A Little Rebel, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford [best novels to read for beginners txt] 📗

CHAPTER I.


"Perplex'd in the extreme."

"The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and beautiful."


The professor, sitting before his untasted breakfast, is looking the very picture of dismay. Two letters lie before him; one is in his hand, the other is on the table-cloth. Both are open; but of one, the opening lines--that tell of the death of his old friend--are all he has read; whereas he has read the other from start to finish, already three times. It is from the old friend himself, written a week before his death, and very urgent and very pleading. The professor has mastered its contents with ever-increasing consternation.

Indeed so great a revolution has it created in his mind, that his face--(the index of that excellent part of him)--has, for the moment, undergone a complete change. Any ordinary acquaintance now entering the professor's rooms (and those acquaintances might be whittled down to quite a _little_ few), would hardly have known him. For the abstraction that, as a rule, characterizes his features--the way he has of looking at you, as if he doesn't see you, that harasses the simple, and enrages the others--is all gone! Not a trace of it remains. It has given place to terror, open and unrestrained.

"A girl!" murmurs he in a feeble tone, falling back in his chair. And then again, in a louder tone of dismay--"A _girl!"_ He pauses again, and now again gives way to the fear that is destroying him--"A _grown_ girl!"

After this, he seems too overcome to continue his reflections, so goes back to the fatal letter. Every now and then a groan escapes him, mingled with mournful remarks, and extracts from the sheet in his hand--

"Poor old Wynter! Gone at last!" staring at the shaking signature at the end of the letter that speaks so plainly of the coming icy clutch that should prevent the poor hand from forming ever again even such sadly erratic characters as these. "At least," glancing at the half-read letter on the cloth--_"this_ tells me so. His solicitor's, I suppose. Though what Wynter could want with a solicitor---- Poor old fellow! He was often very good to me in the old days. I don't believe I should have done even as much as I _have_ done, without him... It must be fully ten years since he threw up his work here and went to Australia!... ten years. The girl must have been born before he went,"--glances at letter--"'My child, my beloved Perpetua, the one thing on earth I love, will be left entirely alone. Her mother died nine years ago. She is only seventeen, and the world lies before her, and never a soul in it to care how it goes with her. I entrust her to you--(a groan). To you I give her. Knowing that if you are living, dear fellow, you will not desert me in my great need, but will do what you can for my little one.'"

"But what is that?" demands the professor, distractedly. He pushes his spectacles up to the top of his head, and then drags them down again, and casts them wildly into a sugar-bowl. "What on earth am I to do with a girl of seventeen? If it had been a boy! even _that _would have been bad enough--but a girl! And, of course--I know Wynter--he has died without a penny. He was bound to do that, as he always lived without one. _Poor_ old Wynter!"-- as if a little ashamed of himself. "I don't see how I can afford to put her out to nurse." He pulls himself up with a start. "To nurse! a girl of seventeen! She'll want to be going out to balls and things--at her age."

As if smitten to the earth by this last awful idea, he picks his glasses out of the sugar and goes back to the letter.

"You will find her the dearest girl. Most loving, and tender-hearted; and full of life and spirits."

"Good heavens!" says the professor. He puts down the letter again, and begins to pace the room. "'Life and spirits.' A sort of young kangaroo, no doubt. What will the landlady say? I shall leave these rooms"--with a fond and lingering gaze round the dingy old apartment that hasn't an article in it worth ten sous--"and take a small house--somewhere--and-- But--er---- It won't be respectable, I think. I--I've heard things said about--er--things like that. It's no good in _looking_ an old fogey, if you aren't one; it's no earthly use,"--standing before a glass and ruefully examining his countenance--"in looking fifty, if you are only thirty-four. It will be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll cut _her_, and they'll cut me, and--what the _deuce_ did Wynter mean by leaving me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me," says the professor, mopping his brow. "What"--wrathfully--"that determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on _my_ shoulders, I---- Oh! _Poor_ old Wynter!"

Here he grows remorseful again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance, seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science. Wynter, too, was a scientist of no mean order, and would, probably, have made his mark in the world, if the world and its pleasures had not made their mark on him. He had been young Curzon's coach at one time, and finding the lad a kindred spirit, had opened out to him his own large store of knowledge, and steeped him in that great sea of which no man yet has drank enough--for all begin, and leave it, athirst.

Poor Wynter! The professor, turning in his stride up and down the narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand, finds his eyes resting on that other letter--carelessly opened, barely begun.

From Wynter's solicitor! It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have _had_ a solicitor. With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins to read it. At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated. He throws up his head. He cackles a bit. He looks as if he wants to say something very badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he has forgotten how to do it, and finally goes back to the letter again, and this time--the third time--finishes it.

Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it _first?_ So the girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old lady--maiden lady. Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss Jane Majendie. Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would never have been old maids, if they had resembled him, which probably they did--if he had any. What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow too.

The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his. After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He glances at the letter again.

He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her fortune, rather than of her.

The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of her society--_he,_ of the estate only.

Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually _rich_. The professor pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has enabled him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly outside the line of _want,_ a thing to be grateful for, as his family having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his family in a _measure_ also (and with reservations), and it would have been impossible to him, of all men, to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any kind. He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son. He knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part all he had to sustain him. But the mind requires not even the material husk, it lives on better food than that, and in his case mind had triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a safe, if not as yet to a victorious, goal.

Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now could be _his_ master, has died, leaving behind him a fortune. What was the sum? He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies his thought. Yes--eighty thousand pounds! A good fortune even in these luxurious days. He has died worth £80,000, of which his daughter is sole heiress!

Before the professor's eyes rises a vision of old Wynter. They used to call him "old," those boys who attended his classes, though he was as light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a dissipated Apollo. They had all loved him, if they had not revered him, and, indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living and lasting joke amongst them.

Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor, remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving them all _planté là_ as it were, and declared his intention of starting life anew and making a pile for himself in some new world.

Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only known. Wynter _had_ made that mythical "pile," and had left his daughter an heiress!

Not only an heiress, but a gift to Miss Jane Majendie, of somewhere in Bloomsbury.

The professor's disturbed face grows calm again. It even occurs to him that he has not eaten his breakfast. He so _often_ remembers this, that it does not trouble him. To pore over his books (that are overflowing every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until his eggs are India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a fresh experience. But though this morning both eggs and rasher have attained a high place in the leather department, he enters on his sorry repast with a glad heart.

Sweet are the rebounds from jeopardy to joy! And he has so _much_ of joy! Not only has he been able to shake from his shoulders that awful incubus--and ever-present ward--but he can be sure that the absent ward is so well-off with regard to this world's goods, that he need never give her so much as a passing thought--dragged, _torn_ as that thought would be from his beloved studies.

The aunt, of course, will see about her fortune. _He_ has only a perfunctory duty--to see that the fortune is not squandered. But he is safe there. Maiden ladies _never_ squander! And the girl, being only seventeen, can't possibly squander it herself for some