Part 36 (2/2)
”Why, Mr. Hartington, it is ages since we saw you.”
”It is indeed--it is over two years.”
”I have two surprising pieces of news to give you, Eliza. In the first place it has been discovered that there was a very serious flaw in the t.i.tle to Fairclose, and that the sale to me was altogether illegal. Mr.
Hartington has behaved most kindly and generously in the matter, but the result is he comes back to Fairclose and we move out.”
The three ladies uttered an exclamation of pleasure. Fairclose had become hateful to them all, and at this moment it mattered little to them how it had come about that they were going to leave it.
”You don't mean to go back to the High Street, father?” Julia, the elder of the girls, asked anxiously.
”No, my dear; it will be a question to be settled between us where we will go, but I have decided to leave Abchester altogether. I feel that I require rest and quiet and shall give up business and go right out of it.”
The girls both clapped their hands.
”And now for my second piece of news which will surprise you as much as the first. Your sister Mary is going to marry Mr. Hartington. The matter was settled in Paris, where they have both been shut up during the siege.”
”That is, indeed, good news,” Mrs. Brander said cordially, foreseeing at once the advantage of such a marriage.
The girls took their cue from her, and professed great pleasure at the news which, however, was not altogether welcome to them.
Mary, whom they had never liked, was to be mistress of Fairclose, and was to gain all the advantages that they had expected but had never obtained. The thought was not pleasant, but it was speedily forgotten in the excitement of the other news. Her mother, however, seeing the pleasure that her husband unmistakably felt at the thought of the marriage, was genuinely pleased. Not only might the connection be useful to the girls, but it might be invaluable in covering their retirement from Fairclose. There might be something more about that than her husband had said. At any rate this would silence all tongues and put an end to the vague anxiety that she had long felt. She had always liked Cuthbert, and had long ago cherished a faint hope that he might some day take to Mary.
”This all comes very suddenly upon us, Mr. Hartington. I suppose I ought to call you Cuthbert again, now.”
”It would certainly sound more like old times, Mrs. Brander.”
”Only think, my dear,” the lawyer put in, ”he proposed to Mary more than two years ago and she refused him. I suppose she never told you?”
”She never said a word on the subject,” Mrs. Brander said, almost indignantly. ”Why, it must have been before----” and she stopped.
”Before my short reign here as master, Mrs. Brander. Yes, I was down at Newquay sketching, when she was staying with her friend, Miss Treadwyn, and Mary was at the time too much occupied with the idea of raising womankind in the scale of humanity to think of taking up with a useless member of society like myself.”
Mrs. Brander shook her head very gravely.
”It was a sad trouble to her father and myself,” she said; ”I hope she has got over those ideas.”
”I think she has discovered that the world is too large for her to move,” Cuthbert replied, with a smile. ”At any rate she has undertaken the task of looking after me instead of reforming the world; it may be as difficult, perhaps, but it sounds less arduous.”
At lunch the girls were engaged in an animated discussion as to where they would like to move to, but Mrs. Brander put an end to it by saying--
”We shall have plenty of time to talk that over, girls--it must depend upon many things. Your father's health will, of course, be the first consideration. At any rate, I shall set my face against London. So you can put that altogether out of your minds. An income that would be sufficient to establish one in a good position near a country or seaside town would be nothing in London. And now, Cuthbert, we want to hear a great deal more about our dear Mary. She writes so seldom, and of course she has been cut off for so long a time from us that we scarcely know what she is doing. In Germany she did not seem to be doing anything particular, but as she said in her letters, was studying the people and their language.”
”That is what she was doing in Paris--at least that is what she came to do, but the siege put a stop to her studies, and she devoted herself to the much more practical work of nursing the wounded.”
”Dear me, what an extraordinary girl she is,” Mrs. Brander said, much shocked. ”Surely there were plenty of women in Paris to nurse the wounded without her mixing herself up in such unpleasant work, of which she could know absolutely nothing.”
”She was a very good nurse, nevertheless,” Cuthbert said, quietly. ”She worked in the American ambulance, under an American doctor, the other nurses and a.s.sistants being all American or English.”
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