“I’ll find you a better one, sir. I’ll set about hunting for a good one this afternoon.”Martin shook hands with her on the door-step, and she stood watching him till he disappeared at the turn of the road. She watched him with a countenance full of sorrow.CHAPTER VIII.MY FROLIC FALCON, WITH BRIGHT EYES.Everybody in Trelasco and in the neighbourhood seemed glad to see Colonel Disney again. All the best people within a six-mile drive came bearing down upon the Angler’s Nest in the week that followed his return; and there were cosy little afternoon tea-drinkings in the drawing-room, or on the lawn, and Isola had her hands full in receiving visitors. Everybody congratulated her upon having her hero back from the wars.“You ought to be very proud of your husband, Mrs. Disney,” said Vansittart Crowther, with his air of taking all the world under his protection.“I have always been proud of him,” Isola answered gently. “I was proud of him before the Burmese War.”“Your poor wife has been looking very unhappy for the last few months,” Mrs. Crowther said to the colonel, with a motherly glance at Isola. “I really had a good mind to write to you and beg you to hurry home if you didn’t want to find the poor thing far gone in a decline when you came back.”“My dear Mrs. Crowther, what nonsense,” cried Isola, growing crimson at this motherly officiousness. “I have never been out of health, or in the least likely to go into a decline. One cannot always look like a dairy-maid.”“My dear, there’s no use talking, you looked very bad. Had one of my girls looked as ill, I should have taken her off to Buxton to drink the waters, without an hour’s delay.”That visit of the Crowthers seemed much longer than any other afternoon call. The Crowthers, husband, and wife, and elder daughter, had an inquisitorial air, Isola fancied, an air of scrutinizing her house and herself and her surroundings, which was intolerable to her; although on Mrs. Crowther’s part she knew the scrutiny was made in theutmost benevolence, and the officiousness was the outcome of a nature overflowing with the milk of human kindness.“I wish you had written to me, Mrs. Crowther,” said Disney. “I couldn’t have come home any sooner, but I could have telegraphed to my sister Allegra to look after my wife, and cheer her solitude. I was a fool not to have had her here all along.”“Hadn’t I better go out of the room while you are holding your consultation about me?” exclaimed Isola, fretfully. “It’s rather hard upon the patient to hear her case discussed in cold blood. I am tired of declaring that I have not been ill, and that it is my misfortune and not my fault to have a pale complexion.”“You were not always so pallid, my dear,” said Mrs. Crowther, persistently. “You were one of the beauties of the Hunt Ball, and you had colour enough that night.”Dr. and Mrs. Baynham came the following afternoon, and these two told the same story, though with less obtrusive concern.“I looked after the young lady now and then,” said the worthy doctor, “and as I found there was nothing radically wrong, I didn’t worry you with any low-spirited reports; but I expect to see her pick up wonderfully now you have come home. She didn’t take enough outdoor exercise, that’s where the harm was. She used to be so fond of her boat last year, but this year I fancy she didn’t feel herself up to handling the sculls. You didn’t now, did you, Mrs. Disney?”“I don’t know about that, but I am ready to row to the Land’s End, now Martin is back,” said Isola, and those few words seemed the sweetest Martin Disney had heard since Colonel Manwaring’s daughter promised to be his wife.Mrs. Baynham sat on the lawn, sipping her tea, and basking in the afternoon sunshine.“You should have seen your wife in her wedding-gown at the Lostwithiel dance,” she said. “You would have been proud of her. She didn’t want to go—refused Mrs. Crowtherand me again and again. She thought it wasn’t right to be at any merry-making while your life was in danger.”“Yes, I know—I know. My tender-hearted Isola!”“But at last we got the better of her objections; and though there were a good many pretty women there, and though Miss Crowther, perhaps, pleased most tastes, being a more showy style of beauty, to my thinking there wasn’t one came up to Mrs. Disney.”“Her partners seemed of the same opinion,” put in the doctor, cheerily. “Why, how often did Lord Lostwithiel dance with you, Mrs. Disney? Oftener than with anybody else, I’ll be bound.”Mrs. Baynham nodded approvingly.“I was very proud of my party that evening, I can tell you, Colonel Disney,” she said. “It isn’t often that one has to chaperon three attractive young women. Do you know that my youngest niece, Maria, has had two offers since that night, Isola, and when I last heard from her she was on the brink of an engagement? Ah, well, I hope we shall have another ball next December, now that the neighbourhood has begun to wake up a bit. We have been thinking of getting up a water picnic this summer—just a little excursion to Mevagissey, and a little fishing for those who might care for it.”“Very pleasant, indeed, of you,” answered the colonel, cheerily. “We will be there.”“The Crowthers are rather grand in their ideas,” said the doctor, “but Alicia is very keen upon all kind of sport, so I know she’ll want to come, whatever Belinda may say to it.”Mrs. Baynham made a wry face at the name of the elder sister. It was an involuntary and unconscious contortion; but Belinda had tried to snub Mrs. Baynham, who never could forget that her father was a banker at Truro, and held the fortunes—the mortgages and encumbrances of the landed gentry—in the hollow of his hand.“You don’t like the elder Miss Crowther?” speculated the colonel.“Well, if I am to be candid, I must confess that I have apositive aversion to that young lady. The airs she gives herself on the strength of her father’s wool are really insupportable, and since Lord Lostwithiel disappointed her she has been more odious than she was before.”“What do you mean by Lostwithiel disappointing her? Did he jilt her?”“Well, it could scarcely be called jilting, and I really don’t know that there was anything between them; but people had coupled their names—and he dined at Glenaveril at least once a week all the time he was at the Mount—and people had quite made up their minds it was to be a match. Mr. Crowther went about talking of Lord Lostwithiel and his affairs as if he was his father-in-law—the neglected condition of the land, and what ought to be done at the Mount, and that the estate wanted judicious nursing, and all that sort of thing. And then one December morning his lordship sailed off in his yacht before it was light, and there was no more heard of him. It was quite in his way to go off suddenly like that, but the Crowthers were evidently taken by surprise, and we heard no more about Lord Lostwithiel and the Mount.”“They dropped him like a hot potato,” said the doctor. “Well, we shall depend upon you both for our water-party. It will not be till the middle of July, when an old chum of mine, a sailor, will be coming this way.”This was a sample of many such visits. In the country, and even in London upon occasion, people are given to discussing the same subjects. Martin Disney heard a good deal about the Crowthers and their supposed disappointment. People liked Mrs. Crowther for her simple, unaffected ways, and thorough-going kindliness; but Vansittart and his daughters had made a good many enemies. He was too coarse; they were too fine; only the mother’s simple nature had caught the golden mean between blunt vulgarity and artificial smartness.Colonel Disney heard all this village gossip with an unheeding ear. He was secure in his own position as a son ofthe soil, a man whose pedigree could pass muster with that of the Rashleighs and the Treffrys, a man of means that were ample for his own unpretending tastes and requirements. He cared not a jot how many guineas a year the Crowthers might give to their cook, or how much Mr. Crowther had paid for the furnishing and decoration of his house, a theme upon which the gossips of the neighbourhood loved to enlarge. That Mrs. Crowther had gowns from Worth, and that her daughters employed Mrs. Mason, irked not this simple soldier. The only point in all the stream of talk that had affected him was the unanimous opinion that Trelasco in the spring had been too relaxing for Mrs. Disney, or else that her solitude had preyed upon her mind, inasmuch as she had looked so ill as to afford an interesting subject of conversation to a good many friendly people who suffered from the chronic malady of not having enough to talk about, a form of starvation almost as bad as not having enough to eat.The colonel listened, and made his own conclusions. He did not believe that Trelasco was “relaxing.” Ho loved the district too well to believe any evil thing about it. Those fresh breezes that blew up from the sea, those balmy airs that breathed across the heather-clad hills, must bring health with them. What could one have better than that mingling of sea and hill, brine and honey, gorse-bloom and seaweed? No, Trelasco was not to blame. His young wife had suffered for lack of youthful company. He made up his mind accordingly.“I suppose you won’t object to our having Allegra here for a summer visit, will you, love?” he asked at breakfast the day after Mrs. Baynham’s call. “London must be hot, and dusty, and dreary in July, and she must want rest and country air, I fancy, after having worked so hard in her art school.”Isola gave a scarcely perceptible sigh as she bent to caress Tim, a privileged attendant of the breakfast-table.“Object! Of course not, Martin. I shall be very pleased for your sister to come here.”“I feel very sure you will be pleased with her when you and she get upon intimate terms. You could know so little of her from that one evening in the Cavendish Road.”The occasion in question was an evening in which Isola and her husband had been bidden to a friendly dinner, on their way through London, by the clergyman’s widow with whom Allegra lived while she pursued her study of art at a famous school in St. John’s Wood. The clergyman’s widow, Mrs. Meynell, was a distant cousin of the Disneys, and Allegra’s home had been with her from the time she left school. The extent of her wanderings after she was old enough to be sent to a boarding-school had been from Falmouth to Kensington, and from Kensington to St. John’s Wood, with occasional holidays in the Isle of Thanet.“I thought she was very fresh and bright and loving,” answered Isola, “and I could see even in that one evening that she was very fond of you.”“Yes, God bless her, there is no doubt about that. I have been brother and father too for her. She has had no one but me since our mother’s death.”“Shall I write and ask her to come to us, Martin, or will you?”“I fancy she would take it more as a compliment if the invitation went straight from you. She would know that I would be glad to have her, but she might feel a little doubtful about you.”“Then I’ll write to her to-day, Martin, and beg her to come at once—as soon as ever she can pack her boxes.”“That’s my darling! I hope she won’t bore you when she is here. I have a shrewd idea she’ll make your life happier. She’ll awaken you from that languor which has grown upon you in your loneliness.”“At least I’ll try to make her happy, Martin, if it is only for your sake.”“Ah, and you will soon love her for her own sake.”“I’ll get the boat looked to at once, and I’ll see about making the spare room pretty for her,” said Isola.A week later Allegra was with them, breakfasting on the lawn in the balmy atmosphere of July. There were two girls, in white gowns, under the tulip tree, instead of one; and Martin Disney felt as if his domestic happiness were doubled, as he looked at those two graceful figures in the flickering light below that canopy of broad bright leaves. Another element of comfort, too, had entered the Angler’s Nest; for the incompetent cook had taken her incompetency and a month’s wages to her native city of Truro; and a buxom damsel from Falmouth, recommended by Tabitha, had already proved herself a treasure in the culinary art.Never was there a fairer picture than that domestic group under the tulip tree. The two girlish figures in white muslin, with palest salmon and palest azure ribbons fluttering and glancing in the light and deepening in the shadow; the white fox-terrier, alert, muscular, mercurial; the tortoise-shell cat, long-haired, aristocratic, and demure; the pretty Moorish plateau on bamboo legs, the purple and crimson breakfast service and rare old silver urn, the fruit and flowers, and amber-hued butter, and rustic luxury of preserved fruit and clotted cream.“How lovely it all is after Cavendish Road!” cried Allegra, rapturously. “When I see the lights and shadows upon those hills, I despair of ever being able to paint a landscape as long as I live. Nature is maddeningly beautiful.”“What is your particular line, Allegra?” asked her brother. “Is it landscape?”“No; I only care for landscape as a background for humanity. I want to paint genre pictures in water-colour—women and children—beautiful women amidst beautiful surroundings—picturesque poverty—interesting bits of daily life. Mrs. Allingham is the ideal after which I strive, but I am only at the bottom of the ladder. It is a long climb to the top; but one does not mind that in a profession where labour is delight.”“You are fond of art, then?” said Isola, watching the earnest face of the speaker.“Fond of it! Why, I live for it! The dream of my life from the time I was seven years old has been one long dream of the bliss that was to be mine when I could feel myself able to paint. I have toiled with all my might. Martin disliked the idea of my being an Academy student—poor, foolish, ignorant Martin—so I have been obliged to plod on at St. John’s Wood, without hope of prizes or medals; but on the whole I have been very lucky, for I have made friends among the Academicians. They are very kind to any student who seems in rightdown earnest; and they have been ever so good to me. I hope, Martin, you will find some day that I am something better than an amateur,” she concluded, resting her two hands caressingly upon her brother’s shoulder.“My dearest, I have not the least doubt you will astonish me. I am very ignorant of everything connected with art. I set my face against the Academy because I thought the training and the life would be too public for my sister.”“As if Burlington House were any more public than that big school at St. John’s Wood, my dear illogical brother: and yet we women are the only people who are said to be wanting in the logical faculty.”She leant back in her basket-chair, revelling in the rural atmosphere, and in that new sense of being in the bosom of her family. Tim leapt upon her lap and licked her face, in token of his acceptance of her into the home-circle. Nobody had ever called Miss Leland a beauty, nor had she ever received those disquieting attentions which follow the footsteps of exceptional loveliness. She was sometimes described as a girl who grew upon one; and people who knew her well generally ended by thinking her distractingly pretty. She had a brilliant complexion, of the true English type, fair and blooming—a complexion which indicated perfect health and an active, orderly life; no late hours or novel-reading over the fire—an out-of-door complexion, which would have looked its best under a neat little felt hat in the hunting-field, or under a coquettish straw sailor hat on board a yacht. Her eyes were blue-grey, with long, brown lashes and boldlymarked eyebrows; her nose was firmly modelled, inclining a little to the aquiline order. Her mouth was the prettiest feature in her face, and yet it was a shade larger than accepted perfection in mouths. It was a mouth chiefly remarkable for character and expression; and, indeed, it was the individuality and variety of expression in the fair young face which constituted Miss Leland’s chief claim to distinction.She started up from the nest of basket-work and flowered chintz, and stood tall and erect, a Juno-like young woman, with heavy plaits of reddish-brown hair rolled in a great knot at the back of her head. She might have answered one of those harsh advertisements for parlour-maids, in which the words, “No fringe,” figure with curt cruelty; for her hair was brushed smoothly back from the fair forehead, and the severity of the style became that wide sagacious brow. It was just the kind of forehead which can endure exposure without conveying an idea of bald ugliness.She was tall and strongly made, fashioned after the semblance of Diana or Atalanta rather than Venus or Psyche. Her every movement had the bold, free grace of vigorous, unspoiled youth. She had always been active—fond of walking, riding, rowing, swimming, as well as of art, and with an ardent passion for the country, which had made existence in a London suburb one long sacrifice.“I used to take the train for Hampstead Heath or Willesden,” she told her brother, “and go off for long, lonely tramps to Finchley or Hendon. I have watched the builder’s progress along roads and lanes I loved. I have seen horrid brick boxes creeping along like some new kind of noxious insect, eating up fields and hedgerows, old hawthorns and old hollies. I could have sat down in the muddy road and cried sometimes, at the thought that soon there would be no country walk left within reach of a Londoner. Once I went off to the north-east, to look for the rural lanes Charles Lamb and his sister loved—the lanes and meadows where they carried their little picnic basket, till they took shelter at a homely inn. Oh, Martin, all those fields and lanes, CharlesLamb’s country—are going, going, or gone! It is heartbreaking! And they are building at Fowey, too, I see. Positively there will be no country anywhere soon. There will be crescents and terraces and little ugly streets at the very Land’s End, and the Logan Rock will be the sign of a public-house.”“Don’t be down-hearted, Chatterbox! I think Cornwall may last our time,” said Disney, laughing at her vehemence.Allegra was a great talker. It seemed as if she had a well-spring of joy and life within her which must find an outlet. When people ventured to hint at her loquacity she declared that her name was in fault.“I have grown up to match my name,” she said; “if I had been christened Penserosa I might have been quite a different person.”Her vivacity gave a new element of brightness to the Angler’s Rest, where Disney had been somewhat oppressed by the sensation of intense repose which had pervaded histête-à-têtelife with Isola. He loved his wife so entirely, so unselfishly, and devotedly, that it was happiness to him to be with her; yet in the three or four weeks that had gone by since his return he had struggled in vain against the feeling that there was something wanting in his home. Isola waited upon him and deferred to him with more than wifely submissiveness. He would have liked a spurt of rebellion once in a way, a little burst of girlish temper, just to show that she was human; but none ever came. His every desire was anticipated. Whatever plan he suggested—to walk, to drive, to visit, or not to visit—the river or the sea—was always the plan that pleased her best, or at least she said so.“I think I shall call you Griselda instead of Isola,” he said one day, taking the fair pale face between his hands and gazing into the mournful depths of the dark violet eyes—inscrutable eyes they seemed to him, when the pupils dilated under his gaze, as if the eyes made a darkness to hide their meaning.“Why?” she asked.A flood of crimson passed over her face like a fire, and left her paler than before.“Because you are only too dutiful. Would you resist if I were to turn tyrant, I wonder?”“I have no fear of your turning tyrant,” she answered, with a sad little smile; “you are only too good to me.”“Good! There can be no question of goodness. If a man picked up a diamond as precious as the Koh-i-noor, could he be good to it? How can I be good to my gem? I have but one thing left in the world to desire, or to pray for.”“What is that, Martin?”“To see you happy.”Again the sudden flame crimsoned her face, that sensitive spiritual face which reflected every change of feeling.“I am happy, Martin, quite happy, happier than I ever thought to be, now that you are home again. What have I more to desire?”“Is that really so? Was my long absence your greatest trouble?”“Yes,” she answered slowly, looking at him with a curiously steady look, “that was the beginning and end of my trouble.”“Thank God!” he said, drawing a deep breath. “There have been moments—just of late—when I have puzzled my brains about you—until I thought—” very slowly, “there might have been something else.”He clasped her in his arms, and hid her face upon his breast, as if—fearing that he might have wounded her by those last words—he wanted to make amends before she had time to feel his unkindness. His tenderness for her had so much of that pitying love which a strong man feels for a child.This conversation occurred the day before Allegra’s arrival; but with that young lady’s appearance on the scene, new life and gladness came into the little household. Allegra sang, Allegra played, Allegra ran out into the gardentwenty times a day, and called through the open window to Isola, sitting quietly in the drawing-room, to come out and look at this or that—a rose finer than all other roses—a suggested alteration—an atmospheric effect—anything and everything. She was a keen observer of Nature, full of vivid interest in every creature that lived, and in every flower that grew. Tim followed her everywhere as she danced along the gravel walks, or across the short springy turf. Tim adored her, and grinned at her, and threw himself into all manner of wriggling attitudes upon the grass to express his delight in her company, and fawned at her feet, and talked to her after his guttural fashion, snorting his friendly feelings. Tim had long languished for such a companion, having found his young mistress’s society very heavy of late. No more runs in the meadow, no more rambles in the neighbouring spinney, and very little boating. But now that Allegra had come the skiff was seldom idle. Isola had to go on the river whether she liked or not. There were strong young arms ready to pull her—round young arms, of a lovely roseate fairness, which looked their best, stretched to the motion of the sculls, with the white cambric shirt rolled up above the elbow.“You can read Shelley while I scull the boat,” said Allegra. “I don’t want any help. If you knew what rapture it is to me to feel the breath of Seagods and Tritons after St. John’s Wood, and the smoke from the Metropolitan Railway, you wouldn’t pity me.”Isola submitted, and sat at her ease upon bright-coloured cushions with an Indian rug spread round her, as idle as if she had been the belle of a Zenana, and read Alastor while the boat sped seaward in the sunshine.Sometimes they moored their boat at the landing stage at Polruan, and walked up the hill to the Point, and sat there for an hour or two in the summer wind with their books and picnic basket, seeing great ships go out towards the Lizard and the big distant world, or sail merrily homeward towards Plymouth and the Start. Isola looked at thoseoutward-bound ships with a strange longing in her eyes—a longing to flee away upon those broad wings that flashed whitely in the sunlit distance. Were people happy on board those ships, she wondered, happy at escaping from the fetters of an old life and a beaten path, happy going away to strange lands and freedom? She had been reading many books of travel of late, and a kind of passion for remote uncivilized countries had come upon her; as if that untrammelled life meant release from memory and saddening cares—a new birth almost. It seemed from some of those books as if there could be no greater happiness upon this earth than to tramp across sandy deserts and stalk occasional lions; while in others the supreme good seemed to be found in the attempt to scale impossible mountains. What was it that made the rapture of these things? Isola wondered. Was it that perils and wild solitudes offered the only possible escape out of a past existence, on this side the grave? Allegra had never so much as crossed the Channel. She had been brought up in the most humdrum fashion. First a school at Falmouth, and then a smarter school at Kensington, and then St. John’s Wood and the Art School. Her mother had died when she was fourteen years of age, and since that time her brother had been her only guardian and almost her only friend. Her life had seen but little variety, and very little of the dancing and gaiety which for most girls is the only form of pleasure. She and Isola talked about the ships as they sat upon the grassy hill at Polruan, and speculated about the lands of which they knew only what they had read in books of travel.“You, at least, know what France is like,” said Allegra, “and that is something.”“Only one little corner of France.”“And to think that you were born in an old French city! It seems strange. Do you feel at all French?”“I don’t think so; only sometimes a longing comes upon me to see the old grey walls, and to hear the old voices, and see the curious old women in their white caps and bright-coloured handkerchiefs, clattering along to the Cathedral. There must be more old women in Brittany than in Cornwall, I think. Fowey does not swarm with old women as Dinan did. And sometimes I long to see mother, and the good old Brittany servants, and the garden where the hours went by so slowly—almost as slowly as they go here”—with a sigh.“Does time go so very slowly here?” asked Allegra, quickly. “That sounds as if you were unhappy.”“What nonsense you talk!” cried Isola, with a flash of sudden anger. “Cannot one be dull and bored sometimes—from very idleness—without being unhappy?”“I don’t know; but, for my own part, when I am happy I am never dull.”“You have more of what people call animal spirits than I have.”“I’m glad you apologize in a manner for that odious phrase—animal spirits. I would not apply such a phrase to Tim. It suggests nothing but Audrey at a statute fair. Heaven gave me a capacity for happiness, and I thank God every night in my prayers for another happy day. Even at school I contrived to be happy, somehow; and think what it must be after seven years of dull routine to feel that I have done with sitting at a stranger’s table and that I am here in a home, my own home, with my brother and sister.”The two women clasped hands, and kissed each other upon this. Only the night before Isola, of her own free will, had asked her sister-in-law to make her home at the Angler’s Nest always, always, till she should be led out of it as a bride; and Martin had shown himself supremely happy in the knowledge that his sister had won his wife’s love and confidence.When Isola and he were alone together after the sealing of that family bond, he kissed and thanked her for this boon which she had bestowed upon him.“I never could have felt quite at ease while Allegra wasliving with strangers,” he told her. “And now my cup is full. But are you sure, dearest, that you will never find her in the way, never fancy yourself any the less mistress of your house, and of my life, because she is here?”“Never, never, never! I am gladder than I can say to have her. She is a delightful companion. She helps me in a hundred ways. But even if she were less charming it would be my duty to have her here since you like her to be with us.”“But it must not be done as a duty. I will not have you sacrifice your inclination in the slightest degree.”“What an obtuse person you are! Don’t I tell you that I am enchanted to have her? She is as much my sister as ever Gwendolen was; indeed, she is much more sympathetic than Gwen ever was.”“Then I am perfectly content.”Allegra wrote to Mrs. Meynell next day, announcing the decision that had been arrived at, not without grateful acknowledgments of that lady’s kindness. The rest of her belongings were to be sent to her forthwith, easels, and colour-boxes, books and knickknacks; her brother’s gifts, most of them from the romantic East; things which made her few little Kensingtonian keepsakes look very trivial and Philistine. Allegra’s possessions gave a new individuality to the large, airy bedroom, and the tiny boudoir at the corner of the house, looking seaward, which Isola had arranged for her.While these things were doing Martin Disney was buying horses and buying land—a farm of over two hundred acres which would make his property better worth holding—and he had further employed a Plymouth architect to plan an enlargement of the old-fashioned cottage—a new and much more spacious drawing-room, two bedrooms over, a verandah below, and a loggia above. In that mild climate the loggia would afford a pleasant lounge even in winter, and myrtle and roses would speedily cover the wooden columns which sustained the tiled roof. It was to be a homely Italianloggia—unpretentious, and not particularly architectural; but Isola and her sister-in-law were delighted at the idea.The stables were to be enlarged as well as the house.“You have no idea how I have hoarded and scraped to lay by money ever since I bought the Nest,” said Disney. “I believe I was the greatest screw in the service all through my last campaign.”He laughed aloud in amused remembrance of many small sacrifices, while the three heads clustered over the architect’s plan, which had that factitious prettiness of delicate drawing and colour which makes every house so much nearer perfection upon paper than it ever can be in brick and stone.CHAPTER IX.“LIES NOTHING BURIED LONG AGO?”Like most small country settlements, little fraternities of well-to-do people who think themselves the beginning and end of the world, Trelasco was slow to rise to any festivity in the way of party-giving. So it was about two months after Colonel Disney’s return before the friendly calls and interchange of small civilities culminated in a dinner-party at Glenaveril. It seemed, indeed, only right and natural that the great house of the district, great by reason of Lord Lostwithiel’s non-residence, should be the first to open its doors in a ceremonial manner to the colonel and his womankind. The invitation to his sister might be taken as an especial compliment, arms outstretched to receive one who was a stranger in the land.“We want to know that nice, young sister of yours,” Mr. Crowther said to Colonel Disney, in his patronizing way, as they all came out of church the Sunday before the dinner-party. “A remarkably fine girl.”The colonel did not thank him for this compliment, which was pronounced in a loud voice, amidst the little knot of acquaintances taking leave of each other on the dip of thehill, where there was a sign-post on a patch of waste grass, and where road and lanes divided, one up the hill to Tywardreath, another to Fowey, and a narrow-wooded lane leading down to Glenaveril and the Angler’s Nest. Short as the distance was, there were carriages waiting for the Crowthers, who never walked to church, however fine the weather. Mrs. Crowther came to the morning service resplendent in a brocade gown and a Parisian bonnet, on pain of being condemned as dowdy by her husband, who liked to put the stamp of his wealth upon every detail. His wife obeyed him with wifely meekness, but the daughters were not so easily ruled. Both were keen-witted enough to feel the vulgarity of Sunday morning splendour. So Belinda worshipped in the exaggerated simplicity of an unstarched jaconet muslin, a yellow Liberty sash, a flopping Gainsborough hat, and a necklace of Indian beads, an attire which attracted every eye, and was a source of wonder to the whole congregation, while Alicia’s neat grey cashmere frock, and smart little toque to match, grey gloves, grey Prayer-book and sunshade, challenged criticism as a study in monochrome.Mr. Crowther would have lingered for farther conversation before getting into the family landau, but Colonel Disney bade a rather abrupt good morning to the whole group, and hurried his wife and sister down the hill.“I’m rather sorry we accepted the Glenaveril invitation,” he said to Isola. “The man is such an unmitigated cad.”“Mrs. Crowther is very kind and good,” replied his wife; “but I have never cared much about going to Glenaveril. I don’t feel that I get on particularly well with the girls. They are both too fine for me. But I should be sorry to offend Mrs. Crowther.”“Yes, she seems a kindly creature. It was thoughtful of her sending you a ticket for the ball. A woman with daughters is seldom over-kind to outsiders.”“Oh, I believe Mrs. Crowther’s heart is big enough to be kind to a whole parish.”“Well, on her account, perhaps it was best to accept the invitation.”“Don’t be so grand about it, Martin,” said Allegra. “You forget that I am pining to see what a dinner-party in a very rich house is like. I have seen nothing in London but literary and artistic dinners, third-rate literary and third-rate artistic, I’m afraid—but they were very nice, all the same. Glenaveril is a place that takes my breath away; and I am curious to see what a dinner-party can be like there.”“Then for your sake, Allegra, I’m glad we said yes. Only I couldn’t stand that fellow patronizing you. Calling you a fine girl, forsooth!”“Yes, it is an odious phrase, is it not? I’m afraid I shall have to live through it, because, like Rosalind, ‘I am more than common tall.’”She drew herself up to her full height, straight as a reed, but with fully developed bust and shoulders which showed to advantage in her pale tussore gown—silk that her brother had sent her from India. She looked the incarnation of girlish innocence and girlish happiness—a brow without a cloud, a step light as a fawn’s—a fearless, joyous nature. Her more commonplace features and finer figure were in curious contrast with Isola’s pensive beauty and too fragile form. Disney glanced from one to the other as he walked along the rustic lane between them; and, though he thought his wife the lovelier, he regretted that she was not more like his sister.A man who is very fond of home and who has no professional cares and occupations is apt to degenerate into a molly-coddle. Martin Disney gave an indication of this weakness on the day before the dinner at Glenaveril.“What are you two girls going to wear?” he asked. “At least, I don’t think I need ask Isola that question. You’ll wear your wedding-gown, of course, love?” he added, turning to his wife.“No, Martin, I am going to wear my grey silk.”“Grey! A dowager’s colour, a soured spinster’s colour—a Quaker’s no colour. I detest grey.”“Oh, but this is a very pretty gown—the palest shade of pearl colour—and I wear pink roses with it. It was made in Paris. I feel sure you will like me in it, Martin,” Isola said hurriedly, as if even this small matter fluttered her nerves.“Not as well as I like you in your wedding-gown. That was made in Paris, and it fitted you like a glove. I never saw such a pretty gown—so simple, yet so elegant.”“I have been married much too long to dress as a bride.”“You shall not seem as a bride—except to me. For my eyes only shall you shine in bridal loveliness. Bride or no bride, what can be prettier for a young woman than a white satin gown with a long train? You can wear some touch of colour to show you have not got yourself up as a bride. What do you say, Allegra? Give us your opinion. Of course you are an authority upon dress.”“Oh, the white satin, by all means. Isola looks ethereal in white. She ought hardly ever to wear anything else.”“You hear, Isa. Two to one against you.”“I’m sorry I can’t be governed by your opinions in this instance. You forget that I last wore my gown at a ball. I danced a good deal—the floor was dirty—the gown was spoilt. I shall never wear it again. I hope that will satisfy you, Martin.”She spoke with a touch of temper, her cheeks flushed crimson, and her eyes filled with sudden tears as she looked deprecatingly at her husband. Martin Disney felt himself a brute.“My dearest, I didn’t mean to tease you,” he said; “wear anything you like. You are sure to be the prettiest woman in the room. I am sorry the gown was spoilt; but it can’t be helped. I’ll buy you another white satin gown the first time you and I are in Plymouth together. And, pray, Miss Allegra, what bravery will you sport?”“I have only a white lace frock that has seen some service,” replied his sister, meekly. “I dare say I shall look like somebody’s poor relation at such a place as Glenaveril.”“Oh, it’s not to be a grand party, by any means. Mrs. Crowther told me she had asked the Baynhams and the Vicarage people to meet us, just in a friendly way.”The party was decidedly small, for on arriving with reasonable punctuality the Disneys found only one guest on the scene, in the person of Mr. Colfox, the curate, who was sitting by one of the little tables, showing a new puzzle of two pieces of interlinked iron to the two Misses Crowther. These young ladies were so interested in the trick of disentanglement that they scarcely noticed the entrance of their mother’s guests, and only rose and came over to greet the party three minutes later, as an afterthought.Mr. and Mrs. Crowther, however, were both upon the alert to receive their friends, the lady frankly cordial, the gentleman swelling with pompous friendliness, as if his manly breast were trying to emerge from the moderate restriction of a very open waistcoat. He protested that he was charmed to welcome Colonel Disney to Glenaveril, and he glanced round the splendid walls as who should say, “It is no light thing to invite people to such a house as this.”Vansittart Crowther was a man of short, squat figure, who tried to make up for the want of inches by extreme uprightness, and had cultivated this carriage until he seemed incapable of bending. He had a bald head, disguised by one dappled streak of grey and sandy hair, which was plastered into a curl on each side of his brow—curls faintly suggestive of a cat’s ears. He had blunt features, a sensual lip, and dull, fishy eyes, large and protuberant, with an expression in perfect harmony with the heavy, sensual mouth.Mr. and Mrs. Baynham were the next arrivals; the lady wearing the family amethysts and the well-known black velvet, under whose weighty splendour she arrived short of breath; the gentleman expansive of shirt front, and genial of aspect, jovial at the prospect of a good dinner and choice wines, and not hypercritical as to the company in which he ate the feast. He shook hands with his host and hostess,and then went over to the Misses Crowther, who had not thought it necessary to suspend their absorbing occupation in order to welcome the village doctor’s wife—a fact which Mrs. Baynham observed and inwardly resented.Mr. Colfox deserted the young ladies, still puzzling over the two bits of iron, and went across the room to greet the Disneys. He was an intelligent young man, steeped to the lips in the opinions and the prejudices of university life—Oxford life, that is to say. He ranked as a literary man in Trelasco, on the strength of having had an article almost published in Blackwood. “The editor had accepted my paper,” he told people modestly; “but on further consideration he found it was a little too long, and so, in point of fact, he sent it back to me in the most courteous manner. He couldn’t have acted more kindly—but I was disappointed. It would have been such an opening, you see.”All Mr. Colfox’s friends agreed that with such an opening the high road to literary fame and fortune would have been made smooth for his feet. They respected him even for this disappointment. To have been accepted by Blackwood made him almost a colleague of George Eliot.He was a tall and rather lean young man, who wore an eye-glass, and seemed to live upon books. It was irritating to Vansittart Crowther, who prided himself on his cellar and his cook, to note how little impression food and drink made upon Francis Colfox.“He takes my Château Yquem as if it were Devonshire cider,” said the aggrieved parvenu, “and he hardly seems to know that this is the only house where he ever sees clear turtle. The man’s people must have lived in a very poor way.”In spite of this contemptuous opinion, Mr. Crowther was always polite to Francis Colfox, and had even thought of him as apis-allerfor one of his daughters. There is hardly anything in this life which a self-made man respects so much as race, and Francis Colfox belonged to an old county family, had a cousin who was an earl, and another cousin who wastalked of as a probable bishop. He was, therefore, allowed to make himself very much at home at Glenaveril, and to speak his mind in a somewhat audacious way to the whole family.Captain Pentreath, an army man of uncertain age, a bachelor, and one of a territorial family of many brothers, came next; and then appeared the vicar and his wife and one daughter, who made up the party. The vicar was deaf, but amiable, and beamed benevolently upon a world about whose spoken opinions he knew so little that he might naturally have taken it for a much better world than it is. The vicar’s wife spent her existence in interpreting and explaining people’s speech to the vicar, and had no time to spare for opinions of her own. The daughter was characterized by a gentle nullity, tempered by a somewhat enthusiastic and evangelical piety. The chief desire of her life was to keep the Church as it had been in the days of her childhood, nearly thirty years before.It was the first time the Disneys had dined together at Glenaveril, so it seemed only proper that Mr. Crowther should give his arm to Isola, which he did with an air of conferring an honour. The colonel had been ordered to take the vicar’s wife, and the doctor was given to Allegra; Captain Pentreath took Miss Trequite, the vicar’s daughter; Mr. Colfox followed with Mrs. Baynham, and the daughters of the house went modestly to the dining-room after the vicar and Mrs. Crowther.The dinner-table was as pretty as roses and Venetian glass could make it. There was no pompous display of ponderous plate, as there might have been thirty years ago on a parvenu’s board. Everybody is enlightened nowadays. The great “culture” movement has been as widespread among the middle class as compulsory education among the proletariat, and everybody has “a taste.” Scarcely were they seated, when Mr. Crowther informed Mrs. Disney that he hated a display of silver, but at the same time took care to let her know that the Venetian glass she admired was rather morevaluable than that precious metal. “And if it’s broken, there’s nothing left you for your outlay,” he said; “but it’s a fancy of my wife and girls. Those decanters are better than anything Salviati ever made for Royalty.”The table was oval, lighted by one large lamp, under an umbrella-shaped amber shade, a lamp which diffused a faint golden glow through the dusky room; and through this dreamy dimness the footmen moved like ghosts, while the table and the faces of the diners shone and sparkled in the brilliant light. It was as picturesque a dining-room and table as one need care to see; and if the Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, which here and there relieved the sombre russet of the Cordovan leather hangings, were not the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Crowther’s ancestors, they were not the less lovely or interesting as works of art.Isola sat by her host’s side, with a silent and somewhat embarrassed air, which her husband noted as he watched her from the other side of the table.All the decorations were low, so that no pyramid of fruit or flowers intervened to prevent a man watching the face opposite to him. Disney saw that while Allegra, in her place between Mr. Baynham and Alicia Crowther, was full of talk and animation, Isola sat with downcast eyes, and replied with a troubled look to her host’s remarks. There was something in that gentleman’s manner which was particularly obnoxious to the colonel—a protecting air, a fatherly familiarity, which brought the bald, shining forehead almost in contact with Isola’s shoulder, as the man bent to whisper and to titter in the very ear of his neighbour.The colonel got through a little duty talk with Mrs. Trequite, whose attention was frequently distracted by the necessity of explaining Mrs. Crowther’s polite murmurs to the vicar on the other side of the table; and this duty done he gave himself up to watching Isola and her host. Why did she blush so when the man talked to her? Was it the bold admiration of those fishy eyes which annoyed her, or the man’s manner altogether; or was it anything that hesaid? Disney strained his ears to hear their conversation, if that could be called conversation which was for the most part monologue.The man was talking of the Hunt Ball of last winter. Disney heard such snatches of speech as “the prettiest woman in the room,” “everybody said so,” “Lostwithiel was evidentlyépris.”Mr. Crowther had a penchant for scraps of French, which decorated his speech as truffles adorn a boned turkey.“Isn’t it odd that he should be such a rover?” he asked, in a less confidential tone than before.Isola looked up at him, as if hardly understanding the question.“I mean Lostwithiel. With such a nice place as he has here, it seems a pity to be broiling himself in Peru. I never could understand the taste for orchids; and in his case—well, I hardly believe in it. He is the last man to emulate a Hooker or a Lawrence. Orchid-hunting must be an excuse for keeping away from England, I take it. Don’t you think so, now, Mrs. Disney?”“I really don’t know.”“You don’t know why he should want to keep away? No, no more does anybody else. Only we all wonder, don’t you know. He talked to me of settling down in the county—looking after the estate a little. He even hinted that he might, in due course, cast about for a nice young wife—with a little money. And then all of a sudden off he sails in that rakish yacht of his, and roves from port to port like the Flying Dutchman in the Opera, till at last we hear of him on the coast of Peru. Curious, ain’t it, Mrs. Disney?”“Why curious?” asked Isola, coldly. “Was not Lord Lostwithiel always fond of yachting?”“No doubt; but when a man talks of settling down in his native place—and then doesn’t do it—there must be a reason, mustn’t there?”“I don’t know. People act as often from caprice as from reason.”“Ah, that is a lady’s idea. No man who is worthy the name ever acts from caprice,” said Mr. Crowther, with his insinuating air, as if some hidden meaning were in the words, and then looking across the table and seeing the colonel’s watchful face, he altered both tone and manner as he added, “Of course you know Lostwithiel, Colonel Disney?”“I saw a good deal of Lord Lostwithiel when he was a small boy,” answered the colonel, coldly. “His father was one of my early friends. But that is a long time ago.”“How old is he, do you say?”“Debrett will answer that question better than I can. I have never reckoned the years that have gone by since I saw him in an Eton collar.”The men did not sit long over their wine. The doctor and his host talked agriculture, Mr. Crowther discussing all farming operations upon a large scale as became a man of territorial magnitude. The vicar prosed about an approaching lecture at the schoolroom, and utterly failed in hearing anything that was said in reply to his observations. Colonel Disney smoked a cigarette in silence, and with a moody brow.Later, in the drawing-room, while the Crowther girls were playing a clamorous duet, by the last fashionable Sclavonic composer, Vansittart Crowther directed his conversation almost wholly to Mrs. Disney, as if she were the only person worthy of his attention. He was full of suggestions for future gaieties in which the Disneys were to share—picnics, boating parties.“You must help us to wake up the neighbourhood, colonel,” he said, addressing Disney, with easy friendliness.“We are not very likely to be of much assistance to you in that line,” Disney answered coldly. “We are quiet stay-at-home people, my wife and I, and take our pleasures on a very small scale.”Colonel Disney’s carriage was announced at this moment. He gave his wife a look which plainly indicated his wish to depart, and she rose quickly from the low, deep chair in which she had been sitting, in some manner a captive, whileMr. Crowther lolled across the broad, plush-cushioned arm to talk to her. Allegra was engrossed in a talk about William Morris’s last poem with Mr. Colfox, who was delighted to converse with any one fresh from the far-away world of art and literature—delighted altogether with Allegra, whose whole being presented a piquant contrast to the Miss Crowthers. But the colonel’s sister saw the movement towards departure, and hastened to her brother’s side. Briefest adieux followed, and the first of the guests being gone, left behind them a feeling of uneasiness in those whose carriages had been ordered half an hour later. One premature departure will cast a blight upon your small dull party; whereas from a scene of real mirth the nine Muses and three Graces might all slip away unmissed and unobserved.CHAPTER X.“OF THE WEAK MY HEART IS WEAKEST.”“You had better send cards to Mrs. Crowther, Isola,” said Martin Disney, two days afterwards, when his wife was sitting at her Davenport writing her family letters.“Cards! Oh, Martin, she would think that so very formal. I can call upon her. She is always at home on Thursday afternoons, and she likes me to go.”“I am sorry for that, since I had rather you should never enter her house again.”“Martin!”“I have nothing to say against Mrs. Crowther, my dear Isola. But the man is more detestable than I could have believed low birth and unlimited money could make any man. Guileless and inexperienced as you are, I think you must have felt that his manner to you the other night was familiar to the point of being insulting.”Isola had felt both embarrassed and distressed by her host’s attentions—the insinuating inflections of his fat, pompous voice; his air of being upon a confidential footing with her.It had seemed to her on that evening as if for the first time in her life, before the eyes of men and women, she drank the cup of shame. She had said no word to her husband of Mr. Crowther’s oppressive familiarity, and she had fondly hoped that the matter had escaped his notice.She sat before him now, flushed and agitated, with lowered eyelids, and one hand restlessly moving about the papers on her blotting-pad.“My dearest, there is nothing in all this to distress you,” said Disney, with infinite gentleness. “It is not your fault that the man is a cad; but it would be my fault if I were to allow you or Allegra to go to his house again.”“He was not rude to Allegra.”“No; it would be her turn next, perhaps. He did not mean to be rude to you. He only wanted to be especially polite in his own odious fashion. There are men in that class who cannot behave decently to a pretty woman, or civilly to a plain one. He meant no doubt to gratify you by his compliments. What a stress he laid upon Lostwithiel’s attention to you at the ball. Were his attentions so very marked?”“Oh no; not more to me than to others,” Isola answered quickly. “He danced a good many times—twice or three times—with Belinda Crowther. Everybody noticed them as the handsomest couple in the room; not that he is handsome, of course—only tall and distinguished-looking.”Allegra came running in from the garden, and broke the thread of the conversation. Isola put the visiting-cards into an envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Vansittart Crowther. She felt that the kindly matron would be puzzled and vexed at this ceremony, from a young person towards whom she had assumed so motherly a tone, urging her to run over to Glenaveril at any hour of the day—asking her to lunch or to tea at least once a week—wanting to take her for drives to Lostwithiel, or railway jaunts to Plymouth.Isola was not mistaken, for Mrs. Crowther called three or four days afterwards and upbraided her for sending the cards.“You might have all come to tea on Thursday, if you had been good-natured,” she said. “Mr. Colfox read us a poem by Swinburne, out of one of the new magazines—there are so many nowadays that I never remember which is which. Belinda was delighted with it—but Alicia and I can’t rise to her height. Mr. Colfox reads poetry beautifully. You can’t judge of his powers by only hearing him read the lessons,” added Mrs. Crowther, as if the English Bible were a poor thing.She stopped an hour, praised Isola’s tea-making and the new cook’s tea-cakes, asked a great many questions about Allegra’s ideas and occupations, and was as hearty, and simple, and friendly, and natural as if she had been a duchess.It grieved Isola to be obliged to refuse an invitation to luncheon, most cordially pressed upon her and Allegra.“I would drive you both to Lostwithiel after lunch, and we could do our little bit of shopping and then have a cup of tea at the Talbot while the horses had their mouths washed out, and I’d show you the room where your brother’s wife was so much admired last year, Miss Leland, and where I hope you’ll have many a good dance next winter. Now the ice is broken we mean to go on with our balls, I can tell you. Indeed, my girls are thinking of trying to get up a tennis-club ball about the end of September.”This was the last time Mrs. Vansittart Crowther appeared in a friendly manner at the Angler’s Nest, for after two or three further invitations—to a picnic—to tea—to lunch—had been declined, in most gracious little notes from Isola, that good lady perceived that there was some kind of barrier to friendly intercourse between her and Colonel Disney’s wife, and she told herself with some touch of honest middle-class dignity that if Martin Disney was proud she could be proud too, and that she would make no further offer of friendship which was undesired.“I suppose he thinks because he comes of a good old family, while we have made our money in trade, that we are not quite good enough to associate with his wife and sister,”she said to her daughters. “I thought he was too much of a gentleman to have such a petty feeling.”“How innocent you are, mother,” cried Alicia, contemptuously; “can’t you see that they are all bursting with envy? That was what made the colonel so gloomy and disagreeable the night of our little dinner. He was vexed to see things done with as good taste as in a nobleman’s house. It cuts these poor gentilities to the quick to see that. They don’t much mind our being rich, if we will only be vulgar and uneducated. But when we have the impertinence to be as well up in the ways of good society as they are themselves, they can’t forgive us. Good taste in a parvenu is the unforgivable sin.”“Well, I don’t know,” mused Mrs. Crowther, sadly. “I’m sure there’s neither pride nor envy in Isola, and Miss Leland looks a frank, straightforward girl, above all foolish nonsense; so it must be the colonel’s fault that they’ve cut us.”“Cut us!” echoed Belinda; “the Angler’s Nest cutting Glenaveril is rather too absurd an idea.”“My dear, you don’t know the importance Cornish people attach to old family—and the Disneys are a very old family—and no one can deny that he is a gentleman, though we don’t like him.”“Oh, no doubt he considers that he belongs to the landed gentry. He has bought Rowe’s farm, two hundred and sixty acres. He had forty to begin with, so he is now lord of three hundred acres, just half our home farm.”“His cousin, Sir Luke Disney, has a large estate near Marazion,” said Mrs. Crowther, meekly.“Yes, but we don’t reckon a man’s importance by his cousin’s estate. Colonel Disney is only a squatter in this part of the country.”Alicia pronounced the word with gusto. It had been whispered to her that the squire of Fowey had spoken of her father—who counted his acres by thousands—as a squatter. That unimpeachable importance, founded uponthe established respectability of bygone centuries—centuries in which men wore armour and women breakfasted on beef and ale—was not to be bought with gold and silver, and the want of it often made the Miss Crowthers angry. Diamonds they could have, and land, art, and beauty, even the ways and manners of good society, but they could not buy themselves a history. Everybody knew that their splendours had all come out of a cloth mill, that their ingots had been in some part transmuted from pestiferous woollen rags gathered in the Jewish quarters of far-off cities, ground into shoddy, and anon issued to the world as sleek superfine cloth. The more shoddy the higher interest upon capital; and Vansittart Crowther’s daughters knew too many of the secrets of the mills to be proud of the source of their prosperity.Mrs. Crowther was sorry to lose Isola as a friend andprotégée. Her daughters were furious at the slight implied in this gradual dropping away. They passed Mrs. Disney and her sister-in-law with their noses in the air, as they went from the church-porch to their carriage. They cut them ostentatiously if they met on the quiet country roads. Mrs. Crowther would still stop to speak and shake hands, albeit she urged no further invitations.And while the gulf widened between the great house and the small one the glorious Cornish summer waned, and slowly, slowly, melted away, lingering very late in that fair western land, which was full of flowers even when the home counties were being withered and blackened by the first frosts. At last came winter, and the gradual turn of the year; short days slowly lengthening out by leisurely sunsets; pale snowdrops glimmering in the borders; and then the gold of crocuses and the bright blue of the Siberian bell-flower in patches of vivid colour; and then hyacinths and tulips, primroses on every bank, narcissus and jonquil in every garden; and by-and-by the full glory of bluebell and hawthorn blossom. And anon in the middle of May came an event in which all the interests of Colonel Disney’s life seemed to culminate. In that balmy Maytime Isola’s firstborn soncame into the world, and Isola’s young life hovered at the gate of death, in so terrible an uncertainty that Martin Disney’s hair grew grey while he awaited the issue of the contest between youth and weakness.For more than a week after the birth of her baby Isola’s condition had satisfied the trained nurse and the kindly doctor. She was very white and weak, and she showed less interest in her baby than most young mothers—a fact which Mr. Baynham ascribed to over-education.“The young women of the present day aren’t half such good mothers as those I used to attend when I began practice,” he said discontentedly. “Their heads are stuffed with poetry, and such-like. They’re nervous and fanciful—and the upshot of it all is that babies have to be wet-nursed or brought up by hand. If I had the government of a model state I wouldn’t allow any married woman the run of a library until she had reared the last of her babies. What does a young married woman want with book-learning? She ought to have enough to do to look after her husband and her nursery.”Before the baby son was a fortnight old, fever supervened, and Isola’s state gave poor Mr. Baynham the keenest anxiety. A hospital nurse was sent for to assist the established custodian; and a great authority was brought over from Plymouth to approve the village doctor’s treatment, and to make a trifling alteration in a prescription, substituting bromide of sodium for bromide of potassium.Many days and nights of delirium followed the physician’s visit, a period in which the patient was watched at every hour of the day and night; and one of the most constant watchers through all that dreary time was Martin Disney. It was in vain that Allegra and the nurses urged him to consider his own health. He would consent only to leave the sick-room for briefest intervals of rest. Day after day, night after night, he sat in the same chair—an old-fashioned armchair, with projecting sides, which almost hid him from the patient—beside the bed. He was never in the way of thenurse. He was always helpful when a man’s help was needed. He was so quiet that it was impossible to object to his presence. He sat there like a statue of patience. No moan escaped his pallid lips; no tear stole down his haggard cheek. He sat and watched and waited for the issue, which was to make him happy, or desolate for ever.All his future was involved in that issue. He looked with a faint smile upon the pink little baby face, when they brought his son to him. No one would have dared to suggest that he should take care of himself and be comforted for that little one’s sake. They all knew that his firstborn was as nothing to him. All his hopes and all his fears were centred in the wife who lay upon yonder bed, with glassy eyes and babbling lips, a wanderer in a world full of torturing images—fountains of bubbling water which she longed to drink—great black serpents, which came crawling in at the window, and creeping nearer, nearer to her bed—wriggling, hideous forms that hemmed her in on every side—giant staircases that she was always trying to climb—mammoth caves in which she lost herself, fifty times bigger and more awful than those serpentine caverns near the Lizard, which she and Allegra had explored in the previous autumn—steeper, stonier than the tall cliffs and pinnacled rocks above Bedruthan sands.Day after day, night after night, Martin Disney sat in his place and listened to those ravings of a mind distraught. He could not keep himself from trying to follow her in that labyrinth of disconnected fancies—visions of shapeless horror, trouble, confusion—a wild babbling of numbers, prattling of millions, billions, trillions—as if her days of health and sense had been spent in the calculations of a Rothschild, she who could scarcely reckon the simplest account in a tradesman’s book.What had she to do with this torturing recital of thousands and millions, this everlasting heaping up of figures?Then at another period of that long struggle between life and death, reason and unreason, she had a ghastly vision of twochildren, squatting on each side of her bed, one living, the other dead, a grisly child with throat cut from ear to ear. Again and again she implored them to take away those babies—the dead child whose horrid aspect froze her blood—the living child that grinned and made faces at her.Once and once only during that season of delirium the elder of her nurses carried the baby to her bedside, the tiny form in snowy cambric and lace, a little roseate face, on which the first glimmer of intelligence was already dawning, sweet blue eyes that smiled at the light, rosebud lips that invited kisses. The nurse took the infant to the side of the bed, and asked the young mother to look at him. Those fever-bright eyes stared at the sweet small face with a gaze of ever-growing horror, and then with a wild shriek Isola clasped her hands before her eyes, and drew herself cowering to the further side of the bed.“The dead child!” she cried. “Why do you show me that dead child? Don’t you see his throat streaming with blood?”It was a case in which the nurses had no easy duty by day or night; and there were times when Disney insisted that the night-nurse should have extra rest, while he kept guard.“But if she should be very bad, sir, you might not be able to manage.”“Oh yes, I should. My sister is a very light sleeper. She would come to me in a moment, and she has a great deal of influence with my wife.”This was true. From the beginning of evil Allegra’s presence had exercised a soothing power. She had been able to lull the patient to sleep sometimes, when opiates had failed to produce even fitful slumber. Isola was calmer and less restless when her sister-in-law was by her side.In those long night watches, sometimes in solitude, Martin Disney had ample leisure in which to ponder upon his wedded life, and to consider how far the hopes with which he had entered upon that life had been realized. The retrospect left him melancholy, and with a latent sense of loss and disappointment; and yet he told himself again and again that he did ill to be dissatisfied, that Providence had dealt kindly with him.At five and forty years of age, he, Martin Disney, of modest fortune and social status, and of no especial claim to be admired, intellectual or physical, had won the hand of a lovely and interesting girl. He had been so bewildered and overcome by the delight of his conquest, that he had entered upon no laborious process of self-examination before he took to himself this fair and winning partner. It had been enough for him that she came to him willingly, lovingly, in all truth and girlish simplicity, loyal as she was pure. He had never asked himself could such an attachment last—on her side? It had been enough for him that the love existed. It would be his duty and his delight to strengthen the bond, to draw that fair spirit into closer union with his own. He had felt no shadow of fear for the future. Once having won her, it must be easy to keep his treasure—easy for him who would so faithfully guard and cherish this priceless gift of a benign Providence. He was a man of deep religious feeling—a man who recognized in good and evil, in joy and in sorrow, the dealings of an Almighty God with His short-sighted creatures. He accepted his happiness in fear and trembling, knowing the instability of all mortal joys; but he had never feared the loss of Isola’s love.
“I’ll find you a better one, sir. I’ll set about hunting for a good one this afternoon.”Martin shook hands with her on the door-step, and she stood watching him till he disappeared at the turn of the road. She watched him with a countenance full of sorrow.CHAPTER VIII.MY FROLIC FALCON, WITH BRIGHT EYES.Everybody in Trelasco and in the neighbourhood seemed glad to see Colonel Disney again. All the best people within a six-mile drive came bearing down upon the Angler’s Nest in the week that followed his return; and there were cosy little afternoon tea-drinkings in the drawing-room, or on the lawn, and Isola had her hands full in receiving visitors. Everybody congratulated her upon having her hero back from the wars.“You ought to be very proud of your husband, Mrs. Disney,” said Vansittart Crowther, with his air of taking all the world under his protection.“I have always been proud of him,” Isola answered gently. “I was proud of him before the Burmese War.”“Your poor wife has been looking very unhappy for the last few months,” Mrs. Crowther said to the colonel, with a motherly glance at Isola. “I really had a good mind to write to you and beg you to hurry home if you didn’t want to find the poor thing far gone in a decline when you came back.”“My dear Mrs. Crowther, what nonsense,” cried Isola, growing crimson at this motherly officiousness. “I have never been out of health, or in the least likely to go into a decline. One cannot always look like a dairy-maid.”“My dear, there’s no use talking, you looked very bad. Had one of my girls looked as ill, I should have taken her off to Buxton to drink the waters, without an hour’s delay.”That visit of the Crowthers seemed much longer than any other afternoon call. The Crowthers, husband, and wife, and elder daughter, had an inquisitorial air, Isola fancied, an air of scrutinizing her house and herself and her surroundings, which was intolerable to her; although on Mrs. Crowther’s part she knew the scrutiny was made in theutmost benevolence, and the officiousness was the outcome of a nature overflowing with the milk of human kindness.“I wish you had written to me, Mrs. Crowther,” said Disney. “I couldn’t have come home any sooner, but I could have telegraphed to my sister Allegra to look after my wife, and cheer her solitude. I was a fool not to have had her here all along.”“Hadn’t I better go out of the room while you are holding your consultation about me?” exclaimed Isola, fretfully. “It’s rather hard upon the patient to hear her case discussed in cold blood. I am tired of declaring that I have not been ill, and that it is my misfortune and not my fault to have a pale complexion.”“You were not always so pallid, my dear,” said Mrs. Crowther, persistently. “You were one of the beauties of the Hunt Ball, and you had colour enough that night.”Dr. and Mrs. Baynham came the following afternoon, and these two told the same story, though with less obtrusive concern.“I looked after the young lady now and then,” said the worthy doctor, “and as I found there was nothing radically wrong, I didn’t worry you with any low-spirited reports; but I expect to see her pick up wonderfully now you have come home. She didn’t take enough outdoor exercise, that’s where the harm was. She used to be so fond of her boat last year, but this year I fancy she didn’t feel herself up to handling the sculls. You didn’t now, did you, Mrs. Disney?”“I don’t know about that, but I am ready to row to the Land’s End, now Martin is back,” said Isola, and those few words seemed the sweetest Martin Disney had heard since Colonel Manwaring’s daughter promised to be his wife.Mrs. Baynham sat on the lawn, sipping her tea, and basking in the afternoon sunshine.“You should have seen your wife in her wedding-gown at the Lostwithiel dance,” she said. “You would have been proud of her. She didn’t want to go—refused Mrs. Crowtherand me again and again. She thought it wasn’t right to be at any merry-making while your life was in danger.”“Yes, I know—I know. My tender-hearted Isola!”“But at last we got the better of her objections; and though there were a good many pretty women there, and though Miss Crowther, perhaps, pleased most tastes, being a more showy style of beauty, to my thinking there wasn’t one came up to Mrs. Disney.”“Her partners seemed of the same opinion,” put in the doctor, cheerily. “Why, how often did Lord Lostwithiel dance with you, Mrs. Disney? Oftener than with anybody else, I’ll be bound.”Mrs. Baynham nodded approvingly.“I was very proud of my party that evening, I can tell you, Colonel Disney,” she said. “It isn’t often that one has to chaperon three attractive young women. Do you know that my youngest niece, Maria, has had two offers since that night, Isola, and when I last heard from her she was on the brink of an engagement? Ah, well, I hope we shall have another ball next December, now that the neighbourhood has begun to wake up a bit. We have been thinking of getting up a water picnic this summer—just a little excursion to Mevagissey, and a little fishing for those who might care for it.”“Very pleasant, indeed, of you,” answered the colonel, cheerily. “We will be there.”“The Crowthers are rather grand in their ideas,” said the doctor, “but Alicia is very keen upon all kind of sport, so I know she’ll want to come, whatever Belinda may say to it.”Mrs. Baynham made a wry face at the name of the elder sister. It was an involuntary and unconscious contortion; but Belinda had tried to snub Mrs. Baynham, who never could forget that her father was a banker at Truro, and held the fortunes—the mortgages and encumbrances of the landed gentry—in the hollow of his hand.“You don’t like the elder Miss Crowther?” speculated the colonel.“Well, if I am to be candid, I must confess that I have apositive aversion to that young lady. The airs she gives herself on the strength of her father’s wool are really insupportable, and since Lord Lostwithiel disappointed her she has been more odious than she was before.”“What do you mean by Lostwithiel disappointing her? Did he jilt her?”“Well, it could scarcely be called jilting, and I really don’t know that there was anything between them; but people had coupled their names—and he dined at Glenaveril at least once a week all the time he was at the Mount—and people had quite made up their minds it was to be a match. Mr. Crowther went about talking of Lord Lostwithiel and his affairs as if he was his father-in-law—the neglected condition of the land, and what ought to be done at the Mount, and that the estate wanted judicious nursing, and all that sort of thing. And then one December morning his lordship sailed off in his yacht before it was light, and there was no more heard of him. It was quite in his way to go off suddenly like that, but the Crowthers were evidently taken by surprise, and we heard no more about Lord Lostwithiel and the Mount.”“They dropped him like a hot potato,” said the doctor. “Well, we shall depend upon you both for our water-party. It will not be till the middle of July, when an old chum of mine, a sailor, will be coming this way.”This was a sample of many such visits. In the country, and even in London upon occasion, people are given to discussing the same subjects. Martin Disney heard a good deal about the Crowthers and their supposed disappointment. People liked Mrs. Crowther for her simple, unaffected ways, and thorough-going kindliness; but Vansittart and his daughters had made a good many enemies. He was too coarse; they were too fine; only the mother’s simple nature had caught the golden mean between blunt vulgarity and artificial smartness.Colonel Disney heard all this village gossip with an unheeding ear. He was secure in his own position as a son ofthe soil, a man whose pedigree could pass muster with that of the Rashleighs and the Treffrys, a man of means that were ample for his own unpretending tastes and requirements. He cared not a jot how many guineas a year the Crowthers might give to their cook, or how much Mr. Crowther had paid for the furnishing and decoration of his house, a theme upon which the gossips of the neighbourhood loved to enlarge. That Mrs. Crowther had gowns from Worth, and that her daughters employed Mrs. Mason, irked not this simple soldier. The only point in all the stream of talk that had affected him was the unanimous opinion that Trelasco in the spring had been too relaxing for Mrs. Disney, or else that her solitude had preyed upon her mind, inasmuch as she had looked so ill as to afford an interesting subject of conversation to a good many friendly people who suffered from the chronic malady of not having enough to talk about, a form of starvation almost as bad as not having enough to eat.The colonel listened, and made his own conclusions. He did not believe that Trelasco was “relaxing.” Ho loved the district too well to believe any evil thing about it. Those fresh breezes that blew up from the sea, those balmy airs that breathed across the heather-clad hills, must bring health with them. What could one have better than that mingling of sea and hill, brine and honey, gorse-bloom and seaweed? No, Trelasco was not to blame. His young wife had suffered for lack of youthful company. He made up his mind accordingly.“I suppose you won’t object to our having Allegra here for a summer visit, will you, love?” he asked at breakfast the day after Mrs. Baynham’s call. “London must be hot, and dusty, and dreary in July, and she must want rest and country air, I fancy, after having worked so hard in her art school.”Isola gave a scarcely perceptible sigh as she bent to caress Tim, a privileged attendant of the breakfast-table.“Object! Of course not, Martin. I shall be very pleased for your sister to come here.”“I feel very sure you will be pleased with her when you and she get upon intimate terms. You could know so little of her from that one evening in the Cavendish Road.”The occasion in question was an evening in which Isola and her husband had been bidden to a friendly dinner, on their way through London, by the clergyman’s widow with whom Allegra lived while she pursued her study of art at a famous school in St. John’s Wood. The clergyman’s widow, Mrs. Meynell, was a distant cousin of the Disneys, and Allegra’s home had been with her from the time she left school. The extent of her wanderings after she was old enough to be sent to a boarding-school had been from Falmouth to Kensington, and from Kensington to St. John’s Wood, with occasional holidays in the Isle of Thanet.“I thought she was very fresh and bright and loving,” answered Isola, “and I could see even in that one evening that she was very fond of you.”“Yes, God bless her, there is no doubt about that. I have been brother and father too for her. She has had no one but me since our mother’s death.”“Shall I write and ask her to come to us, Martin, or will you?”“I fancy she would take it more as a compliment if the invitation went straight from you. She would know that I would be glad to have her, but she might feel a little doubtful about you.”“Then I’ll write to her to-day, Martin, and beg her to come at once—as soon as ever she can pack her boxes.”“That’s my darling! I hope she won’t bore you when she is here. I have a shrewd idea she’ll make your life happier. She’ll awaken you from that languor which has grown upon you in your loneliness.”“At least I’ll try to make her happy, Martin, if it is only for your sake.”“Ah, and you will soon love her for her own sake.”“I’ll get the boat looked to at once, and I’ll see about making the spare room pretty for her,” said Isola.A week later Allegra was with them, breakfasting on the lawn in the balmy atmosphere of July. There were two girls, in white gowns, under the tulip tree, instead of one; and Martin Disney felt as if his domestic happiness were doubled, as he looked at those two graceful figures in the flickering light below that canopy of broad bright leaves. Another element of comfort, too, had entered the Angler’s Nest; for the incompetent cook had taken her incompetency and a month’s wages to her native city of Truro; and a buxom damsel from Falmouth, recommended by Tabitha, had already proved herself a treasure in the culinary art.Never was there a fairer picture than that domestic group under the tulip tree. The two girlish figures in white muslin, with palest salmon and palest azure ribbons fluttering and glancing in the light and deepening in the shadow; the white fox-terrier, alert, muscular, mercurial; the tortoise-shell cat, long-haired, aristocratic, and demure; the pretty Moorish plateau on bamboo legs, the purple and crimson breakfast service and rare old silver urn, the fruit and flowers, and amber-hued butter, and rustic luxury of preserved fruit and clotted cream.“How lovely it all is after Cavendish Road!” cried Allegra, rapturously. “When I see the lights and shadows upon those hills, I despair of ever being able to paint a landscape as long as I live. Nature is maddeningly beautiful.”“What is your particular line, Allegra?” asked her brother. “Is it landscape?”“No; I only care for landscape as a background for humanity. I want to paint genre pictures in water-colour—women and children—beautiful women amidst beautiful surroundings—picturesque poverty—interesting bits of daily life. Mrs. Allingham is the ideal after which I strive, but I am only at the bottom of the ladder. It is a long climb to the top; but one does not mind that in a profession where labour is delight.”“You are fond of art, then?” said Isola, watching the earnest face of the speaker.“Fond of it! Why, I live for it! The dream of my life from the time I was seven years old has been one long dream of the bliss that was to be mine when I could feel myself able to paint. I have toiled with all my might. Martin disliked the idea of my being an Academy student—poor, foolish, ignorant Martin—so I have been obliged to plod on at St. John’s Wood, without hope of prizes or medals; but on the whole I have been very lucky, for I have made friends among the Academicians. They are very kind to any student who seems in rightdown earnest; and they have been ever so good to me. I hope, Martin, you will find some day that I am something better than an amateur,” she concluded, resting her two hands caressingly upon her brother’s shoulder.“My dearest, I have not the least doubt you will astonish me. I am very ignorant of everything connected with art. I set my face against the Academy because I thought the training and the life would be too public for my sister.”“As if Burlington House were any more public than that big school at St. John’s Wood, my dear illogical brother: and yet we women are the only people who are said to be wanting in the logical faculty.”She leant back in her basket-chair, revelling in the rural atmosphere, and in that new sense of being in the bosom of her family. Tim leapt upon her lap and licked her face, in token of his acceptance of her into the home-circle. Nobody had ever called Miss Leland a beauty, nor had she ever received those disquieting attentions which follow the footsteps of exceptional loveliness. She was sometimes described as a girl who grew upon one; and people who knew her well generally ended by thinking her distractingly pretty. She had a brilliant complexion, of the true English type, fair and blooming—a complexion which indicated perfect health and an active, orderly life; no late hours or novel-reading over the fire—an out-of-door complexion, which would have looked its best under a neat little felt hat in the hunting-field, or under a coquettish straw sailor hat on board a yacht. Her eyes were blue-grey, with long, brown lashes and boldlymarked eyebrows; her nose was firmly modelled, inclining a little to the aquiline order. Her mouth was the prettiest feature in her face, and yet it was a shade larger than accepted perfection in mouths. It was a mouth chiefly remarkable for character and expression; and, indeed, it was the individuality and variety of expression in the fair young face which constituted Miss Leland’s chief claim to distinction.She started up from the nest of basket-work and flowered chintz, and stood tall and erect, a Juno-like young woman, with heavy plaits of reddish-brown hair rolled in a great knot at the back of her head. She might have answered one of those harsh advertisements for parlour-maids, in which the words, “No fringe,” figure with curt cruelty; for her hair was brushed smoothly back from the fair forehead, and the severity of the style became that wide sagacious brow. It was just the kind of forehead which can endure exposure without conveying an idea of bald ugliness.She was tall and strongly made, fashioned after the semblance of Diana or Atalanta rather than Venus or Psyche. Her every movement had the bold, free grace of vigorous, unspoiled youth. She had always been active—fond of walking, riding, rowing, swimming, as well as of art, and with an ardent passion for the country, which had made existence in a London suburb one long sacrifice.“I used to take the train for Hampstead Heath or Willesden,” she told her brother, “and go off for long, lonely tramps to Finchley or Hendon. I have watched the builder’s progress along roads and lanes I loved. I have seen horrid brick boxes creeping along like some new kind of noxious insect, eating up fields and hedgerows, old hawthorns and old hollies. I could have sat down in the muddy road and cried sometimes, at the thought that soon there would be no country walk left within reach of a Londoner. Once I went off to the north-east, to look for the rural lanes Charles Lamb and his sister loved—the lanes and meadows where they carried their little picnic basket, till they took shelter at a homely inn. Oh, Martin, all those fields and lanes, CharlesLamb’s country—are going, going, or gone! It is heartbreaking! And they are building at Fowey, too, I see. Positively there will be no country anywhere soon. There will be crescents and terraces and little ugly streets at the very Land’s End, and the Logan Rock will be the sign of a public-house.”“Don’t be down-hearted, Chatterbox! I think Cornwall may last our time,” said Disney, laughing at her vehemence.Allegra was a great talker. It seemed as if she had a well-spring of joy and life within her which must find an outlet. When people ventured to hint at her loquacity she declared that her name was in fault.“I have grown up to match my name,” she said; “if I had been christened Penserosa I might have been quite a different person.”Her vivacity gave a new element of brightness to the Angler’s Rest, where Disney had been somewhat oppressed by the sensation of intense repose which had pervaded histête-à-têtelife with Isola. He loved his wife so entirely, so unselfishly, and devotedly, that it was happiness to him to be with her; yet in the three or four weeks that had gone by since his return he had struggled in vain against the feeling that there was something wanting in his home. Isola waited upon him and deferred to him with more than wifely submissiveness. He would have liked a spurt of rebellion once in a way, a little burst of girlish temper, just to show that she was human; but none ever came. His every desire was anticipated. Whatever plan he suggested—to walk, to drive, to visit, or not to visit—the river or the sea—was always the plan that pleased her best, or at least she said so.“I think I shall call you Griselda instead of Isola,” he said one day, taking the fair pale face between his hands and gazing into the mournful depths of the dark violet eyes—inscrutable eyes they seemed to him, when the pupils dilated under his gaze, as if the eyes made a darkness to hide their meaning.“Why?” she asked.A flood of crimson passed over her face like a fire, and left her paler than before.“Because you are only too dutiful. Would you resist if I were to turn tyrant, I wonder?”“I have no fear of your turning tyrant,” she answered, with a sad little smile; “you are only too good to me.”“Good! There can be no question of goodness. If a man picked up a diamond as precious as the Koh-i-noor, could he be good to it? How can I be good to my gem? I have but one thing left in the world to desire, or to pray for.”“What is that, Martin?”“To see you happy.”Again the sudden flame crimsoned her face, that sensitive spiritual face which reflected every change of feeling.“I am happy, Martin, quite happy, happier than I ever thought to be, now that you are home again. What have I more to desire?”“Is that really so? Was my long absence your greatest trouble?”“Yes,” she answered slowly, looking at him with a curiously steady look, “that was the beginning and end of my trouble.”“Thank God!” he said, drawing a deep breath. “There have been moments—just of late—when I have puzzled my brains about you—until I thought—” very slowly, “there might have been something else.”He clasped her in his arms, and hid her face upon his breast, as if—fearing that he might have wounded her by those last words—he wanted to make amends before she had time to feel his unkindness. His tenderness for her had so much of that pitying love which a strong man feels for a child.This conversation occurred the day before Allegra’s arrival; but with that young lady’s appearance on the scene, new life and gladness came into the little household. Allegra sang, Allegra played, Allegra ran out into the gardentwenty times a day, and called through the open window to Isola, sitting quietly in the drawing-room, to come out and look at this or that—a rose finer than all other roses—a suggested alteration—an atmospheric effect—anything and everything. She was a keen observer of Nature, full of vivid interest in every creature that lived, and in every flower that grew. Tim followed her everywhere as she danced along the gravel walks, or across the short springy turf. Tim adored her, and grinned at her, and threw himself into all manner of wriggling attitudes upon the grass to express his delight in her company, and fawned at her feet, and talked to her after his guttural fashion, snorting his friendly feelings. Tim had long languished for such a companion, having found his young mistress’s society very heavy of late. No more runs in the meadow, no more rambles in the neighbouring spinney, and very little boating. But now that Allegra had come the skiff was seldom idle. Isola had to go on the river whether she liked or not. There were strong young arms ready to pull her—round young arms, of a lovely roseate fairness, which looked their best, stretched to the motion of the sculls, with the white cambric shirt rolled up above the elbow.“You can read Shelley while I scull the boat,” said Allegra. “I don’t want any help. If you knew what rapture it is to me to feel the breath of Seagods and Tritons after St. John’s Wood, and the smoke from the Metropolitan Railway, you wouldn’t pity me.”Isola submitted, and sat at her ease upon bright-coloured cushions with an Indian rug spread round her, as idle as if she had been the belle of a Zenana, and read Alastor while the boat sped seaward in the sunshine.Sometimes they moored their boat at the landing stage at Polruan, and walked up the hill to the Point, and sat there for an hour or two in the summer wind with their books and picnic basket, seeing great ships go out towards the Lizard and the big distant world, or sail merrily homeward towards Plymouth and the Start. Isola looked at thoseoutward-bound ships with a strange longing in her eyes—a longing to flee away upon those broad wings that flashed whitely in the sunlit distance. Were people happy on board those ships, she wondered, happy at escaping from the fetters of an old life and a beaten path, happy going away to strange lands and freedom? She had been reading many books of travel of late, and a kind of passion for remote uncivilized countries had come upon her; as if that untrammelled life meant release from memory and saddening cares—a new birth almost. It seemed from some of those books as if there could be no greater happiness upon this earth than to tramp across sandy deserts and stalk occasional lions; while in others the supreme good seemed to be found in the attempt to scale impossible mountains. What was it that made the rapture of these things? Isola wondered. Was it that perils and wild solitudes offered the only possible escape out of a past existence, on this side the grave? Allegra had never so much as crossed the Channel. She had been brought up in the most humdrum fashion. First a school at Falmouth, and then a smarter school at Kensington, and then St. John’s Wood and the Art School. Her mother had died when she was fourteen years of age, and since that time her brother had been her only guardian and almost her only friend. Her life had seen but little variety, and very little of the dancing and gaiety which for most girls is the only form of pleasure. She and Isola talked about the ships as they sat upon the grassy hill at Polruan, and speculated about the lands of which they knew only what they had read in books of travel.“You, at least, know what France is like,” said Allegra, “and that is something.”“Only one little corner of France.”“And to think that you were born in an old French city! It seems strange. Do you feel at all French?”“I don’t think so; only sometimes a longing comes upon me to see the old grey walls, and to hear the old voices, and see the curious old women in their white caps and bright-coloured handkerchiefs, clattering along to the Cathedral. There must be more old women in Brittany than in Cornwall, I think. Fowey does not swarm with old women as Dinan did. And sometimes I long to see mother, and the good old Brittany servants, and the garden where the hours went by so slowly—almost as slowly as they go here”—with a sigh.“Does time go so very slowly here?” asked Allegra, quickly. “That sounds as if you were unhappy.”“What nonsense you talk!” cried Isola, with a flash of sudden anger. “Cannot one be dull and bored sometimes—from very idleness—without being unhappy?”“I don’t know; but, for my own part, when I am happy I am never dull.”“You have more of what people call animal spirits than I have.”“I’m glad you apologize in a manner for that odious phrase—animal spirits. I would not apply such a phrase to Tim. It suggests nothing but Audrey at a statute fair. Heaven gave me a capacity for happiness, and I thank God every night in my prayers for another happy day. Even at school I contrived to be happy, somehow; and think what it must be after seven years of dull routine to feel that I have done with sitting at a stranger’s table and that I am here in a home, my own home, with my brother and sister.”The two women clasped hands, and kissed each other upon this. Only the night before Isola, of her own free will, had asked her sister-in-law to make her home at the Angler’s Nest always, always, till she should be led out of it as a bride; and Martin had shown himself supremely happy in the knowledge that his sister had won his wife’s love and confidence.When Isola and he were alone together after the sealing of that family bond, he kissed and thanked her for this boon which she had bestowed upon him.“I never could have felt quite at ease while Allegra wasliving with strangers,” he told her. “And now my cup is full. But are you sure, dearest, that you will never find her in the way, never fancy yourself any the less mistress of your house, and of my life, because she is here?”“Never, never, never! I am gladder than I can say to have her. She is a delightful companion. She helps me in a hundred ways. But even if she were less charming it would be my duty to have her here since you like her to be with us.”“But it must not be done as a duty. I will not have you sacrifice your inclination in the slightest degree.”“What an obtuse person you are! Don’t I tell you that I am enchanted to have her? She is as much my sister as ever Gwendolen was; indeed, she is much more sympathetic than Gwen ever was.”“Then I am perfectly content.”Allegra wrote to Mrs. Meynell next day, announcing the decision that had been arrived at, not without grateful acknowledgments of that lady’s kindness. The rest of her belongings were to be sent to her forthwith, easels, and colour-boxes, books and knickknacks; her brother’s gifts, most of them from the romantic East; things which made her few little Kensingtonian keepsakes look very trivial and Philistine. Allegra’s possessions gave a new individuality to the large, airy bedroom, and the tiny boudoir at the corner of the house, looking seaward, which Isola had arranged for her.While these things were doing Martin Disney was buying horses and buying land—a farm of over two hundred acres which would make his property better worth holding—and he had further employed a Plymouth architect to plan an enlargement of the old-fashioned cottage—a new and much more spacious drawing-room, two bedrooms over, a verandah below, and a loggia above. In that mild climate the loggia would afford a pleasant lounge even in winter, and myrtle and roses would speedily cover the wooden columns which sustained the tiled roof. It was to be a homely Italianloggia—unpretentious, and not particularly architectural; but Isola and her sister-in-law were delighted at the idea.The stables were to be enlarged as well as the house.“You have no idea how I have hoarded and scraped to lay by money ever since I bought the Nest,” said Disney. “I believe I was the greatest screw in the service all through my last campaign.”He laughed aloud in amused remembrance of many small sacrifices, while the three heads clustered over the architect’s plan, which had that factitious prettiness of delicate drawing and colour which makes every house so much nearer perfection upon paper than it ever can be in brick and stone.CHAPTER IX.“LIES NOTHING BURIED LONG AGO?”Like most small country settlements, little fraternities of well-to-do people who think themselves the beginning and end of the world, Trelasco was slow to rise to any festivity in the way of party-giving. So it was about two months after Colonel Disney’s return before the friendly calls and interchange of small civilities culminated in a dinner-party at Glenaveril. It seemed, indeed, only right and natural that the great house of the district, great by reason of Lord Lostwithiel’s non-residence, should be the first to open its doors in a ceremonial manner to the colonel and his womankind. The invitation to his sister might be taken as an especial compliment, arms outstretched to receive one who was a stranger in the land.“We want to know that nice, young sister of yours,” Mr. Crowther said to Colonel Disney, in his patronizing way, as they all came out of church the Sunday before the dinner-party. “A remarkably fine girl.”The colonel did not thank him for this compliment, which was pronounced in a loud voice, amidst the little knot of acquaintances taking leave of each other on the dip of thehill, where there was a sign-post on a patch of waste grass, and where road and lanes divided, one up the hill to Tywardreath, another to Fowey, and a narrow-wooded lane leading down to Glenaveril and the Angler’s Nest. Short as the distance was, there were carriages waiting for the Crowthers, who never walked to church, however fine the weather. Mrs. Crowther came to the morning service resplendent in a brocade gown and a Parisian bonnet, on pain of being condemned as dowdy by her husband, who liked to put the stamp of his wealth upon every detail. His wife obeyed him with wifely meekness, but the daughters were not so easily ruled. Both were keen-witted enough to feel the vulgarity of Sunday morning splendour. So Belinda worshipped in the exaggerated simplicity of an unstarched jaconet muslin, a yellow Liberty sash, a flopping Gainsborough hat, and a necklace of Indian beads, an attire which attracted every eye, and was a source of wonder to the whole congregation, while Alicia’s neat grey cashmere frock, and smart little toque to match, grey gloves, grey Prayer-book and sunshade, challenged criticism as a study in monochrome.Mr. Crowther would have lingered for farther conversation before getting into the family landau, but Colonel Disney bade a rather abrupt good morning to the whole group, and hurried his wife and sister down the hill.“I’m rather sorry we accepted the Glenaveril invitation,” he said to Isola. “The man is such an unmitigated cad.”“Mrs. Crowther is very kind and good,” replied his wife; “but I have never cared much about going to Glenaveril. I don’t feel that I get on particularly well with the girls. They are both too fine for me. But I should be sorry to offend Mrs. Crowther.”“Yes, she seems a kindly creature. It was thoughtful of her sending you a ticket for the ball. A woman with daughters is seldom over-kind to outsiders.”“Oh, I believe Mrs. Crowther’s heart is big enough to be kind to a whole parish.”“Well, on her account, perhaps it was best to accept the invitation.”“Don’t be so grand about it, Martin,” said Allegra. “You forget that I am pining to see what a dinner-party in a very rich house is like. I have seen nothing in London but literary and artistic dinners, third-rate literary and third-rate artistic, I’m afraid—but they were very nice, all the same. Glenaveril is a place that takes my breath away; and I am curious to see what a dinner-party can be like there.”“Then for your sake, Allegra, I’m glad we said yes. Only I couldn’t stand that fellow patronizing you. Calling you a fine girl, forsooth!”“Yes, it is an odious phrase, is it not? I’m afraid I shall have to live through it, because, like Rosalind, ‘I am more than common tall.’”She drew herself up to her full height, straight as a reed, but with fully developed bust and shoulders which showed to advantage in her pale tussore gown—silk that her brother had sent her from India. She looked the incarnation of girlish innocence and girlish happiness—a brow without a cloud, a step light as a fawn’s—a fearless, joyous nature. Her more commonplace features and finer figure were in curious contrast with Isola’s pensive beauty and too fragile form. Disney glanced from one to the other as he walked along the rustic lane between them; and, though he thought his wife the lovelier, he regretted that she was not more like his sister.A man who is very fond of home and who has no professional cares and occupations is apt to degenerate into a molly-coddle. Martin Disney gave an indication of this weakness on the day before the dinner at Glenaveril.“What are you two girls going to wear?” he asked. “At least, I don’t think I need ask Isola that question. You’ll wear your wedding-gown, of course, love?” he added, turning to his wife.“No, Martin, I am going to wear my grey silk.”“Grey! A dowager’s colour, a soured spinster’s colour—a Quaker’s no colour. I detest grey.”“Oh, but this is a very pretty gown—the palest shade of pearl colour—and I wear pink roses with it. It was made in Paris. I feel sure you will like me in it, Martin,” Isola said hurriedly, as if even this small matter fluttered her nerves.“Not as well as I like you in your wedding-gown. That was made in Paris, and it fitted you like a glove. I never saw such a pretty gown—so simple, yet so elegant.”“I have been married much too long to dress as a bride.”“You shall not seem as a bride—except to me. For my eyes only shall you shine in bridal loveliness. Bride or no bride, what can be prettier for a young woman than a white satin gown with a long train? You can wear some touch of colour to show you have not got yourself up as a bride. What do you say, Allegra? Give us your opinion. Of course you are an authority upon dress.”“Oh, the white satin, by all means. Isola looks ethereal in white. She ought hardly ever to wear anything else.”“You hear, Isa. Two to one against you.”“I’m sorry I can’t be governed by your opinions in this instance. You forget that I last wore my gown at a ball. I danced a good deal—the floor was dirty—the gown was spoilt. I shall never wear it again. I hope that will satisfy you, Martin.”She spoke with a touch of temper, her cheeks flushed crimson, and her eyes filled with sudden tears as she looked deprecatingly at her husband. Martin Disney felt himself a brute.“My dearest, I didn’t mean to tease you,” he said; “wear anything you like. You are sure to be the prettiest woman in the room. I am sorry the gown was spoilt; but it can’t be helped. I’ll buy you another white satin gown the first time you and I are in Plymouth together. And, pray, Miss Allegra, what bravery will you sport?”“I have only a white lace frock that has seen some service,” replied his sister, meekly. “I dare say I shall look like somebody’s poor relation at such a place as Glenaveril.”“Oh, it’s not to be a grand party, by any means. Mrs. Crowther told me she had asked the Baynhams and the Vicarage people to meet us, just in a friendly way.”The party was decidedly small, for on arriving with reasonable punctuality the Disneys found only one guest on the scene, in the person of Mr. Colfox, the curate, who was sitting by one of the little tables, showing a new puzzle of two pieces of interlinked iron to the two Misses Crowther. These young ladies were so interested in the trick of disentanglement that they scarcely noticed the entrance of their mother’s guests, and only rose and came over to greet the party three minutes later, as an afterthought.Mr. and Mrs. Crowther, however, were both upon the alert to receive their friends, the lady frankly cordial, the gentleman swelling with pompous friendliness, as if his manly breast were trying to emerge from the moderate restriction of a very open waistcoat. He protested that he was charmed to welcome Colonel Disney to Glenaveril, and he glanced round the splendid walls as who should say, “It is no light thing to invite people to such a house as this.”Vansittart Crowther was a man of short, squat figure, who tried to make up for the want of inches by extreme uprightness, and had cultivated this carriage until he seemed incapable of bending. He had a bald head, disguised by one dappled streak of grey and sandy hair, which was plastered into a curl on each side of his brow—curls faintly suggestive of a cat’s ears. He had blunt features, a sensual lip, and dull, fishy eyes, large and protuberant, with an expression in perfect harmony with the heavy, sensual mouth.Mr. and Mrs. Baynham were the next arrivals; the lady wearing the family amethysts and the well-known black velvet, under whose weighty splendour she arrived short of breath; the gentleman expansive of shirt front, and genial of aspect, jovial at the prospect of a good dinner and choice wines, and not hypercritical as to the company in which he ate the feast. He shook hands with his host and hostess,and then went over to the Misses Crowther, who had not thought it necessary to suspend their absorbing occupation in order to welcome the village doctor’s wife—a fact which Mrs. Baynham observed and inwardly resented.Mr. Colfox deserted the young ladies, still puzzling over the two bits of iron, and went across the room to greet the Disneys. He was an intelligent young man, steeped to the lips in the opinions and the prejudices of university life—Oxford life, that is to say. He ranked as a literary man in Trelasco, on the strength of having had an article almost published in Blackwood. “The editor had accepted my paper,” he told people modestly; “but on further consideration he found it was a little too long, and so, in point of fact, he sent it back to me in the most courteous manner. He couldn’t have acted more kindly—but I was disappointed. It would have been such an opening, you see.”All Mr. Colfox’s friends agreed that with such an opening the high road to literary fame and fortune would have been made smooth for his feet. They respected him even for this disappointment. To have been accepted by Blackwood made him almost a colleague of George Eliot.He was a tall and rather lean young man, who wore an eye-glass, and seemed to live upon books. It was irritating to Vansittart Crowther, who prided himself on his cellar and his cook, to note how little impression food and drink made upon Francis Colfox.“He takes my Château Yquem as if it were Devonshire cider,” said the aggrieved parvenu, “and he hardly seems to know that this is the only house where he ever sees clear turtle. The man’s people must have lived in a very poor way.”In spite of this contemptuous opinion, Mr. Crowther was always polite to Francis Colfox, and had even thought of him as apis-allerfor one of his daughters. There is hardly anything in this life which a self-made man respects so much as race, and Francis Colfox belonged to an old county family, had a cousin who was an earl, and another cousin who wastalked of as a probable bishop. He was, therefore, allowed to make himself very much at home at Glenaveril, and to speak his mind in a somewhat audacious way to the whole family.Captain Pentreath, an army man of uncertain age, a bachelor, and one of a territorial family of many brothers, came next; and then appeared the vicar and his wife and one daughter, who made up the party. The vicar was deaf, but amiable, and beamed benevolently upon a world about whose spoken opinions he knew so little that he might naturally have taken it for a much better world than it is. The vicar’s wife spent her existence in interpreting and explaining people’s speech to the vicar, and had no time to spare for opinions of her own. The daughter was characterized by a gentle nullity, tempered by a somewhat enthusiastic and evangelical piety. The chief desire of her life was to keep the Church as it had been in the days of her childhood, nearly thirty years before.It was the first time the Disneys had dined together at Glenaveril, so it seemed only proper that Mr. Crowther should give his arm to Isola, which he did with an air of conferring an honour. The colonel had been ordered to take the vicar’s wife, and the doctor was given to Allegra; Captain Pentreath took Miss Trequite, the vicar’s daughter; Mr. Colfox followed with Mrs. Baynham, and the daughters of the house went modestly to the dining-room after the vicar and Mrs. Crowther.The dinner-table was as pretty as roses and Venetian glass could make it. There was no pompous display of ponderous plate, as there might have been thirty years ago on a parvenu’s board. Everybody is enlightened nowadays. The great “culture” movement has been as widespread among the middle class as compulsory education among the proletariat, and everybody has “a taste.” Scarcely were they seated, when Mr. Crowther informed Mrs. Disney that he hated a display of silver, but at the same time took care to let her know that the Venetian glass she admired was rather morevaluable than that precious metal. “And if it’s broken, there’s nothing left you for your outlay,” he said; “but it’s a fancy of my wife and girls. Those decanters are better than anything Salviati ever made for Royalty.”The table was oval, lighted by one large lamp, under an umbrella-shaped amber shade, a lamp which diffused a faint golden glow through the dusky room; and through this dreamy dimness the footmen moved like ghosts, while the table and the faces of the diners shone and sparkled in the brilliant light. It was as picturesque a dining-room and table as one need care to see; and if the Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, which here and there relieved the sombre russet of the Cordovan leather hangings, were not the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Crowther’s ancestors, they were not the less lovely or interesting as works of art.Isola sat by her host’s side, with a silent and somewhat embarrassed air, which her husband noted as he watched her from the other side of the table.All the decorations were low, so that no pyramid of fruit or flowers intervened to prevent a man watching the face opposite to him. Disney saw that while Allegra, in her place between Mr. Baynham and Alicia Crowther, was full of talk and animation, Isola sat with downcast eyes, and replied with a troubled look to her host’s remarks. There was something in that gentleman’s manner which was particularly obnoxious to the colonel—a protecting air, a fatherly familiarity, which brought the bald, shining forehead almost in contact with Isola’s shoulder, as the man bent to whisper and to titter in the very ear of his neighbour.The colonel got through a little duty talk with Mrs. Trequite, whose attention was frequently distracted by the necessity of explaining Mrs. Crowther’s polite murmurs to the vicar on the other side of the table; and this duty done he gave himself up to watching Isola and her host. Why did she blush so when the man talked to her? Was it the bold admiration of those fishy eyes which annoyed her, or the man’s manner altogether; or was it anything that hesaid? Disney strained his ears to hear their conversation, if that could be called conversation which was for the most part monologue.The man was talking of the Hunt Ball of last winter. Disney heard such snatches of speech as “the prettiest woman in the room,” “everybody said so,” “Lostwithiel was evidentlyépris.”Mr. Crowther had a penchant for scraps of French, which decorated his speech as truffles adorn a boned turkey.“Isn’t it odd that he should be such a rover?” he asked, in a less confidential tone than before.Isola looked up at him, as if hardly understanding the question.“I mean Lostwithiel. With such a nice place as he has here, it seems a pity to be broiling himself in Peru. I never could understand the taste for orchids; and in his case—well, I hardly believe in it. He is the last man to emulate a Hooker or a Lawrence. Orchid-hunting must be an excuse for keeping away from England, I take it. Don’t you think so, now, Mrs. Disney?”“I really don’t know.”“You don’t know why he should want to keep away? No, no more does anybody else. Only we all wonder, don’t you know. He talked to me of settling down in the county—looking after the estate a little. He even hinted that he might, in due course, cast about for a nice young wife—with a little money. And then all of a sudden off he sails in that rakish yacht of his, and roves from port to port like the Flying Dutchman in the Opera, till at last we hear of him on the coast of Peru. Curious, ain’t it, Mrs. Disney?”“Why curious?” asked Isola, coldly. “Was not Lord Lostwithiel always fond of yachting?”“No doubt; but when a man talks of settling down in his native place—and then doesn’t do it—there must be a reason, mustn’t there?”“I don’t know. People act as often from caprice as from reason.”“Ah, that is a lady’s idea. No man who is worthy the name ever acts from caprice,” said Mr. Crowther, with his insinuating air, as if some hidden meaning were in the words, and then looking across the table and seeing the colonel’s watchful face, he altered both tone and manner as he added, “Of course you know Lostwithiel, Colonel Disney?”“I saw a good deal of Lord Lostwithiel when he was a small boy,” answered the colonel, coldly. “His father was one of my early friends. But that is a long time ago.”“How old is he, do you say?”“Debrett will answer that question better than I can. I have never reckoned the years that have gone by since I saw him in an Eton collar.”The men did not sit long over their wine. The doctor and his host talked agriculture, Mr. Crowther discussing all farming operations upon a large scale as became a man of territorial magnitude. The vicar prosed about an approaching lecture at the schoolroom, and utterly failed in hearing anything that was said in reply to his observations. Colonel Disney smoked a cigarette in silence, and with a moody brow.Later, in the drawing-room, while the Crowther girls were playing a clamorous duet, by the last fashionable Sclavonic composer, Vansittart Crowther directed his conversation almost wholly to Mrs. Disney, as if she were the only person worthy of his attention. He was full of suggestions for future gaieties in which the Disneys were to share—picnics, boating parties.“You must help us to wake up the neighbourhood, colonel,” he said, addressing Disney, with easy friendliness.“We are not very likely to be of much assistance to you in that line,” Disney answered coldly. “We are quiet stay-at-home people, my wife and I, and take our pleasures on a very small scale.”Colonel Disney’s carriage was announced at this moment. He gave his wife a look which plainly indicated his wish to depart, and she rose quickly from the low, deep chair in which she had been sitting, in some manner a captive, whileMr. Crowther lolled across the broad, plush-cushioned arm to talk to her. Allegra was engrossed in a talk about William Morris’s last poem with Mr. Colfox, who was delighted to converse with any one fresh from the far-away world of art and literature—delighted altogether with Allegra, whose whole being presented a piquant contrast to the Miss Crowthers. But the colonel’s sister saw the movement towards departure, and hastened to her brother’s side. Briefest adieux followed, and the first of the guests being gone, left behind them a feeling of uneasiness in those whose carriages had been ordered half an hour later. One premature departure will cast a blight upon your small dull party; whereas from a scene of real mirth the nine Muses and three Graces might all slip away unmissed and unobserved.CHAPTER X.“OF THE WEAK MY HEART IS WEAKEST.”“You had better send cards to Mrs. Crowther, Isola,” said Martin Disney, two days afterwards, when his wife was sitting at her Davenport writing her family letters.“Cards! Oh, Martin, she would think that so very formal. I can call upon her. She is always at home on Thursday afternoons, and she likes me to go.”“I am sorry for that, since I had rather you should never enter her house again.”“Martin!”“I have nothing to say against Mrs. Crowther, my dear Isola. But the man is more detestable than I could have believed low birth and unlimited money could make any man. Guileless and inexperienced as you are, I think you must have felt that his manner to you the other night was familiar to the point of being insulting.”Isola had felt both embarrassed and distressed by her host’s attentions—the insinuating inflections of his fat, pompous voice; his air of being upon a confidential footing with her.It had seemed to her on that evening as if for the first time in her life, before the eyes of men and women, she drank the cup of shame. She had said no word to her husband of Mr. Crowther’s oppressive familiarity, and she had fondly hoped that the matter had escaped his notice.She sat before him now, flushed and agitated, with lowered eyelids, and one hand restlessly moving about the papers on her blotting-pad.“My dearest, there is nothing in all this to distress you,” said Disney, with infinite gentleness. “It is not your fault that the man is a cad; but it would be my fault if I were to allow you or Allegra to go to his house again.”“He was not rude to Allegra.”“No; it would be her turn next, perhaps. He did not mean to be rude to you. He only wanted to be especially polite in his own odious fashion. There are men in that class who cannot behave decently to a pretty woman, or civilly to a plain one. He meant no doubt to gratify you by his compliments. What a stress he laid upon Lostwithiel’s attention to you at the ball. Were his attentions so very marked?”“Oh no; not more to me than to others,” Isola answered quickly. “He danced a good many times—twice or three times—with Belinda Crowther. Everybody noticed them as the handsomest couple in the room; not that he is handsome, of course—only tall and distinguished-looking.”Allegra came running in from the garden, and broke the thread of the conversation. Isola put the visiting-cards into an envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Vansittart Crowther. She felt that the kindly matron would be puzzled and vexed at this ceremony, from a young person towards whom she had assumed so motherly a tone, urging her to run over to Glenaveril at any hour of the day—asking her to lunch or to tea at least once a week—wanting to take her for drives to Lostwithiel, or railway jaunts to Plymouth.Isola was not mistaken, for Mrs. Crowther called three or four days afterwards and upbraided her for sending the cards.“You might have all come to tea on Thursday, if you had been good-natured,” she said. “Mr. Colfox read us a poem by Swinburne, out of one of the new magazines—there are so many nowadays that I never remember which is which. Belinda was delighted with it—but Alicia and I can’t rise to her height. Mr. Colfox reads poetry beautifully. You can’t judge of his powers by only hearing him read the lessons,” added Mrs. Crowther, as if the English Bible were a poor thing.She stopped an hour, praised Isola’s tea-making and the new cook’s tea-cakes, asked a great many questions about Allegra’s ideas and occupations, and was as hearty, and simple, and friendly, and natural as if she had been a duchess.It grieved Isola to be obliged to refuse an invitation to luncheon, most cordially pressed upon her and Allegra.“I would drive you both to Lostwithiel after lunch, and we could do our little bit of shopping and then have a cup of tea at the Talbot while the horses had their mouths washed out, and I’d show you the room where your brother’s wife was so much admired last year, Miss Leland, and where I hope you’ll have many a good dance next winter. Now the ice is broken we mean to go on with our balls, I can tell you. Indeed, my girls are thinking of trying to get up a tennis-club ball about the end of September.”This was the last time Mrs. Vansittart Crowther appeared in a friendly manner at the Angler’s Nest, for after two or three further invitations—to a picnic—to tea—to lunch—had been declined, in most gracious little notes from Isola, that good lady perceived that there was some kind of barrier to friendly intercourse between her and Colonel Disney’s wife, and she told herself with some touch of honest middle-class dignity that if Martin Disney was proud she could be proud too, and that she would make no further offer of friendship which was undesired.“I suppose he thinks because he comes of a good old family, while we have made our money in trade, that we are not quite good enough to associate with his wife and sister,”she said to her daughters. “I thought he was too much of a gentleman to have such a petty feeling.”“How innocent you are, mother,” cried Alicia, contemptuously; “can’t you see that they are all bursting with envy? That was what made the colonel so gloomy and disagreeable the night of our little dinner. He was vexed to see things done with as good taste as in a nobleman’s house. It cuts these poor gentilities to the quick to see that. They don’t much mind our being rich, if we will only be vulgar and uneducated. But when we have the impertinence to be as well up in the ways of good society as they are themselves, they can’t forgive us. Good taste in a parvenu is the unforgivable sin.”“Well, I don’t know,” mused Mrs. Crowther, sadly. “I’m sure there’s neither pride nor envy in Isola, and Miss Leland looks a frank, straightforward girl, above all foolish nonsense; so it must be the colonel’s fault that they’ve cut us.”“Cut us!” echoed Belinda; “the Angler’s Nest cutting Glenaveril is rather too absurd an idea.”“My dear, you don’t know the importance Cornish people attach to old family—and the Disneys are a very old family—and no one can deny that he is a gentleman, though we don’t like him.”“Oh, no doubt he considers that he belongs to the landed gentry. He has bought Rowe’s farm, two hundred and sixty acres. He had forty to begin with, so he is now lord of three hundred acres, just half our home farm.”“His cousin, Sir Luke Disney, has a large estate near Marazion,” said Mrs. Crowther, meekly.“Yes, but we don’t reckon a man’s importance by his cousin’s estate. Colonel Disney is only a squatter in this part of the country.”Alicia pronounced the word with gusto. It had been whispered to her that the squire of Fowey had spoken of her father—who counted his acres by thousands—as a squatter. That unimpeachable importance, founded uponthe established respectability of bygone centuries—centuries in which men wore armour and women breakfasted on beef and ale—was not to be bought with gold and silver, and the want of it often made the Miss Crowthers angry. Diamonds they could have, and land, art, and beauty, even the ways and manners of good society, but they could not buy themselves a history. Everybody knew that their splendours had all come out of a cloth mill, that their ingots had been in some part transmuted from pestiferous woollen rags gathered in the Jewish quarters of far-off cities, ground into shoddy, and anon issued to the world as sleek superfine cloth. The more shoddy the higher interest upon capital; and Vansittart Crowther’s daughters knew too many of the secrets of the mills to be proud of the source of their prosperity.Mrs. Crowther was sorry to lose Isola as a friend andprotégée. Her daughters were furious at the slight implied in this gradual dropping away. They passed Mrs. Disney and her sister-in-law with their noses in the air, as they went from the church-porch to their carriage. They cut them ostentatiously if they met on the quiet country roads. Mrs. Crowther would still stop to speak and shake hands, albeit she urged no further invitations.And while the gulf widened between the great house and the small one the glorious Cornish summer waned, and slowly, slowly, melted away, lingering very late in that fair western land, which was full of flowers even when the home counties were being withered and blackened by the first frosts. At last came winter, and the gradual turn of the year; short days slowly lengthening out by leisurely sunsets; pale snowdrops glimmering in the borders; and then the gold of crocuses and the bright blue of the Siberian bell-flower in patches of vivid colour; and then hyacinths and tulips, primroses on every bank, narcissus and jonquil in every garden; and by-and-by the full glory of bluebell and hawthorn blossom. And anon in the middle of May came an event in which all the interests of Colonel Disney’s life seemed to culminate. In that balmy Maytime Isola’s firstborn soncame into the world, and Isola’s young life hovered at the gate of death, in so terrible an uncertainty that Martin Disney’s hair grew grey while he awaited the issue of the contest between youth and weakness.For more than a week after the birth of her baby Isola’s condition had satisfied the trained nurse and the kindly doctor. She was very white and weak, and she showed less interest in her baby than most young mothers—a fact which Mr. Baynham ascribed to over-education.“The young women of the present day aren’t half such good mothers as those I used to attend when I began practice,” he said discontentedly. “Their heads are stuffed with poetry, and such-like. They’re nervous and fanciful—and the upshot of it all is that babies have to be wet-nursed or brought up by hand. If I had the government of a model state I wouldn’t allow any married woman the run of a library until she had reared the last of her babies. What does a young married woman want with book-learning? She ought to have enough to do to look after her husband and her nursery.”Before the baby son was a fortnight old, fever supervened, and Isola’s state gave poor Mr. Baynham the keenest anxiety. A hospital nurse was sent for to assist the established custodian; and a great authority was brought over from Plymouth to approve the village doctor’s treatment, and to make a trifling alteration in a prescription, substituting bromide of sodium for bromide of potassium.Many days and nights of delirium followed the physician’s visit, a period in which the patient was watched at every hour of the day and night; and one of the most constant watchers through all that dreary time was Martin Disney. It was in vain that Allegra and the nurses urged him to consider his own health. He would consent only to leave the sick-room for briefest intervals of rest. Day after day, night after night, he sat in the same chair—an old-fashioned armchair, with projecting sides, which almost hid him from the patient—beside the bed. He was never in the way of thenurse. He was always helpful when a man’s help was needed. He was so quiet that it was impossible to object to his presence. He sat there like a statue of patience. No moan escaped his pallid lips; no tear stole down his haggard cheek. He sat and watched and waited for the issue, which was to make him happy, or desolate for ever.All his future was involved in that issue. He looked with a faint smile upon the pink little baby face, when they brought his son to him. No one would have dared to suggest that he should take care of himself and be comforted for that little one’s sake. They all knew that his firstborn was as nothing to him. All his hopes and all his fears were centred in the wife who lay upon yonder bed, with glassy eyes and babbling lips, a wanderer in a world full of torturing images—fountains of bubbling water which she longed to drink—great black serpents, which came crawling in at the window, and creeping nearer, nearer to her bed—wriggling, hideous forms that hemmed her in on every side—giant staircases that she was always trying to climb—mammoth caves in which she lost herself, fifty times bigger and more awful than those serpentine caverns near the Lizard, which she and Allegra had explored in the previous autumn—steeper, stonier than the tall cliffs and pinnacled rocks above Bedruthan sands.Day after day, night after night, Martin Disney sat in his place and listened to those ravings of a mind distraught. He could not keep himself from trying to follow her in that labyrinth of disconnected fancies—visions of shapeless horror, trouble, confusion—a wild babbling of numbers, prattling of millions, billions, trillions—as if her days of health and sense had been spent in the calculations of a Rothschild, she who could scarcely reckon the simplest account in a tradesman’s book.What had she to do with this torturing recital of thousands and millions, this everlasting heaping up of figures?Then at another period of that long struggle between life and death, reason and unreason, she had a ghastly vision of twochildren, squatting on each side of her bed, one living, the other dead, a grisly child with throat cut from ear to ear. Again and again she implored them to take away those babies—the dead child whose horrid aspect froze her blood—the living child that grinned and made faces at her.Once and once only during that season of delirium the elder of her nurses carried the baby to her bedside, the tiny form in snowy cambric and lace, a little roseate face, on which the first glimmer of intelligence was already dawning, sweet blue eyes that smiled at the light, rosebud lips that invited kisses. The nurse took the infant to the side of the bed, and asked the young mother to look at him. Those fever-bright eyes stared at the sweet small face with a gaze of ever-growing horror, and then with a wild shriek Isola clasped her hands before her eyes, and drew herself cowering to the further side of the bed.“The dead child!” she cried. “Why do you show me that dead child? Don’t you see his throat streaming with blood?”It was a case in which the nurses had no easy duty by day or night; and there were times when Disney insisted that the night-nurse should have extra rest, while he kept guard.“But if she should be very bad, sir, you might not be able to manage.”“Oh yes, I should. My sister is a very light sleeper. She would come to me in a moment, and she has a great deal of influence with my wife.”This was true. From the beginning of evil Allegra’s presence had exercised a soothing power. She had been able to lull the patient to sleep sometimes, when opiates had failed to produce even fitful slumber. Isola was calmer and less restless when her sister-in-law was by her side.In those long night watches, sometimes in solitude, Martin Disney had ample leisure in which to ponder upon his wedded life, and to consider how far the hopes with which he had entered upon that life had been realized. The retrospect left him melancholy, and with a latent sense of loss and disappointment; and yet he told himself again and again that he did ill to be dissatisfied, that Providence had dealt kindly with him.At five and forty years of age, he, Martin Disney, of modest fortune and social status, and of no especial claim to be admired, intellectual or physical, had won the hand of a lovely and interesting girl. He had been so bewildered and overcome by the delight of his conquest, that he had entered upon no laborious process of self-examination before he took to himself this fair and winning partner. It had been enough for him that she came to him willingly, lovingly, in all truth and girlish simplicity, loyal as she was pure. He had never asked himself could such an attachment last—on her side? It had been enough for him that the love existed. It would be his duty and his delight to strengthen the bond, to draw that fair spirit into closer union with his own. He had felt no shadow of fear for the future. Once having won her, it must be easy to keep his treasure—easy for him who would so faithfully guard and cherish this priceless gift of a benign Providence. He was a man of deep religious feeling—a man who recognized in good and evil, in joy and in sorrow, the dealings of an Almighty God with His short-sighted creatures. He accepted his happiness in fear and trembling, knowing the instability of all mortal joys; but he had never feared the loss of Isola’s love.
“I’ll find you a better one, sir. I’ll set about hunting for a good one this afternoon.”
Martin shook hands with her on the door-step, and she stood watching him till he disappeared at the turn of the road. She watched him with a countenance full of sorrow.
CHAPTER VIII.
MY FROLIC FALCON, WITH BRIGHT EYES.
Everybody in Trelasco and in the neighbourhood seemed glad to see Colonel Disney again. All the best people within a six-mile drive came bearing down upon the Angler’s Nest in the week that followed his return; and there were cosy little afternoon tea-drinkings in the drawing-room, or on the lawn, and Isola had her hands full in receiving visitors. Everybody congratulated her upon having her hero back from the wars.
“You ought to be very proud of your husband, Mrs. Disney,” said Vansittart Crowther, with his air of taking all the world under his protection.
“I have always been proud of him,” Isola answered gently. “I was proud of him before the Burmese War.”
“Your poor wife has been looking very unhappy for the last few months,” Mrs. Crowther said to the colonel, with a motherly glance at Isola. “I really had a good mind to write to you and beg you to hurry home if you didn’t want to find the poor thing far gone in a decline when you came back.”
“My dear Mrs. Crowther, what nonsense,” cried Isola, growing crimson at this motherly officiousness. “I have never been out of health, or in the least likely to go into a decline. One cannot always look like a dairy-maid.”
“My dear, there’s no use talking, you looked very bad. Had one of my girls looked as ill, I should have taken her off to Buxton to drink the waters, without an hour’s delay.”
That visit of the Crowthers seemed much longer than any other afternoon call. The Crowthers, husband, and wife, and elder daughter, had an inquisitorial air, Isola fancied, an air of scrutinizing her house and herself and her surroundings, which was intolerable to her; although on Mrs. Crowther’s part she knew the scrutiny was made in theutmost benevolence, and the officiousness was the outcome of a nature overflowing with the milk of human kindness.
“I wish you had written to me, Mrs. Crowther,” said Disney. “I couldn’t have come home any sooner, but I could have telegraphed to my sister Allegra to look after my wife, and cheer her solitude. I was a fool not to have had her here all along.”
“Hadn’t I better go out of the room while you are holding your consultation about me?” exclaimed Isola, fretfully. “It’s rather hard upon the patient to hear her case discussed in cold blood. I am tired of declaring that I have not been ill, and that it is my misfortune and not my fault to have a pale complexion.”
“You were not always so pallid, my dear,” said Mrs. Crowther, persistently. “You were one of the beauties of the Hunt Ball, and you had colour enough that night.”
Dr. and Mrs. Baynham came the following afternoon, and these two told the same story, though with less obtrusive concern.
“I looked after the young lady now and then,” said the worthy doctor, “and as I found there was nothing radically wrong, I didn’t worry you with any low-spirited reports; but I expect to see her pick up wonderfully now you have come home. She didn’t take enough outdoor exercise, that’s where the harm was. She used to be so fond of her boat last year, but this year I fancy she didn’t feel herself up to handling the sculls. You didn’t now, did you, Mrs. Disney?”
“I don’t know about that, but I am ready to row to the Land’s End, now Martin is back,” said Isola, and those few words seemed the sweetest Martin Disney had heard since Colonel Manwaring’s daughter promised to be his wife.
Mrs. Baynham sat on the lawn, sipping her tea, and basking in the afternoon sunshine.
“You should have seen your wife in her wedding-gown at the Lostwithiel dance,” she said. “You would have been proud of her. She didn’t want to go—refused Mrs. Crowtherand me again and again. She thought it wasn’t right to be at any merry-making while your life was in danger.”
“Yes, I know—I know. My tender-hearted Isola!”
“But at last we got the better of her objections; and though there were a good many pretty women there, and though Miss Crowther, perhaps, pleased most tastes, being a more showy style of beauty, to my thinking there wasn’t one came up to Mrs. Disney.”
“Her partners seemed of the same opinion,” put in the doctor, cheerily. “Why, how often did Lord Lostwithiel dance with you, Mrs. Disney? Oftener than with anybody else, I’ll be bound.”
Mrs. Baynham nodded approvingly.
“I was very proud of my party that evening, I can tell you, Colonel Disney,” she said. “It isn’t often that one has to chaperon three attractive young women. Do you know that my youngest niece, Maria, has had two offers since that night, Isola, and when I last heard from her she was on the brink of an engagement? Ah, well, I hope we shall have another ball next December, now that the neighbourhood has begun to wake up a bit. We have been thinking of getting up a water picnic this summer—just a little excursion to Mevagissey, and a little fishing for those who might care for it.”
“Very pleasant, indeed, of you,” answered the colonel, cheerily. “We will be there.”
“The Crowthers are rather grand in their ideas,” said the doctor, “but Alicia is very keen upon all kind of sport, so I know she’ll want to come, whatever Belinda may say to it.”
Mrs. Baynham made a wry face at the name of the elder sister. It was an involuntary and unconscious contortion; but Belinda had tried to snub Mrs. Baynham, who never could forget that her father was a banker at Truro, and held the fortunes—the mortgages and encumbrances of the landed gentry—in the hollow of his hand.
“You don’t like the elder Miss Crowther?” speculated the colonel.
“Well, if I am to be candid, I must confess that I have apositive aversion to that young lady. The airs she gives herself on the strength of her father’s wool are really insupportable, and since Lord Lostwithiel disappointed her she has been more odious than she was before.”
“What do you mean by Lostwithiel disappointing her? Did he jilt her?”
“Well, it could scarcely be called jilting, and I really don’t know that there was anything between them; but people had coupled their names—and he dined at Glenaveril at least once a week all the time he was at the Mount—and people had quite made up their minds it was to be a match. Mr. Crowther went about talking of Lord Lostwithiel and his affairs as if he was his father-in-law—the neglected condition of the land, and what ought to be done at the Mount, and that the estate wanted judicious nursing, and all that sort of thing. And then one December morning his lordship sailed off in his yacht before it was light, and there was no more heard of him. It was quite in his way to go off suddenly like that, but the Crowthers were evidently taken by surprise, and we heard no more about Lord Lostwithiel and the Mount.”
“They dropped him like a hot potato,” said the doctor. “Well, we shall depend upon you both for our water-party. It will not be till the middle of July, when an old chum of mine, a sailor, will be coming this way.”
This was a sample of many such visits. In the country, and even in London upon occasion, people are given to discussing the same subjects. Martin Disney heard a good deal about the Crowthers and their supposed disappointment. People liked Mrs. Crowther for her simple, unaffected ways, and thorough-going kindliness; but Vansittart and his daughters had made a good many enemies. He was too coarse; they were too fine; only the mother’s simple nature had caught the golden mean between blunt vulgarity and artificial smartness.
Colonel Disney heard all this village gossip with an unheeding ear. He was secure in his own position as a son ofthe soil, a man whose pedigree could pass muster with that of the Rashleighs and the Treffrys, a man of means that were ample for his own unpretending tastes and requirements. He cared not a jot how many guineas a year the Crowthers might give to their cook, or how much Mr. Crowther had paid for the furnishing and decoration of his house, a theme upon which the gossips of the neighbourhood loved to enlarge. That Mrs. Crowther had gowns from Worth, and that her daughters employed Mrs. Mason, irked not this simple soldier. The only point in all the stream of talk that had affected him was the unanimous opinion that Trelasco in the spring had been too relaxing for Mrs. Disney, or else that her solitude had preyed upon her mind, inasmuch as she had looked so ill as to afford an interesting subject of conversation to a good many friendly people who suffered from the chronic malady of not having enough to talk about, a form of starvation almost as bad as not having enough to eat.
The colonel listened, and made his own conclusions. He did not believe that Trelasco was “relaxing.” Ho loved the district too well to believe any evil thing about it. Those fresh breezes that blew up from the sea, those balmy airs that breathed across the heather-clad hills, must bring health with them. What could one have better than that mingling of sea and hill, brine and honey, gorse-bloom and seaweed? No, Trelasco was not to blame. His young wife had suffered for lack of youthful company. He made up his mind accordingly.
“I suppose you won’t object to our having Allegra here for a summer visit, will you, love?” he asked at breakfast the day after Mrs. Baynham’s call. “London must be hot, and dusty, and dreary in July, and she must want rest and country air, I fancy, after having worked so hard in her art school.”
Isola gave a scarcely perceptible sigh as she bent to caress Tim, a privileged attendant of the breakfast-table.
“Object! Of course not, Martin. I shall be very pleased for your sister to come here.”
“I feel very sure you will be pleased with her when you and she get upon intimate terms. You could know so little of her from that one evening in the Cavendish Road.”
The occasion in question was an evening in which Isola and her husband had been bidden to a friendly dinner, on their way through London, by the clergyman’s widow with whom Allegra lived while she pursued her study of art at a famous school in St. John’s Wood. The clergyman’s widow, Mrs. Meynell, was a distant cousin of the Disneys, and Allegra’s home had been with her from the time she left school. The extent of her wanderings after she was old enough to be sent to a boarding-school had been from Falmouth to Kensington, and from Kensington to St. John’s Wood, with occasional holidays in the Isle of Thanet.
“I thought she was very fresh and bright and loving,” answered Isola, “and I could see even in that one evening that she was very fond of you.”
“Yes, God bless her, there is no doubt about that. I have been brother and father too for her. She has had no one but me since our mother’s death.”
“Shall I write and ask her to come to us, Martin, or will you?”
“I fancy she would take it more as a compliment if the invitation went straight from you. She would know that I would be glad to have her, but she might feel a little doubtful about you.”
“Then I’ll write to her to-day, Martin, and beg her to come at once—as soon as ever she can pack her boxes.”
“That’s my darling! I hope she won’t bore you when she is here. I have a shrewd idea she’ll make your life happier. She’ll awaken you from that languor which has grown upon you in your loneliness.”
“At least I’ll try to make her happy, Martin, if it is only for your sake.”
“Ah, and you will soon love her for her own sake.”
“I’ll get the boat looked to at once, and I’ll see about making the spare room pretty for her,” said Isola.
A week later Allegra was with them, breakfasting on the lawn in the balmy atmosphere of July. There were two girls, in white gowns, under the tulip tree, instead of one; and Martin Disney felt as if his domestic happiness were doubled, as he looked at those two graceful figures in the flickering light below that canopy of broad bright leaves. Another element of comfort, too, had entered the Angler’s Nest; for the incompetent cook had taken her incompetency and a month’s wages to her native city of Truro; and a buxom damsel from Falmouth, recommended by Tabitha, had already proved herself a treasure in the culinary art.
Never was there a fairer picture than that domestic group under the tulip tree. The two girlish figures in white muslin, with palest salmon and palest azure ribbons fluttering and glancing in the light and deepening in the shadow; the white fox-terrier, alert, muscular, mercurial; the tortoise-shell cat, long-haired, aristocratic, and demure; the pretty Moorish plateau on bamboo legs, the purple and crimson breakfast service and rare old silver urn, the fruit and flowers, and amber-hued butter, and rustic luxury of preserved fruit and clotted cream.
“How lovely it all is after Cavendish Road!” cried Allegra, rapturously. “When I see the lights and shadows upon those hills, I despair of ever being able to paint a landscape as long as I live. Nature is maddeningly beautiful.”
“What is your particular line, Allegra?” asked her brother. “Is it landscape?”
“No; I only care for landscape as a background for humanity. I want to paint genre pictures in water-colour—women and children—beautiful women amidst beautiful surroundings—picturesque poverty—interesting bits of daily life. Mrs. Allingham is the ideal after which I strive, but I am only at the bottom of the ladder. It is a long climb to the top; but one does not mind that in a profession where labour is delight.”
“You are fond of art, then?” said Isola, watching the earnest face of the speaker.
“Fond of it! Why, I live for it! The dream of my life from the time I was seven years old has been one long dream of the bliss that was to be mine when I could feel myself able to paint. I have toiled with all my might. Martin disliked the idea of my being an Academy student—poor, foolish, ignorant Martin—so I have been obliged to plod on at St. John’s Wood, without hope of prizes or medals; but on the whole I have been very lucky, for I have made friends among the Academicians. They are very kind to any student who seems in rightdown earnest; and they have been ever so good to me. I hope, Martin, you will find some day that I am something better than an amateur,” she concluded, resting her two hands caressingly upon her brother’s shoulder.
“My dearest, I have not the least doubt you will astonish me. I am very ignorant of everything connected with art. I set my face against the Academy because I thought the training and the life would be too public for my sister.”
“As if Burlington House were any more public than that big school at St. John’s Wood, my dear illogical brother: and yet we women are the only people who are said to be wanting in the logical faculty.”
She leant back in her basket-chair, revelling in the rural atmosphere, and in that new sense of being in the bosom of her family. Tim leapt upon her lap and licked her face, in token of his acceptance of her into the home-circle. Nobody had ever called Miss Leland a beauty, nor had she ever received those disquieting attentions which follow the footsteps of exceptional loveliness. She was sometimes described as a girl who grew upon one; and people who knew her well generally ended by thinking her distractingly pretty. She had a brilliant complexion, of the true English type, fair and blooming—a complexion which indicated perfect health and an active, orderly life; no late hours or novel-reading over the fire—an out-of-door complexion, which would have looked its best under a neat little felt hat in the hunting-field, or under a coquettish straw sailor hat on board a yacht. Her eyes were blue-grey, with long, brown lashes and boldlymarked eyebrows; her nose was firmly modelled, inclining a little to the aquiline order. Her mouth was the prettiest feature in her face, and yet it was a shade larger than accepted perfection in mouths. It was a mouth chiefly remarkable for character and expression; and, indeed, it was the individuality and variety of expression in the fair young face which constituted Miss Leland’s chief claim to distinction.
She started up from the nest of basket-work and flowered chintz, and stood tall and erect, a Juno-like young woman, with heavy plaits of reddish-brown hair rolled in a great knot at the back of her head. She might have answered one of those harsh advertisements for parlour-maids, in which the words, “No fringe,” figure with curt cruelty; for her hair was brushed smoothly back from the fair forehead, and the severity of the style became that wide sagacious brow. It was just the kind of forehead which can endure exposure without conveying an idea of bald ugliness.
She was tall and strongly made, fashioned after the semblance of Diana or Atalanta rather than Venus or Psyche. Her every movement had the bold, free grace of vigorous, unspoiled youth. She had always been active—fond of walking, riding, rowing, swimming, as well as of art, and with an ardent passion for the country, which had made existence in a London suburb one long sacrifice.
“I used to take the train for Hampstead Heath or Willesden,” she told her brother, “and go off for long, lonely tramps to Finchley or Hendon. I have watched the builder’s progress along roads and lanes I loved. I have seen horrid brick boxes creeping along like some new kind of noxious insect, eating up fields and hedgerows, old hawthorns and old hollies. I could have sat down in the muddy road and cried sometimes, at the thought that soon there would be no country walk left within reach of a Londoner. Once I went off to the north-east, to look for the rural lanes Charles Lamb and his sister loved—the lanes and meadows where they carried their little picnic basket, till they took shelter at a homely inn. Oh, Martin, all those fields and lanes, CharlesLamb’s country—are going, going, or gone! It is heartbreaking! And they are building at Fowey, too, I see. Positively there will be no country anywhere soon. There will be crescents and terraces and little ugly streets at the very Land’s End, and the Logan Rock will be the sign of a public-house.”
“Don’t be down-hearted, Chatterbox! I think Cornwall may last our time,” said Disney, laughing at her vehemence.
Allegra was a great talker. It seemed as if she had a well-spring of joy and life within her which must find an outlet. When people ventured to hint at her loquacity she declared that her name was in fault.
“I have grown up to match my name,” she said; “if I had been christened Penserosa I might have been quite a different person.”
Her vivacity gave a new element of brightness to the Angler’s Rest, where Disney had been somewhat oppressed by the sensation of intense repose which had pervaded histête-à-têtelife with Isola. He loved his wife so entirely, so unselfishly, and devotedly, that it was happiness to him to be with her; yet in the three or four weeks that had gone by since his return he had struggled in vain against the feeling that there was something wanting in his home. Isola waited upon him and deferred to him with more than wifely submissiveness. He would have liked a spurt of rebellion once in a way, a little burst of girlish temper, just to show that she was human; but none ever came. His every desire was anticipated. Whatever plan he suggested—to walk, to drive, to visit, or not to visit—the river or the sea—was always the plan that pleased her best, or at least she said so.
“I think I shall call you Griselda instead of Isola,” he said one day, taking the fair pale face between his hands and gazing into the mournful depths of the dark violet eyes—inscrutable eyes they seemed to him, when the pupils dilated under his gaze, as if the eyes made a darkness to hide their meaning.
“Why?” she asked.
A flood of crimson passed over her face like a fire, and left her paler than before.
“Because you are only too dutiful. Would you resist if I were to turn tyrant, I wonder?”
“I have no fear of your turning tyrant,” she answered, with a sad little smile; “you are only too good to me.”
“Good! There can be no question of goodness. If a man picked up a diamond as precious as the Koh-i-noor, could he be good to it? How can I be good to my gem? I have but one thing left in the world to desire, or to pray for.”
“What is that, Martin?”
“To see you happy.”
Again the sudden flame crimsoned her face, that sensitive spiritual face which reflected every change of feeling.
“I am happy, Martin, quite happy, happier than I ever thought to be, now that you are home again. What have I more to desire?”
“Is that really so? Was my long absence your greatest trouble?”
“Yes,” she answered slowly, looking at him with a curiously steady look, “that was the beginning and end of my trouble.”
“Thank God!” he said, drawing a deep breath. “There have been moments—just of late—when I have puzzled my brains about you—until I thought—” very slowly, “there might have been something else.”
He clasped her in his arms, and hid her face upon his breast, as if—fearing that he might have wounded her by those last words—he wanted to make amends before she had time to feel his unkindness. His tenderness for her had so much of that pitying love which a strong man feels for a child.
This conversation occurred the day before Allegra’s arrival; but with that young lady’s appearance on the scene, new life and gladness came into the little household. Allegra sang, Allegra played, Allegra ran out into the gardentwenty times a day, and called through the open window to Isola, sitting quietly in the drawing-room, to come out and look at this or that—a rose finer than all other roses—a suggested alteration—an atmospheric effect—anything and everything. She was a keen observer of Nature, full of vivid interest in every creature that lived, and in every flower that grew. Tim followed her everywhere as she danced along the gravel walks, or across the short springy turf. Tim adored her, and grinned at her, and threw himself into all manner of wriggling attitudes upon the grass to express his delight in her company, and fawned at her feet, and talked to her after his guttural fashion, snorting his friendly feelings. Tim had long languished for such a companion, having found his young mistress’s society very heavy of late. No more runs in the meadow, no more rambles in the neighbouring spinney, and very little boating. But now that Allegra had come the skiff was seldom idle. Isola had to go on the river whether she liked or not. There were strong young arms ready to pull her—round young arms, of a lovely roseate fairness, which looked their best, stretched to the motion of the sculls, with the white cambric shirt rolled up above the elbow.
“You can read Shelley while I scull the boat,” said Allegra. “I don’t want any help. If you knew what rapture it is to me to feel the breath of Seagods and Tritons after St. John’s Wood, and the smoke from the Metropolitan Railway, you wouldn’t pity me.”
Isola submitted, and sat at her ease upon bright-coloured cushions with an Indian rug spread round her, as idle as if she had been the belle of a Zenana, and read Alastor while the boat sped seaward in the sunshine.
Sometimes they moored their boat at the landing stage at Polruan, and walked up the hill to the Point, and sat there for an hour or two in the summer wind with their books and picnic basket, seeing great ships go out towards the Lizard and the big distant world, or sail merrily homeward towards Plymouth and the Start. Isola looked at thoseoutward-bound ships with a strange longing in her eyes—a longing to flee away upon those broad wings that flashed whitely in the sunlit distance. Were people happy on board those ships, she wondered, happy at escaping from the fetters of an old life and a beaten path, happy going away to strange lands and freedom? She had been reading many books of travel of late, and a kind of passion for remote uncivilized countries had come upon her; as if that untrammelled life meant release from memory and saddening cares—a new birth almost. It seemed from some of those books as if there could be no greater happiness upon this earth than to tramp across sandy deserts and stalk occasional lions; while in others the supreme good seemed to be found in the attempt to scale impossible mountains. What was it that made the rapture of these things? Isola wondered. Was it that perils and wild solitudes offered the only possible escape out of a past existence, on this side the grave? Allegra had never so much as crossed the Channel. She had been brought up in the most humdrum fashion. First a school at Falmouth, and then a smarter school at Kensington, and then St. John’s Wood and the Art School. Her mother had died when she was fourteen years of age, and since that time her brother had been her only guardian and almost her only friend. Her life had seen but little variety, and very little of the dancing and gaiety which for most girls is the only form of pleasure. She and Isola talked about the ships as they sat upon the grassy hill at Polruan, and speculated about the lands of which they knew only what they had read in books of travel.
“You, at least, know what France is like,” said Allegra, “and that is something.”
“Only one little corner of France.”
“And to think that you were born in an old French city! It seems strange. Do you feel at all French?”
“I don’t think so; only sometimes a longing comes upon me to see the old grey walls, and to hear the old voices, and see the curious old women in their white caps and bright-coloured handkerchiefs, clattering along to the Cathedral. There must be more old women in Brittany than in Cornwall, I think. Fowey does not swarm with old women as Dinan did. And sometimes I long to see mother, and the good old Brittany servants, and the garden where the hours went by so slowly—almost as slowly as they go here”—with a sigh.
“Does time go so very slowly here?” asked Allegra, quickly. “That sounds as if you were unhappy.”
“What nonsense you talk!” cried Isola, with a flash of sudden anger. “Cannot one be dull and bored sometimes—from very idleness—without being unhappy?”
“I don’t know; but, for my own part, when I am happy I am never dull.”
“You have more of what people call animal spirits than I have.”
“I’m glad you apologize in a manner for that odious phrase—animal spirits. I would not apply such a phrase to Tim. It suggests nothing but Audrey at a statute fair. Heaven gave me a capacity for happiness, and I thank God every night in my prayers for another happy day. Even at school I contrived to be happy, somehow; and think what it must be after seven years of dull routine to feel that I have done with sitting at a stranger’s table and that I am here in a home, my own home, with my brother and sister.”
The two women clasped hands, and kissed each other upon this. Only the night before Isola, of her own free will, had asked her sister-in-law to make her home at the Angler’s Nest always, always, till she should be led out of it as a bride; and Martin had shown himself supremely happy in the knowledge that his sister had won his wife’s love and confidence.
When Isola and he were alone together after the sealing of that family bond, he kissed and thanked her for this boon which she had bestowed upon him.
“I never could have felt quite at ease while Allegra wasliving with strangers,” he told her. “And now my cup is full. But are you sure, dearest, that you will never find her in the way, never fancy yourself any the less mistress of your house, and of my life, because she is here?”
“Never, never, never! I am gladder than I can say to have her. She is a delightful companion. She helps me in a hundred ways. But even if she were less charming it would be my duty to have her here since you like her to be with us.”
“But it must not be done as a duty. I will not have you sacrifice your inclination in the slightest degree.”
“What an obtuse person you are! Don’t I tell you that I am enchanted to have her? She is as much my sister as ever Gwendolen was; indeed, she is much more sympathetic than Gwen ever was.”
“Then I am perfectly content.”
Allegra wrote to Mrs. Meynell next day, announcing the decision that had been arrived at, not without grateful acknowledgments of that lady’s kindness. The rest of her belongings were to be sent to her forthwith, easels, and colour-boxes, books and knickknacks; her brother’s gifts, most of them from the romantic East; things which made her few little Kensingtonian keepsakes look very trivial and Philistine. Allegra’s possessions gave a new individuality to the large, airy bedroom, and the tiny boudoir at the corner of the house, looking seaward, which Isola had arranged for her.
While these things were doing Martin Disney was buying horses and buying land—a farm of over two hundred acres which would make his property better worth holding—and he had further employed a Plymouth architect to plan an enlargement of the old-fashioned cottage—a new and much more spacious drawing-room, two bedrooms over, a verandah below, and a loggia above. In that mild climate the loggia would afford a pleasant lounge even in winter, and myrtle and roses would speedily cover the wooden columns which sustained the tiled roof. It was to be a homely Italianloggia—unpretentious, and not particularly architectural; but Isola and her sister-in-law were delighted at the idea.
The stables were to be enlarged as well as the house.
“You have no idea how I have hoarded and scraped to lay by money ever since I bought the Nest,” said Disney. “I believe I was the greatest screw in the service all through my last campaign.”
He laughed aloud in amused remembrance of many small sacrifices, while the three heads clustered over the architect’s plan, which had that factitious prettiness of delicate drawing and colour which makes every house so much nearer perfection upon paper than it ever can be in brick and stone.
CHAPTER IX.
“LIES NOTHING BURIED LONG AGO?”
Like most small country settlements, little fraternities of well-to-do people who think themselves the beginning and end of the world, Trelasco was slow to rise to any festivity in the way of party-giving. So it was about two months after Colonel Disney’s return before the friendly calls and interchange of small civilities culminated in a dinner-party at Glenaveril. It seemed, indeed, only right and natural that the great house of the district, great by reason of Lord Lostwithiel’s non-residence, should be the first to open its doors in a ceremonial manner to the colonel and his womankind. The invitation to his sister might be taken as an especial compliment, arms outstretched to receive one who was a stranger in the land.
“We want to know that nice, young sister of yours,” Mr. Crowther said to Colonel Disney, in his patronizing way, as they all came out of church the Sunday before the dinner-party. “A remarkably fine girl.”
The colonel did not thank him for this compliment, which was pronounced in a loud voice, amidst the little knot of acquaintances taking leave of each other on the dip of thehill, where there was a sign-post on a patch of waste grass, and where road and lanes divided, one up the hill to Tywardreath, another to Fowey, and a narrow-wooded lane leading down to Glenaveril and the Angler’s Nest. Short as the distance was, there were carriages waiting for the Crowthers, who never walked to church, however fine the weather. Mrs. Crowther came to the morning service resplendent in a brocade gown and a Parisian bonnet, on pain of being condemned as dowdy by her husband, who liked to put the stamp of his wealth upon every detail. His wife obeyed him with wifely meekness, but the daughters were not so easily ruled. Both were keen-witted enough to feel the vulgarity of Sunday morning splendour. So Belinda worshipped in the exaggerated simplicity of an unstarched jaconet muslin, a yellow Liberty sash, a flopping Gainsborough hat, and a necklace of Indian beads, an attire which attracted every eye, and was a source of wonder to the whole congregation, while Alicia’s neat grey cashmere frock, and smart little toque to match, grey gloves, grey Prayer-book and sunshade, challenged criticism as a study in monochrome.
Mr. Crowther would have lingered for farther conversation before getting into the family landau, but Colonel Disney bade a rather abrupt good morning to the whole group, and hurried his wife and sister down the hill.
“I’m rather sorry we accepted the Glenaveril invitation,” he said to Isola. “The man is such an unmitigated cad.”
“Mrs. Crowther is very kind and good,” replied his wife; “but I have never cared much about going to Glenaveril. I don’t feel that I get on particularly well with the girls. They are both too fine for me. But I should be sorry to offend Mrs. Crowther.”
“Yes, she seems a kindly creature. It was thoughtful of her sending you a ticket for the ball. A woman with daughters is seldom over-kind to outsiders.”
“Oh, I believe Mrs. Crowther’s heart is big enough to be kind to a whole parish.”
“Well, on her account, perhaps it was best to accept the invitation.”
“Don’t be so grand about it, Martin,” said Allegra. “You forget that I am pining to see what a dinner-party in a very rich house is like. I have seen nothing in London but literary and artistic dinners, third-rate literary and third-rate artistic, I’m afraid—but they were very nice, all the same. Glenaveril is a place that takes my breath away; and I am curious to see what a dinner-party can be like there.”
“Then for your sake, Allegra, I’m glad we said yes. Only I couldn’t stand that fellow patronizing you. Calling you a fine girl, forsooth!”
“Yes, it is an odious phrase, is it not? I’m afraid I shall have to live through it, because, like Rosalind, ‘I am more than common tall.’”
She drew herself up to her full height, straight as a reed, but with fully developed bust and shoulders which showed to advantage in her pale tussore gown—silk that her brother had sent her from India. She looked the incarnation of girlish innocence and girlish happiness—a brow without a cloud, a step light as a fawn’s—a fearless, joyous nature. Her more commonplace features and finer figure were in curious contrast with Isola’s pensive beauty and too fragile form. Disney glanced from one to the other as he walked along the rustic lane between them; and, though he thought his wife the lovelier, he regretted that she was not more like his sister.
A man who is very fond of home and who has no professional cares and occupations is apt to degenerate into a molly-coddle. Martin Disney gave an indication of this weakness on the day before the dinner at Glenaveril.
“What are you two girls going to wear?” he asked. “At least, I don’t think I need ask Isola that question. You’ll wear your wedding-gown, of course, love?” he added, turning to his wife.
“No, Martin, I am going to wear my grey silk.”
“Grey! A dowager’s colour, a soured spinster’s colour—a Quaker’s no colour. I detest grey.”
“Oh, but this is a very pretty gown—the palest shade of pearl colour—and I wear pink roses with it. It was made in Paris. I feel sure you will like me in it, Martin,” Isola said hurriedly, as if even this small matter fluttered her nerves.
“Not as well as I like you in your wedding-gown. That was made in Paris, and it fitted you like a glove. I never saw such a pretty gown—so simple, yet so elegant.”
“I have been married much too long to dress as a bride.”
“You shall not seem as a bride—except to me. For my eyes only shall you shine in bridal loveliness. Bride or no bride, what can be prettier for a young woman than a white satin gown with a long train? You can wear some touch of colour to show you have not got yourself up as a bride. What do you say, Allegra? Give us your opinion. Of course you are an authority upon dress.”
“Oh, the white satin, by all means. Isola looks ethereal in white. She ought hardly ever to wear anything else.”
“You hear, Isa. Two to one against you.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be governed by your opinions in this instance. You forget that I last wore my gown at a ball. I danced a good deal—the floor was dirty—the gown was spoilt. I shall never wear it again. I hope that will satisfy you, Martin.”
She spoke with a touch of temper, her cheeks flushed crimson, and her eyes filled with sudden tears as she looked deprecatingly at her husband. Martin Disney felt himself a brute.
“My dearest, I didn’t mean to tease you,” he said; “wear anything you like. You are sure to be the prettiest woman in the room. I am sorry the gown was spoilt; but it can’t be helped. I’ll buy you another white satin gown the first time you and I are in Plymouth together. And, pray, Miss Allegra, what bravery will you sport?”
“I have only a white lace frock that has seen some service,” replied his sister, meekly. “I dare say I shall look like somebody’s poor relation at such a place as Glenaveril.”
“Oh, it’s not to be a grand party, by any means. Mrs. Crowther told me she had asked the Baynhams and the Vicarage people to meet us, just in a friendly way.”
The party was decidedly small, for on arriving with reasonable punctuality the Disneys found only one guest on the scene, in the person of Mr. Colfox, the curate, who was sitting by one of the little tables, showing a new puzzle of two pieces of interlinked iron to the two Misses Crowther. These young ladies were so interested in the trick of disentanglement that they scarcely noticed the entrance of their mother’s guests, and only rose and came over to greet the party three minutes later, as an afterthought.
Mr. and Mrs. Crowther, however, were both upon the alert to receive their friends, the lady frankly cordial, the gentleman swelling with pompous friendliness, as if his manly breast were trying to emerge from the moderate restriction of a very open waistcoat. He protested that he was charmed to welcome Colonel Disney to Glenaveril, and he glanced round the splendid walls as who should say, “It is no light thing to invite people to such a house as this.”
Vansittart Crowther was a man of short, squat figure, who tried to make up for the want of inches by extreme uprightness, and had cultivated this carriage until he seemed incapable of bending. He had a bald head, disguised by one dappled streak of grey and sandy hair, which was plastered into a curl on each side of his brow—curls faintly suggestive of a cat’s ears. He had blunt features, a sensual lip, and dull, fishy eyes, large and protuberant, with an expression in perfect harmony with the heavy, sensual mouth.
Mr. and Mrs. Baynham were the next arrivals; the lady wearing the family amethysts and the well-known black velvet, under whose weighty splendour she arrived short of breath; the gentleman expansive of shirt front, and genial of aspect, jovial at the prospect of a good dinner and choice wines, and not hypercritical as to the company in which he ate the feast. He shook hands with his host and hostess,and then went over to the Misses Crowther, who had not thought it necessary to suspend their absorbing occupation in order to welcome the village doctor’s wife—a fact which Mrs. Baynham observed and inwardly resented.
Mr. Colfox deserted the young ladies, still puzzling over the two bits of iron, and went across the room to greet the Disneys. He was an intelligent young man, steeped to the lips in the opinions and the prejudices of university life—Oxford life, that is to say. He ranked as a literary man in Trelasco, on the strength of having had an article almost published in Blackwood. “The editor had accepted my paper,” he told people modestly; “but on further consideration he found it was a little too long, and so, in point of fact, he sent it back to me in the most courteous manner. He couldn’t have acted more kindly—but I was disappointed. It would have been such an opening, you see.”
All Mr. Colfox’s friends agreed that with such an opening the high road to literary fame and fortune would have been made smooth for his feet. They respected him even for this disappointment. To have been accepted by Blackwood made him almost a colleague of George Eliot.
He was a tall and rather lean young man, who wore an eye-glass, and seemed to live upon books. It was irritating to Vansittart Crowther, who prided himself on his cellar and his cook, to note how little impression food and drink made upon Francis Colfox.
“He takes my Château Yquem as if it were Devonshire cider,” said the aggrieved parvenu, “and he hardly seems to know that this is the only house where he ever sees clear turtle. The man’s people must have lived in a very poor way.”
In spite of this contemptuous opinion, Mr. Crowther was always polite to Francis Colfox, and had even thought of him as apis-allerfor one of his daughters. There is hardly anything in this life which a self-made man respects so much as race, and Francis Colfox belonged to an old county family, had a cousin who was an earl, and another cousin who wastalked of as a probable bishop. He was, therefore, allowed to make himself very much at home at Glenaveril, and to speak his mind in a somewhat audacious way to the whole family.
Captain Pentreath, an army man of uncertain age, a bachelor, and one of a territorial family of many brothers, came next; and then appeared the vicar and his wife and one daughter, who made up the party. The vicar was deaf, but amiable, and beamed benevolently upon a world about whose spoken opinions he knew so little that he might naturally have taken it for a much better world than it is. The vicar’s wife spent her existence in interpreting and explaining people’s speech to the vicar, and had no time to spare for opinions of her own. The daughter was characterized by a gentle nullity, tempered by a somewhat enthusiastic and evangelical piety. The chief desire of her life was to keep the Church as it had been in the days of her childhood, nearly thirty years before.
It was the first time the Disneys had dined together at Glenaveril, so it seemed only proper that Mr. Crowther should give his arm to Isola, which he did with an air of conferring an honour. The colonel had been ordered to take the vicar’s wife, and the doctor was given to Allegra; Captain Pentreath took Miss Trequite, the vicar’s daughter; Mr. Colfox followed with Mrs. Baynham, and the daughters of the house went modestly to the dining-room after the vicar and Mrs. Crowther.
The dinner-table was as pretty as roses and Venetian glass could make it. There was no pompous display of ponderous plate, as there might have been thirty years ago on a parvenu’s board. Everybody is enlightened nowadays. The great “culture” movement has been as widespread among the middle class as compulsory education among the proletariat, and everybody has “a taste.” Scarcely were they seated, when Mr. Crowther informed Mrs. Disney that he hated a display of silver, but at the same time took care to let her know that the Venetian glass she admired was rather morevaluable than that precious metal. “And if it’s broken, there’s nothing left you for your outlay,” he said; “but it’s a fancy of my wife and girls. Those decanters are better than anything Salviati ever made for Royalty.”
The table was oval, lighted by one large lamp, under an umbrella-shaped amber shade, a lamp which diffused a faint golden glow through the dusky room; and through this dreamy dimness the footmen moved like ghosts, while the table and the faces of the diners shone and sparkled in the brilliant light. It was as picturesque a dining-room and table as one need care to see; and if the Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, which here and there relieved the sombre russet of the Cordovan leather hangings, were not the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Crowther’s ancestors, they were not the less lovely or interesting as works of art.
Isola sat by her host’s side, with a silent and somewhat embarrassed air, which her husband noted as he watched her from the other side of the table.
All the decorations were low, so that no pyramid of fruit or flowers intervened to prevent a man watching the face opposite to him. Disney saw that while Allegra, in her place between Mr. Baynham and Alicia Crowther, was full of talk and animation, Isola sat with downcast eyes, and replied with a troubled look to her host’s remarks. There was something in that gentleman’s manner which was particularly obnoxious to the colonel—a protecting air, a fatherly familiarity, which brought the bald, shining forehead almost in contact with Isola’s shoulder, as the man bent to whisper and to titter in the very ear of his neighbour.
The colonel got through a little duty talk with Mrs. Trequite, whose attention was frequently distracted by the necessity of explaining Mrs. Crowther’s polite murmurs to the vicar on the other side of the table; and this duty done he gave himself up to watching Isola and her host. Why did she blush so when the man talked to her? Was it the bold admiration of those fishy eyes which annoyed her, or the man’s manner altogether; or was it anything that hesaid? Disney strained his ears to hear their conversation, if that could be called conversation which was for the most part monologue.
The man was talking of the Hunt Ball of last winter. Disney heard such snatches of speech as “the prettiest woman in the room,” “everybody said so,” “Lostwithiel was evidentlyépris.”
Mr. Crowther had a penchant for scraps of French, which decorated his speech as truffles adorn a boned turkey.
“Isn’t it odd that he should be such a rover?” he asked, in a less confidential tone than before.
Isola looked up at him, as if hardly understanding the question.
“I mean Lostwithiel. With such a nice place as he has here, it seems a pity to be broiling himself in Peru. I never could understand the taste for orchids; and in his case—well, I hardly believe in it. He is the last man to emulate a Hooker or a Lawrence. Orchid-hunting must be an excuse for keeping away from England, I take it. Don’t you think so, now, Mrs. Disney?”
“I really don’t know.”
“You don’t know why he should want to keep away? No, no more does anybody else. Only we all wonder, don’t you know. He talked to me of settling down in the county—looking after the estate a little. He even hinted that he might, in due course, cast about for a nice young wife—with a little money. And then all of a sudden off he sails in that rakish yacht of his, and roves from port to port like the Flying Dutchman in the Opera, till at last we hear of him on the coast of Peru. Curious, ain’t it, Mrs. Disney?”
“Why curious?” asked Isola, coldly. “Was not Lord Lostwithiel always fond of yachting?”
“No doubt; but when a man talks of settling down in his native place—and then doesn’t do it—there must be a reason, mustn’t there?”
“I don’t know. People act as often from caprice as from reason.”
“Ah, that is a lady’s idea. No man who is worthy the name ever acts from caprice,” said Mr. Crowther, with his insinuating air, as if some hidden meaning were in the words, and then looking across the table and seeing the colonel’s watchful face, he altered both tone and manner as he added, “Of course you know Lostwithiel, Colonel Disney?”
“I saw a good deal of Lord Lostwithiel when he was a small boy,” answered the colonel, coldly. “His father was one of my early friends. But that is a long time ago.”
“How old is he, do you say?”
“Debrett will answer that question better than I can. I have never reckoned the years that have gone by since I saw him in an Eton collar.”
The men did not sit long over their wine. The doctor and his host talked agriculture, Mr. Crowther discussing all farming operations upon a large scale as became a man of territorial magnitude. The vicar prosed about an approaching lecture at the schoolroom, and utterly failed in hearing anything that was said in reply to his observations. Colonel Disney smoked a cigarette in silence, and with a moody brow.
Later, in the drawing-room, while the Crowther girls were playing a clamorous duet, by the last fashionable Sclavonic composer, Vansittart Crowther directed his conversation almost wholly to Mrs. Disney, as if she were the only person worthy of his attention. He was full of suggestions for future gaieties in which the Disneys were to share—picnics, boating parties.
“You must help us to wake up the neighbourhood, colonel,” he said, addressing Disney, with easy friendliness.
“We are not very likely to be of much assistance to you in that line,” Disney answered coldly. “We are quiet stay-at-home people, my wife and I, and take our pleasures on a very small scale.”
Colonel Disney’s carriage was announced at this moment. He gave his wife a look which plainly indicated his wish to depart, and she rose quickly from the low, deep chair in which she had been sitting, in some manner a captive, whileMr. Crowther lolled across the broad, plush-cushioned arm to talk to her. Allegra was engrossed in a talk about William Morris’s last poem with Mr. Colfox, who was delighted to converse with any one fresh from the far-away world of art and literature—delighted altogether with Allegra, whose whole being presented a piquant contrast to the Miss Crowthers. But the colonel’s sister saw the movement towards departure, and hastened to her brother’s side. Briefest adieux followed, and the first of the guests being gone, left behind them a feeling of uneasiness in those whose carriages had been ordered half an hour later. One premature departure will cast a blight upon your small dull party; whereas from a scene of real mirth the nine Muses and three Graces might all slip away unmissed and unobserved.
CHAPTER X.
“OF THE WEAK MY HEART IS WEAKEST.”
“You had better send cards to Mrs. Crowther, Isola,” said Martin Disney, two days afterwards, when his wife was sitting at her Davenport writing her family letters.
“Cards! Oh, Martin, she would think that so very formal. I can call upon her. She is always at home on Thursday afternoons, and she likes me to go.”
“I am sorry for that, since I had rather you should never enter her house again.”
“Martin!”
“I have nothing to say against Mrs. Crowther, my dear Isola. But the man is more detestable than I could have believed low birth and unlimited money could make any man. Guileless and inexperienced as you are, I think you must have felt that his manner to you the other night was familiar to the point of being insulting.”
Isola had felt both embarrassed and distressed by her host’s attentions—the insinuating inflections of his fat, pompous voice; his air of being upon a confidential footing with her.It had seemed to her on that evening as if for the first time in her life, before the eyes of men and women, she drank the cup of shame. She had said no word to her husband of Mr. Crowther’s oppressive familiarity, and she had fondly hoped that the matter had escaped his notice.
She sat before him now, flushed and agitated, with lowered eyelids, and one hand restlessly moving about the papers on her blotting-pad.
“My dearest, there is nothing in all this to distress you,” said Disney, with infinite gentleness. “It is not your fault that the man is a cad; but it would be my fault if I were to allow you or Allegra to go to his house again.”
“He was not rude to Allegra.”
“No; it would be her turn next, perhaps. He did not mean to be rude to you. He only wanted to be especially polite in his own odious fashion. There are men in that class who cannot behave decently to a pretty woman, or civilly to a plain one. He meant no doubt to gratify you by his compliments. What a stress he laid upon Lostwithiel’s attention to you at the ball. Were his attentions so very marked?”
“Oh no; not more to me than to others,” Isola answered quickly. “He danced a good many times—twice or three times—with Belinda Crowther. Everybody noticed them as the handsomest couple in the room; not that he is handsome, of course—only tall and distinguished-looking.”
Allegra came running in from the garden, and broke the thread of the conversation. Isola put the visiting-cards into an envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Vansittart Crowther. She felt that the kindly matron would be puzzled and vexed at this ceremony, from a young person towards whom she had assumed so motherly a tone, urging her to run over to Glenaveril at any hour of the day—asking her to lunch or to tea at least once a week—wanting to take her for drives to Lostwithiel, or railway jaunts to Plymouth.
Isola was not mistaken, for Mrs. Crowther called three or four days afterwards and upbraided her for sending the cards.
“You might have all come to tea on Thursday, if you had been good-natured,” she said. “Mr. Colfox read us a poem by Swinburne, out of one of the new magazines—there are so many nowadays that I never remember which is which. Belinda was delighted with it—but Alicia and I can’t rise to her height. Mr. Colfox reads poetry beautifully. You can’t judge of his powers by only hearing him read the lessons,” added Mrs. Crowther, as if the English Bible were a poor thing.
She stopped an hour, praised Isola’s tea-making and the new cook’s tea-cakes, asked a great many questions about Allegra’s ideas and occupations, and was as hearty, and simple, and friendly, and natural as if she had been a duchess.
It grieved Isola to be obliged to refuse an invitation to luncheon, most cordially pressed upon her and Allegra.
“I would drive you both to Lostwithiel after lunch, and we could do our little bit of shopping and then have a cup of tea at the Talbot while the horses had their mouths washed out, and I’d show you the room where your brother’s wife was so much admired last year, Miss Leland, and where I hope you’ll have many a good dance next winter. Now the ice is broken we mean to go on with our balls, I can tell you. Indeed, my girls are thinking of trying to get up a tennis-club ball about the end of September.”
This was the last time Mrs. Vansittart Crowther appeared in a friendly manner at the Angler’s Nest, for after two or three further invitations—to a picnic—to tea—to lunch—had been declined, in most gracious little notes from Isola, that good lady perceived that there was some kind of barrier to friendly intercourse between her and Colonel Disney’s wife, and she told herself with some touch of honest middle-class dignity that if Martin Disney was proud she could be proud too, and that she would make no further offer of friendship which was undesired.
“I suppose he thinks because he comes of a good old family, while we have made our money in trade, that we are not quite good enough to associate with his wife and sister,”she said to her daughters. “I thought he was too much of a gentleman to have such a petty feeling.”
“How innocent you are, mother,” cried Alicia, contemptuously; “can’t you see that they are all bursting with envy? That was what made the colonel so gloomy and disagreeable the night of our little dinner. He was vexed to see things done with as good taste as in a nobleman’s house. It cuts these poor gentilities to the quick to see that. They don’t much mind our being rich, if we will only be vulgar and uneducated. But when we have the impertinence to be as well up in the ways of good society as they are themselves, they can’t forgive us. Good taste in a parvenu is the unforgivable sin.”
“Well, I don’t know,” mused Mrs. Crowther, sadly. “I’m sure there’s neither pride nor envy in Isola, and Miss Leland looks a frank, straightforward girl, above all foolish nonsense; so it must be the colonel’s fault that they’ve cut us.”
“Cut us!” echoed Belinda; “the Angler’s Nest cutting Glenaveril is rather too absurd an idea.”
“My dear, you don’t know the importance Cornish people attach to old family—and the Disneys are a very old family—and no one can deny that he is a gentleman, though we don’t like him.”
“Oh, no doubt he considers that he belongs to the landed gentry. He has bought Rowe’s farm, two hundred and sixty acres. He had forty to begin with, so he is now lord of three hundred acres, just half our home farm.”
“His cousin, Sir Luke Disney, has a large estate near Marazion,” said Mrs. Crowther, meekly.
“Yes, but we don’t reckon a man’s importance by his cousin’s estate. Colonel Disney is only a squatter in this part of the country.”
Alicia pronounced the word with gusto. It had been whispered to her that the squire of Fowey had spoken of her father—who counted his acres by thousands—as a squatter. That unimpeachable importance, founded uponthe established respectability of bygone centuries—centuries in which men wore armour and women breakfasted on beef and ale—was not to be bought with gold and silver, and the want of it often made the Miss Crowthers angry. Diamonds they could have, and land, art, and beauty, even the ways and manners of good society, but they could not buy themselves a history. Everybody knew that their splendours had all come out of a cloth mill, that their ingots had been in some part transmuted from pestiferous woollen rags gathered in the Jewish quarters of far-off cities, ground into shoddy, and anon issued to the world as sleek superfine cloth. The more shoddy the higher interest upon capital; and Vansittart Crowther’s daughters knew too many of the secrets of the mills to be proud of the source of their prosperity.
Mrs. Crowther was sorry to lose Isola as a friend andprotégée. Her daughters were furious at the slight implied in this gradual dropping away. They passed Mrs. Disney and her sister-in-law with their noses in the air, as they went from the church-porch to their carriage. They cut them ostentatiously if they met on the quiet country roads. Mrs. Crowther would still stop to speak and shake hands, albeit she urged no further invitations.
And while the gulf widened between the great house and the small one the glorious Cornish summer waned, and slowly, slowly, melted away, lingering very late in that fair western land, which was full of flowers even when the home counties were being withered and blackened by the first frosts. At last came winter, and the gradual turn of the year; short days slowly lengthening out by leisurely sunsets; pale snowdrops glimmering in the borders; and then the gold of crocuses and the bright blue of the Siberian bell-flower in patches of vivid colour; and then hyacinths and tulips, primroses on every bank, narcissus and jonquil in every garden; and by-and-by the full glory of bluebell and hawthorn blossom. And anon in the middle of May came an event in which all the interests of Colonel Disney’s life seemed to culminate. In that balmy Maytime Isola’s firstborn soncame into the world, and Isola’s young life hovered at the gate of death, in so terrible an uncertainty that Martin Disney’s hair grew grey while he awaited the issue of the contest between youth and weakness.
For more than a week after the birth of her baby Isola’s condition had satisfied the trained nurse and the kindly doctor. She was very white and weak, and she showed less interest in her baby than most young mothers—a fact which Mr. Baynham ascribed to over-education.
“The young women of the present day aren’t half such good mothers as those I used to attend when I began practice,” he said discontentedly. “Their heads are stuffed with poetry, and such-like. They’re nervous and fanciful—and the upshot of it all is that babies have to be wet-nursed or brought up by hand. If I had the government of a model state I wouldn’t allow any married woman the run of a library until she had reared the last of her babies. What does a young married woman want with book-learning? She ought to have enough to do to look after her husband and her nursery.”
Before the baby son was a fortnight old, fever supervened, and Isola’s state gave poor Mr. Baynham the keenest anxiety. A hospital nurse was sent for to assist the established custodian; and a great authority was brought over from Plymouth to approve the village doctor’s treatment, and to make a trifling alteration in a prescription, substituting bromide of sodium for bromide of potassium.
Many days and nights of delirium followed the physician’s visit, a period in which the patient was watched at every hour of the day and night; and one of the most constant watchers through all that dreary time was Martin Disney. It was in vain that Allegra and the nurses urged him to consider his own health. He would consent only to leave the sick-room for briefest intervals of rest. Day after day, night after night, he sat in the same chair—an old-fashioned armchair, with projecting sides, which almost hid him from the patient—beside the bed. He was never in the way of thenurse. He was always helpful when a man’s help was needed. He was so quiet that it was impossible to object to his presence. He sat there like a statue of patience. No moan escaped his pallid lips; no tear stole down his haggard cheek. He sat and watched and waited for the issue, which was to make him happy, or desolate for ever.
All his future was involved in that issue. He looked with a faint smile upon the pink little baby face, when they brought his son to him. No one would have dared to suggest that he should take care of himself and be comforted for that little one’s sake. They all knew that his firstborn was as nothing to him. All his hopes and all his fears were centred in the wife who lay upon yonder bed, with glassy eyes and babbling lips, a wanderer in a world full of torturing images—fountains of bubbling water which she longed to drink—great black serpents, which came crawling in at the window, and creeping nearer, nearer to her bed—wriggling, hideous forms that hemmed her in on every side—giant staircases that she was always trying to climb—mammoth caves in which she lost herself, fifty times bigger and more awful than those serpentine caverns near the Lizard, which she and Allegra had explored in the previous autumn—steeper, stonier than the tall cliffs and pinnacled rocks above Bedruthan sands.
Day after day, night after night, Martin Disney sat in his place and listened to those ravings of a mind distraught. He could not keep himself from trying to follow her in that labyrinth of disconnected fancies—visions of shapeless horror, trouble, confusion—a wild babbling of numbers, prattling of millions, billions, trillions—as if her days of health and sense had been spent in the calculations of a Rothschild, she who could scarcely reckon the simplest account in a tradesman’s book.
What had she to do with this torturing recital of thousands and millions, this everlasting heaping up of figures?
Then at another period of that long struggle between life and death, reason and unreason, she had a ghastly vision of twochildren, squatting on each side of her bed, one living, the other dead, a grisly child with throat cut from ear to ear. Again and again she implored them to take away those babies—the dead child whose horrid aspect froze her blood—the living child that grinned and made faces at her.
Once and once only during that season of delirium the elder of her nurses carried the baby to her bedside, the tiny form in snowy cambric and lace, a little roseate face, on which the first glimmer of intelligence was already dawning, sweet blue eyes that smiled at the light, rosebud lips that invited kisses. The nurse took the infant to the side of the bed, and asked the young mother to look at him. Those fever-bright eyes stared at the sweet small face with a gaze of ever-growing horror, and then with a wild shriek Isola clasped her hands before her eyes, and drew herself cowering to the further side of the bed.
“The dead child!” she cried. “Why do you show me that dead child? Don’t you see his throat streaming with blood?”
It was a case in which the nurses had no easy duty by day or night; and there were times when Disney insisted that the night-nurse should have extra rest, while he kept guard.
“But if she should be very bad, sir, you might not be able to manage.”
“Oh yes, I should. My sister is a very light sleeper. She would come to me in a moment, and she has a great deal of influence with my wife.”
This was true. From the beginning of evil Allegra’s presence had exercised a soothing power. She had been able to lull the patient to sleep sometimes, when opiates had failed to produce even fitful slumber. Isola was calmer and less restless when her sister-in-law was by her side.
In those long night watches, sometimes in solitude, Martin Disney had ample leisure in which to ponder upon his wedded life, and to consider how far the hopes with which he had entered upon that life had been realized. The retrospect left him melancholy, and with a latent sense of loss and disappointment; and yet he told himself again and again that he did ill to be dissatisfied, that Providence had dealt kindly with him.
At five and forty years of age, he, Martin Disney, of modest fortune and social status, and of no especial claim to be admired, intellectual or physical, had won the hand of a lovely and interesting girl. He had been so bewildered and overcome by the delight of his conquest, that he had entered upon no laborious process of self-examination before he took to himself this fair and winning partner. It had been enough for him that she came to him willingly, lovingly, in all truth and girlish simplicity, loyal as she was pure. He had never asked himself could such an attachment last—on her side? It had been enough for him that the love existed. It would be his duty and his delight to strengthen the bond, to draw that fair spirit into closer union with his own. He had felt no shadow of fear for the future. Once having won her, it must be easy to keep his treasure—easy for him who would so faithfully guard and cherish this priceless gift of a benign Providence. He was a man of deep religious feeling—a man who recognized in good and evil, in joy and in sorrow, the dealings of an Almighty God with His short-sighted creatures. He accepted his happiness in fear and trembling, knowing the instability of all mortal joys; but he had never feared the loss of Isola’s love.