Very unpromising, if he were judged by Beatrix’s standard of straightforward manliness. Guy Harley was not the man to say that “twenty thousand pounds and a pretty girl were two good things apart.” On the contrary, he would have said, had he spoken out all his thoughts, “What does the prettiness matter, so long as the twenty thousand pounds is secure? I have good looks enough and to spare for two.”
In effect this was what he was saying to himself every day, of these days of his flirtation with Nellie.
“I know she has a bad temper; her eyes flash like diamonds whenever she looks at Beatrix. But twenty thousand pounds! Why, if I can win her, I can settle down in England at once, as an independent gentleman, instead of toiling for years in a Spanish countinghouse.”
Anyone seeing Nellie for the first time in those days would have agreed with Guy, that she had a very bad temper; and on this last day of the old year, that temper had shown itself in all sorts of uncomfortable ways. At dinner—a dinner at which the Professor was not present—she had startled everyone, Cousin Lavinia especially, by saying that she intended going to Paris to study medicine. Why should she not be a lady-doctor if she liked?
“Why not, indeed?” said Beatrix, good-temperedly. “I’ll chaperon you, little Nellie.”
“In my young days—” began Cousin Lavinia.
“Ah, the world has gone round once or twice since then,” interrupted Nellie, in so disagreeable a manner that Cousin Lavinia in self-defence must have asserted herself, if Beatrix had not at once commenced a series of interesting anecdotes of life in Granada, where so much of her girlhood had been passed.
In the drawing-room it was the same thing. Beatrix was the sunshine, so to speak, of the small party assembled there, and Nellie its wet blanket.
Beatrix seated herself at the piano, and in her beautiful contralto voice sang song after song of the sunny South. Piers turned over her music, and in the pauses between each song they engaged in low-voiced, confidential talk.
Nellie walked away to the window, and, drawing up the blind, stood looking out on the snowy landscape, rendered still more white and glistening by a full moon on high. It was like a little bit of fairyland. One could fancy that all sorts of elves and gnomes were lurking beneath the trees and shrubs, bowed down into a variety of fantastic shapes by the snow, and that by-and-by would emerge a weird company and make for the clear surface of the pond in the near distance, there to go through their midnight gambols.
That pond started an idea to Nellie’s mind.
“I would give anything—anything,” she exclaimed, suddenly clasping her hands together ecstatically, “to go out skating by moonlight.”
“It would be heavenly,” murmured Guy, lounging in a chair at her elbow.
“Oh, delightful beyond everything!” cried Beatrix, with her fingers on a final chord. “Everybody has danced the New Year in or sung it in; but I’ve never heard of it being skated in.”
Cousin Lavinia rose with great dignity from her chair.
“It is a rule in this house,” she said, bringing out her words with great asperity, “that every light should be out by eleven.”
“Except Cousin John’s,” murmured Beatrix.
Cousin Lavinia turned upon her. “I have done my duty in this house, I hope,” she said, her dignity increasing upon her. “It is not part of my duty to enter Cousin John’s study and extinguish his lamp. It is, however, part of my duty to maintain order and propriety in the house, and, with my permission, no one” (looking at Nellie now) “shall go careering about the grounds in the dead of night.”
After that nothing more was said about moonlight skating. The party broke up early that night. Beatrix was the first to leave the drawing-room. There seemed a good deal of subdued talk between her and Piers before she went, and Nellie thought she saw Beatrix scribbling something on a scrap of paper. But she could not be sure, for she turned her back angrily on them, and did not even reply to Beatrix’s cheery “Good night, pussy.”
Piers departed within five minutes of Beatrix. The drawing-room led into the library, and people generally went out of the room that way. Nellie retarded her departure for a few moments, for she could hear Piers at one of the writing-tables in the library, and it occurred to her that there was a letter she wished to direct, and put into the letter-box before she went up to bed. In the old days the two could have sat quite comfortably at one writing-table, now a dinner-table would not have kept them far enough apart. Nellie waited till she heard Piers pass out of the library. Then she went in, took up the pen he had just laid down, and began to address her letter. As she did so, a quarter-sheet of notepaper, lying on the floor, caught her eye. Prompted by instinctive, rather than intentional curiosity, she picked it up and read just these three words inscribed on it in pencil, in a small, cramped hand, “At twelve tonight.”
Nellie stood gazing at it motionless, her thoughts all one angry flame of jealousy. This was Beatrix’s handwriting, not a doubt. She had not as yet seen Beatrix’s writing to note it, but she was sure this was here, just the nasty, cramped, sly, little hand of a person who pretended to be very frank, and yet all the time was playing a sly,
