Sisters Part 29

"Oh, yes--thank you so much--if I had needed anybody. But there were only too many kind friends."

"Aha! Yes, I expect so." His eye lighted and his lip curled craftily.

"I have no doubt whatever of THAT. 'Where the carcase is--' You know the rest?"

"I am not a carcase," she rallied him playfully--for quite the first time in her life.

"No, indeed; I should have said 'prey'. Ah, my dear De--Miss Pennycuick, you will find plenty and to spare of so-called friends, professing anxiety to serve you, when their only object is to serve themselves."

"I expect so," she a.s.sented, smiling.

"So young a girl"--subtle flattery this, now that Deb was in her late thirties--"to be suddenly called to a position of such immense danger and responsibility! But"--cheeringly--"I said when I heard of it that Mr Th.o.r.n.ycroft had justified my high opinion of his judgment and character. It is not often that great wealth comes into hands so worthy of it."

"I am afraid they are not very worthy," sighed Deb. Mr Goldsworthy knew better. He knew HER better--not only from personal intercourse, the observation and intuition of a man trained to read character, but from the loving representations of his dear wife.

"Where is she?" Miss Pennycuick asked abruptly. "Not out, I hope?"

"Out--hardly! She will be here in a moment. I am afraid, when you see her, you will think her looking delicate. The state of her health is a matter of the most anxious concern to me."

"What is the matter with her health? She was always well at home. We used to think her the strongest of the family--until--"

"Until she fell into the clutches of that dreadful man," Mr Goldsworthy concluded for her.

"Oh!"--Deb coloured and frowned--"that is not what I was going to say."

(What she had really been going to say was--"until her marriage.") "And why do you rake up that old story? I thought it had all been forgotten long ago."

"It has been unpleasantly revived," said Mr Goldsworthy solemnly. "And it is my duty to tell you about it, if you have not heard."

Deb looked equally annoyed and alarmed. "What has been revived?" she asked.

He dropped his voice apologetically.

"I have been hearing of his going on in exactly the same way with another."

"Oh," sighed Deb, relieved that it was not Mary who had been the reviver; "then it's no business of ours, thank goodness."

"Pardon me--it is very much our business," he urged weightily. "I grieve to tell you that it is your sister, Mrs Ewing, who is implicated in the affair. Do you mean to say that you know nothing about it?"

Deb knew something, and so she put the question by.

"I don't encourage scandalmongers. Mrs Ewing is young and thoughtless--and pretty--which naturally lays her open to ill--natured gossip." "My informant is one of the least ill-natured of women; she is a person of the highest principle."

"Ah, those high-principled women--I know them!"

Mr Goldsworthy was nonplussed for the moment. He could not accept the suggestion that Deb was not high-principled. But he gave up his informant.

"There is ample evidence that the man is Mrs Ewing's lover," he grieved. "He has been seen with her in the most equivocal situations. I don't wish to go into details--to mention things unfit for a young girl's ears--"

"I hope not," put in Deb, her patience giving out. "I am not fond of that kind of talk. I should not believe, either, in any nasty tales connected with my sister, or with Captain Carey. And you ought not to listen to them, for Mary's sake. You should not pander to your high-principled ladies. You should tell them to be more charitable, and to mind their own business."

A year ago the parson would have taken umbrage at this rebuke; he now hastened to deprecate displeasure on the part of the one whom, of all the world, he most desired to please.

"Far be it from me to speak ill of anyone belonging to you," he declared solemnly; but still he could not help it.

The most good-natured person, if he be greedy, will seek to ingratiate himself with Power by disparagement of rival suitors. He was following an impulse that might be described as an instinct, in trying to weaken Deb's favour towards the rest of her relatives in order to concentrate as much as possible upon himself--to push back, as it were, the hands that he imagined eagerly outstretched to her (palm upwards), that the more might be dropped into his own. He asked her if she had seen Mrs Breen, and sighed over that plebeian connection.

"I may be poor," said he, "but I do come of a good family. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but we cannot help our prejudices." "It is a ridiculous prejudice," said Deb, "especially in a country like this."

"Oh, it is--it is. I own it; but--well, you know--"

She brusquely brought him back to the question of Mary's health.

"It is Mary that I want to hear about. Tell me--before she comes in--what is the matter with her?"

He was willingly confidential.

"She has worries," said he--"worries that you, my dear young lady, in YOUR position, know nothing of--would not understand if I were to tell you."

"I have been in positions to understand most kinds of worries," said Deb. "What are they? Money worries?"

"Well, I have a delicacy in--"

"Oh, you need not have! I know, of course, that you cannot have been too well off, and I am here on purpose to do something for you, if you will allow me.' There was no need to beat about the bush, she knew, since Mary was out of hearing. 'Tell me exactly, if you don't mind--in strict confidence, of course. No need to trouble her--and I shall not say anything."

He told her, with fullness and fervour, when he had expressed his too fulsome grat.i.tude.

"I have done my best, Miss Pennycuick. You bade me be good to her; I gave you my solemn promise--and I can conscientiously say that I have kept my word." Well, so he had; according to his lights he had been an exemplary husband. "But circ.u.mstances have been against me. In the first place, I was in error somewhat, as you know, in regard to my wife's expectations from her father. I did not marry her for her money, as you also know, but appearances were such that I naturally concluded she would have a considerable income of her own. I did not care for myself one way or the other, but I was glad to believe that there would be the means to continue to her the mode of life that she had been used to. I acted upon this supposition, false, as it turned out, and antic.i.p.ated, most imprudently, I confess, the little fortune that I imagined to be secure. When we came here, where living is so much more expensive than in the country"--with no Redford to draw upon--"I surrounded my wife with the comforts that were her due, and which I fully believed she had every right to." He waved his hand over the still blooming Axminster carpet and the brocaded suite the family was not allowed to sit on. "I spent--we spent the little capital represented by your father's wedding present--I had an erroneous idea that it was to be an annual allowance pending the eventual division of the estate; and then--well, then you know what happened."

Deb nodded.

"Did you," she inquired feelingly, "borrow of those professional money-lenders?"

She was prepared to be very sympathetic in that case; but Mr Goldsworthy repelled the suggestion with scorn.

"Certainly not. I never borrowed money in my life. I struggled and sc.r.a.ped and saved, as best I could; I endeavoured in vain to augment my small income by little speculations--harmless little dabblings in mining shares; I--but I won't bore you with these disagreeables"--pulling himself up with an air of forced cheerfulness.

"But I want to know," said Deb. "You spoke of worries--Mary's worries--worries now; are you still--"

He spread his hands and wagged his head.

"I'd rather not talk about our troubles," he sighed. "I don't want to dim the suns.h.i.+ne of your--"

And suddenly his eye flashed and his brow contracted with annoyance.

Mary--somewhat hesitatingly, to be sure--walked in.

Robert had insisted that the pater was all wrong in his idea that it was proper for him alone to receive the visitor, and for the mistress of the house to linger inhospitably after it was known that she must know of the visitor's arrival. Robert had coerced his mother into doing the correct thing. Politely he opened the drawing-room door for her--that, of course, was absolutely the correct thing--and escorted her forward with the aplomb of a man of the world, nicely blended with the respectfulness appropriate to a nephew and a school-boy.

"Ah, HERE she is!" Mr Goldsworthy exclaimed heartily.

The sisters were at once in each other's arms. Deb, pierced to the heart by Mary's aged and faded looks, was the most demonstrative of the two; Mary struck her after a moment as being a little reserved and chilly--as if on the watch to repel benevolence as soon as it should take tangible form. Deb understood, and was warned to be circ.u.mspect.