Halcyone | Page 7

it. It was always, "your poor sainted mother in heaven," or, "your blessed pretty mother"--and with that instinctive knowledge of the feelings of other people which characterized Halcyone's point of view, she had avoided questioning her old nurse. Her stepfather, James Anderton, was a very wealthy stockbroker--she knew that, and also that a year or so after her mother's death he had married again--"a person of his own class," Miss La Sarthe had said, "far more suitable to him than poor Elaine."
Halcyone had only been six years old at her mother's death, but she kept a crisp memory of the horror of it. The crimson, crumpled-looking baby brother, in his long clothes, whose coming somehow seemed responsible for the loss of her tender angel, for a long time was viewed with resentful hatred. It was a terrible, unspeakable grief. She remembered perfectly the helpless sense of loss and loneliness.
Her mother had loved her with passionate devotion. She was conscious even then that Mabel and Ethel, the stepsisters, were as nothing in comparison to herself in her mother's regard. She had a certainty that her mother had loved her own father very much--the young, brilliant, spendthrift, last La Sarthe. And her mother had been of the family, too--a distant cousin. So she herself was La Sarthe to her finger tips--slender and pale and distinguished-looking. She remembered the last scene with her stepfather before her coming to La Sarthe Chase. It was the culmination after a year of misery and unassuaged grieving for her loss. He had come into the nursery where the three little girls were playing--Halcyone and her two stepsisters--and he had made them all stand up in his rough way, and see who could catch the pennies the best that he threw from the door. His brother, "Uncle Ted," was with him. And the two younger children, Mabel of five and Ethel of four, shouted riotously with glee and snatched the coins from one another and greedily quarreled over those which Halcyone caught with her superior skill and handed to them.
She remembered her stepfather's face--it grew heavy and sullen and he walked to the window, where his brother followed him--and she remembered their words and had pondered over them often since.
"It's the damned breeding in the brat that fairly gets me raw, Ted," Mr. Anderton had said. "Why the devil couldn't Elaine have given it to my children, too. I can't stand it--a home must be found for her elsewhere."
And soon after that, Halcyone had come with her own Priscilla to La Sarthe Chase to her great-aunts Ginevra and Roberta, in their tumble-down mansion which her father had not lived to inherit. Under family arrangements, it was the two old ladies' property for their lives.
And now the problem of what James Anderton--or rather the second Mrs. James Anderton--would do was the question of the moment. Would there be a fresh governess or would they all be left in peace without one? Mrs. James Anderton, Miss Roberta had said once, was a person who "did her duty," as people often did "in her class"--"a most worthy woman, if not quite a lady"--and she had striven to do her best by James Anderton's children--even his stepchild Halcyone.
Miss La Sarthe promised to write that night before she went to bed--but Halcyone knew it was a long process with her and that an answer could not be expected for at least a week. Therefore there was no good agitating herself too soon about the result. It was one of her principles never to worry over unnecessary things. Life was full of blessed certainties to enjoy without spoiling them by speculating over possible unpleasantnesses.
The old gentleman--Cheiron--and old William and the timid curate who came to dine on Saturday nights once a month were about the only male creatures Halcyone had ever spoken to within her recollection--their rector was a confirmed invalid and lived abroad--but Priscilla had a supreme contempt for them as a sex.
"One and all set on themselves, my lamb," she said; "even your own beautiful father had to be bowed down to and worshiped. We put up with it in him, of course; but I never did see one that didn't think of himself first. It is their selfishness that causes all the sorrow of the world to women. We needn't have lost your angel mother but for Mr. Anderton's selfishness--a kind, hard, rough man--but as selfish as a gentleman."
It seemed a more excusable defect to Priscilla in the upper class, but had no redeeming touch in the status of Mr. Anderton.
Halcyone, however, had a logical mind and reasoned with her nurse:
"If they are all selfish, Priscilla, it must be either women's fault for letting them be, or God intended them to be so. A thing can't be all unless the big