“Nought looks the same save the nest we made,” said Roma, softly. “Don’t laugh at me, Mr Thurston – fray don’t,” she went on, hurriedly. “I am not the least sentimental. I never look at poetry, only sometimes little rubbishy bits I learnt as a child come into my head and ‘give me feelings,’ as I once heard a little girl say.”
“Then they are poetry to you,” said her companion, kindly – earnestly almost, and a look came into his eyes which she had not seen in them before – a look which gave Roma a silly passing feeling of envy of the woman on whom some day they might rest with an intensity of that gaze. “Let me see,” he went on, “I think I too remember learning those verses as a child —
“Gone are the heads of the silvery hair.
And the young that were have a brow of care.
“Isn’t that it? I don’t think I am likely to find those changes exactly. Perhaps, after all, what I most dread is not actual change – not change from what really was– but change from what I have gone on imagining to myself – hoping for, dreaming of. Ah, it would be very hard to bear!”
He seemed almost to have forgotten he was speaking aloud. Roma felt interested, though she could not altogether follow his train of thought.
“It looks rather like a case of the girl he left behind,” she said to herself, with her usual habit of making fun of anything approaching “sentiment,” and she thought it would be as well to give the conversation a turn. “Are you going to live at Wareborough now?” she inquired, “I wonder if you know my friends there!”
Here broke in the voice of Miss Bessie Montmorris, whose ears, from her seat on Mr Thurston’s other side, had caught the word Wareborough. “We had a governess once who afterwards went to live at Wareborough,” she remarked, with amusing irrelevancy; the truth was she thought Miss Eyrecourt had had quite her share of the good-looking stranger’s attention, and caught at the first straw to draw it to herself. “It was some years ago,” she continued.
“So I should suppose,” muttered Roma, who was not altogether pleased at Miss Bessie’s interruption, and felt delighted to see by a slight contraction of the muscles of Mr Thurston’s mouth, that her murmur had reached his ears.
“Her name,” went on Miss Bessie, calmly, “was Bérard – Mademoiselle Bérard. She was French. I remember all about her going to live at Wareborough, for she used to write to us regularly. I can tell you the name of the family she went to. She stayed there some years. I have the name and address written down somewhere, so I am sure I am right,” as if her hearers had been eagerly beseeching her for accurate information on the subject – “it was Laurence. There were two little girls, and no mother.”
Confirmed story-tellers, it is said, “sometimes speak the truth by mistake.” In the same way, exceedingly silly people do sometimes by a happy chance succeed in producing a sensation. Miss Bessie Montmorris, had she been gifted with clairvoyance, could not have hit upon a name as certain to affect vividly both her hearers as the one that had just passed her lips. For the interest of the morning’s conversation was still strong upon Roma, and Mr Thurston, for reasons best known to himself, was not in a frame of mind to hear quite unmoved this unexpected mention of his friends by name.
Both started, then each looked surprised at the other for doing so. Mr Thurston was the first to speak – it seemed to Miss Eyrecourt, that he was eager to conceal the slight momentary disturbance of his equilibrium. His words were addressed to Miss Bessie, but Roma felt that she was intended to listen to them.
“I remember your friend, Mademoiselle Bérard, very well, Miss Montmorris,” he said. “And an excellent creature she is. The Laurences are old friends of mine. I thought them most fortunate in meeting with Mademoiselle Bérard, for of course motherless girls require extra care. Do you happen to know where she is now? Somewhere in the South of France was her home, I think, was it not?”
He engaged Miss Bessie in recalling how long it was since she had heard from “Mademoiselle,” what she had then said as to her plans, etc, and rather mischievously muddled the poor thing with questions exposing the extremely limited state of her acquaintance with French geography. So that in a few minutes Miss Bessie felt not indisposed to retire from the field and gave, subsequently, in the family council, as her opinion of “Christy’s friend,” that he was a “heavy, prosy young man, quite without conversation.”
When she was safely off his hands, engaged in an amicable sisterly discussion with Mrs Christian across the table as to the precise hour at which Mr Beamish, the family apothecary, had called this morning, and about what o’clock to-morrow it was thought probable the last eye-tooth would appear, Mr Thurston returned to Roma.
“After all,” he said, smiling. “I quite agree with you, the world is very small.” Roma laughed. “I certainly did not expect to have an instance of the truth of my quotation so very soon,” she said. “I met the Laurences when I was staying at Wareborough just now. I see you know them too.”
“Very well indeed,” he replied. “You will not wonder so much at my evident interest in what Miss Montmorris was talking about when I tell you that one of the Miss Laurences is engaged to be married to my brother – my only brother. He is a curate at Wareborough. Perhaps you met him too?”
Roma’s face expressed extreme surprise, and to any one well enough acquainted with her to read a little below the surface, it would have been plain, that at first, the surprise was not of a disagreeable kind.
“Miss Laurence engaged to your brother?” she repeated, without noticing the latter part of Mr Thurston’s speech. “How very strange! Somehow I feel as if I could hardly believe it – having seen her so lately, only the – night before last – ” she hesitated. After all, she must have been completely mistaken in her estimate of that girl’s character. She must be a flirt indeed, and not a very desirable sort of a flirt either, even according to Roma’s not very stringent notions on these subjects, to have looked up into any man’s face, be he never so charming, with those bright innocent smiles of hers, in the sort of way she had looked up into Beauchamp’s, knowing herself to be engaged to another. And a clergyman, too! Somehow the latter fact seemed to Roma to aggravate the unbecomingness of her dancing half the evening with him, and the still more marked “sitting out,” all of which Roma had explained by her extreme inexperience and youth, finding any other theory untenable in the presence of that buoyant girlish bearing, those lovely, honest, unsuspicious eyes. “I think I had fallen a little in love with her myself,” thought Roma. “But if she is really engaged, it is a great relief on Beauchamp’s account, and indirectly on my own. For Gertrude may be as incredulous as she likes – it is not often he will come across a girl like that, and more than half in love with him already, as, engaged or not engaged, I am certain she is.”
But when she had reached this point in her meditations, she became aware that Mr Thurston was looking at her in some perplexity, waiting for her to finish her uncompleted sentence. How could she finish it? She could not tell him what she was thinking, that his brother was very much to be pitied, and that Miss Laurence was by no means “what she seemed,” but that on all accounts, her own and Captain Chancellor’s included, the sooner they were married the better. “What a complication,” thought Roma, “and how odd that this complete stranger, this Mr Thurston, or rather his brother, should be mixed up in my private affairs in this roundabout way.” She felt a silly sort of inclination to burst out laughing: it made her feel nervous to see him sitting there looking at her, waiting for her to speak. Why did he want so much to hear what she had to say? She could not understand the look of restrained eagerness in her face. She must say something.
“It is very absurd of me to feel as if Miss Laurence could not be engaged without its having been formally announced to me,” she began. “I only saw her a few times, but I think she impressed me unusually. She is so very pretty, so – I don’t know what to call it – like a bunch of wild flowers; a perfect embodiment of brightness and young-ness, and everything sweet and fresh and – ingenuous;” the last word came with a little halt. It