Miss Anstruther did not dislike the joke, from him; but when he added, “The pity is you didn’t start it in the very beginning, with young Ted Miller” — she checked him instantly.
“Now don’t you speak about Ted,” she said, in a firm, quiet little way: but he appreciated the look that swept into her soft eyes no better than he had appreciated it six months before; he was merely amused, “Why not?”
“Because he meant it!”
Nunthorp wondered, but not seriously, whether that young fellow, who had gone in first, was to be the one, after all, to carry out his bat. And this way of putting it, in his own head, which was half full of cricket, carried him back to their last chat, and reminded him of a thing he had wanted to say to her for the past twenty-four hours.
“Do you remember my telling you,” said he, “when I last had the privilege of lecturing you, that you sang iniquitously well? Then I feel it a duty to inform you that your singing is now worse than ever — in this respect. No wonder you have had three fresh troubles; I consider it very little, with your style of singing. Your songs have much to answer for; I said so then, I can swear to it now. Your voice is heavenly, of course; but why pronounce your words so distinctly? I’m sure it isn’t at all fashionable. And why strive to make sense of your sounds? I really don’t think it’s good form to do so. And it’s distinctly dangerous. It didn’t happen to matter last night, because the rooms were so crowded; but if you sing to one or two as you sing to one or two hundred, I don’t wonder at them, I really don’t. You sing as if you meant every word of the drivel — I believe you humbug yourself into half meaning it, while you’re singing!”
“I believe I do,” Miss Anstruther replied, with characteristic candour. “You’ve no idea how much better it makes you sing, to put a little heart into it. But I never thought of this! Perhaps I had better give up singing!”
“I’ll tell you, when my turn comes round again,” said he, leading her back to the ball-room. “I’ll think of nothing else meanwhile.”
He did not dance; he was not a dancing man; but he did think of something else meanwhile. He thought of a pale, young, eager face, which appeared over Miss Anstruther’s shoulder in far too many of this evening’s dances. Lord Nunthorp hated dancing, and he had come here only to sit out a square or two with his amusing relative. He had to wait some time between them; he spent it in watching her; and she spent it in dancing everything with the same very young man, excepting one waltz, during which Lord Nunthorp transferred his attention from the bow to its latest string, who, for the time being, looked miserable.
“Who,” he asked her, as they managed to regain possession of their former corner in the conservatory, “is your dark-haired, pale-faced friend?”
“Well,” whispered Miss Anstruther, with grave concern, “I’m very much afraid that he is what you would call the next man in!”
“Good heaven!” ejaculated Lord Nunthorp, for once aghast. “Do you mean to say he is going to propose to you?”
“I feel it coming; I know the symptoms only too well!”
“Then perhaps you’re going to make a different answer at last?”
“My dear man!” said Lord Nunthorp’s sisterly little connection; and her tone was that of a person rather cruelly misjudged.
The noble kinsman held his tongue for several seconds. Man of the world as he was, he looked utterly scandalised. Here, in this fair, frail, beautiful form, lay a depth of cynicism which he could not equal personally — which he could not fathom in another, and that other a quite young girl.
“Midge,” he said at last, with sincere solemnity, “you horrify me! You’ve often told me the kind of thing, but this is the first time I’ve seen you with a fly actually in the web: for I don’t think I myself counted, after all. That boy is helplessly in love with you! And you were smiling upon him as though you liked him too!”
Nunthorp was touched tremulously upon the arm. “Was I?” the girl asked him, in a frightened voice. “Was I looking — like that?”
“I think you were,” he answered frankly. “And now you calmly scoff at the bare notion of accepting him! You make my blood run cold, Midge! I think you can have no heart!”
“Do you think that?” she asked strenuously, as though he had struck her.
“No, no; you know I don’t; only after seeing you look at him like that — —”
“Honestly, I didn’t know I was looking in any particular way.” Miss Anstruther added in a lowered, softened voice; “If I was — well, it wasn’t meant for him.”
Lord Nunthorp dropped his eye-glass.
“And it wasn’t meant for you, either!” she super-added, smartly enough.
Lord Nunthorp breathed again, and ventured to recommend an immediate snub, in the pale boy’s case.
When he had led her back to her chaperone, he felt easier on her account than he had been for a long time. It was obvious to him that the biter was bit at last. The right man was evidently in view, though he was not there at the dance — which was hard on the white-faced youth. Perhaps she was not the right girl for the right man; perhaps he refused to be attracted by her. That would be odd, but not impossible; and a girl who had refused to fall in love with every man who had ever fallen in love with her, was the likeliest girl in the world to care for some man who cared nothing for her — primarily to make him care. That is a woman, through and through, reflected Lord Nunthorp, out of the recesses of a somewhat recherche experience. But Midge would most certainly make him care: she was fascinating enough to capture any man (except himself) if she seriously tried; and he sincerely hoped she was going to try, to succeed, and to live happily ever after. For Nunthorp had now quite a fatherly affection for the girl, and he wished her well from his heart, which was kindly enough, though turning prematurely gray. But he did not like a little scene, with her in it, which he witnessed just before he quitted that party.
“My dance!” said a boy’s confident, excited voice, just behind him; and the voice of Miss Anstruther replied, in the coldest of tones, that he must have made, a mistake, for it was not his dance at all.
“But I’ve got it down,” the boy pleaded, as yet only amazed; his face was like marble as Lord Nunthorp watched him; Miss Anstruther was also slightly pale.
“She’s doing her duty, for once,” thought Lord Nunthorp, to whom the pathos of the incident lay in its utter conventionality. “But she plays a cruel game!”
“You’ve got it down?” said Miss Anstruther, very clearly, examining her card with ostentatious care. “Excuse me, but there is really some mistake; I haven’t got your name down for anything else!”
For an instant Lord Nunthorp held himself in readiness for a scene: he half expected to see the boy, whose white face was now on fire, snatch the card from her, expose her infamy, tear up the card and throw the pieces in her face. His face looked like it for a single instant, and Nunthorp was prepared to protect him if he did it. But the boy went away without a word.
Lord Nunthorp met the girl’s eyes with his. He knew she was looking for his approval: he knew she had earned it, by preventing one poor fellow from going the whole humbling length, and he was glad to think that she had taken his advice: but the glance he gave her was very grim. He could not help it. He went away feeling quite unlike himself.
Just outside, in the street, some one brushed past him, sobbing an oath. And Lord Nunthorp became himself again; for this person was Miss Anstruther’s last victim.
“That’s all right,” he muttered; “not a broken heart — only broken pride. That’s all that’s breakable, after all; and it mends.” He walked home rather pleased with Midge, as he called her, for having done her duty, no matter how late, in at least one case. He was vexed with himself for having been stupid about it at the moment. But it delighted him to think that most likely this would be the last case of the kind; for he took always the most good-natured interest in the vivacious young woman with whom, once upon a time, he had himself been slightly smitten.
Miss Anstruther had been silent and subdued during the drive home. She was considerably ashamed of herself. She was more ashamed of having ill-treated the white-faced boy over that dance — now that it was done — than she would have been to reject his hand after encouragement; use had blunted her feelings to this sort of sin; but the wrong of breaking in cold blood an engagement to dance was altogether out of harmony with her character and practices. She was notorious for leading men on to certain humiliation; she was celebrated for the punctilio with which she kept her word in the smallest matter. She had injured the good reputation in snapping the backbone of the bad one; and she did not feel at all pleased with Lord Nunthorp, who had said or implied one thing, and then stared its opposite. Her spirits had improved, however, on her arrival at the house: she had found a letter for herself, with three bright blue stamps in the corner, stuck up on the mantelpiece. Her hand had closed eagerly over this letter before the lamp was turned up. She was twisting it between her fingers, under her shawl, while her sister repoved her, not too seriously, for her treatment of that boy.
“I know it,” she answered rather dolefully; “I know well enough what a flirt I am! I have never denied it in my life, not even to them. But I really never mean t them to go so far. And — and I don’t think I’m so heartless as I make myself out to be!”
Her sister gazed at her fondly. Her own family, at all events, loved and believed in Miss Anstruther, and held her faults to be all on the surface. The sister now saw in the sweet, flushed face the look that Lord Nunthorp had noticed more than once, but never interpreted.
“Is there some one you care for after all, Midge, dear?” she asked softly.
“There may have been some one all the time,” the young girl whispered, her eyelids fallen, her hand squeezing the letter under her shawl.
“Is it — is it Ted Miller?”
Midge looked up into her sister’s eyes. Her lip was quivering. She was a girl who seldom cried — her detractors would have told you why. She controlled herself before speaking now.
“It was the most hopeless affair of them all,” she said simply; “but — but he was the only one who really meant it!”
His letter was against her bosom.
The married sister’s eyes had filled. “You write to each other still, don’t you, Midge?”
“Yes — as friends. Good-night, Helen!”
“Good-night, darling Midge; forgive me for speaking!” Helen murmured, kissing her eyes.
“Forgive you? You’ve said nothing to what I deserve!”
The girl was running up to her room two steps at a time. Ted Miller’s letter was pressed tight to her heart.
Ted Miller had been four years in Australia. He had written to her regularly, the whole time, as her friend; and she had written fairly regularly to him, as his. His was the one refusal in which she had not been a free agent; she had been but seventeen at the time. There was love between them when they parted; there was never a word of it in their letters. He wrote and told her all that he was doing: he was roughing it in the wilderness; he was not making his fortune: he never spoke of coming home. She wrote and told him — nearly all.
A pleasant fire was burning in her room. She lit the candles, and sat down just as she was, in her very extravagant ball-dress, to read his present letter. She felt, as always in opening a letter from Ted, that she was going to open a window and let in a cool current of fragrant, fresh air upon an unhealthy, heavy atmosphere; and she noticed, what she had not noticed downstairs, through hiding the letter before the lamp was turned up, that its superscription was not in Ted’s hand. The bright blue stamps of New South Wales were really all she had looked at downstairs. She now tore open the envelope with strange misgivings; and the letter turned out to be from the squatter’s wife on Ted Miller’s station, telling how a buck-jumper had broken Ted Miller’s back; and how, before his death, which ensued in a matter of hours, he had directed her to write to his family, and also — but separately — to “his greatest friend.”
The fire dulled down, the candles shortened, and in their light Miss Anstruther sat in her dazzling balldress, her face as gray as its satin sheen. Her rounded arms had more colour than her face. She moaned a little to herself; she could not cry.
At last she stirred herself. Her limbs were stiff. As she crossed the room, she saw herself from head to foot in her pier-glass — with all her grace of form and motion dead and stiff within her dress. She saw herself thus, but at the time with senseless eyes; the sight first came back to her when she next used that mirror. She was going to a certain drawer; she unlocked it, and drew it out bodily; she carried it to the table where the candles were slowly burning down. The drawer was filled with Miller’s letters.
“His greatest friend!” They had been merely friends from the day they parted. He had nothing.
Out there he had found fortune but a little less inaccessible than at home; he had written her no words of love, for how could there be any hope for them? She had plenty of money, but that was all the more reason why he must have some. His letters were not vulgarised by a single passionate, or sentimental, or high-flown passage. They were the letters of an honest friend; they were the letters of a good soldier — on the losing side, certainly, but fighting, not talking about fighting — talking, indeed, of quite other matters. And because these letters had been just what they were, Ted Miller himself had been to a frivolous girl, through frivolous years, what no one else had ever been — not even himself as she had known him face to face. Their friendship had been pure and strong and strengthening; their love idealised by improbability, and further by not being discussed, and yet further by being written “friendship.” His tone to her had been: “Enjoy yourself. I want to hear you’re having a good time. I am — there’s nothing like work.” She had answered, very truthfully, that she was doing so; and now he knew how! This was the bitterest thought: that the new knowledge was now his, and she, in his eyes, just what she had been in the eyes of the throng!
She sat down and read all his letters. The pure breath of heaven rose from every leaf. They did not touch her yet: her heart was numb. But the tones that had once come to her ears from every written word came no longer; the voice was silenced. She returned the letters to the drawer. She would keep them till her death.
And yet — would he like that?
She sat very still, trying to answer this question. The candles went out, but a leaden light had crept into the room through the blinds. She thought that he saw her, that he had seen her for weeks, that she had been grieving him the whole time, that she might please him now. And he was the one man she had known who would have wished her not to keep his letters.
She rose resolutely from her chair, and with difficulty rekindled her fire; it ruined her elaborate dress, but she was glad never to wear this one again. It did not seem to her that she was about to do anything cruel or unnatural. She was going to do violence to her own feelings only. It would please Ted that she was not going to keep his letters, to read them in her better moods, and less and less as the years went on. For her own part, she felt she would like to have them a little longer. It was a subtle sense of sacrifice for his sake — her first and last — which nerved her to burn his letters. Overstrung as she was, she burnt them every one, and without a tear.
A half-leaf happened to escape. She picked it out of the fender when the rest were burnt b
lack, and as her heart was beginning to ache for what she had done. She took it to the window, and read on the crisp, scorched paper the ordinary end of an ordinary letter — the end of all was, as ever: “Yours always, E. M.” Without a moment’s warning, her tears rattled upon the hot paper; she pressed it passionately to her mouth; she flung herself upon the bed in a paroxysm of helpless agony.
STRONG-MINDED MISS METHUEN.
WHEN Canon Methuen was offered the least tempting of Australian bishoprics, strong hopes of a refusal were entertained by admirers of that robust and popular divine. His chances of a much more desirable preferment, if he would but wait for it, were, on the one hand, considerable; and on the other hand was his daughter Evelyn. Miss Methuen, an only unmarried child, was not the one to suffer transportation to the bush, while she was the very one to influence her father’s decision. So said those who knew her, showing, as usual, how little they did know her. For whatsoever was novel, romantic-sounding, or unattractive to her friends, most mightily attracted Evelyn Methuen; and the Australian bishopric possessed all these merits. Her friends were right about the girl’s influence in general with their beloved Canon; they did not over-rate the weight of her say in this particular matter; but beyond this their fond calculations proved sadly adrift. Evelyn never even paused to consider the thing, say in the light of transportation and live burial; she jumped at it; and on this occasion she did not jump back. Her father, who knew her, gave her time for the customary rebound. But for once she knew her mind, and on the fifth day the world learnt that a Colonial bishopric of which it had never heard before had been definitely accepted by the Reverend Canon Methuen.
Miss Methuen had done it, and apparently she knew no regrets. That repentance at leisure of which her father had disquieting visions, founded on past experience of her, did indeed become conspicuous, but only in a delightful manner. She was not, of course, without a proper sorrow at departure; the spires at sunset made her pensive; she duly cried when the wrench came, but performed that wrench strong-mindedly, notwithstanding. This was her accredited characteristic, strength of mind. It enabled her to tear herself away from a grand old town for which she had an unaffected veneration — where she spent most of her life, where her mother lay buried, where two sisters lived married: from some precious Extension Lectures, in the middle of the Browning Course: from her own little room, made pretty with her own hands, at small cost, with fans and Aspinall and photographs in frames: from those very young men who were foolish about her at this time; and almost as easily, six weeks later, from the more mature and less impossible admirers of the outward voyage. But though, to be sure, she had never had absolute occasion for a refusal of marriage, she would have refused Lord Shields himself — the fellow-passenger — on the voyage out. Her heart was set upon the wilderness, and on that Bishop’s Lodge there, her future home; and after devouring some Australian romances, she felt that she would rather encounter one bushranger on his professional rounds than plough the seas with a boat-load of friendly peers.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 403