Wives and Daughters (26 page)

‘That is what he tried to convince me of.’

Roger began kicking the pebble again. He had not got hold of the right end of the clue. Suddenly he looked up.

‘I want to tell you of a girl I know—. Her mother died when she was about sixteen—the eldest of a large family. From that time—all through the bloom of her youth—she gave herself up to her father, first as his comforter, afterwards as his companion, friend, secretary—anything you like. He was a man with a great deal of business on hand, and often came home only to set-to afresh to preparations for the next day’s work. Harriet was always there, ready to help, to talk, or to be silent. It went on for eight or ten years in this way; and then her father married again,—a woman not many years older than Harriet herself. Well—they are just the happiest set of people I know—you wouldn’t have thought it likely, would you?’

She was listening, but she had no heart to say anything. Yet she was interested in this little story of Harriet—a girl who had been so much to her father, more than Molly in this early youth of hers could have been to Mr. Gibson. ‘How was it?’ she sighed out at last.

‘Harriet thought of her father’s happiness before she thought of her own,’ Roger answered, with something of severe brevity. Molly needed the bracing. She began to cry again a little.

‘If it were for papa’s happiness———’

‘He must believe that it is. Whatever you fancy, give him a chance. He cannot have much comfort, I should think, if he sees you fretting or pining,—you who have been so much to him, as you say. The lady herself, too—if Harriet’s stepmother had been a selfish woman, and been always clutching after the gratification of her own wishes; but she was not; she was as anxious for Harriet to be happy as Harriet was for her father—and your father’s future wife may be another of the same kind, though such people are rare.’

‘I don’t think she is, though,’ murmured Molly, a waft of recollection bringing to her mind the details of her day at the Towers long ago.

Roger did not want to hear Molly’s reasons for this doubting speech. He felt as if he had no right to hear more of Mr. Gibson’s family life, past, present, or to come, than was absolutely necessary for him, in order that he might comfort and help the crying girl, whom he had come upon so unexpectedly. And besides, he wanted to go home, and be with his mother at lunch-time. Yet he could not leave her alone.

‘It is right to hope for the best about everybody, and not to expect the worst. This sounds like a truism, but it has comforted me before now, and some day you’ll find it useful. One has always to try to think more of others than of oneself, and it is best not to prejudge people on the bad side. My sermons aren’t long, are they? Have they given you an appetite for lunch? Sermons always make me hungry, I know.’

He appeared to be waiting for her to get up and come along with him, as indeed he was. But he meant her to perceive that he should not leave her; so she rose up languidly; too languid to say how much she should prefer being left alone, if he would only go away without her. She was very weak, and stumbled over the straggling root of a tree that projected across the path. He, watchful though silent, saw this stumble, and, putting out his hand, held her up from falling. He still held her hand when the occasion was past; this little physical failure impressed on his heart how young and helpless she was, and he yearned to her, remembering the passion of sorrow in which he had found her, and longing to be of some little tender bit of comfort to her, before they parted—before their tête-à-tête walk was merged in the general familiarity of the household life. Yet he did not know what to say.

‘You will have thought me hard,’ he burst out at length, as they were nearing the drawing-room windows and the garden-door. ‘I never can manage to express what I feel—somehow I always fall to philosophizing—but I am sorry for you. Yes, I am; it’s beyond my power to help you, as far as altering facts goes, but I can feel for you, in a way which it’s best not to talk about, for it can do no good. Remember how sorry I am for you! I shall often be thinking of you, though I dare say it’s best not to talk about it again.’

She said, ‘I know you are sorry,’ under her breath, and then she broke away, and ran indoors, and upstairs to the solitude of her own room. He went straight to his mother, who was sitting before the untasted luncheon, as much annoyed by the mysterious unpunctuality of her visitor as she was capable of being with anything; for she had heard that Mr. Gibson had been, and was gone, and she could not discover if he had left any message for her; and her anxiety about her own health, which some people esteemed hypochondriacal, always made her particularly craving for the wisdom which might fall from her doctor’s lips.

‘Where have you been, Roger? Where is Molly?—Miss Gibson, I mean,’ for she was careful to keep up a barrier of forms between the young man and young woman who were thrown together in the same household.

‘I’ve been out dredging. (By the way, I left my net on the terrace walk.) I found Miss Gibson sitting there, crying as if her heart would break. Her father is going to be married again.’

‘Married again! You don’t say so.’

‘Yes, he is; and she takes it very hardly, poor girl. Mother, I think if you could send some one to her with a glass of wine, a cup of tea, or something of that sort—she was very nearly fainting———’

‘I’ll go to her myself, poor child,’ said Mrs. Hamley, rising.

‘Indeed you must not,’ said he, laying his hand upon her arm. ‘We have kept you waiting already too long; you are looking quite pale. Hammond can take it,’ he continued, ringing the bell. She sat down again, almost stunned with surprise.

‘Whom is he going to marry?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell me.’

‘That’s so like a man. Why, half the character of the affair lies in the question of who it is that he is going to marry.’

‘I dare say I ought to have asked. But somehow I’m not a good one on such occasions. I was as sorry as could be for her, and yet I couldn’t tell what to say’

‘What did you say?’

‘I gave her the best advice in my power.’

‘Advice! you ought to have comforted her. Poor little Molly!’

‘I think that if advice is good it’s the best comfort.’

‘That depends on what you mean by advice. Hush! here she is.’

To their surprise, Molly came in, trying hard to look as usual. She had bathed her eyes, and arranged her hair, and was making a great struggle to keep from crying, and to bring her voice into order. She was unwilling to distress Mrs. Hamley by the sight of pain and suffering. She did not know that she was following Roger’s injunction to think more of others than of herself—but so she was. Mrs. Hamley was not sure if it was wise in her to begin on the piece of news she had just heard from her son; but she was too full of it herself to talk of anything else. ‘So I hear your father is going to be married, my dear? May I ask whom it is to?’

‘Mrs. Kirkpatrick. I think she was governess a long time ago at the Countess of Cumnor’s. She stays with them a great deal, and they call her Clare, and I believe they are very fond of her.’ Molly tried to speak of her future stepmother in the most favourable manner she knew how.

‘I think I’ve heard of her. Then she is not very young? That’s as it should be. A widow too. Has she any family?’

‘One girl, I believe. But I know so little about her!’

Molly was very near crying again.

‘Never mind, my dear. That will all come in good time. Roger, you’ve hardly eaten anything; where are you going?’

‘To fetch my dredging-net. It’s full of things I don’t want to lose. Besides, I never eat much as a general thing.’ The truth was partly told, not all. He thought he had better leave the other two alone. His mother had such sweet power of sympathy, that she would draw the sting out of the girl’s heart in a tête-à-tête. As soon as he was gone, Molly lifted up her poor swelled eyes, and, looking at Mrs. Hamley, she said,—

‘He was so good to me. I mean to try and remember all he said.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, love; very glad. From what he told me, I was afraid he had been giving you a little lecture. He has a good heart, but he isn’t so tender in his manner as Osborne. Roger is a little rough sometimes.’

‘Then I like roughness. It did me good. It made me feel how badly—oh, Mrs. Hamley, I did behave so badly to papa this morning.’

She rose up and threw herself into Mrs. Hamley’s arms, and sobbed upon her breast. Her sorrow was not now for the fact that her father was going to be married again, but for her own ill-behaviour.

If Roger was not tender in words, he was in deeds. Unreasonable and possibly exaggerated as Molly’s grief had appeared to him, it was real suffering to her; and he took some pains to lighten it, in his own way, which was characteristic enough. That evening he adjusted his microscope, and put the treasures he had collected in his morning’s ramble on a little table; and then he asked his mother to come and admire. Of course Molly came too, and this was what he had intended. He tried to interest her in his pursuit, cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely everyday speech. Molly had come down to dinner wondering how the long hours till bedtime would ever pass away: hours during which she must not speak on the one thing that would be occupying her mind to the exclusion of all others; for she was afraid that already she had wearied Mrs. Hamley with it during their afternoon tête-à-tête. But prayers and bedtime came along before she expected; she had been refreshed by a new current of thought, and she was very thankful to Roger. And now there was to-morrow to come, and a confession of penitence to be made to her father.

But Mr. Gibson did not want speech or words. He was not fond of expressions of feeling at any time, and perhaps, too, he felt that the less said the better on a subject about which it was evident that his daughter and he were not thoroughly and impulsively in harmony. He read her repentance in her eyes; he saw how much she had suffered; and he had a sharp pang at his heart in consequence. And he stopped her from speaking out her regret at her behaviour the day before by a ‘There, there, that will do. I know all you want to say. I know my little Molly—my silly little goosey—better than she knows herself. I’ve brought you an invitation. Lady Cumnor wants you to go and spend next Thursday at the Towers!’

‘Do you wish me to go?’ said she, her heart sinking.

‘I wish you and Hyacinth to become better acquainted—to learn to love each other.’

‘Hyacinth!’ said Molly, entirely bewildered.

‘Yes; Hyacinth! It’s the silliest name I ever heard of; but it’s hers, and I must call her by it. I can’t bear Clare, which is what my lady and all the family at the Towers call her; and “Mrs. Kirkpatrick” is formal and nonsensical too, as she’ll change her name so soon.’

‘When, papa?’ asked Molly, feeling as if she were living in a strange, unknown world.

‘Not till after Michaelmas.’ And then, continuing on his own thoughts, he added, ‘And the worst is, she’s gone and perpetuated her own affected name by having her daughter called after her. Cynthia! One thinks of the moon, and the man in the moon with his bundle of faggots. I’m thankful you’re plain Molly, child.’

‘How old is she—Cynthia, I mean?’

‘Aye, get accustomed to the name. I should think Cynthia Kirkpatrick was about as old as you are. She’s at school in France, picking up airs and graces. She’s to come home for the wedding, so you’ll be able to get acquainted with her then; though, I think, she’s to go back again for another half-year or so.’

M
r. Gibson believed that Cynthia Kirkpatrick was to return to England to be present at her mother’s wedding; but Mrs. Kirkpatrick had no such intention. She was not what is commonly called a woman of determination; but somehow what she disliked she avoided, and what she liked she tried to do, or to have. So although in the conversation, which she had already led to, as to the when and the how she was to be married, she had listened quietly to Mr. Gibson’s proposal that Molly and Cynthia should be the two bridesmaids, still she had felt how disagreeable it would be to her to have her young daughter flashing out her beauty by the side of the faded bride, her mother; and as the further arrangements for the wedding became more definite, she saw further reasons in her own mind for Cynthia’s remaining quietly at her school at Boulogne.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick had gone to bed that first night of her engagement to Mr. Gibson, fully anticipating a speedy marriage. She looked to it as a release from the thraldom of keeping school—keeping an unprofitable school, with barely pupils enough to pay for house-rent and taxes, food, washing, and the requisite masters. She saw no reason for ever going back to Ashcombe, except to wind up her affairs, and to pack up her clothes. She hoped that Mr. Gibson’s ardour would be such that he would press on the marriage, and urge her never to resume her school drudgery, but to relinquish it now and for ever. She even made up a very pretty, very passionate speech for him in her own mind; quite sufficiently strong to prevail upon her and to overthrow the scruples which she felt she ought to have, at telling the parents of her pupils that she did not intend to resume school, and that they must find another place of education for their daughters, in the last week but one of the midsummer holidays.

It was rather like a douche of cold water on Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s plans, when the next morning at breakfast Lady Cumnor began to decide upon the arrangements and duties of the two middle-aged lovers.

‘Of course you can’t give up your school all at once, Clare. The wedding can’t be before Christmas, but that will do very well. We shall all be down at the Towers; and it will be a nice amusement for the children to go over to Ashcombe, and see you married.’