THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY

C >> Charlotte M. Yonge >> THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY

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Alison Williams escaped to her home, sure of nothing but that her
sister must not be allowed to share her uncertainties; and Lady
Temple and her guests sat down to dinner. Rachel meant to have sat
at the bottom and carved, as belonging to the house; but Fanny
motioned the Colonel to the place, observing, "It is so natural to
see you there! One only wants poor Captain Dent at the other end.
Do you know whether he has his leave?"

Wherewith commenced a discussion of military friends--who had been
heard of from Australia, who had been met in England, who was
promoted, who married, who retired, &c., and all the quarters of the
-th since its return from India two years ago; Fanny eagerly asking
questions and making remarks, quite at home and all animation,
absolutely a different being from the subdued, meek little creature
that Rachel had hitherto seen. Attempts were made to include Miss
Curtis in the conversation by addressing anecdotes to her, and asking
if she knew the places named; but she had been to none, and the three
old friends quickly fell into the swing of talk about what interested
them. Once, however, she came down on them with, "What conclusion
have you formed upon female emigration?"

"'His sister she went beyond the seas,
And died an old maid among black savagees.'

"That's the most remarkable instance of female emigration on record,
isn't it?" observed Alick.

"What; her dying an old maid?" said Colonel Keith. "I am not sure.
Wholesale exportations of wives are spoiling the market."

"I did not mean marriage," said Rachel, stoutly. "I am particularly
anxious to know whether there is a field open to independent female
labour."

"All the superior young women seemed to turn nurserymaids," said the
Colonel.

"Oh," interposed Fanny, "do you remember that nice girl of ours who
would marry that Orderly-Sergeant O'Donoghoe? I have had a letter
from her in such distress."

"Of course, the natural termination," said Alick, in his lazy voice.

"And I thought you would tell me how to manage sending her some
help," proceeded Fanny.

"I could have helped you, Fanny. Won't an order do it?"

"Not quite," said Fanny, a shade of a smile playing on her lip. "It
is whether to send it through one of the officers or not. If Captain
Lee is with the regiment, I know he would take care of it for her."

So they plunged into another regiment, and Rachel decided that
nothing was so wearisome as to hear triflers talk shop.

There was no opportunity of calling Fanny to order after dinner, for
she went off on her progress to all the seven cribs, and was only
just returning from them when the gentlemen came in, and then she
made room for the younger beside her on the sofa, saying, "Now,
Alick, I do so want to hear about poor, dear little Bessie;" and they
began so low and confidentially, that Rachel wondered if her alarms
wore to be transfered from the bearded colonel to the dapper boy, or
if, in very truth, she must deem poor Fanny a general coquette.
Besides, a man must be contemptible who wore gloves at so small a
party, when she did not.

She had been whiling away the time of Fanny's absence by looking over
the books on the table, and she did not regard the present company
sufficiently to desist on their account. Colonel Keith began to turn
over some numbers of the "Traveller" that lay near him, and presently
looked up, and said, "Do you know who is the writer of this?"

"What is it? Ah! one of the Invalid's essays. They strike every
one; but I fancy the authorship is a great secret."

"You do not know it?"

"No, I wish I did. Which of them are you reading? 'Country Walks.'
That is not one that I care about, it is a mere hash of old
recollections; but there are some very sensible and superior ones, so
that I have heard it sometimes doubted whether they are man's or
woman's writing. For my part, I think them too earnest to be a
man's; men always play with their subject."

"Oh, yes," said Fanny, "I am sure only a lady could have written
anything so sweet as that about flowers in a sick-room; it so put me
in mind of the lovely flowers you used to bring me one at a time,
when I was ill at Cape Town."

There was no more sense to be had after those three once fell upon
their reminiscences.

That night, after having betrayed her wakefulness by a movement in
her bed, Alison Williams heard her sister's voice, low and steady,
saying, "Ailie, dear, be it what it may, guessing is worse than
certainty."

"Oh, Ermine, I hoped--I know nothing--I have nothing to tell."

"You dread something," said Ermine; "you have been striving for
unconcern all the evening, my poor dear, but surely you know, Ailie,
that nothing is so bad while we share it."

"And I have frightened you about nothing."

"Nothing! nothing about Edward?"

"Oh, no, no!"

"And no one has made you uncomfortable?"

"No."

"Then there is only one thing that it can be, Ailie, and you need not
fear to tell me that. I always knew that if he lived I must be
prepared for it, and you would not have hesitated to tell me of his
death."

"It is not that, indeed it is not, Ermine, it is only this--that I
found to-day that Lady Temple's major has the same name."

"But you said she was come home. You must have seen him."

"Yes, but I should not know him. I had only seen him once, remember,
twelve years ago, and when I durst not look at him."

"At least," said Ermine, quickly, "you can tell me what you saw to-
day."

"A Scotch face, bald head, dark beard, grizzled hair."

"Yes I am grey, and he was five years older; but he used not to have
a Scotch face. Can you tell me about his eyes?"

"Dark," I think.

"They were very dark blue, almost black. Time and climate must have
left them alone. You may know him by those eyes, Ailie. And you
could not make out anything about him?"

"No, not even his Christian name nor his regiment. I had only the
little ones and Miss Rachel to ask, and they knew nothing. I wanted
to keep this from you till I was sure, but you always find me out."

"Do you think I couldn't see the misery you were in all the evening,
poor child? But now you have had it out, sleep, and don't be
distressed."

"But, Ermine, if you--"

"My dear, I am thankful that nothing is amiss with you or Edward.
For the rest, there is nothing but patience. Now, not another word;
you must not lose your sleep, nor take away my chance of any."

How much the sisters slept they did not confide to one another, but
when they rose, Alison shook her head at her sister's heavy eyelids,
and Ermine retorted with a reproachful smile at certain dark tokens
of sleeplessness under Alison's eyes.

"No, not the flowered flimsiness, please," she said, in the course of
her toilette, "let me have the respectable grey silk." And next she
asked for a drawer, whence she chose a little Nuremberg horn brooch
for her neck. "I know it is very silly," she said, "but I can't
quite help it. Only one question, Ailie, that I thought of too late.
Did he hear your name?"

"I think not, Lady Temple named nobody. But why did you not ask me
last night?"

"I thought beginning to talk again would destroy your chance of
sleep, and we had resolved to stop."

"And, Ermine, if it be, what shall I do?"

"Do as you feel right at the moment," said Ermine, after a moment's
pause. "I cannot tell how it may be. I have been thinking over what
you told me about the Major and Lady Temple."

"Oh, Ermine, what a reproof this is for that bit of gossip."

"Not at all, my dear, the warning may be all the better for me," said
Ermine, with a voice less steady than her words. "It is not what,
under the circumstances, I could think likely in the Colin whom I
knew; but were it indeed so, then, Ailie, you had better say nothing
about me, unless he found you out. We would get employment
elsewhere."

"And I must leave you to the suspense all day."

"Much better so. The worst thing we could do would be to go on
talking about it. It is far better for me to be left with my dear
little unconscious companion."

Alison tried to comfort herself with this belief through the long
hours of the morning, during which she only heard that mamma and
Colonel Keith were gone to the Homestead, and she saw no one till she
came forth with her troop to the midday meal.

And there, at sight of Lady Temple's content and calm, satisfied
look, as though she were once more in an accustomed atmosphere, and
felt herself and the boys protected, and of the Colonel's courteous
attention to her and affectionate authority towards her sons, it was
an absolute pang to recognise the hue of eye described by Ermine; but
still Alison tried to think them generic Keith eyes, till at length,
amid the merry chatter of her pupils, came an appeal to "Miss
Williams," and then came a look that thrilled through her, the same
glance that she had met for one terrible moment twelve years before,
and renewing the same longing to shrink from all sight or sound. How
she kept her seat and continued to attend to the children she never
knew, but the voices sounded like a distant Babel; and she did not
know whether she were most relieved, disappointed, or indignant when
she left the dining-room to take the boys for their walk. Oh, that
Ermine could be hid from all knowledge of what would be so much
harder to bear than the death in which she had long believed!

Harder to bear? Yes, Ermine had already been passing through a heart
sickness that made the morning like an age. Her resolute will had
struggled hard for composure, cheerfulness, and occupation; but the
little watchful niece had seen through the endeavour, and had made
her own to the sleepless night and the headache. The usual remedy
was a drive in a wheeled chair, and Rose was so urgent to be allowed
to go and order one, that Ermine at last yielded, partly because she
had hardly energy enough to turn her refusal graciously, partly
because she would not feel herself staying at home for the vague hope
and when the child was out of sight, she had the comfort of clasping
her hands, and ceasing to restrain her countenance, while she
murmured, "Oh, Colin, Colin, are you what you were twelve years back?
Is this all dream, all delusion, and waste of feeling, while you are
lying in your Indian grave, more mine than you can ever be living be
as it may,--

"'Calm me, my God, and keep me calm
While these hot breezes blow;
Be like the night dew's cooling balm
Upon earth's fevered brow.
Calm me, my God, and keep me calm,
Soft resting on Thy breast;
Soothe me with holy hymn and psalm,
And bid my spirit rest.'"

CHAPTER V

MILITARY SOCIETY.

"My trust
Like a good parent did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary as great
As my trust was, which had indeed no limit."--TEMPEST.

Rose found the wheeled chair, to which her aunt gave the preference,
was engaged, and shaking her little discreet head at "the shakey
chair" and "the stuffy chair," she turned pensively homeward, and was
speeding down Mackarel Lane, when she was stayed by the words, "My
little girl!" and the grandest and most bearded gentleman she had
ever seen, demanded, "Can you tell me if Miss Williams lives here?"

"My aunt?" exclaimed Rose, gazing up with her pretty, frightened-fawn
look.

"Indeed!" he exclaimed, looking eagerly at her, "then you are the
child of a very old friend of mine! Did you never hear him speak of
his old school-fellow, Colin Keith?"

"Papa is away," said Rose, turning back her neck to get a full view
of his face from under the brim of her hat.

"'Will you run on and ask your aunt if she would like to see me?" he
added.

Thus it was that Ermine heard the quick patter of the child's steps,
followed by the manly tread, and the words sounded in her ears, "Aunt
Ermine, there's a gentleman, and he has a great beard, and he says he
is papa's old friend! And here he is."

Ermine's beaming eyes as absolutely met the new comer as though she
had sprung forward. "I thought you would come," she said, in a voice
serene with exceeding bliss.

"I have found you at last," as their hands clasped; and they gazed
into each other's faces in the untroubled repose of the meeting,
exclusive of all else.

Ermine was the first to break silence. "Oh, Colin, you look worn and
altered."

"You don't; you have kept your sunbeam face for me with the dear
brown glow I never thought to have seen again. Why did they tell me
you were an invalid, Ermine?"

"Have you not seen Alison?" she asked, supposing he would have known
all.

"I saw her, but did not hear her name, till just now at luncheon,
when our looks met, and I saw it was not another disappointment."

"And she knows you are come to me?"

"It was not in me to speak to her till I had recovered you! One can
forgive, but not forget."

"You will do more when you know her, and how she has only lived and
worked for me, dear Ailie, and suffered far more than I--"

"While I was suffering from being unable to do anything but live for
you," he repeated, taking up her words; "but that is ended now--" and
as she made a negative motion of her head, "have you not trusted to
me?"

"I have thought you not living," she said; "the last I know was your
letter to dear Lady Alison, written from the hospital at Cape Town,
after your wound. She was ill even when it came, and she could only
give it to Ailie for me."

"Dear good aunt, she got into trouble with all the family for our
sake; and when she was gone no one would give me any tidings of you."

"It was her last disappointment that you were not sent home on sick
leave. Did you get well too fast?"

"Not exactly; but my father, or rather, I believe, my brother,
intimated that I should be welcome only if I had laid aside a certain
foolish fancy, and as lying on my back had not conduced to that end,
I could only say I would stay where I was."

"And was it worse for you? I am sure, in spite of all that tanned
skin, that your health has suffered. Ought you to have come home?"

"No, I do not know that London surgeons could have got at the ball,"
he said, putting his hand on his chest, "and it gives me no trouble
in general. I was such a spectacle when I returned to duty, that
good old Sir Stephen Temple, always a proverb for making his staff
a refuge for the infirm, made me his aide-de-camp, and was like a
father to me."

"Now I see why I never could find your name in any list of the
officers in the moves of the regiment! I gave you quite up when I
saw no Keith among those that came home from India. I did believe
then that you were the Colonel Alexander Keith whose death I had seen
mentioned, though I had long trusted to his not being honourable, nor
having your first name."

"Ah! he succeeded to the command after Lady Temple's father. A kind
friend to me he was, and he left me in charge of his son and daughter.
A very good and gallant fellow is that young Alick. I must bring him
to see you some day--"

"Oh! I saw his name; I remember! I gloried in the doings of a Keith;
but I was afraid he had died, as there was no such name with the
regiment when it came home."

"No, he was almost shattered to pieces; but Sir Stephen sent him up
the hills to be nursed by Lady Temple and her mother, and he was sent
home as soon as he could be moved. I was astonished to see how
entirely he had recovered."

"Then you went through all that Indian war?"

"Yes; with Sir Stephen."

"You must show me all your medals! How much you have to tell me!
And then--?"

"Just when the regiment was coming home, my dear old chief was
appointed to the command in Australia, and insisted on my coming with
him as military secretary. He had come to depend on me so much that
I could not well leave him; and in five years there was the way to
promotion and to claiming you at once. We were just settled there,
when what I heard made me long to have decided otherwise, but I could
not break with him then. I wrote to Edward, but had my letter
returned to me."

"No wonder; Edward was abroad, all connexion broken."

"I wrote to Beauchamp, and he knew nothing, and I could only wait
till my chief's time should be up. You know how it was cut short,
and how the care of the poor little widow detained me till she was
fit for the voyage. I came and sought you in vain in town. I went
home, and found my brother lonely and dispirited. He has lost his
son, his daughters are married, and he and I are all the brothers
left out of the six! He was urgent that I should come and live with
him and marry. I told him I would, with all my heart, when I had
found you, and he saw I was too much in earnest to be opposed. Then
I went to Beauchamp, but Harry knew nothing about any one. I tried
to find out your sister and Dr. Long, but heard they were gone to
Belfast."

"Yes, they lost a good deal in the crash, and did not like
retrenching among their neighbours, so they went to Ireland, and
there they have a flourishing practice."

"I thought myself on my way there," he said, smiling; "only I had
first to settle Lady Temple, little guessing who was her treasure of
a governess! Last night I had nearly opened, on another false scent;
I fell in with a description that I could have sworn was yours, of
the heather behind the parsonage. I made a note of the publisher in
case all else had failed."

"I'm glad you knew the scent of the thyme!"

"Then it was no false scent?"

"One must live, and I was thankful to do anything to lighten Ailie's
burthen. I wrote down that description that I might live in the
place in fancy; and one day, when the contribution was wanted and I
was hard up for ideas, I sent it, though I was loth to lay open that
bit of home and heart."

"Well it might give me the sense of meeting you! And in other papers
of the series I traced your old self more ripened."

"The editor was a friend of Edward's, and in our London days he asked
me to write letters on things in general, and when I said I saw the
world through a key-hole, he answered that a circumscribed view
gained in distinctness. Most kind and helpful he has been, and what
began between sport and need to say out one's mind has come to be a
resource for which we are very thankful. He sends us books for
reviewal, and that is pleasant and improving, not to say profitable."

"Little did I think you were in such straits!" he said, stroking the
child's head, and waiting as though her presence were a restraint on
inquiries, but she eagerly availed herself of the pause. "Aunt
Ermine, please what shall I say about the chairs? Will you have the
nice one and Billy when they come home? I was to take the answer,
only you did talk so that I could not ask!"

"Thank you, my dear; I don't want chairs nor anything else while I
can talk so," she answered, smiling. "You had better take a run in
the garden when you come back;" and Rose replied with a nod of assent
that made the colonel smile and say, "Good-bye then, my sweet Lady
Discretion, some day we will be better acquainted."

"Dear child," said Ermine, "she is our great blessing, and some day I
trust will be the same to her dear father. Oh, Colin! it is too much
to hope that you have not believed what you must have heard! And yet
you wrote to him."

"Nay, I could not but feel great distrust of what I heard, since I
was also told that his sisters were unconvinced; and besides, I had
continually seen him at school the victim of other people's faults."

"This is best of all," exclaimed Ermine, with glistening eyes, and
hand laid upon his; "it is the most comfortable word I have heard
since it happened. Yes, indeed, many a time before I saw you, had
I heard of 'Keith' as the friend who saw him righted. Oh, Colin!
thanks, thanks for believing in him more than for all!"

"Not believing, but knowing," he answered--"knowing both you and
Edward. Besides, is it not almost invariable that the inventor is
ruined by his invention--a Prospero by nature?"

"It was not the invention," she answered; "that throve as long as my
father lived."

"Yes, he was an excellent man of business."

"And he thought the concern so secure that there was no danger in
embarking all the available capital of the family in it, and it did
bring us in a very good income."

"I remember that it struck me that the people at home would find that
they had made a mistake after all, and missed a fortune for me! It
was an invention for diminishing the fragility of glass under heat;
was it not?"

"Yes, and the manufacture was very prosperous, so that my father was
quite at ease about us. After his death we made a home for Edward in
London, and looked after him when he used to be smitten with some new
idea and forgot all sublunary matters. When he married we went to
live at Richmond, and had his dear little wife very much with us, for
she was a delicate tender creature, half killed by London. In
process of time he fell in with a man named Maddox, plausible and
clever, who became a sort of manager, especially while Edward was in
his trances of invention; and at all times knew more about his
accounts than he did himself. Nothing but my father's authority had
ever made him really look into them, and this man took them all off
his hands. There was a matter about the glass that Edward was bent
on ascertaining, and he went to study the manufacture in Bohemia,
taking his wife with him, and leaving Rose with us. Shortly after,
Dr. Long and Harry Beauchamp received letters asking for a
considerable advance, to be laid out on the materials that this
improvement would require. Immediately afterwards came the crash."

"Exactly what I heard. Of course the letters were written in
ignorance of what was impending."

"Colin, they were never written at all by Edward! He denied all
knowledge of them. Alison saw Dr. Long's, most ingeniously managed--
foreign paper and all--but she could swear to the forgery--"

"You suspect this Maddox?"

"Most strongly! He knew the state of the business; Edward did not.
And he had a correspondence that would have enabled so ingenious a
person easily to imitate Edward's letters. I do not wonder at their
having been taken in; but how Julia--how Harry Beauchamp could
believe--what they do believe. Oh, Colin! it will not do to think
about it!"

"Oh, that I had been at home! Were no measures taken?"

"Alas! alas! we urged Edward to come home and clear himself; but that
poor little wife of his was terrified beyond measure, imagined
prisons and trials. She was unable to move, and he could not leave
her; she took from him an unhappy promise not to put himself in what
she fancied danger from the law, and then died, leaving him a baby
that did not live a day. He was too broken-hearted to care for
vindicating himself, and no one-no one would do it for him!"

Colonel Keith frowned and clenched the hand that lay in his grasp
till it was absolute pain, but pain that was a relief to feel.
"Madness, madness!" he said. "Miserable! But how was it at home--?
Did this Maddox stand his ground?"

"Yes, if he had fled, all would have been clear, but he doctored the
accounts his own way, and quite satisfied Dr. Long and Harry. He
showed Edward's receipt for the £6000 that had been advanced, and
besides, there was a large sum not accounted for, which was, of
course, supposed to have been invested abroad by Edward--some said
gambled away--as if he had not had a regular hatred of all sorts of
games."

"Edward with his head in the clouds! One notion is as likely as the
other.--Then absolutely nothing was done!"

"Nothing! The bankruptcy was declared, the whole affair broken up;
and certainly if every one had not known Edward to be the most
heedless of men, the confusion would have justified them in thinking
him a dishonest one. Things had been done in his name by Maddox that
might have made a stranger think him guilty of the rest, but to those
who had ever known his abstraction, and far more his real honour and
uprightness, nothing could have been plainer."

"It all turned upon his absence."

"Yes, he must have borne the brunt of what had been done in his name,
I know; that would have been bad enough, but in a court of justice,
his whole character would have been shown, and besides, a prosecution
for forgery of his receipt would have shown what Maddox was,
sufficiently to exculpate him."

"And you say the losers by the deception would not believe in it?"

"No, they only shook their heads at our weak sisterly affection."

"I wish I could see one of those letters. Where is Maddox now?"

"I cannot tell. He certainly did not go away immediately after the
settlement of accounts, but it has not been possible to us to keep up
a knowledge of his movements, or something might have turned up to
justify Edward. Oh, what it is to be helpless women! You are the
very first person, Colin, who has not looked at me pityingly, like a
creature to be forborne with an undeniable delusion!"

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