CHAPTER IV.
AT THE TOWERS.
Cecil Viscount Neville rode off at a gallop at first, but presently he pulled the horse up into a walk, for he wanted to think. Something had happened besides his tumble that afternoon to “shake the soul of him,” as Tasso says. The blood was coursing through his veins at racing pace, and his heart was beating violently with a new and strange emotion. It seemed to him that he had been in fairyland.
Just as Doris had taken out the handkerchief and looked at it to convince herself that she had not been dreaming, so he put his hand to the cut on his forehead to help him to realize that imagination had not been playing pranks with him.
He had seen beautiful women; in the language of his world he had had some half-a-dozen of them at least “pitched at his head;” but this one——
He stopped the horse, and recalled her face as it had looked down upon him when he came back to consciousness.
“I thought I was dead and that she was an angel!” he murmured, his face flushing. “There never were eyes like hers! And her voice! And I don’t know her nameeven! And I may never see her again! I must, I must! And I might have ridden over that beautiful creature—she might have been lying there instead of me!” he shuddered. “I ought to have killed myself, clumsy, awkward idiot! But she forgave me, yes, she forgave me!” and he tried to recall, and succeeded in recalling, every word she had spoken. “I wonder who she is?” he asked himself for the hundredth time. “Why didn’t I ask her her name? No, I remember I could not! I—I never felt like that before, never! I felt actually afraid of her! I’ve half a mind to ride back—would she be angry, I wonder? I didn’t thank her enough. Why, I behaved like a fool! She must have thought me one! I’ll ride back and beg her to tell me who she is. I must know!” and he was about to turn the horse when the clock of the Towers solemnly chimed the hour.
He started and looked at his watch.
“Dinner time,” he murmured, “and it’s a mortal sin to be five minutes late! No matter, I must go back,” and he swung round. Then he pulled up again. “No; she will not like it! It—it will seem as if I were forcing myself on her, and after all her goodness to me! But not to know her name even!” and, with something between a sigh and a groan, he put the horse into a gallop and rode toward home.
Fortunately for the horse, she had struck her knees upon the bank, and was uninjured, for Lord Cecil had—with unusual indifference—quite forgotten her, and it was not until he had ridden into the courtyard of the Towers, and met the surprised stare of the groom who came forward, that he remembered the animal.
“I’ve had a tumble,” he said. “It was my fault, not Polly’s! Give her an extra feed and wipe down,” he added, as he patted her. “She isn’t hurt, I’m glad to say.”
“But you are, my lord, I’m afraid!” said the groom.
“Not a bit,” said Lord Cecil, with a smile, and he hurried across the courtyard, and up the stone steps to the terrace.
The long walk, laid in Carrara marble, and running the whole length of the house, was perfectly empty, and everything was suspiciously quiet.
“They’ve begun dinner,” said Lord Cecil, with a shrug of his shoulders. “That’s unpleasant! I don’t know my uncle very intimately, but I have a shrewd suspicion that he is the sort of man to cut up rough! Well, no, I don’t suppose he would be rough if I burned the place down, but he’d be unpleasantly smooth.”
He hurried along, past a long line of windows, screened by their curtains, and then past one through which the light came in innumerable streaks of color—it was the stained oriel window—and at last reached the great hall.
A groom of the chambers, attired in a dark purple livery that looked almost like a court suit, came forward with something like solemn gravity.
“I’m late, eh?” said Lord Cecil, and his clear, young voice, musical as it was, sounded large and loud in the solemn, subdued air of the place.
“Dinner has been served twenty-two minutes, my lord,” was the grave reply.
“Oh! hang the two minutes,” said Lord Cecil, “I shan’t be long.” And he bounded up the stairs, apparently to the amazement of the official and a couple of stately footmen, who looked after him with surprise. It took him some two or three minutes to reach his room. The Towers was a huge place, but which, huge as it was, the marquis only dwelt in for a month or two once in three or four years—he had so many other and huger places—and Lord Cecil found his valet waiting for him.
“Look sharp, Parkins,” he said, slipping off his coat. “I’m awfully late. Has the marquis inquired for me?”
“No, my lord,” said Parkins, as he set about his ministration with quiet celerity. “Mr. Scobie, the butler, did mention that his lordship never waited for any one.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Lord Cecil. “It’s bad enough to spoil one’s own dinner without ruining other people’s. All right? What are you fumbling at?”
“I was trying to hide the cut on your forehead, my lord.”
“Oh! never mind that,” said Lord Cecil, impatiently, and he hurried down.
The groom came forward with stately step, and led the way to the dining-room, and opened the door slowly, as if it were the entrance to the court.
It was a magnificent room, so large that it had been found necessary to curtail its dimensions with screens and curtains, the last of crimson plush with heavy bullion fringe. The table was loaded with a splendid service of plate, and at the head of it sat the Most Honorable the Marquis of Stoyle, Earl of Braithwaite and Denbigh, of Scotland, Baron Barranough of Ireland, Knight of the Garter of England, etc.
He rose with majestic courtesy as Lord Cecil entered, and the light from the delicately-shaded lamp, falling full upon his face and figure, made a picture of them calculated to strike the least observant of mortals.
He was an old man—seventy-two, the “Peerage” says, and that cannot lie, as somebody remarks—but he was as straight as an arrow, and save for two lines running from the corners of his finely-shaped nose, and a few wrinkles at the ends of his gray, piercing eyes, the face was as smooth as Lord Cecil’s own; smooth and almost as pale as ivory; every feature as cleanly cut as if it were carved in; smooth and cold as ice; and yet, with all its icelike impassability, a vague, indefinite something, not marked enough for an expression, which always riveted a stranger’s gaze, and made him uncomfortable. It was not exactly contempt, or hauteur, or dislike, but a commingling of all three, which imparted to the face a quality hard to define but easy to feel. It should be added, to complete the picture, that his white hair, worn rather long, was brushed straight back from his white forehead, and that the hands were snowy in color and of quite feminine shape and texture.
This imposing figure stood upright until Lord Cecil had taken his seat, the hard, steellike eyes regarding him with an impassive, icelike courtesy, then sank into its seat again.
It was not until he had done so that Lord Cecil was startled by seeing that a third person was present, for he had been unable to remove his eyes from the marquis’ while they were on his face. Now he saw that between him and the marquis sat a lady; and Lord Cecil, as his senses woke to the fact of her presence, was guilty of an astonished stare.
It is not given to every one to meet in one day the twomost beautiful women he had ever seen, but this was Lord Cecil’s fate. The lady was young, with a fair and perfectly-tinted face, with dark-brown eyes, and hair that shone like raw silk under the mellow light that fell from the candelabra above.
Her presence was so unexpected that Lord Cecil might be pardoned for expressing in his gaze something of the surprise he felt.
The sound of the marquis’ voice, low and yet clear, like the sound of a treble-bell, recalled him to himself and his manners.
“This is Lord Cecil Neville, Lady Grace,” he said, and he just moved his snowy hand. “Cecil, I think I told you that I expected Lady Grace?”
Lord Cecil bowed, and the lady inclined her head with a smile.
“As we are strangers, and Lord Neville has probably never heard of me, marquis, perhaps you had better add that I am Lord Peyton’s daughter.”
The marquis bowed.
“Of course I have heard of you, Lady Grace,” said Lord Cecil.
The dark-brown eyes opposite him grew rather keen as they rested on his face, but for a moment only, then she smiled again.
“If I had known that you were here——” He stopped and laughed. “Well, I was going to say that I’d have been home earlier, but the fact is I met with a slight accident and was detained.”
The dark eyes seemed to flash over him, then fixed themselves upon the cut on his forehead.
“You were not hurt, I hope?” she said. “I see you have a cut on your brow.”
“No,” he said. “It is nothing.”
“How did it happen?” asked Lady Grace. The marquis had not condescended to make any inquiry; indeed, for any sign or interest he might have been stone deaf.
“Got pitched over a hedge,” he said.
“By a man?” she asked, raising her brows.
He laughed.
“No, by a horse. By the way, sir,” he said, turning tothe marquis, “I am glad to say that the horse is not injured.”
“No?” said the marquis, with slow indifference. “Perhaps that is as well; horses are valuable,” and the tone more than the words seemed to add—“and men—especially Lord Cecil Neville—are not.”
Lord Cecil glanced at him quickly, but the pale face was set and impassive, as if innocent of any intent to insult.
After this cheerful remark the conversation rather naturally languished. Lord Cecil was hungry, and devoted his attention to his plate; the servants moved to and fro waiting with subdued and watchful assiduity; the marquis ate his dinner with slow, wearied glance, his eyes fixed on the great, golden epergne in the centre of the table, as profoundly silent as if he never meant to utter another word. Now and again Lady Grace raised her eyes and scanned the handsome face opposite her, and Lord Cecil would have returned the compliment, but while he ate his dinner he was thinking of that other face with the dark hair and blue eyes, which had bent over him by the brook, recalling the sweet voice, which still rang in his ears like distant music.
He started when the low, soft voice of Lady Grace said:
“Have you been at the Towers long, Lord Cecil?”
It was rather an awkward question, for this was his first visit to any house of the marquis, his uncle, for ten years.
“Two days,” he replied, simply.
Lady Grace’s eyes grew keen, and she glanced from the young man to the old one.
“I have just been trying to tell the marquis how intensely I admire the place,” she said.
The marquis inclined his head to her in courtly acknowledgment, but without a word.
“It is the prettiest—no, the grandest—old place I have ever seen. I am quite surprised to hear that the marquis seldom visits it. The view from the terrace is simply magnificent. The country round about must be very beautiful.”
“I think it is,” said Lord Cecil; the marquis made no sign. “I haven’t seen much of it.”
“I shall expect you to act as guide to what you haveseen,” she said, with a smile that seemed to flash like a beam of light from her white face.
“I shall be most happy,” he responded.
“I think the country is at its best in the spring, and I am always glad to get a little while, a short breathing time, before the London season commences. Let me see, you are in the Two Hundred and Fifteenth, aren’t you, Captain Neville?”
“I was,” said Lord Cecil, with a momentary embarrassment, and a glance at the marble-like face at the head of the table. “I have retired.”
“What a pity!” she said, and her eyes seemed to take in, at a glance, his broad chest and stalwart limbs.
“Do you extend your sympathy to the army or to Lord Cecil?” asked the marquis, in a voice too smooth for the sneer which his question conveyed.
Lord Cecil’s eyes flashed, and his color rose, but he contained himself and smiled.
“Oh, for both, of course. Surely the commander-in-chief cannot afford to lose a good officer, and Lord Cecil must be sorry to leave the army.”
“No,” murmured the marquis. “I do not suppose the commander-in-chief can afford to lose a good officer. Lord Cecil must have been a great loss,” and his icy glance rested for a moment, without a spark of expression, upon the handsome face which had flushed again under his cruel taunt.
“The loss was all on my side, Lady Grace,” he managed to say, with a smile; “at any rate, the duke bears up wonderfully well.”
Once more the marquis had succeeded in freezing the conversation, and Lady Grace, after toying with a strawberry, rose to leave the table. And as Lord Cecil opened the door for her, she put up her fan, and in a remarkably low voice murmured:
“You will not stay long?”
“I certainly sha’n’t,” he replied, emphatically, and in an equally low voice: but, low as it was, the marquis appeared to have heard it.
“I shall not detain you long,” he said. “You drink, of course?” and he touched the decanter.
The tone, and not the words, again seemed to conveyan insult, and Lord Cecil shook his head, feeling as if he would rather have perished of thirst than drank a glass of the wine thus offered.
“No?” said the marquis, and he managed to make even this single word offensive. “I thought it was the present custom with young men.”
“No, sir,” said Lord Cecil; “we have changed the fashion.”
The marquis inclined his head as if the retort were a compliment.
“Ah, the present age has no vices, I presume. Is it because they have no strength for them?”
“I don’t know,” said Lord Cecil, almost coldly.
The marquis filled a glass with the rare and costly wine, and as he sipped it, allowed his eyes to stray over the rim to his nephew’s face.
“I think I told you Lady Grace was expected?” he said.
“I think not, sir,” said Lord Cecil.
“Ah, it escaped me. Her father is an old—friend of mine.” The pause conveyed the sneer which lay in almost every sentence he uttered, and was expressed by tone or word. “He did me a great service, and I owe him a debt of gratitude.”
Lord Cecil looked up inquiringly. The marquis dipped his white fingers in the finger-glass, and added, smoothly:
“He ran off with a girl to whom I was going to be married. This is her daughter, and I am naturally—attached to her.”
The idea of the marquis being attached to any human being on the face of the earth almost raised a smile on Lord Cecil’s face. He might have laughed outright; the marquis would have made no sign. He sipped his wine slowly, then he said:
“She is what the people call a beautiful girl?”
This was put as a question, and Lord Cecil hastened to reply:
“She is very beautiful, sir.”
“If you say so!” said the marquis, with an inclination of the head, which brought the color to Lord Cecil’s face, and caused him to mutter:
“I can’t stand this much longer.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the marquis, blandly.
In his embarrassment Lord Cecil seized the decanter, and poured out a glass of wine, and the ghost of a smile crossed the marquis’ face.
“It is rather singular that Lady Grace should have mentioned the army,” he said. “It reminded me that I wanted to speak to you on the subject. First let me thank you for complying with my desire.”
Lord Cecil smiled, but rather grimly.
“I don’t think I could have done otherwise, sir,” he said.
“Ah! true—yes. I think, if I remember rightly, that I made the continuance of your allowance subject to your resigning. No doubt you thought the condition rather arbitrary. Permit me to explain it. I could not afford it.”
Lord Cecil stared in an unfeigned astonishment, which appeared to give the marquis immense satisfaction.
“I generally avoid business matters,” he said, slowly, and as smoothly as ever; “I leave them to my steward and lawyer. But I think we had better speak of them—it is a good opportunity! It will surprise you to hear, no doubt, that I am a poor man!”
Lord Cecil certainly looked surprised. The marquis smiled.
“Y—es,” he said, slowly, as if he enjoyed making the statement. “It appears that I have spent rather more than double my income for say fifty years since, and I imagine that my father and grandfather must have done the same; at least that is the only way in which I can account for the fact that the whole of the free estates are mortgaged up to the neck. Up to the neck,” he added, as if it were a line of especially beautiful poetry.
Lord Cecil sat silent and attentive.
“The land that couldn’t be mortgaged will, of course, come to you,” continued the marquis, and his tone conveyed his infinite regret; “but even the income from that will be drawn upon to pay the interest on the others. Consequently,” with bland and icy politeness, “you will probably be the poorest peer of the realm.”
Lord Cecil remained silent, his eyes fixed gravely on the pale, set face, which bore not the faintest indication of regret.
“It is an uncomfortable position! I cannot imagine a more deplorable one, can you?”
Lord Cecil nodded.
“I—I don’t think I have realized it yet, sir,” he replied.
“Ah!” said the marquis. “But you will. I haven’t felt it because, you see, I have been able to raise money for myself! That is unfortunate for you, of course, but I imagine you would have done the same in my place.”
Lord Cecil did not reply. The heartlessness of the speech simply staggered him.
The marquis waited, as if to give him time to digest this charmingly candid statement, then remarked, in as casual a voice as if he were commenting on the weather:
“Lady Grace’s grandfather made his money and his title out of beer. She will be immensely rich, I believe, and will not require the small sum—though it will be my all—which I shall leave her.”
He paused and looked at his white hands, then in an utterly wearied voice, as if he had exhausted all the interest in the subject, said:
“I am glad you think her so charming! Pray, do not let me keep you from her any longer!” and he rose and stood like a statue.
Lord Cecil pushed his chair back and rose, his handsome face rather pale, his eyes flashing.
“Do I understand, sir—do you want me to understand that you wish me to——” He hesitated a moment, then brought it out, bluntly—“to marry Lady Grace?”
The marquis surveyed him from under half-closed eyelids, as if he were some insignificant object at a distance.
“Certainly not!” he said, smoothly. “I was merely making an attempt, I fear a vain attempt, to amuse you by giving you some information. It is”—the words dropped with icy, contemptuous indifference from his scarcely moving lips—“a matter of profound indifference to me whether you marry Lady Grace—or one of the maids in the kitchen!”
A fierce retort trembled on the tip of Lord Cecil’s tongue, but he closed his lips tightly, and, returning the courtly bow which the marquis at this moment accorded him, with a short inclination of the head, left the room. The marquis gently sank back into his chair with theplacid and serene air of a man who has spent a remarkably pleasant quarter of an hour.
Outside, in the hall, Lord Cecil pulled himself up and drew a long breath, as a man does who has kept a tight hold upon himself for about as long as he can manage; then he paced up and down the full length of the hall—much to the concealed amazement of the groom and the footmen, one of whom stood ready to open the drawing-room door for him—and, at last, remembering that Lady Grace was waiting for him, greatly relieved the footman’s feelings by entering the room.
Lady Grace was reclining, almost completely lying, on a couch near the fire. At a little distance sat a middle-aged lady, bent over some kind of needlework. It was a distant connection of the marquis, who acted as a kind of housekeeper, and who was more like a shadow than a living, breathing woman. Beyond his first greeting when he had arrived, Lord Cecil had not succeeded in exchanging a word with her. As he entered now she just raised her head like an automaton, and let it fall again over her work. Lady Grace looked across at him with a smile, and he went and leaned against the mantel-piece of carved marble and mosaic, and she let her eyes scan his face in silence for a moment, then she said, with a smile:
“Have you been enjoying yourself, Lord Cecil?”
“Oh, very much!” he said.
She laughed a low, soft laugh.
“Shall I tell you what you are thinking?” she said.
He looked at her inquiringly.
“You were wondering what train you could catch to-morrow morning.”
He started.
“Right the first time!” he acknowledged, with a short laugh.
She moved her fan—it was a large one of fancy blue feathers—which in juxtaposition with her face made its fairness seem dazzling.
“Well, don’t,” she said, “for my sake.”
“For your sake?” he said, half-absently.
“Yes. Don’t you see that you would leave me alone? You would not be so cruel! And after two days only.”
“It seems about two years,” he said, grimly.
She laughed softly, her eyes still fixed on his face, as if it were a book whose pages she was reading.
“How charming the marquis is, isn’t he?”
“Charming!” he assented, with a volume of bitterness in the word.
“You must be so glad to be here with him, and it is the first time for ten years!”
“And the last for another ten,” he said, under his breath, but she heard him.
“Don’t say that. After all, he is not so bad when you know him.”
“There are some people one doesn’t want to know, Lady Grace.”
“And then we must make allowances,” she said. “Why do they call him Wicked Lord Stoyle?” she asked him, not abruptly, but in the same soft voice that most people found acted upon them like a caress.
“I don’t know. For good and fully sufficient reasons I’ve no doubt,” he replied.
“Do you think he has murdered anybody, now?” she inquired, with a smile.
“I don’t know. Perhaps. I daresay. At any rate, I’m quite sure a great many people must have longed to murder him.”
“Oh, fie!” she said, touching him with the edge of her fan; “and your uncle, too! I wonder what he has done?”
“I was just wondering what he hasn’t done,” said Lord Cecil, grimly.
She laughed.
“You amuse me, Lord Cecil.”
“I’m awfully glad,” he said. “I didn’t think it was in me to amuse any one to-night.”
“You have had rather a bad quarter of an hour—yes?” she said, softly. “What a happy woman the marquis’ wife must have been.”
Lord Cecil started.
“I didn’t know——” he said, inquiringly.
She laughed, and the fan moved to and fro in rhythmic curves.
“No? Oh, yes, there was a marchioness once. Years and years ago. I believe he killed her—with kindness.”
“Poor woman!” he said, under his breath.
“Yes. But that’s the mystery. No one knows, you see, and never will know. Everybody knows about his ruining his cousin, Lord Denbigh, at cards; he committed suicide, and so the marquis inherited the Denbigh title; and about his shooting old Lady Dalrymple’s son—they say that the marquis fired before the word was given; and about his running away with that foolish Lady Penelope—she died in a garret at Dieppe; but nobody knows about the marchioness. How shocked you look!”
“Do I?” he said. “I didn’t think I was capable of it. But surely that isn’t all he has done?” he said, with great sarcasm.
“Oh, no; these are trifles which I happened to remember hearing about. They are only trifles.”
“That is all,” he said.
They were silent for a moment or two; then she said, in the same voice, too low and soft to reach the old lady sitting at the other end of the room:
“And now shall I tell you what you are thinking about, Lord Cecil?”
“Don’t! I’m afraid!” he cried.
She laughed.
“You are wondering why I am here?”
His eyes replied in the affirmative for him.
“Because——But, wait! I am more clever even than you suppose! Shall I tell you what the marquis has been saying to you in the drawing-room; and why do you look so grim and gloomy?”
He did not answer.
She let her eyes rest upon his face with a serene and languid expression of amusement.
“Well, then, he has been advising you to marry me.”
Lord Cecil was almost guilty of a start.
He could not speak. The color rose to his face, and his eyes dropped from hers to the diamond pendant that glistened on the white neck.
She laughed softly, and the diamonds seemed to laugh with her, as they scintillated in the subdued light.
“Am I right? You need not answer—your face is eloquent enough! And now I will tell you why I came here—I came to see you.”
He tried to speak, but she held up her fan to command him to silence.
“You see, I know the marquis and his charming ways better than you do. I knew that he wished us to meet, that we might—how shall I put it?—respect each other. Well, Lord Cecil, I have seen you, and you have seen me. But”—she rose with slow and graceful ease and took up the train of her dress—“but you are not obliged to marry me, and I”—she laughed softly up at his handsome face—“I am certainly not obliged to marry you. And now, in reward for my candor—I have been candid, haven’t I?—you will not leave me alone in this castle of Giant Despair?”
She did not wait for his answer, but with a soft “good-night” and a smiling nod, glided from the room.
With the smile still on her face, Lady Grace went slowly up the great staircase to the magnificent apartments which had been prepared for her. The smile was still on her face while her maid brushed the long tresses of silky hair that fell like a shower of gold over the white shoulders, and even when she was alone she smiled still as she leaned forward and looked at her face in the glass.
“Yes,” she murmured, falling back and half-closing her eyes. “He is worth winning. There is only one thing I fear.” She paused, with a faint sigh. “I am afraid that I shall love him too well!”
Lord Cecil stood with his back to the fire for twenty minutes after Lady Grace had left him. To say that he was amazed would be only inadequately to describe the state of his feelings. At last, as if he were making an effort to cast off the bewilderment which had fallen upon him, he wished the old lady good-night, and went, not to his room, but out on to the terrace, for he felt a kind of craving for the open air, in which he might rid himself of the effects produced by his insight into his uncle’s character and the extraordinary candor of Lady Grace.
He drew a long breath as he leaned over the balustrade, and his brain cleared somewhat.
“If Lady Grace is reading my thoughts at this present moment,” he murmured, “she’ll know I’m thinking of that train still! Yes, I’ll be off the first thing to-morrow morning!”
And with this firm resolution he turned to go back to the house. As he did so, something white fluttered past him, blown by the faint night breeze.
He stooped and picked it up, and absently glanced at it by the light from the window. It was a small hand-bill, having on it in red letters:
Theatre Royal, Barton.“Romeo and Juliet.”
“Romeo and Juliet!” It was that she had been reading by the brook. Instantly her lovely face rose before him, and dispelled all memory of the events of the night. He stood, looking down at the paper dreamily, wistfully,—seeing, not it, but the dark hair and blue eyes of the girl who had bent over him, whose hands his lips had touched.
“No!” he said, with a sharp sigh; “no, I can’t go, for she is somewhere here, and I must find her!”