While Lady Lesbia was draining the cup of London folly and London care to the dregs, Lady Mary was leading her usual quiet life beside the glassy lake, where the green hill-sides and sheep walks were reflected in all their summer verdure under the cloudless azure of a summer sky. A monotonous life — passing dull as seen from the outside — and yet Mary was very happy, happy even in her solitude, with the grave deep joy of a satisfied heart, a mind at rest. All life had taken a new colour since her engagement to John Hammond. A sense of new duties, an awakening earnestness had given a graver tone to her character. Her spirits were less wild, yet not less joyous than of old. The joy was holier, deeper.
Her lover’s letters were the chief delight of her lonely days. To read them again and again, and ponder upon them, and then to pour out all her heart and mind in answering them. These were pleasures enough for her young like. Hammond’s letters were such as any woman might be proud to receive. They were not love-letters only. He wrote as friend to friend; not descending from the proud pinnacle of masculine intelligence to the lower level of feminine silliness; not writing down to a simple country girl’s capacity; but writing-fully and fervently, as if there were no subject too lofty or too grave for the understanding of his betrothed. He wrote as one sure of being sympathised with, wrote as to his second self: and Mary showed herself not unworthy of the honour thus rendered to her intellect.
There was one world which had newly opened to Mary since her engagement, and that was the world of politics. Hammond had told her that his ambition was to succeed as a politician — to do some good in his day as one of the governing body; and of late she had made it her business to learn how England and the world outside England were governed.
She had no natural leaning to the study of political economy. Instead, she had always imagined any question relating to the government of her country to be inherently dry-as-dust and uninviting. But had John Hammond devoted his days to the study of Coptic manuscripts, or the arrow headed inscriptions upon Assyrian tablets, she would have toiled her hardest in the endeavour to make herself a Coptic scholar, or an adept in the cuneiform characters. If he had been a student of Chinese, she would not have been discomfited by such a trifle as the fifty thousand characters in the Chinese alphabet.
And so, as he was to make his name in the arena of public life, she set herself to acquire a proper understanding of the science of politics; and to this end she gorged herself with English history — Hume, Hallam, Green, Justin McCarthy, Palgrave, Lecky, from the days of Witenagemote to the Reform Bill; the Repeal of the Corn Laws, the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, Ballot, Trade unionism, and unreciprocated Free Trade. No question was deep enough to repel her; for was not her lover interested in the dryest thereof; and what concerned him and his welfare must needs be full of interest for her.
To this end she read the debates religiously day by day; and she one day ventured shyly to suggest that she should read them aloud to Lady Maulevrier.
‘Would it not be a little rest for you if I were to read your Times aloud to you every afternoon, grandmother?’ she asked. ‘You read so many books, French, English, and German, and I think your eyes must get a little tired sometimes.’
Mary ventured the remark with some timidity, for those falcon eyes were fixed upon her all the time, bright and clear and steady as the eyes of youth. It seemed almost an impertinence to suggest that such eyes could know weariness.
‘No, Mary, my sight, holds out wonderfully for an old woman,’ replied her ladyship, gently. ‘The new theory of the last oculist whose book I dipped into — a very amusing and interesting book, by-the-bye — is that the sight improves and strengthens by constant use, and that an agricultural labourer, who hardly uses his eyes at all, has rarely in the decline of life so good a sight as the watchmaker or the student. I have read immensely all my life, and find myself no worse for that indulgence. But you may read the debates to me if you like, my dear, for if my eyes are strong, I myself am very tired. Sick to death, Mary, sick to death.’
The splendid eyes turned from Mary, and looked away to the blue sky, to the hills in their ineffable beauty of colour and light — shifting, changing with every moment of the summer day. Intense weariness, a settled despair, were expressed in that look — tearless, yet sadder than all tears.
‘It must be very monotonous, very sad for you,’ murmured Mary, her own eyes brimming over with tears. ‘But it will not be always so, dear grandmother. I hope a time will come when you will be able to go about again, to resume your old life.’
‘I do not hope, Mary. No, child, I feel and know that time will never come. My strength is ebbing slowly day by day. If I live for another year, live to see Lesbia married, and you, too, perhaps — well, I shall die at peace. At peace, no; not ——’ she faltered, and the thin, semi-transparent hand was pressed upon her brow. ‘What will be said of me when I am dead?’
Mary feared that her grandmother’s mind was wandering. She came and knelt beside the couch, laid and her head against the satin pillows, tenderly, caressingly.
‘Dear grandmother, pray be calm,’ she murmured.
‘Mary, do not look at me like that, as if you would read my heart. There are hearts that must not be looked into. Mine is like a charnel-house. Monotonous, yes; my life has been monotonous. No conventual gloom was ever deeper than the gloom of Fellside. My boy did nothing to lighten it for me, and his son followed in his father’s footsteps. You and Lesbia have been my only consolation. Lesbia! I was so proud of her beauty, so proud and fond of her, because she was like me, and recalled my own youth. And see how easily she forgets me. She has gone into a new world, in which my age and my infirmities have no part; and I am as nothing to her.’
Mary changed from red to pale, so painful was her embarrassment. What could she say in defence of her sister? How could she deny that Lesbia was an ingrate, when those rare and hurried letters, so careless in their tone, expressing the selfishness of the writer in every syllable, told but too plainly of forgetfulness and ingratitude?
‘Dear grandmother, Lesbia has so much to do — her life is so full of engagements,’ she faltered feebly.
‘Yes, she goes from party to party — she gives herself up heart and mind and soul to pleasures which she ought to consider only as the trivial means to great ends; and she forgets the woman who reared her, and cared for her, and watched over her from her infancy, and who tried to inspire her with a noble ambition. — Yes, read to me, child, read. Give me new thoughts, if you can, for my brain is weary with grinding the old ones. There was a grand debate in the Lords last night, and Lord Hartfield spoke. Let me hear his speech. You can read what was said by the man before him; never mind the rest.’
Mary read Lord Somebody’s speech, which was passing dull, but which prepared the ground for a magnificent and exhaustive reply from Lord Hartfield. The question was an important one, affecting the well-being of the masses, and Lord Hartfield spoke with an eloquence which rose in force and fire as he wound himself like a serpent into the heart of his subject — beginning quietly, soberly, with no opening flashes of rhetoric, but rising gradually to the topmost heights of oratory.
‘What a speech!’ cried Lady Maulevrier, delighted, her cheeks glowing, her eyes kindling; ‘what a noble fellow the speaker must be! Oh, Mary, I must tell you a secret. I loved that man’s father. Yes, my dear, I loved him fondly, dearly, truly, as you love that young man of yours; and he was the only man I ever really loved. Fate parted us. But I have never forgotten him — never, Mary, never. At this moment I have but to close my eyes and I can see his face — see him looking at me as he looked the last time we met. He was a younger son, poor, his future quite hopeless in those days; but it was not my fault we were parted. I would have married him — yes, wedded poverty, just as you are going to marry this Mr. Hammond; but my people would not let me; and I was too young, too helpless, to make a good fight. Oh, Mary, if I had only fought hard enough, what a happy woman I might have been, and how good a wife.’
‘You were a good wife to my grandfather, I am sure,’ faltered Mary, by way of saying something consolatory.
A dark frown came over Lady Maulevrier’s face, which had softened to deepest tenderness just before.
‘A good wife to Maulevrier,’ she said, in a mocking tone. Well, yes, as good a wife as such a husband deserved. ‘I was better than Caesar’s wife, Mary, for no breath of suspicion ever rested upon my name. But if I had married Ronald Hollister, I should have been a happy woman; and that I have never been since I parted from him.’
‘You have never seen the present Lord Hartfield, I think?’
‘Never; but I have watched his career, I have thought of him. His father died while he was an infant, and he was brought up in seclusion by a widowed mother, who kept him tied to her apron-strings till he went to Oxford. She idolised him, and I am told she taught herself Latin and Greek, mathematics even, in order to help him in his boyish, studies, and, later on, read Greek plays and Latin poetry with him, till she became an exceptional classic for a woman. She was her son’s companion and friend, sympathised with his tastes, his pleasures, his friendships; devoted every hour of her life, every thought of her mind to his welfare, his interests, walked with him, rode with him, travelled half over Europe, yachted with him. Her friends all declared that the lad would grow up an odious milksop; but I am told that there never was a manlier man than Lord Hartfield. From his boyhood he was his mother’s protector, helped to administer her affairs, acquired a premature sense of responsibility, and escaped almost all those vices which make young men detestable. His mother died within a few months of his majority. He was broken-hearted at losing her, and left Europe immediately after her death. From that time he has been a great traveller. But I suppose now that he has taken his seat in the House of Lords, and has spoken a good many times, he means to settle down and take his place among the foremost men of his day. I am told that he is worthy to take such a place.’
‘You must feel warmly interested in watching his career,’ said Mary, sympathetically.
‘I am interested in everything that concerns him. I will tell you another secret, Mary. I think I am getting into my dotage, my dear, or I should hardly talk to you like this,’ said Lady Maulevrier, with a touch of bitterness.
Mary was sitting on a stool by the sofa, close to the invalid’s pillow. She clasped her grandmother’s hand and kissed it fondly.
‘Dear grandmother, I think you are talking to me like this to-day because you are beginning to care for me a little,’ she said, tenderly.
‘Oh, my dear, you are very good, very sweet and forgiving to care for me at all, after my neglect of you,’ answered Lady Maulevrier, with a sigh. ‘I have kept you out in the cold so long, Mary. Lesbia — well, Lesbia has been a kind of infatuation for me, and like all infatuations mine has ended in disappointment and bitterness. Ambition has been the bane of my life, Mary; and when I could no longer be ambitious for myself — when my own existence had become a mere death in life, I began to dream and to scheme for the aggrandisement of my granddaughter. Lesbia’s beauty, Lesbia’s elegance seemed to make success certain — and so I dreamt my dream — which may never be fulfilled.’
‘What was your dream, grandmother? May I know all about it?’
‘That was the secret I spoke of just now. Yes, Mary, you may know, for I fear the dream will never be realised. I wanted my Lesbia to become Lord Hartfield’s wife. I would have brought them together myself, could I have but gone to London; but, failing that, I fancied Lady Kirkbank would have divined my wishes without being told them, and would have introduced Hartfield to Lesbia; and now the London season is drawing to a close, and Hartfield and Lesbia have never met. He hardly goes anywhere, I am told. He devotes himself exclusively to politics; and he is not in Lady Kirkbank’s set. A terrible disappointment to me, Mary!’
‘It is a pity,’ said Mary. ‘Lesbia is so lovely. If Lord Hartfield were fancy-free he ought to fall in love with her, could they but meet. I thought that in London all fashionable people knew each other, and were continually meeting.’
‘It used to be so in my day, Mary. Almack’s was a common ground, even if there had been no other. But now there are circles and circles, I believe, rings that touch occasionally, but never break and mingle. I am afraid poor Georgie’s set is not quite so nice as I could have wished. Yet Lesbia writes as if she were in raptures with her chaperon, and with all the people she meets. And then Georgie tells me that this Mr. Smithson whom Lesbia has refused is a very important personage, a millionaire, and very likely to be made a peer.’
‘A new peer,’ said Mary, making a wry face. ‘One would rather have an old commoner. I always fancy a newly-made peer must be like a newly-built house, glaring, and staring, and arid and uncongenial.’
‘C’est selon,’ said Lady Maulevrier. ‘One would not despise a Chatham or a Wellington because of the newness of his title; but a man who has only money to recommend him ——’
Lady Maulevrier left her sentence unfinished, save by a shrug; while Mary made another wry face. She had that grand contempt for sordid wealth which is common to young people who have never known the want of money.
‘I hope Lesbia will marry some one better than Mr. Smithson,’ she said.
‘I hope so too, dear; and yet do you know I have an idea that Lesbia means to accept Mr. Smithson, or she would hardly have consented to go to his house for the Henley week. Here is a letter from Georgie Kirkbank which you will have to answer for me to-morrow — a letter full of raptures about Mr. Smithson’s place in Berkshire, Rood Hall. I remember the house well. I was there nearly fifty years ago, when the Heronvilles owned it; and now the Heronvilles are all dead or ruined, and this city person is master of the fine old mansion. It is a strange world, Mary.’
From that time forward Mary and her grandmother were on more confidential terms, and when, two days later, Fellside was startled into life by the unexpected arrival of Lord Maulevrier and Mr. Hammond, the dowager seemed almost as pleased as her granddaughter at the arrival of the young men.
As for Mary, she was almost beside herself with joy when she heard their voices from the lawn, and, rushing to the shrubbery, saw them walk up the hill, as she had seen them on that first evening nearly a year ago, when John Hammond came as a stranger to Fellside.
She tried to take her joy soberly, though her eyes were dancing with delight, as she went to the porch to meet them.
‘What extraordinary young men you are,’ she said, as she emerged breathless from her lover’s embrace. ‘The idea of your descending upon us without a moment’s notice. Why did you not write or telegraph, that your rooms might be ready?’
‘Am I to understand that all the spare rooms at Fellside are kept as damp as at the bottom of the lake?’ asked Maulevrier.
‘I did not think any preparation was necessary; but we can go back if we’re not wanted, can’t we, Jack?’
‘You darling,’ cried Mary, hanging affectionately upon her brother’s arm. ‘You know I was only joking, you know how enraptured I am to have you.’
‘To have me, only me,’ said Maulevrier. ‘Jack doesn’t count, I suppose?’
‘You know how glad I am, and that I want to hide my gladness,’ answered Mary, radiant and blushing like the rich red roses in the porch. ‘You men are so vain. And now come and see grandmother, she will be cheered by your arrival. She has been so good to me just lately, so sweet.’
‘She might have been good and sweet to you all your life,’ said Hammond. ‘I am not prepared to be grateful to her at a moment’s notice for any crumbs of affection she may throw you.’
‘Oh but you must be grateful, sir; and you must love her and pity her,’ retorted Mary. ‘Think how sadly she has suffered. We cannot be too kind to her, or too fond of her, poor dear.’
‘Mary is right,’ said Hammond, half in jest and half in earnest. ‘What wonderful instincts these young women have.’
‘Come and see her ladyship; and then you must have dinner, just as you had that first evening,’ said Mary. ‘We’ll act that first evening over again, Jack; only you can’t fall in love with Lesbia, as she isn’t here.’
‘I don’t think I surrendered that first evening, Mary. Though I thought your sister the loveliest girl I had ever seen.’
‘And what did you think of me, sir? Tell me that,’ said Mary.
‘Shall I tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I freely confess that I did not think about you at all. You were there — a pretty, innocent, bright young maiden, with big brown eyes and auburn hair; but I thought no more about you than I did about the Gainsborough on the wall, which you very much resemble.’
‘That is most humiliating,’ said Mary, pouting a little in the midst of her bliss.
‘No, dearest, it is only natural,’ answered Hammond. ‘I believe if all the happy lovers in this world could be questioned, at least half of them would confess to having thought very little about each other at first meeting. They meet, and touch hands, and part again, and never guess the mystery of the future, which wraps them round like a cloud, never say of each other, There is my fate; and then they meet again, and again, as hazard wills, and never know that they are drifting to their doom.’
Mary rang bells and gave orders, just as she had done in that summer gloaming a year ago. The young men had arrived just at the same hour, on the stroke of nine, when the eight o’clock dinner was over and done with; for a tête-à-tête meal with Fr?ulein Müller was not a feast to be prolonged on account of its felicity. Perhaps they had so contrived as to arrive exactly at this hour.
Lady Maulevrier received them both with extreme cordiality. But the young men saw a change for the worse in the invalid since the spring. The face was thinner, the eyes too bright, the flush upon the hollow cheek had a hectic tinge, the voice was feebler. Hammond was reminded of a falcon or an eagle pining and wasting in a cage.
‘I am very glad to see you, Mr. Hammond,’ said Lady Maulevrier, giving him her hand, and addressing him with unwonted cordiality. ‘It was a happy thought that brought you and Maulevrier here. When an old woman is as near the grave as I am her relatives ought to look after her. I shall be glad to have a little private conversation with you to-morrow, Mr. Hammond, if you can spare me a few minutes.’
‘As many hours, if your ladyship pleases,’ said Hammond. ‘My time is entirely at your service.’
‘Oh, no, you will want to be roaming about the hills with Mary, discussing your plans for the future. I shall not encroach too much on your time. But I am very glad you are here.’
‘We shall only trespass on you for a few days,’ said Maulevrier, ‘just a flying visit.’
‘How is it that you are not both at Henley?’ asked Mary. ‘I thought all the world was at Henley.’
‘Who is Henley? what is Henley?’ demanded Maulevrier, pretending ignorance.
‘I believe Maulevrier has lost so much money backing, his college boat on previous occasions that he is glad to run away from the regatta this year,’ said Hammond.
‘I have a sister there,’ replied his friend. ‘That’s an all-sufficient explanation. When a fellow’s women-kind take to going to races and regattas it is high time for him to stop away.’
‘Have you seen Lesbia lately?’ asked his grandmother.
‘About ten days ago.’
‘And did she seem happy?’
Maulevrier shrugged his shoulders.
‘She was vacillating between the refusal or the acceptance of a million of money and four or five fine houses. I don’t know whether that condition of mind means happiness. I should call it an intermediate state.’
‘Why do you make silly jokes about serious questions? Do you think Lesbia means to accept this Mr. Smithson?’
‘All London thinks so.’
‘And is he a good man?’
‘Good for a hundred thousand pounds at half an hour’s notice.’
‘Is he worthy of your sister?’
Maulevrier paused, looked at his grandmother with a curious expression, and then replied —
‘I think he is — quite.’
‘Then I am content that she should marry him,’ said Lady Maulevrier, ‘although he is a nobody.’
‘Oh, but he is a very important nobody, a nobody who can get a peerage next year, backed by the Maulevrier influence, which I suppose would count for something.’
‘Most of my friends are dead,’ said Lady Maulevrier, ‘but there are a few survivors of the past who might help me.’
‘I don’t think there’ll be any difficulty or doubt about the peerage. Smithson stumped up very handsomely at the last General Election, and the Conservatives are not strong enough to be ungrateful. “These have, no master.”’
The three days that followed were among the happiest days of Mary Haselden’s young life. Lady Maulevrier had become strangely indulgent. A softening influence of some kind had worked upon that haughty spirit, and it seemed as if her whole nature was changed — or it might be, Mary thought, that this softer side of her character had always been turned to Lesbia, while to Mary herself it was altogether new. Lesbia had been the peach on the sunny southern wall, ripening and reddening in a flood of sunshine; Mary had been the stunted fruit growing in a north-east corner, hidden among leaves, blown upon by cold winds green and hard and sour for lack of the warm bright light. And now Mary felt the sunshine, and grew glad and gay in those glowing beams.
‘Dear grandmother, I believe you are beginning to love me,’ she said, bending over to arrange the invalid’s pillows in the July morning, the fresh mountain air blowing in upon old and young from the great open window, like a caress.
‘I am beginning to know you,’ answered Lady Maulevrier, gently.
‘I think it is the magic of love, Mary, that has sweetened and softened your nature, and endeared you to me. I think you have grown ever so much sweeter a girl since your engagement. Or it may be that you were the same always, and it was I who was blind. Lesbia was all in all to me. All in all — and now I am nothing to her,’ she murmured, to herself rather than to Mary.
‘I am so proud to think that you see an improvement in me since my engagement,’ said Mary, modestly. ‘I have tried very hard to improve myself, so that I might be more worthy of him.’
‘You are worthy, Mary, worthy of the best and the highest: and I believe that, although you are making what the world calls a very bad match, you are marrying wisely. You are wedding yourself to a life of obscurity; but what does that matter, if it be a happy life? I have known what it is to pursue the phantom fortune, and to find youth and hope and happiness vanish from the pathway which I followed.’
‘Dear grandmother, I wish you had been able to marry the man of your choice,’ answered Mary, tenderly.
She was ready to weep over that wasted life of her grandmother’s; to weep for that forced parting of true lovers, albeit the tragedy was half a century old.
‘I should have been a happier woman and a better woman if fate had been kind to me, Mary,’ answered Lady Maulevrier, gravely; ‘and now that I am daily drawing nearer the land of shadows, I will not stand in the way of faithful lovers. I have a fancy, Mary, that I have not many months to live.’
‘Only an invalid’s fancy,’ said Mary, stooping down to kiss the pale forehead, so full of thought and care; ‘only a morbid fancy, nursed in the monotony of this quiet room. Maulevrier and Jack and I must find some way of amusing you.’
‘You will never amuse me out of that conviction, my dear. I can see the shadows lengthening and the sands running out. There are but a few grains left in the glass, Mary; and while those last I should like to see you and Mr. Hammond married. I should like to feel that your fate is settled before I go. God knows what confusion and trouble may follow my death.’
This was said with a sharp ring of despair.
‘I am not going to leave you, grandmother,’ said Mary.
‘Not even for the man you love? You are a good girl, Mary. Lesbia has forsaken me for a lesser temptation.’
‘Grandmother, that is hardly fair. It was your own wish to have Lesbia presented this season,’ remonstrated Mary, loyal to the absent.
‘True, my dear. I saw she was very tired of her life here, and I thought it was better. But I’m sorely afraid London has spoiled her. No, Mary, you can stay with me to the end, if you like. There is room enough for you and your husband under this roof. I like this Mr. Hammond. His is the only face that ever recalled the face of the dead. Yes, I like him; and although I know nothing about him except what Maulevrier tells me — and that is of the scantiest — still I feel, somehow, that I can trust him. Send your lover to me, Mary. I want to have a serious talk with him.’
Mary ran off to obey, fluttered, blushing, and trembling. This idea of marriage in the immediate future was to be the last degree startling. A year had seemed a very long time; and she had been told that she and her lover must wait a year at the very least; so that vision of marriage had seemed afar off in the dim shadowland of the future. She had been told nothing by her lover of where she was to live, or what her life was to be like when she was his wife. And now she was told that they were to be married almost immediately, that they were to live in the house where she had been reared, in that familiar land of hills and waters, that they were to roam about the dales and mountains together, they two, as man and wife. The whole thing was wonderful, bewildering, impossible almost.
This was on the first morning after Mr. Hammond’s arrival. Maulevrier had gone off to hunt the Rotha for otters, and was up to his waist in the water, no doubt, by this time. Hammond was strolling up and down the terrace in front of the house, looking at the green expanse of Fairfield, the dark bulk of Seat Sandal, the nearer crests of Helm Crag and Silver Howe.
‘You are to come to her ladyship directly, please,’ said Mary, going up to him.
He took both her hands, drew her nearer to him, smiling down at her. They had been sitting side by side at the breakfast table half-an-hour ago, he waiting upon her as she poured out the tea; yet by his tender greeting and the delight in his face it might have been supposed they had not met for weeks. Such are the sweet inanities of love.
‘What does her ladyship want with me, darling? and why are you blushing?’ he asked.
‘I— I think she is going to talk about — our — marriage,’ faltered Mary.
‘“Why, I will talk to her upon this theme until mine eyelids can no longer wag,”’ quoted Hammond. ‘Take me to her, Mary. I hope her ladyship is growing sensible.’
‘She is very kind, very sweet. She has changed so much of late.’
Mary went with him to the door of her ladyship’s sitting-room, and there left him to go in alone. She went to the library — that room over which a gloomy shadow seemed to have hung ever since that awful winter afternoon when Mary found Lady Maulevrier lying on the floor in the twilight. But it was a noble room, and in her studious hours Mary loved to sit here, walled round with books, and able to consult or dip into as many volumes as she liked. To-day, however, her mind was not attuned to study. She sat with a volume of Macaulay open before her: but her thoughts were not with the author. She was wondering what those two were saying in the room overhead, and finding all attempts at reading futile, she let her head sink back upon the cushion of her deep luxurious chair, and sat with her dreamy eyes fixed on the summer landscape and her thoughts with her lover.
Lady Maulevrier looked very wan and tired in the bright morning light, when Mr. Hammond seated himself beside her sofa. The change in her appearance since the spring was more marked to-day than it had seemed to him last night in the dim lamplight. Yes, there was need hero for a speedy settlement of air earthly matters. The traveller was nearing the mysterious end of the journey. The summons might come at any hour.
‘Mr. Hammond, I feel a confidence in your integrity, your goodness of heart, and high principle which I never thought I could feel for a man of whom I know so little,’ began Lady Maulevrier, gravely. ‘All I know of you or your antecedents is what my grandson has told me — and I must say that the information so given has been very meagre. And yet I believe in you — and yet I am going to trust you, wholly, blindly, implicitly — and I am going to give you my granddaughter, ever so much sooner than I intended to give her to you. Soon, very soon, if you will have her!’
‘I will have her to-morrow, if there is time to get a special licence,’ exclaimed Hammond, bending down to kiss the dowager’s hand, radiant with delight.
‘You shall marry her very soon, if you like, marry her by special licence, in this room. I should like to see your wedding. I have a strange impatience to behold one of my granddaughters happily married, to know that her future is secure, that come weal, come woe, she is safe in the protection of a brave true man. I am not scared by the idea of a little poverty. That is often the best education for youth. But while you and I are alone we may as well talk about ways and means. Perhaps you may hardly feel prepared to take upon yourself the burden of a wife this year.’
‘As well this year as next. I am not afraid.’
‘Young men are so rash. However, as long as I live your responsibilities will be only nominal. This house will be Mary’s home, and yours whenever you are able to occupy it. Of course I should not like to interfere with your professional efforts — but if you are cultivating literature — why books can be written at Fellside better than in London. This lakeland of ours has been the nursery of deathless writers. But I feel that my days are numbered — and when I am dead — well death is always a cause of change and trouble of some kind, and Mary will profit very little by my death. The bulk of my fortune is left to Lesbia. I have taught her to consider herself my heiress; and it would be unjust to alter my will.’
‘Pray do not dream of such a thing — there is no need — Mary will be rich enough,’ exclaimed Hammond, hastily.
‘With five hundred a year and the fruits of your industry,’ said Lady Maulevrier. ‘Yes, yes, with modest aspirations and simple habits, people can live happily, honourably, on a few hundreds a year. And if you really mean to devote yourself to literature, and do not mind burying yourself alive in this lake district until you have made your name as a writer, why the problem of ways and means will be easily solved.’
‘Dear Lady Maulevrier, I am not afraid of ways and means. That is the last question which need trouble you. I told Lesbia when I offered myself to her nearly a year ago, that if she would trust me, if she would cleave to me, poverty should never touch her, sordid care should never come near her dwelling. But she could not believe me. She was like Thomas the twin. I could show her no palpable security for my promise — and she would not believe for the promise’ sake. Mary trusted me; and Mary shall not regret her confidence.’
‘Ah! it was different with Lesbia,’ sighed Lady Maulevrier. ‘I taught her to be ambitious. She had been schooled to set a high price upon herself. I know she cared for you — very much, even. But she could not face poverty; or, if you like, I will say that she could not face an obscure existence — sacrifice her ambition, a justifiable ambition in one so lovely, at the bidding of her first wooer. And then, again, she was told that if she married you, she would for ever forfeit my regard. You must not blame her for obeying me.’
‘I do not blame her; for I have won the peerless pearl — the jewel above all price — a perfect woman. And now, dear Lady Maulevrier, give me but your consent, and I am off to York this afternoon, to interview the Archbishop, and get the special licence, which will allow me to wed my darling here by your couch to-morrow afternoon.’
‘I have no objection to your getting the licence immediately; but you must let me write a cheque before you go. A special licence is expensive — I believe it costs fifty pounds.’
‘If it cost a thousand I should not think it dear. But I have a notion that I shall be able to get the licence — cheap. You have made me wild with happiness.’
‘But you must not refuse my cheque.’
‘Indeed I must, Lady Maulevrier. I am not quite such a pauper as you think me.’
‘But fifty pounds and the expenses of the journey; an outlay altogether unexpected on your part. I begin to fear that you are very reckless. A spendthrift shall never marry my granddaughter, with my consent.’
‘I have never yet spent above half my income.’
Lady Maulevrier looked at him in wonderment and perplexity. Had the young man gone suddenly out of his mind, overwhelmed by the greatness of his bliss?
‘But I thought you were poor,’ she faltered.
‘It has pleased you to think so, dear Lady Maulevrier; but I have more than enough for all my wants, and I shall be able to provide a fitting home for my Mary, when you can spare her to preside over her own establishment.’
‘Establishment’ seemed rather a big word, but Lady Maulevrier supposed that in this case it meant a cook and housemaid, with perhaps later on a boy in buttons, to break windows and block the pantry sink with missing teaspoons.
‘Well, Mr. Hammond, this is quite an agreeable surprise,’ she said, after a brief silence. ‘I really thought you were poor — as poor as a young man of gentlemanlike habits could be, and yet exist. Perhaps you will wonder why, thinking this, I brought myself to consent to your marriage with my granddaughter.’
‘It was a great proof of your confidence in me, or in Providence,’ replied Hammond, smiling.
‘It was no such thing. I was governed by a sentiment — a memory. It was my love for the dead which softened my heart towards you, John Hammond.’
‘Indeed!’ he murmured, softly.
‘There was but one man in this world I ever fondly loved — the love of my youth — my dearest and best, in the days when my heart was fresh and innocent and unambitious. That man was Ronald Hollister, afterwards Lord Hartfield. And yours is the only face that ever recalled his to my mind. It is but a vague likeness — a look now and then; but slight as that likeness is it has been enough to make my heart yearn towards you, as the heart of a mother to her son.’
John Hammond knelt beside the sofa, and bent his handsome face over the pale face on the pillow, imprinting such a kiss as a son might have given. His eyes were full of tears.
‘Dear Lady Maulevrier, think that it is the spirit of the dead which blesses you for your fidelity to old memories,’ he said, tenderly.
After that interview with John Hammond all the arrangements for the marriage were planned by Lady Maulevrier with a calm and business-like capacity which seemed extraordinary in one so frail and helpless. For a little while after Hammond left her she remained lost in a reverie, deeply affected by the speech and manner of her granddaughter’s lover, as he gave her that first kiss of duty and affection, the affection of one who in that act declared the allegiance of a close and holy bond.
Yes, she told herself, this marriage, humble as it might be, was altogether satisfactory. Her own feeling towards the man of her granddaughter’s choice was one of instinctive affection. Her heart had yearned to him from the beginning of their acquaintance; but she had schooled herself to hide all indications of her liking for him, she had made every effort to keep him at a distance, deeming his very merits a source of danger in a household where there were two fresh impressionable girls.
And despite all her caution and care he had succeeded in winning one of those girls: and she was glad, very glad, that he had so succeeded in baffling her prudence. And now it was agreeable to discover that he was not quite such a pauper as she had supposed him to be.
Her heart felt lighter than it had been for some time when she set about planning the wedding.
The first step in the business was to send for James Steadman. He came immediately, grave and quiet as of old, and stood with his serious eyes bent upon the face of his mistress, awaiting her instructions.
‘Lady Mary is going to be married to Mr. Hammond, by special licence, in this room, to-morrow afternoon, if it can be managed so soon,’ said Lady Maulevrier.
‘I am very glad to hear it, my lady,’ answered Steadman, without the faintest indication of surprise.
‘Why are you so — particularly glad?’ asked his mistress, looking at him sharply.
‘Because Lady Mary’s presence in this house is a source of danger to — your arrangements. She is very energetic and enterprising — very shrewd — and — well, she is a woman — so I suppose there can be no harm in saying she is somewhat inquisitive. Things will be much safer here when Lady Mary is gone!’
‘But she will not be gone — she is not going away — except for a very brief honeymoon. I cannot possibly do without her. She has become necessary to my life, Steadman; and there is so little left of that life now, that there is no need for me to sacrifice the last gleams of sunshine. The girl is very sweet, and loving, and true. I was not half fond enough of her in the past; but she has made herself very dear to me of late. There are many things in this life, Steadman, which we only find out too late.’
‘But, surely, my lady, Lady Mary will leave Fellside to go to a home of her own after her marriage.’
‘No, I tell you, Steadman,’ his mistress answered, with a touch of impatience; ‘Lady Mary and her husband will make this house their home so long as I am here. It will not be long.’
‘God grant it may be very long before you cease to be mistress here,’ answered Steadman, with real feeling; and then in a lower tone he went on: ‘Pardon me, my lady, for the suggestion, but do you think it wise to have Mr. Hammond here as a resident?’
‘Why should it not be wise? Mr. Hammond is a gentleman.’
‘True, my lady; but any accident, such as that which brought Lady Mary into the old garden ——’
‘No such accident need occur — it must not occur, Steadman,’ exclaimed Lady Maulevrier, with kindling eyes. She who had so long ruled supreme was not inclined to have any desire of hers questioned. ‘There must have been gross carelessness that day — carelessness on your part, or that stable door would never have been left open. The key ought to have been in your possession It ought not to have been in the power of the stableman to open that door. As to Mr. Hammond’s presence at Fellside, I cannot see any danger — any reason why harm should come of it, more than of Lord Maulevrier’s presence here in the past.’
‘The two gentlemen are so different, my lady,’ said Steadman, with a gloomy brow. ‘His lordship is so light-hearted and careless, his mind taken up with his horses, guns, dogs, fishing, shooting, and all kinds of sport. He is not a gentleman to take much notice of anything out of his own line. But this Mr. Hammond is different — a very thoughtful gentleman, an inquiring mind, as one would say.’
‘Steadman, you are getting cowardly in your old age. The danger — such a risk as you hint at, must be growing less and less every day. After forty years of security ——’
‘Security’ echoed Steadman, with a monosyllabic laugh which expressed intense bitterness. ‘Say forty years during which I have felt myself upon the edge of a precipice every day and every hour. Security! But perhaps you are right, my lady, I am growing old and nervous, a feebler man than I was a few years ago, feebler in body and mind. Let Mr. Hammond make his home here, if it pleases your ladyship to have him. So long as I am well and able to get about there can be no danger of anything awkward happening.’
Lady Maulevrier looked alarmed.
‘But you have no expectation of falling ill, I hope, Steadman; you have no premonition of any malady?’
‘No, my lady, none — except the malady of old age. I feel that I am not the man I once was, that is all. My brain is getting woolly, and my sight is clouded now and then. And if I were to fall ill suddenly ——’
‘Oh, it would be terrible, it would be a dire calamity! There is your wife, certainly, to look after things, but ——’
‘My wife would do her best, my lady. She is a faithful creature, but she is not — yes, without any unkindness I must say that Mrs. Steadman is not a genius!’
‘Oh, Steadman, you must not fail me! I am horror-stricken at the mere idea,’ exclaimed Lady Maulevrier. ‘After forty years — great God! it would be terrible. Lesbia, Mary, Maulevrier! the great, malignant, babbling world outside these doors. I am hemmed round with perils. For God’s sake preserve your strength. Take care of your health. You are my strong rock. If you feel that there is anything amiss with you, or that your strength is failing, consult Mr. Horton — neglect no precaution. The safety of this house, of the family honour, hangs upon you.’
‘Pray do not agitate yourself, my lady,’ entreated Steadman. ‘I was wrong to trouble you with my fears. I shall not fail you, be sure. Although I am getting old, I shall hold out to the end.’
‘The end cannot be very far off,’ said Lady Maulevrier, gloomily.
‘I thought that forty years ago, my lady. But you are right — the end must be near now. Yes, it must be near. And now, my lady, your orders about the wedding.’
‘It will take place to-morrow, as I told you, in this room. You will go to the Vicar and ask him to officiate. His two daughters will no doubt consent to be Lady Mary’s bridesmaids. You will make the request in my name. Perhaps the Vicar will call this afternoon and talk matters over with me. Lady Mary and her husband will go to Cumberland for a brief honeymoon — a week at most — and then they will come back to Fellside. Tell Mrs. Power to prepare the east wing for them. She will make one of the rooms into a boudoir for Lady Mary; and let everything be as bright and pretty as good taste can make it. She can telegraph to London for any new furniture that may be wanted to complete her arrangements. And now send Lady Mary to me.’
Mary came, fresh from the pine-wood, where she had been walking with her lover; her lover of to-day, her husband to-morrow. He had told her how he was to start for York directly after luncheon, and to come back by the earliest train next day, and how they two were to be married to-morrow afternoon.
‘It is more wonderful than any dream that I ever dreamt.’ exclaimed Mary. ‘But how can it be? I have not even a wedding gown.’
‘A fig for wedding gowns! It is Mary I am to wed, not her gown. Were you clad like patient Grisel I should be content. Besides you have no end of pretty gowns. And you are to be dressed for travelling, remember; for I am going to carry you off to Lodore directly we are married, and you will have to clamber up the rocky bed of the waterfall to see the sun set behind the Borrowdale hills in your wedding gown. It had better be one of those neat little tailor gowns which become you so well.’
‘I will wear whatever you tell me,’ answered Mary. ‘I shall always dress to please you, and not the outside world.’
‘Will you, my Griselda. Some day you shall be dressed as Grisel was —
“In a cloth of gold that brighte shone,
With a coroune of many a riche stone.”
‘Yes, you darling, when you are Lord Chancellor: and till that day comes I will wear tailor gowns, linsey-wolsey, anything you like,’ cried Mary, laughing.
She ran to her grandmother’s room, ineffably content, without a thought of trousseau or finery; but then Mary Haselden was one of those few young women for whom life is not a question of fashionable raiment.
‘Mary, I am going to send you off upon your honeymoon to-morrow afternoon,’ said Lady Maulevrier, smiling at the bright, happy face which was bent over her. ‘Will you come back and nurse a fretful old woman when the honeymoon is over?’
‘The honeymoon will never be over,’ answered Mary, joyously ‘Our wedded life is to be one long honeymoon. But I will come back in a very few days, and take care of you. I am not going to let you do without me, now that you have learnt to love me.’
‘And will you be content to stay with me when your husband has gone to London?’
‘Yes, but I shall try to prevent his going very often, or staying very long. I shall try to wind myself into his heart, so that there will be an aching void there when we are parted.’
Lady Maulevrier proceeded to tell Mary all her arrangements. Three handsome rooms in the east wing, a bedroom, dressing-room, and boudoir, were to be made ready for the newly-married, couple. Fr?ulein Müller was to be dismissed with a retiring pension, in order that Lady Mary and her husband might feel themselves master and mistress in the lower part of the house.
‘And if your husband really means to devote himself to literature, he can have no better workshop than the library I have put together,’ said Lady Maulevrier.
‘And no better adviser and guide than you, dear grandmother, you who have read everything that has been written worth reading during the last half century.’
‘I have read a great deal, Mary, but I hardly know if I am any wiser on that account,’ answered Lady Maulevrier. ‘After all, however much of other people’s wisdom we may devour, it is in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Our past follies rise up against us at the end of life; and we see how little our book-learning has helped us to stand against foolish impulses, against evil passions. “Be good,” Mary, “and let who will be wise,” as the poet says. A faithful heart is your only anchor in the stormy seas of life. My dear, I am so glad you are going to be married.’
‘It is very sudden,’ said Mary.
‘Very sudden; yet in your case that does not much matter. You have quite made up your mind about Mr. Hammond, I believe.’
‘Made up my mind! I began to worship him the first night he came here.’
‘Foolish child. Well, there is no deed to wait for settlements. You have only your allowance as Lord Maulevrier’s daughter — a first charge on the estate, which cannot be made away with or anticipated, and of which no husband can deprive you.’
‘He shall have every sixpence of it,’ murmured Mary.
‘And Mr. Hammond, though he tells me he is better off than I supposed, can have nothing to settle. So there will be nothing forfeited by a marriage without settlements.’
Mary could not enter upon the question. It was even of less importance than the wedding gown.
The gong sounded for luncheon.
‘Steadman’s dogcart is to take Mr. Hammond to the station at half-past two,’ said Lady Maulevrier, ‘so you had better go and give him his luncheon.’
Mary needed no second bidding. She flew downstairs, and met her lover in the hall.
What a happy luncheon it was! Fr?ulein ‘mounched, and mounched, and mounched,’ like the sailor’s wife eating chestnuts: but those two lovers lunched upon moonshine, upon each other’s little words and little looks, upon their own ineffable bliss. They sat side by side, and helped each other to the nicest thing’s on the table, but neither could eat, and they got considerably mixed in their way of eating, taking chutnee with strawberry cream, and currant jelly with asparagus. What did it matter? Everything tasted of bliss.
‘You have had absolutely nothing to eat,’ said Mary, piteously, as the dogcart came grinding round upon the dry gravel.
‘Oh, I have done splendidly — thanks. I have just had a macaroon and some of that capital gorgonzola. God bless you, dearest, and à revoir, à revoir to-morrow.’
‘And to-morrow I shall be Mary Hammond,’ cried Mary, clasping her hands. ‘Isn’t it capital fun?’
They were in the porch alone. The servants were all at dinner, save the groom with the cart, Miss Müller was still munching at the well-spread table in the dining-room.
John Hammond folded his sweetheart in his arms for one brief embrace; there was no time for loitering. In another moment he was springing into the cart. A shake of the reins, and he was driving slowly down the steep avenue.
‘Life is full of partings,’ Mary said to herself, as she watched the last glimpse of the dogcart between the trees down in the road below, ‘but this one is to be very short, thank God.’
She wondered what she should do with herself for the rest of the afternoon, and finally, finding that she was not wanted by her grandmother until afternoon tea, she set out upon a round of visits to her favourite cottagers, to bid them a long farewell as a spinster.
‘You’ll be away a long time, I suppose, Lady Mary?’ said one of her humble friends; ‘you’ll be going to Switzerland or Italy, or some of those foreign parts where great ladies and gentlemen travel for their honeymoons?’
But Mary declared that she would be absent a week at longest She was coming back to take care of her invalid grandmother; and she was not going to marry a great gentleman, but a man who would have to work for his living.
She went back to Fellside, and read the Times, and poured out Lady Maulevrier’s tea, and sat on her low stool by the sofa, and the old and the young woman were as happy and confidential together as if they had been always the nearest and dearest to each other. Her ladyship had seen Miss Müller, and had informed that excellent person that her services at Fellside would no longer be required after Lady Mary’s marriage; but that her devotion to her duties during the last fourteen years should be rewarded by a pension which, together with her savings, would enable her to spend the rest of her days in repose. Miss Müller was duly grateful, and owned to a tender longing for the Heimath, and declared herself ready to retire from her post whenever her ladyship pleased.
‘I shall go back to Germany directly I leave you, and I shall live and die there, unless I am wanted by one of my old pupils. But should Lady Lesbia or Lady Mary need my services for their daughters, in days to come, they can command me. For no one else will I abandon the Fatherland.’
The Fr?ulein thus easily disposed of, Lady Mary felt that matrimony would verily mean independence. And yet she was prepared to regard her husband as her master. She meant to obey him in all meekness and reverence of spirit.
She spent the rest of the afternoon and the whole of the evening in her grandmother’s sitting-room, dining tête-à-tête with the invalid for the first time since her illness. Lady Maulevrier talked much of Mary’s future, and of Lesbia’s; but it was evident that she was full of uneasiness upon the latter subject.
‘I don’t know what Lesbia is going to do with her life,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘Her letters tell me of nothing but gowns and parties; and Georgina Kirkbank can only expatiate upon Mr. Smithson’s wealth, and the grand position he is going to occupy by-and-by. I should like to see both my granddaughters married before I die — yes, I should like to see Lesbia’s fate secure, if she were to be only Lady Lesbia Smithson.’
‘She cannot fail to make a good match, grandmother,’ said Mary.
‘I am beginning to lose faith in her future,’ answered Lady Maulevrier. ‘There seems to be a fatality about the career of particularly attractive girls. They are too confident of their power to succeed in life. They trifle with fortune, fascinate the wrong people, and keep the right people at arm’s length. I think if I had been Lesbia’s guide in society her first season would have counted for more than it is likely to count for under Lady Kirkbank’s management. I should have awakened Lesbia from the dream of dress and dancing — the mere butterfly life of a girl who never looks beyond the present moment. But now go and give orders about your packing, Mary. It is past ten, and Clara had better pack your trunks early to-morrow morning.’
Clara was a modest Easedale damsel, who had been promoted to be Lady Mary’s personal attendant, when the more mature Kibble had gone away with Lady Lesbia. Mary required very little waiting upon, but she was not the less glad to have a neat little smiling maiden devoted to her service, ready to keep her rooms neat and trim, to go on errands to the cottagers, to arrange the flowers in the old china bowls, and to make herself generally useful.
It seemed a strange thing to have to furnish a trousseau from the wardrobe of everyday life — a trousseau in which nothing, except half-a-dozen pairs of gloves, a pair of boots, and a few odds and ends of lace and ribbons would be actually new. Mary thought very little of the matter, but the position of things struck her maid as altogether extraordinary and unnatural.
‘You should have seen the things Miss Freeman had, Lady Mary,’ exclaimed the damsel, ‘the daughter of that cotton-spinning gentleman from Manchester, who lives at The Gables — you should have seen her new gowns and things when she was married. Mrs. Freeman’s maid keeps company with my brother James — he’s in the stables at Freeman’s, you know, Lady Mary — and she asked me in to look at the trousseau two days before the wedding. I never saw such beautiful dresses — such hats — such bonnets — such jackets and mantles. It was like going into one of those grand shops at York, and having all the things in the shop pulled out for one to look at — such silks and satins — and trimmed — ah! how those dresses was trimmed. The mystery was how the young lady could ever get herself into them, or sit down when she’d got one of them on.’
‘Instruments of torture, Clara. I should hate such gowns, even if I were going to marry a rich man, as I suppose Miss Freeman was.’
‘Not a bit of it, Lady Mary. She was only going to marry a Bolton doctor with a small practice; but her maid told me she was determined she’d get all she could out of her pa, in case he should lose all his money and go bankrupt. They said that trousseau cost two thousand pounds.’
‘Well, Clara, I’d rather have my tailor gowns, in which I can scramble about the ghylls and crags just as I like.’ There was a pale yellow Indian silk, smothered with soft yellow lace, which would serve for a wedding gown; for indifferent as Mary was to the great clothes question, she wanted to look in some wise as a bride. A neat chocolate-coloured cloth, almost new from the tailor’s hands, with a little cloth toque to match, would do for the wedding journey. All the details of Mary’s wardrobe were the perfection of neatness. She had grown very neat and careful in her habits since her engagement, anxious to be industrious and frugal in all things — a really handy housewife for a hard-worked bread-winner. And now she was told that Mr. Hammond was not so poor as she had thought. She would not be obliged to stint herself, and manage, as she had supposed when she went about among the cottagers, taking lessons in household economy. It was almost a disappointment.
She and Clara finished the packing that night, Mary being much too excited for the possibility of sleep. There was not much to pack, only one roomy American trunk — a trunk which held everything — a Gladstone bag for things that might possibly be wanted in a hurry, and a handsome dressing-bag, Maulevrier’s last birthday gift to his sister.
Mary had received no gifts from her lover, save the plain gold engagement ring, and a few new books sent straight from the publishers. Clara took care to inform her young mistress that Miss Freeman’s sweetheart had sent her all manner of splendid presents, scent bottles, photograph albums, glove boxes, and other things of beauty, albeit his means were supposed to be nil. It was evident that Clara disapproved of Mr. Hammond’s conduct in this matter, and even suspected him of meanness.
‘He did ought to have sent you his photograph, Lady Mary,’ said Clara, with a reproachful air.
‘I daresay he would have done so, Clara, but he has been photographed only once in his life.’
‘Lawk a mercy, Lady Mary! Why most young gentlemen have themselves photographed in every new place they go to; and as Mr. Hammond has been a traveller, like his lordship, I made sure he’d have been photographed in knickerbockers and every other kind of attitude.’
Mary had not refrained from asking for her lover’s portrait; and he had told her that he had carefully abstained from having his countenance reproduced in any manner since his fifteenth year, when he had been photographed at his mother’s desire.
‘The present fashion of photographs staring out of every stationer’s window makes a man’s face public property,’ he told Mary. ‘I don’t want every street Arab in London to recognise me.’
‘But you are not a public man,’ said Mary. ‘Your photograph would not be in all the windows; although, in my humble opinion, you are a very handsome man.’
Hammond blushed, laughed, and turned the conversation, and Mary had to exist without any picture of her lover.
‘Millais shall paint me in his grand Reynolds manner by-and-by,’ he told Mary.
‘Millais! Oh, Jack! When will you and I be able to give a thousand or so for a portrait?’
‘Ah, when, indeed? But we may as well enjoy our day-dreams, like Alnaschar, without smashing our basket of crockery.’
And now Mary, who had managed to exist without the picture, was to have the original. He was to be all her own — her master, her lord, her love, after to-morrow — unto eternity, in life, and in the grave, and in the dim hereafter beyond the grave, they two were to be one. In heaven there was to be no marrying or giving in marriage, Mary was told; but her own heart cried aloud to her that the happily wedded must remain linked in heaven. God would not part the blessed souls of true lovers.
A short sleep, broken by happy dreams, and it was morning, Mary’s wedding morning, fairest of summer days, July in all her beauty. Mary went to her grandmother’s room, and waited upon her at breakfast.
Lady Maulevrier was in excellent spirits.
‘Everything is arranged, Mary, I have had a telegram from Hammond, who has got the licence, and will come at half-past one. At three the Vicar will come to marry you, his daughters, Katie and Laura, acting as your bridesmaids.’
‘Bridesmaids!’ exclaimed Mary. ‘I forgot all about bridesmaids. Am I really to have any?’
‘You will have two girls of your own age to bear you company, at any rate. I have asked dear old Horton to be present; and he, Fr?ulein, and Maulevrier will complete the party. It will not be a brilliant wedding, Mary, or a costly ceremonial, except for the licence.’
‘And poor Jack will have to pay for that,’ said Mary, with a long face.
‘Poor Jack refused to let me pay for it,’ answered Lady Maulevrier. ‘He is vastly independent, and I fear somewhat reckless.’
‘I like him for his independence; but he mustn’t be reckless,’ said Mary, severely.
He was to be the master in all things! and yet she was to exercise a restraining influence, she was to guard him against his own weaknesses, his too generous impulses. Her voice was to be the voice of prudence. This is how Mary understood the marriage tie.
Under ordinary conditions Mary would have been in the avenue, lying in wait for her lover, eager to get the very first glimpse of him when he arrived, to see him before he had brushed the dust of the journey from his raiment. But to-day she hung back. She stayed in her grandmother’s room and sat beside the sofa, shy, and even a little downcast. This lover who was so soon to be transformed into a husband was a formidable personage. She dare not rush forth to greet him. Perhaps he had changed his mind by this time, and was sorry he had ever asked her to marry him. Perhaps he thought he was being hustled into a marriage. He had been told that he was to wait at least a year. And now, all in a moment, he was sent off to get a special licence. How could she be quite sure that he liked this kind of treatment?
If there is any faith to be placed in the human countenance, Mr. Hammond was in no wise an unwilling bridegroom; for his face teamed with happy light as he came into the room presently, followed by an elderly man with grey hair and whiskers, and in a strictly professional frock coat, whom the butler announced as Mr. Dorncliffe. Lady Maulevrier looked startled, somewhat offended even at this intrusion, and she gave Mr. Dorncliffe a very haughty salutation, which was almost more crushing than no salutation at all.
Mary stood up by her grandmother’s sofa, and looked rather frightened.
‘Dear Lady Maulevrier,’ said Hammond, ‘I ventured to telegraph to my lawyer to meet me at York last night, and come on here with me this morning. He has prepared a settlement, which I should like you to hear him read, and which he will explain to you, if necessary, while Molly and I go for a stroll in the grounds.’
He had never called her Molly before. He put his arm round her with a proud air of possession, even under her grandmother’s eyes. And she nestled close up to his side, forgetting everything but the delight of belonging to him.
They went downstairs, and through the billiard room to the terrace, and from the terrace to the tennis lawn, where John Hammond sat reading Heine nearly a year ago, just before he proposed to Lesbia.
‘Do you remember that day?’ asked Mary, looking at him, solemnly.
‘I remember every day and every hour we have spent together since I began to love you,’ answered Hammond.
‘Ah, but this was before you began to love me,’ said Mary, with a piteous little grimace. ‘This was while you were loving Lesbia as hard as ever you could. Don’t you remember the day you proposed to her — a lovely summer day like this, the lake just as blue, the sun shining upon Fairfield just as it is shining now, and you sat there reading Heine — those sweet, sweet verses, that seemed made of sighs and tears; and every now and then you paused and looked up at Lesbia, and there was more love in your eyes than in all Heine’s poetry, though that brims over with love.’
‘But how did you know all this, Molly? You were not here.’
‘I was not very far off. I was behind those bushes, watching and listening. I knew you were in love with Lesbia, and I thought you despised me, and I was very, very wretched; and I listened afterwards when you proposed to her there — behind the pine trees — and I hated her for refusing you, and I am afraid I hated you for proposing to her.’
‘When I ought to have been proposing to my Molly, blind fool that I was,’ said Hammond, smiling tenderly at her, smiling, though his eyes were dim with tears. ‘My own sweet love, it was a terrible mistake, a mistake that might have cost me the happiness of a lifetime. But Fate was very good to me, and let me have my Mary after all. And now let us sit down under the old red beech and talk till it is time to go and get ready for our wedding. I suppose one ought to brush one’s hair and wash one’s hands for that kind of thing, even when the function is not on a ceremonious scale.’
Mary laughed.
‘I have a prettier gown than this to be married in, although it isn’t a wedding gown,’ she said.
‘Oh, by-the-by, I have something for you,’ said her lover, ‘something in the way of ornaments, but I don’t suppose you’d care to wear them to-day. I’ll run and get them.’
He went back to the house, leaving Mary sitting on the rustic bench under the fine old copper beech, a tree that had been standing long before Lady Maulevrier enlarged the old stone house into a stately villa. He returned in a few minutes, bringing a morocco bag about the size of those usually carried by lawyers or lawyers’ clerks.
‘I don’t think I have given you anything since we were engaged, Mary,’ he said, as he seated himself by her side.
Mary blushed, remembering how Clara, the maid, had remarked upon this fact.
‘You gave me my ring,’ she said, looking down at the massive band of gold, ‘and you have given me ever so many delightful books.’
‘Those were very humble gifts, Molly: but to-day I have brought you a wedding present.’
He opened the bag and took out a red morocco case, and then half-a-dozen more red morocco cases of various shapes and sizes. The first looked new, but the others were old-fashioned and passing shabby, as if they had been knocking about brokers’ shops for the last quarter of a century.
‘There is my wedding gift, Mary,’ he said, handing her the new case.
It contained an exquisitely painted miniature of a very beautiful woman, in a large oval locket set with sapphires.
‘You have asked me for my portrait, dearest,’ he said. ‘I give you my mother’s rather than my own, because I loved her as I never thought to love again, till I knew you. I should like you to wear that locket sometimes, Mary, as a kind of link between the love of the past and the love of the present. Were my mother living, she would welcome and cherish my bride and my wife. She is dead, and you and she can never meet on earth: but I should like you to be familiar with the face which was once the light of my life.’
Mary’s eyes filled with tears as she gazed at the face in the miniature. It was the portrait of a woman of about thirty — a face of exquisite refinement, of calm and pensive beauty.
‘I shall treasure this picture always, above all things,’ she said: but ‘why did you have it set so splendidly, Jack? No gems were needed to give your mother’s portrait value in my eyes.’
‘I know that, dearest, but I wanted to make the locket worth wearing. And now for the other cases. The locket is your lover’s free gift, and is yours to keep and to bequeath to your children. These are heirlooms, and yours only during your husband’s lifetime.’
He opened one of the largest cases, and on a bed of black velvet Mary beheld a magnificent diamond necklace, with a large pendant. He opened another and displayed a set of sprays for the hair. Another contained earrings, another bracelets, the last a tiara.
‘What are they for?’ gasped Mary.
‘For my wife to wear.’
‘Oh, but I could never wear such things,’ she exclaimed, with an idea that these must be stage jewellery. ‘They are paste, of course — very beautiful for people who like that kind of thing — but I don’t.’
She felt deeply shocked at this evidence of bad taste on the part of her lover. How the things flashed in the sunshine — but so did the crystal drops in the old Venetian girondoles.
‘No, Molly, they are not paste; they are Brazilian diamonds, and, as Maulevrier would say, they are as good as they make them. They are heirlooms, Molly. My dear mother wore them in her summer-tide of wedded happiness. My grandmother wore them for thirty years before her; my great grandmother wore them at the Court of Queen Charlotte, and they were worn at the Court of Queen Anne. They are nearly two hundred years old; and those central stones in the tiara came out of a cap worn by the Great Mogul, and are the largest table diamonds known. They are historic, Mary.’
‘Why, they must be worth a fortune.’
‘They are valued at something over seventy thousand pounds.’
‘But why don’t you sell them?’ exclaimed Mary, opening her eyes wide with surprise, ‘they would give you a handsome income.’
‘They are not mine to sell, Molly. Did not I tell you that they are heirlooms? They are the family jewels of the Countesses of Hartfield.’
‘Then what are you?’
‘Ronald Hollister, Earl of Hartfield, and your adoring lover!’
Mary gave a cry of surprise, a cry of distress even.
‘Oh, that is too dreadful!’ she exclaimed; ‘grandmother will be so unhappy. She had set her heart upon Lesbia marrying Lord Hartfield, the son of the man she loved.’
‘I got wind of her wish more than a year ago,’ said Hartfield, ‘from your brother; and he and I hatched a little plot between us. He told me Lesbia was not worthy of his friend’s devotion — told me that she was vain and ambitious — that she had been educated to be so. I determined to come and try my fate. I would try to win her as plain John Hammond. If she was a true woman, I told myself, vanity and ambition would be blown to the four winds, provided I could win her love. I came, I saw her; and to see was to love her. God knows I tried honestly to win her; but I had sworn to myself that I would woo her as John Hammond, and I did not waver in my resolution — no, not when a word would have turned the scale. She liked me, I think, a little; but she did not like the notion of an obscure life as the wife of a hardworking professional man. The pomps and vanities of this world had it against love or liking, and she gave me up. I thank God that the pomps and vanities prevailed; for this happy chance gave me Mary, my sweet Wordsworthian damsel, found, like the violet or the celandine, by the wayside, in Wordsworth’s own country.’
‘And you are Lord Hartfield!’ exclaimed Mary, still lost in wonder, and with no elation at this change in the aspect of her life. ‘I always knew you were a great man. But poor grandmother! It will be a dreadful disappointment to her.’
‘I think not. I think she has learned my Molly’s value; rather late, as I learned it; and I believe she will be glad that one of her granddaughters should marry the son of her first lover. Let us go to her, love, and see if she is reconciled to the idea, and whether the settlement is ready for execution. Dorncliffe and his clerk were working at it half through the night.’
‘What is the good of a settlement?’ asked Mary. ‘I’m sure I don’t want one.’
‘Lady Hartfield must not be dependent upon her husband’s whim or pleasure for her milliner’s bill or her private charities,’ answered her lover, smiling at her eagerness to repudiate anything business-like.
‘But I would rather be dependent on your pleasure. I shall never have any milliner’s bills; and I am sure you would never deny me money for charity.’
‘You shall not have to ask me for it, except when you have exceeded your pin-money I hope you will do that now and then, just to afford me the pleasure of doing you a favour.’
‘Hartfield,’ repeated Mary, to herself, as they went towards the house; ‘shall I have to call you Hartfield? I don’t like the name nearly so well as Jack.’
‘You shall call me Jack for old sake’s sake,’ said Hartfield, tenderly.
‘How did you think of such a name as Jack?’
‘Rather an effort of genius, wasn’t it. Well, first and foremost I was christened Ronald John — all the Hollisters are christened John — name of the founder of the race; and, secondly, Maulevrier and I were always plain Mr. Morland and Mr. Hammond in our travels, and always called each other Jack and Jim.’
‘How nice!’ said Mary; ‘would you very much mind our being plain Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, while we are on our honeymoon trip?’
‘I should like it of all things.’
‘So should I. People will not take so much notice of us, and we can do what we like, and go where we like.’
‘Delightful! We’ll even disguise ourselves as Cook’s tourists, if you like. I would not mind.’
They were at the door of Lady Maulevrier’s sitting room by this time. They went in, and were greeted with smiles.
‘Let me look at the Countess of Hartfield that is to be in half an hour,’ said her ladyship. ‘Oh, Mary, Mary, what a blind idiot I have been, and what a lucky girl you are! I told you once that you were wiser than Lesbia, but I little thought how much wiser you had been.’
Henley Regatta was over. It had passed like a tale that is told; like Epsom and Ascot, and all the other glories of the London season. Happy those for whom the glory of Henley, the grace of Ascot, the fever of Epsom, are not as weary as a twice-told tale, bringing with them only bitterest memories of youth that has fled, of hopes that have withered, of day-dreams that have never been realised. There are some to whom that mad hastening from pleasure to pleasure, that rush from scene to scene of excitement, that eager crowding into one day and night of gaieties which might fairly relieve the placid monotony of a month’s domesticity, a month’s professional work — some there are to whom this Vanity Fair is as a treadmill or the turning of a crank, the felon’s deepest humiliation, purposeless, unprofitable, labour.
The regatta was over, and Lady Kirkbank and her charge hastened back to Arlington Street. Theirs was the very first departure; albeit Mr. Smithson pleaded hard for a prolongation of their visit. The weather was exceptionally lovely, he urged. Water picnics were delightful just now — the banks were alive with the colour of innumerable wild flowers, as beautiful and more poetical than the gorgeous flora of the Amazon or the Paraguay river. And Lady Lesbia had developed a genius for punting; and leaning against her pole, with her hair flying loose and sleeves rolled up above the elbow, she was a subject for canvas or marble, Millais or Adams Acton.
‘When we are in Italy I will have her modelled, just in that attitude, and that dress,’ said Mr. Smithson. ‘She will make a lovely companion for my Reading Girl: one all repose and reverie, the other all life and action. Dear Lady Kirkbank, you really must stay for another week at least. Why go back to the smoke and sultriness of town? Here we can almost live on the water; and I will send to London for some people to make music for us in the evenings, or if you miss your little game at “Nap,” we will play for an hour or so every night. It shall not be my fault if my house is not pleasant for you.’
‘Your house is charming, and I shall be here only too often in the days to come; you will have more than enough of me then, I promise you,’ replied Georgie, with her girlish laugh, ‘but we must not stop a day longer now. People would begin to talk. Besides, we have engagements for every hour of the week that is coming, and for a fortnight after: and then I suppose I ought to take Lesbia to the North to see her grandmother, and to discuss all the preparations and arrangements for this very serious event in which you and Lesbia are to be the chief performers.’
‘I shall be very glad to go to Grasmere myself, and to make the acquaintance of my future grandmother-in-law,’ said Mr. Smithson.
‘You will be charmed with her. She belongs to the old school — something of a fossil, perhaps, but a very dignified fossil. She has grown old in a rustic seclusion, and knows less of our world than a mother abbess; but she has read immensely, and is wonderfully clever. I am bound to tell you that she has very lofty ideas about her granddaughter; and I believe she will only be reconciled to Lesbia’s marriage with a commoner by the notion that you are sure of a peerage. I ventured to hint as much in my letter to Lady Maulevrier yesterday.’
A shade of sullenness crept over Horace Smithson’s visage.
‘I should hope that such settlements as I am in a position to make will convince Lady Maulevrier that I am a respectable suitor for her granddaughter, ex peerage,’ he said, somewhat haughtily.
‘My dear Smithson, did I not tell you that poor Lady Maulevrier is a century behind the times,’ exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, with an aggrieved look. ‘If she were one of us, of course she would know that wealth is the paramount consideration, and that you are quite the best match of the season. But she is dreadfully arriérée, poor dear thing; and she must have amused herself with the day-dream of seeing Lesbia a duchess, or something of that kind. I shall tell her that Lesbia can be one of the queens of society without having strawberry leaves on her coach panels, and that my dear friend Horace Smithson is a much better match than a seedy duke. So don’t look cross, my dear fellow; in me you have a friend who will never desert you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Smithson, inwardly resolving that, so soon as this little transaction of his marriage were over, he would see as little of Georgie Kirkbank and her cotton frocks and schoolgirl hats as bare civility would allow.
He had promised her that she should be the richer by a neat little bundle of fat and flourishing railway stock when his happiness was secured, and he was not going to break his promise. But he did not mean to give George and Georgie free quarters at Rood Hall, or at Cowes, or Deauville; and he meant to withdraw his wife altogether from Lady Kirkbank’s pinchbeck set.
What were Lesbia’s feelings in the early morning after the last day of the regatta, as she slowly paced the lavender walk in the Ladies’ Garden, alone? — for happily Mr. Smithson was not so early a riser as the Grasmere-bred damsel, and she had this fresh morning hour to herself. Of what was she thinking as she paced slowly up and down the broad gravel walk, between two rows of tall old bushes, on which masses of purple blossom stood up from the pale grey foliage, silvery where the summer breeze touched it?
Well, she was thinking first what a grand old place Rood Hall was, and that it was in a manner hers henceforward. She was to be mistress of this house, and of other houses, each after its fashion as perfect as Rood Hall. She was to have illimitable money at her command, to spend and give away as she liked. She, who yesterday had been tortured by the idea of owing a paltry three thousand pounds, was henceforward to count her thousands by the hundred. Her senses reeled before that dazzling vision of figures with rows of ciphers after them, one cipher more or less meaning the difference between thousands and millions. Everybody had agreed in assuring her that Mr. Smithson was inordinately rich. Everybody had considered it his or her business to give her information about the gentleman’s income; clearly implying thereby that in the opinion of society Mr. Smithson’s merits as a suitor were a question of so much bullion.
Could she doubt — she who had learned in one short season to know what the world was made of and what it most valued — could she, steeped to the lips in the wisdom of Lady Kirkbank’s set, doubt for an instant that she was making a better match in the eye of society, than if she had married a man of the highest lineage in all England, a peer of the highest rank, without large means? She knew that money was power, that a man might begin life as a pot-boy or a greengrocer, a knacker or a dust contractor, and climb to the topmost pinnacles, were he only rich enough. She knew that society would eat such a man’s dinners and dance at his wife’s balls, and pretend to think him an altogether exceptional man, make believe to admire him for his own sake, to think his wife most brilliant among women, if he were only rich enough. And could she doubt that society would bow down to her as Lady Lesbia Smithson? She had learned a great deal in her single season, and she knew how society was influenced and governed, almost as well as Sir Robert Walpole knew how human nature could be moulded and directed at the will of a shrewd diplomatist. She knew that in the fashionable world every man and every woman, every child even, has his or her price, and may be bought and sold at pleasure. She had her price, she, Lesbia, the pearl of Grasmere; and the price having been fairly bidden she had surrendered to the bidder.
‘I suppose I always meant to marry him,’ she thought, pausing in her promenade to gaze across the verdant landscape, a fertile vale, against a background of low hills. All the landscape, to the edge of those hills, belonged to Mr. Smithson. ‘Yes, I must have meant to give way at last, or I should hardly have tolerated his attentions. It would have been a pity to refuse such a place as this; and, he is quite gentlemanlike; and as I have done with all romantic ideas, I do not see why I should not learn to like him very much.’
She dismissed the idea of Smithson lightly, with this conclusion, which she believed very virtuous; and then as she resumed her walk her thoughts reverted to the Park Lane Palace.
‘I hardly know whether I like it,’ she mused languidly; ‘beautiful as it is, it is only a reproduction of bygone splendour, and it is painfully excruciating now. For my own part I would much rather have the shabbiest old house which had belonged to one’s ancestors, which had come to one as a heritage, by divine right as it were, instead of being bought with newly made money. To my mind it would rank higher. Yet I doubt if anybody nowadays sets a pin’s value upon ancestors. People ask, Who is he? but they only mean, How much has he? And provided a person is not absolutely in trade, not actually engaged in selling soap, or matches, or mustard, society doesn’t care a straw how his money has been made. The only secondary question is, How long will it last? And that is of course important.’
Musing thus, wordly wisdom personified, the maiden looked up and saw her lover entering at the light little iron gate which gave entrance to this feminine Eden. She went to meet him, looking all simplicity and freshness in her white morning gown and neat little Dunstable hat. It seemed to him as he gazed at her almost as if this delicate, sylph-like beauty were some wild white flower of the woods personified.
She gave him her hand graciously, but he drew her to his breast and kissed her, with the air of a man who was exercising an indisputable right. She supposed that it was his right, and she submitted, but released herself as quickly as possible.
‘My dearest, how lovely you look in this morning light,’ he exclaimed, ‘while all the other women are upstairs making up their faces to meet the sun, and we shall see every shade of bismuth by-and-by, from pale mauve to purple.’
‘It is very uncivil of you to say such a thing of your guests,’ exclaimed Lesbia.
‘But they all indulge in bismuth — you must be quite aware of that. They call the stuff by different names — Blanc Rosati, Crême de l’Imperatrice, Milk of Beauty, Perline, Opaline, Ivorine — but it means bismuth all the same. Expose your fashionable beauty to the fumes of sewer-gas, and that dazzling whiteness would turn to a dull brown hue, or even black. Thank heaven, my Lesbia wears real lilies and roses. Have you been here long?’
‘About half an hour’
‘I only wish I had known. I should not have dawdled so long over my dressing.’
‘I am very glad you did not know,’ Lesbia answered coolly.
‘Do you suppose I never want to be alone? Life in London is perpetual turmoil; one’s eyes grow weary with ever-moving crowds, one’s ears ache with trying to distinguish one voice among the buzz of voices.’
‘Then why go back to town? Why go back to the turmoil and the treadmill? It is only a kind of treadmill, after all, though we choose to call it pleasure. Stay here, Lesbia, and let us live upon the river, and among the flowers,’ urged Smithson, with as romantic an air as if he had never heard of contango, or bulling and bearing; and yet only half an hour ago, while his valet was shaving him, he was debating within himself whether he should be bear or bull in his influence upon certain stock.
It was supposed that he never went near the city, that he had shaken the dust of Lombard Street and the House off his shoes, that his fortune was made, and he had no further need of speculation. Yet the proverb holds good with the stock-jobber. ‘He who has once drunk will drink again.’ Of that fountain there is no satiety.
‘Stay and hear the last of the nightingales,’ he murmured; ‘we are famous for our nightingales.’
‘I wonder you don’t order a fricassée of their tongues, like that loathsome person in Roman history.’
‘I hope I shall never resemble any loathsome person. Why can you not stay?’
‘Why, because it is not etiquette, Lady Kirkbank says.’
‘Lady Kirkbank, eh? la belle farce, Lady Kirkbank standing out for etiquette.’
‘Don’t laugh at my chaperon, sir. Upon what rock can a poor girl lean if you undermine her faith in her chaperon, sir.’
‘I hope you will have a better guardian before you are a month older. I mean to be a very strong rock, Lesbia. You do not know how firmly I shall stand between you and all the perils of society. You have been but poorly guarded hitherto.’
‘You talk as if you mean to be an abominable tyrant,’ said Lesbia. ‘If you don’t take care I shall change my mind, and recall my promise.’
‘Not on that account, Lesbia: every woman likes a man who stands up for his own. It is only your invertebrate husband whose wife drifts into the divorce court. I mean to keep and hold the prize I have won. When is it to be, dearest — our wedding day?’
‘Not for ages, I hope — some time next summer, at the earliest.’
‘You would not be so cruel as to keep me waiting a year?’
‘Why not?’
‘You would not ask that if you loved me.’
‘You are asking too much,’ said Lesbia, with a flash of defiance. ‘There has been nothing said about love yet. You asked me to be your wife, and I said yes — meaning that at some remote period such a thing might be.’
She knew that the man was her slave — slave to her beauty, slave to her superior rank — and she was determined not to lessen the weight of his chain by so much as a feather.
‘Did not that promise imply something like love?’ he asked, earnestly.
‘Perhaps it implied a little gratitude for your devotion, which I have neither courted nor encouraged a little respect for your talents, your perseverance — a little admiration for your wonderful success in life. Perhaps love may follow these sentiments, naturally, easily, if you are very patient; but if you talk about our being married before next year, you will simply make me hate you.’
‘Then I will say very little, except to remind you that there is no earthly reason why we should not be married next month. October and November are the best months for Rome, and I heard you say last night you were pining to see Rome.’
‘What then — cannot Lady Kirkbank take me to Rome?’
‘And introduce you to the rowdiest people in the city,’ cried Mr. Smithson. ‘Lesbia, I adore you. It is the dream of my life to be your husband: but if you are going to spend a winter in Italy with Lady Kirkbank, I renounce my right, I surrender my hope. You will not be the wife of my dreams after that.’
‘Do you assert a right to control my life during our engagement?’
‘Some little right; above all, the privilege of choosing your friends. And that is one reason why I most fervently desire our marriage should not be delayed. You would find it difficult, impossible perhaps, to get out of Lady Kirkbank’s claws while you are single; but once my wife, that amiable old person can be made to keep her distance.’
‘Lady Kirkbank’s claws! What a horrible way in which to speak of a friend. I thought you adored Lady Kirkbank.’
‘So I do. We all adore her, but not as a guide for youth. As a specimen of the elderly female of the latter half of the nineteenth century, she is perfect. Such gush, such juvenility, such broad views, such an utter absence of starch; but as a lamp for the footsteps of girlhood — no there we must pause.’
‘You are very ungrateful. Do you know that poor Lady Kirkbank has been most strenuous in your behalf?’
‘Oh, yes, I know that.’
‘And you are not grateful?’
‘I intend to be very grateful, so grateful as to entirely satisfy Lady Kirkbank.’
‘You are horribly cynical. That reminds me, there was a poor girl whom Lady Kirkbank had under her wing one season — a Miss Trinder, to whom I am told you behaved shamefully.’
‘There was a parson’s daughter who threw herself at my head in a most audacious way, and who behaved so badly, egged on by Lady Kirkbank, that I had to take refuge in flight. Do you suppose I am the kind of man to marry the first adventurous damsel who takes a fancy to my town house, and thinks it would be a happy hunting ground for a herd of brothers and sisters? Miss Trinder was shocking bad style, and her designs were transparent from the very beginning! I let her flirt as much as she liked; and when she began to be seriously sentimental I took wing for the East?’
‘Was she pretty?’ asked Lesbia, not displeased at this contemptuous summing up of poor Belle Trinder’s story.
‘If you admire the Flemish type, as illustrated by Rubens, she was lovely. A complexion of lilies and roses — cabbage roses, bien entendu, which were apt to deepen into peonies after champagne and mayonaise at Ascot or Sandown — a figure — oh — well — a tremendous figure — hair of an auburn that touched perilously on the confines of red — large, serviceable feet, and an appetite — the appetite of a ploughman’s daughter reared upon short commons.’
‘You are very cruel to a girl who evidently admired you.’
‘A fig for her admiration! She wanted to live in my house and spend my money.’
‘There goes the gong,’ exclaimed Lesbia; ‘pray let us go to breakfast. You are hideously cynical, and I am wofully tired of you.’
And as they strolled back to the house, by lavender walk and rose garden, and across the dewy lawn, Lesbia questioned herself as to whether she was one whit better or more dignified than Isabella Trinder. She wore her rue with a difference, that was all.
The return to Arlington Street meant a return to the ceaseless whirl of gaiety. Even at Rood Hall life had been as near an approach to perpetual motion as one could hope for in this world; but the excitement and the hurrying and scampering in Berkshire had a rustic flavour; there were moments that were almost repose, a breathing space between the blue river and the blue sky, in a world that seemed made of green fields and hanging woods, the plashing of waters, and the song of the lark. But in London the very atmosphere was charged with hurry and agitation; the freshness was gone from the verdure of the parks; the glory of the rhododendrons had faded; the Green Park below Lady Kirkbank’s mansion was baked and rusty; the towers of the Houses of Parliament yonder were dimly seen in a mist of heat. London air tasted of smoke and dust, vibrated with the incessant roll of carriages, and the trampling of multitudinous feet.
There are women of rank who can take the London season quietly, and live their own lives in the midst of the whirl and the riot — women for whom that squirrel-like circulation round and round the fashionable wheel has no charm — women who only receive people they like, only go into society that is congenial. But Lady Kirkbank was not one of these. The advance of age made her only more keen in the pursuit of pleasure. She would have abandoned herself to despair had the glass over the mantelpiece in her boudoir ceased to be choked and littered with cards — had her book of engagements shown a blank page. Happily there were plenty of people — if not all of them the best people — who wanted Sir George and Lady Kirkbank at their parties. The gentleman was sporting and harmless, the lady was good-natured, and just sufficiently eccentric to be amusing without degenerating into a bore. And this year she was asked almost everywhere, for the sake of the beauty who went under her wing. Lesbia had been as a pearl of price to her chaperon, from a social point of view; and now that she was engaged to Horace Smithson she was likely to be even more valuable.
Mr. Smithson had promised Lady Kirkbank, sportively as it were, and upon the impulse of the moment, as he would have offered to wager a dozen of gloves, that were he so happy as to win her protégée’s hand he would find her an investment for, say, a thousand, which would bring her in twenty per cent.; nay, more, he would also find the thousand, which would have been the initial difficulty on poor Georgie’s part. But this little matter was in Georgie’s mind a detail, compared with the advantages to accrue to her indirectly from Lesbia’s union with one of the richest men in London.
Lady Kirkbank had brought about many good matches, and had been too often rewarded with base ingratitude upon the part of her protégées, after marriage; but there was a touch of Arcady in the good soul’s nature, and she was always trustful. She told herself that Lesbia would not be ungrateful, would not basely kick down the ladder by which she had mounted to heights empyrean, would not cruelly shelve the friend who had pioneered her to high fortune. She counted upon making the house in Park Lane as her own house, upon being the prime mover of all Lesbia’s hospitalities, the supervisor of her visiting list, the shadow behind the throne.
There were balls and parties nightly, dinners, luncheons, garden-parties; and yet there was a sense of waning in the glory of the world — everybody felt that the fag-end of the season was approaching. All the really great entertainments were over — the Cabinet dinners, the Reception at the Foreign Office, the last of the State balls and concerts. Some of the best people had already left town; and senators were beginning to complain that they saw no prospect of early deliverance. There was Goodwood still to look forward to; and after Goodwood the Deluge — or rather Cowes Regatta, about which Lady Kirkbank’s set were already talking.
Lady Lesbia was to be at Cowes for the Regatta week. That was a settled thing. Mr. Smithson’s schooner-yacht, the Cayman, was to be her hotel. It was to be Lady Kirkbank and Lady Lesbia’s yacht for the nonce; and Mr. Smithson was to live on shore at his villa, and at that aristocratic club to which, by Maulevrier’s influence, and on the score of his approaching marriage with an earl’s daughter, he had been just selected. He would be only Lady Kirkbank’s visitor on board the Cayman. The severe etiquette of the situation would therefore not be infringed; and yet Mr. Smithson would have the happiness of seeing his betrothed sole and sovereign mistress of his yacht, and of spending the long summer days at her feet. Even to Lady Lesbia this idea of the yacht was not without its charm. She had never been on board such a yacht as the Cayman; she was a good sailor, as testified by many an excursion, in hired sailing boats, at Tynemouth, and St. Bees; and she knew that she would be the queen of the hour. She accepted Mr. Smithson’s invitation for the Cowes week more graciously than she was wont to receive his attentions, and was pleased to say that the whole thing would be rather enjoyable.
‘It will be simple enchantment,’ exclaimed the more enthusiastic Georgie Kirkbank. ‘There is nothing so rapturous as life on board a yacht; there is a flavour of adventure, a sansgêne, a — in short everything in the world that I like. I shall wear my cotton frocks, and give myself up to enjoyment, lie on the deck and look up at the blue sky, too deliciously idle even to read the last horrid thing of Zola’s.’
But the Cowes Regatta was nearly three weeks ahead; and in the meantime there was Goodwood, and the ravelled threads of the London season had to be wound up. And by this time it was known everywhere that the affair between Mr. Smithson and Maulevrier’s sister was really on. ‘It’s as settled a business as the entries and bets for next year’s Derby,’ said one lounger to another in the smoking-room of the Haute Gomme. ‘Play or pay, don’t you know.’
Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia had both written to Lady Maulevrier, Lesbia writing somewhat coldly, very briefly, and in a half defiant tone, to the effect that she had accepted Mr. Smithson’s offer, and that she hoped her grandmother would be pleased with a match which everybody supposed to be extremely advantageous. She was going to Grasmere immediately after the Cowes week to see her dear grandmother, and to be assured of her approval. In the meanwhile she was awfully busy; there were callers driving up to the door at that very moment, and her brain was racked by the apprehension that she might not get her new gown in time for the Bachelor’s Ball, which was to be quite one of the nicest things of the year, so dearest grandmother must excuse a hurried letter, etc., etc., etc.
Georgie Kirkbank was more effusive, more lengthy. She expatiated upon the stupendous alliance which her sweetest Lesbia was about to make; and took credit to herself for having guided Lesbia’s footsteps in the right way.
‘Smithson is a most difficult person,’ she wrote. ‘The least error of taste on your dear girl’s part would have froisséd him. Men with that immense wealth are always suspicious, ready to imagine mercenary motives, on their guard against being trapped. But Lesbia had me at her back, and she managed him perfectly. He is positively her slave; and you will be able to twist him round your little finger in the matter of settlements. You may do what you like with him, for the ground has been thoroughly prepared by me.’
Lady Maulevrier’s reply was not enthusiastic. She had no doubt Mr. Smithson was a very good match, according to the modern estimate of matrimonial alliances, in which money seemed to be the Alpha and Omega. But she had cherished views of another kind. She had hoped to see her dear granddaughter wear one of those noble and historic names which are a badge of distinction for all time. She had hoped to see her enter one of those grand old families which are a kind of royalty. And that Lesbia should marry a man whose sole distinction consisted of an immense fortune amassed heaven knows how, was a terrible blow to her pride.
‘But it is not the first,’ wrote Lady Maulevrier. ‘My pride has received crushing blows in days past, and I ought to be humbled to the dust. But there is a stubborn resistance in some natures which stands firm against every shock. You and Lesbia will both be surprised to hear that Mary, from whom I expected so little, has made a really great match. She was married yesterday afternoon in my morning room, by special licence, to the Earl of Hartfield, the lover of her choice, whom we at Fellside have all known as plain John Hammond. He is an admirable young man, and sure to make a great figure in the world, as no doubt you know better than I do, for you are in the way of hearing all about him. His courtship of Mary is quite an idyll; and the happy issue of this romantic love-affair has cheered and comforted me more than anything that has happened since Lesbia left me.’
This letter, written in Fr?ulein’s niggling little hand, Lady Kirkbank handed to Lesbia, who read it through in silence; but when she came to that part of the letter which told of her sister’s marriage, her cheek grew ashy pale, her brow contracted, and she started to her feet and stared at Lady Kirkbank with wild, dilated eyes, as if she had been stung by an adder.
‘A strange mystification, wasn’t it?’ said Lady Kirkbank, almost frightened at the awful look in Lesbia’s face, which was even worse than Belle Trinder’s expression when she read the announcement of Mr. Smithson’s flight.
‘Strange mystification! It was base treachery — a vile and wicked lie!’ cried Lesbia, furiously. ‘What right had he to come to us under false colours, to pretend to be poor, a nobody — with only the vaguest hope of making a decent position in the future? — and to offer himself under such impossible conditions to a girl brought up as I had been — a girl educated by one of the proudest and most ambitious of women — to force me to renounce everything except him? How could he suppose that any girl, so placed, could decide in his favour? If he had loved me he would have told me the truth — he would not have made it impossible for me to accept him.’
‘I believe he is a very high flown young man,’ said Lady Kirkbank, soothingly; ‘he was never in my set, you know, dear. And I suppose he had some old Minerva-press idea that he would find a girl who would marry him for his own sake. And your sister, no doubt, eager to marry anybody, poor child, for the sake of getting away from that very lovely dungeon of Lady Maulevrier’s, snapped at the chance; and by a mere fluke she becomes a countess.’
Lesbia ignored these consolatory remarks. She was pacing the room like a tigress, her delicate cambric handkerchief grasped between her two hands, and torn and rent by the convulsive action of her fingers. She could have thrown herself from the balcony on to the spikes of the area railings, she could have dashed herself against yonder big plate-glass window looking towards the Green Park, like a bird which shatters his little life against the glass barrier which he mistakes for the open sky. She could have flung herself down on the floor and grovelled, and torn her hair — she could have done anything mad, wicked, desperate, in the wild rage of this moment.
‘Loved me!’ she exclaimed; ‘he never loved me. If he had he would have told me the truth. What, when I was in his arms, my head upon his breast, my whole being surrendered to him, adoring him, what more could he want? He must have known that this meant real love. And why should he put it upon me to fight so hard a fight — to brave my grandmother’s anger — to be cursed by her — to face poverty for his sake? I never professed to be a heroine. He knew that I was a woman, with all a woman’s weakness, a woman’s fear of trial and difficulty in the future. It was a cowardly thing to use me so.’
‘It was,’ said Lady Kirkbank, in the same soothing tone; ‘but if you liked this Hammond-Hartfield creature — a little in those old days, I know you have outlived that liking long ago.’
‘Of course; but it is a hard thing to know one has been fooled, cheated, weighed in the balance and found wanting,’ said Lesbia, scornfully.
She was taming down a little by this time, ashamed of that outbreak of violent passion, feeling that she had revealed too much to Lady Kirkbank.
‘It was a caddish thing to do,’ said Georgie; ‘and this Hartfield is just what I always thought him — an insufferable prig. However, my sweetest girl, there is really nothing to lament in the matter. Your sister has made a good alliance, which will score high in your favour by-and-by, and you are going to marry a man who is three times as rich as Lord Hartfield.’
‘Rich, yes; and nothing but rich; while Lord Hartfield is a man of the very highest standing, belongs to the flower of English nobility. Rich, yes; Mr. Smithson is rich; but, as Lady Maulevrier says, He has made his money heaven knows how.’
‘Mr. Smithson has not made his money heaven knows how,’ answered Lady Kirkbank, indignantly. ‘He has made it in cochineal, in iron, in gunpowder, in coal, in all kinds of commodities. Everybody in the City knows how he has made his money, and that he has a genius for turning everything into gold. If the gold changes back into one of the baser metals, it is only when Mr. Smithson has made all he wanted to make. And now he has quite done with the City. The House is the only business of his life; and he is becoming a power in the House. You have every reason to be proud of your choice, Lesbia.’
‘I will try to be proud of it,’ said Lesbia, resolutely. ‘I will not be scorned and trampled upon by Mary.’
‘She seemed a harmless kind of girl,’ said Lady Kirkbank, as if she had been talking of a housemaid.
‘She is a designing minx,’ exclaimed Lesbia, ‘and has set her cap at that man from the very beginning.’
‘But she could not have known that he was Lord Hartfield.’
‘No; but he was a man; and that was enough for her.’
From this time forward there was a change in Lady Lesbia’s style and manner — a change very much for the worse, as old-fashioned people thought; but to the taste of some among Lady Kirkbank’s set, the change was an improvement. She was gayer than of old, gay with a reckless vivacity, intensely eager for action and excitement, for cards and racing, and all the strongest stimulants of fashionable life. Most people ascribed this increased vivacity, this electric manner, to the fact of her engagement to Horace Smithson. She was giddy with her triumph, dazzled by a vision of the gold which was soon to be hers.
‘Egad, if I saw myself in a fair way of being able to write cheques upon such an account as Smithson’s I should be as wild as Lady Lesbia,’ said one of the damsel’s military admirers at the Rag. ‘And I believe the young lady was slightly dipped.’
‘Who told you that?’ asked his friend.
‘A mother of mine,’ answered the youth, with an apologetic air, as if he hardly cared to own such a humdrum relationship. ‘Seraphine, the dressmaker, was complaining — wanted to see the colour of Lady Lesbia Haselden’s money — vulgar curiosity — asked my old mother if she thought the account was safe, and so on. That’s how I came to know all about it.’
‘Well, she’ll be able to pay Seraphine next season.’
Lord Maulevrier came back to London directly after his sister’s wedding. The event, which came off so quietly, so happily, filled him with unqualified joy. He had hoped from the very first that his Molly would win the cup, even while Lesbia was making all the running, as he said afterwards. And Molly had won, and was the wife of one of the best young men in England. Maulevrier, albeit unused to the melting-mood, shed a tear or two for very joy as the sister he loved and the friend of his boyhood and youth stood side by side in the quiet room at Grasmere, and spoke the solemn words that made them one for ever.
The first news he heard after his return to town was of Lesbia’s engagement, which was common talk at the clubs. The visitors at Rood Hall had come back to London full of the event, and were proud of giving a detailed account of the affair to outsiders.
They all talked patronisingly of Smithson, and seemed to think it rather a wonderful fact that he did not drop his aspirates or eat peas with a knife.
‘A man of stirling metal,’ said the gossips, ‘who can hold his own with many a fellow born in the purple.’
Maulevrier called in Arlington Street, but Lady Kirkbank and her protégée were out; and it was at a cricket match at the Orleans Club that the brother and sister met for the first time after Lord Hartfield’s wedding, which by this time had been in all the papers; a very simple announcement:
‘On the 29th inst., at Grasmere, by the Reverend Douglass Brooke, the Earl of Hartfield to Mary, younger daughter of the ninth Earl of Maulevrier.’
Lesbia was the centre of a rather noisy little court, in which Mr. Smithson was conspicuous by his superior reserve.
He did not exert himself as a lover, paid no compliments, was not sentimental. The pearl was won, and he wore it very quietly; but wherever Lesbia went he went; she was hardly ever out of his sight.
Maulevrier received the coolest possible greeting. Lesbia turned pale with anger at sight of him, for his presence reminded her of the most humiliating passage in her life; but the big red satin sunshade concealed that pale angry look, and nothing in Lesbia’s manner betrayed emotion.
‘Where have you been hiding yourself all this time, and why were you not at Henley?’ she asked.
‘I have been at Grasmere.’
‘Oh, you were a witness of that most romantic marriage. The Lady of Lyons reversed, the gardener’s son turning out to be an earl. Was it excruciatingly funny?’
‘It was one of the most solemn weddings I ever saw.’
‘Solemn! what, with my Tomboy sister as bride! Impossible!’
‘Your sister ceased to be a Tomboy when she fell in love. She is a sweet and womanly woman, and will make an adorable wife to the finest fellow I know. I hear I am to congratulate you, Lesbia, upon your engagement with Mr. Smithson.’
‘If you think I am the person to be congratulated, you are at liberty to do so. My engagement is a fact.’
‘Oh, of course, Mr. Smithson is the winner. But as I hope you intend to be happy, I wish you joy. I am told Smithson is a really excellent fellow when one gets to know him; and I shall make it my business to be better acquainted with him.’
Smithson was standing just out of hearing, watching the bowling. Maulevrier went over to him and shook hands, their acquaintance hitherto having been of the slightest, and very shy upon his lordship’s part; but now Smithson could see that Maulevrier meant to be cordial.
There was a dinner party in one of the new houses in Grosvenor Place that evening, to which Lady Kirkbank and Lesbia had been bidden. The new house belonged to a new man, who was supposed to have made millions out of railways, and other gigantic achievements in the engineering line; and the new man and his wife were friends of Mr. Smithson, and had made the simple Georgie’s acquaintance only within the last three weeks.
‘Of course they are stupid, my dear,’ she remarked, in response to some slighting remark of Lesbia’s, ‘but I am always willing to know rich people. One drops in for so many good things; and they never want any return in kind. It is quite enough for them to be allowed to spend their money upon us.’
The house was gorgeous in all the glory of the very latest fashions in upholstery; hall Algerian; dining-room Pompeian; drawing-room Early Italian; music-room Louis Quatorze; billiard-room mediaeval English. The dinner was as magnificent as dinner can be made. Three-fourths of the guests were the haute gomme of the financial world, and perspired gold. The other third belonged to a class which Mr. Smithson described somewhat contemptuously as the shake-back nobility. An Irish peer, a younger son of a ducal house that had run to seed, a political agitator, a grass widow whose titled husband was governor of an obscure colony, an ancient dowager with hair which was too luxuriant to be anything but a wig, and diamonds which were so large as to suggest paste.
Lesbia sat by her affianced at the glittering table, lighted with clusters of wax candles, which shone upon a level parterre of tea roses, gardenias, and gloire de Malmaison carnations; from which rose at intervals groups of silver-gilt dolphins, supporting shallow golden dishes piled with peaches, grapes, and all the costliest produce of Covent Garden.
Conversation was not particularly brilliant, nor had the guests an elated air. The thermometer was near eighty, and at this period of the season everybody was tired of this kind of dinner, and would gladly have foregone the greatest achievements of culinary art, in favour of a chicken and a salad, eaten under green leaves, in a garden at Wargrave or Henley, within sound of the rippling river.
On Lesbia’s right hand there was a portly personage of Jewish type, dark to swarthiness, and somewhat oily, whose every word suggested bullion. He and Mr. Smithson were evidently acquaintances of long standing, and Mr. Smithson presented him to Lesbia, whereupon he joined in their conversation now and then.
His talk was of the usual standard. He had seen everything worth seeing in London and in Paris, between which cities he seemed to oscillate with such frequency that he might be said to live in both places at once. He had his stall at Covent Garden, and his stall at the Grand Opera. He was a subscriber at the Theatre Fran?ais. He had seen all the races at Longchamps and Chantilly, as well as at Sandown and Ascot. But every now and then he and Mr. Smithson drifted from the customary talk about operas and races, pictures and French novels, to the wider world of commerce and speculation, mines, waterworks, and foreign loans — and Lesbia leant back in her chair, and fanned herself languidly, with half-closed eyelids, while two or three courses went round, she giving the little supercilious look at each entree offered to her, to be observed on such occasions, as if the thing offered were particularly nasty.
She wondered how long the two men were going to prose about mines and shares, in those subdued half-mysterious voices, telling each other occult facts in half-expressed phrases, utterly dark to the outside world; but, while she was languidly wondering, a change in her lover’s manner startled her into keenest curiosity.
‘Montesma is in Paris,’ said Mr. Sampayo, the dark gentleman; ‘I dined last week with him at the Continental.’
Mr. Smithson’s complexion faded curiously, and a leaden darkness came over his countenance, as of a man whose heart and lungs suddenly refuse their office. But in a few moments he was smiling feebly.
‘Indeed! I thought he was played out years ago.’
‘A man of that kind is never played out. Don Gomez de Montesma is as clever as Satan, as handsome as Apollo, and he bears one of the oldest names in Castile. Such a man will always come to the front. C’est un rastaquouère mais rastaquouère de bon genre. You knew him intimately là bas, I believe?’
‘In Cuba; yes, we were pretty good friends once.’
‘And were useful to each other, no doubt,’ said Mr. Sampayo, pleasantly. ‘Was that Argentiferous Copper Company in sixty-four yours or his?’
‘There were a good many people concerned in it.’
‘No doubt; it takes a good many people to work that kind of thing, but I fancy you and Montesma were about the only two who came out of it pleasantly. And he and you did a little in the shipping line, didn’t you — African produce? However, that’s an old song. You have had so many good things since then.’
‘Did Montesma talk of coming to London?’
‘He did not talk about it; but he would hardly go back to the tropics without having a look round on both sides of the Channel. He was always fond of society, pretty women, dancing, and amusements of all kinds. I have no doubt we shall see him here before the end of the season.’
Mr. Smithson pursued the subject no further He turned to Lesbia, who had been curiously interested in this little bit of conversation — interested first because Smithson had seemed agitated by the mention of the Spaniard’s name; secondly, because of the description of the man, which had a romantic sound. The very word tropic suggested a romance. And Lesbia, whose mind was jaded by the monotony of a London season, the threadbare fabric of society conversation, kindled at any image which appealed to her fancy.
Clever as Satan, handsome as Apollo, scion of an old Castilian family, fresh from the tropics. Her imagination dwelt upon the ideas which these words had conjured up.
Three days after this she was at the opera with her chaperon, her lover in attendance as usual. The opera was “Faust,” with Nillson as Marguerite. After the performance they were to drive down to Twickenham on Mr. Smithson’s drag, and to dance and sup at the Orleans. The last ball of the season was on this evening; and Lesbia had been persuaded that it was to be a particular recherché ball, and that only the very nicest people were to be present. At any rate, the drive under the light of a July moon would be delicious; and if they did not like the people they found there they could eat their supper and come away immediately after, as Lady Kirkbank remarked philosophically.
The opera was nearly over — that grand scene of Valentine’s death was on — and Lesbia was listening breathlessly to every note, watching every look of the actors, when there came a modest little knock at the door of her box. She darted an angry glance round, and shrugged her shoulders vexatiously. What Goth had dared to knock during that thrilling scene?
Mr. Smithson rose and crept to the door and quietly opened it.
A dark, handsome man, who was a total stranger to Lesbia, glided in, shaking hands with Smithson as he entered.
Till this moment Lesbia’s whole being had been absorbed in the scene — that bitter anathema of the brother, the sister’s cry of anguish and shame. Where else is there tragedy so human, so enthralling — grief that so wrings the spectator’s heart? It needed a Goethe and a Gounod to produce this masterpiece.
In an instant, in a flash, Lesbia’s interest in the stage was gone. Her first glance at the stranger told, her who he was. The olive tint, the eyes of deepest black, the grand form of the head and perfect chiselling of the features could belong only to that scion of an old Castilian race whom she had heard described the other evening —‘clever as Satan, handsome as Apollo.’
Yes, this must be the man, Don Gomez de Montesma. There was nothing in Mr. Smithson’s manner to indicate that the Spaniard was an unwelcome guest. On the contrary, Smithson received him with a cordiality which in a man of naturally reserved manner seemed almost rapture. The curtain fell, and he presented Don Gomez to Lady Kirkbank and Lady Lesbia; whereupon dear Georgie began to gush, after her wont, and to ask a good many questions in a manner that was too girlish to seem impertinent.
‘How perfectly you speak English!’ she exclaimed. ‘You must have lived in England a good deal.’
‘On the contrary, it is my misfortune to have, lived here very little, but I have known a good many English and Americans in Cuba and in Paris.’
‘In Cuba! Do you really come from Cuba? I have always fancied that Cuba must be an altogether charming place to live in — like Biarritz or Pau, don’t you know, only further away. Do please tell me where it is, and what kind of a place.’
Geographically, Lady Kirkbank’s mind was a blank. It was quite a revelation to her to find that Cuba was an island.
‘It must be a lovely spot!’ exclaimed the fervid creature. ‘Let me see, now, what do we get from Cuba? — cigars — and — and tobacco. I suppose in Cuba everybody smokes?’
‘Men, women, and children.’
‘How delicious! Would that I were a Cuban! And the natives, are they nice?’
‘There are no aborigines. The Indians whom Columbus found soon perished off the face of the island. European civilisation generally has that effect. But one of our most benevolent captain-generals provided us with an imported population of niggers.’
‘How delightful. I have always longed to live among a slave population, dear submissive black things dressed in coral necklaces and feathers, instead of the horrid over-fed wretches we have to wait upon us. And if the aborigines were not wanted it was just as well for them to die out, don’t you know,’ prattled Lady Kirkbank.
‘It was very accommodating of them, no doubt. Yet we could employ half a million of them, if we had them, in draining our swamps. Agriculture suffered by the loss of Indian labour.’
‘I suppose they were like the creatures in Pizarro, poor dear yellow things with brass bracelets,’ said Lady Kirkbank. ‘I remember seeing Macready as Rolla when I was quite a little thing.’
And now the curtain rose for the last act.
‘Do you care about staying for the end?’ asked Mr. Smithson of Lesbia. ‘It will make us rather late at the Orleans.’
‘Never mind how late we are,’ said Lesbia, imperiously. ‘I have always been cheated out of this last act for some stupid party. Imagine losing Gounod and Nillson for the sake of struggling through the mob on a stifling staircase, and being elbowed by inane young men, with gardenias in their coats.’
Lady Lesbia had a pretty little way of always opposing any suggestion of her sweetheart. She was resolved to treat him as badly as a future husband could be treated. In consenting to marry him she had done him a favour which was a great deal more than such a person had any right to expect.
She leant forward to watch and listen, with her elbow resting on the velvet cushion — her head upon her hand, and she seemed absorbed in the scene. But this was mere outward seeming. All the enchantment of music and acting was over. She only heard and saw vaguely, as if it were a shadowy scene enacted ever so far away. Every now and then her eyes glanced involuntarily toward Don Gomez, who stood leaning against the back of the box, pale, languid, graceful, poetic, an altogether different type of manhood from that with which she had of late been satiated.
Those deep dark eyes of his had a dreamy look. They gazed across the dazzling house, into space, above Lady Lesbia’s head. They seemed to see nothing; and they certainly were not looking at her.
Don Gomez was the first man she ever remembered to have been presented to her who did not favour her with a good deal of hard staring, more or less discreetly managed, during the first ten minutes of their acquaintance. On him her beauty fell flat. He evidently failed to recognise her supreme loveliness. It might be that she was the wrong type for Cuba. Every nation has its own Venus; and that far away spot beyond the torrid zone might have a somewhat barbarous idea of beauty. At any rate, Don Gomez was apparently unimpressed. And yet Lesbia flattered herself that she was looking her best to-night, and that her costume was a success. She wore a white satin gown, short in the skirt, for the luxury of freedom in waltzing, and made with Quaker-like simplicity, the bodice high to the throat, fitting her like a sheath.
Her only ornaments were a garland of scarlet poppies wreathed from throat to shoulder, and a large diamond heart which Mr. Smithson had lately given her; ‘a bullock’s heart,’ as Lady Kirkbank called it.
When the curtain fell, and not till then, she rose and allowed herself to be clad in a brown velvet Newmarket, which completely covered her short satin gown. She had a little brown velvet toque to match the Newmarket, and thus attired she would be able to take her seat on the drag which was waiting on the quietest side of Covent Garden.
‘Why should not you go with us, Don Gomez?’ exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, in a gush of hospitality. ‘The drive will be charming — not equal to your tropical Cuba — but intensely nice. And the gardens will be something too sweet on such a night as this. I knew them when the dear Duc d’Aumale was there. Ay de mi, such a man!’
Lady Kirkbank sighed, with the air of having known his Altésse Royale intimately.
‘I should be charmed,’ said Don Gomez, ‘if I thought my friend Smithson wanted me. Would you really like to have me, Smithson?’
‘I should be enchanted.’
‘And there is room on the drag?’
‘Room enough for half-a-dozen. I am only taking Sir George Kirkbank and Colonel Delville — whom we are to pick up at the Haute Gomme — and Mr. and Mrs. Mostyn, who are in the stalls.’
‘A nice snug little party,’ exclaimed that charming optimist, Lady Kirkbank. ‘I hate a crowd on a drag. The way some of the members of the Four-in-hand Club load their coaches on parade reminds me of a Beanfeast!’
They found Lady Kirkbank’s footman and one of Mr. Smithson’s grooms waiting in the hall of the opera house. The groom to conduct them to the spot where the drag was waiting; the footman to carry wraps and take his mistress’s final orders. There was a Bohemian flavour in the little walk to the great fruit garden, which was odorous of bruised peaches and stale salads as they passed it. Waggon-loads of cabbages and other garden stuff were standing about by the old church; the roadway was littered with the refuse of the market; and the air was faint and heavy with the scent of herbs and flowers.
Lesbia mounted lightly to her place of honour on the box-seat; and Lady Kirkbank was hoisted up after her. Mr. and Mrs. Mostyn followed; and then Don Gomez took his seat by Lady Kirkbank’s side and behind Lesbia, a vantage point from which he could talk to her as much as he liked. Mr. Smithson seated himself a minute afterwards, and drove off by King Street and Leicester Square and on to Piccadilly, steering cleverly through the traffic of cabs and carriages, which was at its apogee just now, when all the theatres were disgorging their crowds. Piccadilly was quieter, yet there were plenty of carriages, late people going to parties and early people going home, horses slipping and sliding on stones or wood, half the roadway up, and luminous with lanterns. They stopped in front of the Haute Gomme, where they picked up Sir George Kirkbank and Colonel Delville, a big man with a patriarchal head, supposed to be one of the finest whist players in London, and to make a handsome income by his play. He had ridden in the Balaclava charge, was a favourite everywhere, and, albeit no genius, was much cleverer than his friend and school-fellow, George Kirkbank. They had been at Eton together, had both made love to the lively Georgie, and had been inseparables for the last thirty years.
‘Couldn’t get on without Delville,’ said Sir George; ‘dooced smart fellow, sir. Knows the ropes; and does all the thinking for both of us.’
And now they were fairly started, and the team fell into a rattling pace, with the road pretty clear before them. Hyde Park was one umbrageous darkness, edged by long lines of golden light. Coolness and silence enfolded all things in the summer midnight, and Lesbia, not prone to romance, sank into a dreamy state of mind, as she leaned back in her seat and watched the shadowy trees glide by, the long vista of lamps and verdure in front of her. She was glad that no one talked to her, for talk of any kind must have broken the spell. Don Gomez sat like a statue in his place behind her. From Lady Kirkbank, the loquacious, came a gentle sound of snoring, a subdued, ladylike snore, breathed softly at intervals, like a sigh. Mr. Smithson had his team, and his own thoughts, too, for occupation — thoughts which to-night were not altogether pleasant.
At the back of the coach Mrs. Mostyn was descanting on the evolution of the nautilus, and the relationship of protoplasm and humanity, to Colonel Delville, who sat smiling placidly behind an immense cigar, and accepted the most stupendous facts and the most appalling theories with a friendly little nod of his handsome head.
Mr. Mostyn frankly slept, as it was his custom to do upon all convenient occasions. He called it recuperating.
‘Frank ought to be delightfully fresh, for he recuperated all the way down,’ said his wife, when they alighted in the dewy garden at Twickenham, in front of the lamp-lit portico.
‘I wouldn’t have minded his recuperating if he hadn’t snored so abominably,’ remarked Colonel Delville.
It was nearly one o’clock, and the ball had thinned a little, which made it all the better for those who remained. Mr. Smithson’s orders had been given two days ago, and the very best of the waiters had been told off for his especial service. The ladies went upstairs to take off their wrappings and mufflings, and Lesbia emerged dazzling from her brown velvet Newmarket, while Lady Kirkbank, bending closely over the looking-glass, like a witch over a caldron, repaired her complexion with cotton wool.
They went through the conservatory to the octagon dining-room, where the supper was ready, a special supper, on a table by a window, a table laden with exotics and brilliant with glass and silver. The supper was, of course, perfect in its way. Mr. Smithson’s chef had been down to see about it, and Mr. Smithson’s own particular champagne and the claret grown in his own particular clos in the Gironde, had been sent down for the feast. No common cuisine, no common wine could be good enough; and yet there was a day when the cheapest gargote in Belleville or Montmartre was good enough for Mr. Smithson. There had been days on which he did not dine at all, and when the fumes of a gibelotte steaming from a workman’s restaurant made his mouth water.
The supper was all life and gaiety. Everyone was hungry and thirsty, and freshioned by the drive, except Lesbia. She was singularly silent, ate hardly anything, but drank three or four glasses of champagne.
Don Gomez was not a great talker. He had the air of a prince of the blood royal, who expects other people to talk and to keep him amused, But the little he said was to the point. He had a fine baritone, very low and subdued, and had a languor which was almost insolent, but not without its charm. There was an air of originality about the manner and the man.
He was the typical rastaquouère, a man of finished manners, and unknown antecedents, a foreigner, apparently rich, obviously accomplished, but with that indefinable air which bespeaks the adventurer; and which gives society as fair a warning as if the man wore a placard on his shoulder with the word cave.
But to Lesbia this Spaniard was the first really interesting man she had met since she saw John Hammond; and her interest in him was much more vivid than her interest in Hammond had been at the beginning of their acquaintance. That pale face, with its tint of old ivory, those thin, finely-cut lips, indicative of diabolical craft, could she but read aright, those unfathomable eyes, touched her fancy as it had never yet been touched, awoke within her that latent vein of romance, self-abnegation, supreme foolishness, which lurks in the nature of every woman, be she chaste as ice and pure as snow.
The supper was long. It was past two o’clock, and the ballroom was thinly occupied, when Mr. Smithson’s party went there.
‘You won’t dance to-night, I suppose?’ said Smithson, as Lesbia and he went slowly down the room arm in arm. It was in a pause between two waltzes. The wide window at the end was opened to the summer night, and the room was delightfully cool. ‘You must be horribly tired?’
‘I am not in the least tired, and I mean to waltz, if anyone will ask me,’ replied Lesbia, decisively.
‘I ought to have asked you to dance, and then it would have been the other way,’ said Smithson, with a touch of acrimony. ‘Surely you have dancing enough in town, and you might be obliging for once in a way, and come and sit with me in the garden, and listen to the nightingales.’
‘There are no nightingales after June. There is the Manola,’ as the band struck up, ‘my very favourite waltz.’
Don Gomez was at her elbow at this moment
‘May I have the honour of this waltz with you, Lady Lesbia?’ he asked; and then with a serio-comic glance at his stoutish friend, ‘I don’t think Smithson waltzes?’
‘I have been told that nobody can waltz who has been born on this side of the Pyrenees,’ answered Lesbia, withdrawing her arm from her lover’s, and slipping, it through the Spaniard’s, with the air of a slave who obeys a master.
Smithson looked daggers, and retired to a corner of the room glowering. Were a man twenty-two times millionaire, like the Parisian Rothschild, he could not find armour against the poisoned arrows of jealousy. Don Gomez possessed many of those accomplishments which make men dangerous, but as a dancer he was hors ligne; and Horace Smithson knew that there is no surer road to a girl’s fancy than the magic circle of a waltz.
Those two were floating round the room in the old slow legato step, which recalled to Smithson the picture of a still more spacious room in an island under the Southern Cross — the blue water of the bay shining yonder under the starlight of the tropics, fire-flies gleaming and flashing in the foliage beyond the open windows, fire-flies flashing amidst the gauzy draperies of the dancers, and this same Gomez revolving with the same slow languid grace, his arm encircling the svelte figure of a woman whose southern beauty outshone Lesbia’s blonde English loveliness as the tropical stars outshine the lamps that light our colder skies. Yes, every detail of the scene flashed back into his mind, as if a curtain had been suddenly plucked back from a long-hidden picture. The Cuban’s tall slim figure, the head gently bent towards his partner’s head, as at this moment, and those dark eyes looking up at him, intoxicated with that nameless, indefinable fascination which it is the lot of some men to exercise.
‘He robbed me of her!’ thought Smithson, gloomily. ‘Will he rob me of this one too? Surely not! Havana is Havana — and this one is not a Creole. If I cannot trust that lovely piece of marble, there is no woman on earth to be trusted.’
He turned his back upon the dancers, and went out into the garden. His soul was wrung with jealousy, yet he could watch no longer. There was too much pain — there were too many bitter memories of shame, and loss, and ignominy evoked by that infernal picture. If he had been free he would have asserted his authority as Lesbia’s future husband; he would have taken her away from the Orleans; he would have told her plainly and frankly that Don Gomez was no fit person for her to know; and he would have so planned that they two should never meet again. But Horace Smithson was not free. He was bound hand and foot by those fetters which the chain of past events had forged — stern facts which the man himself may forget, or try to forget, but which other people never forget. There is generally some dark spot in the history of such men as Smithson — men who climb the giddiest heights of this world with that desperate rapidity which implies many a perilous leap from crag to crag, many a moraine skimmed over, and many an awful gulf spanned by a hair-breadth bridge. Mr. Smithson’s history was not without such spots; and the darkest of all had relation to his career in Cuba. The story had been known by very few — perhaps completely known only by one man; and that man was Gomez de Montesma.
For the last fifteen years the most fervent desire of Horace Smithson’s heart had been the hope that tropical nature, in any one of her various disagreeable forms, would be obliging enough to make an end of Gomez. But the forces of nature had not worked on Mr. Smithson’s side. No loathsome leprosy had eaten his enemy’s flesh; neither cayman nor crocodile, neither Juba snake nor poisonous spider had marked him for its prey. The tropical sun had left him unsmitten. He had lived and he had prospered; and he was here, like a guilty conscience incarnate, to spoil Horace Smithson’s peace.
‘I must be diplomatic,’ Smithson said to himself, as he walked up and down an avenue of Irish yews, in a solitary part of the grounds, smoking his cigarette, and hearing the music swell and sink in the distance. ‘I will give her a hint as to that man’s character, and I will keep them apart as much as I can. But if he forces himself upon me there is no help for it. I cannot afford to be uncivil to him.’
‘Cannot afford’ in this instance meant ‘dare not,’ and Horace Smithson’s thoughts as he paced the yew-tree walk were full of gloom.
During that long meditation he made up his mind on one point, namely, that, let him suffer what pangs he might, he must not betray his jealousy. To do that would be to lower himself in Lesbia’s eyes, and to play into his rival’s hand; for a jealous man is almost always contemptible in the sight of his mistress. He would carry himself as if he were sure of her fidelity; and this very confidence, with a woman of honour, a girl reared as Lesbia had been reared, would render it impossible for her to betray him. He would show himself high-minded, confident, generous, chivalrous, even; and he would trust to chance for the issue. Chance were Mr. Smithson’s only idea of Divinity; and Chance had hitherto been kind to him. There had been dark hours in his life, but the darkness had not lasted long; and the lucky accidents of his career had been of a nature to beguile him into the belief that among the favourites of Destiny he stood first and foremost.
While Mr. Smithson mused thus, alone and in the darkness, Montesma and Lady Lesbia were wandering arm in arm in another and lovelier part of the grounds, where golden lights were scattered like Cuban fire-flies among the foliage of seringa and magnolia, arbutus and rhododendron, while at intervals a sudden flush of rosier light was shed over garden and river, as if by enchantment, surprising a couple here and there in the midst of a flirtation which had begun in darkness.
The grounds were lovely in the balmy atmosphere of a July night, the river gliding with mysterious motion under the stars, great masses of gloom darkening the stream with an almost awful look where the woods of Petersham and Ham House cast their dense shadows on the water. Don Gomez and his companion wandered by the river side to a spot where a group of magnolias sheltered them from the open lawn, and where there were some rustic chairs close to the balustrade which protected the parapet. In this spot, which was a kind of island, divided from the rest of the grounds by the intervening road, they found themselves quite alone, and in the midst of a summer stillness which was broken only by the low, lazy ripple of the tide running seawards. The lights of Richmond looked far away, and the little town with its variety of levels had an Italian air in the distance.
From the ballroom, faint and fitful, came the music of a waltz.
‘I’m afraid I’ve brought you too far,’ said Don Gomez.
‘On the contrary, it is a relief to get away from the lights and the people. How delicious this river is! I was brought up on the shores of a lake; but after all a lake is horribly tame. Its limits are always staring one in the face. There is no room for one’s imagination to wander. Now a river like this suggests an infinity of possibilities, drifting on and on and on into undiscovered regions, by ever-varying shores. I feel to-night as if I should like to step into that little boat yonder,’ pointing to a light skiff bobbing gently up and down with the tide, at the bottom of a flight of steps, ‘and let the stream take me wherever it chose.’
‘If I could but go with you,’ said Gomez, in that deep and musical tone which made the commonest words seem melody, ‘I would ask for neither compass nor rudder. What could it matter whither the boat took me? There is no place under the stars which would not be a paradise — with you.’
‘Please don’t make a dreamy aspiration the occasion for a compliment,’ exclaimed Lesbia, lightly. ‘What I said was so silly that I don’t wonder you thought it right to say something just a little sillier. But moonlight and running water have a curious effect upon me; and I, who am the most prosaic among women, become ridiculously sentimental.’
‘I cannot believe that you are prosaic.’
‘I assure you it is perfectly true. I am of the earth, earthy; a woman of the world, in my first season, ambitious, fond of pleasure, vain, proud, exacting, all those things which I am told a woman ought not to be.’
‘You pain me when you so slander yourself; and I shall make it the business of my life to find out how much truth there is in that self-slander. For my own part I do not believe a word of it; but as it is rude to contradict a lady I will only say that I reserve my opinion.’
‘Are you to stay long in England?’ asked Lesbia.
She was leaning against the stone balustrade in a careless attitude, as of one who was weary, her elbow on the stone slab, and her head thrown hack against her arm. The white satin gown, moulded to her figure, had a statuesque air, and she looked like a marble statue in the dim light, every line of the graceful form expressive of repose.
‘That will depend. I am not particularly fond of London. A very little of your English Babylon satisfies me, in a general way; but there are conditions which might make England enchanting. Where do you go at the end of the season?’
‘First to Goodwood, and then to Cowes. Mr. Smithson is so kind as to place his yacht at Lady Kirkbank’s disposal, and I am to be her guest on board the Cayman, just as I am in Arlington Street.’
‘The Cayman! That name is a reminiscence of Mr. Smithson’s South American travels.’
‘No doubt! Was he long in South America?’
‘Three or four years.’
‘But not in Cuba all that time, I suppose?’
‘He had business relations with Cuba all that time, and oscillated between our island and the main. He was rather fortunate in his little adventures with us — made almost as much money as General Tacon, of blessed memory. But I dare say Smithson has told you all his adventures in that part of the world.’
‘No, he very rarely talks about his travels: and I am not particularly interested in commercial speculations. There is always so much to think of and talk about in the business of the moment. Are you fond of Cuba?’
‘Not passionately. I always feel as if I were an exile there, and yet one of my ancestors was with Columbus when be discovered the island, and my race were among the earliest settlers. My family has given three Captain-generals to Cuba: but I cannot forget that I belong to an older world, and have forfeited that which ought to have been a brilliant place in Europe for the luxurious obscurity of a colony.’
‘But you must be attached to a place in which your family have lived for so many generations?’
‘I like the stars and the sea, the mountains and savannas, the tropical vegetation, and the dreamy, half-oriental life; but at best it is a kind of stagnation, and after a residence of a few months in the island of my birth I generally spread my wings for the wider world of the old continent or the new.’
‘You must have travelled so much,’ said Lesbia, with a sigh. ‘I have been nowhere and seen nothing. I feel like a child who has been shut up in a nursery all its life, and knows of no world beyond four walls.’
‘Not to travel is not to live,’ said Don Gomez.
‘I am to be in Italy next November, I believe,’ said Lesbia, not caring to own that this Italian trip was to be her honeymoon.
‘Italy!’ exclaimed the Spaniard, contemptuously. ‘Once the finishing school of the English nobility; now the happy hunting-ground of the Cockney tourist and the prosperous Yankee. All the poetry of Italy has been dried up, and the whole country vulgarised. If you want romance in the old world go to Spain; in the new, try Peru or Brazil, Mexico or California.’
‘I am afraid I am not adventurous enough to go so far.’
‘No: women cling to beaten tracks.’
‘We obey our masters,’ answered Lesbia, meekly.
‘Ah, I forgot. You are to have a master — and soon. I heard as much before I saw you to-night.’
Lesbia half rose, as if to leave this cool retreat above the rippling tide.
‘Yes, it is all settled,’ she said; ‘and now I think I must go back. Lady Kirkbank will be wondering what has become of me.’
‘Let her wonder a little longer,’ said Don Gomez. ‘Why should we hurry away from this delightful spot? Why break the spell of — the river? Life has so few moments of perfect contentment. If this is one with you — as it is with me — let us make the most of it. Lady Lesbia, do you see those weeds yonder, drifting with the tide, drifting side by side, touching as they drift? They have met heaven knows how, and will part heaven knows where, on their way to the sea; but they let themselves go with the tide. We have met like those poor weeds. Don’t let us part till the tide parts us.’
Lesbia gave a little sigh, and submitted. She had talked of women obeying their masters; and the implication was that she meant to obey Mr. Smithson. But there is a fate in these things; and the man who was to be her master, whose lightest breath was to sway her, whose lightest look was to rule her, was here at her side in the silence of the summer night.
They talked long, but of indifferent subjects; and their talk might have been heard by every member of the Orleans Club, and no harm done. Yet words and phrases count for very little in such a case. It is the tone, it is the melody of a voice, it is the magic of the hour that tells.
The tide came, in the person of Mr. Smithson, and parted these two weeds that were drifting towards the great mysterious ocean of fate.
‘I have been hunting for you everywhere,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘If you want another waltz, Lady Lesbia, you had better take the next. I believe it is to be the last. At any rate our party are clamouring to be driven home. I found poor Lady Kirkbank fast asleep in a corner of the drawing-room.’
‘Will you give me that last waltz?’ asked Don Gomez.
Lady Lesbia felt that the long-suffering Smithson had endured enough. Womanly instinct constrained her to refuse that final waltz: but it seemed to her as if she were making a tremendous sacrifice in so doing. And yet she had waltzed to her heart’s content during the season that was waning, and knew all the waltzes played by all the fashionable bands. She gave a little sigh, as she said —
‘No, I must not indulge myself. I must go and take care of Lady Kirkbank.’
Mr. Smithson offered his arm, and she took it and went away with him, leaving Don Gomez to follow at his leisure. There would be some delay no doubt before the drag started. The lamps had gone out among the foliage, and the stars were waning a little, and there was a faint cold light creeping over the garden which meant the advent of morning. Don Gomez strolled towards the lighted house, smoking a cigarette.
‘She is very lovely, and she is — well — not quite spoiled by her entourage, and they tell me she is an heiress — sure to inherit a fine fortune from some ancient grandmother, buried alive in Westmoreland,’ he mused. ‘What a splendid opportunity it would be if — if the business could be arranged on the square. But as it is — well — as it is there is the chance of an adventure; and when did a Montesma ever avoid an adventure, although there were dagger or poison lurking in the background? And here there is neither poison nor steel, only a lovely woman, and an infatuated stockbroker, about whom I know enough to disgrace and ruin an archbishop. Poor Smithson! How very unlucky that I should happen to come across your pathway in the heyday of your latest love affair. We have had our little adventures in that line already, and we have measured swords together, metaphorically, before to-night. When it comes to a question of actual swords my Smithson declines. Pas si bête.’
A honeymoon among lakes and mountains, amidst the gorgeous confusion of Borrowdale, in a little world of wild, strange loveliness, shut in and isolated from the prosaic outer world by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathara — a world of one’s own, as it were, a world steeped in romance and poetry, dear to the souls of poets. There are many such honeymoons every summer; indeed, the mountain paths, the waterfalls and lakes swarm with happy lovers; and this land of hills and waters seems to have been made expressly for honeymoon travellers; yet never went truer lovers wandering by lake and torrent, by hill and valley, than those two whose brief honeymoon was now drawing to a close.
It was altogether a magical time for Mary, this dawn of a new life. The immensity of her happiness almost frightened her. She could hardly believe in it, or trust in its continuance.
‘Am I really, really, really your wife?’ she asked on their last day, bending down to speak to her husband, as he led her pony up the rough ways of Skiddaw. ‘It is all so dreadfully like a dream.’
‘Thank God, it is the very truth,’ answered Lord Hartfield, looking fondly at the fresh young face, brightened by the summer wind, which faintly stirred the auburn hair under the neat little hat.
‘And am I actually a Countess? I don’t care about it one little bit, you know, except as a stupendous joke. If you were to tell me that you had been only making fun of poor grandmother and me, and that those diamonds are glass, and you only plain John Hammond, it wouldn’t make the faintest difference. Indeed, it would be a weight off my mind. It is an awfully oppressive thing to be a Countess.’
‘I’m sorry I cannot relieve you of the burden. The law of the land has made you Lady Hartfield; and I hope you are preparing your mind for the duties of your position.’
‘It is very dreadful,’ sighed Mary. ‘If her ladyship were as well and as active as she was when first you came to Fellside, she could have helped me; but now there will be no one, except you. And you will help me, won’t you Jack?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘My own true Jack,’ with a little fervent squeeze of his sunburnt hand. ‘In society I suppose I shall have to call you Hartfield. “Hartfield, please ring the bell.” “Give me a footstool, Hartfield.” How odd it sounds. I shall be blurting out the old dear name.’
‘I don’t think it will much matter. It will pass for one of Lady Hartfield’s little ways. Every woman is supposed to have little ways, don’t you know. One has a little way of dropping her friends; another has a little way of not paying her dressmaker; another’s little way is to take too much champagne. I hope Lady Hartfield’s little way will be her devotion to her husband.’
‘I’m afraid I shall end by being a nuisance to you, for I shall love you ridiculously,’ answered Mary, gaily; ‘and from what you have told me about society, it seems to me that there can be nothing so unfashionable as an affectionate wife. Will you mind my being quite out of fashion, Jack?’
‘I should very much object to your being in the fashion.’
‘Then I am happy. I don’t think it is in my nature to become a woman of fashion; although I have cured myself, for your sake, of being a hoyden. I had so schooled myself for what I thought our new life was to be; so trained myself to be a managing economical wife, that I feel quite at sea now that I am to be mistress of a house in Grosvenor Square and a place in Kent. Still, I will bear with it all; yes, even endure the weight of those diamonds for your sake.’
She laughed, and he laughed. They were quite alone among the hills — hardy mountaineers both — and they could be as foolish as they liked. She rested her head upon his shoulder, and he and she and the pony made one as they climbed the hill, close together.
‘Our last day,’ sighed Mary, as they went down again, after a couple of blissful hours in that wild world between earth and sky. ‘I shall be glad to go back to poor grandmother, who must be sadly lonely; but it is so sweet to be quite alone with you.’
They left the Lodore Hotel in an open carriage, after luncheon next day, and posted to Fellside, where they arrived just in time to assist at Lady Maulevrier’s afternoon tea. She received them both with warm affection, and made Hartfield sit close beside her sofa; and every now and then, in the pauses of their talk, she laid her wasted and too delicate fingers upon the young man’s strong brown hand, with a caressing gesture.
‘You can never know how sweet it is to me to be able to love you,’ she said tenderly. ‘You can never know how my heart yearned to you from the very first, and how hard it was to keep myself in check and not be too kind to you. Oh, Hartfield, you should have told me the truth. You should not have come here under false colours.’
‘Should I not, Lady Maulevrier? It was my only chance of being loved for my own sake; or, at least of knowing that I was so loved. If I had come with my rank and my fortune in my hand, as it were — one of the good matches of the year — what security could I ever have felt in the disinterested love of the girl who chose me? As plain John Hammond I wooed and was rejected; as plain John Hammond I wooed and won; and the prize which I so won is a pearl above price. Not for worlds, were the last year to be lived over again, would I have one day of my life altered.’
‘Well, I suppose I ought to be satisfied, I wanted you for Lesbia, and I have got you for Mary. Best of all, I have got you for myself. Ronald Hollister’s son is mine; he is of my kin; he belongs to me; he will not forsake me in life; he will be near me, God grant, when I die.’
‘Dear Lady Maulevrier, as far as in me lies, I will be to you as a son,’ said Lord Hartfield, very solemnly, stooping to kiss her hand.
Mary came away from her tea-table to embrace her grandmother.
‘It makes me so happy to have won a little of your regard,’ she murmured, ‘and to know that I have married a man whom you can love.’
‘Of course you have heard of Lesbia’s engagement?’ Lady Maulevrier said presently, when they were taking their tea.
‘Maulevrier wrote to us about it.’
‘To us.’ How nice it sounded, thought Mary, as if they were a firm, and a letter written to one was written to both.
‘And do you know this Mr. Smithson?’
‘Not intimately. I have met him at the Carlton.’
‘I am told that he is very much esteemed by your party, and that he is very likely to get a peerage when this Ministry goes out of office.’
‘That is not improbable. Peerages are to be had if a man is rich enough; and Smithson is supposed to be inordinately rich.’
‘I hope he has character as well as money,’ said Lady Maulevrier, gravely. ‘But do you think a man can become inordinately rich in a short time, with unblemished honour?’
‘We are told that nothing is impossible,’ answered Hartfield. ‘Faith can remove a mountain; only one does not often see it done. However, I believe Mr. Smithson’s character is fairly good as millionaires go. We do not inquire too closely into these things nowadays.’
Lady Maulevrier sighed and held her peace. She remembered the day when she had protested vehemently, passionately, against Lesbia’s marriage with a poor man. And now she had an unhappy feeling about Mr. Smithson’s wealth, a doubt, a dread that all might not be well with those millions, that some portion of that golden tide might flow from impure sources. She had lived remote from the world, but she had read the papers diligently, and she knew how often the splendour of commercial wealth has been suddenly obscured behind a black cloud of obloquy. She could not rejoice heartily at the idea of Lesbia’s engagement.
‘I am to see the man early in August,’ she said, as if she were talking of a butler. ‘I hope I may like him. Lady Kirkbank tells me it is a brilliant marriage, and I must take her word. What can I do for my granddaughter — a useless log — a prisoner in two rooms?’
‘It is very hard,’ murmured Mary, tenderly, ‘but I do not see any reason why Lesbia should not be happy. She likes a brilliant life; and Mr. Smithson can give her as much gaiety and variety as she can possibly desire. And, after all, yachts, and horses, and villas, and diamonds are nice things.’
‘They are the things for which half the world is ready to cheat or murder the other half,’ said Lady Maulevrier, bitterly. She had told herself long ago that wealth was power, and she had sacrificed many things, her own peace, her own conscience among them, in order that her children and grandchildren should be rich; and, knowing this, she felt it ill became her to be scrupulous, and to inquire too, closely as to the sources of Mr. Smithson’s wealth. He was rich, and the world had no fault to find with him. He had attended the last levée. He went into reputable society. And he could give Lesbia all those things which the world calls good.
Fr?ulein Müller had packed her heavy old German trunks, and had gone back to the Heimath, laden with presents of all kinds from Lady Maulevrier; so Mary and her husband felt as if Fellside was really their own. They dined with her ladyship, and left her for the night an hour after dinner; and then they went down to the gardens, and roamed about in the twilight, and talked, and talked, and talked, as only true lovers can talk, be they Strephon and Daphne in life’s glad morning, or grey-haired Darby and Joan; and lastly they went down to the hike, and rowed about in the moonlight, and talked of King Arthur’s death, and of that mystic sword, Excalibur, ‘wrought by the lonely maiden of the lake.’
They spent three happy days in wandering about the neighbourhood, revisiting in the delicious freedom of their wedded life those spots which they had seen together, when Mary was still in bondage, and the eye of propriety, as represented by Miss Müller, was always upon her. Now they were free to go where they pleased — to linger where they liked — they belonged to each other, and were under no other dominion.
The dogcart, James Steadman’s dogcart, which he had rarely used during the last six months, was put in requisition and Lord Hartfield drove his wife about the country. They went to the Langdale Pikes, and to Dungeon Ghyll; and, standing beside the waterfall, Mary told her husband how miserable she had felt on that very spot a little less than a year ago, when she believed that he thought her plain and altogether horrid. Whereupon he had to console her with many kisses and sweet words, for the bygone pain on her part, the neglect of his.
‘I was a wretch,’ he said, ‘blind, besotted, imbecile.’
‘No, no, no. Lesbia is very lovely — and I could not expect you would care for me till she was gone away. How glad I am that she went,’ added Mary, na?vely.
The sky, which had been cloudless all day, began to darken as Lord Hartfield drove back to Fellside, and Mary drew a little closer to the driver’s elbow, as if for shelter from an impending tempest.
‘You have no waterproof, of course,’ he said, looking down at her, as the first big drops of a thunder shower dashed upon the splash-board. ‘No young woman in the Lake country would think of being without a waterproof.’
Mary was duly provided, and with the help of the groom put herself into a snug little tartan Inverness, while Hartfield sent the cart spinning along twelve miles an hour.
They were at Fellside before the storm developed its full power, but the sky was leaden, the landscape dull and blotted, the atmosphere heavy and stifling. The thunder grumbled hoarsely, far away yonder in the wild gorges of Borrowdale; and Mary and her husband made up their minds that the tempest would come before midnight.
Lady Maulevrier was suffering from the condition of the atmosphere. She had gone to bed, prostrate with a neuralgic headache, and had given orders that no one but her maid should go near her. So Lord Hartfield and his wife dined by themselves, in the room where Mary had eaten so many uninteresting dinners tête-à-tête with Fr?ulein; and in spite of the storm which howled, pelted, and lightened every now and then, Mary felt as if she were in Paradise.
There was no chance of going out after dinner. The lake looked like a pool of ink, the mountains were monsters of dark and threatening aspect, the rain rattled against the windows, and ran from the verandah in miniature water-spouts. There was nothing to do but stay in doors, in the sultry, dusky house.
‘Let us go to my boudoir,’ said Mary. ‘Let me enjoy the full privilege of having a boudoir — my very own room. Wasn’t it too good of grandmother to have it made so smart for me?’
‘Nothing can be too good for my Mary,’ answered her husband, still in the doting stage, ‘but it was very nice of her ladyship — and the room is charming.’
Delightful as the new boudoir might be, they dawdled in the picture gallery, that long corridor on which all the upper rooms opened, and at one end of which was the door of Lady Maulevrier’s bedroom, at right angles with that red-cloth door, which was never opened, except to give egress or ingress to James Steadman, who kept the key of it, as if the old part of Fellside House had been an enchanted castle. Lord Hartfield had not forgotten that summer midnight last year, when his meditations were disturbed by a woman’s piercing cry. He thought of it this evening, as Mary and he lowered their voices on drawing near Lady Maulevrier’s door. She was asleep within there now, perhaps, that strange old woman; and at any moment an awful shriek, as of a soul in mortal agony, might startle them in the midst of their bliss.
The lamps were lighted below; but this upper part of the house was wrapped in the dull grey twilight of a stormy evening. A single lamp burned dimly at the further end of the corridor, and all the rest was shadow.
Mary and her husband walked up and down, talking in subdued tones. He was explaining the necessity of his being in London next week, and promising to come back to Fellside directly his business at the House was over.
‘It will be delightful to read your speeches,’ said Mary; ‘but I am silly and selfish enough to wish you were a country squire, with no business in London. And yet I don’t wish that either, for I am intensely proud of you.’
‘And some day, before we are much older, you will sit in your robes in the peeress’s gallery.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ cried Mary. ‘I should make a fool of myself, somehow. I should look like a housemaid in borrowed plumes. Remember, I have no Anstand— I have been told so all my life.’
‘You will be one of the prettiest peeresses who ever sat in that gallery, and the purest, and truest, and dearest,’ protested her lover-husband.
‘Oh, if I am good enough for you, I am satisfied. I married you, and not the House of Lords. But I am afraid your friends will all say, “Hartfield, why in heaven’s name did you marry that uncultivated person?” Look!’
She stopped suddenly, with her hand on her husband’s arm. It was growing momentarily darker in the corridor. They were at the end near the lamp, and that other end by Lady Maulevrier’s door was in deeper darkness, yet not too dark for Lord Hartfield to see what it was to which Mary pointed.
The red-cloth door was open, and a faint glimmer of light showed within. A man was standing in the corridor, a small, shrunken figure, bent and old.
‘It is Steadman’s uncle,’ said Mary ‘Do let me go and speak to him, poor, poor old man.’
‘The madman!’ exclaimed Hartfield. ‘No, Mary; go to your room at once. I’ll get him back to his own den.’
‘But he is not mad — at any rate, he is quite harmless. Let me just say a few words to him. Surely I am safe with you.’
Lord Hartfield was not inclined to dispute that argument; indeed, he felt himself strong enough to protect his wife from all the lunatics in Bedlam. He went towards the end of the corridor, keeping Mary well behind him; but Mary did not mean to lose the opportunity of renewing her acquaintance with Steadman’s uncle.
‘I hope you are better, poor old soul,’ she murmured, gently, lovingly almost, nestling at her husband’s side.
‘What, is it you?’ cried the old man, tremulous with joy.
‘Oh, I have been looking for you — looking — looking — waiting, waiting for you. I have been hoping for you every hour and every minute. Why didn’t you come to me, cruel girl?’
‘I tried with all my might,’ said Mary, ‘but people blocked up the door in the stables, and they wouldn’t let me go to you; and I have been rather busy for the last fortnight,’ added Mary, blushing in the darkness, ‘I— I— am married to this gentleman.’
‘Married! Ah, that is a good thing. He will take care of you, if he is an honest man.’
‘I thought he was an honest man, but he has turned out to be an earl,’ answered Mary, proudly. ‘My husband is Lord Hartfield.’ ‘Hartfield — Hartfield,’ the old man repeated, feebly. ‘Surely I have heard that name before.’
There was no violence in his manner, nothing but imbecility: so Lord Hartfield made up his mind that Mary was right, and that the old man was quite harmless, worthy of all compassion and kindly treatment.
This was the same old man whom he had met on the Fell in the bleak March morning. There was no doubt in his mind about that, although he could hardly see the man’s face in the shadowy corridor.
‘Come,’ said the man, ‘come with me, my dear. You forgot me, but I have not forgotten you. I mean to leave you my fortune. Come with me, and I’ll show you your legacy. It is all for you — every rupee — every jewel.’
This word rupee startled Lord Hartfield. It had a strange sound from the lips of a Westmoreland peasant.
‘Come, child, come!’ said the man impatiently. ‘Come and see what I have left you in my will. I make a new will every day, but I leave everything to you — every will is in your favour; But if you are married you had better have your legacy at once. Your husband is strong enough to take care of you and your fortune.’
‘Poor old man,’ whispered Mary; ‘pray let us humour him.’
It was the usual madman’s fancy, no doubt. Boundless wealth, exalted rank, sanctity, power — these things all belong to the lunatic. He is the lord of creation, and, fed by such fancies, he enjoys flashes of wild happiness in the midst of his woe.
‘Come, come, both of you,’ said the old man, eagerly, breathless with impatience.
He led the way across the sacred threshold, looking back, beckoning to them with his wasted old hand, and Mary for the first time in her life entered that house which had seemed to her from her very childhood as a temple of silence and mystery. The passage was dimly lighted by a little lamp on a bracket. The old man crept along stealthily, looking back, with a face full of cunning, till he came to a broad landing, from which an old staircase, with massive oak banisters, led down to the square hall below. The ceilings were low, the passages were narrow. All things in the house were curiously different from that spacious mansion which Lady Maulevrier had built for herself.
A door on the landing stood ajar. The old man pushed it open and went in, followed by Mary and her husband.
They both expected to see a room humble almost to poverty — an iron bedstead, perhaps, and such furniture as the under servants in a nobleman’s household are privileged to enjoy. Both were alike surprised at the luxury of the apartment they entered, and which was evidently reserved exclusively for Steadman’s uncle.
It was a sitting-room. The furniture was old-fashioned, but almost as handsome as any in Lady Maulevrier’s apartments. There was a large sofa of most comfortable shape, covered with dark red velvet, and furnished with pillows and foot rugs, which would have satisfied a Sybarite of the first water. Beside the sofa stood a hookah, with all appliances in the Oriental fashion; and half a dozen long cherry-wood pipes neatly arranged above the mantelpiece showed that Mr. Steadman’s uncle was a smoker of a luxurious type.
In the centre of the room stood a large writing table, with a case of pigeon-holes at the back, a table which would not have disgraced a Prime Minister’s study. A pair of wax candles, in tall silver candlesticks, lighted this table, which was littered with papers, in a wild confusion that too plainly indicated the condition of the owner’s mind. The oak floor was covered with Persian prayer rugs, old and faded, but of the richest quality. The window curtains were dark red velvet; and through an open doorway Mary and her husband saw a corresponding luxury in the arrangements of the adjoining bedroom.
The whole thing seemed wild and strange as a fairy tale. The weird and wizened old man, grinning and nodding his head at them. The handsome room, rich with dark, subdued colour, in the dim light of four wax candles, two on the table, two on the mantelpiece. The perfume of stephanotis and tea-roses, blended faintly with the all-pervading odour of latakia and Turkish attar. All was alike strange, bearing in mind that this old man was a recipient of Lady Maulevrier’s charity, a hanger-on upon a confidential servant, who might be supposed to be generously treated if he had the run of his teeth and the shelter of a decent garret. Verily, there was something regal in such hospitality as this, accorded to a pauper lunatic.
Where was Steadman, the alert, the watchful, all this time? Mary wondered. They had met no one. The house was as mute as if it were under the spell of a magician. It was like that awful chamber in the Arabian story, where the young man found the magic horse, and started on his fatal journey. Mary felt as if here, too, there, must be peril; here, too, fate was working.
The old man went to the writing table, pushed aside the papers, and then stooped down and turned a mysterious handle or winch under the knee-hole, and the writing-desk moved slowly on one side, while the pigeon-holes sank, and a deep well full of secret drawers was laid open.
From one of these secret drawers the old man took a bunch of keys, nodding, chuckling, muttering to himself as he groped for them with tremulous hand.
‘Steadman is uncommonly clever — thinks he knows everything — but he doesn’t know the trick of this table. I could hide a regiment of Sepoys in this table, my dear. Well, well, perhaps not Sepoys — too big, too big — but I could hide all the State papers of the Presidency. There are drawers enough for that.’
Hartfield watched him intently, with thoughtful brow. There was a mystery here, a mystery of the deepest dye; and it was for him — it must needs be his task, welcome or unwelcome, to unravel it.
This was the Maulevrier skeleton.
‘Now, come with me,’ said the old man, clutching Mary’s wrist, and drawing her towards the half-open door leading into the bedroom.
She had a feeling of shrinking, for there was something uncanny about the old man, something that might be life or death, might belong to this world or the next; but she had no fear. In the first place, she was courageous by nature, and in the second her husband was with her, a tower of strength, and she could know no fear while he was at her side.
The strange old man led the way across his bedroom to an inner chamber, oak pannelled, with very little furniture, but holding much treasure in the shape of trunks, portmanteaux — all very old and dusty — and two large wooden cases, banded with iron.
Before one of these cases the man knelt down, and applied a key to the padlock which fastened it. He gave the candle to Lord Hartfield to hold, and then opened the box. It seemed to be full of books, which he began to remove, heaping them on the floor beside him; and it was not till he had cleared away a layer of dingy volumes that he came to a large metal strong box, so heavy that he could not lift it out of the chest.
Slowly, tremulously, and with quickened breathing, he unlocked the box where it was, and raised the lid.
‘Look,’ he said eagerly, ‘this is her legacy — this is my little girl’s legacy.’
Lord Hartfield bent down and looked at the old man’s treasure, by the wavering light of the candle; Mary looking over his shoulder, breathless with wonder.
The strong box was divided into compartments. One, and the largest, was filled with rouleaux of coin, packed as closely as possible. The others contained jewels, set and unset — diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires — which flashed back the flickering flame of the candle with glintings of rainbow light.
‘These are all for her — all — all,’ exclaimed the old man. ‘They are worth a prince’s ransom. Those rouleaux are all gold; those gems are priceless. They were the dowry of a princess. But they are hers now — yes, my dear, they are yours — because you spoke sweetly, and smiled prettily, and were very good to a lonely old man — and because you have my mother’s face, dear, a smile that recalls the days of my youth. Lift out the box and take it away with you, if you are strong enough — you, you,’ he said, touching Lord Hartfield. ‘Hide it somewhere — keep it from her. Let no one know — no one except your wife and you must be in the secret.’
‘My dear sir, it is out of the question — impossible that my wife or I should accept one of those coins — or the smallest of those jewels.’
‘Why not, in the devil’s name?’
‘First and foremost, we do not know how you came in possession of them; secondly, we do not know who you are.’
‘They came to me fairly enough — bequeathed to me by one who had the right to leave them. Would you have had all that gold left for an adventurer to wallow in?’
‘You must keep your treasure, sir, however it may have come to you,’ answered Lord Hartfield firmly. ‘My wife cannot take upon herself the burden of a single gold coin — least of all from a stranger. Remember, sir, to us your possession of this wealth — nay, your whole existence — is a mystery.’
‘You want to know who I am?’ said the old man drawing himself up, with a sudden hauteur which was not without dignity, despite his shrunken form and grotesque appearence. ‘Well, sir. I am ——’
He checked himself abruptly, and looked round the room with a scared expression.
‘No, no, no,’ he muttered; ‘caution, caution! They have not done with me yet; she warned me — they are lying in wait; I mustn’t walk into their trap.’ And then turning to Lord Hartfield, he said, haughtily, ‘I shall not condescend to tell you who I am, sir. You must know that I am a gentleman, and that is enough for you. There is my gift to your wife’— pointing to the chest —‘take it or leave it.’
‘I shall leave it, sir, with all due respect.’
A frightful change came over the old man’s face at this determined refusal. His eyes glowered at Lord Hartfield under the heavy scowling brows; his bloodless lips worked convulsively.
‘Do you take me for a thief?’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you afraid to touch my gold — that gold for which men and women sell their souls, blast their lives with shame, and pain, and dishonour, all the world over? Do you stand aloof from it — refuse to touch it, as if it were infected? And you, too, girl! Have you no sense? Are you an idiot?’
‘I can do nothing against my husband’s wish,’ Mary answered, quietly; ‘and, indeed, there is no need for us to take your money. We are rich without it. Please leave that chest to a hospital. It will be ever so much better than giving it to us.’
‘You told me you were going to marry a poor man?’
‘I know. But he cheated me, and turned out to be a rich man. He was a horrid impostor,’ said Mary, drawing closer to her husband, and smiling up at him.
The old man flung down the lid of his strong box, which shut with a sonorous clang. He locked it, and put the key in his pocket.
‘I have done with you.’ he said. ‘You can go your ways, both of you. Fools, fools, fools! The world is peopled with rogues and fools; and, by heaven, I would rather have to do with the rogues!’
He flung himself into an arm-chair, one of the few objects of furniture in the room, and left them to find their way back alone.
‘Good-night, sir,’ said Lord Hartfield; but the old man made no reply. He sat frowning sullenly.
‘Good-night, sir,’ said Mary, in her gentle voice, breathing infinite pity.
‘Good-night, child,’ he growled. ‘I am sorry you have married an ass.’
This was more than Mary could stand, and she was about to reply with some acrimony, when her husband put his hand upon her lips and hurried her away.
On the landing they met Mrs. Steadman, a stout, commonplace person, who always had the same half-frightened look, as of one who lived in the shadow of an abiding terror, obviously cowed and brow beaten by her husband, according to the Fellside household.
At sight of Lord Hartfield and his wife she looked a little more frightened than usual.
‘Goodness gracious, Lady Mary! how ever did you come here?’ she gasped, not yet having quite realised the fact that Mary had been promoted.
‘We came to please Steadman’s uncle — he brought us in here,’ Mary answered, quietly.
‘But where did you find him?’
‘In the corridor — just by her ladyship’s room.’
‘Then he must have taken the key out of Steadman’s pocket, or Steadman must have left it about somewhere,’ muttered Mrs. Steadman, as if explaining the matter to herself, rather than to Mary. ‘My poor husband is not the man he was. And so you met him in the corridor, and he brought you in here. Poor old gentleman! He gets madder and madder every day.’
‘There is method in his madness,’ said Lord Hartfield. ‘He talked very much like sanity just now. Has your husband had the charge of him long?’
Mrs. Steadman answered somewhat confusedly.
‘A goodish time, sir. I can’t quite exactly say — time passes so quiet in a place like this. One hardly keeps count of the years.’
‘Forty years, perhaps?’
Mrs. Steadman blenched under Lord Hartfield’s steadfast look — a look which questioned more searchingly than his words.
‘Forty years,’ she repeated, with a faint laugh. ‘Oh, dear no, sir, not a quarter as long. It isn’t so many years, after all, since Steadman’s poor old uncle went a little queer in his head; and Steadman, having such a quiet home here, and plenty of spare room, made bold to ask her ladyship if he might give the poor old man a home, where he would be in nobody’s way.’
‘And the poor old man seems to have a very luxurious home,’ answered Lord Hartfield. ‘Pray when and where did Mr. Steadman’s uncle learn to smoke a hookah?’
Simple as the question was, it proved too much for Mrs. Steadman. She only shook her head, and faltered some unintelligible reply.
‘Where is your husband?’ asked Lord Hartfield: ‘I should like to have a little talk with him, if he is disengaged.’
‘He is not very well, my lord,’ answered Mrs. Steadman. ‘He has been ailing off and on for the last six months, but I couldn’t get him to see the doctor, or to tell her ladyship that he was in bad health. And about a week ago he broke down altogether, and fell into a kind of drowsy state. He keeps about, and he does his work pretty much the same as usual, but I can see that it’s too much for him. If you like to come downstairs I can let you through the lower door into the hall; and if he should have woke up since I have left him he’ll be at your lordship’s service. But I’d rather not wake him out of his sleep.’
‘There is no occasion. What I have to say will keep till to-morrow.’
Lord Hartfield and his wife followed Mrs. Steadman downstairs to the low dark hall, where an old eight-day clock ticked with hoarse and solemn heat, and a fine stag’s head over each doorway gave evidence of some former Haselden’s sporting tastes. The door of a small panelled parlour stood half-way open; and within the room Lord Hartfield saw James Steadman asleep in an arm-chair by the fire, which burned as brightly as if it had been Christmas time.
‘He was so chilly and shivery this afternoon that I was obliged to light a fire,’ said Mrs. Steadman.
‘He seems to be sleeping heavily,’ said Hartfield. ‘Don’t awaken him. I’ll see him to-morrow morning before I go to London.’
‘He sleeps half the day just as heavy as that, my lord,’ said the wife, with a troubled air. ‘I don’t think it can be right.’
‘I don’t think so either,’ answered Lord Hartfield. ‘You had better call in the doctor.’
‘I will, my lord, to-morrow morning. James will be angry with me, I daresay; but I must take upon myself to do it without his leave.’
She led the way along a passage corresponding with the one above, and unlocked a door opening into a lobby near the billiard-room.
‘Come, Molly, see if you can beat me at a fifty game,’ said Lord Hartfield, with the air of a man who wants to shake off the impression of some dominant idea.
‘Of course you will annihilate me, but it will be a relief to play,’ answered Mary. ‘That strange old man has given me a shock. Everything about his surroundings is so different from what I expected. And how could an uncle of Steadman’s come by all that money — and those jewels — if they were jewels, and not bits of glass which the poor old thing has chopped up, in order to delude himself with an imaginary treasure?’
‘I do not think they are bits of glass, Molly.’
‘They sparkled tremendously — almost as much as my — our — the family diamonds,’ said Mary, puzzled how to describe that property which she held in right of her position as countess regnant; ‘but if they are real jewels, and all those rouleaux real money, how could Steadman’s uncle become possessed of such wealth?’
‘How, indeed?’ said Lord Hartfield, choosing his cue
Goodwood had come and gone, a brief bright season of loss and gain, fine gowns, flirtation, lobster en mayonaise, champagne, sunshine, dust, glare, babble of many voices, successes, failures, triumphs, humiliations. A very pretty picture to contemplate from the outside, this little world in holiday clothes, framed in greenery! but just on the Brocken, where the nicest girl among the dancers had the unpleasant peculiarity of dropping a little red mouse out of her mouth — so too here under different forms there were red mice dropping about among the company. Here a hint of coming insolvency; there a whisper of a threatened divorce suit, staved off for awhile, compromises, family secrets, little difficulties everywhere; betrothed couples smilingly accepting congratulations, who should never have been affianced were truth and honour the rule of life; forsaken wives pretending to think their husbands models of fidelity; jovial creatures with ruin staring in their faces; households divided and shamming union; almost everybody living above his or her means; and the knowledge that nobody is any better or any happier than his neighbour society’s only fountain of consolation.
Lady Lesbia’s gowns and parasols had been admired, her engagement had furnished an infinity of gossip, and the fact of Montesma’s constant attendance upon her had given zest to the situation, just that flavour of peril and fatality which the soul of society loveth.
‘Is she going to marry them both?’ asked an ancient dowager of the ever-young type.
‘No, dear Lady Sevenoaks, she can only marry one, don’t you know; but the other is nice to go about with; and I believe it is the other she really likes.’
‘It is always the other that a woman likes,’ answered the dowager; ‘I am madly in love with this Peruvian — no, I think you said Cuban — myself. I wish some good-natured creature would present him to me. If you know anybody who knows him, tell them to bring him to my next afternoon — Saturday. But why does —chose—machin— Smithson allow such a handsome hanger-on? After marriage I could understand that he might not be able to help himself; but before marriage a man generally has some kind of authority.’
The world wondered a little, just as Lady Sevenoaks wondered, at Smithson’s complacency in allowing a man so attractive as Montesma to be so much in the society of his future wife, yet even the censorious could but admit that the Cuban’s manner offered no ground for offence. He came to Goodwood ‘on his own hook,’ as society put it: and every man who wears a decent coat and is not a welsher has a right to enjoy the prettiest race-course in England. He spent a considerable part of the day in Lesbia’s company; but since she was the centre of a little crowd all the time, there could be no offence in this. He was a stranger, knowing very few people, and having nothing to do but to amuse himself. Smithson was an old and familiar friend, and was in a measure bound to give him hospitality.
Mr. Smithson had recognised that obligation, but in a somewhat sparing manner. There were a dozen unoccupied bedchambers in the Park Lane Renaissance villa; but Smithson did not invite his Cuban acquaintance to shift his quarters from the Bristol to Park Lane. He was civil to Don Gomez: but anyone who had taken the trouble to watch and study the conduct and social relations of these two men would have seen that his civility was a forced civility, and that he endured the Spaniard’s society under constraint of some kind.
And now all the world was flocking to Cowes for the regatta, and Lesbia and her chaperon were established on board Mr. Smithson’s yacht, the Cayman; and the captain of the Cayman and all her crew were delivered over to Lesbia to be her slaves and to obey her lightest breath. The Cayman was to lie at anchor off Cowes for the regatta week; and then she was to sail for Hyde, and lie at anchor there for another regatta week; and she was to be a floating-hotel for Lady Lesbia so long as the young lady would condescend to occupy her.
The captain was an altogether exceptional captain, and the crew were a picked crew, ruddy faced, sandy whiskered for the most part, Englishmen all, honest, hardy fellows from between the Nore and the Wash, talking in an honest provincial patois, dashed with sea slang. They were the very pink and pattern of cleanliness, and the Cayman herself from stem to stern was dazzling and spotless to an almost painful degree.
Not content with the existing arrangements of the yacht, which were at once elegant and luxurious, Mr. Smithson had sent down a Bond Street upholsterer to refit the saloon and Lady Lesbia’s cabin. The dark velvet and morocco which suited a masculine occupant would not have harmonised with girlhood and beauty; and Mr. Smithson’s saloon, as originally designed, had something of the air of a tabagie. The Bond Street man stripped away all the velvet and morocco, plucked up the Turkey carpet, draped the scuttle-ports with pale yellow cretonne garnished with orange pompons, subdued the glare of the skylight by a blind of oriental silk, covered the divans with Persian saddlebags, the floor with a delicate Indian matting, and furnished the saloon with all that was most feminine in the way of bamboo chairs and tea-tables, Japanese screens and fans of gorgeous colouring. Here and there against the fluted yellow drapery he fastened a large Rhodes plate; and the thing was done. Lady Lesbia’s cabin was all bamboo and embroidered India muslin. An oval glass, framed in Dresden biscuit, adorned the side, a large white bearskin covered the floor. The berth was pretty enough for the cradle of a duchess’s first baby. Even Lesbia, spoiled by much indulgence and unlimited credit, gave a little cry of pleasure at sight of the nest that had been made ready for her.
‘Really, Mr. Smithson is immensely kind!’ she exclaimed.
‘Smithson is always kind,’ answered Lady Kirkbank, ‘and you don’t half enough appreciate him. He has given me his very own cabin — such a dear little den! There are his cigar boxes and everything lovely on the shelves, and his own particular dressing-case put open for me to use — all the backs of all the brushes repoussé silver, and all the scent-bottles filled expressly for me. If the yacht would only stand quite still, I should think it more delicious than the best house I ever stayed in: only I don’t altogether enjoy that little way it has of gurgling up and down perpetually.’
Mr. Smithson’s chief butler, a German Swiss, and a treasure of intelligence, had come down to take the domestic arrangements of the yacht into his control. The Park Lane chef was also on board, Mr. Smithson’s steward acting as his subordinate. This great man grumbled sorely at the smallness of his surroundings; for the most luxurious yacht was a poor substitute for the spacious kitchens and storerooms and stillrooms of the London mansion. There was a cabin for Lady Kirkbank’s Rilboche and Lady Lesbia’s Kibble, where the two might squabble at their leisure; in a word, everything had been done that forethought could do to make the yacht as perfect a place of sojourn as any floating habitation, from Noah’s Ark to the Orient steamers, had ever been made.
It was between four and five upon a delicious July afternoon that Lady Kirkbank and her charge came on board. The maids and the luggage had been sent a day in advance, so that everything might be in its place, and the empty boxes all stowed away, before the ladies arrived. They had nothing to do but walk on board and fling themselves into the low luxurious chairs ready for them on the deck, a little wearied by the heat and dust of a railway journey, and with that delicious sense of languid indifference to all the cares of life which seems to be in the very atmosphere of a perfect summer afternoon.
A striped awning covered the deck, and great baskets of roses — pink, and red, and yellow — were placed about here and there. Tea was ready on a low table, a swinging brass kettle hissing merrily, with an air of supreme homeliness.
Mr. Smithson had accompanied his fiancée from town, and now sat reading the Globe, and meekly waiting for his tea, while Lesbia took a languid survey of the shore and the flotilla of boats, little and big, and while Lady Kirkbank rhapsodised about the yacht, praising everything, and calling everything by a wrong name. He was to be their guest all day, and every day. They were to have enough of him, as Lesbia had observed to her chaperon, with a spice of discontent, not quite so delighted with the arrangement as her faithful swain. To him the idea was rapture.
‘You have contrived somehow to keep me very much at a distance hitherto,’ he told Lesbia, ‘and I feel sometimes as if we were almost strangers; but a yacht is the best place in the world to bring two people together, and a week at Cowes will make us nearer to each other and more to each other than three months in London;’ and Lesbia had said nothing, inwardly revolting at the idea of becoming any nearer and dearer to this man whom she had pledged herself to marry. She was to be his wife — yes, some day — and it was his desire the some day should be soon: but in the interval her dearest privilege was the power to keep him at a distance.
And yet she could not make up her mind to break with him, to say honestly, ‘I never liked you much, and now we are engaged I find myself liking you less and less every day. Save me from the irrevocable wickedness of a loveless marriage. Forgive me, and let me go.’ No, this she could not bring herself to say. She did not like Mr. Smithson, but she valued the position he was able to give her. She wanted to be mistress of that infinite wealth — she could not renounce that right to which she fancied she had been born, her right to be one of the Queens of Society: and the only man who had offered to crown her as queen, to find her a palace and a court, was Horace Smithson. Without Mr. Smithson her first season would have resulted in dire failure. She might perhaps have endured that failure, and been content to abide the chances of a second season, had it not been for Mary’s triumph. But for Mary to be a Countess, and for Lesbia to remain Lesbia Haselden, a nobody, dependent upon the caprices of a grandmother whose means might after all be but limited — no, such a concatenation as that was not to be endured. Lesbia told herself that she could not go back to Fellside to remain there indefinitely, a spinster and a dependent. She had learnt the true value of money; she had found out what the world was like; and it seemed to her that some such person as Mr. Smithson was essential to her existence, just as a butler is a necessity in a house. One may not like the man, but the post must be filled.
Again, if she were to throw over Mr. Smithson, and speculate upon her chances of next year, what hope had she of doing better in her second season than in her first? The horizon was blank. There was no great parti likely to offer himself for competition. She had seen all that the market could produce. Wealthy bachelors, high-born lovers, could not drop from the moon. Lesbia, schooled by Lady Kirkbank, knew her peerage by heart; and she knew that, having missed Lord Hartfield, there was really no one in the Blue Book worth waiting for. Thus, caring only for those things which wealth can buy, she had made up her mind that she could not do without Horace Smithson’s money; and she must therefore needs resign herself to the disagreeable necessity of taking Smithson and his money together. The great auctioneer Fate would not divide the lot.
She told herself that for her a loveless marriage was, after all, no prodigious sacrifice. She had found out that heart made but a small figure in the sum of her life. She could do without love. A year ago she had fancied herself in love with John Hammond. In her seclusion at St. Bees, in the long, dull August days, sauntering up and down by the edge of the sea, in the melancholy sunset hour, she thought that her heart was broken, that life was worthless without the man she loved. She had thought and felt all this, but not strongly enough to urge her to any great effort, not keenly enough to make her burst her chains. She had preferred to suffer this loss than to sacrifice her chances of future aggrandisement. And now she looked back and remembered those sunset walks by the sea, and all her thoughts and feelings in those silent summer hours; and she smiled at herself, half in scorn, half in pity, for her own weakness. How easily she had learned to do without him who at that hour seemed the better part of her existence. A good deal of gaiety and praise, a little mild flirtation at Kirkbank Castle, and lo! the image of her first lover began to grow dim and blurred, like a faded photograph. A season at Cannes, and she was cured. A week in London, and that first love was a thing of the past, a dream from which the dreamer awaketh, forgetting the things that he has dreamt.
Remembering all this she told herself that she had no heart, that love or no love was a question of very little moment, and that the personal qualities of the man whom she chose for a husband mattered nothing to her, provided that his lands and houses and social status came up to her standard of merit. She had seen Mr. Smithson’s houses and lands; and she was distinctly assured that he would in due course be raised to the peerage. She had, therefore, every reason to be satisfied.
Having thus reasoned out the circumstances of her new life, she accepted her fate with a languid grace, which harmonised with her delicate and patrician beauty. Nobody could have for a moment supposed from her manner that she loved Horace Smithson; but nobody had the right to think that she detested him. She accepted all his attentions as a thing of course. The flowers which he strewed beneath her footsteps, the pearls which he melted in her wine — metaphorically speaking — were just ‘good enough’ and no more. This afternoon, when Mr. Smithson asked her how she liked the arrangements of the saloon and cabin, she said she thought they would do very nicely. ‘They would do.’ Nothing more.
‘It is dreadfully small, of course,’ she said, ‘when one is accustomed to rooms: but it is rather amusing to be in a sort of doll’s house, and on deck it is really very nice.’
This was the most Mr. Smithson had for his pains, and he seemed to be content therewith. If a man will marry the prettiest girl of the year he must be satisfied with such scant civility as conscious perfection may give him. We know that Aphrodite was not altogether the most comfortable wife, and that Helen was a cause of trouble.
Mr. Smithson sat in a bamboo chair beside his mistress, and looked ineffably happy when she handed him a cup of tea. Sky and sea were one exquisite azure — the colours of the boats glancing in the sunshine as if they had been jewels; here an emerald rudder, there a gunwale painted with liquid rubies. White sails, white frocks, white ducks made vivid patches of light against the blue. The landscape yonder shone and sparkled as if it had been incandescent. All the world of land and sky and sea was steeped in sunshine. A day on which to do nothing, read nothing, think nothing, only to exist.
While they sat basking in the balmy atmosphere, looking lazily at that bright, almost insupportable picture of blue sea under blue sky, there came the dip of oars, making music, and a sound of coolness with every plash of water.
‘How good it is of somebody to row about, just to give us that nice soothing sound,’ murmured Lesbia.
Lady Kirkbank, with her dear old head thrown back upon the cushion of her luxurious chair, and her dear little cornflower hat just a thought on one side, was sleeping the sleep of the just, and unconsciously revealing the little golden arrangements which gave variety to her front teeth.
The soothing sound came nearer and nearer, close under the Cayman’s quarter, and then a brown hand clasped the man-ropes, and a light slim figure swung itself upon deck, while the boat bobbed and splashed below.
It was Montesma, who had not been expected till the racing, which was not to begin for two days. A faint, faint rose bloom flushed Lady Lesbia’s cheek at sight of him; and Mr. Smithson gave a little look of vexation, just one rapid contraction of the eyebrows, which resumed their conventional placidity the next instant.
‘So good of you,’ he murmured. ‘I really did not expect you till the beginning of the week.’
‘London is simply insupportable in this weather — most of all for a man born in the Havanas. My soul thirsted for blue water. So I said to myself, This good Smithson is at Cowes; he will give me the run of his yacht and a room at his villa. Why not go to Cowes at once?’
‘The room is at your service. I have only two or three of my people at Formosa, but just enough to look after a bachelor friend.’
‘I want very little service, my dear fellow,’ answered Montesma, pleasantly. ‘A man who has crossed the Cordilleras and camped in the primeval forest on the shores of the Amazon, learns to help himself. So this is the Cayman? Muy deleitoso, mi amigo. A floating Paradise in little. If the ark had been like this, I don’t think any of the passengers would have wanted the flood to dry up.’
He shook hands with Lady Lesbia as he spoke, and with Lady Kirkbank, who looked at him as if he were part of her dream, and then he sank into the chair on Lesbia’s left hand, with the air of being established for the rest of the day.
‘I have left my portmanteaux at the end of the pier,’ he said lazily. ‘I dare say one of your fellows will be good enough to take them to Formosa for me?’
Mr. Smithson gave the necessary order. All the beauty had gone out of the sea and the sky for him, all the contentment from his mind; and yet he was in no position to rebel against Fate — in no position to say directly or indirectly, ‘Don Gomez de Montesma, I don’t want you here, and I must request you to transfer yourself elsewhither.’
Lesbia’s feelings were curiously different. The very sight of that nervous brown hand upon the rope just now had sent a strange thrill through her veins. She who believed herself heartless could scarce trust herself to speak for the vehement throbbing of her heart. A sense of joy too deep for words possessed her as she reclined in her low chair, with drooping eyelids, yet feeling the fire of those dark southern eyes upon her face, scorching her like an actual flame.
‘Lady Lesbia, may I have a cup of tea?’ he asked; not because he wanted the tea, but only for the cruel delight of seeing if she were able to give it to him calmly.
Her hands shook, fluttered, wandered helplessly, as she poured out that cup of tea and handed it to Montesma, a feminine office which she had performed placidly enough for Mr. Smithson. The Spaniard took the cup from her with a quiet smile, a subtle look which seemed to explore the inmost depth of her consciousness.
Yes, this man was verily her master. She knew it, and he know it, as that look of his told her. Vain to play her part of languid indifference — vain to struggle against her bondage. In heart and spirit she was at his feet, an odalisque, recognising and bowing down to her sultan.
Happily for the general peace, Mr. Smithson had been looking away seaward, with a somewhat troubled brow, while that little cap and saucer episode was being enacted. And in the next minute Lesbia had recovered her self-command, and resumed that graceful languor which was one of her charms. She was weak, but she was not altogether foolish; and she had no idea of succumbing to this new influence — of yielding herself up to this conqueror, who seemed to take her life into his hand as if it were a bit of thistledown. Her agitation of those first few minutes was due to the suddenness of his appearance — the reaction from dulness to delight. She had been told that he was not to be at Cowes till Monday, and lo! he was here at her side, just as she was thinking how empty and dreary life was without him.
He dropped into his place so naturally and easily, made himself so thoroughly at home and so agreeable to every one, that it was almost impossible for Horace Smithson to resent his audacity! Mr. Smithson’s vitals might be devoured by the gnawing of the green-eyed monster, but however fierce that gnawing were, he did not want to seem jealous. Montesma was there as the very incarnation of some experiences in Mr. Smithson’s past career, and he dared not object to the man’s presence.
And so the summer day wore on. They had the yacht all to themselves that evening, for the racing yachts were fulfilling engagements in other waters, and the gay company of pleasure-seekers had not yet fully assembled. They were dropping in one by one, all the evening, and Cowes roads grew fuller of life with every hour of the summer night.
Mr. Smithson and his guests dined in the saloon, a snug little party of four, and sat long over dessert, deep into the dusk; and they talked of all things under heaven, things frivolous, things grave, but most of all about that fair, strange world in far-off southern waters, the sunny islands of the Caribbean Sea, and the dreamy, luxurious life of that tropical clime, half Spanish, half Oriental, wholly independent of European conventionalities. Lesbia listened, enchanted by the picture. What were Park Lane palaces, and Berkshire manors, the petty splendours of the architect and the upholsterer, weighed against a world in which all nature is on a grander scale? Mr. Smithson might give her fine houses and costly upholstery; but only the Tropic of Cancer could give her larger and brighter stars, a world of richer colouring, a land of perpetual summer, nights luminous with fire-flies, gardens in which the fern and the cactus were as forest trees, and where humming-birds flashed among the foliage like living flowers; nay, where the flowers themselves took the forms of the animal world and seemed instinct with life and motion.
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Smithson, with his gentlemanlike drawl, ‘Spanish America and the West Indies are delightful places to talk about. There are so many things one leaves out of the picture — thieves, niggers, jiggers, snakes, mosquitoes, yellow Jack, creeping, crawling creatures of all kinds. I always feel very glad I have been to South America.’
‘Why?’
‘In order that I may never go there again,’ replied Mr. Smithson.
‘I was beginning to hope you would take me there some day,’ said Lesbia.
‘Never again, no, not even for your sake. No man should ever leave Europe after he is five-and-thirty; indeed, I doubt if after that age he should venture beyond the Mediterranean. That is the sea of civilisation. Anything outside it means barbarism.’
‘I hope we are going to travel by-and-by,’ said Lesbia; ‘I have been mewed up in Grasmere half my life, and if you are going to confine me to the shores of the Mediterranean, which is, after all, only a larger lake, for the other half of my life, my existence will be a dull piece of work after all. I agree with what Don Gomez said the other night: “Not to travel is not to live.”’
They went on deck presently and sat in the summer darkness, lighted only by the stars, and by the lights of the yachts, and the faintly gleaming windows of the lighted town, sat long and late, in a state of ineffable repose. Lady Kirkbank. fortified by the produce of Mr. Smithson’s particular clos, and by a couple of glasses of green Chartreuse, slept profoundly. She had not enjoyed herself so much for the last three months. She had been stretched on Society’s rack, and she had been ground in Society’s mill; and neither mind nor body had been her own to do what she liked withal. She had toiled early and late, and had spared herself in no wise. And now the trouble was over for a space. Here were rest and respite. She had done her duty as a chaperon, had provided her charge with the very best thing the matrimonial market offered. She had paid her creditors something on account all round, and had left them appeased and trustful, if not content. Sir George had gone oft alone to drink the waters at Spa, and to fortify himself for Scotland and the grouse season. She was her own mistress, and she could fold her hands and take her rest, eat and drink and sleep and be merry, all at Mr. Smithson’s expense.
The yachts came flocking in next day, like a flight of white-winged sea birds, and Mr. Smithson had enough to do receiving visitors upon the Cayman. He was fully occupied; but Montesma had nothing to do, except to amuse Lady Lesbia and her chaperon, and in this onerous task he succeeded admirably. Lesbia found that it was too warm to be on the deck when there were perspiring people, whose breath must be ninety by the thermometer, perpetually coming on board; so she and Lady Kirkbank sat in the saloon, and had the more distinguished guests brought down to them as to a Court; and the shrewder of the guests were quick to divine that no company beyond that of Don Gomez de Montesma was really wanted in that rose-scented saloon.
The Spaniard taught Lady Kirkbank monte, which delighted her, and which she vowed she would introduce at her supper parties in the half season of November, when she should be in London for a week or two, as a bird of passage, flitting southwards. He began to teach Lesbia Spanish, a language for which she had taken a sudden fancy; and it is curious what tender accents, what hidden meanings even a grammar can take from such a teacher. Spanish came easily enough to a learner who had been thoroughly drilled in French and Italian, and who had been taught the rudiments of Latin; so by the end of a lesson, which went on at intervals all day, the pupil was able to lisp a passage of Don Quixote in the sweetest Castilian, very sweet to the ear of Don Gomez — a kind of baby language, precious as the first half-formed syllables of infancy to mothers.
Montesma had nothing to do but to amuse himself and his companions all day in the saloon, amidst odours of roses and peaches, in a shadowy coolness made by striped silken blinds; but Mr. Smithson was not so much his own master. That innumerable company of friends which are the portion of the rich man given to hospitality would not let the owner of the Cayman go scot-free.
At a place like Cowes, on the eve of the regatta week, the freelances of society expect to find entertainment; and Mr. Smithson had to maintain his character for princely hospitalities at the sacrifice of his feelings as a lover. Every ripple of Lesbia’s silvery laughter, every deep tone of Montesma’s voice, from the cabin below, sent a pang to his jealous soul; and yet he had to smile, and to order more champagne cup, and to be lavish of his best cigars, albeit insisting that his friends should smoke their cigars in the bows well to leeward, so that no foul breathings of tobacco should pollute his Cleopatra galley.
Cleopatra was very happy meanwhile, sublimely indifferent even to the odours of tobacco. She had her Antony at her feet, looking up at her, as she recited her lesson, with darkly luminous eyes, obviously worshipping her, obviously intent on winning her without counting the cost. When had a Montesma ever counted the cost to himself or others — the cost in gold, in honour, in human life? The records of Cuba in the palmy days of the slave trade would tell how lightly they held the last; and for honour, well, the private hells of island and main could tell their tale of specially printed playing cards, in which the swords or stars on the back of each card had a secret language of their own, and were as finger-posts for the initiated player.
Mr. Smithson had business on shore, and was fain to leave the yacht for an hour or two before dinner. He invited Don Gomez to go with him, but the offer was graciously declined.
‘Amigo, I don’t care even to look at land in such weather. It is so detestably dry,’ he pleaded. ‘It is only the sound of the sea gurgling against the hull that reconciles one to existence. Go, and be happy at your club, and send off those occult telegrams of yours, dearest. I shall not leave the Cayman till bed-time.’
He looked as fresh and cool as if utterly unaffected by the heat, which to a Cuban must have been a merely lukewarm condition of the atmosphere. But he affected to be prostrate, and Smithson could not insist. He had his cards to play in a game which required extremest caution, and there were no friendly indicators on the backs of his kings and aces. He was feeling his way in the dark, and did not know how much mischief Montesma was prepared to do.
When the owner of the yacht was gone Don Gomez proposed an adjournment to the deck for afternoon tea, and the trio sat under the awning, tea-drinking and gossiping for the next hour. Lady Kirkbank told the steward to say not at home to everybody, just as if she had a street door.
‘There is a good deal of the dolce far niente about this,’ said Montesma, presently; ‘but don’t you think we have been anchored in sight of that shabby little town quite long enough, and that it would be rather nice to spread our wings and sail round the island before the racing begins?’
‘It would be exquisite,’ said Lesbia. ‘I am very tired of inaction, though I dearly love learning Spanish,’ she added, with a lovely smile, and a look that was half submissive, half mutinous. ‘But I have really been beginning to wonder whether this boat can move.’
‘You will see that she can, and at a smart pace, too, if I sail her. Shall we circumnavigate the island? We can set sail after dinner.’
‘Will Mr. Smithson consent, do you think?’
‘Why does Smithson exist, except to obey you?’
‘I don’t know if Lady Kirkbank would quite like it,’ said Lesbia, looking at her chaperon, who was waving a big Japanese fan, slowly, unsteadily, and with a somewhat drunken air, the while she slid into dreamland.
‘Quite like what?’ she murmured, drowsily.
‘A little sail.’
‘I should dearly love it, if it didn’t make me sea-sick.’
‘Sea-sick on a glassy lake like this! Impossible,’ said Montesma. ‘I consider the thing settled. We set sail after dinner.’
Mr. Smithson came back to the yacht just in time to dress for dinner. Don Gomez excused himself from putting on his dress suit. He was going to sail the yacht himself, and he was dressed for his work, picturesquely, in white duck trousers, white silk shirt, and black velvet shooting jacket. He dined with the permission of the ladies, in this costume, in which he looked so much handsomer than in the livery of polite life. He had a red scarf tied round his waist, and when at his work by-and-by, he wore a little red silk cap, just stuck lightly on his dark hair. The dinner to-day was all animation and even excitement, very different from the languorous calm of yesterday. Lesbia seemed a new creature. She talked and laughed and flashed and sparkled as she had never yet done within Mr. Smithson’s experience. He contemplated the transformation with wonder not unmixed with suspicion. Never for him had she been so brilliant — never in response to his glances had her violet eyes thus kindled, had her smile been so entrancingly sweet. He watched Montesma, but in him he could find no fault. Even jealousy could hardly take objection to the Spaniard’s manner to Lady Lesbia. There was not a look, not a word that hinted at a private understanding between them, or which seemed to convey deeper meanings than the common language of society. No, there was no ground for fault-finding; and yet Smithson was miserable. He knew this man of old, and knew his influence over women.
Mr. Smithson handed over the management of the yacht without a murmer, albeit he pretended to be able to sail her himself, and was in the habit of taking the command for a couple of hours on a sunny afternoon, much to the amusement of skipper and crew. But Montesma was a sailor born and bred — the salt keen breath of the sea had been the first breath in his nostrils — he had managed his light felucca before he was twelve years old, had sailed every inch of the Caribbean Sea, and northward to the furthermost of the Bahamas before he was fifteen. He had lived more on the water than on the land in that wild boyhood of his; a boyhood in which books and professors had played but small part. Montesma’s school had been the world, and beautiful women his only professors. He had learnt arithmetic from the transactions of bubble companies; modern languages from the lips of the women who loved him. He was a crack shot, a perfect swordsman, a reckless horseman, and a dancer in whom dancing almost rose to genius. Beyond these limits he was as ignorant as dirt; but he had a cleverness which served as a substitute for book learning, and he seldom failed in impressing the people he met with the idea that he, Gomez de Montesma, was no ordinary man.
Directly after dinner the preparations for an immediate start began; very much to the disgust of skipper and crew, who were not in the habit of working after dinner; but Montesma cared nothing for the short answers of the captain, or the black look of the men.
Lesbia wanted to learn all about everything — the name of every sail, of every rope. She stood near the helmsman, a slim graceful figure in a white gown of some soft material, with never a jewel or a flower to relieve that statuesque simplicity. She wore no hat, and the rich chesnut hair was rolled in a loose knot at the back of the small Greek-looking head. Montesma came to her every now and then to explain what was being done; and by-and-by, when the canvas was all up, and the yacht was skimming over the water, like a giant swan borne by the current of some vast strong river, he came and stayed by her side, and they two sat making little baby sentences in Spanish, he as teacher and she as pupil, with no one near them but the sailors.
The owner of the Cayman had disappeared mysteriously a quarter of an hour after the sails were unfurled, and Lady Kirkbank had tottered down to the saloon.
‘I am not going — cabin,’ she faltered, when Lesbia remonstrated with her, ‘only — going — saloon — sofa — lie down — little — Smithson take care — you,’ not perceiving that Smithson had vanished, ‘shall be — quite close.’
So Lesbia and Don Gomez were alone under the summer stars, murmuring little bits of Spanish.
‘It is the only true way of learning a language,’ he said; ‘grammars are a delusion.’
It was a very delightful and easy way of learning, at any rate. Lesbia reclined in her bamboo chair, and fanned herself indolently, and watched the shadowy shores of the island, cliff and hill, down and wooded crest, flitting past her like dream-pictures, and her lips slowly shaped the words of that soft lisping language — so simple, so musical — a language made for lovers and for song, one would think. It was wonderful what rapid progress Lesbia made.
She heard a church clock on the island striking, and asked Don Gomez the hour.
‘Ten,’ he said.
‘Ten! Surely it must be later. It was past eight before we began dinner, and we have been sailing for ever so long. Captain, kindly tell me the time,’ she called to the skipper, who was lolling over the gunwale near the foremast smoking a meditative pipe.
‘Twelve o’clock, my lady.’
‘Heavens, can I possibly have been sitting here so long. I should like to stay on deck all night and watch the sailing; but I must really go and take care of poor Lady Kirkbank. I am afraid she is not very well.’
‘She had a somewhat distracted air when she went below, but I daresay she will sleep off her troubles. If I were you I should leave her to herself.’
‘Impossible! What can have become of Mr. Smithson?’
‘I have a shrewd suspicion that it is with Smithson as with poor Lady Kirkbank.’
‘Do you mean that he is ill?’
‘Precisely.’
‘What, on a calm summer night, sailing over a sea of glass. The owner of a yacht!’
‘Rather ignominious for poor Smithson, isn’t it? But men who own yachts are only mortal, and are sometimes wretched sailors. Smithson is feeble on that point, as I know of old.’
‘Then wasn’t it rather cruel of us to sail his yacht?’
‘Yachts are meant for sailing, and again, sea-sickness is supposed to be a wholesome exercise.’
‘Good-night.’
‘Good-night,’ both good nights in Spanish, and with a touch of tenderness which the words could hardly have expressed in English.
‘Must you really go?’ pleaded Montesma, holding her hand just a thought longer than he had ever held it before.
‘Ah, the little more, and how much it is,’ says the poet.
‘Really and truly.’
‘I am so sorry. I wish you could have stayed on deck all night.’
‘So do I, with all my heart. This calm sea under the starlit sky is like a dream of heaven.’
‘It is very nice, but if you stayed I think I could promise you considerable variety. We shall have a tempest before morning.’
‘Of all things in the world I should love to see a thunderstorm at sea.’
‘Be on the alert then, and Captain Parkes and I will try to oblige you.’
‘At any rate you have made it impossible for me to sleep. I shall stay with Lady Kirkbank in the saloon. Good-night, again.’
‘Good-night.’
Lesbia found Lady Kirkbank prostrate on a low divan in the saloon, sleepless, and very cross. The atmosphere reeked with red lavender, sal-volatile, eau de Cologne, and brandy, which latter remedy poor Georgie had taken freely in her agonies. Kibble, the faithful Grasmere girl, sat by the divan, fanning the sufferer with a large Japanese fan. Rilboche had naturally, as a Frenchwoman, succumbed utterly to her own feelings, and was moaning in her berth, wailing out every now and then that she would never have taken service with Miladi had she suspected her to be capable of such cruelty as to take her to live for weeks upon the sea.
If this was the state of affairs now while the ocean was only gently stirred, what would it be by-and-by if the tempest should really come?
‘What can you be thinking of, staying on deck all night with those men?’ exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, peevishly. ‘It is hardly respectable.’
She would have been still more inclined to object had she known that Lesbia’s companion had been ‘that man’ rather than ‘those men.’
‘What do you mean by all night?’ Lesbia retorted, contemptuously; ‘it is only just twelve.’
‘Only twelve. I thought we were close upon daylight. I have suffered an eternity of agony.’
‘I am very sorry you should be ill; but really the sea has been so deliciously calm.’
‘I believe I should have suffered less if it had been diabolically rough. Oh, that monotonous flip-flap of the water, that slow heaving of the boat! Nothing could be worse.’
‘I am glad to hear you say that, for Don Gomez says we are likely to have a tempest.’
‘A tempest!’ shrieked Georgie. ‘Then let him stop the boat this instant and put me on shore. Tell him to land me anywhere — on the Needles even. I could stop at the lighthouse till morning. A storm at sea will be simply my death.’
‘Dear Lady Kirkbank, I was only joking,’ said Lesbia, who did not want to be worried by her chaperon’s nervous apprehensions: ‘so far the night is lovely.’
‘Give me a spoonful more brandy, my good creature,’— to Kibble. ‘Lesbia, you ought never to have brought me into this miserable state. I consented to staying on board the yacht; but I never consented to sailing on her.’
‘You will soon be well, dear Lady Kirkbank; and you will have such an appetite for breakfast to-morrow morning.’
‘Where shall we be at breakfast time?’
‘Off St. Catherine’s Point, I believe — just half way round the island.’
‘If we are not at the bottom of the sea,’ groaned Georgie.
They were now in the open Channel, and the boat dipped and rose to larger billows than had encountered her course before. Lady Kirkbank lay in a state of collapse, in which life seemed only sustainable by occasional teaspoonfuls of cognac gently tilted down her throat by the patient Kibble.
Lesbia went to her cabin, but with no intention of remaining there. She was firmly convinced that the storm would come, and she meant to be on deck while it was raging. What harm could thunder or lightning, hail or rain, do to her while he was by to protect her? He would be busy sailing the boat, perhaps, but still he would have a moment now and then in which to think of her and care for her.
Yes, the storm was coming. There was a livid look upon the waters, and the atmosphere was heavy with heat; the sky to windward black as a funeral pall. Lesbia was almost fearless, yet she felt a thrill of awe as she looked into that dense blackness. To leeward the stars were still visible; but that gigantic mass of cloud came creeping slowly, solemnly over the sky, while the shadow flitted fast across the water, swallowing up that ghastly electric glare.
Lesbia wrapped herself in a white cashmere sortie de bal and stole up the companion. Montesma was working at the ropes with his own hands, calling directions to the sailors to shorten and take in the canvas, urging them to increased efforts by working at the ropes with his own hands, springing up the rigging and on deck, flashing backwards and forwards amidst the rigging like a being of supernatural power. He had taken off his jacket, and was clad from top to toe in white, save for that streak of scarlet which tightly girdled his waist. His tall flexible form, perfect in line as a Greek statue of Hermes, stood out against the background of black night. His voice, with its tones of brief imperious command, the proud carriage of his head, the easy grace of his rapid movements, all proclaimed the man born to rule over his fellow-men. And it is these master spirits, these born rulers, whom women instinctively recognise as their sovereign lords, and for whom women count no sacrifice too costly.
In the midst of his activity Montesma suddenly saw that white-robed figure standing at the top of the companion, and flew to her side. The boat was pitching heavily, dipping into the trough of the sea at an angle of forty-five degrees, as it seemed to Lesbia.
‘You ought not to be here,’ said Montesma; ‘it is much rougher than I expected.’
‘I am not afraid,’ she answered; ‘but I will go back to my cabin if I am in your way.’
‘In my way’ (with deepest tenderness): ‘yes, you are in my way, for I shall think of nothing else now you are here. But I believe we have done all that need be done to the yacht, and I can take care of you till the storm is over.’
He put his arm round her as the stem dipped, and led her towards the stern, guiding her footsteps, supporting her as her light figure swayed against him with the motion of the boat. A vivid flash of lightning showed him her face as they stood for an instant leaning against each other, his arm encircling her. Ah, what deep feeling in that countenance, once so passionless; what a new light in those eyes. It was like the awakening of a long dormant soul.
He took the helm from the captain and stood steering the vessel, and calling out his orders, with Lesbia close beside him, holding her with his disengaged arm, drawing her near him as the vessel pitched violently, drawing her nearer still when they shipped a sea, and a great fountain of spray enfolded them both in a dense cloud of salt water.
The thunder roared and rattled, as if it began and ended close beside them. Forked lightnings zigzagged amidst the rigging. Sheet lightning enwrapped those two in a luminous atmosphere, revealing faces that were pale with passion, lips that trembled with emotion. There were but scant opportunity for speech, and neither of these two felt the need of words. To be together, bound nearer to each other than they had ever been yet, than they might ever be again, in the midst of thunder and lightning and dense clouds of spray. This was enough. Once when the Cayman pitched with exceptional fury, when the thunder crashed and roared loudest, Lesbia found her head lying on Montesma’s breast and his arms round her, his lips upon her face. She did not wrench herself from that forbidden embrace. She let those lips kiss hers as never mortal man had kissed her before. But an instant later, when Montesma’s attention was distracted by his duties as steersman, and he let her go, she slipped away in the darkness, and melted from his sight and touch like a modern Undine. He dared not leave the helm and follow her then. He sent one of the sailors below a little later, to make sure that she was safe in her cabin; but he saw her no more that night.
The storm abated soon after daybreak, and the morning was lovely; but Don Gomez and Lady Lesbia did not meet again till the church bells on the island were ringing for morning service, and then the lady was safe under the wing of her chaperon, with her affianced husband in attendance upon her at the breakfast table in the saloon.
She received Montesma with the faintest inclination of the head, and she carefully avoided all occasion of speech with him during the leisurely, long spun-out meal. She was as white as her muslin gown, and her eyes told of a sleepless night. She talked a little, very little to Lady Kirkbank and Mr. Smithson; to the Spaniard not at all. And yet Montesma was in no manner dashed by this appearance of deep offence. So might Francesca have looked the morning after that little scene over the book; yet she sacrificed her salvation for her lover all the same. It was a familiar stage upon the journey which Montesma knew by heart. Here the inclination of the road was so many degrees more or less; for this hill you are commanded to put on an extra horse; at this stage it is forbidden to go more than eight miles an hour, and so on, and so on. Montesma knew every inch of the ground. He put on a melancholy look, and talked very little. He had been on deck all night, and so there was an excuse for his being quiet.
Lady Kirkbank related her impressions of the storm, and talked enough for four. She had suffered the pangs of purgatory, but her natural cheeriness asserted itself, and she made no moaning about past agonies which had exercised a really delightful influence on her appetite. Mr. Smithson also was cheerful. He had paid his annual tribute to Neptune, and might hope to go scot-free for the rest of the season.
‘If I had stayed on deck I must have had my finger in the pie; so I thought it better to go below and get a good night’s rest in the steward’s cabin,’ he said, not caring to confess his sufferings as frankly as Lady Kirkbank admitted hers.
After breakfast, which was prolonged till noon, Montesma asked Smithson to smoke a cigarette on deck with him.
‘I want to talk to you on a rather serious matter,’ he said.
Lesbia heard the words, and looked up with a frightened glance. Could he mean to attempt anything desperate? Was he going to confess the fatal truth to Horace Smithson, to tell her affianced lover that she was untrue to her bond, that she loved him, Montesma, as fondly as he loved her, that their two souls had mingled like two flames fanned by the same current, and thence had risen to a conflagration which must end in ruin, if she were not set free to follow where her heart had gone, free to belong to that man whom her spirit chose for lord and master. Her heart leapt at the hope that Montesma was going to do this, that he was strong enough to break her bonds for her, powerful and rich enough to secure her a brilliant future. Yet this last consideration, which hitherto had been paramount, seemed now of but little moment. To be with him, to belong to him, would be enough for bliss. Albeit that in such a choice she forfeited all that she had ever possessed or hoped for of earthly prosperity. Adventurer, beggar, whatever he might be, she chose him, and loved him with all the strength of a weak soul newly awakened to passionate feeling.
Unhappily for Lesbia Haselden, Montesma was not at all the kind of man to take so direct and open a course as that which she imagined possible.
His business with Mr. Smithson was of quite a different kind.
‘Smithson, do you know that you have an utterly incompetent crew?’ he said, gravely, when they two were standing aft, lighting their cigarettes.
‘Indeed I do not. The men are all experienced sailors, and the captain ranks high among yachtsmen.’
‘English yachtsmen are not particularly good judges of sailors. I tell you your skipper is no sailor, and his men are fools. If it had not been for me the Cayman would have gone to pieces on the rocks last night, and if you are to cross to St. Malo, as you talked of doing, for the regatta there, you had better sack these men and let me get you a South American crew. I know of a fellow who is in London just now — the captain of a Rio steamer, who’ll send you a crew of picked men, if you give me authority to telegraph to him.’
‘I don’t like foreign sailors,’ said Smithson, looking perplexed and worried; ‘and I have perfect confidence in Wilkinson.’
‘Which is as much as to say that you consider me a liar! Go to the bottom your own way, mon ami: ce n’est pas mon affaire,’ said Montesma, turning on his heel, and leaving his friend to his own devices.
Had he pressed the point, Smithson would have suspected him of some evil motive, and would have been resolute in his resistance; but as he said no more about it, Smithson began to feel uncomfortable.
He was no sailor himself, knew absolutely nothing about the navigation of his yacht, though he sometimes pretended to sail her; and he had no power to judge of his skipper’s capacity or his men’s seamanship. He had engaged the captain wholly on the strength of the man’s reputation, guaranteed by certain certificates which seemed to mean a great deal. But after all such certificates might mean very little — such a reputation might be no real guarantee. The sailors had been engaged by the captain, and their ruddy faces and thoroughly British appearence, the exquisite cleanliness which they maintained in every detail of the yacht, had seemed to Mr. Smithson the perfection of seamanship.
But it was not the less true that the cleanest of yachts, with deck of spotless whiteness, sails of unsullied purity, brasses shining and sparkling like gold fresh from the goldsmith’s, might be spiked upon a rock, or might founder on a sand-bank, or heel over under too much canvas. Mr. Smithson was inclined to suspect any proposition of Montesma’s; yet he was not the less disturbed in mind by the assertion.
The day wore on, and the yacht sailed merrily over a summer sea. Mr. Smithson fidgeted about the deck uneasily, watching every movement of the sailors. No boat could be sailing better, as it seemed to him; but in such weather and over such waters any boat must needs go easily. It was in the blackness of night, amidst the fury of the storm, that Montesma’s opinion had been formed. Smithson began to think that his friend was right. The sailors had honest countenances, but they looked horribly stupid. Could men with such vacuous grins, such an air of imbecile good-nature, be capable of acting wisely in any terrible crisis? — could they have nerve and readiness, quickness, decision, all those grand qualites which are needed by the seaman who has to contend with the fury of the elements?
Mr. Smithson and his guests had breakfasted too late for the possibility of luncheon. They were in Cowes Roads by one o’clock. A fleet of yachts had arrived during their absence, and the scene was full of life and gaiety. Lady Lesbia held a levée at the afternoon tea, and had a crowd of her old admirers around her — adorers whose presence in no wise disturbed Horace Smithson’s peace. He would have been content that his wife should go through life with a herd of such worshippers following in her footsteps. He knew the aimless innocence, the almost infantine simplicity of the typical Johnnie, Chappie, Muscadin, Petit Creve, Gommeux— call him by what name you will. From these he feared no evil. But in that one follower who gave no outward token of his worship he dreaded peril. It was Montesma he watched, while dragoons with close-cropped hair, and imbecile youths with heads rigid in four-inch collars, were hanging about Lady Lesbia’s low bamboo chair, and administering obsequiously to the small necessities of the tea-table.
It was while this tea-table business was going on that Mr. Smithson took the opportunity of setting his mind at rest, were it possible, as to the merits of Captain Wilkinson. Among his visitors this afternoon there was the owner of three or four racing yachts — a man renowned for his victories, at home and abroad.
‘I think you knew something of my captain, Wilkinson, before I engaged him,’ said Smithson, with assumed carelessness.
‘I know every skipper on board every boat in the squadron,’ answered his friend. ‘A good fellow, Wilkinson — thoroughly honest fellow.’
‘Honest; oh yes, I know all about that. But how about his seamanship? His certificates were wonderfully good, but they are not everything.
‘Everything, my dear fellow,’ cried the other; ‘they are next to nothing. But I believe Wilkinson is a tolerable sailor.’
This was not encouraging.
‘He has never been unlucky, I believe.’
‘My dear Smithson, you are a great authority in the City, but you are not very well up in the records of the yachting world, or you would know that your Captain Wilkinson was skipper on the Orinoco when she ran aground on the Chesil Bank, coming home from Cherbourg Regatta, fifteen lives lost, and the yacht, in less than half an hour, ground to powder. That was rather a bad case, I remember; for though it was a tempestuous night, the accident would never have happened if Wilkinson had not mistaken the lights. So you see his Trinity House papers didn’t prevent his going wrong.’
Good heavens! This was the strongest confirmation of Montesma’s charge. The man was a stupid man, an incapable man, a man to whose intelligence and care human life should never be trusted. A fig for his honesty! What would honesty be worth in a hurricane off the Chesil Beach? What would honesty serve a ship spitted on the Jailors off Jersey? Montesma was right. If the Cayman was to make a trip to St. Malo she must be navigated by competent men. Horace Smithson hated foreign sailors, copper-faced ruffians, with flashing black eyes which seemed to threaten murder, did you but say a rough word to them; sleek, raven-haired scoundrels, with bowie-knives in their girdles, ready for mutiny. But, after all, life is worth too much to be risked for a prejudice, a sentiment.
Perhaps that St. Malo business might be avoided; and then there need be no change in captain or crew. The yacht must be safe enough lying at anchor in the roadstead. By-and-by, when the visitors had departed, and Mr. Smithson was reposefully enjoying his tea by Lady Lesbia’s side, he approached the subject.
‘Do you really care about crossing to St. Malo after this — really prefer the idea to Ryde?’
‘Infinitely,’ exclaimed Lesbia, quickly. ‘Ryde would only be Cowes ever again — a lesser Cowes; and I thought when you first proposed it that the plan was rather stupid, though I did not want to be uncivil and say so. But I was delighted with Don Gomez de Montesma’s amendment, substituting St. Malo for Ryde. In the first place the trip across will be delicious’— Lady Kirkbank gave a faint groan —‘and in the second place I am dying to see Brittany.’
‘I doubt if you will highly appreciate St. Malo. It is a town of many and various smells.’
‘But I want to smell those foreign smells of which one hears much. At least it is an experience. We need not be on shore any longer than we like. And I want to see that fine rocky coast, and Chateaubriand’s tomb on the what’s-its-name. So nice to be buried in that way.’
‘Then you have set your heart on going to St. Malo, and would not like any change in our plan?’
‘Any change will be simply detestable,’ answered Lesbia, all the more decidedly since she suspected a desire for change on the part of Mr. Smithson.
She was in no amiable humour this afternoon. All her nerves seemed strained to their utmost tension. She was irritated, tremulous with nervous excitement, inclined to hate everybody, Horace Smithson most of all. In her cabin a little later on, when she was changing her gown for dinner, and Kibble was somewhat slow and clumsy in the lacing of the bodice, she wrenched herself from the girl’s hands, flung herself into a chair, and burst into a flood of passionate tears.
‘O God! that I were on one of those islands in the Caribbean Sea — an island where Europeans never come — where I might lie down among the poisonous tropical flowers, and sleep the rest of my days away. I am sick to death of my life here; of the yacht, the people — everything.’
‘This air is too relaxing, Lady Lesbia,’ the girl murmured, soothingly; ‘and you didn’t have your natural rest last night. Shall I get you a nice strong cup of tea?’
‘Tea! no. I have been living upon tea for the last twenty-four hours. I have eaten nothing. My mouth is parched and burning. Oh, Kibble!’ flinging her head upon the girl’s buxom arm, and letting it rest there, ‘what a happy creature you are — not a care — not a care.’
‘I’m sure you can’t have any cares, Lady Lesbia,’ said Kibble, with an incredulous smile, trying to smooth the disordered hair, anxious to make haste with the unfinished toilet, for it was within a few minutes of eight.
‘I am full of care. I am in debt — horribly in debt — getting deeper and deeper every day — and I am going to sell myself to the only man who can pay my debts and give me fine houses, and finery like this,’ plucking at the crépe de chine gown, with its flossy fringe, its delicate lace, a marvel of artistic expenditure; a garment which looked simplicity itself, and yet was so cleverly contrived as to cost five-and-thirty guineas. The greatest effects in it required to be studied with a microscope.
‘But surely, dear Lady Lesbia, you won’t marry Mr. Smithson, if you don’t love him?’
‘Do you suppose love has anything to do with marriages in society?’
‘Oh, Lady Lesbia, it would be so unkind to him, so cruel to yourself.’
‘Cruel to myself. Yes, I am cruel to myself. I had the chance of happiness a year ago, and I lost it. I have the chance of happiness now — yes, of consummate bliss — and haven’t the courage to snatch at it. Take off this horrid gown, Kibble; my head is splitting: I shan’t go to dinner.’
‘Oh, Lady Lesbia, you are treading on the pearl embroidery,’ remonstrated poor Kibble, as Lesbia kicked the new gown from under her feet.
‘What does it matter!’ she exclaimed with a bitter little laugh. ‘It has not been paid for — perhaps it never will be.’
The dinner was silent and gloomy. It was as if a star had been suddenly blotted out of the sky. Smithson, ordinarily so hospitable, had been too much disturbed in mind to ask any of his friends to stay to dinner; so there were only Lady Kirkbank, who was too tired to be lively, and Montesma, who was inclined to be thoughtful. Lesbia’s absence, and the idea that she was ill, gave the feast almost a funereal air.
After dinner Smithson and Montesma sat on deck, smoking their cigars, and lazily watching the lights on sea, and the lights on shore; these brilliant in the foreground, those dim in the distance.
‘You can telegraph to your Rio Janeiro friend to-morrow morning, if you like,’ said Smithson, presently, ‘and tell him to send a first-rate skipper and crew. Lady Lesbia has made up her mind to see St. Malo Regatta, and with such a sacred charge I can’t be too careful.’
‘I’ll wire before eight o’clock to-morrow,’ answered Montesma, ‘You have decided wisely. Your respectable English Wilkinson is an excellent man — but nothing would surprise me less than his reducing your Cayman to matchwood in the next gale.’
That strange scene in the old house at Fellside made a profound impression upon Lord Hartfield. He tried to disguise his trouble, and did all in his power to seem gay and at perfect ease in his wife’s company; but his mind was full of anxiety, and Mary loved him too well to be for a moment in doubt as to his feelings.
‘There is something wrong, Jack,’ she said, while they were breakfasting at a table in the verandah, with the lake and the bills in front of them and the sweet morning air around them. ‘You try to talk and to be lively, but there is a little perpendicular wrinkle in your forehead which I know as well as the letters of the alphabet, and that little line means worry. I used to see it in the old days, when you were breaking your heart for Lesbia. Why cannot you be frank and confide in me. It is your duty, sir, as my husband.’
‘Is it my duty to halve my burdens as well as my joys? How do I know if those girlish shoulders are strong enough to bear the weight of them?’
‘I can bear anything you can bear, and I won’t be cheated out of my share in your worries. If you were obliged to have a tooth out, I would have one out too, for company.’
‘I hope the dentist would be too conscientious to allow that.’
‘Tell me your trouble, Hartfield,’ she said, earnestly, leaning across the table, bringing her grave intelligent face near to him.
They were quite alone, he and she. The servants had done their ministering. Behind them there was the empty dining-room, in front of them the sunlit panorama of lake and hill. There could not be a safer place for telling secrets.
‘Tell me what it is that worries you,’ Mary pleaded again.
‘I will, dear. After all perfect trust is the best; nay, it is your due, for you are brave enough and true enough to be trusted with secrets that mean life and death. In a word, then, Mary, the cause of my trouble is that old man we saw the other night.’
‘Steadman’s uncle?’
‘Do you really believe that he is Steadman’s uncle?’
‘My grandmother told me so,’ answered Mary, reddening to the roots of her hair.
To this girl, who was the soul of truth, there was deepest shame in the idea that her kinswoman, the woman whom of all the world she most owed reverence and honour, could be deemed capable of falsehood.
‘Do you think my grandmother would tell me an untruth?’
‘I do not believe that man is a poor dependent, an old servant’s kinsman, sheltered and cared for in this house for charity’s sake. Forgive me, Mary, if I doubt the word of one you love; but there are positions in life in which a man must judge for himself. Would Mr. Steadman’s kinsman be lodged as that old man is lodged; would he talk as that old man talks; and last and greatest perplexity of all, would he possess a treasure of gold and jewels which must be worth many thousands?’
‘But you cannot know for certain that those things are valuable; they may be rubbish that this poor old man has scraped together and hoarded for years, glass jewels bought at country fairs. Those rouleaux may contain lead or coppers.’
‘I do not think so, Mary. The stones had all the brilliancy of valuable gems, and then there were others in the finest filagree settings — goldsmith’s work which bore the stamp of an Eastern world. Take my word for it, that treasure came from India; and it must have been brought to England by Lord Maulevrier. It may have existed all these years without your grandmother’s knowledge. That is quite possible; but it seems to me impossible that such wealth should be within the knowledge and the power of a pauper lunatic.’
‘But if that unhappy old man is not a relation of Steadman’s supported here by my grandmother’s benevolence, who can he be, and why is he here?’ asked Mary.
‘Oh, Molly dear, these are two questions which I cannot answer, and which yet ought to be answered somehow. Since that night I have felt as if there were a dark cloud lowering over this house — a cloud almost as terrible in its menace of danger as the forshadowing of fate in a Greek legend. For your sake, for the honour of your race, for my own self-respect as your husband, I feel that this mystery ought to be solved, and all dark things made light before your grandmother’s death. When she is gone the master-key to the past will be lost.’
‘But she will be spared for many years, I hope, spared to sympathise with my happiness, and with Lesbia’s.’
My dearest girl, we cannot hope that. The thread of her life is worn very thin. It may snap at any moment. You cannot look seriously in your grandmother’s face, and yet delude yourself with the hope that she has years of life before her.’
‘It will be very hard to part, just as she has begun to care for me,’ said Mary, with her eyes full of tears.
‘All such partings are hard, and your grandmother’s life has been so lonely and joyless that the memory of it must always have a touch of pain. One cannot say of her as we can of the happy; she has lived her life — all things have been given to her, and she falls asleep at the close of a long and glorious day. For some reason which I cannot understand, Lady Maulevrier’s life has been a prolonged sacrifice.’
‘She has always given us to understand that she was fond of Fellside, and that this secluded life suited her,’ said Mary, meditatively.
‘I cannot help doubting her sincerity on that point. Lady Maulevrier is too clever a woman, and forgive me, dear, if I add too worldly a woman, to be content to live out of the world. The bird must have chafed its breast against the bars of the cage many and many a time when you thought that all was peace. Be sure, Mary, that your grandmother had a powerful motive for spending all her days in this place, and I can but think that the old man we saw the other night had some part in that motive. Do you remember telling me of her ladyship’s vehement anger when she heard you had made the acquaintance of her pensioner?’
‘Yes, she was very angry,’ Mary answered, with a troubled look. ‘I never saw her so angry — she was almost beside herself — said the harshest things to me — talked as if I had done some dreadful mischief.’
‘Would she have been so moved, do you think, unless there was some fatal secret involved in that man’s presence here?’
‘I hardly know what to think. Tell me everything. What is it that you fear? — what is it that you suspect?’
‘To tell you my fears and suspicions is to tell you a family secret that has been kept from you out of kindness all the years of your life — and I hardly think I could bring myself to that if I did not know what the world is, and how many good-natured friends Lady Hartfield will meet in society, by-and-by, ready to tell her, by hints and inuendoes, that her grandfather, the Governor of Madras, came back to England under a cloud of disgrace.’
‘My poor grandfather! How dreadful!’ exclaimed Mary, pale with pity and shame. ‘Did he deserve his disgrace, poor unhappy creature — or was he the victim of false accusation?’
‘I can hardly tell you that, Mary, any more than I can tell whether Warren Hastings deserved the abuse that was wreaked upon him at one time, or the acquittal that gave the lie to his slanderers in after years. The events occurred forty years ago — the story was only half known then, and like all such stories formed the basis for every kind of exaggeration and perversion.’
‘Does Maulevrier know?’ faltered Mary.
‘Maulevrier knows all that is known by the general public, and no more.’
‘And you have married the granddaughter of a disgraced man,’ said Mary, with a piteous look. ‘Did you know — when you married me?’
‘As much as I know now, dear love. If you had been Jonathan Wild’s granddaughter you would have been just as dear to me. I married you, dearest; I love you; I believe in you. All the grandfathers in Christendom would not shake my faith by one tittle.’
She threw herself into his arms, and sobbed upon his breast. But sweet as this assurance of his love was to her, she was not the less stricken by shame at the thought of possible infamy in the past, a shameful memory for ever brooding over her name in the present.
‘Society never forgets a scandal,’ she said: ‘I have heard Maulevrier say that.’
‘Society has a long memory for other people’s sins, but it only avenges its own wrongs. Give the wicked fairy Society a bad dinner, or leave her out of your invitation list for a ball, and she will twit you with the crimes or the misfortunes of a remote ancestor — she will go about talking of your grandfather the leper, or your great aunt who ran away with her footman. But so long as the wicked fairy gets all she wants out of you, she cares not a straw for the misdeeds of past generations.’
He spoke lightly, laughingly almost, and then he ordered the dogcart to be brought round immediately, and he drove Mary across the hills towards Langdale, to bring the colour back to her blanched cheeks. He brought her home in time to give her grandmother an hour for letter-writing before luncheon, while he walked up and down the terrace below Lady Maulevrier’s windows, meditating the course he was to take.
He was to leave Westmoreland next day to take his place in the House of Lords during the last important debate of the session. He made up his mind that before he left he would seek an interview with Lady Maulevrier, and boldly ask her to explain the mystery of that old man’s presence at Fellside. He was her kinsman by marriage, and he had sworn to honour her and to care for her as a son; and as a son he would urge her to confide in him, to unburden her conscience of any dark secret, and to make the crooked things straight, before she was called away.
While he was forecasting this interview, meeting imaginary objections, arguing points which might have to be argued, a servant came out to him with an ochre envelope on a little silver tray — that unpleasant-looking envelope which seems always a presage of trouble, great or small.
‘Lord Maulevrier, Albany, to Lord Hartfield, Fellside, Grasmere.
‘For God’s sake come to me at once. I am in great trouble; not on my own account, but about a relation.’
A relation — except his grandmother and his two sisters Maulevrier had no relations for whom he cared a straw. This message must have relation to Lesbia. Was she ill — dying, the victim of some fatal accident, runaway horses, boat upset, train smashed? There was something; and Maulevrier appealed to his nearest and best friend. There was no withstanding such an appeal. It must be answered, and immediately.
Lord Hartfield went into the library and wrote his reply message, which consisted of six words.
‘Going to you by first train.’
The next train left Windermere at three. There was just time to get a fresh horse put in the dogcart, and a Gladstone bag packed.