The Hand of Ethelberta Part 27

'Enfeoffed herself to popularity: That, being daily swallowed by men's eyes, They surfeited with honey, and began To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little More than a little is by much too much.'

But this in its extremity was not quite yet.

We discover her one day, a little after this time, sitting before a table strewed with accounts and bills from different tradesmen of the neighbourhood, which she examined with a pale face, collecting their totals on a blank sheet. Picotee came into the room, but Ethelberta took no notice whatever of her. The younger sister, who subsisted on sc.r.a.ps of notice and favour, like a dependent animal, even if these were only an occasional glance of the eye, could not help saying at last, 'Berta, how silent you are. I don't think you know I am in the room.'

'I did not observe you,' said Ethelberta. 'I am very much engaged: these bills have to be paid.'

'What, and cannot we pay them?' said Picotee, in vague alarm.

'O yes, I can pay them. The question is, how long shall I be able to do it?'

'That is sad; and we are going on so nicely, too. It is not true that you have really decided to leave off story-telling now the people don't crowd to hear it as they did?'

'I think I shall leave off.'

'And begin again next year?'

'That is very doubtful.'

'I'll tell you what you might do,' said Picotee, her face kindling with a sense of great originality. 'You might travel about to country towns and tell your story splendidly.'

'A man in my position might perhaps do it with impunity; but I could not without losing ground in other domains. A woman may drive to Mayfair from her house in Exonbury Crescent, and speak from a platform there, and be supposed to do it as an original way of amusing herself; but when it comes to starring in the provinces she establishes herself as a woman of a different breed and habit. I wish I were a man! I would give up this house, advertise it to be let furnished, and sally forth with confidence.

But I am driven to think of other ways to manage than that.'

Picotee fell into a conjectural look, but could not guess.

'The way of marriage,' said Ethelberta. 'Otherwise perhaps the poetess may live to become what Dryden called himself when he got old and poor--a rent-charge on Providence. . . . . Yes, I must try that way,' she continued, with a sarcasm towards people out of hearing. I must buy a "Peerage" for one thing, and a "Baronetage," and a "House of Commons,"

and a "Landed Gentry," and learn what people are about me. 'I must go to Doctors' Commons and read up wills of the parents of any likely gudgeons I may know. I must get a Herald to invent an escutcheon of my family, and throw a genealogical tree into the bargain in consideration of my taking a few second-hand heirlooms of a p.a.w.nbroking friend of his. I must get up sham ancestors, and find out some notorious name to start my pedigree from. It does not matter what his character was; either villain or martyr will do, provided that he lived five hundred years ago. It would be considered far more creditable to make good my descent from Satan in the age when he went to and fro on the earth than from a ministering angel under Victoria.'

'But, Berta, you are not going to marry any stranger who may turn up?'

said Picotee, who had creeping sensations of dread when Ethelberta talked like this.

'I had no such intention. But, having once put my hand to the plough, how shall I turn back?'

'You might marry Mr. Ladywell,' said Picotee, who preferred to look at things in the concrete.

'Yes, marry him villainously; in cold blood, without a moment to prepare himself.'

'Ah, you won't!'

'I am not so sure about that. I have brought mother and the children to town against her judgment and against my father's; they gave way to my opinion as to one who from superior education has larger knowledge of the world than they. I must prove my promises, even if Heaven should fall upon me for it, or what a miserable future will theirs be! We must not be poor in London. Poverty in the country is a sadness, but poverty in town is a horror. There is something not without grandeur in the thought of starvation on an open mountain or in a wide wood, and your bones lying there to bleach in the pure sun and rain; but a back garret in a rookery, and the other starvers in the room insisting on keeping the window shut--anything to deliver us from that!'

'How gloomy you can be, Berta! It will never be so dreadful. Why, I can take in plain sewing, and you can do translations, and mother can knit stockings, and so on. How much longer will this house be yours?'

'Two years. If I keep it longer than that I shall have to pay rent at the rate of three hundred a year. The Petherwin estate provides me with it till then, which will be the end of Lady Petherwin's term.'

'I see it; and you ought to marry before the house is gone, if you mean to marry high,' murmured Picotee, in an inadequate voice, as one confronted by a world so tragic that any hope of her a.s.sisting therein was out of the question.

It was not long after this exposition of the family affairs that Christopher called upon them; but Picotee was not present, having gone to think of superhuman work on the spur of Ethelberta's awakening talk.

There was something new in the way in which Ethelberta received the announcement of his name; pa.s.sion had to do with it, so had circ.u.mspection; the latter most, for the first time since their reunion.

'I am going to leave this part of England,' said Christopher, after a few gentle preliminaries. 'I was one of the applicants for the post of a.s.sistant-organist at Melchester Cathedral when it became vacant, and I find I am likely to be chosen, through the interest of one of my father's friends.'

'I congratulate you.'

'No, Ethelberta, it is not worth that. I did not originally mean to follow this course at all; but events seemed to point to it in the absence of a better.'

'I too am compelled to follow a course I did not originally mean to take.' After saying no more for a few moments, she added, in a tone of sudden openness, a richer tincture creeping up her cheek, 'I want to put a question to you boldly--not exactly a question--a thought. Have you considered whether the relations between us which have lately prevailed are--are the best for you--and for me?'

'I know what you mean,' said Christopher, hastily antic.i.p.ating all that she might be going to say; 'and I am glad you have given me the opportunity of speaking upon that subject. It has been very good and considerate in you to allow me to share your society so frequently as you have done since I have been in town, and to think of you as an object to exist for and strive for. But I ought to have remembered that, since you have n.o.body at your side to look after your interests, it behoved me to be doubly careful. In short, Ethelberta, I am not in a position to marry, nor can I discern when I shall be, and I feel it would be an injustice to ask you to be bound in any way to one lower and less talented than you. You cannot, from what you say, think it desirable that the engagement should continue. I have no right to ask you to be my betrothed, without having a near prospect of making you my wife. I don't mind saying this straight out--I have no fear that you will doubt my love; thank Heaven, you know what that is well enough! However, as things are, I wish you to know that I cannot conscientiously put in a claim upon your attention.'

A second meaning was written in Christopher's look, though he scarcely uttered it. A woman so delicately poised upon the social globe could not in honour be asked to wait for a lover who was unable to set bounds to the waiting period. Yet he had privily dreamed of an approach to that position--an unreserved, ideally perfect declaration from Ethelberta that time and practical issues were nothing to her; that she would stand as fast without material hopes as with them; that love was to be an end with her henceforth, having utterly ceased to be a means. Therefore this surrept.i.tious hope of his, founded on no reasonable expectation, was like a guilty thing surprised when Ethelberta answered, with a predominance of judgment over pa.s.sion still greater than before:

'It is unspeakably generous in you to put it all before me so nicely, Christopher. I think infinitely more of you for being so unreserved, especially since I too have been thinking much on the indefiniteness of the days to come. We are not numbered among the blest few who can afford to trifle with the time. Yet to agree to anything like a positive parting will be quite unnecessary. You did not mean that, did you? for it is harsh if you did.' Ethelberta smiled kindly as she said this, as much as to say that she was far from really upbraiding him. 'Let it be only that we will see each other less. We will bear one another in mind as deeply attached friends if not as definite lovers, and keep up friendly remembrances of a sort which, come what may, will never have to be ended by any painful process termed breaking off. Different persons, different natures; and it may be that marriage would not be the most favourable atmosphere for our old affection to prolong itself in. When do you leave London?'

The disconnected query seemed to be subjoined to disperse the crude effect of what had gone before.

'I hardly know,' murmured Christopher. 'I suppose I shall not call here again.'

Whilst they were silent somebody entered the room softly, and they turned to discover Picotee.

'Come here, Picotee,' said Ethelberta.

Picotee came with an abashed bearing to where the other two were standing, and looked down steadfastly.

'Mr. Julian is going away,' she continued, with determined firmness. 'He will not see us again for a long time.' And Ethelberta added, in a lower tone, though still in the unflinching manner of one who had set herself to say a thing, and would say it--'He is not to be definitely engaged to me any longer. We are not thinking of marrying, you know, Picotee. It is best that we should not.'

'Perhaps it is,' said Christopher hurriedly, taking up his hat. 'Let me now wish you good-bye; and, of course, you will always know where I am, and how to find me.'

It was a tender time. He inclined forward that Ethelberta might give him her hand, which she did; whereupon their eyes met. Mastered by an impelling instinct she had not reckoned with, Ethelberta presented her cheek. Christopher kissed it faintly. Tears were in Ethelberta's eyes now, and she was heartfull of many emotions. Placing her arm round Picotee's waist, who had never lifted her eyes from the carpet, she drew the slight girl forward, and whispered quickly to him--'Kiss her, too.

She is my sister, and I am yours.'

It seemed all right and natural to their respective moods and the tone of the moment that free old Wess.e.x manners should prevail, and Christopher stooped and dropped upon Picotee's cheek likewise such a farewell kiss as he had imprinted upon Ethelberta's.

'Care for us both equally!' said Ethelberta.

'I will,' said Christopher, scarcely knowing what he said.

When he had reached the door of the room, he looked back and saw the two sisters standing as he had left them, and equally tearful. Ethelberta at once said, in a last futile struggle against letting him go altogether, and with thoughts of her sister's heart:

'I think that Picotee might correspond with Faith; don't you, Mr.

Julian?'

'My sister would much like to do so,' said he.

'And you would like it too, would you not, Picotee?'

'O yes,' she replied. 'And I can tell them all about you.'