SUSIE’S DESCRIPTION OF MISS GRAY.

‘Can’t you give me a clearer idea what Mat Crabtree’s flame is like, if you cannot swear precisely to her antecedents?’ Jack pressed hoarsely, with a feint of carelessness.

‘Give me a moment,’ begged Susie, sitting silent afterwards with her eyes on her lap, as if trying to conjure up the salient points in the lady’s attractions. In reality she was saying to herself, ‘Mr. Jack has been in mischief again. It is highly improbable that he can have come across Miss Gray, but he may have met with somebody in similar circumstances, who may easily have proved too much for him. Mamma’s boy may have left a wife--the family must still be in the future--behind him in Australia, or why not at the railway station here? His coming first to me instead of going to Redcot was rather incomprehensible. Well, pap-pa will not be very sweet to Mrs. Jack when she appears on the scene. I don’t think she’ll find quarters at Redcot. What a fool Jack must have been! and there he sits staring at the wall, gulping down what he has on his mind. What a mercy he is not a girl! Ugliness doesn’t signify much in men; women don’t want rivals. Lamb never was an Adonis, but he has thews and sinews, while poor Jack is short as well as ugly--ugly enough to frighten babies when he is in this mood. As like pap-pa as two peas, but not the more likely to agree on that account. I wonder if the disagreement, and whatever trouble Jack is in--he is pretty sure to be in some mess--could be any good to us now? If we promised to back him through everything, whether he would not help us and be of use--only he is such a stupid boy when there is such need! But perhaps there will be no need after all. Lamb goes from one extreme to another, and likes to play the wolf and terrify me, poor little Red Riding Hood, needlessly, sometimes. He may come down to-morrow, and say it has all blown over, as he has said before.’

These thoughts had crossed Susie’s mind with the rapidity of lightning. Now she looked up, and apparently gave the result of her cogitations with her usual vivacity.

‘A daughter of the gods! Divinely tall and most divinely fair,’

she quoted, laughingly; ‘in sober prose, not so tall as Jane, about the middle height, and not fair at all in the sense of a blonde. Brown-haired, hazel-eyed, broad browed, straight nosed, fresh coloured, with good teeth but too square a jaw. Not bad style but not much of it. A comely young women in rude health, who might have been a milkmaid or a simple squiress, like mam-ma, if she had not been a bluestocking some shades lighter than Janie, and not half such a prig.’

There was a pause in the semi-darkness.

‘Miss Alice Gray must be a lucky young woman with such a bodily and mental physique,’ said Jack at last; ‘ain’t there an old song with her name in it?’

‘I don’t know; but our Miss Gray, as shop-people say, is not an Alice. She signs herself “B. Gray,” and mam-ma told me that B. stood for the surname Bennet.’ Jack rose from his chair precipitately and began to walk backwards and forwards on the side of the room which was most in the shade, and to stand with his back to Susie, looking out at one or other of the windows, which, as they commanded the lower part of the garden, presented only the rainy sky and the hardly-discernible flower-beds for his inspection. His heart was now throbbing like a paddle wheel, now standing still; his face was red with rage and white with pain by turns; he was hot and cold in swift alternations. He could not sit still and face Susie’s scrutiny. He must get up, or die, or tell everything.

Susie seemingly took no notice of what might be colonial manners, taken on with Jack’s acknowledged facility for picking up unprofitable acquirements. She went on with her chat. ‘You will see the young woman at the ball to-morrow night. Of course, you will go to the volunteer ball. It is quite as much my ball as it is Lamb’s, and you must do it honour. You will be a lion--the newly-returned traveller. You will dispute the _pas_ with the beautiful Redcot governess--she has risen into a beauty on the score of her success--who is going to make a marriage above her in station, having captivated that incorrigible old bachelor, Mat Crabtree of Haybridge.’

‘I fear I can’t,’ stammered Jack, like a man who had well drunk. Indeed, though he had never been accused of the vice of drunkenness, Susie was tempted for a second to suspect him of it. ‘I am too modest.’

‘Oh, no, you are not. You will go, Jack dear. Now that I think of it,’ cried Susie, full of zeal to inaugurate a new enterprise, ‘do cut him, Mat, out, just to oblige me. He deserves it; he is good game--a man old enough to have had a grown up daughter. To throw over little Piers!--he ought to be ashamed of himself. But that sort of girl is apt to lose her head with her greed, she never knows when she is well off. She will snatch at another chance--you are not a better match than old Mat, but then you are young, and the son of her employer. I don’t say sacrifice yourself--not for worlds--I would not be so treacherous to my family. But draw her out, play off your admiration at first sight. She is probably mad on making conquests. Get her to flirt with you. Mat would not forgive that, he is as prudish as an old maid about women’s behaviour. I don’t know what I should have done if he had been Lamb.’

‘No man would stand such behaviour,’ objected Jack, roughly. ‘But I can’t, Susie; I’m too honest,’ the last word said almost with a groan.

‘No,’ exclaimed his sister, ‘not when you will be conferring a public benefit by warning off other young women like Miss Gray from stealing a march upon unsuspecting families. Men are so unprotected--so open to attack--yet I don’t suppose Mat is so purblind as to be beyond enlightenment. You may open Jane’s eyes too; sisters may be brought to see to a wonderful distance when their brothers are the unconscious operators. It will only be for a night, and she is really a handsome, agreeable girl, if you can swallow a walking dictionary. After to-morrow night I am afraid it will be too late for this reason--the two learned ladies, with the grizzled victim Mat in their train, are to start the next morning for Oxford. It is the thing now for women to take degrees instead of men, my child,’ with a wicked glance over her shoulder at Jack. ‘Unfortunately, Mat took his ages ago; he cannot undo the deed; but he is so willing that the future Mrs. Mat should have her innings and share his honours, that he is going down with the girls to see justice done. He has secured his old lodgings in St. Giles Road for Jane and Miss Gray. By-the-bye, they were your old lodgings, too, where I flatter myself I worked sad havoc among the undergraduates more than once at Commem. Don’t you remember? I have no doubt Mat’s proposal will be made in due form, and most appropriately among academic groves.’

‘There may be two at a bargain-making. I think I’ll take your advice, Susie,’ said Jack, with flaming face, furious eyes, and a harsh laugh as he turned round. ‘I’ll go to your ball, and have what you call my innings. But you must give me quarters here till the ball. I cannot walk over to Redcot and have it out with them there first. The mother, God help her, would not let me go so soon, and, if I’m to do such damage on the spot, I ought to flash on the pair like a meteor, I take it.’ He spoke foolishly, almost incoherently, but Susie caught at the proposal.

‘Oh yes, Jack, stay with me, darling,’ she implored as when she had come in without any expectation of finding her brother. ‘Help me with the wretched ball and all the rest. They need not know that you have come, out at Redcot. They will have enough of you since you have returned to settle at home, no doubt. They need not grudge you to poor me for a day or two--Lamb away, and everything. Jane and Miss Gray are so occupied with their studies that they will not be in Newton till the evening, and then they drive straight to the ball, and straight home again when they have had enough of the thing. If you really want it not to be known that you are here,’ continued Susie, breathlessly, her eyes sparkling with her swift scheming and fondness for the manœuvring--even when it was not wanted, which Jane hated, ‘you can stay in the house all the morning. But mind, I don’t pledge myself that you will lie _perdu_, since there are hundreds of chances against it, and birds of the air carry tales. Only I’ll do what I can to humour you, for, oh, dear, dear, you have lifted a load from my mind, you jewel of a brother!’

‘It is well when a fellow can be accommodating,’ said Jack, dryly, ‘and can kill two birds with one stone.’

After Susie had bidden Jack good night she came back, put her two hands on his shoulder, and looked wistfully in his face. These two members of one family were totally unlike; but because of their very unlikeness, and also because they were brother and sister, and not two brothers or two sisters, they had been happy together in many a light-hearted hour of the past. Was there compunction in Susie’s woman’s breast as she looked into the homely young face, with the weariness and trouble in it, which made it look, for the moment, so much more like her father’s than it had ever looked before? Had she a passing yearning simply to comfort Jack, returned from his wanderings and come first to her before he had gone to his mother? Did she relent in her half-defined purpose to make gain of his trouble, and employ it to render more secure the tottering plank on which she might have to cross a yawning gulf, not caring though Jack, too, were dragged down with her to perdition?

What Susie did say when she opened her mouth was, ‘Now, Jack, speak the truth. Is it your candid opinion that to have things on your mind--your conscience, if you will--to be forced to keep secrets you never can tell the world, must make you haggard and hideous, and cause all your good looks to go off before your time?’

‘Oh! confound good looks!’ cried poor Jack, becoming worse mannered than ever. ‘Who cares for good looks unless fools of women? A morsel of heart is worth all the good looks in the world. What do I know of the interesting subject? Nobody can pretend it is in my line,’ with a sneer that only half hid an ancient soreness. ‘You have had your share and mine too, you grasping individual,’ he said more lightly, ‘and it has made you a conceited little wretch for your pains.’

Next morning, having tossed and tumbled through a miserable night, Jack abruptly demolished the flimsy fabric of a stratagem which Susie had reared, and to which he had consented the night before. He was not going to the volunteer ball. It was high time that he and some other people, who should be nameless, had done with balls. For his part he was sick of them. No, he would not go in morning dress, and he could not send out to Redcot for his clothes without letting his people know that he had come, and was staying in the neighbourhood, and so giving fresh offence in that quarter. But he would tell his sister what he would prefer to do, if she would let him. He did not care to go to Redcot without a farther notion of how the wind blew in reference to his father. He (Jack) would like to have a word with Jane first. He would be glad of a day’s rest and respite, for he was about done for; but next morning he could take a run down to Oxford, catch up the party from Redcot, get out of Jane what he wanted to hear, and make up his mind there what he ought to do. After all, he wound up grimly, he might be of some service in preventing the proposal among the academic groves which Susie had predicted. Jack was sulky again, contradictory and cross, in a mood which, though rare, was not altogether unprecedented with him.

One might have thought that Mrs. Crabtree would have been grievously disappointed by this frustration of her benevolent intentions and high moral aims--to wit, the rescue of a gentleman of mature years incapable of looking after himself from the snare into which he had fallen, together with the exposure and disarming for all time to come of a young woman found guilty of a too vaulting ambition. Arguing from Susie’s zeal the evening before, it would seem as if the weight of her vexation at its being baulked should have been considerable. Above all, one might have fairly expected Susie to be exceedingly piqued by the necessity for that word with Jane, to which Jack confessed after she--Susie--had expended upon him ever so many words. But the check came when she was too much engaged to resent it or protest against it. She had a telegram from her husband that he could not come down till night--if then, he would make a great push, just to show his face at the ball, but he must leave within a couple of hours and return to town.

‘All the affairs of the volunteers, supper and speeches included, seem to fall upon me,’ Susie complained. She was overwhelmed with obligations. She was only too glad to have Jack in the rear to fall back upon. He need fear no visitors, for the Bank House was positively deserted in the general festivity. Everyone knew it had been given over to painters, and that she was receiving all her guests at the White Hart. It was dreadfully awkward, but what could she do? And as she had said, she was only too glad to have Jack to come home to, and consult and to keep with her another night as the male guardian of the place instead of that depressing Mr. Parsons. ‘Well, do as you please, Jack,’ was the _carte blanche_ she accorded him at last; and though she spoke in the pathetic, dependent way which was a habit of hers, at times, she had recovered completely from the signs of over-exertion and strain which she had shown the evening before. She was almost radiant in her alertness, flying here and there, the moving spirit of the scene, her eyes beaming, her cheeks glowing, her mind working with marvellous quickness, precision, _finesse_. It was as if excitement suited her, and she found in it the most powerful, subtle, and exquisite of stimulants.

As for poor, distrustful, credulous Jack, with poison working in his mind and despair knocking at his heart, he hung about the Bank House drawing-room and garden, playing languidly with the children, smoking innumerable cigars, exchanging a word with Susie when she darted in occasionally, but speaking to no one else, and religiously abstaining from quitting the place, or even from looking out of the front windows. For in the middle of his selfish wrath and grief the thought smote him sharply every now and then that he would be doing ‘the mother’ an unpardonable wrong if he let her learn his return from any mouth save his own.