Lady Maulevrier rarely appeared at luncheon. She took some slight refection in her morning-room, among her books and papers, and in the society of her canine favourites, whose company suited her better at certain hours than the noisier companionship of her grandchildren. She was a studious woman, loving the silent life of books better than the inane chatter of everyday humanity. She was a woman who thought much and read much, and who lived more in the past than the present. She lived also in the future, counting much upon the splendid career of her beautiful granddaughter, which should be in a manner a lengthening out, a renewal of her own life. She looked forward to the day when Lesbia should reign supreme in the great world, a famous beauty and leader of fashion, her every act and word inspired and directed by her grandmother, who would be the shadow behind the throne. It was possible — nay, probable — that in those days Lady Maulevrier would herself re-appear in society, establish her salon, and draw around her closing years all that is wittiest, best, and wisest in the great world.
Her ladyship was reposing in her low reading-chair, with a volume of Tyndall on the book-stand before her, when the door was opened softly and Lesbia came gliding in, and seated herself without a word on the hassock at her grandmother’s feet. Lady Maulevrier passed her hand caressingly over the girl’s soft brown hair, without looking up from her book.
‘You are a late visitor,’ she said; ‘why did you not come to me after breakfast?’
‘It was such a lovely morning, we went straight from the breakfast table to the garden; I did not think you wanted me.’
‘I did not want you; but I am always glad to see my pet. What were you doing in the garden all the morning? I did not hear you playing tennis.’
Lady Maulevrier had already interrogated the German governess upon this very subject, but she had her own reasons for wishing to hear Lesbia’s account.
‘No, it was too warm for tennis. Fr?ulein and I sat and worked, and Mr. Hammond read to us.’
‘What did he read?’
‘Heine’s ballads. He reads German beautifully.
‘Indeed! I daresay he was at school in Germany. There are cheap schools there to which middle-class people send their boys.’
This was like a thrust from a rusty knife.
‘Mr. Hammond was at Oxford,’ Lesbia said, reproachfully; and then, after a longish pause, she clasped her hands upon the arm of Lady Maulevrier’s chair, and said, in a pleading voice, ‘Grandmother, Mr. Hammond has asked me to marry him.’
‘Indeed! Only that? And pray, did he tell you what are his means of maintaining Lord Maulevrier’s sister in the position to which her birth entitles her?’ inquired the dowager, with crushing calmness.
‘He is not rich; indeed, I believe, he is poor; but he is brave and clever, and he is full of confidence in his power to conquer fortune.’
‘No doubt; that is your true adventurer’s style. He confides implicitly in his own talents, and in somebody else’s banker. Mr. Hammond would make a tremendous figure in the world, I daresay, and while he was making it your brother would have to keep him. Well, my dear Lesbia, I hope you gave this gentleman the answer his insolence deserved; or that you did better, and referred him to me. I should be glad to give him my opinion of his conduct — a person admitted to this house as your brother’s hanger-on — tolerated only on your brother’s account; such a person, nameless, penniless, friendless (except for Maulevrier’s too facile patronage), to dare to lift his eyes to my granddaughter! It is ineffable insolence!’
Lesbia crouched by her grandmother’s chair, her face hidden from Lady Maulevrier’s falcon eye. Every word uttered by her ladyship stung like the knotted cords of a knout. She knew not whether to be most ashamed of her lover or of herself — of her lover for his obscure position, his hopeless poverty; of herself for her folly in loving such a man. And she did love him, and would fain have pleaded his cause, had she not been cowed by the authority that had ruled her all her life.
‘Lesbia, if I thought you had been silly enough, degraded enough, to give this young man encouragement, to have justified his audacity of to-day by any act or word of yours, I should despise, I should detest you,’ said Lady Maulevrier, sternly. ‘What could be more contemptible, more hateful in a girl reared as you have been than to give encouragement to the first comer — to listen greedily to the first adventurer who had the insolence to make love to you, to be eager to throw yourself into the arms of the first man who asked you. That my granddaughter, a girl reared and taught and watched and guarded by me, should have no more dignity, no more modesty, or womanly feeling, than a barmaid at an inn!’
Lesbia began to cry.
‘I don’t see why a barmaid, should not be a good woman, or why it should be a crime to fall in love,’ she said, in a voice broken by sobs. ‘You need not speak to me so unkindly. I am not going to marry Mr. Hammond.’
‘Oh, you are not? that is very good of you. I am deeply grateful for such an assurance.’
‘But I like him better than anyone I ever saw in my life before.’
‘You have seen to many people. You have had such a wide area for choice.’
‘No; I know I have been kept like a nun in a convent: but I don’t think when I go into the world I shall ever see anyone I should like better than Mr. Hammond.’
‘Wait till you have seen the world before you make up your mind about that. And now, Lesbia, leave off talking and thinking like a child; look me in the face and listen to me, for I am going to speak seriously; and with me, when I am in earnest, what is said once is said for ever.’
Lady Maulevrier grasped her granddaughter’s arm with long slender fingers which held it as tightly as the grasp of a vice. She drew the girl’s slim figure round till they were face to face, looking into each other’s eyes, the dowager’s eagle countenance lit up with impassioned feeling, severe, awful as the face of one of the fatal sisters, the avengers of blood, the harbingers of doom.
‘Lesbia, I think I have been good to you, and kind to you,’ she said.
‘You have been all that is kind and dear,’ faltered Lesbia.
‘Then give me measure for measure. My life has been a hard one, child; hard and lonely, and loveless and joyless. My son, to whom I devoted myself in the vigour of youth and in the prime of life, never loved me, never repaid me for my love. He spent his days far away from me, when his presence would have gladdened my difficult life. He died in a strange land. Of his three children, you are the one I took into my heart. I did my duty to the others; I lavished my love upon you. Do not give me cursing instead of blessing. Do not give me a stone instead of bread. I have built every hope of happiness or pleasure in this world upon you and your obedience. Obey me, be true to me, and I will make you a queen, and I will sit in the shadow of your throne. I will toil for you, and be wise for you. You shall have only to shine, and dazzle, and enjoy the glory of life. My beautiful darling, for pity’s sake do not give yourself over to folly.’
‘Did not you marry for love, grandmother?’
‘No, Lesbia. Lord Maulevrier and I got on very well together, but ours was no love-match.’
‘Does nobody in our rank ever marry for love? are all marriages a mere exchange and barter?’
‘No, there are love-matches now and then, which often turn out badly. But, my darling, I am not asking you to marry for rank or for money. I am only asking you to wait till you find your mate among the noblest in the land. He may be the handsomest and most accomplished of men, a man born to win women’s hearts; and you may love him as fervently as ever a village girl loved her first lover. I am not going to sacrifice you, or to barter you, dearest. I mean to marry you to the best and noblest young man of his day. You shall never be asked to stoop to the unworthy, not even if worthlessness wore strawberry leaves in his cap, and owned the greatest estate in the land.’
‘And if — instead of waiting-for this King Arthur of yours — I were to do as Iseult did — as Guinevere did — choose for myself ——’
‘Iseult and Guinevere were wantons. I wonder that you can name them in comparison with yourself.’
‘If I were to marry a good and honourable man who has his place to make in the world, would you never forgive me?’
‘You mean Mr. Hammond? You may just as well speak plainly,’ said Lady Maulevrier, freezingly. ‘If you were capable of such idiocy as that, Lesbia, I would pluck you out of my heart like a foul weed. I would never look upon you, or hear your name spoken, or think of you again as long as I lived. My life would not last very long after that blow. Old age cannot bear such shocks. Oh, Lesbia, I have been father and mother to you; do not bring my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.’
Lesbia gave a deep sigh, and brushed the tears from her cheeks. Yes, the very idea of such a marriage was foolishness. Just now, in the pine wood, carried away by the force of her lover’s passion, by her own softer feelings, it had seemed to her as if she could count the world well lost for his sake; but now, at Lady Maulevrier’s feet, she became again true to her training, and the world was too much to lose.
‘What can I do, grandmother?’ she asked, submissively, despairingly. ‘He loves me, and I love him. How can I tell him that he and I can never be anything to each other in this world?’
‘Refer him to me. I will give him his answer.’
‘No, no; that will not do. I have promised to answer him myself. He has gone for a walk on the hills, and will come back at four o’clock for my answer.’
‘Sit down at that table, and write as I dictate.’
‘But a letter will be so formal.’
‘It is the only way in which you can answer him. When he comes back from his walk you will have left Fellside. I shall send you off to St. Bees with Fr?ulein. You must never look upon that man’s face again.’
Lesbia brushed away a few more tears, and obeyed. She had been too well trained to attempt resistance. Defiance was out of the question.
The sky was still cloudless when John Hammond strolled slowly up the leafy avenue at Fellside. He had been across the valley and up the hill to Easedale Tarn, and then by rough untrodden ways, across a chaos of rock and heather, into a second valley, long, narrow, and sterile, known as Far Easedale, a desolate gorge, a rugged cleft in the heart of the mountains. The walk had been long and laborious; but only in such clambering and toiling, such expenditure of muscular force and latent heat, could the man’s restless soul endure those long hours of suspense.
‘How will she answer me? Oh, my God! how will she answer?’ he said within himself, as he walked up the romantic winding road, which made so picturesque an approach to Lady Maulevrier’s domain, ‘Is my idol gold or clay? How will she come through the crucible? Oh, dearest, sweetest, loveliest, only be true to the instinct of your womanhood, and my cup will be full of bliss, and all my days will flow as sweetly as the burden of a song. But if you prove heartless, if you love the world’s. wealth better than you love me — ah! then all is over, and you and I are lost to each other for ever. I have made up my mind.’
His face settled into an expression of indomitable determination, as of a man who would die rather than be false to his own purpose. There was no glow of hope in his heart. He had no deep faith in the girl he loved; indeed in his heart of hearts he knew that this being to whom he had trusted his hopes of bliss was no heroine. She was a lovely, loveable girl, nothing more. How would she greet him when they met presently on the tennis lawn? With tears and entreaties, and pretty little deprecating speeches, irresolution, timidity, vacillation, perhaps; hardly with heroic resolve to act and dare for his sake.
There was no one on the tennis lawn when he went there, though the hour was close at hand at which Lesbia had promised to give him his answer. He sat down in one of the low chairs, glad to rest after his long ramble having had no refreshment but a bottle of soda-water and a biscuit at the cottage by Easedale Tarn. He waited, calmly as to outward seeming, but with a heavy heart.
‘If it were Mary now whom I loved, I should have little fear of the issue,’ he thought, weighing his sweetheart’s character, as he weighed his chances of success. ‘That young termagant would defy the world for her lover.’
He sat in the summer silence for nearly half-an-hour, and still there was no sign of Lady Lesbia. Her satin-lined workbasket, with the work thrown carelessly across it, was still on the rustic table, just as she had left it when they went to the pine wood. Waiting was weary work when the bliss of a lifetime trembled in the balance; and yet he did not want to be impatient. She might find it difficult to get away from her family, perhaps. She was closely watched and guarded, as the most precious thing at Fellside.
At last the clock struck five, and Hammond could endure delay no longer. He went round by the flower garden to the terrace before the drawing-room windows, and through an open window to the drawing-room.
Lady Maulevrier was in her accustomed seat, with her own particular little table, magazines, books, newspapers at her side. Lady Mary was pouring out the tea, a most unusual thing; and Maulevrier was sitting on a stool at her feet, with his knees up to his chin, very warm and dusty, eating pound cake.
‘Where the mischief have you been hiding yourself all day, Jack?’ he called out as Hammond appeared, looking round the room as he entered, with eager, interrogating eyes, for that one figure which was absent.
‘I have been for a walk.’
‘You might have had the civility to announce your design, and Molly and I would have shared your peregrinations.’
‘I am sorry that I lost the privilege of your company.’
‘I suppose you lost your luncheon, which was of more importance,’ said Maulevrier.
‘Will you have some tea?’ asked Mary, who looked more womanly than usual in a cream-coloured surah gown — one of her Sunday gowns.
She had a faint hope that by this essentially feminine apparel she might lessen the prejudicial effect of Maulevrier’s cruel story about the fox-hunt.
Mr. Hammond answered absently, hardly looking at Mary, and quite unconscious of her pretty gown.
‘Thanks, yes,’ he said, taking the cup and saucer, and looking at the door by which he momently expected Lady Lesbia’s entrance, and then, as the door did not open, he looked down at Mary, very busy with china teapots and a brass kettle which hissed and throbbed over a spirit lamp.
‘Won’t you have some cake,’ she asked, looking up at him gently, grieved at the distress and disappointment in his face. ‘I am sure you must be dreadfully hungry.’
‘Not in the least, thanks. How came you to be entrusted with those sacred vessels, Lady Mary? What has become of Fr?ulein and your sister?’
‘They have rushed off to St. Bees. Grandmother thought Lesbia looking pale and out of spirits, and packed her off to the seaside at a minute’s notice.’
‘What! She has left Fellside?’ asked Hammond, paling suddenly, as if a man had struck him. ‘Lady Maulevrier, do I understand that Lady Lesbia has gone away?’
He asked the question in an authoritative tone, with the air of a man who had a right to be answered. The dowager wondered at his surpassing insolence.
‘My granddaughter has gone to the seaside with her governess,’ she said, haughtily.
‘At a minute’s notice?’
‘At a minute’s notice. I am not in the habit of hesitating about any step which I consider necessary for my grandchildren’s welfare.’
She looked him full in the face, with those falcon eyes of hers; and he gave her back a look as resolute, and every whit as full of courage and of pride.
‘Well,’ he said, after a very perceptible pause, ‘no doubt your ladyship has done wisely, and I must submit to your jurisdiction. But I had asked Lady Lesbia a question, and I had been promised an answer.’
‘Your question has been answered by Lady Lesbia. She left a note for you,’ replied Lady Maulevrier.
‘Thanks,’ answered Mr. Hammond, briefly, and he hurried from the room without another word.
The letter was on the table in his bedroom. He had little hope of any good waiting for him in a letter so written. The dowager and the world had triumphed over a girl’s dawning love, no doubt.
This was Lesbia’s letter:
‘Dear Mr. Hammond — Lady Maulevrier desires me to say that the proposal which you honoured me by making this morning is one which I cannot possibly accept, and that any idea of an engagement between you and me could result only in misery and humiliation to both. She thinks it best, under these circumstances, that we should not again meet, and I shall therefore have left Fellside before you receive this letter.
‘With all good wishes, very faithfully yours,
‘LESBIA HASELDEN.’
‘Very faithfully mine — faithful to her false training, to the worldly mind that rules her; faithful to the gods of this world — Belial and Mammon, and the Moloch Fashion. Poor cowardly soul! She loves me, and owns as much, yet weakly flies from me, afraid to trust the strong arm and the brave heart of the man who loves her, preferring the glittering shams of the world to the reality of true and honest love. Well, child, I have weighed you in the balance and found you wanting. Would to God it had been otherwise! If you had been brave and bold for love’s sake, where is that pure and perfect chrysolite for which I would have bartered you?’
He flung himself into a chair, and sat with his head bowed upon his folded arms, and his eyes not innocent of tears. What would he not have given to find truth and courage and scorn of the world’s wealth in that heart which he had tried to win. Did he think her altogether heartless because she so glibly renounced him? No, he was too just for that. He called her only half-hearted. She was like the cat in the adage, ‘Letting I dare not, wait upon I would.’ But he told himself with one deep sigh of resignation that she was lost to him for ever.
‘I have tried her, and found her not worth the winning,’ he said.
The house, even the lovely landscape smiling under his windows, the pastoral valley, smooth lake and willowy island, seemed hateful to him. He felt himself hemmed round by those green hills, by yonder brown and rugged wall of Nabb Scar, stifled for want of breathing space. The landscape was lovely enough, but it was like a beautiful grave. He longed to get away from it.
‘Another man would follow her to St. Bees,’ he said. ‘I will not.’
He flung a few things into a Gladstone bag, sat down, and wrote a brief note to Maulevrier, asking him to make his excuses to her ladyship. He had made up his mind to go to Keswick that afternoon, and would rejoin his friend to-morrow, at Carlisle. This done, he rang for Maulevrier’s valet, and asked that person to look after his luggage and bring it on to Scotland with his master’s things; and then, without a word of adieu to anyone, John Hammond went out of the house, with the Gladstone bag in his hand, and shook the dust of Fellside off his feet.
He ordered a fly at the Prince of Wales’s Hotel, and drove to Keswick, whence he went on to the Lodore. The gloom and spaciousness of Derwentwater, grey in the gathering dusk, suited his humour better than the emerald prettiness of Grasmere — the roar of the waterfall made music in his ear. He dined in a private room, and spent the evening roaming on the shores of the lake, and at eleven o’clock went back to his hotel and sat late into the night reading Heine, and thinking of the girl who had refused him.
Mr. Hammond’s letter was delivered to Lord Maulevrier five minutes before dinner, as he sat in the drawing-room with her ladyship and Mary. Poor Mary had put on another pretty gown for dinner, still bent upon effacing Mr. Hammond’s image of her as a tousled, frantic creature in torn and muddy raiment. She sat watching the door, just as Hammond had watched it three hours ago.
‘So,’ said Maulevrier, ‘your ladyship has succeeded in driving my friend away. Hammond has left Fellside, and begs me to convey to you his compliments and his grateful acknowledgment of all your kindness.’
‘I hope I have not been uncivil to him,’ answered Lady Maulevrier coldly. ‘As you had both made up your minds to go to-morrow, it can matter very little that he should go to-day.’
Mary looked down at the ribbon and lace on her prettiest frock, and thought that it mattered a great deal to her. Yet, if he had stayed, would he have seen her frock or her? With his bodily eyes, perhaps, but not with the eyes of his mind. Those eyes saw only Lesbia.
‘No, perhaps it hardly matters,’ answered Maulevrier, with suppressed anger. ‘The man is not worth talking about or thinking about. What is he? Only the best, truest, bravest fellow I ever knew.’
‘There are shepherds and guides in Grasmere of whom we could say almost as much,’ said Lady Maulevrier, ‘yet you would scarcely expect me to encourage one of them to pay his addresses to your sister? Pray spare us all nonsense-talk, Maulevrier. This business is very well ended. You ought never to have brought Mr. Hammond here.’
‘I am sure of that now. I am very sorry I did bring him.’
‘Oh, the man will not die for love. A disappointment of that kind is good for a young man in his position. It will preserve him from more vulgar entanglements, and perhaps from the folly of a too early marriage.’
‘That is a mighty philosophical way of looking at the matter.’
‘It is the only true way. I hope when you are my age you will have learnt to look at everything in a philosophical spirit.’
‘Well, Lady Maulevrier, you have had it all your own way,’ said the young man, walking up and down the room in an angry mood. ‘I hope you will never be sorry for having come between two people who loved each other, and might have made each other happy.’
‘I shall never he sorry for having saved my granddaughter from an imprudent marriage. Give me your arm, Maulevrier, and let me hear no more about Mr. Hammond. We have all had quite enough of him,’ said her ladyship, as the butler announced dinner.
Fr?ulein Müller and her charge returned from St. Bees after a sojourn of about three weeks upon that quiet shore: but Lady Lesbia did not appear to be improved in health or spirits by the revivifying breezes of the ocean.
‘It is a dull, horrid place, and I was bored to death there!’ she said, when Mary asked how she had enjoyed herself. ‘There was no question of enjoyment. Grandmother took it into her head that I was looking ill, and sent me to the sea; but I should have been just as well at Fellside.’
This meant that between Lesbia and that distinctly inferior being, her younger sister, there was to be no confidence. Mary had watched the life-drama acted under her eyes too closely not to know all about it, and was not inclined to be so put off.
That pale perturbed countenance of John Hammond’s, those eager inquiring eyes looking to the door which opened not, had haunted Mary’s waking thoughts, had even mingled with the tangled web of her dreams. Oh, how could any woman scorn such love? To be so loved, and by such a man, seemed to Mary the perfection of earthly bliss. She had never been educated up to those wider and loftier views of life, which teach a woman that houses and lands, place and power, are the supreme good.
‘I can’t understand how you could treat that noble-minded man so badly,’ she exclaimed one day, when she and Lesbia were alone in the library, and after she had sat for ever so long, staring out of the window, meditating upon her sister’s cruelty.
‘Of whom are you speaking, pray?’
‘As if you didn’t know! Of Mr. Hammond.’
‘And pray, how do you know that he is noble-minded, or that I treated him badly?’
‘Well, as to his being noble-minded, that jumps to the eyes, as French books say. As for your treatment of him, I was looking on all the time, and I know how unkind you were, and I heard him talking to you in the fir-copse that day.’
‘You Were listening’ cried Lesbia indignantly.
‘I was not listening! I was passing by. And if people choose to carry on their love affairs out of doors they must expect to be overheard. I heard him pleading to you, telling you how he would work for you, fight the battle of life for you, asking you to be trustful and brave for his sake. But you have a heart of stone. You and grandmother both have hearts of stone. I think she must have taken out your heart when you were little, and put a stone in its place.’
‘Really,’ said Lesbia, trying to carry things with a high hand, albeit her very human heart was beating passionately all the time, ‘I think you ought to be very grateful to me — and grandmother — for refusing Mr. Hammond.’
‘Why grateful?’
‘Because it leaves you a chance of getting him for yourself; and everybody can see that you are over head and ears in love with him. That jumps to the eyes, as you say.’
Mary turned crimson, trembled with rage, looked at her sister as if she would kill her, for a moment or so, and finally burst into tears.
‘That is not true, and it is shameful for you to say such a thing,’ she cried.
‘Why, what a virago you are, Mary. Well, I’m very glad it is not true. Mr. Hammond is — yes, I will be quite candid with you — he is the only man I am ever likely to admire for his own sake. He is good, brave, clever, all that you think him. But you and I do not live in a world in which girls are free to follow their own inclinations. I should break Lady Maulevrier’s heart if I were to make a foolish marriage; and I owe her too much to set her wishes at naught, or to make her declining years unhappy. I must obey her, at any cost to my own feelings. Please never mention Mr. Hammond’s name. I’m sure I’ve had quite enough unhappiness about him.’
‘I see,’ said Mary, bitterly. ‘It is your own pain you think of, not his. He may suffer, so long as you are not worried.’
‘You are an impertinent chit,’ retorted Lesbia, ‘and you know nothing about it.’
After this there was no more said about Mr. Hammond; but Mary did not forget him. She wrote long letters to her brother, who was still in Scotland, shooting, deer-stalking, fishing, killing something or other daily, in the most approved fashion of an Englishman taking his pleasure. Maulevrier occasionally repaid her with a telegram; but he was not a good correspondent. He declared that life was too short for letter-writing.
Summer was gone; the lake was no longer a shining emerald floor, dotted with the reflection of the flock upon the verdant slopes above it, but dull and grey of hue, and broken by white-edged wavelets. Patches of snow gleamed on the misty heights of Helvellyn, and the autumn winds howled and shrieked around Fellside in the evenings, when all the shutters were shut, and the outside world seemed little more than an idea: that mystic hour when the sheep are slumbering under the starry sky, and when, as the Westmoreland peasant believes, the fairies help the housewife at her spinning-wheel.
Those October evenings were very long and weary for Lesbia and her sister. Lady Maulevrier read and mused in her low chair beside the fire, with her books piled upon her own particular table, and lighted by her own particular lamp. She talked very little, but she was always gracious to her granddaughters and their governess, and she liked them to be with her in the evening. Lesbia played or sang, or sat at work at her basket-table, which occupied the other side of the fireplace; and Fr?ulein and Mary had the rest of the room to themselves, as it were, those two places by the hearth being sacred, as if dedicated to household gods. Mary read immensely in those long evenings, devouring volume after volume, feeding her imagination with every kind of nutriment, good, bad, and indifferent. Fr?ulein Müller knitted a woollen shawl, which seemed to have neither beginning, middle, nor end, and was always ready for conversation, but there were times when silence brooded over the scene for long intervals, and when every sound of the light wood-ashes dropping on the tiled hearth was distinctly audible.
This state of things went on for about three weeks after Lesbia’s return from St. Bees, Lady Maulevrier watchful of her granddaughter all the time, though saying nothing. She saw that Lesbia was not happy, not as she had been in the time before the coming of John Hammond. She had never been particularly gay or light-hearted, never gifted with the wild spirits and buoyancy which make girlhood so lovely a season to some natures, a time of dance and song and joyousness, a morning of life steeped in the beauty and gladness of the universe. She had never been gay as young lambs and foals and fawns and kittens and puppy dogs are gay, by reason of the well-spring of delight within them, needing no stimulus from the outside world. She had been just a little inclined to murmur at the dulness of her life at Fellside; yet she had borne herself with a placid sweetness which had been Lady Maulevrier’s delight. But now there was a marked change in her manner. She was not the less submissive and dutiful in her bearing to her grandmother, whom she both loved and feared; but there were moments of fretfulness and impatience which she could not conceal. She was captious and sullen in her manner to Mary and the Fr?ulein. She would not walk or drive with them, or share in any of their amusements. Sometimes of an evening that studious silence of the drawing-room was suddenly broken by Lesbia’s weary sigh, breathed unawares as she bent over her work.
Lady Maulevrier saw, too, that Lesbia’s cheek was paler than of old, her eyes less bright. There was a heavy look that told of broken slumbers, there was a pinched look in that oval check. Good heavens! if her beauty were to pale and wane, before society had bowed down and worshipped it; if this fair flower were to fade untimely; if this prize rose in the garden of beauty were to wither and decay before it won the prize.
Her ladyship was a woman of action, and no sooner did this fear shape itself in her mind than she took steps to prevent the evil her thoughts foreshadowed.
Among those friends of her youth and allies of her house with whom she had always maintained an affectionate correspondence was Lady Kirkbank, the fashionable wife of a sporting baronet, owner of a castle in Scotland, a place in Yorkshire, a villa at Cannes, and a fine house in Arlington Street, with an income large enough for their enjoyment. When Lady Diana Angersthorpe shone forth in the West End world as the acknowledged belle of the season, the star of Georgina Lorimer was beginning to wane. She was the eldest daughter of Colonel Lorimer, a man of good old family, and a fine soldier, who had fought shoulder to shoulder with Gough and Lawrence, and who had contrived to make a figure in society with very small means. Georgina’s sisters had all married well. It was a case of necessity, the Colonel told them; they must either marry or gravitate ultimately to the workhouse. So the Miss Lorimers made the best use of their youth and freshness, and ‘no good offer refused’ was the guiding rule of their young lives. Lucy married an East India merchant, and set up a fine house in Porchester Terrace. Maud married wealth personified in the person of a leading member of the Tallow Chandlers’ Company, and had her town house and country house, and as fine a set of diamonds as a duchess.
But Georgina, the eldest, trifled with her chances, and her twenty-seventh birthday beheld her pouring out her father’s tea in a small furnished house in a street off Portland Place, which the Colonel had hired on his return from India, and which he declared himself unable to maintain another year.
‘Directly the season is over I shall give up housekeeping and take a lodging at Bath,’ said Colonel Lorimer. ‘If you don’t like Bath all the year round you can stay with your sisters.’
‘That is the last thing I am likely to do,’ answered Georgina; ‘my sisters were barely endurable when they were single and poor. They are quite intolerable now they are married and rich. I would sooner live in the monkey-house at the Zoological than stay with either Lucy or Maud.’
‘That’s rank envy,’ retorted her father ‘You can’t forgive them for having done so much better than you.’
‘I can’t forgive them for having married snobs. When I marry I shall marry a gentleman.’
‘When!’ echoed the parent, with a sneering laugh. ‘Hadn’t you better say “if”’?
At this period Georgina’s waning good looks were in some measure counterbalanced by the cumulative effects of half a dozen seasons in good society, which had given style to her person, ease to her manners, and sharpness to her tongue. Nobody in society said sharper or more unpleasant things than Miss Lorimer, and by virtue of this gift she got invited about a great deal more than she might have done had she been distinguished for sweetness of speech and manner. Georgie Lorimer’s presence at a dinner table gave just that pungent flavour which is like the faint suspicion of garlic in a fricassee or of tarragon in a salad.
Now in this very season, when Colonel Lorimer was inclined to speak of his daughter, as Sainte Beuve wrote of Musset, as a young woman with a very brilliant past, a lucky turn of events gave Georgina a fresh start in life, which may be called a new departure. Lady Diana Angersthorpe, the belle of the season, took a fancy to her, was charmed with her sharp tongue and acute sense of the ridiculous. The two became fast friends, and were seen everywhere together. The best men all flocked round the beauty, and all talked to the beauty’s companion: and before the season was over, Sir George Kirkbank, who had had half made up his mind to propose to Lady Diana, found himself engaged to that uncommonly jolly girl, Lady Diana’s friend. Georgina spent August and September with Lady Di, at the Marchioness of Carisbroke’s delightful villa in the Isle of Wight, and Sir George kept his yacht at Cowes all the time, and was in constant attendance upon his fiancée. It was George and Georgie everywhere. In October Colonel Lorimer had the profound pleasure of giving away his daughter, before the altar in St. George’s, Hanover Square, and it may be said of him that nothing in his relations with that young lady became him better than his manner of parting with her.
So the needy Colonel’s daughter became Lady Kirkbank, and in the following spring Diana Angersthorpe was married at the same St. George’s to the Earl of Maulevrier. The friends were divided by distance and by circumstance as the years rolled on; but friendship was steadily maintained; and a regular correspondence with Lady Kirkbank, whose pen was as sharp as her tongue, was one of the means by which Lady Maulevrier had kept herself thoroughly posted in all those small events, unrecorded by newspapers, which make up the secret history of society.
It was of her old friend Georgie that her ladyship thought in her present anxiety. Lady Kirkbank had more than once suggested that Lady Maulevrier’s granddaughters should vary the monotony of Fellside by a visit to her place near Doncaster, or her castle north of Aberdeen; but her ladyship had evaded these friendly suggestions, being very jealous of any strange influence upon Lesbia’s life. Now, however, there had come a time when Lesbia must have a complete change of scenery and surroundings, lest she should pine and dwindle in sullen submission to fate, or else defy the world and elope with John Hammond.
Now, therefore, Lady Maulevrier decided to accept Lady Kirkbank’s hospitality. She told her friend the whole story with perfect frankness, and her letter was immediately answered by a telegram.
‘I start for Scotland to-morrow, will break my journey by staying a night at Fellside, and will take Lady Lesbia on to Kirkbank with me next day, if she can be ready to go.’
‘She shall be ready,’ said Lady Maulevrier.
She told Lesbia that she had accepted an invitation for her, and that she was to go to Kirkbank Castle the day after to-morrow. She was prepared for unwillingness, resistance even; but Lesbia received the news with evident pleasure.
‘I shall be very glad to go,’ she said, ‘this place is so dull. Of course I shall be sorry to leave you, grandmother, and I wish you would go with me; but any change will be a relief. I think if I had to stay here all the winter, counting the days and the hours, I should go out of my mind.’
The tears came into her eyes, but she wiped them away hurriedly, ashamed of her emotion.
‘My dearest child, I am so sorry for you,’ murmured Lady Maulevrier. ‘But believe me the day will come when you will be very glad that you conquered the first foolish inclination of your girlish heart.’
‘Yes, I daresay, when I am eighty,’ Lesbia answered, impatiently. She had made up her mind to submit to the inevitable. She had loved John Hammond — had been as near breaking her heart for him as it was in her nature to break her heart for anybody; but she wanted to make a great marriage, to be renowned and admired. She had been reared and trained for that; and she was not going to belie her training.
A visitor from the great London world was so rare an event that there was naturally a little excitement in the idea of Lady Kirkbank’s arrival. The handsomest and most spacious of the spare bedrooms was prepared for the occasion. The housekeeper was told that the dinner must be perfect. There must be nothing old-fashioned or ponderous; there must be mind as well as matter in everything. Rarely did Lady Maulevrier look at a bill of fare; but on this particular morning she went carefully through the menu, and corrected it with her own hand.
A pair of post-horses brought Lady Kirkbank and her maid from Windermere station, in time for afternoon tea, and the friends who had only met twice within the last forty years, embraced each other on the threshold of Lady Maulevrier’s morning-room.
‘My dearest Di,’ cried Lady Kirkbank, ‘what a delight to see you again after such ages; and what a too lovely spot you have chosen for your retreat from the world, the flesh, and the devil. If I could be a recluse anywhere, it would be amongst just such delicious surroundings.’
Without, twilight shades were gathering; within, there was only the light of a fire and a shaded lamp upon the tea table; there was just light enough for the two women to see each other’s faces, and the change which time had wrought there.
Never did womanhood in advanced years offer a more striking contrast than that presented by the woman of fashion and the recluse. Lady Maulevrier was almost as handsome in the winter of her days as she had been when life was in its spring. The tall, slim figure, erect as a dart, the delicately chiselled features and alabaster complexion, the soft silvery hair, the perfect hand, whiter and more transparent than the hand of girlhood, the stately movements and bearing, all combined to make Lady Maulevrier a queen among woman. Her brocade gown of a deep shade of red, with a border of dark sable on cuffs and collar, suggested a portrait by Velasquez. She wore no ornaments except the fine old Brazilian diamonds which flashed and sparkled upon her slender fingers.
If Lady Maulevrier looked like a picture in the Escurial, Lady Kirkbank resembled a caricature in La Vie Parisienne. Everything she wore was in the very latest fashion of the Parisian demi-monde, that exaggerated elegance of a fashion plate which only the most exquisite of women could redeem from vulgarity. Plush, brocade, peacock’s feathers, golden bangles, mousquetaire gloves, a bonnet of purple plumage set off by ornaments of filagree gold, an infantine little muff of lace and wild flowers, buttercups and daisies; and hair, eyebrows and complexion as artificial as the flowers on the muff.
All that art could do to obliterate the traces of age had been done for Georgina Kirkbank. But seventy years are not to be obliterated easily, and the crow’s feet showed through the bloom de Ninon, and the eyes under the painted arches were glassy and haggard, the carnation lips had a withered look. Age was made all the more palpable by the artifice which would have disguised it.
Lady Maulevrier suffered an absolute shock at beholding the friend of her youth. She had not accustomed herself to the idea that women in society could raddle their cheeks, stain their lips, and play tricks before high heaven with their eyebrows and eyelashes. In her own youth painted faces had been the ghastly privilege of a class of womankind of which the women of society were supposed to know nothing. Persons who showed their ankles and rouged their cheeks were to be seen of an afternoon in Bond Street; but Lady Diana Angersthorpe had been taught to pass them by as if she saw them not, to behold without seeing these creatures outside the pale. And now she saw her own dearest friend, a person distinctly within the pale, plastered with bismuth and stained with carmine, and wearing hair of a colour so obviously false and inharmonious, that child-like faith could hardly accept it as reality. Forty years ago Lady Kirkbank’s long ringlets had been darkest glossiest brown, to-day she wore a tousled fringe of bright yellow, piquantly contrasting with Vandyke brown eyebrows.
It took Lady Maulevrier some moments to get over the shock. She drew a chair to the fire and established her friend in it, and then, with a little gasp, she said:
‘I am charmed to see you again, Georgie!’
‘You darling, I was sure you would be glad. But you must find me awfully changed — awfully.’
For worlds Lady Maulevrier could not have denied this truth. Happily Lady Kirkbank did not wait for an answer.
‘Society is so wearing, and George and I never seem to get an interval of quiet. Kirkbank is to be full of men next week. Your granddaughter will have a good time.’
‘There will be a few women, of course?’
‘Oh, yes, there’s no avoiding that; only one doesn’t reckon them. Sir George only counts his guns. We expect a splendid season. I shall send you some birds of my own shooting.’
‘You shoot!’ exclaimed Lady Maulevrier, amazed.
‘Shoot! I should think I do. What else is there to amuse one in Scotland, after the salmon fishing is over? I have never missed a season for the last thirty years, unless we have been abroad.’
‘Please, don’t innoculate Lesbia with your love of sport.’
‘What! you wouldn’t like her to shoot? Well, perhaps you are right. It is hardly the thing for a pretty girl with her fortune to make. It spoils the delicacy of the skin. But I’m afraid she’ll find Kirkbank dull if she doesn’t go out with the guns. She can meet us with the rest of the women at luncheon. We have some capital picnic luncheons on the moor, I can assure you.’
‘I know she will enjoy herself with you. She has been accustomed to a very quiet life here.’
‘It is a lovely spot; but I own I cannot understand how you can have lived here exclusively during all these years — you who used to be all life and fire, loving change, action, political and diplomatic society, to dance upon the crest of the wave, as it were. Your whole nature must have suffered some curious change.’
Their close intimacy of the past warranted freedom of speech in the present.
‘My nature did undergo a change, and a severe one,’ answered Lady Maulevrier, gloomily.
‘It was that horrid — and I daresay unfortunate scandal about his lordship; and then the sad shock of his death,’ murmured Lady Kirkbank, sympathetically. ‘Most women, with your youth and beauty, would have forgotten the scandal and the husband in a twelvemonth, and would have made a second marriage more brilliant than the first. But no Indian widow who ever performed suttee was more worthy of praise than you, or even that person of Ephesus, whose story I have heard somewhere. Indeed, I have always spoken of your life as a long suttee. But you mean to re-appear in society next season, I hope, when you present your granddaughter?’
‘I shall certainly go up to London to present her, and possibly I may spend the season in town; but I shall feel like Rip Van Winkle.’
‘No, no, you won’t, my dear Di. You have kept yourself au courant, I know. Even my silly gossiping letters may have been of some use.’
‘They have been most valuable. Let me give you another cup of tea,’ said Lady Maulevrier, who had been officiating at her own exquisite tea-table, an arrangement of inlaid woods, antique silver, and modern china, which her friend pronounced a perfect poem.
Indeed, the whole room was poetic, Lady Kirkbank declared, and there are many highly praised scenes which less deserve the epithet. The dark red walls and cedar dado, the stamped velvet curtains, of an indescribable shade between silver-grey and olive, the Sheraton furniture, the parqueterie floor and Persian prayer-rugs, the deep yet brilliant hues of crackle porcelain and Chinese cloisonné enamel, the artistic fireplace, with dog-stove, low brass fender, and ingle-nook recessed under the high mantelpiece, all combined to form a luxurious and harmonious whole.
Lady Kirkbank admired the tout ensemble in the fitful light of the fire, the dim grey of deepening twilight.
‘There never was a more delicious cell!’ she exclaimed, ‘but still I should feel it a prison, if I had to spend six weeks in the year in it. I never stay more than six weeks anywhere out of London; and I always find six weeks more than enough. The first fortnight is rapture, the third and fourth weeks are calm content, the fifth is weariness, the sixth a fever to be gone. I once tried a seventh week at Pontresina, and I hated the place so intensely that I dared not go back there for the next three years. But now tell me. Diana, have you really performed suttee, have you buried yourself alive in this sweet spot deliberately, or has the love of retirement grown upon you, and have you become a kind of lotus-eater?’
‘I believe I have become a kind of lotus-eater. My retirement here has been no sentimental sacrifice to Lord Maulevrier’s memory.’
‘I am glad to hear that; for I really think the worst possible use a woman can make of her life is in wasting it on lamentation for a dead and gone husband. Life is odiously short at the best, and it is mere imbecility to fritter away any of our scanty portion upon the dead, who can never be any the better for our tears.’
‘My motive in living at Fellside was not reverence for the dead. And now let us talk of the gay world, of which you know all the secrets. Have you heard anything more about Lord Hartfield?’
‘Ah, there is a subject in which you have reason to be interested. I have not forgotten the romance of your youth — that first season in which Ronald Hollister used to haunt every place at which you appeared. Do you remember that wet afternoon at the Chiswick flower-show, when you and he and I took shelter in the orange house, and you two made love to each other most audaciously in an atmosphere of orange-blossoms that almost stifled me? Yes, those were glorious days!’
‘A short summer of gladness, a brief dream,’ sighed Lady Maulevrier. ‘Is young Lord Hartfield like his father?’
‘No, he takes after the Ilmingtons; but still there is a look of your old sweetheart — yes, I think there is an expression. I have not seen him for nearly a year. He is still abroad, roaming about somewhere in search of adventures. These young men who belong to the Geographical and the Alpine Club are hardly ever at home.’
‘But though they may be sometimes lost to society, they are all the more worthy of society’s esteem when they do appear,’ said Lady Maulevrier. ‘I think there must be an ennobling influence in Alpine travel, or in the vast solitudes of the Dark Continent. A man finds himself face to face with unsophisticated nature, and with the grandest forces of the universe. Professor Tyndall writes delightfully of his Alpine experiences; his mind seems to have ripened in the solitude and untainted air of the Alps. And I believe Lord Hartfield is a young man of very high character and of considerable cultivation, is he not?’
‘He is a splendid young fellow. I never heard a word to his disparagement, even from those people who pretend to know something bad about everybody. What a husband he would make for one of your girls!’
‘Admirable! But those perfect arrangements, which seem predestined by heaven itself, are so rarely realised on earth,’ answered the dowager, lightly.
She was not going to show her cards, even to an old friend.
‘Well, it would be very sweet if they were to meet next season and fall in love with each other,’ said Lady Kirkbank. ‘He is enormously rich, and I daresay your girls will not be portionless.’
‘Lesbia may take a modest place among heiresses,’ answered Lady Maulevrier. ‘I have lived so quietly during the last forty years that I could hardly help saving money.’
‘How nice!’ sighed Georgie. ‘I never saved sixpence in my life, and am always in debt.’
‘The little fortune I have saved is much too small for division. Lesbia will therefore have all I can leave her. Mary has the usual provision as a daughter of the Maulevrier house.’
‘And I suppose Lesbia has that provision also?’
‘Of course.’
‘Lucky Lesbia. I only wish Hartfield were coming to us for the shooting. I would engage he should fall in love with her. Kirkbank is a splendid place for match-making. But the fact is I am not very intimate with him. He is almost always travelling, and when he is at home he is not in our set. And now, my dear Diana, tell me more about yourself, and your own life in this delicious place.’
‘There is so little to tell. The books I have read, the theories of literature and art and science which I have adopted and dismissed, learnt and forgotten — those are the history of my life. The ideas of the outside world reach me here only in books and newspapers; but you who have been living in the world must have so much to say. Let me be the listener.’
Lady Kirkbank desired nothing better. She rattled on for three-quarters of an hour about her doings in the great world, her social triumphs, the wonderful things she had done for Sir George, who seemed to be as a puppet in her hands, the princes and princelings she had entertained, the songs she had composed, the comedy she had written, for private representation only, albeit the Haymarket manager was dying to produce it, the scathing witticisms with which she had withered her social enemies. She would have gone on much longer, but for the gong, which reminded her that it was time to dross for dinner.
Half-an-hour later Lady Kirkbank was in the drawing-room, where Mary had retired to the most shadowy corner, anxious to escape the gaze of the fashionable visitor.
But Lady Kirkbank was not inclined to take much notice of Mary. Lesbia’s brilliant beauty, the exquisite Greek head, the faultless complexion, the deep, violet eyes, caught Georgina Kirkbank’s eye the moment she had entered the room, and she saw that this girl and no other must be the beauty, the beloved and chosen grandchild.
‘How do you do, my dear?’ she said, taking Lesbia’s hand, and then, as if with a gush of warm feeling, suddenly drawing the girl towards her and kissing her on both cheeks. ‘I am going to be desperately fond of you, and I hope you will soon contrive to like me — just a little.’
‘I feel sure that I shall like you very much,’ Lesbia answered sweetly. ‘I am prepared to love you as grandmother’s old friend.’
‘Oh, my dear, to think that I should ever be the old friend of anybody’s grandmother!’ sighed Lady Kirkbank, with unaffected regret. ‘When I was your age I used to think all old people odious. It never occurred to me that I should live to be one of them.’
‘Then you had no dear grandmother whom you loved,’ said Lesbia, ‘or you would have liked old people for her sake.’
‘No, my love, I had no grandparents. I had a father, and he was all-sufficient — anything beyond him in the ancestral line would have been a burden laid upon me greater than I could bear, as the poet says.’
Dinner was announced, and Mary came shyly out of her corner, blushing deeply.
‘And this is Lady Mary, I suppose?’ said Lady Kirkbank, in an off-hand way, ‘How do you do, my dear? I am going to steal your sister.’
‘I am very glad,’ faltered Mary. ‘I mean I am glad that Lesbia should enjoy herself.’
‘And some fine day, when Lesbia is married and a great lady, I shall ask you to come to Scotland,’ said Lady Kirkbank, condescendingly, and than she murmured in her friend’s ear, as they went to the dining-room, ‘Quite an English girl. Very fresh and frank and nice,’ which was great praise for such a second-rate young person as Lady Mary.
‘What do you think of Lesbia?’ asked Lady Maulevrier, in the same undertone.
‘She is simply adorable. Your letters prepared me to expect beauty, but not such beauty. My dear, I thought the progress of the human race was all in a downward line since our time; but your granddaughter is as handsome as you were in your first season, and that is going very far.’
Lady Kirkbank carried off Lesbia early next day, the girl radiant at the idea of seeing life under new conditions. She had a few minutes’ serious talk with her grandmother before she went.
‘Lesbia, you are going into the world,’ said Lady Maulevrier; ‘yes, even a country house is the world in little. You will have many admirers instead of one; but I think, I believe, that you will be true to me and to yourself.’
‘You need not fear, grandmother. I have been an idiot; but — but it was only a passing folly, and I shall never be so weak again.’
Lesbia’s scornful lips and kindling eyes gave intensity to her speech. It was evident that she despised herself for that one touch of womanly softness which had made her as ready to fall in love with her first wooer as any peasant girl in Grasmere Vale.
‘I am delighted to hear you speak thus, dearest,’ said Lady Maulevrier. ‘And if Mr. Hamilton — Hammond, I mean — should have the audacity to follow you to Kirkbank, and to intrude himself upon you there — perhaps to persecute you with clandestine addresses ——’
‘I do not believe he would do anything clandestine,’ said Lesbia, drawing herself up. ‘He is quite above that.’
‘My dear child, we know absolutely nothing about him. He has his way to make in the world unaided by family or connections. He is clever — daring. Such a man cannot help being an adventurer; and an adventurer is capable of anything. I warn you to beware of him.’
‘I don’t suppose I shall ever see his face again,’ retorted Lesbia, irritably.
She had made up her mind that her life was not to be spoiled, her brilliant future sacrificed, for the sake of John Hammond; but the wound which she had suffered in renouncing him was still fresh, her feelings were still sore. Any contemptuous mention of him stung her to the quick.
‘I hope not. And you will beware of other adventurers, Lesbia, men of a worse stamp than Mr. Hammond, more experienced in ruse and iniquity, men steeped to the lips in worldly knowledge, men who look upon women as mere counters in the game of life. The world thinks that I am rich, and you will no doubt take rank as an heiress. You will therefore be a mark for every spendthrift, noble or otherwise, who wants to restore his broken fortunes by a wealthy marriage. And now, my dearest, good-bye. Half my heart goes with you. Nothing could induce me to part with you, even for a few weeks, except the conviction that it is for your good.’
‘But we shall not be parted next year, I hope, grandmother,’ said Lesbia, affectionately. ‘You said something about presenting me, and then leaving me in Lady Kirkbank’s care for the season. I should not like that at all. I want you to go everywhere with me, to teach me all the mysteries of the great world. You have always promised me that it should be so.’
‘And I have always intended that it should be so. I hope that it will be so,’ answered her grandmother, with a sigh; ‘but I am an old woman, Lesbia, and I am rooted to this place.’
‘But why should you be rooted here? What charm can keep you here, when you are so fitted to shine in society? You are old in nothing but years, and not even old in years in comparison with women whom we hear of, going everywhere and mixing in every fashionable amusement. You are full of fire and energy, and as active as a girl. Why should you not enjoy a London season, grandmother?’ pleaded Lesbia, nestling her head lovingly against Lady Maulevrier’s shoulder.
‘I should enjoy it, dearest, with you. It would be a renewal of my youth to see you shine and conquer. I should be as proud as if the glory were all my own. Yes, dear, I hope that I shall be a spectator of your triumphs. But do not let us plan the future. Life is so full of changes. Remember what Horace says ——’
‘Horace is a bore,’ said Lesbia. ‘I hate a poet who is always harping upon change and death.’
The carriage, which was to take the travellers to Windermere Station, was announced at this moment, and Lesbia and her grandmother gave each other the farewell embrace.
‘You like Lady Kirkbank, I hope?’ said Lady Maulevrier, as they went towards the ball, where that lady was waiting for them, with Lady Mary and Fr?ulein Müller in attendance upon her.
‘She seems very kind, but I should like her better if she did not paint — or if she painted better.’
‘My dear child I’m afraid it is the fashion of the day, just as it was in Pope’s time, and we ought to think nothing about it.’
‘Well, I suppose I shall get hardened in time.’
‘My dearest Lesbia,’ shrieked Lady Kirkbank from below, ‘remember we have to catch a train.’
Lesbia hurried downstairs, followed by Lady Maulevrier, who had to bid her friend adieu. The luggage had been sent on in a cart, Lesbia’s trunks and dress baskets forming no small item. She was so well furnished with pretty gowns of all kinds that there had been no difficulty in getting her ready for this sudden visit. Her maid was on the box beside the coachman. Lady Kirkbank’s attendant, a Frenchwoman of five-and-thirty, who looked as if she had graduated at Mabille, was to occupy the back seat of the landau.
Lady Mary looked after her sister longingly, as the carriage drove down the hill. She was going into a new world, to see all kinds of people — clever people — distinguished people — musical, artistic, political people — hunting and shooting people — while Mary was to stay at home all the winter among the old familiar faces. Dearly as she loved these hills and vales her heart sank a little at the thought of those long lonely months, days and evenings that would be all alike, and which must be spent without sympathetic companionship. And there would be dreary days on which the weather would keep her a prisoner in her luxurious gaol, when the mountains, and the rugged paths beside the mountain streams, would be inaccessible, when she would be restricted to Fr?ulein’s phlegmatic society, that lady being stout and lazy, fond of her meals, and given to afternoon slumbers. Lesbia and Mary were not by any means sympathetic; yet, after all, blood is thicker than water; and Lesbia was intelligent, and could talk of the things Mary loved, which was better than total dumbness, even if she generally took an antagonistic view of them.
‘I shall miss her dreadfully,’ thought Mary, as she strolled listlessly in the gardens, where the leaves where falling and the flowers fading.
‘I wonder if she will see Mr. Hammond at Lady Kirkbank’s?’ mused Mary. ‘If he were anything like a lover he would find out all about her visit, and seize the opportunity of her being away from grandmother. But then if he had been much of a lover he would have followed her to St. Bees.’
Lady Maulevrier sorely missed her favourite grandchild. In a life spent in such profound seclusion, so remote from the busy interests of the world, this beloved companionship had become a necessity to her. She had concentrated her affections upon Lesbia, and the girl’s absence made a fearful blank. But her ladyship’s dignity was not compromised by any outward signs of trouble or loss.
She spent her mornings in her own room, reading and writing and musing at her leisure; she drove or walked every fine afternoon, sometimes alone, sometimes attended by Mary, who hated these stately drives and walks. She dined tête-à-tête with Mary, except on those rare occasions when there were visitors — the Vicar and his wife, or some wandering star from other worlds Mary lived in profound awe of her grandmother, but was of far too frank a nature to be able to adapt her speech or her manners to her ladyship’s idea of feminine perfection. She was silent and shy under those falcon eyes; but she was still the same Mary, the girl to whom pretence or simulation of any kind was impossible.
Letters came almost every day from Kirkbank Castle, letters from Lesbia describing the bright gay life she was living at that hospitable abode, the excursions, the rides, the picnic luncheons after the morning’s sport, the dinner parties, the dances.
‘It is the most delightful house you can imagine,’ wrote Lesbia; ‘and Lady Kirkbank is an admirable hostess. I have quite forgiven her for wearing false eyebrows; for after all, you know, one must have eyebrows; they are a necessity; but why does she not have the two arches alike? They are never a pair, and I really think that French maid of hers does it on purpose.
‘By-the-bye, Lady Kirkbank is going to write to you to beseech you to let me go to Cannes and Monte Carlo with her. Sir George insists upon it. He says they both like young society, and will be horribly vexed if I refuse to go with them. And Lady Kirkbank thinks my chest is just a little weak — I almost broke down the other night in that lovely little song of Jensen’s — and that a winter in the south is just what I want. But, of course, dear grandmother, I won’t ask you to let me be away so long if you think you will miss me.’
‘If I think I shall miss her!’ repeated Lady Maulevrier. ‘Has the girl no heart, that she can ask such a question? But can I wonder at that? Of what account was I or my love to her father, although I sacrificed myself for his good name? Can I expect that she should be of a different clay?’
And then, meditating upon the events of the summer that was gone, Lady Maulevrier thought —
She renounced her first lover at my bidding; she renounces her love for me at the bidding of the world. Or was it not rather self-interest, the fear of making a bad marriage, which influenced her in her renunciation of Mr. Hammond. It was not obedience to me, it was not love for me which made her give him up. It was the selfishness engrained in her race. Well, I have heaped my love upon her, because she is fair and sweet, and reminds me of my own youth. I must let her go, and try to be happy in the knowledge that she is enjoying her life far away from me.’
Lady Maulevrier wrote her consent to the extension of Lesbia’s visit, and by return of post came a letter from Lesbia which seemed brimming over with love, and which comforted the grandmother’s wounded heart.
‘Lady Kirkbank and I are both agreed, dearest, that you must join us at Cannes,’ wrote Lesbia. ‘At your age it is very wrong of you to spend a winter in our horrible climate. You can travel with Steadman and your maid. Lady Kirkbank will secure you a charming suite of rooms at the hotel, or she would like it still better if you would stay at her own villa. Do consent to this plan, dear grandmother, and then we shall not be parted for a long winter. Of course Mary would be quite happy at home running wild.’
Lady Maulevrier sighed as she read this letter, sighed again, and heavily, as she put it back into the envelope. Alas, how many and many a year had gone, long, monotonous, colourless years, since she had seen that bright southern world which she was now urged to revisit. In fancy she saw it again to-day, the tideless sea of deepest sapphire blue, the little wavelets breaking on a yellow beach, the white triangular sails, the woods full of asphodel and great purple and white lilies, the atmosphere steeped in warmth and light and perfume, the glare of white houses in the sun, the red and yellow blinds, the pots of green and orange and crimson clay, with oleanders abloom, the wonderful glow of colour everywhere and upon all things. And then as the eyes of the mind recalled these vivid images her bodily eyes looked out upon the rain-blotted scene, the mountains rising in a dark and dismal circle round that sombre pool below, walling her in from the outer world.
‘I am at the bottom of a grave,’ she said to herself. ‘I am in a living tomb, from which there is no escape. Forty years! Forty years of patience and hope, for what? For dreams which may never be realised; for descendants who may never give me the price of my labours. Yes, I should like to go to my dear one. I should like to revisit the South of France, to go on to Italy. I should feel young again amidst that eternal, unchangeable loveliness. I should forget all I have suffered. But it cannot be. Not yet, not yet!’
Presently with a smile of concentrated bitterness she repeated the words ‘Not yet!’
‘Surely at my age it must be folly to dream of the future; and yet I feel as if there were half a century of life in me, as if I had lost nothing in either mental or bodily vigour since I came here forty years ago.’
She rose as she said these words, and began to pace the room, with quiet, firm step, erect, stately, beautiful in her advanced years as she had been in her bloom and freshness, only with another kind of beauty — an empress among women. The boast that she had made to herself was no idle boast. At sixty-seven years of age her physical powers showed no signs of decay, her mental qualities were at their best and brightest. Long years of thought and study had ripened and widened her mind. She was a woman fit to be the friend and counsellor of statesmen, the companion and confidant of her sovereign: and yet fate willed that she should be buried alive in a Westmoreland valley, seeing the same hills and streams, the same rustic faces, from year’s end to year’s end. Surely it was a hard fate, a heavy penance, albeit self-imposed.
Lesbia went straight from Scotland to Paris with Sir George and Lady Kirkbank. Here they stayed at the Bristol for just two days, during which her hostess went all over the fashionable quarter buying clothes for the Cannes campaign, and assisting Lesbia to spend the hundred pounds which her grandmother had sent her for the replenishment of her well-provided wardrobe. It is astonishing how little way a hundred pounds goes among the dressmakers, corset-makers, and shoemakers of Lutetia.
‘I had no notion that clothes were so dear,’ said Lesbia, when she saw how little she had got for her money.
‘My dear, you have two gowns which are absolutely chien,’ replied Lady Kirkbank, ‘and you have a corset which gives you a figure, which you must forgive me for saying you never had before.’
Lady Kirkbank had to explain that chien as applied to a gown or bonnet was the same thing as chic, only a little more so.
‘I hope my gowns will always be chien,’ said Lesbia meekly.
Next evening they were dining at Cannes, with the blue sea in front of their windows, dining at a table all abloom with orange flowers, tea roses, mignonette, waxen camellias, and pale Parma violets, while Lady Maulevrier and Mary dined tête-à-tête at Fellside, with the feathery snow flakes falling outside, and the world whitening all around them.
Next day the world was all white, and Mary’s beloved hills were inaccessible.
Who could tell how long they might be covered; the winding tracks hidden; the narrow forces looking like black water or molten iron against that glittering whiteness? Mary could only walk along the road by Loughrigg to the bench called ‘Rest and be thankful,’ from which she looked with longing eyes across towards the Langdale Pikes, and to the sharp cone-shaped peak, known as Coniston Old Man, just visible above the nearer hills. Fr?ulein Müller suggested that it was in just such weather as this that a well brought up young lady, a young lady with Vernunft and Anstand, should devote herself to the improvement of her mind.
‘Let us read German this abscheulich afternoon,’ said the Fr?ulein. ‘Suppose we go on with the “Sorrows of Werther.”’
‘Werther was a fool,’ cried Mary; ‘any book but that.’
‘Will you choose your own book?’
‘Let me read Heine.’
Fr?ulein looked doubtful. There were things in Heine — an all-pervading tone — which rendered him hardly an appropriate poet for ‘the young person.’ But Fr?ulein compromised the matter by letting Mary read Atta Troll, the exact bearing of which neither of them understood.
‘How beautifully Mr. Hammond read Heine that morning!’ said Mary, breaking off suddenly from a perfectly automatic reading.
‘You did not hear him, did you? You were not there,’ said the Fr?ulein.
‘I was not there, but I heard him. I— I was sitting on the bank among the pine trees.’
‘Why did you not come and sit with us? It would have been more ladylike than to hide yourself behind the trees.’
Mary blushed crimson.
‘I had been in the kennels with Maulevrier; I was not fit to be seen,’ she said.
‘Hardly a ladylike admission,’ replied the Fr?ulein, who felt that with Lady Mary her chief duty was to reprove.
It was afternoon. The white hills yonder and all the length of the valley were touched here and there with gleams of wintry sunlight, and Lady Maulevrier was taking her solitary walk in the terrace in front of her house, a stately figure wrapped in a furred mantle, tall, erect, moving with measured pace up and down the smooth gravel path. Now and then at the end of the walk the dowager stopped for a minute or so, and stood as if in deep thought, with her eyes dreamily contemplating the landscape. An intense melancholy shadowed her face, as she thus gazed with brooding eyes on the naked monotony of those wintry hills. So had she looked in many and many a winter, and it seemed to her that her life was of a piece with those bleak hills, where in the dismal winter time nothing living trod. She stood gazing at the sinking sun, a fiery ball shining at the end of a long gallery of crag and rock, like a lamp at the end of a corridor; and as she gazed the red round orb dropped suddenly behind the edge of a crag, as if she had been an enchantress and had dismissed it with a wave of her wand.
‘O Lord, how long, how long?’ she said. ‘How many times have I seen that sun go down from this spot, in winter and summer, in spring and autumn! And now that the one being I loved and cared for is far away, I feel all the weariness and emptiness of my life.’
As she turned to resume her walk she heard the muffled sound of wheels in the road below, that road which was completely hidden by foliage in summer, but which was now visible here and there between the leafless trees. A carriage with a pair of horses was coming along the road from Ambleside.
Lady Maulevrier stood and watched until the carriage drew up at the lodge gate, and then, when the gate had been opened, slowly ascended the winding drive to the house.
She expected no visitor; indeed, there was no one likely to come to her from the direction of Ambleside. Her heart began to beat heavily, with the apprehension of coming evil. What kind of evil she knew not. Bad news about her granddaughter, perhaps, or about Maulevrier. And yet that could hardly be. Evil tidings of that kind would have reached her by telegram.
Perhaps it was Maulevrier himself. His movements were generally erratic.
Lady Maulevrier hurried back to the house. She went through the conservatory, where the warm whiteness of azalia, and spirea, and arum lilies contrasted curiously with the cold white snow out of doors, to the hall, where a stranger was standing talking to the butler.
He was a man of foreign appearance, wearing a cloak lined with sables, and a sable cap, which he removed as Lady Maulevrier approached. He was thin and small, with a clear olive complexion, olive inclining to pale bronze, sleek raven hair, and black almond-shaped eyes. At the first glance Lady Maulevrier knew that he was an Oriental. Her heart sank within her, and seemed to grow chill as death at sight of him. Anything associated with India was horrible to her.
The stranger came forward to meet her, bowing deferentially. He had those lithe, gliding movements which she remembered of old, when she had seen princes and dignitaries of the East creeping shoeless to her husband’s feet.
‘Will your ladyship do me the honour to grant me an interview?’ he said in very good English. ‘I have travelled from London expressly for that privilege.’
‘Then I fear you have wasted your time, sir, whatever your mission may be,’ the dowager answered, haughtily. ‘However, I am willing to hear anything you may have to say, if you will be good enough to come this way.’
She moved towards the library, the butler preceding her to open the door, and the stranger followed her into the spacious room, where coals and logs were heaped high upon the wide dog stove, deeply recessed beneath the old English mantelpiece.
It was one of the handsomest rooms of the house, furnished with oak bookcases about seven feet high, above which vases of Oriental ware and varied colouring stood boldly out against the dark oak wall. Richly bound books in infinite variety testified to the wealth and taste of the owner; while one side of the room was absorbed by a wide Gothic window, beyond which appeared the panorama of lake and mountain, beautiful in every season. A tawny velvet curtain divided this room from the drawing-room; but there was also a strong oak door behind the curtain, which was generally closed in cold weather.
Lady Maulevrier went over to this door, and took the precaution to draw the bolt, before she seated herself in her arm-chair by the hearth. She had her own particular chair in all the rooms she occupied — a chair which was sacred as a throne.
She drew off her sealskin gloves, and motioned with a slender white hand to the stranger to be seated.
‘To whom have I the honour of speaking?’ she asked, looking; him through and through with an unflinching gaze, as she would have looked at Death himself, had the grim skeleton figure come to beckon her.
He handed her a visiting card on which was engraved —
‘Louis Asoph, Rajah of Bisnagar.’
‘If my memory does not deceive me as to the history of modern India, the territory from which you take your title has been absorbed into the English dominion?’ said Lady Maulevrier.
‘It was trafficked away forty-three years ago, stolen, filched from my father! but so long as I have power to think and to act I will maintain my claim to that land; yes, if only by the empty mockery of a name on a visiting card. It is a duty I owe to myself as a man, which I owe still more to my murdered father.’
‘Have you come all the way from London, and in such weather, only to tell me this story?’
She had twisted his card between her fingers as she listened to him, and now, with an action at once careless and contemptuous, she flung it upon the burning logs. Slight as the action was it was eloquent of scorn for the man.
‘No, Lady Maulevrier, my mention of this story, with which you are no doubt perfectly familiar, is only a preliminary. I have come to claim my own, and to appeal to you as a woman of honour to do me justice. Nay, I will say as a woman of common honesty; since there is no nice point of honour in question, only the plain laws of mine and thine, which I believe are the same among all nations and creeds. I come to you, Lady Maulevrier, to ask you to restore to me the wealth which your husband stole from my father.’
‘You come to my house, to me, an old woman, helpless, defenceless, in the absence of my grandson, the present Earl, to insult me, and insult the dead,’ said Lady Maulevrier, white as statuary marble, and as cold and calm. ‘You come to rake up old lies, and to fling them in the face of a solitary woman, old enough to be your mother. Do you think that is a noble thing to do? Even in your barbarous Eastern code of morals and manners is that the act of a gentleman?’
‘We are no barbarians in the East, Lady Maulevrier. I come from the cradle of civilisation, the original fount of learning. We were scholars and gentleman, priests and soldiers, two thousand years before your British ancestors ran wild in their woods, and sacrificed to their unknown gods or rocky altars reeking with human blood! I know the errand upon which I have come is not a pleasant one, either for you or for me; but I come to you strong in the right of a son to claim the heritage which was stolen from him by an infamous mother and her more infamous paramour ——’
‘I will not hear another word!’ cried Lady Maulevrier, starting to her feet, livid with passion. ‘Do not dare to pronounce that name in my hearing — the name of that abominable woman who brought disgrace and dishonour upon my husband and his race.’
‘And who brought your husband the wealth of my murdered father,’ answered the Indian, defiantly. ‘Do not ignore that fact, Lady Maulevrier. What has become of that fortune — two hundred thousand pounds in money and jewels. It was known to have passed into Lord Maulevrier’s possession after my father was put away by his paid instruments.
‘How dare you bring that vile charge against the dead?’
‘There are men living in India who know the truth of that charge: men who were at Bisnagar when my father, sick and heartbroken, was shut up in his deserted harem, hemmed in by spies and traitors, men with murder in their faces. There are those who know tint he was strangled by one of those wretches, that a grave was dug for him under the marble floor of his zenana, a grave in which his bones were found less than a year ago, in my presence, and fitly entombed at my bidding. He was said to have disappeared of his own free will — to have left his palace under cover of night, and sought refuge from possible treachery in another province; but there were those, and not a few, who knew the real history of his disappearance — who knew, and at the time were ready to testify in any court of justice, that he had been got rid of by the Ranee’s agents, and at Lord Maulevrier’s instigation, and that his possessions in money and jewels had been conveyed in the palankins that carried the Ranee and her women to his lordship’s summer retreat near Madras. The Ranee died at that retreat six months after her husband’s murder, not without suspicion of poison, and the wealth which she carried with her when she left Bisnagar passed into his lordship’s possession. Had your husband lived, Lady Maulevrier, this story must have been brought to light. There were too many people in Madras interested in sifting the facts. There must have been a public inquiry. It was a happy thing for you and your race that Lord Maulevrier died before that inquiry had been instituted, and that many animosities died with him. Lucky too for you that I was a helpless infant at the time, and that the Mahratta adventurer to whom my father’s territory had been transferred in the shuffling of cards at the end of the war was deeply concerned in hushing up the story.’
‘And pray, why have you nursed your wrath in all these years? Why do you intrude on me after nearly half a century, with this legend of rapine and murder?’
‘Because for nearly half a century I have been kept in profound ignorance of my father’s fate — in ignorance of my race. Lord Maulevrier’s jealousy banished me from my mother’s arms shortly after my father’s death. I was sent to the South of France under the care of an ayah. My first memories are of a monastery near Marseilles, where I was reared and educated by a Jesuit community, where I was baptised and brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. By the influence of the Jesuit Fathers I was placed in a house of commerce at Marseilles. Funds to provide for my education and establishment in life, under very modest conditions, were sent periodically by an agent at Madras. It was known that I was of East Indian birth, but little more was known about me. It was only when years had gone by and I was a merchant on my own account and could afford to go to India on a voyage of discovery — yes, as much a voyage of discovery as that of Vasco de Gama or of Drake — that I got from the Madras agent the clue which enabled me, at the cost of infinite patience and infinite labour, to unravel the mystery of my birth. There is no need to enter now upon the details of that story. I have overwhelming documentary evidence — a cloud of witnesses — to convince the most sceptical as to who and what I am. The documents are some of them in my valise, at your ladyship’s service. Others are at my hotel in London, ready for the inspection of your ladyship’s lawyers. I do not think you will desire to invite a public inquiry, or force me to recover my birthright in a court of justice. I believe that you will take a broader and nobler view of the case, and that you will restore to the wronged and abandoned son the fortune stolen from his murdered father.’
‘How dare you come to me with this tissue of lies? How dare you look me in the face and charge my dead husband with treachery and dishonour? I believe neither in your story nor in you, and I defy you to the proof of this vile charge against the dead!’
‘In other words you mean that you will keep the money and jewels which Lord Maulevrier stole from my father?’
‘I deny the fact that any such jewels or money ever passed into his lordship’s possession. That vile woman, your mother, whose infamy cast a dark cloud over Lord Maulevrier’s honour, may have robbed her husband, may have emptied the public treasury. But not a rupee or a jewel belonging to her ever came into my possession. I will not bear the burden of her crimes. Her existence spoiled my life — banished me from India, a widow in all but the name, and more desolate than many widows.’
‘Lord Maulevrier was known to leave India carrying with him two large chests — supposed to contain books — but actually containing treasure. A man who was in the Governor’s confidence, and who had been the go-between in his intrigues, confessed on his death-bed that he had assisted in removing the treasure. Now, Lady Maulevrier, since your husband died immediately after his arrival in England, and before he could have had any opportunity of converting or making away with the valuables so appropriated, it stands to reason that those valuables must have passed into your possession, and it is from your honour and good feeling that I claim their restitution. If you deny the claim so advanced, there remains but one course open to me, and that is to make my wrongs public, and claim my right from the law of the land.’
‘And do you suppose that any English judge or English jury would believe so wild a story — or countenance so vile an accusation against the defenceless?’ demanded Lady Maulevrier, standing up before him, tall, stately, with flashing eye and scornful lip, the image of proud defiance. ‘Bring forward your claim, produce your documents, your witnesses, your death-bed confessions. I defy you to injure my dead husband or me by your wild lies, your foul charges! Go to an English lawyer, and see what an English law court will do for you — and your claim. I will hear no more of either.’
She rang the bell once, twice, thrice, with passionate hand, and a servant flew to answer that impatient summons.
‘Show this gentlemen to his carriage,’ she said, imperiously.
The gentleman who called himself Louis Asoph bowed, and retired without another word.
As the door closed upon him, Lady Maulevrier stood, with clenched hands and frowning brow, staring into vacancy. Her right arm was outstretched, as if she would have waved the intruder away. Suddenly, a strange numbness crept over that uplifted arm, and it fell to her side. From her shoulder down to her foot, that proud form grew cold and feelingless and dead, and she, who had so long carried herself as a queen among women, sank in a senseless heap upon the floor.
Lady Mary and the Fr?ulein had been sitting in the drawing-room all this time waiting for Lady Maulevrier to come to tea. They heard her come in from the garden; and then the footman told them that she was in the library with a stranger. Not even the muffled sound of voices penetrated the heavy velvet curtain and the thick oak door. It was only by the loud ringing of the bell and the sound of footsteps in the hall that Lady Mary knew of the guest’s departure. She went to the door between the two rooms, and was surprised to find it bolted.
‘Grandmamma, won’t you come to tea?’ she asked timidly, knocking on the oaken panel, but there was no reply.
She knocked again, and louder. Still no reply.
‘Perhaps her ladyship is going to take tea in her own room,’ she said, afraid to be officious.
Attendance upon her grandmother at afternoon tea had been one of Lesbia’s particular duties; but Mary felt that she was an unwelcome substitute for Lesbia. She wanted to get a little nearer her grandmother’s heart if she could; but she knew that her attentions were endured rather than liked.
She went into the hall, where the footman on duty was staring at the light snowflakes dancing past the window, perhaps wishing he were a snowflake himself, and enjoying himself in that white whirligig.
‘Is her ladyship having tea in the morning-room?’ asked Mary.
The footman gave a little start, as if awakened out of a kind of trance. The sheer vacuity of his mind might naturally slide into mesmeric sleep.
He told Lady Mary that her ladyship had not left the library, and Mary went in timidly, wondering why her grandmother had not joined them in the drawing-room when the stranger was gone.
The sky was dark outside the wide windows, white hills and valleys shrouded in the shades of night. The library was only lighted by the glow of the logs on the hearth, and in that ruddy light the spacious room looked empty. Mary was turning to go away, thinking the footman had been mistaken, when her eye suddenly lighted upon a dark figure lying on the ground. And then she heard an awful stertorous breathing, and knew that her grandmother was lying there, stricken and helpless.
Mary shrieked aloud, with a cry that pierced curtains and doors, and brought Fr?ulein and half-a-dozen servants to her help. One of the men brought a lamp, and among them they lifted the smitten figure. Oh, God! how ghastly the face looked in the lamplight! — the features drawn to one side, the skin livid.
‘Her ladyship has had a stroke,’ said the butler.
‘Is she dying?’ faltered Mary, white as ashes. ‘Oh, grandmother, dear grandmother, don’t look at us like that!’
One of the servants rushed off to the stables to send for the doctor. Of course, being an indoor man, he no more thought of going out himself into the snowy night on such an errand than Noah thought of going out of the ark to explore the face of the waters in person.
They carried Lady Maulevrier to her bed and laid her there, like a figure carved out of stone. She was not unconscious. Her eyes were open, and she moaned every now and then as if in bodily or mental pain. Once she tried to speak, but had no power to shape a syllable aright, and ended with a shuddering sigh. Once she lifted her left arm and waved it in the air, as if waving some one off in fear or anger. The right arm, indeed the whole of the right side, was lifeless, motionless as a stone. It was a piteous sight to see the beautiful features drawn and distorted, the lips so accustomed to command mouthing the broken syllables of an unknown tongue. Lady Mary sat beside the bed with clasped hands, praying dumbly, with her eyes fixed on her grandmother’s altered face.
Mr. Horton came, as soon as his stout mountain pony could bring him. He did not seem surprised at her ladyship’s condition, and accepted the situation with professional calmness.
‘A marked case of hemiplegia,’ he said, when he had observed the symptoms.
‘Will she die?’ asked Mary.
‘Oh, dear, no! She will want great care for a little while, but we shall bring her round easily. A splendid constitution, a noble frame; but I think she has overworked her brain a little, reading Huxley and Darwin, and the German physiologists upon whom Huxley and Darwin have built themselves. Metaphysics too. Schopenhauer, and the rest of them. A wonderful woman! Very few brains could hold what hers has had poured into it in the last thirty years. The conducting nerves between the brain and the spinal marrow have been overworked: too much activity, too constant a strain. Even the rails and sleepers on the railroad wear out, don’t you know, if there’s excessive traffic.’
Mr. Horton had known Mary from her childhood, had given her Gregory’s powder, and seen her safely through measles and other infantine ailments, so he was quite at home with her, and at Fellside generally. Lady Maulevrier had given him a good deal of her confidence during those thirty years in which he had practised as his father’s partner and successor at Grasmere. He used to tell people that he owed the best part of his education to her ladyship, who condescended to talk to him of the new books she read, and generally gave him a volume to put in his pocket when he was leaving her.
‘Don’t be downhearted, Lady Mary,’ he said; ‘I shall come in two or three times a day and see how things are going on, and if I see the slightest difficulty in the case I’ll telegraph for Jenner.’
Mary and the Fr?ulein sat up with the invalid all that night. Lady Maulevrier’s maid was also in attendance, and one of the menservants slept in his clothes on a couch in the corridor, ready for any emergency. But the night passed peacefully, the patient slept a good deal, and next day there was evident improvement. The stroke which had prostrated the body, which reduced the vigorous, active frame to an awful statue — like stillness — a quietude as of death of itself — had not overclouded the intellect. Lady Maulevrier lay on her bed in her luxurious room, with wide Tudor windows commanding half the circle of the hills, and was still the ruling spirit of the house, albeit powerless to move that slender hand, the lightest wave of which had been as potent to command in her little world as royal sign-manual or sceptre in the great world outside.
Now there remained only one thing unimpaired by that awful shock which had laid the stately frame low, and that was the will and sovereign force of the woman’s nature. Voice was altered, speech was confused and difficult; but the strength of will, the supreme power of mind, seemed undiminished.
When Lady Maulevrier was asked if Lesbia should be telegraphed for, she replied no, not unless she was in danger of sudden death.
‘I should like to see her before I go,’ she said, labouring to pronounce the words.
‘Dear grandmother,’ said Mary, tenderly, ‘Mr. Horton says there is no danger.’
‘Then do not send for her; do not even tell her what has happened; not yet.’
‘But she will miss your letters.’
‘True. You must write twice a week at my dictation. You must tell her that I have hurt my hand, that I am well but cannot use a pen. I would not spoil her pleasure for the world.’
‘Dear grandmother, how unselfish you are! And Maulevrier, shall he be sent for? He is not so far away,’ said Mary, hoping her grandmother would say yes.
What a relief, what an unspeakable solace Maulevrier’s presence would be in that dreary house, smitten to a sudden and awful stillness, as if by the Angel of Death!
‘No, I do not want Maulevrier!’ answered her ladyship impatiently.
‘May I sit here and read to you, grandmother?’ Mary asked, timidly. ‘Mr. Horton said you were to be kept very quiet, and that we were not to let you talk, or talk much to you, but that we might read to you if you like.’
‘I do not wish to be read to. I have my thoughts for company,’ said Lady Maulevrier.
Mary felt that this implied a wish to be alone. She bent over the invalid’s pillow and kissed the pale cheek, feeling as if she were taking a liberty in venturing so much. She would hardly have done it had Lesbia been at home; but she had a feeling that in Lesbia’s absence Lady Maulevrier must want somebody’s love — even hers. And then she crept away, leaving Halcott the maid in attendance, sitting at her work at the window furthest from the bed.
‘Alone with my thoughts,’ mused Lady Maulevrier, looking out at the panorama of wintry hills, white, ghost-like against an iron sky. ‘Pleasant thoughts, truly! Walled in by the hills — walled in and hemmed round for ever. This place has always felt like a grave: and now I know that it is my grave.’
Fr?ulein, and Lady Mary, and the maid Halcott, a sedate personage of forty summers, had all been instructed by the doctor that Lady Maulevrier was to be kept profoundly quiet. She must not talk much, since speech was likely to be a painful effort with her for some little time; she must not be talked to much by anyone, least of all must she be spoken to upon any agitating topic. Life must be made as smooth and easy for her as for a new-born infant. No rough breath from the outer world must come near her. She was to see no one but her maid and her granddaughter. Mr. Horton, a plain family man, took it for granted that the granddaughter was dear to her heart, and likely to exercise a soothing influence. Thus it happened that although Lady Maulevrier asked repeatedly that James Steadman should be brought to her, she was not allowed to see him. She whose will had been paramount in that house, whose word had been law, was now treated as a little child, while the will was still as strong, the mind as keen as ever.
‘She would talk to him of business,’ said Mr. Horton, when he was told of her ladyship’s desire to see Steadman, ‘and that cannot be allowed, not for some little time at least.’
‘She is very angry with us for refusing to obey her,’ said Lady Mary.
‘Naturally, but it is for her own welfare she is disobeyed. She can have nothing to say to Steadman which will not keep till she is better. This establishment goes by clockwork.’
Mary wished it was a little less like clockwork. Since Lady Maulevrier had been lying upstairs — the voice which had once ruled over the house muffled almost to dumbness — the monotony of life at Fellside had seemed all the more oppressive. The servants crept about with stealthier tread. Mary dared not touch either piano or billiard balls, and was naturally seized with a longing to touch both. The house had a darkened-look, as if the shadow of doom overhung it.
During this regimen of perfect quiet Lady Maulevrier was not allowed to see the newspapers; and Mary was warned that in reading to her grandmother she was to avoid all exciting topics. Thus it happened that the account of a terrible collision between the Scotch express and a luggage train, a little way beyond Preston, an accident in which seven people were killed and about thirty seriously hurt, was not made known to her ladyship; and yet that fact would have been of intense interest and significance to her, since one of those passengers whose injuries were fatal bore the name of Louis Asoph.
The wintry weeks glided smoothly by in a dull monotony, and now Lady Maulevrier, still helpless, still compelled to lie on her bed or her invalid couch, motionless as marble, had at least recovered her power of speech, was allowed to read and to talk, and to hear what was going on in that metropolitan world which she seemed unlikely ever to behold again.
Lady Lesbia was still at Cannes, whence she wrote of her pleasures and her triumphs, of flowers and sapphire sea, and azure sky, of all things which were not in the grey bleak mountain world that hemmed in Fellside. She was meeting many of the people whom she was to meet again next season in the London world. She had made an informal début in a very select circle, a circle in which everybody was more or less chic, or chien, or zinc, and she was tasting all the sweets of success. But in none of her letters was there any mention of Lord Hartfield. He was not in the little great world by the blue tideless sea.
There was no talk of Lesbia’s return. She was to stay till the carnival; she was to stay till the week before Easter. Lady Kirkbank insisted upon it; and both Lesbia and Lady Kirkbank upbraided Lady Maulevrier for her cruelty in not joining them at Cannes.
So Lady Maulevrier had to resign herself to that solitude which had become almost the habit of her life, and to the society of Mary and the Fr?ulein. Mary was eager to be of use, to sit with her grandmother, to read to her, to write for her. The warm young heart was deeply moved by the spectacle of this stately woman stricken into helplessness, chained to her couch, immured within four walls. To Mary, who so loved the hills and the streams, the sun and the wind, this imprisonment seemed unspeakable woe. In her pity for such a martyrdom she would have done anything to give pleasure or solace to her grandmother. Unhappily there was very little Mary could do to increase the invalid’s sum of pleasure. Lady Maulevrier was a woman of strong feeling, not capable of loving many people. She had concentrated her affection upon Lesbia: and she could not open her heart to Mary all at once because Lesbia was out of the way.
‘If I had a dog I loved, and he were to die, I would never have another in his place,’ Lady Maulevrier said once; and that speech was the keynote of her character.
She was very courteous to Mary, and seemed grateful for her attentions; but she did not cultivate the girl’s society. Mary wrote all her letters in a fine bold hand, and with a rapid pen; but when the letter-writing was over Lady Maulevrier always dismissed her.
‘My dear, you want to be out in the air, riding your pony, or scampering about with your dogs,’ she said, kindly. ‘It would be a cruelty to keep you indoors.’
‘No, indeed, dear grandmother, I should like to stay. May I stop and read to you?’
‘No, thank you, Mary. I hate being read to. I like to devour a book. Reading aloud is such slow work.
‘But I am afraid you must sometimes feel lonely,’ faltered Mary.
‘Lonely,’ echoed the dowager, with a sigh. ‘I have been lonely for the last forty years — I have been lonely all my life. Those I loved never gave me back love for love — never — not even your sister. See how lightly she cuts the link that bound her to me. How happy she is among strangers! Yes, there was one who loved me truly, and fate parted us. Does fate part all true lovers, I wonder?’
‘You parted Lesbia and Mr. Hammond,’ said Mary, impetuously. ‘I am sure they loved each other truly.’
‘The old and the worldly-wise are Fate, Mary,’ answered the dowager, not angry at this daring reproach. ‘I know your sister; and I know she is not the kind of woman to be happy in an ignoble life — to bear poverty and deprivation. If it had been you, now, whom Mr. Hammond had chosen, I might have taken the subject into my consideration.’
Mary flamed crimson.
‘Mr. Hammond never gave me a thought,’ she said, ‘unless it was to think me contemptible. He is worlds too good for such a Tomboy. Maulevrier told him about the fox-hunt, and they both laughed at me — at least I have no doubt Mr. Hammond laughed, though I was too much ashamed to look at him.’
‘Poor Mary, you are beginning to find out that a young lady ought to be ladylike,’ said Lady Maulevrier; ‘and now, my dear, you may go. I was only joking with you. Mr. Hammond would be no match for any granddaughter of mine. He is nobody, and has neither friends nor interest. If he had gone into the church Maulevrier could have helped him; but I daresay his ideas are too broad for the church; and he will have to starve at the bar, where nobody can help him. I hope you will bear this in mind, Mary, if Maulevrier should ever bring him here again.’
‘He is never likely to come back again. He suffered too much; he was treated too badly in this house.’
‘Lady Mary, be good enough to remember to whom you are speaking,’ said her ladyship, with a frown. ‘And now please go, and tell some one to send Steadman to me.’
Mary retired without a word, gave Lady Maulevrier’s message to a footman in the corridor, slipped off to her room, put on her sealskin hat and jacket, took her staff and went out for a long ramble. The hills and valleys were still white. It had been a long, cold winter, and spring was still far off — February had only just begun.
Lady Maulevrier’s couch had been wheeled into the morning-room — that luxurious room which was furnished with all things needful to her quiet life, her books, her favourite colours, her favourite flowers, every detail studiously arranged for her pleasure and comfort. She was wheeled into this room every day at noon. When the day was bright and sunny her couch was placed near the window: and when the day was dull and grey the couch was drawn close to the low hearth, which flashed and glittered with brightly coloured tiles and artistic brass.
To-day the sky was dull, and the velvet couch stood beside the hearth. Halcott sat at work in the adjoining bed-chamber, and came in every now and then to replenish the fire: a footman was always on duty in the corridor. A spring bell stood among the elegant trifles upon her ladyship’s table; and the lightest touch of her left hand upon the bell brought her attendants to her side. She resolutely refused to have any one sitting with her all day long. Solitude was a necessity of her being, she told Mr. Horton, when he recommended that she should have some one always in attendance upon her.
As the weeks wore on her features had been restored to their proud, calm beauty, her articulation was almost as clear as of old: yet, now and then, there would be a sudden faltering, the tongue and lips would refuse their office, or she would forget a word, or use a wrong word unconsciously. But there was no recovery of power or movement on that side of the body which had been stricken. The paralysed limbs were still motionless, lifeless as marble; and it was clear that Mr. Horton had begun to lose heart about his patient. There was nothing obscure in the case, but the patient’s importance made the treatment a serious matter, and the surgeon begged to be allowed to summon Sir William Jenner.
This, however, Lady Maulevrier refused.
‘I don’t want any fuss made about me,’ she said. ‘I am content to trust myself to your skill, and I beg that no other doctor may be summoned.’
Mr. Horton understood his patient’s feelings on this point. She had a sense of humiliation in her helplessness, and, like some wounded animal that crawls to its covert to die, she would fain have hidden her misery from the eye of strangers. She had allowed no one, not even Maulevrier, to be informed of the nature of her illness.
‘It will be time enough for him to know all about me when he comes here,’ she said. ‘I shall be obliged to see him whenever he does come.’
Maulevrier had spent Christmas and New Year in Paris, Mr. Hammond still his companion. Her ladyship commented upon this with a touch of scorn.
‘Mr. Hammond is like the Umbra you were reading about the other day in Lord Lytton’s “Last Days of Pompeii,”’ she said to Mary. ‘It must be very nice for him to go about the world with a friend who franks him everywhere.’
‘But we don’t know that Maulevrier franks him,’ protested Mary, blushing. ‘We have no right to suppose that Mr. Hammond does not pay his own expenses.’
‘My dear child, is it possible for a young man who has no private means to go gadding about the world on equal terms with a spendthrift like Maulevrier — to pay for Moors in Scotland and apartments at the Bristol?’
‘But they are not staying at the Bristol,’ exclaimed Mary.
‘They are staying at an old-established French hotel on the left side of the Seine. They are going about amongst the students and the workmen, dining at popular restaurants, hearing people talk. Maulevrier says it is delightfully amusing — ever so much better than the beaten track of life in Anglo-American Paris.’
‘I daresay they are leading a Bohemian life, and will get into trouble before they have done,’ said her ladyship, gloomily.
‘Maulevrier is as wild as a hawk.’
‘He is the dearest boy in the world,’ exclaimed Mary.
She was deeply grateful for her brother’s condescension in writing her a letter of two pages long, letting her into the secrets of his life. She felt as if Mr. Hammond were ever so much nearer to her now she knew where he was, and how he was amusing himself.
‘Hammond is such a queer fellow,’ wrote Maulevrier, ‘the strangest things interest him. He sits and talks to the workmen for hours; he pokes his nose into all sorts of places — hospitals, workshops, poverty-stricken dens — and people are always civil to him. He is what Lesbia calls sympatico. Ah! what a mistake Lesbia and my grandmother made when they rejected Hammond! What a pearl above price they threw away! But, you see, neither my lady nor Lesbia could appreciate a gem, unless it was richly set.’
And now Lady Maulevrier lay on her couch by the fire, waiting for James Steadman. She had seen him several times since the day of her seizure, but never alone. There was an idea that Steadman must necessarily talk to her of business matters, or cause her mind to trouble itself about business matters; so there had been a well-intentioned conspiracy in the house to keep him out of her way; but now she was much better, and her desire to see Steadman need no longer be thwarted.
He came at her bidding, and stood a little way within the door, tall, erect, square-shouldered, resolute-looking, with a quiet force of character expressed in every feature. He was very much the same man that he had been forty years ago, when he went with her ladyship to Southampton, and accompanied his master and mistress on that tedious journey which was destined to be Lord Maulevrier’s last earthly pilgrimage. Time had done little to Steadman in those forty years, except to whiten his hair and beard, and imprint some thoughtful lines upon his sagacious forehead. Time had done something for him mentally, insomuch as he had read a great many books and cultivated his mind in the monotonous quiet of Fellside. Altogether he was a superior man for the passage of those forty years.
He had married within the time, choosing for himself the buxom daughter of a lodgekeeper, whose wife had long been laid at rest in Grasmere churchyard. The buxom girl had grown into a bulky matron, but she was a colourless personage, and her existence made hardly any difference in James Steadman’s life. She had brought him no children, and their fireside was lonely; but Steadman seemed to be one of those self-contained personages to whom a solitary life is no affliction.
‘I hope I see you in better health, my lady,’ he said, standing straight and square, like a soldier on parade.
‘I am better, thank you, Steadman; better, but a poor lifeless log chained to this sofa. I sent for you because the time has come when I must talk to you upon a matter of business. You heard, I suppose, that a stranger called upon me just before I had my attack?’
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘Did you hear who and what he was?’
‘Only that he was a foreigner, my lady.’
‘He is of Indian birth. He claims to be the son of the Ranee of Bisnagar.’
‘He could do you no harm, my lady, if he were twenty times her son.’
‘I hope not. Now, I want to ask you a question. Among those trunks and cases and packages of Lord Maulevrier’s which were sent here by heavy coach, after they were landed at Southampton, do you remember two cases of books?’
‘There are two large cases among the luggage, my lady; very heavy cases, iron clamped. I should not be surprised if they were full of books.’
‘Have they never been opened?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Are they locked?’
‘Yes, my lady. There are two padlocks on each chest.’
‘And are the keys in your possession?’
‘No, my lady.’
‘Where are the cases?’
‘In the Oak Room, with the rest of the Indian luggage.’
‘Let them remain there. No doubt those cases contain the books of which I have been told. You have not heard that the person calling himself Rajah of Bisnagar has been here since my illness, have you?’
‘No, my lady; I am sure he has not been here.’
Lady Maulevrier gave him a scrutinising look.
‘He might have come, and my people might have kept the knowledge from me, out of consideration for my infirmity,’ she said. ‘I should be very angry if it were so. I should hate to be treated like a child.’
‘You shall not be so treated, my lady, while I am in this house; but I know there is no member of the household who would presume so to treat you.’
‘They might do it out of kindness; but I should loathe such kindness,’ said Lady Maulevrier, impatiently. ‘Though I have been smitten down, though I lie here like a log, I have a mind to think and to plan; and I am not afraid to meet danger, face to face. Are you telling me the truth, Steadman? Have there been no visits concealed from me, no letters kept from me since I have been ill?’
‘I am telling you nothing but the truth, my lady. No letter has been kept from you; no visitor has been to this house whose coming you have not been told of.’
‘Then I am content,’ said her ladyship, with a sigh of relief.
After this there followed some conversation upon business matters. James Steadman was trusted with the entire management of the dowager’s income, the investment of her savings. His honesty was above all suspicion. He was a man of simple habits, his wants few. He had saved money in every year of his service; and for a man of his station was rich enough to be unassailable by the tempter.
He had reconciled his mind to the monotonous course of life at Fellside in the beginning of things; and, as the years glided smoothly by, his character and wants and inclinations had, as it were, moulded themselves to fit that life. He had easy duties, a comfortable home, supreme authority in the household. He was looked up to and made much of in the village whenever he condescended to appear there; and by the rareness of his visits to the Inn or the Reading-room, and his unwillingness to accept hospitality from the tradesmen of Grasmere and Ambleside, he maintained his dignity and exaggerated his importance. He had his books and his newspapers, his evening leisure, which no one ever dared to disturb. He had the old wing of the house for his exclusive occupation; and no one ventured to intrude upon him in his privacy. There was a bell in the corridor which communicated with his rooms, and by this bell he was always summoned. There were servants who had been ten years at Fellside, and who had never crossed the threshold of the red cloth door which was the only communication between the new house and the old one. Steadman’s wife performed all household duties of cooking and cleaning in the south wing, where she and her husband took all their meals, and lived entirely apart from the other servants, an exclusiveness which was secretly resented by the establishment.
‘Mr. Steadman may be a very superior man,’ said the butler ‘and I know that in his own estimation the Premier isn’t in it compared with him; but I never was fond of people who set themselves upon pinnacles, and I’m not fond of the Steadmans.’
‘Mrs. Steadman’s plain and homely enough,’ replied the housekeeper, ‘and I know she’d like to be more sociable, and drop into my room for a cup of tea now and then; but Steadman do so keep her under his thumb: and because he’s a misanthrope she’s obliged to sit and mope alone.’
If Steadman wanted to drive, there was a dogcart and horse at his disposal; but he did not often leave Fellside. He seemed in his humble way to model his life upon Lady Maulevrier’s secluded habits. It was growing dusk when Steadman left his mistress, and she lay for some time looking at the landscape over which twilight shadows were stealing, and thinking of her own life. Over that life, too, the shadows of evening were creeping. She had began to realise the fact that she was an old woman; that for her all personal interest in life was nearly over. She had never felt her age while her activity was unimpaired. She had been obliged to remind herself very often that the afternoon and evening of life had slipped away unawares in that tranquil retirement, and that the night was at hand.
For her the close of earthly life meant actual night. No new dawn, no mysterious after-life shone upon her with magical gleams of an unknown light upon the other side of the dark river. She had accepted the Materialist’s bitter and barren creed, and had taught herself that this little life was all. She had learned to scorn the idea of a great Artificer outside the universe, a mighty spirit riding amidst the clouds, and ruling the course of nature and the fate of man. She had schooled herself to think that the idea of a blind, unconscious Nature, working automatically through infinite time and space, was ever so much grander than the old-world notion of a personal God, a Being of infinite power and inexhaustible beneficence, mighty to devise and direct the universe, with knowledge reaching to the farthest confines of space, with ear to listen to the prayer of His lowest creatures. Her belief stopped short even of the Deist’s faith in an Almighty Will. She saw in creation nothing but the inevitable development of material laws; and it seemed to her that there was quite as much hope of a heavenly world after death for the infusoria in the pool as for man in his pride and power.
She read her Bible as diligently as she read her Shakespeare, and the words of the Royal Preacher in some measure embodied her own dreary creed. And now, in the darkening winter day, she watched the gloomy shadows creep over the rugged breast of Nabb Scar, and she thought how there was a time for all things, and that her day of hope and ambition was past.
Of late years she had lived for Lesbia, looking forward to the day when she was to introduce this beloved grandchild to the great world of London; and now that hope was gone for ever.
What could a helpless cripple do for a fashionable beauty? What good would it be for her to be conveyed to London, and to lie on a couch in Mayfair, while Lesbia rode in the Row and went to three or four parties every night with a more active chaperon?
She had hoped to go everywhere with her darling, to glory in all her successes, to shield her from all possibility of failure. And now Lesbia must stand or fall alone.
It was a hard thing; but perhaps the hardest part of it was that Lesbia seemed so very well able to get on without her. The girl wrote in the highest spirits; and although her letters were most affectionately worded, they were all about self. That note was dominant in every strain. Her triumphs, her admirers, her bonnets, her gowns. She had had more money from her grandmother, and more gowns from Paris.
‘You have no idea how the people dress in this place,’ she wrote. ‘I should have been quite out in the cold without my three new frocks from Worth. The little Princess bonnets I wear are the rage. Worth recommended me to adopt special flowers and colours; so I have worn nothing but primroses since I have been here, and my little primrose bonnets are to be seen everywhere, sometimes on hideous old women. Lady Kirkbank hopes you will be able to go to London directly after Easter. She says I must be presented at the May drawing-room — that is imperative. People have begun to talk about me; and unless I make my début while their interest is fresh I shall be a failure. There is an American beauty here, and I believe she and I are considered rivals, and young men lay wagers about us, as to which will look best at a ball, or a regatta, what colours we shall wear, and so on. It is immense fun. I only wish you were here to enjoy it. The American girl is a most insolent person, but I have had the pleasure of crushing her on several occasions in the calmest way. In the description of the concert in last week’s newspaper I was called l’Anglais de marbre. I certainly had the decency to hold my tongue while Faure was singing. Miss Bolsover’s voice was heard ever so many times above the music. According to our English ideas she has most revolting manners, and the money she spends on her clothes would make your hair stand on end. Now do, dearest grandmother, make all your arrangements for beginning the campaign directly after Easter. You must take a house in the very choicest quarter — Lady Kirkbank suggests Grosvenor-place — and it must be a large house, for of course you will give a ball. Lady K. says we might have Lord Porlock’s house — poor Lady Porlock and her baby died a few weeks ago, and he has gone to Sweden quite broken-hearted. It is one of the new houses, exquisitely furnished, and Lady K. thinks you might have it for a song. Will you get Steadman to write to his lordship’s steward, and see what can be done?
‘I hope the dear hand is better. You have never told me how you hurt it. It is very sweet of Mary to write me such long letters, and quite a pleasant surprise to find she can spell; but I want to see your own dear hand once more.’
Those winter months were unutterably dreary for Lady Mary Haselden. She felt weighed down by a sense of death and woe near at hand. The horror of that dreadful moment in which she found her grandmother lying senseless on the ground, the terror of that distorted countenance, those starting eyes, that stertorous breathing, was not easily banished from a vivid girlish imagination; seeing how few distractions there were to divert Mary’s thoughts, and how the sun sank and rose again upon the same inevitable surroundings, to the same monotonous routine.
Her grandmother was kinder than she had been in days gone by, less inclined to find fault; but Mary knew that her society gave Lady Maulevrier very little pleasure, that she could do hardly anything towards filling the gap made by Lesbia’s absence. There was no one to scold her, no one to quarrel with her. Fr?ulein Müller lectured her mildly from time to time; but that stout German was too lazy to put any force or fire into her lectures. Her reproofs were like the fall of waterdrops on a stone, and infinite ages would have been needed to cause any positive impression.
February came to an end without sign or token from the outer world to disturb the even tenor of life at Fellside. Mary read, and read, and read, till she felt she was made up of the contents of books, crammed with other people’s ideas. She read history, or natural science, or travels, or German poetry in the morning, and novels or English poetry in the evening. She had pledged herself to devote her morning indoor hours to instructive literature, and to accomplish some portion of study in every day. She was carrying on her education on parole, as before stated; and she was too honourable to do less than was expected from her.
March came in with its most leonine aspect, howling and blustering; north-east winds shrieking along the gorges and wailing from height to height.
‘I wonder the lion and the lamb are not blown into the lake,’ said Mary, looking at Helm Crag from the library window.
She scampered about the gardens in the very teeth of those bitter blasts, and took her shivering terriers for runs on the green slopes of the Fell. The snow had gradually melted from the tides of the lowermost range of hills, but the mountain peaks were still white and ghostly, the ground was still hard and slippery in the early mornings. Mary had to take her walks alone in this bleak weather. Fr?ulein had a convenient bronchial affection which forbade her to venture so much as the point of her nose outside the house in an east wind, and which justified her in occasionally taking her breakfast in bed. She spent her days for the most part in her arm-chair, drawn close to the fireplace, which she still insisted upon calling the oven, knitting diligently, or reading the Rundschau. Even music, which had once been her strong point, was neglected in this trying weather. It was such a cold journey from the oven to the piano.
Mary played a good deal in her desultory manner, now that she had the drawing-room all to herself, and no fear of Lady Maulevrier’s critical ear or Lesbia’s superior smile. The Fr?ulein was pleased to hear her pupil ramble on with her favourite bits from Raff, and Hensel, and Schubert, and Mendelssohn, and Mozart, and was very well content to let her play just what she liked, and to escape the trouble of training her to that exquisite perfection into which Lady Lesbia had been drilled. Lesbia was not a genius, and the training process had been quite as hard for the governess as for the pupil.
Thus the slow days wore on till the first week in March, and on one bleak bitter afternoon, when Fr?ulein Müller stuck to the oven even a little closer than usual, Mary felt she must go out, in the face of the east wind, which was tossing the leafless branches in the valley below until the trees looked like an angry crowd, hurling its arms in the air, fighting, struggling, writhing. She must leave that dreary house for a little while, were it even to be lashed and bruised and broken by that fierce wind. So she told Fr?ulein that she really must have her constitutional; and after a feeble remonstrance Fr?ulein let her go, and subsided luxuriously into the pillowed depth of her arm-chair.
There had been a hard frost, and all the mountain ways were perilous, so Mary set out upon a steady tramp along the road leading towards the Langdales. The wind seemed to assail her from every side, but she had accustomed herself to defy the elements, and she only hugged her sealskin jacket closer to her, and quickened her pace, chirruping and whistling to Ahab and Ariadne, the two fox-terriers which she had selected for the privilege of a walk.
The terriers raced along the road, and Mary, seeing that she had the road all to herself, raced after them. A light snow-shower, large feathery flakes flying wide apart, fell from the steel-grey sky; but Mary minded the snow no more than she minded the wind. She raced on, the terriers scampering, rushing, flying before her, until, just where the road took a curve, she almost ran into a horse, which was stepping along at a tremendous pace, with a light, high dogcart behind him.
‘Hi!’ cried the driver, ‘where are you coming, young woman? Have you never seen a horse till to-day?’
Some one beside the driver leapt out, and ran to see if Mary was hurt. The horse had swerved to one side, reared a little, and then spun on for a few yards, leaving her standing in the middle of the road.
‘Why, it’s Molly!’ cried the driver, who was no less distinguished a whip than Lord Maulevrier, and who had recognised the terriers.
‘I hope you are not hurt,’ said the gentleman who had alighted, Maulevrier’s friend and shadow, John Hammond.
Mary was covered with confusion by her exploit, and could hardly answer Mr. Hammond’s very simple question.
She looked up at him piteously, trying to speak, and he took alarm at her scared expression.
‘I am sure you are hurt,’ he said earnestly, ‘the horse must have struck you, or the shaft perhaps, which was worse. Is it your shoulder that is hurt, or your chest? Lean on me, if you feel faint or giddy. Maulevrier, you had better drive your sister home, and get her looked after.’
‘Indeed, I am not hurt; not the least little bit,’ gasped Mary, who had recovered her senses by this time. ‘I was only frightened, and it was such a surprise to see you and Maulevrier.’
A surprise — yes — a surprise which had set her heart throbbing so violently as to render her speechless. Had horse or shaft-point struck her ever so, she would have hardly been more tremulous than she felt at this moment. Never had she hoped to see him again. He had set his all upon one cast — loved, wooed, and lost her sister. Why should he ever come again? What was there at Fellside worth coming for? And then she remembered what her grandmother thought of him. He was a hanger-on, a sponge, a led captain. He was Maulevrier’s Umbra, and must go where his patron went. It was a hard thing so to think of him, and Mary’s heart sank at the thought that Lady Maulevrier’s worldly wisdom might have reckoned aright.
‘It was very foolish of me to run into the horse,’ said Mary, while Mr. Hammond stood waiting for her to recover herself.
‘It was very foolish of Maulevrier to run into you. If he didn’t drive at such a break-neck pace it wouldn’t have happened.’
Umbra was very plain-spoken, at any rate.
‘There’s rank ingratitude,’ cried Maulevrier, who had turned back, and was looking down at them from his elevated perch. ‘After my coming all the way round by Langdale to oblige you with a view of Elterwater. Molly’s all safe and sound. She wouldn’t have minded if I’d run over her. Come along, child, get up beside me, Hammond will take the back seat.’
This was easier said than done, for the back of the dogcart was piled with Gladstone bags, fishing rods, and hat-boxes; but Umbra was ready to oblige. He handed Mary up to the seat by the driver, and clambered up at the back, when he hooked himself on somehow among the luggage.
‘Dear Maulevrier, how delicious of you to come!’ said Mary, when they were rattling on towards Fellside; ‘I hope you are going to stay for ages.’
‘Well, I dare say, if you make yourself very agreeable, I may stay till after Easter.’
Mary’s countenance fell.
‘Easter is in three weeks,’ she said, despondingly.
‘And isn’t three weeks an age, at such a place as Fellside? I don’t know that I should have come at all on this side of the August sports, only as the grandmother was ill, I thought it a duty to come and see her. A fellow mayn’t care much for ancestors when they’re well, you know; but when a poor old lady is down on her luck, her people ought to look after her. So, here I am; and as I knew I should be moped to death here ——’
‘Thank you for the compliment,’ said Mary.
‘I brought Hammond along with me. Of course, I knew Lesbia was safe out of the way,’ added Maulevrier in an undertone.
‘It is very obliging of Mr. Hammond always to go where you wish,’ returned Mary, who could not help a bitter feeling when she remembered her grandmother’s cruel suggestion. ‘Has he no tastes or inclinations of his own?’
‘Yes, he has, plenty of them, and much loftier tastes than mine, I can tell you. But he’s kind enough to let me hang on to him, and to put up with my frivolity. There never were two men more different than he and I are; and I suppose that’s why we get on so well together. When we were in Paris he was always up to his eyes in serious work — lectures, public libraries, workmen’s syndicates, Mary Anne, the International — heaven knows what, making himself master of the political situation in France; while I was rigolant and chaloupant at the Bal Bullier.’
It was generous of Maulevrier to speak of his hanger-on thus; and no doubt the society of a well-informed earnest young man was a great good for Maulevrier, a good far above the price of those pounds, shillings, and pence which the Earl might spend for his dependent’s benefit; but when a girl of Mary’s ardent temper has made a hero of a man, it galls her to think that her hero’s dignity should be sacrificed, his honour impeached, were it by the merest tittle.
Maulevrier made a good many inquiries about his grandmother, and seemed really full of kindness and sympathy; but it was with a feeling of profound awe, nay, of involuntary reluctance and shrinking, that he presently entered her ladyship’s sitting-room, ushered in by Mary, who had been to her grandmother beforehand to announce the grandson’s arrival.
The young man had hardly ever been in a sick room before. He half expected to see Lady Maulevrier in bed, with a crowd of medicine bottles and a cut orange on a table by her side, and a sick nurse of the ancient-crone species cowering over the fire. It was an infinite relief to him to find his grandmother lying on a sofa by the fire in her pretty morning room. A little tea-table was drawn close up to her sofa, and she was taking her afternoon tea. It was rather painful to see her lifting her tea-cup slowly and carefully with her left hand, but that was all. The dark eyes still flashed with the old eagle glance, the lines of the lips were as proud and firm as ever. All sign of contraction or distortion had passed away. In hours of calm her ladyship’s beauty was unimpaired; but with any strong emotion there came a convulsive working of the features, and the face was momentarily drawn and distorted, as it had been at the time of the seizure.
Maulevrier’s presence had not an unduly agitating effect on her ladyship. She received him with tranquil graciousness, and thanked him for his coming.
‘I hope you have spent your winter profitably in Paris,’ she said. ‘There is a great deal to be learnt there if you go into the right circles.’
Maulevrier told her that he had found much to learn, and that he had gone into circles where almost everything was new to him. Whereupon his grandmother questioned him about certain noble families in the Faubourg Saint Germain who had been known to her in her own day of power, and whose movements she had observed from a distance since that time; but here she found her grandson dark. He had not happened to meet any of the people she spoke about: the plain truth being that he had lived altogether as a Bohemian, and had not used one of the letters of introduction that had been given to him.
‘Your friend Mr. Hammond is with you, I am told,’ said Lady Maulevrier, not altogether with delight.
‘Yes, I made him come; but he is quite safe. He will bolt like a shot at the least hint of Lesbia’s return. He doesn’t want to meet that young lady again, I can assure you.’
‘Pray don’t talk in that injured tone. Mr. Hammond is a gentlemanlike person, very well informed, very agreeable. I have never denied that. But you could not expect me to allow my granddaughter to throw herself away upon the first adventurer who made her an offer.’
‘Hammond is not an adventurer.’
‘Very well, I will not call him so, if the term offends you. But Mr. Hammond is — Mr. Hammond, and I cannot allow Lesbia to marry Mr. Hammond or Mr. Anybody, and I am very sorry you have brought him here again. There is Mary, a silly, romantic girl. I am very much afraid he has made an impression upon her. She colours absurdly when she talks of him, and flew into a passion with me the other day when I ventured to hint that he is not a Rothschild, and that his society must be expensive to you.’
‘His society does not cost me anything. Hammond is the soul of independence. He worked as a blacksmith in Canada for three months, just to see what life was like in a wild district. There never was such a fellow to rough it. And as for Molly, well, now, really, if he happened to take a fancy to her, and if she happened to like him, I wouldn’t bosh the business, if I were you, grandmother. Take my word for it, Molly might do worse.’
‘Of course. She might marry a chimney sweep. There is no answering for a girl of her erratic nature. She is silly enough and romantic enough for anything; but I shall not countenance her if she wants to throw herself away on a person without prospects or connections; and I look to you, Maulevrier, to take care of her, now that I am a wretched log chained to this room.’
‘You may rely upon me, grandmother, Molly shall come to no harm, if I can help it.’
‘Thank you,’ said her ladyship, touching her bell twice.
The two clear silvery strokes were a summons for Halcott, the maid, who appeared immediately.
‘Tell Mrs. Power to get his lordship’s room ready immediately, and to give Mr. Hammond the room he had last summer,’ said Lady Maulevrier, with a sigh of resignation.
While Maulevrier was with his grandmother John Hammond was smoking a solitary cigar on the terrace, contemplating the mountain landscape in its cold March greyness, and wondering very much to find himself again at Fellside. He had gone forth from that house full of passionate indignation, shaking off the dust from his feet, sternly resolved never again to cross the threshold of that fateful cave, where he had met his cold-hearted Circe. And now, because Circe was safe out of the way, he had come back to the cavern; and he was feeling all the pain that a man feels who beholds again the scene of a great past sorrow.
Was this the old love and the old pain again, he wondered, or was it only the sharp thrust of a bitter memory? He had believed himself cured of his useless love — a great and noble love, wasted on a smaller nature than his own. He had thought that because his eyes were opened, and he understood the character of the girl he loved, his cure must needs be complete. Yet now, face to face with the well-remembered landscape, looking down upon that dull grey lake which he had seen smiling in the sunshine, he began to doubt the completeness of his cure. He recalled the lovely face, the graceful form, the sweet, low voice — the perfection of gracious womanhood, manner, dress, movements, tones, smiles, all faultless; and in the absence of that one figure, it seemed to him as if he had come back to a tenantless, dismantled house, where there was nothing that made life worth living.
The red sun went down — a fierce and lurid face that seemed to scowl through the grey — and Mr. Hammond felt that it was time to arouse himself from gloomy meditation and go in and dress for dinner. Maulevrier’s valet was to arrive by the coach with the heavier part of the luggage, and Maulevrier’s valet did that very small portion of valeting which was ever required by Mr. Hammond. A man who has worked at a forge in the backwoods is not likely to be finicking in his ways, or dependent upon servants for looking after his raiment.
Despite Mr. Hammond’s gloomy memories of past joys and disillusions, he contrived to make himself very agreeable, by-and-by, at dinner, and in the drawing-room after dinner, and the evening was altogether gay and sprightly. Maulevrier was in high spirits, full of his Parisian experiences, and talking slang as glibly as a student of the Quartier Latin. He would talk nothing but French, protesting that he had almost forgotten his native tongue, and his French was the language of Larchey’s Dictionary of Argot, in which nothing is called by its right name. Mary was enchanted with this new vocabulary, and wanted to have every word explained to her; but Maulevrier confessed that there was a good deal that was unexplainable.
The evening was much livelier than those summer evenings when the dowager and Lady Lesbia were present. There was something less of refinement, perhaps, and Fr?ulein remonstrated now and then about some small violation of the unwritten laws of ‘Anstand,’ but there was more mirth. Maulevrier felt for the first time as if he were master at Fellside. They all went to the billiard room soon after dinner, and Fr?ulein and Mary sat by the fire looking on, while the two young men played. In such an evening there was no time for bitter memories: and John Hammond was surprised to find how little he had missed that enchantress whose absence had made the house seem desolate to him when he re-entered it.
He was tired with his journey and the varying emotions of the day, for it was not without strong emotion that he had consented to return to Fellside — and he slept soundly for the earlier part of the night. But he had trained himself long ago to do with a very moderate portion of sleep, and he was up and dressed while the dawn was still slowly creeping along the edges of the hills. He went quietly down to the hall, took one of the bamboos from a collection of canes and mountain sticks, and set out upon a morning ramble over the snowy slopes. The snow showers of yesterday had only sprinkled the greensward upon the lower ground, but in the upper regions the winter snows still lingered, giving an Alpine character to the landscape.
John Hammond was too experienced a mountaineer to be deterred by a little snow. He went up Silver Howe, and from the rugged breast of the mountain saw the sun leap up from amidst a chaos of hill and crag, in all his majesty, while the grey mists of night slowly floated up from the valley that had lain hidden below them, and Grasmere Lake sparkled and flashed in the light of the newly-risen sun.
The church clock was striking eight as Hammond came at a brisk pace down to the valley. There was still an hour before breakfast, so he took a circuitous path to Fellside, and descended upon the house from the Fell, as he had done that summer morning when he saw James Steadman sauntering about in his garden.
Within about a quarter of a mile of Lady Maulevrier’s shrubberies Mr. Hammond encountered a pedestrian, who, like himself, was evidently taking a constitutional ramble in the morning air, but on a much less extended scale, for this person did not look capable of going far afield.
He was an old man, something under middle height, but looking as if he had once been taller; for his shoulders were much bent, and his head was sunk on his chest. His whole form looked wasted and shrunken, and John Hammond thought he had never seen so old a man — or at any rate any man who was so deeply marked with all the signs of extreme age; and yet in the backwoods of America he had met ancient settlers who remembered Franklin, and who had been boys when the battle of Bunker’s Hill was fresh in the memory of their fathers and mothers.
The little old man was clad in a thick grey overcoat of some shaggy kind of cloth which looked like homespun. He wore a felt hat, and carried a thick oak stick, and there was nothing in his appearance to indicate that he belonged to any higher grade than that of the shepherds and guides with whom Hammond had made himself familiar during his previous visit. And yet there was something distinctive about the man, Hammond thought, something wild and uncanny, which made him unlike any of those hale and hearty-looking dalesmen on whom old age sate so lightly. No, John Hammond could not fancy this man, with his pallid countenance and pale crafty eyes, to be of the same race as those rugged and honest-looking descendants of the Norsemen.
Perhaps it was the man’s exceeding age, for John Hammond made up his mind that he must be a centenarian, which gave him so strange and unholy an air. He had the aspect of a man who had been buried and brought back to life again.
So might look one of those Indian Fakirs who have the power to suspend life by some mysterious process, and to lie in the darkness of the grave for a given period, and then at their own will to resume the functions of the living. His long white hair fell upon the collar of his grey coat, and would have given him a patriarchal appearance had the face possessed the dignity of age: but it was a countenance without dignity, a face deeply scored with the lines of evil passions and guilty memories — the face of the vulture, with a touch of the ferret — altogether a most unpleasant face, Mr. Hammond thought.
And yet there was a kind of fascination about that bent and shrunken figure, those feeble movements, and shuffling gait. John Hammond turned to look after the old man when he had passed him, and stood to watch him as he went slowly up the Fell, plant his crutch stick upon the ground before every footstep, as if it were a third leg, and more serviceable than either of the other two.
Mr. Hammond watched him for two or three minutes, but, as the old man’s movements had an automatic regularity, the occupation soon palled, and he turned and walked toward Fellside. A few yards nearer the grounds he met James Steadman, walking briskly, and smoking his morning pipe.
‘You are out early this morning,’ said Hammond, by way of civility.
‘I am always pretty early, sir. I like a mouthful of morning air.’
‘So do I. By-the-bye, can you tell me anything about a queer-looking old man I passed just now a little higher up the Fell? Such an old, old man, with long white hair.’
‘Yes, sir. I believe I know him.’
‘Who is he? Does he live in Grasmere?’
Steadman looked puzzled.
‘Well, you see, sir, your description might apply to a good many; but if it’s the man I think you mean he lives in one of the cottages behind the church. Old Barlow, they call him.’
‘There can’t be two such men — he must be at least a century old. If any one told me he were a hundred and twenty I shouldn’t be inclined to doubt the fact. I never saw such a shrivelled, wrinkled visage, bloodless, too, as if the poor old wretch never felt your fresh mountain air upon his hollow cheeks. A dreadful face. It will haunt me for a month.’
‘It must be old Barlow,’ replied Steadman. ‘Good day, sir.’
He walked on with his swinging step, and at such a pace that he was up the side of the Fell and close upon old Barlow’s heels when Hammond turned to look after him five minutes later.
‘There’s a man who shows few traces of age, at any rate,’ thought Hammond. ‘Yet her ladyship told me that he is over seventy.’
Having made up his mind to stay at Fellside until after Easter, Maulevrier settled down very quietly — for him. He rode a good deal, fished a little, looked after his dogs, played billiards, made a devout appearance in the big square pew at St. Oswald’s on Sunday mornings, and behaved altogether as a reformed character. Even his grandmother was fain to admit that Maulevrier was improved, and that Mr. Hammond’s influence upon him must be exercised for good and not for evil.
‘I plunged awfully last year, and the year before that,’ said Maulevrier, sitting at tea in her ladyship’s morning room one afternoon about a week after his return, when she had expressed her gracious desire that the two young men should take tea with her.
Mary was in charge of the tea-pot and brass kettle, and looked as radiant and as fresh as a summer morning. A regular Gainsborough girl, Hammond called her, when he praised her to her brother; a true English beauty, unsophisticated, a little rustic, but full of youthful sweetness.
‘You see, I didn’t know what a racing stable meant,’ continued Maulevrier, mildly apologetic —‘in fact, I thought it was an easy way for a nobleman to make as good a living as your City swells, with their soft goods or their Brummagem ware, a respectable trade for a gentleman to engage in. And it was only when I was half ruined that I began to understand the business; and as soon as I did understand it I made up my mind to get out of it; and I am happy to say that I sold the very last of my stud in February, and Tony Lumpkin is his own man again. So you may welcome the prodigal grandson, and order the fatted calf to be slain, grandmother!’
Lady Maulevrier stretched out her left hand to him, and the young man bent over it and kissed it affectionately. He felt really touched by her misfortunes, and was fonder of her than he had ever been before. She had been somewhat hard with him in his boyhood, but she had always cared for his dignity and protected his interests: and, after all, she was a noble old woman, a grandmother of whom a man might be justly proud. He thought of the painted harridans, the bare-shouldered skeletons, whom some of his young friends were obliged to own in the same capacity, and he was thankful that he could reverence his father’s mother.
‘That is the best news I have heard for a long time, Maulevrier,’ said her ladyship graciously; ‘better medicine for my nerves than any of Mr. Horton’s preparations. If Mr. Hammond’s advice has influenced you to get rid of your stable I am deeply grateful to Mr. Hammond.’
Hammond smiled as he sipped his tea, sitting close to Mary’s tray, ready to fly to her assistance on the instant should the brazen kettle become troublesome. It had a threatening way of hissing and bubbling over its spirit lamp.
‘Oh, you have no idea what a fellow Hammond is to lecture,’ answered Maulevrier. ‘He is a tremendous Radical, and he thinks that every young man in my position ought to be a reformer, and devote the greater part of his time and trouble to turning out the dirty corners of the world, upsetting those poor dear families who like to pig together in one room, ordering all the children off to school, marrying the fathers and mothers, thrusting himself between free labour and free beer, and interfering with the liberty of the subject in every direction.’
‘All that may sound like Radicalism, but I think it is the true Conservatism, and that every young man ought to do as much, if he wants this timeworn old country to maintain its power and prosperity,’ answered Lady Maulevrier, with an approving glance at John Hammond’s thoughtful face.
‘Right you are, grandmother,’ returned Maulevrier, ‘and I believe Hammond calls himself a Conservative, and means to vote with the Conservatives.’
Means to vote! An idle phrase, surely, thought her ladyship, where the young man’s chance of getting into Parliament was so remote.
That afternoon tea in Lady Maulevrier’s room was almost as cheerful as the tea-drinkings in the drawing-room, unrestrained by her ladyship’s presence. She was pleased with her grandson’s conduct, and was therefore inclined to be friendly to his friend. She could see an improvement in Mary, too. The girl was more feminine, more subdued, graver, sweeter; more like that ideal woman of Wordsworth’s, whose image embodies all that is purest and fairest in womanhood.
Mary had not forgotten that unlucky story about the fox-hunt, and ever since Hammond’s return she had been as it were on her best behaviour, refraining from her races with the terriers, and holding herself aloof from Maulevrier’s masculine pursuits. She sheltered herself a good deal under the Fr?ulein’s substantial wing, and took care never to intrude herself upon the amusements of her brother and his friend. She was not one of those young women who think a brother’s presence an excuse for a perpetual tête-à-tête with a young man. Yet when Maulevrier came in quest of her, and entreated her to join them in a ramble, she was not too prudish to refuse the pleasure she so thoroughly enjoyed. But afternoon tea was her privileged hour — the time at which she wore her prettiest frock, and forgot to regret her inferiority to Lesbia in all the graces of womanhood.
One afternoon, when they had all three walked to Easedale Tarn, and were coming back by the side of the force, picking their way among the grey stones and the narrow threads of silvery water, it suddenly occurred to Hammond to ask Mary about that queer old man he had seen on the Fell nearly a fortnight before. He had often thought of making the inquiry when he was away from Mary, but had always forgotten the thing when he was with her. Indeed, Mary had a wonderful knack of making him forget everything but herself.
‘You seem to know every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,’ said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders. ‘Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, a very old man?’
‘Old Sam Barlow,’ exclaimed Mary; ‘why, of course I know him.’
She said it as if he were a near relative, and the question palpably absurd.
‘He is an old man, a hundred, at least, I should think,’ said Hammond.
‘Poor old Sam, not much on the wrong side of eighty. I go to see him every week, and take him his week’s tobacco, poor old dear. It is his only comfort.’
‘Is it?’ asked Hammond. ‘I should have doubted his having so humanising a taste as tobacco. He looks too evil a creature ever to have yielded to the softening influence of a pipe.’
‘An evil creature! What, old Sam? Why he is the most genial old thing, and as cheery — loves to hear the newspaper read to him — the murders and railway accidents. He doesn’t care for politics. Everybody likes old Sam Barlow.’
‘I fancy the Grasmere idea of reverend and amiable age must be strictly local. I can only say that I never saw a more unholy countenance.’
‘You must have been dreaming when you saw him,’ said Mary. ‘Where did you meet him?’
‘On the Fell, about a quarter of a mile from the shrubbery gate.’
‘Did you? I shouldn’t have thought he could have got so far. I’ve a good mind to take you to see him, this very afternoon, before we go home.’
‘Do,’ exclaimed Hammond, ‘I should like it immensely. I thought him a hateful-looking old person; but there was something so thoroughly uncanny about him that he exercised an absolute fascination upon me: he magnetised me, I think, as the green-eyed cat magnetises the bird. I have been positively longing to see him again. He is a kind of human monster, and I hope some one will have a big bottle made ready for him and preserve him in spirits when he dies.’
‘What a horrid idea! No, sir, dear old Barlow shall lie beside the Rotha, under the trees Wordsworth planted. He is such a man as Wordsworth would have loved.’
Mr. Hammond shrugged his shoulders, and said no more. Mary’s little vehement ways, her enthusiasm, her love of that valley, which might be called her native place, albeit her eyes had opened upon heaven’s light far away, her humility, were all very delightful in their way. She was not a perfect beauty, like Lesbia; but she was a fresh, pure-minded English girl, frank as the day, and if he had had a brother he would have recommended that brother to choose just such a girl for his wife.
Mr. Samuel Barlow occupied a little old cottage, which seemed to consist chiefly of a gable end and a chimney stack, in that cluster of dwellings behind St. Oswald’s church, which was once known as the Kirk Town. Visitors went downstairs to get to Mr. Barlow’s ground-floor, for the influence of time and advancing civilisation had raised the pathway in front of Mr. Barlow’s cottage until his parlour had become of a cellar-like aspect. Yet it was a very nice little parlour when one got down to it, and it enjoyed winter and summer a perpetual twilight, since the light that crept through the leaded casement was tempered by a screen of flowerpots, which were old Barlow’s particular care. There were no finer geraniums in all Grasmere than Barlow’s, no bigger carnations or picotees, asters or arums.
It was about five o’clock in the March afternoon, when Mary ushered John Hammond into Mr. Barlow’s dwelling, and, in the dim glow of a cheery little fire and the faint light that filtered through the screen of geranium leaves, the visitor looked for a moment or so doubtfully at the owner of the cottage. But only for a moment. Those bright blue eyes and apple cheeks, that benevolent expression, bore no likeness to the strange old man he had seen on the Fell. Mr. Barlow was toothless and nut-cracker like of outline; he was thin and shrunken, and bent with the burden of long years, but his healthy visage had none of those deep lines, those cross markings and hollows which made the pallid countenance of that other old man as ghastly as would be the abstract idea of life’s last stage embodied by the bitter pencil of a Hogarth.
‘I have brought a gentleman from London to see you, Sam,’ said Mary. ‘He fancied he met you on the Fell the other morning.’
Barlow rose and quavered a cheery welcome, but protested against the idea of his having got so far as the Fell.
‘With my blessed rheumatics, you know it isn’t in me, Lady Mary. I shall never get no further than the churchyard; but I likes to sit on the wall hard by Wordsworth’s tomb in a warm afternoon, and to see the folks pass over the bridge; and I can potter about looking after my flowers, I can. But it would be a dull life, now the poor old missus is gone and the bairns all out at service, if it wasn’t for some one dropping in to have a chat, or read me a bit of the news sometimes. And there isn’t anybody in Grasmere, gentle or simple, that’s kinder to me than you, Lady Mary. Lord bless you, I do look forward to my newspaper. Any more of them dreadful smashes?’
‘No, Sam, thank Heaven, there have been no railway accidents.’
‘Ah, we shall have ’em in August and September,’ said the old man, cheerily. ‘They’re bound to come then. There’s a time for all things, as Solomon says. When the season comes t’smashes all coom. And no more of these mysterious murders, I suppose, which baffle t’police and keep me awake o’ nights thinking of ’em.’
‘Surely you do not take delight in murder, Mr. Barlow?’ said Hammond.
‘No, sir, I do not wish my fellow-creatures to mak’ awa’ wi’ each other; but if there is a murder going in the papers I like to get the benefit of it. I like to sit in front of my fire of an evening and wonder about it while I smoke my pipe, and fancy I can see the murderer hiding in a garret in an out-of-the-way alley, or as a stowaway on board a gert ship, or as a miner deep down in a coalpit, and never thinking that even there t’police can track him. Did you ever hear tell o’ Mr. de Quincey, sir?’
‘I believe I have read every line he ever wrote.’
‘Ah, you should have heard him talk about murders. It would have made you dream queer dreams, just as he did. He lived for years in the white cottage that Wordsworth once lived in, just behind the street yonder — a nice, neat, lile gentleman, in a houseful of books. I’ve had many a talk with him when I was a young man.’
‘And how old may you he now, Mr. Barlow?’
‘Getting on for eighty four, sir.’
‘But you are not the oldest man in Grasmere, I should say, by twenty years?’
‘I don’t think there’s many much older than me, sir.’
‘The man I saw on the Fell looked at least a hundred. I wish you could tell me who he is; I feel a morbid curiosity about him.’
He went on to describe the old man in the grey coat, as minutely as he could, dwelling on every characteristic of that singular-looking old person; but Samuel Barlow could not identify the description with any one in Grasmere. Yet a man of that age, seen walking on the hill-side at eight in the morning, could hardly have come from far afield.
Although Maulevrier had assured his grandmother that John Hammond would take flight at the first warning of Lesbia’s return, Lady Maulevrier’s dread of any meeting between her granddaughter and that ineligible lover determined her in making such arrangements as should banish Lesbia from Fellside, so long as there seemed the slightest danger of such a meeting. She knew that Lesbia had loved her fortuneless suitor; and she did not know that the wound was cured, even by a season in the little-great world of Cannes. Now that she, the ruler of that household, was a helpless captive in her own apartments, she felt that Lesbia at Fellside would be her own mistress, and hemmed round with the dangers that beset richly-dowered beauty and inexperienced youth.
John Hammond might be playing a very deep game, perhaps assisted by Maulevrier. He might ostensibly leave Fellside before Lesbia’s return, yet lurk in the neighbourhood, and contrive to meet her every day. If Maulevrier encouraged this folly, they might be married and over the border, before her ladyship — fettered, impotent as she was — could interfere.
Lady Maulevrier felt that Georgie Kirkbank was her strong rock. So long as Lesbia was under that astute veteran’s wing there could be no danger. In that embodied essence of worldliness and diplomacy, there was an ever-present defence from all temptations that spring from romance and youthful impulses. It was a bitter thing, perhaps, to steep a young and pure soul in such an atmosphere, to harden a fresh young nature in the fiery crucible of fashionable life; but Lady Maulevrier believed that the end would sanctify the means. Lesbia, once married to a worthy man, such a man as Lord Hartfield, for instance, would soon rise to a higher level than that Belgravian swamp over which the malarian vapours of falsehood, and slander, and self-seeking, and prurient imaginings hang dense and thick. She would rise to the loftier table-land of that really great world which governs and admonishes the ruck of mankind by examples of noble deeds and noble thoughts; the world of statesmen, and soldiers, and thinkers, and reformers; the salt wherewithal society is salted.
But while Lesbia was treading the tortuous mazes of fashion, it was well for her to be guided and guarded by such an old campaigner as Lady Kirkbank, a woman who, in the language of her friends, ‘knew the ropes.’
Lesbia’s last letter had been to the effect that she was to go back to London with the Kirkbanks directly after Easter, and that directly they arrived she would set off with her maid for Fellside, to spend a week or a fortnight with her dearest grandmother, before going back to Arlington Street for the May campaign.
‘And then, dearest, I hope you will make up your mind to spend the season in London,’ wrote Lesbia. ‘I shall expect to hear that you have secured Lord Porlock’s house. How dreadfully slow your poor dear hand is to recover! I am afraid Horton is not treating the case cleverly. Why do you not send for Mr. Erichsen? It is a shock to my nerves every time I receive a letter in Mary’s masculine hand, instead of in your lovely Italian penmanship. Strange — isn’t it? — how much better the women of your time write than the girls of the present day! Lady Kirkbank receives letters from stylish girls in a hand that would disgrace a housemaid.’
Lady Maulevrier allowed a post to go by before she answered this letter, while she deliberated upon the best and wisest manner of arranging her granddaughter’s future. It was an agony to her not to be able to write with her own hand, to be obliged to so shape every sentence that Mary might learn nothing which she ought not to know. It was impossible with such an amanuensis to write confidentially to Lady Kirkbank. The letters to Lesbia were of less consequence; for Lesbia, albeit so intensely beloved, was not in her grandmother’s confidence, least of all about those schemes and dreams which concerned her own fate.
However, the letters had to be written, so Mary was told to open her desk and begin.
The letter to Lesbia ran thus:—
‘My dearest Child,
‘This is a world in which our brightest day-dreams generally end in mere dreaming. For years past I have cherished the hope of presenting you to your sovereign, to whom I was presented six and forty years ago, when she was so fair and girlish a creature that she seemed to me more like a queen in a fairy tale than the actual ruler of a great country. I have beguiled my monotonous days with thoughts of the time when I should return to the great world, full of pride and delight in showing old friends what a sweet flower I had reared in my mountain home; but, alas, Lesbia, it may not be.
‘Fate has willed otherwise. The maimed hand does not recover, although Horton is very clever, and thoroughly understands my case. I am not ill, I am not in danger; so you need feel no anxiety about me; but I am a cripple; and I am likely to remain a cripple for months; so the idea of a London season this year is hopeless.
‘Now, as you have in a manner made your début at Cannes, it would never do to bury you here for another year. You complained of the dullness last summer; but you would find Fellside much duller now that you have tasted the elixir of life. No, my dear love, it will be well for you to be presented, as Lady Kirkbank proposes, at the first drawing-room after Easter; and Lady Kirkbank will have to present you. She will be pleased to do this, I know, for her letters are full of enthusiasm about you. And, after all, I do not think you will lose by the exchange. Clever as I think myself, I fear I should find myself sorely at fault in the society of to-day. All things are changed: opinions, manners, creeds, morals even. Acts that were crimes in my day are now venial errors — opinions that were scandalous are now the mark of “advanced thought.” I should be too formal for this easy-going age, should be ridiculed as old-fashioned and narrow-minded, should put you to the blush a dozen times a day by my prejudices and opinions.
‘It is very good of you to think of travelling so long a distance to see me; and I should love to look at your sweet face, and hear you describe your new experiences; but I could not allow you to travel with only the protection of a maid; and there are many reasons why I think it better to defer the meeting till the end of the season, when Lady Kirkbank will bring my treasure back to me, eager to tell me the history of all the hearts she has broken.’
The dowager’s letter to Lady Kirkbank was brief and business-like. She could only hope that her old friend Georgie, whose acuteness she knew of old, would divine her feelings and her wishes, without being explicitly told what they were.
‘My dear Georgie,
‘I am too ill to leave this house; indeed I doubt if I shall ever leave it till I am taken away in my coffin; but please say nothing to alarm Lesbia. Indeed, there is no ground for fear, as I am not dangerously ill, and may drag out an imprisonment of long years before the coffin comes to fetch me. There are reasons, which you will understand, why Lesbia should not come here till after the season; so please keep her in Arlington Street, and occupy her mind as much as you can with the preparations for her first campaign. I give you carte blanche. If Carson is still in business I should like her to make my girl’s gowns; but you must please yourself in this matter, as it is quite possible that Carson is a little behind the times.
‘I must ask you to present my darling, and to deal with her exactly as if she were a daughter of your own. I think you know all my views and hopes about her; and I feel that I can trust to your friendship in this my day of need. The dream of my life has been to launch her myself, and direct her every step in the mazes of town life; but that dream is over. I have kept age and infirmity at a distance, have even forgotten that the years were going by; and now I find myself an old woman all at once, and my golden dream has vanished.’
Lady Kirkbank’s reply came by return of post, and happily this gushing epistle had not to be submitted to Mary’s eye.
‘My dearest Di,
‘My heart positively bleeds for you. What is the matter with your hand, that you talk of being a life-long prisoner to your room? Pray send for Paget or Erichsen, and have yourself put right at once. No doubt that local simpleton is making a mess of your case. Perhaps while he is dabbing with lint and lotions the real remedy is the knife. I am sure amputation would be less melancholy than the despondent state of feeling which you are now suffering. If any limb of mine went wrong, I should say to the surgeon, “Cut it off, and patch up the stump in your best style; I give you a fortnight, and at the end of that time I expect to be going to parties again.” Life is not long enough for dawdling surgery.
‘As regards Lesbia, I can only say that I adore her, and I am enchanted at the idea that I am to run her myself. I intend her to be the beauty of the season — not one of the loveliest debutantes, or any rot of that kind — but just the girl whom everybody will be crazy about. There shall be a mob wherever she appears, Di, I promise you that. There is no one in London who can work a thing of that kind better than your humble servant. And when once the girl is the talk of the town, all the rest is easy. She can choose for herself among the very best men in society. Offers will pour in as thickly as circulars from undertakers and mourning warehouses after a death.
‘Lesbia is so cool-headed and sensible that I have not the least doubt of her success. With an impulsive or romantic girl there is always the fear of a fiasco. But this sweet child of yours has been well brought up, and knows her own value. She behaved like a queen here, where I need not tell you society is just a little mixed; though, of course, we only cultivate our own set. Your heart would swell with pride if you could see the way she puts down men who are not quite good style; and the ease with which she crushes those odious American girls, with their fine complexions and loud manners.
‘Be assured that I shall guard her as the apple of my eye, and that the detrimental who circumvents me will be a very Satan of schemers.
‘I can but smile at your mention of Carson, whose gowns used to fit us so well in our girlish days, and whose bills seem moderate compared with the exorbitant accounts I get now.
‘Carson has long been forgotten, my dear soul, gone with the snows of last year. A long procession of fashionable French dressmakers has passed across the stage since her time, like the phantom kings in Macbeth; and now the last rage is to have our gowns made by an Englishman who works for the Princess, and who gives himself most insufferable airs, or an Irishwoman who is employed by all the best actresses. It is to the latter, Kate Kearney, I shall entrust our sweet Lesbia’s toilettes.’
The same post brought a loving letter from Lesbia, full of regret at not being allowed to go down to Fellside, and yet full of delight at the prospect of her first season.
‘Lady Kirkbank and I have been discussing my court dress,’ she wrote, ‘and we have decided upon a white cut-velvet train, with a border of ostrich feathers, over a satin petticoat embroidered with seed pearl. It will be expensive, but we know you will not mind that. Lady Kirkbank takes the idea from the costume Buckingham wore at the Louvre the first time he met Anne of Austria. Isn’t that clever of her? She is not a deep thinker like you; is horribly ignorant of science, metaphysics, poetry even. She asked me one day who Plato was, and whether he took his name from the battle of Platoea; and she says she never could understand why people make a fuss about Shakespeare; but she has read all the secret histories and memoirs that ever were written, and knows all the ins and outs of court life and high life for the last three hundred years; and there is not a person in the peerage whose family history she has not at her fingers’ ends, except my grandfather. When I asked her to tell me all about Lord Maulevrier and his achievements as Governor of Madras, she had not a word to say. So, perhaps, she draws upon her invention a little in talking about other people, and felt herself restrained when she came to speak of my grandfather.’
This passage in Lesbia’s letter affected Lady Maulevrier as if a scorpion had wriggled from underneath the sheet of paper. She folded the letter, and laid it in the satin-lined box on her table, with a deep sigh.
‘Yes, she is in the world now, and she will ask questions. I have never warned her against pronouncing her grandfather’s name. There are some who will not be so kind as Georgie Kirkbank; some, perhaps, who will delight in humiliating her, and who will tell her the worst that can be told. My only hope is that she will make a great marriage, and speedily. Once the wife of a man with a high place in the world, worldlings will be too wise to wound her by telling her that her grandfather was an unconvicted felon.’
The die was cast. Lady Maulevrier might dread the hazard of evil tongues, of slanderous memories; but she could not recall her consent to Lesbia’s début. The girl was already launched; she had been seen and admired. The next stage in her career must be to be wooed and won by a worthy wooer.