Even this last assurance fails very much to exhilarate Margaret. She draws on her gloves slowly, takes leave sadly, and walks heavily away. She does not go directly home, but fetches a compass through the lanes, on whose high hedges the passing harvest-waggons have left their ripe tribute of reft ears; over a bit of waste land, barrenly beautiful with thistles, some in full purple flush, some giving their soft down to the fresh wind. Singing to them, sitting on a mountain-ash tree, is a sleek robin. Peggy stands still mechanically to listen to him; but his contented music knocks in vain at her heart's door. There is no one to let it in. In vain, too, the reaped earth and the pretty white clouds, voyaging northwards under the south wind's friendly puffs, and the thistle's imperial stain ask entrance to her eye. Whether standing or walking, whether abstractedly looking or deafly listening, there is but one thought in her mind; one question perpetually asking itself, 'Is it really and solely for Prue's good that I have prevented her going?' Neither the thistles nor the redbreast supply her with any answer. The only one that she gets comes ringing and stinging back in Prue's own words: 'I suppose it is John Talbot who has made you hate her so.' 'Can there be any truth in them?' she asks again, as she had asked with tears when they were first spoken.
Her aimless walk has brought her, when the afternoon is already advanced, to the gate of the Vicarage. It is open, swinging to and fro, with a bunch of ugly little Evanses clustered upon its bars. This slight fact of its being open just makes the scale dip towards entering. She enters. Mrs. Evans is in the nursery, as the nurse is taking her holiday. She is sitting with a newish baby in a cradle at her side, and an oldish one alternately voyaging on its stomach across the scoured boards, and forcing its sketchy nose between the uprights of the tall nursery fender. A basket of unmended stockings balances the cradle on Mrs. Evans's other side, and an open Peerage lies upon her lap.
'Why, you are quite a stranger!' she says. 'I have not seen you since the party at the Manor. I was just looking out some of the people who were there. I have not had a moment to spare since; and you know I like to find out who is who.'
Peggy sits down, and the old baby props itself against the leg of a chair to stare at her.
'How is Prue?' asks Mrs. Evans, discarding the Peerage. 'Mr. Evans met her yesterday on Wanborough Common, five miles away from home. Do you think it is wise to let her take such long walks?'
'I did not know that she had been so far,' answers Peggy dispiritedly.
'I do not like her looks,' continues the other, consulting Peggy's face with a placid eye, full of that comfortable and easy-sitting compassion with which our neighbours' anxieties are apt to inspire us. 'Do you ever give her cod-liver oil?'
'She has been taking it for the last two months.'
'Or malt? Malt is an excellent thing; the extract, you know – half a glass taken after meals. It did wonders for Billy. No one would have known him for the same boy.'
'I have tried that too.'
'I expect that what she wants is change of air,' says Mrs. Evans, shaking her head as she thrusts her hand into the foot of a stocking, running an experienced eye over the area of its injuries. 'Could not you manage to give her a little?'
For an instant Margaret is silent; then she says abruptly:
'Lady Betty Harborough has invited her to pay her a visit.'
'Lady Betty Harborough!' cries Mrs. Evans, dropping stocking and darning-needle. 'Dear me! what luck some people have! And you, too? No? I wish she had asked you too.' It is the measure of how low Peggy has fallen that she goes nigh to echoing this wish. 'Well, she must be a very kind-hearted woman,' pursues Mrs. Evans, resuming her darning-needle, 'as well as a very pretty one. And what a charming voice she has! That was a horrid song she sang; I did not hear the words very clearly myself. Mr. Evans says it was just as well that I did not; but how well she sang it! What spirit! When does Prue go?'
'I – I – am not sure that she is going at all.'
'I would not put it off longer than I could help, if I were you,' says Mrs. Evans. 'Do not you think that she has fallen away a good deal of late? And such an opportunity may not come again in a hurry. Dear me!' with a sigh and a glance towards the two babies and the stocking-basket, 'some people are in luck!'
It is evident that Margaret is not destined to draw much consolation from her visits to-day. At the gate Mr. Evans is waiting to greet her, having routed that numerous detachment of his offspring which was ornamenting it on Peggy's arrival. There are day's on which Mr. Evans's children appear to him intolerably ugly, and his lot unbearably sordid. On such days he lies under a tree, reading Morris's Earthly Paradise, and his family give him a wide berth.
'How is Miss Prue?' he asks, holding the gate open for her to pass through. 'I met her yesterday on Wanborough Common, looking like a – '
'Yes, yes, I know,' interrupts Peggy, almost rudely. 'Mrs. Evans told me.'
'Are you quite happy about her?' inquires he, not perceiving his companion's shrinking from the subject, glad to escape for a few moments from the contemplation of his own unpicturesque ills to the more poetic ones of other people, and walking a few paces down the road at her side. 'Had not you better take care that she does not slip through your fingers?'
CHAPTER XVII
A fortnight later, and Peggy is alone. Prue has gone after all – gone to that paradise, in yearning for which she seemed to be stooping towards the grave; she has gone to empty jugs of water over stairs on Guardsmen's heads, to put crackers into the coat-tail pockets of Secretaries of Legation, and set booby-traps for Members of Parliament. No wonder that even before entering upon these glories their mere prospect had restored her to more than her pristine vigour. She has gone, with Peggy's one string of pearls in her trinket-case; with Peggy's best gown, contracted and modified to her smaller shape, in her trunk. She has gone, nodding her head, waving her hand, and blowing kisses, altogether restored apparently to the blithe Prueship of earlier days. But at what price?
Peggy's repugnance to the plan has been in no degree diminished by the fact of her having consented to it. She has consented to it, driven partly by a suspicion that her opposition has been half-due to no solicitude for her sister's welfare, but to a resentment and an ache of her own; driven much more, though, by Mr. Evans's few light words, 'Take care that she does not slip through your fingers!' They pursue her by day and by night. 'Slip through her fingers!' There seems a dreadful fitness in the very form of the phrase. Other people may die, may be killed. Prue would just slip away! Oh, if he had but used another form of expression! As she lies on her wakeful, anxious bed, one couple of lines torments her with what she feels to be its prophetic applicability:
'Like a caged bird escaping suddenly
The little innocent soul flitted away!'
Some day she will wake to find her arms empty of little Prue, whom for seventeen fond years they have girdled. That Prue has always been sickly and often forward, has from the moment of her birth caused her far more pain than pleasure, makes no sort of difference. The sea does not reckon how many little rills run into it. A great love has no debit and credit account; it gives vastly, not inquiring for any return. People in weak health, who can become genuinely moribund upon opposition, possess a weapon which the sound cannot pretend to emulate.
On the evening of the day of Margaret's visit to the Vicarage Freddy Ducane had unexpectedly returned to the Manor.
'I believe that that wretched little Prue is going to die on purpose to spite Peggy for not letting her go to the Harboroughs!' says milady crossly, vexed at her nephew's serene flower face. 'I cannot think what possessed you to put such an idea into her stupid little head!'
And Freddy looks mournful, and answers sweetly that he supposes it is useless his trying to explain that he had no hand in the matter, but that he is afraid he shall never be able to inflict gratuitous pain upon any one as long as he lives.
Despite his assertion of innocence, he has in his pocket a second letter of invitation from Lady Betty for Prue, which he reads with her next day under the Judas-tree while Peggy is away at the workhouse. She comes back a little too soon, before the reading is quite finished, just in time to see Prue stick the note hastily into her pocket. At this gesture her heart sinks – Prue is beginning to look upon her as an enemy.
'You need not hide your letter, Prue. I am not going to ask to see it,' she says, in a wounded voice, either forgetting or omitting to make any salutation to Freddy.
Prue reddens.
'I should not have hidden it, only that I knew it would make you angry,' she answers, with a sort of trembling defiance. 'Lady Betty has invited me again. I cannot help it; it is not my fault.'
Freddy has risen, and, scenting a coming storm, follows his instincts by beginning to edge away.
'How bad of you – you dear Peg!' cries he affectionately, holding out both hands – 'to come back just as I am obliged to be off! That is the way you always treat me – is not it, Prue?'
'You needn't go,' replies Margaret, neglecting his hands, and looking rather sternly at him. 'I shall not be here a moment; and we are not going to quarrel, if that is what you are afraid of. Prue, since Lady Betty is so urgent, and you wish it so much, tell her that you will go to her.'
Then she leaves them with a steady step, but when she reaches her own room her tears gush out. That gesture of Prue's hand to her pocket has cut her to the quick; Prue, whose one first impulse through all her seventeen years' span has hitherto been to run to her sister with whatever of good or bad – be it broken head or new doll – fate has brought her. That one small gesture tells her that the old habit is for ever broken, and she cries bitterly at it. She may cry as much as she pleases during the silent fortnight that follows, certain that neither Mink nor the cat will ask her why; but she does not weep again. Through the gossamer-dressed September mornings, and the gold-misted September noons, she lives alone. Alone with her thoughts – thoughts none the less worth thinking perhaps for their new tinge of deep sadness – with her unpretending charities, with Jacob and her hollyhocks. It is a novel experience, since never before in all Prue's little life has she borne to have the child out of her sight for as much as a week.
Three months ago she would have thought it too hard a thing to have asked of her to forego Prue's songs and kisses for a whole fortnight; but of late Prue herself has so entirely robbed their intercourse of its old confident sweetness, has put such a bitter sting into it, that for the first few days after her departure Peggy (albeit with self-reproach) experiences a sense of relief in no longer meeting the small miserable face with its mute and dogged upbraidings. So little does she dread her own company that she avails herself but sparingly even of such society as is within her reach, i. e. that of the Manor and milady, with her spud and frieze-coat; that of the Vicarage with its stocking-basket and its Earthly Paradise. The only visitors of whom she sees much are the little Harboroughs, who still adorn the Manor nurseries, and call upon her almost daily, with that utter absence of misgiving as to being always welcome that few people – and those only the most consummate bores – are able to preserve in later life.
She likes them – the boy best; and even if she herself is not quite in tune for their chatter, there is always the red fox to pant at them, with pretty cunning face and hot wild breath, from behind the wire walls of his house; the pump to wet their clothes, and the stable kittens to scratch them. So no wonder that they come every day. She would enjoy their conversation more if it did not involve so ceaseless a reference to one whom she has neither the need nor the desire to have thus hauled back into her memory. But it seems as if John Talbot had been so inwoven with the very woof of their lives that no anecdote of their little past is complete without it. She could endure it, however, if they confined themselves to anecdotes. It is the perpetual appeal to her for her opinion about him that she finds so trying.
'Oh, Miss Lambton! do not you like John Talbot? When is he coming back? Do not you wish he would come and live with you here always? Do you like him better than father? Franky says he does. Is not it naughty of him?'
And the questions of childhood are not like those of a maturer age, which may be evaded or put aside. They must and will be directly answered. Peggy cannot help a vexed internal laugh as she hears herself, allowing that she likes John Talbot, asseverating that she has no wish that he should come and live with her always, and explaining that it is possible to appreciate him and father too. But she is always deeply thankful when the conversational charms of Alfred the stable-boy, or the chicken-feeding hour, or any other timely distraction releases her from this trying interrogatory. Of John Talbot, except through the too glib tongues of his little partisans, she has heard absolutely nothing. On the morning of his departure she had sent his Keats and one or two other of his books up to the Manor after him.
As she was neatly wrapping them in paper a sprig of lavender fell out of the Keats – a sprig which, as she remembered, he had put in as a mark into the unfinished 'Eve of St. Agnes,' on their last reading. She stooped and picked it up, looking hesitatingly at it. Shall she return it to its place? Why should she? No one could ever connect the idea of Betty with lavender. Gardenias would bring her image at once – gardenias wired and overpowering; but the clean and homely lavender – never! She throws it pensively away; and as she does so a foolish fancy comes over her, as if it were herself that she had just been tossing away out of his life! That he acquiesces in that tossing away is but too evident. He does not even send her a formal line to acknowledge the receipt of his restored property. So it is not his fault that his image walks beside her so often down the garden alleys; both at high blue noon and when, on fair nights, she steps abroad to look at the thronged stars.
One must think of something; and there are many interstices in her thoughts which cannot all be filled up by the one topic – Prue. Into them he creeps; the more so as she lives almost wholly in her garden; and with that his memory is so entangled that there is scarcely a plant that does not say something to her of him. She thinks of him always without bitterness; generally with deep compassion; never with any hope of pulling lavender with him again. But she thinks of him. Perhaps there was some truth in Betty's fleer, of her never having known any better company than that of the village apothecary. The only outward incidents of her life come in the shape of Prue's letters. These begin by being long and full of ecstasies; end by being short and full of nothing.
Before the first week is over they are hurried up, ere the sheet is full, with some excuse. She must go and get dressed to go out riding. They are just off to a tennis-party. They are to go out shooting with the men. The expressions of enjoyment grow fewer in each. Yet in not one is the slightest wish expressed for a return home. In fact, before the fortnight ends comes a feverish note, evidently written in hot haste and deep excitement, begging for a further reprieve of a week. It gives Peggy a little fresh pang to notice that this petition is urged as a criminal might urge some request upon his executioner, not as one would beg a boon of a tender friend.
But she is used to such pain now; rises up and lies down with it; and to-day puts it patiently aside. What she cannot put aside is her perplexity as to how to answer. She has a deep repugnance against complying; and yet the memory of her terror at Prue's rapid decline upon her former opposition makes her tremblingly shrink from adopting a course that may all too probably bring back that condition. She dares not decide upon her own responsibility. She will consult milady.
On her way to the Manor she goes round by the Vicarage, and looks in. Over the lawn there is a festal air. It is evident that the little Evanses have been drinking tea out of doors, in honour of a visit from Miss and Master Harborough. The Vicar is nowhere to be seen; a fact which does not surprise Peggy, as she knows that any signs of conviviality on the part of his children are apt to make him disappear.
On catching sight of her Franky Harborough precipitates himself towards her as fast as his fat legs will carry him. He is in wild spirits, and has evidently, on his own showing, been extremely naughty.
'Oh, we have been having such fun! – we have had tea out of doors! Mrs. Evans said that the next child who shook the table so as to upset anything should have no tea! I,' with a chuckle, 'had finished my tea, so I gave it a good shake!'
He looks so rosily delighted with his own iniquity, and is so flatteringly glad to see her, that poor Peggy, who feels as if not many people were glad to see her nowadays, has not the heart to rebuke him.
With her admirer's small soft hand tightly clutching hers, she advances to where, under a copper beech's shade, sits Mrs. Evans – the stocking-basket banished, and engaged upon some genteeler industry – in company with a female friend.
'We were just talking of you,' says the Vicar's wife, putting out a welcoming hand. 'Let me introduce you to my cousin, Miss Jones; she has been staying in the neighbourhood of the Harboroughs; she saw Prue.'
'Did you indeed?' cries Peggy, turning with anxious interest to the new comer. 'Was she well? Did she look well?'
'She looked extremely well.'
'She must have been very well indeed, I should think,' adds Mrs. Evans, with a meaning smile. It is a smile of such significance that, for a moment, Peggy dares not ask an explanation of it; and before she can frame her question Mrs. Evans goes on. 'How very oddly people seem to amuse themselves in smart houses nowadays! – one never heard of such things when I was a girl; but I suppose, as it is the fashion, it is all right.'
'Were they – were they doing anything very strange?' asks Peggy, with rising colour and wavering voice, addressing the visitor.
'They seemed to be enjoying themselves very thoroughly,' replies the latter, with a prim evasive smile.
'They were all driving donkey tandems full gallop down the main street of the town,' cries Mrs. Evans, taking up the tale; 'it seems that there is a town about three miles from Harborough Castle. Prue was driving one!'
'Prue?'
'Yes, Prue! I was as much surprised as you can be; but it must have been Prue; there was no other unmarried girl there!' Peggy is silent. 'My cousin says it was wonderful how she got her donkeys along! She was at the head of the party; and they were all shouting – shouting at the top of their voices!' Still Margaret makes no comment. 'My cousin says that the whole town turned out to look at them; they were all at their doors and windows. I am sure so should I have been,' with a laugh; 'but it seems a childish romp for grown-up people, does not it?'
Peggy's answer is a slight assenting motion of the head, but her words are not ready. Her eyes seem fixed attentively on the distant gambols of the children – on Lily Harborough swarming a cherry-tree, and being pulled down by the leg by an indignant nurse; on Franky giving a covert pull to the end of the white tea table-cloth, in the pious hope of precipitating all the teacups to the ground.
'Another day,' pursues Mrs. Evans cheerfully, 'they drove into the town and bought all the penny tarts at the confectioner's, and pelted one another with them in the open street.'
Peggy has at length recovered her speech.
'It was very, very stupid,' she says, in a voice of acute annoyance; 'senseless. But after all there was no great harm in it.'
'Of course one does not know what they did indoors,' rejoins Mrs. Evans, as if, though a good-natured woman, unavoidably anxious to knock even this prop from under our poor Peggy. 'People said – did not they?' turning to her cousin – 'that they sat up smoking till all hours of the night, and ran in and out of each other's rooms; and the ladies put things in the men's beds – '
'I am afraid I must be going on,' interrupts Margaret, starting up as if she had been stung; 'I have to see Lady Roupell.'
She takes leave abruptly. It seems to her as if she should not be able to draw her breath properly until she is alone. She pants still as she walks on over the stubble fields, across the park, under the September trees, whose green seems all the heavier and deeper for their nigh-coming change of raiment. She pants at the recollection of the picture just drawn for her of her Prue —her Prue– shouting, smoking, making apple-pie beds!
Her worry of mind must have written itself upon her face, for no sooner has she joined milady, whom she finds out in the shrubberies leaning on her spade, like Hercules upon his club, than the old lady asks sharply what she has been doing to herself.
'Nothing that I know of,' replies Peggy, 'except that I have been rather bothered.'
'Prue, eh?'
'Yes.'
'What about her now?' with a slight accent of impatience.
'She wants to stay away another week.'
'And have you given her leave?'
'I came to ask your advice.'
Milady is neatly squirting a plantain or two out of the turf. She waits until she has finished before answering. Then she says with decision:
'Have her back.'
'You think so? But if,' very anxiously, 'she falls ill again as soon as she gets home?'
'Pish!' rejoins the other in a fury; 'give her a dose of jalap and a whipping.'
But Peggy does not even smile.
'Have you – have you heard anything of the party?' she asks hesitatingly; 'of whom it consists, I mean? Prue is not very communicative. Is Lady Clanranald there still?'
'No, she is gone,' replies milady shortly, digging her weapon into a dandelion. 'She could not stand it. Betty is an ass!'
Could not stand it!
In a dismayed silence Margaret awaits further explanation, but none comes. Milady, whatever she may know, is evidently determined not to be diffuse on the subject.
'Have her home!' repeats she briefly, lifting her shrewd old eyes to Peggy's, and replacing her billycock hat on the top of the cap from which her stooping attitude has nearly dismounted it; 'have her home, and do it as quickly as possible.'
Beyond this piece of short but very definite advice, nothing is to be got out of her. She will explain neither why Lady Clanranald took flight nor why Betty is an ass.
In an uneasiness all the deeper for the vagueness of milady's implications, Peggy takes her way home to her little solitary Red House, and writes the letter which is to summon Prue back.
But with how many tears is that letter penned! How many fond and anxious apologies! Wrapped in what a mantle of loving phrases does the unpalatable fiat go forth! However, it has gone now, and there is nothing for her but to await its result. Between the day on which it was sent and that appointed for Prue's homecoming there is ample time for an answer to be returned; but none comes. The day arrives; the servant who is to be Prue's escort sets off in the early morning, and through the long hours, forenoon, noon, afternoon, Peggy waits. Not in idleness though. She is hard at work from dawn till sunset, cooking, gardening, rearranging, planning surprises that are her fatted calves for the prodigal. As she works her spirits rise. The small house looks so bright; perhaps, after all, Prue will not be very sorry to find herself back in it; and how pleasant it will be to hear her little voice singing about the garden, and to see her jumping over the tennis-net with Mink again! Mink has not jumped over the tennis-net once since she left. With a lightened heart Peggy stoops to ask him why he has not, but he answers only by a foolish smirk.
The expected moment has come. For half an hour beforehand Peggy has been standing at the garden-end straining her eyes down the road, and making up her mind that there must have been an accident. But at length the slow station fly with its dusty nimbus heaves in sight, rolls in at the gate, stops at the door.
Before Prue can well emerge her sister has her in her arms.
'Oh, Prue! how nice it is to have you back! How are you? Have you enjoyed yourself? Are you a little glad to see me?'
Prue's first remark can hardly be said to be an answer to any of these questions. She has disengaged herself from her sister, and stands staring round, as if half-bewildered.
Prue does not look like herself. She has an oddly-shaped hat; there is something unfamiliar about the dressing of her hair; and can it be fatigue or dust that has made her so extremely black under the eyes.
'What a squeezy little place!' she says slowly, with an accent half of wonder, half of disgust. 'Surely it must have shrunk since I went away!'
And Peggy's arms drop to her sides, and her hopes go out.