SISTERS.
More than one idler in Plymouth Station, one morning in October,
turned his head to look again at two women walking side by side on
the platform near to the London train. One, the taller of the two,
was exceptionally beautiful, of a fair delicate type, with an almost
perfect figure and a face fit for a model of the Madonna, so pure in
outline was it, so innocent in its meaning. The younger woman was
slightly shorter. She was clad in mourning, which contrasted
somewhat crudely with the brighter costume of her companion. It was
evident that these two were sisters; they walked in the same easy
way, and especially notable was a certain intrepid carriage of the
head, which I venture to believe is essentially peculiar to high-born
Englishwomen.
By the side of her sister, Brenda Gilholme might easily pass
unnoticed. Mrs. Huston was, in the usual sense of the word, a
beautiful woman, and such women live in an atmosphere of notoriety.
Wherever they go they are worshipped at a distance by those beneath
them in station, patronized by those above them, respected by their
equals, because, forsooth, face and form are moulded with delicacy
and precision. The mind of such a woman is of little importance; the
person is pleasing, and more is not demanded. Only her husband will
some day awaken to the fact that worship from a distance might have
been more satisfactory. The effect of personal beauty is a
lamentable factor which cannot be denied. All men, good and bad
alike, come under its influence. A lovely woman can twist most of us
round her dainty finger with a wanton disregard for the powers of
intellect or physical energy.
Brenda was not beautiful; she was only pretty, with a dainty
refinement of heart which was visible in her delicate face. But her
prettiness was in no way tainted with weakness, as was her sister's
beauty. She was strong and thoughtful, with a true woman's faculty
for hiding these unwelcome qualities from the eyes of inferior men.
She had grown up in the shadow of this beautiful sister, and men had
not cared to seek for intellect where they saw only a reflected
beauty. She had passed through a social notoriety, but eager eyes
had only glanced at her in passing. She had merely been Alice
Gilholme's sister, and now--here on Plymouth platform--Alice Huston
was assuming her old superiority. My brothers, think of this! It
must have been a wondrous love that overcame such drawbacks, that
passed by with tolerance a thousand daily slights. And Brenda's love
for her sister accomplished all this. Ah, and more! In the days
that followed there was a greater wrong--a wrong which only blind
selfishness could have inflicted--and this also Brenda Gilholme
forgave.
The sisters had met on the steamboat landing a few moments
previously. A rattling drive through the town had followed, and now
they were able to speak together alone for the first time. There had
been no display of emotion. The beautiful lips had met lightly, the
well-gloved fingers had clasped each other with no nervous hysterical
fervour, and now it would seem that they had parted but a week ago.
Emotion is tabooed in the school through which these two had
passed--the school of nineteenth-century society--and, indeed, we
appear to get along remarkably well without it.
'My dear,' Mrs. Huston was saying, 'he will be home by the next boat
if he can raise the money. We cannot count on more than a week's
start.'
'And,' inquired Brenda, 'can he raise the money?'
'Oh yes! If he can get as far as the steamboat office without
spending it.'
Brenda looked at her sister in a curious way.
'Spending it on what ... Alice?'
'On--drink!'
Mrs. Huston was not the woman to conceal any of her own grievances
from quixotically unselfish motives.
Brenda thought for some moments before replying.
'Then,' she said at length, with some determination, 'we must make
sure of our start, if, that is, you are still determined to leave
him.'
Mrs. Huston was looking down at her sister's neat black dress, about
which there was a subtle air of refined luxury, which seems natural
to some women, and part of their being.
'Yes, yes, I suppose we must. By the way, dear, you are in mourning
... for whom?'
'For Admiral Wylie,' replied Brenda patiently.
'But it is two months--is it not?--since his death, and he was no
relation. I think it is unnecessary. Black is so melancholy, though
it suits your figure.'
'I am living with Mrs. Wylie,' Brenda explained with unconscious
irony. 'Are you still determined that you cannot live with your
husband, Alice?'
'My dear, he is a brute! I am not an impulsive person, but I think
that if he should catch me again, it is very probable that I should
do something desperate--kill myself, or something of that sort.'
'I do not think,' observed Brenda serenely, 'that you would ever kill
yourself.'
The beautiful woman laughed in an easy, lightsome way, which was one
of her many social gifts. It was such a pleasantly infectious laugh,
so utterly light-hearted, and so ready in its vocation of filling up
awkward pauses.
'No, perhaps not. But in the meantime, what is to become of me?
Will Mrs. Wylie take me in for a day or two, or shall we seek
lodgings? I have some money, enough to last a month or so; but I
must have two new dresses.'
'Mrs. Wylie has kindly said that you can stay as long as you like.
But, Alice, it would never do to stay in London. You must get away
to some small place on the sea-coast, or somewhere where you will not
be utterly bored, and keep in hiding until he comes home, and I can
find out what he intends to do.'
'My dear, I shall be utterly bored anywhere except in London. But
Brenda, tell me ... you have got into a habit of talking exactly like
Theo Trist!'
Brenda met her sister's eyes with a bright smile.
'How funny!' she exclaimed. 'I have not noticed it.'
'No, of course; you--would not notice it. When will he be home?'
The girl stopped and looked critically at an advertisement suspended
on the wall near at hand. It was a huge representation of a coloured
gentleman upon his native shore, making merry over a complicated pair
of braces. She had never seen the work of art before, and for some
unknown reason in the months--ay, and in the years that followed--her
dislike for it was almost nauseating in its intensity.
'I don't know,' she replied indifferently.
'We,' continued Mrs. Huston, following out her own train of thought,
'are so helpless. We want a man to stand by us. Of course papa is
of no use. I suppose he is spouting somewhere about the country. He
generally is.'
'No,' replied Brenda, with a wonderful tolerance. 'We cannot count
on him. He is in Ireland. I had a postcard from him the other day.
He said that I was not to be surprised or shocked to hear that he was
in prison. He is trying to get himself arrested. It is, he says,
all part of the campaign.'
Again Mrs. Huston's pretty laughter made things pleasant and sociable.
'I wonder what that means,' she exclaimed, smoothing a wrinkle out of
the front of her jacket for the benefit of a military-looking man,
with a cigar in his mouth, who stared offensively as he passed.
Brenda shrugged her shoulders slightly, and said nothing. She did
not appear to attach a very great importance to her father's
political movements, in which culpable neglect she was abetted by the
whole of England.
'What we require,' continued Mrs. Huston, 'is an energetic man with
brains.'
'I am afraid that energetic men with brains have in most cases their
own affairs to look after. It is only the idle ones with tongues who
have time to devote to other people's business.'
'The "brute," my dear, is clever; we must remember that. And he is
terribly obstinate. There is a sort of stubborn bloodhoundism about
him which makes me shiver when I think that he is even now after me,
in all probability.'
'We must be cool and cunning, and brave to fight against him,' said
Brenda practically.
At this moment the guard came forward, and held the door of their
compartment invitingly open. They got in, and found themselves
alone. They were barely seated, opposite to each other, when the
train glided smoothly away.
Brenda sat a little forward, with her gloved hand resting on the
window, which had been lowered by the guard. They were seated on the
landward side of the train, and as she looked out her eyes rested on
the rising hills to the north with a vague, unseeing gaze.
A slight movement made by Mrs. Huston caused her at length to look
across, and the two sisters sat for a second searching each other's
eyes for the old heartwhole frankness which never seems to survive
the death of childhood and the birth of separate interests in life.
'Theo,' said the elder woman significantly at last, 'is brave and
cool and cunning, Brenda.'
The girl made an effort, but the old childish confidence was dead.
From Theo Trist, the disciple of stoicism, she had perhaps learnt
something of a creed which, if a mistaken one, renders its followers
of great value in the world, for they never intrude their own private
feelings upon public attention. That effort was the last. It was a
beginning in itself--the first stone of a wall destined to rise
between the two sisters, built by the gray hands of Time.
'But,' suggested Brenda, 'Theo is in Bulgaria.'
Mrs. Huston smiled with all the conscious power of a woman who,
without being actually vain, knows the market value and the moral
weight of her beauty.
'Suppose I telegraphed to him that I wanted him to come to me at
once.'
Brenda fixed her eyes upon her sister's face. For a second her
dainty lip quivered.
'You must not do that,' she said, in such a tone of invincible
opposition that her sister changed colour, and looked somewhat
hastily in another direction.
'I suppose,' murmured the elder woman after a short silence, 'that it
is quite impossible to find out when he may return?'
'Quite impossible. This "Eastern Question," as it is called, is so
complicated that I have given up trying to follow it--besides, I do
not see what Theo has to do with the matter. We must act alone,
Alice.'
'But women are so helpless.'
Brenda smiled in a slightly ironical way.
'Why should they be?' she asked practically. 'I am not afraid of
Captain Huston. He is a gentleman, at all events.'
'He _was_!' put in his wife bitterly.
'And I suppose there is something left of his former self?'
'Not very much, my dear. At least, that phase of his present
condition has been religiously hidden from my affectionate gaze.'
Brenda drew her gloves pensively up her slim wrists, smoothing out
the wrinkles in the black kid. There was in her demeanour an air of
capable attention, something between that accorded by a general to
his aide-de-camp on the field of battle, and the keen watchfulness of
a physician while his patient speaks.
'Theo,' she said conversationally, 'would be a great comfort to us.
He is so steadfast and so entirely reliable. But we must do without
him. We will manage somehow.'
'I am horribly afraid, Brenda. It has just come to me; I have never
felt it before. You seem to take it so seriously, and ... and I
expected to find Theo at home.'
'Theo is one of the energetic men with brains who have their own
affairs to attend to,' said Brenda, in her cheery way. 'We are not
his affairs; besides, as I mentioned before, he is in Bulgaria--in
his element, in the midst of confusion, insurrection, war.'
'But,' repeated Mrs. Huston, with aggravating unconsciousness of the
obvious vanity of her words, 'suppose I telegraphed for him?'
Brenda laughed, and shook her head.
'I have a melancholy presentiment that if you telegraphed for him he
would not come. There is a vulgar but weighty proverb about making
one's own bed, which he might recommend to our notice.'
'Then Theo must have changed!'
Brenda raised her round blue eyes, and glanced sideways out of the
window. She was playing idly with the strap of the sash, tapping the
back of her hand with it.
'Theo,' she observed indifferently, 'is the incarnation of
steadfastness. He has not changed in any perceptible way. But he
is, before all else, a war-correspondent. I cannot imagine that
anyone should possess the power of dragging him away from the seat of
war.'
Mrs. Huston smiled vaguely for her own satisfaction. Her imagination
was apparently capable of greater things. It was rather to be
deplored that, when she smiled, the expression of her beautiful face
was what might (by a true friend behind her back) be called a trifle
vacuous.
'He wrote,' continued the younger sister, 'a very good article the
other day, which came just within the limits of my understanding. It
was upon the dangers of alliance; and he showed that an ally who, in
any one way, might at some time prove disadvantageous, is better
avoided from the very first. It was _àpropos_ of the
Turkish-Christian subjects welcoming a Russian invasion. It seems to
me, Alice, that our position is rather within the reach of that
argument.'
'Being a soldier's wife, I do not know much about military matters;
but it seems to me that a retreat should be safely covered at all
costs.'
'Not at _all_ costs,' said Brenda significantly. Her colour had
changed, and there was a wave of pink slowly mounting over her throat.
Mrs. Huston smiled serenely, and shrugged her shoulders.
'I do not see,' she expostulated frankly, 'what harm there can be in
calling in the aid of an old friend.'
'I would rather work alone!' was Brenda's soft reply.
And in those two casual remarks there lay hidden from the gaze of
blinder mortals the story of two lives.