K. b. Jfrrr _1 inc* u..i'/-R3tTr OF CALIFORNIA 8*N DiEQO presented to the LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY MR. JOHN C. ROSE donor <&? OR -I s/~ THE CEDAR STAR He stood above her, leaning upon the hand placed on the window-frame over her head. Page 166. THE CEDAR BY MARY E. MANN AUTHOR OP 'SUSANNAH," "THERE WAS ONCE A PRINCE,' "WHEN ARNOLD COMES HOME," ETC., ETC, NEW YORK R. F. FENNO & COMPANY 112 FIFTH AVENUE I.ONDON : HENRY & COMPANY Copyright, 189? BY R. F. FBJ*0 & COMPANY CONTENTS. PART I. PAGE CHAPTER I. BETTY AND HER FAMILIAES 7 CHAPTER II. THE CURATE'S FRIEND 18 CHAPTER III. VIOLET BELTON 27 CHAPTER IV. BETTY MAKES A CONFESSION 36 CHAPTER V. HABEINGAY WITHDRAWS 46 CHAPTER VI. UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES 55 CHAPTER VII. GIRLS WANT A MOTHER 64 CHAPTER Vin. BETTY'S DARK HOUR 76 CHAPTER IX. "MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND" .... .83 PART II. CHAPTER I. AFTER TEN YEARS 95 CHAPTER II. A HOME-COMING . 112 CHAPTER III. FRICTION 122 CHAPTER IV. "WE FOUR" , 128 (3) 4 CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. " WHERE ABE THE SPRINGS OF LONG AGO ? " 143 CHAPTER VI. VIOLET'S HUSBAND 156 CHAPTER VII. THE CEDAR STAB 164 CHAPTER VIII. His FORTUNE is THE GBEAT PERHAPS 170 CHAPTER IX. A CONTRADICTION STILL 180 CHAPTER X. THE HARRINGAYS AT HOME 190 CHAPTER XI. I WONDER WHY You CAME 199 CHAPTER XII. THE MOONLIGHT SONATA 207 CHAPTER XIII. "I PITY TAKE ON ALL POOR WOMEN" 218 CHAPTER XIV. I HAD MY WAY . .231 PAET III. CHAPTER I. "INEVITABLE AS DEATH" 245 CHAPTER II. THE WALKER CONVERSAZIONE 255 CHAPTER III. A WOMAN'S No 267 CHAPTER IV. "SHE GAVE ME HERSELF, O EARTH, O SKY! " .... 278 CHAPTER V. AN UNMOUNTED PHOTOGRAPH 290 CHAPTER VI. " BILL, You MUST TAKE ME HOME " 303 CONCLUSION . . 305 PART I. ' YET this thing learn of me: The sweet hours fair and free That we have had of yore, The fair things we did see, The linked melody Of waves upon the shore That rippled in their glee, Are not lost utterly Though they return no more." THE CEDAR STAR. CHAPTER I. BETTY AND HER FAMILIARS. ON three sides of the schoolroom table at Blow Weston Rectory the rector's three little daughters sat. On the fourth sat Miss Walker their governess. A muddy complexion had Miss Walker, and her mud-colored hair was dressed in a hundred little curls above her little brow and arranged in sleek, moist- looking coils above her mud-colored neck. She had, besides, a remarkably short nose, and her very wide mouth was stretched to its utmost limit this afternoon in yawn upon yawn. With one bony hand she clung to the edge of the table to preserve her equilibrium in the chair she had tilted upon its hind legs, in the other she held a long pencil with which she tenderly stirred the multitudi- nous curls. Presently her mouth shut with an audible snap, her chair came down on all fours, she held up the pencil to command attention. " Silence, if you please ? " she said, " I think it is your papa's voice I can hear in the hall." Three pairs of eyes looked up at Miss Walker and fixed themselves with three different expressions on (7) 8 THE CEDAR STAR. her face. The lady gave an eager glance out of the window and sprang to her feet. " A cloud is coming up over the blue. I trust your papa is not going to venture out without his umbrella," she said, and disappeared through the door. Returning, after the lapse of a few minutes, she found the heads of her three pupils bent conscien- tiously above their books. " Your papa does not think it will rain," she volun- teered. " He will not be prevailed on to take his umbrella." She resumed her place again, and her occupation of yawning, and of tilting her chair, and of touching up the curls of her head, while her eyes were fixed on the April sky as seen through the schoolroom window. Suddenly the titter, which Ian, the 3 T oungest of the Reverend Eustace Jervois's motherless little daugh- ters, had endeavored to repress by means of a chubby hand tightly prisoning a rosebud mouth, burst forth. The gooseberry eyes of Miss "Walker relinquished the celestial contemplation for that of the frightened fat face and followed the direction involuntarily taken by the sweet, traitorous eyes. They fell upon a small oblong of drawing-paper laid before her on the table. The mud complexion assumed a dull red hue, waters of anger suffused the gooseberry eyes : " Who has dared to do this ? " she demanded in shrill tones of wrath. The two elder children, bent above their books, muttered the words of their task with renewed energy. " I know very well who has done it," Miss Walker cried. " But I choose to be told. If confession is not at once made, you will be punished severely, and you will all be punished together." BETTY AND HER FAMILIARS. 9 The threat proved too much for the weak heart of fat Ian : " It wasn't me ; nor yet it wasn't Emily," she ventured. She had no desire to betray Betty, but no notion of suffering for Betty's sins. She quailed before the flaming contempt of the elder sister's eyes and at once put herself on the defensive, appealing to Miss Walker in tearful tones. " 1 haven't told any tales, have I? I didn't say Betty made the picture, did I, Miss Walker ? " Miss Walker, terrible in hysteric wrath, had risen from her chair. " I will not stay here to be insulted," she cried, " I never met with insult till I came to this house. I will not be insulted. I have always had little ladies to deal with before. You are not little ladies. You are three little vulgar-minded wretches. You ought to have improved under my example. You haven't improved. I wash my hands of you. I leave you to your papa to punish. The instant that he enters the house I go to him and demand that you shall be pun- ished." As she bounced from the room, carrying the offend- ing sheet of paper, Ian burst into bitter weeping, and a look of alarm crept into Emily's blue eyes. Betty shut the book before her and sprang from her place. " Come on," she said. " Let's go before she catches father, or before she repents. Come on, Emily. Ian, you are a sneak. We won't have you go and cry to Miss Walker, and ask to be forgiven." But in spite of the prohibition, when, two minutes later, the elder children ran through the rectory garden little Ian was not far behind. She understood that having come under the shadow of Betty's wrath she might not presume to walk at either sister's side, 10 THE CEDAR STAB. or to address her, but Ian never knew resentment or how to take punishment with dignity. She kept up a conversation with the black kitten she had brought in her arms and bided her time. The three little scarlet-robed figures for the chil- dren had not waited to pull off their schoolroom pina- fores, but had picked up their garden hats, called to their dog, caught the kitten and bolted ran across the lawn, through shrubbery and kitchen garden, to that part of the globe which was called the church meadow. They passed the church and the church- yard, whose most noticeable monument was the re- cently erected tall marble cross, bearing their own mother's name, and made their way to a small house placed in the corner of the same meadow. It was a quite modern house of a very ornate architecture. Its chimneys and frequent gables were almost painfully picturesque, its windows showed the maximum of mullion and the minimum of glass, their balconies of ponderous masonry scarcely affording standing room for a man and a flower-pot at one and the same time, the heavy roofed porch appeared much larger than the hall it opened into, the residence of the Reverend William Carlyon, curate of Blow Weston. " It is Friday afternoon, his sermon time," Betty re- membered. " Perhaps he won't see us," Emily feared. " When did he ever not see us if we wanted him to ? " demanded the eldest child with scorn. She climbed the small iron gate that led between heavy stone pillars to the curate's tiny garden the little Jer- voises held it a shame to open a gate that could be climbed. Emily fell as she followed suit, but picked herself up and tried to look as if she hadn't. BETTY AND HER FAMILIARS. 11 " Emily's knees are bleeding," Ian, having safely landed her own fat person, remarked cheerfully to the long haired terrier waddling at her side. " Chip, Emily's knees are bleeding." " Chip is not to have the disgrace of being talked to by a sneak," said Betty with scorn, and called the dog to her in sharp tones of command, of which Chip took not the slightest notice. " Hi, Chip ! Mr. Chipley ! " Betty called with quite unnecessary loudness, and with her eyes on the window before which they stood, while Ian, putting the black kitten she carried upon its hind legs, com- pelled the reluctant animal to jig to a tune of her own invention, accompanied by loud mews of dis- satisfaction, and while her kitten went through its unwilling performance, Ian also kept watch upon the window, whose tiny balcony was approached by three squat stone steps from the gravel path on which the children stood. Emily, with the futile boldness that now and again emphasized the extreme timidity of her nature, flung a feeble stone in the same direction. The florid-faced young curate, sitting with his back to the window, biting at the tail of his quill pen with a frown of anxious concentration upon his brow, threw up his head with a sigh as much of relief as of im- patience. He was not so very reluctant to relinquish the work in hand. He got up and opened the window and appeared upon the few feet of balcony, looking down upon the little girls in their scarlet pinafores, their battered black hats. He put his hands in his trousers pockets and stood there, saying nothing, shaking his head at his visitors with a broad smile upon his youthful, pleasant face. " We've got something to tell you, something 12 THE CEDAR STAR. glorious ! " Betty cried, her feet planted apart, hei hands behind her back, an eager face set in roughened ruddy clouds of hair, lifted to his. " Don't you see darling Paulie ? He wants to come in," said Ian, dancing the black kitten with vigorous steps in the young man's direction. " I thought I said I would not be bothered with you on Fridays ? " the curate reminded them. " Yet do be bothered with us ! " implored Betty, while Emily gave a gurgling laugh, and Ian, with " darling Paulie " still dangling from its forepaws to the ground, having mounted the steps, now slipped into the open window beneath young Carl- yon's arm. She was quickly followed by the other children and Chip the long haired terrier. The curate sat down on the edge of the table where the sermon-paper lay, swinging one long loose leg. He felt in his coat pocket for his pipe, eyeing the little intruders as he filled it. Ian, who had squeezed close to his side, held up the black kitten to his face. " Kiss darling Paulie," she entreated. " Paul be hanged ! ' said the curate ; but when he had lit his pipe he took the child, kitten and all upon his knee. At this mark of favor Betty grew crimson with jealous disapproval. " A sneak isn't the kind of a person to sit on people's knees. lan's been sneaking : she sneaked to Miss Walker. I thought you hated a sneak, Billy." " And who's sneaking now, pray ? " demanded the unmoved curate, pulling at his pipe. " It's different when Betty does it," declared Emily in perfect good faith, " Betty's not afraid of Miss BETTY AND HER FAMILIARS. 13 Walker or of anyone. She does not do it to screen herself." " I only said I didn't draw the picture," protested the sneak in the safe shelter of Carlyon's arms, " and I didn't draw it." " I drew it," said Betty. " I came to tell you. Miss Walker will have to go now. When they com- plain to father they're done for. He puts up with them when they try to be amusing ; he hides when they run after him with umbrellas and sticks ; but when they go to him and say that unless an alteration is made in the behavior of the children you know how they go on father puts up his hands to his head, and says, ' Oh go, my good woman I go. For Heaven's sake, go ! ' ' The imitation of the elder's irritable and worried manner was excellent, and Carlyon laughed. " How many does this make in the last year ? " he asked. Betty shook her head quickly. " We don't count them, and don't you count them, please, Billy," she said. " You'll be punished, you know, and you deserve it, Betty." " Then they shouldn't make love to my father," said Betty. " They shouldn't make love to our father," echoed the two smaller girls. " We hate all women," said Betty, " men are nicer. I shall hate myself when I am a woman, only I shall be of a sensibler kind. I shall never wear my petti- coats longer than my calves, and I shall always keep my hair hanging down my back." " Won't Betty look a darling ? " inquired the in- 14 THE CEDAR STAB. gratiating Ian. " Cousin Violet looked a darling till she stuck up her hair, and now she's frightful." " Billy's in love with Violet," said Emily, with her dove-like temerity. " I know, because Susan told me when she put me to bed." " Susan's an ass," said Billy. " Your confounded Paulie is creeping down the back of my neck, Ian," he said. He had turned very red and cross, and no wonder, with the kitten in that position ! " Now, be off, all of you, and leave me in peace. I've got my sermon to write." " Don't do it," advised Betty, unmovedly keeping her ground, " don't preach one. Everyone would be awfully glad. We can't go, Billy. You asked us to tea our first holiday. We've come." " Tea isn't for hours." " Tea could be." " We'll wait till Caroline comes in." " No, no. We don't want Caroline. Only you. Me to make the tea and only you ! " " Betty to make the tea," said the others, " and only Billy I " Of course they had their way. What could a young man, kind as a woman and simple as a child, do against the tyranny of the imperious woman-child and her satellites ? " It was you who spoilt me," Betty used to reproach him in after years. " You should have beaten me daily, and have shown me what a selfish, domineer- ing beast I was. I hadn't even a notion of it in those days. You should have told me." But to have been stern and repressive was as im- possible to the man as to be yielding and self-forget- ful to the child : and so Betty's education, so far as it BETTY AND HER FAMILIARS. 15 lay in the curate's hand, was neglected, and Betty went on to her appointed end. The mistress of the house being away, the children did not as usual confine themselves to the study, but ran riot over house and garden. The two younger ones made at length a temporary settlement in the kitchen, presided over by Hannah, a dragoon of a wo- man with a manish figure and a moustache, of whom the rest of the village stood in awe. " Master, he do have the patience of Jobe along o' them children, for sure," Hannah was wont to say; but Hannah, herself, in spite of a temper as formid- able as her moustache, was generally patient with them, too. She placed them now on two little stools before the fire and set them to make buttered toast for tea. Betty in the study had climbed the library steps and pulled from the topmost shelf of the bookcase, where Hannah had vainly endeavored to hide them out of her reach, a heap of unbound numbers of Punch. She sat on the top of the steps with the papers on her lap, letting the leaves of each number flutter to the ground as she proceeded with the next. " I shall draw this kind of pictures myself when I'm older," she announced without lifting her eyes from the page. " Only I shall want some one to think up the jokes to put underneath." " Perhaps, by the time you're old enough to do the illustrations, you'll have thought up one or two your- self," the curate said with a grin. He watched her for a minute, dimnly conscious, all inartistic as he was, of the pretty picture she made perched upon his library steps, her vivid face and 16 THE CEDAR STAB. flaming hair shining out of the dark corner of the room like an old portrait from its sombre background. u Did you choose your ' pinny ' to match your hair, Betty ? " he inquired. The color of the abundant, crisply curling hair was a sore subject with the eldest little Jervois. The kitchen prejudice against a shade of red in the tresses is well known, and Betty's critics had been mostl}' from that region. She shot an angry glance from eyes greenly grey in the sunlight, but black as night when shining from that shadowy corner upon the young man. " My hair is the color of my cousin Violet's," she declared. " Hers is five shades darker," protested the cu- rate. " Yours is a match with the head of Carrotty Parkin's that blows the organ. I asked him yester- day why he didn't get a wife, and he said none would have him because of the color of his hair. He was very sad about it, poor chap. He said he'd asked dozens. I expect you'll meet with the same rebuffs." Betty gave him an evil glance ; " Ladies don't have to ask. Didn't you even know that ? Were you waiting for one to ask you ? Gentlemen go down on their knees to them and clasp their hands and say : 1 Oh, my dear Violet, won't you be my bride? ' ' " And she smiles down at him," pursued the curate hurriedly, " and says, ' how much have you got, sir.' And he replies ' I have ninety pounds a year, and a house rent free, and an inordinate love of 'baccj', and a pig of a red-head Fiend, called Betty, who ' " Betty broke in remorselessl}', upon his unwontedly imaginative discourse ; she propped her elbow on the remaining Punches on her knee and laid her chin in BETTY AND HER FAMILIARS. 17 her hand, and looked at the young man with con- sidering eyes. " You aren't really in love with Violet, are you ? " she asked, confidentially. " I said to Susan you'd have told me if you had been." " Asked your consent first, of course." " Then why do you turn red when her name is mentioned? That's what I want to ask you. That's what I said to Cousin Violet ; I said, ' if he isn't in love with you and I know he isn't why does he look so ridiculous ? ' " The curate laughed uncomfortably. " To which flattering well chosen speech what did Miss Belton reply ? " he inquired. But Betty had not burdened her memory with the reply. " Violet's not clever a bit," she said. " I think she's silly. If I was a man I wouldn't fall in love with a silly. It's worse than anything. It's worse than " " A carrotty head," young Carlyon said. " Enough of the tender passion. Come down. If you are go- ing to have tea, it's time you had it, and went home." 18 THE CEDAR STAB. CHAPTER II. THE CURATE'S FRIEND. WHEN the curate and his sister went across to the Rectory to dine that evening, they found Edward Harringay already established there. Mr. Jervois, who had driven into Edraundsbury, had brought the young man back to dine and sleep. He had been a school and college friend of William Carlyon's, and Mr. Jervois counted it a happy thought to have se- cured him as fourth at the dinner-table. He was a man on whom exalted hopes had been built ; he said of himself with a cynical cheerfulness, probably assumed, that he had consistently disap- pointed them all. He was bound to be a failure through other peoples' extravagant ambition rather than his own fault. It had been just as well to do it thoroughly while he was about it, he declared. Neither at the private school at Edmundsbury, among the quite ordinary small boys of his native place had he distinguished himself, nor at Marlborough, nor at Balliol. " Quite t'other," as he admitted without ap- parent regret, when talking the matter over. He had declined to enter the office of his father, a solicitor in large practice ; he had no leaning to any of the other professions. He had no definite ambitions in fact. He said of himself that he also had neither enthusi- asms nor illusions ; but it is to be hoped that, being a young man and not a monster, this declaration was at least premature. THE CURATE'S FRIEND. 19 He bad a taste for art, but be bad never wisbed to take seriously to tbe career of an artist. His pictures showed so raucb talent that his people took him for a genius, and said of him that be would acquire a great name; but be himself knew that he should accomplish nothing, nor did be greatly desire to do so. He had been living in Paris for a couple of years, studying art, his parents believed; but beyond the two or three half-finished sketches his mother found among his be- longings on bis return he had nothing to show for the outcome. These sketches, duly framed and assigned places of honor by maternal pride, he sternly deposed and banished to the lumber-room. About himself his own power, and the worth of his productions he at least had no illusions. Having them he would probably have been a better, certainly a more success- ful man. Of rather more than medium height, he had the appearance of great ph}'Sical strength, being heavy in the shoulder, long in the arm, deep in tbe chest. And in his face there was a promise of strength which his character seemed to belie that look of strength being merely its only attraction. He was of a very dark complexion, and he wore bis straight black hair longer than was considered desir- able at that period. His eyes were of a pale grey green, having small beauty of their own, and ordi- narily none of expression, they grew a thought too close to his nose, wbicb was big and fleshy ; his lips were straight and thin, and lifted themselves a little at one corner when he smiled, showing his white and even teeth. Such as be was he was lying back comfortably in his chair in the rectory study on that evening when the Carlyons came to dine. 20 THE CEDAR STAB. There was a rustle among the curtains in the win- dow, and the rectory children, denuded of scarlet overalls, now irreproachable in black frocks and white muslin pinafores, crept forth. "Now be off! Be off!" cried their father. He stood up with his back to the fireplace, and waved the children to the door. The look of irritable worry so familiar to his family usurped the politely attentive expression of his melancholy face. " Betty, what are you doing here ? Take your sisters away." The smaller children at once made for the door, Betty confronted her father from her stand by the curate's knee. " Mayn't she stay, Mr. Jervois? " pleaded the weak young man. " She has been very naught}^," said the rector. " She is under punishment. Miss Walker has com- plained to me. I must be allowed to punish my own children, Bill. She is to go to bed." " I won't go to bed," said Betty. Miss Carlyon opened shocked e} r es of surprise with a remonstrative " My dear Betty ! " The curate muttering " Idiot ! " under his breath, endeavored to shake the child into reasonableness. Harringay turned his head and looked at the rebel with lifted lip. " Miss Walker is a beast," said Betty. " I'm sure she's a beast if the little one says so," Harringay said in his gentle voice, turning indiffer- ently back to his host, " Your little girl's far too pretty to be mistaken." " It is all an intolerable worry to me," said the rec- tor " an intolerable worry ! " He half turned, and took from the mantelpiece behind him the sheet of THE CURATE'S FRIEND. 21 schoolroom paper which had been laid in the govern- ess's place. " Whatever Miss Walker may be, she must be treated as a lady while in my house she mustn't be insulted, or ridiculed, or " He had fitted his eyeglasses upon his nose and was peering at the picture. Betty, watching him in- tently, saw a smile twitching the corner of his mouth. She gave a sigh of relief and sat down on the arm of the curate's chair. The drawing was passed on to Miss Carlyon for inspection, who regarded it and then the artist with a solemn face of sorrowful disapproval, and a reiterated " My dear Betty ! " Harringay looked at the sketch then took it in his hand. His face lit up with amuse- ment. " I call it uncommonly clever," he said. He glanced quickly at the child, and then back to the paper in his hand and gave a short pleased laugh. " I declare it is uncommonly clever." " How wrong of you ! How wicked to encourage her," said Miss Carlyon in the low voice of admoni- tion, and the rector, recalled to a sense of duty, once more, and with all the emphasis roused by contradic- tion, ordered his daughter off to bed. Betty, once on the wrong side of the door, whither she was escorted with the curate's arm about her shoulder, shook a vindictive fist in the direction of that j'oung man's sister : " I hate her," said Betty through grinding little teeth, " I hate her worse than the Walker woman." The rector was sighing miserably upon the hearth- rug. " They are all very kind to me," he said, " Miss Walker and the other long line of ladies she has suc- ceeded. They wait on me with galoshes and slippers 22 THE CEDAE STAS. and as you see umbrellas attention I could dis- pense with. But the weightier matters of caring for my children and delivering me from incessant annoy- ances they altogether omit. Betty has to be sent to bed. It is a little hard on me, I think. But she is getting quite beyond me quite beyond me." He sighed again. Then he bent down and peered once more at the crude performance Harringay was still smiling over. " Poor Miss Walker ran down to remind me of my umbrella. There she is, you see there she is 1 " he said pointing with irrepressible pride to the present- ment of the lady. " And here are you," said Harringay, with a chuckle. " Your face is hidden but I should have known the back of you, anywhere. Look at the eagerness to escape expressed by the flying coat tails I It is won- derfully funny ! " " That is evidently an umbrella, but what is the object in the poor lady's other hand ? " wondered the near-sighted rector. " Those those are your galoshes," his curate as- sured him, unblushingly. It was quite evident to the three guests that the article with which Miss Walker was pursuing the retreating figure of the rector was that lady's chaste unsullied heart. When dinner was over, and Miss Carlyon had re- tired to the drawing-room, where the ill-used gover- ness and her woes awaited her, there came a rustling and a scampering, whose import was well-known to the Reverend William Carlyon, outside the dining- room door. He got up presently and went into the hall and found the two younger children awaiting THE CURATE'S FRIEND. 23 him on the stairs two pretty, active little figures, eager for their woman's game of eluding him when he pursued, and rushing after him when he turned away. For a little while longer the rector and Harringay bored each other over the dining-table, neither was a man of many words and one of them suffered from a paucity of ideas, then Harringay roused by a shout of laughter from the children followed by the dis-- creeter cachinations of their good-natured playfellow, also made his way to the hall. Carlyon, thrusting his hand between the banister-rails was endeavoring, and pretending to endeavor, to catch the flying feet as they passed up and down the stairs. Harringay looked on, leaning against the dining-room door, his cigar in his mouth. "Where's the little artist?" he asked at last. " Where's my pretty friend of the copper-colored hair?" " Betty's in bed," Emily explained. " She hated going, only she wanted to punish father. He told her to go and she's gone, and that will make father most awf'ly unhappy." " You have proved mercifully disobedient lest his trouble should be greater than he could bear ? " ques- tioned the indifferent young man. Then a door which had stood ajar on the land- ing above opened and a ruddy head and pale eager little face emerged into the dim light of the stair- way. " I didn't go to bed," Betty informed the rest in a loud whisper. " I only pretended. Pretending does as well sometimes." " Often," acquiesced Harringay. He removed his 24 THE CEDAR STAB. ) shoulder from the dining-room door, sprang up a stair or two and sat down by Betty's side. He had no particular love for children, but he loved a charming picture and the dining-table with its local topics, and the poor rector's ill suppressed yawns, were so deadly dull. So that during the ten minutes or so that William Carlyon and the giggling Emily skirmished in the hall, that Ian sat with black-stockinged fat legs pushed through the rails of the banisters, gurgling over her efforts to entrap the curate's head between her dangling feet, Edward Harringay and Betty Jervois had their first talk. The talk was principally on the side of the child. Mr. Harringay had called her pretty, he had praised her drawing. A person so discriminating must be very clever and dear. He would understand her, he would be amused, he would admire. Hitherto, all her heart had been given to the young curate with the long slim body, the rough tow-colored hair, the red, red cheeks, and the boyish eyes of blue. She had been furiously jealous of his attentions to her sisters, had resented each caress bestowed on Ian as an injury to herself. " He is my friend," she had declared in the tone which, with Betty meant, " hands off! " and the other children had refrained from making like claim upon the young man, knowing full well that they would have to pay for such presumption. But Billy had never said that she was pretty she, in fact, had had no idea that such was the case until she had heard Harringay 1 s epoch-making speech that evening Billy had not troubled to admire her draw- ings. Ian and Emily were welcome to Billy for the THE CURATE'S FRIEND. 25 present. It was to this charming and discerning per- son she made over her allegiance. Her tongue ran on without hesitation ; she was in- spired to give him her whole confidence, and to put him in possession of all the details of her life and character, to relate to him all her fancies and aspira- tions at once. So she leaned contentedly against him as the} 7 sat on the stairs and told him of her hatred of Miss Carlyon who was so good didn't he also dislike good people ? They were always so detestable ! and so ugly oh, so ugly ! of her resolution never to sub- mit to the rule of a governess who made love to u father " and the} r all made love to him of her love for Mr. Chipling, the long-haired terrier and her de. termination that he should sleep on her bed, on which subject she and Susan, the children's maid, had come to fisticuffs that very night. She told him of her cousin Violet, who had been nice once but had become horrid since she was " a grown up," she told him of Carbon's habit of growing red when Violet's name was mentioned. It couldn't be that he was in love with her, she hastened to add, because Violet was such a noodle. Did Mr. Harringay think it possible that anyone could fall in love with a noodle ? To Harringay's inquiry as to whether she knew what a funny, pretty and clever little girl she was, she replied that Susan in the nursery thought the color of her hair hideous and always scolded when the comb broke in the tangles. That Billy Carlyon had told her she was like Carrotty Parkins who blew the organ and said that no one would ever marry her. That she was not, however, at all desirous of the mar- riage state as she meant to live with Billy Carlyon 26 THE CEDAR STAB. himself and draw for Punch when she grew up. Finally that she intended to be rid of Miss Walker at an early date, and would spare no pains, nor know any scruples while working toward that result. And in this last matter she was allowed to see early of the travail of her soul. VIOLET BELTON. 27 CHAPTER III. VIOLET BELTON. AT Easter Miss Walker departed, wrath in her soul, resentment in her demeanor, fiery disdain in the glance thrown toward the little figures watching eagerly at the schoolroom window to see her off. Then that happened which always happened in each interregnum 'twixt governess and governess since Mrs. Jervois's death, Yiolet came. Violet Belton, the rector's niece, was the daughter of a clergyman at Edmundsbury, whose purse was lean and quiver full. She was shy, retiring, pretty, but in such an ineffective, unimpressive waj r , that her charms generally failed to make their due impression. She was conscious to the finger tips of the curate's approving glance, scarcely daring to believe in his ad- miration, yet secretely desirous of it, taking as much pains to elude the man she wished to meet in village, lane, or garden as other girls would have used for a lure. In the hands of the children she came to con- trol she was quite helpless, failing ignominiously in her timid efforts at coercion, her opinions flouted, her authority laughed to scorn a slave where she should have been a mistress. Yet all such rebuffs she treated with a sweet humilit}', with a gentle, unconscious dignity, which constituted in the curate's mind her not least considerable charm. Her uncle, a man extremely anxious to find the surface of things unruffled, and naturally averse from 28 THE CEDAR STAR. inquiring into the depths beneath, was well content to have the girl at the rectory. The children were so happy that they kept out of mischief, he supposed, out of his way, he knew. There was no ugly, ill-bred woman to sit opposite him at meals, to pursue him with attentions at which his children laughed, to force him to maintain a silence he felt to be impolite, or to embark on a conversation which irked him. " I think we have given the governess scheme a fair trial, and have proved conclusively that it won't answer," he said, talking the matter over with Miss Carlyon a day or two after Violet's arrival. " For the future the children must learn what they can from their cousin." But the lady by no means approved : " Children require a firm hand," she said. " They want a person over them whom they can respect fear a little, even, as well as love." " Yes, yes," the rector, dolefully appreciative, ac- quiesced. He had heard it all before. In each suc- ceeding governess he had hoped to find Caroline Carlyon's ideal. " It is easy enough to talk, but where is that kind of person to be found ? " poor Mr. Jervois cried. Caroline may have thought she knew very well, but she said nothing. It was inconceivable that he did not feel here was such a person, ready to his hand, made for the post ; but the idea of filling his dead wife's place had not entered the rector's head, would never enter it, Miss Carlyon said : who was of far too reserved and self-respecting a nature to put it there. " If you keep Violet Belton with you Betty should be sent to school," the sensible woman said. But the rector had an even greater objection to VIOLET B ELTON. 29 boarding schools, than to governesses, it seemed ; and his curate who came into the room at this point of the conversation advanced the argument that it would be very little use sending the child to a boarding school as she certainly would never go. " My dear ! " his sister said, she gazed at him re- provingly with her serious eyes. She was a good- looking woman of little more than thirty, with smooth, dark hair brushed plainly on each side of her narrow forehead, her regular featured, delicate tinted face terminating in an over-long and pointed chin. " My dear ! the child would go if her father wished it." " I allow no insubordination," said the rector, pull- ing himself up, with an angry glance in Carlyon's di- rection. " She'd break her heart," the curate declared. His sister smiled superior. " Nonsense, dear," she said, " Betty is very much like other girls, I expect." But the father resented this classification of his eld- est, naughtiest daughter. " She is a fine character," he said, " Betty's is a very fine character." It was young Carlyon who had pointed out that fact to his rector on an occasion when Betty's delin- quencies had been under consideration, and Mr. Jer- vois had accepted the assertion with unquestioning faith. " Her mother had a beautiful character," he added now, and fell into the abstracted silence which always followed the mention of his dead wife's name. The consequence of Violet Belton's installation at the rectory anyone could have foreseen. There wanted but opportunity to repress the shy liking which al- read}- existed between them into a warmer feeling, and it was inevitable that the girl and the curate should fall in love. She was so pretty and yielding, and 30 THE CEDAR STAB. sweet, and at such an impressionable age. Elegible too, all things considered. At his father's death he would inherit a modest little fortune, and he was not even now dependent on his curate's stipend. He was of good family, too, and connected with influential people. There was every hope of early promotion for Billy Carlybu. Even the rector, a by no means observant person, awoke to the aspect of the case, and took occasion to mention before his curate in a happily casual way that Violet would have nothing but her pretty face to her fortune. As for Betty, Peter, her brother was at home for the Easter holidays. If the sun would only shine and she could keep Peter at her side, Betty did not for the time trouble greatly about anything besides. So that the lovers, both overwhelmed with shyness, horribly conscious of each other's presence, and if a word passed in public between them, feeling the forces of the universe stand a-pause to listen, had a fearfully joyful time. There were laboriously accidental meet- ings in the lanes or the village street, there were slow pacings of the garden paths, searchings in meadows and beneath hedge-rows for violets and primroses, fit emblems of such youthful, natural and modest loves ; there were rather silent but delightful half-hours in the schoolroom, with Emily and Ian, too busy over the dolls to which they always returned when deserted by Betty, to interrupt. It had been ordained that the Reverend William Carlyon should sing at the approaching village con- cert. The young man's ear was slightly defective, and he had no voice to speak of, but he was so accus- tomed to be made use of without reference to his per- VIOLET BELTON. 31 sonal inclination or advantage, that he did not dream of objecting. It would not be the first time he had made an ass of himself in public, he reflected, and was the less averse from the ordeal as Miss Belton had un- dertaken his musical rehearsals. They were holding one on an afternoon in the schoolroom when Edward Harringay made one of his rather frequent appearances at the rectory. " Go on go on," Violet, at the piano, had com- manded, looking up at her tall young pupil over her shoulder, as the door opened to admit the newcomer. And Bill}', contenting himself with a wink at his friend, by way of greeting, proceeded obediently with his song. Harringay shook hands silently with Miss Carlyon, sitting, bonnetted, her gloves in her bare hands in the window, then took up his place on the hearthrug, and regarded the pair at the piano with a kind of gloomy interest. " Yes. You must try it over again," Yiolet said. She, like so many sweet-faced women, had a sweet voice of her own, and was musical. She was at her ease, therefore, and not at all shy over this subject. " Just that bit where it goes down down, do you see like this," humming it softly as she looked up at him. " Do you see ? Once more please." " If you really wish it," Carlyon said. " But it's a little rough on Harringay, who " " Oh, don't mind me. Cut away, Bill," said the young man on the hearthrug. He was struck by the fact that the girl at the piano was unconscious of, or entirely indifferent to his presence. She was so engrossed with Billy Carlyon that she had positivel} r forgotten a second man was there. He was not used 32 THE CEDAR STAB. to be forgotten. He was not annoyed at all, but sur- prised in spite of himself, and interested. While the song proceeded, his gaze at Violet, which had ever before been careless enough, grew fixed. She was a very pretty object in her simple dark blue dress of simplest make, the afternoon sun shin- ing on her soft hair and lending it a warmth to vie with Betty's own. He noticed how daintily the small head was placed on the slim throat, how graceful were the shoulders in spite of the girlish droop which Vio- let's mother so much regretted. From where he stood he could see only one slight and delicate hand, and he noticed the wrist, where it emerged from the closely gathered, loose sleeve, was beautifully moulded. The pure and lily -type of womanhood was not Harringay's ideal, but he also was at an impressionable age and was not all beauty adorable? Nearing that perilous passage of which the curate's rendering had been so glaringly defective, Violet looked up at the young man, breathless, her innocent eyes full of anxious encouragement. That look un- nerved the singer, perhaps, for he floundered for a minute in a confusion of wrong notes, and broke down, laughing and blushing. But another voice took up the passage, a voice fuller and truer and clearer, than poor Bill's defective organ, and sang the phrase to the end. "My life's bright light was quenched in pain, And you were dead to me ! " As the last note died away, Violet turned slowly on her music stool, and looked at the singer with a mild wonder on her face, as if here were something beauti- ful and strange which she had not seen before. VIOLET S ELTON. 33 " Why, how well you sang ? " said Miss Carlyon from the window. " Oh, Ted's a first-rater at it. Didn't you know before?" the curate inquired, looking proudly upon his friend. " I shan't want to make an ass of myself on the nineteenth now, Miss Belton. You must get Harringay to come and do it instead." That mild wonder was still shining in Violet's eyes, Harringay's met it as his own looked back at her. " Oh, will you please, please, please come and sing ? " she asked, childishly eager, " Mr. Carlj'on has not put it very nicely, but do come I I have been in despair for men's voices and I never once even thought of you." " Then you must be punished," Harringa}' declared with gravity, " When ladies omit to think of me they must be punished." " Oh, Mr. Harringay, you won't be so cruel ! " " Under cruel treatment I can be very cruel indeed, Miss Belton." " But are we all to suffer for Miss Belton 's mis- deeds ? " Caroline inquired with a prim contempt for such trifling. " Sing us something now, Mr. Har- ringay." " And fight out the concert business afterwards," the curate suggested. " Certainly I will sing if Miss Carlyon wishes it," Harringay said. He sat down to the piano, accom- panying himself, and sang several so-called comic songs in vogue that season. He sang that plaintive ditty which tells how the Fatherland the happy Fatherland was to dispense with the services of its sons when once they escape over to England, he waxed eloquent over the history of his first cigar his very first cigar 3 34 THE CEDAR STAB. Betty came in with her brother and took up her stand by the side of the piano and stared with a puzzled frown into the singer's face : " Why didn't you do that before ? " she inquired. " Sing us something more worthy of your voice," Miss Carlyon pleaded. " Give them ' To Anthea,' " said Bill. But he would sing only to Bett} r who did not quite know if to approve him in this unsuspected role. And he had soon finished. Quite well he understood the wisdom of letting your audience long for more. " Do }"ou know that you are very perverse ? " Miss Cartyon inquired when presently he held out his hand to her in farewell. He smiled upon her as she spoke, and she, observing him with awakened interest, because of that unsus- pected gift of song, noticed for the first time how peculiar was his smile, and how his pale eyes glittered into beauty beneath the black brows in its light. " I will sing for you when and where you like and for as long as you like," he said. " But I will not sing for Miss Belton because she has been unkind to me and has hurt my pride." " I thought him a plain young man, and he is, when one looks at him, not at all plain," said Caroline, as the door closed upon the visitor. " He must be a de- lightful person. He has music in his soul. I have a pet theory of my own, Bill, that truly musical people must be good." " I have heard it before, and I hope the converse doesn't hold good, for my own sake," said the poor curate, a little ruefully. " Miss Belton is looking very sad and serious. Do you think my morals are as bad as my music, Miss Belton ? " VIOLET BELTON. 35 " I cannot think how I have been unkind," said Violet, wistfully, looking with puzzled appealing eyes upon them all. " What can have made Mr. Harringay so displeased with me ? " " He was rotting you," Peter called out. " Women never know when men are rotting them." The youth was lying prone on the hearthrug ; he did not conde- scend to lift his rough head from the book he was reading as he favored the company with this elucida- tion, but he raised his legs, one after the other, bend- ing them at the knee, and letting his toes dig into the pile of the carpet as he dropped each heavily in turn. Miss Carlyon eyed his posture with displeasure, but the rest of his surroundings accepted the fact that Peter must lie on his stomach when he was at home for the holida} r s, and that it would be unnatural for him having legs not to kick with them. u That Harringay is a conceited beast, else he'd have sung when he was wanted to," he added. " You shut up ! " cried Betty, glaring fiercely. " What do you know about it ? I suppose if he doesn't want to sing sentimental songs to Violet it's no business of yours. If I was a man I wouldn't. Nothing would make me be such a silly." This with a contemptuous glance at Bill, gazing with all his heart in his eyes at the girl upon the music-stool. He was so tender over her that he could not endure, unmoved, to see the least shadow upon her face. " It was only Harringay's nonsense," he said re- assuringly. " If you aren't tired of it, shall we try ' Summer and Winter ' once again ? I don't mind making an ass of myself for the good of my country now and again, Betty." 36 THE CEDAR STAR. CHAPTER IV. BETTY MAKES A CONFIDENCE. BUT after that occasion when his presence had been temporarily overlooked, and when the afternoon sun had shone tenderly upon Violet's head at the piano, and when she had happened to look up with innocent eyes of proprietorship into William Carlyon's face, Harringay was always turning up at Blow Weston. It seemed natural and pleasant to have him there. He made no special demands on the time or patience of any particular person. No one found that he came too often. He rode over to the rectory for lunch, and Mr. Jervois alwa} r s brightened at his presence. If the two men had nothing in common, the elder at least never found it out. To the children he was never what Bill Carlyon was half slave half mas- ter. He never put himself out of his way to talk to them, or play with them, or draw them out. But Betty had declared that he was a perfect person of whom nothing but good was to be said. It was held therefore by inviolable schoolroom law that Ted Har- ringay was as handsome and clever as he was good. Peter, it is true, proved refractor}' now and then, and generally declined to take " the chap Harringay " to his heart. But Peter, as Betty did not hesitate to explain to him, had never nice manners and always managed to like the wrong people. And Peter soon went back to school. BETTY MAKES A CONFIDENCE. 37 And at the Carlyons' abode " Queen Anne's Cot- tage " as it was called, out of compliment to the so- ciety which had helped the curate's residence into ex- istence, Harringay became very much at home. The good-natured young host, finding that he liked to come, had given a general invitation to his old college friend. As for Caroline, not an expansive or effusive character at all, she took it into her head that it was she who had first discovered him to be a person of in- terest. Ideas once admitted to her brain were safe from expulsion, and she looked upon the young man as her especial protege", the fact being that when Harringay, for reasons of the moment, cared to make a good impression, his efforts were invariably crowned with success. One night when the visitor had been about to start from Queen Anne's for his eight miles ride, Miss Carlyon had discovered that the weather was extremely unpropitious. A room had therefore been hurriedly prepared for him, which, afterwards, he as often occupied as not. He had no duties calling him elsewhere, no law but that of his own wish and will to follow, and, during the months of the spring and summer, he was content to idle away his time in the quiet country spot. He made a water-color sketch of Caroline Carlyon with which even the politest of his critics could not pretend gratification ; and, at the child's urgent re- quest, he undertook to paint Betty Jervois in oils. In spite of her enthusiasm for art, however, Betty made a bad sitter, and speedily became disgusted with the slow fashion in which her face grew beneath the artist's hand. Besides which, it did not appear to the child that Harringay who had called her pretty in- tended to do her justice. 38 THE CEDAR STAB. " My hair does not stick out like a burning bush around my head," she declared disgustedly," And I'm ever so much a fatter kind of a child. And why couldn't you have done me in my best frock, instead of that frightful red pinafore." Something of her disgust communicated itself to the sensitive artist nature, perhaps, for Harringay worked only fitfully upon the picture. He, without a word of apology to the sitter, would fling down his brushes and would join Yiolet and the younger children over their croquet on the lawn, at which game Paul, the kitten, and Chip, the fat terrier, were also supposed to play, Ian and Emily conscientiously undertaking to knock the balls assigned to those animals through the hoops as well as their own, a proceeding which prolonged the game beyond convenient limits. Or he would sit in the deck chair under the cedar to watch the curate and Yiolet play their daily " single " at tennis, a match in which victory was never to the swift nor the race to the strong, as Carlyon, who was the best player of the neighborhood and for several miles around on these occasions always contrived to be beaten. At another time, Harringay being seized with an unaccustomed fit of enthusiasm at work upon his picture awing Betty into silence by the pre-oc- cupation of his manner and the light that at such rare moments was in his almost colorless eyes, in would come Yiolet gently stealing. She would seat herself at the piano and play some of those propitiatory soft melodies which seemed to suit her personality so well. Then good-bye to the portrait in oils ! Out would come the sketchbook, half filled already with the face, full, quarter, three-quarter, dpwn bent, meeting the BETTY MAKES A CONFIDENCE. 39 gaze with wistfully appealing eyes, or looking devo- tionally upward, of Miss Belton. Perhaps it was because Violet's subjects were so limited, and because Harringay, for his part, was so sensitive about boring his hearers on themes in which they were not interested, or through laziness, or con- straint, or want of material, that conversation was apt to languish between the lady at the piano and the artist with the sketchbook ; even to die embarrassingly away. A subject always ready to hand is not lightly to be parted with under these conditions, and Harringay chose to cling to that convenient, manufactured grievance of his with mock seriousness still, a serious- ness Yiolet never dreamed of doubting. She received his reproaches with a great solemnity, and her bear- ing toward him always evinced an anxious desire to atone for that slight she was accused of having shown him. " What a baby she is, in spite of her twenty years," he said to Caroline Carlyon. He was rather fond at this period of making people talk about Miss Belton. " She really is not a fair match for the smallest imp in the Jervois' household." " I often wish her more matured," the mature Caro- line would avow. " Wishing, fortunately, won't do it. She will never grow older. I can picture her as sweet, as tractable, as easily duped and taken in at seventy as she is to- day, and very nearly as pretty. I would not have her altered by so much as a hair of her head." " Of course I am interested in her, as Bill appears so seriously interested," Miss Carlyon confessed. " I could have wished that Bill had waited longer, and seen further first, but " 40 THE CEDAR STAB. " Oh, don't wish anything of the sort," Bill's friend implored. " You, who are so devout, ought to thank God for the spectacle of anything so natural and beautiful as their love making. On his part unques- tioning adoration and devotion, on hers an uncon- scious submission to the old irresistible law drawing the woman to the man. Their marriage will be an ideal one. He will give himself, body and soul, un- hesitating, to her and he is a good fellow : while to her he will be more than mere lord and master as one of the sons of God." " Well, really, how ridiculous ! I hope not," Caro- line said. And then, Bill, with his boyish head, not very well carried as yet on the shoulders that were too slight for his height, his long loose-hanging legs, his general look of immaturity and lack of finish, came in and put an end to the conversation. Certainly there was nothing of the demigod in the appearance of Bill Carlyon. " Isn't Violet a stupid ? " Harringay was lying back in his chair on the rec- tory lawn, his hands clasped behind his uncovered head, his face turned up to the fresh blue and white of the May day sky, and Betty had brought her long- haired terrier in her arms and squatted on the grass alongside. For opening up of conversation she had put the above query. " I think her as stupid as an owl," she added. Because he was not desirous of the child's compan- ionship just then he let the remark pass in silence. She was accustomed to a cavalier treatment from him which she would not have endured for an instant from her older friend, the much-sat-upon curate, and BETTY MAKES A CONFIDENCE. 41 in spite of the absence of encouragement she pres- ently pursued her theme. " She takes in all you say to her," she went on, " I know at once when you are only playing, but Violet never knows. She quite believes you are angry with her about you know what." Betty looked up at the unresponsive gentleman above her, at the dark complexioned face whose irreg- ularity of feature did not always please the beholder, and whose expression was not often either frank or encouraging not a face children found attractive, as a rule. But Betty loved to look upon it, many a time she had tried to draw it in her clever, untaught way ; it was a face that lent itself easily to caricature, but to make a pleasing presentment, as Betty wished, was beyond the power of her untutored pencil. Still she alwaj's had the matter in her mind and was never tired of studying the original with a view to the copy that some day must " come better." " His eyes have no color, only light," she said to herself now, gazing with eager inquiry into Harrin- gay's narrowed orbs, and storing up that fact for fu- ture consideration in her mind. The fashion in which the black hair was parted low on one side and brushed in a long sweep above the forehead particularly commended itself to Betty. " Billy can't have his so because it's short and towy, and curls, but I shall certainty have Peter do his hair that way when he grows up," she said to herself, and dragged " Mr. Chipling " closer to Harringay's chair. The man grew tired of his own thoughts after a time and looked down into the attentive face of the child. " Why aren't you at lessons, pray ? " he inquired. 42 THE CEDAR STAE. "It is not a lessony sort of day, is it? The sua came in, and we all felt we really couldn't." a Why do you trouble to say ' we all ? ' Why not ' I ' frankly and at once ? There is a weak subter- fuge about the phrase which is not in character." She looked away from his face to Mr. Chipling's ears, with which she was playing, being not quite sure how to answer him. " About what does Violet think I am angry ? " She looked up quickly : u I call that subterfuge- ous," she said, " because you know quite well. You are always teasing her about it. And once you teased her so much that after you were gone she cried. Fancy wearing your hair done up, and being such a baby as to cry ! Even Emily doesn't cry now. Not often." " Poor wretch I Rather not I Emily's sister is too much of a Spartan to approve of tears." " Only Ian cries a little, sometimes, but she always hides up to do it. And Yiolet is twenty 1 " " And Yiolet cried 1 " the young man said. His face had lightened in that peculiarly vivid manner, which, as Miss Carlyon had discovered, made it so at- tractive ; the narrow, deep-set grey eyes shone and sparkled like jewels hid in caves, and Betty noticed how soft and dreamy was his voice. She considered him wistfully for a few minutes. She had thought he would have despised weeping women as she did. It was abundantly evident he did no such thing. The discovery gave her courage to make a confidence she would not otherwise have dreamed possible. " I cried last night," she told him on the impulse of the moment in a shamed voice that shook a little. She waited, expecting to see him overcome by the BETTY MAKES A CONFIDENCE. 43 stupendous announcement, but Harringay carefully concealed his emotion. " Emily and Ian forget," she went on, " but I am older I never forget. Last night the church bells rang ; and someone walked upon the gravel beneath my window. I could hear their voices soft, you know and the crunch, crunch of their feet. I don't know why that has such a melancholy sound." " Billy Carlyon and your cousin Violet spooning out in the moonlight, I suppose," Harringay re- marked, gruff, perhaps, through excess of sympathy. But Betty would not be diverted from her own af- fairs. " I cry at that kind of sorrowful thing since my mamma died," she explained, almost in a whisper. From the day of her death, Betty Jervois had scarcely been heard to mention her mother's name. She had shrunk from the word on other lips as from a touch on an open wound. This acutest stage of grief past, and the longing rising within her to speak of what was still the most intimate thought of her heart, lo, no one cared to listen, or seemed to care no one understood ! Her father was kind and indulgent more from the indolence of his nature than from its affectionateness, as Betty well understood without knowing that she understood it. Not the kind of father that could ever be something of a mother too. The other children seemed to have wept away their grief before the mould had fallen on the mother's coffin. Ian had danced with delight because she had been promoted to stockings on the funeral day. Betty had never for- given it. The servants with whom they had been much thrown had held up the dead mother as a kind of bogey to the refractory eldest child. 44 THE CEDAR STAB. " What would your poor ma say if she knowed what a bad girl you've growed into, Miss Betty ? " or " Don't you make no mistake, your ma's lookin' down on you, Miss Betty ! Don't you ever go to think she's covered in her grave, and don't know what a messy girl you are wi' your pinnyfores, and how you're that cheeky, folks are driven to slap your face ! " How could Betty confide the history of that fre- quent tear-wetted pillow to such as these ? She had thought of telling Billy how sad her heart was at times, and how, even when she was at her very naughtiest, she longed for her mother. But Billy would tell Violet, and Betty had posed as a giant of self-possession to Violet. But Mr. Harringay ! He had praised her draw- ings, he thought her clever and pretty. Perhaps he would understand this strange sadness of hers. She thought that to him, alone, in the world, she could bear to speak of her mother, to tell him how pretty she was, and how her eldest daughter had never been in disgrace in her time, but had been always petted and loved and admired. He would never tell, and since he was such a generally comprehending person he would understand. She looked at him with eyes that besought him for sympathy and comfort if he had only noticed the expression. " Since my mamma died " began Betty again, falt- eringly. A figure in a pink cotton dress, belted at the slim waist, with white collar and cufi's turning back from slender wrists and throat, appeared at the drawing- room window, threw up the sash, leaned out into the sunlight. Tones of agonized remonstrance floated across to the two on the lawn. BETTY MAKES A CONFIDENCE. 45 Harringay, in the deck chair beneath the cedar, stared into alert attention. lan's black kitten, stretched to the utmost inch on the warm gravel before the window, watched with an eye that boded no good to its object, a half-fledged sparrow fallen from its nest. Yiolet was so intent on the fate of the bird, so en- gaged in placing before Paul arguments against the killing and eating of the hapless fledgling that she did not see Harringay advancing over the grass. She gave a start and a cry when he stood before her, and Paul, stretching a swift stealthy paw, made short work of the sparrow. " I'm so sorry if I startled you," Harringay said, in tones so gentle that Violet's heart stood still, and she thought no one had ever heard the like. Betty looked after the pair within the drawing- room, receding from the window, " He never even heard 1 " she said. She must be loyal above all things. It could not be that he had heard and had not cared ! But her lip quivered, and she knew that she would never at- tempt to make to anyone that confidence again. She ran across to the gravel where the kitten lay in the sunshine. He was growling and purring over the victim now, enjoying the first fruits of the spring after his kind. The bird was not a pretty object when his remains were released. Emily's eyes filled with tears. She was permitted to weep over the death of a sparrow ; it was only the tragedies affecting human-kind which in the little Jervois's code were held unworthy of tears. " Let's have a funeral," said Ian. " And mightn't darling Paulie have just one other tiny bit of him, first ? " 46 THE CEDAR STAR. CHAPTER Y. HARRINGAY WITHDRAWS. " Do I seem to you such a terrible ogre ? " Harrin- gay asked. Eyes, dark blue, wondering, admiring, afraid, opened upon his. u An ogre? Oh, no, Mr. Harringay." She was breathless, her heart was beating if only she could get away ! He laid a hand upon her arm : " Don't go. You always go. I want to ask you a question. You will answer it ? " " Of course. Yes." "Truthfully?" " Of course." " You look at me always with the gaze of a frightened animal whose master holds the whip. Why?" She shook her head, trying to smile carelessly, look- ing upon the ground. " You don't know why ? " Another shake of the head. " You don't think I could be unkind to you, do you ? " " No. Oh, no ! " " Then why are you afraid ? " Silence. " If we are alone for a second you rush away. If I look at you, you turn your head. Why ? " No answer. A hanging head and a suddenly awak- BARRING AY WITHDRAWS. 47 ened interest in the fastening of one of the stiff white cuffs. " You can't guess." " No." " May I guess?" Eyes reproachful, imploring, swiftly lifted and dropped again. " You think the curate mightn't approve." " Oh, Mr. Harringay, please ! " " It is to be his privilege to ask for and get an ac- count of all your glances, I suppose ? To see his own image in your eyes till the crack of doom ? To look down deep into that innocent heart of } r ours and to find his own name writ large upon it and nothing but that? Isn't that so?" " I don't know, indeed. How should I know ? " " Betty says you cried once after I had gone away at something I had said. Is that so ? " She fidgetted with shaking fingers at the ivory links in her wristband, tears of embarrassment were in her eyes. He repeated his question and waited. " I thought you were vexed with me," at length she said. u You seemed to wish to punish me never singing. Betty said you hated me. It was dread- fully babyish to cry." " If I had been there " he began. His voice was the swiftest whisper caressing her cheek, but Violet's slight strength of resistance melted beneath it and the tightened pressure upon her arm. She felt herself losing not only strength but consciousness, sinking toward him. Then his hand suddenly dropped from her arm, he drew back a couple of paces and the light went out from his face. 48 TEE CEDAR STAB. A voice had sounded in the hall. Violet's eyes, awake now and full of startled dismay, met Harrin- gay's. " The curate," Harringay said, and turned to the mirror and rubbed a finger curiously across a crimson streak that had appeared upon his forehead, and was sullenly dying away. In a few moments he was alone, watching the pair move off toward the tennis-lawn. Violet was not in- clined to the game and went with evident reluctance. She had not much savoir faire, poor girl. To deceive had not been among the simple lessons life had taught her. A lucky thing that the curate was quite of the sucking pig order of simplicity, Harringay thought with uneasiness, looking after them. " With that exasperatingly shame-faced manner of hers and that telltale face another man would have known I had been making love to the girl," he said to himself. He was grateful now to chance for having sent Carlyon upon the scene. " God knows I don't want," he said, " I should be sick of her in a month fit to cut my throat. Poor Bill darling old greenhorn ! will never discover that she's not a brilliant companion. They'll go on boring each other to extinction all the daj's of their lives and never be a bit the wiser. I don't want to interfere. I think I'm well out of it. I think I've had enough of Blow Weston. I'll go awaj'." He went and came at his own will. When he said he was leaving on the morrow, none of them guessed that it was a long farewell he meditated. But he had it in his mind all that evening and was moody and silent, in consequence. HARRINGAY WITHDRAWS. 49 When it was nearly over he broke the silence he had held for some time. He had been looking openly and steadily at Violet, who with her head bent low over some work in her hands, had blushed, and paled, and quivered, a betrayal of her consciousness of his gaze. " Shall I sing you something now ? " he asked her abruptly. She got up and went to the piano and nervously held him up a song or two with Bill's name written across the corner of each. "Nothing of the curate's thanks," he said for her ear alone. He made his own selection. u This old thing will do I'll sing this," he said. " I'm going to sing to you to you alone," he announced as he bent forward to place the music. " The others don't exist for either of us, please, for a few moments." He had chosen a song much in vogue a few years before in musical drawing-rooms Yiolet had heard it sung till her ear had wearied of it an ardent declara- tion of love which was to cling with might and main, and to last for ever and ever. And it was sung for Violet that little girl of hitherto absolutely no im- portance, sitting at the piano in her one evening frock, of pale gray merino, plaj r ing the accompaniment to the passionate voice, with fingers that trembled pain- fully, and with a heart moved to the core ! While she was still bewildered, thrilled, stricken, lost in a maze of overwhelming emotion, Harringay was holding out his hand to her in silent farewell. When Miss Carlyon had gone to bed that night, Harringay recovered from his fit of moody sentimen- tality, and his friend " the greenhorn " curate, sat and 4 50 IRE CEDAR STAB. smoked the pipe of friendship of short confidences and long silences, over the study fire. " You made a mistake in taking holy orders, as 1 always told you," Harringay said, taking up again the thread of a conversation dropped some time before. " You aren't in any way fitted for it that I see. And mind you, I don't mean that for an ill compliment." " Who is fitted for it ? " Bill asked, but indifferently, as if his mind were not fully occupied by the theme. " Though, very likely, in my case there are special dis- abilities," he added humbly. " My opinion was not asked : no choice was given me. One of my uncles happens to be a general, the other is a bishop. You can see, plain enough, that my mother had got to make one of her two sons a soldier, and to stick the other into the Church. Tom wouldn't go into the Church that's all. I shall always be a stick of a preacher (I've a constitutional objection to jawing about anything), and I've no special aptitude or liking for any of the duties ; but there 'tis ; and I've got to make the best of it. I'd rather be in Tom's shoes, seeing about me, and having a good time, generally ; but it's more than certain he never would have stood in mine, so there's no good in thinking about it." " But there is good. Why should you be buried alive because you are too feeble minded to shout ? If you must stick to the Church, go into the manu- facturing districts take a curacy in a London slum." " Yes," Bill said slowly, " I know. But we can't all be pushing to the front. It's useful in its way, to keep the place we're given, I expect. I should feel a lot prouder of myself if I were fighting vice and fever and ignorance in the way you mention ; but the fact of my having gratified a private ambition wouldn't EARRING AY WITHDRAWS. 51 make for the good of the world. Because, somebody must be curate of Blow Weston and Crabberton, you see, while the livings go together." Harringay was naturally not convinced, but the other tacitly declined to carry on the discussion. He thought over several reasons which satisfied him that his life need not necessarily be empty and cast away even in Blow Weston, but these were such as he did not care to drag out for disputation. If he felt a thing strongly, u ' Come then, let us go and be dumb,' " Bill Carlyon said to his hurt. " We've got to stick where we're put and to do the best we can, I suppose," he said, summarizing the articles of his be- lief with the least possible waste of breath ; and he knocked out his pipe to emphasize the fact that that was for him the end of the matter. u But pardon me that is exactly where you are wrong, Bill," the other persisted. " To stick where we are is generally the very worst and feeblest thing we can do. 4 To make the best of it,' is a phrase, simply what does it mean ? put on a grinning face when you're cursing in your heart. Who's the bet- ter for that pantomime ? " Then he too leaned forward and knocked out the ashes of his pipe on the bars of the grate. " Chuck the whole thing, Bill, and come with me to Paris ; and let's wake the echoes for a bit, and live to be thankful before we die," he sug- gested. To this extravagant proposition the curate did not even reply. But he was at length roused to a fuller interest : " Are you going back to Paris, then ? " he asked and looked the other man straight in the eyes. " Why ? " " I'm sharing Lawson's studio, as I told you. I 52 THE CEDAR STAB. only came over to give the mother a look, and have knocked about longer than I intended. I shall be off to-morrow or the next day." " I have often wondered what has kept you here," Bill admitted, with his direct gaze. u I have some- times thought there might be a special attraction. Do you mind telling me if that is so ? " Harringay got up from his chair and stamped his feet upon the rug to shake his trousers into position. " The attraction of much kindness and hospitality," he said, as he looked down upon his nether garments. " The attraction of pleasant companionship and pretty, kind faces." " Nothing more special than that ? " the downright curate persisted. " Tell me if it is so, Harringay. I made up my mind to ask you to-night. It isn't idle curiosity. It's " His florid color faded a little and his eyes left the other man's face. " You know what I mean," he went on in a minute. u I mean Yiolet Belton. If you have any feeling about her any intention, I should like to know at once. It would be kindness in you to tell me." " None, I have none," Harringay said, and having uttered the words ceased to concern himself about the set of his trousers, and stood upright, steady as a rock, his lips locked as though the} 7 never would open again, his jaw hard and strong looking. The curate got up and placed himself on the hearth- rug beside his friend. He was the taller by several inches, and being high shouldered, short-waisted, long in the leg, he appeared to have greatty the advantage in height over Harringay's, well-built, firmly knit frame for strength. But the latter, only a couple of years older than the curate, looked a man and a strong HAERINGAY WITHDRAWS. 53 one, while Carlyon had still something of the appear- ance of a lanky, overgrown boy. " You aren't mad with me for asking ? " Bill said presently and he put a propitiatory hand upon the other's steady shoulder. u It seems to me such a lot of mischief is done because people are afraid to speak out. There is nothing between her and me except what is in my own mind at present. If I knew for certain what I have sometimes fancied that you have for her something of the same feeling that I have, I should know it was all up with me and the thing would be over and no harm done to her." Harringay was moved to generosity by the humility of the speech and proceeded to set the poor fellow's fears thoroughly at rest. " I admire your Yiolet sincerely," he said. " That she was yours predestined from the beginning I never doubted, I wish you every joy, Bill but my dear fellow, you mustn't be angry that I don't envy you. I was not made for constancy. I wouldn't have your prospect of an unbroken domesticity, even with your Yiolet by my side, for half the world holds." He shuddered and shook off Bill's hand from his shoulder. " Bah ! '' he cried, " the contemplation fills me with a miserable dejection. I should blow my brains out in a week. I am half tempted to do it vi- cariously to-night for you, Bill." Bill straightened himself, expanded his chest and drew a long breath. " Ah ! It's lucky we look at things with such dif- ferent eyes, isn't it ? " he said, " but it's so hard to realize that's how I came to make the mistake." " You made it because you're a jealous old fool, Bill." 54 THE CEDAR STAB. Bill laughed unsteadily. " I don't believe I am," he said, " I suppose I can't help thinking that every- one who comes near her must be in love with her." " Shut up and come to bed I " said Harringay. And to bed they went. UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES. 55 CHAPTER VI. UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES. WHEN Carlyon opened tbe door of the schoolroom that afternoon he was greeted with the shout of relief with which the young Jervoises hailed the prospect of any respite from their lessons. But there were two pairs of eyes that looked past him and the door he held in his hand, to the two pairs of lips the same question leapt, and of these one pair was dumb. " Where's Mr. Harringay ? " Betty cried, demand- ing him fiercely of the curate, who had had the temer- ity to appear without the companion from whom he borrowed all the interest he could now command. " Harringay's gone." Alas for Billy Carlyon ! The light that died out of a couple of faces ! " Then why did you let him go ? " Betty cried, and scowled at Carlyon with eyes dagger-pointed, and flung the book she held, face downward, on the table. " When's he coming back ?" " Never, very likely. Harringay's an erratic chap. He's off to-day to Paris. Aren't lessons over, Miss Belton ? " " If you like, I suppose," Miss Belton said " if the children like." The two younger children, waiting for nothing more definite, flung out of the room in search of hats and Paul the kitten ; only Betty kept her chair, lying back in it, her chin on her breast, the picture of scowling dejection. 56 THE CEDAR STAB. " I don't care for a holiday," she said, addressing no one in particular, with severity, " where's the good of a holiday now ? " " Why are you looking like such a little fiend ? " Bill asked her with irritation. " What's up with you now ? " " I wished for Mr. Harringay. There's no good in holidays without him." Violet looked at the child fearlessly giving utter- ance to the thought of her own heart. What was the good of anything without him for ever ever more ? In a minute what a darkness had fallen upon the sweet May day ! How senseless all life was ! How dreary 1 Lessons or no lessons what did it matter now? " Don't be an ass, Betty," Bill said. He did not understand the full seriousness of the situation, but he, too, was laboring under a sudden sense of disap- pointment and discomfort. The child sank lower and lower in her chair, sliding dejectedly over the wooden seat. He tilted it suddenly as he spoke, and Betty disappeared under the table. She was by no means above rough play of that or any other description, but she flew up now and at- tacked the curate with the fierceness of a little wild cat, hitting out at him blindly with feminine disregard of consequence. " Young woman ! It's time you were brought to your senses," the curate said. Then he caught her wrists, and looking in her face saw that her eyes were full of tears. In her rage and shame that he should discover in her that weakness, she ducked her head swiftly, and bit the hand that held her. UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES. 57 " Oh, Betty ! " Violet cried, awaking from her apathy. " For shame 1 You are hurting him. You have made Mr. Carlyon's hand bleed." He held the child for a minute before him and looked into her face, shamed and passionate, and forced her to look into his ; then stooped and kissed her, and let her go. Choking with the sobs to which she would not give way, Betty escaped. In the hall was Ian, a strange little fat figure in the scarlet pinafore, with a soft- peaked cloth cap, much too large for her, pulled well down over eyes and ears. " Oh, Betty, I'm so glad he's gone ! " she cried. " Emily's taken the riding whip he left behind, and I've got his cap look ! for my very own ; and " Betty fetched the little sister a box on the ears, and tore the cap, some of lan's red-brown curls adhering, from the astonished head : " You dare to touch his things ! " she cried, but further speech was beyond her. She stamped her foot furiously at the frightened child and, sobbing loudly now, rushed away from mortal ken. An half hour later the curate, walking slowly, and with hanging head on his homeward way, saw, be- neath the thorn hedge which bordered his small do- main, a scarlet bundle lying. The bundle, erecting it- self at his approach, proved to be no other than Betty Jervois with broken hat, disheveled hair to which twigs and little bits of moss were clinging, and white face where stains of the bank upon which she had been lying mingled with the stain of tears. She uttered no word, but sprang upon him, dragged from the trousers-pocket in which it was hidden the 58 THE CEDAR STAR. hand she had maltreated and, pressing her lips upon it, kissed it again and again. Then, with a swift and passionate movement eluding the grasp he would have laid on her, she turned and fled across the meadow home. Alas poor Betty ! In all her battles always the worst wounded, even in those early days I The curate did not even turn his head to look after her. He was staggering under a worse blow than any Betty had dealt him. The wound in his heart was so sore that he knew of no other, and did not re- member until long after why Betty had kissed his hand. He had put the momentous question to Yiolet Bel- ton and she had said him nay. He kept away from the rectory for two days, and then the rector, who was accustomed to the young man's presence about the place, came across for him and Carlyon told him of what had befallen him. Mr. Jervois was overwhelmed. Hardly surprised, however, as he honestly believed in a conspiring of circumstance to bring about his own personal dis- comfort. And here would be an unspeakable nuisance to have his curate banished from his house here would be a scandal in the parish and an annoyance all round. Here was a matter too, calling for the stirring up of himself, a man only asking peace and leisure, to the taking of disagreeable action. Besides it had been a suitable match for his sister's child to make, and one that would cement interests all round. " Refused you ? " he said, staring at the young man with the plaintively worried look his face as- sumed when things went wrong. " How extremely UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES. 59 inconsiderate of Yiolet ! But she couldn't mean it she didn't understand. I am quite sure she didn't understand what you meant, Bill." " She quite understood," Bill said dismally. " I think I put it to her more than once." He was silent, feeling over again the shock of the stunning blow when it had first fallen. Speech was very difficult, he didn't wish to have to talk. "But I shall have to speak to her. I shall have to ask what she means. She must be made to see what she is doing. It must be put before her." Carlyon stretched out a deprecating hand : " Please 1 " he said, " I would rather she was worried no more. It is my misfortune, but of course, she must please herself." " Of course, of course. Yet if she altered her mind, as she might do women do it, Bill that would be acceptable to you, eh ? You haven't altered yours? " Bill smiled sickly, " I am not likely to alter," he said. The same afternoon a messenger was sent across to Queen Anne's Cottage : " Would Mr. Carlyon go at once ? " The children greeted him, hanging about in the hall. " You're to go into the library," Emily told him with giggling glee, u father's scolding Violet, and Violet's crying." Ian jumped with much enjoyment of the cheerful situation, then, standing the long suffering black kitten on his hind legs, addressed to that unconscious animal remarks which caused the curate to guess that 60 THE CEDAR STAR. the library-door must have stood ajar during the in- terview between the uncle and niece. " You have other people to think of, my dear Paul," Ian said grasping two little paws in one hand and lifting an admonishing finger above the kitten's black nose. " A girl hasn't got nothing but her own feel- ings to think of! And what have you got against the young man, Paul ? Stand up straight on your darling little hind legs and tell me." Here Betty, with her famous imitation of her father's manner, took up the parable : " Surely you owe me some consideration, my dear girl. Haven't I had trouble enough ? Don't you think you owe it to me to try to make matters a little pleasant ? Ian ! " with a swift reassumption of her own personality. " What are you pinching Paulie's tail for ? " " Yiolet cried just there, I wanted to make Paul mew a tiny bit," explained Ian. Signs of the tears were still present on Violet's cheek of delicate fairness, as Carlyon took her hand. He pressed it firmly and his heart swelled with anger and pity. She had been bullied on his account ! He would not bear it for an instant. He would give up all hope of happiness eternally rather than she should suffer through him. Mr. Jervois was startled at the savage look in the ordinarily kind blue eyes that the young man turned on him. " My dear Bill you must excuse my sending for you," the rector said, " It is as I expected. You were a little hasty in the deduction you drew. Yiolet had no intention of speaking finally. She would like to reconsider her answer if you will allow her." UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES. 61 " I didn't give you authority to bother her into saying that," Bill said, with anger, " I made no mis- take, nor did she. She meant to refuse me, and she did it ; and I suppose I'm man enough to abide by what she wishes. I hope," he said very tenderly, and turning to the girl, " 1 hope you do not believe that I wished to complain ? " He had lost all his boyishness in that moment. Yiolet, contemplating him through her wet lashes, saw in him a strong power, willing and able to pro- tect the weak and oppressed. How could she have had the boldness to refuse him ? Her uncle had asked her that question she asked it of herself now. She had given a promise to her uncle, and presently she spoke in fulfilment of it ; "I am quite sure you would not complain," she said falteringly. " But I should like, if you will allow me, to have time to think over the what you asked me before I finally reply." Bill's red face grew redder with surprise and emo- tion ; disregarding the rector's presence, he took her hands in his. " Are you sure of that ? Quite sure ? " he asked, earnest and eager. " It is your own wish not put into your head 3^011 haven't been forced into saying this to me ? " " Really, Bill ! " the rector ejaculated, looking re- proachfully upon his curate with his prominent slate- colored eyes. u Do you suppose that the girl has been coerced by me ? That I have beaten her, or threatened her? But this is the thanks one gets for doing one's best and meaning well all round. It is a little hard, I think a little hard! " He shuffled together some loose papers lying on the 62 THE CEDAR STAR. writing-table and took them in his hand, preparatory to beating the retreat of dignified injury. He always had loose sheets of paper near at hand ; he never at- tended to them, Bill did that, but he had a habit of collecting them loosely, and moving them from one place to another. It made him think that he was busy. " Please don't go, Uncle Eustace," Violet said, less timidly than usual. The firm grasp of Bill's hand had strength in it. " If you don't mind I should like to go to my mother for a time. If you can spare me and if Mr. Carlyon will wait. I will come back again perhaps in a few weeks but I should like to be with my mother first. I can make up my mind better with her." The rector subsided into a chair. He gave a sigh and looked tragically round the room as though to call on all his household gods to witness that here was the very climax of all the disagreeables of his life. " Of course, you know it is just now impossible quite impossible," he began in his tone of half-re- strained irritability ; but Carlyon quickly came to Violet's assistance. " Of course she must go," he said, " of course. The children ? Oh, I will take care of the children Caro- line will take care of them. You shall go at once. And remember," he went on, still maintaining that firm clasp of her hand which had helped her through the trying scene, u remember you are to think of 3^our- self before me before anybody. You are to think of your own happiness and to be afraid of nothing." " I will remember," she promised him. She smiled tremulously upon him, feeling suddenly quite brave and happy. She had never seen him before like this, UNCLE EUSTACE INTERVENES. 63 all his fear of her, his shyness, his boyishness gone. Surely, after a little time, when she and her mother had talked things over, it would be all right, it would not seem so impossible. " You would like to go to-morrow ? " he asked her, and she assented, while the rector groaned aloud, grinding himself lower and lower in his chair, much after Betty's fashion when things went amiss. " Then, good-bye," the curate said, gripping the hands in his and looking steadily into Violet's face. " If you can write me a line do. If not, do not trouble. I can wait." 64 THE CEDAR STAB. CHAPTER VII. GIRLS WANT A MOTHER. IT was all very well for William Carlyon to have taken matters so largely into his hands and to have sent away the rector's niece from her post as care- taker of the rector's children, but Mr. Jervois knew that the responsibilities and the annoyances arising therefrom, would fall very heavily upon himself. The day that Yiolet left Blow Weston happened to be wet, so wet that it was decided in the kitchen the young ladies could not possibly go out of doors to play. The young ladies themselves were of a different opinion. " Laissez moi jouer dans cette belle feoue," Ian would have cried with the little Napoleon if the French language had not been a sealed book to her. Even Emily, a bronchitic little subject, who caught cold on the smallest provocation, thought to paddle in puddles a charming pastime, and exulted in hearing the water squashing out of her boots as she walked. Once, in an unusually complacent mood, but in an evil moment as the sequel shows, Harringay had roughly modelled for the eldest girl a head of Chip, the terrier, in clay, since which occasion Betty had been seized with an enthusiasm for the plastic art. In spite of frantic remonstrance from Susan, the maid, she now started off, followed by her two faithful ad- herents, to secure a supply of the raw material, which she judged the rain would have reduced to fit condi- tion for handling. GIRLS WANT A MOTHER. 65 On the return of the mud-laden trio, the uuhappy father, compelled to the exertion by an outraged Susan, was reluctantly induced to inspect their con- dition. He was shocked at the spectacle revealed to him ; and having pitied himself, and called reproaches upon his daughter, he gave the order that they should at once be put to bed. It was his punishment for all offences, little and big, and in the present instance was a salutary measure to adopt ; if only the delinquents, their sodden clothes, having been removed by a relentless maid, and them- selves tucked warm and safe between the sheets, had stayed there. This they did only till the coast was clear. Then Betty arose, and scudding, barefooted, to the school- room, where it was deposited, re-possessed herself of a supply of clay. The children spent an hour happily in the moulding of various objects, Betty setting about the task with a natural cleverness after which the unsuccessful Emily labored in vain. Ian, less ambi- tious, contented herself with the fashioning of shape- less articles, bearing no resemblance to anj'thing in- animate or inanimate nature, but affording their cre- ator satisfaction as a means for getting as much dirt on to her small person as the limited area would allow. They proposed to themselves to harden their artistic products by exposing them to a toasting on the bars of the grate. But the fire refused to do more than smoulder, and the process was too slow for lan's quick spirit. Before the others knew what she was about, she had sprung on a chair, reached down the paraffin lamp which stood on a bracket out of the children's reach, and flung its contents in the fire. She had seen 5 68 THE CEDAR STAB. Susan do likewise one morning when the kindling was damp and would not burn. Then a scream ran through the house, startling poor Mr. Jervois in the library, turning his blood to ice in his veins. He knew instantly that he would not recover from the shock for days, but his parent's instinct helped him into action. He had reached the schoolroom before the servants, falling back upon each other with gaspings for breath, and hands upon their hearts, had started on the way. The screams continued for minutes to ring through the house ; but after all, not much harm was done. The iron guard had saved the children from destruc- tion. Only the skirt of lan's little shirt had ignited, and when her father reached the room that garment was still flaming upon the boards, while Ian, standing mother-naked, watched the consumption of her only garment with heart-shuddering yells. Each little leg was scorched, and Betty's hands which had torn off the flaming garment were badly burnt. The children were put to bed in serious earnest then, Emily, quite unhurt, cowering between the sheets for sympathy. The doctor was sent for. The rector standing sentinel in his little girl's room be- cause there was no one about him in whom any con- fidence could be placed, and because he did not con- sider it safe to leave his children for an instant, felt a sort of complacency in the contemplation of his, accu- mulated troubles. Surely there was not in the county another man so sorely tired ! The curate and Caroline his sister, hurrying across found the poor man standing by lan's pillow, looking down helpless with gaping mouth and protruding eyes upon the fevered, frightened, excited face. QISLS WANT A MOTHER. 67 " My legs are burnt off," she screamed to Caroline, with looks of terror and anguish. " They're burnt off. Make haste, make haste, make haste to help me, they're burnt off, I say I " How happy the rector was to relinquish his post and to escape downstairs. " I shan't ever be able to make those drawings for Punch now," Betty said, later, when the doctor had been, and had dressed her painfully wounded hands, and reassured Ian as to her probable retention of her fat legs. Later still when the curate came upstairs to say good-night her mind seemed to be running on the same theme : I should think if Mr. Harringay knew, he d sorry," she said. u Because he thought my drawings clever and I never shall be able to do them for Punch now. The rector was profuse in his thanks to Miss Carl- yon for her timely aid. " You see how helpless I am," he said. " At the mercy of servants worthless servants and my motherless little girls exposed to hourly dangers. Other men have the misfortune to lose their wives, I know, and life seems to go on with them much as usual. Surely no other has ever had such worries and anxieties as mine to bear ! You won't leave me, Miss Carlyon ? Not for to-night, at least ? ' " Certainly not, if you wish it. Bill and I will both stay," Caroline assented cheerfully. The unruffled propriety of her bearing was so agreeable after an ex- perience of the hysterical helplessness of the servants. But the rector did not understand why the brother 68 THE CEDAR STAB. also should be compelled to take up residence, and he said as much present!} 7 to the young man. " Oh, I'll stop," Bill said, indifferently. " It's all right. I've got my orders to stay." Mr. Jervois did not wish to seem inhospitable, but he wondered why. The guest-chamber had been prepared for Miss Carlyon, but the servants did not receive at all cheer- fully the order to get ready another spare room which had not been slept in for months. And the rector who heartily disliked his servants, was entirely afraid of them. " There seems to be an idea that the north room is damp," he said to Miss Carlyon when next she ap- peared. " I really think Bill would find it pleasanter to sleep at home to-night and I'm sure we should be all right without him." Whereupon Miss Carlyon had at once made it clear beyond the possibility of mistake that Bill was not to desert her. " Extraordinary freak ! I wonder why," said Mr. Jervois to himself again. And then, he never remembered how, or by what process Caroline's reason for insisting on the curate's presence and chaperonage was at once made clear to him. The enlightenment brought the poor man noth- ing but a load of painful embarrassment. He sank lower and lower in his chair, his jaw dropped on his chest, his always prominent eyes almost fell from his head in dismay. With a nervous hand he raked at the faint side-whiskers which adorned his cheeks, and made repeated, always futfle efforts to get their ends into his mouth. If that was the idea she had in her head it was ex- tremely uncomfortable, and supremely ridiculous. At GIRLS WANT A MOTHER. 69 their ages, and with his history 1 A boy like Bill, too ! Bill was probably enjoying the joke ; and the servants were sure to see through the situation, and to be coarsely facetious among themselves. The Carlyons had been a comfort to him ; he had told Caroline of his troubles and had been at ease with her. Never, never should he know an easy moment in her society again Never? He slipped farther in his chair, his long legs sprawled out across the hearthrug. He would have liked to have hidden under it if so he might have es- caped from his embarrassing thoughts. This was the last and most serious disagreeable to which the death of his wife had exposed him that there was in people's minds an expectation that he would marry again. He recalled the governesses, and how they had rendered him ridiculous by their unwel- come attentions. Caroline had censured the gov- ernesses, he remembered. They had wanted to marry him : was it possible that Caroline was under the im- pression he desired to marry her. The idea so terrified him, filled his being with such revolt that he wondered how he should bring himself to support the presence of the woman in his house. During the first days of the Carlyons' stay, the rector was painfully conscious of the subject he now imagined to be in all minds : his nervousness and dis- comfort in Caroline's presence were patent to all, and he was driven to quite desperate measures, to escape from her society. In those days he rose fifty per cent, in the good graces of his parishioners in whose houses he took refuge, visiting from door to door, sitting down to 70 THE CEDAR STAB. talk, embarrassed and ill at ease, it is true, with peo- ple he had not called on since his wife's death. "The rector is beginning to wake up again," the people said. "And time he did! A wife's a wife, but she ain't evei*ything even when she's dead ! " One old, bed-ridden woman to whom the poor wife had been very kind, had forgotten apparently that such a person had existed. She inquired aggrievedly for the curate when the rector appeared. " Wheer's the young chap ? " she asked. " Tell th' young chap I want some more of his sister's soup. She's a beeti- ful soup-maker the woman is, and that I don't mind sayin' for her." Mrs. Butcher, a wife of one of the farmers, a kind- hearted woman of whom Betty approved, asked him anxiously about his little girls. " I have left Miss Carlyon with them," the rector said, looking away self-consciously from the friendly face as he replied. " I am so relieved to hear it. I was saying to my husband last night ' dear Mrs. Jervois would feel happy about her poor children if she knew they were in Miss Carlyon's care.' " There were tears in her eyes as she looked at the uneasy rector but there was also meaning in her glance. He felt that he hated the woman for that ex- pression as he hurried away. Sitting by the roadside in his old patched jacket, his crutches beside him, his shrivelled, twisted leg laid alongside its able fellow in the long grass, was Am- brose Xudd the cripple. He leered at the clergyman, contorting his hideous face into a knowing smile as Mr. Jervois placed the expected shilling in his willing thorny palm. GIRLS WANT A MOTHER. 71 " I han't seen too many o' your skillin's of late," he said, conscientiously abstaining from any show of gratitude " but if, as I heared tell, a new missus is a- coming to th' rect'ry there's, mayhap, better times in store for all of us." There was no refuge. The thing was in the air. The poor rector took himself homeward, as a poor rabbit turning desperately from the yelping dogs to the hole where the ferret works. Comfort was in Bill's unconsciousness, in his easy mention of his sister's name, in the serene gaze of Caroline herself. He thought he could not go beyond his garden gate again while the children were in Miss Carlyon's care. Presently he perceived that if he could have for- gotten the horrible idea which had been in Caroline's mind, things were more than endurable under the rectory roof they were distinctly pleasant. Bill was always welcome there. He was one of those visitors of whom their entertainers say in praise, " You never know whether they are there or not." He accommo- dated himself easily, had his own amusements, his own occupation. The rector liked to have his pres- ence in the room with him, even though for an hour at a time, perhaps, no word was spoken between the two men. And in the presence of a lady there was enjoy- ment there was no gainsaying. Poor Yiolet was, after all, such a child ! " Like a little wax madonna she was holy in the place ; " but the servants took no orders from her, the children were intractable under her rdgiine. With Caroline everything moved like clockwork. The meals were regular and better cooked. There was no clashing of unanswered bells, because the parlor-maid had just slipped out to her sweetheart in the sables ; no burst 72 THE CEDAR STAB. of untimety vulgar laughter grated on the rector's shrinking ear each time the kitchen-door stood ajar. The evenings were passed in the schoolroom be- cause a piano was there, and both men liked the sooth- ing influence of music in the idle hour, after dinner. And Miss Carlyon and the rector had long discovered a mutual passion for chess. Both were extremely in- different players, and Bill, who was a good one, de- clined to play with either, but as they could not criti- cise each other's blunders, they were happj' in their ignorance and scorned the expert. With the children, subdued and wounded, Caroline showed herself such a patient and attentive nurse that even Betty who hated the curate's sister, and wished to hate her, was silenced. There were days when, helpless with her bandaged hands, Betty had said in the morning that evening never could come days which had been made bearable, even enjoyable, by Caroline's untiring fidelity. She read them David Copper field at this time ; and if there is in the world a book to make boys and girls forget their weariness and restlessness and irritable pain, it is surely David Copper field heard for the twentieth time. But for the first ! Years afterwards when an ocean of wrath, bitter- ness and uncharitableness rolled between the two women, whose characters, besides, had placed them as the poles asunder, Betty, unsparing and vituperative, would pause in the midst of her recrimination and re- mind herself, " She read me David Copperfield when I was ill." By the time that Caroline announced there was no longer any need for her presence at the rectory, Ian the impulsive, given over to likes and dislikes of the GIRLS WANT A MOTHER. 73 moment, wept on the lady's neck, and besought her with a warm, wet cheek pressed convulsively upon Miss Carlyon's own, never to leave them, ever, ever again. " You are just as dear as my mamma. I shall call you my mamma," Ian said. At which speech Emily opened mildly disapproving eyes : " If Betty had heard that, she would have beaten you," she told her small sister afterwards. " Then, don't tell her," said the practical Ian. " I do wish she was my mamma all the same. She's got such a dear little gold whistle on her watch chain. I don't care if her nose is long. She knows how to make beautiful carts out of cardboard for my little fur ponies." But Ian was well and able to play now, it was upon her father that the strange desolation occasioned by the loss of the Carlyons fell. Bill, to get over that weary time, he must wait for Violet's answer, decided that he would take his holiday now, and swept away Caroline with him to their old home in Hampshire, so that there was no alleviation of the loneliness into which the poor rector found himself suddenly plunged. He did not remember to have been so glad of any- thing for years as when that long three weeks of the curate's leave came to an end. He invited the young man and his sister to return to lunch with him after service on the first Sunday of their reappearance, but Caroline said she was tired of her journey and de- clined. On the Monday afternoon when Mr. Jervois called at Queen Anne's, he found Carlyon out on his parish rounds, and Caroline alone. He had far rather, even at that juncture, have found Caroline out and Carlyon 74 THE CEDAR STAB. alone, but it was a relief to talk to one of them. In- deed he had had of late occasion to pity himself to such a degree that he felt if he had no one to confide in speedily, his keen and unshared appreciation of his own troubles would end in disaster to himself. There was no real good in complaint, of course, and trouble had to be borne, but when one's nature craved for sympathy, and when one was absolutely bursting with trouble ! " The cook forgot the caper sauce with the boiled mutton, to-day," he began as soon as greetings were over, and he had sunk in a chair, his plaintive face was turned to Caroline, blank-eyed, he raked at the pale side whiskers with his restless fingers. " I mentioned before Rhoda the parlor-maid, you know something of my annoyance ; she was incon- siderate enough to repeat my few words in the kitchen, and cook came into the room before lunch was over to say she would leave me at once if I was not entirely satisfied. What did she suppose would become of us four hungry, helpless people in the house and no cook ? " Susan has got another young man that danger- ous rascal, Tom Shore. Ian is my informant. My children are posted in all the vulgar love affairs of the kitchen, Miss Carlyon. Can my poor little girls grow up to be delicate-minded ladies with such associations ? I heard Betty using a word to-day, quite innocently, I am sure, which I could not repeat to you. " They had Tom Shore to spend the evening in the kitchen last night and Ian went down in her night- dress and sat on his lap. " Betty took the children to the sand-pit this morn- ing ; they have had no dinner. They wanted red sand GIRLS WANT A MOTHER. 75 for their bird-cages. Gardener lent them the boy to wheel the barrow. I met them just now, coming back. The boy was riding on the sand, his legs dangling, Betty was crowding the barrow." " Betty is old enough to know better," said Miss Carlyon with severity. " Betty has no mother," the rector said. He had prepared the speech which was to follow, but unexpected feeling broke him down. He had so loved the mother of his children 1 The phrase which expressed her loss seemed ever as if it must choke him. But at such an inconvenient time ! He cleared his throat and went on huskity, with dropped eyes and a miserable face. " Girls want a mother, Miss Carlyon. Will you take pity on me, and be a mother to my children ? " he said. 76 THE CEDAR STAB. CHAPTER VIII. BETTY'S DARK HOUR. SUSAN, when she dressed her young ladies in the morning, informed them that it was not for very long she should perform that office. She would not stop to be lorded over by no Miss Carlyon, even if that lady was to be, ten times over, Miss Betty's new mamma. She was on her knees before Miss Betty as she made that statement, in a convenient position for the box of the ears which her young mistress promptly administered with telling effect. During the free fight which ensued between the lady and the maid, Ian slipped half-dressed from the room and ran downstairs. She burst in upon her father, opening his letters at the breakfast table : " Father 1 father ! Is it true ? " she cried. " Oh, I do hope it's true, and Miss Carlyon is going to be my mamma, because then old beast Susan is going. Is it true ? Say it's true." The rector, with an air of utter despondency, drew his youngest daughter upon his knee. " Yes, my dear child. Yes," he said, " I thought it was best for all of us. We seem to get into such muddles. I think she will be kind to us, Ian don't you think she will be kind ? " He had made the sacrifice for his children's sake. He was already horribly doubtful of the wisdom of BETTY'S DARK HOUR. 77 the act. He longed for the backing-up of even such a baby as Ian. Ian was radiant. She swung her black stockinged legs ecstatically backward and forward, and gave little jumps of delight as she sat on her father's knee. " Shall Betty and Emily and me be dressed in pink and blue like those little girls when Nora Butcher was married ? " she inquired with prospective rapture, " Shall we have lockets hanging round ? " But at this point Betty appeared at the door, her face pale on one cheek, and on the other, quite plainly to be seen, the red marks of her gentle nurse's fingers, her unruly hair, disheveled in the late struggle, standing out wildly from her head. " It is true ! " Ian cried to her. " Father is going to marry her. It is true, Betty." For a moment the walls reeled round the child, the earth heaved, that last blow on the side of her head had been a stunning one. If she had understood her feeling then, Betty would probably have fainted; but being the unsophisticated little savage she was, she struggled against the sickening sensation of the in- stabilhy of the material world, and wavering a little in her course, stumbled across the room to her father. Her eyes were misty with pain, but in them was help- less anger, terror, jealousy, almost despair. " You shall not," she said, clutching her father, " I won't have her brought here to live. You wicked, wicked old man how dare you ! you shall not ! " " Go out of the room," said the miserable rector. " Go at once before I have to send you to bed." When she only sobbed out her wild incoherent rage he took her by the shoulders to turn her from the room, but she flung herself to the ground and clung 78 T3E CEDAR STAR. about his feet : " Don't father don't bring her here, I will be good, father. I will take care of Ian and Emily. I will do that you wish always, always, if you won't bring her here instead of my mamma ! " He had in the end to carry her from the room. It was no easy matter, she struggled and shrieked, and kicked in his arms, catching at this object and that, seeming to think if once expelled her cause was lost. She was deposited at length on the mat before the door, and the rector locked himself into the room with a trembling hand. He had done it for the best, God knows ! To obtain a decently regulated household, to secure a fit protection for his children. He had flattered himself that his troubles and disagreeables, arising from the refractoriness of his eldest daughter were nearly at an end. Good heavens 1 were they only just about to begin ? At the hour of earl}' dinner Betty was not to be found. She had said her head ached, Emily explained, and she and Ian had played alone. " Betty must be found," her father said, drumming with thin, nervous fingers on the table and vaguely addressing no one in particular ; but it was a relief to him to be quit for a time of that turbulent presence. He was rendered miserable for the whole day by his recollection of the morning's scene, and when, late in the afternoon, he put on his hat to go out, he remem- bered to ask of the servant opening the door if the child had turned up. As far as Rhoda knew she had not. " Was she in the house ? " Rhoda was not in a position to say. The rector fidgetted for a moment on the door-mat, then turned and opened the drawing-room door. BETTY'S DARK HOUR. $ The drawing-room offered positively no field for mischief or amusement to the youthful mind ; it was the most unlikely place in the world for Betty to hide in. It must have been his unerring instinct to do the useless thing which led the poor rector in that direc- tion. He looked blankly about the place into which he had hardly set foot since his wife's death. It had been a pleasant, sunshiny room, not too bright nor fine for the daily use of a household. Now the blinds were drawn, and there was a smell of dust and airlessness, and an order that was strange to his memory of his wife's favorite room. A deep wicker chair which had been her usual seat, was the only piece of furniture which was not ranged with uncom- fortable precision against the walls. This was pulled in front of the empty grate. He looked at the back of the easy-chair for a minute, and took his hat from his head. He could almost believe the figure of his wife might be lying there still, he looked for the knot of bright brown hair appearing over the top. Slowly, his heart full of tender misery, he came into the room, and laid a hand upon the unconscious child's back. And there, after all, was Betty. Betty the truant, the tyrant, the termagant ! She was crouched upon the rug before the cheerless grate and her head lay on the cushioned seat of the chair as it had been used to lie on her mother's knee. With some dim idea of finding there a reminiscence of the old comfort and protection she had brought the chair into its familiar position and had flung herself be- fore it. Once, when one of the temporarily insurmountable griefs of her life had overtaken her, when the sandy 80 THE CEDAR STAB. cat with which she had played from her cradle, had died, or her tame jackdaw had been killed, she remem- bered to have sobbed and wept till all the trouble left her, against the form that lay in the chair. She had sobbed in that position now, till the old grief and the new became curiously blended, and she hardly knew if she cried for the dead pet or the advent of the new mother. She remembered how the large, firm mother's hand had lain on her head, and softty smoothed and smoothed the tangled hair, and so remembering, had wept herself to sleep. Those dull, prominent eyes of the rector were washed in a rush of sudden tears. He stooped lower, lower still, and with a very timid, awkward hand, stroked, and ever more softly stroked, the tangle of rough hair. A flicker of light stirred upon the sleeping, tear- stained face, the mouth just moved with a half per- ceptible smile. The father rather felt aud saw than heard the name that trembled on the child's lips. But if she had called it aloud in anguish it could not more certainly have aroused the folded memories of the poor man's brain, or more cruelly awakened the half- hid thoughts and longings of his heart. He straightened himself abruptly and went hur- riedly from the room lest the sob that tore at his throat should burst from him and awake the dreaming child. He had been bound for Queen Anne's. He went back to his own room instead, and bolted himself in there and pulled down the blinds. There was a cer- tain locked drawer in his writing-table which since his wife's death he had lacked the courage to open. He opened it now and with eager shaking hands, took BETTY'S DARK HOUR. 81 out its hidden treasures. Little mementoes of her presence, which had escaped the hands carefully laying away for the daughters' future was the dead mother's belongings. Odds and ends he had found in wander- ing bewilderedly through rooms so strangely empty of her presence, and had pushed hurriedly and helter skelter into the drawer to save his eyes the pain of falling on them. " The day will come when I shall be strong enough to look at them," he had said. But he had not yet been strong enough to dare to disturb the covering which the necessities and conventionalities of daily existence had thrown over his unabated grief. He tore it aside ruthlessly now. A few flowers which had withered in a vase where he had seen her fingers place them, a blotting pad which had lain on her writing-table, a half written letter in its leaves; an unfinished sock of lan's, the wool tangled about the needles he had found it pushed into the drawer where his papers were kept, and remembered having swept it there, impatient of its littering his table, on the last morning she had sat with him in the library a book she had read aloud to him with a down-turned leaf a dozen pa- thetic, senseless trifles, talking loudly to his heart with poor dumb mouths of her. He had not been a clever man, nor a strong nor helpful, nor useful one at the best of times, and what of capability he had possessed that best part of him to which his clinging love for her and her protective love for him had given birth had died with her and been buried in her coffin. Yet this much he had of greatness in him that he had known how to love and worship one woman truly, and this much of 6 82 THE CEDAR STAB. nobility remained that, whatever sacrifices paternal affection and nearer ties demanded of him, to that one woman in his heart he would be faithful while he lived. When, hours later, he replaced all that dear rub- bish in its drawer it was too late for Queen Anne's, and Caroline who awaited him there. There had been relief in the tears, there was relief, too, in this. Betty did not come in with the other children to bid him good-night, but when he sent for her she appeared leaden-faced and sullen, dragging her feet reluctantly across the floor to him as he held out his hand. " Betty," he said very kindly, but with a manner more firm and dignified than that to which the child was accustomed : " You are older than the others and I have a thing to say to you which I wish you always to remember. I am going to marry a lady a kind and clever lady, who will take care of us, and show us the right thing to do. I hope we shall be all happy together, and that things may be more pleas- ant. But I shall not forget your mother. Never for an instant. That is what I wished to say to you, Betty. Don't forget it. Now, kiss me, my child, and go to bed." "MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND." 83 CHAPTER IX. " MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND." MR. JERVOIS had prayed of Caroline that his pro- bation might be short, and it was arranged that in six weeks the mistress of Queen Anne's Cottage should allow herself to be installed mistress of the rectory. When about half that time was passed the curate suddenly succumbed to the temptation, which, since Violet's departure, had incessantly beset him, and, in spite of his promise that she should be unmolested, drove in to Edmundsbury to seek her. A faint hope had been held out to him that she might write. In the ardor of his condition and the matured hopefulness of his mind he had looked for the possible letter by the first post she must have hurried to catch on reaching her home. He passed the interval between that first disappointment and the present unexpected break-down in convincing himself that her not writing to him was a favorable sign. He persuaded himself that there really was no doubt about the result. At that second interview surely she had as good as promised herself to him. The fact that everyone took her ultimate acceptance of him as a matter of course was very reassuring. His sister, the rector, usually spoke to him of the time when Violet should be with him. The children were more intimate than discreet in their conversation on the subject ; Ian even going so far as to implore him never 84 THE CEDAR STAB. to have any children of his own, she and Betty and Emily being quite sufficient for him. While, as for Yiolet Yiolet should have one of Paul's kittens when he had them, an event to which Ian was always looking forward on the tiptoe of expectation. In the face of all this it was difficult to remember the uncertainty of the event, and to rebuke an ecstatic, anticipatory joy. " Yiolet will not make you a clever housewife, I fear," Caroline often said to him, being of that excel- lent order of woman who does not shrink from the prophesying of unpleasant things. What did Billy Carlyon care? If Yiolet, who lived in his heart, would live also under his roof, what did puddings and cakes and the putting on of buttons signify ? He was a sentimental being and he looked at the marriage state not apprehensively at all with his young eyes, seeing only the pretty wife who was to laugh and jest and pla} r with him as well as love him. The sun was always to shine on these two always gay and happ3 T , laughing and chatting as they went about their parish work, helping each other to put the sadness of what they saw out of sight in their own homes. The hearth was always to be warm there, the firelight that flickered on their faces was to find them always as smooth and serene. There were alterations in the arrangement of his house which would be desirable in the event of his marriage he longed for Caroline to be gone that he might set about these. In the meantime he contented himself as well as he could in sinking a tennis court in the meadow beyond the kitchen garden. At this labor of love he worked daily with an en- thusiasm beautiful to see. His unremarkable eyes of "MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND." 85 boyish blue were suffused with happiness as he lifted them to contemplate the progress of his work. The little Jervoises had never known even " Billy " so sweet in temper, so hilarious, such good fun. They came across to help him at the tennis court one morning, Ian and Emily more of a hindrance than otherwise, perhaps, but Betty working like a little navvy at his side, driving in her spade with her foot upon the blade, flinging out shovelful for shovelful with him, who to humor her may have slackened his speed a little. Peter, through an ever-to-be-glorified outbreak of measles in the school, was home again in those days, but he had found more entertainment in lying along the fresh-turned soil on his stomach to study the contents of an overturned ant heap than in taking a share in the useful labors around him. Betty straightened herself, shook back her hanging hair that the morning sunlight might shine into her eyes, and looked across at a group of elm-trees in the near distance round which the rooks were whistling and calling. " We ought to have made it nearer to a tree, Bill," she said. " There won't be anywhere for Mr. Harringay to sit while you and Violet play, Bill," Emily remarked. Emily, the least clever of the children, had as make- weight, the insight of sympathy. Her speech was curiously often the statement of Betty's unexpressed thought. " Poor old Harringay always played tennis lying in a chair with Betty at his feet," the curate remembered, recalling the past with a laugh. " Lazy beggar 1 " said Peter, gently stirring the ruins of the ant heap with his fingers. 86 THE CEDAR STAR. " Lazy beggar yourself! " said Betty, with a kick at the ant-hill. The boy caught the vicious little foot : " You wait till you get to school, my lady ! you'll see what will happen if you kick and talk about ' beggars ' there." " Let go her foot," said the curate, and Peter obej'ed, getting a kick here and there in not very vul- nerable parts of his body as reward. He did not ob- ject in the least. It was his ant-hill he wanted to pro- tect. " Come back to your work, and don't be a fool, Betty," the curate recommended, and the young lady returned to her shoveling of the earth. " Mr. Harringay never gave Betty the oil paints he promised," Ian observed. " He promised and prom- ised ! " " He'll bring 'em for her from Paris one of these fine days," the curate said. " He isn't in Paris, though," said Peter. " I forgot to tell you. Betty ! Halloo ! Come here. Look at these two fellows, do you see ? They've caught this lady with wings look, they're dragging her " " Not in Paris ? " said the curate. He raised him- self and looked at the boy sprawling on the ground with a curiously stunned expression. " She was trying to escape they often do and these sturdy little rascals have brought her back." Carlyon went across and prodded the boy in the back with his spade : " Harringay is in Paris," he said. " Then, I tell you he isn't," Peter declared impa- tiently " drop that now, Mr. Carlyon, that spade hurts. Father and I met him yesterday when we drove into Bdmundsbury. He said he'd changed his "MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND." 87 mind and he wasn't going for another few weeks. Father asked him to ride over, and he said he wouldn't." " That don't seem very kind to Betty," said Emily, " he might have sent the oil paints by post." " As if I want his old oil paints ! " said Betty, very fierce, being indeed wounded to the quick. " That's enough work for to-day. Cut home to dinner," the curate said and threw down his spade. He did not explain to himself why the fashioning of the tennis ground had in a moment become a thing of no consequence, a senseless thing. He did not tell himself why he so suddenly determined that he could not wait for Violet's answer longer, but would go and get it. He did not even mention to his sister his des- tination, but as soon as his midday meal was eaten, he changed his every-day, dark grey clothes for his best suit of black and started for Edmundsbury. Taffy, the old white cob he drove, had been pur- chased of a neighboring baker who since the transac- tion had always his tongue in his cheek when speak- ing of the curate. The young man's friends, too, had laughed at the deed but Betty had approved. Betty had seen the baker beat the white cob about the head with his clenched fist one day, and had not rested until Bill, as was usual, had constituted himself the victim. And Bill himself was content. " I don't want spirited horse-flesh to drag me out once in a blue moon, and I'm never very much in a hurry," he explained. It took him nearly three hours to accomplish the fourteen miles which separated Blow Weston from Edmundsbury, and the curate had plenty of time for reflection. 88 THE CEDAR STAB. To be patient was Bill's nature, but be told himself now that perhaps patience was out of place in a love affair. He bad meant by bis forbearance to show his confidence in the girl and perhaps it bad looked as if he had not cared. Not cared ! He cracked his whip smartly above the head of the old white horse, the blood came with a rush to his face. Not cared! He looked appealingly round on sky and trees, calling all nature to witness to the eagerness of his love. It was some time before Taffy forgave him the in- dignity of that stroke of the whip. He kicked with stiff old hind legs, and stumbled with front ones ; he lashed his tail over the rein, and hung his bridle upon the shafts ; went through in fact his whole repertoire of ill manners before he started smoothly on his cour again. It was four o'clock before Carlyon passed the tower of St. Ethelred's Church, of which poor parish Violet's father was incumbent, and with much diffi- culty succeeded in turning Taffy's foolish old stub- born head into the Red Lion yard. As he came out into the street and turned in the direction of the Beltons' house, it was as if the town had been present to him as the abode of his friend rather than of his love. It was the figure of Harrin- gay he looked for, ahead of him, and down each turn- ing. The footsteps that now and again threatened to overtake him, only he alwaj's hurried his speed and never looked behind must be those of Harringay. When he turned into the street that led to the Beltons' house it was with a feeling of intensest relief he found it stretching quiet, hot and sunshiny, before him, empty of the figure which haunted his mind. Dear old Harringay 1 It was a shame to have had " MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND." 89 that inexplicable dread of meeting him being clear of it, the curate was filled with remorse. The garden of the Beltons' house was shut from the road by a tall flint wall over which the heads of a copper-beach, an acacia or two, some elder-bushes showed. When Carlyon reached the beginning of this wall, a green door which was set in it opened and a man came out. Before recognition of that figure could be conveyed by the eyes to the brain, the curate knew whose it was. The two men met beneath the over-topping boughs of the copper-beach, a half-dozen yards from Violet's doorstep. They did not shake hands, nor did any greeting soever pass between them. " Do you mind turning back with me for a few minutes ? " Harringay asked, and they walked side by side till the boundary of the garden wall was reached. Some of the younger Beltons were playing tennis beyond the acacia branches. An excited voice cried clear and shrill, " A love set ! a love set ! Hooray ! " Bill thought of the uncompleted court at Queen Anne's. The court that would never be finished now ! " I suppose you can guess what I have to tell you?" Harringa}' said. His face had paled but he lifted his head and looked at the other fiercely at Bill with a shamed face and a hanging head. " Yes," Bill assented miserably. " I suppose so." " I won't ask for a light judgment," Harringay went on. " I will only ask you to believe that when we spoke together last, I, at any rate, thought that I was honest." There was a pause; then, " I believe it," Bill said lowly. If he had broken his stick across the other's back, 90 THE CEDAR STAB. it is certain Harringa} 7 would not have been punished as those unexpected words punished him. " Thank you," he said, and held his head still higher, his thin lips close shut, his jaw locked as if in pain. When the pair had reached the end of that quiet street, where the shadows of the old houses, and of the tree-topped walls lay as if in the peace of cen- turies, they stopped. " You won't be wanting to see any more of me, Carlyon," Harringay said. " In a mouth we shall be gone. In all probability we shall never come back." " Violet is going with you ? " " Yes, Bill, you must blame me for all." He set his teeth for a moment when he had said that for he had forced himself to say the words they did not come from his heart. It was Violet who had been to blame who else 1 who had lured him with her foolish little baits till he had played, with e}'es wide open, this dastard's part. " Violet is full of sorrow about you," he went on with an effort to say the decent thing, to be loyal to the girl, whom in that crisis he felt he hated and despised. " Perhaps you will go and see her ? " But Bill shook his head : " No," he said. " I think I may as well get back to Blow Weston. There doesn't seem to be much good in anj r thing else, now." Harringay was silent for a minute indeed between every sentence, long pauses fell, each man making a huge effort to keep what emotion he felt well in hand, and free utterance being difficult. Perhaps Harringay had not valued the curate's friendship at much perhaps he had despised him a little, the long, narrow young man, with his bo3'ish manners, his youthful outlook, his unambitious, in- "MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND." 91 artistic, half-awakened nature, yet now a strange in- clination to cling to what he had lost came over him. He would have given Violet, and Violet's easily won adoration without a grudging thought for the right to walk down Edmundsbury High Street at Bill Carlyon's side and no shadow between them 1 " You will do me the credit to believe I feel badly about all this," he said. " If it could have been un- done I would have undone it. It can't be undone. I thank you for everything, Carlyon. You are worth ten thousand of me if Violet had only the sense to see it. Good-bye. I sha'n't see you again but I sha'n't forget." " Good-bye," Bill said. They had reached the entrance of the street leading to the livery stables, and Carlyon turned abruptly down it on his way to stubborn, ungracious old Taffy, to Queen Anne's, to the unfinished tennis court. And Harringay stood where the roads met, and looked after the receding figure, feeling, with a sickening cer- tainty, for ever precluding illusion on the subject, that the love of Violet Belton had been dearty bought at the price of one tithe of the disgust, and the re- morse and the shame he felt. He mentally followed that lost friend of his on his homeward journey ; he saw how differently even the familiar landscape would look to the man whose heart was wounded almost to death, whose life was robbed of its delight. It was from his own lips his people would have to learn that his love had been false to him, his friend untrue. And Harringay knew that whoever blamed the rector in his peevish irritation at having a favorite plan set aside, the sister in her narrow-minded incomprehension of the passion, the 92 THE CEDAR STAB. inconsistency, the weakness of a man's nature Carlyon himself would be the one to find excuses, to defend. These things passed through his mind and many more remorseful, bitter, pitiful thoughts in a flash and all before Bill had reached the second lamp post from that at the corner of the street, where Harringay stood. For when he did reach that point he turned sharply back, and retracing his steps, came up to Harringay and put out his hand : " I don't think we shook hands," Bill said simply. " Good-bye." Harringay's eyes smarted for the relief of tears as he walked away, but no tears came. He sickened under the sense of inferiority, of degradation which he would have to carry through life. He looked with gloomy eyes and locked lips down the dull and common street before him as if it were his own future life he was looking into. " Is she worth it ? Is she worth it? " was the intolerable burden of his thought. " Having walked through this mire to win her, she being won, do I want her do I ever so little care ? " END OP PART I. PART II. Are these the skies we used to know The budding wood, the fresh-blown mead? Where are the springs of long ago ? AFTER TEN YEARS. 95 CHAPTER I. AFTER TEN YEARS. " BETTY must come," the curate said. " I will go and fetch her." The rector of Blow Weston had been married for a half score years, and his union had been blessed by the birth of several children a contingency which had presented itself as a probability to everyone around him, but which Mr. Jervois persisted in re- garding as a circumstance surprising as it was un- welcome, one which could not have recommended it- self to the perception of the most far-seeing man. When his youngest boy there were five of them was two years old, the 83 ; mptoms of an illness from which there could be no recovery declared themselves in the head of the house, and with the illness a desire to have the children of his first wife by his side, grew and asserted himself. The illness was likely to be a long and painful one. Mrs. Jervois herself was not averse from having a responsible person beside her to share the difficulties and disagreeables of the case. She consulted with her brother, still living at Queen Anne's in spite of more than one chance of preferment. The Rev. William Carlyon was no more ambitious than of yore, no more fond of change. He liked the place, he had enough for his needs, the people were fond of him. When the inevitably fatal result of the rector's illness was mentioned for the first time between brother and 96 THE CEDAR STAB. sister, " They will give j r ou Blow Weston and Cral> berton," Mrs. Jervois had said, not without some na- tural bitterness. " In that case you and the children won't have to turn out," Bill had answered ; which assurance had been of great comfort to Caroline Jervois, already worrying herself and her stricken husband in a some- what premature way about plans for her future and that of the boys. " Of course, Peter is out of the question," Mrs. Jervois now said to her brother, talking over the matter of the father's desire for one of his children, " he has already taken his holiday. Betty won't like the interruption, and would be, besides, of small help and no comfort you know how impossible Betty is. Emily, who now seems quite settled with that de- lightful family in Heidelberg and writes her father charming letters, must on no account be disturbed. Yet he is evidently fretting about it, and Doctor Watkins says he must not be thwarted what is to be done ? " Then, " Betty must come. I will fetch her," said the curate. It was on a raw afternoon in November that the Reverend William Carlyon arrived, in a somewhat breathless condition at the top of the seventy-two stairs leading to the flat in Wilmington Terrace, which, for a year past, had been the home of Peter and Betty Jervois. When it had been first declared that, owing to his increasing family, the Reverend Eustace Jervois did not feel justified in sending his eldest son to college, Peter had taken the announcement calmly. It was AFTER TEN YEARS. 97 Betty who had been furious. She had written from Germany, where she was still at school, a letter to her father which had made him very uncomfortable worse, which he was called on to resent, because in it allusions had been made to his second wife which that lady declined to have overlooked. " You have now six sons," Caroline reminded her husband, u are you in a position to give them all a university education ? " Such a question required no answer; but Betty's letter was answered, and she was requested to spend her next yearly holiday in Heidelberg to save the ex- pense of the journe} 7 home. Betty had written only one line in reply to this request. " Home ? where is my home ? " she had written in her fierce, impulsive way. " My dear mother's chil- dren have no home ; and that my father knows." To the rectory she, at least, would never go again ; and, not being of that wisdom which keeps its own counsel, she wrote to that effect, roundly, and in so many words. It was a decision that freed the rector from a good many annoyances the constant friction between his eldest daughter and his wife was an ex- perience to escape from by any means. It was only when his mortal illness seized him that things looked different, and that nature re-asserted herself. When the time came for Betty to leave school she declined a very advantageous offer which was made her to stay as English governess with a family of whom she was fond. Only one could fill the post let Emily take it Emily who had no other prospect and whom the life would suit. It would not suit Betty. But she was not without resource. She 7 98 THE CEDAR STAB. wrote to Peter, whose career which his sisters had firmly expected would be great, had ended in a civil service clerkship and a salary of a hundred a year, proposing to share with him for a year or so. " I won't cost you much, and in the end I will pay you back, and much more," she had said with confi- dence. She had lived with her brother for more than a year in Wilmington Terrace ; and the days when he should be " paid back " seemed sometimes very near, some- times impossible of realization. On this November afternoon she was more than us- ually depressed. She had walked through fog and a drizzling rain to the Art School she attended in the morning ; through fog and a drenching rain she re- turned in the afternoon. Everything had been wrong, the light, the model, the position of her easel, the at- mosphere of the overheated room. The students, chattering in the passages, laughing over their work, throwing lumps of charcoal and pellets of bread at each other across the room, had irritated her sadly. She could not comfortably despise them, because, looking around on that afternoon, it seemed to her that most of them were far cleverer than she. And they worked with light hearts, not caring. The pro- fessor, whom, according to her mood and his attitude toward her work, she adored or detested, standing at her back, influenced, likewise, by the master, perhaps, had said one or two cruel things to her about the bad construction, the false proportion, the unmeaning modelling of her subject. After which he had wound up with his usual sighing formula. " You can do better, 3-011 know, much better. However, go on, go on," and had so passed to the next easel. AFTER TEN YEARS. 99 After that Betty had sat on her " donkey " before her condemned work for half an hour, her hands in her lap doing nothing, glowering fiercely upon the ir- repressible array of students around her. How un- concerned and flippant they seemed, even after the professor had passed behind them, crushing them severally as was his wont. It was because they did not care they did so well ! Not one among them had such an eager desire to succeed as she. Probably not one among them was crippling a brother's slender re- sources until such time as she could earn enough for daily bread. Was there one among the frivolous orew who felt within her that strong craving a hunger for recognition merely which Betty took to be a guarantee of her power ? One, who after every re- buff had clenched hands and teeth and reared in- domitable front, saying " I will 1 I will 1 " This certainly recurring mood was not hers at pres- ent. It was impossible to work longer that afternoon. She put away the temporarily detested drawing ma- terials and went. In the passage she had encountered the professor on his way to pupils in the portrait room. On the impulse of the moment she spoke to him, an unusual proceeding on the part of a student, for, in spite of an encouraging urbanity of manner, when not engaged on criticising their works his pupils held the great man in considerable awe. " I can't work this afternoon," said Betty, attack- ing him, as with a smile and a bow, he would have hurried past. " You have utterly disheartened me." " Indeed ? I am sorry," he said, smiling upon her with his head on one side as she stood before him, a picturesque and charming figure in her painting blouse 100 THE CEDAR STAB. of " butcher " blue. He was better acquaint with the back views of his pupils than their faces, and there were among them many attractive figures and notice- able heads of hair. For his convenience their names were written upon their easels, and he did not alwa3 T s couple names and faces correctly when the latter smiled upon him, meeting him on stairway or in cor- rider. But there was an unusualness, either attract- ive or the reverse, according to the taste of the be- holder, about Betty Jervois which always established her identity. " You must not be discouraged, Miss Jervois," he said sweetly. " Shall I succeed ? Is there any sense in my going on ? Shall I ever do an3'thing ? " Betty asked him imperiously. She affected to despise his opinion some- times. She had often told herself that though the professor might be able to teach, it was impossible for him ever to become an artist in the sense that she felt herself to be one. Yet now her tone was fierce from anxiety and her heart stood still to hear his answer. " You have made great progi'ess. Go on, by all means, to be sure," the professor said, and again with the smile and the sidelong bow of the head was slipping past, but Betty stopped him with a further question. " Tell me this. It is of the utmost importance to me that I know. Am I better than the others the crowd ? Is there more hope of me than of them ? I want to know. Tell me honestly." " You must remember that our students are of a very high average," he said, sweeping slowly from his brow the long black hair against which his delicate thin hand showed in such pleasing contrast. " To AFTER TEN YEARS. 101 hold your own at such a level is sufficient in the present, I think. You hold your own, Miss Jer- vois." So Betty put on her scarcely dried cloak, unfurled her umbrella, and shivering from the contrast of the unkindly outdoor atmosphere with the sweltering condition of the room heated to the requirements of the naked model, went home to Wilmington Terrace in no very elated mood. And when she, too, had mounted the nine flights of stone steps, and passed the nine stone balconies, guarded by iron rails upon which each flat looked out she reached, weariedly enough, her own particular domain. And there was the curate of Blow Weston, standing patiently beneath his umbrella, looking forth upon the blurred, depressing landscape as seen above the iron rail. On one other occasion the Reverend William Carlyon had scaled those heights and made an unex- pected descent upon Betty and Peter in their lofty but hardly exalted retreat. For Caroline Jervois had been shocked and filled with forebodings when she had heard of Betty's scheme. To live alone in a flat with a brother scarce older than herself a girl of Betty's daring and self-willed disposition, and of the peculiar and noticeable appearance I Who could tell what mischief even what disgrace might result? The rector shook his head, staring helplessly, saying noth- ing. It was far less trouble to agree with his wife, who was ingenious in finding up daily, fresh matters of worry and irritation, than to disagree. It was marvellous how, in a question vitally concerning his own flesh and blood, he could be so apathetic, Caroline thought. 102 THE CEDAR STAB. But to Caroline's brother the rector had said : " Go and have a look at the boy and girl, Bill, and say a word of his responsibility to Peter, and caution Betty. Will you ? " Betty had been twenty years of age on that first occasion when her childhood's friend had seen her, with the familiar touzle of her aggressive hair subdued into a knot at the back of her head, come to woman's estate ! All through that first visit Carlyon had been vexed and perplexed by that mysterious, indescribable change from girl to woman. Pull down the coils of curling dark red hair, shorten the skirt a half foot, and there was the Betty of the old days, of fun, of re- bellion, of disaster. And yet But a year with its effort, its strain, its disappoint- ments, its experience of exhausting work in over- heated rooms, of daily walks in ugly, common streets, of the sadness and depression of life in a neighborhood of anxious toilers, had left its mark. Between twenty and twenty-one a gap was fixed. It almost seemed to Carlyon as he looked at the pale and tired face of the girl before him in her rain-soaked cloak, that she and the Betty who had been a child in the days when he, as it looked to him now, had been a bo}', had very little in common. " Bill ! I'm so glad ! " she said. But he noticed that her gladness was not great enough to dispel the weariness of her voice, although her tired face bright- ened a little, and the luminous grey eyes looked at him with a serious friendliness. " Nothing is the matter, is there ? They wrote me my father is not very well. He is not worse ? " " Not worse, to speak of," the curate said and Betty, having regarded him questioningly again, produced AFTER TEN YEARS. 103 the latch-key from her pocket, opened the door of the flat and led the way in. " I expect you'll have to help me to light the fire," she said, " I always tell the charwoman to lay it ready for kindling, but there, you see she hasn't done it. She is a beautifully consistent person. One always knows she hasn't done things." She went down on her knees and began angrily, with much racket and dust-raising, to rake the morning's ashes from the grate. " There will be poor Peter coming home, and no fire and no hot water 1 " she explained. She went out to the kitchen and came back with her hands full of matches and fire-lighters : "I'm sorry for you too," she said to Carlyon. He took the things from her, and unfastened her wet cloak and pushed a chair toward her ; " Sit there and rest, and see me light the fire," he said. " I've lit scores of 'em. They know the master-hand. You'll hear it crackling in no time.," She was too tired and cross and depressed to prevent him. She sat in Peter's armchair and looked at the big man kneeling on the hearth. Carlyon also had changed and developed in the ten years which had given Betty her undesired step- brothers, and was broad now in proportion to his height. His once tow-colored hair had darkened con- siderably and was clipped close to his head. Some lines had cut themselves about his mouth, sweet- natured as of yore, and about the blue eyes, shining kindly as ever from his pleasant, florid face. " Dear old Bill ! He has grown quite presentable," Betty said to herself superciliously, but with a little regret. He had been dearest when he had been the silly, laughing, long-legged old Billy of the past. 104 THE CEDAR STAR. " Where have yon got your experience in fire-mak- ing and kettle-boiling?" she asked him, but he did not reply, nor did she need an answer who knew that he had kindled fires on many a cold hearth. When his people were ill the curate insisted that they should have fires in their bedrooms ; Betty had helped him a score of times to trundle down to this sick house and that a barrow of coals from his own cellar. In a case where there had been no bedroom stove she remem- bered how he had himself wrapped his patient a woman suffering from bronchitis and pneumonia in blankets and carried her in his arms to the impromptu bed he had constructed for her beside the down- stairs fire. Betty and the little sisters had acted that scene many a time, Bett} r staggering under the weight of the year younger Emily, Ian, by reason of the cushion-like properties of her soft, rotund little frame enacting the part of unpremeditated couch. The curate had been but a slight, young fellow in those days, Betty thought he looked strong enough to carry woman, bed and all, if need were, to-day. When the firelight shone upon the little sitting- room, it looked a cheerful, home-like place enough. The big bookcase, filling one side of the room, was loaded not with books, but with Peter's butterfly and moth cases, and with his various appliances for catch- ing, relaxing, and setting the insects. Two other sides were nearly covered by photographs, sketches, and caricatures, done by Betty and her friends, and stuck with drawing-pins on the badly papered walls. The big bow window, red-curtained, and with a plant or two on one of the window seats, all but filled the fourth side. The fog hid the cross on the top of St AFTER TEN YEARS. 105 Pancras Church which was very little above the level of the window. Cold and rain and discomfort were all on the out- side ; the professor's verdict was not altogether dis- couraging. Bett} r had failed and fallen short of her- self because she was fagged and wanted rest. To- morrow all things would look brighter. The visitor had gone into Peter's bedroom to wash the coal-dust from his hands. Betty got up, pulled off her hat, and peeped in the little over-mantel to see if her hair was in condition. She had no fe