AND now the period of Lucy’s first experiment in life was over. From all the delicacies with which Lady Randolph’s care had surrounded her, and from the atmosphere of refinement to which she had grown accustomed, it was now the moment to descend and go back to the homely house which Jock and she instinctively still called “home.” He had come in from Hampstead a day or two before, and lived with Lucy in her little sitting-room, while all the packing went on. The limit of the six months had been relaxed a little, to suit Lady Randolph’s convenience, who considered (as did her doctor) that after the fatigues of the season Homburg was a necessity for her. On ordinary occasions Lady Randolph spent a month at the Hall before she went to Homburg: but she had not thought it prudent this year to take Lucy there, so they had stayed in town till the parks were like brown paper, and the shutters were up in all the houses. This was a thing that had not happened to Lady Randolph for a long time, and she felt that she was something of a martyr, and that it was for Lucy’s sake. However, at last the long days came to an end. Parliament, rose, and everybody, to the last lingering official, went out of town. Sir Thomas, who had been at various places in the interval, and whose absence had been a real affliction to Lucy, came back again for a day or two before the final break-up. He was not going to Homburg, he was going to Scotland, and it had been arranged that he should act as escort to Lucy on her journey, as Farafield and his own house were on his way to the North. Lady Randolph was not quite sure that she liked this arrangement; the “whole thing,” she said to herself, “had gone too far.” Tom was not prudent; to show his hand to the rest of the guardians at once, and put them all on their guard, was foolish; and as for waiting seven years! Lucy might do it; Lucy, who, her maternal guardian thought, already showed all the signs of being in love; but Tom! he would have a dozen other serious devotions before that. Sir Tom was fond of platonic relationships—he did not want to marry, not being able, indeed, to afford that luxury, yet he liked the gentle excitement of a sentimental friendship. He liked even to feel himself just going over the edge into love, yet keeping himself from going over. He had kept himself from going over so many times, that he knew exactly what twigs to snatch at, and what eddies to take advantage of; therefore it is not to be supposed that there could be much danger to him from a simple girl. But certainly he had gone further than was at all expedient, Lady Randolph’s very anxiety that this time he should be brought to reason, should not catch at any twig, but allow himself to be really carried by the current to the legitimate end, made her unwilling to see matters hurried. Lucy would make him a very nice little wife, and, if he married, his aunt knew that he was far too good a fellow not to be a kind husband; but that Lucy’s simple attractions (even including her fortune, which was a charm that would never fail) could hold him for seven years, was not a thing to be hoped for. She spoke to Sir Tom very strongly on the subject the evening before they separated. Lucy and little Jock—who always was a troublesome inmate to Lady Randolph because of his very quietness, the trance of reading, in which she never could be sure that he was not listening—had gone upstairs early. London was very warm and dusty in these August days; the windows were open, but the air that came in was not of a very satisfactory description. Most of the houses were shut up round about, and in the comparative quiet sounds from the Mews behind were frequently audible. In short, there was about the district the uncomfortable feeling that the appropriate inhabitants had gone, and only a swarm of underground creatures were left, to come forth blinking from their coverts. In-doors the furniture had all been put into pinafores, the pretty nothings on the tables had been laid away, the china locked up in cabinets. Lady Randolph was starting by the morning mail-train.
“You know, Tom,” she said, “I am not at all sure that it is wise for you to go down with Lucy to-morrow.”
“Why, aunt? You know it is on my way,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Oh, stuff about it being on your way. You know it would not be on your way at all unless you liked to go.”
“Well!” Sir Thomas said, “and after—” he never indulged in the vulgarity of French; but he was given to literal translations, which is more aggravating, and neither one thing nor another, as Lady Randolph said.
“Well, it is just this: most of the guardians live in Farafield, and they will be immediately put on their guard if they see you much with her. There are the Rushtons, the lawyer people, and that Mrs. Stone, who keeps a school. They will both be in arms against you instantly. That father of Lucy’s was an old— I don’t want to be unkind to anybody that is dead and gone, but—
“Most likely he thought it would be better for her not to marry,” said Sir Thomas, tranquilly.
“What folly! well, it would be just like him. I don’t think the will would stand if it were ever brought in to a court of law. There were the maddest provisos! However, unless it can be broken we must hold by it; and, Tom, you must let me say it, you ought to go more cautiously to work.”
“Is it worth the trouble?” he said, indifferently. “My dear aunt, before a man takes the pains to work cautiously he must have set his heart on the prize with some fervor.”
“And haven’t you done so, Tom? Why, I thought you were going too far—and too fast. I did not see any doubt, or want of warmth, I assure you. Fervor! well, perhaps fervor is a strong word; that means difficulty to get over, and resistance, and a struggle perhaps. Poor little Lucy! I don’t think there will be much resistance on her part.”
“I am not at all so sure of that,” he said.
“Why, Tom! Poor child! we can’t blame her. She is only seventeen; and you have a way— Ah, my boy, it is not want of experience that will balk you. You have a way of speaking, and a way of looking. And Lucy is as simple as a little dove, there is no concealment about her. She thinks there is nobody like you.”
“Well, perhaps you are right. She thinks there is nobody like me,” said Sir Tom, with something of that softening of vanity which makes a man’s countenance imbecile when he thinks he is admired: “but,” he added, with a little laugh, “Lucy is no more in love with me than— I am with you. Like her, I think there is nobody like you—”
“Oh, Tom— Tom, you are a deceiver! My dear, that is nonsense. There is no tie between her and you. The very first night I saw it. Fancy her sitting up to chatter to you—and chattering, she who is so quiet! Why, she is a great deal more open, more at her ease with you than with me.”
“All so many things against me,” he said; “she is not in love with me, as I tell you, any more than I am with you.”
Lady Randolph was struck with great surprise, and so many things poured into her mind to be said that she was silent, and did not say anything, looking at him with confused impatience, and able to bring out nothing save a “but—but,” of bewilderment. At last she enunciated with difficulty and hesitation, “If this is true, which I can’t believe, do you mind, Tom?”
“Not much,” he said, then laughed, and looked her in the face. “You do not understand me, aunt. I think it quite likely that if it were put before her as a suitable arrangement, Lucy might make up her mind to marry me. She is beginning to get perplexed in her life. She has been on the point of confiding in me two or three times.”
“What?” said Lady Randolph, in great excitement. She could not think of anything but love about which a girl could be confidential, and Bertie Russell, like a Jack-in-the-box, suddenly jumped up in her anxious brain. But Sir Thomas shook his head.
“That is exactly what I can not tell you,” he said. “I thought it might be some entanglement with that young fellow of the book; but it is not that. It is quite possible she might marry me—”
“Well, but, Tom, why should you be so very particular? Think what it would be for the estate. You might pay off everything, and regain the first position in the county. You ought to have the first position in the county. What is Lord Langton in comparison with the Randolphs? A nobody; and all this that girl could do. Only think what her fortune could do. I am not mercenary— I don’t think I am mercenary—but when you just realize it. Oh, how often I have said to myself, your uncle had no right to marry me. He ought to have married somebody with money. And now if you can set it right, why, oh, why, should you have any absurd scruples? Of course, Lucy would be very glad; and she would make you a good little wife. She is not impassioned—she never will be out of her wits about any one; if that is what you want, Tom.”
“No, I don’t think that is what I want,” he said; “but in the meantime we need not quarrel about it; for you know there are the guardians to be taken into consideration, and it would be foolish to show one’s hand. And then there is plenty of time. One ought to go cautiously to work.”
He laughed as he quoted all her own little speeches to her. But for her part Lady Randolph could have cried—how difficult it is to be patient when you are anxious! She had been alarmed by what she thought a too hasty progress; now she was cast down to the depths of trouble by this sudden suggestion that no progress at all had been made. She did not know what to do. It was no use speaking to Tom, so self-willed was he—always taking his own way. She had no patience with him. Of course Lucy liked him—how could she help it? And to think that he would run the risk of losing all that for the merest fantastic nonsense! Oh, she had no patience with him! But when he only laughed and made a joke of it all what was the use of saying anything? Poor Lady Randolph! She could not let things take their own way. She was unhappy not to be able to guide them, and yet she knew that she could not guide them. Either they would go on too quickly or they would not go on at all.
The effect of this conversation was, that she started in a much less cheerful and hopeful state of mind for that yearly renovation at Homburg. She tried to make a parting effort for Sir Tom, when she said good-bye to Lucy, who was to leave by a later train. “If Tom stays at the Hall, and there is anything you want advice about, never hesitate to apply to him, my love,” she said; “you may have every confidence in him, as much confidence as in myself.”
“Oh, yes, Lady Randolph,” said Lucy, with the warmest sincerity. “I should ask him anything—he has always been so kind to me.”
“It is more than kindness—he has a real interest in you, Lucy; and you need never fear to trust Tom. He has a heart of gold, and he is the truest friend in the world,” Lady Randolph said. She kissed her charge with fervor. Could she say more? When she turned round who should be watching her but Tom himself, with that twinkle in his eye. The poor lady felt as if she had been detected. She made her exit quite crestfallen, while Sir Thomas paused to tell Lucy he would come back for her half an hour before the train started. “It is not everybody that would make himself a railway porter for your service, is it, Miss Lucy?” he said, laughing. “Depend upon it, however specious other people may look, it is ‘Codlin’s the friend.’” He went out after his aunt, still laughing; but as for Lucy, she looked after him somewhat bewildered. Her reading was not her strong point, and she could not think what “Codlin” had to do with it, or who that personage was.
But what a different Lucy it was that took possession of a special carriage reserved for her own party, to Farafield, with her maid and mountain of luggage, from the humble little Lucy, with two black frocks, who had come to town with Lady Randolph in February. Her groom, with her horses and Jock’s pony, had gone the night before. Jock himself, embracing a big book, was the thing of all her surroundings that was the least changed. Lucy’s mind, indeed, was not altered, as were her outward circumstances, but it had expanded and widened, so that she became a little giddy as the journey approached its close, half pleased, half alarmed to think of the old life, the familiar streets, the old white parlor with its blue curtains, and the view from the window across the common to Mrs. Stone’s school. Sir Thomas, who had traveled with her part of the way, now departing to the smoking-carriage, now coming to inquire into her comfort and the progress she was making in the novel with which he had thoughtfully provided her, joined the party at the last important station.
“You have scarcely read twenty pages,” he said, reproachfully, “after all my care in choosing you a pretty book. You have read five times as much, Jock.”
Jock looked up on being addressed. Though he was many fathoms deep below the surface, he always heard when he was spoken to, and often when he was not spoken to. He was lying across the arm of one seat, with his book lying on the cushions of another, in a dark blue valley below him. He gave a sidelong look of disdain to his questioner.
“Do you count your pages?” said Jock, with contemptuous satire. “I can tell by what the reading is.”
“Hush, Jock! I was not reading at all,” Lucy said, “but thinking.”
“And what might the thinking be? regretting town, or welcoming the country? We’ll give her, Jock, two pennies for her thoughts.”
“You know,” said Lucy, “it is not either town or country I was thinking of. I was thinking of Lady Randolph’s, and all that was new to me there; and of some things I have had to do, and how I have lived so different from everything before, and now coming back—home. It always was home, I can’t call it anything else; but it will be different again. There is no more papa. That does not make me unhappy,” said Lucy, the tears coming into her eyes, “for it was what he always trained me to expect; but it will be dreary to go into the house and to find that he is not there, sitting by the fire—with the will.”
“The will?” Sir Thomas had no fear to be thought inquisitive, his face was full of kindly interest and sympathy.
“Did I never tell you? that was all his thought. It was his amusement, as long—well, as long as Jock could remember. Don’t you recollect, Jock, how he would sit and write a little bit, and rub his hands, and read it to me when I came in? That is how I know so well all he wished me to do. He would put down his newspaper when something occurred to him, and write it down. It pleased him more than anything. Don’t you think it is a great pleasure, when any one is gone, to know exactly what they wished you to do?”
“It is a great bondage sometimes,” Sir Thomas said.
“I don’t think I shall feel it a bondage. But somehow going back is almost stranger than going away. The rooms at the Terrace will look small; and it will not be prettily furnished; and I shall not have Lady Randolph to talk to, nor the carriage, nor the visitors—”
“These things are easily got, even the visitors. As for Lady Randolph, perhaps you can put up with me instead. I am very fond of being talked to, and you know she recommended me as her substitute.”
“That is very true,” said Lucy, with her usual calm; “but then you are going to Scotland to shoot. You are only here on your way.”
“There is no saying, if you consult me a great deal, and give me a great many interesting subjects to think about how long I may linger on my way.”
“Oh, as for that!” said Lucy, “there is one thing—very interesting; but then I am not sure if I should tell it to any one, though it would be a great, a very great comfort. I tried to tell Lady Randolph once, and ask her—and I have wanted so much to tell you—to ask you—”
“Well, I am a sort of an uncle, you know; that was the relationship we decided upon,” Sir Thomas said.
Lucy did not say anything. She laughed, looking at him with a very winning confidence and trust in her eyes. They were quite unabashed in their modest gaze, conscious of no timidity, but there was a gentle affection in them which touched him. However, they were now drawing very near Farafield, and even her composed heart began to beat. She called Jock, very reluctant to be roused from his book, to look at the church-tower, the spire of the town hall, the big roofs of the market. “I don’t want to see them,” Jock said; all he wanted was his story. Perhaps it was her story that made Lucy so animated, one not yet written in any book.
Sir Thomas had intended to take Lucy home, to see her in her old-new habitation, and make himself acquainted with her surroundings; and to this end he had telegraphed to his servants to send a carriage to meet the train. But Sir Thomas had formed no idea in his mind of the real aspect of the other side of Lucy’s life; and it had not occurred to him that the people with whom she was going to stay had a right to guide her, equal to that which his aunt exercised. It was a shock to him to see that respectable couple who stood on the very edge of the station waiting for the train, and moved along by its side, panting yet beaming, as it gradually came to a standstill. “Welcome back, my darlings! welcome home, Lucy and Jock!” the woman said. She had not the least pretension to the title of lady. She was enveloped in a large shawl, though it was summer, and she was red and hot. She seized Lucy in her arms, pushing him away as he helped the girl out of the carriage. “Oh, my pet! we have been counting the days, Ford and I; and a’n’t you thankful to get home after being banished among strangers?” Sir Thomas was confounded. He had thought Lucy was to be pitied for the fantastic arrangement which transferred her from his aunt’s house to the care of the old servants, or poor relations, where her position and surroundings would be so different; but the suggestion that she had been banished among strangers took him altogether by surprise. He had been about to take Lucy to the carriage which was waiting; but in a moment she was separated from him, surrounded by these strange people, and drawn in the midst of them toward a fly which was standing near. It was a curious lesson for Sir Tom. He stood aside and looked on while she was taken out of his hands and deposited in the shabbier vehicle, with a sense of the ludicrous which struggled with a less agreeable feeling. There was another group on the platform to whom Lucy’s arrival was very interesting. This was the Rushton family, the lawyer himself, with his wife on his arm, and a tall youth, clad in a light summer suit, with his hands in his pockets, who lounged up and down the railway station after his parents, looking very much out of place, and somewhat ashamed of himself. Mrs. Rushton dashed boldly in, into the midst of the salutations of the Fords. “I must say a word to Lucy,” she cried. “We have just come in for a moment to welcome you home. Here, is your guardian, Lucy, and Raymond, your old playfellow.” It was all that Sir Tom could do not to laugh out. But the laugh was not pleasurable. He thought that anything more artless than this presentation of the old playfellow at the very earliest moment could not be; but yet what was he himself doing, and what were his inducements to give so much time and attention to this little girl? It was like a scene in the theater, but so much more dramatic than scenes in the theater often are. Lucy, in the midst, so eagerly secured by Mrs. Ford, so effusively embraced by the other lady, the leader of the opposition forces; while old Ford stood jealously on one side, and Mr. Rushton, with his hand held out, looked genial and affectionate on the other. The Fords were gloomy, concentrating their whole attention on the opposing band, whereas the Rushtons, who were the assailants, were directing all their smiles and caresses to Lucy, ignoring her relations. “Ray— Ray— I know you are dying to shake hands with Lucy—come quick and say, how d’ye do. There is no time for any more just now; but I felt I must come just to give you a kiss, and bid you welcome,” said Mrs. Rushton. The lawyer for his part, shook a finger at her. “Fine stories Chervil has had to tell about you, my young lady,” he said.
“Lucy,” cried Mrs. Ford in sharp tones, “the fly is waiting, and I am ready to drop. Whoever wishes to see you can come and see you at the Terrace.”
As for Lucy herself, she was so anxious to be civil to everybody, and so unaccustomed to the conflict that had thus suddenly sprung up around her, that she could not tell what to do. She looked round wistfully toward Sir Tom, who, for his part, stood quite outside the immediate circle round her, smiling to himself with that quick perception of the “fun” of the situation, which was, Lucy thought with vexation, the chief thing he thought of. She felt wounded that he should laugh at her; but then he was always laughing. Little Jock, on the other side, was a spectator too; but a scene has a very different aspect according as you look upon it from above or from below. Jock was low down among the feet of all these people. Mrs. Rushton nearly brushed him away with her ample gown; Ray all but knocked him down as he came forward sheepishly to shake hands with Lucy. There was something savage in the energy with which little Jock clutched at his sister’s dress. “I say, can’t they let us alone? I want to get home— I want to get home,” cried the little fellow. Nobody took the slightest notice of little Jock. Sir Tom, in the distance, laughed more and more in his mustache, but ruefully. He came forward at last and lifted Jock out from among the other people’s legs. “Come and stand here with me, old fellow; you and I are left out in the cold,” said Sir Tom. The tall man and the tiny boy stood out of the crowd and watched while Lucy was hustled into the fly, Sir Tom laughing, Jock alarmed and gloomy. “She’s going away without me,” Jock said with a naïf consternation. Sir Thomas laughed. “Your day and mine is over, old man,” he said.
But Jock at least was not to be forgotten. “Jock, Jock! where are you?” Lucy cried, anxiously looking out. The child pulled his hand out of Sir Tom’s and rushed away; then the whole party were packed inside the fly, Ford with his knees up to his chin bolt upright, Mrs. Ford sunk back into a corner, loosening her bonnet-strings, and “worrited” beyond all description, while Mrs. Rushton stood kissing her hand on the platform. “If you please, Sir Thomas, what am I to do?” said a troubled voice as he looked after them. Then Sir Tom laughed out. It was Lucy’s maid, who had been left behind with a number of small matters. He put her into the carriage with secret glee, and sent her off after her mistress. Old Trevor himself could not have made a more grotesque contrast between the old life and the new; how the old man would have chuckled had he seen it! the great heiress shut up in the close fly—the somewhat frightened maid ensconced in the luxurious corner of the open carriage glittering along with a pair of fine horses, and all the prance and dance with which the coachman of a county family thinks it right to maintain the credit of his house in a country town—following the dustiest and stuffiest of flies. This was carrying out his principles on their broadest basis. Sir Thomas chuckled too; it was a piece of malice after his own heart. “If that’s so, let’s show fight,” he said to himself.