“My home will be where you are, mother dear—for a long time at least,” answered Cicely, forcing herself to the little equivocation, while inwardly shivering at the thought of the bitter blow yet in store for her unselfish mother. “But it is exceedingly kind and good of Sir Thomas to try to arrange so that things need not become public.” She stopped and hesitated. “I wish it could be so,” she went on. “It would be hard to hear remarks made about our loss of money, as if—as if dear papa had been rash or incautious in any way—by people who did not know him, I mean.”
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Methvyn, “it would be very hard. But since I have heard Sir Thomas’s plans, I do not feel afraid of anything of the kind. It will be a great comfort to me to think of your being settled here again before long, whatever arrangements I make for myself.”
“But, mother, you could not do without me, you know you couldn’t,” said Cicely. “Why do you talk as if it were possible we could ever be separated; we never can be now, mother?”
Mrs. Methvyn smiled, a faint sad little smile, that went to Cicely’s heart.
“We need not talk about it just yet, any way,” she said soothingly. And at that moment Geneviève came into the room, so no more was said.
During these days of darkened rooms and hushed voices and mysterious anxiety, Geneviève had drooped sadly. Her fit of humility and grateful affection for Cicely had passed by; perhaps Cicely had not encouraged its expression, and there had been times when she had been very cross and unamiable, indeed. The truth was that she was exceedingly unhappy; and it takes a higher nature than poor Geneviève’s to bear the strain of a protracted and uncertain trouble with a calm, if not, smiling face, with no querulous complaints of the never-failing trivial annoyances which at such times seem to have a double sting. Even Parker was forced back into her old position of dislike and suspicion. “If she were that sorry as she made out for my mistress and Miss Cicely, she would be thinking too much of their trouble to care about her dress not fitting; or to be always wishing herself back again where she came from, and where I wish she had stayed,” grumbled the maid to Mrs. Moore, who in her heart agreed with Parker, though more cautious in putting her opinions into words.
But Cicely understood her cousin better, and pitied her exceedingly. The more trying and unreasonable Geneviève’s moods and tempers, the more Cicely compassionated the state of mind which gave rise to them.
“It must be so terrible to feel that one has been false and deceitful,” thought Cicely with a shudder, crediting, as was natural for her to do, remorse with a far larger share in Geneviève’s wretchedness than it really deserved. And she was marvellously patient with the wayward girl; but yet in her very patience, in her quiet kindness, there was a something against which Geneviève instinctively rebelled.
“Why does she look at me so? I have done no wrong; it is not my fault that Mr. Fawcett likes me best,” she would say to herself with a species of childish defiance that was one of her characteristics when roused to anger. “It was all that she was rich; but now that she is no longer rich, how will it be now?” and a gleam of hope would shoot across her for an instant, to be as quickly succeeded by misgiving and despair. “He said, he promised, he would tell her he could no longer marry her,” she repeated to herself a dozen times a day. “Why has he not done so? Two, three days are past since her father’s funeral, and he has not yet come; he has never come since the day she would not see him. And Cicely does not seem surprised. What can it be? Perhaps he has gone away!”
At last one morning, Geneviève in a fit of restless dreariness, set off for a walk by herself. It was the same morning on which Mrs. Methvyn and Cicely were talking together in the library, and it was on her return from her walk that Geneviève, entering the room, interrupted their conversation.