A Little Rebel by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (freenovel24 txt) 📖

going to settle me! To--to _brush my hair!_ To--make my tea. She says I'm her guardian, and insists on living with me. She doesn't understand! Hardinge," desperately, "what _am_ I to do?"

"Marry her!" suggests Hardinge, who, I regret to say is choking with laughter.

"That is a _jest!"_ says the professor haughtily. This unusual tone from the professor strikes surprise to the soul of Hardinge. He looks at him. But the professor's new humor is short-lived. He sinks upon a chair in a tired sort of way, letting his arms fall over the sides of it. As a type of utter despair he is a distinguished specimen.

"Why don't you take her home again, back to the old aunt?" says Hardinge, moved by his misery.

"I can't. She tells me it would be useless, that the house is locked up, and--and besides, Hardinge, her aunt--after _this,_ you know-- would be----"

"Naturally," says Hardinge, after which he falls back upon his cigar. "Light your pipe," says he, "and we'll think it over." The professor lights it, and both men draw nearer to each other.

"I'm afraid she won't go back to her aunt any way," says the professor, as a beginning to the "thinking it over." He pushes his glasses up to his forehead, and finally discards them altogether, flinging them on the table near.

"If she saw you now she might understand," says Hardinge--for, indeed, the professor without his glasses loses thirty per cent. of old Time.

"She wouldn't," says the professor. "And never mind that. Come back to the question. I say she will never go back to her aunt."

He looks anxiously at Hardinge. One can see that he would part with a good deal of honest coin of the realm, if his companion would only _not_ agree with him.

"It looks like it," said Hardinge, who is rather enjoying himself. "By Jove! what a thing to happen to _you,_ Curzon, of all men in the world. What are you going to do, eh?"

"It isn't so much that," says the professor faintly. "It is what is _she_ going to do?"

_"Next!"_ supplements Hardinge. "Quite so! It would be a clever fellow who would answer that, straight off. I say, Curzon, what a pretty girl she is, though. Pretty isn't the word. Lovely, I----"

The professor gets up suddenly.

"Not that," says he, raising his hand in his gentle fashion--that has now something of haste in it. "It--I--you know what I mean, Hardinge. To discuss her--herself, I mean--and here----"

"Yes. You are right," says Hardinge slowly, with, however, an irrepressible stare at the professor. It is a prolonged stare. He is very fond of Curzon, though knowing absolutely nothing about him beyond the fact that he is eminently likeable; and it now strikes him as strange that this silent, awkward, ill-dressed, clever man should be the one to teach him how to behave himself. Who _is_ Curzon? Given a better tailor, and a worse brain, he might be a reasonable-looking fellow enough, and not so old either--forty, perhaps--perhaps less. "Have you no relation to whom you could send her?" he says at length, that sudden curiosity as to who Curzon may be prompting the question. "Some old lady? An aunt, for example?"

"She doesn't seem to like aunts," says the professor, with deep dejection.

"Small blame to her," says Hardinge, smoking vigorously. _"I've_ an aunt--but 'that's another story!' Well--haven't you a cousin then?--or something?"

"I have a sister," says the professor slowly.

"Married?"

"A widow."

("Fusty old person, out somewhere in the wilds of Finchley," says Hardinge to himself. "Poor little girl--she won't fancy that either!")

"Why not send her to you sister then?" says he aloud.

"I'm not sure that she would like to have her," says the professor, with hesitation. "I confess I have been thinking it over for some days, but----"

"But perhaps the fact of your ward's being an heiress----" begins Hardinge--throwing out a suggestion as it were--but is checked by something in the professor's face.

"My sister is the Countess of Baring," says he gently.

Hardinge's first thought is that the professor has gone out of his mind, and his second that he himself has accomplished that deed. He leans across the table. Surprise has deprived him of his usual good manners.

"Lady Baring!--_your _sister!" says he.


CHAPTER IX.



"Your face, my Thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters."



"I see no reason why she shouldn't be," says the professor calmly--is there a faint suspicion of hauteur in his tone? "As we are on the subject of myself, I may as well tell you that my brother is Sir Hastings Curzon, of whom"--he turns back as if to take up some imaginary article from the floor--"you may have heard."

"Sir Hastings!" Mr. Hardinge leans back in his chair and gives way to thought. This quiet, hard-working student--this man whom he had counted as a nobody--the brother of that disreputable Hastings Curzon! "As good as got the baronetcy," says he still thinking. "At the rate Sir Hastings is going he can't possibly last for another twelvemonth, and here is this fellow living in these dismal lodgings with twenty thousand a year before his eyes. A lucky thing for him that the estates are so strictly entailed. Good heavens! to think of a man with all that almost in his grasp being _happy_ in a coat that must have been built in the Ark, and caring for nothing on earth but the intestines of frogs and such-like abominations."

"You seem surprised again," says the professor, somewhat satirically.

"I confess it," says Hardinge.

"I can't see why you should be."

_"I_ do," says Hardinge drily. "That you," slowly, _"you_ should be Sir Hastings' brother! Why----"

"No more!" interrupts the professor sharply. He lifts his hand. "Not another word. I know what you are going to say. It is one of my great troubles, that I always know what people are going to say when they mention him. Let him alone, Hardinge."

"Oh! _I'll_ let him alone," says Hardinge, with a gesture of disgust. There is a pause.

"You know my sister, then?" says the professor presently.

"Yes. She is very charming. How is it I have never seen you there?"

"At her house?"

"At her receptions?"

"I have no taste for that sort of thing, and no time. Fashionable society bores me. I go and see Gwen on off days and early hours, when I am sure that I shall find her alone. We are friends, you will understand, she and I; capital friends, though sometimes," with a sigh, "she--she seems to disapprove of my mode of living. But we get on very well on the whole. She is a very good girl," says the professor kindly, who always thinks of Lady Baring as a little girl in short frocks in her nursery--the nursery he had occupied with her.

To hear the beautiful, courted, haughty Lady Baring, who has the best of London at her feet, called "a good girl," so tickles Mr. Hardinge, that he leans back in his chair and bursts out laughing.

"Yes?" says the professor, as if asking for an explanation of the joke.

"Oh! nothing--nothing. Only--you _are_ such a queer fellow!" says Hardinge, sitting up again to look at him. "You are a _rara avis,_ do you know? No, of course you don't! You are one of the few people who don't know their own worth. I don't believe, Curzon, though I should live to be a thousand, that I shall ever look upon your like again."

"And so you laugh. Well, no doubt it is a pleasant reflection," says the professor dismally. "I begin to wish now I had never seen myself."

"Oh, come! cheer up," says Hardinge, "your pretty ward will be all right. If Lady Baring takes her in hand, she----"

"Ah! But will she?" says the professor. "Will she like Per---- Miss Wynter?"

"Sure to," said Hardinge, with quite a touch of enthusiasm. "'To see her is to love her, and love but'----"

"That is of no consequence where anyone is concerned except Lady Baring," says the professor, with a little twist in his chair, "and my sister has not seen her as yet. And besides, that is not the only question--a greater one remains."

"By Jove! you don't say so! What?" demands Mr. Hardinge, growing earnest.

"Will Miss Wynter like _her?"_ says the professor. "That is the real point."

"Oh! I see!" says Hardinge thoughtfully.

The next day, however, proves the professor's fears vain in both quarters. An early visit to Lady Baring, and an anxious appeal, brings out all that delightful woman's best qualities. One stipulation alone she makes, that she may see the young heiress before finally committing herself to chaperone her safely through the remainder of the season.

The professor, filled with hope, hies back to his rooms, calls for Mrs. Mulcahy, tells her he is going to take his ward out for a drive, and gives that worthy and now intensely interested landlady full directions to see that Miss Wynter looks--"er--nice! you know, Mrs. Mulcahy, her _best_ suit, and----"

Mrs. Mulcahy came generously to the rescue.

"Her best frock, sir, I suppose, an' her Sunday bonnet. I've often wished it before, Mr. Curzon, an' I'm thinkin' that 'twill be the makin' of ye; an' a handsome, purty little crathur she is an' no mistake. An' who is to give away the poor dear, sir, askin' yer pardon?"

"I am," says the professor.

"Oh no, sir; the likes was never known. 'Tis the father or one of his belongings as gives away the bride, _niver_ the husband to be, an' if ye _have_ nobody, sir, you two, why I'm sure I'd be proud to act for ye in this matther. Faix I don't disguise from ye, Misther Curzon, dear, that I feels like a mother to that purty child this moment, an' I tell ye _this,_ that if ye don't behave dacent to her, ye'll have to answer to Mrs. Mulcahy for that same."

"What d'ye mean, woman?" roars the professor, indignantly. "Do you imagine that _--_--?"

"No. I'd belave nothin' bad o' ye," says Mrs. Mulcahy solemnly. "I've cared ye these six years, an' niver a fault to find. But that child beyant, whin ye take her away to make her yer wife----"

"You must be mad," says the professor, a strange, curious pang contracting his heart. "I am not taking her away to---- I--I am taking her to my sister, who will receive her as a guest."

"Mad!" repeats Mrs. Mulcahy furiously. "Who's mad? Faix," preparing to leave the room, "'tis yerself was born widout a grain o' sinse!"

The meeting between Lady Baring and Perpetua is eminently satisfactory. The latter, looking lovely, but a little frightened, so takes Lady Baring's artistic soul by storm, that that great lady then and there accepts the situation, and asks Perpetua if she will come to her for a week or so. Perpetua, charmed in turn by Lady Baring's grace and beauty and pretty ways, receives the invitation with pleasure, little dreaming that she is there "on view," as it were, and that the invitation is to be prolonged indefinitely--that is, till either she or her hostess tire one of the other.

The professor's heart sinks a little as he sees his sister rise and loosen the laces round the girl's pretty, slender throat, begging her to begin to feel at home at once.