Vera Nevill
by Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron · English · Gutenberg #18385 · 668,186 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Vera Nevill
or, Poor wisdom's chance
Author: Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
Release date: May 14, 2006 [eBook #18385]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18385
Credits: Produced by Mary Meehan and The Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VERA NEVILL ***
Produced by Mary Meehan and The Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
VERA NEVILL;
OR, POOR WISDOM'S CHANCE.
_A NOVEL_.
BY MRS. H. LOVETT CAMERON
Author of "Pure Gold," "In a Grass Country," etc., etc.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
1893.
"No. Vain, alas! th' endeavour
From bonds so sweet to sever.
Poor Wisdom's Chance
Against a glance
Is now as weak as ever."
_Moore's Melodies_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. The Vicar's Family
CHAPTER II. Kynaston Hall
CHAPTER III. Fanning Dead Ashes
CHAPTER IV. The Lay Rector
CHAPTER V. "Little Pitchers"
CHAPTER VI. A Soirée at Walpole Lodge
CHAPTER VII. Evening Reveries
CHAPTER VIII. The Member for Meadowshire
CHAPTER IX. Engaged
CHAPTER X. A Meeting on the Stairs
CHAPTER XI. An Idle Morning
CHAPTER XII. The Meet at Shadonake
CHAPTER XIII. Peacock's Feathers
CHAPTER XIV. Her Wedding Dress
CHAPTER XV. Vera's Message
CHAPTER XVI. "Poor Wisdom"
CHAPTER XVII. An Unlucky Love-Letter
CHAPTER XVIII. Lady Kynaston's Plans
CHAPTER XIX. What She Waited For
CHAPTER XX. A Morning Walk
CHAPTER XXI. Maurice's Intercession
CHAPTER XXII. Mr. Pryme's Visitors
CHAPTER XXIII. A White Sunshade
CHAPTER XXIV. Her Son's Secret
CHAPTER XXV. St. Paul's, Knightsbridge
CHAPTER XXVI. The Russia-Leather Case
CHAPTER XXVII. Dinner at Ranelagh
CHAPTER XXVIII. Mrs. Hazeldine's "Long Eliza"
CHAPTER XXIX. A Wedding Tour
CHAPTER XXX. "If I could Die!"
CHAPTER XXXI. An Eventful Drive
CHAPTER XXXII. By the Vicarage Gate
CHAPTER XXXIII. Denis Wilde's Love
CHAPTER XXXIV. A Garden Party
CHAPTER XXXV. Shadonake Bath
CHAPTER XXXVI. At Peace
VERA NEVILL
OR
POOR WISDOM'S CHANCE.
CHAPTER I.
THE VICAR'S FAMILY.
With that regal indolent air she had
So confident of her charm.
Owen Meredith.
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
Shakespeare.
Amongst the divers domestic complications into which short-sighted man is
prone to fall there is none which has been more conclusively proved to be
an utter and egregious failure than that family arrangement which, for
lack of a better name, I will call a "composite household."
No one could have spoken upon this subject with greater warmth of
feeling, nor out of the depths of a more painful experience, than
could the Rev. Eustace Daintree, sometime vicar of the parish of
Sutton-in-the-Wold.
Mr. Daintree's family circle consisted of himself, his mother, his wife,
and his wife's sister, and I should like to know how a man could expect
to lead a life of peace and tranquillity with such a combination of
inharmonious feminine elements!
There were two children also, who were a fruitful source of discord and
disunion. It is certain that, had he chosen to do so, the Rev. Eustace
might have made many heart-rending and harrowing revelations concerning
the private life and customs of the inhabitants of his vicarage. It is
equally certain, however, that he would not have chosen to do so, for he
was emphatically a man of peace and gentleness, kind hearted and given
to good works; and was, moreover, sincerely anxious to do his duty
impartially to those whom Providence or fate, or a combination of chances
and changes, had somehow contrived to bring together under his roof.
Things had not always been thus with him. In the early days of their
married life Eustace Daintree and Marion his wife had had their home to
themselves, and right well had they enjoyed it. A fairly good living
backed up by independent means, a small rural parish, a pleasant
neighbourhood, a pretty and comfortable vicarage-house--what more can the
hearts of a clergyman of the Church of England and his wife desire? Mr.
and Mrs. Daintree, at all events, had wished for nothing better. But this
blissful state of things was not destined to last; it was, perhaps,
hardly to be expected that it should, seeing that man is born to trouble,
and that happiness is known to be as fleeting as time or beauty or any
other good thing.
When Eustace Daintree had been married five years, his father died,
and his mother, accepting his warmly tendered invitation to come to
Sutton-in-the-Wold upon a long visit, took up her abode in the pleasant
vicarage-house.
Her visit was long indeed. In a weak moment her son consented to her
urgent request to be allowed to subscribe her quota to the household
expenses--this was as good as giving her a ninety-nine years' lease of
her quarters. The thin end of the wedge thus inserted, Mrs. Daintree
_mère_ became immovable as the church tower or the kitchen chimney, and
the doomed members of the family began to understand that nothing short
of death itself was likely to terminate the old lady's residence amongst
them. For the future her son's house became her home.
But, even thus, things were not at their worst. Marion Daintree was a
soft-hearted, gentle-mannered little woman. It cannot be said that she
regarded the permanent instalment of her mother-in-law in her home with
pleasurable feelings; she would have been more than human had she done
so. But then she was unfeignedly fond of her husband, and desired so
earnestly to make his home happy that, not seeing her way to oust the
intruder without a warfare which would have distressed him, she
determined to make the best of the situation, and to preserve the
family peace and concord at all risks.
She succeeded in her praiseworthy efforts, but at what cost no one but
herself ever knew. Marion's whole life became one propitiatory sacrifice
to her mother-in-law. To propitiate Mrs. Daintree was a very simple
matter. Bearing in mind that her leading characteristics were a bad
temper and an ungovernable desire to ride rough-shod over the feelings of
all those who came into contact with her, in order to secure her favour
it was only necessary to study her moods, and to allow her to tread you
under foot as much as her soul desired. Provided that she had her own way
in these little matters, Mrs. Daintree became an amiable old lady. Marion
did all that was needful; figuratively speaking, she laid down in the
dust before her, and the Juggernaut of her fate consented to be appeased
by the lowly attitude, and crushed its way triumphantly over her fallen
body.
Thus Marion accepted her fate, and peace was preserved in her husband's
house. But by-and-by there came somebody into the family who would by no
manner of means consent to be so crushed and trodden under foot. This
somebody was Vera Nevill.
In order duly to set forth who and what was this young woman, who thus
audaciously set at defiance the powers that were, it will be necessary
that I should take a brief survey of Marion's family history.
Marion, then, be it known, was the eldest of three sisters; so much the
eldest, that when Mr. Daintree had met her and married her in Rome during
one of his brief holidays, the two remaining sisters had been at the time
hardly more than children. Colonel Nevill, their father, had married an
Italian lady, long since dead, and had lived a nomad life ever since he
had become a widower; moving about chiefly between Nice, Rome, and Malta.
Wherever pleasant society was to be found, there would Colonel Nevill and
his daughters instinctively drift, and year after year they became more
and more enamoured of their foreign life, and less and less disposed to
venture back to the chill fogs and cloudy skies of their native land.
Three years after Marion had left them, and gone away with her husband to
his English vicarage; Theodora, the second daughter, had at eighteen
married an Italian prince, whose lineage was ancient, but whose acres
were few; and Colonel Nevill, dying rather suddenly almost immediately
after, Vera, the youngest daughter, as was most natural, instantly found
a home with Princess Marinari.
All this time Marion lived at Sutton-in-the-Wold, and saw none of them.
She wept copiously at the news of her father's death, regretting bitterly
her inability to receive his parting blessing; but, her little Minnie
being born shortly after, her thoughts were fortunately diverted into a
happier channel, and she suffered from her loss less keenly and recovered
from it more quickly than had she had no separate life and no separate
interests of her own to engross her. Still, being essentially
affectionate and faithful, she clung to the memory of the two sisters now
separated so entirely from her. For some years she and Theodora kept up a
brisk correspondence. Marion's letters were full of the sayings and
doings of Tommy and Minnie, and Theodora's were full of nothing but Vera.
What Vera had looked like at her first ball, how Prince this and Marquis
so-and-so had admired her; how she had been smothered with bouquets and
bonbons at Carnival time; how she had sat to some world-famed artist, who
had entreated to be allowed to put her face into his great picture, and
how the house was literally besieged with her lovers. By all this, and
much more in the same strain, Marion perceived that her young sister,
whom she had last seen in all the raw unformed awkwardness of early
girlhood, had developed somehow into a beautiful woman.
And there came photographs of Vera occasionally, fully confirming the
glowing accounts Princess Marinari gave of her; fantastic photographs,
portraying her in strange and different ways. There was Vera looking out
through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face; Vera
as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera draped as
a _dévote_, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly upon her bosom.
Sometimes she would be in a ball-dress, with lace about her white
shoulders; sometimes muffled up in winter sables, her head covered with
a fur cap. But always she was beautiful, always a young queen, even in
these poor, fading photographs, that could give but a faint idea of her
loveliness to those who knew her not.
"She must be very handsome," Eustace Daintree would say heartily, as his
wife, with a little natural flush of pride, handed some picture of her
young sister across the breakfast-table to him. "How I wish we could see
her, she must be worth looking at, indeed. Mother, have you seen this
last one of Vera?"
"Beauty is a snare," the old lady would answer viciously, hardly deigning
to glance at the lovely face; "and your sister seems to me, Marion, to be
dressed up like an actress, most unlike my idea of a modest English
girl."
Then Marion would take her treasure away with her up into her own room,
out of the way of her mother-in-law's stern and repelling remarks.
But one day there came sad news to the vicarage at Sutton. Theodora,
Princess Marinari, caught the Roman fever in its worst form, and after
a few agonizing letters and telegrams, that came so rapidly one upon the
other that she had hardly time to realize the dreadful truth, Marion
learnt that her sister was dead.
After that, the elder sister's English home became naturally the right
and fitting place for Vera to come to. So she left her gay life and her
lovers, her bright dresses and all that had hitherto seemed to her worth
living for, and came back to her father's country and took up her abode
in Eustace Daintree's quiet vicarage, where she became shortly her
sister's idol and her sister's mother-in-law's mortal foe.
And then it was that the worthy clergyman came to discover that to put
three grown-up women into the same house, and to expect them to live
together in peace and amity, is about as foolhardy an experiment as to
shut up a bulldog, a parrot, and a tom-cat in a cupboard, and expect
them to behave like so many lambs.
It is now rather more than a year since Vera Nevill came to live in her
brother-in-law's house. Let me waste no further time, but introduce her
to you at once.
The time of the year is October--the time of day is five o'clock. In the
vicarage drawing-room the afternoon tea-table has just been set out, and
the fire just lit, for it is chilly; but one of the long French windows
leading into the garden is still open, and through it Vera steps into
the room.
There is a background of brown and yellow foliage behind her, across the
garden, all aglow with the crimson light of the western sky, against
which the outlines of her figure, in its close-fitting dark dress, stand
out clearly and distinctly. Vera has the figure, not of a sylph, but of
a goddess; it is the absolute perfection of the female form. She is
tall--very tall, and she carries her head a little proudly, like a young
queen conscious of her own power.
She comes in with a certain slow and languid grace in her movements, and
pauses for an instant by the hearth, holding out her hand, that is white
and well-shaped, though perhaps a trifle too long-fingered, to the
warmth.
The glow of the newly-lit fire flickers up over her face--her face, with
its pure oval outlines, its delicate, regular features, and its dreamy
eyes, that are neither blue nor gray nor hazel, but something vague and
indistinctly beautiful, entirely peculiar to themselves. Her hair, a soft
dusky cloud, comes down low over her broad forehead, and is gathered up
at the back in some strange and thoroughly un-English fashion that would
not suit every one, yet that somehow makes a fitting crown to the stately
young head it adorns.
"Tea, Vera?" says Marion, from behind the cups and saucers.
Old Mrs. Daintree sits darning socks, severely, by the fading light.
There is a sound of distant whimpering from the shadowy corner behind the
piano; it is Tommy in disgrace. Vera turns round; Marion's kind face
looks troubled and distressed; the old lady compresses her lips firmly
and savagely.
Vera takes the cup from her sister's hands, and putting it down again on
the table, proceeds to cut a slice of bread from the loaf, and to spread
it thickly with strawberry jam.
"Come here, Tommy, and have some of Auntie's bread and jam."
Out comes a small person, with a very swollen face and a very dirty
pinafore, from the distant seclusion of the corner, and flies swiftly
to Vera's sheltering arm.
Mrs. Daintree drops her work angrily into her lap.
"Vera, I must beg of you not to interfere with Tom; are you aware that he
is in the corner by my orders?"
"Perfectly, Mrs. Daintree; and also that he was there before I went out,
exactly three-quarters of an hour ago; there are limits to all human
endurance."
"I consider it extremely impertinent," begins the old lady, nodding her
head violently.
"Darling Vera," pleads Marion, almost in tears; "perhaps you had better
let him go back."
"Tommy is quite good now," says Vera, calmly passing her hand over the
rough blonde head. Master Tommy's mouth is full of bread and jam, and he
looks supremely indifferent to the warfare that is being carried on on
his account over his head.
His crime having been the surreptitious purloining of his grandmamma's
darning cotton, and the subsequent immersion of the same in the inkstand,
Vera feels quite a warm glow of approval towards the little culprit and
his judiciously-planned piece of mischief.
"Vera, I _insist_ upon that child being sent back into the corner!"
exclaims Mrs. Daintree, angrily, bringing her large fist heavily down
upon her knee.
"The child has been over-punished already," she answers, calmly, still
administering the soothing solace of strawberry jam.
"Oh, Vera, _pray_ keep the peace!" cries Marion, with clasped hands.
"Here, I am thankful to say, comes my son;" as a shadow passes the
window, and Eustace's tall figure with the meekly stooping head comes
in at the door. "Eustace, I beg that you will decide who is to be in
authority in this house--your mother or this young lady. It is
insufferable that every time I send the children into the corner Vera
should call them out and give them cakes and jam."
Eustace Daintree looks helplessly from one to the other.
"My dear mother--my dear girls--what is it all about? I am sure Vera does
not mean----"
"No, Vera only means to be kind, grandmamma," cries Marion, nervously;
"she is so fond of the children----"
"Hold your tongue, Marion, and don't take your sister's part so
shamelessly!"
Meanwhile Vera rises silently and pushes Tommy and all his enormities
gently by the shoulders out of the room. Then she turns round and faces
her foe.
"Judge between us, Eustace!" the old lady is crying; "am I to be defied
and set at nought? are we all to bow down and worship Miss Vera, the most
useless, lazy person in the house, who turns up her nose at honest men
and prefers to live on charity, a burden to her relations?"
"Vera is no burden, only a great pleasure to me, my dear mother," said
the clergyman, holding out his hand to the girl.
"Oh, grandmamma, how unkind you are," says Marion, bursting into tears.
But Vera only laughs lazily and amusedly, she is so used to it all! It
does not disturb her.
"Is she to be mistress here, I ask, or am I?" continues Mrs. Daintree,
furiously.
"Marion is the mistress here," says Vera, boldly; "neither you nor I have
any authority in her house or over her children." And then the old lady
gathers up her work and sails majestically from the room, followed by her
weak, trembling daughter-in-law, bent on reconciliation, on cajolement,
on laying herself down for her own sins, and her sister's as well, before
the avenging genius of her life.
The clergyman stands by the hearth with his head bent and his hands
behind him. He sighs wearily.
Vera creeps up to him and lays her hand softly upon his coat sleeve.
"I am a firebrand, am I not, Eustace?"
"My dear, no, not that; but if you could try a little to keep the peace!"
He stayed the caressing hand within his own and looked at her tenderly.
His face is a good one, but not a handsome one; and, as he looks at his
wife's young sister, it is softened into its best and kindest. Who can
resist Vera, when she looks gentle and humble, with that rare light in
her dark eyes?
"Vera, why don't you look like that at Mr. Gisburne?" he says, smiling.
"Oh, Eustace! am I indeed a burden to you, as your mother says?" she
exclaims, evasively.
"No, no, my dear, but it seems hard for you here; a home of your own
might be happier for you; and Gisburne is a good man."
"I don't like good men who are poor!" says Vera, with a little grimace.
Her brother-in-law looks shocked. "Why do you say such hard worldly
things, Vera? You do not really mean them."
"Don't I? Eustace, look at me: do I look like a poor clergyman's wife? Do
survey me dispassionately." She holds herself at arm's length from him,
and looks comically up and down the length of her gray skirts. "Think of
the yards and yards of stuff it takes to clothe me; and should not a
woman as tall as I am be always in velvet and point lace, Eustace? What
is the good of condemning myself to workhouse sheeting for the rest of my
days?"
Mr. Daintree looks at her admiringly; he has learnt to love her; this
beautiful southern flower that has come to blossom in his home. Women
will be hard enough on Vera through her life--men, never.
"You have great gifts and great temptations, my child," he says,
solemnly. "I pray that I may be enabled to do my duty to you. Do not say
you do not like good men, Vera, it pains me to hear you say it."
"I like _one_ good man, and his name is Eustace Daintree!" she answers,
softly; "is not that a hopeful sign?"
"You are a little flatterer, Vera," he says, kissing her; but, though he
is a middle-aged clergyman and her brother-in-law, he is by no means
impervious to the flattery.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Marion is humbling herself into the dust, at the
footstool of her tyrant. Mrs. Daintree is very angry with Marion's
sister, and Mr. Gisburne is also the text whereon she hangs her sermon.
"I wish her no harm, Marion; why should I? She is most impertinent to me,
but of that I will not speak."
"Indeed, grandmamma, you do not understand Vera. I am sure she----"
"Oh, yes, excuse me, my dear, I understand her perfectly--the
impertinence to myself I waive--I hope I am a Christian, but I cannot
forgive her for turning up her nose at Mr. Gisburne--a most excellent
young man; what can a girl want more?"
"Dear Mrs. Daintree, does Vera look like a poor clergyman's wife?" said
Marion, using unconsciously Vera's own arguments.
"Now, Marion, I have no patience with such folly! Whom do you suppose she
is to wait for? We haven't got any Princes down at Sutton to marry her;
and I say it's a shame that she should go on living on her friends, a
girl without a penny! when she might marry a respectable man, and have
a home of her own."
And then even Marion said that, if Vera could be brought to like Mr.
Gisburne, it might possibly be happier for her to marry him.
CHAPTER II.
KYNASTON HALL.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply of lovers none ever will know.
Swinburne, "A Forsaken Garden."
It seemed to be generally acknowledged by the Daintree family that if
Vera would only consent to yield to the solicitations of the Reverend
Albert Gisburne, and transfer herself to Tripton Rectory for life, it
would be the simplest and easiest solution of a good many difficult
problems concerning her.
In point of fact, Vera Nevill was an incongruous element in the Daintree
household. In that quiet humdrum country clergyman's life she was as much
out of her proper place as a bird of paradise in a chicken yard, or a
Gloire de Dijon rose in a field of turnips.
It was not her beauty alone, but her whole previous life which unfitted
her for the things amongst which she found herself suddenly transplanted.
She was no young unformed child, but a woman of the world, who had been
courted and flattered and sought after; who had learnt to hold her own,
and to fight her battles single-handed, and who knew far more about
the dangers and difficulties of life than did the simple-hearted
brother-in-law, under whose charge she now found herself, or the timid,
gentle sister who was so many years her senior.
But if she was cognizant of the world and its ways, Vera knew absolutely
nothing about the life of an English vicarage. Sunday schools and
mothers' meetings were enigmas to her; clothing clubs and friendly
societies, hopeless and uninteresting mysteries which she had no desire
to solve. She had no place in the daily routine. What was she to do
amongst it all?
Vera did what was most pleasant and also most natural to her--she did
nothing. She was by habit and by culture essentially indolent. The
southern blood she inherited, the life of the Italian fine lady she had
led, made her languid and fond of inaction. To lie late in bed, to sip
chocolate, and open her letters before she rose; to be dressed and
re-dressed by a fashionable lady's maid; to recline in luxurious
carriages, and to listen lazily to the flattery and adulation that had
surrounded her--that had been Vera's life from morning till night ever
since she grew up.
How, with such antecedents, was she to enter suddenly into all the
activity of an English clergyman's home? There were the schools, and the
vestry meetings, and the sick and the destitute to be fretted after from
Monday morning till Saturday night--Eustace and Marion hardly ever had a
moment's respite or a leisure hour the whole week; whilst Sunday, of
course, was the hardest day's work of all.
But Vera could not turn her life into these things. She would not have
known how to set about them, and assuredly she had no desire to try.
So she wandered about the garden in the summer time, or sat dreamily by
the fire in winter. She gathered flowers and decorated the rooms with
them; she spoilt the children, she quarrelled with their grandmother, but
she did nothing else; and the righteous soul of Eustace Daintree was
disquieted within him on account of her. He felt that her life was
wasted, and the responsibility of it seemed, to his over-sensitive
conscience, to rest upon himself.
"The girl ought to be married," he would say to his wife, anxiously. "A
husband and a home of her own is what she wants. If she were happily
settled she would find occupation enough."
"I don't see whom she could marry, Eustace; men are so scarce, and there
are so many girls in the county."
"Well, she might have had Barry." Barry was a curate whom Vera had lately
scorned, and who had, in consequence of the crushed condition of his
affections, incontinently fled. "And then there is Gisburne. Why couldn't
she marry Gisburne? He is quite a catch, and a good young man too."
"Yes, it is a pity; perhaps she may change her mind, and he will ask her
again after Christmas; he told me as much."
"You must try and persuade her to think better of it by then, my dear.
Now I must be off to old Abraham, and be sure you send round the port to
Mary Williams; and you will find the list for the blanket club on my
study table, love."
Her husband started on his morning rounds, and Marion, coming down into
the drawing-room, found old Mrs. Daintree haranguing Vera on the same
all-important topic.
"I am only speaking for your good, Vera; what other object could I have?"
she was saying, as she dived into the huge basket of undarned socks on
the floor before her, and extracted thereout a ragged specimen to be
operated upon. "It is sheer obstinacy on your part that you will not
accept such a good offer. And there was poor Mr. Barry, a most worthy
young man, and his second cousin a bishop, too, quite sure of a living,
I should say."
"Another clergyman!" said Vera, with a soft laugh, just lifting up her
hands and letting them fall down again upon her lap, with a little,
half-foreign movement of impatience. "Are there, then, no other men but
the clergy in this country?"
"And a very good thing if there were no others," glared the old lady,
defiantly, over her spectacles.
"I do not like them," said Vera, simply.
"Not like them! Considering that I am the daughter, the widow, and the
mother of clergymen, I consider that remark a deliberate insult to me!"
"Dear Mrs. Daintree, I am sure Vera never meant----" cried Marion,
trembling for fear of a fresh battle.
"Don't interrupt me, Marion; you ought to have more proper pride than to
stand by and hear the Church reviled."
"Vera only said she did not like them."
"No more I do, Marion," said Vera, stifling a yawn--"not when they are
young; when they are old, like Eustace, they are far better; but when
they are young they are all exactly alike--equally harmless when out of
the pulpit, and equally wearisome when in it!"
A few moments of offended silence on the part of the elder lady,
during which she tugs fiercely and savagely at the ragged sock in her
hands--then she bursts forth again.
"You may scorn them as much as you like, but let me tell you that the
life of a clergyman's wife--honoured, respected, and useful--is a more
profitable one than the idle existence which you lead, utterly
purposeless and lazy. You never do one single thing from morning till
night."
"What shall I do? Shall I help you to darn Eustace's socks?" reaching at
one of them out of the basket.
Mrs. Daintree wrenched it angrily from her hand.
"Good gracious! as if you could! What a bungle it would be. Why, I never
saw you with a piece of work in your hand in my life. I dare say you
could not even thread a needle."
"I am quite sure I have never threaded one yet," laughed Vera, lazily. "I
might try; but you see you won't let me be useful, so I had better resign
myself to idleness." And then she rose and took her hat, and went out
through the French window, out among the fallen yellow leaves, leaving
the other women to discuss the vexed problem of her existence.
She discussed it to herself as she walked dreamily along under the trees
in the lane beyond the garden, her head bent, and her eyes fixed upon the
ground; she swung her hat idly in her hand, for it was warm for the time
of year, and the gold-brown leaves fluttered down about her head and
rustled under the dark, trailing skirts behind her.
About half a mile up the lane, beyond the vicarage, stood an old iron
gateway leading into a park. It was flanked by square red-brick columns,
upon whose summits two stone griffins, "rampant," had looked each other
in the face for the space of some two hundred years or so, peering grimly
over the tops of the shields against which they stood on end, upon which
all the family arms and quarterings of the Kynastons had become softly
coated over by an indistinct veil of gray-green moss.
Vera turned in at this gate, nodding to the woman at the lodge within,
who looked out for a minute at her as she passed. It was her daily walk,
for Kynaston was uninhabited and empty, and any one was free to wander
unreproved among its chestnut glades, or to stand and gossip to its
ancient housekeeper in the great bare rooms of the deserted house.
Vera did so often. The square, red-brick building, with its stone
copings, the terrace walk before the windows, the peacocks sunning
themselves before the front door, the fountain plashing sleepily in the
stone basin, the statues down the square Italian garden--all had a
certain fascination for her dreamy poetical nature. Then turning in at
the high narrow doorway, whose threshold Mrs. Eccles, the housekeeper,
had long ago given her free leave to cross, she would stroll through the
deserted rooms, touching the queer spindle-legged furniture with gentle
reverent fingers, gazing absorbedly at the dark rows of family portraits,
and speculating always to herself what they had been like, these dead and
gone Kynastons, who had once lived and laughed, and sorrowed and died, in
the now empty rooms, where nothing was left of them save those dim and
faded portraits, and where the echo of her own footsteps was the only
sound in the wilderness of the carpetless chambers where once they had
reigned supreme.
She got to know them all at last by name--whole generations of them.
There was Sir Ralph in armour, and Bridget, his wife, in a ruff and a
farthingale; young Sir Maurice, who died in boyhood, and Sir Penrhyn, his
brother, in long love-locks and lace ruffles. A whole succession of Sir
Martins and Sir Henrys; then came the first Sir John and his wife in
powder and patches, with their fourteen children all in a row, whose
elaborate marriages and family histories, Vera, although assisted by Mrs.
Eccles, who had them all at her fingers' ends, had considerable
difficulty in clearly comprehending. It was a relief to be firmly landed
with Sir Maurice, in a sad-coloured suit and full-bottomed wig, "the
present baronet's grandfather," and, lastly, Sir John, "the present
baronet's father," in a deputy-lieutenant's scarlet uniform, with a
cocked hat under his arm--by far the worst and most inartistic painting
in the whole collection.
It was all wonderful and interesting to Vera. She elaborated whole
romances to herself out of these portraits. She settled their loves and
their temptations, heart-broken separations, and true lovers' meetings
between them. Each one had his or her history woven out of the slender
materials which Mrs. Eccles could give her of their real lives. Only one
thing disappointed her, there was no portrait of the present Sir John.
She would have liked to have seen what he was like, this man who was
unmarried still, and who had never cared to live in the house of his
fathers. She wondered what the mystery had been that kept him from it.
She could not understand that a man should deliberately prefer dark,
dirty, dingy London, which she had only once seen in passing from one
station to the other on her way to Sutton, to a life in this quiet
old-world red-brick house, with the rooks cawing among trees, and the
long chestnut glades stretching away into the park, and all the venerable
associations of those portraits of his ancestors. Some trouble, some
sorrow, must have kept him away from it, she felt.
But she would not question Mrs. Eccles about him; she encouraged her to
talk of the dead and gone generations as much as she pleased, but of the
man who was her master Vera would have thought it scarcely honourable to
have spoken to his servant. Perhaps, too, she preferred her dreams. One
day, idly opening the drawer of an old bureau in the little room which
Mrs. Eccles always called religiously "My lady's morning room," Vera came
upon a modern photograph that arrested her attention wonderfully.
It represented, however, nothing very remarkable; only a
broad-shouldered, good-looking young man, with an aquiline noise and a
close-cropped head. On the reverse side of the card was written in
pencil, "My son--for Mrs. Eccles." Lady Kynaston, she supposed, must
therefore have sent it to the old housekeeper, and of course it was Sir
John. Vera pushed it back again into the drawer with a little flush, as
though she had been guilty of an indiscretion in looking at it, and she
said no word of her discovery to the housekeeper. A day or two later she
sought for it again in the same place, but it had been taken away.
But the face thus seen made an impression upon her. She did not forget
it; and when Sir John Kynaston's name was mentioned, she invested him
with the living likeness of the photograph she had seen.
On this particular October morning that Vera strolled up idly to the old
house she did not feel inclined to wander among the deserted rooms; the
sunshine came down too pleasantly through the autumn leaves; the air was
too full of the lingering breath of the dying summer for her to care to
go indoors. She paused a minute by the open window of the housekeeper's
room, and called the old lady by name.
The room, however, was empty and she received no answer, so she wandered
on to the terrace and leant over the stone parapet that looked over the
gardens and the fountains, and the distant park beyond, and she thought
of the photograph in the drawer.
And then and there there came into Vera Neville's mind a thought that,
beginning with nothing more than an indistinct and idle fancy, ended in
a set and determined purpose.
The thought was this:--
"If Sir John Kynaston ever comes down here, I will marry him."
She said it to herself, deliberately and calmly, without the slightest
particle of hesitation or bashfulness. She told herself that what her
relations were perpetually impressing upon her concerning the
desirableness of her marrying and making a home of her own, was perfectly
just and true. It would undoubtedly be a good thing for her to marry; her
life was neither very pleasant nor very satisfactory to herself or to any
one else. She had never intended to end her days at Sutton Vicarage; it
had only been an intermediate condition of things. She had no vocation
for visiting the poor, or for filling that useful but unexciting family
office of maiden aunt; and, moreover, she felt that, with all their
kindness to her, her brother-in-law and his wife ought not to be burdened
with her support for longer than was necessary. As to turning governess,
or companion, or lady-help, there was an incongruity in the idea that
made it too ludicrous to contemplate even for an instant. There is no
other way that a handsome and penniless woman can deliver her friends
of the burden of her existence than by marriage.
Marriage decidedly was what Vera had to look to. She was in no way averse
to the idea, only she intended to look at the subject from the most
practical and matter-of-fact point of view.
She was not going to render herself wretched for life by rashly
consenting to marry Mr. Gisburne, or any other equally unsuitable husband
that her friends might choose to press upon her. Vera differed in one
important respect from the vast majority of young ladies of the present
day--she had no vague and indistinct dreams as to what marriage might
bring her. She knew exactly what she wanted from it. She wanted wealth
and position, because she knew what they were and what life became
without them; and because she knew that she was utterly unfitted to be
the wife of any one but a rich man.
And therefore it was that Vera looked from the square red house behind
her over the wide gardens and broad lawns, and down the noble avenues
that spread away into the distance, and said to herself, "This is what
will suit me, to be mistress of a place like this; I should love it
dearly; I should find real happiness and pleasure in the duties that such
a position would bring me. If Sir John Kynaston comes here, it is he whom
I will marry, and none other."
As to what her feelings might be towards the man whom she thus proposed
to marry it cannot be said that Vera took them into consideration at all.
She was not, indeed, aware whether or no she possessed any feelings; they
had never incommoded her hitherto. Probably they had no existence. Such
vague fancy as had been ever roused within her had been connected with a
photograph seen once in a writing-table drawer. The photograph of Sir
John Kynaston! The reflection did not influence her in the least, only
she said to herself also, "If he is like his photograph, I should be sure
to get on with him."
She was an odd mixture, this Vera. Ambitious, worldly-wise, mercenary
even, if you will; conscious of her own beauty, and determined to exact
its full value; and yet she was tender and affectionate, full of poetry
and refinement, honest and true as her own fanciful name.
The secret of these strange contradictions is simply this. Vera has never
loved. No one spark of divine fire has ever touched her soul or warmed
the latent energies of her being. She has lived in the thick of the
world, but love has passed her scatheless. Her mind, her intellect, her
brain, are all alive, and sharpened acutely; her heart slumbers still.
Happier for her, perhaps, had it never awakened.
She leant upon the stone parapet, supporting her chin upon her hand,
dreaming her dreams. Her hat lay by her side, her long dark dress fell in
straight heavy folds to her feet. The yellow leaves fluttered about her,
the peacocks strutted up and down, the gardeners in the distance were
sweeping up the dead leaves on the lawns, but Vera stirred not; one
motionless, beautiful figure giving grace, and life, and harmony to the
deserted scene.
* * * * *
Some one was passing along among the upper rooms of the house, followed
by Mrs. Eccles, panting and exhausted.
"I am sure, Sir John, I am quite ashamed that you should see the place so
choked up with dust and lumber. If you had only let me have a day's
notice, instead of being took all of a sudden like, I'd have had the
house tidied up a bit; but what with not expecting to see any of the
family, and my being old, and not so quick at the cleaning as I used to
be----"
"Never mind, Mrs. Eccles; I had just as soon see it as it is. I only
wanted to see if you could make three or four rooms tolerably habitable
in case I thought of bringing my horses down for a month or so. The
stables, I find, are in good repair."
"Yes, Sir John, and so is the house; though the furniture is that
old-fashioned, that it is hardly fit for you to use."
"Oh! it will do well enough; besides, I have not made up my mind at all.
It is quite uncertain whether I shall come----Who is that?" stopping
suddenly short before the window.
"That! Oh, bless me, Sir John, it's Miss Vera, from the vicarage. I hope
you won't object to her being here; of course, she could not know you was
back. I had given her leave to walk in the grounds."
"The vicarage! Has Mr. Daintree a daughter so old as that?"
"Oh, law! no, Sir John. It is Mrs. Daintree's sister. She came from
abroad to live with them last year. A very nice young lady, Sir John, is
Miss Nevill, and seems lonely like, and it kind of cheers her up to come
and see me and walk in the garden. I am sure I hope you won't take it
amiss that I should have allowed her to come."
"Take it amiss--good gracious, no! Pray, let Miss--Miss Nevill, did you
say?--come as often as she likes. What about the cellars, Mrs. Eccles?"
"I will get the key, Sir John." The housekeeper precedes him out of the
room, but Sir John stands still by the window.
"What a picture," he says to himself below his breath; "how well she
looks there. She gives to the old place just the one thing it lacks--has
always lacked ever since I have known it--the presence of a beautiful
woman. Yes, Mrs. Eccles, I am coming." This last aloud, and he hastens
downstairs.
Five minutes later, Sir John Kynaston says to his housekeeper,
"You need not scare that young lady away from the place by telling her
I was here to-day and saw her. And you may get the rooms ready, Mrs.
Eccles, and order anything that is wanted, and get in a couple of maids,
for I have made up my mind to bring my horses down next month."
CHAPTER III.
FANNING DEAD ASHES.
Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan,
Sorrow calls no time that's gone,
Violets plucked, the sweetest rain
Makes not fresh, nor grow again.
Fletcher.
"Have you heard of Sir John's latest vagary, grandpapa? He is gone down
to Kynaston to hunt--so there's an end of _him_."
"Humph! Where did you hear that?"
"I've been lunching at Lady Kynaston's."
The speaker stood by the window of one of the large houses at Prince's
Gate overlooking the Horticultural Gardens. She was a small, slight
woman, with fair pale features and a mass of soft yellow hair. She had a
delicate complexion and very clear blue eyes. Altogether she was a pretty
little woman. A stranger would have guessed her to be a girl barely out
of her teens. Helen Romer was in reality five-and-twenty, and she had
been a widow four years.
Of her brief married life few people could speak with any certainty,
although there were plenty of surmises and conjectures concerning it. All
that was known was that Helen had lived with her grandfather till she was
nineteen; that one fine morning she had walked out of the house and had
been married to a man whom her grandfather disapproved of, and to whom
she had always professed perfect indifference. It was also known that
eighteen months later her husband, having rapidly wasted his existence by
drink and other irregular courses, had died in miserable poverty; and
that Helen, not being able to set up a home of her own, upon her slender
fortune of some five or six thousand pounds, had returned to her
grandfather's house in Prince's Gate, where she had lived ever since.
Why she had married William Romer no one ever exactly knew--perhaps Helen
herself least of any one. It certainly was not for love; it could hardly
have been from any worldly motive. Some people averred, and possibly they
were not far wrong, that she had done so out of pique because the man she
loved did not want her.
However that might be, Mrs. Romer returned a widow, and not a very
disconsolate one, to her grandfather's house.
It is certain that she would not have lived there could she have helped
it. She did not love old Mr. Harlowe, neither did Mr. Harlowe love her. A
sense of absolute duty to his dead daughter's child on the one side, a
sense of absolute necessity on the other, kept the two together. Their
natures were inharmonious. They kept up a form of affection and intimacy
openly; in reality, they had not one single thought in common.
It is not too much to say that Mr. Harlowe positively disliked his
grand-daughter. He had, perhaps, good reason for it. Helen had been
nothing but a trouble to him. He had not desired to bring up a young
lady in his house; he had not wished for the society which her presence
entailed, nor for the dissipations of London life into which he was
dragged more or less against his will. Added to which, Helen had not
striven to please him in essential matters. She had married a gambling,
drinking blackguard, whom he had forbidden to enter his doors; and now,
when she might retrieve her position, and marry well and creditably, she
refused to make the slightest effort to meet his views.
Helen's life was a mystery to all but herself. To the world she was a
pretty, lively little widow, with a good house to live in, and sufficient
money of her own to spend to very good effect upon her back, with not a
single duty or responsibility in her existence, and with no other
occupation in life than to amuse herself. At her heart Helen knew herself
to be a soured and disappointed woman, who had desired one thing all her
life, and who, having attained with great pains and toil that forbidden
fruit which she had coveted, had found it turn, as such fruits too often
do, to dust and ashes between her teeth. It was to have been sweet as
honeydew--and behold, it was nothing but bitterness!
She stood at the window looking out at the waning light of the November
afternoon. She was handsomely dressed in dark-green velvet, with a heavy
old-fashioned gold chain round her neck; every now and then she looked at
her watch, and a frown passed over her brow. The old man was bending over
the fire behind her.
"Gone to Kynaston, is he? Humph! that is your fault, you frightened him
off."
"Did I set my cap at him so palpably then?" said Helen, with a short,
hard laugh.
"You know very well what I mean," answered her grandfather, sulkily. "Set
your cap! No, you only do that to the men you know I don't approve of,
and who don't want you."
Helen winced a little. "You put things very coarsely, grandpapa," she
said, and laughed again. "I am sorry I have been unable to make love to
Sir John Kynaston to please you. Is that what you wanted me to do?"
"I want you to look after a respectable husband, who can afford to keep
you. What is the meaning of that perpetual going to Lady Kynaston's then?
And why have you dragged me up to town at this confounded time of the
year if it wasn't for that? You have played your cards badly as usual.
You might have had him if you had chosen."
"I have never had the least intention of casting myself at Sir John's
head," said Helen, scornfully.
"You can cast yourself, as you call it, at that good-for-nothing young
spendthrift's head fast enough if you choose it."
"I don't in the least know whom you mean," she said, shortly.
The old man chuckled. "Oh, yes, you know well enough--the brother who
spends his time racing and betting. You are a fool, Helen; he doesn't
want you; and if he did, he couldn't afford to keep you."
"Suppose we leave Captain Kynaston's name out of the discussion,
grandpapa," she said, quietly, but her face flushed suddenly and her
hands twisted themselves nervously in and out of her heavy chain. "Are
you not going to your study this evening?"
"Oh yes, I'm going, fast enough. You want me out of the way, I suppose.
Somebody coming to tea, eh? Oh yes, I'll clear out. I don't want to
listen to your rubbish."
The old man gathered up his books and papers and shuffled out of the
room, muttering to himself as he went.
The servant came in, bringing the lamp, replenished the fire and drew the
curtains, shutting out the light of day.
"Any one to tea, ma'am?" he inquired, respectfully.
"One gentleman--no one else. Bring up tea when he comes."
"Very well, ma'am;" and the servant withdrew. Mrs. Romer paced
impatiently up and down the room, stopping again and again before the
clock.
"Late again! A whole half-hour behind his time! It is insufferable that
he should treat me like this. He would go quickly enough to see some new
face--some fresh fancy that had attracted him."
She took out her watch and laid it on the table. "Let me see if he will
come before the minute-hand touches the quarter; he _must_ be here by
then!"
She continued to pace steadily up and down the room. The clock ticked on,
the minute-hand of the watch crept ever stealthily forward over the
golden dial; now and then a passing vehicle without made her heart beat
with sudden hope, and then sink down again with disappointment, as the
sound of the wheels went by and died away in the distance.
Suddenly she sank into an arm-chair, covering her face with her hands.
"Oh, what a fool--what a fool I am!" she exclaimed aloud. "Why have I not
strength of mind to go out before he comes, to show him that I don't
care? Why, at least, can I not call up grandpapa, and pretend I had
forgotten he was coming? That would be the best way to treat him; the way
to show him that I am not the miserable slave he thinks me. Why can I,
who know so well how to manage all other men, never manage the one man
whose love I want? That horrid old man was right--he does not want me--he
never did. Oh, if I only could be proud, and pretend I do not care! But I
can't, I can't--there is always this miserable sickening pain at my heart
for him, and he knows it. I have let him know it!"
A ring at the bell made her spring to her feet, whilst a glad flush
suddenly covered her face.
In another minute the man she loved was in the room.
"Nearly three-quarters of an hour late!" she cried, angrily, as he
entered. "How shamefully you treat me!"
He stood in front of the fire, pulling off his dogskin gloves:
a broad-shouldered, handsome fellow, with an aquiline nose and a
close-cropped head.
"Am I late?" he said, indifferently. "I really did not know it. I have
had fifty places to go to in as many minutes."
"Of course I shall forgive you if you have been so busy," she said,
softening at once. "Maurice, darling, are you not going to kiss me?" She
stood up by his side upon the hearthrug, looking at him with all her
heart in her eyes, whilst his were on the fire. She wound her arms round
his neck, and drew his head down. He leant his cheek carelessly towards
her lips, and she kissed him passionately; and he--he was thinking of
something else.
"Poor little woman," he said, almost with an effort recalling himself
to the present; he patted her cheek lightly and turned round to toss
his gloves into his hat on the table behind him. "How cold it has
turned--aren't you going to give me some tea?" And then he sat down on
the further side of the fire and stretched himself back in his arm-chair,
throwing his arms up behind his head.
Helen rang the bell for the tea.
"Is that all you have to say to me?" she said, poutingly.
Maurice Kynaston looked distressed.
"Upon my word, Helen, I am sure I don't know what you expect. I haven't
heard any particular news. I saw you only yesterday, you know. I don't
know what you want me to say."
Helen was silent. She knew very well what she wanted, she wanted him to
say and do things that were impossible to him--to play the lover to her,
to respond to her caresses, to look glad to see her.
Maurice was so tired of it all! tired alike of her reproaches and her
caresses. The first irritated him, the second gave him no pleasure. There
was no longer any attraction to him about her, her love was oppressive to
him. He did not want it, he had never wanted it; only somehow she had
laid it so openly and freely at his feet, that it had seemed almost
unmanly to him not to put forth his hand and take it. And now he was
tired of his thraldom, sick of her endearments, satiated with her kisses.
And what was it all to end in? He could not marry her, he would not have
desired to do so had he been able; but as things were, there was no money
to marry on either side. At his heart Maurice Kynaston was glad of it,
for he did not want her for a wife, and yet he feared that he was bound
to her.
Man-like, he had no courage to break the chains that bound him, and yet
to-night he had said to himself that he would make the effort--the state
of his affairs furnished him with a sufficiently good pretext for
broaching the subject.
"There is something I wanted to say to you," he said, after the tea had
been brought in and they were alone again. He sat forward in his chair
and stroked his moustache nervously, not looking at her as he spoke.
Helen came and sat on the hearthrug at his feet, resting her cheek
caressingly against his knee.
"What is it, Maurice?"
"Well, it's about myself. I have been awfully hard hit this last week at
Newmarket, you know."
"Yes, so you told me. I am so sorry, darling." But she did not care much
as long as he was with her and was kind to her--nothing else signified
much to her.
"Yes, but I am pretty well broke this time--I had to go to John again. He
is an awfully good fellow, is old John; he has paid everything up for me.
But I've had to promise to give up racing, and now I've got to live on
my pay."
"I could lend you fifty pounds."
"Fifty pounds! pooh! what nonsense! What would be the good of fifty
pounds to me?"
He said it rather ungraciously, perhaps, and her eyes filled with tears.
When a man does not love a woman, her little childish offers of help do
not touch him as they would if he loved her. He would not have taken five
thousand from her, yet he was angry with her for talking of fifty pounds.
"What I wanted to say to you, Helen, was that, of course, now I am so
hard up it's no good thinking of--of marrying--or anything of that kind;
and don't you think it would be happiest if you and I--I mean, wisest for
us both--for you, of course, principally----"
"_What!_" She lifted her head sharply. She saw what he meant at once. A
wild terror filled her heart. "You mean that you want to throw me over!"
she said, breathlessly.
"My dear child, do be reasonable. Throw you over! of course not--but what
is it all to lead to? How can we possibly marry? It was bad enough
before, when I had my few hundreds a year. But now even that is gone.
A captain in a line regiment is not exactly in a position to marry. Why,
I shall hardly be able to keep myself, far less a wife too. I cannot drag
you down to starvation, Helen; it would not be right or honourable to
continue to bind you to my broken fortunes."
She was standing up now before him very white and very resolute.
"Why do you make so many excuses? You want to be rid of me."
"My dear child, how unjust you are."
"Am I unjust? Wait! let me speak. How have we altered things? Could you
marry me any more before you lost this money? You know you could not.
Have we not always agreed to wait till better times? Why cannot we go on
waiting?"
"It would not be fair to tie you."
He had not the courage to say, "I do not love you--money or no money, I
do not wish to marry you." How indeed is a man who is a gentleman to say
such a discourteous thing to a lady for whom he has once professed
affection? Maurice Kynaston, at all events, could not say so.
"It would not be fair to tie you; it would be better to let you be free:"
that was all he could find to say. And then Helen burst forth
impetuously,
"I wish to be tied--I do not want to be free--I will not marry any other
man on earth but you. Oh! Maurice, my love, my darling!" casting herself
down again at his feet and clasping her arms wildly round him. "Whom else
do I want but you--whom else have I ever loved? You know I have always
been yours--always--long ago, in the old days when you never even gave me
a look, and I was so maddened with misery and despair that I did not care
what became of me when I married poor Willie, hardly knowing what I was
doing, only because my life was so unbearable at home. And now that I
have got you, do you think I will give you up? And you love me--surely,
surely, you _must_ love me. You said so once, Maurice--tell me so again.
You do love me, don't you?"
What was a man to do? Maurice moved uneasily under her embrace as though
he would withdraw her arms from about his neck.
"Of course," he said, nervously; "of course, I am fond of you, and all
that, but we can't marry upon less than nothing. You must know that as
well as I do."
"No; but we can wait."
"What are we to wait for?" he said, irritably.
"Oh, a hundred things might happen--your brother might die."
"God forbid!" he said, pushing her from him, in earnest this time.
"Well, we will hope not that, perhaps; but grandpapa can't live for ever,
and he ought to leave me all his money, and then we should be rich."
"It is horrible waiting for dead people's shoes," said Maurice, with a
little shudder; "besides, Mr. Harlowe is just as likely as not to leave
his money to a hospital, or to the British Museum, or the National
Gallery--you could not count upon anything."
"We could at all events wait and see."
"And be engaged all that time on the off-chance?" he said, drearily;
"that is a miserable prospect."
"Then you do wish to get rid of me!" she said, looking at him
suspiciously; "you have seen some other woman."
"Pooh! what a little fool you are!" He jumped up angrily from his chair,
leaving her there upon the hearthrug. A woman makes a false move when she
speaks of "another woman" to the man whose affection for her is on the
wane. In the present instance the accusation was utterly without
foundation. Many as were his self-reproaches on her account, that one had
never been amongst them. If he did not love her, neither had he the
slightest fancy for any other woman. Her remark irritated him beyond
measure; it seemed to annul and wipe out the score of his own
shortcomings towards her, and to make himself, not her, the injured one.
"Women are the most irrational, the most unjust, the most thoroughly
pig-headed set of creatures on the face of the earth!" he burst forth,
angrily.
She saw her mistake by this time. She was no fool; she was quick
enough--sharp as a needle--where her love did not, as love invariably
does, warp and blind her judgment.
"I am sorry, Maurice," she said, humbly. "I did not mean to doubt you, of
course. Have you not said you love me? Sit down again, please."
He sat down only half appeased, looking glum and sulky. She felt that
some concession on her part was necessary. She took his hand and stroked
it softly. She knew so well that he did not love her, and yet she clung
so desperately to the hope that she could win him back; she would not own
to herself even in the furthermost recesses of her own heart that his
love was dead. She would not believe it; to put it in words to herself
even would have half killed her; but still she was forced to acknowledge
that unless she met him half-way she might lose him altogether.
"I will tell you what I will do, Maurice," she said thoughtfully. "I will
consent to let our engagement be in abeyance for the present; I will
cease to write to you unless I have anything particular to say, and I
will not expect you to write to me. If people question us, we will deny
any engagement between us--we will say that we are each of us free--but
on one condition only, that you will promise me most solemnly, on your
honour as a gentleman, that should either of us be left any money--should
there be, say, a clear thousand a year between us, within the next five
years----"
"My dear Helen, I am as likely to have a thousand a year as to be
presented with the regalia."
"Never mind. If it is unlikely, so much the worse--or the better,
whichever you may like to call it. But if such a thing does happen, give
me your word of honour that you will come to me at once--that, in fact,
our engagement shall be renewed. If things are no better, our prospects
no brighter, in five years from now--well, then, let us each be free to
marry elsewhere."
There was a moment or two of silence between them. Maurice bent forward
in his chair, leaning his arms upon his knees, and staring moodily into
the fire. He was weighing her proposition. It was something; but it was
not enough. It virtually bound him to her for five years, for, of course,
an engagement that is to be tacitly consented to between the principal
contractors is an engagement still, though the whole world be in
ignorance of it. But then it gave him a chance, and a very good chance
too, of perfect liberty in five years' time. It was something, certainly;
though, as he had wanted his freedom at once, it could hardly be said to
be altogether satisfactory.
Helen knelt bolt upright in front of him, watching his face. How
passionately she desired to hear him indignantly repudiate the
half-liberty she offered him! How ardently she desired that he should
take her in his arms, and swear to her that he would never consent to her
terms, no one but herself could know. It had been her last expedient to
revive the old love, to rekindle the dead ashes of the smouldering fire.
Surely, if there was but a spark of it left, it must leap up into life
and vitality again at her words. But, as she watched him, her heart, that
had beat so wildly, sank cold and colder within her. She felt that his
heart was gone from her; she had cast her last die and lost. But, for all
that, she was not minded to let him go free--her wild, ungoverned passion
for him was too deeply rooted within her; since he would not be hers
willingly, he should be hers by force.
"Surely," she said, wistfully, "you cannot find my terms too hard to
consent to--you who--who love me?"
He turned to her quickly and took her hands, every feeling of
gentleman-like honour, every spark of manly courtesy towards her, aroused
by her gentle words.
"Say no more, Helen--you are too good--too generous to me. It shall be as
you say."
And then he left, thankful to escape from her presence and to be alone
again with his thoughts in the raw darkness of the November evening.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LAY RECTOR.
Or art thou complaining
Of thy lowly lot,
And, thine own disdaining,
Dost ask what thou hast not?
Of the future dreaming,
Weary of the past,
For the present scheming
All but what thou hast.
L. E. Landon.
In the churchyard at Sutton-in-the-Wold was a monument which, for
downright ugliness and bad taste, could hardly find its fellow in the
whole county. It was a wonderful and marvellous structure of gray
granite, raised upon a flight of steps, and consisted of an object like
unto Cleopatra's Needle surmounting a family tea-urn. It had been erected
by one Nathaniel Crupps, a well-to-do farmer in the parish, upon the
death of his second wife. The first partner of his affections had been
previously interred also in the same spot, but it was not until the death
of the second Mrs. Crupps, who was undoubtedly his favourite, that
Nathaniel bethought him of immortalizing the memory of both ladies by one
bold stroke of fancy, as exemplified by this portentous granite
monstrosity. On it the virtues of both wives were recorded, as it was
touchingly and naïvely stated, by their "sorrowing husband with strict
impartiality."
It was upon this graceful structure that Vera Nevill leant one foggy
morning in the first week of November, and surveyed the church in front
of her. She was not engaged in any sentimental musings appropriate to the
situation. She was neither meditating upon the briefness of life in
general, nor upon the many virtues of the ladies of the Crupps family,
over whose remains she was standing. She was simply waiting for Jimmy
Griffiths, and looking at the church because she had nothing else to look
at. The church, indeed, afforded her some food for reflection, purely, I
regret to state, of a practical and mundane character. It was a large and
handsome building, with a particularly fine old tower, that was sadly out
of repair; but the chancel was a modern and barn-like structure of brick
and plaster, which ought, of course, to be entirely swept away, and a new
and more appropriate one built in its stead. The chancel belonged, as
most chancels do, to the lay rector, and the lay rector was Sir John
Kynaston.
As soon as it became bruited abroad that Sir John was coming down to the
old house for the winter, there was a general excitement throughout the
parish, but no one partook of the excitement to a greater degree than did
its worthy vicar.
It was the dream of Eustace Daintree's life to get his church restored,
and more especially to get the chancel rebuilt. There had been a
restoration fund accumulating for some years, and could he have had the
slightest assistance from the lay rector concerning the chancel, Mr.
Daintree would assuredly have sent for the architect, and the builders,
and the stone-cutters, and have begun his church at once with that
beautiful disregard of the future chances of being able to get the money
to pay for it, and with that sparrow-like trust in Providence, which is
usually displayed by those clerical gentlemen who, in the face of an
estimate which tells them that eight thousand pounds will be the sum
total required, are ready to dash into bricks and mortar upon the actual
possession of eight hundred. But there was the chancel! To leave it as it
was whilst restoring the nave would have been too heart-rending; to touch
it without Sir John Kynaston's assistance, impossible and illegal.
Several times Eustace Daintree had applied to Sir John in writing upon
the subject. The answers had been vague and unsatisfactory. He would
promise nothing at all; he would come down and see it some day possibly,
and then he would be able to say more about it; meanwhile, for the
present, things must remain as they were.
When, therefore, the news was known that Sir John was actually coming
down, Mr. Daintree's thoughts flew at once to his beloved church.
"Now we shall get the chancel done at last," he said to his wife
gleefully, rubbing his hands. And the very day after Sir John's arrival
Eustace went up to the Hall after dinner to see him upon the subject.
"Had you not better wait a day or two?" counselled his more prudent wife.
"Wait till you meet him, naturally. You don't very well know what kind of
man he is, nor how he will take it."
"What is the use of waiting? I knew him well enough eight years ago; he
was a pleasant fellow enough then. He won't kill me, I suppose, and the
chancel is a disgrace--a positive disgrace to him. It is my duty to point
it out to him; the thing can't afford to wait, it ought to be done at
once."
So he disregarded Marion's advice, and Vera helped him on with his
great-coat in the hall, and wound his woollen comforter round his neck,
and bade him good luck on his expedition to Kynaston.
He came back sorrowful and abashed. Sir John had been civil, very civil;
he had insisted on his sitting down at his table--for he had apparently
not finished his dinner--and had opened a bottle of fine old port in his
honour. He had inquired about many of the old people, and had expressed
a friendly interest in the parish generally; but with regard to the
chancel, he had been as adamant.
He did not see, he had said, why it could not go on well enough as it
was. If it was in bad repair, Davis should see to it; a man with a
barrowful of bricks and a shovelful of mortar should be sent down. That,
of course, it was his duty to do. Sir John did not understand that more
could possibly be expected of him. The chancel had been good enough for
his father, it would probably be good enough for him; it would last his
time, he supposed, in any case.
But the soul of the Rev. Eustace became as water within him. It was
not of a barrowful of bricks and shovelful of mortar that he had been
dreaming, but of lancet windows and stone mouldings; of polished oak
rafters within, and of high gables and red tiles without.
He came down from the Hall disheartened and discomfited, with all the
spirit crushed out of him; and the ladies of his family, for once,
were of one mind about the matter. There arose about him a storm of
indignation and a gush of sympathy, which could not fail to soothe him
somewhat. Eustace went to rest that night sore and heavy-hearted, it is
true, but with all the damnatory verses in the Scriptures concerning the
latter end of the "rich man" ringing in his head; a course of meditation
which, upon the whole, afforded him a distinct sensation of consolation
and comfort.
And the next morning in the churchyard Vera leant against the Cruppsian
sarcophagus, and thought about it.
"Poor old Eustace," she said to herself; "how I wish I were very rich,
and could do his chancel for him! How pleased he would be; and what a
good fellow he is! How odd it is to think what different aims there are
in people's lives! There are Eustace and Marion simply miserable this
morning because of that hideous barn they can't get rid of. Well, it _is_
hideous certainly; but it doesn't disturb my peace of mind in the least.
What a mean curmudgeon Sir John must be, by the way! I should not have
thought it from his photograph; such a frank, open, generous face he
seemed to have. However, we all know how photographs can mislead one.
I wonder where that wretched boy can be!"
The "wretched boy" was Jimmy Griffiths afore-mentioned; he was the youth
who was in the habit of blowing the organ. The schoolmaster, who was also
the organist, was ill, and had sent word to Mr. Daintree that he would be
unable to be at the church on the morrow. Eustace had asked Vera to take
his place. Now Vera was not accomplished; she neither sang, nor played,
nor painted in water-colours; but she had once learnt to play the organ
a little--a very little. So she professed herself willing to undertake
the office of organ-player for once, that is to say, if she found she
could do it pretty well, only she must go into church and try all the
chants over. So Jimmy Griffiths was sent for from the village, and Vera,
with the church key in her pocket, strolled idly into the churchyard,
and, whilst awaiting him, meditated upon the tomb of the two Mrs. Crupps.
She had come in from the private gate of the vicarage, and the vicarage
garden--very bleak and very desolate by this time--lay behind her. To the
right, the public pathway led down through the lych-gate into the
village. Anybody coming up from the village could have seen her as she
stood against the granite monument. She wore a long fur cloak down almost
to her feet, and a round fur cap upon her head; they were her sister
Theodora's sables, which she had left to her. Old Mrs. Daintree always
told her she ought to sell them, a remark which made Vera very angry. Her
back was turned to the village and to the lych-gate, and she was looking
up at poor Eustace's bug-bear--the barn-like chancel.
Suddenly somebody came up close behind her and spoke to her.
"Can you tell me, please, where the keys of the church are kept?"
A gentleman stood beside her, lifting his hat as he spoke. Vera started
a little at being so suddenly spoken to, but answered quite quietly and
unconfusedly,
"They are generally kept at the vicarage, or else in the clerk's
cottage."
"Thank you; then I will go and fetch them."
"But they are not there now," said Vera, as though finishing her former
remark.
"If you will kindly tell me where I can find them," continued the
stranger, very politely, "I will go and get them."
"I am afraid you can't do that," said Vera, with just the vestige of a
smile playing upon her face, "because they are at present in my pocket."
"Oh, I beg your pardon;" and the stranger smiled outright.
"But I will let you into the church, if you like; if that is what you
wish?" she said, quite simply.
"Yes, if you please." Vera moved up the path to the porch, the gentleman
following her. She turned the key in the heavy door and held it open. "If
you will go in, please, I will take the keys; I must not leave them in
the door." The gentleman went in, and Vera looked at him as he passed by.
Most uninteresting! was her verdict as he passed her; forty at the very
least! What a beautiful situation for an adventure! What a romantic
incident! And how excessively tame is the _dénouement_! A middle-aged
gentleman, tall and slightly bald, with close-cropped whiskers and grave,
set features; who on earth could he be? A stranger, evidently; perhaps he
was staying at some neighbouring country house, and had walked over to
Sutton for the sake of exercise; but what on earth could he want to see
the church for!
The stranger stood just inside the door with his hat off, looking at her.
"Won't you come in and show it to me?" he asked, rather hesitatingly.
"The church? oh, certainly, if you like, but there is nothing to see in
it." She came in, closing the door behind her, and stood beside him. It
did not strike her as unusual or interesting, or as anything, in fact,
but the most common-place and unexciting proceeding, that she should do
the honours of the church to this middle-aged stranger.
They stood side by side in the centre of the small nave with all the
ugly, high, red-cushioned pews around them. Vera looked up and down the
familiar place as though she and not he were seeing it for the first
time; from the row of whitewashed pillars to the staring white windows;
from the hatchment on the plastered walls to the disfiguring gallery
along the west end.
"It is very hideous," she said, almost apologetically, "especially the
chancel; Mr. Daintree wants to have it restored, but I suppose that can't
be done at all now."
"Why can't it be done?"
"Oh, because nothing can be done unless the chancel is pulled down; that
belongs to the lay rector, and he has refused to restore it."
"Sir John Kynaston is the lay rector."
"Yes!" Vera looked a little startled; "do you know him?"
The gentleman passed his hand over his chin.
"Slightly," he answered, not looking at her.
"It is a pity he cannot be brought to see how necessary it is, for he
certainly ought to do it," continued Vera. "You see I cannot help being
interested in it because Mr. Daintree is such a good man, and has worked
so hard to get up money to begin the rest of the church. He had quite
counted upon the chancel being done, and now he is so much disappointed;
but, I beg your pardon, this cannot interest you."
"But it interests me very much. Why does not somebody put it in this
light to Sir John; he would not surely refuse?"
"My brother-in-law, Mr. Daintree, I mean, did ask him last night, and he
would not promise to do anything."
The stranger suddenly left her side and walked up the church by himself
into the chancel. He went straight up to the east end and made a minute
examination apparently of the wall; after that, he came slowly down
again, looking carefully into every corner and cranny from the
whitewashed ceiling down to the damp and uneven stone paving at his feet;
Vera thought him a very odd person, and wondered what he was thinking
about.
He came back to her and stood before her looking at her for a minute. And
then he made this most remarkable speech:
"If _you_ were to ask Sir John Kynaston this he would restore the
chancel!" he said.
For half-a-second Vera stared at him in blank amazement. Then she turned
haughtily round, and flushed hotly with angry indignation.
"There is nothing more to see in the church," she said, shortly, and
walked straight out of it.
The stranger had followed her; when they reached the churchyard he said
to her, quite humbly,
"I beg your pardon; Miss Nevill; how unlucky I am to have made you angry,
to begin with."
Vera looked at him in astonishment. How did he know her name; who was he?
He was looking at her with such a penitent and distressed expression,
that for the first time she noticed what a kind face it was. Then, before
she could answer him, she saw her brother-in-law over the paling of the
vicarage garden, coming towards them.
The stranger saw him, too, and lifted his hat to her.
"Good-bye," he said, rather hastily; "I did not mean to offend you; don't
be angry about it;" and, before she could say a word, he turned quickly
down the churchyard through the lych-gate into the road, and was gone.
"Vera," said Eustace Daintree, coming leisurely up to her through the
garden gate, "how on earth do you come to be talking to Sir John; has he
been saying anything to you about the chancel?"
"_Who_ was it? _who_ did you say?" cried Vera, aghast.
"Why, Sir John Kynaston, to be sure. Did you not know it was he?"
She was thunderstruck. "Are you quite sure?" she faltered.
"Why, of course! I saw him only last night, you know. I wonder why he
went off in such a hurry when he saw me?"
Vera was walking silently down the garden towards the house by his side.
The thought in her mind was, "If that was Sir John Kynaston, who then is
the photograph I found in the writing-table drawer?"
"What did he say to you, Vera? How came you to be talking to him?"
pursued her brother-in-law.
"I only let him into the church. I did not know who he was. I told him
the chancel ought to be restored--by himself."
Eustace Daintree looked dismayed.
"How very unfortunate. It will, perhaps, make him still more decided to
do nothing."
Vera smiled a little to herself. "I hope not, Eustace," was all she said.
But although she said no word of it to him, she knew at her heart that
his chancel would be restored for him.
Late that night Vera sat alone by her fireside, and thought over her
morning's adventure; and once again she said to herself, with a little
regretful sigh, "Whose, then, was the photograph?" But she put the
thought away from her.
After all, she said to herself, it made no difference. He was still Sir
John Kynaston of Kynaston Hall, and just as well worth a woman's while to
marry. She had made some mistake, that was all; and the real Sir John was
not the least romantic or interesting to look at, but Kynaston Hall
belonged to him all the same.
They were not very exalted or very much to be admired, these dreams of
Vera's girlhood. But neither were they quite so coarse and unlovely as
would have been those of a purely mercenary woman. She was free from the
vulgarity of desiring the man's money and his name from any desire to
raise herself above her relations, or to feed her own vanity and ambition
at their expense. It was only that, marriage being a necessity for her,
to marry anything but a rich man would have been, with her tastes and the
habits to which she had been brought up, the sheerest and rankest folly.
She thought she could make a good wife to any man whose life she would
like to share--that is to say, a life of ease and affluence. She knew she
would make a very bad wife to a poor man. Therefore she determined upon
so carving out her own fortunes that she should not make a failure of
herself. It was worldly wisdom of the purest and simplest character.
She was as much determined as ever upon winning Kynaston's owner if he
was to be won. Only she wished, with a little sigh, that he had happened
to be the man in the photograph. She hardly knew why she wished it--but
the wish was there.
She sat bending over her fire, with all her soft, dark hair loose about
her face and flowing down her back, and her eyes fixed dreamily upon the
flames. Her past life came back to her, her old life in the whirl and
turmoil of pleasure which had suited her so well. She compared it, a
little drearily, with the present; with the humdrum routine of the
vicarage; with the parish talk about the old women and the schools; and
the small tittle-tattle about the schoolmaster and the choir, going on
around her all day; with old Mrs. Daintree's sharp tongue and her
sister's meek rejoinders. She was very tired of it. It did not amuse her.
She was not exactly discontented with her lot. Eustace and her sister
were very kind to her, and she loved them dearly; but she did not live
their life--she was with them, but not of them. As for herself, for her
interests and her delights, they stagnated amongst them all. How long was
it to last?
And Kynaston, by contrast, appeared very fair, with its smooth lawns and
its terrace walks, and its great desolate rooms, that she would so well
understand how to fill with life and brightness; but Kynaston's master
counted for very little to her. She knew the power of her own beauty so
well. Experience had taught her that Vera Nevill had but to smile and to
win; it had been so easy to her to be loved and wooed.
"Only," she said to herself, as she stood up before her fire, and
stretched up her arms so that her long hair fell back like a cloud around
her, "only he is a different sort of man to what I had pictured him. It
will, perhaps, not be such an easy matter to win a man like that."
She went to bed and dreamt--not of Sir John Kynaston--but of the man
whose pictured face once seen had haunted her ever since.
CHAPTER V.
"LITTLE PITCHERS."
Once at least in a man's life, if only for a brief space, he reverences
the saint in the woman he desires. He may love and pursue again and
again, but she who has power to hold him back, who can make him tremble
instead of woo, who can make him silent when he feels eloquent, and
restrained when most impassioned, has won from him what never again can
be given.
It was an easier matter to win him than Vera thought.
A week later Sir John Kynaston sat alone by his library fire, after
breakfast, and owned to himself that he had fallen hopelessly and
helplessly in love with Vera Nevill.
This was all the more remarkable because Sir John was not a very young
man, and that he was, moreover, not of a nature to do things rashly or
impulsively.
He was, on the contrary, of a slow and hesitating disposition. He was in
the habit of weighing his words and his actions before he spoke or acted,
his mind was tardy to take in new thoughts and new ideas, and he was
cautious and almost sluggish in taking any steps in a strange and
unaccustomed direction.
Nevertheless, in this matter of Vera, he had succumbed to his fate with
all the uncalculating blindness of a boy in his teens.
Vera was like no other woman he had ever seen; she was as far removed
above common young-ladyhood as Raphael's Madonnas are beyond and above
Greuze's simpering maidens; there could be no other like her--she was
a queen, a goddess among women.
From the very first moment that he had caught sight of her on the terrace
outside his house her absolute mastery over him had begun. Her rare
beauty, her quiet smile, her slow, indolent movements, the very tones of
her rich, low voice, all impressed him in a strange and wonderful manner.
She seemed to him to be the incarnation of everything that was pure and
elevated in womanhood. To have imagined that such a one as she could have
thought of his wealth or his position would have been the rankest
blasphemy in his eyes.
He raised her up on a pedestal of his own creating, and then he fell down
before her and adored her.
John Kynaston had but little knowledge of women. Shy and retiring in
manner--somewhat suspicious and distrustful also--he had kept out of
their way through life. Once, in very early manhood, he had been
deceived; he had become engaged to a girl whom he afterwards discovered
to have accepted him only for his money and his name, whilst her heart
really belonged to another and a poorer man. He had shaken himself free
of her, with horror and disgust, and had sworn to himself that he would
never be so betrayed again. Since then he had been suspicious--and not
without just cause--of the young ladies who had smiled upon him, and of
their mothers, who had pressed him with gracious invitations to their
houses. He was a rich man, but he did not mean to be loved for his
wealth; he said to himself that, sooner than be so, he would die
unmarried and leave to Maurice the task of keeping up the old name and
the old family.
But he had seen Vera; and all at once all the old barriers of pride and
reserve were broken down! Here was the one woman on earth who realized
his dreams, the one woman whom he would wait and toil for, even as Jacob
waited and toiled for Rachel!
He had come down to Kynaston to hunt; but hitherto hunting had been very
little in his thoughts. He had been down to the vicarage once or twice,
he had met her once in the lanes, and he had longed for a glimpse of her
daily; as yet he had done nothing else. He opened his letters on this
particular morning slowly and abstractedly, tossing them into the fire,
one after the other, as he read them, and not paying very much attention
to their contents.
There was one, however, from his brother, "I wish you would ask me down
to Kynaston for a week or two, old fellow," wrote Maurice. "I know you
would mount me--now I have got rid of all my horses to please you--and
I should like a glimpse of the old country. Write and tell me if I shall
come down on Monday."
This letter Sir John did pay attention to. He rose hastily, as though not
a moment was to be lost, and answered it:--
"Dear Maurice,--I can't possibly have you down here yet. My own plans are
very uncertain, and if you are going to take your leave after Christmas,
you had far better not go away from your work now. If I am still here in
January, I shall be delighted if you will come down, and will mount you
as much as you like."
He was happier when he had written and directed this letter.
"I must be alone just now," he murmured. "I could not bear Maurice's
chatter--it would jar upon me."
Then he put on his hat and strolled out. He looked in at the stables one
minute, and called the head groom to him.
"Wright, did not Mr. Beavan say, when I bought that new bay mare of him,
that she had carried a lady to hounds?"
"Yes, Sir John; Miss Beavan rode her last season."
"Ah, she is a good rider. Well, I wish you would put a side-saddle and a
skirt on her, and exercise her this morning. I might want to--to lend her
to a lady; but she must be perfectly quiet. You can take her out every
day this week."
Sir John went on his way, leaving the worthy Wright a prey to speculation
as to who the mysterious lady might be for whom the bay mare was to be
exercised.
His master, meanwhile, bent his steps almost instinctively to the
vicarage.
Vera was undergoing a periodical persecution concerning Mr. Gisburne
at the hands of old Mrs. Daintree. She was standing up by the table
arranging some scarlet berries and some long trails of ivy which the
children had brought to her in a vase. Tommy and Minnie stood by watching
her intently; Mrs. Daintree sat at a little distance, her lap full of
undarned socks, and rated her.
"It is not as if you were a girl who could earn her living in case of
need. There is not one single thing you can do."
"Aunt Vera can make nosegays of berries boofully, grandma," interpolates
Tommy, earnestly; "can't she, Minnie?"
"Yes, she do," assented the smaller child, with emphasis.
"I wasn't speaking to you, Tom; little boys should be--"
"Heard and not seen," puts in Tommy, rapidly; "you always say that,
grandma."
Vera laughs softly. Mrs. Daintree goes on with her lecture.
"Many girls in your position are very accomplished; can teach the piano,
and history, and the elements of Latin; but it seems to me you have been
brought up in idleness."
"Idleness is not to be despised in its way," answers Vera, composedly.
"Another bit of ivy, Tommy. What shall I do, Mrs. Daintree?" she
continues, whilst her deft fingers wind the trailing greenery round and
round the glass stem of the vase. "Shall I go down to the village school
and sit at the feet of Mr. Dee? I have no doubt he could teach me a great
many things I know nothing about."
"That is nonsense; of course I don't mean that you can educate yourself
to any purpose now; it is too late for that; but you need not, at all
events, turn up your nose at the blessings that Providence sets before
you; and I must say, that for a young woman deliberately to choose to
remain a burden upon her friends, betokens an amount of servility and
a lack of the spirit of independence which I should not have supposed
possible even in you!"
"What do you want me to do?" said Vera, without a sign of impatience.
"Shall I walk over to Tripton this afternoon, and make a low curtsey to
Mr. Gisburne, and say to him very politely, 'Here is an idle and
penniless young woman who would be very pleased to stop here and marry
you!' Would that be the way to do it, Mrs. Daintree?"
"No, no, _no_!" imperatively from Tommy, who was listening with rapidly
crimsoning cheeks; "you shall _not_ go and stop at Tripton, and tell Mr.
Gisburne you will marry him!"
Vera laughed. "No, Tommy, I don't think I will; not, that is to say, if
you are a good boy. I think I can do something better than that with
myself!" she added, softly, as if to herself. Mrs. Daintree caught the
words.
"And _what_ better, pray? What better chance are you ever likely to have?
Let me tell you, bachelors who want penniless wives don't grow on the
blackberry bushes down here! If you were not so selfish and so conceited,
you would see where your duty to my son, who is supporting you, lay. You
would see that to be married to an honest, upright man like Albert
Gisburne is a chance that most girls would catch at only too thankfully."
The old lady had raised her voice; she spoke loud and angrily; she was
rapidly working herself into a passion. Tommy, accustomed to family rows,
stood on the hearthrug, looking excitedly from his grandmother to his
aunt. He was a precocious child; he did not quite understand, and yet he
understood partly. He knew that his grandmother was scolding Vera, and
telling her she was to go away and marry Mr. Gisburne. That Vera should
go away! That, in itself, was sufficiently awful. Tommy adored Vera with
all the intensity of his childish soul; that she should go away from him
to Mr. Gisburne seemed to him the most terrible visitation that could
possibly happen. His little heart swelled within him; the tears were very
near his eyes.
At this very minute the door softly opened, and Sir John Kynaston, whose
ring had been unheard in the commotion, was ushered in.
Tommy thought he saw a deliverer, specially sent in by Providence for the
occasion. He made one spring at him and caught him round the legs, after
the manner of enthusiastic small boys.
"Please--please--don't let grandmamma send aunt Vera away to Tripton
to marry Mr. Gisburne! He has red hair, and I hate him; and aunt Vera
doesn't want to go, she wants to stop at home and do something better!"
A moment of utter confusion on all sides; then Vera, crimson to the roots
of her hair, stepped forward and held out her hand.
"Little pitchers have long ears!" she said, laughing: "and Tommy is a
very silly little boy."
"No, but, aunt Vera, you said--you said," cried the child. What further
revelations he might have made were fortunately not destined to be known.
His aunt placed her hand unceremoniously over his small, eager mouth, and
hustled both children in some haste out of the room.
Meanwhile, Sir John, looking the picture of distress and embarrassment,
had shaken hands with the old lady, and inquired if he could speak with
her son.
"Mr. Daintree is in his study; I will take you to him," she said, rising,
and led him away out of the room. She looked at him sharply as she showed
him into the study; and it did come across her mind, "I wonder what you
come so often for." Still, no thought of Vera entered into her head. Sir
John was the great man of the place, the squire, the potentate in the
hollow of whose hand lay Sutton-in-the-Wold and all its inhabitants, and
Vera was a nobody in the old lady's eyes,--a waif, whose presence was of
no account at all. Sir John was no more likely to notice her than any of
the village girls; except, indeed, that he would speak politely to her
because she was Eustace's sister-in-law. Still, it did come across her
mind to wonder what he came so often for.
Five minutes later the two gentlemen were seen going across the vicarage
garden towards the church.
They remained there a very long time, more than half an hour. When they
came back Marion had finished her housekeeping and was in the room busy
cutting out unbleached calico into poor men's shirts, on the grand piano,
an instrument which she maintained had been specially and originally
called into existence for no other purpose. Mrs. Daintree still sat in
her chimney corner. Vera was at the writing-table with her back to the
room, writing a letter.
The vicar came in with his face all aglow with excitement and delight;
his wife looked up at him quickly, she saw that something unusual and of
a pleasant character had happened.
"My dear Marion, we must both thank our good friend, Sir John. I am happy
to tell you that he has consented to restore the chancel."
"Oh, Sir John, how can we ever thank you enough!" cried Marion, coming
forward breathlessly and pressing his hands in eager gratitude. Sir John
looked as if he didn't want to be thanked, but he glanced towards the
writing-table. Vera's back was turned; she made no sign of having heard.
"I am sure I had given up all hopes of it altogether," continued the
vicar. "You gave such an unqualified refusal when I spoke to you about
it before, I never dreamt that you would be induced to change your mind."
"Some one--I mean--I thought it over--and--and it was presented to my
notice--in another light," stammered Sir John, somewhat confusedly.
"And it is most kind, most generous of you to allow it to be done in my
own way, according to the plans I had wished to follow."
"Oh, I am quite sure you will understand it much better than I am likely
to do. Besides, I have no time to attend to it; it will suit me better to
leave it entirely in your hands."
"Would you not like to see the plans Mr. Woodley drew for us last year?"
"Not now, I think, thank you; I must be going; another time, Mr.
Daintree; I can't wait just now."
He was standing irresolute in the middle of the room. He looked again
wistfully at Vera's back. Was it possible that she was not going to give
him one word, one look, when surely she must know by whose influence he
had been induced to consent to rebuild the chancel!
Almost in despair he moved to the door, and just as he reached it, when
his hand was already on the handle, she looked up. Her eyes, all softened
with pleasure and gratitude, nay, almost with tenderness, met his. He
stopped suddenly short.
"Miss Nevill, might I ask you to walk with me as far as the clerk's
cottage? I--I forget which it is!"
It was the lamest and most blundering excuse. Any six-year-old child in
the village could have pointed out the cottage to him. Mrs. Daintree
looked up in astonishment. Vera blushed rosy red; Eustace, man-like, saw
nothing, and began eagerly,
"I am walking that way myself; we can go together----" Suddenly his coat
tails were violently pulled from behind. "Quite impossible, Eustace; I
want you at home for the next hour," says Marion, quietly standing by his
side, with a look of utter innocence upon her face. The vicar, almost
throttled by the violence of the assault upon his garments, perceived
that, in some mysterious manner, he had said something he ought not to
have said. He deemed it wisest to subside into silence.
Vera rose from the writing-table. "I will go and put my hat on," she
said, quietly, and left the room.
Three minutes later she and Sir John went out of the front door together.
"Well, that is the oddest fellow I ever came across in my life," said
Eustace, fairly puzzled as soon as he was gone. "It is my belief,"
tapping his forehead significantly, "that he is a little touched _here_.
I don't believe he quite knows what he is talking about. Why, the other
night he would have nothing to say to the chancel, wouldn't even listen
to me, cut me so short about it I really couldn't venture to pursue the
subject; and here he comes, ten days later, all of his own accord, and
proposes to do it exactly as it ought to be done, in the best and most
expensive way--purbeck columns round the lancet windows, and all, Marion,
just what I wanted; gives me absolute _carte blanche_ about it. I only
hope he won't take a fresh fancy into his head and change his mind
again."
"Perhaps he found he would make himself unpopular if he did not do it,"
suggested his mother.
Marion held her tongue, and snipped away at her unbleached calico.
"And then, again, about old Hoggs' cottage," pursued Mr. Daintree. "What
on earth could make him forget where it was? He might as well forget the
way to his own house. I really do think he must be a little gone in the
upper storey, poor fellow! Marion, what have you to say about it?"
"I have to say that if you stand chattering here all the morning, we
shall never get anything done. I want to speak to you immediately,
Eustace, in the other room."
She hurried her husband out into the study, and carefully closed the door
upon them.
What then was the Rev. Eustace's amazement to behold his wife suddenly
execute a series of capers round the room, which would not have disgraced
a _coryphée_ at a Christmas pantomime, but were hardly in keeping with
the demure and highly respectable bearing of the wife of the vicar of
Sutton-in-the-Wold!
Mr. Daintree began to think that everybody was going mad this morning.
"My dear Marion, what on earth is the matter?"
"Oh, you dear, stupid, blunder-headed old donkey!" exclaimed his wife,
finishing her _pas seul_ in front of him, and hugging him vehemently as a
finale to the entertainment. "Do you mean to say that you don't see it?"
"See it? See what?" repeated the unfortunate clergyman, in mortal
bewilderment, staring at her hard.
"Oh, you dear, stupid old goose! why, it's as plain as daylight. Can't
you guess?"
Eustace shook his head dolefully.
"Why, Sir John Kynaston has fallen in love with Vera!"
"_Marion!_ impossible!" in an awe-struck whisper. "What can make you
imagine such a thing?"
"Why, everything--the chancel, of course. She must have spoken to him
about it; it is to be done for her; did you not see him look at her? And
then, asking her to go down the village with him; he knows where Hoggs'
cottage is as well as you do, only he couldn't think of anything better."
Eustace literally gasped with the magnitude of the revelation.
"Great Heavens! and I offered to go with him instead of her."
"Yes, you great blundering baby!"
"Oh, my dear, are you sure--are you quite sure? Remember his position and
Vera's."
"Well, and isn't Vera good enough, and beautiful enough, for any
position?" answered her sister, proudly.
"Yes, yes; that is true; God bless her!" he said, fervently. "Marion,
what a clever woman you are to find it out."
"Of course I am clever, sir. But, Eustace, it is only beginning, you
know; so we must just let things take their course, and not seem to
notice anything. And, mind, not a word to your mother."
Meanwhile Vera and Sir John Kynaston were walking down the village street
together. The man awkward and ill at ease, the woman calm and composed,
and thoroughly mistress of the occasion.
"It is very good of you about the chancel," said Vera, softly, breaking
the embarrassment of the silence between them.
"You _knew_ I should do it," he said, looking at her.
She smiled. "I thought perhaps you would."
"You know _why_ I am going to do it--for whose sake, do you not?" he
pursued, still keeping his eyes upon her downcast face.
"Because it is the right thing to do, I hope; and for the sake of doing
good," she answered, sedately; and Sir John felt immediately reproved and
rebuked, as though by the voice of an angelic being.
"Tell me," he said, presently, "is it true that they want you to
marry--that parson--Gisburne, of Tripton? Forgive me for asking."
Vera coloured a little and laughed.
"What dreadful things little boys are!" was all she said.
"Nay, but I want to know. Are you--are you _engaged_ to him?" with a
sudden painful eagerness of manner.
"Most decidedly I am not," she answered, earnestly.
Sir John breathed again.
"I don't know what you will think of me; you will, perhaps, say I am very
impertinent. I know I have no right to question you."
"I only think you are very kind to take an interest in me," she answered,
gently, looking at him with that wonderful look in her shadowy eyes that
came into them unconsciously when she felt her softest and her best.
They had passed through the village by this time into the quiet lane
beyond; needless to say that no thought of Hoggs, the clerk, or his
cottage, had come into either of their heads by the way.
Sir John stopped short, and Vera of necessity stopped too.
"I thought--it seemed to me by what I overheard," he said, hesitatingly,
"that they were tormenting you--persecuting you, perhaps--into a marriage
you do not wish for."
"They have wished me to marry Mr. Gisburne," Vera admitted, in a low
voice, rustling the fallen brown leaves with her foot, her eyes fixed on
the ground.
"But you won't let them over-persuade you; you won't be induced to listen
to them, will you? Promise me you won't?" he asked, anxiously.
Vera looked up frankly into his face and smiled.
"I give you my word of honour I will not marry Mr. Gisburne," she
answered; and then she added, laughingly, "You had no business to make me
betray that poor man's secrets."
And then Sir John laughed too, and, changing the subject, asked her if
she would like to ride a little bay mare he had that he thought would
carry her. Vera said she would think of it, with the air of a young queen
accepting a favour from a humble subject; and Sir John thanked her as
heartily as though she had promised him some great thing.
"Now, suppose we go and find Hoggs' cottage," she said, smiling. And they
turned back towards the village.
CHAPTER VI.
A SOIRÉE AT WALPOLE LODGE.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet notes are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute.
Shelley.
About three miles from Hyde Park Corner, somewhere among the cross-roads
between Mortlake and Kew, there stands a rambling, old-fashioned house,
within about four acres of garden, surrounded by a very high, red-brick
wall. It is one of those houses of which there used to be scores within
the immediate neighbourhood of London--of which there still are dozens,
although, alas! they are yearly disappearing to make room for gay rows of
pert, upstart villas, whose tawdry flashiness ill replaces the sedate
respectability of their last-century predecessors. But, uncoveted by the
contractor's lawless eye, untouched by the builder's desecrating hand,
Walpole Lodge stands on, as it did a hundred years ago, hidden behind
the shelter of its venerable walls, and half smothered under masses of
wisteria and Virginia creeper. On the wall, in summer time, grow
countless soft green mosses, and brown, waving grasses. Thick masses of
yellow stonecrop and tufts of snapdragon crown its summit, whilst the
topmost branches of the long row of lime-trees within come nodding
sweet-scented greetings to the passers-by along the dusty high road
below.
But in the winter the wall is flowerless and the branches of the
lime-trees are bare, and within, in the garden, there are only the
holly-trees and the yew-hedge of the shrubbery walks, and the empty brown
flower-beds set in the faded grass. But winter and summer alike, old Lady
Kynaston holds her weekly receptions, and thither flock all the wit, and
the talent, and the fashion of London. In the summer they are garden
parties, in the winter they become evening receptions. How she manages it
no one can quite tell; but so it is, that her rooms are always crowded,
that no one is ever bored at her house, that people are always keen to
come to her, and that there are hundreds who would think it an effort to
go to other people's parties across the street who think it no trouble at
all to drive nearly to Richmond, to hers. She has the rare talent of
making society a charm in itself. No one who is not clever, or beautiful,
or distinguished in some way above his or her fellows ever gains a
footing in her drawing-rooms. Every one of any note whatever is sure to
be found there. There are savants and diplomatists, poets and painters,
foreign ambassadors, and men of science. The fashionable beauty is sure
to be met there side by side with the latest type of strong-minded woman;
the German composer, with the wild hair, whose music is to regenerate
the future, may be seen chatting to a cabinet minister; the most rising
barrister of the day is lingering by the side of a prima-donna, or
discoursing to an Eastern traveller. Old Lady Kynaston herself has
charming manners, and possesses the rare tact of making every one feel
at home and happy in her house.
It was not done in a day--this gathering about her of so brilliant and
delightful a society. She had lived many years at Walpole Lodge, ever
since her widowhood, and was now quite an old lady. In her early life she
had written several charming books--chiefly biographies of distinguished
men whom she had known, and even now she occasionally put pen again to
paper, and sent some delightful social essay or some pleasantly written
critique to one or other of the Reviews of the day.
Her married life had been neither very long nor very happy. She had never
learnt to love her husband's country home. At his death she had turned
her back thankfully upon Kynaston, and had never seen it again. Of her
two sons, she stood in some awe of the elder, whose cold and unresponsive
character resembled her dead husband's, whilst she adored Maurice, who
was warm-hearted and affectionate in manner, like herself. There were ten
years between them, for she had been married twelve years; and at her
secret heart Lady Kynaston hoped and believed that John would remain
unmarried, so that the estates and the money might in time become
Maurice's.
It is the second Thursday in December, and Lady Kynaston is "at home" to
the world. Her drawing-rooms--there are three of them, not large, but
low, comfortable rooms, opening one out of the other--are filled, as
usual, with a mixed and brilliant crowd.
Across the square hall is the dining-room, where a cold supper, not very
sumptuous or very _recherché_, but still sufficient of its kind for the
occasion, is laid out; and beyond that is Lady Kynaston's boudoir, where
there is a piano, and which is used on these occasions as a music-room,
so that those who are musical may retire there, and neither interfere,
nor be interfered with, by the rest of the company. Some one is singing
in the music-room now--singing well, you may be sure, or he would not be
at Walpole Lodge--but the strains of the song can hardly be heard at all
across dining-room and hall, in the larger of the three rooms, where most
of the guests are congregated.
Lady Kynaston, a small, slight woman in soft gray satin and old lace,
moves about graciously and gracefully still, despite her seventy years,
among her guests--stopping now at one group, now at another, talking
politics to one, science to a second, whispering a few discreet words
about the latest scandal to this great lady, murmuring words of approval
upon her clever book or her charming poem to another. Her smiles are
equally dispensed, no one is passed over, and she has the rare talent of
making every single individual in the crowded room feel himself to be the
one particular person whom Lady Kynaston is especially rejoiced to see.
She has tact, and she has sympathy--two invaluable gifts in a woman.
Conspicuous among the crowd of well-dressed and handsome women is Helen
Romer. She sits on an ottoman at the further end of the room, where she
holds a little court of her own, dispensing her smiles and pleasant words
among the little knot of men who linger admiringly by her side.
She is in black, with masses of gold embroidery about her, and she
carries a large black and gold feather fan in her hands, which she
moves rapidly, almost restlessly, up and down; her eyes wander often
to the doorway, and every now and then she raises her hand with a short,
impatient action to her blonde head, as though she were half weary of
the talk about her.
Presently, Lady Kynaston, moving slowly among her guests, comes near her,
and, leaning for a moment on the back of the ottoman, presses her hand as
she passes.
Mrs. Romer is a favourite of hers; she is pretty, and she is piquant in
manner and conversation; two very good things, which she thinks highly of
in any young woman. Besides that, she knows that Helen loves her younger
son; and, although she hardly understands how things are between them,
nor how far Maurice himself is implicated, she believes that Helen will
eventually inherit her grandfather's money, and, liking her personally,
she has seen no harm in encouraging her too plainly displayed affection.
Moreover, the love they both bear to him has been a link between them.
They talk of him together almost as a mother and a daughter might do;
they have the same anxieties over his health, the same vexations over
his debts, the same rejoicings when his brother comes forward with his
much-needed help. Lady Kynaston does not want her darling to marry yet,
but when the time shall come for him to take unto himself a wife, she
will raise no objection to pretty Helen Romer, should he bring her to
her, as a daughter-in-law.
As the old lady stoops over her, Helen's upturned wistful eyes say as
plainly as words can say it--
"Is he coming to-night?"
"Maurice will be here presently, I hope," says his mother, answering the
look in her eyes; "he was to come up by the six o'clock train; he will
dine at his club and come on here later." Helen's face became radiant,
and Lady Kynaston passed on.
Maurice Kynaston's regiment was quartered at Northampton; he came up to
town often for the day or for the night, as he could get leave; but his
movements were never quite to be depended upon.
Half-an-hour or so more of feverish impatience. Helen watches the gay
crowd about her with a feeling of sick weariness. Two members of
Parliament are talking of Russian aggression and Turkish misrule close to
her; they turn to her presently and include her in the conversation; Mrs.
Romer gives her opinion shrewdly and sensibly. An elderly duchess is
describing some episode of Royalty's last ball; there is a general laugh,
in which Helen joins heartily; a young attaché bends over her and
whispers some admiring little speech in her ear, and she blushes and
smiles just as if she liked it above all things; while all the time her
eyes hardly stray for one second from the open doorway through which
Maurice will come, and her heart is saying to itself, over and over
again,
"Will he come, will he come?"
He comes at last. Long before the servant, who opens the door to him, has
taken his coat and hat from him, Helen catches sight of his handsome head
and his broad shoulders through an opening in the crowd. In another
minute he is in the room standing irresolute in the doorway, looking
round as if to see who is and who is not there to-night.
He is, after all, only a very ordinary type of a good-looking soldierly
young Englishman, just such a one as may be seen any day in our parks or
our drawing-rooms. He has clearly-cut and rather _prononcé_ features, a
strong-built, well made figure, a long moustache, close-shaven cheeks,
and eyes that are rather deep-set, and are, when you are near enough to
see them well, of a deep blue-gray. In all that Maurice Kynaston is in no
way different from scores of other good-looking young men whom we may
have met. But there is just something that makes his face a remarkable
one: it is a strong-looking face--a face that looks as if he had a will
of his own and knew how to stick to it; a face that looks, too, as if he
could do and dare much for truth and honour's sake. It is almost stern
when he is silent; it can soften into the tenderness of a woman when he
speaks.
Look at him now as he catches sight of his mother, and steps forward for
a minute to press her loving hands. All the hardness and all the strength
are gone out of his face now; he only looks down at her with eyes full of
love and gentleness--for life as yet holds nothing dearer or better for
him than that little white-haired old woman. Only for a minute, and then
he leaves go of her hands, and passes on down the room, speaking to the
guests whom he knows.
"He does not see me," says Helen, bitterly, to herself; "he will go on
into the next room, and never know that I am here."
But he had seen her perfectly. Next to the woman he most wishes to see in
a room, the one whom a man first catches sight of is the woman he would
sooner were not there. He had seen Helen the very instant he came in, but
he had noticed thankfully that some one was talking to her, and he said
to himself that there was no occasion for him to hurry to her side; it
was not as if they were openly engaged; there could be no necessity for
him to rush into slavery at once; he would speak to her, of course,
by-and-by; and whenever he came to her he well knew that he would be
equally welcomed: he was so sure of her. Nothing on earth or under Heaven
is so fatal to a man's love as that. There was no longer any uncertainty;
there was none of the keenness of pursuit dear to the old hunting
instinct inherent in man; there was not even the charm of variety in her
moods. She was always the same to him; always she pouted a little at
first, and looked ill-tempered, and reproached him; and always she came
round again at his very first kind word, and poured out her heart in a
torrent of worship at his feet. Maurice knew it all by heart, the sulks
and the cross words, and then the passionate denials, and the wild
protestations of her undying love. He was sorry for her, too, in his way;
he was too tender-hearted, too chivalrous, to be anything but kind to
her; but though he was sorry, he could not love her; and, oh! how
insufferably weary of her he was!
Presently he did come up to her, and took the seat by her side just
vacated by the attaché. The little serio-comedy instantly repeated
itself.
A little pout and a little toss of the head.
"You have been as long coming to speak to me as you possibly could be."
"Do you think it would look well if I had come rushing up to you the
instant I came in?"
"You need not, at all events, have stood talking for ten minutes to that
great black-eyed Lady Anderleigh. Of course, if you like her better than
me, you can go back to her."
"Of course I can, if I choose, you silly little woman; but seeing that
I am by you, and not by her, I suppose it is a proof that I prefer your
society, is it not?"
Very polite, but not strictly true, Captain Maurice! At his heart he
preferred talking to Lady Anderleigh, or to any other woman in the room.
The admission, however, was quite enough for Helen.
"Dear Maurice," she whispered, "forgive me; I am a jealous, bad-tempered
wretch, but," lower still, "it is only because I love you so much."
And had there been no one in the room, Maurice knew perfectly that at
this juncture Mrs. Romer would have cast her arms around his neck--as
usual.
To his unspeakable relief, a man--a clever lawyer, whose attention was a
flattering thing to any woman--came up to Helen at this moment, and took
a vacant chair beside her. Maurice thankfully slipped away, leaving his
inamorata in a state of rage and disgust with that talented and elderly
lawyer, such as no words can describe.
Captain Kynaston took the favourable opportunity of escaping across the
hall, where he spent the remainder of the evening, dividing his attention
between the music and supper rooms, and Helen saw him no more that night.
She saw, however, some one she had not reckoned upon seeing. Glancing
carelessly across to the end of the room, she perceived, talking to Lady
Kynaston, a little French gentleman, with a smooth black head, a neat,
pointed, little black beard, and the red ribbon of the Légion d'Honneur
in his button-hole.
What there was in the sight of so harmless and inoffensive a personage to
upset her it may be difficult to say; but the fact is that, when Mrs.
Romer perceived this polite little Frenchman talking to her hostess, she
turned suddenly so sick and white, that a lady sitting near her asked her
if she was going to faint.
"I feel it a little hot," she murmured; "I think I will go into the next
room." She rose and attempted to escape--whether from the heat or the
observation of the little Frenchman was best known to herself.
Her maneuver, however, was not destined to succeed. Before she could
work her way half-way through the crush to the door, the man whom she was
bent upon avoiding turned round and saw her. A look of glad recognition
flashed into his face, and he instantly left Lady Kynaston's side, and
came across the room to speak to her.
"This is an unlooked-for pleasure, madame."
"I certainly never expected to meet you here, Monsieur D'Arblet,"
faltered Helen, turning red and white alternately.
"Will you not come and have a little conversation with me?"
"I was just going away."
"So soon! Oh, bien! then I will take you to your carriage." He held out
his arm, and Helen was perforce obliged to take it.
There was a little delay in the hall, whilst Helen waited for her, or
rather for her grandfather's carriage, during which she stood with her
hand upon her unwelcome friend's arm. Whilst they were waiting he
whispered something eagerly in her ear.
"No, no; it is impossible!" reiterated Helen, with much apparent
distress.
Monsieur D'Arblet whispered something more.
"Very well, if you insist upon it!" she said, faintly, and then got into
her carriage and was driven away.
Before, however, she had left Walpole Lodge five minutes, she called out
to the servants to stop the carriage. The footman descended from the box
and came round to the window.
They had drawn up by the side of a long wall quite beyond the crowd of
carriages that was waiting at Lady Kynaston's house.
"I want to wait here a few minutes, for--for a gentleman I am going to
drive back to town," she said to the servant, confusedly. She was ashamed
to give such an order to him.
She was frightened too, and trembled with nervousness lest any one should
see her waiting here.
It was a cold, damp night, and Helen shivered, and drew her fur cloak
closer about her in the darkness. Presently there came footsteps along
the pathway, and a man came through the fog up to the door. It was opened
for him in silence, and he got in, and the carriage drove off again.
Monsieur Le Vicomte D'Arblet had a mean, cunning-looking countenance;
strictly speaking, indeed, he was rather handsome, his features being
decidedly well-shaped, but the evil and vindictive expression of his
face made it an unpleasant one to look upon. As he took his seat in the
brougham by Helen's side she shrank instinctively away from him.
"So, ma mie!" he said, peering down into her face with odious
familiarity, "here I find you again after all this time, beautiful as
ever! It is charming to be with you again, once more."
"Monsieur D'Arblet, pray understand that nothing but absolute necessity
would have induced me to drive you home to-night," said Helen, who was
trembling violently.
"You are not polite, ma belle--there is a charming _franchise_ about you
Englishwomen, however, which gives a piquancy to your conversation."
"You know very well why it is that I am obliged to speak to you alone,"
she interrupted, colouring hotly under his bold looks of admiration.
"_Le souvenir du beau passé!_" murmured the Frenchman, laughing softly.
"Is that it, ma belle Hélène?"
"Monsieur," she cried, almost in tears, "pray listen to me; for pity's
sake tell me what you have done with my letters--have you destroyed
them?"
"Destroyed them! What, those dear letters that are so precious to my
heart? Ah, madame, could you believe it of me?"
"You have kept them?" she murmured, faintly.
"Mais si, certainement, that I have kept them, every one--every single
one of them," he repeated, looking at her meaningly, with a cold glitter
in his black eyes.
"Not that--_that_ one?" pleaded Helen, piteously.
"Yes--that one too--that charming and delightful letter in which you so
generously offered to throw yourself upon my protection--do you remember
it?"
"Alas, only too well!" she murmured, hiding her face in her hands.
"Ah!" he continued, with a sort of relish in torturing her, which
resembled the feline cruelty of a wild beast playing with its prey. "Ah!
it was a delightful letter, that; what a pity it was that I was out of
Paris that night, and never received it till, alas! it was too late to
rush to your side. You remember how it was, do you not? Your husband was
lying ill at your hotel; you were very tired of him--ce pauvre mari!
Well, you had been tired of him for some time, had you not? And he was
not what you ladies call 'nice;' he did drink, and he did swear, and I
had been often to see you when he was out, and had taken you to the
theatre and the bal d'Opéra--do you remember?"
"Ah, for Heaven's sake spare me these horrible reminiscences!" cried
Helen, despairingly.
He went on pitilessly, as though he had not heard her, "And you were good
enough to write me several letters--there were one, two, three, four of
them," counting them off upon his fingers; "and then came the fifth--that
one you wrote when he was ill. Was it not a sad pity that I had gone out
of Paris for the day, and never received it till you and your husband had
left for England? But think you that I will part with it ever? It is my
consolation, my trésor!"
"Monsieur D'Arblet, if you have one spark of honour or of gentleman-like
feeling, you will give me those mad, foolish letters again. I entreat you
to do so. You know that I was beside myself when I wrote them, I was so
unhappy--do you not see that they compromise me fatally; that it is my
good name, my reputation, which are at stake?" In her agony she had half
sunk at his feet on the floor of the carriage, clasping her hands
entreatingly together.
Monsieur D'Arblet raised her with _empressement_.
"Ah, madame, do not thus humiliate yourself at my feet. Why should you be
afraid? Are not your good name and your reputation safe in my hands?"
Helen burst into bitter tears.
"How cruel, how wicked you are!" she cried; "no Englishman would treat a
lady in this way."
"Your Englishmen are fools, ma chère--and I--I am French!" he replied,
shrugging his shoulders expressively.
"But what object, what possible cause can you have for keeping those
wretched letters?"
He bent his face down close to hers.
"Shall I tell you, belle Hélène? It is this: You are beautiful and you
have talent; I like you. Some day, perhaps, when the grandpapa dies, you
will have money--then Lucien D'Arblet will come to you, madame, with
that precious little packet in his hands, and he will say, 'You will
marry me, ma chère, or I will make public these letters.' Do you see?
Till then, amusez vous, ma belle; enjoy your life and your liberty as
much as you desire; I will not object to anything you do. Only you will
not venture to marry--because I have these letters?"
"You would prevent my marrying?" said Helen, faintly.
"Mais, certainement that I should. Do you suppose any man would care to
be your husband after he had read that last letter--the fifth, you know?"
No answer, save the choking sobs of his companion.
Monsieur D'Arblet waited a few minutes, watching her; then, as she did
not raise her head from the cushions of the carriage, where she had
buried it, the Frenchman pulled the check-string of the carriage.
"Now," he said, "I will wish you good-night, for we are close to your
house. We have had our little talk, have we not?"
The brougham, stopped, and the footman opened the door.
"Good-night, madame, and many thanks for your kindness," said D'Arblet,
raising his hat politely.
In another minute he was gone, and Helen, hoping that the darkness had
concealed the traces of her agitation from the servant's prying eyes, was
driven on, more dead than alive, to her grandfather's house.
CHAPTER VII.
EVENING REVERIES.
For nothing on earth is sadder
Than the dream that cheated the grasp,
The flower that turned to the adder,
The fruit that changed to the asp,
When the dayspring in darkness closes,
As the sunset fades from the hills,
With the fragrance of perished roses,
And the music of parched-up rills.
A. L. Gordon.
It had been the darkest chapter of her life, that fatal month in Paris,
when she had foolishly and recklessly placed herself in the power of a
man so unscrupulous and so devoid of principle as Lucien D'Arblet.
It had begun in all innocence--on her part, at least. She had been very
miserable; she had discovered to the full how wild a mistake her marriage
had been. She had felt herself to be fatally separated from Maurice, the
man she loved, for ever; and Monsieur D'Arblet had been kind to her; he
had pitied her for being tied to a husband who drank and who gambled, and
Helen had allowed herself to be pitied. D'Arblet had charming manners,
and an accurate knowledge of the weakness of the fair sex; he knew when
to flatter and when to cajole her, when to be tenderly sympathetic to her
sorrows, and when to divert her thoughts to brighter and pleasanter
topics than her own miseries. He succeeded in fascinating her completely.
Whilst her husband was occupied with his own disreputable friends, Helen,
sooner than remain alone in their hotel night after night, was persuaded
to accept Monsieur D'Arblet's escort to theatres and operas, and other
public places, where her constant presence with him very soon compromised
her amongst the few friends who knew her in Paris.
Then came scenes with her husband; frantic letters of misery to this
French vicomte, whom she imagined to be so devotedly attached to her,
and, finally, one ever-to-be-repented letter, in which she offered to
leave her husband for ever and to come to him.
True, this letter did not reach its destination till too late, and Helen
was mercifully saved from the fate which, in her wicked despair, she was
ready to rush upon. Twenty-four hours after her return to England she saw
the horrible abyss upon which she had stood, and thanked God from the
bottom of her heart that she had been rescued, in spite of herself, from
so dreadful a deed. But the letter had been written, and was in Lucien
D'Arblet's possession. Later on she learnt, by a chance conversation, the
true character of the man, and shuddered when she remembered how nearly
she had wrecked her whole life for him. And when her husband's death had
placed her once more in the security and affluence of her grandfather's
house, with fresh hopes and fresh chances before her, she had but one
wish with regard to that Parisian episode of her life,--to forget it as
though it had never been.
She hoped, and, as time went on, she felt sure, that she would never see
Monsieur D'Arblet again. New hopes and new excitements occupied her
thoughts. The man to whom in her youth she had given her heart once more
came across her life; she was thrown very much into his society; she
learnt to love him more devotedly than ever, and when at last she had
succeeded in establishing the sort of engagement which existed between
them, she had assured him, and also assured herself, that no other man
had ever, for one instant, filled her fancy. That stormy chapter of her
married life was forgotten; she resolutely wiped it out of her memory, as
if it had never existed.
And now, after all this time--it was five years ago--she had met him
again--this Frenchman, who had once compromised her name, and who now had
possession of her letters.
There was a cruel irony of fate in the fact that she should be destined
to meet him again at Lady Kynaston's, the very house of all others where
she would least have wished to see him.
There was, however, had she thought of it, nothing at all extraordinary
in her having done so. No house in all London society was so open to
foreigners as Walpole Lodge, and Monsieur Le Vicomte D'Arblet was no
unknown upstart; he bore a good old name; he was clever, had taken an
active part in diplomatic life, and was a very well-known individual in
Parisian society. He had been brought to Lady Kynaston's by a member of
the French Embassy, who was a frequenter of her soirées.
Neither, however, was meeting with Mrs. Romer entirely accidental on
Monsieur D'Arblet's part. He had never forgotten the pretty Englishwoman
who had so foolishly and recklessly placed herself in his power.
It is true he had lost sight of her, and other intrigues and other
pursuits had filled his leisure hours; but when he came to England he had
thought of her again, and had made a few careless inquiries after her. It
was not difficult to identify her; the Mrs. Romer who was now a widow,
who lived with her rich grandfather, who was very old, who would probably
soon die and leave her all his wealth, was evidently the same Mrs. Romer
whom he had known. The friend who gave him the information spoke of her
as lovely and _spirituelle_, and as a woman who would be worth marrying
some day. "She is often at Lady Kynaston's receptions," he had added.
"Mon cher, take me to your Lady Kynaston's soirées," had been Lucien
D'Arblet's lazy rejoinder as they finished their evening smoke together.
"I would like to meet my friend, la belle veuve, again, and I will see if
she has forgotten me."
Bitter, very bitter, were Mrs. Romer's remorseful meditations that night
when she reached her grandfather's house at Prince's Gate. Every detail
of her acquaintance with Lucien D'Arblet came back to her with a horrible
and painful distinctness. Over and over again she cursed her own folly,
and bewailed the hardness of the fate which placed her once more in the
hands of this man.
Would he indeed keep his cruel threats to her? Would he bring forward
those letters to spoil her life once more--to prevent her from marrying
Maurice should she ever have the chance of doing so?
Stooping alone over her fire, with all the brightness, and all the
freshness gone out of her, with an old and almost haggard look in the
face that was so lately beaming with smiles and dimples, Helen Romer
asked herself shudderingly these bitter questions over and over again.
Had she been sure of Maurice's love, she would have been almost tempted
to have confessed her fault, and to have thrown herself upon his mercy;
but she knew that he did not love her well enough to forgive her. Too
well she knew with what disgust and contempt Maurice would be likely to
regard her past conduct; such a confession would, she knew, only induce
him to shake himself clear of her for ever. Indeed, had he loved her, it
is doubtful whether Maurice would have been able to condone so grave a
fault in the past history of a woman; his own standard of honour stood
too high to allow him to pass over lightly any disgraceful or
dishonourable conduct in those with whom he had to do. But, loving her
not, she would have been utterly without excuse in his eyes.
She knew it well enough. No, her only chance was in silence, and in vague
hopes that time might rescue her out of her difficulties.
Meanwhile, whilst Helen Romer sat up late into the early morning,
thinking bitterly over her past sins and her future dangers, Maurice
Kynaston and his mother also kept watch together at Walpole Lodge after
all the guests had gone away, and the old house was left alone again to
the mother and son.
"Something troubles you, little mother," said Maurice, as he stretched
himself upon the rug by her bedroom fire, and laid his head down
caressingly upon her knees.
Lady Kynaston passed her hand fondly over the short dark hair. "How well
you know my face, Maurice! Yes, something has worried me all day--it is a
letter from your brother."
Maurice looked up laughingly. "What, is old John in trouble? That would
be something new. Has he taken a leaf out of my book, mother, and dropped
his money at Newmarket, too?"
"No, you naughty boy? John has got more sense. No!" with a sigh--"I wish
it were only money; I fear it is a worse trouble than that."
"My dear mother, you alarm me," cried Maurice, looking up in mock dismay;
"why, whatever has he been and gone and done?"
"Oh, Maurice, it is nothing to laugh at--it is some woman--a girl he has
met down at Kynaston; some nobody--a clergyman's daughter, or sister, or
something--whom he says he is going to marry!" Lady Kynaston looked the
picture of distress and dismay.
Maurice laughed softly. "Well, well, mother; there is nothing very
dreadful after all--I am sure I wish him joy."
"My boy," she said, below her breath, "I had so hoped, so trusted he
would never marry--it seemed so unlikely--he seemed so completely happy
in his bachelor's life; and I had hoped that you--that you----"
"Yes, yes, mother dear, I know," he said, quickly, and twisted himself
round till he got her hand between his, kissing it as he spoke; "but I--I
never thought of that--dear old John, he has been the best of brothers to
me; and, mother dear, I know it is all your love to me; but you and I,
dear, we will not grudge him his happiness, will we?"
He knew so well her weakness--how that she had loved him at the expense
of the other son, who was not so dear to her; he loved her for it, and
yet he did not at his heart think it right.
Lady Kynaston wiped a few tears away. "You are always right, my boy,
always, and I am a foolish old woman. But oh, Maurice, that is only half
the trouble! Who is this woman whom he has chosen? Some country girl,
ignorant of the ways of the world, unformed and awkward--not fitted to be
his wife!"
"Does he say so?" laughed Maurice.
"No, no, of course not. Stay, where is his letter? Oh, there, on the
dressing-table; give it me, my dear. No, this is what he says: 'Miss
Nevill seems to me in every way to fulfil my ideal of a good and perfect
woman, and, if she will consent to marry me, I intend to make her my
wife.'"
"Well, a good and perfect woman is a _rara avis_, at all events mother."
"Oh, dear! but all men say that of a girl when they are in love--it
amounts to very little."
"You see, he has evidently not proposed to her yet; perhaps she will
refuse him."
"Refuse Sir John Kynaston, of Kynaston Hall! A poor clergyman's daughter!
My dear Maurice, I gave you credit for more knowledge of the world.
Besides, John is a fine-looking man. Oh, no, she is not in the least
likely to refuse him."
"Then all we have got to do is to make the best of her," said Maurice,
composedly.
"That is easily said for you, who need see very little of her. But
John's wife is a person who will be of great importance to my
happiness. Dear me! and to think he might have had Lady Mary Hendrie
for the asking: a charming creature, well born, highly educated and
accomplished--everything that a man could wish for. And there were the De
Vallery girls--either of them would have married him, and been a suitable
wife for him; and he must needs go and throw himself away on a little
country chit, who could have been equally happy, and much more suitably
mated, with her father's curate. Maurice, my dear," with a sudden change
of voice, "I wish you would go down and cut him out; if you made love to
her ever so little you could turn her head, you know."
Maurice burst out laughing. "Oh, you wicked, immoral little mother! Did I
ever hear such an iniquitous proposition! Do you want _me_ to marry her?"
"No, no!" laughed his mother; "but you might make her think you meant to,
and then, perhaps, she would refuse John."
"I have not Kynaston Hall at my back, remember, after which you have
given her the credit of angling. Besides, mother dear, to speak plainly,
I honestly do not think my taste in women is in the least likely to be
the same as John's. No, I think I will keep out of the way whilst the
love-making is going on. I will go down and have a look at the young
woman by-and-by when it is all settled, and let you know what I think of
her. I dare say a good, honest country lass will suit John far better
than a beautiful woman of the world, who would be sure to be miserable
with him. Don't fret, little mother; make the best of her if you can."
He rose and stretched himself up to his full height before the fire. Lady
Kynaston looked up at him admiringly. Oh, she thought, if the money and
the name could only have been his! How well he would have made use of it;
how proud she would have been of him--her handsome boy, whom all men
liked, and all women would gladly love.
"A good son makes a good husband," she said aloud, following her own
thoughts.
"And John has been a good son, mother," said Maurice, cordially.
"Yes, yes, in his way, perhaps; but I was thinking of you, my boy, not
of him, and how lucky will be the woman who is your wife, Maurice--will
it be----"
Maurice stooped quickly, and laid his hand playfully over her lips.
"I don't know, mother dear--never ask me--for I don't know it myself."
And then he kissed her, and wished her good-night, and left her.
She sat long over her fire, dreaming, by herself, thinking a little,
perhaps, of the elder son, and the bride he was going to bring her, whom
she should have to welcome whether she liked her or no, but thinking more
of the younger, whose inner life she had studied, and who was so entirely
dear and precious to her. It was very little to her that he had been
extravagant and thoughtless, that he had lost money in betting and
racing--these were minor faults--and she and John between them had always
managed to meet his difficulties; they had not been, in truth, very
tremendous. But for that, he had never caused her one day's anxiety,
never given her one instant's pain. "God grant he may get a wife who
deserves him," was the mother's prayer that night. "I doubt if Helen
be worthy of him; but if he loves her, as I believe he must do, no word
of mine shall stand between him and his happiness."
And then she went to bed, and dreamed, as mothers dream of the child they
love best.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MEMBER FOR MEADOWSHIRE.
Honour and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.
Pope, "Essay on Man."
About five miles from Kynaston Hall, as the crow flies, across the
fields, stood, as the house-agents would have described it, "a large
and commodious modern mansion, standing in about eighty acres of
well-timbered park land."
I do not know that any description that could be given of Shadonake would
so well answer to the reality as the above familiar form of words.
The house was undoubtedly large, very large, and it was also modern, very
modern. It was a handsome stone structure, with a colonnade of white
pillars along the entrance side, and with a multiplicity of large
plate-glass windows stretching away in interminable vistas in every
direction. A broad gravel sweep led up to the front door; to the right
were the stables, large and handsome too, with a clock-tower and a belfry
over the gateway; and to the left were the gardens and the shrubberies.
There had been an old house once at Shadonake, old and picturesque and
uncomfortable; but when the property had been purchased by the present
owner--Mr. Andrew Miller--after he had been returned as Conservative
member for the county, the old house was swept away, and a modern
mansion, more suited to the wants and requirements of his family, arose
in its place.
The park was flat, but well wooded. The old trees, of course, remained
intact; but the gardens of the first house, being rambling and
old-fashioned, had been done away with, to make room for others on a
larger and more imposing scale; and vineries and pineries, orchid-houses,
and hot-houses of every description arose rapidly all over the site of
the old bowling-green and the wilderness, half kitchen garden, half
rosary, that had served to content the former owners of Shadonake, now
all lying dead and buried in the chancel of the village church.
The only feature of the old mansion which had been left untouched was
rather a remarkable one. It was a large lake or pond, lying south of the
gardens, and about a quarter of a mile from the house. It lay in a sort
of dip in the ground, and was surrounded on all four sides--for it was
exactly square--by very steep high banks, which had been cut into by
steep stone steps, now gray, and broken, and moss-grown, which led down
straight into the water. This pool was called Shadonake Bath. How long
the steps had existed no one knew; probably for several hundred years,
for there was a ghost story connected with them. Somebody was supposed,
before the memory of any one living, to have been drowned there, and to
haunt the steps at certain times of the year.
It is certain that but for the fact of a mania for boating, and punting,
and skating indulged in by several of his younger sons, Mr. Miller, in
his energy for sweeping away all things old, and setting up all things
new, would not have spared the Bath any more than he had spared the
bowling-green. He had gone so far, indeed, as to have a plan submitted to
him for draining it, and turning it into a strawberry garden, and for
doing away with the picturesque old stone steps altogether in order to
encase the banks in red brick, suitable to the cultivation of peaches and
nectarines; but Ernest and Charley, the Eton boys, had thought about
their punts and their canoes, and had pleaded piteously for the Bath; so
the Bath was allowed to remain untouched, greatly to the relief of many
of the neighbours, who were proud of its traditions, and who, in the
general destruction that had been going on at Shadonake, had trembled for
its safety.
Where Mr. Miller had originally come from nobody exactly knew. It was
generally supposed that he had migrated early in life from northern and
manufacturing districts, where his father had amassed a large fortune.
In spite, however, of his wealth, it is doubtful whether he would ever
have achieved the difficult task of being returned for so exclusive and
aristocratic a county as Meadowshire had he not made a most prudent and
politic marriage. He had married one of the Miss Esterworths, of
Lutterton.
Now, everybody who has the slightest knowledge of Meadowshire and its
internal politics will see at once that Andrew Miller could not have done
better for himself. The Esterworths are the very oldest and best of the
old county families; there can be no sort of doubt whatever as to their
position and standing. Therefore, when Andrew Miller married Caroline
Esterworth, there was at once an end of all hesitation as to how he was
to be treated amongst them. Meadowshire might wonder at Miss Caroline's
taste, but it kept its wonder to itself, and held out the right hand of
fellowship to Andrew Miller then and ever after.
It is true that there were five Miss Esterworths, all grown up, and all
unmarried, at the time when Andrew came a-wooing to Lutterton Castle;
they were none of them remarkable for beauty, and Caroline, who was the
eldest of the five, less so than the others. Moreover, there were many
sons at Lutterton, and the daughters' portions were but small. Altogether
the love-making had been easy and prosperous, for Caroline, who was a
sensible young woman, had readily recognized the superior advantages
of marrying an excellent man of no birth or breeding, with twenty
thousand a year, to remaining Miss Esterworth to her dying day, in
dignified but impecunious spinsterhood. Time had proved the wisdom of her
choice. For some years the Millers had rented a small but pretty little
house within two miles of Lutterton, where, of course, everybody visited
them, and got used to Andrew's squat, burly figure, and agreed to
overlook his many little defects of speech and manner in consideration of
his many excellent qualities--and his wealth--and where, in course of
time, all their children, two daughters and six sons, were born.
And then, a vacancy occurring opportunely, Mrs. Miller determined that
her husband should stand in the Conservative interest for the county. She
would have made a Liberal of him had she thought it would answer better.
How she toiled and how she slaved, and how she kept her Andrew, who was
not by any means ambitious of the position, up to the mark, it boots not
here to tell. Suffice it to say, that the deed was accomplished, and that
Andrew Miller became M.P. for North Meadowshire.
Almost at the same time Shadonake fell into the market, and Mrs. Miller
perceived that the time had now come for her husband's wealth to be
recognized and appreciated; or, as he himself expressed it, in vernacular
that was strictly to the point if inelegant in diction, the time was
come for him "to cut a splash."
She had been very clever, this daughter of the Esterworths. She had kept
a tight rein over her husband all through the early years of their
married life. She would have no ostentation, no vulgar display of wealth,
no parading and flaunting of that twenty thousand per annum in their
neighbours' faces. And she had done what she had intended; she had
established her husband's position well in the county--she had made him
to be accepted, not only by reason of his wealth, but also because he was
her husband; she had roused no one's envy--she had never given cause for
spite or jealousy--she had made him popular as well as herself. They had
lived quietly and unobtrusively; they had, of course, had everything of
the best; their horses and carriages were irreproachable, but they had
not had more of them than their neighbours. They had entertained freely,
and they had given their guests well-cooked dinners and expensive wines;
but there had been nothing lavish in their entertainments, nothing that
could make any of them go away and say to themselves, with angry
discontent, that "those Millers" were purse-proud and vulgar in their
wealth. When she had gone to her neighbours' houses Mrs. Miller had been
handsomely but never extravagantly dressed; she had praised their cooks,
and expressed herself envious of their flowers, and had bemoaned her own
inability to vie with their peaches and their pineapples; she had never
talked about her own possessions, nor had she ever paraded her own eight
thousand pounds' worth of diamonds before the envious eyes of women who
had none.
In this way she had made herself popular--and in this way she had won the
county seat for her husband.
When, however, that great end and aim of her existence was accomplished,
Caroline Miller felt that she might now fairly launch out a little. The
time was come when she might reap the advantage of her long years of
repression and patient waiting. Her daughters were growing up, her sons
were all at school. For her children's sake, it was time that she should
take the lead in the county which their father's fortune and new position
entitled them to, and which no one now was likely to grudge them.
Shadonake therefore was bought, and the house straightway pulled down,
and built up again in a style, and with a magnificence, befitting Mr.
Miller's wealth.
Bricks and mortar were Andrew Miller's delight. He was never so happy as
during the three years that Shadonake House was being built; every stone
that was laid was a fresh interest to him; every inch of brick wall a
keen and special delight. He had been disappointed not to have had the
spoliation of Shadonake Bath; it had been a distinct mortification to him
to have to forego the four brick walls which would have replaced its
ancient steps; but then he had made it up to himself by altering the
position of the front door three times before it was finally settled
to his satisfaction.
But all this was over by this time, and when my story begins Shadonake
new House, as it was sometimes called, was built, and furnished and
inhabited in every corner of its lofty rooms, and all along the spacious
length of its many wide corridors.
One afternoon--it is about a week later than that soirée at Walpole
Lodge, mentioned in a previous chapter--Mrs. Miller and her eldest
daughter are sitting together in the large drawing-room at Shadonake. The
room is furnished in that style of high artistic decoration that is now
the fashion. There are rich Persian rugs over the polished oak floor; a
high oak chimney-piece, with blue tiles inserted into it in every
direction, and decorated with old Nankin china bowls and jars; a wide
grate below, where logs of wood are blazing between brass bars;
quantities of spindle-legged Chippendale furniture all over the room,
and a profusion of rich gold embroidery and "textile fabrics" of all
descriptions lighting up the carved oak "dado" and the sombre sage green
of the walls. There are pictures, too, quite of the best, and china of
every period and every style, upon every available bracket and shelf and
corner where a cup or a plate can be made to stand. Four large windows on
one side open on to the lawn; two, at right angles to them, lead into
a large conservatory, where there is, even at this dead season of the
year, a blaze of exotic blossoms that fill the room with their sweet rich
odour.
Mrs. Miller sits before a writing bureau of inlaid satin-wood of an
ancient pattern. She has her pen in her hand, and is docketing her
visiting list. Beatrice Miller sits on a low four-legged stool by her
mother's side, with a large Japanese china bowl on her knees filled with
cards, which she takes out one after the other, reading the names upon
them aloud to her mother before tossing them into a basket, also of
Japanese structure, which is on the floor in front of her.
Beatrice is Mrs. Miller's eldest daughter, and she is twenty. Guy is only
eleven months older, and Edwin is a year younger--they are both at
Oxford; next comes Geraldine, who is still in the school-room, but who is
hoping to come out next Easter; then Ernest and Charley, the Eton boys;
and lastly, Teddy and Ralph, who are at a famous preparatory school,
whence they hope, in process of time, to be drafted on to Eton, following
in the footsteps of their elder brothers.
Of all this large family it is Beatrice, the eldest daughter, who causes
her mother the most anxiety. Beatrice is like her mother--a plain but
clever-looking girl, with the dark swart features and colouring of the
Esterworths, who are not a handsome race. Added to which, she inherits
her father's short and somewhat stumpy figure. Such a personal appearance
in itself is enough to cause uneasiness to any mother who is anxious for
her daughter's future; but when these advantages of looks are rendered
still more peculiar by the fact that her hair had to be shaved off some
years ago when she had scarlet fever, and that it has never grown again
properly, but is worn short and loose about her face like a boy's, with
its black tresses tumbling into her eyes every time she looks down--and
when, added to this, Mrs. Miller also discovered to her mortification
that Beatrice possessed a will of her own, and so decided a method of
expressing her opinions and convictions, that she was not likely to be
easily moulded to her own views, you will, perhaps, understand the extent
of the difficulties with which she has to deal.
For, of course, so clever and so managing a woman as Mrs. Miller has not
allowed her daughter to grow up to the age of twenty without making the
most careful and judiciously-laid schemes for her ultimate disposal. That
Beatrice is to marry is a matter of course, and Mrs. Miller has well
determined that the marriage is to be a good one, and that her daughter
is to strengthen her father's position in Meadowshire by a union with one
or other of its leading families. Now, when Mrs. Miller came to pass the
marriageable men of Meadowshire under review, there was no such eligible
bachelor amongst them all as Sir John Kynaston, of Kynaston Hall.
It was on him, therefore, that her hopes with regard to Beatrice were
fixed. Fortune hitherto had seemed to smile favourably upon her. Beatrice
had had one season in town, during which she had met Sir John frequently,
and he had, contrary to his usual custom, asked her to dance several
times when he had met her at balls. Mrs. Miller said to herself that Sir
John, not being a very young man, did not set much store upon mere
personal beauty; that he probably valued mental qualities in a woman more
highly than the transient glitter of beauty; and that Beatrice's good
sense and sharp, shrewd conversation had evidently made a favourable
impression upon him.
She never was more mistaken in her life. True, Sir John did like Miss
Miller, he found her unconventional and amusing; but his only object in
distinguishing her by his attentions had been to pay a necessary
compliment to the new M.P.'s daughter, a duty which he would have
fulfilled equally had she been stupid as well as plain: moreover, as we
have seen, few men were so intensely sensitive to beauty in a woman as
was Sir John Kynaston. Mrs. Miller, however, was full of hopes concerning
him. To do her justice, she was not exactly vulgarly ambitious for her
daughter; she liked Sir John personally, and had a high respect for his
character, and she considered that Beatrice's high spirit and self-willed
disposition would be most desirably moderated and kept in check by a
husband so much older than herself. Lady Kynaston, moreover, was one of
her best and dearest friends, and was her beau-idéal of all that a clever
and refined lady should be. The match, in every respect, would have been
a very acceptable one to her. Whether or no Miss Beatrice shared her
mother's views on her behalf remains to be seen.
The mother and daughter are settling together the preliminaries of a
week's festivities which Mrs. Miller has decided shall be held at
Shadonake this winter. The house is to be filled, and there are to be a
series of dinner parties, culminating in a ball.
"The Bayleys, the Westons, the Foresters, and two daughters, I suppose,"
reads Mrs. Miller, aloud, from the list in her hand, "Any more for the
second dinner-party, Beatrice?"
"Are you not going to ask the Daintrees, of Sutton, mother?"
"Oh, dear me, another parson, Beatrice! I really don't think we can; I
have got three already. They shall have a card for the ball."
"You will ask that handsome girl who lives with them, won't you?"
"Not the slightest occasion for doing so," replied her mother, shortly.
Beatrice lifted her eyebrows.
"Why, she is the best-looking woman in all Meadowshire; we cannot leave
her out."
"I know nothing about her, not even her name; she is some kind of poor
relation, I believe--acts as the children's governess. We have too many
women as it is. No, I certainly shall not ask her. Go on to the next,
Beatrice."
"But, mother, she is so very handsome! Surely you might include her."
"Dear me, Beatrice, what a stupid girl you are! What is the good of
asking handsome girls to cut you out in your own house? I should have
thought you would have had the sense to see that for yourself," said Mrs.
Miller, impatiently.
"I think you are horribly unjust, mamma," says Miss Beatrice,
energetically; "and it is downright unkind to leave her out because
she is handsome--as if I cared."
"How can I ask her if I do not know her name?" said her mother,
irritably, with just that amount of dread of her daughter's rising temper
to make her anxious to conciliate her. "If you like to find out who she
is and all about her----"
"Yes, I will find out," said Beatrice, quietly; "give me the note, I will
keep it back for the present."
"Now, for goodness sake, go on, child, and don't waste any more time. Who
are coming from town to stay in the house?"
"Well, there will be Lady Kynaston, I suppose."
"Yes. She won't come till the end of the week. I have heard from her; she
will try and get down in time for the ball."
"Then there will be the Macpherson girls and Helen Romer. And, as a
matter of course, Captain Kynaston must be asked?"
"Yes. What a fool that woman is to advertise her feelings so openly that
one is obliged to ask her attendant swain to follow her wherever she
goes!"
"On the contrary, I think her remarkably clever; she gets what she wants,
and the cleverest of us can do no more. It is a well-known fact to all
Helen's acquaintances that not to ask Captain Kynaston to meet her would
be deliberately to insult her--she expects it as her right."
"All the same, it is in very bad taste and excessively underbred of her.
However, I should ask Captain Kynaston in any case, for his mother's
sake, and because I like him. He is a good shot, too, and the coverts
must be shot that week. Who next?"
"Mr. Herbert Pryme."
"Goodness me! Beatrice, what makes you think of _him_? We don't know
anything about him--where he comes from or who are his belongings--he is
only a nobody!"
"He is a barrister, mamma!"
"Yes, of course, I know that--but, then, there are barristers of all
sorts. I am sure I do not know what made you fix upon him; you only met
him two or three times in town."
"I liked him," said Beatrice, carelessly; "he is a gentleman, and would
be a pleasant man to have in the house."
Her mother looked at her sharply. She was playing with the gold locket
round her neck, twisting it backwards and forwards along its chain, her
eyes fixed upon the heap of cards on her lap. There was not the faintest
vestige of a blush upon her face.
"However," she continued, "if you don't care about having him, strike his
name out. Only it is a pity, because Sophy Macpherson is rather fond of
him, I fancy."
This was a lie; it was Miss Beatrice herself who was fond of him, but not
even her mother, keen and quick-scented as she was, could have guessed it
from her impassive face. Mrs. Miller was taken in completely.
"Oh," she said, "if Sophy Macpherson likes him, that alters the case. Oh,
yes, I will ask him by all means--as you say, he is a gentleman and
pleasant."
"Look, mamma!" exclaimed Beatrice, suddenly; "there is uncle Tom riding
up the drive."
Now, Tom Esterworth was a very important personage; he was the present
head of the Esterworth family, and, as such, the representative of its
ancient honours and traditions. He was a bachelor, and reigned in
solitary grandeur at Lutterton Castle, and kept the hounds as his
fathers had done before him.
Uncle Tom was thought very much of at Shadonake, and his visits always
caused a certain amount of agitation in his sister's mind. To her dying
day she would be conscious that in Tom's eyes she had been guilty of a
_mésalliance_. She never could get that idea out of her head; it made her
nervous and ill at ease in his presence. She hustled all her notes and
cards hurriedly together into her bureau.
"Uncle Tom! Dear me, what can he have come to-day for! I thought the
hounds were out. Ring the bell, Beatrice; he will like some tea. Where
is your father?"
"Papa is out superintending the building of the new pigsties," said
Beatrice as she rang the bell. "I think uncle Tom has been hunting; he is
in boots and breeches I see."
"Dear me, I hope your father won't come in with his muddy feet and his
hands covered with earth," said Mrs. Miller, nervously.
Uncle Tom came in, a tall, dark-faced, strong-limbed man of fifty--an
ugly man, if you will, but a gentleman, and an Esterworth, every inch of
him. He kissed his sister, and patted his niece on the cheek.
"Why weren't you out to-day, Pussy?"
"You met so far off, uncle. I had no one to ride with to the meet. The
boys will be back next week. Have you had a good run?"
"No, we've done nothing but potter about all the morning; there isn't a
scrap of scent."
"Uncle Tom, will you give us a meet here when we have our house-warming?"
"Humph! you haven't got any foxes at Shadonake," answered her uncle. He
had drawn his chair to the fire, and was warming his hands over the
blazing logs. Beatrice was rather a favourite with him. "I will see about
it, Pussy," he added, kindly, seeing that she looked disappointed. Mrs.
Miller was pouring him out a cup of tea.
"Well, I've got a piece of news for you women!" says Mr. Esterworth,
stretching out his hand for his tea. "John Kynaston's going to be
married!"
Mrs. Miller never knew how it was that the old Worcester tea-cup in her
hand did not at this juncture fall flat on the ground into a thousand
atoms at her brother's feet. It is certain that only a very strong
exercise of self-control and presence of mind saved it from destruction.
"Engaged to be married!" she said, with a gasp.
"That is news indeed," cried Beatrice, heartily, "I am delighted."
"Don't be so foolish, Beatrice," said her mother, quite sharply. "How on
earth can you be delighted when you don't even know who it is? Who is it,
Tom?"
"Ah, that is the whole pith of the matter," said Mr. Esterworth, who was
not above the weakness of liking to be the bearer of a piece of gossip.
"I'll give you three guesses, and I'll bet you won't hit it."
"One of the Courtenay girls?"
"No."
"Anna Vivian?"
"I know," says Beatrice, nodding her head sagely; "it is that girl who
lives with the Daintrees."
"Beatrice, how silly you are!" cries her mother.
Tom Esterworth turns round in his chair, and looks at his niece.
"By Jove, you've hit it!" he exclaims. "What a clever pussy you are to be
sure."
And then the soul of the member's wife became filled with consternation
and disgust.
"Well, I call it downright sly of John Kynaston!" she exclaims, angrily;
"picking out a nobody like that behind all our backs, and keeping it so
quiet, too; he ought to be ashamed of himself for such an unsuitable
selection!"
Beatrice laughed. "You know, uncle Tom, mamma wanted him to marry me."
"Beatrice, you should not say such things," said her mother, colouring.
"Whew!" whistled Mr. Esterworth. "So that was the little game, Caroline,
was it? John Kynaston has better taste. He wouldn't have looked at an
ugly little girl like our pussy here, would he, Puss? Miss Nevill is one
of the finest women I ever saw in my life. She was at the meet to-day on
one of his horses; and, by Jove! she made all the other women look plain
by the side of her! Kynaston is a very lucky fellow."
"I think, mamma, there can be no doubt about sending Miss Nevill an
invitation to our ball now," said Beatrice, laughingly.
"She will have to be asked to stay in the house," said Mrs. Miller, with
something akin to a groan. "I cannot leave her out, as Lady Kynaston is
coming. Oh, dear! oh, dear! what fools men are, to be sure!"
But Beatrice was wicked enough to laugh again over her mother's
discomfiture.
CHAPTER IX.
ENGAGED.
I wonder did you ever count
The value of one human fate,
Or sum the infinite amount
Of one heart's treasures, and the weight
Of one heart's venture.
A. Procter.
It was quite true what Mr. Thomas Esterworth had said, that Vera was
engaged to Sir John Kynaston.
It had all come about so rapidly, and withal so quietly, that, when Vera
came to think of it, it rather took her breath away. She had expected it,
of course; indeed, she had even planned and tried for it; but, when it
had actually come to her, she felt herself to be bewildered by the
suddenness of it.
In the end the climax of the love-making had been prosaic enough. Sir
John had not felt himself equal to the task of a personal interview with
the lady of his affections, with the accompanying risks of a personal
rejection, which, in his modesty and humility with reference to her, he
had believed to be quite on the cards. So he had written to her. The note
had been taken up to the vicarage by the footman, and had been brought
into the dining-room by the vicarial parlour-maid, just as the three
ladies were finishing breakfast, and after the vicar himself had left the
room.
"A note from Kynaston, please 'm," says rosy-cheeked Hannah, holding it
forth before her, upon a small japanned tray, as an object of general
family interest and excitement.
"For your master, Hannah?" says old Mrs. Daintree. "Are they waiting for
an answer? You will find him in his study."
"No, ma'am, it's for Miss Vera."
"Dear me!" with a suspicious glance across the table; "how very odd!"
Vera takes up the note and opens it.
"May I have the crest, auntie?" clamours Tommy before she had read three
words of it.
"Is it about the horse he has offered you to ride?" asks his mother.
But Vera answers nothing; she gets up quietly, and leaves the room
without a word.
"Extraordinary!" gasps Mrs. Daintree; "Vera's manners are certainly most
abrupt and unlady-like at times, Marion. I think you ought to point it
out to her."
Marion murmurs some unintelligible excuse and follows her sister--leaving
the unfortunate Tommy a prey to his grandmother's tender mercies. So
brilliant an opportunity is not, of course, to be thrown away. Tommy's
fingers, having incontinently strayed in the direction of the
sugar-basin, are summarily slapped for their indiscretion, and an
admonition is straightway delivered to him in forcible language
concerning the pains and penalties which threaten the ulterior destiny of
naughty little boys in general and of such of them in particular who are
specially addicted to the abstraction of lumps of sugar from the
breakfast-table.
Meanwhile, Marion has found her sister in the adjoining room standing up
alone upon the hearthrug with Sir John Kynaston's letter in her hands.
She is not reading it now, she is looking steadfastly into the fire. It
has fulfilled--nay, more than fulfilled--her wishes. The triumph of her
success is pleasant to her, and has brought a little more than their
usual glow into her cheeks, and yet--Heaven knows what vague and
intangible dreams and fancies have not somehow sunk down chill and cold
within her during the last five minutes.
Gratified ambition--flattered vanity--the joy of success--all this she
feels to the full; but nothing more! There is not one single other
sensation within her. Her pulses have not quickened, ever so little, as
she read her lover's letter; her heart has not throbbed, even once, with
a sweeter, purer delight--such as she has read and heard that other women
have felt.
"I suppose I have no heart," said Vera to herself; "it must be that I am
cold by nature. I am happy; but--but--I wonder what it feels like--this
_love_--that there is so much talked and written about?"
And then Marion came in breathlessly.
"Oh, Vera, what is it?"
Vera turns round to her, smiling serenely, and places the note in her
hands.
This is what Sir John Kynaston has written:--
"Dear Miss Nevill,--I do not think what I am about to say will be
altogether unexpected by you. You must have surely guessed how sincere
an affection I have learnt to feel for you. I know that I am unworthy
of you, and I am conscious of how vast a disparity there is between
my age and your own youth and beauty. But if my great love and devotion
can in any way bridge over the gap that lies between us, believe me,
that if you will consent to be my wife, my whole life shall be devoted
to making you happy. If you can give me an answer to-day, I shall be
very grateful, as suspense is hard to bear. But pray do not decide
against me in haste, and without giving me every chance in your power.
"Yours devotedly,
"John Kynaston."
"Oh! Vera, my darling sister, I am so glad!" cries Marion, in tearful
delight, throwing her arms up round the neck of the young sister, who is
so much taller than she is; "I had guessed it, dearest; I saw he was in
love with you; and oh, Vera, I shall have you always near me!"
"Yes, that will be nice," assents Vera, quietly, and a trifle absently,
stroking her sister's cheek, with her eyes still fixed on the fire; "and
of course," rousing herself with an effort, "of course I am a very lucky
woman."
And then Mr. Daintree came in, and his wife rushed to him rapturously to
impart the joyful news. There was a little pleasant confusion of broken
words and explanations between the three, and then Marion whisked away,
brimming over with triumphant delight to wave the flags of victory
exultingly in her mother-in-law's face.
Eustace Daintree and Vera were alone. He took her hands within his, and
looked steadfastly in her face.
"Vera, are you sure of yourself, my dear, in this matter?"
Her eyes met his for a moment, and then fell before his earnest gaze. She
coloured a little.
"I am quite sure that I mean to accept Sir John's proposal," she said,
with a little uneasy laugh.
"Child, do you love him?"
Her eyes met his again; there was a vague trouble in them. The man had a
power over her, the power of sheer goodness of soul. She could never be
untrue to herself with Eustace Daintree; she was always at her very best
with him, humble and gentle; and she could no more have told him a lie,
or put him off with vague conventionalities, than she could have
committed a deadly sin.
What is it about some people that, in spite of ourselves, they thus force
out of us the best part of our nature; that base and unworthy thoughts
cannot live in us before them,--that they melt out of our hearts as the
snow before the rays of the sun? Even though the effect may be transient,
such is the power of their faith, and their truth, and their goodness,
that it must needs call forth in us something of the same spirit as their
own.
Such was Eustace Daintree's influence over Vera. It was not because of
his office, for no one was less susceptible than Vera--a Protestant
brought up, with but vague ideas of her own faith, in a Catholic land--to
any of those recognized associations with which a purely English-bred
girl might have felt the character of the clergyman of the parish where
she lived to be invested. It was nothing of that sort that made him great
to her; it was, simply and solely, the goodness of the man that impressed
her. His guilelessness, his simplicity of mind, his absolute uprightness
of character, and, with it all, the absence in him of any assumption of
authority, or of any superiority of character over those about him. His
very humility made her humble with him, and exalted him into something
saintly in her eyes.
When Eustace looked at her fixedly, with all his good soul in his earnest
eyes, and said to her again, "Do you love him, Vera?" Vera could but
answer him simply and frankly, almost against her will, as it were.
"I don't think I do, Eustace; but then I do not quite know what love is.
I do not think, however, that it can be what I feel."
"My child, no union can be hallowed without love. Vera, you will not run
into so great a danger?" he said anxiously.
She looked up at him smiling.
"I like him better than any one else, at all events. Better than Mr.
Gisburne, for instance. And I think, I do really think, Eustace, it will
be for my happiness."
The vicar looked grave. "If Sir John Kynaston were a poor man, would you
marry him?"
And Vera answered bravely, though with a heightened colour--
"No; but it is not only for the money, Eustace; indeed it is not.
But--but--I should be miserable without it; and I must do something with
my life."
He drew her near to him, and kissed her forehead. He understood her. With
that rare gift of sympathy--the highest, the most God-like of all human
attributes--he felt at once what she meant. It was wonderful that this
man, who was so unworldly, so unselfish, so pure of the stains of earth
himself, should have seen at once her position from her own point of
view; that was neither a very exalted one, nor was it very free from the
dross of worldliness. But it was so. All at once he seemed to know by a
subtle instinct what were the weaknesses, and the temptations, and the
aims of this girl, who, with all her faults, was so dear to him. He
understood her better, perhaps, than she understood herself. Her soul was
untouched by passion; the story of her life was unwritten; there was no
danger for her yet; and perchance it might be that the storms of life
would pass her by unscathed, and that she might remain sheltered for ever
in the safe haven which had opened so unexpectedly to receive her.
"There is a peril in the course you have chosen," he said, gravely; "but
your soul is pure, and you are safe. And I know, Vera, that you will
always do your duty."
And the tears were in her eyes as he left her.
When he had gone she sat down to write her answer to Sir John Kynaston.
She dipped her pen into the ink, and sat with it in her hand, thinking.
Her brother-in-law's words had aroused a fresh train of thought within
her. There seemed to be an amount of solemnity in what she was about to
do that she had not considered before. It was true that she did not love
him; but then, as she had told Eustace just now, she loved no one else;
she did not rightly understand what love meant, indeed. And is a woman to
wait on in patience for years until love comes to her? Would it ever
come? Probably not, thought Vera; not to her, who thought herself to be
cold, and not easily moved. There must be surely many women to whom this
wonderful thing of love never comes. In all her experience of life there
was nothing to contradict this. It was not as if she had been a girl who
had never left her native village, never tasted of the pleasures of life,
never known the sweet incense of flattery and devotion. Vera had known it
all. Many men had courted her; one or two had loved her dearly, but she
had not loved them. Amongst them all, indeed, there had been never one
whom she had liked with such a sincere affection as she now felt for this
man, who seemed to love her so much, and who wrote to her so diffidently,
and yet so devotedly.
"I love him as well as I am ever likely to love any one," said Vera, to
herself. Yet still she leant her chin upon her hand and looked out of the
window at the gray bare branches of the elm-trees across the damp green
lawn, and still her letter was unwritten.
"Vera!" cries Marion, coming in hurriedly and breaking in upon her
reverie, "the footman from Kynaston is waiting all this time to know if
there is any answer! Shall I send him away? Or have you made up your
mind?"
"Oh yes, I have made up my mind. My note will be ready directly; he may
as well take it. It will save the trouble of sending up to the Hall
later." For Vera remembers that there is not a superfluity of servants
at the vicarage, and that they all of them have plenty to do.
And thus, a mere trifle--a feather, as it were, on the river of
life--settled her destiny for her out of hand.
She dipped her pen into the ink once more, and wrote:--
"Dear Sir John,--You have done me a great honour in asking me to be
your wife. I am fully sensible of your affection, and am very grateful
for it. I fear you think too highly of me; but I will endeavour to
prove myself worthy of your good opinion, and to make you as good a
wife as you deserve.
"Yours,
"Vera Nevill."
She was conscious herself of the excessive coldness of her note, but she
could not help it. She could not, for the life of her, have made it
warmer. Nothing, indeed, is so difficult as to write down feelings that
do not exist; it is easier to simulate with our spoken words and our
looks; but the pen that is urged beyond its natural inclination seems to
cool into ice in our fingers. But, at all events, she had accepted him.
It was a relief to her when the thing was done, and the note sent off
beyond the possibility of recall.
After that there had been no longer any leisure for her doubting
thoughts. There was her sister's delighted excitement, Mrs. Daintree's
oppressive astonishment, and even Eustace's calmer satisfaction in her
bright prospects, to occupy and divert her thoughts. Then there came her
lover himself, tender and grateful, and with so worshipful a respect in
every word and action that the most sensitive woman could scarcely have
been ruffled or alarmed by the prospects of so deferential a husband.
In a few days Vera became reconciled to her new position, which was in
truth a very pleasant one to her. There were the congratulations of
friends and acquaintances to be responded to; the pleasant flutter of
adulation that surrounded her once more; the little daily excitement
of John Kynaston's visits--all this made her happy and perfectly
satisfied with the wisdom of her decision.
Only one thing vexed her.
"What will your mother say, John?" she had asked the very first day she
had been engaged to him.
"It will not make much difference to me, dearest, whatever she may say."
Nor in truth would it, for Sir John, as we have seen, had never been a
devoted son, nor had he ever given his confidence to his mother; he had
always gone his own way independently of her.
"But it must needs make a difference to me," Vera had insisted. "You have
written to her, of course."
"Oh, yes; I wrote and told her I was engaged to you."
"And she has not written?"
"Yes, there was a message for you--her love or something."
Sir John evidently did not consider the subject of much importance. But
Vera was hurt that Lady Kynaston had not written to her.
"I will never enter any family where I am not welcome," she had said to
her lover, proudly.
And then Sir John had taken fright, for she was so precious to him that
the fear of losing her was becoming almost as a nightmare to him, and,
possibly, at the bottom of his heart he knew how feeble was his hold
over her. He had written off to his mother that day a letter that was
almost a command, and had told her to write to Vera.
This letter was not likely to prepossess Lady Kynaston, who was a
masterful little lady herself, in her daughter-in-law's favour; it did
more harm than good. She had obeyed her son, it is true, because he was
the head of the family, and because she stood in awe of him; but the
letter, thus written under compulsion, was not kind--it was not even
just.
"Horrid girl!" had said Lady Kynaston, angrily, to herself, as she had
sat down to her writing-table to fulfil her son's mandate. "It is not
likely that I can be very loving to her--some wretched, second-rate girl,
evidently--for not even Caroline Miller who, goodness knows, rakes up all
the odds and ends of society--ever heard of her before!"
It is not to be supposed that a letter undertaken under such auspices
could be in any way conciliatory or pleasant in its tone. Such as it was,
Vera put it straight into the fire directly she had read it; no one ever
saw it but herself.
"I have heard from your mother," she said to Sir John.
"Yes? I am very glad. She wrote everything that was kind, no doubt."
"I dare say she meant to be kind," said Vera; which was not true, because
she knew perfectly that there had been no kindness intended. But she
pursued the subject no further.
"I hope you will like Maurice," said Sir John, presently; "he is a
good-hearted boy, though he has been sadly extravagant, and given me
a good deal of trouble."
"I shall be glad to know your brother," said Vera, quietly. "Is he coming
to Kynaston?"
"Yes, eventually; but you will meet him first at Shadonake when you go
to stay there: they have asked a large party for that week, I hear, and
Maurice will be there."
Now, by this time Vera knew that the photograph she had once found in the
old writing-table drawer at Kynaston was that of her lover's brother
Maurice.
CHAPTER X.
A MEETING ON THE STAIRS.
Since first I saw your face
I resolved to honour and renown you;
If now I be disdained,
I wish my heart had never known you.
The Sun whose beams most glorious are
Rejecteth no beholder,
And your sweet beauty past compare
Made my poor eyes the bolder.
Thomas Ford.
I have often wondered why, in the ordering of human destinies,
some special Providence, some guardian spirit who is gifted with
foreknowledge, is not mercifully told off to each of us so to order the
trifles of our lives that they may combine to the working together of our
weal, instead of conspiring, as they too often and too evidently do, for
our woe.
Look back upon your own life, and upon the lives of those whose story you
have known the most intimately, and see what straws, what nonentities,
what absurd trivialities have brought about the most important events of
existence. Recollect how, and in what manner, those people whom it would
have been well for you never to have known came across you. How those
whose influence over you is for good were kept out of your way at the
very crisis of your life. Think what a different life you would have led;
I do not mean only happier, but how much better and purer, if some absurd
trifle had not seemed to play into the hands, as it were, of your
destiny, and to set you in a path whereof no one could at the time
foresee the end.
Some one had looked out their train in last month's Bradshaw, unwitting
of the autumn alterations, and was kept from you till the next day. You
took the left instead of the right side of the square on your way home,
or you stood for a minute gossiping at your neighbour's door, and there
came by some one who ultimately altered and embittered your whole life,
and who, but for that accidental meeting, you would, probably, never have
seen again; or some evil adviser was at hand, whilst one whose opinion
you revered, and whose timely help would have saved you from taking that
false step you ever after regretted, was kept to the house, by Heaven
knows what ridiculous trifle--a cold in the head, or finger-ache--and
did not see you to warn and to keep you back from your own folly until it
was too late.
People say these things are ordered for us. I do not know; it may be so,
but sometimes it seems rather as if we were irresponsible puppets, tossed
and buffeted about, blindly and helplessly, upon life's river, as
fluttering dead leaves are danced wildly along the swift current of a
Highland stream. Such a trifle might have saved us! yet there was no
pitying hand put forth to avert that which, in our human blindness,
appeared to us to be as unimportant as any other incident of our lives.
Life is an unsolvable problem. Shall we ever, in some other world,
I wonder, read its riddles aright?
All these moral dissertations have been called forth because Vera Nevill
went to stay for a week at Shadonake. If she had known--what we none of
us know--the future, she doubtless would have stayed away. Fate--a
beneficent fate, indeed--made, I am bound to confess, a valiant effort in
her behalf. Little Minnie fell ill the day before her departure; and the
symptoms were such that everybody in the house believed that she was
sickening for scarlet fever. The doctor, however, having been hastily
summoned, pronounced the disease to be an infantile complaint of a
harmless and innocuous nature, which he dignified by the delusively
poetical name of "Rosalia."
"It is not infectious, Mr. Smee, I hope?" asked Marion, anxiously.
"Nothing to prevent my sister going to stay at the Millers' to morrow?"
"Not in the least infectious, Mrs. Daintree, and anybody in the house can
go wherever they like, except the child herself, who must be kept in a
warm room for two days, when she will probably be quite well again."
"I am glad, dear, there is nothing to put a stop to your visit; it would
have been such a pity," said Marion, in her blindness, to her sister
afterwards.
So the fates had a game of pitch and toss with Vera's future, and settled
it amongst them to their own satisfaction, probably, but not, it will be
seen, for Vera's own good or ultimate happiness.
On the afternoon of the 3rd day of January, therefore, Eustace
Daintree drove his sister-in-law over to Shadonake in the open
basket pony-carriage, and deposited her and her box safely at the
stone-colonnaded door of that most imposing mansion, which she entered
exactly ten minutes before the dressing-bell rang, and was conducted
almost immediately upstairs to her own room.
Some twenty minutes later there are still two ladies sitting on in the
small tea-room, where it is the fashion at Shadonake to linger between
the hours of five and seven, who alone have not yet moved to obey the
mandate of the dressing-bell.
"What _is_ the good of waiting?" says Beatrice, impatiently; "the train
is often late, and, besides, he may not come till the nine o'clock
train."
"That is just what I want to wait for," answers Helen Romer. "I want
just to hear if the carriage has come back, and then I shall know for
certain."
"Well, you know how frightfully punctual papa is, and how angry it makes
him if anybody is late."
"Just two minutes more, Beatrice; I can dress very quickly when once
I set to work," pleads Helen.
Beatrice sits down again on the arm of the sofa, and resigns herself to
her fate; but she looks rather annoyed and vexed about it.
Mrs. Romer paces the room feverishly and impatiently.
"What did you think of Miss Nevill?" asks Beatrice.
"I could hardly see her in her hat and that thick veil; but she looked as
if she were handsome."
"She is _beautiful_!" says Beatrice, emphatically, "and uncle Tom
says----"
"Hush!" interrupts Helen, hurriedly. "Is not that the sound of
wheels?--Yes, it is the carriage."
She flies to the door.
"Take care, Helen," says Beatrice, anxiously; "don't open the door
wide, don't let the servants think we have been waiting, it looks so
bad--so--so unlady-like."
But Helen Romer does not even hear her; she is listening intently to the
approaching sounds, with the half-opened door in her hand.
The tea-room door opens into a large inner hall, out of which leads the
principal staircase; the outer or entrance-hall is beyond; and presently
the stopping of the carriage, the opening and shutting of doors from the
servants' departments, and all the usual bustle of an arrival are heard.
The two girls stand close together listening, Beatrice hidden in the
shadow of the room.
"There are _two_ voices!" cries Helen, in a disappointed tone; "he is not
alone!"
"I suppose it is Mr. Pryme--mamma said he might come by this train,"
answers Beatrice, so quietly that no one could ever have guessed how her
heart was beating.
"Helen, _do_ let us run upstairs; I really cannot stay. Let _me_ go, at
all events!" she adds, with a sudden agony of entreaty as the guests were
heard advancing towards the door of the inner hall. And as Helen made not
the slightest sign of moving, Beatrice slipped past her and ran lightly
and swiftly across the hall upstairs, and disappeared along the landing
above just as Captain Kynaston and Mr. Herbert Pryme appeared upon the
scene below.
No such scruples of modesty troubled Mrs. Romer. As the young men entered
the inner hall preceded by the butler, who was taking them up to their
rooms, and followed by two footmen who were bearing their portmanteaus,
Helen stepped boldly forward out of the shelter of the tea-room, and held
out her hand to Captain Kynaston.
"How do you do? How late your train is."
Maurice looked distinctly annoyed, but of course he shook hands with her.
"How are you, Mrs. Romer? I did not expect you to be here till to-morrow.
Yes, we are late," consulting his watch; "only twenty minutes to dress
in--I must look sharp."
Meanwhile the stranger, Mr. Pryme, was following the butler upstairs.
Helen lowered her voice.
"I _must_ speak to you a minute, Maurice; it is six weeks since we have
met, and to meet in public would be too trying. Please dress as quickly
as ever you can; I know you can dress quickly if you choose; and wait for
me here at the bottom of the stairs--we might get just three minutes
together before dinner."
There were the footmen and the portmanteaus within six yards of them, and
Mr. Pryme and the butler still within earshot. What was Maurice to do? He
could not really listen to a whole succession of prayers, and entreaties,
and piteous appeals. There was neither the time, nor was it the place,
for either discussion or remonstrance. All he could do was to nod a hasty
assent to her request.
"Then I must make haste," he said, and ran quickly upstairs in the wake
of the other guest.
The staircase at Shadonake was very wide and very handsome, and
thoroughly in keeping with the spacious character of the house. It
consisted of one wide flight of shallow steps, with a richly-carved
balustrade on either side of it, leading straight down from a large
square landing above. Both landing and steps were carpeted with thick
velvet-pile carpet, so that no jarring footfall was ever heard upon them.
The hall into which the staircase led was paved in coloured mosaic tiles,
and was half covered over with rich Persian rugs. A great many doors,
nearly all the sitting-rooms of the house, in fact, opened into it,
and the blank spaces of the wall were filled in with banks of large
handsome plants, palms and giant ferns, and azaleas in full bloom, which
were daily rearranged by the gardeners in every available corner.
At the foot of the staircase, and with his back to it, leaning against
the balustrade, stood Captain Kynaston, exactly four minutes before the
dinner was announced.
Most people were in the habit of calling Maurice a good-looking man, but
if anybody had seen him now for the first time it is doubtful whether
they would have endorsed that favourable opinion upon his personal
appearance. A thoroughly ill-tempered expression of face seldom enhances
any one's good looks, and if ever a man looked in a bad temper, Maurice
Kynaston did so at the present moment.
He stood with his hands in his trousers pockets, and his eyes fixed upon
his own boots, and he looked as savage as it was well possible for a man
to look.
He was waiting here for Helen, because he had told her that he would do
so, and when Captain Kynaston promised anything to a lady he always kept
his word.
But to say that he hated being there is but a mild term for the rage and
disgust he experienced.
To be waylaid and attacked thus, directly he had set foot in the house,
with a stranger and three servants looking on so as to render him
absolutely helpless; to be uncomfortably hurried over his toilet, and
inveigled into a sort of rendezvous at the foot of a public staircase,
where a number of people might at any minute enter from any one of the
six or eight surrounding doors, was enough of itself to try his temper;
but when he came to consider how Helen, in thus appropriating him and
making him obey her caprices, was virtually breaking her side of the
treaty between them; that she was exacting from him the full amount of
servitude and devotion which an open engagement would demand, and yet she
had agreed to deny any such engagement between them openly--it was, he
felt, more than he could continue to bear with meekness.
Meekness, indeed, was in no way Maurice Kynaston's distinguishing
characteristic. He was masterful and imperious by nature; to be the slave
of any woman was neither pleasant nor profitable to him. Honour, indeed,
had bound him to Helen, and had he loved her she might have led him. Her
position gave her a certain hold over him, and she knew how to appeal to
his heart; but he loved her not, and to control his will and his spirit
was beyond her power.
Maurice said to himself that he would put a stop to this system of
persecution once and for all--that this interview, which she herself had
contrived, should be made the opportunity of a few forcible words, that
should frighten her into submission.
So he stood fretting, and fuming, and raging, waiting for her at the foot
of the stairs.
There was a soft rustle, as of a woman's dress, behind him. He turned
sharply round.
Halfway down the stairs came a woman whom he had never seen before.
A black velvet dress, made high in the throat, with a wide collar of
heavy lace upon her shoulders, hung clingingly about the outlines of her
tall and perfect figure; her hands, with some lace ruffles falling about
her wrists, were simply crossed before her. The light of a distant
hanging-lamp shone down upon her, just catching one diamond star that
glittered among the thick coils of her hair--she wore no other ornament.
She came down the stairs slowly, almost lingeringly, with a certain
grace in her movements, and without a shadow of embarrassment or
self-consciousness.
Maurice drew aside to let her pass him--looking at her--for how could he
choose but look? But when she reached the bottom of the steps, she turned
her face towards him.
"You are Maurice--are you not?" she said, and put forth both her hands
towards him.
An utter bewilderment as to who she was made him speechless; his mind had
been full of Helen and his own troubles; everything else had gone out of
his head. She coloured a little, still holding out her hands to him.
"I am Vera," she said, simply, and there was a little deprecating appeal
in the words as though she would have added, "Be my friend."
He took the hands--soft slender hands that trembled a very little in his
grasp--within his own, and some nameless charm in their gentle touch
brought a sudden flush into his face, but no appropriate words concerning
his pleasure at meeting her, or his gratification at their future
relations, fell from Maurice Kynaston's lips. He only held her thus by
her hands, and looked at her--looked at her as if he could never look at
her enough--from her head to her feet, and from her feet up again to her
head, till a sudden wave of colour flooded her face at the earnestness
of his scrutiny.
"Vera--_Vera Nevill_!" was all he said; and then below his breath, as
though his absolute amazement were utterly irrepressible: "_By Jove!_"
And Vera laughed softly at the thoroughly British character of the
exclamation.
"How like an Englishman!" she said. "An Italian would have paid me fifty
pretty compliments in half the time you have taken just to stare at me!"
"What a charming _tableau vivant_!" exclaims a voice above them as Mrs.
Romer comes down the staircase. "You really look like a scene in a play!
Pray don't let me disturb you."
"I am making friends with my sister-in-law that is to be, Mrs. Romer,"
says Maurice, who has dropped Vera's hands with a guilty suddenness, and
now endeavours to look completely at his ease--an effort in which he
signally fails.
"Were you? Dear me! I thought you and Miss Nevill were practising the
pose of the 'Huguenots'!"
Now the whole armoury of feminine weapons--impertinence, spite, and bad
manners, born of jealousy--is utterly beneath the contempt of such a
woman as Vera; but she is no untried, inexperienced country girl such as
Mrs. Romer imagines her to be disconcerted or stricken dumb by such an
attack. She knew instantly that she had been attacked, and in what
manner, and she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
"I have never seen that picture, the 'Huguenots,' Mrs. Romer," she
said, quietly; "do you think there is a photograph or a print of it
at Kynaston, Maurice? If so, you or John must show it to me."
And how Mrs. Romer hated her then and there, from that very minute until
her life's end, it would not be easy to set forth!
The utter _insouciance_, the lady-like ignoring of Helen's impertinence,
the quiet assumption of what she knew her own position in the Kynaston
family to be, down to the sisterly "Maurice," whereby she addressed the
man whom in public, at least, Mrs. Romer was forced to call by a more
formal name--all proved to that astute little woman that Vera Nevill was
no ordinary antagonist, no village maiden to be snubbed or patronised at
her pleasure, but a woman of the world, who understood how to fight her
own battles, and was likely, as she was forced to own to herself, to
"give back as good as she got."
Not another single word was spoken between them, for at that very minute
a door was thrown open, and the whole of the party in the house came
trooping forth in pairs from the drawing-room in a long procession on
their way to the dining-room.
First came Mr. Miller with old Mrs. Macpherson on his arm. Then Mr. Pryme
and Miss Sophy Macpherson; her sister behind with Guy Miller; Beatrice,
looking melancholy, with the curate in charge; and her mother last with
Sir John, who had come over from Kynaston to dinner. Edwin Miller, the
second son, by himself brought up the rear.
There was some laughter at the expense of the three defaulters, who, of
course, were supposed to have only just hurried downstairs.
"Aha! just saved your soup, ladies!" cried Mr. Miller, laughingly. "Fall
in, fall in, as best you can!"
Mrs. Miller came to the rescue, and, by a rapid stroke of generalship,
marshalled them into their places.
Miss Nevill, of course, was a stranger; Helen had been on intimate terms
with them all for years; Vera, besides, was standing close to Maurice.
"Please take in Miss Nevill, Captain Kynaston; and Edwin, my dear, give
your arm to Mrs. Romer."
Edwin, who was a pleasant-looking boy, with plenty to say for himself,
hurried forward with alacrity; and Helen had to accept her fate with the
best grace she could.
"Well, how did you get on with Vera, and how did you like her?" asked Sir
John, coming round to his brother's side of the table when the ladies had
left the room. He had noted with pleasure that Vera and Maurice had
talked incessantly throughout the dinner.
"My dear fellow!" cried Maurice, heartily, "she is the handsomest woman I
ever met in my life! I give you my word that, when she introduced herself
to me coming downstairs, I was so surprised, she was so utterly different
to what I and the mother have been imagining, that upon my life I
couldn't speak a word--I could do nothing but stare at her!"
"You like her, then?" said his brother, smiling, well pleased at his
openly expressed admiration.
"I think you are a very lucky fellow, old man! Like her! of course I do;
she's a downright good sort!"
And if Sir John was slightly shocked at the irreverence of alluding to so
perfect and pure a woman as his adored Vera by so familiar a phrase as "a
good sort," he was, at all events, too pleased by Maurice's genuine
approval of her to find any fault with his method of expressing it.
CHAPTER XI.
AN IDLE MORNING.
We loved, sir; used to meet;
How sad, and bad, and mad it was;
But then, how it was sweet!
Browning.
Leaning against a window-frame at the end of a long corridor on the
second floor, and idly looking out over the view of the wide lawns and
empty flower-beds which it commands, stands Mr. Herbert Pryme, on the
second morning after his arrival at Shadonake House.
It is after breakfast, and most of the gentlemen of the house have
dispersed; that is to say, Mr. Miller has gone off to survey his new
pigsties, and his sons and a Mr. Nethercliff, who arrived last night,
have ridden to a meet some fifteen miles distant, which the ladies had
voted to be too far off to attend.
Mr. Pryme, however, is evidently not a keen sports-man; he has declined
the offer of a mount which Guy Miller has hospitably pressed upon him,
and he has also declined to avail himself of his host's offer of the
services of the gamekeeper. Curiously enough,
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