Chapter 18

drive. Miss Nora says she’ll go on again.”

“Does she? She seems so—so busy.”

“Ah, yes—she’s got some work for the University Press. Plucky little thing! But she mustn’t overdo it.”

Connie dropped the subject. These conferences in the study, which had gone on all day, had nothing to do with Nora’s work for the Press—that she was certain of. But she only said—holding out her hands, with the free gesture that was natural to her—

“I wish some one would give me the chance of ‘overdoing it’! Do set me to work—hard work! The sun never shines here.”

Her eyes wandered petulantly to the rainy sky outside, and the high-walled college opposite.

“Southerner! Wait till you see it shining on the Virginia creeper in our garden quad. Oxford is a dream in October!—just for a week or two, till the leaves fall. November is dreary, I admit. All the same—try and be happy!”

He looked at her gravely and tenderly. She coloured a little as she withdrew her hands.

“Happy? That doesn’t matter—does it? But perhaps for a change—one might try—”

“Try what?”

“Well!”—she laughed, but he thought there were tears in her eyes—“to do something—for somebody—occasionally.”

“Ask Mrs. Mulholland! She has a genius for that kind of thing. Teach some of her orphans!”

“I couldn’t! They’d find me out.”

Sorell, rather puzzled, suggested that she might become a Home Student like Nora, and go in for a Literature or Modern History Certificate. Connie, who was now sitting moodily over a grate with no fire in it, with her chin in her hands, only shook her head.

“I don’t know anything—I never learnt anything. And everybody here’s so appallingly clever!”

Then she declared that she would go and have tea with the Master of Beaumont, and ask his advice. “He told me to learn something”—the tone was one of depression, passing into rebellion—“but I don’t want to learn anything!—I want to do something!”

Sorell laughed at her.

“Learning is doing!”

“That’s what Oxford people think,” she said defiantly. “I don’t agree with them.”

“What do you mean by ‘doing’?”

Connie poked an imaginary fire.

“Making myself happy”—she said slowly, “and—and a few other people!”

Sorell laughed again. Then rising to take his leave, he stooped over her.

“Make me happy by undoing that stroke of yours at Boar’s Hill!”

Connie raised herself, and looked at him steadily.

Then gravely and decisively she shook her head.

“Not at all! I shall keep an eye on it!—so must you!”

Then, suddenly, she smiled—the softest, most radiant smile, as though some hope within, far within, looked out. It was gone in a moment, and Sorell went his way; but as one who had been the spectator of an event.

After his departure Connie sat on in the cold room, thinking about Sorell. She was devoted to him—he was the noblest, dearest person. She wished dreadfully to please him. But she wasn’t going to let him—well, what?—to let him interfere with that passionate purpose which seemed to be beating in her, and through her, like a living thing, though as yet she had but vaguely defined it even to herself.

After tea, which Mrs. Hooper dispensed with red eyes, and at which neither Nora nor Dr. Hooper appeared, Constance found a novel, and established herself in the deserted schoolroom. She couldn’t go out. She was on the watch for a letter that might arrive. The two banks were only a stone’s throw apart. The local post should deliver that letter about six.

Once Nora looked in to find a document, and was astonished to see Connie there. But she was evidently too harassed and miserable to talk. Connie listened uneasily to the opening and shutting of a drawer, with which she was already acquainted. Then Nora disappeared again. What were they trying to do, poor dears!—Nora, and Uncle Ewen? What could they do?

The autumn evening darkened slowly. At last!—a ring and a double knock. The study door opened, and Connie heard Nora’s step, and the click of the letter-box. The study door closed again.

Connie put down her novel and listened. Her hands trembled. She was full indeed of qualms and compunctions. Would they be angry with her? She had meant it well.

Footsteps approaching—not Nora’s.

Uncle Ewen stood in the doorway—looking very pale and strained.

“Connie, would you mind coming into my study? Something rather strange has happened.”

Connie got up and slowly followed him across the hall. As she entered the study, she saw Nora, with blazing eyes and cheeks, standing by her father’s writing-table, aglow with anger or excitement—or both. She looked at Connie as at an enemy, and Connie flushed a bright pink.

Uncle Ewen shut the door, and addressed his niece. “My dear Connie, I want you, if you can—to throw some light on a letter I have just received. Both Nora and I suspect your hand in it. If so, you have done something I—I can’t permit.”

He held out a letter, which Connie took like a culprit. It was a communication from his Oxford bankers to Professor Hooper, to the effect that, a sum of £1100 having been paid in to his credit by a person who desired to remain unknown, his debt to them was covered, and his account showed a balance of about six hundred pounds.

“My dear!”—his voice and hand shook—“is that your doing?”

“Of course it is!” interrupted Nora passionately. “Look at her, father! How dared you, Connie, do such a thing without a word to father! It’s a shame—a disgrace! We could have found a way out—we could!”

And the poor child, worn out with anxiety and lack of sleep, and in her sensitive pride and misery ready to turn on Connie and rend her for having dared thus to play Lady Bountiful without warning or permission, sank into a chair, covered her face with her hands, and burst out sobbing.

Connie handed back the letter, and hung her head. “Won’t you—won’t you let the person—who—sent the money remain unknown, Uncle Ewen?—as they wished to be?”

Uncle Ewen sat down before his writing-table, and he also buried his face in his hands. Connie stood between them—as it were a prisoner at the bar—looking now very white and childish.

“Dear Uncle Ewen—”

“How did you guess?” said Nora vehemently, uncovering her face—“I never said a word to you!”

Connie gave a tremulous laugh.

“Do you think I couldn’t see that you were all dreadfully unhappy about something? I—I made Alice tell me—”

“Alice is a sieve!” cried Nora. “I knew, father, we could never trust her.”

“And then”—Connie went on—“I—I did an awful thing. I’d better tell you. I came and looked at Nora’s papers—in the schoolroom drawer. I saw that.” She pointed penitentially to a sheet of figures lying on the study table.

Both Nora and her uncle looked up in amazement, staring at her.

“It was at night,” she said hurriedly—“last night. Oh, I put it all back!”—she turned, pleading, to Nora—“just as I found it. You shouldn’t be angry with me—you shouldn’t indeed!”

Then her own voice began to shake. She came and laid her hand on her uncle’s shoulder.

“Dear Uncle Ewen—you know, I had that extra money! What did I want with it? Just think—if it had been mamma! Wouldn’t you have let her help? You know you would! You couldn’t have been so unkind. Well then, I knew it would be no good, if I came and asked you—you wouldn’t have let me. So I—well, I just did it!”

Ewen Hooper rose from his table in great distress of mind.

“But, my dear Connie—you are my ward—and I am your guardian! How can I let you give me money?”

“It’s my own money,” said Connie firmly. “You know it is. Father wrote to you to say I might spend it now, as I liked—all there was, except the capital of my two thousand a year, which I mayn’t spend—till I am twenty-five. This has nothing to do with that. I’m quite free—and so are you. Do you think”—she drew herself up indignantly—“that you’re going to make me happy—by turning me out, and all—all of you going to rack and ruin—when I’ve got that silly money lying in the bank? I won’t have it! I don’t want to go and live in the Cowley Road! I won’t go and live in the Cowley Road! You promised father and mother to look after me, Uncle Ewen, and it isn’t looking after me—”

“You can’t reproach me on that score as much as I do myself!” said Ewen Hooper, with emotion. “There’s something in that I admit—there’s something in that.”

He began to pace the room. Presently, pausing beside Connie, he plunged into an agitated and incoherent account of the situation—of the efforts he had made to get even some temporary help—and of the failure of all of them. It was the confession of a weak and defeated man; and as made by a man of his age to a girl of Connie’s, it was extremely painful. Nora hid her eyes again, and Connie got paler and paler.

At last she went up to him, holding out again appealing hands.

“Please don’t tell me any more! It’s all right. I just love you, Uncle Ewen—and—and Nora! I want to help! It makes me happy. Oh, why won’t you let me!”

He wavered.

“You dear child!” There was a silence. Then he resumed—as though feeling his way—

“It occurs to me that I might consult Sorell. If he thought it right—if we could protect you from loss—!”

Connie sprang at him and kissed him in delight.

“Of course!—that’ll do splendidly! Mr. Sorell will see, at once, it’s the right thing for me, and my happiness. I can’t be turned out—I really can’t! So it’s settled. Yes—it’s settled!—or it will be directly—and nobody need bother any more—need they? But—there’s one condition.”

Ewen Hooper looked at her in silence.

“That you—you and Nora—go to Borne this Christmas time, this very Christmas, Uncle Ewen! I think I put in enough—and I can give you such a lot of letters!”

She laughed joyously, though she was very near crying.

“I have never been able to go to Home—Or Athens—never!” he said, in a low voice, as he sat down again at his table. All the thwarted hopes, all the sordid cares of years were in the quiet words.

“Well, now you’re going!” said Connie shyly. “Oh, that would be ripping! You’ll promise me that—you must, please!”

Silence again. She approached Nora, timidly.

“Nora!”

Nora rose. Her face was stained with tears.

“It’s all wrong,” she said heavily—“it’s all wrong. But—I give in. What I said was a lie. There is nothing else in the world that we could possibly do.”

And she rushed out of the room without another word. Connie looked wistfully after her. Nora’s pain in receiving had stirred in her the shame-faced distress in giving that lives in generous souls. “Why should I have more than they?”

She stole out after Nora. Ewen Hooper was left staring at the letter from his bankers, and trying to collect his thoughts. Connie’s voice was still in his ears. It had all the sweetness of his dead sister’s.

Connie was reading in her room before dinner. She had shut herself up there, feeling rather battered by the emotions of the afternoon, when she heard a knock that she knew was Nora’s.

“Come in!”

Nora appeared. She had had her storm of weeping in private and got over it. She was now quite composed, but the depression, the humiliation even, expressed in her whole bearing dismayed Connie afresh.

Nora took a seat on the other side of the fire. Connie eyed her uneasily.

“Are you ever going to forgive me, Nora?” she said, at last.

Nora shrugged her shoulders.

“You couldn’t help it. I see that.”

“Thank you,” said Connie meekly.

“But what I can’t forgive is that you never said a word—”

“To you? That you might undo it all? Nora, you really are an absurd person!” Connie sprang up, and came to kneel by the fire, so that she might attack her cousin at close quarters. “We’re told it’s ‘more blessed to give than to receive.’ Not when you’re on the premises, Nora! I really don’t think you need make me feel such an outcast! I say—how many nights have you been awake lately?”

Nora’s lip quivered a little.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said shortly.

“Yes, but it does matter! You promised to be my friend—and—you have been treating me abominably!” said Connie, with flashing eyes.

Nora feebly defended herself, but was soon reduced to accept a pair of arms thrown round her, and a soft shoulder on which to rest an aching head.

“I’m no good,” she said desparingly. “I give up—everything.”

“That’s all right!” Connie’s tone was extremely cheerful. “Which means, I hope, that you’ll give up that absurd copying in the Bodleian. You get about twopence halfpenny for it, and it’ll cost you your first-class. How are you going to get a First I should like to know, with your head full of bills, and no sleep at nights?”

Nora flushed fiercely.

“I want to earn my living—I mean to earn my living! And how do you know—after all”—she held Connie at arm’s length—“that Mr. Sorell’s going to approve of what you’ve done? And father won’t accept, unless he does.”

Connie laughed.

“Mr. Sorell will do—exactly what pleases me. Mr. Sorell”—she began to search for a cigarette—“Mr. Sorell is an angel.”

A silence. Connie looked up, rather surprised.

“Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” said Nora in an odd voice.

Connie observed her. A flickering light began to play in the brown eyes.

“H’m. Have you been doing some Greek already?—stealing a march on me?”

“I had a lesson last week.”

“Had you? The first I’ve heard of it!” Connie fluttered up and down the room in her white dressing-gown, occasionally breaking into a dance-step, as though to work off a superfluity of spirits.

Finally she stopped in front of Nora, looking her up and down.

“I dare you to hide anything again from me, Nora!”

Nora sat up.

“There is nothing to hide,” she said stiffly.

Connie laughed aloud; and Nora suddenly sprang from her chair, and ran out of the room.

Connie was left panting a little. Life in Medburn House seemed certainly to be running faster than of old!

“I never gave him leave to fall in love with Nora!” she thought, with an unmistakable pang of common, ordinary jealousy. She had been so long accustomed to take her property in Sorell for granted!—and the summer months had brought her into such intimate contact with him. “And he never made love to me for one moment!—nor I to him. I don’t believe he’s made love to Nora—I’m sure he hasn’t—yet. But why didn’t he tell me of that Greek lesson?”

She stood before the glass, pulling down her hair, so that it fell all about her.

“I seem to be rather cut out for fairy-godmothering!” she said pensively to the image in the glass. “But there’s a good deal to do for the post!—one must admit there’s a good deal to do—Nora’s got to be fixed up—and all the money business. And then—then!”

She clasped her hands behind her head. Her eyelids fell, and through her slight figure there ran a throb of yearning—of tender yet despairing passion.

“If I could only mend things there, I might be some use. I don’t want him to marry me—but just—just—”

Then her hands fell. She shook her head angrily. “You humbug!—you humbug! For whom are you posing now?”