Volume I Part 15 (1/2)

”Is the funeral quite over?” she asked presently, without lifting her heavy eyelids.

”Yes, dear. It was a n.o.ble funeral. Everybody was there--rich and poor.

Everybody loved him.”

”The poor most of all,” she said. ”I know how good he was to them.”

Somebody knocked at the door and asked something of Miss McCroke, which obliged the governess to leave her pupil. Roderick was glad at her departure, That substantial figure in its new black dress had been a hinderance to freedom of conversation.

Miss McCroke's absence did not loosen Violet's tongue. She sat looking at the ground, and was dumb. That silent grief was very awful to Roderick.

”Violet, why don't you talk to me about your sorrow?” he said. ”Surely you can trust me--your friend--your brother!”

That last word stung her into speech. The hazel eyes shot a swift angry glance at him.

”You have no right to call yourself that,” she said, ”you have not treated me like a sister.”

”How not, dear?”

”You should have told me about your engagement--that you were going to marry Lady Mabel Ashbourne.”

”Should I?” exclaimed Rorie, amazed. ”If I had I should have told you an arrant falsehood. I am not engaged to my cousin Mabel. I am not going to marry her.”

”Oh, it doesn't matter in the least whether you are or not,” returned Vixen, with a weary air. ”Papa is dead, and trifles like that can't affect me now. But I felt it unkind of you at the time I heard it.”

”And where and how did you hear this wonderful news, Vixen?” asked Rorie, very pleased to get her thoughts away from her grief, were it only for a minute.

”Mamma told me that everybody said you were engaged, and that the fact was quite obvious.”

”What everybody says, and I what is quite obvious, is very seldom true, Violet. You may take that for a first principle in social science. I am not engaged to anyone. I have no thought of getting married--for the next three years.”

Vixen received this information with chilling silence. She would have been very glad to hear it, perhaps, a week ago--at which time she had found it a sore thing to think of her old playfellow as Lady Mabel's affianced husband--but it mattered nothing now. The larger grief had swallowed up all smaller grievances. Roderick Vawdrey had receded into remote distance. He was no one, nothing, in a world that was suddenly emptied of all delight.

”What are you going to do, dear?” asked Roderick presently. ”If you shut yourself up in your room and abandon yourself to grief, you will make yourself very ill. You ought to go away somewhere for a little while.”

”For ever!” exclaimed Vixen pa.s.sionately. ”Do you think I can ever endure this dear home without papa? There is not a thing I look at that doesn't speak to me of him. The dogs, the horses. I almost hate them for reminding me so cruelly. Yea, we are going away at once, I believe.

Mamma said so when I saw her this morning.”

”Your poor mamma! How does she bear her grief?”

”Oh, she cries, and cries, and cries,” said Vixen, rather contemptuously. ”I think it comforts her to cry. I can't cry. I am like the dogs. If I did not restrain myself with all my might I should howl.

I should like to lie on the ground outside his door--just as his dog does--and to refuse to eat or drink till I died.”

”But, dear Violet, you are not alone in the world. You have your poor mamma to think of.”

”Mamma--yes. I am sorry for her, of course. But she is only like a lay-figure in my life. Papa was everything.”

”Do you know where your mamma is going to take you?”

”No; I neither know nor care. It will be to a house with four walls and a roof, I suppose. It will be all the same to me wherever it is.”