In the meantime Heathcote Mountford felt as warmly as anyone could have desired the wonderful brightening of the local horizon which followed upon the ladies’ return. The Dower-house was for him also within the limits of a walk, and the decoration and furnishing which went on to a great extent after they had taken possession, the family bivouacking pleasantly in the meantime, accepting inconveniences with a composure which only ladies are capable of under such circumstances, gave opportunity for many a consultation and discussion. It was no obsequious purpose of pleasing her which made Heathcote almost invariably agree with Anne when questions arose. They were of a similar mould, born under the same star, to speak poetically, with a natural direction of their thoughts and fancies in the same channel, and an agreement of tastes perhaps slightly owing to the mysterious affinities of the powerful and wide-spreading family character which they both shared. By-and-by it came to be recognised that Anne and Heathcote were each other’s natural allies. One of them even, no one could remember which, playfully identified a certain line of ideas as ‘our side.’ When the winter came on and country pleasures shrank as they are apt to do, to women, within much restricted limits, the friendship between these two elder members of the family grew. That they were naturally on the same level, and indeed about the same age, nobody entertained any doubt, aided by that curious foregone conclusion in the general mind (which is either a mighty compliment or a contemptuous insult to a woman) that a girl of twenty-one is in reality quite the equal and contemporary, so to speak, of a man of thirty-five. Perhaps the assumption was more legitimate than usual in the case of these two; for Anne, always a girl of eager intelligence and indiscriminate intellectual appetite, had lived much of her life among books, and was used to unbounded intercourse with the matured minds of great writers, besides having had the ripening touch of practical work, and of that strange bewildering conflict with difficulties unforeseen which is called disenchantment by some, disappointment by others, but which is perhaps to a noble mind the most certain and unfailing of all maturing influences. Heathcote Mountford had not lived so much longer in the world without having known what that experience was, and in her gropings darkly after the lost ideal, the lost paradise which had seemed so certain and evident at her first onset, Anne began to feel that now and then she encountered her kinsman’s hand in the darkness with a reassuring grasp. This consciousness came to her slowly, she could scarcely tell how; and whether he himself was conscious of it at all she did not know. But let nobody think this was in the way of love-making or overtures to a new union. When a girl like Anne, a young woman full of fresh hope and confidence and all belief in the good and true, meets on her outset into life with such a ‘disappointment’ as people call it, it is not alone the loss of her lover that moves her. She has lost her world as well. Her feet stumble upon the dark mountains; the steadfast sky swims round her in a confusion of bewildering vapours and sickening giddy lights. She stands astonished in the midst of a universe going to pieces, like Hamlet in those times which were out of joint. All that was so clear to her has become dim. If she has a great courage, she fights her way through the blinding mists, not knowing where she is going, feeling only a dull necessity to keep upright, to hold fast to something. And if by times a hand reaches hers thrust out into the darkness, guiding to this side or that, her fingers close upon it with an instinct of self-preservation. This, I suppose, is what used to be called catching a heart in the rebound. Heathcote himself was not thinking of catching this heart in its rebound. He was not himself aware when he helped her; but he was dimly conscious of the pilgrimage she was making out of the gloom back into the light.
This was going on all the winter through. Mr. Morris’s papers, and all the harmonies or discordances of the furniture, and the struggle against too much of Queen Anne, and the attempts to make some compromise that could bear the name of Queen Victoria, afforded a dim amusement, a background of trivial fact and reality which it was good to be able always to make out among the mists. Love may perish, but the willow-pattern remains. The foundation of the world may be shaken, but so long as the dado is steady! Anne had humour enough to take the good of all these helps, to smile, and then laugh, at all the dimly comic elements around her, from the tremendous seriousness of the decorator, up to the distress and perplexity of the Rector and his alarmed perception of the possible old maid in her. Anne herself was not in the least alarmed by the title which made Mr. Ashley shiver. The idea of going over all that course of enchantment once again was impossible. It had been enchantment once—a second time it would be—what would a second time be? impossible! That was all that could be said. It was over for her, as certainly as life of this kind is over for a widow. To be sure it is not always over even for a widow: but Anne, highly fantastical as became her temper and her years, rejected with a lofty disdain any idea of renewal. Nevertheless, towards the spring, after the darkness had begun to lighten a little, when she found at a hard corner that metaphorical hand of Heathcote taking hers, helping her across a bad bit of the road, her heart was conscious of a throb of pleasure.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE LAST.
Rose’s behaviour had been a trouble and a puzzle to her family during the latter part of the year. Whether it was that the change from the dissipation of London and the variety of their wanderings ‘abroad’ to the dead quiet of country life, in which the young heiress became again little Rose and nothing more, was a change beyond the powers of endurance, or whether it was some new spring of life in her, nobody could tell. She became fretful and uncertain in temper, cross to her mother, and absolutely rebellious against Anne, to whom she spoke in a way which even Mrs. Mountford was moved to declare ‘very unbecoming.’
‘You ought to remember that Anne is your elder sister, at least, whatever else,’ the mother said, who had always been a little aggrieved by the fact that, even in making her poor, her father had given to Anne a position of such authority in the house.
‘Mamma!’ Rose had cried, flushed and furious, ‘she may manage my property, but she shall not manage me.’
The little girl talked a great deal about her property in those days, except when Mr. Loseby was present, who was the only person, her mother said, who seemed to exercise any control over her. By-and-by, however, this disturbed condition of mind calmed down. She gave Willie Ashley a great deal of ‘encouragement’ during the Christmas holidays; then turned round upon him at Easter, and scarcely knew him. But this was Rose’s way, and nobody minded very much. In short, the Curate was cruelly consoled by his brother’s misadventure. It is a sad confession to have to make; but, good Christian as he was, Charley Ashley felt better when he found that Willie had tumbled down from confidence to despair.
‘I told you you were a fool all the time,’ he said, with that fraternal frankness which is common among brothers; and he felt it less hard afterwards to endure the entire abandonment in his own person of any sort of hope.
And thus the time went on. Routine reasserted those inalienable rights which are more potent than anything else on earth, and everybody yielded to them. The Mountfords, like the rest, owned that salutary bondage. They half forgot the things that had happened to them—Anne her disenchantments, Rose her discovery, and Mrs. Mountford that life had ever differed much from its present aspect. All things pass away except dinner-time and bed-time, the day’s business, and the servants’ meals.
But when the third year was nearly completed from Mr. Mountford’s death, the agitation of past times began to return again. Rose’s temper began to give more trouble than ever, and Mr. Loseby’s visits were more frequent, and even Anne showed a disturbance of mind unusual to her. She explained this to her kinsman Heathcote one autumn afternoon, a few days before Rose’s birthday. He had asked the party to go and see the last batch of the cottages, which had been completed—a compliment which went to Anne’s heart—according to her plans. But Heathcote had stopped to point out some special features to his cousin, and these two came along some way after the others. The afternoon was soft and balmy, though it was late in the year. The trees stood out in great tufts of yellow and crimson against the sky, which had begun to emulate their hues. The paths were strewed, as for a religious procession, with leaves of russet and gold, and the low sun threw level lights over the slopes of the park, which were pathetically green with the wet and damp of approaching winter.