But in one matter there had been no disappointment. The fact that Lucy's childhood had been spent, though not unhappily, far from her parents, seemed to make her doubly dear to them: and then, to their fond eyes and hearts, their child was everything a girl should be. Unlike the girls of whom Mrs. Kemp sometimes heard so much, she showed no desire to leave her father and mother—no wish even to enjoy the gaieties which fell to the lot of her contemporaries who lived amid livelier scenes than those afforded by a remote Sussex village, and this though she was as fond of dancing and of play as other young creatures of her age.
Until a year ago,—nay, till six months back,—Mrs. Kemp would have disbelieved an angel, had so august a visitant foretold that there would soon arise, and that through no fault of hers or of the girl's, a cloud between her daughter, her darling Lucy, and herself; and yet this thing, this incredible thing, had come to pass.
The worst the mother had feared, and she had sometimes feared it greatly, was that her only daughter, following in this her own example, would marry to India, or, worse still, to some far-away colony. But, even so, Mrs. Kemp would have made the sacrifice, especially if Lucy's lover had in any way recalled the Tom Kemp of thirty years before.
However, as so generally happens, the danger the mother had dreaded passed by harmlessly: Lucy received and rejected the offer of a soldier, the son of one of the General's oldest friends; and her girlish heart had turned to something so utterly different, so entirely unexpected, that neither Mrs. Kemp nor Lucy's father had known how to deal with the situation which had come upon them with a suddenness which had amazed them both.
In spite of her look of unformed youth and gravely young manner, Lucy Kemp was in no sense a child. There are surely many women who at some stage of their life, paraphrasing the famous phrase, might well exclaim, "I think, therefore I am—a woman." But such a test would convict many women of eternal childhood.
Lucy, during the last year, had thought much—too much, perhaps, for her comfort. She had early made up her mind as to what she did not wish to do with her life. In no circumstances would she become the wife of Captain Laxton, but she had found it difficult to convince him of her resolution.
So it was that now, during those dreary days when the flow of constant communication between Oliver Boringdon and the Grange had ceased, as if by a stroke of malignant magic, poor Lucy had had more than time to examine her mind and heart, and to feel a dreadful terror lest what she found there should also be discovered by those about her, and especially by Oliver himself.
Mrs. Kemp was not well—so rare an occurrence as to alter all the usual habits of the Grange. The General wandered disconsolately about the garden, and through the lower rooms, reading, smoking, and gardening, but it always ended in his going up to his wife's room. Lucy, standing apart, was not too busy with her thoughts to realise, more than she had ever done before, the vitality, the compelling bondage, of such an attachment as that between her quiet, rather silent, father and her impulsive affectionate mother. Watching those two with a new, and an almost painful, interest, the girl told herself that, for a year of such happy bondage between herself and Oliver Boringdon, she would willingly give the rest of her life in exchange.
Looking back, especially on the last few months, Lucy was able to recall many moments, nay hours, when Oliver had undoubtedly regarded her as being in a very special sense his friend. Bending over her work, sitting silent by her mother's bedside, Lucy would suddenly remember, with a fluttering of the heart, certain kindly looks, certain frankly uttered confidences—and, remembering these things, she would regain some of the self-respect which sometimes seemed to have slipped away from her in a night. To Lucy Kemp the thought of seeking before being sought was profoundly repugnant, and she was deeply ashamed of the feeling which possessed her, and which alone seemed real in her daily life.