Beechcroft at Rockstone

CHAPTER XIII. – ST. VALENTINE’S DAY

Miss Mohun came back in the dark after a long day, for once in her life quite jaded, and explaining that the health-officer and the landlord had been by no means agreed, and that nothing could be done till Sir Jasper came home and decided whether to retain the house or not.

All that she was clear about, and which she had telegraphed to Aden, was, that there must be no going back to Silverfold for the present, and she was prepared to begin lodging-hunting as soon as she received an answer.

‘And how have you got on?’ she asked, thinking all looked rather blank.

‘We haven’t been to see Fly,’ broke out Valetta, ‘though she went out on the beach, and Mysie must not stay out after dark, for fear she should cough.’

‘Mysie says they are afraid of excitement,’ said Gillian gloomily.

‘Then you have seen nothing of the others?’

‘Yes, I have seen Victoria, said Aunt Adeline, with a meaning smile.

Miss Mohun went up to take off her things, and Gillian followed her, shutting the door with ominous carefulness, and colouring all over.

‘Aunt Jane, I ought to tell you. A dreadful thing has happened!’

‘Indeed, my dear! What?’

‘I have had a valentine.’

‘Oh!’ repressing a certain inclination to laugh at the bathos from the look of horror and shame in the girl’s eyes.

‘It is from that miserable Alexis! Oh, I know I brought it on myself, and I have been so wretched and so ashamed all day.’

‘Was it so very shocking! Let me see—’

‘Oh! I sent it back at once by the post, in an envelope, saying, “Sent by mistake.”’

‘But what was it like? Surely it was not one of the common shop things?’

‘Oh no; there was rather a pretty outline of a nymph or muse, or something of that sort, at the top—drawn, I mean—and verses written below, something about my showing a lodestar of hope, but I barely glanced at it. I hated it too much.’

‘I am sorry you were in such a hurry,’ said Aunt Jane. ‘No doubt it was a shock; but I am afraid you have given more pain than it quite deserved.’

‘It was so impertinent!’ cried Gillian, in astonished, shame-stricken indignation.

‘So it seems to you,’ said her aunt, ‘and it was very bad taste; but you should remember that this poor lad has grown up in a stratum of society where he may have come to regard this as a suitable opportunity of evincing his gratitude, and perhaps it may be very hard upon him to have this work of his treated as an insult.’

‘But you would not have had me keep it and tolerate it?’ exclaimed Gillian.

‘I can hardly tell without having seen it; but you might have done the thing more civilly, through his sister, or have let me give it back to him. However, it is too late now; I will make a point of seeing Kalliope to-morrow, but in the meantime you really need not be so horribly disgusted and ashamed.’

‘I thought he was quite a different sort!’

‘Perhaps, after all, your thoughts were not wrong; and he only fancied, poor boy, that he had found a pretty way of thanking you.’

This did not greatly comfort Gillian, who might prefer feeling that she was insulted rather than that she had been cruelly unkind, and might like to blame Alexis rather than herself. And, indeed, in any case, she had sense enough to perceive that this very unacceptable compliment was the consequence of her own act of independence of more experienced heads.

The next person Miss Mohun met was Fergus, lugging upstairs, step by step, a monstrous lump of stone, into which he required her to look and behold a fascinating crevice full of glittering spar.

‘Where did you get that, Fergus?’

‘Up off the cliff over the quarry.’

‘Are you sure that you may have it?’

‘Oh yes; White said I might. It’s so jolly, auntie! Frank Stebbing is gone away to the other shop in the Apennines, where the old boss lives. What splendiferous specimens he must have the run of! Our Stebbing says ‘tis because Kally White makes eyes at him; but any way, White has got to do his work while he’s away, and go all the rounds to see that things are right, so I go after him, and he lets me have just what I like—such jolly crystals.’

‘I am sure I hope it is all right.’

‘Oh yes, I always ask him, as you told me; but he is awfully slow and mopy and down in the mouth to-day. Stebbing says he is sweet upon Gill; but I told him that couldn’t be, White knew better. A general’s daughter, indeed! and Will remembers his father a sergeant.’

‘It is very foolish, Fergus. Say no more about it, for it is not nice talk about your sister.’

‘I’ll lick any one who does,’ said Fergus, bumping his stone up another step.

Poor Aunt Jane! There was more to fall on her as soon as the door was finally shut on the two rooms communicating with one another, which the sisters called their own. Mrs. Mount’s manipulations of Miss Adeline’s rich brown hair were endured with some impatience, while Miss Mohun leant back in her chair in her shawl-patterned dressing-gown, watching, with a sort of curious wonder and foreboding, the restlessness that proved that something was in store, and meantime somewhat lazily brushing out her own thinner darker locks.

‘You are tired, Miss Jane,’ said the old servant, using the pet name in private moments. ‘You had better let me do your hair.’

‘No, thank you, Fanny; I have very nearly done,’ she said, marking the signs of eagerness on her sister’s part. ‘Oh, by the bye, did that hot bottle go down to Lilian Giles?’

‘Yes, ma’am; Mrs. Giles came up for it.’

‘Did she say whether Lily was well enough to see Miss Gillian?’

Mrs. Mount coughed a peculiar cough that her mistresses well knew to signify that she could tell them something they would not like to hear, if they chose to ask her, and it was the younger who put the question—

‘Fanny, did she say anything?’

‘Well, Miss Ada, I told her she must be mistaken, but she stuck to it, though she said she never would have breathed a word if Miss Gillian had not come back again, but she thought you should know it.’

‘Know what?’ demanded Jane.

‘Well, Miss Jane, she should say ‘tis the talk that Miss Gillian, when you have thought her reading to the poor girl, has been running down to the works—and ‘tis only the ignorance of them that will talk, but they say it is to meet a young man. She says, Mrs. Giles do, that she never would have noticed such talk, but that the young lady did always seem in a hurry, only just reading a chapter, and never stopping to talk to poor Lily after it; and she has seen her herself going down towards the works, instead of towards home, ma’am. And she said she could not bear that reading to her girl should be made a colour for such doings.’

‘Certainly not, if it were as she supposes,’ said Miss Mohun, sitting very upright, and beating her own head vigorously with a very prickly brush; ‘but you may tell her, Fanny, that I know all about it, and that her friend is Miss White, who you remember spent an evening here.’

Fanny’s good-humoured face cleared up. ‘Yes, ma’am, I told her that I was quite sure that Miss Gillian would not go for to do anything wrong, and that it could be easy explained; but people has tongues, you see.’

‘You were quite right to tell us, Fanny. Good-night.’

‘People has tongues!’ repeated Adeline, when that excellent person had disappeared. ‘Yes, indeed, they have. But, Jenny, do you really mean to say that you know all about this?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘Oh, I wish you had been at home to-day when Victoria came in. It really is a serious business.’

‘Victoria! What has she to do with it? I should have thought her Marchioness-ship quite out of the region of gossip, though, for that matter, grandees like it quite as much as other people.’

‘Don’t, Jane, you know it does concern her through companionship for Phyllis, and she was very kind.’

‘Oh yes, I can see her sailing in, magnificently kind from her elevation. But how in the world did she manage to pick up all this in the time?’ said poor Jane, tired and pestered into the sharpness of her early youth.

‘Dear Jenny, I wish I had said nothing to-night. Do wait till you are rested.’

‘I am not in the least tired, and if I were, do you think I could sleep with this half told?’

‘You said you knew.’

‘Then it is only about Gillian being so silly as to go down to Miss White’s office at the works to look over the boy’s Greek exercises.’

‘You don’t mean that you allowed it!’

‘No, Gillian’s impulsiveness, just like her mother’s, began it, as a little assertion of modern independence; but while she was away that little step from brook to river brought her to the sense that she had been a goose, and had used me rather unfairly, and so she came and confessed it all to me on the way home from the station the first morning after her return. She says she had written it all to her mother from the first.’

‘I wonder Lily did not telegraph to put a stop to it.’

‘Do you suppose any mother, our poor old Lily especially, can marry a couple of daughters without being slightly frantic! Ten to one she never realised that this precious pupil was bigger than Fergus. But do tell me what my Lady had heard, and how she heard it.’

‘You remember that her governess, Miss Elbury, has connections in the place.’

‘“The most excellent creature in the world.” Oh yes, and she spent Sunday with them. So that was the conductor.’

‘I can hardly say that Miss Elbury was to be blamed, considering that she had heard the proposal about Valetta! It seems that that High School class-mistress, Miss Mellon, who had the poor child under her, is her cousin.’

‘Oh dear!’

‘It is exactly what I was afraid of when we decided on keeping Valetta at home. Miss Mellon told all the Caesar story in plainly the worst light for poor Val, and naturally deduced from her removal that she was the most to blame.’

‘Whereas it was Miss Mellon herself! But nobody could expect Victoria to see that, and no doubt she is quite justified in not wishing for the child in her schoolroom! But, after all, Valetta is only a child; it won’t hurt her to have this natural recoil of consequences, and her mother will be at home in three weeks’ time. It signifies much more about Gillian. Did I understand you that the gossip about her had reached those august ears?’

‘Oh yes, Jane, and it is ever so much worse. That horrid Miss Mellon seems to have told Miss Elbury that Gillian has a passion for low company, that she is always running after the Whites at the works, and has secret meetings with the young man in the garden on Sunday, while his sister carries on her underhand flirtation with another youth, Frank Stebbing, I suppose. It really was too preposterous, and Victoria said she had no doubt from the first that there was exaggeration, and had told Miss Elbury so; but still she thought Gillian must have been to blame. She was very nice about it, and listened to all my explanation most kindly, as to Gillian’s interest in the Whites, and its having been only the sister that she met, but plainly she is not half convinced. I heard something about a letter being left for Gillian, and really, I don’t know whether there may not be more discoveries to come. I never felt before the force of our dear father’s saying, apropos of Rotherwood himself, that no one knows what it is to lose a father except those who have the care of his children.’

‘Whatever Gillian did was innocent and ladylike, and nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Aunt Jane stoutly; ‘of that I am sure. But I should like to be equally sure that she has not turned the head of that poor foolish young man, without in the least knowing what she was about. You should have seen her state of mind at his sending her a valentine, which she returned to him, perfectly ferociously, at once, and that was all the correspondence somebody seems to have smelt out.’

‘A valentine! Gillian must have behaved very ill to have brought that upon herself! Oh dear! I wish she had never come here; I wish Lily could have stayed at home, instead of scattering her children about the world. The Rotherwoods will never get over it.’

‘That’s the least part of the grievance, in my eyes,’ said her sister. ‘It won’t make a fraction of difference to the dear old cousin Rotherwood; and as to my Lady, it is always a liking from the teeth outwards.’

‘How can you say so! I am sure she has always been most cordial.’

‘Most correct, if you please. Oh, did she say anything about Mysie?’

‘She said nothing but good of Mysie; called her delightful, and perfectly good and trustworthy, said they could never have got so well through Phyllis’s illness without her, and that they only wished to keep her altogether.’

‘I dare say, to be humble companion to my little lady, out of the way of her wicked sisters.’

‘Jane!’

‘My dear, I don’t think I can stand any more defence of her just now! No, she is an admirable woman, I know. That’s enough. I really must go to bed, and consider which is to be faced first, she or Kalliope.’

It was lucky that Miss Mohun could exist without much sleep, for she was far too much worried for any length of slumber to visit her that night, though she was afoot as early as usual. She thought it best to tell Gillian that Lady Rotherwood had heard some foolish reports, and that she was going to try to clear them up, and she extracted an explicit account as to what the extent of her intercourse with the Whites had been, which was given willingly, Gillian being in a very humble frame, and convinced that she had acted foolishly. It surprised her likewise that Aunt Adeline, whom she had liked the best, and thought the most good-natured, was so much more angry with her than Aunt Jane, who, as she felt, forgave her thoroughly, and was only anxious to help her out of the scrape she had made for herself.

Miss Mohun thought her best time for seeing Kalliope would be in the dinner-hour, and started accordingly in the direction of the marble works. Not far from them she met that young person walking quickly with one of her little brothers.

‘I was coming to see you,’ Miss Mohun said. ‘I did not know that you went home in the middle of the day.’

‘My mother has been so unwell of late that I do not like to be entirely out of reach all day,’ returned Kalliope, who certainly looked worn and sorrowful; ‘so I manage to run home, though it is but for a quarter of an hour.’

‘I will not delay you, I will walk with you,’ and when Petros had been dismissed, ‘I am afraid my niece has not been quite the friend to you that she intended.’

‘Oh, Miss Mohun, do you know all about it? It is such a relief! I have felt so guilty towards you, and yet I did not know what to do.’

‘I have never thought that the concealment was your fault,’ said Jane.

‘I did think at first that you knew,’ said Kalliope, ‘and when I found that was not the case, I suppose I should have insisted on your being told; but I could not bear to seem ungrateful, and my brother took such extreme delight in his lessons and Miss Merrifield’s kindness, that—that I could not bear to do what might prevent them. And now, poor fellow, it shows how wrong it was, since he has ventured on that unfortunate act of presumption, which has so offended her. Oh, Miss Mohun, he is quite broken-hearted.’

‘I am afraid Gillian was very discourteous. I was out, or it should not have been done so unkindly. Indeed, in the shock, Gillian did not recollect that she might be giving pain.’

‘Yes, yes! Poor Alexis! He has not had any opportunity of understanding how different things are in your class of life, and he thought it would show his gratitude and—and—Oh, he is so miserable!’ and she was forced to stop to wipe away her tears.

‘Poor fellow! But it was one of those young men’s mistakes that are got over and outgrown, so you need not grieve over it so much, my dear. My brother-in-law is on his way home, and I know he means to see what can be done for Alexis, for your father’s sake.’

‘Oh, Miss Mohun, how good you are! I thought you could never forgive us. And people do say such shocking things.’

‘I know they do, and therefore I am going to ask you to tell me exactly what intercourse there has been with Gillian.’

Kalliope did so, and Miss Mohun was struck with the complete accordance of the two accounts, and likewise by the total absence of all attempt at self-justification on Miss White’s part. If she had in any way been weak, it had been against her will, and her position had been an exceedingly difficult one. She spoke in as guarded a manner as possible; but to such acute and experienced ears as those of her auditor, it was impossible not to perceive that, while Gillian had been absolutely simple, and unconscious of all but a kind act of patronage, the youth’s imagination had taken fire, and he had become her ardent worshipper; with calf-love, no doubt, but with a distant, humble adoration, which had, whether fortunately or unfortunately, for once found expression in the valentine so summarily rejected. The drawing and the composition had been the work of many days, and so much against his sister’s protest that it had been sent without her knowledge, after she had thought it given up. She had only extracted the confession through his uncontrollable despair, which made him almost unfit to attend to his increased work, perhaps by his southern nature exaggerated.

‘The stronger at first, the sooner over,’ thought Miss Mohun; but she knew that consolation betraying her comprehension would not be safe.

One further discovery she made, namely, that on Sunday, Alexis, foolish lad, had been so wildly impatient at their having had no notice from Gillian since her return, that he had gone to the garden to explain, as he said, his sister’s non-appearance there, since she was detained by her mother’s illness. It was the only time he had ever been there, and he had met no one; but Miss Mohun felt a sinking of heart at the foreboding that the mauvaises langues would get hold of it.

The only thing to be decided on was that there must be a suspension of intercourse, at any rate, till Lady Merrifield’s arrival; not in unkindness, but as best for all. And, indeed, Kalliope had no time to spare from her mother, whose bloated appearance, poor woman, was the effect of long-standing disease.

The daughter’s heart was very full of her, and evidently it would have been a comfort to discuss her condition with this kind friend; but no more delay was possible; and Miss Mohun had to speed home, in a quandary how much or how little about Alexis’s hopeless passion should be communicated to its object, and finally deciding that Gillian had better only be informed that he had been greatly mortified by the rude manner of rejection, but that the act itself proved that she must abstain from all renewal of the intercourse till her parents should return.