MABEL'S LIFE BEGINS

The girls at our school were sure that Mabel was Miss Carefull's favourite pupil. How could it be otherwise when she did everything so well—her drawing, her singing, her French, all winning her high commendation from their respective professors; when she wrote such a pretty hand, had such good manners, and moved so gracefully; whilst her dancing was such that the dancing master could hardly speak of it without emotion?

Our dancing lessons were ever occasions of triumph for Mabel and of humiliation for me. She was the one to be first initiated into every new step, and often were we others bidden to stand still and look on while Miss Carmichael showed us what our dancing should be. It was a pretty sight to see Mabel and the old dancing master go through the slow, stately measures of the minuet. As I watched her movements, I felt much pride in my sister's grace and prettiness, and fancied they atoned to some extent for my own awkwardness, which brought upon me frequent exclamations of—

"What are you doing, Miss Dorothy? Do you call that a curtsey? Pray, if you are going to dance like that when you go out, never say that I taught you," from my sorely tried instructor.

Such of the pupils as cared about dancing were eager for the privilege of dancing with Mabel, and sometimes I sought to do so, thinking I should get on better if she gave me a little help.

But seldom would Mabel accept me as a partner.

"It is too dreadful," she would say, "to be dragged round by you, and have you coming down on my toes with your elephantine tread."

And such words, though playfully uttered, wounded me so much that I did not soon renew my request.

But though our sisterly intercourse did not flow with unbroken serenity, owing, as Mabel would say, to my "bad temper," I was, in truth, passionately fond of my pretty sister, and did not at all like the idea of returning to school without her.

"You are quite sure that you will not go back to school?" I asked, in reply to Mabel's remark.

"Of course I shall not," said Mabel. "Father told Miss Carefull that I should probably leave at the end of this term. If he says anything to me about it, I shall tell him it is high time I left. Girls do not go to school after they are nineteen, and I shall be nineteen next month. I might have been allowed to leave at Christmas."

"I wish he would let me leave too," I exclaimed, with a sudden burst of hope; "I am only eighteen months younger than you, and lots of the girls leave at seventeen."

"Perhaps he would if you were as forward in your studies as some girls are at seventeen," said Mabel, quietly; "but you must know, Dorothy, that you have not come out of the examinations well. Father will be vexed when he hears how low your marks are, for you know he is so anxious that we should be well-educated women."

My hope of leaving school was put to instant death by Mabel's words. I knew that I had been idle and careless in my school work during the half-year, and if my father's attention were drawn to the fact, and Mabel was not likely to hide it from him, he would certainly not be inclined to shorten my schooldays. Besides, I suspected that Mabel would wish me to return to school, leaving her to reign in sole glory at home; and it was part of my sister's general cleverness that she always contrived to gain whatever she wished.

Whilst Mabel spoke, her eyes were studying my appearance, and evidently not with the pleasure with which I surveyed her pretty little person. I was humbly conscious that this was not surprising. I knew it was a trial to Mabel that I was so unlike herself, being as large limbed, awkward, and untidy as she was slight, graceful, and neat.

"Dorothy," she said, leaning forward, and speaking "sotto voce," that the other passengers who shared the compartment might not hear her remarks, "I never saw anything like the state of shabbiness to which you have brought that gown. No one would think that you had it when I had mine. We must really give up dressing alike. It is too dreadful always to see before me a soiled and creased copy of my own gowns."

No doubt such an experience was very trying to Mabel's delicate sense of propriety. My gown had been cut from the same piece as hers; they had been exactly alike, but now mine was dirty and frayed; in some places badly mended, rents were apparent, in others a keen eye could have detected inkstains, and the bodice lacked the stylish shapeliness which Mabel's still retained. But I could not at that moment regard the matter from Mabel's point of view. I was still under the annoyance which her previous words had excited, and I answered snappishly—

"I am sure I should be thankful not to have dresses like yours, for then you could not always be drawing horrid comparisons between them."

"You need not be cross with me about it," said Mabel, complacently; "it is not my fault that your things always get shabby so much more quickly than mine. Oh, Dorothy, your hair is coming down!"

"What a bother my hair is!" I exclaimed, impatiently, as I caught the offending loose end and tried to push it back into its place. "It never will keep up."

"It is very strange," said Mabel, as she put up her hand to pat her own exquisitely neat coil of plaits, "my hair never comes down."

I felt cross, and relapsed into silence. Mabel took a book from her bag and began to read, whilst I sat watching the cornfields and meadows we passed as the train bore us on to Burford, the little Essex town at which we lived.

In a few minutes, my vexation was forgotten and my mind filled with the delightful thought that I was going back to the dear old home, which I loved so well, though it had for me no association with mother love. My mother had died when I was too young to remember her, and my father had not married again. We three children—my brother Edmund, Mabel, and I—had been taken care of in our younger days by a sister of our father's. But some years earlier, our aunt had married, and gone to a distant home of her own, and since then Mabel and I in our holidays had been left pretty much to ourselves, save for the half authoritative oversight of our old servant, Salome, who acted as housekeeper to my father during our absence.

Half of my delight in the prospect of getting home arose from the thought of seeing my brother, who ere this had returned from his college at Cambridge to spend the long vacation at home. I hardly know how to describe the intense love I had ever felt for my brother Edmund. My earliest recollections show me that his kindness to his "little sister" made the sunshine of my young life. I think he was always more to me than my father, who, though goodness itself and failing in no duty towards his children, was more deficient than most men in the knack of soothing and cherishing little children.

Edmund was my hero. Sometimes my heart swelled high with an exultant belief—for which I afterwards blamed myself, because it betokened so mean a spirit—that he loved me better than he loved Mabel. I must do Mabel the justice to say that she never exhibited the least jealousy of Edmund's attachment to me. I do not think she would have minded his loving me best.

Time sped fast as I pondered the delights of the coming holidays, the walks and drives which Edmund and I would have, and the long talks in which he would tell me about his college life and the friends he had made at Cambridge.

As I thought thus, the wonder crossed my mind how I should feel if I, like Mabel, were about to leave school. Was it true, as Mabel had said, that one's real life did not begin till one had one had left school?

My life had not lacked interest hitherto. I loved to remember the sunny days of my childhood. There had been many pleasurable excitements in my schooldays, too, although I had failed to distinguish myself in examinations. What difference would my leaving school make in my life? Only surely that my holidays would lengthen out indefinitely; that I should enjoy more freedom, more leisure to do as I liked. I could not conceive of any greater change.

But now, as after long years, I look back on my young self, I know that I did enter upon a new stage of experience, and that my real life may be said to have begun at the time of my leaving school. Up to that time, I had simply dreamed and enjoyed, but then I began to make acquaintance with the "changes and chances of this mortal life." Life seems so simple when we are young; it is only when we can look back over the course of many years that we know what a complex thing it is; see how one life blends with another, what trifles affect human destinies, and can weigh the various influences that have entered into our lives and made them what they are.

At that hour I could look forward to the future without a shadow of fear.

Suddenly I startled Mabel by springing up and exclaiming, in the impetuous manner which she thought so unladylike, "Oh, Mab, we are almost there; I can see the castle. And here is the platform and Edmund. Oh, Edmund is here to meet us!"

Mabel quietly put away her book, and gathered her things together. She was never so undignified as to hurry herself.

"Wait till the train stops, Dorothy," she said; "it is hardly worth while to endanger your life for the sake of a few seconds."

The warning was not uncalled for. The train had scarcely come to a standstill when I was on the platform eagerly greeting my brother, a tall, slight youth of twenty, with a long neck and sloping shoulders, and by no means good-looking to any eyes save mine. The girls at Miss Carefull's would have called him ugly, and even Mabel considered him plain, though she qualified the term by admitting that his plainness was of an intellectual description. He was very tall, more than six feet in height, though he hardly looked so tall, because he stooped, the result partly of weakness, partly of his student habits.

"Well, Dottie, how are you? Why, how you have grown! I was quite unprepared to see such a giraffe!" he exclaimed, as he saw me.

"Don't be rude," I said, laughingly. "And you can't talk about growing."

"Well, perhaps not," he said. "Ah, here is Mabel, little and good, as usual."

We stood talking on the platform for a few minutes, till Mabel asked Edmund what was to be done with our luggage.

"Oh, Luke is here with the light cart," he said, "and I've got the dog-cart; I thought you would not care to walk."

"No, indeed; I would much rather drive," said Mabel.

In a few minutes, we had mounted the dog-cart, Mabel sitting up beside Edmund, and I on the seat behind, leaning sideways, so that I could see my brother as he drove.

The station was at New Burford, and our home lay at Old Burford, about a mile distant. We drove through the sleepy town with its few shops and many public houses, crossed the bridge, which had a railed and raised footpath on one side for the benefit of pedestrians when the river flooded the road, a frequent occurrence in winter, and, following the level country road, soon came to the outlying houses of Old Burford.

A conspicuous object as we approached the place was a large, new-looking mansion, with an extinguisher-shaped turret at each extremity, standing back from the road in its own extensive grounds, which were carefully walled in from the public gaze.

This vulgarly ostentatious-looking building, unlike every other dwelling at Burford, and out of harmony with the homely, rural neighbourhood in which it stood, had been built by a Mr. Steinthorpe, the owner of some saw-mills at Burford. The house had been his hobby, and on it he had expended a considerable portion of the fortune he had amassed in his prosperous business. His own ideas had been carried out in its construction, but their outcome, if satisfactory to himself, was not held in admiration by people in general.

The house had been years in building, and when finished was deemed by everyone, save its owner, to be neither beautiful nor convenient. But whatever the advantages or disadvantages of the dwelling he had planned for himself, Mr. Steinthorpe did not enjoy or suffer them long. Within a year of his taking possession of his new abode, he died, leaving his house and property to his only son, with whom he had quarrelled some years earlier, and who had not been seen at Burford since.

"There is that hideous excrescence, 'the Towers!'" I exclaimed, as my eyes fell on "Steinthorpe's Folly," as some people called the place; "I suppose it is still shut up."

"No, indeed; have you not heard? The son, Mr. Howard Steinthorpe, is there now; he is taking the management of the business."

"You don't mean it?" said Mabel. "Why, it was said that the reason he and his father quarrelled was because he refused to have anything to do with the mills."

"Ah, he is wiser now," said Edmund. "He knows that there is money to be made in that business, and he will get the more if he looks into everything for himself. Father says that he seems quite a man of business, wonderfully shrewd and long-sighted."

"Then father has made his acquaintance," said Mabel, quickly.

"Oh, yes; very soon after he arrived, he came to father for some information respecting local affairs, and now he often drops into the office for a chat with father. He is not half a bad fellow."

"He must be glad to get a chat with anyone," I observed. "How dreary for the poor man to live all alone in that huge place. Whatever possessed Mr. Steinthorpe to build such a house for himself! If his wife had been living and he had had a large family, there would have been some sense in it; but what one man can want with a house like a great public asylum it is beyond me to imagine."

"Oh, he was cracked when he planned that house," said Edmund; "a clever man of business, but insane on that point."

"The house may be better suited to Mr. Howard Steinthorpe than you imagine, Dorothy," said Mabel. "How do you know that he lives there alone? He may be married."

"So he may," I said. "I forgot that he cannot be so very young."

"Well, I can tell you, for your satisfaction, that he is not married," said Edmund, mischievously, "so perhaps, Mab, if you play your cards well, you may be mistress of 'the Tower' some day."

Mabel laughed, and told Edmund not to be absurd.

"Poor Mabel!" I said. "It is to be hoped there is a happier fate in store for you. I would as soon live in a prison as in that great house."

"They say it is lovely inside," said Mabel, her eyes resting gravely on the turreted mansion; "Mr. Steinthorpe spared no expense in furnishing it. There are Turkey carpets, and Persian rugs and curtains, and all sorts of curiosities that he bought on the Continent."

But now we were leaving the Towers behind, and driving past the dear old houses, each one with an individuality of its own that I knew so well. We turned a corner and entered a still quieter road, with a brook running at one side of it, and a long stretch of grass on the other. Two minutes more and Edmund was pulling up his horse before a low, white house pith a small flower garden in front, shut in by white-painted wooden palings. Lower down the road, to the right of the house, a large swing gate gave access to the tan-yard and offices, for my father was a tanner.

I sprang from my seat at the back of the vehicle before Edmund could come to my assistance. Salome had opened the door, and stood there smiling a hearty welcome—a hard-featured, wiry-made woman of more than forty years, with a hard set colour in her cheeks, and a shrewd, keen look in her grey eyes. She was a good, high-principled woman, a very particular, old-fashioned housekeeper, and fairly good tempered, as long as she had her own way. She had always been good to us children, never failing to scold us when she considered that we deserved scolding, and in all respects doing her duty by us according to her lights.

In spite of many a skirmish we had together in me childhood, I had learned to love our faithful old Salome, and now I ran up to her and kissed her as I had always been wont to do, although I knew that Mabel thought it very undignified of me to keep to this childish habit.

Just at that moment, I heard the tan-yard gate swing back, and turning saw my father standing there with a gentleman, who, of course, must have seen me embracing my old nurse.

"What, children, are you here already?" said my father, coming forward is his shabby office coat; a grey-haired, grey-bearded man, stooping somewhat, and looking worn and weary in the bright sunlight. "It seems but a few minutes since I heard the train passing at the bottom of the meadows."

Mabel had already alighted from the dog-cart, and she stepped forward, and in her pretty way asked father how he was, and put up her face to be kissed. I saw the stranger, who, I felt sure, must be Mr. Howard Steinthorpe, look at her with interest as she did so.

Perhaps it was because his companion's exceedingly well-to-do appearance acted as a foil that I thought my father looking so much more grey and worn than usual. Mr. Steinthorpe was a man in the prime of life, with a healthy, vigorous, well-satisfied air, of middle height, and by no means slim of figure, yet hardly to be called stout. He was considered a very handsome man by most persons at Burford, but this was not the impression which his appearance made on me as Mabel and I were now introduced to him, though I gradually became aware that his features were well-cut and regular, that his cold blue eyes were all that could be desired in size and shape, and that his fine auburn moustache was in itself a distinction.

He was irreproachably dressed, in a style quite superior to anything to which we were accustomed at Burford, and was altogether so well groomed, if I may be allowed to use such a horsey expression, that my poor father, always careless of his personal appearance, looked deplorably shabby by his side. His manners, too, had a finish that Burford manners lacked, but which Mabel and I, fresh from our London boarding school, felt to be the correct thing. Mabel actually coloured with gratification as he bowed low before her. I was less elated by his courtesy, for I was not conscious of deserving admiration, and I fancied I detected a sardonic gleam in his eyes as they met mine.

We exchanged a few polite commonplaces, and then, gracefully expressing a hope that he should see more of us, Mr. Steinthorpe bowed again and went on his way. We entered the house with our father, I with a lurking sense of irritation, which I could hardly have explained.

"Father, dear, it is time I came home to look after you," Mabel said, as she laid her hand caressingly on his arm. "What a shocking coat! You must hand that over to Luke."

"Oh, it is good enough for me," said my father, wearily, as he hung up his hat in the passage. "But I am glad to have you home again, children."

"So that is Mr. Steinthorpe!" Mabel said to me as we went upstairs together. "What a perfect gentleman he is! But I was vexed that he should see us all dusty and untidy from our journey."

"You mean that you are vexed he saw me so untidy," I said. "You looked most proper, as you always do."

For I had felt some pride in Mabel as she talked to Mr. Steinthorpe. Although I had not taken to him myself, I was pleased that he should see what a charming little lady my sister was. Mabel appeared gratified by my words.

"He is very good-looking," she observed, as she surveyed her neat little person in the glass.

"Oh, I can't bear his looks," I burst out; "I think he has a dreadful expression. Depend upon it, he is not a man to be trusted."

"You don't mean to say that you have taken one of your unreasonable dislikes?" said Mabel, with an air of patiently enduring my perversity. "I never knew anyone like you for jumping to wild conclusions. You always set yourself against nice people."

"Someone else is jumping to conclusions now," I observed. "How do you know that Mr. Steinthorpe is nice?"

But Mabel vouchsafed me no reply to this question.

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