Not Without Thorns

“Miss Laurence – Eugenia,” he exclaimed. She started a little. “I must ask you one thing: Will you think as well as you can of me, even if others may blame me? Will you not judge me by appearances more than you can help? My position is full of difficulty. As I said just now, I am not in any sense my own master; but – if I may hope for nothing else – I would at least like to think you would judge me leniently, even if I hardly seem to deserve it.”

He was quite in earnest now. He had never spoken so to any woman before. When he had left home this afternoon, he had not the slightest idea he should speak so to this woman to-day. He got his answer.

“You need not ask me to judge you leniently. I do not think it would be possible for me ever to judge you at all. Nothing – no one but yourself could ever make me think ill of you.”

She looked up at him with a light in her beautiful eyes as she said these words, that made Beauchamp Chancellor feel strangely unlike his usual equable, comfortable self. Why did she trust him so? Why did she take things so deeply, so in earnest? Why was she not like the ninety-and-nine other girls he had flirted with, and thought pretty, and talked nonsense to, and left none the worse? He felt half provoked with her for being so different, yet a vague instinct whispered to him, that in this very difference lay her peculiar charm.

There were no more têtes-à-têtes. It was getting dusk as they walked home, and they all kept together, and the conversation was general. Sydney wondered a little why Eugenia was so quiet, but supposed she must be suffering from some amount of reaction from her high spirits earlier in the day.

Captain Chancellor bade them good-night at their own door. Sydney fancied his manner a little odd – more abrupt, less self-possessed than usual, when he shook hands with her. He did not call the next day, as she somehow half expected, nor the day after, and Eugenia did not seem surprised. She did not look well, Sydney fancied; and when urged by her sister to tell what was wrong, she confessed, to having felt over fatigued since Saturday’s long walk.

“She has many and many a time walked to Ayclough and back without being tired,” thought Sydney. “There must be something wrong. Can they have quarrelled?”

Possessed with this idea, she watched eagerly for Captain Chancellor’s next appearance, and thought it doubly unlucky that Frank’s absence from home for a day or two should have happened at this crisis, when through him she might have learnt something of what was the matter, and if anything lay within her power to do for her sister. To a superficial observer, poor Sydney, during these few days, would have looked the more anxious and unhappy of the two. It was as sad as strange to her to believe Eugenia in suffering, and to be in ignorance of the cause.

On Thursday evening the sisters were sitting by themselves in the drawing-room, their father busy writing in his own little room, when there came a ring at the front door bell. Up jumped Sydney, her heart beating considerably faster than its wont, her face full of eagerness.

“That must be Frank,” observed Eugenia, quietly.

For the time being, the sisters seemed to have changed characters.

“Frank!” exclaimed Sydney; and though it was five days since she had seen her fiancé, at the supposition, her face fell. “Oh, no, it can’t be Frank! He was not to return till Friday – that’s to-morrow.”

But Frank it was. No trace of disappointment was legible in Eugenia’s countenance as she welcomed him rather more cordially than usual, whereas Sydney’s manner was preoccupied and almost cold. Frank was tired, however, and very glad to be home again; and not being gifted with the quickest perception in the world, discovered nothing amiss. Eugenia rang for tea for him, and he drew in his chair near the fire, and sat there drinking it in comfortable content, telling them all about his journey and adventures, and what a charming little country parsonage he had been staying at – “The very place for you and me, Sydney, when we get old, and past hard work.” And Sydney smiled, without seeming to hear what he was saying. Then a new thought struck Frank.

“Oh, by-the-bye,” he exclaimed, “did you see Chancellor before he left? He went off quite in a hurry at the end. He told me on Saturday evening he was expecting to go soon, but he thought he would be here through this week. And this evening I got a letter from him from some place or other – Wins – something – his home, I suppose – saying how sorry he was not to have seen me, to say good-bye – some family arrangements, he said, had called him off in a hurry at the last.”

“I saw a note in his handwriting addressed to papa on the hall-table. It came by this evening’s post. No doubt, it was saying the same thing,” said Eugenia.

She almost overdid it; even Frank looked up, struck by the strange unfamiliar monotone in which she spoke.

“But he is coming back again. He is certain to come back again, Frank? Tell me, isn’t he quite certain to come back again?” asked Sydney, with a quick, painful eagerness in her voice, as if entreating Frank not to answer no.

He stared at her for a moment, he did not understand her. Had he done so, he might have softened the bluntness of his reply, for he was far from callous or hardhearted to suffering in any shape.

“How interested you seem in his movements, Sydney. I have always thought you didn’t particularly like him. You’ve changed your opinion rather suddenly, surely? Come back again? No, it is very unlikely indeed that he will ever come back again. The 203rd is sure to leave Bridgenorth before Captain Chancellor’s leave is over, and, of course, the Wareborough detachment will go too. The regiment has been quite its time here. Chancellor was aide-de-camp to his cousin, General Conyers, somewhere in Ireland, till he came here – that’s how he happened to be so short a time here.”

“And where will the regiment go to?” inquired Sydney. The words seemed to form themselves mechanically on her lips; a strange feeling came over her that it was really Eugenia, not herself, who was speaking.

“Goodness knows,” answered Frank. “Oh, yes, by-the-bye, I remember Chancellor saying they were next on the roster for foreign service. He said, a few months would see him in India, unless he sold out. I shouldn’t much wonder if he did. I shouldn’t much wonder if – ” he hesitated. For the first time a slight misgiving seemed to come over him; he looked up in some little embarrassment. Eugenia was sitting perfectly still, looking just as usual. He felt reassured.

“If what?” asked Sydney, again with the same feeling of being forced by the intensity of her sister’s anxiety to continue putting these questions against her own will.

“Oh, nothing,” said Frank. “That is to say, it is only a fancy of mine that there may be something between Chancellor and that handsome Miss Eyrecourt. His cousin, isn’t she? I never saw her, but he had rather a constrained way of alluding to her, I noticed, and he had half-a-dozen photographs of her in different attitudes and dresses.”

“I should think it very likely,” said somebody – for the moment Sydney actually did not recognise the voice as her sister’s. “I wonder if papa wants any tea, Sydney. I think I’ll go and see.”

She rose from her seat almost as she spoke, walked quietly to the door, and left the room.

Five minutes later, on some pretext, Sydney followed her – not to Mr Laurence’s study, up to Eugenia’s own room. It was quite dark. Sydney had to feel her way across the floor.

“Eugenia,” she said, softly.

No one answered. She groped her way to the bed. Down at one end a figure was kneeling or crouching, she could not tell which. She felt it was her sister. Round the poor child’s quivering frame stole two clinging, clasping arms; all over her eyes and cheeks and mouth fell tears and kisses.

“Don’t push me away, don’t, Eugenia,” entreated Sydney.

There was a moment’s hesitation – a struggle between pride and old habit of love and confidence for the victory. But pride had had more than its share of work lately; it gave in.

“Oh, Sydney,” came at last, with a convulsive grasp of her sister. “Oh, Sydney, how shall I bear it? I don’t blame him. He couldn’t help it, but I do think my heart is broken.”

Volume One – Chapter Nine.
At Winsley

 
Breathe no love to me,
I will give none of mine.
 

It was late in the evening of the Tuesday succeeding the skating expedition to Ayclough when Captain Chancellor reached Winsley Grange, so late that the only person awake to receive him was a sleepy footman charged with his mistress’s apologies for not having sat up to welcome her brother in person. Beauchamp received the apologies with philosophy, for he was not sorry to defer seeing Mrs Eyrecourt till the next day; he was tired and not quite as comfortable and complacent as usual, and Gertrude’s eyes were dreadfully keen. Then there was Roma too. He had been preparing himself to meet them both, but it was a relief to find he should have a few hours to himself first; he wanted to think things over a little, quietly; he wanted quite thoroughly to satisfy himself of the truth of what he had many times already repeated to himself – that he had certainly acted for the best.

Yes, there could be no doubt that he had done so, he decided, as he sat with his pipe by the fire, after declining the sleepy footman’s offers of “getting him anything” – he had dined in town on his way – he was very well out of it; it wasn’t every man that would have had the strength of mind to cut it short decisively just as a crisis was approaching, for, no doubt, he confessed to himself he had been hit, just the least in the world. She, too, would very soon be all right again, poor little soul; and by some curious code of morality of his own, the reflection that the tools with which he had been playing had scratched him, though it might be but slightly, greatly lessened the discomfort of the half-acknowledged suspicion that they had cut her deeply.

Late as it was, however, he felt he should sleep better if he first wrote a few civil words to her father and to Frank Thurston of apology for, or rather explanation of, his abrupt departure. It must have looked odd, he feared, but he could easily make it all right. Besides, he had told Thurston he should be leaving soon; “family arrangements” had only hastened his movements by a few days; anything was better than the risk of a formal leave-taking, and Gertrude’s letter had just come in the nick of time. So he wrote his notes, and calmly turned the last page of this short chapter in his history, and went to bed believing or imagining that he believed that the little “affaire” was well over, and no one the worse, no results left, as Roma had indirectly prophesied, that would in the least interfere with his old dream of winning her– no results, at least, that she need ever discover, or that would be lasting. He would be quite himself again in a day or two; to-night he felt a little out of sorts, and somehow the old dream was hardly as attractive as usual. No wonder, he had not seen Roma for a good while, and she had bothered him a little the last time they met, and he hated being bothered; besides, is it not human nature to have temporary misgivings as to the excellence of the trellised grapes when the sweetest of strawberries within one’s easy grasp have been a familiar sight?

When Beauchamp woke in the morning he felt already a different man. His spirits had recovered themselves amazingly. It was a bright day for one thing, and it was pleasant to glance lazily round the comfortable, familiar room, and feel he was at home again; to catch sight out of the window of the clear blue sky and the beautiful Winsley trees – beautiful even in winter – instead of leaden Wareborough clouds and grim Wareborough roofs. He was really attached to Winsley, and had reason for being so, for to him and his sister, if not the Grange itself, at least its immediate neighbourhood had always seemed home.

The root of the Chancellor family was to be found in quite another part of the country, but the personal associations of Beauchamp and Mrs Eyrecourt were all connected with Winsley. When they were little children their father had succeeded to the adjoining tiny little property of Winsedge, and there they had lived till, shortly before his death, Winsedge was sold to Mr Eyrecourt of the Grange. And before the young Chancellors had had time to realise that their connection with the neighbourhood was at an end, Gertrude’s marriage to their former lord of the manor riveted it again more strongly than before, for the premature death of their mother, whose life had been a slow martyrdom of vain devotion to a selfish and extravagant husband, soon left Beauchamp, still a boy, with no near friend but his elder sister – no home but hers. And Mrs Eyrecourt had been very kind to her brother, and, while he lived, had influenced her husband to be the same, winning his goodwill towards Beauchamp in part, perhaps, by that which she herself showed to his step-sister, Roma, when she in turn came to be left motherless and homeless.

Winsley Grange was a thoroughly and really “desirable residence.” A long, low, thick-walled, deep-windowed house of no particular architecture, sufficiently picturesque, with its gable ends and lattices, not to disappoint the expectations suggested by its name; old enough for respectability, but not for inconvenience; not too large for the size of the property, nor too grand to be comfortable. To these advantages it united that of a charming situation in the prettiest part of a pretty county, where the society, though undeniably “good,” was – thanks probably to the comparatively near neighbourhood of the capital – but very slightly tainted by that spirit of stupid and indiscriminating exclusiveness so liable to flourish among the lords of the soil in more remote and isolated districts.

So it was – considering all things – only natural that Captain Chancellor should like his sister and his sister’s house, and be always glad to return to them after absence.

“What a bore these people are coming to-day,” he thought to himself, as he went downstairs. “We might have had a comfortable little time to ourselves; that is to say, if I find both Gertrude and Roma in a good humour.”

They were both in very good humour, as he discovered almost immediately he entered the breakfast-room. Mrs Eyrecourt received him with even more than her usual cordiality; so warmly, indeed, as to give rise to a slight suspicion in his mind of there being “something in the wind.” Roma’s manner was cheerful and hearty – so free, apparently, from the slightest tinge of constraint or self-consciousness, that Beauchamp felt puzzled and not altogether pleased, but he took good care to conceal his incipient annoyance, and comported himself as faultlessly and serenely as ever.

“It was very good of you, Beauchamp, to come off so quickly,” said his sister. “I hardly expected you would be able to manage it. How did you do about your leave?”

“Oh, quite easily,” he replied. “I might have had it, you know, since the New-year if I had liked.” Here he surprised a look of curiosity on Roma’s part – a look of “I thought as much,” too, it seemed to him. It hardly suited him now for her to suspect any rival attraction at Wareborough. Lightly as he treated the remembrance of Eugenia, the idea of making use of her as he had once intended had somehow grown distasteful to him, so he went on quietly with his answer to his sister: “I have been so long away from the regiment, I wanted to be as good-natured as I could, and my only taking half my leave was a convenience to one or two of them. I meant, any way, to have come here next week, but it suited me quite as well to come sooner. I got your letter on Saturday evening, and this is only Wednesday. I did not lose much time, did I?”

“No, indeed,” responded Mrs Eyrecourt, very graciously. “I can’t tell you how glad I was to find you were coming. It is so very much nicer to have you here when the Chancellors come, particularly as they are our own relations, you know, and they would have been away by next week.”

“I can’t make out what brings them here, or where you came across them. You condescended to no explanations in your letter – you only said the Halswood Chancellors were coming. I had to think for some time before I could remember anything about them. I had almost forgotten that there was such a place as Halswood,” said Beauchamp.

“I had no idea myself of their coming, till the day I wrote to you,” replied Gertrude. “You see I wrote to Herbert Chancellor when I saw the announcement of the grandfather’s death, to con – ”

“Gratulate him,” suggested Roma, for her sister-in-law had hesitated a little over her condolences.

“I wrote to him,” continued Mrs Eyrecourt, without condescending to notice the interruption, “and of course I said if ever they were in our neighbourhood I should be very much pleased to see them here. Mr Chancellor answered very civilly, and the other day I accidentally heard they were staying at Ferrivale, not twenty miles from here, so I wrote again, making my general invitation a special one, and they accepted it at once. That’s the whole story. You will see them for yourself this afternoon.”

“But who are ‘they’?” cross-questioned her brother. “Mr Chancellor and his wife and all the little Chancellors?”

“There are no little Chancellors. That is to say, only one girl of fourteen or so, besides the eldest daughter, who is out, and the son – there is only one, I thought there were two – who is at Eton,” replied Mrs Eyrecourt.

“Oh, indeed; so it is only Herbert and his wife who are coming,” said Beauchamp, as if he now knew all about it, for he had got scent at last, and wished to provoke his sister into letting him see all that was in her mind.

“Of course not, Beauchamp; how stupid you are!” exclaimed Gertrude. “Why should Herbert and his wife go about the country paying visits, and leave their grown-up daughter at home? She is past eighteen, and out, I told you. And very pretty,” she added, injudiciously.

“Oh, indeed, I understand now,” answered Beauchamp, meekly, and looking across the table, the expression in Roma’s eyes told him that she knew he now did understand.

“Poor dear Gertrude! So that is why I was sent for in such a hurry,” he observed, when, breakfast being over, Roma and he were left by themselves for a short time. “Couldn’t you make her comprehend, Roma, that she might save herself the trouble?”

Miss Eyrecourt was standing by the window, looking over her letters. She seemed perfectly cool and comfortable, in no way embarrassed by finding herself, for the first time for some months, alone with her would-be lover. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and answered quietly and deliberately —

“No, Beauchamp, I certainly could not do anything of the kind. If you have anything to say to Gertrude, you must say it yourself. I am not going to come between you two in any way. I don’t want to meddle in your affairs at all; no advice of mine is likely to do good. Now, Beauchamp,” she went on, in a different tone, half remonstrating, half coaxing, “do let us be nice and comfortable together. And do try not to vex Gertrude, that’s a good boy. If her plans don’t please you, there is time enough to say so, and you need not vex her by seeming determined to thwart her beforehand. Those sorts of schemes generally right themselves – very likely Addie Chancellor is already out of your reach – she it pretty, I have seen her. There, now, after all, I have begun advising and warning you, and I vowed I would never do so again.”

She looked very handsome this morning. She was, as usual, beautifully dressed, and it was some time since Beauchamp had been in the company of a perfectly attired, perfectly well-bred, self-possessed woman of Roma’s order. Beside her, Eugenia Laurence, lovely as she was, rose to his mind’s eye as an unformed child. He was in a mood to be very sensitive to Miss Eyrecourt’s particular attractions, and something in her manner impressed him pleasantly. She seemed softer and less satirical than her wont. There was a half playfulness, a coaxingness in her way of speaking to him which, in his opinion, became her marvellously.

“And why shouldn’t you advise and warn me, Roma?” he asked, softly, going a little nearer her. “You know very well there is no, one in the world I should take advice from half so willingly. Why will you always misunderstand me?”

His tone was growing dangerously tender.

“Oh, silly Beauchamp!” said Roma to herself. Then looking up, “I am glad to hear it,” she observed, rather coldly. “Your have thoroughly acted up to the last piece of advice I gave you, have you not? You remember what it was – that night at the Dalrymples?”

As she spoke, Beauchamp, though looking down, felt conscious that her keen dark eyes were regarding him searchingly. He could not pretend not to understand her, little as he had been prepared for this embarrassing cross-examination, and to his intense annoyance he felt himself slightly change colour. It was very slightly, so slightly that no other eyes would have perceived it, but looking up again boldly to brave out this home-thrust, the ready words died on his lips; he saw that Roma was watching him with an expression not very unlike contempt.

“That Mrs Dalrymple has been writing to her, and she wants to show me she won’t stand it,” thought Beauchamp. He was quite mistaken. Roma knew very little of his life at Wareborough, and, selfishly speaking, cared very little with whom, or to what extent, he chose to flirt. But she did care about the possibly serious results to himself, his sister, and, even indirectly, to herself, of his folly. And she had never been able to forget the bright, sweet face of Eugenia Laurence. She had, however, promised Gertrude to be most discreet in her conduct to Beauchamp. She had no wish to quarrel with him. She was resolved cautiously to steer clear of any sort of “scene.” There was no saying in what contradictory way an explanation with her might affect him, and her great desire was that, without any such crisis, he should gradually arrive at a tacit understanding of her complete indifference.

“Not that I ever have believed, or ever shall believe, he really cares about me,” she had said to her sister-in-law. “It is half of it contradiction, and the other half the accident of our having been so often thrown together when he had no better occupation. Beauchamp would not be Beauchamp if he had not some little affair on hand, and I daresay I am the only woman who has never in the least appreciated his attentions.”

She agreed with Mrs Eyrecourt, that if he would but have the sense to take a fancy to Adelaide Chancellor, it would be the best thing he could do; and she felt not a little provoked with Gertrude for showing her cards so plainly. It could not be helped, however, and now she felt conscious that she too had been foolish in approaching the subject of Eugenia.

“Whatever he has been doing, I cannot make it any better,” she thought, “and I may make it worse.”

So, though she was certain that he perfectly understood to what she referred, she expressed no incredulity when he calmly assured her he did not know to what special piece of advice she was alluding.

“Very well. If you have forgotten it so quickly, we will hope that in this case the cap didn’t fit,” she said, lightly.

And then she went on talking about other things with so evident a determination to avoid all subjects of close personal interest, that Beauchamp could not but follow her lead. And she made herself so pleasant that there was no excuse for his growing sulky. He said to himself she was perverse and tiresome – very few fellows would put up with it as he did, and so on; but in his inmost heart he was not sorry that just at present no love-making seemed to be expected of him; for, after all, he did not feel quite as much inclined for it as usual. More than once during the day his spirits seemed suddenly to desert him. He would find his thoughts straying to the dull house in the outskirts of Wareborough, where, ignore it as he would, he knew full well a girlish heart was growing heavy at his unwonted absence.

“Her father will get my note to-morrow,” he reflected; “and then she won’t expect me any more, and she will soon be all right. Besides, I prepared her for it on Saturday, and she did not seem much surprised. There is nothing to bother about. I have acted for the best, only she is such a queer sort of girl – takes things to heart so. And Roma has evidently not forgotten about her.”

Very evidently Roma had not forgotten about her. Two or three times in the course of the day, she surprised Beauchamp in an absent fit, and disgusted him greatly by inquiring what he was thinking about, what was the matter, what had become of his good spirits, etc, etc, so that by the afternoon, Captain Chancellor had come to feel almost glad that their family party was to be augmented by the expected guests.

As the hour drew near at which the Chancellors were to arrive, Mrs Eyrecourt got quite into a flutter of excitement. Such a state of things was very unusual with her, well accustomed as she was to society and its usages. Beauchamp felt amused. “It is all on my account, I fear, that poor Gertrude is in such a fuss. She is only laying up disappointment for herself. I do wish she would leave me to manage my own affairs,” he thought to himself, though to please her he hung about the house idle all the afternoon, in case of the Halswood party possibly appearing before their time. Gertrude’s excitement was not only on his account, keenly anxious though she was that he and Adelaide Chancellor should impress each other agreeably; there was to Mrs Eyrecourt a peculiar and not unnatural feeling of gratification in receiving as her guests for the first time the head of the family – Mr Chancellor of Halswood himself – and his belongings. For, undoubted as was the position of the Winsley Eyrecourts in their own county and among their own set, that of the owner of Halswood was several pegs higher in the social scale, and Herbert Chancellor had more reason than many people for thinking himself rather a big man. But this second cause of his sister’s “fuss,” Beauchamp’s less excitable, more individually selfish nature neither suspected nor would have sympathised with. It was all very well to “call cousins” with the Halswood people; but Gertrude sometimes bothered herself unnecessarily. In her place, Beauchamp said to himself, he certainly would not have gone out of his way to invite these strangers to take up their abode with them for a whole week. He felt bored even in anticipation. He hoped certainly Roma’s attention would be distracted from teasing him with those silly questions of hers, but he more than half wished he was back at Wareborough.

Things improved, however, to some extent, when the visitors arrived. Mr Chancellor proved to be a pleasant looking, pleasant feeling man, a little too palpably prosperous perhaps, but with sufficient tact and refinement to steer clear of being offensively so; Mrs Chancellor – a still handsome woman, large and fair and languid, was several degrees more a fine lady, than her husband was a fine gentleman, but for this there was the excuse of her having been an heiress, and possessed of a property which she thought far more of than of twenty Halswoods, in days when Herbert had been landless and, comparatively speaking, penniless. And Adelaide, the daughter of this fortunate pair, amiable, pretty, commonplace and silly, was, on the whole, however, rather better than might have been expected. All three were evidently prepared to be pleased, and were graciousness itself to their cousins, and quite sufficiently civil to Miss Eyrecourt, who smiled to herself at the thought of Beauchamp’s desperate position, should it actually prove the case that Gertrude’s scheme was tacitly approved of by the authorities on the other side also.

“It almost looks like it,” she thought, “yet why the Chancellors should wish it, I hardly understand.”

She was not long left in the dark. The party at dinner this first day consisted only of themselves and the three visitors. Captain Chancellor, who had so far shown plainly enough to his sister and Roma, a determination to bestow none of his attentions on Adelaide, talked principally to her mother, and with such good effect that when the ladies retired to the drawing-room, the great lady quite forgot her languor in enthusiastic praise of Beauchamp’s charms.

“It is so odd we have never met before,” she remarked, “for Beauchamp – I must call you both by your Christian names, my dear Gertrude – Beauchamp tells me he has often been staying within a few miles of Wylingham. He knows the Prudhoe-Bettertons, of Prudhoe Castle, I find; charming people. He must not treat us so shabbily when he is next in our neighbourhood. By September, at latest, we shall be settled at home again, and I shall count upon your coming to us – I shall, positively. Beauchamp says he has half promised the Bettertons a few days about then.”

“But we shall be at Halswood then, mamma,” said Adelaide.

“Oh, nonsense, my dear. We shall certainly not be there before Christmas; at least, I devoutly hope not. Halswood is all very well in its way, but at present it is really uninhabitable. You never saw anything so frightful as the state of the house, my dear Gertrude. It wants refurnishing from top to bottom. I should like you to see Wylingham.”

Depreciation of Halswood rather jarred on Mrs Eyrecourt’s Chancellor loyalty. But there was no time for her guest to observe any hesitation in her reply, for just then a loud squeal from the other end of the room made all the ladies jump, and effectually distracted Mrs Chancellor’s attention.

“Floss, you naughty child, what are you screaming in that dreadful way for? Why are you not in bed? I told you to run upstairs as soon as we came out of the dining-room? What is the matter?” exclaimed Gertrude, at no loss to pitch upon the invisible offender.