CHAPTER VII.

WEAVING IN THE SUNSET.

"Where waitest thou, Lady I am to love? Thou comest not; Thou knowest of my sad and lonely lot; I look'd for thee ere now!

"It is the May! And each sweet sister soul hath found its brother; Only we two seek fondly each the other, And, seeking, still delay."--_Arnold._

Queenie entered upon her new duties with an ardor that would have surprised any one acquainted with the real state of the case. If a feeling of amusement sometimes crossed her mind at the incongruity between her present position and the heiress-ship she had refused to take up, it only added zest and flavor to her work.

Queenie Marriott was one of those women whose zeal was according to knowledge. She loved her work for its own sake. In her eyes it was invested with a meaning and dignity that redeemed it from its so-called drudgery, and placed it high in the ranks of honorable labor.

Her youthful enthusiasm anointed everything with a sort of moral chrism. The little barnlike structure, with its half-moon windows, and rough forms and desks, was a species of temple wherein she enshrined all manner of precious things. When she looked round on the children's faces they seemed to appeal to her with all sorts of involved meanings, demanding patience and sympathy, and all such goodly things at her hands.

Queenie knew the royal road to learning lay through her pupils' hearts. She must love them, and teach them to love her; obedience would follow as a matter of course. All children were dear to her, for Emmie's sake. Now and then, through the buzz of voices droning through the repetition lessons, there would come before her a certain vivid memory, stabbing her with sudden, sharp pain--a dark garret haunted with shadows; a pale-faced child crouched on the window-seat, wrapped in an old red shawl, with great blue eyes dim with fear; of a little figure stricken down, and lying amongst them as one that was dead; of a sick-room where a child-martyr went down into the very valley of the shadow of death, where a fight so long and terrible was carried on that the weary watcher only covered her face with her trembling hands, and prayed for merciful death to come as a deliverer.

And so for the sake of that childish sufferer, and that great miracle of healing--Queenie clave with very love to all children. There was one child, Prissy Atkinson, the sister of the very Patience whom Langley had selected as her little maid, to whom she showed especial kindness.

She was the plainest and most uninteresting girl in the school, slightly lame, and with an odd drawl and lisp in her voice, ungainly in manner, and with no particular cleverness to recommend her; yet, by some undefinable feeling, Queenie singled out this child as an object of her interest.

The little rough head often felt a tender hand laid upon it. The gentlest voice Prissy had ever heard would accost her now and then; difficult tasks were smoothed by magic; pleasant smiles would reward her diligence. When her head once ached, a resting-place was found for it on teacher's own shoulder. "Oh, teacher! I love you! I do love you so!" cried Prissy, out of the fulness of her heart, throwing her thin arms round Queenie's neck. Was the warm kiss that answered her given in reality to Prissy or to Emmie?

Emmie would come sometimes and look in at the open door, with round blue eyes, very wide open with pleasure and astonishment. The little girls would look up from their tasks and nod at her; the sisters would interchange fond, satisfied looks. Sometimes a tall figure would pause for a moment behind Emmie; then a strong arm would draw the child from the threshold.

"Naughty Emmie! infringing the rules in school-hours. Do you know I shall have you put on a form as an example for disobedient children? Why has Langley allowed you to play truant in this way?"

"I ran away from Cathy, down the lane," Emmie answered, clinging to his hand, and looking up coaxingly into his face. "I do love to see Queenie amongst them all. Did she not look nice, Mr. Clayton?"

"Very nice," returned Garth absently. In reality he was pondering over the little scene he had just witnessed. "It would make a picture," he thought; "the slim, girlish figure in the black dress, the bent brown head, the children's eager faces, the bowl of white narcissus on the desk, the sunshine streaming in at the open door." She had looked up at him, and smiled as he stood there, such a bright smile; somehow it haunted him. "What a brave, true heart it is," he thought, as he went down the village with Emmie still clinging closely to him. "She looked as proud of herself and her work as ever Princess Ida amongst her golden-haired girl-graduates. That is what I like about her; she is superior to the nonsense and conventionality of the present day. Most women would have felt themselves humiliated in her position; but she seems to have grasped the real meaning of her work and purpose. If it were not selfish I could find it in my heart to be half sorry about that legacy. I wanted to see if the bare crust she talked about would have set her teeth on edge in the eating. I had a notion that it would have been pleasant to see her working up her way alone; and then one would have a faint chance of helping her. She is beyond this now; Cathy says he has left her a hundred a-year. Why, with her salary and what she has they will have close upon two hundred. They will do capitally on that; and, after all, one would not like to see them pinch. Well, it is none of my business," finished Garth, rousing himself from his cogitations. "I wish Dora could have seen her just now, giving that object lesson; I fancy she would have changed her opinion altogether. How strange it was that they did not seem to take to each other; but then women are strange creatures, and difficult to understand."

It was an odd coincidence that made Garth think of Dora; for at that moment her little pony-carriage turned the corner of the lane. She waved her whip and her little gloved hand as she saw him; and Garth crossed the road with a slight flush on his face.

"I wanted to see Miss Marriott. I promised to call upon her; but I find the cottage is still unoccupied," said Miss Cunningham, leaning a little towards him, and fixing her calm blue eyes on his face. Not a look or gesture escaped her scrutiny. His slight confusion at her unexpected appearance was perfectly transparent to her. "Things are going on as they ought to go on," she said to herself; "but there is no need to hurry it;" and though her pulses quickened a little at his obvious pleasure at seeing her she would have scorned to betray her interest.

"They do not go in until Tuesday; we shall keep them until then," returned Garth, stroking the pony's neck absently. Dora was looking prettier than ever this morning, he thought. She wore a hat with a long, white curling feather; the golden hair shone under it; she patted it nonchalantly with her little gloved hand as she talked. Emmie interrupted them presently.

"School is over! there are the girls coming out. Prissy is last, of course. Ah! there is Queenie!" and she darted across the road, and almost threw herself on her sister. Queenie did not quicken her steps when she saw them. She came up a little reluctantly when she recognized the occupant of the pony-carriage.

Dora greeted her with her usual good-humor.

"Ah, there you are, Miss Marriott! how cool you look in that nice, broad-brimmed hat. But I am sorry to see you in black. You have lost a friend, Mr. Clayton tells me. Well, I told you that I should call and have a chat about the school and all manner of things. Will you jump in and let me drive you up the lane. Langley has promised me some luncheon."

"Emmie and I will be at the house as soon as you," returned Queenie, taking the child's hand and walking on swiftly. Miss Cunningham meant to be kind, she was sure of that; why was it that her manner always irritated her? There was a flavor of patronage in it that galled her sensitiveness. "Perhaps if she knew I had five thousand a-year she might change her tone," thought Queenie, a little wrathfully. "I never find it difficult to get on with people; and yet in my heart I cannot like her. Why will she make it her business to poach on other people's manor? The Hepshaw school is my affair, and has nothing to do with Crossbill Vicarage."

Miss Cunningham seemed to think otherwise. She cross-examined Queenie all through luncheon on a hundred petty details. Queenie, to her surprise, found she was acquainted with many of the girls' names and histories. She put the new mistress right on one or two points with much shrewdness and cleverness. She could talk, and talk well, on most subjects. By-and-bye, when the school was exhausted, she turned to Garth, and argued quite a knotty point of politics with him, elucidating her view with a clear-headedness and force of words that surprised her feminine hearers.

Garth had much ado to hold his own against her, but the consciousness of being in the right gave him the advantage.

"Now, Miss Dora, I think you must yield this once," he said, looking at her triumphantly. Dora measured him with her glance before she answered.

"I never yield to papa, but I suppose I must to you," she said in the quietest manner possible, and there was a slight stress on the last word that made Garth redden as though he had received an unexpected concession.

He placed himself at her side when they went into the garden after luncheon, and appeared determined to monopolize her attention; but this did not seem to suit Miss Cunningham, for she called Cathy to her, and the two commenced a conversation in which he soon found himself excluded. Once or twice, when he turned restive under this treatment, and seemed to incline to seek conversation in a little talk with Queenie, a soft glance from Dora's blue eyes recalled and kept him stationary.

"All this is so uninteresting to you gentlemen, you like politics better," she said presently in a low voice, as though appealing for pardon; "if you will gather me a few flowers, Mr. Clayton, I shall soon have finished my talk with Cathy, and then we will take a turn down the plane-tree walk; it looks so cool and shady." But when the flowers were tastefully arranged, and Garth, with a little look of triumph, threw open the gate for her to pass through, Dora still held Cathy's arm. It was not quite as enjoyable as Garth had fancied it would be. Dora was all amiability and sweetness; she had the roses in her hands, and touched them tenderly from time to time. She tripped beside him, holding up her long white dress with one hand, the other rested lightly on Cathy's arm. Her blue eyes looked yearningly at him and the sunset together.

"How calm and still everything looks. I think I love this old walk better than any place in the world. It reminds me of old days, Mr. Clayton, when you and I and Cathy used to walk here."

"When we were children we used to say that two were company and three none," responded Garth sulkily. The hint was so obvious that Cathy would at once have made her escape, but Dora tightened her grasp on her arm with a slightly heightened color.

"That depends on one's company. One could never find Cathy in the way," she said, with a little infusion of tenderness in her voice.

"Never! can you imagine no possible circumstances in which a duet would be preferable?" questioned Garth, turning on her so abruptly that Dora, for all her coolness, was non-plussed for the moment. What was he going to say? With all her prudence she felt alarmed and fluttered, but the thought of her girls calmed her into soberness again.

"I never was good at guessing riddles," she returned, not perusing the gravel at her feet as some girls would have done in her place, but looking full at him with unblenching eyes. "Just now a trio suits me best, that is all I meant."

"Pshaw," he muttered, turning angrily away. Was she fooling him after all? He was not a man who would ever understand coquetry or caprice; such things would have simply disgusted him; but then he knew Dora was no coquette. "She is trying to manage me for some purpose of her own; she wants me to come to a certain point and no further; she is showing me very plainly what she means," he said to himself, repulsed and yet attracted in spite of himself by this strange conduct. After all the plane-tree walk and the sunset, now he had them, were failures. He had not once this evening called her Dora. How could he, with Cathy walking there beside them, and noting his discomfiture with her keen girlish eyes. True, he had not known what he would have said to her if they had been alone; sentiment was only just waking up in Garth's nature. A week or two ago he would have pronounced himself heart-whole, would have laughed at the notion of his being in love. Why had a sudden fancy come to him for golden hair and sunsets, and quiet evening strolls? Was he feeling dimly after something? was this restlessness, this indefinable longing after some visionary ideal, a part of the disease?

Garth could not have answered these questions if his life depended on it. He had ceased to be satisfied with his sister's company. A craving after some new excitement made itself very plainly felt at this time. His pulses were throbbing with fresh life; the world was before him, the young man's world; he had only to look round him and choose. Strong, keen-eyed, vigorous, with dominant will and sober judgment, what obstacle need he dread? what impediments could he not overcome?

Hitherto freedom, and the mystery obscuring his future fate, had had a strange charm in Garth's eyes. It had pleased him to know that such things were for him when he should stoop and open his hand to receive the best gift of heaven. "I suppose I shall fall in love some day, every one does; but there is plenty of time for that sort of thing," he often said to his sisters, and there had been an amused look upon his face, as though the notion pleased him.

But, in spite of his young man's conceit, Garth had an old-fashioned reverence in speaking on such subjects. It would not be too much to say that he stood, as it were, bare-headed on holy ground. One evening, shortly after Queenie's return from Carlisle, Cathy had been repeating to them scraps of poetry as they sat round the open window in the twilight, and by-and-bye she commenced in a low voice reciting some quaint old lines of Arnold, in which this craving for an unknown love is most touchingly depicted.

"Thou art as I-- Thy soul doth wait for mine, as mine for thee; We cannot live apart must meeting be Never before we die?

"Dear soul, not so! That time doth keep for us some happy years, That God hath portion'd out our smiles and tears, Thou knowest, and I know.

"Yes, we shall meet! And therefore let our searching be the stronger: Dark days of life shall not divide us longer. Nor doubt, nor danger, sweet!

"Therefore I bear This winter-tide as bravely as I may, Patiently waiting for the bright spring-day That cometh with thee, dear."

"How beautiful!" sighed Langley. "I have always been so fond of those lines. Your new song, 'My Queen.' embodies the same meaning, Cathy." But Garth said nothing; he only sat for a long time shading his eyes with his hand, and there was a certain moved look on his face when he uncovered it as though he had been strongly affected.

But ever since that evening the restlessness had grown upon him, and there had been a certain carping fastidiousness in his manner to his sisters; and once or twice he had used Dora's name as a sort of reproach. "If you were only as good a manager as Miss Cunningham, Langley;" or "I wish you would read more, and choose your books as sensibly as Miss Dora does, Cathy."

Langley took her rebuke meekly and in silence; but Cathy treated her brother to a contemptuous shrug and a disdainful look.

"Dora; I am sick of Dora. Every one sees how that will end," she said in a vexed voice, when they had come in from the garden, and she had followed her friend up-stairs. "When that happens I suppose we shall all be managed into our graves."

"Oh don't!" exclaimed Queenie, with a sudden accent of pain, and becoming somewhat pale over her words. "She is not good enough for him--for your brother."

"She is too good, you mean. I hate such faultless people. Dora is never in the wrong; she is a pattern daughter, a pattern sister, a model housekeeper, and unexceptionable in all parochial and social duties; the work she gets through would astonish your weak mind."

"And then she is so clever."

"Clever! she is a perfect paragon of learning. She educated her sisters until they went to Brussels. Then she is no mean musician; she works beautifully too, and copies out all her father's sermons. I am not sure she does not write them as well."

"Ah! now I can see you are joking."

"My dear, Dora is no joking matter, I can assure you; she and her goodness together are very ponderous affairs. Do you think Garth does not know all this? Why he and Dora have been friends ever since they were children."

"I can see that he respects her most thoroughly."

"Not more than she respects him; she is always telling how excellent he is, and what a model to other young men. When I am in a very good humor with Garth, I sometimes repeat these little speeches, only I have come lately to doubt the wisdom of adding fuel to the fire."

"Surely such perfection must satisfy you as well as him, or you must be difficult to please," returned Queenie a little sarcastically. A numb, undefinable sort of pain seemed taking possession of her. Would Hepshaw be quite so desirable a place of residence when Dora was mistress of Church-Stile House? this was the question she asked herself. And for the first time the thought of her fortune gave her a positive feeling of pleasure.

"Oh, as to that, I am very fond of Dora," replied Cathy carelessly; "she amuses me, and she is very good-natured; and then one must like one's future sister-in-law for the sake of dear old Garth. I only hope she will have the good sense not to try and manage him, for he will never stand it."

This conversation depressed Queenie somehow, and kept her wakeful and restless; it did not add to her tranquillity to hear Garth's footsteps under her window, crunching the gravel walk, for long after they had retired. It was contrary to his usual habit; it argued disturbance or preoccupation of mind.

Garth's soliloquy would have perplexed both her and Cathy if they had heard it.

"I wonder if I am in love with Dora after all?" he was asking himself, as he lighted himself a fresh cigar, and then stood leaning against the little gate, looking down the plane-tree walk. It was moonlight now, and the monuments glimmered in the white light; there were faint, eerie shadows under the dark trees; now and then a night-bird called, or a dog barked from the village, and then stillness gathered over everything again.

"I wonder if I am really in love, or if I am only arguing myself into it. Now I come to think of it, when I imagined my future wife I always thought of Dora; we have grown up together, and it seems natural somehow; and then I had always a boyish fancy for golden hair. What a pretty little head it is, as well as a wise one. I wish she were not quite so independent, and would lean on a fellow more. I suppose it is the fault of circumstances. Every one depends on her--her father and her sisters. She never had the chance of being helpless like other women. I always think of that and make allowance for her faults.

"Sometimes," soliloquized the young philosopher as his cigar went out, and he calmly relighted it, "sometimes I'm afraid that if we ever came together I might find her a little masterful and opinionated; that is the danger with capable women, they have their own notions and stick to them. I confess I should like my wife to follow my ideas, and not to be lady paramount in everything; not that even Dora would find it easy to manage me," continued Garth, with an amused curl of the lip.

"What a nice, sensible little companion she would be for a man," he resumed presently, after the firm even footsteps had crunched the gravel awhile. "That is the best of her, she never bores or wearies one; she is always fresh and good-humored, and ready to take interest in everything, even in the schools, and Miss Marriott, only Miss Marriott repulses her somehow. Her manner vexed me this afternoon; there was a stand-offishness and a reserve in it, as though Dora's interest offended her. She never appears at her best advantage when Dora is with us. Why am I always comparing those two? somehow I can't help it. Dora interests me most, of course; and yet men who are in love seldom study the pros and cons of character as I have been doing for the last half-hour. Certainly some of the symptoms are still lacking, or else I am too matter-of-fact a fellow to have them. And yet I don't know. What were those lines Cathy repeated the other night? How well the little puss recited them; with such feeling too.

'Thy soul doth wait for mine, as mine for thee; We cannot live apart.'

Humph! I am not in love so much as all that, and I don't think Dora is either. I have a doubt whether the 'open sesame' has been said to either of us yet; if so, 'where waitest thou, lady I am to love?' Well, it is a rare old poem, and touches a fellow up in an extraordinary sort of way. I have got it by heart now, and it haunts me to a droll extent. There, my cigar is out, confound it, so I may as well get rid of all this moonshine and go in. How runs the last verse--

'Tis the May-light That crimsons all the quiet college gloom. May it shine softly in thy sleeping room; And so, dear wife, good night.'"