What Necessity Knows - Lily Dougall (readera ebook reader txt) 📗

encouraged the conversation about the dean. It occurred to him to ask if there was a portrait extant of that worthy. "We are such repetitions of our ancestors," said he, "that I think it is a pity when family portraits are lacking."

Mrs. Bennett regretted that her father's modesty, the fortunes of the family, etc.; but she said there was a very good portrait of her uncle, the admiral, in his son's house in London.

"I do not feel that I represent my ancestors in the least," said Miss Bennett, "and I should be very sorry if I did."

She certainly did not look very like her mother, as she sat with affectionate nearness to Sophia Rexford, accomplishing more work in an hour with her toil-reddened hands than her mother was likely to do in two.

"Ah, ladies' feelings!" Trenholme rallied her openly. "But whatever you may _feel_, you assuredly do represent them, and owe to them all you are."

"Very true," said the mother approvingly. "Papa had black hair, Principal Trenholme; and although my daughter's hair is brown, I often notice in it just that gloss and curl that was so beautiful in his."

"Yes, like and unlike are oddly blended. My father was a butcher by trade, and although my work in life has been widely different from his, I often notice in myself something of just those qualities which enabled him to succeed so markedly, and I know that they are my chief reliance. My brother, who has determined to follow my father's trade, is not so like him in many ways as I am."

If he had said that his father had had red hair, he would not have said it with less emphasis. No one present would have doubted his truthfulness on the one point, nor did they now doubt it on this other; but no one mastered the sense and force of what he had said until minutes, more or less in each case, had flown past, and in the meantime he had talked on, and his talk had drifted to other points in the subject of heredity. Sophia answered him; the discussion became general.

Blue and Red came offering cups of tea.

"Aren't they pretty?" said the youngest Miss Brown, again lifting her eyes to Trenholme for sympathy in her admiration.

"Sh--sh--," said the elder ladies, as if it were possible that Blue and Red could be kept in ignorance of their own charms.

A man nervously tired can feel acute disappointment at the smallest, silliest thing. Trenholme had expected that Sophia would pour out his tea; he thought it would have refreshed him then to the very soul, even if she had given it indifferently. The cup he took seemed like some bitter draught he was swallowing for politeness' sake. When it, and all the necessary talk concerning it, were finished, together with other matters belonging to the hour, he got himself out of his big chair, and Mrs. Brown's horses, that had been switching their tails in the lane, drove him home.

The carriage gone, Mrs. Brown's curiosity was at hand directly. She and Mrs. Rexford were standing apart where with motherly kindness they had been bidding him good-bye.

"I suppose, Mrs. Rexford, you know--you have always known--this fact concerning Principal Trenholme's origin. I mean what he alluded to just now." Mrs. Brown spoke, not observing Mrs. Rexford but the group in which her daughters were prominent figures.

Nothing ever impressed Mrs. Rexford's imagination vividly that did not concern her own family.

"I do not think it has been named to me," said she, "but no doubt my husband and Sophia--"

"You think they have known it?" It was of importance to Mrs. Brown to know whether Captain Rexford and Sophia had known or not; for if they knew and made no difference--"If Miss Rexford has not objected. She is surely a judge in such matters!"

"Sophia! Yes, to be sure, Sophia is very highly connected on her mother's side. I often say to my husband that I am a mere nobody compared with his first wife. But Sophia is not proud. Sophia would be kind to the lowest, Mrs. Brown." (This praise was used with vaguest application.) "She has such a good heart! Really, what she has done for me and my children--"

A light broke in upon Mrs. Brown's mind. She heard nothing concerning Mrs. Rexford and her children. She knew now, or felt sure she knew, why Miss Rexford had always seemed a little stiff when Trenholme was praised. Her attitude towards him, it appeared, had always been that of mere "kindness." Now, up to this moment, Mrs. Brown, although not a designing woman, had entertained comfortable motherly hopes that Trenholme might ultimately espouse one of her daughters, and it had certainly advanced him somewhat in her favour that his early acquaintance with Miss Rexford was an undisputed fact; but in the light of what Mrs. Rexford had just said of her daughter's good-heartedness all assumed a different aspect. Mrs. Brown was in no way "highly connected," belonging merely to the prosperous middle class, but, with the true colonial spirit that recognises only distance below, none above, she began to consider whether, in the future, her role should not be that of mere kindness also. To do her justice, she did not decide the question just then.

The voice of her youngest daughter was heard laughing rather immoderately. "Indeed, Mrs. Bennett," she laughed, "we all heard him say it, and, unlike you, we believed our ears. We'll draw up a statement to that effect and sign our names, if that is necessary to assure you."

Her mother, approaching, detected, as no one else did, a strain of hysterical excitement in her laughter, and bid her rise to come home, but she did not heed the summons.

"Yes, he _did_ say it. That handsome brother of his, to whom I lost my heart two weeks ago, does really--well, to put it plainly, knock animals on the head, you know, and sell them in chops, and--what do you call it, mamma?--the sirloin and brisket. 'How do you do, Mr. Trenholme? I want some meat for dinner--chops, I think.' Oh, how I should love to go and buy chops!"

Sophia was kneeling over a pile of work, folding it. She asked the boisterous girl for the cloth she had been sewing, and her voice was hard and impatient, as if she wished the talk at an end.

Mrs. Bennett arose and wrapped her cape about her thin shoulders, not without some air of majesty. There was a bitter angry expression upon her delicate face.

"All that I wish to say in this matter is, that _I_ never knew this before; others may have been in possession of these facts, but I was not."

"If you had been, of course you would have honoured him the more for triumphing over difficulties," answered the elder Miss Brown, with smooth sarcasm.

"Yes, certainly _that_, of course; but I should have thought him very unsuitably placed as an instructor of youth and--"

The right adjustment of the cape seemed to interrupt the speech, but others mentally supplied the ending with reference to Miss Bennett.

"Miss Rexford, being one of Principal Trenholme's oldest friends, is not taken by surprise." Some one said this; Sophia hardly knew who it was. She knelt upright by the packing basket and threw back her head.

"I met him often at my own uncle's house. My uncle knew him _thoroughly_, and liked him well."

Most of the women there were sensibly commenting on the amount of work done, and allotting shares for the ensuing week. It would take a week at least to rouse them to the state of interest at which others had already arrived.

Her cape adjusted, Mrs. Bennett found something else to say. "Of course, personally, it makes no difference to me, for I have always felt there was _something_ about Principal Trenholme--that is, that he was not--It is a little hard to express; one feels, rather than speaks, these things."

It was a lie, but what was remarkable about it was that its author did not know it for one. In the last half-hour she had convinced herself that she had always suffered in Trenholme's presence from his lack of refinement, and there was little hope that an imagination that could make such strides would not soon discover in him positive coarseness. As the party dispersed she was able to speak aside to Sophia.

"I see how you look upon it," she said. "There is no difference between one trade and another, or between a man who deals in cargoes of cattle and one who sells meat in a shop."--She was weakly excited; her voice trembled. "Looking down from a higher class, we must see that, although all trades are in a sense praiseworthy, one is as bad as another."

"They seem to me very much on a level," said Sophia. There was still a hard ring in her voice. She looked straight before her.

"Of course in this country"--Mrs. Bennett murmured something half-audible about the Browns. "One cannot afford to be too particular whom one meets, but I certainly should have thought that in our pulpits--in our schools--"

She did not finish. Her thin mouth was settling into curves that bespoke that relentless cruelty which in the minds of certain people, is synonymous with justice.

It was a rickety, weather-stained chaise in which Mrs. Bennett and her daughter were to drive home. As Miss Bennett untied the horse herself, there was a bright red spot on either of her cheeks. She had made no remark on the subject on which her mother was talking, nor did she speak now. She was in love with Trenholme, that is, as much in love as a practical woman can be with a man from whom she has little hope of a return. She was not as pretty as many girls are, nor had she the advantages of dress and leisure by which to make herself attractive. She had hoped little, but in an honest, humble-minded, quiet way she had preferred this man to any other. Now, although she was as different from her mother as nature could make her, precepts with which her mind had been plied from infancy had formed her thought. She was incapable of self-deception, she knew that he had been her ideal man; but she was also incapable of seeing him in the same light now as heretofore.

Miss Bennett held the reins tight and gave her horse smart strokes of the whip. The spiritless animal took such driving passively, as it jogged down the quiet road by the enclosure of the New College.

Unconscious that her words were inconsistent with what she had so lately said, Mrs. Bennett complained again. "My nerves have received quite a shock; I am all in a tremble." It was true; she was even wiping away genuine tears. "Oh, my dear, it's a terribly low occupation. Oh, my dear, the things I have heard they do--the atrocities they commit!"

"I daresay what you heard was true," retorted Miss Bennett, "but it does not follow that they are all alike." Without perceiving clearly the extent of the fallacy, she felt called upon to oppose the generalisations of a superficial mind.

So they passed out of sight of Trenholme's house. Inside he sat at his desk, plunged again in the work of writing business letters. We seldom realise in what way we give out the force that is within us, or in what proportion it flows into this act or that. Trenholme was under the impression that what he had