Norah’s dark, handsome face brightened into a smile – then lightly clouded again with its accustomed quiet reserve.
‘A very little headache; not half enough to make me regret the concert,’ she said, and walked away by herself to the window.
On the far side of a garden and paddock, the view overlooked a stream, some farm-buildings which lay beyond, and the opening of a wooded rocky pass (called, in Somersetshire, a Combe), which here cleft its way through the hills that closed the prospect. A winding strip of road was visible, at no great distance, amid the undulations of the open ground; and along this strip the stalwart figure of Mr Vanstone was now easily recognizable, returning to the house from his morning walk. He flourished his stick gaily, as he observed his eldest daughter at the window. She nodded and waved her hand in return, very gracefully and prettily – but with something of old-fashioned formality in her manner, which looked strangely in so young a woman, and which seemed out of harmony with a salutation addressed to her father.
The hall-clock struck the adjourned breakfast-hour. When the minute-hand had recorded the lapse of five minutes more, a door banged in the bedroom regions – a clear young voice was heard singing blithely – light rapid footsteps pattered on the upper stairs, descended with a jump to the landing, and pattered again, faster than ever, down the lower flight. In another moment, the youngest of Mr Vanstone’s two daughters (and two only surviving children) dashed into view on the dingy old oaken stairs, with the suddenness of a flash of light; and clearing the last three steps into the hall at a jump, presented herself breathless in the breakfast-room, to make the family circle complete.
By one of those strange caprices of Nature, which science leaves still unexplained, the youngest of Mr Vanstone’s children presented no recognizable resemblance to either of her parents. How had she come by her hair? how had she come by her eyes? Even her father and mother had asked themselves those questions, as she grew up to girlhood, and had been sorely perplexed to answer them. Her hair was of that purely light-brown hue, unmixed with flaxen, or yellow, or red – which is oftener seen on the plumage of a bird than on the head of a human being. It was soft and plentiful, and waved downward from her low forehead in regular folds – but, to some tastes, it was dull and dead, in its absolute want of glossiness, in its monotonous purity of plain light colour. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were just a shade darker than her hair, and seemed made expressly for those violet-blue eyes, which assert their most irresistible charm when associated with a fair complexion. But it was here exactly that the promise of her face failed of performance in the most startling manner. The eyes, which should have been dark, were incomprehensibly and discordantly light: they were of that nearly colourless grey, which, though little attractive in itself, possesses the rare compensating merit of interpreting the finest gradations of thought, the gentlest changes of feeling, the deepest trouble of passion, with a subtle transparency of expression which no darker eyes can rival. Thus quaintly self-contradictory in the upper part of her face, she was hardly less at variance with established ideas of harmony in the lower. Her lips had the true feminine delicacy of form, her cheeks the lovely roundness and smoothness of youth – but the mouth was too large and firm, the chin too square and massive for her sex and age. Her complexion partook of the pure monotony of tint which characterized her hair – it was of the same soft warm creamy fairness all over, without a tinge of colour in the cheeks, except on occasions of unusual bodily exertion, or sudden mental disturbance. The whole countenance – so remarkable in its strongly-opposed characteristics – was rendered additionally striking by its extraordinary mobility. The large, electric, light-grey eyes were hardly ever in repose; all varieties of expression followed each other over the plastic, ever-changing face, with a giddy rapidity which left sober analysis far behind in the race. The girl’s exuberant vitality asserted itself all over her, from head to foot. Her figure – taller than her sister’s, taller than the average of woman’s height; instinct with such a seductive, serpentine suppleness, so lightly and playfully graceful, that its movements suggested, not unnaturally, the movements of a young cat – her figure was so perfectly developed already that no one who saw her could have supposed that she was only eighteen. She bloomed in the full physical maturity of twenty years or more – bloomed naturally and irresistibly, in right of her matchless health and strength. Here, in truth, lay the mainspring of this strangely-constituted organization. Her headlong course down the house stairs; the brisk activity of all her movements; the incessant sparkle of expression in her face; the enticing gaiety which took the hearts of the quietest people by storm – even the reckless delight in bright colours, which showed itself in her brilliantly-striped morning dress, in her fluttering ribbons, in the large scarlet rosettes on her smart little shoes – all sprang alike from the same source; from the overflowing physical health which strengthened every muscle, braced every nerve, and set the warm young blood tingling through her veins, like the blood of a growing child.
On her entry into the breakfast-room, she was saluted with the customary remonstrance which her flighty disregard of all punctuality habitually provoked from the long-suffering household authorities. In Miss Garth’s favourite phrase, ‘Magdalen was born with all the senses – except a sense of order’.
Magdalen! It was a strange name to have given her? Strange, indeed; and yet, chosen under no extraordinary circumstances. The name had been borne by one of Mr Vanstone’s sisters, who had died in early youth; and, in affectionate remembrance of her, he had called his second daughter by it – just as he had called his eldest daughter Norah, for his wife’s sake. Magdalen! Surely, the grand old Bible name – suggestive of a sad and sombre dignity; recalling, in its first association, mournful ideas of penitence and seclusion2 – had been here, as events had turned out, inappropriately bestowed? Surely, this self-contradictory girl had perversely accomplished one contradiction more, by developing into a character which was out of all harmony with her own Christian name!
‘Late again!’ said Mrs Vanstone, as Magdalen breathlessly kissed her.
‘Late again!’ chimed in Miss Garth, when Magdalen came her way next. ‘Well?’ she went on, taking the girl’s chin familiarly in her hand, with a half-satirical, half-fond attention which betrayed that the youngest daughter, with all her faults, was the governess’s favourite – ‘Well? and what has the concert done for you? What form of suffering has dissipation inflicted on your system, this morning?’
‘Suffering!’ repeated Magdalen, recovering her breath, and the use of her tongue with it. ‘I don’t know the meaning of the word: if there’s anything the matter with me, I’m too well. Suffering! I’m ready for another concert to-night, and a ball to-morrow, and a play the day after. Oh,’ cried Magdalen, dropping into a chair and crossing her hands rapturously on the table, ‘how I do like pleasure!’
‘Come! that’s explicit at any rate,’ said Miss Garth. ‘I think Pope must have had you in his mind, when he wrote his famous lines:
‘“Men some to business, some to pleasure take,
But every woman is at heart a rake.”’3
‘The deuce she is!’ cried Mr Vanstone, entering the room while Miss Garth was making her quotation, with the dogs at his heels. ‘Well; live and learn. If you’re all rakes, Miss Garth, the sexes are turned topsy-turvy with a vengeance; and the men will have nothing left for it, but to stop at home and darn the stockings. – Let’s have some breakfast.’
‘How-d’ye-do, papa?’ said Magdalen, taking Mr Vanstone as boisterously round the neck, as if he belonged to some larger order of Newfoundland dog, and was made to be romped with at his daughter’s convenience. ‘I’m the rake Miss Garth means; and I want to go to another concert – or a play, if you like – or a ball, if you prefer it – or, anything else in the way of amusement that puts me into a new dress, and plunges me into a crowd of people, and illuminates me with plenty of light, and sets me in a tingle of excitement all over, from head to foot. An
ything will do, as long as it doesn’t send us to bed at eleven o’clock.’
Mr Vanstone sat down composedly under his daughter’s flow of language, like a man who was well used to verbal inundation from that quarter. ‘If I am to be allowed my choice of amusements next time,’ said the worthy gentleman, ‘I think a play will suit me better than a concert. The girls enjoyed themselves amazingly, my dear,’ he continued, addressing his wife. ‘More than I did, I must say. It was altogther above my mark. They played one piece of music which lasted forty minutes. It stopped three times by the way; and we all thought it was done each time, and clapped our hands, rejoiced to be rid of it. But on it went again, to our great surprise and mortification, till we gave it up in despair, and all wished ourselves at Jericho. Norah, my dear! when we had Crash-Bang for forty minutes, with three stoppages by the way, what did they call it?’
‘A Symphony, papa,’ replied Norah.
‘Yes, you darling old Goth, a Symphony by the great Beethoven!’ added Magdalen. ‘How can you say you were not amused? Have you forgotten the yellow-looking foreign woman, with the unpronounceable name? Don’t you remember the faces she made when she sang? and the way she curtseyed and curtseyed, till she cheated the foolish people into crying encore? Look here, mamma – look here, Miss Garth!’
She snatched up an empty plate from the table, to represent a sheet of music, held it before her in the established concert-room position, and produced an imitation of the unfortunate singer’s grimaces and curtseyings, so accurately and quaintly true to the original, that her father roared with laughter; and even the footman (who came in at that moment, with the post-bag) rushed out of the room again, and committed the indecorum of echoing his master audibly on the other side of the door.
‘Letters, papa. I want the key,’ said Magdalen, passing from the imitation at the breakfast-table to the post-bag on the sideboard, with the easy abruptness which characterized all her actions.
Mr Vanstone searched his pockets and shook his head. Though his youngest daughter might resemble him in nothing else, it was easy to see where Magdalen’s unmethodical habits came from.
‘I dare say I have left it in the library, along with my other keys,’ said Mr Vanstone. ‘Go and look for it, my dear.’
‘You really should check Magdalen,’ pleaded Mrs Vanstone, addressing her husband, when her daughter had left the room. ‘Those habits of mimicry are growing on her; and she speaks to you with a levity which it is positively shocking to hear.’
‘Exactly what I have said myself, till I am tired of repeating it,’ remarked Miss Garth. ‘She treats Mr Vanstone as if he was a kind of younger brother of hers.’
‘You are kind to us in everything else, papa; and you make kind allowance for Magdalen’s high spirits – don’t you?’ said the quiet Norah, taking her father’s part and her sister’s, with so little show of resolution on the surface, that few observers would have been sharp enough to detect the genuine substance beneath it.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ said good-natured Mr Vanstone. ‘Thank you, for a very pretty speech. As for Magdalen,’ he continued, addressing his wife and Miss Garth, ‘she’s an unbroken filly. Let her caper and kick in the paddock to her heart’s content. Time enough to break her to harness, when she gets a little older.’
The door opened, and Magdalen returned with the key. She unlocked the post-bag at the sideboard and poured out the letters in a heap. Sorting them gaily in less than a minute, she approached the breakfast-table with both hands full; and delivered the letters all round with the business-like rapidity of a London postman.
‘Two for Norah,’ she announced, beginning with her sister. ‘Three for Miss Garth. None for mamma. One for me. And the other six all for papa. You lazy old darling, you hate answering letters, don’t you?’ pursued Magdalen, dropping the postman’s character, and assuming the daughter’s. ‘How you will grumble and fidget in the study! and how you will wish there were no such things as letters in the world! and how red your nice old bald head will get at the top with the worry of writing the answers; and how many of the answers you will leave until tomorrow after all! The Bristol Theatre’s open, papa,’ she whispered, slily and suddenly in her father’s ear; ‘I saw it in the newspaper when I went to the library to get the key. Let’s go to-morrow night!’
While his daughter was chattering, Mr Vanstone was mechanically sorting his letters. He turned over the first four, in succession, and looked carelessly at the addresses. When he came to the fifth, his attention, which had hitherto wandered towards Magdalen, suddenly became fixed on the post-mark of the letter.
Stooping over him, with her head on his shoulder, Magdalen could see the post-mark as plainly as her father saw it: NEW ORLEANS.
‘An American letter, papa!’ she said. ‘Who do you know at New Orleans?’
Mrs Vanstone started, and looked eagerly at her husband, the moment Magdalen spoke those words.
Mr Vanstone said nothing. He quietly removed his daughter’s arm from his neck, as if he wished to be free from all interruption. She returned accordingly to her place at the breakfast-table. Her father, with the letter in his hand, waited a little before he opened it; her mother looking at him, the while, with an eager expectant attention, which attracted Miss Garth’s notice, and Norah’s, as well as Magdalen’s.
After a minute or more of hesitation, Mr Vanstone opened the letter.
His face changed colour the instant he read the first lines; his cheeks fading to a dull, yellow-brown hue, which would have been ashy paleness in a less florid man; and his expression becoming saddened and overclouded in a moment. Norah and Magdalen, watching anxiously, saw nothing but the change that passed over their father. Miss Garth alone observed the effect which that change produced on the attentive mistress of the house.
It was not the effect which she, or any one, could have anticipated. Mrs Vanstone looked excited rather than alarmed. A faint flush rose on her cheeks – her eyes brightened – she stirred the tea round and round in her cup in a restless impatient manner which was not natural to her.
Magdalen, in her capacity of spoilt child, was, as usual, the first to break the silence.
‘What is the matter, papa?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Mr Vanstone, sharply, without looking up at her.
‘I’m sure there must be something,’ persisted Magdalen. ‘I’m sure there is bad news, papa, in that American letter.’
‘There is nothing in the letter that concerns you,’ said Mr Vanstone.
It was the first direct rebuff that Magdalen had ever received from her father. She looked at him with an incredulous surprise, which would have been irresistibly absurd under less serious circumstances.
Nothing more was said. For the first time, perhaps, in their lives, the family sat round the breakfast-table in painful silence. Mr Vanstone’s hearty morning appetite, like his hearty morning spirits, was gone. He absently broke off some morsels of dry toast from the rack near him, absently finished his first cup of tea – then asked for a second, which he left before him untouched.
‘Norah,’ he said, after an interval, ‘you needn’t wait for me. Magdalen, my dear, you can go when you like.’
His daughters rose immediately; and Miss Garth considerately followed their example. When an easy-tempered man does assert himself in his family, the rarity of the demonstration invariably has its effect; and the will of that easy-tempered man is Law.
‘What can have happened?’ whispered Norah, as they closed the breakfast-room door, and crossed the hall.
‘What does papa mean by being cross with Me?’ exclaimed Magdalen, chafing under a sense of her own injuries.
‘May I ask what right you had to pry into your father’s private affairs?’ retorted Miss Garth.
‘Right?’ repeated Magdalen. ‘I have no secrets from papa – what business has papa to have secrets from me! I consider myself insulted.’
‘If you considered yourself properly reproved for not minding your
own business,’ said the plain-spoken Miss Garth, ‘you would be a trifle nearer the truth. Ah! you are like all the rest of the girls in the present day. Not one in a hundred of you knows which end of her’s uppermost.’
The three ladies entered the morning-room; and Magdalen acknowledged Miss Garth’s reproof by banging the door.
Half an hour passed, and neither Mr Vanstone nor his wife left the breakfast-room. The servant, ignorant of what had happened, went in to clear the table – found his master and mistress seated close together in deep consultation – and immediately went out again. Another quarter of an hour elapsed before the breakfast-room door was opened, and the private conference of the husband and wife came to an end.
‘I hear mamma in the hall,’ said Norah. ‘Perhaps she is coming to tell us something.’
Mrs Vanstone entered the morning-room as her daughter spoke. The colour was deeper on her cheeks, and the brightness of half-dried tears glistened in her eyes; her step was more hasty, all her movements were quicker than usual.
‘I bring news, my dears, which will surprise you,’ she said, addressing her daughters. ‘Your father and I are going to London to-morrow.’
Magdalen caught her mother by the arm in speechless astonishment; Miss Garth dropped her work on her lap; even the sedate Norah started to her feet, and amazedly repeated the words, ‘Going to London!’
‘Without us?’ added Magdalen.
‘Your father and I are going alone,’ said Mrs Vanstone. ‘Perhaps, for as long as three weeks – but not longer. We are going’ – she hesitated – ‘we are going on important family business. Don’t hold me, Magdalen. This is a sudden necessity – I have a great deal to do to-day – many things to set in order before to-morrow. There, there, my love, let me go.’
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