CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.

THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD.

Not very long after this abrupt conclusion of so much that had appeared to be but just begun, and in process of continuance, the care-taker at Cleverley Hall uncovered and set to rights three or four of the smaller rooms, and received the four Miss Haredales, who came there to wait till the family plans were somewhat matured, to leave some of their belongings in one locked-up room, while the rest of the house was prepared for letting; and to select and pack all that it was necessary to take with them, for what was likely to be some months, at least, of visiting and wandering.

An inhabited oasis in the midst of brown holland and shutters is not cheerful; but the last few days before the break-up in London had been so wretched that the girls were all thankful for any change, and Amethyst, in particular, packed, contrived, and planned with a vigour and energy that would fain have made the little work into much. Freedom gave her a sense of eager, strenuous life, and there was nothing before her but a long stretch of idle, tiresome days, made lonely by uncongenial companionship.

"How I hate it all!" she thought; but her hatred was living and vigorous, and there was a ring in her voice and a spring in her feet, as she moved about the empty house, which had never been there in the Eaton Square drawing-rooms.

The afternoon was hot, tea was on the school-room table. Kattern, with her pretty face markedly sullen, was slowly sipping her tea. Una lay idly back in a corner of the sofa, and Tory was sitting on the deep ledge of the window, holding the end of her immense plait of hair in her hand, and contemplating Amethyst's quick, careful packing of small valuables, with a curious elvish expression of critical observation.

"I have been informing the neighbours," she said, after a silence, "that is, our good Rector's worthy sister, as my lady used to call her, that we are going abroad for education--for Kat and me. But that first we are going to pay visits to some old friends. Can anything sound more creditable?"

"I don't care how it sounds," burst out Kattern; "it's very dull and disappointing. I wish I was the eldest. I wish _I_ had had even Una's chances! I wouldn't have thrown people over at the last minute. _I_ would have got married, and not been called a _fiasco_ in the society papers. I hate going abroad. We may get a little fun out of the visits, but I shall be sent on the dullest, and I haven't near as many frocks as Amethyst and Una."

"You have quite as many frocks as you want at present," said Amethyst; "when you will have any more is another question."

"Well," said Tory reflectively, "I mean to keep respectable. The Kirkpatricks' and Lorrimores' aren't very nice places for little girls. I shall have to take care of the rest of you. I'm very tired of our line of life, I should like to go to school. How much better good conduct pays! I dislike being ruined, and having a shady reputation."

"I hate having all one's pleasure stopped," said Kattern.

"Don't be a cross cat," returned Tory. "If we go for to quarrel, as girls in goody story-books do, when the author wants them to be naughty for a change, we shall get _no_ comfort in life. Goody! What a story I could write! I know! I'll be a sensational, realistic author, and make a fortune. Experience is better for that than education. Come along, Katty, let us take farewell of our childish haunts. They weren't our childish haunts. But no matter--"

She dragged Kattern up from her chair, and out of the room, as she spoke; while Amethyst laughed.

"I believe there's something staunch about Tory, at bottom," she said. "I'd rather trust her than Kat, among shady people."

Una moved a little, and watched Amethyst for a few moments in silence.

"Amethyst," she said, suddenly, "setting aside being married, what would you like best to do with your life?"

"I think I should like to enlist for a soldier," said Amethyst with a laugh.

"But really?"

"Really. Oh, I could keep school, I always liked teaching. When I'm twenty-one, I shall think about it. We shall none of us ever have enough money to be comfortable, if we don't marry. What can become of us? I think, perhaps, I shall write to Miss Halliday and consult her, though I would rather teach in a High School than go back to Saint Etheldred's. I think there would be more life in it. I think one's title might be swallowed, and, as for my beauty reputation, one would be the safest of young women, for there never would be anybody one would care to look twice at."

"I suppose they wouldn't like it, if rows of young men went to church to look at you?"

"You're thinking of some Miss Pinkerton's academy. Don't you know that one's own life would be quite independent of the schoolwork? And I might make such a line possible for Tory. There's a great deal of spirit in the life."

"Would it go on being enough for you?" Amethyst laughed again, but this time with some bitterness.

"Perhaps not," she said, shortly. "I wonder what would! But there are some things I should like to take up again."

"Amethyst--in some ways you are more like what you were when first you came home, than you have been since--since you were engaged to Lucian."

"I am free," said Amethyst. "That past is over really, over now for good and all. It has gone, I don't know where; and I have got, thank heaven! to reconcile myself to no good fortune. I need not tell myself any more lies, nor pare down my feelings to suit my fate. If I am a High School mistress, and want the moon and the sun and the stars, why, I can cry for them. But if I'd married that rich, good, generous man, I should never have dared to wish for anything as long as I lived. Every wish would have opened the gates into the universe. Well, now I'm outside the bars, and it _is_ the universe, and full of stars, and I can look at them, if I can't have them."

As Amethyst uttered this tirade, she lifted up her head, and her lovely face glowed with eagerness. Una listened, but her soul gave no response. Amethyst saw her blank expression, and stopped with a blush.

"Oh," she said, "if you only knew what it is to let myself go! Of course I know we are in for a hateful existence--troubles and bothers of every sort. But I feel as if I should pull through! Nothing can be worse than the last week or two."

"It has been bad enough," said Una, sighing.

"Life has a great many sides, as I always told you," said Amethyst. "Work is a great help, and, as Tory says, _I'm_ tired of men. I wish I could go to Newnham or Girton, and take a first-class. But who's to pay?"

"You, Amethyst! Oh, don't take to being blue because you're disappointed!"

"You little behind-the-world fossil! Blue! Cultured is the proper expression. And how am I disappointed? Una, I'm more in love with my real true natural self than with any one else at present. And I _should_ like to go to college--I read an article about it the other day. I should like a little room to fit up, and to have tea with my friends, and debates, and discussions, and new ideas. Then I needn't think about being married for the next five years. But there, that packing is finished. I'll go for a walk, the country is delightful after London."

She went away as she spoke, and Una heard her run down the long staircase, light of foot, and seemingly light of heart.

"I shall never be able to `let myself go,' as long as I live," thought she, with a weary sigh. "And I see no stars anywhere. Only-- sometimes--that great Light--and then darkness."

Amethyst walked through the deserted garden, rejoicing in her freedom, for she was free of regrets for Lucian, as well as of pledges to Sir Richard Grattan. She could laugh a little cynically at the girlish dream in which Lucian had seemed an ideal of perfection; she could give thanks, with bated breath, that she had not tied herself to Sir Richard; she could not but be thankful to Sylvester for having saved her; but she looked back upon her interview with him with a sense of shame, as she remembered that he, her lover, had pleaded with her not to debase her womanhood by marrying a man whom she did not love, and had had to plead, long and earnestly, before he won the day. She hoped that the love he had declared had been but the love of a poet's dream; it seemed so, since he had never followed it up, for she could never wish to see him again, though she hoped never to fall again below his standard of noble maidenhood. His voice seemed to ring in her ears: "I would rather see you die than do it."

She wondered what Mr Carisbrooke thought of the end of all her prospects. Had he really been Blanche's first lover, as Una declared Charles to have said? Perhaps there was another side to that old story, and Blanche had broken his heart, not he Blanche's.

But she had nothing now to do with any of them. Her life was her own, to begin afresh. But what lay before her? The life of intellectual interests and youthful striving was altogether out of her reach. All that was likely was a bad imitation of her London success. She knew well enough the sort of "old friends" among whom her parents' rank, and her own reputation as a beauty, would still make her a desired guest. She had had glimpses of such society in the last two years.

"I am only twenty," she thought. "I am strong and I am clever, and I think that I have proved that I am brave, and I should like to be good. Yet it seems that there is no life worth living, open to me. What am I to do? There's plenty of spring in me. Free? I'm tied up with cobwebs. If any one could tell me what to do?"

As she looked round, as if in search of an answer, she saw Mr Riddell coming towards her, along the very path by which he had come on that day when his few words of advice had seemed to offer her a little help in her early helplessness; when his kindness had given her a little comfort, though all her world had then been unkind.

Amethyst believed in the existence of good people. That faith she perhaps owed to the capacity for goodness in herself. She knew that Mr Riddell would never tell her anything that he did not himself believe to be helpful and true. He asked after her family with kindly courtesy.

"We shall see you and your sisters, I hope, at the Rectory," he said. "My sister and I are alone, for my son has gone to Scotland."

Amethyst coloured a little, she wondered how much the Rector knew; but she was too worldly-wise to ignore the troubles.

"I suppose, Mr Riddell," she said, "that you know why we left London so suddenly?"

"Yes, my dear," he said gently, "I know all that is to be said on that matter. I am sorry."

"It is a very unhappy prospect for myself and my sisters," said Amethyst, with straightforward dignity. "I don't in the least see how we are to lead lives that can be at all good. You were very kind to me once--you told me to try and be a little better, if I could not be good. May I speak to you now?"

"Surely," said Mr Riddell; then after a moment he added, "My son has told me how fatally he was once mistaken, and how cruel an injury he once did you."

"Yes," said Amethyst, "but that is all at an end." She paused; then said, with a deep blush, "Your son has done me a great service now, far greater than the harm he did then. I don't want to speak about what is all over. If I could work or study, I could be quite happy. Indeed, I do care for _many_ other things besides society and admiration; but there is such a wretched life before us. We shall never see good or clever people. And I do not feel religion as Una does, though indeed, Mr Riddell, I wish more to be good than for anything else in the world, though I have not been good lately."

There was something in the simplicity of this final appeal--coming from this rarely beautiful girl, with her look of belonging to the great ones of the earth--that was very touching. Mr Riddell did not answer her for a minute, then he said--

"That trying to be a little better of which you spoke, that _relative_ goodness that no lot can make impossible--it is important to be clear as to what is meant by better. Is it to make life a little smoother, or a little nobler, each day?"

Amethyst looked up as if these words struck her.

"And, Amethyst," said Mr Riddell, stopping in his walk and taking her by the hand; "there is no need for you to stop at a little--

"`Pray to be perfect--though material heave Forbid the spirit so on earth to be.'

"Your life is very full of trial, you have high thoughts and good thoughts. What hinders you from leading it like a saint?"

She looked at him still, but in silence.

"You say you don't `feel religion.' The word is a little vague. You have felt the guiding hand of God, and He speaks to you in that love of goodness which you possess. He _will_ speak to you, believe me, with a yet clearer voice. He has a great deal yet to say to you. Aim spiritually at the very highest perfection; and, for the rest, my dear, you must indeed try for `a little.' Perhaps a little study might keep your mind fresh, and, though I suppose religious observances will often be difficult to you, do what you can with a little. You have nearly all your life before you, and there is time in it for a great many things."

A great hope shone in Amethyst's face, a sense of vigour stole again into her soul. The light dawned in the depths of her earnest eyes, as she still looked up into her teacher's face.

"The hope of holiness," said Mr Riddell, "is an inspiration great enough to set against the greatness of the world's temptations."

"Yes," said Amethyst, in full deep tones.

"You see that light, follow it, and you shall have more," he said solemnly; then, with a change of tone to his usual simple and fatherly manner, he said--"Come and see Miss Riddell, and bring the girls with you. She will give you something to read up, or something to do-- something interesting, you know."

Amethyst laughed a little, and gave his hand a grateful pressure.

"Thank you," she said earnestly, and sped away.

Mr Riddell looked after her, watching her quick and vigorous step. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them.

"Poor Syl!" he said, as he turned away. "He must have much patience in seeking his Iris. She is in the distance--in the distance, as yet."