[CHAPTER I., ] [ II., ] [ III., ] [ IV., ] [ V., ] [ VI., ] [ VII., ] [ VIII., ] [ IX., ] [ X., ] [ XI., ] [ XII., ] [ XIII., ] [ XIV., ] [ XV. ]

MRS. ARTHUR.

BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF
“The Chronicles of Carlingford,”
&c. &c.

“Fie, fie! unknit that threat’ning, unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes.
. . . . . . .
A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled.”
TAMING OF THE SHREW.

“He breathed a sigh, and toasted Nancy!”
DIBDIN.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1877.
All rights reserved.

MRS. ARTHUR.

CHAPTER I.

IT was like a dream when it was all over, so huddled up at the end, so seemingly causeless; the sudden outburst of accumulated dissatisfaction and failure breaking out in a moment, a storm out of a clear sky, as it were. There was no adequate reason for the catastrophe; greater troubles had been between them before, more violent disputes; perhaps it was that never before had there been any witnesses, nor had the menace ever before come from Arthur’s side. When he left Underhayes, almost carried off by Durant, yet with many stings in his heart, which in time, at least, might slay the love that was still warm within him, Arthur could think of his married life only as a dream. Nancy had refused to see him. She would make no arrangement, listen to no terms, make no promises; indeed, she would not communicate with her husband or his friend except through her parents, and refused to say anything except that all was over, that she never wanted to hear Arthur’s name again. The father and mother were without any question deeply distressed. Mrs. Bates was, on the whole, a sensible woman, who, though she might be disposed to back up her married daughter in a certain amount of folly and hot-headedness as to the honours and privileges which were “no more than what she had a right to,” was yet horrified at the notion of practical divorce and disjunction such as this; and her husband not only shared this moral horror, but was profoundly excited by the idea of having his daughter, whom he had believed to be provided for, once more on his hands. All through that long Sunday, and for some days after, Durant did nothing but come and go between the two houses with proposals of all kinds. If Nancy would not return, would she join Arthur in London and go to Oakley with him? If she would not go to Oakley, would she go to Vienna, where they could make a fresh start, having both, it was to be hoped, learned a tremendous lesson? To all these suggestions Nancy answered No. She kept upstairs, locking her door, when her husband himself came. No, she would do nothing. She would not go to his friends to be despised. She would not go abroad with him to be miserable. He knew how she hated foreign countries. She would not go home to him, or see him to discuss these questions. He could go where he pleased, she would not put herself in his way. She would not shame him among his fine friends. Nobody should say she was a burden on her husband. It is impossible to imagine anything more confused, more agitated, more feverish than the course of these painful days; but at last it became apparent even to Arthur that this could go on no longer. Many little indications of a state of things which he had never dreamt of, and which was fatal to the self-esteem which is in every man’s bosom, worked on the poor young fellow’s mind as much as the actual grievance of the moment. That he had been thought of as a good match was, perhaps, inevitable in the circumstances; but even that is not agreeable; and to know that your wife has gone to her father’s house to complain of you, is an offence which few men could easily forgive. All this produced in Arthur’s mind an impression of painful unreality in the past than which there is nothing more wounding, more bitter on earth. That love should fail and hearts change is bad enough; but that the love which you have believed in implicitly should never have existed at all, that your affection should have been regarded as a matter of worldly advantage, and your conduct discussed with others, what thought can sting more deeply? It destroyed not only Arthur’s faith in his wife, but his faith in the life they had lived together. Hitherto it had been her too great sincerity, her incapacity for feigning, he thought, poor fellow, which had been their rock ahead. And now was all insincere, was all feigned from beginning to end? His head seemed to turn, and the giddy world to go round with him, and that wrath “which works like madness in the brain,” the wrath which is half love, and which feels every injury with twofold aggravation of resentment, yet yearning, took possession of his mind. It was in this condition that he left Underhayes. Durant had made on Arthur’s behalf the most careful arrangements for Nancy with her father. She was to retain the villa if she chose, and the half of the allowance Sir John gave to his son. Arthur would have given the whole, had that been possible. As it was she would be well off, able to do as she pleased, according to her breeding, to help her family, to occupy an important position among them. The poor young fellow thought with bitterness that this would be more congenial to her than any elevation which could have reached her with him; and perhaps, indeed, there was some reason in this, for the elevations which could reach her as Arthur’s wife were, in a sense, humiliations. Everybody in his rank looked upon her with wonder, with curiosity and suspicion, as on a creature of a different race. Her actions were scrutinized, her little imperfections noted as they never would have been otherwise. Whereas as the richest member of the family, the one standing above them all at once by nature and by position, the family goddess and beauty, and most successful member, Nancy was looked up to and adored. Perhaps it was not wonderful that a young creature with no sense of duty in her, who had expected merely, as Arthur said, to be made happy, flattered, courted, and caressed in her marriage, and to whom such disappointment had come, should prefer the position in which she could regain a little of the self-pride and complacency which was natural to her. The first blow which assails that complacency, how terrible it is! And Nancy had been beaten down, though she would not own it, by the sense of universal disapproval, by the failure even of her own confidence in herself.

And it would be impossible to describe the strange desolation and sense that all was over and ended, with which this self-willed and hot-headed girl woke to her misery on the morning after Arthur went away. The probation of the last few months had been very bad for Nancy. She was not altogether unworthy, as poor Arthur was inclined to think, of the higher opinion which had been formed of her; indeed it was the finer element in her nature which had led her astray in the final strain and trial. She who had been the superior of her family, who had been raised to the poetic heaven of a young lover’s adoration, had after her marriage plunged at once into a bottomless abyss of inferiority and humiliation. It had begun upon her wedding-day with the vision of Lucy, in whom her jealous, suddenly enlightened eyes had seen at a glance so many differences, so many refinements unknown to herself—and with Arthur’s objection to her salmon-coloured dress. Then her ignorance, her want even of the most elementary acquaintance with the world he was familiar with, was brought home to the alarmed, resentful girl on every side of her. The more she found herself wanting, the hotter had risen that suppressed fury in her heart against herself, her belongings, her breeding, and the new circumstances which brought out all their deficiencies. Pride first, and the vanity of flattered and self-admiring youth had risen wildly against the apparent need of improvement, of education and culture, which alone would have fitted her to be Arthur’s wife; and if she rejected with proud disgust and self-assertion the idea of improvement in herself, what was there for it but to turn her back upon Arthur’s world and drag him into her own, where she was at her ease, where she was still the first, whatever happened? This, however, had not contented Nancy’s mind. She had been no more satisfied here than elsewhere. The mere fact of withdrawing her husband into this village atmosphere, which he supported patiently or impatiently, according to the mood of the moment, but always with an effort, was in itself a confession of failure. She was unfit for the society of his equals; and he, was not he unfit for hers? None of these things had Nancy said to herself, but they were all surging within, pushing her on by their very tumult and unrest to ever more and more entire committal of herself to this foolish and wrong way.

Nobody knew better than she how foolish it was and wrong; but the more the conviction grew, the more ungovernable was her determination to be stopped by no one, to yield to no one, to assert herself as everybody’s equal or superior, claiming in her own right all the consideration that a princess could command. She had never put these feelings into words, passionate and vehement though they were, nor had she anyone in the world to whom she could confide them. Poor girl! the conflict in her mind had often been beyond utterance; but she had clung desperately all through to that most variable and poorest of supports her personal pride. And this had driven her into all manner of follies, as has been seen, and into this culminating folly at last. She lay sleepless all the night through, and wept, thinking of Arthur. It would be better for him. No more would that anxious look come over his face, the look which had driven her wild and made her ruder and more self-assertive than ever, that anxiety as to her behaviour and her appearance which made her tingle with the consciousness that she was still Nancy Bates, and would still be judged as such, whatever might happen. He would not be troubled with Nancy Bates now. He would go back untrammeled among his fine friends, where nobody made mistakes in dress, and where everybody knew as their A B C those things which were mysteries to her. He would be free; Nancy jumped up in her bed clenching her hands, her eyes heavy, her head hot, her brain almost mad with passion—he would be free! and she left here to be sneered at, and smiled at, and pointed at—a wife, a woman who had been forsaken. Then this furious sense of humiliation would melt, and burst forth into a sense of something better which she had concealed, which no one had ever known. She had been a failure; but who would love him so well as she did among all the fine people he might meet with? who would think of him so much? She, thinking of him, had brought little happiness to Arthur; her love had been as a fire which scorched and charred rather than one which warmed and gladdened—but still, if anything happened to him, if trouble came in his way, who would be faithful like his wife, faithful to death, ready to confront every danger for him; but that he would never know. The convulsions of feeling which she thus went through fortunately made Nancy ill. For a day or two she was feverish, and kept her bed, where she was waited on with sedulous care by her mother and sisters. They had never failed in kindness or affection, but they were now more anxious, more concerned than ever, for Nancy was still the great person of the family. She was rich in comparison with them. She had a house of her own—she was a lady. Numberless benefits might flow to them from her hands. This was not necessary to make these good people kind to their own flesh and blood; but still such considerations warm and quicken human feeling. They were not fond of Nancy for what she had to bestow, but the fact that she had something to bestow did not diminish their fondness. They hushed the house and kept it still, making Charley’s life miserable, and the father’s a burden to him, for Nancy’s sake. It was her nerves, poor thing, they said, and everything had to give way to Nancy’s nerves—things hitherto unknown in the house.

When, however, Nancy came downstairs at last, after her bout of illness, she experienced not only the horrible sense of re-beginning which wrings the soul after any great calamity, but a sudden and fantastic increase of misery in the disgust which seized upon her for all her surroundings. Not only had she a new life to begin without Arthur, without hope, without any future widening of her horizon possible; but the home which she had sought so anxiously, and to which she had clung in opposition to Arthur and defiance of him, suddenly changed its aspect to her. She felt it the first afternoon when she came downstairs supported, though it was unnecessary, by her anxious mother, and was placed in the old easy-chair by the fire, which was burning brightly, though it was not necessary either, on this soft spring afternoon. She had scarcely sat down in the chair, which was her father’s chair, close to the fire and to the little mahogany bracket on which he placed his rum-and-water, when this sudden loathing seized her. The afternoon sun was shining into the room, betraying dust where dust was not expected, showing the imperfections of everything—the old haircloth sofa in the corner, the not very clean carpet, the table covered with painted oil-cloth. Meanness, smallness, poverty seemed to have come into every detail. The air was too warm, and it was not fresh, but retained odours of the dinner, of the beer and cheese with which it had been concluded; for Mrs. Bates had not liked to open the window to chill the air for the invalid. What spell had fallen upon this room, which she had so longed for, and which she had returned to with such content? How mean it looked, what a contracted, paltry place, unlovely, unsweet! And it was to this that she had dragged Arthur! this was the thought that flew like an arrow through Nancy’s mind. They brought a little tray with tea, and hot muffins to tempt her invalid appetite, and Mrs. Bates was at once alarmed and vexed when she pushed it peevishly away and declined to eat.

“You all know I can’t bear muffins!” cried Nancy, pushing it away rudely; and her own action made her sick with self-disgust as she noted unconsciously how rude, how ungracious and ungrateful it was. Yes, she was like the place, rude, ill-bred, not a lady! She could have cried, but she was too proud to cry, and instead of this innocent relief to her mind, became cross in her wretchedness and found fault with everything. “Oh, how hot it is!” she cried, “how can you live in this stifling atmosphere? One would think you were always having dinner, it is so stuffy—open the window for pity sake!” But when the window was open she began to shiver. “There is not a corner that is out of the draught,” she said. Nothing that they did pleased her. Sarah Jane’s noisy ways, as she went sweeping about, knocking down a chair here and a footstool there, sweeping against the table, were insupportable, and Matilda’s demure quietness not much better. Everything grated on Nancy. And this was where she had brought Arthur! and had been angry that he was not delighted; and now Arthur was gone never to be found any more. Oh, how her heart sank in her miserable bosom! Then came tea, the tray placed upon the oilcloth, and hot toast this time brought to her instead of the muffins. The room was full now, her father and Charley added to the group of women. Mr. Bates looked at her when he came in, sitting in his chair, with a “humph!” of disapproval. Was she not only to be a failure as far as all their hopes were concerned, but to occupy his place also and put everybody out? Nancy saw the look, and jumped up in hot resentment.

“Oh, you shall have your chair!” she cried, and retreated to the sofa, where her mother feared she would take cold, so far from the fire. “Cold!” cried Nancy, “I think I shall never be cool again. You don’t know how stuffy it is in this close little room.”

“Upon my word!” said Sarah Jane. “Nobody’s obliged to stay here. It is good enough for us, and so it might be for Nancy. I don’t see that she’s any better than the rest.”

“Oh, hold your tongue, Sarah Jane,” cried Mrs. Bates; “can’t you see that your poor sister is poorly and out of sorts?” But neither did she like to hear the parlour called stuffy. If it was good enough for the others, why was it not good enough for Nancy? And then the family settled to their evening occupations, and the lamp was brought in, which added the smell of paraffin to that of the tea. And then Mr. Bates had his rum-and-water; and Mr. Raisins came to visit Sarah Jane. He came in with a witty greeting to the family, which made them all laugh.

“Here we are again! and how was you all?” he said, with refined jocosity; and was making his way to the sofa, which was the lover’s corner, when he saw Nancy there, and drew up with a significant look of dismay and a prolonged whistle of surprise. Nancy could bear it no longer. She started up with a cry of anger, and flew up-stairs to her room, sick with disgust and misery.

“Do you like to see me insulted, mamma?” she said, when Mrs. Bates followed. “How can you endure that vulgar fellow? and how dares he show his insolence to me?”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Bates, “you must not be unreasonable. He did not mean to be insolent. If we have not the refinements you have been used to, Nancy, still you mustn’t forget the advantages of your old home—”

“Advantages!” Nancy murmured under her breath, but pride kept down the cry. Had not she sacrificed her life for these advantages, cast her own existence to the winds? She went to bed miserable, and cried herself to sleep.

This was but a melancholy beginning to the new life. When she heard afterwards the arrangements that Arthur had made for her comfort, her first impulse was to accept nothing.

“I am no wife to him,” she cried, “and why should I take his money? I will not take his money. What am I to Arthur now that he should maintain me? It is like taking charity.”

But here Mr. Bates came in, who had a certain authority in such matters, if not a great deal of influence in other ways. Mr. Bates would stand no nonsense. It was bad enough that the responsibility of his daughter, and her behaviour as a married woman separated from her husband, should fall upon her parents; but her support certainly should not, of that he was clear. And Nancy, fresh from all these conflicts and miseries, was cowed before her father, and dared not resist him, notwithstanding all her efforts to hold her own. She who had not yielded to Arthur’s love and generosity, yielded to the tax-collector’s practical decidedness. She could not help herself. And after a few days’ growing wretchedness in this “home,” for which she had sacrificed so much, Nancy was glad to retire to the villa with the sensible Matilda for her companion, and begin again as she best could in such changed and fallen circumstances the career so perversely cut short. At least it was a relief to get away from the stuffy parlour, and the rum-and-water, and the grocer’s wit and courtship—all of which, heaven forgive her, she had called upon her husband to endure.

In two years from this time, strangely enough, the Bates family and almost all trace of them disappeared from Underhayes. Nothing had happened to them for all Nancy’s lifetime till her marriage—nothing of an exciting kind. There had been neither misfortune nor great success in the house; but all had gone on with humdrum regularity, unexciting, unalarming. Mr. Bates had got a little mild promotion, and they had saved a very little money, and for the rest had eaten and drunk, and slept and woke, and all had been as if it might thus go on for ever. So flows the tranquil current of life, in many cases, for years and years, until at length the cycle of change commences, and all that has been done is undone. Nancy’s marriage was the first family event, but it was followed in close succession by others. Charley went to New Zealand shortly after the separation between Arthur Curtis and his wife. Then a little after Sarah Jane married. Then Mr. Bates, in the midst of his tax-collecting, had an accident, and after lingering for a time died; and Mrs. Bates, a person of apparently robust constitution, both bodily and mental, developed all at once, to the amazement of her family and friends, an incapacity to live without the man whom she had not been very enthusiastic about, or devoted to, during his lifetime, and died in her turn, leaving her house desolate. Matilda, the only representative of the name, would have joined Charley in New Zealand but for her sister, to whom she had proved a discreet and faithful companion. After, however, the little house was cleared, and all the old furniture dispersed, sold, or laid up in the house of the Raisins’ for their future use, the two elder sisters disappeared, no one, except, perhaps, Sarah Jane, who said nothing about it, knowing whither. The little parlour passed away, like all the teas and dinners that had been consumed there, and the family existence ended. Notwithstanding the moving events that had been transacted in it, and the temporary link which had been woven between it and the upper classes of society, its history was all over like a bubble, like the snow on the mountain and the foam on the river. The same fate befalls small and great; but in the case of a tax-collector the conclusion is more complete than that which comes upon the higher classes, which Mr. Bates respected so much. Death, emigration, marriage, disappearance, thus followed each other in swift succession. Young Mrs. Raisins, blooming in her shop—where, however, her bridegroom did not permit her to appear to minister to the wants of a vulgar public, keeping her, on the contrary, in high happiness and splendour, and without requiring her to do anything, in her drawing-room above the shop—alone remained of the family in Underhayes. And as for Nancy, no one knew anything about her, nor where she had gone.

CHAPTER II.

EVERYTHING went on very quietly at Oakley during these two years. Arthur’s visit at home was very brief, and not very lively. And if there was a temporary sense of relief in Lady Curtis’s mind to know that he had escaped from the influence of “those people” and “that young woman,” it soon disappeared in presence of Arthur’s melancholy looks, and in contemplation of the painful position of a man so young, who was married, and yet not married, and whose path, accordingly, could not but be full of thorns and troubles. Such a position is dangerous and difficult in any sphere; but how much more in that to which he was going, where every temptation of society would surround the young man, and every freedom would be accorded to him! The mother and sister had many a discussion over him; but how difficult it was to question him on the subject, to pry into those arrangements of his which he did not care to reveal, or to ask anything about the final causes of the separation! Arthur, for his part, did not speak on the subject; when he arrived, at first, he had let them know, in a few words, that his wife and he had parted. “Don’t ask me about it, for I can’t tell you. I don’t know how it is,” he had said to his mother. “She will not conform to my way of living, and I cannot conform to hers—that is all. There is no blame; but how it happened, don’t ask me, for I don’t know.” Lady Curtis respected the request absolutely, and inquired no more of him. But it is needless to say how interesting the subject was to her; and with what eagerness she endeavoured to get the information otherwise which Arthur would not furnish. Durant told her all that he knew personally, all that happened under his own eyes; but this was not much more satisfactory than Arthur’s silence. “He has an air of thinking that she was not so very much in the wrong after all,” Lady Curtis said. “I do not understand Lewis. You would almost think, from the letters he writes, that she had bewitched him too.”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy said quickly, with a passing look upon her face which surprised her mother.

“I don’t mean to say anything against her,” said Lady Curtis. “It is not to be supposed that she has any great fault. God forbid, Lucy! I did not mean that.”

Lucy did not make any reply. It was not, perhaps, her brother’s wife she was thinking of. And when Arthur went away, Nancy became as if she had never existed to the family. They had Arthur’s letters as in the days when nothing lay between him and home; nothing but mere distance and absence—time and space, innocent obstacles which harm no one, though they are hard enough to put up with. And his wife, whom he ceased to speak of, fell into the background with his people. To be sure, when any young man in the county, or whom they knew, made a brilliant and satisfactory marriage, Lady Curtis and Lucy would look at each other with quick interchange of glances. And Sir John would come in, in the afternoon, and set his back against the mantel-piece, while he took his cup of tea, and say with a sigh, “They seem to be making a great fuss over young Seymour’s marriage.”

“Yes,” Lady Curtis would answer with another sigh, “and no wonder—nothing could be more suitable.” They were almost angry with young Seymour for marrying as the heir to such a property ought to have married; and, probably, Lucy would launch some arrow at the new pair in sheer impatience of the praise thus accorded. “So suitable that it is unnecessary to think of love in the matter,” Lucy perhaps would say. And then Sir John would shrug his shoulders as he stood before the fire.

“Love! that’s neither here nor there; if all the follies could be collected that have been done in the name of love!” And he would shake his grey old head, and again sigh, looking with eyes of admiration at Lucy as he went slowly back to his library, not able to get young Seymour and his fine marriage out of his head. Lady Curtis broke into a smile against her will as he went away.

“You are not to think of any such folly, Lucy,” she said, “your father thinks that with your fortune you would be very happy unmarried. He says it is only poor people who need fear the fate of old maids. This is a great step for Sir John to take, who is such a Conservative.”

“Are old maids against the Tory faith?” said Lucy, not sorry to have something to say.

“Yes; it is the ancient creed that every woman should marry, and that it is only the ugly, the cross, and the unloveable that fail to attain that glorious end. What a stretch of principle this is for your father! I do not go so far even with my advanced views.”

Lady Curtis looked at her daughter curiously as she spoke. They spent their lives together, hour by hour and year by year. They had everything in common—when the post came in, they opened each other’s letters indiscriminately, the last depth of mutual confidence; read the same books, thought the same thoughts, were one in all the affairs of life; and yet in this most intimate affair of all, the mother looked at the daughter with unutterable yearnings of curiosity, not knowing what Lucy thought.

Nothing was said for some time after. Spring had come breathing over the woods, and to look between the pillars of the facade through the long windows of my lady’s room upon the avenue, was like looking into a wilderness of buds and hopes. “Here is Bertie coming again,” she said with a little impatience; then laughing, “he is one, Lucy, of whom your father is afraid.”

“Poor Bertie!” said Lucy composedly; but she was startled into dismay when her mother suddenly burst into tears.

“To think,” said Lady Curtis, “that Bertie’s child, if he had a child, would be your father’s heir!”

“Mamma!” Lucy blushed crimson, then laughed. “He is the second son—and Arthur—”

“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.

“So Bertie is coming,” said Sir John. “Why, Bertie? Yes, to be sure, he is a relation, and has a claim; but I see no reason why you should ask him so often. It looks as if you meant to throw him in Lucy’s way.”

“He will never be anything to Lucy,” said Lady Curtis, smiling.

“That is all very well; but how do you know? Girls are not like anything else. They may hate a man one week and accept him the next. I’ve lived long enough to see that.”

“You think they like to begin with a little aversion, as Mrs. Malaprop says—”

“Eh? I don’t know anything about Mrs. Malaprop. I speak from my own observation. I would not put him in Lucy’s way.”

“No one would be less likely to attract Lucy’s attention. Why, Bertie! he is no more equal to Lucy—”

“As if that mattered,” said Sir John, with quiet contempt. “What do they care? You’ve had one example; you ought to know better; and you will have another before you know where you are. You are injudicious, I must say. You don’t mind whom you introduce Lucy to, my lady; and if it is not one it will be another,” he said, winding up hurriedly as Lucy came in. The parents both looked at her with that tender admiration which is, perhaps, of all admiration the most exquisite. They were not easily pleased in respect to Lucy. Her dress, her ornaments, her appearance were all surveyed with fastidious eyes; and from her shiny hair to the tip of her little satin shoe, these two difficult people could bear no imperfection in this lamp of their life. Sir John’s inspection was not so minute or so intelligent as his wife’s; he could not tell what she had on, or whether there was technical perfection in her toilette; but he was very critical about the general effect. As for Lady Curtis, she went into all the details; and they were both satisfied; it was no small thing to say. There was a little cluster of white narcissus in her hair, which her mother liked, but at which Sir John shook his head. “Is that for Bertie?” he said jealously, in his mind. Girls were strange creatures; they liked to be admired whether they cared for the man who admired them or not; and no doubt she would fall a victim to one of my lady’s protégés, if not to Bertie. This thought it was, along with disapprobation of the flowers, as something added to her toilette for Bertie’s sake, which made Sir John shake his head.

“The Rolts were to have been here to-day,” said Lady Curtis; “but I hear Mrs. John caught cold at the Seymours’, and Julia has gone to nurse her.”

“Julia is always nursing somebody,” said Sir John.

Julia was Mrs. Rolt, the wife of the agent, who was a humble relation of the Curtises; and Mrs. John Rolt was the wife of his brother, the lawyer at Oakenden, who had the affairs of the county in his hands.

“She will have heard everything about the marriage. As soon as she comes back she will rush up here, wet or dry, to tell us what the bridesmaids had on, and all about the breakfast; it is a long time,” said Lady Curtis with a sigh, “since there have been such grand doings in the county; not since Arthur came of age.”

“I am glad to hear that Arthur gets on so well in Vienna,” said the Rector, addressing himself to his uncle; “that is better than the Seymours’ junketings. I hope he’ll make a mark in diplomacy. He ought with his abilities.”

“Ah, yes,” said Sir John; “as for making a mark, that’s another thing. It’s very well for the present; but a country gentleman’s place is at home in his own county. It’s all very well now.”

“Well, Sir,” said the Rector, “some of us have no chance beyond the county, or even the parish; but when a man has a chance he ought to take advantage of it.”

“There’s nothing better than the county,” said Sir John, “and the parish for a clergyman. What would you have? You can’t do more than your duty wherever you may be. I hope Arthur will stick to his, and then I shan’t complain. If he had been at it sooner it would have been better for us all.”

“Lewis Durant has been hearing a great deal about him,” said Lady Curtis; “everything that is most satisfactory. Lewis is not much in society, I suppose, his work would not permit it; but he hears everything at the club. That is where you men get all your news. I hear all sorts of things from him; and he knows the kind of news that is most acceptable here.”

“There is a great deal in that,” said the Rector. “Some men make quite a business of it. It helps a man on wonderfully; but if Durant is rising in his profession, as you were saying, he can’t have much time for his club. Son of old Durant, the saddler, isn’t he? How odd that such men should be in clubs at all.”

Bertie Curtis knew exactly what he was doing; he was not cowed by the look of indignant wonder which met him from Lady Curtis’s eyes, nor the less open gleam of scorn and defiance which came from under Lucy’s drooped eyelids. It was Sir John the Rector meant to work upon, not the ladies, whom he knew to be partizans of his rival. Nobody had ever hinted that Durant was his rival, or that Sir John was nervous on the subject; but there are some things which reveal themselves without the aid of words.

“Not the son, the grandson,” said Sir John. “Old Durant is dead long ago, and left a very good fortune; but they’ve run through a great part of it, I fear. That is the worst of fortunes made in trade; they go as fast as they come. As for young Durant, I wish half the young men in the clubs were half as good fellows. But he is not the kind of man, one must allow, whom you would expect to see familiar in our houses.”

“What kind of men do you like to see familiar in your house?” said Lady Curtis. “Empty-headed nobodies? Lewis will always make his way. He has friends that are more worth having than we are. He goes everywhere.”

“Does he, indeed?” said the Rector; “and his profession, what becomes of his profession? His father—or grandfather, was it?—would not have approved of that; but lawyers, though everybody says they are so hardworking, have a great deal of leisure, I think. How different a clergyman is, now—”

“Cousin Bertie, were you not at Epsom or somewhere the other day?” said Lucy, whose indignation was almost beyond words.

“Yes; I went down with Gerald, who has to be amused, poor fellow; but I did not think anyone knew,” the Rector said, hastily; at which Sir John, though perhaps it was not quite polite, shook his head.

“The turf is all very well,” he said. “It suits some men well enough; but a clergyman should not get the name of it, Bertie. I don’t like it for a clergyman.”

“Nor I, Sir; you are perfectly right, as you always are. I may have liked horses too much in my younger days—not wisely, but too well, perhaps—we all have some weakness; but I hope since I took orders there has been nothing to object to,” said the Rector, looking his astonished uncle full in the face, with mild defiance. And what could Sir John say thus boldly encountered? “Poor Gerald is a wretched invalid,” he continued, “sick of everything. I never saw such a blasé washed out being. He has had too much of what people call life, and he’s tired enough of it all. They think at home that his health depends upon keeping him amused—that’s why I went,” said Bertie, with all the innocence imaginable. “We’ve all got to amuse him, and you might just as well try to amuse this table. He is bored to death with everything. But then, he always was my father’s favourite, and he can do no wrong.”

There was a pause, for this Gerald, the eldest son, who was bored with everything, and in bad health, and possessed every attribute disliked by Sir John, was, failing Arthur, the heir presumptive of Oakley; and this passed through the minds of all the party, bringing a pang of unhappiness with it, as the Rector knew it would do.

“Is he likely to marry I wonder?” said Sir John.

“That is the only foolish thing he has omitted to do. It is far from being a foolish thing with most people; but with him, worn out in body and mind, old before his time—and without a penny, why should he marry?”

“I am not so sure of that,” said Sir John, with a sigh; and then he broke out hastily with an exclamation and question, in which a stranger would have seen little coherence. “Lord, what a strange world it is! How many boys are there of the Seymours?” he said.

That was the bitterest thought to them. Young Seymour to marry somebody so very suitable, and failing him, if he had not married, half-a-dozen boys to succeed! whereas Arthur had put himself out of court, and made all succession in the direct line impossible; and there were only Anthony’s sons to follow. Anthony’s sons! the thought was gall and wormwood to them both. Gerald, a worn out young roué, and Bertie; one of them must come after Arthur, who had cut off himself, or at least cut off all following, all blessings of succession. And such a suitable marriage as young Seymour had made! What wonder if it went to their hearts.

“I’ve seen Durant at Epsom too,” said the Rector, forgetting, for the moment, his own line of self-defence; “he’s very much about, I think; here and there, and wherever one goes. Men of his class lay themselves out to please; they have more motive, I suppose, than men of more assured position.”

“Mr. Durant,” said Lady Curtis, hotly, “lays himself out, if you like the expression, Bertie, to be of use to his friends. He has got from his Maker one of the kindest hearts that ever beat, and consequently he is welcome wherever he is known.”

“There is justice though in what Bertie says,” said Sir John, coming up with his heavy forces to conclude the argument. “A young fellow like that may be very friendly, but you can’t take his friendship for nothing, my lady; and what would you ladies say who make so much of him, if the tradesman’s grandson asked for one of your daughters? That would open your eyes.”

Sir John felt that he had made a great coup when he said this, and he was glad of the opportunity of saying it; but nevertheless he was a little afraid of the consequences.

“Take another glass of wine,” he said, hurriedly, pushing the decanter towards his nephew. “You’ll excuse me not sitting long to-night, for I’ve something to do.”

This cut short any indignant remonstrance that might have been on Lady Curtis’s lips. She and Lucy took the hint and went away; but they did not say anything to each other, as they certainly would have done had anyone but Durant been in question. To tell the truth, the great curiosity in Lady Curtis’s curious and lively mind was on this subject of Durant. What did Lucy think of him? What did he think of Lucy? But as neither one nor the other had spoken to her on the subject, how could she interfere? She stole many a look at her daughter as they went to their tranquil occupations together. Perhaps Lucy’s eyes were heavier than usual, less ready to meet her mother’s; but she said not a word on the subject; and from Lady Curtis’s side, after that utterance of her husband’s, what was there to say?

CHAPTER III.

THUS time went on at Oakley as elsewhere with little happening, long lulls coming after the moments of active living which tell for so much in individual history, yet usually occupy so little space in it. Arthur was as much away from them as if he had been at Underhayes—more in one way, for he was now swallowed up in public life, embarked upon that bigger sea of business or pleasure which absorbs all individual interests. They did not hear much more of him than when he was absorbed by his bride, and yet how different it was. Though Arthur was less happy, though he was further off, yet he was restored to his family. They spoke of him freely to each other and to strangers. There was no longer any cloud upon him; he was in his natural position. It was true that the friends of the family would turn to each other and ask in a whisper, “Do you ever hear anything of his wife—what has become of his wife?” after the conversation about him, how he was liking his new appointment, and all about it, which was carried on openly. “What has been done with her?” the friends said; “or was it really a marriage after all?” Many people came expressly to put these questions to Mrs. Rolt, who, being a distant relative as well as the agent’s wife, naturally knew all about the family affairs. Cousin Julia was very prudent, all the more prudent that she knew nothing about the matter, no more than the questioners themselves. But about Arthur everybody talked openly now, inquiring how he liked Vienna, which was a great relief from the time when the country neighbours did not know how to manage, whether to remain silent about him altogether, which was the safest way, or to frame careful questions which could not compromise them. It was very lucky that all this was now at an end; but still nobody knew much of Arthur, and except that one rapid visit, he was never seen at home.

Arthur himself, it need not be said, had a great many convulsions to go through. Probably he had not expected that Nancy would acquiesce calmly in the arrangements made for her. He knew her pride, and he knew also the relentings of tenderness that were in the girl; and in his heart he believed that she would have scorned the money he had left for her, would repudiate the settlement altogether—which would have made a return necessary upon all their steps—and might, indeed, put out all calculations by rushing back into his arms suddenly, without rhyme or reason, and making an end of these miserable bargainings. The hope of this kept him up, though he would not acknowledge it even to himself. She might come, even, in her impetuosity, to Oakley—he could believe this possible, unlikely though it was—but at least to his lodgings in town, where he lingered, making preparations, and thinking that every sound outside his room meant the arrival of his penitent wife. But Nancy did nothing of the kind, as has been seen. She accepted the income, and settled down and took no notice of him. Was it possible that it had all been calculation from beginning to end, and that she had never loved him at all? He never said anything of this, never betrayed his expectation nor his disappointment, unless it might be to Durant, who knew his thoughts before they got into words, and who also on his part had expected better things of Nancy; for, naturally, neither of them knew how her practical father had cowed her, and how all her tempers and impetuosities had been quenched by the dull and vulgar obstacle of his determination not to have his daughter back upon his hands without a fit provision. Thus it was for the first time they did her absolute wrong in their thoughts. When Arthur, having finally given up all those delusions which at first had been so consolatory, but which now in their failure were so bitter, left England, the severance was real and complete. His mind was now at last turned violently away from the object of his love. Passion can be borne, that passion which impels a hasty spirit to foolish actions unintended in cooler moments; and even change can be forgiven; but who could forgive the bitter wrong of having been chosen from the first for interested motives, of having been the mere representative of wealth and advancement to the woman who had accepted his love? Was she never true at all, never tender, never touched by the flame of love which had burned in Arthur’s breast? This was the one intolerable thought; and when silence followed all these agitations, and Nancy accepted without a word what he could do for her, and left him without a word, to endure as he best might, taking mere vulgar comfort from his hands, instead of all that he had been willing to bestow, the poor young fellow’s heart closed with a pang against her. How much had she cost him! but she would not permit him to cost her anything. She would give up nothing to him, or for him. What could it have been all along that she cared for? Not him, but what he had to bestow; and all that had been said on this subject came back to Arthur’s mind—the discussions beforehand, which made it apparent that Nancy had hoped to be my lady very soon; and her complaints after, that she was so little the better of the fine marriage she had made. These were trifles, but such trifles as turn honey itself into gall, and make all evils ten times worse. He was in very low spirits when he left England. When Durant spoke of his return, he shook his head.

“It is much more likely that I will never come back,” he said. “Why should I come back? I shall be out of everybody’s way there.”

“Arthur, you know there is nobody who wants you out of the way.”

“I don’t know it; I know the reverse. I shall be out of her way. She will be left in quiet. If I came here, I might not be able to put up with it, Durant. And how can they look at me at home without thinking what a mess I have made of everything? My poor father! I believe he feels it most of all—all the more for having so little to say.”

“Come, come! Sir John will not break his heart.”

“You don’t know him,” said Arthur, glad of a reason which would justify the desolate misery in his own. “Poor old governor! he feels it more than my mother does. She will storm at you, or mock at you, or cry over you, and get it out. But he says nothing; and the disappointment in me, the failure of me! I shouldn’t wonder if they broke his heart.”

Arthur’s eyes grew red while he spoke. He was young enough to feel the tears in their fountains; but, poor boy! while he spoke of Sir John, it was Nancy of whom he thought. He loved her, and she thought nothing, except allowances and comforts, of him. She would allow him to pay her money, to share his income with her; but not to share his heart with her, and all his thoughts. These she did not want. Poor Arthur! if that would have done him any good, he would have laid down his head and wept. But as it was, he had to shake back indignantly into the depths all emotions which required stormy utterance. He could be sorry for his father, but he must not be sorry for himself.

And this was how he went away. An attaché of a foreign Legation is not supposed to be the most hardworking of men. Yet there are things which they may do when it is a matter of preference for them to be occupied; and Arthur went into society, almost vehemently, not caring to remember himself and his position. Perhaps he did not pass through the furnace entirely unscathed. He thrust Nancy’s image out of his heart, and shut the door on her, and pretended not to be conscious of the efforts that image made to get back. Not Nancy—Nancy herself made no attempt one way or another, no overture; but her image, her recollection, that reflection of her which had occupied him when she was gone, kept persistently upon the threshold of the temple whence she had been expelled. Perhaps he was not always faithful to her, but sought after new impressions, new sensations as a man may be excused for doing to whom the shrine of his heart has already been defiled; but he never got beyond the feeling that she was there—his rightful queen, and what was more his actual possessor, whatever he might think, or others might think. Meanwhile he lived a gay and busy life. He talked and danced, and, no doubt, flirted; for though he had made his position known, there were plenty of people in society to whom his position was quite indifferent; and Nancy, had she seen her husband, who was so devoted to her, in those early days of separation, would, no doubt, have had occasions for heavy enough thoughts on her part. But all the same, her image was never farther off than outside the door—artificially closed and bolted by curious devices, but of itself ever ready to open—of Arthur’s heart.

All this, however, makes an effect upon a man; and when Durant wrote to him, after the interval of those two years, that the parents were dead, and that Nancy had left Underhayes, it made a great commotion in his mind, no doubt, but it did not rouse him to instant action. His first thought, indeed, was to rush home himself, and come to her help in her trouble; but this was only a first thought. Why should he go, said a soberer impulse? Had she not rejected him, driven him from her, refused to be touched by any argument he could offer; and why should he humble himself to seek her again without any indication that he would be more successful this time? No, no, he would not risk a repetition of it all. Repetitions are always to be avoided. If any lingering feeling for him had been in her mind, would not she have had him informed of this new state of circumstances which might have modified affairs between them? But she had said nothing, she had taken no notice of his existence at this moment of trouble, when her heart, no doubt, must have been touched. He wrote to Durant to inquire into the circumstances, and to let him know how Nancy was. But he did nothing more.

As for Durant, his heart perhaps was softer, and he wondered at Arthur’s indifference; or, perhaps, it was only that he himself had not been the offended and slighted person; and no one, however warm a friend, can feel our grievances as we ourselves do. Durant had not himself been particularly happy during these two years. He had worked hard and made progress in his profession, but he had not made very wonderful progress. His father, who had spent his fortune when he had one, had shown no disinclination to go on spending when he had none; and all that Lewis got by his labours did not seem too much to keep the paternal house going. Whosoever will work and support other people who don’t, has to work and be eaten up in this world. It is a common enough fate; and with Durant, as with so many others, the miserable meanness of those who sucked his blood and mind, always wanting more, was a heavier affliction than the loss of his hard earnings which he took with greater philosophy. “For what good were they to himself,” he said somewhat bitterly. Lucy was as far, nay farther, from him than ever. He had not been asked to Oakley at all during the last year, and though he still saw the ladies of the family now and then, Sir John’s disapproval had been too distinct to make it possible to disregard it, so that everything was at a standstill in this respect. Lucy understood him, he believed; but what would it serve him to be secretly understood if he could go no further, if years like this were to float away before he could approach her openly; before he could break through the obstacles on all sides, and venture to present himself with his suit openly? Indeed, for the last year Durant had almost come to acquiesce in his banishment, to feel that it was better for him not to see her, not to vex her with a sight of his faithfulness. Rather that she should forget all about it, not linger, as he did, on the verge of despair, but be happy whether he was happy or not. He had come this length when Arthur commissioned him to make those inquiries at Underhayes, and it may be supposed with how many thoughts, with what suppressed impatience of these two, who were thus voluntarily wrecking their happiness, and destroying everything that was best in life to each other, this martyr to social prejudice and other people’s sins trod over again the road he had gone with Lucy, along those streets which he had hurried through to witness Arthur’s marriage. Had it been Lucy and he, who had pledged their faith that winter morning, what sweet years of righteous toil, softened and made joyful by love and sympathy, might his have been! while the other two, who had taken the matter into their own hands, defiant of duty, had wrecked themselves thus, and parted as lightly and easily as they had come together. But for his father’s folly, Durant might have had that to offer to the object of his faithful affection, which even Sir John could not despise, and but for her brother’s folly, Lucy would have been free to accept, or refuse, that honest offering. He did not know that she would have accepted it—but there had been moments in which his hopes had risen almost to certainty—only to be cast down again into more miserable depths. Thus the two to whom honour and duty ranked highest were kept apart, and might be kept apart all their lives—while the two who thought but little of either (was not this hard upon Arthur?) played with the happiness they had snatched in defiance of duty, and threw it away. Durant may be pardoned, all things considered, for these hard thoughts; for, modest as he was, hope had been high in his breast when he conducted Lucy to her brother’s wedding. But gradually, bit by bit, that hope had ebbed away. He had thought of winning her family’s favour by his devotion to their service. He had thought that their familiar friendship with him might have balanced the humbleness of his birth—he had once thought his money, now lost, might tell for something. But all had worked against him instead of for him; while Arthur who had got the happiness he wanted, the desire of his heart, had thrown it away. These thoughts filled his mind as he walked through the streets of Underhayes. He went to the little house in which the Bates’ had lived, from which it seemed impossible to believe that the flavour of the early dinners and the evening rum and water could have faded away. When lovely things are carried hence by death, the vacancy is less strange almost, less poignant than when that tragi-comic strain of grim amusement comes in, and we feel that things so earthy, things having no affinity with a higher sphere, have come under its sublimating touch. Could anything have made the tax-collector’s evening potations approach solemnity? and yet there was a kind of awe in the recollection of all those vulgar circumstances gone with the vulgar being to whom they belonged into the darkness—into the unknown which is not vulgar. Death is more akin to the noble and beautiful than it is to the paltry and commonplace. It is not unnatural that those should die and be translated into the sphere to which their finer impulses belong; but these, what have they to do with dying, with heaven and hell and the unseen? This was what Durant felt as he looked with a kind of strange pity into the room, now occupied by a young mother with her little children.

“All messages is to go to Raisins the grocer,” she said, opening the familiar door. It seemed to Durant impossible that Arthur was not there seated with Nancy upon the old haircloth sofa, within; but he met the haircloth sofa a little further on, standing out in the damp at a broker’s door; and Arthur and Nancy, where were they? never, it would seem, likely to sit together again.

“Oh la, Mr. Durant!” said Sarah Jane. She blushed, and gave a glance at her husband in his white apron, and felt a burning pang that she had not married a gentleman. “Won’t you step upstairs, Sir—do step upstairs;” she cried. She was glad that the customers in the shop, and even her husband, should see how intimate she was with a gentlemanlike-looking person, such as Durant undeniably was. And she told him all about the accident that had carried off papa, and mother’s inability to survive him. She was in all the freshness of her mourning, and shed a few natural tears, notwithstanding the pleasure she had in exhibiting her drawing-room to one of Arthur’s friends. “You would have thought she didn’t take much notice of him; but he had a deal more in him than people thought, Mr. Durant, and she couldn’t live without him. She lingered just seven weeks. I can’t say that she ever held up her head again.”

“And your sister has gone away?”

“Oh, yes, my sister has gone away. Mamma wasn’t one to say very much, but I say it’s as touching an instance of conjugal affection—like what they put in the newspapers; and I tell Mr. Raisins, I’m sure I hope I’ll do as much for him when our time comes,” said Sarah Jane, half laughing, half crying. “The doctor couldn’t say what it was.”

“And—Nancy?”

“You might be more civil, Mr. Durant. My sister isn’t one to be spoken of as if she was a housemaid; but I forgot—you were always such a friend of Arthur Curtis. I see his name sometimes in the papers. La, the difference marriage makes! I never used to look at the papers, but now I read them regular every morning; and I see Arthur’s name sometimes.”

“Yes,” said Durant, “and your sister, Mrs. Raisins—where has your sister gone?”

“Oh, it has been a trying time!” said Sarah Jane. “Charley went first, and I’m sure if it’s all true about New Zealand, I wonder we don’t all go; and then papa died, and then mamma, and now there’s Nancy.”

“But she has not died—or gone to New Zealand?”

“I never said she had, Mr. Durant. I was saying it was a trying time, one thing coming on the back of another. I’m thankful Mr. Raisins and me were married before it all began, for if we hadn’t been there’s no telling what might have happened. I couldn’t have been married in my mourning.”

“Has Mrs. Arthur Curtis removed far off? It would be very kind to give me an answer.”

“Oh la! how can I tell?” cried Sarah Jane. “She’s as self-willed as the old gentleman himself. Nothing stops her when she’s made up her mind. There’s no telling where she may get to, before she’s done.”

“She is travelling then? She may perhaps go to Vienna? Is that what you mean?”

“I couldn’t say what I mean—I don’t mean anything particular. You never can, when it’s Nancy. She may go here or she may go there, and nobody can tell.”

“But you must know something—you must have an address for her letters.”

“Bless you, she never has any letters; who would write to her? She always paid her way, I must say that for her—and what letters could she have? She never was one for writing letters herself, so I don’t expect to hear; and as for writing, if I don’t hear, I never would think of doing such a thing.”

“But you must know something of her,” said Durant, alarmed. “You cannot have lost sight of your sister.”

“Such things have happened,” said Sarah Jane, with a certain pleasure in his discomfiture. “When you’re married you’ve other things to think of than just your own family. I’ve got my house now and my husband; he don’t ask me to do anything in the business, not a thing; but I like to be serviceable when I can, though I’m glad to say I’ve no need, Mr. Durant. We’re doing very well, and I’ve got my nice drawing-room, all my own, and paid for, and my servants, and my front door to walk out of, as nice as any lady’s in the land.”

“I am very glad you are so well off; but there is something I wish to communicate to your sister.”

“Oh, you shan’t communicate with her through me; I have had enough of that; how foolish of Arthur, Mr. Durant, to make such a fuss! and Nancy too. They never could get on together. I don’t say it was her fault or it was his fault, but they never got on.”

“Then you will not tell me where she is?” said Durant.

“Oh, I never said anything one way or another,” said Sarah Jane; but he could not get any other reply from her, and left Underhayes as little informed as when he came. One other fact he ascertained, however, from Arthur’s banker, who informed him formally that Nancy’s allowance had been returned by the country banker to whom they were in the habit of remitting it, with the intimation that it would be received no longer, Mrs. Arthur Curtis having left the place without giving any address. Thus Nancy made the first use of her liberty. She disappeared, leaving no trace of which they could get hold, and the place that had known her, already knew her no more.

CHAPTER IV.

IT was about a month after this, in the early autumn, when Lucy Curtis, coming down from the Hall upon one of her courses of visitation in the village, went, as she often did, to Cousin Julia to report herself as she passed, and inquire if there were any special troubles requiring her aid in the little community. Mrs. Rolt was not herself so active as her young cousin; but she heard of everything that was wanted, and was the universal medium of communication between the village and the Hall. The poor people came to her if she did not go to them, and her poor neighbours had unbounded reliance upon her kindness, liking her all the better perhaps that she never made any investigations into their cleanliness or providence, and did not trouble them with visits, but was sorry, indiscriminately, for everybody who was in trouble, and for everybody who was sick had port-wine to bestow and beef-tea. It was not entirely indolence, but rather a just knowledge of herself, combined with a love of keeping at home, which intercepted “parish work” on her part. “I know I should gossip,” she said, with looks of humility, when it was suggested to her that she should visit the poor; and there could be no doubt that she availed herself even of the lessened opportunities presented to her in this particular when the poor visited her. She was lying in wait for Lucy on this particular morning, which happened to be one of the days on which the young lady was expected in the village. Lucy had a great deal of business to do which is not reckoned in the management of an estate. She had the villagers to look after, which probably ought to have been the Rector’s business. But as the Rector did not take naturally to that portion of his work, it was she who did it. She had her little private savings-bank, her small provident societies, her clothing clubs, her parish library, all in her own management, with various additions to the formal educational processes of the place; classes for big girls and boys, and a private little school of cookery, and many small matters, all intended to make the people of Oakley happy; which object, perhaps, they did not succeed in fulfilling, but yet did infinitesimal scraps of good, such as is the utmost most human schemes attain to. One of these undertakings required her presence to-day. It was an October day; the leaves falling, the sky red; and the time was nearly three years from Arthur’s marriage. It was cold enough to make that warm jacket quite expedient which she had hesitated to put on; and as Lucy approached Mrs. Rolt’s house, Mrs. Rolt stationed herself at the window, ready to tap as she passed, and secure ten minutes’—conversation Cousin Julia called it, but gossip would be the proper word to say.

The house of the Rolts was a large substantial building of brick, very much like the Rectory, but not with the same imposing grounds; a house of Queen Anne’s time, with a pediment, and rows of twinkling windows flush with the wall. There was an excellent garden behind, but in front nothing save one large very white doorstep between the door and the street; and the windows of the dining-room, where Mrs. Rolt sat in the morning, were so close upon the road that no one could escape her whom she chose to arrest in this way.

“I am coming,” said Lucy, nodding as she passed; and the neat housemaid, already on the alert, rushed to open the door.

“Missis has been looking for you all the morning,” Sally said. There was evidently something more than ordinary to say.

Nothing could be more warm and cosy than the Rolts’ dining-room. Its warm red curtains filled all the intervals between the windows, not, it is to be feared, as the canons of art would approve, at the present day, but with a comfortable fullness. The room itself was panelled, however, which would have redeemed it, notwithstanding that the old mantelshelf had been tampered with, and was not so high up as it ought to have been. There was a big table in the centre of the room, and two easy-chairs by the fire. The newspaper thrown down in one of them showed that Mr. Rolt himself had but lately left this comfortable room. A big old mahogany sideboard, not handsome, but substantial, stood against the end wall, and a long row of low book-cases opposite the windows. There was not much room to move about because of the big table, upon which there was nothing decorative except a huge basin of China-asters, the last of the garden; but the room was warm, and very handy, Mrs. Rolt thought, when she had anything to do. The good soul never had anything to do; but what did that matter? She liked to have her big basket of odds and ends brought down and placed upon the table, where there was plenty of room; and there she would occupy herself very pleasantly looking out skeins of wool which might make a pair of socks for a poor child, and bits of cloth which would answer for some one’s patchwork. These last were very useful whenever a bundle of children happened to come to Oakley. More dolls than tongue could reckon had been dressed out of Mrs. Rolt’s odds and ends; but they did not do so much good to the poor children who were in want of socks. Mrs. Rolt met Lucy at the door, and kissed her, and brought her in to the big chair.

“How-are-you-and-how-is-your-mamma-and-everybody?” she said in a breath, linking all the words together in her eagerness to get over preliminaries. “Will-you-have-a-cup-of-chocolate-after-your-walk? No? Then-sit-down-and-I-will-tell-you-something,” said Cousin Julia, out of breath.

“I knew you must have something to tell me when I saw your face. What is it? You don’t look as if anything very bad had happened.”

“Oh, it is nothing very bad. I don’t suppose it is of much consequence, and yet it is very funny, you know. Lucy, two ladies have come to live in the little Wren Cottage. Did you ever hear of such a thing? two ladies, one of them tall and handsome. My old Sam has quite lost his heart; and the other not so pretty, and much commoner looking, and both complete strangers, nobody knowing about them, or where they came from, or whom they belong to; and quite young. Did you ever hear anything so strange?”

“Two ladies in the Wren Cottage! Yes, that is news,” said Lucy, with much composure. “I hope they will turn out pleasant neighbours; it will be very agreeable for you.”

“Won’t it? But it is not that, so much that I am thinking of. Who can they be, you know, Lucy? to choose a place like this to settle in, where there is no attraction, no society, no inducement whatever?”

“There is you, and Bertie at the Rectory; that is not bad; and it is very pretty, you know,” said Lucy. “I don’t wonder that anyone should choose Oakley. Where could you find so pretty a place?”

“That is all very well, my dear,” said Mrs. Rolt, who, not having been brought up in Oakley, was less enthusiastic; “but how did they find out that it was a pretty place? No one has ever seen them here before. They could not find it out by instinct, you know, could they? To be sure, Wren Cottage has been advertised in the paper and is let for almost nothing at all. That might tempt them, perhaps, if they are poor.”

“Very likely indeed, I should think; and they must be poor, or else they would never come to Oakley. Is not that what you are thinking? I am glad you are going to have neighbours.”

“Going, Lucy! My love, they are there. Look—look out of the furthest window; don’t you see somebody’s back in the bedroom doing something? Look as plain as possible between the white curtains. Somebody’s back, and I do believe an ear!”

“I could not swear to the ear,” said Lucy, laughing; “but I see there is something; and there is Fanny Blunt at the door, charing; that is good,” she continued, warming into interest. “Fanny Blunt is a good little girl. I am glad she has a place.”

“Listen, Lucy. I told you there were two of them. They don’t look like sisters, but Fanny says they are sisters.”

“Oh, Cousin Julia! you have been asking Fanny—”

“Only her mother, only her mother, dear. Of course, I would not for the world question the girl about her mistresses. You could not think I would be guilty of such a thing, Lucy; but her mother tells me they are two sisters. You would scarcely believe it. The little one is a nice common-looking person; but the other, the one who was at the window, and you saw her ear—”

“But I could not swear to the ear.”

“Don’t laugh, dear. I assure you I am quite serious, and very, very much interested. Their name is Arthur, and one of them is married; at least it is Mrs. Arthur that has taken the cottage. Of course, if the other is her sister, she can scarcely be Arthur too.”

“Mrs. Arthur!” said Lucy, startled.

“Do you know the name, Lucy? Do you know anyone of the name? I should like, I must say, to find out some clue.”

Lucy shook her head. She did not know anyone of the name, which is, of course, a respectable surname borne by many people. It could have nothing to do with anyone she knew.

“I know it only as a Christian name,” said Lucy.

“Ah, as a Christian name—everybody knows it as that,” said Mrs. Rolt. “Poor dear Arthur, I think of him every day, poor fellow.”

“He seems to be happy enough, Cousin Julia; we need not call him poor fellow now.”

“No; but then it is uncomfortable, you know, to be like that, separated from his wife. To be sure, if they did not get on it was better, perhaps; but what a pity, Lucy, they did not get on! There must be great faults, I always say, on the woman’s side.”

“On both sides, I should think,” said Lucy with a sigh.

“On the woman’s side chiefly, my dear; for we know we ought to give in. We may always be quite sure we ought to give in, whatever our husbands may do; and in that case things generally come right; for you know one person cannot quarrel by himself, can he? there must always be two. But that has nothing to do with the poor lady opposite.”

“Is she a poor lady? You seem to know more about her than you said at first.”

“Well, Fanny—or, rather, Fanny’s mother—she comes, you know, about her rent; poor thing, she is always behind with her rent; and she says she is either a widow or her husband is away. He may be a sailor, you know, or in India, or something of that sort; and she does not seem to expect him home. It is a sad position for a young woman. I am not quite sure which of them is Mrs. Arthur though; the little dumpy one is certainly the oldest, but then the tall one looks the most superior.”

“Perhaps it is not always the superior who is the married one,” said Lucy, again tempted to laugh; for such guesses throw gleams of reflection upon the hearers, and lead young women unconsciously to think of themselves.

“No, indeed; I was thirty-five myself before I married, Lucy. It would not become me to speak as if the best people were always the ones that married soonest. There is yourself; but then you are so hard to please. But it stands to reason in this case, don’t you think, that the married one should be the chief? for it is her house, you know, and she is the mistress. Now the tall one, whom you saw at the window, is evidently the principal; therefore she must be Mrs. Arthur. The little fat one seems a good little thing. She looks after everything, and helps to cook the dinner. The other—I wonder if she is a widow?—does very little about the house. I see her reading generally.”

“You speak as if they had been the objects of your observation for years.”

“No, not for years, of course; but when you live opposite to people for a fortnight, you find out a great deal about them. You know you have been away, Lucy. She reads a great deal, and I have seen her out sketching, and sometimes she talks to the poor people; but she looks shy and frightened. Whenever she sees me she hurries away.”

“And you have not called? I wonder you did not call when you take so much interest in her,” said Lucy, taking up her little basket again, and preparing to go.

“Do you think I ought to call?” cried Cousin Julia eagerly. “I have been turning it over and over in my own mind. I wonder if I ought to call, I have been saying to Sam. What would your mamma think, I wonder? You see, they have no introductions, no one to be, as it were, responsible for them; and they might be something very different, they might be not at all nice people for anything we can tell.”

“How unkind of you to imagine evil! Why shouldn’t they be nice people? I am afraid you are beginning to be hardhearted,” said Lucy, laughing. “Mamma will be very much surprised to hear that you have not called, I am sure.”

“Do you really think so? I am dying to call,” cried Mrs. Rolt. “Hard-hearted—me! Oh, Lucy, how can you say so? When you know it is chiefly on your account that your mamma may always be quite certain you will meet no one whom you ought not to meet here.”

“I should like to meet her very much,” said Lucy, offering her pretty cheek for Cousin Julia’s kiss. “I shall come back for some luncheon if you will have me, and then you can tell me all the rest. My people will be waiting now.”

Mrs. Rolt stood at the window and looked after her admiringly as she went away. Such a young creature—to do so much—and to keep the parish together. But then the good woman reflected that she had now said this of Lucy for some years, and counting back, decided that she must be twenty-three—not so very young to be still unmarried, for Sir John Curtis’s daughter, who might marry anybody. “I wonder if there is some one,” said Cousin Julia to herself, making a private review in her own mind of all the gentlemen she knew—which took her thoughts off the new-comer in Wren Cottage, though she might already be seen at the window gazing out with a certain eagerness, and showing more than one ear.

Lucy went on her way with a little tremble of excitement about her, though she laughed at herself for this absurd fancy of hers about Mrs. Arthur. Why should she think of her brother’s wife? She was not aware that Nancy had left Underhayes, or that anything had happened to the family; and it was too foolish to suppose that the unknown sister-in-law who had left her husband and her duty rather than abandon her family would have thrown them aside again aimlessly to come here. Why should she come here? She had shown no symptom of any desire to make herself acquainted with Arthur’s home; but rather had defied and rejected everything that could connect her with it. And now, after all was over between them, why should she come now? Arthur was a quite well-known surname, as Mrs. Rolt said; and she rebuked herself for the fantastic idea with some vehemence. She went about her business, however, with a mind a little discomposed, feeling she knew not how, as if some new chapter had begun; and half expecting the new-comer to rise up in her path, and interfere with her. But Lucy’s business went on as usual without disturbance from any one. She held her usual business levée, receiving the little savings of the poor women, the scrapings of pennies and threepennies they could put aside for the children’s frocks at Christmas, and heard all their stories of boys who were doing well, and boys who were doing ill, and girls that wanted “placing,” and those that were going to learn the dress-making, or away to Oakenden to service. Many a domestic tale she had to hear and sympathise with, and had to make several promises to “speak to” unruly sons and husbands. The village women had a great confidence in “somebody speaking to” those careless fellows, who would go with their wages to the public-house instead of taking them home. “It ain’t that he’s got a bad heart—but oh, Miss Lucy, he do want talking to!” they would say; and Lucy would request that the offending husband might be sent up to the Hall on some little commission, or inveigled in the afternoon into the school-room. “But he’s got that sharp, he won’t go nigh the school-room now as he knows as you’re there, and what’s a-coming,” one of these plaintive wives said shaking her head. “Then you must say I want to speak to him,” said Lucy, “don’t make any pretence of business, but just say I want to see him up at the House. I will give him a little job to do for me if he behaves himself rightly,” said Lucy. She had not, perhaps, so much faith in “talking to” as they had; but it was, at the worst, a flattering delusion, and the men themselves did not dislike the importance of the “talking to” which elevated them for the moment, though it was an undesirable elevation. She had come among them since she was a child. She had waged war with the public-house since it was half a joke to hear her small denunciations, and both women and men had laughed and cried at Miss Lucy. “Lord bless her! she do speak up bold,” they had said; and this early interference had given her a certain power such as the roughest ploughman will allow, holding his breath, to the child, who in baby rectitude and indignation may sometimes lecture a drunken father. She had done a great deal of business in this way before she went back to take luncheon with Cousin Julia, which was not one of the least of her kind offices. You would have supposed Lucy was the most dainty of epicures to see the little feasts Mrs. Rolt made for her on these parish days. Her husband was seldom at home at that hour, and Cousin Julia was ready to feed on nightingale’s tongues, had they been procurable, the young Lady Bountiful who saved her from a solitary meal. And in the afternoon there were the schools to visit, and the little Cottage Hospital, and the cookery, and all that was going on for the good of her village subjects. Bertie, too, had a way of coming to Mrs. Rolt’s on these parish days, and though she was not fond of him, she avowed, as she was of Lucy, yet Bertie was a cousin too, and it was not possible for the gentle soul to forbear from a little feeble essay at matchmaking when she saw these handsome young people together. Bertie was not good enough for Lucy, but Lucy might like him for all that. Things much more unlikely had been known; while it was probable, indeed, that he, only a clergyman, and humble-minded (perhaps) was afraid to venture to open his mind to Sir John’s daughter. Mrs. Rolt felt that it was only doing as she would be done by—or rather as she would have been done by—to allow them to meet when they could. It was the Curtises who were her relations, not my Lady; and she had a little natural opposition in her mind to Lucy’s mother, who was understood to have little admiration for the Rector. “I hope you will not mind, my love, but poor Bertie is coming to lunch,” she said, in deprecating tones on this particular “parish day.”

“Why do you say poor Bertie? I don’t think he considers himself poor,” said Lucy, half annoyed.

“Ah, my dear, he does not get everything he wishes for any more than the rest of us in this world,” Cousin Julia replied; and to such a very natural and likely fact what could anyone say?

CHAPTER V.

BERTIE came to luncheon; and he had things his own way with Cousin Julia, much more than he ever had at the Hall—especially when Mr. Rolt was absent, Mr. Hubert Curtis was permitted to lay down the law. On ordinary occasions he was in the habit of saying that all these shows of interference with the public-house were a piece of womanish nonsense, and did no good, and that the public-house had its place in society, as well as any other institution. But Lucy, being known to entertain strong opinions on this point, the Rector modified his views, or at least the expression of them, when she was present. Sometimes, however, his indiscreet speeches during his absence were brought home to him, even by Cousin Julia’s misdirected zeal and desire to show him at his cleverest.

“Tell Lucy what you were saying about interfering with the people’s liberty,” she said. “I thought it was very clever, Bertie. I should like Lucy to know your way of thinking.” At this Lucy pricked up her ears, and prepared for battle.

“It was nothing,” said the Rector, confused, and giving his simple patroness a murderous look. “Lucy knows that I don’t go so far as she does in using the influence which our position gives us.”

“Is it about the ‘Curtis Arms’?” said Lucy. “I know I would take away the license to-morrow, if I was papa.”

“But, my dearest, your papa must know best. Bertie can tell you a great deal better than I can; but he says it is a pity to force the people even to do what is good.”

“Perhaps,” said Lucy, tossing back her small head and preparing for the contest. “But I should risk it. Let me force them to do right, if you call it forcing, and let Bertie leave them to take their own way—and just see at the end of six months which would be the most satisfactory. If Bertie,” said the young parish potentate relapsing into calm, and with a certainty which had some gentle scorn in it, “had worked in the parish as long as I have done—”

“One would think that had been a hundred years,” said the Rector, “and I yield to Lucy’s experience, Cousin Julia. Besides, nothing that I should do, as you very well know, would interfere with Lucy. To us the legal means of maintaining order, is by keeping up authority without interfering with freedom; but let her interfere with freedom as much as she pleases. Don’t I know that there is not a man in the parish who does not like to be bullied by Miss Lucy?—not one that I know of,” said the Rector with a little gentle emphasis. He meant to infer that he too was ready to be bullied, with that granting of all feminine eccentricities of influence, which is the gentlemanly way of letting women know that they have no real right to interfere.

“I did not think I bullied anyone,” said Lucy, reddening. Perhaps she deserved this for her implied superiority over the Rector in knowledge of the parish. But Mrs. Rolt here saw the mistake she had made, and rushed to the rescue.

“Dear, no. Bertie never thought so, my love. He is always saying what an influence you have, and always so beautifully employed. You must never live anywhere but in the country, Lucy. You could not have your poor people in a town, and you would miss them dreadfully. It gives one so many things to think of. And, Bertie, talking of things to think of, tell us about our new neighbours. You were talking to them yesterday, I heard from Fanny’s mother. And Lucy is like myself, she is dying to know.”

“You mean the ladies at the Wren Cottage? Yes, I saw them yesterday,” said Bertie; but he showed no disposition to say more.

“Tell Lucy about them. She has not seen them. And which is Mrs. Arthur—the tall one, or the little one? and is she a widow? and if she is not a widow, is her husband coming, or where is he? and what put it into her head to come to Oakley? Lucy is quite interested from what I told her; and she wants to know—”

“You must wait till I have mastered your questions before I can reply. Is it the tall one or the little one who is Mrs. Arthur? the tall one, I think. Is she a widow? I can’t tell. She wears an odd sort of dress.”

“It is more like a Sister’s dress than a widow’s. I know she wears a peculiar dress, Bertie. You need not tell me that. But you have talked to her—”

“Could I ask her if she was a widow? and if not, when her husband was coming, and why she came to Oakley? I can’t interrogate new parishioners like that; and only a lady can find out such things. I don’t know anything about them,” said the Rector hastily. Evidently he had no wish to talk of them; and Lucy, looking at him keenly, set down this reluctance as a proof that he knew more than he said. This however was not at all the case. The Rector did not choose to speak of the new-comers, because he felt more interest in them than it was perhaps quite right to feel. He admired “the tall one” very much, and would have been rather glad to make sure that she was a widow. But, on the other hand, he did not want Lucy to suspect this, or to take the idea into her head that Mrs. Arthur was the object of his admiration. Was not Lucy herself his chief object? And if he could win her, it would be of very little importance about Mrs. Arthur. But in the meantime there seemed very little appearance of winning her, and Mrs. Arthur was interesting, and he had no desire to betray to Lucy that he found her so. In this, of course, the Rector was very foolish, for if there had been any chance of awaking Lucy to pique or jealousy, nothing could have been more to his advantage than that he should allow her to perceive his interest in the new inhabitants; but few men are wise enough for this, and Bertie, to his credit, be it said, had in such matters no wisdom at all.

He owed it, however, to the impression made upon her mind by his reticence, that he could tell more about these strangers if he would, that Lucy almost invited his attendance on part of her way home.

“I will walk with you as far as our paths lie together,” she said, as she met him at the door of her cookery school; and he turned with her, well content, though he had not intended to walk that way. Was Lucy coming round to a sense of his excellencies? he asked himself. It seemed “just like” one of the usual aggravating ways of Providence, that this should come, just as he began to feel a new interest stealing into his mind.

“Our paths lie together, as far as you will permit,” he said, tempering however the largeness of this speech by a prudent limit. “I should like nothing better than to walk up the avenue with you this beautiful afternoon.”

“Oh no, don’t take that trouble;” said Lucy. She wanted to question him, but she did not want so much of him as that; while on the other hand, he, though conscious of the rising of a new interest, would on no account have done anything to spoil his chance with Lucy, had she shown the slightest appearance of turning favourable eyes on him. Whatever divergencies of sentiment there might be, Bertie knew well, without any foolishness, which was the right thing to do.

“How good of you to take so much pains with all these children,” he said. “Will they be really the better for it, I wonder? The cooking looked very nice; but will their fathers’ dinners be the better?”

“Their fathers are prejudiced—and perhaps their mothers too. It is their husbands and their mistresses who will be the better. We must always consent to lose a generation,” said Lucy, with youthful prudence. And he smiled. It was, perhaps, scarcely possible not to smile.

“Then if my uncle agreed with you,” he said, “and the rest of us—the girls who are learning to broil and stew in your schools would make nice dinners for the boys, who never would have been allowed to have a glass of beer in the ‘Curtis Arms,’ and then the old generation once swept away, all would go well.”

“Why not?” said Lucy; “but I do not wish to touch the old generation, if not for good, certainly not for evil. I would not sweep them away, but I don’t hope to do much with them. Even the like of you and me,” she said, with meaning, “though we are not old yet, are too old to take up with a new order of things. But, Cousin Bertie, it was something else I meant to say to you. I am not in a flutter of curiosity, like poor dear old Julia; but—you know something more about these ladies, I could see, than what you told us, at least.”

“These ladies! what ladies?” he cried, a little confused by the question.

“The new people—at Wren Cottage; Mrs.—Arthur, I think you call her.”

“Oh!” he said, then made a little pause again, confirming all Lucy’s suspicions, “indeed I don’t know anything about them, more than I told you; why should I? I don’t suppose there is anything to know—and if there is why should I conceal it from you?”

But in his tone and in his look, there was such a distinct intention of holding back something that Lucy was more certain of it than ever.

“Yes,” she said, “why should you—from me? I felt there was something; if there is a mystery about them, surely, Bertie, I am the best person to confide it to. I think I have a right to know.”

What could she mean? did she mean that there being a secret understanding between them, any “new interest” on his part ought to be confided to her? The Rector was profoundly puzzled. He had never said anything to Lucy, nor Lucy to him, to warrant such a pretension as this.

“Of course,” he said, faltering, “you know that you are the first person I would confide in—if there was anything to confide. The idea that you care to know is too sweet to me, Lucy.”

She looked him full in the face; asking in her turn, what did he mean? sweet to him, why should it be sweet to him? What was there in her question to give him this flattered yet confused look? She regarded him very gravely with inquiring steady eyes.

“I think you must fail to understand my question,” she said. “And of course I can’t help being anxious. Tell me; there can be no possible reason,” she added, with some impatience, “why you should not tell me!”

But there was something so comical in the perplexity which succeeded that expression of happy vanity in his face, that Lucy laughed out.

“I don’t believe, after all, you have anything to tell,” she said.

“Not I—not a scrap of anything; what could I have to tell? what could they be to me? I have eyes only for one,” said the Rector, still somewhat confused, and taking rather awkward advantage of the opportunity. They were just then approaching the gate, and Lucy gave her head that little toss of impatience which he was acquainted with, perceiving, with some anger, her mistake.

“Here we are at the end of our joint road,” she said, abruptly; “thank you for carrying my basket so far, Bertie. Oh no, I prefer to carry it myself. I cannot indeed let you take any further trouble. Good morning. Papa expects you to-morrow, I believe.”

“But that need not hinder me from coming now.”

“Oh no, not at all, if you have any object in coming; but papa will be out, and you must not take any more trouble for me—Good-bye!” she said, abruptly, waving her hand to him. He had nothing to do but to acquiesce. He turned back, feeling that he had not come off well in the encounter—what did she mean? She was a troublesome squire’s daughter as ever young Rector was plagued with. She knew the parish better than he did, and took her own way in it, indifferent to his advice. She would not be guided, directed, nor made to see that he was the first person to be considered. And she would not be made love to—nor even receive compliments—much less consent that to settle down along with him in the Rectory, bringing with her all that Sir John could keep back from rebellious Arthur, was the natural arrangement. And, this being the case, if a “new interest” did enter his mind, why in the name of everything that was mysterious should she have a right to know it, and be the natural person to confide it to? He was more mystified and puzzled than words could say.

As for Lucy, she went on with a little tingling in her cheeks, feeling that she had made a mistake, but not clear as to what the mistake was. Could he think that it mattered to her whether he had eyes for one or half-a-dozen? what were his eyes to her? But still though she did not see how what he said could bear upon the subject, there was certainly a little confusion about Bertie; he knew something about Mrs. Arthur, if not what she, with so much excitement, permitted herself to suspect. It was a lovely October evening, with a sunset coming on which blazed behind the woods. The sunset is, perhaps, the one only scenic representation of which we are never tired. Lucy went on looking at it, lost in the beauty of it, as if she had never seen one before. There was a deep band of crimson round the lower horizon, all broken as it was with masses of trees, and rosy clouds flung about to all the airs stained into every gradation of red, till the colour melted in an ethereal blush upon the blue. And between the crimson below, and the rose tints above, how the very sky itself changed into magical tones of green, and faint lights of yellow, far too visionary to be called by such vulgar names. She went on slowly, her face turned towards it, and illuminated by the light. “Beginning to sink in the light he loves on a bed of daffodil sky,” she was saying to herself. At such moments there are thoughts which will intrude even into the peacefullest soul, thoughts of some one absent—of something lost—if there should happen to be anything lost or absent in our lives: and even with those who are altogether happy, a sweet pretence at unhappiness will invade the heart; the hour which turns the traveller’s desire homeward that day when he has bidden sweet friends farewell. All this was in Lucy’s head, and in her heart, and she forgot what she had been so curious about only a few minutes before.

A path struck from the avenue across the Park, not much beyond the gate. Some sound of crackling twigs under passing footsteps disturbed her with the moisture, scarcely to be called tears, standing in her eyes. She half turned her head, and saw two figures against the light, one taller, the other shorter—figures unknown to her who knew everybody. Without intending it, Lucy made a half pause of suspicion, which looked almost like a question—though that was quite unintended too, for it was a thoroughfare, and she had neither the wish nor the right to interfere with anyone who might be there. The strangers had long wreaths of the wild clematis flowered out, with its great downy seedpods, and some clusters of scarlet and yellow leaves in their hands. They made a little alarmed pause too, and there was a kind of stumbling retreat backwards, and a momentary consultation. Lucy went on, but in a moment more, paused again, at the sound of some one pattering after her over the carpet of fallen leaves.

“Oh! if you please—”

Lucy turned round. It was a comely young woman who stood before her, in mourning, a little flush upon her face, her breath coming quick with the running. She was little and plump, a kind, good-tempered, homely little person, with good sense in her face.

“I hope we are not trespassing. I hope if we were trespassing you will forgive us, please, for we did not mean it. We are strangers here. All this is rubbish,” she said, looking down upon the leaves in her hands; “not even flowers. We thought it was no harm to pick them; they took my sister’s fancy, they were so bright-coloured. I hope we have done nothing wrong.”

The English was good enough, the h’s faint, yet not markedly absent; but the voice was not the voice of a lady; this Lucy divined at once.

“The road is free to everyone,” she said; “you are not trespassing; and you are quite welcome to the leaves. They are beautiful; you have very good taste to like them—but of course they are of no use.”

“Oh, they are of no use;” said the little woman, “it is my sister. She draws them sometimes. Indeed she paints them quite nicely, as like as possible. She takes such great pains.”

“Is she an artist?” said Lucy. It seemed necessary to say something, for the stranger with her good-humoured face stood still expecting a reply.

“Oh, no; she does not require to do anything. She does it for her pleasure. She has a great deal of education—now.” This was said with a look of some alarm behind her. Lucy turned and looked too; the other taller figure in sombre black garments had already reached the gate.

“It must be you who have come to the Wren Cottage,” she said; “everyone is known and talked about in a village; is it you that are Mrs. Arthur, or the other lady? I will come and see you, if you will allow me, on my next parish day.”

“O-oh!” the plump young woman gave a startled cry. “My sister is not seeing anybody.” Then her countenance recovered a little, and she said, “But I shall be glad—very glad to see you. Of course if she wishes to shut herself up, she can go upstairs.”

“I should not like to intrude upon anyone,” said Lucy, with a smile. She was a princess in her own kingdom, and no one could affront her. The idea indeed amused rather than offended her, that she could be supposed to intrude upon anyone in Oakley. The notion was delightfully absurd.

“Not intrude—oh, dear no, not intrude; but she has had a deal of trouble,” said the stranger, “a great deal of trouble; if she could be persuaded to see—anyone, it would do her good.”

“I will come,” said Lucy, with a friendly nod. She did not require to stand upon any ceremony with this homely little person; “and in the meantime the road across the Park is quite free. Good day,” she said, smiling. All other fancies flew away out of her mind at the sight of this rational common-place little person. She was not vulgar, certainly not vulgar, for there was no pretension in her; but certainly not in the least like——. Lucy had seen the Bateses, the family of Arthur’s wife; she had seen Sarah Jane in her cheap finery, and the mother in her big bonnet and shawl. Nothing could be more unlike them than this sensible little person in her plain neat mourning dress. She had seen them but for a few minutes, it is true; but the recollection of florid beauty, of flowers and ribbons, and flimsy fine dresses, and boisterous manners of the free and easy kind was strong upon her; and this little woman was quite sensible and simple. What fantastic notions people take into their heads! there was evidently no mystery or difficulty here, she said to herself smiling, as nodding again to the new-comer, she resumed her walk at a quicker pace, and made her way henceforth undisturbed to the Hall.

CHAPTER VI.

“WHY did you speak to her? why didn’t you just make our excuses and come on?” said the younger to the elder. “I thought you would never be done talking.”

“I wanted to see her; I wanted to make out what kind of girl she was; and I will tell you this, she is a nice girl. No more stuck up than I am. A nice, smiling, pleasant girl, not a bit proud; not half nor a quarter so proud as you are, Nancy.”

“H-hush! Don’t call me by that name. Can’t you understand that is the only name they know? Call me Anna, and it will not matter; they would never think of that in connection with me.”

“Why should they think anything about you?” said Matilda. “A young lady like Miss Curtis, why should she trouble her head with new people coming into the village? Or what would make her think of you? You know the reason why you came here, because it was the very last place Arthur would think of looking for you; though, indeed, he has not troubled you much with looking for you,” she added in a lower voice.

“You are very unfeeling,” said Nancy, with a quiver on her lip.

For it would be in vain to attempt to delude the reader into the idea that this tall young lady in mourning who had taken the Wren Cottage, and was called Mrs. Arthur, was anybody but Nancy. Her disguise was transparent, indeed, to anyone whose suspicions had ever been awakened, and the very transparence of her disguise was part of the character of the girl, who had suffered a great deal indeed, and learned something, but who was still herself at bottom, notwithstanding the progress she had made. She had made a great deal of progress. She had read numbers of very heavy, very solid books, and could have passed an examination on various abstruse subjects which never could be of the slightest service to her. How was the poor girl to know? She was aware that reading books was the way to be educated, and she was too proud to be guided by anybody who knew better than she did. She had devoured a great deal of poetry, and many novels as well; though these she was rather ashamed of. But she knew that it must be right to work through the Encyclopædia, and to read history, and Locke upon the Human Understanding, and other volumes of solid reputation. No doubt they did her good, more or less, and the very effort to read them did her good. And she knew now all about those things which had puzzled her so much at Paris; about the Queen who was murdered, and the people whose heads were cut off; and had gone over all the collections of pictures open in London, and knew now, at least, the names of the painters with whom people are generally enraptured. Her mistakes in the old days thus gave her a certain enlightenment, revealing to her certain points on which she was very ignorant, and which it was right to know; but beyond these limits Nancy had not much information as to what was wanted for the education of a lady, and stumbled along in the dark, though with the best will in the world. But the occupation which this gave her was of the utmost importance to her, and had softened and consolidated her whole moral being. Further, she had tried music, which comes into the most elementary conception of a lady’s training, but had found this very hard work, neither her fingers nor her patience being equal to the strain upon them; but she had managed better with drawing, and had made a great many elaborate pencil copies, and some in chalk, which Matilda thought beautiful. When her father and mother both died, it was impossible to keep her longer in Underhayes. No one had any longer the smallest control over her. Matilda, though she was sensible, had never taken any lead in the family, and though she criticised, always obeyed the more potent impulse of her younger sister. Nancy had been as impulsive and imprudent in her present action as in all the previous movements of her life. She had given up her income from Arthur without telling anyone, to the great dismay of her sisters. “What are you to live on?” they had both cried, with horror and alarm. But Nancy was not to be talked to then more than at other periods. She had informed them that she meant to live on her own little infinitesimal fortune, the two hundred and fifty pounds her aunt had left her; and in answer to all their representations that this would last a very short time, she would deign no reply. She had determined to do it, and that was enough—as she had determined to do other foolish things. Matilda had come with her in the spirit of a martyr. “We must do something to make our own living when she has spent it all,” Matilda said; “and I won’t forsake her.” Thus Nancy carried out her foolish intention. She was independent for the moment, obliged to nobody, whatever might happen to-morrow or next year. Two hundred and fifty pounds seems a large sum to the inexperienced. And as to the reason why she came to Oakley, it would have been still more difficult to tell that. Because it was the last place in the world where Arthur would be likely to find her, she said. Was it not rather because when Arthur came to find her (as she had no doubt he would as soon as he heard “what had happened,”) she would not permit herself to be found at Underhayes, yet would not either put herself out of his way? However, Nancy did not herself know what she meant upon this point. A great many confused and inarticulate feelings were in her mind. Her heart yearned towards her husband, whom she had loved in her way. Only when she had driven him from her had she realized how much he was to her; and though far too proud to make any overtures of reconciliation, all her forlorn studies, her foolish self-trainings had been one long silent overture, had anybody known. And now to come to the neighbourhood of his home, to hear of him, to see the people whom she had stigmatized so often as fine folks (how the educated Nancy blushed now at such a vulgar expression!) seemed the greatest attraction in the world to her. She would not put herself in the way of being noticed by them, but she would not, on the other hand, make any violent effort to keep out of their way; and there was something that pleased her fantastic condition of mind in the mere idea of living there, unknown, yet not too carefully concealed, indifferent as to whether she was found out or not; unrevealed, yet not disguised. She would not change her name. She was Mrs. Arthur, and there she would stay as Mrs. Arthur. If she were discovered she was harming no one. She had a right to live there if she pleased. Thus half in longing, half in defiance, Nancy took up her abode in the little cottage called, nobody knew why, the Wren Cottage, probably because it was not much bigger than a wren’s nest. Perhaps it had not occurred to her how much discussion would be raised in the tranquil little village by her arrival as a stranger; perhaps she did not care whether she was talked of or not. Indeed, she did not think on the subject, but only wondered with all her mind whether they would find her out, whether they would not find her out, what they would think of her? but never asked herself, as Matilda said, why they should think of her at all. This, it was to be feared, was not at all a thing desirable to Nancy. That they should inquire about her, wonder who she was, suspect her, recognize her, these were the things she preferred to imagine, and which it pleased her to brood over. Lucy had seen her, and very likely would recognize her. She was sure she would recognize Lucy wherever she might see her. It was exciting to meet her in the avenue as they approached, and Nancy had a secret pleasure in sending Matilda to apologize and explain, although she was quite well aware that the thoroughfare was a public one, and that nobody could interfere with their movements. Though she would not let Matilda see it, she was trembling with suppressed excitement when her sister rejoined her. Nothing could happen in consequence of such a meeting; Lucy could not have divined who she was by the distant vision of her figure against the light, or through Matilda, whom she had never seen; but yet the wilful headstrong girl, who had resisted so much, trembled at this chance encounter. She went back to the Wren Cottage afterwards, excited and tingling all over; yet feeling a blankness in the air as if all the colour and expectation had passed away.

The Wren Cottage was very small. The door opened direct into the sitting-room without any passage or antechamber. Nancy of two years ago would have thought it very common, but Nancy of to-day, knowing a little about Art, in respect to modern dwelling-places, supposed it must be “quaint,” and called it so. A wooden staircase led up into the bedrooms. There was a deep recessed window at the side which gave a little more pretension to the room, and commanded the road as far as the Hall gates, and some small portion of the avenue. Here Nancy had ranged her books in the window sill. They were of a very heterogeneous description. There was a French book, something about the revolution, which she was reading “for practice,” and there was a philosophical work which she read—because she thought that was the right thing to do; but a little of it went a long way. Thus the few volumes which she liked made an imperfect balance with a great many which she did not like, but worked at conscientiously, as understood to be the proper means for her purpose. Her present solid study was of the most heterodox character, and might have compromised Nancy’s “soundness” in doctrine, had there been any critic here apt to judge; and might have confused her own brain, poor girl, had she paid any attention to it. But she used the book just as she used a chair—the one was to read, the other to sit down in; and Nancy did not trouble her mind about the one more than about the other. Besides these studies, there was a large cartoon in chalk hung up against the side of the window, which she was copying so carefully that it made one’s fingers ache to see. When she came in from her walk, however, Nancy put down her podded clematis, and all the autumnal leaves in her hands, upon the window sill, and arranged them somewhat mechanically, yet with a certain grace, upon a large sheet of paper, where she partly traced, partly drew them as they lay. This was her fancy—and she thought it very frivolous and childish; not at all a thing that had to do with the formation of the character, like the cartoon in chalk.

While Nancy settled her wreath to her satisfaction, Matilda made the tea. They had carpeted the little room with a common carpet all of one colour, ornamented with a narrow border. Among Nancy’s books there had been some which treated this question, and she had given to it a solemnity of consideration which might have satisfied the most severe critic. The little table in the middle of the room had a cover to correspond; the stairs had the same red carpeting, and there were similar curtains at the broad lattice window looking out to the street. This was but an elementary stage of decoration, but how important it seemed in Nancy’s eyes! as important as Queen Marie Antoinette and the fact, which she had learned so painfully, that old pictures were generally considered better than new ones. She was ashamed of herself as she painted her leaves very rapidly, and with a blush on her face, thinking it mere childishness, and when she read a novel, or even a new poem. But to keep Matilda from placing the chairs against the walls, and to keep the same colour in all the accessories of the room, that was serious. It was one of her proofs that she was becoming a real lady, and was no longer ignorant, fond of everything new and gaudy, as she had been, alas! when Arthur was with her; everything was changed and mended now. The tea went rather against Nancy’s notions of what she ought to be doing in her present state of self-culture. She ought to be preparing for dinner. But then there were practical considerations which told against theory here. Fanny, the little maid, came only in the morning and “late dinner,” that distinguishing feature in the life of “the gentry,” would required cooking before it was eaten; and they both preferred tea; and it was much cheaper, and caused less trouble; and, lastly, no one visited them to see that they did not dine. Nancy was not indisposed to call the dinner luncheon that day the Rector had called.

As it was she sat down to her bread and butter with sufficient content. She had a great deal to do, and notwithstanding her precarious condition, separated from her husband, without an income, and living upon her little capital, she was not unhappy. She was too busy to be unhappy. She had been quite unfit to be Arthur’s companion when they were together; and there was so much to do to qualify herself for that post. But when the Curtises saw that she could draw so well, and that her room was so artistic, and that she had read so many books, what could they think but that she was truly a lady? And Arthur would come home for her, and all would be well. These hopes were in her mind as she read, and as she drew. She was occupied, and there was hope in her, and no one to cross her. Accordingly Nancy was not unhappy.

“I shouldn’t wonder at all if Miss Curtis was to call—she said something about it. Will you see her, or will you not see her? I said I was not sure you would like it.”

“Matilda, that was rude!”

“Nothing of the sort—what could I say? I couldn’t tell her, Nancy don’t want to be seen.”

“Don’t call me Nancy, please!”

“Well, Anna then—but I never can recollect. I said I didn’t know if you would like it—but anyhow you could go upstairs if you didn’t like it.”

“She must think me a pretty bear. She did not ask you—what your sister’s name was, nor where she came from, nor—anything about her?”

“Not a word. Why should she? You didn’t show at all; when you are seen you are a deal more interesting than me, I don’t deny it.”

“Please!” said Nancy clasping her hands, “don’t say ‘a deal,’ and ‘more interesting than me.’”

“What should I say,” said the good-humoured Matilda; “it is a good thing I am not nervous. When she comes, you can run upstairs. You can listen over the banisters, and hear all she is saying; and if you like her talk, you can come down next time. After all, Nancy, if you had not imagined that we would see them, why should we have come here?”

“But she will know me,” said Nancy, “she saw me once—”

“On your wedding day! You don’t think you are a bit like the same person in that funny stiff little cap, and white collar, as you were in your wedding dress with your veil? I don’t think Arthur himself would know you,” said her sister frankly. Nancy winced at this, in spite of herself. She did not want to be so changed as this. That she might be changed a little, that there might be a difficulty in recognising her, and a sense of mystery exciting their curiosity before they found her out—that would be nothing but pleasant; but to be so unlike herself as not to be recognised, even by Arthur, was not in her thoughts.

It was Matilda’s part to put the tea away, as it had been hers to make it. There was no question between them of their different positions. Matilda yielded to Nancy all that the other could require. It was not hers, heaven forbid it, to read these big books, to think so much about everything, to take such trouble to learn drawing, and to understand the arrangements of a room. But she liked getting the tea, and putting the things away, though she was apt to make Nancy angry by setting the chairs straight against the wall. And then they sat at the table with the lamp between them, Matilda with her needlework, Nancy reading her French for practice. Perhaps in her heart the elder sister might be sighing for the friendliness of Underhayes, where she could steal out in the evening and go through the blazing gas in Raisins’ shop, into the comfortable little parlour, to have a chat with Sarah Jane; but on the whole they were not at all unhappy; all the energies of Nancy’s active mind were fixed upon her French. She could now, she thought, understand very well all that was said to her, if ever she went to France again; and understand the plays, and know what everything was about. Thus she revolved in her narrow circle, preparing for those contingencies which had once happened, and still hopeful that they were the same which would happen again.

But Nancy was taking a little rest from her occupations, painting again her tangled wreath of autumn leaves, but rather disposed to throw something over it, perhaps one of those wretched antimacassars, which proved her (though she did not know it) to be still in the land of bondage—for even Matilda, who entertained a profound admiration for the chalk cartoon, considered the other rubbish—when next morning there came a soft knock to the front door. Matilda opened it so quickly that her sister had neither time to disappear nor even to conceal her occupation, when Mrs. Rolt’s pleasant middle-aged face appeared at the door.

“I am Mrs. Rolt, a very near neighbour. May I come in and see Mrs. Arthur, if she is at home?” said Cousin Julia. Her soft eyes were quite keen with curiosity. She glanced to the very background of the picture, the depth of the recess in which Nancy stood, with her pencils in her hand. Her figure looked taller than it was in the long clinging black gown; and the little close cap of transparent net on her head, looked like a piece of conventual costume; and she wore a jet cross at her neck, which increased this effect. Mrs. Rolt thought she was like the mysterious lady in a novel with an interesting secret. She looked at Nancy, though Matilda stood so much the nearest. “I don’t even know which is Mrs. Arthur,” she said, with one of her ingratiating smiles. Nancy came forward, laying down the pencils. She made a nondescript kind of salutation, half bow, half curtsey, to the stranger. It was awkward and shy, but it was not ungraceful. Matilda only smiled cordially, which answered the purpose quite as well, it must be allowed; but there was no likelihood that Matilda would ever be an ambassador’s wife, called upon by her duty to be solemnly civil to all the world. “I am so glad to make your acquaintance,” said Mrs. Rolt; “I daresay you see me sometimes, as I see you. I have often and often looked across; and I should have called, but I was afraid you might think I was intruding. However, being told yesterday—that is Miss Curtis, whom you are sure to have heard of, told me that I ought to come; and I was very glad to hear her say so. Have you met any of the Curtises, Mrs. Arthur? They are, as of course you know, the chief people here.”

“I have met—one of the family; long ago;” said Nancy, trembling as she said it. But she could not restrain herself, for she suddenly felt that she must hear of Arthur or die.

“Have you indeed? I wonder what one that would be. I should not wonder if it were Arthur—Arthur is the one that has been most in the world. And oh, such a sad fate for him, poor fellow! He married some common girl or other—I don’t mean to say anything against her character, you know; but she was not a lady. And after a while he had to separate from her. Such a sad business! and poor dear Arthur was the nicest boy, poor fellow! I suppose you must have met him in London. How interested poor dear Lady Curtis will be.”

“Oh, don’t say I met him!” cried Nancy, whose cheeks were burning. “It—might not be the same; it might be a mistake. Was he—not happy—with his wife?”

Matilda got behind Mrs. Rolt, and made a warning sign to her sister. Nancy’s eyes were blazing, her face suffused with crimson. Any spectator less placid and unobservant would have fathomed her secret at once.

“Oh, poor fellow! he was dreadfully in love with her, I believe, as young men so often are when they marry out of their own station; but they separated, you know, so I suppose they can’t have been happy. We expected them down here, and all sorts of preparations were made, and dear Lady Curtis so much excited. And then all at once everything was countermanded, and poor Arthur came down by himself, looking very wretched, poor fellow! I wonder often if they will ever come together again. It seems such a pity—a young man with everything before him! But, of course, this puts a stop to his life; what can he do? cut off from everything! For people don’t care to encourage in society an attractive young man like that who is married, and yet isn’t married, as it were. Ah!” said Mrs. Rolt, drawing a long breath; “how I run on! As if you, who are strangers to the place, could be as interested about the Curtises as we are. It is very good of you to listen, I am sure.”

CHAPTER VII.

NANCY’S agitation after this interview with Mrs. Rolt was great. It had never occurred to her before, to think of the feelings which might legitimately affect Arthur’s family and friends in respect to her marriage. That they “looked down upon” her—despised her as a poor girl, sneered at her as not a lady, was comprehensible enough, and woke her to a wild defiance. It was this that roused the principle that she was “as good as they were” in her undisciplined bosom, and led to all the subsequent woes. But when she heard thus simply what was the state of feeling on the other side, and especially the lamentation over Arthur’s spoiled life with which Mrs. Rolt had concluded, Nancy’s heart, which had been tremulously confident, began to sink. If this was how it was—and of course this must be how it was—could he forgive her for having by her perversity doomed him to such a fate? She had thought of him often jealously as “enjoying himself” in the unknown society of which she knew nothing; but it had never occurred to her that Arthur was in a false position in that society, a married man, yet not a married man; better off, no doubt, than a woman in the same position, yet but poorly off, all the same; looked upon doubtfully, not belonging to one class or another. Was this what she had sentenced him to? Had she been reasonable, had she come with him when Lady Curtis had made all those preparations for her reception, all this might have been avoided. It gave her a strange thrill to think that Lady Curtis, who was now so near her, had made preparations to receive her, and had even herself been agitated by the thought of meeting her son’s wife.

“If I went now and told her, what would she say?” Nancy asked herself. That would be entirely different. Arthur’s wife formerly had a right to everything. Arthur’s wife now, what had she a right to? nothing but the dislike and opposition of Arthur’s family. She was a stranger to them—an enemy!

“If it takes effect on you like this, just to see one that knows them, even though she don’t belong to them,” said Matilda, “what will they do to you if they come themselves? and that young lady said she would come herself—and oh! hasn’t she got quick eyes? she’ll read you all through and through in a moment.”

“Let me alone,” said Nancy; “do you think I care who comes? I have more control over myself than you think.”

“I’d like to see some more signs of it,” said Matilda; “I thought you had mended of your silly ways; but here you are again, walking up and down and rampaging as bad as you were at home. If this is all to begin over again at the first mention of Arthur, whatever in all the world did you leave Arthur for?”

“Because I was mad, I think;” said Nancy.

“Well, that was always my opinion. Your husband, a nice well-dispositioned young man, that would have done anything to please you! and all for us at home, that were fond of you to be sure; but didn’t want you very much, Nancy.”

“You are cruel, very cruel, to tell me so,” cried Nancy, “to tell me now!”

“Well, now is the only time I could have told you,” said Matilda, composedly. “I wouldn’t have said it then to hurt your feelings; but you can’t blame poor old father and mother now, and it is quite true. When a daughter has married and gone off with a husband, who wants her back again at home? But nobody would be unkind and hurt your feelings; and now you hear the same from the other side. When married folks are separated, what can anyone think but that there’s something wrong? on one side or on the other side, it’s all one. But between you there’s nothing wrong, only your tempers—only your temper, Nancy, I should say, for Arthur, I will say that for him, always stood a deal more than he ought to have stood, a deal more than I’d have stood in his place.”

Nancy made no reply. She retreated into her recessed window, and put down her head into her hands among all the “rubbish” of autumn leaves which Matilda was so severe upon, and cried. It was all true. So long as her father and mother lived, there had been a kind of anchor to her wayward soul in the thought that Arthur and his family had slighted and condemned them, whom she was bound to defend and vindicate; and this gave a certain reason and excuse for her own conduct, which of itself did not bear any cooler examination. Her books, from which she had acquired such strange bits of heterogeneous information, had not guided her much in the way of thought; but to be at a distance from any exciting period of individual history is of itself sufficient to throw a cold gleam of uncomfortable light upon it, light which we would in most cases elude if we could. Nancy had eluded it by impulsive action after the change which had compelled her to think, the two deaths which threw her, as it were, adrift upon the world. She had rushed at one thing and another, given up her allowance, resigned her villa, removed here, without leaving herself much time to consider; but now the retarded moment could be held off no longer, and she was obliged to think. There was not much that was satisfactory in the retrospect. Was it possible that they had not wanted her at home? and that she had spoiled Arthur’s life as well as her own? For what? She could not tell. Because his family “looked down upon her,” because he objected to live in Underhayes, because she was foolish, hot-headed, unreasonable. And now what prospect was there that the husband whom she had thus slighted, and his family whom she had defied and wounded through him, would be ready to forgive, to take her into favour? A temporary despair came over Nancy. The first time that an impetuous young mind sees its own faults, and thoroughly disapproves of itself, what a moment that is! Reproof of others most generally brings with it an impulse of self-defence which defeats self-judgment; but when first, in the silence, unaccused of any one, the soul rises up and judges itself, what a pang is there in the always tardy conviction—too late, perhaps, late always, after suffering and making to suffer, distracted in the best cases with the desperate question whether there may still be a place of repentance. Matilda, sitting calmly at her needlework, had not the least idea what passionate despairings were in Nancy’s mind as she sat there and cried. What was to become of her? The elder sister had been anxious enough over that question when Nancy was so foolish as to give up her allowance. Matilda herself had settled to join Charley in New Zealand, where useful young women like herself were, she knew, wanted, as men’s wives, and in other domestic capacities; but she would not forsake her foolish sister—and now Matilda awaited with sufficient composure the solution of the question, what was to become of them? If, when their transparent secret was found out, the Curtises showed themselves willing to take charge of Arthur’s wife, Matilda intended to give her so very distinct a piece of her mind that there could no longer be any possibility of self-deception on the part of Nancy; and to lay before her then and there the option of return to her duties or immediate emigration; but, in the meantime, until this crisis arrived, the sensible Matilda could wait. She was working quietly at her own outfit for New Zealand at this very moment, while Nancy studied her books, or drew, or “played” with the “rubbish” which littered the room. Matilda, like most people, had a respect for education, and perhaps there might be good in all that; but while this fantastic, undirected preparation for something, she could not tell what, was going on with Nancy, Matilda made those matter-of-fact preparations which can never be without their use. She made her chemises for the voyage while the other tried to make herself “a lady.” The one attempt might fail, but not the other; and thus she worked on steadily, altogether unconscious of the wild surgings of despair and self-condemnation in Nancy’s mind. Matilda did not know what these sentiments were. She herself had always done her duty, and as for Nancy, she had been very silly, and there was an end of it. If she persevered in being silly, Matilda had fully settled within herself that she would take the command of affairs, and bring the fantastic young woman to her senses, by giving her at least a piece of her mind.

Things went on in this way for a week or two after Mrs. Rolt’s visit; nothing further occurred to disturb the sisters in their stillness, and Nancy at least required the stimulation of some new thing. She got into despair about her reading, her conscientious pursuit of knowledge and accomplishments. If things were always to go on as now, what was the good? Every day she got up hoping that something might happen, some encounter that would quicken the blood in her veins; but nothing happened. It was rainy weather, and not even a hairbreadth escape of meeting Lucy, or any chance of being recognized—that danger which she professed to fear and secretly longed for—had ever happened. The village life was very dull and still, and the sisters had no natural distractions, no breaks upon the heaviness and monotony of the rainy autumn days. To Matilda, indeed, it was occupation enough to get on steadily with her chemises, and she even rejoiced in the quiet which permitted her to “get so much done.” But Nancy, even without the sense of uncertainty in her fate which made her restless, was not sufficiently placid of nature to have lived without break or change; and her whole scheme of living, artificial as it had been from the beginning, was disorganized and broken up. She had hoped everything at first, making a little romance of the story: how Arthur would come to seek her as soon as he knew of “what had happened;” how, failing to find her at Underhayes, he would rush everywhere to look for her, advertise for her, pursue her far and near; how he would come sadly home to tell his mother that his Nancy was lost for ever and his heart broken; and then would find her, turning all trouble into joy. This was the fancy the foolish girl had cherished in her heart; but there was no sign or appearance that anything would come of it. On the contrary, she began to perceive something like the real state of affairs; she saw what she had brought upon her husband by her causeless abandonment of him, and something of the light in which her conduct must appear to others; and how could she be sure that he was now ready to pardon, ready to open his arms to her again? This thought disturbed all Nancy’s confidence in her progress, in her reading, her French, her beautifully shaded étude. What folly these labours would all turn to if he despised them, and had no interest in her improvement! It could do her no good to be a lady unless she was reconciled to Arthur; and what if to be reconciled was no longer Arthur’s desire?

Mrs. Rolt, however, for her part, was most agreeably moved and excited by the new neighbours, to whom her visit had brought excitement of so different a kind. She hurried out to the Hall to tell the story, in her waterproof and goloshes. It was too wet for Lucy to venture to the village; but Cousin Julia could have ventured anywhere in the strength of such a piece of news as she had now to carry. She told how she had gone to call, chiefly moved by Lucy’s encouragements.

“For I thought if Lucy thought it was the right thing to do, you must have thought so, dear Lady Curtis; and of course you know better than I do. There is something very strange about them. The married one is quite different from the other. I am sure she is a most accomplished person, very handsome. I should think she must be something very artistic, and perhaps she has been on the stage. Oh, no, she did not say anything to make me think that; but there is something about her;—very handsome, with such a lovely complexion, and fine eyes and hair. But the other is quite homely, a nice sort of little friendly woman. My own opinion, if you ask me,” said Mrs. Rolt, mysteriously, “is that she’s not a widow. I should say Mr. Arthur, whoever he may be, is no better than he should be; and he has broken his poor wife’s heart, and driven her away from him. That’s my idea. Sam says ‘Fudge!’ but then he is always saying ‘Fudge.’ I wish I knew the rights of the story; and you will see, it will turn out something like what I say.”

“On the stage—was the young woman on the stage? I hope she will not introduce any taste for that kind of thing in the village,” said Sir John, who had come in as usual for his cup of tea.

“Oh, dear no—no, I did not mean that. She is only the kind of mysterious, lovely young creature—so superior, and yet with such a homely sister; and so handsome—and all alone, you know—that might have been on the stage, as you read in books; something quite romantic, and so interesting, like a novel,” cried Mrs. Rolt.

“I hope it may come to the third volume and entertain us all,” said Lady Curtis. “We want a little amusement this rainy weather. Perhaps the husband will turn up, and prove to be handsome and superior too: or perhaps she will hear of his death—what is the matter, Lucy? You have spilt your tea over my crewels!”

“No, I only scalded my fingers a little. I don’t like to hear you settling all about the husband, as if we were quite sure he was the one to blame.”

“Ah, well,” said Lady Curtis, with a sigh. It brought another story to her mind, as no doubt it had done to Lucy’s; and after this no more was said. To be sure, Mrs. Rolt said to herself, as she drove home in the brougham which Lady Curtis (always so kind!) insisted upon having out for her—it was not, perhaps, right to talk of anything that could recall poor Arthur’s sad circumstances. But then this was evidently so different, such an interesting young creature; and dear Sir John had been quite amused.

The next bright day after this, Lady Curtis and her daughter were both in the village. After the first outburst of autumn rains, a bright day is very tempting; and the walk down the avenue was pleasant, and the village basked in the sunshine with genuine enjoyment, as if the old red houses knew how expedient it was to make the most of the little warmth and brightness which remained possible. Lady Curtis sat at Cousin Julia’s window while she waited for Lucy, and looked out, not without satisfaction, upon the village, tranquil as it was. To see the women at their doors, curtseying to the Rector as he passed, and the children getting out of his way, and the cart with baskets, conducted by two hoarse and strident tramps, which was at that moment making a triumphal progress through the street, was a change from the sodden green of the park, as seen from the long windows of the morning-room. She was a woman whom it was easy to amuse, and this simple variety pleased her. She was looking out with a smile on her face at this rural scene, when the sudden appearance of two unknown figures surprised her; and when Bertie stopped to speak to them with much appearance of cordiality and interest, Lady Curtis was interested.

“Who are these?” she asked, with the ready curiosity of a great county lady, almost affronted that any new individual unknown to her should appear, as it were, in the very streets of her metropolis without her leave. “I never saw Bertie so eager before; he looks as if he had forgotten for the moment that he himself must be the first person to be thought of. Who is she, Julia?” cried Lady Curtis.

Mrs. Rolt came hastily from the other end of the room, where she had been making the tea.

“Oh, that is the mysterious stranger—that is Mrs. Arthur—that is the lovely creature I told you so much about. Don’t you think she is very handsome—don’t you think she is interesting? I am so glad you have seen her! Yes, Bertie is very civil to them. He is going back to their door with them; but they never ask him in. I must say there never was anything more prudent. They never encourage him to come; and though he is the Rector he is a young man, you know, and agreeable. I should certainly say Bertie was agreeable, if my opinion was of any weight.”

“So that is your mysterious young woman?” said Lady Curtis. “No, Julia, no, she has never been on the stage. They never walk like that when they have been on the stage. She doesn’t know how to walk; but there is a kind of gracefulness about her. I cannot say if she is handsome or not; but what can such a woman as that possibly want here?”

“That is just what I never could make out,” said Cousin Julia, delighted to open forth on her favourite subject. Nancy just then turned round unconscious of the eyes bent upon her, to look at the cart with the baskets, and thus exposed herself unawares to the full gaze of her husband’s mother. Her long black dress gave a certain dignity to her figure, calling attention by its very plainness, and so did the little close black bonnet with its edge of white which encircled her face. Nancy in her ordinary garb and ordinary moods never had looked half so distinguished or lovely. Lady Curtis could not take her eyes from this face so softly tinted, so purely fresh and severely framed.

“Why didn’t you tell me before? The girl is a beauty!” she said.

“A beauty?” said Lucy, coming into the room; and she, too, gazed from behind her mother’s shoulder. Had she ever seen that face before? she asked herself, with an anxiety which neither of the others divined. She had seen it only once, for a minute or two, surrounded by clouds of bridal white. Was it likely she could recognise it now in this almost conventual severity of costume? She dropped behind her mother, half-satisfied, half-disappointed, and paid no attention to the further comments of Lady Curtis, which delighted Mrs. Rolt. If it was no one she had ever seen before—what did it matter to Lucy who it was? But when the two ladies had left Cousin Julia, after they had taken a few steps on the way home, Lady Curtis came to a sudden pause.

“Don’t you think, Lucy,” she said, in a conciliatory tone, “that it would be only kind to call upon those new people? They must feel very strange in this quiet place; and as she really seems a lady—”

“I am quite willing to go, mamma;” said Lucy, feeling her heart beat more quickly in spite of herself.

“But don’t you think it is only a duty?” said Lady Curtis. She wanted to be persuaded that she ought to go—not to go merely because she was curious, which was the real reason; but when Lucy returned no further answer, her mother, making use of her own impatience of temper as a reason for doing what she wanted, turned sharp round with a little show of annoyance at Lucy, and went straight across to the cottage door. Cousin Julia saw her, and almost clapped her hands with pleasure, as she lurked behind the curtains and watched; and the two people in the Wren Cottage, who had been watching also from their windows since they came in, saw her too, and prepared for the visit with excitement indescribable. Lady Curtis’s movements were so rapid that she had knocked at the door, and Matilda had opened, before Nancy, who was standing behind, had got over her first breathless start of agitation and suspicion. She was standing, leaning forward a little, her hands clasped, her lips apart and panting with excitement, when the visitors saw her first. Lady Curtis was in a little glow of pleasure and interest.

“I had heard of Mrs. Arthur as a new neighbour,” she said; “I hope I may come in and pay my respects, though it is getting late.”

“Oh, come in, come in, my lady;” cried Matilda, officiously hastening to place chairs for the great ladies. Matilda’s heart was not leaping so in her breast that she thought it must escape altogether—but Nancy’s was, as she felt herself suddenly in the presence of these two ladies, with whom her own fate was so closely connected. She held her heart with her hand, that it might not leap out of her throat, and made a gasp for breath, and could say nothing; and it was no wonder if Lady Curtis was flattered by the impression made by her visit, and thought she had never seen so expressive a face before.

“My sister will be very pleased to make your ladyship’s acquaintance,” said Matilda. “What a fine day, and what a blessing after the wet! We were beginning to think it never would be fine again. Anna! don’t you see my lady—and haven’t you got a word to say?”

“It is very kind of Lady Curtis to come,” said Nancy, with difficulty. She could not withdraw her eyes from the two. And Lucy looked at her from behind her mother with again a thrill of wonder and suspicion. Why was she so much agitated? what was there to be agitated about?

“I hope you like our village,” said Lady Curtis; “very few people see it, except the people of the place, so it is not admired so much as it ought to be, we think. It is a pretty village; but I trust you may not find it very dull as the winter goes on.”

“Oh, we do not look for much; we are used to living very quietly—”

“That is well,” said Lady Curtis; “for Oakley is very quiet—so quiet in winter that I much fear you will be frightened. Any stranger passing by is an event. To-day for instance, it was quite gay; a pedlar’s cart, a most picturesque object—and when you two ladies appeared, whom I had not seen before, it became quite exciting. Hyde Park is seldom so full of novelty to me.”

They both stared at her a little, not knowing what to say.

“The cart looked quite cheerful,” said Matilda; “I thought just like your ladyship says. Some of the baskets were quite pretty, and it was nice to see it. But I could not persuade Na—my sister, to buy any,” she concluded hurriedly. What a glance of fire shot at her from Nancy’s eyes!

“We did not want them,” she said; drawing a step nearer. She was too restless to sit down; her heart indeed beat more quietly, and her breathing was calmer; but to be here in the same room with them both, talking to them indifferently, as if she did not know them, as if she was not devoured with anxiety to conciliate them!—though a touch too much might have driven her on the other side to defy them openly. For the first time, Nancy felt how little she could depend on herself. They might say something, they might even look something, that would offend her, and send her off at a tangent. She felt no strength in her to guide herself. At present, even, while there was neither offence nor rapprochement, how wild and breathless she was, how incapable of managing the situation! It must depend altogether on what they would do or say.

“You have resources, I see,” said Lady Curtis, “Books secure one against everything. But—” she added, shutting one hastily, which she had opened on the table. “This is not common reading. Is it a girl-graduate in her golden hair that we have got among us without knowing.” She smiled graciously as she spoke. And Nancy grew red, and grew pale, and sat down, though only because her limbs trembled under her.

“I know—very little,” she said, humbly, scarcely able to command her voice.

“But she is not a girl at all,” said Matilda. “She is a married woman, though you would scarcely think it, my lady; and she is very fond of her book. Na—Anna, show her ladyship that beautiful drawing you are doing; that is what she thinks of most.”

“The leaves? what a charming garland!” said Lady Curtis. The “rubbish” which Nancy had been amusing herself with, was fixed up against the wall with two pins. Nancy, herself, thought it was rather pretty, but nothing of course to the étude in chalks.

“Oh no, not that! that is all nonsense. It isn’t fit for your ladyship to look at; but look here, my lady,” said Matilda, proudly. Lady Curtis cast a careless glance at the drawing, which the sister thought so superior; then turned with much admiration to the wreath that hung against the wall.

“I must try to coax you,” she said, “after a while, when you know us, to make some designs for me, for my crewels. How beautifully they would work! Look, Lucy!”

“They are very clever,” said Lucy, going up to look; the sisters could not believe their ears; and never, though Nancy had known the sweetness of girlish triumph, and had “had offers” before Arthur, and had tasted the sweetness of a young lover’s adoration—never had gratified pride so touched her heart as at this moment; her face brightened out of its anxious awe and alarm.

“Do you really, really think that? that I could make designs—for you?”

Lady Curtis thought she understood it all; evidently they were poor, and this promised perhaps some occupation that would help their poor little ends to meet. “Indeed I do, really, really,” she said, pleased with the simplicity of the words, “if you will be so very kind and take so much trouble. I will show you what I am working now when you come to see me at the Hall.”

Nancy’s head swam with a soft intoxication of pleasure. These kind looks, these kind words from this dreaded fine lady, who had been her bugbear—whom she hated in imagination, and credited with every evil quality—overwhelmed her. And Lucy’s presence gave a thrill of danger, half-alarming, half-delicious, to this strange ecstasy of feeling. If Lucy should have recognised her! She was saying something, she could scarcely tell what, about nothing she could do being good enough—when Lady Curtis, still looking, smiling, in her face, prostrated her with the innocent question:

“You have met my son—in society—Mrs. Rolt thinks—”

Nancy started from her chair, unable to restrain herself. “Oh—no, no!” she said trembling—not, she was going to say, in society, but changed this by instinct rather than reason, “not—your son; I told her after that it was—a mistake; only some one of the name.”

“Ah!” said Lady Curtis with a little sigh. “I am disappointed. I thought it had been my Arthur. Perhaps then it was one of my nephews, the General’s boys? The Rector is one of them. My son has not been at home for more than two years—it is a long time not to see him. I quite hoped,” she added with flattering friendliness, “that it had been him you knew.”