Lucy shook her head. She could not muster courage to speak, the tears were in her eyes.
“Ah!” said Lady Randolph. Lucy’s emotion had a very disturbing effect upon her: but it moved her not to compassion for Mrs. Russell, but to suspicion against Bertie. “I never thought it would come to much,” she said. “It seems so easy to start anything like that. They had their furniture, and what more did they want? Indian children! one would think it rained Indian children; every poor lady with no money thinks she can manage to make a living out of them—without calculating that everybody in India, or almost everybody, has poor relations of their own.”
But she was kind, notwithstanding her severity. There are few people who are not more or less kind to absolute suffering. Though she thought Mrs. Russell silly, and considered that her son had been served rightly (if cruelly), and was impatient of the foolish hopes on which their little establishment had been founded, still she could not be satisfied to leave the poor lady whom she had known in her better days to want. “I will speak to Tom,” she said. “If Bertie could but get some situation, far better than writing nonsensical books, something in the Customs, or perhaps the post-office. I believe there are a great many young men of good families in places like that—where he could get a settled income, and be able to help his mother.”
Lucy made no reply to this suggestion. She brightened a little in the evening, when Sir Tom came in bringing all his news with him; but she was not herself. When she was safe in her room at night, she cried plentifully, like a child as she was, over her failure. Perhaps her heart had never been so sore. Sorrow, such as she had felt for her father, is a different thing—there had been no cross or complication in that; but in this all her life seemed to be compromised. This dearest legacy that had been left her, the power of making others happy, was it to be a failure in her hands? She had never contemplated such a probability. In all the books she had read (and these are a girl’s only medium of knowledge) there had been no such incident. There had been indeed records of profuse gratitude; followed by unkindness and indifference; but these had never alarmed Lucy. Gratitude had been the only thing she feared, and that the recipients of the bounty should forget it was her chief hope. But this unexpected rebuff threw Lucy down to the earth from those heights of happy and simple beneficence. Was it her fault? she asked herself; had she offered it unkindly, shown any ungenerous feeling? She examined every word she had said—at least as far as she could recollect them, but she had been so much agitated, so overwhelmed by the excitement and passion of the others, that she could not recollect much that she had said. All night long in her dreams she was pleading with people who would not take her gifts, and blaming herself for not knowing how to offer them. And when she woke in the morning, Was it my fault? was the first question that occurred to her. It seemed to assail the very foundations of her life. Was not this her first duty, and if she could not discharge it, what was to become of her? What would be the value of all the rest?
She was sitting in the sitting-room in the morning, somewhat disconsolate, pondering these questions. A bright, still morning of midsummer, all the windows open, and shaded by the pretty striped blinds outside, which kept out the obtrusive sunshine, yet showed it brilliant over all the world below; the windows were full of flowers, those city plants always at the fullest perfection, which know no vicissitudes of growth or decay, but fill the luxurious rooms with one continuous bloom, by grace, not of nature, but the gardener. It was the hour when Lucy was supposed to “read.” She had not herself any great eagerness for education; but no woman who respects herself can live in the same house with a young girl nowadays without taking care to provide that she shall “read.” Lucy had need enough, it must be allowed, to improve her mind; but that mind, so far as the purely intellectual qualities were concerned, did not count for very much in her being. To be more or less well-informed does not affect very much, one way or other, the character, though we fear to utter any dogmatism on such a subject. She was reading history, poor child; she had a number of books open before her, a large atlas, and was toiling conscientiously through a number of battles. Into the very midst of these battles, her thoughts of the earlier morning, which were so much more interesting to her, would intrude, and indeed she had paused after the Battle of Lepanto, and was asking herself, not who was Don John of Austria, or what other great personages had figured there, which was what she ought to have done, but whether it could possibly be her fault, and in what other form she could have put it to succeed better, when suddenly, without any warning, a knock came to her door. She sat very bolt upright at once, and thought of Don John before she said “Come in.” Perhaps it was the lady who was so kind as to read with her—perhaps it was Lady Randolph. She said, “Come in,” and with no displeasure at all, but much consolation, closed her book. She was not sorry to part company with Don John.
To her great surprise, when the door opened it was neither Lady Randolph nor the lady who directed her reading, but Mrs. Russell, with the heavy crape veil hanging over her bonnet, her eyes still very red, and her countenance very pale. Lucy rose hastily from her chair, repeating her “Come in,” with the profoundest astonishment, but eagerness. Could it be Jock who was ill? could it be— Mrs. Russell smiled a somewhat ghastly smile, and looked with an anxious face at the surprised girl. She took the chair Lucy gave her, threw back her veil, and the little mantle from her shoulders, which was crape, too, and looked suffocating. Then she prepared for the interview by taking out her handkerchief. Tears were inevitable, however it might turn out.
“You will be surprised to see me,” Mrs. Russell said.
Lucy assented, breathless. “Is there, anything the matter with Jock?” she said.
“It is natural you should think of your own first,” said the visitor, with, a little forced smile. “Oh, very natural. We always think of our own first. No, Miss Trevor, there is nothing the matter with Jock. What should be the matter with him? He is very well cared for. My poor Mary gives herself up to the care of him. She lies awake with him and his stories. Mary is a— She is the best daughter that ever was—” the mother said, with fervor. Now, Mary was generally in the background among the Russells, and Lucy was perplexed more and more.
“It is by Mary’s advice I have come,” Mrs. Russell said, putting her handkerchief to her eyes. “It has been very difficult for me, very difficult to make up my mind to come, Miss Trevor. Mary says she is sure you meant—kindly—yesterday. I don’t know how to refer to yesterday. Everything that passed is written here,” she said, putting her hand upon her breast, “as if it were in fire—as if it were in fire! Oh, Miss Trevor! you don’t know what it is when a woman has kept up a good position all her life, and always been able to hold her head high—you don’t know what it is when she has to give in, and allow herself to be spoken to as one of the poor!”