Miss Norreys found the sheltered corner she was in search of, and then
she read her letter. It was a very long one, full of interest to her
for reasons besides those affecting Winifred. And more than an hour had
passed before, at last recalling herself to the present, she rose from
her seat to return to the house.
"How perfectly beautiful it is!" she thought. "This place is almost too
sunshiny, so far as I have seen it. I should like to know it in winter,
or in cloudy weather; I wonder if the `White cat's palace' feeling could
still remain, or if it would seem more commonplace and homely."
"Homely," in the sweetest sense of the word, it always was, however. As
Hertha went slowly in, crossing the white-panelled entrance hall, and
down one or two of the long passages, on a rather roundabout route to
her quarters--for she now knew the house well, and felt a fascination in
strolling about it--she passed one or two open doors, revealing glimpses
of "interiors" which carried her in fancy back by a century or two.
There was the still-room as it might have been in the days of the
great-great-grandmothers of the present inhabitants; the white-shelved
"napery" room with its snowy piles, which one knew by instinct must be
lavender-scented; even the girls' own sitting-room, which she passed on
one of the first-floor landings, in spite of the very nineteenth-century
piano and easel and wealth of books and book-cases, might, at the first
rapid glance, have been the legendary tabby-lady's own boudoir, with its
lattice-paned windows and polished floor.
"It is like no other place in the world," said Hertha to herself for the
twentieth time. "I only wish I could give to poor Winifred some of the
quite indescribable charm it has for me. I suppose it is just that she
has grown up in it; but yet Celia, and even Louise, feel it almost as I
do. Well, Winifred may awake in many ways yet. She will probably love
her home better when there is no stifled consciousness of self-reproach
mixed up with it. How glad I am she gave in before she--or I--knew the
contents of Mr Montague's letter. I must answer it at once, by the
bye."
She was standing in the corridor out of which her own room opened,
leaning idly against the balusters here surrounding a sort of gallery
overlooking the inner hall below, admiring the charming effects of the
morning sunshine creeping in at the capriciously placed windows of this
part of the house, lighting up the brasses of the great "dog fireplace,"
and flecking the well-worn crimson carpet of the shallow-stepped
staircase--a perfect picture of somewhat slumbrous peacefulness. All at
once, through the morning quiet and stillness, re-echoing up and down
from no direction that she could at once define, came a piercing
scream--a scream so utterly at variance with everything around, that the
startling terror of it was doubled in intensity.
Hertha looked about her, horror-stricken. Then realising that the sound
had entirely died away, she began to collect herself a little, to hope
that it was some trick or folly among the servants, and she was hurrying
to the stairs, when again broke out the cry; this time, however,
accompanied by wild confused words and the sound of hurrying footsteps.
They were hurrying towards her, and in another moment Miss Norreys
recognised the voice as Celia's.
"Oh, come, come quickly," she was calling. "She is dead! I am sure she
is dead!"
"Celia," said Hertha, as the girl came flying along wildly, "what _is_
the matter?"
For all answer Celia caught her by the arm and dragged her backwards
again--across the hall, for by this time Hertha had got to the foot of
the staircase--down a side passage to a door leading out to the grounds.
And there, just below the few steps leading from the terrace, for even
here there were terraces to descend from as in the front, lay the cause
of Celia's agonised screams.
It was Winifred, white and unconscious, very, very white, with the
half-closed, unseeing eyes, that make the dearest and best known face
look strange and dreadful.
"Is she dead?" gasped Celia, who was almost as white as her sister.
Hertha had stooped down beside poor Winifred, bending very closely over
her.
"Dead!" she repeated, looking up, "of course not. My dear Celia, you
must have more self-control."
The rather cold, seemingly unsympathising words brought the young girl
more quickly to herself than anything else could have done, which was
Hertha's intention, though, in truth, at the first moment she had been
nearly as terrified as Celia.
"Of course not. She has only fainted. Run and fetch Mrs Grimthorp--
and water--and then, perhaps, Louise. Yes, Louise, tell her quietly so
as not to startle her too."
Somewhat hurt, but inexpressibly relieved, Celia rushed off. And in a
few minutes the crowd of anxious faces and ready hands was only too
great. Miss Norreys dismissed them all, while she and the housekeeper
set to work to bring Winifred round again. After a while they
succeeded: she shivered and opened her eyes, smiled faintly at Hertha,
mentioning something about her head, then seemed to relapse into
semi-consciousness again.
"It is more than a common faint," said Hertha, regretfully. "I fear it
may have been something of a sunstroke. Poor child, I hope I was not
too hard upon her," she added to herself.
Winifred had to be carried into the house, to a bedroom, for there were
several such at White Turrets, on the ground floor; the doctor sent for,
and worst of all, her father and mother told of the catastrophe, a shock
which Hertha and Louise would gladly have spared them had it been
possible. And for a few hours there was some serious anxiety. But it
gradually dispersed. Hertha's idea had been correct: it was a mild case
of sunstroke, aggravated, no doubt, by the unusual agitation and emotion
that Winifred had gone through that same morning.
By the third day she was much better, though not yet well enough to
leave her room. And this was the day on which she was to have returned
to London with her friend.
"It is rather too bad--don't you think so?" she said to Hertha, "that
when I _had_ given in I should be tied by the leg like this,
literally,"--for in her fall one ankle had been sprained. "It seems to
take away all the--the credit of it, as it were," she went on, with a
rueful smile.
"No, dear, it does not. They all know--your parents and your sisters,
and," with a glance round to make sure that no one could hear, "your
cousin. They all know what you had resolved, and as soon as you are
well enough to talk more you will see what they feel about it," Hertha
replied.
A gleam of bright pleasure crossed Winifred's pale face.
"Still," she said, "does it not a little destroy your faith in our
guardian ghost, as you choose to consider her? If I had been standing
out about it, determined not to give in, she might have tried something
of the kind, but as I had given in--"
Her tone puzzled Miss Norreys.
"You don't mean to say that the White Weeper had anything to do with
your fainting-fit--your fall?" she said.
"N-no," replied Winifred. "But if she is really so concerned about us
all, about me in particular, she might have prevented it somehow, don't
you think?"
Her tone of matter-of-fact discussion of the subject was almost amusing.
Winifred would always be Winifred!
"As things have turned out, I scarcely see that the catastrophe affects
you or the whole question very much one way or the other," said Miss
Norreys, "except that--Winifred, it must show you how mistaken you have
been in thinking you are not deeply cared for and loved."
"Yes," said Winifred, flushing a little, "it may have been to show me
that." Then, after a little pause: "Practically, it only affects me in
this way, that I had made up my mind to go back to London with you to do
my work for a week or two--for nothing, of course," and here she grew
still more flushed, "till they replace me. And I wanted to collect my
things and to say good-bye to two or three people--the people where I
lodged, amongst them. I have been so interested in them--in the two
poor daughters; the father and mother are dreadful people, very often
intoxicated," she added calmly.
"My dear Winifred! And the society recommended such a place for a young
girl to live at?" exclaimed Hertha, aghast.
"Oh dear no, I found it out for myself. And I am not a young girl. I
was able to be of great use to them. But for me there would have been
an execution in the house ever so long ago."
And then some allusion in Mr Montague's letter--which, in her newborn
anxiety to spare Winifred further mortification, Hertha had determined
she should never see, recurred to Miss Norreys's mind. "It appears she
has even set the society's rules at defiance with regard to her
lodgings." She understood the sentence now.
"I can do any commissions that need to be done for you. I have arranged
now to stay till the day after to-morrow, and you will be able to tell
me all by then," she said quietly, thinking in her own mind that it was
probably very well that Winifred was not to return to her self-chosen
quarters at all. "The White Weeper must have been very wise not to have
prevented the accident, even supposing she could have done so," she
thought to herself, while half laughing at her own fancifulness. But
the idea suggested a question.
"What did make you fall, I wonder?" she said. "Do you think you fainted
first, or that the shock of the fall made you faint?"
"I don't know," said Winifred. "It was very strange. I was dizzy--that
was the sunstroke, I suppose. But I might have had a slight sunstroke
without either falling or fainting. I have never fainted before, so I
don't know anything about it. But it was very strange. I felt dizzy,
as I said, and I was going up the terrace steps--it was _the_ terrace,
you know, that runs on to the aspens--when all at once I became icy
cold, not cold in myself, but as if something outside me, something
coming to me, had made me cold. It was so startling, so extraordinary,
that the shock seemed to paralyse me--I felt myself going, and then I
must have fallen. The next thing I remember is your face looking at
me."
"It is strange," said Hertha, "but I do not know much about fainting
either."
"You see," said Winifred, naively, "I don't think in all my life before
I had ever cried so violently, or--or felt so--so unlike myself."
"No," agreed Hertha. And in her own mind she said that there are
certainly "more things" close about us than we dream of. Who could say
if the awakening of Winifred's finer and more perceptive nature might
not have begun?
Two days later, Miss Norreys found herself in the train on her return
journey to London. She was alone this time--she could scarcely believe
that barely ten days had passed since the exquisite spring morning when
she and Winifred travelled down together to the home Hertha had pictured
to herself as so modest, if not humble, an abode. And even now she
could not repress a smile at the thought of her own astonishment at the
first sight of White Turrets, and her indignation against Winifred.
How much seemed to have happened in those few days! It had been to
Hertha like the reading of a very interesting book, in which, for the
time, her own life and thoughts had been merged.
"And not even the ghost story wanting, which is to be found in every
orthodox novel nowadays," she thought. "But I am not at the end of my
story of real life yet. I have to prepare for pretty Celia coming to me
next month, and to settle up Winifred's small affairs. I am sorry for
her accident, poor child, but very glad she is not coming up to London
just now. It would have been almost impossible to conceal from her the
real state of the case."
For Mr Montague's letter--the letter which Hertha had refrained from
reading before her talk with Winifred--had contained matter which would
have been sorely mortifying to the heiress of White Turrets. The
society among whose workers she had for a short time been enrolled had
decided on dismissing her, feeling naturally indignant at the deception
which its heads considered had been put upon them. Mr Montague was, of
course, exonerated from all intentional collusion, but his position in
the matter was unpleasant, and but for his firm and steady regard for
Hertha, he might have visited on her some of his annoyance.
"Nor could I have resented it if he had done so," thought Miss Norreys.
But Mr Montague had behaved well and unselfishly. All he could do he
had done, and that had been to obtain a promise that if Miss Maryon at
once sent in her resignation it would be accepted in lieu of a
dismissal.
"They are by no means sorry to be free of her," he wrote, "for though a
clever girl in several ways, her self-will and defiance of authority
were impossible to stand, coupled as they were with complete
inexperience and reluctance to ask or take advice." And then followed
the remark already quoted about Winifred's change of quarters.
Hertha sighed.
"I do feel terribly sorry to have involved Mr Montague so
uncomfortably," she said. "Even now I feel as if I could shake Winifred
with pleasure."
She took the letter out of her bag to read it again. She did not own to
herself that in the postscript--for there was a postscript--lay its
greatest interest. Yet her eyes dwelt on the two or three lines as if
they would read in them more, far more, than was there.
"I think I must tell you," wrote her old friend, "that at last, after
all these years, I have heard from Austin. He writes cheerfully, and
hopes to be able to return home for good next autumn. He is not
married."
But Hertha folded the page and replaced the letter resolutely in the
envelope.
"No," she said to herself, "I must not think of him at all. After all
these years, as Mr Montague says, it would be worse than folly, utter
madness, to risk reopening the old wounds."
And Hertha knew how to use a mental lock and key.
Still, all through the weeks and months that followed--through the
fatigue and not infrequent trials and annoyances of her own almost
overwhelmingly busy life--through her newly awakened, interest in, and
friendship for, the family at White Turrets--through _everything_, there
ran, like the rippling of an all but inaudible brook in the summer time,
a little acknowledged refrain of gladness, of hope. And the words,
which were set to this fairy music were always the same. "Austin is
coming home for good next autumn. He is not married."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Celia, pretty Celia, as Hertha called her to herself, joined Miss
Norreys before long, as arranged. Long afterwards--_always_ afterwards,
perhaps I should say--Hertha came to see what a happy thing for her at
this juncture had been the advent into her own daily life of this fresh,
enthusiastic, yet thoughtful young nature. They suited each other
admirably. Celia was so entirely in earnest, so forgetful of self in
her work, so grateful for the advantages she owed in considerable
measure to her friend, that she seemed never in the way. She had, of
course, many difficulties to contend with, for even genius cannot walk
along a royal road for many steps together; then come the rough bits,
the flat, dull, monotonous stretches, when one seems to be making no
way, and worst, yet best of all, perhaps, the ever-increasing
consciousness of falling short of one's ever ascending ideal.
But by degrees the great fact came to be incontestable--the genius was
there.
And Winifred, for her part, kept her promise man--or womanfully. She
had not boasted in saying she was not one to do things by halves. She
set her shoulder to the wheel of the duties she had never before taken
any real interest in. There came up to Celia now and then lists of
appallingly clever books on eminently practical subjects, all directly
or indirectly connected with the management, on the best possible lines,
of a large estate.
And when Celia returned to London again, after a happy Christmastide at
White Turrets the following winter, her report was most encouraging.
"I cannot tell you how well Winifred is getting on," she said, "and how
excellently she does everything. And with her as his more than right
hand, papa seems a different being. She really _is_ very clever."
"I am sure of it," Miss Norreys replied warmly.
"And the queer thing is, that though she has never been so useful in her
life, she is so much less self-confident," said Celia. "She is, oh, so
_much_ softer and more sympathising!"
"I think that is natural. She is no longer at war with herself, and
unconsciously on the defensive," replied the elder woman.
"But is it not delightful to you to think that it is really all _your_
doing, dear Hertha?" asked Celia.
Hertha smiled.
"I do not feel that it was," she said. "At least, my hands were
strengthened very strangely. I--Celia," she broke off abruptly, "I want
to ask you something. Has the White Weeper been heard of or seen of
late?"
"No, I believe not once," said Celia in surprise.
Hertha bent her head in sign of satisfaction.
"I thought so," she said. "Celia," she went on, "I think I will tell
you now what I have never told any one but Winifred."
And she related the story of her strange experience that moonlight night
at White Turrets.
Celia listened breathlessly, her face growing a shade paler.
"How extraordinary, _how_ strange!" she exclaimed. "And you think
Winifred was really influenced by it?"
"At least she did not mock at it--not in the very slightest," said
Hertha. "And--there was something more, that day she fainted, you
remember?"
"Yes," said Celia.
"Did she never tell you what she had felt?" And Hertha repeated what
Winifred had told her.
Celia shook her head.
"No, she never told me. She knows I have always been so frightened
about it. But--I scarcely see why she came, or tried to come, to
Winifred herself, when the point _was_ gained and she had given in?"
"Ah--I must tell you the rest, and this I think impressed your sister
most of all. A day or two after I returned to London, after that Easter
time--I went, at her request, to collect her things and pay some money
_she_ thought due to the people she had lodged with. What do you think
I found? A deserted house--in the possession of the police. There had
been a fire the night but one before, caused, no doubt, by the people
themselves, for they were a very undesirable lot. They had all escaped,
however, as they lived below; but the upper rooms, the very rooms
Winifred had had, were literally gutted--in a state of black, charred
desolation. We cannot say, of course, but when I explained my errand,
the policeman said the lady should be thankful that she had been
prevented returning. `Ten to one if she could have been got out alive,'
he said."
"Oh, Hertha!" exclaimed Celia, horror-struck. "And you told Winifred?"
"Yes, though not immediately. She was still ill when it happened. But
I think it impressed her exceedingly. Still, as she has not told you
about it, it may be as well never to mention it."
"I will never do so," said Celia. "But I think I shall never feel
_afraid_ of the White Weeper again."
Then she went on to tell her friend about Louise and Lennox in their own
house, their marriage having taken place the preceding autumn.
"They are as happy as the good people in a fairy tale," she said.
When Celia went home the next time--a little more than a year after she
had joined Miss Norreys, she took with her an astonishing piece of news.
Hertha, Winifred's typical, self-dependent woman, _Hertha_, was going
to be married!
"It is an old story," said Celia, calmly. "An old story, ending very
beautifully, _I_ think. I cannot tell you much, for I do not know the
whole. But they were separated for years, through nobody's fault
exactly, and neither has ever cared for any one else," she added simply.
"All the same," said Winifred, "I am just a _little_ disappointed in
her."
Celia's own plans were not materially affected by this unexpected event,
as, having by this time gathered experience, she was able to go on with
her studies without actually sharing her friend's home. Before long,
those studies led her further afield for a time. But this sketch, or
rough outline, rather--not worthy of the name of a story--of some girls'
experiences, must come to an end without chronicling the successes of
the young painter, of whom great things are prophesied.
There _are_ those, too, who predict that Celia Maryon is about to try
the experiment of reconciling the claims and duties of married life with
those of a special vocation. And if it be possible to succeed in so
doing, assuredly no woman could have a wiser, less exacting, and more
sympathising husband than the one whom rumour has selected for her--Eric
Balderson.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The End.