CHAPTER XXVI

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THE UGLY DUCKLING.

Captain MacNeill--I felt as if I must always call him Lance in my own mind--came forward when I entered the library after the dinner-bell had rung.

"You'll have to dine with a wild man of the woods, Miss Brandon," he said apologetically. "I have only the clothes I stand up in."

"Never mind, Lance," said his father, "we're glad to have you in any. We'll go over to London next week, and I'll give you a blank cheque for Poole. You've no idea what a dandy he has always been, Hilda!"

"Oh, I remember him!" said I. "Like Solomon in his glory--that is to say, dressed like any other well-dressed young man."

"And I remember you--"

Lance broke off with a quizzical glance.

"Come, my lad, postpone reminiscences till we're over the soup," said the General as he offered me his arm.

We dined at a little round table, which brought us all in close neighbourhood. As Captain MacNeill ate his soup I had time to look at him. He was a good deal changed from the young man I remembered. No doubt rest and good living would bring back much of the youth and brightness, but there were lines in the keen brown face that would never be obliterated. He was thin, and a little haggard: that, of course, was to be expected; but the years of suffering had not changed his eyes, nor his smile, with its quick flash of white teeth; by these I felt I should have known him under any circumstances.

"How good everything here is!" he said, looking up suddenly. "I never knew how beautiful a thing a dinner-table was before. Such flowers in the winter! And how golden the candle-light is! To say nothing at all of this delicious soup!"

"Ah! Mrs. O'Connor has done her best with the cookery. I am glad you still care for your food, my boy. Appetite, rightly considered, is a gift of God."

The young man's eyes twinkled.

"I've the appetite of a school-boy still, and you remember, Dad, that mine was a record, even for Harrow. I've been saving it up all the years of my imprisonment."

"Hilda decorated the table in your honour. How she got the flowers out of old Crosbie I don't know!"

"He's a heart-broken man to-night, General," said I. "Still, to give him his due, he chopped away generously under the excitement of the good news, though to an accompaniment of grumbles."

"Crosbie's a good fellow," said the General. "I think I must take on that lad of his, though there's little enough for him to do."

"There's an epidemic of joy in the household, General. If you begin rewarding, I don't know where you'll stop."

"Hilda thought to reward us, Lance, by running away without her dinner."

"That would have been unkind," said the Captain seriously.

"You don't know what she's been to me, Lance," said the General, looking at me affectionately. "I was such a lonely old man till that day I came into my desolate house, and found her perched on my library steps, a little bit of white and gold, like a daisy."

"I found her in precisely the same position," said the Captain, laughing. "Do you live at such an eminence, Miss Hilda?"

"Pretty well," the General answered for me. "She's an uncanny child, and will read in the most uncomfortable positions."

"Till Mary O'Connor goes in incessant dread of my falling down like a precious china figure, and getting broken," said I, feeling rather embarrassed at being the subject of conversation.

"Hilda has a prescriptive right to the library, Lance," said the General.

"I sha'n't dispute it," said Captain MacNeill. "Is everybody else shut out altogether?"

"When she wills it. She is a successful writer, you know, and when she comes to a crux in the story she, having nerves, can't bear the presence of anyone but Paudeen, who is sympathetic, she says.

"Are you really an author, Miss Hilda?" said Captain MacNeill, with real or simulated astonishment.

"She is, my boy, and a successful one at that," answered the General.

"I shall be horribly afraid of you, Miss Hilda. But what precocity! At what age do people begin to write novels nowadays?"

Captain MacNeill seemed determined not to take me seriously. I didn't altogether like his lack of seriousness about my authorship.

"I was twenty-one last May," said I. "It is not so very young."

"Not really twenty-one, Miss Hilda?" said the Captain. "Then why do you go on looking fifteen?"

"Because I'm small, I suppose," I said. "But you must have known I was grown-up, for I was a big girl when you saw me first five years ago."

"So you were," he said. "I remember now that when I lifted you in the donkey-cart I thought you were like a very considerable piece of thistle-down that a fairly robust south wind might blow away."

"Please don't talk about that silly time," said I. "But the General is telling stories about my nerves. If I have any I vent them on Paudeen and the four walls of my little room at home. I have never written a line yet in Rose Hill library."

"Time you should begin, Hilda," said the General. "If you'll set up your study here I'll promise you this fellow and I won't disturb you. Life seems to be so full of things to be done, now he has come home, that I don't know which thing to begin at to-morrow morning."

"Oh, General!" said I, "I must be at home sometimes. Why, I have been spending nearly half my life at Rose Hill this winter."

"And why not?" said the General. "A couple of lonely buffers like us want you more than Brandon can. Do you know that she catalogued and arranged all our library, Lance?"

"Well," said I, half-laughing and half-confused, "I should think you two could find something to talk about this night of nights other than me."

"Why, my dear," said the General mildly, "I like to tell Lance all you have been to me--a bird of good omen in my lonely life. I had had no joy for so long before you came--since this fellow left me, in short,--and then you came into my life, like a--like a dear little daughter. She has been like that to me, Lance."

"I am very glad, sir," said Captain MacNeill gently; but something in his eyes as he looked at me made me turn, all of a sudden, redder than the roses in my belt.

Fortunately the dear old General never looked at me, but I was acutely conscious of the gaze, half-kind, half-quizzical, of the eyes across the table. I did not know why I had blushed, and felt furious with myself.

"Did you know that Hilda recognized your portrait at once, Lance?"

"Dear General," said I, "if you mention my name, or refer to me even indirectly again during dinner, you shall be fined. Do make him talk about his adventures instead."

"Ah! you don't know Lance. He was a laconic fellow from childhood about anything that concerned himself. We'll only get his adventures from him by bits and scraps."

But Captain MacNeill seemed to understand that I was really a little uncomfortable at being talked about so much, and turned the conversation in the deftest and kindest way.

I gave them their coffee in the library before I went home, and after I had gone in and said good-night to them, and they had escorted me to the dog-cart, which Hawkins was to drive, I carried away the happiest impression of the peace and joy I had left behind. The night was cold enough to make me nestle down inside the fleecy rug which Captain MacNeill had wrapped about me, but the picture I carried in my mind was of the father and son sitting, one on each side of a glowing lire, with their cigars between their lips and their eyes fondly regarding each other.

After that evening I did not go to Rose Hill for a day or so, but on the second day came the General himself driving over to fetch me back. In a week or so Captain MacNeill, whose wardrobe had become renovated after a hurried run to Dublin, came and called with his father, and won everybody's heart, from Aline's to the youngest of the twins.

The boys were now in the shy and gawky stage, and required a good deal of coaxing out of their shells, and for a time they were very awkward with this bronzed man of the world, who had had so many adventures, and was so modest and reticent about them. However, before the close of the visit, I saw that the ice was thawing, and guessed that in a very short time they would be calling him MacNeill, and smoking his cigars with all the ease in the world; and I was not mistaken. In fact, that state of things came about sooner than I could have believed possible, and presently a certain difference of opinion arose between the boys and the twins, for the boys were quite certain that it was only MacNeill's decency that made him put up with a pair of stupid little duffers like the twins when there were men to be had; and the twins, on the other hand, believed, and said openly, that they were the real attraction that so often brought Captain MacNeill to Brandon.

Aline, the dear mother of us all, was not without qualms about my visiting at Rose Hill as freely as of old, now that the house contained an additional inhabitant in the shape of an attractive young man; but what could she and I and the conventionalities do against the absolute unconsciousness of the dear old General? If I stayed away he would come or send for me, and it was as impossible for me to repulse his affection as it was for Aline to reveal her scruples to him. At last she consulted Lady O'Brien about it, and that dear woman responded with her usual common-sense:

"Let the child go as before, Aline," she said. "It isn't the world, and there's no one to make invidious remarks; and if there were I'd let them talk till doomsday before I'd come between Hilda and her friends."

So I came and went as of old, and soon lost much of my shyness of Captain MacNeill, whom indeed I only met at meals, or for an odd half-hour occasionally. He and his father seemed to find so much to take them out of the house now. The General had become so keen and alert about things that thirty years might have been suddenly lifted off his life, and as I became aware of how they were being sought by the neighbours--we called everyone within thirty miles neighbours--and being asked here and there, and besought to take up this and that position, I was conscious of an odd kind of jealousy. General MacNeill and Rose Hill had seemed so much to belong to me, that if it was going to be swamped now by the county families, and I driven out, as I surely should be if they came in,--well then, I shouldn't be too well pleased, that was all.

Certainly they had not come yet, and the greater stir in the house caused by its new inhabitant was so far distinctly pleasant. Mary O'Connor felt it as I did.

"'Tis more heartsome like," she said to me one day, "to have the young master to do for. The General is a desperate tidy gentleman, an' if it was only the cigar-ash on the floor, or the clothes flung anyway about the room, or even the bath-water splashed to that unchristian extent that it comes through the dinin'-room ceilin', I'd rather have a young gentleman to look after. Let alone that that Hawkins waits on the ould master like a cat in boots, till the silence and the tidiness grew so lonesome that I often had a mind to take a stravague through the rooms meself an' turn everything upside down. But, glory be! that onnatural temptation is removed from my path to-day."

Captain MacNeill was quite a long time at home before he saw Esther. She was not well in those days, and rather shrunk from meeting strangers. I used to wonder how the sight of her would affect him, for though Esther needed happiness to bring out her beauty in full bloom, yet the sorrow that dimmed her colour had given her eyes a more mysterious midnight beauty, so that, to my mind, she was lovelier for anyone who had eyes to see.

I was quite anxious that they should meet, and yet I had a curious shrinking from it. My anxiety was as for something painful that has to be gone through, and the sooner the better.

For I had made up my mind that Captain MacNeill must inevitably fall in love with Esther. I used to sit and look at her silently and try to see her as he would, and I said to myself that it was inevitable. Before Esther's eyes, and Esther's hair, and Esther's lovely colour--

Brown is my Love, but graceful, And each renowned whiteness Matched with that lovely brown loseth its brightness.

--what chance would there be for blue eyes and pale cheeks and pale hair--if such desired to be remembered?

And if he came to love Esther, would she not in time turn to his love and forget her boyish lover? Why, that was inevitable too. The elder, stronger man was, it seemed to me, so much more love-worthy. For in regard to Esther's love of Harry De Lacy I had always a little wonder. Now with me my love should be the stronger one, not I. And yet it seemed that the gentleness, the dependence, the need of Esther's lover was the dearest element in her love for him.

Ah well! there are different ways of loving, and she might yet love differently. Somehow, as I thought these things, I seemed to be the spectator of a drama in which I had no part. What part was cast for me indeed--plain, little, with a limping foot--but to look at happiness through the eyes of others? Yet I was not resigned. On the contrary, my compassion for myself was so poignant that I often melted into tears.

At last the meeting came about. I was at Annagower one afternoon, when, about tea-time, the General and Captain MacNeill were announced. It was nearly twilight, and we were sitting by a leaping fire. Esther was listless enough, but the fire gave a simulated life to her beauty, putting golden deeps into the darkness of her eyes, and bronze lights amid the shadows of her hair. She had a pretty pink frock of nun's veiling, and a handful of bronze leaves pinned in the soft folds at her throat.

I drew back in the shadows to see how Captain MacNeill took his first introduction to her. He looked at her alertly indeed, and when he had sat down in my corner beside me he looked at her again. I did not know whether I was sorry or glad. There was admiration in his look, but it was an admiration entirely impersonal and distant; and after those two glances he looked only at me.

He had been at home now several weeks, and in a day or two he and his father were going to London. There was business to be done, but they had been putting it off week after week, being so delightfully happy with each other at Rose Hill.

The day after their call at Annagower I was in the library at Rose Hill. I had come in by the side door unannounced, and imagined I had the house to myself, pretty well, as usual, till the door opened and Captain MacNeill walked in.

"Why," I said, "are you at home to-day?"

"Yes; don't look so distressed about it. My father is at the Petty Sessions at Raheenduff. This is the first day he takes his seat on the bench. And here am I, like the little boy in the story, who had no one to play with, and appealed to all the insects in turn, but they were all too busy. Miss Hilda, are you too busy, or may I sit down here?"

"You may, if you will tell me first which of the insects I represent?" I said severely.

"It's too hard, Miss Hilda. Let it be a bird or a flower," he said with imploring eyes.

I passed over the suggestion in silence. Then I rushed awkwardly into a subject which had been much in my mind.

"I was glad you met my sister yesterday. I have always wanted you to meet her."

"Thank you. I was very pleased to meet her," he said simply.

"She is my chum of all the family," I said. "I think there is no one like Esther."

"She is a very lovely creature," he answered.

"You remembered her again?" I asked.

"No," he said, looking at me questioningly. "Did I see her before?"

Well, I don't mind confessing that a little wave of joy rushed over my heart. I could hardly keep my voice still as I answered him, for I had told myself so often that his eyes that day long ago must have been for Esther.

"Why, of course," said I. "She was with me that day at Annagassan races."

"I only saw one face there," he said softly.

"Miss Pettigrew's?" I asked mischievously.

"Miss Pettigrew!" he repeated in astonishment.

"Yes, you remember you were walking with her when you first passed close to our shandrydan early in the day?"

"Ah! I remember; I had forgotten her name. Someone, a man in my regiment, had asked me to take her to see the leaping at the stone wall. I never saw her afterwards. But"--with a flash of triumph--"you noticed me then and remembered me?"

"I couldn't help it. You were looking at us when I was capering about because an Irish horse had won."

"I can see you now," he said.

"Don't, please!" I cried out. "I must have looked too silly."

"Shall I tell you how you looked?"

My eyes dropped before his, and I trembled, but I said nothing.

"I will tell you then. I thought you the dearest, sweetest, softest little white-and-gold girl in all the world."

"Oh!" I cried out, and held my fingers tightly across my eyes. "You couldn't. I am Hilda the Ugly Duckling. How could you look at me when Esther was there?"

"Perhaps I like ugly ducklings," he said.

"And I have a lame foot!" I cried.

"Dear little foot! We will cure it."

I removed my fingers from before my eyes and said:

"The Dublin doctor said it would cure itself. I am not nearly as lame as I used to be."

"Ah! that is a good thing," he answered, laughing; "but even if it were not curable, do you think that would come between us?"

I said nothing, not quite knowing what to say.

"Come down here, you white witch," he said next, "or am I to climb your ladder for you?"

"Oh, I will come down," I said, "but why?"

"Because I want the size of your finger. I will bring you the prettiest ring I can find in Bond Street."

"Your father will think it very sudden," I said lamely.

"He will sing his _Nunc Dimittis_," he answered. "But we will keep him with us as long as we can all the same."

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