Margaret Maliphant

by Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

"There," said he, patting my cheek, "I thought she hadn't lost her pride."

And neither had I; but the strangeness of the request, and the strangeness of Mr. Hoad's face as he read the letter, set me thinking most uncomfortably all the way home. Nor was it only on that occasion that I had need to ponder somewhat anxiously on matters that were not my own.

A Sunday morning about this time comes back to my mind. Father had been up to London during the week on one or two matters of business. It was an event in those days for a farmer to go up to London. To father it was specially an event, for he always had been a more than usually stay-at-home man. But there must have been some special reason that took him up; he had seemed disquieted for some time.

I had fancied that it was purely on account of that scheme that Frank Forrester had not yet succeeded in floating, and I was angry with Frank for that cooling down which I have noticed as happening in him whenever he got away from the fiery influence. I was angry with Joyce for not keeping him up to his first ardor, angry with mother for not allowing them to correspond, so that she might do so. But after all, I don't believe that father's uneasiness was entirely owing to Frank Forrester, for his journey to London was suddenly decided upon one afternoon after he and Mr. Hoad had had a long talk together in the business-room. Father had seen Harrod afterwards, and had then announced his proposed journey at the tea-table.

He had been away only two days; but although he said that he had been made a great deal of by the old friend with whom he had stayed, and though he declared that Frank was just the same as ever, and it was therefore to be supposed that they had been as good comrades as usual, father looked none the better for his little change. As we all stood up in the old church to say the Creed, I remember noticing how ill he looked.

It was not only that he bent his tall, massive figure over the desk, leaning heavily upon it with both hands, as if for needful support; it was not even that his cheeks were more sunken, and that he bowed his head wearily; it was that in his dull eyes and set lips there was an air of suffering, of dejection and hopelessness, that was pathetic even to me who should have known nothing of pathos at nineteen. It struck me with sad forebodings, and those words of the squire's a few weeks before came back to my mind.

I glanced at mother's face—beautiful and serene as ever—with the little net-work of delicate wrinkles spread over its soft surface, and the blue eyes content as a young girl's beneath the shadow of the thick white hair. It was what Joyce's face might grow to be some day, although at that time there were lines of character about the mouth which my sister's beauty lacked; it was what my face could never grow to. But surely neither of those two had any misgivings. "And the life of the world to come," repeated mother, gravely, saying the words a little after everybody else in a kind of conclusive way. But, somehow, I wondered whether she had really been thinking of what they meant, for she sat down again with almost a smile upon her lips and smoothed out her soft old black brocade without any air of undue solemnity.

I glanced at Joyce. Her eyes were bent down looking at her hands—large, well-shaped, useful hands, that looked better in the dairy or at her needle than they did in ill-fitting kid-gloves; her face was undisturbed, the lovely little chin resting on the white bow of the ribbon that tied on her fresh chip-bonnet. It was before the days when it was considered respectable to go to church in a hat.

I, too, had a white chip-bonnet—Joyce had brought them both from London, together with the blue merino frocks, which we also wore that day; but I did not look as well in a chip-bonnet as Joyce did.