Robinetta. Findlater Jane Helen

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СКАЧАТЬ none who can put her up. Tho’ she is a widow, she is only twenty-two (just imagine!), very pretty, and really, tho’ you won’t believe it, quite nice. I am desperate, and just wondering if you would let by-gones be by-gones, and receive her at Stoke Revel. She has set her heart upon seeing the place, and some picture she was called after (I can’t remember it, so it can’t be one of the famous Stoke Revel group–a copy, I fancy), and on paying a visit to Lizzie Prettyman, her mother’s old nurse at Wittisham over the river. She promised her mother she would do this–and such a promise is sacred, don’t you think? It’s such an old story now, Cynthia’s American marriage, and no fault of Robinette’s, poor dear child. Her wish is almost a pious one, don’t you agree, to pay respect to her mother’s memory and the family, and is much to be encouraged in these days of radicalism, when every natural tie is loosened and people pay no more respect to their parents than if they hadn’t any, but had made themselves and brought themselves up from the beginning. So don’t you think it’s a good thing to encourage the right kind of feeling in Robinette, especially as she is an American, you know…

      Mrs. de Tracy paused, and replaced the letter in the package from which she had withdrawn it.

      “Maria Spalding’s point of view,” she observed, “has, I confess, helped me to overcome the extreme reluctance I felt to receive the child of that American here. Cynthia de Tracy’s elopement nearly broke my dear husband’s heart. She was the apple of his eye before our marriage; so much younger than himself that she was like his child rather than his sister.”

      “What a shock it must have been!” murmured the companion. “What ingratitude! Can you really receive her child? Of course you know best, Mrs. de Tracy; but it seems a risk.”

      “Hardly a risk,” rejoined Mrs. de Tracy with dignity. “But it is a trial to me, and an effort that I scarcely feel called upon to make.”

      Miss Smeardon was so well versed in her duties that she knew she always had to urge her employer to do exactly what she most wanted to do, and the poor creature had developed a really wonderful ingenuity in divining what these wishes were. Just now, however, she was, to use a sporting phrase, “at fault” for a minute. She could not exactly tell whether Mrs. de Tracy wanted to be urged to ask her niece to Stoke Revel, or whether she wanted to be supplied with a really plausible excuse for not doing so. Those of you who have seen a hound at fault can imagine the companion at this moment: irresolute, tense, desperately anxious to find and follow up the right scent. Compromise, that useful refuge, came to her aid.

      “It is difficult to know,” she faltered. Then Mrs. de Tracy gave her the lead.

      “Maria Spalding is right when she says that my husband’s niece contemplates a duty in visiting Stoke Revel,” she announced. “The young woman is the lawful daughter of Cynthia de Tracy that was: our solicitors could never discover anything dubious in the marriage, though we long suspected it. Therefore, though I never could have invited her here, I admit that the Admiral’s niece has a right to come, in a way.”

      “Though her maiden name was Bean!” ejaculated the companion, almost under her breath. “There are Pease in the North, as everyone knows; perhaps there are Beans somewhere.”

      “There have never been Beans,” said Mrs. de Tracy solemnly and totally unconscious of a pun. “Look for yourself!”

      Miss Smeardon did not need to rise from her seat and fetch Burke: it lay always close at hand. She merely lifted it on to her knee and ran her finger down the names beginning with B-e-a.

      “Beaton, Beare, Beatty, Beale–” she read out, and she shook her head in dismal triumph; “but never a Bean! No! we English have no such dreadful names, thank Heavens!”

      “This is the beginning of April,” pursued Mrs. de Tracy, referring to a date-card. “Maria Spalding’s course at Nauheim will take three weeks. We must allow her a week for going and coming. During that time Mrs. David Loring can be my guest.”

      “A whole month!” cried the companion, as though in ecstasy at her employer’s generosity. “A whole month at Stoke Revel!”

      Mrs. de Tracy took no notice. “Write in my name to Maria Spalding, please,” she commanded. “Be sure that there is no mistake about dates. Mention the departure and arrival of trains, and say that Mrs. David Loring will find a fly at the station. That is all, I think.”

      The companion bent officiously forward. “You remember, of course, that young Mr. Lavendar comes down next week upon business?”

      “Well, what if he does?” asked Mrs. de Tracy shortly.

      “Mrs. David Loring is a widow,” murmured the companion darkly; “a young American widow; and they are said to be so dangerous!”

      Mrs. de Tracy drew herself up. “Do you insinuate that the Admiral’s niece will lay herself out to attract Mr. Lavendar, a widow in the house of a widow! You go rather too far, Miss Smeardon, though you are speaking of an American. Besides, allusions of this character are extremely distasteful to me. I have been told that the minds of unmarried women are always running upon love affairs, but I should hardly have thought it of you.”

      “I’m sure I never imagined any about myself!” murmured Miss Smeardon with the pitiable writhe of the trodden-on worm.

      “I should suppose not,” rejoined Mrs. de Tracy gravely, and the companion took up her pen obediently to write to Maria Spalding.

      “Shall I send your love to the Admiral’s niece?” she humbly enquired, “or–or something of the kind?” There was irony in the last phrase, but it was quite unconscious.

      “Not my love,” replied Mrs. de Tracy, “some suitable message. Make no mistake about the dates, remember.”

      Thus a letter containing dates, and though not love, the substitute described by Miss Smeardon as “something of the kind” for an unwanted niece from an unknown aunt, left Stoke Revel by the afternoon post and reached Robinette Loring at breakfast next morning.

      III

      YOUNG MRS. LORING

      Young Mrs. Loring thought she had never taken so long a drive as that from the Weston railway station to Stoke Revel. The way stretched through narrow winding roads, always up hill, always between high Devonshire hedges. The rain-soaked lanes were slippery and she was unpleasantly conscious of the size and weight of the American wardrobe trunk that reared its mighty frame in front of her almost to the blotting-out of the driver, who steadied it with one hand as he plied the whip with the other. It struck her humorously that the trunk was larger than most of the cottages they were passing.

      It was a late spring that year in England,–Robinette was a new-comer and did not know that England runs to late and wet springs, believing that they make more conversation than early, fine ones,–and the trees were just bursting into leaf. The sun had not shone for three days and the landscape, for all its beautiful greenness, looked gloomy to an eye accustomed to a good deal of crude sunshine.

      As the horse mounted higher and higher Robinette glanced out of the windows at the dripping boughs and her face lost something of its sparkle of anticipation. She had little to expect in the way of a warm welcome, she knew that; or at least her mind knew it, but Robinette’s heart always expected surprises, although she had lived two and twenty summers and was a widow at that.

      Her mother had been a de Tracy of Stoke Revel whose connection with that ancient family had ceased abruptly when she met an American architect while СКАЧАТЬ