Between her and Isabel undoubtedly existed a strong mutual attachment. Whereon this was based could not at first sight be determined; the two appeared different in most things. Possibly it was one of those cases which occur, of attraction to and by qualities, which, owing to circumstances, remain potential. Had Isabel’s marriage resulted in offspring, she might have developed maternal passion in no less a degree than her friend; the sweet and lovable nature, which now exercised such a universal charm in virtue of its wide activity, might very well have concentrated itself on those few objects, with an intensity detrimental to the broader influences of her womanhood. The story of her relations with Ada Warren, viewed aright, perhaps tells in favour of this idea. She could not herself have explained to you her affection for Mrs. Stratton, and he who is giving these chapters of her history may not pretend to do much more than exhibit facts and draw at times a justifiable inference. He is not a creator of human beings, with eyes to behold the very heart of the machine he has himself pieced together; merely one who takes trouble to trace certain lines of human experience, and, working here on grounds of knowledge, there by aid of analogy, here again in the way of bolder speculation, spins his tale with what skill he may till the threads are used up.
Ada, as one would have anticipated, thoroughly disliked Mrs. Stratton, and avoided intercourse with her as much as possible. When the lady was at Knightswell, Ada would frequently keep apart for a whole day; even in the visitor’s presence she could not feign friendliness. Mrs. Stratton’s manner to her was one of genial indifference, with no suggestion that she felt herself slighted.
“I see no change,” said Isabel’s friend, the day after her arrival, knowing, of course, of the enlightenment which had come to the girl. “She seems to me exactly the same.”
“She is not,” returned Isabel. “Her life is twice as intense and varied. She is happy, or nearly so, and conceals it to spare me.”
“H’m; you think her capable of that?”
“Quite.”
“By-the-bye, does she correspond with young Lacour, do you think?”
“I fancy not. I believe she would tell me.”
“You have astonishing faith in her uprightness.”
“She is a strange girl, but she is honourable,” affirmed Mrs. Clarendon.
Isabel was not wrong as to the change in Ada. Outwardly there was not much evidence of the processes at work in the hidden places of her being, yet sufficient to prove to just observation whither they tended. Formerly Ada had kept to herself to hide her misery, had striven in solitude with passions which left their mark upon her face when she reappeared, had been worn with listnessness, when not overtaxing her strength to escape the torments which assailed her leisure. Now, she was seldom actively employed, yet solitude was precious to her; Isabel saw her pacing up and down the garden paths, no longer with dark and troubled face, but with the light of earnest preoccupation in her eyes, and a clear brow, which was often raised as if at the impulse of intense feeling. There was more of healthful girlishness in her motions, her smile; she would spring and catch a bough swaying above her, would run a space with the big house-dog bounding beside her. Once she came in at the front door with her breath gone, her cheeks in high colour, her hat in her hand; Isabel met her in the hall, and in surprise asked her what was the matter.
“A race with the rain!” Ada panted, sinking on a chair. “I could see it coming, nearer every second; I got in as the first drop fell!”
She showed a childish delight in her achievement; perhaps she enjoyed the sense of her health and strength, scarcely ever tried in active exercise. After this, running with the big dog became a daily pastime. Young Stratton caught a glimpse of her at it in the park one day, and rushed to join the sport.
“After a rabbit, eh?” he shouted, coming up with them.
Ada at once dropped to a walk, and spoke to the dog, instead of answering the boy’s question.
“I say, you look here!” Edgar suddenly exclaimed in a whisper.
She turned, and saw him aiming with a catapult at a bird perched on a bush hard by. Before the aim was perfect, Ada had snatched the tool from his hands.
“Well, I call that!” cried the youngster, at a loss for words. “What do you want to spoil my shot for?”
“Can’t you amuse yourself without murdering!” returned the girl, hot in anger. “Shoot at that tree-trunk if you must shoot.”
“Murdering!” echoed the youth, in blank astonishment. “Come now, Miss Warren! Murdering a bird—I call that good!”
“What else is it? What right have you to rob the bird of its life? What is it that drives you to kill every creature that you safely may?”
“It’s fair sport!” urged the young Briton, in amaze at this outlandish mode of regarding things.
“Sport?”
She stood regarding him, the catapult still in her hand.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?”
“What am I going to be? A soldier, of course.”
“I thought so; then you can murder on a large scale.”
“You call killing the enemy in battle, murder?”
“What do you call it? Fair sport?”
“I say, Miss Warren, you’re a rum’un, you are!” observed Edgar, shaking his round head in wonder. “Are you joking?—though you don’t look like it.”
Ada held the catapult out to him.
“Here, take it and run off,” she said, shortly.
He obeyed, and brought down a blackbird not fifty yards away, then ran to Mrs. Clarendon and his mother, who laughed at the story. The ladies’ ideas of sport did not greatly differ; were not the fowls of the air, the fishes of the deep and the foxes of the field created for the British sportsman? Surely no piece of teleology was clearer.
Ada had no one whom she could take into her confidence, no soul to which she could speak out the sincerity of her own. With Rhoda Meres she exchanged letters at long intervals, but the thoughts they expressed to each other were only from the surface of their lives; the girls were friends only in the slightest sense of the word. It was true that she had in her possession just now a letter from another correspondent, awaiting an answer; that reply she could not bring herself to write; and, when she did so, the words would not be those it was in her to say. Her isolation was absolute. Whatsoever force of waters beat against the flood-gates of her heart, she could not give them free passage.
She was driven to commune with herself in set speech; by degrees, to take her pen and write the words she would have uttered had any ear been bent to her. She resumed her habit of spending the mornings in the library, but no longer with books; either she sat in reverie, or, at her desk, filled sheet after sheet with small, nervous handwriting, her features fixed in eager interest, her whole body knit as if in exertion, in sympathy with the effort of her mind. When she came forth to meet the other inmates of the house, she did not speak, but looked quietly cheerful.
She had been thus occupied through the morning of the day on which Kingcote was expected to appear at luncheon. Entering the drawing-room shortly after the first bell rang, she found no one there; a moment later a servant opened the door and announced the visitor.
As they exchanged such phrases as the situation gave rise to, Kingcote found himself reflecting on the familiar fact that our first impression of a face is greatly modified by acquaintance. The girl’s features no longer appeared to him irredeemably plain, though their variance from types of smooth comeliness was obvious enough. In profile it was a very harsh visage, the nose irregular, the chin too prominent, the cheek-bone high, the ear seemingly too far back on the head; viewed in full, details were lost in the general expression of force and passionate life. The jaw was heavy, the lips large, yet these not illshaped, the contrary rather; but all the upper part bore the stamp of character and intelligence. The deep eyes had no unkindly light, and readily answered to a humorous suggestion. Perhaps it was the hint of hard endurance which struck an observer first of all, and left him with the idea of a sullen, resentful face; for her brows had a way of nervously wrinkling up between the eyes, and her lips of making themselves yet fuller by compression at the corners. Her gaze was not one of open friendliness, but Kingcote was beginning to discover something in its reserve quite different from mere irresponsive egoism. Her forehead, taken apart with its weight of dark hair, might have been modelled for Pallas.
But whilst justice was thus being done, Mrs. Clarendon entered, sweet, smiling, irresistible from the first glance, and was followed by Mrs. Stratton. When all proceeded to the dining-room, Master Edgar was found already in possession, seated at table, waiting with impatience. Meals were with him a matter of supreme importance; he ate his way stolidly and steadily through all courses, scorning the idleness of conversation.
There was much talk between the two elder ladies of a meet on the following day; both proposed joining the field, Mrs. Stratton having brought horses of her own with that view. Edgar had his pony, and would follow the hunt in his own fashion.
“Where is the meet?” Kingcote inquired.
“At Salcot,” replied Isabel. “Do let us drive you over. Don’t look so scornful, Ada; I’m sure Mr. Kingcote would enjoy it.”
“I think it very likely,” the girl remarked quietly.
“Your judgment on us, one and all,” laughed Mrs. Stratton.
“Miss Warren calls it murder,” cried Edgar derisively, with his mouth full.
Kingcote gave his assent to the proposal that he should drive with the ladies and witness the meet. They promised to take him up at the junction of the old and the new roads.
He talked with Mrs. Stratton in the drawingroom after luncheon. Edgar came and reclined on the carpet, resting his head against his mother.
“Get up, sir!” Mrs. Stratton addressed him. “I won’t have this laziness after meals. Look at him, Mr. Kingcote; don’t you think it high time he was packed off to school again?”
“Well, I shan’t be sorry,” observed the youth, reluctantly rising to his feet.
“I suppose you are eager to get back to cricket?” said Kingcote.
“Cricket! Why, you don’t play cricket this time of year!” cried Edgar, with scornful laughter.
“Indeed? What is the game, then? Football?”
“I should think so.”
“You must mend your manners, Edgar,” observed his mother. “Now run out into the garden, and don’t trouble us. His body is getting rather too much for him,” she continued playfully to Kingcote. “He must get back to his fagging. I wouldn’t for the world send a boy of mine to a school where there was no fagging.”
“Capital thing, no doubt,” said Kingcote. “He’s a fine boy.”
“A little too noisy just at present.”
“Oh, it’s a sign of his perfect health. Surely you wouldn’t see him mooning about, or shutting himself up with books?”
“Like that poor little fellow of the rector’s,” said Mrs. Stratton. “That child ought to be sent off to school.”
“Certainly. They’d soon knock him into shape, take the dreaminess out of him. Robust health before everything. Are your other boys as hearty as this one?”
“Oh, every bit! My eldest lad has broken almost every bone in his body, and seems all the better for it.”
“Why, that’s magnificent! Their lives will be a joy to them. Constitution, of course, is much; but I’m sure they have to thank you for an admirable bringing-up.”
Ada, who sat close by, was regarding Kingcote curiously, just suppressing a smile as she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Stratton’s gratified face.
“This is your ideal of education?” she put in gravely.
“Assuredly it is,” was Kingcote’s answer. “Surely that education is best which leads to happiness. That boy will never be afflicted with nervous disorders; he will never be melancholy, hypochondriacal, despairing; he will never see the world in any but the rosiest light, never be troubled by abstract speculation, never doubt for a moment about his place and his work. The plan of education which has such a result as that is beneficence itself. Don’t you think so, Miss Warren?”
“To be sure I wouldn’t have the minds altogether neglected,” said Mrs. Stratton. “Come and listen, Isabel; Mr. Kingcote is saying the most interesting things.”
“Let the mind take care of itself,” continued Kingcote, smiling slightly as he looked at Mrs. Clarendon. “If a boy has a bent for acquiring knowledge, he will manage that later. I wouldn’t encourage it. Make him a sound creature, that’s the first thing. Occupy him with vigorous bodily pursuits; keep his mind from turning inwards; save him from reflection. If every boy in England could be so brought up, they would be a blissful generation.”
“How about the girls?” questioned Isabel. “Would you educate them in the same way?”
“Precisely, with yet more wholesome effect. Nay, I would go further; they should never open a book till they were one-and-twenty, and their previous training should be that of Amazons.”
“That is a merciful provision,” said Ada, meaning possibly more than her hearers understood.
When Kingcote took his leave the ladies separated. Mrs. Clarendon had before her a dinner party at Dunsey Priors, and it was necessary to give certain orders. Mrs. Stratton took up The Times till tea should appear.
Ada, after pacing about the library for a quarter of an hour, took her hat and went into the open air. Her mind was disturbed in some way; the darkness of trouble was back again in her eyes. She walked among the evergreens of the shrubbery, then strayed to a seat which stood against the wall of the circular portion of the conservatory. The landscape before her was wild with the hues of a sky in which the declining sun fought against flying strips of ragged cloud. The wind was kept off from this part of the lawn, but in the distance it made a moaning over the fields. She watched a cohort of dead leaves sweeping in great curves along the side of the house.
A voice spoke very near to her. It came from within the rotunda; the stained-glass window just above her head was partly open.
“It would be infinitely better,” Mrs. Clarendon was saying, “than that a man like Vincent Lacour should make a prize of her.”
“But she cannot be so infatuated,” returned Mrs. Stratton. “She has sense enough to understand her own position and to take care of herself. My idea is that she won’t marry for some time, perhaps not at all.”
There was silence, then the last speaker resumed.
“She certainly has no interest in Mr. Kingcote.”
“You can’t judge so speedily. I don’t say that I desire it,” Isabel added with an uncertain voice. “But I am sure it would be a happy thing.”
“Then why not desire it?”
“I don’t know, I can’t quite explain. And I half think she __has an interest in him; but then—poor Ada!”
“She isn’t so ugly as she was,” remarked Mrs. Stratton’s matter-of-fact voice. “I notice that distinctly.”
Ada rose and walked away with quick steps. At the corner of the house, as she passed it to reach the front door, a great gust of wind met her, and a troop of dry crackling leaves swarmed about her feet and dress; she bent her head and hastened on, not staying till she had reached her bedroom. There she stood, just within the door, motionless and purposeless. Her face was pale, her lips set at their hardest and cruelest. When at length she stirred, it was to go to the glass and view herself. She turned away with a laugh, no pleasant one....
As Isabel came downstairs a few minutes before the time for which the carriage had been ordered, she saw Ada standing in the doorway of the library.
“Don’t, of course, sit up for me, Ada,” she said.
“I will not. But I should be glad to speak to you now, if you could spare me a moment.”
Isabel gazed, surprised at her tone.
“Certainly,” she acceded, and passed into the library. Ada closed the door behind her. Isabel was resplendent in her evening costume; her pure, shapely neck and shoulders gleamed above the dark richness of her robe, the gold and jewels made worthy adornment of her beauty. Her colour a trifle heightened, her eyes lustrous with foresight of homage, her white, womanly brows crowned with the natural tiara of her hair—fine and rich still as in her girlhood—the proud poise of her small and perfect head, these things were lovelier to-night than on the day when her picture had been painted as a young bride. Maturity had rewarded her with its dower, which so few dare count upon. To-night she was a woman whom men of ripe experience, men of the world, would take for herself, asking no wealth but that of her matchless charm, a woman for whom younger and more passionate hearts would break with longing.
“What is it, Ada?” she asked in a voice of concern.
“This, Mrs. Clarendon. You rightly required of me that I should keep secret no step that affected us both. I wish to tell you that I have accepted an offer from Mr. Lacour—that I am going to be married to him.”
She spoke neither hurriedly nor vehemently. The only measure of her feeling was in the words she used, the plainest and directest which came into her mind.
Isabel regarded her steadily for a moment. The look was grave, not hostile. Her eyes were dulled a little, her cheeks less warm, the jewels on her breast rose and fell; but she mastered the emotions which such an announcement could not but cause, forced back that cold, heavy flood which just touched her heart, held her own against the onset of fears.
“You have well considered this, Ada?”
Her hand sought the nearest chair, but she resisted the need of seating herself, merely rested her gloved fingers on the back.
“Yes, I have given it all the consideration that is necessary,” was Ada’s reply, less self-controlled than her last speech.
“But why do you tell me in this way?” Isabel inquired, when she had again regarded the girl’s pale anguish. “What has happened? What has offended you?”
“I have said all that I wished to say, Mrs. Clarendon,” continued the other, regardless, seeming not to hear what was asked of her. “Please to tell me whether I am free to act, whether, as I am still under your authority, you will use it or not to oppose my marriage?”
“I cannot understand you, Ada. Why do you speak to me so harshly? What unkindness have I been guilty of, and so recently?” She stopped, her eyes fell, a thought seemed to strike her.
“Have I said anything to hurt you?”
Ada made a nervous movement, then spoke more calmly.
“I should not allow anything you say to influence my actions. Will you please tell me what I wish to know?”
“I shall offer no opposition of that kind,” Isabel said. “You are old enough to think and act for yourself. If you had come and told me of this in a friendly way I should no doubt have used the privilege of my age and experience–”
“To tell me what you have already on several occasions said indirectly,” broke in the girl, again passionate. “Thank you; I can make all such reflections for myself.”
“I think you are unjust to me, Ada,” said Mrs. Clarendon, in a lowered voice. Her fingers were now grasping the chair, instead of resting upon it. “When you have had time to reflect I am sure you will speak to me differently.”
Ada stood silent.
“You propose to be married shortly?” Isabel asked, joining her hands together before her.
“As soon as will suit your convenience, Mrs. Clarendon.”
“Pray do not consult that.”
She could not hold back this little note of resentment, and, having uttered it, she turned and left the room. As she drew the door to, a servant approached to say that the carriage waited.
“I shall not want it,” Isabel replied shortly; “let it go back.”
She moved to the foot of the stairs, and in doing so, had to pass the drawing-room door, which stood open. Mrs. Stratton was within. Hearing the rustle of Isabel’s dress she came forward.
“Ready?” she said; and added with a smile, “pray remember me to Lord Winterset; he is sure to be there.”
Isabel was pale now. She stood with one foot on the stairs and a hand pressed against her side. For a moment she looked strangely into her friends face, then turned and called to the footman, who was in the doorway of the house.
“Ward, stop the carriage!”
“Whats this?” inquired Mrs. Stratton, looking puzzled. Only an extreme occasion would have called alarm to that heroic lady’s face.
“I sent the carriage away,” Isabel explained. “I had a faintness—thought I wouldn’t go. It has gone! I shall be late.”
“You certainly don’t look very well. A glass of sherry, dear–?”
“No, no; it has gone. Don’t sit up for me, Rose. Good-bye, dear.”
They kissed each other, and Mrs. Clarendon rustled to her carriage.