Wives and Daughters (57 page)

‘Oh, very well, my dears! When I was young it wouldn’t have been thought becoming for girls of your age to fly out because a little restraint was exercised as to the hours at which they should receive the young men’s calls. And they would have supposed that there might be good reasons why their parents disapproved of the visits of certain gentlemen, even while they were proud and pleased to see some members of the same family.’

‘But that was what I said, mamma,’ said Cynthia, looking at her mother with an expression of innocent bewilderment on her face. ‘One man may———’

‘Be quiet, child! All proverbs are vulgar, and I do believe that is the vulgarest of all. You are really catching Roger Hamley’s coarseness, Cynthia!’

‘Mamma,’ said Cynthia, roused to anger, ‘I don’t mind your abusing me, but Mr. Roger Hamley has been very kind to me while I’ve not been well: I can’t bear to hear him disparaged. If he’s coarse, I’ve no objection to be coarse as well, for it seems to me it must mean kindliness and pleasantness, and the bringing of pretty flowers and presents.’

Molly’s tears were brimming over at these words; she could have kissed Cynthia for her warm partisanship, but, afraid of betraying emotion, and ‘making a scene,’ as Mrs. Gibson called any signs of warm feeling, she laid down her book hastily, and ran upstairs to her room, and locked the door in order to breathe freely. There were traces of tears upon her face when she returned into the drawing-room half an hour afterwards, walking straight and demurely up to her former place, where Cynthia still sat and gazed idly out of the window, pouting and displeased; Mrs. Gibson, meanwhile, counting her stitches aloud with great distinctness and vigour.

D
uring all the months that had elapsed since Mrs. Hamley’s death, Molly had wondered many a time about the secret she had so unwittingly become possessed of that last day in the Hall library. It seemed so utterly strange and unheard-of a thing to her inexperienced mind, that a man should be married, and yet not live with his wife—that a son should have entered into the holy state of matrimony without his father’s knowledge, and without being recognized as the husband of some one known or unknown by all those with whom he came in daily contact, that she felt occasionally as if that little ten minutes of revelation must have been a vision in a dream. Both Roger and Osborne had kept the most entire silence on the subject ever since. Not even a look, or a pause, betrayed any allusion to it; it even seemed to have passed out of their thoughts. There had been the great sad event of their mother’s death to fill their minds on the next occasion of their meeting Molly; and since then long pauses of intercourse had taken place; so that she sometimes felt as if each of the brothers must have forgotten how she had come to know their important secret. She often found herself entirely forgetting it, but perhaps the consciousness of it was present to her unawares, and enabled her to comprehend the real nature of Osborne’s feeling towards Cynthia. At any rate, she never for a moment had supposed that his gentle kind manner towards Cynthia was anything but the courtesy of a friend. Strange to say, in these latter days Molly had looked upon Osborne’s relation to herself as pretty much the same as that in which at one time she had regarded Roger’s; and she thought of the former as of some one as nearly a brother both to Cynthia and herself, as any young man could well be, whom they had not known in childhood, and who was in nowise related to them. She thought that he was very much improved in manner, and probably in character, by his mother’s death. He was no longer sarcastic, or fastidious, or vain, or self-confident. She did not know how often all these styles of talk or of behaviour were put on to conceal shyness or consciousness, and to veil the real self from strangers.

Osborne’s conversation and ways might very possibly have been just the same as before, had he been thrown amongst new people; but Molly only saw him in their own circle in which he was on terms of decided intimacy. Still there was no doubt that he was really improved, though perhaps not to the extent for which Molly gave him credit; and this exaggeration on her part arose very naturally from the fact that he, perceiving Roger’s warm admiration for Cynthia, withdrew a little out of his brother’s way; and used to go and talk to Molly in order not to intrude himself between Roger and Cynthia. Of the two, perhaps, Osborne preferred Molly; to her he needed not to talk if the mood was not on him—they were on those happy terms where silence is permissible, and where efforts to act against the prevailing mood of the mind are not required. Sometimes, indeed, when Osborne was in the humour to be critical and fastidious as of yore, he used to vex Roger by insisting upon it that Molly was prettier than Cynthia.

‘You mark my words, Roger. Five years hence the beautiful Cynthia’s red and white will have become just a little coarse, and her figure will have thickened, while Molly’s will only have developed into more perfect grace. I don’t believe the girl has done growing yet; I’m sure she’s taller than when I first saw her last summer.’

‘Miss Kirkpatrick’s eyes must always be perfection. I cannot fancy any could come up to them: soft, grave, appealing, tender; and such a heavenly colour—I often try to find something in nature to compare them to; they are not like violets—that blue in the eyes is too like physical weakness of sight; they are not like the sky—that colour has something of cruelty in it.’

‘Come, don’t go on trying to match her eyes as if you were a draper, and they a bit of ribbon; say at once “her eyes are lodestars,”
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and have done with it! I set up Molly’s grey eyes and curling black lashes, long odds above the other young woman’s; but, of course, it’s all a matter of taste.’

And now both Osborne and Roger had left the neighbourhood. In spite of all that Mrs. Gibson had said about Roger’s visits being ill-timed and intrusive, she began to feel as if they had been a very pleasant variety, now that they had ceased altogether. He brought in a whiff of a new atmosphere from that of Hollingford. He and his brother had been always ready to do numberless little things which only a man can do for a woman; small services which Mr. Gibson was always too busy to render. For the good doctor’s business grew upon him. He thought that this increase was owing to his greater skill and experience, and he would probably have been mortified if he could have known how many of his patients were solely biased in sending for him, by the fact that he was employed at the Towers. Something of this sort must have been contemplated in the low scale of payment adopted long ago by the Cumnor family. Of itself the money he received for going to the Towers would hardly have paid him for horse-flesh, but then, as Lady Cumnor in her younger days worded it—

‘It is such a thing for a man just setting up in practice for himself to be able to say he attends at this house!’

So the prestige was tacitly sold and paid for; but neither buyer nor seller defined the nature of the bargain.

On the whole, it was as well that Mr. Gibson spent so much of his time from home. He sometimes thought so himself when he heard his wife’s plaintive fret or pretty babble over totally indifferent things, and perceived of how flimsy a nature were all her fine sentiments. Still, he did not allow himself to repine over the step he had taken; he wilfully shut his eyes and waxed up his ears to many small things that he knew would have irritated him if he had attended to them; and, in his solitary rides, he forced himself to dwell on the positive advantages that had accrued to him and his through his marriage. He had obtained an unexceptionable chaperon, if not a tender mother, for his little girl; a skilful manager of his formerly disorderly household; a woman who was graceful and pleasant to look at for the head of his table. Moreover, Cynthia reckoned for something on the favourable side of the balance. She was a capital companion for Molly; and the two were evidently very fond of each other. The feminine companionship of the mother and daughter was agreeable to him as well as to his child—when Mrs. Gibson was moderately sensible and not over-sentimental, he mentally added; and then he checked himself, for he would not allow himself to become more aware of her faults and foibles by defining them. At any rate, she was harmless, and wonderfully just to Molly for a stepmother. She piqued herself upon this indeed, and would often call attention to the fact of her being unlike other women in this respect. Just then sudden tears came into Mr. Gibson’s eyes, as he remembered how quiet and undemonstrative his little Molly had become in her general behaviour to him; but how once or twice, when they had met upon the stairs, or were otherwise unwitnessed, she had caught him and kissed him—hand or cheek—in a sad passionateness of affection. But in a moment he began to whistle an old Scotch air he had heard in his childhood, and which had never recurred to his memory since; and five minutes afterwards he was too busily treating a case of white swelling in the knee of a little boy, and thinking how to relieve the poor mother, who went out charing
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all day and had to listen to the moans of her child all night, to have any thought for his own cares, which, if they really existed, were of so trifling a nature compared to the hard reality of this hopeless woe.

Osborne came home first. He returned, in fact, not long after Roger had gone away; but he was languid and unwell, and, though he did not complain, he felt unequal to any exertion. Thus a week or more elapsed before any of the Gibsons knew that he was at the Hall; and then it was only by chance that they became aware of it. Mr. Gibson met him in one of the lanes near Hamley; the acute surgeon noticed the gait of the man as he came near, before he recognized who it was. When he overtook him he said—

‘Why, Osborne, is it you? I thought it was an old man of fifty loitering before me! I didn’t know you had come back.’

‘Yes,’ said Osborne, ‘I’ve been at home nearly ten days. I dare say I ought to have called on your people, for I made a half-promise to Mrs. Gibson to let her know as soon as I returned; but the fact is, I’m feeling very good-for-nothing-this air oppresses me; I could hardly breathe in the house, and yet I’m already tired with this short walk.’

‘You’d better get home at once; and I’ll call and see you as I come back from Rowe’s.’

‘No, you mustn’t on any account!’ said Osborne, hastily; ‘my father is annoyed enough about my going from home so often, he says, though I hadn’t been from it for six weeks. He puts down all my languor to my having been away—he keeps the purse-strings, you know,’ he added, with a faint smile, ‘and I’m in the unlucky position of a penniless heir, and I’ve been brought up so—in fact, I must leave home from time to time, and, if my father gets confirmed in this notion of his that my health is worse for my absence, he will stop the supplies altogether.’

‘May I ask where you do spend your time when you are not at Hamley Hall?’ asked Mr. Gibson, with some hesitation in his manner.

‘No!’ replied Osborne, reluctantly. ‘I will tell you this: I stay with friends in the country. I lead a life which ought to be conducive to health, because it is thoroughly simple, rational, and happy. And now I’ve told you more about it than my father himself knows. He never asks me where I have been; and I shouldn’t tell him if he did—at least, I think not.’

Mr. Gibson rode on by Osborne’s side, not speaking for a moment or two.

‘Osborne, whatever scrapes you may have got into, I should advise your telling your father boldly out. I know him; and I know he’ll be angry enough at first, but he’ll come round, take my word for it; and, somehow or another, he’ll find money to pay your debts and set you free, if it’s that kind of difficulty; and if it’s any other kind of entanglement, why, still he’s your best friend. It’s this estrangement from your father that’s telling on your health, I’ll be bound.’

‘No,’ said Osborne, ‘I beg your pardon; but it’s not that; I am really out of order. I dare say my unwillingness to encounter any displeasure from my father is the consequence of my indisposition; but I’ll answer for it, it is not the cause of it. My instinct tells me there is something really the matter with me.’

‘Come, don’t be setting up your instinct against the profession,’ said Mr. Gibson, cheerily.

He dismounted, and throwing the reins of his horse round his arm, he looked at Osborne’s tongue and felt his pulse, asking him various questions; at the end he said—

‘We’ll soon bring you about, though I should like a little more quiet talk with you, without this tugging brute for third. If you’ll manage to ride over and lunch with us to-morrow, Dr. Nicholls will be with us; he’s coming over to see old Rowe; and you shall have the benefit of the advice of two doctors instead of one. Go home now, you’ve had enough exercise for the middle of a day as hot as this is. And don’t mope in the house, listening to the maunderings of your stupid instinct.’

‘What else have I to do?’ said Osborne. ‘My father and I are not companions; one can’t read and write for ever, especially when there’s no end to be gained by it. I don’t mind telling you—but in confidence, recollect—that I’ve been trying to get some of my poems published; but there’s no one like a publisher for taking the conceit out of one. Not a man among them would have them as a gift.’

‘Oho! so that’s it, is it, Master Osborne, I thought there was some mental cause to this depression of health. I wouldn’t trouble my head about it, if I were you, though that’s always very easily said, I know. Try your hand at prose, if you can’t manage to please the publishers with poetry; but, at any rate, don’t go on fretting over spilt milk. But I mustn’t lose my time here. Come over to us to-morrow, as I said; and what with the wisdom of two doctors, and the wit and folly of three women, I think we shall cheer you up a bit.’

So saying, Mr. Gibson remounted, and rode away at the long, sling trot so well known to the country people as the doctor’s pace.

‘I don’t like his looks,’ thought Mr. Gibson to himself at night, as over his day-books he reviewed the events of the day. ‘And then his pulse. But how often we’re all mistaken; and, ten to one, my own hidden enemy lies closer to me than his does to him—even taking the worse view of the case.’