Sisters Part 13

"Why?" he demanded, with his man's dull incomprehension, and went on to demonstrate that there was no other. "I do not wish," he lied chivalrously, "to take any other. I--I--believe me, I am not ungrateful for your--for your thinking a great deal more of me than I deserve. I will try to show myself worthy--"

A magnanimous arm attempted to encircle her. She backed from it, and rose hurriedly from her chair, with what he would have imagined a gesture of repulsion if he had not known her, from her own showing, so over-eager for his embraces. He rose too.

"Do not!" she cried breathlessly, pa.s.sionately. "As if I could dream--What can you think of me, to imagine that I would for a moment--"

She broke from him and ran towards the door, sobbing, with her handkerchief to her eyes. In three strides he was there before her, cutting off her retreat; so she swung back into the room, cast herself on the floor beside a sofa, and throwing up her arms, plunged her head down between them into the depths of a large cushion, which smothered cries that would otherwise have been shrieks. She abandoned all effort to control herself, except the effort to hide, which was futile.

Guthrie Carey's first feeling was of alarm, lest anyone should hear and come in to see what was the matter; he felt like wanting to guard the door. But in a minute or two his soft heart was so worked upon by the spectacle before him that he could think of nothing else. However little he might want to marry Mary Pennycuick, he was not going to be answerable for this sort of thing; so he marched resolutely to the sofa, and stooped to lift the convulsed creature bodily into his arms.

He might as well have tried to grasp a sleeping porcupine.

"How dare you?" she cried shrilly, whirling to her feet, dilating like a hooded snake before his astonished eyes. "How dare you touch me?" He was too cowed to answer, and she stood a moment, all fire and fury, glaring at him, her tear-ravaged face distorted, her hands clenched; then she whirled out of the room, and this time he made no effort to stop her.

He dropped back on the sofa, and said to himself helplessly:

"Well, I'm blowed!"

There was stillness for some time. This part of the house seemed quite empty, save for one buzzing fly, which he or Mary had let in. The little housekeeper was very particular about flies in summer, every window and chimney-opening being wire-netted, every door labelled with a printed request to the user to shut it; and his dazed mind occupied itself with the idea of how this insect would have distressed her if she had not had so much else to think of. He had an impulse to hunt it, for her sake, through the green-shadowed s.p.a.ce in which it careered in long tacks with such energy and noise; but, standing up, he was seized with a stronger impulse to leave the house forthwith, and everything in it. He wanted liberty to consider his position and further proceedings before he faced the family.

As he approached the door, it was opened from without. Deb stood on the threshold, pale, proud, with tight lips and sombre eyes. She bowed to him as only she could bow to a person she was offended with.

"Would you kindly see my father in his office, Mr Carey?" she inquired, with stony formality. "He wishes to speak to you."

"Certainly, Miss Deborah," he replied, not daring to preface the words with even a "How-do-you-do". "I want to see him--I want to see him particularly."

Deb swept round to lead the way downstairs.

An embarra.s.sing march it was, tandem fashion, through the long pa.s.sages of the rambling house. While trying to arrange his thoughts for the coming interview, Captain Carey studied her imperious back and shoulders, the haughty poise of her head; and though he was not the one that had behaved badly, he had never felt so small. At the door of the morning-room she dismissed him with a jerk of the hand. "You know your way," said she, and vanished.

"She is more beautiful than ever," was his poignant thought, as he walked away from her, and from all the glorious life that she suggested--to such a dull and common doom.

Mr Pennycuick, at first, was a terrible figure, struggling between his father-fury and his old-gentleman instincts of courtesy to a guest.

"Sir," said he, "I am sorry that I have to speak to you under my own roof; in another place I could better have expressed what I have to say--"

But before he could get to the gist of the matter, Mary intervened.

"Miss Keene has some refreshment for Mr Carey in the dining-room," she said. "And, father, I want, if you please, to have a word with you first." She had recovered self-possession, and wore a rigid, determined air, contrasting with the sailor's bewilderment, which was so great that he found himself driven from the office before he had made up his mind whether he ought to go or stay.

He sat down to his unnecessary meal, and tried to eat, while an embarra.s.sed maiden lady talked plat.i.tudes to him. Didn't he find it very dusty in town? Miss Keene, knitting feverishly, was anxious to be informed. And didn't he think the country looked well for the time of year?

He was relieved from this tedium by another summons to the office.

Fortified with a gla.s.s of good wine, he returned to the encounter, inwardly calling upon his G.o.ds to direct him how to meet it. He found poor old Father Pennycuick aged ten years in the hour since he had seen him last. But he still stood in ma.s.sive dignity, a true son of his old race.

"Well, Mr Carey," said he, "I have had a great many troubles of late, sir, but never one like this. I thought that losing money--the fruits of a lifetime of hard work--was a thing to fret over; and then, again, I've thought that money's no consequence so long as you've got your children alive and well--that THAT was everything. I know better now. I know there's things may happen to a man worse than death--worse than losing everything belonging to him, no matter what it is. When that child was a little thing, she had an illness, and the doctors gave her up. Two nights her mother and I sat up watching her, expecting every breath to be the last, and broken-hearted was no word for what we felt.

I cried like a calf, and I prayed--I never prayed like it before or since--and fools we are to ask the Almighty for we don't know what! Now I wish He had taken her. And I've told her so."

"Then you have been very cruel, Mr Pennycuick," Guthrie Carey replied sharply--"and as unjust as cruel. She has done nothing--"

"I know what she's done," the stern parent interposed. "I wouldn't have believed it if anybody else had told me; but I have her own word for it. And if she has been a liar once, I still know when to believe her."

"If you will be so good as to tell me what she has said, then I will make MY statement."

The old man put up his hand.

"Don't perjure yourself," said he, grimly smiling. "It is very kind of you to try to let us down easily, but you can spare your breath.

Excuses only make it worse. There's nothing to be said for her, and you'll really oblige me by not going into details. I only sent for you to make such amends as I can--to apologise most humbly--to express my sorrow--my shame--my unspeakable humiliation--that a child of mine--a Pennycuick--a girl I thought was nothing if not maidenly and self-respecting, and the very soul of honour and straightness and proper pride--"

"You speak as if she was not all that now--"

"NOW!--and done a low, contemptible thing like that! Oh, I don't understand it--I can't; it's too monstrous--except that I have her word for it. She says she did it, and so there it is. And, sir, I beg your pardon on behalf of the house that she has disgraced--the house that reared her and thought her so different--"

He gulped, coughed, and gave Guthrie a chance to put in a word.

"Mr Pennycuick, the simple fact is that I made love to your daughter--"

"Made her an offer of marriage?" snarled the other, wheeling round.

"I kissed her--"

Mr Pennycuick snapped his thumb and finger derisively.

"THAT kind of kiss!--as good as asked for."

"It was not as good as asked for. Your daughter is not that kind of woman."

"I thought not, but she says she is."

"Pay no heed to what she says. Her morbid conscientiousness runs away with her. I tell you the plain truth, as man to man, without any hysterics--I kissed her of my own free will--your daughter, sir. And I am here now to stand by my act. If she will forgive my--my tardiness--as you know, I was in no position then to aspire to marriage with a lady of this family; I am not now, but I am better off than I was--will you give your consent to our engagement?"

"No!" roared Mr Pennycuick, looking as if threatened with an apoplectic fit. "I'll see her engaged to the devil first!"

Like Mary, he seemed to take the generous offer as a personal insult.

Guthrie Carey, conscious of doing the duty of a gentleman at enormous cost, could not understand why.

CHAPTER XI.

Captain Carey, while leaving it to be understood that he held himself engaged to Mary Pennycuick until further orders, realised the welcome fact that in the meantime he was honourably free; and he excused himself from staying to dinner. But scarcely had he driven off in his hired buggy than that of Mr Goldsworthy clattered into the stableyard.

It was the good man's habit, when on his parochial visitations, to 'make' Redford at meal times, or at bed-time, whenever distances allowed; he called it, most appropriately, his second home, and walked into the house as if it really belonged to him two or three times a week.

The first person that he encountered on this occasion was Frances, who had waylaid Guthrie Carey on his departure, and whom he had left standing under the back porch, aglow with excitement. She was a picture in her pale blue frock--put on for his eyes--and with her mane of burnished gold falling about her sparkling blush-rose face; but the parson, accustomed to regard her as a child, was unaffected by the sight.

"Surely," he exclaimed, with agitation, "that was young Mr Carey that I pa.s.sed at the gate just now? He had his hat pulled over his eyes, and did not stop to speak to me; but the figure--" "Was his," said Frances, bursting to be the first to say it. "Very much in the flesh still, isn't he? And oh, to think he's gone like this, just as we'd got him back--SO big and handsome, and such a DEAR brother-in-law as he would have made!"