THE day on which these events occurred was the day of Mr. Frank St. Clair’s arrival at the White House, where he had come dutifully in answer to his aunt’s summons, to hear of “something to his advantage.” To do him justice, he was by no means delighted with the project; but he was dutiful and needy, and there was nothing for it but to submit. He went the next morning to pay his respects to the heiress and assume the charge of his pupil. It was not a long walk from the White House, but Mr. Frank St. Clair was warm when he arrived, being, according to the euphemism of the day, “out of training,” and glad to sit down and contemplate the little fellow who was to be the instrument of his fortune. Jock, who had resumed his position on the white rug, and lay there, cool and at his ease, while Lucy dutifully read her history, was by no means inclined to submit to any examination.
“Come and tell me what you can do, my little man,” Mr. St. Clair said; “let us see which of us knows the most; we are going to teach each other—you me, or I you. Come and let’s make out which it is to be.”
Jock raised his head from the rug and looked at his questioner with big eyes. The inspection did not seem to please him. “I know a lot,” he said, concisely, and dropped his head; his book was more interesting than the stranger. It was “Don Quixote,” with pictures, which he had in his hands; this deeply experienced reader had never encountered the work with these attractions before.
“I told you, Miss Trevor,” said St. Clair, “he sees through me, he knows my learning is antiquated. If a man has the misfortune to live before Madvig, what is he to do? Scholarship is the most progressive of all sciences; which is curious, considering that it is with dead languages it has to do.”
Lucy raised her mild eyes with no understanding in them. It was in vain to speak of dead languages to her. “Though he is so little,” she said, apologetically, “he has read a great many books. That is what he means; but he has had no education, Mr. St. Clair, except just a little at Hampstead. He has done nothing but read books—nonsense books,” said Lucy severely, thinking to reach the culprit, “that could not teach him anything or do him any good.”
“Reading books is, on the whole, not a bad kind of education,” said St. Clair. “I see you pursue that way yourself.”
“Oh—but this is history; it is not in the least amusing; sometimes it is very hard; I can’t remember it a bit; and sometimes I almost go to sleep: very different,” said Lucy, pointedly, “from the books that Jock reads; they make him laugh, they make him so interested that he can’t bear any one to speak to him. He won’t go to bed, he won’t play for them. That can not be education at all.”
“Very true,” Mr. St. Clair said. “Medicine must be nasty. Might one know, my friend, what you are reading now?”
Jock raised himself from the rug once more. He did not lose a word either of the book or the conversation. “I’ve read it before; but this time I’ve just come to the windmills,” he said.
“The windmills? now what may they be?”
“I told you,” said Lucy, regretfully, “they are all nonsense books—nothing that is of any good.”
“Because you don’t know,” cried Jock, hotly. “You’ve no business to speak when you don’t know. He doesn’t think they’re windmills; he thinks they’re big giants, and they’re just like it—just like giants— I’ve thought so myself. He thinks they’ve got a lot of poor people carrying them off to be slaves, and there’s only him upon his own horse—nobody more; but do you think he’ll let them carry off the poor people for slaves? He goes at them like a dozen knights—he goes at them like an army,” cried Jock, his eyes flashing. “I wish I had been there, I’d have done it, too.”
“Ah, Don Quixote,” said St. Clair. “What! you, Jock! You that know such a lot—you’d have gone at the windmills, too?”
Jock grew red, for he did not like ridicule. “He didn’t know they were windmills,” he said.
“Didn’t I tell you, Mr. St. Clair,” said Lucy, “that is all he thinks about—windmills? what good can windmills do him? unless he were to learn all about the uses of them, and who began them, and the good they are to the country; that would be very different from a fairy tale.”
“It is not a bit a fairy tale,” Jock cried, indignant. “It’s a long time since I read any fairy tales—never any since Prospero and Ariel on the enchanted island. This is about a man. Fairy tales are very nice when you are quite little,” he added, with dignity, “just beginning to read plain; but when you are bigger you like the sense best, for you can think, I would do the same.”
“You see, Mr. St. Clair, that is just like him; it is not education,” said Lucy, with mild despair.
“I am not quite clear about that,” said St. Clair, who knew a little more than Lucy; “but, Jock, you will find a great many more books to read and men to hear about if you come to me and learn. Leave your tall gentleman to overcome the windmills, and come and speak to me. Tell me what you have learned,” he said, holding the child within his arm as he stood up reluctantly by his side. Lucy looked on with pleased approval, yet many excuses. “He has never been to school; he was so delicate papa didn’t like him to be out of his sight,” she said, reddening with much shame and self-reproach as the real state of the case was elucidated. When the cross-examination was over Jock, though not at all ashamed, escaped as quickly as he could from Mr. St. Clair’s detaining arm. He snatched up his book from the rug, and made assurance sure by putting a flight of stairs and the closed door of Mrs. Ford’s room between him and the inquisitor, who laughed and shook his head as the little fellow bolted. “We must begin from the beginning, I fear,” he said. “He has been neglected; but after all, there has not been much time lost.”
“I am very sorry he is so ignorant,” said Lucy, deprecatingly; “but, Mr. St. Clair, papa was old, and I was very young.”
“Yes; no one could expect you to think of it; you are very young now, Miss Trevor, to have such a charge.”
“Oh, that is nothing,” Lucy said; “many people have had a great deal more to do. I have heard of girls that have had to work for their brothers and sisters; indeed, I have been acquainted with some,” she said, thinking of Mary Russell. “But now that we know of it, it is not too late to mend it, Mr. St. Clair.”
“Not at all too late;” he was pleased that she should say we. Such a familiarity of association was all he thought that could be desired. “I will undertake to put him in the right way—for the moment.”
“Oh,” Lucy said, with disturbed looks, “will it be only for the moment, Mr. St. Clair? I know it is very good fortune, far more than we could have expected, to get you at all—and that you should take such a very little boy.”
“I am very happy to be able to be of any use to you,” St. Clair said, with a smile; “and if I am not called away—but you well understand that I can not be at all sure of my time, Miss Trevor. I may be called away.”
St. Clair was ready to laugh at the little formula, and this gave him an additional air of seriousness, which looked like feeling. “I wish I had done nothing in my life to be so little ashamed of,” he added, “as teaching a small boy.”
Lucy looked at him with great respect, and even a little awe. An innocent girl has a certain awe of a man so much older than herself, so much more experienced in every way, who perhaps has had mysterious wrong-doings in his life as well as other things, more momentous and terrible than any her imagination has ever realized. The things that St. Clair might have to be ashamed of loomed large upon her in the darkness of her ignorance, like gigantic shadows, upon which she looked with pity and a little horror, yet the same time an awful respect. “Mrs. Stone told me,” she said, with her serious face, “that you had not been well; that after all your studies and work you had not been well enough— I am very, very sorry. It must have been a great disappointment.”
“That is exactly what it was; it is very sweet to meet with some one who understands,” St. Clair said; “yes, it is not so much for myself, but they had all done so much for me, all believed in me so.”
“But, Mr. St. Clair, with rest and taking care, will it not all come right?”
“They say so,” he said; “but, Miss Trevor, though you don’t know much of the hardships of life, you will understand that this is exactly what it is most hard to do. To rest implies means and leisure, and I ought to be working night and day.”
“I am very, very sorry,” said Lucy; a great many waves of varying resolution were passing over her mind—what could she do? would it be most polite to take notice, to receive such a confidence as if it was nothing to her? or should she be bold and put forth her powers as a helper, a wrong-redresser? Jock’s story about the windmills had seemed very great nonsense to his unlettered sister, yet practically she was in a strait not dissimilar. She put her lance in rest with a very doubtful and unassured hand; but if they were giants, as they seemed, she, too, felt, like the great Spaniard, that to pass them by would be cowardly. She looked at him wistfully, faltering. “You will think it strange of me to say it,” she said, her serious face gradually crimsoning from chin to forehead; “but perhaps you know—that I am—not the same as other girls; if there were anything that I could do—”
St. Clair grew red too with surprise and mortification; what could the girl mean? he asked himself; but he answered suavely, “I am sure you are a great deal better and kinder than most girls—or men either, Miss Trevor. You have the divine gift of sympathy, which always does one good.”
“I don’t know if it is sympathy, Mr. St. Clair. Papa left me a great many directions. He said there were some things I was to try to do; and if it would be good for you to have leisure, and be able to rest for a year or two—”
St. Clair was reduced to the level of Raymond Rushton by the utter confusion which these words seemed to bring into the very atmosphere.
“Oh, by Jove!” he ejaculated faintly, in his dismay. He rose up hurriedly. She would offer him money, he felt, if he gave her another moment to do it, and though he was very willing and desirous, if he could, to get possession of her money as a whole, to have a little of it thus offered to him seemed the last indignity. “I expect to find Jock a very amusing pupil,” he said; “not at all like the average little boy. He shall give me a lesson in literature when I have given him his Latin. I suspect it is I who will profit the most. The little wretch seems to have read everything; I wonder if you have shared his studies. He must have got the taste from some one; it is not generally innate in small boys.”
“Oh, no,” said Lucy, “not I.” She was disappointed to have the subject changed so rapidly, and abandoned it with great reluctance, still looking at him to know why he should so cut her short. “Jock does not think much of me,” she added, “and all those story-books and plays and poetry can not be good for him surely. Papa never minded; he was old, and Jock seemed such a baby it did not seem to matter what he did; it was not his fault.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was anybody’s fault. But you are reading, I see, in a steadier way. What is it? history?” Mr. St. Clair approached her table where she was sitting and looked at Lucy’s book.
“Yes,” she said, with a soft little sigh. “Lady Randolph thought I ought; and I should be thinking of my French. It is so hard when one is not clever. I must ask Mr. Stone to let me go to mademoiselle when she comes back.”
“And may I help you with this?” Mr. St. Clair said. He drew a chair near her and sat down.
It had not occurred to good Mrs. Ford that any precautions were necessary, or that she should break up her mornings by being present during all the talk of the young people. If a girl had to be watched forever, Mrs. Ford thought, she must be a very poor sort of girl; so that Lucy’s pink drawing-room was practically open to the world; as entirely open as if she had been an American young lady, with a salon and visiting list of her own. She was very grateful to Mr. St. Clair when he sat down beside her. It was so kind. He took up the book, and asked her if she had seen this and that, other books more readable than the dry compendium Lucy was studying.
“If you will let me get them for you it will give me the greatest pleasure,” St. Clair said. “I consider history my great subject. I should like to help you, if you will let me.” Lucy accepted his offer with the greatest gratitude. She had found it very dry work by herself.
This was the scene upon which Raymond Rushton came in, very slowly, crushing his hat in his hands. His mother had prevented him from signifying the hour of his visit, with a natural fear of the precautions which Mrs. Stone would certainly have taken to occupy the ground beforehand; but this prudence, as it happened, did him no good. Raymond, to tell the truth, was as much relieved as he was annoyed by St. Clair’s presence. He had felt himself grow red and grow pale, hot and cold, all the way, as he came along the street, wondering how he was to manage to make himself agreeable as his mother had ordered him. The very fact that he was commanded to make himself agreeable hindered any natural effort he might have been capable of. He did not know how to talk to Lucy. Some girls saved you the trouble of talking, but she was not one of those girls, and he did not know how he was to manage to get upon such easy terms with her as would make flirtation possible—even if he had known how to flirt, which he did not—at least with Lucy. So, though he was so far sensible of the importance of the pursuit as to be slightly angry and alarmed by St. Clair’s presence, he was still more relieved, on the whole, to feel that he was thus protected, and that there would not be so much required of him. He came in looking very much embarrassed, crushing his hat between his hands.
“How d’ye do, Miss Trevor?” he said. “My mother thought I ought to come and see about our ride. We have fixed Thursday for the picnic, but don’t you think we might go out to-morrow to see how the horses go together? Mine,” said Raymond, with a blush, “is rather an old screw.”
“I should like to go—whenever you like. I am very fond of it,” said Lucy. “Jock and I thought of going a little way this evening, but only a little way.”
This put Raymond more and more out.
“I am afraid I can’t get my horse to-day. It is too late now to arrange it.”
“Do you get your horses from the Black Bull?” said St. Clair. “It must be difficult to make sure of anything there. I go to the Cross Keys, where you are much better served. The Black Bull,” he added, in an explanatory tone, “is the place where you get your flies, Miss Trevor. When the fine weather comes, and a great many people are driving about, all their horses are put into requisition.”
“Oh, not quite so bad as that,” cried Raymond, reddening; “you don’t suppose I ride a fly-horse.”
“I know I have done it,” St. Clair said; “when one has not a horse of one’s own, one has to be content with what one can get; but to feel that you are upon a noble steed which made his last appearance, perhaps, between the shafts of a hearse—”
“Oh, hold hard!” Raymond cried; he was sadly humiliated by the suggestion, and he now began to feel that the presence of this intruder made his visit of very little use, indeed; “you must not take all that for gospel, Miss Trevor. A joke is a joke, but a man may go too far in joking.”
“Which is more than you are likely to do on old Fryer’s horses,” St. Clair said, laughing. But then he got up, feeling that he had made an end of his young rival. He was bigger, broader, altogether more imposing than Raymond. He stood up, and expanded his large proportions, feeling that anybody with half an eye must see the difference—which, perhaps, on the whole, was an unwise step; for St. Clair was too much developed for a young man, and the merest suspicion of fatness, is not that a capital crime in a girl’s eyes? On the whole, when they stood up together, Raymond’s slim youthfulness carried the day; but there are no delusions so obstinate as those which concern our own personal appearance, and it was with a smile of conscious triumph that the larger young man spread himself out. As for Raymond he too felt outdone, and withdrew a little from the competition.
“Emmie has got her pony,” he said. “My mother thinks it will do her a great deal of good to see how you ride, Miss Trevor.”
“Oh, but I never was considered to ride very well,” Lucy said.
“We think down here that whatever you do is done well,” said St. Clair, taking the very words out of Raymond’s mouth, with this difference, that Ray would have uttered them seriously, and would have broken down, whereas that fellow made a joke of it, and carried off the compliment with a laugh. “We are not much used to accomplished young ladies from town down here,” St. Clair added; “and whatever you do is a wonder to us. ‘When you speak we’d have you do so ever; when you sing we’d have you buy and sell so, so give alms—’”
From this it will be seen that Mr. Frank St. Clair was possessed of some of the graces of letters. But the young persons on either side of him opened their eyes. Ray had a suspicion that there was some sort of play-acting in it; but Lucy was simply amazed that any one should speak of her singing when she could not sing at all.
“Indeed,” she said, seriously, “I do not know a note. I never had a voice, and what was the use of having lessons?” which simple answer, though it made him laugh, entirely disconcerted St. Clair, and reduced him almost to the level of Raymond, who had now got one hand into his pocket and felt more comfortable and at his ease. It was thus that Ray was left master of the field, somewhat to his own surprise, but at the same time much to his gratification, too.
“I say, what a queer fellow that is,” Raymond said; “we all want to know about him. If he’s a barrister, as they say, why isn’t he at his chambers, or on circuit, or something? To be sure it’s the ‘Long’ just now; but he seems to be always here.”
“He has overworked himself; he is not able to do anything,” said Lucy with great sympathy, looking out from the window with a grave face as he went out through the big gate-way and crossed the road. When he had reached the edge of the common he looked back, and seeing her, took off his hat. It gave St. Clair a glow of satisfaction to see Lucy looking after him. He went on with a lighter step, and, if possible, a broader chest than ever.
“By Jove! isn’t he fat?” said Raymond, by Lucy’s side; and Lucy, full of sympathy as she was, could not help remarking the breadth of shadow which moved with him across the sunshine. She laughed in spite of herself. The observation was not witty, but Raymond was put into such high spirits by the laugh he elicited that he burst forth into scintillations of still more unquestionable wit. “That is because they pet him so at Mrs. Stone’s. Ladies always do pet one. I should like to know where he’d find a fly-horse up to his weight. Let us ask him to the picnic, Miss Trevor, and borrow a beast for him from the brewer. One elephant upon another,” said Ray.
But Lucy’s amusement did not last through so long an address. She ended by a sigh, looking after him sympathetically. “I wish one could do everything one wished!” she said.
“Ah!” Raymond echoed with a sigh. “But you can, I should think, pretty near. I wish I could do any one thing I wished,” the young man added, ruefully.
“And that is just my case, too,” Lucy said.