Читать книгу Not Like Other Girls - Rosa Nouchette Carey - Страница 7

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“Shall we have our usual stroll?” asked Phillis, as Nan and Dick joined her at the window.

This was one of the customs at Glen Cottage. When any such fitting escort offered itself, the three girls would put on their hats, and, regardless of the evening dews and their crisp white dresses, would saunter, under Dick’s guidance through the quiet village, or down and up the country roads “just for a breath of air,” as they would say.

It is only fair to Mrs. Challoner’s views of propriety to say that she would have trusted her three pretty daughters to no other young man but Dick; and of late certain prudential doubts had crossed her mind. It was all very well for Phillis to say Dick was Dick, and there was an end of it. After all, he belonged to the phalanx of her enemies, those shadowy invaders of her hearth that threatened her maternal peace. Dick was not a boy any longer; he had outgrown his hobbledehoy ways; the slight sandy moustache that he so proudly caressed was not a greater proof of his manhood than the undefinable change that had passed over his manners.

Mrs. Challoner began to distrust these evening strolls, and to turn over in her own mind various wary pretexts for detaining Nan on the next occasion. 15

“Just this once, perhaps, it does not matter,” she murmured to herself, as she composed herself to her usual nap.

“We shall not be long, little mother; so you must not be dull,” Dulce had said, kissing her lightly over her eyes. This was just one of the pleasant fictions at the cottage—one of those graceful little deceptions that are so harmless in families.

Dulce knew of those placid after-dinner naps. She knew her mother’s eyes would only unclose when Dorothy brought in the tea-tray; but she was also conscious that nothing would displease her mother more than to notice this habit. When they lingered in-doors, and talked in whispers so as not to disturb her, Mrs. Challoner had an extraordinary facility for striking into the conversation in a way that was somewhat confusing.

“I don’t agree with you at all,” she would say, in a drowsy voice. “Is it not time for Dorothy to bring in the tea? I wish you would all talk louder. I must be getting a little deaf, I think, for I don’t hear half you say.”

“Oh, it was only nonsense talk, mammie,” Dulce would answer; and the sisterly chit-chat would recommence, and her mother’s head nid-nodded on the cushions until the next interruption.

“We shall not have many more of these strolls,” observed Dick, regretfully, as they all walked together through the village, and then branched off into a long country road, where the air blew freshly in their faces and low mists hung over the meadow land. Though it was not quite dark, there was a tiny moon, and the glimmer of a star or two; and there was a pleasant fragrance as of new-mown grass.

They were all walking abreast, and keeping step, and Dick was in the middle, with Nan beside him. Dulce was hanging on to her arm, and every now and then breaking into little snatches of song.

“How I envy you!” exclaimed Phillis. “Think of spending three whole months in Switzerland. Oh, you lucky Dick!”

For the Maynes had decided to pass the long vacation in the Engadine. Some hints had been dropped that Nan should accompany them, but Mrs. Challoner had regarded the invitation with some disfavor, and Mrs. Mayne had not pressed the point. If only Nan had known! but her mother had in this matter kept her own counsel.

“I don’t know about that,” dissented Dick; he was rather given to argue from the mere pleasure of opposition. “Mountains and glaciers are all very well in their way; but I think, on the whole, I would as soon be here. You see, I am so accustomed to mix with a lot of fellows, that I am afraid of finding the pater’s sole company rather slow.”

“For shame!” remarked his usual monitress. But she spoke gently: in her heart she knew why Dick failed to find the mountains alluring.

“Why could not one of you girls join us?” he continued, 16 wrathfully. The rogue had fairly bullied the unwilling Mrs. Mayne into giving that invitation.

“Do ask her, mother; she will be such a nice companion for you when the pater and I are doing our climbing; do, there’s a dear good soul!” he had coaxed. And the dear good soul, who was secretly jealous of Nan, and loved her about as much as mothers usually love an only son’s choice, had bewailed her hard fate in secret; and had then stepped over to the cottage with a bland and cheerful exterior, which grew more cheerful as Mrs. Challoner’s reluctance made itself felt.

“It is not wise; it will throw them so much together,” Nan’s mother had said. “If it were only Phillis or Dulce; but you must have noticed––”

“Oh, yes, I have noticed!” returned Mrs. Mayne, hastily. She was a stout, comely-looking woman, but beside Mrs. Challoner she looked like a housekeeper dressed in her mistress’s smart clothes. Mrs. Mayne’s dresses never seemed to belong to her; it could not be said that they fitted her ill, but there was a want of adaptability—a lack of taste that failed to accord with her florid style of beauty.

She had been a handsome woman when Richard Mayne married her, but a certain deepening of tints and broadening of contour had not improved the mistress of Longmead. Her husband was a decided contrast: he was a small, wiry man, with sharp features that expressed a great deal of shrewdness. Dick had got his sandy hair; but Richard Mayne the elder had not his son’s honest, kindly eyes. Mr. Mayne’s were small and twinkling; he had a way of looking at people between his half-closed lids, in a manner half sharp and half jocular.

He was not vulgar, far from it; but he had a homely air about him that spoke of the self-made man. He was rather fond of telling people that his father had been in trade in a small way and that he himself had been the sole architect of his fortune. “Look at Dick,” he would say; “he would never have a penny, that fellow, unless I made it for him: he has come into the world to find his bread ready buttered. I had to be content with a crust as I could earn it. The lad’s a cut above us both, though he has the good taste to try and hide it.”

This sagacious speech was very true. Dick would never have succeeded as a business man; he was too full of crotchets and speculations to be content to run in narrow grooves. The notion of money-making was abhorrent to him; the idea of a city life, with its hard rubs and drudgery, was utterly distasteful to him. “One would have to mix with such a lot of cads,” he would say. “English, pure and undefiled, is not always spoken. If I must work, I would rather have a turn at law or divinity; the three old women with the eye between them knows which.”

It could not be denied that Dick winced a little at his father’s homely speeches; but in his heart he was both proud and fond 17 of him, and was given to assert to a few of his closest friends “that, take it all in all, and looking at other fellows’ fathers, he was a rattling good sort, and no mistake.”

When Mrs. Challoner had entered her little protest against her daughter’s acceptance of the invitation, Mrs. Mayne had risen and kissed her with some effusion as she took her leave.

“It is so nice of you to say this to me; of course I should have been pleased, delighted to have had Nan with us” (oh, Mrs. Mayne, fie for shame! when you want your boy to yourself), “but all the same I think you are so wise.”

“Poor child! I am afraid I am refusing her a great treat,” returned Mrs. Challoner, in a tone of regret. It was the first time since her husband’s death that she had ever decided anything without reference to her daughters; but for once her maternal fears were up in arms, and drove her to sudden resolution.

“Yes, but, as you observed, it would throw them so entirely together; and Dick is so young. Richard was only saying the other night that he hoped the boy would not fancy himself in love for the next two years, as he did not approve of such early engagements.”

“Neither do I,” returned Mrs. Challoner, quickly. “Nothing would annoy me more than for one of my daughters to entangle herself with so young a man. We know the world too well for that, Mrs. Mayne. Why, Dick may fall in and out of love half a dozen times before he really makes up his mind.”

“Ah, that is what Richard says,” returned Dick’s mother, with a sigh; in her heart she was not quite of her husband’s opinion. She remembered how that long waiting wasted her own youth—waiting for what? For comforts that she would gladly have done without—for a well-furnished house, when she would have lived happily in the poorest lodging with the Richard Mayne who had won her heart—for whom she would have toiled and slaved with the self-abnegating devotion of a loving woman; only he feared to have it so.

“ ‘When poverty enters the door, love flies out of the window:’ we had better make up our minds to wait, Bessie. I can better work in single than double harness just now.” That was what he said to her, and Bessie waited—not till she grew thin, but stout, and the spirit of her youth was gone; and it was a sober, middle-aged woman who took possession of the long-expected home.

Mrs. Mayne loved her husband, but during that tedious engagement her ardor had a little cooled, and it may be doubted whether the younger Richard was not dearer to her than his father; which was ungrateful, to say the least of it, as Mr. Mayne doted on his comely wife, and thought Bessie as handsome now as in the days when she came out smiling to welcome him, a slim young creature with youthful roses in her cheeks.

From this brief conversation it may be seen that none of the elders quite approved of this budding affection. Mrs. Challoner, 18 who belonged to a good old family, found it hard to forgive the Maynes’ lowliness of birth; and though she liked Dick, she thought Nan could do better for herself. Mr. Mayne pooh-poohed the whole thing so entirely that the women could only speak of it among themselves.

“Dick is a clever fellow; he ought to marry money,” he would say. “I am not a millionaire, and a little more would be acceptable;” and though he was always kind to Nan and her sisters, he was forever dealing sly hits at her. “Phillis has the brains of the family,” he would say: “that is the girl for my money. I call her a vast deal better looking than Nan, though people make such a fuss about the other one;” a speech he was never tired of repeating in his son’s presence, and at which Dick snapped his fingers metaphorically and said nothing.

When Dick wished that one of them were going to Switzerland, Nan sighed furtively. Dick was going away for three months, for the remainder of the long vacation. After next week they would not see him until Christmas—nearly six months. A sense of dreariness, as new as it was strange, swept momentarily over Nan as she pondered this. The summer months would be grievously clouded. Dick had been the moving spirit of all the fun; the tennis-parties, the pleasant dawdling afternoons, would lose their zest when he was away.

She remembered how persistently he had haunted their footsteps. When they paid visits to the Manor House, or Gardenhurst, or Fitzroy Lodge, Dick was sure to put in an appearance. People had nicknamed him the “Challoners’ Squire;” but now Nan must go squireless for the rest of the summer, unless she took compassion on Stanley Parker, or that dreadful chatterbox his cousin.

The male population was somewhat sparse at Oldfield. There were a few Eton boys, and one or two in that delightful transition age when youth is most bashful and uninteresting—a sort of unfledged manhood, when the smooth boyish cheek contradicts the deepened bass of the voice—an age that has not ceased to blush, and which is full of aggravating idosyncrasies and unexpected angles.

To be sure, Lord Fitzroy was a splendid specimen of a young guardsman, but he had lately taken to himself a wife; and Sir Alfred Mostyn, who was also somewhat attractive and a very pleasant fellow, and unattached at present, had a tiresome habit of rushing off to Norway, or St. Petersburg, or Niagara, or the Rocky Mountains, for what he termed sport, or a lark.

“It seems we are very stupid this evening,” observed Phillis for Dick had waxed almost as silent as Nan. “I think the mother must nearly have finished her nap, so I propose we go back and have some tea;” and, as Nan languidly acquiesced they turned their faces towards the village again, Dulce still holding firmly to Nan’s arm. By and by Dick struck out in a fresh direction. 19

“I say, don’t you wish we could have last week over again?”

“Yes! oh, yes! was it not too delicious?” from the three girls; and Nan added, “I never enjoyed anything so much in my life,” in a tone so fervent that Dick was delighted.

“What a brick your mother was, to be sure, to spare you all!”

“Yes; and she was so dull, poor dear, all the time we were away. Dorothy gave us quite a pitiful account when we got home.”

“It was a treat one ought to remember all one’s life,” observed Phillis, quite solemnly; and then ensued a most animated discussion.

The treat to which Phillis alluded had been simply perfect in the three girls’ eyes. Dick, who never forgot his friends, had so worked upon his mother that she had consented to chaperon the three sisters during Commemoration; and a consent being fairly coaxed out of Mrs. Challoner, the plan was put into execution.

Dick, who was in the seventh heaven of delight, found roomy lodgings in the High Street, in which he installed his enraptured guests.

The five days that followed were simply hours snatched out of fairyland to these four happy young creatures. No wonder envious looks were cast at Dick as he walked in Christ Church Meadows with Nan and Dulce, Phillis bringing up the rear somewhat soberly with Mrs. Mayne.

“One pretty face would content most fellows,” his friends grumbled; “but when you come to three, and not his own sisters either, why, it isn’t fair on other folk.” And to Dick they said, “Come, it is no use being so awfully close. Of course we see what’s up: you are a lucky dog. Which is it, Mayne?—the pretty one with the pink and white complexion or the quiet one in gray, or the one with the mischievous eyes?”

“Faix, they are all darlints and jewels, bless their purty faces!” drawled one young rogue, in his favorite brogue. “Here’s the top of the morning to ye, Mayne; and it is mavourneen with the brown eyes and the trick of the smile like the sunshine’s glint that has stolen poor Paddy’s heart.”

“Oh, shut up, you fellows!” returned Dick, in a disgusted voice. “What is the good of your pretending to be Irish, Hamilton, when you are a canny Scotchman?”

“Hoots, man, mind your clavers! You need not grizzle at a creature because he admires a wee gairl that is just beyond the lave—a sonsie wee thing with a glint in her een like diamonds.”

“Hamilton, will you leave off this foolery?”

“Nae doubt, nae doubt; would his honor pe axing if he pe wrang in the head, puir thing? Never mind that, put pe giving me the skene-dhu, or I will fight with proud-swords like a gentleman 20 for the bit lassie;” but here a wary movement on Dick’s part extinguished the torrent of Highland eloquence, and brought the canny Scotchman to the ground.

Perfectly oblivious of all these compliments, the Challoners enjoyed themselves with the zest of healthy, happy English girls. They were simply indefatigable: poor Mrs. Mayne succumbed utterly before the fine days were over.

They saw the procession of boats; they were at the flower-show at Worcester; Sunday afternoon found them in the Broad Walk; and the next night they were dancing at the University ball.

They raved about the beauty of Magdalen cloisters; they looked down admiringly into the deer-park; Addison’s Walk became known to them, and the gardens of St. John’s. Phillis talked learnedly about Cardinal Wolsey as she stood in Christ Church hall: and in the theatre “the young ladies in pink” invoked the most continuous cheers.

“Can they mean us?” whispered Dulce, rather alarmed, to their faithful escort Dick. “I don’t see any other pink dresses!”

And Dick said, calmly—

“Well, I suppose so. Some of those fellows up there are such a trumpery lot.”

So Dulce grew more reassured.

But the greatest fun of all was the afternoon spent in Dick’s room, when all his special friends were bidden to five o’clock tea, over which Nan, in her white gown, presided so gracefully.

What a dear, shabby old room it was, with old-fashioned window-seats, where one could look down into the quadrangle. Dick was an Oriel man, and thought his college superior even to Magdalen.

It became almost too hot and crowded at last, so many were the invitations given; but then, as Dick said afterwards, “he was such a soft-hearted beggar that he could not refuse the fellows that pestered him for invitations.”

Mrs. Mayne, looking very proud and happy, sat fanning herself in one of these windows. Phillis and Dulce were in the other attended by that rogue Hamilton and half a dozen more. Nan was the centre of another clique, who hemmed her and the tea-table in so closely that Dick had to wander disconsolately round the outskirts: there was no getting a look from Nan that afternoon.

How hot it was! It was a grand coup when the door opened and the scout made his appearance carrying a tray of ices.

“It is well to be Mayne!” half grumbled young Hamilton, as Dulce took one gratefully from his hand. “He is treating us like a prince, instead of the thin bread-and-butter entertainment he led us to expect. Put down that tea, Miss Challoner. I see iced claret-cup and strawberries in the corner. There is nothing like being an only child; doting parents are extremely 21 useful articles. I am one of ten; would you believe it?” continued the garrulous youth. “When one has six brothers older than one’s self, I will leave you to imagine the consequences.”

“How nice!” returned Dulce, innocently; “I have always so longed for a brother. If it had not been for Dick, we should have had no one to do things for us.”

“Oh, indeed! Mayne is a sort of adopted brother!” observed her companion, looking at her rather sharply.

“We have always looked upon him as one. We do just as we like with him—scold and tease him, and send him on our errands;” which intelligence fairly convinced the envious Hamilton that the youngest Miss Challoner was not his friend’s fancy.

Dick always recalled that evening with a sense of pride. How well and gracefully Nan had fulfilled her duties! how pretty she had looked, in spite of her flushed cheeks! He had never seen a girl to compare with her—not he!

They were so full of these delightful reminiscences that they were at the cottage gate before they knew it; and then Dick astonished them by refusing to come in. He had quite forgotten, he said, but his mother had asked him to come home early, as she was not feeling just the thing.

“Quite right; you must do as she wishes,” returned Nan, dismissing him far too readily, as he thought; but she said “Good-night!” with so kind a smile after that, that the foolish young fellow felt his pulses quicken.

Dick lingered at the corner until the cottage door was closed, and then he raced down the Longmead shrubbery and set the house-bell pealing.

“They are in the library, I suppose?” he asked of the butler who admitted him; and, on receiving an answer in the affirmative, he dashed unceremoniously into the room, while his mother held up her finger and smiled at the truant.

“You naughty boy, to be so late; and now you have spoiled you father’s nap!” she said, pretending to scold him.

“Tut! tut! what nonsense you talk sometimes!” said Mr. Mayne, rather crossly, as he stood on the hearth-rug rubbing his eyes. “I was not asleep, I will take my oath of that; only I wish Dick could sometimes enter a room without making people jump;” by which Dick knew that his father was in one of his contrary moods, when he could be very cross—very cross indeed!