'I wish they had anything to fall back upon,' said Mrs. Egremont anxiously. 'They are so unwilling to let any one know of their difficulties that I feel as if I never knew in what straits they may be. You will be sure to let me know, Ursula, if there is anything that I can do for them.'
That conversation was a great comfort and help to Nuttie, who was pleased to find herself treated as a real friend by her aunt, and perceived the wisdom of her advice. But the watching over the Mark Egremonts was a very difficult matter to accomplish, for when she went back to London she was warned that Billy had the whooping cough, rendering them unapproachable all the winter, so that she could only hear of them through Mr. Dutton, whom she continued to see occasionally whenever there was anything to communicate. Mr. Egremont rather liked him, and on meeting him in the street, would ask him casually in to dinner, or to make up a rubber, or play piquet, for he excelled in these arts, and still more in chess, and an evening with Mr. Dutton was quite a red-letter time with Nuttie. It gave her an indefinable sense of safety and protection; but it was not always to be had, for her friend had many engagements, being one of the active lay church workers, and devoting two regular evenings in each week to Gerard Godfrey's eastern district, where he kept all the accounts, had a model court and evening class, besides hospitably resting tired clergymen and their wives in his pleasant quiet house.
In the spring Mr. Egremont was laid up with the worst rheumatic attack he had yet had, in consequence of yielding to the imperious will of his son, who had insisted on standing in a bleak corner to see the Life Guards pass by. On this occasion Nuttie did not prove herself the heaven-born nurse that the true heroine ought to be, but was extremely frightened, and altogether dependent on Gregorio, who knew all about the symptoms, and when to send for the doctor and a garde-malade. Gregorio always talked French to Nuttie when he felt himself in the ascendant, as he certainly was at present; but he became much less gracious when he heard that Mrs. William Egremont might be expected, declaring that madame would only excite his master, and that her presence was quite unnecessary. Her coming had been volunteered, but it was a great boon to Ursula, who was thus helped out in many perplexities, although Mrs. Egremont was a great deal at her step-son's, and neither lady was of much avail in the sick-room, during the stress of the illness. It was never actually dangerous, but there was great suffering and much excitement, and for four or five days the distress and anxiety were considerable. After this passed off Ursula was surprised to find her company preferred to that of her aunt. She was a better souffre-douleur, was less of a restraint, and was besides his regular reader and amanuensis, so that as the force of the attack abated, he kept her a good deal in his room during the latter part of the day, imparting scraps of intelligence, skimming the papers for him, and reading his letters.
There was a lease to be signed, and, as soon as might be, Mr. Bulfinch, the Redcastle solicitor, brought it up, and had to be entertained at luncheon. While he was waiting in the drawing-room for Mr. Egremont to be made ready for him, he looked with deep interest on the little heir, whom Ursula presently led off to the other end of the room to the hoard of downstair toys; and an elaborate camp was under construction, when by the fireside, the Canoness inquired in a low confidential tone, 'May I ask whether you came about a will?'
'No, Mrs. Egremont. I wish I were. It is only about the lease of Spinneycotes farm.'
'Then there is none?'
'None that I am aware of. None has ever been drawn up by us. Indeed, I was wishing that some influence could be brought to bear which might show the expedience of making some arrangement. Any melancholy event is, I trust, far distant, but contingencies should be provided for.'
'Exactly so. He is recovering now, but these attacks always leave effects on the heart, and at his age, with his habits, no one knows what may happen. Of course it would not make much difference to the boy.'
'No, the Court of Chancery would appoint the most suitable natural guardians.'
'But,' said Mrs. Egremont, 'I am afraid that the personal property when divided would not be much of a provision for her.'
'You are right. The investments are unfortunately and disproportionately small.'
'She ought either to have them all, or there should be a charge on the estate,' said the Canoness decisively. 'If possible, he must be made to move.'
'Oh, don't!' cried Nuttie, jumping up from the floor. 'He mustn't be upset on any account.'
'My dear, I had no notion that you heard us!' exclaimed her aunt. 'I thought Alwyn was making too much noise with his soldiers.'
'I beg your pardon,' said Nuttie, 'perhaps I should have spoken sooner, but indeed he must not be worried and disturbed,' she added, somewhat fiercely.
'Don't be afraid, my dear,' said her aunt. 'Mr. Bulfinch knows that your father is in no condition to have such matters brought before him.'
'Certainly,' said the old lawyer politely;' and we will trust that Miss Egremont's prospects may soon come forward on a more auspicious occasion.'
Nuttie could have beaten him, but she was obliged to content herself with such a sweeping charge of her Zulus among Alwyn's Englishmen, that their general shrieked out in indignation against such a variation of the accustomed programme of all their games.
Nuttie thought she had defended her patient sufficiently, but she found she had been mistaken, for when her aunt had left them, some days later, her father began, 'We are well quit of her. Those troublesome dictatorial women always get worse when they are left widows--taking upon them to say what their dear husbands would have said, forsooth.'
'Aunt Jane was very kind to me,' said Ursula, not in the least knowing what he was thinking of.
'To you. Ay, I should think so, taking upon her to lecture me about securing a provision for you.'
'Oh! I hoped--'
'What?' he broke in. 'You knew of it! You set her on, I suppose.'
'Oh! no, no, father. She and Mr. Bulfinch began about it, not meaning me to hear--about a will, I mean--and I told them I wasn't going to have you worried, and I thought I had stopped it altogether.'
'Stop a woman bent on her duty? Hein! But you are a good girl, and shall come to no loss when we have to make your marriage settlement.'
'You won't have to do that, father!'
'Hein! What do you keep that poor fellow Clarence Fane dangling in attendance on you for? '
'I don't! I'm sure I don't want him. I would do anything to keep him at a distance!'
'How now! I thought your Grace condescended to him more than to any one else.'
'I don't dislike him unless he has _that_ in his head; but as to marrying him! Oh--h--h,' such a note of horror that elicited a little laugh.
'So hot against him, are we? Who is it then? Not the umbrella fellow?'
'Father! how can you?' she cried, with a burning flush of indignation. He--why--he! He has always been a sort of uncle, ever since I was a little girl.'
'Oh yes, adopted uncles are very devout when young ladies rush out to morning prayers at unearthly hours--'
'Father!' with her voice trembling, 'I assure you he doesn't--I mean he always goes to St. Michael's, unless he has anything particular to say to me.'
'Oh yes, I understand,' and Mr. Egremont indulged in a hearty laugh, which almost drove poor Nuttie beside herself.
'Indeed--indeed,' she stammered, in her confusion and suppressed wrath; 'it is nothing of that sort. He is a regular old bachelor--he always was.'
'At what age do men become old bachelors? For he seems to me about the age of poor Clarry, whom you seem to view as a bugbear.'
'I wish you would not think of such things, father; I have not the slightest intention of leaving you and dear little Wynnie! Nothing should tempt me!'
'Nothing? Hein! Then you may as well be on your guard, Miss Egremont, or we shall have pleadings that you have encouraged them-- church and world--or both, maybe. You pious folk take your little diversions and flirtations just like your poor sisters whom you sh
ake your heads at, never guessing how Gregorio and I have looked out at you and your adopted uncle parading the street.'
'I wish Gregorio would mind his own business, and not put such things in your head!' burst out Nuttie.
At which Mr. Egremont laughed longer and louder than ever.
Poor Nuttie! It was terrible discomfiture, not only for the moment, but a notion had been planted in her mind that seemed cruel, almost profane, and yet which would not be dismissed, and made her heart leap with strange bounds at the wild thought, 'Could it be true?' then sink again with shame at her own presumptuous folly in entertaining such a thought for a moment.
Yet whenever she actually encountered Mr. Dutton her habitual comfort and reliance on him revived, and dispelled all the embarrassment which at other times she expected to feel in his presence.
CHAPTER XXXI. SPES NON FRACTA.
Summer had quite set in before Mr. Egremont was able to go out for a drive, and then he was ordered to Buxton.
Nuttie only once saw her cousins before leaving town, for their little boy fulfilled the nursery superstition by whooping till May; and all intercourse was prohibited, till he had ceased for a whole week to utter a suspicious sound. Mr. Dutton had insisted on the family spending a fortnight at Springfield House for change of air, and it was there that Nuttie was permitted to see them, though the children were still forbidden to meet.
Annaple looked very thin, but rattled as merrily as ever. 'No one could guess,' she said, 'what a delight it was not to know what one was to have for dinner?'
'To do more than know, I am afraid,' said Ursula.
'Well, next to the delight of knowing nothing at all about it--and even that is only good for a holiday--is the delight of seeing a pudding come out smooth and comfortable and unbroken from its basin. "Something attempted, something done," you know. It is quite as good a work of art as a water-coloured drawing.'
'Only not quite so permanent.'
'No; it is only one's first pudding that one wants to embalm in a glass case for being so good as not to leave its better part behind in the basin, or to collapse as soon as it is in the dish.'
'Which my puddings always did in the happy days of old, but then I was always hunted ignominiously out of the kitchen and told I wasted good food,' said Nuttie.
'Yes, and waste is fearful when Mark and Billy have to eat it all the same, like the poor cows with spoilt hay. I wonder whether your old experiences recall the joy of finding trustworthy eggs within your price.'
'Ah, I was not housekeeper. I only remember being in disgrace for grumbling when there was no pudding, because the hens would not lay.'
'Though I heard a woman declaring the other day that there ought to be a machine for them. Oh, the scenes that I encounter when I am marketing! If I only could describe them for Punch! I walked home once with our porter's wife, carrying two most brilliant sticks of rhubarb, all carmine stalk and gamboge leaf, and expressing a very natural opinion that the rhubarb tree must be very showy to look at, and curious to know in what kind of fruit the medicine grew.'
'Oh, Annaple! do you go yourself in that way?'
'Mark used to go with me, but, poor old fellow, he has ruinous ideas about prices and quantities, and besides, now he is so hard worked-up and down all day--he wants a little more of his bed in the morning.'
'And what do you want?'
'I never was a sleepy creature, and I get back in time to dress the boy. I generally find him at high-jinks on his father's bed. It uses up a little superfluous energy before the dressing.'
'But surely you have a servant now?'
'I've come to the conclusion that a workman's wife charing is a better institution. No. 1, a pet of Miss Nugent's, was a nice creature, but the London air did for her at once. No. 2, also from Micklethwayte, instantly set up a young man, highly respectable, and ready to marry on the spot, as they did, though their united ages don't amount to thirty-nine. No. 3 was a Cockney, and couldn't stay because the look-out was so dull; and No. 4 gossiped with her kind when I thought her safe in the Temple Gardens with Billy, whereby he caught the whooping-cough, and as she also took the liberty of wearing my fur cloak, and was not particular as to accuracy, we parted on short notice; and I got this woman to come in every day to scrub, help make the bed, etc. It is much less trouble, and the only fault I have to find with her is an absolute incapability of discerning blacks. I believe she thinks I have a monomania against them.'
Still Annaple insisted that she did not work half so hard as her nieces, Muriel and Janet, in their London season, and that her economy was not nearly so trying and difficult as that which Lady Delmar had been practising for years in order to afford them a summer there; nor was her anxiety to make both ends meet by any means equal to her sister's in keeping up appearances, and avoiding detrimentals. The two sisters met occasionally, but Lady Delmar was so compassionate and patronising that Annaple's spirit recoiled in off- hand levity and rattle, and neither regretted the occupation that prevented them from seeing much of one another.
A year passed by, chiefly spent by Mr. Egremont in the pursuit of comparative health, at Buxton, Bagneres, and Biarritz, during which his daughter could do little but attend to him and to little Alwyn. The boy had been enough left to her and nurse during his father's acute illness to have become more amenable. He was an affectionate child, inheriting, with his mother's face, her sweetness and docility of nature, and he was old enough to be a good deal impressed with the fact that he had made poor papa so ill by teasing him to stand in the cold. Mr. Egremont was not at rest without a sight of the child every day, if only for a moment, and the helplessness and suffering had awed the little fellow a good deal. It was touching to see him pause when galloping about the house when he went past the sick-room, and hush his merry voice of his own accord.
And in the journeys, when his father's invalided state would have made a fractious or wilful child a serious inconvenience, his good temper and contentment were invaluable. He would sit for hours on his sister's lap, listening to whispered oft-told tales, or playing at impromptu quiet games; he could go to sleep anywhere, and the wonderful discoveries he made at each new place were the amusement of all his auditors. Sister was always his playfellow and companion whenever she could be spared from her father, and she had an ever- increasing influence over him which she did her best to raise into principle.
Perhaps she never had a happier moment than when she heard how he had put his hands behind him and steadily refused when Gregorio had offered to regale him at a stall of bonbons forming only a thin crust to liqueurs, which unfortunately he had already been taught to like.
'But I told him sister said I mustn't have them,' said Alwyn. 'And then he made a face and said something in French about you. I know 'twas you, for he said "soeur." What was it?'
'Never mind, Wynnie dear. We had much better never know. You were sister's own dear steadfast boy, and you shall kiss mother's picture.'
Nuttie had a beautiful coloured photograph of her mother, finished like a miniature, which had been taken at Nice, in the time of Alice Egremont's most complete and matured beauty. She had taught Alwyn to kiss and greet it every evening before his prayers, and such a kiss was his reward when he had shown any special act of goodness, for which, as she told him, 'mother would have been pleased with her little son.'
Such another boon was his one Sunday evening at Biarritz, when she found that while she was shut up at dinner with her father he had voluntarily gone to church with nurse instead of playing on the beach with some other English children. 'It was all very long and tiresome,' he said, when asked if he liked it.
'Then why did you go, old man? There was no need to drag you there,' said his father.
'She didn't drag me,' said the boy; 'I walked.'
'You need not have walked then, Master Dignity.'
'Poor nursie couldn't go without me,' said Alwyn, 'and sister says there's a blessing on those that go.'
'A blessing? eh! and what idea
does that little head entertain of a blessing?' said Mr. Egremont.
Alwyn lifted his soft brown eyes reverently and said, 'It is something good,' speaking, as he always did, in a baby lisp inimitable here.
'Well?'
'And it comes from God.'
'Well, what is it? Can you see it?'
'No'--he looked in perplexity towards Nuttie, who was in agony all the time, lest there should be a scoff that might remain in the child's mind.
'Never mind sister. Can you feel it?'
'Yes;' and the little face lighted with such a reality that the incipient mockery turned into wonder on the next question.
'And how does it feel?'
'Oh, so nice! It makes Wynnie glad here,' and he spread his hands over his breast; and gave a little caper like a kid for very gladness.
'There!' said Mr. Egremont, leaning back fairly conquered. 'Any one might envy Wynnie! Goodnight, my boy, blessing and all. I wonder if one felt like that when one was a little shaver,' he pursued, as Alwyn went off to his bed.
'I think I did sometimes,' said Nuttie, 'but I never was half as good as Wynnie!'
'What?' exclaimed her father. 'You! bred up among the saints.'
'Ah! but I hadn't the same nature. I never was like--_her_.'
'Well--'tis very pretty now, and I don't know how we could stand a young Turk, but you mustn't make a girl of him.'
'There's no fear of that,' said Nuttie. 'He is full of spirit. That old bathing woman calls him "un vrai petit diable d'Anglais," he is so venturous.'
Which delighted Mr. Egremont as much as the concession that the boy's faith was 'pretty' delighted Ursula. Indeed, he went a little further, for when she came back from her few minutes at Alwyn's bedside he proceeded to tell her of the absolute neglect in which his mother, a belle of the Almacks days, had left her nursery. It was the first time he had ever hinted at a shadow of perception that anything in his own life had been amiss, and Ursula could not but feel a dreamy, hopeful wonder whether her sweet little Alwyn could be the destined means of doing that in which her mother had failed. It was at least enough to quicken those prayers which had been more dutiful than trustful.
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