Volume I Part 15 (2/2)
What could Roderick say? It was too soon to talk about hope or comfort.
His heart was rent by this dull silent grief; but he could do nothing except sit there silently by Vixen's side with her cold unresponsive hands held in his.
Miss McCroke came back presently, followed by a maid carrying a pretty little j.a.panese tea-tray.
”I have just been giving your poor mamma a cup of tea, Violet,” said the governess. ”Mr. Clements has been telling her about the will, and it has been quite too much for her. She was almost hysterical. But she's better now, poor dear. And now we'll all have some tea. Bring the table to the fire, Mr. Vawdrey, please, and let us make ourselves comfortable,” concluded Miss McCroke, with an a.s.sumption of mild cheerfulness.
Perhaps there is not in all nature so cheerful a thing as a good sea-coal fire, with a log of beechwood on the top of the coals. It will be cheerful in the face of affliction. It sends out its gushes of warmth and brightness, its gay little arrowy flames that appear and disappear like elves dancing their midnight waltzes on a barren moor.
It seems to say: ”Look at me and be comforted! Look at me and hope! So from the dull blackness of sorrow rise the many coloured lights of new-born joy.”
Vixen suffered her chair to be brought near that cheery fire, and just then Argus crept into the room and nestled at her knee. Roderick seated himself at the other side of the hearth--a bright little fire-place with its border of high-art tiles, illuminated with the story of ”Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” after quaintly mediaeval designs, by Mr. Stacey Marks. Miss McCroke poured out the tea in the quaint old red and blue Worcester cups, and valiantly sustained that a.s.sumption of cheerfulness. She would not have permitted herself to smile yesterday; but now the funeral was over, the blinds were drawn up, and a mild cheerfulness was allowable.
”If you would condescend to tell me where you are going, Vixen, I might contrive to come there too, by-and-by. We could have some rides together. You'll take Arion, of course.”
”I don't know that I shall ever ride again,” answered Violet with a shudder.
Could she ever forget that awful ride? Roderick hated himself for his foolish speech.
”Violet will have to devote herself to her studies very a.s.siduously for the next two years,” said Miss McCroke. ”She is much more backwards than I like a pupil of mine to be at sixteen.”
”Yes, I am going to grind at three or four foreign grammars, and to give my mind to lat.i.tude and longitude, and fractions, and decimals,”
said Vixen, with a bitter laugh. ”Isn't that cheering?”
”Whatever you do, Vixen,” cried Roderick earnestly, ”don't be a paradigm.”
”What's that?”
”An example, a model, a paragon, a perfect woman n.o.bly planned, &c. Be anything but that, Vixen, if you love me.”
”I don't think there is much fear of any of us being perfect,” said Miss McCroke severely. ”Imperfection is more in the line of humanity.”
”Do you think so?” interrogated Rorie. ”I find there is a great deal too much perfection in this world, too many faultless people--I hate them.”
”Isn't that a confession of faultiness on your side?” suggested Miss McCroke.
”It may be. But it's the truth.”
Vixen sat with dry hollow eyes staring at the fire. She had heard their talk as if it had been the idle voices of strangers sounding in the distance, ever so far away. Argus nestled closer and closer at her knee, and she patted his big blunt head absently, with a dim sense of comfort in this brute love, which she had not derived from human sympathy.
Miss McCroke went on talking and arguing with Rorie, with a view to sustaining that fict.i.tious cheerfulness which might beguile Vixen into brief oblivion of her griefs. But Vixen was not so to be beguiled. She was with them, but not of them. Her haggard eyes stared at the fire, and her thoughts were with the dear dead father, over whose newly-filled grave the evening shadows were closing.
CHAPTER X.
Captain Winstanley.
Two years later, and Vixen was sitting with the same faithful Argus nestling beside her, by the fireside of a s.p.a.cious Brighton drawing-room, a large, lofty, commonplace room, with tall windows facing seawards. Miss McCroke was there too, standing at one of the windows taking up a dropped st.i.tch in her knitting, while Mrs. Tempest walked slowly up and down the expanse of Brussels carpet, stopping now and then at a window to look idly out at the red sunset beyond the low-lying roofs and spars of Sh.o.r.eham. Those two years had changed Violet Tempest from a slender girl to a n.o.bly-formed woman; a woman whom a sculptor would have wors.h.i.+pped as his dream of perfection, whom a painter would have reverenced for her glow and splendour of colouring; but about whose beauty the common run of mankind, and more especially womankind, had not quite made up their minds. The pretty little women with eighteen-inch waists opined that Miss Tempest was too big.
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