“Arthur will never have any children,” said Lady Curtis gloomily, “if things do not change. And she is young and strong, as young as you are—why should she die to accommodate us? And Gerald Curtis is a wandering invalid. Ah! there is no fear of the Seymours—they will have their own flesh and blood after them whatever happens. But your father is growing an old man, Lucy; and Bertie—Bertie’s son will be the heir!”
“He is not even married yet; there can be no need for vexing ourselves over such a remote contingency.”
“But it will happen,” said Arthur’s mother, “though it is so remote. My boy is like Warrington, in ‘Pendennis,’ Lucy, shut off from life; no child for him, no love for him; all because of one foolish, foolish step when he was nothing but a boy!”
“But, mamma! you really do not mean that boys should be permitted to escape the consequences of such foolish steps,” cried Lucy. “How unlike you to say so!”
“Ah! one becomes unlike one’s self when it is one’s self that suffers,” said Lady Curtis with a sigh.
And then Bertie made his appearance, and all feeling was banished from her countenance. She discussed young Seymour’s marriage with interest. “Nothing could have been more suitable. So suitable that one felt something must interpose to put a stop to it. The girl of all others he ought to have married! And a charming girl—pretty and well-bred, and sweet—”
“I hear they are all immensely pleased; but I do not admire her so much as you do. She is not the style I care for,” said the Rector. “She is too charming, and too sensible, and too everything she ought to be—for me.”
“Faultily faultless,” said Lady Curtis smiling. She was pleased that he did not approve of young Seymour’s perfect wife.
“And she is heavy,” said Bertie. “I used to know her very well. Her brother was of my college. She will not be an addition to the gaiety of the family. She has not very much to say for herself.”
“All the more suitable,” Lady Curtis said, brightening visibly, “they are all heavy.” She had never liked Bertie so well. She told him the news in Arthur’s last letter, that he was liking Vienna very much, and happy in his new position; and wound up by an invitation to dinner. Lucy sat by and worked, and wondered, not without a smile about the corners of her mouth. She had no objection to her cousin, nor any alarm of him in her mind. He was “not the style she cared for,” she said to herself with a mocking echo of his speech; but that Lady Curtis, after her melancholy anticipation of the inevitable heirship of Bertie’s problematical son should be so easily mollified, amused her daughter. She let the conversation go on while she worked quietly, thinking her own thoughts. Lucy did not, perhaps, find the idea of remaining unmarried as attractive as her father did. She smiled at that too in her secret thoughts. Who is there that does not smile at it, being young? Why should there be anyone in the world who was not happy—who did not have all that the imagination desires, love and honour, and all the brightnesses and sympathy which love can give? Lucy had a private world to retire into at odd moments, a world so peopled that her fancy could not receive the idea of a lonely life. While her mother and Bertie talked, she had opened her secret door and gone in, entering into that vague sweet blessedness of dreams which is more than any vulgar reality of happiness. She heard their conversation, but it did not touch her. Her head was bent down a little over that work at which she was seldom so industrious, and even the smile was concealed that floated about her lips—that smile which was not for her family, much as she loved them. Lady Curtis had tried her best to lift the curtain, to look into that secret world of which she suspected the existence, but which she had no clue to, no thread to guide her through; but it did not occur to her to think of this at the moment when her daughter had escaped into it from her very side.