Part 26

“I think it better, auntie,” said Hope, “that Philip should not stay here longer at present. You can truly say that the house is full, and--”

“I have just had a note from him,” said Aunt Jane severely. “He has gone to lodge at the hotel. What next?”

“Aunt Jane,” said Hope, looking her full in the face, “I have not the slightest idea what to do next.”

(“The next thing for me,” thought her aunt, “is to have a little plain speech with that misguided child upstairs.”)

“I can see no way out,” pursued Hope.

“Darling!” said Aunt Jane, with a voice full of womanly sweetness, “there is always a way out, or else the world would have stopped long ago. Perhaps it would have been better if it had stopped, but you see it has not. All we can do is, to live on and try our best.”

She bade Hope leave Emilia to her, and furthermore stipulated that Hope should go to her pupils as usual, that afternoon, as it was their last lesson. The young girl shrank from the effort, but the elder lady was inflexible. She had her own purpose in it. Hope once out of the way, Aunt Jane could deal with Emilia.

No human being, when met face to face with Aunt Jane, had ever failed to yield up to her the whole truth she sought. Emilia was on that day no exception. She was prostrate, languid, humble, denied nothing, was ready to concede every point but one. Never, while she lived, would she dwell beneath John Lambert’s roof again. She had left it impulsively, she admitted, scarce knowing what she did. But she would never return there to live. She would go once more and see that all was in order for Mr. Lambert, both in the house and on board the yacht, where they were to have taken up their abode for a time. There were new servants in the house, a new captain on the yacht; she would trust Mr. Lambert’s comfort to none of them; she would do her full duty. Duty! the more utterly she felt herself to be gliding away from him forever, the more pains she was ready to lavish in doing these nothings well. About every insignificant article he owned she seemed to feel the most scrupulous and wife-like responsibility; while she yet knew that all she had was to him nothing, compared with the possession of herself; and it was the thought of this last ownership that drove her to despair.

Sweet and plaintive as the child’s face was, it had a glimmer of wildness and a hunted look, that baffled Aunt Jane a little, and compelled her to temporize. She consented that Emilia should go to her own house, on condition that she would not see Philip,--which was readily and even eagerly promised,--and that Hope should spend the night with Emilia, which proposal was ardently accepted.

It occurred to Aunt Jane that nothing better could happen than for John Lambert, on returning, to find his wife at home; and to secure this result, if possible, she telegraphed to him to come at once.

Meantime Hope gave her inevitable music-lesson, so absorbed in her own thoughts that it was all as mechanical as the metronome. As she came out upon the Avenue for the walk home, she saw a group of people from a gardener’s house, who had collected beside a muddy crossing, where a team of cart-horses had refused to stir. Presently they sprang forward with a great jerk, and a little Irish child was thrown beneath the wheel. Hope sprang forward to grasp the child, and the wheel struck her also; but she escaped with a dress torn and smeared, while the cart passed over the little girl’s arm, breaking it in two places. She screamed and then grew faint, as Hope lifted her. The mother received the burden with a wail of anguish; the other Irishwomen pressed around her with the dense and suffocating sympathy of their nation. Hope bade one and another run for a physician, but nobody stirred. There was no surgical aid within a mile or more. Hope looked round in despair, then glanced at her own disordered garments.

“As sure as you live!” shouted a well-known voice from a carriage which had stopped behind them. “If that isn’t Hope what’s-her-name, wish I may never! Here’s a lark! Let me come there!” And the speaker pushed through the crowd.

“Miss Ingleside,” said Hope, decisively, “this child’s arm is broken. There is nobody to go for a physician. Except for the condition I am in, I would ask you to take me there at once in your carriage; but as it is--”

“As it is, I must ask you, hey?” said Blanche, finishing the sentence. “Of course. No mistake. Sans dire. Jones, junior, this lady will join us. Don’t look so scared, man. Are you anxious about your cushions or your reputation?”

The youth simpered and disclaimed.

“Jump in, then, Miss Maxwell. Never mind the expense. It’s only the family carriage;--surname and arms of Jones. Lucky there are no parents to the fore. Put my shawl over you, so.”

“O Blanche!” said Hope, “what injustice--”

“I’ve done myself?” said the volatile damsel. “Not a doubt of it. That’s my style, you know. But I have some sense; I know who’s who. Now, Jones, junior, make your man handle the ribbons. I’ve always had a grudge against that ordinance about fast driving, and now’s our chance.”

And the sacred “ordinance,” with all other proprieties, was left in ruins that day. They tore along the Avenue with unexplained and most inexplicable speed, Hope being concealed by riding backward, and by a large shawl, and Blanche and her admirer receiving the full indignation of every chaste and venerable eye. Those who had tolerated all this girl’s previous improprieties were obliged to admit that the line must be drawn somewhere. She at once lost several good invitations and a matrimonial offer, since Jones, junior, was swept away by his parents to be wedded without delay to a consumptive heiress who had long pined for his whiskers; and Count Posen, in his Souvenirs, was severer on Blanche’s one good deed than on the worst of her follies.

A few years after, when Blanche, then the fearless wife of a regular-army officer, was helping Hope in the hospitals at Norfolk, she would stop to shout with delight over the reminiscence of that stately Jones equipage in mad career, amid the barking of dogs and the groaning of dowagers. “After all, Hope,” she would say, “the fastest thing I ever did was under your orders.”

XXI. A STORM.

THE members of the household were all at the window about noon, next day, watching the rise of a storm. A murky wing of cloud, shaped like a hawk’s, hung over the low western hills across the bay. Then the hawk became an eagle, and the eagle a gigantic phantom, that hovered over half the visible sky. Beneath it, a little scud of vapor, moved by some cross-current of air, raced rapidly against the wind, just above the horizon, like smoke from a battle-field.

As the cloud ascended, the water grew rapidly blacker, and in half an hour broke into jets of white foam, all over its surface, with an angry look. Meantime a white film of fog spread down the bay from the northward. The wind hauled from southwest to northwest, so suddenly and strongly that all the anchored boats seemed to have swung round instantaneously, without visible process. The instant the wind shifted, the rain broke forth, filling the air in a moment with its volume, and cutting so sharply that it seemed like hail, though no hailstones reached the ground. At the same time there rose upon the water a dense white film, which seemed to grow together from a hundred different directions, and was made partly of rain, and partly of the blown edges of the spray. There was but a glimpse of this; for in a few moments it was impossible to see two rods; but when the first gust was over, the water showed itself again, the jets of spray all beaten down, and regular waves, of dull lead-color, breaking higher on the shore. All the depth of blackness had left the sky, and there remained only an obscure and ominous gray, through which the lightning flashed white, not red. Boats came driving in from the mouth of the bay with a rag of sail up; the men got them moored with difficulty, and when they sculled ashore in the skiffs, a dozen comrades stood ready to grasp and haul them in. Others launched skiffs in sheltered places, and pulled out bareheaded to bail out their fishing-boats and keep them from swamping at their moorings.

The shore was thronged with men in oilskin clothes and by women with shawls over their heads. Aunt Jane, who always felt responsible for whatever went on in the elements, sat in-doors with one lid closed, wincing at every flash, and watching the universe with the air of a coachman guiding six wild horses.

Just after the storm had passed its height, two veritable wild horses were reined up at the door, and Philip burst in, his usual self-composure gone.

“Emilia is out sailing!” he exclaimed,--“alone with Lambert’s boatman, in this gale. They say she was bound for Narragansett.”

“Impossible!” cried Hope, turning pale. “I left her not three hours ago.” Then she remembered that Emilia had spoken of going on board the yacht, to superintend some arrangements, but had said no more about it, when she opposed it.

“Harry!” said Aunt Jane, quickly, from her chair by the window, “see that fisherman. He has just come ashore and is telling something. Ask him.”