Chapter X: Sibyl Takes the Lead

The favourable impression which Sibyl makes on her uncle Stephen Trenchard is a fact too obvious for diversity of opinion.

Marion reluctantly, sullenly even, admits that truth, with many sneers and inuendos about winning manners and hollow-heartedness.

‘I have never laid myself out to please uncle Stephen as Sibyl lays herself out,’ murmurs the injured maiden. ‘I can’t flatter people with my looks. I haven’t Sibyl’s caressing ways. I can’t pretend more affection than I feel; and I must say that uncle Stephen’s dry little jerky ways of speaking and looking at one are not calculated to develop affection.’

Thus argues Marion in the easy atmosphere of uncle Robert’s every-day parlour. The girls are seated at supper with Dr. Faunthorpe, trifling with morsels of bread and cheese, after having dined with Mr. Trenchard.

‘I did not find him hard or dry,’ replies Sibyl. ‘He seems really kind and affectionate, and I was grateful to him for his warm welcome. I don’t know what you mean by my laying myself out to please him. I remembered that he was poor mamma’s only brother, and our own flesh and blood, the uncle I had heard so much about years ago, and I was naturally touched by our meeting.’

‘Ah,’ says Marion, ‘what an advantage it is for a woman to be able to cry when she likes! How _do_ you manage it, Sib?’

‘If the tears came into my eyes to-day it was because I am not very strong just now, Marion,’ answers Sibyl, reddening. ‘You are really the most horrid girl I ever met with.’

‘However horrid I am, I am not double-faced,’ replies the other, promptly. ‘I should be ashamed to court uncle Trenchard if I were you, when I remember the things you’ve said about him.’

‘What things?’

‘What a convenient memory yours is! Haven’t you said that you despised him for his meanness as a young man--that he won his way in the world by double-dealing, by base flattery of his patron--that all your sympathy was with the young man he supplanted, Mr. Secretan?’

At that name Sibyl flushes crimson, and then grows ashy pale.

‘Ah, I see you do remember,’ cries Marion, triumphantly.

‘Marion,’ exclaims the mild little surgeon, with a rare flash of anger, ‘I will not have your sister teased in this manner. How dare you accuse her of falsehood or hypocrisy? She has as good a right to Stephen Trenchard’s favour as you have.’

‘Yes, and to his fortune. Let her have it all,’ cries Marion, tempted to go into hysterics, but thinking better of it immediately. ‘She is to go and stay with him, and keep house for him, directly she can get her things ready, which, considering she came home without a rag, must take some time. She is to pay him a long visit. I’m nobody now.’

‘My love, you have had your innings,’ pleads the pacific doctor.

‘Oh, of course, and just as I have got to understand his ways and know how to please him I am pushed aside.’

‘My dear, his sense of justice will induce him to distribute his bounty fairly.’

‘His sense of justice did not prevent his kissing Sibyl more affectionately than he has ever kissed me.’

‘Mere fancy on your part, I have no doubt,’ says the doctor.

After this little burst of temper Marion calms down and is tolerably placable. She even discusses her sister’s outfit with some show of interest. Mr. Trenchard has given Sibyl five-and-twenty pounds. ‘I suppose you are pretty well provided with cash, little one,’ he said, just before she wished him good night, ‘an independent-minded young woman like you who goes out into the world to get her own living is sure to have a well-lined purse.’

Sibyl blushed, and owned that her purse had no lining at all.

‘Ah, I see, sent help home to the old doctor,’ muttered Mr. Trenchard, fortunately not loud enough for Marion to hear, or that sharp-tongued young person would inevitably have set him right. ‘Well, well, very right, very proper.’

And then the crimson pocket-book was slowly brought forth, and Mr. Trenchard sighed a desponding sigh as he opened it, a sigh that was like a funeral gun for his departed bank notes. Sibyl went back to the dingy old house at the bottom of the town richer by five-and-twenty pounds than when she left it at midday.

The girls go out gaily enough next morning to Carmichael’s, _the_ haberdashery, linendrapery, and silk mercery establishment of Redcastle, to supply the void in Sibyl’s wardrobe. Five-and-twenty pounds is not much for a young lady of large ideas, but Sibyl, schooled in the philosophy of small means, makes the most of that sum. She spends all her money at Carmichael’s, and trusts to Providence and Stephen Trenchard for means to pay Miss Eylett for the making up of her dresses, and Mr. Korksoll, the bootmaker, for the equipment of her pretty little feet. It is astonishing how far away from the thoughts of Miss Eylett and Mr. Korksoll seems the notion of payment now that Miss Faunthorpe’s rich uncle has returned from the Indies. ‘You are to send the things home to me at Lancaster Lodge,’ says Sibyl, and that seems as good as paying for them.

Sibyl has asked for a week in which to prepare herself for this important visit, and that week is occupied in the stitching, hemming, sewing, felling, gathering, and trimming of underclothing--the fashion of ready-made linen not having yet vitiated the housewifely habits of Redcastle. The lower middle classes make their own garments, laboriously, and are proud of their toil; the upper classes employ school children, reduced widows, or virtuous orphans for the labour, and contrive thereby to exercise a good deal of patronage at a very small expenditure.

Sibyl revives considerably during this week of preparation. She manages to rest a good deal, other people taking the chief burden of getting her clothes made on their shoulders. She lies on the sofa in the shabby old parlour, staring idly at the white and yellow spring flowers that brighten the dull brown beds yonder in the familiar garden, the white pear blossoms tossing gaily in the light April wind, the jonquils peeping over the tall box border, the sword-shaped lily of the valley leaves cleaving the damp mould in the shadow of the bulging moss-grown wall, summer’s harbinger in the shape of a butterfly skimming over the tender rose leaves. A dull old house verily--a limited prospect, this long strip of walled garden, yet sweet and soothing to one who has suffered. Sweet to lie at rest on the slumberous sofa, with no thought or care for the day, and with but vaguest thought of the morrow.

‘If uncle Trenchard leaves me a fortune life will be made so easy,’ Sibyl muses, her arms folded above her head, her eyes fixed dreamily on the waving white pear-bloom, ‘I shall have but to call Alex back to me, and we can be happy together again, and taste the sweets of life again, as we did in our brief bright honeymoon. Poverty and love cannot live long together; but love with plenty of money--_that_ means paradise.’

The future, dimly veiled though it is, seems very easy to her just now. She is elated by her uncle’s evident admiration of her. She has made just the impression that she would have wished to make upon that fate-disposing relative. To follow up that impression will be simple enough. Has she not been told of her winning ways, of those small fascinations which make a woman powerful for good or evil? Has she not been always her uncle Robert’s favourite, everybody’s favourite, without effort on her own part? while Marion, painfully anxious to please, has been looked on rather as a nuisance, a vivacious nonentity of whom one might easily have too much.

Mr. Trenchard’s carriage calls every afternoon, with its coachman and footman in respectable Puritan drab liveries, to take the two young ladies for an airing; Mr. Trenchard himself rarely making any use of the equipage, which he keeps rather as an appanage of his state than for pleasure or convenience. It is very agreeable to Sibyl to drive up the long street, with its ascending scale of social importance, from the shabby old houses at uncle Robert’s end of the town to the stately stone mansions above Bar. Very agreeable to pass the _élite_ whom Marion has just begun to know, and salutes with delighted becks and bows, but whom Sibyl surveys with a stony stare, affecting to have not the faintest notion who they are.

‘That Faunthorpe girl is handsomer than ever,’ says Colonel Stormont to his wife, whom he is driving in a pony carriage a size or two larger than a washing basket. ‘She’s pretty sure to come in for a tidy share of the old fellow’s money, I should think. Not a bad match for Frederick.’

Frederick is the hope of the Stormonts--great at cricket, croquet, and athletics, fire brigade and volunteer rifle corps; a youth with very thin legs, and not much body, who wears a cutaway coat that just clears his hips, and has never been seen in an overcoat, or without a flower in his button-hole.

‘No family,’ says Mrs. Stormont, pursing up her lips.

‘Family be bothered!’ remarks the colonel. ‘Old Trenchard is rolling in money. What’s the good of family? It won’t keep a roof over your head, or pay the tax-gatherer. Commerce is the thing now-a-days. If Fred doesn’t marry a rich woman pretty soon he’ll have to go into commerce. You ought to take notice of those Faunthorpe girls.’

‘I’ll call next week,’ replies Mrs. Stormont, obediently.

Sibyl’s beauty is the talk of the town. Redcastle is suddenly awakened to the consciousness of loveliness that scarcely moved it to admiration two years ago, although the girl’s beauty had then the bloom and freshness of unchastened youth. Perhaps she is really lovelier now. Sorrow and passion have passed there, and left the exalted look of an awakened soul, where there was before only girlish innocence, curious and wondering about a world of which it knew nothing. She has eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The mystery of life has been revealed to her. Be sure that Eve’s beauty had a deeper meaning after she came out by the fatal gate where the angel with the flaming sword kept watch and ward.

The carriage comes at the week’s end to fetch Miss Faunthorpe and her belongings, to the tribulation of her young sister Jenny, who has had so much of Marion lately that she is deeply grieved to lose Sibyl.

‘It will be ever so much worse for me when you’re gone,’ she says. ‘You do stand up for a fellow sometimes. She’ll be sending me upstairs for her handkerchief or her keys three times an hour, and making me crimp her hair till my fingers ache, and unpick her old dresses. I wish uncle Trenchard would let me go with you. I shouldn’t cost much or be in his way. And now uncle Robert says I’m not to go to school any more, because it makes me vulgar, and Marion is to go on with my education. A nice education it will be! I don’t believe she knows when William the Conqueror came over, or who invented potatoes.’

Sibyl tears herself from the lamenting damsel, kisses uncle Robert with a plaintive little look more expressive of gratitude than many a lengthy oration, and takes her place in the barouche, which becomes her as a frame does a picture, and seems as much her attribute as Juno’s car to the goddess.

‘Good-bye, Poverty,’ she says to herself as the chestnuts throw up their fore-legs as if they were playing cup and ball, and dash off towards the Bar. ‘It shall go hard with me if my name is not written in uncle Trenchard’s will before long.’