Part 1 (1/2)
Lady Connie.
by Mrs. Humphry Ward.
PART I
CHAPTER I
”Well, now we've done all we can, and all I mean to do,” said Alice Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. ”Everything's perfectly comfortable, and if she doesn't like it, we can't help it. I don't know why we make such a fuss.”
The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring day, and the windows of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were open to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just coming into blossom. Through their twinkling buds and interlacing branches could be seen grey college walls--part of the famous garden front of St.
Cyprian's College, Oxford. There seemed to be a slight bluish mist over the garden and the building, a mist starred with patches of white and dazzlingly green leaf. And, above all, there was an evening sky, peaceful and luminous, from which a light wind blew towards the two girls sitting by the open window. One, the elder, had a face like a Watteau sketch, with black velvety eyes, hair drawn back from a white forehead, delicate little mouth, with sharp indentations at the corners, and a small chin. The other was much more solidly built--a girl of seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an intelligent eye would have read as not likely to last; a complexion of red and brown tanned by exercise; an expression in her clear eyes which was alternately frank and ironic; and an inconvenient ma.s.s of golden brown hair.
”We make a fuss, my dear,” said the younger sister, ”because we're bound to make a fuss. Connie, I understand, is to pay us a good round sum for her board and lodging, so it's only honest she should have a decent room.”
”Yes, but you don't know what she'll call decent,” said the other rather sulkily. ”She's probably been used to all sorts of silly luxuries.”
”Why of course, considering Uncle Risborough was supposed to have twenty-odd thousand a year. We're paupers, and she's got to put up with us. But we couldn't take her money and do nothing in return.”
Nora Hooper looked rather sharply at her sister. It fell to her in the family to be constantly upholding the small daily traditions of honesty and fair play. It was she who championed the servants, or insisted, young as she was, on bills being paid, when it would have been more agreeable to buy frocks and go to London for a theatre. She was a great power in the house, and both her languid, incompetent mother, and her pretty sister were often afraid of her. Nora was a ”Home Student,” and had just begun to work seriously for English Literature Honours. Alice on the other hand was the domestic and social daughter. She helped her mother in the house, had a head full of undergraduates, and regarded the ”Eights” week and Commemoration as the s.h.i.+ning events of the year.
Both girls were however at one in the uneasy or excited antic.i.p.ation with which they were looking forward that evening to the arrival of a newcomer, who was, it seemed, to make part of the household for some time. Their father, Dr. Ewen Hooper, the holder of a recently founded cla.s.sical readers.h.i.+p, had once possessed a younger sister of considerable beauty, who, in the course of an independent and adventurous career, had captured--by no ign.o.ble arts--a widower, who happened to be also an earl and a rich man. It happened while they were both wintering at Florence, the girl working at paleography, in the Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the neighbourhood of the Torre San Gallo, was giving himself to the artistic researches and the cosmopolitan society which suited his health and his tastes. He was a dilettante of the old sort, incurably in love with living, in spite of the loss of his wife, and his only son; in spite also of an impaired heart--in the physical sense--and various other drawbacks. He came across the bright girl student, discovered that she could talk very creditably about ma.n.u.scripts and illuminations, gave her leave to work in his own library, where he possessed a few priceless things, and presently found her company, her soft voice, and her eager, confiding eyes quite indispensable. His elderly sister, Lady Winifred, who kept house for him, frowned on the business in vain; and finally departed in a huff to join another maiden sister, Lady Marcia, in an English country _menage_, where for some years she did little but lament the flesh-pots of Italy--Florence. The married sister, Lady Langmoor, wrote reams of plaintive remonstrances, which remained unanswered.
Lord Risborough married the girl student, Ella Hooper, and never regretted it. They had one daughter, to whom they devoted themselves--preposterously, their friends thought; but for twenty years, they were three happy people together. Then virulent influenza, complicated with pneumonia, carried off the mother during a spring visit to Rome, and six weeks later Lord Risborough died of the damaged heart which had held out so long.
The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by the influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double blow of her parents' deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit her youth rather hard. Some old friends in Rome, with the full consent of her guardian, the Oxford Reader, had carried her off, first to Switzerland, and then to the Riviera for the winter, and now in May, about a year after the death of her parents, she was coming for the first time to make acquaintance with the Hooper family, with whom, according to her father's will, she was to make her home till she was twenty-one. None of them had ever seen her, except on two occasions; once, at a hotel in London; and once, some ten years before this date, when Lord Risborough had been D.C.L-ed at the Encaenia, as a reward for some valuable gifts which he had made to the Bodleian, and he, his wife, and his little girl, after they had duly appeared at the All Souls'
luncheon, and the official fete in St. John's Gardens, had found their way to the house in Holywell, and taken tea with the Hoopers.
Nora's mind, as she and her sister sat waiting for the fly in which Mrs.
Hooper had gone to meet her husband's niece at the station, ran persistently on her own childish recollections of this visit. She sat in the window-sill, with her hand behind her, chattering to her sister.
”I remember thinking when Connie came in here to tea with us--'What a stuck-up thing you are!' And I despised her, because she couldn't climb the mulberry in the garden, and because she hadn't begun Latin. But all the time, I envied her horribly, and I expect you did too, Alice. Can't you see her black silk stockings--and her new hat with those awfully pretty flowers, made of feathers? She had a silk frock too--white, very skimp, and short; and enormously long black legs, as thin as sticks; and her hair in plaits. I felt a thick lump beside her. And I didn't like her at all. What horrid toads children are! She didn't talk to us much, but her eyes seemed to be always laughing at us, and when she talked Italian to her mother, I thought she was showing off, and I wanted to pinch her for being affected.”
”Why, of course she talked Italian,” said Alice, who was not much interested in her sister's recollections.
”Naturally. But that didn't somehow occur to me. After all I was only seven.”
”I wonder if she's really good-looking,” said Alice slowly, glancing, as she spoke, at the reflection of herself in an old dilapidated mirror, which hung on the schoolroom wall.
”The photos are,” said Nora decidedly. ”Goodness, I wish she'd come and get it over. I want to get back to my work--and till she comes, I can't settle to anything.”
”Well, they'll be here directly. I wonder what on earth she'll do with all her money. Father says she may spend it, if she wants to. He's trustee, but Uncle Risborough's letter to him said she was to have the income if she wished--_now_. Only she's not to touch the capital till she's twenty-five.”
”It's a good lot, isn't it?” said Nora, walking about. ”I wonder how many people in Oxford have two thousand a year? A girl too. It's really rather exciting.”
”It won't be very nice for us--she'll be so different.” Alice's tone was a little sulky and depressed. The advent of this girl cousin, with her t.i.tle, her good looks, her money, and her unfair advantages in the way of talking French and Italian, was only moderately pleasant to the eldest Miss Hooper.
”What--you think she'll snuff us out?” laughed Nora. ”Not she! Oxford's not like London. People are not such sn.o.bs.”
”What a silly thing to say, Nora! As if it wasn't an enormous pull everywhere to have a handle to your name, and lots of money!”
”Well, I really think it'll matter less here than anywhere. Oxford, my dear--or some of it--pursues 'the good and the beautiful'”--said Nora, taking a flying leap on to the window-sill again, and beginning to poke up some tadpoles in a jar, which stood on the window-ledge.