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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78381 ***
+
+
+
+
+                                   AN
+
+                               ODD COUPLE
+
+                                   BY
+
+                             MRS. OLIPHANT,
+
+         AUTHOR OF “CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,” “SALEM CHAPEL,”
+                       “THE MINISTER’S WIFE,” &C.
+
+                             PHILADELPHIA:
+                           PORTER AND COATES,
+                        NO. 822 CHESTNUT STREET.
+
+
+                                PRESS OF
+                           HENRY B. ASHMEAD,
+                        1102 and 1104 Sansom St.
+
+
+
+
+                             AN ODD COUPLE.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+_CHAPTER I._
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+_He, and She_                                                          7
+
+_CHAPTER II._
+
+_Conjugality_                                                         27
+
+_CHAPTER III._
+
+_A Mediator_                                                          42
+
+_CHAPTER IV._
+
+_The Breach Accomplished_                                             56
+
+_CHAPTER V._
+
+_Education_                                                           74
+
+_CHAPTER VI._
+
+_The Captain of the Eleven_                                           91
+
+_CHAPTER VII._
+
+_A Dinner at Hyde Park Square_                                       111
+
+_CHAPTER VIII._
+
+_The Villa_                                                          130
+
+_CHAPTER IX._
+
+_The Villa_ (_continued_)                                            141
+
+_CHAPTER X._
+
+_Edward_                                                             153
+
+_CHAPTER XI._
+
+_The Day After_                                                      163
+
+_CHAPTER XII._
+
+_Romance_                                                            178
+
+_CHAPTER XIII._
+
+_An Anxious Mother_                                                  193
+
+_CHAPTER XIV._
+
+_The Boy’s Appeal_                                                   214
+
+_CHAPTER XV._
+
+_The Girl’s Escape_                                                  229
+
+_CHAPTER XVI._
+
+_Conclusion--The Father’s Share_                                     244
+
+
+
+
+AN ODD COUPLE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+HE, AND SHE.
+
+
+“In that case, perhaps, it would be better that we should part!”
+
+These ominous words were said very steadily and precisely, but with a
+certain sense of nervous excitement in the utterance, by Mr. Charles
+Tremenheere, one morning in November, in his own drawing-room, and were,
+I need scarcely say, addressed to his own wife. To whom else could they
+have been said? He was not the kind of man who might have been expected
+to speak words striking at the very root of family existence, being,
+indeed, a very orderly and respectable personage,--anything but a
+revolutionary. The amount of provocation which he had endured before he
+said them need not be entered into here. He had been married about ten
+years, and had two children, a boy of nine and a girl of seven. Mrs.
+Tremenheere was seated opposite to him at a small work-table knitting,
+with a composure which was aggravating to the last degree. Her needles
+met each other with tranquil regularity, and not a single dropped stitch
+or irregular line bore witness to any excitement of feeling. They were
+middle-aged people, and might very well have been married twenty years
+instead of ten. He was standing in the favorite attitude of Englishmen,
+in front of the fire, a thin angular man, moving with a certain
+jerkiness and rapidity, slightly bald, with refined features, and hair
+growing gray, and looking very much what he was, a clerk in a public
+office, much more experienced and learned in the country’s business than
+was in general the distinguished “chief” at the head of the department,
+though he was a Minister of State and probably a Grand Seigneur, Knight
+of the Garter, and everything that was splendid--while his instructor
+and referee who kept him out of mischief was only Mr. Charles
+Tremenheere. Nevertheless, the injustice in this respect was more
+apparent than real, for Mr. Tremenheere was a man as well known in those
+high regions from which the country is ruled as the Queen herself, and
+most people whose opinion he cared about were perfectly acquainted with
+the real standing of which the vulgar knew nothing. “Tremenheere will
+keep him right,” the Premier himself said when he appointed the rising
+man of the day Secretary of State for _that_ department. Indeed, I need
+not tell you, dear reader, which department it was. It is in very good
+hands and does not require our interference, and it is enough for the
+purpose of the narrative that you should know who this gentleman was. He
+had been very much in society in his younger days, and still kept up his
+old friends, though his wife, whose taste was somewhat different from
+his own, had separated him from the tide of fashion; and he loved
+society, judging men and things by the standard in favor there, and
+making but small account of qualities which were not appreciated in
+these finest circles. This was a grave ground of debate between his wife
+and himself. They did not quarrel according to the ordinary pattern of
+conjugal quarrels. She was not a scold nor he a villain; he behaved as a
+gentleman should and she like a well-bred woman. But they differed
+incessantly, continually, with the heat of people who quarrel about
+convictions, a thing more persistent than the light differences which
+arise on every-day subjects; and so at last it had come to
+this--“Perhaps in that case it would be better that we should part!”
+
+Mr. Tremenheere felt when he said this that he had discharged his last
+volley. What more could he say or do? and he expected it to startle and
+appal his calm antagonist. He thought that an utterance so trenchant, so
+final, would penetrate through all her defences, and make her feel what
+it was to defy a man who was her natural head, her social
+representative. Almost, he expected to see the common appeal of
+womankind which he had read of in books, and which everybody, so far as
+he knew (who was not married to Mrs. Tremenheere), believed in. Mrs.
+Tremenheere had never yet wept to him nor pleaded for forgiveness. She
+had never broken down under any of his reproaches--never been melted
+into helplessness by his appeals. Would she do it now--would she
+cry--would she throw herself at his feet or on his neck and ask him to
+take back that cruel suggestion? Inevitably it must bring her to
+herself.
+
+But, indeed, the result was not as he anticipated. Mrs. Tremenheere bore
+the shock with wonderful composure. She scarcely raised her head; she
+scarcely paused in her knitting. She allowed him to speak as calmly as
+if he had been saying, “I will dine at my club.” And then there followed
+an interval of silence which was as if the spheres stood still to Mr.
+Tremenheere. His eyes were upon her, but she did not look at him. Was it
+that she did not dare to look at him? Was it her pride which kept her
+eyes on her knitting, her head bowed down? one or the other it must be.
+
+But if she did not feel the shock, he did, when Mrs. Tremenheere,
+raising her head and looking at him, without any of the excitement in
+her eyes which blinded his, replied quietly, “I have no doubt, as things
+have gone so far, that it would be the best--in every way.”
+
+“Good God! Ada,” he said in sudden horror. “What do you mean?”
+
+“It is not what I mean, Mr. Tremenheere. I have not taken any
+initiative. We do not agree, unfortunately, or think alike in anything;
+but it was not I who called attention to this. I had made up my mind to
+go on and make the best of it. But when you see it so clearly I feel
+that it would be foolish to contradict you. Yes,” she said with a sigh;
+“it is a pity, but I think you are right: and separation would be the
+best.”
+
+“You think so!” he said, furious. “Oh, you think so! Good heavens! and
+this is what it is to end in, after all that has come and gone!”
+
+“It was not I who suggested it,” she said, resuming her knitting; “but
+since you think so, dear----”
+
+“Dear! dear comes in well in such a discussion,” said the husband
+furiously. He left the fire and strode across to the window, and stood
+gazing out with his back to her. The sight of her composure made him
+wild. “If we are to arrange this let it be without any pretence of false
+affection. Conventional humbug may at least be put away now.”
+
+“I am never conventional that I know of,” she said slightly roused. “We
+do not agree, Charles; but why should we hate each other? It is this
+that would be conventional, not an innocent word.”
+
+“Oh, confound your innocent words,” he muttered through his teeth; but
+this she did not hear, nor was she intended to hear it. He could hear
+the slight stir of her needles where he stood looking out upon the
+rolling of the fog which now lifted a little, now came down heavier.
+Nothing could be more doleful than the prospect out-of-doors. Hyde Park,
+which was opposite, threw up a line of spectral trees into the yellow of
+the atmosphere. The passengers went by slipping upon the greasy
+pavement, the horses surrounded themselves with a halo of white breath
+like the _nimbus_ of a mediæval saint; the kind of day from which you
+shrink and turn to the cheerful fire within; but to poor Mr. Tremenheere
+the fog itself was more cheerful than the genial blaze near which the
+wife sat in her warm velvet dress, the impersonation of domestic
+comfort. How comfortable she looked! He saw her very well, though his
+back was turned. With a matronly fulness of person,--not too much, only
+enough to be becoming,--light brown hair, not changed or touched by
+time, and a great deal more abundant than is usual nowadays. It seemed
+suddenly to flash upon him how changed the room would look without her,
+and the house and all his daily life. Was it possible that she could be
+so hard-hearted, so cruel, so blind to every duty? If it had not been
+his own suggestion he would have turned round and laughed in her face.
+She go away after ten years’ companionship and quarrelling! Quarreling
+when it is continuous and familiar endears just as much as anything
+else. She could not think of it. It must be a bit of bravado to frighten
+him and make him give in on the subject they had disagreed upon. Women
+were bad enough; but they were not so bad, not so heartless as this. So
+Mr. Tremenheere considered that the wisest thing he could do was to show
+the impatience, but not the uneasiness he felt, and to rush off to the
+office, where he ought to have been some time ago, but for the
+disagreement which had brought matters all at once and unexpectedly to a
+crisis so terrible.
+
+“I am aware that you have plenty of time to talk,” he said, “but I have
+not. I am off to the office. You have detained me too long already with
+this ridiculous discussion. Why should we have these continual
+misunderstandings? I advise you to put folly out of your head, and try
+to find some way by which we can get on like other people. I shall be
+back at seven to-night.”
+
+And he turned round and looked at her. Surely at least she would show
+some natural feeling now. But she did not. She bent her head a little
+and said, “Very well, good morning,” and went on with her knitting. Good
+morning! Good heavens! What did she mean by that “good morning!” Was it
+anxiety! Was it determination? He would rather have seen her eyes, and
+then he might have known what she meant. But he would not resign the
+superior position he had assumed by waiting to see what her eyes meant.
+He had to go, as he said, shutting the door with some energy behind him.
+He stumbled over the children at the door, and, instead of stopping to
+kiss them, as was his wont, pushed the little things away, who were all
+done up in their winter gear, great coats and furs.
+
+“Is this a day to take the children out? Go back to the nursery at
+once,” he said, not stopping to hear what the nurse, indignant, said
+about Missis. Missis! what was she that she must argue about everything,
+instead of taking her husband’s opinion like other people?--when of
+course he must know best; he a man of the world. But Mr. Tremenheere
+went to the office that day with a heavy heart. He had “shot an arrow
+into the air,” and he did not know where he should find that inadvertent
+missile. And all without meaning it! meaning nothing more than to
+frighten her; to show her what terrors might be if she did not mind what
+she was about--to warn her of possibilities which perhaps had never
+dawned upon her before.
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere, however, was much more startled by her husband’s
+suggestion than she allowed to appear; but scarcely in the way a wife
+might be supposed to be startled. It was not the fear of lost love or
+any sentimental disturbance which was in her mind. There are wives, and
+even some whose married life is not particularly harmonious, to whom
+such words would be as the rending asunder of heaven and earth; but this
+lady was not one of them. She did not feel the soil crumbling under her
+feet or the skies dividing over her head because her husband threw out
+the suggestion, that probably they might be better apart. She was not
+wounded in this profound and poignant way, but she was startled by the
+sudden introduction to her of a new idea, a something previously
+unthought of which was evidently worthy of thought. And perhaps she was
+a little piqued and slightly stung in her pride that the idea had not
+originated with herself. Even the most philosophical woman, she who has
+least care to preserve the often humiliating privileges of sex, has a
+kind of prejudice in favor of all such suggestions originating with
+herself. That her husband should be able calmly to contemplate a
+separation did not throw her into hysterics or into despair, but yet she
+should have liked to have been the first to suggest the separation.
+When, however, she had got over this she was seriously struck by the new
+idea. Separation! it meant a great deal which Mrs. Tremenheere had never
+considered before, and which she began to consider with the seriousness
+which became a very important matter. Living separate was easy enough to
+friends who perhaps might be better friends apart than if thrown
+continually together. It was nothing very dreadful even for members of
+the same family. Brothers and sisters separated continually, yet
+remained brotherly and sisterly all their lives; but a man and
+wife,--this was something totally different, involving a very great deal
+more. A separation of this sort is seldom considered in the reflective
+and calm spirit in which Mrs. Tremenheere regarded it. Usually it is
+decided upon in mere heat of passion, or under the sting of some
+intolerable wrong--and only when the misery of the two compelled to live
+together has become past bearing. All this was very different from her
+sentiments; she sat very still going on with her knitting, her needles
+perhaps moving a little more quickly than usual, and her eyes very
+intent upon what she was doing, until at last she dropped her work on
+her lap, letting fall the ball of wool with which she was knitting, and
+which a playful kitten from the hearthrug immediately sprang upon. The
+kitten thought her mistress had done it on purpose, and that this was an
+invitation to play, and purred loudly to show her satisfaction, arching
+her back and looking up into Mrs. Tremenheere’s abstracted face as she
+put her foot upon the ball. It was a pretty Persian kitten with a long
+sweeping tail, and the room was very pretty, with harmonious furniture
+and fine water-color drawings, a carefully selected collection, for both
+husband and wife prided themselves on knowing something about art. The
+chair upon which Mrs. Tremenheere sat was an elegant Chippendale, which
+she preferred to the usual luxurious articles of the drawing-room. The
+table by her side was spider-legged, and daintily carved in ebony. An
+old Italian cabinet in the same wood, inlaid with silver, stood against
+the wall behind. Careful thought and taste, and some amount of culture,
+showed in every part of the room. A bright fire blazed, throwing
+pleasant lights about, sparkling in the glasses of the old Venice
+chandelier, and doing its best to neutralize the effects of the fog
+without. When Mrs. Tremenheere dropped her knitting in her lap she
+raised her head with a sigh and turned her eyes to the window, as it is
+so natural to do when one is in trouble. She was not young; but she was
+a handsome woman, with clear high features, blue eyes, and abundant
+hair--not fat, though that is the usual epithet to apply to a woman of
+forty, which was her age, but tall and of an imposing presence. And she
+was very well dressed in a dark velvet gown, which threw up her
+fairness, with old-fashioned ornaments such as betrayed the same
+prevailing taste as that which was apparent in the room. She was so
+entirely in keeping with the place that it may be supposed the idea of
+leaving it was not agreeable to her. But even this was not how the
+matter appeared at the present moment to Mrs. Tremenheere. She had not
+yet come so far as to think of leaving her home, or of any of the
+material consequences to follow, but was only startled into serious
+consideration of the idea and of what it meant, and if it really would
+be “best,” as her husband had said.
+
+She was asking herself this question when the nurse and children burst
+into the room in full walking array, as when Mr. Tremenheere had turned
+them back--every ribbon on nurse’s bonnet (and there were a great many),
+and every hair on her head, though they were less abundant, was bridling
+with indignation. The little girl had her finger in her mouth, and was
+whimpering in sympathy. The boy, more indifferent, received imaginary
+balls upon the short hoop-stick which he held like a cricket-bat, and
+let the woman talk with masculine composure.
+
+“Please ma’am, master-has-turned-us-back,” said nurse, running all her
+words into one. “It’s-a-fog-and-we-ain’t-to-go-out-in-a-fog; and a deal
+of exercise the dear children will get in London if we don’t never go
+out in fogs. I said as it was you, but he said as it was me, and gave
+’em a push which it isn’t like a gentleman,” said the nurse out of
+breath; while little Vera, stamping her little foot, cried, “Naughty
+papa!”
+
+“And master is as unreasonable as unreasonable, as well you knows,
+ma’am, though you might’nt say it,” nurse added, before she could be
+stopped.
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere colored high, and when she flushed the color remained,
+as she was well aware, on the ridge of her delicate high nose much
+longer than was becoming or agreeable, which made her still more angry.
+“You are very impertinent to speak of your master so,” she said. “Take
+the children’s things off at once, and send them to me; and Vera, if you
+whimper you shall have a punishment. Go directly. I am very much
+displeased.”
+
+“It ain’t us, ma’am, that you’ve occasion to be displeased with,” nurse
+began. “It’s Mr. ----”
+
+“Do you wish me to send you away at an hour’s notice?” said Mrs.
+Tremenheere in a low voice, hastily rising from her chair and putting
+down the knitting with some impatience on the table, as she dismissed
+the party peremptorily. Was this the end of it all? She had meant well,
+as well as ever woman meant, or so at least she thought; but this was
+the end. A servant who ventured to appeal to her knowledge of her
+husband’s unreasonableness--a child who felt itself justified in saying
+“Naughty papa.” Was this what she had done, betraying herself and
+betraying him, bringing down the credit and good reputation which she
+was bound to preserve? Then indeed he was right, and it would be best
+for them to part.
+
+She had, however, little time to pursue these reflections, for soon
+after the door again opened, and the little pair came back, Vera in a
+little velvet frock like her mother’s, with the hair cut square on her
+forehead and falling behind upon her shoulders, leading the way,--Eddy
+behind, still with the hoop-stick of which he made an imaginary
+cricket-bat. Vera had a lapful of dolls in her pinafore--dolls without
+noses, without arms, with feet twisted off, with necks wrung, with hair
+torn from their heads, but only the dearer for all their misfortunes, as
+Othello was “for the dangers he had known.” Vera tripped in light as a
+little fairy, her pretty hair streaming over her shoulders. She was one
+of those born actors who (up to the age of ten or so) are always
+consciously playing some _rôle_ or other, and to-day her part was that
+of an anxious mother taking care of her offspring. The little creature
+took no notice of her own mother, who sat gazing at her with many
+thoughts in her heart, but seating herself on the other side of the
+fireplace began to arrange her family. She put her dolls round her like
+a class at school, setting them up to sit with their miserable legs
+thrust out on all the stools she could find, and then began to address
+them with busy gravity--now pulling a dress straight, now arranging a
+wig of tow. The busy little human thing among all these wooden
+counterfeits of herself was as curious a sight as one could wish to see.
+How she managed them, pulling this one roughly about, coaxing another,
+according to their character! and indeed there were to the child’s
+lively imagination distinct traces of character in the very attitude of
+these ungainly babes.
+
+“Try and sit up like a lady,” she said, taking up unceremoniously one of
+her collected family by the head and setting it down again with a shake,
+“is that how a lady sits? If you are all good and don’t make a noise,
+nor spoil your pinnies, I will tell you a story. Oh you disagreeable
+little fright, why can’t you hold your toes straight? Now listen!” Vera
+held up a small finger in the air to enforce attention. “There was once
+a little girl, and she was sometimes naughty just like you, and she had
+a great many little children belonging to her, and one that was called
+Rose, and one that was called Violet, and one that was called Lily, just
+the same names as you have; ain’t it strange? And this little girl had a
+mamma, the same as you have, but she had a papa too, and you never had a
+papa. You hold your tongue, you naughty Rose. You want to know what a
+papa is like--you all want to know? Well, a papa is a very funny thing.
+Sometimes he is good and gives you new dolls, but I do not like any new
+dolls, the nicest that could be got, so much as I love you, you dear old
+dirty naughty ones; so be quiet and don’t interfere ever any more. But
+then a papa is sometimes cross. He is very funny to look at, and doesn’t
+wear frocks like us; and some of them have beards, great hairy things
+like your muff stuck on to your chin, and when they kiss you it pricks.
+But that is not all. Now you shall hear about the little girl in the
+story. Once she met her papa when she was just going out for a walk, and
+her nurse was going to take her to the Baker Street Bazaar, and she was
+so happy; and what do you think this naughty, naughty, cross, unkind
+papa did?----”
+
+“Vera, what are you talking about?”
+
+“I was not talking, mamma; I was only telling Rose and Violet and the
+rest, a story. I often tell them stories--like what you used to tell
+me--that begin--‘There was once a little girl.’ I never liked to hear
+about that little girl,” said Vera, shaking her head; “she was always
+doing silly things, and I knew she was me.”
+
+“Vera, it is very naughty either to your dolls, or any one, to talk so
+of your papa.”
+
+“My papa!” said Vera with well-feigned surprise. “I was only talking of
+the little girl’s papa.”
+
+But here the boy, who had been silent, interposed with masculine
+reproof, “What stupids girls are with their dolls! You might come and
+bowl for me,” said Eddy, who was still playing imaginary cricket.
+
+Vera threw all her dolls into a heap in a corner and went with
+light-hearted fickleness; while the mother sat by and went on with her
+thoughts.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+CONJUGALITY.
+
+
+Mr. Tremenheere came home that evening at seven o’clock. It was not his
+custom to be quite so early. He went late in the morning, and was not
+unwilling to stay late, and to get all the evening’s news before he went
+home, so that the dinners generally were very late in Hyde Park Square.
+Mrs. Tremenheere, who was a busy woman with many occupations of her own,
+did not object to this--indeed she was (as he remembered on his way
+home) on the whole a very easy woman to live with, and disposed to use
+mutual toleration in respect to a great many things which women in
+general are inclined to make unnecessary fusses about. Oddly enough,
+when he came to think of it, there were a great many things in respect
+to which she was very easy. It was ideas that she fought about, but of
+all things that make a woman disagreeable, ideas, it must be allowed,
+are among the worst.
+
+However, he dressed and made himself particularly pleasant at dinner.
+They were people who took pleasure in the table after a more refined
+fashion than that generally understood by these words. Mr. Tremenheere
+indeed liked a good dinner with that _naive_ devotion which is common
+among men of his age, but Mrs. Tremenheere considered cookery one of the
+fine arts, and studied it in an elevated and elevating way. Mr.
+Tremenheere had made up his mind when he married, with a certain rueful
+submission, that it would be madness to expect in an imperfect and
+newly-constituted establishment under the charge of a lady whom he knew
+to be much too enlightened on other subjects, and consequently expected
+little from on this, the carefully-regulated cuisine, the excellent
+cookery which to a man of many clubs, with a tolerable income, had
+become second nature. He had even had jokes made upon him on the
+subject, and had made jokes of a melancholy nature in return. But to his
+great and delightful surprise he had been able to turn the tables upon
+his sympathizers by giving them dinners which the best _chef_ could not
+have surpassed. “I don’t suppose you want banquets,” Mrs. Tremenheere
+had said, “but I think we are capable of dinners of eight--or even of
+ten, if you please;” and she had kept her word in the most noble way. To
+such a philosophical artist as she had proved herself, it need not be
+said that a dinner for two--a delicate composition which answers to a
+copy of verses from a poet, or a short story from a novelist--was a
+special triumph of art; but on this particular evening, when Mr.
+Tremenheere came home, trembling with suppressed anxiety, from his
+office, and not very sure as to whether Fate and his offended wife would
+allow him any dinner at all, the _ménu_ of the little repast was
+unusually exquisite. He took this, deluded man, for a good sign. He
+thought if she had been going to take those idle words of his at their
+full value and act upon them, that it was not female nature (of which,
+like many men, he thought he knew much) to have taken so much trouble
+about what he ate. He believed that she would have been spiteful, and
+refused him such a meal as he could sit down to with any pleasure. But
+on the contrary--! Mr. Tremenheere’s courage rose. It is impossible to
+describe how genial he was. He praised every dish; the fish was a wonder
+of freshness--the _entrêes_ were perfect--the birds were cooked as one
+scarcely ever saw them out of Scotland. He glowed and beamed over the
+well-spread table. Was it not a promise, a foretaste of years of good
+dinners and friendly conjugalities--all the better, perhaps, for this
+sudden and alarming cloud--to come?
+
+And he was equally genial to the children, whose introduction at dessert
+did not always please him. To-night he was the politest and most amiable
+of fathers. Vera, taking advantage of the opportunity, though most
+inopportunely, so far as his feelings were concerned, plunged
+immediately into comment upon the transactions of the morning.
+
+“We have never been out all day, not one little bit,” she said. “Why
+mustn’t we go out when its a fog? We have been ever so often before, and
+no one found fault. Papa, you know it was because you were cross you
+turned us back; and we were going to the Bazaar to see all the things
+for Christmas. Naughty papa!”
+
+“Vera, I must send you to bed,” said Mrs. Tremenheere.
+
+“Let her talk--let her talk,” said the conciliating father. “Going to
+the Bazaar, were you! I will take you myself when it is a fine day and
+buy you something.”
+
+“You!” Vera’s delight was great. “Do you hear, Eddy? Papa himself! But
+you never did it before.”
+
+“I am always so busy, my dear.”
+
+“Are you busy? I should like to go with you; shouldn’t you, Eddy? better
+than with nurse--better than with mamma.”
+
+“Vera, that is very ungrateful,” said Mr. Tremenheere, secretly
+flattered by the preference, “and, besides, I don’t believe it. You
+would rather go with mamma.”
+
+“No; she would come any time. I should like you because you never, never
+did it before. I like everything that is new,” cried Vera, clapping her
+hands; “and then you would be stupid--you would not know where to go, or
+anything. You would not know which was the place for the dolls, nor
+where those funny Japan things are. Will you come to-morrow, papa?”
+
+“That is abrupt,” he said. “Yes, perhaps, Vera, if nothing happens to
+interfere I will go to-morrow. Will that please you? and then I shall be
+made, I suppose, to buy half the dolls in the Bazaar.”
+
+“Vera, it is your hour for bed,” said her mother; and the remonstrances
+which were on the child’s lips were hushed by the fact that just then
+nurse came in solemnly and took her place at the door. As is usual in
+well-regulated families, mothers and fathers may yield, but nurse is
+inexorable. The children did not even attempt by any unnecessary
+blandishments to work upon the feelings of that Rhadamantha. They
+yielded at once. Eddy rose from his oranges without much reluctance, and
+Vera slid down unwillingly from her father’s knee. At the same moment
+Mrs. Tremenheere rose. “You will find me in the drawing-room if you want
+me, Charles,” she said quietly. Alas, he felt there was more in these
+words than met the ear.
+
+And then an interval ensued which was not delightful for either of them.
+Mr. Tremenheere was long of making his appearance that night--which was
+not even to be explained by the fact that he took a glass of wine more
+than usual to strengthen him for the evening trial--not even that; he
+did it on purpose, poor man, thinking that her courage would ooze out at
+her fingers’ end, when she saw how late it was and how little time there
+was for talk. He strolled in at length in a careless way.
+
+“Give me a cup of tea, my dear,” he said, with ostentatious
+friendliness. “I have brought some work home with me from the office,
+and I want to have all my wits about me. In such cases there is nothing
+so good as a cup of your tea----”
+
+“I am sorry, Charles, that you have work to-night.”
+
+“Yes?--well, so am I. I don’t like it much, I assure you--but the
+country’s business must be attended to,” he said, rubbing his hands with
+premature delight over the success of his scheme.
+
+“I don’t doubt it; still our own life is sometimes more important to us
+than even the country’s business--though I have never, that I know of,
+interfered with that.”
+
+“Never, Ada, never,” he answered, briskly, “--of course, you are a
+sensible woman and know the importance of it as well as I do.”
+
+“And I have never wasted your time or kept you from your work for my own
+pleasure----”
+
+“Never, my dear, never!” He interrupted her more nervously this time,
+feeling that so strenuous a self-defence must mean something more.
+
+“Then I need the less excuse for now occupying your time, Charles. I
+must speak to you. Things are involved of more consequence to us than
+there can be in your office papers for the country. The country is not
+in mortal peril, that I know of, but our house is----”
+
+“My dear, you astonish me----”
+
+“No indeed, I don’t astonish you. You know very well what I mean. You
+cannot have passed the day without thinking of it. I do not think it is
+worthy of you to suppose that we can get over this by simply ignoring
+the whole matter. Something was said this morning----”
+
+“Yes, yes! I knew you would come back to that,” he said, pettishly.
+“Well, it was a foolish speech on my part. I said it in the heat of
+discussion, not meaning it. Will that satisfy you? When a man is very
+much provoked he is not always master of what he says. There, Ada! I did
+think that to ignore the whole business was the best--but since you
+insist upon it, I apologize, and I hope now you are content.”
+
+“The view you take of this is not the same as mine,” said Mrs.
+Tremenheere. “You laugh: you are accustomed to hear such words from me.
+But don’t laugh, I beg of you, for this is far more serious than any
+disagreement we have ever had. Charles, you said it would be best for us
+to separate. I have thought of little else since.”
+
+“Nor I, for that matter,--if that will be any consolation to you,” he
+muttered between his teeth.
+
+“Why should it be a consolation to me? It is not that I want to get the
+better of you, to be apologized to, or think myself the wiser. Again,”
+cried Mrs. Tremenheere, “it is the old difficulty. You will not go to
+the heart of the matter. You will think only of the outside.”
+
+“It has no heart that I know of,” he said, with a sullen acceptance of
+the new controversy, placing himself once more in that citadel of
+argument, the front of the fire. “The whole affair lies in a nutshell.
+In one of our continual and apparently inevitable quarrels, I said some
+inadvertent words which I am sorry for. They were struck out of me in
+the heat of quarrel, and I tell you I am sorry for them; what more is to
+be done? I have said all a man can say.”
+
+“But yet you have not touched the heart of the subject. If, indeed, our
+quarrels are continual and apparently inevitable, that gives double
+force to your words. Charles, I have been thinking it over all day, and
+I think perhaps you are right. It will make a wonderful change in our
+lives, and it is not a thing to be done lightly--but yet I think you are
+right. We do quarrel a great deal. I don’t know whose fault it is, but
+it is very undignified and unseemly. We will do our duty better and fill
+our place in the world better--apart.”
+
+“Apart?”
+
+She said the last word so low that he stooped to hear what it was.
+
+“Yes--apart!” Mrs. Tremenheere spoke tremulously, but firmly. Never was
+woman stronger in her own opinion, and, perhaps, in all her life she
+had never formed a more decided opinion than now.
+
+“You speak like a fool, Ada,” he said, with a rudeness quite unusual to
+him. “This is carrying matters ridiculously far. And yet you are not a
+silly woman to leap to conclusions. You know, as well as I do, that
+there is a great deal more involved than mere agreement or disagreement.
+We can always wash our dirty linen at home, at all events. If we
+quarrel, there is no occasion to publish it to all the world. And this
+must be done if we separate; nonsense; separate! for one ill-advised and
+hasty word! Expose ourselves, break up our house, put a stigma on our
+children! You cannot think of such a thing. One can surely trust to your
+good sense to see that.”
+
+“I have thought of it all,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, “and painfully
+enough. That is the outside view of the question--but the other aspect
+of it is this. Which is best? To undergo what you have described once
+for all: or to go on quarrelling, never taking the same view of
+anything, bringing up our children without any feeling of household
+sanctity, to see their father and mother in a perpetual struggle, to
+take sides, perhaps, and fight too, after our fashion, and think of us
+as of antagonistic powers? Apparently, so far as I can make out, one or
+the other of these must be.”
+
+“Folly! utterly far-fetched, and unlike your good sense. Why should
+either of them be?”
+
+“Do not you see why? Charles, Vera came to me this morning, quite ready
+to enter on the fray. You had turned them back when they were ready to
+go out, unreasonably. Yes, I cannot deny it was unreasonably. You were
+angry, and you made them turn back, saying it was the fog, and they came
+to me to complain. Of course, I had to maintain your authority; but I
+did so simply as a matter of duty. And children are very quick to notice
+this, Mr. Tremenheere.”
+
+“Oh! confound the children!” he cried. “This question surely may be
+allowed to be between us; it does not affect the children. Why should
+they be brought into it? Surely nothing can be more distinctly between
+you and me.”
+
+“It was you who brought in the children first, not I,” she said.
+
+“So! so!” cried Mr. Tremenheere, rubbing his hands together with growing
+rage, “and thus the whole old business commences again. It was not I but
+you--it is not one incidental question or another, but the entire matter
+between us, how we are to get on at all, what is to become of the
+family! I take heaven to witness it is not my fault. I said a few hasty
+unintentional words. I have withdrawn them--I have begged you pardon,
+which is a great deal for a man in my circumstances to do. If you are
+determined to go on, well! do it on your own responsibility. It is
+true,” he continued, growing in excitement as he went on, “that this
+house is a perfect hell upon earth, that one is never safe from argument
+even at the moment one is least inclined for it. That is what comes of
+your educated women,” cried the unlucky man. “This is the Attic salt
+they season their husband’s daily fare with! Give me the old domestic
+drudge, the one that suckled fools, and gave her family a little
+peace.--This new edition of a wife is not the thing for me.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere grew red and then pale, but with that ridge of color on
+her nose of which she was always so unpleasantly conscious. She could
+bear (she thought) a great deal of individual abuse, but general abuse
+addressed to her as a woman cut her to the heart. But she did not show
+anger as he did. She waited until he came to a pause, and then said,
+deliberately:
+
+“It is unnecessary, Mr. Tremenheere, to assail all women on my account.
+There are women enough in the world of the kind you like, who might have
+married you perhaps had you asked them, so in that matter at least you
+have only yourself to blame. The question is strictly between
+individuals, not between the sexes--and I must remind you that you
+yourself said it lay in a nutshell. We cannot agree. Therefore you think
+it is best we should separate--and so do I.”
+
+“That is putting it in a nutshell, indeed,” he cried. “I never made any
+such cut-and-dry statement. I spoke inadvertently in a moment of
+excitement.--No doubt it was true enough, if you come to that--but I
+have withdrawn it. I do withdraw it----”
+
+“How can you withdraw it,” she said, quietly, “if still it is true?”
+
+“Ada, you will drive me mad!” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead
+violently. She looked at him with a slight shrug of her shoulders, and
+no visible sign of her corresponding excitement except that red line
+down the high ridge of her handsome nose.
+
+“Mr. Tremenheere,” she said, “you withdraw everything and then you
+repeat it. Be logical. If I drive you mad--if our house is hell upon
+earth--why then it is unquestionable that to separate is the only
+possible thing for us to do----”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+A MEDIATOR.
+
+
+Mr. Tremenheere took a very strange step on the morning after this
+discussion. He went to call on his wife’s chief friend, Miss Elinor
+Meadows, a single woman of fortune and advanced opinions, his aversion
+hitherto, and the very impersonation of everything he disliked--and put
+the case into her hands. And in less than an hour after, Miss Meadows
+burst into the drawing-room at Hyde Park Square. She was a handsome
+woman, with a wind of motion always about her, a “tempestuous
+petticoat,” and hair somewhat wild at the best of times. Her hair was
+gray, curly, and frizzy, and full of life, running into curls and
+eddies, even when the most decorous attempts had been made to get it
+into order. On this occasion, when she had walked, and walked quickly,
+in the teeth of a breeze which had dragged it out from under her
+bonnet, and twisted it up in her veil, her broad white forehead shone
+out among the unruly locks with greater solidity and breadth than ever.
+She had an eager heartiness of manner which corresponded with her
+wind-tossed aspect. Her clear brown eyes shone with the excitement of
+her mission. When she came into the orderly room it was as if a fresh
+breeze had been let loose there. She rushed up to Mrs. Tremenheere, put
+her hands on her shoulders, and gave her a kiss upon either cheek.
+
+“Why, Ada,” she said, “what is this? What have you been doing? Do you
+mean it, or are you only frightening this poor man?”
+
+“What poor man? Of course it is you, Nelly. No one else comes in like a
+gale.”
+
+“I have come to puff the cobwebs away,” said Miss Meadows. “I have had a
+penitent husband with me this morning. Fancy! you may imagine how very
+droll I found it that he should appeal to me.”
+
+“Before you go further, let us understand each other,” said her friend,
+steadily. “The poor man and the penitent husband do not of course mean
+Mr. Tremenheere. Any one else you please you can speak of so, but not
+him.”
+
+“Ada, he has been making me his confidant. It is very strange, I allow,
+but still he has done it. Are you both out of your senses, or what on
+earth do you mean?”
+
+“We mean, my dear Nelly, as he has taken you into his confidence, to do
+the wisest thing we have done for a long time--to withdraw amicably from
+each other’s society. I don’t know what he may have said to you, but
+this is really how it is. We differ very much in sentiment and opinion.
+We have different ways of regarding things. He considers all subjects by
+their bearing on society,--I for what they are in themselves. This makes
+frequent dissensions between us. We don’t seem able to modify our views,
+or rather, our way of looking at life, and we cannot allow the children
+to grow up in constant presence of that which, while it is only
+reasonable controversy to us, will look like strife and discord to them.
+There! you have the whole affair in a nutshell, as Mr. Tremenheere
+says.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere warmed unconsciously as she spoke, and her voice
+quivered till it ended in a little outburst. She was perfectly
+self-possessed, but not unmoved or callous. In the little tremblings of
+her dress, in the slight vibration of her head when she ceased speaking,
+in the movements of her hand, she betrayed excitement which was almost
+passionate, though so powerfully restrained.
+
+“Ada, I don’t know what you have been quarrelling about,” said the
+intercessor, with deprecating meekness of speech, “but I could see he is
+very sorry. If he has provoked you badly, as I suppose, I could almost
+promise he will never do it again. Come, Ada----”
+
+“Is it Mr. Tremenheere you are speaking of, as if he was a child who had
+gone wrong? I cannot allow it--this is taking an entirely false view of
+the subject.”
+
+“Upon my word! and so because he is _your_ husband no one is to say a
+word about him. You will quarrel with him yourself, but to others he
+shall be a demigod!” said Miss Meadows. “_I_ don’t care for the man. I
+never did, as you know. I don’t care for men generally. There is not
+good enough in them, to make amends for the trouble they give. It is
+just like you. At all times everything that was yours was better than
+anybody else’s. But I am not going to be put down; I have a mission, and
+I must do my duty to my principal. Come, Ada, be reasonable. Fight it
+out and be done with it. After all, I don’t suppose he is any worse than
+other people. He likes his own way, and so do you, and I, and all of us.
+That is why I never understood your marriage at all, for any one more
+determined to be in the right than you are I never saw. Give in a
+little, and things will come round.”
+
+At this moment the door slowly opened, and the small figure of Vera,
+fully equipped, appeared, framed in by the doorway. The child stood in
+her little velvet coat and furs, her little hat, with its long feather
+pushed off her forehead, everything perfect and carefully arranged about
+her, an example of luxury and warmth and comfort. But Vera, though she
+loved her best hat as a little woman ought, was not thinking of it for
+the moment. She stood on the threshhold of the room and searched it with
+widening eyes of wonder and anxiety and dismay. The changes on her
+little countenance amused the visitor, who had stopped short in her
+speech to look at the child. All expectation, pleasure and brightness,
+just clouded with the suspense of a moment, was the little face when it
+first appeared; then the blue eyes grew bigger and searched with a
+slight shade of fear in them; then the corners of her mouth began to
+droop. “Perhaps he is in the library,” said Vera, slowly. “It is not
+possible that he can have forgotten;” and then the little mouth
+quivered, and a shower of quick tears came down in a moment. “But no,
+no; Aunt Elinor is there, and he does not like her, and she has
+frightened him away.”
+
+“I am much obliged to you, Vera,” said Miss Meadows, laughing; “but on
+the contrary, my dear, your father likes me very well, and it is he who
+has sent me----”
+
+“To take us to meet him,” cried the child, with a sudden recovery of
+sunshine, despising all probabilities; upon which a gruffer voice arose
+behind her, and Eddy said curtly, himself unseen: “He never intended it.
+I told you so. Vera, come along and don’t cry!”
+
+“Your papa is very busy; he was obliged to go out early. I will remind
+him when he comes home,” said Mrs. Tremenheere.
+
+Vera rushed into the room and pulled off her best hat violently, pulling
+off along with it the pretty ribbon that tied her hair. She clenched her
+fists like a little fury, looking out through a mist of shiny locks with
+tears and rage in her eyes, and stamped her little foot on the carpet.
+“Eddy said so,” she cried, “but I could not believe him. I would not
+believe him. Oh, isn’t it dreadful; isn’t it shameful! To break his
+word: You would kill me for it if it was me.”
+
+“Vera, you forget yourself,” said her mother.
+
+“But I don’t forget my promises!” cried the child, “and why should big
+people be let do things which children musn’t! No, I shan’t come, Eddy.
+I’ll stay here. I don’t want to go out. I don’t care for anything. I
+have had a disappointment;” and Vera marched to a corner of the room and
+sat down, gloomily turning her face to the wall.
+
+The two women looked on with more interest than the situation warranted,
+Vera ought to have been whipped, I allow; but the circumstances gave a
+certain changed character to her childish petulance. Elinor Meadows went
+up to her friend and stood over her chair, stooping to whisper that the
+child might not hear. “If you carry out your intentions,” she said,
+feeling herself to be delivering a stroke against which no woman could
+have any defence, “what is to be done about _them_? Are they to be
+divided and separated like your other goods? Ada, Ada, you can never
+have thought of that.”
+
+“I have thought of little else,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a twitching
+about her lips. “Of course it is the chief thing to think of. It has
+been my thought night and day. In the ordinary way of arranging such
+matters Vera would go with me, and Eddy with his father; but----”
+
+“But----?”
+
+“If you only knew how long and how much I have thought of it! Yes--if I
+had Vera I should bring her up to be like myself--and I am not such a
+great success as I might have been, Nelly; while his father would chill
+Eddy into a nobody, and leave him to grow up as he pleased, or as his
+schoolmaster pleased. But Mr. Tremenheere is proud of _the child_.”
+Here Mrs. Tremenheere’s voice grew choked, and for the moment she broke
+down.
+
+“Ada,” cried her friend, “for heaven’s sake don’t be obstinate. Why
+should you bring all this pain upon yourself?”
+
+“I do it for the best,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, faintly; then she
+recovered her tone of authority. “There is, I believe a principle in
+human nature which makes men kinder to women (in the abstract) and women
+kinder to men than either are to their own sex--at least such is the
+general opinion. Bringing up Vera would be to me a matter of course; one
+knows all about it--it is a thing of routine; as we were trained
+ourselves--or exactly the reverse--we train our daughters; but a
+boy--that requires thought. Therefore, Nelly, it is my opinion that I
+could do most justice to Eddy.”
+
+“And Vera?” said Miss Meadows, “she whom you call _the child_? I know
+she is the apple of your eye, however you may choose to deny it; is Mr.
+Tremenheere, do you think, likely to do the most justice to her?”
+
+Vera’s mother bore her friend’s satirical gaze for a moment, then she
+put up her hands and covered her face. Vera, who was sitting somewhat
+sullen on a stool in the corner after her outbreak, her pretty hair
+dishevelled, and her pretty face stained with crying, had begun to wake
+up from the monotony of a fit of ill-temper, which had lasted two whole
+minutes, and as her eyes began to wander round the room in search of
+some excitement, she suddenly perceived this group, which surprised her.
+Elinor Meadows, with her finger elevated in the air, scolding--as Vera
+thought--and mamma crying. Such an extraordinary concatenation of
+circumstances had never happened to her knowledge before. She started up
+from her seat, and threw herself between them.
+
+“Aunt Elinor!” cried Vera, thrusting her small person in front of her
+mother. “You can tell _me_ what it is if you want to scold--but you
+shan’t make mamma cry.”
+
+Upon this Elinor, strong-minded woman as she was, began to whimper too.
+
+“Child, you are a darling!” she cried, making a sudden attempt to kiss
+her; which Vera repulsed, standing up like a little lioness, at her
+mother’s knee.
+
+Then Mrs. Tremenheere raised her head, and putting an arm round her
+little defender, drew Vera to her side. Vera deserved that whipping all
+the same, I do not deny, and her mother knew it; but it was not in human
+courage to administer it now. She took the little impatient hand which
+had been raised in her defence, and held it between her own and kissed
+it. Though she had so much self-command it took her some time to clear
+her voice.
+
+“Mr. Tremenheere is a good man,” she said, still faltering. “He will do
+as I mean to do myself. He will feel that it is a new thing, and that he
+does not understand it, and he will study what is best.”
+
+“But for a girl! A man, without any experience or understanding, left in
+charge of a girl!”
+
+“Hush!” said Mrs. Tremenheere.
+
+Vera turned round from one to the other, her eyes widening once more
+with curiosity and eagerness. “Something is going to happen,” she said.
+“Mamma, tell me what it is?”
+
+“I cannot tell you yet, dear, for I don’t know. Go, Vera, Eddy is
+calling you.--Who has taught her that something is going to happen?” she
+said, with a sigh, when they had watched the child’s unwilling
+departure. She herself looked so melancholy and depressed that Elinor
+saw her opportunity. She was of an oratorical turn, and, indeed had
+given some attention to the art of public speaking. She withdrew a step
+for the greater effect, and shaking her curly gray locks off her broad
+fair forehead, began:
+
+“Ada! What kind of a woman are you? flesh and blood or rock and stone,
+to look at that child and leave her, and make up your mind in cold blood
+to give her up! I say nothing about your boy. He won’t talk to me; I
+don’t understand him. Mothers have weaknesses for their boys which are
+inexplicable; the most uninteresting, speechless, stolid beings! (I
+don’t mean Eddy) and yet women will stand by them--for no reason but an
+accident of birth--while a child like that!---- If she was mine, they
+should cut me in little pieces before I parted with her. They should
+take everything else I possess. Ada! I tell you, if she was mine I
+should not care for all the men in the world. I should take her,
+whatever they did--steal her, if it was necessary; run away, hide
+myself; but part with her!--never--not for the world!”
+
+“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a trembling voice;
+“don’t take the devil’s part and tempt me. I must be just. There are two
+of us, and two of them, father and mother, boy and girl. He has a right
+to his share as well as I. We must be just. If it is barbarous to give
+all to the father, it would be equally barbarous to give all to the
+mother. Nelly, say no more! that would be a crime.”
+
+“Then I should risk the crime,” cried Elinor. “I should care nothing for
+justice in comparison with Vera. Bah! abstract justice! who minds it? It
+is a thing to frighten babies with. Do you think Mr. Tremenheere would
+mind about justice, if he could get the better of you?”
+
+“You are talking of my husband,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with dignity,
+“besides, if he were to do wrong a hundred times (which he would not)
+that would be no excuse for me. I will do him no injustice, whatever
+happens.”
+
+“Then put up with him, Ada! It is your only alternative. Good heavens!
+what does it matter? An argument more or less, a discussion here or
+there. You have always been fond of argument. Make it up! For my part,
+I’d almost marry him myself,” cried Elinor, in a burst of energy, “to
+have that child--and you have married him, and got all the worst over.
+Make it up, Ada; don’t be foolish--make up!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE BREACH ACCOMPLISHED.
+
+
+Before Christmas it was all over. Christmas! Perhaps we make a good deal
+of unnecessary fuss about this festival--not that the associations about
+it, the traditions of universal kindness and good-will which,
+fortunately for us, are so English, and still more fortunately are more
+or less so honestly carried out, can ever be exaggerated. Yet it is no
+doubt true that the universal jollity, the rude fun and sometimes
+mawkish sentiment which have got to be associated with the name, just as
+often disgust and sadden as delight those who have learned by time or
+trouble that Christmas does not always bring the reunion and happiness
+which are supposed to be its particular privilege. Alas! on the
+contrary, how sharply it reminds some of us of gaps not to be filled
+again, of empty places, of life diminished and wearing out! But whether
+we do rightly or not in making a saturnalia of its homely delights,
+certain it is that of all times to choose for a parting, Christmas is
+the least appropriate. I don’t think Mrs. Tremenheere thought of this;
+she had so many things to think about, how should she remember dates? It
+was the morning of the 24th of December, but she had forgotten, so full
+was her mind of other things, that the 24th of December was Christmas
+eve. She went away in the afternoon in a cab to the railway station,
+with Eddy by her side, dull and lowering and miserable, not knowing why
+she was so unhappy. No explanations had been entered into with the
+children. Mrs. Tremenheere was in reality so miserable that she desired
+to avoid dramatic effect as far as this was possible, and her husband,
+naturally, as a man and an Englishman, hated scenes. So the curious boy
+and girl, full of secret interest in the something going on which was
+not confided to them, were put off with the intimation that mamma was
+going away for a time, taking Eddy with her, while Vera was to stay at
+home to “take care of papa.” Eddy for one was never taken in by this
+false explanation, but Vera in the delight of her own importance,
+contrived to stave off her vague inquietude on the subject, and accepted
+it. The boy’s inquietude was equally vague, but it was stronger. He felt
+himself a very forlorn waif and stray as the dreary cab traversed the
+streets, where all the shops were decked for Christmas, and where so
+many holiday parties were wandering about, looking in at the shop
+windows for their Christmas presents. “Mamma,” he said at last, when his
+heart was too full to bear the pressure longer, “isn’t it very odd to
+leave home to-day when to-morrow is Christmas?” A big tear was forming
+in the corner of his eye. He did not like to look up at her, lest she
+should see it, or lest--still more terrible possibility--it should fall.
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere put her arm round him. I will not say that she was in
+much better plight than Eddy was, though a strong sense of duty held her
+up. Something was choking in her throat which was not exactly the fog,
+and her heart was wrung with a sterner pang. She paused a moment, to be
+quite firm and collected, and drew him close to her. “Yes,” she said,
+“it is very odd, very odd; but I can’t help it, Eddy.” There was a kind
+of apology, a kind of appeal in her voice, and it went to Eddy’s heart,
+who vaguely comprehended, though it would have been utterly impossible
+for him to put in words what it was he felt and understood. He crouched
+himself up close against his mother, and caressed the hand that was
+round him, and allowed those two tears with which his eyes were big to
+drop upon it; and thus the pain in both was a little softened and
+sweetened, though the child was as far from understanding intellectually
+what the woman had in her mind as if they had been creatures of
+different species. But to go away to a hotel in Brighton through the
+cold, through the wintry dimness and brightness, through the crowds of
+travellers that encumbered every railway, the clusters of happy holiday
+people, and all the hampers and all the presents--one must have done it
+to know what it is. Mrs. Tremenheere bought some Christmas numbers of
+various periodicals at the station to amuse the boy. They were all about
+meetings, dances, mistletoe, wanderers returning and hard hearts
+relenting, and every kind of revolution made in every kind of life by
+the simple agency of Christmas carols, snow, church-bells and sentiment.
+“Merry Christmas!” the very shops flaunted at them in big print. “Merry
+Christmas!” the porter said when he got his sixpence. And so the
+strong-minded woman and her boy went off into the yellow misty distance
+which led to Brighton, if you please, but which was the cold outside
+world,--outside of home.
+
+Elinor Meadows joined them next day, in the strange hotel looking out
+upon the quay, which Mrs. Tremenheere had chosen as the first step in
+her self-banishment. It was not that Miss Meadows had not many cheerful
+houses to which to go for Christmas, but being a kind-hearted soul, as
+well as a strong-minded woman, she preferred to come to Brighton, and
+spend the festival in the dismallest way, over the fire in a
+sitting-room of a big vulgar inn, with her depressed and somewhat
+irritable friend. Never was a work more worthy of a good Samaritan. She
+came in the middle of the day, after church, which was the only cheerful
+portion of the Christmas to poor Eddy. The holly-berries and the wreaths
+pleased the child, and the Christmas hymns which he could sing, and
+which did him good, till they came out of church into the dreary world
+again. To be sure, Eddy wanted a hundred times during the service to
+nudge Vera, and call her attention to a bit of decoration that pleased
+him, or to the little girl in the next pew who fell asleep, or to the
+clergyman curtesying to the altar in his long cassock and surplice, or
+some one of the other anythings, nothings, that caught his childish
+eyes; but still church is church, wherever you are, and not so terribly
+dull as a strange place far from home. And then it was a hopeless sort
+of Christmas day, with neither sunshine nor frost, such as are orthodox
+and befitting, but a drizzling dull rain, and skies so low, so leaden,
+and so cloudy that they seemed to Eddy to be coming down upon him,
+threatening to crush him every minute. After Elinor came (whom the
+children called Aunt Elinor, for friendship’s sake, though there was no
+relationship between them), it grew duller and duller for Eddy. He had
+not anything to do with the conversation of his mother and her friend,
+which was carried on in subdued tones, and with occasional warning
+glances from one to the other at himself, which showed him that he was
+in the way--upon which, being proud, Eddy gathered together the
+Christmas papers his mother had bought him, and drew a chair to the
+window, in front of which he placed himself, shutting out half of the
+gray and stifled daylight there was, and pored over first one and then
+another of his stories, wondering to himself rather why all those tales
+were of people who came back, and not one of people who went away just
+at Christmas. He read and read, hearing behind him the murmur of the two
+voices, the sound of the sparkling, crackling fire, and seeing, when by
+chance he lifted his eyes, the gray sea breaking in a muddy soiled rim
+of white upon the gray pebbles, and the street, which looked like a very
+dismal Sunday street--“only rather more so,” Eddy thought. But he did
+not often raise his eyes. He read on and on, one tale after another,
+scarcely quite sure where one ended and another began, till the monotony
+of his reading and of the lapping waves outside, and the murmuring
+voices within, lulled the lonely boy into a kind of dream.
+
+The ladies had drawn their chairs to the fire; they had eaten their
+luncheon, they had done their best to be cheerful; and now the floods of
+remark and criticism and question which were in Elinor’s mind could be
+contained no longer. She began even before poor Eddy withdrew, leaving
+them at liberty; and showed her sympathy, as so many friends do, by
+taunt and sudden reproach.
+
+“Well,” she said, “you have done it now. It is all over, and every place
+of repentance comfortably cut off. How do you like it? You have given up
+your husband to confusion and remorse. You have left your child----”
+
+“Mr. Tremenheere has nothing to be remorseful about,” said his wife,
+with a slight shiver, turning away from the last suggestion. “You
+mistake the matter altogether, Elinor. You do not understand either me
+or him. I blame him for nothing. He has no need to be remorseful on my
+account.”
+
+“Then why, in the name of heaven, did you go away? I never believed you
+would carry it out. I expected you to threaten and frighten him, and
+then to relent.”
+
+“That is to say,” cried Mrs. Tremenheere, “that you expected me to do
+exactly what the woman does whom you find fault with in books, and are
+indignant about as a man’s idea of women. You expect me to say things I
+don’t mean, and do the reverse of what I say, and act like a creature
+without conscience, or honor, or moral responsibility.”
+
+“Ada! No, I don’t do anything of the sort. Don’t please come down upon
+an unoffending person in that way. I don’t quite see why, in a case
+where the feelings are concerned, you should not act as a great many
+other people act, who are not without honor or conscience.”
+
+“I may be wrong,” said Mrs. Tremenheere. “No one is free from the risk
+of taking a wrong view, but to threaten anything without meaning to do
+it is not possible to me. This seemed to me right----”
+
+“Yes, yes, I know,” said Elinor. “We need not discuss it over again.
+Isn’t there a book which is called ‘He Knew He was Right?’ We must put
+it the other way now. You are right and you are satisfied. And now what
+are you going to do? You can’t stay always here.”
+
+“No, I am going--to devote myself to _his_ education.”
+
+She would not say Eddy’s name to attract his attention. Was he not
+happily unconscious, absorbed in his Christmas stories? so, at least,
+she thought.
+
+“That too is abstract, Ada. Don’t tell me where you mean to go unless
+you like--but give me some idea of your plans.”
+
+“I have not any yet. I must find out what is best.”
+
+“Put him to school, Ada. That is always best for boys. Put him to some
+good school, and then when you are free of responsibility, come abroad
+with me. I have been thinking of it all the morning. You want change,
+you want refreshment. You have been worried and tired. Get the boy
+comfortably disposed of, so that you need have no anxiety about him, and
+come with me.”
+
+“Get him comfortably disposed of, where I shall have no anxiety about
+him!” Mrs. Tremenheere repeated slowly, with a smile.
+
+“Yes,” said Elinor, suspecting no sarcasm in her tone, “it would be the
+very thing to do. That is the chief good of children at his age; you can
+dispose of them in so satisfactory a way. Vera under the care of her
+father, Eddy at school; and then you and I----”
+
+“Can go and enjoy ourselves?” Said Mrs. Tremenheere with a forced laugh.
+
+“Why not? Of course we should enjoy ourselves. Don’t you recollect,
+before you were married, that trip we took? I was not much more than a
+girl, and how I did enjoy it! I never thought there would be such luck
+for me again. Come, Ada, now you are free, with only the boy to dispose
+of, this is the very thing to do. We might start almost at once; stay at
+Nice or Cannes, to rest ourselves a little, and then on to Rome.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere rose before eager Elinor had got this length, and began
+to walk about the room in an agitated way. Then she went across to where
+Eddy, in front of the window, had dropped half asleep over the stories,
+with the monotony and the misery and the stillness. She woke him up
+bending over him, taking his curly head between her hands and kissing
+his forehead, a caress which the drowsy, confused child responded to by
+stumbling from his chair with a sudden start, and all but knocking her
+down.
+
+“Mamma!” cried Eddy, overpowered, and beginning in spite of his manhood,
+to cry without knowing it.
+
+“Yes, my darling,” she said, with quivering lips, soothing him. Elinor
+sat still, turning round in her chair, gazing eagerly at her, not
+knowing what it all meant. What had this sudden demonstration to do with
+what she had been saying--with that plan of hers which would be so
+pleasant and so easily carried out?
+
+While Eddy and his mother got through this dreary Christmas afternoon a
+great many things had happened to Vera. She had managed to keep herself
+going all the previous day. A lively, vivacious, independent
+disposition, and a great sense of importance were as wings to the little
+heroine. She gave herself a great many airs, to the pitying wonder and
+admiration of the servants, who, I need not say, were indignant beyond
+the power of utterance at Mrs. Tremenheere. Vera walked about over the
+house to see that everything was ready for her father when it came to be
+time for his return. She interfered with the butler in laying out his
+things in his dressing-room. She interfered with the cook, requesting to
+know what was ordered for dinner, and suggesting an additional pudding
+“out of her own head.” She went to the dining-room and insisted upon
+helping to arrange the dessert. Her mind was full of a lofty
+determination to make her father so comfortable that “he should not miss
+mamma!” Accordingly she took care to remove his claret from the fire
+where it had been carefully placed, and let fall the bottle, which was
+warm, from her small fingers.
+
+“If it hadn’t a been for the hearthrug, miss, you’d have broke it, and
+spilt the wine all over the floor,” said Jervis.
+
+“But why do you put it there? Gentlemen take ice in their wine, they
+don’t like it hot!” cried Vera, stamping her foot, as she saw it put
+back again. “Take it away, take it away!”
+
+Then when Mr. Tremenheere came in, Vera placed herself at the table
+beside him, and pressed him to eat of every dish, especially the pudding
+she had ordered.
+
+“I told cook to make it myself, papa.”
+
+“Then you had better have some of it,” he said, and Vera was nothing
+loth. She sat with him while he took his wine, chattering without pause
+or intermission, and she led him up-stairs and made tea for him, her
+little heart beating with a mingled pain and pleasure which she did not
+analyze, poor child, but which excited her as either sensation unmingled
+seldom does.
+
+“When mamma comes back you can tell her how I took care of you,” she
+cried in triumph. “I do love to pour out your tea, papa!”
+
+All this touched him beyond description with a strange little flavor of
+sharp sweetness amid a great deal of pain. Mr. Tremenheere felt the
+world’s comments hanging over him, felt that already the servants were
+all “sitting upon” himself and his private affairs, and that ere a day
+had passed “everybody” in the narrow sense that belongs to that word in
+society, would be aware of what had happened, and would discuss them
+too. How was he to face their remarks, what account was he to give even
+to his best friends? “Incompatibility of temper;” but how few people
+would believe that there was not something else below that well-worn
+plea? Some _faux pas_ on her part, some atrocity on his--which was being
+veiled on one side or the other. As it was, he was very irritable to
+the servants, and launched out upon poor Jervis about that very claret
+which he had saved from Vera’s meddling little hands.
+
+“But, Lord bless you, to see her there a setting beside him, comforting
+of him, I hadn’t the heart to say as it was Miss Vera’s fault,” that
+dignitary said, when he went down-stairs; “and though he’s in the
+devil’s own temper, I could’nt stand up to him, not to-night. Poor
+beggar, it ain’t very nice for him, whatever you may say.” Nobody,
+however, down-stairs took up this challenge, or had a word to say in
+favor of Mrs. Tremenheere. She was universally condemned.
+
+“A woman as thinks of herself first didn’t ought to have children,” said
+cook, who was a great domestic authority.
+
+“And how any woman as hadn’t a heart of stone could go and leave my
+little Duckie!” whimpered the nurse.
+
+In short the house was in a state of moral indignation. But Vera went to
+bed, straight from the drawing-room, after tea, supported by her own
+elation; and only wept two or three tears when she remembered that
+mamma would not come to kiss after she was asleep.
+
+Next morning, however, it was different. Mr. Tremenheere did not go to
+church, but he stayed at home with a sullen respect for the festival
+which was so far from being a festival to him. What a day it was! A
+drizzling dull Christmas, with scarcely anybody about the streets, the
+shops shut, the houses either shut up or turned outside in, as it were,
+everything cheerful being concentrated in doors. Vera came down full of
+prattle to breakfast, but her father replied to her with an effort. He
+was very kind, and kissed her, and gave her a little locket which he had
+bought for her for Christmas, and which made her quite happy for five
+minutes; but after that he let the child run on without any reply, and
+got impatient when she clamored for an answer. “Hush child, I am busy,”
+he said. As soon as he had finished his breakfast he went off to the
+library to write letters; and Vera went up-stairs, her heart sinking
+more and more, and sat down on the carpet close to one of the long
+drawing-room windows. She leaned her poor little head against the pane,
+looking out. There were only a few people passing under dripping
+umbrellas. Everybody who was not out of town was at church, or else
+preparing for the festivities of the evening. The house was very still;
+there were no preparations going on in Hyde Park Square. Vera’s little
+heart sank lower and lower--all the world seemed to ebb away from
+her,--mother, brother, even nurse and cook; only herself and her father
+remained, two forlorn and shipwrecked people. There came into Vera’s
+mind a picture of the Flood, which she had seen somewhere, in which two
+people perched on the smallest point of rock were holding by each other.
+“Like me and poor papa!” she said to herself, with a rising sob in her
+lonely little bosom. Just at that moment, however, she heard her
+father’s voice down-stairs.
+
+“I am going out,” Mr. Tremenheere was saying. “Probably I shall dine
+out. You needn’t prepare anything; and tell nurse to look after Miss
+Vera.” When nurse did go, very ill-tempered to have her holiday thus
+interfered with, she found Vera lying on the floor, crying her little
+heart out. The loneliness had swallowed up all her little bravery, her
+resolution and courage. She put her hand to the locket round her neck
+to try and console herself; but even that did not reanimate her failing
+spirit. Poor little Vera! It was she now who was on that peak alone,
+with the hurrying muddy waters sweeping round her, and nobody to lay
+hold of. She sank down like a weak little unfledged bird. Was mamma in
+that cruel ark, floating, floating away, taking no thought for her? Love
+and help and kindness seemed to have abandoned the child. Her pretty
+hair was ruffled, her eyes blind with tears; she laid down her head and
+thought she would die. And it was Christmas day!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+EDUCATION.
+
+
+Whether Mrs. Tremenheere had any foundation of justice in the theory
+which made her take her boy’s education in hand instead of her girl’s, I
+cannot venture to say; but in the meantime the poor children had a
+troubled interval to go through. She devoted herself to Eddy, walking
+with him, superintending his lessons, doing everything the most anxious
+care could do. The toys she bought him, the books she accumulated, the
+common people with children whose acquaintance she permitted herself to
+make on her boy’s account, that he might have some one to play with, are
+not to be described. And she had a tutor for him, who came daily and
+drove him quickly along the stony ways of learning, and took him out for
+walks upon the Downs, and told his mother he was one of the brightest
+of boys, not convincing her much, though he pleased her by so saying.
+She had settled herself in Brighton with the express idea that it would
+be good for him and cheerful, and I cannot tell with what anxiety, poor
+soul, she watched over him, straining every faculty to amuse and cheer
+him. But the more she devoted herself to Eddy the paler and quieter he
+grew. He became as mild as a little invalid, and weak, though there was
+nothing the matter with him. He clung to his mother, as sick children
+do, stealing his hand into her’s when he walked with her, pressing close
+up to her when she talked to any one, never leaving her when he could
+help it, he who had been so little amenable to female government in
+those old days at home. She perceived it and yet she did not perceive
+it, as people do who resolutely shut their eyes and will not see; and it
+was again her friend Elinor who first really called her attention to the
+state of affairs, which had then lasted more than a year.
+
+“Do you remember telling me your ideas about men training girls and
+women boys?” said Elinor. Eddy was in the room with them as usual. It
+was a warm day in the early spring, and the boy sat half out in the
+balcony, with a book over which he pored. He heard what they were
+saying, and yet did not hear, in his abstracted way.
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, raising herself up. “What then? You have
+seen my Vera, Elinor!”
+
+“I have seen her; but that is not what I was thinking of.”
+
+“What were you thinking of? Her letters are full of bright spirits, and
+amusing, as she always was. Is her father not doing his duty to her?
+Tell me, tell me, Nelly!”
+
+“She is very well--quite well. I was not thinking of anything so far
+off.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere sat upright on her chair, very upright, grasping as it
+were instinctively for her weapons of defence. “You are thinking of me?”
+
+Elinor stretched out her oratorical right hand. “Look at that child,
+Ada! is that a good specimen of a woman’s training? You are bringing him
+up entirely as you would bring up a girl. Look at the color of his
+hands--are these like a boy’s hands? Look at his quiet timid way. You
+are ruining him, both health and spirit. I don’t know what you mean by
+it; while Vera, whom you could have managed----”
+
+“Nelly, you have heard something about my child.”
+
+She began to tremble, she who was so firm and steady. Somehow any
+mistakes she herself might have made seemed so trivial, so easily
+rectified, in comparison with the mistakes that might be made on the
+other side.
+
+“It is not Vera,” said Elinor. “Vera is running wild; she is growing a
+romp and a tomboy; but that is less harm. Her health will not suffer,
+nor her mind much, at her age. But, Ada, look there! Is that pale, still
+child, poring over his book, the sort of creature you wish your son to
+be? You are bringing him up like a girl, not like a boy.”
+
+“I thought you and your friends maintained that there should be no
+difference between girls and boys,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a faint
+smile. She had received the arrow into her very heart; but she did not
+mean to show it now, however it might affect her afterwards. She was too
+proud all at once to own herself in the wrong.
+
+“You need not sneer about my friends,” said Miss Meadows, warmly. “I
+thought, too, that you had been one of them, that you had yourself shown
+some interest in such questions. I don’t care whether I am consistent or
+not, any more than I care whether you are angry or not. Girls and boys
+may be the same in the abstract, and it may be good for girls perhaps to
+have more of a boy’s training; but for a boy to be thrown back into the
+domestic bondage which I hope we shall break for girls, is monstrous--it
+is a disgrace--it is against nature.”
+
+“Do you wish me to quarrel with you, Nelly?”
+
+“I don’t care whether you quarrel or not,” cried the orator, with a
+large gesture of indifference. “Quarrel as you like, so long as you open
+your eyes and see what you are doing to that boy.”
+
+After this there was a long pause. Elinor, somewhat agitated by her own
+boldness, sat still and began to work with great but fatal ardor at a
+piece of embroidery she found on the table, and to which she did untold
+damage. She was so carried away by her feelings that she did not
+perceive that her friend had left the room. But when Mrs. Tremenheere
+came down-stairs again, though there were traces of emotion about her
+face she was as friendly as ever. She had put on her hat, and invited
+Elinor to come out for a walk.
+
+“Eddy, I see the Troutbeck boys going out to play cricket,” she said,
+“could not you join them?”
+
+A flash of boyish triumph came into Eddy’s still eyes.
+
+“Cricket, mamma! What can you be thinking of? There is no cricket at
+this time of the year.”
+
+“What does it matter for the name? They are going to play at something.”
+
+“Jumping, perhaps, or football. Some people still play football at this
+season; or hare and hounds.”
+
+“What does it matter which it is? but it does matter that you should
+play and get a little color in your cheeks.”
+
+“They are jumping,” said Eddy, from the window, with a sparkle of
+energy, “but then there is a lot of them,” he added, falling back, “they
+won’t want me.”
+
+“Nonsense--go!” said his mother, peremptorily.
+
+He got up from his book with reluctance. He did care for the jumping,
+but was it worth while to disturb himself for that, or anything else? He
+was quite comfortable and interested in his story. The two ladies stood
+still and watched him creeping away, languid and indifferent. For the
+first time Mrs. Tremenheere noticed the change in the boy. A great
+wrinkle of anxiety came into her forehead. “Nelly, I am very much
+obliged to you,” she cried. “What shall I do?”
+
+Miss Meadows glowed and expanded with the sense of victory. “Ada,” she
+said, “it is not many people who have the sense to see where they have
+been wrong. I always said you were no ordinary woman. Send him to
+school, my dear--send him to school; let him be among other boys; try
+him with wholesome neglect; and come off to Italy with me.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere listened very seriously till Elinor came to her last
+clause, then she laughed, though her face was still clouded. “Come and
+walk,” she said.
+
+In the meantime things were going on very differently, and yet with much
+the same result, at Hyde Park Square. Mr. Tremenheere was very kind to
+Vera when she came immediately under his notice. He still allowed her to
+pour out his tea for him in the morning while he read his newspaper, and
+had her down-stairs to amuse him after dinner, when now and then he
+dined at home. But in a very short time after his wife left him, this
+ceased to be his ordinary custom. He got over the scandal much better
+than he had hoped. It had taken place when Society was out of town, and
+therefore had passed comparatively without notice; and without much
+difficulty he fell back into his bachelor habits. He had suffered more
+at the moment than she did, but he did not suffer very much after it was
+over, and when the secondary consequences he feared proved in great part
+illusory. He had liked his old life, with all its varieties and
+comforts, and now, notwithstanding the interval of ten years which he
+had spent in trying to learn how to be happy otherwise, he took it up
+again with unfeigned pleasure. Now and then a few men dined with him at
+home, and then Vera would come down in her best frock, and chatter to
+them, and do the honors with childish excitement, her eyes blazing with
+the novelty and pride of her position. Mr. Tremenheere had been
+considerably startled, it is not to be denied, by her talk on several of
+these occasions, and one morning he remonstrated gently.
+
+“When there is company, as the servants say, a little girl of your age
+should be very quiet, Vera. It is not to you, my dear, that my friends
+look for amusement. You must be quiet and good, and answer when people
+speak to you.”
+
+“Why, papa, they all like to talk to me best,” said Vera, tossing her
+little head. “They all laugh and say I am clever. Why shouldn’t I talk?
+I am very fond of talking. I talk to everybody, and that is why people
+like me, and say I am not at all proud.”
+
+“What sort of people do you talk to?” said her father, half alarmed,
+half amused.
+
+“Oh, all sorts of people; not only gentlemen, papa. When Nurse goes to
+see her friends I go with her, and they all say it is nice of me not to
+be proud. They are going to have a party in the kitchen to-night. It is
+such fun. They have tea, and then they dance, and then they have supper,
+and Nurse says if I am good I may stay to supper this time.”
+
+“This time!” said Mr. Tremenheere, with horror; “have you gone to
+anything of the sort before?”
+
+“Oh yes, papa, several! I went with Nurse to the servants’ party next
+door; but oh,” said Vera, suddenly, “I am afraid I ought not have talked
+of it. I don’t think they like the masters to know.”
+
+Mr. Tremenheere rose and walked about the room in great agitation. Here
+was an unlooked-for disclosure. For a moment he was quite appalled by
+the discovery he had made. “Vera,” he said in a voice which trembled,
+“you must promise not to go to this affair to-night.”
+
+“Papa! not to go!” cried Vera, the corners of her mouth dropping; “oh,
+you can’t mean it! you can’t mean it! It is such a nice party, papa, and
+they take such care of me. I sit next to Nurse or the cook always, and I
+dance with the nicest people only. There was once somebody quite as
+nicely dressed as you, and with beautiful diamond studs, and who could
+speak French and do all sorts of things. Papa, you can’t mean it. Nurse
+says it is the only party I ever have, and that it would be cruel to
+send me to bed.”
+
+“The only party you ever have! I thought you went out a great deal, and
+had a great many parties?”
+
+“Yes, baby parties; I don’t care for them,” said Vera, with serene
+fatuity, looking her father in the face, and holding up her little head.
+
+After this a storm arose. Mr. Tremenheere sent for his three principal
+functionaries, Jervis, the cook, and the nurse, and demanded to know how
+they dared to take Miss Vera to their d---- parties. He was not a man
+who interfered much in his household, and when he did so he was usually
+calm and polite, a thing which the domestics understood much less and
+resented much more deeply than the chance blasphemy, which they forgave
+easily. Jervis stammered out excuses, and apologies, and protestations.
+“As I was always against it, and knew it wasn’t no place for Miss Vera.”
+Nurse retired in floods of tears, which threatened every moment to
+become hysterics, and cook, who was hot-tempered, threw up her place.
+Vera, very red and very angry, darted in front of the accused to defend
+them. “Papa! when it was I who told you! They will never trust me any
+more; they will think I am a traitor and betrayed them! Papa, you are
+not to scold them, when it is all my fault!”
+
+“Take Miss Vera up-stairs,” said Mr. Tremenheere to the housemaid, who,
+stood by. “Go at once without a word,” he cried, and very reluctantly
+the child, still hot and red with excitement, was forced to obey. Vera
+was shut up all day, and overwhelmed by reproaches from the nurse. “You
+see what comes of it with your tongue, Miss,” cried this weeping
+sufferer. “Can’t you never hold your tongue, as I’m a telling of you,
+night and day? Them as can’t hold their tongues should never be let into
+secrets, and it’s all over Miss Vera, I can tell you, between you and
+me. No more parties in this house, nor no other house; no more cakes as
+I asked cook to make for you--no more nice suppers. After this you’ll go
+to bed at eight o’clock regular, as you used to in your mamma’s time,
+and when you feel to want something nice you needn’t look to me. And
+here’s poor cook losing her good place along of your chatter!” she
+added, discharging this last arrow with full confidence in its effect.
+There was no party in the house that night; but nobody informed Vera of
+this fact, which might have been partially consolatory. She was put to
+bed, and left there in solitude to cry her eyes out, no one coming near
+her. “Oh, mamma, mamma!” cried poor little Vera, forlorn in the
+darkness. Her mother was miles off, and could not hear; her father was
+at his club; the servants were having an indignation supper down-stairs,
+four stories off, and there was nobody to say a word of consolation to
+the poor little abandoned girl.
+
+However, after these very different scenes, both husband and wife set
+themselves to think on the subject, as Mrs. Tremenheere had predicted.
+“He shall not say that the boy is ruined by a woman’s training,” she
+said to herself; and “She shall not taunt me that I have not been able
+to look after the girl,” said Mr. Tremenheere. This delightful spirit of
+opposition worked strongly in concert with other feelings more laudable,
+for indeed both parents were fond of their children, in their different
+ways. Mrs. Tremenheere’s part was the easiest of the two, and she took
+her steps promptly. The very next day after that revelation had been
+made to her, she went off to one of the great public schools and put
+Eddy’s name down, and began herself to look for a house in the
+neighborhood, for she did not mean to throw the boy off entirely, as her
+childless friend thought right and expedient. Before Easter, at which
+time Eddy began his school-life, she had found the house she wanted, a
+villa on a hillside, which was not high indeed, but which had all the
+advantages of much greater height, since it looked over a great plain of
+rich cultivated country, fields, and hedges, and fine trees, and red
+farmhouses, with here and there a great mansion gleaming away into the
+far distance, till it got indistinct like the sea, and almost as
+suggestive. Here she settled and furnished her house, which was
+agreeable work, and tossed the pale boy into the sea of life and youth
+close by--where he soon ceased to be pale.
+
+Mr. Tremenheere, poor man, had a more difficult task. The first thing he
+did was to reflect bitterly upon his wife’s abandonment of her natural
+duty. “It is just like a woman,” he said to himself through his teeth.
+“They profess to love their children beyond everything, and yet they
+will give up their children rather than give in or own themselves
+wrong.” But this reflection, though it was in its way satisfactory, did
+not help him to the solution of his problem. How was he to bring up his
+daughter? In his perplexity he betook himself wisely to a friend who was
+a clergyman, and had to do with all kind of educational and benevolent
+institutions. “I suppose I want a governess,” he said. “She must be old
+to avoid scandal, and well educated and so forth, but chiefly she must
+be a dragon--recollect this. She must never relax, night or day. I will
+have my girl well looked after; that is one thing I am determined on. A
+woman who will suspect everything, believe nothing, and keep an eye upon
+her for ever.”
+
+“Surely this is going too far. It is against the spirit of the time.
+Everything tends to emancipate women, Tremenheere, not to make slaves of
+them.”
+
+“I hate the spirit of the time,” he said. “I hate your enlightened
+women, that know the world as well as we do. I want my girl to be of the
+old type. I want her to be seen and not heard, like our grandmothers.
+And therefore I want a dragon for her governess--a woman that will allow
+nothing out of the regulation in point of propriety--an iceberg, a
+machine, whatever you please, but one that will guard the child, and
+watch her and make her incapable of mischief. Now, if you have any
+regard for me, bestir yourself and find out what I want.”
+
+“I have her,” said the clergyman, sighing. “So few people want dragons
+nowadays that I feared she would have to fall back upon the Home, poor
+lady. But, as that is what you want--only I don’t think you’ll find it
+successful with a high-spirited child like Vera.”
+
+“Vera’s high spirits must come down,” said her father. “I want a soft,
+submissive, yielding girl, and not a self-opinionated being that will
+set up for a mind of her own. What do they want with minds of their
+own?”
+
+“Tremenheere, you speak like a Turk.”
+
+“Perhaps I feel like one,” he said, dismissing the subject with a forced
+laugh. And this was how he found his way out of the dilemma. Miss
+Campbell arrived at the end of the week, a tall, severe Scotswoman, with
+a large nose and high cheekbones. She was over fifty, and she had been
+trained in the belief that young ladies ought to be kept in absolute
+subjection. A girl who had no will but that of her parents, and who
+consulted her mother with her eyes before she took a piece of bread and
+butter, was Miss Campbell’s ideal; she was exactly the kind of person to
+satisfy Mr. Tremenheere.
+
+Thus father and mother entered at the same time into the right way, or
+into what they thought to be the right way; and the two experiments of
+education began.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE CAPTAIN OF THE ELEVEN.
+
+
+A bright July day, early in the month, with London still full, and all
+the world weary yet toiling on, more or less, in the treadmill work of
+society; such a day as revives the toilers in that everlasting round,
+and breathes into hundreds of worn-out minds an air of freshness, waking
+them up from the fatigue of their pleasures and of their disgust. Stands
+all round, with ladies ranged one row above another like banks of
+flowers, carriages thronging twenty deep, and crowds standing in a deep
+inner ring. But it is not a race-course, like Ascot or Epsom. It is in
+the heart of London; and all these thousands of fine people surround a
+green smooth lawn, on which a set of lads are playing--no such great
+matter, one would suppose, and little comprehensible to a foreigner.
+Yet surely this is one of the most innocent, the kindliest of all freaks
+of fashion. The fine ladies are turned as by magic into mothers and
+sisters. They have their parasols and their dresses and their horses’
+heads trimmed with symbolical ribbons. Many of the younger ones watch
+the game with an anxiety as great as if the welfare of the kingdom
+depended upon it; and the men, world-worn men from all sorts of unlikely
+places, men from the clubs and the public offices, and Parliament, and
+business, carry their ensigns too, if not so openly, in some snip of
+blue somewhere about them, a forget-me-not in a button-hole, a tassel to
+an umbrella. And this is all, need I say, for Eton against Harrow, the
+Public Schools Match. Not to a hundredth part of these crowds is it
+given to have a personal interest in the sublime band on either side.
+But as every smallest imp, with his knot of blue ribbon, feels himself
+Eton or Harrow impersonated against all the world, so all the elder
+people stand by the school to which they are vaguely attached in the
+person of that smallest of schoolboys, with as much fervor as if they
+belonged to the Captain of the Eleven. But those who do belong to the
+Captain of the Eleven--those who can with exultant yet anxious eyes
+follow the apparition of that demigod, as he comes and goes--who can
+describe the feelings that agitate their bosoms? Such feelings had full
+sway on the special occasion to which we refer, in a certain modest
+carriage, holding two ladies, which occupied one of the places in the
+front rank at Lord’s, carefully placed there before daylight to make
+sure of a good view. The elder lady in it took but little interest in
+what was going on, but then, though the elder, she was the least
+important, and her young companion was entirely absorbed in the scene.
+She was but sixteen, dressed in the simplest demure costume of white,
+and sometimes whiter still than her dress with agitation, sometimes all
+flushed and rose-red with excitement. Her eyes, her whole soul, her
+whole heart were fixed on the game and the players. Her young bosom gave
+a great throb whenever there was a good hit on her own side. Her heart
+sank when the good hit was on the other. She had neither sight, nor
+hearing, nor understanding for anything else. And who will wonder? She
+was the sister of the Captain of the Eleven. It is unnecessary to say
+which of the blues that captain wore. Tremenheere had played once before
+for his school, but as this was almost by an accident, and not known
+until the last moment, “his people” did not have the glory of it as they
+ought; but with full announcement and preparation the once backward
+Eddy, the boy whom his mother had spoilt, burst suddenly upon the world
+now. And everything else was dwarfed to Vera by this event. All other
+honors and delights grew dim before it. She watched her brother (whom
+she scarcely knew) with a strange enthusiasm, and eagerness, and anxiety
+which it is impossible to describe. How could she bear to see him
+beaten? If life and death had been on it she could not have taken it
+more seriously. Her hand was on the door of the carriage, sometimes
+trembling, sometimes holding it tight with agony when the other side
+seemed to be making progress; the pretty girlish figure bent a little
+forward, her eyes intent, never losing a movement, seeing nothing,
+hearing nothing, unaware who came near her, who passed, even who spoke
+to her,--and all this for a cricket match! But then it was much more
+than a cricket match for Vera. Her brother seemed to her the very
+foremost young man in England. Had not he and his comrades eclipsed all
+other incidents in busy London on this hot day? Parliament itself was
+diminished. There was nobody in the Row; afternoon teas were as good as
+done away with; telegrams from hour to hour appeared in all the papers;
+the streets were full of the two different blues. What wonder that Vera,
+only sixteen, should think her brother the very greatest personage that
+ever girl belonged to? She looked at the card in her hand now and then
+when Edward was not playing, to read his name with a thrill of fresh
+excitement. “Tremenheere, captain.” If he had come to this honor and
+glory when he was only eighteen, what prizes must not life hold for such
+a hero?
+
+“Vera, my dear, I think you should put down your veil? People are
+remarking you. I don’t think it is nice to be so absorbed in anything.
+You forget yourself altogether, my dear.”
+
+“Why should I remember myself?--there is nothing in me to remember,” she
+said, in her excitement. Then coming to herself, “Oh please, Miss
+Campbell, I do so hate a veil. It gets in one’s eyes, and one can’t
+see.”
+
+“Dear, how often must I tell you that a well-bred girl expresses herself
+much more quietly. Take the opera-glass, then, that conceals the face.”
+
+“But I can see very well without it. I can see Eddy quite plain. Look,
+Miss Campbell! I can always make him out. There! four for us!”
+
+“I don’t understand the interest you all take in this game,” said Miss
+Campbell. “In Scotland the gentlemen play golf, which they tell me is
+much finer exercise. All this I think is very bad for the boys. All
+London coming out to look at them hitting a ball with a stick. And bad
+for you too, Vera. If you get so very much excited I think I must take
+you away.”
+
+Vera knew that this could not be done, and therefore heard the threat
+calmly. Fortunately, after a while, Miss Campbell got engrossed with
+something else, and with a sigh of relief she let the glass drop, thus
+revealing her moving animated countenance all at once to two people to
+whom the sight of it was like something from heaven. The one was a
+middle-aged woman, no more or less than Vera’s mother; the other a
+young man. Let us keep the more interesting personage to the last. Mrs.
+Tremenheere has the best right to come forward. She stood at a little
+distance among the crowd looking at her child. She had always called
+Vera by this name. After years of virtual separation--though there never
+had been any personal objection made on either side to either parent
+seeing the children when he or she pleased--here was the child she had
+left, grown into a woman. I cannot describe the feelings with which her
+mother regarded her, gazing at the young absorbed countenance. Little
+Vera, the baby, the plaything, the amusement of the house, the little
+bud of life whom she had left behind, not knowing what was to come of
+her!
+
+“Look, Elinor!” she said, grasping the arm of her inseparable companion,
+and leaning on her with a trembling which she could not command.
+
+“I see her,” said Miss Meadows, cheerfully. “Hasn’t she grown up pretty?
+Come and speak to her, Ada. She must be looking for you.”
+
+“She is looking for her brother, nothing else,” said Mrs. Tremenheere.
+“Wait a little, Nelly; I feel like a divorced woman, with no right to go
+near my child. God help us! what those wretched beings must suffer! I
+never thought of it before.”
+
+“One never does think of other people’s sufferings till one shares
+them,” said Elinor, oracularly. “Thank heaven, you are not so bad as
+that! Come along. Shall I go first and tell her.”
+
+“Wait a little.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere, though she was a strong-minded woman, trembled for the
+meeting. What would the child think of the mother who had deserted her?
+If she had been only a child! but a woman with a mind and judgment--who
+could understand and perhaps condemn. She stood by and looked at this
+creature of sixteen with her heart in a flutter. The judgment of a child
+is a terrible tribunal. One can face the world and one’s equals, knowing
+all that is in one’s favor, and feeling the full force of one’s rights.
+But the secret verdict of a boy or girl, whom natural respect will
+prevent from expressing it or even defining it to themselves--what a
+thing that is to encounter! Very seldom do fathers or mothers encounter
+this judgment in so dramatically distinct a manner as Mrs. Tremenheere
+had to do; and she trembled and held back. What if she should read
+dislike, disapproval, the pained and wondering sentence of the innocent
+in Vera’s eyes?
+
+In the meantime the other individual of whom I have spoken had gone past
+again, gazing furtively at the carriage. “Jove! how pretty she is,” he
+was saying to himself. “How absorbed she is, not seeing me nor any one!
+That’s what I like in a girl; never to see you if you stare like a
+madman. Why should she? The ones that are thinking of themselves see you
+fast enough. She is not thinking of herself, bless her. I wonder who
+she’s thinking of? one of those fellows in their flannels? Idiots! with
+nothing but hits to leg, and catches got, or missed, in their empty
+heads. I beg your pardon, Miss Meadows, I am very sorry. I hope I did
+not hurt a ribbon or a feather.”
+
+“You are very saucy to talk of feathers and ribbons. You have hurt _me_.
+Where are you going with your head over your shoulder? Who are you
+gazing at?”
+
+“Look here,” cried the young man, drawing her aside. “Look at that
+girl’s face. What is she, a St. Cecilia or a rapt young Madonna intent
+upon the angel? No, perhaps she is not exactly beautiful. I don’t care
+for your beautiful faces, all feature and nothing else.”
+
+“Oswald! when you do nothing but rave about form. Greek, forsooth! As if
+good English flesh and blood was not finer than your marbles!”
+
+“Miss Meadows, you were always a woman of the most just ideas. Precisely
+what I think. Look at her! the features are not much, but the expression
+is divine. I should like to paint her, I should like to carry her off! I
+should like to----”
+
+“Not eat her I hope, though your eyes look like it--for, hush! here is
+her mother,” cried Elinor. Mr. Oswald Fane started, and grew red, and
+drew back a step. He turned to the other face behind him in which he was
+not so interested; and yet that, too, if painting had been all that he
+was thinking of! Mrs. Tremenheere had not heard what was going on
+between the others. She, too, was absorbed, thinking only of one
+thing,--how Vera would look at her, what she should see in the child’s
+eyes. The young man gave a glance at her, then turned back to the first
+object of his admiration.
+
+“Is it only that they resemble each other,” he whispered, “or what gives
+them both that rapt look? It is interesting.--Do you know them?--I
+should like to be you. I wonder if that girl is like her face.”
+
+“If you are patient and wait, perhaps I may introduce you,” said Elinor.
+“I don’t know that she is like her face. That is one side of her.
+Wait--I must introduce her mother to her first.”
+
+“Introduce--her mother!”
+
+“Hush! It’s a story. I’ll tell it you afterwards.--Ada, come! you are
+wasting all the morning, and I tell you she expects you. That is what
+she is looking for.”
+
+“She is looking for her brother,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, “and it is
+quite right; I don’t complain. Stand by me, Nelly. I feel very silly, as
+if I might make a scene.”
+
+“Don’t make a scene, whatever you do!” cried Elinor. “Nonsense; there is
+nothing so dreadful about it. Come!”
+
+Vera’s attention was aroused a moment after by the shock of finding a
+hand laid upon hers. She looked up quickly with a start, and saw the
+mother of whom she had seen so little, and whom at the first moment she
+scarcely recognised, standing beside her. The girl’s heart gave a
+violent jump--sudden tears came into her eyes and a choking in her
+throat.
+
+“Mamma?” she said, interrogatively. The shock brought all the blood to
+her heart. She looked wistfully, anxiously at this sudden claimant. Miss
+Campbell sat looking on, somewhat uneasy. She had never believed in the
+pretence about Mrs. Tremenheere’s separation from her husband.
+Incompatibility! It was no use telling a woman of her experience this.
+She looked at the stranger with a mixture of disapproval and dislike,
+and bent forward across the carriage, as if to ask what she wanted,
+pretending she did not know.
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, taking her daughter’s hand between her
+own, and holding it closely, “I have been looking for you, Vera.”
+
+What was in Vera’s face? Her eyes were not so limpid, so frankly and
+tenderly eager as when she gazed at her brother; a shadow was over the
+young countenance--but what? Mrs. Tremenheere could not tell what it was
+that clouded her eyes.
+
+“Oh, mamma! you will get into the carriage, won’t you?” she said, trying
+to open the door.
+
+“I will stand here and talk to you a little. Stoop down and give me a
+kiss, Vera, my darling,” cried the poor woman.
+
+Vera put down her soft, youthful face, upon which the same doubtful,
+wondering, troubled expression still hung. She did not know what to
+think. Her brother--yes, that was right, that was nature. But her
+mother? Could she sit here and let her stand by her. Should not she get
+out, and follow her, and cease to be a stranger to her; or should she be
+cold and keep back and take papa’s part? Vera did not know what to do.
+The triumphant satisfaction died out of her face. Eddy was the sunshine
+of this picture, but her mother was the inevitable shadow. She put her
+soft face down to meet Mrs. Tremenheere’s kiss, but raised it again
+tingling with blushes, as if it had been a stranger who had kissed her.
+She could not look at her brother again, with this figure at her elbow.
+Ought she not to give her entire attention to the new-comer? So many
+emotions chased each other over her face that the young man in the crowd
+who was still looking at her groped in his pockets instinctively for a
+pencil, and then laughed at himself. “Draw all that--a whole volume in
+two lines?” he said to himself. “What a fool I am.”
+
+“Vera, you have grown almost a woman----”
+
+“Yes, mamma.” She made a little pause, panting in her agitation and
+bewilderment, which poor Mrs. Tremenheere feared was reluctance to give
+her that title. This went to her heart, but she would not show it. She
+began bravely again.
+
+“And Eddy is almost a man. You are like each other; he has grown
+stronger and taller than I expected. You are pleased to see him, Vera?
+and of course you have got his colors. Poor boy, I suppose he is very
+happy with all these people staring at him; and that pleases you too?”
+
+“Pleases me! oh, more than that! I am so proud I don’t know what to
+say--no word is strong enough. Are not you proud and happy, too, mamma?”
+
+“I proud and happy? I don’t know, my darling, I do not use such words.
+I am pleased that you are all pleased----”
+
+“Oh, mamma! What could you wish, what could you have more?” said Vera,
+indignant with fire in her eyes.
+
+“Vera, I beg you will not be so vehement. It is quite out of place,”
+said Miss Campbell with dignity, “in a well-bred girl.”
+
+The blood rushed to Mrs. Tremenheere’s face. She felt herself stung to
+the very heart. Of all that had happened to her this reproof, addressed
+by another woman to her child in her presence, was, I think, the very
+hardest blow she had yet had to bear. She made a strenuous effort to
+command herself. “I must beg pardon,” she said, “for forgetting Miss
+Campbell in the agitation of seeing Vera for the first time after a long
+separation; and I owe you many, many thanks for your good offices to my
+child.” She held out her hand across Vera. Miss Campbell touched the
+tips of her fingers with reluctance. All very well to talk of
+incompatibility! She, an experienced woman, felt sure that there was
+more in it than that, and she did not like to touch the erring woman,
+even with her finger tips.
+
+“I wish Vera would profit more by my lessons; but it is a thankless
+task,” she said.
+
+“Mamma,” said Vera, “it is impossible that I can sit here and see you
+standing there; either you must come into the carriage or I must get
+down; this sort of thing cannot be!”
+
+At this moment, however, another personage came suddenly on the scene,
+whose appearance stilled Vera and had the strangest effect upon her
+mother,--Mr. Tremenheere, with Edward’s colors in his button-hole, and a
+glow of pleasure on his face which smoothed away all harshness from it.
+He came up to his wife with outstretched hands. “How do you do, Ada? I
+am very glad to see you looking so well,” he said heartily, “though here
+you are, triumphing over me with your boy.”
+
+“Triumphing over you? I had no such meaning.” It seemed impossible not
+to contradict him, do what she would. She saw this, and her voice sank a
+little. Then she said with a smile: “He is your boy as well as mine.”
+
+“I am taking all the credit of him, I assure you,” he said. “I never
+thought Eddy would have turned out so well. He does you credit. The most
+prominent young person in England for the moment; to be sure it won’t
+last long, but still it is always something. Look at Vera, as proud as a
+little peacock!”
+
+“What an idiot the man is!” whispered Oswald Fane, behind backs, to
+Elinor Meadows; for they were all within hearing, and quite innocently
+so in consequence of the crowd, “he means like a little white dove.”
+
+“Not such a dove either,” said Elinor. “Vera has a spirit--but she has a
+dragon by her side, and is kept down dreadfully, poor little darling.”
+
+“I wish mine might be the hand to free her.”
+
+“What do you say? Oswald, she is too young to flirt.--Promise me you
+will attempt no flirtation if I introduce you. She is only a child, and
+you are, as you know, not so----”
+
+“Angelic as I ought to be,” he answered, laughing. “No, I promise you,
+on my honor, there shall be no flirtation, properly so-called. But
+stop--If I can make her like me? I won’t deceive you----”
+
+“Then I shan’t introduce you at all,” said Elinor, putting back from her
+forehead those gray curls, like a child’s, which the wind kept ruffling
+out.
+
+“I want mamma to come into the carriage, please,” said Vera.
+
+“Of course, she must,” Mr. Tremenheere cried, opening the door, “and you
+are coming home with us, the boy and you? Nobody can have so good a
+claim upon you. Where are you staying--with Elinor Meadows? Well, she
+shall come too; and you will tell me, Ada, if you approve of my work as
+much as I approve of yours. Come, Vera will be unhappy otherwise--and so
+shall I.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere kept asking herself all this time whether the nerves of
+a woman like herself, always strong and steady, as she liked to think
+them, were to be less under command than the nerves of a man. If he took
+it as a matter of course, must not she do the same? But it cost her an
+effort--for sentiment, perhaps, in all circumstances has more power,
+whether she will own it or not, over a woman than over a man. She
+answered, however, cheerfully, after that struggle.
+
+“To be sure--it is the natural arrangement. Eddy will be very glad to
+spend an evening with his sister--and I----”
+
+Nobody heard the end of the sentence. Her husband had given her his hand
+to help her into the carriage; where she sat down by the side of prim
+Miss Campbell, who did not budge, and who kept thinking to herself with
+_naïve_ disregard of grammar--“Me to be sitting by the side of a woman
+compromised!” And there Mrs. Tremenheere sat for the first half hour in
+a sort of dream, Vera opposite to her, all apparently as it might have
+been had she never deserted her home; apparently--yet without any
+reality in the appearance. By and by old friends began to find her out,
+and one brought another to greet and congratulate her.
+
+“All made up, I suppose?” these visitors whispered to Elinor Meadows as
+they passed. “Absurd business altogether?” But no one was prim except
+Miss Campbell, who scarcely condescended to notice the mother of her
+charge. As for Mr. Tremenheere, he went about among the crowd radiant.
+“Tremenheere must be a relative of yours,” his friends said to him.
+“Yes;--only my son,” he said, his countenance expanding. Eddy might have
+attained a much more substantial success without pleasing him half so
+much. Pride very often puts on the very guise of love, so that one
+cannot tell them apart. Mr. Tremenheere had thought but little of Eddy
+hitherto; he took all the credit, as he said, and really felt that he
+had everything to do with the boy. A boy who had put himself in the
+front so easily, and was for the moment the observed of all observers,
+the very centre to which was directed the gaze of society, was
+indisputably a son of whom every parent was entitled to be proud.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+A DINNER AT HYDE PARK SQUARE.
+
+
+I do not know by what charm Miss Meadows had been gained over to tell a
+fib, and enact a whole little drama of domestic perfidy; but she did it.
+When Mr. Tremenheere in his satisfaction asked her to dinner she told
+him unblushingly that she had just invited young Oswald Fane, a
+connection of Lord Fanebury’s, a very clever young man, in whom she took
+a great interest, to dine with her, and did not see how she could put
+him off. “Clever young men were always Elinor’s weakness,” said Mr.
+Tremenheere, so intoxicated with his own contentment that he forgot for
+the moment that it was not his habit to call Miss Meadows by her
+Christian name. “But if he is one of the Fanes of Fanebury I know his
+uncle. Bring him with you. That will make it all right.”
+
+And thus accidentally Oswald Fane was introduced into Hyde Park Square.
+He was not so near a relation of Lord Fanebury’s as Mr. Tremenheere in
+his moment of elation was ready to suppose. As he waited till his son
+had changed his dress, and walked out with him to the crowded streets,
+feeling sure that everybody he met knew that the blushing youth was the
+hero of the day, that proud father was ready to receive as an heir
+presumptive at the least, anybody who might have been presented to him.
+His gratified pride threw a radiance over all the world. He was for the
+time being the most proud of fathers, the most kind of men. He put his
+arm through Eddy’s who was two inches taller than himself, with that
+delightful mixture of the familiar friend with the father which
+everybody says it is so pleasant to see, and introduced him to several
+men they met, with overflowing satisfaction. Then when they got out of
+the lingering crowd, away into the more quiet streets, Mr. Tremenheere
+began to inquire into his son’s hopes and intentions for the future, as
+a father should.
+
+“Is this your last year at school,” he said. “How old are you? Eighteen!
+Are you expected to stay another year?”
+
+“I think, sir,” said Edward, “that my mother means me to leave and go to
+Oxford at once. But--I don’t think anything is settled. If you
+thought----”
+
+“I have left all that to your mother,” said Mr. Tremenheere. “That was a
+bargain, and I don’t mean to interfere with her. Your mother is a very
+sensible woman. We did not get on when we were together, which was
+unfortunate, but she has managed admirably with you, and I approve all
+she does. And after Oxford, Ned, what then, my boy? What do you think of
+doing then?”
+
+“Well, sir,” said Eddy, “that is a thing there has been no decision
+about--I think my mother----”
+
+“Yes, but in the choice of a profession one must act for one’s self.
+What do _you_ think? You will have your mother’s money, of course, but
+it will scarcely be enough to enable you to take the position I should
+like to see you take. You must do something----”
+
+“My mother’s money is her own,” said Edward, with a slight flush upon
+his face. “I don’t want her to give it me. I am very willing to do
+something. Indeed, I am not at all sure about Oxford for my part,
+except that she wishes it. For you ought to know, sir,” he added,
+looking down with another flush of color, “I am not clever; good enough
+as a bat and that sort of thing, but not much good in school.”!
+
+“Is that so?” said Mr. Tremenheere. But he said it without anything of
+that half shame, half pity, both sentiments generally concealed by a
+caress, with which the women among whom Edward Tremenheere had been
+brought up regarded his want of success in school. The boy had learned
+to divine this though nobody ever put it into words, and the easy tone
+of his father cheered and eased him in the most wonderful way. Was it
+then perhaps not so humiliating after all to be without cleverness?
+Might a fellow still do something though he could not get Greek and
+Latin into his head, and had no hope of a scholarship? Edward felt
+cheered and encouraged, he could scarcely tell why.
+
+“Yes, I am afraid it is so, I have got such a bad memory or something. I
+do my work, but it goes out of my head again just as fast. That is why I
+think it is money wasted sending me to Oxford.”
+
+“Not at all,” said Mr. Tremenheere. “It is not for work alone that men
+go to Oxford. It always tells well in society. Not a high degree, or
+honors or anything of that sort; for unless you are going into a
+profession, the world cares very little for Senior Wranglers, &c. But
+you make friends who can help you in life, and widen your acquaintance,
+and learn a great deal that is quite as important. Yes, yes, you must go
+to college; but after? as I asked before----”
+
+“I don’t know, sir,” said Edward, “my mother used to talk of the Bar,
+not knowing how stupid I was. But that would never do. I don’t seem to
+have any particular choice; anything that pleases other people----”
+
+“You are too good, I am afraid,” said his father. “Your mother can’t go
+on thinking for you----”
+
+“So she says,” said the boy with a laugh. At this moment they met a
+group of other lads with blue ribbons who stared at Eddy’s appearance
+here; he nodded to them with a look of dejection. “The rest of the
+fellows are dining together,” he said. “It is rather fun; but I don’t
+suppose I shall mind.”
+
+“And you came away without telling me! That was kind of you, Ned. But I
+hope you will enjoy yourself with us. You will see a great difference in
+Vera. She is almost grown up, and I shall soon have to think of getting
+her brought out and introduced into society, which is a great bore for
+me. So you see we all have our difficulties. I am still in that same old
+house which you remember. It will be pleasant to dine together this one
+night.”
+
+“Yes,” said Edward, somewhat disconsolately. He would have liked the
+dinner with his comrades better, but he was too good to put his own
+wishes forward. And Mr. Tremenheere thought no more about it. He told
+him of several young potentates at Oxford whom he should introduce him
+to. “And I hope you will be very careful about the set you get into.
+Whatever you may do in the way of scholarship you must never be
+indifferent to the art of making friends.”
+
+“That is what my mother says,” said the lad, a statement which made his
+father stare. “She says that if I get into a good reading set----”
+
+Mr. Tremenheere laughed. “That is very like your mother,” he said, “but
+not exactly what I meant. If you are weak in scholarship don’t go in
+for it, my boy. What I mean is a good set of men, men whom it will be of
+use for you to know, who may give you a helping hand in life, or at
+least in society. A great deal depends on that.”
+
+“Yes,” said Eddy, dutifully. “A good set of men” sounded much better to
+him than “the reading set” of whom he had been thinking with some alarm,
+but he did not so well understand about the “helping hand in life” to
+which his father referred. He was a perfectly humble simple-minded
+fellow, but yet he was not without a certain pride of his own.
+
+Thus they went home to Hyde Park Square, where Mrs. Tremenheere,
+agitated by many thoughts, was preparing for dinner in her old room, now
+empty, swept, and garnished, and asking herself various questions which
+she could not answer, which she did not like even to put in words. There
+was a little pause when they all came together in the drawing-room, a
+little holding of the breath, or so, she thought. It was late and
+beginning to be twilight, and I cannot describe with what a strange
+thrill of curiosity Edward looked at his two parents thus brought
+together. What could they be thinking, these two people who belonged to
+each other, yet did not belong to each other? And--whose fault was it?
+The boy was instinctively respectful and dutiful, and made no reply to
+himself, but yet the question arose in his mind whether he would or not.
+
+“I have been speaking to Ned about his future,” said Mr. Tremenheere.
+“He does not seem to be very clear what he is to do after Oxford.”
+
+“No. We must let circumstances decide,” said his mother. “Perhaps if he
+reads hard----”
+
+“My dear Ada, I wouldn’t interfere with you for the world, but why
+should he read if that is not the turn of his mind?” said Mr.
+Tremenheere.
+
+“It is the turn his mind ought to take,” she said. “It is the only use
+so far as I can see of a University. What were colleges instituted for
+but reading? And it is his duty as well as the best thing to do.”
+
+“Well, I think there are other uses for Universities,” said Mr.
+Tremenheere. “Is that you, Vera? Come here; your mother cannot see you
+in this light. You would not think, would you,” he added, with some
+pride, “that this demure little person was the saucy Vera who used to
+poke her small fingers into everything?” He laid his hand upon her head
+caressingly--not that he was much in the habit of caressing her, but he
+felt a natural impulse to put forth his own production, as it were, by
+the side of his wife’s, in an amiable rivalry which had no evil
+intention in it. For, indeed, though he felt proud of his son, and was
+pleased with him, he was not at all jealous of his son’s mother, to whom
+the boy specially belonged, and could not have understood the sharp and
+keen jealousy of himself, almost bitter, which shot like an arrow
+through Mrs. Tremenheere’s heart as he laid his hand on Vera’s head.
+
+“I had no objections to the saucy Vera,” she said, hurriedly forcing
+herself to smile.
+
+“Ah, that is not my ideal of a young woman,” said the father, equally
+unaware how much of the original leaven remained in the demure little
+person of whose quietness he was so proud.
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere restrained herself as by force and made no reply,
+though all the old lively impulses of contradiction seemed to spring up
+in her as she listened; and thus the divided family remained for a
+moment silent, the father and son standing together, the mother and
+daughter seated in the shadow. Miss Campbell kept apart at the furthest
+window, with a book in her hand. She disapproved profoundly of Mrs.
+Tremenheere. What did she want in this house which she had left of her
+own accord? Did she mean to come back, disturbing other people in the
+established routine of their life, perhaps turning the carefully-trained
+Vera into something fast and disorderly? Such a woman was capable of
+anything, Miss Campbell thought, and the poor lady had an excuse for her
+dislike in her growing alarm and terror. She had a very comfortable
+position in Mr. Tremenheere’s house, and was fond of Vera in her way,
+and if she left Hyde Park Square there was at her age little before her,
+except poor genteel lodgings on a small annuity, or the “Home.”
+
+When Miss Meadows came in with young Fane, followed at a moment’s
+interval by the stray man, adapted to fill a place at an emergency, whom
+Mr. Tremenheere had met at Lords’, the family were not sorry. Perhaps,
+on the whole, it was more easy to get on when there were strangers
+present. There was an awkward moment, however, when they went to
+dinner. Mr. Tremenheere went across the room to Miss Campbell before the
+procession started.
+
+“Perhaps,” he said, in a slightly nervous tone, “it would be better if
+Vera took the head of the table to-day?”
+
+“It must be exactly as you please, Mr. Tremenheere,” she replied
+stiffly, giving him no assistance. And then he had to give his wife his
+arm, and hand her down-stairs.
+
+“You are the greatest stranger, Ada,” he cried, with a nervous laugh,
+and attempt at jauntiness. “The guest of the evening!”
+
+She did not say anything, but put her hand within his arm, as if she had
+been in a dream. But after that, the small party round the dinner-table
+went on quite smoothly. Vera, her cheeks burning, sat at the head of the
+table, feeling wretched, ashamed and proud. She could not bear to look
+at her mother, who ought to have been occupying that place, and yet
+could look at nothing else, not even at Eddy, who kept smiling at her,
+shy but genial. She did not even notice, for five minutes at least, the
+handsome countenance of Oswald Fane at her left hand, though it was one
+which few girls of Vera’s age looked at with absolute indifference. He
+had one of those picturesque dark faces which physiognomists suspect and
+sentimentalists love; dark eyes, liquid and persuasive, capable of
+looking unutterable things; dark hair, curling crisply round a
+well-shaped head; a smile on the curved lips, just shaded with a soft
+line of moustache which no unsuspecting person could resist. And he had
+judgment to add to his personal attractions. He saw Vera’s agitation,
+and neither spoke nor looked at her for these five minutes, but
+chattered pleasantly to Elinor Meadows, shielding her from observation.
+Then when Vera began to get used to her position, and to calm out of her
+excitement, he threw over Elinor and struck in:
+
+“You were very much interested in the match to-day, Miss Tremenheere.
+Was it for the sake of cricket? Some ladies, I know, are great
+connoisseurs----”
+
+“Oh, no! I don’t know anything about cricket. My brother was playing.”
+
+“I know; and I knew that was the reason, if you will let me say so.
+Cricketing young ladies don’t look as you look.”
+
+“I? How did I look? Not very odd, I hope?” said Vera; “Miss Campbell
+says I am always showing my feelings.”
+
+“I must not trust myself to description,” he said. “Your look raised
+very violent emotions in my mind. Yes, I may as well confess. I turned
+immediately to the men in the field, and I said to myself, ‘A set of
+wretched schoolboys. What have they done, I wonder, with their stupid
+game that any idiot could play, to deserve _that_?----’”
+
+“Mr. Fane! I hope you don’t mean what you say!” cried Vera, indignantly,
+raising her head, “because I am Edward’s sister. No one ought to speak
+like that, knowing that my brother is Captain of the Eleven.”
+
+“I told you, you had raised diabolical passions in my breast,” said Fane
+unmoved. “Envy, hatred, and jealousy; because you see, I knew very well
+that if I were to do the greatest feat that a man could do, no one would
+look so at me.”
+
+“Ah!” said Vera, mollified, drawing a breath of relief; “then you have
+no sister,” she added softly, looking at him for the first time with
+interest.
+
+Here I think it was the duty of Elinor to have interfered; but she was
+much amused; and she was, as she avowed boldly, half in love herself, in
+an elderly fashion, with Oswald Fane.
+
+“No,” he said, “I am all alone in the world. It does not matter to any
+one what I do or what I don’t do; so, you must forgive me my grudge at
+that happy fellow you were watching. I did not intend him any harm.”
+
+“Eddy played very well to-day,” said the friend of the family, who sat
+at Vera’s right hand. “Made a good score. Saved that last innings, he
+did. I don’t like to see my old school beaten, though I’m an old fellow.
+I give you leave to be proud of your brother, Vera. I never saw a neater
+catch. It made a man feel young again.”
+
+“I am very proud of him, thanks,” said Vera, beaming. She looked at Eddy
+almost for the first time. His face was very serious, poor fellow. He
+was sitting next to Miss Campbell, who addressed instructive
+conversation to him, as she thought it was her duty to do with the
+young. And, alas, I fear poor Eddy, though he was at home, with all the
+members of his family round him, was thinking ruefully of the gay dinner
+at which the others were drinking their toasts and making their
+speeches. This certainly was not so lively. He did not see Vera look at
+him, but he met his mother’s eye, and smiled, with a slight shrug of the
+shoulders. Vera saw this pantomime, and was angry. Was he not glad to be
+at home?
+
+Thus the dinner was not the greatest of successes; and the ordeal of the
+drawing-room was still more severe. Mr. Tremenheere walked up to his
+wife when he came up-stairs, and sat down beside her.
+
+“I could not say anything to you at dinner,” he said, “Ada; but I want
+now just to say a word. Don’t press the scholarship business upon Ned.
+You can afford to send him to Oxford, and he can afford to go; that is,
+he is young enough not to be losing his time; but don’t worry him and
+strain him to do something out of his line altogether. There, I don’t
+want to interfere; but this you must let me say.”
+
+“Thank you,” she said, a little stiffly; “I will think of it, Charles.
+Of course your advice in respect to Eddy must always have the greatest
+weight.”
+
+“Well, yes, I think it ought,” said the father, “especially as there has
+never been any quarrel, so to speak, between us. We have always been
+quite good friends.”
+
+“Perfectly good friends; if you will allow me in my turn to make a
+remark, I think poor Vera’s natural vivacity is too much repressed. Miss
+Campbell, I have no doubt, is a very good woman, but Vera will never be
+really one of those meek girls whom you admire. She has a great deal of
+energy and spirit in her. I think you should take care not to carry the
+subduing process too far.”
+
+“Ah!” he said, raising his eyebrows, “do you think so? I should not have
+supposed that would have occurred to you. Miss Campbell’s process seems
+to me to have answered admirably. However, I will keep my eye upon her,
+since you think so. Curious! I expected you to compliment me, as
+everybody does.”
+
+“Yes, and so I do; she has grown up very sweet and fair,” she said, with
+some emotion.
+
+“But only you do not approve of the way in which she has been brought
+up,” he said, with a laugh. “Well, well, we never did agree, and it is
+evident we were never intended to agree, Ada; which does not, however,
+prevent me from giving, as you say, the greatest weight to your advice,
+and from our continuing the best of friends.”
+
+With this he grasped her hand heartily, and rising from his chair beside
+her, went off to talk to Edward, whom old Mr. Carnaby was
+cross-questioning. Mrs. Tremenheere sat alone for a time. Near the open
+window, with its long lace curtains swaying softly in the summer air,
+sat Vera beside Miss Meadows, looking up into the dark, handsome face of
+young Fane, who bent over her. I don’t think it occurred to the mother
+to take any panic about young Fane. She had subjects enough to occupy
+her mind without that. But whether by inadvertence or purpose, I cannot
+tell which, Elinor Meadows rose up suddenly, and came and joined her,
+leaving the two young people together--Miss Campbell, not being able to
+put up with this overturn of all her habits, having left the room.
+
+“Well,” said Elinor, eagerly, “have you settled anything? Indeed you
+ought to have come to your senses, you two, at your age.”
+
+“Perhaps we ought,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, “but nothing is changed that
+I can see. Age makes little difference. For Vera’s sake I might risk it,
+but he has no such idea; he is too triumphant in his own success.”
+
+“Then nothing is to come of it; what was the good then--” cried Elinor,
+with tears in her eyes. “Ada! Ada! I thought you would have done
+anything for poor little Vera’s sake.”
+
+“I suppose it is only justice,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a slight
+faltering; “when he would have made it up, I wouldn’t; and now when
+perhaps--I don’t know--I might----”
+
+“Is that all you say? when of course you would that or anything else,
+for Vera’s sake.”
+
+“Well, put it as you please; but anyhow it would be a failure. We should
+begin again to contradict each other the very next day. However, it is
+needless to discuss the question, for he does not wish it; that is as
+clear as daylight.”
+
+A little while after the two halves of the divided family said goodbye
+to each other, and the mother and son went back to their separate
+lodgings with Elinor, like any other visitors.
+
+“Well, Eddy, have you spent a happy evening?” said Miss Meadows, in the
+darkness of the carriage, driving home.
+
+“Oh, happy? Well enough,” said Edward. “Of course I was glad to see my
+father and Vera; still it was a bore not to be at the dinner with the
+other fellows, and this my last year.”
+
+The next step after this strange family meeting was taken in all
+innocence, with no thought of the complications it might lead to. Mr.
+Tremenheere consented that Vera should pay a visit to her mother in the
+country, under the charge of Elinor Meadows. It was to be for two days
+only, too short a time to have much effect upon the girl, one way or
+another,--Miss Meadows, however, did not tell any one that on her own
+responsibility she had offered a seat in her carriage, and an
+introduction into her friend’s house, to Oswald Fane.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE VILLA.
+
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere rather prided herself on her society; though she had
+given up so much she had never given up that; the people she knew were
+not commonplace people, such as you meet everywhere, but persons of high
+intelligence, of advanced opinions, people known in literature, in art,
+and in science. Her parties were generally in summer, daylight parties,
+a combination of outdoor pleasures, concluding with that good dinner
+which mortal men, even when they are philosophers, love. When the little
+party arrived from town they found preparations going on for one of
+these gatherings. Mrs. Tremenheere took Vera through the garden and
+shady grounds, which were skilfully planted to look double their size,
+and showed her everything with tender anxiety. “You must help me to
+receive my friends,” she said, smiling upon her little daughter.
+
+“What would Miss Campbell say? she is not ‘out’ of course,” said Elinor.
+
+“A girl does not require to be ‘out’ when she is by her mother’s side,”
+said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a sigh, drawing Vera’s hand within her arm.
+It was not for Vera she said this, but for the relief of her own mind;
+but Vera heard it, and ventured to clasp her mother’s arm with a sudden
+sense of security, such as she thought she had never experienced before.
+
+By her mother’s side--very different from Miss Campbell’s; everything
+was made natural, everything as it ought to be, by that one fact. She
+turned round without knowing why, and met Fane’s dark eyes fixed upon
+her; never before had innocent Vera met such looks; and a soft
+suffusion, the first blush of tenderest youth, came over her white
+throat and delicate cheeks. She clung a little closer to her mother’s
+arm. Yes, even this, the confused sweet guiltiness, the innocent shame
+where no shame was, all were without danger, without harm there--by her
+mother’s side.
+
+Then the strangers began to arrive, but first of all came Edward, fresh
+from school, happy and radiant in the delight of “leave,” and the whole
+day to himself, though not so happy about “the party.”
+
+“To be sure we can have some croquet,” said Edward, “though that is not
+much; but with such a terrible set of swells what else can one do?”
+
+“There is a swell coming who will fascinate you, Eddy,” said his mother.
+The lad shrugged his shoulders with a laugh.
+
+“All right, if they please you, mamma,” he said, putting his arm round
+her with a happy ease which made Vera wonder. Fancy any one doing that
+to papa, she said to herself--or Miss Campbell! After a while Edward
+dragged her off to see the croquet-ground, where the implements of that
+diversion were all in order. “Between ourselves it is a bore, rather,”
+he said; “a lot of bigwigs all talking as if to talk was the best thing
+in the world; but, never mind, it pleases the mother. And then a day’s
+leave is always a day’s leave,” he added, with good-humored philosophy.
+It was Edward’s disposition to make the best of everything.
+
+“And I have a day’s leave, too,” said Vera, with a little sigh; “but I
+can’t have one whenever I please, Eddy, like you.”
+
+“Whenever I please!” he looked at her with natural contempt for her
+ignorance; but then what can a girl be expected to know? “Why can’t you
+stay?” he said; “it would be much jollier if you were here. Why can’t we
+all live together, as we used to do--as we ought to do?” the boy added,
+suddenly.
+
+This conversation was interrupted by the appearance of Fane, who was
+never long absent from Vera’s elbow, and by the gradual arrival of the
+visitors--among whom, as I have said, there was one celebrity of the
+moment whom it was a very great honor to produce here so far out of
+town. While the young people were in the garden Elinor Meadows came
+rushing towards them, her black lace billowing around her, and the rings
+of her gray hair blown about her forehead.
+
+“Come!” she cried, breathless, “come, before there is a crowd, and be
+introduced to him, both of you. You, too, Oswald, if you like,--only
+make haste and come!”
+
+“Who is it?” they all asked in a breath.
+
+“It is the lion--and a real great roaring lion, shaking his mane--none
+of your make-believes, that don’t know how to keep it up. It is Mr.
+Buckram Bass, the great African traveller. He has been everywhere where
+nobody ever was before. Come, you foolish boys and girls. You may never
+have another such opportunity. Come, Vera; and Edward especially,--you
+must come!”
+
+“Presently. I shall see him soon enough,” said Edward.
+
+He would not come in. He was busy out of doors, looking after the
+croquet, showing the finer points of view to one wandering group after
+another, pointing out the pinnacles of the great school in the distance,
+telling the names of the distant places, and also the names of the
+notabilities present to his mother’s guests.
+
+“That is Dr. Jones, the great geologist, I believe--and that lady
+yonder, in the corner with a lot of people round her, is the lady that
+plays the fiddle--well, yes, violin, it’s all the same, isn’t it? I
+daresay my mother will get her to play after dinner. And that is the
+Bishop of St. James’s, who is an old friend of my mother’s.”
+
+“Will he preach after dinner?” said some one, hoping to be witty.
+
+“I hope not,” said Edward gravely. “I don’t think he is a fool, nor my
+mother either. There is the editor of the ‘Northerly,’ whom you may have
+heard of, and Miss Cloots, who writes novels. By the way, I believe
+there is somebody here who is the very last novelty in the way of
+travels. The great African man, that----”
+
+“Hush!” said Elinor Meadows, by his side.
+
+“Why should he hush? I wish he had described me as well as he described
+the rest,” said Mr. Buckram Bass himself, stepping into the circle.
+“This is Mrs. Tremenheere’s son, the hero of the cricket, and why has he
+not been introduced to me? There spoke the true spirit of youth! not
+feelings!--When his time comes, ladies, he will experience them; at
+present he does not care to have any babbling about them. Bravo! those
+are my sentiments exactly. Let us shake hands upon it. Yes, what is
+worth is doing--not to talk, not to read, but to do. Schools! yes,
+schools are excellent. I do not say a word against schools. I myself was
+not created by any school, but what does that matter? When I was your
+age I rebelled against books. I felt myself a slave. To tie me down,”
+cried the lion, roaring loudly, and grasping his red beard--he was a
+large man, handsome and even commanding in appearance, and when he
+spoke, took a large handful of the vast beard which he had grown during
+his travels--“to tie me down with all my energies fettered, to construe
+Herodotus! when I knew there were things in the world more wonderful
+than Herodotus--and true.”
+
+Edward had looked at him, half contemptuously, half suspiciously when he
+began. Gradually, however, his looks changed. His eyes began to laugh,
+then to glow. The big man and his beard impressed him. “More wonderful
+than Herodotus--and true!” He forgot his natural opposition to the lion.
+After all, if this was a lion, he was so because of what he had done,
+not of what he had said or written. He began to look eagerly at this new
+kind of man.
+
+“Do you know anything about Africa?” said the traveller. “No! The great
+continent of the future!--the real new world, teeming with wealth, full
+of wonder, from which there is everything to expect. Take a walk with me
+through your mother’s pretty grounds. ‘That moment that his face I see,
+I know the man that must hear me.’”
+
+With this the adventurer thrust his great arm through Edward’s and led
+him away, half pleased, half reluctant. The others who stood round heard
+his big voice discoursing as he promenaded through the shrubbery.
+
+Nothing more was seen of Eddy that day, except at dinner, during which
+he was very absent and _distrait_, straining his attention to make out
+what Mr. Buckram Bass was saying at the other end of the table. He
+reappeared in the evening, but only in the train of the traveller, who
+was delighted by the boy’s enthusiasm. Few people noticed even then that
+it was to Edward he was talking, for the talk was addressed to the whole
+gathering, as well as to that one particular boy who stood close by him,
+his eyes gleaming, his whole aspect changed.
+
+“Yes, yes, you are right, and I respect you for it,” said the traveller.
+“This is not a time for music, for the fine arts, for poetry and
+feeling. What men want is to be doing. You know where I am going
+to--what I call the Continent of the future, that great mysterious
+Africa, to one corner of which the roots of our religion itself still
+cling. Is it not a work worthy of Christianity to carry freedom and
+civilization back to the warm, rich, teeming countries where so much
+wealth and capability lie dormant? Yes, sir, take the question at its
+lowest, nothing could be more admirable for trade. In that view alone it
+is worth doing--opening up, not a single nation, like France or Germany,
+but a crowd of nations, a whole continent to British enterprise. But I
+don’t profess myself to take that point of view. My mind is burdened
+with the thought of so many fine, interesting races, so many tribes and
+peoples, as varied as Europeans, not stupid negroes only, who are living
+in mud-cabins, under savage laws, decimated by fever and by each other,
+whom we might help with a little trouble into civilization and humanity.
+My expedition starts in October. It is not all filled up. How thankful I
+should be to have volunteers, sportsmen, adventurers, whatever you
+please to call them. Every new traveller is so much gain.”
+
+“For heaven’s sake, Ada, do something to stop that man,” cried Elinor
+Meadows, in Mrs. Tremenheere’s ear. “Ask somebody to play; let us do
+something.”
+
+“Why? I find him very interesting,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, smiling
+calmly in her friend’s face, “and he always does this, you know,
+wherever he goes. It is tacitly understood.”
+
+“Look at Edward’s face.”
+
+“Yes, he is interested, poor boy. I am so glad that he should have had
+his mind roused by some new subject.”
+
+Edward stood by his new apostle, his eyes fixed upon him, swallowing
+every word with eager interest. Already he saw himself in imagination
+with a wild retinue of Arabs and negroes trampling through the jungle,
+pressing over the sands, passing from one savage court to another. He
+had read all the books upon the subject eagerly, but here was a man who
+was a living book, who had seen and heard and done, and was about to do
+again, all these wonders. Edward’s mind, newly aroused within him,
+expanded and grew. He seemed to feel himself grow strong and daring and
+patient as he listened. Yes, that was the life--not a sham life at
+college, making good friends, as his father said, or laboring vainly
+after scholarship, as his mother wished.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE VILLA (_continued_).
+
+
+Meanwhile the day had passed for Vera like a strange sweet dream, too
+rapid, too full of feeling to be understood. The novelty and the
+strangeness and the complication of emotions so suddenly introduced into
+her young life, which had been carefully trained to know no emotions at
+all, involved her in a secret bewilderment, so that she did not seem to
+know what she was saying, or on what she was treading, whether enchanted
+ground, or air, or clouds. When she was about to follow the rest
+indoors, Fane, who was with her, begged so hard that she would stay,
+that Vera, not unwilling, though a little doubtful as to whether she
+ought, softly sat down again on the rustic seat under the lime trees,
+which were so sweet in the dimness of the night. Fane said nothing for a
+few minutes; he let the silence and charm of the night steal into the
+girl’s soul.
+
+“I wanted to drive on for ever this morning,” at last he said softly;
+“what a mistake it was! But now, if this night would only last for ever!
+I don’t know what more one could wish for. Do you remember ‘The Last
+Ride?’”
+
+“What is ‘The Last Ride?’” said Vera, wondering if it was very very
+ignorant of her not to know.
+
+“It is a poem of Mr. Browning’s.”
+
+“I don’t think I like poetry,” said Vera, shyly. “It seems dreadful to
+say so, but one ought to be honest. It is so stiff and so formal, not
+like anything natural.”
+
+“What have you read? I think I could show you some you would like.”
+
+“I have read some of Pope, and Miss Campbell is very fond of Young’s
+‘Night Thoughts’ and Kirke White--and a little Cowper. I like Cowper
+best, but----”
+
+“Ah!” he said. “Shall I tell you about the ‘Last Ride?’ It is very
+different from Pope. It is a poor lover whom his lady has refused. He
+loves her, but she does not love him; yet, though she does not love him,
+she is sweet and gracious, and will not refuse the last thing he asks of
+her,--one last ride with him. And so they set out; and as they go along
+he keeps comforting himself all the way, knowing every step is nearer
+the end--‘Perhaps the world may end to-night.’”
+
+“And what happens?” asked Vera, eagerly.
+
+“Nothing happens; the ride may be going on still, for all one knows.”
+
+Vera was silent. She was too young to understand how this ending of the
+world might have helped the hapless lover. She sat quite still, in shy
+wonder, feeling sad for him; wishing that the lady had relented, which
+would have been better than the world ending; her thoughts entirely
+carried away even from the present enchantment. Then her companion spoke
+again; his voice was very soft and naturally melodious, and there was a
+certain pleading in the tone:
+
+“I wonder,” he said, “if I am to be sent away to-night.”
+
+“To be sent away?”
+
+“Miss Meadows brought me. She is not going till to-morrow. She is as
+good as gold, but she is apt to forget details.”
+
+“Oh, shall I run in and ask?” cried Vera. “How disagreeable for you to
+be kept here. I will run and tell her.”
+
+“No, indeed, you shall not run anywhere to serve me. It is I who will
+run--wherever you please--to do anything you please. But don’t be
+satirical or hard upon me. The dreadful thing will be to be sent away. I
+prefer to keep out of the way till it is too late.”
+
+Again Vera did not quite understand, and was silent, thinking it best
+not to commit herself. But she began to be a little uneasy about sitting
+here quite alone while everybody else had gone in. It was strangely
+pleasant--so warm, yet so cool, so fresh and dewy, the house so near
+with all its lights, yet the stillness so perfect. Would it be right,
+though, if not so pleasant, to go back to the house?
+
+“Can you see, beyond the garden, the lights scattered about in the
+houses,” he said, “and up in the sky the stars? I don’t know which I
+like best.”
+
+“Oh, Mr. Fane, the stars!”
+
+“Do you think so?--but see, every one of these little lights, twinkling
+away far down at the foot of the hill, means something. There are people
+there talking, living--with a story of one kind or another--and love.
+Is it not pleasant,” he said, as she made no answer, “to sit here and
+watch it all--all the other people going on with their living, and we
+looking on?”
+
+“But we are living, too,” said Vera, startled.
+
+“Beginning to live----”
+
+He did not say any more. And how still it was--every little rustle in
+the leaves audible, though there was so much life and sound close at
+hand! Vera began to feel a little frightened. All these strangenesses
+seemed coming to a climax. She gave a little start when some watchful
+bird made a stir among the branches and got up. “I think mamma may want
+me. I think we should go in,” she said.
+
+More than half the people were gone, however, when they went in, and the
+last train was gone, and there was nothing for it but to offer Mr. Fane,
+whom Elinor Meadows confessed she had forgotten, a bed. Vera, coming in
+shy and dazzled by the lights, did not quite listen to all that was
+said; but to know that he was going to stay was pleasant. He sat down by
+her again, while her mother was occupied with the last of the departing
+groups. Somehow she seemed to know him better than any one--better even
+than her mother, to whom she was so much a stranger; and here indoors,
+with so many people about, it was easier to talk. She confessed to him
+with a little blush that she had never been here before.
+
+“Is it not strange?” she said, “it is home, as much as the Square, and
+yet I don’t know it. People are not often like that. I suppose you used
+to live with your mother when you were young, as young as I am--most
+people do.”
+
+“Most people do, but I did not, for my mother was dead. I was very
+lonely--my brother a great deal older than myself, and no one else
+belonging to me.”
+
+“Ah! my brother is only two years older than I. But then if one never
+sees them it comes to just the same thing. I was very lonely, too. Never
+anybody to play with,” said Vera, tears coming into her eyes out of pity
+for the forlorn little self whom she had conjured up. “Nobody to talk
+to--except Miss Campbell. I remember,” she went on, changing
+involuntarily into a soft laugh; “I got the poor servants into sad
+trouble because I told papa they had a party and I danced. Oh! how nice
+that party was! I was only eight. It couldn’t have done me much harm,
+could it?”
+
+“Evidently it has not done you any harm,” said Fane. “Nothing could do
+you any harm. I ran wild as I liked, and no one was shocked.”
+
+“Ah!” cried Vera again, with a sigh, “you boys are so much better off
+than girls. Nobody says you ought to be still, never to talk, never to
+be remarked. It is hard always to be obliged to remember that one is a
+girl. Miss Campbell always says, ‘You forget yourself,’ when that is
+just what I would like to do. Forget all about me! Why should one always
+be obliged to think about one’s self?”
+
+“When there are so many other people that would be too glad to do it for
+you!” said Fane--a speech which, like many others, was lost upon Vera.
+But the fountain of her confidences was opened, and she went on almost
+without a pause.
+
+“It is now so many years since Miss Campbell came, and I have been
+obliged to be so good. I don’t think I was good before. And when I go
+back again I shall have to begin once more, and try not to forget
+myself, and to speak low, and to keep in the background, and not ‘to be
+remarked.’ Why should any one remark me?” cried Vera. “It is very hard
+upon us poor girls, you must allow, Mr. Fane.”
+
+“And when do you go back?”
+
+“To-morrow!” she said, with a long-drawn breath, a sigh so pathetic,
+that it was all he could do, notwithstanding his profound sympathy, not
+to laugh.
+
+“I wonder if I might call,” he said. “I should like to bring you some
+books. I should like to try to amuse--Miss Campbell a little. Do you
+think I might come?”
+
+“Miss Campbell!” said Vera, somewhat disappointed; then she recollected
+that it would still be better than nothing to be amused even at second
+hand. “Papa never said nobody was to call. People do call, not very
+amusing people, and if it is Miss Campbell you want to see----”
+
+“Yes, of course it is Miss Campbell,” he said, laughing.
+
+Upon which Vera understood, and laughed and blushed, and between the
+two this seemed the very best of jokes. They kept laughing at it at
+intervals as they went on talking.
+
+“I am the victim of a romantic but hopeless passion,” said Fane. “If
+Miss Campbell will not smile upon me, what will become of me?” and it
+seemed to Vera that the humor was exquisite. All at once Miss Campbell
+and the Square seemed to be suffused with the same rosy light which made
+the villa such a world of enchantment. Elinor Meadows looked back at
+them, somewhat uneasily, wondering if it was quite right, if Oswald was
+quite to be trusted, if he knew where he was leading that innocent
+child. She became frightened at her own handiwork. Mrs. Tremenheere, on
+the other side, heard the laugh, and looked gratefully at the young
+stranger who called forth so merry a laugh from Vera. Thus tolerated and
+protected, the two young creatures felt secure in their corner, and
+talked and smiled, and poured out their hearts to each other, they could
+not tell why, and were more happy than they could say.
+
+Next day was quieter, but still more sweet. They went out, the whole
+little party, and strayed about the lanes, and visited the school where
+Edward, still very absent, showed them everything, and saw the boys
+playing cricket as on that wonderful day which had made a new beginning
+to Vera’s life.
+
+It was late in the evening when they returned to town, their party
+increased by the addition of one of Mrs. Tremenheere’s neighbors. It was
+not at all the same as the drive down. That had been merry, brilliant, a
+little company of three all united in one. This was different. You
+cannot lean across a carriage to talk in the dimness of the night,
+though two who are seated next each other may say much. The lady who sat
+by Miss Meadows had a great deal of conversation, and occupied her so,
+that at the end of the journey she half apologized to Vera.
+
+“I have never been able to say a word to you,” said Elinor. “That
+tiresome woman! You must forgive me, my dear.”
+
+Vera forgave her very freely. She leant back upon the soft cushions,
+quite indifferent to the fact that she had her back to the horses. She
+could not see him very well in the dusk, but she could see how he
+looked at her, which is different. Why should he look so, as nobody else
+ever looked? It was strange, but it was pleasant; and he spoke so low,
+not to disturb the others, that she had to lean her head towards him to
+hear. And once by accident (he begged her pardon for it) their fingers
+just touched; and she heard him say to himself softly,
+
+“Perhaps the world may end to-night.”
+
+Vera would not have acknowledged for the world that she had heard it,
+but she began to understand now what these words which had seemed so
+strangely unsatisfactory and unintelligible meant. Alas! When they came
+to Hyde Park Square, and the steps were let down, and the door opened,
+and old Jervis appeared on the threshold waiting for her, had not the
+world indeed suddenly come to an end? When the door shut upon that fairy
+chariot, and she was left standing in the half-lighted, dull, drab,
+too-familiar hall, the very heart seemed to die out of Vera’s bosom. She
+shivered all over, feeling cold, and would have liked to cry.
+
+“Is anything wrong, Miss?” said Jervis, sympathetically.
+
+“Oh, no, no, nothing!” cried Vera, with a sob in her throat; and stole
+softly up-stairs, a forlorn little white ghost. Alas! the world had
+ended--but not in the poet’s way.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+EDWARD.
+
+
+Edward went back to his school-work next day, with the excitement of the
+last night buzzing through his head. He was a schoolboy according to
+English custom, and yet he was a man. He went back to his construing,
+over which at the best he always hesitated, and his composition, in
+which he gained much less applause, though he worked at it twice as
+laboriously as the little fellow next to him, who carried off all the
+honors; and as he worked he said to himself, fatalest of all questions
+for learner or worker, “What is the good of it?” When a man could be
+carrying civilization to a continent--when he could be opening paths for
+knowledge, for education, for trade, for human advancement, when he
+could be changing savages into Christians, teaching them those things
+which make all the difference between man and brute,--in short, when he
+could be doing what Mr. Bass had done, what he was going once more to
+do, shooting huge game, encountering lions, exterminating serpents in
+the jungle, besides all other more elevated occupations; the thought of
+this sent a thrill through the lad’s veins. Oxford! What should he do at
+Oxford? Stumble through one examination after another, each less
+successful than the first, take a pass degree, disappoint his mother’s
+hopes, and, for the very best he could do, make friends according to his
+father’s directions. Make friends! not for the sake of friendship and
+mutual help and brotherhood, which was a thing Eddy’s honest soul
+comprehended thoroughly, but to help him on in life. That was all he
+could do. Was it worth going to Oxford on the strength of that?
+
+The visit of his sister and the others partially freed his mind from
+this haunting vision, but it came on stronger than ever next day when
+they were gone; and in the evening he went to see his mother, whom he
+found somewhat despondent after the excitement of the two days past. She
+was sitting by herself in the evening, looking wearily over her
+beautiful view. It was very delightful so long as there was some one
+there to point it out to, to see the sudden lights and shadows; but when
+one is all alone, a fine landscape is more trial than pleasure. Close
+the curtains, light the lamp, turn indoors to your books and to your
+pictures, lonely one. Do not look abroad upon that quiet serene nature
+which was made for the happy. The wistful lights, the gathering dimness,
+the falling dew, the home-going of all things--birds to the nest,
+laborers to the cottage--are a sight too exquisite for you.
+
+Edward found his mother looking out on that evening scene, and commanded
+her peremptorily, in those terms which mothers are so easily moved to
+obey, to get her hat and come out with him. “I believe you have been
+crying all by yourself,” he said indignantly.
+
+“I shan’t cry now, Eddy--when my boy is here,” she said with a smile.
+
+What a blow that gave him, though she did not know it! But then he
+recollected that to be absent at Oxford was as bad as to be absent in
+Africa, and this gave him courage to begin.
+
+“I have something very particular to say to you mother. Come out,
+please. I can always talk to you better out of doors.”
+
+“What is the matter, Eddy? Are the small boys unruly? Have you got into
+trouble about your composition----”
+
+“No, no. Come, mother; I have a great deal to say to you. I have not
+said anything to you for a long time about myself.”
+
+“You never do say very much about yourself, dear.”
+
+“Yes, I do; quite as much as other fellows--and I think a deal. Mother,
+what is the good of sending me to the University? I was talking to
+Somerville about it to-day.”
+
+“And what does the great Somerville, who knows everything, say?” asked
+Mrs. Tremenheere with a smile.
+
+“You don’t do him justice, mamma. If I talk too much about him, that is
+my fault, not his. He wants me to go, of course. He says there are other
+things besides scholarship, but he allows that it is not much use so
+far as scholarship goes. Don’t be disappointed, mother. You know I
+always said so.”
+
+“And do you think I am going to take Somerville’s word for it, Eddy?
+Your tutor says you will do very well.”
+
+“So I should hope,” said Edward, with a flush on his face; “I should not
+be a rowdy or make a beast of myself; that’s what he means, I suppose;
+it would be a joke, if I couldn’t do well in that sense. And I might get
+into the ‘Varsity Eleven like enough, which isn’t bad--but for anything
+else---- If you were to be satisfied with that I shouldn’t mind, but
+even at Lord’s--why you know you did not care a bit about it, mamma.”
+
+“I beg your pardon, my dear,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, humbly, “I care for
+everything you take an interest in; but I don’t deny I would rather have
+seen my son come out first in an examination than be the Captain of the
+Eleven.”
+
+“Yes, that is your way of thinking,” said the boy, “I know; you don’t
+care much for what I can do, and I cannot do what you really care for.
+But if scholarship is out of the question, you don’t care for the
+‘Varsity Eleven, do you, or for the ‘making friends’ dodge? I can’t bear
+that ‘making friends.’”
+
+“My dear boy, you make friends everywhere.”
+
+“Ah, that’s different; friends at school that one makes because one
+likes them--but friends to help you on in the world! Don’t send me to
+Oxford, mamma; of course I shall go if you wish it--if you insist upon
+it.”
+
+“Eddy, I wish you would tell me honestly what you are thinking of; there
+is something behind all this,” said Mrs. Tremenheere; but still she
+smiled, and was not afraid.
+
+“I will tell you what I am thinking of,” he said, rather tremulously;
+“reading and that sort of thing will never be much in my way; it may be
+a pity, but it can’t be helped. But, mamma, there are more things in the
+world than reading. I am a strong fellow; I could do heaps of things; I
+might be of real use all the same.”
+
+“I hope so, Eddy, but how, my dear? Out with it! You don’t require to go
+and work for your living. Tell me what you want to do.”
+
+“Mamma,” he said, his breath coming short, “I fear you will not like
+it; I hope you will not be angry. It came to me all at once when Mr.
+Bass was speaking; I could not help telling him that of all things in
+the world I should like to join his expedition----”
+
+“You are raving, Eddy,” said his mother suddenly; and then she laughed:
+“you foolish boy, you gave me a fright for a moment. You might as well
+talk of going to the moon.”
+
+“I was afraid you would take it so; but I am not raving, I am quite
+entirely in earnest; it is the sort of thing I could do. You can’t call
+a man like that useless can you, mother? He is not one of the fine
+gentlemen, good for nothing, whom you dislike so; he knows what he can
+do, and is doing it. That is what I have set my heart on. I want to go
+with him to Africa.”
+
+She looked at him, stunned with the shock; stopped short in the middle
+of the road as if he had shot her, and looked at him.
+
+“Eddy! you are out of your senses,” she said.
+
+The boy made no answer; he expected this, and more than this, knowing
+well that if it was done at all it could not be done without trouble.
+He did not say anything, but let the first force of the shock wear
+itself out.
+
+“Oh!” she cried, “was it for this I brought him to my house? Eddy! you
+cannot be thinking what you are saying. You shall read all the books
+about this wretched Africa. It is mere nonsense, what he says about the
+new world, the Continent of the future. You should read what other
+travellers say. The most debased, miserable country--the people absolute
+savages. What am I saying? I am taking it too seriously. I know you will
+hear reason. This is just a boy’s foolish fancy--the first wild idea
+that has come into your head.”
+
+“I don’t think so, mother.”
+
+“But I know it. I know what ideas come into such a young brain as yours,
+my dear boy. No more about it to-night, Eddy. I ought to have foreseen
+that he would have an effect upon you, for he is eloquent after a sort.
+The days are getting quite short already, and before we know, summer
+will be over. We have not settled where we are going for the holidays,”
+she added, suddenly changing the subject with simple artifice. “Shall
+we go to Switzerland? This year I should not object if you climbed to
+your heart’s content. You are old enough and strong enough to risk it
+now.”
+
+This would have made Edward’s eyes sparkle a week before, but it had
+little effect upon him now.
+
+“If you like, mother,” he said, indifferently. “But I begin to think I
+have had enough play in my life.”
+
+“Your life--it is such a long one--eighteen!”
+
+“Long enough for amusement,” said Eddy, solemnly. “Now I want work.”
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere parted with her boy that evening with some dismay in
+her heart.
+
+“I suppose it is just a fancy like any other,” she said to herself; but
+it was an appalling fancy for an only son, a boy of so much importance
+in her life. She went back to the pretty house which had looked so
+cheerful and delightful to Vera, and felt it very dreary. Mrs.
+Tremenheere closed the shutters with her own hands to-night in a kind of
+suppressed passion, as if the country was her enemy. She could not
+endure its quiet and tranquillity. When the lamp was brought in the poor
+woman went and sat by it for company, and gazed into the light as if
+that could counsel her. A panic took possession of her soul. “Only a
+fancy, like another,” she repeated aloud, trying to take off the edge of
+her own thoughts.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE DAY AFTER.
+
+
+Next day! It was a lovely summer day, but very hot and stifling in Hyde
+Park Square. Miss Campbell did not permit her pupil so much as that
+wistful gaze from the window across the brown park and dusty trees,
+which is the favorite consolation of such prisoners. She allowed no
+indulgence on account of an unsettled mind, but rather the reverse. And
+what a day it was! nothing but sunshine, heat, blazing pavements
+outside, airless rooms, all hot and heavy with the warm carpets and
+curtains of English use and wont. Vera read Rollin’s Ancient History all
+the afternoon, not even trying, as she often did, to interest herself in
+Xerxes, but thinking all the time of yesterday, and of all that
+happened. “Perhaps the world may end to-night.” What did he mean? Would
+he have liked it to go on, and on, that progress through the darkness,
+without seeing anything, without saying much, but now and then
+half-a-dozen words quite low, under cover of the lively chatter of the
+two people opposite? Was it possible that _he_ would have liked that? As
+for Vera, she did not ask herself if she liked it. It had changed the
+world to her; it had given her a new world of her own into which she
+could retire safely, almost glad of the Rollin, and think it all over
+again,--the few words that meant so much, the consciousness of nearness
+and companionship, the dreamy sweep of movement through the soft night.
+
+“Are you sleepy, my dear?” said Miss Campbell, somewhat sharply rousing
+her.
+
+“N--no,” said Vera.
+
+“I thought you must be sleepy, you mumble your words so, and shut your
+eyes. I suppose you were kept up very late at the villa,” the old
+governess said. She disliked the villa with an intensity of dislike such
+as mingled jealousy and fear alone could produce. She was afraid that
+any day Mrs. Tremenheere might come back and turn her out of a
+comfortable home; and she was jealous of the mother’s influence with
+Vera, of whom in her way this hard-featured, hard-principled woman was
+fond, though she could not express her fondness in any ingratiating way.
+“Go on, my dear, and rouse yourself up,” she said--and Vera went on; but
+when she shut her eyes she could see that scene, and feel it, as vividly
+as if it were still existing, and still within the possibilities that it
+might go on for ever; and then her voice would drop, and there would be
+a pause in the reading of which she was scarcely conscious; for dreaming
+even of that description in a hot July afternoon is akin to sleep.
+
+“This will never do, Vera,” said Miss Campbell; “I suppose your mother
+did not have a ball last night? Go and put on your hat; we may have our
+walk now, and perhaps that will rouse you up.”
+
+They went out for their walk when the afternoon was beginning to cool a
+little, and went to Kensington Gardens, which was the usual scene of
+their daily promenade. A demure little girl in a white frock, not even
+made quite “long” as yet, with a very precise, elderly lady by her,
+straight as a piece of iron, and as unbending--this sort of thing is to
+be seen in Kensington Gardens every day. They walked down the broad
+walk and up again, going quickly, but not too quickly, not to attract
+attention, Miss Campbell keeping a steady look-out around her, on her
+guard against any possible danger, Vera very silent, scarcely raising
+her eyes.
+
+“Miss Campbell!” suddenly said a voice beside her, which made Vera’s
+heart beat. She gave such a sudden start of surprise, and grew so red
+with wonder and joy that Miss Campbell vaguely perceived with a corner
+of her eye that something was the matter. “This is a most unlooked-for
+pleasure. I have been waiting here wondering if I should see anybody I
+knew now that all the world is pouring out of town. You are still in
+London? Ah!” said Oswald, coldly turning round and bowing, “I beg your
+pardon, Miss Tremenheere.”
+
+Vera, who was not used to such transparent deceits, was wounded to her
+innocent heart. “So he does not care about seeing _me_! I am only an
+accident. He saw nobody but Miss Campbell!” the foolish little girl said
+to herself. And she did not trust herself to look at him lest he should
+see the hot tear which this mortification had forced into her eyes, and
+consequently never received the glance he sent to make up for his meagre
+salutation. Fane had as little doubt that she understood him perfectly,
+and was laughing secretly at his enthusiasm for Miss Campbell, as he had
+of his own existence.
+
+“You have the advantage of me,” said Miss Campbell. “I beg your pardon.
+One meets so many people in society----”
+
+“Oswald Fane,” he said. “I had the pleasure of dining the other day in
+Hyde Park Square----”
+
+Miss Campbell gave him a keen glance. “I recollect,” she said. “A
+friend, I think, of Mrs. Tremenheere’s?”
+
+What was he to say? Offend Vera by disclaiming any particular friendship
+with her mother, or ruin his hopes of Miss Campbell’s help by claiming
+this? “I have known Mr. and Mrs. Tremenheere about the same time,” he
+said, “and I have had the pleasure of visiting both. But I think I have
+known some relations of yours in Scotland longer than either--the
+Campbells of Stormaway? I am sure I have heard them talk of you.”
+
+“Really!” said Miss Campbell, gratified, “that was very kind. I know
+the family you speak of--a very good family, but I cannot claim them as
+near relations. There is some far cousinship, no doubt. It is gratifying
+to my feelings that they should know--I mean remember me; and have you
+seen them lately Mr.--Mr. Vane?”
+
+“Fane. I met them in Scotland last year; indeed, I was at their house
+for a few days. What a pleasant place to visit is a Highland country
+house! Of course you remember your cousin’s delightful place?”
+
+“Yes--yes--that is, I have been there very seldom, Mr. Fane; very
+seldom, not since a child, I may say; and no doubt there are additions
+and alterations----”
+
+“They said it was a long time since they had seen you, and I promised to
+let them know if I happened to meet you anywhere. A fortunate chance,
+was it not? The daughters have grown up charming girls, and as for
+Hector and Colin----”
+
+“Yes--yes,” said Miss Campbell. She was for the moment quite bamboozled;
+was he trying to deceive her, or was it really true that the Highland
+magnates, whose names alone she was acquainted with, had found out and
+recognised her as their kinswoman? After the first flush of
+gratification she became uncertain, and did not know what to think. He
+had turned, and was walking along with them. But he walked by Miss
+Campbell’s side, taking no notice of Vera, who for her part went along
+with downcast eyes, offended and never looking at him.
+
+“By the way,” he said, “Miss Meadows, who is out of town for a few days,
+gave me some books for Miss Tremenheere. May I bring them? I am going
+away myself shortly. One day this week may I bring them, and discharge
+my conscience of my commission before I go?”
+
+“Oh, pray do not take the trouble. I will send a servant,” said Miss
+Campbell, who had seen a sudden lifting of Vera’s eyes. “This is our
+way, I think. Do not take the trouble. I must bid you good morning, Mr.
+Fane.”
+
+And he took his leave of them quite calmly, though he was going away.
+Vera was so startled, so wounded, so suddenly thrown down out of all
+those sweet vague dreams in which she had been indulging, that she could
+not raise her eyes. Tears come so easily at sixteen. If he had really
+gone and she had seen no more of him, Vera, after that first sharp shock
+of mortification and disappointment, which made her poor little lip
+quiver and her eyes fill, would no doubt have forgotten all about Oswald
+Fane. But in the meantime the blow of his supposed indifference and the
+sudden cruel end put all at once to the romance which was just
+beginning, crushed her for the moment, depressed as she was by other
+influences. She walked home by Miss Campbell’s side with a piteous
+little face, not saying a word. Only once a little cry of impatience
+burst from her. “I do not believe that gentleman knew much about my
+cousins of Stormaway,” Miss Campbell said. “I think it was very strange
+that he should have accosted me as he did, currying favor. If he is a
+friend of Miss Meadows I must request her not to send her messages by
+him. I am sure she has plenty of servants. I must tell her I do not
+approve of calls from gentlemen.”
+
+“Oh, you need not give yourself the trouble,” said Vera; “he is not
+coming. He said it was to clear his conscience of his commission. He
+never wanted to come.”
+
+“So much the better,” said Miss Campbell dryly, and she talked about the
+Aquarium in the Zoological Gardens, which was a safe subject. Vera no
+longer trod on air; her dreams were gone and ended, her beautiful new
+world broken like a bubble. She went into her own room and cried, tears
+innocent and bitter, such as one sheds at sixteen, when every grief
+seems eternal. It was all over, then. Not only should she never see him
+more, but she had lost that sweet refuge into which she could retire as
+she had done this morning when the day was dull, when Miss Campbell was
+hard upon her.
+
+Next morning, however, she had to go back to her lessons as usual. When
+these came to a pause before luncheon, she wandered into the
+drawing-room, intending to breathe forth some of her melancholy upon the
+grand piano. Some one rose as she went in. The girl grew red all over
+with a flush which was partly anger, and partly shame, and partly
+delight.
+
+“Oh!” she said impetuously, not knowing what she said, “I thought you
+were gone.”
+
+“Did you really think so?” said Fane. “No, impossible. I came this
+morning that she might not have time to warn the servants not to admit
+me.”
+
+“But, Mr. Fane, of whom are you speaking? You seemed to know Miss
+Campbell so well--to like her--and her relations.”
+
+Fane laughed. Vera could not have explained what her feelings were at
+that moment. Her heart bounded, and yet she did not like it. Why should
+he deceive even Miss Campbell? She looked at him doubtfully--and yet how
+happy she was!
+
+“You think I should not tell a fib? Quite true. But then how was I to
+see you? That was the first thing I had to think of; and there was no
+harm done. It was a very innocent fib. I could not give up tamely all
+hope of seeing you again.”
+
+Vera’s cheeks glowed and her heart beat. She did not say anything to
+check him--to demur to this statement. Was it not natural that he should
+want to see her? Had not she wanted too, though she would not say it, to
+see him?
+
+“But you _are_ going away?” she said softly, with a very little subdued
+sigh.
+
+“Not I--not so long as there is any chance.--Here is the book I spoke
+to you about, and another. Take them, please, before the dragon comes; I
+fear, I fear, she will be here directly. Ah, Miss Tremenheere, you
+cannot think how I have thought about those two days at the villa, and
+lived them over and over! Shall not you go there again, or to Miss
+Meadows? She knows me. She would not shut me out; and now that I have
+seen you it does not seem possible to live just as one lived before.
+Life is different. It is so much sweeter--better; since that day at
+Lord’s, that first wonderful day. I had never seen you till then.”
+
+Vera stood silent, with the books in her hands, her eyes cast down, her
+cheeks glowing, her heart beating high, yet soft--not wildly in her
+ears, as it had done a little while before, but with a satisfied and
+quiet beating. How true it all was! Life was different, quite different,
+and yet it did not seem right for him to say so. But to listen to him?
+Civility demanded that she should listen to any one who talked to her,
+especially when he was a visitor, and she at home.
+
+“You are very--kind, Mr. Fane,” she said at last, faltering. That was
+not at all what she meant, but what could she say?
+
+“Kind! It is you who are kind, listening to me. Elinor Meadows would
+stand my friend if you were with her, and how good Mrs. Tremenheere was!
+But what must I do with this dragon? If I tell lies to her to please
+her, you will disapprove of me, and that I cannot bear; but still less
+can I bear not to see you. What can I do?”
+
+“Mr. Fane: oh! please, don’t speak so--and you said you were going
+away.”
+
+“I am going away when you go,” he said, “for I shall find out where you
+go, and follow you--don’t be angry, I can’t help it,--if it is only to
+see the light in your window. You wouldn’t like me to fall back, and be
+just the poor creature I was before I knew you? Yes, of course, you are
+angry with me for telling lies, Vera--you who are truth itself; but the
+more I see you the truer I shall be. Don’t give me up, because I can’t
+give you up. You are too sweet and too good to break my heart.”
+
+All this no doubt would have seemed over-bold and over-sudden to a girl
+of twenty; but how could Vera discriminate, she upon whom the same
+spell had fallen? Did not she, too, feel how different life was, how
+transformed from the pale gray routine, the stagnant repression of the
+days before? The strangeness and excitement of it made her breathless.
+
+“Oh! don’t talk so, please don’t talk so,” she cried.
+
+“It is the only way I can talk,” said Fane. “The moment I saw you I knew
+what had happened to me. ‘That is she,’ I said to myself, ‘that is
+she--there is none in all the world like her.’ And--ah!--Good morning,
+Miss Campbell. I made bold to call to discharge my commission. Miss
+Tremenheere has got the books----”
+
+“Good morning,” said Miss Campbell. “What books? I never permit Miss
+Tremenheere to read anything that I have not first looked at myself.”
+
+“I have no doubt it is a very wise rule,” he said carelessly. “The books
+belong to Miss Meadows--it is she who sent me with them, and, of course,
+she is answerable.--I shall say I put them into your own hands, Miss
+Tremenheere. Any commands for Scotland, Miss Campbell? May I take
+tidings of you to your cousins? It would be a great pleasure to
+them--and I may say, to me.”
+
+Miss Campbell looked at him seriously.
+
+“Mr. Fane,” she said, “I don’t pretend to know what you mean by talking
+of my cousins, who, after all, are but distant relations upon whom I
+have no claim.”
+
+“What I mean is to please you, of course,” said Fane with a laugh. “What
+else? If they were my people I should like friends to talk of them to
+me.”
+
+“If that was all! but I do not forget my position; and--when a gentleman
+sets himself to flatter a lady in my position----” said the governess.
+
+“Flatter! Do you think it flattering to remind you of your relations? It
+might be so to them,” said Fane with a bow and a smile. “Never mind, I
+shall hold my tongue another time if you don’t like the Stormaway
+people. In the meantime I must really say goodbye. Goodbye, Miss
+Tremenheere. I will tell Miss Meadows I saw you. And Miss Campbell, you
+will surely shake hands with me, and wish me luck among the grouse.”
+
+“Now, if one could only tell what that young man meant!” said Miss
+Campbell, when he was gone. “He seems well-bred and agreeable, but he
+may have a motive of his own. Vera, it is the hour for Rollin. Get your
+book, my dear.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+ROMANCE.
+
+
+After this there followed a very exciting interval to Vera. Fane came
+again with another mission (nominally) from Miss Meadows, and was
+tolerably received. Emboldening by this, he came a third time and a
+fourth, addressing most of his conversation to Miss Campbell, and
+describing, in elaborate detail, the long series of accidents which
+delayed him from the grouse. The Tremenheeres themselves generally left
+town in the beginning of August, but this year were later than usual.
+Miss Campbell found it agreeable on the whole to receive so unusual a
+visitor, and to hear so much about the Campbells of Stormaway, whom she
+really began at last to believe in as her cousins. He had always some
+trait to relate of one or other of them, when the conversation flagged,
+or she began to look suspicious. Vera did not know whether she was
+happy or not during these visits. He gave her now and then a look, now
+and then a whispered word, in the intervals of his talk with Miss
+Campbell, and left her in no doubt as to his motives for cultivating
+with such extreme assiduity that lady’s friendship; but after all, at
+sixteen, it is but an indifferent pleasure to see your proper slave
+devoting himself to another person, even if it be for your sake. Vera
+sat silent, and now and then felt somewhat sad. But her whole life
+became absorbed in these visits. She thought of them all day long. She
+expected him till he came, mused upon him after he was gone. Except
+Rollin and the lessons it was all that Vera had. Her mother wrote to her
+less frequently than usual, and more briefly. Mrs. Tremenheere, for her
+part, was involved in great anxiety and trouble. “I am rather unhappy
+about an idea Eddy has got into his head,” she wrote, as an excuse for
+her short letters, “but I trust it will not come to anything.” Vera
+scarcely asked herself what this could be. She was lost in her own
+excitement.
+
+One afternoon Mr. Tremenheere came in a little earlier than usual, and
+met Fane, who was leaving after a prolonged call. They stood talking
+together for a few minutes at the door, and Mr. Tremenheere was heard to
+laugh, which took a burden off the minds of both the ladies in the
+drawing-room; for it suddenly occurred to Miss Campbell that before she
+knew Mr. Fane, and was aware how well he was acquainted with the
+Campbells of Stormaway, she, too, had been a little suspicious of him,
+and thought him an undesirable visitor. However, nothing could be more
+friendly than Mr. Tremenheere’s tone. When he came in, however, he did
+not look quite so genial. He gave a half-angry glance at the governess,
+and a doubtful one at Vera.
+
+“Since when has young Fane become a visitor in the house?” he asked, and
+there was something uncomfortable in his voice.
+
+“Since when? I think Mr. Fane dined here first on the evening of the
+match.”
+
+“I beg you pardon, that was not what I was asking. Since when has he
+been in the habit of calling here? He is not an acquaintance of mine.
+Elinor Meadows, who always has a _cortège_ of young fellows about her,
+brought him; she takes him everywhere. How often have you seen him,
+Vera? I don’t want him here.”
+
+“How often?” Vera’s foolish face began to flush as usual, though she
+would, she thought, have given everything she had in the world to
+prevent it. This made her father very angry, who liked a prompt and
+plain reply.
+
+“Yes. How often? What are you frightened about? I shan’t eat you; give
+me a straightforward answer. How often have you seen him here?”
+
+“I--I met him--at mamma’s,” said Vera, under her breath.
+
+“Ah! at your mother’s? So she has taken him up, too.”
+
+“I ought to say it is my fault, not Vera’s,” said Miss Campbell. “He
+knows some cousins of mine in Argyleshire, the Campbells of Stormaway.
+He has come to talk to me about them. Vera has seen very little of him,”
+the governess added, with a little complacency, for indeed it had
+pleased her to feel that the visitor’s conversation had been so much
+addressed to herself.
+
+“Oh! that is it, is it?” he said, rather carelessly, “then perhaps you
+will not mind giving him a hint that I don’t care for his visits. There
+is not much in him; and his relationship to Lord Fanebury scarcely worth
+counting. Perhaps you might hint to him, that if he calls again you are
+not likely to be at home.”
+
+“Surely, if you wish it,” said Miss Campbell, though she was not
+pleased. As for Vera, a great blackness of darkness came over her. She
+had not always liked it when he came; but to lose him, to have no longer
+that piquant centre to her days, that something to dream of, to think
+of--what could she do? Vera felt that it was intolerable. At dinner she
+was too unhappy to preserve her usual composure. She was irritable in
+her suffering; so irritable as to move her father to the idea that she
+must be ill, and must go to the seaside, for which he issued his orders
+on the spot. She had never, since the days of her childhood, been so
+courageous before.
+
+“I don’t want change of air,” she said. “It is all very well, papa, for
+you. You go to your friends. You do what pleases you. You enjoy
+yourself; but as for me I am sent off to a dreadful seaside, where I
+know nobody, where we live in horrible lodgings, and practice, and
+read, and walk, and do exactly as we do at home.”
+
+“Vera!” cried Miss Campbell, “I am shocked, I am astonished; you forget
+yourself.”
+
+“I just wish I could,” cried Vera. “I am so sick, so sick of myself! Let
+me go to Aunt Elinor, or to the villa; or let me stay at home.”
+
+Mr. Tremenheere watched her with some astonishment. “I did not give your
+mother credit for so much discrimination,” he said. “She warned me you
+had a temper. The seaside is far the best for you. When you are a few
+years older, you can visit your friends, too, and enjoy yourself.”
+
+Vera said nothing. She sat still, with flushed cheeks, excited and
+miserable, not trusting herself to look at any one. It seemed to her
+that she must strike a blow for her own deliverance, or die. For the
+first time in her life she waited after Miss Campbell had left the room,
+and going up to her father, put her hand timidly on his arm. “Papa,” she
+said, imploringly, “when you go away don’t leave me alone with Miss
+Campbell. Let me go to--to the villa; or to Aunt Elinor----”
+
+“Why will you give Miss Meadows that absurd name? She is not your aunt.”
+
+“I beg you pardon, papa, I will not do it again. I should be so much
+happier if I were not alone. The--villa? Mamma will not mind having me,
+and Eddy and I could be together, if only for a little while. I should
+be so good--so good and obedient----”
+
+“And why should you not go to the seaside with Miss Campbell this year,
+as well as every other year? Go away! go away! and don’t let me hear any
+more of this.”
+
+Vera went away, as he told her, without another word, without a look.
+She passed Miss Campbell, who was waiting and wondering on the
+staircase, and hurried to her room. She could not cry this time, her
+eyes were too hot and dry. Oh, why was she so different from other
+girls! Why had she not a mother to care for her, some one who would see
+what was happening, who would judge for her if she was wrong, who would
+not have left her to make Oswald Fane the centre of the world! He was
+the centre of the world, she felt it now!--the pivot upon which all that
+was worth having in life turned. If he was sent away, forbidden the
+house, what was to become of her? Either she would kill herself, or God
+would be kind and do it for her--one way or other, she must die.
+
+Her heart beat so wildly that it made her sick and faint. But all at
+once, as she sat down, it gave one big jump, and then was still. Why was
+this? Before her lay a letter carefully placed upon her little
+prayer-book, where she could not miss seeing it. Vera knew at once what
+it was. Not from her mother, Eddy, any ordinary correspondent; from
+_him_. She did not know his handwriting. Why should it be from him?
+Perhaps it was some childish invitation, somebody’s letter whom she did
+not care for. Saying this over to herself with trembling lips, and
+knowing it was not true, she opened the note, and with another big jump
+of her heart read as follows:--
+
+     “I met your father to-day as I left the house. He was not rude to
+     me, but I read my doom in his eye. I am not to be allowed to come
+     any more. I shall come--I shall leave no chance untried; I will try
+     to see him, and plead my cause with him; but I know how it will
+     end, unless you, you alone, you who are my better life, will stand
+     by me. Is it too much? Ah, I know it is too much. I have no right
+     to disturb your young life, to bring painful questions into it; but
+     I am in despair: and you, you too--sweet Vera, you, for whom I
+     would give my life, you are not happy either. But for this I would
+     go away; I would trust to time and Providence to bring me back to
+     your feet, where alone I can be happy. But to know that you are
+     lonely and in trouble, too--that is what I cannot bear. Vera,
+     darling, forgive me, write me one word, only one word, and do not
+     let them separate us. Have pity upon me! Since the first day I saw
+     you, that white day, I have had no thought but you.
+
+                                                           O. F.”
+
+Vera read this with feelings I cannot describe. There had never been a
+word of love-making between them, so to speak; nothing but those vague
+suggestions which make the early paths of love so exquisite; but after
+this letter there could be no further disguise. She read it over and
+over again with a mixture of heartrending pain and delight, one as
+delicious and as heartrending as the other. Stand by him? what else
+could she do?--for he was her life if she was his; but write to him! How
+could she do that? How she trembled, how sore her heart was, how happy!
+Out of the despair and blank hopelessness with which she had left the
+dining-room, what a change to this sea of emotion, so sweet, so
+terrible, so alarming, yet consolatory! Neither father nor mother had
+any sympathy for Vera, any feeling for her feelings; but he felt for
+her, with her, everything she felt--yet but for her would be as much
+alone as she was; they were two against the world. But write to him! The
+thought trembled all through her, made her hand shake, and her heart
+beat. Could she do it? How could she do it? When she heard a sound at
+her door she thrust the letter away, not into her bosom, which would
+have been romantic, but into her pocket, which was natural; and,
+conscious in every look and breath and movement turned round to see who
+it was; fortunately it was only Mary, the daughter of her old nurse, who
+had lately been promoted to be Vera’s maid. Mary was over twenty, an
+experienced young person, who had “kept company” for many years with a
+tall Guardsman to whom she was faithful through many flirtations on both
+sides. She knew what it was to have had parents and a troublesome cook
+to interfere with the course of her true love; but even cook was not so
+bad as Miss Campbell. And to have Miss Vera’s little heart broken and
+her young man driven to despair was not a thing which could be allowed
+to be, if sympathetic Mary could prevent it. She came into the room,
+smiling with a consciousness equal to Vera’s own, but with more
+comfortable sensations.
+
+Mary was cautious, however, in her advances. She said nothing until she
+was well into her pretty work of brushing Vera’s long beautiful hair,
+standing behind her, unseen and unseeing, a position which gave both
+maid and mistress ease. When this period had arrived, Mary said softly,
+“Miss Vera, I hope you had your letter?”
+
+“Yes, Mary,” said Vera with a start, and seized a book on the table
+under pretence of reading. But Mary was not so dull as not to see the
+warm color that came flushing over the girl’s neck, or the tremulous
+instinct of self-defence which made her seize upon the book which she
+did not read. Mary had the matter in her own hands. She resumed----
+
+“How long your hair do grow, to be sure, Miss Vera. Mother was always
+proud of your hair; and now here’s somebody come as thinks more of it
+than coined gold. You’ll write him just a little word, won’t you, Miss
+Vera, dear, to keep up his heart, poor gentleman? just a little
+word----”
+
+“Mary, you ought not to speak to me so. What have you to do with
+gentlemen, or me either? How did you get it? Was it you that put it
+there? Oh Mary, you shouldn’t have done it--you must never, never do it
+again.”
+
+“Miss Vera, you don’t know nothing about it,” said Mary. “Me--I’ve kept
+company with my young man since I was just your age, and nobody shan’t
+come between him and me. We’ve got to wait, but I don’t mind waiting,
+and I’ve told mother so, when she’s been at me about it. But look you
+here, Miss Vera, your papa is the only one you’ve got to look to, and if
+you hold out he’ll give in. They always does. I never see a young
+gentleman more deep in love, and to give him up would be a burning
+shame.”
+
+“Oh, Mary, how can you, how dare you talk so?” said poor Vera, with her
+face burning. “What would become of us both if papa or Miss Campbell
+knew?”
+
+“They couldn’t do much harm to me, Miss,” said Mary. “A servant as knows
+her work is always sure of a good place. Don’t you be afraid for me. And
+they can’t harm you neither, not if you holds out. Whoever holds out
+wins; them as gives in is the only one as is beaten. Miss Vera, you’ve
+got a spirit of your own, for all they think they have broken it. If I
+were you, I’d write him a word just to keep up his heart, poor
+gentleman; and I’d up and tell my papa that he might be a bluebeard or a
+raging Turk, as much as he likes--it wouldn’t make no effect upon me.”
+
+“Oh, Mary, Mary, hush! You don’t know what you are saying!”
+
+“Don’t I just? It’s you as don’t understand, Miss, not me. I know all
+about it, and a deal more than you do, and this I’ll say, that no father
+nor tyrant would ever make me false to my young man. I wouldn’t do it,
+not for the world; and Miss Vera, I can’t believe as you’re a traitor in
+your heart.”
+
+This was such a totally new view of the question that it took away
+Vera’s breath. A traitor! She had never once thought of treachery in the
+question. How long Mary’s arguments went on I need not say. She came
+back, stealing into Vera’s room in the dark after Miss Campbell had been
+there and declared the girl to be feverish, and had given her some white
+homœopathic globules, to calm her down again. “It is the hot weather,”
+Miss Campbell said to herself, never suspecting Mary. And the maid stole
+back in the dark, and the little mistress cried and let her talk, happy
+yet ashamed of the company and the confidences, and the familiarity and
+sympathy. Mary pleaded so well that Vera was persuaded to write half a
+dozen words, in great trouble and agitation, to the effect that Mr. Fane
+must not be unhappy, that he must not think of her; but that she should
+always think of him, and pray for him, and hoped he would be very happy
+all the same. Was it wrong? was it very wrong? Should not a girl answer
+a letter from a gentleman as well as from another girl? Vera knew,
+alas, that this was not at all the question. But she read over Fane’s
+letter again, and put it under her pillow when she went to sleep. He was
+the only one who felt for her. They two stood against the world!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+AN ANXIOUS MOTHER.
+
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere had spent a very uneasy month no less than her
+daughter, but in a way which had no gildings of romance and happiness
+like Vera’s trouble. The holidays had come, but had brought no pleasant
+wanderings, no genial ease to her. She had not gone to Switzerland, as
+she had proposed. Edward, disturbed and excited as he was, had declared
+himself quite indifferent to Switzerland. “If there is to be nothing but
+play in my life, I may as well play here as anywhere else,” he had said,
+with a gloomy ill-temper quite unusual to him; and he spent the sunny
+weeks of August in trudging about from one cricket match to another, an
+occupation which his mother sighed over, without enjoying that kind of
+honor and glory which consists in the report of “scores” in the
+“_Field_.” These, it is to be supposed, gave some consolation to him,
+but they did not cheer her, especially as they were diversified by long
+and painful debates with her son on the subject which he had never put
+aside or relinquished for a moment. Edward had changed his nature
+altogether. From a docile amiable lad, ready to accept her guidance and
+to be kind to everybody around him, without standing upon his own will,
+he had changed into a dogged monomaniac, a being of one idea, thinking
+of nothing but the project which had taken possession of his generally
+dull imagination, and set it all aflame. When a slow and tranquil mind
+gets roused into fanaticism the result is much more serious than with an
+inflammable nature; the fire takes deeper hold, and burns with a more
+concentrated and obstinate force. Edward could think of nothing but this
+idea of his. He too began a correspondence essentially as clandestine as
+Vera’s, though his letters came openly by the post. The boy was free
+from surveillance, and therefore had no temptation towards
+communications absolutely secret; but Edward wrote letters to his new
+friend, the traveller, which he would not for worlds have shown to his
+mother, and which were full of plans and engagements which she neither
+knew nor sanctioned. The expedition was to set out in October, and the
+mind of Mr. Buckram Bass was not disturbed by the fact that his young
+convert, his eager disciple, was forming plans and pledging himself to
+acts of which his friends disapproved. Men look leniently upon such
+kinds of family treachery. Poor Mrs. Tremenheere felt that the world
+would be against her when she set herself in opposition to an enterprise
+which would leave her desolate, and throw away as she thought her son’s
+better life. “Did she expect to keep him always at her apron strings?”
+she already heard people say, and Edward himself, all the more that he
+was not very bright, took up with fervor that common notion. “You know,
+mamma,” he said, “if I were a girl it would be quite different; but I
+can’t stay by you always, can I? You would not like to see me stick fast
+at home, a poor creature like Tom Crabbe, always thinking of the danger
+of wet feet!”
+
+“You know I do not wish for anything of the sort,” said Mrs.
+Tremenheere.
+
+“No, you are not foolish like that; but is it not something of the same
+kind in a more sensible way? You don’t mind my cricket, and that sort
+of thing. You would let me go up Mont Blanc--all for my amusement. You
+wouldn’t have me laughed at for your anxieties. I know, mother dear, you
+are a great deal too wise and good for that. But when I want to throw
+myself into real work, into something that will be of use in the world,
+then you turn round upon me--you who have always been so good, and
+refuse, because it is so far away, because it is such hard work----”
+
+“Eddy,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, “it is always a bad thing to attribute
+low motives to other people--even people much less near to you than I
+am. Can you not conceive it possible that I have some better reason than
+even regret to lose you and anxiety about the hardships involved? I
+don’t say all the same that these would not be reason enough----”
+
+“What reason?” said Edward. “I don’t know what other objection there
+could be.”
+
+“To me it would seem like throwing away all your chances,” said his
+mother. “I don’t mean only of success in the world; that is important
+enough, Eddy, though you shake your head. If any misfortune was to
+happen, if our investments were to go wrong, for instance, like so many
+people’s, you might have the strongest of inducements to think of
+success in the world. Money never comes amiss, as everybody will tell
+you--nor friends.”
+
+“You, too, mamma!” cried Eddy, “is self-interest then the only
+rule?--make friends to help one on in life, as my father said.”
+
+“Your father knows more of the world than either you or me--yes, to help
+you on, and to be helped on in turn--all true assistance is mutual; but
+I did not think of that,” said Mrs. Tremenheere. “What I was thinking
+was this--that you will throw yourself out of all the reasonable chances
+of life if you go on with this mad notion, and separate yourself from
+all your friends, and give up everything--prospects, occupations,
+suitable companions--all for what? for what, Eddy?”
+
+The lad’s face flushed. “For the good of mankind,” he cried. “Oh yes, I
+know what you will say, mother! you will say that is too vague, too
+general, and means nothing. I can’t help that, I can’t bring it down to
+details. Africa is swarming with millions of poor creatures who know
+nothing; it is to bring civilization to them, and education and trade,
+to raise them above the possibility of slavery; why are they slaves
+except because they are too ignorant and debased to know better? Think,
+mother--is not that of greater use than anything a fellow like me could
+do at home? I am not clever, you know I am not clever--but that will not
+matter in Africa; so long as one is strong and honest and honorable.”
+
+“Oh, Eddy, Eddy!” cried his mother in despair, “what am I to say to you
+to dispel this illusion, my generous, good boy!”
+
+“I will tell you what you can do, mother dear,” he said, coming up to
+her, putting his arms round her, “let me go! My heart is set on it; why
+should you not let me go, mamma? you never refused me anything before. I
+know very well I have often disappointed you; you would have liked me to
+be clever, to take a high place in school, to gain prizes and
+things--but you have never blamed me when I failed, never! You have
+given in to me in many a thing you did not care for, because you saw I
+cared for it. Oh, don’t think I haven’t seen it! I knew it well enough.
+You have never reproached me, nor refused me anything. Mother, don’t
+turn round for the first time in my life, and refuse me now; don’t fail
+me now, the first time when it has been really important, when I have
+wanted it most!”
+
+“You ought to see the difference,” said poor Mrs. Tremenheere; “I have
+been ready to give in to you even when I did not approve, when it was of
+no great importance; but now, when it is of the last importance, when
+all your more serious interests are involved, how can I go against my
+own judgment for the mere sake of pleasing your fancy, Eddy? You ought
+not to ask me, and I--I ought not to listen.”
+
+“I cannot see that,” he cried. “I don’t see why you should depart from
+the way you have always treated me. As for me, don’t suppose this is a
+mere fancy,” he added, growing red; “it is a fancy I will never depart
+from; you may oblige me to put it off, but I will give it up never.”
+
+Some one fortunately came in then, and stopped the further discussion;
+but such conversations took place daily between the mother and son, and
+the reader may judge how painful they were, and confusing to the mind
+of Mrs. Tremenheere, who had gone all these years on the principle that
+to yield all legitimate gratification to her son was the best mode of
+education, and to place in him unlimited confidence. It had answered
+very well up to this moment. Edward, who knew that he would not be
+opposed in any innocent and natural wish, had been less, not more,
+exacting, than many others more strictly governed; but now, what was she
+to do now? to preserve the tradition of her theory without its spirit,
+to yield to him for his own destruction, as she had yielded to him for
+his innocent pleasures. To refuse and cross him--how hard it was! but to
+consent to what she thought his ruin, that was harder still.
+
+It was while Mrs. Tremenheere was involved in this painful controversy,
+not knowing what was to be the end of it, that she received suddenly a
+letter from Elinor Meadows, telling her about the love of Oswald Fane
+for Vera. The letter was long and full of details, recounting the
+efforts which the young man had made to see Mr. Tremenheere, and gain
+his consent; and how, failing in this, he had appealed to her to
+intercede for him with Vera’s father, and how this, too, had failed;
+proceedings which had been taking place in the meanwhile. I scarcely
+know by what rule it is that a youthful love-story bulks so much more
+largely in the eyes of an unmarried woman, who may be supposed to have
+had no such experiences of her own, than in those of a married woman,
+who must of necessity, one would imagine, have herself passed through
+some such passages; but so it is generally, and Mrs. Tremenheere was no
+exception to the rule. Her own trouble seemed to her much more serious
+than any folly about love, which no doubt Elinor had put into the
+children’s heads. But though she was impatient she wrote to Vera,
+telling her she was too young, much too young, to think of any such
+thing, and that her first duty was to please her father, and give up
+anything that he thought improper for her. When, however, Mrs.
+Tremenheere had written this letter, it occurred to her, with a kind of
+whimsical vexation, that it was exactly the kind of letter which her
+husband would probably write to Eddy when he knew of the controversy in
+which they were engaged, and this idea made her think again,
+pre-occupied as she was, of her poor little woman-child, left to Miss
+Campbell’s sole society, in all the tremors and distresses of that
+fanciful moment, when Love and all involved in it had been first
+suggested to her mind. Poor Vera! Would her father be gentle, as he
+ought? Would not she now feel deeply and doubly what it was to be
+without a mother? Mrs. Tremenheere’s mind, withdrawn from Vera by the
+immediate vexations which were more near to her, awoke to this all at
+once with that sudden, painful sense how much she was herself to blame
+for depriving Vera of a mother, which gives double force to every pang.
+After a day or two, during which, amid all her own troubles, this
+painful question kept returning perpetually to her mind, she decided at
+last to write to her husband. She must not interfere, but yet perhaps he
+would be glad to have his wife’s assistance at such a moment, as she
+would be glad to have his. Accordingly, in the beginning of September,
+when all her own anxieties were growing greater, day by day, she took
+the final resolution, and wrote to him as follows, wording her letter as
+carefully as if she had been writing to the Queen:----
+
+     “DEAR CHARLES,--I don’t know whether you begin to find out, as I
+     do, how very much more difficult it is to manage children when they
+     are grown up, and begin to have fancies and opinions of their own,
+     than when they are small and can be commanded without explanation.
+     I am sorry to say I have made this discovery in a disagreeable way,
+     Eddy, all at once, without rhyme or reason, has fallen in love with
+     a life of adventure, and gives me no peace, trying to wring from me
+     a consent to let him go off to Africa with Mr. Buckram Bass’s
+     expedition. Perhaps a few words from you would help to make him
+     more reasonable, if you would take the trouble to write to him. He
+     is so good a boy in every other respect that it is very painful for
+     me to be obliged to cross him; and yet I am sure you will agree
+     with me that on this point it would be weakness and almost
+     wickedness to yield to his wishes.
+
+     “Elinor Meadows has written me some rigmarole about Vera and a
+     lover. A lover at her age! I hope it is only one of Elinor’s many
+     delusions in respect to this favorite subject, and that our dear
+     little girl’s mind has not yet been disturbed by any such ideas I
+     know this is the time you appropriate to relaxation, and it has
+     occurred to me that if Vera has known of this proposal, and has
+     been at all upset by it, you may dislike leaving her in the sole
+     companionship of Miss Campbell, who, though I don’t doubt a most
+     admirable person, does not look very sympathetic. If this should be
+     the case would you trust her to me? I should, I need not say, take
+     the greatest care of her, and preserve her from every suggestion of
+     premature love-making; her company would be very good for Eddy, who
+     is in an extremely unsettled state of mind, and it would be very
+     sweet and delightful for me. I hope, too, you might find it a
+     relief to your anxiety to dispose of Vera comfortably with me while
+     you are absent. Pray give me your advice on the other subject. With
+     love to Vera,
+
+                     “I am, ever affectionately yours,
+                                          “ADA TREMENHEERE.”
+
+Mr. Tremenheere received this letter just as he was arranging his plans
+to send his daughter to the seaside. It was an unfortunate moment. More
+difficult to manage! No, he would not acknowledge anything of the kind.
+For a girl at least it was always the best way to command without
+explanation. He thought but little of what his wife said about Eddy,
+which no doubt was so much dust thrown in his eyes to blind him to the
+real meaning of the proposed interference--as if he was to be taken in
+so easily! He answered this letter by return of post. He was angry with
+Elinor Meadows for her interference, and angry that his wife should know
+anything about it. They should all find that he was quite able to manage
+Vera and Vera’s lover without any help from them. The answer he returned
+was as follows. It was not by any means so carefully written as the
+epistle to which it was a reply:--
+
+     “MY DEAR ADA,--I am very sorry that you find any difficulty with
+     Eddy after all the indulgence you have shown him. Of course I shall
+     be quite ready to write and point out his duty to him if you think
+     there is really any necessity for such a step; but I should hope he
+     has not been spoiled to such an extent that he has not sense to see
+     what a fatal piece of absurdity this would be. It is really too
+     ridiculous and too entirely out of the question, I feel sure, to
+     warrant any serious alarm.
+
+     “As for Vera, I am very much obliged to you for volunteering to
+     take her off my hands, but up to the present moment I have seen
+     nothing in her to make such a transference necessary. I have no
+     doubt the system upon which she has been trained will continue to
+     answer perfectly, as it has done hitherto, and neither Vera nor I
+     have found anything wanting in Miss Campbell as a companion, though
+     I am aware you don’t like her. That perhaps was to be expected.
+     Vera is quite well, and goes to Worthing with her admirable friend
+     and governess the day after to-morrow. Thanking you all the same
+     for your kind offer, and with love to Eddy, who I trust by this
+     time has come to his senses, I am, my dear Ada,
+
+                         “Affectionately yours,
+                                     “C. TREMENHEERE.”
+
+This letter was very irritating to Mrs. Tremenheere. Her services were
+not only rejected, but rejected with something like contumely, and the
+suggestion that it was to be expected she should dislike Miss Campbell
+made her furious. Why should she dislike Miss Campbell? It was all she
+could do to refrain from falling upon Elinor Meadows, who had come to
+her the night before it arrived, while she was still entertaining the
+hope of being permitted to have her child with her. “She is not coming,
+she is going to Worthing with Miss Campbell,” she said; and
+magnanimously swallowed the other words which were fain to come.
+
+“Ah!” cried Miss Meadows, with a start of interest. She was on Oswald’s
+side, and delighted to feel that she should be able at once to give him
+news as to where his little lady had been taken; for to be sure she was
+ignorant of Mary, and all that went on through Mary’s means.
+
+And thus poor Vera’s affairs drew to a climax. Oswald Fane, I need not
+say, followed Miss Campbell and her charge to Worthing, where twice
+over, by Mary’s help, he saw Vera in the early morning before Miss
+Campbell was out of bed, when the girl went out for a walk--as it was so
+natural she should do--with her maid. But on the last of these two
+interviews Fane had lost all idea of prudence or patience. It was not
+only that he was hotly in love, and kept from all legitimate intercourse
+with the object of his impetuous young affection; but Mary, with whom he
+was now in constant communication, and whose head was turned by the
+delight and excitement of the whole transaction, drew such a touching
+picture to him of Vera’s solitude and semi-imprisonment, that Fane’s
+blood boiled, and it seemed the first of duties to deliver her.
+
+“She ain’t found out as Miss Vera is up early of a morning, not yet,”
+said Mary, “which it is my young lady’s only breath of freedom; but
+you’ll see she will afore long, for there’s spies all about. Mercifully
+she’s fond of her bed in the morning, is Miss Campbell; but as soon as
+she finds it out, don’t you think for to see Miss Vera any more--not to
+say as it’s as much as my place is worth now.”
+
+“Never mind about your place,” said the lover. “You shall have your
+place all right, don’t you fear.”
+
+“Well, sir,” said Mary, curtseying, “I’ve done my best for you; but if
+you’ll take my advice you won’t let that poor dear linger on here, a
+prisoner, and nothing better. Daren’t take up her own letters she
+daren’t, her letters from her poor mamma, nor lift her head from her
+book, nor go a step without the old one after her. But for me, I know
+she’d die,” Mary added emphatically. And indeed it was true that among
+them they had brought poor Vera into a state of excitement in which the
+child’s mind could find no rest. Her temper and her spirit rose against
+the tyranny exercised over her. Miss Campbell, and only Miss Campbell,
+all day; her intercourse with the external world, except through Miss
+Campbell, stopped short; no one near to give the poor child any
+counsel--and Mary’s insidious whispering in her ears, and the daily love
+letters, with all their wonderful flattery and worship. What wonder that
+poor Vera by and by found herself ready for anything? A panic seized her
+indeed when Fane unfolded his plan, and showed her exactly how
+everything was to be done, and how they were to be married in a church
+in London, where already, without consulting her, he had put up the
+banns. Married! the words froze Vera’s blood in her veins, and then sent
+it tingling and burning all over her in fright and wonder and shame.
+Married!
+
+“Well, Miss, it’s a thing that happens to most folks,” said Mary, “and
+all the young ladies as I’ve ever known is pleased to be asked young.
+I’ve known a many as has been married at sixteen. It’s early, but still
+when a lady has set her heart on a gentleman as ain’t allowed to come
+and see her nor keep her company, what is to be expected? It ain’t your
+blame, Miss, but them that drove you to it----”
+
+Vera, in her confused and frightened ponderings, felt that there was
+some truth in this. They were driving her to it. Shut up here, never
+free to do anything, seeing nobody except by stealth--and lo, if she
+liked to-morrow she might be free to go where she pleased, to see whom
+she pleased, to be perpetually by his side who had made the world such a
+different place to her. To be sure the idea of being married was very
+appalling; but she only trembled and shrank back at the word; she no
+longer made any serious opposition now.
+
+The arrangements were all concluded while Mr. Tremenheere was in
+Scotland, among a circle of friends, very much satisfied with himself;
+and while Mrs. Tremenheere, worried and unhappy, was arguing with
+Edward, forgetting for the moment all about Vera; and while Miss
+Campbell was listening to Rollin with that routine attention which the
+unfortunate educators of humanity somehow attain by long practice. Not
+without excitement, not without a passing doubt, did Fane arrange all
+the details. It was a risk, for he was not rich, and what might happen
+to them was very uncertain. But it was only by moments that this cold
+shadow came over him--to deliver Vera and make her life ever after a
+dream of happiness, to be happy himself, beyond words in having her,
+these were the motives that were uppermost in his mind, and he waited
+with impatience, for the decisive moment. The last step was precipitated
+by the discovery on Miss Campbell’s part of one of the morning walks
+which the girl had taken, and which a slip on Vera’s part had betrayed
+to her.
+
+“Do you mean to say you go out in the morning before I am up?” said Miss
+Campbell. Mary, who was present, made signs of every possible kind to
+her mistress, and even stole behind her, suggesting a fib.
+
+“Yes,” said Vera, whose moral failure had not gone so far. She trembled,
+but she told the truth. “I have been out twice in the morning when it
+was very fine--but Mary was with me,” she added, falteringly.
+
+Miss Campbell sent a suspicious glance at Mary, but could do no more, as
+there was no evidence against her. “I think perhaps, on the whole, Vera,
+it will be better for you to have your bed brought into my room,” she
+said. This roused all Vera’s spirit.
+
+“Into your room, Miss Campbell? Why?” she said, with a quivering lip. “I
+have always had a room of my own.”
+
+“Yes, but then there were no reasons against it. I wish you to be in my
+room now. Don’t say anything. I know what I am doing, and I am
+responsible to your papa. Mary, give the orders to-morrow. It is too
+late, I suppose to-night?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Campbell, they’ve all gone to bed, or going,” said Mary.
+“I’ll see to it first thing to-morrow.”
+
+Vera went to her little room, stunned by this last blow. No more privacy
+to think, no more possibility of getting her letters, and feeding her
+heart upon them, of talking about him to her attendant. Mary followed
+her up-stairs, a little frightened in her turn, feeling that the crisis
+had come, which was too exciting to be comfortable. As long as things
+could go on without coming to a crisis it was better fun. But even Mary
+felt a certain trembling now.
+
+“What am I to do? I will not bear it. I cannot bear it,” said Vera. “It
+has all come to an end now.”
+
+“Oh! Miss Vera,” said the maid, dead frightened. It was Vera now, after
+being tempted and led on so long, who took the lead. She settled
+everything in a few quiet words. “Stay here and sleep on the sofa,” she
+said--which was a wise precaution; for otherwise, Mary, struck with a
+sudden panic, was capable in pure fright of betraying everything to Miss
+Campbell, already excited and full of alarm.
+
+That morning, when it was scarcely daylight, Vera, with her maid after
+her, stole out of the house, while still Miss Campbell and everybody
+else in the big lodging-house was fast asleep.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE BOY’S APPEAL.
+
+
+“Mother, now you must come to a decision. You cannot keep me longer in
+suspense. Mr. Bass writes to me that there is only one vacant place in
+the expedition, and that he cannot leave it longer unfilled up. It must
+be Yes or No.”
+
+“I have said No, Eddy, a hundred times.”
+
+“But without due consideration,” he cried eagerly. “Think mother! How
+often have you said that it was easier for every one when a fellow had a
+bent one way or another, when he knew what he wanted to be. I never did
+till now; one thing was the same to me as another; I was ready to do
+whatever you said, and then you regretted that I had no bent! But now
+that I have a wish, a strong desire, you deny me, you will not give me a
+plain answer. The responsibility will be on you,” cried Edward, with
+excitement, “if you baulk me. I feel I can do this, and I don’t know
+what else I can do, and I don’t care for anything else in life.”
+
+He was hot and flushed with eagerness. She was pale, and her face drawn
+with anxiety and distress. The boy assailed with all the eagerness of
+his young strength and self-will, the mother, torn by conflicting
+emotions, resisted. All was unity in his mind, all contention and
+complication in hers. She would have done anything in the world to
+please him. She would have made any sacrifice to secure him his
+wish--except the sacrifice he demanded, the sacrifice of his own
+prospects, and comfort, and use in life. Even, feeling this deeply, and
+feeling that it was her duty to resist him, the effort of doing so wrung
+her heart.
+
+“I know I have the responsibility,” she said gravely. “You are too young
+to judge for yourself, and if you were older you are excited, Eddy, and
+your mind is warped. I cannot consent to it. If I must speak decisively
+let me do it at once. I cannot give you up to this vagabondism, this
+mere wild course of adventure. All that man says is but words--fine
+words, brave words, but nothing, nothing more, Eddy. I know what I am
+speaking of. I cannot consent.”
+
+“Then, mother--” he sprang up furiously to his feet, his whole aspect
+changed. He looked as if about to pour upon her some violent outburst of
+rage or reproach. Then he stopped suddenly. “If it is to be so,” he said
+with a sombre countenance, “if you refuse me this only thing I have ever
+cared for, then all is over with me. I don’t care what becomes of me. Do
+what you like, it doesn’t matter any more.”
+
+“This is folly--it is madness, Edward!”
+
+“You may call it what you please,” said the lad, with a sullen shrug of
+the shoulders. “One word or another, what does it matter? It is all one.
+Mamma, I know you mean well, you think it is for the best; but you have
+crushed all the life out of me, and I don’t care now what I do.”
+
+“You will feel differently, Eddy, when you have considered--when you
+have thought of it more.”
+
+“Considered! Thought! As if I had done anything else for weeks,” he
+said, with something like scorn; and there ensued a heavy pause, a pause
+which neither broke--until at last after awhile he rose dully, and went
+away, thrusting his hands down to the depths of his pockets. Poor Mrs.
+Tremenheere was left victorious, but miserable. She had broken her
+boy’s heart--for his good. She knew it was for his good, but still, as
+he said, she had crushed him, she who would rather have been crushed
+herself a hundred times. She had all the feebleness of a mother, though
+she thought herself a strong-minded woman; the moment she had refused
+him absolutely she began to think, would it have been possible to let
+him go? Perhaps--if he had been allowed to try it, to go a certain
+distance, to make the discovery for himself what it really
+was--_perhaps_ that might have cured him; whereas, now it would be his
+dream and ideal all his life. I can scarcely tell how she managed to
+live through the afternoon without conceding to Eddy’s downcast looks
+what her better judgment had refused to his entreaties, but she did hold
+out for the next day, and the next again. She saw him wandering about
+listlessly, not caring to go out, not caring for his cricket, not even
+waking up when the _Field_ came with all its news. When a boy like
+Edward Tremenheere can resist the _Field_, he must be bad indeed. Poor
+Eddy looked entirely broken down. He thrust his shoulders up to his ears
+and his hands down into his pockets. He left off whistling, he left off
+smiling, and if indeed his mother had broken his heart, as he said, he
+paid her back in her own coin, and broke hers. Never had there been a
+more melancholy house than the villa for these two days. At last Mrs.
+Tremenheere could bear it no longer.
+
+“Edward,” she said, the third morning, throwing aside the diminutive,
+half consciously in the solemnity of the circumstances, “this is more
+than I can bear. You look as if you had lost all your friends, all you
+care for----”
+
+“So I have,” he said sullenly; and then with a look that wrung her heart
+he added, “Have patience a little, mother. I have lost a great deal more
+than you think--the first thing I ever really cared for. I daresay I
+shall be better after a while, but I can’t look cheerful all at once.
+Leave me alone till I come to myself--if I ever do.”
+
+“You break my heart,” she said, “Oh, Eddy, if I could give in to you I
+would--but how can I, feeling as I do? And you would be the first to
+blame me when you are older, and see things in their true light.”
+
+“I shall never do that,” said Edward doggedly. “The true light is what I
+have been seeing so long. Now I have fallen back into no light at all,
+and that is what I must put up with for the rest of my life.”
+
+Then there was another interval of gloom and silence--another day with
+still the same heavy languor upon him. Mrs. Tremenheere was altogether
+overwhelmed. In the afternoon she went up-stairs, and put on her bonnet,
+tying the strings resolutely before the glass, and looking almost
+fiercely at her own pale face.
+
+“I am going to town,” she said, meeting Edward on her way to the door.
+“I cannot bear the responsibility you have thrown on me. I am going to
+consult your father. If he thinks anything can be done to satisfy you I
+will put aside my own feelings. I will not put myself in your way.”
+
+A sudden light of joy flushed over Edward’s face.
+
+“How good you are, mother, how good you are to me!” he cried; but then
+he paused and shook his head. There was not much faith to be put in his
+father. Still, a glimmering of hope sprang up in him the moment he found
+that the question was not entirely concluded. He walked to the railway
+station with her, his face already lightened, his head more erect, his
+shoulders in their usual place. He was more tender to her than ever he
+had been, compunctious, sorry for having troubled her, now that he saw a
+revival of possibility that he might yet have his own way.
+
+It was a desperate resolution which Mrs. Tremenheere had taken; all her
+pride, both as wife and woman, would have to be sacrificed. She would be
+obliged as good as to confess, she who in her heart thought her
+experiment so much more successful than her husband’s, that she had
+failed, that the mother was not enough, that she required his aid to
+influence and guide her boy. Only a few weeks before her husband had
+rejected her proffered aid with scorn; and now she had to go humbly to
+seek his, to lay her problem before him. She walked to the little
+station with a sense of humiliation and downfall in her mind which her
+very anxiety could scarcely keep in balance. Never, after thus giving
+in, could she hold up her head as of old before either father or son. If
+she had done wrong she felt that she was punished. She could scarcely
+respond to Edward’s rising cheerfulness as she went along that dreary
+bit of way. What an end it was to all her pride, to all her theories! A
+train had just arrived from town as she approached the platform of the
+country station to wait for her train going up to town. The people
+streaming out kept her back till she began to fear she would be too
+late. Going on in advance, anxiously, leaving Edward behind her, she
+almost ran against a gentleman who was coming with equal haste and
+eagerness in the other direction, but whom in her pre-occupation she did
+not notice except to get out of his way. Then she stopped short
+suddenly, stopped by the cry he gave at seeing her--“Ada!” She raised
+her head quickly, thunderstruck. It was Mr. Tremenheere.
+
+“You are coming to me?” he said, holding out his hand, and stranger
+still, drawing hers within his arm, and leading her with him as if they
+had been the most confidential of friends. His manner was anxious and
+excited. “You were coming to me, Ada. I can see it in your face.--She is
+here!”
+
+“She?” said Mrs. Tremenheere, excited too. “I don’t understand you.
+Yes, I was coming to you, Charles.”
+
+“God bless you, my dear!” he cried earnestly, “if she is safe with you
+all is well.”
+
+“Of whom are you speaking?” she said. “There is nobody with me but
+Eddy;” then with a cry, “Vera! Something has happened to my child!”
+
+Mr. Tremenheere was quite tremulous and shaken, his eyes bloodshot, his
+countenance haggard, like an old man.
+
+“Hush!” he said, “don’t let us publish it to everybody. She is not here,
+then? God help us! I thought she must certainly have gone to you.”
+
+She grasped his arm with both hands:
+
+“Charles,” she said, “tell me what has happened? Tell me everything. It
+is right I should know.”
+
+“Yes, yes! it is right you should know. I came to you at once; it was
+the first thought in my mind. We are both to blame, both to blame, if
+anything beyond remedy has happened to her. Ada, she went away two days
+ago, where we cannot tell. I have come down from Scotland, travelling
+all night in answer to that woman’s telegram. Then I came on to you. I
+thought, God help me! she was sure to be here; and when I saw you----
+But pride must be at an end and everything else. I have failed with
+Vera. I have driven her to despair; and where are we to find her, and
+how?”
+
+“I was coming to you with the same confession in my mouth,” said Mrs.
+Tremenheere, with tears in her eyes. “I have failed as well. I was
+coming to ask your help.”
+
+“Has he gone away, too?”
+
+“No; but something else,” she said. “Oh! forgive me, Charles, that is
+not so urgent. Tell me about Vera, and we must plan what is best to be
+done without delay.”
+
+She forgot Edward and everything else. She turned down a quiet byway,
+holding her husband’s arm, clinging to it. He told her his story, and
+she listened, their two heads close together, their minds in absolute
+union, in one interest, in one feeling. He told her how it had been
+found out that Fane had followed Vera to Worthing, and how it was proved
+at last that Mary, her maid, the daughter of her old nurse, was in
+Fane’s pay, and working for him with all her might. He confessed that
+Miss Campbell had been hard upon the girl, keeping her in a kind of
+imprisonment.
+
+“Carrying out my orders,” said the penitent father, “to the letter,
+without thinking of the spirit; for, of course, that was never what I
+intended. What I intended was by means of society and occupation to wean
+her from any foolish fancy that might have crept into her mind; and,
+indeed, I did not even know that she cared for the young fellow. I only
+knew that he supposed himself to be fond of her.”
+
+“She is such a child. It was not to be expected that you could think of
+any strong sentiment on her part,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, soothingly,
+“but tell me more--Was he with her? Was any one with her? and how, if
+she was so watched, did she get away?”
+
+“She went away in the morning, before any one was up, by the early train
+to town. Mary was with her; no one else, so far as we can find out. It
+appears,” said Mr. Tremenheere, with a look of shame, “that Miss
+Campbell, hearing of some early walks she had taken, had threatened to
+take her into her own room henceforward, to sleep there.”
+
+“Vera would not put up with that. You never knew how impetuous she was;
+but if Mary was with her, and Mary only---- Charles, had you reason to
+think badly of this Mr. Fane?”
+
+“Badly? No,” he said, with some impatience. “No. He is a mere nobody,
+that is all. Younger brother of a commonplace squire in one of the
+Midland counties--_quite_ distantly related to Lord Fanebury, with next
+to nothing, and no prospects that I know of; a sort of half-artist, as
+has been the fashion lately with idle young men--a man who could give
+her nothing, neither money nor position, nor----”
+
+“But that meant no harm--could not mean any harm? Oh! Charles, they are
+both so young! and if you say she was harshly treated, my poor darling!
+He had a good face----”
+
+“Ada, you are always ridiculous,” he cried, giving her arm in sheer
+impatience a hasty pressure with his. “What has the goodness of his face
+to do with it? He was well-looking enough--the question is, What is to
+be done? How are we to find her? I have set a detective on his track, of
+course. Why do you cry out? Such things are done every day, and the
+world need not be any the wiser. But tell me, if you have any
+suggestion to make.”
+
+“I am thinking,” she said. “But, in the first place you must come home
+and rest, and take some food; you are worn out. Eddy and I, who are
+fresh and untired, must work now.”
+
+“Ah!” he said, drawing a long breath. “Yes, I am very tired; but I did
+not expect you would think of me when Vera was in danger.”
+
+“Oh! hush! hush!” she said, “are we not all one family, though we have
+been fools and divided ourselves? We shall find Vera. She is a good
+child, though she is hasty and young. She will not do anything there is
+shame in. God bless her!” cried the mother, with tears in her eyes,
+“wherever she is! She may be foolish and unhappy, but she will not go
+wrong. Charles, come home and take some rest, or you will be ill. Leave
+it for the moment to Eddy and me.”
+
+It would be useless to say what Mr. Tremenheere’s feelings were when he
+found himself in his wife’s house, which she called “home”--the villa he
+had heard so often spoken of, but had never seen. His anxiety and
+fatigue blunted the sharpness of his personal feelings. He took the food
+that was served to him without even feeling it strange that she should
+fill his glass with wine, and sit by him while he ate; and went to lie
+down after his long vigil while she went to London with Edward, now
+fully roused up, and for the moment delivered from all thought of
+Africa. Mr. Tremenheere was no longer a young man, and he was very
+tired; and somehow putting the whole troublesome business into other
+hands seemed to relieve him, and gave him a degree of immediate ease
+which a few hours ago would scarcely have seemed possible. No doubt her
+mother would find her. A woman would know what another woman was likely
+to do in such an emergency; and she was fresh, as she said, and untired,
+whereas his head was aching with weariness. He had not slept for two
+nights, and scarcely had taken any food. After his wife and his son had
+left him, he wandered over the house in a curious languor of fatigue
+which blunted even his anxieties. The pretty house, all still and
+vacant, the broad rich landscape beneath, the sunny air and warmth and
+sweetness worked upon him like a spell. How strange it was that he
+should be here reposing himself, putting his burden upon other
+shoulders! Yes, “we are all one family, though we have been fools and
+divided ourselves.” How true that was! Mr. Tremenheere thought he had
+said it himself, and in the strength of that virtuous and reasonable
+sentiment went and lay down and slept. This new comer, who went to bed
+in broad daylight, and who was thus left alone in possession of the
+house, was a great wonder and excitement to the servants at the villa.
+He was “Missis’s husband,” but he was not “Master.” “Something was up,”
+everybody felt, from Jane, who was Mrs. Tremenheere’s feminine butler,
+to Sam, the boy in the garden. Had he come and taken possession, and
+ousted her altogether? The popular mind has great ideas as to what a
+husband can do. They thought Mrs. Tremenheere’s independence must have
+come to an end, and that the stranger had turned her out.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE GIRL’S ESCAPE.
+
+
+“Miss Vera, oh, where will you wait till I run and let him know? Stop a
+moment, oh Miss Vera, please. Let me run and let him know! However is he
+to come, Miss, if you won’t let me tell him! Oh Miss Vera, please!”
+
+“Come along, come along! the train is going,” said Vera. She had taken
+the lead at last. She did not know what she was going to do, and had no
+thought of separating herself from her lover, whose suggestion had put
+this flight into her mind, and whose presence seemed a necessary part of
+it. But for the moment she was desperate, and to her excited mind it
+seemed that Fane must know of it by instinct. She kept hold of her maid,
+holding her fast. She had never gone anywhere by herself, nor been left
+alone in any public place. Mary was taller than she,--older,--used to
+moving about the world. Vera held her with a clutch on her arm,--holding
+her by moral force rather than physical. “I shall die if you leave me,”
+she said. “Come,--come; the chief thing is to get away.”
+
+“But, Miss Vera, Mr. Fane!”
+
+Vera made no answer, but clutched her closer, drawing her into a
+carriage. It was a train chiefly used by workmen and people given to
+very early hours. Vera thought nothing of the tickets, but Mary did;
+whose code of respectability was dreadfully wounded by this unauthorized
+intrusion into a public conveyance. And they had no luggage,
+either,--nothing except a small black bag, into which the maid had
+thrust her young mistress’s little trinkets,--many of them the useless
+and valueless ornaments of a child.
+
+It was the quaintest half-comic version of the flight of the traditional
+princess, with her devoted attendant and her jewels. The beads and the
+little lockets in Mary’s bag were as unlike the casket of diamonds which
+the heroine of old romance was bound to take with her, as little
+sixteen-year-old Vera was unlike that impassioned and poetical
+personage. When they were fairly off, and beyond the reach of any
+immediate stoppage, in the carriage by themselves, it was Mary’s brain
+that worked the most anxiously. As for Vera, she dropped back in her
+corner with a sensation of rest and relief for the moment. She had
+escaped. Nobody more alarming than a railway guard could climb the step
+and look in at the window--no Miss Campbell could come and dictate to
+her with suspicion in her eyes,--no lover, too urgent, too impassioned,
+could frighten her youth with terrific suggestions of marriage.
+Marriage! The idea frightened her almost as much as Miss Campbell did.
+But for the moment both of these terrors were at a distance. No one
+could say “Vera, it is time for Rollin;” or “Vera, in three days we
+shall be married.” She was safe; and for two hours she leaned back and
+rested, for it was a slow train.
+
+Mary, however, had her hands full. An elopement which did not end in a
+marriage was a horror to think of; and the fact that Vera’s flight was
+premature, that the marriage could not be for two days yet, and that
+Fane knew nothing of their sudden start,--this was a complication of
+difficulties which it required all her skill to meet. When she had
+extricated herself from the first of her troubles by paying the fare to
+the guard,--and indeed it almost emptied both their purses to do
+this,--she set herself to the consideration of her after-proceedings.
+And in her thoughts there arose a very neat little plan. She had at
+first intended taking her little mistress to the house of her mother,
+who lived near Hampstead, and who, as I have already said, had been
+Vera’s nurse. This had been settled when she had arranged the flight
+with Fane for the eve of the intended marriage day. But as two days must
+elapse, and there would, no doubt, be immediate pursuit, Mary evolved a
+more astute arrangement out of her busy brain. She resolved to take
+Vera,--not to her own mother, whom the pursuers would immediately think
+of--but to the sister of her young man,--the gallant Guardsman with whom
+Mary “kept company”--of whom nobody at Hyde Park Square knew anything.
+When she had settled this to her perfect satisfaction, Mary had leisure
+to rest, and indeed to dose,--a refreshment which, what with anxiety and
+what with early rising, she required much. She woke up only as the train
+arrived in London, and get her young mistress instantly into a cab.
+
+“I’ve settled all where we’re going, Miss Vera; leave it all to me,”
+said Mary. Upon which Vera put back her veil, and faced her conductor
+with the appalling statement, “I am going to Hyde Park Square.”
+
+“Oh, goodness gracious me! she has gone out of her senses!” cried the
+maid. “Oh, Miss Vera! stop a moment! think a moment! For all we know
+there is a telegraph after us, describing us like two thieves! Yes,
+Miss, William street, Stanhope street, Pentonville,--that is the
+address----”
+
+“I am going,” said Vera, drawing herself up, “home to Hyde Park Square.
+Be quiet, if you please,--I shall do what I think right, not what you
+tell me,” and with that she put her head out of the window--“as if she
+had been a hundred,” Mary said afterwards--and gave the address to the
+coachman. Here was a business! Mary wept, and scolded, and remonstrated;
+she tried every argument she could think of; she poured out reproaches
+and adjurations. But Vera sat in the corner with her mouth shut tight,
+her face pale, her small hands clasped together. She made no answer,
+but she did not yield one iota, whatever her attendant might say.
+
+“What is to become of Mr. Fane?” said Mary; “he can’t come to you there,
+Miss, after he’s been forbid the house. Jervis ’d do a deal for me, or
+for you either, Miss Vera; but to do that is as much as his place is
+worth; and what’s to become of the poor young gentleman as thinks you
+the light of his eyes? And what’s to become of me, Miss Vera?” she
+continued with an outburst of tears. “I’m ruined for ever and ever if
+that’s what you’re agoing to do. Your papa will turn me off without a
+character; and I can’t blame him either, for all as I’ve been doing it’s
+been for you. I’ve been a-thinking of your happiness, and master will
+say as it’s ’is orders I ought to ’a been thinking of. And oh, goodness
+gracious! what am I to do?”
+
+“Do not be frightened, Mary,” said Vera, like a little princess. “I
+shall write to papa--he is not at home, and there will be time to
+explain everything, and to show him that it was Miss Campbell who did it
+all. I have done wrong too,” said Vera, faltering; “but I will tell him
+everything, and I hope he will forgive us all. We must try and do right
+now.”
+
+“That is all very well, Miss, after you’re married,--they always does,
+after they’re married, go down on their knees, and say as they’re sorry.
+But how are you ever to be married, Miss Vera, going like this, as bold
+as brass, and quite open, to the Square?”
+
+“I don’t want to be married, Mary,” said Vera, growing very red, and
+speaking very low.
+
+Upon which Mary uttered a scream of disgust and horror. “Oh, how could
+you go deceiving him--how could you take him in like this!--to break his
+heart, poor young gentleman!” she said. “If he goes to the bad after,
+you mark my words, Miss Vera, it’ll be all along of you!”
+
+This blanched Vera’s cheeks once more, though it did not change her
+resolution. She did not wish to break Fane’s heart,--very, very far from
+that. What she would have liked would have been to see him every
+evening,--to get those letters,--to be always the one woman in the
+world,--his princess,--his better life. None of these privileges was she
+willing to part with; and perhaps after a long time it might be
+possible to reconcile herself to the appalling idea of being married,
+only not at present;--but indeed the very last thing in the world that
+would have occurred to her was to break his heart.
+
+She had her way, however; and went in spite of all opposition, to Hyde
+Park Square, where her appearance startled very much the small
+household, consisting of Jervis and a charwoman, who were left in
+charge. Mary, however, making the best of a bad business, explained very
+glibly that she had come with her young mistress on a variety of
+businesses; deputed by Miss Campbell to take her place,--to go to the
+dentist’s, to go to the dressmaker’s, and various other missions beside;
+and Jervis was willing to be deceived, while the charwoman was strong in
+the happy conviction that it was none of her business. Fane, whom the
+clever young woman contrived to summon by telegram just as Miss Campbell
+summoned Mr. Tremenheere, arrived that afternoon, and had an interview
+with Vera in the deserted shades of Kensington Gardens. He was in a
+great fright to find that she had gone home; but afterwards was brought
+to approve by the plea brought forth by Mary--that it was the last
+place in which they were likely to look for the fugitives.
+
+When she got home after this interview, during which, in terror of her
+lover’s remonstrances, the poor child had dissembled, and said nothing
+about her newly-formed resolution, Vera wrote to her father a long
+account of how it all was,--how she could not bear Miss Campbell any
+longer; how Oswald Fane wished her to marry him, but she would rather
+wait if papa would only come at once and stand by her. To this, however,
+she added an energetic postscript, announcing her intention not to give
+up Oswald Fane. And then she wrote to that personage himself, begging
+him to pardon her,--calling him for the first time her “dear Oswald,”
+assuring him that she should always love him,--always think of him; and
+perhaps, some time after, when she was older--if he still wished it--But
+how could she--how could she be married now?--Mary carried this last
+letter to him and comforted him in his terror, declaring that all girls
+felt just like that at the last moment, but that there was nothing
+really to be apprehended.
+
+“It can’t be said but what she’s dreadful young, if you come to think
+of it,” said Mary--“six years younger than me.”
+
+“But girls are often married at sixteen,” said Fane,--he had not his
+wits sufficiently about him to pay Mary a compliment, as she expected.
+He too felt it to be very serious. Poor little tender darling! Was his
+love cruel to her? Ought he to have waited without being bidden? Ought
+he to have taken advantage of her helplessness and loneliness? This
+thought made Oswald’s pillow very uneasy that night. He was a better man
+than he himself knew. Though it was hard, it seemed to him almost as if
+he could sacrifice himself for Vera’s good. But then, who would take
+care of her as he would? To give her back into the hands of her father
+and Miss Campbell would be barbarous. He could not do so,--certainly, he
+said to himself, that could not be for Vera’s good.
+
+Thus Tuesday passed; Mr. Tremenheere, posting through London on the
+Wednesday morning, had not time to go to his deserted house, nor did he
+think it necessary; and again the long day crept on while he went to the
+villa, and her mother resumed the search in London, hurrying from one
+place to another,--to the house of Miss Meadows, to Fane’s
+lodgings--who was denied to her, although he watched her with great
+trepidation from an upper window--and to the house of the nurse at
+Hampstead. Vera passed the day in the gloomy house at Hyde Park Square,
+scarcely venturing to look out,--wondering what was going to happen to
+her,--if her father would arrive in time, or if she should have to be
+married, or what was to be done. Jervis, too, had many thoughts in his
+mind. There was “something up,” he felt sure, as the servants did at the
+villa; and Jervis, an old family servant, began to consider whether he
+ought not to take some active part in it. He would have made up his
+mind, probably, and written to somebody--he could not tell whom--after
+all the mischief was done.
+
+Mrs. Tremenheere and her son drove about the town all the afternoon.
+Miss Meadows was gone, and Vera had not been heard of there. Asking
+after Fane at his club, they were told he was in Scotland--and at his
+lodgings--that he was not at home. Then they went to the detective who
+had traced him, and had seen him in close conversation with two young
+women in Kensington Gardens, but being directed to look after the
+gentleman, had paid little attention to the women, and had let them
+steal away, he could not tell where. “That must have been Vera and her
+maid,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, and immediately drove to Hampstead, where,
+after some trouble, she found Mary’s mother, who declared she knew
+nothing; but did it with so guilty an air that the pursuers went back to
+get another detective, and sent him to keep up a vain watch on the old
+woman’s house. In reality, she was as innocent and ignorant as either of
+them; but she had received an intimation from her daughter that it was
+possible Vera might come to her house, and therefore looked guilty when
+the question was put to her. By the time this was done, it was growing
+late, and the more unsuccessful Mrs. Tremenheere was, the more anxious
+she grew. “Another night! and my child somewhere about, with no one to
+take care of her!” she said, wringing her hands. “I cannot leave London
+to-night, Eddy; she must be here!”
+
+“But my father,--how anxious he will be! You cannot do anything during
+the night.”
+
+“I can be on the spot,” she said, with an unconscious emphasis, poor
+soul. “Go down to him, my dear boy, and comfort him, and tell him I will
+stay. You can come back with him to-morrow, for she is evidently in
+London. No, better not do anything till I telegraph; he looked
+dreadfully worn and shaken. He is not so young as he used to be. Be kind
+to him, Eddy, and let him know I don’t blame him,--at least not at this
+moment. I daresay he never thought what harm he might do.”
+
+“I shall say nothing about harm or blame either,” said Edward; “he
+looked very miserable. If you don’t telegraph, I shall bring him up to
+town by the eleven o’clock train. And, mother, where shall you go?”
+
+Then Mrs. Tremenheere repeated that strange return to common sense of
+which Vera had been the originator. She looked at her son, and said
+gently, “I am going to Hyde Park Square.”
+
+“Mother!”
+
+“Yes, it is the fittest place,--I never ought to have left it. If your
+father pleases, I will go back again for good. We have done harm enough
+by our divisions. My pride shall not stand in the way any longer. If
+only my poor Vera, my innocent little darling, may be found!”
+
+Edward went away confounded, home to his father, in the house which was
+not his father’s. The boy did not know how he should like it. He felt
+half ashamed, and wholly startled and taken aback,--something as a boy
+might feel whose mother had told him she was about to marry again.
+
+And Mrs. Tremenheere, with a heavy heart, drove to Hyde Park Square. It
+was the fittest place for her to go,--the fittest place to take her lost
+child to, should she find her. She smiled sadly at Jervis’s astonished
+face when he saw her.
+
+“Yes, Jervis, you may be surprised; it is trouble that has brought me,
+but I hope not trouble that will last. Mr. Tremenheere knows that I have
+come, and I dare say you can manage to give me a bed. What is that I
+hear up-stairs? Jervis! Has the man gone crazy! Are you having visitors
+in the house while the family is away?”
+
+She stood in the hall, looking up the big dingy London staircase,
+wondering at the sound of voices,--crying and exclamations, and a kind
+of struggle. Then a light young step came rushing down the stairs,--a
+little white figure, like a ghost, with floods of hair about its
+shoulders, flashed round the windings,--appeared,--disappeared,--threw
+itself with a shriek of joy into Mrs. Tremenheere’s arms.
+
+“Vera!” she said, with a great cry. Where, but at home, and by her
+mother, should the child have been found?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+CONCLUSION--THE FATHER’S SHARE.
+
+
+“You have heard nothing, I suppose?” said Mr. Tremenheere, huskily. He
+grasped his son’s arm with a hand that trembled as they met in the
+middle of the road.
+
+“Nothing, sir, but my mother has stayed behind to be on the spot. She
+seems to be full of hope,” said Eddy; and then he entered into the
+details of all they had done. “I should have stayed too, but mamma likes
+to do things herself;” said the lad. “I dare say she is quite right, for
+she does them best; and she sent me down to make your mind easy.”
+
+“Uneasy, you mean,” said his father with a forced smile; “till she is
+found, there is no peace of mind for me.”
+
+“At least you know that she is on the spot,” said Edward, unconsciously
+copying his mother’s emphasis; and then they walked down the dark road
+together,--scarcely seeing each other, still less knowing each other.
+Mr. Tremenheere kept hold of his son’s arm.
+
+“I did not think I had any nerves left,” he said; “I never could have
+supposed twenty hours’ journey and two days’ anxiety would have taken so
+much out of me. I got Miss Campbell’s telegram at ten o’clock on Monday,
+and since then--but I have had a sleep this afternoon,--I must not count
+this afternoon. Your mother has a great deal of energy, Ned; she is a
+very clever woman. What a pity we did not get on! It would have been
+better for us all,--better for Vera, poor child, and even for
+you,--though nothing has happened to you,--if we had all been, as we
+ought to have been, in our own home.”
+
+Edward’s heart trembled at this address. His mother might have been got
+to yield about Africa; but this father, this man of the world,--would he
+yield? The young fellow had a moment of sharp conflict with himself; and
+then he resolved to make a plunge into it, and know his fate.
+
+“My mother was just going to consult you about me, when you came, sir.
+There is a thing I have set my heart upon which she does not approve
+of. My mother is very kind. Though she does not approve of it she could
+not bear to see me cast down; and as a last chance for me she said she
+would consult you. I wonder if you will be on my side! Oh, sir!” said
+Edward throwing all the expression which the darkness denied to his
+countenance into his voice, “you can’t think of what importance it is to
+me. I told you before I should never be a great scholar. I am an
+out-of-door fellow,--good at walking, and that sort of thing, not at
+book-work. I never knew what I could do with myself that would be any
+good till I heard of this!”
+
+“Well, what is it? Let me hear,” said his father, “I am very much afraid
+it must be something nonsensical, as you are so much in earnest about
+it; and my advice is of little good just now,--my mind is all taken up
+about the other affair. Nevertheless, let me hear what you have got to
+say.”
+
+There was a pause. It was strange how much more difficult Edward felt it
+to state his case to his father than to his mother. Immediately, all
+that might appear absurd in his fanaticism,--his own ignorance of the
+subject, and his very faith in the traveller,--appeared to him as Mr.
+Tremenheere might see them. He had been angry when his mother took this
+view of the case; but the moment he saw it with his father’s eyes,
+everything seemed to change. The meaning stole out of his own wishes,
+the force out of his reasons. He faltered and hesitated, in spite of
+himself.
+
+“Well, sir,” he said, with a dogged determination to have it out, “Mr.
+Bass was down here one day talking about his African Mission. Nobody
+ever had such an effect upon me. I made up my mind at once that to go
+with him was the thing I could do best; and I had a letter from him the
+other day, saying there was one place still open for me. A woman, though
+the best mother in the world, sees these things in a different light,”
+said poor Eddy, encouraged by his father’s silence. “She thinks of the
+distance, and the hardships; and my last chance is that perhaps you
+might see it as I see it.” Here Eddy came to a breathless pause, and
+waited for his answer, with a beating heart.
+
+Had Mr. Tremenheere been in better spirits he would have laughed; but,
+fortunately for Eddy, he was not in good spirits. He was worn out and
+depressed, and amiable as perhaps he had never been before in his life.
+“My dear Ned,” he said gently, in the darkness, rousing all the lad’s
+hopes by the softness of his tone, “whether I might have agreed or
+disagreed with your mother, scarcely matters in this instance. I am
+afraid it will be a disappointment to you if you have so set your heart
+upon it; but the fact is, there is to be no expedition to Africa under
+the charge of Mr. Buckram Bass. That very clever man is supposed by some
+people to be too clever. The Geographical Society will not give him a
+groat, neither will Government; and his expedition has melted into thin
+air. No one will go with him to Africa for many a day.”
+
+“But I heard from him on Monday, about the vacancy,” cried Edward with a
+gasp.
+
+“Then he must have had some plan in his head for equipment, by which he
+could make something,” said Mr. Tremenheere. “I cannot be mistaken, you
+know, in my position; and so you may make it up with your mother, and
+relieve her mind as soon as you choose.” Then moved by an amiable
+impulse,--for the boy pleased him--he added, “I am very sorry for your
+disappointment, Ned.”
+
+“Oh, it does not matter,” cried the lad, with a great gulp of
+self-control. Dark waters of bitterness surged up into Edward’s eyes,
+but fortunately the darkness concealed them. And acting on an English
+boy’s savage code of honor, he made a brave effort at once to talk of
+other things, and covered the stab he had got. No word should any one
+hear more on the subject from his lips with his will. The pain stung him
+like that Spartan fox; but, like the boy whom it devoured, he would
+rather die than complain.
+
+And here Mr. Tremenheere was of more use to his son than the boy’s
+mother would have been. She would have felt the sting for Edward as
+sharply as he felt it for himself. She would have lavished a thousand
+sympathetic tendernesses upon him to make up for his suffering. His
+father did nothing of the sort. For one thing he did not truly realize
+how great the blow was; but he was sorry for the disappointment--said so
+once, and was done with it; and talked about other things, forcing Eddy
+to answer him, and helping him to keep down the pain. But, poor fellow,
+he had a bad night of it when it was too late to sit up any longer. It
+obliterated Vera from his mind, and all his anxiety about her. Vera was
+but a stranger to him after all; and this was so close a misery, and so
+near!
+
+The father and son made but a miserable breakfast next morning. “I must
+get off to town, I cannot delay longer,” said Mr. Tremenheere. “When you
+consider where that unhappy child may be--what may be happening to
+her,--perhaps at that fellow’s mercy, confound him! No, no, I can’t
+stay,--don’t ask me. Your mother must have no news, or she would have
+telegraphed before now.”
+
+“I am quite ready, sir,” said Edward. They were both of them pale and
+miserable; and Mr. Tremenheere, forgetting already Edward’s own share of
+trouble, was touched by this supposed sympathy. “You don’t know much of
+your sister,” he said. “I will not forget, my boy, how you’ve thrown
+yourself into it. Please God, when we find her we’ll be a more united
+family. Ned, she and you will have to help me with your mother. She is a
+proud woman, but for my part I am not proud; and I don’t mind making a
+sacrifice if only--God help us!--we could find the child.”
+
+“We shall find her!” cried Edward, this time with a rush of real
+sympathy which came to his eyes, and made them shine; and though Mr.
+Tremenheere knew that Edward’s confidence was without foundation, it
+cheered him as the foolishest consolation sometimes does. He grasped his
+son’s hand with a tremulous yet strenuous grasp.
+
+“Come along,” he said; “I know it is too early for the train, but
+somehow it is easier to endure one’s self when one is in motion. It
+feels like doing something. Your mother has the best of it staying in
+town. What a pretty place she has made of this! What a fool I was--good
+heavens! what an ass! when she asked it, not to let her have the child
+here!”
+
+“Don’t think of that now, sir,” said Eddy, with feeling. “Come out into
+the garden in the meantime,--the air will do you good.” He was very
+sorry for his father. He led him through the little space which had been
+planted so cleverly, and showed him the points of view, upon which they
+both looked with pre-occupied eyes. It wanted half an hour yet to the
+time for the train, and the station was not ten minutes’ walk. Then Mr.
+Tremenheere remembered a note he had to write, and they went back into
+the house that he might do it. He sat down at his wife’s writing-table,
+and used the paper with her monogram. How strange that the recollection
+should dart on him then of another time when he had done this,--when he
+had taken a pretty sheet with “Ada” emblazoned on it, to write to his
+sister of the engagement between Ada Langdale and himself! Curious
+moment for such a reminiscence; but the man was weakened with much
+unusual feeling, and he stopped to recollect it. “I think it must be a
+good sign,” he said half to himself; “once I took her paper before----”
+
+He was interrupted by a touch on his shoulder, and jumped up, nearly
+upsetting the paraphernalia of the writing-table. “Charles,” said his
+wife, taking him by both hands, “I went to our house last night, where
+you took me when we were married; and there, at home, where she ought to
+be, and where I ought to have been all the time taking care of her--I
+found the child!”
+
+“God bless you, Ada!” he cried, with a sudden great sob, forced from
+him by the surprise and the joy. And then he made a blind clutch at her,
+his eyes being full, and got her into his arms. “You have found
+her,--and I have found you!”
+
+And it was thus that these foolish people ended their matrimonial
+quarrel. They had had ten years of it, which was certainly enough, and
+it had not answered. But the reader must not imagine that all the
+consequences dispersed into thin air when the principals took each
+other’s hands, as Mr. Bass’s African Expedition had done. Edward’s heart
+mended after a while, though it was very sore; but it would not have
+mended so easily had Government and the Geographical Society encouraged
+instead of making an end of the expedition of Mr. Buckram Bass. And
+Providence, though it interfered on one side in this way, did not
+interfere on the other to make an end of Oswald Fane. He stood in solid
+flesh and blood in the path of the united family, refusing to let all be
+as it ought to have been. Poor Oswald! it was wholesome punishment for
+him to find his bird flown on the very day when he intended to fly with
+her,--carrying her beyond pursuit or power of any one to touch her. But
+a thing which has been carried so far can rarely stop there. As soon as
+she was parted from him, and the terrible spectre of marriage removed
+out of her way, Vera began to pine for her lover; and her lover began to
+besiege the heart, soft with penitence and reconciliation, of Mrs.
+Tremenheere. Between the two they worked so effectually that Mr.
+Tremenheere, no longer absolute sovereign in Hyde Park Square, but
+reduced to the safer limits of a constitutional monarchy and a joint
+throne, had to give in at last; and much less alarmed by the word than
+she had been a year before, Vera Tremenheere, at seventeen, with all the
+pomp befitting a lawful ceremonial, permitted by all the authorities,
+married Oswald Fane. I wish it was permitted me to kill the
+uninteresting elder brother and his little son, and make the young pair
+master and mistress of the paternal halls at Weathernook; but, partly by
+her father’s influence, partly by that of Lord Fanebury, who came to the
+marriage and good-humoredly declared the bridegroom to be his very
+cousin, Oswald got a valuable appointment, and the young pair went to
+Italy after all; and coming home, settled down very comfortably, and
+were much happier than the improper and reprehensible beginning of
+their story deserved; which is a bad moral, but to change it is beyond
+my power.
+
+Edward Tremenheere went into his father’s office, and became private
+secretary to his father’s chief--an admirable appointment. In the
+meantime, however, he was left free for a great deal of travel, and took
+to climbing mountains, by special grace of Providence, and became a
+member of the Alpine Club, atoning to himself in his holidays for the
+responsibility and regularity of his everyday life. Miss Campbell, I am
+glad to say, had saved enough money to retire upon an annuity, and
+tortures young girls no more; but she still thinks Mr. Tremenheere’s
+family monsters of ingratitude for not requiting her exertions in saving
+their child. Mary was dismissed, as she deserved; but I fear
+surreptitious means were used whereby she was enabled to marry her
+Guardsman. Everybody had done wrong all round, and which was the one
+that was to throw a stone? The only person who had a right to do so was
+Elinor Meadows, who made a speech to the re-united family on the evening
+of the day on which Oswald was first received among them, and Vera’s
+happiness sanctioned by her parents. Miss Meadows pushed back the
+vigorous rings of gray hair from her broad forehead and held out her
+oratorical right hand. “You two old fools,” she said, “and you two young
+ones, I don’t know which of you have made yourselves the most
+ridiculous. I protest against this absurd happiness, which you have no
+right to. All of you, in your turn, have come to me in the depths of
+despair, and employed me to intercede for you. I never did the least
+good by my attempts. How dare you, without either rhyme or reason, and
+every law of justice against it, be so happy now?”
+
+
+THE END.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78381 ***