CHAPTER II.

SISTERS.

More than one idler in Plymouth Station, one morning in October, turned his head to look again at two women walking side by side on the platform near to the London train. One, the taller of the two, was exceptionally beautiful, of a fair delicate type, with an almost perfect figure and a face fit for a model of the Madonna, so pure in outline was it, so innocent in its meaning. The younger woman was slightly shorter. She was clad in mourning, which contrasted somewhat crudely with the brighter costume of her companion. It was evident that these two were sisters; they walked in the same easy way, and especially notable was a certain intrepid carriage of the head, which I venture to believe is essentially peculiar to high-born Englishwomen.

By the side of her sister, Brenda Gilholme might easily pass unnoticed. Mrs. Huston was, in the usual sense of the word, a beautiful woman, and such women live in an atmosphere of notoriety. Wherever they go they are worshipped at a distance by those beneath them in station, patronized by those above them, respected by their equals, because, forsooth, face and form are moulded with delicacy and precision. The mind of such a woman is of little importance; the person is pleasing, and more is not demanded. Only her husband will some day awaken to the fact that worship from a distance might have been more satisfactory. The effect of personal beauty is a lamentable factor which cannot be denied. All men, good and bad alike, come under its influence. A lovely woman can twist most of us round her dainty finger with a wanton disregard for the powers of intellect or physical energy.

Brenda was not beautiful; she was only pretty, with a dainty refinement of heart which was visible in her delicate face. But her prettiness was in no way tainted with weakness, as was her sister's beauty. She was strong and thoughtful, with a true woman's faculty for hiding these unwelcome qualities from the eyes of inferior men. She had grown up in the shadow of this beautiful sister, and men had not cared to seek for intellect where they saw only a reflected beauty. She had passed through a social notoriety, but eager eyes had only glanced at her in passing. She had merely been Alice Gilholme's sister, and now--here on Plymouth platform--Alice Huston was assuming her old superiority. My brothers, think of this! It must have been a wondrous love that overcame such drawbacks, that passed by with tolerance a thousand daily slights. And Brenda's love for her sister accomplished all this. Ah, and more! In the days that followed there was a greater wrong--a wrong which only blind selfishness could have inflicted--and this also Brenda Gilholme forgave.

The sisters had met on the steamboat landing a few moments previously. A rattling drive through the town had followed, and now they were able to speak together alone for the first time. There had been no display of emotion. The beautiful lips had met lightly, the well-gloved fingers had clasped each other with no nervous hysterical fervour, and now it would seem that they had parted but a week ago. Emotion is tabooed in the school through which these two had passed--the school of nineteenth-century society--and, indeed, we appear to get along remarkably well without it.

'My dear,' Mrs. Huston was saying, 'he will be home by the next boat if he can raise the money. We cannot count on more than a week's start.'

'And,' inquired Brenda, 'can he raise the money?'

'Oh yes! If he can get as far as the steamboat office without spending it.'

Brenda looked at her sister in a curious way.

'Spending it on what ... Alice?'

'On--drink!'

Mrs. Huston was not the woman to conceal any of her own grievances from quixotically unselfish motives.

Brenda thought for some moments before replying.

'Then,' she said at length, with some determination, 'we must make sure of our start, if, that is, you are still determined to leave him.'

Mrs. Huston was looking down at her sister's neat black dress, about which there was a subtle air of refined luxury, which seems natural to some women, and part of their being.

'Yes, yes, I suppose we must. By the way, dear, you are in mourning ... for whom?'

'For Admiral Wylie,' replied Brenda patiently.

'But it is two months--is it not?--since his death, and he was no relation. I think it is unnecessary. Black is so melancholy, though it suits your figure.'

'I am living with Mrs. Wylie,' Brenda explained with unconscious irony. 'Are you still determined that you cannot live with your husband, Alice?'

'My dear, he is a brute! I am not an impulsive person, but I think that if he should catch me again, it is very probable that I should do something desperate--kill myself, or something of that sort.'

'I do not think,' observed Brenda serenely, 'that you would ever kill yourself.'

The beautiful woman laughed in an easy, lightsome way, which was one of her many social gifts. It was such a pleasantly infectious laugh, so utterly light-hearted, and so ready in its vocation of filling up awkward pauses.

'No, perhaps not. But in the meantime, what is to become of me? Will Mrs. Wylie take me in for a day or two, or shall we seek lodgings? I have some money, enough to last a month or so; but I must have two new dresses.'

'Mrs. Wylie has kindly said that you can stay as long as you like. But, Alice, it would never do to stay in London. You must get away to some small place on the sea-coast, or somewhere where you will not be utterly bored, and keep in hiding until he comes home, and I can find out what he intends to do.'

'My dear, I shall be utterly bored anywhere except in London. But Brenda, tell me ... you have got into a habit of talking exactly like Theo Trist!'

Brenda met her sister's eyes with a bright smile.

'How funny!' she exclaimed. 'I have not noticed it.'

'No, of course; you--would not notice it. When will he be home?'

The girl stopped and looked critically at an advertisement suspended on the wall near at hand. It was a huge representation of a coloured gentleman upon his native shore, making merry over a complicated pair of braces. She had never seen the work of art before, and for some unknown reason in the months--ay, and in the years that followed--her dislike for it was almost nauseating in its intensity.

'I don't know,' she replied indifferently.

'We,' continued Mrs. Huston, following out her own train of thought, 'are so helpless. We want a man to stand by us. Of course papa is of no use. I suppose he is spouting somewhere about the country. He generally is.'

'No,' replied Brenda, with a wonderful tolerance. 'We cannot count on him. He is in Ireland. I had a postcard from him the other day. He said that I was not to be surprised or shocked to hear that he was in prison. He is trying to get himself arrested. It is, he says, all part of the campaign.'

Again Mrs. Huston's pretty laughter made things pleasant and sociable.

'I wonder what that means,' she exclaimed, smoothing a wrinkle out of the front of her jacket for the benefit of a military-looking man, with a cigar in his mouth, who stared offensively as he passed.

Brenda shrugged her shoulders slightly, and said nothing. She did not appear to attach a very great importance to her father's political movements, in which culpable neglect she was abetted by the whole of England.

'What we require,' continued Mrs. Huston, 'is an energetic man with brains.'

'I am afraid that energetic men with brains have in most cases their own affairs to look after. It is only the idle ones with tongues who have time to devote to other people's business.'

'The "brute," my dear, is clever; we must remember that. And he is terribly obstinate. There is a sort of stubborn bloodhoundism about him which makes me shiver when I think that he is even now after me, in all probability.'

'We must be cool and cunning, and brave to fight against him,' said Brenda practically.

At this moment the guard came forward, and held the door of their compartment invitingly open. They got in, and found themselves alone. They were barely seated, opposite to each other, when the train glided smoothly away.

Brenda sat a little forward, with her gloved hand resting on the window, which had been lowered by the guard. They were seated on the landward side of the train, and as she looked out her eyes rested on the rising hills to the north with a vague, unseeing gaze.

A slight movement made by Mrs. Huston caused her at length to look across, and the two sisters sat for a second searching each other's eyes for the old heartwhole frankness which never seems to survive the death of childhood and the birth of separate interests in life.

'Theo,' said the elder woman significantly at last, 'is brave and cool and cunning, Brenda.'

The girl made an effort, but the old childish confidence was dead. From Theo Trist, the disciple of stoicism, she had perhaps learnt something of a creed which, if a mistaken one, renders its followers of great value in the world, for they never intrude their own private feelings upon public attention. That effort was the last. It was a beginning in itself--the first stone of a wall destined to rise between the two sisters, built by the gray hands of Time.

'But,' suggested Brenda, 'Theo is in Bulgaria.'

Mrs. Huston smiled with all the conscious power of a woman who, without being actually vain, knows the market value and the moral weight of her beauty.

'Suppose I telegraphed to him that I wanted him to come to me at once.'

Brenda fixed her eyes upon her sister's face. For a second her dainty lip quivered.

'You must not do that,' she said, in such a tone of invincible opposition that her sister changed colour, and looked somewhat hastily in another direction.

'I suppose,' murmured the elder woman after a short silence, 'that it is quite impossible to find out when he may return?'

'Quite impossible. This "Eastern Question," as it is called, is so complicated that I have given up trying to follow it--besides, I do not see what Theo has to do with the matter. We must act alone, Alice.'

'But women are so helpless.'

Brenda smiled in a slightly ironical way.

'Why should they be?' she asked practically. 'I am not afraid of Captain Huston. He is a gentleman, at all events.'

'He _was_!' put in his wife bitterly.

'And I suppose there is something left of his former self?'

'Not very much, my dear. At least, that phase of his present condition has been religiously hidden from my affectionate gaze.'

Brenda drew her gloves pensively up her slim wrists, smoothing out the wrinkles in the black kid. There was in her demeanour an air of capable attention, something between that accorded by a general to his aide-de-camp on the field of battle, and the keen watchfulness of a physician while his patient speaks.

'Theo,' she said conversationally, 'would be a great comfort to us. He is so steadfast and so entirely reliable. But we must do without him. We will manage somehow.'

'I am horribly afraid, Brenda. It has just come to me; I have never felt it before. You seem to take it so seriously, and ... and I expected to find Theo at home.'

'Theo is one of the energetic men with brains who have their own affairs to attend to,' said Brenda, in her cheery way. 'We are not his affairs; besides, as I mentioned before, he is in Bulgaria--in his element, in the midst of confusion, insurrection, war.'

'But,' repeated Mrs. Huston, with aggravating unconsciousness of the obvious vanity of her words, 'suppose I telegraphed for him?'

Brenda laughed, and shook her head.

'I have a melancholy presentiment that if you telegraphed for him he would not come. There is a vulgar but weighty proverb about making one's own bed, which he might recommend to our notice.'

'Then Theo must have changed!'

Brenda raised her round blue eyes, and glanced sideways out of the window. She was playing idly with the strap of the sash, tapping the back of her hand with it.

'Theo,' she observed indifferently, 'is the incarnation of steadfastness. He has not changed in any perceptible way. But he is, before all else, a war-correspondent. I cannot imagine that anyone should possess the power of dragging him away from the seat of war.'

Mrs. Huston smiled vaguely for her own satisfaction. Her imagination was apparently capable of greater things. It was rather to be deplored that, when she smiled, the expression of her beautiful face was what might (by a true friend behind her back) be called a trifle vacuous.

'He wrote,' continued the younger sister, 'a very good article the other day, which came just within the limits of my understanding. It was upon the dangers of alliance; and he showed that an ally who, in any one way, might at some time prove disadvantageous, is better avoided from the very first. It was _àpropos_ of the Turkish-Christian subjects welcoming a Russian invasion. It seems to me, Alice, that our position is rather within the reach of that argument.'

'Being a soldier's wife, I do not know much about military matters; but it seems to me that a retreat should be safely covered at all costs.'

'Not at _all_ costs,' said Brenda significantly. Her colour had changed, and there was a wave of pink slowly mounting over her throat.

Mrs. Huston smiled serenely, and shrugged her shoulders.

'I do not see,' she expostulated frankly, 'what harm there can be in calling in the aid of an old friend.'

'I would rather work alone!' was Brenda's soft reply.

And in those two casual remarks there lay hidden from the gaze of blinder mortals the story of two lives.