GEORGE arrived by the next mail. He did not travel all night, but came in the evening, driving up the avenue with a good deal of noise and commotion, with two flys from the station carrying him and the two children and the luggage they brought, in addition to the brougham which had been sent out of respect to the lady. She occupied it by herself, for it was a small carriage, and she was a large woman, and thus was the first to arrive, stumbling out with a large cage in her hand containing a pair of unhappy birds with drooping feathers and melancholy heads. She would not allow any one to take them from her hand, but stumbled up the steps with them and thrust them upon Winnie, who had come out to the door to receive her brother, but who did not at first realise who this was.
“Here, take ’em,” said Mrs. George; “they’re for you, and they’ve been that troublesome! I’ve done nothing but look after them all the voyage. I suppose you’re Winnie,” she added, pausing with a momentary doubt.
“I hope you are not very tired,” Winifred said, with that imbecility which extreme surprise and confusion gives. She took the cage, which was heavy, and set it on a table. “And George—where is George?” she said.
“Oh, George is coming fast enough; he’s in the first fly with the children. But you don’t look at what I’ve brought you. They’re the true love-birds, the prettiest things in the world. I brought them all the way myself. I trusted them to nobody. George said you would think a deal of them.”
“So I shall—when I have time to think. It was very kind,” said Winnie. “Oh, George!” She ran down to meet him as he stepped out with a child on his arm.
George was not fat, like his wife, but careworn and spare.
“How do you do, Winnie?” he said, taking her outstretched hand. “Would you mind taking the baby till I get Georgie and the things out of the fly?”
The baby was a fat baby, and like his mother. He gazed at her with a placid aspect, and did not cry. There was something ludicrous in the situation, which Winifred faintly perceived, though everything was so serious. George was not like the long-lost brother of romance. He had shaken hands with her as if he had parted from her yesterday. He scarcely cast a glance at the house to which he was coming back, but turned quickly to the fly, and lifted out first a little fat boy of three, then parcel after parcel, with a slightly anxious but quite business-like demeanour.
“The maid and the boxes can go round to the other door,” he said, paying serious attention to every detail. “I suppose I can leave these things to be brought upstairs, Winnie? Now, Georgie, come along. There’s mamma waiting.” He did not offer to take the baby, which was a serious weight upon Winifred’s slight shoulder, but looked with a certain grave gratification at his progeny. “He is quite good with you,” he said, with pleased surprise. There was nothing in the fact of his return home that affected George so much. “Look at baby, how good he is with Winnie! I told you the children would take to her directly.”
“Well, I suppose it’s natural your sister should look to you first,” said the wife; “but I’ve taken a great deal of trouble bringing the birds to her, and she hasn’t given them hardly a glance.”
“It was very kind,” said Winnie; “but the children must come first. This is the way; don’t you remember, George? Bring your wife here.”
“I don’t believe she knows my name, or perhaps she’s proud, and won’t call me by it, George?”
“Winnie proud? Look how good baby is with her!” said George.
They discussed Winifred thus, walking on either side of her, while she tottered under the weight of the big baby, from which neither dreamt of relieving her. Winifred began to feel a nervous necessity to laugh, which she could not control. She drew a chair near the fire for her sister-in-law, and put down the good-humoured baby, in whose contact there seemed something consolatory, though he was very heavy, on the rug. “I should like to give the other one a kiss,” she said—“is he George too?—before I give you some tea.”
“Yes, I should like my tea,” said Mrs. George; “I’m ready for it after that long journey. Have you seen after Eliza and the boxes, George? We’ve had a good passage upon the whole; but I should never make a good sailor if I were to make the voyage every year. Some people can never get over it. Don’t you think, Miss Winnie, that you could tell that old gentleman to bring the birds in here?”
“Is it old Hopkins?” said George. “How do you do, Hopkins? There is a cage with some birds”—
“I hope I see you well, sir?” said the old butler. “I’m glad as I’ve lived to see you come home. And them two little gentlemen, sir, they’re the first little grandsons? and wouldn’t master have been pleased to see them!” Hopkins had been growing feeble ever since his master’s death, and showed a proclivity to tears, which he had never dared to indulge before.
“Well, I think he might have been,” said George, with a dubious tone. But his mind was not open to sentiment. “They might have a little bread and butter, don’t you think?—it wouldn’t hurt them,—and a cup of milk.”
“No, George,” said his wife; “it would spoil their tea.”
“Do you think it would spoil their tea? I am sure Winnie would not mind them having their tea here with us, the first evening, and then Eliza might put them to bed.”
“Eliza has got my things to look to,” said Mrs. George; “besides being put out a little with a new place, and all that houseful of servants. I shouldn’t keep up half of them, when once we have settled down and see how we are going to fit in.”
“Some one must put the children to bed,” said George, with an anxious countenance. This conversation was carried on without any apparent consciousness of Winnie’s presence, who, what with pouring out tea and making friends with the children, did her best to occupy the place of spectator with becoming unconsciousness. Here, however, she was suddenly called into the discussion. “Oh, Winnie,” said her brother, “no doubt you’ve got a maid, or some one who knows a little about children, who could put them to bed?”
“He is an old coddle about the children,” said his wife; “the children will take no harm. Eliza must see to me first, if I’m to come down to dinner as you’d wish me to. But George is the greatest old coddle.”
She ran into a little ripple of laughter as she spoke, which was fat and pleasant. Her form was soft and round, and prettily coloured, though her features, if she had ever possessed any, were much blunted and rounded into indistinctness. A sister is, perhaps, a severe judge under such circumstances; yet Winifred was relieved and softened by the new arrival. She made haste to offer the services of her maid, or even her own, if need were. The house was turned entirely upside down by this arrival. The two babies sent a thrill of excitement through all the female part of the household, from Miss Farrell downwards, and old Hopkins was known to have wept in the pantry over the two little grandsons, whom master would have been so proud to see. Winifred alone felt her task grow heavier and heavier. The very innocence and helplessness of the party whom she had thus taken in hand, and whom, after all, she was likely to have so little power to help, went to her heart. She was not fitted to play the part of Providence. And certain looks exchanged between George and his wife, and a few chance words, had made her heart sick. They had pointed out to each other how this and that could be changed. “The rooms in the wing would be best for the nurseries,” George had said and “There’s just the place for you to practise your violin,” his wife had added. They looked about them with a serene and satisfied consciousness (though George was always anxious) that they were taking possession of their own house. Winifred felt as she came back into the hall, where Mrs. George’s present was still standing, the cage with the two miserable birds, laying their drooping heads together, that this simplicity was more hard to deal with than even Tom’s discontent and sullen anger. She felt that she had collected elements of mischief together with which she was quite unable to deal, and stood in the midst of them discouraged, miserable, feeling herself disapproved and unsupported. Not even Edward stood by her. Edward, least of all, whose want of sympathy she felt to her soul, though it had never been put into words. And Miss Farrell’s attempts to make the best were almost worse than disapproval. She was entirely alone with those contending elements, and what was she to do?
Tom had chosen to be absent when his brother arrived; he did not appear even at dinner, to which Mrs. George descended, to the surprise of the ladies, decked in smiles and in an elaborate evening dress, which (had they but known) she had spent all the spare time on the voyage in preparing out of the one black silk which had been the pride of her heart. She had shoulders and arms which were worth showing had they not been a trifle too fat, so white and rosy, so round and dimpled. She made a little apology to Winifred for the absence of crape. “It was such a hurry,” she said, “to get away at once. George would not lose a day, and I wouldn’t let him go without me, and such things as that are not to be got on a ship,” she added, with a laugh. Mrs. George’s aspect, indeed, did not suggest crape or gloom in any way.
“No, I wouldn’t let him come without me,” she continued, while they sat at dinner. “I couldn’t take the charge of the children without him to help me, and then I thought he might be put upon if he came to take possession all alone. I didn’t know that Miss Winnie was as nice as she is, and would stand his friend.”
“She is very nice,” said Miss Farrell, to whom this remark was addressed, looking across the table at her pupil with eyes that glistened, though there was laughter in them. The sight of this pair, and especially of the wife with her innocence and good-humour, had been very consoling to the old lady. And she was anxious to awaken in Winifred a sense of the humour of the situation to relieve her more serious thoughts.
“But then I had never seen her,” said Mrs. George; “and it’s so natural to think your husband’s sister will be nasty when she thinks herself a cut above the like of you. I thought she might brew up a peck of troubles for George, and make things twice as hard.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk so much,” her husband said under his breath.
“Why shouldn’t I talk? I’m only saying what’s agreeable. I am saying I never thought she would be so nice. I thought she might stand in George’s way. I am sure it might make any one nasty that was likely to marry and have children of her own, to see everything going past her to a brother that had behaved like George has done and taken his own way.”
This innocent conversation went on till Winifred felt her part become more and more intolerable. Her paleness, her hesitating replies, and anxious air at last caught George’s attention, though he had little to spare for his sister. “Have you been ill, Winnie?” he said abruptly, as he followed them into the drawing-room when dinner was over.
“Yes, George,” she put her hand on his arm timidly; “and I am ill now with anxiety and trouble. I have something to say to you.”
George was always ready to take alarm. He grew a little more depressed as he looked at her. “Is it anything about the property?” he said.
“I never thought to deceive you,” she cried, losing command of herself. “I did not know. I thought it would be all simple, George—oh, if you will hear me to the end! and let us all consult together and see what will be best.”
George did not make her any reply. He looked across at his wife, and said, “I told you there would be something,” with lips that quivered a little. Mrs. George got up instantly and came and stood beside him, all her full-blown softness reddening over with quick passion. “What is it? Have I spoke too fast? Is there some scheme against us after all?” she cried.
“George,” said Winifred, “you know I am in no scheme against you. I want to give you your rights—but it seems I cannot. I want you to know everything, to help me to think. Tom will not hear me, he will not believe me; but you, George!”
“Tom?” George cried. The news seemed so unexpected that his astonishment and dismay were undisguised. “Is Tom here?”
“I sent for you both on the same day,” said Winifred, bowing her head as if it were a confession of guilt.
“Oh,” he said; he did not show excitement in its usual form, he grew quieter and more subdued, standing in a sort of grey insignificance against the flushed fulness of his astonished wife. “If it is Tom,” he said, “you might as well have let us stay where we were. He never held up a finger for me when my father sent me away. You did your best, Winnie; oh, I am not unjust to you. Whatever it is, it’s not your fault. But Tom—if Tom has got it! though I thought he had been sent about his business too.”
“But, George, George!” cried his wife, almost inarticulate with eagerness to speak. “George, you’re the eldest son. I want to know if you’re the eldest son, yes or no? And after that, who—who has any right? I’m in my own house and I’ll stay. It’s my own house, and nobody shall put me out,” she cried, with a hysterical laugh, followed by a burst of tears.
“Stop that,” said George, with dull quiet, but authoritatively. “I don’t mean to say it isn’t an awful disappointment, Winnie; but if it’s Tom, why did you go and send for me?”
Winifred stood between the two, the wife sobbing wildly behind her, her brother looking at her in a sort of dull despair, and stretched out her hands to them with an appeal for which she could find no words. But at that moment the door opened harshly and Tom came in, appearing at the end of the room, with a pale and gloomy countenance, made only more gloomy by wine and fatigue, for he had ridden far and wildly, dashing about the country to exhaust his rage and disappointment. All that he had done had been to increase both. “Oh, you have got here,” he said, with an angry nod to his brother. “It is a nice home-coming ain’t it, for you and me? Shake hands; we’re in the same boat now, whatever we once were. And there stands the supplanter, the hypocrite that has got everything!” cried the excited young man, the foam flying from his mouth. And thereupon came a shriek from Mrs. George, which went through poor Winifred like a knife. For some minutes she heard no more.