FALSE LIGHTS.

Miss Gray, in her unconsciousness of any fresh betrayal through the children’s chatter, seemed so relieved by what she had done that Jane was tempted to doubt all that had gone before it, and think she had been the victim of her imagination.

The spring day was one of those exceptionally fine ones of which the English climate can sometimes boast. The party started, to all appearance, in excellent spirits, and the drive was not long enough to weary the children.

Haybridge was a large, square, comparatively modern white house, which, with its superabundance of green railings and palisadings, its chain of ponds, that included a hand-bridge and a boathouse like an old-fashioned summer-house, might almost have been modelled on a Flemish or a German country house. The best that could be said for the house was that it looked roomy, comfortable, and cheerful. It stood in a small park with the by no means extensive ground prettily broken. Other gains consisted of a hill, which rose behind the house, and was for a large part of the year dotted with Mr. Crabtree’s sheep. There were also meadows which stretched in front down to a trout stream stealing along beneath a fringe of osiers. These meadows formed, in summer, pasture-ground for Mr. Crabtree’s cattle. They were acknowledged to be the finest, far and near, and as they browsed they helped rather than hindered the general repose of the scene.

Mr. Crabtree awaited his guests at one of the green gates. He was a tall, broad figure, easy and authoritative-looking as he stood there in his rough tweeds, with his air of mature mastership of all about him, and his handsome, vigorous face equally mature and somewhat masterful too, lit up with good-humoured hospitality. The whole man was in entire keeping with his surroundings. He lifted out the children and exchanged words with them. He shook hands with the young ladies, and thanked them heartily for their company. ‘This is very good of you, Jane; I am much obliged to you for coming and making it livelier for Susie.’

His next sentence was addressed to Miss Gray. Did it contain any _double entendre_?

‘That is right of you, Miss Gray, to come and see what Haybridge is like.’ He praised her lightly. ‘We must try and make the place show itself in its best colours to a strange lady, mustn’t we, Sam? But we hope she will be better acquainted with it and us, so we must not let any objectionable nonsense slip out.’

Was there more meant than met the ear? Jane could not tell. Mr. Crabtree spoke in a half-jesting tone, but he did not laugh. His gaiety was not without the grave kindness and marked respect which she could imagine him man and gentleman enough to show to a woman whom he was called upon to re-assure, whose fears he sought to lay to rest. But, when it came to that, Mat Crabtree was tolerably sure to be studiously considerate in his very friendliness to any woman whom a large proportion of the world would judge socially his inferior, because of her lack of the world’s goods and her independence in working for her bread.

Withal there was something contradictory in Mat Crabtree’s look and manner. Jane fancied she caught amidst the serious courtesy and interest of his voice and face, a twinkle of the blue eyes, as if they said in spite of him, ‘I recognise the comicality of the situation.’

Miss Gray blushed vividly, and it might be she hung her head a little. But Bennet Gray had a trick of blushing, and the hanging her head, if she did hang it, was so slight and momentary that the inclination could not be counted on any more than the blush. Indeed, Jane was not certain that there was not a fleeting response, a twinkle in the hazel eyes, in accordance with the twinkle in the blue, as Bennet looked up the next instant. She appeared happy and at her ease afterwards, allowing the children to drag her here and there, and point out some of the wonderful things which were to be seen at Haybridge.

Susie and her babies, as she persisted in calling them, though the little boy and girl were as old as Tom and Sam Wood, had arrived beforehand. Susie was already presiding in her brother-in-law’s house, graciously ordering and patronising everybody and everything to a greater extent, perhaps, than Mat Crabtree altogether approved. Lambert Crabtree had not come with his wife, an omission which nobody, not even Susie, pretended to regret. Whatever his presence might be on other festival occasions, it was certainly not desirable at a family party where women and children predominated.

There was an immense deal to do, and a limited time to do it in. There was first luncheon--brown soup and chicken pie, and the junket for which Haybridge was famous, with special dainties of cakes and fruit for the children. It was served in the big square dining-room, containing pictures of the master of the house’s father and mother, and of himself and his brother when they were round-faced, round-eyed boys like Tom and Sam. That room seemed to have been made for twelve people dining in it all the year round; but Mat Crabtree, as he presided over the luncheon, did not look as if he would ever sing small or feel forlorn when he was eating his meals there alone.

The children resumed their hats and coats, for the visitors had to be taken up to the hill to see the lambs, away to the offices to inspect the calves, over to the ponds to count the goslings and ducklings, with a detour to the poultry-yard to find the earliest turkeys’ eggs to carry home to granny. The round implied an amount of fatigue, which was trying for little legs, though Mr. Crabtree carried one and sometimes a couple of the Redcot or the Newton children on his shoulders the most of the way. At last the children were installed in the half empty, disused drawing-room, where there was nothing to spoil. It was understood that little people can only rest by romping in another form, as horses can only rest standing, so bricks, marbles, and balls, a cat and her kittens were thoughtfully provided for the guests. Miss Gray offered to stay and be play-mistress, and Susie, amidst profuse thanks, managed to convey softly that the part was one side of Bennet’s calling for life. ‘You are so fond of children, dear Miss Gray, and they are so fond of you, that you ought never to be separated. I quite envy your delightful way with the babies.’

The real state of the case was that Susie troubled herself very little with the two big, red, light-eyed, boisterous bantlings that were so like their father. She seldom contradicted them, for she craved their homage, as she did that of every living creature. But when they would have been in her way as might have happened often, particularly since they were not ornamental, she sent them from her without a pang. She sweetly entrusted them to their nurse, or to Susie’s French maid, or to any other constrained or complacent person who would take the children off their mother’s hands. There was not much harm in the poor little things as yet, only they were not engaging. Mat Crabtree’s heart occasionally ached for them, he could hardly have told why. He now enacted that they could play with their Redcot cousins, and even if there did come a collision, his housekeeper, who was somewhat of a personage--elderly, stately, but not ungenial--was prepared to settle all disputes, and if the disputants were good, and got on her right side, she might even tell them a story when they were tired. Mr. Crabtree would not, on any account, permit the sacrifice of Miss Gray to her duties, against which Jane Prior also protested.

‘Children are all very well,’ he said peremptorily, ‘but their elders are glad to get rid of them sometimes; eh, Jane? We are all out having holiday for the day, ain’t we?’ he asserted cheerfully, ‘and one of us shall not be allowed to steal a march upon the others, and slip her neck back into the sober yoke to which our shoulders have grown accustomed, while the rest toil at disporting themselves in a heavy, ungainly fashion--all save my sister Susie here, to whom play seems to come natural.’

‘Don’t flatter, Mat,’ protested Susie, languidly, taking his exception as a compliment.

Miss Gray was at liberty, and she repaired with the remainder of the grown-up people to the garden. There was not much to be seen, and Susie employed herself more with the blossoming peach trees and their promise of fruit--in view of the peaches, the principal share of which was likely to find its way to the Bank House, than with the small share of ordinary spring flowers which occupied the others.

The garden of Haybridge was, like the house, chiefly remarkable for answering the end proposed. It had been sensibly laid out, was productive even at this season, and left a wholesome impression on the minds of the visitors that nothing was neglected or forgotten. From the sea-kail to the rhubarb, everything was looked to properly. The newly-dug, smoothly-raked beds, the young plants in the frames, the very heaps of leaves and bundles of sticks were there in a state of hopeful preparation. There was only one small hot-house, because Mr. Crabtree did not want many grapes, and cared more for open-air native flowers than for the exotics of a conservatory. But here, too, the hyacinths and jonquils, heaths and azaleas did credit both to Mr. Crabtree and his gardener.

In the borders outside the amber-yellow aconite was sharing its reign with the golden and purple crocuses, which had been mentioned as one of the inducements to the visit to Haybridge, and with masses of blue, white, and pink hepaticas, and tufts of brown and pink garden heather.

The straw-coloured primroses and their milk-white sisters were waiting for the next moon before they were rife. The anemones and polyanthuses only presented their aggressive green sheaths. The wall-flowers held up their heads, but displayed no more than the iron-brown edges of the petals well shrouded in the slaty calyxes. The commonest crimson, lilac, and chocolate auricula merely existed in the shape of tiny-crumpled balls like collections of small green clenched fists powdered with flour.

The most liberal plant was Sweet Alison, which amicably spread out a few hundreds of broad flat miniature white faces in prominent patches. It represented those groups of common-place, easily-pleased smiling people that diversify the more sombre ranks of society. These hardy, homely people, not chary of their favours, are little thought of except to be despised, but they bring untold relief to what without them would be the sensitive and oppressive nature of human intercourse.

It was in the garden that the party fell into pairs--Mrs. Crabtree walking with her sister, and Mr. Crabtree accompanying Miss Gray, whom he invited to turn down a side walk in order to look at a singularly situated last year’s nest. Susie could not object to be left with Jane for a few minutes, though the young matron was wont to appropriate as her right any man in the company, and was quite honest in expressing her preference for male society. She took advantage of her present deprivation to link her arm in Jane’s, looking a fragile little creature beside her tall sister, and to deliver her mind of a warning. ‘My dear Janie,’ said Susie, in her most caressing way, ‘there is no doubt Miss Gray is a most charming person. Even if I thought otherwise, which would be difficult, I should hesitate to say so to you, since you have elected her to be your particular friend. But does it never strike you that she forgets--just the least little bit?’

‘What?’ demanded Jane, bluntly, ready to boil over with wrath, and stopping short in their walk.

‘Well, my love, in the first place, come along. I am sure,’ spoken most politically, ‘you do not choose that everybody should observe we are at high words--at least you are. I mean the accident of her position. No one has more sympathy than I have with girls in her sad circumstances.’

‘There is really no call for your sympathy. I don’t know anything sad in Miss Gray’s circumstances.’ Jane boiled over at once. ‘I wish I had been as well grounded in my education and could feel myself as thoroughly equipped to be of some use in the world, and to secure my own independence. Suppose my father were not able to keep up Redcot any longer, and I saw it to be my duty to relieve him from the burden of supporting me--now that I am a grown woman! Suppose I not only felt such a course of conduct to be my duty, but was able to put it in practice, and could turn my education and whatever abilities I have to good account, do you intend to say you or anybody else would be justified in regarding my circumstances as sad?’

‘I don’t know about the justification,’ said Mrs. Susie, shaking her lovely little head; ‘but I’m afraid we’d do it, justified or not. It is the verdict of the world, and, my dear child, there must be something in that.’

‘As if there had never been such a thing as stupid errors and cruel prejudices, taking whole centuries to clear away,’ protested Jane. ‘But the world is getting wiser.’

‘It is quite wise enough for me,’ said Susie, coolly. ‘Now, don’t lose your temper, it is not worth while. Besides, did I not begin by saying Miss Gray is a charming person, quite handsome in her own style, ladylike, and all that which makes her the more dangerous? Yes, that is the right word, though you are so dreadfully touchy that I am almost frightened to use it. For girls in her position--you may hold what extravagant notions you like about it, you dear, high-flown, learned goose! the sharp-sighted world judges differently--have a double motive for breaking away from their disadvantages and establishing themselves creditably.’

Jane was silent for an instant at what appeared to her the sheer insult of the words.

‘Do you mean me to think, Susie,’ and she gave a gasp to recover her composure, ‘it would be the opinion of you and people like you, if that happened to which I have referred, if my father, who is poor, as you must know perfectly, were to get poorer, and I were to become a schoolmistress, I should all at once grow a dangerous person, eager to relinquish my calling, and driven to scheme and plot for a husband? I shall be very glad to have mistaken your meaning, but if that is not what you are thinking, I cannot imagine what you intend to convey.’

‘Oh, good heavens, Jane, don’t let your madness reach that pass; don’t suggest that you may become a “school ma’am,”’ cried Susie, in half genuine, half mock horror.

‘Why not?’ cried Jane, recovering her self-command. ‘I at least should be contented with my lot, and should not strive to better it. To be a “school ma’am,” as you think fit to call it, strikes me as a more honest and honourable shift than to marry a man I could neither love nor respect, simply that he might furnish me with gowns and bonnets.’ Jane was sorry the moment she had said the bitter words. She was sensitive on the point of her sister’s marriage, and she could not comprehend that Susie might have no sensitiveness for herself.

Mrs. Crabtree turned aside the implication very neatly. ‘You forget there is another alternative, that a woman may love and respect a man who can give her gowns and bonnets. The two conditions do not necessarily clash. Indeed,’ she went on with an airy laugh, ‘I am not sure that the last ought not to imply the first. You would not have us wives ungrateful, would you? I know I am much obliged to Lamb,’ with a pretty little assumption of languishing humility, ‘for “swotting,” as he says, in that bank of his, in order that the babies and I may be what you think disgustingly smart. But we have lost sight of one consideration,’ and she posed her little figure more daintily as she spoke. ‘Even though you were to demean yourself--excuse me, dear, for using the language of rational people--and lose your social standing by going out as a governess and earning your living, you would still be, in this neighbourhood at least, one of the Priors of Redcot.’

‘And if Miss Gray’s father had been a beggar it would have been no fault of hers,’ insisted Jane. ‘As it is, he was one of the partners in a respectable firm of attorneys in London,’ she ended a little faintly. Her mind had been unsettled lately with regard to Miss Gray’s antecedents, though the deceased attorney had not been one of the disturbing elements.

‘There are attorneys and attorneys,’ said Susie, with a wave of her little hand, very much as Jane herself had said ‘There are Grays and Grays,’ ‘and London is a wide word; but though you may twit Lamb and me with keeping a bank at Newton, the best attorney in London who could not leave his daughter a penny, by the way, is hardly a match for the heads of old county families like the Crabtrees and Priors.’ She looked pointedly as she spoke at Mat Crabtree appearing in the opposite walk, talking and laughing with Miss Gray. ‘Mind my words, Jane, whether you like them or not--I am sure I do not often say things that people do not like; I hate to set people against me’--this was uttered quite plaintively--‘but I cannot bear to see you so wilfully blind without doing what I can to put you on your guard.’

Jane opened her lips to say, ‘You may spare yourself the trouble. I do not want your warning, Susie, any more than I prize your example;’ but she shut her mouth in time to keep in the caustic retort, and Mrs. Crabtree remained mistress of the field. She resumed, ‘I repeat, that such a handsome, well-mannered girl as Miss Gray is a dangerous person to have for a governess, without any blame to her. I daresay if I were in her shoes I should do the same. I do not pretend to be superhumanly disinterested and virtuous. It would have been a most injudicious step to have brought her to Redcot and kept her there, if Jack had been at home. Surely mam-ma and pa-pa’s eyes would have been opened to such a gross piece of imprudence. But, I declare, you are all as innocent as babes; I feel quite like a Mephistopheles beside you. Even as it is,’ Susie waxed confidential while she nodded her head with Mandarin or Burleigh-like sagacity and grasped the two sides of her sable cape in the most impressive manner, ‘I confess I am not quite comfortable to-day. I am not at all certain that Mat Crabtree has not taken a fancy to her. There are no fools like old ones.’

Jane stood still again, fairly aghast this time, and not without warrant. To bring such an accusation against Mr. Crabtree in his own garden, well nigh in his presence, and to clench it by doing the next thing to calling him an old fool! Truly Susie, with an eel-like smoothness and pliancy, did not know what reverence meant.

‘Come along,’ enjoined Mrs. Crabtree once more, almost in an annoyed tone this time. ‘Don’t you see they are looking at us? Forgive me for being rude,’ she continued, as she rapidly recovered her good humour, ‘but I must call you a young fool, Janie, whom one might buy at one end of a town and sell at the other. It is not that I have not your interest at heart. Quite the contrary. Who should if I have not?’ broke off Susie, lifting up her lustrous dark eyes, and opening them wide with an expression of almost pious sisterly affection. ‘I was always inclined to believe that Mat had a sneaking kindness for you, and I should never have stood in the way or turned him against it, though it might have cost my boy his place.’

‘Susie, how dare you say such things?’ groaned poor Jane, fit to sink into the earth. ‘Are you not ashamed to speak in this way? Mr. Crabtree is old enough to be my father. He has done nothing but laugh at me and argue with me ever since I can recollect.’

‘Oh, my dear, these fatherly feelings when a man has just turned forty-five, are most delusive, and not to be depended on,’ pronounced Susie, as from the depths of a profound experience. ‘As for the laughter, I often tell Lamb the Crabtrees are all laughing hyenas; and, with regard to the arguing, why, with some people it is the height of agreeing,’ declared Susie, with another emphatic nod. ‘Such would-be fathers and mentors are almost as dangerous as charming persons like Miss Gray. I say, Jane,’ Susie burst out afresh with bird-like inquisitiveness and cunning, ‘I cannot fathom the quickness with which she and Mat Crabtree have struck up an intimacy, only begun, I believe, at the Kershaw collier lads’ club-room the evening I was there last week. Ah! that, too, is not wise--a sort of levelling of class distinctions in amateur teaching and learning. That dear old gaby Mr. Haynes should be well shaken for devising such an institution. No, I never saw my worthy brother-in-law so easily won or so readily accessible before. That absurd, deceptive fatherly air, on which you say you have counted, has this gain, that it makes him, in spite of his _bonhomie_, rather formal and slow in getting along with girls, unless, as in your case, he happens to have known them all their lives.’

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

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Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious punctuation errors and omissions have been corrected.