Mrs. HUNGERFORD (Margaret Wolfe Hamilton) (1855?-1897),
A little Rebel (1890) Lovell edition
A LITTLE REBEL
A NOVEL
BY
THE DUCHESS
_Author of "Her Last Throw," "April's Lady,"
"Faith and Unfaith," etc. etc._
Montreal:
JOHN LOVELL & SON,
23 ST. NICHOLAS STREET.
Entered according to Act of Parliament in the year 1891, by John
Lovell & Son, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture and
Statistics at Ottawa.
A LITTLE REBEL.
CHAPTER I.
"Perplex'd in the extreme."
"The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and
beautiful."
The professor, sitting before his untasted breakfast, is looking the
very picture of dismay. Two letters lie before him; one is in his
hand, the other is on the table-cloth. Both are open; but of one,
the opening lines--that tell of the death of his old friend--are
all he has read; whereas he has read the other from start to finish,
already three times. It is from the old friend himself, written a
week before his death, and very urgent and very pleading. The
professor has mastered its contents with ever-increasing
consternation.
Indeed so great a revolution has it created in his mind, that his
face--(the index of that excellent part of him)--has, for the
moment, undergone a complete change. Any ordinary acquaintance now
entering the professor's rooms (and those acquaintances might be
whittled down to quite a _little_ few), would hardly have known him.
For the abstraction that, as a rule, characterizes his features--the
way he has of looking at you, as if he doesn't see you, that
harasses the simple, and enrages the others--is all gone! Not a
trace of it remains. It has given place to terror, open and
unrestrained.
"A girl!" murmurs he in a feeble tone, falling back in his chair.
And then again, in a louder tone of dismay--"A _girl!"_ He pauses
again, and now again gives way to the fear that is destroying
him--"A _grown_ girl!"
After this, he seems too overcome to continue his reflections, so
goes back to the fatal letter. Every now and then a groan escapes
him, mingled with mournful remarks, and extracts from the sheet in
his hand--
"Poor old Wynter! Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at
the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy
clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again
even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at
the half-read letter on the cloth--_"this_ tells me so. His
solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a
solicitor---- Poor old fellow! He was often very good to me in the
old days. I don't believe I should have done even as much as I
_have_ done, without him... It must be fully ten years since he
threw up his work here and went to Australia!... ten years. The girl
must have been born before he went,"--glances at letter--"'My
child, my beloved Perpetua, the one thing on earth I love, will be
left entirely alone. Her mother died nine years ago. She is only
seventeen, and the world lies before her, and never a soul in it to
care how it goes with her. I entrust her to you--(a groan). To you I
give her. Knowing that if you are living, dear fellow, you will not
desert me in my great need, but will do what you can for my little
one.'"
"But what is that?" demands the professor, distractedly. He pushes
his spectacles up to the top of his head, and then drags them down
again, and casts them wildly into a sugar-bowl. "What on earth am I
to do with a girl of seventeen? If it had been a boy! even _that
_would have been bad enough--but a girl! And, of course--I know
Wynter--he has died without a penny. He was bound to do that, as he
always lived without one. _Poor_ old Wynter!"-- as if a little
ashamed of himself. "I don't see how I can afford to put her out to
nurse." He pulls himself up with a start. "To nurse! a girl of
seventeen! She'll want to be going out to balls and things--at her
age."
As if smitten to the earth by this last awful idea, he picks his
glasses out of the sugar and goes back to the letter.
"You will find her the dearest girl. Most loving, and
tender-hearted; and full of life and spirits."
"Good heavens!" says the professor. He puts down the letter again,
and begins to pace the room. "'Life and spirits.' A sort of young
kangaroo, no doubt. What will the landlady say? I shall leave these
rooms"--with a fond and lingering gaze round the dingy old apartment
that hasn't an article in it worth ten sous--"and take a small
house--somewhere--and-- But--er---- It won't be respectable, I think.
I--I've heard things said about--er--things like that. It's no good
in _looking_ an old fogey, if you aren't one; it's no earthly
use,"--standing before a glass and ruefully examining his
countenance--"in looking fifty, if you are only thirty-four. It will
be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll cut _her_,
and they'll cut me, and--what the _deuce_ did Wynter mean by leaving
me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death
of me," says the professor, mopping his brow.
"What"--wrathfully--"that determined spendthrift meant, by
flinging his family on _my_ shoulders, I---- Oh! _Poor_ old Wynter!"
Here he grows remorseful again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one,
too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor,
was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father
who was only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the
chance, seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his
father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a
Government appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very
insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason,
that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science. Wynter,
too, was a scientist of no mean order, and would, probably, have
made his mark in the world, if the world and its pleasures had not
made their mark on him. He had been young Curzon's coach at one
time, and finding the lad a kindred spirit, had opened out to him
his own large store of knowledge, and steeped him in that great sea
of which no man yet has drank enough--for all begin, and leave it,
athirst.
Poor Wynter! The professor, turning in his stride up and down the
narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand,
finds his eyes resting on that other letter--carelessly opened,
barely begun.
From Wynter's solicitor! It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have
_had_ a solicitor. With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and
begins to read it. At the end of the second page, he starts,
re-reads a sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes
illuminated. He throws up his head. He cackles a bit. He looks as if
he wants to say something very badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he
has forgotten how to do it, and finally goes back to the letter
again, and this time--the third time--finishes it.
Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it _first?_ So the
girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old
lady--maiden lady. Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss
Jane Majendie. Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would
never have been old maids, if they had resembled him, which probably
they did--if he had any. What a handsome fellow he was! and such a
good-natured fellow too.
The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his
spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his.
After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter
of anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He
glances at the letter again.
He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her
fortune, rather than of her.
The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of
her society--_he,_ of the estate only.
Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually _rich_. The professor
pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre
apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the
scientific world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has
enabled him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt,
and distinctly outside the line of _want,_ a thing to be grateful
for, as his family having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his
part, had abandoned his family in a _measure_ also (and with
reservations), and it would have been impossible to him, of all men,
to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any
kind. He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son. He
knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part all he
had to sustain him. But the mind requires not even the material
husk, it lives on better food than that, and in his case mind had
triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a safe, if not as
yet to a victorious, goal.
Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now
could be _his_ master, has died, leaving behind him a fortune. What
was the sum? He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies
his thought. Yes--eighty thousand pounds! A good fortune even in
these luxurious days. He has died worth £80,000, of which his
daughter is sole heiress!
Before the professor's eyes rises a vision of old Wynter. They used
to call him "old," those boys who attended his classes, though he
was as light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a
dissipated Apollo. They had all loved him, if they had not revered
him, and, indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living
and lasting joke amongst them.
Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his
memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor,
remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at
forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving
them all _planté là_ as it were, and declared his intention of
starting life anew and making a pile for himself in some new world.
Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only
known. Wynter _had_ made that mythical "pile," and had left his
daughter an heiress!
Not only an heiress, but a gift to Miss Jane Majendie, of somewhere
in Bloomsbury.
The professor's disturbed face grows calm again. It even occurs to
him that he has not eaten his breakfast. He so _often_ remembers
this, that it does not trouble him. To pore over his books (that are
overflowing every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until
his eggs are India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a
fresh experience. But though this morning both eggs and rasher have
attained a high place in the leather department, he enters on his
sorry repast with a glad heart.
Sweet are the rebounds from jeopardy to joy! And he has so _much_ of
joy! Not only has he been able to shake from his shoulders that
awful incubus--and ever-present ward--but he can be sure that the
absent ward is so well-off with regard to this world's goods, that
he need never give her so much as a passing thought--dragged, _torn_
as that thought would be from his beloved studies.
The aunt, of course, will see about her fortune. _He_ has only a
perfunctory duty--to see that the fortune is not squandered. But he
is safe there. Maiden ladies _never_ squander! And the girl, being
only seventeen, can't possibly squander it herself for some time.
Perhaps he ought to call on her, however. Yes, of course, he must
call. It is the usual thing to call on one's ward. It will be a
terrible business no doubt. _All_ girls belong to the genus
nuisance. And _this_ girl will be at the head of her class no doubt.
"Lively, spirited," so far went the parent. A regular hoyden may be
read between those kind parental lines.
The poor professor feels hot again with nervous agitation as he
imagines an interview between him and the wild, laughing, noisy,
perhaps horsey (they all ride in Australia) young woman to whom he
is bound to make his bow.
How soon must this unpleasant interview take place? Once more he
looks back to the solicitor's letter. Ah! On Jan. 3rd her father,
poor old Wynter, had died, and on the 26th of May, she is to be "on
view" at Bloomsbury! and it is now the 2nd of February. A respite!
Perhaps, who knows? She may never arrive at Bloomsbury at all! There
are young men in Australia, a hoyden, as far as the professor has
read (and that is saying a good deal), would just suit the man in
the bush.