry!” she cried, with redoubled
severity, “it is no nonsense I am going to talk of—it is something very
serious. Oh, children!” exclaimed the elder sister, as Alf jumped upon
Harry’s back, and the two had a harmless scuffle in continuation of that
assault which had roused Harry. “Oh, children!” cried Loo, who had
laughed in spite of herself, now bursting into quick tears of impatience
and vexation. “You play and play and think of nothing else—and you won’t
let me talk to you of what’s going to happen to mamma.”
“What is it?” cried Harry, opening a pair of great bright eyes, and
coming hastily to his sister’s side. Alf asked “What is it?” too, and
placed himself on the other hand. As for Mary, she was frightened and
stood a little apart, ready to rush off to her mother, or to ring for
Nurse, or to do anything else that the exigency might demand.
“Do you remember what mamma said to us when we were in the dining-room
on Sunday after dinner, when Tom—I mean when Mr Summerhayes was
there—when he kissed us all?” said Loo, with a little red spot suddenly
glowing out upon one indignant little cheek.
“She said he was going to be a father to us,” said Harry, rather
stolidly.
“And we didn’t know what it meant,” said little Mary, breaking in
eagerly, “but Nurse told me afterwards. It means that mamma is going to
be married to cousin Tom. Oh, won’t it be queer? Shall we have to call
him papa, Loo? I shall never recollect, I am sure.”
Loo gazed with eyes growing larger and larger in the face of her
insensible sister. Then seeing Mary’s arm on the top of the great
nursery fender, Loo, we are sorry to say, was so far betrayed by her
resentment as to thrust little Mary violently away with a sob of
passion. They all looked at her with wondering eyes.
“Oh, you stupid, stupid children!” cried the poor little heroine, “don’t
you know mamma, though she is so pretty, is not a young lady like other
people that are going to be married; don’t you know people talk about
it, and laugh at her, and say she is foolish? I have heard them do it!”
cried Loo. “I heard them in Summerhayes to-day talking and scolding
about our mamma. She knows best what to do—better than all of them. She
will never be unkind to us, or stop loving us. Oh, only think if she
knew that people said such things—it would kill her! I heard them, and I
thought I should have died. And now, children,” said Loo, solemnly,
“what we’ve got to do is to go down to mamma, not jumping or making a
noise like great babies, but quiet and serious; and to tell her that she
is to do what she thinks best, and never mind what people say; and that
we—we,” sobbed the little girl, vainly trying to preserve her composure,
as she brought out word after word with a gush of tears—“we’ll stand by
her and trust in her, and never believe anything. That is what we must
go and say.”
After she had finished her speech Loo fell into a little passion of
crying, in which she partly lost the slight murmurs and remonstrances of
her calmer and wondering audience; but passion as usual carried the day.
When Mrs Clifford’s bell rang the children went down-stairs, looking
rather scared, in a kind of procession, Loo coming last with Alf, who
had to be held tightly by the hand lest he should break out into
gambols, and destroy all the solemnity of the proceeding. Mrs Clifford
was sitting by the fire when they went in, in an attitude of thought.
The candles were not lighted, and it was very easy to suppose that mamma
herself looked sad, and was quite in a state of mind to be thus
addressed. Harry and Mary, rather ashamed of themselves, were already
carrying on a quiet scuffle at the door when Loo came up to them. “You
go first, Harry”—“No, you,” they were saying to each other. “Oh, you
stupid, stupid children, you have no feeling!” cried Loo, bitterly, as
she swept past them. Mrs Clifford looked up with a smile, and held out
her hand, which she expected to be grasped immediately by a crowd of
little fingers, but the mother’s looks were dreamy to-night, and some
one else was before her children in her thoughts. She was startled when
she felt Loo’s little cold hand put into hers, and woke up and pushed
her chair back from the fire to look at the little things who stood
huddled together before her. “What is the matter?” said Mrs Clifford.
“Oh, mamma, mamma,” cried Loo; her poor little voice grew shrill,
notwithstanding all her efforts. She had to make a pause, and to
preserve her dignity had to let Alf go, who immediately went off to ride
on the arm of the sofa, and compromise the seriousness of the scene.
“Oh, mamma, dear,” said Loo, feeling that no time was to be lost, “we
have come to say that we will never believe anything; that we know you
love us, and will always love us—and—and—we believe in _you_; oh, mamma,
we believe in you, and we will always stand by you, if everybody in the
world were on the other side.”
Here Loo fell, choking with tears and passion, on her mother’s
footstool, and laid her poor little head, which ached with cold and
crying, on Mrs Clifford’s lap. The mother’s eyes had woke up out of all
their dreaming. Perhaps it was as well the candles were not lighted.
That cheek which the widow screened with her hand was as crimson and as
hot as Harry’s had been reading over the fire. She was glad Loo’s keen
eyes were hidden upon her lap; she blushed, poor tender woman as she
was, before her children. The little woman-daughter was dreadful to her
mother at the moment—a little female judge, endued with all the
awfulness of nature, shaming the new love in her mature heart.
“What does this all mean, children?” said Mrs Clifford, trying to be a
little angry, to conceal the shock she had received.
“Oh, please mamma, it’s Loo,” cried Mary, frightened. “She made us come;
it was one of her passions.”
“No, it was not one of her passions,” said Harry, who was Loo’s
champion; “it was to tell mamma we would always stand by her; and so I
will,” cried the boy on his own account, kindling up, “if there were any
robbers or anything—for I’m the eldest son when Charley’s at school.”
Loo heard this where she lay, with her head on her mother’s lap; she was
incapable of speech or motion almost, but she could not but groan with
impatience over the stupidity of the children; and Alf was riding loudly
on the arm of the sofa, shouting to his imaginary horse. Loo gathered
herself up with a blush upon her cheeks; it did not enter into her head
to imagine that her mother blushed much more hotly and violently when
the little face unfolded itself slowly out of her lap.
“Hush! Loo, don’t say any more,” said Mrs Clifford; then with a little
effort the mother put her arm round the child and drew her close. “I
understand what you mean—but you must not say any more,” she said; then
she stooped down her hot cheek upon that wet one of poor Loo’s. “We
shall all be very happy, I hope,” said Mrs Clifford in the dark, in her
little daughter’s ear. “I am doing it—for—for all your sakes, dear. He
will stand by you and me, and all of us, Loo. I hope we shall be—very
happy—happier even than we are now,” said Mrs Clifford, with a faint
little tremble in her voice and quiver at her heart. When she had kissed
Loo, and the child had gone away to compose herself, poor Mary, the
mother, sat for a long time looking into the fire with a terrible
misgiving upon her—“happier even than we are now.” Ah! just then she had
been so happy—all well in the prosperous, plentiful house; not an ache
or a trouble that she knew of among all her children; not a single look
of love dimmed to her yet by her resolution; and the new love, sweet as
any girl’s dream, restoring to her firmament all the transitory
delicious lights of youth. Somehow that prospect darkened under a
strange cloud of alarm and shame when the mother felt her cheeks flush
at the look of her woman-child. “I am doing it for—all their sakes,” she
tried to say to herself; but her innocence grew like guilt as she felt
in her heart that this pretence was not true.