MRS. LAMBERT CRABTREE’S RECEPTION OF HER BROTHER.

A strange servant opened the hall-door of the somewhat stately portico to the Bank House in answer to Jack Prior’s knock. As if he was destined to be overwhelmed with strangeness on his arrival, he was shown into the newly-painted hall, up the newly-painted staircase, into the newly-painted, freshly-arranged drawing-room. It was harmonious and dark in grey greens, olive browns, dead gold, and wrought brass, not unpleasant to contemplate first and last, but making him feel as if he had never been in the house before. Susie might only have taken possession of the house that day, with nothing save the fundamentals in the public rooms set in order.

The mistress of the house was absent, out at the drill-hall, if Jack had been told. On the whole, he did not look a suspicious character, so the servant who had answered his inquiry left him, though the hour was not a canonical hour for any visitor, save the habitués of the house, to wait for Mrs. Crabtree’s return. Jack had time to fret and fume, turn over the newspapers and club books, wonder if the children were in bed so that he might not ask for their company, speculate what Lambert Crabtree did with himself in the evenings, and question what on earth Susie could be about abroad at this hour. She could not be at church, because it was too late for any service, even for choral practising; besides, Mrs. Lambert Crabtree held advanced views which dispensed with all save the most perfunctory church attendance. She could hardly be out at dinner, else the servant would have mentioned it. He had time to doubt and feel remorseful, to think he had better have gone on to Redcot, faced his father’s caustic coldness, and given the fragments of the first evening to the mother. He owed it to her. He was giving her cause to reproach him, though certainly the reproach would never be uttered.

At last Susie came in, still wearing her hat and light summer mantle. The same servant who had admitted Jack had told her mistress that there was a gentleman--a stranger--in the drawing-room who had asked to see her. Susie had made a little _moue_ as if her patience was worn out. She had come up the stairs slowly as if she felt tired, and was turning over in her mind how she might dismiss the intruder most plausibly and urbanely, for Susie was plausible and urbane if she was anything.

She must have been very wearied and worried, apprehensive of fresh fatigue and trouble, for she entered the room quietly, with almost an intermission of her wonted graces. In place of casting a sidelong, languishing look at Jack from her lovely eyes, she darted out sharp glances from under her lowered eyebrows straight at him. The servant had lit the lamp, and of course Susie knew her brother instantly, though he had grown a large moustache and was tanned considerably deeper than she had ever seen him. With a little spontaneous shriek of delight, she sprang to him and clutched at him rather than clung to him.

‘Jack, you here! come back to stay with me?’ she cried so breathlessly that her accents were broken with joy.

Jack had entertained an impulsive liking rather than a deliberate preference for his sister Susie. What man could refrain from admiring and seeking to cherish so beautiful, pleasant, and dependent a creature? But the truth in Jack Prior had been enough to inspire an uneasy, mortifying suspicion, even when this vision was most agreeable, that the pleasantness was too sweet to be wholesome, and did not ring true. However, the most sceptical could not have doubted that Mrs. Lambert Crabtree was glad to see her brother. The proof of her affection coming at such a time not only helped to restore Jack’s self-respect, it touched him keenly. ‘Thanks, Sue,’ he said quickly as he kissed her; ‘it is good that somebody is happy to have me back.’

‘Happy!’ cried Susie enthusiastically, and there was actually moisture glistening in her fine eyes. ‘Happy is not the word. I am enchanted, my dear boy; and I shall have you all to myself, for Lamb has been called up to town on business this very afternoon. Horrid, isn’t it, with all this volunteering going on? However, he hopes to get down to the ball at least. But you will stay with me, and take care of me, and keep me company, dear.’ She heaped up the affectionate, appealing words. ‘I shall not be obliged to have in that poor, tiresome, Mr. Parsons,’ and an aggrieved, harassed look came into her face at the mere mention of the official’s name. ‘You know Roger,’ mentioning the man-servant, ‘who has been slaving all day at that blessed hall, sleeps in the bosom of his family above the coach-house. We have always to get Mr. Parsons to stay in the house--not to leave it to unprotected females, on account of the bank--when Lamb is from home. I cannot avoid inquiring if Mr. Parsons is made comfortable, and bidding him good night, when he will call me “ma’am,” and detain me with long-winded speeches about giving me trouble and being in my way. Bless the man! on ordinary occasions I smile and say, “Not at all, I am the obliged person. The interests of the bank are sacred. I would not endanger them for worlds,” and think no more about him, beyond bidding the maids look after the worthy creature. But to-night, when one is worn off one’s feet already, with this miserable ball, it is the last straw which breaks the unfortunate camel’s back.’ That was settled.

‘And now, Jack dear, what have you had to eat, or rather, what will you eat?’ urged Susie. ‘Did you dine early or late, or not at all? For I know you are a foolish, careless boy in not making it a duty to look after yourself. Shall we have a cosy supper together, whatever and whenever the dinner was? What do you say to a veal cutlet or a salmon steak? I am so sorry we cannot have a game pie, but you have not forgotten my lobster salad, I hope?’ As she spoke she pulled off her long gloves and laid aside her mantle and hat, putting them down on the sofa beside her. She was left in the demi-toilet of a faint-coloured thin evening gown, with sleeves reaching to the elbow and a square-cut bodice finished with frills of lace. It was a pretty and becoming house dress in itself, but the dimness of the colour seemed to be reflected in her face, and to cause her warm and brilliant brunette complexion to pale to a wan sallowness--the change in such a colour as hers when from any cause it is blanched. In the same manner the softness of the stuff of her gown resulting in lines almost as straight, and folds as close as Jane patronised, exaggerated Susie’s smallness and slimness. It made her appear for the moment almost meagre--a minute specimen of humanity afflicted with a strange nervous springiness rather than a perfectly-proportioned sylph gifted with exhaustless skimming grace and an Atalanta swiftness of movement.

Jack observed the effect with a little vague surprise and regret, and referred to it the next moment. He had been saying, ‘You are the old woman, Susie, spoiling a fellow through his baser appetites. Do you think I have been feasting on game pie and lobster salad in the bush?’--when he broke off to add with brotherly, blundering, plain-speaking, ‘But what have you been doing to yourself, little woman? You are not up to the mark. Have you been ill, or what? You might have lost your teeth and hair, and been as old as Crabtree--not that he is bald and toothless--to see you to-night.’

Jack ought to have known that he could not have said anything more certain to offend his sister, even though the speech was off-hand and half in jest. But he was not prepared for the something more serious than petulance, the passionate vexation and alarm in her voice when she answered him. ‘What do you mean by speaking like this to me, Jack?’ she protested. And the scarlet flush of her anger instantaneously recalled the bloom that had gone for the time, while the swelling of the throat and neck restored the roundness of the shrunk lines. ‘It is too bad. You must be aware that I hate the idea of growing old and ugly. With this incubus of a ball hanging over my head--when everybody will be remarking upon my looks--after I have taken such pains, too, to be myself--it is very unkind of you to tell me in this rude, abrupt way, that you see how much I have fallen off of late.’

‘My dear Susie,’ remonstrated Jack, half amused, but still more astonished and distressed, ‘you cannot think for a moment I meant to hurt you. “Fallen off!” you are anything save fallen off now. You are as red as a rose, and you look as if you were towering up to the roof, a dragon ready to come down and crush a repentant sinner. “Old and ugly!” What ridiculous bosh! When you are not thirty, and you have always been--well, not a fright, Susie. Come, forget my speech, which was not a compliment; but I am sure you have had compliments enough from all the world--there, that is better as a specimen of politeness--to dispense with them from me. How are they all at home? Has the poor pater got over my lack of brains, sense, and go? Is the mother still pretending to have no attention to spare from her quilts and her novels, dear soul? What is Jane about with the little Woods? How are Crabtree and the babies?’

Susie was not hard to appease; indeed, she made a half apology to her brother for being touchy, explaining plaintively how much she had been put about, what a great deal of thinking she had been obliged to do within the last few weeks, between the painters in the Bank House and the calling out of the volunteers. ‘Not a corner quite in order, not a hole we could call our own till the tradesmen departed finally with their brushes and pails yesterday. To think that I have the Pierrepoints, mother and daughter, and Netty and Gerty and May Allardyce all established in the White Hart Inn. Bertie and Ben Girdlestone are there also. Ben saw me to my own door ten minutes ago. I have just come from them, and I ought to have stayed with them. I don’t deserve to be rewarded by a cosy supper and chat with you, Jack dear, which will be so much nicer and more refreshing.’

Susie was as good as her word. After she had despatched a message to Mr. Parsons, Lambert Crabtree’s head clerk, that his services would be dispensed with, she ordered up everything that the heart of man could desire for Jack’s bodily solace. She set herself to entertain him, and when she had recovered from the fatigue she complained of, and the affront he had inadvertently dealt her, she was her bewitching, amusing self again.

‘Poor little thing, she has been done up, and was out of sorts, I suppose, with all this fuss,’ Jack thought. ‘It is kind of her to exert herself on my account. I did not give Susie credit for so much family affection,’ he reflected remorsefully. But Jack did not approve; nay, he was secretly aggrieved, and a good deal ‘riled’ by what might have been called the irreverent affectionateness of the tone in which Susie spoke of their father and mother’s foibles, and made good stories out of pap-pa’s growls and close-fistedness and mam-ma’s weakness for Tommy. Still, it was done so lightly and divertingly that Jack laughed against his conscience, and could not put a stop to the raillery.

‘Let me see,’ said Susie, resting her two elbows on the table in a free-and-easy fashion which had recently found favour in polite society. In doing so she lifted up her slender arms--from which the lace fell back, and supported her chin on the little clasped hands. There sapphires and emeralds blazed in a style hardly in accordance with the position of the wife of a local banker, even though she was a Prior of Redcot, and he a Crabtree of Haybridge. ‘Where are we at?’ as if she were speaking of their place in a book they were reading. ‘What is the greatest event that has happened in your absence? Oh, I have it, the advent of Janie’s idol, the Redcot governess.’

‘Is she such a stunner?’ asked Jack, clasping his hands behind his head, smothering a yawn, and not exhibiting much curiosity.

‘Well, you know, I always say she’s not my style,’ explained Susie, with her ingenuous coquettishness. ‘That makes me dispassionate, but, on the other hand, it hinders me from being so appreciative as I might have been even with a heart devoured by jealousy. She is reckoned handsome, and she’s quite awfully clever--knows both Latin and Greek--that goes without saying--and I daresay could

Solve a problem In Euclid before she could speak.

What is of more consequence to her and to everybody,’ went on Susie, with her affectation of cynicism, ‘she is perfectly well aware on which side her bread may be buttered. If you will believe me, she has been employing herself making up to my elderly brother-in-law, Mat, and I am not at all clear that I may not have to welcome her as a sister-in-law, one of these days, with all the grace I can muster.’

‘The plot is thickening and getting interesting,’ declared Jack, waking up. ‘She must be a clever woman. Mat Crabtree of Haybridge is not a bird to be caught with chaff.’

‘Oh! Mat has an idiotically soft side,’ said Susie, shaking her small worldly-wise brown head, that had sometimes the pretty pert air of a charmingly knowing linnet or hedge-sparrow. ‘And Miss Gray has “come over him,” as Lamb says, where that vulnerable region is concerned.’

‘Miss Gray!’ muttered Jack, unlocking his fingers and letting his arms drop, with so irrepressible a start that it was well for him the drawing-room in the Bank House, in which the new chandeliers were set with wax candles, furnished only a dim, religious light, most æsthetically obscure. He was telling himself, in the same breath, what a self-conscious ass he was. There was not a commoner name in England. There were Grays and Grays of all shades, as his sister had said before him, though the plagiarism was involuntary. What on earth should his Miss Gray be doing here, at Redcot of all places in the world? His? Was she his if there was a particle of truth in Susie’s outrageous story--if Miss Burton had any tangible ground to go upon when she refused him the information to which he was entitled, that very morning?

‘Where does this marvel come from?’ he steadied his nerves to ask, in an odd voice which did not fail to strike on Susie’s quick ear.

‘Why do you inquire?’ she turned upon him. ‘Are you going in for a share of her smiles? You men are so gregarious, that if one of you leaps the hedge the rest are sure to follow, mad to see what the other side is like. That is why widows are so popular. I always tell Lamb that if he would do me the favour to make me a widow, even though I should not be without encumbrances, I could have three times more offers yet than I had to pick and choose from in my maiden days. Where does Miss Gray come from? You don’t think she is such a fool as to go about proclaiming that?’ answered Susie, laughing with the strain of hardness in her laugh that sometimes prevailed till it spoilt its melody. ‘Her crony Jane told me that the father Gray was an attorney in London--respectable enough, you see, and may judiciously be manipulated till it sounds like a barrister, a sergeant-at-law, anything up to the Attorney-General.’

London, like Gray, was a wide word, Jack was reminding himself desperately, and it contained enough limbs of the law to form a Briareus.