Heriot's Choice Part 40

She looked up a little surprised at the tall, broad-shouldered young man who was making his way across the room.

'Royal told me I should find you here, Miss Lambert. I hope your niece has recovered the fatigue of her journey.'

'I am not Aunt Milly; I am Olive,' returned the girl, gravely, but not refusing the proffered hand. 'You are my father's new curate, Mr.

Marsden, I suppose?'

'Yes; I beg your pardon, I have made a foolish mistake I see,' returned the young man, confusedly, stammering and flus.h.i.+ng over his words.

'Royal sent me in to find his aunt, and--and--I did not notice.'

'What does it matter?' returned Olive, simply. The curate's evident nervousness made her anxious to set him at his ease. 'You could not know; and Aunt Milly looks so young, and my illness has changed me. It was such a natural mistake, you see,' with the soft seriousness with which Olive always spoke now.

'Thank you; yes, of course,' stammered Hugh, twirling his felt hat through his fingers, and looking down at her with a sort of puzzled wonder. The grave young face under the quaint head-dress, the soft dark hair just parted on the forehead, the large earnest eyes, candid, and yet unsmiling, filled him with a sort of awe and reverence.

'You have been very ill,' he said at last, with a pitying chord in his voice. 'People do not look like that who have not suffered. You remind me,' he continued, sitting down beside her, and speaking a little huskily, 'of a sister whom I lost not so very long ago.'

Olive looked up with a sudden gleam in her eyes.

'Did she die?'

'Yes. You are more fortunate, Miss Lambert; you were permitted to get well.'

'You are a clergyman, and you say that,' she returned, a little breathlessly. 'If it were not wrong I should envy your sister, who finished her work so young.'

'Hush, Miss Lambert, that is wrong,' replied Hugh. His brief nervousness had vanished; he was quite grave now; his round, boyish face, ruddy and brown with exercise, paled a little with his earnestness and the memory of a past pain.

'Caroline wanted to live, and you want to die,' he said, in a voice full of rebuke. 'She cried because she was young, and did not wish to leave us, and because she feared death; and you are sorry to live.'

'I have always found life so hard,' sighed Olive. It did not seem strange to her that she should be talking thus to a stranger; was he not a clergyman--her father's curate--in spite of his boyish face? 'St. Paul thought it was better, you know; but indeed I am trying to be glad, Mr.

Marsden, that I have all this time before me.'

'Trying to be glad for the gift of life!' Here was a mystery to be solved by the Rev. Hugh Marsden, he who rejoiced in life with the whole strength of his vigorous young heart; who loved all living things, man, woman, and child--nay, the very dumb animals themselves; who drank in light and vigour and cheerfulness as his daily food; who was glad for mere gladness' sake; to whom sin was the only evil in the world, and suffering a privilege, and not a punishment; who measured all things, animate and inanimate, with a merciful breadth of views, full of that 'charity that thinketh no evil,'--he to be told by this grave, pale girl that she envied his sister who died.

'What is the matter--have I shocked you?' asked Olive, her sensitiveness taking alarm at his silence.

'Yes--no; I am sorry for you, that is all, Miss Lambert. I am young, but I am a clergyman, as you say. I love life, as I love all the good gifts of my G.o.d; and I think,' hesitating and dropping his voice, 'your one prayer should be, that He may teach you to be glad.'

CHAPTER XVII

THREE YEARS AFTERWARDS--A RETROSPECT

'And still I changed--I was a boy no more; My heart was large enough to hold my kind, And all the world. As hath been apt before With youth, I sought, but I could never find Work hard enough to quiet my self-strife, And the strength of action craving life.

She, too, was changed.'--Jean Ingelow.

In the histories of most families there are long even pauses during which life flows smoothly in uneventful channels, when there are few breaks and fewer incidents to chronicle; times when the silent ingathering of individual interests deepens and widens imperceptibly into an under-current of strength ready for the crises of emergency.

Times of peace alternating with the petty warfare which is the prerogative of kinsmans.h.i.+p, a blessed routine of daily duty misnamed by the young monotony, but which in reality is to train them for the rank and file in the great human army hereafter; quiescent times during which the memory of past troubles is mercifully obliterated by present ease, and 'the cloud no bigger than a man's hand' does not as yet obscure the soft breadth of heaven's blue.

Such a time had come to the Lamberts. The three years that followed Olive's illness and tardy convalescence were quite uneventful ones, marked with few incidents worthy of note; outwardly things had seemed unchanged, but how deep and strong was the under-current of each young individual life; what rapid developments, what unfolding of fresh life and interests in the budding manhood and womanhood within the old vicarage walls.

Such thoughts as these came tranquilly to Mildred as she sat alone one July day in the same room where, three years before, the Angels of Life and Death had wrestled over one frail girl, in the room where she had so patiently and tenderly nursed Olive's sick body and mind back to health.

For once in her life busy Mildred was idle, the work lay unfolded beside her, while her eyes wandered dreamily over the fair expanse of sunny green dotted with browsing sheep and tuneful with the plaintive bleating of lambs; there was a crisp crunching of cattle hoofs on the beck gravel below, a light wind touched the elms and thorns and woke a soft soughing, the tall poplar swayed drowsily with a flicker of shaking leaves; beyond the suns.h.i.+ne lay the blue dusk of the circling hills, prospect fit to inspire a daydream, even in a nature more prosaic than Mildred Lambert's.

It was Mildred's birthday; she was thirty to-day, and she was smiling to herself at the thoughts that she felt younger and brighter and happier than she had three years before.

They had been such peaceful years, full of congenial work and blessed with sympathetic fellows.h.i.+p; she had sown so poorly, she thought, and had reaped such rich harvests of requited love; she had come amongst them a stranger three years ago, and now she could number friends by the score; even her poorer neighbours loved and trusted her, their northern reserve quite broken down by her tender womanly graces.

'There are two people in Kirkby Stephen that would be sorely missed,' a respectable tradesman once said to Miss Trelawny, 'and they are Miss Lambert and Dr. Heriot, and I don't know which is the greater favourite.

I should have lost my wife last year but for her; she sat up with her three nights running when that fever got hold of her.'

And an old woman in the workhouse said once to Dr. Heriot when he wished her to see the vicar:

'Nae thanks to ye, doctor; ye needn't bother yersel' about minister, Miss Lambert has sense enough. I wudn't git mair gude words nir she gi'es; she's terrible gude, bless her;' and many would have echoed old Sally Bates's opinion.

Mildred's downright simplicity and unselfishness were winning all hearts.

'Aunt Milly has such a trustworthy face, people are obliged to tell their troubles when they look at her,' Polly said once, and perhaps the girl held the right clue to the secret of Mildred Lambert's influence.

Real sympathy, that spontaneity of vigorous warm feeling emanating from the sight of others' pain, is rarer than we imagine. Without exactly giving expression to conventional forms of condolence, Mildred conveyed the most delicate sympathy in every look and word; by a rapid transit of emotion, she seemed to place herself in the position of the bereaved; to feel as they felt--the sacred silence of sorrow; her few words never grazed the outer edge of that bitter irritability that trenches on great pain, and so her mere presence seemed to soothe them.

Her perfect unconsciousness added to this feeling; there were times when Mildred's sympathy was so intense that she absolutely lost herself.

'What have I done that you should thank me?' was a common speech with her; in her own opinion she had done absolutely nothing; she had so merged her own individual feelings into the case before her that grat.i.tude was a literal shock to her, and this same simplicity kept her quiet and humble under the growing idolatry of her nephews and nieces.

'My dear Miss Lambert, how they all love you,' Mrs. Delaware said to her once; 'even that fine grown young man Richard seems to lay himself out to please you.'

'How can they help loving me,' returned Mildred, with that shy soft smile of hers, 'when I love them so dearly, and they see it? Of course I do not deserve it; but it is the old story, love begets love;' and the glad, steady light in her eyes spoke of her deep content.

Yes, Mildred was happy; the quiet woman joyed in her life with an intense appreciation that Olive would have envied. Mildred never guessed that there were secret springs to this fountain of gladness, that the strongly-cemented friends.h.i.+p between herself and Dr. Heriot added a fresh charm to her life, investing it with the atmosphere of unknown vigour and strength. Mildred had always been proud of her brother's intellect and goodness, but she had never learnt to rely so entirely on his sagacity as she now did on Dr. Heriot.

If any one had questioned her feelings with respect to the vicarage Mentor, Mildred would have a.s.sured them with her sweet honesty that her brother's friend was hers also, that she did full justice to his merits, and was ready to own that his absence would leave a terrible gap in their circle; but even Mildred did not know how much she had learnt to depend on the sympathy that never failed her and the quick appreciation that was almost intuitive.

Mildred knew that Dr. Heriot liked her; he had found her trustworthy in time of need, and he showed his grat.i.tude by making fresh demands on her time and patience most unblus.h.i.+ngly: in his intercourse with her there had always been a curious mixture of reverence and tenderness which was far removed from any warmer feeling, though in one sense it might be called brotherly.

Perhaps Mildred was to blame for this; in spite of her appreciation of Dr. Heriot, she had never broken through her habit of shy reserve, which was a second nature with her--the old girlish Mildred was hidden out of sight. Dr. Heriot only saw in his friend's sister a gentle, soft-eyed woman, seeming older than she really was, and with tender, old-fas.h.i.+oned ways, always habited in sober grays and with a certain staidness of mien and quiet precision of speech, which, with all its restfulness, took away the impression of youth.

Yes, good and womanly as he thought her, Dr. Heriot was ignorant of the real Mildred. Aunt Milly alone with her boys, blus.h.i.+ng and dimpling under their saucy praise, would have shattered all his ideas of primness; just as those fits of wise eloquence, while Olive and Polly lingered near her in the dark, the sweet impulse of words that stirred them to their hearts' core, would have roused his latent enthusiasm to the utmost.

Dr. Heriot's true ideal of womanly beauty and goodness pa.s.sed his door daily, disguised in Quaker grays and the large shady black hat that was for use and not for ornament, but he did not know it; when he looked out it was to note how fresh and piquant Polly looked in her white dress and blue ribbons as she tripped beside Mildred, or how the Spanish hat with its long black feather suited Olive's sombre complexion.

Olive had greatly improved since her illness; she was still irredeemably plain in her own eyes, but few were ready to endorse this opinion; her figure had rounded and filled out into almost majestic proportions, her shoulders had lost their ungainly stoop, and her slow movements were not without grace.

Her complexion would always be sallow, but the dark abundant hair was now arranged to some advantage, and the large earnest eyes were her redeeming features, while a settled but soft seriousness had replaced the old absorbing melancholy.

Olive would never look on the brighter side of life as a happier and more sanguine temperament would; she still took life seriously, almost solemnly, though she had ceased to repine that length of days had been given her; with her, conscientiousness was still a fault, and she would ever be given to weigh herself carefully and be found wanting; but there were times when even Olive owned herself happy, when the grave face would relax into smiles and the dark eyes grow bright and soft.

And there were reasons for this; Olive no longer suffered the pangs of pa.s.sionate and unrequited love, and her heart was at rest concerning Richard.