"Four or five years hence!" sighed Miriam.
Cornelius perhaps remembered the threat of death suspended over my whole youth, for he observed uneasily--
"Yes--I trust--I hope--Daisy, you must not learn so much!"
He drew me nearer to him with a look and motion kinder than a caress, then said to Miriam--
"She looks pale."
"It is only excitement; she is so anxious to please you. When she is near committing a mistake, she is quite agitated, poor child!"
Miriam had struck the right chord at last. There was some truth in what she said. My desire to please Cornelius did agitate me a little, and this he knew.
"She must go back to Kate," he hastily observed; "I won't have her so pale as that; and she must not study so much," he added, with increased anxiety, "she can always make up for lost time."
In vain I endeavoured to keep my teacher, he was resolute; it was some comfort that the change sprang from no unkindness, and had been effected only by working on his affection for me. But even that change, such as it was, did not last for more than a week. One evening, after listening to Kate and me with evident impatience, Cornelius swept away the books from before her, sat down between us, and, informing his sister that her method was no good, he announced his intention of taking me once more under his own exclusive care.
"My method is as good as any," tartly replied Kate, "but the pupil who frets for her first teacher cannot make much progress under the second."
"Have you been fretting, Daisy?" asked Cornelius.
I could not deny it; he smiled and caressed me.
"If it were any use remonstrating," said Kate, who looked half pleased, half dissatisfied, "I should tell you, Cornelius, that you are very foolish; not to lose time, I simply say this--you have taken Daisy from me a second time, you may keep her."
"I mean it," he answered gaily.
At once he resumed his office. We had scarcely begun when Miriam entered.
She came almost every evening, for as her aunt was still at Hastings, Cornelius never visited her. From the door I saw her look at us, as we sat at the table, his arm on the back of my chair, his bent face close to mine, with a mute, expressive glance.
"Yes," said Cornelius, smiling, as he smoothed my hair, "I have got my pupil back again. The remedy was found worse than the disease."
Miriam smiled too. She gave up the point and attempted no more to deprive me of my teacher, but I had to pay dear in the daytime for what I received in the evening.
Whilst she sat for Medora, I studied or sewed. She said little to me, but every word bore its sting. Cornelius never detected the irony that lurked beneath the seeming praise and apparent kindness. She tormented me with impunity. There were so many points in which she could irritate my secret wound; for I was still intensely jealous of her, and though Cornelius and Kate thought me cured, she knew better.
But suffering gives premature wisdom.
I had entered my fourteenth year--I was no longer quite a child. When she made me feel, as she did almost daily, that I was plain, sallow, and sickly, my vanity smarted, but I reflected that Cornelius liked me in spite of these disadvantages, and I bore the insult silently; when however she made me see that Cornelius was devoted to her, that my place in his heart was as far removed from hers, as she was above me in years, beauty, and many gifts, I could scarcely bear it. That it should be so was bad enough, but to be taunted with it by the intruder who had come between him and me, wakened within me every emotion of anger and jealous grief; yet I had sufficient power over myself to control the outward manifestations of these feelings. Taught by the past, I mistrusted her.
Weeks elapsed, and she could not make me fall into my old errors, or betray me into any outbreak of temper. But alas! even whilst I governed myself externally, I sought not to rule my heart, which daily grew more embittered against her. To this, and this only, I recognize it--I owed what happened. But before proceeding further, I cannot help recording a little incident which surprised me then, and which, when I look back on those times, still gives me food for thought.
The blind nurse of Miriam had returned with her from Hastings. I believe Miss Russell never moved without this old woman, to whom she was devotedly kind: she humoured her as she would have humoured a child, and, amongst other things, indulged her in the homely fashion of sitting at the front door of the house, in the narrow strip of garden that divided it from the Grove. It had been a favourite habit of hers to sit thus years back at the door of her cottage home; sightless though she was, she liked to sit so still; in the absence of old Miss Russell she did so freely. We too had a little front garden, divided from that of our neighbours by a low trellis. I was seldom in it, unless to water the few flowers it contained. I was thus engaged one calm evening, when the old woman sat alone at her door. She was wrinkled and aged; yet she had a happy, childish face, as if in feelings as well as in years she had gently returned to a second infancy. I noticed that as I moved about she bent her head and listened attentively.
"Do you want anything?" I asked, going up to the partition near which she sat.
Her face brightened; she stretched out her hand, felt me, and smiled.
"You are the little girl," she said eagerly.
"Yes," I replied, "I am."
"Is my blessed young lady with you?"
"Miss Russell is in our garden with Cornelius."
"I shall never see him," she sighed, "but I like his voice; he is very handsome, isn't he?"
"Kate says so, but I don't know anything about it."
"Is he kind to you?"
"He is very good to me and every one."
"That's right;" she said eagerly; "better goodness than gold any day."
"Cornelius will have gold too," I observed, piqued that he should be thought poor; "he will earn a great deal of money and will be quite rich."
The old woman looked delighted and astonished.
"I always said my blessed young lady would make a grand match," she said; "and so he is to be rich! God bless the good young gentleman!"
"He will be quite a great man," I resumed, "a Knight perhaps, or a Baronet."
She raised her hands.
"Ah well!" she sighed, after brooding for a few moments over my words, "he will have a blessed young lady for his wife, as good as she's handsome; and," she added, turning towards me her sightless eyes and gently laying her hand on my head, "and happy's the little girl that'll be with my dear young lady."
CHAPTER XX.
Matters had gone on thus for about a month, when Cornelius sold his Happy Time. Kate made him promise not to be extravagant; the only act of folly of which he rendered himself guilty was not a very expensive one.
One morning, when Miriam came to the studio, to sit as usual, Cornelius produced a pair of morocco cases; each contained a silver filagree bracelet: he asked her to choose one, and accept it. She was sitting in the attire and attitude of Medora; he stood by her, his present in his hand.
"Must I really choose?" she said. "What will Miss O'Reilly say?"
"Oh! the other is not for Kate, but for Daisy," he quietly answered.
I saw a scarcely perceptible change on her face, but she abstained from comment, gave an indifferent look to the two bracelets, and chose one, saying briefly--
"That one."
Cornelius placed the rejected bracelet on the table before me, with a careless--
"There, my dear, that is for you."