“What!” exclaimed Sylvia. “You don’t mean that she’ll guess!”
“She’s very clever at guessing, my child.” So Sylvia, as she rode home, realized that she had no more time to lose. When she got to the Hall, she set to work at once to carry out her plans.
She found her Aunt Varina in her room with a headache. On her dressing-table was a picture of the late-lamented Mr. Tuis, which Sylvia picked up. By manifesting a little interest in it, she quickly got her aunt to talking on the subject of matrimony.
Mrs. Tuis was the youngest of the Major’s sisters. In the face of the protests of her relatives she had married a comparatively “common” man, who was poor and had turned out to be a drunkard, and after leading Aunt Varina a dog’s life, had taken chloral. So Mrs. Tuis had come back to eat the bread of charity—which, though it was liberally sweetened with affection, had also a slightly bitter taste of compassion.
Her ill-fated romance was a poor thing, perhaps—but her own. As she told it her bosom fluttered and the tears trickled down her cheeks; and when she had got to a state of complete deliquescence, her niece whispered: “Oh, Aunt Varina, I’m so glad you believe in love! Aunt Varina, will you keep a solemn secret if I tell it to you?”
And so came the story of the amazing engagement. Mrs. Tuis listened with wide-open, startled eyes, every now and then whispering, “Sylvia! Sylvia!” Of course she was thrilled to the deeps of her soul by it; and of course, in the mood that she had been caught, she could not possibly refuse her sympathy. “You must help me with the others,” said the girl. “I’m going to tell mother next.”
§ 23
The first thing that struck you about “Miss Margaret” was her appalling incompetence. But underneath it lay the most exclusively maternal soul imaginable. She had nursed her children when they were almost two years old, great healthy calves running about the place and standing up to suck; she had rocked them to sleep in her arms when they were big enough to be reading Virgil; she had shed as many tears over a broken finger as most mothers shed over a funeral. She wanted her daughters to be happy, and to this end she would give them anything that civilization provided; she would even be willing that one of them should marry a man whose father “wore stripes”—so far as she was concerned, and so long as she remained alone with the daughter. You must picture her, clasping Sylvia in her arms and weeping from general agitation; moved to pity by the tale of Frank’s loneliness, moved to awe by the tale of his goodness—but then suddenly smitten as by a thunderbolt with the thought: “What will people say! What will your Aunt Nannie say!”
While Sylvia was bent upon having her way, you must not imagine that she did not feel any of these emotions. Although she was mostly Lady Lysle, her far-off ancestress, she was also a little of “Miss Margaret,” and was almost capsized in these gales of emotion. She remembered a hundred scenes of tenderness and devotion; she clasped the great girl-mother in her arms, and mingled their tears and vowed that she would never do anything to make her unhappy. It was a lachrymal lane—this pathway of Sylvia’s engagement!
With her father she took a different line. She got the Major alone in his office and talked to him solemnly, not about love and romance, but about Frank Shirley’s character. She knew that the Major was disturbed by the wildness of the young men of the world about him; she had heard him discuss the pace at which Aunt Nannie’s boys were traveling. And here was a man who had sowed no wild oats, and had learned the lesson of self-control.