Mr. Vanstone searched his pockets and shook his head. Though his youngest daughter might resemble him in nothing else, it was easy to see where Magdalen’s unmethodical habits came from.
“I dare say I have left it in the library, along with my other keys,” said Mr. Vanstone. “Go and look for it, my dear.”
“You really should check Magdalen,” pleaded Mrs. Vanstone, addressing her husband when her daughter had left the room. “Those habits of mimicry are growing on her; and she speaks to you with a levity which it is positively shocking to hear.”
“Exactly what I have said myself, till I am tired of repeating it,” remarked Miss Garth. “She treats Mr. Vanstone as if he was a kind of younger brother of hers.”
“You are kind to us in everything else, papa; and you make kind allowances for Magdalen’s high spirits — don’t you?” said the quiet Norah, taking her father’s part and her sister’s with so little show of resolution on the surface that few observers would have been sharp enough to detect the genuine substance beneath it.
“Thank you, my dear,” said goodnatured Mr. Vanstone. “Thank you for a very pretty speech. As for Magdalen,” he continued, addressing his wife and Miss Garth, “she’s an unbroken filly. Let her caper and kick in the paddock to her heart’s content. Time enough to break her to harness when she gets a little older.”
The door opened, and Magdalen returned with the key. She unlocked the postbag at the sideboard and poured out the letters in a heap. Sorting them gayly in less than a minute, she approached the breakfast-table with both hands full, and delivered the letters all round with the business-like rapidity of a London postman.
“Two for Norah,” she announced, beginning with her sister. “Three for Miss Garth. None for mamma. One for me. And the other six all for papa. You lazy old darling, you hate answering letters, don’t you?” pursued Magdalen, dropping the postman’s character and assuming the daughter’s. “How you will grumble and fidget in the study! and how you will wish there were no such things as letters in the world! and how red your nice old bald head will get at the top with the worry of writing the answers; and how many of the answers you will leave until tomorrow after all! The Bristol Theater’s open, papa,” she whispered, slyly and suddenly, in her father’s ear; “I saw it in the newspaper when I went to the library to get the key. Let’s go tomorrow night!”
While his daughter was chattering, Mr. Vanstone was mechanically sorting his letters. He turned over the first four in succession and looked carelessly at the addresses. When he came to the fifth his attention, which had hitherto wandered toward Magdalen, suddenly became fixed on the postmark of the letter.
Stooping over him, with her head on his shoulder, Magdalen could see the postmark as plainly as her father saw it — NEW ORLEANS.
“An American letter, papa!” she said. “Who do you know at New Orleans?”
Mrs. Vanstone started, and looked eagerly at her husband the moment Magdalen spoke those words.
Mr. Vanstone said nothing. He quietly removed his daughter’s arm from his neck, as if he wished to be free from all interruption. She returned, accordingly, to her place at the breakfast-table. Her father, with the letter in his hand, waited a little before he opened it; her mother looking at him, the while, with an eager, expectant attention which attracted Miss Garth’s notice, and Norah’s, as well as Magdalen’s.
After a minute or more of hesitation Mr. Vanstone opened the letter.
His face changed colour the instant he read the first lines; his cheeks fading to a dull, yellow-brown hue, which would have been ashy paleness in a less florid man; and his expression becoming saddened and overclouded in a moment. Norah and Magdalen, watching anxiously, saw nothing but the change that passed over their father. Miss Garth alone observed the effect which that change produced on the attentive mistress of the house.
It was not the effect which she, or any one, could have anticipated. Mrs. Vanstone looked excited rather than alarmed. A faint flush rose on her cheeks — her eyes brightened — she stirred the tea round and round in her cup in a restless, impatient manner which was not natural to her.
Magdalen, in her capacity of spoiled child, was, as usual, the first to break the silence.
“What is the matter, papa?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Mr. Vanstone, sharply, without looking up at her.
“I’m sure there must be something,” persisted Magdalen. “I’m sure there is bad news, papa, in that American letter.”
“There is nothing in the letter that concerns you,” said Mr. Vanstone.
It was the first direct rebuff that Magdalen had ever received from her father. She looked at him with an incredulous surprise, which would have been irresistibly absurd under less serious circumstances.
Nothing more was said. For the first time, perhaps, in their lives, the family sat round the breakfast-table in painful silence. Mr. Vanstone’s hearty morning appetite, like his hearty morning spirits, was gone. He absently broke off some morsels of dry toast from the rack near him, absently finished his first cup of tea — then asked for a second, which he left before him untouched.
“Norah,” he said, after an interval, “you needn’t wait for me. Magdalen, my dear, you can go when you like.”
His daughters rose immediately; and Miss Garth considerately followed their example. When an easy-tempered man does assert himself in his family, the rarity of the demonstration invariably has its effect; and the will of that easy-tempered man is Law.
“What can have happened?” whispered Norah, as they closed the breakfast-room door and crossed the hall.
“What does papa mean by being cross with Me?” exclaimed Magdalen, chafing under a sense of her own injuries.
“May I ask — what right you had to pry into your father’s private affairs?” retorted Miss Garth.
“Right?” repeated Magdalen. “I have no secrets from papa — what business has papa to have secrets from me! I consider myself insulted.”
“If you considered yourself properly reproved for not minding your own business,” said the plain-spoken Miss Garth, “you would be a trifle nearer the truth. Ah! you are like all the rest of the girls in the present day. Not one in a hundred of you knows which end of her’s uppermost.”
The three ladies entered the morning-room; and Magdalen acknowledged Miss Garth’s reproof by banging the door.
Half an hour passed, and neither Mr. Vanstone nor his wife left the breakfast-room. The servant, ignorant of what had happened, went in to clear the table — found his master and mistress seated close together in deep consultation — and immediately went out again. Another quarter of an hour elapsed before the breakfast-room door was opened, and the private conference of the husband and wife came to an end.
“I hear mamma in the hall,” said Norah. “Perhaps she is coming to tell us something.”
Mrs. Vanstone entered the morning-room as her daughter spoke. The colour was deeper on her cheeks, and the brightness of half-dried tears glistened in her eyes; her step was more hasty, all her movements were quicker than usual.
“I bring news, my dears, which will surprise you,” she said, addressing her daughters. “Your father and I are going to London tomorrow.”
Magdalen caught her mother by the arm in speechless astonishment. Miss Garth dropped her work on her lap; even the sedate Norah started to her feet, and amazedly repeated the words, “Going to London!”
“Without us?” added Magdalen.
“Your father and I are going alone,” said Mrs. Vanstone. “Perhaps, for as long as three weeks — but not longer. We are