“I should like the boys to have a home somehow,” said Virginia. “Perhaps that would make some place into home for me.”
“I don’t wish to desert you,” said Miss Seyton, “but candidly I think we should be happier apart. We shouldn’t amuse each other if we lived together. But won’t James want to keep you?”
“I don’t know,” said Virginia. “I am afraid it would not be a good plan for the boys to go there for holidays—if this place is to be given up. But oh, Aunt Julia, how can we tell what will happen? I can’t make plans; I don’t feel as if it mattered; and Roland seems to want to cast us all off.”
“Yes; he’s a selfish fellow. But, my dear, just consider how much worse it would be, if we had to take him on. Thank your stars that he means to stay in India. And as for the place, with its paint and its fences and its broken glass, let it go. We’re better free of it. He is right, there. The worst part of the story is poor old James who must stay.”
“He can’t forgive Roland.”
“No—you see, Queenie, it’s wits that tell.—James hasn’t brains, and he has never thought of cutting himself loose. He couldn’t live away from Elderthwaite, any more than he could live without his skin. But when he hasn’t the family dignity to keep him up, I’m afraid he’ll go down.”
“He is so wretched now about Cheriton Lester.”
“Yes. He is the only Lester worth fretting for. As for that prig Jack, I’d like to see him make a fool of himself. I’d like to see him ‘exceed his allowance considerably.’ There’s a pretty way of putting it for you!”
With which parting shot Miss Seyton went away, and Virginia sat sorrowful and perplexed, and with something of the family bitterness in her heart. Life was very hard to her. Her love for each one of her relations was a triumph over difficulties, and the sweet spontaneous passion that had promised to make her happy had been in its turn triumphed over by the uncongeniality of her lover. The softness of early youth and of her previous training had been replaced by something of the strength that expects little and makes the best of a bad business, but at a risk, the risk of the sense that evil is inevitable. Virginia was always outwardly gentle; but she had been thrown back on herself till she had gained a self-reliance that the Seyton blood in her was ready to exaggerate into scorn. For even Ruth was slow in answering her letters, and never wrote as in her girlish days.
As she sat musing a note was brought to her. It was from Mrs Lester, containing Cheriton’s imperative request that she would come and see him. Would she come at once?