However, these delights came to an end when Mr. Beresford came home at length ‘to settle.’ To say with what secret dismay, though external pleasure, this news was received at ‘the Hill’ would require a volume. The hearts of the ladies there sank into their shoes. They did not dare to say anything but that they were delighted.
‘Of course I am to be congratulated,’ Miss Charity said, with a countenance that seemed to be cut out of stone. ‘To see James settle down to his life again is the greatest desire I can have. What good was he to any one, wandering like that over the face of the earth? We might all have been dead and buried before we could have called him back.’
‘Of course we are delighted,’ said Miss Cherry, with a quaver in her voice. ‘He is my only brother. People get separated when they come to our time of life, but James and I have always been one in heart. I am more glad than words can say.’ And then she cried. But she was not a strong-minded or consistent person, and her little paradoxes surprised nobody. Miss Charity herself, however, who was not given to tears, made her blue eyes more muddy that first evening after the news came, than all her seventy years had made them. ‘What is the child to do?’ she asked abruptly when they were alone; ‘of an age to be “out,” and without a chaperon, or any sense in his head to teach him that such a thing is wanted?’
‘You would not like him to marry again?’ said Miss Cherry, blowing her agitated nose.
‘I’d like him to have some sense, or sensible notions in his head, whatever he does. What is to become of the child?’
Alas! I fear it was, ‘What is to become of us without her?’ that filled their minds most.
It was autumn; the end of the season at which the Hill was most beautiful. It had its loveliness too in winter, when the wonderful branching of the trees—all that symmetry of line and network which summer hides with loving decorations—was made visible against the broader background of the skies, which gained infinitude from the dropping of those evanescent clouds of foliage. But the common mind rejected the idea of the Hill in winter as that place of bliss which it was acknowledged to be during the warmer half of the year. In autumn, however, the ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ of the great plain, the tints of fervid colour which came to the trees, the soft hazy distances and half-mournful brightness of the waning season, gave the place a special beauty. There were still abundant flowers fringing the lawn; blazing red salvias, geraniums, all the warm-hued plants that reach the ‘fall;’ big hollyhocks flaunting behind backs, and languishing dahlias. Some late roses lingered still; the air was sweet with the faint soft perfume of mignonette; petunias, just on the point of toppling over into decay, made a flutter of white and lilac against the walls, and here and there a bunch of belated honeysuckle, or cluster of jessamine stars out of date, threw themselves forth upon the trellis. It was on the sweetest mellow autumnal day, warm as July, yet misty as October, that the Miss Beresfords had their last garden-party for Cara. All their parties were for Cara; but this was especially hers, her friends far and near coming to take leave of her, as her life at the Hill terminated.
‘She goes just at the proper moment,’ Miss Charity said, sitting out on the lawn in her white crape shawl, receiving her visitors, with St. George’s and all the plain beyond shining through the autumn branches like a picture laid at her feet. ‘She takes the full good of us to the last, and when winter comes, which lays us bare, she will be off with the other birds. She lasts just a little longer than the swallows,’ said the old lady with a laugh.
‘But you can’t wonder, dear Mrs. Beresford, that she should wish to go to her father. What can come up to a father?’ said Mrs. Burchell, meaning, it is to be supposed, to smooth over the wound.
Miss Charity lifted her big green fan ominously in her hand. It was closed, and it might have inflicted no slight blow; and, of all things in the world, it would have pleased the old lady most to bring it down smartly upon that fat hand, stuffed desperately into a tight purple glove, and very moist and discoloured by the confinement, which rested on the admirable clergywoman’s knee.