Hopes and Fears Part 32

'So I ought,' said Robert, gravely, 'but my father wished me to make the experiment, and I must own, that before I looked into the details, there were considerations which--which--'

'Such considerations as pounds_ s. d._? For shame!'

'For shame, indeed,' said the happy Robert. 'Phoebe judged you truly. I did not know what might be the effect of habit--' and he became embarra.s.sed, doubtful whether she would accept the a.s.sumption on which he spoke; but she went beyond his hopes.

'The only place I ever cared for is a very small old parsonage,' she said, with feeling in her tone.

'Wrapworth? that is near Castle Blanch.'

'Yes! I must show it you. You shall come with Honor and Phoebe on Monday, and I will show you everything.'

'I should be delighted--but is it not arranged?'

'I'll take care of that. Mr. Prendergast shall take you in, as he would a newly-arrived rhinoceros, if I told him. He was our curate, and used to live in the house even in our time. Don't say a word, Robin; it is to be. I must have you see my river, and the stile where my father used to sit when he was tired. I've never told any one which that is.'

Ordinarily Lucilla never seemed to think of her father, never named him, and her outpouring was doubly prized by Robert, whose listening face drew her on.

'I was too much of a child to understand how fearfully weak he must have been, for he could not come home from the castle without a rest on that stile, and we used to play round him, and bring him flowers. My best recollections are all of that last summer--it seems like my whole life at home, and much longer than it could really have been. We were all in all to one another. How different it would have been if he had lived! I think no one has believed in me since.'

There was something ineffably soft and sad in the last words, as the beautiful, petted, but still lonely orphan cast down her eyelids with a low long sigh, as though owning her errors, but pleading this extenuation. Robert, much moved, was murmuring something incoherent, but she went on. 'Rashe does, perhaps. Can't you see how it is a part of the general disbelief in me to suppose that I come here only for London seasons, and such like? I must live where I have what the dear old soul there has not got to give.'

'You cannot doubt of her affection. I am sure there is nothing she would not do for you.'

'"Do!" that is not what I want. It can't be done, it must be _felt_, and that it never will be. When there's a mutual antagonism, grat.i.tude becomes a fetter, intolerable when it is strained.'

'I cannot bear to hear you talk so; revering Miss Charlecote as I do, and feeling that I owe everything to her notice.'

'Oh, I find no fault, I reverence her too! It was only the nature of things, not her intentions, nor her kindness, that was to blame. She meant to be justice and mercy combined towards us, but I had all the one, and Owen all the other. Not that I am jealous! Oh, no! Not that she could help it; but no woman can help being hard on her rival's daughter.'

Nothing but the sweet tone and sad arch smile could have made this speech endurable to Robert, even though he remembered many times when the trembling of the scale in Miss Charlecote's hands had filled him with indignation. 'You allow that it was justice,' he said, smiling.

'No doubt of that,' she laughed. 'Poor Honor! I must have been a grievous visitation, but I am very good now; I shall come and spend Sunday as gravely as a judge, and when you come to Wrapworth, you shall see how I can go to the school when it is not forced down my throat--no merit either, for our mistress is perfectly charming, with _such_ a voice! If I were Phoebe I would look out, for Owen is desperately smitten.'

'Phoebe!' repeated Robert, with a startled look.

'Owen and Phoebe! I considered it _une affaire arrangee_ as much as--'

She had almost said you and me: Robert could supply the omission, but he was only blind of _one_ eye, and gravely said, 'It is well there is plenty of time before Owen to tame him down.'

'Oney,' laughed Lucilla; 'yes, he has a good deal to do in that line, with his opinions in such a mess that I really don't know what he does believe.'

Though the information was not new to Robert, her levity dismayed him, and he gravely began, 'If you have such fears--' but she cut him off short.

'Did you ever play at bagatelle?'

He stared in displeased surprise.

'Did you never see the ball go joggling about before it could settle into its hole, and yet abiding there very steadily at last? Look on quietly, and you will see the poor fellow as sober a parish priest as yourself.'

'You are a very philosophical spectator of the process,' Robert said, still displeased.

'Just consider what a capacious swallow the poor boy had in his tender infancy, and how hard it was crammed with legends, hymns, and allegories, with so many scruples bound down on his poor little conscience, that no wonder, when the time of expansion came, the whole concern should give way with a jerk.'

'I thought Miss Charlecote's education had been most anxiously admirable.'

'Precisely so! Don't you see? Why, how dull you are for a man who has been to Oxford!'

'I should seriously be glad to hear your view, for Owen's course has always been inexplicable to me.'

'To you, poor Robin, who lived gratefully on the crumbs of our advantages! The point was that to you they were crumbs, while we had a surfeit.'

'Owen never seemed overdone. I used rather to hate him for his faultlessness, and his familiarity with what awed my ignorance.'

'The worse for him! He was too apt a scholar, and received all unresisting, unsifting--Anglo-Catholicism, slightly touched with sentiment, enthusiasm for the Crusades, pa.s.sive obedience--acted faithfully up to it; imagined that to be "not a good Churchman," as he told Charles, expressed the seven deadly sins, and that reasoning was the deadliest of all!'

'As far as I understand you, you mean that there was not sufficient distinction between proven and non-proven--important and unimportant.'

'You begin to perceive. If Faith be overworked, Reason kicks; and, of course, when Owen found the Holt was not the world; that thinking was not the exclusive privilege of demons; that habits he considered as imperative duties were inconvenient, not to say impracticable; that his articles of faith included much of the apocryphal,--why, there was a general downfall!'

'Poor Miss Charlecote,' sighed Robert, 'it is a disheartening effect of so much care.'

'She should have let him alone, then, for Uncle Kit to make a sailor of.

Then he would have had something better to do than to _think_!'

'Then you are distressed about him?' said Robert, wistfully.

'Thank you,' said she, laughing; 'but you see I am too wise ever to think or distress myself. He'll think himself straight in time, and begin a reconstruction from his scattered materials, I suppose, and meantime he is a very comfortable brother, as such things go; but it is one of the grudges I can't help owing to Honora, that such a fine fellow as that is not an independent sailor or soldier, able to have some fun, and not looked on as a mere dangler after the Holt.'

'I thought the reverse was clearly understood?'

'She ought to have "acted as sich." How my relatives, and yours too, would laugh if you told them so! Not that I think, like them, that it is Elizabethan dislike to naming a successor, nor to keep him on his good behaviour; she is far above that, but it is plain how it will he. The only other relation she knows in the world is farther off than we are--not a bit more of a Charlecote, and twice her age; and when she has waited twenty or thirty years longer for the auburn-haired lady my father saw in a chapel at Toronto, she will bethink herself that Owen, or Owen's eldest son, had better have it than the Queen. That's the sense of it; but I hate the hanger-on position it keeps him in.'

'It is a misfortune,' said Robert. 'People treat him as a man of expectations, and at his age it would not be easy to disown them, even to himself. He has an eldest son air about him, which makes people impose on him the belief that he is one; and yet, who could have guarded against the notion more carefully than Miss Charlecote?'

'I'm of Uncle Kit's mind,' said Lucilla, 'that children should be left to their natural guardians. What! is Lolly really moving before I have softened down the edge of my ingrat.i.tude?'

'So!' said Miss Charteris, as she brought up the rear of the procession of ladies on the stairs.

Lucilla faced about on the step above, with a face where interrogation was mingled with merry defiance.

'So that is why the Calthorp could not get a word all the livelong dinner-time!'

'Ah! I used you ill; I promised you an opportunity of studying "c.o.c.k Robin," but you see I could not help keeping him myself--I had not seen him for so long.'

'You were very welcome! It is the very creature that baffles me. I can talk to any animal in the world except an incipient parson.'

'Owen, for instance?'

'Oh! if people choose to put a force on nature, there can be no general rules. But, Cilly, you know I've always said you should marry whoever you liked; but I require another a.s.surance--on your word and honour--that you are not irrevocably Jenny Wren as yet!'