Part 33 (1/2)

Jacinth hesitated.

'But there _was_ a choice,' she said; and now there was a touch of timidity in her voice.

Colonel Mildmay considered; they were approaching the crucial point, and he took his resolution.

'No, Jacinth,' he said. 'To my mind, as an honourable man, there was no choice. I should have forfeited for ever my own self-respect had I agreed to Lady Myrtle's proposal.'

And then he rapidly, but clearly, put before her the substance of their old friend's intentions and wishes, and his reasons for refusing to fall in with them.

'Lady Myrtle is too good a woman to sow discord in a family,' he said, 'between a child and her parents. And it was impossible for us to approve of the apportionment of her property she proposed, knowing that there exist at this very time those who _have_ a claim on her, who most thoroughly deserve the restoration of what should have been theirs always; who have suffered, indeed, already only too severely for the sin and wrong-doing of another.'

Jacinth started, and the lines of her face hardened again.

'I thought it was that,' she exclaimed. 'Those people--they are at the bottom of it, then.'

'Jacinth!' said her mother.

'I beg your pardon, mamma,' said the girl quickly. 'It must sound very strange for me to speak like that; but, you don't know how I have been teased about these Harpers. And mamma, Lady Myrtle doesn't look upon them as you and papa do, so why should you expect me to do so? Do you suppose she will leave _them_ anything she would have left us--me?'

'Very likely not,' said Colonel Mildmay.

'Then for everybody's sake, why not have left things as Lady Myrtle meant? I--we, I mean,' and Jacinth's face crimsoned, 'could have been good to them; it would have been better for them in the end.'

'Do you suppose they would have accepted help--money, to put it coa.r.s.ely--from strangers?' said Colonel Mildmay. 'It is not _help_ they should have, but actual practical restoration of what should be theirs.

And even supposing our decision does them no good, can't you see, Jacinth, that anything else would be _wrong_?'

'No,' said Jacinth, 'I don't see it.'

'Then I am sorry for you,' said her father coldly.

'I know,' said Jacinth, 'that Lady Myrtle likes things one way or another. I suppose she will give us up altogether now. I suppose she will leave off caring anything about me. You think very badly of me, papa, I can see; you think me mercenary and selfish and everything horrid; but--it _wasn't_ only for myself, and it isn't only because of what she was doing for us, and meant to do for us. I have got to love Lady Myrtle very much, and I shall feel dreadfully the never seeing her any more, and--and'----

Here, not altogether to her mother's distress, Jacinth broke down and began to sob bitterly. Mrs Mildmay got up from her seat, and came close to where the girl was sitting by the table.

'My poor dear child,' she said, 'we have never thought you selfish in _that_ sort of way.'

'No,' agreed her father; 'that you may believe. You have had of late too much responsibility thrown upon you, and it has given you the feeling that the whole fortunes of your family depended upon you in some sense.

Be content to be a child a little longer, my Jacinth, and to trust your parents. And there is no need for you to antic.i.p.ate any change with Lady Myrtle. She will care for you, and for us all, as much as ever--more perhaps; and as much time as it will be right for you to spend away from your own home, you shall have our heartiest consent to spending with her. If you can in any way give her pleasure--and I know you can--it will be the very least we can do in return for her really wonderful goodness to us.'

'I should like to see her; to be with her sometimes,' said Jacinth, whose sobs had now calmed down into quiet crying. 'But I don't want--once we go away to that place--I don't want ever to see Robin Redbreast again. Ever since'--and here she had to stop a moment--'ever since that first day when we pa.s.sed it with Uncle Marmy, I have had a sort of feeling to this house--a kind of presentiment. I can't bear to think of its going to strangers, or--or people that know nothing about Lady Myrtle. And very likely, if she leaves all she has to big hospitals or something like that, very likely this place will be sold.'

'It may be so,' said Colonel Mildmay; and he added with a smile, 'I wish for your sake I were rich enough to buy it, my poor dear child.'

So Jacinth's castles in the air were somewhat rudely destroyed. There was but one consolation to her. Lady Myrtle was even more loving than hitherto, though she said nothing about the collapse of her plans. For Mrs Mildmay gave her to understand that matters, so far as was fitting, had been explained to her elder daughter.

'Humph!' said the old lady. 'That seals _my_ lips. For of course I cannot express disapproval of her parents to the child.'

But her tenderness and marked affection went some way to soothe the smarting of the girl's sore feelings.