‘No.’
They both recollected why—and that ‘the next expedition’ after those long honeymooning travels was to have been accompanied by ‘the child.’ Cara remembered this with a certain bitterness; her father merely with melancholy sentiment.
‘Ah!’ he said, vaguely, ‘we must mend that—some day. And how are the aunts? I can fancy that my sister looks just as she always did. She and I are at the age when people change little. But Aunt Charity? she is getting quite an old woman now—over seventy. Have you been dull in the country, Cara? or have they petted you so much that you will feel it dull to be here?’
He looked at her with a smile which lit up his face, and touched her heart just a little; but the question touched something else than her heart—her pride and sense of importance.
‘I was not dull,’ she said. ‘One is not dull when one has something to do—and is with those whom one loves.’
‘Ah!’ he said, looking at her with a little curiosity; ‘that is a better way of putting it, certainly,’ he added, with a smile.
Then there was a pause. John, behind Mr. Beresford’s chair, who had been in the house when Cara was born, and who thought he knew his master thoroughly, had much ado not to interfere, to whisper some instructions in her father’s ear as to how a child like this should be dealt with, or to breathe into Cara’s an entreaty that she would humour her papa. He said to his wife afterwards that to see them two sitting, pretending to eat their dinners, and never speaking, no more nor if they were wax images—or, when they did talk, talking like company—made him that he didn’t know whether he was standing on his head or his heels. How many hints our servants could give us if decorum permitted their interference! John felt himself a true friend of both parties, anxious to bring them as near to each other as they ought to be; but he knew that it would have been as much as his place was worth had he ventured to say anything. So he stood regretfully, wistfully, behind backs and looked on. If he could but have caught Miss Cara’s eye! but he did not, not even when, in the confusion of his feelings, he offered her mustard instead of sugar with her pudding. Her feelings were so confused also that she never noticed the mistake. Thus the dinner passed with nothing but the sparest company conversation. There were but these two in the world of their immediate family, therefore they had no safe neutral ground of brothers and sisters to talk about.
‘Is your room comfortable?’ Mr. Beresford said, when they had got through a comfortless meal. ‘If I had been here sooner, I should have refurnished it; but you must do it yourself, Cara, and please your own taste.’
‘I don’t think I have any taste,’ she said.
‘Ah, well!—perhaps it does not matter much; but the things that pleased you at ten will scarcely please you at seventeen. Seventeen are you? and out, I suppose? One might have been sure of that. Cherry would have no peace till she had you to go to parties with her.’