The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax Part 38

"You will have your own way, Harry, lead where it will; your father and me have not that to learn at this time of day. But, Bessie joy, Mr.

Carnegie's in a hurry, and it is a good step to Fairfield. We shall see you often while you are in the Forest, I hope?"

"Staying with Lady Latimer is not quite the same as being at home, but I shall try to come again."

"Do, dear--we shall be more than pleased; you were ever a favorite at Brook," said Mrs. Musgrave tenderly. Bessie kissed Harry's mother, shook hands with himself and his father, who also patted her on the back as a reminder of old familiarity, and then went off with Mr. Carnegie, light-hearted and light-footed, a picture of young content. The doctor, after one glance at her blithe face, thought that he could tell his wife when he got home who it was their little Bessie really loved.

Harry Musgrave took his hat to set Christie part of the way back to Beechhurst in the opposite direction. The young men talked as they walked, Christie resuming the argument that the apparition of Bessie Fairfax had interrupted in the afternoon. The argument was that which Mrs. Musgrave had enunciated against the study of the law. Harry was not much moved by it. If he had a new motive for prudence, he had also a new and very strong motive for persistence. Christie suspected as much, but the name of Miss Fairfax was not mentioned.

"You have made your mark in that review, and literature is as fair a profession as art if a man will only be industrious," he said.

"I hate the notion of task-work and drudgery in literature; and what sort of a living is to be got out of our inspirations?" objected Harry.

"It is good to bear the yoke in our youth: I find it discipline to paint pot-boilers," rejoined little Christie mildly. "You must write pot-boilers for the magazines. The best authors do it."

"It is not easy to get a footing in a magazine where one would care to appear. There are not many authors whose sole dependence is a goose-quill. Call over the well-known men; they are all something else before they are authors. Your pot-boilers are sure of a market; pictures have become articles of furniture, indispensable to people of taste, and everybody has a taste now-a-days. But rejected papers are good for nothing but to light one's fire, if one can keep a fire. Look at Stamford! Stamford has done excellent work for thirty years; he has been neither idle nor thriftless, and he lives from hand to mouth still. He is one of the writers for bread, who must take the price he can get, and not refuse it, lest he get nothing. And that would be my case--is my case--for, as you know, my pen provides two-thirds of my maintenance. I cannot tax my father further. If I had not missed that fellows.h.i.+p! The love of money may be a root of evil, but the want of it is an evil grown up and bearing fruit that sets the teeth on edge."

"My dear Musgrave, that is the voice of despair, and for such a universal _crux_!"

"I don't despair, but I am tried, partly by my hard lines and partly by the anxieties at home that infect me. To think that with this frame,"

striking out his muscular right arm, "even Carnegie warns me as if I were a sick girl! The sins of the fathers are the modern Nessus' s.h.i.+rt to their children. I shall do my utmost to hold on until I get my call to the bar and a platform to start from. If I cannot hold on so long, I'll call it, as my mother does, defeat by visitation of G.o.d, and step down to be a poor fellow amongst other poor fellows. But that is not the life I planned for."

"We all know that, Musgrave, and there is no quarter where you won't meet the truest sympathy. Many a man has to come down from the tall pedestal where his hopes have set him, and, unless it be by his own grievous fault, he is tolerably sure to find his level of content on the common ground. That's where I mean to walk with my Janey; and some day you'll hold up a finger, and just as sweet a companion will come and walk hand in hand with you."

Harry smiled despite his trouble; he knew what Christie meant, and he believed him. He parted with his friend there, and turned back in the soft gloom towards home, thinking of her all the way--dear little Bessie, so frank and warm-hearted. He remembered how, when he was a boy and lost a certain prize at school that he had reckoned on too confidently, she had whispered away his shame-faced disappointment with a rosy cheek against his jacket, and "Never mind, Harry, I love you."

And she would do it again, he knew she would. The feeling was in her--she could not hide it.

But at this point of his meditations his worldly wisdom came in to dash their beauty. Unless he could bridge with bow of highest promise the gulf that vicissitude had opened between them since those days of primitive affection, he need not set his mind upon her. He ought not, so he told himself, though his mind was set upon her already beyond the chance of turning. He did not know yet that he had a rival; when that knowledge came all other obstacles, sentimental, chivalrous, would be swallowed up in its portentous shadow. For to-night he held his reverie in peace.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

_AT FAIRFIELD._

"We thought you were lost," was Lady Latimer's greeting to Bessie Fairfax when she entered the Fairfield drawing-room, tired with her long walk, but still in buoyant spirits.

"Oh no!" said Bessie. "I have come from Brook. When I had seen them all at home my father carried me off there to tea."

"I observed that you were not at the evening service. The Musgraves and those people drink tea at five o'clock: you must be ready for your supper now. Mr. Logger, will you be so good as to ring the bell?"

Bessie was profoundly absorbed in her own happiness, but Lady Latimer's manner, and still more the tone of her voice, struck her with an uncomfortable chill. "Thank you, but I do not wish for anything to eat,"

she said, a little surprised.

The bell had rung, however, and the footman appeared. "Miss Fairfax will take supper--she dined in the middle of the day," said Lady Latimer, but nothing could be less hospitable than the inflection of her speech as she gave the order.

"Indeed, indeed, I am not hungry; we had chicken and tongue to tea,"

cried Bessie, rather shamefaced now.

"And matrimony-cake and hot b.u.t.tered toast--"

"No, we had no matrimony-cake," said Bessie, who understood now that my lady was cross; and no one could be more taunting and unpleasant than my lady when she was cross.

The footman had taken Miss Fairfax's remonstrative statement for a negative, and had returned to his own supper when the drawing-room bell rang again: "Why do you not announce Miss Fairfax's supper? Is it not ready yet?"

"In a minute, my lady," said the man, and vanished. In due time he reappeared to say that supper was served, and Lady Latimer looked at her young guest and repeated the notice. Bessie laughed, and, rising with a fine color and rather proud air, left the room and went straight to bed.

When neither she nor Mrs. Betts came in to prayers half an hour later, my lady became silent and reflective: she was not accustomed to revolt amongst her young ladies, and Miss Fairfax's quiet defiance took her at a disadvantage. She had antic.i.p.ated a much more timid habit in this young lady, whom she had undertaken to manage and mould to the will of her grandfather. In the morning her humor was gracious again, and Bessie, who had received counsel from Dora Meadows, deeply experienced in Aunt Olympia's peculiarities, made no sign of remembering that there had been any fray. But she was warned of the imperious temper of her hostess, who would have no independence of action amongst her youthful charges, but expected them to consult her and defer to her at every step. "Why, then," thought Bessie, "did she bid me, in the first instance, do exactly what I liked?" To this there was no answer: is there ever an answer to the _why_ of an exacting woman's caprice?

After breakfast the young ladies took Mr. Logger out for a salubrious airing across the heath. In their absence Harry Musgrave and young Christie called at Fairfield, and, no longer in terror of Lady Latimer's patronage, talked to her of themselves, which she liked. She was exceedingly kind, and asked them both to dine the next day. "You will meet Mr. Cecil Burleigh: you may have heard his name, Mr. Musgrave? The Conservative member for Norminster," she said rather imposingly.

"Oh yes, he is one of the coming men," said Harry, much interested, and he accepted the invitation. Mr. Christie declined it. His mother was very ill, he said, but he would send his portfolio for her ladys.h.i.+p to look over, if she would allow him. Her ladys.h.i.+p would be delighted.

When the young ladies brought Mr. Logger back to luncheon the visitors were gone, but Lady Latimer mentioned that they had been there, and she gave Mr. Logger a short account of them: "Mr. Harry Musgrave is reading for the bar. He took honors at Oxford, and if his const.i.tution will stand the wear and tear of a laborious, intellectual life, great things may be expected from him. But unhappily he is not very strong." Mr.

Logger shook his head, and said it was the London gas. "Mr. Christie is a son of our village wheelwright, himself a most ingenious person. Mr.

Danberry found him out, and spoke those few words of judicious praise that revealed the young man to himself as an artist. Mr. Danberry was staying with me at the time, and we had him here with his sketches, which were so promising that we encouraged him to make art his study.

And he has done so with much credit."

"Christie? a landscape-painter? does a portrait now and then? I have met him at Danberry's," said Mr. Logger, whose vocation it was to have met everybody who was likely to be mentioned in society. "Curious now: Archdeacon Topham was the son of a country carpenter: headstrong fellow--took a mountain-walk without a guide, and fell down a _creva.s.se_, or something."

Mr. Cecil Burleigh arrived the next day to luncheon. In the afternoon the whole party walked in the Forest. Lady Latimer kept Dora at her elbow, and required Mr. Logger's opinion and advice on a new emigration scheme that she was endeavoring to develop. Bessie Fairfax was thus left to Mr. Cecil Burleigh, and they were not at a loss for conversation.

Bessie was feeling quite gay and happy, and talked and listened as cheerfully as possible. The gentleman was rather jaded with the work of the session, and showed it in his handsome visage. He a.s.sumed that Miss Fairfax was so far in his confidence as to be interested in the high themes that interested himself, and of these he discoursed until his companion inadvertently betrayed that she was capable of abstracting her mind and thinking of something else while seeming to give him all her polite attention. He was then silent--not unthankfully.

Their walk took them first round by the wheelwright's and afterward by the village. Lady Latimer loved to entertain and occupy her guests, even those who would have preferred wider margins of leisure. On the green in front of the wheelwright's they found little Christie seated under a white umbrella, making a sketch of his father's house and the shed. A group of st.u.r.dy children had put themselves just in the way by a disabled wagon to give it life.

"I am doing it to please my mother," said the artist in reply to Lady Latimer's inquiry if he was going to make a finished picture of it. He went on with his dainty touches without moving. "I must not lose the five-o'clock effect of the sun through that tall fir," he explained apologetically.

"No; continue, pray, continue," said my lady, and summoned her party to proceed.

At the entrance of the village, to Bessie's great joy, they fell in with Mr. Carnegie returning from a long round on horseback.

"Would Bessie like a ride with the old doctor to-morrow?" he asked her as the others strolled on.

"Oh yes--I have brought my habit," she said enthusiastically.

"Then Miss Hoyden shall trot along with me, and we'll call for you--not later than ten, Bessie, and you'll not keep me waiting."

"Oh no; I will be ready. Lady Latimer has not planned anything for the morning, so I may be excused."

Whether Lady Latimer had planned anything for the morning or not, she manifested a lofty displeasure that Miss Fairfax had planned this ride for herself. Dora whispered to her not to mind, it would soon blow over.

So Bessie went up stairs to dress somewhat relieved, but still with a doubtful mind and a sense of indignant astonishment at my lady's behavior to her. She thought it very odd, and speculated whether there might be any reason for it beyond the failure in deference to herself.

An idea struck her when she saw Mrs. Betts unfolding her most sumptuous dress--a rich white silk embroidered in black and silver for mourning--evidently in the intention of adorning her to the highest.

"Oh, not that dress," she said. "I will wear my India muslin with black ribbons."

"It is quite a set party, miss," remonstrated Mrs. Betts.

"No matter," said Bessie decisively. No, she would not triumph over dear Harry with grand clothes.