Chapter Twenty Four
Et Tu, Brute!
”… How strange the tangle is!
What old perplexity is this?”
Songs of Two Worlds.
And Alys did not get her flowers, poor girl. Nor was she told the reason why. But late that last evening, when the packing was done, and the various little personalities that, even in an enforced sojourn of the kind, are sure to collect about people, above all about people of individuality and refinement, were all collected together and put away, and the farm-house rooms had resumed their ordinary consistent bareness, Mary sat down by Alys’s bed and put her arms round the girl’s neck and kissed her with a clinging tenderness that brought the tears to Alys’s eyes.
“Dear Alys,” she said, softly, “I want to thank you.”
“To thank me,” replied Alys, in astonishment. “Oh, no, Mary, all the thanks are, must be, on one side.”
“No,” said Mary, “I have many things to thank you for. You have been so patient and sweet, and so grateful for the little I have been able to do for you. And one thing I may thank you for certainly.”
“What?” whispered Alys.
“For loving me,” said Mary. “You have done me good, Alys. I was growing, not perhaps exactly selfish, but self-centred. I put my own home and my own people before everything else, in a narrow-minded way, and I fancied that people who were different from us externally – people who had had fewer struggles and more luxuries than my parents – must of necessity be narrow-minded and self-absorbed and unsympathising. Alys, it is absurd, but do you know I do believe I have myself been growing into the very thing I so detested – I do believe, in a sense, I was encouraging a kind of class prejudice?”
Alys listened attentively.
“I see what you mean,” she said. “Mary, you are awfully honest.”
“I don’t know,” replied Mary, vaguely. “Self-deception must be a kind of dishonesty.”
Alys hardly heard her. She was watching eagerly for the upshot of this confession, yet afraid of startling away the concession she was hoping for by any premature congratulation on her friend’s altered views. So she lay, without speaking, till at last Mary’s silence roused her to new misgiving.
“Won’t you go on with what you were saying?” she ventured at last.
“What was it?” said Mary.
“Oh! about your being glad you had got to know us, and – ”
“Nay,” exclaimed Mary, “I am sure I did not say that, Alys. What I said was that I thanked you for showing me how loving and sympathising you are, and that being prosperous and rich and courted and all that, as you are, need not necessarily make one narrow-minded and selfish.”
“Well,” said Alys, “it comes to much the same thing. I don’t see why you need have flown up so at my way of putting it.”
“Because,” said Mary, with vehemence, disproportionate to the occasion, “I was speaking of and to you, Alys – you alone.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” said Alys, “I would like my praise far, far more, Mary, if you would give poor Laurence a little bit of it too. He deserves it, while I – ”
“Never mind,” said Mary, uneasily. “Don’t let us get into a discussion, dear Alys.”
“I am sure I don’t want to discuss anything except the end of your sentence. Do finish, Mary. Now that you have got to know me, or like me a little, you are not going to keep to your horrible resolution?”
Mary’s face clouded.
“I see, what you mean,” she said. “Oh! Alys, I am sorry to pain you, and very, very sorry not to be able to look forward to seeing you again, but I cannot change. I cannot – ”
Alys leaned forward and put her hand over Mary’s mouth.
“No,” she said, “I won’t let you repeat that. I know what is coming, ‘I cannot under any circumstances whatever imagine myself, etc.’ No, Mary, you are not to say that. It is a sort of tempting Providence to be obstinate. Fancy now what might happen. Suppose I get much worse, Mary, – suppose that great London doctor that Laurence is going to have down to see me, says I can’t get better – that I am going to die – wouldn’t you come to Romary then, to say good-bye, Mary?”
Mary turned away her head and sighed deeply.
“I was not going to say what you thought, Alys,” she said, at length. “I was only going to say that I cannot see any probability of my ever going to you at Romary. If you ever marry, Alys – I should not say that; you are sure to marry —when you do, I shall go to see you in your own home, if you still care to have me, and if your husband has no objection.”
“But yours, Mary? What about his objections or non-objections?” said Alys.
“They will never exist, for there will never be such a person,” said Mary, calmly. “It was settled – oh, I can’t tell you how long ago, always, I think – in all our family conclaves there was never a dissentient voice on the subject – that I was to be an old maid. I am thoroughly cut out for it. Any one can see that. ‘Dans mon coeur il n’y a point d’amour’ of that kind, certainly,” she hummed, lightly.
“But, but, Mary,” said Alys, “finish the verse.”
“How do you know it?” said Mary. “It’s an old Norman or Breton song. Mother sang it when she was a girl.”
“I do know the second line, and that is all that matters,” said Alys, sagely. “Well, good-night, Mary. You are not quite as naughty as you have been, but that is the best I can say for you. However, I shall live in hope. But I am awfully dull, Mary. And how merry we were last night! It is too bad of Laurence to have gone over to Romary so late to-night, just when he might have known our – at least my spirits would need cheering. You, of course, have the getting back to your beloved people to look forward to.”
And, two mornings after this, Mary woke to find herself in her own familiar room at the Rectory. What a dream the last fortnight seemed! And what a long time ago appeared now the day of Alys Cheviott’s accident! Spring had come on fast since then. The leaves of the creeper round Mary’s window were beginning to peep in and to be visible as she lay in bed, the birds’ busy twitter and the early sunlight told that the world was waking up once more to approaching summer. How home-like and peaceful it seemed! yet Mary could not feel as delighted to be at home again as she had expected.
“I am anxious about Alys, I suppose,” she said to herself, “and sorry to have been obliged to disappoint her. If she knew, what would she think or feel? would she ever wish to see me again? I hardly think so, and I could never be at ease in her presence. Another reason in favour of my decision. Yet I wish I could have avoided saying some of the things I did – even to him. Oh, if only I could forget all about it!”
For, notwithstanding all the strength of mind she brought to bear on the subject, that scene in the wood Mary could not succeed in banishing from her thoughts. Over and over again it rose up before her, leaving behind it each time, it seemed to her, a sharper sting of pain, a more humiliating sense of self-reproach. Yet how and where had she been wrong? Was it not better to be honest at all costs? Over and over again she determined to banish it finally from her memory, but no sooner had she done so than some trifle – the sight of a primrose in Francie’s hat, or some apparently entirely disconnected allusion, would bring it back again as vividly as ever, and, with a certain fascination that Mary could not explain to herself, every word that Mr Cheviott had said, every change of expression that had come over his face, would repeat themselves to her imagination. Was it true? she asked herself, was it true what he had said to her? – but for her previous knowledge of his real character, but for the deep-dyed “prejudice,” as he had called it, against him in her mind, could she ever have grown to care for this man? Surely not – yet why did this assertion of his recur to her so often, and not altogether in the sense of re-arousing her indignation?
“He is like two people in one,” she said to herself, “but as to which is the real one, facts, fortunately, leave me in no doubt. And yet I am sorry to have wounded him so deeply, little as he cared for the feelings of others.”
“You look tired, Mary dear,” said her mother, when, after the early Rectory breakfast, Mary was preparing as usual to collect her sisters and little Brooke for lessons in the school-room. “Don’t you think you might leave the children to manage for themselves one other day? You need rest, I am sure, after all you have gone through.”
“No, mother dear, I am really not tired,” said Mary. “I only feel rather – I don’t know how – dissipated, I suppose, unsettled, or whatever you like to call it.”
“That only means tired, dear,” repeated her mother, fondly, so fondly – for Mrs Western was not, as a rule, demonstrative with her children – that Mary felt angry with herself for not being able to respond more gratefully to her solicitude, for, in fact, feeling rather irritated than soothed by it.
“But I have really had nothing to tire me, mother,” she persisted. “Alys Cheviott was as considerate as possible, and, except the first two nights, I had no watching or anxiety. It was hardly to be called ‘nursing’.”
“Perhaps not,” allowed Mrs Western, “but there was the constraint and discomfort of the life – above all, the enforced intercourse with that disagreeable man – that Mr Cheviott, whom you dislike so. I really cannot tell you, Mary dear, how much I have admired your unselfishness and moral courage during this trying time. But you will never regret it. Who knows how much good you may have done that poor girl for all her life – poor I cannot but call her, notwithstanding her riches and position, and everything – fatherless and motherless, and with such a cold, selfish brother as her only protector.”
“He is a very good brother to her, mother. I cannot but confess that I was astonished at his devotion and tenderness to her, and they are deeply attached to each other,” said Mary, her colour rising a little as she spoke. “I am afraid, mother, I sometimes am too wholesale in my opinion of people. Once I take a dislike to them it is difficult for me to see any good in them. I want to correct this in myself.”
“You are so honest, dear,” said her mother.
“And as for my doing good to Alys Cheviott,” continued Mary, “it seems to me rather that she might do me good. She is so simple, so unselfish and unspoiled.”
“Anyway, I am glad they were considerate, and, I suppose, grateful,” said Mrs Western. “How, indeed, could they be otherwise?”
And Mary went off to her pupils.
But lessons seemed rather heavy work this morning. The fortnight’s interregnum had been far from salutary in its effects. Alexa was languid and uninterested, Josey pert and self-willed, Brooke and Francie quarrelsome and careless. And, lessons over, there was no Lilias to whom to resort for ever ready sympathy. Mary felt strangely dull and dispirited. She missed Alys’s bright yet gentle companionship, Mr Cheviott’s constant watchful attention, of which at the time she had hardly been conscious. She missed the quiet and refinement which had of late surrounded her even in the homely farm-house. Not that “home” was unrefined in the coarser sense of the word, but it seemed strangely full of small worries and irksomenesses and “fuss,” and Mary hated herself for feeling less heartily ready than usual to take her share in them. She looked round her with vague dissatisfaction and misgiving. How hard a thing it was, after all, to be poor! How difficult, increasingly difficult, it appeared to bring up these younger girls as could be desired! The boys must make their own way in the world; but with regard to Alexa and Josey, there was no doubt that they stood at a disadvantage both as to the present and the future.
“Lilias and I had our own places in the family even at their ages,” thought Mary; “but the third and fourth daughters of a poor clergyman – what are they to do? If it were possible to give them a couple of years’ training at some first-rate school they might be fitted to be governesses. But such a thing is not to be thought of,” and, with a sigh, she turned to the letter to Lilias which was costing her unusual pains from her excessive anxiety not to let it seem less cheerful in tone than usual. “What would Lilias say if she knew?” she said to herself as she wrote. “I do not think I need ever tell her, or any one, that is one comfort, and – oh, if only I could forget all about it myself!”
The next morning brought a letter from Lilias. It came, as the letters generally did, at breakfast-time, an hour at which there was but little possibility of privacy for any of the Rectory party. Mary opened, but merely glanced at it, and put it in her pocket to read when alone.
“From Lilias,” she said, calmly. “It is a long letter. I will read it afterwards. She begins by saying she is quite well, and sends her love to everybody, so no one need feel anxious about her.”
“You might read it now, Mary,” said Josey. “It would be something to talk about. You forget how dull it is for Alexa and me – never any change from year’s end to year’s end – while Lilias and you go about paying visits. The least you can do is to amuse us when you return, and you haven’t told us a thing about the Cheviotts.”
“Josephine, be quiet at once,” said Mr Western, severely, and to every one’s surprise. “That shrill voice of yours seems to stab my head through and through.”
“Have you a headache, father dear?” said Mary, with concern. Such an occurrence was a rare one.
“Not exactly, but my head seems oppressed and uneasy. I long for quiet,” said the Rector, nervously passing his hand across his forehead. “Lilias – did you say there was a letter from her? How is she? When does she return?”
“Return?” repeated Mary, in surprise. “Why, dear papa, she has not been away a fortnight yet! The London doctors cannot yet say how soon Mr Greville is to go to Hastings, and they mean to stay there a month at least.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure. I am glad she is enjoying herself, poor child, but I shall be glad to have her back again,” said Mr Western, vaguely, but with a slight confusion of manner which struck Mary as unlike his usual clear way of expressing himself. She put it all down to the “headache,” however, as her mother said he had been suffering a little from something of the kind lately. And by the afternoon he seemed quite like himself again.
It was not till after morning school hours that conscientious Mary felt herself free to read the precious letter. She had looked forward to it as a treat all the morning, and had, from the thoughts of it, gathered extra patience with which to deal with her somewhat unruly pupils. They got on rather better this morning, however.
“I shall get them into shape again in a little,” said Mary, to herself, as at last she sat down on the low window-seat in her own room at leisure to read all that Lilias had to say; “but it certainly does not do for me to leave home even for a few days. Even if I could have agreed to go to Romary sometimes, that is another reason against it. And, besides, the life there would spoil me for my home duties.”
A vision, a tempting vision, came over her for a moment of how pleasant a thing “the life there” must be. The quiet and regularity of a well-trained and well-managed household were in themselves a delightful thing to one of Mary’s naturally methodical and orderly nature; then the prettiness of the surroundings, the gardens, and the flowers, and the tastefully furnished rooms, the pictures, and the books, and the pleasant voices whose tones seemed still to ring in her ears. What pleasant talks they could have had, they three together; how kind and attentive to every wish or fancy of hers they would have been; how they would have fêted and made much of her in return for her easy task of nursing Alys, had she but “given in” and agreed to forsake her colours! Mary was by no means indifferent, in her own way, to the agreeableness of much that would have surrounded her position as a guest at Romary; she was a perfectly healthy-natured girl, well able to enjoy when enjoyment came in her way, and a girl too of barely one-and-twenty. She gave a little sigh as she re-opened her letter, hoping, in some vague, half-unconscious way, therein to find consolation and support and tacit approval – ignorant though Lilias was of all details of the sturdy stand she had made.
But she was disappointed.
The letter was a nice letter, a very nice letter, as affectionate, sympathising, and sister-like as a letter could be. Written too in very good spirits, it was evident to see; the very result that Mary had so hoped for from Lilias’s visit seemed already to be accomplished à merveille. Why was not Mary pleased?
“What an inconsistent, selfish creature I must be,” she said to herself, when she had finished it. “Why am I not glad, delighted, to see that Lilias is happy again? If she did not care much for Captain Beverley, if I was mistaken in imagining her whole heart to be given to him, should I not rejoice? It does not alter my position, it does not in the least condone the cruel interference that might have ruined her life.”
She turned again to a passage in which Lilias spoke of the Cheviotts.
“Now that you are at home again,” wrote Miss Western, “you will have more time – at least, you will feel freer to tell me all about the Cheviotts. For it always seems to me a mean sort of thing to sit down and write elaborate pulling to pieces of people whose hospitality one is in the act of receiving, even though in your case the receiving it was certainly enforced and not voluntary. I cannot help thinking Miss Cheviott an unusually lovable girl, and I shall not be at all sorry to hear that you have got rid of your terrible prejudice against the brother; I feel so sure that it is to a great extent undeserved.”
Mary turned over the page impatiently.
“I wish people would not write about what they don’t understand,” she said to herself. “How can Lilias’s ‘feeling sure’ affect the question one way or the other?”
Then glancing again at the letter, she saw that there was a long postscript on a separate sheet yet unread.
“I am forgetting to tell you,” it said, “that I do believe I have come across those cousins of mother of whom you heard something from those Miss Morpeths when you were staying at the Grevilles. It was at the doctor’s. I had gone there with Mr Greville, as he hated going alone, and Mrs Greville had a cold. While we were in the waiting-room, an elderly, very nice-looking lady came in with a tall, thin, dreadfully delicate-looking boy of about seventeen. As Mr Greville was first summoned to the doctor, he happened to say as he left the room, ‘I shall only be a very few minutes this morning, Miss Western.’ Immediately the lady turned to me and asked me very nicely if I happened to be any relation of the Westerns of Hathercourt, and did I know Miss Cheviott of Romary? I was so astonished, but, of course, answered civilly. She seemed so pleased, and so did the boy, poor fellow, when I told them who I was. Mr Greville was back before there was time for any more explanation. But she gave me her card – ‘Mrs Brabazon’ – and asked where I was staying, and said she would hope to see me before we left town. The boy’s name she said was Anselm Brooke, and her own maiden name was Brooke, so they must be mamma’s people. Use your own discretion as to telling mother or not. It may only revive painful associations with her if nothing more comes of it.”
“It is curious,” thought Mary. “I think I may as well tell mother about it. It will give them all something else to talk of besides my adventures at the farm.”
Mrs Western was interested, in her quiet way, in Lilias’s news. Mr Western, somewhat to Mary’s surprise, took it up much more eagerly.
“I should be very thankful, relieved I may say, if some renewal of intercourse could take place with your mother’s relations,” he said when alone with Mary, the subject happening to be alluded to.
“Would you, papa?” said Mary. “I don’t feel as if I cared to know them in the least. We have been very happy and content without them all our lives.”
“Ah, yes! Ah, yes!” said her father. “But who knows, my dear, how long the present state of things may last? Were anything happening to me, I should leave you all strangely friendless and unprotected. The thought of it comes over me very grievously sometimes, and yet I hardly see what I could have done. Basil is so young – a few years hence I trust he may be beginning to get on – but it will be up-hill work.”
“But Lilias and I are strong and ‘capable,’ father,” said Mary, encouragingly. “We could work if needs were, for mother and the younger ones. Besides, you are not an old, or even an elderly man yet, papa.”
“I am not as young and by no means as strong as I have been,” said Mr Western with a sigh. “I don’t like this feeling in my head. I have never had anything like it before, and it makes me fidgety, though I have not said anything to make your mother uneasy. Perhaps it will be better now that I have spoken of it; it may be more nervousness than anything else.”
“I trust so, dear father,” said Mary, anxiously. “Are you not glad to have me back again? Didn’t you miss me dreadfully?” she added, trying to speak more lightly.
“Very much indeed, my dear. I dare say it affected my spirits more than I realised at the time. Yet I could wish, as I was saying, that all of you, you and Lilias especially, had more friends, more outside interests. I hope we have not been selfish and short-sighted in the way we have brought you up – keeping you too much to ourselves, as it were;” again Mr Western sighed. “It is possible, I suppose, to be too devoid of social ambition. By the way,” he went on, “I think that Mr Cheviott must be a very fine fellow. People took up an unreasonable prejudice against him in the country at first from his manner, which, I believe, is cold and stiff. But they are finding themselves mistaken. He must be exceeding clever, and, what is better, thoroughly right-minded. I have been very much pleased by some things I have heard of him lately; he has shown himself so liberal and yet sensible in his dealings with his tenantry.”
“Indeed,” said Mary. She was pleased to see her father roused to his usual healthy interest in such matters, yet wished devoutly the model proprietor in question had not been the master of Romary.
“That place has been grossly mismanaged in the old days,” continued Mr Western. “But it will be a very different story now. How I wish we had a squire of that kind here, there would be some hope then of doing practical and lasting good.”
“Still no squire is better than a bad one,” said Mary. “True, very true. How did you like Mr Cheviott, Mary? I was just thinking I should be rather pleased to make friends with him. He might be a good friend to the boys some day, and no one could say we had courted the acquaintance in the way your mother and I have always so deprecated.”
“No,” said Mary, feebly.
“Coming in such an altogether unexpected way, you see,” pursued Mr Western, who seemed “by the rule of contrary,” thought Mary, to be working himself up to increasing interest on the subject she was so anxious to avoid, “I should not have, by any means, the objection I have always had to such an acquaintance. They are sure to call – in fact, they cannot possibly avoid doing so.”
“I don’t know,” Mary moved herself to say, “I hardly think they will.”
“It will be exceedingly, strangely uncourteous if they do not,” said her father, with unusual warmth. “Surely, my dear, you were not so ill-advised as to say anything to discourage their doing so,” he added, in a tone of most unwonted irritability.
“I am afraid what I said may have indirectly tended to do so,” said poor Mary, feeling as if she were ready on the spot to run all the way to Romary and back to beg Mr Cheviott to call on her father at once.
“You were very foolish, very foolish indeed,” said Mr Western, severely. “It is pride, and very false pride, that is at the root of such things, and I warn you that much future suffering is in store for you if you encourage such a spirit.”
“I can’t imagine any future suffering much worse than the present one of having displeased you,” said Mary, struggling hard to keep back the tears that would come. “But indeed, father, I thought I was doing what you and mamma would like.”
“Your mother has been mistaken before now in such matters,” said Mr Western. “However, there is no more to be said about it. I confess I should have enjoyed seeing more of a man of Mr Cheviott’s character and talents, and it is mortifying at my age to be placed in the position of being unable to receive a friendly call from a neighbour.”
“But I did not put it in that way, papa, indeed I did not,” said Mary. “Oh, papa, cannot you trust me? If there is anything I have thoroughly at heart it is that you should receive all the respect and consideration you so entirely deserve.”
“Ah, well, ah, well, my dear, say no more about it. You have made a mistake, that is all. Do not distress yourself any more about it,” said Mr Western, with some return to his ordinary equanimity. But he pressed his hand wearily against his head as he spoke with the action that was becoming habitual to him, and Mary’s heart felt very heavy. On all sides nothing but reproach. Where or how had she done wrong? Was it all personal pride and offended feeling that had actuated her conduct, under the guise of unselfish devotion? No, take herself to task sharply as she would, her conscience would not say so.
“Though there must have been a mingling of personal feeling and wounded pride, far more than I was conscious of,” she said, regretfully. “And now it is too late. I have myself placed a far more hopeless barrier between us by the scornful way I rejected what – what he said to me, what, indeed, I do not believe he ever would have said had I not in a way goaded him to it. Oh, yes, I must have been wrong – if only I could clearly see how!”
She was too young to have had much experience of that terrible longing, that anguish of yearning “to see how” we have been wrong; too young to understand that, were that cry answered at our entreaty, half our hard battle would be over; too young to have any but the vaguest conception of the bewildering complication of motive in ourselves, as in others, which at times makes “right and wrong” seem but meaningless jargon in our ears, idle words to be presumptuously discarded with other worn-out childishness. As if our childhood were ever over in this world! – as if the existence of eternal truth depended on our understanding of it!
Mr Western’s headache increased to severity that afternoon, and Mary took all the blame of it on to herself, notwithstanding her mother’s consolations and assurances that it would pass off again as it had done before.