Phantom Fortune, A Novel by M. E. Braddon (page 2)

‘Come along, Molly,’ said Maulevrier; ‘come and tell me about the terriers, while I eat my dinner.’

Mary hesitated, glanced doubtfully at her grandmother, who made no sign, and then slipped out of the room, hanging fondly on her brother’s arm, and almost forgetting that there was any such person as Mr. Hammond in existence.

When these three were gone Lady Lesbia expressed herself strongly upon Maulevrier’s folly in bringing such a person as Mr. Hammond to Fellside.

‘What are we to do with him, grandmother?’ she said, pettishly. ‘Is he to live with us, and be one of us, a person of whose belongings we know positively nothing, who owns that his people are common?’

‘My dear, he is your brother’s friend, and we have the right to suppose he is a gentleman.’

‘Not on that account,’ said Lesbia, more sharply than her wont. ‘Didn’t he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and of Ford, the wrestler. I have no confidence in Maulevrier’s ideas of fitness.’

‘We shall find out all about this Mr. Hamleigh–no Hammond–in a day or two,’ replied her ladyship, placidly; ‘and in the meantime we must tolerate him, and be grateful to him if he reconcile Maulevrier to remaining at Fellside for the next six weeks.’

Lesbia was silent. She did not consider Maulevrier’s presence at Fellside an unmitigated advantage, or, indeed, his presence anywhere. Those two were not sympathetic. Maulevrier made fun of his elder sister’s perfections, chaffed her intolerably about the great man she was going to captivate, in her first season, the great houses in which she was going to reign. Lesbia despised him for that neglect of all his opportunities of culture which had left him, after the most orthodox and costly curriculum, almost as ignorant as a ploughboy. She despised a man whose only delight was in horse and hound, gun and fishing-tackle. Molly would have cared very little for the guns or the fishing-tackle perhaps in the abstract; but she cared for everything that interested Maulevrier, even to the bagful of rats which were let loose in the stable-yard sometimes, for the education of a particularly game fox-terrier.

There was plenty of talk and laughter at the dinner-table, while the Countess and Lady Lesbia conversed gravely and languidly in the dimly-lighted drawing-room. The dinner was excellent, and both travellers were ravenous. They had eaten nothing since breakfast, and had driven from Windermere on the top of the coach in the keen evening air. When the sharp edge of the appetite was blunted, Maulevrier began to talk of his adventures since he and Molly had last met. He had not being dissipating in London all the time–or, indeed, any great part of the time of his absence from Fellside; but Molly had been left in Cimmerian, darkness as to his proceedings. He never wrote a letter if he could possibly avoid doing so. If it became a vital necessity to him to communicate with anyone he telegraphed, or, in his own language, ‘wired’ to that person; but to sit down at a desk and labour with pen and ink was not within his capacities or his views of his mission in life.

‘If a fellow is to write letters he might as well be a clerk in an office,’ he said, ‘and sit on a high stool.’

Thus it happened that when Maulevrier was away from Fellside, no fair _chatelaine_ of the Middle Ages could be more ignorant of the movements or whereabouts of her crusader knight than Mary was of her brother’s goings on. She could but pray for him with fond and faithful prayer, and wait and hope for his return. And now he told her that things had gone badly with him at Epsom, and worse at Ascot, that he had been, as he expressed it, ‘up a tree,’ and that he had gone off to the Black Forest directly the Ascot week was over, and at Rippoldsau he had met his old friend and fellow traveller, Hammond, and they had gone for a walking tour together among the homely villages, the watchmakers, the timber cutters, the pretty peasant girls. They had danced at fairs–and shot at village sports–and had altogether enjoyed the thing. Hammond, who was something of an artist, had sketched a good deal. Maulevrier had done nothing but smoke his German pipe and enjoy himself.

‘I was glad to find myself in a world where a horse was an exception and not the rule,’ he said.

‘Oh, how I should love to see the Black Forest!’ cried Mary, who knew the first part of Faust by heart, albeit she had never been given permission to read it, ‘the gnomes and the witches–der Freischuetz–all that is lovely. Of course, you went up the Brocken?’

‘Of course,’ answered Mr. Hammond; ‘Mephistopheles was our _valet de place_, and we went up among a company of witches riding on broomsticks.’ And then quoted,

‘Seh’ die Baeume hinter Baeumen,
Wie sie schnell vorueberruecken,
Und die Klippen, die sich buecken, Und die langen Felsennasen,
Wie sie schnarchen, wie sie blasen!’

This was the first time he had addressed himself directly to Mary, who sat close to her brother’s side, and never took her eyes from his face, ready to pour out his wine or to change his plate, for the serving-men had been dismissed at the beginning of this unceremonious meal.

Mary looked at the stranger almost as superciliously as Lesbia might have done. She was not inclined to be friendly to her brother’s friend.

‘Do you read German?’ she inquired, with a touch of surprise.

‘You had better ask him what language he does not read or speak,’ said her brother. ‘Hammond is an admirable Crichton, my dear–by-the-by, who was admirable Crichton?–knows everything, can twist your little head the right way upon any subject.’

‘Oh,’ thought Mary, ‘highly cultivated, is he? Very proper in a man who was educated on charity to have worked his hardest at the University.’

She was not prepared to think very kindly of young men who had been successful in their college career, since poor Maulevrier had made such a dismal failure of his, had been gated and sent down, and ploughed, and had everything ignominious done to him that could be done, which ignominy had involved an expenditure of money that Lady Maulevrier bemoaned and lamented until this day. Because her brother had not been virtuous, Mary grudged virtuous young men their triumphs and their honours. Great, raw-boned fellows, who have taken their degrees at Scotch Universities, come to Oxford and Cambridge and sweep the board, Maulevrier had told her, when his own failures demanded explanation. Perhaps this Mr. Hammond had graduated north of the Tweed, and had come southward to rob the native. Mary was not any more inclined to be civil to him because he was a linguist. He had a pleasant manner, frank and easy, a good voice, a cheery laugh. But she had not yet made up her mind that he was a gentleman.

‘If some benevolent old person were to take a fancy to Charles Ford, the wrestler, and send him to a Scotch University, I daresay he would turn out just as fine a fellow,’ she thought, Ford being somewhat of a favourite as a local hero.

The two young men went off to the billiard-room after they had dined. It was half-past ten by this time, and, of course, Mary did not go with them. She bade her brother good-night at the dining-room door.

‘Good-night, Molly; be sure you are up early to show me the dogs,’ said Maulevrier, after an affectionate kiss.

‘Good-night, Lady Mary,’ said Mr. Hammond, holding out his hand, albeit she had no idea of shaking hands with him.

She allowed her hand to rest for an instant in that strong, friendly grasp. She had not risen to giving a couple of fingers to a person whom she considered her inferior; but she was inclined to snub Mr. Hammond as rather a presuming young man.

‘Well, Jack, what do you think of my beauty sister?’ asked his lordship, as he chose his cue from the well-filled rack.

The lamps were lighted, the table uncovered and ready, Carambole in his place, albeit it was months since any player had entered the room. Everything which concerned Maulevrier’s comfort or pleasure was done as if by magic at Fellside; and Mary was the household fairy whose influence secured this happy state of things.

‘What can any man think except that she is as lovely as the finest of Reynold’s portraits, as that Lady Diana Beauclerk of Colonel Aldridge’s, or the Kitty Fisher, or any example you please to name of womanly loveliness?’

‘Glad to hear it,’ answered Maulevrier, chalking his cue; ‘can’t say I admire her myself–not my style, don’t you know. Too much of my lady Di–too little of poor Kitty. But still, of course, it always pleases a fellow to know that his people are admired; and I know that my grandmother has views, grand views,’ smiling down at his cue. ‘Shall I break?’ and he began with the usual miss in baulk.

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Hammond, beginning to play. ‘Matrimonial views, of course. Very natural that her ladyship should expect such a lovely creature to make a great match. Is there no one in view? Has there been no family conclave–no secret treaty? Is the young lady fancy free?’

‘Perfectly. She has been buried alive here; except parsons and a few decent people whom she is allowed to meet now and then at the houses about here, she has seen nothing of the world. My grandmother has kept Lesbia as close as a nun. She is not so fond of Molly, and that young person has wild ways of her own, and gives everybody the slip. By-the-by, how do you like my little Moll?’

The adjective was hardly accurate about a young lady who measured five feet six, but Maulevrier had not yet grown out of the ideas belonging to that period when Mary was really his little sister, a girl of twelve, with long hair and short petticoats.

Mr. Hammond was slow to reply. Mary had not made a very strong impression upon him. Dazzled by her sister’s pure and classical beauty, he had no eyes for Mary’s homelier charms. She seemed to him a frank, affectionate girl, not too well-mannered; and that was all he thought of her.

‘I’m afraid Lady Mary does not like me,’ he said, after his shot, which gave him time for reflection.

‘Oh, Molly is rather _farouche_ in her manners; never would train fine, don’t you know. Her ladyship lectured till she was tired, and now Mary runs wild, and I suppose will be left at grass till six months before her presentation, and then they’ll put her on the pillar-reins a bit to give her a better mouth. Good shot, by Jove!’

John Hammond was used to his lordship’s style of conversation, and understood his friend at all times. Maulevrier was not an intellectual companion, and the distance was wide between the two men; but his lordship’s gaiety, good-nature, and acuteness made amends for all shortcomings in culture. And then Mr. Hammond may have been one of those good Conservatives who do not expect very much intellectual power in an hereditary legislator.

CHAPTER VII.

IN THE SUMMER MORNING.

John Hammond loved the wild freshness of morning, and was always eager to explore a new locality; so he was up at five o’clock next morning, and out of doors before six. He left the sophisticated beauty of the Fellside gardens below him, and climbed higher and higher up the Fell, till he was able to command a bird’s-eye view of the lake and village, and just under his feet, as it were, Lady Maulevrier’s favourite abode. He was provided with a landscape glass which he always carried in his rambles, and with the aid of this he could see every stone of the building.

The house, added to at her ladyship’s pleasure, and without regard to cost, covered a considerable extent of ground. The new part consisted of a straight range of about a hundred and twenty feet, facing the lake, and commandingly placed on the crest of a steepish slope; the old buildings, at right angles with the new, made a quadrangle, the third and fourth sides of which were formed by the dead walls of servants’ rooms and coach-houses, which had no windows upon this inner enclosed side. The old buildings were low and irregular, one portion of the roof thatched, another tiled. In the quadrangle there was an old-fashioned garden, with geometrical flower-beds, a yew tree hedge, and a stone sun-dial in the centre. A peacock stalked about in the morning light, and greeted the newly risen sun with a discordant scream. Presently a man came out of a half glass door under a verandah which shaded one side of the quadrangle, and strolled about the garden, stopping here and there to cut a dead rose, or trim a geranium, a stoutly-built broad shouldered man, with gray hair and beard, the image of well-fed respectability.

Mr. Hammond wondered a little at the man’s leisurely movements as he sauntered about, whistling to the peacock. It was not the manner of a servant who had duties to perform–rather that of a gentleman living at ease, and hardly knowing how to get rid of his time.

“Some superior functionary, I suppose,” thought Hammond, “the house-steward, perhaps.”

He rambled a long way over the hill, and came back to Fellside by a path of his own discovering, which brought him to a wooden gate leading into the stable-yard, just in time to meet Maulevrier and Lady Mary emerging from the kennel, where his lordship had been inspecting the terriers.

‘Angelina is bully about the muzzle,’ said Maulevrier; ‘we shall have to give her away.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ cried Mary. ‘She is a most perfect darling, and laughs so deliciously whenever she sees me.’

Angelina was in Lady Mary’s arms at this moment; a beautifully marked little creature, all thew and sinew, palpitating with suppressed emotions, and grinning to her heart’s content.

Lady Mary looked very fresh and bright in her neat tailor gown, kilted kirtle, and tight-fitting bodice, with neat little brass buttons. It was a gown of Maulevrier’s ordering, made at his own tailor’s. Her splendid chestnut hair was uncovered, the short crisp curls about her forehead dancing in the morning air. Her large, bright; brown eyes were dancing, too, with delight at having her brother home again.

She shook hands with Mr. Hammond more graciously than last night; but still with a carelessness which was not complimentary, looking at him absently, as if she hardly knew that he was there, and hugging Angelina all the time.

Hammond told his friend about his ramble over the hills, yonder, up above that homely bench called ‘Rest, and be Thankful,’ on the crest of Loughrigg Fell. He was beginning to learn the names of the hills already. Yonder darkling brow, rugged, gloomy looking, was Nab Scar; yonder green slope of sunny pasture, stretching wide its two arms as if to enfold the valley, was Fairfield; and here, close on the left, as he faced the lake, were Silver Howe and Helm Crag, with that stony excrescence on the summit of the latter known as the ‘Lion and the Lamb.’ Lady Maulevrier’s house stood within a circle of mountain peaks and long fells, which walled in the deep, placid, fertile valley.

‘If you are not too tired to see the gardens, we might show them to you before breakfast,’ said Maulevrier. ‘We have three-quarters of an hour to the good.’

‘Half an hour for a stroll, and a quarter to make myself presentable after my long walk,’ said Hammond, who did not wish to face the dowager and Lady Lesbia in disordered apparel. Lady Mary was such an obvious Tomboy that he might be pardoned for leaving her out of the question.

They set out upon an exploration of the gardens, Mary clinging to her brother’s arm, as if she wanted to make sure of him, and still carrying Angelina.

The gardens were as other gardens, but passing beautiful. The sloping lawns and richly-timbered banks, winding shrubberies, broad terraces cut on the side of the hill, gave infinite variety. All that wealth and taste and labour could do to make those grounds beautiful had been done–the rarest conifers, the loveliest flowering shrubs grew and flourished there, and the flowers bloomed as they bloom only in Lakeland, where every cottage garden can show a wealth of luxurious bloom, unknown in more exposed and arid districts. Mary was very proud of those gardens. She had loved them and worked in them from her babyhood, trotting about on chubby legs after some chosen old gardener, carrying a few weeds or withered leaves in her pinafore, and fancying herself useful.

‘I help ‘oo, doesn’t I, Teeven?’ she used to say to the gray-headed old gardener, who first taught her to distinguish flowers from weeds.

‘I shall never learn as much out of these horrid books as poor old Stevens taught me,’ she said afterwards, when the gray head was at rest under the sod, and governesses, botany manuals, and hard words from the Greek were the order of the day.

Nine o’clock was the breakfast hour at Fellside. There were no family prayers. Lady Maulevrier did not pretend to be pious, and she put no restraints of piety upon other people. She went to Church on Sunday mornings for the sake of example; but she read all the newest scientific books, subscribed to the Anthropological Society, and thought as the newest scientific people think. She rarely communicated her opinions among her own sex; but now and then, in strictly masculine and superior society, she had been heard to express herself freely upon the nebular hypothesis and the doctrine of evolution.

‘After all, what does it matter?’ she said, finally, with her grand air; ‘I have only to marry my granddaughters creditably, and prevent my grandson going to the dogs, and then my mission on this insignificant planet will be accomplished. What new form that particular modification of molecules which you call Lady Maulevrier may take afterwards is hidden in the great mystery of material life.’

There was no family prayer, therefore, at Fellside. The sisters had been properly educated in their religious duties, had been taught the Anglican faith carefully and well by their governess, Fraeulein Mueller, who had become a staunch Anglican before entering the families of the English nobility, and by the kind Vicar of Grasmere, who took a warm interest in the orphan girls. Their grandmother had given them to understand that they might be as religious as they liked. She would be no let or hindrance to their piety; but they must ask her no awkward questions.

‘I have read a great deal and thought a great deal, and my ideas are still in a state of transition,’ she told Lesbia; and Lesbia, who was somewhat automatic in her piety, had no desire to know more.

Lady Maulevrier seldom appeared in the forenoon. She was an early riser, being too vivid and highly strung a creature, even at sixty-seven years of age, to give way to sloth. She rose at seven, summer and winter, but she spent the early part of the day in her own rooms, reading, writing, giving orders to her housekeeper, and occasionally interviewing Steadman, who, without any onerous duties, was certainly the most influential person in the house. People in the village talked of him, and envied him so good a berth. He had a gentleman’s house to live in, and to all appearance lived as a gentleman. This tranquil retirement, free from care or labour, was a rich reward for the faithful service of his youth. And it was known by the better informed among the Grasmere people that Mr. Steadman was saving money, and had shares in the North-Western Railway. These facts had oozed out, of themselves, as it were. He was not a communicative man, and rarely wasted half an hour at the snug little inn near St. Oswald’s Church, amidst the cluster of habitations that was once called Kirktown. He was an unsociable man, people said, and thought himself better than Grasmere folk, the lodging-house keepers, and guides, and wrestlers, and the honest friendly souls who were the outcome of that band of Norwegian exiles which found a home in these peaceful vales.

Miss Mueller, more commonly known as Fraeulein, officiated at breakfast. She never appeared at the board when Lady Maulevrier was present, but in her ladyship’s absence Miss Mueller was guardian of the proprieties. She was a stout, kindly creature, and by no means a formidable dragon. When the gong sounded, John Hammond went into the dining-room, where he found Miss Mueller seated alone in front of the urn.

He bowed, quick to read ‘governess’ or ‘companion’ in the lady’s appearance; and she bowed.

‘I hope you have had a nice walk,’ she said. ‘I saw you from my bedroom window.’

‘Did you? Then I suppose yours is one of the few windows which look into that curious old quadrangle?’

‘No, there are no windows looking into the quadrangle. Those that were in the original plan of the house were walled up at her ladyship’s orders, to keep out the cold winds which sweep down from the hills in winter and early spring, when the edge of Loughrigg Fell is white with snow. My window looks into the gardens, and I saw you there with his lordship and Lady Mary.’

Lady Lesbia came in at this moment, and saluted Mr. Hammond with a haughty inclination of her beautiful head. She looked lovelier in her simple morning gown of pale blue cambric than in her more elaborate toilette of last evening; such purity of complexion, such lustrous eyes; the untarnished beauty of youth, breathing the delicate freshness of a newly-opened flower. She might be as scornful as she pleased, yet John Hammond could not withhold his admiration. He was inclined to admire a woman who kept him at a distance; for the general bent of young women now-a-days is otherwise.

Maulevrier and Mary came in, and everyone sat down to breakfast. Lady Lesbia unbent a little presently, and smiled upon the stranger. There was a relief in a stranger’s presence. He talked of new things, places and people she had never seen. She brightened and became quite friendly, deigned to invite the expression of Mr. Hammond’s opinions upon music and art, and after breakfast allowed him to follow her into the drawing-room, and to linger there fascinated for half an hour, looking over her newest books, and her last batch of music, but looking most of all at her, while Maulevrier and Mary were loafing on the lawn outside.

‘What are you going to do with yourself this morning?’ asked Maulevrier, appearing suddenly at the window.

‘Anything you like,’ answered Hammond. ‘Stay, there is one pilgrimage I am eager to make. I must see Wordsworth’s grave, and Wordsworth’s house.’

‘You shall see them both, but they are in opposite directions–one at your elbow, the other a four mile walk. Which will you see first? We’ll toss for it,’ taking a shilling from a pocketful of loose cash, always ready for moments of hesitation. ‘Heads, house; tails, grave. Tails it is. Come and have a smoke, and see the poet’s grave. The splendour of the monument, the exquisite neatness with which it is kept, will astound you, considering that we live in a period of Wordsworth worship.’

Hammond hesitated, and looked at Lady Lesbia.

‘Aren’t you coming?’ called Maulevrier from the lawn. ‘It was a fair offer. I’ve got my cigarette case.’

‘Yes, I’m coming,’ answered the other, with a disappointed air.

He had hoped that Lesbia would offer to show him the poet’s grave. He could not abandon that hope without a struggle.

‘Will you come with us, Lady Lesbia? We’ll suppress the cigarettes!’

‘Thanks, no,’ she said, becoming suddenly frigid. ‘I am going to practice.’

‘Do you never walk in the morning–on such a lovely morning as this?’

‘Not very often.’

She had re-entered those frozen regions from which his attentions had lured him for a little while. She had reminded herself of the inferior social position of this person, in whose conversation she had allowed herself to be interested.

‘_Filons_!’ cried Maulevrier from below, and they went.

Mary would have very much liked to go with them, but she did not want to be intrusive; so she went off to the kennels to see the terriers eat their morning and only meal of dog biscuit.

CHAPTER VIII.

THERE IS ALWAYS A SKELETON.

The two young men strolled through the village, Maulevrier pausing to exchange greetings with almost everyone he met, and so to the rustic churchyard, above the beck.

The beck was swollen with late rains, and was brawling merrily over its stony bed; the churchyard grass was deep and cool and shadowy under the clustering branches. The poet’s tomb was disappointing in its unlovely simplicity, its stern, slatey hue. The plainest granite cross would have satisfied Mr. Hammond, or a cross in pure white marble, with a sculptured lamb at the base. Surely the lamb, emblem at once pastoral and sacred, ought to enter into any monument to Wordsworth; but that gray headstone, with its catalogue of dates, those stern iron railings–were these fit memorials of one whose soul so loved nature’s loveliness?

After Mr. Hammond had seen the little old, old church, and the medallion portrait inside, had seen all that Maulevrier could show him, in fact, the two young men went back to the place of graves, and sat on the low parapet above the beck, smoking their cigarettes, and talking with that perfect unreserve which can only obtain between men who are old and tried friends. They talked, as it was only natural they should talk, of that household at Fellside, where all things were new to John Hammond.

‘You like my sister Lesbia?’ said Maulevrier.

‘Like her! well, yes. The difficulty with most men must be not to worship her.’

‘Ah, she’s not my style. And she’s beastly proud.’

‘A little _hauteur_ gives piquancy to her beauty; I admire a grand woman.’

‘So do I in a picture. Titian’s Queen of Cyprus, or any party of that kind; but for flesh and blood I like humility–a woman who knows she is human, and not infallible, and only just a little better than you or me. When I choose a wife, she will be no such example of cultivated perfection as my sister Lesbia. I want no goddess, but a nice little womanly woman, to jog along the rough and tumble road of life with me.’

‘Lady Maulevrier’s influence, no doubt, has in a great measure determined the bent of your sister’s character: and from what you have told me about her ladyship, I should think a fixed idea of her own superiority would be inevitable in any girl trained by her.’

‘Yes, she is a proud woman–a proud, hard woman–and she has steeped Lesbia’s mind in all her own pet ideas and prejudices. Yet, God knows, we have little reason to hold our heads high,’ said Maulevrier, with a gloomy look.

John Hammond did not reply to this remark: perhaps there was some difficulty for a man situated as he was in finding a fit reply. He smoked in silence, looking down at the pure swift waters of the Rotha tumbling over the crags and boulders below.

‘Doesn’t somebody say there is always a skeleton in the cupboard, and the nobler and more ancient the race the bigger the skeleton?’ said Maulevrier, with a philosophical air.

‘Yes, your family secret is an attribute of a fine old race. The Pelopidae, for instance–in their case it was not a single skeleton, but a whole charnel house. I don’t think your skeleton need trouble you, Maulevrier. It belongs to the remote past.’

‘Those things never belong to the past,’ said the young man. ‘If it were any other kind of taint–profligacy–madness, even–the story of a duel that went very near murder–a runaway wife–a rebellious son–a cruel husband. I have heard such stories hinted at in the records of families. But our story means disgrace. I seldom see strangers putting their heads together at the club without fancying they are telling each other about my grandfather, and pointing me out as the grandson and heir of a thief.’

‘Why use unduly hard words?’

‘Why should I stoop to sophistication, with you, my friend. Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a pocket on Ludgate Hill.’

‘Nothing was ever proved against your grandfather.’

‘No, he died in the nick of time, and the inquiry was squashed, thanks to the Angersthorpe interest, and my grandmother’s cleverness. But if he had lived a few weeks longer England would have rung with the story of his profligacy and dishonour. Some people say he committed suicide in order to escape the inquiry; but I have heard my mother emphatically deny this. My father told her that he had often talked with the people who kept the little inn where his father died, and they were clear enough in their assertion that the death was a natural death–the sudden collapse of an exhausted constitution.’

‘Was it on account of this scandal that your father spent the best part of his life away from England?’ Hammond asked, feeling that it was a relief to Maulevrier to talk about this secret burden of his.

The young Earl was light-hearted and frivolous by nature, yet even he had his graver moments; and upon this subject of the old Maulevrier scandal he was peculiarly sensitive, perhaps all the more so because his grandmother had never allowed him to speak to her about it, had never satisfied his curiosity upon any details of that painful story.

‘I have very little doubt it was so–though I wasn’t old enough when he died to hear as much from his own lips. My father went straight from the University to Vienna, where he began his career in the diplomatic service, and where he soon afterwards married a dowerless English girl of good family. He went to Rio as first secretary, and died of fever within seven years of his marriage, leaving a widow and three babies, the youngest in long clothes. Mother and babies all came over to England, and were at once established at Fellside. I can remember the voyage–and I can remember my poor mother who never recovered the blow of my father’s death, and who died in yonder house, after five years of broken health and broken spirits. We had no one but the dowager to look to as children–hardly another friend in the world. She did what she liked with us; she kept the girls as close as nuns, so _they_ have never heard a hint of the old history; no breach of scandal has reached _their_ ears. But she could not shut me up in a country house for ever, though she did succeed in keeping me away from a public school. The time came when I had to go to the University, and there I heard all that had been said about Lord Maulevrier. The men who told me about the old scandal in a friendly way pretended not to believe it; but one night, when I had got into a row at a wine-party with a tailor’s son, he told me that if his father was a snip my grandfather was a thief, and so he thought himself the better bred of the two. I smashed his nose for him, but as it was a decided pug before the row began, that hardly squared the matter.’

‘Did you ever hear the exact story?’

‘I have heard a dozen stories; and if only a quarter of them are true my grandfather was a scoundrel. It seems that he was immensely popular for the first year or so of his government, gave more splendid entertainments than had been given at Madras for half a century before his time, lavished his wealth upon his favourites. Then arose a rumour that the governor was insolvent and harassed by his creditors, and then a new source of wealth seemed to be at his command; he was more reckless, more princely than ever; and then, little by little, there arose the suspicion that he was trafficking in English interests, selling his influence to petty princes, winking at those mysterious crimes by which rightful heirs are pushed aside to make room for usurpers. Lastly it became notorious that he was the slave of a wicked woman, false wife, suspected murderess, whose husband, a native prince, disappeared from the scene just when his existence became perilous to the governor’s reputation. According to one version of the story, the scandal of this Rajah’s mysterious disappearance, followed not long after by the Ranee’s equally mysterious death, was the immediate cause of my grandfather’s recall. How much, or how little of this story–or other dark stories of the same kind–is true, whether my grandfather was a consummate scoundrel, or the victim of a baseless slander,–whether he left India a rich man or a poor man, is known to no mortal except Lady Maulevrier, and compared with her the Theban Sphinx was a communicative individual.’

‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ said Hammond. ‘Neither you nor your sisters can be the worse for this ancient slander. No doubt every part of the story has been distorted and exaggerated in the telling; and a great deal of it may be pure invention, evolved from the inner consciousness of the slanderer. God forbid that any whisper of scandal should ever reach Lady Lesbia’s ears.’

He ignored poor Mary. It was to him as if there were no such person. Her feeble light was extinguished by the radiance of her sister’s beauty; her very individuality was annihilated.

‘As for you, dear old fellow,’ he said, with warm affection, ‘no one will ever think the worse of you on account of your grandfather’s peccadilloes.’

‘Yes, they will. Hereditary genius is one of our modern crazes. When a man’s grandfather was a rogue, there must be a taint in his blood. People don’t believe in spontaneous generation, moral or physical, now-a-days. Typhoid breeds typhoid, and typhus breeds typhus, just as dog breeds dog; and who will believe that a cheat and a liar can be the father of honest men?’

‘In that case, knowing what kind of man the grandson is, I will never believe that the grandfather was a rogue,’ said Hammond, heartily.

Maulevrier put out his hand without a word, and it was warmly grasped by his friend.

‘As for her ladyship, I respect and honour her as a woman who has led a life of self-sacrifice, and has worn her pride as an armour,’ continued Hammond.

‘Yes, I believe the dowager’s character is rather fine,’ said Maulevrier; ‘but she and I have never hit our horses very well together. She would have liked such a fellow as you for a grandson, Jack–a man who took high honours at Oxford, and could hold his own against all comers. Such a grandson would have gratified her pride, and would have repaid her for the trouble she had taken in nursing the Maulevrier estate; for however poor a property it was when her husband went to India there is no doubt that it is a very fine estate now, and that the dowager has been the making of it.’

The two young men strolled up to Easedale Tarn before they went back to Fellside, where Lady Maulevrier received them with a stately graciousness, and where Lady Lesbia unbent considerably at luncheon, and condescended to an animated conversation with her brother’s friend. It was such a new thing to have a stranger at the family board, a man whose information was well abreast with the march of progress, who could talk eloquently upon every subject which people care to talk about. In this new and animated society Lesbia seemed like an enchanted princess suddenly awakened from a spell-bound slumber. Molly looked at her sister with absolute astonishment. Never had she seen her so bright, so beautiful–no longer a picture or a statue, but a woman warm with the glow of life.

‘No wonder Mr. Hammond admires her,’ thought poor Molly, who was quite acute enough to see the stranger’s keen appreciation of her sister’s charms, and positive indifference towards herself.

There are some things which women find out by instinct, just as the needle turns towards the magnet. Shut a girl up in a tower till she is eighteen years old, and on the day of her release introduce her to the first man her eyes have ever looked upon, and she will know at a glance whether he admires her.

After luncheon the four young people started for Rydal Mount; with Fraeulein as chaperon and watch-dog. The girls were both good walkers. Lady Lesbia even, though she looked like a hot-house flower, had been trained to active habits, could walk and ride, and play tennis, and climb a hill as became a mountain-bred damsel. Molly, feeling that her conversational powers were not appreciated by her brother’s friend, took half a dozen dogs for company, and with three fox-terriers, a little Yorkshire dog, a colley and an otter-hound, was at no loss for society on the road, more especially as Maulevrier gave her most of his company, and entertained her with an account of his Black Forest adventures, and all the fine things he had said to the fair-haired, blue-eyed Baden girls, who had sold him photographs or wild strawberries, or had awakened the echoes of the hills with the music of their rustic flutes.

Fraeulein was perfectly aware that her mission upon this particular afternoon was not to let Lady Lesbia out of her sight for an instant, to hear every word the young lady said, and every word Mr. Hammond addressed to her. She had received no specific instructions from Lady Maulevrier. They were not necessary, for the Fraeulein knew her ladyship’s intentions with regard to her elder granddaughter,–knew them, at least, so far as that Lesbia was intended to make a brilliant marriage; and she knew, therefore, that the presence of this handsome and altogether attractive young man was to the last degree obnoxious to the dowager. She was obliged to be civil to him for her nephew’s sake, and she was too wise to let Lesbia imagine him dangerous: but the fact that he was dangerous was obvious, and it was Fraeulein’s duty to protect her employer’s interests.

Everybody knew Lord Maulevrier, so there was no difficulty about getting admission to Wordsworth’s garden and Wordsworth’s house, and after Mr. Hammond and his companions had explored these, they went back to the shores of the little lake, and climbed that rocky eminence upon which the poet used to sit, above the placid waters of silvery Rydal. It is a lovely spot, and that narrow lake, so poor a thing were magnitude the gauge of beauty, had a soft and pensive loveliness in the clear afternoon light.

‘Poor Wordsworth’ sighed Lesbia, as she stood on the grassy crag looking down on the shining water, broken in the foreground by fringes of rushes, and the rich luxuriance of water-lilies. ‘Is it not pitiable to think of the years he spent in this monotonous place, without any society worth speaking of, with only the shabbiest collection of books, with hardly any interest in life except the sky, and the hills, and the peasantry?’

‘I think Wordsworth’s was an essentially happy life, in spite of his narrow range,’ answered Hammond. ‘You, with your ardent youth and vivid desire for a life of action, cannot imagine the calm blisses of reverie and constant communion with nature. Wordsworth had a thousand companions you and I would never dream of; for him every flower that grows was an individual existence–almost a soul.’

‘It was a mild kind of lunacy, an everlasting opium dream without the opium; but I am grateful to him for living such a life, since it has bequeathed us some exquisite poetry,’ said Lesbia, who had been too carefully cultured to fleer or flout at Wordsworth.

‘I do believe there’s an otter just under that bank,’ cried Molly, who had been watching the obvious excitement of her bandy-legged hound; and she rushed down to the brink of the water, leaping lightly from stone to stone, and inciting the hound to business.

‘Let him alone, can’t you?’ roared Maulevrier; ‘leave him in peace till he’s wanted. If you disturb him now he’ll desert his holt, and we may have a blank day. The hounds are to be out to-morrow.’

‘I may go with you?’ asked Mary, eagerly.

‘Well, yes, I suppose you’ll want to be in it.’ Molly and her brother went on an exploring ramble along the edge of the water towards Ambleside, leaving John Hammond in Lesbia’s company, but closely guarded by Miss Mueller. These three went to look at Nab Cottage, where poor Hartley Coleridge ended his brief and clouded days; and they had gone some way upon their homeward walk before they were rejoined by Maulevrier and Mary, the damsel’s kilted skirt considerably the worse for mud and mire.

‘What would grandmother say if she were to see you!’ exclaimed Lesbia, looking contemptuously at the muddy petticoat.

‘I am not going to let her see me, so she will say nothing,’ cried Mary, and then she called to the dogs, ‘Ammon, Agag, Angelina;’ and the three fox terriers flew along the road, falling over themselves in the swiftness of their flight, darting, and leaping, and scrambling over each other, and offering the spectators the most intense example of joyous animal life.

The colley was far up on the hill-side, and the otter-hound was still hunting the water, but the terriers never went out of Mary’s sight. They looked to her to take the initiative in all their sports.

They were back at Fellside in time for a very late tea. Lady Maulevrier was waiting for them in the drawing-room.

‘Oh, grandmother, why did you not take your tea!’ exclaimed Lesbia, looking really distressed. ‘It is six o’clock.’

‘I am used to have you at home to hand me my cup,’ replied the dowager, with a touch of reproachfulness.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Lesbia, sitting down before the tea-table, and beginning her accustomed duty. ‘Indeed, dear grandmother, I had no idea it was so late; but it was such a lovely afternoon, and Mr. Hammond is so interested in everything connected with Wordsworth–‘

She was looking her loveliest at this moment, all that was softest in her nature called forth by her desire to please her grandmother, whom she really loved. She hung over Lady Maulevrier’s chair, attending to her small wants, and seeming scarcely to remember the existence of anyone else. In this phase of her character she seemed to Mr. Hammond the perfection of womanly grace.

Mary had rushed off to her room to change her muddy gown, and came in presently, dressed for dinner, looking the picture of innocence.

John Hammond received his tea-cup from Lesbia’s hand, and lingered in the drawing-room talking to the dowager and her granddaughters till it was time to dress. Lady Maulevrier found herself favourably impressed by him in spite of her prejudices. It was very provoking of Maulevrier to have brought such a man to Fellside. His very merits were objectionable. She tried with exquisite art to draw him into some revealment as to his family and antecedents: but he evaded every attempt of that kind. It was too evident that he was a self-made man, whose intellect and good looks were his only fortune. It was criminal in Maulevrier to have brought such a person to Fellside. Her ladyship began to think seriously of sending the two girls to St. Bees or Tynemouth for change of air, in charge of Fraeulein. But any sudden proceeding of that kind would inevitably awaken Lesbia’s suspicions; and there is nothing so fatal to a woman’s peace as this idea of danger. No, the peril must be faced. She could only hope that Maulevrier would soon tire of Fellside. A week’s Westmoreland weather–gray skies and long rainy days, would send these young men away.

CHAPTER IX.

A CRY IN THE DARKNESS.

The peril had to be faced, for the weather did not favour Lady Maulevrier’s hopes. Westmoreland skies forgot to shed their accustomed showers. Westmoreland hills seemed to have lost their power of drawing down the rain. That August was a lovely month, and the young people at Fellside revelled in ideal weather. Maulevrier took his friend everywhere–by hill and stream and force and gill–to all those chosen spots which make the glory of the Lake country–on Windermere and Thirlmere, away through the bleak pass of Kirkstone to Ullswater–on driving excursions, and on boating excursions, and pedestrian rambles, which latter the homely-minded Hammond seemed to like best of all, for he was a splendid walker, and loved the freedom of a mountain ramble, the liberty to pause and loiter and waste an hour at will, without being accountable to anybody’s coachman, or responsible for the well-being of anybody’s horses.

On some occasions the two girls and Miss Mueller were of the party, and then it seemed to John Hammond as if nothing were needed to complete the glory of earth and sky. There were other days–rougher journeys–when the men went alone, and there were days when Lady Mary stole away from her books and music, and all those studies which she was supposed still to be pursuing–no longer closely supervised by her governess, but on parole, as it were–and went with her brother and his friend across the hills and far away. Those were happy days for Mary, for it was always delight to her to be with Maulevrier; yet she had a profound conviction of John Hammond’s indifference, kind and courteous as he was in all his dealings with her, and a sense of her own inferiority, of her own humble charms and little power to please, which was so acute as to be almost pain. One day this keen sense of humiliation broke from her unawares in her talk with her brother, as they two sat on a broad heathy slope face to face with one of the Langdale pikes, and with a deep valley at their feet, while John Hammond was climbing from rock to rock in the gorge on their right, exploring the beauties of Dungeon Ghyll.

‘I wonder whether he thinks me very ugly?’ said Mary, with her hands clasped upon her knees, her eyes fixed on Wetherlam, upon whose steep brow a craggy mass of brown rock clothed with crimson heather stood out from the velvety green of the hill-side.

‘Who thinks you ugly?’

‘Mr. Hammond. I’m sure he does. I am so sunburnt and so horrid!’

‘But you are not ugly. Why, Molly, what are you dreaming about?’

‘Oh, yes, I am ugly. I may not seem so to you, perhaps, because you are used to me, but I know he must think me very plain compared with Lesbia, whom he admires so much.’

‘Yes, he admires Lesbia. There is no doubt of that.’

‘And I know he thinks me plain,’ said Molly, contemplating Wetherlam with sorrowful eyes, as if the sequence were inevitable.

‘My dearest girl, what nonsense! Plain, forsooth? Ugly, quotha? Why, there are not a finer pair of eyes in Westmoreland than my Molly’s, or a prettier smile, or whiter teeth.’

‘But all the rest is horrid,’ said Mary, intensely in earnest. ‘I am sunburnt, freckled, and altogether odious–like a haymaker or a market woman. Grandmother has said so often enough, and I know it is the truth. I can see it in Mr. Hammond’s manner.’

‘What! freckles and sunburn, and the haymaker, and all that?’ cried Maulevrier, laughing. ‘What an expressive manner Jack’s must be, if it can convey all that–like Lord Burleigh’s nod, by Jove. Why, what a goose you are, Mary. Jack thinks you a very nice girl, and a very pretty girl, I’ll be bound; but aren’t you clever enough to understand that when a man is over head and ears in love with one woman, he is apt to seem just a little indifferent to all the other women in the world? and there is no doubt Jack is desperately in love with Lesbia.’

‘You ought not to let him be in love with her,’ protested Mary. ‘You know it can only lead to his unhappiness. You must know what grandmother is, and how she has made up her mind that Lesbia is to marry some great person. You ought not to have brought Mr. Hammond here. It is like letting him into a trap.’

‘Do you think it was wrong?’ asked her brother, smiling at her earnestness. ‘I should be very sorry if poor Jack should come to grief. But still, if Lesbia likes him–which I think she does–we ought to be able to talk over the dowager.’

‘Never,’ cried Mary. ‘Grandmother would never give way. You have no idea how ambitious she is. Why, once when Lesbia was in a poetical mood, and said she would marry the man she liked best in the world, if he were a pauper, her ladyship flew into a terrible passion, and told her she would renounce her, that she would curse her, if she were to marry beneath her, or marry without her grandmother’s consent.’

‘Hard lines for Hammond,’ said Maulevrier, rather lightly. ‘Then I suppose we must give up the idea of a match between him and Lesbia.’

‘You ought not to have brought him here,’ retorted Mary. ‘You had better invent some plan for sending him away. If he stay it will be only to break his heart.’

‘Dear child, men’s hearts do not break so easily. I have fancied that mine was broken more than once in my life, yet it is sound enough, I assure you.’

‘Oh!’ sighed Mary, ‘but you are not like him; wounds do not go so deep with you.’

The subject of their conversation came out of the rocky cleft in the hills as Mary spoke. She saw his hat appearing out of the gorge, and then the man himself emerged, a tall well-built figure, clad in brown tweed, coming towards them, with sketch-book and colour-box in his pocket. He had been making what he called memoranda of the waterfall, a stone or two here, a cluster of ferns there, or a tree torn up by the roots, and yet green and living, hanging across the torrent, a rude natural bridge.

This round by the Langdale Pikes and Dungeon Ghyll was one of their best days; or, at least, Molly and her brother thought so; for to those two the presence of Lesbia and her chaperon was always a restraint.

Mary could walk twice as far as her elder sister, and revelled in hill-side paths and all manner of rough places. They ordered their luncheon at the inn below the waterfall, and had it carried up on to the furzy slope in front of Wetherlam, where they could eat and drink and be merry to the music of the force as it came down from the hills behind them, while the lights and shadows came and went upon yonder rugged brow, now gray in the shadow, now ruddy in the sunshine.

Mary was as gay as a bird during that rough and ready luncheon. No one would have suspected her uneasiness about John Hammond’s peril or her own plainness. She might let her real self appear to her brother, who had been her trusted friend and father confessor from her babyhood; but she was too thorough a woman to let Mr. Hammond discover the depth of her sympathy, the tenderness of her compassion for his woes. Later, as they were walking home across the hills, by Great Langdale and Little Langdale, and Fox Howe and Loughrigg Fell, she fell behind a few paces with Maulevrier, and said to him very earnestly–

‘You won’t tell, will you, dear?’

‘Tell what?’ he asked, staring at her.

‘Don’t tell Mr. Hammond what I said about his thinking me ugly. He might want to apologise to me, and that would be too humiliating. I was very childish to say such a silly thing.’

‘Undoubtedly you were.’

‘And you won’t tell him?’

‘Tell him anything that would degrade my Mary? Assail her dignity by so much as a breath? Sooner would I have this tongue torn out with red-hot pincers.’

On the next day, and the next, sunshine and summer skies still prevailed; but Mr. Hammond did not seem to care for rambling far afield. He preferred loitering about in the village, rowing on the lake, reading in the garden, and playing lawn tennis. He had only inclination for those amusements which kept him within a stone’s throw of Fellside: and Mary knew that this disposition had arisen in his mind since Lesbia had withdrawn herself from all share in their excursions. Lesbia had not been rude to her brother or her brother’s friend; she had declined their invitations with smiles and sweetness; but there was always some reason–a new song to be practised, a new book to be read, a letter to be written–why she should not go for drives or walks or steamboat trips with Maulevrier and his friend.

So Mr. Hammond suddenly found out that he had seen all that was worth seeing in the Lake country, and that there was nothing so enjoyable as the placid idleness of Fellside; and at Fellside Lady Lesbia could not always avoid him without a too-marked intention, so he tasted the sweetness of her society to a much greater extent than was good for his peace, if the case were indeed as hopeless as Lady Mary declared. He strolled about the grounds with her; he drank the sweet melody of her voice in Heine’s tenderest ballads; he read to her on the sunlit lawn in the lazy afternoon hours; he played billiards with her; he was her faithful attendant at afternoon tea; he gave himself up to the study of her character, which, to his charmed eyes, seemed the perfection of pure and placid womanhood. There might, perhaps, be some lack of passion and of force in this nature, a marked absence of that impulsive feeling which is a charm in some women: but this want was atoned for by sweetness of character, and Mr. Hammond argued that in these calm natures there is often an unsuspected depth, a latent force, a grandeur of soul, which only reveals itself in the great ordeals of life.

So John Hammond hung about the luxurious drawing-room at Fellside in a manner which his friend Maulevrier ridiculed as unmanly.

‘I had no idea you were such a tame cat,’ he said: ‘if when we were salmon fishing in Canada anybody had told me you could loll about a drawing-room all day listening to a girl squalling and reading novels, I shouldn’t have believed a word of it.’

‘We had plenty of roughing on the shores of the St. Lawrence,’ answered Hammond. ‘Summer idleness in a drawing-room is an agreeable variety.’

It is not to be supposed that John Hammond’s state of mind could long remain unperceived by the keen eyes of the dowager. She saw the gradual dawning of his love, she saw the glow of its meridian. She was pleased to behold this proof of Lesbia’s power over the heart of man. So would she conquer the man foredoomed to be her husband when the coming time should bring them together. But agreeable as the fact of this first conquest might be, as an evidence of Lesbia’s supremacy among women, the situation was not without its peril; and Lady Maulevrier felt that she could no longer defer the duty of warning her granddaughter. She had wished, if possible, to treat the thing lightly to the very last, so that Lesbia should never know there had been danger. She had told her, a few days ago, that those drives, and walks with the two young men were undignified, even although guarded by the Fraeulein’s substantial presence.

‘You are making yourself too much a companion to Maulevrier and his friend,’ said the dowager. ‘If you do not take care you will grow like Mary.’

‘I would do anything in the world to avoid _that_,’ replied Lesbia. ‘Our walks and drives have been very pleasant. Mr. Hammond is extremely clever, and can talk about everything.’

Her colour heightened ever so little as she spoke of him, an indication duly observed by Lady Maulevrier.

‘No doubt the man is clever; all adventurers are clever; and you have sense enough to see that this man is an adventurer–a mere sponge and toady of Maulevrier’s.’

‘There is nothing of the sponge or the toady in his manner,’ protested Lady Lesbia, with a still deeper blush, the warm glow of angry feeling.

‘My dear child, what do you know of such people–or of the atmosphere in which they are generated? The sponge and toady of to-day is not the clumsy fawning wretch you have read about in old-fashioned novels. He can flatter adroitly, and feed upon his friends, and yet maintain a show of manhood and independence. I’ll wager Mr. Hammond’s trip to Canada did not cost him sixpence, and that he hardly opened his purse all the time he was in Germany.’

‘If my brother wants the company of a friend who is much poorer than himself, he must pay for it,’ argued Lesbia. ‘I think Maulevrier is lucky to have such a companion as Mr. Hammond.’

Yet, even while she so argued, Lady Lesbia felt in some manner humiliated by the idea that this man who so palpably worshipped her was too poor to pay his own travelling expenses.

Poets and philosophers may say what they will about the grandeur of plain living and high thinking; but a young woman thinks better of the plain liver who is not compelled to plainness by want of cash. The idea of narrow means, of dependence upon the capricious generosity of a wealthy friend is not without its humiliating influence. Lesbia was barely civil to Mr. Hammond that evening when he praised her singing; and she refused to join in a four game proposed by Maulevrier, albeit she and Mr. Hammond had beaten Mary and Maulevrier the evening before, with much exultant hilarity.

Hammond had been at Fellside nearly a month, and Maulevrier was beginning to talk about a move further northward. There was a grouse moor in Argyleshire which the two young men talked about as belonging to some unnamed friend of the Earl’s, which they had thought of shooting over before the grouse season was ended.

‘Lord Hartfield has property in Argyleshire,’ said the dowager, when they talked of these shootings. ‘Do you know his estate, Mr. Hammond?’

‘Hammond knows that there is such a place, I daresay,’ replied Maulevrier, replying for his friend.

‘But you do not know Lord Hartfield, perhaps,’ said her ladyship, not arrogantly, but still in a tone which implied her conviction that John Hammond would not be hand-in-glove with earls, in Scotland or elsewhere.

‘Oh, yes! I know him by sight every one in Argyleshire knows him by sight.’

‘Naturally. A young man in his position must be widely known. Is he popular?’

‘Fairly so.’

‘His father and I were friends many years ago,’ said Lady Maulevrier, with a faint sigh. ‘Have you ever heard if he resembles his father?’

‘I believe not. I am told he is like his mother’s family.’

‘Then he ought to be handsome. Lady Florence Ilmington was a famous beauty.’

They were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner, the room dimly lighted by darkly-shaded lamps, the windows wide open to the summer sky and moonlit lake. In that subdued light Lady Maulevrier looked a woman in the prime of life. The classical modelling of her features and the delicacy of her complexion were unimpaired by time, while those traces of thought and care which gave age to her face in the broad light of day were invisible at night. John Hammond contemplated that refined and placid countenance with profound admiration. He remembered how her ladyship’s grandson had compared her with the Sphinx; and it seemed to him to-night, as be studied her proud and tranquil beauty, that there was indeed something of the mysterious, the unreadable in that countenance, and that beneath its heroic calm there might be the ashes of tragic passion, the traces of a life-long struggle with fate. That such a woman, so beautiful, so gifted, so well fitted to shine and govern in the great world, should have been content to live a long life of absolute seclusion in this remote valley was in itself a social mystery which must needs set an observant young man wondering. It was all very well to say that Lady Maulevrier loved a country life, that she had made Fellside her earthly Paradise, and had no desire beyond it. The fact remained that it was not in Lady Maulevrier’s temperament to be satisfied with such an existence; that falcon eye was never meant to gaze for ever upon one narrow range of mountain and lake; that lip was made to speak among the great ones of the world.

Lady Maulevrier was particularly gracious to her grandson’s friend this evening. Maulevrier spoke so decisively about a speedy migration northward, seemed so inclined to regret the time wasted since the twelfth of the month, that she thought the danger was past, and she could afford to be civil. She really liked the young man, had no doubt in her own mind that he was a gentleman in the highest and broadest sense of the word, but not in the sense which made him an eligible husband for either of her granddaughters.

Lesbia was in a pensive mood this evening. She sat in the verandah, looking dreamily at the lake, and at Fairfield yonder, a broad green slope, silvered with moonlight, and seeming to stretch far away into unfathomable distance.

If one could but take one’s lover by the hand and go wandering over those mystic moonlit slopes into some new unreal world where it would not matter whether a man were rich or poor, high-born or low-born, where there should be no such things as rank and state to be won or lost! Lesbia felt to-night as if she would like to live out her life in dreamland. Reality was too hard, too much set round by difficulties and sacrifices.

While Lesbia was losing herself in that dream-world, Lady Maulevrier unbent considerably to John Hammond, and talked to him with more appearance of interest in his actual self, and in his own affairs, than she had manifested hitherto although she had been uniformly courteous.

She asked him his plans for the future–had he chosen a profession?

He told her that he had not. He meant to devote himself to literature and politics.

‘Is not that rather vague?’ inquired her ladyship.

‘Everything is vague at first.’

‘But literature now–as an amusement, no doubt, it is delightful–but as a profession–does literature ever pay?’

‘There have been such cases.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Walter Scott, Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, those made money no doubt. But there is a suspicion of hopelessness in the idea of a young man starting in life intending to earn his bread by literature. One remembers Chatterton. I should have thought that in your case the law or the church would have been better. In the latter Maulevrier might have been useful to you. He is patron of three or four livings.’

‘You are too good even to think of such a thing,’ said Hammond; ‘but I have set my heart upon a political career. I must swim or sink in that sea.’

Lady Maulevrier looked at him with a compassionate smile Poor young man! No doubt he thought himself a genius, and that doors which had remained shut to everybody else would turn on their hinges directly he knocked at them. She was sincerely sorry for him. Young, clever, enthusiastic, and doomed to bitterest disappointment.

‘You have parents, perhaps, who are ambitious for you–a mother who thinks her son a heaven-born statesman!’ said her ladyship, kindly.

‘Alas, no! that incentive to ambition is wanting in my case. I have neither father nor mother living.’

‘That is very sad. No doubt that fact has been a bond of sympathy between you and Maulevrier?’

‘I believe it has.’

‘Well, I hope Providence will smile upon your path.’

‘Come what may, I shall never forget the happy weeks I have spent at Fellside,’ said Hammond, ‘or your ladyship’s gracious hospitality.’

He took up the beautiful hand, white to transparency, showing the delicate tracing of blue veins, and pressed his lips upon it in chivalrous worship of age and womanly dignity.

Lady Maulevrier smiled upon him with her calm, grave smile. She would have liked to say, ‘You shall be welcome again at Fellside,’ but she felt that the man was dangerous. Not while Lesbia remained single could she court his company. If Maulevrier brought him she must tolerate his presence, but she would do nothing to invite that danger.

There was no music that evening. Maulevrier and Mary were playing billiards; Fraeulein Mueller was sitting in her corner working at a high-art counterpane. Lesbia came in from the verandah presently, and sat on a low stool by her grandmother’s arm-chair, and talked to her in soft, cooing accents, inaudible to John Hammond, who sat a little way off turning the leaves of the _Contemporary Review_: and this went on till eleven o’clock, the regular hour for retiring, when Mary came in from the billiard-room, and told Mr. Hammond that Maulevrier was waiting for a smoke and a talk. Then candles were lighted, and the ladies all departed, leaving John Hammond and his friend with the house to themselves.

They played a fifty game, and smoked and talked till the stroke of midnight, by which time it seemed as if there were not another creature awake in the house. Maulevrier put out the lamps in the billiard-room, and then they went softly up the shadowy staircase, and parted in the gallery, the Earl going one way, and his friend the other.

The house was large and roomy, spread over a good deal of ground, Lady Maulevrier having insisted upon there being only two stories. The servants’ rooms were all in a side wing, corresponding with those older buildings which had been given over to Steadman and his wife, and among the villagers of Grasmere enjoyed the reputation of being haunted. A wide panelled corridor extended from one end of the house to the other. It was lighted from the roof, and served as a gallery for the display of a small and choice collection of modern art, which her ladyship had acquired during her long residence at Fellside. Here, too, in Sheraton cabinets, were those treasures of old English china which Lady Maulevrier had inherited from past generations.

Her ladyship’s rooms were situated at the southern end of this corridor, her bed-chamber being at the extreme end of the house, with windows commanding two magnificent views, one across the lake and the village of Grasmere to the green slopes of Fairfield, the other along the valley towards Rydal Water. This and the adjoining boudoir were the prettiest rooms in the house, and no one wondered that her ladyship should spend so much of her life in the luxurious seclusion of her own apartments.

John Hammond went to his room, which was on the same side of the house as her ladyship’s; but he was in no disposition for sleep. He opened the casement, and stood looking out upon the moonlit lake and the quiet village, where one solitary light shone like a faint star in a cottage window, amidst that little cluster of houses by the old church, once known as Kirktown. Beyond the village rose gentle slopes, crowned with foliage, and above those wooded crests appeared the grand outline of the hills, surrounding and guarding Easedale’s lovely valley, as the hills surrounded Jerusalem of old.

He looked at that delicious landscape with eyes that hardly saw its beauty. The image of a lovely face came between him and all the glory of earth and sky.

‘I think she likes me,’ he was saying to himself. ‘There was a look in her eyes to-night that told me the time was come when—-‘

The thought died unfinished in his brain. Through the silent house, across the placid lake, there rang a wild, shrill cry that froze the blood in his veins, or seemed so to freeze it–a shriek of agony, and in a woman’s voice. It rang out from an open window near his own. The sound seemed close to his ear.

CHAPTER X.

‘O BITTERNESS OF THINGS TOO SWEET.’

Only for an instant did John Hammond stand motionless after hearing that unearthly shriek. In the next moment he rushed into the corridor, expecting to hear the sound repeated, to find himself face to face with some midnight robber, whose presence had caused that wild cry of alarm. But in the corridor all was silent as the grave. No open door suggested the entrance of an intruder. The dimly-burning lamps showed only the long empty gallery. He stood still for a few moments listening for voices, footsteps, the rustle of garments: but there was nothing.

Nothing? Yes, a groan, a long-drawn moaning sound, as of infinite pain. This time there was no doubt as to the direction from which the sound came. It came from Lady Maulevrier’s room. The door was ajar, and he could see the faint light of the night-lamp within. That fearful cry had come from her ladyship’s room. She was in peril or pain of some kind.

Convinced of this one fact, Mr. Hammond had not an instant’s hesitation. He pushed open the door without compunction, and entered the room, prepared to behold some terrible scene.

But all was quiet as death itself. No midnight burglar had violated the sanctity of Lady Maulevrier’s apartment. The soft, steady light of the night-lamp shone on the face of the sleeper. Yes, all was quiet in the room, but not in that sleeper’s soul. The broad white brow was painfully contracted, the lips drawn down and distorted, the delicate hand, half hidden by the deep Valenciennes ruffle, clutched the coverlet with convulsive force. Sigh after sigh burst from the agitated breast. John Hammond gazed upon the sleeper in an agony of apprehension, uncertain what to do. Was this dreaming only; or was it some kind of seizure which called for medical aid? At her ladyship’s age the idea of paralysis was not too improbable for belief. If this was a dream, then indeed the visions of Lady Maulevrier’s head upon her bed were more terrible than the dreams of common mortals.

In any case Mr. Hammond felt that it was his duty to send some attendant to Lady Maulevrier, some member of the household who was familiar with her ladyship’s habits, her own maid if that person could be unearthed easily. He knew that the servants slept in a separate wing; but he thought it more than likely that her ladyship’s personal attendant occupied a room near her mistress.

He went back to the corridor and looked round him in doubt, for a moment or two.

Close against her ladyship’s door there was a swing door, covered with red cloth, which seemed to communicate with the old part of the house. John Hammond pushed this door, and it yielded to his hand, revealing a lamp-lit passage, narrow, old-fashioned, and low. He thought it likely that Lady Maulevrier’s maid might occupy a room in this half-deserted wing. As he pushed open the door he saw an elderly man coming towards him, with a candle in his hand, and with the appearance of having huddled on his clothes hastily.

‘You heard that scream?’ said Hammond.

‘Yes. It was her ladyship, I suppose. Nightmare. She is subject to nightmare.’

‘It is very dreadful. Her whole countenance was convulsed just now, when I went into her room to see what was wrong. I was almost afraid of a fit of some kind. Ought not her maid to go to her?’

‘She wants no assistance,’ the man answered, coolly. ‘It was only a dream. It is not the first time I have been awakened by a shriek like that. It is a kind of nightmare, no doubt; and it passes off in a few minutes, and leaves her sleeping calmly.’

He went to her ladyship’s door, pushed it open a little way, and looked in. ‘Yes, she is sleeping as quietly as an infant,’ he said, shutting the door softly as he spoke.

‘I am very glad; but surely she ought to have her maid near her at night, if she is subject to those attacks.’

‘It is no attack, I tell you. It is nothing but a dream,’ answered Steadman impatiently.

‘Yet you were frightened, just as I was, or you would not have got up and dressed,’ said Hammond, looking at the man suspiciously.

He had heard of this old servant Steadman, who was supposed to enjoy more of her ladyship’s confidence than any one else in the household; but he had never spoken to the man before that night.

‘Yes, I came. It was my duty to come, knowing her ladyship’s habits. I am a light sleeper, and that scream woke me instantly. If her ladyship’s maid were wanted I should call her. I am a kind of watch-dog, you see, sir.’

‘You seem to be a very faithful dog.’

‘I have been in her ladyship’s service more than forty years. I have reason to be faithful. I know her ladyship’s habits better than any one in the house. I know that she had a great deal of trouble in her early life, and I believe the memory of it comes back upon her sometimes in her dreams, and gets the better of her.’

‘If it was memory that wrung that agonised shriek from her just now, her recollections of the past must be very terrible.’

‘Ah, sir, there is a skeleton in every house,’ answered James Steadman, gravely.

This was exactly what Maulevrier had said under the yew trees which Wordsworth planted.

‘Good-night, sir,’ said Steadman.

‘Good-night. You are sure that Lady Maulevrier may be left safely–that there is no fear of illness of any kind?’

‘No, sir. It was only a bad dream. Good-night, sir.’

Steadman went back to his own quarters. Mr. Hammond heard him draw the bolts of the swing door, thus cutting off all communication with the corridor.

The eight-day clock on the staircase struck two as Mr. Hammond returned to his room, even less inclined for sleep than when he left it. Strange, that nocturnal disturbance of a mind which seemed so tranquil in the day. Or was that tranquillity only a mask which her ladyship wore before the world: and was the bitter memory of events which happened forty years ago still a source of anguish to that highly strung nature?

‘There are some minds which cannot forget,’ John Hammond said to himself, as he meditated upon her ladyship’s character and history. ‘The story of her husband’s crime may still be fresh in her memory, though it is only a tradition for the outside world. His crime may have involved some deep wrong done to herself, some outrage against her love and faith as a wife. One of the stories Maulevrier spoke of the other day was of a wicked woman’s influence upon the governor–a much more likely story than that of any traffic in British interests or British honour, which would have been almost impossible for a man in Lord Maulevrier’s position. If the scandal was of a darker kind–a guilty wife–the mysterious disappearance of a husband–the horror of the thing may have made a deeper impression on Lady Maulevrier than even her nearest and dearest dream of: and that superb calm which she wears like a royal mantle may be maintained at the cost of struggles which tear her heart-strings. And then at night, when the will is dormant, when the nervous system is no longer ruled by the power of waking intelligence, the old familiar agony returns, the hated images flash back upon the brain, and in proportion to the fineness of the temperament is the intensity of the dreamer’s pain.’

And then he went on to reflect upon the long monotonous years spent in that lonely house, shut in from the world by those everlasting hills. Albeit the house was an ideal house, set in a landscape of infinite beauty, the monotony must be none the less oppressive for a mind burdened with dark memories, weighed down by sorrows which could seek no relief from sympathy, which could never become familiarised by discussion.

‘I wonder that a woman of Lady Maulevrier’s intellect should not have better known how to treat her own malady,’ thought Hammond.

Mr. Hammond inquired after her ladyship’s health next morning, and was told she was perfectly well.

‘Grandmother is in capital spirits,’ said Lady Lesbia. ‘She is pleased with the contents of yesterday’s _Globe_. Lord Denyer, the son of one of her oldest friends, has been making a great speech at Liverpool in the Conservative interest, and her ladyship thinks we shall have a change of parties before long.’

‘A general shuffle of the cards,’ said Maulevrier, looking up from his breakfast. ‘I’m sure I hope so. I’m no politician, but I like a row.’

‘I hope you are a Conservative, Mr. Hammond,’ said Lesbia.

‘I had hoped you would have known that ever so long ago, Lady Lesbia.’

Lesbia blushed at his tone, which was almost a reproach.

‘I suppose I ought to have understood from the general tenor of your conversation,’ she said; ‘but I am terribly stupid about politics. I take so little interest in them. I am always hearing that we are being badly governed–that the men who legislate for us are stupid or wicked; yet the world seems to go on somehow, and we are no worse.’

‘It is just the same with sport,’ said Maulevrier. ‘Every rainy spring we are told that all the young birds have been drowned, or that the grouse-disease has decimated the fathers and mothers, and that we shall have nothing to shoot; but when August comes the birds are there all the same.’

‘It is the nature of mankind to complain,’ said Hammond. ‘Cain and Abel were the first farmers, and you see one of them grumbled.’

They were rather lively at breakfast that morning–Maulevrier’s last breakfast but one–for he had announced his determination of going to Scotland next day. Other fellows would shoot all the birds if he dawdled any longer. Mary was in deep despondency at the idea of his departure, yet she laughed and talked with the rest. And perhaps Lesbia felt a little moved at the thought of losing Mr. Hammond. Maulevrier would come back to Mary, but John Hammond was hardly likely to return. Their parting would be for ever.

‘You needn’t sit quite in my pocket, Molly,’ said Maulevrier to his younger sister.

‘I like to make the most of you, now you are going away,’ sighed Mary. ‘Oh, dear, how dull we shall all be when you are gone.’

‘Not a bit of it! You will have some fox-hunting, perhaps, before the snow is on the hills.’

At the very mention of fox-hounds Lady Mary’s bright young face crimsoned, and Maulevrier began to laugh in a provoking way, with side-long glances at his younger sister.

‘Did you ever hear of Molly’s fox-hunting, by-the-by, Hammond?’ he asked.

Mary tried to put her hand before his lips, but it was useless.

‘Why shouldn’t I tell?’ he exclaimed. ‘It was quite a heroic adventure. You must know our fox-hunting here is rather a peculiar institution,–very good in its way, but strictly local. No horse could live among our hills, so we hunt on foot, and as the pace is good, and the work hard, nobody who starts with the hounds is likely to be in at the death, except the huntsmen. We are all mad for the sport, and off we go, over the hills and far away, picking up a fresh field as we go. The ploughman leaves his plough, and the shepherd leaves his flock, and the farmer leaves his thrashing, to follow us; in every field we cross we get fresh blood, while those who join us at the start fall off by degrees. Well, it happened one day late in October, when there were long ridges of snow on Helvellyn, and patches of white on Fairfield, Mistress Mary here must needs take her bamboo staff and start for the Striding Edge. It was just the day upon which she might have met her death easily on that perilous point, but happily something occurred to divert her juvenile fancy, for scarcely had she got to the bottom of Dolly Waggon Pike–you know Dolly—-‘

‘Intimately,’ said Hammond, with a nod.

‘Scarcely had she neared the base of Dolly Waggon when she heard the huntsman’s horn and the hounds at full cry, streaming along towards Dunmail Raise. Off flew Molly, all among the butcher boys, and farmers’ men, and rosy-cheeked squireens of the district–racing over the rugged fields–clambering over the low stone walls–up hill, down hill–shouting when the others shouted–never losing sight of the waving sterns–winding and doubling, and still going upward and upward, till she stood, panting and puffing like a young grampus, on the top of Seat Sandal, still all among the butcher boys and the farmer’s men, and the guides and the red-cheeked squireens, her frock torn to ribbons, her hat lost in a ditch, her hair streaming down her back, and every inch of her, from her nose downwards, splashed and spattered with mire and clay. What a spectacle for gods and men, guides and butcher boys. And there she stood with the sun going down beyond Coniston Old Man, and a seven-mile walk between her and Fellside.

‘Poor Lady Mary!’ said Hammond, looking at her very kindly: but Mary did not see that friendly glance, which betokened sympathy rather than scorn. She sat silent and very red, with drooping eyelids, thinking her brother horribly cruel for thus publishing her foolishness.

‘Poor, indeed!’ exclaimed Maulevrier. ‘She came crawling home after dark, footsore and draggled, looking like a beggar girl, and as evil fate would have it, her ladyship, who so seldom goes out, must needs have been taking afternoon tea at the Vicarage upon that particular occasion, and was driving up the avenue as Mary crawled to the gate. The storm that followed may be more easily imagined than described.’

‘It was years and years ago,’ expostulated Mary, looking very angry. ‘Grandmother needn’t have made such a fuss about it.’

‘Ah, but in those days she still had hopes of civilising you,’ answered Maulevrier. ‘Since then she has abandoned all endeavour in that direction, and has given you over to your own devices–and me. Since then you have become a chartered libertine. You have letters of mark.’

‘I don’t care what you call me,’ said Mary. ‘I only know that I am very happy when you are at home, and very miserable when you are away.’

‘It is hardly kind of you to say that, Lady Mary,’ remonstrated Fraeulein Mueller, who, up to this point, had been busily engaged with muffins and gooseberry jam.

‘Oh, I don’t mean that any one is unkind to me or uses me badly,’ said Mary. ‘I only mean that my life is empty when Maulevrier is away, and that I am always longing for him to come back again.’

‘I thought you adored the hills, and the lake, and the villagers, and your pony, and Maulevrier’s dogs,’ said, Lesbia faintly contemptuous.

‘Yes, but one wants something human to love,’ answered Mary, making it very obvious that there was no warmth of affection between herself and the feminine members of her family.

She had not thought of the significance of her speech. She was very angry with Maulevrier for having held her up to ridicule before Mr. Hammond, who already despised her, as she believed, and whose contempt was more galling than it need have been, considering that he was a mere casual visitor who would go away and return no more. Never till his coming had she felt her deficiencies; but in his presence she writhed under the sense of her unworthiness, and had an almost agonising consciousness of all those faults which her grandmother had told her about so often with not the slightest effect. In those days she had not cared what Lady Maulevrier or any one else might say of her, or think of her. She lived her life, and defied fortune. She was worse than her reputation. To-day she felt it a bitter thing that she had grown to the age of womanhood lacking all those graces and accomplishments which made her sister adorable, and which might make even a plain woman charming.

Never till John Hammond’s coming had she felt a pang of envy in the contemplation of Lesbia’s beauty or Lesbia’s grace; but now she had so keen a sense of the difference between herself and her sister that she began to fear that this cruel pain must indeed be that lowest of all vices. Even the difference in their gowns was a source of humiliation to her how. Lesbia was looking her loveliest this morning, in a gown that was all lace and soft Madras muslin, flowing, cloud-like; while Mary’s tailor gown, with its trim tight bodice, horn buttons, and kilted skirt, seemed to cry aloud that it had been made for a Tomboy. And this tailor gown was a costume to which Mary had condemned herself by her own folly. Only a year ago, moved by an artistic admiration for Lesbia’s delicate breakfast gowns, Mary had told her grandmother that she would like to have something of the same kind, whereupon the dowager, who did not take the faintest interest in Mary’s toilet, but who had a stern sense of justice, replied–

‘I do not think Lesbia’s frocks and your habits will agree, but you can have some pretty morning gowns if you like;’ and the order had been given for a confection in muslin and lace for Lady Mary.

Mary came down to breakfast one bright June morning, in the new frock, feeling very proud of herself, and looking very pretty.

‘Fine feathers make fine birds,’ said Fraeulein Mueller. ‘I should hardly have known you.’

‘I wish you would always dress like that,’ said Lesbia; ‘you really look like a young lady;’ and Mary danced about on the lawn, feeling sylph-like, and quite in love with her own elegance, when a sudden uplifting of canine voices in the distance had sent her flying to see what was the matter with the terrier pack.

In the kennel there was riot and confusion. Ahab was demolishing Angelina, Absalom had Agamemnon in a deadly grip. Dog-whip in hand, Mary rushed to the rescue, and laid about her, like the knights of old, utterly forgetful of her frock. She soon succeeded in restoring order, but the Madras muslin, the Breton lace had perished in the conflict. She left the kennel panting, and in rags and tatters, some of the muslin and lace hanging about her in strips a yard long, but the greater part remaining in the possession of the terriers, who had mauled and munched her finery to their hearts’ content, while she was reading the Riot Act.

She went back to the house, bowed down by shame and confusion, and marched straight to the dowager’s morning-room.

‘Look what the terriers have done to me, grandmother,’ she said, with a sob. ‘It is all my own fault, of course. I ought not to have gone near them in that stupid muslin. Please forgive me for being so foolish. I am not fit to have pretty frocks.’

‘I think, my dear, you can now have no doubt that the tailor gowns are fittest for you,’ answered Lady Maulevrier, with crushing placidity. ‘We have tried the experiment of dressing you like Lesbia, and you see it does not answer. Tell Kibble to throw your new gown in the rag-bag, and please let me hear no more about it.’

After this dismal failure Mary could not feel herself ill-used in having to wear tailor gowns all the year round. She was allowed cotton frocks for very warm weather, and she had pretty gowns for evening wear; but her usual attire was cloth or linsey woolsey, made by the local tailor. Sometimes Maulevrier ordered her a gown or a coat from his own man in Conduit Street, and then she felt herself smart and fashionable. And even the local tailor contrived to make her gowns prettily, having a great appreciation of her straight willowy figure, and deeming it a privilege to work for her, so that hitherto Mary had felt very well content with her cloth and linsey. But now that John Hammond so obviously admired Lesbia’s delicate raiment, poor Mary began to think her woollen gowns odious.

After breakfast Mary and Maulevrier went straight off to the kennels. His lordship had numerous instructions to give on this last day, and his lieutenant had to receive and register his orders. Lesbia went to the garden with her book and with Fraeulein–the inevitable Fraeulein as Hammond thought her–in close attendance.

It was a lovely morning, sultry, summer-like, albeit September had just begun. The tennis lawn, which had been levelled on one side of the house, was surrounded on three sides by shrubberies planted forty years ago, in the beginning of Lady Maulevrier’s widowhood. All loveliest trees grew there in perfection, sheltered by the mighty wall of the mountain, fed by the mists from the lake. Larch and mountain ash, and Lawsonian cyprus,–deodara and magnolia, arbutus, and silver broom, acacia and lilac, flourished here in that rich beauty which made every cottage garden in the happy district a little paradise; and here in a semi-circular recess at one end of the lawn were rustic chairs and tables and an umbrella tent. This was Lady Lesbia’s chosen retreat on summer mornings, and a favourite place for afternoon tea.

Mr. Hammond followed the two ladies to their bower.

‘This is to be my last morning,’ he said, looking at Lesbia. ‘Will you think me a great bore if I spend it with you?’

‘We shall think it very nice of you,’ answered Lesbia, without a vestige of emotion; ‘especially if you will read to us.’

‘I will do any thing to make myself useful. What shall I read?’

‘Anything you like. What do you say to Tennyson?’

‘That he is a noble poet, a teacher of all good; but too philosophical for my present mood. May I read you some of Heine’s ballads, those songs which you sing so exquisitely, or rather some you do not sing, and which will be fresher to you. My German is far from perfect, but I am told it is passable, and Fraeulein Mueller can throw her scissors at me when my accent is too dreadful.’

‘You speak German beautifully,’ said Fraeulein. ‘I wonder where you learned it?’

‘I have been a good deal in Germany, and I had a Hanoverian valet who was quite a gentleman, and spoke admirably, I think I learned more from him than from grammars or dictionaries. I’ll go and fetch Heine.’

‘What a very agreeable person Mr. Hammond is,’ said Fraeulein, when he was gone. ‘We shall quite miss him.’

‘Yes, I have no doubt we shall miss him,’ said Lesbia, again without the faintest emotion.

The governess began to think that the ordeal of an agreeable young man’s presence at Fellside had been passed in safety, and that her pupil was unscathed. She had kept a close watch on the two, as in duty bound. She knew that Hammond was in love with Lesbia; but she thought Lesbia was heart-whole.

Mr. Hammond came back with a shabby little book in his hand and established himself comfortably in one of the two Beaconsfield chairs.

He opened his book at that group of short poems called Heimkehr, and read here and there, as fancy led him. Sometimes the strain was a love-song, brief, passionate as the cry of a soul in pain; sometimes the verses were bitter and cynical; sometimes full of tenderest simplicity, telling of childhood, and youth and purity; sometimes dark with hidden meanings, grim, awful, cold with the chilling breath of the charnel-house. Sometimes Lesbia’s heart beat a little faster as Mr. Hammond read, for it seemed as if it was he who was speaking to her, and not the dead poet.

An hour or more passed in this way. Fraeulein Mueller was charmed at hearing some of her favourite poems, asking now for this little bit, and anon for another, and expatiating upon the merits of German poets in general, and Heine in particular, in the pauses of the lecture. She was quite carried away by her delight in the poet, and was so entirely uplifted to the ideal world that, when a footman came with a message from Lady Maulevrier requesting her presence, she tripped gaily off at once, without a thought of danger in leaving those two together on the lawn. She had been a faithful watch-dog up to this point; but she was now lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that the time of peril was all but ended.

So she left them; but could she have looked hack two minutes afterwards she would have perceived the unwisdom of that act.

No sooner had the Fraeulein turned the corner of the shrubbery than Hammond laid aside his book and drew nearer Lesbia, who sat looking downward, with her eyes upon the delicate piece of fancy work which had occupied her fingers all the morning.

‘Lesbia, this is my last day at Fellside, and you and I may never have a minute alone together again while I am here. Will you come for a little walk with me on the Fell? There is something I must say to you before I go.’

Lesbia’s delicate cheek grew a shade more pale. Instinct told her what was coming, though never mortal man had spoken to her of love. Nor until now had Mr. Hammond ever addressed her by her Christian name without the ceremonious prefix. There was a deeper tone in his voice, a graver look in his eyes, than she had ever noticed before.

She rose, and took up her sunshade, and went with him meekly through the cultivated shrubbery of ornamental timber to the rougher pathway that wound through a copse of Scotch fir, which formed the outer boundary of Lady Maulevrier’s domain. Beyond the fir trees rose the grassy slope of the hill, on the brow of which sheep were feeding. Deep down in the hollow below the lawns and shrubberries of Fellside the placid bosom of the lake shone like an emerald floor in the sunlight, reflecting the verdure of the hill, and the white sheep dotted about here and there.

There was not a breath in the air around them as those two sauntered slowly side by side in the pine wood, not a cloud in the dazzling blue sky above; and for a little time they too were silent, as if bound by a spell which neither dared to break. Then at last Hammond spoke.

‘Lesbia, you know that I love you,’ he began, in his low, grave voice, tremulous with feeling. ‘No words I can say to-day can tell you of my love more plainly than my heart has been telling you in every hour of this happy, happy time that you and I have spent together. I love you as I never hoped to love, fervently, completely, believing that the perfection of earthly bliss will be mine if I can but win you. Dearest, is there such a sweet hope for me; are you indeed my own, as I am yours, heart and soul, and mind and being, till the last throb of life in this poor clay?’

He tried to take her hand, but she drew herself away from him with a frightened look. She was very pale, and there was infinite distress in the dark violet eyes, which looked entreatingly, deprecatingly at her lover.

‘I dare not answer as you would like me to answer,’ she faltered, after a painful pause. ‘I am not my own mistress. My grandmother has brought me up, devoted herself to me almost, and she has her own views, her own plans. I dare not frustrate them!’

‘She would like to marry you to a man of rank and fortune–a man who will choose you, perhaps, because other people admire you, rather than because he himself loves you as you ought to be loved; who will choose you because you are altogether the best and most perfect thing of your year; just as he would buy a yearling at Newmarket or Doncaster. Her ladyship means you to make a great alliances–coronets, not hearts, are the counters for her game; but, Lesbia, would you, in the bloom and freshness of youth–you with the pulses of youth throbbing at your heart–lend yourself to the calculations of age which has lived its life and forgotten the very meaning of love? Would you submit to be played as a card in the game of a dowager’s ambition? Trust me, dearest, in the crisis of a woman’s life there is one only counsellor she should listen to, and that counsellor is her own heart. If you love me–as I dare to hope you do–trust in me, hold by me, and leave the rest to Heaven. I know that I can make your life happy.’

‘You frighten me by your impetuosity,’ said Lesbia. ‘Surely you forget how short a time we have known each other.’

‘An age. All my life before the day I saw you is a dead, dull blank as compared with the magical hours I have spent with you.’

‘I do not even know who and what you are.’

‘First, I am a gentleman, or I should not be your brother’s friend. A poor gentleman, if you like, with only my own right arm to hew my pathway through the wood of life to the temple of fortune; but trust me, only trust me, Lesbia, and I will so hew my path as to reach that temple. Look at me, love. Do I look like a man born to fail?’

She looked up at him shyly, with eyes that were dim with tears. He looked like a demi-god, tall, straight as the pine trunks amongst which he was standing, a frame formed for strength and activity, a face instinct with mental power, dark eyes that glowed with the fire of intellect and passion. The sunlight gave an almost unearthly radiance to the clear dark of his complexion, the curly brown hair cut close to the finely shaped head, the broad brow and boldly modelled features.

Lesbia felt in her heart that such a man must be destined for success, born to be a conqueror in all strifes, a victor upon every field.

‘Have I the thews and sinews of a man doomed to be beaten in the battle?’ he asked her. ‘No, dearest; Heaven meant me to succeed; and with you to fight for I shall not be beaten by adverse fortune. Can you not trust Providence and me?’

‘I cannot disobey my grandmother. If she will consent—-‘

‘She will not consent. You must defy Lady Maulevrier, Lesbia, if you mean to reward my love. But I will promise you this much, darling, that if you will be my wife–with your brother’s consent–which I am sure of before I ask for it, within one year of our marriage I will find means of reconciling her ladyship to the match, and winning her entire forgiveness for you and me.’

‘You are talking of impossibilities,’ said Lesbia, frowning. ‘Why do you talk to me as if I were a child? I know hardly anything of the world, but I do know the woman who has reared and educated me. My grandmother would never forgive me if I married a poor man. I should be an outcast.’

‘We would be outcasts together–happy outcasts. Besides, we should not always be poor. I tell you I am predestined to conquer fate.’

‘But we should have to begin from the beginning.’

‘Yes, we should have to begin from the beginning, as Adam and Eve did when they left Paradise.’

‘We are not told in the Bible that they had any happiness after that. It seems to have been all trouble and weariness, and toil and death, after the angel with the flaming sword drove them out of Eden.’

‘They were together, and they must have been happy. Oh, Lesbia, if you do not feel that you can face poverty and the world’s contempt by my side, and for my sake, you do not love me. Love never calculates so nicely; love never fears the future; and yet you do love me, Lesbia,’ he said, trying to fold her in his arms; but again she drew herself away from him–this time with a look almost of horror–and stood facing him, clinging to one of the pine trunks, like a scared wood-nymph.

‘You have no right to say that,’ she said.

‘I have the divine right of my own deep love–of heart which cries out to heart. Do you think there is no magnetic power in true love which can divine the answering love in another? Lesbia, call me an insolent coxcomb if you like, but I know you love me, and that you and I may be utterly happy together. Oh, why–why do you shrink from me, my beloved; why withhold yourself from my arms! Oh, love, let me hold you to my heart–let me seal our betrothal with a kiss!’

‘Betrothal–no, no; not for the world,’ cried Lesbia. ‘Lady Maulevrier would cast me off for ever; she would curse me.’

‘What would the curse of an ambitious woman weigh against my love? And I tell you that her anger would be only a passing tempest. She would forgive you.’

‘Never–you don’t know her.’

‘I tell you she would forgive you, and all would be well with us before we had been married a year. Why cannot you believe me, Lesbia?’

‘Because I cannot believe impossibilities, even from your lips,’ she answered sullenly.

She stood before him with downcast eyes, the tears streaming down her pale cheeks, exquisitively lovely in her agitation and sorrow. Yes, she did love him; her heart was beating passionately; she was longing to throw herself on his breast, to be folded upon that manly heart, in trust in that brave, bright look which seemed to defy fortune. Yes, he was a man born to conquer; he was handsome, intellectual, powerful in all mental and physical gifts. A man of men. But he was, by his own admission, a very obscure and insignificant person, and he had no money. Life with him meant a long fight with adverse circumstances; life for his wife must mean patience, submission, long waiting upon destiny, and perhaps with old age and grey hairs the tardy turning of Fortune’s wheel. And was she for this to resign the kingdom that had been promised to her, the giddy heights which she was born to scale, the triumphs and delights and victories of the great world? Yes, Lesbia loved this fortuneless knight; but she loved herself and her prospects of promotion still better.

‘Oh, Lesbia, can you not be brave for my sake–trustful for my sake? God will be good to us if we are true to each other.’

‘God will not be good to me if I disobey my grandmother. I owe her too much; ingratitude in me would be doubly base. I will speak to her. I will tell her all you have said, and if she gives me the faintest encouragement—-‘

‘She will not; that is a foregone conclusion. Tell her all, if you like; but let us be prepared for the answer. When she denies the right of your heart to choose its own mate, then rise up in the might of your womanhood and defy her. Tell her, “I love him, and be he rich or poor, I will share his fate;” tell her boldly, bravely, nobly, as a true woman should; and if she be adamant still, proclaim your right to disobey her worldly wisdom rather than the voice of your own heart. And then come to me, darling, and be my own, and the world which you and I will face together shall not be a bad world. I will answer for that. No trouble shall come near you. No humiliation shall ever touch you. Only believe in me.’

‘I can believe in you, but not in the impossible,’ answered Lesbia, with measured accents.

The voice was silver-sweet, but passing cold. Just then there was a rustling among the pine branches, and Lesbia looked round with a startled air.

‘Is there any one listening?’ she exclaimed. ‘What was that?’

‘Only the breath of heaven. Oh, Lesbia, if you were but a little less wise, a little more trustful. Do not be a dumb idol. Say that you love me, or do not love me. If you can look me in the face and say the last, I will leave you without another word. I will take my sentence and go.’

But this was just what Lesbia could not do. She could not deny her love; and yet she could not sacrifice all things for her love. She lifted the heavy lids which veiled those lovely eyes, and looked up at him imploringly.

‘Give me time to breathe, time to think,’ she said.

‘And then will you answer me plainly, truthfully, without a shadow of reserve, remembering that the fate of two lives hangs on your words.’

‘I will.’

‘Let it be so, then. I’ll go for a ramble over the hills, and return in time for afternoon tea. I shall look for you on the tennis lawn at half-past four.’

He took her in his arms, and this time she yielded herself to him, and the beautiful head rested for a few moments upon his breast, and the soft eyes looked up at him in confiding fondness. He bent and kissed her once only, but a kiss that meant for life and death. In the next moment he was gone, leaving her alone among the pine trees.

CHAPTER XI.

‘IF I WERE TO DO AS ISEULT DID.’

Lady Maulevrier rarely appeared at luncheon. She took some slight refection in her morning-room, among her books and papers, and in the society of her canine favourites, whose company suited her better at certain hours than the noisier companionship of her grandchildren. She was a studious woman, loving the silent life of books better than the inane chatter of everyday humanity. She was a woman who thought much and read much, and who lived more in the past than the present. She lived also in the future, counting much upon the splendid career of her beautiful granddaughter, which should be in a manner a lengthening out, a renewal of her own life. She looked forward to the day when Lesbia should reign supreme in the great world, a famous beauty and leader of fashion, her every act and word inspired and directed by her grandmother, who would be the shadow behind the throne. It was possible–nay, probable–that in those days Lady Maulevrier would herself re-appear in society, establish her salon, and draw around her