Part 91 (1/2)

And the next moment he was gone.

Audrey stood rooted to the spot; she felt as though some nightmare oppression were on her. She heard her father's voice calling to her.

'Where is Audrey?' he said. 'She must bid Michael good-bye.' And then someone--Michael, perhaps--answered him.

A great longing was on her to see him again; but as she hesitated the wheels of the dog-cart sounded on the gravel, and she knew that she was too late. With a sudden impulse she leant out of the window. Michael was looking back at the house; he saw her, and raised his hat. She had just time to wave her hand as Dr. Ross drove rapidly through the gate.

When her mother came to find her she was still standing there; she looked very pale, and the pained, wistful look was still in her eyes.

'Mother,' she said, 'Cyril has left me, and now Michael has gone, too; and the world seems a different place to me.'

'Michael will come back, my darling,' replied Mrs. Ross, vaguely troubled by the look on the girl's face. 'Your father says he has long wanted a thorough change, and this trip will do him so much good.'

'Yes, he will come back; but when and how? And he will not come back for a long time;' and then she broke down, and hid her face in her mother's shoulder. 'If I were only like you, mother! if my life lay behind me, and had not to be lived out day by day and year by year! for I seem so tired of everything.'

Mrs. Ross could make nothing of her girl; but she gave her just what she required that moment, a little soothing and extra petting.

'You have gone through so much, and you have borne it all so quietly, and now Nature is having her revenge; you will be better presently, my darling.'

And she was right: Audrey's strong will and sense of duty soon overcame the hysterical emotion.

'I think I am tired,' she acknowledged; and to her mother's relief she consented to lie still and do nothing. 'I will make up for this idle day to-morrow,' she said with a faint smile, as she closed her eyes. 'Now go downstairs, mother dear, and don't trouble about me any more, unless you want to make me ashamed of myself for having been such a baby.'

'She is just worn out with keeping everything to herself, and trying to spare us pain,' Mrs. Ross said to her husband, as she recounted this little scene to him. 'I never knew Audrey hysterical before; I was obliged to give her some sal volatile. I think she is asleep now.'

'I don't hold with sal volatile,' returned the Doctor a little grimly.

'Sleep is a far safer remedy, Emmie. Leave her to herself; she will be all right in a day or two.'

But Dr. Ross sighed as he got up and went to his study. Audrey little knew that her father was in the secret; that in his pain and perplexity Michael had at last taken his best friend into his confidence.

'We must leave things to work round,' had been his parting words to Michael that morning. 'No one, not even her father, must coerce her. All these years you have been like a son to me, Mike; and if my child could bring herself to love you as you deserve to be loved, no one would be better pleased than I should be.'

'And you will tell no one--not even Cousin Emmeline?'

'Why, I should not dare tell her,' returned the Doctor with rather a dejected smile, for he hated to keep things from his wife. 'Geraldine would get hold of it, and then it would come round to Harcourt. No, I will keep my own counsel, Mike. And now good-bye, and good luck to you!'

'It is the Burnett motto,' replied Michael, with a touch of solemnity in his voice--'”Good luck G.o.d send.” Take care of her, Cousin John.'

And then the two men grasped hands and parted.

'If I had to search the whole world over for a husband for her, I'd choose Mike,' was Dr. Ross's thought as he drove himself back again to Woodcote.

Audrey kept her promise and made up for her one idle day. 'Work was good for everyone,' she said, 'and it was especially good for her.' So the following morning she resumed lessons with Mollie. She had complained a few weeks before that her German was becoming rusty, and by her father's advice she and Mollie were taking lessons together of Herr Freiligrath.

The master she had selected was a very strict one, and his lessons entailed a great deal of preparation. No discipline could have been more wholesome. Audrey forgot her perplexities while she translated Wallenstein and followed the unhappy fortunes of Max and Theckla.

But she did not at once regain her cheerfulness, and the daily round of duty was not performed without a great deal of effort and inward prompting; if no task were left unfulfilled, if she were always ready to give her mother or Geraldine the companions.h.i.+p they needed, and if her father never missed one of her usual ministrations, it was because she would listen to no plea of self-indulgence.

'You are unhappy, and I fear you must be unhappy and not at ease for a long time,' she would say to herself in the intervals of her work; 'but idleness will not help you.' And to give her her due, she was never busier than during the summer that followed Michael's leave-taking. She had no idea that Michael knew all she was doing, and that her father often wrote to him. Michael had kept his word, and his letters to Audrey were very few and far between, and there was not a word in them that her mother or Geraldine could not have read if she had chosen to show them; but Michael's letters had always been sacred to her. Still it was impossible to answer them with her old freedom. The happy, sisterly intercourse was now a thing of the past. She could no longer pour out to her friend all her innocent girlish thoughts; a barrier--a strange, unnatural barrier--had been built up between them, and Audrey's letters, with all her painstaking effort, gave very little pleasure to Michael.

'Poor child! she is still afraid of me,' he thought, as he folded up the thin paper. And he could not always suppress a sigh as he missed the old playfulness and open-hearted affection that used to breathe in every carelessly-worded sentence. But he knew that she could not help herself; that it was impossible for her now to tell him how she missed him and how heavily the days pa.s.sed without him; and how could he know it, if she thought less of Cyril and more of him every day?

Michael could not guess at all that inward self-questioning that seemed for ever making dumb utterance in her breast. Now and then, when no one needed her, she would wander down to 'Michael's bench' in the dusk or moonlight, and go over that strange conversation again.