In order perhaps to give an ostensible reason for her last flying visit to the empty Manor, or more likely (since she is not much in the habit of testing the value of her actions by the world's opinion) for her own solace and consolation, Lady Betty Harborough had taken her little son with her on her return home; had taken also her daughter, though the latter's company is a matter of much less moment to her maternal heart.
The departure of the children had, at the time, been an unspeakable relief to Margaret. The recollection of the poignant pain and inconvenience she had endured last year from their questions upon John Talbot's departure, such as, 'When was he coming back?' 'Would not she like him to come and live with her always?' make her look forward with dread unutterable to a repetition of such questions, to which her new circumstances lend an agony lacked by her former ones. How shall she answer them if they ask her now whether she would like John Talbot to come back and live with her always? Shall she scream out loud?
It is, then, with untold relief that she hears that they are gone, whipped off with such promptitude by their parent as to be unable to make their adieux to the Red House, the fox, and the fondly loved though freckled Alfred. That they have again reappeared on the scene, she learns only a couple of days after her interview with milady, by coming upon them and their nurses suddenly at a turn of the Road. The shock is so great--Lily is wearing the very same frock and Franky the same hat in which they had burst into her love-dream on the first morning of her engagement--that she cuts their greetings, to their immense surprise, very short, and, under the pretext of extremest haste, breaks away from their eager little hands and voices.
Her conscience smites her when the sound of sobbing overtakes her, and she turns her head to see Franky fighting with his nurse to get away and run after her, in order to rectify the, to him, unintelligible mistake of her want of gladness at meeting him. Poor Franky! She has not so many lovers that she can afford to rebut the tenderness of even so small a one as Master Harborough. She will make it up to him next time. It is not long before she is given the opportunity. On the following morning she is sitting at her writing-table doing the weekly accounts, when a rapping as of minute knuckles on the outer door is followed--before permission to enter can be either given or refused--by the appearance of a small figure, that of Miss Lily, who advances not quite so confidently as usual.
'Oh, Miss Lambton!' she says rather affectedly, obviously borrowing a phrase she has heard employed by her mother, 'how fortunate I am to find you! We have come to see you. Franky wants to know whether he was naughty yesterday that you would not speak to him. He thinks he must have been naughty. He has sent you a present; he did not like to give it you himself, so he has asked me. He took a bit of Nanny's letter-paper when she was not looking, to wrap it up in. It is not hers really; it is ours, for there is "Harborough Castle" on it. Nanny always likes to write to her friends on paper with "Harborough Castle" on it.'
During her voluble speech, she has come up to the table and deposited in Peggy's hand a tiny untidy parcel, piping hot, evidently from the pressure of anxious small fingers tightly closed over it, all the way from the Manor to the Red House. Peggy begins to unroll it; but before this operation is nearly completed, a second little voice is heard, in intense excitement from the door.
'It is my knife that father gave me after I was ill; it has five blades, and a scissors, and a button-hook, and a corkscrew, and a file. It cost ten and sixpence; and I like you to have it: it is a present.'
The next moment Master Harborough and the object of his affections are in each other's arms. It is a long time before she can persuade the little generous heart to take back its offering; before, with the tears in her own eyes, she can succeed in forcing it back to its natural home in the pocket of his sailor trousers; before general conversation can be introduced by Lily.
'Just as we were setting off we saw Freddy going out riding,' says she agreeably. 'He would not tell us where he was going; but Nanny thinks it was to Hartley's. Why does she say "Hartley's" instead of "Mr. Hartley's"? She always talks of Mr. Richards, the butcher!'
Simultaneously with this unanswerable query about her, Nanny herself appears with a note in her hand, which she has been commissioned by Lady Roupell to give to Miss Lambton, and which, when she is once more alone--the children having scampered off to embrace Alfred--Miss Lambton opens. She does so with some slight curiosity. The envelope is so large as to imply the certainty of an enclosure. Milady's own notes are not apt to require much space, nor is the present one any exception to her general rule. It runs thus:
'DEAR PEGGY,
'This woman has asked me to forward you the enclosed. I do not quite know why she could not find out your address for herself. Freddy has worried me into saying I would go. It is such a long while off that we shall probably all be dead and buried first. Meanwhile, do not order a fly, as I can take you and Prue.
'Yours,
'M. R.'
With a heightened interest Peggy turns to the enclosure. It reveals a large and highly glazed invitation card, on which Mrs. Hartley announces her intention of being 'At Home' on the evening of the 15th of September, and which holds out the two lures--each lurking seductively in its own corner--of 'Theatricals' and 'Dancing.' While she is still looking at it, Prue comes up behind her and reads it over her shoulder; and as she does so, the elder sister hears her breathe quicker.
'Oh, Peggy!' she cries, with agitation, 'then I shall see her at last. I shall be able to judge for myself. It is so odd that we should never have met her, living in the same neighbourhood; it shows how little we go out, does not it? He has always been so anxious that we should know her, almost ever since he knew her himself. How long is that ago?' stifling a sigh. 'Oh, a long time ago now! He says he is always trying to make the people he likes clasp each other's hands.'
'And is he very successful generally?' asks Peggy drily.
But Prue's eyes have lit upon Lady Roupell's note, and her attention is too much absorbed in it for her even to hear her elder's sarcastic question. Peggy would fain have spared her the pain of reading the sentence that refers to Freddy. But it is too late. Margaret becomes aware of the moment when she reaches it by the slight colour that rises to her eager face.
'He was always so good-natured about the Hartleys,' she says, in hasty explanation; 'he would have been just the same to any one else in the same position. He thought that people left them out in the cold; he never can bear any one to be left out in the cold.'
'This does not look much like being left out in the cold, does it?' says Margaret, rising, walking to the chimney-piece, and setting up the card against the dark background of the old oak; 'since it is our only invitation, it is well that it is such a smart one. What an odd fashion it is, when one comes to think of it, that a woman should consider it necessary to send these magnificent bits of pasteboard flying half over the country, merely to tell us that she is at home!'
'There is no need for us to do that,' rejoins Prue rather disconsolately; 'we are always at home.'
'We shall not be at home on the night of the 15th of September,' says Peggy, laughing, and passing her arm fondly round her sister, who, unable to keep away from the magnet of Mrs. Hartley's invitation, has followed it to the fireplace.
'The 15th of September,' repeats the other, dismayed; 'is it possible that it is not till the 15th of September? Oh, what a long time off! How I wish that I could fall asleep now, and only wake up on the very morning!'
Peggy sighs. There is to her something terrible in her sister's eagerness, knowing, as she does, how little it has in common with the wholesome hearty hunger for pleasure of her age. But she speaks cheerfully:
'The play will be the better acted; the floor will be the better waxed.'
'I am sure that it was he who reminded them to ask us; I am sure that they would never have remembered us but for him,' pursues the young girl, colouring with pleasure. 'He used to say--indeed,' still further brightening, 'he said it again not so long ago, that he always felt a sensation of emptiness about a room that I was not in.'
'Oh, Miss Lambton!' cries Franky, bursting into the room, and bringing with him a somewhat powerful agricultural odour, 'we have been having such fun! we have been helping Alfred to fork manure. Nanny is so cross; she is coming after me--oh, do not let her find me! do hide me somewhere!'
But unfortunately Master Harborough's attendant is able to track him by another sense than sight, and from the shelter of Peggy's petticoat, magnanimously extended to protect him, he is presently drawn forth, and carried off, in company with his sister, to a purification profoundly deprecated by both.
For the next four weeks the Hartley card of invitation remains enthroned in the place of honour on Peggy's chimney-piece. Festivities are not so rife in the neighbourhood of the little Red House that it runs any risk of being dethroned, or of even having its eminence shared. Freddy has been affectionately taxed by his betrothed with having been instrumental in its despatch, but he has delicately denied.
'I always think,' he says prettily, 'that there is a magnet in the heart of all good people, drawing them towards each other; so that you see, dear, there was no need for me.'
The magnet of which he speaks must be in great force in his own case just now, judging by the frequency with which the ten long miles--always charged by the flymen as eleven--between the Manor and the home of the Hartleys are spanned by him. Prue does not always hear from himself of these excursions, though, indeed, he makes no great secret of them. Oftener an officious young Evans thrusts upon her the fact of having met him going in the accustomed direction; oftener still, the little Harboroughs innocently mention it as a thing of course; oftenest, her own heart divines it. And after all, what can be more natural than that at such a juncture his services should be needed and asked; than that he whose mouth has always been so full of the beauty and duty of living for others, should give them readily and freely? And again, what can be more natural or obvious than that his presence should be needed, should be indispensable in fact, in the endless discussions as to the choice of a play, interminable as the ever famous ones in 'Mansfield Park;' and that with him it should rest to adjust the jarring claims of the young Hartleys, of whom some pipe, some harp, and some do neither, but are none the less resolved to display themselves in one capacity or another before the ----shire public? And, later on, when the stage with its decorations arrives from London, what can be more natural than that those among the scenes which do not commend themselves to the actors' liking should be painted afresh; and that again Freddy's unerring taste and illimitable good-nature should be called into play?
'You really are too good-natured, Mr. Ducane,' Mrs. Hartley reiterates; 'you let them impose upon you. You really ought to think of yourself sometimes; it does not do not to think of one's self sometimes; one has to be selfish now and again, in this world.' And Freddy, aloft on a ladder with a large brush in his hand, and smouches of paint on his charming face, smiles delightfully, and says he should be sorry to have to think that. And when he does make time for a visit to the Red House, he is so affectionate; brings with him such an atmosphere of enjoyment; is so full of interesting pieces of news about the progress of the preparations, of pleasant speeches as to the intense eagerness on the part of the whole Hartley family to make Prue's acquaintance, that for twenty-four hours after each of them her spirits maintain the level to which the fillip of his easy tendernesses has lifted them.
'It would be tiresome if it were to last for ever, I grant you,' she says to Peggy one day, with an assumption of placid indifference; 'but as it is a temporary thing--so very temporary--why, in less than a fortnight now it will be over, how silly I should be to care! In less than a fortnight' (her face growing suffused with a happy pink) 'we shall go back to our old ways; and the Hartleys will be off in their fine yacht round the world--and good luck go with them! I like him to help them. I tell you I like it,' reiterating the assertion as if knowing it to be one not very easily to be believed; 'it would not have tallied at all with my idea of him if he had refused.'
And Peggy only rejoins despondently: 'Well, dear, if you are pleased, so am I.'
Not, indeed, that Margaret contents herself with this depressed acquiescence in her sister's eclipsed condition. She has on several occasions, and despite many gently conveyed hints on his part that she is not judicious in her choice of opportunities, endeavoured to tackle Mr. Ducane on the subject of his future, to obtain some definite answer from him as to the choice of a profession, etc. But her unsuccess has been uniform and unvaried. It is not that he has ever refused to discuss the question with her. Indeed, in looking back upon their conversation she is always puzzled to remember how it was that he had eluded her. She has generally ended by tracing his escape back to some exalted abstraction; some sentiment too delicate for the wear and tear of everyday life; some bubbling jest.
'You know, dear,' he says to her very kindly one day, when she has been pointing out to him, with some warmth, the entire frivolity of his present mode of life; 'you know, dear, that you and I are always a little at odds as to the true meaning of the word "education." I have always felt that the soul's education can be more furthered by what the world calls "play," than by what it has chosen to define specially as "work." There is no use in forcing one's spirit, dear Peggy. One is much more likely to learn the lines that one's true development ought to follow by sitting still and listening humbly to the voice of the Erd Geist.'
'And the voice of the Erd Geist tells you to paint drop-scenes for the Hartleys'?' replies Peggy witheringly; but her sarcasm furthers her cause as little as do her more serious reasonings.
At the end of the month that intervenes between the arrival of the Hartleys' invitation and the fulfilment of its promise, that cause is exactly where it was. By milady Peggy has been spared any further reference to the subject of her sister's engagement; nor, as far as is known to the girl, has Lady Roupell taken any step such as she had threatened for the separation of the lovers.
With a stab at her heart Peggy recognises the reason of this inaction. The shrewd old woman sees how needless is her interference; and, being kind as well as shrewd, refrains from giving the last unnecessary shove to the tottering card-house of poor Prue's felicity.
