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The Golden Calf

by M. E. Braddon · English · Gutenberg #9052 · 919,400 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Golden Calf

Author: M. E. Braddon


        
Release date: October 1, 2005 [eBook #9052]
                Most recently updated: December 21, 2017

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9052

Credits: Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan and Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN CALF ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Mary Meehan and Distributed Proofreaders











                            THE GOLDEN CALF


                               _A Novel_

                            BY M.E. BRADDON


                               AUTHOR OF

                'LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET,' 'AURORA FLOYD,'
                    'VIXEN,' 'ISHMAEL,' ETC., ETC.



[Illustration:  "Ida stood with clasped hands, and lips moving dumbly in
prayer."]




CONTENTS

CHAP.

      I. THE ARTICLED PUPIL

     II. 'I AM GOING TO MARRY FOR MONEY'

    III. AT THE KNOLL

     IV. WENDOVER ABBEY

      V. DR. RYLANCE ASSERTS HIMSELF

     VI. A BIRTHDAY FEAST

    VII. IN THE RIVER-MEADOW

   VIII. AT THE LOCK-HOUSE

     IX. A SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT

      X. A BAD PENNY

     XI. ACCOMPLISHMENTS AT A DISCOUNT

    XII. THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

   XIII. KINGTHORPE SOCIETY

    XIV. THE TRUE KNIGHT

     XV. MR. WENDOVER PLANS AN EXCURSION

    XVI. THICKER THAN WATER

   XVII. OUGHT SHE TO STAY?

  XVIII. AFTER A STORM COMES A CALM

    XIX. AFTER A CALM A STORM

     XX. WAS THIS THE MOTIVE?

    XXI. TAKING LIFE QUIETLY

   XXII. LADY PALLISER STUDIES THE UPPER TEN

  XXIII. 'ALL OUR LIFE is MIXED WITH DEATH'

   XXIV. 'FRUITS FAIL AND LOVE DIES AND TIME RANGES'

    XXV. 'MY SEED WAS YOUTH, MY CROP WAS ENDLESS CARE'

   XXVI. 'AND, IF I DIE, NO SOUL WILL PITY ME'

  XXVII. JOHN JARDINE SOLVES THE MYSTERY

 XXVIII. AN ENGLISHMAN'S HOUSE IS HIS CASTLE

   XXIX. 'AS ONE DEAD IN THE BOTTOM OF A TOMB'

    XXX. A FIERY DAWN

   XXXI. 'SOLE PARTNER AND SOLE PART OF ALL THESE JOYS'




THE GOLDEN CALF




CHAPTER I.


THE ARTICLED PUPIL.

'Where is Miss Palliser?' inquired Miss Pew, in that awful voice of hers,
at which the class-room trembled, as at unexpected thunder. A murmur ran
along the desks, from girl to girl, and then some one, near that end of
the long room which was sacred to Miss Pew and her lieutenants, said that
Miss Palliser was not in the class-room.

'I think she is taking her music lesson, ma'am,' faltered the girl who
had ventured diffidently to impart this information to the
schoolmistress.

'Think?' exclaimed Miss Pew, in her stentorian voice. 'How can you think
about an absolute fact? Either she is taking her lesson, or she is not
taking her lesson. There is no room for thought. Let Miss Palliser be
sent for this moment.'

At this command, as at the behest of the Homeric Jove himself, half a
dozen Irises started up to carry the ruler's message; but again Miss
Pew's mighty tones resounded in the echoing class-room.

'I don't want twenty girls to carry one message. Let Miss Rylance go.'

There was a grim smile on the principal's coarsely-featured countenance
as she gave this order. Miss Rylance was not one of the six who had
started up to do the schoolmistress's bidding. She was a young lady who
considered her mission in life anything rather than to carry a message--a
young lady who thought herself quite the most refined and elegant thing
at Mauleverer Manor, and so entirely superior to her surroundings as to
be absolved from the necessity of being obliging. But Miss Pew's voice,
when fortified by anger, was too much even for Miss Rylance's calm sense
of her own merits, and she rose at the lady's bidding, laid down her
ivory penholder on the neatly written exercise, and walked out of the
room quietly, with the slow and stately deportment imparted by a long
course of instruction from Madame Rigolette, the fashionable
dancing-mistress.

'Rylance won't much like being sent on a message,' whispered Miss
Cobb, the Kentish brewer's daughter, to Miss Mullins, the Northampton
carriage-builder's heiress.

'And old Pew delights in taking her down a peg,' said Miss Cobb, who was
short, plump, and ruddy, a picture of rude health and unrefined good
looks--a girl who bore 'beer' written in unmistakable characters across
her forehead, Miss Rylance had observed to her own particular circle. 'I
will say that for the old lady,' added Miss Cobb, 'she never cottons to
stuckupishness.'

Vulgarity of speech is the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She
spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she
is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye
of authority is off her, she seems naturally to degenerate into licence.
No speech so interwoven with slang as the speech of a schoolgirl--except
that of a schoolboy.

There came a sudden hush upon the class-room after Miss Rylance had
departed on her errand. It was a sultry afternoon in late June, and the
four rows of girls seated at the two long desks in the long bare room,
with its four tall windows facing a hot blue sky, felt almost as
exhausted by the heat as if they had been placed under an air-pump. Miss
Pew had a horror of draughts, so the upper sashes were only lowered a
couple of inches, to let out the used atmosphere. There was no chance of
a gentle west wind blowing in to ruffle the loose hair upon the foreheads
of those weary students.

Thursday afternoons were devoted to the study of German. The sandy-haired
young woman at the end of the room furthest from Miss Pew's throne was
Fräulein Wolf, from Frankfort, and it was Fräulein Wolf's mission to go
on eternally explaining the difficulties of her native language to the
pupils at Mauleverer Manor, and to correct those interesting exercises of
Ollendorff's which ascend from the primitive simplicity of golden
candlesticks and bakers' dogs, to the loftiest themes in romantic
literature.

For five minutes there was no sound save the scratching of pens, and the
placid voice of the Fräulein demonstrating to Miss Mullins that in an
exercise of twenty lines, ten words out of every twenty were wrong, and
then the door was opened suddenly--not at all in the manner so carefully
instilled by the teacher of deportment. It was flung back, rather, as if
with an angry hand, and a young woman, taller than the generality of her
sex, walked quickly up the room to Miss Pew's desk, and stood before that
bar of justice, with head erect, and dark flashing eyes, the incarnation
of defiance.

_'Was für ein Mädchen.'_ muttered the Fräulein, blinking at that distant
figure, with her pale gray-green eyes.

Miss Pew pretended not to see the challenge in the girl's angry eyes. She
turned to her subordinate, Miss Pillby, the useful drudge who did a
little indifferent teaching in English grammar and geography, looked
after the younger girls' wardrobes, and toadied the mistress of the
house.

'Miss Pillby, will you be kind enough to show Ida Palliser the state of
her desk?' asked Miss Pew, with awe-inspiring politeness.

'She needn't do anything of the kind,' said Ida coolly. 'I know the state
of my desk quite as well as she does. I daresay it's untidy. I haven't
had time to put things straight.'

'Untidy!' exclaimed Miss Pew, in her appalling baritone; 'untidy is not
the word. It's degrading. Miss Pillby, be good enough to call over the
various articles which you have found in Ida Palliser's desk.'

Miss Pillby rose to do her employer's bidding. She was a dull piece of
human machinery to which the idea of resistance to authority was
impossible. There was no dirty work she would not have done meekly,
willingly even, at Miss Pew's bidding. The girls were never tired of
expatiating upon Miss Pillby's meanness; but the lady herself did not
even know that she was mean. She had been born so.

She went to the locker, lifted the wooden lid, and proceeded in a flat,
drawling voice to call over the items which she found in that receptacle.

'A novel, "The Children of the Abbey," without a cover.'

'Ah!' sighed Miss Pew.

'One stocking with a rusty darning-needle sticking in it. Five apples,
two mouldy. A square of hardbake. An old neck-ribbon. An odd cuff. Seven
letters. A knife, with the blade broken. A bundle of pen-and-ink--well, I
suppose they are meant for sketches.'

'Hand them over to me,' commanded Miss Pew.

She had seen some of Ida Palliser's pen-and-ink sketches before
to-day--had seen herself represented in every ridiculous guise and
attitude by that young person's facile pen. Her large cheeks reddened in
anticipation of her pupil's insolence. She took the sheaf of crumpled
paper and thrust it hastily into her pocket.

A ripple of laughter swept over Miss Palliser's resolute face; but she
said not a word.

'Half a New Testament--the margins shamefully scribbled over,' pursued
Miss Pillby, with implacable monotony. 'Three Brazil nuts. A piece of
slate-pencil. The photograph of a little boy--'

'My brother,' cried Ida hastily. 'I hope you are not going to confiscate
that, Miss Pew, as you have confiscated my sketches.'

'It would be no more than you deserve if I were to burn everything in
your locker, Miss Palliser,' said the schoolmistress.

'Burn everything except my brother's portrait. I might never get another.
Papa is so thoughtless. Oh, please, Miss Pillby, give me back the photo.'

'Give her the photograph,' said Miss Pew, who was not all inhuman,
although she kept a school, a hardening process which is supposed to
deaden the instincts of womanhood. 'And now, pray, Miss Palliser, what
excuse have you to offer for your untidiness?'

'None,' said Ida, 'except that I have no time to be tidy. You can't
expect tidiness from a drudge like me.'

And with this cool retort Miss Palliser turned her back upon her mistress
and left the room.

'Did you ever see such cheek?' murmured the irrepressible Miss Cobb to
her neighbour.

'She can afford to be cheeky,' retorted the neighbour. 'She has nothing
to lose. Old Pew couldn't possibly treat her any worse than she does. If
she did, it would be a police case.'

When Ida Palliser was in the little lobby outside the class room, she
took the little boy's photograph from her pocket, and kissed it
passionately. Then she ran upstairs to a small room on the landing, where
there was nothing but emptiness and a worn-out old square piano, and sat
down for her hour's practice. She was always told off to the worst pianos
in the house. She took out a book of five-finger exercises, by a Leipsic
professor, placed it on the desk, and then, just as she was beginning to
play, her whole frame was shaken like a bulrush in a sudden gust of wind;
she let her head fall forward on the desk, and burst into tears, hot,
passionate tears, that came like a flood, in spite of her determination
not to cry.

What was the matter with Ida Palliser? Not much, perhaps. Only poverty,
and poverty's natural corollary, a lack of friends. She was the
handsomest girl in the school, and one of the cleverest--clever in an
exceptional way, which claimed admiration even from the coldest. She
occupied the anomalous position of a pupil teacher, or an articled pupil.
Her father, a military man, living abroad on his half pay, with a young
second wife, and a five-year old son, had paid Miss Pew a lump sum of
fifty pounds, and for those fifty pounds Miss Pew had agreed to maintain
and educate Ida Palliser during the space of three years, to give her the
benefit of instruction from the masters who attended the school, and to
befit her for the brilliant and lucrative career of governess in a
gentleman's family. As a set-off against these advantages, Miss Pew had
full liberty to exact what services she pleased from Miss Palliser,
stopping short, as Miss Green had suggested, of a police case.

Miss Pew had not shown herself narrow in her ideas of the articled
pupil's capacity. It was her theory that no amount of intellectual
labour, including some manual duties in the way of assisting in the
lavatory on tub-nights, washing hair-brushes, and mending clothes, could
be too much for a healthy young woman of nineteen. She always talked of
Ida as a young woman. The other pupils of the same age she called girls;
but of Ida she spoke uncompromisingly as a 'young woman.'

'Oh, how I hate them all!' said Ida, in the midst of her sobs. 'I hate
everybody, myself most of all!'

Then she pulled herself together with an effort, dried her tears
hurriedly, and began her five-finger exercises, _tum, tum, tum,_ with the
little finger, all the other fingers pinned resolutely down upon the
keys.

'I wonder whether, if I had been ugly and stupid, they would have been a
little more merciful to me?' she said to herself.

Miss Palliser's ability had been a disadvantage to her at Mauleverer
Manor. When Miss Pew discovered that the girl had a knack of teaching she
enlarged her sphere of tuition, and from taking the lowest class only, as
former articled pupils had done, Miss Palliser was allowed to preside
over the second and third classes, and thereby saved her employers forty
pounds a year.

To teach two classes, each consisting of from fifteen to twenty girls,
was in itself no trifling labour. But besides this Ida had to give music
lessons to that lowest class which she had ceased to instruct in English
and French, and whose studies were now conducted by Miss Pillby. She had
her own studies, and she was eager to improve herself, for that career of
governess in a gentleman's family was the only future open to her. She
used to read the advertisements in the governess column of the _Times_
supplement, and it comforted her to see that an all-accomplished teacher
demanded from eighty to a hundred a year for her services. A hundred a
year was Ida's idea of illimitable wealth. How much she might do with
such a sum! She could dress herself handsomely, she could save enough
money for a summer holiday in Normandy with her neglectful father and her
weak little vulgar step-mother, and the half-brother, whom she loved
better than anyone else in the world.

The thought of this avenue to fortune gave her fortitude. She braced
herself up, and set herself valourously to unriddle the perplexities of a
nocturne by Chopin.

'After all I have only to work on steadily,' she told herself; 'there
will come an end to my slavery.'

Presently she began to laugh to herself softly:

'I wonder whether old Pew has looked at my caricatures,' she thought,
'and whether she'll treat me any worse on account of them?'

She finished her hour's practice, put her music back into her portfolio,
which lived in an ancient canterbury under the ancient piano, and went to
the room where she slept, in company with seven other spirits, as
mischievous and altogether evilly disposed as her own.

Mauleverer Manor had not been built for a school, or it would hardly have
been called a manor. There were none of those bleak, bare dormitories,
specially planned for the accommodation of thirty sleepers--none of those
barrack-like rooms which strike desolation to the soul. With the
exception of the large classroom which had been added at one end of the
house, the manor was very much as it had been in the days of the
Mauleverers, a race now as extinct as the Dodo. It was a roomy, rambling
old house of the time of the Stuarts, and bore the date of its erection
in many unmistakable peculiarities. There were fine rooms on the ground
floor, with handsome chimney-pieces and oak panelling. There were small
low rooms above, curious old passages, turns and twists, a short flight
of steps here, and another flight there, various levels, irregularities
of all kinds, and, in the opinion of every servant who had ever lived in
the house, an unimpeachable ghost. All Miss Pew's young ladies believed
firmly in that ghost; and there was a legend of a frizzy-haired girl
from Barbados who had seen the ghost, and had incontinently gone out
of one epileptic fit into another, until her father had come in a
fly--presumably from Barbados--and carried her away for ever, epileptic
to the last.

Nobody at present located at Mauleverer Manor remembered that young lady
from Barbados, nor had any of the existing pupils ever seen the ghost.
But the general faith in him was unshaken. He was described as an elderly
man in a snuff-coloured, square-cut coat, knee-breeches, and silk
stockings rolled up over his knees. He was supposed to be one of the
extinct Mauleverers; harmless and even benevolently disposed; given
to plucking flowers in the garden at dusk; and to gliding along
passages, and loitering on the stairs in a somewhat inane manner. The
bolder-spirited among the girls would have given a twelve-month's
pocket money to see him. Miss Pillby declared that the sight of that
snuff-coloured stranger would be her death.

'I've a weak 'art, you know,' said Miss Pillby, who was not mistress
of her aspirates,--she managed them sometimes, but they often evaded
her,--'the doctor said so when I was quite a little thing.'

'Were you ever a little thing, Pillby?' asked Miss Rylance with superb
disdain, the present Pillby being long and gaunt.

And the group of listeners laughed, with that frank laughter of school
girls keenly alive to the ridiculous in other people.

There was as much difference in the standing of the various bedrooms at
Mauleverer Manor as in that of the London squares, but in this case it
was the inhabitants who gave character to the locality. The five-bedded
room off the front landing was occupied by the stiffest and best behaved
of the first division, and might be ranked with Grosvenor Square or
Lancaster Gate. There were rooms on the second floor where girls of the
second and third division herded in inelegant obscurity, the Bloomsbury
and Camden Town of the mansion. On this story, too, slept the rabble of
girls under twelve--creatures utterly despicable in the minds of girls
in their teens, and the rooms they inhabited ranked as low as St.
Giles's.

Ida Palliser was fortunate enough to have a bed in the butterfly-room, so
called on account of a gaudy wall paper, whereon Camberwell Beauties
disported themselves among roses and lilies in a strictly conventional
style of art. The butterfly-room was the most fashionable and altogether
popular dormitory at the Manor. It was the May Fair--a district not
without a shade of Bohemianism, a certain fastness of tone. The wildest
girls in the school were to be found in the butterfly-room.

It was a pleasant enough room in itself, even apart from its association
with pleasant people. The bow window looked out upon the garden and
across the garden to the Thames, which at this point took a wide curve
between banks shaded by old pollard willows. The landscape was purely
pastoral. Beyond the level meadows came an undulating line of low hill
and woodland, with here and there a village spire dark against the blue.

Mauleverer Manor lay midway between Hampton and Chertsey, in a land of
meadows and gardens which the speculating builder had not yet invaded.

The butterfly-room was furnished a little better than the common run of
boarding-school bedchambers. Miss Pew had taken a good deal of the
Mauleverer furniture at a valuation when she bought the old house; and
the Mauleverer furniture being of a _rococo_ and exploded style, the
valuation had been ridiculously low. Thus it happened that a big wainscot
wardrobe, with doors substantial enough for a church, projected its
enormous bulk upon one side of the butterfly-room, while a tall narrow
cheval glass stood in front of a window. That cheval was the glory of the
butterfly-room. The girls could see how their skirts hung, and if the
backs of their dresses fitted. On Sunday mornings there used to be an
incursion of outsiders, eager to test the effect of their Sabbath
bonnets, and the sets of their jackets, by the cheval.

And now Ida Palliser came into the butterfly-room, yawning wearily, to
brush herself up a little before tea, knowing that Miss Pew and her
younger sister, Miss Dulcibella--who devoted herself to dress and the
amenities of life generally--would scrutinize her with eyes only too
ready to see anything amiss.

The butterfly-room was not empty. Miss Rylance was plaiting her long
flaxen hair in front of the toilet table, and another girl, a plump
little sixteen-year-old, with nut-brown hair, and a fresh complexion, was
advancing and retiring before the cheval, studying the effect of a
cherry-coloured neck-ribbon with a gray gown.

'Cherry's a lovely colour in the abstract,' said this damsel, 'but it
reminds one too dreadfully of barmaids.'

'Did you ever see a barmaid?' asked Miss Rylance, languidly, slowly
winding the long flaxen plait into a shining knob at the back of her
head, and contemplating her reflection placidly with large calm blue eyes
which saw no fault in the face they belonged to.

With features so correctly modelled, and a complexion so delicately
tinted, Miss Rylance ought to have been lovely. But she had escaped
loveliness by a long way. There was something wanting, and that something
was very big.

'Good gracious, yes; I've seen dozens of barmaids,' answered Bessie
Wendover, with her frank voice. 'Do you suppose I've never been into an
hotel, or even into a tavern? When I go for a long drive with papa he
generally wants brandy and soda, and that's how I get taken into the bar
and introduced to the barmaid.'

'When you say introduced, of course you don't mean it,' said Miss
Rylance, fastening her brooch. 'Calling things by their wrong names is
your idea of wit.'

'I would rather have a mistaken idea of wit than none at all,' retorted
Miss Wendover, and then she pirouetted on the tips of her toes, and
surveyed her image in the glass from head to foot, with an aggravated
air. 'I hope I'm not vulgar-looking, but I'm rather afraid I am,' she
said. 'What's the good of belonging to an old Saxon family if one has a
thick waist and large hands?'

'What's the good of anything at Mauleverer Manor?' asked Ida, coming into
the room, and seating herself on the ground with a dejected air.

Bessie Wendover ran across the room and sat down beside her.

'So you were in for it again this afternoon, you poor dear thing,' she
murmured, in a cooing voice. 'I wish I had been there. It would have been
"Up, guards, and at 'em!" if I had. I'm sure I should have said something
cheeky to old Pew. The idea of overhauling your locker! I should just
like her to see the inside of mine. It would make her blood run cold.'

'Ah!' sighed Ida, 'she can't afford to make an example of you. You mean a
hundred and fifty pounds a year. I am of no more account in her eyes than
an artist's lay figure, which is put away in a dark closet when it isn't
in use. She wanted to give you girls a lesson in tidiness, so she put me
into her pillory. Fortunately I'm used to the pillory.'

'But you are looking white and worried, you dear lovely thing,' exclaimed
Bessie, who was Ida Palliser's bosom friend. 'It's too bad the way they
use you. Have this neck-ribbon,' suddenly untying the bow so carefully
elaborated five minutes ago. 'You must, you shall; I don't want it; I
hate it. Do, dear.'

And for consolation Miss Wendover tied the cherry-coloured ribbon under
her friend's collar, patted Ida's pale cheeks, and kissed and hugged her.

'Be happy, darling, do,' she said, in her loving half-childish way, while
Miss Rylance looked on with ineffable contempt. 'You are so clever and so
beautiful; you were born to be happy.'

'Do you think so, pet?' asked Ida, with cold scorn; 'then I ought to have
been born with a little more money.'

'What does money matter?' cried Bessie.

'Not very much to a girl like you, who has never known the want of it.'

'That's not true, darling. I never go home for the holidays that I don't
hear father grumble about his poverty. The rents are so slow to come in;
the tenants are always wanting drain-pipes and barns and things. Last
Christmas his howls were awful. We are positive paupers. Mother has to
wait ages for a cheque.'

'Ah, my pet, that's a very different kind of poverty from mine. You have
never known what it is to have only three pairs of wearable stockings.'

Bessie looked as if she were going to cry.

'If you were not so disgustingly proud, you horrid thing, you need never
feel the want of stockings,' she said discontentedly.

'If it were not for what you call my disgusting pride, I should
degenerate into that loathsome animal a sponge,' said Ida, rising
suddenly from her dejected attitude, and standing up before her admiring
little friend,

    '_A daughter of the gods, divinely tall
     And most divinely fair_.'

That fatal dower of beauty had been given to Ida Palliser in fullest
measure. She had the form of a goddess, a head proudly set upon shoulders
that were sloping but not narrow, the walk of a Moorish girl, accustomed
to carrying a water-jug on her head, eyes dark as night, hair of a deep
warm brown rippling naturally across her broad forehead, a complexion
of creamiest white and richest carnation. These were but the sensual
parts of beauty which can be catalogued. But it was in the glorious
light and variety of expression that Ida shone above all compeers. It
was by the intellectual part of her beauty that she commanded the
admiration--enthusiastic in some cases, in others grudging and
unwilling--of her schoolfellows, and reigned by right divine, despite her
shabby gowns and her cheap ready-made boots, the belle of the school.




CHAPTER II.


'I AM GOING TO MARRY FOR MONEY.'

When a schoolgirl of sixteen falls in love with one of her schoolfellows
there are no limits to her devotion. Bessie Wendover's adoration of Miss
Palliser was boundless. Ida's seniority of three years, her beauty, her
talent, placed her, as it were, upon a pinnacle in the eyes of the
younger girl. Her poverty, her inferior position in the school, only made
her more interesting to the warm-hearted Bessie, who passionately
resented any slight offered to her friend. It was in vain that Miss
Rylance took Bessie to task, and demonstrated the absurdity of this
childish fancy for a young person whose future sphere of life must be
necessarily remote from that of a Hampshire squire's daughter. Bessie
despised this worldly wisdom.

'What is the use of attaching yourself to a girl whom you are never
likely to see after you leave school?' argued Miss Rylance.

'I shall see her. I shall ask her home,' said Bessie, sturdily.

'Do you think your people will let you?'

'Mother will do anything I ask her, and father will do anything mother
asks him. I am going to have Ida home with me all the summer holidays.'

'How do you know that she will come?'

'I shall make her come. It is very nasty of you to insinuate that she
won't.'

'Palliser has a good deal of pride--pride and poverty generally go
together, don't you know. I don't think she'll care about showing herself
at the Grange in her old clothes and her three pairs of stockings, one
on, one off, and one at the laundress's,' said Miss Rylance, winding up
with a viperish little laugh as if she had said something witty.

She had a certain influence with Bessie, whom she had known all her life.
It was she who had inspired Bessie with the desire to come to Mauleverer
Manor, to be finished, after having endured eight years of jog-trot
education from a homely little governess at home--who grounded the boys
in Latin and mathematics before they went to Winchester, and made herself
generally useful. Miss Rylance was the daughter of a fashionable
physician, whose head-quarters were in Cavendish Square, but who spent
his leisure at a something which he called 'a place' at Kingthorpe, a
lovely little village between Winchester and Romsey, where the Wendovers
were indigenous to the soil, whence they seemed to have sprung, like the
armed men in the story; for remotest tradition bore no record of their
having come there from anywhere else, nor was there record of a time when
the land round Kingthorpe belonged to any other family.

Dr. Rylance, whose dainty verandah-shaded cottage stood in gardens of
three and a half acres, and who rented a paddock for his cow, was always
lamenting that he could not buy more land.

'The Wendovers have everything,' he said. 'It is impossible for a new man
to establish himself.'

It was to be observed, however, that when land within a reasonable
distance of Kingthorpe came into the market, Dr. Rylance did not put
himself forward as a buyer. His craving for more territory always ended
in words.

Urania Rylance had spent much of her girlhood at Kingthorpe, and had
always been made welcome at The Knoll; but although she saw the Wendovers
established upon their native soil, the rulers of the land, and revered
by all the parish, she had grown up with the firm conviction that Dr.
Rylance, of Cavendish Square, and Dr. Rylance's daughter were altogether
superior to these country bumpkins, with their narrow range of ideas and
their strictly local importance.

The summer days wore on at Mauleverer Manor, not altogether unpleasantly
for the majority of the girls, who contrived to enjoy their lives in
spite of Miss Pew's tyranny, which was considered vile enough to rank
that middle-aged, loud-voiced lady with the Domitians and Attilas of
history. There was a softening influence, happily, in the person of Miss
Dulcibella, who was slim and sentimental, talked about sweetness and
light, loved modern poetry, spent all her available funds upon dress, and
was wonderfully girlish in her tastes and habits at nine-and-thirty years
of age.

It was a splendid summer, a time of roses and sunshine, and the girls
were allowed to carry on their studies in the noble old garden, in the
summer-houses and pleasure domes which the extinct Mauleverers had made
for themselves in their day of power. Grinding at history, grammar, and
geography did not seem so oppressive a burden when it could be done
under the shade of spreading cedars, amid the scent of roses, in an
atmosphere of colour and light. Even Ida's labours seemed a little easier
when she and her pupils sat in a fast-decaying old summer-house in the
rose-garden, with a glimpse of sunlit river flashing athwart the roses.

So the time wore on until the last week in July, and then all the school
was alive with excitement, and every one was looking forward to the great
event of the term, 'breaking up.' 'Old Pew,' had sent out her invitations
for a garden party, an actual garden party--not a mere namby-pamby
entertainment among the girls themselves, in which a liberal supply of
blanc-mange and jam tarts was expected to atone for the absence of the
outside world. Miss Pew had taken it into her head that Mauleverer Manor
ought to be better known, and that a garden party would be a good
advertisement. With this idea, she had ordered a hundred invitation
cards, and had disseminated them among the most eligible of her old
pupils, and the parents and guardians of those damsels now at the Manor.
The good old gardens, where velvet greensward and cedars of Lebanon cost
little labour to maintain in perfect order, were worthy to be exhibited.
The roses, Miss Dulcibella's peculiar care, were, in that lady's opinion,
equal to anything outside Chatsworth or Trentham. A garden party, by all
means, said Miss Dulcibella, and she gave the young ladies to understand
that the whole thing was her doing.

'I waited till Sarah was in a good temper,' she told her satellites, half
a dozen or so of the elder girls who worshipped her, and who, in the
slang phraseology of the school, were known as Miss Dulcie's 'cracks,'
'and then I proposed a garden party. It required a great deal of talking
to bring her even to think about such a thing. You see the expense will
be enormous! Ices, tea and coffee, cakes, sandwiches, claret-cup. Thank
goodness it's too late in the year for people to expect strawberries.
Yes, my dears, you may thank me for your garden party.'

'Dear Miss Dulcibella,' exclaimed one.

'You too delicious darling,' cried another.

'What will you wear?' asked a third, knowing that Miss Dulcie was weak
about dress, and had a morbid craving for originality.

'Well, dears,' began Miss Dulcie, growing radiant at the thrilling
question, 'I have been thinking of making up my art needlework tunic--the
pale green, you know, with garlands of passion flowers, worked in
crewels--over a petticoat of the faintest primrose.'

'That will be quite too lovely,' exclaimed four enthusiasts in a chorus.

'You know how fond I am of those delicate tints in that soft Indian
cashmere, that falls in such artistic folds.'

'Heavenly,' sighed the chorus, and Miss Dulcie went on talking for
half-an-hour by Chertsey clock, in fact till the tea-bell broke up the
little conclave.

What was Ida Palliser going to wear at the garden party? The question was
far more serious for her than for Miss Dulcibella, who had plenty of
money to spend upon her adornment. In Ida the necessity for a new gown
meant difficulty, perhaps mortification.

'Why should I not spend the day in one of the garrets, darning stockings
and packing boxes?' she said bitterly, when a grand discussion about the
garden party was being held in the butterfly-room; 'nobody will want me.
I have no relations coming to admire me.'

'You know you don't mean what you say,' said Miss Rylance. 'You expect to
have half-a-dozen prizes, and to lord it over all of us.'

'I have worked hard enough for the prizes,' answered Ida. 'I don't think
you need grudge me them.'

'I do not,' said Miss Rylance, with languid scorn. 'You know I never go
in for prizes. My father looks upon school as only a preliminary kind of
education. When I am at home with him in the season I shall have lessons
from better masters than any we are favoured with here.'

'What a comfort it is for us to know that!' retorted Ida, her eyes
dancing mischievously.

It was now within a week of the garden party. Miss Pew was grimmer of
aspect and louder of voice than usual, and it was felt that, at the
slightest provocation, she might send forth an edict revoking all her
invitations, and the party might be relegated to the limbo of unrealized
hopes. Never had the conduct of Miss Pew's pupils been so irreproachable,
never had lessons been learned, and exercises prepared, so diligently.

Ida had received a kind little note from Mrs. Wendover, asking her to
spend her summer holidays at Kingthorpe, and at Bessie's earnest desire
had accepted the cordial invitation.

'You don't know what a foolish thing you are doing, Bess,' said Miss
Palliser, when--reluctant to the last--she had written her acceptance,
Bessie looking over her shoulder all the while. 'Foolish for you, foolish
for me. It is a mistake to associate yourself with paupers. You will feel
ashamed of me half-a-dozen times a day at Kingthorpe.'

'No, no, no!' cried the energetic Bessie; 'I shall never feel anything
but pride in you. I shall be proud to show my people what a beautiful,
brilliant, wonderful friend I have chosen for myself.'

'Ardent child!' exclaimed Ida, with a touch of sadness even in her
mockery. 'What a pity you have not a bachelor brother to fall in love
with me!'

'Never mind the brother. I have two bachelor cousins.'

'Of course! The rich Brian, and the poor Brian, whose histories I have
heard almost as often as I heard the story of "Little Red Ridinghood" in
my nursery days. Both good-looking, both clever, both young. One a man of
landed estate. All Kingthorpe parish belongs to him, does it not?'

'All except the little bit that belongs to papa.'

'And Dr. Rylance's garden and paddock; don't forget that.'

'Could I forget the Rylances? Urania says that although her father has no
land at Kingthorpe, he has influence.'

'The other cousin dependent on his talents, and fighting his way at the
Bar. Is not that how the story goes, Bess?'

'Yes, darling. I am afraid poor Brian has hardly begun fighting yet. He
is only eating his terms. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds
rather low.'

'Well, Bess, if I am to marry either of your cousins, it must be the rich
one,' said Ida, decisively.

'Oh, Ida, how can you say so? You can't know which you will like best.'

'My likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it. I am going to marry
for money.'

Miss Rylance had brought her desk to that end of the table where the two
girls were sitting, during the latter part of the conversation. It was
evening, the hour or so of leisure allowed for the preparation of studies
and the writing of home letters. Miss Rylance unlocked her desk, and took
out her paper and pens; but, having got so far as this, she seemed rather
inclined to join in the conversation than to begin her letter.

'Isn't that rather a worldly idea for your time of life?' she asked,
looking at Ida with her usual unfriendly expression.

'No doubt. I should be disgusted if you or Bessie entertained such a
notion. But in me it is only natural. I have drained the cup of poverty
to the dregs. I thirst for the nectar of wealth. I would marry a
soap-boiler, a linseed-crusher, a self-educated navvy who had developed
into a great contractor--any plebian creature, always provided that he
was an honest man.'

'How condescending!' said Miss Rylance. 'I suppose, Bessie, you know that
Miss Pew has especially forbidden us all to indulge in idle talk about
courtship and marriage?'

'Quite so,' said Bessie; 'but as old Pew knows that we are human, I've no
doubt she is quite aware that this is one of her numerous rules which we
diligently set at nought.'

Urania began her letter, but although her pen moved swiftly over her
paper in that elegant Italian hand which was, as it were, a badge of
honour at Mauleverer Manor, her ears were not the less open to the
conversation going on close beside her.

'Marry a soap-boiler, indeed!' exclaimed Bessie, indignantly; 'you ought
to be a duchess!'

'No doubt, dear, if dukes went about the world, like King Cophetua, on
the look out for beggar-maids.'

'I am so happy to think you are coming to Kingthorpe! It is the dearest
old place. We shall be so happy!'

'It will not be your fault if we are not, darling,' said Ida, looking
tenderly at the loving face, uplifted to hers. 'Well, I have written to
my father to ask him for five pounds, and if he sends the five pounds I
will go to Kingthorpe. If not, I must invent an excuse--mumps, or
measles, or something--for staying away. Or I must behave so badly for
the last week of the term that old Pew will revoke her sanction of the
intended visit. I cannot come to Kingthorpe quite out at elbows.'

'You look lovely even in the gown you have on,' said Bessie.

'I don't know anything about my loveliness, but I know that this gown is
absolutely threadbare.'

Bessie sighed despondently. She knew her friend's resolute temper, and
that any offer of clothes or money from her would be worse than useless.
It would make Ida angry.

'What kind of man is your father, darling?' she asked, thoughtfully.

'Very good-natured.'

'Ah! Then he will send the five pounds.'

'Very weak.'

'Ah! Then he may change his mind about it.'

'Very poor.'

'Then he may not have the money.'

'The lot is in the urn of fate, Bess, We must take our chance. I think,
somehow, that the money will come. I have asked for it urgently, for I do
want to come to Kingthorpe.' Bessie kissed her. 'Yes, dear, I wish with
all my heart to accept your kind mother's invitation; though I know, in
my secret soul, that it is foolishness for me to see the inside of a
happy home, to sit beside a hospitable hearth, when it is my mission in
life to be a dependent in the house of a stranger. If you had half a
dozen small sisters, now, and your people would engage me as a nursery
governess--'

'You a nursery governess!' cried Bessie, 'you who are at the top of every
class, and who do everything better than the masters who teach you?'

'Well, if my perfection prove worth seventy pounds a-year when I go out
into the world, I shall be satisfied,' said Ida.

'What will you buy with your five pounds?' asked Bessie.

'A black cashmere gown, as plain as a nun's, a straw hat, and as many
collars, cuffs, and stockings as I can get for the rest of the money.'

Miss Rylance listened, smiling quietly to herself as she bent over her
desk. To the mind of an only daughter, who had been brought up in a
supremely correct manner, who had had her winter clothes and summer
clothes at exactly the right season, and of the best that money could
buy, there was a piteous depth of poverty and degradation in Ida
Palliser's position. The girl's beauty and talents were as nothing when
weighed against such sordid surroundings.

The prize-day came, a glorious day at the beginning of August, and the
gardens of Mauleverer Manor, the wide reach of blue river, the meadows,
the willows, the distant woods, all looked their loveliest, as if Nature
was playing into the hands of Miss Pew.

'I am sure you girls ought to be very happy to live in such a place!'
said one of the mothers, as she strolled about the velvet lawn with her
daughters, 'instead of being mewed up in a dingy London square.'

'You wouldn't say that if you saw the bread and scrape and the sloppy tea
we have for breakfast,' answered one of the girls.

'It's all very well for you, who see this wretched hole in the sunshine,
and old Pew in her best gown and her company manners. The place is a
whited sepulchre. I should like you to have a glimpse behind the scenes,
ma.'

'Ma' smiled placidly, and turned a deaf ear to these aspersions of the
schoolmistress. Her girls looked well fed and healthy. Bread and scrape
evidently agreed with them much better than that reckless consumption of
butter and marmalade which swelled the housekeeping bills during the
holidays.

It was a great day. Miss Pew the elder was splendid in apple-green moiré
antique; Miss Pew the younger was elegant in pale and flabby raiment of
cashmere and crewel-work. The girls were in that simple white muslin of
the _jeune Meess Anglaise_, to which they were languishing to bid an
eternal adieu. There were a great many pretty girls at Mauleverer Manor,
and on this day, when the white-robed girlish forms were flitting to and
fro upon the green lawns, in the sweet summer air and sunshine, it seemed
as if the old manorial mansion were a bower of beauty. Among the parents
of existing pupils who had accepted the Misses Pew's invitation was Dr.
Rylance, the fashionable physician, whose presence there conferred
distinction upon the school. It was Miss Rylance's last term, and the
doctor wished to assist at those honours which she would doubtless reap
as the reward of meritorious studies. He was not blindly devoted to his
daughter, but he was convinced that, like every thing else belonging to
him, she was of the best quality; and he expected to see her appreciated
by the people who had been privileged to educate her.

The distribution of prizes was the great feature of the day. It was to
take place at four o'clock, in the ball room, a fine old panelled saloon,
in which the only furniture was a pair of grand pianos, somewhat the
worse for wear, a table at the end of the room on which the prizes were
arranged, and benches covered with crimson cloth for the accommodation of
the company.

There was to be a concert before the distribution. Four of the best
pianoforte players in the school were to hammer out an intensely noisy
version of the overture to _Zampa_, arranged for eight hands on two
pianos. The crack singer was to sing 'Una voce,' and Ida Palliser was to
play the 'Moonlight Sonata.'

Dr. Rylance had come early, on purpose to be present at this ceremonial.
He was the most important guest who had yet arrived, and Miss Pew devoted
herself to his entertainment, and went rustling up and down the terrace
in front of the ballroom windows in her armour of apple-green moiré,
listening deferentially to the physician's remarks.

Dr. Rylance was a large fair-complexioned man, who had been handsome in
his youth, and who at seven-and-forty was still remarkably good-looking.
He had fine teeth, good hair, full blue eyes, capable of the hardest,
coldest stare that ever looked out of a human countenance. Mr. Darwin has
told us that the eyes do not smile, that the radiance we fancy we see in
the eye itself is only produced by certain contractions of the muscles
surrounding it. Assuredly there was no smile in the eyes of Dr. Rylance.
His smile, which was bland and frequent, gave only a vague impression of
white teeth and brown whiskers. He had a fine figure, and was proud of
his erect carriage. He dressed carefully and well, and was as particular
as Brummel about his laundress. His manners were considered pleasing by
the people who liked him; while those who disliked him accused him of an
undue estimate of his own merits, and a tendency to depreciate the rest
of humanity. His practice was rather select than extensive, for Dr.
Rylance was a specialist. He had won his reputation as an adviser in
cases of mental disease; and as, happily, mental diseases are less common
than bodily ailments, Dr. Rylance had not the continuous work of a Gull
or a Jenner. His speciality paid him remarkably well. His cases hung long
on hand, and when he had a patient of wealth and standing Dr. Rylance
knew how to keep him. His treatment was soothing and palliative, as
befitted an enlightened age. In an age of scepticism no one could expect
Dr. Rylance to work miraculous cures. It is in no wise to his discredit
to say that he was more successful in sustaining and comforting the
patient's friends than in curing the patient.

This was Laurence Rylance, a man who had begun life in a very humble way,
had raised himself by his own efforts, if not to the top of the medical
tree, certainly to a very comfortable and remunerative perch among its
upper branches; a man thoroughly satisfied with himself and with what
destiny had done for him; a man who, to be a new Caesar, would hardly
have foregone the privilege of being Laurence Rylance.

'My daughter has done well during this last term, I hope, Miss Pew?' he
said, interrogatively, but rather as if the question were needless, as he
walked beside the rustling moiré.

'She has earned my entire approval,' replied Miss Pew, in her oiliest
accents. 'She has application.' Dr. Rylance nodded assentingly. 'She has
a charming deportment. I know of no girl in the school more thoroughly
ladylike. I have never seen her with a collar put on crookedly, or with
rough hair. She is a pattern to many of my girls.'

'That is all gratifying to my pride as a father; but I hope she has made
progress in her studies.'

Miss Pew coughed gently behind a mittened hand.

'She has not made quite so great an advance as I should have wished. She
has talent, no doubt; but it is hardly of a kind that comes into play
among other girls. In after-life, perhaps, there may be development. I am
sorry to say she is not in our roll-call of honour to-day. She has won no
prize.'

'Perhaps she may have hardly thought it worth her while to compete,' said
Dr. Rylance, hurt in his own individual pride by the idea that his
daughter had missed distinction, just as he would have been hurt if
anybody had called one of his pictures a copy, or made light of his blue
china. 'With the Rylances it has always been Caesar or nothing.'

'I regret to say that my three most important prizes have been won by a
young woman whom I cannot esteem,' said Miss Pew, bristling in her
panoply of apple-green, at the thought of Ida Palliser's insolence. 'I
hope I shall ever be just, at whatever sacrifice of personal feeling. I
shall to-day bestow the first prize for modern languages, for music, and
for English history and literature, upon a young person of whose moral
character I have a very low opinion.'

'And pray who is this young lady?' asked Dr. Rylance.

'Miss Palliser, the daughter of a half-pay officer residing in the
neighbourhood of Dieppe--for very good reasons, no doubt.

'Palliser; yes, I have heard my daughter talk of her. An insolent,
ill-bred girl. I have been taught to consider her somewhat a disgrace to
your excellent and well-managed school.'

'Her deportment is certainly deplorable,' admitted Miss Pew; 'but the
girl has remarkable talents.'

More visitors were arriving from this time forward, until everyone was
seated in the ball-room. Miss Pew was engaged in receiving people, and
ushering them to their seats, always assisted by Miss Dulcibella--an
image of limp gracefulness--and the three governesses--all as stiff as
perambulating black-boards. Dr. Rylance strolled by himself for a little
while, sniffed at the great ivory cup of a magnolia, gazed dreamily at
the river--shining yonder across intervening gardens and meadows--and
ultimately found his daughter.

'I am sorry to find you are not to be honoured with a prize, Ranie,' he
said, smiling at her gently.

In no relation of life had he been so nearly perfect as in his conduct as
a father. Were he ever so disappointed in his daughter, he could not
bring himself to be angry with her.

'I have not tried for prizes, papa. Why should I compete with such a girl
as Ida Palliser, who is to get her living as a governess, and who knows
that success at school is a matter of life and death with her?'

'Do you not think it might have been worth your while to work as hard as
Miss Palliser, for the mere honour and glory of being first in your
school?'

'Did you ever work for mere honour and glory, papa?' asked Urania, with
her unpleasant little air of cynicism.

'Well, my love, I confess there has been generally a promise of solid
pudding in the background. Pray, who is this Miss Palliser, whom I hear
of at every turn, and whom nobody seems to like?'

'There you are mistaken, papa. Miss Palliser has her worshippers, though
she is the most disagreeable girl in the school. That silly little Bessie
raves about her, and has actually induced Mrs. Wendover to invite her to
The Knoll!'

'That is a pity, if the girl is ill-bred and unpleasant,' said Dr.
Rylance.

'She's a horror,' exclaimed Urania, vindictively.

Five minutes later Dr. Rylance and his daughter made their entrance into
the ball-room, which was full of people, and whence came the opening
crash of an eight-handed 'Zampa.' Father and daughter went in softly, and
with a hushed air, as if they had been going into church; yet the firing
of a cannon or two more or less would hardly have disturbed the
performers at the two pianos, so tremendous was their own uproar. They
were taking the overture in what they called orchestral time; though it
is doubtful whether even their playing could have kept pace with the
hurrying of excited fiddles in a presto passage, or the roll of the big
drum, simulating distant thunder. Be that as it may, the four performers
were pounding along at a breathless pace; and if their pianissimo
passages failed in delicacy, there was no mistake about their fortissimo.

'What an abominable row!' whispered Dr. Rylance. 'Is this what they call
music?'

Urania smiled, and felt meritorious in that, after being chosen as one of
the four for this very 'Zampa,' she had failed ignominiously as a timist,
and had been compelled to cede her place to another pupil.

'I might have toiled for six weeks at the horrid thing,' she thought,
'and papa would have only called it a row.'

'Zampa' ended amidst polite applause, the delighted parents of the four
players feeling that they had not lived in vain. And now the music
mistress took her place at one of the pianos, the top of the instrument
was lowered, and Miss Fane, a little fair girl with a round face and
frizzy auburn hair, came simpering forward to sing 'Una voce,' in a reedy
soprano, which had been attenuated by half-guinea lessons from an Italian
master, and which frequently threatened a snap.

Happily on this occasion the thin little voice got through its work
without disaster; there was a pervading sense of relief when the crisis
was over, and Miss Fane had simpered her acknowledgments of the applause
which rewarded a severely conscientious performance.

'Any more singing?' inquired Dr. Rylance of his daughter, not with the
air of a man who pants for vocal melody.

'No, the next is the "Moonlight Sonata."'

Dr. Rylance had a dim idea that he had heard of this piece before. He
waited dumbly, admiring the fine old room, with its lofty ceiling, and
florid cornice, and the sunny garden beyond the five tall windows.

Presently Ida Palliser came slowly towards the piano, carrying herself
like an empress. Dr. Rylance could hardly believe the evidence of his
eyes. Was this the girl whose deportment had been called abominable, whom
Urania had denounced as a horror? Was this the articled pupil, the girl
doomed to life-long drudgery as a governess, this superb creature, with
her noble form and noble face, looking grave defiance at the world which
hitherto had not used her too kindly?

She was dressed in black, a sombre figure amidst the white muslins and
rainbow sashes of her comrades. Her cashmere gown was of the simplest
fashion, but it became the tall full figure to admiration. Below her
linen collar she wore a scarlet ribbon, from which hung a silver locket,
the only ornament she possessed. It was Bessie Wendover who had insisted
on the scarlet ribbon, as a relief to that funereal gown.

'I was never so surprised in my life,' whispered Dr. Rylance to his
daughter. 'She is the handsomest girl I ever saw.'

'Yes, she is an acknowledged beauty, said Urania, with a contraction of
her thin lips; 'nobody disputes her good looks. It is a pity her manners
are so abominable.'

'She moves like a lady.'

'She has been thoroughly drilled,' sneered Urania. 'The original savage
in her has been tamed as much as possible.'

'I should like to know more of that girl,' said Dr. Rylance, 'for she
looks as if she has force of character. I'm sorry you and she are not
better friends.'

Ida seated herself at the piano and began to play, without honouring the
assembly with one glance from her dark eyes. She sat looking straight
before her, like one whose thoughts are far away. She played by memory,
and at first her hands faltered a little as they touched the keys, as if
she hardly knew what she was going to play. Then she recollected herself
in a flash, and began the firm, slow, legato movement with the touch of a
master hand, the melody rising and falling in solemn waves of sound, like
the long, slow roll of a calm sea.

The 'Moonlight Sonata' is a composition of some length. Badly, or even
indifferently performed, the 'Moonlight Sonata' is a trial; but no one
grew weary of it to-day, though the strong young hands which gave
emphasis to the profound beauties of that wonderful work were only the
hands of a girl. Those among the listeners who knew least about music,
knew that this was good playing; those who cared not at all for the
playing were pleased to sit and watch the mobile face of the player as
she wove her web of melody, her expression changing with every change in
the music, but unmoved by a thought of the spectators.

Presently, just as the sonata drew to its close, an auburn head was
thrust between Dr. Rylance and his daughter, and a girl's voice
whispered,

'Is she not splendid? Is she not the grandest creature you ever saw?'

The doctor turned and recognized Bessie Wendover.

'She is, Bessie,' he said, shaking hands with her. 'I never was so struck
by anyone in my life.'

Urania grew white with anger. Was it not enough that Ida Palliser should
have outshone her in every accomplishment upon which school-girls pride
themselves? Was it not enough that she should have taken complete
possession of that foolish little Bessie, and thus ingratiated herself
into the Wendover set, and contrived to get invited to Kingthorpe? No.
Here was Urania's own father, her especial property, going over to the
enemy.

'I am glad you admire her so much, papa,' she said, outwardly calm and
sweet, but inwardly consumed with anger; 'for it will be so pleasant for
you to see more of her at Kingthorpe.'

'Yes,' he said heartily, 'I am glad she is coming to Kingthorpe. That was
a good idea of yours, Bessie.'

'Wasn't it? I am so pleased to find you like her. I wish you could get
Ranie to think better of her.'

Now came the distribution of prizes and accessits. Miss Pew took her seat
before the table on which the gaudily-bound books were arranged, and
began to read out the names. It was a hard thing for her to have to award
the three first prizes to a girl she detested; but Miss Pew knew the
little world she ruled well enough to know that palpable injustice would
weaken her rule. Ninety-nine girls who had failed to win the prize would
have resented her favouritism if she had given the reward to a hundredth
girl who had not fairly won it. The eyes of her little world were upon
her, and she was obliged to give the palm to the real victor. So, in her
dull, hard voice, looking straight before her, with cold, unfriendly
eyes, she read out--

'The prize for modern languages has been obtained by Miss Palliser!' and
Ida came slowly up to the table and received a bulky crimson volume,
containing the poetical works of Sir Walter Scott.

'The prize for proficiency in instrumental music is awarded to Miss
Palliser!'

Another bulky volume was handed to Ida. For variety the binding was
green, and the inside of the book was by William Cowper.

'The greatest number of marks for English history and literature have
been obtained by Miss Palliser.'

Miss Palliser was now the happy possessor of a third volume bound in
blue, containing a selection from the works of Robert Southey.

With not one word of praise nor one smile of approval did Miss Pew
sweeten the gifts which she bestowed upon the articled pupil. She gave
that which justice, or rather policy, compelled her to give. No more.
Kindliness was not in the bond.

Ida came slowly away from the table, laden with her prizes, her head held
high, but not with pride in the trophies she carried. Her keenest feeling
at this moment was a sense of humiliation. The prizes had been given her
as a bone might be flung to a strange dog, by one whose heart held no
love for the canine species. An indignant flush clouded the creamy
whiteness of her forehead, angry tears glittered in her proud eyes. She
made her way to the nearest door, and went away without a word to the
crowd of younger girls, her own pupils, who had crowded round to
congratulate and caress her. She was adored by these small people, and it
was her personal influence as much as her talent which made her so
successful a teacher.

Dr. Rylance followed her to the door with his eyes. He was not capable of
wide sympathies, or of projecting himself into the lives of other people;
but he did sympathize with this girl, so lonely in the splendour of her
beauty, so joyless in her triumph.

'God help her, poor child, in the days to come!' he said to himself.




CHAPTER III.


AT THE KNOLL.

Between Winchester and Romsey there lies a region of gentle hills and
grassy slopes shadowed by fine old yew trees, a land of verdure, lonely
and exceeding fair; and in a hollow of this undulating district nestles
the village of Kingthorpe, with its half-dozen handsome old houses, its
richly cultivated gardens, and quaint old square-towered church. It is a
prosperous, well-to-do little settlement, where squalor and want are
unknown. Its humbler dwellings belong chiefly to the labourers on the
Wendover estate, and those are liberally paid and well cared for. An
agricultural labourer's wages at Kingthorpe might seem infinitely small
to a London mechanic; but when it is taken into account that the tiller
of the fields has a roomy cottage and an acre of garden for sixpence
a-week, his daily dole of milk from the home farm, as much wood as he can
burn, blankets and coals at Christmas, and wine and brandy, soup and
bread from the great house, in all emergencies, he is perhaps not so very
much worse off than his metropolitan brother.

There was an air of comfort and repose at Kingthorpe which made the place
delightful to the eye of a passing wanderer--a spot where one would
gladly have lain down the burden of life and rested for awhile in one of
those white cottages that lay a little way back from the high road,
shadowed by a screen of tall elms. There was a duck-pond in front of a
low red-brick inn which reminded one of Birkett Foster, and made the
central feature of the village; a spot of busy life where all else was
stillness. There were accommodation roads leading off to distant farms,
above which the tree-tops interlaced, and where the hedges were rich
in blackberry and sloe, dog-roses and honeysuckle, and the banks in
spring-time dappled with violet and primrose, purple orchids and wild
crocus, and all the flowers that grow for the delight of village
children.

Ida Palliser sat silent in her corner of the large landau which was
taking Miss Wendover and her schoolfellows from Winchester station to
Kingthorpe. Miss Rylance had accepted a seat in the Wendover landau at
her father's desire; but she would have preferred to have had her own
smart little pony-carriage to meet her at the station. To drive her own
carriage, were it ever so small, was more agreeable to Urania's temper
than to sit behind the over-fed horses from The Knoll, and to be thus, in
some small measure, indebted to Bessie Wendover.

Ida Palliser's presence made the thing still more odious. Bessie was
radiant with delight at taking her friend home with her. She watched
Ida's eyes as they roamed over the landscape. She understood the girl's
silent admiration.

'They are darling old hills, aren't they, dear?' she asked, squeezing
Ida's hand, as the summer shadows and summer lights went dancing over the
sward like living things.

'Yes, dear, they are lovely,' answered Ida, quietly.

She was devouring the beauty of the scene with her eyes. She had seen
nothing like it in her narrow wanderings over the earth--nothing so
simple, so beautiful, and so lonely. She was sorry when they left that
open hill country and came into a more fertile scene, a high road, which
was like an avenue in a gentleman's park, and then the village duck-pond
and red homestead, the old gray church, with its gilded sun-dial, marking
the hour of six, the gardens brimming over with roses, and as full of
sweet odours as those spicy islands which send their perfumed breath to
greet the seaman as he sails to the land of the Sun.

The carriage stopped at the iron gate of an exquisitely kept garden,
surrounding a small Gothic cottage of the fanciful order of
architecture,--a cottage with plate-glass windows, shaded by Spanish
blinds, a glazed verandah sheltering a tesselated walk, sloping banks and
terraces, on a very small scale, stone vases full of flowers, a tiny
fountain sparkling in the afternoon sun.

This was Dr. Rylance's country retreat. It had been a yeoman's cottage,
plain, substantial and homely as the yeoman and his household. The doctor
had added a Gothic front, increased the number of rooms, but not the
general convenience of the dwelling. He had been his own architect, and
the result was a variety of levels and a breakneck arrangement of stairs
at all manner of odd corners, so ingenious in their peril to life and
limb that they might be supposed to have been designed as traps for the
ignorant stranger.

'Don't say good-bye, Ranie,' said Bessie, when Miss Rylance had alighted,
and was making her adieux at the carriage door; 'you'll come over to
dinner, won't you, dear? Your father won't be down till Saturday. You'll
be dreadfully dull at home.'

'Thanks, dear, no; I'd rather spend my first evening at home. I'm never
dull,' answered Urania, with her air of superiority.

'What a queer girl you are!' exclaimed Bessie, frankly. 'I should be
wretched if I found myself alone in a house. Do run over in the evening,
at any rate. We are going to have lots of fun.'

Miss Rylance shuddered. She knew what was meant by lots of fun at The
Knoll; a romping game at croquet, or the newly-established lawn-tennis,
with girls in short petticoats and boys in Eton jackets; a raid upon
the plum-trees on the crumbling red brick walls of the fine old
kitchen-garden; winding up with a boisterous bout at hide-and-seek in the
twilight; and finally a banquet of sandwiches, jam tarts, and syllabub in
the shabby old dining-room.

'I'll come over to see Mrs. Wendover, if I am not too tired,' she said,
with languid politeness, and then she closed the gate, and the carriage
drove on to The Knoll.

Colonel Wendover's house was a substantial dwelling of the Queen Anne
period, built of unmixed red brick, with a fine pediment, a stone shell
over the entrance, four long narrow windows on each side of the tall
door, and nine in each upper story, a house that looked all eyes, and was
a blaze of splendour when the western sun shone upon its many windows.
The house stood on a bit of rising ground at the end of the village, and
dominated all meaner habitations. It was the typical squire's house, and
Colonel Wendover was no bad representative of the typical squire.

A fine old iron gate opened upon a broad gravel drive, which made the
circuit of a well-kept _parterre_, where the flowers grew as they only
grow for those who love them dearly. This gate stood hospitably open at
all times, and many were the vehicles which drove up to the tall door of
The Knoll, and friendly the welcome which greeted all comers.

The door, like the gate, stood open all day long--indeed, open doors
were the rule at Kingthorpe. Ida saw a roomy old hall, paved with black
and white marble, a few family portraits, considerably the worse for
wear, against panelled walls painted white, a concatenation of guns,
fishing-rods, whips, canes, cricket-bats, croquet-mallets, and all things
appertaining to the out-door amusements of a numerous family. A large
tiger skin stretched before the drawing-room door was one memorial of
Colonel Wendover's Indian life; a tiger's skull gleaming on the wall,
between a pair of elephant's ears, was another. One side of the wall was
adorned with a collection of Indian arms, showing all those various
curves with which oriental ingenuity has improved upon the straight
simplicity of the western sword.

It was not a neatly kept hall. There had been no careful study of colour
in the arrangement of things--hats and caps were flung carelessly on the
old oak chairs--there was a licentious mixture of styles in the
furniture--half Old English, half Indian, and all the worse for wear: but
Ida Palliser thought the house had a friendly look, which made it better
than any house she had ever seen before.

Through an open door at the back of the hall she saw a broad gravel walk,
long and straight, leading to a temple or summer-house built of red
brick, like the mansion itself. On each side of the broad walk there was
a strip of grass, just about wide enough for a bowling-green, and on the
grass were orange-trees in big wooden tubs, painted green. Slowly
advancing along the broad walk there came a large lady.

'Is that you mother?' asked Ida.

'No, it's Aunt Betsy. You ought to have known Aunt Betsy at a glance. I'm
sure I've described her often enough. How good of her to be here to
welcome us!' and Bessie flew across the hall and rushed down the broad
walk to greet her aunt.

Ida followed at a more sober pace. Yes, she had heard of Aunt Betsy--a
maiden aunt, who lived in her own house a little way from The Knoll. A
lady who had plenty of money and decidedly masculine tastes, which she
indulged freely; a very lovable person withal, if Bessie might be
believed. Ida wondered if she too would be able to like Aunt Betsy.

Miss Wendover's appearance was not repulsive. She was a woman of heroic
mould, considerably above the average height of womankind, with a large
head nobly set upon large well-shaped shoulders. Bulky Miss Wendover
decidedly was, but she carried her bulkiness well. She still maintained a
waist, firmly braced above her expansive hips. She walked well, and was
more active than many smaller women. Indeed, her life was full of
activity, spent for the most part in the open air, driving, walking,
gardening, looking after her cows and poultry, and visiting the
labouring-classes round Kingthorpe, among whom she was esteemed an
oracle.

Bessie hung herself round her large aunt like ivy on an oak, and the two
thus united came up the broad walk to meet Ida, Bessie chattering all the
way.

'So this is Miss Palliser,' said Aunt Betsy heartily, and in a deep
masculine voice, which accorded well with her large figure. 'I have heard
a great deal about you from this enthusiastic child,--so much that I was
prepared to be disappointed in you. It is the highest compliment I can
pay you to say I am not.'

'Where's mother?' asked Bessie.

'Your father drove her to Romsey to call on the new vicar. There's the
phaeton driving in at the gate.'

It was so. Before Ida had had breathing time to get over the introduction
to Aunt Betsy, she was hurried off to see her host and hostess.

They were very pleasant people, who did not consider themselves called on
to present an icy aspect to a new acquaintance.

The Colonel was the image of his sister, tall and broad of figure, with
an aquiline nose and a commanding eye, thoroughly good-natured withal,
and a man whom everybody loved. Mrs. Wendover was a dumpy little woman,
who had brought dumpiness and a handsome fortune into the family. She had
been very pretty in girlhood, and was pretty still, with a round-faced
innocent prettiness which made her look almost as young as her eldest
daughter. Her husband loved her with a fondly protecting and almost
paternal affection, which was very pleasant to behold; and she held him
in devoted reverence, as the beginning and end of all that was worth
loving and knowing in the Universe. She was not an accomplished woman,
and had made the smallest possible use of those opportunities which
civilization affords to every young lady whose parents have plenty of
money; but she was a lady to the marrow of her bones--benevolent, kindly.
thinking no evil, rejoicing in the truth--an embodiment of domestic love.

Such a host and hostess made Ida feel at home in their house in less than
five minutes. If there had been a shade of coldness in their greeting her
pride would have risen in arms against them, and she would have made
herself eminently disagreeable. But at their hearty welcome she expanded
like a beautiful flower which opens its lovely heart to the sunshine.

'It is so good of you to ask me here,' she said, when Mrs. Wendover had
kissed her, 'knowing so little of me.'

'I know that my daughter loves you,' answered the mother, 'and it is not
in Bessie's nature to love anyone who isn't worthy of love.'

Ida smiled at the mother's simple answer.

'Don't you think that in a heart so full of love some may run over and
get wasted on worthless objects?' she asked.

'That's very true,' cried a boy in an Eton jacket, one of a troop that
had congregated round the Colonel and his wife since their entrance. 'You
know there was that half-bred terrier you doted upon, Bess, though I
showed you that the roof of his mouth was as red as sealing-wax.'

'I hope you are not going to compare me to a half-bred terrier,' said
Ida, laughing.

'If you were a terrier, the roof of your mouth would be as black as my
hat,' said the boy decisively. It was his way of expressing his
conviction that Ida was thoroughbred.

The ice being thus easily broken, Ida found herself received into the
bosom of the family, and at once established as a favourite with all.
There were two boys in Eton jackets, answering to the names of Reginald
and Horatio, but oftener to the friendly abbreviations Reg and Horry.
Both had chubby faces, liberally freckled, warts on their hands, and
rumpled hair; and it was not easy for a new comer to distinguish Horatio
from Reginald, or Reginald from Horatio. There was a girl of fourteen
with flowing hair, who looked very tall because her petticoats were very
short, and who always required some one to hug and hang upon. If she
found herself deprived of human support she lolled against a wall.

This young person at once pounced upon Ida, as a being sent into the
world to sustain her.

'Do you think you shall like me?' she asked, when they had all swarmed up
to the long corridor, out of which numerous bedrooms opened.

'I like you already,' answered Ida.

'Do thoo like pigs?' asked a smaller girl, round and rosy, in a holland
pinafore, putting the question as if it were relevant to her sister's
inquiry.

'I don't quite know,' said Ida doubtfully.

''Cos there are nine black oneths, tho pwutty. Will thoo come and thee
them?'

Ida said she would think about it: and then she received various
pressing invitations to go and see lop-eared rabbits, guinea-pigs, a tame
water-rat in the rushes of the duck-pond, a collection of eggs in the
schoolroom, and the new lawn-tennis ground which father had made in the
paddock.

'Now all you small children run away!' cried Bessie, loftily. 'Ida and I
are going to dress for dinner.'

The crowd dispersed reluctantly, with low mutterings about rabbits, pigs,
and water-rats, like the murmurs of a stage mob; and then Bessie led her
friend into a large sunny room fronting westward, a room with three
windows, cushioned window-seats, two pretty white-curtained beds, and a
good deal of old-fashioned and heterogeneous furniture, half English,
half Indian.

'You said you wouldn't mind sleeping in my room,' said Bessie, as she
showed her friend an exclusive dressing-table, daintily draperied, and
enlivened with blue satin bows, for the refreshment of the visitor's eye.

While the girls were contemplating this work of art the door was suddenly
opened and Blanche's head was thrust in.

'I did the dressing-table, Miss Palliser, every bit, on purpose for you.'

And the door then slammed to, and Bessie rushed across the room and drew
the bolt.

'We shall have them all one after another,' she said.

'Don't shut them out on my account.'

'Oh, but I must. You would have no peace. I can see they are going to be
appallingly fond of you.'

'Let them like me as much as they can. Do you know, Bessie, this is my
first glimpse into the inside of a home!'

'Oh, Ida, dear, but your father,' remonstrated Bessie.

'My father has never been unkind to me, but I have had no home with him.
When my mother brought me home from India--she died very soon after we
got home, you know'--Ida strangled a sob at this point--'I was placed
with strangers, two elderly maiden ladies, who reared me very well, no
doubt, in their stiff business-like way, and who really gave me a very
good education. That went on for nine years,--a long time to spend with
two old maids in a dull little house at Turnham Green,--and then I had a
letter from my father to say he had come home for good. He had sold his
commission and meant to settle down in some quiet spot abroad. His first
duty would be to make arrangements for placing me in a high-class school,
where I could finish my education; and he told me, quite at the end of
his letter, that he had married a very sweet young lady, who was ready to
give me all a mother's affection, and who would be able to receive me in
my holidays, when the expense of the journey to France and back was
manageable.'

'Poor darling!' sighed Bessie. 'Did your heart warm to the sweet young
lady?'

'No, Bess; I'm afraid it must be an unregenerate heart, for I took a
furious dislike to her. Very unjust and unreasonable, wasn't it?
Afterwards, when my father took me over to his cottage, near Dieppe, to
spend my holidays, I found that my stepmother was a kind-hearted, pretty
little thing, whom I might look down upon for her want of education, but
whom I could not dislike. She was very kind to me; and she had a baby
boy. I have told you about him, and how he and I fell in love with each
other at first sight.'

'I am horribly jealous of that baby boy,' protested Bessie. 'How old is
he now?'

'Nearly five. He was two years and a half old when I was at Les
Fontaines, and that was before I went to Mauleverer Manor.'

'And you have been at Mauleverer Manor more than two years without once
going home for the holidays,' said Bessie. 'That seems hard.'

'My dear, poverty is hard. It is all of a piece. It means deprivation,
humiliation, degradation, the severance of friends. My father would have
had me home if he could have afforded it; but he couldn't. He has only
just enough to keep himself and his wife and boy. If you were to see the
little box of a house they inhabit in that tiny French village, you would
wonder that anybody bigger than a pigeon could live in so small a place.
They have a narrow garden, and there is an orchard on the slope of a hill
behind the cottage, and a long white road leading to nowhere in front. It
is all very nice in the summer, when one can live half one's life out of
doors, but I am sure I don't know how they manage to exist through the
winter.'

'Poor things!' sighed Bessie, who had a large stock of compassion always
on hand.

And then she tied a bright ribbon at the back of Ida's collar, by way of
finishing touch to the girl's simple toilet, which had been going on
while they talked, and then, Bessie in white and Ida in black, like
sunlight and shadow, they went downstairs to the drawing-room, where
Colonel Wendover was stretched on his favourite sofa, reading a county
paper. Since his retirement from active service into domestic idleness
the Colonel had required a great deal of rest, and was to be found at all
hours of the day extended at ease on his own particular sofa. During his
intervals of activity he exhibited a large amount of energy. When he was
indoors his stentorian voice penetrated from garret to cellar; when he
was out of doors the same deep-toned thunder could be heard across a
couple of paddocks. He pervaded the gardens and stables, supervised the
home farm, and had a finger in every pie.

Mrs. Wendover was sitting in her own particular arm-chair, close to her
husband's sofa--they were seldom seen far apart--with a large basket of
crewel-work beside her, containing sundry squares of kitchen towelling
and a chaos of many-coloured wools, which never seemed to arrive at any
result.

The impression which Mrs. Wendover's drawing-room conveyed to a stranger
was a general idea of homeliness and comfort. It was not fine, it was not
aesthetic, it was not even elegant. A great bay window opened upon the
garden, a large old-fashioned fireplace, with carved wooden chimney-piece
faced the bay. The floor was polished oak, with only an island of faded
Persian carpet in the centre, and Indian prayer rugs lying about here and
there. There were chairs and tables of richly carved Bombay blackwood,
Japanese cabinets in the recesses beside the fire-place, a five-leaved
Indian screen between the fire-place and the door. There was just enough
Oriental china to give colour to the room, and to relieve by glowing reds
and vivid purples the faded dead-leaf tint of curtains and chair covers.

The gong began to boom as the two girls came into the room, and the rest
of the family dropped in through the open windows at the same moment,
Aunt Betsy bringing up the rear. There was no nursery dinner at The
Knoll. Colonel Wendover allowed his children to dine with him from the
day they were able to manage their knives and forks. Save on state
occasions, the whole brood sat down with their father and mother to the
seven o'clock dinner; as the young sprigs of the House of Orleans used to
sit round good King Louis Philippe in his tranquil retirement at
Claremont. Even the lisping girl who loved pigs had her place at the
board, and knew how to behave herself. There was a subdued struggle for
the seat next Ida, whom the Colonel had placed on his right, but
Reginald, the elder of the Winchester boys, asserted his claim with a
quiet firmness that proved irresistible. Grace was said with solemn
brevity by the Colonel, whose sum total of orthodoxy was comprised in
that brief grace, and in regular attendance at church on Sunday mornings;
and then there came a period of chatter and laughter which might have
been a little distracting to a stranger. Each of the boys and girls had
some wonderful fact, usually about his or her favourite animal, to
communicate to the father. Aunt Betsy broke in with her fine manly voice
at every turn in the conversation. Ripples of laughter made a running
accompaniment to everything. It was a new thing to Ida Palliser to find
herself in the midst of so much happiness.

After dinner they all rushed off to play lawn tennis, carrying Ida along
with them.

'It's a shame,' protested Bessie. 'I know you're tired, darling. Come and
rest in a shady corner of the drawing-room.'

This sounded tempting, but it was not to be.

'No she's not,' asserted Blanche, boldly. 'You're not tired, are you,
Miss Palliser?'

'Not too tired for just one game,' replied Ida. 'But you are never to
call me Miss Palliser.'

'May I really call you Ida? That's too lovely.'

'May we all call you Ida?' asked Horatio. 'Don't begin by making
distinctions. Blanche is no better than the rest of us.'

'Don't be jealous,' said Miss Palliser, laughing. 'I am going to be
everybody's Ida.'

On this she was borne off to the garden as in a whirlwind.

There were some bamboo chairs and sofas on the grass in front of the bay
window, and here the elder members of the family established themselves.

'I like that schoolfellow of Bessie's,' said Aunt Betsy, with her decided
air, whereupon the Colonel and his wife assented, as they always did to
any proposition of Miss Wendover's.

'She is remarkably handsome,' said the Colonel.

'She is good and thorough, and that's of much more consequence,' said his
sister.

'She takes to the children, and that is so truly nice in her,' murmured
Mrs. Wendover.




CHAPTER IV.


WENDOVER ABBEY.

The next day was fine. The children had all been praying for fine
weather, that they might entertain Miss Palliser with an exploration of
the surrounding neighbourhood. Loud whoops of triumph and sundry
breakdown dances were heard in the top story soon after five o'clock, for
the juvenile Wendovers were early risers, and when in high spirits made
themselves distinctly audible.

The eight o'clock breakfast in the old painted dining-room--all oak
panelling, but painted stone colour by generations of Goths and
Vandals--was even more animated than the seven o'clock dinner.

Such a breakfast, after the thick bread and butter and thin coffee at
Mauleverer. Relays of hot buttered cakes, and eggs and bacon, fish,
honey, fresh fruit from the garden, a picturesque confusion of form and
colour on the lavishly-furnished table, and youthful appetites ready to
do justice to the good cheer.

'What are you going to do with Miss Palliser?' asked the Colonel. 'Am I
to take her for a drive?'

'No, father, you can't have Miss Palliser to-day. She's going in the
jaunting-car,' said Reginald, talking of the lady as if she were a horse.
'We're going to take her over to the Abbey.'

The Abbey was the ancestral home of the Wendovers, now in possession of
Brian Wendover, only son of the Colonel's eldest brother, and head of the
house.

'Well, don't upset her oftener than you can help,' replied the father. 'I
suppose you don't much mind being spilt off an outside car, Miss
Palliser? I believe young ladies of your age rather relish the
excitement.'

'She needn't be afraid,' said Reginald; 'I am going to drive.'

'Then we are very likely to find ourselves reposing in a ditch before the
day is over,' retorted Bessie. 'I hope you--or the pony--will choose a
dry one.'

'I'll risk it, ditches and all,' said Ida, good-naturedly. 'I am longing
to see the Abbey.'

'The rich Brian's Abbey,' said Bessie, laughing. 'What a pity he is not
at home for you to see him too! Do you think Brian will be back before
Ida's holidays are over, father?'

'I never know what that young man is going to do,' answered the Colonel.
'When last I heard from him he was fishing in Norway. He doesn't care
much about the sport, he tells me; indeed, he was never a very
enthusiastic angler; but he likes the country and the people. He ought to
stay at home, and stand for the county at the next election. A young man
in his position has no business to be idle.'

'Is he clever?' asked Ida.

'Too clever for my money,' answered the Colonel. 'He has too much
book-learning, and too little knowledge of men and things. What is the
good of a man being a fine Greek scholar if he knows nothing about the
land he owns, or the cattle that graze upon it, and has not enough tact
to make himself popular in his own neighbourhood? Brian is a man who
would starve if his bread depended on his own exertions.'

'He's a jolly kind of cousin for a fellow to have,' suggested Horry,
looking up from his eggs and bacon. 'He lets us do what we like at the
Abbey. By the way, Blanche, have you packed the picnic basket?'

'Yes.'

'What have you put in?'

'That's my secret,' answered Blanche. 'Do you think I am going to tell
you what you are to have for lunch? That would spoil all the fun.'

'Blanche isn't half a bad caterer,' said Reg. 'I place myself in her
hands unreservedly; I will only venture to hint that I hope she hasn't
forgotten the chutnee, Tirhoot, and plenty of it. What's the good of
having a father who was shoulder to shoulder with Gough in the Punjab, if
we are to run short of Indian condiments?'

At nine o'clock the young people were all ready to start. The
jaunting-car held five, including the driver; Bessie and her friend were
to occupy one side, Eva, the round child who loved pigs, was to have a
seat, and a place was to be kept for Miss Rylance, who was to be invited
to join the exploration party, much to the disgust of the Winchester
lads, who denounced her as a stuck-up minx, and distinguished her with
various other epithets of an abusive character selected from a vocabulary
known only to Wyckhamists. Blanche and Horatio and a smaller boy, called
Ernest, who was dressed like a gillie, and had all the wildness of a
young Highlander, were to walk, with the occasional charity of a lift.

The jaunting-car was drawn by a large white pony, fat and pampered,
overfed with dainties from the children's tables, and petted and played
with until he had become almost human in his intelligence, and a match
for his youthful masters in cunning and mischief. This impish animal had
been christened Robin Goodfellow, a name that was shortened for
convenience to Robin. Robin's eagerness to depart was now made known to
the family by an incessant rattling of his bit.

Reginald took the reins, and got into his seat with the quiet grandeur of
a celebrity in the four-in-hand club. Ida and Bessie were handed to their
places by Horatio, the chubby Eva scrambled into her seat, with a liberal
display of Oxford blue stocking, under the shortest of striped
petticoats; and off they drove to the cottage, Dr. Rylance's miniature
dwelling, where the plate-glass windows were shining in the morning sun,
and the colours of the flower-beds were almost too bright to be looked
at.

Bessie found Miss Rylance in the dainty little drawing-room, all ebonized
wood and blue china, as neat as an interior by Mieris. The fair Urania
was yawning over a book of travels--trying to improve a mind which was
not naturally fertile--and she was not sorry to be interrupted by an
irruption of noisy Wendovers, even though they left impressions of their
boots on the delicate tones of the carpet, and made havoc of the cretonne
chair-covers.

Miss Rylance had no passion for country life. Fields and trees, hills and
winding streams, even when enlivened by the society of the lower animals,
were not all-sufficient for her happiness. It was all very well for her
father to oscillate between Cavendish Square and Kingthorpe, avoiding the
expense and trouble of autumn touring, and taking his rest and his
pleasure in this rustic retreat. But her summer holidays for the last
three years had been all Kingthorpe, and Miss Rylance detested the
picturesque village, the busy duck-pond, the insignificant hills, which
nobody had ever heard of, and the monotonous sequence of events.

'We are going to the Abbey for a nice long day, taking our dinner with
us, and coming round to Aunt Betsy's to tea on our way home,' said
Bessie, as if she were proposing an entirely novel excursion; 'and we
want you to come with us, Ranie.'

Miss Rylance stifled a yawn. She had been trying to pin her thoughts to a
particular tribe of Abyssinians, who fought all the surrounding tribes,
and always welcomed the confiding stranger with a shower of poisoned
arrows. She did not care for the Wendover children, but they were better
than those wearisome Abyssinians.

'You are very kind, but I know the Abbey so well,' she said, determined
to yield her consent as a favour.

'Never mind that. Ida has never seen it. We are going to show her
everything. We want her to feel one of us.'

'We shall have a jolly lunch,' interjected Blanche. 'There are some lemon
cheesecakes that I made myself yesterday afternoon. Cook was in a good
temper, and let me do it.'

'I hope you washed your hands first,' said Horatio. 'I'd sooner cook had
made the cheesecakes.'

'Of course I washed my hands, you too suggestive pig. But I should hope
that in a general way my hands are cleaner than cook's. It is only
schoolboys who luxuriate in dirt.'

'You'll come, Ranie?' pleaded Bess.

'If you really wish it.'

'I do, or I shouldn't be here. But I hope you wish it too. You ought to
be longing to get out of doors on such a lovely morning. Houses were
never intended for such weather as this. Come and join the birds and
butterflies, and all the happiest things in creation.'

'I must go for my hat and sunshade. I wasn't born full-dressed, like the
birds and butterflies,' replied Urania.

She ran away, leaving Bessie and Ida in the drawing-room. The younger
children having rushed in and left their mark upon the room, had now
rushed out again to the jaunting-car.

'A pretty drawing-room, isn't it?' asked Bess. 'It looks so neat and
fresh and bright after ours.'

'It doesn't look half so much like home,' said Ida.

'Perhaps not. But I believe it is just the exact thing a drawing-room
ought to be in this latter part of the nineteenth century; or, at least,
so Dr. Rylance says. How do you like the blue china? Dr. Rylance is an
amateur of blue china. He will have no other. Dresden and Sevres have no
existence for him. He recognizes nothing beyond his own particular breed
of ginger-jars.'

Miss Rylance came back, dressed as carefully as if she had been going for
a morning lounge in Hyde Park, hat and feather, pongee sunshade,
mousquetaire gloves. The Wendovers all wore their gloves in their
pockets, and cultivated blisters on the palms of their hands, as a mark
of distinction, which implied great feats in rowing, or the pulling in of
desperate horses.

Now they were all mounted on the car, just as the church clock struck
ten. Reginald gave the reins a shake, cracked his whip, and Robin, who
always knew where his young friends wanted to go, twisted the vehicle
sharply round a corner and started at an agreeable canter, expressive of
good spirits.

Robin carried them joltingly along a lovely lane till they came to a
gentle acclivity, by which time, having given vent to his exuberance, the
pony settled down into a crawl. Vainly did Reginald crack his whip--vain
even stinging switches on Robin's fat sides. Out of that crawl nothing
could move him. The sun was gaining power with every moment, and blazing
down upon the occupants of the car; but Robin cared not at all. He was an
animal of tropical origin, and had no apprehension of sunshine; his eyes
were so constructed as to accommodate themselves to a superfluity of
light.

'I think we shall be tolerably well roasted by the time we get to the
Abbey,' said Bessie. 'Don't you think if we were all to get down and push
the back of the car, Robin might go a little faster?'

'He'll go fast enough when he has blown a bit,' said Reg. 'Can't you
admire the landscape?'

'We could, if we were not being baked,' replied Ida.

Miss Rylance sat silent under her pongee umbrella, and wished herself in
Cavendish Square; even though western London were as empty and barren as
the great wilderness.

They were on the ridge of a hill, overlooking undulating pastures and
quiet sheep-walks, fair hills on which the yew-trees cast their dark
shadows, a broad stretch of pastoral country with sunny gleams of water
shining low in the distance.

Suddenly the road dipped, and Robin was going downhill with alarming
speed.

'This means that we shall all be in the ditch presently,' said Bessie.
'Never mind. It's only a dry bed of dock and used-up stinging nettles. We
shan't be much hurt.'

After two or three miraculous escapes they landed at the bottom of the
hill, and Ida beheld the good old gates of Kingthorpe Abbey, low iron
gates that stood open, between tall stone pillars supporting the
sculptured escutcheon of the Wendovers. There was a stone lodge on each
side of the gate, past which the car drove in triumph into an avenue of
ancient yew-trees, low and wide-spreading, with a solemn gloom that would
better have become a churchyard than a gentleman's park.

It was a noble old park, richly timbered with oaks as old as those
immemorial trees that make the glory of Stoneleigh. There was a lake in a
wooded hollow in front of the Abbey, a long low pile of stone, the newest
part of which was as old as the days of the last Tudor. Nor had much
money been spent on the restoration or decorative repair of that fine old
house. It had been kept wind and weather proof. It had been protected
against the injuries of time; and that was all. There it stood, a brave
and solid monument of the remote past, grand in its stern simplicity and
its historic associations.

'Oh, what a dear old house!' cried Ida, clasping her hands, as the car
came out of the yew-tree avenue into the open space in front of the
Abbey; a wide lawn, where four mighty cedars of Lebanon spread their
dense shadows--grave old trees--which were in somewise impostors, as they
looked older than the house, and yet had been saplings in the days of
Queen Anne. 'What a sweet old place!' repeated Ida; 'and how I envy the
rich Brian!'

'Don't you think the rich Brian's wife will be still more enviable?'
sneered Miss Rylance.

'That depends. She may be a Vere-de-Vereish kind of person, and pine
amongst her halls and towers,' said Ida.

'Not if she had been brought up in poverty. She would revel in the
advantages of her position as Mrs. Wendover of the Abbey,' asserted Miss
Rylance.

'Would she? The Earl of Burleigh's wife had been poor, and yet did not
enjoy being rich and great,' said Bessie. 'It killed her, poor thing. And
yet she had married for love, and had no remorse of conscience to weigh
her down.'

'She was a sensitive little fool,' said Ida; 'I have no patience with
her.'

'Modern young ladies are not easily crushed,' remarked Miss Rylance;
'they make marrying for money a profession.'

'Is that your idea of life?' asked Ida.

'No; but I understand it is yours. I heard you say you meant to marry for
money.'

'Then you must have been listening to a conversation in which you had no
concern,' Ida answered coolly. 'I never said as much to you.'

The three girls, and the chubby Eva, had alighted from the car, which was
being conveyed to the stables at a hand-gallop, and this conversation was
continued on the broad gravel sweep in front of the Abbey. Just as the
discussion was intensifying in unpleasantness, the arrival of the
pedestrians made an agreeable diversion. Blanche and her two brothers had
come by a short cut, across fields and common, had given chase to
butterflies, experimented with tadpoles, and looked for hedge-birds' eggs
in the course of their journey, and were altogether in a state of
dilapidation--perspiration running down their sunburnt faces--their hats
anyhow--their hands embellished with recent scratches--their boots coated
with clay.

'Did ever anyone see such objects?' exclaimed Bessie, who had imbibed
certain conventional ideas of decency at Mauleverer Manor: 'you ought to
be ashamed of yourselves.'

'I daresay we ought, but we aren't,' retorted Horatio. 'I found a tadpole
in an advanced stage of transmutation, Miss Palliser, and it has almost
converted me to Darwinism. Given a single step and you may accept the
whole ladder. If from tadpoles frogs, why not from monkeys man?'

'Go and be a Darwinian, and don't prose,' said Blanche, impatiently. 'We
are going to show Ida the Abbey. How do you like the outside, darling?'
asked the too-affectionate girl, favouring Miss Palliser with the full
weight of her seven stone and three-quarters.

'I adore it. It is like a page out of an old chronicle.'

'Isn't it?' gasped Blanche; 'and you can fancy the fat old monks sitting
on those stone benches, nodding in the sunshine. The house is hardly
altered a bit since it was an actual abbey, except that half a dozen
cells have been knocked into one comfortable bedroom. The long dark
passages are just the same as they were when those sly old monks went
gliding up and down them--such dear old passages, smelling palpably of
ghosts.'

'Mice,' said Horatio.

'No, sir, ghosts. Do you suppose my sense of smell is of such inferior
quality that I can't distinguish a ghost from a mouse?'

'Now, how about luncheon?' demanded Horatio. 'I propose that we all go
and sit under that prime old cedar and discuss the contents of the picnic
basket before we discuss the Abbey.'

'Why, it isn't half-past eleven,' said Bessie.

'Ah,' sighed Blanche, 'I'm afraid it's too early for lunch. We should
have nothing left to look forward to all the rest of the day.'

'There'd be afternoon tea at Aunt Betsy's to build upon, said Horry. 'I
gave her to understand we were to have something good: blue gages from
the south wall, cream to a reckless extent.'

'Strawberry jam and pound-cake,' suggested Eva.

'If you go on like that you'll make me distracted with hunger,' said
Blanche, a young person who at the seaside wanted twopence to buy buns
directly after she had swallowed her dinner.

Bessie and Miss Rylance had been walking up and down the velvet sward
beside the beds of dwarf roses and geraniums, with a ladylike stateliness
which did credit to their training at Mauleverer. Ida was the centre of
the juvenile group.

'Come and see the Abbey,' exclaimed Horry, putting his arm through Miss
Palliser's, 'and at the stroke of one we will sit down to lunch under the
biggest of the cedars--the tree which according to tradition was planted
by John Evelyn himself, when he came on a visit to Sir Tristram
Wendover.'

They all trooped into the Abbey, the hall door standing open, as in a
fairy tale. Bessie and Urania followed at a more sober pace; but Ida had
given herself over to the children, and they did what they liked with
her, Blanche hanging on her bodily all the time.

They were now joined by Reginald, who appeared mysteriously from the back
premises, where he had been seeing Robin eat his corn, having a fixed
idea that it was in the nature of all grooms and stablemen to cheat
horses.

The Abbey was furnished with a sober grandeur, in perfect tone with its
architecture. Everything was solid and ponderous, save here and there,
where in some lady's bower there appeared the spindle-legged tables and
inlaid cabinets of the Chippendale period, which had an air of newness
where all else was so old. The upper rooms were low and somewhat dark,
the heavily mullioned windows being designed to exclude rather than to
admit light. There was much tapestry, subdued in hue, but in good
condition, and as frankly uninteresting in subject as the generality of
old English needlework.

Below, the rooms were large and lofty, rich in carved chimney pieces,
well preserved panelling, and old oak furniture. There were some fine
pictures, from Holbein downwards, and the usual array of family
portraits, which the boys and girls explained and commented upon
copiously.

'There's my favourite ancestor, Sir Tristram,' cried Blanche pointing to
a dark-eyed cavalier, with strongly-marked brow and bronzed visage. 'He
was middle-aged when that picture was painted, but I know he was handsome
in his youth. The face is still in the family.'

'Of course it is,' said Horatio--'on my shoulders.'

'Your shoulders!' ejaculated Blanche, contemptuously. 'As if my Sir
Tristram ever resembled you. He fought in all the great battles, from
Edgehill to Worcester,' continued the girl; 'and he was wounded seven
times; and he was true to his master through every trial; and he had all
the Wendover plate melted down; and he followed Charles the Second into
exile; he mortgaged his estate to raise money for the king; and he
married a very lovely French woman, who introduced turned-up noses into
the family,' concluded Blanche, giving her tip-tilted nose a complacent
toss.

'I thought it was a mercy that we were spared the old housekeeper,' said
Urania, 'but really Blanche is worse.'

'Ida doesn't know all about our family, if you do,' protested Blanche.
'It is all new to her.'

'Yes, dear, it is all new and interesting to me,' said Ida.

'How much more deeply you would have been interested if Mr. Wendover had
been here to expatiate upon his family tree,' said Urania.

'That might have made it still more interesting,' admitted Ida, with a
frankness which took the sting out of Miss Rylance's remark.

The young Wendovers had shown Ida everything. They had opened cabinets,
peered into secret drawers, sniffed at the stale _pot-pourri_ in old
crackle vases; they had dragged their willing victim through all the long
slippery passages, by all the mysterious stairs and by-ways; they had
obliged her to look at the interior of ghostly closets, where the ladies
of old had stored their house linen or hung their mantuas and
farthingales; they had made her look out of numerous windows to admire
the prospect; they had introduced her to the state bedroom in which the
heads of the Wendover race made a point of being born; they made her peep
shuddering into the death-chamber where the family were laid in their
last slumber. The time thus pleasantly occupied slipped away unawares;
and the chapel clock was striking one as they all went trooping down the
broad oak staircase for about the fifteenth time.

A gentleman was entering the hall as they came down. They could only see
the top of his hat.

'It's father,' cried Eva.

'You little idiot; did you ever see my father in a stove-pipe hat on a
week-day?' cried Reg, with infinite scorn.

'Then it's Brian.'

'Brian is in Norway.'

The gentleman looked up and greeted them all with a comprehensive smile.
It was Dr. Rylance.

'So glad I have found you, young people,' he said blandly.

'Papa,' exclaimed Urania, in a tone which did not express unmitigated
pleasure, 'this is a surprise. You told me you would not be down till
late in the evening.'

'Yes, my dear: but the fine morning tempted me. I found my engagements
would stand over till Monday or Tuesday, so I put myself into the eight
o'clock train, and arrived at The Cottage just an hour after you and your
friends had left for your picnic. So I walked over to join you. I hope I
am not in the way.'

'Of course not,' said Bessie. 'I'm afraid you'll find us hardly the kind
of company you are accustomed to; but if you will put up with our
roughness and noise we shall feel honoured.'

'We are going to get lunch ready,' said Blanche. 'You grown-ups will find
us under Evelyn's tree when you're hungry, and you'd better accommodate
yourselves to be hungry soon.'

'Or you may find a dearth of provisions,' interjected Reg. 'I feel in a
demolishing humour.'

The troop rushed off, leaving the three elder girls and Dr. Rylance
standing in the hall, listlessly contemplative of Sir Tristram's dinted
breast-plate, hacked by Roundhead pikes at Marston Moor.




CHAPTER V.


DR. RYLANCE ASSERTS HIMSELF.

The luncheon under Evelyn's tree took a cooler shade from Dr. Rylance's
presence than from the far-reaching branches of the cedar. His politeness
made the whole business different from what it would have been without
him.

Blanche and the boys, accustomed to abandon themselves to frantic
joviality at any outdoor feast of their own contriving, now withdrew into
the background, and established themselves behind the trunk of the tree,
in which retirement they kept up an insane giggling, varied by low and
secret discourse, and from which shelter they issued forth stealthily,
one by one, to pounce with crafty hands upon the provisions. These
unmannerly proceedings were ignored by the elders, but they exercised a
harassing influence upon poor little Eva, who had been told to sit
quietly by Bessie, and who watched her brothers' raids with round-eyed
wonder, and listened with envious ears to that distracting laughter
behind the tree.

'Did you see Horry take quite half the cake, just now?' she whispered to
Bessie, in the midst of a polite conversation about nothing particular.

And anon she murmured in horrified wonder, after a stolen peep behind the
tree, 'Reg is taking off Dr. Rylance.'

The grown-up luncheon party was not lively. Tongue and chicken,
pigeon-pie, cheese-cakes, tarts, cake, fruit--all had been neatly spread
upon a tablecloth laid on the soft turf. Nothing had been forgotten.
There were plates and knives and forks enough for everybody--picnicking
being a business thoroughly well understood at The Knoll; but there was a
good deal wanting in the guests.

Ida was thoughtful, Urania obviously sullen, Bessie amiably stupid; but
Dr. Rylance appeared to think that they were all enjoying themselves
intensely.

'Now this is what I call really delightful,' he said, as he poured out
the sparkling Devonshire cider with as stately a turn of his wrist as if
the liquor had been Cliquot or Roederer. 'An open-air luncheon on such a
day as this is positively inspiring, and to a man who has breakfasted at
seven o'clock on a cup of tea and a morsel of dry toast--thanks, yes, I
prefer the wing if no one else will have it--such an unceremonious meal
is doubly welcome. I'm so glad I found you. Lucky, wasn't it, Ranie?'

He smiled at his daughter, as if deprecating that stolid expression of
hers, which would have been eminently appropriate to the funeral of an
indifferent acquaintance,--a total absence of all feeling, a grave
nullity.

'I don't see anything lucky in so simple a fact,' answered Urania. 'You
were told we had come here, and you came here after us.'

'You might have changed your minds at the last moment and gone somewhere
else. Might you not, now, Miss Palliser?'

'Yes, if we had been very frivolous people; but as to-day's exploration
of the Abbey was planned last night, it would have indicated great
weakness of mind if we had been tempted into any other direction,'
answered Ida, feeling somewhat sorry for Dr. Rylance.

The coldest heart might compassionate a man cursed in such a disagreeable
daughter.

'I am very glad you were not weak-minded, and that I was so fortunate as
to find you,' said the doctor, addressing himself henceforward
exclusively to Ida and her friend.

Bessie took care of his creature-comforts with a matronly hospitality
which sat well upon her. She cut thin slices of tongue, she fished out
savouriest bits of pigeon and egg, when he passed, by a natural
transition, from chicken to pie. She was quite distressed because he did
not care for tarts or cake. But the doctor's appetite, unlike that of the
young people on the other side of the cedar, had its limits. He had
satisfied his hunger long before they had, and was ready to show Miss
Palliser the gardens.

'They are fine old gardens,' he said, approvingly. 'Perhaps their chief
beauty is that they have not a single modern improvement. They are as
old-fashioned as the gardens of Sion Abbey, before the good queen Bess
ousted the nuns to make room for the Percies.'

They all rose and walked slowly away from the cedar, leaving the
fragments of the feast to Blanche and her three brothers. Eva stayed
behind, to make one of that exuberant group, and to see Reg 'take off'
Urania and her father. His mimicry was cordially admired, though it was
not always clear to his audience which was the doctor and which was his
daughter. A stare, a strut, a toss, an affected drawl were the leading
features of each characterization.

'I had no opportunity of congratulating you on your triumphs the other
day, Miss Palliser,' said Dr. Rylance, who had somehow managed that Ida
and he should be side by side, and a little in advance of the other two.
'But, believe me, I most heartily sympathized with you in the delight of
your success.'

'Delight?' echoed Ida. 'Do you think there was any real pleasure for me
in receiving a gift from the hands of Miss Pew, who has done all she
could do to make me feel the disadvantages of my position, from the day I
first entered her house to the day I last left it? The prizes gave me no
pleasure. They have no value in my mind, except as an evidence that I
have made the most of my opportunities at Mauleverer, in spite of my
contempt for my schoolmistress.'

'You dislike her intensely, I see.'

'She has made me dislike her. I never knew unkindness till I knew her. I
never felt the sting of poverty till she made me feel all its sharpness.
I never knew that I was steeped in sinful pride until she humiliated me.'

'Your days of honour and happiness will come, said the doctor, 'days when
you will think no more of Miss Pew than of an insect which once stung
you.'

'Thank you for the comforting forecast,' answered Ida, lightly. 'But it
is easy to prophesy good fortune.'

'Easy, and safe, in such a case as yours. I can sympathize with you
better than you may suppose, Miss Palliser. I have had to fight my
battle. I was not always Dr. Rylance, of Cavendish Square; and I did not
enter a world in which there was a fine estate waiting for me, like the
owner of this place.'

'But you have conquered fortune, and by your own talents,' said Ida.
'That must be a proud thought.'

Dr. Rylance, who was not utterly without knowledge of himself, smiled at
the compliment. He knew it was by tact and address, smooth speech and
clean linen, that he had conquered fortune, rather than by shining
abilities. Yet he valued himself not the less on that account. In his
mind tact ranked higher than genius, since it was his own peculiar gift:
just as blue ginger-jars were better than Sevres, because he, Dr.
Rylance, was a collector of ginger-jars. He approved of himself so
completely that even his littlenesses were great in his own eyes.

'I have worked hard,' he said, complacently, 'and I have been patient.
But now, when my work is done, and my place in the world fixed, I begin
to find life somewhat barren. A man ought to reap some reward--something
fairer and sweeter than pounds, shillings, and pence, for a life of
labour and care.'

'No doubt,' assented Ida, receiving this remark as abstract philosophy,
rather than as having a personal meaning. 'But I think I should consider
pounds, shillings, and pence a very fair reward, if I only had enough of
them.'

'Yes, now, when you are smarting under the insolence of a purse-proud
schoolmistress; but years hence, when you have won independence, you will
feel disappointed if you have won nothing better.'

'What could be better?'

'Sympathetic companionship--a love worthy to influence your life.'

Ida looked up at the doctor with naïve surprise. Good heavens, was this
middle-aged gentleman going to drop into sentiment, as Silas Wegg dropped
into poetry? She glanced back at the other two. Happily they were close
at hand.

'What have you done with the children, Bessie?' asked Ida, as if she were
suddenly distracted with anxiety about their fate.

'Left them to their own devices. I hope they will not quite kill
themselves. We are all to meet in the stable yard at four, so that we may
be with Aunt Betsy at five.'

'Don't you think papa and I had better walk gently home?' suggested
Urania; 'I am sure it would be cruel to inflict such an immense party
upon Miss Wendover.'

'Nonsense,' exclaimed Bessie. 'Why, if all old Pew's school was to march
in upon her, without a moment's notice Aunt Betsy would not be put out of
the way one little bit. If Queen Victoria were to drop in unexpectedly to
luncheon, my aunt would be as cool as one of her own early cucumbers, and
would insist on showing the Queen her stables, and possibly her pigs.'

'How do you know that?' asked Ida.

'Because she never had a visitor yet whom she did not drag into her
stables, from archbishops downwards; and I don't suppose she'd draw the
line at a queen,' answered Bessie, with conviction.

'I am going to drink tea with Miss Wendover, whatever Urania may do,'
said Dr. Rylance, who felt that the time had come when he must assert
himself. 'I am out for a day's pleasure, and I mean to drink the cup to
the dregs.'

Urania looked at her father with absolute consternation. He was
transformed; he had become a new person; he was forgetting himself in a
ridiculous manner; letting down his dignity to an alarming extent. Dr.
Rylance, the fashionable physician, the man whose nice touch adjusted the
nerves of the aristocracy, to disport himself with unkempt, bare-handed
young Wendovers! It was an upheaval of things which struck horror to
Urania's soul. Easy, after beholding such a moral convulsion, to believe
that the Wight had once been part of the mainland; or even that Ireland
had originally been joined to Spain.

They all roamed into the rose-garden, where there were alleys of standard
rose-trees, planted upon grass that was soft and springy under the foot.
They went into the old vineries, where the big bunches of grapes were
purpling in the gentle heat. Dr. Rylance went everywhere, and he
contrived always to be near Ida Palliser.

He did not again lapse into sentiment, and he made himself fairly
agreeable, in his somewhat stilted fashion. Ida accepted his attention
with a charming unconsciousness; but she was perfectly conscious of
Urania's vexation, and that gave a zest to the whole thing.

'Well, Ida, what do you think of Kingthorpe Abbey?' asked Bessie, when
they had seen everything, even to the stoats and weasles, and various
vermin nailed flat against the stable wall, and were waiting for Robin to
be harnessed.

'It is a noble old place. It is simply perfect. I wonder your cousin can
live away from it.'

'Oh, Brian's chief delight is in roaming about the world. The Abbey is
thrown away upon him. He ought to have been an explorer or a missionary.
However, he is expected home in a month, and you will be able to judge
for yourself whether he deserves to be master of this old place. I only
wish it belonged to the other Brian.'

'The other Brian is your favourite.'

'He is ever so much nicer than his cousin--at least, the children and I
like him best. My father swears by the head of the house.'

'I think I would rather accept the Colonel's judgment than yours, Bess,'
said Ida. 'You are so impulsive in your likings.'

'Don't say that I am wanting in judgment,' urged Bessie, coaxingly, 'for
you know how dearly I love you. You will see the two Brians, I hope,
before your holidays are over; and then you can make your own selection.
Brian Walford will be with us for my birthday picnic, I daresay, wherever
he may be now. I believe he is mooning away his time in Herefordshire,
with his mother's people.'

'Is his father dead?'

'Yes, mother and father both, ages ago, in the days when I was a
hard-hearted little wretch, and thought it a treat to go into mourning,
and rather nice to be able to tell everybody, "Uncle Walford's dead. He
had a fit, and he never speaked any more." It was news, you know, and in
a village that goes for something.'

After a lengthy discussion, and some squabbling, it was decided that the
children were to have the benefit of the jaunting-car for the homeward
journey, and that Dr. Rylance and the three young ladies were to walk,
attended by Reginald, who insisted upon attaching himself to their
service, volunteering to show them the very nearest way through a wood,
and across a field, and over a common, and down a lane, which led
straight to the gate of Aunt Betsy's orchard.

Urania wore fashionable boots, and considered walking exercise a
superstition of medical men and old-fashioned people; yet she stoutly
refused a seat in the car.

'No, thanks, Horatio; I know your pony too well. I'd rather trust myself
upon my own feet.'

'There's more danger in your high heels than in my pony, retorted
Horatio. 'I shouldn't wonder if you dropped in for a sprained ankle
before you got home.'

Urania risked the sprained ankle. She began to limp before she had
emerged from the wood. She hobbled painfully along the rugged footpath
between the yellow wheat. She was obliged to sit down and rest upon a
furzy hillock on the common, good-natured Bess keeping her company, while
Ida and Reginald were half a mile ahead with Dr. Rylance. Her delicate
complexion was unbecomingly flushed by the time she and Bessie arrived
wearily at the little gate opening into Miss Wendover's orchard.

There were only some iron hurdles between Aunt Betsy's orchard and the
lawn before Aunt Betsy's drawing-room. The house was characteristic of
the lady. It was a long red-brick cottage, solid, substantial, roomy,
eschewing ornament, but beautified in the eyes of most people by an air
of supreme comfort, cleanliness, and general well-being. In all
Kingthorpe there were no rooms so cool as Aunt Betsy's in summer--none so
warm in winter. The cottage had originally been the homestead of a small
grass-farm, which had been bequeathed to Betsy Wendover by her father,
familiarly known as the Old Squire, the chief landowner in that part of
the country. With this farm of about two hundred and fifty acres of the
most fertile pasture land in Hampshire and an income of seven hundred a
year from consols, Miss Wendover found herself passing rich. She built a
drawing-room with wide windows opening on to the lawn, and a bed-room
with a covered balcony over the drawing-room. These additional rooms made
the homestead all-sufficient for a lady of Aunt Betsy's simple habits.
She was hospitality itself, receiving her friends in a large-hearted,
gentleman-like style, keeping open house for man and beast, proud of her
wine, still prouder of her garden and greenhouses, proudest of her
stables; fond of this life, and of her many comforts, yet without a
particle of selfishness; ready to leave her cosy fireside at a moment's
notice on the bitterest winter night, to go and nurse a sick child, or
comfort a dying woman; religious without ostentation, charitable without
weakness, stern to resent an injury, implacable against an insult.

A refreshing sight, yet not altogether a pleasant one for Miss Rylance,
met the eyes of the two young ladies as they neared the little iron gate
opening from the orchard to the lawn. A couple of tea-tables had been
brought out upon the grass before the drawing-room window. The youngsters
were busily engaged at one table, Blanche pouring out tea, while her
brothers and small sister made havoc with cake and fruit, home-made bread
and butter, and jams of various hues. At the other table, less lavishly
but more elegantly furnished, sat Miss Wendover and Ida Palliser, with
Dr. Rylance comfortably established in a Buckinghamshire wickerwork chair
between them.

'Does not that look a picture of comfort?' exclaimed Bessie.

'My father seems to be making himself very comfortable,' said Urania.

She hobbled across the lawn, and sank exhausted into a low chair, near
her parent.

'My poor child, how dilapidated you look after your walk,' said Dr.
Rylance; 'Miss Palliser and I enjoyed it immensely.'

'I cannot boast of Miss Palliser's robust health,' retorted Urania
contemptuously, as if good health were a sign of vulgarity. 'I had my
neuralgia all last night.'

Whenever the course of events proved objectionable, Miss Rylance took
refuge in a complaint which she called her neuralgia, indicating that it
was a species of disorder peculiar to herself, and of a superior quality
to everybody else's neuralgia.

'You should live in the open air, like my sunburnt young friends yonder,'
said the doctor, with a glance at the table where the young Wendovers
were stuffing themselves; 'I am sure they never complain of neuralgia.'

Urania looked daggers but spoke none.

It was a wearisome afternoon for that injured young lady. Dr. Rylance
dawdled over his tea, handed teacups and bread and butter, was assiduous
with the sugar basin, devoted with the cream jug, talked and laughed with
Miss Palliser, as if they had a world of ideas in common, and made
himself altogether objectionable to his only child.

By-and-by, when there was a general adjournment to the greenhouses and
stables, Urania contrived to slip her arm through her father's.

'I thought I told you that Miss Palliser was my favourite aversion,
papa,' she said, tremulous with angry feeling.

'I have some faint idea that you did express yourself unfavourably about
her,' answered the doctor, with his consulting-room urbanity, 'but I am
at a loss to understand your antipathy. The girl is positively charming,
as frank as the sunshine, and full of brains.'

'I know her. You do not,' said Urania tersely.

'My dear, it is the speciality of men in my profession to make rapid
judgments.'

'Yes, and very often to make them wrong. I was never so much annoyed in
my life. I consider your attention to that girl a deliberate insult to
me; a girl with whom I never could get on--who has said the rudest things
to me.'

'Can I be uncivil to a friend of your friend Bessie?'

'There is a wide distance between being uncivil and being obsequiously,
ridiculously attentive.'

'Urania,' said the doctor in his gravest voice, 'I have allowed you to
have your own way in most things, and I believe your life has been a
pleasant one.'

'Of course, papa. I never said otherwise.'

'Very well, my dear, then you must be good enough to let me take my own
way of making life pleasant to myself, and you must not take upon
yourself to dictate what degree of civility I am to show to Miss
Palliser, or to any other lady.'

Urania held her peace after this. It was the first deliberate snub she
had ever received from her father, and she added it to her lengthy score
against Ida.




CHAPTER VI.


A BIRTHDAY FEAST.

Ida Palliser's holidays were coming to an end, like a tale that is told.
There was only one day more left, but that day was to be especially
glorious; for it was Bessie Wendover's birthday, a day which from time
immemorial--or, at all events, ever since Bessie was ten years old--had
been sacred to certain games or festivities--a modernized worship of the
great god Pan.

Sad was it for Bessie and all the junior Wendovers when the seventh of
September dawned with gray skies, or east winds, rain, or hail. It was
usually a brilliant day. The clerk of the weather appeared favourably
disposed to the warm-hearted Bessie.

On this particular occasion the preparations for the festival were on a
grander scale than usual, in honour of Ida, who was on the eve of
departure. A cruel, cruel car was to carry her off to Winchester at six
o'clock on the morning after the birthday; the railway station was to
swallow her up alive; the train was to rush off with her, like a fiery
dragon carrying off the princess of fairy tale; and the youthful
Wendovers were to be left lamenting.

In six happy weeks their enthusiasm for their young guest had known no
abatement. She had realized their fondest anticipations. She had entered
into their young lives and made herself a part of them. She had given
herself up, heart and soul, to childish things and foolish things, to
please these devoted admirers; and the long summer holiday had been very
sweet to her. The open-air life--the balmy noontides in woods and
meadows, beside wandering trout streams--on the breezy hill-tops--the
afternoon tea-drinking in gardens and orchards--the novels read aloud,
seated in the heart of some fine old tree, with her auditors perched on
the branches round about her, like gigantic birds--the boating excursions
on a river with more weeds than water in it--the jaunts to Winchester,
and dreamy afternoons in the cathedral--all had been delicious. She had
lived in an atmosphere of homely domestic love, among people who valued
her for herself, and did not calculate the cost of her gowns, or despise
her because she had so few. The old church was lovely in her eyes; the
old vicar and his wife had taken a fancy to her. Everything at Kingthorpe
was delightful, except Urania. She certainly was a drawback; but she had
been tolerably civil since the first day at the Abbey.

Ida had spent many an hour at the Abbey since that first inspection. She
knew every room in the house--the sunniest windows--the books in the long
library, with its jutting wings between the windows, and cosy nooks for
study. She knew almost every tree in the park, and the mild faces of the
deer looking gravely reproachful, as if asking what business she had
there. She had lain asleep on the sloping bank above the lake on drowsy
afternoons, tired by wandering far a-field with her young esquires. She
knew the Abbey by heart--better than even Urania knew it; though she had
used that phrase to express utter satiety. Ida Palliser had a deeper love
of natural beauty, a stronger appreciation of all that made the old place
interesting. She had a curious feeling, too, about the absent master of
that grave, gray old house--a fond, romantic dream, which she would not
for the wealth of India have revealed to mortal ear, that in the days to
come Brian's life would be in somewise linked with hers. Perhaps this
foolish thought was engendered of the blankness of her own life, a stage
on which the players had been so few that this figure of an unknown young
man assumed undue proportions.

Then, again, the fact that she could hear very little about Mr. Wendover
from his cousins, stimulated her curiosity about him, and intensified her
interest in him. Brian's merits were a subject which the Wendover
children always shirked, or passed over so lightly that Ida was no wiser
for her questioning; and maidenly reserve forbade her too eager inquiry.

About Brian Walford, the son of Parson Wendover, youngest of the three
brothers, for seven years vicar of a parish near Hereford, and for the
last twelve years at rest in the village churchyard, the young Wendovers
had plenty to say. He was good-looking, they assured Ida. She would
inevitably fall in love with him when they met. He was the cleverest
young man in England, and was certain to finish his career as Lord
Chancellor, despite the humility of his present stage of being.

'He has no fortune, I suppose?' hazarded Ida, in a conversation with
Horatio.

She did not ask the question from any interest in the subject. Brian
Walford was a being whose image never presented itself to her mind. She
only made the remark for the sake of saying something.

'Not a denarius,' said Horry, who liked occasionally to be classical.
'But what of that? If I were as clever as Brian I shouldn't mind how poor
I was. With his talents he is sure to get to the top of the tree.'

'What can he do?' asked Ida.

'Ride a bicycle better than any man I know.'

'What else?'

'Sing a first-rate comic song.'

'What else?'

'Get longer breaks at billiards than any fellow I ever played with.'

'What else?'

'Pick the winner out of a score of race-horses in the preliminary
canter.'

'Those are great gifts, I have no doubt,' said Ida. 'But do eminent
lawyers, in a general way, win their advancement by riding bicycles and
singing comic songs?'

'Don't sneer, Ida. When a fellow is clever in one thing he is clever in
other things. Genius is many-sided, universal. Carlyle says as much. If
Napoleon Bonaparte had not been a great general, he would have been a
great writer like Voltaire--or a great lawyer like Thurlow.'

From this time forward Ida had an image of Brian Walford in her mind. It
was the picture of a vapid youth, fair-haired, with thin moustache
elaborately trained, and thinner whiskers--a fribble that gave half its
little mind to its collar, and the other half to its boots. Such images
are photographed in a flash of lightning on the sensitive brain of youth,
and are naturally more often false guesses than true ones.

There was delightful riot in the house of the Wendovers on the night
before the picnic. The Colonel had developed a cold and cough within the
last week, so he and his wife had jogged off to Bournemouth, in the
T-cart, with one portmanteau and one servant, leaving Bessie mistress of
all things. It was a grief to Mrs. Wendover to be separated from home and
children at any time, and she was especially regretful at being absent on
her eldest daughter's birthday; but the Colonel was paramount. If his
cough could be cured by sea air, to the sea he must go, with his faithful
wife in attendance upon him.

'Don't let the children turn the house quite out of windows, darling,'
said Mrs. Wendover, at the moment of parting.

'No, mother dear, we are all going to be goodness itself.'

'I know, dears, you always are. And I hope you will all enjoy
yourselves.'

'We're sure to do that, mother,' answered Reginald, with a cheerfulness
that seemed almost heartless.

The departing parent would not have liked them to be unhappy, but a few
natural tears would have been a pleasing tribute. Not a tear was shed.
Even the little Eva skipped joyously on the doorstep as the phaeton drove
away. The idea of the picnic was all-absorbing.

The Colonel and his wife were to spend a week at Bournemouth. Ida would
see them no more this year.

'You must come again next summer, Mrs. Wendover said heartily, as she
kissed her daughter's friend.

'Of course she must,' cried Horry. 'She is coming every summer. She is
one of the institutions of Kingthorpe. I only wonder how we ever managed
to get on so long without her.'

All that evening was devoted to the packing of hampers, and to general
skirmishing. The picnic was to be held on the highest hill-top between
Kingthorpe and Winchester, one of those little Lebanons, fair and green,
on which the yew-trees flourished like the cedars of the East, but with a
sturdy British air that was all their own.

The birthday dawned with the soft pearly gray and tender opal tints which
presage a fair noontide. Before six o'clock the children had all besieged
Bessie's door, with noisy tappings and louder congratulations. At seven,
they were all seated at breakfast, the table strewn with birthday gifts,
mostly of that useless and semi-idiotic character peculiar to such
tributes--ormolu inkstands, holding a thimbleful of ink--penholders
warranted to break before they have been used three times--purses with
impossible snaps--photograph frames and pomatum-pots.

Bessie pretended to be enraptured with everything. The purse Horry gave
her was 'too lovely.' Reginald's penholder was the very thing she had
been wanting for an age. Dear little Eva's pomatum-pot was perfection.
The point-lace handkerchief Ida had worked in secret was exquisite.
Blanche's crochet slippers were so lovely that their not being big enough
was hardly a fault. They were much too pretty to be worn. Urania
contributed a more costly gift, in the shape of a perfume cabinet, all
cut-glass, walnut-wood, and ormolu.

'Urania's presents are always meant to crush one,' said Blanche
disrespectfully; 'they are like the shields and bracelets those rude
soldiers flung at poor Tarpeia.'

Urania was to be one of the picnic party. She was to be the only stranger
present. There had been a disappointment about the two cousins. Neither
Brian had accepted the annual summons. One was supposed to be still in
Norway, the other had neglected to answer the letter which had been sent
more than a week ago to his address in Herefordshire.

'I'm afraid you'll find it dreadfully like our every-day picnics,' Bessie
said to Ida, as they were starting.

'I shall be satisfied if it be half as pleasant.'

'Ah, it would have been nice enough if the two Brians had been with us.
Brian Walford is so amusing.'

'He would have sung comic songs, I suppose?' said Ida rather
contemptuously.

'Oh, no; you must not suppose that he is always singing comic songs. He
is one of those versatile people who can do anything.'

'I don't want to be rude about your own flesh and blood Bess, but in a
general way I detest versatile people,' said Ida.

'What a queer girl you are, Ida! I'm afraid you have taken a dislike to
Brian Walford,' complained Bessie.

'No,' said Ida, deep in thought,--the two girls were standing at the
hall-door, waiting for the carriage,--'it is not that.'

'You like the idea of the other Brian better?'

Ida's wild-rose bloom deepened to a rich carnation.

'Oh, Ida,' cried Bessie; 'do you remember what you said about marrying
for money?'

'It was a revolting sentiment; but it was wrung from me by the infinite
vexations of poverty.'

'Wouldn't it be too lovely if Brian the Great were to fall in love with
you, and ask you to be mistress of that dear old Abbey which you admire
so much?

'Don't be ecstatic, Bessie. I shall never be the mistress of the Abbey. I
was not born under a propitious star. There must have been a very ugly
concatenation of planets ruling the heavens at the hour of my birth. You
see, Brian the Great does not even put himself in the way of falling
captive to my charms.'

This was said half in sport, half in bitterness; indeed, there was a
bitter flavour in much of Ida Palliser's mirth. She was thinking of the
stories she had read in which a woman had but to be young and lovely, and
all creation bowed down to her. Yet her beauty had been for the most part
a cause of vexation, and had made people hate her. She had been
infinitely happy during the last six weeks; but embodied hatred had been
close at hand in the presence of Miss Rylance; and if anyone had fallen
in love with her during that time, it was the wrong person.

The young ladies were to go in the landau, leaving the exclusive
enjoyment of Robin's variable humours to Horatio and the juveniles. There
was a general idea that Robin, in conjunction with a hilly country, might
be sooner or later fatal to the young Wendovers; but they went on driving
him, nevertheless, as everybody knew that if he did ultimately prove
disastrous to them it would be with the best intentions and without loss
of temper.

Bessie and Ida took their seats in the roomy carriage, Reginald mounted
to the perch beside the coachman, and they drove triumphantly through the
village to the gate of Dr. Rylance's cottage, where Urania stood waiting
for them.

'I hope we haven't kept you long?' said Bessie.

'Not more than a quarter of an hour,' answered Urania, meekly; 'but that
seems rather long in a broiling sun. You always have such insufferably
hot weather on your birthdays, Bessie.'

'It will be cool enough on the hills by-and-by,' said Bess,
apologetically.

'I daresay there will be a cold wind,' returned Urania, who wore an
unmistakable air of discontent. 'There generally is on these unnatural
September days.'

'One would think you bore a grudge against the month of September because
I was born in it,' retorted Bessie. And then, remembering her
obligations, she hastened to add, 'How can I thank you sufficiently for
that exquisite scent-case? It is far too lovely.'

'I am very glad you like it. One hardly knows what to choose.'

Miss Rylance had taken her seat in the landau by this time, and they were
bowling along the smooth high road at that gentle jog-trot pace affected
by a country gentleman's coachman.

The day was heavenly; the wind due south; a day on which life--mere
sensual existence--is a delight. The landscape still wore its richest
summer beauty--not a leaf had fallen. They were going upward, to the
hilly region between Kingthorpe and Winchester, to a spot where there was
a table-shaped edifice of stones, supposed to be of Druidic origin.

The young Wendovers were profoundly indifferent to the Druids, and to
that hypothetical race who lived ages before the Druids, and have broken
out all over the earth in stony excrescences, as yet vaguely classified.
That three-legged granite table, whose origin was lost in the remoteness
of past time, seemed to the young Wendovers a thing that had been created
expressly for their amusement, to be climbed upon or crawled under as the
fancy moved them. It was a capital rallying-point for a picnic or a gipsy
tea-drinking.

'We are to have no grown-ups to-day,' said Reginald, looking down from
his place beside the coachman. 'The pater and mater are away, and Aunt
Betsy has a headache; so we can have things all our own way.'

'You are mistaken, Reginald,' said Urania; 'my father is going to join us
by-and-by. I hope he won't be considered an interloper. I told him that
it was to be a young party, and that I was sure he would be in the way;
but he wouldn't take my advice. He is going to ride over in the broiling
sun. Very foolish, I think.'

'I thought Dr. Rylance was in London?'

'He was till last night. He came down on purpose to be at your picnic.'

'I am sure I feel honoured,' said Bessie.

'Do you? I don't think _you_ are the attraction,' answered Urania, with a
cantankerous glance at Miss Palliser.

Ida's dark eyes were looking far away across the hills. It seemed as if
she neither heard Miss Rylance's speech nor saw the sneer which
emphasized it.

Dr. Rylance's substantial hunter came plodding over the turfy ridge
behind them five minutes afterwards, and presently he was riding at a
measured trot beside the carriage door, congratulating Bessie on the
beauty of the day, and saying civil things to every one.

'I could not resist the temptation to give myself a day's idleness in the
Hampshire air,' he said.

Reginald felt unutterably savage. What a trouble-feast the man was. They
would have to adapt the proceedings of the day to his middle-aged good
manners. There could be no wild revelry, no freedom. Dr. Rylance was an
embodiment of propriety.

Half-an-hour after dinner they were all scattered upon the hills.

Reginald, who cherished a secret passion for Ida, which was considerably
in advance of his years, and who had calculated upon being her guide,
philosopher, and friend all through the day, found himself ousted by the
West End physician, who took complete possession of Miss Palliser, under
the pretence of explaining the history--altogether speculative--of the
spot. He discoursed eloquently about the Druids, expatiated upon the City
of Winchester, dozing in the sunshine yonder, among its fat water
meadows. He talked of the Saxons and the Normans, of William of Wykeham,
and his successors, until poor Ida felt sick and faint from very
weariness. It was all very delightful talk, no doubt--the polished
utterance of a man who read his _Saturday Review_ and _Athenaeum_
diligently, saw an occasional number of _Fors Clavigera_, and even
skimmed the more aesthetic papers in the _Architect_; but to Ida this
expression of modern culture was all weariness. She would rather have
been racing those wild young Wendovers down the slippery hill-side, on
which they were perilling their necks; she would rather have been lying
beside the lake in Kingthorpe Park, reading her well-thumbed Tennyson, or
her shabby little Keats.

Her thoughts had wandered ever so far away when she was called back to
the work-a-day world by finding that Dr. Rylance's conversation had
suddenly slipped from archaeology into a more personal tone.

'Are you really going away to-morrow?' he asked.

'Yes,' answered Ida, sadly, looking at one of the last of the
butterflies, whose brief summertide of existence was wearing to its
close, like her own.

'You are going back to Mauleverer Manor?'

'Yes. I have another half-year of bondage, I am going back to drudgery
and self-contempt, to be brow-beaten by Miss Pew, and looked down upon by
most of her pupils. The girls in my own class are very fond of me, but
I'm afraid their fondness is half pity. The grown-up girls with happy
homes and rich fathers despise me. I hardly wonder at it. Genteel poverty
certainly is contemptible. There is nothing debasing in a smock-frock or
a fustian jacket. The labourers I see about Kingthorpe have a glorious
air of independence, and I daresay are as proud, in their way, as if they
were dukes. But shabby finery--genteel gowns worn threadbare: there is a
deep degradation in those.'

'Not for you,' answered Dr. Rylance, earnestly, with an admiring look in
his blue-gray eyes. They were somewhat handsome eyes when they did not
put on their cruel expression. 'Not for you. Nothing could degrade,
nothing could exalt you. You are superior to the accident of your
surroundings.'

'It's very kind of you to say that; but it's a fallacy, all the same,'
said Ida. 'Do you think Napoleon at St. Helena, squabbling with Sir
Hudson Lowe, is as dignified a figure as Napoleon at the Tuileries, in
the zenith of his power? But I ought not to be grumbling at fate. I have
been happy for six sunshiny weeks. If I were to live to be a century old,
I could never forget how good people at Kingthorpe have been to me. I
will go back to my old slavery, and live upon the memory of that
happiness.'

'Why should you go back to slavery?' asked Dr. Rylance, taking her hand
in his and holding it with so strong a grasp that she could hardly have
withdrawn it without violence. 'There is a home at Kingthorpe ready to
receive you. If you have been happy there in the last few weeks, why not
try if you can be happy there always? There is a house in Cavendish
Square whose master would be proud to make you its mistress. Ida, we have
seen very little of each other, and I may be precipitate in hazarding
this offer; but I am as fond of you as if I had known you half a
lifetime, and I believe that I could make your life happy.'

Ida Palliser's heart thrilled with a chill sense of horror and aversion.
She had talked recklessly enough of her willingness to marry for money,
and, lo! here was a prosperous man laying two handsomely furnished houses
at her feet--a man of gentlemanlike bearing, good-looking, well-informed,
well-spoken, with no signs of age in his well-preserved face and figure;
a man whom any woman, friendless, portionless, a mere waif upon earth's
surface, at the mercy of all the winds that blow, ought proudly and
gladly to accept for her husband.

No, too bold had been her challenge to fate. She had said that she would
marry any honest man who would lift her out of the quagmire of poverty:
but she was not prepared to accept Dr. Rylance's offer, generous as it
sounded. She would rather go back to the old treadmill, and her old
fights with Miss Pew, than reign supreme over the dainty cottage at
Kingthorpe and the house in Cavendish Square. Her time had not come.

Dr. Rylance had not risen to eloquence in making his offer; and Ida's
reply was in plainest words.

'I am very sorry,' she faltered. 'I feel that it is very good of you to
make such a proposal; but I cannot accept it.'

'There is some one else,' said the doctor. 'Your heart is given away
already.'

'No,' she answered sadly; 'my heart is like an empty sepulchre.'

'Then why should I not hope to win you? I have been hasty, no doubt: but
I want if possible to prevent your return to that odious school. If you
would but make me happy by saying yes, you could stay with your kind
friends at The Knoll till the day that makes you mistress of my house. We
might be married in time to spend November in Italy. It is the nicest
month for Rome. You have never seen Italy, perhaps?'

'No. I have seen very little that is worth seeing.'

'Ida, why will you not say yes? Do you doubt that I should try my
uttermost to make you happy?'

'No,' she answered gravely, 'but I doubt my own capacity for that kind of
happiness.'

Dr. Rylance was deeply wounded. He had been petted and admired by women
during the ten years of his widowhood, favoured and a favourite
everywhere. He had made up his mind deliberately to marry this penniless
girl. Looked at from a worldling's point of view, it would seem, at the
first glance, an utterly disadvantageous alliance: but Dr. Rylance had an
eye that could sweep over horizons other than are revealed to the average
gaze, and he told himself that so lovely a woman as Ida Palliser must
inevitably become the fashion in that particular society which Dr.
Rylance most affected: and a wife famed for her beauty and elegance
would assuredly be of more advantage to a fashionable physician than a
common-place wife with a fortune. Dr. Rylance liked money; but he liked
it only for what it could buy. He had no sons, and he was much too fond
of himself to lead laborious days in order to leave a large fortune to
his daughter. He had bought a lease of his London house, which would last
his time; he had bought the freehold of the Kingthorpe cottage; and he
was living up to his income. When he died there would be two houses of
furniture, plate, pictures, horses and carriages, and the Kingthorpe
cottage, to be realized for Urania. He estimated these roughly as worth
between six and seven thousand pounds, and he considered seven thousand
pounds an ample fortune for his only daughter. Urania was in happy
ignorance of the modesty of his views. She imagined herself an heiress on
a much larger scale.

To offer himself to a penniless girl of whose belongings he knew
absolutely nothing, and to be peremptorily refused! Dr. Rylance could
hardly believe such a thing possible. The girl must be trifling with him,
playing her fish, with the fixed intention of landing him presently. It
was in the nature of girls to do that kind of thing. 'Why do you reject
me?' he asked seriously; 'is it because I am old enough to be your
father?'

'No, I would marry a man old enough to be my grandfather if I loved him,'
answered Ida, with cruel candour.

'And I am to understand that your refusal is irrevocable? he urged.

'Quite irrevocable. But I hope you believe that I am grateful for the
honour you have done me.'

'That is the correct thing to say upon such occasions, answered Dr.
Rylance, coldly; 'I wonder the sentence is not written in your copy
books, among those moral aphorisms which are of so little use in after
life.'

'The phrase may seem conventional, but in my case it means much more than
usual,' said Ida; 'a girl who has neither money nor friends has good
reason to be grateful when a gentleman asks her to be his wife.'

'I wish I could be grateful for your gratitude,' said Dr. Rylance, 'but I
can't. I want your love, and nothing else. Is it on Urania's account that
you reject me?' he urged. 'If you think that she would be a hindrance to
your happiness, pray dismiss the thought. If she did not accommodate
herself pleasantly to my choice her life would have to be spent apart
from us. I would brook no rebellion.'

The cruel look had come into Dr. Rylance's eyes. He was desperately
angry. He was surprised, humiliated, indignant. Never had the possibility
of rejection occurred to him. It had been for him to decide whether he
would or would not take this girl for his wife; and after due
consideration of her merits and all surrounding circumstances, he had
decided that he would take her.

'Is my daughter the stumbling-block?' he urged.

'No,' she answered, 'there is no stumbling-block. I would marry you
to-morrow, if I felt that I could love you as a wife ought to love her
husband. I said once--only a little while ago--that I would marry for
money. I find that I am not so base as I thought myself.'

'Perhaps the temptation is not large enough,' said Dr. Rylance. 'If I had
been Brian Wendover, and the owner of Kingthorpe Abbey, you would hardly
have rejected me so lightly.'

Ida crimsoned to the roots of her hair. The shaft went home. It was as if
Dr. Rylance had been inside her mind and knew all the foolish day-dreams
she had dreamed in the idle summer afternoons, under the spreading cedar
branches, or beside the lake in the Abbey grounds. Before she had time to
express her resentment a cluster of young Wendovers came sweeping down
the greensward at her side, and in the next minute Blanche was hanging
upon her bodily, like a lusty parasite strangling a slim young tree.

'Darling,' cried Blanche gaspingly, 'such news. Brian has come--cousin
Brian--after all, though he thought he couldn't. But he made a great
effort, and he has come all the way as fast as he could tear to be here
on Bessie's birthday. Isn't it too jolly?'

'All the way from Norway?' asked Ida.

'Yes,' said Urania, who had been carried down the hill with the torrent
of Wendovers, 'all the way from Norway. Isn't it nice of him?'

Blanche's frank face was brimming over with smiles. The boys were all
laughing. How happy Brian's coming had made them!

Ida looked at them wonderingly.

'How pleased you all seem!' she said. 'I did not know you were so fond of
your cousin. I thought it was the other you liked.'

'Oh, we like them both,' said Blanche, 'and it is so nice of Brian to
come on purpose for Bessie's birthday. Do come and see him. He is on the
top of the hill talking to Bess; and the kettle boils, and we are just
going to have tea. We are all starving.'

'After such a dinner!' exclaimed Ida.

'Such a dinner, indeed!--two or three legs of fowls and a plate or so of
pie!' ejaculated Reginald, contemptuously. 'I began to be hungry a
quarter of an hour afterwards. Come and see Brian.'

Ida looked round her wonderingly, feeling as if she was in a dream.

Dr. Rylance had disappeared. Urania was smiling at her sweetly, more
sweetly than it was her wont to smile at Ida Palliser.

'One would think she knew that I had refused her father,' mused Ida.

They all climbed the hill, the children talking perpetually, Ida
unusually silent. The smoke of a gipsy fire was going up from a hollow
near the Druid altar, and two figures were standing beside the altar;
one, a young man, with his arm resting on the granite slab, and his head
bent as he talked, with seeming earnestness, to Bessie Wendover. He
turned as the crowd approached, and Bessie introduced him to Miss
Palliser. 'My cousin Brian--my dearest friend Ida,' she said.

'She is desperately fond of the Abbey,' said Blanche; 'so I hope she will
like you. "Love me, love my dog," says the proverb, so I suppose one
might say, "Love my house, love me."'

Ida stood silent amidst her loquacious friends, looking at the stranger
with a touch of wonder. No, this was not the image which she had pictured
to herself. Mr. Wendover was very good-looking--interesting even; he had
the kind of face which women call nice--a pale complexion, dreamy gray
eyes, thin lips, a well-shaped nose, a fairly intellectual forehead. But
the Brian of her fancies was a man of firmer mould, larger features, a
more resolute air, an eye with more fire, a brow marked by stronger
lines. For some unknown reason she had fancied the master of the Abbey
like that Sir Tristram Wendover who had been so loyal a subject and so
brave a soldier, and before whose portrait she had so often lingered in
dreamy contemplation.

'And you have really come all the way from Norway to be at Bessie's
picnic?' she faltered at last, feeling that she was expected to say
something.

'I would have come a longer distance for the sake of such a pleasant
meeting,' he answered, smiling at her.

'Bessie,' cried Blanche, who had been grovelling on her knees before the
gipsy fire, 'the kettle will go off the boil if you don't make tea
instantly. If it were not your birthday I should make it myself.'

'You may,' said Bessie, 'although it is my birthday.'

She had walked a little way apart with Urania, and they two were talking
somewhat earnestly.

'Those girls seem to be plotting something,' said Reginald; 'a charade
for to-night, perhaps. It's sure to be stupid if Urania's in it.'

'You mean that it will be too clever,' said Horatio.

'Yes, that kind of cleverness which is the essence of stupidity.'

While Bessie and Miss Rylance conversed apart, and all the younger
Wendovers devoted their energies to the preparation of a tremendous meal,
Ida and Brian Wendover stood face to face upon the breezy hill-top, the
girl sorely embarrassed, the young man gazing at her as if he had never
seen anything so lovely in his life.

'I have heard so much about you from Bessie,' he said after a silence
which seemed long to both. 'Her letters for the last twelve months have
been a perpetual paean--like one of the Homeric hymns, with you for the
heroine. I had quite a dread of meeting you, feeling that, after having
my expectations strung up to such a pitch, I must be disappointed.
Nothing human could justify Bessie's enthusiasm.'

'Please don't talk about it. Bessie's one weak point is her affection for
me. I am very grateful. I love her dearly, but she does her best to make
me ridiculous.'

'I am beginning to think Bessie a very sensible girl,' said Brian,
longing to say much more, so deeply was he impressed by this goddess in a
holland gown, with glorious eyes shining upon him under the shadow of a
coarse straw hat.

'Have you come back to Hampshire for good?' asked Ida, as they strolled
towards Bessie and Urania.

'For good! No, I never stay long.'

'What a pity that lovely old Abbey should be deserted!'

'Yes, it is rather a shame, is it not? But then no one could expect a
young man to live there except in the hunting season--or for the sake of
the shooting.'

'Could anyone ever grow tired of such a place?' asked Ida.

She was wondering at the young man's indifferent air, as if that solemn
abbey, those romantic gardens, were of no account to him. She supposed
that this was in the nature of things. A man born lord of such an elysium
would set little value upon his paradise. Was it not Eve's weariness of
Eden which inclined her ear to the serpent?

And now the banquet was spread upon the short smooth turf, and everybody
was ordered to sit down. They made a merry circle, with the tea-kettle in
the centre, piles of cake, and bread and butter, and jam-pots surrounding
it. Blanche and Horatio were the chief officiators, and were tremendously
busy ministering to the wants of others, while they satisfied their own
hunger and thirst hurriedly between whiles. The damsel sat on the grass
with a big crockery teapot in her lap, while her brother watched and
managed the kettle, and ran to and fro with cups and saucers. Bessie, as
the guest of honour, was commanded to sit still and look on.

'Dreadfully babyish, isn't it?' said Urania, smiling with her superior
air at Brian, who had helped himself to a crust of home-made bread, and a
liberal supply of gooseberry jam.

'Uncommonly jolly,' he answered gaily. 'I confess to a weakness for bread
and jam. I wish people always gave it at afternoon teas.'

'Has it not a slight flavour of the nursery?'

'Of course it has. But a nursery picnic is ever so much better than a
swell garden-party, and bread and jam is a great deal more wholesome than
salmon-mayonaise and Strasbourg pie. You may despise me as much as you
like, Miss Rylance. I came here determined to enjoy myself.'

'That is the right spirit for a picnic,' said Ida, 'People with grand
ideas are not wanted.'

'And I suppose in the evening you will join in the dumb charades, and
play hide-and-seek in the garden, all among spiders and cockchafers.'

'I will do anything I am told to do,' answered Brian, cheerily. 'But I
think the season of the cockchafer is over.'

'What has become of Dr. Rylance?' asked Bessie, looking about her as if
she had only that moment missed him.

'I think he went back to the farm for his horse,' said Urania. 'I suppose
he found our juvenile sports rather depressing.'

'Well, he paid us a compliment in coming at all,' answered Bessie, 'so we
must forgive him for getting tired of us.'

The drive home was very merry, albeit Bessie and her friend were to part
next morning--Ida to go back to slavery. They were both young enough to
be able to enjoy the present hour, even on the edge of darkness.

Bessie clasped her friend's hand as they sat side by side in the landau.

'You must come to us at Christmas,' she whispered: 'I shall ask mother to
invite you.'

Brian was full of talk and gaiety as they drove home through the dusk. He
was very different from that ideal Brian of Ida's girlish fancy--the
Brian who embodied all her favourite attributes, and had all the finest
qualities of the hero of romance. But he was an agreeable, well-bred
young man, bringing with him that knowledge of life and the active world
which made his talk seem new and enlightening after the strictly local
and domestic intellects of the good people with whom she had been living.

With the family at The Knoll conversation had been bounded by Winchester
on one side, and Romsey on the other. There was an agreeable freshness in
the society of a young man who could talk of all that was newest in
European art and literature, and who knew how the world was being
governed.

But this fund of information was hinted at rather than expressed.
To-night Mr. Wendover seemed most inclined to mere nonsense talk--the
lively nothings that please children. Of himself and his Norwegian
adventures he said hardly anything.

'I suppose when a man has travelled so much he gets to look upon strange
countries as a matter of course,' speculated Ida. 'If I had just come
from Norway, I should talk of nothing else.'

The dumb-charades and hide-and-seek were played, but only by the lower
orders, as Bessie called her younger brothers and sisters.

Ida strolled in the moonlit garden with Mr. Wendover, Bessie, Urania, and
Mr. Ratcliffe, a very juvenile curate, who was Bessie's admirer and
slave. Urania had no particular admirer. She felt that every one at
Kingthorpe must needs behold her with mute worship; but there was no one
so audacious as to give expression to the feeling; no one of sufficient
importance to be favoured with her smiles. She looked forward to her
first season in London next year, and then she would be called upon to
make her selection.

'She is worldly to the tips of her fingers,' said Ida, as she and Bessie
talked apart from the others for a few minutes: 'I wonder she does not
try to captivate your cousin.'

'What--Brian? Oh, he is not at all in her line. He would not suit her a
bit.'

'But don't you think it would suit her to be mistress of the Abbey?'

Bessie gave a little start, as if the idea were new.

'I don't think she has ever thought of him in that light,' she said.

'Don't you? If she hasn't she is not the girl I think her.'

'Oh, I know she is very worldly; but I don't think she's so bad as that.'

'Not so bad as to be capable of marrying for money--no, I suppose not,'
said Ida, thoughtfully.

'I'm sure you would not, darling, said Bessie. 'You talked about it once,
when you were feeling bitter; but I know that in your heart of hearts you
never meant it. You are much too high-minded.'

'I am not a bit high-minded. All my high-mindedness, if I ever had any,
has been squeezed out of me by poverty. My only idea is to escape from
subjection and humiliation--a degrading bondage to vulgar-minded people.'

'But would the escape be worth having at the cost of your own
degradation?' urged Bessie, who felt particularly heroic this evening,
exalted by the moonlight, the loveliness of the garden, the thought of
parting with her dearest friend. 'Marry for love, dearest. Sacrifice
everything in this world rather than be false to yourself.'

'You dear little enthusiast, I may never be asked to make any such
sacrifice. I have not much chance of suitors at Mauleverer, as you
know--and as for falling in love--'

'Oh, you never know when the fatal moment may come. How do you like
Brian?'

'He is very gentlemanlike; he seems very well informed.'

'He is immensely clever,' answered Bessie, almost offended at this
languid praise; 'he is a man who might succeed in any line he chose for
himself. Do you think him handsome?'

'He is certainly nice looking.'

'How cool you are! I had set my heart upon your liking him.'

'What could come of my liking?' asked Ida with a touch of bitterness. 'Is
there a portionless girl in all England who would not like the master of
Wendover Abbey?'

'But for his own sake,' urged Bessie, with a vexed air; 'surely he is
worthy of being liked for his own sake, without a thought of the Abbey.'

'I cannot dissociate him from that lovely old house and gardens. Indeed,
to my mind he rather belongs to the Abbey than the Abbey belongs to him.
You see I knew the Abbey first.'

Here they were interrupted by Brian and Urania, and presently Ida found
herself walking in the moonlight in a broad avenue of standard roses, at
the end of the garden, with Mr. Wendover by her side, and the voices of
the other three sounding ever so far away. On the other side of a low
quickset hedge stretched a wide expanse of level meadow land, while in
the farther distance rose the Wiltshire hills, and nearer the heathy
highlands of the New Forest. The lamp-lit windows of Miss Wendover's
cottage glimmered a little way off, across gardens and meadows.

'And so you are really going to leave us to-morrow morning?' said Brian,
regretfully.

'By the eight o'clock train from Winchester. To-morrow evening I shall be
sitting on a form in a big bare class-room, listening to the babble of a
lot of girls pretending to learn their lessons.'

'Are you fond of teaching?'

'Just imagine to yourself the one occupation which is most odious to you,
and then you may know how fond I am of teaching; and of school-girls; and
of school-life altogether.'

'It is very hard that you should have to pursue such an uncongenial
career.'

'It seems so to me; but, perhaps, that is my selfishness. I suppose half
the people in this world have to live by work they hate.'

'Allowing for the number of people to whom all kind of work is hateful, I
dare say you are right. But I think, in a general way, congenial work
means successful work. No man hates the profession that brings him fame
and money; but the doctor without patients, the briefless barrister, can
hardly love law or medicine.'

He beguiled Ida into talking of her own life, with all its bitterness.
There was something in his voice and manner which tempted her to confide
in him. He seemed thoroughly sympathetic.

'I keep forgetting what strangers we are,' she said, apologizing for her
unreserve.

'We are not strangers. I have heard of you from Bessie so much that I
seem to have known you for years. I hope you will never think of me as a
stranger.'

'I don't think I ever can, after this conversation. I am afraid you will
think me horribly egotistical.'

She had been talking of her father and stepmother, the little brother she
loved so fondly, dwelling with delight upon his perfections.

'I think you all that is good and noble. How I wish this were not your
last evening at the Knoll!'

'Do you think I do not wish it? Hark, there's Bessie calling us.'

They went back to the house, and to the drawing-room, which wore quite a
festive appearance, in honour of Bessie's birthday; ever so many extra
candles dotted about, and a table laid with fruit and sandwiches, cake
and claret-cup, the children evidently considering a superfluity of meals
indispensable to a happy birthday. Blanche and her juniors were sitting
about the room, in the last stage of exhaustion after hide-and-seek.

'This has been a capital birthday,' said Horatio, wiping the perspiration
from his brow, and then filling for himself a bumper of claret-cup; 'and
now we are going to dance. Blanche, give us the Faust Waltz, and go on
playing till we tell you to leave off.'

Blanche, considerably blown, and with her hair like a mop, sat down and
began to touch the piano with resolute fingers and forcible rhythm. ONE,
two, three, ONE, two, three. The boys pushed the furniture into the
corners. Brian offered himself to Ida; Bessie insisted upon surrendering
the curate to Urania, and took one of her brothers for a partner; and the
three couples went gliding round the pretty old room, the cool night
breezes blowing in upon them from wide-open windows.

They danced and played, and sang and talked, till midnight chimed from
the old eight-day clock in the hall,--a sound which struck almost as much
consternation to Bessie's soul as if she had been Cinderella at the royal
ball.

'TWELVE O'CLOCK! and the little ones all up!' she exclaimed, looking
round the circle of towzled heads with remorseful eyes. 'What would
mother say? And she told me she relied on my discretion! Go to bed, every
one of you, this instant!'

'Oh, come, now,' remonstrated Blanche, 'there's no use in hustling us off
like that, after letting us sit up hours after our proper time. I'm going
to have another sandwich; and there's not a bit of good in leaving all
those raspberry tarts. The servants won't thank us. _They_ have as many
jam tarts as they like.'

'You greedy little wretches; you have been doing nothing but eat all
day,' said Ida. 'When I am back at Mauleverer I shall remember you only
as machines for the consumption of pudding and jam. Obey your grown-up
sister, and go to bed directly.'

'Grown up, indeed! How long has she been grown up, I should like to
know!' exclaimed Blanche vindictively. 'She's only an inch and a quarter
taller than me, and she's a mere dumpling compared with Horry.'

The lower orders were got rid of somehow--driven to their quarters, as it
were, at the point of the bayonet; and then the grown-ups bade each other
good-night; the curate escorting Miss Rylance to her home, and Brian
going up to the top floor to a bachelor's room.

'Who is going to drive Miss Palliser to the station?' he asked, as they
stood, candlestick in hand, at the foot of the stairs.

'I am, of course,' answered Reginald. 'Robin will spin us over the hills
in no time. I've ordered the car for seven sharp.'

There was very little sleep for either Bessie or her guest that night.
Both girls were excited by memories of the day that was past, and by
thoughts of the day that was coming. Ida was brooding a little upon her
disappointment in Brian Wendover. He had very pleasant manners, he seemed
soft-hearted and sympathetic, he was very good-looking--but he was not
the Brian of her dreams. That ideal personage had never existed outside
her imagination. It was a shock to her girlish fancy. There was a sense
of loss in her mind.

'I must be very silly,' she told herself, 'to make a fancy picture of a
person, and to be vexed with him because he does not resemble my
portrait.'

She was disappointed, and yet she was interested in this new
acquaintance. He was the first really interesting young man she had ever
met, and he was evidently interested in her. And then she pictured him at
the Abbey, in the splendid solitude of those fine old rooms, leading the
calm, studious life which Bessie had talked of--an altogether enviable
life, Ida thought.

Mr. Wendover was in the dining-room at half-past six when the two girls
went down to breakfast. All the others came trooping down a few minutes
afterwards, Reginald got up to the last degree of four-in-handishness
which the resources of his wardrobe allowed, and with a flower in his
buttonhole. There was a loud cry for eggs and bacon, kippered herrings,
marmalade, Yorkshire cakes; but neither Ida nor Bessie could eat.

'Do have a good breakfast,' pleaded Blanche affectionately; 'you will be
having bread and scrape to-morrow. We have got a nice hamper for you,
with a cake and a lot of jam puffs and things; but those will only last a
short time.'

'You dear child, I wouldn't mind the bread and scrape, if there were only
a little love to flavour it,' answered Ida softly.

The jaunting-car came to the door as the clock struck seven. Ida's
luggage was securely bestowed, then, after a perfect convulsion of
kissing, she was handed to her place, Reginald jumped into his seat and
took the reins, and Brian seated himself beside Ida.

'You are not going with them?' exclaimed Bessie.

'Yes I am, to see that Miss Palliser is not spilt on the hills.'

'What rot!' cried Reginald. 'I should be rather sorry for myself if I
were not able to manage Robin.'

'This is a new development in you, who are generally the laziest of
living creatures,' said Bessie to Brian, and before he could reply, Robin
was bounding cheerily through the village, making very little account of
the jaunting-car and its occupants. Urania was at her garden gate, fresh
and elegant-looking in pale blue cambric. She smiled at Ida, and waved
her a most gracious farewell.

'I don't think I ever saw Miss Rylance look so amiable,' said Ida. 'She
does not often favour me with her smiles.'

'Are you enemies?' asked Brian.

'Not open foes; we have always maintained an armed neutrality. I don't
like her, and she doesn't like me, and we both know it. But perhaps I
ought not to be so candid. She may be a favourite of yours.'

'She might be, but she is not. She is very elegant, very
lady-like--according to her own lights--very viperish.'

It was a lovely drive in the crisp clear air, across the breezy hills.
Ida could not help enjoying the freshness of morning, the beauty of
earth, albeit she was going from comfort to discomfort, from love to cold
indifference or open enmity.

'How I delight in this landscape!' she exclaimed. 'Is it not ever so much
better than Norway?' appealing to Brian.

'It is a milder, smaller kind of beauty,' he answered. 'Would you not
like to see Norway?'

'I would like to see all that is lovely on earth; yet I think I could be
content to spend a life-time here. This must seem strange to you, who
grow weary of that beautiful Abbey.'

'It is not of his house, but of himself, that a man grows weary,'
answered Brian.

Robin was in a vivacious humour, and rattled the car across the hills at
a good pace. They had a quarter of an hour to wait at the busy little
station. Brian and Ida walked up and down the platform talking, while
Reginald looked after the pony and the luggage. They found so much to say
to each other, that the train seemed to come too soon.

They bade each other good-bye with a tender look on Brian's part, a blush
on Ida's. Reginald had to push his cousin away from the carriage window,
in order to get a word with the departing guest.

'We shall all miss you awfully,' he said; 'but mind, you must come back
at Christmas.'

'I shall be only too glad, if Mrs. Wendover will have me. Good-bye.'

The train moved slowly forward, and she was gone.

'Isn't she a stunner?' asked Reginald of his cousin, as they stood on the
platform looking at each other blankly.

'She is the handsomest girl I ever saw, and out and away the nicest,'
answered Brian.




CHAPTER VII.


IN THE RIVER-MEADOW.

The old hackneyed round of daily life at Mauleverer Manor seemed just a
little worse to Ida Palliser after that happy break of six weeks' pure
and perfect enjoyment. Miss Pew was no less exacting than of old. Miss
Pillby, for whose orphaned and friendless existence there had been no
such thing as a holiday, and who had spent the vacation at Mauleverer
diligently employed in mending the house-linen, resented Ida's visit to
The Knoll as if it were a personal injury, and vented her envy in sneers
and innuendoes of the coarsest character.

'If _I_ were to spoon upon one of the rich pupils, I dare say I could get
invited out for the holidays,' she said, _à propos_ to nothing particular;
'but I am thankful to say I am above such meanness.'

'I never laid myself under an obligation I didn't feel myself able to
return,' said Miss Motley, the English governess, who had spent her
holidays amidst the rank and fashion of Margate. 'When I go to the
sea-side with my sister and her family, I pay my own expenses, and I feel
I've a right to be made comfortable.'

Miss Pillby, who had flattered and toadied every well-to-do pupil, and
laboured desperately to wind herself into the affections of Bessie
Wendover, that warm-hearted young person seeming particularly accessible
to flattery, felt herself absolutely injured by the kindness that had
been lavished upon Ida. She drank in with greedy ears Miss Palliser's
description of The Knoll and its occupants--the picnics, carpet-dances,
afternoon teas; and the thought that all these enjoyments and
festivities, the good things to eat and drink, the pleasant society,
ought to have been hers instead of Ida's, was wormwood.

'When I think of my kindness to Bessie Wendover,' she said to Miss
Motley, in the confidence of that one quiet hour which belonged to the
mistresses after the pupils' curfew-bell had rung youth and hope and
gaiety into retirement, 'when I think of the mustard poultices I have put
upon her chest, and the bronchial troches I have given her when she had
the slightest touch of cold or cough, I am positively appalled at the
ingratitude of the human race.'

'I don't think she likes bronchial troches,' said Miss Motley, a very
matter-of-fact young person who saved money, wore thick boots, and was
never unprovided with an umbrella: 'I have seen her throw them away
directly after you gave them to her.'

'She ought to have liked them,' exclaimed Miss Pillby, sternly. 'They are
very expensive.'

'No doubt she appreciated your kindness,' said Miss Motley, absently,
being just then absorbed in an abstruse calculation as to how many yards
of merino would be required for her winter gown.

'No, she did not,' said Miss Pillby. 'If she had been grateful she would
have invited me to her home. I should not have gone, but the act would
have given me a higher idea of her character.'

'Well, she is gone, and we needn't trouble ourselves any more about her,'
retorted Miss Motley, who hated to be plagued about abstract questions,
being a young woman of an essentially concrete nature, born to consume
and digest three meals a day, and having no views that go beyond that
function.

Miss Pillby sighed at finding herself in communion with so coarse a
nature.

'I don't easily get over a blow of that sort,' she said; 'I am too
tender-hearted.'

'So you are,' acquiesced Miss Motley. 'It doesn't pay in a big
boarding-school, however it may answer in private families.'

Ida, having lost her chief friend and companion, Bessie Wendover, found
life at Mauleverer Manor passing lonely. She even missed the excitement
of her little skirmishes, her passages-at-arms, with Urania Rylance, in
which she had generally got the best of the argument. There had been life
and emotion in these touch-and-go speeches, covert sneers, quick retorts,
innuendoes met and flung back in the very face of the sneerer. Now there
was nothing but dull, dead monotony. Many of the old pupils had departed,
and many new pupils had come, daughters of well-to-do parents,
prosperous, well-dressed, talking largely of the gaieties enjoyed by
their elder sisters, of the wonderful things done by their brothers at
Oxford or Cambridge, and of the grand things which were to happen two or
three years hence, when they themselves should be 'out.' Ida took no
interest in their prattle. It was so apt to sting her with the reminder
of her own poverty, the life of drudgery and dependence that was to be
her portion till the end of her days. She did not, in the Mauleverer
phraseology, 'take to' the new girls. She left them to be courted by Miss
Pillby, and petted by Miss Dulcibella. She felt as lonely as one who has
outlived her generation.

Happily the younger girls in the class which she taught were fond of her,
and when she wanted company she let these juveniles cluster round her in
her garden rambles; but in a general way she preferred loneliness, and to
work at the cracked old piano in the room where she slept. Beethoven and
Chopin, Mozart and Mendelssohn were companions of whom she never grew
weary.

So the slow days wore on till nearly the end of the month, and on one
cool, misty, afternoon, when the river flowed sluggishly under a dull
grey sky she walked alone along that allotted extent of the river-side
path which the mistresses and pupil-teachers were allowed to promenade
without _surveillance_. This river walk skirted a meadow which was in
Miss Pew's occupation, and ranked as a part of the Mauleverer grounds,
although it was divided by the high road from the garden proper.

A green paling, and a little green gate, always padlocked, secured this
meadow from intrusion on the road-side, but it was open to the river. To
be entrusted with the key of this pastoral retreat was a privilege only
accorded to governesses and pupil-teachers.

It was supposed by Miss Pew that no young person in her employment would
be capable of walking quite alone, where it was within the range of
possibility that her solitude might be intruded upon by an unknown member
of the opposite sex. She trusted, as she said afterwards, in the refined
feeling of any person brought into association with her, and, until
rudely awakened by facts, she never would have stooped from the lofty
pinnacle of her own purity to suspect the evil consequences which arose
from the liberty too generously accorded to her dependents.

Ida detested Miss Pillby and despised Miss Motley; and the greatest
relief she knew to the dismal monotony of her days was a lonely walk by
the river, with a shabby Wordsworth or a battered little volume of
Shelley's minor poems for her companions. She possessed so few books that
it was only natural for her to read those she had until love ripened with
familiarity.

On this autumnal afternoon she walked with slow steps, while the river
went murmuring by, and now and then a boat drifted lazily down the
stream. The boating season was over for the most part--the season of
picnics and beanfeasts, and Cockney holiday-making, and noisy revelry,
smart young women, young men in white flannels, with bare arms and
sunburnt noses. It was the dull blank time when everybody who could
afford to wander far from this suburban paradise, was away upon his and
her travels. Only parsons, doctors, schoolmistresses, and poverty stayed
at home. Yet now and then a youth in boating costume glided by, his
shoulders bending slowly to the lazy dip of his oars, his keel now and
then making a rushing sound among long trailing weeds.

Such a youth presently came creeping along the bank, almost at Ida's
feet, but passed her unseen. Her heavy lids were drooping, her eyes
intent upon the familiar page. The young man looked up at her with keen
gray eyes, recognised her, and pushed his boat in among the rushes by the
bank, moored it to a pollard willow, and with light footstep leaped on
shore.

He landed a few yards in the rear of Ida's slowly moving figure, followed
softly, came close behind her, and read aloud across her shoulder:

'There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this garden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.'

Ida looked round, first indignant, then laughing.

'How you startled me!' she exclaimed; 'I thought you were some horrid,
impertinent stranger; and yet the voice had a familiar sound. How are
they all at The Knoll? It is nearly a fortnight since Bessie wrote to me.
If she only knew how I hunger for her letters.'

'Very sweet of you,' answered Mr. Wendover, holding the girl's hand with
a lingering pressure, releasing it reluctantly when her rising colour
told him it would be insolent to keep it longer.

How those large dark eyes beamed with pleasure at seeing him! Was it for
his own sake, or for love of her friends at Kingthorpe? The smile was
perhaps too frank to be flattering.

'Very sweet of you to care so much for Bessie's girlish epistles,' he
said lazily; 'they are full of affection, but the style of composition
always recalls our dear Mrs. Nickleby. "Aunt Betsy was asking after you
the other day: and that reminds me that the last litter of black
Hampshires was sixteen--the largest number father ever remembers having.
The vicar and his wife are coming to dinner on Tuesday, and do tell me if
this new picture that everybody is talking about is really better than
the Derby Day," and that sort of thing. Not a very consecutive style,
don't you know.'

'Every word is interesting to me,' said Ida, with a look that told him
she was not one of those young ladies who enjoy a little good-natured
ridicule of their nearest and dearest. 'Is it long since you left
Kingthorpe?'

'Not four-and-twenty hours. I promised Bessie that my very first
occupation on coming to London should be to make my way down here to see
you, in order that I may tell her faithfully and truly whether you are
well and happy. She has a lurking conviction that you are unable to live
without her, that you will incontinently go into a galloping consumption,
and keep the fact concealed from all your friends until they receive a
telegram summoning them to your death-bed. I know that is the picture
Bessie's sentimental fancies have depicted.'

'I did not think Bessie was so morbid,' said Ida, laughing. 'No, I am not
one of those whom the gods love. I am made of very tough material, or I
should hardly have lived till now. I see before me a perspective of
lonely, loveless old age--finishing in a governess' almshouse. I hope
there are almshouses for governesses.

'Nobody will pity your loneliness or lovelessness,' retorted Brian, 'for
they will both be your own fault.'

She blushed, looking dreamily across the dark-gray river to the level
shores beyond--the low meadows--gentle hills in the back-ground--the
wooded slopes of Weybridge and Chertsey. If this speaker, whose voice
dropped to so tender a tone, had been like the Brian of her
imaginings--if he had looked at her with the dark eyes of Sir Tristram's
picture, how differently his speech would have affected her! As it was,
she listened with airy indifference, only blushing girlishly at his
compliment, and wondering a little if he really admired her--he the
owner of that glorious old Abbey--the wealthy head of the house of
Wendover--the golden fish for whom so many pretty fishers must have
angled in days gone by.

'Did you stay at The Knoll all the time,' she inquired, her thoughts
having flown back to Kingthorpe; 'or at the Abbey?'

'At The Knoll. It is ever so much livelier, and my cousins like to have
me with them.'

'Naturally. But I wonder you did not prefer living in that lovely old
house of yours. To occupy it must seem like living in the Middle Ages.'

'Uncommonly. One is twelve miles from a station, and four from
post-office, butcher, and baker. Very like the Middle Ages. There is no
gas even in the offices, and there are as many rats behind the wainscot
as there were Israelites in Egypt. All the rooms are draughty and some
are damp. No servant who has not been born and bred on the estate will
stay more than six months. There is a deficient water supply in dry
summers, and there are three distinct ghosts all the year round.
Extremely like the Middle Ages.'

'I would not mind ghosts, rats, anything, if it were my house' exclaimed
Ida, enthusiastically. 'The house is a poem.'

'Perhaps; but it is not a house; in the modern sense of the word, that is
to say, which implies comfort and convenience.'

Ida sighed, deeply disgusted at this want of appreciation of the romantic
spot where she had dreamed away more than one happy summer noontide,
while the Wendover children played hide-and-seek in the overgrown old
shrubberies.

No doubt life was always thus. The people to whom blind fortune gave such
blessings were unable to appreciate them, and only the hungry outsiders
could imagine the delight of possession.

'Are you living in London now?' she asked, as Mr. Wendover lingered at
her side, and seemed to expect the conversation to be continued
indefinitely.

His boat was safe enough, moving gently up and down among the rushes,
with the gentle flow of the tide. Ida looked at it longingly, thinking
how sweet it would be to step into it and let it carry her--any whither,
so long as it was away from Mauleverer Manor.

'Yes, I am in London for the present.'

'But not for long, I suppose.'

'I hardly know. I have no plans. I won't say with Romeo that I am
fortune's fool--but I am fortune's shuttlecock; and I suppose that means
pretty much the same.'

'It was very kind of you to come to see me,' said Ida.

'Kind to myself, for in coming I indulged the dearest wish of my soul,'
said the young man, looking at her with eyes whose meaning even her
inexperience could not misread.

'Please don't pay me compliments,' she said, hastily, 'or I shall feel
very sorry you came. And now I must hurry back to the house--the tea-bell
will ring in a few minutes. Please tell Bessie I am very well, and only
longing for one of her dear letters. Good-bye.'

She made him a little curtsey, and would have gone without shaking hands,
but he caught her hand and detained her in spite of herself.

'Don't be angry,' he pleaded; 'don't look at me with such cold, proud
eyes. Is it an offence to admire, to love you too quickly? If it is, I
have sinned deeply, and am past hope of pardon. Must one serve an
apprenticeship to mere formal acquaintance first, then rise step by step
to privileged friendship, before one dares to utter the sweet word love?
Remember, at least, that I am your dearest friend's first cousin, and
ought not to appear to you as a stranger.'

'I can remember nothing when you talk so wildly,' said Ida, crimson to
the roots of her hair. Never before had a young lover talked to her of
love. 'Pray let me go. Miss Pew will be angry if I am not at tea.'

'To think that such a creature as you should be under the control of any
such harpy,' exclaimed Brian. 'Well, if I must go, at least tell me I am
forgiven, and that I may exist upon the hope of seeing you again. I
suppose if I were to come to the hall-door, and send in my card, I should
not be allowed to see you?'

'Certainly not. Not if you were my own cousin instead of Bessie's.
Good-bye.'

'Then I shall happen to be going by in my boat every afternoon for the
next month or so. There is a dear good soul at the lock who lets
lodgings. I shall take up my abode there.'

'Please never land on this pathway again,' said Ida earnestly 'Miss Pew
would be horribly angry if she heard I had spoken to you. And now I must
go.'

She withdrew her hand from his grasp, and ran off across the meadow,
light-footed as Atalanta. Her heart was beating wildly, beating
furiously, when she flew up to her room to take off her hat and jacket
and smooth her disordered hair. Never before had any man, except
middle-aged Dr. Rylance, talked to her of love: and that this man of all
others, this man, sole master of the old mansion she so intensely
admired, her friend's kinsman, owner of a good old Saxon name; this man,
who could lift her in a moment from poverty to wealth, from obscurity to
place and station; that this man should look at her with admiring eyes,
and breathe impassioned words into her ear, was enough to set her heart
beating tumultuously, to bring hot blushes to her cheeks. It was too wild
a dream.

True, that for the man himself, considered apart from his belongings, his
name and race, she cared not at all. But just now, in this tumult of
excited feeling, she was disposed to confuse the man with his
surroundings--to think of him, not as that young man with gray eyes and
thin lips, who had walked with her at The Knoll, who had stood beside her
just now by the river, but as the living embodiment of fortune, pride,
delight.

Perhaps the vision really dominant in her mind was the thought of
herself as mistress of the Abbey, herself as living for ever among the
people she loved, amidst those breezy Hampshire hills, in the odour of
pine-woods--rich, important, honoured, and beloved, doing good to all who
came within the limit of her life. Yes, that was a glorious vision, and
its reflected light shone upon Brian Wendover, and in somewise glorified
him.

She went down to tea with such a triumphant light in her eyes that the
smaller pupils who sat at her end of the table, so as to be under her
_surveillance_ during the meal, exclaimed at her beauty.

'What a colour you've got, Miss Palliser!' said Lucy Dobbs, 'and how your
eyes sparkle! You look as if you'd just had a hamper.'

'I'm not quite so greedy as you, Lucy,' retorted Ida; 'I don't think a
hamper would make my eyes sparkle, even if there were anybody to send me
one.'

'But there is somebody to send you one,' argued Lucy, with her mouth full
of bread and butter; 'your father isn't dead?'

'No.'

'Then he might send you a hamper.'

'He might, if he lived within easy reach of Mauleverer Manor,' replied
Ida; 'but as he lives in France--'

'He could send a post-office order to a confectioner in London, and the
confectioner would send you a big box of cakes, and marmalade, and jam,
and mixed biscuits, and preserved ginger,' said Lucy, her cheeks glowing
with the rapture of her theme. 'That is what my mamma and papa did, when
they were in Switzerland, on my birthday. I never had such a hamper as
that one. I was ill for a week afterwards.'

'And I suppose you were very glad your mother and father were away,' said
Ida, while the other children laughed in chorus.

'It was a splendid hamper,' said Lucy, stolidly. 'I shall never forget
it. So you see your father might send you a hamper,' she went on, for the
sake of argument, 'though he is in France.'

'Certainly,' said Ida, 'if I were not too old to care about cakes and
jam.'

'_We_ are not too old,' persisted Lucy; 'you might share them among us.'

Ida's heart had not stilled its stormy vehemence yet. She talked lightly
to her young companions, and tried to eat a little bread and butter, but
that insipid fare almost choked her. Her mind was overcharged with
thought and wonder.

Could he have meant all or half he said just now?--this young man with
the delicate features, pale complexion, and thin lips. He had seemed
intensely earnest. Those gray eyes of his, somewhat too pale of hue for
absolutely beauty, had glowed with a fire which even Ida's inexperience
recognised as something above and beyond common feeling. His hand had
trembled as it clasped hers. Could there be such a thing as love at first
sight? and was she destined to be the object of that romantic passion?
She had read of the triumphs of beauty, and she knew that she was
handsome. She had been told the fact in too many ways--by praise
sometimes, but much more often by envy--to remain unconscious of her
charms. She was scornful of her beauty, inclined to undervalue the gift
as compared with the blessings of other girls--a prosperous home, the
world's respect, the means to gratify the natural yearnings of youth--but
she knew that she was beautiful. And now it seemed to her all at once
that beauty was a much more valuable gift than she had supposed
hitherto--indeed, a kind of talisman or Aladdin's lamp, which could win
for her all she wanted in this world--Wendover Abbey and the position of
a country squire's wife. It was not a dazzling or giddy height to which
to aspire; but to Ida just now it seemed the topmost pinnacle of social
success.

'Oh, what a wretch I am!' she said to herself presently; 'what a
despicable, mercenary creature! I don't care a straw for this man; and
yet I am already thinking of myself as his wife.'

And then, remembering how she had once openly declared her intention of
marrying for money, she shrugged her shoulders disdainfully.

'Ought I to hesitate when the chance comes to me?' she thought. 'I always
meant to marry for money, if ever such wonderful fortune as a rich
husband fell in my way.'

And yet she had refused Dr. Rylance's offer, without a moment's
hesitation. Was it really as he had said, in the bitterness of his wrath,
because the offer was not good enough, the temptation not large enough?
No, she told herself, she had rejected the smug physician, with his West
End mansion and dainty Hampshire villa, his courtly manners, his perfect
dress, because the man himself was obnoxious to her. Now, she did not
dislike Brian Wendover--indeed, she was rather inclined to like him. She
was only just a little disappointed that he was not the ideal Brian of
her dreams. The dark-browed cavalier, with grave forehead and eagle eyes.
She had a vague recollection of having once heard Blanche say that her
cousin Brian of the Abbey was like Sir Tristram's portrait; but this must
have been a misapprehension upon her part, since no two faces could have
differed more than the pale delicate-featured countenance of the living
man and the dark rugged face in the picture.

She quieted the trouble of her thoughts as well as she could before tea
was over and the evening task of preparation,--the gulfs and straits, the
predicates and noun sentences, rule of three, common denominators, and
all the dry-as-dust machinery was set in motion again.

Helping her pupils through their difficulties, battling with their
stupidities, employed her too closely for any day-dreams of her own. But
when prayers had been read, and the school had dispersed, and the
butterfly-room was hushed into the silence of midnight, Ida Palliser lay
broad awake, wondering at what Fate was doing for her.

'To think that perhaps I am going to be rich after all--honoured, looked
up to, able to help those I love,' she thought, thrilling at the
splendour of her visions.

Ah! if this thing were verily to come to pass, how kind, how good she
would be to others! She would have them all at the Abbey,--the shabby old
half-pay father, shabby no longer in those glorious days; the vulgar
little stepmother, improved into elegance; the five-year old brother,
that loveliest and dearest of created beings. How lovely to see him
rioting in the luxuriance of those dear old gardens, rolling on that
velvet sward, racing his favourite dogs round and round the grand old
cedars! What a pony he should ride! His daily raiment should be Genoa
velvet and old point lace. He should be the admiration and delight of
half the county. And Bessie--how kind she could be to Bessie, repaying
in some small measure that which never could be fully repaid--the
kindness shown by the prosperous girl to the poor dependent. And above
all,--vision sweeter even than the thought of doing good,--how she would
trample on Urania Rylance--how the serpentine coils of that damsel's
malice and pride could be trodden under foot! Not a ball, not a dinner,
not a garden-party given at the Abbey that would not be a thorn in
Urania's side, a nail in Urania's coffin.

So ran her fancies--in a very fever--all through the troubled night; but
when the first streak of the autumn dawn glimmered coldly in the east,
dismal presage of the discordant dressing-bell, then she turned upon her
pillow with a weary sigh, and muttered to herself:--

'After all I daresay Mr. Wendover is only fooling me. Perhaps it is his
habit to make love to every decent-looking girl he meets.'

The next day Ida walked on the same riverside path, but this time
not alone. Her natural modesty shrank from the possibility of a second
_tête-à-tête_ with her admirer, and she stooped from her solitary state
to ask Fräulein Wolf to accompany her in her afternoon walk.

Fräulein was delighted, honoured even, by the request. She was a
wishy-washy person, sentimental, vapourish, altogether feeble, and she
intensely admired Ida Palliser's vigorous young beauty.

The day was bright and sunny, the air deliciously mild, the river simply
divine. The two young women paced the path slowly, talking of German
poetry. The Fräulein knew her Schiller by heart, having expounded him
daily for the last four years, and she fondly believed that after
Shakespeare Schiller was the greatest poet who had ever trodden this
globe.

'And if God had spared him for twenty more years, who knows if he would
not have been greater than Shakespeare? inquired the Fräulein, blandly.

She talked of Schiller's idea of friendship, as represented by the
Marquis of Posa.

'Ah,' sighed Ida, 'I doubt if there is any such friendship as that out of
a book.'

'I could be like the marquis,' said the Fräulein, smiling tenderly.' Oh,
Ida, you don't know what I would do for anyone I loved--for a dear and
valued friend, like you for instance, if you would only let me love you;
but you have always held me at arm's length.'

'I did not mean to do so,' answered Ida, frankly; 'but perhaps I am not
particularly warm-hearted. It is not in my nature to have many friends. I
was very fond of Bessie Wendover, but then she is such a dear clinging
thing, like a chubby child that puts its fat arms round your neck--an
irresistible creature. She made me love her in spite of myself.'

'Why cannot I make you love me?' asked the fair Gertrude, with a
languishing look.

Ida could have alleged several reasons, but they would have been
unflattering, so she only said feebly,--

'Oh, I really like you very much, and I enjoy talking about German
literature with you. Tell me more about Schiller--you know his poetry so
well--and Jean Paul. I never can quite understand the German idolatry of
him. He is too much in the clouds for me.'

'Too philosophic, you mean,' said Fräulein. 'I love philosophy.'

'"Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, it helps not, it avails not,"'
said a manly voice from the river close by, and Brian Wendover shot his
boat in against the bank and leapt up from among the rushes like a
river-god.

Miss Palliser blushed crimson, but it hardly needed her blushes to
convince Fräulein Wolf that this young stranger was a lover. Her
sentimental soul thrilled at the idea of having plunged into the very
midst of an intrigue.

Ida's heart throbbed heavily, not so much with emotion at beholding her
admirer as at the recollection of her visions last night. She tried to
look calm and indifferent.

'How do you do?' she said, shaking hands with him. 'Mr. Wendover--Miss
Wolf, our German mistress.'

The Fräulein blushed, sniggered, and curtseyed.

'This gentleman is Bessie Wendover's first cousin, Fräulein,' said Ida,
with an explanatory air. 'He was staying at The Knoll during the last
part of my visit.'

'Yes, and you saw much of each other, and you became heart-friends,'
gushed Miss Wolf, beaming benevolently at Brian with her pale green orbs.

Brian answered in very fair German, sinking his voice a little so as only
to be heard by the Fräulein, who was in raptures with this young
stranger. So good-looking, so elegant, and speaking Hanoverian German. He
told her that he had seen only too little of Ida at The Knoll, but enough
to know that she was his 'Schicksal'; and then he took the Fräulein's
hand and pressed it gently.

'I know you are our friend,' he said.

'Bis den Tod,' gasped Gertrude.

After this no one felt any more restraint. The Fräulein dropped into her
place of confid

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