The evening of the day following was that of the ball. Chris was in the lowest of low spirits, and would have shut herself up in her room but for Mr. Bradfield, who had insisted on her reserving a square dance for him. The strange communications made by Stelfox, and her own conviction that Mr. Richard was being unfairly treated, made her shy and depressed in the society of the master of the house, whose sharp eyes detected a change in her manner towards him. The girl was troubled also on her mother’s account. Mrs. Abercarne had been worried and exasperated, not only by the airs which Mrs. Graham-Shute gave herself, which she could have put up with, but by the orders she gave the servants on matters concerning the ball. Knowing her relationship to their master, and being somewhat impressed also by her pretensions, the servants did not dare to disobey her; so that in the attempt to serve two mistresses they wasted their time and fell to grumbling. A consciousness of the battle between the wills of the two ladies pervaded the entire household by the time the dancing began, and the ball opened in general depression.
“So good of you to give this dance for my girls!” cried Mrs. Graham-Shute’s loud voice in Mr. Bradfield’s ear, as he stood surveying the dancers, and looking about for Chris. “I’ve just been telling Mrs.Ethandene so,” she added, glancing at a middle-aged lady by her side, who was one of the great people of the place, and with whom, therefore, Mrs. Graham-Shute thought it advisable to strike up a friendship.
“H’m! Not much in my line—balls!” said Mr. Bradfield, grumpily, as he watched enviously the young fellow who was at that moment leading Chris out for a waltz.
“Who is that very distinguished-looking girl?” asked Mrs. Ethandene, who, having no daughters to marry, could afford a little admiration for those of other women.
“That one in the white nun’s veiling, with the marguerites in her bodice?” said Mrs. Graham-Shute, looking in the wrong direction either on purpose or by accident; “that is my daughter Lilith. She is hardly out yet, dear girl; but for my cousin John’s ball Icouldn’trefuse her permission, you know.”
“No, no! I don’t mean her,” went on Mrs. Ethandene, a homely person, incapable of taking a hint of any kind. “I mean that tall girl with the good figure—the one in grey silk, with the flat gold necklace?”
“That,” answered Mr. Bradfield, in stentorian tones, frowning a little, and stepping forward so that the lady should not misunderstand, “is Miss Christina Abercarne.”
Mrs. Graham-Shute, whose face had in a moment become flaccid and expressionless, drew her head well back, and murmured a postscript in Mrs. Ethandene’s ear:
“The housekeeper’s little girl. I didn’t know you meant her. So good of my cousin to let her come, wasn’t it?”
Now Mrs. Graham-Shute did not wish her cousin to hear these words; but being one of those uncomfortable persons who are always more interested in what is not intended for their ears than in what is, he did hear them. And he utterly confounded and exasperated his dear cousin by saying, in the same loud voice as before:
“There wasn’t any goodness about it; there’s no goodness in being kind to a pretty girl. I gave the ball just because she likes dancing. Nothing else would have induced me to turn my house upside down like this.”
Mrs. Graham-Shute could only affect to laugh at this speech as if it had been some charming pleasantry. But she did it with such an ill grace, being, indeed, extremely mortified, that it was plain she was on the verge of tears.
Meanwhile Chris was not enjoying herself so much as Mr. Bradfield had wished her to do. Her partner was a local production, being, indeed, no other than one of the famous Brownes, without an assortment of whom no Wyngham gaiety could be considered complete. He was the younger partner in the principal firm of solicitors of the town, and was, as she afterwards learnt, looked upon as “a great catch.” No Wyngham lady, however, had as yet caught him, and young Mr. Browne, modestly conscious of the interest he excited in the feminine breasts of the neighbourhood, conceived it as more his duty than his pleasure to distribute his attentions as equally as he could among the maidens of the place. In the course of his philanthropic wanderings, therefore, he had fallen temporarily to the lot of Chris, who was, perhaps, not yet sufficiently acclimatised to appreciate the honour as it deserved.
For young Mr. Browne’s attractions did not include the gift of conversational brilliancy, and Chris found thetête-à-têtehard work.
“You go in a great deal for theatricals, don’t you?” she said, thinking, from what she had heard, that this was a safe shot.
But he shook his head with a smile, which had in it not more than the minimum of the contempt the average Englishman always shows for any form of recreation in which he is not proficient.
“No,Idon’t, but my brothers and sisters do. Amy, the second one, acts awfully well. They did theVicar of Wakefieldlast year for the Blind School, and her Olivia was ever so much better than Ellen Terry’s. Everybody said so. She’d make her fortune on the stage, that girl would. Of course, my father would never let her go on; but lots of people would say it’s a pity.”
After this, as his interest in the stage evidently languished, Chris tried Art. Did he sketch? No, young Mr. Browne didn’t sketch himself, but his brother Algernon did; awfully well, too, so that everybody said it was simply disgraceful laziness, and nothing else, which kept him from exhibiting at the Academy. And this was the limit of young Mr. Browne’s interest in Art.
“No doubt, living down here so close to the sea, you take more interest in yachting and boating than anything else?”
“Well, I can’t say I’m much of a sailor myself,” answered Mr. Browne, modestly. “But Guy—that’s my eldest brother—can sail a yacht better than any of those men who get their living by it. My father keeps a little yacht, and I assure you that whenthey’re out in dirty weather the captain gives the boat over to Guy.”
“Indeed!” said Chris, with as little incredulity as possible. And at last, tired of fishing about in these unpromising waters, she came straight to the point with, “And what is your favourite recreation? Or are you too studious to have one?”
“Oh, no! Walter’s the studious one of the family. He’ll make a name for himself some day, for he’s got the real stuff in him, that chap.”
“So that you’re the idle one, who looks on and does nothing?”
“I’m afraid I am; but they’re all so clever that there’s nothing left for me. And I think even they are cut out by my cousins at Colchester. It’s an odd thing, but there are three distinct branches of the Browne family, one at Colchester, one here, and one as far north as Caithness, though we haven’t the remotest idea how they got up there.”
“In the Wars of the Roses, perhaps,” suggested Chris, wildly, feeling that she must say something, and that it didn’t much matter what it was.
Young Mr. Browne quite caught at the notion.
“Very likely,” said he, waking up into vivid interest. “Any national convulsion like that causes the great families to shift from their old places, and distribute themselves over the country. I daresay such disturbances do some hidden good in that way; don’t you think so?”
“Oh, no doubt,” answered Chris, feebly, wishing that she were on the arm of the brother who could waltz better than anybody else.
The next partner she had was a little man, nearly a head shorter than herself, as dark as young Mr.Browne was fair. He was of a different type, too—the type that goes up to town now and then, and thinks it the proper thing to speak of the place it lives in as “this hole.” In essentials, however, there was a stronger resemblance between young Mr. Cullingworth’s way of looking at life and young Mr. Browne’s than the former would have been ready to admit.
“Do you like this place?” was his first, almost contemptuous question.
“Yes, I like it better than any place I have ever lived in,” answered Chris, exuberantly. “I don’t seem ever to have known before what fresh air was.”
“Oh, fresh air—yes,” replied young Mr. Cullingworth, his tone betraying several degrees more of disdain than before. “One gets a little too much of that; but of most of the other things which help to make life endurable one gets next to nothing down here. It really is the slowest hole you ever were in, and I shall be obliged to think much worse of you than I should like to do if you don’t heartily wish yourself out of it before very long.”
“I’m horribly afraid I shall have, then, to reconcile myself to that fall in your estimation,” said Chris, smiling. “I like this place much, much better than London. London is only pleasant when you’re rich enough to get out of it whenever you like. Now we were not rich enough—my mother and I—so we were very glad to come down here.”
“Awfully lucky for us down here,” said Mr. Cullingworth, without enthusiasm. For he was not so deeply buried in the provinces as to fall in love with every pretty face he met. “Wonder what on earth made this Bradfield take it into his head to settle down here, don’t you?”
“I suppose he had heard of it as a nice place, and a healthy place,” suggested Chris.
“He’s been awfully lucky in being taken up by all the best people in the place, hasn’t he?”
Now Chris had nothing to say to this, for she thought the “best people” were very lucky in being taken up by Mr. Bradfield. They were mostly poor and proud, which is not a nice combination, and they showed their poverty in their eagerness to avail themselves of Mr. Bradfield’s invitations, and their pride in their unanimity in not inviting him back.
Mr. Cullingworth, luckily, did not wait for an answer, but resumed, with admiration:
“Why, there’s all the very best society of Wyngham here to-night, there is, indeed. I suppose you know them all, don’t you?”
Chris, who thought the assembly decidedly unprepossessing, regretted her ignorance, and said she supposed they would rather look down upon her than seek her society. But Mr. Cullingworth, as representing the “best society” of Wyngham, was magnanimous.
He didn’t think there was any feeling of that sort, “’pon his word he didn’t.” There might have been, of course, if some little bird had not happily whispered about that Mrs. Abercarne was the widow of an officer in the army, and a cousin of Lord Llanfyllin’s. As it was, Mr. Cullingworth felt sure that the “best people” were ready to receive her and her mother as equals.
“If you want to know who anybody is, you know, why, I’ll tell you,” said he, obligingly.
Chris, obliging too, asked the name of a tall, bald-headed man, who, although not particularly interestingin appearance, looked like a gentleman. Mr. Cullingworth’s face fell a little, but he answered at once:
“Oh, that Sir George Brandram. Don’t know much about him, he’s a Wosham man.”
His tone was so cold, and his manner intimated such strong disapproval, that Chris did not like to ask more about Sir George, fearing that he might be the hero of some terrible scandal. It was only later that she learnt that the sting of Mr. Cullingworth’s account of him lay in the words, “He’s a Wosham man.” For Wosham, four miles off along the coast, was the deadly rival of Wyngham; and it was a point of honour among their respective inhabitants to acknowledge no good in the dwellers of the rival town.
Meanwhile, the giver of the ball was enjoying himself very little better than the young lady in whose honour it was given. Mr. Bradfield loved to see his house full of guests, having to the full the pleasure of the self-made man in ostentatious hospitality. He took a cynical delight in the knowledge that these people who were civil to him for what he had, and not for what he was, considered themselves his superiors, and would have disdained to shake hands with him while he was still a poor man.
But to-night his enjoyment of his new position was spoilt for him by a chance word, uttered in all good faith by Lilith Shute, who was ashamed of her mother’s behaviour towards Chris, with whom she had struck up a friendship, which would have been a warm one if she could have had her will.
Lilith was dancing the Lancers with her host, whoseconstant glances in the direction of Chris Abercarne she could not fail to notice.
“How nice she looks to-night,” said Lilith, who looked pretty enough herself to afford a word of praise to a rival beauty, and who did not believe in her friend’s supposed designs upon the rich cousin’s heart.
“She always does look nice,” said Mr. Bradfield, gruffly. “And she knows it, too—a little too well, I expect, like all you girls who think yourself beauties.”
He was jealous, entirely without reason, of the men younger than himself, with one or other of whom she was dancing or talking whenever he glanced in her direction.
“I don’t see how a girl is to help knowing it, when it makes such a difference in the amount of attention she gets,” giggled Lilith. “Not,” she went on laughingly, “that the attention of anyone here would be likely to turn her head.” Then a malicious thought crossed her mind, taking the place of her magnanimity. “Chris Abercarne’s thoughts are too much occupied with somebody else for her to derive much entertainment from her partners,” she said, demurely.
Mr. Bradfield looked at her scrutinisingly; he dared to hope that Lilith was going to say something encouraging to himself.
“Somebody else?” he asked abruptly. “Who is it?”
Lilith shrugged her shoulders, and laughed mischievously.
“Ah, that’s more than I can tell you. All the information I can give you is that he is very,verygood-looking, that he met her to-day in the park, and walked a little way with her as she came back from the town, and that she looked very much confused when she met me in the garden, and would have liked, I’m sure, to think I hadn’t seen her.”
Now there was a little mischief in this speech, for Lilith did not think Chris had behaved quite well in pretending not to know whom she meant when she described the stranger present at thetableaux. But, to do her justice, she had not the least intention of rousing the real anger she instantly saw in Mr. Bradfield’s face. Not only in his face either, for Lilith felt, when his hand next touched hers in the dance, that he was trembling with rage.
“Oh, ho!” said he, with an exclamation which was meant to sound like a laugh, but which was, in truth, anything but mirthful; “so she meets a sweetheart on the quiet, does she?”
Lilith, rather frightened, and seeing that she had made more serious mischief than she had intended hastened to answer:
“Oh, no, no; I didn’t mean that. I daresay it was only an accidental meeting. I—I——”
Mr. Bradfield interrupted her sternly.
“Have you ever seen him before, this fellow whom she met?”
“Only once,” answered Lilith, quickly.
“Where was that? Was she with him?”
“N—no, she wasn’t with him. It was the day of thetableaux. He was sitting on one of the back seats, and nobody seemed to know who he was. Not even Chris, for I asked her.”
Mr. Bradfield was evidently much puzzled. All the golden youth of Wyngham and the neighbourhoodwere dancing in his drawing-rooms that night, and who the fortunate young man could be who was considered good-looking by such a connoisseur as Lilith, and whom Chris condescended to meet on the sly, he had not the remotest notion. Certainly a man’s ideas of another man’s good looks differed considerably from those of a girl; but he could not, running over in his mind the eligible young men of the neighbourhood, conceive that any one of them should find favour in the very particular eyes of both the beauties.
With his usual directness, he set about solving the mystery at once. Taking Lilith back to her mother as soon as the dance was over, he went in search of Chris, whom he found sitting in the dining-room, eating an ice, and looking bored by young Cullingworth’s conversation.
“Miss Christina, I want to speak to you,” said he, shortly.
Chris, upon whom a hazy dread began to fall, as to the subject upon which he wished to interrogate her, followed him with reluctance into the embrasure of the window, which had been kept free from refreshment tables on purpose fortête-à-têtesof a more or less interesting sort.
Mr. Bradfield commanded rather than invited Chris to be seated, and planted himself in a rather menacing than lover-like attitude before her. He had just remembered, luckily for him, that he must tone down his martinet-like manner, as he had no claim whatever on the girl to give him a right to be offended.
“So you’ve found a sweetheart?” he began, in a voice which he had subdued to the pitch of a confidentialtête-à-tête, but which betrayed his feelings more clearly than he had intended.
A bright pink blush rose in the pale face of Chris to the very roots of her hair. She hesitated a moment before replying, but her hesitation was not of a kind to inspire her interlocutor with hopeful feelings. She looked frightened, but she looked also as if she did not mean to be bullied. He did not wait for her to reply before he said:
“Did you tell your mother what I said to you the other day?”
Chris just glanced up into his face, and resolved not to pretend to misunderstand.
“No, Mr. Bradfield.”
“Why not?”
“It would make no difference.”
“You’ve found someone else you like better?”
Again Chris hesitated. She had grown very white,and was chilled by a fear of this man. There was something hard, something cruel in his manner, which let her, for the first time, into the secret of those qualities of doggedness and remorselessness in his nature, which had helped him to get on in the world. She rose quickly, with the feeling that she could hold her own better at her full height, than when she was under the direct fire of those strange eyes. She was in terror lest he should find out who her companion had been on her walk through the park that afternoon. The truth was that it had been Mr. Richard, who, after evidently lying in wait for her among the trees, had accompanied her a little way, as usual in silence, but with a manner in which there was no longer any attempt at concealment of the fact that he loved her. But this was the one fact beyond all others which Chris was anxious to hide from Mr. Bradfield. For the unhappy Mr. Richard would certainly be made to suffer for it, if his guardian had any suspicion that he was his rival.
Mr. Bradfield, impatient at her silence, spoke again:
“I suppose you will think I have no right to ask you such questions; but you are under my roof. If I cannot be your accepted husband, I am, at any rate for the time, your guardian, and I hear that you meet someone else,” added he, his tone betraying the jealous anger that he felt.
Now Chris knew what his information was, and who his informant had been. She turned to him quickly, and laughed uneasily.
“Lilith told you; she saw me in the park.” Then, with a fast beating heart, dreading the answer, she asked, “Didn’t she say who it was?”
“She said she didn’t know. But perhaps it’s some plot between you girls, and she knows his name as well as you do.”
“There is no plot between us, and I never said anything to her about him,” said Chris, quickly. “But I don’t deny that I have met a gentleman belonging to the place once or twice by accident, by accident entirely; and as you take it so seriously, I shall certainly take great care not to tell you his name.”
Mr. Bradfield was evidently furious; but he only said, drily:
“Does your mother know of it?”
“No. But,” added Chris, defiantly, “you can tell her if you like.”
Her spirits had risen, for during the last few moments she had felt pretty sure that either her words or her manner, or both, had diverted his suspicions, if he had had any, from the right quarter.
And all that poor Mr. Bradfield got by his talk with her was the loss of his dance; for Chris went away and hid herself, rather than walk through the quadrille with him.
The next day was the faded, uncomfortable, heavy-eyed day which usually succeeds to a night of unusual dissipation. Mrs. Graham-Shute put the climax to the general discomfort by insisting that they should all, directly luncheon was over, drive some miles in the cold to inspect ruins.
“But why in the world to-day?” as Lilith grumbled aloud. “As they’ve stood there sinceA.D.250, mightn’t they manage to stand there a few days longer?”
But Mrs. Graham-Shute saw no reason in anpoint of view but her own. They had an afternoon to spare; there were ruins to be seen; therefore ruins must be seen on that spare afternoon. So they all drove off in the cold, looking very blue about the nose, and feeling too cold to go to sleep, even under a mountain of rugs and furs, and nobody at all got any pleasure out of the expedition except John Bradfield, who drove Lilith over in his dog-cart, and managed, by steady persistence, to get Chris to consent to drive back with him. He was so gentle, so humble, touched just the right chords of gratitude in her so deftly, under his seeming clumsiness, that the girl could not hold out against him. However, she made her own conditions.
“Mind,” she said, holding up a warning forefinger in its pretty glove, as he made a collection of rugs for her comfort, and held out his hand to help her to mount, radiant with his victory, “you are not to try to converse with me except upon the subjects I specially choose, for I’m too cold to be civil, unless I have everything my own way.”
Mr. Bradfield, glad to get her upon any terms, consented with a roar of laughter. But Mrs. Graham-Shute, who overheard this speech from Chris, was overwhelmed by the girl’s audacity.
“I wonder how my cousin puts up with such impudence,” she said, in a tone of exasperation, as she floundered, panting, through the mud which, at this season, was an indispensable adjunct to the ruins. “She puts on all the airs of a person of consequence, like her horrible old mother. Thank goodness, I’ve escaped an afternoon withher, at any rate.”
“That’s just what she said of you when she refusedto go, my dear,” said her husband, gently, in her ear, as, tottering under her weight, he helped her into the landau.
Chris need not have felt apprehensive. Mr. Bradfield had thought matters over, and decided that the fortress was not to be stormed, that his best plan lay in starving out the garrison by a long and careful siege. Besides, it was too cold for ardent lovemaking; their jaws were stiff as they drove in the face of the winter wind. So that Chris was pleased to find that her drive back with Mr. Bradfield was a good deal pleasanter than her drive out had been in the company of Mrs. Graham-Shute.
It was Mr. Bradfield who chose the topics of conversation after all. For he was so anxious to prove his good faith that he gave her no opportunity of starting any subject of her own, but beguiled the way by stories of his life on Australian sheep farms. His experience had been hard, and some of his tales of hardship and privation, while they had the desired effect of securing the young girl’s sympathy, made her shudder.
“Why, I would rather have remained as poor as you say you were all my life than have made a large fortune in such hard ways as those!” she exclaimed.
Mr. Bradfield’s face clouded suddenly at her words, so that Chris began to wonder what there was in her speech to offend him.
To break the silence which followed, she said:
“You must be very glad those hard times are over?”
As he answered, one of the hard looks his face could assume at times made his features look repulsive in their rugged harshness.
“Glad!” he exclaimed. “There isn’t a crime I wouldn’t commit sooner than go through them again.”
Chris glanced at his face, and a sudden remembrance of Mr. Bradfield’s unfortunate ward flashed into her mind. Without reason, by a woman’s sensitive instinct, she connected the words he had just uttered, the hard, harsh spirit which they betrayed, with the treatment of the man whom he kept shut up in such a mysterious manner in the east wing.
By this time they were passing Wyngham Station. A few passengers were coming out in a straggling thread, for the London train had just come in. Although the afternoon was light for the time of year, it was too dark to distinguish clearly the faces of these people, although something of their figures was discernible. Mr. Bradfield’s gaze was suddenly attracted by the appearance of a man who was walking in the road a little in front of the dog-cart. As soon as he caught sight of him, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a remark he was making to Chris. As his voice, besides being very gruff, was very loud, Chris saw nothing remarkable in the fact that as he stopped speaking, the man in the road turned quickly round.
“John Bradfield!” he cried, stepping back to the roadside. He had not spoken loudly, so there was nothing surprising in the fact that Mr. Bradfield drove on, apparently without hearing the stranger’s voice.
But glancing at him as they drove on, Chris was able to see, even in the twilight which was fast closing in, that his face was distorted and drawn with a strong emotion.
And the emotion was fear.
It was impossible for Chris not to be struck by the change in Mr. Bradfield’s face, impossible for her to avoid the supposition that this change was caused by the sight of the shabby man who stood on one side as the dog-cart went by, and called to “John Bradfield” by name.
Her companion was too shrewd not to know this. He turned to her, therefore, and said:
“That was a narrow squeak. Never had such a fright in my life as that fellow gave me; I thought I’d run over him.”
Chris was deceived by this speech, and she said, innocently:
“He knew you, Mr. Bradfield. He called to you by name!”
Mr. Bradfield turned in his seat, as if to have another look at the man; but they had turned a corner, and he was out of sight.
“Did he, though?” said he, as if in surprise. “Well, I daresay he’ll find me out, if he wants anything of me. People have a trick of doing that.” Then, as if dismissing the subject from his thoughts, he said, “Well, haven’t I been ‘good?’ Will you come out with me again?”
Chris laughed with some constraint. Mr. Bradfield certainly had behaved well, but she did not want to put his good behaviour to any further tests. Therewas about him all the time a certain air of an angler playing his fish, which made her ask herself whether she were not in truth compromising herself by receiving from him even those attentions, slight as they were, which she could not avoid.
They reached home before the rest of the party, and Chris ran upstairs to her mother, while Mr. Bradfield went to his study. Stelfox, who made himself useful about the house when he was not in attendance upon Mr. Richard, was just placing upon the table a great pile of letters. This being Christmas eve, the mid-day post had been some hours late.
Mr. Bradfield glanced searchingly at Stelfox. He was rather afraid of that faithful servitor, who was too useful a person, and perhaps too shrewd a one, to be dismissed. Manners, the weak-eyed secretary, was away for his holiday, so that master and man were alone. After a few moments’ rapid debate with himself, Mr. Bradfield asked a question which had been very near his lips since the night before, when Lilith’s communication had made him uneasy.
“How is your patient to-day, Stelfox?” he asked, as an opening.
“About the same as usual, sir.”
“Been giving you much trouble lately?”
“Not more than usual, sir.”
“And that’s not much, eh?”
“No, sir, that’s not much.”
“Do you think he gets any more rational as time goes on? Any more fit to be about?”
Mr. Bradfield put this question in the same tone as the rest, but the look with which he accompanied the words was more penetrating, more curious than before.
He wanted Stelfox to look up, but the man persisted in looking down.
“He’s about the same, sir, as he’s been ever since I’ve known him.”
“Just as mad? Just as unfit to go about uncontrolled?”
“Exactly the same, sir.”
Now Mr. Bradfield was not satisfied with this answer. He looked angrily at all that he could see of Stelfox’s stolid face, and then said, shortly:
“I haven’t seen you to speak to about that affair of Wednesday last—you know—when he got away.”
Stelfox raised his eyes for a moment, as respectfully as ever.
“No, sir, you haven’t.”
“Did you have any difficulty with him, in getting him to come back? It was in the barn you found him, wasn’t it—where I told you he was?”
“Yes, sir, it was in the barn. I had no difficulty with him.”
“And, of course, you have taken good care that he shouldn’t get out again?”
Now this was a question, undoubtedly, although he hardly meant it to be taken as one. It was supposed to be a matter-of-course remark, that hardly needed an answer. Stelfox’s answer was, perhaps, just the least bit aggressive in tone.
“I have taken the same care of him as usual, sir; I can’t do no more.”
John Bradfield, as he glanced again at the man’s face, looked doubtful still; but he saw that he had gone as far as he dared.
“I am quite satisfied with your care of him,Stelfox, quite satisfied. Of course, I’m always anxious, always nervous. I shouldn’t like him to get out again, and frighten the ladies.”
“There’s no fear of that, sir,” said Stelfox, as stolidly as ever.
“It’s a very awkward and responsible position that I have taken upon myself, in undertaking to keep an insane person under my own roof,” pursued John Bradfield. “The expense is nothing to me, and, of course, I don’t mind the danger to myself. His father was a very valued servant of mine, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for his son. I could never have borne to see the boy taken away to a pauper lunatic asylum.”
He paused, and seemed to expect some comment. So Stelfox said:
“I understand, sir; I quite understand.”
But he looked as if he did not.
“And the hard part of it is,” went on Mr. Bradfield, in a loud, aggrieved tone of voice, “that if some friend, say, of his father’s, were to turn up now, and want to see him, ten to one he’d think I ought to have treated the lad differently, put him into an asylum, or done something or other that I haven’t done.”
Again he paused. Stelfox, still stolid, still apparently without vivid interest, said:
“No doubt, sir.”
Mr. Bradfield would have given anything to know exactly what was passing in the man’s mind. Stelfox would have given anything to know what was passing in his master’s.
Mr. Bradfield, impatient, turned on his heel, and began rummaging among the letters the post hadbrought, tossing on to his secretary’s already well-covered table all those directed in handwritings he did not know, and opening the rest, only to throw them for the most part, half-read, into the waste-paper basket.
“However,” he went on, still reading, “I have the satisfaction of knowing I have done my best for the lad. And so have you, Stelfox. And I may as well take this opportunity of telling you that you will start the New Year with new wages. No objection to another ten pounds a year, I suppose?”
“Not the least, sir, and thank you,” replied Stelfox, moving aside from the door as somebody knocked at it from the outside.
Then Mr. Graham-Shute put his head in.
“Any admission?” said he, and he brought the rest of himself inside without waiting for an answer. “It’s d—d cold in these parts, Bradfield, and you keep your horses too fat. We’ve been a week on the road back from those d—d ruins. I’m frozen to death. There was only one comfort, and that was that my little Maudie’s jaw got too stiff to move. So we had a heavenly spell of silence on the way back.”
He walked to the fire, and began slowly taking off his silk muffler, his gloves, and his overcoat in the cheery warmth.
Stelfox had quietly withdrawn.
“By-the-bye, Bradfield,” went on Mr. Graham-Shute, agitating his jaw violently, as if under the impression that in the Arctic atmosphere outside something had gone wrong with it, “you’ll never guess who we met down in the town just now, looking about for you.”
John Bradfield’s back was turned to his cousin, who might otherwise have seen that the approaching communication was no surprise to him. He was expected to show curiosity, however, so he asked:
“Well, who was it?”
“Why, your old pal, Alfred Marrable, who went out to Australia with you over thirty years ago. He doesn’t seem to have done as well out there as you did, by the looks of him. I knew him in a moment, dark as it was, by that odd limp in his walk. So I stopped the carriage and spoke to him. It appears he has come down here on purpose to see you. So I put him on the road. We were full, or I would have given him a lift.”
“Much obliged to you, I am sure,” said John Bradfield, rather more drily than he meant to do.
Mr. Graham-Shute, who took an intelligent interest in his cousin’s affairs, stared at him in astonishment.
“What, don’t you want to see him?” he asked. “I thought I was bringing you the best piece of news you’d had for a long day. For you’ve generally such a good memory for your old friends, and I know that you and Marrable were always great chums. Did you fall out, or what?”
“No,” said John Bradfield, recovering himself. “But the longest memory is not eternal, and it’s seventeen years since I saw him last. I’ll do all I can for him, certainly, for the sake of auld lang syne.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth when a footman knocked at the door, and informed his master that a person wished to see him, a person who gave the name of Marrable.
“Oh, yes, I’ll go and see him myself,” said John Bradfield, who hoped that his cousin would, in the meantime, take himself off, and allow him to welcome his old friend Marrableen tête-à-tête.
“I daresay he’ll be too shy, after all these years, to come in at all,” said he, as he went out. But what he thought was, “I’ll do my best to get rid of him.”
Graham-Shute’s voice, however, rang out cheerily after him:
“You have forgotten Marrable, if that’s what you think of him.”
John Bradfield went slowly down the few stairs which led into the inner hall. By the time he reached the bend which would bring him in sight of the newcomer, he had made up his mind.
“I must take the bull by the horns,” said he to himself. “After all, the man’s a fool, and will be easy to manage, even if he does know or guess a little too much.”
With all his knowledge of the world, John Bradfield was capable of making the mistake of thinking a fool can be easy to manage.
Surely no human creature ever trod this earth, who, by his appearance, seemed less likely to inspire fear than Mr. Marrable.
A fair, colourless, middle-aged man, under the middle height, and inclined to be stout, he was the most inoffensive-looking person in the world, and, to judge by his demeanour as he stood in the hall, holding his shabby tall hat in his hand, and looking about him with an air of awe-struck astonishment, the humblest and the meekest.
As John Bradfield approached him, with outstretched hand, and a rather forced smile of welcome on his face, Mr. Marrable withdrew his gaze from the objects around him, and fixed it nervously upon his old friend.
“Well, Alf,” began John Bradfield, as he came up to his abashed old friend, “this is a strange meeting after all these years, isn’t it?”
The other man, after hesitating a moment, thrust his hand with great delight into that of his old friend, and instantly became as talkative and lively as a moment before he had been taciturn and depressed.
“Why, John, so it is,” he exclaimed, with a smile broadening on his plump and placid face, turning his head a little towards his companion, after the manner of those who are slightly deaf. “And glad am I to see you again, old chap, and looking so well too, and—andso prosperous,” and he gave a shy glance round him. “Do you know,” he went on, growing buoyantly confidential under the influence of his friend’s hearty grip of the hand, “that I thought you wanted to cut me? That you had grown too grand for your old friends.”
“No. When was that?” asked John Bradfield, shortly.
He was not a good actor, and Marrable looked at him doubtfully, as he answered:
“Why, out in the street just now, outside the station. I knew you in a moment, wrapt up as you were, and cutting such a dash, too. But then you were always a dashing fellow, even in the old days, John,” maundered on the unprosperous one, admiringly. “I called out to you, but you took no notice. And I said to myself, ‘Ah, he’s like all the rest of ’em; he knows his friends by their coats. He——’”
“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” returned John Bradfield’s loud voice. “I never turned my back on an old friend yet, and I’m not going to begin now. Did you come down here to see me?”
“Yes,” answered the other, meekly. “Well, at least, the fact is I heard of you quite by chance, and of how you’d got on, and as I’m down in the world, and I remembered your good heart in the old days, John, I thought I’d just run down and have a peep at you, and then, if I wasn’t wanted, I could come away.”
Mr. Bradfield felt a sensation of relief; these words seemed to show him a way out of his difficulty. But the next moment he was undeceived.
“If you don’t want me here, John, I’ll just spend a few days in the town here; I daresay I can find lodgings good enough for me easily enough, and all I’ll trouble you for will be my fare back to town, which you’ll not begrudge me, for old acquaintance sake.”
Mr. Bradfield inwardly called down upon his old friend’s head something which was not a blessing. He was not going back to town then, but proposed to potter about the place, chattering of course to everyone he met about his old friendship with the rich Mr. Bradfield, and either letting fall or picking up some scrap of information which it would be prejudicial to the rich Mr. Bradfield’s interests to be known.
The first suggestion which came into John Bradfield’s mind was bribery, but the next moment’s reflection told him that this was always a dangerous method, for if he were to make Marrable a handsome money present with the condition that he must take himself back to town immediately, that gentleman, little gifted as he was with intellectual brilliancy, could hardly fail to see that his old friend must have some strong motive for wishing to get rid of him. His curiosity once roused, he could hardly fail to find out something which would serve as an excuse for blackmailing in the time to come. The only alternative to this course was, John Bradfield felt, to keep his old chum under his own eye while he remained at Wyngham, so he said:
“Come, come; that’s not the way I treat my old friends. Stay and spend Christmas with me, Alf, and when it’s over, and you back to town, where I suppose your heart lies—for you’re a thoroughbredcockney, I know—I’ll see what I can do to set you on your legs, and give you a fresh start in life.”
Although Marrable was pleased, he was not overwhelmed with joy and gratitude as John Bradfield had expected. In truth Alfred, on learning by chance of the change in his old friend’s circumstances, had taken it for granted that he would be allowed, nay, invited to share in John Bradfield’s luck, as, in the old days of struggling and hardship, he, then the more prosperous one of the two, had shared what he had with John. An invitation to spend Christmas, even with the promise of help afterwards, was only a small measure of the hospitality he had expected; his answer betrayed his feelings.
“Thank you, thank you, John. I thought you couldn’t have forgotten old times altogether. I thought you had more heart than that. As for London, I seem to have lost my old fondness for it somehow. The old folk are dead; my poor mother died there as soon as we got back. I seem to have got disgusted with the bricks and mortar somehow. There’s nothing I should like better than to settle down for the rest of my days in a nice country place, as you have done.”
John Bradfield did not take this hint, as his friend had hoped. But he invited Marrable to come upstairs, and said he would see what he could do for him in the way of evening dress.
Unfortunately this was not much. John Bradfield was slim, Alfred Marrable was stout. The struggle of the latter to get into the clothes of the former left him, therefore, both uncomfortable and apoplectic. No persuasions, however, would induce him to go down to dinner in his own shabby morning clothes, forMarrable flattered himself that he was a lady’s man, and that he looked his best—which he did not—in evening dress.
John Bradfield, who had been turning over the situation in his mind, gave his old friend a hint as they went downstairs.
“I say, old chap,” said he, in a confidential tone, “there’s one thing I want you to do to oblige me.”
“Anything, old man, anything.”
“You see, I’m a great man here, not the poor starveling I was when you and I went out in the steerage to Melbourne thirty years ago. I don’t think I’ve grown much of a snob, but still one doesn’t care, when one’s got on, to have all the servants talking about their master having been glad enough to do things for himself once. Do you see?”
“Oh, yes, yes; of course, of course. I understand perfectly. You may rely upon me, old chap. I flatter myself I’m not wanting in tact, whatever my faults may be.”
John Bradfield, although he feared that Alfred was giving himself too high a character, went on:
“So no talk about old times and hard times, or”—his voice trembled a little here, for this was in truth a point on which he was most anxious—“or old acquaintances. Let the dead past bury its dead, as the poet says,” he continued, jocularly, “and we’ll have a merry Christmas over its grave.”
“That’s it, that’s it; so we will,” agreed Marrable, heartily, as they reached the drawing-room door.
In all good faith Alfred Marrable had given his promise to be discreet, and in all good faith John Bradfield had told him that he should have a merry Christmas. But unluckily the powers of darknessin the shape of Mrs. Graham-Shute, were against him. Indeed, John Bradfield had had his doubts about her, and as he entered the drawing-room with hisprotégéin his ill-fitting clothes, he whispered to the latter:
“Never mind the Queen of Snobs,” with a glance in the portly lady’s direction.
Mrs. Graham-Shute was already looking at them with an unpromising stare. She had a hatred of shabbily-dressed people, the keener that it was only by a great effort that she herself escaped that category. She had been indignant when her husband stopped the landau to speak to this “person,” and now to have the “person” obtruded upon her notice, in clothes which did not belong to him, was an outrage to her dignity, which at once dispelled the good humour which is traditionally supposed to belong to fat people. If people must invite their humble friends, they should not ask them to meet guests of greater consideration. It was extremely awkward and unpleasant, as one didn’t know where to draw the line between too much civility, which made the humble friend “presume,” and too little, which might offend one’s host.
In the case of Alfred Marrable, Mrs. Graham-Shute certainly did not err in the former manner. Her disdain of the poor man, who was just the sort of weak-minded person to be impressed by her foolish arrogance, had a crushing effect upon him; so, far from becoming loquacious on the subject of old times, the poor man could scarcely be prevailed upon to open his lips at all. The glare of the cold, fish-like eyes, turned full upon him at dinner—for she sat opposite to him—even took away the poor man’sappetite; and John Bradfield was able to congratulate himself that night that the evening had passed off (according to his views) so well.
The next day was Christmas day, and Alfred Marrable, always under the watchful eyes of his careful old friend, began it beautifully. He went to church, was almost pathetically civil and attentive to the ladies, delighted to carry their prayer-books, and to render them such small services of a like kind as he could. At luncheon, by which time Mrs. Graham-Shute had grown sufficiently used to him to ignore him altogether, he thawed a little, and needed the warning eye of his host to restrain him from making appropriate Christmas allusions to old times over his glass of port.
But it was at the Christmas dinner that evening that his discretion melted away like wax before the fire, and he made up for lost time and past reticence with a loquacity even more dangerous than John Bradfield had feared.
He alluded to change of fortune, some for the better, some for the worse, when they had got as far as the turkey. When they reached the plum-pudding, he got so far as to remember old friends by the initials of their names; and he broke down altogether into amiable chatter about thirty years ago, at the cheese.
John Bradfield frowned, but by this time frowns were thrown away upon Alfred. Nothing short of taking him by the shoulders and turning him out of the room would have checked the flow of his half-cheerful, half-sorrowful, wholly sentimental reminiscences.
Mr. Graham-Shute, observing John Bradfield’sdisapproval in his face, and being, moreover, really interested in the past life of the extraordinarily successful man, mischievously encouraged Marrable by his sympathetic questions; while his wife, who considered these allusions to a ragged past indecent and revolting, tried in vain to talk more loudly than ever to drown the remarks both of Alfred Marrable and her liege lord.
“Dear me, that’s very interesting! And so you walked six hundred miles up the country with only one shirt apiece, and your feet for the most part tied up in straw for the want of boots!” said Mr. Graham-Shute, with deliberate distinctness, thus cleverly epitomising for the benefit of the entire company a rambling story which Alfred had been pouring into his ear.
“I’m sure we shall have skating to-morrow, at least almost sure, though of course one never knows, and the frost may break any minute, and then there would be an end of everything, just when the ice in the parks will be getting into nice condition, and when there are sure to be some ponds and things down here that will bear, though I think myself that skating in the country is always more risky than in town, because there are not so many appliances and things, in case you are drowned,” babbled out Mrs. Graham-Shute, with one nervous eye on dear cousin John, and the other on that wretched William, who was by this time cracking nuts while he listened to Alfred, and who took care, as his wife raised her voice, to raise his also.
The unhappy Marrable went on:
“Yes, indeed! Times are changed, and no mistake, since then. Fancy that fellow there,” andhe gently indicated, by a wave of his bunch of grapes, his unhappy host, “fancy him coming to me, with a coat on his back that he bought for eighteenpence from the ship’s steward, and saying to me: ‘Alf, my boy! it’s all up with me! I’m stone-broke; and I believe I’ve got a touch of the fever upon me, and I know I can never stand the hard life out there in the bush. I shall just go and throw myself into the dock basin before another night has passed over my head.’ Fancy that, now, for a man that must have thousands and thousands a year, to judge by the style he lives in, and the goodness of the wines he gives us.”
And Mr. Marrable ended with an expressive smack of the lips. Mr. Graham-Shute nodded appreciatively.
“Was that when you first went out?” he asked with interest.
“Oh, no. We’d been knocking about out there for some time, and not doing much good, either of us. That was the odd part of it, that Bradfield, who’s got on so well since, didn’t seem to do any better than I.”
Being unable to silence her husband, Mrs. Graham-Shute had now turned her attention to occupying “dear cousin John” with conversation, so that William’s delinquencies should escape his notice. Otherwise, it is possible that John Bradfield might have been exasperated into some heroic measure to stop his old friend’s tongue. As it was, Mr. Graham-Shute’s kindly “Dear me, yes, that was curious!” encouraged Marrable to go on:
“Let me see, where had I got to? Oh, yes, I remember, Bradfield had told me he meant to doaway with himself; he was so down on his luck, poor chap! I didn’t know what to say to him; the little capital I had gone out with was all gone; when who should we come across but the old chum we had gone out with, the only one of the three who had done any good—Gilbert Wryde!”
At the mention of this name, Mr. Graham-Shute suddenly put down his nut-crackers, and leaned back in his chair.
“Ah!” cried he, “that’s the name I’ve been trying to remember; I knew there were three of you who went out to Australia together, and I couldn’t remember the name of the third. I never saw him, but I’ve read some of his letters to John when they were little more than lads; and they were full of most uncommon sense for such a young chap. I thought to myself then that he ought to get on. So he did, did he? Gilbert Wryde!”
As he repeated the name deliberately and slowly, to impress it upon his memory, both John Bradfield and Chris looked up, rather startled. Chris was the more impressed of the two, for she had not been expecting to hear the name, while John Bradfield had.
Quite innocent of the effect his information was producing, Marrable resumed his story.
“Get on! I believe you, as well as our friend John here himself, and in half the time. He was the right sort, too, old Gilbert, and he took us by the hand, and set us on our legs again, and there was no more talk of suicide after that. He set me up in business in Melbourne, and he took John away with him up country, where he’d made his own fortune at sheep-farming, and where he evidently put himin the way of making his. Poor Wryde! He did not live long to enjoy his fortune. I never saw him again.”
John Bradfield had been listening to this speech with only the smallest pretence of attending to what his cousin Maude was saying. Marrable, catching his eye, and being in too jovial a mood to understand the menace in his host’s expression, turned to him with the direct question:
“Ah, John, you wouldn’t be in the position you are to-day if it hadn’t been for Gilbert Wryde, would you?”
John Bradfield’s face was as white as his friend’s was rosy. He answered at once, in a hard, metallic tone:
“We did each other mutual good service, Wryde and I. I’m not likely to forget him, certainly.”
“Ah!” pursued Marrable, “if he’d only been alive and here to-day, it would have been a merry meeting indeed, eh, John?”
Even Mrs. Abercarne, at the other end of the table, could see that something had gone wrong: Mr. Bradfield’s voice as he loudly assented, had not the right ring: Mr. Graham-Shute looked mischievous, his wife looked anxious, while Chris looked as if she had been frightened. The housekeeper gave the signal hastily to Mrs. Graham-Shute, even in the midst of the laughter and cracker-pulling which was going on among the young people. Lilith and Rose were surprised, but both Mrs. Graham-Shute and Chris jumped up in a hurry, quite eager to leave the scene of what looked like the beginning of a serious quarrel. For, although no angry words had passed between the gentlemen, Marrable’s effusive geniality in face of his host’s ever-increasing abruptness, looked ominous to those who knew the temper of the latter.
When the ladies were assembled in the drawing-room, and Chris had sat down to the piano to play some carols, Mrs. Graham-Shute, for want of a better, was forced to make a confidante of the obnoxious lady-housekeeper.
“Exceedingly unpleasant, was it not, to have to endure the presence of that extraordinary individual at dinner,” she said to Mrs. Abercarne in a confidential tone. “Of course, it is very good of my cousin to remember his old friends, but it’s a pity he cannotfind some who would make themselves more agreeable to the rest of us. Such a pleasant party we should have been, too, if it hadn’t been for that!”
Now Mrs. Abercarne had been smarting for the past week under the snubs and slights which Mrs. Graham-Shute had administered to her daughter and herself, and she was by no means mollified by the Bayswater lady’s momentary condescension. She pricked up her ears, figuratively speaking, rejoicing in her opportunity.
“Yes,” she answered, frigidly, drawing herself up and surveying Mrs. Graham-Shute in a manner full of stately vindictiveness. “I quite agree with you. Mr. Bradfield is a great deal too good to his old friends; and they do make themselves excessively disagreeable; and the party would be much pleasanter without them.”
And poor Mrs. Graham-Shute, try as she would, could not look as if she did not perceive that this speech was a barbed one. She turned away abruptly, and, taking the place at the piano which Chris had just vacated, began hurriedly and very badly, and with vicious thumps upon the keys, a hymn about “peace on earth and goodwill towards men.”
Chris had stolen into the recess formed by the great bay window on the western side of the room. She heard a sound like the breaking of glass outside, and had left her place at the piano to look out. Raising the heavy curtain, and pulling back the blind, she saw dimly through the moisture on the window-pane, the forms of two men, one of whom was so close that he seemed to have been trying to look through the window. She could just see enough of them to know that the figures were those of Mr.Richard and his keeper Stelfox, and her heart leapt up, and her brain seemed suddenly to be on fire, as there rang in her ears the words used by Mr. Marrable about Gilbert Wryde.
Gilbert Wryde! Gilbert Wryde—Mr. Bradfield’s benefactor! She remembered the portrait bearing that name, and she remembered Mr. Bradfield’s change of expression at the sight of it. That expression, which she had taken for annoyance, must then have been caused by some more tender emotion, to which also the subsequent disappearance of the miniature must be traced. And then the likeness between the portrait of Gilbert Wryde and the solitary occupant of the east wing? Chris felt sick with excitement, bewilderment and fear. She would have given the world to be able to forget the problem which was beginning to trouble her peace of mind, to shut her mind to the questions she could not help asking.
In the meantime, a great impulse of pity for Mr. Richard, spending his Christmas alone except for his attendant, and peeping in through the windows at the warmth and light inside the room he was not allowed to enter, seized her, and caused her to find an opportunity of leaving the room unobserved. Putting on a hooded cloak, and wrapping it tightly round her, she went out into the garden.
Chris, who had run down the steps, paused at the bottom. The impulse upon which she had acted in coming out into the night was the kindly one of exchanging a Christmas greeting with the outcast from the east wing. But to this impulse had succeeded a fit of maidenly shyness. Twice since their last meeting in the barn, she had encountered Mr. Richardin the park in a manner which could scarcely have been the result of chance, and on each of these occasions the silent happiness he had shown in her society had touched her deeply; so deeply, indeed, that she could not help feeling a little self-consciousness about this meeting which she herself was bringing about. Whether she would have turned back, following the dictates of her impulse of shyness and maidenly modesty, it is impossible to say. For at that moment she heard a footstep on the path, and a great thrill of a feeling she did not understand passed through her as a voice she had never heard before said low in her ear:
“I wish you a merry Christmas.”
With a start she turned, and put her hand into that of Mr. Richard, who kissed it with the fervour of a lover.
“I am afraid your Christmas is not a very merry one,” she said gently.
They were standing in the full moonlight, and Mr. Richard was gazing with his usual melancholy into her face.
“No, it has not been happy,” he answered very slowly, and with an apparent effort, “until now.”
Then he stood for a short time in silence, and Chris, utterly thrown off her balance by new and strange feelings, did not notice, or did not mind, that he held her hand in his own with a warm pressure which said more than his words had done.
Chris roused herself by an effort from the trance of pleasant feeling into which the first words she had ever heard him utter had thrown her.
“You are here by yourself!” she exclaimed. “I thought Stelfox was with you!”
Mr. Richard seemed to find it even more painful than she had done to break by speech the spell which the happiness of the meeting had cast upon him. His first answer was a heavy sigh. Then he said, gently, with the same strange appearance of speaking with difficulty, as if the exercise of speech were an unaccustomed thing which made him shy and nervous:
“He is not far off. He did not want me to come out here to-night. But I begged that the day might not pass for me without one sight of you.”
He uttered these words in such a low voice, and so indistinctly, that Chris had some difficulty in understanding him. Perceiving this he became so painfully nervous, that in repeating the words he was more indistinct than ever. He had scarcely finished saying them for the second time when Stelfox came with his usual noiseless footsteps round the angle of the house.
He started on seeing the young lady, and, without uttering a word, made a sign to his charge which Chris understood to be an imperious command to return to the east wing. Mr. Richard was as submissive as a lamb. Taking the young lady’s hand for one moment in his, he pressed it for a moment in his own, and whispering in a very low voice, “Good-bye,” disappeared rapidly towards his rooms, returning by the north side of the house.
As soon as he was out of sight, his attendant shook his head gravely.
“It’s a great risk we’re all of us running, through my letting the young gentleman out, as I’ve done the last few days,” he said, in a warning voice; “but he’s begged so hard and he’s behaved so wellthat I’ve done it to keep him quiet for one thing, for fear he’d get out without my leave, instead of with it.”
Here was her opportunity. In a voice which was one of earnest entreaty, Chris said:
“Why should he not be let out? He is not mad, you know he is not mad, Stelfox. You would never dare to let a man who was really insane go about as he has done the last few days. Why should you ever have been afraid to let him out? And why have you changed your mind now?”
Stelfox looked rather alarmed by the young lady’s vehemence. He gave a glance round and made a gesture of warning, as if afraid they might be overheard; but Chris went on in a reckless tone:
“I can’t understand you. Either this unhappy man is mad, in which case he certainly ought not to come out at all, now more than at any other time, or he is not mad, in which case it is very wicked of Mr. Bradfield to shut him up, and very wicked of you to be quiet about it, and very silly of Mr. Richard himself not to get away when he can.”
“Hush, ma’am, pray don’t speak so loud; you wouldn’t if you knew the harm you might be doing the poor gentleman by it. Mr. Richard’s mad, and he’s not mad, and that’s the truth. You can see for yourself there’s something wrong with him,” he went on, looking into the young lady’s face, with an expression of some doubt and curiosity. “He’s reasonable enough in many ways, as I told you before. He’s as mad as a hatter in his likes and dislikes. It’s by his liking for you, ma’am, that I’m keeping him in order. But he hates Mr. Bradfield so much that if I were to allow him to meet my master alone, I wouldn’t givesixpence for Mr. Bradfield’s chances of getting away from him alive.”
The night air was clear and still, and keen with frost. The great evergreen oaks above them were lightly powdered with snow, which there was not even a breath of wind to shake off. For a moment after Stelfox had uttered these words there was a dead, silent calm, which increased the dread roused by the man’s words in poor Chris.
Then, from the north side of the house, there came suddenly, piercing their ears, a ringing cry of “Help—help!”
Then there came a crash, the sound of a heavy fall, and then again perfect stillness.