"You are all alone at home?" said grandmamma. "Yes, it must be very lonely. I shall be delighted to read with you as much as you like. I am not very busy."
"Thank you," said Gerard. "Well, I only hope you won"t have too much of me. May I stay to tea to-day?"
"Certainly," said grandmamma. But I noticed--I don"t think Gerard did--that her face had grown rather anxious-looking as he spoke. "If you like," she went on, "we can glance over your books, some of them are still here, and settle on a little work at once."
"All right," said he. But then he added, rather abruptly, "You are not looking well, Mrs. Wingfield? I think you have got thinner. And Helena looks rather white, though she has not grown much."
I felt vexed at his saying I had not grown much.
"It"s no wonder I am white," I said in a surly tone. "I have been mewed up in the house almost ever since Sharley and all of them went away."
And then grandmamma explained about my having been ill.
"I"m very sorry," said Jerry, "but you look worse than Helena, Mrs.
Wingfield."
I felt crosser and crosser. I fancied he meant to reproach me with grandmamma"s looking ill, even though it made me uneasy too. I glanced at her--a faint pink flush had come over her face at his words.
"_I_ don"t think granny looks ill at all," I said.
"No, indeed, I am very well," she said, with a smile.
Gerard said no more, but I know he thought me a selfish spoilt child.
And from that moment he set himself to watch grandmamma and to find out if anything was really the matter.
He _did_ find out, and that pretty quickly, I fancy, that we were much poorer. But it was very difficult for him to do anything to help grandmamma. She was so dignified, and in some ways reserved. She got a letter from Mrs. Nestor a few days later, thanking her for reading with Jerry again, and saying that of course the lessons must be arranged about as before. And it vexed her a very little. (She has told me about it since.) Perhaps she was feeling unusually sensitive and depressed just then. But however that may have been, she wrote a letter to Mrs.
Nestor, which made her really _afraid_ of offering to pay. It was not as if there was time for a good many lessons, granny wrote--would not Mrs.
Nestor let her render this very small service as a friend?
And Jerry did not know what he _could_ do. It was not the season for game, except rabbits--and he did send rabbits two or three times--and I know now that he scarcely dared to stay to tea, or _not_ to stay, for if he refused granny seemed hurt.
On the whole, nice as he was, it was almost a relief when he went away back to school.
Still things were not so bad as in winter. I was really all right again, and a little money come in to grandmamma about May or June that she had not dared to hope for. We got on pretty well that summer.
None of the Nestors came to Moor Court at all. Gerard joined them for the long holidays in Switzerland. Mrs. Nestor wrote now and then to granny, and Sharley to me, but of course there was not the least hint of what Gerard had told them. I think they believed and hoped he had exaggerated it--he was the sort of boy to fancy things worse than they were if he cared about people, I think.
And so it got on to be the early autumn again. I think it was about the middle of September when the first beginning of the great change in our lives came.
It was cold already, and the weather prophets were talking of another severe winter. Grandmamma watched the signs of it anxiously. She kept comparing it with the same time last year till I got quite tired of the subject.
"Really, grandmamma," I said one morning, "what does it matter? If it is very cold we must have big fires and keep ourselves warm. And one thing I know--I am not going to be shut up again like last winter. I am going to get skates and have some fun as soon as ever the frost comes."
I said it half jokingly, but still I was ready to be cross too. I had not improved in some ways since I was ill. I was less thoughtful for grandmamma and quite annoyed if she did not do exactly what I wanted, or if she seemed interested in anything but me. In short, I was very spoilt.
She did not answer me about the skates, for at that moment Kezia brought in the letters. It was not by any means every morning that we got any, and it was always rather an excitement when we saw the postman turning up our path.
That morning there were two letters. One was for me from Sharley. I knew at once it was from her by the foreign stamp and the thin paper envelope, even before I looked at the writing. I was so pleased that I rushed off with it to my favourite window-seat, without noticing grandmamma, who had quietly taken her own letter from the little tray Kezia handed it to her on and was examining it in a half-puzzled way. I remembered afterwards catching a glimpse of the expression on her face, but at the moment I gave no thought to it.
There was nothing _very_ particular in Sharley"s letter. It was very affectionate--full of longings to be coming home again, even though she allowed that their present life was very bright and interesting. I was just laughing at a description of Pert and Quick going to market on their own account, and how they bargained with the old peasant women, when a slight sound--_was_ it a sound or only a sort of feeling in the air?--made me look up from the open sheet before me, and glance over at grandmamma.
For a moment I felt quite frightened. She was leaning back in her chair, looking very white, and I could almost have thought she was fainting, except that her lips were moving as if she were speaking softly to herself.
I flew across the room to her.
"Granny," I said, "_dear_ granny, what is it? Are you ill--is anything the matter?"
Just at first, I think, I forgot about the letter lying on her lap--but before she spoke she touched it with her fingers.
"I am only a little startled, dear child," she said, "startled and----"
I could not catch the other word she said, she spoke it so softly, but I think it was "thankful." "No, there is nothing wrong, but you will understand my feeling rather upset when I tell you that this letter is from Cosmo--you know whom I mean, Helena, Cosmo Vandeleur, my nephew, who has not written to me all these years."
At once I was full of interest, not unmixed--and I think it was natural--with some indignation.
"So he is alive and well, I suppose?" I said, rather bitterly. "Well, granny, I hope you will not trouble about him any more. He must be a horrid man, after all your kindness to him when he was a boy, never to have written or seemed to care if you were alive or dead."
"No, dear," said grandmamma, whose colour was returning, though her voice still sounded weak and tremulous--"no, dear. You must not think of him in that way. Careless he has certainly been, but he has not lost his affection for me. I will explain it all to you soon, but I must think it over first. I feel still so upset, I can scarcely take it in."
She stopped, and her breath seemed to come in gasps. I was not a stupid child, and I had plenty of common sense.
"Granny, dear," I said, "don"t try to talk any more just now. I will call Kezia, and she must give you some water, or tea, or something. And I won"t call Mr. Vandeleur horrid if it vexes you."
Kezia knew how to take care of grandmamma, though it was very, very seldom she was ever faint or nervous or anything of that kind.
And something told me that the best _I_ could do was to leave dear granny alone for a little with the faithful servant who had shared her joys and sorrows for so long.
So I took my own letter--Sharley"s letter I mean, and ran upstairs to fetch my hat and jacket.
"I"m going out for a little, grandmamma," I said, putting my head in again for half a second at the drawing-room door as I pa.s.sed. "It isn"t cold this morning, and I"ve got a long letter from Sharley to read over and over again."
"Take care of yourself, darling," said granny, and as I shut the door I heard her say to Kezia, "dear child--she has such tact and thoughtfulness for her age. It is for her I am so thankful, Kezia."
I was pleased to be praised. I have always loved praise--too much, I am afraid. But my conscience told me I had _not_ been thoughtful for grandmamma lately, not as thoughtful as I might have been certainly.
This feeling troubled me on one side, and on the other I was dying with curiosity to know what it was granny was thankful about. The mere fact of a letter having come from that "horrid, selfish, ungrateful man," as I still called him to myself, though I would not speak of him so to grandmamma, could not be anything to be so thankful about--at least not to be thankful for _me_. What could it be? What had he written to say?
I am afraid that Sharley"s letter scarcely had justice done to it the second time I read it through--between every line would come up the thought of what grandmamma had said, and the wondering what she could mean. And besides that, the uncomfortable feeling that I was not as good as she thought me--that I did not deserve all the love and anxiety she lavished on me.
CHAPTER IX
A GREAT CHANGE
Perhaps here it will be best for me to tell straight off what the contents of Mr. Vandeleur"s letter were. Not, I mean, to go into all as to when and how grandmamma told me about it, with "she said"s" and "I said"s." Besides, it would not be quite correct to tell it that way, for as a matter of fact I did not understand everything _then_ as I do now that I am several years older, and it would be difficult not to mix up what I have since come to know with the ideas I then had--ideas which were in some ways mistaken and childish.
First of all, how do you think Cousin Cosmo, as I was told to call him, had come to write again after all those years of silence? What had put it into his head?