Part 10 (1/2)

But I dared not follow Aunt Emmy to her little sitting-room at the top of the house. She who was almost never alone, clung, I knew, to that tiny refuge, and it was an understood thing between us that I might creep in and sit with her a little after tea, but not before.

So I raged up and down the empty gilded and mirrored drawing-room, finding myself quite unable to reconcile the situation with my faith in a beneficent Deity; and then consoled myself by chronicling my tottering faith in my diary. I wrote a diary until I married. Then, I suppose, I became more interested in life than in recording my own feelings. At any rate, I discontinued it.

At last, when Aunt Emmy did not come down for tea, I took her a cup.

She was sitting in a low chair with her back to the light. I could see that she had been crying, but she was quite calm. She had a suspiciously clean pocket-handkerchief in her hand. Her sitting-room was a small north chamber under the roof, but it was the place I liked best in the house. On her rare expeditions abroad, before Uncle Thomas had become too ill to be left, she had picked up some quaint pieces of pottery and a few old Italian mirrors. The little white room with its pale blue linen coverings had an atmosphere and a refinement of its own. It was spring, and there was a bunch of daffodils near the open window in a blue-and-white oil-jar with _Ole Scorpio_ on it.

Aunt Emmy drank some tea, and remarked that I made it better than she did.

”Your Uncle Tom has a very kind heart,” she said, looking a little pugnaciously at me. ”It is so like him, just when he might naturally be taken up with his own affairs, to be anxious about me.”

We each knew the other was not deceived.

I longed to say, ”Why not marry Colonel Stoddart?”

I had only seen him on horseback. I did not know how he looked on the ground, but I would have married him myself in a second if he had asked me, partly no doubt because he was a little like Lord K----, the hero of my teens to whom I had never spoken, and partly because he was the exact opposite of Uncle Tom. How Miss Collett _could_! How anybody could! Yet Uncle Tom always talked as if he had only to choose among the flower of English womanhood, and the stouter and more repellent he grew the more communicative and conscientious he became about his fear of raising expectations in female bosoms which he might not be able to gratify. How I scorned Uncle Tom when he talked like that, knowing as I did--but neither he nor Aunt Emmy knew I knew (it was always like that, they always thought I did not know things)--knowing as I did that Miss Rose Delaine and Miss Wright had both refused him. I did not realise in my intolerant youth that the anxiety of some middle-aged bachelors still to appear eligible, the way their minds hover round imaginary conquests, has its pathetic side. Looking back, I believe now that Miss Collett was not by any means poor Uncle Tom's first choice, but his last chance. And perhaps he was her last chance too.

”I know father is dying. I have known it some time,” said Aunt Emmy, and her face became convulsed. ”He spoke so beautifully about it only yesterday. And I have known for a long time that Tom and Miss Collett were likely to come to an arrangement.”

She had not a grain of irony in her, but no word could have been more applicable to Uncle Tom and Miss Collett than an arrangement. One felt that each had measured the other by avoirdupois weight, and had found the balance even.

”Is Uncle Thomas opposed to your marrying?” I ventured to say, with the tact of eighteen.

”No, my dear; that is what is so wonderful. He was so dreadfully against it long ago--once--indeed, until quite lately. But it's no use speaking of that. But now he is quite anxious for it, so long as I don't leave him. He wants me to promise Colonel Stoddart, but to tell him that I could not leave my father during his lifetime, which of course I couldn't.”

”Won't Colonel Stoddart wait?” I said, waxing bolder. I had slipped down on the floor beside her and was stroking her white hand. I hoped I was saying the right thing. I was adoringly fond of her, but I was also eighteen, and this was my first introduction to a real romance. I was feverishly anxious to rise to the occasion, to have nothing to regret in retrospect.

”I daresay he would. I think he said something about it,” she said apathetically.

I remembered a beautiful sentence I had read in a novel about confidences being mutual, and I said reproachfully, ”Aunt Emmy, I have told you _all_ about Lord K----; won't you tell me, just me, no one else--about Mr. Kingston?”

And she told me. I think it was a relief to speak to some one. I held my cheek against her hand all the time. It seemed that a sort of demiG.o.d of the name of Kingston had alighted in her life when she was nineteen (I felt with a pang that I had still a whole year to wait) and he was twenty-one. Aunt Emmy waxed boldly eloquent in her description of his unique and heroic character, shyly eloquent in her dispa.s.sionate indication of his almost terrifying beauty.

I think Aunt Emmy became a girl in her teens again for a few minutes, carried away by her memory, and by the idolising sympathy of the other girl in her teens at her feet in a seventh heaven at being a confidant.

But in one sense, on the sentimental plane, she had never ceased to be a girl. She and I viewed the situation almost from the same standpoint.

”Aunt Emmy, _was_ he tall?”

”He was, my love.”

”And slender?”

My whole life hung in the balance. I had all a young girl's repulsion towards stout men.

”He was thin and wiry, and very athletic, a great rider.”

I gave a sigh of relief.

”Did his--it does not really matter” (I felt the essentials were all right and that I must not ask too much of life)--”but did his hair curl?”

Aunt Emmy drew out of her bosom a little locket, hanging by a thin gold chain, with a forget-me-not in blue enamel on it, and opened it. Inside was a curl of chestnut hair. It was not tied in the shape of a curl. It was a real curl.