CHAPTER XXVIII
“Charlie wishes to go up to Oxford to read. Why does he wish to go up to Oxford to read? And what reading is it necessary to do there?”
“He says, papa, that it is easier to get on when you have all your books about you – and when you can arrange all your way of living for that, instead of the interruptions at home.”
“Oh, there are too many interruptions at home? I should have thought you were quiet enough here. I hope you have not thrown yourself into lawn tennis parties, and tea parties, and that sort of thing – so soon, Bee.”
Her father looked at her with a seriously reproachful air. He had begun to dine out pretty freely, though only in serious houses, and where, he explained, it would be prejudicial to him in his profession not to appear.
The undeserved reproach brought quick tears to Bee’s eyes. “I have thrown myself into no parties,” she said, hastily. “Nobody has been here. What Charlie means is the meal times, and hours for everything, and all the children about. I have often heard you say that you couldn’t work when the children were playing about.”
“My work and Charlie’s are rather different,” Colonel Kingsward said, with a smile.
“Well, papa! but to read for a good degree, so that you may distinguish yourself, must want a great deal of application – ”
“Oh, he wants a good degree, does he? He should have thought of it a little earlier. And what use will that be to him in the Foreign Office? Let him learn French and German – that’s what he has got to do.”
“But even for French and German,” said Bee. “German is dreadfully difficult, and Charlie does not pick up a language easily; and, besides,” she added, “he has nobody to teach him at home – ”
“And who would he have at Oxford? Why, in the Long, even the shopkeepers go away!”
“But that is just the time for good, hard reading,” said Bee, acting on her instructions, “when there are no lectures or anything formal to interrupt you.”
“He means, I suppose, when he can do whatever he likes, and there are no proctors nor gate bills to keep him right.”
“Papa,” said Bee, earnestly, “I don’t think that is at all what Charlie means. I am sure that he has a real desire to get on. He says that he feels he has been wasting his time, and – and not – not responding properly to all you have done for him. He wants to make himself fit for anything that may happen. If you will think, papa,” she added, with the deepest gravity, “what a great deal of study and reading an ambassador must require – ”
“An ambassador!” Colonel Kingsward was not given to laughter, but he laughed now. “He may think himself fortunate if he is anything but an unpaid attaché for the next ten years – which is an office which does not require a great deal of study.”
“But, papa – ”
“Nonsense, Bee. He wants, I suppose, complete freedom, and to amuse himself as he pleases, with no control. I know what it means to stay up at Oxford to read during the Long. Oh, yes. I don’t doubt men who know how to grind, grind, but Charlie is not one of them. Let him stay at home. You are a great deal sharper than he is at languages; you can help him with his German as well as anyone.”
“Oh,” cried Bee, from the bottom of her heart, “not with German, not with German, papa!”
And there came over her a sudden vision of the gardens at the Baths, the murmur of talk in the air, the German officers with their spurs, and one Englishman coming forward among them, an Englishman without spurs, without uniform, so much more distinguished, it had been Bee’s pride to think, in his simplicity, than all these bedizened warriors – and now! A gush of hot tears came to her eyes. There was reason enough for them without Aubrey Leigh, and Colonel Kingsward, whose heart was still tender to every recollection of his wife, did not think of the other memory that thrilled poor Bee’s heart. He walked up and down through the room for a moment saying nothing, and then he paused by her side and put his hand with an unusual caress upon his daughter’s bowed head.
“You are right, you are right,” he said. “I could not ask that of you, Bee.”
Oh! if I had but known! Bee felt not only miserable, but guilty, when her father’s touch came upon her hair. To think how little the dear mother’s presence told in that picture, and how much, how much! that of the man – who had been vulgarly untrue to her, a man without sense of purity or honour! One whose name she never desired to hear again. She could hardly accept the imputation of so much higher and nobler feeling which her father’s touch conveyed. The dear mother! who never condemned, who was always kind. She was moved to cry out in self-abasement, “It was not mamma I was thinking of, it was him! him!” But she did not do this. She raised her head and took up her work again with a trembling hand.
“I suppose,” said Colonel Kingsward, as anxious as his daughter was to get away from a subject which was too moving for discussion, “that Charlie finds Kingswarden dull. It is not unnatural at his age, and I shall not object if he wishes to come to town for a week or so. His own good feeling, I hope, would keep him from anything unbecoming in the circumstances. But I must hear no more of this going to Oxford. It is quite out of the question. If he had shown any desire to go in for honours at the right time – . But now it is worse than folly. He must get through as quickly as he can, and take advantage of his nomination at once. Who can tell how soon it may be of no value? The Foreign Office may be thrown open, like all the rest, to every costermonger in the country, in a year or two, for anything one knows.”
Charlie received this conclusion with disappointment, rapidly turning into rage and rebellion. “I should have thought the most old-fashioned old fogey in the world would have known better,” he cried. “What, prevent a man from reading when he is at the University! Did you ever hear of such a thing, Bee? Why, even a military man, though they are the most obstinate in the world, must know that to be really educated is everything in these days. A week in town! What do I care for a week in town? It is exactly like the man in the Bible who, being asked for bread, gave a stone.”
Bee was greatly impressed by her brother’s anxiety to continue his studies. It filled her with a respect and admiration which up to this time she had never entertained for Charlie, and occupied her mind much with the question how, if her father were obdurate, he might be aided at home in those studies. She remembered suddenly that Mr. Burton’s curate had been spoken of as a great scholar when he came first to the parish. He had taken tremendous honours she had heard. And why might not he be secured as an aid to Charlie in his most laudable ambition? She thought this over a great deal as she moved about her household duties. Bee as a housekeeper was much more anxious than her mother had been for many years. She thought that everything that was done required her personal attention. She had prolonged interviews every morning with the cook, who had been more or less the housekeeper for a long time, and who (with a secret sense of humour) perplexed Bee with technicalities which she would not allow that she did not understand. The girl ordered everything minutely for dinner and lunch and breakfast, and decided what was to be for the nursery as if she knew all about it, and reproved cook gravely when she found that certain alterations had been made in the menu when those meals were served. “I assure you as that is what you ordered, miss,” cook said, with a twinkle in her eye. All this Bee did, not only because of her strong determination to do her duty, but also because preoccupation with all these details was her great salvation from thoughts which, do what she would, claimed her attention more than nursery puddings and the entrées that pleased papa. But while she pursued these labours there was still time for other thoughts, and she occupied herself very much with this question about Charlie. Why could not Mr. Delaine come to read with him? Mr. Delaine had shown an inclination to flirt with Betty, but Betty was now absent, so that no harm could be done in that direction. She thought it all out during the somewhat gloomy days which Colonel Kingsward spent with his family in the country. It rained all the Sunday, which is a doleful addition to the usual heaviness of a day in which all usual occupations are put away. Colonel Kingsward himself wrote letters, and was very fully occupied on Sunday afternoon, after the Church parade on Sunday morning, which was as vigorously maintained as if the lessening rows of little ones all marshalled for morning service had been a regiment – but he did not like to see Bee doing anything but “reading a book” on Sunday. And it had always been a rule in that well-ordered house that the toys should be put away on Saturday evening, so that the day hung rather heavily, especially when it rained, on the young ones’ heads. Colonel Kingsward did not mean to be a gloomy visitor. He was always kind to his children, and willing to be interested in what they did and said; but, as a matter of fact, those three days were the longest and the most severe of any that passed over the widowed and motherless house. When Bee came downstairs from the Sunday lesson, which she gave in the nursery, she found her brother at the writing-table in the drawing-room, composing what seemed a very long letter. His pen was hurrying over the page; he was at the fourth side of a sheet of large paper – and opened out on the table before him were several sheets of a very long, closely-written letter, to which he was evidently replying. When Bee appeared, Charlie snatched up this letter, and hastily folding it, thrust it into its envelope, which he placed in his breast pocket. He put the blotting paper hastily over the letter which he was himself writing, and the colour mounted to his very forehead as he turned half round. It was not any colour of guilt, but a glow of mingled enthusiasm and shamefacedness, beautiful upon the face of a youth. Bee was too young herself to admire and appreciate this flush of early feeling, but she was so far sympathetic in her own experience, that she divined something at least of what it meant.
“Oh, Charlie!” she said, “you are writing to someone – ”
“Most assuredly, I am writing to someone,” he said, with the half pride, half shame of a young lover.
“Who is she?” cried Bee. “Oh, Charlie, tell me! Oh, tell me! Do I know who it is?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “what you are making such a fuss about. I am writing to – a friend.” He paused a moment, and then said with fervour – “the best friend that ever man had.”
“A friend,” cried Bee, a little disappointed. “But isn’t it a lady?” she asked.
“I hope,” he said, with a haughty air, “that you are not one of those limited people that think there can be no friendship between a man and a woman, for if that’s so I’ve got nothing to say.”
Bee was scarcely philosophical enough to take up this challenge. She looked at him, bewildered, for a moment, and then said, “Oh, tell me about her, Charlie! It would do me good – it would, indeed, to hear about somebody whom there could not be any objection to, who would be, perhaps, happier than me,” cried poor little Bee, the tears coming to her eyes.
“Happier than you? And why shouldn’t you be happy?” said the elder brother. He made an effort to turn away in dignified silence, but the effort was too much for the young man, longing to talk of the new thing in his life. “There is no comparison at all between a little thing like you and – and the lady I was writing to,” he said, holding his head high. “If you think it is any sort of nonsense you are very much mistaken. Why, she – she is as much above me as heaven is from earth. That she should take the trouble to show any interest in me at all, just proves what an angel she is. I, an idle, ordinary sort of fellow, and she! – the sort of woman that one dreams of. Bee, you can’t think what she has done for me already,” Charlie cried, forgetting his first defiance. “I’m another fellow ever since she began to take notice of me.”
Bee stole to her brother’s side and gave him a sympathetic stroke upon his shoulder. “Oh! Charlie! what is her name?”
“You wouldn’t know her name if I were to tell you,” he said. And then, after a moment’s hesitation: “Her name,” he went on, “her real name as I call it, is Laura, like Petrarch’s Laura, don’t you know, Bee? But I don’t suppose you do know.”
“Yes, indeed, I do,” said Bee, eagerly. She added in her turn, “I shouldn’t have thought you would know anything like that.”
“No; I’m not up to it,” said Charlie, with unexpected humility; “but I read it all up as soon as she said it. Don’t you think it’s a beautiful name?”
“Yes,” said Bee, yet not with enthusiasm. “But, oh!” she added, “I hope she is not married, Charlie; for that would not be nice at all.”
“Married!” cried Charlie. “I wish you were not such a horrid little – Philistine. But she is not married, if that is any satisfaction to you.”
“And is she – beautiful, Charlie? and are you very, very fond of her? Oh, Charlie!” Bee clasped his arm in both her hands and sobbed. It made her feel wretched, yet filled her with a delicious tender sense of fellow-feeling. If he would only tell her all! It would be hard upon her, and yet it would be a sort of heavenly pang to hear another, and, oh! surely, this time, a happy love tale. Bee sat down close by him, and clasped his arm, and sometimes leaned her head upon it in the warmth of her tenderness and sympathy. And Charlie was persuaded, by degrees, to speak. But his tale was not like Bee’s. It was a tale of a lady who had stooped as from her throne to the young fellow of no account – the ordinary young man, who could not understand how she had come to think of him at all. It was she who had inspired him with his new ambition, who had made him so anxious to distinguish himself, to make something of his life. She had taken the trouble to write to him, to keep him up to it since he had come “down.” She had promised to let him come to see her when he came “up” again, to inspire him and encourage him. “One look at her is better than a dozen coaches,” Charlie cried, in the fervour of his heart.
“Do you mean that you are going to see her – in town?” asked Bee, doubtfully.
“In town? No. She detests town. It’s all so vain and so hollow, and such a rush. She came to live in Oxford at the beginning of last term,” Charlie said.
“Oh,” said Bee, and she found no more to say. She did not herself understand how it was that a little chill came upon her great sympathy with Charlie and this unknown lady of his – friendship, if not love.
CHAPTER XXIX
Colonel Kingsward, however, could not be moved either by Bee’s representations or by anything said by his son to grant to Charlie the permission, and the funds necessary, to pursue his studies in Oxford by going “up” to read “in the Long.” It was indeed very little that Charlie said to his father on the subject. He responded somewhat sullenly to the Colonel’s questions.
“So I hear you want to go back to Oxford to read?”
“Yes,” said the young man.
“You have generally found before this that by the end of the term you had had too much reading.”
No reply.
“I suppose you want to be free of supervision and do exactly what you please. And you find it dull at home?”
“I have never said so,” said Charlie.
“You ought to feel that in the circumstances it was appropriate that it should be dull. Good heavens! Were you contemplating amusing yourself, rioting with your comrades, when your poor mother – ”
“I have never thought of rioting with comrades,” said Charlie, with averted head.
“One knows what that means – going up to read in the Long: boats and billiards and hotels, bands of young men in flannels lounging about, and every decorum thrown to the winds.”
The Colonel looked severely at his son, who stood before him turning over the pages of a book in his hand, with lowering brows and closed mouth.
“You think I don’t know,” he said, sharply; “but you are mistaken. What would have been best for you would have been the discipline of a regiment. I always thought so, but at least I’m not going to permit every decent bond to be broken through.”
“I think, sir,” said Charlie, “that it’s enough to say ‘No,’ without accusing me of things I never thought of.”
“I am the best judge of what is enough,” said the angry father. “If you want a week or so in town, I don’t object; but Oxford in the Long – No. I only hope,” he added severely, “that there’s no woman in the case.”
Charlie’s countenance flushed crimson. He gave his father a furious glance. “If that’s all,” he said, “I may now go, perhaps?”
“Yes, go,” said the Colonel, angrily. He was himself sorry for that last insinuation as soon as his son had left the room. His angry suspiciousness had carried him too far. Not that he blamed himself for the suspicion, but he was aware that to speak of it was a false step and could do no good. If there was a woman in the case, that flying dart would not move the young man to penitence or turn him from any dangerous way. Colonel Kingsward, however, quickly forgave himself for this inadvertence, and reflected with satisfaction that, at least, he had prevented the young fool from making an ass of himself for this summer. And in such cases absence is the best remedy and hinders much mischief. Charlie rejected with indignation the week in town which his father offered. “A week in town!” he said to Bee, contemptuously, “to waste my time and debase all my ideas! What does he think I want with a week in town? That’s the way a fellow’s father encourages him to do the best he can. Cuts off all inspiration, and throws one on the dregs of life! It’s enough to make a man kick over the traces altogether.”
“But, Charlie,” said Bee, with timidity, “don’t you think it’s very, very quiet here. We have nothing to disturb us. If you were to try to do your work at home? – you would have the library to sit in all the week while papa is in town.”
“Out of reach of books, out of reach of any coach – it’s like telling a mason to build a wall without any stone.”
“The library is full of books,” said Bee, with a little indignation.
“What kind of books? Military books, and travels, and things for reference – old peerages, and so forth – and some of the heavy old reviews, and a few novels. Much good a man who is going in for real reading would get out of those!”
“But you have your own books – all those that you carry about with you, Charlie.”
“Oh!” he said, with impatience, “What are they? Horrible cribs and things, that I promised not to use any more.”
“Does Laura,” said Bee, with a little awe, “say you are not to use cribs?”
“And as for the quiet,” said Charlie, continuing his strain of complaint, “if you call that quiet! When you never know that next moment there may not be a rush down the nursery stairs like wild horses let loose, and shrieks all over the house for Bee or for nurse, sending every idea out of a man’s head; or else baby screaming fit to bring down the house. You know nothing about it, to be sure; it is like talking to the wind to talk to a little thing like you. A man can’t work unless he’s in the right place for working. If any difficulty arises in a passage, for instance, what do you think I am to do here?”
“Do you go to – Laura, when there is a difficulty about a passage, Charlie?”
“No, you little fool!” With a flush of anger and shame he begged her pardon next minute. “But it is so hard to explain things to you, Bee. You are so ignorant – naturally, for, of course, you never were taught anything. Don’t you know that Oxford is full of coaches?” he said.
“That was just what I was thinking of, Charlie – if you will not be angry, but let me speak.”
“Speak away,” he said. This was on Monday, after Colonel Kingsward had left. The days which he spent at Kingswarden were the heaviest, as has been said, to the young party; nevertheless when he went away the blank of that long world of a week, without any communication to speak of from without, closed down alarmingly upon the elders of the family. Even when papa was cross, when he was dissatisfied with his dinner or found fault with the noise of the children, it was more or less an event. But when he departed there was a sense of being cut off from all events, separated from the world altogether, shut out from the news and the hum of society, which was very blank and deadening. Bee and Charlie dined alone, and it was dreary; they spent the evening together, or else – one in the library, one in the garden, where the beauty of the summer evening was terrible to the one poor little girl with her recollections, incapable of shutting them out in that utter stillness, and trying very ineffectually not to be unhappy. When Charlie threw open the window of the library and strolled forth to join her, as he generally did, it was a little better. Bee had just done very conscientiously all her duties in the nursery – had heard the children say their prayers, in which they still, with a little pause of awe, prayed God to bless dear mother – and had made all the valorous little efforts she could to keep down the climbing sorrow. When she heard the sound of the library window she quickly dried her eyes and contrived to smile. And she was a very good listener. She suffered Charlie to talk about himself as much as he pleased, and was interested in all he said. She made those little allusions to Laura which pleased him, though he generally answered with a scornful word, as who should say that “a little thing like you” was incapable of comprehending that lady. But this was the sole diversion of these young people in the evening. People called in the afternoon, and there was occasionally a game of tennis. But in the evening they were almost invariably alone.
They were strolling about the garden on this occasion when the young man bewailed himself. Bee, though she made those allusions to Laura, had never got over that little chill in respect to her which had arisen in the most capricious, causeless way when she knew that Laura lived in Oxford. Nothing could be more unreasonable, but yet it was so. It suggested something fictitious in her brother’s eagerness to get back, and in his supposed devotion to his work. Had his Egeria been anywhere else Bee would not have felt this; but she did feel it, though she could not tell why. She was very anxious to please him, to content him, if possible, with his present life, to make her sympathy sweet to him, seeing that he had nobody but herself to console him, and must be separated from Laura until October. Poor Charlie! It was hard indeed that this should be the case, that he should have so dull a home and no companion but his sister. But it could not be helped; his sister, at least, must do what she could.
“You must not be angry,” said Bee, very humbly. “It is only an idea that has come into my head – there may be nothing at all in it – but don’t please shut me up as you do sometimes – hear me out. Charlie! there is Mr. Delaine.”
“Mister – what?” said Charlie, which indeed did not show a very complaisant frame of mind – but a curate in the country is of less importance in the horizon of the son of a house who is at Oxford than he is in that of the daughter at home.
“Mr. Delaine,” repeated Bee. “You don’t remember him, perhaps, at all. He is the curate. When he came first he was said to be a great scholar. He took a first class. You need not say, pooh! Everybody said so, and it is quite true.”
“A first in theology, I suppose,” said Charlie, disdainfully.
“No, not that – that’s not what people call a first. Mr. Burton, I have always heard, is a good scholar himself, and he said a first; of course you know better than I do what that means.”
“Well,” said Charlie, “and supposing for the sake of argument that he took a first – what then?”
“Why, Charlie dear! He is an Oxford man too; he must know all the things you want to know – difficult passages and all that. Don’t you think, perhaps – ”
“Oh, a coach!” cried Charlie. Then he paused, and with withering satire, added “No doubt, for little boys – your curate might do very well, Bee.”
“He is not my curate,” said Bee, with indignation; “but I have always heard he was a great scholar. I thought that was what you wanted.”
“It is not to be expected,” said her brother, loftily, “that you should know what I want. It is not a coach that is everything. If that were all, there need be no such things as universities. What a man needs is the whole machinery, the ways of thinking, the arrangements, the very atmosphere.”
He strolled along the walk with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up to his ears.
“I do not think it is possible,” he added, turning to her with a softened tone, “that I could make you understand; for it is so different from anything you have ever known.”
“I hope I am not so dreadfully stupid!” said Bee, incensed. “If Laura understands, why should it be so impossible for me?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake talk of things you can know something about; as if there was any comparison between her and you.”
“I think you are very uncivil,” said Bee, ready to weep. “I may not be clever, but yet I am your sister, and it is only because I wanted to help you that I took the trouble to speak at all.”
“You are very well meaning, Bee, I am sure,” said Charlie, with condescension; “I do full justice to your good intentions. Another fellow might think you wanted to have Delaine here for yourself.”
“Me!” cried Bee, with a wild pang of injured feeling and a sense of the injustice, and inappropriateness, the cruel wrong of such a suggestion. And that Charlie could speak like that – who knew everything! It was almost more than she could bear.
“But I don’t say that,” he went on in his lofty tones. “I know you mean well. It is only that you don’t – that you can’t understand.” How should she? he said to himself with amusing superiority, and a nod of his head as if agreeing to the impossibility. Bee resented the tone, the assumption, the comparison that was implied in every word.
“I wonder,” she cried, “if you ever tell Laura that she doesn’t and can’t understand?”
He stopped short opposite to her, and grasped her arm. “Bee,” he said almost solemnly, “Don’t! If you knew her you would know what folly it is and presumption to compare yourself for one moment! – and do me the favour not to profane that name, as if it were only a girl’s name like your own.”
“Is she a princess, then?” cried Bee, “or an angel? Or what is she?”
“She is both, I think,” said Charlie, in a voice full of awe, “at least to me. I wish you wouldn’t talk of her in that way. I am sorry I ever told you her name. And please just let my affairs alone. You haven’t been able to do anything for me with my father, which is the only thing you might have done – and I don’t want to discuss other things with you. So please just let my concerns alone from this day.”
“It was not I that ever wished to interfere!” cried Bee, with great mortification and resentment, and after a few minutes’ silent walk together in much gloom and stateliness the brother and sister bade each other an offended and angry good-night.