home.'
'With you to watch them, I will fear the less.'
Miss Charlecote wondered whether any disappointment of his own added to his depression, and if he thought of Lucilla.
CHAPTER XVIII
My sister is not so defenceless left
As you imagine. She has a hidden strength
Which you remember not.-
Phoebe was left to the vacancy of the orphaned house, to a blank where her presence had been gladness, and to relief more sad than pain, in parting with her favourite brother, and seeing him out of danger of provoking or being provoked.
To have been the cause of strife and object of envy weighed like guilt on her heart, and the tempest that had tossed her when most needing peace and soothing, left her sore and suffering. She did not nurse her grief, and was content that her mother should be freed from the burthen of existence that had of late been so heavy; but the missing the cherished recipient of her care was inevitable, and she was not of a nature to shake off dejection readily, nor to throw sorrow aside in excitement.
Mervyn felt as though he had caught a lark, and found it droop instead of singing. He was very kind, almost oppressively so; he rode or drove with her to every ruin or view esteemed worth seeing, ordered books for her, and consulted her on improvements that pained her by the very fact of change. She gave her attention sweetly and gratefully, was always at his call, and amused his evenings with cards or music, but she felt herself dull and sad, and saw him disappointed in her.
Then she tried bringing in Bertha as entertainment for both, but it was a downright failure. Bertha was far too sharp and pert for an elder brother devoid both of wit and temper, and the only consequence was that she fathomed his shallow acquirements in literature and the natural sciences, and he pronounced her to be eaten up with conceit, and the most intolerable child he ever saw-an irremediable insult to a young woman of fifteen; nor could Bertha be brought forward without disappointing Maria, whose presence Mervyn would not endure, and thus Phoebe was forced to yield the point, and keep in the background the appendages only tolerated for her sake.
Greatly commiserating Bertha's weariness of the schoolroom, she tried to gratify the governess and please her sisters by resuming her studies; but the motive of duty and obedience being gone, these were irksome to a mind naturally meditative and practical, and she found herself triumphed over by Bertha for forgetting whether Lucca were Guelf or Ghibelline, putting oolite below red sandstone, or confusing the definition of ozone. She liked Bertha to surpass her; but inattention she regarded as wrong in itself, as well as a bad example, and her apologies were so hearty as quite to affect Miss Fennimore.
Mervyn's attentions wore off with the days of seclusion. By the third week he was dining out, by the fourth he was starting for Goodwood, half inviting Phoebe to come with him, and assuring her that it was just what she wanted to put her into spirits again. Poor Phoebe-when Mr. Henderson talking to Miss Fennimore, and Bertha at the same time insisting on Decandolle's system to Miss Charlecote, had seemed to create a distressing whirl and confusion!
Miss Fennimore smiled, both with pleasure and amusement, as Phoebe asked her permission to walk to the Holt, and be fetched home by the carriage at night.
'Don't laugh at me,' said Phoebe. 'I am so glad to have some one's leave to ask.'
'I will not laugh, my dear, but I will not help you to reverse our positions. It is better we should both be accustomed to them.'
'It seems selfish to take the carriage for myself,' said Phoebe; 'but I think I have rather neglected Miss Charlecote for Mervyn, and I believe she would like to have me alone.'
The solitude of the walk was a great boon, and there was healing in the power of silence-the repose of not being forced to be lively. Summer flowers had passed, but bryony mantled the bushes in luxuriant beauty, and kingly teazles raised their diademed heads, and exultingly stretched forth their sceptred arms. Purple heather mixed with fragrant thyme, blue harebells and pale bents of quiver-grass edged the path, and thistledown, drifting from the chalk uplands, lay like snow in the hollows, or danced like living things on the path before her. A brood of goldfinches, with merry twitter and flashing wings, flitted round a tall milk thistle with variegated leaves and a little farther on, just at the opening of a glade from the path, she beheld a huge dragon-fly, banded with green, black, and gold, poised on wings invisible in their rapid motion, and hawking for insects. She stood to watch, collecting materials to please Miss Charlecote, and make a story for Maria.
'Stand still. He is upon you.'
She saw Miss Charlecote a few yards off, nearly on all-fours in the thymy grass.
'Only a grasshopper. I've only once seen such a fellow. He makes portentous leaps. There! on your flounce!'
'I have him! No! He went right over you!'
'I've got him under my handkerchief. Put your hand in my pocket-take out a little wide-mouthed bottle. That's it. Get in, sir, it is of no use to bite. There's an air-hole in the cork. Isn't he a beauty?'
'O, the lovely green! What saws he wears on his thighs! See the delicate pink lining! What horns! and a quaint face, like a horse's.'
''The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses.' Not that this is a locust, only a
'What is the difference?'
'Long or short horns, since Bertha is not here to make me call them antennae. I must take him home to draw, as soon as I have gathered some willow for my puss. You are coming home with me?'
'I meant to drink tea with you, and be sent for in the evening.'
'Good child. I was almost coming to you, but I was afraid of Mervyn. How has it been, my dear?'
Phoebe's 'he is very kind' was allowed to stand for the present, and Honora led the way by a favourite path, which was new to Phoebe, making the circuit of the Holt; sometimes dipping into a hollow, over which the lesser scabious cast a tint like the gray of a cloud; sometimes rising on a knoll so as to look down on the rounded tops of the trees, following the undulations of the grounds; and beyond them the green valley, winding stream, and harvest fields, melting into the chalk downs on the horizon. To Phoebe, all had the freshness of novelty, with the charm of familiarity, and without the fatigue of admiration required by the show-places to which Mervyn had taken her. Presently Miss Charlecote opened the wicket leading to an oak coppice. There was hardly any brushwood. The ground was covered with soft grass and round elastic cushions of gray lichen. There were a few brackens, and here and there the crimson midsummer men, but the copsewood consisted of the redundant shoots of the old, gnarled, knotted stumps, covered with handsome foliage of the pale sea-green of later summer, and the leaves far exceeding in size those either of the sapling or the full-sized tree-vigorous playfulness of the poor old wounded stocks.
'Ah!' said Honor, pausing, 'here I found my purple emperor, sunning himself, his glorious wings wide open, looking black at first, but turning out to be of purple-velvet, of the opaque mysterious beauty which seems nobler than mere lustre.'
'Did you keep him? I thought that was against your principles.'
'I only mocked him by trying to paint him. He was mine because he came to delight me with the pleasure of having seen him, and the remembrance of him that pervades the path. It was just where Humfrey always told me the creatures might be found.'
'Was Mr. Charlecote fond of natural history?' asked Phoebe, shyly.
'Not as natural history, but he knew bird, beast, insect, and tree, with a friendly hearty intimacy, such as Cockney writers ascribe to peasants, but which they never have. While he used the homeliest names, a dish-washer for a wagtail, cuckoo's bread-and-cheese for wood-sorrel (partly I believe to tease me), he knew them thoroughly, nests, haunts, and all.'
Phoebe could not help quoting the old lines, 'He prayeth well that loveth well both man and bird and
