“None in England,” Eve answered, with a touch of sadness, and then without another moment’s delay she began to make her adieux.
“I am going to see you home, if you will let me,” said Vansittart, in the hall; “I heard you say that Colonel Marchant is at home, and I should like to seize the opportunity of making his acquaintance.”
A faint cloud spread itself over Eve’s happy face, and she was somewhat slow in replying. “I am sure father will be very pleased to see you.”
“And I’m sure you won’t like father when you see him,” cried Peggy, the irrepressible.
“Peggy, how dare you?” exclaimed Eve.
“Well, but people don’t like him,” urged the resolute damsel. “He ain’t civil to people, and then we have to suffer for it; for, of course, people think we’re just as bad. He keeps all his good manners for London.”
“Peggy, Peggy!”
“Don’t Peggy me. It’s the truth,” protested this dreadful child; and then she challenged Vansittart boldly, “You like us, Mr. Vansittart, I know you do; but you’ll never be kind to us any more after you’ve seen father.”
This gush of childish candour was discouraging, and Vansittart’s heart sank as he asked himself what manner of man this might be whom he was thinking of as a father-in-law. Other people had spoken ill of Colonel Marchant, and he had made light of their disparagement; but this denunciation from the lips of the eleven-year-old daughter was far more serious.
“Perhaps the Colonel and I may get on better than you expect, Madam Peggy,” he said, with a forced laugh; “and allow me at the same time to suggest that you have forgotten a certain commandment which tells us to honour our fathers and mothers.”
“Are we to honour any kind of father?” asked Peggy; but Vansittart was not called upon to answer, for Hetty at that moment descrying a squirrel, both little girls rushed off to watch his ascent of a tall beech that grew on the grassy waste by which they were walking.
The walk was a long one, but though there was time for Vansittart and Eve to talk about many things, time for the two younger girls to afford many distractions, an undercurrent of thought about the man he was going to see ran beneath all that light surface talk, and made Vansittart’s spirit heavy.
“You must not think anything of what Peggy says,” Eve apologized, directly after that little outbreak of the youngest born. “Father is irritable sometimes. He can’t endure noise, and Hetty and Peggy are dreadfully noisy. And our house is so small—I mean from his point of view. And then he snubs them, poor young things, and they think him unkind.”
“It is a way we have when we are young,” answered Vansittart gently, “to take snubs too seriously. If our parents and guardians could only put themselves inside those small skins of ours they would know what pain their preachings and snubbings inflict.”
“Father is much to be pitied,” pursued Eve, in a low voice. “His life has been full of disappointments.”
“Ah, that is a saddening experience,” answered Vansittart, tenderly sympathetic.
His heart thrilled at the thought that she was beginning to confide in him, to treat him as a friend.
“His property in Yorkshire was so disappointing. I suppose land has gone down in value everywhere,” said Eve, rather vaguely; “but in father’s case it was dreadful. He was forced to sell the estate just when land in our part of the country was a drug in the market.”
Vansittart had never heard of this cheapness of land in the East Riding, but he felt that if this account of things were not actual truth, Eve Marchant fully believed what she was telling him.
“And then his horses, they all turned out so badly.”
“Ungrateful beasts.”
“You can understand that the life we lead at Fernhurst is not a very happy life for such a man as my father—a sportsman—a man whose youth was spent in the best society. It is hard for him to be mewed up with a family of girls. Everything we say and do must jar upon him.”
“Surely not everything. There must be times in which he can take delight in your society.”
“Oh, I’m afraid not. There are so many of us; and we seem so shallow and silly to a man of the world.”
“A man of the world. Ah, there’s the difficulty,” said Vansittart, slightly cynical. “That kind of man is apt to be miserable without the world.”
After this they talked of other things; lightly, joyously; of the country through which they were walking; its beasts, and birds, and flowers, and humble cottage folk; of the places he had seen and the books she had read, those fictions of the great masters which create a populace and a world for the dwellers in lonely homes, and provide companions for the livers of solitary lives. They were at no loss for subjects, though that wellspring of polite conversation, a common circle of smart acquaintance, was denied to them. Their talk was as vivacious as if they had had all London society to dissect.
It was teatime again by the time they arrived at the Homestead. The lamp was lighted in the family parlour; the round table was spread; the kettle was hissing on the hob; Sophy and Jenny were sitting on one side of the fire; and on the other side, in that armchair which Vansittart had occupied on a previous occasion, sat a man of about fifty, a man with clear-cut features, silver-grey hair and moustache, and a querulous expression of countenance.
“What in the name of all that’s reasonable made you stay so late, Eve?” he grumbled, as his daughters entered. “Both those children will be laid up with influenza, I dare say, in consequence of your folly.”
Only at this moment did he observe the masculine figure in the rear. He rose hastily to receive a visitor.
“Mr. Vansittart, father,” explained Eve.
The two men shook hands.
“Girls are so foolish,” said the Colonel, by
