Neuralgia and headache reigned at Penlyon; and the two girls grew white and wan, like their all-accomplished governess; and Mr. Nicholls, the family doctor, had no longer to complain of the rude health of the Miss Penlyons. He had plenty of visits booked against Penlyon Place at the end of the year.
Just at the time when Lilian and Sibyl were growing fastest, running up from stout, chubby children, into thin slips of girls; just when their constitutions most needed rest, and liberty, and pleasant exercise in the open air — riding, tennis, walking, rowing, romping — this burden of education was laid upon them. They were reminded every day that they had been neglected, and that they were to make amends for lost time by extra application. They were crammed with ‘ologies from which not one young woman out of a hundred ever derives the faintest pleasure or advantage in after-life. They were made to sit at the piano, tap, tap, tapping the notes, first with one finger and then with another, in monotonous five-finger exercises — the athletics of piano practice, Miss Gambert called this heart-sickening drudgery. Even the music they played as a relief from the five-finger tapping was of a dry and learned order which aroused no interest in their minds — a “sad, mechanic exercise,” and no more. Their only pleasure at the piano was found in stolen minutes, when Miss Gambert was out of ear-shot, when Sibyl, whose ear was of the quickest, picked out music-hall tunes, which she had heard gardeners or stable-boys whistling at their work. Music-hall ditties that catch the fancy of city and suburbs will travel even as far west as Tintagel.
Mr. Nicholls remonstrated with the governess upon the subject of over-much study, and had even the audacity to argue the point with Mrs. Hawberk herself, no one of her half-yearly visits to Penlyon Place.
That lady laughed his arguments to scorn.
“We have got beyond that old-fashioned idea of brain-work being bad for the constitution, my good Mr. Nicholls. Look at judges, bishops, famous physicians, some of the longest-lived men on record. My nieces are like all girls of their age, fanciful and rather affected. Miss Gambert is giving them a sound and solid education, which will make them valuable members of society; and here you come with your old-fashioned fads about overwork and mental strain.”
“I can only tell you, madam, that these dear young ladies have deteriorated in health since Miss Peterson left—”
“Miss Peterson! She was a favourite of yours, evidently, doctor,” interrupted Mrs. Hawberk, with a sneer which brought an indignant blush to the cheeks and forehead of the bachelor doctor, who had never given Miss Peterson so much as a thought in the way of gallantry. “Come, Mr. Nicholls, in spite of your worship of ignorance, I think you will admit that any deterioration in my nieces is the effect of over-growth, and that it is natural for girls of their age to be weak and weedy.”
“Yes, Mrs. Hawberk, and that weak and weedy age is just the period at which the educational strain should be relaxed. However, I can but submit to your superior wisdom, and hope that with the help of tonics and a strengthening diet the young ladies may regain the ground lost in the last year or so.”
“Give them as many tonics as you like; only don’t interfere with the cultivation of their minds.”
Mrs. Hawberk took her own way in this as in every other matter in which she was given what she called a free hand. She had an invincible belief in her own wisdom, and in the foolishness of almost everybody else. She drove Miss Gambert, and Miss Gambert drove her pupils, and Lilian Penlyon at eighteen years of age was certainly a very well read and accomplished young woman, only it was a pity that she should be so weak and weedy, and consumptive-looking.
“Her poor mother’s constitution,” Mrs. Hawberk said decisively, when Sir John lamented his daughter’s delicate health.
Lilian made her début in society, chaperoned by her aunt, from a fine house in the best part of Cromwell Road, while Sibyl stayed at Penlyon, and went on grinding at the dry-as-dust books, and the learned German music, which the most advanced educational authorities had prescribed for the cultivation of youthful minds. Lilian went everywhere, and was admired for her delicate beauty and the shy dignity of her manners, and her unlikeness to other girls. She had grown up in solitude, and the slang of other girls was a language unknown to her, and the ways of other girls were foreign to her mind. She was very much admired for these superior qualities, and it was not forgotten that she was joint heiress of Sir John Penlyon, the wealthy Cornishman, whose mines and slate quarries were known to yield a large revenue, without counting his extensive landed estate, the greater part of which unhappily was included in the entail, and would go to the heir-at-law. Before Lilian had been out three months Mrs. Hawberk had the triumph of informing her brother that Lord Lurgrave, the Earl of Holmsley’s son, had proposed to his elder daughter, and only waited his permission to consider himself formally engaged to her.
“Does Lilian like the young man?” Sir John asked briefly.
“I believe it is quite a romantic attachment on both sides.”
“Then let them marry,” said Sir John; “the sooner the better.”
He did everything in his power to facilitate the marriage. The young man was a good young man. Nobody had any charge to bring against him; and his father, Lord Holmsley, was well placed in the world, and stood well with the world. The alliance was altogether honourable; and Miss Penlyon was thought to have done well for herself in her first season.
Sir John had his own reasons for hurrying on the marriage, reasons which he told to nobody. More than once during the years of his widowhood he had been on the point of taking a second wife, and at the eleventh hour, on the eve of proposing to a lady whom he thought inclined to favour his suit, he had drawn back. No, he had married once without love, and he had not made his wife happy. He would not enter upon a second loveless union in the hope of an heir to his estate. Long ago, in his early manhood, he had loved, and he had been balked in his love, which had been bestowed upon one who was his inferior in birth and social status. He had loved a farmer’s daughter, and had wanted to make her his wife, setting all social distinctions at nought for her dear sake. But he had given her up at his father’s bidding, and at her own entreaty. She loved him too well to make bad blood between father and son, All this had happened nearly forty years ago, but it had influenced the whole of Sir John Penlyon’s after life. He made up his mind that there should be no second loveless union for him, and he looked forward to seeing his grandchildren grow up about him. He could not give Penlyon Place or the lands of Penlyon to his daughter’s son. Those must go to the heir-at-law; but he might bequeath the accumulations of long years, and the quarries and mines which he himself had bought. He had never spent more than a third of his income.
When he went down to the west in October he found Mrs. Hawberk established there before him, superintending all the domestic arrangements for the marriage. The wedding clothes were being made in London. All that Sir John had to do was to agree with Lord Holmsley’s lawyers about the settlement. The wedding was fixed for the fifteenth of November. The settlement was liberal, but if Sir John Penlyon’s daughter were to die childless, her fortune would revert to her father, and young Lord Lurgrave would have nothing. This point was insisted upon by Sir John’s lawyer.
“Happily the young lady’s death is a remote contingency,” said Lord Holmsley, when his own lawyer objected to the clause.
Sir John found the lovers very happy, and Penlyon Place in a pleasant bustle of expectation. He found Sibyl still grinding on at science and history, and more ‘ologies than he himself had ever heard of, a university education in his day not having recognized the ‘ologies. He found her pale and thin, and disguised in smoke-coloured spectacles, which she had taken to wearing because the light hurt her eyes.
“My poor pretty Sibyl, how they have changed you!” exclaimed Sir John.
His younger daughter, once so daring in her merriment, so frankly demonstrative in her affection, was now shy and restrained in her manner to her father. He had seen a good deal of Lilian i
n the London season; and the ice had been broken between them. Lilian was almost the Lilian of old. But Sibyl was completely changed; and though Mrs. Hawberk assured him that the change was an improvement, he could not help regretting the old Sibyl, the frank and fearless companion, the spirited young horsewoman, the sunburnt, bronze-haired girl who could handle oar or boat-hook with the best of the lads of Boscastle. He saw her at her studies in the library every morning; he heard her play erudite German music after dinner in the drawingroom. He saw her and Miss Gambert setting out every afternoon for their constitutional walk on the moors, and riding home in the dusk one evening he saw them pacing the windblown road with Mr. Morland, the High Church curate, in attendance. He questioned Sibyl about the curate when she had played her newest mazurka and was bidding him good-night.
“Is there anything between Miss Gambert and Morland?” he asked. “Is he paying his addresses to her?”
“No, father, I think not.”
Humph; I began to suspect something when I saw him walking with you two this afternoon. He is a very good fellow, though his father is only a grocer in a small way of business in Plymouth. She might do worse.”
“Yes, he is very good.”
That was all. Sibyl touched her father’s cheek with a faint fluttering kiss and retired, leaving the room in the quiet manner which Miss Gambert had impressed upon her as the proper manner for a young lady belonging to one of the county families.
Miss Penlyon’s wedding was a very smart wedding, or as smart as a wedding can be in the wilds of Cornwall. She had a bishop to marry her, assisted by a High Church archdeacon, and by Mr. Morland, curate of the parish — Mr. Morland, who was a pale, thin young man with large blue eyes and a short, nervous cough, and who was nearer Rome in all his thoughts and aspirations than the archdeacon.
Lilian Penlyon was as graceful and dignified a bride as any one could desire to see; and Mrs. Hawberk prided herself upon the result of her wise administration.
“I hope you are satisfied with your daughters to-day, John,” she said, swelling with conscious merit, her matronly form seeming larger than usual in the amplitude of a brand new velvet gown.
“They are looking very handsome; but I wish they did not look so fragile,” replied Sir John, gravely.
“Blood, my dear John, blood. You wouldn’t expect a racer to show the bulk and bone of a carthorse.”
When the wedding was over, and Lilian and her husband were travelling in Italy on a wedding tour which was to last till the spring, life at Penlyon Castle dropped back into the old grooves; and the old grooves meant books and piano and drawing-board, varied only by the dull constitutional walk or the duller drive. The winter skies in that western land were clear and bright, and a few stray flowers lingered here and there in the shelter of the hills, as if winter had forgotten them; but the landscape in all its poetic beauty was a melancholy landscape for the afternoon eyes of a girl, whose long laborious mornings were given to dry books and drier music, and to convincing herself with strenuous toil that she had no talent for painting.
The daily walk was insisted upon by doctor and governess; so Miss Penlyon was marched out in fair weather or foul, and had to tramp submissively for at least four miles, sometimes buffeted by the wind and the spray, sometimes moving ghost-like in a grey mist of rain.
Mr. Morland, the curate, often joined governess and pupil in these afternoon walks. He had nothing to say about the world of men, but he had lived and had his being from boyhood upwards in a little world of books, and about these he was eloquent. Carlyle, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Shelley, Keats — these were his gods, and he would quote them and talk of them for an hour at a stretch.
To Sibyl, who had been reared upon hard facts strictly on the Gradgrind principle, the world of philosophy and poetry was a revelation. She explored her father’s library, and in a corner among the very refuse of the shelves found a shabby old volume of Shelley, printed in Paris; and this treasure she carried off to her bedroom and kept under her pillow and pored over in secret, marking his favourite passages and learning them by rote; so that one day, half unconsciously, she took up the line where Mr. Morland stopped, and went on to the end of the stanza, “I hope you found those lines in a book of selections,” said Miss Gambert. “I am sure your aunt would disapprove of Shelley.”
“She may disapprove, but I’m sure she never read him,” answered Sibyl. “Lilian told me that she never reads anything but the tradesmen’s books, and that she pores over them every Tuesday morning in a maddening manner, and then has awful talks with her housekeeper.
“Mrs. Hawberk is a very clever woman and an admirable manager.”
“I dare say she is; but she need not parade her butcher’s book. She has a pile of horrid tradesmen s books on the breakfast table, and looks over them as she eats her breakfast. I call it absolutely indecent. Lilian said it made her hate Tuesday mornings. She used to wonder if aunt thought she made too much difference in the weekly bills.”
“Mrs. Hawberk has ample means, and keeps a liberal table; but she abhors waste, as all sensible women do,” said the governess, reprovingly.
“If she parades her butcher’s book when I am in the Cromwell Road I shall say something rude to her,” retorted Sibyl; “but I hope Lilian will be in town in the spring, and then she will be able to chaperon me.”
“You are looking forward eagerly to the spring, when you will have left Cornwall,” said Mr. Morland, pensively; and then there came a silence upon Sibyl and the curate, and Miss Gambert did all the talking during the homeward walk.
Sir John Penlyon went back to London soon after Christmas, and politics claimed him for their own. He had arranged with his sister that Sibyl was to make her debut from the Cromwell Road as Lilian had done. Lady Lurgrave, even if she were to have a house in town, which was doubtful, would be too young and inexperienced a matron to take charge of her sister. She would not have the firmness of will needed to keep younger sons at bay; she would be too good-natured and easy in her treatment of detrimentals: altogether Sir John felt that his sister would be the only competent chaperon for Sibyl, whom he always thought of as wild and difficult to manage, remembering how rash and wilful she had been in those childish years, when she rode the piebald pony, and insisted upon going faster at ditches and hedges than her father thought safe for so juvenile a performer. She had been headstrong and disobedient in those days; but he had loved her for her high spirits and daring. Now on the threshold of womanhood she was obedient enough to please the most exacting parent. Mrs. Hawberk and Miss Gambert between them had succeeded in taming her; but perhaps Sir John hardly liked this younger daughter of his quite so well after that careful training as he had liked her in her childhood, when she had been as wild and sweet as a dog-rose and as full of thorns. Mrs. Hawberk, however, took credit to herself for having produced the most perfect thing in young ladies; and Sir John felt that he ought to be grateful.
He really did feel grateful to this clever sister of his for having taken all his paternal responsibilities off his shoulders and left him free to attend to the affairs of the nation — very grateful, until one foggy afternoon in February when a telegram was brought to him in the library at the Carlton, where he was writing his letters.
“To Sir John Penlyon.
“Sibyl left the castle at seven this morning. She has been traced as far as Bodmin-road Station; supposed to have gone to Bristol. I am in the greatest distress of mind. Pray tell me what I am to do.
“GAMBERT.”
“What does the woman mean?” Sir John asked himself, staring at the words in the telegram. “Sibyl must have quarrelled with her, and is on her way to London, meaning no doubt to come to her aunt or to me. Bristol is all nonsense — a mistake of the porters or of the servant who followed her to Bodmin. A foolish, troublesome business — just now, too, with this amendment coming on to-night, and when I am so full of work.”
He looked at his watch. Half-past two. The train from Bodmin would arriv
e at Paddington soon after four. He must be on the platform, of course, to receive this foolish daughter. It was very wrong of her — a vein of the old Adam cropping up in the regenerate Sibyl. Who would have thought her capable of such rebellion?
“She seemed so tame and well broken when I was at Penlyon,” mused Sir John, “but no doubt that middle-aged young lady with the spectacles and the scraggy shoulders is rather a trying person to live with, in a country house, through a long winter.”
He went on writing his letters till there was only just time to get to Paddington, allowing a widish margin fur the fog — before the fast train from the far west came in. If the train also had not been delayed by the fog, Sir John would not have been there to see its arrival.
He was there, walking up and down the platform, watchful and on the alert, until the last cab had driven away with the last passenger and the last portmanteau; but among all those passengers there was no daughter of his.
“l am a fool,” he said to himself; “she may have got out at Westbourne Park.”
He took another cab and had himself driven slowly through the thickening fog across the park to South Kensington and the fine large house in the Cromwell Road, from which Sibyl was to take a header into London society.
Mrs. Hawberk was sitting alone in the subdued lamplight of the back drawing-room, the spacious front drawing-room a yawning gulf of shadows lighted only by occasional gleams from a low fire.
She started from her chair as Sir John was announced, and ran to him and fell upon his neck sobbing —
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