CHAPTER III.—WHAT THE CHILDREN HAD TO SAY.

Meanwhile little Loo, with another pair of big tears in her brown eyes, had been driven home in the wintry twilight over the frosty road, which rang to every stamp of her ponies’ heels in a way which would have excited the little thing into positive enjoyment of the exhilarating sounds and sensations of rapid motion, had things been as usual. As it was, she sat wrapped up in a fur cloak, with her little veil over her face, watching the great trees glide past in the darkening, and turning her wistful looks now and then to the young winterly moon, which had strayed like a lost child into the midst of a whole covey of clouds, still crimsoned with reflections from the sunset. Loo’s little heart ached so, and she was so steadfastly determined not to admit that it was aching, that she was almost glad to feel how chill her little feet were getting, and how benumbed the hand which was outside of the fur cloak. She kept her little stiff fingers exposed to the frosty breeze all the same, and was rather glad of that sensation of misery which gave her a little excuse to herself for feeling unhappy. As the tinges of crimson stole out of the clouds, and the sky grew so wistfully, coldly clear around the moon, Fontanel came in sight, with lights in all its windows, twinkling through the trees in the long avenue, now one gleam, now another, as the little carriage drove on. There first of all was the great nursery window blazing with firelight, where Loo meant to hold a little committee as soon as she got in, and where she could so well picture “all of them” in all their different occupations, populating all the corners of the familiar room. A little further on it was the window of mamma’s room, which lightened brightly out behind the bare branches of the great chestnut tree. What would the house be without mamma? the little girl asked herself, and the great blobs of hot dew in her eyes fell upon her cold fingers. “Aren’t you well, Miss Loo?” asked the old groom who drove her, and Loo made him a very sharp answer in the irritation of her troubled little heart. She ran into the light and comfort of the house with a perverse, childish misery which she did not understand. She would not let old William take her cloak from her, but threw it down, and stumbled over it, and stamped her little foot, and could have cried. Poor little Loo! she was sick at heart, and did not know what it meant. Instead of going to her mother, as she usually did, she hastened up to the nursery where “all of them” were in a highly riotous condition at the moment, and where the darkness of her little face was unnoted by all but nurse, who took off her boots and warmed her feet, and did away with the only physical reason Loo dared to pretend to as an excuse for looking wretched. It was not very easy to look wretched in that room. By the side of the fire where a great log blazed was Harry, aged ten, with a great book clasped in his arms, and his cheeks and hair equally scorched and crimsoned with near vicinity to the flame. Little Mary, and Alf, the baby, were playing at the other end of the room. Alf was six, though he was the baby; but Mrs Clifford was the kind of woman to love a pet, and the little fellow’s indignant manhood was still smothered in long curls and lace tuckers. He avenged himself by exercising the most odious tyranny over his next little sister, who was Baby’s slave. All this little company Loo looked round upon with mysterious looks. She herself was twelve, little and pale, with nothing particular about her but her eyes, and her temper, which had already made itself, unfortunately, felt through the house. She sat maturing her plans till she heard the clock strike, and saw that it would shortly be time to go to her mother in her dressing-room, as the Fontanel children always did before dinner. She immediately bestirred herself to her task.

“Nurse,” said Loo, “will you take these things down to mamma’s dressing-room, please, and tell her we will all come presently; and if you wish to go down-stairs, you may. I will take care of the children, and take them down to mamma.”

“Thank you, Miss Loo; but there’s nobody to be at dinner but Mr Summerhayes and Mademoiselle, and you’re all to go down,” said Nurse; “you’re too little to have the charge of Master Alf, and you’ve all got to be dressed, dears, for dessert.”

“Then you can come up when I ring. I want the children by themselves,” said little Loo, with her imperious air. “You can go away.”

“You’re a deal too forward for such a little thing. I’ll speak to your ma, Miss, I will,” said the offended nurse. “At least I would if it was any good; but as long as Missis encourages her like this;—oh children dear, there’s changed times coming! You won’t have the upper hand always; it’s a comfort to a poor servant anyhow, whatever it may be to other folks. I’m going, Miss Loo; and you’ll come up directly the very minute you leave your ma to be dressed.”

Loo watched her to the door, and, skipping off her chair, closed it behind the dethroned guardian of the nursery. “Now, children, come here, I want to speak to you all,” said the little princess. “Mary, don’t be as great a baby as Alf; you are eight—you are almost a woman. Alf, come here and stand by me like a gentleman. Harry——”

But Harry was not so easily roused. He had been lectured so long about scorching his face that he was now proof to all appeals. He had to be hunted up out of his corner, and the book skilfully tilted up and thrown out of his arms, which operation surprised Loo into a momentary laugh, of which she was much ashamed. “Harry!” she cried, with redoubled severity, “it is no nonsense I am going to talk of—it is something very serious. Oh, children!” exclaimed the elder sister, as Alf jumped upon Harry’s back, and the two had a harmless scuffle in continuation of that assault which had roused Harry. “Oh, children!” cried Loo, who had laughed in spite of herself, now bursting into quick tears of impatience and vexation. “You play and play and think of nothing else—and you won’t let me talk to you of what’s going to happen to mamma.”

“What is it?” cried Harry, opening a pair of great bright eyes, and coming hastily to his sister’s side. Alf asked “What is it?” too, and placed himself on the other hand. As for Mary, she was frightened and stood a little apart, ready to rush off to her mother, or to ring for Nurse, or to do anything else that the exigency might demand.

“Do you remember what mamma said to us when we were in the dining-room on Sunday after dinner, when Tom—I mean when Mr Summerhayes was there—when he kissed us all?” said Loo, with a little red spot suddenly glowing out upon one indignant little cheek.

“She said he was going to be a father to us,” said Harry, rather stolidly.

“And we didn’t know what it meant,” said little Mary, breaking in eagerly, “but Nurse told me afterwards. It means that mamma is going to be married to cousin Tom. Oh, won’t it be queer? Shall we have to call him papa, Loo? I shall never recollect, I am sure.”

Loo gazed with eyes growing larger and larger in the face of her insensible sister. Then seeing Mary’s arm on the top of the great nursery fender, Loo, we are sorry to say, was so far betrayed by her resentment as to thrust little Mary violently away with a sob of passion. They all looked at her with wondering eyes.

“Oh, you stupid, stupid children!” cried the poor little heroine, “don’t you know mamma, though she is so pretty, is not a young lady like other people that are going to be married; don’t you know people talk about it, and laugh at her, and say she is foolish? I have heard them do it!” cried Loo. “I heard them in Summerhayes to-day talking and scolding about our mamma. She knows best what to do—better than all of them. She will never be unkind to us, or stop loving us. Oh, only think if she knew that people said such things—it would kill her! I heard them, and I thought I should have died. And now, children,” said Loo, solemnly, “what we’ve got to do is to go down to mamma, not jumping or making a noise like great babies, but quiet and serious; and to tell her that she is to do what she thinks best, and never mind what people say; and that we—we,” sobbed the little girl, vainly trying to preserve her composure, as she brought out word after word with a gush of tears—“we’ll stand by her and trust in her, and never believe anything. That is what we must go and say.”

After she had finished her speech Loo fell into a little passion of crying, in which she partly lost the slight murmurs and remonstrances of her calmer and wondering audience; but passion as usual carried the day. When Mrs Clifford’s bell rang the children went down-stairs, looking rather scared, in a kind of procession, Loo coming last with Alf, who had to be held tightly by the hand lest he should break out into gambols, and destroy all the solemnity of the proceeding. Mrs Clifford was sitting by the fire when they went in, in an attitude of thought. The candles were not lighted, and it was very easy to suppose that mamma herself looked sad, and was quite in a state of mind to be thus addressed. Harry and Mary, rather ashamed of themselves, were already carrying on a quiet scuffle at the door when Loo came up to them. “You go first, Harry”—“No, you,” they were saying to each other. “Oh, you stupid, stupid children, you have no feeling!” cried Loo, bitterly, as she swept past them. Mrs Clifford looked up with a smile, and held out her hand, which she expected to be grasped immediately by a crowd of little fingers, but the mother’s looks were dreamy to-night, and some one else was before her children in her thoughts. She was startled when she felt Loo’s little cold hand put into hers, and woke up and pushed her chair back from the fire to look at the little things who stood huddled together before her. “What is the matter?” said Mrs Clifford.

“Oh, mamma, mamma,” cried Loo; her poor little voice grew shrill, notwithstanding all her efforts. She had to make a pause, and to preserve her dignity had to let Alf go, who immediately went off to ride on the arm of the sofa, and compromise the seriousness of the scene. “Oh, mamma, dear,” said Loo, feeling that no time was to be lost, “we have come to say that we will never believe anything; that we know you love us, and will always love us—and—and—we believe in _you_; oh, mamma, we believe in you, and we will always stand by you, if everybody in the world were on the other side.”

Here Loo fell, choking with tears and passion, on her mother’s footstool, and laid her poor little head, which ached with cold and crying, on Mrs Clifford’s lap. The mother’s eyes had woke up out of all their dreaming. Perhaps it was as well the candles were not lighted. That cheek which the widow screened with her hand was as crimson and as hot as Harry’s had been reading over the fire. She was glad Loo’s keen eyes were hidden upon her lap; she blushed, poor tender woman as she was, before her children. The little woman-daughter was dreadful to her mother at the moment—a little female judge, endued with all the awfulness of nature, shaming the new love in her mature heart.

“What does this all mean, children?” said Mrs Clifford, trying to be a little angry, to conceal the shock she had received.

“Oh, please mamma, it’s Loo,” cried Mary, frightened. “She made us come; it was one of her passions.”

“No, it was not one of her passions,” said Harry, who was Loo’s champion; “it was to tell mamma we would always stand by her; and so I will,” cried the boy on his own account, kindling up, “if there were any robbers or anything—for I’m the eldest son when Charley’s at school.”

Loo heard this where she lay, with her head on her mother’s lap; she was incapable of speech or motion almost, but she could not but groan with impatience over the stupidity of the children; and Alf was riding loudly on the arm of the sofa, shouting to his imaginary horse. Loo gathered herself up with a blush upon her cheeks; it did not enter into her head to imagine that her mother blushed much more hotly and violently when the little face unfolded itself slowly out of her lap.

“Hush! Loo, don’t say any more,” said Mrs Clifford; then with a little effort the mother put her arm round the child and drew her close. “I understand what you mean—but you must not say any more,” she said; then she stooped down her hot cheek upon that wet one of poor Loo’s. “We shall all be very happy, I hope,” said Mrs Clifford in the dark, in her little daughter’s ear. “I am doing it—for—for all your sakes, dear. He will stand by you and me, and all of us, Loo. I hope we shall be—very happy—happier even than we are now,” said Mrs Clifford, with a faint little tremble in her voice and quiver at her heart. When she had kissed Loo, and the child had gone away to compose herself, poor Mary, the mother, sat for a long time looking into the fire with a terrible misgiving upon her—“happier even than we are now.” Ah! just then she had been so happy—all well in the prosperous, plentiful house; not an ache or a trouble that she knew of among all her children; not a single look of love dimmed to her yet by her resolution; and the new love, sweet as any girl’s dream, restoring to her firmament all the transitory delicious lights of youth. Somehow that prospect darkened under a strange cloud of alarm and shame when the mother felt her cheeks flush at the look of her woman-child. “I am doing it for—all their sakes,” she tried to say to herself; but her innocence grew like guilt as she felt in her heart that this pretence was not true.