‘Rose! that is sacred. Rose! you must not touch it. I will never forgive you if you so much as break one seal,’ cried Anne.
‘Well, then, do it yourself. What can it matter if you break it to-day or in two years and a half? Papa never could mean that you were to keep it there and look at it, and never open it for two years and a half.’ All this time Rose turned over and over the little packet with its three red seals, playing with it as a cat plays with a mouse. ‘Perhaps it changes everything,’ she said; ‘perhaps there is a new will here without me having to make it. Why should we all be kept in such suspense, not knowing anything, and poor Mr. Douglas made so unhappy?’
‘Did Mr. Douglas tell you that he was unhappy?’ said Anne, humouring her tormentor, while she kept her eyes upon the letter. ‘Dear Rose, put it back again: here is the place for it. I have a great deal to do and to think of. Don’t worry me, dear, any more.’
Then Rose put it back, but with reluctance. ‘If it were addressed to me I should open it at once,’ she said. ‘It is far more important now than it will be after. Mr. Douglas did not tell me he was unhappy, but he let mamma guess it, which was much the same. Anne, if I were you, I would break the engagement; I would set him free. It must be dreadful to hold anyone like that bound up for life. And when you think—if nothing turns up, if this is to be the end, if you never have money enough to marry, why shouldn’t you do it now, and give yourselves, both of you, another chance?’
Anne rose up from her papers, thrusting them into the despatch-box pell-mell in the confusion of her thoughts. The little calm matter-of-fact voice which sounded so steadily, trilling on like a large cricket—was it speaking the truth? was this, perhaps, what it would have to come to? Her hands trembled as she shut the box hastily; her limbs shook under her. But Rose was no way disturbed. ‘You would be sure to get someone else with more money,’ she said serenely, ‘and so would he.’
CHAPTER XXVI.
GOING AWAY.
But this was not the first time that Anne had been driven out of patience by the suggestions of her little sister. When Rose had gone away, she calmed down by degrees and gradually got back her self-possession. What did Rose know about this matter or any other matter in which serious things like the heart, like love and the larger concerns of life were involved? She knew about superficial things, having often a keen power of observation, Anne knew; but the other matters were too high for her. Her unawakened mind could not comprehend them. How could she have found a way of seeing into Cosmo’s heart which was denied to Anne? It was impossible; the only thing that could have made her believe in Rose’s superior penetration was that, Anne felt, she did not herself understand Cosmo as she had thought she did, and was perplexed about his course of action, and anxious as to the motives which she could not believe to have been anything but fine and noble. Though his coming had brought her back to something of her original faith, yet she had been checked and chilled without admitting it to herself. All that we can conceive of perfection is, perhaps, what we would have done ourselves in certain circumstances, or, at least, what we would have wished to do, what we might have been capable of in the finest combination of motives and faculties; and whatsoever might be the glosses with which she explained his behaviour to herself, Anne knew very well that this was not how Cosmo had behaved. She could not think of his conduct as carrying out any ideal, and here accordingly was the point in which her mind was weak and subject to attack. But after a while she laughed, or tried to laugh, at herself; ‘as if Rose could know!’ she said, and settled down to arrange her papers again, and finally to write to Cosmo, which was her way of working off her fright and returning to herself.
‘Rose has been talking to me and advising me,’ she wrote. ‘She has been telling me what I ought to do. And the chief point of all is about you. She thinks, as we are both poor now, that I ought to release you from our engagement, and so “give us both another chance,” as she says. It is wonderful the worldly wisdom that is in my little sister. She thinks that you and I could both use this “chance” to our own advantage, and find someone else who is well off as a fitter mate for our respective poverties. Is it the spirit of the time of which we all hear so much, that suggests wisdom like this even in the nursery? It makes me open my eyes and feel myself a fool. And she does it all in such innocence, with her dear little chin turned up, and everything about her so smooth and childlike; she suggests these villanies with the air of a good little girl saying her lesson. I cannot be sure that it amused me, for you know I am always a little, as you say, au grand sérieux; but for you who have a sense of humour, I am afraid it would be very amusing. I wonder, if the people she advises for their good, took Rose at her word, whether she would be horrified? I hope and believe she would. And as for you, Cosmo, I trust you will let me know when you want to be freed from your engagement. I am afraid it would take that to convince me. I cannot think of you even, from any level but your own, and, as that is above mine, how could it be comprehensible to Rose? This calculation would want trigonometry (is not that the science?), altogether out of my power. Give me a hint from yourself, dear Cosmo, when that moment arrives. I shall know you have such a motive for it as will make it worthy of you.’
When she had written this she was relieved; though perhaps the letter might never be sent to its address. In this way her desk was full of scraps which she had written to Cosmo for the relief of her mind rather than the instruction of his. Perhaps, if her confidence in him had been as perfect as she thought, she would have sent them all to him. They were all appeals to the ideal Cosmo who was her real lover, confidences in him, references to his understanding and sympathy, which never would have failed had he been what she thought. This had been the charm and delight of her first and earliest abandonment of heart and soul to her love. But as one crisis came after another, or rather since the last crisis came which had supplied such cruel tests, Anne had grown timid of letting all these outpourings reach his eyes; though she continued to write them all the same, and they relieved her own heart. When she had done this now, her mind regained its serenity. What a wonder was little Rose! Where had the child learned all that ‘store of petty maxims,’ all those suggestions of prudence? Anne smiled to herself with the indulgence which we all have for a child. Some people of a rough kind are amused by hearing blasphemies, oaths which have no meaning as said by her, come out of a child’s lips. It was with something of the same kind of feeling that Anne received her little sister’s recommendations. They did not amuse her indeed, but yet impressed her as something ludicrous, less to be blamed than to be smiled at, not calling forth any real exercise of judgment, nor to be considered as things serious enough to be judged at all.
The packing up kept the house in commotion, and it was curious how little feeling there was, how little of the desolation of parting, the sense of breaking up a long-established home. The pleasure of freedom and expectations of a new life were great even with Mrs. Mountford: and Rose’s little decorous sorrow had long ago worked itself out. ‘Some natural tears she dropped, but wiped them soon.’ And it did not give these ladies any great pang to leave Mount. They were not leaving it really, they said to themselves. So long as the furniture was there, which was Mrs. Mountford’s, it was still their house, though the walls of it belonged to Heathcote—and then, if Heathcote ‘came forward,’ as Mrs. Mountford, at least, believed he would do——. Rose did not think anything at all about this. At first, no doubt, it had appeared to her as rather a triumph, to win the affections of the heir of entail, and to have it in her power to assume the position of head of the house, as her mother had done. But, as the sniff of the freshening breeze came to her from the unseen seas on which she was about to launch forth, Rose began to feel more disdain than pleasure for such easy triumphs. Cousin Heathcote was handsome, but he was elderly—thirty-five! and she was only eighteen. No doubt there were finer things in the unknown than any she had yet caught sight of; and what was Mount? a mere simple country house, not half so grand as Meadowlands—that the possible possession of it in the future should so much please a rich girl with a good fortune and everything in her favour. Leaving home did not really count for much in her mind, as she made her little individual preparations. The future seemed her own, the past was not important one way or another. And having given her sister the benefit of her advice with such decision, she felt herself still more able to advise Keziah, who cried as she put up Miss Rose’s things. On the whole, perhaps, there was more fellowship between Keziah and Rose than the little maid felt with the more serious Anne, who was so much older than herself, though the same age.