'And, oh! surely you have been comforted by him?'
'Comforted! Cut to the heart would be truer. One moment, I could only look at him as having borne off my treasure to destroy it; but then there rose on me his loving, patient, heartbroken humility and cheerfulness; and I saw such a character, such a course, as showed me how much better he had deserved her, and filled me with shame at having ever less esteemed him. And through all, there was the same dear Dick May, that never, since the day we first met at the pump in the school court, had I been able to help loving with all my heartthe only being that was glad to see me again. When he begged me to stay and watch over your sister, what could I do but remain while she lived?'
'So he bound you down! Oh, you know how we thank you! no, you can't, nor what you have been to him, and to all of us, through the worst of our sad days. And though it was a sacrifice, I do not think it was bad for you.'
'No, Ethel. When you implored me to give up my Crimean notion, to spare your father pain, I did feel for once that you at least thought me of value to some one.'
'I cannot bear you to speak so,' cried Ethel. 'You to talk of having been of no use!'
'No honest man of principle and education can be utterly useless; but when, three days ago, I recollected that it was my sixtieth birthday, I looked back, and saw nothing but desultory broken efforts, and restless changes. Your father told me, when I thought him unaware of the meaning of his words, that if I had missed many joys, I had missed many sorrows; but I had taken the way to make my one sorrow a greater burden than his many.'
'But you do not grieve for my mother still?' said Ethel, anxiously. 'Even his grief is a grave joy to him now; and one is always told that such things, as it was with you, are but a very small part of a man's life.'
'I am not one of the five hundred men, whom any one of five hundred women might have equally pleased,' said Dr. Spencer; 'but it is so far true, that the positive pain and envy wore out, and would not have interfered with my after life, but for my own folly. No, Ethel; it was not the loss of her that embittered and threw away my existence; it was my own rash vow, and its headstrong fulfilment, which has left me no right to your father's peaceful spirit.'
'How little we guessed!' said Ethel. 'So cheerful and ready as you always are.'
'I never trouble others, he said abruptly. 'Neither man nor woman ever heard a word of all this; and you would not have heard it now, but for that sea; and you have got your mother's voice, and some of her ways, since you have grown older and more sedate.'
'Oh, I am so glad!' said Ethel, who had been led to view her likeness to her father as natural, that to her mother as acquired.
Those were the last words of the conversation; but Ethel, leaning from her window to listen to the plash of the waves, suspected that the slowly moving meteor she beheld, denoted that a cigar was soothing the emotions excited by their dialogue. She mused long over that revelation of the motives of the life that had always been noble and generous in the midst of much that was eccentric and wayward, and constantly the beat of the waves repeated to her the half-comprehended words, 'Never threaten Providence.'
After superintending Aubrey's first bath, and duly installing the vice-M. D. and her charges, Dr. Spencer departed; and Ethel was launched on an unknown ocean, as pilot to an untried crew. She had been told to regard Leonard's bashfulness as a rare grace; but it was very inconvenient to have the boy wretchedly drooping, and owning nothing amiss, apparently unacquainted with any English words, except 'Thank you' and 'No, thank you.' Indeed, she doubted whether the shyness were genuine, for stories were afloat of behaviour at Stoneborough parties which savoured of audacity, and she vainly consulted Aubrey whether the cause of his discomfiture were her age or her youth, her tutorship or her plain face. Even Aubrey could not elicit any like or dislike, wish or complaint; and shrugging up his shoulders, decided that it was of no use to bother about it; Leonard would come to his senses in time. He was passive when taken out walking, submissive when planted on a three-cornered camp-stool that expanded from a gouty walking-stick, but seemed so inadequately perched, and made so forlorn a spectacle, that they were forced to put him indoors out of the glare of sea and sky, and hoping that he would condescend to the sofa when Ethel was out of sight.
Punctilio broke down the next morning; and in the midst of breakfast, he was forced to lie down, and allow Ethel to bathe his face with vinegar and water; while she repented of the 'make-the-best-of-it' letter of the yesterday, and sent Aubrey out on a secret commission of inquiry about medical men, in case of need. Aubrey was perfectly well, and in such a state of desultory enjoyment and sea-side active idleness, that he was quite off her mind, only enlivening her morning of nursing by his exits and entrances, to tell of fresh discoveries, or incidents wonderful to the inland mind.
After dinner, which had driven Leonard to lie on his bed, Aubrey persuaded his sister to come to see his greatest prize; a quaint old local naturalist, a seafaring man, with a cottage crammed with pans of live wonders of the deep in water, and shelves of extinct ones, 'done up in stane pies,' not a creature, by sea or land, that had haunted Coombe for a few million of ages, seemed to have escaped him. Such sea-side sojourns as the present, are the prime moments for coquetries with the lighter branches of natural science, and the brother and sister had agreed to avail themselves of the geological facilities of their position, the fascinations of Hugh Miller's autobiography having entirely gained them during Aubrey's convalescence. Ethel tore herself away from the discussion of localities with the old man, who was guide as well as philosopher, boatman as well as naturalist, and returned to her patient, whom she found less feverish, though sadly low and languid.
'I wish I knew what to do for you,' she said, sitting down by him. 'What would your sister do for you?'
'Nothing,' he wearily said, 'I mean, a great deal too much.' The tone so recalled Norman's dejected hopelessness, that she could not help tenderly laying her cold hands on the hot brow, and saying, 'Yes, I know how little one can do as a sisterand the mockery it is to think that one place can ever be taken!'
The brown eyes looked at her with moist earnestness that she could hardly bear, but closed with a look of relief and soothing, as she held her hand on his forehead. Presently, however, he said, 'Don't let me keep you in.'
'I have been out, thank you. I am so glad to try to do anything for you.'
'Thank you. What o'clock is it, please? Ah, then I ought to take that draught! I forgot it in the morning.'
He permitted her to fetch it and pour it out, but as she recognized a powerful tonic, she exclaimed, 'Is this what you are taking? May it not make you feverish?'
'No doubt it does,' he said, lying down again; 'it was only Henry'
'What! did not my father know of it?'
'Of course he does not, as it seems to be poison.'
'Not exactly that,' said Ethel; 'but I was surprised, for it was talked of for Aubrey; but they said it wanted watching.'
'Just like Henry,' observed Leonard.
'Well,' said Ethel, repressing her indignation, 'I am glad, at least, to find a possible cause for your bad night. We shall see you refreshed to-morrow, and not wishing yourself at home.'
'Don't think that I wish that. Home is gone for ever.'
'Home may be gone higherup to the real Home,' said Ethel, blushing with the effort at the hint, and coming down to earthlier consolations, 'but even the fragments will grow into home again here, and you will feel very differently.'
Leonard did not answer; but after a pause said, 'Miss May, is not it a horrid pity girls should go to school?'
'I am no judge, Leonard.'
'You see,' said the boy, 'after the little girls were born, my mother had no time for Ave, and sent her to Brighton, and there she begged to stay on one half after another, learning all sorts of things; but only coming home for short holidays, like company, for us to wonder at her and show her about, thinking herself ever so much in advance of my poor mother, and now she knows just nothing at all of her!'
'You cannot tell, Leonard, and I am sure she has been devoted to you.'
'If she had stayed at home like you, she might have known how to let one alone. Oh, you can't think what peace it was yesterday!'
'Was it peace? I feared it was desertion.'
'It is much better to be by oneself, than always worried. To have them always at me to get up my spirits when the house is miserable'
'Ah,' said Ethel, 'I remember your mother rejoicing that she had not to send you from home, and saying you were always so kind and gentle to her.'
'Did she!' cried the boy, eagerly. 'Oh, but she forgot' and he hid his face, the features working with anguish.
'So pleased and proud she used to look, walking with you on Saturday afternoons.'
'Those Saturdays! They were the only walks she ever would take; but she would always come with me.'
More followed in the same strain, and Ethel began to gather more distinct impressions of the Ward family. She saw that her present charge was warm and sound-hearted, and that the strength of his affections had been chiefly absorbed by the homely housewifely mother, comparatively little esteemed by the modernized brother and sister. Of the loss of his father he seemed to think less; it seemed, indeed, rather to reconcile him to that of his mother, by the grief it spared her; and it confirmed Ethel's notion, that Mr. Ward, a busy and dull man, paid no great attention to his children between the plaything period and that of full development. The mother was the home; and Averil, though Leonard showed both love for and pride in her, had hitherto been a poor substitute, while as to Henry, there was something in each mention of him which gave Ethel an undefined dread of the future of the young household, and a doubt of the result of her father's kind schemes of patronage.
At any rate, this conversation had the happy effect of banishing constraint, and satisfying Ethel that the let-alone system was kindness, not neglect. She was at ease in discussing fossils, though he contributed no word, and she let him sleep or wake as he best liked; whilst Aubrey read to her the 'Cruise of the Betsey.'
Henry's prescription was sent to invigorate the fishes, when its cessation was found to be followed by the recovery of sleep and appetite, and in the cool of the evening, by a disposition to stroll on the beach, and lie under the lee of a rock upon a railway rug, which Ethel had substituted for the 'three-legged delusion.'
There he was left, while his companions went fossil-hunting, and stayed so long as to excite their compunction, and quicken their steps when they at length detached themselves from the enticing blue lias.
'What has he got there?' cried Aubrey. 'Hillo, old fellow! have you fallen a prey to a black cat?'
'Cat!' returned Leonard, indignantly; 'don't you see it is the jolliest little dog in the world?'
'You call that a dog?' said the other boy with redoubled contempt; 'it is just big enough for little Margaret's Noah's Ark!'
'It really is a beauty!' said Ethel. 'I have known one of Flora's guests bring a bigger one in her muff.'
'It is the most sensible little brute,' added Leonard. 'See; beg, my man, beg!'
And the beauteous little black-coated King Charles erected itself on its hind legs, displaying its rich ruddy tan waistcoat and sleeves, and beseeching with its black diamond eyes for the biscuit, dropped and caught in mid-air. It was the first time Leonard had looked bright.
'So you expect us to sanction your private dog stealing?' said Aubrey.
'I have been watching for his mistress to come back,' said Leonard; 'but she must have passed an hour ago, and she does not deserve to have him, for she never looked back for him; and he had run up to me, frisking and making much of me, as if he had found an old friend.'
'Perhaps it will run home when we move.'
No such thing; it trotted close at Leonard's heels, and entered the house with them. Barbara was consulted, and on Leonard's deposition that the dog's mistress was in deep mourning, opined that she could be no other than the widow of an officer, who during his lingering illness had been often laid upon the beach, and had there played with his little dogs. This one, evidently very young, had probably, in the confusion of its puppy memory, taken the invalid for its lost master.
'Stupid little thing,' said Aubrey; 'just like an undersized lady's toy.'
'It knows its friends. These little things have twice the sense of overgrown dogs as big and as stupid as jackasses.'
A retort from Leonard was welcome in Ethel's ears, and she quite developed his conversational powers, in an argument on the sagacity of all canine varieties. It was too late to send the little animal home; and he fondled and played with it till bed-time, when he lodged it in his own room; and the attachment was so strong, that it was with a deep sigh, that at breakfast he accepted Aubrey's offer of conveying it home.
'There she is! he exclaimed in the midst, gazing from the window.
'And see the perfection of the animal!' added Aubrey, pointing to a broad-backed waddling caricature of the little black fairy.
'Restitution must be made, little as she deserves you, you little jewel,' said Leonard, picking up the object of his admiration. 'I'll take you out.'
'No, no; I am not so infectious,' said Ethel, tying on her hat; 'I had better do it.'
And after Leonard's parting embrace to his favourite, she received it; and quickly overtaking the pensive steps of the lady, arrested her progress with, 'I beg your pardon, but I think this is your dog.'
'Poor little Mab! as the dog struggled to get to her, and danced gladly round her. 'I missed her last night, and was coming to look for her.'
'She joined one of our party,' said Ethel; 'and he was not strong enough to follow you. Indeed, he has had scarlet fever, so perhaps it was better not. But he has taken great care of the little dog, and hopes it is not the worse.'
'Thank you. I wish poor Mab may always meet such kind friends,' said the lady, sadly.
'She secured her welcome,' said Ethel. 'We were very grateful to her, for it was the first thing that has seemed to interest him since his illness; and he has just lost both his parents.'
'Ah! Thank you.'
Ethel wondered at herself for having been so communicative; but the sweet sad face and look of interest had drawn her words out; and on her return she made such a touching history of the adventure, that Leonard listened earnestly, and Aubrey looked subdued.
When they went out Leonard refused to spread his rug in that only bed of pulverized shingle; and Ethel respected his avoidance of it as delicacy to her whose husband had no doubt often occupied that spot.
'He is a thorough gentleman,' said she, as she walked away with Aubrey.
'He might be an Eton fellow,' was the significant reply.
'I wonder what made him so!' said Ethel, musingly.
'Looking at Tom,' returned Aubrey, not in jest.
'Even with that advantage, I don't quite see where he learnt that refined consideration.'
'Pshaw, Ethel! The light of nature would show that to any one but a stupex.'
Ethel was not sorry that such were Aubrey's views of courtesy, but all thought of that subject was soon lost in the pursuit of ammonites.