THE girls were now as eager to go away as they had been to come; they would scarcely wait for the cab which was sent for, and they paid very little attention to the anxious civilities of Mrs Underwood and Geoffrey, who conducted them to the door and put them into the carriage, making every kind of wistful endeavour to obliterate the impression made upon their minds by the other member of the family. Grace and Milly were in too great haste to consult each other, to compare notes, and to realise this strange new complication in their lives, to have their ears open to Mrs Underwood’s apologies.
“You must not mind Anna,” she said in an undertone, as she led them into the hall, with its dark oaken furniture and scanty light, out of the warm and softened brightness of Miss Anna’s room. “She has always been used to having her own way; she cannot bear to be contradicted. When she takes anything into her head it is so difficult to convince her; oh, she is a great deal cleverer than I am, that is true; but she will not be convinced when she has taken a thing into her head.”
This little explanatory stream of talk seemed to flow round them as they went to the door, but they paid very little attention to it. They scarcely heard Mrs Underwood’s promise to go and see them at their hotel next day; and they submitted with a little surprise rather than accepted with any pleasure her offer of kindness, when she took each in succession by the hand and kissed her, with a mixture of nervous timidity and affection. “If it is so, we are relations,” she said almost under her breath; “and if it is not so, my poor dears, my poor children, my heart bleeds for you all the same.” The water trembling in her eyes and the quaver of her voice showed the good woman’s sincerity; but the girls were scarcely moved by it, so full were their minds of this discovery, which they did not understand. As for Geoffrey, he said nothing at all; he shut the door of the cab and lingered for a moment looking at them wistfully, but that was all. There was in his face a pained consciousness of the difference between his own position and theirs. He, with his home behind him, and all the long-established household gods which had protected him all his life; while the other two, so much younger, feebler, and less able to shift for themselves, had nothing but the cold foreign shelter of a hotel to go back upon. He stood bareheaded in the rain, which, to complete the resemblance with their father’s visit to this place, began to drizzle down continuously out of the dim persistent skies; and his face was the last thing they saw, gazing compassionately after them as they disappeared into the darkness. They were too much preoccupied even to notice this—at least Grace was too much preoccupied. Milly for her part saw him very well, but said nothing. Her mind too was full of other thoughts—yet not so full but that she could remark this quietly to herself.
But though they thus left Grove Road in great excitement they were not disappointed. If they had found themselves simply mistaken, and that nothing was known there of their father or his visit, they would have fallen from an eminence of hope, which in present circumstances they had by no means lost. Had they been received with kind indulgence as strangers, rousing no hostile or any other kind of feeling, but simply a little surprise, they would have been cruelly disappointed; but the excitement of seeing themselves regarded with alarm as dangerous intruders, so important as to be perilous to family peace, flattered them in the most subtle way. As they went slowly down the hill, jolting over the stones, their hearts were fluttered by a sense of dignity which they had never felt before. They laid their girlish heads together as they had been longing to do since ever they set foot in that strange enchanted place. What could it be? what solemn inheritance, what great fortune, to justify the panic which they had seen by movements beneath all the glitter and bravado of Miss Anna’s words? Between that exciting and wonderful idea and the associations with their father of which the darkling road seemed full, their minds were transported altogether out of their own trouble and raised into an atmosphere of high interest and responsibility. It would depend, they thought, upon how they now behaved whether their whole position might be changed. They were well off enough; there was no want in their house, nor had they any reason to suppose that their father’s death would leave them destitute. But there was a great difference between that state of ordinary and commonplace comfort, and this dazzling probability. It might have been a vacant principality, almost a throne, from the way in which Grace and Milly contemplated it. They felt as if their former life had been stopped, and that something new, altogether unrealised and unrealisable, awaited them in the future. “If we only knew what to do; if we could only decide on what is best,” Grace said. That was the difficulty now. This morning there had seemed nothing before them but a patient, melancholy waiting for their mother’s sad letter, and the news of her arrangements for their return to her; now they thought no longer of the voyage home or of anything connected with it, but of what to do and say as representatives of their father, and heads, so to speak, of the family, working on their behalf. “It will change everything,” Grace said again thoughtfully. “Instead of all of us being alike, Lenny—Lenny will be the heir. That is one thing that gives a likelihood to it,” she added, sinking her voice as if the cab-driver might perhaps hear and report the matter. “His name, Milly! I never thought of it till a few minutes ago. Lenny; of course he is Leonard; and when you think of it, papa had Leonard in his name too.”
“I thought of it directly,” said Milly, with a little satisfaction.
Grace, in her excitement, threw her arms round her sister. “It is you who ought to be the first of us two,” said Grace admiringly. “It is true that I am the eldest—but so many things occur to you that never come into my head.”
“It is because I have the time to think while you are talking,” Milly said with modesty; but she was not displeased with this testimony to her superior insight. She added, with a little awe: “Gracie, I wonder if that—is our real name?”
This was a question that took away the breath of both. They looked at each other almost with an inclination to laugh, then stopped short and mutually contemplated the impulse with horror. “It is dreadful,” said Milly, “isn’t it, to have a false name?”
“I don’t know,” said Grace, who had been so indignant an hour ago at the suggestion; “it cannot be so very dreadful if papa did it. He must have had his reasons for taking another name. There are reasons that account for everything.” Her momentary humility had disappeared by this time, and she felt equal to explaining all mysteries to her sister in her usual way. “He must have been wronged somehow when he left home. I suspect that Miss Anna, Milly; I am sure she is at the bottom of everything. She must have told lies of him, or invented stories; and then perhaps he was disinherited, and the money given to her. It would not be money; it would be lands or an estate—perhaps a fine old house.” Then they paused and looked at each other for a moment. “If that was how it was, and we got it back, mamma would certainly have to come home then.”
“But it could not be for all of us; it would only be for Lenny,” said Milly doubtfully.
“Lenny is only fifteen; he would not be of age for ever so long. And then it is always stipulated,” said Grace, “that when people have estates, what is called a great stake in the country, they should be educated in the country and made to understand it.” Insensibly she drew herself up, holding her head higher at the thought—“Mamma would not like it; but she would do what was best for Lenny——”
“Then I suppose—” Milly said, and now in spite of herself the smallest little laugh, instantly repented of, burst from her. She looked at her sister in great alarm, with a portentously serious countenance. “I suppose,” she repeated, as if, instead of something ridiculous, this had been the most solemn suggestion in the world, “that Lenny—will be the one of us that will be important now.”
So full was Grace of the seriousness of this thought, that she replied, without taking any notice of that guilty laugh, only by an inclination of her head: “We will have to learn all about the English laws, and how things are managed, for Lenny’s sake,” she said seriously. “He will be a magistrate, you know, and most likely in Parliament; and he will be rather behind by losing so much time in Canada. We will have to coach him up.”
“Oh but, Gracie, I don’t know things myself; I never was able to do that.”
“I must begin directly,” said Grace with a little sigh—the sigh of the self-devoted. “It was such a business—don’t you remember, Milly?—to coach him for school; and England—England is a great deal more difficult. I think I must begin Greek directly, and law—or he will never know his lessons. I hope mamma will see that it is her duty, Milly, to come at once,” she added still more seriously. Milly for one second was inclined to laugh again at the portentous and preposterous importance of her young brother, but then she recollected herself, and the tears filled her eyes.
“Oh, poor mamma!” she cried, “poor mamma! to come now!”
This turned once more the current of their thoughts. But when they got back to their hotel the argument was resumed: for it soon became an argument maintained with great heat on one side, with an unimaginable gentle obstinacy on the other. Milly, who never went against her sister’s will, was for once in opposition, and though she was not strong enough to subdue Grace, she did not yield to her.
They had begun languidly and mournfully to arrange their father’s papers in the morning. Now Grace betook herself to this pursuit with passion. She found nothing: some fragments of torn letters, torn up into very small pieces, on one of which the name of “Anna” occurred, lay in the bottom of his dressing bag; but Grace was not sufficiently skilled in the art of detection to join them together as a more experienced investigator might have done. And it revolted her to pry into what the dead man had thus wished to conceal. In all his other stores there was not a word which even suggested any information. He had scrawled, “3 Grove Road,” on a page of his blotting-paper, and twice over in other places, as if afraid of forgetting it. When she came to a little diary he had kept she paused with a sensation of awe. She had seen it a hundred times—had seen it lying open, and knew that no special sanctity was attributed to it. It was nothing but a little record of events and engagements; but when the hand is still that has scribbled these careless memoranda, how strangely their character changes! She took it to where Milly sat, and placed herself on the sofa beside her. “I cannot read this by myself,” she said.
“Oh, why should we read it at all, Grace? If papa had wanted us to know he would have told us.”
“Hush! even papa shall not make me suffer injustice!” cried the excited girl. But when the little book was opened it gave but the scantiest information. There was one entry since the landing in England, and no more; and this was all it contained:—
“Same name in directory, at old address; to go first thing and inquire.”
Grace gave a little cry when she read this; it seemed to her to tell all she wanted—and yet it told nothing. “It is quite clear,” she cried in her mistaken little triumph. Milly looked at it too with all the feeling that it was an important revelation. Then they cried a little over the foolish little events of the voyage, all set down there, with that strange unconsciousness of what was coming, which makes death so doubly terrible to the survivors. If he had but known, surely he would have put something in that little record to console, to elevate, to calm the survivors, to whom his every word was so soon to be sacred! But he did not know, and put down nothing except “Wind so-and-so; a little fog in the morning. Captain’s birthday; champagne at dinner,” and such other trifles. They folded it carefully away in paper and sealed it, with an ache at their hearts. Oh, if he had but known! and so told them something, left them some information, if it had only been a task to do! “But there is something to do!” Grace cried; “this that he began; and I will never, never give it up till Lenny has his rights! He is papa’s heir.”