‘I am glad to see him out of doors,’ said Ethel.
‘Henry was bent on it; but I think the air and the glare of everything is too much for him; he is so tired and oppressed.’
‘I am sure he must like your singing,’ said Ethel.
‘It is almost the only thing that answers,’ said Averil, her eyes wistfully turning to the sofa; ‘he can’t read, and doesn’t like being read to.’
‘It is very difficult to manage a boy’s recovery,’ said Ethel. ‘They don’t know how to be ill.’
‘It is not that,’ replied the sister, as if she fancied censure implied, ‘but his spirits. Every new room he goes into seems to beat him down; and he lies and broods. If he could only talk!’
‘I know that so well!’ said Ethel. But to Averil the May troubles were of old date, involved in the mists of childhood. And Ethel seeing that her words were not taken as sympathy, continued, ‘Do not the little girls amuse him?’
‘Oh no! they are too much for him; and I am obliged to keep them in the nursery. Poor little things! I don’t know what we should do if your sister Mary were not so kind.’
‘Mary is very glad,’ began Ethel, confusedly. Then rushing into her subject: ‘Next week, I am to take Aubrey to the seaside; and we thought if Leonard would join us, the change might be good for him.’
‘Thank you,’ Averil answered, playing with her heavy jet watch-guard. ‘You are very good; but I am sure he could not move so soon.’
‘Ave,’ called Leonard at that moment; and Ethel, perceiving that she likewise was to advance, came forth in time to hear, ‘O, Ave! I am to go to the sea next week, with Aubrey May and his sister. Won’t it—’
Then becoming aware of the visitor, he stopped short, threw his feet off the sofa, and stood up to receive her.
‘I can’t let you come if you do like that,’ she said, shaking his long thin hand; and he let himself down again, not, however, resuming his recumbent posture, and giving a slight but effective frown to silence his sister’s entreaties that he would do so. He sat, leaning back as though exceedingly feeble, scarcely speaking, but his eyes eloquent with eagerness. And very fine eyes they were! Ethel remembered her own weariness, some twelve or fourteen years back, of the raptures of her baby-loving sisters about those eyes; and now in the absence of the florid colouring of health, she was the more struck by the beauty of the deep liquid brown, of the blue tinge of the white, and of the lustrous light that resided in them, but far more by their power of expression, sometimes so soft and melancholy, at other moments earnest, pleading, and almost flashing with eagerness. It was a good mouth too, perhaps a little inclined to sternness of mould about the jaw and chin; but that might have been partly from the absence of all softening roundness, aging the countenance for the time, just as illness had shrunk the usually sturdy figure.
‘Has Ethel told you of our plan?’ asked Dr. May of the sister.
‘Yes,’ she hesitated, in evident confusion and distress. ‘You are all very kind, but we must see what Henry says.’
‘I have spoken to Henry! He answers for our patching Leonard up for next week; and I have great faith in Dr. Neptune.’
Leonard’s looks were as bright as Averil’s were disturbed.
‘Thank you, thank you very much! but can he possibly be well enough for the journey?’
Leonard’s eyes said ‘I shall.’
‘A week will do great things,’ said Dr. May, ‘and it is a very easy journey—only four hours’ railway, and a ten miles’ drive.’
Averil’s face was full of consternation; and Leonard leant forward with hope dancing in his eyes.
‘You know the place,’ continued Dr. May, ‘Coombe Hole. Quite fresh, and unhackneyed. It is just where Devon and Dorset meet. I am not sure in which county; but there’s a fine beach, and beautiful country. The Riverses found it out, and have been there every autumn; besides sending their poor little girl and her governess down when London gets too hot. Flora has written to the woman of the lodgings she always has, and will lend them the maid she sends with little Margaret; so they will be in clover.’
‘Is it not a very long way!’ said Averil, thinking how long those ten yards of lawn had seemed.
‘Not as things go,’ said Dr. May. ‘You want Dr. Spencer to reproach you with being a Stoneborough fungus. There are places in Wales nearer by the map, but without railway privilege; and as to a great gay place, they would all be sick of it.’
‘Do you feel equal to it? as if you should like it, Leonard?’ asked his sister, in a trembling would-be grateful voice.
‘Of all things,’ was the answer.
Ethel thought the poor girl had suffered constraint enough, and that it was time to release the boy from his polite durance, so she rose to take leave, and again Leonard pulled himself upright to shake hands.
‘Indeed,’ said Ethel, when Averil had followed them into the drawing-room, ‘I am sorry for you. It would go very hard with me to make Aubrey over to any one! but if you do trust him with me, I must come and hear all you wish me to do for him.’
‘I cannot think that he will be able or glad to go when it comes to the point,’ said Averil, with a shaken tone.
Dr. May was nearer than she thought, and spoke peremptorily. ‘Take care what you are about! You are not to worry him with discussions. If he can go, he will; if not, he will stay at home; but pros and cons are prohibited. Do you hear, Averil!’
‘Yes; very well.’
‘Papa you really are very cruel to that poor girl,’ were Ethel’s first words outside.
‘Am I? I wouldn’t be for worlds, Ethel. But somehow she always puts me in a rage. I wish I knew she was not worrying her brother at this moment!’
No, Averil was on the staircase, struggling, choking with the first tears she had shed. All this fortnight of unceasing vigilance and exertion, her eyes had been dry, for want of time to realize, for want of time to weep, and now she was ashamed that hurt feeling rather than grief had opened the fountain. She could not believe that it was not a cruel act of kindness, to carry one so weak as Leonard away from home to the care of a stranger. She apprehended all manner of ill consequences; and then nursing him, and regarding his progress as her own work, had been the sedative to her grief, which would come on her ‘like an armed man,’ in the dreariness of his absence. Above all, she felt herself ill requited by his manifest eagerness to leave her who had nursed him so devotedly—her, his own sister—for the stiff, plain Miss May whom he hardly knew. The blow from the favourite companion brother, so passionately watched and tended, seemed to knock her down; and Dr. May, with medical harshness, forbidding her the one last hope of persuading him out of the wild fancy, filled up the measure.
Oh, those tears! How they would swell up at each throb of the wounded heart, at each dismal foreboding of the desponding spirit. But she had no time for them! Leonard must not be left alone, with no one to cover him up with his wrappers.
The tears were strangled, the eyes indignantly dried. She ran out at the garden door. The sofa was empty! Had Henry come home and helped him in? She hurried on to the window; Leonard was alone in the drawing-room, resting breathlessly on an ottoman within the window.