“What do people care about frocks?” exclaimed Jenny, the third daughter, with a Republican air. “If we are asked out it is because we are liked, in spite of our old frocks.”
“Or because people are sorry for us,” said Eve, gravely.
“I don’t think people are ever sorry for youth and beauty,” said Vansittart. “Both are objects of envy rather than of compassion.”
“Oh, I can’t follow you there,” answered Eve; “everybody is young once. Youth is as common as chickweed or groundsel, and it lasts such a short time; and if one has to spend that one bright little bit of life in a state of perpetual hard-uppishness, I am sure one deserves to be pitied.”
She talked of her poverty with an alarming frankness. Most people hide their indigence as if it were an ugly sore, or if they speak of it, speak softly, apologetically, or with an assumed lightness, as if their poverty were not really poverty, but only a genteel limitation of means, implying none of the shortcomings of actual want. But this girl talked of her old frock and her father’s poverty, without a blush.
“Father won’t visit anywhere now,” she said. “He can’t forget that he once lived in a big house, and had a thousand acres of shooting, and bred his own pheasants. He can hardly bring himself to shoot other people’s birds, even when they ask him to their big shoots.”
“Your old home was in the North, I think?” said Vansittart, delighted at being let into the family secrets.
“In Yorkshire—within ten miles of Beverley. Do you know Beverley?”
“Yes; I was there once—a queer sleepy old place, once renowned for its corruption; now from a political point of view nil. A town with a Bar—a Bar which did something to Charles the First, I believe. Did Beverley shut him out, or did Beverley let him in after Hull had shut him out? My common or Gardiner history is at fault there.”
“Beverley is a dear old town,” asserted Eve. “I haven’t seen it since I was twelve years old, but I can remember the countenance of every house in the marketplace, and the colouring of every window in the Minster. Father won a cup at the races when I was eleven, and I took it home in the carriage with me. I remember having it in my lap, a great gilt cup. I thought it was gold till my governess told me it was only silver-gilt. Heaven knows what became of that cup! Father despised it. The race was a paltry affair, I believe, and his horse was a poor creature. He had won ever so many better cups at bigger races; but I only remember the cup I carried home, and the broad, bright common, and the blazing July day, and the happy-looking people. It was my last summer in Yorkshire, my last summer in the house where I was born. Before the next summer we all came here. Mother, and the governess, and the rest of us. Peggy was a baby in long clothes, and mother was only just beginning to be seriously ill.”
“And if you could have seen this place when we first came to it you would have pitied us,” said Sophy. “A parson’s family had been living in it, an overgrown family like us, but without the faintest idea of the beautiful. The parson’s wife kept poultry, and there were horrid wired enclosures close to the parlour window, and there was no porch, and no possibility of saying ‘Not at home’ to callers. There were only vegetables in the garden, potatoes and scarlet-runners, where we have made lawns.”
“She calls those long strips of grass lawns,” interjected Peggy, irreverently disposed towards a dictatorial grown-up sister who was not the eldest. Against Eve no one rebelled.
“And think how squeezed we all must have been till father built this room, and picture to yourself the mess and muddle we had to endure all the time it was being built. It didn’t matter to him, for he was out of the worst of it.”
“He had to take mother to the South that winter,” explained Eve. “She had been in weak health for ever so long before we left Yorkshire. A weakly plant can’t bear being torn up by the roots, can it? I think that change in our fortunes broke her heart—added to—to other things.”
She did not say what the other things were, and he could not ask her; nor would he ask her what had brought about the Colonel’s ruin. He could make a shrewd guess upon the latter point. The value of landed property had gone down, and the man had kept a racing stud. Between those two facts there was ample room for change of fortune.
“Mother never came back to us,” said Eve, with a gentle sigh. “She is lying in the cemetery at Cannes. People have told me about her grave, and that it is in a lovely spot. There is some comfort in being able to think of that, after all these years.”
“I know that resting-place well,” said Vansittart. “There is no lovelier home for the dead.”
There was a brief silence. Even the children on the hearthrug were dumb, and there was no sound but the contented purring of Hetty’s colossal cat, a brindled grey, with a fluffy white breast, a cat that was satiated with the worship of pretty girls, and gave himself as many airs as if he had been kittened in Egypt, and ranked among gods.
“Dear as Beverley was, I hope you all like your Sussex home,” said Vansittart.
“Sussex is well enough, but when one is used to a big stone house, with a picture-gallery, and one of the finest Jacobean staircases in the
