He patted her on the shoulder, took her hand, gazed at it—the round, rosy, girlish hand—with a melancholy tenderness; then bade "Good-bye" to us all generally, and rode off.
It struck me then, though I hurried the thought away—it struck me afterwards, and does now with renewed surprise—how strange it was that the mother never noticed or took into account certain possibilities that would have occurred naturally to any worldly mother. I can only explain it by remembering the unworldliness of our lives at Beechwood, the heavy cares which now pressed upon us from without, and the notable fact—which our own family experience ought to have taught us, yet did not—that in cases like this, often those whom one would have expected to be most quick-sighted, are the most strangely, irretrievably, mournfully blind.
When, the very next day, Lord Ravenel, not on horse-back but in his rarely-used luxurious coronetted carriage, drove up to Beechwood, every one in the house except myself was inconceivably astonished to see him back again.
He said that he had delayed his journey to Paris, and gave no explanation of that delay. He joined as usual in our midday dinner; and after dinner, still as usual, took a walk with me and Maud. It happened to be through the beech-wood, almost the identical path that I remembered taking, years and years ago, with John and Ursula. I was surprised to hear Lord Ravenel allude to the fact, a well-known fact in our family; for I think all fathers and mothers like to relate, and all children to hear, the slightest incidents of the parents' courting days.
"You did not know father and mother when they were young?" said Maud, catching our conversation and flashing back her innocent, merry face upon us.
"No, scarcely likely." And he smiled. "Oh, yes—it might have been—I forget, I am not a young man now. How old were Mr. and Mrs. Halifax when they married?"
"Father was twenty-one and mother was eighteen—only a year older than I." And Maud, half ashamed of this suggestive remark, ran away. Her gay candour proved to me—perhaps to others besides me—the girl's entire free-heartedness. The frank innocence of childhood was still hers.
Lord Ravenel looked after her and sighed. "It is good to marry early; do you not think so, Mr. Fletcher?"
I told him—(I was rather sorry after I had said it, if one ought to be sorry for having, when questioned, given one's honest opinion)—I told him that I thought those happiest who found their happiness early, but that I did not see why happiness should be rejected because it was the will of Providence that it should not be found till late.
"I wonder," he said, dreamily, "I wonder whether I shall ever find it."