Christina Part 23

"We hope so, we hope so," Sir Arthur answered pompously; "dear Ellen and I always try to infuse a wholesome spirit into all the little gaieties, and we feel keenly being absent this Christmas. But we must be in London just now. Our own beloved border is too remote." Cicely thought with a shudder of that wild Welsh border on which the Congreve mansion stood, and instinctively she drew her costly furs more closely round her dainty person, as if the very memory of the remote region gave her a sensation of chill.

"You are in town on business, of course," she went on, more for the sake of saying something, than because she felt the slightest grain of interest in the affairs of her husband's elderly cousin. "I must bring Baba to see Cousin Ellen before we go to Bramwell. Baba is the duckiest wee thing in the world--in my prejudiced opinion--and I believe Cousin Ellen will like her."

Sir Arthur disliked all modern terms of endearment. He looked frigidly at Cicely; and wondered, not for the first time, what his sensible and sober-minded cousin, John Redesdale, could possibly have seen to admire, in this frivolous creature who was now his widow.

"I am not surprised poor John died," Sir Arthur reflected; "such flightiness, such flippancy, must have grated on him terribly." It was not given to Sir Arthur to understand his fellow-men, much less his fellow-women; and it is doubtful whether he would have believed John Redesdale himself, if that dear and n.o.ble man had risen from the dead, to a.s.sure his cousin of his pa.s.sionate and unswerving devotion to Cicely, his much-loved wife.

"Dear Ellen will be very pleased to see your little girl," Sir Arthur said stiffly, after that swift moment of thought. "You know we always call her Veronica. We disapprove of pet names, and Veronica is a valued name in our family." The vexed question of Baba's style and t.i.tle, being one that recurred on every occasion when Cicely and Sir Arthur met, the little lady made a hasty change of subject, saying brightly:

"I will bring her one day. You know she was ill at Graystone. She gave me a terrible fright, but she is quite well again, and I think we owe a great deal to Christina, Baba's delightful nurse--a lady, a most dear and charming girl, who is as much of a companion for me, as for her own special charge."

"A lady? A lady nurse? I hope you are wise in this, my dear Cicely; it is rather an innovation, a departure from the good old ways. Now, I have a theory that a middle-aged nurse of the very respectable, old-fashioned type, is the best sort of person to be about a child."

"If only one could dig her out of anywhere," Cicely answered with her bright smile; "but she is so scarce nowadays, as to be practically prehistoric. I have had every variety of nurse, and they seemed to me to oscillate between minxes and humbugs, until I found Christina."

"And with this young woman you no doubt had excellent references?" said Sir Arthur, fixing a piercing glance upon his companion; "too much care could not be exercised about the person who has charge of your little girl."

Cicely gave what she afterwards explained to herself as a mental gasp, but she was mistress of the situation. She looked into Sir Arthur's severe face, with a smile upon her own, and said smoothly--

"I do agree so entirely with you about being very careful who one engages as a nurse for a little child. I often feel that Baba's whole future depends on the hands that mould her now, when her dear little character is so much clay, to be made into what shape the hands choose."

Sir Arthur, let loose on another of his favourite hobby-horses, the education of the young, forgot to notice that his cousin's pretty widow had omitted to answer the question he had put to her, and cantering away on the above horse, did not realise that he was as ignorant as before, about Christina's references. He was still descanting forcibly on the most absolutely perfect, and, in fact, the only way of training a child in the way it should go, when the door of the hotel sitting-room opened, and Lady Congreve entered. She was a depressed-looking little woman, with the meek mouth and deprecating eyes of a wife whose lord's word is law--and more than law--and her first glance was not for their guest, but for the masterful gentleman standing with legs firmly apart on the hearth-rug, giving his opinion, in the full certainty that Cicely's interested attention, signified complete acquiescence in all his views.

"Ah! my dear, there you are," he broke off to say, with a gracious wave of his hand to his wife. "Cicely and I have been talking about education, and I am glad to think she sees matters quite as I see them."

The tiniest smile dimpled about Cicely's mouth. Sir Arthur's interpretation of her total silence during his harangue, pleased her sense of humour, but, being of a peace-loving disposition, and averse to argument, especially with such an obstinately one-sided arguer as Sir Arthur, she allowed his statement to pa.s.s without contradiction, and greeted Lady Congreve with the charming cordiality, that gave her so delightful a personality.

"I am so sorry you have to be in town at this time of the year, just when you must want to be at home," she said sympathetically. Lady Congreve cast another fleeting glance at her husband, then looked with a sigh round the stiffly-furnished sitting-room, with its suite of brightly upholstered furniture, and its particularly unhomelike air.

"It is a great disappointment to us both," she answered, in her soft, deprecating voice, that to Cicely always seemed to be apologising for daring to make itself heard at all. "I dislike this terribly noisy, wicked city as much as dear Arthur does; and we had looked forward to our usual pleasant Christmas gathering. To me, Christmas is scarcely Christmas if it is not spent in a home--a real home."

In the flash of a second, Cicely, with her wonted kindly impulsiveness, made up her mind to do what in the bottom of her soul, she knew she loathed doing, and what she knew would rob her own Christmas of all its joyousness. She looked from one to the other of the two Congreves--Sir Arthur still upright on the hearth-rug; his wife a small, dejected heap in an armchair--and said in her most gracious manner--

"I do wonder if you will do what I am going to ask you to do? I know you are here on business, but just at Christmas time itself, just for Christmas Day and Boxing Day, you can't do any business at all, so will you come and spend at least those days with us at Bramwell? We go to-morrow; could you come three days hence--on Christmas Eve, or earlier, if you will. I quite see that your own home is too far away, but our home is so near, only an hour by train, and we mean to try and have a home-like Christmas. Do come."

Lady Congreve's pathetic little face brightened, a gleam of pleasure shot into her wistful eyes. Somewhere in that small, crushed soul of hers--the soul that for nearly forty years her husband had manipulated with ruthless hands--she had a profound longing for all the colour and glory of life, and in some nebulous and inexplicable way, Cicely had always seemed to her the embodiment of both.

"Oh, Arthur!" she faltered. "Could we? It would be delightful; such a relief after this great wilderness of an hotel. Could we go, dear?"

Sir Arthur drew his brows together in a judicial way peculiar to him, and bearing no relation to the importance of the matter in hand.

"Very kind of you to think of such an arrangement, my dear Cicely," he began; "very kind, indeed. And it is true, as you say, that ordinary business cannot be transacted at Christmas-time. But--we are not here on quite ordinary business. I think I told you when I last saw you, that my unfortunate brother-in-law is giving us great uneasiness."

"Yes, you did mention it," Cicely answered, again racking her brain in vain to remember what const.i.tuted the misfortunes of the brother-in-law, "but I did not know----"

"Quite so, quite so," Sir Arthur interrupted, waving her words aside; "we do not discuss the subject frequently, because, as you are aware, it is one which is most repugnant to us. But, for my poor sister's sake, I feel bound to come forward now, greatly as I dislike being mixed up with such an affair. I belong to those who believe that the touch of pitch defiles."

Cicely wondered more and more who and what the recalcitrant brother-in-law could be, that the mention of him drew such strong expressions from Sir Arthur's lips, brought so stern a look to his face; but he did not allow her time to ask any questions, or make any comment on his speech, resuming with scarcely a pause--

"I am using what influence I possess, to have the whole matter hushed up, as far as is compatible with right and justice. The poor man himself is not likely to live long enough to be punished; and if scandal can be averted from our family, which for so many generations has been _sans reproche_, I shall feel rewarded for all my trouble."

Cicely reflected that it was quite useless to try and disentangle the meaning of Sir Arthur's mysterious and incomprehensible words; and, being by nature the least inquisitive of beings, she asked no further questions.

"But if all that you have to do leaves you free for two or three days at Christmas, please come to us," she said; "we shall be only a very small party. My brother Wilfred can't come, and I am afraid Rupert Mernside, my cousin, may not be with us this year; but my dear old governess, Miss Doubleday, always comes to us for Christmas, and Baba, Christina, and I are the gay and youthful elements. I like to make Christmas a very happy time for my girlie," she added, almost apologetically when she saw how, at her words, Sir Arthur's lips closed tightly. "You think it rather wrong to be young and gay, don't you?"

she went on, a touch of defiance in her pretty voice; "but, you see, I am--anyhow--not at all old--and I want to keep myself as young as ever I can for Baba."

"I have no objection to youth, as such," Sir Arthur answered, with a lofty condescension that gave Cicely an overpowering wish to giggle feebly; "but I should have thought you, a widow, with so many cares, so many responsibilities, and above all with an immortal soul entrusted to your care, that you would have put childish things behind you, and taken up life with greater seriousness."

"Do you know," Cicely answered very softly, though her eyes shone, "John, my dear husband, told me he hoped I should always keep my young heart, and I hope I shall. I want to be young--as he liked me to be--when I meet him again. And I want to keep Baba always with her child soul, too," she went on, a sudden dreaminess in her glance.

"John used to say that the Kingdom of Heaven was for the child-like, and the children. But I mustn't waste your time and Cousin Ellen's in argument," she exclaimed, with a brisk change of tone; "only promise to come to Bramwell for Christmas, and we will try to make you happy. And I am sure you will like my dear little Christina."

"You are not allowing her to presume on her being a lady, I do trust, Cicely?" Sir Arthur said gravely. "You keep her in her place? If she has undertaken to be a children's nurse, she should learn to occupy the position usually occupied by children's nurses, and only that."

Cicely lifted lovely pleading eyes to his censorious blue ones.

"I am afraid you will think me all sorts of dreadful things, but I could not keep Christina exclusively in the nursery. When you see her, you will understand what I mean. She and Baba are a good deal with me, and at Bramwell they will probably be with me still more." There was a gentle dignity about her manner, which made even the outrageous autocrat before her, understand that he had touched the limit of interference. Cicely might appear to be sweet and yielding; and, indeed, she was almost invariably more inclined to yield her own will, than to struggle to attain it, but there was no lack of character in her small person, and when she had once determined that a course of action was expedient or right, nothing had power to turn her from that course.

"Your cousin Ellen and I will enjoy spending Christmas with you very much," Sir Arthur said, beating his retreat with dignity. "I have no doubt I can manage to be out of London for three days, and I should like to see Bramwell again. John and I had many talks about the alterations and improvements he carried out there."

Cicely had a vivid recollection of her husband's whimsical description of Sir Arthur's well-meant, but annoying, suggestions about those same alterations, and she was conscious again of a giggle choked on its way to birth, but she contrived to make a suitable reply, adding hastily--

"And when you were in town in November, you told me you had some business with Scotland Yard about a pendant. I do hope the police have found the jewel for you."

"Alas! no. It is altogether a most singular thing about that pendant.

I told you it was a family heirloom, a magnificent emerald with three letters A.V.C. twisted together above it."

"Yes?"

"The police had a very strange clue the other day, a clue that, so far, has come to nothing. A p.a.w.nbroker in a back street in Chelsea, came forward, and stated that a pendant, answering in every particular to the stolen one, had been offered to him for sale, a few weeks ago."

"Then why didn't he send for the police, and give the person offering it for sale into custody?" Cicely asked.

"Because the police had not then notified the p.a.w.nbrokers of London of the loss. In fact, as far as I can make out, the attempted sale must have taken place at almost identically the same time when I came to London to make enquiries about the pendant. The p.a.w.nbroker himself, it seems, did not see the pendant. Two of his a.s.sistants were in charge of the shop, when a young woman came in, and asked them what they would give her for it. They seem to have suspected her from the first, for she was obviously very poor, and not at all the sort of person likely to be possessed of such a magnificent ornament. They made her an offer, and apparently she took flight, and left the shop in a violent hurry. She evidently saw and understood their suspicions of her, but unfortunately they lost sight of her in the fog, and all trace of her is completely gone."

"I think I remember you suspected a young woman of the theft? Does the description of the young person who went to the p.a.w.nbroker, answer to the woman who was alone in the railway carriage with Cousin Ellen's dressing-bag?"

"The p.a.w.nbroker's a.s.sistants can only give a confused account of a shabbily-dressed girl, who seemed badly in need of money. Their descriptions are far from explicit. According to our maid, the young woman in the railway carriage, was neatly dressed and very respectable in appearance, but the two people might very easily be identical."

"Very easily," Cicely answered; "but it is unfortunate that the p.a.w.nbroker's a.s.sistants let the girl go. By now, I suppose, the pendant may be broken up, and the stones untraceable."

"Only too likely," Sir Arthur answered; "and yet I cannot help still hoping to recover the thing intact. I cannot bear to think that a jewel my mother so greatly valued, one which indeed has become an heirloom, should be irretrievably lost."

"Not irretrievably, I hope," Cicely answered, as she rose to go.

"Perhaps, when you come to us at Bramwell, you will be able to bring us good news of the missing jewel, and--" she added with some hesitation, "and about your brother-in-law, too." Again she wished that she could in the least recollect what the scandal had been. Possibly, she might never even have heard it, for John, her chivalrous and tender husband, had kept from her ears everything that could vex or soil them, and if she had ever heard the story, it had long since been buried in oblivion. At her words, Sir Arthur's face clouded.

"All! there will never be any good news about that wretched man. The best news about him, the only news I can honestly say I wish to hear, would be that he was safely in his grave. My sister, poor silly woman, is infatuated about him still, I believe. She was always a fool where he was concerned, always a fool." Sir Arthur's tones were irascible; "you never saw her, of course?"

"I never saw either of your sisters," Cicely answered gently; "they--I think they had been married and had gone right away, long before I knew any of you. You see it is only six years since I married John."