That Stick ...

He was greatly admired for his utter impatience of commiseration, but there was no doubt that the disappointment was far greater to his mother and Ida than to himself.  He cared little for what did not make any actual difference to his present life, whereas to them the glory and honour of his heirship and the future hopes were everything—and Constance’s manifest delight in the joy of her uncle and aunt, and her girlish interest in the baby, were to their eyes unfeeling folly, if not absolute unkindness to her brother.

‘Dear little baby, indeed!’ said Ida scornfully.  ‘Nasty little wretch, I say.  One good thing is, up in that cold place all this time he’s sure not to live.’

Herbert whistled.  ‘That’s coming it rather strong.’  And Constance, with tears starting to her eyes, said, ‘For shame, Ida, how can you be so wicked!  Think of Uncle Frank and Aunt Mary!’

‘I believe you care for them more than for your own flesh and blood!’ exclaimed her mother.

‘Well, and haven’t they done a sight deal more for her?’ said Herbert.

‘You turning on me too, you ungrateful boy!’ cried Mrs. Morton.

Herbert laughed.

‘If it comes to gratitude,’ he said, and looked significantly at the decorations.

‘And what is it but the due to his brother’s widow?’ said Mrs. Morton.  ‘Just a pittance, and you may depend that will be cut down on some pretext now!’

p. 151‘I should think so, if they heard Ida’s tongue!’ said Herbert.

‘And Constance there is spitefulness enough to go and tell them—favourite as she is!’ said Ida.

‘I should think not!’ said Constance indignantly.  ‘As if I would do such a mean thing!’

‘Come, come, Ida,’ said her mother, ‘your sister knows better than that.  It’s not the way when she is only just come home, so grown too and improved, “quite the lady.”‘

Mrs. Morton had a mother’s heart for Constance, though only in the third degree, and was really gratified to see her progress.  She had turned up her pretty brown hair, and the last year had made her much less of a child in appearance; her features were of delicate mould, she had dark eyes, and a sweet mouth, with a rose-blush complexion, and was pleasing to look on, though, in her mother’s eyes, no rival to the thin, rather sharply-defined features, bright eyes, and pink-and-white complexion that made Ida the belle of a certain set at Westhaven.  The party were more amicable over the dinner-table—for dinner it was called, as an assertion of gentility.

‘Are you allowed to dine late,’ asked Ida patronisingly of her sister, ‘when you are not at school?

‘Lady Adela dines early,’ said Constance.

‘Oh, for your sake, I suppose?’

‘Always, I believe,’ said Constance.

‘Yes, always,’ said Herbert.  ‘Fine people needn’t ask what’s genteel, you see, Ida.’

That was almost the only breeze, and after dinner Herbert rushed out for a smell of sea, p. 152interspersed with pipe, and to ‘look up the inevitable old Jack.’

Constance was then subjected to a cross-examination on all the circumstances of the detention at Ratzes, and all she had heard or ought to have heard about the arrival of the unwelcome little Michael, while her mother and sister drew their own inferences.

‘Really,’ said Ida at last, ‘it is just like a thing in a book.’

Constance was surprised.

‘Because it was such a happy surprise for them,’ she added hastily.

‘No, nonsense, child, but it is just what they always do when they want a supposititious heir.’

‘Ida, how can you say such things?’

‘But it is, Conny!  There was the wicked Sir Ronald Macronald.  He took his wife away to Belgrade, right in the Ukraine mountains, and it—’

‘Belgrade is in Hungary, and the Cossacks live in the Ukraine in Russia,’ suggested Constance.

‘Oh, never mind your school-girl geography, it was Bel something, an out-of-the-way place in the mountains anyway, and there he pretended she had a child, just out of malice to the right heiress, that lovely Lilian, and he got killed by a stag, and then she confessed on her death-bed.  I declare it is just like—’

‘My dear, don’t talk in that way, your sister is quite shocked.  Your uncle never would—’

‘Bless me, ma, I was only in fun.  I could tell you ever so many stories like that.  There’s Broughton’s, on the table there.  I knew from the p. 153first it was an impostor, and the old nurse dressed like a nun was his mother.’

‘I believe you always know the end before you are half through the first volume,’ said her mother admiringly; ‘but of course it is all right, only it is a terrible disappointment and misfortune for us, and not to be looked for after all these years.’

The last three Christmastides had been spent at Northmoor, where it had been needful to conform to the habits of the household, which impressed Ida and her mother as grand and conferring distinction, but decidedly dull and religious.