The Master of the Ceremonies Part 34

"Oh, May, May! As if I had not care and pain enough without this.

Surely it cannot be true."

"Hush! don't make a fuss like that, you silly thing. You'll have the people hearing you down in the street. How could I help it?"

"Help it? May, you must have been mad."

"Oh! no, I wasn't," said Mrs Burnett, nestling into a corner of the couch in her father's drawing-room. "I believe he was, though, poor fellow."

She gazed up at her portrait with her pretty girlish face wrinkling up, and these wrinkles seeming to have had work to get the better of the dimples in her baby cheeks and chin.

"He was dreadfully fond of me, Claire," she continued, "and I was very fond of him. And then, you see, we were both so young."

Claire clasped her hands together and gazed at her sister with a face full of wonder, she seemed so calm and unconcerned, as if it were some one else's trouble and not her own that had brought the tears into her eyes.

"But, May, why did not you confide in me?"

"Likely! You were always scolding and snubbing me, as it was. I don't know what you would have said if you had known. Besides, I was afraid of you in those days."

"May, you will drive me mad," said Claire, pacing the room.

"Nonsense; and don't go on running up and down the room like that. Be sensible, and help me."

"Why have you not told me before?"

"I've been going to tell you heaps of times, but you've always had something or other to worry about, and I've been put off."

"Till you knew that detection was inevitable; and now you come to me,"

cried Claire reproachfully.

"Look here, Claire, are you going to talk sensibly, or am I to go to some lady friend to help me? There's Mrs Pontardent."

"No, no," cried Claire excitedly. "You must not take anyone else into your confidence. Tell me all. But May, May, is this really true, or is it some miserable invention of your own?"

"Oh, it's true enough," said May sharply, as she arranged her bonnet strings, and bent forward to catch a glimpse of her great ostrich feather.

Claire looked at her with her face drawn with care and horror, while she wondered at the indifference of the little wife, and the easy way in which she was trying to shift the trouble and responsibility of her weakness and folly upon her sister.

"Why, May, you could not have been seventeen."

"Sixteen and a half," said May. "Heigho! I begin to feel quite an old woman now."

"But, Frank? Do you ever think of the consequences if he were to know?"

"Why, of course I do, you silly thing. Haven't I lain in bed and quaked hundreds of times for fear he should ever find out? How can you talk so? Why do you suppose I came to you, if it was not that I was afraid of his getting to know?"

"May, it would drive our father mad if all came out."

"Of course it would. Now you are beginning to wake up and understand why I have come."

"How could you accept Frank Burnett, and deceive him so?"

"How could I marry him? What would papa have said if I had refused?

Don't talk stuff."

Claire's brow knit more and more, as she realised her sister's utter want of principle, and her heart seemed rent by anger, pity, and grief.

"Besides, do you suppose I wanted to stop here and pinch and starve when a rich husband and home were waiting for _me_? Poor Louis was dead, and if I'd cried my eyes out every week and said I'd be a widow for ever and ever, it would not have brought him to life."

Claire did not speak. Her words would not come, and she gazed in utter perplexity, struggling to realise the fact that the girlish little thing before her could possibly have been a widow and mother before she became Mrs Burnett.

"When--when did this begin?" said Claire at last.

"Now, don't talk to me like that, Claire, or you'll set me off crying my eyes blind, and I shall go home red and miserable, and Frank will find it all out."

"He must be told."

"Told?" cried May, starting up. "Told? If he is told, I'll go right down to the end of the pier and drown myself. He must never know, and papa must never know. Do you think I've kept this a secret for more than two years for them to be told?"

"They will be sure to know."

"Yes, if you tell them. Oh, Claire, Claire, I did think I could find help in my sister, now that I am in such terrible trouble."

"I will help you all I can, May," said Claire sadly; "but they must know."

"I tell you they must not," cried May angrily, and speaking like a spoiled child. "Frank would kill me, and as for poor, dear, darling papa, with all his troubles about getting you married and Morton settled, and Fred turning out so badly, it would kill him, and then you'd have a nice time of it, far worse than poor old mummy Teigne being killed."

"Oh, hush, May!" said Claire, with a horrified look.

"That moves you, does it, miss? Well, then, be reasonable. I don't know what to make of you of late, Claire; you seem to be so changed.

Ah, you'll find the difference when you're a married woman."

Claire gazed down at her, with the trouble and perplexity seeming to increase, while May Burnett arranged the folds of her dress, as she once more nestled in the corner of the old sofa, and seemed as if she were posing herself to be pitied and helped.

Then she lifted her eyes towards the florid portrait on the wall, and sighed.

"Poor Louis! How he did flatter me. But he always did that, and I suppose it was his flattering words made me love him so. I was very fond of him."

"May," said Claire excitedly, "when was it you were married?"

"Oh, it was such fun. It was while I was staying at Aunt Jerdein's, and taking the music lessons. I went out as usual, to go to Golden Square for my lesson as aunt thought, and Louis was waiting for me, and he took me in a hackney coach with straw at the bottom and mouldy old cushions, and one of the windows broken. And we went to such a queer old church somewhere in the city, and were married--a little old church that smelt as mouldy as the hackney coach; and the funny old clergyman took snuff all over his surplice, and he did mumble so."

"And then?"

"Oh, Louis left Saltinville, you know, when I went up to London, and gave lessons at Aunt Jerdein's, and we used to see as much of each other as we could, till he had to go back to Rome, and there, poor boy, you know he died of fever."

Claire did not speak, but stood with her hands clasped before her, listening to the calm, cool, selfish words that seemed to come rippling out from the prettily-curved mouth as if it were one of the simplest and most matter-of-fact things in the world.

"It was a great trouble to me, of course, dear," May continued; and she raised herself a little, to spread her handsome dress, so that it should fall in graceful folds. "I used to cry my eyes out, and I don't know what I should have done if it had not been for Anne Brown."