Birds of Prey Part 13

"I thought I should never see you again, dear," she cried when she and Diana had retired to a corner of the schoolroom to talk confidentially on the morning of Miss Paget's return; "and I missed you so cruelly.

Other girls are very nice and very kind to me. There is a new girl, Miss Spencer--that girl with flaxen hair, standing by the big Canterbury--whom I get on with delightfully; but there is no one in the world like you, Di. And where have you been all this time? With your papa, I suppose."

"Yes," answered Miss Paget gloomily; "I have been with my father. Don't ask me anything about the last three years, Lotta. I have been utterly wretched and miserable, and I can't bear to talk about my misery."

"And you shan't talk of it, darling," cried Charlotte, pursing up her mouth for a kiss in a manner which might have been distraction to a masculine mind of average susceptibility. "You shan't talk of anything or think of anything the least, least, least bit unpleasant; and you shall have my gold pencil-case," added Miss Halliday, wrenching that trinket suddenly from the ribbon by which it hung at her side. Perhaps there was just the least touch of Georgy's childishness in this impulsive habit of giving away all her small possessions, for which Lotta was distinguished. "Yes, you must, dear," she went on. "Mamma gave it me last half; but I don't want it; I don't like it; in point of fact, I have had it so long that I positively loathe it. And I know it's a poor trumpery thing, though mamma gave two guineas for it; but you know she is always imposed upon in shops. Do, do, do take it, darling, just to oblige me. And now, tell me, dear,--you're going to stop here for ever and ever, now you've come back" asked Charlotte, after having thrust the gold pencil-case into Diana's unwilling hand.

"I don't know about for ever and ever, dear," Miss Paget replied presently; "but I daresay I shall stay here till I'm tired of the place and everybody about it. You won't be here very long, you know, Lotta; for you'll be twenty next birthday, and I suppose you'll be leaving school before you're twenty-one. Most of the girls leave at eighteen or nineteen at latest; and you've been here so long, and are so much farther advanced than others are. I am not going to be a pupil again--that's out of the question; for I'm just twenty-two, as you know. But Priscilla has been good enough to let me stay as a kind of second teacher for the little ones. It will be dull work going through the stupid abridgments of history and geography, and the sc.r.a.ppy bits of botany and conchology, with those incorrigible little ones; but of course I am very grateful to my cousin for giving me a home under any conditions, after papa's dishonourable conduct. If it were not for her, Lotta, I should have no home. What a happy girl you are, to have a respectable man for your father!"

Charlotte's brow darkened a little as her friend said this.

"He is not my own father, you know," she said gravely, "and I should be a great deal happier if mamma and I were alone in the world. We could live in some dear little cottage on wide open downs near the sea, and I could have a linsey habit, and a pony, and ride about all day, and read and play to mamma at night. Of course Mr. Sheldon is very respectable, and I daresay it's very wicked of me; but O, Diana, I think I should like him better if he were not _quite_ so respectable. I saw your papa once when he came to call, and I thought him nicer than my stepfather.

But then I'm such a frivolous creature, Di, and am always thinking what I ought not to think."

Nearly a year had pa.s.sed since Diana's return, and the girl's life had been very monotonous during that time. She had stuck bravely to the abridgments and the juvenile sc.r.a.ps of --ologies, and had been altogether a model of propriety, sewing on such a number of strings and b.u.t.tons during the period as can only be compa.s.sed by the maternal mind. Her existence had been by no means as joyless or desolate as such an existence is generally represented by the writer of fiction. There was plenty of life and bustle in the big prosperous boarding-school, if there was not much variety. There were small scandals and small intrigues; departures and arrivals; wonderful hampers of cake and wine to be divided among the elect of a fas.h.i.+onable dormitory--for there is as wide a difference between the tone and status of the bedrooms in a ladies'-school as between the squares of Berkeley and Bedford. There were breaking-up parties, and the free-and-easy idleness of the holidays, when a few dark-complexioned girls from the colonies, a yellow-haired damsel from the remote north of Scotland, and Miss Diana Paget, were wont to cl.u.s.ter round the fire in the smaller of the schoolrooms to tell ghost-stories or talk scandal in the gloaming.

It was a life which, taken with all its small hards.h.i.+ps and petty annoyances, should have been as the life of Paradise compared to that which Diana had led with her father and Mr. Hawkehurst. Whether the girl fully appreciated the change from the Bohemianism of her late existence to the respectability of Hyde Lodge was a question which no one had asked of her. She had fits of despondency now and then, even in the midst of her duties, and was apt to fall into a sombre reverie over one of the abridgments, whereby she was neglectful of her pupils'

aspirates, and allowed Henry the Second to be made the poorer by the loss of an H, or Heliogabalus to be described by a name which that individual himself would have failed to recognise.

There were times when, in the midst of that shrill Babel, the schoolroom, Diana Paget heard the summer winds sighing in the pine-woods above Foretdechene, and fancied herself standing once more in that cla.s.sic temple on whose plastered wall Valentine had once cut her initials with his penknife in a fantastical monogram, surmounted by a death's-head and encircled by a serpent. She thought of that familiar companion very often, in spite of her juvenile pupils and the sewing-on of tapes and b.u.t.tons. He had seemed to her a perpetual enigma and mystery when she was with him; and now that she was far away from him, he was more than ever an inscrutable creature. Was he altogether vile, she wondered, or was there some redeeming virtue in his nature? He had taken trouble to secure her escape from shame and disgrace, and in doing this he surely had performed a good action; but was it not just possible that he had taken this opportunity of getting rid of her because her presence was alike wearisome and inconvenient? She thought very bitterly of her fellow Bohemian when this view of his conduct presented itself to her; how heartlessly he had shuffled her off,--how cruelly he had sent her out into the hard pitiless world, to find a shelter as best she might!

"What would have become of me if Priscilla had refused to take me in?"

she asked herself. "I wonder whether Mr. Hawkehurst ever considered that."

More than one letter had come to Diana from her old companion since her flight from the little Belgian watering-place. The first letter told her that her father had "tided over _that_ business, and was in better feather than before the burst-up at the Hotel d'Orange." The letter was dated from Paris, but gave no information as to the present arrangements or future plans of the writer and his companion. Another letter, dated from the same place, but not from the same address, came to her six months afterwards, and anon another; and it was such a wonderful thing for Captain Paget to inhabit the same city for twelve months together, that Diana began to cherish faint hopes of some amendment in the scheme of her father's life and of Valentine's, since any improvement in her father's position would involve an improvement in that of his _protege_.

Miss Paget's regard for her father was by no means an absorbing affection. The Captain had never cared to conceal his indifference for his only child, or pretended to think her anything but a nuisance and an enc.u.mbrance--a superfluous piece of luggage more difficult to dispose of than any other luggage, and altogether a stumbling-block in the stony path of a man who has to live by his wits. So perhaps it is scarcely strange that Diana did not think of her absent father with any pa.s.sionate tenderness or sad yearning love. She thought of him very often; but her thoughts of him were painful and bitter. She thought still more often of his companion; and her thoughts of him were even more bitter.

The experiences of Diana Paget are not the experiences which make a pure or perfect woman. There are trials which chasten the heart and elevate the mind; but it is doubtful whether it can be for the welfare of any helpless, childish creature to be familiar with falsehood and chicanery, with debt and dishonour, from the earliest awakening of the intellect; to feel, from the age of six or seven, all the shame of a creature who is always eating food that will not be paid for, and lying on a bed out of which she may be turned at any moment with shrill reproaches and upbraidings; to hear her father abused and vilified by vulgar gossips over a tea-table, and to be reminded every day and every hour that she is an unprofitable enc.u.mbrance, a consumer of the bread of other people's children, an intruder in the household of poverty, a child whose heritage is shame and dishonour. These things had hardened the heart of Captain Paget's daughter. There had been no counteracting influence--no fond, foolish loving creature near at hand to save the girl from that perdition into which the child or woman who has never known what it is to be loved is apt to fall. For thirteen years of Diana's life all love and tenderness, endearing words, caressing touches, fond admiring looks, had been utterly unknown to her. To sit in a room with a father who was busy writing letters, and who was wont to knit his brows peevishly if she stirred, or to mutter an oath if she spoke; to be sent to a p.a.w.nbroker's in the gloaming with her father's watch, and to be scolded and sworn at on her return if the money-lender had advanced a less sum than was expected on that security--do not compose the most delightful or improving experiences of a home life.

But Diana could remember little of a more pleasant character respecting her existence during those brief periods when she was flung back upon her father's hands, and while that gentleman was casting about for some new victim on whom to plant her.

At Hyde Lodge, for the first time, the girl knew what it was to be loved. Bright, impulsive Charlotte Halliday took a fancy to her, as the schoolgirl phrase goes, and clung to her with a fond confiding affection. It may be that the softening influence came too late, or that there was some touch of natural hardness and bitterness in Diana's mind; for it is certain that Charlotte's affection did not soften the girl's heart or lessen her bitter consciousness of the wide difference between her own fortunes and those of the happier daughters whose fathers paid their debts. The very contrast between Charlotte's position and her own may have counteracted the good influence. It was very easy for Charlotte to be generous and amiable. _She_ had never been hounded from pillar to post by shrewish matrons who had no words too bitter for their unprofitable charge. _She_ had never known what it was to rise up in the morning uncertain where she should lie down at night, or whether there would be any shelter at all for her hapless head; for who could tell that her father would be found at the lodging where he had last been heard of, and how should she obtain even workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician.

Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender--Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame and a degradation by reason of obvious decay in the heels of her boots?

"If your father would dress you decently, and supply you with proper boots, I could almost bring myself to keep you for nothing," Priscilla had said to her reprobate kinsman's daughter; "but the more one does for that man the less he will do himself; so the long and the short of it is, that you will have to go back to him, for I cannot consent to have such an expensive establishment as mine degraded by the shabbiness of a relation."

Diana had been obliged to listen to such speeches as this very often during her first residence at Hyde Lodge, and then, perhaps, within a few minutes after Priscilla's lecture was concluded, Charlotte Halliday would bound into the room, looking as fresh and bright as the morning, and dressed in silk that rustled with newness and richness. Keenly as Diana felt the difference between her friend's fortune and her own, she did nevertheless in some manner return Charlotte's affection. Her character was not to be altered all at once by this new atmosphere of love and tenderness; but she loved her generous friend and companion after her own fitful fas.h.i.+on, and defended her with pa.s.sionate indignation if any other girl dared to hint the faintest disparagement of her graces or her virtues. She envied and loved her at the same time. She would accept Charlotte's affection one day with unconcealed pleasure, and revolt against it on the next day as a species of patronage which stung her proud heart to the Quick.

"Keep your pity for people who ask you for it," she had exclaimed once to poor bewildered Charlotte; "I am tired of being consoled and petted.

Go and talk to your prosperous friends, Miss Halliday; I am sick to death of hearing about your new frocks, and your holidays, and the presents your mamma is always bringing you."

And then when Charlotte looked at her friend with a sad perplexed face, Diana relented, and declared that she was a wicked discontented creature, unworthy of either pity or affection.

"I have had so much misery in my life, that I am very often inclined to quarrel with happy people without rhyme or reason, or only because they are happy," she said in explanation of her impatient temper.

"But who knows what happiness may be waiting for you in the future, Di?" exclaimed Miss Halliday. "You will marry some rich man by-and-by, and forget that you ever knew what poverty was."

"I wonder where the rich man is to come from who will marry Captain Paget's daughter?" Diana asked contemptuously. "Never mind where he comes from; he will come, depend upon it. The handsome young prince with the palace by the Lake of Como will come to fall in love with my beautiful Diana, and then she will go and live at Como; and desert her faithful Charlotte, and live happy ever afterwards."

"Don't talk nonsense, Lotta," cried Miss Paget. "You know what kind of fate lies before me as well as I do. I looked at myself this morning, as I was plaiting my hair before the gla.s.s--you know how seldom one gets a turn at the gla.s.s in the blue room--and I saw a dark, ugly, evil-minded-looking creature, whose face frightened me. I have been getting wicked and ugly ever since I was a child. An aquiline nose and black eyes will not make a woman a beauty; she wants happiness, and hope, and love, and all manner of things that I have never known, before she can be pretty." "I have seen a beautiful woman sweeping a crossing," said Charlotte doubtfully.

"Yes, but what sort of beauty was it?--a beauty that made you shudder.

Don't talk about these things, Charlotte; you only encourage me to be bitter and discontented. I daresay I ought to be very happy, when I remember that I have dinner every day, and shoes and stockings, and a bed to lie down upon at night; and I am happier, now that I work for my living, than I was in the old time, when my cousin was always grumbling about her unpaid bills. But my life is very dreary and empty; and when I look forward to the future, it seems like looking out upon some level plain that leads nowhere, but across which I must tramp on for ever and ever, until I drop down and die."

It was something in this fas.h.i.+on that Miss Paget talked, as she sat in the garden with Charlotte Halliday at the close of the half-year. She was going to lose her faithful friend--the girl who, so much richer, and happier, and more amiable than herself, had yet clung to her so fondly; she was going to lose this tender companion, and she was more sorry for the loss than she cared to express.

"You must come and see us very often," Charlotte said for the hundredth time; "mamma will be so glad to have you, for my sake; and my stepfather never interferes with our arrangements. O, Di, how I wish you would come and live with us altogether! Would you come, if I could manage to arrange it?"

"How could I come? What Quixotic nonsense you talk, Lotta!"

"Not at all, dear; you could come as a sort of companion for me, or a sort of companion for mamma. What does it matter how you come, if I can only have you? My life will be so dreary in that dreadful new-looking house, unless I have a companion I love. Will you come, Di?--only tell me you will come! I am sure Mr. Sheldon would not refuse, if I asked him to let you live with us. Will you come, dear?--yes or no. You would be glad to come, if you loved me."

"And I do love you, Lotta, with all my heart," answered Miss Paget, with unusual fervour; "but then the whole of my heart is not much. As to coming to live with you, of course it would be a hundred thousand times pleasanter than the life I lead here; but it is not to be supposed that Mr. Sheldon will consent to have a stranger in his house just because his impulsive stepdaughter chooses to take a fancy to a schoolfellow who isn't worthy of half her affection."

"Let me be the judge of that. As to my stepfather, I am almost sure of his consent. You don't know how indulgent he is to me; which shows what a wicked creature I must be not to like him. You shall come to us, Diana, and be my sister; and we will play and sing our pet duets together, and be as happy as two birds in a cage, or a good deal happier--for I never could quite understand the ecstatic delight of perpetual hempseed and an occasional peck at a dirty lump of sugar."

After this there came all the bustle of packing and preparation for departure, and a kind of saturnalia prevailed at Hyde Lodge--a saturnalia which terminated with the breaking-up ball: and who among the crowd of fair young dancers so bright as Charlotte Halliday, dressed in the schoolgirl's festal robes of cloud-like muslin, and with her white throat set off by a black ribbon and a gold locket?

Diana sat in a corner of the schoolroom towards the close of the evening, very weary of her share in the festival, and watched her friend, half in sadness, half in envy.

"Perhaps if I were like her, _he_ would love me," she thought.

CHAPTER III.

GEORGE SHELDON'S PROSPECTS.

For George Sheldon the pa.s.sing years had brought very little improvement of fortune. He occupied his old dingy chambers in Gray's Inn, which had grown more dingy under the hand of Time; and he was wont to sit in his second-floor window on sultry summer Sundays, smoking his solitary cigar, and listening to the cawing of the rooks in the gardens beneath him, mingled with the voices of rebellious children, and shrill mothers threatening to "do for them," or to "flay them alive," in Somebody's Rents below. The lawyer used to be quite meditative on those Sunday afternoons, and would wonder what sort of a fellow Lord Bacon was, and how he contrived to get into a mess about taking bribes, when so many other fellows had done it quietly enough before the Lord of Verulam's day, and even yet more quietly since--agreeably instigated thereto by the casuistry of Escobar.

Mr. Sheldon's prospects were by no means promising. From afar off he beheld his brother's star s.h.i.+ning steadily in the commercial firmament; but, except for an occasional dinner, he was very little the better for the stockbroker's existence. He had reminded his brother very often, and very persistently, of that vague promise which the dentist had made in the hour of his adversity--the promise to help his brother if ever he did "drop into a good thing." But as it is difficult to prevent a man who is disposed to shuffle from shuffling out of the closest agreement that was ever made between Jones of the one part, and Smith of the other part, duly signed, and witnessed, and stamped with the sixpenny seal of infallibility, so is it still more difficult to obtain the performance of loosely-worded promises, uttered in the confidential intercourse of kinsmen.

In the first year of his married life Philip Sheldon gave his brother a hundred pounds for the carrying out of some grand scheme which the lawyer was then engaged in, and which, if successful, would secure for him a much larger fortune than Georgy's thousands. Unhappily the grand scheme was a failure; and the hundred pounds being gone, George applied again to his brother, reminding him once more of that promise made in Bloomsbury. But on this occasion Mr. Sheldon plainly told his kinsman that he could do no more for him.

"You must fight your own battle, George," he said, "as I have fought mine."

"Thank you, Philip," said the younger brother; "I would rather fight it any other way."

And then the two men looked at each other, as they were in the habit of doing sometimes, with a singularly intent gaze.

"You're very close-fisted with Tom Halliday's money," George said presently. "If I'd asked poor old Tom himself, I'm sure he wouldn't have refused to lend me two or three hundred."

"Then it's a pity you didn't ask him," Mr. Sheldon answered, with supreme coolness.