CHAPTER XXVI

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.