CHAPTER X.
"My dear," said Mrs. Alwynn to her husband that morning, as they started for church across the glebe, "if any of the Atherstone party are in church, as they ought to be, for I hear from Mrs. Smith that they are not at all regular at Greenacre--only went once last Sunday, and then late--I shall just tell Ruth that she is to come back to me to-morrow. A few days won"t make any difference to her, and it will fit in so nicely her coming back the day you go to the palace. After all I"ve done for Ruth--new curtains to her room, and the piano tuned and everything--I don"t think she would like to stay there with friends, and me all by myself, without a creature to speak to. Ruth may be only a niece by marriage, but she will see in a moment--"
And in fact she did. When Mrs. Alwynn took her aside after church, and explained the case in the all-pervading whisper for which she had apparently taken out a patent, Ruth could not grasp any reason why she should return to Slumberleigh three days before the time, but she saw at once that return she must if Mrs. Alwynn chose to demand it; and so she yielded with a good grace, and sent Mrs. Alwynn back smiling to the lych-gate, where Mr. Alwynn and Mabel Thursby were talking with Dare and Molly, while Charles interviewed the village policeman at a little distance.
"No news of the tramp," said Charles, meeting Ruth at the gate; and they started homeward in different order to that in which they had come, in spite of a great effort at the last moment on the part of Dare, who thought the old way was better. "The policeman has seen nothing of him.
He has gone off to pastures new, I expect."
"I hope he has."
"Mrs. Alwynn does not want you to leave Atherstone to-morrow, does she?"
"I am sorry to say she does."
"But you won"t go?"
"I must not only go, but I must do it as if I liked it."
"I hope Evelyn won"t allow it."
"While I am living with Mrs. Alwynn, I am bound to do what she likes in small things."
"H"m!"
"I should have thought, Sir Charles, that this particularly feminine and submissive sentiment would have met with your approval."
"It does; it does," said Charles, hastily. "Only, after the stubborn rigidity of your--shall I say your--week-day character, especially as regards money, this softened Sabbath mood took me by surprise for a moment."
"You should see me at Slumberleigh," said Ruth, with a smile half sad, half humorous. "You should see me tying up Uncle John"s flowers, or holding Aunt f.a.n.n.y"s wools. Nothing more entirely feminine and young lady-like can be imagined."
"It must be a great change, after living with a woman like Lady Deyncourt--to whose house I often went years ago, when her son was living--to come to a place like Slumberleigh."
"It _is_ a great change. I am ashamed to say how much I felt it at first. I don"t know how to express it; but everything down here seems so small and local, and hard and fast."
"I know," said Charles, gently; and they walked on in silence. "And yet," he said at last, "it seems to me, and I should have thought you would have felt the same, that life is very small, very narrow and circ.u.mscribed everywhere; though perhaps more obviously so in Cranfords and Slumberleighs. I have seen a good deal during the last fifteen years. I have mixed with many sorts and conditions of men, but in no cla.s.s or grade of society have I yet found independent men and women.
The groove is as narrow in one cla.s.s as in another, though in some it is better concealed. I sometimes feel as if I were walking in a ball-room full of people all dancing the lancers. There are different sets, of course--fashionable, political, artistic--but the people in them are all crossing over, all advancing and retiring, with the same apparent aimlessness, or setting to partners."
"There is occasionally an aim in that."
Charles smiled grimly.
"They follow the music in that as in everything else. You go away for ten years, and still find them, on your return, going through the same figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don"t set their watches by other people"s; who don"t live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to heaven by rote afterwards?"
"I believe there are such people," said Ruth, earnestly; "I have had glimpses of them, but the real ones look like the shadows, and the shadows like the real ones, and--we miss them in the crowd."
"Or one thinks one finds them, and they turn out only clever imitations after all. In these days there is a mania for shamming originality of some kind. I am always imagining people I meet are real, and not shadows, until one day I unintentionally put my hand through them, and find out my mistake. I am getting tired of being taken in."
"And some day you will get tired of being cynical."
"I am very much obliged to you for your hopeful view of my future. You evidently imagine that I have gone in for the fashionable creed of the young man of the present day. I am not young enough to take pleasure in high collars and cheap cynicism, Miss Deyncourt. Cynical people are never disappointed in others, as I so often am, because they expect the worst. In theory I respect and admire my fellow-creatures, but they continually exasperate me because they won"t allow me to do so in real life. I have still--I blush to own it--a lingering respect for women, though they have taken pains to show me, time after time, what a fool I am for such a weakness."
Charles looked intently at Ruth. Women are so terribly apt in handling any subject to make it personal. Would she fire up, or would she, like so many women, join in abuse of her own s.e.x? She did neither. She was looking straight in front of her, absently watching the figures of Dare and Molly in the next field. Then she turned her grave, thoughtful glance towards him.
"I think respect is never weakness," she said. "It is a sign of strength, even when it is misplaced. There is not much to admire in cunning people who are never taken in. The best people I have known, the people whom it did me good to be with, have been those who respected others and themselves. Do not be in too great a hurry to get rid of any little fragment that still remains. You may want it when it is gone."
Charles"s apathetic face had become strangely earnest. There was a keen, searching look in his tired, restless eyes. He was about to make some answer, when he suddenly became aware of Dare and Molly sitting perched on a gate close at hand waiting for them. Never had he perceived Molly"s little brown face with less pleasure than at that moment. She scrambled down with a n.o.ble disregard of appearances, and tried to take his hand.
But it was coolly withdrawn. Charles fell behind on some pretence of fastening the gate, and Molly had to content herself with Ruth"s and Dare"s society for the remainder of the walk.
Ruth had almost forgotten, until Molly suggested at luncheon a picnic for the following day, that she was returning to Slumberleigh on Monday morning; and when she made the fact known, Ralph had to be "hushed"
several times by Evelyn for muttering opinions behind the sirloin respecting Mrs. Alwynn, which Evelyn seemed to have heard before, and to consider unsuited to the ears of that lady"s niece.
"But if you go away, Cousin Ruth, we can"t have the picnic. Can we, Uncle Charles?"
"Impossible, Molly. Rather bread and b.u.t.ter at home than a mixed biscuit in the open air without Miss Deyncourt."
"Is Mrs. Alwynn suffering?" asked Lady Mary, politely, down the table.
Ruth explained that she was not in ill-health, but that she did wish to be left alone; and Ralph was "hushed" again.
Lady Mary was annoyed, or, more properly speaking, she was "moved in the spirit," which in a Churchwoman seems to be the same thing as annoyance in the unregenerate or unorthodox mind. She regretted Ruth"s departure more than any one, except perhaps Ruth herself. She had watched the girl very narrowly, and she had seen nothing to make her alter the opinion she had formed of her; indeed, she was inclined to advance beyond it.
Even she could not suspect that Ruth had "played her cards well;"
although she would have aided and abetted her in any way in her power, if Ruth had shown the slightest consciousness of holding cards at all, or being desirous of playing them. Her frank yet reserved manner, her distinguished appearance, her sense of humor (which Lady Mary did not understand, but which she perceived others did), and the quiet _savoir faire_ of her treatment of Dare"s advances, all enhanced her greatly in the eyes of her would-be aunt. She bade her good-bye with genuine regret; the only person who bore her departure without a shade of compunction being Dare, who stood by the carriage till the last moment, a.s.suring Ruth that he hoped to come over to the rectory very shortly; while Charles and Molly held the gate open meanwhile, at the end of the short drive.
"I know that Frenchman means business," said Lady Mary wrathfully to herself, as she watched the scene from the garden. Her mind, from the very severity of its tension, was liable to occasional lapses of this painful kind from the spiritual and ecclesiastical to the mundane and transitory. "I saw it directly he came into the house; and with _his_ opportunities, and living within a stone"s-throw, I should not wonder if he were to succeed. Any man would fetch a fancy price at Slumberleigh; and the most fastidious woman in the world ceases to be critical if she is reduced to the proper state of dulness. He is handsome, too, in his foreign way. But she does not like him now. She is inclined to like Charles, though she does not know it. There is an attraction between the two. I knew there would be. And he likes her. Oh, what fools men are! He will go away; and Dare, on the contrary, will ride over to Slumberleigh every day, and by the time he is engaged to her Charles will see her again, and find out that he is in love with her himself. Oh, the folly, the density, of unmarried men! and, indeed," (with a sudden recollection of the deceased Mr. Cunningham), "of the whole race of them! But of all men I have ever known, I really think the most provoking is Charles."
"Musing?" inquired her nephew, sauntering up to her.
"I was thinking that we had just lost the pleasantest person of our little party," said Lady Mary, viciously seizing up her work.
"I am still here," suggested Charles, by way of consolation. "I don"t start for Norway in Wyndham"s yacht for three days to come."
"Do you mean to say you are going to Norway?"
"I forget whether it was to be Norway; but I know I"m booked to go yachting somewhere. It"s Wyndham"s new toy. He paid through the parental nose for it, and he made me promise in London to go with him on his first cruise. I believe a very charming Miss Wyndham is to be of the party."
"And how long, pray, are you going to yacht with Miss Wyndham?"
"It is with her brother I propose to go. I thought I had explained that before. I shall probably cruise about, let me see, for three weeks or so, till the grouse-shooting begins. Then I am due in Scotland, at the Hope-Actons", and several other places."
Lady Mary laid down her work, and rose to her feet, her thin hand closing tightly over the silver crook of her stick.
"Charles," she said, in a voice trembling with anger, looking him full in the face, "you are a fool!" and she pa.s.sed him without another word, and hobbled away rapidly into the house.
"Am I?" said Charles, half aloud to himself, when the last fold of her garment had been twitched out of sight through the window.
"_Am I?_ Molly," with great gravity, as Molly appeared, "yes, you may sit on my knee; but don"t wriggle. Molly, what is a fool?"