Mrs. Fairfield was a proud woman when she received Mrs. Riccabocca and Violante in her grand house; for a grand house to her was that cottage to which her boy Lenny had brought her home. Proud, indeed, ever was Widow Fairfield; but she thought then in her secret heart, that if ever she could receive in the drawing-room of that grand house the great Mrs. Hazeldean, who had so lectured her for refusing to live any longer in the humble, tenement rented of the squire, the cup of human bliss would be filled, and she could contentedly die of the pride of it. She did not much notice Helen,—her attention was too absorbed by the ladies who renewed their old acquaintance with her, and she carried them all over the house, yea, into the very kitchen; and so, somehow or other, there was a short time when Helen and Leonard found themselves alone. It was in the study. Helen had unconsciously seated herself in Leonard’s own chair, and she was gazing with anxious and wistful interest on the scattered papers, looking so disorderly (though, in truth, in that disorder there was method, but method only known to the owner), and at the venerable well-worn books, in all languages, lying on the floor, on the chairs—anywhere. I must confess that Helen’s first tidy womanlike idea was a great desire to arrange the litter. “Poor Leonard,” she thought to herself, “the rest of the house so neat, but no one to take care of his own room and of him!”
As if he divined her thought, Leonard smiled and said, “It would be a cruel kindness to the spider, if the gentlest band in the world tried to set its cobweb to rights.”
HELEN.—“You were not quite so bad in the old days.”
LEONARD.—“Yet even then you were obliged to take care of the money. I have more books now, and more money. My present housekeeper lets me take care of the books, but she is less indulgent as to the money.”
HELEN (archly).—“Are you as absent as ever?”
LEONARD.—“Much more so, I fear. The habit is incorrigible, Miss Digby—”
HELEN.—“Not Miss Digby; sister, if you like.”
LEONARD (evading the word that implied so forbidden an affinity).—“Helen, will you grant me a favour? Your eyes and your smile say ‘yes.’ Will you lay aside, for one minute, your shawl and bonnet? What! can you be surprised that I ask it? Can you not understand that I wish for one minute to think that you are at home again under this roof?”
Helen cast down her eyes, and seemed troubled; then she raised them, with a soft angelic candour in their dovelike blue, and, as if in shelter from all thoughts of more warm affection, again murmured “brother,” and did as he asked her.
So there she sat, amongst the dull books, by his table, near the open window, her fair hair parted on her forehead, looking so good, so calm, so happy! Leonard wondered at his own self-command. His heart yearned to her with such inexpressible love, his lips so longed to murmur, “Ah, as now so could it be forever! Is the home too mean?” But that word “brother” was as a talisman between her and him. Yet she looked so at home—perhaps so at home she felt!—more certainly than she had yet learned to do in that stiff stately house in which she was soon to have a daughter’s rights. Was she suddenly made aware of this, that she so suddenly arose, and with a look of alarm and distress on her face.
“But—we are keeping Lady Lansmere too long,” she said falteringly. “We must go now,” and she hastily took up her shawl and bonnet.
Just then Mrs. Fairfield entered with the visitors, and began making excuses for inattention to Miss Digby, whose identity with Leonard’s child-angel she had not yet learned.
Helen received these apologies with her usual sweetness. “Nay,” she said, “your son and I are such old friends, how could you stand on ceremony with me?”
“Old friends!” Mrs. Fairfield stared amazed, and then surveyed the fair speaker more curiously than she had yet done. “Pretty, nice-spoken thing,” thought the widow; “as nice-spoken as Miss Violante, and humbler-looking like,—though, as to dress, I never see anything so elegant out of a picter.”
Helen now appropriated Mrs. Riccabocca’s arm; and, after a kind leave-taking with the widow, the ladies returned towards Riccabocca’s house.
Mrs. Fairfield, however, ran after them with Leonard’s hat and gloves, which he had forgotten.
“‘Deed, boy,” she said, kindly, yet scoldingly, “but there’d be no more fine books, if the Lord had not fixed your head on your shoulders. You would not think it, marm,” she added to Mrs. Riccabocca, “but sin’ he has left you, he’s not the ‘cute lad he was; very helpless at times, marm!”
Helen could not resist turning round, and looking at Leonard, with a sly smile.
The widow saw the smile, and catching Leonard by the arm, whispered, “But where before have you seen that pretty young lady? Old friends!”
“Ah, Mother,” said Leonard, sadly, “it is a long tale; you have heard the beginning, who can guess the end?” and he escaped. But Helen still leaned on the arm of Mrs. Riccabocca, and, in the walk back, it seemed to Leonard as if the winter had re-settled in the sky.
Yet he was by the side of Violante, and she spoke to him with such praise of Helen! Alas! it is not always so sweet as folks say to hear the praises of one we love. Sometimes those praises seem to ask ironically, “And what right hast thou to hope because thou lovest? All love her.”
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