Margaret Oliphant - A Widow's Tale, and Other Stories

Thus it will be seen that these two persons left chaos and untold confusion behind them when they went away. Mrs Brunton looked very wistfully at her cousins when she took leave of them. She had the air of wishing to ask their pardon. But then it would have been an offence, an insult, to ask pardon – for what? for taking May's lover from her, for being preferred to May! Better to bear the stain of blackest guilt, to submit to an everlasting breach, than to insult May by suggesting that. And yet Nelly was very sorry and ashamed of herself, though supported underneath these two sentiments by a certain softening of complacence and gratified vanity, which she would not have acknowledged for the world. That she, poor Jack's widow, hardly out of her weeds (indeed she left Bampton-Leigh in the same crape bonnet, with the long veil, in which she had arrived), should have interfered with May's love affair, should have taken her place, and carried on something which she could not to herself deny to be very like a flirtation with her young cousin's admirer! How terrible, how treacherous, how shocking it was! At the bottom of her heart there remained that dreadful little guilty sense that there was pleasure in it; that to be still capable, amid all her disadvantages, of touching a man's heart, was something not disagreeable: but this she did not own to herself. She was very tender to May all that last morning, praising her and flattering her with the intention of making up a little for her fault; and she looked very wistfully in Julia's face, and would fain, very fain, have said something. But Miss Bampton was much on her dignity, and had a look which forbade all such effusions. "I hope you will like your new house," Miss Bampton said. "For my part, I think you would have been a great deal better in the country – not so near town."

"But it is quite in the country," said Nelly.

"Nothing which is within ten minutes of town by the railway can be called the country," said Julia, with great severity. "I hope it may be good for the children – of course it will be much livelier for yourself."

"Indeed, I don't see how it can be very lively for myself," cried Nelly, feeling this attack upon her. "I know nobody but the clergyman's family – and the society is not usually very lively in such places – if I wished for lively society," she added in an equally serious tone.

"Oh, my dear Nelly, you will wish for it!" cried her cousin. "It is not to be expected that you should shut yourself up for ever at your age. And then it will be so handy for town – you will have all your friends coming to see you from town."

And a look passed between these ladies which did away with the recollection of many years of love and friendship – a look which said on one side – You know that you have asked him to come to see you! – and on the other with a flash. Well! and what then! – notwithstanding that Julia's heart was full of charity, and Nelly's of compunction. But Mrs Brunton was stirred up to self-defence, and Miss Bampton had in her all the fury of the outraged dove.

"Well! she is gone," said Miss Bampton, coming back to May who stood at the window of the hall looking out very gravely at her cousin's departure. Julia did not recollect now how angry she had been with May for not driving to the station to meet Mrs Brunton. But neither of them thought of accompanying her when she went away. May stood at the hall window while Julia went out to the door, and they both looked after the disappearing carriage with a seriousness that was alarming to see. It might have been a funeral after which they were gazing, instead of Nelly in her mourning bonnet and with all her little boxes. "Well!" said Miss Bampton, "she is gone at last, and I am sure I am very glad. I never thought Nelly Bampton could have changed so in half a dozen years."

"Has she changed?" said May, with a quiet air of indifference, turning from the window. "And I don't see why you should say 'at last.' For, after all, she has only been a fortnight here."

"A fortnight too long," Miss Bampton said.

"You are such a very strange person, Julia, one never understands you," said her young sister. "Why in the name of wonder did you ask Nelly to come here, if she has been a fortnight too long? What absurdity that is! She thinks she had a most successful visit, I feel sure."

"If she calls that success!"

"What?" said May, looking fiercely into Miss Bampton's eyes.

But that was what the poor mother-sister dared not to say. If she had uttered the name of Percy Fitzroy, May would have turned upon her, with what angry disdain! "Mr Fitzroy! what could he possibly have to do with it?" May would have said. Miss Bampton did not venture to bring upon herself such a response as that.

"Oh, nothing!" she said. "I am always making mistakes. Nelly is – not at all what she used to be, dear. Matrimony is not good for some people, and ladies in India get dreadfully spoiled sometimes. They are accustomed to so much attention. There are not so many of them there as here, and they are never contented if they have not every man they see at their feet."

"I did not remark that in Nelly," said May, who was very pensive, and so wounded and sore in her poor little heart that it did her good to be disagreeable to Julia. "There was Bertie Harcourt, for instance, whom she took no notice of – and who, I am sure, was not at her feet."

"Ah, Bertie Harcourt!" cried Miss Bampton, "He" – she paused on the pronoun for greater emphasis, speaking with fervour – "He – is a heart of gold."

"Is he?" said May, indifferently; "you seem to imply that others are different – and indeed I think that it would be much more comfortable to have a heart like other people."

"Oh, May!"

"I wish you would stop all that," cried May, angrily; "when you get into one of your moods, Julia, you are intolerable. I wish you would let Nelly Brunton alone: I don't see anything remarkable about her," the girl said with a toss of her head, walking back into the drawing-room, where she flung the piano open, and began to sing in the most defiant manner. It was a wet day, the lawn swept by a white blast of rain, and all the trees cowering piteously as if running in for shelter. Poor Miss Bampton sat down in a deep chair to hide herself, feeling as if she had been the occasion of all that had happened, and that it was natural she should suffer accordingly. And when presently May ran singing up-stairs, and the door of her room was heard to shut upon her, poor Julia did not follow. She dared not follow; for the first time in her life poor little May, now finding out what it was to be grown up and a woman, had to bear her moment of bitterness by herself. I need not say that Julia cried silently all the time, sunk in the depths of the big chair, so that Mr Bampton when he came in, in quest of tea or something to break the dulness of the afternoon, saw nobody in the room, and went out again calling indignantly for Ju and Maysey, and demanding of the butler in angry tones whether this afternoon of all others, when no one could go out or do anything to amuse oneself, there was to be no tea.

Mrs Brunton was not, I think, at all comfortable in her mind as she left her cousin's house. It had been in some sort a trial visit. She had not gone anywhere, or seen anybody, except aunts and other uninteresting relations, since she had returned home. She had paid a long visit to her husband's family, with her children, where everything of course was mourning and seclusion, and where she was made more conscious of her widowhood than of any other condition in her life; then she had been in the country with her own people, where everything was subdued in order to be suitable for poor Nelly; and then she had been involved in the trouble of settling, finding a little house, which was nice and not too dear, which would be good for the children, and quiet, and yet sufficiently in the way to be accessible to those who were most interested in her. This had cost a great deal of trouble and kept her in full occupation, so that it was only when she had settled down, furnished the house, and arranged everything, and got her new address neatly printed upon her writing paper and her visiting cards (if she ever had any need for the latter, which she doubted), that she had consented to go for a fortnight to Bampton-Leigh, leaving the children under charge of their excellent nurse, who had assisted at their birth and was devoted to them – for her uncle Bampton could not bear children in the house. She had explained to her only friend at Haven Green, the clergyman's wife, and still more gravely she had explained to herself, that this was in every way a trial visit to see whether she could bear society again. Society, she said to herself, without Jack! without the consideration which is accorded to a woman who has her husband behind her. She did not know how it looked to a widow, who would naturally be shut out from some things, who might perhaps be pushed aside among the dowagers, who certainly would see everything from a different point of view. Should she be able to bear it?