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Doctor Cupid: A Novel

by Rhoda Broughton · English · Gutenberg #35548 · 705,058 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Doctor Cupid: A Novel

Author: Rhoda Broughton


        
Release date: March 11, 2011 [eBook #35548]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR CUPID: A NOVEL ***




Produced by woodie4 and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









  DOCTOR CUPID



      Ich komme, Ich weiss nicht woher;
      Ich gehe, Ich weiss nicht wohin;
      Ich bin, Ich weiss nicht was;
      Mich wundert dass Ich so froehlich bin



  DOCTOR CUPID

  A Novel

  BY

  RHODA BROUGHTON

  AUTHOR OF 'COMETH UP AS A FLOWER,' 'NANCY,' 'GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART!'
  'SECOND THOUGHTS,' ETC.


  '_Oh, Doctor Cupid, thou for me reply_'
                        SIR PHILIP SIDNEY


  _A NEW EDITION_


  LONDON

  RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON ST.

  Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen

  1891




DOCTOR CUPID




CHAPTER I


WHAT THE BIG HOUSE OWES TO US.

1. As much of our company as it likes to command.

2. As much dance music as it can get out of our fingers.

3. The complete transfer of all the bores among its guests from its
shoulders to ours.

4. The entire management of its Workhouse teas.

5. The wear and tear of mind of all its Christmas-trees and bran-pies.

6. The physicking of its sick dogs.

7. The setting its canaries' broken legs.

8. The general cheerful and grateful charing for it.

WHAT WE OWE TO THE BIG HOUSE.

1. Heartburnings from envy.

2. Headaches from dissipation.

3. The chronic discontent of our three maids.

4. The utter demoralisation of our boot-boy.

5. The acquaintance of several damaged fine ladies.

6. A roll of red flannel from the last wedding.

7. The occasional use of a garden-hose.


'There! I do not think that the joys and sorrows of living in a little
house under the shadow of a big one were ever more lucidly set forth,'
says an elder sister, holding up the slate on which she has just been
totting up this ingenious debit and credit account to a pink junior,
kneeling, head on hand, beside her; a junior who, not so long ago, did
sums on that very slate, and the straggle of briony round whose
sailor-hat tells that she has only just left the sunburnt harvest-fields
and the overgrown August hedgerows behind her.

'We have had a good deal of fun out of it too,' says she, rather
remorsefully. 'Do you remember'--with a sigh of recollected
enjoyment--'the day that we all blackened our faces with soot, and could
not get the soot off again afterwards?'

To what but a mind of seventeen could such a reminiscence have appeared
in the light of a departed joy?

'I have left out an item, I see,' says Margaret, running her eye once
again over her work; 'an unlimited quantity of the society of Freddy
Ducane, when nothing better turns up for him! Under which head, profit
or loss'--glancing with a not more than semi-amused smile at her
sister--'am I to enter it, eh, Prue?'

'Loss, loss!' replies Prue, with a suspiciously rosy precipitation. 'No
question about it; no one makes us lose so much time as he! Loss, loss!'

Margaret's eyes rest for an instant on her sister's face, and then
return not quite comfortably to the slate, upon which she painstakingly
inscribes the final entry, 'An unlimited quantity of Freddy Ducane's
society, when nothing better turns up for him!'

'"The acquaintance of several damaged fine ladies!"' reads Prue over her
sister's shoulder. 'I suppose that means Lady Betty?'

'I name no names,' replies Margaret gravely. 'I keep to a discreet
generality--

                    '"If it do her right,
    Then she hath wrong'd herself; if she be free,
    Why, then, my taxing like a wild-goose flies,
    Unclaimed of any man."'

'Dear me!' repeats Prue, under her breath, in a rather awed voice; 'I
wonder what it feels like to be damaged!'

'You had better ask her,' drily.

'I suppose she says dreadful things,' continues the young girl, still
with that same awed curiosity. 'I heard Mrs. Evans telling you that she
"stuck at nothing." I wonder how she does it.'

'You had better ask her,' more drily.

'Damaged or not damaged,' cries Prue, springing up from her knees and
beginning to caper about the room, and sing to her own capering, 'we
shall meet her to-night--

    '"For I'm to be married to-day, to-day,
      For I'm to be married to-day."

Or if I am not to be married, I am to go to my first dinner-party, which
is a step in the right direction. Do you remember your first
dinner-party, Peggy? How did you feel? How did you look?'

'I looked very plain, I believe,' replies Peggy sedately. 'At least, I
was told so afterwards. I remember that I felt very swollen. I had a
cold, and was shy, and I think both combined to make me feel swelled.'

'It is a pity that shyness has not the same effect upon me,' says Prue,
stretching out a long girlish arm, whose thinness is apparent even
through its chintz muslin covering. 'The one thing that would really
improve my appearance'--stopping before the only looking-glass that the
little room boasts, and putting her finger and thumb in the hollows of
cheeks scarcely rounded enough to match the rest of the pansy-textured
child face--'the one thing that would really improve my appearance would
be to have the mumps.'

Peggy laughs.

'_Unberufen!_ I should catch them, and you cannot say that they would
improve me.'

'Never mind!' cries Prue, turning away with a joyous whirl from the
mirror. 'I shall do very well. There are people who admire bones! I
shall pass in a crowd.

    '"For I'm to be married to-day, to-day,
      For I'm to be married to-day."'

Her dance and her song have carried her out into the garden--the small
but now opulent garden; and, partly to look at her, partly to pasture
her eyes upon a yet more admired object, Peggy has followed her as far
as to the French window, and now stands leaning one handsome shoulder
against the door-post, and looking out upon her kingdom of flowers.

'We owe the Big House one good thing, at all events,' she says, a smile
of satisfaction stealing into her comely eyes. 'I never knew what peace
of mind was until I had a garden-hose.'

At this moment, in the hands of Jacob the gardener, it is playing
comfortably on the faces of the tea-roses, and a luxurious drip and
patter testify to their appreciation.

Prue has come back panting, and sunk out of breath on the window-sill.
The briony garland has fallen from her hat, and a little hairy dog is
now galloping about the lawn boastfully with it, his head held very
high. Something in his attitude gets on the nerves of the other animals;
for the parrot, brought out to sun himself upon the sward, raps out his
mysterious marine oath, which he generally keeps for a crisis; and the
white cat forgets herself so far as to deal him a swingeing box on the
ear as he passes her.

'I met the brougham from the Big House as I came up the lane,' says
Prue, trying to cool herself with the inadequate fan of a small
pocket-handkerchief; 'it was on its way back from the station. How tired
those poor horses must be of the road to the station! It had three
people inside it--Lady Betty, Mr. Harborough, and some third person.'

'Her maid, probably.'

Prue shakes her head.

'No; the maid followed in a fly with the nurses and children. Dear me,
Peggy, what a number of servants they take about with them--maid, one;
valet, two; footman, three; two nurses, five!'

'Nurses, five!' repeats Margaret inattentively, not thinking of what she
is saying, and with her eyes still riveted on the hose; 'surely that is
a very unusual number, isn't it?'

'I could not see the third person distinctly,' continues Prue
narratively; 'but I think it was the man whom Lady Betty brought with
her last year. She seems always to bring him with her.'

'More shame for her!' replies Peggy severely.

'Mr. Harborough was very fond of him, too,' says Prue reflectively. 'He
called him "John."'

'More fool he!' still severelier; then, with a sudden and happy change
of key, 'That is right, Jacob. Give it a good souse; it is covered with
fly.'

'Do not you wonder what we shall do to-night?' cries Prue, her mind
galloping gaily away from the blackness of Lady Betty's deeds to the
splendid whiteness of her own immediate prospect. 'Charades? dancing? I
prophesy dancing.'

    '"For Willy will dance with Jane,"'

bursting out into song again--

    '"And Betty has got her John."'

She breaks off, laughing. Margaret laughs too.

'Betty may have got her John, but I am sure I do not know who Peggy and
Prue will have, unless Freddy can split himself up into several young
gentlemen at once. He can do most things'--with a touch of
bitterness--'possibly he can do that too.'

'Or perhaps we shall go out star-gazing in the walled garden,'
interrupts Prue, hurriedly and redly shying away from the name thus
introduced. 'I always think that the stars look bigger from the walled
garden than anywhere else in the world.'

'Was it there that you and Freddy went to look for Cassiopeia's Chair?'
inquires Peggy drily; 'and were more than an hour and a half before you
could find her?'

'It is so odd that I had never noticed her before,' cries Prue hastily.
'She is such a queer shape, more like a long straggling W than a chair.'

'And, after all,' continues Margaret slowly, with an uneasy smile, and
not paying any heed to her sister's interpolation, 'she turned out to be
in the kiosk.'

Prue is silent. The little hairy dog has brought her ruined garland back
to her feet; and, holding it between his fore-paws, is painstakingly
biting off each leaf and tendril, and strewing them over the
close-shaven sward. The parrot is going to sleep, standing on one leg,
and making a clacking noise with his beak; not a posture that one would
have thought _a priori_ conducive to slumber.

'It was not a place in which one would have expected to find a large
constellation, was it?' asks Peggy, still with that same rather rueful
smile, and stroking her sister's childish head as she speaks--'the
darkest corner of a kiosk.'

But at that Prue leaps to her feet; and having, in the twinkling of an
eye, twitched the hose out of Jacob's hand, she points it at her sister.

'Mention the word kiosk once more,' cries she desperately, and winking
away a couple of tears, 'and you will not have a dry stitch upon you.'




CHAPTER II

    'Ave Maria! 'Tis the hour of prayer!
     Ave Maria! 'Tis the hour of love!'


Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of dinner, too; and towards that dinner, about
to be spread at the Big House, the inmates of the little one are
hastening on foot through the park. Brougham have they none; goloshes
and a lanthorn their only substitute. The apricot sunset and the harvest
moon will be their two lanthorns to-night; but upon the goloshes Peggy
has, in the case of her sister, sternly insisted. Hastening through the
park--alternately hastening, that is to say--and loitering, as Prue's
fear of being too late, and Peggy's better-grounded apprehension of
being too early, get the upper hand.

'How calm you are!' cries the young girl feverishly, as Margaret stops
for a moment to

    'Suck the liquid air'

of the ripe harvest evening, and admire the velvet-coated stags
springing through the bracken. 'How _can_ you be so calm? Were you calm
at your first dinner-party?'

'I cannot recollect,' replies Peggy, honestly trying to recall the now
five-years-old dead banquet referred to. 'I can only remember that I
felt swelled.'

'Do not you think that we might go on now?' asks Prue, anxiously kicking
one golosh against the other. 'We cannot be much too soon; our clocks
are always slow. It would be awkward, would not it, if we sailed in
last of all?'

Though inwardly convinced that there is very little fear of this
catastrophe, Peggy good-humouredly complies; and still more
good-humouredly refrains from any 'told-you-so' observation upon their
finding themselves sole occupants of the flamboyant Louis Quatorze
chairs and Gobelin sofas in the large drawing-room, where the housemaids
have evidently only just ceased patting cushions and replacing
chair-backs.

'Never mind!' says Prue joyfully; 'we shall have all the more of it, and
we shall see everybody come in. I shall love to see everybody come in.
Who will be first? Guess! Not Lady Betty! she will be last. I remember
your saying last year that she was always late, and that she never
apologised.'

'That was very ill bred of her,' replies Margaret austerely.

'And that one night Mr. Harborough scolded her, and you saw her making a
face at him behind his back. Oh! how I wish'--breaking out into
delighted laughter--'that she would make a face at him to-night, and
that he could catch her doing it!'

Her laughter is checked by the thrilling sound of the folding-doors
being rolled back to admit some new arrivals. It is nobody very
exciting, however; only Mr. Evans, the clergyman of the parish, whom
they see every day, and that household angel of his, upon whose
testimony lies the weight of Lady Betty Harborough's conversational
laxities.

A stranger would be thunderstruck to hear that Mrs. Evans is in her
wedding-dress, as the sable rook is less black from head to heel than
she; but to those who know and love her, it is _le secret de
Polichinelle_ that her gown--through having since taken an insignificant
trip or two to the dye-pot, and been eked out with a selection of
funeral scarves and hat-bands--is verily and indeed the one in which
she stood in virgin modesty beside Mr. Evans at the altar, fifteen
rolling years ago. During a transition stage of red, it has visited the
Infirmary Ball for five years; it had an unpopular interval of
snuffy-brown, during which it did nothing remarkable; and in its present
inky phase it has mourned for several dead Evanses, and for every
crowned head in Europe.

'I am so glad we are not last,' says Mrs. Evans, relaxing her entrance
smile, and sinking into an easy conversational manner, as she sees that
she has only her two young parishioners to accost; 'not that there is
ever much fear of that in this house, but Mr. Evans could not get the
horse along. Have you any idea'--looking curiously round--'whom we are
to meet? Lady Roupell's note merely said, "Dear Mrs. Evans," or "My dear
Mrs. Evans"--I forget which--"will you and Mr. Evans come and help us to
eat a haunch of venison?" She knows that Mr. Evans would go any distance
for a haunch of venison.'

To this somewhat extravagant statement of his appreciation of the
pleasures of the table the pastor is heard to make a captious demurrer;
but his wife goes on without heeding him.

'Of course that gave one no clue. I think people ought to give one some
clue that one may know what to put on. However, I thought I could not go
far wrong in black; never too smart, and always smart enough, you know.'

Peggy assents, and, as she does so, a trivial unbelieving wonder crosses
her mind as to what the alternative 'toilette,' which Mrs. Evans
implies, but upon which the eye of man has never looked, may be.

'And you are no wiser than we?' pursues the vicar's wife
interrogatively. 'I wonder at that, living so near as you do. Have not
you heard of anybody at all?' with a rather discouraged intonation.

'I am not sure--I think--the Harboroughs----'

'The Harboroughs?' cries the other eagerly. 'Mr. and Lady Betty? Her
father died last winter; he was the second duke; succeeded by his eldest
son, her brother. The Harboroughs!--and Mr. Talbot, of course?' with a
knowing look.

'I do not know,' replies Margaret cautiously; 'perhaps.'

'I am afraid it is more than perhaps,' rejoins Mrs. Evans significantly.
'I am afraid it is----'

But her sentence dies unfinished, killed by the frou-frou of silk that
announces the approach of a smart woman, and of the white-waistcoated
gentleman who has bought the privilege of paying for the silk. Then
follows an unencumbered man, whose speech bewrayeth him to be a
diplomate, and who has a great deal to say to the smart woman.

After five minutes more frou-frou is audible, heralding the approach of
a second smart woman--Lady Betty herself this time--with her lawful
Harborough stepping somewhat insignificantly behind her.

Lady Betty is so exceedingly glad to see the two girls that Peggy asks
herself whether her memory has played her false as to the amount of
intimacy that existed between them last year. She has not overheard the
aside that passed between her ladyship and her husband as she sailed up
the long room:

'Who are they? Have we ever met them here before? Are they all one lot?'

Nor, indeed, would it ever have entered into the guileless Peggy's mind
as possible that a woman who took her by both hands, and smiled into
both eyes, could have clean forgotten, not only her name, but her very
existence.

Once more the folding-doors roll wide, to admit this time, at last, the
hostess, Lady Roupell, and her nephew, Freddy Ducane, who--both
chronically late for everything--arrive simultaneously; the one still
fastening his sleeve-link, and the other hastily clasping her bracelets.

'I beg you all a thousand pardons, good people,' cries the old lady,
going round and dealing out hearty handshakes to her injured guests. 'I
am sure you must all have been blessing me; but if you had seen me five
minutes ago, you would wonder that I am here now--ha! ha! Well, at all
events we are all assembled at last, are not we? No! Surely we are short
of somebody; who is it? John Talbot, of course! Where is John Talbot?'
looking round, first at the general company, who are quite unable to
answer her; and turning, secondly, as if involuntarily, towards Lady
Betty. 'Where is John Talbot?'

But at this instant, in time to save Lady Betty's blushes, which indeed
are in no great hurry to show themselves, John Talbot appears to answer
for himself--John Talbot, the third occupant of the brougham, the 'man
whom Lady Betty always takes about with her.'

His entry is not quite what is expected, as he enters by no means alone.
Clasped in his embrace, with her fat arms fastened round his neck, and
her face buried--a good deal to its detriment--in his collar, is a young
person in her nightgown; while running by his side is a little barefoot
gentleman, with a long dressing-gown trailing behind him.

'We hope that you will forgive us,' says the young man, advancing
towards his hostess; 'but we have come to say good-night. I suggested
that our costume was not quite what is usual, but I was overruled.'

As he speaks his fair burden makes it clear by a wriggling movement that
she wishes to be set down; and, being obliged in this particular,
instantly makes for her mother, and, climbing up into Lady Betty's
splendid lap, begins to whisper in her ear. The boy stands shamefaced,
clutching his protector's hand, and evidently painfully conscious that
no other gentleman but himself in the room is in a dressing-gown.

'Do you know what she is asking me?' cries Lady Betty, bursting into a
fit of laughter. 'Freddy, I must congratulate you upon a new bonne
fortune. She is asking whether she may kiss Freddy Ducane! There, be off
with you! Since'--with a look of casual careless coquetry at
Talbot--'you have introduced my family, perhaps you will be good enough
to remove them.'

Mr. Talbot complies; and, having recaptured Miss Harborough--a feat of
some difficulty, as, unlike her brother, she enjoys her _deshabille_,
and announces a loud intention of kissing everybody--departs in the same
order in which he arrived, and the pretty little couple are seen no
more.




CHAPTER III


It is obvious that, whatever else he may be, John Talbot is, with the
exception of Mr. Evans, the man of smallest rank in the room, since to
him is assigned the honour of leading Peggy into the dining-room. She
had not at all anticipated it; but had somehow expected fully to see
him, in defiance of precedence, bearing off his Betty. Nor is she by any
means more pleased at, than prepared for, the provision made for her
entertainment. John Talbot, the man whose name she has never heard
except in connection with that of another man's wife! John Talbot, 'the
man whom Lady Betty always takes about with her!' In Heaven's name, why
does not she take him about with her now, and not devolve the onus of
his entertainment upon other innocent and unwilling persons?

With thoughts such as these, that augur but ill for the amusingness of
his dinner, running through her mind, Margaret lays her hand as lightly
as it is possible to do, without absolutely not touching it, upon the
coat-sleeve presented to her, and marches silently by its side into the
dining-room, inwardly resolving to be as laconic, as forbidding, and as
unlike Lady Betty to its owner as politeness towards her hostess will
allow, and to devote as nearly as possible the whole of her conversation
to her neighbour on the other side. Nor does her resolution flinch, even
when that other neighbour reveals himself as Mr. Evans. It is certain
that no duty compels her to take the initiative. Until John Talbot
begins, she may preserve that silence which she would like to maintain
intact, until she rises from the feast to which she has but just sat
down. Doubtlessly he is of the same mind as she; and, maddened by
separation from his idol, irritated against her, who, for even an hour,
has taken that idol's place, he will ask nothing better than to sit mute
in resentful pining for her, from whom Lady Roupell has so inhumanly
parted him. As to his intentions to be mute, she is soon undeceived; for
she has not yet finished unbuttoning her gloves when she finds herself
addressed by him.

'I think I had the pleasure of meeting you here last year?'

Nothing can be more banal than the observation; more serenely civil,
less maddened than the tone in which it is conveyed. He is not going to
leave her in peace then? She is so surprised and annoyed at this
discovery that for a moment she forgets to answer him. It is not until
reminded of her omission by an expectant look on his face that she
recollects to drop a curt 'Yes.'

'I came'--thinking from her manner that the incident has escaped her
memory, and that he will recall it by becoming more circumstantial--'I
came with the Harboroughs.'

Another 'Yes,' still more curt and bald than the last. H'm! not
flattering for him, certainly; but she has obviously not yet overtaken
the reminiscence.

'It was about this time of year.'

'Yes.'

What is the matter with the girl? there is certainly something very odd
about her. He has noticed her but cursorily so far, but now gives her an
attentively examining look. She appears to be perfectly sane, and not in
the least shy. Is that handsome mouth, fresh and well cut, absolutely
incapable of framing any syllable but 'Yes'? He gives himself some
little trouble so to compose his next question that the answer, 'Yes,'
to it shall be impossible.

'Do you happen to recollect whether it was this month or September? Lady
Betty Harborough and I had an argument about it as we came up from the
station.'

_Lady Betty Harborough!_ With what a brazen front he himself has
introduced her! She, Peggy, would as soon have thought of flying in the
air as of mentioning that name which he has just so matter-of-factly
pronounced.

'I am afraid that I do not remember,' she answers frostily.

He looks at her again, in growing wonder. What _does_ ail her? Is it,
after all, a mysterious form of shyness? He knows under how many odd
disguises that strange malady of civilisation hides itself. Despite his
thirty-two years, is not he shy himself sometimes? Poor girl, he can
feel for her!

'Not only did we meet here,' pursues he, with a pleasant friendly smile,
'but Lady Roupell was good enough to take me down to call upon you at
your own house.'

'Yes?'

Well, it is uphill work! If he has to labour at the oar like this from
now until dessert, there will not be much left of him at the end. Well,
never mind! it is all in the day's work; only he will ask Lady Roupell
quietly not to inflict this impossible dummy upon him again.

'We came down upon you in great force, I remember--it was on a
Sunday--Lady Roupell, Freddy, the Bentincks, the Harboroughs.'

He pauses, discouraged, despite himself. She has been leisurely sipping
her soup, and now lays down her spoon, looking straight before her. He
heaves a loud sigh, but not even that induces her to look round at him.

'Lady Roupell often brings people down on Sunday afternoons,' she says,
in an indifferent voice, which implies that it is a quite impossible
feat for her memory to separate the one insignificant Sunday to which he
alludes from all or any others. In point of fact, she remembers it
perfectly, and the recollection of it adds a double chill to her tone.

On that very Sunday afternoon did not this man and his Lady Betty
flagrantly lose themselves for an hour in an orchard six yards square?
Did not Lady Betty, without leave asked or given, eat all the mulberries
that were ripe on Peggy's one tree? Did not she, in rude horse-play
pelting a foolish guardsman with green apples, break a bell-glass that
sheltered the picotee cuttings cherished of Jacob's and of Peggy's
souls?

Ignorant of the offensive reminiscences he has stirred up, Mr. Talbot
blunders on:

'I remember you had a tame----'

He stops. He cannot for the life of him recollect what the tame animal
was that he was taken to see. He can only recall that it was some beast
not usually kept as a pet, and that it lived in a house in the
stable-yard. Of course if he pauses she will supply the word, and his
lapse of memory need never be perceived.

But he has reckoned without his host. She has indeed turned her face a
little towards him, and says 'Yes?' expectantly.

It is clear that she has not the least intention of helping him; and is
it, or is it not, his fancy that there is a slight ill-natured tremor
about that corner of her mouth which is nearest him?

'A tame--badger,' suggests he desperately.

But the moment that he has uttered the word he knows that it was not a
badger.

'A tame badger!' repeats she slowly, and again gazing straight before
her; 'yes, what a nice pet!'

She is not shy at all, nor even stupid. She is only rude and
malevolent. But he will not give her the satisfaction of letting her see
that he perceives it.

'Perhaps Lady Roupell will have your permission to bring us down to see
you next Sunday, when I may have an opportunity of stroking my old
friend the badger's' (he smiles, as if he had known all along that it
was not a badger) 'head once again.'

'I do not know what Lady Roupell's plans for next Sunday are,' replies
she snubbingly; and so turns, with a decided movement of head and
shoulder, towards her other neighbour, Mr. Evans, who, however, is not
nearly so grateful for her attentions as he should be.

Mr. Evans has the poor and Peggy Lambton always with him, but he has not
a haunch of fat buck-venison more than three times a year. In everyday
life he is more than willing to give his share of the Vicarage dinner to
such among the sick and afflicted of his flock as can be consoled and
supported by underdone shoulders of mutton and batter-puddings; but on
the rare occasions when the opportunity offers of having his palate
titillated by the delicate cates of the higher civilisation, he had very
much rather be left in peace to enjoy them. He has no fault to find in
this respect with Prue Lambton, to whom, as having taken her in to
dinner, he might be supposed to have some conversational obligations.

Why, then, cannot Peggy, to whom he owes nothing, be equally
considerate? Perhaps Peggy's heart speaks for him. At all events, after
one or two vain shots at the harvest-home and the Workhouse tea, she
desists from the futile effort to lead him into chat; but subtly remains
sitting half turned towards him, as if talking to him, so as to baffle
any further ventures--if, indeed, he have the spirit to make such--on
the part of her other neighbour. Her tongue being idle, she allows her
eyes to travel. It is true that the thick forest of oats and poppies
which waves over the board renders the sight of the table's other side
about as difficult as that of the coast of France; but at least she can
see her fat hostess at the head of the table, and her slim host at the
foot. Freddy Ducane is in his glory--something fair and female on either
hand. On his right Lady Betty, who, being a duke's daughter, takes
precedence of the other smart woman, who was only a miss before she
blossomed into a viscountess; on his left, to ensure himself against the
least risk of having any dull or vacuous moments during his dinner, he
has arranged Prue Lambton--'his little friend Prue.' Beyond the mere
fact of proximity--in itself, of course, a splendid boon--she does not,
so far, seem to be much the gainer by her position.

However, he snatches a moment every now and then to explain to
her--Peggy knows it as well as if she heard his words--how entirely a
matter of irksome duty and hospitality are his whispers to Lady Betty,
his tender comments upon her clothes, and long bunglings with the clasp
of her pearls. And, judging by her red-stained cheeks, her empty plate
(which of us in his day has not been too superbly happy to eat?), and
the trembling smiles that rush out to meet his lame explanations, Prue
believes him. Poor little Prue!

Margaret sighs sadly and impatiently, and looks away--looks away to find
John Talbot's eyes fastened upon her with an expression of such innocent
and genuine curiosity that she asks involuntarily:

'Why do you look at me?'

'I beg your pardon a thousand times!' he answers apologetically. 'I was
only wondering, to be quite sincere--by the bye, do you like people to
be quite sincere?'

'That depends,' replies Peggy cautiously.

'Well, then, I must risk it. I was wondering why on earth you had
thought it worth your while to snub me in the way you have been doing.'

She does not answer, but again looks straight before her.

How very offensive in a woman to look straight before her! She ought to
be quite certain of the perfection of her profile before she presents it
so persistently to you.

Shall he tell her so? That would make her look round pretty quickly.

'I was trying to see whether I could not regard it in the light of a
compliment,' continues he audaciously.

'That would not be easy,' replies she drily.

'It was something that you should have thought me worth wasting your
powder and shot upon,' he answers.

Certainly her profile is anything but perfect; her chin projects too
much. In her old age, if she had a hook nose (which she has not), she
would be a mere nut-cracker.

Shall he tell her that? How many disagreeable things he might tell her!
It puts him into quite a good humour with her to think of them.

'Now, about that badger, for instance,' says he.

But at that, against her will, she laughs outright.

'Dear little beast!' she cries maliciously; 'so playful and
affectionate! such a pet!'

She has laughed. That is something gained, at all events. It is not a
nice friendly laugh. On the contrary, it is a very rude, ill-natured
one: she is obviously a rude, ill-natured girl; but it is a laugh.

'You can see for yourself,' pursues he, holding out one of the _menus_
for her inspection, 'that we are only at the first _entree_; we shall
have to sit beside each other for a good hour more. Lady Roupell does
not want to talk to me; and your neighbour--I do not know who he is, and
I will not ask you, because I know you would not answer me civilly--but
whoever he is, he will not talk to you. I saw you try to make him, and
he would not; he snubbed you. I was avenged! I was very glad!'

Peggy would much rather not have laughed; but there is something that
seems to her so ludicrous in the fact of her abortive advances to Mr.
Evans having been overheard and triumphed at, that she cannot help
yielding to a brief and stifled mirth at her own expense. And, after
all, what he says is sense. He is a very bad man, and she dislikes him
extremely; but to let him observe to her that the news from Afghanistan
seems warlike; or to remark in return that she has never seen the
root-crops look better, need not in the least detract from the
thoroughness of her ill opinion of him, and may make the ensuing hour a
shade less tedious to herself than would entire silence. So she turns
her candid eyes, severely, serenely blue, for the first time, full upon
him, and says:

'I think you are right; I think we had better talk.'

But of course, at that sudden permission to talk, every possible topic
of conversation flies out of his head. And yet as she remains, with her
two blue eyes sternly fixed upon him, awaiting the question or questions
that she has given him permission to put, he must say something; so he
asks stupidly:

'Who is your neighbour?'

'Our vicar.'

'What is his name?' (How infinitely little he cares what the vicar's
name is; but it gives him time.)

'E V A N S,' replies she, spelling very distinctly and slowly, afraid
that she may be overheard if she pronounce the whole name.

'Oh, thanks; and the lady opposite in mourning is Mrs. E V A N S?'
(spelling too).

'She is Mrs. Evans; but she is not in mourning; she is in her
wedding-gown!' replies Peggy, breaking into a smile.

She never can help smiling at the thought of Mrs. Evans's wedding-dress,
any more than Charles Lamb's Cheshire cats can help laughing when they
think of Cheshire being a County Palatine. She is smiling broadly now.
Well, if her smile come seldom, there is no doubt that it is a very
agreeable one when it does come. What sort of thing could he say that
would be likely to bring it back?

'I did not know that people were ever married in black.'

She shakes her head oracularly.

'No more they are!'

She is smiling still. (What a delightful wide mouth! and what _dents de
jeune chien_!)

'It is made out of an old Geneva gown of his?' suggests Talbot wildly.

Again she shakes her nut-brown head.

'Wrong.'

'I have it!' he cries eagerly. 'I know more about the subject than you
think; it has been dyed.'

The mirth has retired from her mouth, and now lurks in the tail of her
bright eye.

'You did not find that out for yourself,' she says distrustfully; 'some
one told you.'

'Upon my honour, it is my own unassisted discovery,' replies he
solemnly, and then they both laugh.

Finding herself betrayed into such a harmony of light-hearted merriment
with him, Margaret pulls herself up. After all, she must not forget that
there is a medium between the stiff politeness she had planned and this
hail-fellow-well-met-ness into which she finds herself somehow sliding.
Nor does his next sentence, though innocently enough meant, at all
conduce to make her again relax her austerity.

'I should not allow my wife to dye her wedding-gown black.'

His wife! How dare he allude to such a person? He, with his illegal
Betty ogling and double-entendre-ing and posturing opposite! How dare he
allude to marriage at all? He to whom that sacred tie is a derision! She
has frozen up again.

Without having the faintest suspicion of the cause, he is wonderingly
aware of the result. Is it possible that she can object to his
introducing his hypothetical wife into the consideration? She is more
than welcome to retort upon him with her supposititious husband. He will
give her the chance.

'Would you?'

'Would I what?'

'Dye your wedding-gown black?'

She knows that she would not. She knows that she would lay it up in
lavender, and tenderly show the yellowed skirt and outlandish sleeves to
her grandchildren forty years hence. But in the pleasure of
contradicting him, truth is worsted.

'Yes.'

'You would?' in a tone of surprise.

She must repeat her fib.

'Yes.'

'Well, I should not have thought it.'

He would like her to ask him why he would not have thought it; but she
does not oblige him.

'I think it would show a want of sentiment,' pursues he perseveringly.

'Yes?'

Good heavens! If she has not got back again to her monosyllable!

'Do not you?'

'No.'

'I should think it would bring ill-luck, should not you?'

'No.'

'Should not you, really?'

'I do not think that it is worth arguing about,' replies Peggy, roused
and wearied. 'I may dye mine, and you need not dye yours, and we shall
neither of us be any the worse.'

'And yet----' he begins; but she interrupts him.

'After all,' she says, turning once more upon him those two dreadfully
direct blue eyes--'after all, I am not at all sure that it is not a good
emblem of marriage--the white gown that goes through muddy waters, and
comes out black on the other side.'

There is such a weight of meaning and emphasis in her words that he is
silent, and wishes that she had kept to her monosyllables.




CHAPTER IV

    'Yon meaner beauties of the night,
       That poorly satisfy our eyes,
     More by your number than your light;
       You common people of the skies,
       What are you when the moon shall rise?'


'Oh, Peggy! I have had such a dinner!' cries Prue, in an ecstatic voice,
drawing her sister away into a window as soon as the ladies have reached
the drawing-room.

'Have you indeed?' replies Margaret distrustfully, and wilfully
misunderstanding. 'Had you two helps of venison, like Mr. Evans?'

'Oh! I am not talking of the food!' rejoins the other impatiently. 'I do
not know whether or not I ate anything; I do not think I did. But they
were so amusing, I did not want to talk. He saw that I did not want to
talk, so he let me sit and listen.'

'That was very considerate of him.'

'She was so amusing; she told us such funny stories about Mr.
Harborough--no harm, you know, but rather making game of him. I do not
know what Mrs. Evans meant by saying that she stuck at nothing. She said
one or two things that I did not quite understand; but I am sure there
was no harm in them.'

'Perhaps not.'

'And she was so kind to me,' pursues Prue, with enthusiasm; 'trying to
draw me into the conversation, asking how long I had been out.'

But here the sisters' _tete-a-tete_ is broken in upon by the
high-pitched voice of the subject of their conversation.

'Who would like to come and see my children in bed? Do not all speak at
once. H'm! nobody? This is hardly gratifying to a mother's feelings.
Miss Lambton, I am sure you will come; you look as if you were fond of
children. And you, Miss Prue, I shall insist upon your coming, whether
you like it or not!'

So saying she puts her hand familiarly through the delighted little
girl's arm, and walks off with her, Peggy following grudgingly. She has
not the slightest desire to see the young Harboroughs, asleep or wake;
though she has already had to defend her heart against an inclination to
grow warm towards them, upon their rosy nightgowned entry before dinner.
She has to defend it still more strongly, when, the nursery being
reached, she sees them lying in the all-gentleness of perfect slumber in
their cribs. Even that not innumerous class who dislike the waking
child, the self-assertive, interrogative, climbing, bawling, smashing,
waking child, grow soft-hearted at the sight of the little sleeping
angel. Is this really Lady Betty bending over the little bed? recovering
the outflung chubby arm from fear of cold, straightening the coverlets,
and laying a light hand on the cool forehead? Peggy ought to be pleased
by such a sign of grace; but when we have formed a conception of a
person we are seldom quite pleased by the discovery of a fact that
declines to square with that conception.

'You are very fond of them?' she says in a whisper, that, without her
intending it, is interrogative; and through which pierces perhaps a tone
of more surprise than she is herself aware of.

Lady Betty stares.

'Fond of them! Why, I am a perfect fool about them; at least I am about
him! I do not care so much about her; she is a thorough Harborough! Did
you ever see such a likeness as hers to her father? He' (with a
regretful motion of the head toward the boy's bed) 'is a little like him
too; but he has a strong look of me. When his eyes are open he is the
image of me. I have a good mind to wake him to show you.'

'Oh, do not!' cries Margaret eagerly; 'it would be a sin!'

But the caution is needless. The mother had no real thought of breaking
in upon that lovely slumber.

'Did you ever see such a duck?' says she rapturously, stooping over him;
'and his hand!'--taking the little plump fist softly into her own
palm--'look at his hand! Will not he be a fine strong man? He can pummel
his nurse already, cannot he, Harris? And not a day's illness in all his
little life, bless him!'

Her eyes are almost moist as she speaks. The colour would no doubt come
and go in her cheeks, only that unfortunately it has contracted the
habit of never going, unless washed off by eau-de-Cologne. Against her
will, Peggy feels her ill opinion melting away like mist; but happily,
on her return to the drawing-room, she is able to restore it in its
entirety. For no sooner have the men appeared than Lady Betty
disappears. The exact moment of her flight and its companion Peggy has
been unable to verify; as, at the moment when it must have taken place,
she was buttonholed by Mrs. Evans on the subject of rose-rash, an
unhandsome little disorder at present rioting among the Evans's ranks;
and for which Peggy is supposed to have a specific. But though she did
not actually see the person who shared Lady Betty's evasion, she is as
sure as to who it was as if her very bodily eyes had looked upon
him,--John Talbot, of course. With John Talbot she is now dishonestly
philandering under the honest harvest-moon; to John Talbot she is now
talking criminal nonsense, with those very lips that five minutes ago
were laid upon the sacred velvet cheeks of her little children. With a
curling lip Margaret looks round the room.

Why, Prue is missing too, and Freddy! Prue, the prone to quinsy, to
throats, to delicacy of all kinds, straying over the deep-dewed grass
without cloak or goloshes! For it would be expecting something more than
human of her to suppose that when invited out by her admirer to hear all
that the poets have said of Orion and Arcturus and the sister Pleiads,
she should stop him in the full flow of his inspiration to inquire after
what the Americans prettily call her 'gums.' If she will only have the
sense to keep to the gravel paths! The elder sister has walked to the
window, and now stands straining her eyes down the long alley to see if
she can catch any glimpse of the little figure that, since its wailing
infancy seventeen years ago, has caused her so many anxious hours. Shall
she take upon herself the invidious office of spy, and follow her? or
trust to the child's common sense, and to the possibility of her
occasionally dropping her eyes from the enormous moon, now queening it
in a great field of radiance above her head, to her own thin-shod feet?
She is still hesitating when a voice, coming from behind her, makes her
start.

'What a night!'

She turns to find that the utterer of this original ejaculation is none
other than John Talbot. Is it possible that they have already returned
from their lovers' ramble? But no! there is no sign of Lady Betty. It is
clear that _he_ could not have been the companion of her stroll. For the
second time this evening Margaret has found herself in error.

'_You?_' she says, in a tone of rather vexed surprise.

'Why not?'

'I thought that you were out.'

'_I!_ no!'

A moment's silence. Whom then could she have lured into her toils?
Freddy? But Freddy must be with Prue. Mr. Evans? the diplomate? There is
not much choice.

Her speculations are again broken in upon by the voice:

'Will not you take a turn?'

'I think not; that is to say'--correcting herself--'I shall only go a
few steps, just to find my sister.'

'May I help you to find her?'

'I do not know why I should give you that trouble.'

A moment's silence, spent by both in reflections. This is the outcome of
his.

'I do not think that I have done anything fresh.'

'Anything fresh?'

'Not since we parted; nothing to earn me a new set of snubs.'

She smiles a little. 'You have not had much time.'

'And I will not do anything fresh.' Then aside, 'I am blessed if I know
what I did.'

'That is rather a rash engagement,' smiling again.

It is fortunate that her teeth are so good, for she shows a great many
of them.

'But if I keep it I may come?' pertinaciously.

'I suppose so;' and out they step together.

It cannot be helped, but it is a little perverse of fate that, after
all, it should be she who, in appearance at least, is the one to
philander in the moonlight with this despiser of the marriage law. And
whether or no it is his presence that brings her ill-luck, it is some
time before she succeeds in the object of her search. The grounds are
rather large, with meandering walks and great clumps of shrubs that hide
them from one another.

Each of Prue's favourite resorts has been visited, but without result.
The walled garden, hushed and sleeping; the trellised wall, where
ancient brick has disappeared beneath the thronged faces, diversely
dazzling, of the brown, orange, tawny and sulphur nasturtiums; the
retired seat beneath the tulip-tree. All, all are empty. Nothing remains
but the kiosk, and Peggy feels sure that Prue is not in the kiosk.

Thither, however, they bend their steps; but before they reach it a turn
of the walk reveals to them two seated figures. One is certainly the
Prue whom they seek; Prue sitting upon an uncomfortable garden bench, on
which nobody ever sits--on which she herself has never sat before. But
is it conceivable that, since dinner, Freddy can have doubled in size,
can have lost all the hair off the top of his head, and have exchanged
his cambric shirt-front and his diamond and turquoise studs for a
double-breasted waistcoat buttoned to the chin?

With a feeling akin to stupefaction Peggy realises that it is Mr. Evans,
and not Freddy, who is Prue's companion. As they approach he rises
reluctantly. He had much rather that they had not come. Prue never wants
to talk to him. She lets him sit and silently ruminate and dream beside
her; a cigarette between his lips, and a blessed oblivion of dissenters,
boys' schooling, girls' ugly faces, rickety baby, Christmas bills,
invading his lulled brain. Prue neither rises nor changes her position.
Her arms lie listlessly on her lap, and she is staring up at Cassiopeia,
the one constellation for ever exalted above its fellows by having had
Freddy Ducane for its exhibitor.

'Do you think you are quite wise to sit out here, with nothing over your
shoulders?' asks Margaret, stooping over her sister, and speaking in a
tone of such exceeding gentleness as positively to astound Talbot, who
had not calculated upon the existence of such tones in a voice which has
conscientiously employed only its harsher keys for his benefit.

'I am not cold,' replies Prue dully.

'How long have you been here? Long?'

'I do not know.'

'We were too comfortable to take note of time, were not we, Miss Prue?'
says Mr. Evans, with a sigh for his lost peace. 'A southern moon, is not
it?' to Talbot.

'Quite long enough, I am sure,' rejoined Peggy, putting her hand
persuasively on her sister's shoulder. 'Come with us! come!'

Talbot cannot help hearing that 'Come!' even while exchanging original
remarks upon the stars of the southern hemisphere with the vicar; nor
can he further help speculating as to whether, if that 'Come!' were
addressed to himself, and were inviting him to follow it to Lapland, to
Hong Kong, or to some yet hotter place, he should have the force of mind
to decline. But at all events Prue has.

'I had rather stay here,' replies she, _sotto voce_, with an accent of
miserable irritation. 'Why should I come? Nobody wants me; nobody misses
me! Please leave me alone.'

There is nothing for it but to comply. With a heavier heart than that
with which she reached it, Margaret leaves the bench and its ill-sorted
occupants. She takes little heed as to the direction of her steps until
she finds herself and her companion approaching the kiosk, whence is
plainly audible the sound of voices, which, as they advance nearer to
it, grows hushed. It is too dark to see into the interior, as above the
little gimcrack temple, memorial of the bad taste of fifty years ago,
rises a brotherhood of tall, spruce firs that project their shade over
and before it.

Just in front of it Talbot stops her to point out to her a shooting-star
that is darting its trail of glory through the immensities of space. Has
he not heard those voices--he must have been deaf if he did not--nor
observed that marked succeeding silence? He shows no sign of uneasiness
or curiosity. His eye is resting apparently, with a calmer enjoyment
than she can bring to it, on the gold mist rolling its gauzy-billows in
the hollows of the park.

It is only to those who come to her with a tranquil and disengaged mind
that the great mother gives the real key of her treasure-houses; and
Peggy's mind to-night is too ruffled to give her any claim to the great
endowment.

They are standing silently side by side, when a noise, proceeding from
the inside of the kiosk, makes itself audible--a noise apparently
intended to counterfeit the mewing of a cat, followed by the crowing of
a most improbable cock.

Talbot does not even turn his head.

'We are not at all frightened, and not much amused,' he says, in a clear
matter-of-fact voice.

'You had not an idea that we were here, had you?' cries Lady Betty,
springing out of the temple, followed by Freddy Ducane. 'Did not I mew
well? and did not Freddy crow badly? Freddy, you have no more idea of
crowing than a carp.'

'I can do better than that,' replies Freddy, in self-defence. 'I am not
in voice to-night.'

'But you had not a notion that we were here, had you?' repeats Lady
Betty pertinaciously.

'As we had heard you talking at the top of your voices for half a mile
before we came up to you, we had some slight inkling of it.'

Peggy wonders whether the cold dryness of his tone is as patent to the
person to whom it is addressed as it is to herself. She supposes that it
is, since she instantly takes possession of him; and, under the pretext
of showing him a plant which can scarcely be distinguishable from its
neighbours under the colourless moonlight, walks him off into a dusky
alley.

Margaret remains alone with Freddy.

    '"Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
      Prithee, why so mute?"'

says he familiarly, approaching her.

She looks him fully and gravely in the face. Most people find it
difficult to look at Freddy Ducane without smiling. Peggy feels no such
inclination. Between her and this image of youth and sunshine there
rises another image--a poor little image, to whom this gay weather-cock
gives its weather--a little image that expands or shrinks as this
all-kissing zephyr blows warm or cold upon it.

'Because I have nothing to say, I suppose,' replies she shortly.

'Come with me to the walled garden'--in a wheedling voice--'and show me
the stars.'

'Thank you, I can see them quite well here.'

    '"My pretty Peg, my pretty Peg,
      Ah, never look so shy!"'

cries he, breaking into a laugh, which she does not echo.

'I am not your pretty Peg; and I have told you several times that I will
not be called "Peg."'

'_Peggy_, then. Personally, I prefer _Peg_; but it is a matter of
opinion. Peggy, are you aware that you have been poaching?'

'I do not know what you mean.' But she does.

'Her ladyship did not much like it, I can tell you,' continues he
delightedly. 'She manifested distinct signs of uneasiness. I could not
keep her quiet, though I went through all my little tricks for her. She
_would_ make those ridiculous noises; and she whipped him off pretty
quickly, did not she? Ah, Peggy'--tenderly--'you would have done better
to have kept to me! _I_ would not have left you in the lurch.'

To this she deigns no answer.

'Where is Prue?' asks he, a moment later, with an easy change of topic.
'What have you done with Prue?'

'I have done nothing with her,' rather sadly.

'You have sent her home with her nurse to bed, I suppose?' suggests he
reproachfully. 'I sometimes think that you are a little hard upon Prue.'

_Hard upon Prue!_ She, whose one thought, waking and sleeping, is how
best to put her strong arm round that fragile body and weakling soul, so
as to shield them from the knocks of this rough world! This, too, from
him, who has introduced the one element of suffering it has ever known
into Prue's little life.

'Am I?' she answers quietly; but her cheek burns.

'There is no one that suits me so well as Prue,' says the young man
sentimentally, looking up to the sky.

    '"She's like the keystone of an arch,
        That doth consummate beauty;
      She's like the music of a march,
        That maketh joy of duty!"'

Peggy's eye relents. He may mean it--may be speaking truth--it is not
likely, as he seldom does so; but after all, the greatest liars must,
during their lives, speak more truth than lies. One is prone to believe
what one wishes, and he _may_ mean it.

'There is no one that I am so fond of as I am of Prue,' pursues he, with
a quiver in his voice.

'You have an odd way of showing it sometimes,' says she, in a softened
tone.

'Are you alluding to _that_?' asks he, glancing carelessly over his
shoulder at the kiosk. 'Pooh! I hated it. I shall get milady to pull it
down some day. I was so glad when you and Talbot came up: it was so
dark, and I felt the earwigs dropping on my head.'

'Then why did you go there?' inquires she.

He bursts into a laugh, from which sentiment and quiver are miles away.

'The woman tempted me; at least' (seeing his companion's mouth taking a
contemptuous upward curve at this mode of expression)--'at least, she
seemed to expect it. I always like to do what people seem to expect.'

And Margaret's heart sinks.




CHAPTER V

    'To one that has been long in city pent,
       'Tis very sweet to gaze upon the fair
       And open face of heaven--to breathe a prayer
     Full in the smile of the blue firmament.'


It is the next day. John Talbot has spent a very happy morning. He is a
countryman at heart. Fate has put him into the Foreign Office, and made
him a great man's secretary, and tied him by the leg to London for ten
months out of the twelve; but the country, whose buttercups brightened
his childhood, keeps his heart--the country, with its little larks
upsoaring from its brown furrows; with its green and its russet gowns;
with its good, sweet, innocent noises, and its heavenly smells. He has
been lying on the flat of his back on the sward, with his hands under
his head, staring in luxurious idleness up at the sky, and listening to
the robin's song--in August scarcely anybody but the redbreast
sings--and to the pleasant swish of the wind among the lime-tops. Lying
there alone on the flat of his back--that is to say, at first.
Afterwards he has plenty of company. Not, indeed, that either his host
or his fellow-guests trouble him much. From the lair he has chosen he
has a view of his lady's window. It is true that he looks but seldom
towards it, nor do its carefully closed casements and drawn curtains
hold out much hope of a descent of the sleeping goddess within. Lady
Roupell lets it be understood that she does not wish to be seen or
spoken to till luncheon; and the rest are dispersed, he neither knows
nor cares whither. And yet he has companions. They are in the act of
being escorted out to walk by their nurses when they catch sight of him.
In an instant they bear down upon him as fast as their fat legs will
carry them.

'Just think!' cries Lily, beginning to shout at the top of her voice
long before she reaches him--'just think what Franky has been doing! Is
not he a naughty boy? He took the water-can and emptied it over Nanny's
skirt! She says she will ask mammy to whip him!'

'Which mammy will most certainly decline to do,' says Talbot _sotto
voce_ to himself.

He has raised himself on his elbow, the more safely to receive their
onslaught. He is aware of an idiosyncrasy of Miss Harborough's--that of
narrating hideous crimes as having been committed by her little brother,
which have in reality been executed by herself.

'If it was Franky who upset the water-can, how is it that it is your
frock which is wet?' asks he judicially.

She does not answer, beyond putting her head affectedly on one side, and
rubbing her shoulder against her ear.

'Are you sure that it was not you, and not Franky?'

Instantly, with the greatest ease and affability, she acknowledges that
it was she; and the nurses at that moment coming up, she is about to be
walked off for chastisement, when weakly interceded for by Talbot, who
has the further lunacy to request that both children may be left in his
charge. After that he has a very eventful morning. He is in turn a pony,
a giraffe, a hyaena, a flamingo (unhappily for him the little Harboroughs
have lately visited the Zoological Gardens), a rabbit (about the natural
history and domestic life of which animal he hears some very startling
facts), and the captain of a robber band. Finally, he has to take part
in a terrible game--the one most dreaded by their family of all in the
little Harborough repertoire--Ingestre Hall destroyed by fire, done
with bricks. And the odd thing is that he likes it--likes it better than
Downing Street and the great statesman.

When the luncheon gong sounds he can hardly realise that it is two
o'clock. He is so much dishevelled by his transmigrations--which,
indeed, have been as numerous as Buddha's--that, after having repaired
the injuries to his toilette, he finds that everybody is already in the
dining-room--finds the inevitable chair left vacant for him beside Lady
Betty. He has sat by Lady Betty through so many luncheons and dinners
that it has lost the gloss of novelty, and they speak to each other
scarcely more than a husband and wife would do. It is her voice that he
hears prevailing over those of the rest of the company as he enters the
room, for she has not Cordelia's gift.

'Lambton? Are they any relation to Lord Durham?'

'I do not think so,' replies the hostess carelessly. 'Their father was a
small squire in these parts, who over-farmed himself, and died very much
out at elbows. And their mother--well, their mother was nothing but a
very poor creature' (with a shrug), 'who was always fancying herself
ill, and whom nobody believed until she proved it by dying! Ha! ha! Poor
soul! I do not think that anybody cried much, except Peggy; she cried
her eyes out.'

'Not quite out,' thinks Talbot, remembering the severe blue darts that
shot at him over-night; and to his own soul, at this testimony to her
tender-heartedness, he says, 'Nice Peggy!'

'Which was Peggy?' asks Mr. Harborough, looking up from his cutlet; 'the
big one? Yes? I like Peggy. I do not know when I have seen such a
good-looking girl.'

His wife bursts into a laugh.

'I knew that Ralph would admire her. Did not I tell you so?' turning to
Talbot. 'She is just his style; they cannot be too big for Ralph; he
admires by avoirdupois weight.'

'As to that, my dear,' retorts Mr. Harborough tranquilly, 'we all know
that you are not much in the habit of commending your own sex; but I
think you will find that I am not alone in my opinion.'

There is a moment's silence. Men are cowardly things. Not one of them is
found to take up the cudgels for poor Margaret.

'She would be good-looking perhaps if she were bled,' pursues Lady
Betty; 'she looks so aggressively healthy!'

'You cannot make the same complaint of poor Prue, at any rate,' says
Lady Roupell, in a voice that betrays some slight signs of
dissatisfaction with her guest's observations, for she likes her
Lambtons.

'No; she is a high-coloured little skeleton!' rejoins Betty, looking
with pensive ill-nature at her plate. 'What a pity that they cannot
strike a balance! The one is as much too small as the other is too big;
they are like a shilling and sixpence!'

And having thus peaceably demolished the sisters, whom nobody defends,
she passes smilingly to another subject.

After luncheon Talbot is lounging before the hall door, with a
cigarette, thinking, with a sort of subdued disgust (engendered,
perhaps, by the fragment of conversation but now related) of himself,
his surroundings, and his life in general, when he is joined by his
hostess, dressed for walking--as villainously dressed as only a female
millionnaire dares be: a frieze jacket like a man's, a billycock hat set
on the top of her cap, and a stout stick in her hand. She tells him that
she is going down to the farm to see how the stacks are getting on, and
he strolls along aimlessly beside her. He knows that he ought not--he
knows that his unwritten laws bind him for all the afternoon to the side
of the hammock where Lady Betty is swinging; and yet he goes on
strolling along by the side of an old woman to whom no laws, either
God's straight or man's crooked ones, bind him, simply opening his
nostrils to the pungent perfume of the hot bracken, and his eyes to the
sight of the gentle doves watching him from under Queen Elizabeth's oak.

Arrived at the farm, he is slowly making up his mind to return to his
duty, when his companion addresses him:

'Will you go a message for me?'

'With all the pleasure in life,' replies he, a slight misgiving crossing
his mind as to how he will be received on his return after so prolonged
a truancy.

'It is only just to run over to the Lambtons'.'

'The Lambtons'?'

'Yes--Peggy and Prue.'

'Of course, of course; but--but how am I to find them?'

'I thought you knew the way; I took you there last year. You cannot miss
it; a hundred yards down the road'--(pointing)--'just outside the park;
a little old red house. You cannot miss it.'

She is turning away back to her ricks and her reapers when he recalls
her.

'But what am I to say when I get there?'

'Pooh?' she says, laughing; 'what a head I have! I forgot the message.
Tell Peggy we are all coming down to-morrow afternoon, Sunday, as usual;
and bid her have plenty of muffins for us.'

As he walks along the road he ponders with himself whether, if Margaret
looks at him with the unaccountable austerity of last night, he shall
ever be able to give her that insolent order for unlimited muffins.

Lady Roupell was right. There is no missing the way. He almost wishes
that there was. He has rung the bell--how much too loudly! It seems as
if it would never stop clanging. And yet the odd thing is that he has
produced no result by his violence; nor does the stout Annian door
show any signs of rolling back on its hinges. He stares up at the face
of the house; every window wide open, and above each a little
century-and-a-half-old decoration of Cupids and cornucopias, and
apples and grapes; a broken arch over the relentless door, and on
either hand of it a great bush of traveller's joy, with its pretty
welcoming name; and a Virginia creeper, in its dazzling decay, showing
the stained and faded red brick what red can be. Is that one of the
windows of the drawing-room on the right-hand side--that window into
which he has so much difficulty in hindering himself from
looking--with the green earthenware cruches and the odd-shaped
majolica pot crammed with corn marigolds on the window-ledge? It is
certainly very strange. He rings again, more mildly, but still very
distinctly, without any further result than before. A third time; the
same silence. A ridiculous idea crosses his mind that perhaps Margaret
has seen from an upper window who her visitor is, and has forbidden
any of her household to admit him; and, though he dismisses it as
incredible, he is so disheartened by it, and by his thrice-repeated
failures to attract attention, that he is turning away towards the
entrance-gate, when, at last, something happens. A figure appears,
flying round the corner of the house; a figure so out of breath, so
dishevelled, so incoherent, that it is some seconds before he
recognises in it the younger Miss Lambton--the 'high-coloured little
skeleton,' as his gentle lady had sweetly baptized her. High-coloured
she is now with a vengeance!

'Oh! it is you, is it?' she cries pantingly. He has never been presented
to her, nor have they ever exchanged a sentence; but, in great crises
like the present, the social code goes to the wall. 'Oh, I wonder could
you help us? we are in such trouble!' Her tone is so _navre_ that his
heart stands still. Peggy is dead, of course. 'The fox has got out!'
pursues she, sobbing; 'got out of his house, and we do not know what has
become of him!'

'_The fox!_' repeats he, relieved of his apprehensions, and with a
flash of self-reproach--'of course it was a _fox_! of course it was not
a _badger_!'

Surprise at this observation checks Prue's tears.

'No!' says she; 'who ever thought it was?'

And at that moment another tumultuous figure appears round the corner of
the house. This time it is Margaret; Margaret nearly as breathless, as
scarlet, as tearful as Prue. On catching sight of Talbot she pulls
herself into a walk, and with a laudable, instantaneous struggle to look
cold and neat and repellent, she holds out her hand.

'I hope you have not been waiting long,' she says formally. (The little
unconquerable pants between each word betray her.) 'Did you ring often?
I am afraid that there was nobody in the house; we were all, servants
and all, about the fields and garden. Oh!' (nature and sorrow growing
too strong for her) 'have you heard of our misfortune?'

'That I have,' replies Talbot, throwing as much sympathetic affection as
that organ is capable of into his voice; 'and I am so sorry!'

'He has never been out except upon a chain in all his life, poor little
fellow!' says Peggy, sinking dejectedly upon a large old-fashioned round
stone ball, one of which ornaments each side of the door. 'He will know
no more than a baby how to take care of himself!'

'Have you searched everywhere?'

'Everywhere.'

'The hen-house?'

'Yes.'

'Stables?'

'Yes.'

'Coach-house?'

'Yes.'

'Hayloft?'

'Yes.'

'Boot-hole?'

'Yes.'

'Cellar?' growing wild in his suggestions. 'Once I knew a hard-pressed
fox run right into a cellar.'

'Even there.'

Talbot is at the end of his ingenuity. But at least there is one thing
gained--she has spoken to him as to a fellow-sufferer.

This is no great advance perhaps, since were a new Deluge to cover the
earth, which of us would not cling round the neck of a parricide if he
were on a higher ledge of rock than we?

'If he is once away in the open,' says Margaret desperately, 'he is sure
to get into a trap or be worried by a dog; he has no experience of life.
Oh, poor little man!'

Her eyes brim up, and her voice breaks.

Prue has fallen, limp and whimpering, upon the other stone ball. Talbot
stands between the mourners.

'Come,' says he stoutly, 'let us be doing something. Let us rout out
every possible hole and corner once again; and if he does not turn up, I
will go and tell the game-keepers and the farm-labourers to be on the
look-out for him.'

Something in the manly energy of his tone puts new life into the
dispirited girls, and the search recommences.

The procession is swelled by the three maids, with their aprons over
their heads; by the stable-boy, and by Jacob with a pitchfork. It is led
by Talbot, whose zeal sometimes degenerates into ostentation, as when he
insists on exploring chinks into which the leanest lizard could not
squeeze itself, and on running his stick through little heaps of mown
grass where not a field-mouse could lie perdue.

The party has gradually dispersed in different directions, and Talbot
finds himself alone in the tool-house, which has been already twice
explored. In one corner stands a pile of pots of all sizes, reaching
almost to the roof, and with its monotony enlivened by a miscellaneous
stock of rakes, pea-sticks, and scythes leaning against it. The whole
erection looks too solid to admit of its being a hiding-place for
anything, but it is possible that there may be a hollow behind it.

After prying about for a few moments on his knees, he finds indeed an
aperture, which has been hidden by a pendent bit of bass-matting--an
aperture large enough to admit the passage of a small animal. To this
aperture he applies his eye. What does he see? Two things like green
lamps glaring at him from the darkness. Aha! he is here!




CHAPTER VI


Talbot looks round apprehensively. Heaven send that no one, neither
meddlesome Jacob, nor gaping boy, nor screaming maids, nor--worst of
all--Peggy herself, may come up till he has got at his prey, may come up
to rob him of the glory of safe recovery and restoration. In his haste
he incautiously thrusts in his arm, feels something warm and woolly, but
feels too, at the same instant, a smart stinging sensation as of little
teeth fastening on his finger. He draws his hand away quickly, and
shakes it, for the pain is acute.

'You are there, my young friend, that is very clear.'

But he cannot be stopped by such a trifle! He hastily binds up his wound
with his pocket-handkerchief, and begins quickly to enlarge the opening.
As it grows, he has to fill it with his body, to obviate the danger of
the fox making a dash past him. In the course of his labours, several
little pots fall about his ears; a dislodged spade-handle gives him a
brisk blow on the shoulder; old cobwebs get into his mouth. But he is
rewarded at last. Through the breach he has made daylight pours in, and
shows him a little red form crouched up against the wall, and showing
all its dazzling white teeth in a frenzy of fear. Poor little beast!
Probably some indistinct memory of the cruel hounds that tore its mother
limb from limb is giving its intensity of terror to that grin. But if he
is suffering from fear, he is also perhaps at present a little
calculated to inspire it. It just crosses Talbot's mind how exceedingly
unpleasant it will be, if, in these very close quarters, the companion
of his _tete-a-tete_ makes for his nose. There is nothing for it but to
take the initiative. It occurs to him that he may have a pair of
dog-skin gloves in his pocket; and this on examination, proving to be
the case, he puts them on. The right-hand glove will of course not go
over the handkerchief that binds his finger. It--the handkerchief--has
therefore to be removed, and the blood spurts out afresh. What matter?
Thus protected, without further delay he makes a bold grab, past that
grinning, gleaming row of fangs, at the scruff of the fox's neck, and
having got a good grip of it, proceeds to back out of the hole, dragging
his booty after him; the booty snapping, and holding on to the ground
with all his four pads in agonised protestation.

To back out of a hole, with all the blood in your body running to your
head, smothered in cobwebs, with dusty knees and barked knuckles--this
is hardly the way in which a man would wish to present himself to a
woman with whom he is anxious to stand well. And yet it is under these
conditions that Peggy, at whose feet he finds himself on having
completed his retrograde movement, first sees anything in him to admire.

'So you have found him?' cries she, dropping on her knees, and turning a
radiant face towards the procession on all-fours which has now quite
emerged into the daylight; 'behind the pots? and we thought that we had
searched everywhere so carefully. How clever of you!--but' (her tone
changing) 'you have hurt him!' her glance falling on a few drops of
Talbot's blood which, stealing from under the glove, have dropped on the
fox's fur.

'I do not think so,' replies the young man drily; but he does not more
directly claim his own property, nor protest against the--as it
happens--rather ingenious injustice of this accusation.

'Then he has hurt you!' says she, drawing this obvious inference; and
her blue eye darts like lightning at his hand. 'He has bitten you! oh,
how shocking of him! Not badly?'

'He mistook me for a hound, I suppose,' replies John, smiling.

'He was determined that you should not forget a second time that he was
a fox,' says she, breaking into a charming mischievous laugh, lapsing,
however, at once again into grave solicitude; 'but it is not a bad bite,
is it? Let me look! Here, Prue! take this little villain home, and shut
him up, and let us hear no more about him!'

Prue complies, and the two young people remain in the tool-house alone.

'Let me look,' says she, beginning very delicately to pull off the
glove, so as not to hurt him. 'How did he manage to get at you through
this thick glove?'

'I did not put it on till afterwards,' replies Talbot. 'Of whom does
that trait remind you? If it is Simple Simon, do not mind saying so!'

They both laugh.

'But it is a dreadful bite!' says she, holding the wounded finger with
two or three of her slight yet strong ones--fingers a little embrowned
by much practical gardening, and down which he now feels little shivers
of compunction and concern running. 'Almost to the bone! oh, poor
finger! I feel so guilty. Come with me into the house, and let me tie it
up for you.'

He is in no great hurry to have it tied up. He likes the dusty
tool-house, and is not at all alarmed at the sight of his own gore; but,
consoling himself with the reflection that Prue will probably pass some
time in weeping over and fondling their amiable pet, and that he has a
good chance of, at all events, some further _tete-a-tete_ over the rag
and oil-silk, he follows her docilely, and presently finds himself
inside the little room into which he had had so much ado to hinder
himself from peering during his long kicking his heels at the hall door.

It proves to be not a drawing-room after all--to have more of the
character and informality of a little sitting-hall; a room where dogs
may jump on the chairs with as valid a right as Christians; a room with
an oak settle by the chimney-corner, and a great cage full of twittering
finches in a sunny window, and into which half the flowers of the field
seem to have walked, and colonised its homely vases; a room with nothing
worth twopence-halfpenny in it, and that yet is sweet and lovable.

He has not many minutes in which to make his explorations, for she is
promptly back with her appliances, and silently binding round his finger
her bit of linen that smells of lavender.

As she stoops over his hand he can look down on the top of her head, and
admire her parting--a thing which not many ladies possess nowadays. Hers
is as straight as a die; and on each side of that narrow white road
rises the thick fine hair, bright and elastic.

It is many years since Betty has owned a parting. On the other hand, she
has two very nice toupets--a morning and an evening one. Talbot has once
or twice seen one of these toupets off duty, and has regretted his
knowledge that it came off and on. Well, there is nothing about Peggy
that comes off and on.

How quickly and daintily she has dressed his wound, and--oh! if here is
not Prue already back again!

'Have you shut him safely in?' looking up from her nearly finished task.

'Yes.'

'And given him his dinner?'

'Yes; but he will not eat it. I think he is seriously vexed; he tried to
bite me, too!'

Talbot laughs.

'What could have made you choose such a pet?'

'We did not exactly choose him,' replies Margaret gravely; 'he was sent
to us; all the rest of the litter were killed. He was the only one the
huntsman could save. He brought him to show us. He was a mere ball of
fluff then. One could not turn away a poor little orphan ball of fluff
from one's door, could one?'

'He was a very tiresome orphan then, as he always has been since,' says
Prue drily. 'No one but Peggy would have been bothered with him; he was
far more trouble than a baby. She had him,'--turning towards Talbot--'to
sleep in her room for a whole fortnight, and got up every two hours all
through the night to feed him.'

Margaret reddens.

'He would have died else!'

'But no other person on earth would have had the patience, would they?'
cries Prue, warming with her theme.

'Prue!' says Peggy severely, 'is my trumpeter dead, and are you applying
for the situation?'

At this moment the door opens, and one of the three neat maids whom John
has already seen careering about the pleasure-grounds in pursuit of the
fox, enters with a tea-tray.

The sight of a covered dish of hot cakes recalls to Talbot the original
object of his visit.

'Oh, by the bye, I was forgetting! I have a message for you from Lady
Roupell.'

'Have you?'

She is standing, straight and lithe as a young poplar, by the tea-table,
brandishing a brown teapot in her hand.

'Yes. She bid me tell you that they are all coming down to see you
to-morrow afternoon.'

Is it his imagination that a sudden slight stiffening comes over her as
he speaks--a stiffening that seems to extend even to the friendly
teapot?

'And also,' continues he, not much liking his errand, and hastening to
get it over, 'she desired me to say that, as she is particularly fond of
muffins, and as yours are an exceptionally good----'

'Are you sure that she said all that?' interrupts Prue, with a sceptical
gaiety. 'She is not generally so polite. She generally says only,
"Girls, I'm coming; have lots of muffins!"'

Talbot laughs, convicted.

'Perhaps that was nearer the mark.'

'I am so glad that they are all coming,' pursues Prue, with excitement.
'Will Lady Betty come? Oh, I hope so! How beautiful she is! What eyes!
What a colour!'

Talbot looks sheepish. The alarmingly increased volume and splendour of
his Betty's carnations of late have been the cause of several sharp
altercations between him and her. And yet he cannot doubt that the child
says it in all good faith. It is not at the corners of _her_ mouth that
that tiny malicious smile is lurking. To him how much pleasanter a topic
was the fox! He relishes the change in the conversation so little that
he scalds his throat in his haste to drink his tea and be gone.

As he walks home across the park he entertains himself with the
reflection how he shall account to Betty for his finger.




CHAPTER VII


Next day is

    'The day that comes between
     A Saturday and Monday,'

as the pretty old song obliquely puts it. Such of the parish as are not
Dissenters, drunkards, or the mothers of young babies (it does not leave
a very large margin), have been to morning church. The Vicarage, the
Manor, and the Red House have all been represented. The Vicarage sits
immediately below the pulpit, so that the preacher's eloquence may soar
on stronger pinions, upborne by the sight of the nine ugly faces to whom
he has given the light of day. The Manor, with its maids, footmen, and
stables, spreads half over the aisle; and in one of its pews the Red
House, pewless itself, is allowed to take its two seats.

On this particular morning Peggy's devotions are a good deal distempered
by the fact of her having Miss Harborough for a neighbour--Miss
Harborough without her nurse; Miss Harborough wriggling a good deal,
bringing out of her pocket things new and old; and finally (the devil
having entered into her), when the hymn begins, striking up in rivalry,
'Over the Garden Wall.' As, however, no one perceives this piece of
iniquity except Peggy, who feigns not to hear it, she desists, and
adopts instead the less reprehensible but still somewhat embarrassing
course of closely copying Peggy's every smallest gesture--unbuttoning
her glove, turning a page of her prayer-book, whipping out her
pocket-handkerchief at the very same instant as her unwitting model. It
is even a relief when this flattering if servile imitation gives way to
loud stage-whispers, such as, 'Franky has got his book upside down;'
'Don't you wish you were as tall as John Talbot?' 'Evans is all in
white;' 'Did you hear me say the Lord's Prayer?' etc. etc.

It is afternoon now. You need not be either a Dissenter, a drunkard, or
a mother, not to go to church in the afternoon. Nobody goes--nobody,
that is, except Mr. Evans and the children whom he catechises, asking
them questions which they never answer, and which he would be very much
embarrassed if they did. Luncheon is over.

'Let us give them all the slip,' says Lady Betty. 'I know what milady's
Sunday walks are--she does not spare one a turnip or a pigsty; and as to
going to tea with the Lambtons, I say, like the man in the Bible, "I
prithee have me excused."'

Talbot, to whom this is addressed, follows her in silence, to where,
beneath a great lime-tree only just out of flower, hangs the hammock,
spread the wolf-skins, stand the wicker-chairs and tables, the iced
drinks, and the Sunday papers.

'Now we'll be happy!' says Betty, sitting down sideways on the hammock,
and adroitly whisking her legs in after her. 'As soon as milady's back
is turned I will have a cigarette, and you shall talk me to sleep. By
the bye,' with a slight tinge of umbrage in her tone, 'your conversation
of late has rather tended to produce that effect.'

'And what better effect could it produce?' asks John ironically. 'I
sometimes wish that I could get some one to talk me to sleep for good
and all!'

'How tiresome!' cries his fair one, not paying much heed to this
lugubrious aspiration, and feeling in her pocket. 'I have left my
cigarette-case in the house; go, like a good fellow, and get it for me.
Ask Julie for it.'

He goes with the full docility of a pack-horse or a performing poodle,
and on his way indoors meets his young host, sent by his aunt in search
of the truants, and to whom he imparts Betty's change of plans.

'So you are not coming!' says Freddy, in a broken-hearted voice,
throwing himself into a chair. In his soul he is rather glad.

'So I'm not coming!' repeats she, mimicking his tone.

'May not I stay too?' travelling over the sward in his chair nearer the
hammock, and lightly touching the pendent white hand.

'What! and leave your little anatomical specimen lamenting?' cries she
ill-naturedly.

He winces.

'I do not know to whom you are alluding. But may not I stay?' with a
slight tremble in his voice.

'Of course you may,' replies she cheerfully. 'Who hinders you?--stay by
all means!'

He looks confused. He has not the slightest wish to stay. He has only
followed his habitual impulse to say what he imagines to be the
agreeable thing--an impulse that has already led him into many
quagmires, and will lead him into many more.

'I would not be so selfish,' he says with a charming smile of
abnegation; 'I know my place better,' with an expressive glance at the
back of the disappearing John. And, suiting the action to the word, he
disappears too; when she screams after him:

'Give my love to the sack of potatoes and the skeleton!'

By the time that Talbot returns with the cigarette-case the coast is
quite clear, and Betty is at liberty to light her cigarette as soon as
she pleases; a liberty of which she immediately avails herself.

There is a prospect before them of an unbroken _tete-a-tete_ until eight
o'clock. With how deep a joy and elation ought this reflection to fill
him! A year ago it would have done so. To-day with how leaden a foot
does the stable clock pace from quarter to quarter. And yet there is no
lack of talk. He himself, indeed, does not contribute much; but Betty is
in a fine flow. She favours him--not for the first time by many--with
several unamiable traits in Mr. Harborough's character, with the
dreadful things her dearest friend said of her last week--faithfully
reported to her by her second dearest--together with various shady
particulars in the personal history of both friends. She gives him the
latest details of an internecine broil between two ladies, both
candidates for the favour of a great personage. She makes some good
jokes upon the death of a relation, and the approaching collapse of an
intimate acquaintance's reputation; and, in short, dots her _i_'s and
crosses her _t_'s, and calls a spade a spade, and enjoys herself
famously. And _he_? He listens in a sort of wonder.

This, then, is what he has for five years sacrificed his career to.
This, then--to be alone with this--he has manoeuvred for invitations,
planned risky rendezvous, abandoned the hope of home's sanctities. A
heavy leaden sickness seems to steal over him. He is recalled to the
present by a tone of very decided indignation in his lady's voice--his
lady, who, by an easy transition, has slipped from scandal to the hardly
dearer or less dear subject of clothes.

'Shepherd is a beast! Just fancy! he sent me out deer-stalking in a silk
skirt! Why, you are not listening to a word I say!'

It is in vain for him to protest. On cross-examination he shows so
culpable an ignorance as to who Shepherd is--though heaven knows that in
his day he has heard enough of the great woman's tailor--that her
ladyship's anger is heightened instead of appeased.

'You certainly are not amusing to-day,' cries she, flouncing out of the
hammock.

'I never was much of a Jack Pudding,' replies he wearily. 'Was I ever
amusing? I do not recollect it. I think that I left that to you.'

His tone is so dry that she reddens even under her rouge.

'Perhaps it is your finger that pains you too much,' says she, looking
round her armoury for a weapon of offence, and rather cleverly hitting
upon this one. 'We have never got to the bottom of that mysterious wound
yet. I believe it is somehow connected with your Blowsabella. Perhaps
you became too attentive, and she had to set her dog or her cat upon you
in self-defence.'

There is such a horrible caricature of the truth in this supposition,
and her tone is so insulting, that he turns pale, and it is a moment or
two before he can speak; then:

'Do not you think it would be a good thing if you gave up this sort of
joke?' he asks, with a rather dangerous quietness. 'They are not very
ladylike. Had you not better leave them to Julie?'

He has no sooner finished these sentences than Betty bursts into tears.
She had imagined that she was amusing him as much as herself; and,
indeed, he has often before laughed heartily at things not less
ill-natured or more harmless; now the disgust and _ennui_ of his tone
are a disagreeable revelation to her. And besides, as I have before
observed, her paint is of that quality that she may confidently afford
herself a few tears. But even if it were not to be done with safety she
must give way to them now, anger and mortification forcing them from her
eyes.

Now if there is one thing that a waning lover dreads more than a
quarrel, it is the reconciliation that follows it. So, by the time that
Betty has sobbed, and wished herself and him dead, and announced her
intention of telling Mr. Harborough, and going away to-morrow and taking
Freddy Ducane with her, and been apologised to and comforted, her
admirer is reduced to such a pitch of flat lassitude of mind that there
is no bidding of hers which he would not tamely execute. He therefore
acquiesces dumbly when, her smiles being at length restored, she
proposes that they shall go to tea with the Lambtons after all. They can
easily overtake the others, and perhaps it will be more amusing than
sitting here quarrelling--'though there is a certain charm in
quarrelling too!' she adds sentimentally.

As he cannot echo this, he pretends not to hear it. His mind is occupied
by the doubt, which he is unable to resolve, whether her proposal is
dictated by a generous desire to make an _amende_, or by further malice.
She is perfectly capable of either. They have not a very pleasant walk.
Betty's preposterous heels turn under her at every three steps; and
though she always says that she is very fond of the country, she
generally forgets to look at it, while John loves it too heartily and
deeply dear to say anything about it to such ears.

As they near the Red House his heart sinks lower and lower. He has never
had the moral courage to confess his yesterday's visit, and the episode
that marked it. There are ninety-nine chances to one against his
escaping without some inquiry after his finger, some mention of the fox,
some chance allusion which will betray him. And then? what then? Why,
another quarrel, another reconciliation. Pah! No; sooner than face that
he will be telegraphed for back to Downing Street.

They are not kept waiting at the door at all to-day, but are at once
ushered through the house into the garden, where they are told that they
will find Miss Lambton.

As she hears their footsteps she looks up, and sees them
approaching--Betty stepping smartly ahead, and Talbot following
sheepishly behind. He is conscious of there being a sort of false air of
man and wife about them--a happy couple spending their Sunday afternoon
in parading their domestic bliss before their friends. By an intuition
that he would far rather have been without, he sees the same idea
passing through Margaret's mind, and reflected in a sudden cloud, and as
sudden honest redness on her face. Certainly any stranger coming in upon
the scene would be more likely to credit him with the honour of being
Lady Betty's owner than he would the insignificant figure kneeling and
mysteriously bending over something on the top of the stone steps that
lead down a gentle bank from the gravel walk to the sward and the vivid
August borders--a figure whose manoeuvres are interestedly watched by
the rest of the company, and which does not take the trouble to turn its
head an inch at the sound of its wife's voice.

'We have been quarrelling,' cries Betty, with a sprightly candour which
grates horribly upon Talbot, 'and we have come to you to help us to keep
the peace. Oh!'--making a face--'so Ralph is showing you some of his
tricks. I would not look at them if I were you. He will never leave you
any peace if you encourage him! The whole of the first year of our
married life he spent in teaching me to tie knots in my
pocket-handkerchief and swallow spoons; and I have never found that I
have been much the better for either.'

Not a shadow of a smile shows itself upon Margaret's face, but Prue has
smiles enough for the two.

'He is showing us how to mesmerise a hen!' cries she delightedly. 'Oh!
it is _so_ clever! I cannot think how he does it!'

In effect, upon closer examination, Mr. Harborough is seen to be
grappling with a large barn-door fowl, which is squawking a good deal,
and resisting his efforts to hold her nose down upon the stone step;
while Freddy, with a piece of chalk, draws a straight line from her beak
to the end of the step.

'You must none of you speak!' says Mr. Harborough, with authority. 'If
you talk, you will prevent her going off into the mesmeric sleep.'

Dead silence. The protesting squalls have ceased. After a few moments
the hands that hold her are lightly removed. She lies quite still.

'There!' says the operator, in a tone of subdued triumph; 'she will not
awake until the chalk line is rubbed out. Curious, is not it?'

But even as he speaks Dame Partlet, to give him the lie, has struggled
to her legs, and lustily screeching, makes off with her longest stride
and fluttered wings. Instantly the whole company gives chase. John
Talbot, Mr. Harborough, Freddy Ducane, Margaret, Prue, even
Chinese-footed Betty, two collies, and a terrier, who have been standing
officiously round, all off in full cry at once. Across the garden-beds;
through Jacob's best potatoes; over the sunk fence into the open park,
helter-skelter they go--John leading, closely followed by Freddy and Mr.
Harborough, while the three women tear madly behind.

John has got her! Not at all! She has slipped between his fingers, and
he has measured his length on the grass! Then it is Freddy's turn, but
she runs between his legs, and down goes he too. Certainly she is a
gallant hen! John is up again, and now both he and Peggy make an
unsuccessful lunge at her as she passes; and if it had not been for
Mink, who adroitly pinned her by the wing--a feat for which he was
afterwards much blamed, though they profited by his discourtesy--they
would probably still have been tumbling over each other in pursuit of
that speckled hen.

At the moment when Peggy and John had made their joint and futile grab
at the object of their chase, her hand had come with some violence into
contact with his wounded one. Instantly she is off her guard, and down
from her stilts.

'Did I hurt your finger?' very anxiously.

'Not in the least, thanks.'

'Are you quite sure?'

'Quite.'

'But I am afraid that I must have done.'

'I assure you no! How is the fox?'

He adds the last words with a hasty attempt to keep the conversation to
the one topic over which alone they seem fated to be friendly.

'He is very well! better'--with a slight smile--'than he deserves.'

'I should like to see him, to tell him that I bear no malice.'

She looks irresolute for a moment; then, 'Would you? Come this way!'

Before they have made three steps Betty is after them.

'Where are you two making off to in such a hurry?'

'We are going to see the fox,' replies Peggy coldly.

'The fox? What fox?'

'Why, my tame fox,' rejoins Peggy, with a little air of surprise; 'the
one that bit Mr. Talbot when he was here yesterday.'

The murder is out.

'H'm!' says Betty, in a very dry voice; 'so the mystery is solved!'

'What mystery?' asks the other, in a tone of ever colder and growing
astonishment. 'There is no mystery; it is only that my fox escaped from
his house yesterday, and Mr. Talbot was good enough to catch him again
for me; and in so doing was unfortunately bitten. What mystery is there
in that?'

Her displeased blue eyes turn in inquiry from one to the other, but
neither has any answer ready for her. Nor does she again repeat her
question; but Talbot, stealing one guilty look at her, sees that she has
comprehended that he has been afraid to own his visit to her, and that
she despises him heartily for it.




CHAPTER VIII


John Talbot spends a wretched night. He does not owe this to the fact of
Betty's infantine gambols, her ogles and cats'-cradles with Freddy
Ducane through the previous evening; nor yet to any physical ill. It is
one ray of honest contempt from a country-bred girl's heaven-blue eye
that kills his rest. It seems to shine in upon his whole life, as a beam
of clear morning sunshine shines in upon some ugly over-night revel,
bringing out into all their unlovely prominence the wine-stains, and the
guttered candles, and the faded flowers. A desire, whose futility he
recognises, but which is none the less real for the impossibility of its
ever being gratified, to set himself right with this thrice-seen
stranger, takes possession of him; a desire to tell her his story--to
lay before her the reasons why she should be lenient with him. Would she
think them very cogent? His memory, made acuter by the darkness,
journeys back over the past five years, weighing, sifting,
recalling--back to the beginning, that August when his chief's affairs
kept him in London after everybody else had left; when, sick at heart
from a recent grief, he had fallen sick in body too; and when Betty,
also detained in London by some accident--Betty, whom he had hitherto
met only as one meets in the world, hearing of his sad plight, had come
out of pure kind-heartedness--yes, he is quite sure that at first it was
only out of pure kind-heartedness--to sit beside his sofa; Betty, laden
with sweet flowers; Betty, with compassionate eyes and a womanly smile;
Betty, with less paint and a lower voice; with more clothes and fewer
after-dinner stories; and last, fatalest of all, with that likeness,
fancied or real, to the sister he had just lost. He remembers the day on
which he first told her of that resemblance. In the dark night he
recalls again many another little landmark in that first period of his
passion, and grows half tender again as their dead faces rise before
him. But what did that first idyllic stage lead to? To nothing, indeed,
as criminal as the world, as Margaret probably gives them credit for,
but to those unhandsome shifts and expedients which have made of his
life since one long shuffle and evasion. The kotowing to people he
disliked and despised for invitations to meet her; the risky rendezvous;
the mad jealousies; the half-heartedness in his work; the entire
disintegration of all his plans, liable to be upset at a moment's
notice, in order to dovetail in with her convenience; the irrepressible
senseless friendliness, which he dare not refuse, on the part of the
stupid worthy Harborough; the genuine fondness of that Harborough's
little children--he looks back upon them all with nausea. No! there is
nothing to be said for him! She would say that there was nothing to be
said for him! He has slidden down a precipice, it is true, whose first
slope was easy and gentle; but there were many bushes at which he might
have caught in his downward passage to save himself if he had wished;
and he caught at none. And now he is at the bottom! The very passion
which gave some slight tinge of a bastard nobility to his ignoble life
is dead--dead as the roses that flushed its dawn, and he must still be
tied to its lifeless body as fast as--nay, faster than--he was to its
living charms. This is his conclusion; and it is one not much calculated
to lull him into slumber.

To prove the difference between a bad conscience and a good one,
Margaret sleeps calmly; but she wakes in the morning with the sense of
something faintly disagreeable having happened. She shakes it off as she
goes about her garden and her chicken-pens, the more easily as Prue is
in bounding spirits, which is to be accounted for by the fact of Freddy
having invited her to go out riding with him in the afternoon, and
promised to mount her upon one of his own horses--a privilege often
before accorded to her, but which never fails to lift her into Elysium.
She is too excited to settle to anything more solid than jumping over
the garden-beds and the tennis-net, to and fro with Mink. If you are in
paradise, why trouble yourself with earth's sordid tasks? But Margaret,
not being in paradise, is meditatively grubbing on hands and knees in
the rather overgrown border, when a ring at the door-bell brings her
somewhat quickly to her feet. A sudden thought sends the indignant blood
to her cheek. Is it possible that it can be Talbot? After yesterday, is
it conceivable that he can have the presumption again to force himself
upon her? She moves hastily towards the house to forbid his admission,
if it be he. But she is too late. The visitor has been already let in;
and proves to be one to whom her door is never shut--only Freddy Ducane.

'Have you come to fix the time for your ride?' asks she cordially,
beaming upon him. He, at least, has wrenched himself out of Circe's sty.
'Do you want Prue? She is in the garden.'

The young man looks a shade embarrassed.

'Yes,' he says; 'I do. No; I do not--at least, I have something to say
to her, but I think'--insinuatingly--'that I had rather say it to you.
You know, Peggy, how fond I am of saying things to you! There is no one
to whom I can say things as comfortably as I can to you.'

At this preface her heart sinks a little.

'What is it?' she asks curtly.

'Oh, only my luck!' throwing himself into a chair. 'By Jove'--looking
round the room--'how cool you feel! and how good you smell!'

'I do not suppose that you came here to say that,' rejoins she, still
standing over him in expectant anxiety.

His answer is to try and get possession of her hand.

'Peggy,' he says plaintively, 'that is not a nice way to speak to me;
that is not the way I like to be spoken to. The reason why I came
here--it is very inhospitable of you to insist upon my giving a
reason--was to say'--sighing profoundly--'that I fear dear little Prue
and I shall have to give up our ride this afternoon.'

Her foreboding was a true one then!

'Why?'

'Oh, because--because--just my luck!'

'I understand,' replies she caustically. 'You are in the case of the man
who telegraphed to the house where he did not wish to stay, "So sorry.
Cannot come. _No lie ready._"'

Freddy colours.

'Peggy, if I were not so really fond of you,' he says, in an injured
voice, 'I should not allow you to speak to me like that. There are days
when you rasp one like a file. Prue never rasps one.'

'Is that the reason why you think yourself justified in always letting
her go to the wall?' asks Margaret, with a bitterness that seems out of
proportion to the occasion; but in her mind's eye she sees the poor
little figure that has been frolicking among the geraniums with dog and
cat--sees, too, the metamorphosis that will be worked in it.

Freddy rolls his curly head uneasily to and fro on the chair-back.

'You talk as if I were not quite as disappointed as she,' he says, in a
lamentable tone. 'But what is one to do? When one has guests, one must
entertain them. Somebody must entertain _her_.'

'Must entertain whom?'

'Oh, you know as well as I do! You are only asking out of ill-nature.
Betty, of course!'

'Betty, of course!' repeats she after him, with an indefinable accent.

'Well, Peggy, I appeal to you. What could I do, when she asked me
point-blank? You know that I never can refuse to do anything that
anybody asks me point-blank.'

'Then suppose that _I_ ask you point-blank to throw _her_ over?'
suggests Margaret, looking full at him with her straightforward blue
eyes.

'But you would not,' returns he hastily. 'You dear thing, it would not
be the least like you; and it would only make her hate Prue for life.
Ah, you do not know Betty!'

'And, meanwhile, where is her _ame damnee_, pray?' asks Margaret with a
curling nose.

    '"Where is John Talbot? Where is valiant John?"'

Freddy shrugs his shoulders.

'Valiant John is a little slack of late; he wants poking up a bit.
But'--with a coaxing change of tone--'it will be just the same to Prue
to go another day, will not it? and you will tell her, will not you?
I--I really am in a great hurry this morning; and I--I--think I had
rather _you_ told her.'

'I will do nothing of the kind,' replies Peggy severely. 'You may do
your own errands.'

Nor do any of his blandishments, any of his numerous assertions of the
reverential attachment he has always felt for herself, any of his
asseverations of the agonising grief it causes him to give the slightest
pain to Prue, avail to make her budge one inch from her original
resolution. She watches him as, with a somewhat hang-dog air, he walks
across the grass-plot to meet her sister, who comes treading on air to
meet him. And then Margaret looks away. She cannot bear to witness the
extinction of that poor short radiance. She does not again meet young
Ducane; nor does Prue reappear until luncheon-time, when she comes down
from her bedroom with red eyes, but an air of determined cheerfulness.

'It would have been much too hot for riding to-day,' she says, fanning
herself; 'unbearable, indeed! We are going a far longer ride in a day or
two. He says he does not think that they will stay long. He was so
bitterly disappointed. I do not think that I ever saw any one so
disappointed--did you?' casting a wistful glance at her elder.

'He _said_ he was,' replies Peggy sadly.

The incident has made her own heart heavy; and it is with an unelastic
step that she sets off in the afternoon to the Manor, summoned thither
by one of Lady Roupell's almost daily cocked-hat notes, to hold sweet
converse upon the arrangements of an imminent village concert. A casual
sentence to the effect that everybody but the old lady herself will be
out has decided Margaret to obey the summons, which, did it expose her
to a meeting with Lady Betty and John Talbot, she would have certainly
disregarded.

Prue accompanies her to their gate, still with that strained look of
factitious content on her childish face; and, as she parts from her
sister, whispers feverishly:

'Find out how soon they are going!'

Dispirited as she was on leaving her own home, Miss Lambton's
cheerfulness undergoes still further diminution before she reaches her
goal; as, in passing through the park, has not she, in a retired and
bosky dell, caught a glimpse of a white gown, and of a supine male
figure, with a curly head and a poetry book, stretched beside it? She
starts at the sight.

Freddy had certainly implied that he was going out riding with Lady
Betty. On searching her memory, she found that he had not actually said
so; but he had knowingly conveyed that idea to her mind. It is not the
first time by many that Freddy Ducane has succeeded in conveying
impressions that do not absolutely tally with the fact; but each fresh
discovery of his disingenuousness gives her a new shock. Lady Roupell's
boudoir is upstairs; and, following her usual custom, Margaret repairs
thither unannounced. In doing so she passes the day nursery's open door;
and, through it, sees Miss Harborough sitting on the floor, buttoning
her boots. Peggy stops a moment to throw the child a greeting; but is
instantly checked by the nurse.

'Oh, please, ma'am, do not speak to her! I am sure that she does not
deserve it! she has been a real naughty girl!'

On inquiry, it appears that the enemy of man having again entered into
Miss Lily, she has cut the string of her necklace, strewed the beads all
over the floor, and then told a barefaced lie, and entirely denied it.

During this recital of her iniquities she continues her buttoning quite
calmly; and merely says, with a dispassionate tone of indifference and
acquiescence:

'Yes, I am bad.'

It is two hours later--so long does the discussion over the penny
reading last--before Margaret again passes the nursery door. The
interval has been filled by a discussion as to which of the local talent
must be invited to contribute, and which may be, without giving too much
offence, left out; but the larger part has been spent in a confederate
consultation as to how best to prevent Mrs. Evans from singing 'Love,
the Pilgrim.'

The matter is arranged at last; and Peggy puts on her hat and gloves
again to depart. As she repasses the nursery door she finds that an
entire change of decoration has taken place. Instead of the young cynic
defiantly buttoning her boots in the teeth of the law, she sees a little
pious figure in a white nightgown, kneeling by its nurse's side. The
instant, however, that the saintly little form catches sight of her it
is up on its bare legs, and rushing towards her.

'Oh, Miss Lambton, do let me say my prayers to you! it would be so
pleasant!--No, Franky,' with a disposition to hustle her little brother,
who is putting in a like claim; 'you are too little; you can say yours
to Nanny!'

As she speaks she pulls Peggy by the gown into the room; and, placing
her in a chair, kneels down at once--so that there may be no chance of
her escaping--beside her, with hands devoutly folded, but a somewhat
roving eye.

'Which shall I say?' asks she, with a wriggle of the back and an air of
indifference: '"Our Father" or "Gentle Jesus"?'

'Say whichever you please,' replies Margaret gently; 'only attend and
make up your mind which.'

'Oh, then,' with another wriggle, 'I will say "Gentle Jesus."'

After a pause:

'Do you think that there would be any harm in my praying for John
Talbot?'

Margaret gives a little jump. It is, then, an hereditary passion! But
she answers drily:

'Not the least.'

Another pause. The wriggling has ceased.

'Only,' pursues Peggy, quite determined not to supply the form of
petition for Talbot's welfare, 'only you must say it out of your own
head. I am not going to tell you what to say.'

'Oh, then,' with an air of resolution, 'I had better say, "God bless
John Talbot; and I am glad he is here."'

She has pronounced this last somewhat eccentrically-worded supplication
rather loud, and at the end of it her wandering eye takes in an object
which makes her spring from her knees as hastily as she had done before.

'Oh! there is John Talbot!' cries she, tearing out barefoot into the
passage, and flinging herself into his arms.

'I have been praying for you!' cries she, hugging him. 'Miss Lambton
said that I might.'

At this unexpected colouring given to her reluctant permission Peggy
reddens.

'I said that there was no harm in it,' explains Peggy hurriedly; 'there
is no _harm_ in praying for any one.'

'And the more they need it the greater charity it is,' replies he,
looking at her with so sad and deprecating a humility that her anger
against him melts.




CHAPTER IX

     'God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the Purest
     of Humane pleasures. It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirit
     of Man; Without which Buildings and Pallaces are but Grosse
     Handy-works: And man shall ever see that when Ages grow to
     Civility and Elegancie they come to Build Stately, sooner than to
     Garden Finely: as if Gardening were the Greater Perfection.'


I do not know whether Peggy had ever read Bacon, but she certainly
endorsed his opinion.

'The garden is the only really satisfactory thing,' she says to herself,
three days after that on which she had conducted Miss Harborough's
devotions, as she stands beside her carnation-bed, and notes how many
fat buds have, during the night, broken into pale sulphur and striped
and blood-red flowers.

To few of us, I think, has not at one time or other of our lives the
doubt presented itself, whether the people we love are not a source of
more pain than pleasure to us, what with their misfortunes, their
ill-doings, and their deaths. But despite frost, and snail, and fly, and
drought, and flood, the joy in a garden must always enormously exceed
the pain. The frost may shrivel the young leaves, but the first sun-kiss
brings out green successors; the drought may make the tender herbs bow
and droop, but at the next warm rain-patter they look up again. The
frost that nips our human hearts often no after-sunbeam can uncongeal;
and the rain falls too late to revive the flower that the world's cruel
drought has killed.

'Did you find out how soon they are going?' asks Prue breathlessly,
running down the road to meet her sister on her return from the Manor,
in her eagerness to get her tidings.

It has been the one thought that has filled her mind during the three
hours of Margaret's absence. Peggy shakes her head despondently.

'Milady did not know.'

'I suppose that they had gone out riding before you got there.'

This is not a question, so Margaret thinks herself exempted from the
necessity of answering it.

'Had they gone out riding before you got there?' repeats Prue, with
feverish pertinacity.

It _is_ a question now, so she must make some reply. She only shakes her
head.

'Then you saw them set off?'--very eagerly. 'How did she look?
beautiful, I am sure!'

'I did not see them.'

It is a moment before the younger girl takes in what the last sentence
implies; then she says in a changed low key:

'You mean to say that they did not go out riding at all?'

'No,' replies Peggy, softly putting her arm round her sister's
shoulders, as if she would ward off the imminent trouble from her by
that kind and tender gesture; 'they did not go out riding at all; they
sat in the park together instead.'

There is a short silence.

'Then he threw me over for nothing?' says Prue, in a choked whisper.

'Yes,' in a whisper too.

Prue has snatched herself out of Peggy's arms, and drawn up her small
willowy figure.

'He shall not have the chance of playing fast and loose with me again in
a hurry,' she says, her poor face burning.

Alas! he would have the chance next day, if he chose to take it; but he
does not even take the trouble to do that. Two whole days pass, and
nothing is either seen or heard of him. And through these two long days
Prue, with flagging appetite and fled sleep, rejecting occupation,
starting at the sound of the door-bell, watches for him; and Peggy
watches too, and starts, and is miserable for company.

During those weary two days Prue's mood changes a hundred times, varying
from pitiful attempts at a dignified renunciation of him, always ending
in a deluge of tears, to agonised efforts at finding excuses for his
neglect, and irritation at her sister for not being able to say that she
thinks them sufficing ones.

'He is so hospitable,' she says wistfully, as the sun sets upon the
second empty day; 'he has almost exaggerated ideas of what he owes to
his guests. And after all, there is no one else to entertain them.
Milady does not trouble her head about them; he has such good manners;
he is so courteous! Come now, prejudiced as you always are against him,
you yourself have often said, "How courteous he is!"' Then, as Peggy
makes but a faint and dubious sign of acquiescence, she adds irritably:
'Whether you own it or not, you have said so repeatedly; but there is no
use in talking to a person who blows hot and cold, says one thing to-day
and another to-morrow.'

The third morning has come. In the garden, dew-crisped and odorous, but
whose spicy clove-carnation breath brings no solace to her careless
nostril, Prue sits bent and listless, her fragile prettiness dimmed, and
the nosegay of her choicest flowers--usually most grudgingly
plucked--extravagantly gathered by Margaret five minutes ago, in the
hope that their morning beauty may tempt her sick chick to a smile,
lying disregarded on the grass beside her, and sniffed at by Mink, who
makes a face of unaffected disgust at the mignonette.

'He has never in his life been so long without coming to see us when he
was at home,' says Prue dejectedly; 'once he was thirty-six hours, but
that was accounted for afterwards by his having had one of his neuralgic
headaches. Do you think'--with a little access of life and
animation--'that he can be ill?'

'It is possible, of course,' replies Margaret gravely; 'but I do not
think it is probable.'

'If I could only _know_,' says the other wearily; 'if I could be _sure_;
it would be something to be _sure_ of anything! I am so tired of
wondering!'

'I might go up to the Big House to find out for you,' suggests Peggy,
magnanimously swallowing down her own acute distaste to this
proposition, and speaking with a cheerful relish, as if she liked it. 'I
could easily make an excuse to go up to the Big House; shall I go?'

The capricious poppy colour has sprung back into Prue's thin cheek.

'Oh, if you would!'

'Of course I will,' replies Margaret gaily; 'it will be a nice walk for
me; the garden makes me so lazy about walking. What time shall I go?
morning or afternoon?'

'Oh, if you did not mind, morning is the soonest.'

The words are scarcely out of her mouth before ting, tang! sharply
sounds the hall-door bell. It is a bell that is hardly ever pulled in a
forenoon, save by one person--a person who does not confine himself to
the canonical hours of calling.

In a moment there is a light in Prue's dimmed eyes, and Margaret's great
blue ones beam for company.

'I think that I need not go up to the Big House, after all,' she says,
with soft gladness.

'Shall I go away,' asks Prue, in a trembling whisper, 'and not come back
for ten minutes or so? Perhaps he would think better of me if I did not
seem so eager to meet him. Shall I?'

'I think I would not,' answers Peggy gently; 'I would sit quietly here,
just as if nothing had happened. I think it would be more dignified.'

They wait in silence. What a long time Sarah is in putting on a clean
apron and turning down her sleeves! But he is admitted at last, has
passed through the house, and is stepping across the turf towards them.

_He!_ But what he? Alas for Prue! there are more he's than one in the
world--more he's that call at uncanonical hours!

'Oh, Peggy!' she says, with almost a sob, 'it is only John Talbot! It is
not he after all.'

Peggy does not answer. Her feelings, though nearly as poignant as her
sister's, are a good deal more complex. An indignation for which she can
perfectly account, and an agitation for which she can give herself no
reason at all, make her disappointment, though not far from being as
bitter, less simple than Prue's.

She advances to meet her visitor with an air that would make a more
impudent heart than his sink. Over her face is written, though the words
do not actually pass her lips, that least reassuring of salutations, 'To
what are we indebted for the honour of this visit?'

A woman's anger is seldom wholly reasonable, and on this occasion
Margaret's indignation against Talbot is called forth not only by his
being himself, but by his not being Freddy Ducane, which is certainly
more his misfortune than his fault. After all, he is, for a villain, not
possessed of very much effrontery, since the austerity of so young an
eye strikes him dumb.

The only person who shows him any civility is Mink, who, being of a
rather superficial character, is glad of any addition to his social
circle, and does not inquire too nicely into its quality.

It is probable that Talbot, being a man of the world, would have
recovered the use of his tongue in time; but as he is rather slow about
it, Margaret takes the initiative.

'Is it something about the village concert?' she asks.

He looks puzzled.

'The village concert! I am afraid that I have not heard anything about
the village concert.'

'Oh!' returns she, coldly surprised. 'I thought that probably Lady
Roupell had asked you to leave a message with me about it. It is not
that, then?'

She continues to look expectantly at him. Since it is not that, it must
be on some other errand he has come. She clearly thinks it an impossible
impertinence on his part to have called on her at eleven o'clock in the
morning without an excuse.

And yet such is the case. He has come because he has come; he has no
better reason to give, either to her or to himself. A wild idea of
trumping up the expected message, and another of feigning that he has
come to inquire after the fox, cross his mind; but he dismisses both:
the first because he knows he should be found out, and the second
because Miss Lambton might take it as a fresh demand upon her pity for
the wound got in her service.

'I am afraid I have no message,' he says boldly. 'I was passing your
door, and I--I--rang. By the bye' (smiling nervously as the utter
inadequacy of his explanation falls upon his ears), 'what a loud bell
yours is! I was so frightened at the noise I made that I was half
inclined to run away when I had rung it.'

She does not say that she is glad he did not; she does not say anything
civil. She only asks him to sit down, which, when he has shaken hands
with Prue, and wondered inwardly what she can have been doing to make
herself look so odd, he does.

Again silence, and again it is broken by Margaret. After all, she cannot
be conspicuously rude even to him in her own house. It is, indeed, one
of the problems of life, 'When is it permissible to insult one's
neighbour?' Not in one's own house; not in his. There is, then, only the
open street left.

For the sake of saying something, and also because she knows that she is
giving voice to her sister's unspoken wish, Peggy inquires civilly
whether they are all well at the Manor.

'Yes, I think so,' replies Talbot slowly. 'I have not heard any of them
complain of any disease beyond the long disease of life.'

His tone is so little what one would expect from the happy lover of a
fashionable beauty, that Margaret, with that charity that thinketh no
evil, to which we are all so prone, instantly sets it down to
affectation.

'That is a disease that I daresay does not hinder you all from amusing
yourselves,' returns she sarcastically.

'Amusing ourselves? Oh yes, very well. I do not complain.'

There is such an obviously true ring about the depression with which
this announcement of his contentment with his lot is uttered, that even
she can no longer doubt of its reality. So he is not happy with his
Betty after all! And a very good thing, too! Serve him right! But
perhaps the discovery tends to mollify a little the tone of her next
observation.

'Are you thinking how badly we want mowing?' she asks, her eyes
following the direction of his, which are absently bent upon the sward,
to-day not shorn to quite its usual pitch of velvet nicety. 'So we do,
indeed. But Jacob has unluckily fallen ill, just as milady lent me the
machine, and there it and the pony stand idle, and we'--regretfully
eyeing her domain--'are, as you see, like a hay-meadow.'

Talbot does not speak for a moment. A great idea is labouring its way to
birth in his mind--an idea that may give him a better foothold here than
any casually escaped fox or precarious porterage of messages can ever
do.

'Why should not I mow?' asks he at last.

'_You?_'

'Yes, I; and you lead the pony.'

She looks at him, half inclined to be angry.

'Is that a joke?'

'A joke--no! Will you tell me where the pony is? May I harness it?'

Again she looks at him, waveringly this time, and thence to her turf. It
is already an inch and a half too long; by to-morrow morning it will be
three inches, an offence to her neat eye; and when Jacob falls ill he is
apt to take his time about it. She yields to temptation.

'I will call the boy.'

But the boy is out--_marbleing_, vagranting after his kind about the
near village, no doubt.

They have to harness the pony themselves; and by the time that they have
put the bridle over her head, inserted her feet into her mowing shoes,
and led her out of her dark stall into the sunny day, John has almost
recovered the ground he had lost since that fortunate hour when, with
three drops of his blood, he had bought a square inch of oil-silk and a
heavenly smile.

They set off. Loudly whirs the machine. Up flies the grass in a little
green cloud, which the sun instantly turns into deliciously scented
new-mown hay; sedately steps the pony; gravely paces Margaret beside
her; honourably John stoops to his toil behind. It is not a pursuit that
lends itself much to conversation; but at least he has continuously
before his eyes her flat back, her noble shoulders, the milky nape of
her neck; and can conjecture as to the length of her unbound hair by
counting the number of times that the brown plait winds round the back
of her broad head. Every now and then they pause to empty out the grass,
and each time a few words pass between them.

'Is Jacob very ill?'

'I am afraid that he suffers a good deal.'

'Is he likely to die?'

'Heaven forbid!'

'Because if he is, I wish you would think of me.'

He is half afraid when he has said this; it verges, perhaps, too nearly
upon familiarity.

But she is not offended. Her eye, flattered by her shaven lawn, cannot
rest very severely upon him who has shaven it for her. Her spirits have
risen; exhilarated by the wholesome exercise, by the sunshine, by who
knows what. Only when her look falls now and again upon Prue, still
flung listlessly on the garden-seat, with her nosegay--not more flagging
than she--withering on the ground beside her, does a cloud come over it.

'Should I get a good character from your last place?' returns she
playfully.

'From the Foreign Office?'

'Was it the Foreign Office?' with a momentary impulse of curiosity for
which she instantly pulls herself up. 'You know one always expects to
get a character from the last place.'

'I do not know whether it is a good one. It is a nine-years' one.'

Then they set off again. Next time it is about Prue.

'I hope she is not ill?' his eyes following Margaret's to the little
forlorn figure under the Judas-tree.

'No-o.'

'Nor unhappy?'

'We all have our Black Mondays'--evasively--'only some of us have Black
Tuesdays and Black Wednesdays as well--ah!'

What has happened to her? Her gloomy sentence has ended in a suppressed
cry of joy, and her cheeks have changed from pink to damask. He turns to
seek the cause of this metamorphosis.

'Why, there is Ducane!'

In an instant his eyes have pounced back upon her face. It is settling
again into its pretty normal colours, but the joy is still there.

'Yes, there is Freddy!' she acquiesces softly.

A sharp needle of jealousy pricks his heart. This, then, is why she
received him so frigidly. She was expecting the other.

'We stop now, I suppose?' he says abruptly.

'What! tired already, Jacob's would-be successor?' asks she rallyingly.

'Hardly. But I supposed that you would wish to stop.'

'On account of Freddy?'--with a little shrug. 'Pooh! he is a fly on the
wall; and besides, he--he is not coming this way.'

It is true. Straight as a die young Ducane is making for the Judas-tree;
and from under that Judas-tree a little figure, galvanised back into
youth and bloom, rises, walking on air to meet him.

The eyes of John and Margaret meet, and he understands. As he goes home
he feels that he has made a real step in advance this time. He shares a
secret with her. He knows about Prue!




CHAPTER X

    'Our Master hath a garden which fair flowers adorn,
     There will I go and gather, both at eve and morn:
     Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute,
     Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.

    'The lily white that bloometh there is Purity,
     The fragrant violet is surnamed Humility:
     Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute,
     Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.'


'Well,' cries Peggy anxiously, as, the young men having taken leave, she
sees her sister come running and jumping, and humming an air, to meet
her, 'is it all right?'

'Of course it is all right,' replies Prue, vaulting over the tennis-net
to let off a little of her steam. 'If it had not been for your long
face, I should never have doubted it.'

'Yes?'

'It was just as I expected; he was too polite to leave them. He says he
never in his life remembers spending two such tedious days; but he is so
unselfish. He says himself that he knows he is full of faults, but that
he cannot understand any one being selfish, even from the point of view
of their own pleasure. He said it so simply.'

'H'm!'

'I was so sorry for you, Peggy--saddled with that tiresome John Talbot
all morning. Of course I ought to have helped you; but you know I had
not a word to throw to a dog. It was very provoking of him, wasting all
your morning for you.'

'My morning was not wasted,' rejoins Margaret calmly. 'He may be a very
bad man, but he mows well.'

'He might as well have finished it while he was about it,' says Prue,
captiously eyeing the lawn. 'It looks almost worse than it did before,
half mown and half unmown.'

For an instant Margaret hesitates; then, with a slight though
perceptible effort over herself, she says:

'I suppose he thought so; for he has offered to come again to-morrow to
finish it. He said one could not leave it half-shaven, like a poodle.'

She looks at her sister a little doubtfully as she speaks--as one not
quite sure of the soundness of the comparison, and that would be glad to
have it confirmed by another judgment. But Prue's wings have already
carried her up again into her empyrean.

'We are to ride quite late this afternoon. He wants me to see the
reapers reaping by moonlight as we come home. He says he always
associates me with moonlight. I am to ride the bay. He says he quite
looks upon her as mine--that it gives him a sort of turn to see any one
else on her;' and so on, and so on.

Margaret smiles rather sadly; but as it is no use going to meet trouble
half-way, she allows herself to be carried away by Prue's infectious
spirits, on however rickety a foundation those spirits may be built. In
her heart she is scarcely more pleased with her own conduct than with
her sister's.

'One cannot touch pitch without being defiled,' she says to herself
severely.

She says it several times--is, indeed in the act of saying it next
morning, when, on the stroke of eleven, punctual to his minute, the poor
pitch reappears. She sets him at once to his mowing, and allows him very
short intervals for rest and conversation. Since he has come to work,
let him work. No doubt as soon as he discovers that it is honest labour
and not play that is expected of him he will trouble her with no more of
his assiduities. And yet, as he bids her good-bye, leaving behind him a
smooth sweep of short velvet for her to remember him by, he seems to
linger.

'How is Jacob?' he asks.

'No better.'

'The garden looks a little straggly,' suggests he insidiously, knowing
her weak side. 'A great many things want tying up. The beds need edging,
and the carnations ought to be layered.'

'You are very learned,' says she, smiling. 'Does the F.O. teach you
gardening?'

'Well, no; that is not included in the curriculum. That is an extra.'

'Who did teach you, then?' asks she, with an inquisitiveness which, as
soon as the words are out of her mouth, shocks and surprises herself.

Can it be Betty? A Betty that loves her children and digs in her garden!
If it is so, Peggy will have to reconstruct her altogether.

'My sister.'

His sister! What a relief! It would have been so humiliating to have had
her strongest taste degraded by a community with painted, posturing
Betty.

'You have a sister?'

'_Had._ There is a good deal of difference.'

And with that he leaves her abruptly. But he returns next day at the
same hour; and, as there has blown a boisterous wind in the night, which
has prostrated top-heavy plants, torn off leaves, and scattered
flower-petals, she has not the heart to refuse his aid in a general
tidying and sweeping up. Next day he clips the edges of the borders
very nicely with a pair of shears; and the next day they gather lavender
off the same bush. Gathering lavender, particularly off the same bush,
is a good deal more productive of talk than mowing; nor is it possible
to her to keep her new servant within the bounds of a silence to which
she had never attempted to confine her old one.

But, indeed, by the time that they have come to the lavender day the
wish for his silence has ceased. On the second--the general sweeping
day--he had told her about his sister--had told her in short dry
sentences how he had lost her; and she had cried out of sympathy for him
who did not cry, and had said to herself, 'What if it had been my Prue?'
On the third day, though assuredly no word or hint of Betty had passed
his lips, somehow, by woman's instinct, sharpened by observation, she
has sprung to a conclusion, not very erroneous, as to his garish
mock-happiness and his shattered life. On the fourth day she asks
herself why he never comes except in the forenoon; and herself answers
the question, that it is because lazy Betty lies late, and until one
o'clock has no knowledge of his comings or goings. On the fifth day she
resolves that he shall come in the afternoon. She will be visited openly
or not at all. So when, giving his bundle of lavender into her hands, he
says with a valedictory formula, 'The same hour to-morrow?' she answers
quietly:

'I am afraid not; I have an engagement with Mrs. Evans for to-morrow
morning; we must give up the garden to-morrow, unless'--as if with an
afterthought--'unless you could come later--some time in the afternoon?'

His countenance falls. What property has he in his own afternoons? His
weary afternoons of hammock and scandal and cigarettes?

'I am afraid----' he begins; but at once he sees her face hardening. She
knows. She understands. Cost what it may, he will not see again in her
mouth and eyes that contempt whose dawning he had once before detected,
to the embittering of his rest. He will not leave her with those tight
lips and that stern brow. Pay for it as he may, he will do her bidding.

'At what hour, then?' he asks readily. 'Four? five? it is all one to
me.'

She hesitates a moment. She has laid a trap for him, and he has not
fallen into it.

'Shall we say five?'

He sees the surprise in her look, and is rewarded by it. But as he walks
home he ponders. How is he to break to Betty the act of insubordination
of which he has pledged himself to be guilty? For the last week he has
been leading a double life; dissembling his happy mornings from the
monopoliser of his weary afternoons. A sense of shame and revolt comes
over him. He will dissemble no longer. Know as he may that from the
tyranny whose yoke he himself fastened about his neck--from the chain
which he himself has encouraged to eat into his life, only death or
Betty's manumission can--according to honour's distorted code--free him;
yet there is no reason why he should deny himself the solace of such a
friendship as a good woman who divines his miserable story will accord
him: a woman who lies under no delusion as to his being a free agent; in
whose clear eyes--their innocence not being a stupid ignorance--he has
read her acquaintance with his history; and whose strong heart can run
no danger from the company of one whom she despises. Nor as the time
draws near, though the natural man's aversion from vexing anything
weaker than itself, coupled with his knowledge of his lady's unusual
tear-and-invective power, may make him wince at the thought of the
coming contest, does his resolution at all flag as to asserting and
sticking to his last remnant of liberty. He might, as it happens, have
cut the knot by flight, Betty having given him the occasion by
forsaking him for a game of billiards with Freddy; but he is determined
to fight the battle out on the open field. She has rejoined him now, and
the weather being fresher than it was, and Betty the chilliest of
mortals, they are walking briskly up and down the terrace, she wrapped
in a 'fluther' of lace and feathers, and with her children frisking
round her, a good and happy young matron. She is very happy just now,
dear Betty. She has beaten Freddy at billiards, and made him break tryst
with Prue. She is going to make him break another to-morrow. Is it any
wonder that she looks bright and sweet? Little Franky has hold of her
hand; and Lily is backing along the gravel walk before her. Betty
laughs.

'Can you imagine what can be the pleasure of walking backwards with your
tongue out?' asks she of Talbot. 'Franky darling, you are pulling my
hand off; would not you like to run away and play with Lily?'

But the little spoilt fellow only clutches her fingers the tighter.

'No, no; I like to stay with you, mammy!'

'And so you shall,' cries she, hugging him; 'you shall always do
whatever you like. But Lily'--in a colder key--'you may run away; we do
not want you. What are you staring at me so for, child?'

Lily puts her head on one side, and hoisting up her shoulder to meet her
cheek, rubs them gently together, with her favourite gesture.

'I was only thinking, mammy,' replies she pensively, 'what much smaller
ears than yours Miss Lambton has. Do you think that she will grow deaf
sooner than other people because her ears are so small?'

'Nonsense!' rejoins the mother sharply; 'do not get into the habit of
asking stupid questions. Run away!'

'Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,' etc. The way has been paved
for Talbot in a way that he could not have expected. Miss Harborough
walks away slowly, dragging her legs, and with a very deep reluctance.
She scents an interesting conversation in the air.

'It is odd that Lily should have mentioned Miss Lambton,' says Talbot,
taking the plunge; 'for I was just going to mention her myself.'

'It is what you do not often do,' replies Betty drily; '"out of the
abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," cannot be said of you.'

'Her gardener is ill,' continues Talbot, leaving unnoticed this little
fling, and speaking in as matter-of-fact a tone as he can assume; 'and I
promised to help her to water her garden. By the bye'--with an
unnecessary glance at the stable clock--'if you could spare me for half
an hour--I said I would be there by five--I ought to be off.'

There is an ominous silence. Then:

'How do you know that her gardener is ill? Did she think it necessary to
write and communicate that interesting fact to you?'

'No.'

'She has not been here since Monday?'

'I believe not.'

'Then you have been there?'

'Yes.'

'What day?'

He hesitates. Shall he make a clean breast of it? Yes; 'in for a penny,
in for a pound.'

'I have been there five days,' replies he slowly, and looking down.

Another pause. He keeps his eyes resolutely averted from her face, but
he hears an angry catch in her breath.

'In the morning, I suppose, before I was up?'

'Yes.'

She breaks into a rather shrill laugh.

'What an incentive to early rising! The early Blowsabel picks the
worm.'

Her tone is so inexpressibly insulting that he has to bite his lips hard
to keep in the furious retort that rises to them; but he masters
himself. Of what use to bandy words with an angry woman? And, after all,
from her point of view she has some cause of complaint. Franky has
altered his mind, and trotted off after his senior, for whose
tree-climbing, cat-teasing, general mischief-doing powers he entertains
a respect tempered with fear. They are alone.

Betty is walking along with her nose in the air, a smile of satisfied
ire at the happiness of her last shaft giving a malicious upward curve
to her pretty mouth.

'How I should have laughed,' says she presently, 'if any fortune-teller
had told me that it would be my fate to be supplanted by a sa----'

'You are going to say "a sack of potatoes,"' says he, interrupting her.
'Do not. If you must call names, invent a new one!'

'Why give myself that trouble,' asks she insolently, 'when the old one
fits so admirably? _Supplanted by a sack!_' (dwelling with prolonged
relish on the obnoxious noun). 'What a good title for a novel! Ah!
Freddy, my child!' catching sight of the young fellow, who is just
stepping out of the window of the drawing-room. 'I was afraid you had
gone to dry your skeleton's eyes. Come and dry mine instead: I assure
you they need it much more.'

As she speaks she goes hurriedly to meet Ducane, and disappears with him
round a corner of the house.

Talbot is free to pursue his scheme with what heart he may. The last ten
minutes' conversation has taken all the bloom off his project. That the
whole pleasure to himself has been eliminated from it is, however, no
reason why he should break his word to Peggy, and, if he wishes to obey
her with the punctuality that he has always hitherto shown, he must set
off at once. He begins to walk towards a turn-stile that leads into the
park!




CHAPTER XI

    'Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
     No daisy makes comparison
     (Who sees them is undone);
     For streaks of red were mingled there,
     Such as are on a Catherine pear,
     The side that's next the sun.'


He has not gone above a hundred yards when he hears a small thunder of
feet behind him, and turning, finds Miss Harborough flying at the top of
her speed to overtake him.

'Mammy said I might go with you,' cries she breathlessly.

He stops and hesitates. Is it possible that she has sent this innocent
child to be an unconscious spy upon him?

'Mammy said I might go with you,' repeats Lily, seeing his hesitation,
and beginning to drop her long lashes, and rub her cheek with her
shoulder, according to her most approved methods of fascination.

'But I did not say so,' returns he gravely.

'Oh, but you will,' cries she, flinging herself boisterously into his
arms; 'and I--I'll help you over the stiles.'

Who could resist such a bribe as this? Certainly not Talbot. They walk
off amicably hand-in-hand. After all, he ought to be thankful for
anything that distracts him from his own thoughts, which are certainly
neither pleasant nor profitable enough to be worth thinking. To-day he
is sad, not only on his own account, but on Margaret's. Short as has
been the time of his acquaintance with her, he has got into a habit,
which seems long, of being sorry with her sorrows. He knows that to-day
will be a black day for Prue, and that Peggy will be darkened in
company. Is it not better then, seeing that he cannot stir a finger to
lift the weight from the three hearts he would fain lighten, that he
should have his eight-year-old companion's chatter to be distracted by,
that he should be initiated into the hierarchy of her affections, and
learn the order and degree in which her relations and friends are dear
to her? He is surprised and flattered at the extremely high place
assigned to himself immediately after father, and some way above mammy;
but is less exhilarated on finding out that he shares it with the
odd-man, who has made and presented a whistle to her.

'And Franky? where does Franky come?' asks John, really quite interested
in the subject.

'My dear little brother!' exclaims Lily, with an extravagant affection
of sisterly tenderness. 'I am _so_ fond of him! Poor little brother! he
has _no_ toys!'

John smiles rather grimly. He knows that Miss Lily squabbles frightfully
with her little brother in real life; and how entirely mendacious is her
statement as to his destitution of playthings.

'I have given him most of mine,' pursues Lily, casting one eye subtly up
to watch the effect of her words, 'but he has broken them nearly all,
and now we neither of us have any!'

John receives this broad hint in a silence which Miss Lily feels to be
sceptical; but as her attention is at the same moment diverted by the
sight of Miss Lambton's Red House, and of Mink's face looking through
the bars of the gate, on the anxious watch for passing market-carts to
insult, she does not pursue the subject.

Mink takes them for a market-cart at first, and insults them; but
afterwards apologises, and shows them the way to the garden, jumping up
at Lily's nose, with an affectation of far greater pleasure than he can
really feel.

They find his mistress standing alone in the middle of her domain, a
great gutta-percha snake lying on the ground behind her, and the hose
directed at a thirsty verbena-bed.

As they come up with her, the chiming church clock, having finished its
preliminary stave of 'Home, Sweet Home,' strikes five. Whether the
chimes or her own thoughts have deafened her, she does not hear their
approach.

'Is not that punctuality?' asks Talbot, drawing near. 'Which is better,
to have only one very small virtue, and to have it in absolute
perfection, or to have a smattering of several large ones?'

At his voice she starts, and turns, her eye falling upon him, and also,
of course, upon the child. The latter instantly flings herself into her
arms.

'Mammy and John Talbot said I might come!' cries she effusively.

'You did not give John Talbot much choice in the matter,' returns he
drily.

'But mammy told me to come,' urges Lily in eager self-defence; 'she told
me to run fast that I might be sure to overtake you!'

John feels a dull red rising to his brow; but he will not let his eyes
sink: they meet Peggy's full and straight. She shall see that this time,
at all events, he has been neither ashamed nor afraid to proclaim his
visit to her.

Peggy has gently unclasped the child's arms from about her neck.

'What a dear little doggy!' cries Lily, chattering on, and deceived by
Mink's manner, as all strangers are, into the belief that he has
conceived a peculiar fancy for her. 'What is his name?'

'Mink.'

'And what kind of dog is he?'

'That is what no one--not even himself--has ever been able to make out,'
returns Margaret, with a smile. 'Sometimes he thinks that he is a
Yorkshire terrier, and sometimes he does not. I bought him at the Dogs'
Home, because he was the most miserable little dog there, and because I
was quite certain that if I did not, nobody else would. He has grown so
uppish now that sometimes I have to remind him of his origin--have not
I, Minky?'

'Mammy had a Yorkshire terrier once,' says Miss Harborough
thoughtfully--'John Talbot gave it her--but he died. She had him
stuffed: he looks horrid now!'

Talbot writhes. It seems to him as if he had never before tasted the
full degradation of his position. He makes a clumsy plunge at changing
the conversation by inquiring after Prue.

'She is lying down,' replies Peggy, while he sees a furrow come upon her
white forehead. 'The heat tries her; at least'--her eye meeting his with
a sort of appeal--'she is very easily tired; and she has been waiting
all afternoon with her habit on. She was engaged to go out riding at
three, and now it is five; people ought not to make engagements if they
are not prepared to keep them!'

'I am afraid he had forgotten all about it,' answers Talbot sadly.

Margaret's only answer is a dispirited shrug; and Lily having by this
time scampered off to visit the fox; if possible, with safety, pull his
brush; eat anything that is eatable in the kitchen-garden; and make
friendly advances to the stable-boy--Miss Lambton again takes up the
hose.

'This,' says she, looking at it affectionately, 'is the one solid good I
have ever got from the Big House!'

He does not answer. Though he certainly does not class himself under the
head of a solid good, her words give him a vague chill.

'It sounds ungrateful,' pursues Peggy; 'but I often wish we could move
this acre of ground, with everything that is on it, fifty miles farther
away.'

'Do you?'

'Of course,' pursues she gravely, 'we get a great deal more society here
than we should anywhere else; but I often think that that is a doubtful
good. We grow to know people whose acquaintance we should be far better
without.'

He winces. Does he himself come under this category? But she means no
offence.

'You can have no notion how our lives are cut up,' she continues. 'We
live in a whirl of tiny excitements, that would not be excitements to
anybody but us. We never can settle to any serious occupation; the
moment we take up a book there is a note: "Prue, come out riding;"
"Peggy, come and look over the accounts of the Boot and Shoe Club;"
"Peggy and Prue, come and dine to meet the--the----"'

Harboroughs is the name which rises to her lips, and which she
suppresses out of politeness to him.

He knows, too, that the plural pronoun which she has employed throughout
has been used only as a veil for Prue's weakness; that the picture she
has drawn has no likeness to her own steady soul.

'I sometimes think seriously of moving,' she says presently. 'It would
be a wrench'--looking round wistfully. 'The only two big things that
ever happened to me have happened here: Prue was born here, and mother
died here. Yes, it would be a wrench.'

He listens to her in a respectful silence. It would be impertinent in
him to express overt sympathy in her trouble, the trouble she has never
put into words.

'Sometimes I think that we should do better in London,' she goes on,
looking at him almost as if appealing to him for counsel; 'there would
be more to interest and distract us in London.'

'What, and leave the garden?' says he, lifting his eyebrows.

'She does not care really about the garden,' answers Margaret,
forgetting herself, and using the singular pronoun which she might have
employed all along. 'And as for me'--with a little laugh--'I would grow
mignonette in a box; and buy a load of hay, as I heard of one
country-sick lady doing, and make myself a haycock in the back-yard.'

'I cannot fancy you in a town,' says he, almost under his breath.

It is true. It is impossible to him to picture her except with a
background of waving trees, a floor of blossoming flowers, a spicy wind
to toss her hair, and finches to sing to her. His imagination is not
strong enough to transplant her to the narrow bounds of a little South
Kensington home, lost in the grimy monotony of ten thousand others.

'It is very difficult to know what to decide,' she says, almost
plaintively, 'and I have no one to advise me. Though I am not very
young--twenty-two--I have very little experience of life. There must be
a best; but it is hard to find. Do you never feel it so?'

Her large pure eyes are upon him, asking him, as well as her mouth does,
for an answer to this unanswerable question. For a moment he hesitates,
then:

'Do not you know that there are some people who have arranged their
lives so ingeniously that for them there is no best; that the only
choice left them lies between bad and worse?'

'I do not believe it,' answers she solemnly. 'God gives us all a best,
if we will only look for it; and' (in a lighter key) 'never fear but I
shall find mine before I have done!'

After that they finish their watering almost in silence. When he bids
her good-bye, having recaptured his Miss Harborough, who is restored to
him a good deal smirched by a delirious half-hour in the hayloft with a
litter of kittens, Margaret thanks him simply, yet very heartily, for
his services to her.

'Why are you so grateful to-day particularly?' asks he, alarmed. 'You
make me feel as if the band were playing "God Save the Queen," and
everything was at an end.'

'Jacob comes back to his work to-morrow,' answers she, 'and you know,'
with a smile, 'I cannot afford to keep two gardeners.'

'He must be very weak still.'

'Do not be afraid,' laughing again; 'I will not overwork him.'

'Then I am to consider myself dismissed?'

'With thanks--yes.'

'Out of work? Turned into the street?'

'Yes.'

'And without a character?'

'I daresay you will not miss it,' replies she, a little cynically. 'Many
people do without one.'

He winces. She is not half so nice when she is cynical.

'Come along, Lily,' he says, in a vexed voice; 'we are not wanted here
any longer. We are old shoes, sucked lemons, last year's almanacs. Let
us go.'

'My child!' cries Margaret, her eye falling for the first time on a
gigantic rift in the front of Miss Harborough's frock, 'what have you
done to yourself? What will Nanny say to you?'

'I do not care what she says!' replies Lily swaggeringly. 'She is an old
beast! Oh, Miss Lambton,' with a sudden change of key, 'may not I come
again to-morrow? Alfred wants me to come again to-morrow.' (Alfred is
the stable-boy.) 'May not I come with John Talbot again to-morrow?'

'You see that we are both of one mind,' says John, with a melancholy
whine, walking off with his young lady.




CHAPTER XII


The Harboroughs' and Talbot's invitation to the Manor had been for a
fortnight. Of that fortnight fully a week has already elapsed. To the
house which comes next in the Harboroughs' autumn programme John Talbot
has, by some strange oversight, not been asked. For this reason--to mark
her indignation at so flagrant a departure from the code of civilised
manners--Betty shows every symptom of an intention to throw up her
engagement.

But for once Mr. Harborough's love of sport exceeds his pliability. From
a house which possesses some of the best grousing on the Yorkshire
moors, not even the fact that his wife's admirer is not bidden to share
it can keep him; and what is more, as it is an old-fashioned house which
expects to see husband and wife together, he will make Betty go too.

Talbot's engagements are more elastic. By an easy readjustment of them
he might spare another seven days to his present quarters. It is true
that Lady Roupell has not as yet definitely asked him to prolong his
visit, but he knows that she is hardly aware whether he goes or stays;
and as to Freddy, he is always brimming over with an easy hospitality
which costs him nothing, and makes every one say what a good fellow he
is.

A whole week of absolute freedom, afternoons as well as mornings; a
whole week during which he need not pretend to be jealous--pretend to be
fond--pretend to be everything that he once was, and is not, and never
will be again! It is possible, too, that Jacob may have a relapse. In
that case, a whole week of mowing, of clipping edges, of picking
lavender, and gathering groundsel for the cage-birds! He knows that
there must always be eleven bits gathered, because there are eleven
birds, and she cannot bear one to be without. He smiles softly at this
tender-hearted puerility of hers.

And meanwhile, since she has made it clear to him that she does not
desire any more of his immediate company, he keeps himself away for two
whole days. What business has he, who can never claim any rights over
her, to expose her, by his assiduities, to the coarse gossip of a gaping
village?

But though his eye is not enriched by her, her presence and her words
are with him night and day. One of her sentences rings for ever in his
ears--'God gives us all a best, if we will only look for it.' Look for
it as he may, how can he find his best? and finding, how dare he take
hold of and make it his? His best! The best for him--does not it
apparently stare him in the face?

To shake off this chain that was once of flowers, and is now of cold
eating iron, and to walk the world a free man, free for honest work and
honest love. Ay, but to the riveting of that chain there went an oath,
from which the mere fact of his having grown tired of wearing its
fetters does not, in his opinion, release him. He is bound by an
engagement the more perversely sacred, because none can hold him to it.

Only by her with whom it was made can he be emancipated from it; and for
that emancipation how can he ask her? How can he go to her and say, 'I
have grown tired of you; I have grown fond of another woman. Let me go!'

It is only as a free gift from her hand that he can accept his
dismissal; and, of the improbability of her ever making him that gift,
his sinking spirit assures him. It is not only vanity and habit that tie
her to him. Deep in his heart he knows that, cold wife, partial mother,
bad friend as she is, to him she has been, and is, a fond and faithful
lover; that, if he were but to hold up his finger, she would toss to the
winds position, diamonds, toilettes, admirers, everything that for her
life holds of valuable, to face opprobrium and poverty by his side. He
knows that he and Franky are the two things in the world she really
loves, and for whom her foolish heart beats as truly under its worldly
'fluther' of lace and satin as did ever Cornelia's for her Gracchi, or
Lucretia's for her lord.

It is absolutely impossible that he can cut her adrift. Bitterly
unsatisfactory, wrong, senseless, and now oppressive as is the
connection that binds him to her, he must hope for none other, none
better, none dearer, as long as her and his lives last.

Such being the case, is not it the height of unwisdom to himself,
perhaps of injustice to that other woman, that he should seek her
company with the consciousness of a heart he dare not give, and a hand
he dare not offer?

This is the question that dings perpetually in his ears, as he lies down
and as he rises up, as he walks moody and alone in the park, as he
answers Lily's startling questions, and evades her broad hints; or
listens to Betty's anathemas of her man-milliner, or her petulant
lamentations over the expected loss of his society during the ensuing
week.

He has not yet answered it on the third day after his last visit to the
little Red House, when he meets Peggy in the lane, staggering under a
philanthropic load of framed lithographs, which he helps her to carry to
the workhouse, and to hang up on the walls, whose dreary monotony of
whitewash they agreeably and gaudily vary. He has not yet answered it
the next day, when he carries a message to her from Lady Roupell, a
message which must be preposterously long, since it takes two hours and
a half to deliver; he has not yet answered it on the day after, nor on
the day after that again, which is the last of the Harboroughs' visit.

On the afternoon of that day some business has brought Peggy reluctantly
up to the Manor, where she had not appeared for above a week. John and
Lily, as is but civil, escort her home again! It is true that Miss
Harborough has had a near shave, at the moment of setting off, of being
recaptured by her nurse--a danger from which she has been rescued only
by her own presence of mind, a presence of mind made all the acuter by
her excessive desire to flirt with John, and to overhear
what--unintended for Lilyan ears--he has to say to his companion.

'Oh, Miss Lambton!' cries she, pulling down Peggy's face in order to
whisper importantly into her ear; 'do not you think I had better come
with you? There are the stiles! I do not see,' with an affectation of
excessive delicacy, 'how you are to get over the stiles with only John
Talbot!'

Her plea is admitted as sound.

They all three spend a long dawdling afternoon at the Little House. They
take the fox out for a run in the field on his chain; and in his joy he
gallops round and round, tying all their legs together, even throwing
Miss Harborough down--an accident which fills her with delight. He
offers to play with Mink, who growls, and receives his advances with
such hauteur that he has to be reminded of the humility of his own
beginnings, and of the Dogs' Home. The snubbed fox throws himself on the
sward and pants, swishing his brush from side to side like a cross cat.
Then they restore him to his prison, at which he opens his red mouth
wide, making little angry wild noises.

After they have done with the fox, they have still the garden to water;
the kittens in the hayloft--to which they ascend, on the joint
invitation of Alfred and Lily--to see; peas to throw to the pretty prosy
pigeons, long-windedly courting in fans and pouts, and prism-coloured
throats on the dove-cot roof. And when at length her guests take their
tardy leave, Peggy is insensibly lured, step by step, into accompanying
them more than half-way home.

Into what could not such an evening lure one? Through a barley-field
first; all the pale spears slanting westward in the level sun; then a
field of old pasture, knapweeds purpling, little hawkweed clocks telling
the time in fairyland, loitering buttercups. Then a hedgerow with woody
nightshade and long blue vetch; then the green night of a little wood.
Though the sun is nearing his declension, the delicious smell that all
day long he has compelled the grass and the flowers to bring him, in
odorous tribute, still tarries, making the air rich--_acre_, as the
French say; a word for which there is no precise English equivalent. On
the farther side of the tiny forest they part; if so short a severance
can indeed be called to part. Are not they to meet again in an hour or
so, at that dinner-party at the Manor, to which both Peggy and Prue are
bidden? and even if it were not so, have not they to-morrow, and again
to-morrow, and yet to-morrow again, to look forward to? This being so,
why is it that such a curious last-time feeling clings to Talbot as he
crosses the park with his little chattering comrade, making him turn his
head again and again in futile seeking towards the sylvan gate whence
his tall and white-gowned friend has already disappeared?

On entering the house, and going through an upper passage to his room,
he is accosted by Betty's maid, who tells him that her ladyship's
headache is better; that she is on the sofa in Lady Roupell's boudoir,
and that she has expressed a wish to see him as soon as he comes in. He
follows with a guilty conscience and a sinking heart. Has he for one
moment of his long blissful afternoon remembered the headache, to which
alone he owed his freedom; the headache genuine enough--though it took
its birth from mortification and spleen--to keep her stretched in pain
and solitary darkness the livelong day? She is in semi-darkness still,
her windows closed (a headache always makes her chilly); not a glint of
apricot cloud or suave blue sky-field reaching her. A sense of pity,
largely touched with remorse, comes over him, as he takes her hand, and
says softly:

'You are better at last? Come, that is well!'

She leaves her hand, languid and rather feverish, lying in his.

'It is time that I should be better!' she says, with an impatient sigh.
'What a day I have had!--our last day!' There is such genuine grief and
regret in the accent with which she pronounces the three final words
that his remorse deepens; but that increase of self-reproach does not
make it the least more possible to him to echo her lamentation. 'I asked
Julie how often you had been to inquire after me,' continues she,
turning her eyes, innocent to-day of their usual black smouches,
interrogatively upon him; 'she said she could not remember.'

Talbot blesses the wisely ambiguous maid; and, to hide his confusion,
stoops his head over the hand, which he still--since it is evidently
expected of him--holds.

'I wish my inquiries could have made you better,' says he, taking--and
feeling with shame that he is taking--a leaf out of Julie's book. 'I am
afraid that you will not be able to come down to dinner.'

'Oh, but I shall!' returns she sharply. 'Why do you think I shall not?
Is the wish father to the thought?'

He laughs constrainedly, taking refuge in what is often the best
disguise, truth.

'Yes, that is it!'

'Milady would never forgive me,' pursues she, rolling her head
restlessly about upon the cushions, 'if I left her to struggle with the
natives alone; I am sure I have not the heart to struggle with any one!
Oh, how miserable I am! John!'--laying her other hand on his, and
clasping it between both hers--'how _am_ I to get through the next
fortnight?'

Talbot wonders whether the burning blush that he feels searing him all
through his body shows in his face, whether he looks the double-faced
cur that he feels. Probably he does not, or else the faint light helps
him; for she goes on unsuspiciously:

'You have never told me where you have decided to go to-morrow--to the
Mackintoshes or the Delaneys? If you ask my advice,' with a rather
showery smile, 'I should say the Delaneys; for you will be less well
amused there, and have more time to think of me! Remember that you have
not given me your address; give it me now, lest you should forget it!'

The tug of war has come. He would rather have put it off until her
headache was gone--until he could meet her upon more equal terms. What
chance has a man against a woman lying on a sofa with her eyes full of
tears, and a handkerchief wetted with eau-de-Cologne tied round her
aching brows? None. His hesitation is so obvious that she cannot but
notice it.

'Well,' she says, with some sharpness, 'why do not you answer me? Where
is the difficulty?'

He laughs artificially.

'The difficulty,' he says, trying to speak carelessly--'the difficulty
is that there is no difficulty. You have my address already. I am going
to stay here!'

He has deposited his box of dynamite: he has now only to wait for the
explosion. But for twenty or thirty heart-beats she remains entirely
silent, and, at the end of that time, only repeats his own words:

'To--stay--here!'

'Yes.'

Another silence. He begins to wish that the explosion would come. It
would at least be better than this. She has sat up on her sofa, and
pushed back the wet bandage from her damp and straightened hair. She has
neither belladonna nor rouge. He has always strongly deprecated and even
reviled the use of either; and yet he cannot help thinking, though he
hates himself for so thinking, that she looks old and haggard without
them.

'And this,' says she at last, speaking between her teeth in a low voice,
'is your delicate way of intimating to me that I am superseded!'

He has risen to his feet. They stand staring each at each in the
twilight room, the one not whiter than the other. How much worse it is
than he had feared! Close outside the window a robin is piping blithely.
A stupid wonder flashes across his mind as to whether he is one of those
for whom Peggy scatters crumbs on her window-sill.

'I think that that is a question not worth answering,' he replies,
trying to speak calmly.

'But all the same it must be answered,' rejoins she, with symptoms of
rising excitement. 'You shall not leave the room until it is answered.'

'Will you please to repeat it then in a more intelligible form?' asks
he, with a forced composure.

For a moment she glares at him with dead-white face and shining eyes;
then, rising from her sofa, flings herself into his arms.

'How can you expect me to say such words twice?' cries she, bursting
into a tempest of tears; 'but if it is so, tell me the truth. You have
always blamed me for not speaking truth; learn your own lesson: tell me
the truth. Is it all over--all at an end?'

She has withdrawn herself again from him, and now stands holding him at
arm's length, a hand upon each shoulder, her dimmed eyes fixed upon his
face, searching for the least sign of faltering or evasion upon it. But
she finds none.

'You know,' he answers, in a low quiet voice, whose gentleness is the
cover for a bottomless depression, 'that there will never be an end to
it until you make one.'

Something in his tone dries her tears.

'Then why do you want to stay here?' asks she, her voice still shaking
from her late gust of passion.

He is silent. Her words find an echo in his own heart. Why indeed? Seen
in the hell-light of his renewed bondage, his plan for that one little
halcyon week ahead seems to him to have been a monstrosity of folly and
unreason. How could he, for even a moment, have entertained it?

Betty has sat down again upon the sofa; and wiping rather viciously the
eyes in which an ireful light is flashing, she says softly, as if she
were saying something rather pleasant:

'I am sure you would not wish to hurt _her_, or blight _her_ young
affections; and yet it seems to me that you are on the high-road to do
both.'

He writhes, but he could not speak, if flaying alive were to be the
penalty of his dumbness.

'I do not think'--still in that silky key--'that you have any right to
turn the poor thing's head with attentions such as she has probably
never received before.'

At that he laughs out loud, and insultingly:

'Turn her head! Ha! ha!'

'It is very amusing, no doubt,' rejoins Betty, her false suavity giving
way to a most real fury, breast heaving, and colour rising, 'and such
hilarity becomes you extremely; but, as she has probably never seen any
one more attractive than the village apothecary, it would be no great
excess of coxcombry on your part to suppose that you might be his
successful rival.'

But this taunt fails to extract any reply. Exasperated by her insuccess
in driving him into angry speech, she goes on:

'I do not think you have had to complain of her rigour; how many
days'--with an innocent air of inquiry--'has she allowed you to mow her
lawn, and milk her cow, and feed her pig for her? Six? Seven? I suppose
you have been with her to-day, too?'

At that he unwisely abandons his fortress of silence, and speaks:

'You had better ask Lily; you have set her on more than once as a spy.
Have your child in and ask her!'

To this cold and withering taunt her own weaker sarcasms succumb; and
again abandoning all self-control, she bursts into an agony of weeping,
burying her head in the sofa-cushions, and convulsed from head to foot
by her sobs.

'Is it any wonder,' she moans, 'that I do not want to see the only thing
I have in the world go from me? What am I saying?'--pulling herself up
suddenly--'how dare I say the only thing? have not I my Franky? I shall
always have my Franky!'

The grief of her tone is so poignant and so real that his heart softens
to her, despite her former gibes. He lays his hand upon her shoulder.

'What is all this about?' he asks kindly. 'You know as well as I do that
you will have me--such as I am--as long as you choose to keep me!'

'Then you will not stay here?' cries she precipitately, quitting her
desperate posture, and springing back with startling suddenness into
life and animation again; 'then you will go to-morrow?'

There is a pause. He walks to the window. Through it there comes the
peaceful sound of bleating sheep; and the distant sharp bark of a little
dog. Can it be Mink? He has a sharp bark. Poor little Mink! He will
probably never see Mink again. And to-morrow, according to Peggy, Mink
had promised to tell them all about the Dogs' Home!

He smiles transiently at the recollection of her childish jest. How many
things they were to have done to-morrow! Then he walks slowly back from
the window and says:

'I will go to-morrow!'

Perhaps there is something in the tone of this concession which takes
away from the value of it, for Betty begins to sob again; this time more
in wrath than in sorrow.

'I do not think you need make such a favour of it; I do not think it is
much to ask, considering all things--considering how I have
com--com--compromised my reputation for your sake for the last five
years!' cries she hysterically.

He does not defend himself; only a thought, whose want of generosity
shocks him, flashes across his mind, that that was already a _fait
accompli_ when he had first made her acquaintance.

'_We_ know that there is no harm in our friendship,' pursues she, a
slight red staining her tear-washed cheeks; 'but nobody else knows it.
The world is always only too pleased to think the worst, and in one
sense'--again mastered by her emotion--'it is right! I would have given
up _anything--everything_ for you--you know I would! and you--you--will
give up _nothing_ for me, not even such a trifle as this!'

Once again pity gets the upper hand of him; but a pity crossed by such a
bottomless regret and remorse at having let himself slide into this
tangled labyrinth of wrong, when honour and dishonour have changed
coats, and he does not know which is which, as the Lost Souls in Hell,
if such there be, might feel in looking back upon their earthly course.

'You are right,' he says; 'we must do the best we can for each other! We
must not make life harder for one another than it already is. I will do
what you wish! I ought! I will! Such a trifle, too!'




CHAPTER XIII

    'At length burst in the argent revelry,
       With plume, tiara and all rich array,
     Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
       The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay
     Of old Romance.'


The 'argent revelry' has burst into the Manor in the shape of what Lady
Roupell, with more vigour than elegance, is apt to call one of her
'Beast Parties,' _i.e._ one of those miscellaneous gatherings of the
whole neighbourhood to which she thinks herself bound twice or thrice in
the year--gatherings which, though dictated by hospitality, are not
usually very successful. It is Lady Roupell's principle to override all
the small social distinctions of the neighbourhood, to invite all the
people who quarrel, all the people who look down upon each other, all
the people who are bored by one another, all the people who are trying
to avoid each other, to hobnob at her bounteous board.

'They all go to God's house together, my dear; why should not they come
to mine?' asks she, with a logic that she thinks unanswerable. And so
they do; but they do not enjoy themselves.

That, however, is no concern of milady's. The 'Beasts' _must_ like to
talk to one another, or, if they do not, they ought to like it.

Having thrown open her house to them, having given them every
opportunity of over-eating themselves on her excellent food, and being
exhilarated by her admirable wines, she washes her hands of them; and
having enjoyed her own champagne and venison, sits down to her
Patience-table, which is set out for her every night of her life, and
would be were Queen Victoria to honour her with a visit.

Of the Beast Parties the Evans pair invariably form a constituent part.

'I always ask the Evanses,' says milady good-naturedly. 'It is quite
pretty to see the way in which he enjoys his dinner; and she likes to
wear her dyed gown, good woman, and smuggle candied apricots into her
pockets for those ugly urchins of hers, and look out my friends in her
"Peerage" next day!'

So the Evanses are here, and several harmless rural clergy; like them to
the outer eye, though no doubt to the inner as dissimilar as each
island-like human soul is from its neighbour. There are some large
landowners with their wives, and some very small lawyers and doctors
with theirs. There is a tallow-merchant, who to-day grovels in hides and
tallow, but to-morrow will probably--oh, free and happy England!--soar
to a seat in the Cabinet. There is a Colonial Bishop imported by one
neighbour, and a fashionable buffoon introduced by another; and lastly,
there are Peggy and Prue.

Never before has Peggy set off to a Beast Party with so light a heart.
She knows how little chance of rational or even irrational entertainment
such a feast affords; and yet, do what she will, she feels gay. Prue is
gay too, extravagantly gay, for did not Freddy stroll in half an hour
ago with a flower for her, and a request to her to wear her green gown
for his sake?

Before setting off Peggy bids her eleven birds good-night, telling them
that to-morrow they shall have a swinging ladder in their large cage to
remind them of the swinging tree-tops. Has not Talbot promised to make
them a ladder?

The girls have timed their arrival better than on a former occasion. The
room is already full when they walk in with their breeze-freshened
cheeks and their simple clothes.

Margaret has not even her best dress on. She had looked at it waveringly
and hankeringly at dressing-time; but a sort of superstition--an
undefined feeling that she is not going to meet any one for whom she has
a right to prank herself out, prevents her wearing it. But she cannot
help having her best face on. There is sunshiny weather in her heart.
Even her repulsion for Lady Betty is weakened. Possibly she has been
unjust towards her. Certainly she is not the human octopus from whose
grasp no prey can escape alive, for which she took her. She herself has
the best reason for knowing that from this octopus's arms prey can and
does escape alive and well. After all, she has condemned her upon mere
loose hearsay evidence. Henceforth she will trust only the evidence of
her own eyes and ears. At present her eyes tell her that Betty is very
highly rouged, and rather naked; and her ears--thanks to the din of
tongues--tell her nothing.

For a wonder, Lady Roupell is down in time, her gown properly
laced--usually, from excessive hurry, her maid has to skip half the
eyelet-holes--and with her ornaments duly fastened on. She is following
her usual rule, talking to the person who amuses her most, and leaving
all the others to take care of themselves.

As soon as dinner is announced, and Freddy has walked off with his
allotted lady, she turns with an easy smile to her company, and says:

'Will everybody take in somebody, please?'

At this command, so grateful and natural in a small and intimate party,
so extremely ill-suited to this large and miscellaneous crowd, there is
a moment of hesitating and consternation. The hearts of those who know
that they are never anybody's voluntary choice, but whom conventionality
generally provides with a respectable partner, sink to the soles of
their shoes. The young men hang back from the girls, because they think
that some one else may have a better right to them. All fear to grasp at
a precedence not their due.

At length there is a movement. The tallow-merchant, true to his
principle of soaring, offers his arm to the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant.
The parsons and doctors begin timidly to exchange wives. The Colonial
Bishop casts his landing-net over Prue. Margaret's is one of the few
breasts in the room in which the order for promiscuous choice has
excited a spark of pleasure. In the ordinary course of things she is
aware that it is improbable that Talbot would be her portion. If it is a
case of selection, the improbability vanishes. She smiles slightly to
herself as she recalls the surly indignation with which she had
discovered that he was to be her fate on the last occasion of her dining
here. She is still smiling when he passes her by with Betty on his arm.
For a few seconds it seems as if the handsomest girl in the room were to
be left altogether overlooked and unclaimed; and, in point of fact, she
is one of the latest to be paired. Usually such a blow to her vanity
would have disquieted her but little, as her pretensions are never high.
To-day she is shocked to find how much it galls her.

The ill-sorted party have taken their seats, precedence gone, natural
barriers knocked on the head, reciprocal antipathies forced into close
contact, in that topsy-turvy Utopia of universal equality and amity
which it is Lady Roupell's principle to produce.

Margaret looks round the table to see how the principle has worked. Mrs.
Evans has been led in by the doctor, to whom she is fully persuaded that
she owes the death of the last Evans but one. The next largest squiress
in the parish to Lady Roupell is made sulky for the evening by having
had to accept the arm of her man of business. Prue's Bishop has
innocently planted her as far as the length of the interminable table
will allow from Freddy. Betty and Talbot, though distant, are in sight.
She can see that they are sitting side by side in total silence. Is this
their mode of expressing their sorrow at their approaching separation?
Possibly; but, at all events, what a depth of intimacy does such a total
silence imply! Margaret's own mate is the buffoon. She has often heard
his name as that of the pet of royalty; the darling of the fine ladies;
the crowning sparkle in each choicest social gathering. To her, whether
it be that her mental palate is out of taste, he seems dull and coarse;
his wit made up of ugly faces, elderly _double-entendres_, flat
indecencies.

'It is clear that I am not made for good company,' she says to herself
sadly and wearily. 'Jacob, and the birds, and the fox--these are my
society! They are the only ones I am fit for.'

The long dinner ends at last, and the incongruous couples part--in most
cases with mutual relief. Neither Margaret nor her merry man ever wish
to set eyes upon each other again. In the drawing-room natural
affinities reassert themselves: intimates gather into little groups. The
squiress, escaped from her presumptuous solicitor, makes her plaint to
her fellows. Mrs. Evans makes hers to Peggy.

'Did you see how unlucky I was?' cries she. 'I assure you it gave me
quite a shudder to put my hand upon his arm! I declare I look upon that
man as as much the murderer of my Natty as if he had stuck a knife into
her. I could hardly bear to speak to him. However, I managed to secure
some crackers for the children'--indicating a tell-tale bulge in the
direction of her pocket. 'Their last word to me before I came away was,
"Mother, be sure you bring us some crackers!"'

Then it is Prue's turn to make her lament, which she begins with almost
the same words as Mrs. Evans:

'Did you ever see anything like my ill-luck? I was the farthest from
_him_ of anybody at the table. There were eighteen between us. I
counted. But did you notice how he rushed to open the door? As I passed
him he said to me, "Thank you, Prue." That was because I had put my
green gown on. He is always so grateful for any little thing that one
does for him.'

She pauses rather suddenly, for Lady Betty has drawn near.

'What a pretty frock!' says she, stopping before the two girls. 'As
green as grass, as jealousy, as green peas! Come and talk to me, Miss
Prue, and tell me what you have all been doing to-day. You may have been
up to any amount of mischief for all I can tell. Do you know that I have
been writhing on a bed of pain from morning to night? No? but I have.
Are not you sorry for me?'

As she speaks she draws the childish figure down on the sofa beside her.

Margaret walks away. She would like to take Prue away too. There seems
to her to be something unnatural and sinister in an alliance, however
temporary, between these two, and from the distant corner to which she
has retired her eye often wanders uneasily back to them.

Presently her view is obscured. It is no use her looking any longer. The
sofa is shut out from her by a ring of black coats that has clustered
round it. Only now and then, through the interstices, she catches the
glint of one of the numerous hornets, lizards, frogs, flashing in
diamonds upon Betty's breast. Bursts of laughter come from the group,
which Freddy and the buffoon have joined. In the intervals of the other
conversations buzzing around Peggy can hear Betty's high voice
piercing. She cannot hear what she says; but apparently it is always
followed by torrents of mirth, among which Prue's girl-tones are plainly
audible. Oh, what is Prue laughing at? If she could but get her away!

As she so thinks, herself wedged in among a phalanx of women, she sees a
stir among the band she is watching. It expands and moves, pursuing
Betty, who has walked to the piano. Evidently she has been persuaded to
sing.

As soon as this intention has become manifest in the room there is a
polite hush in the talk. Wives look menacingly at unmusical husbands.
The Bishop, who is fond of music, approaches the instrument. Betty has
seated herself leisurely, her audacious eyes wandering round and taking
in the prelate with a mischievous twinkle.

'I am not quite sure that you will like it,' Peggy hears her say. 'But,
you know, I cannot help that--I did not write it. It is supposed to be
said by an affectionate husband on the eve of his setting out for the
wars.'

With this prelude she sets off--

    'Oh! who will press that lily-white hand
        When I am far away?
          Some other man!'

Two more lines in the nature of a chorus follow, but they are so drowned
by a roar of applause that Peggy can't catch them. She can only
conjecture their nature from the look of impudent laughing challenge
which the singer throws at the men around her. Under cover of that roar
of applause the Bishop turns abruptly away.

The second verse follows--

    'Oh! who will kiss those ruby lips
        When I am far away?
          Some other man!'

Again the two drowned lines. Again the chord and the applause; but this
time it is very evident that the approbation is confined to the circle
round the piano.

Betty has been well taught, and her enunciation is exceedingly pure and
distinct. Not a word of her charming song is lost. She has reached the
third verse--

    'Oh! who will squeeze that little waist
        When I am far away?
          Some other man!'

Again that roar of admiring laughter from the men round the piano--all
the more marked from the displeased silence of the rest of the room.

But is it only men who are encoring so ecstatically? Is not that Prue
who is joining her enraptured plaudits to theirs?--Prue, with flushed
face and flashing eyes, and slight shoulders convulsed with merriment?
If she could but get her away! But that is out of the question; Prue is
in the inner circle, utterly beyond reach.

    'Oh! who will pay those little bills?'

Peggy cannot stand it any longer; it makes her sick. A gap in the ranks
of ladies that had shut her in gives her the wished-for opportunity to
escape. She slips towards an open French window giving on the terrace.
Before reaching it she has to pass Lady Roupell and her Patience. As she
does so she hears the old lady saying, in a voice of tepid annoyance, to
the man beside her:

'I wish that some one would stop her singing that indecent song. She
will not leave me a rag of character in the county!'




CHAPTER XIV.

                      'Whilst she was here
    Methought the beams of light that did appear
    Were shot from her; methought the moon gave none
    But what it had from her.'


Safely out on the terrace in the moonlight! Not, it is true, a great
wash of moonlight such as went billowing over the earth when she paid
her former night-visit to milady's garden; but such small radiance as a
lessening crescent, now and then dimmed by over-flung cloud-kerchiefs,
can lend. The stars, indeed, seeing their lady faint and fail, eke her
out with their lesser lights. Peggy stands drawing deep breaths, staring
up at them with her head thrown back, as they shine down upon her in
their overwhelming, overpowering distance, and purity and age. But
between her and their august and soothing silence comes again that
odious refrain:

    'Some other man!
     .....'

She puts her fingers in her ears and runs, nor does she stop until she
has reached the close of the long, broad gravel walk that keeps the
house-front company from end to end. Then she pauses and listens. No,
she is not far enough off even yet. Fainter, but still perfectly
audible, comes the vulgar ribaldry:

    'Some other man!
     .....'

and then the storm of applause. Let her at all events reach some spot
where she will be unable to detect any tone of Prue's in that insane
mirth! But is there such a spot? To her excited fancy it seems as if in
the remotest dell, the loneliest coppice of the park, she would still
overhear her Prue's little voice applauding that disgusting pleasantry.

She walks quickly on, between flower-borders and shrubberies, until she
reaches a wrought-iron gate that leads into the walled garden. She opens
it and passes through, then stands still once again to listen. She has
succeeded at last. Not an echo of Betty's high-pitched indecencies
attains to this quiet garden-close to offend her ears. There is no noise
less clean and harmless than that of the south wind delicately wagging
the heads of the slumberous flowers.

The garden, as its name implies, is hedged in from each rude gust on
three sides by stout walls, stone-coped and balled. On the fourth,
towards the sun-setting, it is guarded only by a light decorated iron
railing, now muffled in the airy fluff of the traveller's joy, and
embraced by the luxuriant arms of the hop, the clematis, and the
wandering vine. Between their tendrils, between the branches of the
strong tea-rose and the Virginia creeper's autumn fires, one catches
friendly glimpses of the church tower and the park, and the gentle deer.
Inside, the garden is encompassed by wide and crowded flower-borders,
but the middle is sacred to the green simplicity of the velvet grass.

Margaret draws a deep breath of relief, and begins to walk slowly along.
A row of tall, white gladioli, nearly as high-statured as herself,
looking ghostly fair in the starshine, keep her company, lovely and
virginal as May lilies; and from the farther side of the garden comes an
ineffable waft of that violet smell which we used to connect only with
spring. As she paces to and fro the ugly din fades out of her ears and
the ireful red out of her cheeks. A sort of peace settles down upon
her--only a _sort_ of peace, however! Her mind is still oppressed by the
image of Prue, and by a vague misgiving of coming trouble, coupled with
a sense, which she will not own to herself, of personal disappointment,
and of a mortified covert self-gratulation upon not having worn her best
gown, or in anywise tricked herself out.

To one, however, whose hand is on the garden-latch, as she so thinks,
she looks tricked out enough, indeed, in her own fairness; enough to
make his heart sick with the hopelessness of its longing as he goes
towards her. After all, she is not much surprised at his having followed
her! Possibly he may have a message of recall for her.

'Well!' she says, meeting him with a delicate moonlit smile.

Low as the light is, it is light enough to show that there is no
answering smile on his face.

'So you escaped at last!' he says, with a sort of groan. 'I watched to
see how long you could stand it.'

The shadow that the star-beams, and the violet breath, and Heaven knows
what other gentle influence, have chased from her features, settles down
on them again.

'I am never fond of comic songs,' she answers stiffly; 'and I do not
think that that was a particularly favourable specimen.'

He makes a gesture of disgust.

'Pah!' Then adds: 'I should have followed you before, only that I wanted
to get Prue away. I knew that you would be glad if I could; but it was
impossible!'

He has never spoken of her as 'Prue' before; but in his present
agitation--an agitation for which Peggy is at a loss to account--he has
obviously clean forgotten the formal prefix.

She is too much touched by his thoughtfulness for her to answer.

'My chief motive for following you,' continues he, speaking in an
unusual and constrained voice, 'was that I thought I might possibly not
have another opportunity of giving you _this_.'

As he speaks he puts a small parcel into her hands.

'It is only the ladder for the birds.'

She breaks into a laugh.

'They are in no such great hurry for it,' says she gaily; 'they could
have waited until to-morrow.'

He sighs.

'I am afraid that they would have had to wait longer than until
to-morrow!'

'Well, I daresay that they might have made shift until Wednesday,'
returns she.

The entire unsuspiciousness of her tone makes his task a tenfold harder
one than it would otherwise have been.

'It is--it is better that you should take it yourself to them,' he says,
hesitating and floundering. 'I--I--might be prevented after all from
coming. There is a chance of my--my--being obliged after all to go
to-morrow!'

The star and moonlight are falling full on her face, lifted and
attentive: he can see it as plainly as at high noonday. It seems to him
that a tiny change passes over it. But still she does not suspect the
truth.

'What!' says she; 'has your chief telegraphed for you? What a thing it
is to be so indispensable!'

Shall he leave her in her error? Nothing would be easier! Leave her in
the belief that a legitimate summons to honourable work has called him
away; leave her with a friendly face turned towards him, expecting and
perhaps lightly hoping his return. The temptation is strong, but he
conquers it.

'No,' he says, trying to speak carelessly; 'my chief is innocent this
time of breaking into my holiday. I expect that he is enjoying his own
too much; I am not going Londonwards; but--but--other reasons compel me
to leave to-morrow.'

How unutterably flat and naked it sounds! There is no mistake now as to
the change in her face--the change that he has dreaded and yet known
would come--the hardening of eye and tightening of lip. Well, it is
better that it should come! And yet, do what he may, he cannot leave her
in the belief that, as he sees, has in one moment stolen all the frank
sweetness out of her eyes.

'I--I--am not going north, either,' he cries, in miserable, eager
stammering. 'I--I--do not know where I am going!'

'You are compelled to go, and yet you do not know where you are going!
is that a riddle?' asks she ironically.

Her tone jars horribly upon his strung and aching nerves.

'Not much of a riddle,' he answers, with a bitter laugh. 'I do not know
the exact road I am going to take; I only know the direction--downhill.'

She fixes her eyes steadily upon his for a moment or two, a ray of
compassion stealing into them. So they are to pass each other, like
ships upon the sea! After all, he has not been able to wrench himself
out of the arms of his octopus! A transient flash of self-derision
crosses her mind for having ever supposed it possible that he could,
coupled with an immense pity.

This is to be their last speech together; for some instinct tells her
that he will not return. Let it not, then, be bitter speech! Poor
fellow! There are aloes enough, God wot, in the cup he has brewed for
himself!

'Well!' she says, smiling kindly, albeit very sadly, at him, 'whether
you go uphill or downhill, the birds and I must always have a good word
for you. I do not know what we should have done without you; you have
been so kind to us all--to me and my Prue, and my fox and my birds!'

He ought to make some acknowledgment of this farewell civility of hers;
but to 'ought' and to do have, since the world was, never been one and
the same thing. He receives it in a suffocated silence.

'And I was so rude to you at first,' pursues she, lightly brushing, as
she speaks, her own lips with a bit of mignonette she has gathered from
the odorous bed at her feet, perhaps to hide the slight tremble of which
she cannot but be conscious in them--'so angry at being sent in to
dinner with you! but, then'--with another friendly starlit smile--'you
must remember that I did not know how well you could _mow_!'

He is still silent, his throat choked with words he dare not utter. Oh,
if she would only stop! But she goes on in all innocence:

'You never took your bunch of lavender after all to-day. I thought of
bringing it up for you to-night, but then I remembered that I should see
you to-morrow, so I did not; I wish I had now.'

Cannot he find even one word? one word of prayer to her in mercy to be
silent? Not one!

'Are you going by an early train?' continues she; 'because, if not, I
might send up Alfred with it in the morning, if you really cared to have
it.'

Perhaps it is that last most unnecessary clause that loosens the string
of his tied tongue.

'Do not!' he says almost rudely; 'I hope I shall never smell the scent
of lavender again!'

For a moment she looks at him, astonished at his discourtesy; but
probably his face explains it, for her eyes drop. When next she speaks
it is in a rather colder key.

'At all events I must send you back your books; you left some books with
us to-day, if you remember.'

_If he remember_ the Keats from which he was to have read aloud to her
to-morrow, sitting beside her under the Judas-tree, with her little
finches calling to her from the house, with Mink crouched on her white
skirt, and the parrot waddling over the sward, with his toes turned in,
to have his head scratched by her! _If he remember!_ She must be the
very 'belle dame sans merci' of whom John Keats spake, to ask him that!
May not he at least beg her to keep his Keats to remember him by--laying
here and there among the leaves a sprig of the lavender they together
plucked? No! No! No! Out of her life he and his Keats must depart, as
she and her lavender out of his. Who, in his place, will read her 'La
Belle Dame sans merci'? As if in devilish mockery of the jealous anguish
of this question comes Betty's disgusting refrain darting across his
mind:

    'Some other man!
     .....
     .....'

He grinds his teeth. It is some minutes before he can regain sufficient
command over himself to answer with a tolerable appearance of composure:

'You are right; I will send for them!'

A little sighing gust has risen; sighing for him perhaps, he thinks,
with a flash of imaginative self-pity, as he watches its soft antics
among the lily-like flowers, and its light ruffling of Peggy's gown. It
has mistaken her for one of the flowers! What foolish fancies are
careering through his hot brain! There can be none in hers, or how could
she be holding out such a cool hand and lifting such a suave calm look
to his?

'I must be going,' she says, speaking in a rather lower voice than is
her wont; 'good-bye! Since'--a wavering smile breaking tremulously over
her face--'since you are so determined to go downhill, I suppose I dare
not say that I hope our roads will ever meet again!'

Her hand slides out of his unreturning clasp. He feels that if he keep
that soft prisoner for one instant, he must keep it through eternity.

'Good-bye!' he says.

He would like to bid God bless her; but he can no more do it than
Macbeth could say 'Amen.' What right has he to bid God bless her? Will
God be more likely to send her a benison for his unworthy asking? So he
lets her go unblessed.




CHAPTER XV


The Beast Party is over. It has not differed materially from its
predecessors, though it may perhaps glory in the bad pre-eminence of
having left even more ill-feeling and mortification in its wake than did
they.

The little Evanses, indeed, bless its memory, gobbling the bonbons and
strutting about the Vicarage garden in the masks and fools' caps that
they have extracted out of its crackers. And Lady Roupell, too, is
perfectly satisfied with it. Her guests have come, have eaten and drunk,
have gone away again, and she need not trouble her head about them for
another six months. To-day she gets rid of all her friends except the
Harborough children, and is left at liberty to waddle about in her
frieze coat, and with her spud in her hand, in peace--a peace which, at
the worst of times, she never allows to be very seriously infringed. But
there are gradations of age and shabbiness in her frieze coats, and
to-day she may don the oldest.

The peace of the Manor, like its gaieties, is apt to be reflected in the
Cottage: an exodus from the one is virtually an exodus from the other;
and, as such, is apt to be rejoiced over by Margaret as the signal for
Prue to begin to eat her dinner better, sleep sounder, and engage in
some other occupation than running to the end of the garden to see
whether there is a sign of any messenger coming from the Manor. She is
at her post of predilection this morning--the end of the garden that
overhangs the highway--that highway along which all arrivers at and
departers from the Big House must needs travel. She is looking eagerly
down the road.

'Prue!' cries her sister from under the Judas-tree, where she is
sitting, for a wonder, unoccupied.

'Yes,' replies Prue, but without offering to stir from her post of
observation.

'Come here. I want to talk to you.'

'In a minute--directly--by and by.'

A few moments pass.

'Prue?'

'Yes.'

'What are you looking at? What are you waiting for?'

'I am waiting for the Harboroughs to pass. I want to kiss my hand to
Lady Betty as she goes by; she asked me to.'

Margaret makes a gesture of annoyance, and irritably upsets Mink, who
has just curled himself upon her skirt; but she offers no remonstrance,
and it is a quarter of an hour before--the brougham with its
Harboroughs, late as usual, and galloping to catch the train, having
whirled past and been watched till quite out of sight--Prue saunters up
radiant.

'She kissed her hand to me all the way up the hill!' says she, beaming
with pleasure at the recollection. 'I threw her a little bunch of
jessamine just as the carriage went by. She put her head out in a
second, and caught it _in her teeth_!' Was not it clever of her? She
_is_ so clever!'

'Why should she kiss her hand to you? Why should you throw her
jessamine?' asks Peggy gloomily.

'Why should not I?' returns the other warmly. 'I am sure she has been
kind enough to me, if you only knew!'

'You were not so fond of her last week,' says Margaret, lifting a pair
of very troubled eyes to her sister's face. 'Have you already forgotten
the three days running that she robbed you of your ride?'

'I cannot think how I could have been so silly!' returns Prue, with a
rather forced laugh. 'Of course, it was a mere accident. _He_ says he
wonders how I could have been so silly; he was dreadfully hurt about it.
He says he looks upon her quite as an elder sister.'

'An elder sister!' echoes Peggy, breaking into a short angry laugh. 'The
same sort of elder sister, I think, as the nursery-maid is to the Life
Guardsman!'

'I cannot think how you can be so censorious!' retorts Prue, reddening.
'He says it is your one weakness. He admires your charact

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