Chapter XXI: Her Sister’s Secret

No, Polly knew nothing of what was true. It was not given to her to read into Valentine’s heart and see what was written there, and her own heart grew cold as she remembered how she had told herself once that this man was learning to care for her, when all the time he had cared for another, and that other Sister Christina.

It was a repetition of her story with Hubert Kestridge all over again, and Polly’s proud spirit winced.

Her life with Christina in the house was a torment to her now; gradually but surely, her courage flagged as it had never flagged before. The change was marked very visibly in her face.

“Yes,” she said one morning to Grace, when the latter had been questioning her, and insisting that she could not feel well, “yes, Grace, dear, you are right. I do feel ill. I suppose it is a kind of reaction. This has been such a sad year and there has been so much struggle and trouble. I would give, I don’t know what, to go away. I want to be in some big, fresh place. Grace, will you help me to get away? I—I—don’t think I can struggle on much more.”

Grace took the matter calmly into her own hands.

“When can you be ready? We will go together. Will that suit you? Or, better still, you shall go alone at the first, and I will join you. I know just how you feel, and I know that a change by yourself will do you all the good in the world. I know more than this—I know the very place for you. One of our old servants, who left us to be married, has set up a lodging house at Beachcroft. I will write and tell her you are coming. She will take all care of you, and you will love the place. It is small, and wild, and free, but it is just the place for you! Tell me, little Polly, will you go if I make all arrangements?”

Polly looked round her with big, pathetic eyes. Of late they had lost their sea-green brilliancy, these eyes, and looked gray only and very tired.

“Yes, I will go,” she answered. “Mother has Christina now, she will not miss me. I will go, Grace, dear, and I will go to-morrow—this very day, if possible,” she added, hurriedly turning away to hide her face, but not before Grace had seen her tears.

And in effect, she did go that same day, and when Valentine came to the house, eager to catch a glimpse of her, he was told she had gone away.

It was Christina who announced Polly’s departure. Christina had her own way of telling him.

“We are rather low-spirited to-day, mother and I. We have lost our little Polly for a while,” she said, looking her loveliest, and very gentle and sweet to boot, in her widow’s cap and trailing black gown. “It has cost us a lot to part with her, but,” with a sigh, “I urged mother to let her go. The truth is—I feel I can speak to you on such a matter, for you are more than a friend—dear little Polly wanted to get away before the Kestridges arrive in town. They are coming over from Ireland to-morrow, and will of course be here a good deal. Hubert Kestridge does not exactly look like a man who could inspire a _grande passion_ in any woman’s heart, does he?” Christina queried, softly, with a fleeting smile.

Valentine had a sharp pang through his heart.

He felt as though he had at last lighted on the true reason why Polly and he still stood so widely apart. But he had a sudden revulsion of feeling for Christina. All his old distrust of and dislike for her returned.

“I think,” he said, in his stiffest way, “I think, Lady Wentworth, you are wrong to tell me this. If it be true, it is your sister’s secret, and should be respected. Shall we go through these letters from your lawyers?”

Christina complied, biting her lip sharply to curb her anger.

She had made a false move, that she saw instantly; but such was the power of her vanity and her determination that she did not let this disturb her very much.

She could not gather very easily from Valentine’s manner whether his rebuke had come from an angry or from a hurt feeling.

He went through such business as they had to transact as quickly as possible; and he left the house eventually with a curious longing not to set foot in it again.

Christina might have been content with the success of her introduction of Hubert Kestridge’s name could she have known how painfully the matter clung to Valentine’s memory all the day. He could think of nothing else, and the more he thought, the more he seemed to light on a truth, and to feel that he stood in close contact with the secret of Polly’s young life.

Up to now he had had a warm liking for Kestridge, but there seemed an element in this recital of the marriage with one sister, instead of another, that suggested cruelty. For it was, in a degree, incongruous to Valentine’s knowledge of Polly’s proud, high-spirited nature to credit her with wearing her heart out in a love given unsought.

There must have been some deeper chord struck between herself and Kestridge other than simply cousinly affection. Probably Kestridge had flirted with pretty Polly, and then at last, had turned away from her, and married her sister. Whichever way he turned the matter, it remained hurtful to him, and at last he resolved not to think further about it, and to put, if he could, all memory of the girl he loved from his mind.

There was nothing, not even the shadow, of a pessimist about Valentine Ambleton. He was far too clear sighted, too practical, to be anything but optimistic in almost everything, and up to this moment he had been strongly optimistic in his thoughts and dreams for the future.

True, Polly had given him little enough encouragement. Friends they had become, in a sense, but he found her a thorny little individual, and nothing he had done had seemed to bring them any nearer. Yet he had not renounced his hope, rather had it grown stronger and more earnest of late.

His cousin’s sad and unexpected death had put Valentine in a very different position. He was now a wealthy man, a man whom any woman, however worldly, would have been glad to marry, and he had rejoiced in the knowledge of his money, and of his many possessions, purely because of his love for Polly, and for his Sister Grace.

Each time he had gone, at Christina’s bidding, to the shabby old house in Kensington, his eyes had been blind to her beauty, his senses had never once been moved by the fascination of her presence.

He had looked only to see Polly; he had dreamed only of the moment when he could transplant her, this slender, brown-skinned little creature, with her bewitching eyes, and sharp, childlike speech, away from this, her shabby and trouble-shadowed old home, away back to that other where he had spent the happiest days of his boyhood, and in and about which all the memories of his life seemed woven.

And each day he had gone hoping to find that the time was propitious, and that this happy moment might be his, and every day he had left the house chilled and disappointed, because he had never seen Polly, or seeing her, he had found her short tongued and very cold, but never so chilled and disappointed as to-day.

Now a broad streak of clear, cold light had been cast upon the situation, and in this light he saw how poor and feeble had been his hope. It was all very well, however, to make resolutions and to contract with himself to set aside all thought of Polly and his love for her. In these matters mind is not everything, and nature is too strong voiced to be silenced at will.

Valentine went about his business just as he would have done had Christina refrained from telling him that pitiful little story; but though he walked, and spoke, and wrote, and eventually traveled down to Dynechester just as he usually walked and spoke and traveled, he was conscious, actually conscious, of a great difference in himself, and he looked ahead at his future half nervously, for this was his first actual consciousness of the power of heart over mind, and he hardly knew how the future was to be faced with this dull, aching pain clamoring to be healed and never healing.

“Time, I suppose,” he said to himself, wearily, “time will put things right again.”

But he had no faith even in time.

Life in its simplest aspects had changed to Valentine when he had told himself in quiet, measured terms, that his love for this woman, the first, the only love he had ever known, must be taken out of its setting and destroyed.

He was glad to be obliged to go to Dynechester; he escaped contact with Sacha, who annoyed him more than he could describe, since they had been thrown so much together; he was even glad not to see Grace before he went, although he would like to have heard from his sister some news of Polly, and if all were well with the girl.

This sudden departure, this quitting of her mother, all served to bear testimony to the truth of what Christina had told him, for it was so unlike Polly to permit herself to be separated from her mother; it must, therefore, have been some very strong motive that had urged her departure.

Grace was absent when her eldest brother ran into their temporary home, and, picking up his bag, took himself off to the station en route for Dynechester. She was, therefore, unable to enlighten him, as she was in a full position to do, on all touching Polly.

Grace had managed everything.

She had telegraphed to her old servant, and had received a reply, saying there was room and over for any friend of Miss Ambleton’s.

Then she had gone up with Polly to her bedroom and had helped to pack a modest little box, and then she had whisked Polly away, out of the house into a cab, and into a station, and finally into a train, so quickly that Polly had been bewildered.

Speech came in the form of remonstrance when Grace, having kissed Polly tenderly, left the carriage as the train was beginning to move, and dropped a pretty purse into the girl’s lap as she did so.

“Oh! You mustn’t! Grace, dear, you mustn’t!” Polly cried, but the door was shut, and the train glided away, and all she saw of Grace was a fading vision of a smiling face, whose lips bade her be well and happy.

Polly sat down in the empty first-class carriage, and at the beginning she cried, and she reproached herself all round.

“How good she is, and how selfish I am! and how will mother manage without me? Will Chrissie look after her well? I hope so, but I am afraid not. I hope my darling mother does not think me unkind; it is wrong to run away just because one is tired and troubled, and yet—yet, oh! it is nice to be away! to be safe from things that hurt one to hear and see. Mother would forgive me if she knew, and I shall go back to her cured, quite cured,” Polly assured herself, severely; and she shed more tears as she said this, for being quite cured meant sweeping even the remembrance of Valentine out of her thoughts, and that was something that would take long to accomplish, if indeed it was ever accomplished at all.

By and by she grew more calm, and sitting down in a corner, she watched the landscape slip by.

The air from the wide, open country greeted her with a sweet, fresh whisper, and little by little her spirit rose, and something of the old mischief and enjoyment of life came back to lurk in her eyes.

When the sea flashed into sight, a vast mirror reflecting myriads of diamond sun rays, she almost laughed.

“I am glad I came,” she said to herself, and she said it many times as she was driven in a ramshackle old fly over the rough road from the station to Beachcroft.

“It is the sort of place where you could live quite comfortably in a bathing machine,” Grace had said. “Primitive to a degree. Why Betsy Blaine should have chosen this sort of place to start a lodging house, I never can tell; but she is quite content, and it seems that she makes her enterprise pay. It will do you any amount of good, Polly, and Blainey will take such care of you.”

Grace had given her a note to deliver to her landlady, but Mrs. Blaine had no need of any urging from her former young mistress to be extra kind and thoughtful to Miss Pennington, for she had lost her heart to Polly on the spot. As she said to Grace on a later occasion:

“She’ve got eyes, miss, that fairly witch one; and when she smiles, why, she’s just lovely!”

Polly spent that first evening of solitary holiday in wandering over the beach and sea-washed rocks.

The tide went out very far at Beachcroft, and it took Polly quite half an hour to walk to its rippling, white-frothed edge, and when she had arrived there, she did, of course, just what one would expect Polly to do; she sat down on the wet sands, took off her little shoes and stockings, and slinging them about her neck, she waded through the murmuring wavelets, feeling like a creature set free after a long term of imprisonment.

It was a glorious sensation, and no amount of discomfort robbed that evening of its full measure of joy.

What if she did drop one of her shoes in the water? She could walk barefoot back over the rocks, a feat that delayed her so long in reaching the parade—magnificent name for about a dozen yards of asphalt in front of the few houses Beachcroft could claim—that she found Mrs. Blaine waiting for her at the door with some anxiety.

A large tub of water to cleanse away the sand from the little pink feet, a delicious supper of lobster, homemade bread, hot cakes and honey—Polly had a really excellent digestion—sleep in the large, fresh lavender-scented bed, and then dreams to put an end to a day which had begun with a broken spirit and real misery, and finished more sweetly than any day Polly had known in the last year.

“I am getting splendidly cured,” she murmured to herself, in her last moment of conscious thought. “By to-morrow I shall have forgotten that I ever had a heartache or that there ever existed a man called Valentine, or a woman named Christina.”

A delightful statement to go to sleep upon, but alas! the next morning the ache stole back again, and the weary question started anew.

“It is because it is a wet day,” Polly said to herself, valiantly. “I am always in the dumps on a wet day.”

But it was more than the bad weather that brought that ache, and as the girl counted up the years that she might possibly live with that dull, cold pain perpetually in her heart, she may be forgiven because the tears came.