She remains behind without a laugh. She is not, however, left long to her own reflections, for scarcely is young Ducane out of sight before Prue reappears. Her eyes are dried, and her cheeks look hot and bright.
'Well?' she says, in a rather hard voice, coming and standing before her sister.
'Well, dear!' returns Peggy, taking one of her hands and gently stroking it.
'Has he been talking to you about it?' asks the young girl, with a quick short breathing.
'I have been talking to him about it,' returns Margaret gravely, 'if that is the same thing.'
'And you have told him that I--I--am not to go?'
'Yes.'
Prue has pulled her hand violently away, which for a few moments is her only rejoinder; then:
'I hope,' she says in a faltering voice, 'that you told him as--as gently as you could. You are so often hard upon him; it must have been such a--such a bitter disappointment!'
'Was it?' says Peggy sadly; 'I think not! Did you hear him laughing as he went away? You need not make yourself unhappy on that score; he told me he had never been very eager for the plan!'
'He said so!' cries Prue, with almost a scream, while a deluge of carnation pours over her face. 'Oh, Peggy! you must be inventing. He could not have said that! I think--without intending it of course--you often misrepresent him! Oh, he could not have said it! Why, only last night, as we were walking home in the moonlight, he said that to have me there under those chestnuts--I believe that the Harboroughs have some very fine old Spanish chestnuts in their park--would be the realisation of a poet's dream.'
Peggy groans.
'If he did say it,' continues Prue, in great agitation, 'it was to please you. He saw how set against the plan you were, and he has such beautiful manners--such a lovely nature that he cannot bear saying anything that goes against the person he is talking to.'
'Perhaps you are right in your view of his character,' says Peggy quietly, but with a tightening of the lines about her mouth that tells of acute pain; 'in fact he told me that the only reason of his having ever advocated the project was that you were so keen about it.'
If Peggy imagines that the drastic medicine conveyed in this speech will have a healing effect upon her sister's sick nature, she soon sees that she is mistaken.
'And is it any wonder if I am keen about it?' asks she, trembling with excitement. 'I who have never had any pleasure in all my life!'
'Never any pleasure in all your life!' repeats Peggy, in a tone of sharp suffering. 'Oh, Prue! and I thought we had been so happy together! I thought we had not wanted anything but each other!'
Prue looks rather ashamed.
'Oh! of course we have been happy enough,' returns she; 'just jogging along from day to day--every day the same. But that--that,' her agitation gathering volume again, 'that is not pleasure.'
'Pleasure!' repeats Margaret, with reflective bitterness; 'what is pleasure? I suppose that the party last night was pleasure. I think, Prue, that pleasure is an animal that mostly carries a sting in its tail.'
'I--I should not be among strangers either,' urges Prue, with that piteous crimson still raging in her cheeks; 'he would be there.'
'And he would be such an efficient chaperon, would not he?' returns Peggy, unable to help a melancholy smile. 'But from what he said to me, even his going seems problematical.'
'Oh no, it is not!' cries Prue hurriedly. 'There is no doubt about that; the very day is fixed. I--I,' faltering, 'was invited for the same one, too.'
Again Margaret gives vent to an impatient groan at this fresh proof of Freddy's unveracity, but she says nothing.
'Is it quite sure that I am not to go?' asks Prue, throwing herself upon her knees at her sister's feet, and looking up with her whole fevered soul blazing in her eyes. 'I do not feel as if I had ever wished for anything in my whole life before.'
Peggy turns away her head.
'I shall have to begin to live on my own account some time!' continues Prue, her words tumbling one over another in her passionate beseeching. 'I cannot always be in leading-strings! Why may not I begin now?'
'Are you going to kill me, then?' asks Margaret, with a painful laugh. 'Am I to die to be out of your way? I am afraid, for your sake, that I do not see much chance of it.'
'I have never in my whole life stayed in the same house with him,' pursues Prue, too passionately bent upon her own aim to be even aware of her sister's sufferings. 'He says himself that our meetings are so scrappy and patchy that he sometimes thinks they are more tantalising than none.'
'And whose fault is it, pray, if they are scrappy and patchy?' cries Peggy, bursting out into a gust of irrepressible indignation. 'Who hinders him from coming here at sunrise and staying till sunset?'
'You never did him justice,' returns Prue irritably. 'You never see how sensitive he is; he says he thinks that every one's privacy is so sacred, that he has a horror of intruding upon it. Ah! you will never understand him! He says himself that his is such a complex nature, he fears you never will.'
'I fear so too!' replies Peggy sadly.
There is a short silence.
'I--I--would behave as nicely as I could,' says poor Prue, beginning again her faltering beseechments. 'I--I--would not do anything that I was not quite sure that you would like.'
The tears have stolen again into her great blue eyes, and across Margaret's mind darts, in a painful flash, the recollection of Freddy's late reproach to her, for the frequency with which she makes his Prue cry.
'I am sure you would not!' cries the elder sister, in a pained voice, taking the little eager face, and framing it in both her compassionate hands. 'Oh, Prue, it is not you that I doubt!'
'But indeed you are not just to her!' returns the young girl, eagerly seizing her sister's wrists, and pressing them with a violence of which she herself is not aware, in her own hot, dry clasp. 'You should see her at home! He says that you should see her at home; that every one should see her at home; that no one knows what she is at home, and that she has a heart of gold--oh, such a good heart!'
'They always have good hearts!' rejoins Margaret, with a sad irony. 'These sort of women always have good hearts.'
'And every one goes there,' urges Prue, panting and speaking scarcely above a whisper. 'Last year the Prince of Morocco was there.'
'H'm! Nice customs curtsey to great kings!'
'And the Bishop.'
'What Bishop?'
'Oh, I do not quite know. A Bishop; and when he went away he thanked Lady Betty for the most delightful three days he had ever spent.'
'H'm!'
'He thought it so beautiful of him; he said it showed so large a charity.'
'So it did.'
'And if a Bishop visits her' (redoubling her urgencies, as she fancies she detects a slight tone of relenting in her sister's voice)----
'Do you think that she sang to him?' interrupts Margaret scathingly. 'Oh, Prue!' (as the vision of Betty with her song, her naked shoulders, bismuthed eyes, and dubious jests, rises in all its horrible vividness between her and the poor, simple face, lifted in such passionate begging to hers), 'I cannot; it is no use to go on asking me. Oh, do not ask me any more; it only makes us both miserable! I tell you' (with rising excitement) 'I--I had rather push you over that wall' (pointing to the one at the garden-end, which drops sharply to the road), 'or throw you into that pool' (indicating a distant silver glint), 'than let you go to her!'
There is such an impassioned decision in both eyes and words that Prue's hopes die. She rises from her knees, and stands quite still on the sward opposite her sister. Her colour has turned from vivid red to paper-white, with that rapidity peculiar to people in weak health. In a moment she has grown to look ten years older.
'I suppose,' she says in a low but very distinct key, 'that it is John Talbot who has made you hate her so!' Then she turns on her heel and walks slowly towards the house.
As long as she is in sight Peggy stares after her wide-eyed, and as if stunned; then she covers her face with both hands and bursts into a passion of tears, in comparison with which Prue's small weepings are as a summer shower to a lashing winter storm. Can it be that there is any truth in her sister's words?
A few days pass, and to a superficial look the Big House and the Little House wear precisely the same aspect as they did before the invasion of the former by its last batch of guests. It is only to a more careful eye that the presence of the little Harboroughs in the Manor nurseries, to which they are chiefly confined--milady having no great passion for the society of other people's children--is revealed; and it would require a still nicer observation to detect the change in the Little Red House. There is no longer any question there of the Harborough invitation. It has been declined, though in what terms the refusal was couched Peggy is ignorant. At all events the letter to Lady Betty has gone. Freddy has gone too. It had been understood, or Margaret imagined that it had been understood, that he, at least, was to have remained; that he had, in fact, been counting the hours until the departure of importunate strangers should leave him free to show the real bent of his inclinations.
However that may be, he has gone, having deferred his going no later than the day but one after that which saw the Harboroughs' exodus. He leaves behind him a misty impression of having reluctantly obeyed some call of duty--some summons of exalted friendship. It is a duty, a task that involves the taking with him of two guns, a cricket-bag, and some fishing-rods.
The Manor is therefore tenanted only by its one old woman, and the Red House by its two young ones. This is a condition of things that has existed very often before without any of the three looking upon herself as an object of pity in consequence of it.
Milady is far, indeed, from thinking herself an object of pity now. But the other two? Prue has made no further effort to alter her sister's decision. She has beset her with no more of those tears and entreaties that Margaret had found so sorely trying, but she has exchanged them for a mood which makes Peggy ask herself hourly whether she does not wish them back. A heavy blanket of silence seems to have fallen upon the cheerful Little House, and upon the garden, still splendid in colour and odour, in its daintily tended smallness. The parrot appears to have taken a vow of silence, in expiation of all the irrelevant and loose remarks of his earlier years; a vow of silence which the greenfinch and the linnet have servilely imitated. Even Mink barks less than usual at the passing carts; and though his bark, as a bark, is below contempt for its shrill thinness, Peggy would be glad to hear even it in the absence of more musical sounds.
Prominent among those more musical sounds used to be Prue's singing, and humming, and lilting, as she ran about the house, and jumped about the garden with Mink and the cat. Prue never now either sings or runs. She is not often seen in the garden: dividing her time between the two solitudes of her own room and of long and lonely walks. If spoken to, she answers briefly and gravely; if her sister asks her to kiss her, she presents a cold cheek; but she volunteers neither speech nor caress. She eats next to nothing, and daily falls away in flesh and colour.
By the close of the week Peggy is at her wits' end. She has spent hours in the hot kitchen trying to concoct some dainty that may titillate that sickly palate. In vain. To her anxious apostrophes, 'Oh, Prue! you used to like my jelly!' 'Oh, Prue! cannot you fancy this cream? I made it myself!' there is never but the one answer, the pushed-away plate, and the 'Thank you, I am not hungry!'
One morning, when the almost ostentatiously neglected breakfast, and the hollow cheeks that seem to have grown even hollower since over-night, have made Peggy well-nigh desperate, she puts on her hat and runs up to the Manor. She must hold converse with some human creature or creatures upon the subject that occupies so large and painful a share of her thoughts. Perhaps to other and impartial eyes Prue may not appear so failing as to her over-anxious ones. She reaches the Big House just as milady takes her seat at the luncheon-table. Miss and Master Harborough, who have been given swords by some injudicious admirer, have been rushing bellowing downstairs, brandishing them in pursuit of the footmen. Nor has the eloquence of the latter at all availed to induce Franky to relinquish his, even when he is hoisted into his high chair and invested with his dinner-napkin. He still wields it, announcing a doughty intention of cutting his roast-beef with it.
'You will do nothing of the kind!' replies milady, who, on principle, always addresses children in the same tone and words as she would grown-up people; 'it would be preposterous; no one ever cuts beef with a sword. You would be put into Bedlam if you did.'
And Lily, whose clamour has been far in excess of her brother's, chimes in with pharisaic officiousness, 'Nonsense, Franky! do not be naughty! You must remember that we are not at home!'
'Bedlam!' repeats Franky, giving up his weapon peaceably, and pleased at the sound. 'Where is Bedlam? Is that where mammy has gone?'
Milady laughs.
'Not yet! Eat your dinner, and hold your tongue.'
Franky complies, and allows the conversation to flow on without any further contribution from himself.
'It was not such a bad shot, was it?' says milady, chuckling; 'I heard from her this morning.'
'Yes?'
'They are still at the B----'s. She says that the one advantage of visiting them is, that it takes all horrors from death! Ha!--ha!'
'Prue heard from her the other day,' says Peggy, speaking slowly and with an overclouded brow; 'she asked Prue to pay her a visit.'
'H'm! What possessed her to do that, I wonder? I suppose Freddy wheedled her into it. Well, and when is she to go?'
'She--she's not going.'
'H'm! You would not give her leave?'
Peggy glances expressively at Miss Harborough, who has dropped her knife and fork, and is listening with all her ears to what has the obvious yet poignant charm of not being intended for them.
'Pooh!' replies milady, following the direction of Margaret's look. 'Ne faites pas attention a ces marmots! ils ne comprennent pas de quoi il s'agit!'
At the sound of the French words a look of acute baffled misery has come into Lily's face, which, later on, deepens on her being assured that she and her brother have sufficiently feasted, and may efface themselves. Franky gallops off joyfully with his sword; and his sister follows reluctantly with hers. As soon as they are really out of earshot--Peggy has learnt by experience the length of Lily's ears--she answers the question that had been put to her by another.
'Do you think that I ought to have let her go?'
Milady shrugs her shoulders.
'Everybody goes there. Lady Clanranald, who is the most straitlaced woman in London, takes her girls there; one must march with one's age.'
The colour has deepened in Margaret's face.
'Then you think that I ought to have let her go?'
Lady Roupell is peeling a peach. She looks up from it for an instant, with a careless little shrug.
'I daresay that she would have amused herself. If she likes bear-fighting, and apple-pie beds, and practical jokes, I am sure that she would.'
'And songs?' adds Peggy, with a curling lip; 'you must not forget them.'
'Pooh!' says milady cynically; 'Prue has no ear, she would not pick them up; and, after all, Betty's bark is worse than her bite.'
'Is it?' very doubtfully.
'Why do not you go too, and look after her?' asks the elder woman, lifting her shrewd eyes from the peach, off whose naked satin she has just whipped its rosy blanket, to her companion's troubled face.
'I am not invited.'
'And you would not go if you were--eh?'
'I would sooner go than let her go by herself,' replies poor Peggy with a groan.
'She is looking very ill,' says Lady Roupell, not unkindly. 'What have you done to her? I suppose that Freddy has been teasing her!'
'I suppose so,' dejectedly.
'I wish that he would leave her alone,' rejoins milady, with irritation. 'I have tried once or twice to broach the subject to him, but he always takes such high ground that I never know where to have him.'
'I wish you would send him away somewhere!' cries Peggy passionately. 'Could not you send him on a tour round the world?'
The old lady shakes her head.
'He would not go; he would tell me that though there is nothing in the world he should enjoy so much, it is his obvious duty to stay by my side, and guide my tottering footsteps to the grave.'
She laughs robustly, and Peggy joins dismally. There is a pause.
'She does look very ill,' says the younger woman, in a voice of poignant anxiety; 'and long ago our doctor told us that she was not to be thwarted in anything. Oh, milady,' with an outburst of appeal for help and sympathy, 'do you think I am killing her? What am I to do? oh, do advise me!'
'Let her go!' replies the elder woman half-impatiently, yet not ill-naturedly either. 'She will fret herself to fiddlestrings if you do not; and you will have a long doctor's bill to pay. I daresay she will not come to much harm. I will tell Lady Clanranald to have an eye upon her; and if she fall ill, I can promise you that nobody will poultice and bolus her more thoroughly than Betty would; she loves physicking people.'
Even this last assurance fails very much to exhilarate Margaret. She draws on her gloves slowly, takes leave sadly, and walks heavily away. She does not go directly home, but fetches a compass through the lanes, on whose high hedges the passing harvest-waggons have left their ripe tribute of reft ears; over a bit of waste land, barrenly beautiful with thistles, some in full purple flush, some giving their soft down to the fresh wind. Singing to them, sitting on a mountain-ash tree, is a sleek robin. Peggy stands still mechanically to listen to him; but his contented music knocks in vain at her heart's door. There is no one to let it in. In vain, too, the reaped earth and the pretty white clouds, voyaging northwards under the south wind's friendly puffs, and the thistle's imperial stain ask entrance to her eye. Whether standing or walking, whether abstractedly looking or deafly listening, there is but one thought in her mind; one question perpetually asking itself, 'Is it really and solely for Prue's good that I have prevented her going?' Neither the thistles nor the redbreast supply her with any answer. The only one that she gets comes ringing and stinging back in Prue's own words: 'I suppose it is John Talbot who has made you hate her so.' 'Can there be any truth in them?' she asks again, as she had asked with tears when they were first spoken.
Her aimless walk has brought her, when the afternoon is already advanced, to the gate of the Vicarage. It is open, swinging to and fro, with a bunch of ugly little Evanses clustered upon its bars. This slight fact of its being open just makes the scale dip towards entering. She enters. Mrs. Evans is in the nursery, as the nurse is taking her holiday. She is sitting with a newish baby in a cradle at her side, and an oldish one alternately voyaging on its stomach across the scoured boards, and forcing its sketchy nose between the uprights of the tall nursery fender. A basket of unmended stockings balances the cradle on Mrs. Evans's other side, and an open Peerage lies upon her lap.
'Why, you are quite a stranger!' she says. 'I have not seen you since the party at the Manor. I was just looking out some of the people who were there. I have not had a moment to spare since; and you know I like to find out who is who.'
Peggy sits down, and the old baby props itself against the leg of a chair to stare at her.
'How is Prue?' asks Mrs. Evans, discarding the Peerage. 'Mr. Evans met her yesterday on Wanborough Common, five miles away from home. Do you think it is wise to let her take such long walks?'
'I did not know that she had been so far,' answers Peggy dispiritedly.
'I do not like her looks,' continues the other, consulting Peggy's face with a placid eye, full of that comfortable and easy-sitting compassion with which our neighbours' anxieties are apt to inspire us. 'Do you ever give her cod-liver oil?'
'She has been taking it for the last two months.'
'Or malt? Malt is an excellent thing; the extract, you know--half a glass taken after meals. It did wonders for Billy. No one would have known him for the same boy.'
'I have tried that too.'
'I expect that what she wants is change of air,' says Mrs. Evans, shaking her head as she thrusts her hand into the foot of a stocking, running an experienced eye over the area of its injuries. 'Could not you manage to give her a little?'
For an instant Margaret is silent; then she says abruptly:
'Lady Betty Harborough has invited her to pay her a visit.'
'Lady Betty Harborough!' cries Mrs. Evans, dropping stocking and darning-needle. 'Dear me! what luck some people have! And you, too? No? I wish she had asked you too.' It is the measure of how low Peggy has fallen that she goes nigh to echoing this wish. 'Well, she must be a very kind-hearted woman,' pursues Mrs. Evans, resuming her darning-needle, 'as well as a very pretty one. And what a charming voice she has! That was a horrid song she sang; I did not hear the words very clearly myself. Mr. Evans says it was just as well that I did not; but how well she sang it! What spirit! When does Prue go?'
'I--I--am not sure that she is going at all.'
'I would not put it off longer than I could help, if I were you,' says Mrs. Evans. 'Do not you think that she has fallen away a good deal of late? And such an opportunity may not come again in a hurry. Dear me!' with a sigh and a glance towards the two babies and the stocking-basket, 'some people are in luck!'
It is evident that Margaret is not destined to draw much consolation from her visits to-day. At the gate Mr. Evans is waiting to greet her, having routed that numerous detachment of his offspring which was ornamenting it on Peggy's arrival. There are day's on which Mr. Evans's children appear to him intolerably ugly, and his lot unbearably sordid. On such days he lies under a tree, reading Morris's Earthly Paradise, and his family give him a wide berth.
'How is Miss Prue?' he asks, holding the gate open for her to pass through. 'I met her yesterday on Wanborough Common, looking like a----'
'Yes, yes, I know,' interrupts Peggy, almost rudely. 'Mrs. Evans told me.'
'Are you quite happy about her?' inquires he, not perceiving his companion's shrinking from the subject, glad to escape for a few moments from the contemplation of his own unpicturesque ills to the more poetic ones of other people, and walking a few paces down the road at her side. 'Had not you better take care that she does not slip through your fingers?'
