Part 2

Mrs. Tregaskis shut the door behind them with astonishing briskness and whisked round to face her hostess.

“A little diplomatic ruse, my dear, to get those infants out of hearing. And once out of doors they’ll be tearing all over the place and forget our very existence. I really must talk to you about them--that eldest girl means trouble if _I_ know anything of spoilt children. I foresee a scene this evening.”

“Why, Bertie dear? I thought them so very brave and good, poor little things.”

“Oh, you know what children are! They’ve practically ‘got over’ it as people say, already, but there’s bound to be an outburst, I’m afraid, at the ‘last evening’--you know the kind of thing. The men have been taking away the furniture, such of it as is going to be sold, this afternoon while we’ve been out, and I do rather dread taking them back to that half-dismantled cottage. Rosamund is very highly strung, poor child, and she always infects the little one.”

“Poor children,” sighed Lady Argent, while Ludovic was wishing that Mrs. Tregaskis had not taken up a position that rendered it impossible for him to walk out at the door.

“Poor me, too, I think. It’s very stupid to mind it, but these days have been a frightful strain, in a way--one has somehow felt for them so much more than they’ve probably felt for themselves. But what with mothering them, and seeing to the business part of it all, and packing up, I really feel a rag.”

She sank limply into an armchair and Ludovic made for the unguarded doorway as rapidly as he could.

“My poor dear! But why shouldn’t you all stay here for the night, and avoid going back to the cottage at all. _Do_ do that, Bertie dear.”

“Sybil, you angel!” cried Mrs. Tregaskis, reviving abruptly. “What a lot it would save me--I’ve simply been dreading to-night. But wouldn’t it be a fearful nuisance?”

Ludovic opened the door, stumbled on the threshold, then awkwardly readjusted his crutch and shut the library door with a hasty bang.

He had almost fallen over Rosamund Grantham, crouching outside the door.

She raised a deeply flushed face, and he looked gravely down at her. He was shocked only at the unchildlike misery and exhaustion that showed in her dark-circled eyes.

“Let me help you up from the floor,” he said after a moment, as though her position were the most usual one for a guest to select.

She let him take her hand and raise her from the floor, and then followed him slowly across the hall into a small morning-room.

Ludovic supposed that he ought to say: “Listening at doors is dishonourable,” but the sense of courtesy, apparently less in abeyance than where Bertha Tregaskis was concerned, revolted, and he moreover felt convinced that Rosamund was as well aware as himself of the breach she had committed.

Presently she said in a low voice:

“I know it is dreadful to listen at doors. I have never done it before, but I felt certain--_certain_--that they would try and arrange something or other without telling me--perhaps separate me and Francie or something; there’s nobody to understand anything, and I don’t know what is going to happen to us.”

“They can’t separate you and your sister,” said Ludovic earnestly; “no one could do that.”

“Then what are they settling in there, all by themselves? I know they’re talking about us, because I could hear a little--but only a very little--that was the worst of it.”

She began to struggle with tears.

“My mother asked Mrs. Tregaskis to stay here with you and your sister, for to-night, instead of going back,” he told her straight.

“Why weren’t Frances and I asked if we would? Why is it arranged like that without telling me?” she demanded resentfully, her voice shaking.

“I don’t know. I suppose Mrs. Tregaskis thought you would not mind. Do you mind very much? If you do, I--I will see that you _do_ go home to-night,” said Ludovic desperately.

She looked at him for an instant with a sort of wonder in her eyes that touched him acutely, and then broke into floods of tears.

Ludovic stood looking out of the window.

“She is utterly bewildered by that woman,” he told himself angrily, “and distrusts her instinctively. Heaven help the child! What will she do in Cornwall? That woman will break her. Dear, kind, wonderful Bertie, as my mother calls her! and those two--sensitive, highly-strung, who’ve probably lived in an atmosphere of understanding all their lives....”

He wondered for a wild instant if his mother could be persuaded to receive Rosamund and Frances as daughters. It hardly seemed probable, in view alone of her admiration for their self-appointed guardian. How could the charges of the benevolent cousin be reft from her under no pretext but their reluctance to be benefited, and Ludovic Argent’s passionate conviction that such beneficence would be the ruin of both?

“I’m not crying any more,” said Rosamund’s voice behind him, after a few moments.

He turned round.

“What shall I do? Shall I tell my mother that you are to go to your home again this evening?”

She shook her head.

“No, thank you. In a way, they’re quite right. Frances would only cry, which would be bad for her.”

“Where is she now?” asked Ludovic.

“In the garden. She doesn’t know,” said Rosamund, colouring again, “about my listening at the door. She would think it dreadful, and I know it is--but somehow nothing seemed to matter except just to know what was going to be done with us.”

She looked mournfully at him and he saw her, bewildered and defenceless, thrust among alien standards and with all the foundations of her tiny world rocking. No wonder that in a suddenly revolutionized scale of values honour had seemed to count for less than the primitive instinct of self-defence.

“What _can_ I do for you?” he said, almost unconsciously venting aloud the strong sense of impotent compassion that moved him.

“Oh,” she cried, “nobody can make things come right again--even God couldn’t, though I’ve prayed and prayed.”

“Do you mean--your mother?”

“My mother _had_ to die,” she told him seriously. “She coughed and coughed every night, sometimes right on till the next morning. The night that she died, it was dreadful. She never stopped. I prayed for anything that might stop her coughing like that, and God answered the prayer by making her die. When I heard she wasn’t coughing any more, I thought it was all my prayers being answered, and I went to sleep, and then in the morning _she_ came and told us that mother had died.”

She stopped and looked at him, with the most pathetic look that can be seen on a child’s face, that of bewilderment at pain.

“Go on,” said Ludovic in a low voice.

“Cousin Bertie said we could go in and see her afterwards, but I wouldn’t”--she shuddered--“I thought it would frighten Francie so. And we didn’t go to the funeral, either. Were you there?” she asked suddenly.

“No. I only came back from Paris yesterday,” he told her gently.

“Cousin Bertie went. She was very kind, and made us go in the garden, and told us a lot of things about heaven, and mother being quite well again now and happy, and somehow it didn’t all seem so bad then. But now we’re going away, and--and there’s nobody to understand. Except you,” she added mournfully.

“Haven’t you any relations at all?”

“No. Only Cousin Bertie. She is very kind, and she is taking us to live with her--but oh, she doesn’t understand!”

The despair in Rosamund’s voice seemed to Ludovic Argent to sum up all the inadequacy that he had felt in Bertha Tregaskis. She was very kind--she was taking the orphans to live with her--but she would never “understand.”

He felt her lack of understanding to be yet more apparent when Mrs. Tregaskis called Rosamund and Frances back to the library, just as Frances timidly pushed open the French window of the room where he stood with Rosamund.

An imploring look from Rosamund made him follow them quickly into the library.

Lady Argent welcomed him with a glad look in which, nevertheless, he detected a slight surprise.

“Well, you two,” began Bertha in a tone of careful gaiety, “what do you think of an invitation? Kind Lady Argent wants us all three to stay here for the night. Then cook won’t have any trouble about getting supper ready for us, and we shan’t have to bother any more about squeezing into the bedrooms with all those trunks! Isn’t that splendid?”

“We shall have to go back to get our things,” said Frances quickly and solemnly.

“I’ll see to all that,” declared kind Mrs. Tregaskis briskly. “I’m going to pop over and see to one or two things, and I’ll bring back the nighties with me. I shall put on my seven-leagued boots, and be back before you know I’ve gone.”

“I’ll go back with you,” said Rosamund.

“No, my dear. It’s too far for you.” There was an underlying anxiety in Mrs. Tregaskis’ firm kindliness.

Frances looked at her sister with consternation.

“But--but----” she half-whispered, turning her back on Mrs. Tregaskis, “it’s our very last night at home. We _must_ go back, Rosamund.”

“Bon! ça y est,” ejaculated Bertie under her breath and casting a glance of humorous despair at Lady Argent and Ludovic. “Une scène de première classe!”

He noted with angry resentment her admirable French.

“Rosamund and Frances,” she said, in a tone of elaborate reasonableness, “I want you to listen to me, like good children. Lady Argent is very kindly letting you stay here so that we shouldn’t have to go back to the cottage, which is all upside down with packing and--and furniture and things, and I want you to be very good and give no trouble at all.”

“Oh no,” breathed Lady Argent, distressed. “But would they rather--do they want to go to the cottage again----” She hesitated helplessly.

“Bless me,” cried Bertie cheerily, “the cottage isn’t going to run away in the night. There’ll be heaps of time to-morrow morning before we start for home.”

Rosamund flushed an angry red.

“The cottage is _our_ home,” she said with emphasis.

“Well, darling, that’s very loyal of you,” laughed her guardian, “and I’m quite ready to hear you call it so until you’ve got used to our part of the world.

“Now what about washing paws, Sybil, before we adorn your dinner-table?”

It was perhaps this masterly conduct of a difficult situation that made Lady Argent say to her son that evening, when Mrs. Tregaskis had hurried upstairs “just to give those two a tucking-up and ‘God bless you’”:

“Oh Ludovic! How splendid Bertie is, and how I hope it will turn out well.”

“Why should it not?” asked Ludovic, who held, indeed, his own certainties as to why it should not, but was perversely desirous of hearing and contradicting his mother’s point of view.

“It’s always rather a risk, isn’t it, to take other people’s children like that, even though they are relations. But they’re dear little girls, and so good and brave.”

“They seem to me singularly intelligent, and altogether rather remarkable.”

“Yes, indeed, one does feel that,” returned Lady Argent with the sort of gentle cordiality with which she almost always acclaimed any opportunity of praising others, and which consequently detracted considerably from the value of her approbation. “They are not at all ordinary, I feel sure, and that’s why it seems so very fortunate that Bertie, of all people, should take them. She will _understand_ them so wonderfully. Her love of children is one of the most characteristic things about her, and she always says herself that she’s never quite stopped being a child in some ways, and so understands children. They come to her instinctively. Children and animals always _know_, they say.”

Ludovic had met this aphorism before, and disagreed with it profoundly, but he had no wish to deprive his mother of any of the gentle Victorian beliefs which ruled her life. At thirty years old, Ludovic Argent was still young enough to feel superior.

But at this moment his thoughts were altogether engaged with the little girls who yesterday had been all but unknown to him. Presently, to his own surprise, he said:

“Mother, you wouldn’t consider the idea of having those two here, I suppose?”

“You don’t mean for good, Ludovic?”

He did, but a certain strain of moral cowardice, always latent in the imaginative, made him temporize.

“Well--for a long visit, perhaps. I--I think they’d be happier near their old home, and in their own part of the world.”

“But, my dear boy,” said his astonished mother, “you surely don’t mean to suggest that I should adopt two children of whom I know hardly anything, when they’ve already been offered an excellent and much more suitable home with a relation? It would be quite impossible. Do think of what you’re saying.”

Ludovic thought. From every point of view his suggestion was inadmissible. The instinct which had prompted it, he decided, was unpractical sentimentality.

He rose abruptly.

“You’re right, of course. It would be quite impossible.”

Lady Argent’s sigh was compounded of mingled relief and regret that any scheme suggested by her son would prove to be impracticable.

“Perhaps,” she said, by way of compromise, “we could have them to stay, later on. I quite see what you mean about their liking the Wye valley, poor little things. And of course I know how fond you are of children, darling.”

Ludovic rightly conjectured that the last few hours had for ever placed this parental illusion beyond the reach of doubt. It would be part of the penalty of an unconventional, and therefore unpractical, suggestion.

“The infants are asleep!” cried Bertha Tregaskis at the door, merrily, triumphantly, and also, as it happened, altogether untruly. “At least if they’re not they ought to be. I left them very much _en route_ for the Land of Nod, though Rosamund wouldn’t own to it, and of course the little one always holds fast by her. I tell you what, Sybil, it will be the making of them both to be with another child. As it is, I can see that Rosamund is domineering, and Frances simply has no individuality of her own. It always is so when there are only two. The elder or cleverer or stronger simply has things all her own way--and Rosamund is all three. She has any amount of character, but I foresee a handful. Well, it’s all in the day’s work, I suppose.”

“As though your day wasn’t full enough already, Bertie dear!”

Ludovic left the room.

Next morning the visitors were driven early to the station. There was, after all, Mrs. Tregaskis had declared at breakfast, no time to return to the cottage on the other side of the valley--Rosamund and Frances must wave to it from the train window. Couldn’t they see the garden and a little bit of the house from the train? Very well, then it would be quite exciting to watch for it. They could have a race to see who caught sight of it first.

Into this bracing atmosphere of cheery optimism Ludovic’s voice cut coldly and decisively:

“I can drive round that way, if you wish it.” He addressed himself directly to Rosamund. His mother looked surprised, but it was left to Bertha to exclaim:

“Only at the risk of missing the train, and I don’t want to do that--my old man is counting on my being back by the early train, and he’ll drive down to meet it, I expect. That’s no joke, when one lives three miles from the station at the top of one of our Cornish hills!”

Mrs. Tregaskis was always possessive when speaking of Cornwall.

“I’m afraid you might find it rather out of your way, Ludovic, and we haven’t left much time,” began Lady Argent apologetically.

“I don’t mind,” said Rosamund miserably, answering Ludovic’s gaze.

“Good girl!” said Mrs. Tregaskis approvingly. “Why, Francie!”

Frances had suddenly begun to cry, quietly and hopelessly.

Rosamund said “_Francie!_” in a tone of exasperated misery that spoke of nerves rasped to breaking point.

“Hush! Leave her to me,” commanded her guardian. “Frances, darling, what is it? Come here to me. What is the matter?”

She held out both her capable hands.

Frances looked at her quite silently with streaming eyes.

“Oh,” cried Lady Argent pitifully, and Frances turned to her at once and hid her face against the outstretched arm.

“Poor little thing,” said Lady Argent almost tearfully. But Ludovic noted that his mother seemed to comfort Frances in an instinctive sort of way, with gentle hand stroking her hair, and without attempting to make her speak.

Bertha Tregaskis, “wonderful with children,” Ludovic ironically reflected, was capable of nothing more startling than an imperative:

“Hush, now, Rosamund. She’ll stop in a minute. Go on with your breakfast, and remember that you have a long journey in front of you. However, you’ll have a real Cornish tea when you arrive--splits and cream, and pasties, and all sorts of things. Us has a real proper ole set-tü, at tay-time.” She laughed, and for the rest of the meal was very jovial and talkative, drawing attention from Frances, who presently stopped crying and wiped her eyes in a shamefaced way. She looked timidly once or twice at Rosamund, which glances were intercepted by Mrs. Tregaskis with significantly raised eyebrows which said plainly to Lady Argent, “What did I tell you?”

But it was Ludovic who saw the elder sister’s answering look and read into it her intense agony of protective love and impotent apprehension. The dead mother might have made Frances’ world, but Frances made Rosamund’s.

III

“Here we are!” declared Mrs. Tregaskis thankfully, as the train slowed down at Porthlew. “I declare it’s good to be alive, in such weather and a country like this one.”

She descended lightly on to the astonishingly bleak little platform, empty and swept by a north wind.

“Now for bags and baggage! Frances--umbrellas, dressing-bag, papers--that’s all right. Rosamund? Come along, darlings, you must get out everything while I see to the luggage. Porter! Ah, Trewin, good-afternoon. Is the trap outside? Just show these young ladies the way, and then come back for the trunks. How’s the wife?”

“Better, thank you, Mrs. Tregaskis,” said the man, touching his cap with a grin.

“That’s right. Tell her I’ll be round to see her in a day or two.”

Kind, competent Mrs. Tregaskis hurried along, beaming and exchanging greetings with one or two porters and a newspaper-boy.

“How pleased they all are to see her,” said Frances wistfully. “Isn’t it cold, Rosamund?”

“It’s much colder than at home. Turn up your collar, Francie. Do you think we shall go to the house in a cab?”

“No--she said the old man would drive down in a trap. I suppose it’s the coachman.”

“I think she meant Cousin Frederick. She said ‘_my_ old man.’”

“Oh! Is he very old?” asked Frances in rather awe-struck tones.

“I suppose he must be.”

But when they presently went outside the station and climbed into the tall dog-cart, driven by Cousin Frederick, they did not think him very old after all.

He was small and brown and clean-shaven, with a thin, deeply lined face and a curious twist at the corner of his mouth that gave him the appearance of always wearing a rather sardonic smile. But his little grey eyes were inscrutable, and never smiled. No one had ever called him Freddy, or even Fred.

He lifted his cap to Rosamund and Frances and said:

“I’m afraid I can’t get down. The mare won’t stand. Do you mind sitting at the back?”

They climbed up obediently, and from an elevation which both secretly felt to be perilous, watched the arrival of Mrs. Tregaskis and sundry minor articles of luggage.

“Here we are,” she announced gaily to her husband, after the universal but obvious fashion of the newly arrived. “How are you, dear? and how’s Hazel? All well at home? That’s right, thank you, Trewin. You’ll see to the boxes, won’t you. I suppose the luggage cart is here?”

Frederick pointed silently with the whip.

“Oh yes, that’s all right. Well, I’ll pop in, and we can be off.”

She patted the mare vehemently.

“Jenny needs clipping,” she observed in parenthesis. “Well”--she got in beside her husband.

As they drove through the steep town of Porthlew Mrs. Tregaskis exchanged cheery salutations in her hearty, ringing voice with a number of people. Frederick slanted the whip slightly in the direction of his cap, straightened it again, and said nothing.

Neither did he say anything throughout the three-mile drive, nor when they stopped before the square stone house, and Mrs. Tregaskis kissed first Rosamund and then Frances, on the steps of the porch, and said:

“Welcome home, darlings.”

Then she shouted aloud:

“Hazel, my poppet! Hazel! Come and say how d’ye do to the cousins.”

Hazel Tregaskis, aged fourteen, came into the hall. She was small and brown like her father, with something of the same twist at the corner of her mouth, but rendered charming by rippling tawny hair, and beautiful eyes where an elfin spirit of mockery seemed eternally to dance. She held herself very erect, and moved with remarkable grace and lightness.

They had tea in the hall, and Hazel sat beside her father and chattered freely to the new arrivals.

“Where is Minnie?” suddenly demanded Mrs. Tregaskis. “Frederick, we’ve forgotten Minnie. Where is Minnie? Hazel, where is Minnie--where is Miss Blandflower, darling?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel calmly.

“Go and find her at once, my pet. Poor Miss Blandflower! You know this isn’t quite like her own home, and we never want to let her feel herself forgotten, or unwanted. Now run, Hazel.”

Hazel rose from her place with no appearance of haste, and went slowly in search of the missing one.

Mrs. Tregaskis remarked rather elaborately:

“Miss Blandflower is a very old friend of ours, though she is a great deal younger than I am. She will give you your lessons, I hope, with Hazel.”

“Is she Hazel’s governess?” inquired Frances gently.

Frederick Tregaskis nodded, but his wife said with an air of slight repression: “She lives with us, Frances dear, as I told you, and we do our very best to make her feel that this is her home. You see, Miss Blandflower is extremely poor, and has nowhere else to live.”

“Like us,” returned Frances with mournful matter-of-factness.

“Not at all like you,” said her cousin Frederick, suddenly looking at her. “Neither you nor Rosamund need think that you have nowhere to go. You will have money of your father’s some day, in fact it belongs to you now, and will be used for your education and any other expenses. You can go to school, if you would like that, or live with anybody----”

“Come, come, Frederick, we needn’t go into these sordid details,” said Bertha, with an extremely annoyed laugh.

Frances looked bewildered, as though she felt herself to have received a rebuke, but Rosamund’s grey eyes met those of Frederick Tregaskis with a sudden lightening of their sombre gloom.

“I disagree with you, Bertha,” he observed, with a look of dislike at his wife. “These things are much better clearly defined. It is quite conceivable that Rosamund and Frances may dislike the position of refugees under our hospitable roof, and in that case they may as well know that I shall further any reasonable scheme they may entertain for existence elsewhere.”

“Frederick, how impossible you are, dear. The children will think you don’t want them. Cousin Frederick is only joking, darling,” she added, laying her hand on Frances’ reassuringly.