Chapter IV: Was It a Recognition?

While Mabin was still talking to Rudolph in the road between “The Towers” and “Stone House,” a tall parlormaid, in snow-white French cap and ends, passed them, on her way from the former to the latter house, bearing a letter in her hand.

And when Mabin reached home, she found that the Powers had already received Mrs. Dale’s invitation to Mabin.

In truth it had put both husband and wife into a position of some difficulty. For while, on the one hand, they were delighted at this opportunity of getting “the one too many” off their hands for a time, yet there were the opinions of their neighbors to be considered; and the tide of public feeling had set in strongly against the lady in black.

If her hair had been dark instead of fair, it would have made all the difference. The beauty which goes with brown hair and a more or less dark complexion is not so startling, not so sensational, as the loveliness of pink and white and gold which made Mrs. Dale so conspicuous. If again, she had not been in mourning, and such pretty mourning, they would have been readier to make allowance for her eccentricities. But the knowing ones had begun to discover that there were discrepancies in her attire, that her mourning was either too deep for diamond rings to be permissible, or not deep enough for the heavy black veil she wore.

So that, in short, it was now almost universally admitted that this person with the too showy carriage and horses, and the dangerously pretty face, was an individual to be avoided, and it was decided that her reluctance to enter the best society of the place, when that society had held out its uninviting arms to her, arose from a wholesome fear that the wise women of the place would “find her out.”

Mr. Rose read Mrs. Dale’s note twice through, very slowly, as if trying to discover hidden meanings in its simple words. Then he looked at his wife, who was watching him rather anxiously.

“Well, my dear, and what do you think?” asked he.

It pleased him to ask her opinion thus on most things, not that he ever had any intention of heeding her wishes in preference to his own, but in the hope that she would express some modest inclination one way or the other, to give him an impetus in the opposite direction.

“I think, dear, that it would hardly do,” murmured the lady, hoping that for once her husband would fall in with her views. “You must have heard the way in which people talk about this Mrs. Dale, so that it would be thought very strange if we let Mabin stay with her. Don’t you think it was rather underhand of her to get hold of the child this afternoon?”

“Underhand! Certainly not,” replied Mr. Rose with decision. “The most natural thing in the world, considering how kind she was to the girl at the time of her accident. And as for the talk of the place, why, if you listened to all the old women say you would never go outside your door for fear your neighbors should think you were going to steal their hens!”

There was a pause. She would not irritate him by another remark. So he presently went on:

“I suppose you think the Vicar’s wife would scold you?”

“Not scold, of course, but I am sure she would disapprove,” said Mrs. Rose meekly.

“Ah! I thought so. Well, I will give the old lady something to talk about then. Mabin shall stay with Mrs. Dale if she wishes.”

Mrs. Rose sighed heavily.

“She will wish it, of course. Girls always wish to do the very things which are not proper for them.”

“You may be quite satisfied, Emily, that what I allow my daughter to do is quite proper,” said Mr. Rose severely, as he left the room.

Mrs. Rose sighed. She had not told him, because it would have been of no use, that she had to be more particular than he about Mabin, because, being the girl’s step-mother only, she was the more exposed to the gossip of the neighborhood--a force she dreaded--than her husband was. But she vented her ill-humor on Mabin herself, whom she informed very acidly that if she chose to go to “this Mrs. Dale,” and was not comfortable with her, the fault was hers and her father’s.

Mabin received these remarks meekly, rejoicing in the approaching holiday. She had nothing very serious to complain of in her treatment under her father’s roof, but the snubs of her father, the tacit dislike of her step-mother, and the fact that the difference in age between her half-sisters and herself left her much alone, all combined to make her welcome the change.

Emily and Ethel, who were fourteen and twelve years of age, insipid and spiritless young persons with little brown eyes and little brown pigtails, teased her with questions about her visit of the afternoon.

“Is it true that her hair’s dyed?” asked Emily, getting Mabin into a corner after tea.

“No, of course it’s not,” was the indignant answer.

“Oh, well, you needn’t be so angry. Miss Bradley said she was sure it was, and that she knew the very stuff she used.”

“Miss Bradley had better try the stuff on her own wisp then,” retorted Mabin angrily.

“What is the house like inside, Mabin?” asked Ethel, who, though only twelve, was quite as great a gossip as there was in the parish.

“Why, there were chairs and tables in it, just as there are in every other house. What do you suppose it was like?”

“Mabin, don’t snub the children. Their interest is very natural,” said Mr. Rose peevishly from the other end of the room.

“Horsehair and mahogany, red moreen curtains, and a black marble clock on the mantelpiece,” said Mabin laconically.

“Why, that doesn’t sound very nice, that you should be in such a hurry to go there!” objected Ethel. “But perhaps the other rooms are better.”

“Very likely,” said Mabin.

But Mabin was really just a little bit alarmed at her own good fortune in getting her father’s consent so easily. She had a superstitious feeling, in spite of her reputed strength of mind, that anything worth having ought to be rather difficult to get. In spite of all her loyalty to her heroine, too, she thought more often than she wished about Rudolph’s ridiculous fancy that Mrs. Dale was watched. And although she always dismissed the thought by saying to herself that Rudolph was in love with the lovely widow, and therefore “fancied things,” she was anxious to meet him again and to learn whether he still thought that the fair tenant of “The Towers” was being watched.

In the mean time great confusion reigned at “Stone House.”

Everybody was immersed in the horrors of “packing up,” and it was impossible to go upstairs without encountering people staggering under the burden of a heap of things which would have been better left behind. Even the authority of Mr. Rose, who disliked the daily routine to be disturbed, failed to get any meal eaten at the proper time, or without unnecessary hurry.

Even the fact that Mr. Rose’s old friend Mrs. Haybrow was expected on a short visit before the migration, failed to check the fury of the packers. It was unfortunate that she should come at such a time, certainly. But Mrs. Rose reckoned on inflaming her friend’s mind with her own zeal, and inwardly proposed orgies of competitive trunk-filling to while away the visitor’s time.

Mrs. Rose secretly hoped, too, that Mrs. Haybrow, through her connections at Todcaster, would be able to furnish her husband with proofs that Mrs. Dale was not a person to be encouraged. It was not yet too late to put off Mrs. Dale, although Mr. Rose had called upon that person to thank her for the invitation to his daughter and to accept it.

It was the day of Mrs. Haybrow’s expected arrival, and Mr. and Mrs. Rose had driven to the station to meet her. Mabin, wondering whether the visitor, whom she had not seen since she was a child, would be “nice,” was hobbling along the garden path, rather painfully indeed, but at last without a crutch, when she heard a great rustling of the branches of the lilac bushes which grew close under the wall.

And then, above the wall, she saw the face of Rudolph.

“Oh!” cried Mabin, with a little fluttering of the heart. “I--I thought you had gone back to your ship!”

“Why, so I had,” replied Rudolph, raising himself so that she had a view of his shoulders as well as of his head. “But I’ve come back again, you see.”

“I can guess what brought you!” said Mabin, wishing the next moment that she had not uttered the words.

Rudolph took her up quickly.

“Can you? Well then, what was it?”

Mabin blushed scarlet. Of course the thought that was in her mind that the charms of the fascinating widow had drawn him to Stone. And just the least little twinge of nascent jealousy had given a sting of pique to her tone. But she would not for the world have owned to this; and the mere thought that he might have guessed it was misery. As she did not answer, Rudolph shook his head.

“I don’t think you are quite as clever as you suppose,” he said. “And I don’t choose to tell you what brought me back. But I may just warn you that you are likely to get tired of the sight of me before I do go away altogether, as I can get as much leave as I like while my ship is at Portsmouth. Rather alarming prospect, isn’t it?”

“You will get tired of being on shore, won’t you?” asked Mabin, not feeling equal to answering him in his own tone, which was what her parents and the Vicarage people would have called “flippant.”

“That depends,” said Rudolph, looking down with interest at the dried-up blossoms of the lilac trees.

Mabin glanced at him, and began to hope nervously that she might not see too much of him. She had never seen a man whom she considered so handsome as this brown-faced young lieutenant with the merry black eyes, who made her feel so ridiculously shy and stiff. And the very attraction he had for her seemed to the simple young girl alarming, since she raised him in her maiden fancy to a pinnacle from which such a peerless creature could never descend to her.

In spite of herself her tone sounded cold and constrained, therefore, as she cut short the pause in the conversation by asking if they were all well at the Vicarage.

“Quite well, thank you,” answered Rudolph demurely. “I suppose that kind inquiry is meant for a snub, isn’t it? And intended to imply that I ought not to have addressed you in this informal manner over the wall, but that I ought to have called in the proper manner at the other side of the house?”

“It wasn’t meant to imply that,” replied Mabin with solemn straightforwardness. “Only I wanted to say something, and I had nothing better to say. I must tell you that everybody says that I have no conversation.”

“People allow you very few good points, according to your account.”

“Quite as many as I have, though!”

“Well, at least, then you have one merit of unusual modesty.”

Mabin looked up at him steadily and frankly.

“It’s rather difficult for me to talk to you, because I can never tell whether you are serious or only laughing at me. Don’t you rather--rather _puzzle_ Mrs. Bonnington?”

“Well, I am afraid I rather--rather shock her too.”

“We must all seem, down here, very antediluvian to you. There is only one person about here you can speak to in your own way.”

“Mrs. Dale?”

To Mabin’s fanciful and rather jealous eyes it seemed that Rudolph’s color grew a little deeper as he uttered the name.

“Yes.”

“Ah! You will have an opportunity of learning the art, if you are going to stay with her.”

“But it is an art which will be entirely useless when I get back here again. Papa and mamma would think it rather shocking. Do you know, if they knew how lively Mrs. Dale is in her ordinary talk they wouldn’t let me go to her?”

“Then I shouldn’t tell them, if I were you. You will find a use for the art of conversation some day, you know, when you come across other frivolous and good-for-nothing young persons, like Mrs. Dale and me.”

Mabin would rather he had not coupled his name with that of the lovely widow.

“Were Mr. and Mrs. Bonnington interested to hear you had been to see her?” asked Mabin, feeling as she spoke that this was another indiscretion.

But Rudolph began to laugh mischievously.

“They would have been extremely ‘interested,’ I am sure, if they had heard of it,” said he. “But I have too much consideration for my parents to impart to them any information which would ‘interest’ them too deeply to be good for their digestions. I suppose you think that shocking, don’t you?”

But Mabin was cautious. There was more than one gulf, she felt, between her and the merry young sailor, and she was not going to make them any wider.

“I’m sure you do what is best,” she said modestly.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” said he. “But it’s rather a confidential communication, and these lilac bushes extend a long way. Will you come nearer to the wall? Or may I get over it?”

“You may get over if you like,” said Mabin, coming as she spoke a little nearer to the bushes.

Rudolph availed himself of the permission in the twinkling of an eye, and stood beside her on the grass path under the limes, looking down at the pretty nape of the girlish neck, which showed between the soft brown hair and the plain, wide turn-down collar of pale blue linen which she wore with her fresh Holland frock.

“The man--I told you about the man I saw watching ‘The Towers,’ well, he has disappeared,” said Rudolph, not sorry to have an excuse for whispering into such a pretty little pink ear.

“Oh! I am glad!”

“So I hope we shall see no more of him.”

“And do you still think--surely you can’t still think--that he was watching Mrs. Dale?”

“Oh, well, don’t _know_, of course. And at any rate the slight objection I had to your going to ‘The Towers’ has disappeared.”

Mabin felt a strange pleasure at the interest implied in this concern for her. There was a pause, broken by Mabin, who suddenly started, as if waking from a dream.

“The carriage!” cried she. “They have come back. I must go in. Good-by.”

She held out her hand. He took it, and detained it a moment.

“I may come and see you sometimes, when you are at ‘The Towers,’ mayn’t I? For old acquaintance’ sake?”

“Or--for Mrs. Dale’s!” said Mabin quickly, as she snatched away her hand and ran into the house.

She was not so silly as not to know where the attraction of ‘The Towers’ lay!

Mrs. Rose’s lumbering old landau, which made such a contrast to Mrs. Dale’s smart victoria, had returned from the station, and as it drove slowly along the road past ‘The Towers,’ Mrs. Rose was just finishing to Mrs. Haybrow a long recital of her difficulties in connection with the doubtful new resident.

Mr. Rose had chosen to come back on foot, so his wife could pour out her tale without interruption or contradiction.

“There,” she cried below her breath, as they came close to the gates of ‘The Towers,’ “you will be able to see her. She is standing just inside the garden, calling to her little dog. Don’t you think that a little dog always looks rather--rather _odd_?”

Mrs. Haybrow thought that this was somewhat severe judgment, but she did not say so. She got a good view of the mysterious lady in black; for Mrs. Dale raised her golden head as the carriage passed, and she and Mrs. Rose exchanged a rather cool bow.

To the great surprise of her companion, Mrs. Haybrow fell suddenly into a state of intense excitement.

“Why, it’s Dolly Leatham, little Dolly Leatham!” she cried with evident delight. “The idea of my meeting her down here! I haven’t seen the child for years.”

“You know her then?” asked Mrs. Rose, in a tone which in relief was mingled with disappointment at the collapse of her own suspicions.

“I used to know her very well. She was the belle of that part of Yorkshire. The last I heard of her was that she was engaged to be married to some man who had a lot of money; and they said she was being hurried into it by her people rather against her will.”

“Well, she has managed to get rid of him,” said Mrs. Rose coldly. “You see she is in widow’s dress now.”

“Yes, so I see. Poor Dolly! It seems rather strange to find her here, so far from all her friends! And the things you have told me.”

After a pause Mrs. Haybrow said decidedly: “I must call upon her to-morrow--No, I’ll go and see her at once. There will be plenty of time before dinner, won’t there? There’s something mysterious about this, and I must find out what it is.”

So, when she had had a cup of tea, Mrs. Haybrow went straight to “The Towers.”

She remained there a long time, so long that Mrs. Rose wondered what the ladies could have to say to each other. And when at last Mabin, who was watching at the drawing-room window for her return, called out that she was coming up the garden, the girl added: “Oh, mamma, how pale she looks!”

“She is tired, no doubt,” said Mrs. Rose, as she left the room to meet her friend as the latter came in.

But she also was surprised to see how white Mrs. Haybrow had grown.

“You should have waited until after dinner. You look quite worn out,” she said. “Well, and what had your friend got to say to you?”

Mrs. Haybrow paused, as if too much exhausted to answer at once. Then she said quietly:

“I was mistaken. She was not my friend after all.”

“Not your friend! Dear me! You were so long gone that we were quite sure she was.”

“No. She is very nice, though, quite a charming woman.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Rose suspiciously. “But what do you think about her having Mabin?”

There was another slight pause before Mrs. Haybrow answered: “I am sure you may be quite satisfied about that.”

But when dinner was over, Mrs. Haybrow got Mabin to take her to see the new ducks that Mr. Rose was so proud of; and on the way back she asked the girl whether she was very anxious for her visit to “The Towers.” And finding that she was, Mrs. Haybrow added:

“And of course, dear, if anything were to happen while you were there, which seemed to you rather strange or unusual, you would write or telegraph to papa and mamma, at once, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course. I see,” went on Mabin, smiling, “that mamma has managed to infect you already with her own suspicions of poor Mrs. Dale.”

“No, dear, she seemed to me a very nice woman indeed, and very anxious to have you. But I am getting old, and I am nervous about girls away from their homes. That is all.”

And she turned the conversation to another subject.