‘Well, well, I submit. I am a woman. Molly, thou art a woman! Go and order some strawberries and cream for this father of yours. Such humble offices fall within the province of women. Strawberries and cream are all kindness and no common sense, for they’ll give him a horrid fit of indigestion.’
‘Please speak for yourself, Mrs. Hamley,’ said Molly, merrily. ‘I ate—oh, such a great basketful yesterday, and the squire went himself to the dairy and brought out a great bowl of cream, when he found me at my busy work. And I’m as well as ever I was, to-day, and never had a touch of indigestion near me.’
‘She’s a good girl,’ said her father, when she had danced out of hearing. The words were not quite an inquiry, he was so certain of his answer. There was a mixture of tenderness and trust in his eyes, as he awaited the reply, which came in a moment.
‘She’s a darling. I cannot tell you how fond the squire and I are of her; both of us. I am so delighted to think she is not to go away for a long time. The first thing I thought of this morning when I wakened up, was that she would soon have to return to you, unless I could persuade you into leaving her with me a little longer. And now she must stay—oh, two months at least.’
It was quite truth that the squire had become very fond of Molly. The chance of having a young girl dancing and singing inarticulate ditties about the house and garden, was indescribable in its novelty to him. And then Molly was so willing and so wise; ready both to talk and to listen at the right times. Mrs. Hamley was quite right in speaking of her husband’s fondness for Molly. But either she herself chose a wrong time for telling him of the prolongation of the girl’s visit, or one of the fits of temper to which he was liable, but which he generally strove to check in the presence of his wife, was upon him; at any rate, he received the news in anything but a gracious frame of mind.
‘Stay longer! Did Gibson ask for it?’
‘Yes! I don’t see what else is to become of her; Miss Eyre away and all. It’s a very awkward position for a motherless girl like her to be at the head of a household with two young men in it.’
‘That’s Gibson’s look-out; he should have thought of it before taking pupils, or apprentices, or whatever he calls them.’
‘My dear squire! why, I thought you’d be as glad as I was—as I am, to keep Molly. I asked her to stay for an indefinite time; two months at least.’
‘And to be in the house with Osborne! Roger, too, will be at home.’
By the cloud in the squire’s eyes, Mrs. Hamley read his mind.
‘Oh, she’s not at all the sort of girl young men of their age would take to. We like her because we see what she really is, but lads of one and two-and-twenty want all the accessories of a young woman.’
‘Want what?’ growled the squire.
‘Such things as becoming dress, style of manner. They should not at their age even see that she is pretty; their ideas of beauty would include colour.’
‘I suppose all that’s very clever; but I don’t understand it. All I know is, that it’s a very dangerous thing to shut two young men of one and three-and-twenty up in a country-house like this with a girl of seventeen—choose what her gowns may be like, or her hair, or her eyes. And I told you particularly I didn’t want Osborne, or either of them, indeed, to be falling in love with her. I’m very much annoyed.’
Mrs. Hamley’s face fell; she became a little pale.
‘Shall we make arrangements for their stopping away while she is here; staying up at Cambridge, or reading with some one? going abroad for a month or two?’
‘No; you’ve been reckoning this ever so long on their coming home. I’ve seen the marks of the weeks on your almanack. I’d sooner speak to Gibson, and tell him he must take his daughter away, for it’s not convenient to us——’
‘My dear Roger! I beg you will do no such thing. It will be so unkind; it will give the lie to all I said yesterday. Don’t, please, do that. For my sake, don’t speak to Mr. Gibson!’
‘Well, well, don’t put yourself in a flutter,’ for he was afraid of her becoming hysterical; ‘I’ll speak to Osborne when he comes home, and tell him how much I should dislike anything of the kind.’
‘And Roger is always far too full of his natural history and comparative anatomy, and messes of that sort, to be thinking of falling in love with Venus herself He has not the sentiment and imagination of Osborne.’
‘Ah, you don’t know; you never can be sure about a young man! But with Roger it wouldn’t so much signify. He would know he couldn’t marry for years to come.’
All that afternoon the squire tried to steer clear of Molly, to whom he felt himself to have been an inhospitable traitor. But she was so perfectly unconscious of his shyness of her, and so merry and sweet in her behaviour as a welcome guest, never distrusting him for a moment, however gruff he might be, that by the next morning she had completely won him round, and they were quite on the old terms again. At breakfast this very morning, a letter was passed from the squire to his wife, and back again, without a word as to its contents; but—
‘Fortunate!’
‘Yes! very!’
Little did Molly apply these expressions to the piece of news Mrs. Hamley told her in the course of the day; namely, that her son Osborne had received an invitation to stay with a friend in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, and perhaps to make a tour on the Continent with him subsequently; and that, consequently, he would not accompany his brother when Roger came home.
Molly was very sympathetic.
‘Oh, dear! I am so sorry!’
Mrs. Hamley was thankful her husband was not present, Molly spoke the words so heartily.
‘You have been thinking so long of his coming home. I am afraid it is a great disappointment.’
Mrs. Hamley smiled—relieved.
‘Yes! it is a disappointment certainly, but we must think of Osborne’s pleasure. And with his poetical mind, he will write us such delightful travelling letters. Poor fellow! he must be going into the examination to-day! Both his father and I feel sure, though, that he will be a high wrangler. Only—I should like to have seen him, my own dear boy. But it is best as it is.’
Molly was a little puzzled by this speech, but soon put it out of her head. It was a disappointment to her, too, that she should not see this beautiful, brilliant young man, his mother’s hero. From time to time her maiden fancy had dwelt upon what he would be like; how the lovely boy of the picture in Mrs. Hamley’s dressing-room would have changed in the ten years that had elapsed since the likeness was taken; if he would read poetry aloud; if he would ever read his own poetry. However, in the never-ending feminine business of the day, she soon forgot her own disappointment; it only came back to her on first wakening the next morning as a vague something that was not quite so pleasant as she had anticipated, and then was banished as a subject of regret. Her days at Hamley were well filled up with the small duties that would have belonged to a daughter of the house, had there been one. She made breakfast for the lonely squire, and would willingly have carried up madam’s, but that daily piece of work belonged to the squire, and was jealously guarded by him. She read the smaller print of the newspapers aloud to him, city articles, money and corn markets included. She strolled about the gardens with him, gathering fresh flowers, meanwhile, to deck the drawing-room against Mrs. Hamley should come down. She was her companion when she took her drives in the close carriage; they read poetry and mild literature together in Mrs. Hamley’s sitting-room upstairs. She was quite clever at cribbage now, and could beat the squire if she took pains. Besides these things, there were her own independent ways of employing herself. She used to try to practise a daily hour on the old grand piano in the solitary drawing-room, because she had promised Miss Eyre she would do so. And she had found her way into the library, and used to undo the heavy bars of the shutters if the housemaid had forgotten this duty, and mount the ladder, sitting on the steps, for an hour at a time, deep in some book of the old English classics. The summer days were very short to this happy girl of seventeen.
CHAPTER 8
Drifting into Danger
O
n Thursday, the quiet country household was stirred through all its fibres with the thought of Roger’s coming home. Mrs. Hamley had not seemed quite so well, or quite in such good spirits for two or three days before; and the squire himself had appeared to be put out without any visible cause. They had not chosen to tell Molly that Osborne’s name had only appeared very low down in the mathematical tripos. So all that their visitor knew was that something was out of tune, and she hoped that Roger’s coming home would set it to rights, for it was beyond the power of her small cares and wiles.
On Thursday, the housemaid apologized to her for some slight negligence in her bedroom, by saying she had been busy scouring Mr. Roger’s rooms. ‘Not but what they were as clean as could be beforehand; but mistress would always have the young gentlemen’s rooms cleaned afresh before they came home. If it had been Mr. Osborne the whole house would have had to be done; but to be sure he was the eldest son, so it was but likely.’ Molly was amused at this testimony to the rights of heirship; but somehow she herself had fallen into the family manner of thinking that nothing was too great or too good for ‘the eldest son.’ In his father’s eyes, Osborne was the representative of the ancient house of Hamley of Hamley, the future owner of the land which had been theirs for a thousand years. His mother clung to him because they two were cast in the same mould, both physically and mentally—because he bore her maiden name. She had indoctrinated Molly with her faith, and, in spite of her amusement at the housemaid’s speech, the girl visitor would have been as anxious as any one to show her feudal loyalty to the heir, if indeed it had been he that was coming. After luncheon, Mrs. Hamley went to rest in preparation for Roger’s return; and Molly also retired to her own room, feeling that it would be better for her to remain there until dinner-time, and so to leave the father and mother to receive their boy in privacy. She took a book of MS. poems with her; they were all of Osborne Hamley’s composition; and his mother had read some of them aloud to her young visitor more than once. Molly had asked permission to copy one or two of those which were her greatest favourites; and this quiet summer afternoon she took this copying for her employment, sitting at the pleasant open window, and losing herself in dreamy outlooks into the gardens and woods, quivering in the noon-tide heat. The house was so still, in its silence it might have been the ‘moated grange’; the booming buzz of the blue flies in the great staircase window seemed the loudest noise indoors. And there was scarcely a sound out of doors but the humming of bees in the flower-beds below the window. Distant voices from the far-away fields where they were making hay—the scent of which came in sudden wafts distinct from that of the nearer roses and honeysuckles—these merry piping voices just made Molly feel the depth of the present silence. She had left off copying, her hand weary with the unusual exertion of so much writing, and she was lazily trying to learn one or two of the poems off by heart.
I asked of the wind, but answer made it none,
Save its accustomed sad and solitary moan—
she kept saying to herself, losing her sense of whatever meaning the words had ever had in the repetition which had become mechanical. Suddenly there was the snap of a shutting gate; wheels crackling on the dry gravel, horses’ feet on the drive; a loud cheerful voice in the house, coming up through the open windows, the hall, the passages, the staircase, with unwonted fullness and roundness of tone. The entrance-hall downstairs was paved with diamonds of black and white marble; the low wide staircase that went in short flights around the hall, till you could look down upon the marble floor from the top story of the house, was uncarpeted—uncovered. The squire was too proud of his beautifully-joined oaken flooring to cover this staircase up unnecessarily; not to say a word of the usual state of want of ready money to expend upon the decorations of his house. So, through the undraperied hollow square of the hall and staircase every sound ascended clear and distinct; and Molly heard the squire’s glad ‘Hallo! here he is,’ and madam’s softer, more plaintive voice; and then the loud, full, strange tone, which she knew must be Roger’s. Then there was an opening and shutting of doors, and only a distant buzz of talking. Molly began again—
I asked of the wind, but answer made it none.
And this time she had nearly finished learning the poem, when she heard Mrs. Hamley come hastily into her sitting-room that adjoined Molly’s bedroom, and burst out into an irrepressible half-hysterical fit of sobbing. Molly was too young to have any complication of motives which should prevent her going at once to try and give what comfort she could. In an instant she was kneeling at Mrs. Hamley’s feet, holding the poor lady’s hands, kissing them, murmuring soft words; which, all unmeaning as they were of aught but sympathy with the untold grief, did Mrs. Hamley good. She checked herself, smiling sadly at Molly through the midst of her thick-coming sobs.
‘It’s only Osborne,’ said she, at last. ‘Roger has been telling us about him.’
‘What about him?’ asked Molly, eagerly.
‘I knew on Monday; we had a letter—he said he had not done so well as we had hoped—as he had hoped himself, poor fellow! He said he had just passed, but was only low down among the junior op-times, and not where he had expected, and had led us to expect. But the squire has never been at college, and does not understand college terms, and he has been asking Roger all about it, and Roger has been telling him, and it has made him so angry. But the squire hates college slang;—he has never been there, you know; and he thought poor Osborne was taking it too lightly, and he has been asking Roger about it, and Roge
______
’
There was a fresh fit of the sobbing crying. Molly burst out,—