Lover or Friend Part 91

And the next moment he was gone.

Audrey stood rooted to the spot; she felt as though some nightmare oppression were on her. She heard her father's voice calling to her.

'Where is Audrey?' he said. 'She must bid Michael good-bye.' And then someone--Michael, perhaps--answered him.

A great longing was on her to see him again; but as she hesitated the wheels of the dog-cart sounded on the gravel, and she knew that she was too late. With a sudden impulse she leant out of the window. Michael was looking back at the house; he saw her, and raised his hat. She had just time to wave her hand as Dr. Ross drove rapidly through the gate.

When her mother came to find her she was still standing there; she looked very pale, and the pained, wistful look was still in her eyes.

'Mother,' she said, 'Cyril has left me, and now Michael has gone, too; and the world seems a different place to me.'

'Michael will come back, my darling,' replied Mrs. Ross, vaguely troubled by the look on the girl's face. 'Your father says he has long wanted a thorough change, and this trip will do him so much good.'

'Yes, he will come back; but when and how? And he will not come back for a long time;' and then she broke down, and hid her face in her mother's shoulder. 'If I were only like you, mother! if my life lay behind me, and had not to be lived out day by day and year by year! for I seem so tired of everything.'

Mrs. Ross could make nothing of her girl; but she gave her just what she required that moment, a little soothing and extra petting.

'You have gone through so much, and you have borne it all so quietly, and now Nature is having her revenge; you will be better presently, my darling.'

And she was right: Audrey's strong will and sense of duty soon overcame the hysterical emotion.

'I think I am tired,' she acknowledged; and to her mother's relief she consented to lie still and do nothing. 'I will make up for this idle day to-morrow,' she said with a faint smile, as she closed her eyes. 'Now go downstairs, mother dear, and don't trouble about me any more, unless you want to make me ashamed of myself for having been such a baby.'

'She is just worn out with keeping everything to herself, and trying to spare us pain,' Mrs. Ross said to her husband, as she recounted this little scene to him. 'I never knew Audrey hysterical before; I was obliged to give her some sal volatile. I think she is asleep now.'

'I don't hold with sal volatile,' returned the Doctor a little grimly.

'Sleep is a far safer remedy, Emmie. Leave her to herself; she will be all right in a day or two.'

But Dr. Ross sighed as he got up and went to his study. Audrey little knew that her father was in the secret; that in his pain and perplexity Michael had at last taken his best friend into his confidence.

'We must leave things to work round,' had been his parting words to Michael that morning. 'No one, not even her father, must coerce her. All these years you have been like a son to me, Mike; and if my child could bring herself to love you as you deserve to be loved, no one would be better pleased than I should be.'

'And you will tell no one--not even Cousin Emmeline?'

'Why, I should not dare tell her,' returned the Doctor with rather a dejected smile, for he hated to keep things from his wife. 'Geraldine would get hold of it, and then it would come round to Harcourt. No, I will keep my own counsel, Mike. And now good-bye, and good luck to you!'

'It is the Burnett motto,' replied Michael, with a touch of solemnity in his voice--'"Good luck G.o.d send." Take care of her, Cousin John.'

And then the two men grasped hands and parted.

'If I had to search the whole world over for a husband for her, I'd choose Mike,' was Dr. Ross's thought as he drove himself back again to Woodcote.

Audrey kept her promise and made up for her one idle day. 'Work was good for everyone,' she said, 'and it was especially good for her.' So the following morning she resumed lessons with Mollie. She had complained a few weeks before that her German was becoming rusty, and by her father's advice she and Mollie were taking lessons together of Herr Freiligrath.

The master she had selected was a very strict one, and his lessons entailed a great deal of preparation. No discipline could have been more wholesome. Audrey forgot her perplexities while she translated Wallenstein and followed the unhappy fortunes of Max and Theckla.

But she did not at once regain her cheerfulness, and the daily round of duty was not performed without a great deal of effort and inward prompting; if no task were left unfulfilled, if she were always ready to give her mother or Geraldine the companionship they needed, and if her father never missed one of her usual ministrations, it was because she would listen to no plea of self-indulgence.

'You are unhappy, and I fear you must be unhappy and not at ease for a long time,' she would say to herself in the intervals of her work; 'but idleness will not help you.' And to give her her due, she was never busier than during the summer that followed Michael's leave-taking. She had no idea that Michael knew all she was doing, and that her father often wrote to him. Michael had kept his word, and his letters to Audrey were very few and far between, and there was not a word in them that her mother or Geraldine could not have read if she had chosen to show them; but Michael's letters had always been sacred to her. Still it was impossible to answer them with her old freedom. The happy, sisterly intercourse was now a thing of the past. She could no longer pour out to her friend all her innocent girlish thoughts; a barrier--a strange, unnatural barrier--had been built up between them, and Audrey's letters, with all her painstaking effort, gave very little pleasure to Michael.

'Poor child! she is still afraid of me,' he thought, as he folded up the thin paper. And he could not always suppress a sigh as he missed the old playfulness and open-hearted affection that used to breathe in every carelessly-worded sentence. But he knew that she could not help herself; that it was impossible for her now to tell him how she missed him and how heavily the days pa.s.sed without him; and how could he know it, if she thought less of Cyril and more of him every day?

Michael could not guess at all that inward self-questioning that seemed for ever making dumb utterance in her breast. Now and then, when no one needed her, she would wander down to 'Michael's bench' in the dusk or moonlight, and go over that strange conversation again.

'Let your own heart plead for me,' had been his parting words; and, indeed, it seemed as though some subtle influence were for ever bringing his words to her memory. Why had he left her? Could he not have trusted her to do even this for him? She had loved Cyril, but she had not wished to marry him; she had wished to marry no man. It was the instinct of her nature to make others happy, and not to think of herself; and if Michael had wanted her----But the next moment a sort of despair seized her.

He was not like Cyril. What she had to give would not content him in the least.

'I must have all your heart or none,' he had said to her; and his eyes seemed to dominate her as he spoke. 'I should ask more than he did.' And she had not dared to answer him.

No; she could not deceive him. She knew that no kindness on her part would ever wear in his eyes the semblance of the love he wanted. What could she do for him or for herself?

'Can love come by trying?' he had asked; and she could recall vividly the bitterness of his tone as he said this.

But the speech over which she pondered most, sometimes for an hour together, was a very different one.

'I shall leave you,' he had told her, and there had been a strange light in his eyes as he spoke--'I shall leave you to question your own heart.

Let it speak truly. Perhaps--I do not say it will be so, but perhaps you may find that I am more to you than you think. If that time ever comes, will you send for me?'

'What did he mean by saying this?' she would ask herself. 'Why did his look seem to reproach me and pierce me to the heart? How could I know, unless he told me? It is not my fault that I have been so blind. I cannot send for him--I cannot! It is too soon, and----'

But Audrey did not finish her sentence. Even under the dark trees the hot flush was scorching her face.

'Oh, I am so tired of it all!' she would say, springing to her feet with a sudden, quick impatience.

The old tranquil life--the happy, careless life--was gone for ever.

Cyril--her poor dear Cyril--was in his grave; and now there was this new lover, with his proud, gentle wooing: not her old Michael who had so satisfied her, but a new, powerful Michael, who half drew and half repelled her, and for whom she had no fitting answer.

Audrey was glad when August came and she could find some relief in change of scene. Dr. Ross had taken a large roomy cottage at Keswick for the summer holidays, and the Harcourts and Kester were to join them.

Audrey was thankful that her father had not selected Scotland, as his son-in-law had suggested; and she made up her mind, in her sensible way, that, as far as lay in her power, she would enjoy herself as much as possible; and after a time her efforts were not unsuccessful.

Derwent-water was in unusual beauty that year, and a spell of warm, sunny weather enabled them to enjoy their boating expeditions on the lake. Audrey liked to paddle herself and Mollie to one of the islands, and sit there reading and working, while Kester and Percival fished and Geraldine roamed by the lake-side with her bonnie boy, sitting like a young prince in his little wheeled carriage, beside her. There was a long-tailed, s.h.a.ggy pony belonging to the cottage--a st.u.r.dy, sure-footed, good-tempered animal, and Dr. Ross would often drive his wife through some of the lovely dales. Mrs. Ross never thoroughly enjoyed herself in a boat--she had a dislike to find herself surrounded by the deep, clear water; and she much preferred the chaise and Jemmy.

'You were always a goose, Emmie, and I suppose that is why I married you,' Dr. Ross remarked, as he tickled up Jemmy's broad back with the whip.

Nevertheless, the Doctor loved these expeditions quite as much as his wife did.

'What a handsome Darby and Joan they look, Jerry!' Mr. Harcourt once said, as he walked beside her, with Leonard proudly seated on his shoulder. 'I doubt if we shall make such a good-looking couple, my love, in thirty years' time.'

But Mr. Harcourt was smiling in a sly fashion, as he took a sidelong glance at his graceful wife. Geraldine was looking lovelier than ever in the broad-brimmed hat that her husband had chosen for her.

A sad event happened soon after their return to Woodcote. Matthew O'Brien died on the anniversary of his son's death. His end had been very sudden; no one had suspected that for months an insidious disease had been making stealthy progress. He had seemed much as usual, and had made no complaint, only Mrs. Baxter had remarked to her father that Uncle Mat seemed quieter-like and more peaceable. 'He has given up those wearisome prowls of his, and takes more kindly to the chimney-corner,'

as she said.

But one evening Mat put his pipe down silently before it was half smoked, and went off to bed, and the next day he complained of pain and drowsiness; and Prissy cooked some of her messes and soothing possets, and made much of him as he lay on his pillow looking idly out on the October sunshine. And the next day, as the pain and drowsiness did not diminish, she very wisely suggested that a doctor should be sent for; and as Dr. Foster stood beside him, asking him questions rather gravely, a sudden thought came into Mat's mind, and he looked into the doctor's eyes a little solemnly.

'You need not be afraid to tell me, doctor,' he said sadly; 'my life has not been much good to me, and I shall not be sorry to part with it.' But the doctor's answer was kindly evasive.

But two or three nights afterwards, as Thomas...o...b..ien was sitting beside the bed for an hour to relieve Prissy, Mat stretched out his lean arm and grasped his brother's coat-sleeve.

'It is coming, Tom,' he said; 'I shall soon be with my boy--that is, if G.o.d's mercy will grant me admittance to that good place. Give my love to Mollie and the little chap, and, Tom, old fellow, G.o.d bless you!'