“That is very pretty of you,” said Constance, turning round to look at her; “if you are sure you mean it, and that it is not only true—in a sort of a way. I am afraid I have been nothing but a bore, breaking in upon you like this. It would be nice if we could be together,” she added, very calmly, as if, however, no great amount of philosophy would be necessary to reconcile her to the absence of her sister. “It would be nice; but it will not be allowed. You needn’t be afraid, though, for I can give you a number of hints which will make it much easier. Mamma is a little—she is just a little—but I should think you would get on with her. You look so young, for one thing. She will begin your education over again, and she likes that; and then you are like her, which will give you a great pull. It is very funny to think of it; it is like a transformation scene; but I daresay we shall both get on a great deal better than you think. For my part, I never was the least afraid.”
With this, Constance sank into her chair again, and resumed the book she had been reading, with that perfect composure and indifference which filled Frances with admiration and dismay.
It was with difficulty that Frances herself kept her seat or her self-command at all. She had been drawing, making one of those innumerable sketches which could be made from the loggia: now of a peak among the mountains; now of the edge of foam on the blue, blue margin of the sea; now of an olive, now of a palm. Frances had a consistent conscientious way of besieging Nature, forcing her day by day to render up the secret of another tint, another shadow. It was thus she had come to the insight which had made her father acknowledge that she was “growing up.” But to-day her hand had no cunning. Her pulses beat so tumultuously that her pencil shared the agitation, and fluttered too. She kept still as long as she could, and spoiled a piece of paper, which to Frances, with very little money to lose, was something to be thought of. And when she had accomplished this, and added to her excitement the disagreeable and confusing effect of failure in what she was doing, Frances got up abruptly and took refuge in the household concerns, in directions about the dinner, and consultations with Mariuccia, who was beginning to be a little jealous of the signorina’s absorption in her new companion. “If the young lady is indeed your sister, it is natural she should have a great deal of your attention; but not even for that does one desert one’s old friends,” Mariuccia said, with a little offended dignity.
Frances felt, with a sinking of the heart, that her sister’s arrival had been to her perhaps less an unmixed pleasure than to any of the household. But she did not say so. She made no exhibition of the trouble in her bosom, which even the consultations over the mayonnaise did not allay. That familiar duty indeed soothed her for the moment. The question was whether it should be made with chicken or fish—a very important matter. But though this did something to relieve her, the culinary effort did not last. To think of being sent away into that new world in which Constance had been brought up—to leave everything she knew—to meet “mamma,” whose name she whispered to herself almost trembling, feeling as if she took a liberty with a stranger,—all this was bewildering, wonderful, and made her heart beat and her head ache. It was not altogether that the anticipation was painful. There was a flutter of excitement in it which was almost delight; but it was an alarmed delight, which shook her nerves as much as if it had been unmixed terror. She could not compose herself into indifference as Constance did, or sit quietly down to think, or resume her usual occupation, in the face of this sudden opening out before her of the unforeseen and unknown.
CHAPTER XII.
The days ran on for about a week with a suppressed and agitating expectation in them, which seemed to Frances to blur and muddle all the outlines, so that she could not recollect which was Wednesday or which was Friday, but felt it all one uncomfortable long feverish sort of day. She could not take the advantage of any pleasure there might be in them—and it was a pleasure to watch Constance, to hear her talk, to catch the many glimpses of so different a life, which came from the careless, easy monologue which was her style of conversation—for the exciting sense that she did not know what might happen at any moment, or what was going to become of her. Even the change from her familiar place at table, which Constance took without any thought, just as she took her father’s favourite chair on the loggia, and the difference in her room, helped to confuse her mind, and add to the feverish sensation of a life altogether out of joint.
Constance had not observed any of those signs of individual habitation about the room which Frances had fancied would lead to a discovery of the transfer she had made. She took it quite calmly, not perceiving anything beyond the ordinary in the chamber which Frances had adorned with her sketches, with the little curiosities she had picked up, with all the little collections of her short life. It was wanting still in many things which to Constance seemed simple necessities. How was she to know how many were in it which were luxuries to that primitive locality? She remained altogether unconscious, accordingly, of the sacrifice her sister had made for her, and spoke lightly of poor Frances’ pet decorations, and of the sketches, the authorship of which she did not take the trouble to suspect. “What funny little pictures!” she had said. “Where did you get so many odd little things? They look as if the frames were homemade, as well as the drawings.”
Fortunately she was not in the habit of waiting for an answer to such a question, and she did not remark the colour that rose to her sister’s cheeks. But all this added to the disturbing influence, and made these long days look unlike any other days in Frances’ life. She took the other side of the table meekly with a half-smile at her father, warning him not to say anything; and she lived in the blue room without thinking of adding to its comforts—for what was the use, so long as this possible banishment hung over her head? Life seemed to be arrested during these half-dozen days. They had the mingled colours and huddled outlines of a spoiled drawing; they were not like anything else in her life, neither the established calm and certainty that went before, nor the strange novelty that followed after.
There were no confidences between her father and herself during this period. Since their conversation on the night of Constance’s arrival, not a word had been said between them on the subject. They mutually avoided all occasion for further talk. At least Mr Waring avoided it, not knowing how to meet his child, or to explain to her the hazard to which her life was exposed. He did not take into consideration the attraction of the novelty, the charm of the unknown mother and the unknown life, at which Frances permitted herself to take tremulous and stealthy glimpses as the days went on. He contemplated her fate from his own point of view as something like that of the princess who was doomed to the dragon’s maw but for the never-to-be-forgotten interposition of St George, that emblem of chivalry. There was no St George visible on the horizon, and Waring thought the dragon no bad emblem of his wife. And he was ashamed to think that he was helpless to deliver her; and that, by his fault, this poor little Una, this hapless Andromeda, was to be delivered over to the waiting monster.
He avoided Frances, because he did not know how to break to her this possibility, or how, since Constance probably had made her aware of it, to console her in the terrible crisis at which she had arrived. It was a painful crisis for himself as well as for her. The first evening on which, coming into the loggia to smoke his cigarette after dinner, he had found Constance extended in his favourite chair, had brought this fully home to him. He strolled out upon the open-air room with all the ease of custom, and for the first moment he did not quite understand what it was that was changed in it, that put him out, and made him feel as if he had come, not into his own familiar domestic centre, but somebody else’s place. He hung about for a minute or two, confused, before he saw what it was; and then, with a half-laugh in his throat, and a mingled sense that he was annoyed, and that it was ridiculous to be annoyed, strolled across the loggia, and half seated himself on the outer wall, leaning against a pillar. He was astonished to think how much disconcerted he was, and with what a comical sense of injury he saw his daughter lying back so entirely at her ease in his chair. She was his daughter, but she was a stranger, and it was impossible to tell her that her place was not there. Next evening he was almost angry, for he thought that Frances might have told her though he could not. And indeed Frances had done what she could to warn her sister of the usurpation. But Constance had no idea of vested rights of this description, and had paid no attention. She took very little notice, indeed, of what was said to her, unless it arrested her attention in some special way; and she had never been trained to understand that the master of a house has sacred privileges. She had not so much as known what it is to have a master to a house.