Heriot's Choice Part 26

Mildred smiled; she thought she knew the reason why Miss Trelawny looked so animated. She knew Dr. Heriot was a great favourite up at Kirkleatham, in spite of the many battles that were waged between him and Ethel; somehow she felt glad herself that Dr. Heriot had come.

Following Miss Trelawny's lead, they had crossed the park and the pleasure garden, and were now in a little grove skirting the fields, which led to a lonely summer-house, set in the heart of the green meadows, with an enchanting view of the blue hills beyond.

'What a lovely spot,' observed Mildred.

'Here would my hermit spirit dwell apart,' laughed Ethel. 'What a sense of freedom those wide hills give one. I am glad you like it,' she continued, more simply. 'I brought you here because I saw you cared for these sort of things.'

'Most people care for a beautiful prospect.'

'Yes; but theirs is mere surface admiration--yours goes deeper. Do you know, Miss Lambert, I was wondering all luncheon time why you always look so restful and contented?'

'Perhaps because I am so,' returned Mildred, smiling.

'Yes, but you have known trouble; your face says so plainly; there are lines that have no business to be there; in some things you are older than your age.'

'You are a keen observer, Miss Trelawny.'

'Do not answer me like that,' she returned, a little hurt; 'you are so earnest yourself that you ought to allow for earnestness in others. I knew directly I heard your voice that I should like you; does my frankness displease you?' turning on her abruptly.

'On the contrary, it pleases me!' replied Mildred, but she blushed a little under the scrutiny of this strange girl.

'You are undemonstrative, so am I to most people; but directly I saw your face and heard you speak I knew yours was a true nature, and I was anxious to win you for my friend; you do not know how sadly I want one,'

she continued, her voice trembling a little. 'One cannot live without sympathy.'

'It is not meant that we should do so,' returned Mildred, softly.

'I believe mine to be an almost isolated case,' returned Ethel. 'No mother, no----' she checked herself, turned pale and hurried on, 'with only a childlike memory of what brother-love really is, and a faint-off remembrance of a little white wasted face resting on a pillow strewn with lilies. I was very young then, but I remember how I cried when they told me my baby-sister was an angel in heaven.'

'How old were you when your brothers died?' asked Mildred, gently.

Ethel's animation had died away, and a look of deep sadness now crossed her face.

'I was only ten, Rupert was twelve, and Sidney fourteen; such fine manly boys, Sid. especially, and so good to me. Mamma never got over their death; and then I lost her; it seems so lonely their leaving me behind.

Sometimes I wonder for what purpose I am left, and if I have much to suffer before I am allowed to join them?' and Ethel's eyes grew fixed and dreamy, till Mildred's sympathetic voice roused her.

'I should think nothing can replace a brother. When I was young I used to wish I were one of a large family. I remember envying a girl who told me she had seven sisters.'

Ethel looked up with a melancholy smile.

'I wonder what it would be like to have a sister? I mean if Ella had lived--she would be sixteen now. I used to have all sorts of strange fancies about her when I was a child. Mamma once read me Longfellow's poem of _Resignation_, and it made a great impression on me. You remember the words, Miss Lambert?' and Ethel repeated in her fresh sweet voice--

'"Not as a child shall we again behold her, For when with raptures wild, In our embraces we again enfold her, She will not be a child.

"But a fair maiden in her Father's mansion, Clothed with celestial grace, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion Shall we behold her face."

That image of progressive beat.i.tude and expanding youth seized strongly upon my childish imagination.' Mildred's smile was a sufficient answer, and Ethel went on in the same dreamy tone, 'After a time the little dead face became less distinct, and in its place I became conscious of a strange feeling, of a new sort of sister-love. I thought of Ella growing up in heaven, not learning the painful lessons I was so wearily learning here, but schooled by angels in the n.o.bler mysteries of love; and so strong was this belief, that when I was naughty or had given way to temper, I would cry myself to sleep, thinking that Ella would be disappointed in me, and often I did not dare look up at the stars for fear her eyes should be sorrowfully looking down on me. You will think me a fanciful visionary, Miss Lambert, but this childish thought has been my safeguard in many an hour of temptation.'

'I would all our fancies were as pure. You need not fear that I should laugh at you as visionary, my dear Miss Trelawny; after all you may have laid your grasp on a great truth--there can be nothing undeveloped and imperfect in heaven, and infancy is necessarily imperfect.'

'I never sympathised with the crude fancies of the old masters,'

returned Miss Trelawny; 'the winged heads of their bodiless cherubs are as unsatisfactory and impalpable as Homer's flitting shades and shivering ghosts; but your last speech has chilled me somehow.'

Mildred looked up in surprise; but Ethel's smile rea.s.sured her.

'No one but my father ever calls me Ethel--to the world I am Miss Trelawny, even Olive and Chriss are ceremonious, and latterly Mr.

Lambert has dropped the old familiar term; somehow it adds to one's feeling of loneliness.'

'Do you mean that you wish me to drop such ceremony?' returned Mildred, laughing a little nervously. 'Ethel! it is a quaint name, hardly musical, and with a suspicion of a lisp, but full of character; it suits you somehow.'

'Then you will use it!' exclaimed Ethel impulsively. 'We are strangers, and yet I have talked to you this afternoon as I have never done to any one before.'

'There you pay me a compliment.'

'You have such a motherly way with you, Mildred--Miss Lambert, I mean.'

Mildred blushed, 'Please do not correct yourself.'

'What! I may call you Mildred? how nice that will be; I shall feel as though you are some wise elder sister, you have got such tender old-fashioned ways, and yet they suit you somehow. I like you better, I think, because there seems nothing young about you.'

Ethel's speech gave Mildred a little pang--unselfish and free from vanity as her nature was, she was still only a woman, and regret for her pa.s.sing youth shadowed her brightness for a moment. Until her mother's death she had never given it a thought. Why did Ethel's fresh beauty and glorious young vitality raise the faint wish, now heard for the first time, that she were more like the youthful and fairer Mildred of long ago? but even before Ethel had finished speaking, the unworthy thought was banished.

'I believe a wearing and long-continued trouble ages more than years; women have no right to grow sober before thirty, I know. Some lighter natures go haymaking between the tombs,' she went on quaintly, and as Ethel looked up astonished at the strange simile--'I have borrowed my metaphor from a homely circ.u.mstance, but as I sat working in the cool lobby yesterday they were making hay in the sunny churchyard, and somehow the idea seemed incongruous--the idea of gleaning sweetness and nourishment from decay. But does it not strike you we are becoming very philosophical--what are the little rush-bearers doing now I wonder?'

'After all, your human sympathies are less exclusive than mine,'

returned her companion, regretfully. 'I like this cool retreat better than the crowded park; but we are not to be left any longer in peace,'

she continued, with a slight access of colour, 'there are Dr. Heriot and Richard bearing down on us.' Mildred was not sorry to be disturbed, as she thought it was high time to look after Olive and Chriss, an intention that Dr. Heriot instantly negatived by placing himself at her side.

'There is not the slightest necessity--they are under Mrs. Chesterton's wing,' he remarked coolly; 'we have been searching the park and grounds fruitlessly for an hour, till Richard hit on this spot; the hiding-place is worthy of Miss Trelawny.'

'You mean it is romantic enough; your words have a double edge, Dr.

Heriot.'

'Pax,' he returned, laughingly, 'it is too hot to renew the skirmish we carried on in the tent. I have brought you a favourable report of your brother, Miss Lambert; Mr. Warden, an old college chum of his, had arrived unexpectedly, and he was showing him the church.'

One of Mildred's sweet smiles flitted over her face.

'How good you are to take all this trouble for me, Dr. Heriot.'

Dr. Heriot gave her an inscrutable look in which drollery came uppermost.

'Are you given to weigh fractional kindnesses in your neighbour? Most people give grat.i.tude in grains for whole ounces of avoirdupois weight; what a grateful soul yours is, Miss Lambert.'

'The moral being that Dr. Heriot dislikes thanks, Mildred.'

Dr. Heriot gave a low exclamation of surprise, which evidently irritated Miss Trelawny. 'It has come to that already, has it,' he said to himself with an inward chuckle, but Mildred could make nothing of his look of satisfaction and Ethel's aggravated colour.

'Why don't you deliver us one of your favourite tirades against feminine caprice and impulse?' observed Miss Trelawny, in a piqued voice.

'When caprice and impulse take the form of wisdom,' was the answer in a meaning tone, 'Mentor's office of rebuke fails.'