But when they came to the great door, and were about to separate, she “thought it her duty” to leave him with a final word of counsel, “Mr. Earnshaw,” she said, almost timidly, “you saw that I was carried away by my feelings—for I feel for you, however I may be obliged to side with my sister in what she thinks to be best. You will forget all I have been so foolish as to say—and keep to what you said to her, won’t you? Don’t let me have done harm instead of good.”
“I will keep to what I said to her, religiously; she has my word,” said Edgar, “but don’t think I can ever forget what you have said to me.”
“Mr. Earnshaw, it was in confidence.”
“In closest, dearest confidence,” he said, “but not to be forgotten—never to be forgotten; that is not possible. It will be wiser to tell Lady Augusta what I have said; and remember, dear Lady Mary, you, who have been so good to me, that, at a moment’s notice, at a word, at a look, I am ready to go away.”
“Not if I can help it,” she said, half crying again, holding out her hand; and in sight of the biggest of the powdered footmen, and of the porter, and of one of the under-gardeners, all looking on in consternation, he kissed it, absolutely indifferent to what any one might say. To be sure it was only a little glove he kissed, warm out of her muff.
CHAPTER XXII.
The Opposite Camp.
The Thornleigh family, or at least the feminine portion of it, was, as has been indicated to the reader, in town—though it was still very early in the year—for the purpose of looking after little Mary’s trousseau, as her wedding was to take place at Easter. Lady Augusta’s family numbered eight altogether—five girls and three boys; and if I could tell you half the trouble she had gone through with them, you would no longer wonder at the wrinkles on her forehead. Her girls had been as troublesome as her boys, which seldom happens, and that was saying a great deal. Harry, the eldest son, was a prodigal, constantly in debt and in trouble; John, the second, who, it was hoped, would have distinguished himself by his brains, had been plucked for his degree; and the regiment of which Reginald, the youngest son, was an ornament, had been sent off to India, contrary to all prognostications. As for the daughters, though the youngest was nineteen, only one was married—a terrible thought for an anxious mother, as anxious to do her duty by her children as Lady Augusta was—and that one!
The eldest was Ada, who, when her lover, only a poor clergyman at the best, died of typhus fever, caught in his work, never would look at another man, but retired meekly into old maidenhood. The second, Helena, was the clever one of the family. She had more brains than all the rest put together, everybody said, and so indeed she herself thought—more than she knew what to do with. If that head could only have been put on her brother John’s shoulders, what a blessing to everyone concerned! for, alas! all the good her brains did her, was to betray her into a marriage with a very clever and very learned professor, painfully superior to everybody else, but altogether out of “her own class.” The third was Gussy, who had been always Lady Augusta’s most dearly beloved, and who, three years ago, had been all but betrothed to the best match in the county—young Edgar Arden; but when Edgar was ruined, and disappeared, as it were, off the face of the earth, Gussy, instead of abandoning him as a sensible girl should have done, clung with the obstinacy which distinguished the Thornleighs, to the very recollection of him—which, as he was still living and marriageable, though no match at all, was a fanaticism much less manageable than Ada’s. For Ada, if she insisted upon considering herself a widow, was at all events quite submissive in other matters, and content to be her mother’s right hand at home; but Gussy, who had by no means given up her personal possibilities of happiness, and whose hopes were still alive, had been very restless, and worried her family with many vagaries. Schemes and crotchets ran, I suppose, in the noble blood which Lady Augusta had transmitted to her daughters. It showed itself in different ways in the sisters: Helena’s ways had been all intellectual, but Gussy, who was benevolent and religious, was more difficult to deal with. The melancholy seclusion, which to an English mind is the first characteristic of a convent, has little to do with the busy beehive of a modern sisterhood; and a young woman connected with such an institution has claims made upon her which are wonderfully embarrassing to a fashionable mother. Helena, in her wildest days, when she had all sorts of committees going on, could be taken to her meetings and lectures in the carriage, like a Christian, and could be sent for when these séances were over; but Gussy had to trudge off on foot to all sorts of places in her long black cloak, and to visit houses in which fever, and every kind of evil, physical and moral, abounded; and was not to be shaken by any remonstrances. Indeed, the parents had been glad to compromise and consent to any amount of Associateship, so as to keep off the dreaded possibility of a determination on Gussy’s part to enter the Sisterhood for good and all. I do not think that Gussy herself ever threatened this, though she thought of it sometimes as her best alternative, if—; but there was still an if, a living and strong peradventure in her mind. Other good-natured friends, however, strongly pressed the possibility on Lady Augusta’s mind; they did all they could to persuade the anxious mother to take forcible steps in the matter, and constrain Gussy, on her obedience, to give up her objectionable charities and devotions. Fortunately Lady Augusta did not belong to that class of women who take pleasure in worrying their children for their good. She shook her head when her pretty daughter, still as pretty as in her first season, went out in her black cloak, and the hideous bonnet, which the mother would not allow to herself was “becoming,” notwithstanding its intrinsic hideousness. She moaned over the dirt, the disease, the evil smells and sights which her child was about to encounter, and about the risk of infection to which she would expose herself.
“Who can tell what you may bring back with you, Gussy?—fever, or one does not know what,” Lady Augusta said, piteously. “It is so different with our poor people at home, whom we all know.”
“I will shut myself up in my room, mamma; or I will go to the House, when there is anything infectious about; but I cannot give up my work,” said Gussy, filial, but determined.