That Stick ...

One by one the girls were summoned for their prizes, the little ones first.  Lord Northmoor had not the gift of inventing a pretty speech for each, he could do no more than smile as he presented the p. 119book, and read its name; but the smile was a very decided one when, in the class next to the highest, three out of the seven prizes were awarded to Constance Elizabeth Morton, and it might be a question which had the redder cheeks, the uncle or the niece, as he handed them to her.  It was one of the few happinesses that he had derived from his brother’s family!

After such achievements on Constance’s part, it was impossible to withhold—as they drove back to Northmoor—the proposal to take her with them, and the effect was magical.  Constance opened her eyes, bounded up, as if she were going to fly out of the carriage, and then launched herself, first on her uncle, then on her aunt, for an ecstatic kiss.

‘Take care, take care, we shall have the servants thinking you a little lunatic!’

‘I am almost!  Oh, I am so glad!  To be with you and Aunt Mary all the holidays!  That would be enough!  But to go and see all the places,’ she added, somehow perceiving that the desire to escape from home was, at least ought not to be approved of, and yet there was some exultation, when she hazarded a supposition that there was no time to go home.

p. 120CHAPTER XVIII

DESDICHADO

Home—that is to say, Westhaven—was in some commotion when Herbert came back and grimly growled out his intelligence as to his own personal affairs.  Mrs. Morton had been already apprized, in one of Lord Northmoor’s well-considered letters, of his intentions of removing his nephew to a tutor more calculated to prepare for the army, and she had accepted this as promotion such as was his due.  However, when the pride of her heart, the tall gentlemanly son, made his appearance in a savage mood, her feelings were all on the other side, and those of Ida exaggerated hers.

‘So I’m to go to some disgusting hole where they grind the fellows no end,’ was Herbert’s account of the matter.

‘But surely with your connection there’s no need for grinding?’ said his mother.

Herbert laughed, ‘Much you know about it!  Nobody cares a rap for connections nowadays, even if old Frank were a connection to do a man any good.’

‘But you’ll not go and study hard and hurt p. 121yourself, my dear,’ said his mother, though Herbert’s looks by no means suggested any such danger, while Ida added, ‘It is not as if he had nothing else to look to, you know.  He can’t keep you out of the peerage.’

‘Can’t he then?  Why, he can and will too, for thirty or forty years more at least.’

‘I thought his health was failing,’ said Ida, putting into words a hope her mother had a little too much sense of propriety to utter.

‘Bosh, it’s only neuralgia, just because he is such a stick he can’t take things easy, and lark about and do every one’s work—he hasn’t the least notion what a gentleman ought to do.’

‘It is bred in the bone,’ said his mother; ‘he always was a shabby poor creature!  I always said he would not know how to spend his money.’

‘He is a regular screw!’ responded Herbert.  ‘What do you think now!  He was in no end of a rage with me just because I went with some of the other fellows to the Colbeam races; and one can’t help a bet or two, you know.  So I lost twelve pound or so, and what must he do but stop it out of my allowance two pound at a time!’

There was a regular outcry at this, and Mrs. Morton declared her poor dear boy should not suffer, but she would make it up to him, and Herbert added that ‘it had been unlucky, half of it was that they were riled with him, first because he had shot a ridiculous rook with white wings that my lady made no end of a fuss about.’

‘Ah, then it is her spite,’ said Ida.  ‘She’s a sly cat, with all her meek ways.’

p. 122Herbert was not displeased with this evening’s sympathy, as he lay outspread on the sofa, with the admiring and pitying eyes of his mother and sister upon him; but he soon began to feel—when he had had his grumble out, and could take his swing at home—that there could be too much of it.

It was all very well to ease his own mind by complaining, but when he heard of Ida announcing that he had been shamefully treated, all out of spite for killing a white rook, his sense of justice made him declare that the notion was nothing but girl’s folly, such as no person with a grain of sense could believe.