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The Great House

by Stanley John Weyman · English · Gutenberg #39294 · 689,510 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Great House

Author: Stanley John Weyman


        
Release date: March 28, 2012 [eBook #39294]
                Most recently updated: June 16, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39294

Credits: Charles Bowen


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT HOUSE ***

[Illustration]




THE GREAT HOUSE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR


THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF
THE NEW RECTOR
THE STORY OF FRANCIS CLUDDE
A GENTLEMAN OF FRANCE
THE MAN IN BLACK
UNDER THE RED ROBE
MY LADY ROTHA
MEMOIRS OF A MINISTER OF FRANCE
THE RED COCKADE
SHREWSBURY
THE CASTLE INN
SOPHIA
COUNT HANNIBAL
IN KINGS’ BYWAYS
THE LONG NIGHT
THE ABBESS OF VLAYE
STARVECROW FARM
CHIPPINGE
LAID UP IN LAVENDER
THE WILD GEESE




THE GREAT HOUSE

BY
STANLEY J. WEYMAN

Author of “The Castle Inn,” “Chippinge,”
“A Gentleman of France,” etc., etc.

NEW YORK

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

FOURTH AVENUE AND 30th STREET

1919

Copyright, 1919
BY
STANLEY J. WEYMAN




Contents

 CHAPTER I. The Hôtel Lambert—Upstairs.
 CHAPTER II. The Hôtel Lambert—Downstairs.
 CHAPTER III. The Lawyer Abroad.
 CHAPTER IV. Homeward Bound.
 CHAPTER V. The London Packet.
 CHAPTER VI. Field and Forge.
 CHAPTER VII. Mr. John Audley.
 CHAPTER VIII. The Gatehouse.
 CHAPTER IX. Old Things.
 CHAPTER X. New Things.
 CHAPTER XI. Tact and Temper.
 CHAPTER XII. The Yew Walk.
 CHAPTER XIII. Peter Pauper.
 CHAPTER XIV. The Manchester Men.
 CHAPTER XV. Strange Bedfellows.
 CHAPTER XVI. The Great House at Beaudelays.
 CHAPTER XVII. To the Rescue.
 CHAPTER XVIII. Masks and Faces.
 CHAPTER XIX. The Corn Law Crisis.
 CHAPTER XX. Peter’s Return.
 CHAPTER XXI. Toft at the Butterflies.
 CHAPTER XXII. My Lord Speaks.
 CHAPTER XXIII. Blore Under Weaver.
 CHAPTER XXIV. An Agent of the Old School.
 CHAPTER XXV. Mary is Lonely.
 CHAPTER XXVI. Missing.
 CHAPTER XXVII. A Footstep in the Hall.
 CHAPTER XXVIII. The News from Riddsley.
 CHAPTER XXIX. The Audley Bible.
 CHAPTER XXX. A Friend in Need.
 CHAPTER XXXI. Ben Bosham.
 CHAPTER XXXII. Mary Makes a Discovery.
 CHAPTER XXXIII. The Meeting at the Maypole.
 CHAPTER XXXIV. By the Canal.
 CHAPTER XXXV. My Lord Speaks Out.
 CHAPTER XXXVI. The Riddsley Election.
 CHAPTER XXXVII. A Turn of the Wheel.
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. Toft’s Little Surprise.
 CHAPTER XXXIX. The Deed of Renunciation.
 CHAPTER XL. “Let Us Make Others Thankful.”




THE GREAT HOUSE




CHAPTER I
THE HÔTEL LAMBERT—UPSTAIRS


On an evening in March in the ’forties of last century a girl looked
down on the Seine from an attic window on the Ile St. Louis. The room
behind her—or beside her, for she sat on the window-ledge, with her
back against one side of the opening and her feet against the other—was
long, whitewashed from floor to ceiling, lighted by five gaunt windows,
and as cold to the eye as charity to the recipient. Along each side of
the chamber ran ten pallet beds. A black door broke the wall at one
end, and above the door hung a crucifix. A painting of a Station of the
Cross adorned the wall at the other end. Beyond this picture the room
had no ornament; it is almost true to say that beyond what has been
named it had no furniture. One bed—the bed beside the window at which
the girl sat—was screened by a thin curtain which did not reach the
floor. This was her bed.

But in early spring no window in Paris looked on a scene more cheerful
than this window; which as from an eyrie commanded a shining reach of
the Seine bordered by the lawns and foliage of the King’s Garden, and
closed by the graceful arches of the Bridge of Austerlitz. On the water
boats shot to and fro. The quays were gay with the red trousers of
soldiers and the coquettish caps of soubrettes, with students in
strange cloaks, and the twinkling wheels of yellow cabriolets. The
first swallows were hawking hither and thither above the water, and a
pleasant hum rose from the Boulevard Bourdon.

Yet the girl sighed. For it was her birthday, she was twenty this
twenty-fifth of March, and there was not a soul in the world to know
this and to wish her joy. A life of dependence, toned to the key of the
whitewashed room and the thin pallets, lay before her; and though she
had good reason to be thankful for the safety which dependence bought,
still she was only twenty, and springtime, viewed from prison windows,
beckons to its cousin, youth. She saw family groups walking the quays,
and father, mother, children, all, seen from a distance, were happy.
She saw lovers loitering in the garden or pacing to and fro, and
romance walked with every one of them; none came late, or fell to
words. She sighed more deeply; and on the sound the door opened.

“_Hola!_” cried a shrill voice, speaking in French, fluent, but oddly
accented. “Who is here? The Princess desires that the English
Mademoiselle will descend this evening.”

“Very good,” the girl in the window replied pleasantly. “At the same
hour, Joséphine?”

“Why not, Mademoiselle?” A trim maid, with a plain face and the
faultless figure of a Pole, came a few steps into the room. “But you
are alone?”

“The children are walking. I stayed at home.”

“To be alone? As if I did not understand that! To be alone—it is the
luxury of the rich.”

The girl nodded. “None but a Pole would have thought of that,” she
said.

“Ah, the crafty English Miss!” the maid retorted. “How she flatters!
Perhaps she needs a touch of the tongs to-night? Or the loan of a pair
of red-heeled shoes, worn no more than thrice by the Princess—and with
the black which is convenable for Mademoiselle, oh, so neat! Of the
_ancien régime_, absolutely!”

The other laughed. “The _ancien régime_, Joséphine—and this!” she
replied, with a gesture that embraced the room, the pallets, her own
bed. “A curled head—and this! You are truly a cabbage——”

“But Mademoiselle descends!”

“A cabbage of—foolishness!”

“Ah, well, if I descended, you would see,” the maid retorted. “I am but
the Princess’s second maid, and I know nothing! But if I descended it
would not be to this dormitory I should return! Nor to the tartines!
Nor to the daughters of Poland! Trust me for that—and I know but my
prayers. While Mademoiselle, she is an artist’s daughter.”

“There spoke the Pole again,” the girl struck in with a smile.

“The English Miss knows how to flatter,” Joséphine laughed. “That is
one for the touch of the tongs,” she continued, ticking them off on her
fingers. “And one for the red-heeled shoes. And—but no more! Let me
begone before I am bankrupt!” She turned about with a flirt of her
short petticoats, but paused and looked back, with her hand on the
door. “None the less, mark you well, Mademoiselle, from the whitewash
to the ceiling of Lebrun, from the dortoir of the Jeunes Filles to the
Gallery of Hercules, there are but twenty stairs, and easy, oh, so easy
to descend! If Mademoiselle instead of flattering Joséphine, the
Cracovienne, flattered some pretty gentleman—who knows? Not I! I know
but my prayers!” And with a light laugh the maid clapped to the door
and was gone.

The girl in the window had not throughout the parley changed her pose
or moved more than her head, and this was characteristic of her. For
even in her playfulness there was gravity, and a measure of stillness.
Now, left alone, she dropped her feet to the floor, turned, and knelt
on the sill with her brow pressed against the glass. The sun had set,
mists were rising from the river, the quays were gray and cold. Here
and there a lamp began to shine through the twilight. But the girl’s
thoughts were no longer on the scene beneath her eyes.

“There goes the third who has been good to me,” she pondered. “First
the Polish lodger who lived on the floor below, and saved me from that
woman. Then the Princess’s daughter. Now Joséphine. There are still
kind people in the world—God grant that I may not forget it! But how
much better to give than to take, to be strong than to be weak, to be
the mistress and not the puppet of fortune! How much better—and, were I
a man, how easy!”

But on that there came into her remembrance one to whom it had not been
easy, one who had signally failed to master fortune, or to grapple with
circumstances. “Poor father!” she whispered.




CHAPTER II
THE HÔTEL LAMBERT—DOWNSTAIRS


When ladies were at home to their intimates in the Paris of the
’forties, they seated their guests about large round tables with a view
to that common exchange of wit and fancy which is the French ideal. The
mode crossed to England, and in many houses these round tables, fallen
to the uses of the dining-room or the nursery, may still be seen. But
when the Princess Czartoriski entertained in the Hôtel Lambert, under
the ceiling painted by Lebrun, which had looked down on the arm-chair
of Madame de Châtelet and the tabouret of Voltaire, she was, as became
a Pole, a law to herself. In that beautiful room, softly lit by wax
candles, her guests were free to follow their bent, to fall into
groups, or to admire at their ease the Watteaus and Bouchers which the
Princess’s father-in-law, old Prince Adam, had restored to their native
panels.

Thanks to his taste and under her rule the gallery of Hercules
presented on this evening a scene not unworthy of its past. The silks
and satins of the old régime were indeed replaced by the
high-shouldered coats, the stocks, the pins and velvet vests of the
dandies; and Thiers beaming through his glasses, or Lamartine, though
beauty, melted by the woes of Poland, hung upon his lips, might have
been thought by some unequal to the dead. But they were now what those
had been; and the women peacocked it as of old. At any rate the effect
was good, and a guest who came late, and paused a moment on the
threshold to observe the scene, thought that he had never before done
the room full justice. Presently the Princess saw him and he went
forward. The man who was talking to her made his bow, and she pointed
with her fan to the vacant place. “Felicitations, my lord,” she said.
She held out her gloved hand.

“A thousands thanks,” he said, as he bent over it. “But on what,
Princess?”

“On the success of a friend. On what we have all seen in the _Journal_.
Is it not true that you have won your suit?”

“I won, yes.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But what, Madame? A bare
title, an empty rent-roll.”

“For shame!” she answered. “But I suppose that this is your English
phlegm. Is it not a thing to be proud of—an old title? That which money
cannot buy and the wisest would fain wear? M. Guizot, what would he not
give to be Chien de Race? Your Peel, also?”

“And your Thiers?” he returned, with a sly glance at the little man in
the shining glasses.

“He, too! But he has the passion of humanity, which is a title in
itself. Whereas you English, turning in your unending circle, one out,
one in, one in, one out, are but playing a game—marking time! You have
not a desire to go forward!”

“Surely, Princess, you forget our Reform Bill, scarce ten years old.”

“Which bought off your cotton lords and your fat bourgeois, and left
the people without leaders and more helpless than before. No, my lord,
if your Russell—Lord John, do you call him?—had one jot of M. Thiers’
enthusiasm! Or your Peel—but I look for nothing there!”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I admit,” he said, “that M. Thiers has an
enthusiasm beyond the ordinary.”

“You do? Wonderful!”

“But,” with a smile, “it is, I fancy, an enthusiasm of which the object
is—M. Thiers!”

“Ah!” she cried, fanning herself more quickly. “Now there spoke not Mr.
Audley, the attaché—he had not been so imprudent! But—how do you call
yourself now?”

“On days of ceremony,” he replied, “Lord Audley of Beaudelays.”

“There spoke my lord, unattached! Oh, you English, you have no
enthusiasm. You have only traditions. Poor were Poland if her fate hung
on you!”

“There are still bright spots,” he said slyly. And his glance returned
to the little statesman in spectacles on whom the Princess rested the
hopes of Poland.

“No!” she cried vividly. “Don’t say it again or I shall be displeased.
Turn your eyes elsewhere. There is one here about whom I wish to
consult you. Do you see the tall girl in black who is engaged with the
miniatures?”

“I saw her some time ago.”

“I suppose so. You are a man. I dare say you would call her handsome?”

“I think it possible, were she not in this company. What of her,
Princess?”

“Do you notice anything beyond her looks?”

“The picture is plain—for the frame in which I see her. Is she one of
the staff of your school?”

“Yes, but with an air——”

“Certainly—an air!” He nodded.

“Well, she is a countrywoman of yours and has a history. Her father, a
journalist, artist, no matter what, came to live in Paris years ago. He
went down, down, always down; six months ago he died. There was enough
to bury him, no more. She says, I don’t know”—the Princess indicated
doubt with a movement of her fan—“that she wrote to friends in England.
Perhaps she did not write; how do I know? She was at the last sou, the
street before her, a hag of a concierge behind, and withal—as you see
her.”

“Not wearing that dress, I presume?” he said with a faint smile.

“No. She had passed everything to the Mont de Piété; she had what she
stood up in—yet herself! Then a Polish family on the floor below, to
whom my daughter carried alms, told Cécile of her. They pitied her,
spoke well of her, she had done—no matter what for them—perhaps
nothing. Probably nothing. But Cécile ascended, saw her, became
enamoured, _enragée!_ You know Cécile—for her all that wears feathers
is of the angels! Nothing would do but she must bring her here and set
her to teach English to the daughters during her own absence.”

“The Princess is away?”

“For four weeks. But in three days she returns, and you see where I am.
How do I know who this is? She may be this, or that. If she were
French, if she were Polish, I should know! But she is English and of a
calm, a reticence—ah!”

“And of a pride too,” he replied thoughtfully, “if I mistake not. Yet
it is a good face, Princess.”

She fluttered her fan. “It is a handsome one. For a man that is the
same.”

“With all this you permit her to appear?”

“To be of use. And a little that she may be seen by some English
friend, who may tell me.”

“Shall I talk to her?”

“If you will be so good. Learn, if you please, what she is.”

“Your wishes are law,” he rejoined. “Will you present me?”

“It is not necessary,” the Princess answered. She beckoned to a stout
gentleman who wore whiskers trimmed à la mode du Roi, and had laurel
leaves on his coat collar. “A thousand thanks.”

He lingered a moment to take part in the Princess’s reception of the
Academician. Then he joined a group about old Prince Adam Czartoriski,
who was describing a recent visit to Cracow, that last morsel of free
Poland, soon to pass into the maw of Austria. A little apart, the girl
in black bent over the case of miniatures, comparing some with a list,
and polishing others with a square of silk. Presently he found himself
beside her. Their eyes met.

“I am told,” he said, bowing, “that you are my countrywoman. The
Princess thought that I might be of use to you.”

The girl had read his errand before he spoke and a shade flitted across
her face. She knew, only too well, that her hold on this rock of safety
to which chance had lifted her—out of a gulf of peril and misery of
which she trembled to think—was of the slightest. Early, almost from
the first, she had discovered that the Princess’s benevolence found
vent rather in schemes for the good of many than in tenderness for one.
But hitherto she had relied on the daughter’s affection, and a little
on her own usefulness. Then, too, she was young and hopeful, and the
depths from which she had escaped were such that she could not believe
that Providence would return her to them.

But she was quick-witted, and his opening frightened her. She guessed
at once that she was not to be allowed to await Cécile’s return, that
her fate hung on what this Englishman, so big and bland and forceful,
reported of her.

She braced herself to meet the danger. “I am obliged to the Princess,”
she said. “But my ties with England are slight. I came to France with
my father when I was ten years old.”

“I think you lost him recently?” He found his task less easy than it
should have been.

“He died six months ago,” she replied, regarding him gravely. “His
illness left me without means. I was penniless, when the young Princess
befriended me and gave me a respite here. I am no part of this,” with a
glance at the salon and the groups about them. “I teach upstairs. I am
thankful for the privilege of doing so.”

“The Princess told me as much,” he said frankly. “She thought that,
being English, I might advise you better than she could; that possibly
I might put you in touch with your relations?”

She shook her head.

“Or your friends? You must have friends?”

“Doubtless my father had—once,” she said in a low voice. “But as his
means diminished, he saw less and less of those who had known him. For
the last two years I do not think that he saw an Englishman at home.
Before that time I was in a convent school, and I do not know.”

“You are a Roman Catholic, then?”

“No. And for that reason—and for another, that my account was not
paid”—her color rose painfully to her face—“I could not apply to the
Sisters. I am very frank,” she added, her lip trembling.

“And I encroach,” he answered, bowing. “Forgive me! Your father was an
artist, I believe?”

“He drew for an Atelier de Porcelaine—for the journals when he could.
But he was not very successful,” she continued reluctantly. “The china
factory which had employed him since he came to Paris, failed. When I
returned from school he was alone and poor, living in the little street
in the Quartier, where he died.”

“But forgive me, you must have some relations in England?”

“Only one of whom I know,” she replied. “My father’s brother. My father
had quarrelled with him—bitterly, I fear; but when he was dying he bade
me write to my uncle and tell him how we were placed. I did so. No
answer came. Then after my father’s death I wrote again. I told my
uncle that I was alone, that I was without money, that in a short time
I should be homeless, that if I could return to England I could live by
teaching French. He did not reply. I could do no more.”

“That was outrageous,” he answered, flushing darkly. Though well under
thirty he was a tall man and portly, with one of those large faces that
easily become injected. “Do you know—is your uncle also in narrow
circumstances?”

“I know no more than his name,” she said. “My father never spoke of
him. They had quarrelled. Indeed, my father spoke little of his past.”

“But when you did not hear from your uncle, did you not tell your
father?”

“It could do no good,” she said. “And he was dying.”

He was not sentimental, this big man, whose entrance into a room
carried with it a sense of power. Nor was he one to be lightly moved,
but her simplicity and the picture her words drew for him of the
daughter and the dying man touched him. Already his mind was made up
that the Czartoriski should not turn her adrift for lack of a word.
Aloud, “The Princess did not tell me your name,” he said. “May I know
it?”

“Audley,” she said. “Mary Audley.”

He stared at her. She supposed that he had not caught the name. She
repeated it.

“Audley? Do you really mean that?”

“Why not?” she asked, surprised in her turn. “Is it so uncommon a
name?”

“No,” he replied slowly. “No, but it is a coincidence. The Princess did
not tell me that your name was Audley.”

The girl shook her head. “I doubt if she knows,” she said. “To her I am
only ‘the English girl.’”

“And your father was an artist, resident in Paris? And his name?”

“Peter Audley.”

He nodded. “Peter Audley,” he repeated. His eyes looked through her at
something far away. His lips were more firmly set. His face was grave.
“Peter Audley,” he repeated softly. “An artist resident in Paris!”

“But did you know him?” she cried.

He brought his thoughts and his eyes back to her. “No, I did not know
him,” he said. “But I have heard of him.” And again it was plain that
his thoughts took wing. “John Audley’s brother, the artist!” he
muttered.

In her impatience she could have taken him by the sleeve and shaken
him. “Then you do know John Audley?” she said. “My uncle?”

Again he brought himself back with an effort. “A thousand pardons!” he
said. “You see the Princess did not tell me that you were an Audley.
Yes, I know John Audley—of the Gatehouse. I suppose it was to him you
wrote?”

“Yes.”

“And he did not reply?”

She nodded.

He laughed, as at something whimsical. It was not a kindly laugh, it
jarred a little on his listener. But the next moment his face softened,
he smiled at her, and the smile of such a man had its importance, for
in repose his eyes were hard. It was clear to her that he was a man of
position, that he belonged of right to this keen polished world at
which she was stealing a glance. His air was distinguished, and his
dress, though quiet, struck the last note of fashion.

“But I am keeping you in suspense,” he said. “I must tell you, Miss
Audley, why it surprised me to learn your name. Because I, too, am an
Audley.”

“You!” she cried.

“Yes, I,” he replied. “What is more, I am akin to you. The kinship is
remote, but it happens that your father’s name, in its place in a
pedigree, has been familiar to me of late, and I could set down the
precise degree of cousinship in which you stand to me. I think your
father was my fourth cousin.”

She colored charmingly. “Is it possible?” she exclaimed.

“It is a fact, proved indeed, recently, in a court of law,” he answered
lightly. “Perhaps it is as well that we have that warrant for a
conversation which I can see that the Princess thinks long. After this
she will expect to hear the whole of your history.”

“I fear that she may be displeased,” the girl said, wincing a little.
“You have been very kind——”

“Who should be kind,” he replied, “if not the head of your family? But
have no fear, I will deal with the Princess. I shall be able to satisfy
her, I have no doubt.”

“And you”—she looked at him with appeal in her eyes—“will you be good
enough to tell me who you are?”

“I am Lord Audley. To distinguish me from another of the same name, I
am called Audley of Beaudelays.”

“Of Beaudelays?” she repeated. He thought her face, her whole bearing,
singularly composed in view of his announcement. “Beaudelays?” she
repeated thoughtfully. “I have heard the name more than once. Perhaps
from my father.”

“It were odd if you had not,” he said. “It is the name of my house, and
your uncle, John Audley, lives within a mile of it.”

“Oh,” she said. The name of the uncle who had ignored her appeals fell
on her like a cold douche.

“I will not say more now,” Lord Audley continued. “But you shall hear
from me. To—morrow I quit Paris for three or four days, but when I
return have no fear. You may leave the matter in my hands in full
confidence that I shall not fail—my cousin.”

He held out his hand and she laid hers in it. She looked him frankly in
the face. “Thank you,” she said. “I little thought when I descended
this evening that I should meet a kinsman.”

“And a friend,” he answered, holding her hand a little longer than was
needful.

“And a friend,” she repeated. “But there—I must go now. I should have
disappeared ten minutes ago. This is my way.” She inclined her head,
and turning from him she pushed open a small door masked by a picture.
She passed at once into a dark corridor, and threading its windings
gained the great staircase.

As she flitted upwards from floor to floor, skirting a long procession
of shadowy forms, and now ogled by a Leda whose only veil was the dusk,
now threatened by the tusks of the great boar at bay, she was not
conscious of thought or surprise. It was not until she had lighted her
taper outside the dormitory door, and, passing between the rows of
sleeping children, had gained her screened corner, that she found it
possible to think. Then she set the light in her tiny
washing-basin—such was the rule—and seated herself on her bed. For some
minutes she stared before her, motionless and unwinking, her hands
clasped about her knees, her mind at work.

Was it true, or a dream? Had this really happened to her since she had
viewed herself in the blurred mirror, had set a curl right and,
satisfied, had turned to go down? The danger and the delivery from it,
the fear and the friend in need? Or was it a Cinderella’s treat, which
no fairy godmother would recall to her, with which no lost slipper
would connect her? She could almost believe this. For no Cinderella, in
the ashes of the hearth, could have seemed more remote from the gay
ball-room than she crouching on her thin mattress, with the breathing
of the children in her ears, from the luxury of the famous salon.

Or, if it was true, if it had happened, would anything come of it?
Would Lord Audley remember her? Or would he think no more of her,
ignoring to-morrow the poor relation whom it had been the whim of the
moment to own? That would be cruel! That would be base! But if Mary had
fallen in with some good people since her father’s death, she had also
met many callous, and a few cruel people. He might be one. And then,
how strange it was that her father had never named this great kinsman,
never referred to him, never even, when dying, disclosed his name!

The light wavered in the draught that stole through the bald, undraped
window. A child whimpered in its sleep, awoke, began to sob. It was the
youngest of the daughters of Poland. The girl rose, and going on
tip-toe to the child, bent over it, kissed it, warmed it in her bosom,
soothed it. Presently the little waif slept again, and Mary Audley
began to make ready for bed.

But so much turned for her on what had happened, so much hung in the
balance, that it was not unnatural that as she let down her hair and
plaited it in two long tails for the night, she should see her new
kinsman’s face in the mirror. Nor strange that as she lay sleepless and
thought-ridden in her bed the same face should present itself anew
relieved against the background of darkness.




CHAPTER III
THE LAWYER ABROAD


Half an hour later Lord Audley paused in the hall at Meurice’s, and
having given his cloak and hat to a servant went thoughtfully up the
wide staircase. He opened the door of a room on the first floor. A
stout man with a bald head, who had been for some time yawning over the
dying fire, rose to his feet and remained standing.

Audley nodded. “Hallo, Stubbs!” he said carelessly, “not in bed yet?”

“No, my lord,” the other answered. “I waited to learn if your lordship
had any orders for England.”

“Well, sit down now. I’ve something to tell you.” My lord stooped as he
spoke and warmed his hands at the embers; then rising, he stood with
his back to the hearth. The stout man sat forward on his chair with an
air of deference. His double chin rested on the ample folds of a soft
white stock secured by a gold pin in the shape of a wheat-sheaf. He
wore black knee-breeches and stockings, and his dress, though plain,
bore the stamp of neatness and prosperity.

For a minute or two Audley continued to look thoughtfully before him.
At length, “May I take it that this claim is really at an end now?” he
said. “Is the decision final, I mean?”

“Unless new evidence crops up,” Stubbs answered—he was a lawyer—“the
decision is certainly final. With your lordship’s signature to the
papers I brought over——”

“But the claimant might try again?”

“Mr. John Audley might do anything,” Stubbs returned. “I believe him to
be mad upon the point, and therefore capable of much. But he could only
move on new evidence of the most cogent nature. I do not believe that
such evidence exists.”

His employer weighed this for some time. At length, “Then if you were
in my place,” he said, “you would not be tempted to hedge?”

“To hedge?” the lawyer exclaimed, as if he had never heard the word
before. “I am afraid I don’t understand.”

“I will explain. But first, tell me this. If anything happens to me
before I have a child, John Audley succeeds to the peerage? That is
clear?”

“Certainly! Mr. John Audley, the claimant, is also your heir-at-law.”

“To title and estates—such as they are?”

“To both, my lord.”

“Then follow me another step, Stubbs. Failing John Audley, who is the
next heir?”

“Mr. Peter Audley,” Stubbs replied, “his only brother, would succeed,
if he were alive. But it is common ground that he is dead. I knew Mr.
Peter, and, if I may say it of an Audley, my lord, a more shiftless,
weak, improvident gentleman never lived. And obstinate as the devil! He
married into trade, and Mr. John never forgave it—never forgave it, my
lord. Never spoke of his brother or to his brother from that time. It
was before the Reform Bill,” the lawyer continued with a sigh. “There
were no railways then and things were different. Dear, dear, how the
world changes! Mr. Peter must have gone abroad ten years ago, but until
he was mentioned in the suit I don’t think that I had heard his name
ten times in as many years. And he an Audley!”

“He had a child?”

“Only one, a daughter.”

“Would she come in after Mr. John?”

“Yes, my lord, she would—if living.”

“I’ve been talking to her this evening.”

“Ah!” The lawyer was not so simple as he seemed, and for a minute or
two he had foreseen the _dénouement_. “Ah!” he repeated, thoughtfully
rubbing his plump calf. “I see, my lord. Mr. Peter Audley’s daughter?
Really! And if I may venture to ask, what is she like?”

Audley paused before he answered. Then, “If you have painted the father
aright, Stubbs, I should say that she was his opposite in all but his
obstinacy. A calm and self-reliant young woman, if I am any judge.”

“And handsome?”

“Yes, with a look of breeding. At the same time she is penniless and
dependent, teaching English in a kind of charity school, cheek by jowl
with a princess!”

“God bless my soul!” cried the lawyer, astonished at last. “A
princess!”

“Who is a good creature as women go, but as likely as not to send her
adrift to-morrow.”

“Tut-tut-tut!” muttered the other.

“However, I’ll tell you the story,” Audley concluded. And he did so.

When he had done, “Well,” Stubbs exclaimed, “for a coincidence——”

“Ah, there,” the young man broke in, “I fancy, all’s not said. I take
it the Princess noted the name, but was too polite to question me.
Anyway, the girl is there. She is dependent, friendless; attractive,
and well-bred. For a moment it did occur to me—she is John Audley’s
heiress—that I might make all safe by——” His voice dropped. His last
words were inaudible.

“The chance is so very remote,” said the lawyer, aware that he was on
delicate ground, and that the other was rather following out his own
thoughts than consulting him.

“It is. The idea crossed my mind only for a moment—of course it’s
absurd for a man as poor as I am. There is hardly a poorer peer out of
Ireland—you know that. Fourteenth baron without a roof to my house or a
pane of glass in my windows! And a rent-roll when all is told of——”

“A little short of three thousand,” the lawyer muttered.

“Two thousand five hundred, by God, and not a penny more! If any man
ought to marry money, I am that man, Stubbs!”

Mr. Stubbs, staring at the fire with a hand on each knee, assented
respectfully. “I’ve always hoped that you would, my lord,” he said,
“though I’ve not ventured to say it.”

“Yes! Well—putting that aside,” the other resumed, “what is to be done
about her? I’ve been thinking it over, and I fancy that I’ve hit on the
right line. John Audley’s given me trouble enough. I’ll give him some.
I’ll make him provide for her, d—n him, or I don’t know my man!”

“I’d like to know, my lord,” Stubbs ventured thoughtfully, “why he
didn’t answer her letters. He hated her father, but it is not like Mr.
John to let the young lady drift. He’s crazy about the family, and she
is his next heir. He’s a lonely man, too, and there is room at the
Gatehouse.”

Audley paused, half-way across the room. “I wish we had never leased
the Gatehouse to him!”

“It’s not everybody’s house, my lord. It’s lonely and——”

“It’s too near Beaudelays!”

“If your lordship were living at the Great House, quite so,” the lawyer
agreed. “But, as it is, the rent is useful, and the lease was made
before our time, so that we have no choice.”

“I shall always believe that he had a reason for going there!”

“He had an idea that it strengthened his claim,” the lawyer said
indulgently. “Nothing beyond that, my lord.”

“Well, I’ve made up my mind to increase his family by a niece!” the
other replied. “He shall have the girl whether he likes it or not. Take
a pen, man, and sit down. He’s spoiled my breakfast many a time with
his confounded Writs of Error, or whatever you call them, and for once
I’ll be even with him. Say—yes, Stubbs, say this:

“‘I am directed by Lord Audley to inform you that a young lady,
believed to be a daughter of the late Mr. Peter Audley, and recently
living in poverty in an obscure’—yes, Stubbs, say obscure—‘part of
Paris, has been rescued by the benevolence of a Polish lady. For the
present she is in the lady’s house in a menial capacity, and is
dependent on her charity. Lord Audley is informed that the young lady
made application to you without result, but this report his lordship
discredits. Still, he feels himself concerned; and if those to whom she
naturally looks decline to aid her, it is his lordship’s intention to
make such provision as may enable her to live respectably. I am to
inform you that Miss Audley’s address is the Hôtel Lambert, Ile St.
Louis, Paris. Letters should be addressed “Care of the Housekeeper.”’”

“He won’t like the last touch!” the young man continued, with a quiet
chuckle. “If that does not touch him on the raw, I’ll yield up the
title to-morrow. And now, Stubbs, good-night.”

But Stubbs did not take the hint. “I want to say one word, my lord,
about the borough—about Riddsley,” he said. “We put in Mr. Mottisfont
at the last election, your lordship’s interest just tipping the scale.
We think, therefore, that a word from you may set right what is going
wrong.”

“What is it?”

“There’s a strong feeling,” the lawyer answered, his face serious,
“that the party is not being led aright. And that Mr. Mottisfont, who
is old——”

“Is willing to go with the party, eh, Stubbs?”

“No, my lord, with the party leaders. Which is a different thing. Sir
Robert Peel—the land put him in, but, d—n me, my lord”—the lawyer’s
manner lost much of its deference and he spoke bluntly and strongly—“it
looks as if he were going to put the land out! An income-tax in peace
time, we’ve taken that. And less protection for the farmer, very
good—if it must be. But all this taking off of duties, this letting in
of Canadian corn—I tell you, my lord, there’s an ugly feeling abroad!
There are a good many in Riddsley say that he is going to repeal the
Corn Laws altogether; that he’s sold us to the League, and won’t be
long before he delivers us!”

The big man sitting back in his chair smiled. “It seems to me,” he
said, “that you are travelling rather fast and rather far, Stubbs!”

“That’s just what we fear Sir Robert is doing!” the lawyer retorted
smartly, the other’s rank forgotten. “And you may take it from me the
borough won’t stand it, my lord, and the sooner Mr. Mottisfont has a
hint the better. If he follows Peel too far, the bottom will fall out
of his seat. There’s no Corn Law leaguer will ever sit for Riddsley!”

“With your help, anyway, Stubbs,” my lord said with a smile. The
lawyer’s excitement amused him.

“No, my lord! Never with my help! I believe that on the landed interest
rests the stability of the country! It was the landed interest that
supported Pitt and beat Bony, and brought us through the long war. It
was the landed interest that kept us from revolution in the dark days
after the war. And now because the men that turn cotton and iron and
clay into money by the help of the devil’s breath—because they want to
pay lower wages——”

“The ark of the covenant is to be overthrown, eh?” the young man
laughed. “Why, to listen to you, Stubbs, one would think that you were
the largest landowner in the county!”

“No, my lord,” the lawyer answered. “But it’s the landowners have made
me what I am. And it’s the landowners and the farmers that Riddsley
lives by and is going to stand by! And the sooner Mr. Mottisfont knows
that the better. He was elected as a Tory, and a Tory he must stop,
whether Sir Robert turns his coat or not!”

“You want me to speak to Mottisfont?”

“We do, my lord. Just a word. I was at the Ordinary last fair day, and
there was nothing else talked of. Free Canadian corn was too like free
French corn and free Belgian corn for Stafford wits to see much
difference. And Peel is too like repeal, my lord. We are beginning to
see that.”

Audley shrugged his shoulders. “The party is satisfied,” he said. “And
Mottisfont? I can’t drive the man.”

“No, but a word from you——”

“Well, I’ll think about it. But I fancy you’re overrunning the scent.”

“Then the line is not straight!” the lawyer retorted shrewdly.
“However, if I have been too warm, I beg pardon, my lord.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Audley answered. “Very good. And now,
good-night, Stubbs. Don’t forget to send the letter to John Audley as
soon as you reach London.”

Stubbs replied that he would, and took his leave. He had said his say
on the borough question, lord or no lord; which to a Briton—and he was
a typical Briton—was a satisfaction.

But half an hour later, when he had drawn his nightcap down to his ears
and stood, the extinguisher in his hand, he paused. “He’s a sober hand
for a young man,” he thought, “a very sober hand. I warrant he will
never run his ship on the rocks for lack of a good look-out!”




CHAPTER IV
HOMEWARD BOUND


In the corner of the light diligence, seating six inside, which had
brought her from Montreuil, Mary Audley leant forward, looking out
through the dingy panes for the windmills of Calais. Joséphine slept in
the corner facing her, as she had slept for two hours past. Their
companions, a French shopkeeper and her child, and an English bagman,
sighed and fidgeted, as travellers had cause to sigh and fidget in days
when he was lucky who covered the distance from Paris to Calais in
twenty-five hours. The coach rumbled on. The sun had set, a small rain
was falling. The fading light tinged the plain of the Pas de Calais
with a melancholy which little by little dyed the girl’s thoughts.

She was on her way to her own country, to those on whom she might be
dependent without shame. And common sense, of which she had a large
share, told her that she had cause, great cause to be thankful. But the
flush of relief, to which the opening prospect had given rise, was
ebbing. The life before her was new, those amongst whom she must lead
that life were strange; nor did the cold phrases of her uncle’s
invitation, which ignored both her father and the letters that she had
written, promise an over-warm welcome.

Still, “Courage!” Mary murmured to herself, “Courage!” And she recalled
a saying which she had learned from the maid, “At the worst, ten
fingers!” Then, seeing that at last they were entering the streets of
the town and that the weary journey was over—she had left Paris the day
before—she touched Joséphine. “We are there,” she said.

The maid awoke with her eyes on the bagman, who was stout. “Ah!” she
muttered. “In England they are like that! No wonder that they travel
seeing that their bones are so padded! But, for me I am one ache.”

They jolted over the uneven pavement, crossed a bridge, lumbered
through streets scarcely wider than the swaying diligence, at last with
a great cracking of whips they swerved to the left and drew up amid the
babel of the quay. In a twinkling they were part of it. Porters dragged
down, fought for, snatched up their baggage. English-speaking touts
shook dirty cards in their faces. Tide-waiters bawled questions in
their ears. The postilion, the conductor, all the world stretched
greedy palms under their noses. Other travellers ran into them, and
they ran into other travellers. All this, in the dusk, in the rain,
while the bell on the deck overhead clanged above the roar of the
escaping steam, and a man shouted without ceasing, “Tower steamer!
Tower steamer! Any more for England?”

Joséphine, after one bitter exchange of words with a lad who had seized
her handbag, thrust her fingers into her ears and resigned herself.
Even Mary for a moment was aghast. She was dragged this way and that,
she lost one article and recovered it, lost another and recovered that,
she lost her ticket and rescued it from a man’s hand. At last, her
baggage on board, she found herself breathless at the foot of the
ladder, with three passengers imploring her to ascend, and six touts
clinging to her skirts and crying for drink-money. She had barely time
to make her little gift to the kind-hearted maid—who was returning to
Paris by the night coach—and no time to thank her, before they were
parted. Mary was pushed up the ladder. In a moment she was looking down
from the deck on the wet, squalid quay, the pale up-turned faces, the
bustling crowd.

She picked out the one face which she knew, and which it pained her to
lose. By gestures and smiles, with a tear in the eye, she tried to make
amends to Joséphine for the hasty parting, the half-spoken words. The
maid on her side was in tears, and after the French fashion was proud
of them. So the last minute came. The paddles were already turning, the
ship was going slowly astern, when a man pushed his way through the
crowd. He clutched the ladder as it was unhooked, and at some risk and
much loss of dignity he was bundled on board. There was a lamp
amidships, and, as he regained his balance, Mary, smiling in spite of
herself, saw that he was an Englishman, a man about thirty, and plainly
dressed. Then in her anxiety to see the last of Joséphine she crossed
the deck as the ship went about, and she lost sight of him.

She continued to look back and to wave her handkerchief, until nothing
remained but a light or two in a bank of shadow. That was the last she
was to see of the land which had been her home for ten years; and
chilled and lonely she turned about and did what, had she been an older
traveller, she would have done before. She sought the after-cabin.
Alas, a glance from the foot of the companion was enough! Every place
was taken, every couch occupied, and the air, already close, repelled
her. She climbed to the deck again, and was seeking some corner where
she could sit, sheltered from the wind and rain, when the captain saw
her and fell foul of her.

“Now, young lady,” he said, “no woman’s allowed on deck at night!”

“Oh, but,” she protested, “there’s no room downstairs!”

“Won’t do,” he answered roughly. “Lost a woman overboard once, and as
much trouble about her as about all the men, drunk or sober, I’ve ever
carried. All women below, all women below, is the order! Besides,” more
amicably, as he saw by a ray of lantern-light that she was young and
comely, “it’s wet, my dear, and going to be d—d wet, and as dark as
Wapping!”

“But I’ve a cloak,” she petitioned, “if I sit quite still, and——”

A tall form loomed up at the captain’s elbow. “This is the lady I am
looking for,” the new-comer said. “It will be all right, Captain
Jones.”

The captain turned sharply. “Oh, my lord,” he said, “I didn’t know; but
with petticoats and a dark night, blest if you know where you are! I’m
sure I beg the young lady’s pardon. Quite right, my lord, quite right!”
With a rough salute he went forward and the darkness swallowed him.

“Lord Audley?” Mary said. She spoke quietly, but to do so she had to
steady her voice.

“Yes,” he replied. “I knew that you were crossing to-night, and as I
had to go over this week I chose this evening. I’ve reserved a cabin
for you.”

“Oh, but,” she remonstrated, “I don’t think you should have done that!
I don’t know that I can——”

“Afford it?” he said coolly. “Then—as it is a matter of some
shillings—your kinsman will presume to pay for it.”

It was a small thing, and she let it pass. “But who told you,” she
asked, “that I was crossing to-night?”

“The Princess. You don’t feel, I suppose, that as you are crossing, it
was my duty to stay in France?”

“Oh no!” she protested.

“But you are not sure whether you are more pleased or more vexed? Well,
let me show you where your cabin is—it is the size of a milliner’s box,
but by morning you will be glad of it, and that may turn the scale.
Moreover,” as he led the way across the deck, “the steward’s boy, when
he is not serving gin below, will serve tea above, and at sea tea is
not to be scorned. That’s your number—7. And there is the boy. Boy!” he
called in a voice that ensured obedience, “Tea and bread and butter for
this lady in number 7 in an hour. See it is there, my lad!”

She smiled. “I think the tea and bread and butter may turn the scale,”
she said.

“Right,” he replied. “Then, as it is only eight o’clock, why should we
not sit in the shelter of this tarpaulin? I see that there are two
seats. They might have been put for us.”

“Is it possible that they were?” she asked shrewdly. “Well, why not?”

She had no reason to give—and the temptation was great. Five minutes
before she had been the most lonely creature in the world. The parting
from Joséphine, the discomfort of the boat, the dark sea and the darker
horizon, the captain’s rough words, had brought the tears to her eyes.
And then, in a moment, to be thought of, provided for, kindly
entreated, to be lapped in attentions as in a cloak—in very fact, in
another second a warm cloak was about her—who could expect her to
refuse this? Moreover, he was her kinsman; probably she owed it to him
that she was here.

At any rate she thought that it would be prudish to demur, and she took
one of the seats in the lee of the screen. Audley tucked the cloak
about her, and took the other. The light of a lantern fell on their
faces and the few passengers who still tramped the windy deck could see
the pair, and doubtless envied him their shelter. “Are you
comfortable?” he inquired—but before she could answer he whistled
softly.

“What is it?” Mary asked.

“Not much.” He laughed to himself.

Then she saw coming along the deck towards them a man who had not found
his sea-legs. As he approached he took little runs, and now brought up
against the rail, now clutched at a stay. Mary knew the man again. “He
nearly missed the boat,” she whispered.

“Did he?” her companion answered in the same tone. “Well, if he had
quite missed it, I’d have forgiven him. He is going to be ill, I’ll
wager!”

When the man was close to them he reeled, and to save himself he
grasped the end of their screen. His eyes met theirs. He was past much
show of emotion, but his voice rose as he exclaimed, “Audley. Is that
you?”

“It is. We are in for a rough night, I’m afraid.”

“And—pardon me,” the stranger hesitated, peering at them, “is that Miss
Audley with you?”

“Yes,” Mary said, much surprised.

“Oh!”

“This is Mr. Basset,” Audley explained. Mary stared at the stranger.
The name conveyed nothing to her.

“I came to meet you,” he said, speaking with difficulty, and now and
again casting a wild eye abroad as the deck heaved under him. “But I
expected to find you at the hotel, and I waited there until I nearly
missed the boat. Even then I felt that I ought to learn if you were on
board, and I came up to see.”

“I am very much obliged to you,” Mary answered politely, “but I am
quite comfortable, thank you. It is close below, and Lord Audley found
this seat for me. And I have a cabin.”

“Oh yes!” he answered. “I think I will go down then if you—if you are
sure you want nothing.”

“Nothing, thank you,” Mary answered with decision.

“I think I—I’ll go, then. Good-night!”

With that he went, making desperate tacks in the direction of the
companion. Unfortunately what he gained in speed he lost in dignity,
and before he reached the hatch Lord Audley gave way to laughter.

“Oh, don’t!” Mary cried. “He will hear you. And it was kind of him to
look for me when he was not well.”

But Audley only laughed the more. “You don’t catch the full flavor of
it,” he said. “He’s come three hundred miles to meet you, and he’s too
ill to do anything now he’s here!”

“Three hundred miles to meet me!” she cried in astonishment.

“Every yard of it! Don’t you know who he is? He’s Peter Basset, your
uncle’s nephew by marriage, who lives with him. He’s come, or rather
your uncle has sent him, all the way from Stafford to meet you—and he’s
gone to lie down! He’s gone to lie down! There’s a squire of dames for
you! Upon my honor, I never knew anything richer!”

And my lord’s laughter broke out anew.




CHAPTER V
THE LONDON PACKET


Mary laughed with him, but she was not comfortable. What she had seen
of the stranger, a man plain in feature and ordinary in figure, one
whom the eye would not have remarked in a crowd, did not especially
commend him. And certainly he had not shown himself equal to a
difficult situation. But the effort he had made to come to her help
appealed to her generosity, and she was not sure how far she formed a
part of the comedy. So her laughter was from the lips only, and brief.
Then, “My uncle’s nephew?” she asked thoughtfully.

“His wife’s nephew. Your uncle married a Basset.”

“But why did he send him to meet me?”

“For a simple reason—I should say that he had no one else to send. Your
uncle is not a man of many friends.”

“I understood that some one would meet the boat in London,” she said.
“But I expected a woman.”

“I fancy the woman would be to seek,” he replied. “And Basset is a kind
of tame cat at the Gatehouse. He lives there a part of the year, though
he has an old place of his own up the country. He’s a Staffordshire man
born and bred, and I dare say a good fellow in his way, but a dull dog!
a dull dog! Are you sure that the wind does not catch you?”

She said that she was very comfortable, and they were silent awhile,
listening to the monotonous slapping of a rope against the mast and the
wash of the waves as they surged past the beam. A single light at the
end of the breakwater shone in the darkness behind them. She marked the
light grow smaller and more distant, and her thoughts went back to the
convent school, to her father, to the third-floor where for a time they
had been together, to his care for her—feeble and inefficient, to his
illness. And a lump rose in her throat, her hands gripped one another
as she strove to hide her feelings. In her heart she whispered a
farewell. She was turning her back on her father’s grave. The last
tendril which bound her to the old life was breaking.

The light vanished, and gradually the girl’s reflections sought a new
channel. They turned from the past to the present, and dwelt on the man
beside her, who had not only thought of her comfort, who had not only
saved her from some hours of loneliness, but had probably wrought this
change in her life. This was the third time only that she had seen him.
Once, some days after that memorable evening, he had called at the
Hôtel Lambert, and her employer had sent for her. He had greeted her
courteously in the Princess’s presence, had asked her kindly if she had
heard from England, and had led her to believe that she would hear. And
she remembered with a blush that the Princess had looked from one to
the other with a smile, and afterwards had had another manner for her.

Meanwhile the man wondered what she was thinking, and waited for her to
give him the clue. But she was so long silent that his patience wore
thin. It was not for this, it was not to sit silent beside her, that he
had taken a night journey and secured these cosey seats.

“Well?” he said at last.

She turned to him, her eyes wet with tears. “It seems so strange,” she
murmured, “to be leaving all and going into a world in which I know no
one.”

“Except the head of your family.”

“Except you! I suppose that I owe it to you that I am here?”

“I should be happy if I thought so,” he replied, with careful
reticence. “But we set a stone rolling, we do not know where it falls.
You will soon learn—Basset will tell you, if I don’t—that your uncle
and I are not on good terms. Therefore it is unlikely that he was moved
by what I said.”

“But you said something?”

“If I did,” he answered, smiling, “it was against the grain—who likes
to put his finger between the door and the jamb? And let me caution
you. Your uncle will not suffer meddling on my part, still less a
reminder of it. Therefore, as you are going to owe all to him, you will
do well to be silent about me.”

She was sure that she owed all to him, and she might have said so, but
at that moment the boat changed its course and the full force of the
wind struck them. The salt spray whipped and stung their faces. Her
cloak flew out like a balloon, her scarf pennon-wise, the tarpaulin
flapped like some huge bird. He had to spring to the screen, to adjust
it to the new course, to secure and tuck in her cloak—and all in haste,
with exclamations and laughter, while Mary, sharing the joy of the
struggle, and braced by the sting of the salt wind, felt her heart
rise. How kind he was, and how strong. How he towered above ordinary
men. How safe she felt in his care.

When they were settled anew, she asked him to tell her something about
the Gatehouse.

“It’s a lonely place,” he said. “It is quite out of the world. I don’t
know, indeed, how you will exist after the life you have led.”

“The life I have led!” she protested. “But that is absurd! Though you
saw me in the Princess’s salon, you know that my life had nothing in
common with hers. I was downstairs no more than three or four times,
and then merely to interpret. My life was spent between whitewashed
walls, on bare floors. I slept in a room with twenty children, ate with
forty—onion soup and thick tartines. The evening I saw you I wore shoes
which the maid lent me. And with all that I was thankful, most
thankful, to have such a refuge. The great people who met at the
Princess’s——”

“And who thought that they were making history!” he laughed. “Did you
know that? Did you know that the Princess was looking to them to save
the last morsel of Poland?”

“No,” she said. “I did not know. I am very ignorant. But if I were a
man, I should love to do things like that.”

“I believe you would!” he replied. “Well, there are crusades in
England. Only I fear that you will not be in the way of them.”

“And I am not a princess! But tell me, please, what are they?”

“You will not be long before you come upon one,” he replied, a hint of
derision in his tone. “You will see a placard in the streets, ‘_Shall
the people’s bread be taxed?_’ Not quite so romantic as the
independence of Poland? But I can tell you that heads are quite as
likely to be broken over it.”

“Surely,” she said, “there can be only one answer to that.”

“Just so,” he replied dryly. “But what is the answer? The land claims
high prices that it may thrive; the towns claim cheap bread that they
may live. Each says that the country depends upon it. ‘England
self-supporting!’ says one. ‘England the workshop of the world!’ says
the other.”

“I begin to see.”

“‘The land is the strength of the country,’ argues the squire. ‘Down
with monopoly,’ cries the cotton lord. Then each arms himself with a
sword lately forged and called ‘Philanthropy,’ and with that he
searches for chinks in the other’s armor. ‘See how factories work the
babes, drive the women underground, ruin the race,’ shout the squires.
‘Vote for the land and starvation wages,’ shout the mill-owners.”

“But does no one try to find the answer?” she asked timidly. “Try to
find out what is best for the people?”

“Ah!” he rejoined, “if by the people you mean the lower classes, they
cry, ‘Give us not bread, but votes!’ And the squires say that that is
what the traders who have just got votes don’t mean to give them; and
so, to divert their attention, dangle cheap bread before their noses!”

Mary sighed. “I am afraid that I must give it up,” she said. “I am so
ignorant.”

“Well,” he replied thoughtfully. “Many are puzzled which side to take,
and are waiting to see how the cat jumps. In the meantime every fence
is placarded with ‘Speed the Plough!’ on one side, and ‘The Big Loaf!’
on the other. The first man you meet thinks the landlord a devourer of
widows’ houses; to the next the mill-owner is an ogre grinding men’s
bones to make his bread. Even at the Gatehouse I doubt if you will
escape the excitement, though there is not a field of wheat within a
mile of it!”

“To me it is like a new world,” she said.

“Then, when you are in the new world,” he replied, smiling as he rose,
“do not forget Columbus! But here is the lad to tell you that your tea
is ready.”

He repented when Mary had left him that he had not made better use of
his time. It had been his purpose to make such an impression on the
girl as might be of use in the future, and he wondered why he had not
devoted himself more singly to this; why he had allowed minutes which
might have been given to intimate subjects to be wasted in a dry
discussion. But there was a quality in Mary that did not lightly invite
to gallantry—a gravity and a balance that, had he looked closely into
the matter, might have explained his laches.

And in fact he had builded better than he knew, for while he reproached
himself, Mary, safe within the tiny bathing machine which the packet
company called a cabin, was giving much thought to him. The dip-candle,
set within a horn lantern, threw its light on the one comfortable
object, the tea-tray, seated beside which she reviewed what had
happened, and found it all interesting; his meeting with her, his
thought for her, the glimpses he had given her of things beyond the
horizon of the convent school, even his diversion into politics. He was
not on good terms with her uncle, and it was unlikely that she would
see more of him. But she was sure that she would always remember his
appearance on the threshold of her new life, that she would always
recall with gratitude this crossing and the kindness which had lapped
her about and saved her from loneliness.

In her eyes he figured as one of the brilliant circle of the Hôtel
Lambert. For her he played a part in great movements and high
enterprises such as those which he had revealed to her. His light
treatment of them, his air of detachment, had, indeed, chilled her at
times; but these were perhaps natural in one who viewed from above and
from a distance the ills which it was his task to treat. How ignorant
he must think her! How remote from the plane on which he lived, the
standards by which he judged, the objects at which he aimed! Yet he had
stooped to explain things to her and to make them clear.

She spent an hour deep in thought, and, strange as the life of the ship
was to her, she was deaf to the creaking of the timbers, and the surge
of the waves as they swept past the beam. At intervals hoarse orders, a
rush of feet across the deck, the more regular tramp of rare
passengers, caught her attention, only to lose it as quickly. It was
late when she roused herself. She saw that the candle was burning low,
and she began to make her arrangements for the night.

Midway in them she paused, and colored, aware that she knew his tread
from the many that had passed. The footstep ceased. A hand tapped at
her door. “Yes?” she said.

“We shall be in the river by daybreak,” Audley announced. “I thought
that you might like to come on deck early. You ought not to miss the
river from the Nore to the Pool.”

“Thank you,” she answered.

“You shouldn’t miss it,” he persisted. “Greenwich especially!”

“I shall be there,” she replied. “It is very good of you. Good-night.”

He went away. After all, he was the only man on board shod like a
gentleman; it had been odd if she had not known his step! And for going
on deck early, why should she not? Was she to miss Greenwich because
Lord Audley went to a good bootmaker?

So when Peter Basset, still pale and qualmish, came on deck in the
early morning, a little below the Pool, the first person he saw was the
girl whom he had come to escort. She was standing high above him on the
captain’s bridge, her hands clasping the rail, her hair blown about and
shining golden in the sunshine. Lord Audley’s stately form towered
above her. He was pointing out this and that, and they were talking
gaily; and now and again the captain spoke to them, and many were
looking at them. She did not see Basset; he was on the deck below,
standing amid the common crowd, and so he was free to look at her as he
pleased. He might be said not to have seen her before, and what he saw
now bewildered, nay, staggered him. Unwillingly, and to please his
uncle, he had come to meet a girl of whom they knew no more than this,
that, rescued from some backwater of Paris life, into which a weak and
shiftless father had plunged her, she had earned her living, if she had
earned it at all, in a dependent capacity. He had looked to find her
one of two things; either flashy and underbred, with every fault an
Englishman might consider French, or a nice mixture of craft and
servility. He had not been able to decide which he would prefer.

Instead he saw a girl tall, slender, and slow of movement, with eyes
set under a fine width of brow and grave when they smiled, a chin
fuller than perfect beauty required, a mouth a little large, a perfect
nose. Auburn hair, thick and waving, drooped over each temple, and
framed a face as calm as it was fair. “Surely a pearl found on a
midden!” he thought. And as the thought passed through his mind, Mary
looked down. Her eyes roved for a moment over the crowded deck, where
some, like Basset, returned her gaze with interest, while others sought
their baggage or bawled for missing companions. He was not a man, it
has been said, to stand out in a crowd, and her eyes travelled over him
without seeing him. Audley spoke to her, she lifted her eyes, she
looked ashore again. But the unheeding glance which had not deigned to
know him stung Basset! He dubbed her, with all her beauty, proud and
hard. Still—to be such and to have sprung from such a life! It was
marvellous.

He knew nothing of the convent school with its hourly discipline
lasting through years. He did not guess that the obstinacy which had
been weakness in the father was strength in the child. Much less could
he divine that the improvidence of that father had become a beacon,
warning the daughter off the rocks which had been fatal to him! Mary
was no miracle, but neither was she proud or hard.

They had passed Erith, and Greenwich with its stately pile and formal
gardens glittering in the sunshine of an April morning. The ripple of a
westerly wind, meeting the flood, silvered the turbid surface. A
hundred wherries skimmed like water-flies hither and thither, long
lines of colliers fringed the wharves, tall China clippers forged
slowly up under a scrap of foresail, dumb barges deep laden with hay or
Barclay’s Entire, moved mysteriously with the tide. On all sides hoarse
voices bawled orders or objurgations. Charmed with the gayety, the
movement, the color, Mary could not take her eyes from the scene. The
sunshine, the leap of life, the pulse of spring, moved in her blood and
put to flight the fears that had weighed on her at nightfall. She told
herself with elation that this was England, this was her native land,
this was her home.

Meanwhile Audley’s mind took another direction. He reflected that in a
few minutes he must part from the girl, and must trust henceforth to
the impression he had made. For some hours he had scarcely given a
thought to Basset, but he recalled him now, and he searched for him in
the throng below. He found him at last, pressed against the rail
between a fat woman with a basket and a crying child. Their eyes met.
My lord glanced away, but he could not refrain from a smile as he
pictured the poor affair the other had made of his errand. And Basset
saw the smile and read its meaning, and though he was not
self—assertive, though he was, indeed, backward to a fault, anger ran
through his veins. To have travelled three hundred miles in order to
meet this girl, to have found her happy in another’s company, and to
have accepted the second place—the position had vexed him even under
the qualms of illness. This morning, and since he had seen her, it
stirred in him an unwonted resentment. He d—d Audley under his breath,
disengaged himself from the basket which the fat woman was thrusting
into his ribs, lifted the child aside. He escaped below to collect his
effects.

But in a short time he recovered his temper. When the boat began to go
about in the crowded Pool and Mary reluctantly withdrew her eyes from
the White Tower, darkened by the smoke and the tragedies of twenty
generations, she found him awaiting them at the foot of the ladder. He
was still pale, and the girl’s conscience smote her. For many hours she
had not given him a thought. “I hope you are better,” she said gently.

“Horrid thing, _mal de mer!_” remarked my lord, with a gleam of humor
in his eye.

“Thank you, I am quite right this morning,” Basset answered.

“You go from Euston Grove, I suppose?”

“Yes. The morning train starts in a little over an hour.”

No more was said, and they went ashore together. Audley, an old
traveller, and one whose height and presence gave weight to his orders,
saw to Mary’s safety in the crowd, shielded her from touts and
tide-waiters, took the upper hand. He watched the aproned porters
disappearing with the baggage in the direction of the Custom House, and
a thought struck him. “I am sorry that my servant is not here,” he
said. “He would see our things through without troubling us.” His eyes
met Basset’s.

Basset disdained to refuse. “I will do it,” he said. He received the
keys and followed the baggage.

Audley looked at Mary and laughed. “I think you’ll find him useful,” he
said. “Takes a hint and is not too forward.”

“For shame!” she cried. “It is very good of him to go.” But she could
not refrain from a smile.

“Well trained,” Audley continued in a whimsical tone, “fetches and
carries, barks at the name of Peel and growls at the name of Cobden,
gives up a stick when required, could be taught to beg—by the right
person.”

She laughed—she could not resist his manner. “But you are not very
kind,” she said. “Please to call a—whatever we need. He shall not do
everything.”

“Everything?” Lord Audley echoed. “He should do nothing,” in a lower
tone, “if I had my way.”

Mary blushed.




CHAPTER VI
FIELD AND FORGE


The window of the clumsy carriage was narrow, but Mary gazed through it
as if she could never see enough of the flying landscape, the fields,
the woods, the ivy-clad homes and red-roofed towns that passed in
procession before her. The emotions of those who journeyed for the
first time on a railway at a speed four times as great as that of the
swiftest High-flier that ever devoured the road are forgotten by this
generation. But they were vivid. The thing was a miracle. And though by
this time men had ceased to believe that he who passed through the air
at sixty miles an hour must of necessity cease to breathe, the novice
still felt that he could never tire of the panorama so swiftly unrolled
before him.

And it was not only wonder, it was admiration that held Mary chained to
the window. Her infancy had been spent in a drab London street, her
early youth in the heart of a Paris which was still gloomy and
mediæval. Some beautiful things she had seen on fête days, the bend of
the river at Meudon or St. Germain, and once the Forest of
Fontainebleau; on Sundays the Bois. But the smiling English meadows,
the gray towers of village churches, the parks and lawns of
manor-houses, the canals with their lines of painted barges, and here
and there a gay packet boat—she drank in the beauty of these, and more
than once her eyes grew dim. For a time Basset, seated in the opposite
corner, did not exist for her; while he, behind the _Morning
Chronicle_, made his observations and took note of her at his leisure.
The longer he looked the more he marvelled.

He asked himself with amusement what John Audley would think of her
when he, too, should see her. He anticipated the old man’s surprise on
finding her so remote from their preconceived ideas of her. He wondered
what she would think of John Audley.

And while he pondered, and now scanned his paper without reading it,
and now stole another glance at her, he steeled himself against her.
She might not have been to blame, it might not have been her fault;
but, between them, the two on the boat had put him in his place and he
could not forget it. He had cut a poor figure, and he resented it. He
foresaw that in the future she would be dependent on him for society,
and he would be a fool if he then forgot the lesson he had learned. She
had a good face, but probably her up-bringing had been anything but
good. Probably it had taught her to make the most of the moment and of
the man of the moment, and he would be foolish if he let her amuse
herself with him. He had seen in what light she viewed him when other
game was afoot, and he would deserve the worst if he did not remember
this.

Presently an embankment cut off the view, and she withdrew her eyes
from the window. In her turn she took the measure of her companion. It
seemed to her that his face was too thoughtful for his years, and that
his figure was insignificant. The eye which had accustomed itself to
Lord Audley’s port and air found Basset slight and almost mean. She
smiled as she recalled the skill with which my lord had set him aside
and made use of him.

Still, he was a part of the life to which she was hastening, and
curiosity stirred in her. He was in possession, he was in close
relations with her uncle, he knew many things which she was anxious to
know. Much of her comfort might depend on him. Presently she asked him
what her uncle was like.

“You will see for yourself in a few hours,” he replied, his tone cold
and almost ungracious. “Did not Lord Audley describe him?”

“No. And you seem,” with a faint smile, “to be equally on your guard,
Mr. Basset.”

“Not at all,” he retorted. “But I think it better to leave you to judge
for yourself. I have lived too near to Mr. Audley to—to criticise him.”

She colored.

“Let me give you one hint, however,” he continued in the same dry tone;
“you will be wise not to mention Lord Audley to him. They are not on
good terms.”

“I am sorry.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It cannot be said to be unnatural, after
what has happened.”

She considered this. “What has happened?” she asked after a pause.

“Well, the claim to the peerage, if nothing else——”

“What claim?” she asked. “Whose claim? What peerage? I am quite in the
dark.”

He stared. He did not believe her. “Your uncle’s claim,” he said
curtly. Then as she still looked a question, “You must know,” he
continued, “that your uncle claimed the title which Lord Audley bears,
and the property which goes with it. And that the decision was only
given against him three months ago.”

“I know nothing of it,” she said. “I never heard of the claim.”

“Really?” he replied. He hardly deigned to veil his incredulity. “Yet
if your uncle had succeeded you were the next heir.”

“I?”

“Yes, you.”

Then her face shook his unbelief. She turned slowly and painfully red.
“Is it possible?” she said. “You are not playing with me?”

“Certainly I am not. Do you mean that Lord Audley never told you that?
Never told you that you were interested?”

“Never! He only told me that he was not on good terms with my uncle,
and that for that reason he would leave me to learn the rest at the
Gatehouse.”

“Well, that was right,” Basset answered. “It is as well, since you have
to live with Mr. Audley, that you should not be prejudiced against
him.”

“No doubt,” she said dryly. “But I do not understand why he did not
answer my letters.”

“Did you write to him?”

“Twice.” She was going to explain the circumstances, but she refrained.
Why appeal to the sympathies of one who seemed so cold, so distant, so
indifferent?

“He cannot have had the letters,” Basset decided after a pause.

“Then how did he come to write to me at last?”

“Lord Audley sent your address to him.”

“Ah!” she said. “I supposed so.” With an air of finality she turned to
the window, and for some time she was silent. Her mind had much upon
which to work.

She was silent for so long that before more was said they were running
through the outskirts of Birmingham, and Mary awoke with a shock to
another and sadder side of England. In place of parks and homesteads
she saw the England of the workers—workers at that time exploited to
the utmost in pursuance of a theory of economy that heeded only the
wealth of nations, and placed on that wealth the narrowest meaning.
They passed across squalid streets, built in haste to meet the needs of
new factories, under tall chimneys the smoke of which darkened the sky
without hindrance, by vile courts, airless and almost sunless. They
looked down on sallow children whose only playground was the street and
whose only school-bell was the whistle that summoned them at dawn to
premature toil. Haggard women sat on doorsteps with puling babes in
their arms. Lines of men, whose pallor peered through the grime,
propped the walls, or gazed with apathy at the train. For a few minutes
Mary forgot not only her own hopes and fears, but the aloofness and
even the presence of her companion. When they came to a standstill in
the station, where they had to change on to the Grand Junction Railway,
Basset had to speak twice before she understood that he wished her to
leave the carriage.

“What a dreadful place!” she exclaimed.

“Well, it is not beautiful,” Basset admitted. “One does not look for
beauty in Birmingham and the Black Country.”

He got her some tea, and marshalled her carefully to the upper line.
But his answer had jarred upon her, and when they were again seated,
Mary kept her thoughts to herself. Beyond Birmingham their route
skirted towns rather than passed through them, but she saw enough to
deepen the impression which the lanes and alleys of that place had made
upon her. The sun had set and the cold evening light revealed in all
their meanness the rows of naked cottages, the heaps of slag and
cinders, the starveling horses that stood with hanging heads on the
dreary lands. As darkness fell, fires shone out here and there, and
threw into Dantesque relief the dark forms of half-naked men toiling
with fury to feed the flames. The change which an hour had made in all
she saw seemed appalling to the girl; it filled her with awe and
sadness. Here, so near the paradise of the country and the plough, was
the Inferno of the town, the forge, the pit! Here, in place of the
thatched cottage and the ruddy faces, were squalor and sunken cheeks
and misery and dearth.

She thought of the question which Lord Audley had raised twenty-four
hours before, and which he had told her was racking the minds of
men—should food be taxed? And she fancied that there was, there could
be, but one answer. These toiling masses, these slaves of the hammer
and the pick, must be fed, and, surely, so fed that a margin, however
small, however meagre, might be saved out of which to better their
sordid lot.

“We call this the Black Country,” Basset explained, feeling the silence
irksome. After all, she was in his charge, in a way she was his guest.
He ought to amuse her.

“It is well named,” she answered. “Is there anything in England worse
than this?”

“Well, round Hales Owen and Dudley,” he rejoined, “it may be worse. And
at Cradley Heath it may be rougher. More women and children are
employed in the pits; and where women make chains—well, it’s pretty
bad.”

She had spoken dryly to hide her feelings. He replied in a tone as
matter-of-fact, through lack of feeling. For this he was not so much to
blame as she fancied, for that which horrified her was to him an
everyday matter, one of the facts of life with which he had been
familiar from boyhood. But she did not understand this. She judged him
and condemned him. She did not speak again.

By and by, “We shall be at Penkridge in twenty minutes,” he said.
“After that a nine-miles drive will take us to the Gatehouse, and your
journey will be over. But I fear that you will find the life quiet
after Paris.”

“I was very quiet in Paris.”

“But you were in a large house.”

“I was at the Princess Czartoriski’s.”

“Of course. I suppose it was there that you met Lord Audley?”

“Yes.”

“Well, after that kind of life, I am afraid that the Gatehouse will
have few charms for you. It is very remote, very lonely.”

She cut him short with impatience, the color rising to her face. “I
thought you understood,” she said, “that I was in the Princess’s house
as a governess? It was my business to take care of a number of
children, to eat with them, to sleep with them, to see that they washed
their hands and kept their hair clean. That was my position, Mr.
Basset. I do not wish it to be misunderstood.”

“But if that were so,” he stammered, “how did you——”

“Meet Lord Audley,” she replied. “Very simply. Once or twice the
Princess ordered me to descend to the salon to interpret. On one of
these occasions Lord Audley saw me and learned—who I was.”

“Indeed,” he said. “I see.” Perhaps he had had it in his mind to test
her and the truth of Audley’s letter, which nothing in her or in my
lord’s conduct seemed to confirm. He did not know if this had been in
his mind, but in any case the result silenced him. She was either very
honest or very clever. Many girls, he knew, would have slurred over the
facts, and not a few would have boasted of the Princess’s friendship
and the Princess’s society, and the Princess’s hôtel, and brought up
her name a dozen times a day.

She is very clever, he thought, or she is—good. But for the moment he
steeled himself against the latter opinion.

No other travellers alighted at Penkridge, and he went away to claim
the baggage, while she waited, cold and depressed, on the little
platform which, lit by a single oil lamp, looked down on a dim
churchyard. Dusk was passing into night, and the wind, sweeping across
the flat, whipped her skirts and chilled her blood. Her courage sank. A
light or two betrayed the nearness of the town, but in every other
direction dull lines of willows or pale stretches of water ran into the
night.

Five minutes before she had resented Basset’s company, now she was glad
to see him return. He led the way to the road in silence. “The carriage
is late,” he muttered, but even as he spoke the quick tramp of a pair
of horses pushed to speed broke on them, lights appeared, a moment
later a fly pulled up beside them and turned. “You are late,” Basset
said.

“There!” the man replied. “Minutes might be guineas since trains came
in, dang ’em! Give me the days when five minutes made neither man nor
mouse, and gentry kept their own time.”

“Well, let us get off now.”

“I ask no better, Squire. Please yourself and you’ll please me.”

When they were shut in, Basset laughed. “Stafford manners!” he said.
“You’ll become used to them!”

“Is this my uncle’s carriage?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, smiling in the darkness. “He does not keep one.”

She said no more. Though she could not see him, her shoulder touched
his, and his nearness and the darkness in which they sat troubled her,
though she was not timid. They rode thus for a minute or two, then
trundled through a narrow street, dimly lit by shop windows; again they
were in the dark and the country. Presently the pace dropped to a walk
as they began to ascend.

She fancied, peering out on her side, that they were winding up through
woods. Branches swept the sides of the carriage. They jolted into ruts
and jolted out of them. By and by they were clear of the trees and the
road seemed to be better. The moon, newly risen, showed her a dreary
upland, bare and endless, here dotted with the dark stumps of trees,
there of a deeper black as if fire had swept over it and scarred it.
They met no one, saw no sign of habitation. To the girl, accustomed all
her life to streets and towns, the place seemed infinitely desolate—a
place of solitude and witches and terror and midnight murder.

“What is this?” she asked, shivering.

“This is the Great Chase,” he said. “Riddsley, on the farther side, is
our nearest town, but since the railway was opened we use Penkridge
Station.”

His practical tone steadied her, but she was tired, and the loneliness
which she had felt while she waited on the bleak platform weighed
heavily on her. To what was she going? How would her uncle receive her?
This dreary landscape, the gaunt signpost that looked like a gibbet and
might have been one, the skeleton trees that raised bare arms to
heaven, the scream of a dying rabbit, all added to the depression of
the moment. She was glad when at last the carriage stopped at a gate.
Basset alighted and opened the gate. He stepped in again, they went on.
There were now shadowy trees about them, sparsely set. They jolted
unevenly over turf.

“Are we there?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.

“Very nearly,” he said. “Another mile and we shall be there. This is
Beaudelays Park.”

She called pride to her aid, and he did not guess—for all day he had
marked her self-possession—that she was trembling. Vainly she told
herself that she was foolish, that nothing could happen to her, nothing
that mattered. What, after all, was a cold reception, what was her
uncle’s frown beside the poverty and the hazards from which she had
escaped? Vainly she reassured herself; she could not still the rapid
beating of her heart.

He might have said a word to cheer her. But he did not know that she
was suffering, and he said no word. She came near to hating him for his
stolidity and his silence. He was inhuman! A block!

She peered through the misty glass, striving to see what was before
them. But she could make out no more than the dark limbs of trees, and
now and then a trunk, which shone as the light of the lamp slipped over
it, and as quickly vanished. Suddenly they shot from turf to hard road,
passed through an open gateway, for an instant the lamp on her side
showed a grotesque pillar—they wheeled, they stopped. Within a few feet
of her a door stood open, and in the doorway a girl held a lantern
aloft in one hand, and with the other screened her eyes from the light.




CHAPTER VII
MR. JOHN AUDLEY


An hour later Basset was seated on one side of a wide hearth, on the
other John Audley faced him. The library in which they sat was the room
which Basset loved best in the world. It was a room of silence and
large spaces, and except where four windows, tall and narrow, broke one
wall, it was lined high with the companions of silence—books. The
ceiling was of black oak, adorned at the crossings of the joists and
beams with emblems, butterflies, and Stafford knots and the like, once
bright with color, and still soberly rich. A five-sided bay enlarged
each of the two inner corners of the room and broke the outlines. One
of these bays shrined a window, four-mullioned, the other a spiral
staircase. An air of comfort and stateliness pervaded the whole; here
the great scutcheon over the mantel, there the smaller coats on the
chair-backs blended their or and gules with the hues of old rugs and
the dun bindings of old folios. There were books on the four or five
tables, and books on the Cromwell chairs; and charts and deeds, antique
weapons and silver pieces, all the tools and toys of the antiquary, lay
broadcast. Against the door hung a blazoned pedigree of the Audleys of
Beaudelays. It was six feet long and dull with age.

But Basset, as he faced his companion, was not thinking of the room, or
of the pursuits with which it was connected in his mind, and which,
more than affection and habit, bound him to John Audley. He moved
restlessly in his chair, then stretched his legs to meet the glow of
the wood fire. “All the same,” he said, “I think you would have done
well to see her to-night, sir.”

“Pooh! pooh!” John Audley answered with lazy good humor. “Why? It
doesn’t matter what I think of her or she thinks of me. It’s what Peter
thinks of Mary and Mary thinks of Peter that matters. That’s what
matters!” He chuckled as he marked the other’s annoyance. “She is a
beauty, is she?”

“I didn’t say so.”

“But you think it. You don’t deceive me at this time of day. And
stand-off, is she? That’s for the marines and innocent young fellows
like you who think women angels. I’ll be bound that she’s her mother’s
daughter, and knows her value and will see that she fetches it! Trading
blood will out!”

To the eye that looked and glanced away John Audley, lolling in his
chair, in a quilted dressing-gown with silk facings, was a plump and
pleasant figure. His face was fresh-colored, and would have been comely
if the cheeks had not been a little pendulous. His hair was fine and
white and he wore it long, and his hands were shapely and well cared
for. As he said his last word he poured a little brandy into a glass
and filled it up with water. “Here’s to the wooing that’s not long
adoing!” he said, his eyes twinkling. He seemed to take a pleasure in
annoying the other.

He was so far successful that Basset swore softly. “It’s silly to talk
like that,” he said, “when I have hardly known the girl twenty-four
hours and have scarcely said ten times as many words to her.”

“But you’re going to say a good many more words to her!” Audley
retorted, grinning. “Sweet, pretty words, my boy! But there, there,” he
continued, veering between an elfish desire to tease and a desire
equally strong to bring the other to his way of thinking. “I’m only
joking. I know you’ll never let that devil have his way! You’ll never
leave the course open for _him!_ I know that. But there’s no hurry!
There’s no hurry. Though, lord, how I sweated when I read his letter! I
had never a wink of sleep the night after.”

“I don’t suppose that he’s given a thought to her in that way,” Basset
answered. “Why should he?”

John Audley leant forward, and his face underwent a remarkable change.
It became a pale, heavy mask, out of which his eyes gleamed, small and
malevolent. “Don’t talk like a fool!” he said harshly. “Of course he
means it. And if she’s fool enough all my plans, all my pains, all my
rights—and once you come to your senses and help me I shall have my
rights—all, all, all will go for nothing. For nothing!” He sank back in
his chair. “There! now you’ve excited me. You’ve excited me, and you
know that I can’t bear excitement!” His hand groped feebly for his
glass, and he raised it to his lips. He gasped once or twice. The color
came back to his face.

“I am sorry,” Basset said.

“Ay, ay. But be a good lad. Be a good lad. Make up your mind to help me
at the Great House.”

Basset shook his head.

“To help me, and twenty-four hours—only twenty-four hours, man—may make
all the difference! All the difference in the world to me.”

“I have told you my views about it,” Basset said doggedly. He shifted
uneasily in his chair. “I cannot do it, sir, and I won’t.”

John Audley groaned. “Well, well!” he answered. “I’ll say no more now.
I’ll say no more now. When you and she have made it up”—in vain Basset
shook his head—“you’ll see the question in another light. Ay, believe
me, you will. It’ll be your business then, and your interest, and
nothing venture, nothing win! You’ll see it differently. You’ll help
the old man to his rights then.”

Basset shrugged his shoulders, but thought it useless to protest. The
other sighed once or twice and was silent also. At length, “You never
told me that you had heard from her,” Basset said.

“That I’d——” John Audley broke off. “What is it, Toft?” he asked over
his shoulder.

A man-servant, tall, thin, lantern-jawed, had entered unseen. “I came
to see if you wanted anything more, sir?” he said.

“Nothing, nothing, Toft. Good-night!” He spoke impatiently, and he
watched the man out before he went on. Then, “Perhaps I heard from her,
perhaps I didn’t,” he said. “It’s some time ago. What of it?”

“She was in great distress when she wrote.”

John Audley raised his eyebrows. “What of it!” he repeated. “She was
that woman’s daughter. When Peter married a tradesman’s
daughter—married a——” He did not continue. His thoughts trickled away
into silence. The matter was not worthy of his attention.

But by and by he roused himself. “You’ve ridiculous scruples,” he said.
“Absurd scruples. But,” briskly, “there’s that much of good in this
girl that I think she’ll put an end to them. You must brighten up, my
lad, and spark it a little! You’re too grave.”

“Damn!” said Basset. “For God’s sake, don’t begin it all again. I’ve
told you that I’ve not the least intention——”

“She’ll see to that if she’s what I think her,” John Audley retorted
cheerfully. “If she’s her mother’s daughter! But very well, very well!
We’ll change the subject. I’ve been working at the Feathers—the
Prince’s Feathers.”

“Have you gone any farther?” Basset asked, forcing an interest which
would have been ready enough at another time.

“I might have, but I had a visitor.”

Visitors were rare at the Gatehouse, and Basset wondered. “Who was it?”
he asked.

“Bagenal the maltster from Riddsley. He came about some political
rubbish. Some trouble they are having with Mottisfont. D—n Mottisfont!
What do I care about him? They think he isn’t running straight—that
he’s going in for corn-law repeal. And Bagenal and the other fools
think that that will be the ruin of the town.”

“But Mottisfont is a Tory,” Basset objected.

“So is Peel. They are both in Bagenal’s bad books. Bagenal is sure that
Peel is going back to the cotton people he came from. Spinning Jenny
spinning round again!”

“I see.”

“I asked him,” Audley continued, rubbing his knees with sly enjoyment,
“what Stubbs the lawyer was doing about it. He’s the party manager. Why
didn’t he come to me?”

Basset smiled. “What did he say to that?”

“Hummed and hawed. At last he said that owing to Stubbs’s connection
with—you know who—it was thought that he was not the right person to
come to me. So I asked him what Stubbs’s employer was going to do about
it.”

“Ah!”

“He didn’t know what to say to that, the ass! Thought I should go the
other way, you see. So I told him”—John Audley laughed maliciously as
he spoke—“that, for the landed interest, the law had taken away my
land, and, for politics, I would not give a d—n for either party in a
country where men did not get their rights! Lord! how he looked!”

“Well, you didn’t hide your feelings.”

“Why should I?” John Audley asked cheerfully. “What will they do for
me? Nothing. Will they move a finger to right me? No. Then a plague on
both their houses!” He snapped his fingers in schoolboy fashion and
rose to his feet. He lit a candle, taking a light from the fire with a
spill. “I am going to bed now, Peter. Unless——” he paused, the
candlestick in his hand, and gazed fixedly at his companion. “Lord,
man, what we could do in two or three hours! In two or three hours.
This very night!”

“I’ve told you that I will have nothing to do with it!” Basset
repeated.

John Audley sighed, and removing his eyes, poked the wick of the candle
with the snuffers. “Well,” he said, “good-night. We must look to bright
eyes and red lips to convert you. What a man won’t do for another he
will do for himself, Peter. Good-night.”

Left alone, Basset stared fretfully at the fire. It was not the first
time by scores that John Audley had tried him and driven him almost
beyond bearing. But habit is a strong tie, and a common taste is a bond
even stronger. In this room, and from the elder man, Basset had learned
to trace a genealogy, to read a coat, to know a bar from a bend, to
discourse of badges and collars under the guidance of the learned
Anstie or the ingenious Le Neve. There he had spent hours flitting from
book to book and chart to chart in the pursuit, as thrilling while it
lasted as any fox-chase, of some family link, the origin of this, the
end of that, a thing of value only to those who sought it, but to them
all-important. He could recall many a day so spent while rain lashed
the tall mullioned windows or sunlight flooded the window-seat in the
bay; and these days had endeared to him every nook in the library from
the folio shelves in the shadowy corner under the staircase to the
cosey table near the hearth which was called “Mr. Basset’s,” and
enshrined in a long drawer a tree of the Bassets of Blore.

For he as well as Audley came of an ancient and shrunken stock. He also
could count among his forbears men who had fought at Blore Heath and
Towton, or had escaped by a neck from the ruin of the Gunpowder Plot.
So he had fallen early under the spell of the elder man’s pursuits,
and, still young, had learned from him to live in the past. Later the
romantic solitude of the Gatehouse, where he had spent more of the last
six years than in his own house at Blore, had confirmed him in the
habit.

Under the surface, however, the two men remained singularly unlike.
While a fixed idea had narrowed John Audley’s vision to the inhuman,
the younger man, under a dry and reserved exterior—he was shy, and his
undrained acres, his twelve hundred a year, poorly supported an ancient
name—was not only human, but in his way was something of an idealist.
He dreamed dreams, he had his secret aspirations, at times ambition of
the higher kind stirred in him, he planned plans and another life than
this. But always—this was a thing inbred in him—he put forward the
commonplace, as the cuttle-fish sheds ink, and hid nothing so shyly as
the visions which he had done nothing to make real. On those about him
he made no deep impression, though from one border of Staffordshire to
the other his birth won respect. Politics viewed as a game, and a
selfish game, had no attraction for him. Quarter Sessions and the Bench
struck no spark from him. At the Races and the County Ball richer men
outshone him. But given something to touch his heart and fire his
ambition, he had qualities. He might still show himself in another
light.

Something of this, for no reason that he could imagine, some feeling of
regret for past opportunities, passed through his mind as he sat
fretting over John Audley’s folly. But after a time he roused himself
and became aware that he was tired; and he rose and lit a candle. He
pushed back the smouldering logs and slowly and methodically he put out
the lights. He gave a last thought to John Audley. “There was always
one maggot in his head,” he muttered, “now there’s a second. What I
would not do to please him, he thinks I shall do to please another!
Well, he does not know her yet!”

He went to bed.




CHAPTER VIII
THE GATEHOUSE


It is within the bounds of imagination that death may make no greater
change in our inner selves than is wrought at times by a new mood or
another outlook. When Mary, an hour before the world was astir on the
morning after her arrival, let herself out of the Gatehouse, and from
its threshold as from a ledge saw the broad valley of the Trent
stretched before her in all the beauty of a May morning, her alarm of
the past night seemed incredible. At her feet a sharp slope, clothed in
gorse and shrub, fell away to meet the plain. It sank no more than a
couple of hundred feet, but this was enough to enable her to follow the
silver streak of the river winding afar between park and coppice and
under many a church tower. Away to the right she could see the three
graceful spires of Lichfield, and southward, where an opal haze closed
the prospect, she could imagine the fringe of the Black Country, made
beautiful by distance.

In sober fact few parts of England are less inviting than the low lands
of Staffordshire, when the spring floods cover them or the fogs of
autumn cling to the cold soil. But in spring, when larks soar above
them and tall, lop-sided elms outline the fields, they have their
beauty; and Mary gazed long at the fair prospect before she turned her
back on it and looked at the house that was fated to be her home.

It was what its name signified, a gatehouse; yet by turns it could be a
sombre and a charming thing. Some Audley of noble ideas, a man long
dead, had built it to be the entrance to his demesne. The park wall,
overhung by trees, still ran right and left from it, but the road which
had once passed through the archway now slid humbly aside and entered
the park by a field gate. A wide-latticed Tudor tower, rising two
stories above the arch and turreted at the four corners, formed the
middle. It was buttressed on either hand by a lower building, flush
with it and of about the same width. The tower was of yellowish stone,
the wings were faced with stained stucco. Right and left of the whole a
plot of shrubs masked on the one hand the stables, on the other the
kitchens—modern blocks set back to such a distance that each touched
the old part at a corner only.

He who had planned the building had set it cunningly on the brow of the
Great Chase, so that, viewed from the vale, it rose against the
skyline. On dark days it broke the fringe of woodland and stood up,
gloomy and forbidding, the portal of a Doubting Castle. On bright days,
with its hundred diamond panes a-glitter in the sunshine, it seemed to
be the porch of a fairy palace, the silent home of some Sleeping
Beauty. At all times it imposed itself upon men below and spoke of
something beyond, something unseen, greater, mysterious.

To Mary Audley, who saw it at its best, the very stains of the plaster
glorified by the morning light, it was a thing of joy. She fancied that
to live behind those ancient mullioned windows, to look out morning and
evening on that spacious landscape, to feel the bustle of the world so
remote, must in itself be happiness. For a time she could not turn from
it.

But presently the desire to explore her new surroundings seized her and
she re-entered the house. A glance at the groined roof of the hall—many
a gallant horseman had ridden under it in his time—proved that it was
merely the archway closed and fitted with a small door and window at
either end. She unlocked the farther door and passed into a paved
court, in which the grass grew between the worn flags. In the stables
on the left a dog whined. The kitchens were on the other hand, and
before her an opening flanked by tall heraldic beasts broke a low wall,
built of moss-grown brick. She ventured through it and uttered a cry of
delight.

Near at hand, under cover of a vast chestnut tree, were traces of
domestic labor: a grindstone, a saw-pit, a woodpile, coops with
clucking hens. But beyond these the sward, faintly lined at first with
ruts, stretched away into forest glades, bordered here by giant oaks
brown in bud, there by the yellowish-green of beech trees. In the
foreground lay patches of gorse, and in places an ancient thorn, riven
and half prostrate, crowned the russet of last year’s bracken with a
splash of cream. Heedless of the spectator, rabbits sat making their
toilet, and from every brake birds filled the air with a riot of song.

To one who had seen little but the streets of Paris, more sordid then
than now, the scene was charming. Mary’s eyes filled, her heart
swelled. Ah, what a home was here! She had espied on her journey many a
nook and sheltered dell, but nothing that could vie with this! Heedless
of her thin shoes, with no more than a handkerchief on her head, she
strayed on and on. By and by a track, faintly marked, led her to the
left. A little farther, and old trees fell into line on either hand, as
if in days long gone, before age thinned their ranks, they had formed
an avenue.

For a time she sat musing on a fallen trunk, then the hawthorn that a
few paces away perfumed the spring air moved her to gather an armful of
it. She forgot that time was passing, almost she forgot that she had
not breakfasted, and she might have been nearly a mile from the
Gatehouse when she was startled by a faint hail that seemed to come
from behind her. She looked back and saw Basset coming after her.

He, too, was hatless—he had set off in haste—and he was out of breath.
She turned with concern to meet him. “Am I very late, Mr. Basset?” she
asked, her conscience pricking her. What if this first morning she had
broken the rules?

“Oh no,” he said. And then, “You’ve not been farther than this?”

“No. I am afraid my uncle is waiting?”

“Oh no. He breakfasts in his own room. But Etruria told me that you had
gone this way, and I followed. I see that you are not empty-handed.”

“No.” And she thrust the great bunch of may under his nose—who would
not have been gay, who would not have lost her reserve in such a scene,
on such a morning? “Isn’t it fresh? Isn’t it delicious?”

As he stooped to the flowers his eyes met hers smiling through the
hawthorn sprays, and he saw her as he had not seen her before. Her
gravity had left her. Spring laughed in her eyes, youth fluttered in
the tendrils of her hair, she was the soul of May. And what she had
found of beauty in the woodland, of music in the larks’ songs, of
perfume in the blossoms, of freshness in the morning, the man found in
her; and a shock, never to be forgotten, ran through him. He did not
speak. He smelled the hawthorn in silence.

But a few seconds later—as men reckon time—he took note of his
feelings, and he was startled. He had not been prepared to like her, we
know; many things had armed him against her. But before the witchery of
her morning face, the challenge of her laughing eyes, he awoke to the
fact that he was in danger. He had to own that if he must live beside
her day by day and would maintain his indifference, he must steel
himself. He must keep his first impressions of her always before him,
and be careful. And be very careful—if even that might avail.

For a hundred paces he walked at her side, listening without knowing
what she said. Then his coolness returned, and when she asked him why
he had come after her without his hat he was ready.

“I had better tell you,” he answered, “this path is little used. It
leads to the Great House, and your uncle, owing to his quarrel with
Lord Audley, does not like any one to go farther in that direction than
the Yew Tree Walk. You can see the Walk from here—the yews mark the
entrance to the gardens. I thought that it would be unfortunate if you
began by displeasing him, and I came after you.”

“It was very good of you,” she said. Her face was not gay now. “Does
Lord Audley live there—when he is at home?”

“No one lives there,” he explained soberly. “No one has lived there for
three generations. It’s a ruin—I was going to say, a nightmare. The
greater part of the house was burnt down in a carouse held to celebrate
the accession of George the Third. The Audley of that day rebuilt it on
a great scale, but before it was finished he gave a housewarming, at
which his only son quarrelled with a guest. The two fought at daybreak,
and the son was killed beside the old Butterfly in the Yew Walk—you
will see the spot some day. The father sent away the builders and never
looked up again. He diverted much of his property, and a cousin came
into the remainder and the title, but the house was never finished, the
windows in the new part were never glazed. In the old part some
furniture and tapestry decay; in the new are only bats and dust and
owls. So it has stood for eighty years, vacant in the midst of
neglected gardens. In the sunlight it is one of the most dreary things
you can imagine. By moonlight it is better, but unspeakably
melancholy.”

“How dreadful,” she said in a low voice. “I almost wish, Mr. Basset,
that you had not told me. They say in France that if you see the dead
without touching them, you dream of them. I feel like that about the
house.”

It crossed his mind that she was talking for effect. “It is only a
house after all,” he said.

“But our house,” with a touch of pride. Then, “What are those?” she
asked, pointing to the gray shapeless beasts, time-worn and
weather-stained, that flanked the entrance to the courtyard.

“They are, or once were, Butterflies, the badge of the Audleys. These
hold shields. You will see the Butterflies in many places in the
Gatehouse. You will find them with men’s faces and sometimes with a
fret on the wings. Your uncle says that they are not butterflies, but
moths, that have eaten the Audley fortunes.”

It was a thought that matched the picture he had drawn of the deserted
house, and Mary felt that the morning had lost its brightness. But not
for long. Basset led her into a room on the right of the hall, and the
sight drew from her a cry of pleasure. On three sides the dark wainscot
rose eight feet from the floor; above, the walls were whitewashed to
the ceiling and broken by dim portraits, on stretchers and without
frames. On the fourth side where the panelling divided the room from a
serving-room, once part of it, it rose to the ceiling. The stone
hearth, the iron dogs, the matted floor, the heavy chairs and oak
table, all were dark and plain and increased the austerity of the room.

At the end of the table places were laid for three, and Toft, who had
set on the breakfast, was fixing the kettle amid the burning logs.

“Is Mr. Audley coming down?” Basset asked.

“He bade me lay for him,” Toft replied dryly. “I doubt if he will come.
You had better begin, sir. The young lady,” with a searching look at
her, “must want her breakfast.”

“I am afraid I do,” Mary confessed.

“Yes, we will begin,” Basset said. He invited her to make the tea.

When they were seated, “You like the room?”

“I love it,” she answered.

“So do I,” he rejoined, more soberly. “The panelling is linen—pattern
of the fifteenth century—you see the folds? It was saved from the old
house. I am glad you like it.”

“I love it,” she said again. But after that she grew thoughtful, and
during the rest of the meal she said little. She was thinking of what
was before her; of the unknown uncle, whose bread she was eating, and
upon whom she was going to be dependent. What would he be like? How
would he receive her? And why was every one so reticent about him—so
reticent that he was beginning to be something of an ogre to her? When
Toft presently appeared and said that Mr. Audley was in the library and
would see her when she was ready, she lost color. But she answered the
man with self-possession, asked quietly where the library was, and had
not Basset’s eyes been on her face he would have had no notion that she
was troubled.

As it was, he waited for her to avow her misgiving—he was prepared to
encourage her. But she said nothing.

None the less, at the last moment, with her hand on the door of the
library, she hesitated. It was not so much fear of the unknown relative
whom she was going to see that drove the blood from her cheek, as the
knowledge that for her everything depended upon him. Her new home, its
peace, its age, its woodland surroundings, fascinated her. It promised
her not only content, but happiness. But as her stay in it hung upon
John Audley’s will, so her pleasure in it, and her enjoyment of it,
depended upon the relations between them. What would they be? How would
he receive her? What would he be like? At last she called up her
courage, turned the handle, and entered the library.

For a moment she saw no one. The great room, with its distances and its
harmonious litter, appeared to be empty. Then, “Mary, my dear,” said a
pleasant voice, “welcome to the Gatehouse!” And John Audley rose from
his seat at a distant table and came towards her.

The notion which she had formed of him vanished in a twinkling, and
with it her fears. She saw before her an elderly gentleman, plump and
kindly, who walked with a short tripping step, and wore the
swallow-tailed coat with gilt buttons which the frock-coat had
displaced. He took her hand with a smile, kissed her on the forehead,
and led her to a chair placed beside his own. He sat for a moment
holding her hand and looking at her.

“Yes, I see the likeness,” he said, after a moment’s contemplation.
“But, my dear, how is this? There are tears in your eyes, and you
tremble.”

“I think,” she said, “I was a little afraid of you, sir.”

“Well, you are not afraid now,” he replied cheerfully. “And you won’t
be again. You won’t be again. My dear, welcome once more to the
Gatehouse. I hope that it may be your home until another is offered
you. Things came between your father and me—I shall never mention them
again, and don’t you, my dear!”—this a little hurriedly—“don’t you; all
that is buried now, and I must make it up to you. Your letters?” he
continued, patting her hand. “Yes, Peter told me that you wrote to me.
I need not say that I never had them. No, never had them—Toft, what is
it?”

The change in his voice struck her. The servant had come in quietly.
“Mr. Basset, sir, has lost——”

“Another time!” John Audley replied curtly. “Another time! I am engaged
now. Go!” Then when the door had closed behind the servant, “No, my
dear,” he continued, “I need not say that I never had them, so that I
first heard of your troubles through a channel upon which I will not
dwell. However, many good things come by bad ways, Mary. I hope you
like the Gatehouse?”

“It is charming!” she cried with enthusiasm.

“It has only one drawback,” he said.

She was clever enough to understand that he referred to its owner, and
to escape from the subject. “This room,” she said, “is perfection. I
have never seen anything like it, sir.”

“It is a pleasant room,” he said, looking round him. “There is our coat
over the mantel, gules, a fret or; like all old coats, very simple.
Some think it is the Lacy Knot; the Audley of Edward the First’s time
married a Lacy. But we bore our old coat of three Butterflies later
than that, for before the fall of Roger Mortimer, who was hung at
Tyburn, he married his daughter to an Audley, and the escheaters found
the wedding chamber in his house furnished with our Butterflies. Later
the Butterfly survived as our badge. You see it there!” he continued,
pointing it out among the mouldings of the ceiling. “There is the
Stafford Knot, the badge of the great Dukes of Buckingham, the noblest
of English families; it is said that the last of the line, a cobbler,
died at Newport, not twenty miles from here. We intermarried with them,
and through them with Peter’s people, the Bassets. That is the Lovel
Wolf, and there is the White Wolf of the Mortimers—all badges. But you
do not know, I suppose, what a badge is?”

“I am afraid not,” she said, smiling. “But I am as proud of our
Butterfly, and as proud to be an Audley, sir, as if I knew more.”

“Peter must give you some lessons in heraldry,” he answered. “We live
in the past here, my dear, and we must indoctrinate you with a love of
our pursuits or you will be dull.” He paused to consider. “I am afraid
that we cannot allot you a drawing-room, but you must make your room
upstairs as comfortable as you can. Etruria will see to that. And Peter
shall arrange a table for you in the south bay here, and it shall be
your table and your bay. That is his table; this is mine. We are
orderly, and so we do not get in one another’s way.”

She thanked him gratefully, and with tears in her eyes, she said
something to which he would not listen—he only patted her hand—as to
his kindness, his great kindness, in receiving her. She could not,
indeed, put her relief into words, so deep was it. Nowhere, she felt,
could life be more peaceful or more calm than in this room which no
sounds of the outer world except the songs of birds, no sights save the
swaying of branches disturbed; where the blazoned panes cast their
azure and argent on lines of russet books, where an aged hound sprawled
before the embers, and the measured tick of the clock alone vied with
the scratching of the pen. She saw herself seated there during drowsy
summer days, or when firelight cheered the winter evenings. She saw
herself sewing beside the hearth while her companions worked, each
within his circle of light.

Then, she also was an Audley. She also had her share in the race which
had lived long on this spot. Already she was fired with the desire to
know more of them, and that flame John Audley was well fitted to fan.
For he was not of the school of dry-as-dust antiquaries. He had the
knack of choosing the picturesque in story, he could make it stand out
for others, he could impart life to the actors in it. And, anxious to
captivate Mary, he bent himself for nearly an hour to the display of
his knowledge. Taking for his text one or other of the objects about
him, he told her of great castles, from which England had been ruled,
and through which the choicest life of the country had passed, that now
were piles of sherds clothed with nettles. He told her of that woodland
country on the borders of three counties, where the papists had long
lived undisturbed and where the Gunpowder Plot had had its centre. He
told her of the fashion which came in with Richard the Second, of
adorning the clothes with initials, reading and writing having become
for the first time courtly accomplishments; and to illustrate this he
showed her the Westminster portrait of Richard in a robe embroidered
with letters of R. He quoted Chaucer:


And thereon hung a broch of gold ful schene
On which was first i-written a crowned A
And after that, Amor vincit omnia.


Then, turning his back on her, he produced from some secret place a
key, and opening a masked cupboard in the wall, he held out for her
inspection a small bowl, bent and mis-shapen by use, and supported by
two fragile butterflies. The whole was of silver so thin that to modern
eyes it seemed trivial. Traces of gilding lingered about some parts of
it, and on each of the wings of the butterflies was a capital A.

She was charmed. “Of all your illustrations,” she cried, “I prefer this
one! It is very old, I suppose?”

“It is of the fifteenth century,” he said, turning it about. “We
believe that it was made for the Audley who fell early in the Wars of
the Roses. Pages and knights, maids and matrons, gloves of silk and
gloves of mail, wrinkled palms and babies’ fingers, the men, the women,
the children of twelve generations of our race, my dear, have handled
this. Once, according to an old inventory, there were six; this one
alone remains.”

“It must be very rare?” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“It is very rare,” he said, and he handled it as if he loved it. He had
not once allowed it to go out of his fingers. “Very rare. I doubt if,
apart from the City Companies, there is another in the hands of the
original owners.”

“And it came to you by descent, sir?”

He paused in the act of returning it to its hiding-place. “Yes, that is
how it came to me,” he said in a muffled tone. But he seemed to be a
long time putting it away; and when he turned with the key in his hand
his face was altered, and he looked at her—well, had she done anything
to anger him, she would have thought he was angry. “To whom besides me
could it descend!” he asked, his voice raised a tone. “But there, I
must not grow excited. I think—I think you had better go now. Go, my
dear, now. But come back presently.”

Mary went. But the change in tone and face had been such as to startle
her and to dash the happy mood of a few moments earlier. She wondered
what she had said to annoy him.




CHAPTER IX
OLD THINGS


The Gatehouse, placed on the verge of the upland, was very solitary.
Cut off from the vale by an ascent which the coachmen of the great
deemed too rough for their horses, it was isolated on the other three
sides by Beaudelays Park and by the Great Chase, which flung its barren
moors over many miles of table-land. In the course of the famous suit
John Audley had added to the solitude of the house by a smiling
aloofness which gave no quarter to those who agreed with his rival. The
result was that when Mary came to live there, few young people would
have found the Gatehouse a lively abode.

But to Mary during the quiet weeks that followed her arrival it seemed
a paradise. She spent long hours in the open air, now seated on a
fallen trunk in some glade of the park, now watching the squirrels in
the clear gloom of the beech-wood, or again, lying at length on the
carpet of thyme and heather that clothed the moor. She came to know by
heart every path through the park—except that which led to the Great
House; she discovered where the foxgloves clustered, where the
meadow-sweet fringed the runlet, where the rare bog-bean warned the
traveller to look to his footing. Even the Great Chase she came to
know, and almost daily she walked to a point beyond the park whence she
could see the distant smoke of a mining village. That was the one sign
of life on the Chase; elsewhere it stretched vast and unpeopled, sombre
under a livid sky, smiling in sunshine, here purple with ling, there
scarred by fire—always wide under a wide heaven, raised high above the
common world. Now and again she met a shepherd or saw a gig, lessened
by distance, making its slow way along a moorland track. But for days
together she might wander there without seeing a human being.

The wide horizon became as dear to her as the greenwood. Pent as she
had been in cities, straitened in mean rooms where sight and smell had
alike been outraged, she revelled in this sweet and open life. The hum
of bees, the scent of pines, the flight of the ousel down the water,
the whistle of the curlew, all were to her pleasures as vivid as they
were new.

Meantime Basset made no attempt to share her excursions. He was
fighting a battle with himself, and he knew better than to go out of
his way to aid the enemy. And for her part she did not miss him. She
did not dislike him, but the interest he excited in her was feeble. The
thought of comparing him with Lord Audley, with the man to whose
intervention she owed this home, this peace, this content, never
occurred to her. Of Audley she did think as much perhaps as was
prudent, sometimes with pensive gratitude, more rarely with a smile and
a blush at her folly in dwelling on him. For always she thought of him
as one, high and remote, whom it was not probable that she would ever
see again, one whose course through life lay far from hers.

Presently, it is not to be denied, Basset began to grow upon her. He
was there. He was part of her life. Morning and evening she had to do
with him. Often she read or sewed in the same room with him, and in
many small ways he added to her comfort. Sometimes he suggested things
which would please her uncle; sometimes he warned her of things which
she would do well to avoid. Once or twice he diverted to himself a
spirt of John Audley’s uncertain temper; and though Mary did not always
detect the manœuvre, though she was far from suspecting the extent of
his vigilance or the care which he cast about her, it would have been
odd if she had not come to think more kindly of him, and to see merits
in him which had escaped her at first.

Meanwhile he thought of her with mingled feelings. At first with
doubt—it was never out of his mind that she had made much of Lord
Audley and little of him. Then with admiration which he withstood more
feebly as time went on, and the cloven hoof failed to appear. Later,
with tenderness, which, hating the scheme John Audley had formed, he
masked even from himself, and which he was sure that he would never
have the courage to express in her presence.

For Basset was conscious that, aspire as he might, he was not a hero.
The clash of life, the shock of battle, had no attraction for him. The
library at the Gatehouse was, he owned it frankly, his true sphere.
She, on the other hand, had had experiences. She had sailed through
unknown seas, she had led a life strange to him. She had seen much,
done much, suffered much, had held her own among strangers. Before her
calmness and self-possession he humbled himself. He veiled his head.

He did not attempt, therefore, to accompany her abroad, but at home he
had no choice save to see much of her. There was only one living room
for all, and she glided with surprising ease into the current of the
men’s occupations. At first she was astray on the sea of books. Her
knowledge was not sufficient to supply chart or compass, and it fell to
Basset to point the way, to choose her reading, to set in a proper
light John Audley’s vivid pictures of the past, to teach her the
elements of heraldry and genealogy. She proved, however, an apt
scholar, and very soon she dropped into the position of her uncle’s
secretary. Sometimes she copied his notes, at other times he set her on
the track of a fact, a relationship, a quotation, and she would spend
hours in a corner, embedded in huge tomes of the county histories.
Dugdale, Leland, Hall, even Polydore Vergil, became her friends. She
pored over the Paston Letters, probed the false pedigrees of Banks, and
could soon work out for herself the famous discovery respecting the
last Lovel.

For a young girl it was an odd pursuit. But the past was in the
atmosphere of the house, it went with the fortunes of a race whose
importance lay in days long gone. Then all was new to her, enthusiasm
is easily caught, and Mary, eager to please her uncle, was glad to be
of use. She found the work restful after the suspense of the past year.
It sufficed for the present, and she asked no more.

She never forgot the lamplit evenings of that summer; the spacious
room, the fluttering of the moths that entered by the open windows, the
flop of the old dog as it sought a cooler spot, the whisper of leaves
turned ceaselessly in the pursuit of a fact or a fancy. In the
retrospect all became less a picture than a frame containing a past
world, a fifteenth-century world of color and movement, of rooms
stifled in hangings and tapestries, of lines of spear-points and rows
of knights in surcoats, of tolling bells and praying monks, of
travellers kneeling before wayside shrines, of strange changes of
fortune. For says the chronicler:

“I saw one of them, who was Duke of Exeter (but he concealed his name)
following the Duke of Burgundy’s train barefoot and bare-legged,
begging his bread from door to door—this person was the next of the
House of Lancaster and had married King Edward’s sister.”

And of dark sayings:

“Thys sayde Edward, Duke of Somerset, had herde a fantastyk prophecy
that he sholde dy under a Castelle, wherefore he, as meche as in him
was, he lete the King that he sholde not come in the Castelle of
Wynsore, dredynge the sayde prophecy; but at Seint Albonys there was an
hostelry havyng the sygne of a Castelle, and before that hostelry he
was slayne.”

“His badge was a Portcullis,” her uncle said, when she read this to
him, “so it was natural that he should fall before a castle. He used
the Beanstalk, too, and if his name had been John, a pretty thing might
have been raised upon it. But you’re divagating, my dear,” he
continued, smiling—and seldom had Mary seen him in a better
humor—“you’re divagating, whereas I—I believe that I have solved the
problem of the Feathers.”

“The Prince of Wales’s? No!”

“I believe so. Of course there is no truth in the story which traces
them to the blind King of Bohemia, killed at Crécy. His crest was two
vulture wings.”

“But what of Arderne, who was the Prince’s surgeon?” Basset objected.
“He says clearly that the Prince gained it from the King of Bohemia.”

“Not at all!” John Audley replied arrogantly—at this moment he was an
antiquary and nothing more. “Where is the Arderne extract? Listen.
‘Edward, son of Edward the King, used to wear such a feather, and
gained that feather from the King of Bohemia, whom he slew at Crécy,
and so assumed to himself that feather which is called an ostrich
feather which the first-named most illustrious King, used to wear on
his crest.’ Now who was the first-named most illustrious King, who
before that used to wear it?”

“The King of Bohemia.”

“Rubbish! Arderne means his own King, ‘Edward the King.’ He means that
the Black Prince, after winning his spurs by his victory over the
Bohemian, took his father’s insignia. He had only been knighted six
weeks and waited to wear his father’s crest until he had earned it.”

“By Jove, sir!” Basset exclaimed, “I believe you are right!”

“Of course I am! The evidence is all that way. The Black Prince’s
brothers wore it; surely not because their brother had done something,
but because it was their father’s crest, probably derived from their
mother, Philippa of Hainault? If you will look in the inventory of
jewels made on the usurpation of Henry the Fourth you will see this
item, ‘A collar of the livery of the Queen, on whom God have mercy,
with an ostrich.’”

“But that,” Basset interposed, “was Queen Anne of Bohemia—she died
seven years before. There you get Bohemia again!”

“Compare this other entry,” replied the antiquary, unmoved: “‘A collar
of the livery of Queen Anne, of branches of rosemary.’ Now either Queen
Anne of Bohemia had two liveries—which is unlikely—or the inventory
made by order of Henry IV. quotes verbatim from lists made during the
lifetime of Queen Anne; if this be the case, the last deceased Queen,
on whom God have mercy, would be Philippa of Hainault; and we have here
a clear statement that her livery was an ostrich, of which ostrich her
husband wore a feather on his crest.”

Basset clapped his hands. Mary beat applause on the table. “Hurrah!”
she cried. “Audley for ever!”

“Miss Audley,” Basset said, “Toft shall bring in hot water, and we will
have punch!”

“Miss Audley!” her uncle exclaimed, with a wrinkling nose. “Why don’t
you call her Mary? And why, child, don’t you call him Peter?”

Mary curtseyed. “Why not, my lord?” she said. “Peter it shall be—Peter
who keeps the keys that you discover!”

And Peter laughed. But he saw that she used his name without a blush or
a tremor, whereas he knew that if he could force his lips to frame her
name, the word would betray him. For by this time, from his seat at his
remote table, and from the ambush of his book, he had watched her too
often for his peace, and too closely not to know that she was
indifferent to him. He knew that at the best she felt a liking for him,
the growth of habit, and tinged, he feared, with contempt.

He was so far right that there were three persons in the house who had
a larger share of the girl’s thoughts than he had. The first was John
Audley. He puzzled her. There were times when she could not doubt his
affection, times when he seemed all that she could desire, kind,
good-humored, frank, engaged with the simplicity of a child in innocent
pursuits, and without one thought beyond them. But touch a certain
spot, approach with steps ever so delicate a certain subject—Lord
Audley and his title—and his manner changed, the very man changed, he
became secretive, suspicious, menacing. Nor, however quickly she might
withdraw from the danger-line, could the harm be undone at once. He
would remain for hours gloomy and thoughtful, would eye her covertly
and with suspicion, would sit silent through meals, and at times mutter
to himself. More rarely he would turn on her with a face which rage
made inhuman, a face that she did not know, and with a shaking hand he
would bid her go—go, and leave the room!

The first time that this happened she feared that he might follow up
his words by sending her away. But nothing ensued, then or later. For a
while after each outburst he would appear ill at ease. He would avoid
her eyes, and look away from her in a manner almost as unpleasant as
his violence; later, in a shamefaced way, he would tell her that she
must not excite him, she must not excite him, it was bad for him. And
the man-servant meeting her in the hall, would take the liberty of
giving her the same advice.

Toft, indeed, was the second who puzzled her. He was civil, with the
civility of the trained servant, but always there was in his manner a
reserve. And she fancied that he watched her. If she left the house and
glanced back she was certain to see his face at a window, or his figure
in a doorway. Within doors it was the same. He slept out, living with
his wife in the kitchen wing, which had a separate entrance from the
courtyard. But he was everywhere at all hours. Even his master appeared
uneasy in his presence, and either broke off what he was saying when
the man entered, or continued the talk on another note. More rarely he
turned on Toft and without rhyme or reason would ask him harshly what
he wanted.

The third person to share Mary’s thoughts, but after a more pleasant
fashion, was Toft’s daughter, Etruria. “I hope you will like her, my
dear,” John Audley had said. “She will give you such attendance as you
require, and will share the south wing with you at night. The two
bedrooms there are on a separate staircase. I sleep above the library
in this wing, and Peter in the tower room—we have our own staircase. I
have brought her into the house because I thought you might not like to
sleep alone in that wing.”

Mary had thanked him, and had said how much she liked the girl. And she
had liked her, but for a time she had not understood her. Etruria was
all that was good and almost all that was beautiful. She was simple,
kindly, helpful, having the wide low brow, the placid eyes, and perfect
complexion of a Quaker girl—and to add to these attractions she was
finely shaped, though rather plump than slender; and she was incredibly
neat. Nor could any Quaker girl have been more gentle or more demure.

But she might have had no tongue, she was so loth to use it; and a
hundred times Mary wondered what was behind that reticence. Sometimes
she thought that the girl was merely stupid. Sometimes she yoked her
with her father in the suspicions she entertained of him. More often,
moved by the girl’s meek eyes, she felt only a vague irritation. She
was herself calm by nature, and reserved by training, the last to
gossip with a servant, even with one whose refinement appeared innate.
But Etruria’s dumbness was beyond her.

One day in a research which she was making she fancied that she had hit
on a discovery. It happened that Etruria came into the room at the
moment, and in the fulness of her heart Mary told her of it. “Etruria,”
she said, “I’ve made a discovery all by myself.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Something that no one has known for hundreds of years! Think of that!”

“Indeed, Miss.”

Provoked, Mary took a new line. “Etruria,” she asked, “are you happy?”

The girl did not answer.

“Don’t you hear me? I asked if you were happy.”

“I am content, Miss.”

“I did not ask that. Are you happy?”

And then, moved on her side, perhaps, by an impulse towards confidence,
Etruria yielded. “I don’t think that we can any of us be happy, Miss,”
she said, “with so much sorrow about us.”

“You strange girl!” Mary cried, taken aback. “What do you mean?”

But Etruria was silent.

“Come,” Mary insisted. “You must tell me what you mean.”

“Well, Miss,” the girl answered reluctantly, “I’m sad and loth to think
of all the suffering in the world. It’s natural that you should not
think of it, but I’m of the people, and I’m sad for them.”

Balaam when the ass spoke was scarcely more surprised than Mary. “Why?”
she asked.

The girl pointed to the open window. “We’ve all we could ask,
Miss—light and air and birds’ songs and sunshine. We’ve all we need,
and more. But I come of those who have neither light nor air, nor songs
nor sunshine, who’ve no milk for children nor food for mothers! Who, if
they’ve work, work every hour of the day in dust and noise and heat.
Who are half clemmed from year’s end to year’s end, and see no close to
it, no hope, no finish but the pauper’s deals! It’s for them I’m sad,
Miss.”

“Etruria!”

“They’ve no teachers and no time to care,” Etruria continued in
desperate earnest now that the floodgates were raised. “They’re just
tools to make money, and, like the tools, they wear out and are cast
aside! For there are always more to do their work, to begin where they
began, and to be worn out as they were worn out!”

“Don’t!” Mary cried.

Etruria was silent, but two large tears rolled down her face. And Mary
marvelled. So this mild, patient girl, going about her daily tasks,
could think, could feel, could speak, and upon a plane so high that the
listener was sensible of humiliation as well as surprise! For a moment
this was the only effect made upon her. Then reflection did its
part—and memory. She recalled that glimpse of the under-world which she
had had on her journey from London. She remembered the noisome alleys,
the cinder wastes, the men toiling half-naked at the furnaces, the
pinched faces of the women; and she remembered also the account which
Lord Audley had given her of the fierce contest between town and
country, plough and forge, land-lord and cotton-lord, which had struck
her so much at the time.

In the charms of her new life, in her new interests, these things had
faded from her mind. They recurred now, and she did not again ask
Etruria what she meant. “Is it as bad as that?” she asked.

“It is not as bad as it has been,” Etruria answered. “Three years ago
there were hundreds of thousands out of work. There are thousands,
scores of thousands, still; and thousands have no food but what’s given
them. And charity is bitter to many,” she added, “and the poorhouse is
bitter to all.”

“But what has caused things to be so bad?”

“Some say one thing and some another. But most that machines lower
wages, Miss, and the bread-tax raises food.”

“Ah!” Mary said. And she looked more closely at the girl who knew so
much that was at odds with her station.

“Others,” Etruria continued, a faint color in her cheeks, “think that
it is selfishness, that every one is for himself and no one for one
another, and——”

“Yes?” Mary said, seeing that she hesitated.

“And that if every one thought as much of his neighbor as of himself,
or even of his neighbor as well as of himself, it would not be machines
nor corn-taxes nor poorhouses would be strong enough to take the bread
out of the children’s mouths or the work out of men’s hands!”

Mary had an inspiration. “Etruria,” she cried, “some one has been
teaching you this.”

The girl blushed. “Well, Miss,” she said simply, “it was at church I
learned most of it.”

“At church? What church? Not Riddsley?” For it was to Riddsley, to a
service as dull as it was long, that they proceeded on Sundays in a
chaise as slow as the reader.

“No, Miss, not Riddsley,” Etruria answered. “It’s at Brown Heath on the
Chase. But it’s not a real church, Miss. It’s a room.”

“Oh!” Mary replied. “A meeting-house!”

For some reason Etruria’s eyes gleamed. “No, Miss,” she said. “It’s the
curate at Riddsley has a service in a room at Brown Heath on
Thursdays.”

“And you go?”

“When I can, Miss.”

The idea of attending church on a week-day was strange to Mary; as
strange as to that generation was the zeal that passed beyond the
common channel to refresh those whom migrations of population or
changes in industry had left high and dry. The Tractarian movement was
giving vigor not only to those who supported it, but to those who
withstood it.

“And you’ve a sermon?” Mary said. “What was the text last Thursday,
Etruria?”

The girl hesitated, considered, then looked with appeal at her
mistress. She clasped her hands. “‘Two are better than one,’” she
replied, “‘because they have good reward for their labor. For if they
fall, one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he
falleth, for he hath not another to lift him up.’”

“Gracious, Etruria!” Mary cried. “Is that in the Bible?”

Etruria nodded.

“And what did your preacher say about it?”

“That the employer and the workman were fellows, and if they worked
together and each thought for the other they would have a good reward
for their labor; that if one fell, it was the duty of the other to help
him up. And again, that the land and the mill were fellows—the town and
the country—and if they worked together in love they would have a good
return, and if trouble came to one the other should bear with him. But
all the same,” Etruria added timidly, “that the bread-taxes were
wrong.”

“Etruria,” Mary said. “To-morrow is Thursday. I shall go with you to
Brown Heath.”




CHAPTER X
NEW THINGS


Mary Audley, crossing the moor to a week-day service, was but one of
many who in the ’forties were venturing on new courses. In religion
there were those who fancied that by a return to primitive forms they
might recapture the primitive fervor; and those again who, like the
curate whom Mary was going to hear, were bent on pursuing the beaten
path into new places. Some thought that they had found a panacea for
the evils of the day in education, and put their faith in workmen’s
institutes and night schools. Others were satisfied with philanthropy,
and proclaimed that infants of seven ought not to toil for their
living, that coal-pits were not fit places for women, and that what
paid was not the only standard of life. A few dreamt of a new England
in which gentle and simple were to mix on new-old terms; and a
multitude, shrewd and hard-headed, believed in the Corn Law League,
whose speakers travelled from Manchester to carry the claims of cheap
bread to butter crosses and market towns, and there bearded the very
landlord’s agent.

The truth was that the country was lying sick with new evils, and had
perforce to find a cure, whether that cure lay in faith, or in the
primer, or in the Golden Rule, or in Adam Smith. For two generations
men had been quitting the field for the mill, the farm for the
coal-pit. They had followed their work into towns built haphazard, that
grew presently into cities. There, short of light, of air, of water,
lacking decency, lacking even votes—for the Reform Bill, that was to
give everything to everybody, had stopped at the masters—lacking
everything but wages, they swarmed in numbers stupendous and alarming
to the mind of that day. And then the wages failed. Machines pushed out
hands, though


Tools were made, and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.


Machines lowered wages, machines glutted the markets. Men could get no
work, masters could sell no goods. On the top of this came bad seasons
and dear bread. Presently hundreds of thousands were living on public
charity, long lists of masters were in the _Gazette_. In the gloomy
cities of the North, masses of men heaved and moaned as the sea when
the south-west wind falls upon it.

All but the most thoughtless saw danger as well as unhappiness in this,
and called on their gods. The Chartists proclaimed that safety lay in
votes. The landed interest thought that a little more protection might
mend matters. The Golden Rulers were for shorter hours. But the men who
were the loudest and the most confident cried that cheap bread would
mend all. The poor, they said, would have to eat and to spend. They
would buy goods, the glut would cease. The wheels would turn again,
there would be work and wages. The Golden Age would return. So preached
the Manchester men.

In the meantime the doctors wrangled, and the patient grew a little,
not much, better. And Mary Audley and Etruria walked across the
moorland in the evening sunshine, with a light breeze stirring the
bracken, and waves of shadow moving athwart the stretches of purple
ling. They seemed very far, very remote from the struggle for life and
work and bread that was passing in the world below.

Presently they dropped into a fern-clad dingle and saw below them,
beside the rivulet that made music in its bottom, a house or two.
Descending farther, they came on more houses, crawling up the hill
slopes, and on a few potato patches and ash-heaps. As the sides of the
valley rose higher and closed in above the walkers cottages fell into
lines on either side of the brook, and began to show one behind the
other in rough terraces, with middens that slid from the upper to the
lower level. The valley bent to the left, and quickly tall chimneys
became visible, springing from a huddle of mean roofs through which no
other building of size, no tower, no steeple, rose to break the ugly
sameness. This was Brown Heath.

“It’s a rough place,” Etruria said as they picked their way. “But don’t
be afraid, Miss. I’m often passing, and they know me.”

Still it was a rough place. The roadway was a cinder-track, and from
the alleys and lanes above it open drains wormed their way across the
path and into the stream, long grown foul. The air was laden with
smoke, coal dust lay everywhere; the most cleanly must have despaired.
Men seated, pipe in mouth, on low walls, watched the two go by—not
without some rude banter; frowsy women crouching on door-steps and
nursing starveling babes raised sullen faces. Lads in clogs made way
for them unwillingly. In one place a crowd seethed from a side street
and, shouting and struggling, overflowed the roadway before them and
threatened to bar their path.

“It’s a dog-fight,” Etruria said. “They are rare and fond of them,
Miss. We’d best get by quickly.”

They passed in safety, passed, too, a brawl between two colliers, the
air about them thick with oaths, passed a third eddy round two women
fighting before a public-house. “The chaps are none so gentle,” Etruria
said, falling unconsciously into a commoner way of speaking. “They’re
all for fighting, dogs or men, and after dark I’m not saying we’d be
safe. But we’ll be over the moor by dusk, Miss.”

They came, as she spoke, to a triangular space, sloping with the hill,
skirted by houses, and crossed by an open sewer. It was dreary and
cinder-covered, but five publics looked upon it and marked it for the
centre of Brown Heath. Etruria crossed the triangle to a building a
little cleaner than its neighbors; it was the warehouse, she told her
mistress, of a sack-maker who had failed. She entered, and her
companion followed her.

Mary found herself in a bare barn-like room, having two windows set
high in the walls, the light from which fell coldly on a dozen benches
ranged one behind the other, but covering only a portion of the floor.
On these were seated, when they entered, about twenty persons, mainly
women, but including three or four men of the miner class. No attempt
had been made to alter the character of the place, and of formality
there was as little. The two had barely seated themselves before a lean
young man, with a long pale face and large nose, rose from the front
bench, and standing before the little congregation, opened his book. He
wore shabby black, but neither surplice nor gown.

The service lasted perhaps twenty minutes, and Mary was not much moved
by it. The young man’s voice was weak, the man himself looked
under-fed. She noticed, however, that as the service went on the number
in the room grew, and when it closed she found that all the seats were
filled, and that there were even a few men—some of them colliers fresh
from the pit—standing at the back. Remembering the odd text that the
clergyman had given out the week before, she wondered what he would
choose to-day, and, faintly amused, she stole a glance at her
companion. But Etruria’s rapt face was a reproach to her levity.

The young clergyman pushed back the hair from his forehead. His posture
was ungainly, he did not know what to do with his hands, he opened his
mouth and shut it again. Then with an effort he began. “My text, my
friends,” he said, “is but one word, ‘Love.’ Where will you find it in
the Scriptures? In every chapter and in every verse. In the dark days
of old the order was ‘Thou shalt live!’ The new order in these days is
‘Thou shalt love!’” He began by describing the battle of life in the
animal and vegetable world, where all things lived at the cost of
others; and he admitted that the struggle for life, for bread, for
work, as they saw it around them, resembled that struggle. In moving
terms he enlarged on the distress, on the vast numbers lately living on
the rates, on the thousands living, where even the rates fell short, on
Government aid. He described the fireless homes, the foodless children,
the strong men hopeless. And he showed them that others were stricken,
that masters suffered, tradesmen were ruined, the country languished.
“The worst may be past,” he said. “You are working half-time, you are
living on half-wages, you are thankful that things are better.” Then he
told them that for his part he did not presume to say what was at the
root of these unhappy conditions, but that of one thing he felt
sure—and this was his message to them—that if the law of love, if the
golden rule of preferring another to one’s self, if the precept of that
charity,


Which seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,


if that were followed by all, then all


Might build a heaven in hell’s despair.


And in words more eloquent than he had yet compassed he begged them to
set that example of brotherhood, in the certainty that the worst social
evils, nay, all evils save pain and death, would be cured by the love
that thought for others, that in the master preferred the servant’s
welfare and in the servant put first his master’s interests. Finally he
quoted his old text, “Let two work together, for if they fall, one will
lift up his fellow!”

It seemed as if he had done. He was silent; his hearers waited. Then
with an effort he continued:

“I have a word to say about something which fell from me in this place
last week. While I did not venture, unskilled as I am, to say where
lies the cause of our distress, I did say that I found it hard to
believe that the system which taxes the bread you earn in the sweat of
your brow, which takes a disproportionate part from the scanty crust of
the widow and from the food of the child, was in accordance with the
law of love. I repeat that now; and because I have been told that I
dare not say in the pulpit of Riddsley church what I say here, I shall
on the first opportunity state my belief there. You may ask why I have
not done so; my answer is, that I am there the representative of
another, whereas in this voluntary work I am myself more responsible.
In saying that I ask you to judge me, as we should judge all, with that
charity which believeth no evil.”

A moment later Mary, deeply moved, was passing out with the crowd. As
she stood, caught in the press by the door, an old man in horn-rimmed
glasses, who was waiting there, held out his hand. She was going to
take it, when she saw that it was not meant for her, but for the young
clergyman who was following at her heels.

“Master, dunno you do it,” the old fellow growled. “You’ll break your
pick, and naught gotten. Naught gotten, that’ll serve. Your gaffer’ll
not abide it, and you’ll lose your job!”

“Would you have me take it,” the young man answered, “and not do the
work, Cluff? Never fear for me.”

“Dunno you be rash, master!” the other rejoined, clutching his sleeve
and detaining him. “You be sure——”

Mary heard no more. She felt Etruria’s hand pressing her arm. “We’d
best lose no time,” the girl whispered. And she drew Mary onward,
across the triangle and into the lane which led to the moor.

“Are we so late?” The sun had set, but it was still light. “We’d best
hurry,” Etruria persisted, increasing her speed.

Mary looked at her and saw that she was troubled, but at the moment she
set this down to the influence of the sermon, and her own mind went
back to it. “I am glad you brought me, Etruria,” she said. “I shall
always be glad that I came.”

“We’d best be getting home now,” was Etruria’s only answer, but this
time Mary’s ear caught the sound of footsteps behind them, and she
turned. The young clergyman was hastening after them.

“Etruria!” he cried.

For a moment Mary fancied that Etruria did not hear. The girl hurried
on. But Mary saw no occasion to run away, and she halted. Then Etruria,
with a gesture of despair, stopped.

“It is no use,” she said.

The young man came up with them. His head was bare, his hat was in his
hand, his long plain face was aglow with the haste he had made. He had
heard Etruria’s words, and “It is of every use,” he said.

“This is—my mistress,” Etruria said.

“Miss Audley?”

“I am Miss Audley,” Mary announced, wondering much.

“I thought that it might be so,” he replied. “I have waited for such an
occasion. I am Mr. Colet, the curate at Riddsley. Etruria and I love
one another,” he continued. “We are going to be married, if ever my
means allow me to marry.”

“No, we are not,” the girl rejoined sharply. “Mr. Colet knows my mind,”
she continued, her eyes turned away. “I have told him many times that I
am a servant, the daughter of a servant, in a different class from his,
and I’ll never be the one to ruin him and be a disgrace to him! I’ll
never marry him! Never!”

“And I have told Etruria,” he replied, “that I will never take that
answer. We love one another. It is nothing to me that she is a servant.
My work is to serve. I am as poor as it is possible to be, with as poor
prospects as it is possible to have. I shall never be anything but what
I am, and I shall think myself rich when I have a hundred pounds a
year. I who have so little, who look for so little, am I to give up
this happiness because Etruria has less? I, too, say, Never!”

Mary, standing between them, did not know what to answer, and it was
Etruria who replied. “It is useless,” she said. And then, in a tone of
honest scorn, “Who ever heard,” she cried, “of a clergyman who married
a servant? Or who ever heard of good coming of it?”

Mary had an inspiration. “Does Etruria’s father know?” she asked.

“He knows and approves,” the young man replied, his eyes bent fondly on
his mistress.

Mary too looked at Etruria—beautiful, patient, a servant, loved. And
she wondered. All these weeks she had been rubbing elbows with this
romance, and she had not discerned it! Now, while her sympathies flew
to the lover’s side, her prejudices rose up against him. They echoed
Etruria’s words, “Who ever heard of good coming of such a match?” The
days had been, as Mary knew, when the chaplain had married the lady’s
maid. But those days were gone. Meantime the man waited, and she did
not know what to say.

“After all,” she said at last, “it is for Etruria to decide.”

“No, it is for us both to decide,” he replied. And then, as if he
thought that he had sufficiently stated his case, “I ask your pardon,
Miss Audley, for intruding,” he continued. “I am keeping you, and as I
am going your way that is needless. I have had a message from a sick
woman, and I am on my way to see her.”

He took permission for granted, and though Etruria’s very shoulders
forbade him, he moved on beside them. “Conditions are better here than
in many places,” he said, “but in this village you would see much to
sadden you.”

“I have seen enough,” Mary answered, “to know that.”

“Ten years ago there was not a house here. Now there is a population of
two thousand, no church, no school, no gentry, no one of the better
class. There is a kind of club, a centre of wild talk; better that,
perhaps, than apathy.”

“Is it in Riddsley parish?” Mary asked. They were nearly clear of the
houses, and the slopes of the hill, pale green in the peaceful evening
light, began to rise on either side. It was growing dusk, and from the
moorland above came the shrill cries of plovers.

“Yes, it is in Riddsley parish,” he answered, “but many miles from the
town, and as aloof from it—Riddsley is purely agricultural—as black
from white. In such places as this—and there are many of them in
Staffordshire, as raw, as rough, and as new—there is work for plain men
and plain women. In these swarming hives there is no room for any
refinement but true refinement. And the Church must learn to do her
work with plain tools, or the work will pass into other hands.”

“You may cut cheese with an onion knife,” Etruria said coldly. “I don’t
know that people like it.”

“I know nothing better than onions in the right place,” he replied.

“That’s not in cheese,” she rejoined, to Mary’s amusement.

“The poor get little cheese,” he said, “and the main thing is to cut
their bread for them. But here I must leave you. My errand is to that
cottage.”

He pointed to a solitary house, standing a few score paces above the
road on the hillside. Mary shook hands with him, but Etruria turned her
shoulder resolutely.

“Good-bye, Etruria,” he said. And then to Mary, “I hope that I have
made a friend?”

“I think you have,” she answered. “I am sure that you deserve one.”

He colored, raised his hat, and turned away, and the two went on,
without looking back; darkness was coming apace, and they were still
two miles from home. Mary kept silence, prudently considering how she
should deal with the matter, and what she should say to her companion.
As it fell out, events removed her difficulty. They had not gone more
than two hundred yards, and were still some way below the level of the
Chase, when a cry reached them. It came out of the dusk behind them,
and might have been the call of a curlew on the moor. But first one,
and then the other stood. They turned, and listened, and suddenly
Etruria, more anxious or sharper of eye than her mistress, uttered a
cry and broke away at a run across the sloping turf towards the
solitary cottage. Alarmed, Mary looked intently in that direction, and
made out three or four figures struggling before the door of the house.
She guessed then that the clergyman was one of them, and that the cry
had come from him, and without a thought for herself she set off,
running after Etruria as fast as she could.

Twice Etruria screamed as she ran, and Mary echoed the cry. She saw
that the man was defending himself against the onset of three or
four—she could hear the clatter of sticks on one another. Then she trod
on her skirt and fell. When she had got, breathless, to her feet again,
the clergyman was down and the men appeared to be raining blows on him.
Etruria shrieked once more and the next moment was lost amid the moving
figures, the brandished sticks, the struggle.

Mary ran on desperately. She caught sight of the girl on her knees over
the fallen man, she saw her fend off more than one blow, she heard more
than one blow fall with a sickening thud. She came up to them. With
passion that drove out fear, she seized the arm of the nearest and
dragged him back.

“You coward!” she cried. “You coward! I am Miss Audley! Do you hear!
Leave him! Leave him, I say!”

Her appearance, the surprise, checked the man; her fearlessness,
perhaps her name, gave the others pause. They retreated a step. The man
she had grasped shook himself free, but did not attempt to strike her.
“Oh, d—n the screech-owls!” he cried. “The place is alive with them!
Hold your noise, you fools! We’ll have the parish on us!”

“I am Miss Audley!” Mary repeated, and in her indignation she advanced
on him. “How dare you?” Etruria, still on her knees, continued to
shriek.

“You’re like to get a wipe over the head, dang you!” the man growled,
“whoever you be! Go to—— and mind your own brats! He’ll know better now
than to preach against them as he gets his living by! You be gone!”

But Mary stood her ground. She declared afterwards that, brutally as
the man spoke, the fight had gone out of him. Etruria, on the contrary,
maintained that, finding only women before them, the ruffians would
have murdered them. Fortunately, while the event hung in the balance,
“What is it?” some one shouted from the road below. “What’s the matter
there?”

“Murder!” cried Etruria shrilly. “Help! Help!”

“Help!” cried Mary. She still kept her face to the men, but for the
first time she began to know fear.

Footsteps thudded softly on the turf, figures came into view, climbing
the slope. It needed no more. With a volley of oaths the assailants
turned tail and made off. In a trice they were round the corner of the
house and lost in the dusk.

A moment later two men, equally out of breath and each carrying a gun,
reached the spot. “Well!” said the bigger of the two, “What is it?”

He spoke as if he had not come very willingly, but Mary did not notice
this. The crisis over, her knees shook, she could barely stand, she
could not speak. She pointed to the fallen man, over whom Etruria still
crouched, her hair dragged down about her shoulders, her neckband torn,
a ghastly blotch on her white cheek.

“Is he dead?” the new-comer asked in a different tone.

“Ay, dead!” Etruria echoed. “Dead!”

Fortunately the curate gave the lie to the word. He groaned, moved,
with an effort he raised himself on his elbow. “I’m—all right!” he
gasped. “All right!”

Etruria sprang to her feet. She stepped back as if the ground had
opened before her.

“I’m not—hurt,” Colet added weakly.

But it was evident that he was hurt, even if no bones were broken. When
they came to lift him he could not stand, and he seemed to be uncertain
where he was. After watching him a moment, “He should see a doctor,”
said the man who had come up so opportunely. “Petch,” he continued,
addressing his companion, who wore a gamekeeper’s dress, “we must carry
him to the trap and get him down to Brown Heath. Who is he, do you
know? He looks like a parson.”

“He’s Mr. Colet of Riddsley,” Mary said.

The man turned and looked at her. “Hallo!” he exclaimed. And then in
the same tone of surprise, “Miss Audley!” he said. “At this time of
night?”

Mary collected herself with an effort. “Yes,” she said, “and very
fortunately, for if we had not been here the men would have murdered
him. As it is, you share the credit of saving him, Lord Audley.”

“The credit of saving you is a good deal more to me,” he answered
gallantly. “I did not think that we should meet after this fashion.”




CHAPTER XI
TACT AND TEMPER


He looked at Etruria, and Mary explained who she was.

“I am afraid that she is hurt.”

The girl’s temple was bruised and there was blood on her cheek; more
than one of the blows aimed at her lover had fallen on her. But she
said eagerly that it was “Nothing! Nothing!”

“Are you sure, Etruria?” Mary asked with concern.

“It is nothing, indeed, Miss,” the girl repeated. She was trying with
shaking fingers to put up her hair.

“Then the sooner,” Audley rejoined, “we get this—this gentleman to my
dogcart, the better. Take his other arm, Petch. Miss Audley, can you
carry my gun?—it is not loaded. And you,” he continued to Etruria, “if
you are able, take Petch’s.”

They took the guns, and the little procession wound down the path to
the road, where they found a dogcart awaiting them, and, peering from
the cart, two setters, whining and fretting. The dogs were driven under
the seat, and the clergyman, still muttering that he was all right, was
lifted in. “Steady him, Petch,” Audley said; “and do you drive slowly,”
he added, to the other man. “You will be at the surgeon’s at Brown
Heath in twenty minutes. Stay with him, Petch, and send the cart back
for me.”

“But are you not going?” Mary cried.

“I am not going to leave you in the dark with only your maid,” he
answered with severity. “One adventure a night is enough, Miss Audley.”

She murmured a word or two, but submitted. The struggle had shaken her;
she could still see the men’s savage faces, still hear the thud of
their blows. And she and Etruria had nearly a mile to go before they
reached the park.

When they were fairly started, “How did it happen?” he asked.

Mary told the story, but said no word of Etruria’s romance.

“Then you were not with him when they set on him?”

“No, we had parted.”

“And you went back?”

“Of course we did!”

“It was imprudent,” he said, “very imprudent. If we had not come up at
that moment you might have been murdered.”

“And if we had not gone back, Mr. Colet might have been murdered!” she
answered. “What he had done to offend them——”

“I think I can tell you that. He’s the curate at Riddsley, isn’t he?
Who’s been preaching up cheap bread and preaching down the farmers?”

“Perhaps so,” Mary answered. “He may be. But is he to be murdered for
that? From your tone one might think so.”

“No,” he replied slowly, “he is not to be murdered for it. But whether
he is wise to preach cheap bread to starving men, whether he is wise to
tell them that they would have it but for this man or that man, this
class or that class—is another matter.”

She was not convinced—the sermon had keyed her thoughts to a high
pitch. But he spoke reasonably, and he had the knack of speaking with
authority, and she said no more. And on his side he had no wish to
quarrel. He had come down to Riddsley partly to shoot, partly to look
into the political situation, but a little—there was no denying it—to
learn how Mary Audley fared with her uncle.

For he had thought much of her since they had parted, and much of the
fact that she was John Audley’s heir. Her beauty, her spirit, her
youth, had caught his fancy. He had looked forward to renewing his
acquaintance with her, and he was in no mood, now he saw her, to spoil
their meeting by a quarrel. He thought Colet, whose doings had been
reported to him, a troublesome, pestilent fellow, and he was not sorry
that he had got his head broken. But he need not tell her that.
Circumstances had favored him in bringing them together and giving him
the beau rôle, and he was not going to cross his luck.

So, “Fire is an excellent thing of course,” he continued with an air of
moderation, “but, believe me, it’s not safe amid young trees in a wind.
Whatever your views, to express them in all companies may be honest,
but is not wise. I have no doubt that a parson is tried. He sees the
trouble. He is not always the best judge of the remedy. However, enough
of that. We shall agree at least in this, that our meetings are
opportune?”

“Most opportune,” Mary answered. “And from my point of view very
fortunate!”

“There really is a sort of fate in it. What but fate could have brought
about our meeting at the Hôtel Lambert? What but fate could have drawn
us to the same spot on the Chase to-night?”

There was a tone in his voice that brought the blood to her cheek and
warned her to keep to the surface of things. “The chance that men call
fate,” she answered lightly.

“Or the fate that fools call chance,” he urged, half in jest, half in
earnest. “We have met by chance once, and once again—with results! The
third time—what will the third time bring? I wonder.”

“Not a fright like this, I hope!” Mary answered, remaining cheerfully
matter of fact. “Or if it does,” with a flash of laughter, “I trust
that the next time you will come up a few moments earlier!”

“Ungrateful!”

“I?” she replied. “But it was Etruria who was in danger!”

For the peril had left her with a sense of exhilaration, of lightness,
of ease. She was pleased to feel that she could hold her own with him,
relieved that she was not afraid of him. And she was glad—she was
certainly glad—to see him again. If he were inclined to make the most
of his advantage, well, a little gallantry was quite in the picture;
she was not deceived, and she was not offended. While he on his side,
as they walked over the moor, thought of her as a clever little witch
who knew her value and could keep her head; and he liked her none the
less for it.

When they came at last to the gap in the wall that divided the Chase
from the park, a figure, dimly outlined, stood in the breach waiting
for them. “Is that you?” a voice asked.

The voice was Basset’s, and Mary’s spirits sank. She felt that the
meeting was ill-timed. “Yes,” she answered.

Unluckily, Peter was one of those whose anxiety takes an irritable
form. “What in the world has happened?” he asked. “I couldn’t believe
that you were still out. It’s really not safe. Hallo!” breaking off and
speaking in a different tone, “is some one with you?”

“Yes,” Mary said. They were within touch now and could see one another.
“We have had an adventure. Lord Audley was passing, he came to our
rescue, and has very kindly seen us home.”

“Lord Audley!” Basset was taken by surprise and his tone was much as if
he had said, “The devil!”

“By good fortune, Basset,” Audley replied. He may have smiled in the
darkness—we cannot say. “I was returning from shooting, heard cries for
help, and found Miss Audley playing the knight-errant, encircled by
prostrate bodies!”

Basset could not frame a word, so great was his surprise, so
overwhelming his chagrin. Was this man to spring up at every turn? To
cross him on every occasion? To put him in the background perpetually?
To intrude even on the peace and fellowship of the Gatehouse? It was
intolerable!

When he did not answer, “It was not I who was the knight-errant,” Mary
said. “It was Etruria. She is a little the worse for it, I fear, and
the sooner she is in bed the better. As Mr. Basset is here,” she
continued, turning to Audley, “we must not take you farther. Your cart
is no doubt waiting for you. But you will allow us to thank you again.
We are most grateful to you—both Etruria and I.”

She spoke more warmly, perhaps she let her hand rest longer in his, to
make up for Basset’s silence. For that silence provoked her. She had
gathered from many things that Basset did not love the other; but to
stand mute and churlish on such an occasion, and find no word of
acknowledgment—this was too bad.

And Basset knew, he too knew that he ought to thank Audley. But the
black dog was on his back, and while he hesitated, the other made his
adieux. He said a pleasant word to Etruria, tossed a careless
“Good-night” to the other man, turned away, and was gone.

For awhile the three who remained trudged homewards in silence. Then,
“What happened to you?” Basset asked grudgingly.

Vexed and indignant, Mary told the story.

“I did not know that you knew Mr. Colet!”

“When a man is being murdered,” she retorted, “one does not wait for an
introduction.”

He was a good fellow, but jealousy was hot within him, and he could not
bridle his tongue. “Oh, but murdered?” he said. “Isn’t that rather
absurd? Who would murder Colet?”

Mary did not deign to reply.

Baffled, he sought for another opening. “I do not know what your uncle
will say.”

“Because we rescued Mr. Colet? And perhaps saved his life?”

“No, but——”

“Or because Lord Audley rescued us?”

“He will certainly not be pleased to hear that,” he retorted
maliciously. He knew that he was misbehaving, but he could not refrain.
“If you take my advice you will not mention it.”

“I shall tell him the moment I reach the house,” she declared.

“You will be very unwise if you do.”

“I shall be honest at least! For the rest I would rather not discuss
the matter, Mr. Basset. I am a good deal shaken by what we have gone
through, and I am very tired.”

He muttered humbly that he was sorry—that he only meant——

“Please leave it there,” she said. “Enough has been said.”

Too late the anger and the spirit died out of the unlucky man, and he
would have grovelled before her, he would have done anything to earn
his pardon. But Etruria’s presence tied his tongue, and gloomy and
wretched—oh, why had he not gone farther to meet them, why had he not
been the one to rescue her?—he walked on beside them, cursing his
unhappy temper. It was dark, the tired girls lagged, Etruria hung
heavily on her mistress’s arm; he longed to help them. But he did not
dare to offer. He knew too well that Mary would reject the offer.

Etruria had her own dreams, and in spite of an aching head was happy.
But to Mary, fatigued by the walk, and vexed by Basset’s conduct, the
way seemed endless. At last the house loomed dark above them, their
steps rang hard on the flagged court. The outer door stood ajar, and
entering, they found a lamp burning in the hall; but the silence which
prevailed, above and below, struck a chill. Silence and an open door go
ill together.

Etruria at Mary’s bidding went up at once to her room. Basset called
angrily for Toft. But no Toft appeared, and Mary, resentment still hot
in her, opened the door of the library and went in to see her uncle.
She felt that the sooner her story was told the better.

But the library was empty. Lights burned on the several tables, the
wood fire smouldered on the hearth, the tall clock ticked in the
silence, the old hound flopped his tail. But John Audley was not there.

“Where is my uncle?” she asked, as she stood in the open doorway.

Basset looked over her shoulder. He saw that the room was empty. “He
may have gone to look for us.”

“And Toft?”

“And Toft, too, I suppose.”

“But why should my uncle go to look for us?” she asked, aghast at the
thought—he troubled himself so little for others, he lived so
completely his own life!

“He might,” Basset replied. He stood for a moment, thinking. Then—for
the time they had forgotten their quarrel—“You had better get something
to eat and go to bed,” he said. “I will send Mrs. Toft to you.”

She had not the strength to resist. “Very well,” she said. “Are you
going to look for them?”

“Perhaps Mrs. Toft will know where they are.”

She took her candle and went slowly up the narrow winding staircase
that led to her room and to Etruria’s. As she passed, stair by stair,
the curving wainscot of dull wood which so many generations had rubbed,
she carried with her the picture of Basset standing in thought in the
middle of the hall, his eyes on the doorway that gaped on the night.
Then a big man with a genial face usurped his place; and she smiled and
sighed.

A moment later she went into Etruria’s room to learn how she was, and
caught the girl rising from her knees. “Oh, Miss,” she said, coloring
as she met Mary’s eyes, “if we had not been there!”

“And yet—you won’t marry him, you foolish girl?”

“Oh no, no!”

“Although you love him!”

“Love him!” Etruria murmured, her face burning. “It is because I love
him, Miss, that I will never, never marry him.”

Mary wondered. “And yet you love him?” she said, raising the candle so
that its light fell on the other’s face.

Etruria looked this way and that way, but there was no escape. In a
very small voice she said,


“Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care!”


She covered her hot cheeks with her hands. But Mary took away the hands
and kissed her.

“Oh, Miss!” Etruria exclaimed.

Mary went out then, but on the threshold of her own room she paused to
snuff her candle. “So that is love,” she thought. “It’s very
interesting, and—and rather beautiful!”




CHAPTER XII
THE YEW WALK


Basset had been absent the greater part of the day, and returning at
sunset had learned that Miss Audley had not come back from Brown Heath.
The servant had hinted alarm—the Chase was lonely, the hour late; and
Basset had hurried off without more, not doubting that John Audley was
in the house.

Now he was sure that John Audley had been abroad at the time, and he
suspected that Toft had known it, and had kept it from him. He stood
for a moment in thought, then he crossed the court to Toft’s house.
Mrs. Toft was cooking something savory in a bonnet before the fire, and
the contrast between her warm cheerful kitchen and the stillness of the
house from which he came struck him painfully. He told her that her
daughter had received a blow on the head, and that Miss Audley needed
supper—she had better attend to them.

Mrs. Toft was a stout woman, set by a placid and even temper above
small surprises. She looked at the clock, a fork in her hand. “I can’t
hurry it, Mr. Basset,” she said. “You may be Sir Robert Peel himself,
but meat’s your master and will have its time. A knock on the head?”
she continued, with a faint stirring of anxiety. “You don’t say so?
Lor, Mr. Basset, who’d go to touch Etruria?”

“You’d better go and see.”

“But where’s Toft?”

Basset’s temper gave way at that. “God knows!” he said. “He ought to be
here—and he’s not!” He went out.

Mrs. Toft stared after him, and by and by she let down her skirt and
prepared to go into the house. “On the head?” she ruminated. “Well,
’Truria’s a tidy lot of hair! And I will say this, if there’s few
points a man gives a woman, hair’s one of them.”

Meanwhile Basset had struck across the court and taken in the darkness
the track which led in the direction of the Great House. The breeze,
light but of an autumn coldness, swept the upland, whispering through
the dying fern, and rustling in the clumps of trees by which he steered
his course. He listened more than once, hoping that he might hear
approaching footsteps, but he heard none, and presently he came to the
yew-trees that masked the entrance to the gardens.

The trees formed a wall of blackness exceeding that of the darkest
night, and Basset hesitated before he plunged into it. The growth of a
century had long trespassed on the walk, a hundred and fifty yards
long, which led through the yew-wood, and had been in its time a
stately avenue trimmed to the neatness of a bowling green. Now it was
little better than a tunnel, dark even at noon, and at night bristling
with a hundred perils. Basset peered into the blackness, listened,
hesitated. But he was honestly anxious on John Audley’s account, and
contenting himself with exclaiming that the man was mad, he began to
grope his way along the path.

It was no pleasant task. If he swerved from his course he stumbled over
roots, branches swept his cheek, jagged points threatened his eyes, and
more than once he found himself in the hedge. Half-way through the wood
he came to a circular clearing, some twenty yards across; and here a
glimmer of light enabled him to avoid the crumbling stone Butterfly
that crouched on its mouldering base in the centre of the clearing—much
as a spider crouches in its web. It seemed in that dim light to be the
demon of this underworld, a monster, a thing of evil.

The same gleam, however, disclosed the opposite opening, and for
another seventy yards he groped his way onward, longing to be clear of
the stifling air, and the brooding fancies that dwelt in it, longing to
plant his feet on something more solid than this carpet of rotting yew.
At last he came to the tall, strait gate, wrought of old iron, that
admitted to the pleasance. It was ajar. He passed through it, and with
relief he felt the hard walk under his feet, the fresh air on his face.
He crossed the walk, and stepping on to the neglected lawn, he halted.

The Great House loomed before him, a hundred yards away. The moon had
not risen, but the brightness which goes before its rising lightened
the sky behind the monstrous building. It outlined the roof but left
the bulk in gloom. No light showed in any part, and it was only the
watcher’s memory that pictured the quaint casements of the north wing,
or filled in the bald rows of unglazed windows, which made of the new
portion a death-mask. In that north wing just eighty years before, in a
room hung with old Cordovan leather, the fatal house-warming had been
held. The duel had been fought at sunrise within a pace or two of the
moss-grown Butterfly that Basset had passed; and through the gate of
ironwork, wood-smelted and wrought with the arms of Audley, which had
opened at his touch, they had carried the dead heir back to his father.
Tradition had it that the servant who bore in the old lord’s morning
draught of cool ale had borne also the tragic news to his bedside.

Basset remembered that the hinges of the gate, seldom as it was used,
had not creaked, and he felt sure that he was on the right track. He
scanned the dark house, and tried to sift from the soughing of the wind
any sound that might inform him.

Presently he moved forward and scrutinized with care the north wing,
which abutted on the yew-wood. There lay between the two only a strip
of formal garden, once set with rows of birds and beasts cut in yew.
Time had turned these to monsters, huge, amorphous, menacing, amidst
which rank grass rioted and elder pushed. Even in daylight it seemed as
if the ancient trees stretched out arms to embrace and strangle the
deserted house.

But the north wing remained as dark as the bulk of the house, and
Basset uttered a sigh of relief. Ill-humor began to take the place of
misgiving. He called himself a fool for his pains and anticipated with
distaste a return through the yew-walk. However, the sooner he
undertook the passage the sooner it would be over, and he was turning
on his heel when somewhere between him and the old wing a stick
snapped.

Under a foot, he fancied; and he waited. In two or three minutes the
moon would rise.

Again he caught a faint sound. It resembled the stealthy tread of some
one approaching from the north wing, and Basset, peering that way, was
striving to probe the darkness, when a gleam of light shot across his
eyes. He turned and saw in the main building a bright spark. It
vanished. He waited to see it again, and while he waited a second stick
snapped. This time the sound was behind him, and near the iron gate.

He had been outflanked, and he had now to choose which he would stalk,
the footstep or the light. He chose the latter, the rather as while he
stood with his eyes fixed on the house the upper edge of a rising moon
peeped above the roof.

He stepped back to the gate, and in the shadow of the trees he waited.
Two or three minutes passed. The moon rose clear of the roof, outlining
the stately chimneys and gables and flooding with cold light the lower
part of the lawn. With the rising of the moon the air grew more chilly.
He shivered.

At length a dull sound reached him—the sound of a closing door or a
shutter cast back. A minute later he heard the footsteps of some one
moving along the walk towards him. The man trod with care, but once he
stumbled.

Basset advanced. “Is that you, sir?” he asked.

“D—n!” John Audley replied out of the darkness. He halted, breathing
quickly.

“I say d—n, too!” Basset replied. As a rule he was patient with the old
man, but to-night his temper failed him.

The other came on. “Why did you follow me?” he asked. “What is the use?
What is the use? If you are willing to help me, good! But if not, why
do you follow me?”

“To see that you don’t come to harm,” Basset retorted. “As you
certainly will one of these nights if you come here alone.”

“Well, I haven’t come to harm to-night! On the contrary—— But there,
there, man, let us get back.”

“The sooner the better,” Basset replied. “I nearly put out an eye as I
came.”

John Audley laughed. “Did you come through the yews in the dark?” he
asked.

“Didn’t you?”

“No, I brought a lantern.” He removed as he spoke the cap of a small
bull’s-eye lantern and threw its light on the path. “Who’s the fool
now?”

“Let us get home,” Basset snapped.

John Audley locked the iron gate behind them and they started. The
light removed their worst difficulties and they reached the open park
without mishap. But long before they gained the house the elder man’s
strength failed, and he was glad to lean on Basset’s arm. On that a
sense of weakness on the one side and of pity on the other closed their
differences. “After all,” Audley said wearily, “I don’t know what I
should have done if you had not come.”

“You’d have stayed there!”

“And that would have been—Heavens, what a pity that would have been!”
Audley paused and struck his stick on the ground. “I must take care of
myself, I must take care of myself! You don’t know, Basset, what I——”

“And I don’t want to know—here!” Basset replied. “When you are safe at
home, you may tell me what you like.”

In the courtyard they came on Toft, who was looking out for them with a
lantern. “Thank God, you’re safe, sir,” he said. “I was growing alarmed
about you.”

“Where were you,” Basset asked sharply, “when I came in?” John Audley
was too tired to speak.

“I had stepped out at the front to look for the master,” Toft replied.
“I fancied that he had gone out that way.”

Basset did not believe him, but he could not refute the story. “Well,
get the brandy,” he said, “and bring it to the library. Mr. Audley has
been out too long and is tired.”

They went into the library and Toft pulled off his master’s boots and
brought his slippers and the spirit-tray. That done, he lingered, and
Basset thought that he was trying to divine from the old man’s looks
whether the journey had been fruitful.

In the end, however, the man had to go, and Audley leant forward to
speak.

“Wait!” Basset muttered. “He is coming back.”

“How do you know?”

Basset raised his hand. The door opened. Toft came in. “I forgot to
take your boots, sir,” he said.

“Well, take them now,” his master replied peevishly. When the man had
again withdrawn, “How did you know?” he asked, frowning at the fire.

“I saw him go to take your boots—and leave them.”

Audley was silent for a time, then “Well,” he said, “he has been with
me many years and I think he is faithful.”

“To his own interests. He dogged you to-night.”

“So did you!”

“Yes, but I did not hide! And he did, and hid from me, too, and lied
about it. How long he had been watching you, I cannot say, but if you
think that you can break through all your habits, sir, and be missing
for two hours at night and a man as shrewd as Toft suspect nothing, you
are mistaken. Of course he wonders. The next time he thinks it over.
The third time he follows you. Presently whatever you know he will
know.”

“Confound him!” Audley turned to the table and jerked some brandy into
a glass. Then, “You haven’t asked yet,” he said, “what I’ve done.”

“If I am to choose,” Basset replied, “I would rather not know. You know
my views.”

“I know that you didn’t think I should do it? Well, I’ve done it!”

“Do you mean that—you’ve found the evidence?”

“Is it likely?” the other replied petulantly. “No, but I’ve been in the
Muniment Room. It is fifty years since I heard my father describe its
position, but I could have gone to it blindfold! I was a boy then, and
the name—he was telling a story of the old lord—took my fancy. I
listened. In time the thing faded, but one day when I was at the
lawyer’s and some one mentioned the Muniment Room, the story came back
to me so clearly, that I could almost repeat my father’s words.”

“And you’ve been in the room?”

“I’ve been in it. Why not? A door two inches thick and studded with
iron, and a lock that one out of any dozen big keys would open!” He
rubbed his calves in his satisfaction. “In twenty minutes I was
inside.”

“And it was empty?”

“It was empty,” the other agreed, with a cunning smile. “As bare as a
board. A little whitewashed room, just as my father described it!”

“They had removed the papers?”

“To the bank, or to London, or to Stubbs’s. The place was as clean as a
platter! Not a length of green tape or an end of parchment was left!”

“Then what have you gained?” Basset asked.

Audley looked slyly at him, his head on one side. “Ay, what?” he said.
“But I’ll tell you my father’s story. At one time the part of the room
under the stairs was crumbling and the rats got in. The steward told
the old lord and he went to see it. ‘Brick it up!’ he said. The steward
objected that there would not be room—the place was full; there were
boxes everywhere, some under the stairs. The old lord tapped one of the
boxes with his gold-headed cane. ‘What’s in these!’ he asked. ‘Old
papers,’ the steward explained. ‘Of no use, my lord, but curious; old
leases for lives, and terriers.’ ‘Terriers?’ cried the old lord. ‘Then,
by G—d, brick ’em up with the rats!’ And that day at dinner he told my
father the story and chuckled over it.”

“And that’s what you’ve had in your mind all this time?” Basset said.
“Do you think it was done?”

“The old lord bricked up many a pipe of port, and I think that he would
do it for the jest’s sake. And”— John Audley turned and looked in his
companion’s face—“the part under the stairs _is bricked up_, and the
room is as square and as flush as the family vault—and very like it.
The old lord,” he added sardonically, “knows what it is to be bricked
up himself now.”

“And still there may be nothing there to help you.”

Audley rose from his chair. “Don’t say it!” he cried passionately. “Or
I’ll say that there’s no right in the world, no law, no providence, no
God! Don’t dare to say it!” he continued, his cheeks trembling with
excitement. “If I believed that I should go mad! But it is there! It is
there! Do you think that it was for naught I heard that story? That it
was for naught I remembered it, for naught I’ve carried the story in my
mind all these years? No, they are there, the papers that will give me
mine and give it to Mary after me! They are there! And you must help me
to get them.”

“I cannot do it, sir,” Basset replied firmly. “I don’t think that you
understand what you ask. To break into Audley’s house like any common
burglar, to dig down his wall, to steal his deeds——”

John Audley shook his fist in the young man’s face. “His house!” he
shrieked. “His wall! His deeds! No, fool, but my house, my wall, my
deeds! my deeds! If the papers are there all’s mine! All! And I am but
taking my own! Can’t you see that? Can’t you see it? Have I no right to
take what is my own?”

“But if the papers are not there?” Basset replied gravely. “No, sir, if
you will take my advice you will tell your story, apply to the court,
and let the court examine the documents. That’s the straightforward
course.”

John Audley flung out his arms. “Man!” he cried. “Don’t you know that
as long as he is in possession he can sit on his deeds, and no power on
earth can force him to show them?”

Basset drew in his breath. “If that is so,” he said, “it is hard. Very
hard! But to go by night and break into his house—sticks in my gizzard,
sir. I’m sorry, but that is the way I look at it. The man’s here too. I
saw him this evening. The fancy might have taken him to visit the
house, and he might have found you there?”

Audley’s color faded, he seemed to shrink into himself. “Where did you
see him?” he faltered.

Basset told the story. “I don’t suppose that the girls were really in
danger,” he continued, “but they thought so, and Audley came to the
rescue and brought them as far as the park gap.”

The other took out his silk handkerchief and wiped his brow. “As near
as that,” he muttered.

“Ay, and if he had found you at the house, he might have guessed your
purpose.”

John Audley held out a hand trembling with passion. “I would have
killed him!” he cried. “I would have killed him—before he should have
had what is there!”

“Exactly,” Basset replied. “And that is why I will have nothing to do
with the matter! It’s too risky, sir. If you take my advice you will
give it up.”

Audley did not answer. He sat awhile, his shoulders bowed, his eyes
fixed on the hearth, while the other wondered for the hundredth time if
he were sane. At length, “What is he doing here?” the old man asked in
a lifeless tone. The passion had died out of him.

“Shooting, I suppose. But there was some talk in Riddsley of his coming
down to stir up old Mottisfont.”

“What about?”

“Against the corn-law repeal, I suppose.”

Audley nodded. But after a while, “That’s a pretext,” he said. “And so
is the shooting. He has followed the girl.”

Basset started. “Followed Mary!” he exclaimed.

“What else? I have looked for it from the first. I’ve pressed you to
come to an understanding with her for that reason. Why the devil can’t
you? If you leave it much longer you’ll be too late! Too late! And, by
G—d, I’ll never forgive you!” with a fresh spirt of passion. “Never!
Never, man!”

“I’ve not said that I meant to do it.”

“You’ve not said!” Audley replied contemptuously. “Do you think that I
don’t know that she’s all the world to you? Do you think that I’ve no
eyes? Do you think that when you sit there watching her from behind
your book by the hour together, I have not my sight? Man, I’m not a
fool! And I tell you that if you’re not to lose her you must speak! You
must speak! Stand by another month, wait a little longer, and Philip
Audley will put in his oar, and I’ll not give that for your chances!”
He snapped his fingers.

“Why should he put in his oar?” Basset asked sullenly. His face had
turned a dull red.

John Audley shrugged his shoulders. “Do you think that she is without
attractions?”

“But Audley lives in another world.”

“The more likely to have attractions for her!”

“But surely he’ll look for—for something more,” Basset stammered.

“For a rich wife? For an alliance, as the saying is? And sleep ill of
nights? And have bad dreams? No, he is no fool, if you are. He sees
that if he marries the girl he makes himself safe. He makes himself
safe! After me, it lies between them.”

“I take it that he does think himself safe.”

“Not he!” Audley replied. He was stooping over the ashes, warming his
hands, but at that he jumped up. “Not he! he knows better than you! And
fears! And sleeps ill of nights, d—n him! And dreams! But there, I must
not excite myself. I must not excite myself. Only, if he once begins,
he’ll be no laggard in love as you are! He’ll not sit puling and
peeping and looking at the back of her head by the hour together! He’ll
be up and at her—I know what that big jowl means! And she’ll be in his
arms in half the time that you’ve taken to count her eyelashes!” He
turned in a fresh fit of fury and seized his candle. “In his arms, I
tell you, fool, while you are counting her eyelashes. Well, lose her,
lose her, and I never want to see you again, or her! Never! I’ll curse
you both!”

He stumbled to the door and went out, a queer, gibbering, shaking
figure; and Basset had no doubt at such moments that he was mad. But on
this occasion he was afraid—he was very much afraid, as he sat
pondering in his chair, that there was method in his madness!




CHAPTER XIII
PETER PAUPER


The impression which the events of the evening had made on Mary’s mind
was still lively when she awoke next day. It was not less clear,
because like the feminine letter of the ’forties, crossed and
recrossed, it had stamped itself in two layers on her mind, of which
the earlier was the more vivid.

The solitude in which her days had of late been spent had left her
peculiarly open to new ideas, while the quiet and wholesome life of the
Gatehouse had prepared her to answer any call which those ideas might
make upon her. Rescued from penury, lifted above anxiety about bed and
board, no longer exposed to the panic-fears which in Paris had beset
even her courageous nature, Mary had for a while been content simply to
rest. She had taken the sunshine, the beauty, the ease and indolence of
her life as a convalescent accepts idleness, without scruple or
question.

But this could not last. She was young, nature soon rallied in her, and
she had seen things and done things during the last two years which
forbade her to accept such a limited horizon as satisfied most of the
women of that day. Unlike them, she had viewed the world from more than
one standpoint; through the grille of a convent school, from the grimy
windows of a back-street in Paris; again, as it moved beneath the
painted ceilings of a French salon. And now, as it presented itself in
this retired house.

Therefore she could not view things as those saw them whose standpoint
had never shifted. She had suffered, she still had twinges—for who,
with her experience, could be sure that the path would continue easy?
And so to her Mr. Colet’s sermon had made a strong appeal.

It left the word which Mr. Colet had taken for his text sounding in her
ears. Borne upward on the eloquence which earnestness had lent to the
young preacher, she looked down on a world in torment, a world holding
up piteous hands, craving, itself in ignorance, the help of those who
held the secret, and whose will might make that secret sufficient to
save. Love! To do to others as she would have others do to her! With
every day, with every hour, with every minute to do something for
others! Always to give, never to take! Above all to give herself, to do
her part in that preference of others to self, which could alone right
these mighty wrongs, could find work for the idle, food for the hungry,
roofs for the homeless, knowledge for the blind, healing for the sick!
Which could save all this world in torment, and could


“Build a Heaven in Hell’s despair!”


It was a beautiful vision, and in this her first glimpse of it, Mary’s
fancy was not chilled by the hard light of experience. It seemed so
plain that if the workman had his master’s profit at heart, and the
master were as anxious for the weal of his men, the interests of the
two would be one. Equally plain it seemed that if they who grew the
food aimed at feeding the greatest number, and they who ate had the
same desire to reward the grower, if every man shrank from taking
advantage of other men, if the learned lived to spread their knowledge,
and the strong to help the weak, if no man wronged his neighbor, but


“Each for another gave his ease,”


then it seemed equally plain that love would indeed be lord of all!

Later, she might discover that it takes two to make a bargain; that
charity does bless him who gives but not always him who takes; even,
that cheap bread might be a dear advantage—that at least it might have
its drawbacks.

But for the moment it was enough for Mary that the vision was beautiful
and, as a theory, true. So that, gazing upward at the faded dimity of
her tester, she longed to play her part in it. That world in torment,
those countless hands stretched upward in appeal, that murmur of
infinite pain, the cry of the hungry, of the widow, of men sitting by
tireless hearths, of children dying in mill and mine—the picture
wrought on her so strongly, that she could not rest. She rose, and
though the hoar frost was white on the grass and the fog of an autumn
morning still curtained the view, she began to dress.

Perhaps the chill of the cold water in which she washed sobered her. At
any rate, with the comb in one hand and her hair in the other, she
drifted down another line of thought. Lord Audley—how strange was the
chance which had again brought them together! How much she owed him,
with what kindness had he seen to her comfort, how masterfully had he
arranged matters for her on the boat. And then she smiled. She recalled
Basset’s ill-humor, or his—jealousy. At the thought of what the word
implied, Mary colored.

There could be nothing in the notion, yet she probed her own feelings.
Certainly she liked Lord Audley. If he was not handsome, he had that
air of strength and power which impresses women; and he had ease and
charm, and the look of fashion which has its weight with even the most
sensible of her sex. He had all these and he was a man, and she admired
him and was grateful to him. And yesterday she might have thought that
her feeling for him was love.

But this morning she had gained a higher notion of love. She had
learned from Etruria how near to that pattern of love which Mr. Colet
preached the love of man and woman could rise. She had a new conception
of its strength and its power to expel what was selfish or petty. She
had seen it in its noblest form in Etruria, and she knew that her
feeling for Lord Audley was not in the same world with Etruria’s
feeling for the curate. She laughed at the notion.

“Poor Etruria!” she meditated. “Or should it be, happy Etruria? Who
knows? I only know that I am heart-whole!”

And she knotted up her hair and, Diana-like, went out into the pure
biting air of the morning, along the green rides hoary with dew and
fringed with bracken, under the oak trees from which the wood-pigeons
broke in startled flight.

But if the energy of her thoughts carried her out, fatigue soon brought
her to a pause. The evening’s excitement, the strain of the adventure
had not left her, young as she was, unscathed. The springs of
enthusiasm waned with her strength, and presently she felt jaded. She
perceived that she would have done better had she rested longer; and
too late the charms of bed appealed to her.

She was at the breakfast table when Basset—he, too, had had a restless
night and many thoughts—came down. He saw that she was pale and that
there were shadows under her eyes, and the man’s tenderness went out to
her. He longed, he longed above everything to put himself right with
her; and on the impulse of the moment, “I want you to know,” he said,
standing meekly at her elbow, “that I am sorry I lost my temper last
evening.”

But she was out of sympathy with him. “It is nothing,” she said. “We
were all tired, I think. Etruria is not down yet.”

“But I want to ask your——”

“Oh dear, dear!” she cried, interrupting him with a gesture of
impatience. “Don’t let us rake it up again. If my uncle has not
suffered, there is no harm done. Please let it rest.”

But he could not let it rest. He longed to put his neck under her foot,
and he did not see that she was in the worst possible mood for his
purpose. “Still,” he said, “you must let me say——”

“Don’t!” she cried. She put her hands to her ears. Then, seeing that
she had wounded him, she dropped them and spoke more kindly. “Don’t let
us make much of little, Mr. Basset. It was all natural enough. You
don’t like Lord Audley——”

“I don’t.”

“And you did not understand that we had been terribly frightened, and
had good reason to be grateful to him. I am sure that if you had known
that, you would have behaved differently. There!” with a smile. “And
now that I have made the amende for you, let us have breakfast. Here is
your coffee.”

He knew that she was holding him off, and all his alarms of the night
were quickened. Again and again had John Audley’s warning recurred to
him and as often he had striven to reject it, but always in vain. And
gradually, slowly, it had kindled his resolution, it had fired him to
action. Now, the very modesty which had long kept him silent and
withheld him from enterprise was changed—as so often happens with
diffident man—into rashness. He was as anxious to put his fate to the
test as he had before been unwilling.

Presently, “You will not need to tell your uncle about Lord Audley,” he
said. “I’ve done it.”

“I hope you told him,” she answered gravely, “that we were indebted to
Lord Audley for our safety.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Don’t say things like that!” she cried. “It is foolish. I have no
doubt that in telling my uncle you meant to relieve me. You have helped
me more than once in that way. But——”

“But this is a special occasion?”

She looked at him. “If you wish us to be friends——”

“I don’t,” he answered roughly. “I don’t want to be friends with you.”

Then, ambiguous as his words were, she saw where she stood, and she
mustered her presence of mind. She rose from her seat. “And I,” she
said, “am not going to quarrel with you, Mr. Basset. I am going now to
learn how Etruria is. And then I shall see my uncle.”

She escaped before he could answer.

Once or twice it had crossed her mind that he looked at her with
intention; and once reading that look in his eyes she had felt her
color rise, and her heart beat more quickly. But the absence on her
side of any feeling, except that which a sister might feel for a kind
brother, this and the reserve of his manner had nipped the fancy as
soon as it budded. And if she had given it a second thought, it had
been only to smile at her vanity.

Now she had no doubt of the fact, no doubt that it 

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