Читать книгу We Two - Lyall Edna - Страница 15

Table of Contents

A life of unalloyed content,

A life like that of land-locked seas.

J. R. Lowell

“Elspeth, you really must tell me, I'm dying of curiosity, and I can see by your face you know all about it! How is it that grandpapa's name is in the papers when he has been dead all these years? I tell you I saw it, a little paragraph in today's paper, headed, 'Mr. Luke Raeburn.' Is this another namesake who has something to do with him?”

The speaker was a tall, bright-looking girl of eighteen, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired blond, with a saucy little mouth, about which there now lurked an expression of undisguised curiosity. Rose, for that was her name, was something of a coax, and all her life long she had managed to get her own way; she was an only child, and had been not a little spoiled; but in spite of many faults she was lovable, and beneath her outer shell of vanity and self-satisfaction there lay a sterling little heart.

Her companion, Elspeth, was a wrinkled old woman, whose smooth gray hair was almost hidden by a huge mob-cap, which, in defiance of modern custom, she wore tied under her chin. She had nursed Rose and her mother before her and had now become more like a family friend than a servant.

“Miss Rose,” she replied, looking up from her work, “if you go on chatter-magging away like this, there'll be no frock ready for you tonight,” and with a most uncommunicative air, the old woman turned away, and gave a little impressive shake to the billowy mass of white tarletan to which she was putting the finishing touches.

“The white lilies just at the side,” said Rose, her attention diverted for a moment. “Won't it be lovely! The prettiest dress in the room, I'm sure.” Then, her curiosity returning, “But, Elspeth, I sha'nt enjoy the dance a bit unless you tell me what Mr. Luke Raeburn has to do with us? Listen, and I'll tell you how I found out. Papa brought the paper up to Mamma, and said, 'Did you see this?' And then mamma read it, and the color came all over her face, and she did not say a word, but went out of the room pretty soon. And then I took up the paper, and looked at the page she had been reading, and saw grandpapa's name.”

“What was it about?” asked old Elspeth.

“That's just what I couldn't understand; it was all about secularists. What are secularists? But it seems that this Luke Raeburn, whoever he is, has lost his wife. While he was lecturing at Birmingham on the soul, it is said, his wife died, and this paragraph said it seemed like a judgment, which was rather cool, I think.”

“Poor laddie!” signed old Elspeth.

“Elspeth,” cried Rose, “do you know who the man is?”

“Miss Rose,” said the old woman severely, “in my young days there was a saying that you'd do well to lay to heart, 'Ask no questions, and you'll be told no stories.'”

“It isn't your young days now, it's your old days, Elsie,” said the imperturbable Rose. “I will ask you questions as much as I please, and you'll tell me what this mystery means, there's a dear old nurse! Have I not a right to know about my own relations?”

“Oh, bairn, bairn! If it were anything you'd like to hear, but why should you know what is all sad and gloomful? No, no, go to your balls, and think of your fine dresses and gran' partners, though, for the matter of that, it is but vanity of vanities—”

“Oh, if you're going to quote Ecclesiastes, I shall go!” said Rose, pouting. “I wish that book wasn't in the Bible! I'm sure such an old grumbler ought to have been in the Apocrypha.”

Elspeth shook her head, and muttered something about judgment and trouble. Rose began to be doubly curious.

“Trouble, sadness, a mystery—perhaps a tragedy! Rose had read of such things in books; were there such things actually in the family, and she had never known of them? A few hours ago and she had been unable to think of anything but her first ball, her new dress, her flowers; but she was seized now with the most intense desire to fathom this mystery. That it bid fair to be a sad mystery only made her more eager and curious. She was so young, so ignorant, there was still a halo of romance about those unknown things, trouble and sadness.

“Elspeth, you treat me like a child!” she exclaimed; “it's really too bad of you.”

“Maybe you're right, bairn,” said the old nurse; “but it's no doing of mine. But look here, Miss Rose, you be persuaded by me, go straight to your mamma and ask her yourself. Maybe there is a doubt whether you oughtn't to know, but there is no doubt that I mustn't tell you.”

Rose hesitated, but presently her curiosity overpowered her reluctance.

Mrs. Fane-Smith, or, as she had been called in her maiden days, Isabel Raeburn, was remarkably like her daughter in so far as features and coloring were concerned, but she was exceedingly unlike her in character, for whereas Rose was vain and self-confident, and had a decided will of her own, her mother was diffident and exaggeratedly humble. She was a kind-hearted and a good woman, but she was in danger of harassing herself with the question, “What will people say?”

She looked up apprehensively as her daughter came into the room. Rose felt sure she had been crying, her curiosity was still further stimulated, and with all the persuasiveness at her command, she urged her mother to tell her the meaning of the mysterious paragraph.

“I am sorry you have asked me,” said Mrs. Fane-Smith, “but, perhaps, since you are no longer a child, you had better know. It is a sad story, however, Rose, and I should not have chosen to tell it to you today of all days.”

“But I want to hear, mamma,” said Rose, decidedly. “Please begin. Who is this Mr. Raeburn?”

“He is my brother,” said Mrs. Fane-Smith, with a little quiver in her voice.

“Your brother! My uncle!” cried Rose, in amazement.

“Luke was the oldest of us,” said Mrs. Fane-Smith, “then came Jean, and I was the youngest of all, at least of those who lived.”

“Then I have an aunt, too, an Aunt Jean?” exclaimed Rose.

“You shall hear the whole story,” replied her mother. She thought for a minute, then in rather a low voice she began: “Luke and Jean were always the clever ones, Luke especially; your grandfather had set his heart on his being a clergyman, and you can fancy the grief it was to us when he threw up the whole idea, and declared that he could never take Orders. He was only nineteen when he renounced religion altogether; he and my father had a great dispute, and the end of it was that Luke was sent away from home, and I never have seen him since. He has become a very notorious infidel lecturer. Jean was very much unsettled by his change of views, and I believe her real reason for marrying old Mr. Craigie was that she had made him promise to let her see Luke again. She married young and settled down in London, and when, in a few years, her husband died, she too, renounced Christianity.”

To tell the truth, Rose was not deeply interested in the story, it fell a little flat after her expectations of a tragedy. It had, moreover, a sort of missionary flavor, and she had till the last few months lived in India, and had grown heartily tired of the details of mission work, in which both her father and mother had been interested. Conversions, relapses, heathenism, belief and unbelief were words which had sounded so often in her ears that now they bored her; as they were the merest words to her it could hardly be otherwise. But Rose's best point was her loyalty to her own family, she had the “clan” feeling very strongly, and she could not understand how her mother could have allowed such a complete estrangement to grow up between her and her nearest relations.

“Mamma,” she said, quickly, “I should have gone to see Uncle Luke if I had been you.”

“It is impossible, dear,” replied Mrs. Fane-Smith. “Your father would not allow it for one thing, and then only think what people would say! This is partly my reason for telling you, Rose; I want to put you upon your guard. We heard little or nothing of your uncle when we were in India, but you will find it very different here. He is one of the most notorious men in England; you must never mention his name, never allude to him, do you understand me?”

“Is he then so wicked?”

“My dear, consider what his teaching is, that is sufficient; I would not for the whole world allow our Greyshot friends to guess that we are connected with him in any way. It might ruin all your prospects in life.”

“Mamma,” said Rose, “I don't think Mr. Raeburn will injure my prospects—of course you mean prospects of marrying. If a man didn't care enough for me to take me whether I am the niece of the worst man in England or not, do you think I would accept him?”

There was an angry ring in her voice as she spoke, her little saucy mouth looked almost grand. After a moment's pause, she added, more quietly, but with all the force of the true woman's heart which lay hidden beneath her silliness and frivolity, “Besides, mamma, is it quite honest?”

“We are not bound to publish our family history to the world, Rose. If any one asked me, of course I should tell the truth; if there was any way of helping my brother or his child I would gladly serve them, even though the world would look coldly on me for doing so; but while they remain atheists how is it possible?”

“Then he has a child?”

“One only, I believe, a girl of about your own age.”

“Oh, mamma, how I should like to know her!”

“My dear Rose, how can you speak of such a thing? You don't realize that she is an atheist, has not even been baptized, poor little thing!”

“But she is my cousin, and she is a girl just like me,” said Rose. “I should like to know her very much. I wonder whether she has come out yet. I wonder how she enjoyed her first ball.”

“My dear! They are not in society.”

“How dull! What does she do all day, I wonder?”

“I cannot tell, I wish you would not talk about her, Rose; I should not wish you even to think about her, except, indeed, to mention her in your prayers.”

“Oh, I'd much rather have her here to stay,” said Rose, with a little mischievous gleam in her eyes.

“Rose!”

“Why mamma, if she were a black unbeliever you would be delighted to have her; it is only because she is white that you won't have anything to do with her. You would have been as pleased as possible if I had made friends with any of the ladies in the Zenanas.”

Mrs. Fane-Smith looked uncomfortable, and murmured that that was a very different question. Rose, seeing her advantage, made haste to follow it up.

“At any rate, mamma, you will write to Uncle Luke now that he is in trouble, and you'll let me send a note to his daughter? Only think, mamma, she has lost her mother so suddenly! Just think how wretched she must be! Oh, mamma, dear, I can't think how she can bear it!” and Rose threw her arms round her mother's neck. “I should die too if you were to die! I'm sure I should.”

Rose was very persuasive, Mrs. Fane-Smith's motherly heart was touched; she sat down there and then, and for the first time since the summer day when Luke Raeburn had been turned out of his father's house, she wrote to her brother. Rose in the meantime had taken a piece of paper from her mother's writing desk, and with a fat volume of sermons by way of a desk was scribbling away as fast as she could. This was her letter:

“My dear cousin—I don't know your name, and have only just heard anything about you, and the first thing I heard was that you were in dreadful trouble. I only write to send you my love, and to say how very sorry I am for you. We only came to England in the autumn. I like it very much. I am going to my first ball tonight, and expect to enjoy it immensely. My dress is to be white tarle—Oh, dear! How horrid of me to be writing like this to you. Please forgive me. I don't like to be so happy when you are unhappy; but, you see, I have only just heard of you, so it is a little difficult. With love, I remain, your affectionate cousin, Rose Fane-Smith.”

That evening, while Erica, with eyes dim with grief and weariness, was poring over the books in her father's study, Rose was being initiated into all the delights of the ballroom. She was in her glory. Everything was new to her; she enjoyed dancing, she knew that she looked pretty, knew that her dress was charming, knew that she was much admired, and of course she liked it all. But the chaperons shook their heads; it was whispered that Miss Fane-Smith was a terrible flirt, she had danced no less than seven dances with Captain Golightly. If her mother erred by thinking too much of what people said, perhaps Rose erred in exactly the opposite way; at any rate, she managed to call down upon her silly but innocent little head an immense amount of blame from the mothers and elderly ladies.

“A glorious moonlight night,” said Captain Golightly. “What do you say, Miss Fane-Smith? Shall we take a turn in the garden? Or are you afraid of the cold?”

“Afraid! Oh, dear no,” said Rose; “it's the very thing I should enjoy. I suppose I must get my shawl, though; it is upstairs.”

They were in the vestibule.

“Have my ulster,” said Captain Golightly. “Here it is, just handy, and it will keep you much warmer.”

Rose laughed and blushed, and allowed herself to be put into her partner's coat, rather to the detriment of her billowy tarletan. After a while they came back again from the dim garden to the brightly lighted vestibule, and as ill luck would have it, chanced to encounter a stream of people going into the supper room. Every one stared at the apparition of Miss Fane-Smith in Captain Golightly's coat. With some difficulty she struggled out of it, and with very hot cheeks sought shelter in the ballroom.

“How dreadfully they looked! Do you think it was wrong of me?” she half whispered to her partner.

“Oh, dear, no! Sensible and plucky, and everything delightful! You are much too charming to be bound down to silly conventionalities. Come, let us have this dance. I'm sure you are engaged to some one in the supper room who can't deserve such a delightful partner. Let us have this TROIS TEMPS, and hurl defiance at the Greyshot chaperons.”

Rose laughed, and allowed herself to be borne off. She had been excited before, now she was doubly excited, and Captain Golightly had the most delicious step imaginable.