Read Ebook: A lady in black by Warden Florence

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Ebook has 1372 lines and 51453 words, and 28 pages

Mrs. Bonnington leaned back in her chair, and drew on her brown cotton gloves further. Mrs. Rose wondered again as to the source of this information. She felt a little ashamed of listening to all this gossip, and was less inclined than her friend to take a suspicious view of the case, strange though it was. So she contented herself with murmured interjections, to fill up the pause before Mrs. Bonnington went on again:

"However, I have got a clew to where she came from, for a van-load of furniture came down before she arrived, and it came from Todcaster."

"Todcaster!" echoed Mrs. Rose. "Then we shall soon know something more about her. Mr. Rose's old friend, Mrs. Haybrow, is coming down to see us early next month. She lived near Todcaster when she was a girl, and she often goes back to the old place, and keeps in touch with all the people about there."

"Well," said Mrs. Bonnington, rising from her chair, and speaking in a rather more stilted tone than at first, with the consciousness that her news had hardly been received as she had expected, "I sincerely trust we may find we have been mistaken. No one will rejoice more unfeignedly than I if she proves to be indeed what she gives herself out to be. Indeed, if she had received me frankly at the outset, I would have shown her such Christian sympathy as one soul can give to another without asking any questions. And it is only in the interests of our young people that I lift up my voice now."

The Vicar's wife then took her leave, and went on her way to complete her morning rounds. She was rather a terrible person, this little, faded middle-aged woman with the curate's voice and the curate's manner, uniting, as she did, a desperate interest in other people's affairs with a profound conviction that her interference in them could only be for good. But she had her good points. A devoted, submissive, and worshipful wife, she modified her worship by considering herself the Vicar's guardian angel. A parish busybody and tyrant, she never spared herself and could show true womanly kindness to such of her husband's parishioners as were not of "a froward spirit."

Unluckily, she had not the power of conciliating, but had, on the contrary, a grand talent for raising up antagonism in unregenerate minds like those of the unfortunate Mabin.

The young girl had been both sorry and ashamed at her own loss of temper. Not that an outburst such as that she had indulged in was any unusual thing. Like many young girls of spirit under injudicious rule, Mabin was in a state of perpetual friction with those around her. Her step-mother was not intentionally unkind; but poor Mabin had to suffer from the constant comparison of her unruly and independent self with her quiet and insipid half-sisters.

And the worst of it was that her father was even less indulgent than his wife to her waywardness. A stiff, straight-laced, narrow-minded man, accustomed to be looked up to and deferred to by the female members of his household, he disapproved in the strongest manner both of the erratic moods of his eldest daughter, and of her longing for independence. It was from him, indeed, that Mabin chiefly suffered. She looked upon the cold, handsome, aquiline face of her father with something very much like horror, and the mere fact that he approved only of submissive "womanly" women seemed to goad her into the very rebelliousness and independence which shocked him so deeply.

At the same time that he disapproved of her, however, Mr. Rose did not hesitate to avail himself of his daughter's bright wits; and if any task requiring a little thought or a little judgment presented itself, it was always upon Mabin's shoulders that he put the burden.

He had even gone so far, protesting loudly the while against the "unfeminine" practice, as to allow Mabin to ride a bicycle; and it was on this machine that the girl was expected to go into Seagate two or three times a week, to fetch him his books and magazines from the local library.

As Mrs. Bonnington descended the steps of the big stone house, and, emerging from the portico, made her way down the broad gravel path to the gate, she met Mabin coming out by the side gate among the evergreens with her bicycle by her side.

Now if there was one thing more detestable in the eyes of the Vicar's wife than another, it was a bicycle. But this detestation increased tenfold when the rider of the obnoxious machine was a woman. It was her one grievance against upright Mr. Rose that he allowed his nineteen-year-old daughter to "career about the country" on the abominable thing.

She uttered an involuntary "Ugh!" of disgust as the thing almost touched her uplifted skirts.

"I beg your pardon. I hope I didn't run against you. I am so clumsy," said Mabin with studied politeness.

"You can't expect to be anything but clumsy while you use such a thing as that!" said Mrs. Bonnington severely. "I wish for your own sake it would get broken, that you might never be seen in an attitude so unbecoming to a gentlewoman again."

"Is it you who tell your sons to throw stones at it when I am riding past the Vicarage?" said Mabin, trying to speak civilly, while the blood rose to her cheeks. "Walter struck the hind wheel two days ago, and now I have to walk as long as I am within stone's-throw of your garden wall."

"I have heard nothing about it," said Mrs. Bonnington icily.

"Of course you wouldn't," said Mabin, keeping her tone in check. "But I see Rudolph has taken to riding one too since he's been back. So if they throw stones at me, I can have my revenge upon him," she concluded darkly.

"If girls unsex themselves, they can't expect to be treated with the chivalry they used to receive," said Mrs. Bonnington, as, not caring to continue the encounter with the rebellious one, she turned her back, and went down the hill.

Mabin looked at Mrs. Bonnington's retreating figure, half regretfully and half resentfully. The regret was for her own incivility; the resentment was for the want of tact which had provoked it.

Mabin, like so many other young girls on the threshold of womanhood, lived in a constant state of warfare both with herself and her neighbors. Sensitive, affectionate, hasty tempered and wilful, she was at the same time almost morbidly modest and mistrustful of herself; so that she passed her time in alternate bursts of angry resentment against those who misunderstood her, and fits of remorse for her own shortcomings.

She now mounted her bicycle with the feeling that the Vicar's wife had spoilt her morning's ride for her. Not by any means a vain girl, she underrated her own attractions, which included a pretty, gray-eyed little flower-face, a fair skin, and short, soft, dark-brown hair. But she was keenly alive to the reproach of clumsiness, which had so often been cast at her. She had shot up, within the last three years, to a height which, together with the girlish leanness of her figure, had caused her to be called, even outside the family circle, "a lamp-post" and a "gawky creature." And although she stubbornly refused to take to the long skirts which would have lent her the grace she wanted, she nourished a smouldering indignation against her traducers.

And chief among these were the boys of the Vicarage, against whom, as against their mother for her criticisms, and their father for his dull sermons, her spirit was always in arms.

The strife between the Bonningtons and the Roses had not always been so keen. Indeed, in the old days when they were children together, Mabin and Rudolph had got on well enough together, and had exchanged love-tokens of ends of slate pencil, lumps of chalk, and bird's eggs. But with advancing years had come first coolness and then estrangement. So that it was now the correct thing among the Bonnington boys to laugh at Mabin for being "advanced," "superior," "a New Woman," and a "fright;" while she, on her side, treated them with lofty contempt as "savages" and "boors."

Mabin had not gone twenty yards, however, on her way up the slight ascent, when she saw something which diverted her thoughts from the Vicarage people. The gates at "The Towers" were wide open, and Mrs. Dale's smart victoria, with its well-matched pair of small, dark-brown horses, came out so suddenly that Mabin had to jump off her bicycle to avoid a collision. Alone in the carriage sat a lady in deep mourning, who turned and looked out anxiously at the girl, and stopped the carriage to speak to her.

"I'm so sorry! I hope you didn't hurt yourself, in having to jump off so quickly?" asked the lady in black, in a sweet, plaintive voice that struck some chord in Mabin's heart, and made the girl gasp, and pause before she could answer.

"Oh no, oh no, thank you. One often has to do that," stammered the girl, flushing, and speaking with a shy constraint which made her tone cold and almost rude.

And she knew it, poor child, and was miserable over it; miserable to think that now when she had an opportunity of speaking to the being who had excited in her an enthusiastic admiration, she was throwing her chance away.

A common and a most tragic experience with most young girls.

One thing, however, Mabin was able to do. In the shy look with which she returned Mrs. Dale's kind gaze of inquiry, she took in a picture of a lovely woman which remained impressed on her mind ineffaceably.

Mrs. Dale was a lovely woman, lovelier than Mabin had thought when she only got glimpses of the lady's profile from her seat in church, or peeps at her through a thick black veil. Mrs. Dale wore a black veil to-day, but in the open carriage, in the full glare of the sun, her beauty was evident enough.

A little woman, plump, pink, childlike in face and figure, with wavy fair hair, infantine blue eyes, and a red-lipped mouth which was all the more lovable, more attractive for not being on the strict lines of beauty, Mrs. Dale had, so Mabin felt, exactly the right features and the right expression for the sweet voice she had just heard. And through the beauty, and through the voice, the girl, inspired perhaps by the mourning dress, thought she detected a sadness which seemed to her the most pathetic thing in the world.

In two moments the interview was over; Mrs. Dale had smiled upon her sweetly, bidden her farewell merely with a bend of her head, and driven away, leaving Mabin to scold herself for her idiocy in throwing away an opportunity which she might never have again.

She did not try to overtake the carriage; she watched it down the open road, until the shining coil of silky fair hair under the black crape bonnet grew dim in the distance. And then, with a shrug of her shoulders and a murmur that "it was just like her," Mabin turned defiantly into the road which led past the Vicarage.

However, nobody was about to throw stones at the bicycle on this occasion; and it was not until she had reached Seagate, changed her father's books at the library, and matched a skein of cable silk for Emily, that she was reminded afresh of the existence of the Bonningtons by the sight of Rudolph, in his knickerbockers and gaiters, standing by his bicycle while he lit a cigarette.

Unconsciously Mabin frowned a little. And unluckily Rudolph saw the frown. She meant to pass him without appearing to notice him, but he foresaw the intention, and was nettled by it. For Rudolph, with his black eyes and curly black hair, and his sunbrowned face, was the handsomest fellow in the neighborhood when he was on shore, and was accustomed to a great deal of kindness and civility from Mabin's sex. Her rudeness, which arose more from shyness than from the lofty contempt he supposed, puzzled the young fellow, and made him angry. He remembered their ancient comradeship, which she seemed to have forgotten; and most unwisely he let a spirit of "devilment" get the better of him, and addressed her as if they had been still on the old terms.

"Good-morning, Mabin," said he.

She gave him a bend of the head, without looking at him, and was passing on to the place where her bicycle stood outside the door of a shop. But he would not let her escape so.

"Mayn't I offer you a cigarette?"

To do him justice Rudolph had not noticed that a small boy with a basket stood near enough to hear. The boy burst into shrill laughter, and Mabin turned fiercely. For once she did not stoop.

"I'm afraid you have forgotten a great deal since you went to sea," she said in a voice which she could not keep steady.

The young man was surprised, and rather shocked at the way in which he had been received. He had been anxious to heal the breach between her and himself, and he had thought that a dash into their old familiarity might avail where more carefully studied attempts had failed.

Before he could do more than begin to apologize, to appeal to their old friendship, Mabin had got on her bicycle and ridden away.

The sun was beating down fiercely by this time upon the white chalky roads; but Mabin rode on recklessly, at a higher speed than usual. She was well on her way back to Stone, when, turning her head to look along the road she had come by, she perceived that Rudolph was not far behind. She had forgiven his indiscretion by this time, and rather hoped that he was following quickly on purpose to "make it up." So she went on her way through a group of straggling cottages, at a rather slower pace.

There was a sharp bend in the road at this point, and just as she sounded her bell in turning the corner, she saw Rudolph, who was now close behind, dismount and pick something up from the road. The next moment something struck the front wheel of her bicycle, and she and her machine were flung with violence down in the road.

She had time to utter a cry, no more, before the crash came.

Then she remembered nothing, knew nothing, until she heard somebody sobbing close to her ears; and opening her eyes, she saw the sweet face of Mrs. Dale, with the black veil thrown back, and with tears in the blue eyes, leaning over her tenderly.

Mrs. Dale uttered a cry of joy, and another voice, which Mabin recognized as Rudolph's, said: "Thank God! she isn't dead, at any rate."

"Are you better, dear? Are you in any pain?" asked Mrs. Dale with so much solicitude that answering tears of sympathetic emotion started into the girl's own eyes.

"I am quite well, quite well," said Mabin. "Only--only--I think my foot hurts."

Rudolph and Mrs. Dale exchanged glances.

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