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Wylder's Hand

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu · English · Gutenberg #9983 · 988,490 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Wylder's Hand

Author: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu


        
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9983]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9983

Credits: Produced by Stan Goodman, Thomas Berger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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Produced by Stan Goodman, Thomas Berger and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.










WYLDER'S HAND


A NOVEL

by

J. SHERIDAN LE FANU




First published 1864



CONTENTS

CHAP.

I.--RELATING HOW I RODE THROUGH THE VILLAGE OF GYLINGDEN WITH MARK
WYLDER'S LETTER IN MY VALISE

II.--IN WHICH I ENTER THE DRAWING-ROOM

III.--OUR DINNER-PARTY AT BRANDON

IV.--IN WHICH WE GO TO THE DRAWING-ROOM AND THE PARTY BREAKS UP

V.--IN WHICH MY SLUMBER IS DISTURBED

VI.--IN WHICH DORCAS BRANDON SPEAKS

VII.--RELATING HOW A LONDON GENTLEMAN APPEARED IN REDMAN'S DELL

VIII.--IN WHICH CAPTAIN LAKE TAKES HIS HAT AND STICK

IX.--I SEE THE RING OF THE PERSIAN MAGICIAN

X.--THE ACE OF HEARTS

XI.--IN WHICH LAKE UNDER THE TREES OF BRANDON, AND I IN MY CHAMBER, SMOKE
OUR NOCTURNAL CIGARS

XII.--IN WHICH UNCLE LORNE TROUBLES ME

XIII.--THE PONY CARRIAGE

XIV.--IN WHICH VARIOUS PERSONS GIVE THEIR OPINIONS OF CAPTAIN STANLEY
LAKE

XV.--DORCAS SHOWS HER JEWELS TO MISS LAKE

XVI.--"JENNY PUT THE KETTLE ON"

XVII.--RACHEL LAKE SEES WONDERFUL THINGS BY MOONLIGHT FROM HER WINDOW

XVIII.--MARK WYLDER'S SLAVE

XIX.--THE TARN IN THE PARK

XX.--CAPTAIN LAKE TAKES AN EVENING STROLL ABOUT GYLINGDEN

XXI.--IN WHICH CAPTAIN LAKE VISITS HIS SISTER'S SICK BED

XXII.--IN WHICH CAPTAIN LAKE MEETS A FRIEND NEAR THE WHITE HOUSE

XXIII.--HOW RACHEL SLEPT THAT NIGHT IN REDMAN'S FARM

XXIV.--DORCAS BRANDON PAYS RACHEL A VISIT

XXV.--CAPTAIN LAKE LOOKS IN AT NIGHTFALL

XXVI.--CAPTAIN LAKE FOLLOWS TO LONDON

XXVII.--LAWYER LARKIN'S MIND BEGINS TO WORK

XXVIII.--MARK WYLDER'S SUBMISSION

XXIX.--HOW MARK WYLDER'S DISAPPEARANCE AFFECTED HIS FRIENDS

XXX.--IN BRANDON PARK

XXXI.--IN REDMAN'S DELL

XXXII.--MR. LARKIN AND THE VICAR

XXXIII.--THE LADIES OF GYLINGDEN HEATH

XXXIV.--SIR JULIUS HOCKLEY'S LETTER

XXXV.--THE HUNT BALL

XXXVI.--THE BALL ROOM

XXXVII.--THE SUPPER-ROOM

XXXVIII.--AFTER THE BALL

XXXIX.--IN WHICH MISS RACHEL LAKE COMES TO BRANDON, AND DOCTOR BUDDLE
CALLS AGAIN

XL.--THE ATTORNEY'S ADVENTURES ON THE WAY HOME

XLI.--IN WHICH SIR FRANCIS SEDDLEY MANIPULATES

XLII.--A PARAGRAPH IN THE COUNTY PAPER

XLIII.--AN EVIL EYE LOOKS ON THE VICAR

XLIV.--IN WHICH OLD TAMAR LIFTS UP HER VOICE IN PROPHECY

XLV.--DEEP AND SHALLOW

XLVI.--DEBATE AND INTERRUPTION

XLVII.--A THREATENING NOTICE

XLVIII.--IN WHICH I GO TO BRANDON, AND SEE AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE IN THE
TAPESTRY ROOM

XLIX.--LARCOM, THE BUTLER, VISITS THE ATTORNEY

L.--NEW LIGHTS

LI.--A FRACAS IN THE LIBRARY

LII.--AN OLD FRIEND LOOKS INTO THE GARDEN AT REDMAN'S FARM

LIII.--THE VICAR'S COMPLICATIONS, WHICH LIVELY PEOPLE HAD BETTER NOT READ

LIV.--BRANDON CHAPEL ON SUNDAY

LV.--THE CAPTAIN AND THE ATTORNEY CONVERSE AMONG THE TOMBS

LVI.--THE BRANDON CONSERVATORY

LVII.--CONCERNING A NEW DANGER WHICH THREATENED CAPTAIN STANLEY LAKE

LVIII.--MISS RACHEL LAKE BECOMES VIOLENT

LIX.--AN ENEMY IN REDMAN'S DELL

LX.--RACHEL LAKE BEFORE THE ACCUSER

LXI.--IN WHICH DAME DUTTON IS VISITED

LXII.--THE CAPTAIN EXPLAINS WHY MARK WYLDER ABSCONDED

LXIII.--THE ACE OF HEARTS

LXIV.--IN THE DUTCH ROOM

LXV.--I REVISIT BRANDON HALL

LXVI.--LADY MACBETH

LXVII.--MR. LARKIN IS VIS-A-VIS WITH A CONCEALED COMPANION

LXVIII.--THE COMPANION DISCLOSES HIMSELF

LXIX.--OF A SPECTRE WHOM OLD TAMAR SAW

LXX.--THE MEETING IN THE LONG POND ALLEY

LXXI.--SIR HARRY BRACTON'S INVASION OF GYLINGDEN

LXXII.--MARK WYLDER'S HAND

LXXIII.--THE MASK FALLS

LXXIV.--WE TAKE LEAVE OF OUR FRIENDS




WYLDER'S HAND.




CHAPTER I.

RELATING HOW I DROVE THROUGH THE VILLAGE OF GYLINGDEN WITH MARK WYLDER'S
LETTER IN MY VALISE.


It was late in the autumn, and I was skimming along, through a rich
English county, in a postchaise, among tall hedgerows gilded, like all
the landscape, with the slanting beams of sunset. The road makes a long
and easy descent into the little town of Gylingden, and down this we were
going at an exhilarating pace, and the jingle of the vehicle sounded like
sledge-bells in my ears, and its swaying and jerking were pleasant and
life-like. I fancy I was in one of those moods which, under similar
circumstances, I sometimes experience still--a semi-narcotic excitement,
silent but delightful.

An undulating landscape, with a homely farmstead here and there, and
plenty of old English timber scattered grandly over it, extended mistily
to my right; on the left the road is overtopped by masses of noble
forest. The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end
to end. These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but
splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows--my eyes
wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that
mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene
familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long
interval of maturity and absence, like a romantic reverie.

As I looked through the chaise-windows, every moment presented some
group, or outline, or homely object, for years forgotten; and now, with a
strange surprise how vividly remembered and how affectionately greeted!
We drove by the small old house at the left, with its double gable and
pretty grass garden, and trim yews and modern lilacs and laburnums,
backed by the grand timber of the park. It was the parsonage, and old
bachelor Doctor Crewe, the rector, in my nonage, still stood, in memory,
at the door, in his black shorts and gaiters, with his hands in his
pockets, and a puckered smile on his hard ruddy countenance, as I
approached. He smiled little on others I believe, but always kindly upon
me. This general liking for children and instinct of smiling on them is
one source of the delightful illusions which make the remembrance of
early days so like a dream of Paradise, and give us, at starting, such
false notions of our value.

There was a little fair-haired child playing on the ground before the
steps as I whirled by. The old rector had long passed away; the shorts,
gaiters, and smile--a phantom; and nature, who had gathered in the past,
was providing for the future.

The pretty mill-road, running up through Redman's Dell, dank and dark
with tall romantic trees, was left behind in another moment; and we were
now traversing the homely and antique street of the little town, with its
queer shops and solid steep-roofed residences. Up Church-street I
contrived a peep at the old gray tower where the chimes hung; and as we
turned the corner a glance at the 'Brandon Arms.' How very small and low
that palatial hostelry of my earlier recollections had grown! There were
new faces at the door. It was only two-and-twenty years ago, and I was
then but eleven years old. A retrospect of a score of years or so, at
three-and-thirty, is a much vaster affair than a much longer one at
fifty.

The whole thing seemed like yesterday; and as I write, I open my eyes and
start and cry, 'can it be twenty, five-and-twenty, aye, by Jove!
five-and-thirty, years since then?' How my days have flown! And I think
when another such yesterday shall have arrived, where shall I be?

The first ten years of my life were longer than all the rest put
together, and I think would continue to be so were my future extended to
an ante-Noachian span. It is the first ten that emerge from nothing, and
commencing in a point, it is during them that consciousness, memory--all
the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and
astounding. It is this beginning at a point, and expanding to the immense
disk of our present range of sensuous experience, that gives to them so
prodigious an illusory perspective, and makes us in childhood, measuring
futurity by them, form so wild and exaggerated an estimate of the
duration of human life. But, I beg your pardon.

My journey was from London. When I had reached my lodgings, after my
little excursion up the Rhine, upon my table there lay, among the rest,
one letter--there generally _is_ in an overdue bundle--which I viewed
with suspicion. I could not in the least tell why. It was a broad-faced
letter, of bluish complexion, and had made inquisition after me in the
country--had asked for me at Queen's Folkstone; and, _vised_ by my
cousin, had presented itself at the Friars, in Shropshire, and thence
proceeded by Sir Harry's direction (there was the autograph) to Nolton
Hall; thence again to Ilchester, whence my fiery and decisive old aunt
sent it straight back to my cousin, with a whisk of her pen which seemed
to say, 'How the plague can I tell where the puppy is?--'tis your
business, Sir, not mine, to find him out!' And so my cousin despatched it
to my head-quarters in town, where from the table it looked up in my
face, with a broad red seal, and a countenance scarred and marred all
over with various post-marks, erasures, and transverse directions, the
scars and furrows of disappointment and adventure.

It had not a good countenance, somehow. The original lines were not
prepossessing. The handwriting I knew as one sometimes knows a face,
without being able to remember who the plague it belongs to; but, still,
with an unpleasant association about it. I examined it carefully, and
laid it down unopened. I went through half-a-dozen others, and recurred
to it, and puzzled over its exterior again, and again postponed what I
fancied would prove a disagreeable discovery; and this happened every now
and again, until I had quite exhausted my budget, and then I did open it,
and looked straight to the signature.

'Pooh! Mark Wylder,' I exclaimed, a good deal relieved.

Mark Wylder! Yes, Master Mark could not hurt _me_. There was nothing
about him to excite the least uneasiness; on the contrary, I believe he
liked me as well as he was capable of liking anybody, and it was now
seven years since we had met.

I have often since thought upon the odd sensation with which I hesitated
over his unopened letter; and now, remembering how the breaking of that
seal resembled, in my life, the breaking open of a portal through which I
entered a labyrinth, or rather a catacomb, where for many days I groped
and stumbled, looking for light, and was, in a manner, lost, hearing
strange sounds, witnessing imperfectly strange sights, and, at last,
arriving at a dreadful chamber--a sad sort of superstition steals over
me.

I had then been his working junior in the cause of Wylder _v._ Trustees
of Brandon, minor--Dorcas Brandon, his own cousin. There was a
complicated cousinship among these Brandons, Wylders, and
Lakes--inextricable intermarriages, which, five years ago, before I
renounced the bar, I had at my fingers' ends, but which had now relapsed
into haze. There must have been some damnable taint in the blood of the
common ancestor--a spice of the insane and the diabolical. They were an
ill-conditioned race--that is to say, every now and then there emerged a
miscreant, with a pretty evident vein of madness. There was Sir Jonathan
Brandon, for instance, who ran his own nephew through the lungs in a duel
fought in a paroxysm of Cencian jealousy; and afterwards shot his
coachman dead upon the box through his coach-window, and finally died in
Vienna, whither he had absconded, of a pike-thrust received from a sentry
in a brawl.

The Wylders had not much to boast of, even in contrast with that wicked
line. They had produced their madmen and villains, too; and there had
been frequent intermarriages--not very often happy. There had been many
lawsuits, frequent disinheritings, and even worse doings. The Wylders of
Brandon appear very early in history; and the Wylder arms, with their
legend, 'resurgam,' stands in bold relief over the great door of Brandon
Hall. So there were Wylders of Brandon, and Brandons of Brandon. In one
generation, a Wylder ill-using his wife and hating his children, would
cut them all off, and send the estate bounding back again to the
Brandons. The next generation or two would amuse themselves with a
lawsuit, until the old Brandon type reappeared in some bachelor brother
or uncle, with a Jezebel on his left hand, and an attorney on his right,
and, presto! the estates were back again with the Wylders.

A 'statement of title' is usually a dry affair. But that of the dynasty
of Brandon Hall was a truculent romance. Their very 'wills' were spiced
with the devilment of the 'testators,' and abounded in insinuations and
even language which were scandalous.

Here is Mark Wylder's letter:--

'DEAR CHARLES--Of course you have heard of my good luck, and how kind
poor Dickie--from whom I never expected anything--proved at last. It was
a great windfall for a poor devil like me; but, after all, it was only
right, for it ought never to have been his at all. I went down and took
possession on the 4th, the tenants very glad, and so they might well be;
for, between ourselves, Dickie, poor fellow, was not always pleasant to
deal with. He let the roof all out of repair, and committed waste beside
in timber he had no right to in life, as I am told; but that don't
signify much, only the house will cost me a pretty penny to get it into
order and furnish. The rental is five thousand a-year and some hundreds,
and the rents can be got up a bit--so Larkin tells me. Do you know
anything of him? He says he did business for your uncle once. He seems a
clever fellow--a bit too clever, perhaps--and was too much master here, I
suspect, in poor Dickie's reign. Tell me all you can make out about him.
It is a long time since I saw you, Charles; I'm grown brown, and great
whiskers. I met poor Dominick--what an ass that chap is--but he did not
know me till I introduced myself, so I must be a good deal changed. Our
ship was at Malta when I got the letter. I was sick of the service, and
no wonder: a lieutenant--and there likely to stick all my days. Six
months, last year, on the African coast, watching slavers--think of that!
I had a long yarn from the viscount--advice, and that sort of thing. I do
not think he is a year older than I, but takes airs because he's a
trustee. But I only laugh at trifles that would have riled me once. So I
wrote him a yarn in return, and drew it uncommon mild. And he has been
useful to me; and I think matters are pretty well arranged to disappoint
the kind intention of good Uncle Wylder--the brute; he hated my father,
but that was no reason to persecute me, and I but an infant, almost, when
he died, d-- him. Well, you know he left Brandon with some charges to my
Cousin Dorcas. She is a superbly fine girl. Our ship was at Naples when
she was there two years ago; and I saw a good deal of her. Of course it
was not to be thought of then; but matters are quite different, you know,
now, and the viscount, who is a very sensible fellow in the main, saw it
at once. You see, the old brute meant to leave her a life estate; but it
does not amount to that, though it won't benefit me, for he settled that
when I die it shall go to his right heirs--that will be to my son, if I
ever have one. So Miss Dorcas must pack, and turn out whenever I die,
that is, if I slip my cable first. Larkin told me this--and I took an
opinion--and found it is so; and the viscount seeing it, agreed the best
thing for her as well as me would be, we should marry. She is a
wide-awake young lady, and nothing the worse for that: I'm a bit that way
myself. And so very little courtship has sufficed. She is a splendid
beauty, and when you see her you'll say any fellow might be proud of such
a bride; and so I am. And now, dear Charlie, you have it all. It will
take place somewhere about the twenty-fourth of next month; and you must
come down by the first, if you can. Don't disappoint. I want you for best
man, maybe; and besides, I would like to talk to you about some things
they want me to do in the settlements, and you were always a long-headed
fellow: so pray don't refuse.

'Dear Charlie, ever most sincerely,

'Your old Friend,

'MARK WYLDER.

'P.S.--I stay at the Brandon Arms in the town, until after the marriage;
and then you can have a room at the Hall, and capital shooting when we
return, which will be in a fortnight after.'


I can't say that Wylder was an old _friend_. But he was certainly one of
the oldest and most intimate acquaintances I had. We had been for nearly
three years at school together; and when his ship came to England, met
frequently; and twice, when he was on leave, we had been for months
together under the same roof; and had for some years kept up a regular
correspondence, which first grew desultory, and finally, as manhood
supervened, died out. The plain truth is, I did not _very_ much like him.

Then there was that beautiful apathetic Dorcas Brandon. Where is the
laggard so dull as to experience no pleasing flutter at his heart in
anticipation of meeting a perfect beauty in a country house. I was
romantic, like every other youngish fellow who is not a premature
curmudgeon; and there was something indefinitely pleasant in the
consciousness that, although a betrothed bride, the young lady still was
fancy free: not a bit in love. It was but a marriage of convenience, with
mitigations. And so there hovered in my curiosity some little flicker of
egotistic romance, which helped to rouse my spirits, and spur me on to
action.




CHAPTER II.

IN WHICH I ENTER THE DRAWING-ROOM.


I was now approaching Brandon Hall; less than ten minutes more would set
me down at its door-steps. The stiff figure of Mrs. Marston, the old
housekeeper, pale and austere, in rustling black silk (she was accounted
a miser, and estimated to have saved I dare not say how much money
in the Wylder family--kind to me with the bread-and-jam and
Naples-biscuit-kindness of her species, in old times)--stood in fancy at
the doorway. She, too, was a dream, and, I dare say, her money spent by
this time. And that other dream, to which she often led me, with the
large hazel eyes, and clear delicate tints--so sweet, so _riante_, yet so
sad; poor Lady Mary Brandon, dying there--so unhappily mated--a young
mother, and her baby sleeping in long 'Broderie Anglaise' attire upon the
pillow on the sofa, and whom she used to show me with a peeping mystery,
and her finger to her smiling lip, and a gaiety and fondness in her
pretty face. That little helpless, groping, wailing creature was now the
Dorcas Brandon, the mistress of the grand old mansion and all its
surroundings, who was the heroine of the splendid matrimonial compromise
which was about to reconcile a feud, and avert a possible lawsuit, and,
for one generation, at least, to tranquillise the troubled annals of the
Brandons and Wylders.

And now the ancient gray chapel, with its stained window, and store of
old Brandon and Wylder monuments among its solemn clump of elm-trees,
flitted by on my right; and in a moment more we drew up at the great gate
on the left; not a hundred yards removed from it, and with an eager
recognition, I gazed on the noble front of the old manorial house.

Up the broad straight avenue with its solemn files of gigantic timber
towering at the right and the left hand, the chaise rolled smoothly, and
through the fantastic iron gate of the courtyard, and with a fine
swinging sweep and a jerk, we drew up handsomely before the door-steps,
with the Wylder arms in bold and florid projection carved above it.

The sun had just gone down. The blue shadows of twilight overcast the
landscape, and the mists of night were already stealing like thin smoke
among the trunks and roots of the trees. Through the stone mullions of
the projecting window at the right, a flush of fire-light looked pleasant
and hospitable, and on the threshold were standing Lord Chelford and my
old friend Mark Wylder; a faint perfume of the mildest cheroot declared
how they had been employed.

So I jumped to the ground and was greeted very kindly by the smokers.

'I'm here, you know, _in loco parentis_;--my mother and I keep watch and
ward. We allow Wylder, you see, to come every day to his devotions. But
you are not to go to the Brandon Arms--you got my note, didn't you?'

I had, and had come direct to the Hall in consequence.

I looked over the door. Yes, my memory had served me right. There were
the Brandon arms, and the Brandon quartered with the Wylder; but the
Wylder coat in the centre, with the grinning griffins for supporters, and
flaunting scrolls all round, and the ominous word 'resurgam' underneath,
proclaimed itself sadly and vauntingly over the great entrance. I often
wonder how the Wylder coat came in the centre; who built the old house--a
Brandon or a Wylder; and if a Wylder, why was it Brandon Hall?

Dusty and seedy somewhat, as men are after a journey, I chatted with Mark
and the noble peer for a few minutes at the door, while my valise and _et
ceteras_ were lifted in and hurried up the stairs to my room, whither I
followed them.

While I was at my toilet, in came Mark Wylder laughing, as was his wont,
and very unceremoniously he took possession of my easy-chair, and threw
his leg over the arm of it.

'I'm glad you're come, Charlie; you were always a good fellow, and I
really want a hand here confoundedly. I think it will all do very nicely;
but, of course, there's a lot of things to be arranged--settlements, you
know--and I can't make head or tail of their lingo, and a fellow don't
like to sign and seal hand over head--_you_ would not advise that, you
know; and Chelford is a very good fellow, of course, and all that--but
he's taking care of Dorcas, you see; and I might be left in the lurch.'

'It is a better way, at all events, Mark, than Wylder _versus_ Trustees
of Brandon, minor,' said I.

'Well, things do turn out very oddly; don't they?' said Mark with a sly
glance of complacency, and his hands in his pockets. 'But I know you'll
hold the tiller till I get through; hang me if I know the soundings, or
where I'm going; and you have the chart by heart, Charlie.'

'I'm afraid you'll find me by no means so well up now as six years ago in
"Wylder and Brandon;" but surely you have your lawyer, Mr. Larkin,
haven't you?'

'To be sure--that's exactly it--he's Dorcas's agent. I don't know
anything about him, and I do know you--don't you see? A fellow doesn't
want to put himself into the hands of a stranger altogether, especially a
lawyer, ha, ha! it wouldn't pay.'

I did not half like the equivocal office which my friend Mark had
prepared for me. If family squabbles were to arise, I had no fancy to mix
in them; and I did not want a collision with Mr. Larkin either; and, on
the whole, notwithstanding his modesty, I thought Wylder very well able
to take care of himself. There was time enough, however, to settle the
point. So by this time, being splendid in French boots and white vest,
and altogether perfect and refreshed, I emerged from my dressing-room,
Wylder by my side.

We had to get along a dim oak-panelled passage, and into a sort of
_oeil-de-boeuf_, with a lantern light above, from which diverged two
other solemn corridors, and a short puzzling turn or two brought us to
the head of the upper stairs. For I being a bachelor, and treated
accordingly, was airily perched on the third storey.

To my mind, there is something indescribably satisfactory in the intense
solidity of those old stairs and floors--no spring in the planks, not a
creak; you walk as over strata of stone. What clumsy grandeur! What
Cyclopean carpenters! What a prodigality of oak!

It was dark by this time, and the drawing-room, a vast and grand chamber,
with no light but the fire and a pair of dim soft lamps near the sofas
and ottomans, lofty, and glowing with rich tapestry curtains and
pictures, and mirrors, and carved oak, and marble--was already tenanted
by the ladies.

Old Lady Chelford, stiff and rich, a Vandyke dowager, with a general
effect of deep lace, funereal velvet, and pearls; and pale, with dreary
eyes, and thin high nose, sat in a high-backed carved oak throne, with
red cushions. To her I was first presented, and cursorily scrutinised
with a stately old-fashioned insolence, as if I were a candidate footman,
and so dismissed. On a low seat, chatting to her as I came up, was a very
handsome and rather singular-looking girl, fair, with a light
golden-tinted hair; and a countenance, though then grave enough, instinct
with a certain promise of animation and spirit not to be mistaken. Could
this be the heroine of the pending alliance? No; I was mistaken. A third
lady, at what would have been an ordinary room's length away, half
reclining on an ottoman, was now approached by Wylder, who presented me
to Miss Brandon.

'Dorcas, this is my old friend, Charles de Cresseron. You have often
heard me speak of him; and I want you to shake hands and make his
acquaintance, and draw him out--do you see; for he's a shy youth, and
must be encouraged.'

He gave me a cheerful slap on the shoulder as he uttered this agreeable
bit of banter, and altogether disconcerted me confoundedly. Wylder's
dress-coats always smelt of tobacco, and his talk of tar. I was quietly
incensed and disgusted; for in those days I _was_ a little shy.

The lady rose, in a soft floating way; tall, black-haired--but a
blackness with a dull rich shadow through it. I had only a general
impression of large dusky eyes and very exquisite features--more delicate
than the Grecian models, and with a wonderful transparency, like tinted
marble; and a superb haughtiness, quite unaffected. She held forth her
hand, which I did little more than touch. There was a peculiarity in her
greeting, which I felt a little overawing, without exactly discovering in
what it consisted; and it was I think that she did not smile. She never
took that trouble for form's sake, like other women.

So, as Wylder had set a chair for me I could not avoid sitting upon it,
though I should much have preferred standing, after the manner of men,
and retaining my liberty.




CHAPTER III.

OUR DINNER PARTY AT BRANDON.


I was curious. I had heard a great deal of her beauty; and it had
exceeded all I heard; so I talked my sublimest and brightest chit-chat,
in my most musical tones, and was rather engaging and amusing, I ventured
to hope. But the best man cannot manage a dialogue alone. Miss Brandon
was plainly not a person to make any sort of exertion towards what is
termed keeping up a conversation; at all events she did not, and after a
while the present one got into a decidedly sinking condition. An
acquiescence, a faint expression of surprise, a fainter smile--she
contributed little more, after the first few questions of courtesy had
been asked, in her low silvery tones, and answered by me. To me the
natural demise of a _tête-à-tête_ discourse has always seemed a disgrace.
But this apathetic beauty had either more moral courage or more stupidity
than I, and was plainly terribly indifferent about the catastrophe. I've
sometimes thought my struggles and sinkings amused her cruel serenity.

Bella ma stupida!--I experienced, at last, the sort of pique with which
George Sand's hero apostrophises _la derniere Aldini_. Yet I could not
think her stupid. The universal instinct honours beauty. It is so
difficult to believe it either dull or base. In virtue of some mysterious
harmonies it is 'the image of God,' and must, we feel, enclose the
God-like; so I suppose I felt, for though I wished to think her stupid, I
could not. She was not exactly languid, but a grave and listless beauty,
and a splendid beauty for all that.

I told her my early recollections of Brandon and Gylingden, and how I
remembered her a baby, and said some graceful trifles on that theme,
which I fancied were likely to please. But they were only received, and
led to nothing. In a little while in comes Lord Chelford, always natural
and pleasant, and quite unconscious of his peerage--he was above it, I
think--and chatted away merrily with that handsome animated blonde--who
on earth, could she be?--and did not seem the least chilled in the stiff
and frosted presence of his mother, but was genial and playful even with
that Spirit of the Frozen Ocean, who received his affectionate trifling
with a sort of smiling, though wintry pride and complacency, reflecting
back from her icy aspects something of the rosy tints of that kindly
sunshine.

I thought I heard him call the young lady Miss Lake, and there rose
before me an image of an old General Lake, and a dim recollection of some
reverse of fortune. He was--I was sure of that--connected with the
Brandon family; and was, with the usual fatality, a bit of a _mauvais
sujet_. He had made away with his children's money, or squandered his
own; or somehow or another impoverished his family not creditably. So I
glanced at her, and Miss Brandon divined, it seemed, what was passing in
my mind, for she said:--

'That is my cousin, Miss Lake, and I think her very beautiful--don't
you?'

'Yes, she certainly is very handsome,' and I was going to say something
about her animation and spirit, but remembered just in time, that that
line of eulogy would hardly have involved a compliment to Miss Brandon.
'I know her brother, a little--that is, Captain Lake--Stanley Lake; he's
her brother, I fancy?'

'_Oh?_' said the young lady, in that tone which is pointed with an
unknown accent, between a note of enquiry and of surprise. 'Yes; he's her
brother.'

And she paused; as if something more were expected. But at that moment
the bland tones of Larcom, the solemn butler, announced the Rev. William
Wylder and Mrs. Wylder, and I said--

'William is an old college friend of mine;' and I observed him, as he
entered with an affectionate and sad sort of interest. Eight years had
passed since we met last, and that is something at any time. It had
thinned my simple friend's hair a little, and his face, too, was more
careworn than I liked, but his earnest, sweet smile was there still.
Slight, gentle, with something of a pale and studious refinement in his
face. The same gentle voice, with that slight, occasional hesitation,
which somehow I liked. There is always a little shock after an absence of
some years before identities adjust themselves, and then we find the
change is not, after all, so very great. I suspect it is, rather, that
something of the old picture is obliterated, in that little interval, to
return no more. And so William Wylder was vicar now instead of that
straight wiry cleric of the mulberry face and black leggings.

And who was this little Mrs. William Wylder who came in, so homely of
feature, so radiant of goodhumour, so eager and simple, in a very plain
dress--a Brandon housemaid would not have been seen in it, leaning so
pleasantly on his lean, long, clerical arm--made for reaching books down
from high shelves, a lank, scholarlike limb, with a somewhat threadbare
cuff--and who looked round with that anticipation of pleasure, and that
simple confidence in a real welcome, which are so likely to insure it?
Was she an helpmeet for a black-letter man, who talked with the Fathers
in his daily walks, could extemporise Latin hexameters, and dream in
Greek. Was she very wise, or at all learned? I think her knowledge lay
chiefly in the matters of poultry, and puddings, and latterly, of the
nursery, where one treasure lay--that golden-haired little boy, four
years old, whom I had seen playing among the roses before the parsonage
door, asleep by this time--half-past seven, 'precise,' as old Lady
Chelford loved to write on her summons to dinner.

When the vicar, I dare say, in a very odd, quaint way, made his proposal
of marriage, moved thereto assuredly, neither by fortune, nor by beauty,
to good, merry, little Miss Dorothy Chubley, whom nobody was supposed to
be looking after, and the town had, somehow, set down from the first as a
natural-born old maid--there was a very general amazement; some
disappointment here and there, with customary sneers and compassion, and
a good deal of genuine amusement not ill-natured.

Miss Chubley, all the shopkeepers in the town knew and liked, and, in a
way, respected her, as 'Miss Dolly.' Old Reverend John Chubley, D.D., who
had been in love with his wife from the period of his boyhood; and yet so
grudging was Fate, had to undergo an engagement of nigh thirty years
before Hymen rewarded their constancy; being at length made Vicar of
Huddelston, and master of church revenues to the amount of three hundred
pounds a year--had, at forty-five, married his early love, now forty-two.

They had never grown old in one another's fond eyes. Their fidelity was
of the days of chivalry, and their simplicity comical and beautiful.
Twenty years of happy and loving life were allotted them and one
pledge--poor Miss Dorothy--was left alone, when little more than nineteen
years old. This good old couple, having loved early and waited long, and
lived together with wonderful tenderness and gaiety of heart their
allotted span, bid farewell for a little while--the gentle little lady
going first, and, in about two years more, the good rector following.

I remembered him, but more dimly than his merry little wife, though she
went first. She made raisin-wine, and those curious biscuits that tasted
of Windsor soap.

And this Mrs. William Wylder just announced by soft-toned Larcom, is the
daughter (there is no mistaking the jolly smile and lumpy odd little
features, and radiance of amiability) of the good doctor and Mrs.
Chubley, so curiously blended in her loving face. And last comes in old
Major Jackson, smiling largely, squaring himself, and doing his
courtesies in a firm but florid military style, and plainly pleased to
find himself in good company and on the eve of a good dinner. And so our
dinner-list is full.

The party were just nine--and it is wonderful what a row nine
well-behaved people will contrive to make at a dinner-table. The inferior
animals--as we see them caged and cared for, and fed at one o'clock,
'precise,' in those public institutions provided for their
maintenance--confine their uproar to the period immediately antecedent to
their meal, and perform the actual process of deglutition with silent
attention, and only such suckings, lappings, and crunchings, as
illustrate their industry and content. It is the distinctive privilege of
man to exert his voice during his repast, and to indulge also in those
specially human cachinnations which no lower creature, except that
disreputable Australian biped known as the 'laughing jackass,' presumes
to imitate; and to these vocal exercises of the feasters respond the
endless ring and tinkle of knife and fork on china plate, and the
ministering angels in white chokers behind the chairs, those murmured
solicitations which hum round and round the ears of the revellers.

Of course, when great guns are present, and people talk _pro bono
publico_, one at a time, with parliamentary regularity, things are
different; but at an ordinary symposium, when the garrulous and diffident
make merry together, and people break into twos or threes and talk across
the table, or into their neighbours' ears, and all together, the noise is
not only exhilarating and peculiar, but sometimes perfectly
unaccountable.

The talk, of course, has its paroxysms and its subsidences. I have once
or twice found myself on a sudden in total silence in the middle of a
somewhat prolix, though humorous story, commenced in an uproar for the
sole recreation of my pretty neighbour, and ended--patched up,
_renounced_--a faltering failure, under the converging gaze of a sternly
attentive audience.

On the other hand, there are moments when the uproar whirls up in a
crescendo to a pitch and volume perfectly amazing; and at such times, I
believe that anyone might say anything to the reveller at his elbow,
without the smallest risk of being overheard by mortal. You may plan with
young Caesar Borgia, on your left, the poisoning of your host; or ask
pretty Mrs. Fusible, on your right, to elope with you from her grinning
and gabbling lord, whose bald head flashes red with champagne only at the
other side of the table. There is no privacy like it; you may plot your
wickedness, or make your confession, or pop the question, and not a soul
but your confidant be a bit the wiser--provided only you command your
countenance.

I don't know how it happened, but Wylder sat beside Miss Lake. I fancied
he ought to have been differently placed, but Miss Brandon did not seem
conscious of his absence, and it seemed to me that the handsome blonde
would have been as well pleased if he had been anywhere but where he was.
There was no look of liking, though some faint glimmerings both of
annoyance and embarrassment in her face. But in Wylder's I saw a sort of
conceited consciousness, and a certain eagerness, too, while he talked;
though a shrewd fellow in many ways, he had a secret conviction that no
woman could resist him.

'I suppose the world thinks me a very happy fellow, Miss Lake?' he said,
with a rather pensive glance of enquiry into that young lady's eyes, as
he set down his hock-glass.

'I'm afraid it's a selfish world, Mr. Wylder, and thinks very little of
what does not concern it.'

'Now, _you_, I dare say,' continued Wylder, not caring to perceive the
_soupçon_ of sarcasm that modulated her answer so musically, 'look upon
me as a very fortunate fellow?'

'You are a very fortunate person, Mr. Wylder; a gentleman of very
moderate abilities, with no prospects, and without fortune, who finds
himself, without any deservings of his own, on a sudden, possessed of an
estate, and about to be united to the most beautiful heiress in England,
_is_, I think, rather a fortunate person.'

'You did not always think me so stupid, Miss Lake,' said Mr. Wylder,
showing something of the hectic of vexation.

'Stupid! did I say? Well, you know, we learn by experience, Mr. Wylder.
One's judgment matures, and we are harder to please--don't you think
so?--as we grow older.'

'Aye, so we are, I dare say; at any rate, some things don't please us as
we calculated. I remember when this bit of luck would have made me a
devilish happy fellow--_twice_ as happy; but, you see, if a fellow hasn't
his liberty, where's the good of money? I don't know how I got into it,
but I can't get away now; and the lawyer fellows, and trustees, and all
that sort of prudent people, get about one, and persuade, and exhort, and
they bully you, by Jove! into what they call a marriage of convenience--I
forget the French word--you know; and then, you see, your feelings may be
very different, and all that; and where's the good of money, I say, if
you can't enjoy it?'

And Mr. Wylder looked poetically unhappy, and trundled over a little bit
of fricandeau on his plate with his fork, desolately, as though earthly
things had lost their relish.

'Yes; I think I know the feeling,' said Miss Lake, quietly. 'That ballad,
you know, expresses it very prettily:--"Oh, thou hast been the cause of
this anguish, my mother?"'

It was not then as old a song as it is now.

Wylder looked sharply at her, but she did not smile, and seemed to speak
in good faith; and being somewhat thick in some matters, though a cunning
fellow, he said--

'Yes; that is the sort of thing, you know--of course, with a
difference--a girl is supposed to speak there; but men suffer that way,
too--though, of course, very likely it's more their own fault.'

'It is very sad,' said Miss Lake, who was busy with a _pâté_.

'She has no life in her; she's a mere figurehead; she's awfully slow; I
don't like black hair; I'm taken by conversation--and all that. There are
some men that can only really love once in their lives, and never forget
their first love, I assure you.'

Wylder murmured all this, and looked as plaintive as he could without
exciting the attention of the people over-the-way.

Mark Wylder had, as you perceive, rather vague notions of decency, and
not much experience of ladies; and thought he was making just the
interesting impression he meditated. He was a good deal surprised, then,
when Miss Lake said, and with quite a cheerful countenance, and very
quickly, but so that her words stung his ear like the prick of a bodkin.

'Your way of speaking of my cousin, Sir, is in the highest degree
discreditable to you and offensive to me, and should you venture to
repeat it, I will certainly mention it to Lady Chelford.'

And so she turned to old Major Jackson at her right, who had been
expounding a point of the battle of Vittoria to Lord Chelford; and she
led him again into action, and acquired during the next ten minutes a
great deal of curious lore about Spanish muleteers and French prisoners,
together with some particulars about the nature of picket duty, and 'that
scoundrel, Castanos.'




CHAPTER IV.

IN WHICH WE GO TO THE DRAWING-ROOM AND THE PARTY BREAKS UP.


Wylder was surprised, puzzled, and a good deal incensed--that saucy craft
had fired her shot so unexpectedly across his bows. He looked a little
flushed, and darted a stealthy glance across the table, but no one he
thought had observed the manoeuvre. He would have talked to ugly Mrs. W.
Wylder, his sister-in-law, at his left, but she was entertaining Lord
Chelford now. He had nothing for it but to perform _cavalier seul_ with
his slice of mutton--a sensual sort of isolation, while all the world was
chatting so agreeably and noisily around him. He would have liked, at
that moment, a walk upon the quarter-deck, with a good head-wind blowing,
and liberty to curse and swear a bit over the bulwark. Women are so full
of caprice and hypocrisy, and 'humbugging impudence!'

Wylder was rather surly after the ladies had floated away from the scene,
and he drank his liquor doggedly. It was his fancy, I suppose, to revive
certain sentimental relations which had, it may be, once existed between
him and Miss Lake; and he was a person of that combative temperament that
magnifies an object in proportion as its pursuit is thwarted.

In the drawing-room he watched Miss Lake over his cup of coffee, and
after a few words to his _fiancée_ he lounged toward the table at which
she was turning over some prints.

'Do come here, Dorothy,' she exclaimed, not raising her eyes, 'I have
found the very thing.'

'What thing? my dear Miss Lake,' said that good little woman, skipping to
her side.

'The story of "Fridolin," and Retzch's pretty outlines. Sit down beside
me, and I'll tell you the story.'

'Oh!' said the vicar's wife, taking her seat, and the inspection and
exposition began; and Mark Wylder, who had intended renewing his talk
with Miss Lake, saw that she had foiled him, and stood with a heightened
colour and his hands in his pockets, looking confoundedly cross and very
like an outcast, in the shadow behind.

After a while, in a pet, he walked away. Lord Chelford had joined the two
ladies, and had something to say about German art, and some pleasant
lights to throw from foreign travel, and devious reading, and was as
usual intelligent and agreeable; and Mark was still more sore and angry,
and strutted away to another table, a long way off, and tossed over the
leaves of a folio of Wouverman's works, and did not see one of the plates
he stared at so savagely.

I don't think Mark was very clear as to what he wanted, or, even if he
had had a cool half-hour to define his wishes, that he would seriously
have modified existing arrangements. But he had a passionate sort of
obstinacy, and his whims took a violent character when they were crossed,
and he was angry and jealous and unintelligible, reminding one of
Carlyle's description of Philip Egalité--a chaos.

Then he joined a conversation going on between Dorcas Brandon and the
vicar, his brother. He assisted at it, but took no part, and in fact was
listening to that other conversation which sounded, with its pleasant
gabble and laughter, like a little musical tinkle of bells in the
distance. His gall rose, and that distant talk rang in his ears like a
cool but intangible insult.

It was dull work. He looked at his watch--the brougham would be at the
door to take Miss Lake home in a quarter of an hour; so he glided by old
Lady Chelford, who was dozing stiffly through her spectacles on a French
novel, and through a second drawing-room, and into the hall, where he saw
Larcom's expansive white waistcoat, and disregarded his advance and
respectful inclination, and strode into the outer hall or vestibule,
where were hat-stands, walking-sticks, great coats, umbrellas, and the
exuviae of gentlemen.

Mark clapped on his hat, and rifled the pocket of his paletot of his
cigar-case and matches, and spluttered a curse or two, according to old
Nollekins' receipt for easing the mind, and on the door-steps lighted his
cheroot, and became gradually more philosophical.

In due time the brougham came round with its lamps lighted, and Mark, who
was by this time placid, greeted Price on the box familiarly, after his
wont, and asked him whom he was going to drive, as if he did not know,
cunning fellow; and actually went so far as to give Price one of those
cheap and nasty weeds, of which he kept a supply apart in his case for
such occasions of good fellowship.

So Mark waited to put the lady into the carriage, and he meditated
walking a little way by the window and making his peace, and there was
perhaps some vague vision of jumping in afterwards; I know not. Mark's
ideas of ladies and of propriety were low, and he was little better than
a sailor ashore, and not a good specimen of that class of monster.

He walked about the courtyard smoking, looking sometimes on the solemn
front of the old palatial mansion, and sometimes breathing a white film
up to the stars, impatient, like the enamoured Aladdin, watching in
ambuscade for the emergence of the Princess Badroulbadour. But honest
Mark forgot that young ladies do not always come out quite alone, and
jump unassisted into their vehicles. And in fact not only did Lord
Chelford assist the fair lady, cloaked and hooded, into the carriage, but
the vicar's goodhumoured little wife was handed in also, the good vicar
looking on, and as the gay good-night and leave-taking took place by the
door-steps, Mark drew back, like a guilty thing, in silence, and showed
no sign but the red top of his cigar, glowing like the eye of a Cyclops
in the dark; and away rolled the brougham, with the two ladies, and
Chelford and the vicar went in, and Mark hurled the stump of his cheroot
at Fortune, and delivered a fragmentary soliloquy through his teeth; and
so, in a sulk, without making his adieux, he marched off to his crib at
the Brandon Arms.




CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH MY SLUMBER IS DISTURBED.


The ladies had accomplished their ascension to the upper regions. The
good vicar had marched off with the major, who was by this time
unbuckling in his lodgings; and Chelford and I, _tête-à-tête_, had a
glass of sherry and water together in the drawing-room before parting.
And over this temperate beverage I told him frankly the nature of the
service which Mark Wylder wished me to render him; and he as frankly
approved, and said he would ask Larkin, the family lawyer, to come up in
the morning to assist.

The more I saw of this modest, refined, and manly peer, the more I liked
him. There was a certain courteous frankness, and a fine old English
sense of duty perceptible in all his serious talk. So I felt no longer
like a conspirator, and was to offer such advice as might seem expedient,
with the clear approbation of Miss Brandon's trustee. And this point
clearly settled, I avowed myself a little tired; and lighting our candles
at the foot of the stairs, we scaled that long ascent together, and he
conducted me through the intricacies of the devious lobbies up stairs to
my chamber-door, where he bid me good-night, shook hands, and descended
to his own quarters.

My room was large and old-fashioned, but snug; and I, beginning to grow
very drowsy, was not long in getting to bed, where I fell asleep
indescribably quickly.

In all old houses one is, of course, liable to adventures. Where is the
marvellous to find refuge, if not among the chambers, the intricacies,
which have seen the vicissitudes, the crimes, and the deaths of
generations of such men as had occupied these?

There was a picture in the outer hall--one of those full-length gentlemen
of George II.'s time, with a dark peruke flowing on his shoulders, a cut
velvet coat, and lace cravat and ruffles. This picture was pale, and had
a long chin, and somehow had impressed my boyhood with a singular sense
of fear. The foot of my bed lay towards the window, distant at least
five-and-twenty-feet; and before the window stood my dressing-table, and
on it a large looking-glass.

I dreamed that I was arranging my toilet before this glass--just as I had
done that evening--when on a sudden the face of the portrait I have
mentioned was presented on its surface, confronting me like a real
countenance, and advancing towards me with a look of fury; and at the
instant I felt myself seized by the throat and unable to stir or to
breathe. After a struggle with this infernal garotter, I succeeded in
awaking myself; and as I did so, I felt a rather cold hand really resting
on my throat, and quietly passed up over my chin and face. I jumped out
of bed with a roar, and challenged the owner of the hand, but received no
answer, and heard no sound. I poked up my fire and lighted my candle.
Everything was as I had left it except the door, which was the least bit
open.

In my shirt, candle in hand, I looked out into the passage. There was
nothing there in human shape, but in the direction of the stairs the
green eyes of a large cat were shining. I was so confoundedly nervous
that even 'a harmless, necessary cat' appalled me, and I clapped my door,
as if against an evil spirit.

In about half an hour's time, however, I had quite worked off the effect
of this night-mare, and reasoned myself into the natural solution that
the creature had got on my bed, and lay, as I have been told they will,
upon my throat, and so, all the rest had followed.

Not being given to the fear of _larvae_ and _lemures_, and also knowing
that a mistake is easily committed in a great house like that, and that
my visitor might have made one, I grew drowsy in a little while, and soon
fell asleep again. But knowing all I now do, I hold a different
conclusion--and so, I think, will you.

In the morning Mark Wylder was early upon the ground. He had quite slept
off what he would have called the nonsense of last night, and was very
keen upon settlements, consols, mortgages, jointures, and all that dry
but momentous lore.

I find a note in my diary of that day:--'From half-past ten o'clock until
two with Mark Wylder and Mr. Larkin, the lawyer, in the study--dull
work--over papers and title--Lord Chelford with us now and then to lend a
helping hand.'

Lawyer Larkin, though he made our work lighter--for he was clear, quick,
and orderly, and could lay his hand on any paper in those tin walls of
legal manuscripts that built up two sides of his office--did not make our
business, to me at least, any pleasanter. Wylder thought him a clever man
(and so perhaps, in a certain sense, he was); Lord Chelford, a most
honourable one; yet there came to me by instinct an unpleasant feeling
about him. It was not in any defined way--I did not fancy that he was
machinating, for instance, any sort of mischief in the business before
us--but I had a notion that he was not quite what he pretended.

Perhaps his _personnel_ prejudiced me--though I could not quite say why.
He was a tall, lank man--rather long of limb, long of head, and gaunt of
face. He wanted teeth at both sides, and there was rather a skull-like
cavity when he smiled--which was pretty often. His eyes were small and
reddish, as if accustomed to cry; and when everything went smoothly were
dull and dove-like, but when things crossed or excited him, which
occurred when his own pocket or plans were concerned, they grew
singularly unpleasant, and greatly resembled those of some not amiable
animal--was it a rat, or a serpent? It was a peculiar concentrated
vigilance and rapine that I have seen there. But that was long
afterwards. Now, indeed, they were meek, and sad, and pink.

He had an ambition, too, to pass for a high-bred gentleman, and thought
it might be done by a somewhat lofty and drawling way of talking, and
distributing his length of limb in what he fancied were easy attitudes.
If the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, so are the elegances of a
vulgar man; and his made me wince.

I might be all in the wrong--and was, no doubt, unreasonable--for he bore
a high character, and passed for a very gentlemanlike man among the
villagers. He was also something of a religious light, and had for a time
conformed to Methodism, but returned to the Church. He had a liking for
long sermons, and a sad abhorrence of amusements, and sat out the morning
and the evening services regularly--and kept up his dissenting connection
too, and gave them money--and appeared in print, in all charitable
lists--and mourned over other men's backslidings and calamities in a
lofty and Christian way, shaking his tall bald head, and turning up his
pink eyes mildly.

Notwithstanding all which he was somehow unlovely in my eyes, and in an
indistinct way, formidable. It was not a pleasant misgiving about a
gentleman of Larkin's species, the family lawyer, who become _viscera
magnorum domuum_.

My duties were lighter, as adviser, than I at first apprehended. Wylder's
crotchets were chiefly 'mare's nests.' We had read the draft of the
settlement, preparatory to its being sent to senior counsel to be
approved. Wylder's attorney had done his devoir, and Mr. Larkin avowed a
sort of parental interest in both parties to the indentures, and made, at
closing, a little speech, very high in morality, and flavoured in a manly
way with religion, and congratulated Mark on his honour and plain
dealing, which he gave us to understand were the secrets of all success
in life, as they had been, in an humble way of his own.




CHAPTER VI.

IN WHICH DORCAS BRANDON SPEAKS.


In answer to 'the roaring shiver of the gong' we all trooped away
together to luncheon. Lady Chelford and Dorcas and Chelford had nearly
ended that irregular repast when we entered. My chair was beside Miss
Brandon; she had breakfasted with old Lady Chelford that morning, and
this was my first meeting that day. It was not very encouraging.

People complained that acquaintance made little way with her. That you
were, perhaps, well satisfied with your first day's progress, but the
next made no head-way; you found yourself this morning exactly at the
point from which you commenced yesterday, and to-morrow would recommence
where you started the day before. This is very disappointing, but may
sometimes be accounted for by there being nothing really to discover. It
seemed to me, however, that the distance had positively increased since
yesterday, and that the oftener she met me the more strange she became.
As we went out, Wylder enquired, with his usual good taste: 'Well, what
do you think of her?' Then he looked slily at me, laughing, with his
hands in his pockets. 'A little bit slow, eh?' he whispered, and laughed
again, and lounged into the hall. If Dorcas Brandon had been a plain
woman, I think she would have been voted an impertinent bore; but she was
so beautiful that she became an enigma. I looked at her as she stood
gravely gazing from the window. Is it Lady Macbeth? No; she never would
have had energy to plan her husband's career and manage that affair of
Duncan. A sultana rather--sublimely egotistical, without reverence--a
voluptuous and haughty embodiment of indifference. I paused, looking at a
picture, but thinking of her, and was surprised by her voice very near
me.

'Will you give me just a minute, Mr. De Cresseron, in the drawing-room,
while I show you a miniature? I want your opinion.'

So she floated on and I accompanied her.

'I think,' she said, 'you mentioned yesterday, that you remembered me
when an infant. You remember my poor mamma, don't you, very well?'

This was the first time she had yet shown any tendency, so far as I had
seen, to be interested in anything, or to talk to me. I seized the
occasion, and gave her, as well as I could, the sad and pretty picture
that remained, and always will, in the vacant air, when I think of her,
on the mysterious retina of memory.

How filmy they are! the moonlight shines through them, as through the
phantom Dane in Retzch's outlines--colour without substance. How they
come, wearing for ever the sweetest and pleasantest look of their earthly
days. Their sweetest and merriest tones hover musically in the distance;
how far away, how near to silence, yet how clear! And so it is with our
remembrance of the immortal part. It is the loveliest traits that remain
with us perennially; all that was noblest and most beautiful is there, in
a changeless and celestial shadow; and this is the resurrection of the
memory, the foretaste and image which the 'Faithful Creator' accords us
of the resurrection and glory to come--the body redeemed, the spirit made
perfect.

On a cabinet near to where she stood was a casket of ormolu, which she
unlocked, and took out a miniature, opened, and looked at it for a long
time. I knew very well whose it was, and watched her countenance; for, as
I have said, she interested me strangely. I suppose she knew I was
looking at her; but she showed always a queenlike indifference about what
people might think or observe. There was no sentimental softening; but
her gaze was such as I once saw the same proud and handsome face turn
upon the dead--pale, exquisite, perhaps a little stern. What she read
there--what procession of thoughts and images passed by--threw neither
light nor shadow on her face. Its apathy interested me inscrutably.

At last she placed the picture in my hand, and asked--

'Is this really very like her?'

'It is, and it is _not_,' I said, after a little pause. 'The features are
true: it is what I call an accurate portrait, but that is all. I dare
say, exact as it is, it would give to one who had not seen her a false,
as it must an inadequate, idea, of the original. There was something
_naïve_ and _spirituel_, and very tender in her face, which he has not
caught--perhaps it could hardly be fixed in colours.'

'Yes, I always heard her expression and intelligence were very beautiful.
It was the beauty of mobility--true beauty.'

'There is a beauty of another stamp, equally exquisite, Miss Brandon, and
perhaps more overpowering.' I said this in nearly a whisper, and in a
very marked way, almost tender, and the next moment was amazed at my own
audacity. She looked on me for a second or two, with her dark drowsy
glance, and then it returned to the picture, which was again in her hand.
There was a total want of interest in the careless sort of surprise she
vouchsafed my little sally; neither was there the slightest resentment.
If a wafer had been stuck upon my forehead, and she had observed it,
there might have been just that look and no more. I was ridiculously
annoyed with myself. I was betrayed, I don't know how, into this little
venture, and it was a flat failure. The position of a shy man, who has
just made an unintelligible joke at a dinner-table, was not more pregnant
with self-reproach and embarrassment.

Upon my honour, I don't think there was anything of the _roué_ in me. I
own I did feel towards this lady, who either was, or seemed to me, so
singular, a mysterious interest just beginning--of that peculiar kind
which becomes at last terribly absorbing.

I was more elated by her trifling notice of me than I can quite account
for. It was a distinction. She was so indescribably handsome--so
passively disdainful. I think if she had listened to me with even the
faintest intimation of caring whether I spoke in this tone or not, with
even a flash of momentary resentment, I might have rushed into a most
reprehensible and ridiculous rigmarole.

In this, the subtlest and most perilous of all intoxications, it needs
immense presence of mind to conduct ourselves always with decorum. But
she was looking, just as before, at the miniature, as it seemed to me, in
fancy infusing some of the spirit I had described into the artist's
record, and she said, only in soliloquy, as it were, 'Yes, I see--I
_think_ I see.'

So there was a pause; and then she said, without, however, removing her
eyes from the miniature, 'You are, I believe, Mr. De Cresseron, a very
old friend of Mr. Wylder's. Is it not so?'

So soon after my little escapade, I did not like the question; but it was
answered. There was not the faintest trace of a satirical meaning,
however, in her face; and after another very considerable interval, at
the end of which she shut the miniature in its case, she said, 'It was a
peculiar face, and very beautiful. It is odd how many of our family
married for love--wild love-matches. My poor mother was the last. I could
point you out many pictures, and tell you stories--my cousin, Rachel,
knows them all. You know Rachel Lake?'

'I've not the honour of knowing Miss Lake. I had not an opportunity of
making her acquaintance yesterday; but I know her brother--so does
Wylder.'

'What's that?' said Mark, who had just come in, and was tumbling over a
volume of 'Punch' at the window.

'I was telling Miss Brandon that we both know Stanley Lake.' On hearing
which, Wylder seemed to discover something uncommonly interesting or
clever in the illustration before him; for he approached his face very
near to it, in a scrutinising way, and only said, 'Oh?'

'That marrying for love was a fatality in our family,' she continued in
the same low tone--too faint I think to reach Mark. 'They were all the
most beautiful who sacrificed themselves so--they were all unhappy
marriages. So the beauty of our family never availed it, any more than
its talents and its courage; for there were clever and witty men, as well
as very brave ones, in it. Meaner houses have grown up into dukedoms;
ours never prospers. I wonder what it is.'

'Many families have disappeared altogether, Miss Brandon. It is no small
thing, through so many centuries, to have retained your ancestral
estates, and your pre-eminent position, and even this splendid residence
of so many generations of your lineage.'

I thought that Miss Brandon, having broken the ice, was henceforth to be
a conversable young lady. But this sudden expansion was not to last. Ovid
tells us, in his 'Fasti,' how statues sometimes surprised people by
speaking more frankly and to the purpose even than Miss Brandon, and
straight were cold chiselled marble again; and so it was with that proud,
cold _chef d'oeuvre_ of tinted statuary.

Yet I thought I could, even in that dim glimpse, discern how the silent
subterranean current of her thoughts was flowing; like other
representatives of a dynasty, she had studied the history of her race to
profit by its errors and misfortunes. There was to be no weakness or
passion in her reign.

The princess by this time was seated on the ottoman, and chose to read a
letter, thus intimating, I suppose, that my audience was at an end; so I
took up a book, put it down, and then went and looked over Wylder's
shoulder, and made my criticisms--not very novel, I fear--upon the pages
he turned over; and I am sorry to say I don't think he heard much of what
I was saying, for he suddenly came out with--

'And where is Stanley Lake now, do you know?'

'I saw him in town--only for a moment though--about a fortnight ago; he
was arranging, he said, about selling out.'

'Oh! retiring; and what does he propose doing then?' asked Wylder,
without raising his eyes from his book. He spoke in a sort of undertone,
like a man who does not want to be overheard, and the room was quite
large enough to make that sort of secrecy easy without the appearance of
seeking it.

'I have not an idea. I don't think he's fit for many things. He knows
something of horses, I believe, and something of play.'

'But he'll hardly make out a living that way,' said Wylder, with a sort
of sneer or laugh. I thought he seemed put out, and a little flushed.

'I fancy he has enough to live upon, without adding to it, however,' I
said.

Wylder leaned back in his low chair, with his hands stuffed in his
pockets, and the air of a man trying to look unconcerned, but both
annoyed and disconcerted nevertheless.

I tell you what, Charlie, between you and me, that fellow, Stanley, is a
d----d bad lot. I may be mistaken, of course; he's always been very civil
to me, but we don't like one another; and I don't think I ever heard him
say a good word of any one, I dare say he abuses you and me, as he does
everyone else.'

'Does he?' I said. 'I was not aware he had that failing.'

'Oh, yes. He does not stick at trifles, Master Stanley. He's about the
greatest liar, I think, I ever met with,' and he laughed angrily.

I happened at that moment to raise my eyes, and I saw Dorcas's face
reflected in the mirror; her back was towards us, and she held the letter
in her hand as if reading it, but her large eyes were looking over it,
and on us, in the glass, with a gaze of strange curiosity. Our glances
met in the mirror; but hers remained serenely undisturbed, and mine
dropped and turned away hastily. I wonder whether she heard us. I do not
know. Some people are miraculously sharp of hearing.

'I dare say,' said Wylder, with a sneer, 'he was asking affectionately
for me, eh?'

'No; not that I recollect--in fact there was not time; but I suppose he
does not like you less for what has happened; you're worth cultivating
now, you know.'

Wylder was leaning on his elbow, with just the tip of his thumb to his
teeth, with a vicious character of biting it, which was peculiar to him
when anything vexed him considerably, and glancing sharply this way and
that--

'You know,' he said, suddenly, 'we are a sort of cousins; his mother was
a Brandon--a second cousin of Dorcas's--no, of her father's--I don't know
exactly how. He's a pushing fellow, one of the coolest hands I know; but
I don't see that I can be of any use to him, or why the devil I should. I
say, old fellow, come out and have a weed, will you?'

I raised my eyes. Miss Brandon had left the room. I don't know that her
presence would have prevented his invitation, for Wylder's wooing was
certainly of the coolest. So forth we sallied, and under the autumnal
foliage, in the cool amber light of the declining evening, we enjoyed our
cheroots; and with them, Wylder his thoughts; and I, the landscape, and
the whistling of the birds; for we waxed Turkish and taciturn over our
tobacco.




CHAPTER VII.

RELATING HOW A LONDON GENTLEMAN APPEARED IN REDMAN'S DELL.


I believe the best rule in telling a story is to follow events
chronologically. So let me mention that just about the time when Wylder
and I were filming the trunks of the old trees with wreaths of lingering
perfume, Miss Rachel Lake had an unexpected visitor.

There is, near the Hall, a very pretty glen, called Redman's Dell, very
steep, with a stream running at the bottom of it, but so thickly wooded
that in summer time you can only now and then catch a glimpse of the
water gliding beneath you. Deep in this picturesque ravine, buried among
the thick shadows of tall old trees, runs the narrow mill-road, which
lower down debouches on the end of the village street. There, in the
transparent green shadow, stand the two mills--the old one with A.D.
1679, and the Wylder arms, and the eternal 'resurgam' projecting over its
door; and higher up, on a sort of platform, the steep bank rising high
behind it, with its towering old wood overhanging and surrounding, upon a
site where one of king Arthur's knights, of an autumn evening, as he rode
solitary in quest of adventures, might have seen the peeping, gray gable
of an anchorite's chapel dimly through the gilded stems, and heard the
drowsy tinkle of his vesper-bell, stands an old and small two-storied
brick and timber house; and though the sun does not very often glimmer on
its windows, it yet possesses an air of sad, old-world comfort--a little
flower-garden lies in front with a paling round it. But not every kind of
flowers will grow there, under the lordly shadow of the elms and
chestnuts.

This sequestered tenement bears the name of Redman's Farm; and its
occupant was that Miss Lake whom I had met last night at Brandon Hall,
and whose pleasure it was to live here in independent isolation.

There she is now, busy in her tiny garden, with the birds twittering
about her, and the yellow leaves falling; and her thick gauntlets on her
slender hands. How fresh and pretty she looks in that sad, sylvan
solitude, with the background of the dull crimson brick and the climbing
roses. Bars of sunshine fall through the branches above, across the thick
tapestry of blue, yellow, and crimson, that glow so richly upon their
deep green ground.

There is not much to be done just now, I fancy, in the gardening way; but
work is found or invented--for sometimes the hour is dull, and that
bright, spirited, and at heart, it may be, bitter exile, will make out
life somehow. There is music, and drawing. There are flowers, as we see,
and two or three correspondents, and walks into the village; and her dark
cousin, Dorcas, drives down sometimes in the pony-carriage, and is not
always silent; and indeed, they are a good deal together.

This young lady's little Eden, though overshadowed and encompassed with
the solemn sylvan cloister of nature's building, and vocal with sounds of
innocence--the songs of birds, and sometimes those of its young
mistress--was no more proof than the Mesopotamian haunt of our first
parents against the intrusion of darker spirits. So, as she worked, she
lifted up her eyes, and beheld a rather handsome young man standing at
the little wicket of her garden, with his gloved hand on the latch. A man
of fashion--a town man--his dress bespoke him: smooth cheeks, light brown
curling moustache, and eyes very peculiar both in shape and colour, and
something of elegance of finish in his other features, and of general
grace in the _coup d'oeil_, struck one at a glance. He was smiling
silently and slily on Rachel, who, with a little cry of surprise, said--

'Oh, Stanley! is it you?'

And before he could answer, she had thrown her arms about his neck and
kissed him two or three times. Laughingly, half-resisting, the young man
waited till her enthusiastic salutation was over, and with one gloved
hand caressingly on her shoulder, and with the other smoothing his
ruffled moustache, he laughed a little more, a quiet low laugh. He was
not addicted to stormy greetings, and patted his sister's shoulder
gently, his arm a little extended, like a man who tranquillises a
frolicsome pony.

'Yes, Radie, you see I've found you out;' and his eye wandered, still
smiling oddly, over the front of her quaint habitation.

'And how have you been, Radie?'

'Oh, very well. No life like a gardener's--early hours, work, air, and
plenty of quiet.' And the young lady laughed.

'You are a wonderful lass, Radie.'

'Thank you, dear.'

'And what do you call this place?'

'"The Happy Valley," _I_ call it. Don't you remember "Rasselas?"'

'No,' he said, looking round him; 'I don't think I was ever there.'

'You horrid dunce!--it's a book, but a stupid one--so no matter,' laughed
Miss Rachel, giving him a little slap on the shoulder with her slender
fingers.

His reading, you see, lay more in circulating library lore, and he was
not deep in Johnson--as few of us would be, I'm afraid, if it were not
for Boswell.

'It's a confounded deal more like the "Valley of the Shadow of Death," in
"Pilgrim's Progress"--you remember--that old Tamar used to read to us in
the nursery,' replied Master Stanley, who had never enjoyed being quizzed
by his sister, not being blessed with a remarkably sweet temper.

'If you don't like my scenery, come in, Stanley, and admire my
decorations. You must tell me all the news, and I'll show you my house,
and amaze you with my housekeeping. Dear me, how long it is since I've
seen you.'

So she led him in by the arm to her tiny drawing-room; and he laid his
hat and stick, and gray paletot, on her little marquetrie-table, and sat
down, and looked languidly about him, with a sly smile, like a man
amused.

'It is an odd fancy, living alone here.'

'An odd necessity, Stanley.'

'Aren't you afraid of being robbed and murdered, Radie?' he said, leaning
forward to smell at the pretty bouquet in the little glass, and turning
it listlessly round. 'There are lots of those burglar fellows going
about, you know.'

'Thank you, dear, for reminding me. But, somehow, I'm not the least
afraid. There hasn't been a robbery in this neighbourhood, I believe, for
eight hundred years. The people never think of shutting their doors here
in summer time till they are going to bed, and then only for form's sake;
and, beside, there's nothing to rob, and I really don't much mind being
murdered.'

He looked round, and smiled on, as before, like a man contemptuously
amused, but sleepily withal.

'You are very oddly housed, Radie.'

'I like it,' she said quietly, also with a glance round her homely
drawing-room.

'What do you call this, your boudoir or parlour?'

'I call it my drawing-room, but it's anything you please.'

'What very odd people our ancestors were,' he mused on. 'They lived, I
suppose, out of doors like the cows, and only came into their sheds at
night, when they could not see the absurd ugliness of the places they
inhabited. I could not stand upright in this room with my hat on. Lots of
rats, I fancy, Radie, behind that wainscoting? What's that horrid work of
art against the wall?'

'A shell-work cabinet, dear. It is not beautiful, I allow. If I were
strong enough, or poor old Tamar, I should have put it away; and now that
you're here, Stanley, I think I'll make you carry it out to the lobby for
me.'

'I should not like to touch it, dear Radie. And pray how do you amuse
yourself here? How on earth do you get over the day, and, worse still,
the evenings?'

'Very well--well enough. I make a very good sort of a nun, and a capital
housemaid. I work in the garden, I mend my dresses, I drink tea, and when
I choose to be dissipated, I play and sing for old Tamar--why did not you
ask how she is? I do believe, Stanley, you care for no one, but' (she was
going to say yourself, she said instead, however, but) 'perhaps, the
least in the world for me, and that not very wisely,' she continued, a
little fiercely, 'for from the moment you saw me, you've done little else
than try to disgust me more than I am with my penury and solitude. What
do you mean? You always have a purpose--will you ever learn to be frank
and straightforward, and speak plainly to those whom you ought to trust,
if not to love? What are you driving at, Stanley?'

He looked up with a gentle start, like one recovering from a reverie, and
said, with his yellow eyes fixed for a moment on his sister, before they
dropped again to the carpet.

'You're miserably poor, Rachel: upon my word, I believe you haven't clear
two hundred a year. I'll drink some tea, please, if you have got any, and
it isn't too much trouble; and it strikes me as very curious you like
living in this really very humiliating state.'

'I don't intend to go out for a governess, if that's what you mean; nor
is there any privation in living as I do. Perhaps you think I ought to go
and housekeep for you.'

'Why--ha, ha!--I really don't know, Radie, where I shall be. I'm not of
any regiment now.'

'Why, you have not sold out?' She flushed and suddenly grew pale, for she
was afraid something worse might have happened, having no great
confidence in her brother.

But she was relieved.

'I _have_ sold my commission.'

She looked straight at him with large eyes and compressed lips, and
nodded her head two or three times, just murmuring, 'Well! well! well!'

'Women never understand these things. The army is awfully expensive--I
mean, of course, a regiment like ours; and the interest of the money is
better to me than my pay; and see, Rachel, there's no use in lecturing
_me_--so don't let us quarrel. We're not very rich, you and I; and we
each know our own affairs, you yours, and I mine, best.'

There was something by no means pleasant in his countenance when his
temper was stirred, and a little thing sometimes sufficed to do so.

Rachel treated him with a sort of deference, a little contemptuous
perhaps, such as spoiled children receive from indulgent elders; and she
looked at him steadily, with a faint smile and arched brows, for a little
while, and an undefinable expression of puzzle and curiosity.

'You are a very amusing brother--if not a very cheery or a very useful
one, Stanley.'

She opened the door, and called across the little hall into the homely
kitchen of the mansion.

'Tamar, dear, Master Stanley's here, and wishes to see you.'

'Oh! yes, poor dear old Tamar; ha, ha!' says the gentleman, with a gentle
little laugh, 'I suppose she's as frightful as ever, that worthy woman.
Certainly she _is_ awfully like a ghost. I wonder, Radie, you're not
afraid of her at night in this cheerful habitation. _I_ should, I know.'

'A ghost _indeed_, the ghost of old times, an ugly ghost enough for many
of us. Poor Tamar! she was always very kind to _you_, Stanley.'

And just then old Tamar opened the door. I must allow there was something
very unpleasant about that worthy old woman; and not being under any
personal obligations to her, I confess my acquiescence in the spirit of
Captain Lake's remarks.

She was certainly perfectly neat and clean, but white predominated
unpleasantly in her costume. Her cotton gown had once had a pale pattern
over it, but wear and washing had destroyed its tints, till it was no
better than white, with a mottling of gray. She had a large white
kerchief pinned with a grisly precision across her breast, and a white
linen cap tied under her chin, fitting close to her head, like a child's
nightcap, such as they wore in my young days, and destitute of border or
frilling about the face. It was a dress very odd and unpleasant to
behold, and suggested the idea of an hospital, or a madhouse, or death,
in an undefined way.

She was past sixty, with a mournful puckered and puffy face, tinted all
over with a thin gamboge and burnt sienna glazing; and very blue under
the eyes, which showed a great deal of their watery whites. This old
woman had in her face and air, along with an expression of suspicion and
anxiety, a certain character of decency and respectability, which made
her altogether a puzzling and unpleasant apparition.

Being taciturn and undemonstrative, she stood at the door, looking with
as pleased a countenance as so sad a portrait could wear upon the young
gentleman.

He got up at his leisure and greeted 'old Tamar,' with his sleepy, amused
sort of smile, and a few trite words of kindness. So Tamar withdrew to
prepare tea; and he said, all at once, with a sudden accession of energy,
and an unpleasant momentary glare in his eyes--

'You know, Rachel, this sort of thing is all nonsense. You cannot go on
living like this; you must marry--you shall marry. Mark Wylder is down
here, and he has got an estate and a house, and it is time he should
marry you.'

'Mark Wylder is here to marry my cousin, Dorcas; and if he had no such
intention, and were as free as you are, and again to urge his foolish
suit upon his knees, Stanley, I would die rather than accept him.'

'It was not always so foolish a suit, Radie,' answered her brother, his
eyes once more upon the carpet. 'Why should not _he_ do as well as
another? You liked him well enough once.'

The young lady coloured rather fiercely.

'I am not a girl of seventeen now, Stanley; and--and, besides, I _hate_
him.'

'What d--d nonsense! I really beg your pardon, Radie, but it _is_
precious stuff. You are quite unreasonable; you've no cause to hate him;
he dropped you because you dropped him. It was only prudent; he had not a
guinea. But now it is different, and he _must_ marry you.'

The young lady stared with a haughty amazement upon her brother.

'I've made up my mind to speak to him; and if he won't I promise you he
shall leave the country,' said the young man gently, just lifting his
yellow eyes for a second with another unpleasant glare.

'I almost think you're mad, Stanley; and if you do anything so insane,
sure I am you'll rue it while you live; and wherever he is I'll find him
out, and acquit myself, with the scorn I owe him, of any share in a plot
so unspeakably mean and absurd.'

'Brava, brava! you're a heroine, Radie; and why the devil,' he continued,
in a changed tone, 'do you apply those insolent terms to what I purpose
doing?'

'I wish I could find words strong enough to express my horror of your
plot--a plot every way disgusting. You plainly know something to Mark
Wylder's discredit; and you mean, Stanley, to coerce him by fear into a
marriage with your penniless sister, who _hates_ him. Sir, do you pretend
to be a gentleman?'

'I rather think so,' he said, with a quiet sneer.

'Give up every idea of it this moment. Has it not struck you that Mark
Wylder may possibly know something of you, you would not have published?'

'I don't think he does. What do you mean?'

'On my life, Stanley, I'll acquaint Mr. Wylder this evening with what you
meditate, and the atrocious liberty you presume--yes, Sir, though you are
my brother, the _atrocious liberty_ you dare to take with my name--unless
you promise, upon your honour, now and here, to dismiss for ever the
odious and utterly resultless scheme.'

Captain Lake looked very angry after his fashion, but said nothing. He
could not at any time have very well defined his feelings toward his
sister, but mingling in them, certainly, was a vein of unacknowledged
dread, and, shall I say, respect. He knew she was resolute, fierce of
will, and prompt in action, and not to be bullied.

'There's more in this, Stanley, than you care to tell me. You have not
troubled yourself a great deal about me, you know: and I'm no worse off
now than any time for the last three years. You've _not_ come down here
on _my_ account--that is, altogether; and be your plans what they may,
you sha'n't mix my name in them. What you please--wise or foolish--you'll
do in what concerns yourself;--you always _have_--without consulting me;
but I tell you again, Stanley, unless you promise, upon your honour, to
forbear all mention of my name, I will write this evening to Lady
Chelford, apprising her of your plans, and of my own disgust and
indignation; and requesting her son's interference. _Do_ you promise?'

'There's no such _haste_, Radie. I only mentioned it. If you don't like
it, of course it can lead to nothing, and there's no use in my speaking
to Wylder, and so there's an end of it.'

'There _may_ be some use, a purpose in which neither my feelings nor
interests have any part. I venture to say, Stanley, your plans are all
for _yourself_. You want to extort some advantage from Wylder; and you
think, in his present situation, about to marry Dorcas, you can use me
for the purpose. Thank Heaven! Sir, you committed for once the rare
indiscretion of telling the truth; and unless you make me the promise I
require, I will take, before evening, such measures as will completely
exculpate me. Once again, do you promise?'

'Yes, Radie; ha, ha! of course I promise.'

'Upon your honour?'

'Upon my honour--_there_.'

'I believe, you gentlemen dragoons observe that oath--I hope so. If you
choose to break it you may give me some trouble, but you sha'n't
compromise me. And now, Stanley, one word more. I fancy Mr. Wylder is a
resolute man--none of the Wylders wanted courage.'

Captain Lake was by this time smiling his sly, sleepy smile upon his
French boots.

'If you have formed any plan which depends upon frightening him, it is a
desperate one. All I can tell you, Stanley, is this, that if I were a
man, and an attempt made to extort from me any sort of concession by
terror, I would shoot the miscreant who made it through the head, like a
highwayman.'

'What the devil are you talking about?' said he.

'About _your danger_,' she answered. 'For once in your life listen to
reason. Mark Wylder is as prompt as you, and has ten times your nerve and
sense; you are more likely to have committed yourself than he. Take care;
he may retaliate your _threat_ by a counter move more dreadful. I know
nothing of your doings, Stanley--Heaven forbid! but be warned, or you'll
rue it.'

'Why, Radie, you know nothing of the world. Do you suppose I'm quite
demented? Ask a gentleman for his estate, or watch, because I know
something to his disadvantage! Why, ha, ha! dear Radie, every man who has
ever been on terms of intimacy with another must know things to his
disadvantage, but no one thinks of telling them. The world would not
tolerate it. It would prejudice the betrayer at least as much as the
betrayed. I don't affect to be angry, or talk romance and heroics,
because you fancy such stuff; but I assure you--when will that old woman
give me a cup of tea?--I assure you, Radie, there's nothing in it.'

Rachel made no reply, but she looked steadfastly and uneasily upon the
enigmatical face and downcast eyes of the young man.

'Well, I hope so,' she said at last, with a sigh, and a slight sense of
relief.




CHAPTER VIII.

IN WHICH CAPTAIN LAKE TAKES HIS HAT AND STICK.


So the young people sitting in the little drawing-room of Redman's farm
pursued their dialogue; Rachel Lake had spoken last, and it was the
captain's turn to speak next.

'Do you remember Miss Beauchamp, Radie?' he asked rather suddenly, after
a very long pause.

'Miss Beauchamp? Oh! to be sure; you mean little Caroline; yes, she must
be quite grown up by this time--five years--she promised to be pretty.
What of her?'

Rachel, very flushed and agitated still, was now trying to speak as
usual.

'She _is_ good-looking--a little coarse some people think,' resumed the
young man; 'but handsome; black eyes--black hair--rather on a large
scale, but certainly handsome. A style I admire rather, though it is not
very refined, nor at all classic. But I like her, and I wish you'd advise
me.' He was talking, after his wont, to the carpet.

'Oh?' she exclaimed, with a gentle sort of derision.

'You mean,' he said, looking up for a moment, with a sudden stare, 'she
has got money. Of course she has; I could not afford to admire her if she
had not; but I see you are not just now in a mood to trouble yourself
about my nonsense--we can talk about it to-morrow; and tell me now, how
do you get on with the Brandon people?'

Rachel was curious, and would, if she could, have recalled that sarcastic
'oh' which had postponed the story; but she was also a little angry, and
with anger there was pride, which would not stoop to ask for the
revelation which he chose to defer; so she said, 'Dorcas and I are very
good friends; but I don't know very well what to make of her. Only I
don't think she's quite so dull and apathetic as I at first supposed; but
still I'm puzzled. She is either absolutely uninteresting, or very
interesting indeed, and I can't say which.'

'Does she like you?' he asked.

'I really don't know. She tolerates me, like everything else; and I don't
flatter her; and we see a good deal of one another upon those terms, and
I have no complaint to make of her. She has some aversions, but no
quarrels; and has a sort of laziness--mental, bodily, and moral--that is
sublime, but provoking; and sometimes I admire her, and sometimes I
despise her; and I do not yet know which feeling is the juster.'

'Surely she is woman enough to be fussed a little about her marriage?'

'Oh, dear, no! she takes the whole affair with a queenlike and
supernatural indifference. She is either a fool or a very great
philosopher, and there is something grand in the serene obscurity that
envelopes her,' and Rachel laughed a very little.

'I must, I suppose, pay my respects; but to-morrow will be time enough.
What pretty little tea-cups, Radie--quite charming--old cock china, isn't
it? These were Aunt Jemima's, I think.'

'Yes; they used to stand on the little marble table between the windows.'

Old Tamar had glided in while they here talking, and placed the little
tea equipage on the table unnoticed, and the captain was sipping his cup
of tea, and inspecting the pattern, while his sister amused him.

'This place, I suppose, is confoundedly slow, is not it? Do they
entertain the neighbours ever at Brandon?'

'Sometimes, when old Lady Chelford and her son are staying there.'

'But the neighbours can't entertain them, I fancy, or you. What a dreary
thing a dinner party made up of such people must be--like "Aesop's
Fables," where the cows and sheep converse.'

'And sometimes a wolf or a fox,' she said.

'Well, Radie, I know you mean me; but as you wish it, I'll carry my fangs
elsewhere;--and what has become of Will Wylder?'

'Oh! he's in the Church!'

'Quite right--the only thing he was fit for;' and Captain Lake laughed
like a man who enjoys a joke slily. 'And where is poor Billy quartered?'

'Not quite half a mile away; he has got the vicarage of Naunton Friars.'

'Oh, then, Will is not quite such a fool as we took him for.'

'It is worth just £180 a year! but he's very far from a fool.'

'Yes, of course, he knows Greek poets and Latin fathers, and all the rest
of it. I don't mean he ever was plucked. I dare say he's the kind of
fellow _you'd_ like very well, Radie.' And his sly eyes had a twinkle in
them which seemed to say, 'Perhaps I've divined your secret.'

'And so I do, and I like his wife, too, _very_ much.'

'His wife! So William has married on £180 a year;' and the captain
laughed quietly but very pleasantly again.

'On a very little more, at all events; and I think they are about the
happiest, and I'm sure they are the best people in this part of the
world.'

'Well, Radie, I'll see you to-morrow again. You preserve your good looks
wonderfully. I wonder you haven't become an old woman here.'

And he kissed her, and went his way, with a slight wave of his hand, and
his odd smile, as he closed the little garden gate after him.

He turned to his left, walking down towards the town, and the innocent
green trees hid him quickly, and the gush and tinkle of the clear brook
rose faint and pleasantly through the leaves, from the depths of the
glen, and refreshed her ear after his unpleasant talk.

She was flushed, and felt oddly; a little stunned and strange, although
she had talked lightly and easily enough.

'I forgot to ask him where he is staying: the Brandon Arms, I suppose. I
don't at all like his coming down here after Mark Wylder; what _can_ he
mean? He certainly never would have taken the trouble for _me_. What
_can_ he want of Mark Wylder? I think _he_ knew old Mr. Beauchamp. He may
be a trustee, but that's not likely; Mark Wylder was not the person for
any such office. I hope Stanley does not intend trying to extract money
from him; anything rather than that degradation--than that _villainy_.
Stanley was always impracticable, perverse, deceitful, and so foolish
with all his cunning and suspicion--so _very_ foolish. Poor Stanley. He's
so unscrupulous; I don't know what to think. He said he could force Mark
Wylder to leave the country. It must be some bad secret. If he tries and
fails, I suppose he will be ruined. I don't know what to think; I never
was so uneasy. He will blast himself, and disgrace all connected with
him; and it is quite useless speaking to him.'

Perhaps if Rachel Lake had been in Belgravia, leading a town life, the
matter would have taken no such dark colouring and portentous
proportions. But living in a small old house, in a dark glen, with no
companion, and little to occupy her, it was different.

She looked down the silent way he had so lately taken, and repeated,
rather bitterly, 'My only brother! my only brother! my only brother!'

That young lady was not quite a pauper, though she may have thought so.
Comparatively, indeed, she was; but not, I venture to think, absolutely.
She had just that symmetrical three hundred pounds a year, which the
famous Dean of St. Patrick's tells us he so 'often wished that he had
clear.' She had had some money in the Funds besides, still more
insignificant but this her Brother Stanley had borrowed and begged
piecemeal, and the Consols were no more. But though something of a nun in
her way of life, there was no germ of the old maid in her, and money was
not often in her thoughts. It was not a bad _dot_; and her Brother
Stanley had about twice as much, and therefore was much better off than
many a younger son of a duke. But these young people, after the manner of
men were spited with fortune; and indeed they had some cause. Old General
Lake had once had more than ten thousand pounds a year, and lived, until
the crash came, in the style of a vicious old prince. It was a great
break up, and a worse fall for Rachel than for her brother, when the
plate, coaches, pictures, and all the valuable effects' of old Tiberius
went to the hammer, and he himself vanished from his clubs and other
haunts, and lived only--a thin intermittent rumour--surmised to be in
gaol, or in Guernsey, and quite forgotten soon, and a little later
actually dead and buried.




CHAPTER IX.

I SEE THE RING OF THE PERSIAN MAGICIAN.


'That's a devilish fine girl,' said Mark Wylder.

He was sitting at this moment on the billiard table, with his coat off
and his cue in his hand, and had lighted a cigar. He and I had just had a
game, and were tired of it.

'Who?' I asked. He was looking on me from the corners of his eyes, and
smiling in a sly, rakish way, that no man likes in another.

'Radie Lake--she's a splendid girl, by Jove! Don't you think so? and she
liked me once devilish well, I can tell you. She was thin then, but she
has plumped out a bit, and improved every way.'

Whatever else he was, Mark was certainly no beauty;--a little short he
was, and rather square--one shoulder a thought higher than the other--and
a slight, energetic hitch in it when he walked. His features in profile
had something of a Grecian character, but his face was too broad--very
brown, rather a bloodless brown--and he had a pair of great, dense,
vulgar, black whiskers. He was very vain of his teeth--his only really
good point--for his eyes were a small cunning, gray pair; and this,
perhaps, was the reason why he had contracted his habit of laughing and
grinning a good deal more than the fun of the dialogue always warranted.

This sea-monster smoked here as unceremoniously as he would have done in
'Rees's Divan,' and I only wonder he did not call for brandy-and-water.
He had either grown coarser a great deal, or I more decent, during our
separation. He talked of his _fiancée_ as he might of an opera-girl
almost, and was now discussing Miss Lake in the same style.

'Yes, she is--she's very well; but hang it, Wylder, you're a married man
now, and must give up talking that way. People won't like it, you know;
they'll take it to mean more than it does, and you oughtn't. Let us have
another game.'

'By-and-by; what do you think of Larkin?' asked Wylder, with a sly glance
from the corners of his eyes. 'I think he prays rather more than is good
for his clients; mind I spell it with an 'a,' not with an 'e;' but hang
it, for an attorney, you know, and such a sharp chap, it does seem to me
rather a--a joke, eh?'

'He bears a good character among the townspeople, doesn't he? And I don't
see that it can do him any harm, remembering that he has a soul to be
saved.'

'Or the other thing, eh?' laughed Wylder. 'But I think he comes it a
little too strong--two sermons last Sunday, and a prayer-meeting at nine
o'clock?'

'Well, it won't do him any harm,' I repeated.

'Harm! O, let Jos. Larkin alone for that. It gets him all the religious
business of the county; and there are nice pickings among the charities,
and endowments, and purchases of building sites, and trust deeds; I dare
say it brings him in two or three hundred a year, eh?' And Wylder laughed
again. 'It has broken up his hard, proud heart,' he says; 'but it left
him a devilish hard head, I told him, and I think it sharpens his wits.'

'I rather think you'll find him a useful man; and to be so in his line of
business he must have his wits about him, I can tell you.'

'He amused me devilishly,' said Wylder, 'with a sort of exhortation he
treated me to; he's a delightfully impudent chap, and gave me to
understand I was a limb of the Devil, and he a saint. I told him I was
better than he, in my humble opinion, and so I am, by chalks. I know very
well I'm a miserable sinner, but there's mercy above, and I don't hide my
faults. I don't set up for a light or a saint; I'm just what the
Prayer-book says--neither more nor less--a miserable sinner. There's only
one good thing I can safely say for myself--I am no Pharisee; that's all;
I air no religious prig, puffing myself, and trusting to forms, making
long prayers in the market-place' (Mark's quotations were paraphrastic),
'and thinking of nothing but the uppermost seats in the synagogue, and
broad borders, and the praise of men--hang them, I hate those fellows.'

So Mark, like other men we meet with, was proud of being a Publican; and
his prayer was--'I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, spiritually
proud, formalists, hypocrites, or even as this Pharisee.'

'Do you wish another game?' I asked.

'Just now,' said Wylder, emitting first a thin stream of smoke, and
watching its ascent. 'Dorcas is the belle of the county; and she likes
me, though she's odd, and don't show it the way other girls would. But a
fellow knows pretty well when a girl likes him, and you know the marriage
is a sensible sort of thing, and I'm determined, of course, to carry it
through; but, hang it, a fellow can't help thinking sometimes there are
other things besides money, and Dorcas is not my style. Rachel's more
that way; she's a _tremendious_ fine girl, by Jove! and a spirited minx,
too; and I think,' he added, with an oath, having first taken two puffs
at his cigar, 'if I had seen her first, I'd have thought twice before I'd
have got myself into this business.'

I only smiled and shook my head. I did not believe a word of it. Yet,
perhaps, I was wrong. He knew very well how to take care of his money; in
fact, compared with other young fellows, he was a bit of a screw. But he
could do a handsome and generous thing for himself. His selfishness would
expand nobly, and rise above his prudential considerations, and drown
them sometimes; and he was the sort of person, who, if the fancy were
strong enough, might marry in haste, and repent--and make his wife, too,
repent--at leisure.

'What do you laugh at, Charlie?' said Wylder, grinning himself.

'At your confounded grumbling, Mark. The luckiest dog in England! Will
nothing content you?'

'Why, I grumble very little, I think, considering how well off I am,'
rejoined he, with a laugh.

'Grumble! If you had a particle of gratitude, you'd build a temple to
Fortune--you're pagan enough for it, Mark.'

'Fortune has nothing to do with it,' says Mark, laughing again.

'Well, certainly, neither had you.'

'It was all the Devil. I'm not joking, Charlie, upon my word, though I'm
laughing.' (Mark swore now and then, but I take leave to soften his
oaths). 'It was the Persian Magician.'

'Come, Mark, say what you mean.'

'I mean what I say. When we were in the Persian Gulf, near six years ago,
I was in command of the ship. The captain, you see, was below, with a
hurt in his leg. We had very rough weather--a gale for two days and a
night almost--and a heavy swell after. In the night time we picked up
three poor devils in an open boat--. One was a Persian merchant, with a
grand beard. We called him the magician, he was so like the pictures of
Aladdin's uncle.'

'Why _he_ was an African,' I interposed, my sense of accuracy offended.

'I don't care a curse what he was,' rejoined Mark; 'he was exactly like
the picture in the story-books. And as we were lying off--I forget the
cursed name of it--he begged me to put him ashore. He could not speak a
word of English, but one of the fellows with him interpreted, and they
were all anxious to get ashore. Poor devils, they had a notion, I
believe, we were going to sell them for slaves, and he made me a present
of a ring, and told me a long yarn about it. It was a talisman, it seems,
and no one who wore it could ever be lost. So I took it for a keepsake;
here it is,' and he extended his stumpy, brown little finger, and showed
a thick, coarsely-made ring of gold, with an uncut red stone, of the size
of a large cherry stone, set in it.

'The stone is a humbug,' said Wylder. 'It's not real. I showed it to
Platten and Foyle. It's some sort of glass. But I would not part with it.
I got a fancy into my head that luck would come with it, and maybe that
glass stuff was the thing that had the virtue in it. Now look at these
Persian letters on the inside, for that's the oddest thing about it. Hang
it, I can't pull it off--I'm growing as fat as a pig--but they are like a
queer little string of flowers; and I showed it to a clever fellow at
Malta--a missionary chap--and he read it off slick, and what do you think
it means: "I will come up again;"' and he swore a great oath. 'It's as
true as you stand there--_our_ motto. Is not it odd? So I got the
"resurgam" you see there engraved round it, and by Jove! it did bring me
up. I was near lost, and did rise again. Eh?'

Well, it certainly was a curious accident. Mark had plenty of odd and not
unamusing lore. Men who beat about the world in ships usually have; and
these 'yarns,' furnished, after the pattern of Othello's tales of
Anthropophagites and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, one
of the many varieties of fascination which he practised on the fair sex.
Only in justice to Mark, I must say that he was by no means so shameless
a drawer of the long-bow as the Venetian gentleman and officer.

'When I got this ring, Charlie, three hundred a year and a London life
would have been Peru and Paradise to poor Pill Garlick, and see what it
has done for me.'

'Aye, and better than Aladdin's, for you need not rub it and bring up
that confounded ugly genii; the slave of your ring works unseen.'

'So he does,' laughed Wylder, in a state of elation, 'and he's not done
working yet, I can tell you. When the estates are joined in one, they'll
be good eleven thousand a year; and Larkin says, with smart management, I
shall have a rental of thirteen thousand before three years! And that's
only the beginning, by George! Sir Henry Twisden can't hold his
seat--he's all but broke--as poor as Job, and the gentry hate him, and he
lives abroad. He has had a hint or two already, and he'll never fight the
next election. D'ye see--hey?'

And Wylder winked and grinned, with a wag of his head.

'M.P.--eh? You did not see that before. I look a-head a bit, eh? and can
take my turn at the wheel--eh?'

And he laughed with cunning exultation.

'Miss Rachel will find I'm not quite such a lubber as she fancies. But
even then it is only begun. Come, Charlie, you used to like a bet. What
do you say? I'll buy you that twenty-five guinea book of pictures--what's
its name?--if you give me three hundred guineas one month after I'm a
peer of Parliament. Hey? There's a sporting offer for you. Well! what do
you say--eh?'

'You mean to come out as an orator, then?'

'Orator be diddled! Do you take me for a fool? No, Charlie; but I'll come
out strong as a _voter_--that's the stuff they like--at the right side,
of course, and that is the way to manage it. Thirteen thousand a
year--the oldest family in the county--and a steady thick and thin
supporter of the minister. Strong points, eh, Charlie? Well, do you take
my offer?'

I laughed and declined, to his great elation, and just then the gong
sounded and we were away to our toilets.

While making my toilet for dinner, I amused myself by conjecturing
whether there could be any foundation in fact for Mark's boast, that Miss
Brandon liked him. Women are so enigmatical--some in everything--all in
matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is
repulsive? Does not brutality in our sex, and even rascality, interest
them sometimes? Don't they often affect indifference, and occasionally
even aversion, where there is a different sort of feeling?

As I went down I heard Miss Lake chatting with her queen-like cousin near
an open door on the lobby. Rachel Lake was, indeed, a very constant guest
at the Hall, and the servants paid her much respect, which I look upon as
a sign that the young heiress liked her and treated her with
consideration; and indeed there was an insubordinate and fiery spirit in
that young lady which would have brooked nothing less and dreamed of
nothing but equality.




CHAPTER X.

THE ACE OF HEARTS.


Who should I find in the drawing-room, talking fluently and smiling,
after his wont, to old Lady Chelford, who seemed to receive him very
graciously, for her at least, but Captain Stanley Lake!

I can't quite describe to you the odd and unpleasant sort of surprise
which that very gentlemanlike figure, standing among the Brandon
household gods at this moment, communicated to me. I thought of the few
odd words and looks that had dropped from Wylder about him with an
ominous pang as I looked, and I felt somehow as if there were some occult
relation between that confused prelude of Wylder's and the
Mephistophelean image that had risen up almost upon the spot where it was
spoken. I glanced round for Wylder, but he was not there.

'You know Captain Lake?' said Lord Chelford, addressing me.

And Lake turned round upon me, a little abruptly, his odd yellowish eyes,
a little like those of the sea-eagle, and the ghost of his smile that
flickered on his singularly pale face, with a stern and insidious look,
confronted me. There was something evil and shrinking in his aspect,
which I felt with a sort of chill, like the commencing fascination of a
serpent. I often thought since that he had expected to see Wylder before
him.

The church-yard meteor expired, there was nothing in a moment but his
ordinary smile of recognition.

'You're surprised to see me here,' he said in his very pleasing low
tones.

'I lighted on him in the village; and I knew Miss Brandon would not
forgive me if I allowed him to go away without coming here. (He had his
hand upon Lake's shoulder.) They are cousins, you know; we are all
cousins. I'm bad at genealogies. My mother could tell us all about
it--we, Brandons, Lakes; Wylders, and Chelfords.'

At this moment Miss Brandon entered, with her brilliant Cousin Rachel.
The blonde and the dark, it was a dazzling contrast.

So Chelford led Stanley Lake before the lady of the castle. I thought of
the 'Fair Brunnisende,' with the captive knight in the hands of her
seneschal before her, and I fancied he said something of having found him
trespassing in her town, and brought him up for judgment. Whatever Lord
Chelford said, Miss Brandon received it very graciously, and even with a
momentary smile. I wonder she did not smile oftener, it became her so.
But her greeting to Captain Lake was more than usually haughty and
frozen, and her features, I fancied, particularly proud and
pale. It seemed to me to indicate a great deal more than mere
indifference--something of aversion, and nearer to a positive emotion
than anything I had yet seen in that exquisitely apathetic face.

How was it that this man with the yellow eyes seemed to gleam from them
an influence of pain or disturbance, wherever almost he looked.

'Shake hands with your cousin, my dear,' said old Lady Chelford,
peremptorily. The little scene took place close to her chair; and upon
this stage direction the little piece of by-play took place, and the
young lady coldly touched the captain's hand, and passed on.

Young as he was, Stanley Lake was an old man of the world, not to be
disconcerted, and never saw more than exactly suited him. Waiting in the
drawing-room, I had some entertaining talk with Miss Lake. Her
conversation was lively, and rather bold, not at all in the coarse sense,
but she struck me as having formed a system of ethics and views of life,
both good-humoured and sarcastic, and had carried into her rustic
sequestration the melancholy and precocious lore of her early London
experience.

When Lord Chelford joined us, I perceived that Wylder was in the room,
and saw a very cordial greeting between him and Lake. The captain
appeared quite easy and cheerful; but Mark, I thought, notwithstanding
his laughter and general jollity, was uncomfortable; and I saw him once
or twice, when Stanley's eye was not upon him, glance sharply on the
young man with an uneasy and not very friendly curiosity.

At dinner Lake was easy and amusing. That meal passed off rather
pleasantly; and when we joined the ladies in the drawing-room, the good
vicar's enthusiastic little wife came to meet us, in one of her honest
little raptures.

'Now, here's a thing worth your looking at! Did you ever see anything so
bee-utiful in your life? It is such a darling little thing; and--look
now--is not it magnificent?'

She arrested the file of gentlemen just by a large lamp, before whose
effulgence she presented the subject of her eulogy--one of those costly
trifles which announce the approach of Hymen, as flowers spring up before
the rosy steps of May.

Well, it was pretty--French, I dare say--a little set of tablets--a
toy--the cover of enamel, studded in small jewels, with a slender border
of symbolic flowers, and with a heart in the centre, a mosaic of little
carbuncles, rubies, and other red and crimson stones, placed with a view
to light and shade.

'Exquisite, indeed!' said Lord Chelford. 'Is this yours, Mrs. Wylder?'

'Mine, indeed!' laughed poor little Mrs. Dorothy. 'Well, dear me, no,
indeed;'--and in an earnest whisper close in his ear--'a present to Miss
Brandon, and the donor is not a hundred miles away from your elbow, my
lord!' and she winked slyly, and laughed, with a little nod at Wylder.

'Oh! I see--to be sure--really, Wylder, it does your taste infinite
credit.'

'I'm glad you like it,' says Wylder, chuckling benignantly on it, over
his shoulder. 'I believe I _have_ a little taste that way; those are all
real, you know, those jewels.'

'Oh, yes! of course. Have you seen it, Captain Lake?' And he placed it in
that gentleman's fingers, who now took his turn at the lamp, and
contemplated the little parallelogram with a gleam of sly amusement.

'What are you laughing at?' asked Wylder, a little snappishly.

'I was thinking it's very like the ace of hearts,' answered the captain
softly, smiling on.

'Fie, Lake, there's no poetry in you,' said Lord Chelford, laughing.

'Well, now, though, really it is funny; it did not strike me before, but
do you know, now, it _is_,' laughs out jolly Mrs. Dolly, 'isn't it. Look
at it, do, Mr. Wylder--isn't it like the ace of hearts?'

Wylder was laughing rather redly, with the upper part of his face very
surly, I thought.

'Never mind, Wylder, it's the winning card,' said Lord Chelford, laying
his hand on his shoulder.

Whereupon Lake laughed quietly, still looking on the ace of hearts with
his sly eyes.

And Wylder laughed too, more suddenly and noisily than the humour of the
joke seemed quite to call for, and glanced a grim look from the corners
of his eyes on Lake, but the gallant captain did not seem to perceive it;
and after a few seconds more he handed it very innocently back to Mrs.
Dorothy, only remarking--

'Seriously, it _is_ very pretty, and _appropriate_.'

And Wylder, making no remark, helped himself to a cup of coffee, and then
to a glass of Curaçoa, and then looked industriously at a Spanish quarto
of Don Quixote, and lastly walked over to me on the hearthrug.

'What the d-- has he come down here for? It can't be for money, or balls,
or play, and he has no honest business anywhere. Do you know?'

'Lake? Oh! I really can't tell; but he'll soon tire of country life. I
don't think he's much of a sportsman.'

'Ha, isn't he? I don't know anything about him almost; but I hate him.'

'Why should you, though? He's a very gentlemanlike fellow and your
cousin.'

'My cousin--the Devil's cousin--everyone's cousin. I don't know who's my
cousin, or who isn't; nor you don't, who've been for ten years over those
d--d papers; but I think he's the nastiest dog I ever met. I took a
dislike to him at first sight long ago, and that never happened me but I
was right.'

Wylder looked confoundedly angry and flustered, standing with his heels
on the edge of the rug, his hands in his pockets, jingling some silver
there, and glancing from under his red forehead sternly and unsteadily
across the room.

'He's not a man for country quarters! he'll soon be back in town, or to
Brighton,' I said.

'If _he_ doesn't, _I_ will. That's all.'

Just to get him off this unpleasant groove with a little jolt, I said--

'By-the-bye, Wylder, you know the pictures here; who is the tall man,
with the long pale face, and wild phosphoric eyes? I was always afraid of
him; in a long peruke, and dark red velvet coat, facing the hall-door. I
had a horrid dream about him last night.'

'That? Oh, I know--that's Lorne Brandon. He was one of our family devils,
he was. A devil in a family now and then is not such a bad thing, when
there's work for him.' (All the time he was talking to me his angry
little eyes were following Lake.) 'They say he killed his son, a
blackguard, who was found shot, with his face in the tarn in the park. He
was going to marry the gamekeeper's daughter, it was thought, and he and
the old boy, who was for high blood, and all that, were at loggerheads
about it. It was not proved, only thought likely, which showed what a
nice character he was; but he might have done worse. I suppose Miss
Partridge would have had a precious lot of babbies; and who knows where
the estate would have been by this time.'

'I believe, Charlie,' he recommenced suddenly, 'there is not such an
unnatural family on record as ours; is there? Ha, ha, ha! It's well to be
distinguished in any line. I forget all the other good things he did; but
he ended by shooting himself through the head in his bed-room, and that
was not the worst thing ever he did.'

And Wylder laughed again, and began to whistle very low--not, I fancy,
for want of thought, but as a sort of accompaniment thereto, for he
suddenly said--

'And where is he staying?'

'Who?--Lake?'

'Yes.'

'I don't know; but I think he mentioned Larkins's house, didn't he? I'm
not quite sure.'

'I suppose he this I'm made of money. By Jove! if he wants to borrow any
I'll surprise him, the cur; I'll talk to him; ha, ha, ha!'

And Wylder chuckled angrily, and the small change in his pocket tinkled
fiercely, as his eye glanced on the graceful captain, who was
entertaining the ladies, no doubt, very agreeably in the distance.




CHAPTER XI.

IN WHICH LAKE UNDER THE TREES OF BRANDON, AND I IN MY CHAMBER, SMOKE OUR
NOCTURNAL CIGARS.


Miss Lake declined the carriage to-night. Her brother was to see her
home, and there was a leave-taking, and the young ladies whispered a word
or two, and kissed, after the manner of their kind. To Captain Lake, Miss
Brandon's adieux were as cold and haughty as her greeting.

'Did you see that?' said Wylder in my ear, with a chuckle; and, wagging
his head, he added, rather loftily for him, 'Miss Brandon, I reckon, has
taken your measure, Master Stanley, as well as I. I wonder what the deuce
the old dowager sees in him. Old women always like rascals.'

And he added something still less complimentary.

I suppose the balance of attraction and repulsion was overcome by Miss
Lake, much as he disliked Stanley, for Wylder followed them out with Lord
Chelford, to help the young lady into her cloak and goloshes, and I found
myself near Miss Brandon for the first time that evening, and much to my
surprise she was first to speak, and that rather strangely.

'You seem to be very sensible, Mr. De Cresseron; pray tell me, frankly,
what do you think of all this?'

'I am not quite sure, Miss Brandon, that I understand your question,' I
replied, enquiringly.

'I mean of the--the family arrangements, in which, as Mr. Wylder's
friend, you seem to take an interest?' she said.

'There can hardly be a second opinion, Miss Brandon; I think it a very
wise measure,' I replied, much surprised.

'Very wise--exactly. But don't these very wise things sometimes turn out
very foolishly? Do you really think your friend, Mr. Wylder, cares about
me?'

'I take that for granted: in the nature of things it can hardly be
otherwise,' I replied, a good deal startled and perplexed by the curious
audacity of her interrogatory.

'It was very foolish of me to expect from Mr. Wylder's friend any other
answer; you are very loyal, Mr. De Cresseron.'

And without awaiting my reply she made some remark which I forget to Lady
Chelford, who sat at a little distance; and, appearing quite absorbed in
her new subject, she placed herself close beside the dowager, and
continued to chat in a low tone.

I was vexed with myself for having managed with so little skill a
conversation which, opened so oddly and frankly, might have placed me on
relations so nearly confidential, with that singular and beautiful girl.
I ought to have rejoiced--but we don't always see what most concerns our
peace. In the meantime I had formed a new idea of her. She was so
unreserved, it seemed, and yet in this directness there was something
almost contemptuous.

By this time Lord Chelford and Wylder returned; and, disgusted rather
with myself, I ruminated on my want of general-ship.

In the meantime, Miss Lake, with her hand on her brother's arm, was
walking swiftly under the trees of the back avenue towards that footpath
which, through wild copse and broken clumps near the park, emerges upon
the still darker road which passes along the wooded glen by the mills,
and skirts the little paling of the recluse lady's garden.

They had not walked far, when Lake suddenly said--

'What do you think of all this, Radie--this particular version, I mean,
of marriage, _à-la-mode_, they are preparing up there?' and he made a
little dip of his cane towards Brandon Hall, over his shoulder. 'I really
don't think Wylder cares twopence about her, or she about him,' and
Stanley Lake laughed gently and sleepily.

'I don't think they pretend to like one another. It is quite understood.
It was all, you know, old Lady Chelford's arrangement: and Dorcas is so
supine, I believe she would allow herself to be given away by anyone, and
to anyone, rather than be at the least trouble. She provokes me.'

'But I thought she liked Sir Harry Bracton: he's a good-looking fellow;
and Queen's Bracton is a very nice thing, you know.'

'Yes, so they said; but that would, I think, have been worse. Something
may be made of Mark Wylder. He has some sense and caution, has not
he?--but Sir Harry is wickedness itself!'

'Why--what has Sir Harry done? That is the way you women run away with
things! If a fellow's been a little bit wild, he's Beelzebub at once.
Bracton's a very good fellow, I can assure you.'

The fact is, Captain Lake, an accomplished player, made a pretty little
revenue of Sir Harry's billiards, which were wild and noisy; and liking
his money, thought he liked himself--a confusion not uncommon.

'I don't know, and can't say, how you fine gentlemen define wickedness:
only, as an obscure female, I speak according to my lights: and he is
generally thought the wickedest man in this county.'

'Well, you know, Radie, women like wicked fellows: it is contrast, I
suppose, but they do; and I'm sure, from what Bracton has said to me--I
know him intimately--that Dorcas likes him, and I can't conceive why they
are not married.'

'It is very happy, for her at least, they are not,' said Rachel, and a
long silence ensued.

Their walk continued silent for the greater part, neither was quite
satisfied with the other. But Rachel at last said--

'Stanley, you meditate some injury to Mark Wylder.'

'I, Radie?' he answered quietly, 'why on earth should you think so?'

'I saw you twice watch him when you thought no one observed you--and I
know your face too well, Stanley, to mistake.'

'Now that's impossible, Radie; for I really don't think I once thought of
him all this evening--except just while we were talking.'

'You keep your secret as usual, Stanley,' said the young lady.

'Really, Radie, you're quite mistaken. I assure you, upon my honour, I've
no secret. You're a very odd girl--why won't you believe me?'

Miss Rachel only glanced across her mufflers on his face. There was a
bright moonlight, broken by the shadows of overhanging boughs and
withered leaves; and the mottled lights and shadows glided oddly across
his pale features. But she saw that he was smiling his sly, sleepy smile,
and she said quietly--

'Well, Stanley, I ask no more--but you don't deceive me.'

'I don't try to. If your feelings indeed had been different, and that you
had not made such a point--you know--'

'Don't insult me, Stanley, by talking again as you did this morning. What
I say is altogether on your own account. Mark my words, you'll find him
too strong for you; aye, and too deep. I see very plainly that _he_
suspects you as I do. You saw it, too, for nothing of that kind escapes
you. Whatever you meditate, he probably anticipates it--you know
best--and you will find him prepared. You have given him time enough. You
were always the same, close, dark, and crooked, and wise in your own
conceit. I am very uneasy about it, whatever it is. _I_ can't help it. It
will happen--and most ominously I feel that you are courting a dreadful
retaliation, and that you will bring on yourself a great misfortune; but
it is quite vain, I know, speaking to you.'

'Really, Radie, you're enough to frighten a poor fellow; you won't mind a
word I say, and go on predicting all manner of mischief between me and
Wylder, the very nature of which I can't surmise. Would you dislike my
smoking a cigar, Radie?'

'Oh, no,' answered the young lady, with a little laugh and a heavy sigh,
for she knew it meant silence, and her dark auguries grew darker.

To my mind there has always been something inexpressibly awful in family
feuds. Mortal hatred seems to deepen and dilate into something diabolical
in these perverted animosities. The mystery of their origin--their
capacity for evolving latent faculties of crime--and the steady vitality
with which they survive the hearse, and speak their deep-mouthed
malignities in every new-born generation, have associated them somehow in
my mind with a spell of life exceeding and distinct from human and a
special Satanic action.

My chamber, as I have mentioned, was upon the third storey. It was one of
many, opening upon the long gallery, which had been the scene, four
generations back, of that unnatural and bloody midnight duel which had
laid one scion of this ancient house in his shroud, and driven another a
fugitive to the moral solitudes of a continental banishment.

Much of the day, as I told you, had been passed among the grisly records
of these old family crimes and hatreds. They had been an ill-conditioned
and not a happy race. When I heard the servant's step traversing that
long gallery, as it seemed to the in haste to be gone, and when all grew
quite silent, I began to feel a dismal sort of sensation, and lighted the
pair of wax candles which I found upon the small writing table. How
wonderful and mysterious is the influence of light! What sort of beings
must those be who hate it?

The floor, more than anything else, showed the great age of the room. It
was warped and arched all along by the wall between the door and the
window. The portion of it which the carpet did not cover showed it to be
oak, dark and rugged. My bed was unexceptionably comfortable, but, in my
then mood, I could have wished it a great deal more modern. Its four
posts were, like the rest of it, oak, well-nigh black, fantastically
turned and carved, with a great urn-like capital and base, and shaped
midway, like a gigantic lance-handle. Its curtains were of thick and
faded tapestry. I was always a lover of such antiquities, but I confess
at that moment I would have vastly preferred a sprightly modern chintz
and a trumpery little French bed in a corner of the Brandon Arms. There
was a great lowering press of oak, and some shelves, with withered green
and gold leather borders. All the furniture belonged to other times.

I would have been glad to hear a step stirring, or a cough even, or the
gabble of servants at a distance. But there was a silence and desertion
in this part of the mansion which, somehow, made me feel that I was
myself a solitary intruder on this level of the vast old house.

I shan't trouble you about my train of thoughts or fancies; but I began
to feel very like a gentleman in a ghost story, watching experimentally
in a haunted chamber. My cigar case was a resource. I was not a bit
afraid of being found out. I did not even take the precaution of smoking
up the chimney. I boldly lighted my cheroot. I peeped through the dense
window curtain there were no shutters. A cold, bright moon was shining
with clear sharp lights and shadows. Everything looked strangely cold and
motionless outside. The sombre old trees, like gigantic hearse plumes,
black and awful. The chapel lay full in view, where so many of the,
strange and equivocal race, under whose ancient roof-tree I then stood,
were lying under their tombstones.

Somehow, I had grown nervous. A little bit of plaster tumbled down the
chimney, and startled me confoundedly. Then some time after, I fancied I
heard a creaking step on the lobby outside, and, candle in hand, opened
the door, and looked out with an odd sort of expectation, and a rather
agreeable disappointment, upon vacancy.




CHAPTER XII.

IN WHICH UNCLE LORNE TROUBLES ME.


I was growing most uncomfortably like one of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe's
heroes--a nervous race of demigods.

I walked like a sentinel up and down my chamber, puffing leisurely the
solemn incense, and trying to think of the Opera and my essay on
'Paradise Lost,' and other pleasant subjects. But it would not do. Every
now and then, as I turned towards the door, I fancied I saw it softly
close. I can't the least say whether it was altogether fancy. It was with
the corner, or as the Italians have it, the 'tail' of my eye that I saw,
or imagined that I saw, this trifling but unpleasant movement.

I called out once or twice sharply--'Come in!' 'Who's there?' 'Who's
that?' and so forth, without any sort of effect, except that unpleasant
reaction upon the nerves which follows the sound of one's own voice in a
solitude of this kind.

The fact is I did not myself believe in that stealthy motion of my door,
and set it down to one of those illusions which I have sometimes
succeeded in analysing--a half-seen combination of objects which, rightly
placed in the due relations of perspective, have no mutual connection
whatever.

So I ceased to challenge the unearthly inquisitor, and allowed him, after
a while, serenely enough, to peep as I turned my back, or to withdraw
again as I made my regular right-about face.

I had now got half-way in my second cheroot, and the clock clanged 'one.'
It was a very still night, and the prolonged boom vibrated strangely in
my excited ears and brain. I had never been quite such an ass before; but
I do assure you I was now in an extremely unpleasant state. One o'clock
was better, however, than twelve. Although, by Jove! the bell was
'beating one,' as I remember, precisely as that king of ghosts, old
Hamlet, revisited the glimpses of the moon, upon the famous platform of
Elsinore.

I had pondered too long over the lore of this Satanic family, and drunk
very strong tea, I suppose. I could not get my nerves into a comfortable
state, and cheerful thoughts refused to inhabit the darkened chamber of
my brain. As I stood in a sort of reverie, looking straight upon the
door, I saw--and this time there could be no mistake whatsoever--the
handle--the only modern thing about it--slowly turned, and the door
itself as slowly pushed about a quarter open.

I do not know what exclamation I made. The door was shut instantly, and I
found myself standing at it, and looking out upon the lobby, with a
candle in my hand, and actually freezing with foolish horror.

I was looking towards the stair-head. The passage was empty and ended in
utter darkness. I glanced the other way, and thought I saw--though not
distinctly--in the distance a white figure, not gliding in the
conventional way, but limping off, with a sort of jerky motion, and, in a
second or two, quite lost in darkness.

I got into my room again, and shut the door with a clap that sounded
loudly and unnaturally through the dismal quiet that surrounded me, and
stood with my hand on the handle, with the instinct of resistance.

I felt uncomfortable; and I would have secured the door, but there was no
sort of fastening within. So I paused. I did not mind looking out again.
To tell you the plain truth, I was just a little bit afraid. Then I grew
angry at having been put into such remote, and, possibly, suspected
quarters, and then my comfortable scepticism supervened. I was yet to
learn a great deal about this visitation.

So, in due course having smoked my cheroot, I jerked the stump into the
fire. Of course I could not think of depriving myself of candle-light;
and being already of a thoughtful, old-bachelor temperament, and averse
from burning houses, I placed one of my tall wax-lights in a basin on the
table by my bed--in which I soon effected a lodgment, and lay with a
comparative sense of security.

Then I heard two o'clock strike; but shortly after, as I suppose, sleep
overtook me, and I have no distinct idea for how long my slumber lasted.
The fire was very low when I awoke, and saw a figure--and a very odd
one--seated by the embers, and stooping over the grate, with a pair of
long hands expanded, as it seemed, to catch the warmth of the sinking
fire.

It was that of a very tall old man, entirely dressed in white flannel--a
very long spencer, and some sort of white swathing about his head. His
back was toward me; and he stooped without the slightest motion over the
fire-place, in the attitude I have described.

As I looked, he suddenly turned toward me, and fixed upon me a cold, and
as it seemed, a wrathful gaze, over his shoulder. It was a bleached and a
long-chinned face--the countenance of Lorne's portrait--only more faded,
sinister, and apathetic. And having, as it were, secured its awful
command over me by a protracted gaze, he rose, supernaturally lean and
tall, and drew near the side of my bed.

I continued to stare upon this apparition with the most dreadful
fascination I ever experienced in my life. For two or three seconds I
literally could not move. When I did, I am not ashamed to confess, it was
to plunge my head under the bed-clothes, with the childish instinct of
terror; and there I lay breathless, for what seemed to me not far from
ten minutes, during which there was no sound, nor other symptom of its
presence.

On a sudden the bed-clothes were gently lifted at my feet, and I sprang
backwards, sitting upright against the back of the bed, and once more
under the gaze of that long-chinned old man.

A voice, as peculiar as the appearance of the figure, said:--

'You are in my bed--I died in it a great many years ago. I am Uncle
Lorne; and when I am not here, a devil goes up and down in the room. See!
he had his face to your ear when I came in. I came from Dorcas Brandon's
bed-chamber door, where her evil angel told me a thing;--and Mark Wylder
must not seek to marry her, for he will be buried alive if he does, and
he will, maybe, never get up again. Say your prayers when I go out, and
come here no more.'

He paused, as if these incredible words were to sink into my memory; and
then, in the same tone, and with the same countenance, he asked--

'Is the blood on my forehead?'

I don't know whether I answered.

'So soon as a calamity is within twelve hours, the blood comes upon my
forehead, as they found me in the morning--it is a sign.'

The old man then drew back slowly, and disappeared behind the curtains at
the foot of the bed, and I saw no more of him during the rest of that
odious night.

So long as this apparition remained before me, I never doubted its being
supernatural. I don't think mortal ever suffered horror more intense. My
very hair was dripping with a cold moisture. For some seconds I hardly
knew where I was. But soon a reaction came, and I felt convinced that the
apparition was a living man. It was no process of reason or philosophy,
but simply I became persuaded of it, and something like rage overcame my
terrors.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE PONY CARRIAGE


So soon as daylight came, I made a swift cold water toilet, and got out
into the open air, with a solemn resolution to see the hated interior of
that bed-room no more. When I met Lord Chelford in his early walk that
morning, I'm sure I looked myself like a ghost--at all events, very wild
and seedy--for he asked me, more seriously than usual, how I was; and I
think I would have told him the story of my adventure, despite the secret
ridicule with which, I fancied, he would receive it, had it not been for
a certain insurmountable disgust and horror which held me tongue-tied
upon the affair.

I told him, however, that I had dreamed dreams, and was restless and
uncomfortable in my present berth, and begged his interest with the
housekeeper to have my quarters changed to the lower storey--quite
resolved to remove to the 'Brandon Arms,' rather than encounter another
such night as I had passed.

Stanley Lake did not appear that day; Wylder was glowering and
abstracted--worse company than usual; and Rachel seemed to have quite
passed from his recollection.

While Rachel Lake was, as usual, busy in her little garden that day, Lord
Chelford, on his way to the town, by the pretty mill-road, took off his
hat to her with a smiling salutation, and leaning on the paling, he
said--

'I often wonder how you make your flowers grow here--you have so little
sun among the trees--and yet, it is so pretty and flowery; it remains in
my memory as if the sun were always shining specially on this little
garden.'

Miss Lake laughed.

'I am very proud of it. They try not to blow, but I never let them alone
till they do. See all my watering-pots, and pruning-scissors, my sticks,
and bass-mat, and glass covers. Skill and industry conquer churlish
nature--and this is my Versailles.'

'I don't believe in those sticks, and scissors, and watering-pots. You
won't tell your secret; but I'm sure it's an influence--you smile and
whisper to them.'

She smiled--without raising her eyes--on the flower she was tying up;
and, indeed, it was such a smile as must have made it happy--and she
said, gaily--

'You forget that Lord Chelford passes this way sometimes, and shines upon
them, too.'

'No, he's a dull, earthly dog; and if he shines here, it is only in
reflected light'

'Margery, child, fetch me the scissors.'

And a hobble-de-hoy of a girl, with round eyes, and a long white-apron,
and bare arms, came down the little walk, and--eyeing the peer with an
awful curiosity--presented the shears to the charming Atropos, who
clipped off the withered blossoms that had bloomed their hour, and were
to cumber the stalk no more.

'Now, you see what art may do; how _passée_ this creature was till I made
her toilet, and how wonderfully the poor old beauty looks now,' and she
glanced complacently at the plant she had just trimmed.

'Well, it is young again and beautiful; but no--I have no faith in the
scissors; I still believe in the influence--from the tips of your
fingers, your looks, and tones. Flowers, like fairies, have their
favourites, whom they smile on and obey; and I think this is a haunted
glen--trees, flowers, all have an intelligence and a feeling--and I am
sure you see wonderful things, by moonlight, from your window.'

With a strange meaning echo, those words returned to her afterwards--'I'm
sure you see wonderful things, by moonlight, from your window.'

But no matter; the winged words--making pleasant music--flew pleasantly
away, now among transparent leaves and glimmering sun; by-and-by, in
moonlight, they will return to the casement piping the same tune, in
ghostly tones.

And as they chatted in this strain, Rachel paused on a sudden, with
upraised hand, listening pleasantly.

'I hear the pony-carriage; Dorcas is coming,' she said.

And the tinkle of tiny wheels, coming down the road, was audible.

'There's a pleasant sense of adventure, too, in the midst of your
seclusion. Sudden arrivals and passing pilgrims, like me, leaning over
the paling, and refreshed by the glimpse the rogue steals of this
charming oratory. Yes; here comes the fair Brunnisende.'

And he made his salutation. Miss Brandon smiled from under her gipsy-hat
very pleasantly for her.

'Will you come with me for a drive, Radie?' she asked.

'Yes, dear--delighted. Margery, bring my gloves and cloak.' And she
unpinned the faded silk shawl that did duty in the garden, and drew off
her gauntlets, and showed her pretty hands; and Margery popped her cloak
on her shoulders, and the young lady pulled on her gloves. All ready in a
moment, like a young lady of energy; and chatting merrily she sat down
beside her cousin, who held the reins. As there were no more gates to
open, Miss Brandon dismissed the servant, who stood at the ponies' heads,
and who, touching his hat with his white glove, received his _congé_, and
strode with willing steps up the road.

'Will you take me for your footman as far as the town?' asked Lord
Chelford; so, with permission, up he jumped behind, and away they
whirled, close over the ground, on toy wheels ringing merrily on the
shingle, he leaning over the back and chatting pleasantly with the young
ladies as they drove on.

They drew up at the Brandon Arms, and little girls courtesied at doors,
and householders peeped from their windows, not standing close to the
panes, but respectfully back, at the great lady and the nobleman, who was
now taking his leave.

And next they pulled up at that official rendezvous, with white-washed
front--and 'post-office,' in white letters on a brown board over its
door, and its black, hinged window-pane, through which Mr. Driver--or, in
his absence, Miss Anne Driver--answered questions, and transacted affairs
officially.

In the rear of this establishment were kept some dogs of Lawyer Larkin's;
and just as the ladies arrived, that person emerged, looking
overpoweringly gentlemanlike, in a white hat, gray paletot, lavender
trowsers, and white riding gloves. He was in a righteous and dignified
way pleased to present himself in so becoming a costume, and moreover in
good company, for Stanley Lake was going with him to Dutton for a day's
sport, which neither of them cared for. But Stanley hoped to pump the
attorney, and the attorney, I'm afraid, liked being associated with the
fashionable captain; and so they were each pleased in the way that suited
them.

The attorney, being long as well as lank, had to stoop under the doorway,
but drew himself up handsomely on coming out, and assumed his easy,
high-bred style, which, although he was not aware of it, was very nearly
insupportable, and smiled very engagingly, and meant to talk a little
about the weather; but Miss Brandon made him one of her gravest and
slightest bows, and suddenly saw Mrs. Brown at her shop door on the other
side, and had a word to say to her.

And now Stanley Lake drew up in the tax-cart, and greeted the ladies, and
told them how he meant to pass the day; and the dogs being put in, and
the attorney, I'm afraid a little spited at his reception, in possession
of the reins, they drove down the little street at a great pace, and
disappeared round the corner; and in a minute more the young ladies, in
the opposite direction, resumed their drive. The ponies, being grave and
trustworthy, and having the road quite to themselves, needed little
looking after, and Miss Brandon was free to converse with her companion.

'I think, Rachel, you have a lover,' she said.

'Only a bachelor, I'm afraid, as my poor Margery calls the young
gentleman who takes her out for a walk on a Sunday, and I fear means
nothing more.'

'This is the second time I've found Chelford talking to you, Rachel, at
the door of your pretty little garden.'

Rachel laughed.

'Suppose, some fine day, he should put his hand over the paling, and take
yours, and make you a speech.'

'You romantic darling,' she said, 'don't you know that peers and princes
have quite given over marrying simple maidens of low estate for love and
liking, and understand match-making better than you or I; though I could
give a tolerable account of myself, after the manner of the white cat in
the story, which I think is a pattern of frankness and modest dignity.
I'd say with a courtesy--"Think not, prince, that I have always been a
cat, and that my birth is obscure; my father was king of six kingdoms,
and loved my mother tenderly," and so forth.'

'Rachel, I like you,' interrupted the dark beauty, fixing her large eyes,
from which not light, but, as it were, a rich shadow fell softly on her
companion. It was the first time she had made any such confession. Rachel
returned her look as frankly, with an amused smile, and then said, with a
comic little toss of her head--

'Well, Dorcas, I don't see why you should not, though I don't know why
you say so.'

'You're not like other people; you don't complain, and you're not bitter,
although you have had great misfortunes, my poor Rachel.'

There be ladies, young and old, who, the moment they are pitied, though
never so cheerful before, will forthwith dissolve in tears. But that was
not Rachel's way; she only looked at her with a good-humoured but grave
curiosity for a few seconds, and then said, with rather a kindly smile--

'And now, Dorcas, I like you.'

Dorcas made no answer, but put her arm round Rachel's neck, and kissed
her; Dorcas made two kisses of it, and Rachel one, but it was cousinly
and kindly; and Rachel laughed a soft little laugh after it, looking
amused and very lovingly on her cousin; but she was a bold lass, and not
given in anywise to the melting mood, and said gaily, with her open hand
still caressingly on Dorcas's waist--

'I make a very good nun, Dorcas, as I told Stanley the other day. I
sometimes, indeed, receive a male visitor, at the other side of the
paling, which is my grille; but to change my way of life is a dream that
does not trouble me. Happy the girl--and I am one--who cannot like until
she is first beloved. Don't you remember poor, pale Winnie, the maid who
used to take us on our walks all the summer at Dawling; how she used to
pluck the leaves from the flowers, like Faust's Marguerite, saying, "He
loves me a little--passionately, not at all." Now if I were loved
passionately, I might love a little; and if loved a little--it should be
not at all.'

They had the road all to themselves, and were going at a walk up an
ascent, so the reins lay loosely on the ponies' necks and Dorcas looked
with an untold meaning in her proud face, on her cousin, and seemed on
the point of speaking, but she changed her mind.

'And so Dorcas, as swains are seldom passionately in love with so small a
pittance as mine, I think I shall mature into a queer old maid, and take
all the little Wylders, masters and misses, with your leave, for their
walks, and help to make their pinafores.' Whereupon Miss Dorcas put her
ponies into a very quick trot, and became absorbed in her driving.




CHAPTER XIV.

IN WHICH VARIOUS PERSONS GIVE THEIR OPINIONS OF CAPTAIN STANLEY LAKE.


'Stanley is an odd creature,' said Rachel, so soon as another slight
incline brought them to a walk; 'I can't conceive why he has come down
here, or what he can possibly want of that disagreeable lawyer. They have
got dogs and guns, and are going, of course, to shoot; but he does not
care for shooting, and I don't think Mr. Larkin's society can amuse him.
Stanley is clever and cunning, I think, but he is neither wise nor frank.
He never tells me his plans, though he must know--he _does_ know--I love
him; yes, he's a strange mixture of suspicion and imprudence. He's
wonderfully reserved. I am certain he trusts no one on earth, and at the
same time, except in his confidences, he's the rashest man living. If he
were like Lord Chelford, or even like our good vicar--not in piety, for
poor Stanley's training, like my own, was sadly neglected there--I mean
in a few manly points of character, I should be quite happy, I think, in
my solitary nook.'

'Is he so very odd?' said Miss Brandon, coldly.

'I only know he makes me often very uncomfortable,' answered Rachel. 'I
never mind what he tells me, for I think he likes to mislead everybody;
and I have been two often duped by him to trust what he says. I only know
that his visit to Gylingden must have been made with some serious
purpose, and his ideas are all so rash and violent.'

'He was at Donnyston for ten days, I think, when I was there, and seemed
clever. They had charades and _proverbes dramatiques_. I'm no judge, but
the people who understood it, said he was very good.'

'Oh! yes he is clever; I knew he was at Donnyston, but he did not mention
he had seen you there; he only told me he had met you pretty often when
you were at Lady Alton's last season.'

'Yes, in town,' she answered, a little drily.

While these young ladies are discussing Stanley Lake, I may be permitted
to mention my own estimate of that agreeable young person.

Captain Lake was a gentleman and an officer, and of course an honourable
man; but somehow I should not have liked to buy a horse from him. He was
very gentlemanlike in appearance, and even elegant; but I never liked
him, although he undoubtedly had a superficial fascination. I always
thought, when in his company, of old Lord Holland's silk stocking with
something unpleasant in it. I think, in fact, he was destitute of those
fine moral instincts which are born with men, but never acquired; and in
his way of estimating his fellow men, and the canons of honour, there was
occasionally perceptible a faint flavour of the villainous, and an
undefined savour, at times, of brimstone. I know also that when his
temper, which was nothing very remarkable, was excited, he could be
savage and brutal enough; and I believe he had often been violent and
cowardly in his altercations with his sister--so, at least, two or three
people, who were versed in the scandals of the family, affirmed. But it
is a censorious world, and I can only speak positively of my own
sensations in his company. His morality, however, I suppose, was quite
good enough for the world, and he had never committed himself in any of
those ways of which that respectable tribunal takes cognizance.

'So that d--d fellow Lake is down here still; and that stupid, scheming
lubber, Larkin, driving him about in his tax-cart, instead of minding his
business. I could not see him to-day. That sort of thing won't answer me;
and he _is_ staying at Larkin's house, I find.' Wylder was talking to me
on the door steps after dinner, having in a rather sulky way swallowed
more than his usual modicum of Madeira, and his remarks were delivered
interruptedly--two or three puffs of his cigar interposed between each
sentence.

'I suppose he expects to be asked to the wedding. He _may_ expect--ha,
ha, ha! You don't know that lad as I do.'

Then there came a second cigar, and some little time in lighting, and
full twenty enjoyable puffs before he resumed.

'Now, you're a moral man, Charlie, tell me really what you think of a
fellow marrying a girl he does not care that for,' and he snapt his
fingers. 'Just for the sake of her estate--it's the way of the world, of
course, and all that--but, is not it a little bit shabby, don't you
think? Eh? Ha, ha, ha!'

'I'll not debate with you, Wylder, on that stupid old question. It's the
way of the world, as you say, and there's an end of it.'

'They say she's such a beauty! Well, so I believe she is, but I can't
fancy her. Now you must not be angry. I'm not a poet like
you--book-learned, you know; and she's too solemn by half, and grand. I
wish she was different. That other girl, Rachel--she's a devilish
handsome craft. I wish almost she was not here at all, or I wish she was
in Dorcas's shoes.'

'Nonsense, Wylder! stop this stuff; and it is growing cold throw away
that cigar, and come in.'

'In a minute. No, I assure you, I'm not joking. Hang it! I must talk to
some one. I'm devilish uncomfortable about this grand match. I wish I had
not been led into it I don't think I'd make a good husband to any woman I
did not fancy, and where's the good of making a girl unhappy, eh?'

'Tut, Wylder, you ought to have thought of all that before. I don't like
your talking in this strain when you know it is too late to recede;
besides, you are the luckiest fellow in creation. Upon my word, I don't
know why the girl marries you; you can't suppose that she could not marry
much better, and if you have not made up your mind to break off, of which
the world would form but one opinion, you had better not speak in that
way any more.'

'Why, it was only to you, Charlie, and to tell you the truth, I do
believe it is the best thing for me; but I suppose every fellow feels a
little queer when he is going to be spliced, a little bit nervous, eh?
But you are right--and I'm right, and we are all right--it _is_ the best
thing for us both. It will make a deuced fine estate; but hang it! you
know a fellow's never satisfied. And I suppose I'm a bit put out by that
disreputable dog's being here--I mean Lake; not that I need care more
than Dorcas, or anyone else; but he's no credit to the family, you see,
and I never could abide him. I've half a mind, Charlie, to tell you a
thing; but hang it! you're such a demure old maid of a chap. Will you
have a cigar?'

'No.'

'Well, I believe two's enough for me,' and he looked up at the stars.

'I've a notion of running up to town, only for a day or two, before this
business comes off, just on the sly; you'll not mention it, and I'll have
a word with Lake, quite friendly, of course; but I'll shut him up, and
that's all. I wonder he did not dine here to-day. Did you ever see so
pushing a brute?'

So Wylder chucked away his cigar, and stood for a minute with his hands
in his pockets looking up at the stars, as if reading fortunes there.

I had an unpleasant feeling that Mark Wylder was about some mischief--a
suspicion that some game of mine and countermine was going on between him
and Lake, to which I had no clue whatsoever.

Mark had the frankness of callosity, and could recount his evil deeds and
confess his vices with hilarity and detail, and was prompt to take his
part in a lark, and was a remarkably hard hitter, and never shrank from
the brunt of the row; and with these fine qualities, and a much superior
knowledge of the ways of the flash world, had commanded my boyish
reverence and a general popularity among strangers. But, with all this,
he could be as secret as the sea with which he was conversant, and as
hard as a stonewall, when it answered his purpose. He had no lack of
cunning, and a convenient fund of cool cruelty when that stoical
attribute was called for. Years, I dare say, and a hard life and
profligacy, and command, had not made him less selfish or more humane, or
abated his craft and resolution.

If one could only see it, the manoeuvring and the ultimate collision of
two such generals as he and Lake would be worth observing.

I dare say my last night's adventure tended to make me more nervous and
prone to evil anticipation. And although my quarters had been changed to
the lower storey, I grew uncomfortable as it waxed late, and half
regretted that I had not migrated to the 'Brandon Arms.'

Uncle Lorne, however, made me no visit that night. Once or twice I
fancied something, and started up in my bed. It was fancy, merely. What
state had I really been in, when I saw that long-chinned apparition of
the pale portrait? Many a wiser man than I had been mystified by
dyspepsia and melancholic vapours.




CHAPTER XV.

DORCAS SHOWS HER JEWELS TO MISS LAKE.


Stanley Lake and his sister dined next day at Brandon. Under the cold
shadow of Lady Chelford, the proprieties flourished, and generally very
little else. Awful she was, and prompt to lecture young people before
their peers, and spoke her mind with fearful directness and precision.
But sometimes she would talk, and treat her hearers to her recollections,
and recount anecdotes with a sort of grim cleverness, not wholly
unamusing.

She did not like Wylder, I thought, although she had been the inventor
and constructor of the family alliance of which he was the hero. I did
not venture to cultivate her; and Miss Brandon had been, from the first,
specially cold and repellent to Captain Lake. There was nothing very
genial or promising, therefore, in the relations of our little party, and
I did not expect a very agreeable evening.

Notwithstanding all this, however, our dinner was, on the whole, much
pleasanter than I anticipated. Stanley Lake could be very amusing; but I
doubt if our talk would quite stand the test of print. I often thought if
one of those artists who photograph language and thought--the quiet,
clever 'reporters,' to whom England is obliged for so much of her daily
entertainment, of her social knowledge, and her political safety, were,
pencil in hand, to ensconce himself behind the arras, and present us, at
the close of the agreeable banquet, with a literal transcript of the
feast of reason, which we give and take with so much complacency--whether
it would quite satisfy us upon reconsideration.

When I entered the drawing-room after dinner, Lord Chelford was plainly
arguing a point with the young ladies, and by the time I drew near, it
was Miss Lake's turn to speak.

'Flattering of mankind, I am sure, I have no talent for; and without
flattering and wheedling you'll never have conjugal obedience. Don't you
remember Robin Hood? how--

  'The mother of Robin said to her husband,
  My honey, my love, and my dear.'

And all this for leave to ride with her son to see her own brother at
Gamwell.'

'I remember,' said Dorcas, with a smile. 'I wonder what has become of
that old book, with its odd little woodcuts.

  'And he said, I grant thee thy boon, gentle Joan!
  Take one of my horses straightway.'

'Well, though the book is lost, we retain the moral, you see,' said
Rachel with a little laugh; 'and it has always seemed to me that if it
had not been necessary to say, "my honey, my love, and my dear," that
good soul would not have said it, and you may be pretty sure that if she
had not, and with the suitable by-play too, she might not have ridden to
Gamwell that day.'

'And you don't think _you_ could have persuaded yourself to repeat that
little charm, which obtained her boon and one of his horses straightway?'
said Lord Chelford.

'Well, I don't know what a great temptation and a contumacious husband
might bring one to; but I'm afraid I'm a stubborn creature, and have not
the feminine gift of flattery. If, indeed, he felt his inferiority and
owned his dependence, I think I might, perhaps, have called him "my
honey, my love, and my dear," and encouraged and comforted him; but to
buy my personal liberty, and the right to visit my brother at
Gamwell--never!'

And yet she looked, Lord Chelford thought, very goodhumoured and
pleasant, and he fancied a smile from her might do more with some men
than all gentle Joan's honeyed vocabulary.

'I own,' said Lord Chelford, laughing, 'that, from prejudice, I suppose,
I am in favour of the apostolic method, and stand up for the divine right
of my sex; but then, don't you see, it is your own fault, if you make it
a question of right, when you may make it altogether one of fascination?'

'Who, pray, is disputing the husband's right to rule?' demanded old Lady
Chelford unexpectedly.

'I am very timidly defending it against very serious odds,' answered her
son.

'Tut, tut! my dears, what's all this; you _must_ obey your husbands,'
cried the dowager, who put down nonsense with a high hand, and had ruled
her lord with a rod of iron.

'That's no tradition of the Brandons,' said Miss Dorcas, quietly.

'The Brandons--pooh! my dear--it is time the Brandons should grow like
other people. Hitherto, the Brandon men have all, without exception, been
the wickedest in all England, and the women the handsomest and the most
self-willed. Of course the men could not be obeyed in all things, nor the
women disobeyed. I'm a Brandon myself, Dorcas, so I've a right to speak.
But the words are precise--honour and obey--and obey you _must_; though,
of course you may argue a point, if need be, and let your husband hear
reason.'

And, having ruled the point, old Lady Chelford leaned back and resumed
her doze.

There was no longer anything playful in Dorcas's look. On the contrary,
something fierce and lurid, which I thought wonderfully becoming; and
after a little she said--

'I promised, Rachel, to show you my jewels. Come now--will you?--and see
them.'

And she placed Rachel's hand on her arm, and the two young ladies
departed.

'Are you well, dear?' asked Rachel when they reached her room.

Dorcas was very pale, and her gaze was stern, and something undefinably
wild in her quietude.

'What day of the month is this?' said Dorcas.

'The eighth--is not it?--yes, the eighth,' answered Rachel.

'And our marriage is fixed for the twenty-second--just a fortnight hence.
I am going to tell you, Rachel, what I have resolved on.'

'How really beautiful these diamonds are!--quite superb.'

'Yes,' said Dorcas, opening the jewel-cases, which she had taken from her
cabinet, one after the other.

'And these pearls! how very magnificent! I had no idea Mark Wylder's
taste was so exquisite.'

'Yes, very magnificent, I suppose.'

'How charming--quite regal--you will look, Dorcas!'

Dorcas smiled strangely, and her bosom heaved a little, Rachel thought.
Was it elation, or was there not something wildly bitter gleaming in that
smile?

'I _must_ look a little longer at these diamonds.'

'As long, dear, as you please. You are not likely, Rachel, to see them
again.'

From the blue flash of the brilliants Rachel in honest amazement raised
her eyes to her cousin's face. The same pale smile was there; the look
was oracular and painful. Had she overheard a part of that unworthy talk
of Wylder's at the dinner-table, the day before, and mistaken Rachel's
share in the dialogue?

And Dorcas said--

'You have heard of the music on the waters that lures mariners to
destruction. The pilot leaves the rudder, and leans over the prow, and
listens. They steer no more, but drive before the wind; and what care
they for wreck or drowning?'

I suppose it was the same smile; but in Rachel s eyes, as pictures will,
it changed its character with her own change of thought, and now it
seemed the pale rapt smile of one who hears music far off, or sees a
vision.

'Rachel, dear, I sometimes think there is an evil genius attendant on our
family,' continued Dorcas in the same subdued tone, which, in its very
sweetness, had so sinister a sound in Rachel's ear. 'From mother to
child, from child to grandchild, the same influence continues; and, one
after another, wrecks the daughters of our family--a wayward family, and
full of misery. Here I stand, forewarned, with my eyes open, determinedly
following in the funereal footsteps of those who have gone their way
before me. These jewels all go back to Mr. Wylder. He never can be
anything to me. I was, I thought, to build up our house. I am going, I
think, to lay it in the dust. With the spirit of the insane, I feel the
spirit of a prophetess, too, and I see the sorrow that awaits me. You
will see.'

'Dorcas, darling, you are certainly ill. What is the matter?'

'No, dear Rachel, not ill, only maybe agitated a little. You must not
touch the bell--listen to me; but first promise, so help you Heaven, you
will keep my secret.'

'I do promise, indeed Dorcas, I swear I'll not repeat one word you tell
me.'

'It has been a vain struggle. I know he's a bad man, a worthless
man--selfish, cruel, maybe. Love is not blind with me, but quite insane.
He does not know, nor you, nor anyone; and now, Rachel, I tell you what
was unknown to all but myself and Heaven--looking neither for counsel,
nor for pity, nor for sympathy, but because I must, and you have sworn to
keep my secret. I love your brother. Rachel, you must try to like me.'

She threw her arms round her cousin's neck, and Rachel felt in her
embrace the vibration of an agony.

She was herself so astonished that for a good while she could hardly
collect her thoughts or believe her senses. Was it credible? Stanley!
whom she had received with a coldness, if not aversion, so marked, that,
if he had a spark of Rachel's spirit, he would never have approached her
more! Then came the thought--perhaps they understood one another, and
that was the meaning of Stanley's unexpected visit?

'Well, Dorcas, dear, I _am_ utterly amazed. But does Stanley--he can
hardly hope?'

Dorcas removed her arms from her cousin's neck; her face was pale, and
her cheeks wet with tears, which she did not wipe away.

'Sit down by me, Rachel. No, _he_ does _not_ like _me_--that is--I don't
know; but, I am sure, he can't suspect that I like him. It was my
determination it should not be. I resolved, Rachel, quite to extinguish
the madness; but I could not. It was not his doing, nor mine, but
something else. There are some families, I think, too wicked for Heaven
to protect, and they are given over to the arts of those who hated them
in life and pursue them after death; and this is the meaning of the curse
that has always followed us. No good will ever happen us, and I must go
like the rest.'

There was a short silence, and Rachel gazed on the carpet in troubled
reflection, and then, with an anxious look, she took her cousin's hand,
and said--

'Dorcas, you must think of this no more. I am speaking against my
brother's interest. But you must not sacrifice yourself, your fortune,
and your _happiness_, to a shadow; whatever his means are, they hardly
suffice for his personal expenses--indeed, they don't suffice, for I have
had to help him. But that is all trifling compared with other
considerations. I am his sister, and, though he has shown little love for
me, I am not without affection--and strong affection--for him; but I must
and will speak frankly. You could not, I don't think anyone could be
happy with Stanley for her husband. You don't know him: he's profligate;
he's ill-tempered; he's cold; he's selfish; he's secret. He was a spoiled
boy, totally without moral education; he might, perhaps, have been very
different, but he _is what_ he is, and I don't think he'll ever change.'

'He may be what he will. It is vain reasoning with that which is not
reason; the battle is over; possibly he may never know, and that might be
best for both--but be it how it may, I will never marry anyone else.'

'Dorcas, dear, you must not speak to Lady Chelford, or to Mark Wylder,
to-night. It is too serious a step to be taken in haste.'

'There has been no haste, Rachel, and there can be no change.'

'And what reason can you give?'

'None; no reason,' said Dorcas, slowly.

'Wylder would have been suitable in point of wealth. Not so well, I am
sure, as you _might_ have married; but neither would _he_ be a good
husband, though not so bad as Stanley; and I do not think that Mark
Wylder will quietly submit to his disappointment.'

'It was to have been simply a marriage of two estates. It was old Lady
Chelford's plan. I have now formed mine, and all that's over. Let him do
what he will--I believe a lawsuit is his worst revenge--I'm indifferent.'

Just then a knock came to the chamber door.

'Come in,' said Miss Brandon: and her maid entered to say that the
carriage, please Ma'am, was at the door to take Miss Lake home.

'I had no idea it was so late,' said Rachel.

'Stay, dear, don't go for a moment. Jones, bring Miss Lake's cloak and
bonnet here. And now, dear,' she said, after a little pause, 'you'll
remember your solemn promise?'

'I never broke my word, dear Dorcas; your secret is safe.'

'And, Rachel, try to like me.'

'I love you better, Dorcas, than I thought I ever could. Good-night,
dear.'

'Good-night.'

And the young ladies parted with a kiss, and then another.




CHAPTER XVI.

'JENNY, PUT THE KETTLE ON.'


Old Lady Chelford, having despatched a sharp and unceremonious message to
her young kinswoman, absent without leave, warning her, in effect, that
if she returned to the drawing-room it would be to preside, alone, over
gentlemen, departed, somewhat to our secret relief.

Upon this, on Lord Chelford's motion, in our forlorn condition, we went
to the billiard-room, and there, under the bright lights, and the gay
influence of that wonderful game, we forgot our cares, and became
excellent friends apparently--'cuts,' 'canons,' 'screws,' 'misses,'
'flukes'--Lord Chelford joked, Wylder 'chaffed,' even Lake seemed to
enjoy himself; and the game proceeded with animation and no lack of
laughter, beguiling the watches of the night; and we were all amazed, at
length, to find how very late it was. So we laid down our cues, with the
customary ejaculations of surprise.

We declined wine and water, and all other creature comforts. Wylder and
Lake had a walk before them, and we bid Lord Chelford 'good-night' in the
passage, and I walked with them through the deserted and nearly darkened
rooms.

Our talk grew slow, and our spirits subsided in this changed and
tenebrose scenery. The void and the darkness brought back, I suppose, my
recollection of the dubious terms on which these young men stood, and a
feeling of the hollowness and delusion of the genial hours just passed
under the brilliant lights, together with an unpleasant sense of
apprehension.

On coming out upon the door-steps we all grew silent.

The moon was low, and its yellow disk seemed, as it sometimes does,
dilated to a wondrous breadth, as its edge touched the black outline of
the distant woods. I half believe in presentiments, and I felt one now,
in the chill air, the sudden silence, and the watchful gaze of the moon.
I suspect that Wylder and Lake, too, felt something of the same ominous
qualm, for I thought their faces looked gloomy in the light, as they
stood together buttoning their loose wrappers and lighting their cigars.

With a 'good-night, good-night,' we parted, and I heard their retreating
steps crunching along the walk that led to Redman's Hollow, and by Miss
Rachel's quiet habitation. I heard no talking, such as comes between
whiffs with friendly smokers, side by side; and, silent as mutes at a
funeral, they walked on, and soon the fall of their footsteps was heard
no more, and I re-entered the hall and shut the door. The level moonlight
was shining through the stained heraldic window, and fell bright on the
portrait of Uncle Lorne, at the other end, throwing a patch of red, like
a stain, on one side of its pale forehead.

I had forgot, at the moment, that the ill-omened portrait hung there, and
a sudden horror smote me. I thought of what my vision said of the 'blood
upon my forehead,' and, by Jove! there it was!

At this moment the large white Marseilles waistcoat of grave Mr. Larcom
appeared, followed by a tall powdered footman, and their candles and
business-like proceedings frightened away the phantoms. So I withdrew to
my chamber, where, I am glad to say, I saw nothing of Uncle Lorne.

Miss Lake, as she drove that night toward Gylingden, said little to the
vicar's wife, whose good husband had been away to Friars, making a
sick-call, and she prattled on very merrily about his frugal little tea
awaiting his late return, and asked her twice on the way home whether it
was half-past nine, for she did not boast a watch; and in the midst of
her prattle was peeping at the landmarks of their progress.

'Oh, I'm so glad--here's the finger post, at last!' and then--'Well, here
we are at the "Cat and Fiddle;" I thought we'd never pass it.'

And, at last, the brougham stopped at the little garden-gate, at the far
end of the village; and the good little mamma called to her
maid-of-all-work from the window--

'Has the master come yet, Becky?'

'No, Ma'am, please.'

And I think she offered up a little thanksgiving, she so longed to give
him his tea herself; and then she asked--

'Is our precious mannikin asleep?' Which also being answered happily, as
it should be, she bid her fussy adieux, with a merry smile, and hurried,
gabbling amicably with her handmaid, across the little flower-garden; and
Miss Lake was shut in and drove on alone, under the thick canopy of old
trees, and up the mill-road, lighted by the flashing lamps, to her own
little precincts, and was, in turn, at home--solitary, triste, but still
her home.

'Get to your bed, Margery, child, you are sleepy,' said the young lady
kindly to her queer little maid-of-honour. Rachel was one of those
persons who, no matter what may be upon their minds, are quickly
impressible by the scenes in which they find themselves. She stepped into
her little kitchen--always a fairy kitchen, so tiny, so white, so
raddled, and shining all over with that pleasantest of all
effulgence--burnished tins, pewters, and the homely decorations of the
dresser--and she looked all round and smiled pleasantly, and kissed old
Tamar, and said--

'So, my dear old fairy, here's your Cinderella home again from the ball,
and I've seen nothing so pretty as this since I left Redman's Farm. How
white your table is, how nice your chairs; I wish you'd change with me
and let me be cook week about; and, really the fire is quite pleasant
to-night. Come, make a cup of tea, and tell us a story, and frighten me
and Margery before we go to our beds. Sit down, Margery, I'm only here by
permission. What do you mean by standing?' And the young lady, with a
laugh, sat down, looking so pleased, and good-natured, and merry, that
even old Tamar was fain to smile a glimmering smile; and little Margery
actively brought the tea-caddy; and the kettle, being in a skittish
singing state, quickly went off in a boil, and Tamar actually made tea in
her brown tea-pot.

'Oh, no; the delf cups and saucers;--it will be twice as good in them;'
and as the handsome mistress of the mansion, sitting in the deal chair,
loosened her cloak and untied her bonnet, she chatted away, to the
edification of Margery and the amusement of both.

This little extemporised bivouac, as it were, with her domestics,
delighted the young belle. Vanity of vanities, as Mr. Thackeray and King
Solomon cry out in turn. Silver trays and powdered footmen, and Utrecht,
velvet upholstery--miserable comforters! What saloon was ever so cheery
as this, or flashed all over in so small a light so splendidly, or
yielded such immortal nectar from chased teapot and urn, as this brewed
in brown crockery from the roaring kettle?

So Margery, sitting upon her stool in the background--for the Queen had
said it, and sit she must--and grinning from ear to ear, in a great halo
of glory, partook of tea.

'Well, Tamar, where's your story?' said the young lady.

'Story! La! bless you, dear Miss Radie, where should I find a story? My
old head's a poor one to remember,' whimpered white Tamar.

'Anything, no matter what--a ghost or a murder.'

Old Tamar shook her head.

'Or an elopement?'

Another shake of the head.

'Or a mystery--or even a dream?'

'Well--a dream! Sometimes I do dream. I dreamed how Master Stanley was
coming, the night before.'

'You did, did you? Selfish old thing! and you meant to keep it all to
yourself. What was it?'

Tamar looked anxiously and suspiciously in the kitchen fire, and placed
her puckered hand to the side of her white linen cap.

'I dreamed, Ma'am, the night before he came, a great fellow was at the
hall-door.'

'What! here?'

'Yes, Ma'am, this hall-door. So muffled up I could not see his face; and
he pulls out a letter all over red.'

'Red?'

'Aye, Miss; a red letter.'

'Red ink?'

'No, Miss, red _paper_, written with black, and directed for you.'

'Oh!'

'And so, Miss, in my dream, I gave it you in the drawing-room; and you
opened it, and leaned your hand upon your head, sick-like, reading it. I
never saw you read a letter so serious-like before. And says you to me,
Miss, "It's all about Master Stanley; he is coming." And sure enough,
here he was quite unexpected, next morning.'

'And was there no more?' asked Miss Lake.

'No more, Miss. I awoke just then.'

'It _is_ odd,' said Miss Lake, with a little laugh. 'Had you been
thinking of him lately?'

'Not a bit, Ma'am. I don't know when.'

'Well, it certainly is _very_ odd.'

At all events, it had glanced upon a sensitive recollection unexpectedly.
The kitchen was only a kitchen now; and the young lady, on a sudden,
looked thoughtful--perhaps a little sad. She rose; and old Tamar got up
before her, with her scared, secret look, clothed in white--the witch,
whose word had changed all, and summoned round her those shapes, which
threw their indistinct shadows on the walls and faces around.

'Light the candles in the drawing-room, Margery, and then, child, go to
your bed,' said the young lady, awakening from an abstraction. 'I don't
mind dreams, Tamar, nor fortune-tellers--I've dreamed so many good
dreams, and no good ever came of them. But talking of Stanley reminds me
of trouble and follies that I can't help, or prevent. He has left the
army, Tamar, and I don't know what his plans are.'

'Ah! poor child; he was always foolish and changeable, and a deal too
innocent for them wicked officer-gentlemen; and I'm glad he's not among
them any longer to learn bad ways--I am.'

So, the drawing-room being prepared, Rachel bid Tamar and little Margery
good-night, and the sleepy little handmaid stumped off to her bed; and
white old Tamar, who had not spoken so much for a month before, put on
her solemn round spectacles, and by her dipt candle read her chapter in
the ponderous Bible she had thumbed so well, and her white lips told over
the words as she read them in silence.

Old Tamar, I always thought, had seen many untold things in her day, and
some of her recollections troubled her, I dare say; and she held her
tongue, and knitted her white worsteds when she could sit quiet--which
was most hours of the day; and now and then when evil remembrances,
maybe, gathered round her solitude, she warned them off with that book of
power--so that my recollection of her is always the same white-clad,
cadaverous old woman, with a pair of barnacles on her nose, and her look
of secrecy and suffering turned on the large print of that worn volume,
or else on the fumbling-points of her knitting-needles.

It was a small house, this Redman's Farm, but very silent, for all that,
when the day's work was over; and very solemn, too, the look-out from the
window among the colonnades of tall old trees, on the overshadowed earth,
and through them into deepest darkness; the complaining of the lonely
stream far down is the only sound in the air.

There was but one imperfect vista, looking down the glen, and this
afforded no distant view--only a downward slant in the near woodland, and
a denser background of forest rising at the other side, and to-night
mistily gilded by the yellow moon-beams, the moon herself unseen.

Rachel had opened her window-shutters, as was her wont when the moon was
up, and with her small white hands on the window-sash, looked into the
wooded solitudes, lost in haunted darkness in every direction but one,
and there massed in vaporous and discoloured foliage, hardly more
distinct, or less solemn.

'Poor old Tamar says her prayers, and reads her Bible; I wish _I_ could.
How often I wish it. That good, simple vicar--how unlike his brother--is
wiser, perhaps, than all the shrewd people that smile at him. He used to
talk to me; but I've lost that--yes--I let him understand I did not care
for it, and so that good influence is gone from me--graceless creature.
No one seemed to care, except poor old Tamar, whether I ever said a
prayer, or heard any good thing; and when I was no more than ten years
old, I refused to say my prayers for her. My poor father. Well, Heaven
help us all.'

So she stood in the same sad attitude, looking out upon the shadowy
scene, in a forlorn reverie.

Her interview with Dorcas remained on her memory like an odd, clear,
half-horrible dream. What a dazzling prospect it opened for Stanley; what
a dreadful one might it not prepare for Dorcas. What might not arise from
such a situation between Stanley and Mark Wylder, each in his way a
worthy representative of the ill-conditioned and terrible race whose
blood he inherited? Was this doomed house of Brandon never to know repose
or fraternity?

Was it credible? Had it actually occurred, that strange confession of
Dorcas Brandon's? Could anything be imagined so mad--so unaccountable?
She reviewed Stanley in her mind's eye. She was better acquainted,
perhaps, with his defects than his fascinations, and too familiar with
both to appreciate at all their effect upon a stranger.

'What can she see in him? There's nothing remarkable in Stanley, poor
fellow, except his faults. There are much handsomer men than he, and many
as amusing--and he with no estate.'

She had heard of charms and philtres. How could she account for this
desperate hallucination?

Rachel was troubled by a sort of fear to-night, and the low fever of an
undefined expectation was upon her. She turned from the window, intending
to write two letters, which she had owed too long--young ladies'
letters--for Miss Lake, like many of her sex, as I am told, had several
little correspondences on her hands; and as she turned, with a start, she
saw old Tamar standing in the door-way, looking at her.

'Tamar!'

'Yes, Miss Rachel.'

'Why do you come so softly, Tamar? Do you know, you frightened me?'

'I thought I'd look in, Miss, before I went to bed, just to see if you
wanted anything.'

'No--nothing, thank you, dear Tamar.'

'And I don't think, Miss Rachel, you are quite well to-night, though you
are so gay--you're pale, dear; and there's something on your mind. Don't
be thinking about Master Stanley; he's out of the army now, and I'm
thankful for it; and make your mind easy about him; and would not it be
better, dear, you went to your bed, you rise so early.'

'Very true, good old Tamar, but to-night I must write a letter--not a
long one, though--and I assure you, I'm quite well. Good-night, Tamar.'

Tamar stood for a moment with her odd weird look upon her, and then
bidding her good-night, glided stiffly away, shutting the door.

So Rachel sat down to her desk and began to write; but she could not get
into the spirit of her letter; on the contrary, her mind wandered away,
and she found herself listening, every now and then, and at last she
fancied that old Tamar, about whom that dream, and her unexpected
appearance at the door, had given her a sort of spectral feeling that
night, was up and watching her; and the idea of this white sentinel
outside her door excited her so unpleasantly, that she opened it, but
found no Tamar there; and then she revisited the kitchen, but that was
empty too, and the fire taken down. And, finally, she passed into the old
woman's bed-chamber, whom she saw, her white head upon her pillow,
dreaming again, perhaps. And so, softly closing her door, she left her to
her queer visions and deathlike slumber.



CHAPTER XVII.

RACHEL LAKE SEES WONDERFUL THINGS BY MOONLIGHT FROM HER WINDOW.


Though Rachel was unfit for letter-writing, she was still more unfit for
slumber. She leaned her temple on her hand, and her rich light hair half
covered her fingers, and her amazing interview with Dorcas was again
present with her, and the same feeling of bewilderment. The suddenness
and the nature of the disclosures were dream-like and unreal, and the
image of Dorcas remained impressed upon her sight; not like Dorcas,
though the same, but something ghastly, wan, glittering, and terrible,
like a priestess at a solitary sacrifice.

It was late now, not far from one o'clock, and around her the terrible
silence of a still night. All those small sounds lost in the hum of
midday life now came into relief--a ticking in the wainscot, a crack now
and then in the joining of the furniture, and occasionally the tap of a
moth against the window pane from outside, sounds sharp and odd, which
made her wish the stillness of the night were not so intense.

As from her little table she looked listlessly through the window, she
saw against the faint glow of the moonlight, the figure of a man who
seized the paling and vaulted into the flower garden, and with a few
swift, stumbling strides over the flower-beds, reached the window, and
placing his pale face close to the glass, she saw his eyes glittering
through it; he tapped--or rather beat on the pane with his fingers--and
at the same time he said, repeatedly: 'Let me in; let me in.'

Her first impression, when she saw this person cross the little fence at
the road-side was, that Mark Wylder was the man. But she was mistaken;
the face and figure were Stanley Lake's.

She would have screamed in the extremity of her terror, but that her
voice for some seconds totally failed her; and recognising her brother,
though like Rhoda, in Holy Writ, she doubted whether it was not his
angel, she rose up, and with an awful ejaculation, she approached the
window.

'Let me in, Radie; d-- you, let me in,' he repeated, drumming incessantly
on the glass. There was no trace now of his sleepy jeering way. Rachel
saw that something was very wrong, and beckoned him toward the porch in
silence, and having removed the slender fastenings of the door, it
opened, and he entered in a rush of damp night air. She took him by the
hand, and he shook hers mechanically, like a man rescued from shipwreck,
and plainly not recollecting himself well.

'Stanley, dear, what's the matter, in Heaven's name?' she whispered, so
soon as she had got him into her little drawing-room.

'He has done it; d-- him, he has done it,' gasped Stanley Lake.

He looked in her face with a glazed and ashy stare. His hat remained on
his head, overshadowing his face; and his boots were soiled with clay,
and his wrapping coat marked, here and there, with the green of the stems
and branches of trees, through which he had made his way.

'I see, Stanley, you've had a scene with Mark Wylder; I warned you of
your danger--you have had the worst of it.'

'I spoke to him. He took a course I did not expect. I'm not well.'

'You've broken your promise. I see you have used _me_. How base; how
stupid!'

'How could I tell he was such a _fiend_?'

'I told you how it would be. He has frightened you,' said Rachel, herself
frightened.

'D-- him; I wish I had done as you said. I wish I had never come here.
Give me a glass of wine. He has ruined me.'

'You cruel, wretched creature!' said Rachel, now convinced that he had
compromised her as he threatened.

'Yes, I was wrong; I'm sorry; things have turned out different. Who's
that?' said Lake, grasping her wrist.

'Who--where--Mark Wylder?'

'No; it's nothing, I believe.'

'Where is he? Where have you left him?'

'Up there, at the pathway, near the stone steps.'

'Waiting there?'

'Well, yes; and I don't think I'll go back, Radie.'

'You _shall_ go back, Sir, and carry my message; or, no, I could not
trust you. I'll go with you and see him, and disabuse him. How could
you--how _could_ you, Stanley?'

'It was a mistake, altogether; I'm sorry, but I could not tell there was
such a devil on the earth.'

'Yes, I told you so. _He_ has frightened _you_' said Rachel.

'He _has_, _maybe_. At any rate, I was a fool, and I think I'm ruined;
and I'm afraid, Rachel, you'll be inconvenienced too.'

'Yes, you have made him savage and brutal; and between you, I shall be
called in question, you wretched fool!'

Stanley was taking these hard terms very meekly for a savage young
coxcomb like him. Perhaps they bore no very distinct meaning just then to
his mind. Perhaps it was preoccupied with more exciting ideas; or, it may
be, his agitation and fear cried 'amen' to the reproach; at all events,
he only said, in a pettish but deprecatory sort of way--

'Well, where's the good of scolding? how can I help it now?'

'What's your quarrel? why does he wait for you there? why has he sent you
here? It must concern _me_, Sir, and I insist on hearing it all.'

'So you shall, Radie; only have patience just a minute--and give me a
little wine or water--anything.'

'There is the key. There's some wine in the press, I think.'

He tried to open it, but his hand shook. He saw his sister look at him,
and he flung the keys on the table rather savagely, with, I dare say, a
curse between his teeth.

There was running all this time in Rachel's mind, and had been almost
since the first menacing mention of Wylder's name by her brother, an
indistinct remembrance of something unpleasant or horrible. It may have
been mere fancy, or it may have referred to something long ago
imperfectly heard. It was a spectre of mist, that evaporated before she
could fix her eyes on it, but was always near her elbow.

Rachel took the key with a faint gleam of scorn on her face and brought
out the wine in silence.

He took a tall-stemmed Venetian glass that stood upon the cabinet, an
antique decoration, and filled it with sherry--a strange revival of old
service! How long was it since lips had touched its brim before, and
whose? Lovers', maybe, and how. How long since that cold crystal had
glowed with the ripples of wine? This, at all events, was its last
service. It is an old legend of the Venetian glass--its shivering at
touch of poison; and there are those of whom it is said, 'the poison of
asps is under their lips.'

'What's that?' ejaculated Rachel, with a sudden shriek--that whispered
shriek, so expressive and ghastly, that you, perhaps, have once heard in
your life--and her very lips grew white.

'Hollo!' cried Lake. He was standing with his back to the window, and
sprang forward, as pale as she, and grasped her, with a white leer that
she never forgot, over his shoulder, and the Venice glass was shivered on
the ground.

'Who's there?' he whispered.

And Rachel, in a whisper, ejaculated the awful name that must not be
taken in vain.

She sat down. She was looking at him with a wild, stern stare, straight
in the face, and he still holding her arm, and close to her.

'I see it all now,' she whispered.

'Who--what--what is it?' said he.

'I could not have fancied _that_,' she whispered with a gasp.

Stanley looked round him with pale and sharpened features.

'What the devil is it! If that scoundrel had come to kill us you could
not cry out louder,' he whispered, with an oath. 'Do you want to wake
your people up?'

'Oh! Stanley,' she repeated, in a changed and horror-stricken way. 'What
a fool I've been. I see it at last; I see it all now,' and she waved her
white hands together very slowly towards him, as mesmerisers move theirs.

There was a silence of some seconds, and his yellow ferine gaze met hers
strangely.

'You were always a sharp girl, Radie, and I think you do see it,' he said
at last, very quietly.

'The witness--the witness--the dreadful witness!' she repeated.

'I'll show you, though, it's not so bad as you fancy. I'm sorry I did not
take your advice; but how, I say, could I know he was such a devil? I
must go back to him. I only came down to tell you, because Radie, you
know you proposed it yourself; _you_ must come, too--you _must_, Radie.'

'Oh, Stanley, Stanley, Stanley!'

'Why, d-- it, it can't be helped now; can it?' said he, with a peevish
malignity. But she was right; there was something of the poltroon in him,
and he was trembling.

'Why could you not leave me in peace, Stanley?'

'I can't go without you, Rachel. I won't; and if we don't we're both
ruined,' he said, with a bleak oath.

'Yes, Stanley, I knew you were a coward,' she replied, fiercely and
wildly.

'You're always calling names, d-- you; do as you like. I care less than
you think how it goes.'

'No, Stanley; you know me too well. Ah! No, you sha'n't be lost if I can
help it.' Rachel shook her head as she spoke, with a bitter smile and a
dreadful sigh.

Then they whispered together for three or four minutes, and Rachel
clasped her jewelled fingers tight across her forehead, quite wildly, for
a minute.

'You'll come then?' said Stanley.

She made no answer, and he repeated the question.

By this time she was standing; and without answering, she began
mechanically to get on her cloak and hat.

'You must drink some wine first; he may frighten you, perhaps. You _must_
take it, Rachel, or I'll not go.'

Stanley Lake was swearing, in his low tones, like a swell-mobsman
to-night.

Rachel seemed to have made up her mind to submit passively to whatever he
required. Perhaps, indeed, she thought there was wisdom in his advice. At
all events she drank some wine.

Rachel Lake was one of those women who never lose their presence of mind,
even under violent agitation, for long, and who generally, even when
highly excited, see, and do instinctively, and with decision, what is
best to be done; and now, with dilated eyes and white face, she walked
noiselessly into the kitchen, listened there for a moment, then stole
lightly to the servants' sleeping-room, and listened there at the door,
and lastly looked in, and satisfied herself that both were still
sleeping. Then as cautiously and swiftly she returned to her
drawing-room, and closed the window-shutters and drew the curtain, and
signalling to her brother they went stealthily forth into the night air,
closing the hall-door, and through the little garden, at the outer gate
of which they paused.

'I don't know, Rachel--I don't like it--I'm not fit for it. Go back
again--go in and lock your door--we'll not go to him--_you_ need not, you
know. He may stay where he is--let him--I'll not return. I say, I'll see
him no more. I'll get away. I'll consult Larkin--shall I? Though that
won't do--he's in Wylder's interest--curse him. What had I best do? I'm
not equal to it.'

'We _must_ go, Stanley. You said right just now; be resolute--we are both
ruined unless we go. You have brought it to that--you _must_ come.'

'I'm not fit for it, I tell you--I'm not. You were right, Radie--I think
I'm not equal to a business of this sort, and I won't expose you to such
a scene. _You're_ not equal to it either, I think,' and Lake leaned on
the paling.

'Don't mind me--you haven't much hitherto. Go or stay, I'm equally ruined
now, but not equally disgraced; and go we must, for it is _your only_
chance of escape. Come, Stanley--for shame!'

In a few minutes more they were walking in deep darkness and silence,
side by side, along the path, which diverging from the mill-road,
penetrates the coppice of that sequestered gorge, along the bottom of
which flows a tributary brook that finds its way a little lower down into
the mill-stream. This deep gully in character a good deal resembles
Redman's Glen, into which it passes, being fully as deep, and wooded to
the summit at both sides, but much steeper and narrower, and therefore
many shades darker.

They had now reached those rude stone steps, some ten or fifteen in
number, which conduct the narrow footpath up a particularly steep
acclivity, and here Lake lost courage again, for they distinctly heard
the footsteps that paced the platform above.




CHAPTER XVIII.

MARK WYLDER'S SLAVE.


Nearly two hours had passed before they returned. As they did so, Rachel
Lake went swiftly and silently before her brother. The moon had gone
down, and the glen was darker than ever. Noiselessly they re-entered the
little hall of Redman's Farm. The candles were still burning in the
sitting-room, and the light was dazzling after the profound darkness in
which they had been for so long.

Captain Lake did not look at all like a London dandy now. His dress was
confoundedly draggled; the conventional countenance, too, was wanting.
There was a very natural savagery and dejection there, and a wild leer in
his yellow eyes.

Rachel sat down. No living woman ever showed a paler face, and she stared
with a look that was sharp and stern upon the wainscot before her.

For some minutes they were silent; and suddenly, with an exceeding bitter
cry, she stood up, close to him, seizing him in her tiny hands by the
collar, and with wild eyes gazing into his, she said--

'See what you've brought me to--wretch, wretch, wretch!'

And she shook him with violence as she spoke. It was wonderful how that
fair young face could look so terrible.

'There, Radie, there,' said Lake, disengaging her fingers. 'You're a
little hysterical, that's all. It will be over in a minute; but don't
make a row. You're a good girl, Radie. For Heaven's sake, don't spoil all
by folly now.'

He was overawed and deprecatory.

'A slave! only think--a slave! Oh frightful, frightful! Is it a dream? Oh
frightful, frightful! Stanley, Stanley, it would be _mercy_ to kill me,'
she broke out again.

'Now, Radie, listen to reason, and don't make a noise; you know we
agreed, _you_ must go, and _I can't_ go with you.'

Lake was cooler by this time, and his sister more excited than before
they went out.

'I used to be brave; my courage I think is gone; but who'd have imagined
what's before me?'

Stanley walked to the window and opened the shutter a little. He forgot
how dark it was. The moon had gone down. He looked at his watch and then
at Rachel. She was sitting, and in no calmer state; serene enough in
attitude, but the terribly wild look was unchanged. He looked at his
watch again, and held it to his ear, and consulted it once more before he
placed the tiny gold disk again in his pocket.

'This won't do,' he muttered.

With one of the candles in his hand he went out and made a hurried,
peeping exploration, and soon, for the rooms were quickly counted in
Redman's Farm, he found her chamber small, neat, _simplex munditiis_.
Bright and natty were the chintz curtains, and the little toilet set out,
not inelegantly, and her pet piping-goldfinch asleep on his perch, with
his bit of sugar between the wires of his cage; her pillow so white and
unpressed, with its little edging of lace. Were slumbers sweet as of old
ever to know it more? What dreams were henceforward to haunt it? Shadows
were standing about that lonely bed already. I don't know whether Stanley
Lake felt anything of this, being very decidedly of the earth earthy. But
there are times when men are translated from their natures, and forced to
be romantic and superstitious.

When he came back to the drawing-room, a toilet bottle of _eau de
cologne_ in his hand, with her lace handkerchief he bathed her temples
and forehead. There was nothing very brotherly in his look as he peered
into her pale, sharp features, during the process. It was the dark and
pallid scrutiny of a familiar of the Holy Office, bringing a victim back
to consciousness.

She was quickly better.

'There, don't mind me,' she said sharply; and getting up she looked down
at her dress and thin shoes, and seeming to recollect herself, she took
the candle he had just set down, and went swiftly to her room.

Gliding without noise from place to place, she packed a small black
leather bag with a few necessary articles. Then changed her dress
quickly, put on her walking boots, a close bonnet and thick veil, and
taking her purse, she counted over its contents, and then standing in the
midst of the room looked round it with a great sigh, and a strange look,
as if it was all new to her. And she threw back her veil, and going
hurriedly to the toilet, mechanically surveyed herself in the glass. And
she looked fixedly on the pale features presented to her, and said--

'Rachel Lake, Rachel Lake! what are you now?'

And so, with knitted brows and stern lips, a cadaveric gaze was returned
on her from the mirror.

A few minutes later her brother, who had been busy down stairs, put his
head in and asked--

'Will you come with me now, Radie, or do you prefer to wait here?'

'I'll stay here--that is, in the drawing-room,' she answered, and the
face was withdrawn.

In the little hall Stanley looked again at his watch, and getting quietly
out, went swiftly through the tiny garden, and once upon the mill-road,
ran at a rapid pace down towards the town.

The long street of Gylingden stretched dim and silent before him. Slumber
brooded over the little town, and his steps sounded sharp and hollow
among the houses. He slackened his pace, and tapped sharply at the little
window of that modest post-office, at which the young ladies in the pony
carriage had pulled up the day before, and within which Luke Waggot was
wont to sleep in a sort of wooden box that folded up and appeared to be a
chest of drawers all day. Luke took care of Mr. Larkin's dogs, and
groomed Mr. Wylder's horse, and 'cleaned up' his dog-cart, for Mark being
close about money, and finding that the thing was to be done more cheaply
that way, put up his horse and dog-cart in the post-office premises, and
so evaded the livery charges of the 'Brandon Arms.'

But Luke was not there; and Captain Lake recollecting his habits and his
haunt, hurried on to the 'Silver Lion,' which has its gable towards the
common, only about a hundred steps away, for distances are not great in
Gylingden. Here were the flow of soul and of stout, long pipes, long
yarns, and tolerably long credits; and the humble scapegraces of the town
resorted thither for the pleasures of a club-life, and often revelled
deep into the small hours of the morning.

So Luke came forth.

D-- it, where's the note?' said the captain, rummaging uneasily in his
pockets.

'You know me--eh!'

'Captain Lake. Yes, Sir.'

'Well--oh! here it is.'

It was a scrap pencilled on the back of a letter--


'LUKE WAGGOT,

'Put the horse to and drive the dog-cart to the "White House." Look out
for me there. We must catch the up mail train at Dollington. Be lively.
If Captain Lake chooses to drive you need not come.

'M. WYLDER.'


'I'll drive,' said Captain Lake. 'Lose no time and I'll give you
half-a-crown.'

Luke stuck on his greasy wideawake, and in a few minutes more the
dog-cart was trundled out into the lane, and the horse harnessed, went
between the shafts with that wonderful cheerfulness with which they bear
to be called up under startling circumstances at unseasonable hours.

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