IT was not possible, however, to remove Mrs. Kingsward to Kingswarden next day. She was too much fatigued even to leave her bed, and the doctor who came to see her, her own familiar doctor who had sent her to Germany to the celebrated bath, looked a little grave when he saw the condition in which she had come home. “No fatigue, no excitement,” was what he enjoined. She was to have nothing to excite, nothing to disturb her—to go to the country? Oh, yes, but not for some days. To see the children? Certainly, the children could not be kept from their mother; but all in moderation, with great judgment, not too long at a time, not too often. And above all she must not be worried. Nothing must be done, nothing said to cross or vex her. When he heard from the Colonel a very brief and studiously subdued version of a little family business which had disturbed her—“I need not keep any secrets from you, doctor. The fact is that someone wanted to marry my girl Bee, and that I made some discoveries about him which obliged me to withdraw my consent.” The doctor formed his lips into a whistle, to which he did not give vent. “That accounts for it,” he said.
“That accounts for—what?” cried Colonel Kingsward, not without irritation.
“For the state in which I find her. And mind my words, Kingsward, you’d better let your girl marry anybody that isn’t a blackguard than risk that sort of shock with your wife. Never forget that her life—— I mean to say that she’s very delicate. Don’t let her be worried—stretch a point—have things done as she wishes. You will find it pay best in the end.”
“For once you are talking nonsense, my dear fellow,” said Colonel Kingsward; “my wife is not a woman who has ever been set upon having her own way.”
“Let her have it this time,” said the doctor, “and you’ll never repent it. If she wants Bee to marry, let her marry. Bee is a dear little thing, but her mother, Kingsward, her mother—is of far more consequence to you than even she—”
“That is a matter of course,” said Colonel Kingsward. “Lucy is of more importance to me than all the world beside; but neither must I neglect the interests of my child.”
“Oh, bother the child,” cried the doctor, “let her have her lover; the mother is what you must think of now.”
“You seem tremendously in earnest, Southwood.”
“So I am—tremendously in earnest. And don’t you work your mind on the subject, but do what I say.”
“Do you mean to say that my wife is in a—state of danger?”
“I mean that she must be kept from worry—she must not be contradicted—things must not be allowed to go contrary to her wishes. Poor little Bee! I don’t say you are to let her marry a blackguard. But don’t worry her mother about it—that is the chief thing I’ve got to say.”
“No, I shan’t worry her mother about it,” said the Colonel, shutting his mouth closely as if he were locking it up. When Dr. Southwood was gone, however, he stopped the two girls who were lingering about to know the doctor’s opinion, and detaching Betty’s arm from about Bee’s waist drew his eldest daughter into his study and shut the door. “I want to speak to you, Bee,” he said.
“Yes, papa.” In this call to her alone to receive some communication, Bee, as may be imagined, jumped to a conclusion quite different from what her father intended, and almost for the moment forgot mamma.
“The doctor tells me that above everything your mother must be kept from worry. Do you understand? In the circumstances it is extremely important that you should know this.”
“Papa,” she cried, half in indignation half in disappointment, “do you think that I would worry her—in any circumstances?”
“I think that girls of your age often think that no affairs are so important as your own, and it is very likely that you may be of that opinion, and I wish you to know what the doctor says.”
“Is mamma—very ill?” Bee asked, bewildered.
“He does not say so—only that she is not to be fretted or contradicted, or disturbed about anything. I feel it necessary to warn you, Bee.”
“Why me above the rest?” she cried. “Am I likely to be the one to worry mamma?”
“The others have no particular affairs of their own to worry her with. There must be no private talks, no discussions, no endeavours to get her upon what you may suppose to be your side.”
Bee gave her father a glance of fire, but she felt that a little prudence was necessary, and kept the tumult of feeling which was within her as much as possible in her own breast. “I have always talked to mamma of everything that was in my mind,” she said, piteously. “I don’t know how I am to stop. She would wonder so if I stopped talking; and how can I talk to her except of things that are in my mind?”
“You must learn,” said the Colonel, “to think of her more than of yourself.” He did not at all mean to prescribe to her a course of conduct more elevated than that he meant to pursue himself, but then it was only in action that he meant to carry out his purposes, he was not afraid of committing himself in speech.
Bee looked at him again with a gaze that asked a great many questions, but she only answered, “I will try my very best, papa.”
“If you do, I am sure you will succeed, my dear,” he said, in a gentler tone.
“Is that all?” she asked, hesitating.
“That is all I want with you just now.”
Bee turned away towards the door, and then she paused and made a step back.
“Papa!”
“Yes, Bee.”
“Would you mind telling me—I will not say a word to her—but oh, please tell me—”
“What is it?” said the Colonel. He went to his writing table, and sitting down began to turn over his papers. His tone was slightly impatient, his eyebrows slightly raised, as if in surprise.
“Papa, you must know what it is. I know that you have seen—Mr. Leigh!”
“How do you know anything about it? What have you to do with whom I have seen? Run away. I do not mean to enter into any explanations on this subject with you.”
“Then with whom will you enter into explanations? You cannot speak to mamma; she must not be worried. Papa, I am not a little girl now, to be told to run away.”
“You seem to be determined not to lose a moment in telling me so.”
“I should not have told you so,” said Bee, looking at him over the high back of his writing-table, “if you had not told me I was not to talk to mamma.”
He looked up at her, and their eyes met; both of them keenly, fiercely blue, lit up with fires of combat. It is often imagined that blue eyes are the softest eyes—but not by those who are acquainted with the kind which belonged to the Kingswards, which might have been called sapphires, if sapphires ever flash and cut the air as diamonds do. They were not either so dark as sapphires—they were like nothing but themselves, two pairs of blue eyes that might have been made to order, so like were they to each other, and both blazing across that table as if they would have set the house on fire.
“That’s an excellent point,” he said. “I can’t deny it. What made you so terrifically clever all at once?”
There is nothing more stinging than to be called clever in the midst of a discussion. Bee’s eyes seemed to set fire to her face, at least, which flashed crimson upon her father’s startled sight.
“When one has someone else to think of, someone’s interests to take care of——”
“Which are your own interests—and vastly more important than anything which concerns your father and mother.”
“I never said so—nor thought so, papa—but if they are different from yours, that’s no reason,” said Bee, bold in words but faltering in manner, “is it, why I should not think of them, if, as you say, they’re my own interests, papa?”
“You are very bold, Bee.”
“What am I to do if I have no one to speak for me? Papa, Aubrey——”
“I forbid you to speak with such familiarity of a man whom you have nothing to do with, and whom you scarcely know.”
“Papa, Aubrey—” cried Bee, with astonishment.
Colonel Kingsward jumped up from his table in a fury of impatience. “How dare you come and besiege me here in my own room with your Aubrey?—a man whom you have not known a month; a stranger to the family.”
“Papa, you must let me speak. You allowed me to be engaged to him. If you had said ‘no’ at first, there might, perhaps, have been some reason in it.”
“Perhaps—some reason!” he repeated, with an angry laugh.
“Yes, for even then it was not your own happiness that was in question. It was I, after all, that was to marry him.”
“And you think that is a reason for defying me?”
“It is always said to be a reason—not for defying anybody—but for standing up for what you call my own interests, papa—when they are somebody else’s interests as well. You said we might be engaged—and we were. And how can I let anyone, even you, say he is a stranger? He is my fiancé. He is betrothed to me. We belong to each other. Whatever anyone may say, that is the fact,” cried Bee, very rapidly, to get it all out before she was interrupted.
“It is not at all a cheerful or pleasant fact—if it changes my little Bee, whom I thought I knew, to this flushed and brazen woman, fighting for her——. Go, child, and don’t make an exhibition of yourself. Your mother’s daughter! It is not credible—to assault me, your father, in my own room, for the sake of——”
“Papa! don’t you remember that it is said in the Bible you are not to provoke your children to wrath? Mamma would have stood up for you, I suppose, when she was engaged to you. I may be flushed,” cried Bee, putting her hands to her blazing cheeks, “how could I help it? Forced to talk to you, to ask you—on a subject that gives you a right to speak to me, your own child, like that——”
“I am glad you think I have a right to speak as the circumstances demand to my own child,” said the Colonel, cooling down; “but why you should be forced, as you say, to take up such an unbecoming and unwomanly position is beyond my guessing.”
“It is because I have no longer mamma to speak for me,” Bee said.
The creature was not without skill. Now she came back to the point that was not to be gainsaid.
“We have had quite enough of this,” Colonel Kingsward replied. “Your mother, as you are quite aware, never set up her will against mine. She was aware, if you are not, that I knew the world better than she did, and was more competent to decide. Your mother would never have stood up to me as you have done.”
“It would have been better, perhaps, sometimes, if she had,” cried Bee, carried away by the tide of her excitement. Colonel Kingsward was so astounded that he had scarcely power to be angry. He gazed at his excited child with a surprise that was beyond words.
“Oh, papa, papa! Forgive me! I never meant that; it came out before I was aware.”
“The thought must have been there or it could not have come out,” he said.
“Oh, no; there was no thought there. It may be so with you, but not with us, papa. Words come into our mouths. We don’t think them; we don’t mean to say—they only seem to—hook on to—something that went before; and then they come out with a crash. Oh, forgive me, forgive me, papa!”
“I suppose,” he said, with a half laugh, “that may be taken as a woman’s exposition of her own style of argument.”
“Don’t call me a woman,” she said, with her soft small voice, aggrieved and wounded, drawing closer to him. “Oh, papa! I am only your little girl after all.”
“A naughty little girl,” he said, shaking his head.
“And without mamma to speak for me,” added Bee.
The Colonel laughed aloud. “You wily little natural lawyer!” he said; but immediately became very grave, for underneath this burst of half angry amusement Bee had given him a shock she did not know of. All unaware of the edge of the weapons which she used with a certain instinctive deftness, it did not occur to her that these words of hers might penetrate not only deeper than she thought, but far deeper than her own thoughts had ever gone. His wife’s worn face seemed suddenly to appear before Colonel Kingsward’s eyes in a light which he had never seen before, and the argument which this child used so keenly, yet so ignorantly, pierced him like a knife. “Without mamma to speak for me!” These words sounded very simple to Bee, a mischievous expedient to trap him in the snare he had laid for her. But if the time should ever come when they should be true! The Colonel was struck down by that arrow flown at a venture. He went back to his table subdued, and sat down there. “That will do,” he said, “that will do. Now run away and leave me to my work, Bee.”
She came up to him and gave him a timid kiss, which the Colonel accepted quietly in the softening of that thought. She roamed about the table a little, flicking off an imperceptible speck of dust with her handkerchief, arranging some books upon the upper shelf of his bureau, sometimes looking at him over that row of books, sometimes lingering behind him as if doing something there. He did not interfere with her movements for a few minutes, in the attendrissement of his thoughts. Without a mother to speak for her! Poor little girl, if that should ever be so! Poor little children unconscious in their nursery crying for mamma; and, oh, worse than all, himself without his Lucy, who had made all the world sweet to him! He was a masterfull man, who would stand to his arms in any circumstances, who would not give in even if his heart was broken; but what a strange, dull, gloomy world it would be to him if the children had no mother to speak for them! He made a sudden effort to shake off that thought, and the first thing that recalled him to himself was to hear Bee, having no other mischief, he supposed, to turn her hand to, heaping coals upon the little bit of fire which had been lighted for cheerfulness only.
“Bee,” he cried, “are you still there? What are you doing? The room is like an oven already, and you are making up a sort of Christmas fire.”
“Oh, I am so sorry—I forgot,” cried Bee, putting down the shovel hastily. “I thought it wanted mending—for you always like a good fire.”
“Not in September,” he said, “and such weather; the finest we have had since July. Come, cease this fluttering about—you disturb me—and I have a hundred things to do.”
“Yes, papa.” Bee’s little figure stole from behind him in the meekest way. She stopped in her progress towards the door to give a touch to the flowers on a side table; and then she went slowly on, going out. She had got her hand upon the handle of the door, and Colonel Kingsward thanked heaven he had got rid of her for the moment, when she turned round, eyeing him closely again though keeping by that means of escape. “Papa,” she said, softly, “after all the talk we have been having—you perhaps don’t remember that—you have never—answered my question yet.”
“What question?” he said sharply.
Bee put her hands together like a child, she looked at him beseechingly, coaxingly, like that child returning to its point, and then she said still more softly, “About Aubrey, dear papa!”