The Curate in Charge. Oliphant Margaret

not the “Blue Danube” that was being played, but the old Lancers, the which to hear is enough to make wooden legs dance. Cicely and Mab pressed each other’s arms, and glanced up at the window, where dancing shadows and figures were visible. They sighed, and they went into their garret, avoiding the tacit disapproval of Miss Blandy’s good-night. She did not approve of twilight walks. Why should they want to go out just then like the tradespeople, a thing which ladies never did? But if Miss Blandy had known that the girls were quite saddened by the sound of the music from the Robinsons’, and yet could not sleep for listening to it, I fear she would have thought them very improper young persons indeed. She had forgotten how it felt to be eighteen – it was so long ago.

      On the very next morning the news came of their stepmother’s death. It was entirely unexpected by them, for they had no idea of the gradual weakness which had been stealing over that poor little woman, and they were moved by deep compunction as well as natural regret. It is impossible not to feel that we might have been kinder, might have made life happier to those that are gone – a feeling experienced the moment that we know them to be certainly gone, and inaccessible to all kindness. “Oh, poor Mrs. St. John!” said Mab, dropping a few natural tears. Cicely was more deeply affected. She was the eldest and had thought the most; as for the young artist, her feeling ran into the tips of her fingers, and got expansion there; but Cicely had no such medium. She went about mournfully all day long, and in the evening Mab found her seated at the window of their attic, looking out with her eyes big with tears upon the darkening sea. When her sister touched her on the shoulder Cicely’s tears fell. “Oh, poor Miss Brown!” she said, her heart having gone back to the time when they had no grievance against their kind little governess. “Oh, Mab, if one could only tell her how one was sorry! if she could only see into my heart now!”

      “Perhaps she can,” said Mab, awe-stricken and almost under her breath, lifting her eyes to the clear wistful horizon in which the evening star had just risen.

      “And one could have said it only yesterday!” said Cicely, realizing for the first time that mystery of absolute severance; and what light thoughts had been in their minds yesterday! Sighs for Alice Robinson’s ball, depression of soul and spirit caused by the distant strains of the Lancers, and the “Blue Danube” – while this tragedy was going on, and the poor soul who had been good to them, but to whom they had not been good, was departing, altogether and for ever out of reach. Cicely in her sorrow blamed herself unjustly, as was natural, and mourned for the mystery of human shortsightedness as well as for Mrs. St. John. But I do not mean to say that this grief was very profound after the first sting, and after that startling impression of the impossibility of further intercourse was over. The girls went out quietly in the afternoon, and bought black stuff to make themselves mourning, and spoke to each other in low voices and grave tones. Their youthful vigour was subdued – they were overawed to feel as it were the wings of the great Death-Angel overshadowing them. The very sunshine looked dim, and the world enveloped in a cloud. But it was within a week or two of Miss Blandy’s “breaking up,” and they could not go away immediately. Miss Blandy half audibly expressed her satisfaction that Mrs. St. John was only their step-mother. “Had she been their own mother, what should we have done?” she said. So that it was not till the end of July, when the establishment broke up, that the girls were at last able to get home.

      CHAPTER VI

      THE GIRLS AT HOME

      WE are so proud in England of having a word which means home, which some of our neighbours we are pleased to think have not, that, perhaps, it is a temptation to us to indulge in a general rapture over the word which has sometimes little foundation in reality. When Cicely and Mab walked to the rectory together from the station a suppressed excitement was in their minds. Since they first left for school, they had only come back for a few days each year, and they had not liked it. Their stepmother had been very kind, painfully kind; and anxious above measure that they should find everything as they had left it, and should not be disappointed or dull; but this very anxiety had made an end of all natural ease, and they had been glad when the moment came that released them. Now, poor woman, she had been removed out of their way; they were going back to take care of their father as they might have done had there been no second Mrs. St. John; and everything was as it had been, with the addition of the two babies, innocent little intruders, whom the girls, you may be sure, could never find it in their hearts to be hard upon. Cicely and Mab took each others’ hands instinctively as they left the station. It was the first of August, the very prime and glory of summer; the woods were at their fullest, untouched by any symptom of decay. The moorland side of the landscape was more wealthy and glorious still in its flush of heather. The common was not indeed one sheet of purple, like a Scotch moor; but it was all lighted up between the gorse bushes with fantastic streaks and bands of colour blazing in the broad sunshine, and haunted by swarms of bees which made a hum in the air almost as sweet and all-pervading as the murmur of the sea. As they drew near the house their hearts began to beat louder. Would there be any visible change upon it? Would it look as it did when they were children, or with that indefinable difference which showed in her time? They did not venture to go the familiar way by the garden, but walked up solemnly like visitors to the front door. It was opened to them by a new maid, whom they had never seen before, and who demurred slightly to giving them admittance, “Master ain’t in,” said the girl; “yes miss, I know as you’re expected,” but still she hesitated. This was not the kind of welcome which the daughters of a house generally receive. They went in to the house nevertheless, Betsy following them. The blinds were drawn low over the windows, which were all shut, and though the atmosphere was stifling with heat, yet it was cold, miserably cold to Cicely and Mab. Their father’s study was the only place that had any life in it. The rectory seemed full of nothing but old black heavy furniture, and heavier memories of some chilled and faded past.

      “What a dreadful old place it is,” said Mab; “it is like coming home to one’s grave,” and she sat down on the black haircloth easy-chair and shivered and cried; though this was coming home, to the house in which she had been born.

      “Now it will be better,” said Cicely pulling up the blinds and opening the window. She had more command of herself than her sister. She let the sunshine come down in a flood across the dingy carpet, worn with the use of twenty years.

      “Please, miss,” said Betsy interposing, “missis would never have the blinds up in this room ‘cause of spoiling the carpet. If master says so, I don’t mind; but till he do – ” and here Betsy put up her hand to the blind.

      “Do you venture to meddle with what my sister does?” cried Mab, furious, springing from her chair.

      Cicely only laughed. “You are a good girl to mind what your mistress said, but we are your mistresses now; you must let the window alone, for don’t you see the carpet is spoiled already? I will answer to papa. What is it? Do you want anything more?”

      “Only this, miss,” said Betsy, “as it’s the first laugh as has been heard here for weeks and weeks, and I don’t like it neither, seeing as missis is in her grave only a fortnight to-day.”

      “I think you are a very good girl,” said Cicely: and with that the tears stood in that changeable young woman’s eyes.

      No Betsy that ever was heard of could long resist this sort of treatment. “I tries to be, miss,” she said with a curtsy and a whimper. “Maybe you’d like a cup of tea?” and after following them suspiciously all over the house, she left them at last on this hospitable intent in the fading drawing-room, where they had both enshrined the memory of their mother. Another memory was there now, a memory as faded as the room, which showed in all kinds of feeble feminine decorations, bits of modern lace, and worked cushions and foolish foot-stools. The room was all pinafored and transmogrified, the old dark picture-frames covered with yellow gauze, and the needlework in crackling semi-transparent covers.

      “This was how she liked things, poor soul! Oh, Mab,” cried Cicely, “how strange that she should die!”

      “No stranger than that any one else should die,” said Mab, who was more matter of fact.

      “A great deal stranger! It was not strange at all that little Mary Seymour should die. One saw it in her eyes; she was like an angel; it was natural; but