NOT for some minutes after the little carriage containing the Reverend Meredith Brander and his wife had driven on did either of the young people they had left break silence. Olivia watched the disappearing vehicle with much interest, and Vernon Brander, though with less openness, watched Olivia.
At last she turned sharply, and met his eyes fixed upon her with a half-fierce, half-mournful intentness, which struck her with painful surprise. He at once turned away his head, and asked abruptly—
“Well, what do you think of them? Mind, it is of no use for you to say you ‘haven’t had time to judge,’ or anything of that sort, for I have already caught the reflection of very decided opinion in your face.”
“I don’t deny that I have formed decided opinions, though I don’t pledge myself they are correct.”
“Well?”
“I think I shall like your brother, but I know I shan’t like his wife.”
“Very straightforwardly put. An instinct merely, or something more?”
“Something more, I think. You know, I have seen their portraits; well, I have thought about them a great deal, and now I have compared my impressions of the photographs with my impressions of the originals, and the result is a decided opinion.”
“You know I told you that you would like my brother—that all ladies do,” said Vernon, with a perceptible shade of jealousy.
“Well, you were right; I admit it. He seems the incarnation of good humor—to shed a sort of sunshine of cheeriness around him.”
“Yes, yes, he does,” admitted Vernon, rather bitterly, Olivia thought.
She continued: “It was plain that, for some reason or other, neither he nor Mrs. Brander was glad to see me. It almost seemed as if they took an instinctive dislike to me. But even that could not sour your brother; it scarcely made him less genial. On the other hand, it made all the difference in the world to Mrs. Brander’s manner. She looked at me just as if I were an enemy, who had done her, or was going to do her, some severe injury.”
Glancing at her companion, Olivia saw that something she had said affected him very strongly. She was silent therefore, afraid that she had already said too much.
“It may be,” said Mr. Brander, after a pause, “that she feels a kind of most innocent jealousy of you. She has, all through her married life, been used to look upon me as one of those unattached tame cats who are only too glad to catch mice for any responsible matron who is kind to them. My sister-in-law annexed me in that capacity long ago; sends me to market, sets me to mind the children, to nail up the fallen picture, or even to lecture the gardener. I don’t suppose she has seen me speak to another lady—a young lady—for ten years.”
“I should have thought, by her look, she would be equal to lecturing the gardener herself,” said Olivia, drily.
Mr. Brander laughed. “Well, she is not quite resourceless when it comes to an affair of the tongue,” he admitted. “But you must not think she is a shrew, for all that. Then, she has been our beauty, too, and has been used to set the fashions for the ladies. While now——” He stopped and smiled as he looked at the blooming, prettily dressed girl beside him.
Olivia, however, found this no smiling matter, but replied, with deep scorn—
“Surely, Mrs. Brander can’t be so small-minded as that. I can assure her I have no wish to entrench upon her privileges; and, with only eighteen pounds a year for dress and pocket money, I am not likely to set fashions that there will be a rush to follow.”
“You might set a fashion in faces,” suggested he.
“Oh,” said she, laughing, “if Mrs. Brander envies me the admiration of Mr. Frederick Williams—or, indeed, of any of the jeunesse doree of this neighborhood—I can assure her that she will only have to wait a very little while before my unqualified disdain will bring them all again to her matronly feet.”
“Myself among the number.”
“Oh, Mr. Brander, I didn’t count you.”
“But in mercy you must. I am rather grey behind the ears, and rather lean about the jaws; but let me still think myself as eligible a bachelor as the place boasts.”
He spoke playfully, but something, either in his tone or in the knowledge she had of his life, touched her, and made her voice very kind, as she answered—
“I did not mean that I thought you too old. I meant that I could not think of classing you with a creature like Frederick Williams.”
“He would take that as a compliment.”
“I don’t think he would if he saw me look at him and then at you while I said so.”
Mr. Brander pulled up his clerical collar, and affected to give his hat a jaunty cock.
“It’s so long since I’ve been ‘buttered up,’ and it’s so nice,” said he.
“Why, you have a great following among the ladies of the village.”
“I am afraid I look upon them—though without so much reason—much as you do upon their counterparts of the opposite sex.”
“And Mrs. Brander, doesn’t she, in return for your services at marketing and nailing pictures, ‘butter you up’ too?”
The gaiety, which had sat so pleasantly on the usually grave man, suddenly evaporated. He answered, very quietly—
“She calls me a good fellow, and—yes, I think she means it.”
They had slackened their steps a little as they drew near the bottom of the hill where The Chequers hid the entrance to Rishton Hall Farm. They had stopped altogether at the bottom to exchange these last few sentences before saying farewell. As his last words were succeeded by a moment’s pause, Mr. Brander glanced up the hill he had to climb to the Vicarage, and became aware of his brother’s portly figure descending the slope with measured steps toward them. His cheeks grew pale; the last gleam of vivacity died out of his face.
The change caused Olivia to look in the same direction, and to note that there was something judicial in the handsome vicar’s gait—something mildly apprehensive in the expression of his face. She felt an impulse of indignation against both husband and wife for their inexplicably rigorous attitude towards Vernon Brander and herself. At sight of his brother, Vernon, who seemed at once to grow cold and formal, raised his hat, and would have left her with a few words of farewell. But she held out her hand, and, as he took it with a flushing face, she retained his with a warm clasp, while she said—
“I am going to get papa to waylay you, Mr. Brander, as you come back from the Vicarage. You have never been inside the house since the day you played fairy godmother to me and poor Lucy. I want you to see the old house now we have made it again a home.”
“I shall be delighted, Miss Denison,” faltered poor Vernon, with one ear for her kindly words and the other for his brother’s deliberately approaching footsteps. “You are very kind to me,” he added, in a hasty undertone. Then in his usual voice, “Good-night,” said he, as she released his hand, and, with a bow to the vicar, turned to the farmyard gate.
With a few steps on either side—dignified in the one, hurried and nervous in the other—the brothers met. The elder passed his arm affectionately within that of the younger, and turned to walk up the hill with him.
“Evelyn began to be afraid you had forgotten us and our dinner in pleasanter society than ours,” said Meredith, in his genial voice.
If Vernon, as his nervous manner suggested, was afraid of his brother, the fault lay in his own conscience, and not in any coldness or harshness on the part of the Vicar of Rishton.
“No,” said Vernon, hastily; “I had not forgotten. Of course not. Miss Denison was annoyed by a rough as she was crossing the fields; I came up just in time—by the merest accident—and I could do no less than see her home.”
“Of course not. Not a very great penance either. What an extremely pleasant-looking girl!”
It was characteristic of the vicar’s warm, expansive nature that he found enjoyment in all goodly things; and he never attempted to hide the pleasure the sight of a beautiful woman gave him, although, as in the present instance, he remembered his cloth in the expression of it.
“She is very handsome,” said Vernon, whose candor went a step further than his brother’s.
“And amiable?”
“By that one means sympathetic to oneself, I suppose. Yes, I find her amiable,” said the younger man, with a sort of dogged defiance in his tone.
“Then you are pretty intimate already?”
The vicar spoke without the least harshness, but the answer came in an almost sullen tone, as if Vernon’s own conscience were reproaching him.
“Not very. This is the fourth time I have met her.”
“But, dear me, with these sweet-faced girls, one gets over the ground so fast!” suggested the elder more genially than ever.
“That depends. There’s not much about me to fascinate a beautiful woman.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that: I certainly did not mean that. But we had looked upon you—you had taught us to look upon you—as a confirmed bachelor; almost a misogynist.”
“No, not that,” interrupted the younger, abruptly. “I have always admired women; in my way, at least, as much as you have in yours—unluckily for me,” he added in a bitter, mocking tone.
“And now your admiration is to take shape in a definite preference for one?” said the vicar, rather diffidently.
Vernon was restless and uneasy; he snapped twigs off the hedge as he walked along, and seemed unable to look his brother in the face.
“What does my preference matter?” he asked, at last, almost fiercely. “What did it matter before, except to bring upon me the shame and shadow of my whole life?”
His brother looked shocked and alarmed at this outburst. He put his arm, which Vernon had thrown off, again most persuasively through that of the younger man.
“Come, come,” he said, very earnestly, very affectionately; “you must not talk like that. You lead a life—voluntarily, mind, else there would be no grandeur, no dignity, in it—so full of austerity and self-sacrifice that you are winning yourself almost the reputation of a saint. You have shown an example of courage and endurance such as few men would have the steadfastness to follow—not I, for one, I admit. You are loved by your parishioners. And it is scarcely too much to say that by your own family—Evelyn, myself, and the little ones—you are adored.”
The Vicar of Rishton watched his brother’s face closely as he pronounced these words in full tones of deep feeling. They took effect at once. The thin, sensitive face relaxed, and a faint smile hovered on Vernon’s lips as he answered—
“You are all very good to me, and I love you for it; but you don’t need to be told that now. As for all that about my being a saint and a martyr, it is nonsense, and only a kind way of putting the fact that ten years ago——”
“Now why trouble yourself about what happened ten years ago?” interrupted the vicar in grave but most gentle tones. “The evil wrought then has been bitterly repented of, and atoned for in a manner so noble that I can scarcely speak of it without tears.”
“Noble? Nonsense! There was nothing in what I have done but the outcome of a most commonplace human feeling. I don’t wish to deceive you about that, or get more credit than is due to me.”
“Well, I will say no more on the point. It is not for me to contradict you. For, whatever may have been our relative positions ten years ago, your life since then has made you a better man than I, and I bow to you as to my superior.”
It was very gracefully said, with a warmth and sincerity of tone which made it no empty compliment from the handsome, much-revered vicar to the hermit-parson of ruinous St. Cuthbert’s. The latter received it with a restive, deprecatory, impatient wave of the hand; but yet a keen observer, who had looked from the one face to the other at that moment, would almost have been inclined to say that the elder, whether or not he quite meant what he said, had spoken the truth, and that the worn features and keen grey eyes of the younger man revealed higher capacities for good than the bland, benevolent, and good-humored countenance of his brother. Ten years ago, before the tragic event which had been the turning point of Vernon’s life, the reverse of this would have been true. Passionate, reckless, and hot tempered, he would have looked, beside his open-faced brother, like the evil angel beside the good. But a decade of unruffled prosperity on the one hand, and the same period of austere self-sacrifice on the other, had told their tale; and the man over whom there hung the shadow of a fearful crime now threatened, by long humility and devotion, to oust from the first place in the esteem of the rough mining population the irreproachable and kindly Vicar of Rishton himself.
Meredith had spoken the last words in a decisive tone, as if he considered the discussion at an end. But from the expression of his brother’s face, it was clear that he had yet something to say—something of more import than anything that had yet passed between them.
“You have tried me long enough to trust my discretion a little, Meredith; but I don’t know how you will take what I am going to tell you.” He hurried on in an agitated voice, without looking his brother in the face. “I have never been a misogynist; perhaps I shall not always be a bachelor. Mind, I only say perhaps.”
There was a long pause. They tramped up the hill side by side without exchanging so much as a look, until the pretty gables of the Vicarage were in sight, peeping out behind the massive evergreens and the yet bare lilac branches of the vicar’s garden. Then Meredith spoke, in the most subdued and gentlest of voices—
“You are the best, indeed, the only possible judge of your own conduct, Vernon; but I fear that, to a nature like yours, the thought of having caused suffering to a woman you love will some day be very bitter.”
His voice seemed to fade away on the last words, as it did at the pathetic points of his sermons. His eloquence again took effect on the sensitive Vernon.
“My wife—if, indeed, I ever had a wife—should never know the truth,” said he, in a low and husky voice.
“Oh, but she will!” said Meredith, with energy. “Do not deceive yourself on that point; you cannot deceive me. No one can prevent your marrying; I, for one, shall never utter another word against such a step; but, if you do take it, your ten years’ silence, as far as the feelings of others are concerned, will have been in vain.”
There was another pause—a short one, this time. Then Vernon spoke, in a harsh and broken voice—
“Be satisfied. No woman shall ever suffer through me—again. I will bear it to the end—alone.”
“Spoken bravely—spoken like yourself,” began the vicar of Rishton, in his usual firm and cheerful tones. He was about to say more, when his speech was checked by the sight of a man’s face peering over the wall of a small, neglected garden, which adjoined the vicar’s own premises on a lower level of the hill.
The face was that of a stranger, but of a stranger who apparently took a deep interest in his surroundings. Meredith Brander examined his features with frank and rather puzzled interest, while Vernon scanned the face with an intentness which almost savored of dread. The stranger, on his side, gave them a nod of free-and-easy greeting, which they returned by a more conventional salute, as they proceeded up the hill.
“Who is that man?” asked Meredith, as if trying to recall some memory connected with the features he had just seen.
“I don’t know,” answered the brother, in a troubled voice. His brother looked inquiringly.
“Have you seen him before? I can’t quite make up my mind whether he is a stranger to me or not.”
“He is a stranger,” said Vernon; “probably the man who has taken the cottage. I heard this morning that it was let at last.”
“You don’t know his name then?”
“Mat Oldshaw, who told me, did not mention his name.”
No more was said on the subject of the stranger by either of the brothers, both of whom remained apparently in deep thought for the few remaining steps of their walk.
The gravity of both faces lightened when, on reaching the Vicarage, the sounds of childish voices broke upon their ears. Mrs. Meredith Brander prided herself on nothing so much as on being a “sensible woman;” and, as there is no sign of want of sense in a woman so marked as the spoiling of children, the event went a little way in the opposite direction, and kept her little daughter of ten and small son of six in somewhat rigorous subjection. Not only did she honor the old-fashioned saying that “children should be seen and not heard,” but she even went so far as to think that the less seen of them the better. Her husband, who was an affectionate and even demonstrative father, would have had them much more about the house; but he yielded in all domestic matters implicitly to his wife’s ruling, and, as she had decreed that the proper place for children was the nursery, in the nursery they for the most part remained. Therefore, the children had come back in a cab with the luggage, instead of with papa and mamma, in the pony carriage, and they were on their way up the stairs towards their own domain when their father and uncle came in and caught them.
Vernon Brander’s haggard face lighted up with an expression of deep tenderness as the little girl turned on hearing the gentlemen’s footsteps, and, with a shrill cry of childish delight, ran down a few steps, and flung her little arms tempestuously round his neck.
“Uncle Vernie! Uncle Vernie!” she cooed breathlessly into his ear. “Oh, I have such a lot to tell you, and I’ve such a heap of shells for you, and some seaweed for you to dry; and, oh! I have so wanted to see you, and have you with us there by the sea. It would have been lovely if only you’d been there!”
“Come, come, you carneying, blarneying, little sixpenn’orth of halfpence,” said Uncle Vernon, seating himself on the stairs and putting his arm affectionately around her little waist, “don’t pretend it wasn’t lovely without me, or that you’re glad the holiday’s over so that you can see your old uncle again.”
“But I am though, whether you believe it or not,” said the child, gravely, looking into the wrinkles of the clergyman’s face with affectionate solicitude. “The sea was beautiful, and it was nice to have no lessons, and to see the pretty people, and to have new walks instead of the old ones we’re so tired of. But there was no one to tell what one thought, no one to look at me like you look, Uncle Vernie—no one to hug like this.”
And, suiting the action to the word, she crushed up his head and face in a stifling embrace.
At that moment the drawing-room door opened, and Mrs. Brander, handsome, erect, and neat as a statue, came upon the scene.
“Kate, you are forgetting yourself, my dear,” she said, in a tone of gentle but decided reproof. “Your uncle does not mind a kiss, but a bear’s hug is neither lady-like nor welcome.”
The child withdrew her arms at once, and relapsed into the unnatural demeanor of a sensitive child snubbed. Vernon grew red, and passed his hand over the little girl’s fair head with more than paternal tenderness.
“Don’t be hard upon the child, Evelyn,” he said in a low voice. “You who have children of your own don’t know what pleasure that ‘bear’s hug’ can give to a childless man.”
Meredith Brander, who had been playing with his little boy, looked uneasily towards his brother at this speech.
“What a fuss you make about that child!” said Mrs. Brander, lightly, as if anxious to turn the conversation.
And, coming to the staircase, she picked up the little girl’s hat, which had fallen off in the course of her excited greetings, and telling her to run upstairs and get her face washed, Mrs. Brander invited her brother-in-law, with a welcoming gesture, to come with her into the drawing-room.
Vernon followed her with scarcely disguised reluctance, which the lady did not fail to perceive.
“What is the matter with you, Vernon?” she asked, as she seated herself by an open work-basket, and immediately began operations upon an embroidered pinafore. “There is a change in you since we went away; you have either grown less sociable, or else you have found some society more congenial than ours. Sit down; that pacing to and fro fidgets me.”
Vernon stopped in front of her, but did not seat himself.
“Do you know,” he began, abruptly, “that I have gone through a lengthy catechism of this sort at the hands of your husband? I have given the fullest answers to all his questions, and he can pass on to you any information you may require.”
In spite of the peremptoriness of his words, his tone was almost pleading; and in his face, as he looked down upon her, there was an expression of chivalrous kindliness which took all harshness out of his speech.
Mrs. Brander, glancing up at him, drew a breath of relief.
“I was almost beginning to fear, Vernon, that you had formed, or were on the point of forming, new ties which would make you forget the old ones.”
Mrs. Brander’s voice was not capable of expressing much deep emotion; but she lowered it, as she said these words, to the softest pitch it could reach.
“Forget!” he echoed. “That is a process my mind is incapable of. I think you know that, Evelyn.”
She gave him a straightforwardly, affectionate look out of her handsome eyes.
“Perhaps I do, Vernon,” she said, gently. “Perhaps I think your mind incapable of any process by which you could bring suffering upon another person.”
Vernon looked down into her beautiful face critically. There was genuine anxiety in her expression, but it did not touch him as much as a similar expression on those comely features had been wont to do. For the last few weeks he had been haunted by another woman’s face, one which betrayed most ingenuously every thought of the owner’s mind, every impulse of a warm young heart. Mrs. Brander was intelligent enough to have an idea of the truth; and when she saw that her soft speech left him comparatively cold, she did not waste another on him, but rose from her seat with a sigh, and bent over her table in such a way that he could not see her face. The sensitive Vernon instantly began to imagine tears in her eyes, drawn forth by his own hardness. He was seeking words to comfort her when the door opened, and Meredith came in. His genial presence seemed on the instant to relieve the embarrassment of the other two.
“It seems to me, my dear,” he began to his wife, “that Kitty is not looking any the better for her stay at Bournemouth. I went upstairs with the children just now, and I was quite struck with the paleness of the child’s cheeks.”
As the vicar uttered these words, a change came rapidly over his brother’s face. He glanced from father to mother with an expression of the deepest anxiety, which Mrs. Brander, while answering her husband in calm and measured tones, did not fail to note.
“I think you worry yourself unnecessarily about the child. She’s tired now after her journey; she will probably look all right again to-morrow.”
The vicar allowed himself to be pacified by his wife’s assurances, and, leading his brother away to the fireplace, they occupied themselves, until the announcement of dinner, in discussing the trifling events which had happened in the parish during the vicar’s absence. Mrs. Brander listened with an especially attentive ear while her brother-in-law gave a somewhat detailed account of the arrival of the new occupants of Rishton Hall Farm, including, as it necessarily did, the story of his own assistance at their installation.
Mrs. Brander did not attempt to deceive herself as to the strong measure of interest which the beautiful young farmer’s daughter had excited in Vernon. Neither did she disguise from herself the anxiety and annoyance which this discovery caused her. Instead, however, of indulging in any feelings of feminine jealousy, she set herself to try to devise a way of ousting this rival. A ray of light broke suddenly over her handsome face.
“When I spoke of my own suffering, he was certainly not so much touched as he used to be,” she reflected. “On the other hand, anything connected with Kitty seems to move him more than ever. I must play Kitty against this Miss Denison.”
And, without any of the pangs of a jealous woman, Mrs. Brander, with a glance at her innocent brother-in-law, made a calm resolution as to the part she should play in what she perceived to be an incipient love affair.