“I do wish you joy; I will wish you joy; there is my hand,” and she frankly put out her ungloved hand. “You are quite man enough to understand me: there is my hand; I trust you use it only as it is meant to be used.”
He took it in his and pressed it cordially, as he might have done that of any other friend in such a case; and then—did not drop it as he should have done. He was not a St Anthony, and it was most imprudent in Miss Thorne to subject him to such a temptation.
“Mary,” said he; “dear Mary! dearest Mary! if you did but know how I love you!”
As he said this, holding Miss Thorne’s hand, he stood on the pathway with his back towards the lawn and house, and, therefore, did not at first see his sister Augusta, who had just at that moment come upon them. Mary blushed up to her straw hat, and, with a quick jerk, recovered her hand. Augusta saw the motion, and Mary saw that Augusta had seen it.
From my tedious way of telling it, the reader will be led to imagine that the hand-squeezing had been protracted to a duration quite incompatible with any objection to such an arrangement on the part of the lady; but the fault is mine: in no part hers. Were I possessed of a quick spasmodic style of narrative, I should have been able to include it all—Frank’s misbehaviour, Mary’s immediate anger, Augusta’s arrival, and keen, Argus-eyed inspection, and then Mary’s subsequent misery—in five words and half a dozen dashes and inverted commas. The thing should have been so told; for, to do Mary justice, she did not leave her hand in Frank’s a moment longer than she could help herself.
Frank, feeling the hand withdrawn, and hearing, when it was too late, the step on the gravel, turned sharply round. “Oh, it’s you, is it, Augusta? Well, what do you want?”
Augusta was not naturally very illnatured, seeing that in her veins the high de Courcy blood was somewhat tempered by an admixture of the Gresham attributes; nor was she predisposed to make her brother her enemy by publishing to the world any of his little tender peccadilloes; but she could not but bethink herself of what her aunt had been saying as to the danger of any such encounters as that she just now had beheld; she could not but start at seeing her brother thus, on the very brink of the precipice of which the countess had specially forewarned her mother. She, Augusta, was, as she well knew, doing her duty by her family by marrying a tailor’s son for whom she did not care a chip, seeing the tailor’s son was possessed of untold wealth. Now when one member of a household is making a struggle for a family, it is painful to see the benefit of that struggle negatived by the folly of another member. The future Mrs Moffat did feel aggrieved by the fatuity of the young heir, and, consequently, took upon herself to look as much like her Aunt de Courcy as she could do.
“Well, what is it?” said Frank, looking rather disgusted. “What makes you stick your chin up and look in that way?” Frank had hitherto been rather a despot among his sisters, and forgot that the eldest of them was now passing altogether from under his sway to that of the tailor’s son.
“Frank,” said Augusta, in a tone of voice which did honour to the great lessons she had lately received. “Aunt de Courcy wants to see you immediately in the small drawing-room;” and, as she said so, she resolved to say a few words of advice to Miss Thorne as soon as her brother should have left them.
“In the small drawing-room, does she? Well, Mary, we may as well go together, for I suppose it is tea-time now.”
“You had better go at once, Frank,” said Augusta; “the countess will be angry if you keep her waiting. She has been expecting you these twenty minutes. Mary Thorne and I can return together.”
There was something in the tone in which the words, “Mary Thorne,” were uttered, which made Mary at once draw herself up. “I hope,” said she, “that Mary Thorne will never be any hindrance to either of you.”
Frank’s ear had also perceived that there was something in the tone of his sister’s voice not boding comfort to Mary; he perceived that the de Courcy blood in Augusta’s veins was already rebelling against the doctor’s niece on his part, though it had condescended to submit itself to the tailor’s son on her own part.
“Well, I am going,” said he; “but look here Augusta, if you say one word of Mary—”
Oh, Frank! Frank! you boy, you very boy! you goose, you silly goose! Is that the way you make love, desiring one girl not to tell of another, as though you were three children, tearing your frocks and trousers in getting through the same hedge together? Oh, Frank! Frank! you, the full-blown heir of Greshamsbury? You, a man already endowed with a man’s discretion? You, the forward rider, that did but now threaten young Harry Baker and the Honourable John to eclipse them by prowess in the field? You, of age? Why, thou canst not as yet have left thy mother’s apron-string!
“If you say one word of Mary—”
So far had he got in his injunction to his sister, but further than that, in such a case, was he never destined to proceed. Mary’s indignation flashed upon him, striking him dumb long before the sound of her voice reached his ears; and yet she spoke as quick as the words would come to her call, and somewhat loudly too.
“Say one word of Mary, Mr Gresham! And why should she not say as many words of Mary as she may please? I must tell you all now, Augusta! and I must also beg you not to be silent for my sake. As far as I am concerned, tell it to whom you please. This was the second time your brother—”
“Mary, Mary,” said Frank, deprecating her loquacity.
“I beg your pardon, Mr Gresham; you have made it necessary that I should tell your sister all. He has now twice thought it well to amuse himself by saying to me words which it was illnatured in him to speak, and—”
“Illnatured, Mary!”
“Illnatured in him to speak,” continued Mary, “and to which it would be absurd for me to listen. He probably does the same to others,” she added, being unable in heart to forget that sharpest of her wounds, that flirtation of his with Patience Oriel; “but to me it is almost cruel. Another girl might laugh at him, or listen to him, as she would choose; but I can do neither. I shall now keep away from Greshamsbury, at any rate till he has left it; and, Augusta, I can only beg you to understand, that, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing which may not be told to all the world.”
And, so saying, she walked on a little in advance of them, as proud as a queen. Had Lady de Courcy herself met her at this moment, she would almost have felt herself forced to shrink out of the pathway. “Not say a word of me!” she repeated to herself, but still out loud. “No word need be left unsaid on my account; none, none.”
Augusta followed her, dumfounded at her indignation; and Frank also followed, but not in silence. When his first surprise at Mary’s great anger was over, he felt himself called upon to say some word that might tend to exonerate his ladylove; and some word also of protestation as to his own purpose.
“There is nothing to be told, nothing, at least of Mary,” he said, speaking to his sister; “but of me, you may tell this, if you choose to disoblige your brother—that I love Mary Thorne with all my heart; and that I will never love any one else.”
By this time they had reached the lawn, and Mary was able to turn away from the path which led up to the house. As she left them she said in a voice, now low enough, “I cannot prevent him from talking nonsense, Augusta; but you will bear me witness, that I do not willingly hear it.” And, so saying, she started off almost in a run towards the distant part of the gardens, in which she saw Beatrice.
Frank, as he walked up to the house with his sister, endeavoured to induce her to give him a promise that she would tell no tales as to what she had heard and seen.
“Of course, Frank, it must be all nonsense,” she had said; “and you shouldn’t amuse yourself in such a way.”
“Well, but, Guss, come, we have always been friends; don’t let us quarrel just when you are going to be married.” But Augusta would make no promise.
Frank, when he reached the house, found the countess waiting