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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 the 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
always 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 la_
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 word'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 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.