‘We are not very rich,’ Mrs. Tracy said in reply; ‘but to have made acquaintance with you is such a pleasure. And it is not often we indulge ourselves.’
Mrs. Renton declared, when they were gone, that it was years since she had seen any one who pleased her so much. ‘As for the daughter, she is perfectly beautiful!’ she cried, in rapture; ‘and to think that such a lovely creature should have married Harry Rich!’
‘But we don’t know anything about Harry Rich,’ said Mary, who was disposed to be misanthropical; ‘perhaps he was a lovely creature too.’
‘I don’t understand what has come to you, Mary,’ said her aunt. ‘Why should you be so disagreeable? Such a nice, pretty creature; one would have thought she was just the very companion you want. And your own old schoolfellow, too! I never like to give in to what people say of girls being jealous of each other, but it really looks more like that than anything else.’
‘Yes; I suppose I must be jealous of her,’ said Mary; and Mrs. Renton took the admission for irony, and read her a long lecture when they went for their drive. It is hard upon a young woman to be lectured when she is out driving, and can neither run away nor occupy herself with anything that may make a diversion. Poor Mary had to listen to a great many remarks about the evils of envy and self-estimation, and the curious want of sympathy she showed.
‘Poor thing!—a widow at such an early age, and badly left, and with such very sweet manners. And the mother such a very judicious person,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I am so glad they are at The Willows. It will be quite a resource to the boys.’
Then indeed something very like bitterness rankled in Mary Westbury’s heart. Envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. Yes, very likely it would be a resource for the boys. In all her own long and tedious fulfilment of their duties, Mary had never once proposed to herself any reward ‘when the boys came home,’ and yet, perhaps, there had been in her heart some hope of appreciation,—some idea that they would understand what abnegation of herself it had been. They would know that this long, monotonous stretch of duty,—which was not, after all, her first natural duty,—was not less, but perhaps more hard, than their own wanderings and labour. And now all at once a cloud had fallen over this prospect. One soweth and another reapeth. Mary had laboured and denied herself for their sakes; but it was this stranger who would be the great resource for the boys. And Ben! Mary’s heart contracted with a secret, silent pang as she thought of Ben coming defenceless, unprepared, to find the syren who had,—she did not doubt,—bewitched and betrayed him, seated at his very gates. Her last conversation with him rose up before her as clear as if it had but just occurred. Ben, too, had ventured to suggest that she,—that all women,—would be envious of Millicent. Her heart rose with an indignant swell and throb. Was there nothing then in the world better than blue eyes and lips like rose-leaves, and the syren’s voice and smile? If that was all a man cared for, was he worth thinking of? She had gone and married Henry Rich when Ben was poor. And now that the man whose name she bore had opportunely vanished from her path, she had returned now Ben was about to regain his fortune, to lie in wait for him, with a miserable pretence of old friendship and tender regard for his cousin, who was to be the victim, and scapegoat, and sacrifice for all! Perhaps it was not much wonder that Mary was bitter. And she had all a woman’s natural distrust in the man’s powers of resistance. It never occurred to her that the syren of his youth might now have no attraction for him. ‘They are like that,’ she said to herself, with a true woman’s feeling of half-impatient tolerance, and pity, and something like contempt,—not blame, as if he were a free agent. It was not he, but she, upon whom it was natural to lay the blame.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DOVE.
About a week after the arrival of the visitors from The Willows, an arrival of a very different kind happened at Renton;—and yet it could not be called an arrival. There had been no further news, and the Manor was still in the same state of pleasant confusion and preparation,—the maids sitting and chatting over their work in the west wing, and a roomful of seamstresses working at the new carpets and curtains for ‘the boys’ rooms,’—when one morning Mary was mysteriously called out from Mrs. Renton’s room, where she was reading the newspaper, her usual morning occupation. ‘It was a lady who wanted to see her,’ the maid said; and was stolid, and refused all further particulars. ‘A lady,—any one who has been here lately?’ Mary asked, stiffening into sudden offence. It could be nobody but Millicent, she thought, though Millicent had been at the house repeatedly since her first visit, and was already known. ‘I never saw her before, miss,—not at Renton,’ was the reply; and Mary, annoyed, went to see for herself who the unknown visitor was. She had been set on edge by the events of the last few days. ‘Wheresoever the carrion is, there will the eagles be gathered together,’ she said to herself, with a kind of spiteful misery. So long as nothing was going to happen in the family, no mysterious visitors, neither men nor women, came near Renton; and now here was the second in a week! Perhaps some other syren to put herself in Ben’s way; perhaps somebody who possessed Laurie’s secret, whatever that might be. As for Frank, he was a married man, and had his wife to take care of him, and, heaven be praised! could have no secrets,—at least, none in which Mary could be compelled to interfere.
She went to the drawing-room door discontented, with no comfortable expectation. But when she had opened it, the most unexpected scene burst upon her eyes. The first thing she saw was a Hindoo ayah holding in her arms one of those milk-white, blue-veined children whose delicacy of tint contrasts so strangely with the dusky arms that carry them,—the kind of child of which one says involuntarily that it is an Indian child. Her first glance was at that pearly, blue-eyed creature, and then she turned round with a start and cry of joy upon a lady who stood by smiling.