WHERE CAN SHE BE?
Something had on that particular day, at that special hour occurred to
disturb the customary serenity of Kingslough. Spite of the sun which
flared upon the terrace, blinds were drawn up and heads thrust out.
People stood in knots upon the Glendare Parade talking eagerly together,
and looking down into the sea. At the doors of the houses in Main Street
servants occupied the door-steps and gaped vaguely to right and left as
though expecting the coming of some strange spectacle.
In the middle of the horse-ways poodles, unexpectedly released from
durance in stuffy parlours, yelped at other poodles, and fought and ran
or were carried away. The young ladies who attended as day-boarders that
select establishment presided over by the Misses Chesterfield having
been accorded a half-holiday, came walking through the town to their
respective homes, thereby adding to the tumult. Thundering double knocks
resounded momentarily at the door of an insignificant-looking
three-storey house on the parade, in the lower room of which a very old
lady, feeble though voluble, sat wringing her hand, bemoaning her fate,
and appealing in turn to each of her visitors to “do something.”
“They are turning the water out of Hay’s mill-pond, and all the
fishermen are down on the shore, and Colonel Perris has taken his groom
and gardener to the Black Stream, and oh! my dear friend, let us try to
hope for the best,” said Mrs. Lefroy, one of the annual visitors to
Kingslough, acting with a wonderful naturalness the part of Job’s
comforter to the decrepit, broken woman she addressed.
“You may be quite sure, dear Miss Riley, that everybody is doing their
best,” added Mrs. Mynton kindly, if ungrammatically.
“And whatever may have happened,” broke in the clergyman who did not
reside in his parish, and never visited it save on Sunday mornings,
“whatever may have happened I need not remind so thorough a Christian
that—”
“How can you all be so silly as to frighten the poor old lady in this
absurd manner,” said a deep stern female voice at this juncture; “the
girl will come back safe and sound, never fear. Girls do not get
murdered, or drowned, or kidnapped so easily at this age of the world;
she will return about dinner-time, if not before, mark my words.” And
the speaker a hard-featured woman of more than middle age, who possessed
a kindly eye as well as decided manners, looked round the persons
assembled as she finished, as though to inquire “Who is there amongst
you that shall dare contradict me?”
For a moment there was silence, and then uprose a confused murmur of
many voices—amongst which one sounded shrill above the rest.
“If ye think ye are in England still, Mrs. Hartley—” commenced the owner
of that cracked treble in a brogue which made one at least of her
auditors shiver.
“Pardon me, Miss Tracey, I never indulge in day-dreams,” interposed Mrs.
Hartley, rustling across the room in one of those stiff black silks,
which were at once the envy and the condemnation of feminine Kingslough,
“but whether people are in England or Ireland, I consider it very
foolish to meet trouble half way. Particularly in this case, where I
hope and believe the trouble is all imaginary.”
“Ah! and indeed we hope that too, every one of us,” said Mrs. Mynton,
who was regarded in Kingslough as a sort of peace-making chorus.
“Perhaps _you_ know where Nettie is, Mrs. Hartley,” suggested Mrs.
Lefroy, who on the score of her husband’s name claimed a relationship
with various distinguished members of the bar which it would have
puzzled the king-at-arms to trace, and adopted in consequence a severe
and judicial deportment amongst her acquaintances.
“I know no more of Miss O’Hara’s movements than you do, perhaps rather
less,” replied the lady addressed, “but until I am positively assured
some accident has happened to her, I prefer to believe that, finding she
was too late for school, she took a holiday, and has walked up to the
Abbey to sketch, or gone to see some of her young friends, who may
perhaps have induced her to spend the remainder of the day in
forgetfulness of backboards and Cramer’s exercises.”
“Ah! you don’t know Nettie.”
“Indeed, you don’t know Nettie.”
“You know nothing at all about Nettie,” broke forth Miss Riley’s
visitors, whilst Miss Riley herself, shaking her poor old head, mumbled
out from jaws that were almost toothless, “Nettie would not do such a
thing, not for the world.”
For a moment Mrs. Hartley remained silent; but she was a person who did
not like to be beaten or to seem beaten, and accordingly, with a sudden
rally of her forces, she inquired,—
“Had the girl any lover?”
Now this was in reality the question which every woman in the room had
been dying to put; and yet so unquestioned was Miss Riley’s
respectability of position and propriety of demeanour during seventy
years or thereabouts of maidenhood, that no one impressed by the
Hibernian unities had ventured to put it. Mrs. Hartley was however a
“foreigner” and audacious. “Had the girl a lover?” she asked, and at the
mere suggestion of such a possibility, the curls in Miss Riley’s brown
front began slowly to slip from their tortoiseshell moorings, whilst her
wrinkled old cheeks became suffused with a pale pink glow, just as
though she were eighteen again, young enough to be wooed, and won, and
wed.
“I am astonished at such an idea entering into the mind of _any_ one who
ever beheld my grand-niece,” she remarked, the very bows in her cap
trembling with indignation and palsy. “Nettie is only sixteen—a mere
child—”
(“With a very pretty face,” remarked Mrs. Hartley, _inter alia_.)
“Who has never, so far as I know,” went on the octogenarian, “spoken
half-a-dozen words to a—a—gentleman since she was ten years old.”
“And pray, my dear Miss Riley, how far do you know about it,” retorted
that irrepressible Englishwoman. “How can you, who never stir out of
your house except for an hour in the sun, tell how many half-a-dozen
words a young girl may have spoken to a young man. Have you asked that
delightful Jane of yours if she ever suspected a love affair?”
“You can have in Jane, if you like,” said Miss Riley. “If anything of
that sort had been going on, Mrs. Hartley, Jane was too old and faithful
a servant to have kept it from me.”
“I wish we were all as sure Nettie has met with no accident, as we are
that she has always behaved, and always will behave, like the good
little girl we know her to be,” remarked Mrs. Mynton.
“It is natural though,” began Miss Tracey, “that seeing Mrs. Hartley is
an Englishwoman, she—”
“Nonsense,” interposed the lady, thus disparagingly referred to. “No one
can think more highly of Nettie than I; indeed if I had a fault to find
with her manners, it was only that they were too sedate and quiet for
such a young creature—such a very pretty young creature,” added Mrs.
Hartley reflectively.
“It is very hard upon me at my time of life,” said Miss Riley with a
helpless whimper, and the irrelevance of incipient dotage.
“Indeed it is; indeed we all feel that, but you must hope for the best.
We shall see Nettie come back yet safe and sound.” Thus the chorus,
while Mrs. Hartley walked to the window and looked out upon the sea, a
puzzled expression lurking in her brown eyes, and an almost contemptuous
smile lingering about her mouth.
“Can you not throw any further light on this matter, Grace,” she asked
at last turning towards a young girl who sat silent in one corner of the
room.
“I never saw Nettie after she left our gate at nine o’clock this
morning,” was the reply accompanied by a vivid blush. “I wanted her to
come in, but she said she was in a hurry; that she wished to get to
school early, so as to speak to Miss Emily about a French exercise she
did not quite understand.”
“And when you reached Kingslough House she had not arrived?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I believe Miss Moffat has already told us all she knows on the
subject,” interposed a lady who had not hitherto entered into the
conversation.
“I believe Miss Moffat knows more than she chooses to tell,” retorted
Mrs. Hartley, with a brusqueness which caused the eyes of every person
to turn towards the girl, who in a perfect agony of confusion
exclaimed,—
“Oh! Mrs. Hartley, I have not the remotest idea where Nettie is. I am
quite positive she had not another thought in her mind when she left me,
but to go straight to Kingslough House.”
“The first remark you made when you heard she had not reached school
was, that some accident must have happened to her.”
“Allow me to correct you, Mrs. Hartley,” said Miss Chesterfield. “Miss
Moffat’s words were, ‘something must have happened,’ meaning, as I
understood, that something must have happened to prevent her attending
as usual to her duties; that was what you intended to imply, my dear,”
added the lady, addressing her pupil, “is it not so?”
“Yes, that was what I intended to say,” the girl eagerly agreed.
“And when the man brought in her scarf, which he saw floating on the
pond, you thought she must have met with an accident?”
“Please, Mrs. Hartley, do not ask me any more,” pleaded the witness. “We
are making Miss Riley wretched. I cannot tell what to think. Very likely
her scarf blew off as she crossed the plank. It was not in the least
degree slippery this morning. I went that way myself. Besides the water
there is not deep enough to drown any person.”
A long sentence for a young lady of that day to utter in public. The
gift of tongues had not then been so freely vouchsafed to damsels under
twenty, as it has in these later times. And after listening to Miss
Grace’s little speech, Mrs. Hartley turned once more towards the window,
and looked again over the sea.
With a different expression, however, to that her face had worn
previously. She looked anxious and troubled. Nettie O’Hara’s beauty was
too pleasant a remembrance for this middle-aged lady to be able to
contemplate without dismay, the possibility of harm having come to her.
And that harm had come to her she began to fear, not in the way
suggested by the Job’s comforters who surrounded Miss Riley, but in a
manner which might make the dripping corpse and long fair hair rendered
unlovely by clinging sand, a welcome and happy memory by comparison.
No visitor who entered Miss Riley’s house that day, had been so much
inclined to pooh-pooh the alarm excited by the girl’s disappearance as
that remarkably sensible and matter-of-fact English lady, who now stood
silently looking out over the sea; but as that sweet young face,
innocent and guileless, and yet not quite happy, rose up before the eyes
of her memory, she felt as though she should like to go forth and assist
herself in the search foolish, kindly, incompetent, well-meaning friends
and acquaintances were making for the girl.
While she stood there she heard vaguely as one hears the sound of
running water, the stream of consolation and condolence flow on. They
were good people all, those friends of the poor palsied lady, who with
shaking head and trembling hands sat listening to their reiterated
assurances that she need not be uneasy, there would be good news of
Nettie soon; but not a competent counsellor could be reckoned amongst
them. That at least was Mrs. Hartley’s opinion when she turned and
surveyed the group, and her opinion took the form of words in this
wise:—
“If you hear nothing of Nettie before the post goes out to-night, Miss
Riley, I should advise you to write and ask your nephew, the General, to
come and see you without delay. I hope and trust, however, there may be
no necessity for you to write. I shall send this evening to know if your
anxiety is at an end.”
And so saying, Mrs. Hartley took the old lady’s hand, and held it for a
moment sympathizingly; then with a general curtsey and good morning to
an assemblage so large as to render a more friendly leave-taking
well-nigh impossible, she passed from the room, her silk dress rustling
as she went.
“That delightful Jane,” as Mrs. Hartley called her, was in waiting to
let the visitor out. She was a woman of thirty or thereabouts, ruddy
complexioned, and of a comely countenance. She was arrayed in decent
black. Some one or other of the Riley family was always dying, and her
mistress liked to see Jane in black, though the mistress could not
perhaps well have afforded to provide mourning for the maid.
Mourning was tidy and respectable, further it enabled Jane to wear out
Miss Riley’s tardily laid aside sable garments; but a better dressed
servant could not have been found in Kingslough than Jane M’Bride, who
now stood apron at her eye ready to open the door for Mrs. Hartley.
“My good Jane,” said that lady, pausing, “what do you think of all
this?”
“If anything has happened to Miss Nettie, it will break the mistress’s
heart altogether,” answered the servant.
“But what can have happened?” asked Mrs. Hartley.
“Nothin’ plaze God,” replied Jane, with that ready invocation of the
sacred name, which is an Hibernian peculiarity, and yet apparently with
a secret misgiving, that her own views and those of Providence might on
the special occasion in question have chanced to be at variance.
“Jane,” said Mrs. Hartley, unmoved by the solemnity of the
adjuration—perhaps because she was too much accustomed to hear it
used—“has it occurred to you that Miss Nettie might have gone off with
a—lover?”
“No, ma’am; oh! presarve us all, no; Miss Nettie had no lover, nor
thought of one.”
“You are quite certain of that? I speak to you as a friend of the
family.”
“Certain sure; it is as sure as death, Miss Nettie had no lover.”
“Then as sure as death, if Miss Nettie had not a lover, she will be back
here before the sun sets,” and adown the parade sailed Mrs. Hartley, all
her silken flags and streamers flying in the light summer breeze.
Before, however, she reached Glendare Terrace, came a soft voice in her
ear, and a light touch on her arm.
“May I walk with you, Mrs. Hartley?” said the voice.
“I want to confide in you,” said the touch.
“You here, Grace?” exclaimed Mrs. Hartley stopping and looking her young
companion straight in the face. “Most decidedly you may walk with me,
you know I am always glad of your company.”
And then they went on in silence. “Surely she will ask me some
question,” thought Grace. “I will give my lady line enough,” decided the
older woman—and the latter won.
“I have so wanted to speak to you, dear Mrs. Hartley,” said the girl,
after they had paced along a few minutes in silence.
“I like to hear you speak, Grace,” was the calm reply.
“But about Nettie—”
“I understood you to say, my love, that you had told us all there was to
tell.”
“And so I have—told all I had to tell, but surely, surely—you know—that
is—I mean—dear Mrs. Hartley,” and the timid hand clasped the widow’s
well-developed arm more tightly, “I may trust you implicitly, may I
not?”
There was a second’s pause, then Mrs. Hartley said,—
“I hope you may trust me, Grace.”
“I have told all I know about Nettie,” went on the girl vehemently, “but
not all I suspect. Oh! Mrs. Hartley, when I heard you advise Miss Riley
to send for the General, I could have _blessed_ you. If ever Nettie
comes back, you must never tell, never, what I am saying to you now.
Nettie was miserable and discontented, and—and wicked. She used to wish
she was dead. Oh! how she used to cry at the prospect of being a
governess for life; and it _was_ hard, was it not, poor dear? I cannot
bear to think about it. She seemed good and kind to Miss Riley, but she
was not a bit grateful, really. Papa never liked Nettie. I did, and I
like her still, but somehow, try her as one would, soft and sweet as she
appeared, one always seemed to be getting one’s teeth on a stone. I am
afraid you will think me dreadfully unkind, but I _must_ talk to
somebody, and, may I, please, talk to you?”
“Certainly, Grace, if you will make yourself intelligible,” was the
reply; “but I want to understand. Not fifteen minutes since you said you
were certain that when Nettie parted company with you, she had, to use
your own expression, which, if you were my child, I should beg of you
never to use again, ‘not another thought in her mind but to go straight
to Kingslough House.’”
“If I talked English, like you,” retorted Grace, “everybody in Ireland
would laugh at me.”
“Do you talk Irish, then?” asked Mrs. Hartley.
“You know what I mean,” was the answer, and once again Mrs. Hartley felt
the soft hand clasping her arm.
“My love, I do know what your Irish-English means, but not in the
slightest degree do I comprehend your mystery. Do you believe Nettie has
committed suicide?”
“Suicide!” with a shiver, “why should she?”
“Do you believe she is drowned?”
“No! oh, no!”
“Will she return to the Parade to-night?”
“I hope she may. How can I tell?”
At this juncture Mrs. Hartley freed her arm from Miss Moffat’s grasp.
“My dear child,” she said, “you had better go home to your father. He is
a man of mature years, and may like to be fooled. I am a woman of mature
years, and the bare suspicion of being fooled is intolerable to
me—good-bye.”
Then Miss Moffat suddenly brought to book, exclaimed,—
“I have no mother, Mrs. Hartley, and my father never liked Nettie, and I
liked her so—so much.”
“And therefore you know what has become of her—where she has gone?”—a
sentence severely uttered as an interrogative.
“No! I wish I did—I wish I did.”
“What do you suspect? you may be quite frank, Grace, with me.”
“She had a locket she wore inside her dress, a ring she put on sometimes
and said belonged to her grandfather; but it was quite a new ring, and
the hair in the locket was black as jet. The locket fell out of her
dress one day, and she invented in her confusion two or three stories
about it. If she had only told me—if she had only said one word—Nettie,
Nettie,” wailed the girl, extinguishing with that cry the last ray of
hope Mrs. Hartley’s horizon had contained.
“Grace,” began that lady, after a long and painful pause, “you reminded
me a little time since that you have no mother. May I talk to you like
one?”
“Dear Mrs. Hartley, yes! what have I done wrong?” and Grace’s hand stole
back to its accustomed place, and for once Mrs. Hartley thought her
companion’s accent more than pretty, something which might even have
attracted admirers at “the West End.”
“Nothing, I hope; I trust you never will; but does your great interest
in Nettie O’Hara arise from the fact that you and John Riley are likely
to be much hereafter one to another?”
Instantly the hand was withdrawn, and a quick flush passed over the
girl’s face.
“John and I are nothing to each other but very good friends. He does not
care enough for me, and I do not care enough for him, for things to be
different. I only wish Nettie and he could have liked each other, and
made a match. Perhaps in time she would have grown good enough for him.”
“You think John Riley a very good man, then?”
“Yes, too good and rare—” began the girl, when her companion interrupted
her with—
“You little simpleton, run home, and to-night when you say your prayers,
entreat that if you ever marry, you may have just such a good and rare
(though foolish and capable of improvement) husband as John Riley. In
all human probability you never will be anything more to each other than
you are now; but still keep him as a friend, and you shall have me too,
Grace, if you care for an old woman’s liking.”
“Though I am not pretty like Nettie,” added the girl.
“You are pretty, though not like Nettie. Ah! child, when you are my age
you will understand why we, for whom admiration, if we ever had the
power to attract it, is a forgotten story, are so tender to girls. Oh! I
wish I had that fair-haired Nettie beside me now. How shall I sleep if
no tidings come of her to-night?”
“Surely there will,” said Grace softly.
“Surely there will not,” considered Mrs. Hartley; and so the pair
parted, Miss Moffat with the hope that although Nettie might have “gone
off” with somebody she would repent by the way and turn back, Mrs.
Hartley wondering who in the world that “somebody” might be with whom
the young lady had chosen to elope.
Could it be Mr. John Riley; that same John to whom Grace Moffat had, by
popular consent, been long assigned? Grace was young, but young people
grow older in a judicious course of years. John likewise had not yet
that head on his shoulders which is popularly supposed to bestow wisdom
on its possessor; but he was an honest, honourable, good-looking,
sufficiently clever young man, and as both families approved of the
suggested alliance (had done so indeed since Grace wore a coral and
bells), Kingslough considered the marriage as well-nigh _un fait
accompli_.
True, Grace had been known to declare “she never meant to leave her
father, that she did not think much of love or lovers, of marrying or
giving in marriage. Why could not girls let well alone, and when they
were happy at home, stay there? She was happy; she would always remain
at Bayview; she was well; she did wish people would leave her alone.”
Thus Grace, whilst John, when gracefully rallied on the subject by
acquaintances who never could be made to understand that if a man has
lost his heart, he does not care to talk about the fact, was wont
laughingly to quote the Scotch ballad, and say, “‘Gracie is ower young
to marry yet,’ and when she is old enough it is not likely she would
throw herself away upon a poor fellow like me.”
For Grace had a large fortune in her own right, and expectations worthy
of consideration, and she came of a good old family, and persons who
were supposed to understand such matters declared that eventually Grace
would be a very attractive woman.
But then that time was the paradise of girls; they held the place in
masculine estimation now unhappily monopolized by more mature sirens,
and if a girl failed in her early teens to develope beauty after the
fashion of Nettie O’Hara, her chances in the matrimonial market were not
considered promising.
Curls, book-muslin, blue eyes, sashes to match, blushes when spoken to,
no original or commonplace observations to advance when invited out to
the mild dissipation of tea, and a carpet-dance; such was the raw
material from which men of that generation chose wives for themselves,
mothers for their children.
It was the fashion of the day, and we are all aware that fashions are
not immutable.
Such is not the fashion now; and yet who, looking around, shall dare to
say that the old curl and crook and shepherdess business had not, spite
of its folly, much to recommend it?
Men made mistakes then no doubt, but they were surely less costly
mistakes than are made nowadays. If a husband take to wife the wrong
woman—and this is an error which has not even the charm of novelty to
recommend it—he had surely a better chance for happiness with natural
hair, virgin white dresses made after simplicity’s own device, innocent
blue eyes, and cheeks whose roses bloomed at a moment’s notice, than
with the powders, paints, and frizettes of our own enchanting maidens.
We are concerned now, however, with the girl of _that_ period. According
to the then standard of beauty, as by society established, Grace Moffat
was not lovely. With Nettie O’Hara the case stood widely different.
Had her portrait ever been painted, it might now have been exhibited as
the type of that in woman which took men’s hearts captive in those old
world days; golden hair hanging in thick curls almost to her waist;
large blue eyes, with iris that dilated till at times it made the pupil
seem nearly black; long, tender lashes; a broad white forehead; a
complexion pure pink, pure white; dimpled cheeks; soft tender throat;
slight figure, undeveloped; brains undeveloped also; temper, perhaps,
ditto.
A face without a line; eyes without even a passing cloud; an expression
perfectly free from shadow; and yet Grace Moffat described her favourite
companion accurately, when in vague language she likened her to some
fair tempting fruit, inside whereof there lurked a hardness, which
friend, relative, and acquaintance, tried in vain to overcome. It had
been the custom at Kingslough to regard Nettie as a limpid brook,
through the clean waters of which every pebble, every grain of sand was
to be plainly discerned. Now as Mrs. Hartley sat and pondered over the
girl’s mysterious disappearance, she marvelled whether Miss Nettie’s
innocent transparency might not rather have been that of a mirror; in
other words, whether, while showing nothing much of her own thoughts,
the young lady merely reflected back those of others.
She had been unhappy, yet who save Grace was cognizant of the fact? The
outside world always imagined she was interested and absorbed in those
studies, which were to fit her to fill a responsible position—perhaps
eventually at a salary of eighty pounds a year; such things were amongst
the chronicles of society—in that state of life in which strangely
enough Providence had seen fit to place an O’Hara. And yet what was the
truth? the position had been unendurable to her, and most probably the
studies likewise.
“Oh!” sighed Mrs. Hartley, sinking into the depths of a comfortable
easy-chair, “is truth to be found nowhere save at the bottom of a well?
and has John Riley anything to do with Nettie’s disappearance? If I find
he has, I shall renounce humanity.”
Nevertheless, how was she to retain her faith intact even in John Riley?
Not for one moment did she now imagine that if Nettie were actually
gone, and she believed this to be the case, she had gone alone. No
relative, Mrs. Hartley well knew, would welcome this prodigal with tears
of rejoicing—with outstretched arms of love. She had been slow to share
in the alarm caused by Nettie’s disappearance, by Nettie’s saturated
scarf; now she could not resist a gradually increasing conviction that
the girl’s conduct had belied her face, and brought discredit on her
family; that she had stolen away with some one who, fancying the match
would not be approved of by his own relatives, possessed power enough
over her affections to induce her to consent to a secret marriage.
A deeper depth of misfortune than a runaway match Mrs. Hartley had
indeed for a moment contemplated, as whilst the talk in Miss Riley’s
parlour ran on, her eyes looked over the sun-lit sea; but seated in her
own pleasant drawing-room, her reason refused to let her fears venture
again to the brink of so terrible an abyss. No; Nettie had always been
surrounded by honest and honourable men and women; women, who though
they might be at times malicious, fond of scandal, given to tattling
concerning the offences of their neighbours, would yet have done their
best to keep a girl from wrong, or the knowledge of wrong; men, who let
their sins of omission and commission be in other respects what they
would, had yet a high standard of morality, as morality concerned their
wives, mothers, sisters, children, and female relatives generally.
Had Nettie been one of the royal family, fenced round by all sorts of
forms and ceremonies, by state etiquette, and the traditions of a line
of kings, she could not, in Mrs. Hartley’s opinion, have breathed an
atmosphere more free from taint of evil, than that in which she had
hitherto lived and had her being.
It might be John Riley—incited thereto by love of her pretty face, and
fear of opposition from his family—had persuaded the girl to run off
with him. If this were so, the greater pity for both. He was poor and
struggling; her worldly fortune consisted of those personal charms
already duly chronicled, a very little learning, and a smattering of a
few accomplishments.
She knew as much as other young ladies of her age of that period; but
after all, “La Clochette,” the “Battle of Prague,” and other such
triumphs of musical execution were not serviceable articles with which
to set up house.
She had been in training for a governess, and why, oh! why, could not
John Riley have left her in peace to follow that eminently respectable,
if somewhat monotonous vocation?
“It must be John Riley;” that Mrs. Hartley decided with a sorrowful
shake of her head. Thanks to the blindness, or folly, or design of Grace
Moffat, the young man had been afforded ample opportunities of
contemplating Nettie’s pink cheeks, and blue eyes, and golden curls, in
the old-fashioned garden at Bayview.
She had counted there as nobody, no doubt, the demure little chit. She
had been still and proper, Mrs. Hartley could well understand. At a very
early period of her young life, Nettie was taught in a bitter enough
school the truth, that speech is silver, but silence gold.
Nevertheless, young men have eyes, and John Riley was at least as likely
as Mrs. Hartley to realize the fact that Nettie was a very pretty girl.
“And it will be misery for both of them,” decided the lady; “but there,
what can it signify to me, who have no reason to trouble myself about
the matter, to whom they are neither kith nor kin? I shall never believe
in an honest face again Mr. John Riley, nor in a blundering, stupid
schoolboy manner. There, I wash my hands of the whole matter; I only
wish they were both young enough to be whipped and put in the corner,
couple of babies.”
And then as a fitting result of her sentence, Mrs. Hartley sent up this
message to the Parade: “Mrs. Hartley’s kind love, and has Miss Riley
heard any tidings of her niece?” as by a convenient fiction Miss O’Hara
was called.
The answer which came back was, “Miss Riley’s best love to Mrs. Hartley.
She is very poorly, and has sent for the General. No news of Miss
Nettie.”
“What a shame,” thought Mrs. Hartley, “for them to keep the poor old
lady in such a state of suspense!” and she went to bed, having
previously corked up all the vials of her wrath, with the intention of
opening them sooner or later for the benefit of John Riley.
Alas! however, for the best laid schemes of humanity. Next morning, when
Dodson, Mrs. Hartley’s highly respectable and eminently disagreeable
maid, called her mistress, she brought with her into the room the
following announcement:—
“It is nine o’clock’ ’m, and if you please, ’m, Mr. Riley, ’m, is in the
drawing-room, ’m, and Miss O’Hara—”
“What of her, woman?” demanded Mrs. Hartley, in a tone Mrs. Siddons
might have envied, sitting bolt upright in bed and looking in her
_toilette de nuit_ a very different person indeed from the stately widow
whose dress was the envy and whose tongue was the dread of all the
ladies in Kingslough, whether married or single. “Don’t stand there
silent, as if you were an idiot.”
“Miss O’Hara have gone off with Mr. Daniel Brady, ’m, if you please,
’m,” and Dodson the imperturbable, having made this little speech,
turned discreetly to leave the room.
“If she pleased, indeed!” Whether she pleased or not the deed was done
and irrevocable.
For blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and golden hair there was in this world
no hope, no pardon, no chance of social or family rehabiliment; not even
when the eyes were bleared and glassy, not when the cheeks were pale and
furrowed, not when the thick, bright hair was thin and grey, might
Nettie ever imagine this sin of her youth would be forgiven and
forgotten.
An hour had been enough for the sowing, years would scarcely suffice for
the in-gathering.
All this Mrs. Hartley foresaw as she laid her head again on the pillow
and turned her eyes away from the sight of the bright sunbeams dancing
on the sea.
Meantime the door had closed behind her immaculate and most unpleasant
maid.