THERE had been great preparations made for Herbert’s reception at the Hatch. I say Herbert’s—for Reine, though she had been perforce included in the invitation, was not even considered any more. After the banquet at Whiteladies the sisters had many consultations on this subject, and there was indeed very little time to do anything. Sophy had been of opinion at first that the more gay his short visit could be made the better Herbert would be pleased, and had contemplated an impromptu dance, and I don’t know how many other diversions; but Kate was wiser. It was one good trait in their characters, if there was not very much else, that they acted for each other with much disinterestedness, seldom or never entering into personal rivalry. “Not too much the first time,” said Kate; “let him make acquaintance with us, that is the chief thing.” “But he mightn’t care for us,” objected Sophy. “Some people have such bad taste.” This was immediately after the Whiteladies dinner, after the moonlight walk and the long drive, when they were safe in the sanctuary of their own rooms. The girls were in their white dressing-gowns, with their hair about their shoulders, and were taking a light refection of cakes and chocolate before going to bed.
“If you choose to study him a little, and take a little pains, of course he will like you,” said Kate. “Any man will fall in love with any woman, if she takes trouble enough.”
“It is very odd to me,” said Sophy, “that with those opinions you should not be married, at your age.”
“My dear,” said Kate seriously, “plenty of men have fallen in love with me, only they have not been the right kind of men. I have been too fond of fun; and nobody that quite suited has come in my way since I gave up amusing myself. The Barracks so near is very much in one’s way,” said Kate, with a sigh. “One gets used to such a lot of them about; and you can always have your fun, whatever happens; and till you are driven to it, it seems odd to make a fuss about one. But what you have got to do is easy enough. He is as innocent as a baby, and as foolish. No woman ever took the trouble, I should say, to look at him. You have it all in your own hands. As for Reine, I will look after Reine. She is a suspicious little thing, but I’ll keep her out of your way.”
“What a bore it is!” said Sophy, with a yawn. “Why should we be obliged to marry more than the men are. It isn’t fair. Nobody finds fault with them, though they have dozens of affairs; but we’re drawn over the coals for nothing, a bit of fun. I’m sure I don’t want to marry Bertie, or any one. I’d a great deal rather not. So long as one has one’s amusement, it’s jolly enough.”
“If you could always be as young as you are now,” said Kate oracularly; “but even you are beginning to be passée, Sophy. It’s the pace, you know, as the men say—you need not make faces. The moment you are married you will be a girl again. As for me, I feel a grandmother.”
“You are old,” said Sophy compassionately; “and indeed you ought to go first.”
“I am just eighteen months older than you are,” said Kate, rousing herself in self-defence, “and with your light hair, you’ll go off sooner. Don’t be afraid; as soon as I have got you off my hands I shall take care of myself. But look here! What you’ve got to do is to study Herbert a little. Don’t take him up as if he were Jack or Tom. Study him. There is one thing you never can go wrong in with any of them,” said this experienced young woman. “Look as if you thought him the cleverest fellow that ever was; make yourself as great a fool as you can in comparison. That flatters them above everything. Ask his advice you know, and that sort of thing. The greatest fool I ever knew,” said Kate, reflectively, “was Fenwick, the adjutant. I made him wild about me by that.”
“He would need to be a fool to think you meant it,” said Sophy, scornfully; “you that have such an opinion of yourself.”
“I had too good an opinion of myself to have anything to say to him, at least; but it’s fun putting them in a state,” said Kate, pleased with the recollection. This was a sentiment which her sister fully shared, and they amused themselves with reminiscences of several such dupes ere they separated. Perhaps even the dupes were scarcely such dupes as these young ladies thought; but anyhow, they had never been, as Kate said, “the right sort of men.” Dropmore, etc., were always to the full as knowing as their pretty adversaries, and were not to be beguiled by any such specious pretences. And to tell the truth, I am doubtful how far Kate’s science was genuine. I doubt whether she was unscrupulous enough and good-tempered enough to carry out her own programme; and Sophy certainly was too careless, too feather brained, for any such scheme. She meant to marry Herbert because his recommendations were great, and because he lay in her way, as it were, and it would be almost a sin not to put forth a hand to appropriate the gifts of Providence; but if it had been necessary to “study” him, as her sister enjoined, or to give great pains to his subjugation, I feel sure that Sophy’s patience and resolution would have given way. The charm in the enterprise was that it seemed so easy; Whiteladies was a most desirable object; and Sophy, longing for fresh woods and pastures new, was rather attracted than repelled by the likelihood of having to spend the Winters abroad.
Mr. Farrel-Austin, for his part, received the young head of his family with anything but delight. He had been unable, in ordinary civility, to contradict the invitation his daughters had given, but took care to express his sentiments on the subject next day very distinctly—had they cared at all for those sentiments, which I don’t think they did. Their schemes, of course, were quite out of his range, and were not communicated to him; nor was he such a self-denying parent as to have been much consoled for his own loss of the family property by the possibility of one of his daughters stepping into possession of it. He thought it an ill-timed exhibition of their usual love of strangers, and love of company, and growled at them all day long until the time of the arrival, when he absented himself, to their great satisfaction, though it was intended as the crowning evidence of his displeasure. “Papa has been obliged to go out; he is so sorry, but hopes you will excuse him till dinner,” Kate said, when the girls came to receive their cousins at the door. “Oh, they won’t mind, I am sure,” said Sophy. “We shall have them all to ourselves, which will be much jollier.” Herbert’s brow clouded temporarily, for, though he did not love Mr. Farrel-Austin, he felt that his absence showed a want of that “proper respect” which was due to the head of the house. But under the gay influence of the girls the cloud speedily floated away.
They had gone early, by special prayer, as their stay was to be so short; and Kate had made the judicious addition of two men from the barracks to their little luncheon-party. “One for me, and one for Reine,” she had said to Sophy, “which will leave you a fair field.” The one whom Kate had chosen for herself was a middle-aged major, with a small property—a man who had hitherto afforded much “fun” to the party generally as a butt, but whose serious attentions Miss Farrel-Austin, at five-and-twenty, did not absolutely discourage. If nothing better came in the way, he might do, she felt. He had a comfortable income and a mild temper, and would not object to “fun.” Reine’s share was a foolish youth, who had not long joined the regiment; but as she was quite unconscious that he had been selected for her, Reine was happily free from all sense of being badly treated. He laughed at the jokes which Kate and Sophy made; and held his tongue otherwise—thus fulfilling all the duty for which he was told off. After this morning meal, which was so much gayer and more lively than anything at Whiteladies, the new-comers were carried off to see the house and the grounds, upon which many improvements had been made. Sophy was Herbert’s guide, and ran before him through all the new rooms, showing the new library, the morning-room, and the other additions. “This is one good of an ugly modern place,” she said. “You can never alter dear old Whiteladies, Bertie. If you did we should get up a crusade of all the Austins and all the antiquarians, and do something to you—kill you, I think; unless some weak-minded person like myself were to interfere.”
“I shall never put myself in danger,” he said, “though perhaps I am not such a fanatic about Whiteladies as you others.”
“Don’t!” said Sophy, raising her hand as if to stop his mouth. “If you say a word more I shall hate you. It is small, to be sure; and if you should have a very large family when you marry”—she went on, with a laugh—“but the Austins never have large families; that is one part of the curse, I suppose your Aunt Augustine would say! but for my part, I hate large families, and I think it is very grand to have a curse belonging to us. It is as good as a family ghost. What a pity that the monk and the nun don’t walk! But there is something in the great staircase. Did you ever see it? I never lived in Whiteladies, or I should have tried to see what it was.”
“Did you never live at Whiteladies? I thought when we were children—”
“Never for more than a day. The old ladies hate us. Ask us now, Bertie, there’s a darling. Well! he will be a darling if he asks us. It is the most delightful old house in the world, and I want to go.”
“Then I ask you on the spot,” said Herbert. “Am I a darling now? You know,” he added in a lower tone, as they went on, and separated from the others, “it was as near as possible being yours. Two years ago no one supposed I should get better. You must have felt it was your own!”
“Not once,” said Sophy. “Papa’s, perhaps—but what would that have done for us? Daughters marry and go away—it never would have been ours; and Mrs. Farrel-Austin won’t have a son. Isn’t it provoking? Oh, she is only our step-mother, you know—it does not matter what we say. Papa could beat her; but I am so glad, so glad,” cried Sophy, with aglow of smiles, “that instead of papa, or that nasty little French boy, Bertie, it is you, our cousin, whom we are fond of!—I can’t tell you how glad I am.”
“Thanks,” said Herbert, clasping the hand she held out to him, and holding it. It seemed so natural to him that she should be glad.
“Because,” said Sophy, looking at him with her pretty blue eyes, “we have been sadly neglected, Kate and I. We have never had any one to advise us, or tell us what we ought to do. We both came out too young, and were thrown on the world to do what we pleased. If you see anything in us you don’t like, Bertie, remember this is the reason. We never had a brother. Now, you will be as near a brother to us as any one could be. We shall be able to go and consult you, and you will help us out of our scrapes. I did so hope, before you came, that we should be friends; and now I think we shall,” she said, giving a little pressure to the hand which still held hers.
Herbert was so much affected by this appeal that it brought the tears to his eyes.
“I think we shall, indeed,” he said, warmly,—“nay, we are. It would be a strange fellow indeed who would not be glad to be brother, or anything else, to a girl like you.”
“Brother, not anything else,” said Sophy, audibly but softly. “Ah, Bertie! you can’t think how glad I am. As soon as we saw you, Kate and I could not help feeling what an advantage Reine had over us. To have you to refer to always—to have you to talk to—instead of the nonsense that we girls are always chattering to each other.”
“Well,” said Herbert, more and more pleased, “I suppose it is an advantage; not that I feel myself particularly wise, I am sure. There is always something occurring which shows one how little one knows.”
“If you feel that, imagine how we must feel,” said Sophy, “who have never had any education. Oh yes, we have had just the same as other girls! but not like men—not like you, Bertie. Oh, you need not be modest. I know you haven’t been at the University to waste your time and get into debt, like so many we know. But you have done a great deal better. You have read and you have thought, and Reine has had all the advantage. I almost hate Reine for being so much better off than we are.”
“But, really,” cried Herbert, laughing half with pleasure, half with a sense of the incongruity of the praise, “you give me a great deal more credit than I deserve. I have never been very much of a student. I don’t know that I have done much for Reine—except what one can do in the way of conversation, you know,” he added, after a pause, feeling that after all it must have been this improving conversation which had made his sister what she was. It had not occurred to him before, but the moment it was suggested—yes, of course, that was what it must be.
“Just what I said,” cried Sophy; “and we never had that advantage. So if you find us frivolous, Bertie—”
“How could I find you frivolous? You are nothing of the sort. I shall almost think you want me to pay you compliments—to say what I think of you.”
“I hate compliments,” cried Sophy. “Here we are on the lawn, Bertie, and here are the others. What do you think of it? We have had such trouble with the grass—now, I think, it is rather nice. It has been rolled and watered and mown, and rolled and watered and mown again, almost every day.”
“It is the best croquet-ground in the county,” said the Major; “and why shouldn’t we have a game? It is pleasant to be out of doors such a lovely day.”
This was assented to, and the others went in-doors for their hats; but Sophy stayed. “I have got rid of any complexion I ever had,” she said. “I am always out of doors. The sun must have got tired of burning me, I am so brown already,” and she put up two white, pink-fingered hands to her white-and-pink cheeks. She was one of those blondes of satin-skin who are not easily affected by the elements. Herbert laughed, and with the privilege of cousinship took hold of one of the pink tips of the fingers, and looked at the hand.
“Is that what you call brown?” he said. “We have just come from the land of brown beauties, and I ought to know. It is the color of milk with roses in it,” and the young man, who was not used to paying compliments, blushed as he made his essay; which was more than Sophy, experienced in the commodity, felt any occasion to do.
“Milk of roses,” she said, laughing; “that is a thing for the complexion. I don’t use it, Bertie; I don’t use anything of the kind. Men are always so dreadfully knowing about young girls’ dodges—” The word slipped out against her will, for Sophy felt that slang was not expedient, and she blushed at this slip, though she had not blushed at the compliment. Herbert did not, however, discriminate. He took the pretty suffusion to his own account, and laughed at the inadvertent word. He thought she put it in inverted commas, as a lady should; and when this is done, a word of slang is piquant now and then as a quotation. Besides, he was far from being a purist in language. Kate, however, the unselfish, thoughtful elder sister, sweetly considerate of the young beauty, brought out Sophy’s hat with her own, and they began to play. Herbert and Reine were novices, unacquainted (strange as the confession must sound) with this universally popular game; and Sophy boldly stepped into the breech, and took them both on her side. “I am the best player of the lot,” said Sophy calmly. “You know I am. So Bertie and Reine shall come with me; and beat us if you can!” said the young champion; and if the reader will believe me, Sophy’s boast came true. Kate, indeed, made a brave stand; but the Major was middle-aged, and the young fellow was feeble, and Herbert showed an unsuspected genius for the game. He was quite pleased himself by his success; everything, indeed, seemed to conspire to make Herbert feel how clever he was, how superior he was, what an acquisition was his society; and during the former part of his life it had not been so. Like one of the great philosophers of modern times, Herbert felt that those who appreciated him so deeply must in themselves approach the sublime. Indeed, I fear it is a little mean on my part to take the example of that great philosopher, as if he were a rare instance; for is not the most foolish of us of the same opinion? “Call me wise, and I will allow you to be a judge,” says an old Scotch proverb. Herbert was ready to think all these kind people very good judges who so magnified and glorified himself.
In the evening there was a very small dinner-party; again two men to balance Kate and Reine, but not the same men—persons of greater weight and standing, with Farrel-Austin himself at the foot of his own table. Mrs. Farrel-Austin was not well enough to come to dinner, but appeared in the drawing-room afterward; and when the gentlemen came upstairs, appropriated Reine. Sophy, who had a pretty little voice, had gone to the piano, and was singing to Herbert, pausing at the end of every verse to ask him, “Was it very bad? Tell me what you dislike most, my high notes or my low notes, or my execution, or what?” while Herbert, laughing and protesting, gave vehement praise to all. “I don’t dislike anything. I am delighted with every word; but you must not trust to me, for indeed I am no judge of music.”
“No judge of music, and yet fresh from Italy!” cried Sophy, with flattering contempt.
While this was going on Mrs. Farrel-Austin drew Reine close to her sofa. “I am very glad to see you, my dear,” she said, “and so far as I am concerned I hope you will come often. You are so quiet and nice; and all I have seen of your Aunt Susan I like, though I know she does not like us. But I hope, my dear, you won’t get into the racketing set our girls are so fond of. I should be very sorry for that; it would be bad for your brother. I don’t mean to say anything against Kate and Sophy. They are very lively and very strong, and it suits them, though in some things I think it is bad for them too. But your brother could never stand it, my dear; I know what bad health is, and I can see that he is not strong still.”
“Oh, yes,” said Reine eagerly. “He has been going out in the world a great deal lately. I was frightened at first; but I assure you he is quite strong.”
Mrs. Farrel-Austin shook her head. “I know what poor health is,” she said, “and however strong you may get, you never can stand a racket. I don’t suppose for a moment that they mean any harm, but still I should not like anything to happen in this house. People might say—and your Aunt Susan would be sure to think—It is very nice, I suppose, for young people; and of course at your age you are capable of a great deal of racketing; but I must warn you, my dear, it’s ruin for the health.”
“Indeed, I don’t think we have any intention of racketing.”
“Ah, it is not the intention that matters,” said the invalid. “I only want to warn you, my dear. It is a very racketing set. You should not let yourself be drawn into it, and quietly, you know, when you have an opportunity, you might say a word to your brother. I dare say he feels the paramount value of health. Oh, what should I give now if I had only been warned when I was young! You cannot play with your health, my dear, with impunity. Even the girls, though they are so strong, have headaches and things which they oughtn’t to have at their age. But I hope you will come here often, you are so nice and quiet—not like the most of those that come here.”
“What is Mrs. Austin saying to you, Reine?” asked Kate.
“She told me I was nice and quiet,” said Reine, thinking that in honor she was bound not to divulge the rest; and they both laughed at the moderate compliment.
“So you are,” said Kate, giving her a little hug. “It is refreshing to be with any one so tranquil—and I am sure you will do us both good.”
Reine was not impressed by this as Herbert was by Sophy’s pretty speeches. Perhaps the praise that was given to her was not equally well chosen. The passionate little semi-French girl (who had been so ultra-English in Normandy) was scarcely flattered by being called tranquil, and did not feel that to do Sophy and Kate good by being “nice and quiet” was a lofty mission. What did a racketing set mean? she wondered. An involuntary prejudice against the house rose in her mind, and this opened her eyes to something of Sophy’s tactics. It was rather hard to sit and look on and see Herbert thus fooled to the top of his bent. When she went to the piano beside them, Sophy grew more rational; but still she kept referring to Herbert, consulting him. “Is it like this they do it in Italy?” she sang, executing “a shake” with more natural sweetness than science.
“Indeed, I don’t know, but it is beautiful,” said Herbert. “Ask Reine.”
“Oh, Reine is only a girl like myself. She will say what she thinks will please me. I have far more confidence in a gentleman,” cried Sophy; “and above all in you, Bertie, who have promised to be a brother to me,” she said, in a lower tone.
“Did I promise to be a brother?” said poor, foolish Herbert, his heart beating with vanity and pleasure.