CONFIDENCES.
They were still at breakfast at Heatonshaw next morning when the new
cousin came to the door. He was on a good horse, which was a thing they
all remarked at once, being learned in such matters--and looked
handsomer in daylight than he had done at night. The household had been
late on the previous evening--a party being a matter of such rare
occurrence that it was considered only right to make the best of it,
both in kitchen and parlour, and to bustle half the night “putting
away.” The whole company had dispersed at a little after eleven; but
next morning there was as much license as if it had been the morning
after a ball. And the household felt equally dissipated; everything is
comparative; eleven o’clock at night was in Heatonshaw as bad as three
or four in the morning at another place. So they were still around the
breakfast table when young Brotherton rode up.
“That’s not Pilgrim’s horse,” Mr. Selby said. “It must be out of his own
stables; and he did not get that for nothing.” Even Liddy got up from
where she was sitting, a little out of the way, to peep at the new
arrival. He came in a few minutes after whip in hand.
“You are not so early, Mrs. Selby, as I feared. I made a very early
start lest you should be gone before I could get here.”
“We are not so early as all that,” said Joan, “and we’re not used to
have our home disturbed, and the house turned upside-down, as it was
last night. I’m one that thinks it a duty, where people have a nice
house and plenty to do with, to have your friends from time to time. But
it’s a great trouble both before and after. Not a servant in this house
was in their bed till long past twelve o’clock at night; and, poor
things, we could not be exacting this morning,” Joan added,
apologetically. “Liddy, if Mr. Brotherton will not take anything, we
will, maybe, better get ready to go.”
“Do not hurry for me,” the young man said. He was quite at his ease
talking to Philip Selby, whom it pleased his wife to see putting on
mildly the air of a man of the world when any invasion came from that
big place into the Fell-country. When they had gone to “put on their
things,” young Brotherton made himself very agreeable to the master of
the house. He spoke of my “cousins” as if he had known them all his
life: though all the time there was a look of semi-amusement on his
face. He had stumbled into a new life without knowing anything about it.
The servants up till after twelve, which was spoken of with bated breath
as a wonderful interruption of rule; the master and mistress, who “were
not exacting” after that tremendous vigil; the freshness and sweetness
of the rural place, all produced a great effect upon him. He thought it
a kind of Arcadia, an Arcadia dashed with reminiscences of hot supper,
and some vagaries of homely fashion which struck Brotherton as more
amusing than all the similar vagaries which he had come across before.
When the ladies came down again, Joan attired in a bonnet which was more
striking in its colours and composition than was common, ready to drive
her phaeton to the White House, and Lydia in her riding habit, his
pleasure in the sunshiny expedition he was about to make was as great as
his amusement in finding himself a member of the primitive society,
almost of the family, which was so simple and so kind. He watched the
packing of the phaeton with laughing eyes. Lydia’s box, containing her
evening dress no doubt, was carefully fastened on behind, and in front,
in the vacant seat, was a basket, in which there were a number of
delicacies from the feast, which Mrs. Selby thought “Mother might like:
or if she doesn’t care for them herself, it will always be a pleasure to
give them away,” said Joan; “though you must not think, Mr. Brotherton,
that I am forgetting our own poor folk. A little bit that is out of the
way, that comes from the party--everybody likes that.” He helped to lift
the basket into the phaeton almost with reverence. The feast of last
night became beautiful to him in this light. How many had he seen, much
more delicate and costly, of which the fragments went to the dogs,
nobody dreaming of the “poor folk!” Mr. Selby put Liddy upon her horse
while the young stranger was helping with the basket, and this he felt
to be a sacrifice on his part, in consonance with the kind and homely
charity that breathed about the place. Then Philip Selby promised to
walk over to join his wife in the afternoon, and the party went off,
Mrs. Selby in advance, talking cheerily to her horse, bidding him to get
on, and not bother her with a whip. Liddy and the young man set out
soberly together. They did not say much for the first mile or two. Now
that they were alone together they were a little abashed by each other.
He thought her the prettiest girl he had ever seen--which was by no
means the case, for Liddy, though very pretty, was not a wonder of
loveliness; and she thought him, with more reason, the finest gentleman
that had ever came across her path. She asked herself how it was that he
was so different from Raaf Selby? but could not make any reply. He was
like nobody she had ever seen. “This is what a gentleman is, a real
gentleman, the kind that goes to Court and sees the Queen; the kind that
is in Parliament and rules the country; the kind that everybody tries to
be like, and that Raaf Selby would fain be taken for--he!” Liddy said to
herself; and she was abashed, and did not talk much to her companion.
Indeed it was not till they were near the White House that she ventured
to ask a question which had been long on her lips.
“Are you a member of Parliament, Mr. Brotherton?”
“Oh, no,” he said, laughing; “it is my father you are thinking of. I
have never attained that dignity. I ought to have told you more about
myself before I asked admittance; but Mrs. Selby was so kind. I am a
briefless barrister, if you know what that is.”
“A lawyer with nothing to do,” said Liddy; “one reads about them in
books.”
Young Brotherton laughed. “It is as good a definition as another,” he
said; “but sometimes it means only some one who has pretended to study
for a profession which is all a pretence together, and never comes to
anything. That is my case: and I have been wandering over all the
world.”
“In Italy?” asked Lydia, with eager eyes.
“Oh, yes. You are fond of Italy? I daresay we shall find we have
sympathies on that point. My mother is a great devotee; she would live
there all the year round if we would let her. I wonder which is your
favourite spot.”
“Oh!” cried Lydia, with all her heart in her voice, “I have no
favourite spot; I only know it by name. Italy is where everything
happens--all the stories are there: and besides,” she added, “I have a
private reason too.”
He looked at her with some curiosity, and a great deal of interest. What
could the private reason of a young girl be? “You have, perhaps,” he
said, “friends there?”
Lydia shook her head. “If you are our cousin, Mr. Brotherton, and going
to know all about us--”
“_If_ I am your cousin! Do you think I am making a false claim, Miss
Joscelyn?” he said.
“--then you will soon know about Harry,” said Lydia, going on in the
same breath. “I have a brother who went away a great many years ago. We
don’t know where he is, or anything about him; but I am sure if I could
go abroad I should find him--that is why I am always so anxious to talk
to anyone who has been there.”
“Where?” he said.
“Abroad.” Lydia said the word with all simplicity. “Abroad” meant
everything to her. It meant the place in which Harry was, and where she
should certainly find him if she got there. When she said “Italy” she
meant much the same thing. Not Italy, of which she knew little, except
by the stories in the “Book of Beauty;” but a vague and beautiful place
in which everything that was wonderful happened, and in which it would
be natural that this should happen too.
But Brotherton, whose knowledge was more precise, was puzzled. He did
not know whether to follow out this line of conversation, which promised
to become intimate, or to go back to subjects personal to himself. He
had no right to inquire into the story of the family prodigal, he
thought; but still, as the door had been opened to him, how was he to
turn from it? “I have gone abroad since ever I can remember,” he said;
“my mother, as I tell you, is never so happy in England as out of it.
She is rather an invalid, and she cannot bear the cold. When I was a boy
I scarcely knew where my home was.”
“Are there many of you?” asked Liddy, full of interest. She did not
understand a small family, and a vision came on her of sisters, girls
like herself, companions such as she had never had; but this new idea
was alarming as well as delightful, and she could not help fearing that
young ladies who were equal to her new friend would think themselves
above her; therefore it was almost a relief, though at the same time a
disappointment, when he laughed and said, “I am all the daughters of my
father’s house, and all the brothers too,”--words which she thought she
had heard somewhere else, but was not clear about. And then they went on
again quite silently for a time, the wide valley all about them, the air
breathing in their faces, the great world all to themselves. Joan,
driving in her steady way, was round the next corner, well ahead, and
there was nothing but these two figures stalking on in the sunshine,
with their shadows behind them. Liddy felt that she did not care to
talk. The sensation was sweet, and tranquil, and friendly, and furnished
all that was required, without any talking at all. It is impossible to
describe what an interruption it was, a kind of outrage upon the quiet,
when, as they went round that next corner, skirting the hedgerows, they
were suddenly met face to face by young Selby, on his big brown horse.
Even Lydia, not too favourably disposed towards him, had been obliged to
admit on former occasions that Raaf Selby looked well on his big horse.
But to-day he positively offended her by his appearance. There is no
class of men in the world so delightful, so helpful, so kind, so modest
about their own merits, and of so much service to all the rest of the
world, as doctors; but yet there is a compound of rudeness, jauntiness,
pretension, and vulgarity to be found now and then in a country
practitioner, which can nowhere else be paralleled. Raaf Selby was not
always like this, nor was it at all the impression which he made upon
the general mind, or even upon Liddy’s, who, in other times, had
considered him, as all the country did, “quite a gentleman.” But when he
met them now he had a red face (which was not his fault) and the air of
having been up all night (which, if it had been true, would have been a
virtue in him), and looked altogether like a rural dandy trying to be
something which he was not.
“Hullo, Miss Liddy,” he said, “I suppose you kept it up to all the hours
last night after the rest of us were gone?”
“I don’t know what there was to keep up,” Liddy said, with an indignant
blush; upon which young Selby laughed loudly.
“Ah, I daresay; but _I_ know,” he said, with an open look at Brotherton,
a look full of insolence and jealousy--and he gave a great laugh. “I
was out of it last night; but I haven’t always been out of it,” he said.
Lydia was a girl not at all disposed in her own person to submit to any
impertinence, but she got alarmed when she saw the gathering clouds on
her companion’s face. “I think you are alluding to something I don’t
understand,” she said, firmly, “but I need not ask what it is, to detain
you. We have got to keep up with Joan. Did you see Joan? She has got the
lead of us, and we are bound to make up to her now.”
“Yes, I saw she had got judiciously out of hearing,” said young Selby,
with another laugh. “That’s the first duty of a chaperon.”
In this he meant no particular offence, but spoke with the rough
bantering which was not disliked by ordinary country girls, just
sharpened with jealousy and envy, and the sting of seeing how thoroughly
harmonious and sympathetic Liddy and her new companion looked. As for
Brotherton he kept apart as far as he could. Good manners in another
generation would have suggested a use of his whip. Good manners now
restrained him from taking any notice, though his blood boiled.
“I don’t know about a chaperon’s duties,” Liddy said; “I think we must
go on. Good morning, Mr. Selby,” and they went on, leaving him in the
middle of the road, staring. He could not help looking after them,
though he did not like the sight. Two handsome young people, in complete
accord and harmony, moving along together as if to music, with no noise
nor boisterous gaiety, as would have been the case had Selby himself
ridden home with Liddy after the party, but in perfect friendliness and
union, as he thought.
“Good morning,” he called after them, “and my congratulations to Joan
upon her success last night.”
He was so bitter that he could not forbear from sending this last shaft
after them. Who was this fellow, that he should come in and spoil other
people’s chances? Selby recalled furiously to his recollection,
incidents of a similar kind that he had known. A swell comes down, he
pokes himself between a foolish lass and some honest man that likes her;
and when he has turned her head he rides away! The country gallant was
aware that he had acted this fine part himself in a lower class, when he
had merely laughed at the lass’s credulity and the fury of the clown
who was her true lover, but whom she could not endure after being
courted by a gentleman; but he did not laugh when the case was his own.
This swell, of course, would go away; but Liddy’s head would be turned;
and she was a girl who would have a good bit of money, besides being the
prettiest girl in the county. Joscelyn had been making money of late,
everybody said, and there was her Uncle Henry’s money, which must be
divided sooner or later; and all this to be put out of an honest
suitor’s reach by a young fellow who would not even take it himself, but
only spoil the lass for a better man. This was what was rankling in
Selby’s heart as he rode away.
“Is Mr. Selby a relation of yours?” Brotherton asked.
“Only of Joan’s--my sister’s--husband. It is not bragging,” said Lydia,
with a little blush, yet a slight elevation of her head as well, “but we
are very different from the Selbys, Mr. Brotherton. Many people thought
Joan made a very poor marriage. I don’t think so, for she is fond of
Philip, and he is so good; but the Joscelyns are the oldest family--I
don’t speak out of vanity--the oldest family in the county. We used to
be great people,” said Liddy, laughing, but very serious all the same,
“in the old days.”
“I always knew,” said Brotherton, “that it was an old name.”
“Oh, there are all sorts of people who have old names; but we are the
real people; if you stay long we will show you the old tower. There have
been Joscelyns in it ever since there was any history at all.”
She gave her head a slight fling backwards, and laughed again, half at
herself--but yet Lydia meant every word she said. Young Brotherton, for
his part, had been brought up in more enlightened circles, and would
have thought of himself that he failed in that “sense of humour” which
is the modern preservation from all absurdities, had he spoken of his
family in this way. He held his tongue on the subject, and thought that
he esteemed one name as much as another, and was no respector of
persons; and he laughed in his heart at Lydia’s brag, and admired, with
an indulgent sense of superiority, to see how this sentiment of family
pride kindled her eyes and elevated her head. But all the same he was
impressed by it. It produced its effect upon him, as it does upon every
Englishman. He liked the boast, of which he did not fail to see the
ludicrous side, and which his more cultivated taste would have entirely
prevented him from putting forth in his own person--but in Liddy he
liked it, and laughed, yet was more pleased with her and his connection
with her. She carried it in her face, he thought, and in every movement
of her untutored, yet graceful, carriage. It did not occur to him to
think that homely Joan, soberly speeding along the road in her phaeton,
had all the same advantages of blood.
Mrs. Joscelyn came out to meet them at the door. She liked to see her
Liddy get down beaming, from her horse--the horse as handsome as
herself, which Mrs. Joscelyn began for the first time to see the beauty
of, now that her child was the rider. She did not know who the young man
was, and she did not much care. Her mind had not been awakened to the
matrimonial question, though, to tell the truth, no wild beast, no lion
with a devouring maw, would have wakened so much alarm in Mrs. Joscelyn
as the appearance of a lover for Liddy. That would have inferred the
saddest fate for herself, the destruction of her present sweet life,
and all the late happiness which had come to her in compensation for her
troubles; but fortunately such an idea did not enter into her mind. It
was a pleasant arrival. Joan, always active and bright, lifting down
with her own hands her big basket, stood in the hall watching too the
arrival of the young people, yet calling out to the groom some prudent
suggestions about her own horse, which was being led away to the
stables. She was as well informed about all the necessities of the
stable as any of them, and took the deepest interest in the welfare of
the animals, and she stepped forward to pat the fine neck of Liddy’s
steed as her mother got the young rider in her arms.
“Did you ever see a prettier creature?” she said to Brotherton, “and I
would not say but there were two of them. But mother’s just a fool about
Liddy. She thinks there’s nothing like her on the face of the earth.
Mother, here’s a relation come to see you,” she added, turning round.
Mrs. Joscelyn gave a little cry. Brotherton was standing against the
light, so that his features were not at first decipherable. She made a
quick step forward, throwing out her hands, then grew suddenly pale.
“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” she said, faintly. “I am sure I
beg your friend’s pardon, Joan, and yours too.”
“I see what you’re thinking of, mother--but there’s nothing in it,” Joan
said. “This is young Mr. Brotherton, who’s come to the Fells asking for
a cousin of his name that married here long ago. If it’s not you, I
don’t know who it can be--and I’ve brought him to see you. It would be
his father you knew, for he’s but a young lad himself, as you can see.”
“He’s kindly welcome,” Mrs. Joscelyn said, and he was brought into the
parlour, and a great deal of family explanation was gone through. Mrs.
Joscelyn had her pride of birth, as well as her daughter, and it had
always been a secret pleasure to her to think that there was a Sir John
in her family, who might turn up some time or other and balance the
faded Joscelyn pretensions with a far more tangible living dignity. For
her own part, she did not know anything about Sir John; but it gratified
her mightily to think that he had remembered he had a cousin married in
the Fell-country. “There could not be any--stranger that it would give
me more pleasure to see,” she said.
Young Brotherton, for his part, was delighted with his old cousin. It
was from her, he perceived with pleasure, that Liddy had taken her
willowy grace, and the refined and delicate features which bore little
resemblance to those of Mrs. Selby. He was in a humour to be pleased
with everything he saw. When the master of the house appeared, he
thought him the model of an old North-country squire, rough, perhaps,
but manly and full of character, as suited that strong-minded country.
The plainness of manners and living, the woman-servant, not very adroit,
that served the dinner--which was plainly dinner, and not luncheon--the
atmosphere of farm and stables outside of the house, instead of park and
pleasure-grounds, all struck him in the most favourable light. Liddy had
thrown glamour in the young man’s eyes; he saw them all through her.
These, the unusual features in her surroundings, appeared to him in the
form of characteristic traits and country peculiarities, not as symptoms
of a level of society lower than his own. It was all piquant, novel,
delightful, and when he was asked to stay, a grace which Joscelyn put
forth to the wonder and admiration of all the household, he accepted the
invitation with eagerness. Mrs. Selby, for one, could not get over her
astonishment.
“Nay, when father’s asked him there’s not a word to say,” she cried.
“Father! I would as soon have believed that you and me, Phil, would have
been asked to take tea with the Queen.”