CHAPTER III.
Meanwhile Stephen Lawler had returned to the Grange, happy in the favor pretty Miss Lane had accorded him at the expense of Harry, whom he hated with a hatred which, if unreasonable, was not without excuse. He joined his cousins in the billiard-room, where a hot quarrel between George and Harry was only just kept from blazing forth afresh by the presence of their father, the only power on earth which could keep in check the ungovernable passions of his unruly brood. Stephen glanced from one to the other of the two angry, flushed faces, and rolled the spot-ball along the table in an idle manner, through which the least glimpse of the conqueror showed. George laughed unpleasantly.
“Stephen looks happy.”
“He’s the fox who carried off the lamb while the lion and tiger were fighting about it,” said Wilfred, the second son, quoting from Æsop’s fables rather at random.
“Was she kind, Stephen?” asked George, mockingly.
“Very kind—much kinder than she was to you.”
“That goes without saying, my dear fellow,” answered George, with a cruel patronage in his tone which made the cripple wince.
“All women don’t worship brutes! I wouldn’t enter the lists with you for your Molly and Sukey; but ladies are different.”
“Different from what? From Molly and Sukey, or from Miss Lane, the governess?”
“Ah, you can look down upon ‘Miss Lane, the governess,’ since she calls you a brute!”
“When did she call me a brute? It’s a lie!” said George, sharply.
“It’s not a lie! She said you and Harry were both brutes; and, by Jove, she was right!”
George raised his fist, but dropped it with an ostentatious self-restraint.
“You are a privileged person,” said he, coolly.
Stephen sprung forward and struck him in the face; but George remained as irritatingly quiet as ever.
“But you shouldn’t presume upon your advantages. You can tell lies as other gentlemen may not do, and you can strike a man without getting struck back; but you can’t expect to hold your own with a woman against me, or even Harry. It’s absurd!”
“What do you mean by ‘even Harry?’” asked the third brother, savagely.
“What I mean by it in this case is that, by a little careful management you might have got thetête-à-têteyou wanted with pretty Miss Lane, but that, if I had stepped in, not all the management in the world would have availed you to get what you wanted.”
“You think yourself irresistible?”
“No, I don’t. But I think I know more about women than you do; and I’m not quite such a cub as to think I can impress a woman favorably by merely staring across the dinner-table at her and insulting everybody who is civil to her.”
Harry grew red at this home-thrust.
“And I suppose you think you have impressed her very favorably by drawling compliments into her ear one minute and turning your back to her the next?”
“That’s all his science,” said Wilfred, who had been drinking more than the rest, but who had as much wit when he was tipsy as his brothers had when they were sober.
“Well, haven’t we exhausted the little governess?” asked George, yawning.
“Yes; let us talk of the Duchess of Shoreditch,” proposed Wilfred, mimicking him.
“Oh, y-e-s, we will!” said Harry, following his example rather clumsily. “You might have condescended to see a duchess home yourself, perhaps?”
“To the man of principle all women are duchesses,” answered Wilfred, who was becoming tiresome.
“My dear Wilfred, what do you know about the man of principle?” asked his eldest brother, with a look which recalled to the sententious one various occasions on which his morality had given way rather suddenly. “All women are not duchesses; and I would rather see a governess home on a moonlit evening than a duchess, for the simple reason that I should get better paid for my trouble.”
“Not by Miss Lane!” cried Harry, starting up, his face aflame.
George did not answer.
“Not by Miss Lane!” said Harry again, in a louder voice. “Answer, you—conceited liar!”
“It is of no use to continue the discussion if you only lose your temper and throw your manners to the winds——”
“Harry’s manners!” chuckled Wilfred; but nobody took any notice of him.
“Say what you mean then, or by——”
“I only mean that I should have neglected my opportunities, and put a cruel slight upon a very pretty girl, if I had not got a kiss when I wished her good-night.”
“She would never have spoken to you again if you had done such a thing. She would have boxed your ears——”
“She would have done nothing of the kind. Your experience being confined to barmaids, who very naturally resent your rough overtures in the free-and-easy manner you describe, you cannot tell how a woman of more refinement accepts the homage due to her charms when it is properly offered.”
“I think this is blackguard talk,” said Wilfred; but the time had long gone past for him to get a hearing.
“You think she would have let you kiss her willingly?” said Harry, not so loudly as before, but with his whole frame quivering with restless excitement.
“I don’t wish to be boastful, but I think it most likely.”
“It’s a——”
Stephen shook his cousin’s arm.
“Let him prove it, Harry; let him prove it.”
But Harry shrunk from that. He was as thoughtless and unprincipled as the rest of them; but he was notblasé. He was only twenty; and some instincts of chivalry and respect for the beautiful girl whose name was being bandied about so freely made him hesitate.
“He knows better than to agree to that!” sneered George.
“Why don’t you try to be beforehand with him?” suggested Stephen.
“I will, by Jove!” said Harry, stung and excited past all scruples. “We’ll see if my rough overtures may not be more to her taste than your what-do-you-call-it homage. I bet Fire King to a five-pound note I’ll have a kiss from her to-morrow.”
“Willingly, mind?”
“Willingly.”
“Done, then! But how am I to be sure you have won fairly if you come and claim it?”
“You will have my word.”
There was a general laugh. There are some families, as lawless as the Braithwaites, in which truth is part of their code, and a lie held to be beneath a gentleman; but the Braithwaites, while fiercely proud of their birth, considered that it placed them above obligations, and that the title “gentleman,” descended to them from their fathers, was a sort of inherited, inalienable fortune which required no effort of theirs to support or to increase.
However, Harry having refused to let the bet hold except on this condition, it was resolved to trust him, George having fully made up his mind to supplement his brother’s account of the interview by the evidence of his own eyes.
The next morning, at breakfast time, when the wine was gone out of his head and his temper was cooler, Harry was a little ashamed of his bet, for to increase his compunction came the very strongest doubts as to his power to win it. However, when George asked with a sneer whether he did not wish the bet were off, his brother answered fiercely that he never made bets which he did not intend to keep. So George only shrugged his shoulders, told him he was a fool, and walked off to the stable-yard, already looking upon his brother’s favorite horse, Fire King, as his own by right, although he did not expect to enter into possession without a struggle. In spite of his ostentatiously cynical speeches the night before, his own respect for the demure girl-governess stood higher than he wished to have it believed, and he thought it extremely unlikely that his younger brother, who was still at the stage of being alternately boisterous and shy with women, would even risk a meeting with Miss Lane.
But Harry, nerved by the danger of losing Fire King, had strung himself up to do great things. Fate favored him.
It was Saturday; and on that day the vicar’s children always had a half holiday, and their governess was free to spend the afternoon as she liked. When it was fine she generally used her liberty to enjoy her one chance in the week of a walk by herself, and with a book—some solidly instructive book in her hand, just to justify her ramble to herself and relieve her conscience of the reproach of “wasting her time.” So on this Saturday afternoon she had strolled out with a sketch-book and a small camp-stool, and, after wandering through the fields alongside the hedges, watching the young rabbits playing about their holes, gathering a few late primroses, singing to herself all the while very happily, she opened her camp-stool in the corner of a field where there was a pond half surrounded by trees, seated herself, and began to draw.
On the other side of the pond, divided from it by a stretch of uneven grass-covered ground, ran a private road, and beyond that was a thick plantation from which, unknown to her, Harry had for some time been watching the governess; and further along the road were some stables and outbuildings, in the shelter of which his brother George had been for some time watching Harry.
Miss Lane set to work with the dry enthusiasm of the conscientious amateur, and was soon too much absorbed in calculating distances and making little dots on the paper with her pencil to notice Harry, until, by making a long circuit through the plantation, across the road and along the edge of the field she was in, he came through the long grass to her side. Filled with the guilty consciousness of the enterprise he had in hand, he was half sheepish, half bold, and Miss Lane’s greeting, which was a rather cold little bow and a complete ignoring of his proffered hand, did not help him to recover his self-possession.
“You are drawing, I see,” he remarked, rather huskily.
“Yes,” said she. Then, as there was a pause which her companion evidently did not know how to fill, she added, glancing first at her paper, and then at the pond in front of her, “It doesn’t look much like it yet, does it?”
“I dare say it will look more like when it is finished.”
“No, it won’t,” said Miss Lane, candidly; “that is the worst of it. I can’t draw, though I really do try very hard.”
“Then why do you give yourself all the trouble of trying?”
Harry felt that his share in the talk was not in the style he had intended, but her rather stiff simplicity of manner disconcerted him.
“It is an excuse for coming out of doors.”
“An excuse? I never want one. I only want excuses for not coming home. I hate houses—they are so beastly stuffy; don’t you think so?”
He felt he was getting further and further from the lover-like manner which was to overcome Miss Lane; but he could not help it. She considered a little before answering.
“I like houses too—some houses, I wonder you don’t like yours. I think it is one of the nicest I have ever been in.”
“Do you? Do you like it better than the Vicarage?”
“Oh, yes! The Vicarage is only a place to eat and drink and sleep in!” she said, scornfully. “As for the drawing-room, everything in it is an insult to one’s eyes.”
“I suppose you mean that it is not artistic,” said Harry. “But it isn’t the furniture that insults me; it is the people. I feel as if I were in church, or as if I had had a bucket of cold water over me when I didn’t expect it, directly I get inside the house.”
“Oh, don’t say that! They are all very kind.”
“Then you like the Vicarage people better than the Grange people?”
“I did not say that. But I know them better.”
“Oh, yes; I remember! You said we were a set of brutes.”
He felt that this was worse and worse; he was getting positively rude.
“I have never said anything of the kind, Mr. Braithwaite,” said she, coldly.
“Didn’t you tell Stephen that George and I were brutes?”
“I did say it was brutal to box your sister’s ears and knock your brother down just because they contradicted you; and I think so,” said Miss Lane, quietly.
“But it was about you. It was because they wouldn’t tell me where you were, and wouldn’t let me see you home.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
This answer was a blow. Miss Lane was the first woman who had ever excited in him any but the most fleeting admiration. He looked upon women as a nuisance in the hunting-field and a positive danger at abattue, pretty things whose society at any sort of gathering gave one more trouble than it was worth, and who ought accordingly to feel deeply grateful for any admiration that might be cast to them. Of course this applied only to his equals; with women of a lower rank he was at his ease; and it was a current prophecy that he would be a bachelor till he was forty-five, and then marry his cook. So he looked down at Miss Lane in amazement without speaking, when she thus candidly stated that his admiration “didn’t make any difference.”
“Then you hate me, I see,” said he, at last, deeply hurt and offended.
“Hate you? No; indeed I don’t, Mr. Braithwaite!” she answered, rising.
It had only just dawned upon her that his unusually restless manner and his flushed face were the result of anything but his natural awkwardness, and she was anxious to cut the interview short, for fear any of the Mainwarings should pass—they would perhaps not even believe she had met him by accident.
“Then why do you want to run away from me? I may be a brute; but I won’t hurt you.”
“Oh, no; I am not afraid of that!” said she, her face breaking into the bright, child-like smile that made her so charming to him. “But it is really time for me to go in.”
She held out her hand; but he did not seem to see it. He was positively shaking with nervousness, preparing for a bold stroke.
“Won’t you shake hands, or have I offended you too deeply?” she asked, with simple, smiling coquetry.
Harry jerked his head suddenly down to her upturned face, and kissed her. George, who was observing this scene, watched for the girl’s start, listened for the scream.
But there was neither. She remained quite still, without a sound but a short, quick sob that George was too far off to hear, and he could only see that she bent her head, without being able to catch the expression of her face. He watched a moment longer, then, with a curious look of cynical surprise, turned and sauntered back to the Grange.
But Harry was near enough to know better. He saw the color leave her cheeks and her very lips, and he knew that his impertinence had made her dumb and still with horror. Then the tears began to gather in her eyes; she stooped to feel blindly for the book she had dropped, then turned her back upon him without a word.
In a moment he was mad with remorse.
“Miss Lane!” said he huskily; but she took no notice, and began to walk away.
All his better instincts were aroused, and moved him to words less boorish than usual.
“Miss Lane,” he repeated, “I would give my right hand to undo my impertinence or to make you forget it! Upon my soul, you cannot hate me for it as much as I hate myself! Won’t you—won’t you just look at me? Only just let me see you look again as you looked before—even if you don’t speak. Good heavens, you look like stone!”
But she shook her head without looking up.
“Go away, please,” was all she said, in a voice from which the bright ring had gone.
Harry was sobbing himself.
“You—you are more cruel than I,” said he, unsteadily.
But he dared not stay. Those few words of dismissal were too cutting for him to try any more entreaties. He scrambled through the hedge, rather anxious that she should see he was hurting himself in his eagerness to obey her. But she never looked round. She made her way back to her cottage more quietly, without even shedding any more tears. She was too much excited for that. But, when she was once more in her little sitting-room, she gave way, threw herself on the floor by the sofa, and cried until she could scarcely see. She was so proud, so haughtily reserved to men, that this outrage to her dignity and self-respect wounded her far more deeply than it would have done an ordinary girl.
“He would not have dared if I hadn’t been ‘only a governess,’” she thought bitterly.
In the meantime Harry had slunk home to the Grange, where the first person he met was George.
“By Jove, Harry, I didn’t think you had it in you!” was his greeting.
“What the deuce do you mean?”
“Nothing but what is complimentary on this occasion. Here are your five pounds, fairly won.”
He took out his pocket-book, and handed a note leisurely to his brother, who crumpled it in his hand and tossed it into a flower-bed.
“What! Have you suddenly grown above filthy lucre? Very well, I’ll take it back again;” and George was stooping over a geranium to pick it up when his brother brought his hand roughly down upon his shoulder.
“What do you mean by this tomfoolery?”
“Well, to be frank, I watched your interview, quite by accident, and saw you win your bet.”
“I didn’t win it,” said the other, surlily.
“Not win it? Why, I saw you!”
“I—tell—you—I—didn’t—win—it,” said Harry, savagely. “I kissed her—like a beastly cad—and she looked as if I had killed her.”
He turned round quickly and made for the house. His brother followed.
“Here, but I say, Harry——”
The other paid no attention, but disappeared into the house.
But the consequences of the act were not over. When tea-time came, and, having bathed her red and swollen eyes, Miss Lane appeared in the family circle, a deadlier chill than usual was evidently upon them. Joan looked like an ugly statue of disgust or some kindred emotion; Betty’s cheeks were flushed, and her pretty vacant eyes bright with anger; Mrs. Mainwaring was cold and nervous; the Rev. Mr. Mainwaring, above all human passions, was quietly attentive to his tea and toast, as usual. The governess’ heart sunk.
After tea, when she had said “Good-night” in an agony under this frigidity, Mrs. Mainwaring followed her into the hall and asked her to come into the schoolroom for a few minutes. After closing the door with ominous carefulness, the elder lady faced her victim.
“I am very sorry to have to say anything of this kind to you, Miss Lane; but I must ask whether there is any sort of engagement between you and Mr. Harry Braithwaite?”
“None, Mrs. Mainwaring,” said the girl, white to the lips.
“And is it true—excuse me for asking—that he kissed you this afternoon?”
“Yes, Mrs. Mainwaring.” The answer came at once, clear and cold.
The elder lady was disconcerted for a moment by this prompt reply; then she said, between tightly compressed lips:
“I did not think you would allow a gentleman you were not engaged to to take such a liberty.”
Miss Lane gave a little hard laugh.
“Not a liberty, Mrs. Mainwaring; surely you make a mistake! Mr. Braithwaite did not wait to be allowed; he was good enough to give me a kiss as he would, with his easy good nature to any dependent. I only wonder you did not know me better than to think I could object.”
Mrs. Mainwaring read the acute misery in the girl’s face. She was sorry for her. However, as she murmured out rather incoherently, Betty was out walking and had seen the kiss given, and of course it was not a proper sight for her, and would Miss Lane kindly understand she must leave at the end of the quarter?
And Miss Lane said she would be very glad to do so. And so she would have been, if she had known where to go.