SOME ARE WISE, SOME OTHERWISE.
“. . . à quoi bon avoir une jolie figure et une délicieuse toilette, si on ne les montre pas?”
Les Misérables.
THE next day was Sunday. A Sunday beautiful enough to make Cicely’s wish that she could spend it altogether in the woods seem excusable. It was better than “a perfect day;” it was a day brimming over with promise of better things yet to come, a day to infuse one with vague, delicious hopefulness, to set one in tune with oneself, and, as a natural consequence of such a happy state of things, with everybody else as well.
Mrs. Methvyn could not go to church in the morning, for her husband had had a restless night, and as was often the case, objected to her leaving him, so the two girls set off alone. It was Geneviève’s first Sunday in England. She seemed quiet and preoccupied, but Cicely was bright and animated.
“Isn’t it beautiful, Geneviève?” said Cicely, stopping for a moment and gazing up through the thick network of leaves to the brilliant blue beyond. “Don’t you like to see that green light among the trees? It looks so fresh and cool up there, I think I should like to be a squirrel.”
“A what?” said Geneviève, looking puzzled.
“A squirrel—écureuil, isn’t it, in French? Those dear little creatures with great bushy tails,” said Cicely.
“Oh!” said Geneviève, enlightened, but not interested. But Cicely was in a talkative mood, and was not to be easily discouraged.
“Did you never play at fancying what animal you would like to be when you were a little girl?” she asked. “I thought all children did.”
“I don’t think we ever did,” said Geneviève. “I don’t remember. I was not very happy when I was a little girl. I was not like you, Cicely, the only child; there were so many children, and mamma always busy. Ah! no,” with a slight shrug of her shoulders, “I am glad to be no longer a child.”
“What a pity!” exclaimed Cicely involuntarily. “I mean,” she went on, softening her tone, “I am so sorry for any one that has not a happy remembrance of childhood. I should have fancied you had had such a happy childhood, Geneviève. Of course I was very happy, and, I suspect, a good deal indulged, but I often wished for companions near me in age. My sister Amiel, you know, is seven years older than I, and Trevor Fawcett, my other companion, is five years older than I am. And you had brothers and sisters not much younger than yourself.”
“Brothers,” corrected Geneviève. “Eudoxie is eight years younger. But my brothers amused themselves always without me; they were several. One brother would be different; one brother might have been to me such as Mr. Fawcett was to you.”
Her tone was more animated now. But Cicely did not seem to care to pursue the subject further.
“Yes,” she said, “perhaps your having several brothers made it different,” and then they walked on in silence for a few minutes.
It was very quiet in the woods: such sounds as there were, came clear and crisp; it was too early in the season yet for the rich, all-pervading hum of full summer life; it seemed the morning of the year as well as of the day.
“Could you tell it was Sunday without knowing, Geneviève?” said Cicely suddenly.
Geneviève looked at her with again a puzzled expression on her face; it seemed to her that her sensible cousin said very silly things sometimes. Cicely appeared to read her thoughts. She smiled, as she went on speaking.
“That was another of my fancies when I was little,” she said. “I always thought the birds and the leaves and the insects and everything spoke in hushed tones on Sunday. And a rainy Sunday upset all my theories terribly! Do you hear the brook, Geneviève? When it is in good spirits, that is to say, pretty full, we can hear it a long way off. Ah! yes; there it is.”
She stood still, her head bent slightly forward as she listened, her lips parted, her soft eyes bright with eagerness. And from far away came the tinkling murmur she loved so well to hear.
“It is not very full today,” she said at last. “Sometimes it has quite a rushing sound, as if a crowd of fairies were going by in a great bustle, but to-day it sounds soft and sleepy. But we shall be late. The wind is not the right way for us to hear the bell. Don’t you think it is rather difficult to get to church at all when the road lies through a wood like this, Geneviève?”
“It is very pretty,” said Geneviève; “it would be charming to have a picnic here, Cicely.”
The idea roused her to something like enthusiasm, and made her temporarily forget the fears for the well-being of her pretty lavender muslin, which had considerably interfered with her enjoyment of the walk.
“Do you like picnics?” said Cicely.
“But yes, certainly I like them,” replied Geneviève; “that is to say, when there are plenty of agreeable people. At Hivèritz the picnics are charming. Once, Madame Rousille, the mother of one of my school companions, invited me to one that she gave when her eldest daughter was married. Ah, it was charming! But I was only fifteen then,” she added with a sigh.
“Why do you sigh, Geneviève?” asked Cicely.
“I was thinking how few pleasures I have had compared with Stéphanie Rousille,” said Geneviève naïvely; “her parents are so rich, they have a so beautiful house. You do not know what it is to be poor, my cousin.”
“No,” said Cicely, “I don’t; but I don’t think I should dread being poor so very much.”
“That is because you do not know,” replied her cousin sagely; and Cicely, owning to herself that the remark might be true, did not contradict her. She felt the less inclined to discuss the point that a certain selfishness in Geneviève’s allusions to her life at home diminished the sympathy she had felt anxious to express.
They were in good time at church, after all; they were almost the first-comers, and, considerably to Geneviève’s disappointment, when she followed her cousin to the Greystone pew, she found that it was in an extreme corner of the church, commanding no view of the rest of the congregation. It was very vexatious; she had set her heart on observing the Fawcett family, on being—not impossibly—observed and recognized by them, and, full of these hopes, she had put on her very best bonnet—for nothing, as it turned out, but a walk with Cicely through the woods, and the feeble admiration of a row of old women in poke bonnets and scarlet cloaks.
It was not an impressive or picturesque little church inside by any means, though outside, its ivy-grown old walls looked respectably venerable, if nothing more. It had never, however, occurred to Cicely Methvyn to remark its ugliness; it had been familiar to her since earliest childhood, the high dark pews, the top-heavy pulpit, and sentry-box reading-desk, even the very stains on the plaster had been a part of Sunday to her ever since she could remember, and had they been suddenly removed, their absence would have pained her, for, like most sensitive children, she shrank curiously from change. But on this particular Sunday, the bareness and general unattractiveness of the little building struck her as they had never done before; it had been shut up for several weeks during the clerical interregnum, and the superiority of Haverstock church had unconsciously impressed her; then, too, the unusual brightness and radiance of the morning outside rendered the contrast with the chill dinginess of the drab-coloured walls the more striking. Cicely could not restrain a passing feeling of pity for the new clergyman.
“How ugly he will think it, especially if he has been accustomed to any of those beautiful new churches,” she thought to herself, recalling what she had heard of Mr. Hayle, and she watched with some interest for his appearance.
He was not the least like what she had expected; he was a small, boyish-looking man—boyish-looking in a way which advancing years would not affect. He read well, and without hesitation, and his voice, though low, was not weak; the only nervousness he betrayed was at the beginning of his sermon, but he quickly recovered his self-possession as he went on. There was nothing remarkable about the sermon; it was not in itself strikingly original, nor expressed in particularly good English, yet Miss Methvyn found herself compelled to listen to it with attention, and though it contained quite the average amount of faulty logic and sweeping denunciation, it failed to irritate or even to annoy her. The gentleness and earnestness of the preacher’s manner disarmed her latent antagonism, the matter-of-fact conviction with which he uttered such of the dogmas of his school as his subject trenched upon, impressed her, in spite of herself, while the evident goodness of the man, the single-minded restrained fervour with which he spoke, aroused her admiration. Once or twice during the service, Cicely glanced at her cousin in some curiosity as to how she was affected by this, her first experience of English church-going. Geneviève’s face looked sad; once, it seemed to Cicely, its expression was troubled and bewildered as well. “Poor girl!” she thought, “I wonder if it all seems very strange to her. I dare say she is thinking about her Sundays at home, when her own father is the preacher.”
Her pity was misplaced; at that moment, home and friends, Monsieur Casalis and his sermons, were far enough from Geneviève’s thoughts. She was looking sad, because there was no Mr. Fawcett to be seen to admire the effect of her pretty bonnet; the distressed expression arose from the furtive efforts she made from time to time to obtain a view of that part of the church behind where she sat, in hopes of catching sight of the tall, fair-haired figure of the young milord.
Coming out of church, Miss Methvyn was waylaid by one of the scarlet cloaks with a string of inquiries and confidences; Geneviève was not partial to poor old women, and was just now too cross and disappointed to simulate an interest she did not feel, so she walked on slowly across the churchyard and a little way down the road by no means in a happy or hopeful frame of mind. This was her first Sunday in England, and already she was half inclined to wish herself back at Hivèritz again; she was beginning to think life at the Abbey triste in the extreme, and to feel provoked with her placid cousin’s content therewith. She certainly liked the sensation of ease and plenty, the comforts and luxuries and absence of the incessant small economies of her home, but this measure of enjoyment was far from being all that she had looked for in her new circumstances; she wanted to be féted and admired and amused; she wanted to see something of English society; she wanted Mr. Fawcett to fall desperately in love with her, and he had not even been at church.
Suddenly there came a quick step behind her,—in her preoccupation of mind she had wandered further than she had imagined; now she turned round with a start at the sound of her own name, and found herself face to face with Mr. Fawcett.
“Miss Casalis,” he exclaimed, “where in the world are you going? Cicely sent me after you, and it is a very hot day for May, let me remind you, and I haven’t a parasol.”
She looked up into his laughing face, all the brightness back again in her own.
“I am so sorry, so very sorry,” she said with her soft accent and pretty stress upon the r’s, “so sorry to have troubled you; I thought not of it.”
“By George!” thought the young man, as he let his eyes rest for a moment on the lovely blushing face, “she is frightfully pretty.”
Aloud he only made some little joking speech about his perfect readiness to run all the way to Haverstock in her service if she chose. “For this is the Haverstock Road you were posting along at such a rate,” he explained.
A foolish commonplace little speech, but it made Geneviève blush all the more; she had heard so much of the formality and the stiffness of Englishmen, that she was ready to attach absurdly exaggerated importance to the most ordinary little bit of gallantry, and to treasure up in her memory, as fraught with meaning, idle words forgotten by the speaker as soon as uttered.
“Where then is my cousin?” she said, turning as if to retrace her steps, but Mr. Fawcett stopped her.
“Cicely will meet us across the field,” he said; “there is a stile a few steps further on. You are not going home through the woods again, Miss Casalis, you are coming back to Lingthurst with me to luncheon; my mother ordered me to bring you and Cicely back—she has got a cold or a headache or something, and wants cheering—and so I came to church on purpose to fetch you. Wasn’t it good of me?”
He spoke in his usual half-bantering tone, and Geneviève hardly understood how much was fun, and how much earnest. So she said nothing, but looked up again and smiled; then a thought struck her.
“Did Cicely say I too should go to your—to Miladi Fawcett’s house to luncheon?” she inquired; “might it not be better that I should return to Greystone to tell my aunt?”
“Walk all the way there alone?” exclaimed Mr. Fawcett. “Certainly not. Of course you must come to Lingthurst, too. Cicely sent word home by Mrs. Moore. It will be all right. Cicely often comes back with us on Sundays. And didn’t I tell you, Miss Casalis, that I came to church on purpose?”
Geneviève made no more objections.
“I knew not that you were at church,” she said; “I could not see you.”
“Did you look for me?” said Mr. Fawcett lightly.
To his surprise Geneviève grew scarlet, and made no reply. He felt vexed with himself for annoying her.
“French girls are brought up so primly,” he reflected. “I suspect she thinks my manners very free and easy, poor little soul. How sensitive she is!”
There was increased gentleness in his tone when next he spoke.
“We sit up in the gallery,” he said; “we have a sort of little room up there all to ourselves. So I saw you, Miss Casalis, though you didn’t see me.”
Geneviève felt that the new bonnet and lavender muslin had not been donned in vain.
“There is Cicely,” continued Mr. Fawcett, “as happy as a king, chatting to her old woman. Another stile, Miss Casalis, that’s right; you are as light as a feather.”
Geneviève laughed merrily; the sound of the cheerful voices reached Cicely in front; she stopped, said good-bye to her old friend, and walked back slowly to meet her cousins.
“How much brighter Geneviève looks now,” she thought. “I wonder if it is really true that French people are so changeable. Those commonplace sayings must have had truth in them originally, though one’s inclination is to doubt them. But, certainly, Geneviève is not like an English girl; she is simpler and less sophisticated; and yet—”
Geneviève met her with an apology—an apology disproportionate to the occasion, it seemed to Cicely. She said so.
“Why, Geneviève, you talk as if I were an ogress,” she exclaimed. “Why should I be so vexed with you for walking on a little way? I should rather, if we are to be on such terms, apologize to you for staying behind to talk to old Mrs. Perkins.”.
A little hurt feeling was perceptible in her tone. Geneviève’s face assumed an expression of great distress, and her eyes grew dewy. She fell a few steps behind without speaking. Mr. Fawcett walked on beside Cicely. He looked annoyed.
“Are you put out about anything this morning, Cicely? You don’t seem like yourself,” he remarked.
Miss Methvyn looked up quickly. “You mean that I spoke crossly to Geneviève,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. But it is a little disappointing, Trevor; I can’t get her to understand me. She seems to forget that I am a girl like herself, and she seems in awe of me in a way that hurts me. I wish she were more frank.”
“More frank,” repeated Trevor; “upon my word, Cicely, you are difficult to please. If you had wished the poor little soul were a little more dignified, a degree more self-confident, I could understand you. It is no wonder she is in awe of you, as you say. You must throw off some of your reserve if you want to win her confidence.”
“I did not know you thought me reserved, Trevor,” said Cicely sadly. And then, before he had time to answer, she turned back to Geneviève. “Are you tired, dear?” she said kindly. “I am very thoughtless in forgetting you are not accustomed to such long walks as I.”
“I am not tired, thank you. That is to say, only the least in the world,” said Geneviève, in a sweet but subdued tone. But Cicely was not discouraged; she talked on persistently, drawing her cousin into the conversation, till at last Geneviève unconsciously forgot her role of pretty suffering saint, and Trevor his very rare fit of annoyance, and they were all three the best of friends again.
“And how do you like Mr. Hayle, Cicely?” asked Mr. Fawcett when there fell a little pause in the conversation.
“I don’t know,” she replied doubtfully. “I am sure he is a good man, and there is something in his manner that interests one, though I suspect I should disagree with him on almost every subject.”
Mr. Fawcett began to laugh.
“That speech is so like you, Cis,” he said.
“How?” said Cicely; but she laughed too.
“Oh! I can’t tell you,” he replied; “it was just like you, I can’t explain why. I saw that you were interested. I never saw you so attentive before. I shall be getting jeal—”
“Trevor,” exclaimed Cicely remonstratingly. The half word had caught Geneviève’s quick ears. She looked up with a sudden change of expression, and something in her face struck Cicely curiously; but in a moment the look had died out again, for Geneviève imagined that she saw before her the reason of Cicely’s exclamation. A few steps in front of them, in the lane they had just entered, a sudden turn showed the figure of the young clergyman. He was walking very fast, but Mr. Fawcett ran forward and overtook him.
“I looked for you after church,” he was saying to Mr. Hayle when the cousins came up, “but you had disappeared. My mother is expecting you at luncheon, you know.”
“At dinner, thank you,” replied Mr. Hayle, “I shall be very happy to dine with you, but I never take luncheon.”
“Where are you off to, then, in such a hurry?” asked Mr. Fawcett; “but I am forgetting,” he went on, “that you have not met Miss Methvyn before; Cicely, may I introduce Mr. Hayle to you?”
The clergyman bowed, growing rather red as he did so. On nearer view he looked even more boyish than at a little distance, and it was not difficult to see that he was unaccustomed to society.
“I am afraid Lingthurst church must strike you unpleasantly,” said Cicely, anxious to say something to set him at his ease. “I don’t think it ever occurred to me before how very ugly it is. It looked somehow, extra chilly and gloomy this morning. I even felt grateful to the row of old Dame Durdens in their red cloaks.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Hayle calmly, “I think it is the ugliest church, for its size, that I ever saw. I am glad you think it ugly, Miss Methvyn, for I hope you may help me to do what can be done towards improving it.”
Cicely looked a little startled.
“You must ask Lady Frederica in the first place,” she said. “Lingthurst isn’t our church, Mr. Hayle; we only go there because it is so much nearer than Haverstock.”
“And because it is so much nicer to walk through the woods than to drive along the dusty high-road,” observed Mr. Fawcett quietly.
“Trevor,” said Miss Methvyn, her face flushing a little.
Geneviève began to laugh, but Mr. Hayle looked graver than before. He disliked the faintest suspicion of a joke on certain subjects, and he saw that Miss Methvyn seemed annoyed. He turned to her, completely ignoring Mr. Fawcett’s remark.
“I am afraid there is not very much that can be done,” he said. “At the best I do not hope for much at present.”
Then they talked about other things for a few minutes till their ways separated, Mr. Hayle turning off in the direction of a small hamlet about a mile away.
“This is my best way to Notcotts, is it not?” he inquired as he said good-bye, and Mr. Fawcett went a few steps down the lane with him to make his instructions more clear.
“What in the world is he going to Notcotts for?” Trevor exclaimed as he rejoined the two girls.
“To see some sick person, no doubt,” said Cicely.
Mr. Fawcett gave a species of grunt. “I think he’s a prig,” he announced, at which Cicely smiled, and Geneviève, who had not the slightest idea what he meant, smiled too.
But now they were entering Lingthurst Park, and Miss Casalis’s whole attention was absorbed in looking about her. It was a much larger and grander place than Greystone, but neither as picturesque nor as homelike. It was newer, in every sense of the word, for Sir Thomas, the grandson of the first baronet, was but the second of his family who had owned land in Sothernshire, and his position on first succeeding to Lingthurst was not so assured as not to be strengthened by his marriage with Lady Frederica St. Ives, one of the four remaining unmarried daughters of an Irish earl of long descent and small possessions. Lady Frederica was a cousin on the mother’s side of Colonel Methvyn; she was not very young, and not very wise; she was very poor, and had been very pretty; she was still pleasing-looking, amiable, gentle, and perfectly absorbed in her immediate interests. So, though Sir Thomas, who might have been a usefully clever man, had contented himself with taking prizes for fat oxen and occasional appearances on the board, and though Lady Frederica’s silliness did not diminish with her years, the Fawcett household was looked upon as a happy and prosperous one, and there were not many mothers in Sothernshire who would have been other than delighted to welcome young Trevor as a son-in-law. And of this fact the person chiefly concerned was perfectly well aware. There was, perhaps, but one girl of his acquaintance whose feelings to him he believed to be completely unaffected by his present position or future prospects, and this girl was his cousin Cicely—Cicely, whom he had been trusted to hold in his little arms when he himself was a tiny lad, whose first toddling steps he had proudly guided—sweet Cicely, who was to be his wife “some day.”
But of nearly all that concerned Trevor Fawcett, Geneviève was in ignorance. She only knew that he was rich and handsome and agreeable; very nearly, if not quite, fulfilling the conditions she had prescribed to herself as requisite for the hero of her romance. And the sight of his home went far to confirm her predilections.
Everywhere at Lingthurst signs of wealth were scattered by a profuse but not vulgar hand. Everything was perfect of its kind, and perfectly well kept. There were no weeds in the borders, no grass on the paths, which was more than could be said for all the byways and corners of the queer, rambling, old garden at Greystone; the fruit and vegetables were always the finest and earliest of the season; the Lingthurst “glass” was the boast of the country-side. Indoors it was the same; carpets, curtains, sofas, chairs and tables of the best make and material; huge plate-glass windows, beautiful inlaid fireplaces, ormolu, marqueterie, Sèvres and Dresden everywhere. And all, to do the owners or their advisers justice, in unexceptionably good taste. There was no over-crowding, no heterogeneous mixture of colour, no obtrusive “gold.” But there were no quaint cloister passages like those at the Abbey, no latticed casements or deep window seats; no many-cornered, oak wainscoted room with the ivy leaves, peeping in at the windows, like the old library at Greystone. And when Cicely Methvyn, as she could not but do sometimes, glanced forward at her future life as mistress of this rich domain. When she thought of the days that must come, the days when her free, unfettered, girl life would be a thing of the past; when father and mother, already grey haired and ageing, would be further from their darling than the few miles which separated Greystone from Lingthurst,—when she looked forward to these things, sometimes Cicely’s heart failed her; why, she knew not. But a vague wish would arise that Trevor had been her brother; that he, not she, were her father’s heir. “If I could have looked forward to living on always at Greystone with Trevor, just as we are now!” she would say to herself; “I dread changes. I could have been happy never to have been married. Only, if Trevor had been my brother, he would have married—perhaps he would have married some one like Geneviève.”
This last thought came into her head suddenly, as they were all sitting at luncheon this Sunday in the grand Lingthurst dining-room, and though she smiled at herself for speculating on impossibilities, the picture of Geneviève as Trevor’s wife recurred persistently to her imagination. The pastor’s daughter was looking so bright and so very pretty, she seemed so wonderfully at home among the luxuries and splendours of Lingthurst, that Cicely found it difficult to realise the novelty and strangeness of the girl’s position. They all made so much of her; Sir Thomas was evidently struck by her beauty, and Lady Frederica, who prided herself a good deal on her “foreign travels,” and smattering of French and Italian, kept up a constant, gentle chatter about Hivèritz and Paris, and the charms of continental life, as if Geneviève were a little princess travelling incognita. And Geneviève sat on Sir Thomas’s right hand, with Mr. Fawcett beside her, and smiled and blushed and talked her pretty broken English; all with the most perfect propriety, but with a curious, indefinable taking it all as a matter of course in her manner, which surprised Cicely—surprised and puzzled her, and gave her again the uneasy sensation of not understanding her cousin, of having been mistaken in the estimate she had formed of her character. And gradually the feeling of bewilderment affected Cicely’s manner. She grew graver and more silent than usual, and felt provoked with herself for being so, especially when Sir Thomas’s inquiry if she had a headache, drew everybody’s attention to her.
“Oh! no, thank you, I am perfectly well,” she answered. But somehow the words sounded uneasy and constrained, and she felt glad when Lady Frederica proposed that they should stroll through the gardens before getting ready for afternoon church.
Sir Thomas’s gout was bad in one foot, and his wife was supposed to be suffering from influenza, so there were only Mr. Fawcett and Miss Winter to accompany the two girls in their ramble. And Geneviève being the stranger, it naturally came to pass that Mr. Fawcett appointed himself her guide to the points of interest about the grounds. So Cicely was left behind with Miss Winter, and for some minutes the two walked on in silence.
Miss Winter was fussy, but truly kind. She had known Cicely since she was a little girl, and loved her dearly. And, somehow, the order of things to-day was hardly to her liking. She could not bear to see the girl so silent and abstracted.
“You are not well, my dear Miss Methvyn,” she exclaimed at last. “I am perfectly certain you are over-tired, or anxious, or something.”
Cicely started. “No, indeed, I am not,” she replied hastily, “I am quite well, I assure you, Miss Winter. I am only very rude and selfish—I am a little dull, perhaps,” she added hesitatingly, “but it is very silly of me.”
She stifled a little sigh—she could not tell Miss Winter that for, as far as she could remember, the first time in her life, Trevor had to-day spoken unkindly and hurtingly to her.
“Everybody is dull sometimes,” said Miss Winter consolingly.
“Are you?” said Cicely. Then it struck her the question was a thoughtless one, and she looked up quickly to see if Miss Winter felt it to be such. “I beg your pardon,” she added hurriedly.
But there was no annoyance visible in the old maid’s kindly face. A face that had once been young and round and pretty, perhaps, thought Cicely with a sort of dreamy pity as she looked at it,—a face that still lighted up cheerily at small enough provocation.
“Why should you beg my pardon, my dear?” she exclaimed. “Of course, I am dull sometimes, but I try not to give way to it. You know, my dear, it is part of the business of my life to be cheerful.”
Poor Miss Winter! Cicely pitied her more than ever she had done before. But the little diversion of thought had been salutary.
They drove to afternoon church in the Lingthurst brougham, and when the service was over Miss Methvyn’s pony carriage was waiting for them. So Cicely had no more talk with Trevor alone. But as he was putting the reins in her hand, at the church door, he whispered, “You didn’t think me cross to-day; did you, dear? I am very sorry if I seemed so.”
A grateful glance was all the reply she had time for, but she drove home with a lighter heart.
And, “Ah! my cousin, what a pleasant day we have had!” exclaimed Geneviève. “La famille Fawcett est vraiment charmante; and, ah!” she added ecstatically, “quelle belle maison, que de jolies choses! Ah! que je voudrais étre riche!”
“Geneviève!” exclaimed Cicely, in a tone of some remonstrance. But Geneviève only laughed. Then sobering down again, she repeated her speech of the morning. “Ah! Cécile,” she said, “you don’t know what it is to be poor.”