Lady Ushant at Bragton
On the Sunday Larry came into Dillsborough and had
“his gossip with the girls” according
to order;—but it was not very successful.
Mrs. Masters who opened the door for him instructed
him in a special whisper “to talk away just
as though he did not care a fig for Mary.”
He made the attempt manfully,—but with slight
effect. His love was too genuine, too absorbing,
to leave with him the power which Mrs. Masters assumed
him to have when she gave him such advice. A
man cannot walk when he has broken his ankle-bone,
let him be ever so brave in the attempt. Larry’s
heart was so weighed that he could not hide the weight.
Dolly and Kate had also received hints and struggled
hard to be merry. In the afternoon a walk was
suggested, and Mary complied; but when an attempt was
made by the younger girls to leave the lover and Mary
together, she resented it by clinging closely to Dolly;—and
then all Larry’s courage deserted him.
Very little good was done on the occasion by Mrs.
Masters’ manoeuvres.
On the Monday morning, in compliance with a request
made by Lady Ushant, Mary walked over to Bragton to
see her old friend. Mrs. Masters had declared
the request to be very unreasonable. “Who
is to walk five miles and back to see an old woman
like that?” To this Mary had replied that the
distance across the fields to Bragton was only four
miles and that she had often walked it with her sisters
for the very pleasure of the walk. “Not
in weather like this,” said Mrs. Masters.
But the day was well enough. Roads in February
are often a little wet, but there was no rain falling.
“I say it’s unreasonable,” said
Mrs. Masters. “If she can’t send a
carriage she oughtn’t to expect it.”
This coming from Mrs. Masters, whose great doctrine
it was that young women ought not to be afraid of work,
was so clearly the effect of sheer opposition that
Mary disdained to answer it. Then she was accused
of treating her stepmother with contempt.
She did walk to Bragton, taking the path by the fields
and over the bridge, and loitering for a few minutes
as she leant upon the rail. It was there and
there only that she had seen together the two men
who between them seemed to cloud all her life,—the
man whom she loved and the man who loved her.
She knew now,—she thought that she knew
quite well,—that her feelings for Reginald
Morton were of such a nature that she could not possibly
become the wife of any one else. But had she
not seen him for those few minutes on this spot, had
he not fired her imagination by telling her of his
desire to go back with her over the sites which they
had seen together when she was a child, she would
not, she thought, have been driven to make to herself
so grievous a confession. In that case it might
have been that she would have brought herself to give
her hand to the suitor of whom all her friends approved.
