Part 28 (1/2)
With a gesture of rage and despair she dashes Freddy's note to the ground, and flings her own head down on the open blotting-book whose pages keep the imprint, scarcely dry, of her sister's insane words. But in a few minutes she has pulled herself together. There is only one thing for her to do--to follow and overtake her sister as quickly as possible. _As quickly as possible!_ But how quickly is that? This is the first thing to be discovered.
She goes down into the cheerful hall, where the birds in their big cage are swinging on John Talbot's ladder, and chattering to each other as jovially as if no disaster had fallen on their roof-tree; where Mink is lying on his small hairy side in a sun-patch, with his little paws crossed like a dying saint's. Margaret searches for the _Bradshaw_, which apparently Sarah has tidied away. Her first impulse is to call to her, and ask where she has put it; but her second corrects it. Why should the household learn any sooner than is unavoidable that Prue has fled?
By and by she discovers the missing volume, and sitting down, buries herself in its pages. What she had feared is realised. There is no second train for Oxford until 2.15. Three hours of forced inaction stretch before her--three hours for Prue to carry out whatever cureless folly her burning heart and rudderless mind may dictate.
She starts up. To sit still with such thoughts for company is out of the question. She wanders back again to Prue's room, picks up Freddy's note which she had left in her ire lying on the carpet; tears both it and Prue's into small pieces, and throws them into the grate; then, mis...o...b..ing their being sufficiently destroyed, collects the fragments again and burns them--tears out even that sheet of the blotting-book upon which Prue had dried her words, and burns it too.
Then she goes downstairs, and looks at the clock. It has seemed to her as if she had been a long time over her burning. Yet the clock-hand points only to a quarter past eleven. She must force herself to some occupation. To read is impossible. Needlework and gardening both sharpen instead of deadening thought. It is the day for doing up the week's accounts. She will compel herself to do them as usual. But the figures swim before her eyes. The simplest addition baffles her. The names of Prue, Freddy, Oxford, force themselves into her record of expenditure, making nonsense of it, defacing her neat columns; and after half an hour's vain efforts, she desists with a sigh. When one o'clock comes at last she sits down to luncheon, calmly telling Sarah that she does not expect Prue back; and having obliged herself, for the sake of appearances, to eat something, she puts on her hat and jacket.
Leaving word with her household as indifferently as she can that they are not to be surprised if she and her sister are late in returning, she sets forth on her walk to the station. She has reflected that she would start early, in order to give herself plenty of time to walk slowly.
But she does not walk slowly; she walks fast; towards the end she runs.
Who knows whether her clocks may not be slow? whether on coming in sight of the little upstart red-brick house that const.i.tutes the station, she may not see the train sliding away without her? She arrives breathless, to find that she has half an hour to wait--half an hour in which to admire the station-master's canariensis and his mignonette, which greets each dusty train-load with its whiff of perfume.
By and by another intending traveller or two arrive. The Manor omnibus drives up, and disgorges the little Harboroughs and their nurses. Peggy had known and forgotten that they were to return home to-day. She feels rather guilty at her own cold inability to echo their loud expressions of pleasure at this unexpected meeting with her. But they apparently detect no lack of warmth in her answering greetings, as they each at once take possession of one of her hands, and march up and down with her. In the intervals of a searching interrogatory as to the goal and object of her journey, they continue a quarrel apparently begun in the omnibus; putting out their red tongues at each other before her face, and executing agile kicks at one another's legs behind her back.
When the train draws up they insist upon deserting their own suite and getting in with her. She had rather that they would not have done so; and yet perhaps it affords a wholesome diversion from her own thoughts to be continually jumping up to grasp Franky by the seat of his sailor-trousers, and hinder him from breaking his neck by tumbling out of the window, or his legs by his endeavours to climb up into the netting. Lily is not nearly so troublesome. She is sitting quite still, and _showing off_; trying, that is, to impress by her remarks two quiet ladies who are fellow-occupants of the carriage with a sense of her importance.
'I hope,' she says, in a loud voice, 'that my large box is in;' as she speaks she turns her eyes upon the strangers to see whether they look awed; but as they do not, she adds, in a still louder key, 'because it is full of clothes!'
The train slides on through the bright-dyed autumn country; past the flooded flat meadows lying a-dazzle in the sun, blinding mirrors for the gorgeous October trees; across and then again across the broad ribbon of the silver Thames; past distant country houses, lifting their shoulders out of the gold and red billows of their elms and beeches; past big villages and little towns, till, after several previous stoppages, they come to a standstill at the platform of a small station, as dest.i.tute of importance as the one from which they set off. It is that at which the little Harboroughs are to get out.
'Mammy is coming to meet us,' Lily had announced; 'she will give Franky such a hug! She never hugs me--I am father's child.'
She throws one final look at her fellow-travellers, to see whether they are not rather struck by the last statement, before joining her brother at the window, and jostling her hat against his in the endeavour to have the glory of obtaining the first glimpse of their common parent. Of this, however, she is balked, as, whatever may be her after-a.s.sertions to the contrary, there is no doubt that the shrill cries of boy and girl, 'There she is!' 'There's mammy!' rang out absolutely simultaneous.
Their curly heads fill up the window-s.p.a.ce so completely that Peggy, for a moment, hopes to escape detection and recognition. She hopes it the more, since, for the first minute, Betty has no eyes save for her boy, whom she has caught in her arms; relieving Peggy at length from her convulsive hold of his small-clothes, and burying him under a perfect smother of kisses.
'My blessing--my beauty! so I have got you back at last! You must never--never leave your poor mammy again! Well, Lily, how are you?
Goodness, child, what a figure you are! You are one large freckle! Oh, Miss Lambton, is that you? Where are you off to? Is Prue with you? No?
What fun Prue is! I had no idea until she stayed with me what capital fun she was. You must let me have her again before long.'
The train moves off, and Margaret, a little heavier-hearted than before, with it. Some impulse prompts her to pull back the curtain of the little side-window in order to watch, as long as it is in sight, that figure on the little platform. Yes, Prue is certainly like her; but, alas! it is to be not even a good imitation for which she has foregone her own woodland grace. Margaret had forgotten how pretty Betty was. How charming she looks now, with her face full of wholesome mother-love, perfectly unconscious, indifferent as to whether any one is looking at her or not, clasping her little rosy child.
CHAPTER XIX
'Ox--ford! Ox--ford!' Her goal is reached; and as she has no luggage, and is therefore independent of the scanty-numbered and not particularly civil porters, in two minutes after the stopping of the train she is in a hansom, spinning up to Christ Church. At Tom Gate she gets out, and rather timidly entering the archway, bends her steps to the porter's lodge. He comes out politely to meet her.
'Can you tell me where Mr. Ducane's rooms are?'
'Certainly, ma'am. Peckwater Quad, third door on the left hand, second staircase.'
As she is moving off hurriedly in the direction indicated her informant adds:
'I am afraid that you will not find him in, ma'am.'
'Not in?' repeats she, in a tone of the most acute astonishment. 'Is not he ill, then?'