‘Not as things go,’ said Dr. May. ‘You want Dr. Spencer to reproach you with being a Stoneborough fungus. There are places in Wales nearer by the map, but without railway privilege; and as to a great gay place, they would all be sick of it.’
‘Do you feel equal to it? as if you should like it, Leonard?’ asked his sister, in a trembling would-be grateful voice.
‘Of all things,’ was the answer.
Ethel thought the poor girl had suffered constraint enough, and that it was time to release the boy from his polite durance, so she rose to take leave, and again Leonard pulled himself upright to shake hands.
‘Indeed,’ said Ethel, when Averil had followed them into the drawing-room, ‘I am sorry for you. It would go very hard with me to make Aubrey over to any one! but if you do trust him with me, I must come and hear all you wish me to do for him.’
‘I cannot think that he will be able or glad to go when it comes to the point,’ said Averil, with a shaken tone.
Dr. May was nearer than she thought, and spoke peremptorily. ‘Take care what you are about! You are not to worry him with discussions. If he can go, he will; if not, he will stay at home; but pros and cons are prohibited. Do you hear, Averil!’
‘Yes; very well.’
‘Papa you really are very cruel to that poor girl,’ were Ethel’s first words outside.
‘Am I? I wouldn’t be for worlds, Ethel. But somehow she always puts me in a rage. I wish I knew she was not worrying her brother at this moment!’
No, Averil was on the staircase, struggling, choking with the first tears she had shed. All this fortnight of unceasing vigilance and exertion, her eyes had been dry, for want of time to realize, for want of time to weep, and now she was ashamed that hurt feeling rather than grief had opened the fountain. She could not believe that it was not a cruel act of kindness, to carry one so weak as Leonard away from home to the care of a stranger. She apprehended all manner of ill consequences; and then nursing him, and regarding his progress as her own work, had been the sedative to her grief, which would come on her ‘like an armed man,’ in the dreariness of his absence. Above all, she felt herself ill requited by his manifest eagerness to leave her who had nursed him so devotedly—her, his own sister—for the stiff, plain Miss May whom he hardly knew. The blow from the favourite companion brother, so passionately watched and tended, seemed to knock her down; and Dr. May, with medical harshness, forbidding her the one last hope of persuading him out of the wild fancy, filled up the measure.
Oh, those tears! How they would swell up at each throb of the wounded heart, at each dismal foreboding of the desponding spirit. But she had no time for them! Leonard must not be left alone, with no one to cover him up with his wrappers.
The tears were strangled, the eyes indignantly dried. She ran out at the garden door. The sofa was empty! Had Henry come home and helped him in? She hurried on to the window; Leonard was alone in the drawing-room, resting breathlessly on an ottoman within the window.
‘Dear Leonard! Why didn’t you wait for me!’
‘I thought I’d try what I could do. You see I am much stronger than we thought.’ And he smiled cheerfully, as he helped himself by the furniture to another sofa. ‘I say, Ave, do just give me the map—the one in Bradshaw will do. I want to find this place.’
‘I don’t think there is a Bradshaw,’ said Averil, reluctantly.
‘Oh yes, there is—behind the candlestick, on the study chimney-piece.’
‘Very well—’ There were more tears to be gulped down—and perhaps they kept her from finding the book.
‘Where’s the Bradshaw?’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘I tell you I know it was there. The left-hand candlestick, close to the letter-weight. I’ll get it myself.’
He was heaving himself up, when Averil prevented him by hastening to a more real search, which speedily produced the book.
Eagerly Leonard unfolded the map, making her steady it for his shaking hand, and tracing the black toothed lines.
‘There’s Bridport—ten miles from there. Can you see the name, Ave?’
‘No, it is not marked.’
‘Never mind. I see where it is; and I can see it is a capital place; just in that little jag, with famous bathing. I wonder if they will stay long enough for me to learn to swim?’
‘You are a good way from that as yet,’ said poor Averil, her heart sinking lower and lower.
‘Oh, I shall be well at once when I get away from here!’
‘I hope so.’
‘Why, Ave!’ he cried, now first struck with her tone, ‘don’t you know I shall?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, from the soreness of her heart; ‘but I can’t tell how to trust you with strangers.’
‘Strangers! You ungrateful child!’ exclaimed Leonard, indignantly. ‘Why, what have they been doing for you all this time?’
‘I am sure Miss May, at least, never came near us till to-day.’
‘I’m very glad of it! I’m sick of everything and everybody I have seen!’
Everybody! That was the climax! Averil just held her tongue; but she rushed to her own room, and wept bitterly and angrily. Sick of her after all her devotion! Leonard, the being she loved best in the world!
