CUTHBERT'S ROMANCE.
Janetta was hardly surprised when, two days later, she was asked to give
a private audience to Mr. Cuthbert Brand. She had not yet told Nora of
the course that she had pursued, for she was indeed rather unnecessarily
ashamed of it. "It was just like a worldly mamma asking a young man his
intentions about her daughter," she said to herself, with a whimsical
smile. "Probably nothing will come of it but a cessation of these silly
little attentions to Nora." But she felt a little shy and constrained
when she entered the drawing-room, and, while shaking hands with her
cousin, she did not lift her eyes to his face.
When she had taken a seat, however, and managed to steal a glance at
him, she was half-provoked, half-reassured. Cuthbert's mobile face was
full of a merry, twinkling humor, and expressed no penitence at all. She
was so much astonished that she forgot her shyness, and looked at him
inquiringly without opening her lips.
Cuthbert laughed--an irrepressible little laugh, as if he could not help
it. "Look here, Cousin Janetta," he said, "I'm awfully sorry, but I
really can't help it. The idea of you as a duenna and of Wyvis as a
heavy father has been tickling me ever since yesterday, and I shall have
to have it out sooner or later. I assure you it's only a nervous
affection. If I didn't laugh, I _might_ cry or faint, and that would be
worse, you know."
"I don't quite see the joke," said Janetta, gravely.
"The joke," said Cuthbert, "lies in the contrast between yourself and
the role you have taken upon you."
"It is a role that I am obliged to take upon me," interposed Janetta;
"because my sisters have no father, and a mother whose health makes it
impossible for her to guard them as she would like to do."
"Now you're going to be severe," said Cuthbert; "and indeed I am
guiltless of anything but a little harmless fooling. I can but tender my
humblest apologies, and assure you that I have resigned my post in Mrs.
Smith's educational establishment, and that I will keep my flowers in
future to myself, unless I may send them with your consent and that of
my authoritative elder brother."
Janetta was not mollified. "It is easy for you to talk of it so
lightly," she said, "but you forget that you might have involved both my
sisters in serious trouble."
"Don't you think I should have been able to get them out again?" said
Cuthbert, with all the lightness to which she objected. "Don't you think
that I could have pacified the schoolmistress? There is one thing that I
must explain. My fancy for teaching was a fad, undertaken for its own
sake, which led me accidentally at first to Mrs. Smith's school. I did
not know that your sisters were there until I had made my preliminary
arrangements."
Janetta flushed deeply, and did not reply. Nora's imagination had been
more active than she expected. Cuthbert, who was watching her, saw the
flush and the look of surprise, and easily guessed what had passed
between the sisters.
"Did you ever read Sheridan's 'Rivals?'" he asked, quietly. "Don't you
remember the romantic heroine who insisted on her romance? She would
hardly consent to marry a man unless he had a history, and would help
her to make one for herself?"
"I don't think that Nora is at all like Lydia Languish."
"Possibly not, in essentials. But she loves romance and mystery and
excitement, as Lydia Languish did. It is a very harmless romance that
consists in sending a few cut flowers by Parcel Post, Cousin Janetta."
"I know--it sounds very little," Janetta said, "but it may do harm for
all that."
"Has it done harm to your sister, then?" Cuthbert inquired, with
apparent-innocence, but with the slight twinkle of his eye, which told
of inward mirth. Janetta was again growing indignant, and was about to
answer rather sharply, when he once more changed his tone. "There," he
said, "I have teased you quite enough, haven't I? I have been presuming
on our relationship to be as provoking as I could, because--honestly--I
thought that you might have trusted me a little more. Now, shall I be
serious?"
"If you can," said Janetta.
"That's awfully severe. By nature, I must tell you, I am the most
serious, not to say melancholy, person in creation. But on a fine day my
spirits run away with me. Now, Janetta--I may call you Janetta, may not
I?--I am going to be serious, deadly serious, as serious as if it were a
wet day in town. And the communication that I wish to make to you as the
head of the family, which you seem to be, is that I am head over ears in
love with your sister Nora, and that I beg for the honor of her hand."
"You are joking," said his hearer, reproachfully.
"Never was joking further from my thoughts. Getting married is an
exceedingly solemn business, I believe. I want to marry Nora and take
her to Paris."
"Oh, this is ridiculous: you can't mean it," said Janetta.
"Why ridiculous? Did I not tell you that I admired Miss Lydia Languish?
Her desire for a romance was quite praiseworthy: it is what every woman
cherishes in her heart of hearts: only Nora, being more naive and frank
and child-like than most women, let me see the desire more clearly than
women mostly do. That's why I love her. She is natural and lovable and
lovely. Don't tell me that I can't win her heart. I know I may have
touched her fancy, but that is not enough. Let me have the chance, and I
think that I can go deeper still."
"You said that you would be serious, but you don't know how serious this
is to me," said Janetta, the tears rising to her eyes. "My father told
me to take care of her: she is very young--and not very wise; and how am
I to know whether you mean what you say?"
"I do mean it, indeed!" said Cuthbert, in a much graver tone. "I have
got into the habit of talking as if I felt very little--a ridiculous
habit, I acknowledge--but, in this matter, I mean it from the bottom of
my heart."
"I suppose, then," said Janetta, tremulously, "that you must speak to
mamma--and to Nora. I am not at all the head of the house, although you
are pleased--in fun--to call me so. I am only Nora's half-sister, fond
of her and anxious about her, and ready to do all that I can do for her
good."
Cuthbert looked at her intently. Her face was pale, and the black dress
that she wore was not altogether becoming to her dark eyes and
complexion, but there was something pathetic to him in the weight of
care which seemed to sit upon those young brows and bear down the
slender shoulders of the girl. The new sensation thus given caused him
to say, with sudden earnestness--
"Will you forgive me for having spoken and acted so thoughtlessly? I
never meant to cause you so much anxiety. You see, I am not very well
acquainted with English ways, and I may have made more mistakes than I
knew. When Nora is my wife you shall not have to fear for her
happiness."
"You speak very confidently of making her your wife," said Janetta,
forgiving him in her heart, nevertheless. "But you have no house--no
profession, have you?"
"No income, you mean?" said Cuthbert, with his merry smile. "Oh, yes, I
have a profession. It does not pay me quite so well as it might do, but
I think I shall do better by-and-bye. Then I have a couple of hundreds a
year of my own. Is it too much of a pittance to begin upon?"
"Nora is quite too young to begin upon anything. If only you would leave
her alone for a year or two!--till she is a little more staid and
sensible!"
"But that's too late, don't you see? That's where my apologies have to
come in. I have disturbed the peace already, haven't I?"
"Mr. Brand," said Janetta, gravely, in spite of an exclamation of
protest from her cousin, "I don't think that we are going quite deeply
enough into the matter. There are one or two things that I must say:
there is no one else to say them. Nora is young and foolish, but she is
affectionate and sensitive, and if she once cares for you, you may make
the happiness or the misery of her life. Our dear father told me to take
care of her. And I am not sure that he would have sanctioned her
engagement to you."
"I'd better send Wyvis to talk to you," said Cuthbert, starting up and
nearly upsetting a chair in his eagerness. "I knew he could manage
and--and explain things better than I could. He's well up in the family
affairs. Will you see him now?"
"Now?"
"He's outside waiting. He wouldn't come in. I'll go and send him to you.
No, don't object: there are ever so many things that you two elders had
better talk over together. I must say," said Cuthbert, beginning to
laugh again in his light-hearted way, "that, when I think of Wyvis as a
family man, bent on seeing his younger brother _se ranger_, and you as
Nora's stern guardian, I am seized with an access of uncontrollable
mirth."
He caught up his hat and left the room so quickly that Janetta, taken by
surprise, could not stop him. She tried to follow, but she was too late:
he had rushed off, leaving the hall-door open, and a draught of cold air
was ascending the stairs and causing her stepmother peevishly to remark
that Janetta's visitors were really intolerable. "Who _was_ it, this
time?" she asked of her second daughter Georgie, who was standing at the
window--the mother and her girls being assembled in Mrs. Colwyn's
bedroom, her favorite resort on cold afternoons.
Georgie gave a little giggle--her manners were not perfect, in spite of
a term at Mrs. Smith's superior seminary for young ladies--and answered,
under her breath--
"It was Mr. Cuthbert Brand."
Nora's book fell from her knee. When she picked it up her cheeks were
crimson and her eyes were flashing fire.
"Don't be absurd, Georgie. It was _not_."
"Indeed it was, Nora. I suppose he came to see Janetta, and Janetta has
sent him away. Oh, how he's running, although he is a little lame! He
has caught some one--his brother, I believe it is; and now the brother's
walking back with him."
"I shall go down," said Mrs. Colwyn, with dignity. "It is not at all
proper for a young person like Janetta to receive gentlemen alone. I
shall go and sit in the drawing-room myself."
"Then Janetta will take her visitors into the dining-room," said Nora,
abruptly. "She has only business with these people, mamma: they don't
come to visit us because they like us--it is only when they want us to
do something for them; so I would not put myself out for them if I were
you. And as for Janetta's being young, she is the oldest person amongst
us." And then Nora turned to her book, which she held upside down
without being at all aware of it.
"I do not know what you mean, Nora," was Mrs. Colwyn's fretful response;
"and if the other brother is coming here, I shall certainly not disturb
myself, for I believe him to be a wild, dissipated, immoral, young man."
"Just the sort of man for Janet to receive alone," murmured Georgie,
maliciously. Georgie was the member of the family who "had a tongue."
Meanwhile Wyvis had come into the house, though without Cuthbert, who
had thought it better to disappear into the gathering darkness; and
Janetta received him in the hall.
He laughed a little as he took her hand. "Cuthbert is a little
impatient, is he not? Well, he has persuaded me into talking this matter
over with you. I'm to come in here, am I?" as Janetta silently opened
the sitting-room door for him. "This looks pleasant," he added after a
moment's pause.
In the gathering evening gloom the shabbiness of the furniture could not
be seen, and the fire-light danced playfully over the worn,
comfortable-looking chairs drawn up to the hearth, on the holly and
mistletoe which decorated the walls, and the great cluster of geranium
and Christmas roses which the Adairs had sent to Janetta the day before.
Everything looked homelike and comfortable, and perhaps it was no wonder
that Wyvis--accustomed to the gloom of his own home, or the garish
splendor of a Paris hotel--felt that he was entering a new sphere, or
undergoing some new experience.
"Don't light the lamp," he said, in his imperious way: "let us talk in
this half-light, if you don't mind? it's pleasanter."
"And easier," said Janetta, softly.
"Easier? Does it need an effort?"
"I am afraid I have something unpleasant to say."
"So have I. We are quits, then. You can begin."
"Your brother has been asking if he maybe engaged to Nora----"
"If he may marry her out of hand, you mean. That's what he wants to do."
"We know very little of him," said Janetta, rather unsteadily, "or of
you. Things have been said against you in Beaminster--you have yourself
told me things that I did not like--indeed, my father almost warned me
against you----"
A murmur from Wyvis Brand sounded uncommonly like "the devil he
did!"--but Janetta did not stop to listen.
"I never heard anything but vague generalities against _him_, but then I
never heard anything particularly good. I don't like the way in which he
has pursued his acquaintance with Nora. I have no authority with
her--not much influence with her mother--and, therefore, I throw myself
on you for help," said Janetta, her musical voice taking a pathetically
earnest cadence; "and I ask you to beg your brother to wait--to let Nora
grow older and know her own mind a little better--to give us the chance
of knowing him before he asks to take her away."
"You have not said either of the things that I was expecting to hear,"
said Wyvis.
"What were those?"
"How much money he had a year!"
"Oh, he told me about that."
"Or--an allusion to his forbears: his father's character and his
mother's relations--the two bugbears of Beaminster."
"I think nothing of those, if Cuthbert himself is good."
"Well, he _is_ good. He is as different from me as light is from
darkness. He is a little thoughtless and unpractical sometimes, but he
is sweet-tempered, honest, true, clean-living, and God-fearing. Will
that suit you?"
"If he is all that----"
"He is that and more. We are not effusive, Cuthbert and I, but I think
him one of the best fellows in the world. She'll be lucky who gets him,
in my opinion."
"All the more reason, then, why I must say a still more unpleasant thing
than ever," she replied. "Nora is in great trouble, because she has been
told what I have known for some time. Her mother does not always control
herself; you know what I mean? She must not marry without telling
this--we cannot deceive the man who is to be her husband--he must know
the possible disgrace."
"If every woman were as straightforward and honorable as you, Janetta,
there would be fewer miserable marriages," said Wyvis, slowly. "You are,
no doubt, right to speak; but, on the other hand, _our_ family record is
much worse than yours. If one of you can condescend to take one of us, I
think we shall have the advantage."
Janetta drew a long breath.
"Then, will you help me in what I ask?"
"Yes, I will. I'll speak to Cuthbert and point out how reasonable you
are. Then--you'll let him cultivate your sister's acquaintance, I
suppose? In spite of your disclaimers, I believe you are supreme in the
house. I wish there were more like you to be supreme, Janetta. I
wish--to God I wish--that I had met you--a woman like you--eight years
ago."
And before she could realize the meaning of what he had said to her, the
man was gone.