Heriot's Choice Part 88

'So I have, and it is pretty bad, but I thought a walk would do us both good, and we might as well be miserable together, to tell you the truth,' with an attempt at a laugh. 'I can't stand the house without Aunt Milly, and I thought you were feeling the same.'

'Dear Cardie, how good of you to think of me at all,' returned Olive, gratefully. Her brother's evident sympathy was already healing in its effects. Just now she had felt so lonely, so forlorn, it made her better to feel that he was missing Aunt Milly too.

She looked up at him in her mild affectionate way as he walked beside her. She thought, as she had often thought before, how well the straitly-cut clerical garb became him--its severe simplicity suiting so well the grave young face. How handsome, how n.o.ble he must look in Ethel's eyes!

'We are so used to have Aunt Milly thinking for us, that it will be hard to think for ourselves,' she went on presently, when they were walking down by the weir. 'You will have to put up with a great deal from me, and to be very patient, though you are always that now, Cardie.'

'Am I?' he returned, touched by her earnestness. Olive had always been loyal to him, even when he had most neglected her; and he had neglected her somewhat of late, he thought. 'I will tell you what we must do, Livy; we must try to help each other, and to be more to each other than we have been. You see Rex has Polly, but I have no one, not even Aunt Milly now; at least we cannot claim her so much now.'

'You have Ethel, Cardie.'

'Yes, but not in the way I want,' he returned, the sensitive colour flitting over his face. He could never hear or speak her name unmoved; she was far more to him now than she had ever been, when he thought of her less as the youthful G.o.ddess he had adored in his boyish days, than as the woman he desired to have as his wife. He no longer cast a glamour of his own devising over her image--faulty as well as lovable he knew her to be; but all the same he craved her for his own.

'Not one man in a hundred, not one in a thousand, would make her happy,'

he said more than once to himself; 'but it is because I believe myself to be that man that I persevere. If I did not think this, I would take her at her word and go on my way.'

Now, as he answered Olive, a sadness crossed his face, and she saw it.

Might it not be that she could help him even here? He had talked about his trouble to Aunt Milly, she knew. Could she not win him to some, confidence in herself? Here was a beginning of the work Aunt Milly had left her.

'Dear Cardie, I should so like it if you would talk to me sometimes about Ethel,' she said, hesitating, as though fearing how he would like it. 'I know how often it makes you unhappy. I can always see just when it is troubling you, but I never could speak of it before.'

'Why not, Livy?' not abruptly, but questioning.

'One is so afraid of saying the wrong things, and then you might not have liked it,' stammering in her old way.

'I must always like to talk of what is so dear to me,' he replied, gravely. 'I could as soon blot out my own individuality, as blot out the hope of seeing Ethel my future wife; and in that case, it were strange indeed if I did not love to talk of her.'

'Yes, and I have always felt as though it must come right in the end,'

interposed Olive, eagerly; 'her manner gives me that impression.'

'What impression?' he asked, startled by her earnestness.

'I can't help thinking she cares for you, though she does not know it; at least she will not allow herself to know it. I have seen her draw herself so proudly sometimes when you have left her. I am sure she is hardening her heart against herself, Cardie.'

A faint smile rose to his lips. 'Livy, who would have thought you could have said such comforting things, just when I was losing heart too?'

'You must never do that,' she returned, in an old-fas.h.i.+oned way that amused him, and yet reminded him somehow of Mildred. 'Any one like you, Cardie, ought never to lose courage.'

'Courage, Coeur-de-Lion!' he returned, mimicking her tone more gaily as his spirits insensibly rose under the sisterly flattery. 'G.o.d bless her! she is worth waiting for; there is no other woman in the world to me. Who would have thought we should have got on this subject to-day, of all days in the year? but you have done me no end of good, Livy.'

'Then I have done myself good,' she returned, simply; and indeed some sweet hopeful influence seemed to have crept on her during the last half-hour; she thought how Mildred's loving sympathy would have been aroused if she could have told her how Richard and she had mutually comforted themselves in their dulness. But something still stranger to her experience happened that night before she slept.

She was lying awake later than usual, pondering over the events of the day, when a stifled sound, strongly resembling a sob promptly swallowed by a simulated yawn, reached her ear.

'Chrissy, dear, is there anything the matter?' she inquired, anxiously, trying to grope her way to the huddled heap of bed-clothes.

'No, thank you,' returned Chriss, with dignity; 'what should be the matter? good-night. I believe I am getting sleepy,' with another artfully-constructed yawn which did not in the least deceive Olive.

Chrissy was crying, that was clear; and Olive's sympathy was wide-awake as usual; but how was she with her clumsy, well-meaning efforts to overcome the p.r.i.c.kles?

Chriss was well known to have a soul above sympathy, which she generally resented as impertinent; nevertheless Olive's voice grew aggravatingly soft.

'I thought perhaps you might feel dull about Aunt Milly,' she began, hesitating; 'we do--and so----'

'I don't know, I am sure, whom you mean by your aggravating we's,'

snapped Chriss; 'but it is very hard a person can't have their feelings without coming down on them like a policeman and taking them in charge.'

'Well, then, I won't say another word, Chriss,' returned her sister, good-humouredly.

But this did not mollify Chriss.

'Speaking won't hurt a person when they are sore all over,' she replied, with her usual contradiction. 'I hate prying, of course, and it is a pity one can't enjoy a comfortable little cry without being put through one's catechism. But I do want Aunt Milly. There!' finished Chriss, with another ominous shaking of the bed-clothes; 'and I want her more than you do with all your mysterious we's.'

'I meant Cardie,' replied Olive, mildly, too much used to Chriss's oddities to be repulsed by them. 'You have no idea how much he misses her and all her nice quiet ways.'

Chriss stopped her ears decidedly.

'I don't want to hear anything about Aunt Milly; you and Richard made her a sort of golden image. It is very unkind of you, Olive, to speak about her now, when you know how horrid and disagreeable and cross and altogether abominable I have always been to her,' and here honest tears choked Chriss's utterance.

A warm thrill pervaded Olive's frame; here was another piece of work left for her to do. She must gain influence over the cross-grained warped little piece of human nature beside her; hitherto there had been small sympathy between the sisters. Olive's dreamy susceptibilities and Chriss's shrewdness had kept them apart. Chriss had always made it a point of honour to contradict Olive in everything, and never until now had she ever managed to insert the thinnest wedge between Chriss's bristling self-esteem and general pugnacity.

'Oh, Chriss,' she cried, almost tremblingly, in her eagerness to impart some consolation, 'there is not one of us who cannot blame ourselves in some way. I am sure I have not been as nice as I might have been to Aunt Milly.'

Chriss shook her shoulder pettishly.

'Dear me, that is so like you, Olive; you are the most funnily-constructed person I ever saw--all poetry and conscience. When you are not dreaming with your eyes open you are always reading yourself a homily.'

'I wish I were nice for all your sakes,' replied Olive, meekly, not in the least repudiating this personal attack.

'Oh, as to that, you are nice enough,' retorted Chriss, briskly. 'You won't come up to Aunt Milly, so it is no use trying, but all the same I mean to stick to you. I don't intend you to be quite drowned dead in your responsibilities. If you say a thing, however stupid it is, I shall think it my duty to back you up, so I warn you to be careful.'

'Dear Chriss, I am so much obliged to you,' replied Olive, with tears in her eyes.

She perfectly understood by this somewhat vague sentence that Chriss was entering into a solemn league and covenant with her, an alliance aggressive and defensive for all future occasions.

'There is not another tolerably comfortable person in the house,'

grumbled Chriss; 'one might as well talk to a monk as to Richard; the corners of his mouth are beginning to turn down already with ultra-goodness, and now he has taken to the Noah's Ark style of dress one has no comfort in contradicting him.'

'Chrissy, how can you say such things? Cardie has never been so dear and good in his life.'

'And then there are Rex and Polly,' continued Chriss, ignoring this interruption; 'the way they talk in corners and the foolish things they say! I have made up my mind, Livy, never to be in love, not even if I marry my professor. I will be kind to him and sew on his b.u.t.tons once in a way, and order him nice things for dinner; but if he sent me on errands as Rex does Polly I would just march out of the room and never see his face again. I am so glad that no one will think of marrying you, Olive,' she finished, sleepily, disposing herself to rest; 'every family ought to have an old maid, and a poetical one will be just the thing.'

Olive smiled; she always took these sort of speeches as a matter of course. It never entered her head that any other scheme of life were possible with her. She was far too humble-minded and aware of her shortcomings to imagine that she could find favour in any man's eyes.

She lay with a lightened heart long after Chriss had fallen into a sweet sleep, thinking how she could do her best for the froward young creature beside her.

'I have begun work in earnest to-day,' she thought, 'first Cardie and now Chriss. Oh, how hard I will try not to disappoint them!'

Dr. Heriot had hoped to secure some five weeks of freedom from work, but before the month had fully elapsed he had an urgent recall home. Richard had telegraphed to him that they were all in great anxiety about Mr.