Hathercourt. Molesworth Mrs.

told that to some at least of the Rectory party it was not an unwelcome sound. Mary fled up-stairs, her father followed the hungry flock into the dining-room. And the Sunday meal that day was considerably enlivened by discussions about the mysterious strangers. Who were they? – whence had they come, and wherefore? – and, “Will they come again next Sunday?” said little Frances, a question which her eldest sister very summarily answered in the negative.

      “They have given you all something to talk about, children, anyway,” said Mrs Western.

      “Yes,” said Basil, who, on the strength of having left school three months ago, considered himself a man of the world, “it’s ridiculous how people get excited about nothing at all, when they live such shut-up lives. I bet you the whole neighbourhood’s full of it. All the old women will be discussing these unfortunate people over their tea-tables at this very moment.”

      “Not over their tea, Basil,” said little Brooke. “They don’t have tea till four o’clock.”

      Chapter Three

      The Colour of the Spectacles

      “Mais, il faut bien le reconnaître, tout est relatif en ce monde, et les choses nous affectent toujours dans la mesure de l’éducation que nous avons reçue et du milieu social où nous avons été élevés.”

      Enault.

      Mrs Western’s views of life differed considerably from those of her husband – she had quite another stand-point. She was not ambitious, nothing in her experience had ever tended to make her so, and though by nature she was far less “easy-going” than the Rector, yet her thoughts concerning the future of her children were not by any means so harassing and dissatisfied as his. Had she seen anything to worry about, she would have worried about it, but she did not see that there was. Her boys and girls were infinitely better off, better cared for, better educated than she had been, and happier far than she ever remembered herself before her marriage, and she saw no reason why, if they turned out good and sensible, as they mostly promised to do, they should not all get on fairly well in life, without feeling that their start in the great race had been weighted with undue disadvantages.

      Yet the Rector’s wife was not a peculiarly reasonable woman; circumstances mainly had made her appear so, or rather, perhaps, had never called forth the latent unreasonableness which we are told, by authority we dare not question, is a part of every feminine character. When she married Mr Western, she was only a governess in a family where she was not unkindly treated, but where no special thought was bestowed upon her. She was not discontented, however; for the kindness she received she was sincerely grateful, and considered herself, on the whole, a fortunate girl. She was not remarkably pretty, but pleasing and gentle, and with a certain sedateness of air and manner not without a charm of its own. People spoke of her, when they did speak of her, which was not often, as “a very sensible girl;” in point of fact, she was more than sensible; she had both intellect and originality, neither of which was ever fully developed – in one sense, indeed, hardly developed at all. For her youth had been a depressing one; from her earliest years she had been familiar with poverty and privation, and she only was not altogether crushed by them because personally she had had experience of nothing else.

      Her father had been one of the several younger sons of a rich and well-born man. But neither the riches nor the good birth had helped him on in life. He quarrelled with his parents by refusing to enter the profession designed for him; he made bad worse by a hasty and imprudent marriage; he hopelessly widened the breach by choosing to resent on his own people his young wife’s speedy death, and declining to accept any help in the bringing up of his motherless little daughter. And then his old parents died, and the brothers and sisters, married and scattered, and absorbed in their individual interests, learned to forget, or to remember but with a sore reproach worse than forgetting, this hot-headed, ungrateful “Basil,” who had not condoned by success in his self-sought career the follies of his youth. And before many more years had passed, poor Basil Brooke died himself, nursed, and comforted, and sorrowed for by but one little solitary being, his thirteen-years-old Margaret, for whom at the last he had managed to scrape, together a tiny sum that left her not absolutely destitute, but was enough to pay for her schooling till, at eighteen, she went out into the world on her own small account as one of the vast army of half-educated girls who call themselves governesses.

      But if Margaret Brooke’s pupils obtained no very great amount of so-called “book-learning” from their young teacher, at least they learned no harm, and indirectly no small amount of good. For she herself was good – good, and true, and healthy-minded, perfectly free from self-consciousness, or morbid repining after what had not fallen to her lot. Once in her governess life she came across some members of her dead father’s family. Being really gentlefolks, though self-absorbed and narrow-minded, it did not occur to them to ignore their poor relations. They even went out of their way to show her some little kindness, which the girl accepted pleasantly and without bitterness; for, young as she was at the time of her father’s death, she had yet been able to discern that the family estrangement had been mainly, if not altogether, of his own causing. So the rich Brookes spoke favourably of poor Margaret, and though it was taken for granted among them that the fact of her existence was a mistake, she was, on the whole, regarded with approval as doing her part towards making the best of an unfortunate business. And when, two or three years later, Margaret, to her own inexpressible astonishment, found herself actually fallen in love with by the most charming and unexceptionable of young curates, a curate too with every prospect of before long becoming a rector, and when this prospect was ere long fulfilled, and Margaret, in consequence, became Mrs Western, her Brooke cousins approved of her still more highly, to the extent even of sending her a tea-pot, cream-jug, and sugar-basin of the best electro-plate as a wedding present.

      But all that was now nearly a quarter of a century ago – the generation of Brookes who had seen Margaret in her youth, who had some of them been contemporaries of her father, had mostly died out – they were not a long-lived race – and the old relationship had grown to seem more of a legend than a fact. A legend, however, which, little as the young Westerns knew of the far-off cousins who now represented their mother’s people, was not likely to be allowed by them to sink into oblivion. They were too well-bred and right-minded to be ashamed of their mother’s position when their father wooed and won her, but, nevertheless, half unconsciously to themselves, perhaps, the knowledge of this fact made it all the more agreeable to be able to say to each other, with dignity and satisfaction, “Though mamma was poor when she was a girl, her family was quite as good, if not, indeed, better than papa’s.”

      And “papa” himself was the first always, on the rare occasions when such subjects came under discussion, to remind his girls and boys of the fact, but Mrs Western herself thought little about it. She lived in the present, even her lookings forward to the future were but a sort of transference of her own life and experience to others. She hoped that her daughters, if they married at all, would marry as happily as she had done, and beyond this she was not ambitious for them, and conscientiously tried to check Lilias’s good-tempered murmurings at the monotony of their life by platitudes, in which she herself so entirely believed that they sometimes carried with them a certain weight.

      Mrs Western was less interested than the rest of the Rectory party in the mysterious strangers who had so disturbed the Hathercourt devotions this Sunday morning. She did not like strangers; she had a vague fear of them – not from shyness, but from a sort of apprehensiveness which her early life, probably, had caused to become chronic with her. When Lilias snubbed little Frances’s inquiry as to whether these ladies and gentlemen would come to church again next Sunday, in her heart the mother hoped the elder sister’s “no, of course not,” would be justified by the event, and, secretly, she chafed at the talk that went on round the table, talk in which even Mr Western was interested, as she could see.

      “You remember Romary, Margaret?” he said, across the table, “that splendid place near Withenden?”

      “Yes, I remember it,” replied Mrs Western, “but I don’t like splendid places,” she added, with a little smile.

      “Nor splendid people?” said Lilias, half mischievously. “Isn’t mother funny – odd I mean, in some ways – difficult