How very rarely, how “almost never,” do things turn out as we have pictured them to ourselves? How the misfortunes which we foresee and prepare to face disappear; how wholly unexpected difficulties and complications weave themselves about our unwary feet till we scarcely dare to risk a step! “If we had but known,” “if I had had any idea of this happening,” “ifs” without end, and better disregarded.
The unexpected came to Philippa Raynsworth this winter, though not altogether in painful guise, and she found, as so many of us do, that she had expended fears and misgivings in quite unnecessary directions.
Charles Raynsworth was the eldest of the family, and the only plain member of it. He had none of Philippa’s graceful stateliness, nor Evelyn’s charm of manner and appearance, some traces and promise of all of which were to be found in the two younger boys—handsome Hugh and blue-eyed Leonard. But no one of the five brothers and sisters was more loved and trusted by the other four than the insignificant-looking head of the party. For the insignificance began and ended with his outward appearance; he was far above the average in every other direction; intellectually gifted and possessing, in addition to undoubted talent, the “genius” of perseverance and steady application; honest and straightforward like all his family, unselfish and with a power of sympathy unusual in a man. No wonder that “Charley’s” home-coming was the best of good news.
And for a day or two the pleasure of all being together again shed a rosy hue over everything. Charley was in such request that he had scarcely time to think. If he were not closeted with his father in the study, he was button-holed by his mother in the drawing-room; if he were not in the thick of the boys’ pets—feathered, guinea-pigs, and all the rest of them—admiring, advising, and doing his best to make sense of Hugh and Leonard both talking at once, he was pretty sure to be in the nursery, with Bonny riding on his shoulder, or listening to Evelyn’s maternal raptures over baby Vanda’s attempts at conversation. It was not till he had been some days at home that he one morning waylaid his mother and drew her out to the front of the house for a stroll up and down the gravel drive.
“You are not busy, are you, mother?” he said. “You have got your cook-interviewing and all that sort of thing over for the day, haven’t you? I want a talk with you without being interrupted, as we always are in the drawing-room, and in the afternoon it is even worse. Next week I must buckle to work regularly; but for these two or three days I have been giving myself time to settle down.”
It was a mild day—“mild for November,” as one so often hears people say when that maligned daughter of the year is with us, forgetting how very often the early days of the month are altogether charming.
“Shall I get you a shawl?” Charles Raynsworth went on, but his mother negatived the proposal.
“I am not the least cold,” she said, “and if we keep at this side of the house it is always sheltered. What is it, dear, that you want to talk about? Nothing wrong?” and a slight furrow of anxiety made itself seen between her eyebrows. For the moment, unreasonable though it was, a fear startled her that possibly—could it be?—was Charley going to tell her that Philippa’s escapade had come to his ears?
But her son’s first words reassured her.
“Don’t look so startled and anxious, mother,” he said, eagerly. “No, of course it’s nothing wrong. I only want to take the bull by the horns, so as to prevent anything wrong coming to pass. Mother, I don’t think my father is looking well—one notices looks, you see, dropping in among you all from the outside, as it were. And once the idea struck me it made me watch him; no, he is not what he was last year, I am quite sure of it. He is overdone. I can see that he has been working too hard.”