Yet now, sitting in the deep of night beside that bed which might be the bed of death, he told himself that his wife’s love was lost to him, had been lost from the hour of his return to Trelasco, when he went back to her with all the enthusiasm of a lover, forgetful of his mature years, of his long experience of life—hard fighting, hard knocks of all kinds in the great life-battle.He had gone back to her as Leander to Hero, a boy in heart and hopefulness; and what had he found in her? A placid, obedient wife, gentle almost to apathy, but with a strain of melancholy underlying all their relations which his devoted love could not conquer.To all his interrogations her answer had been the same. She was not unhappy. She had everything in life that she desired. There was nothing that he could give her, no possible change in their existence which could add to her content. All this should mean domestic peace, a heart at ease; yet all this was unsatisfying to Martin Disney; for his instinct told him that his wife was not happy—that the element of gladness was, for some inscrutable reason, banished from her life.She had seemed happier, or at least the little home had been brighter and gayer after Allegra’s coming; but as the time wore on it became clear to him that the life and gaiety were all in Allegra herself, and that Isola was spiritless and depressed. It was as if the spring of her life had snapped suddenly, and left her nerveless and joyless, a submissive, unhopeful creature. That sense of disappointment and loss which he had dimly felt, even when his home-coming had been a new thing, had grown and deepened with the passage of time. He had bought his land; he had added to the space and comfort of his house; he had enlarged the stables, and bought a couple of hunters, and a cob for harness; and while these things had been doing, the activity of his days, the fuss and labour of arrangement and supervision, had occupied his mind so pleasantly as to stifle those growing doubts for the time being. But when all was done; when the vine and the figtree had been planted, and he sat down to take his ease in their shade, then he began to feel very keenly that his wife’s part in all that he had done was the part of submission only. She liked this or that because he liked it. She was content, and that was all. And the line between contentment and resignation is so faint a demarcation that it seemed to him sometimes as if she were only resigned, as if she suffered life rather than lived—suffered life as holy women suffer some slow, wasting disease, in meek subjection to a mysterious decree.He sat beside her bed, while she battled with all the demons of delirium; and he wondered whether—when she had beenat her best, when her mind had been brightest and clearest—she had been any nearer to him than she was now in her madness; whether he had known any more of her inner self—the mystery of her heart and conscience—than he knew now, while those wild eyes stared at him without sight or knowledge.One summer morning, as he sat alone in his watch in that dull interval between darkness and dawn, the visions of the wandering mind took a more consecutive form than usual. She fancied herself in a storm at sea. The waves were rolling mountains high—were bearing down upon her with threatenings of instant death. She feared, and yet she courted the danger. In one minute she was recoiling from the wild rush of waters, clinging distractedly to the brass rail at the head of her bed, crouching against the wall as if to save herself from an advancing wave; and in the next minute she sprang out of bed, and rushed to the open window, wanting to throw herself out of it. Disney was only just quick enough to seize her in his arms, and carry her back to bed. He held her there, battling with him in a vehement effort to escape from his restraining arms.“Why do you stop me?” she cried, looking at him fiercely with her distracted eyes. “What else is there for me? What other refuge? what other hope? Let me go! let me go! Cruel! cruel! cruel! Let me throw myself into the sea! Don’t you understand? Oh, cruel! cruel! Cold and wicked, shameless and cruel! There is nothing else—only that refuge left! Let me hide myself in death! let me hide—hide!”Her voice rose to a shriek; and both the nurse and Allegra came hurrying in. The faint white dawn shone upon her livid face and on the scarlet spot upon each hollow cheek. Her eyes stared wildly, starting from their sockets in that paroxysm of her madness.Only a few days after that night of terror Isola was lying calm as a child. The fever had gone down—the enfeebled constitution had at last answered to the influence of medicine;and gradually, like the slow lifting of the darkness after a long night of cloud and fog, consciousness and reason came back. Sleep soothed the strained and weary nerves, and the exhausted frame, which a few days before had seemed endowed with a superhuman strength, lay like a log upon the bed of sickness.Recovery was slow, but there was no relapse. Slow as the dawning of day to the tired watcher, after the long, blank night, there came the dawn of maternal love. The young mother began to take delight in her child; and it was rapture to Martin Disney to see her sitting opposite him under the tulip-tree, in the low Madeira chair, with her baby in her lap. Allegra vied with her in her devotion to that over-praised infant; while the Shah and Tim, of the same opinion for the first time in their lives, were almost rabid with jealousy.They all lived in the garden in that happy summer season, as they had done the year before, when Allegra first came among them. It was in the garden they received their visitors, and it was there that Mr. Colfox came at least thrice a week, upon the flimsiest pretexts of parish business, to drink tea poured out for him by Allegra’s helpful hands, while Isola sat quietly by, listening to their talk, and watching every change in her child’s face; from smiles to frowns, from slumber to waking.Allegra had taken kindly to parish work, and, in Mr. Colfox’s own phraseology, was a tower of strength to him in his labours among the poor of Trelasco. She had started a series of mothers’ meetings in the winter afternoons, and had read to the women and girls while they worked, helping them a good deal with their work into the bargain. She had done wonders at penny readings, singing, reciting, drawing lightning caricatures of local celebrities with bits of coloured chalk on rough white paper. Her portrait of Vansittart Crowther had been applauded to the echo, although it was not a flattering portrait. She had visited the sick; she had taught in the night school. The curatehad been enthusiastic in his appreciation of her, and his praises had been listened to contemptuously by the two Miss Crowthers, each of whom at different periods had taken up these good works, only to drop them again after the briefest effort.“She will get tired as soon as we did,” said Alicia, “when she finds out how impossible these creatures are—unless she has an ulterior motive.”“What ulterior motive should she have?” asked Colfox, bluntly.“Who can tell? She may want to get herself talked about. As Miss Leland, of the Angler’s Nest, a sort of useful companion to her brother’s wife, she is a nobody. If she can get a reputation for piety and philanthropy, that will be better than nothing. Or she may be only angling for a husband.”“If you knew her as well as I do you would know that she is above all trivial and selfish motives, and that she is good to these people because her heart has gone out to them.”“Ah, but you see we don’t know her. Her brother has chosen to hold himself aloof from Glenaveril; and I must say I am very glad he has taken that line—for more than one reason.”“If any of your reasons concern Miss Leland you are very much mistaken in under-rating her. You could not have had a more delightful companion,” said Mr. Colfox, with some warmth.“Oh, we all know that you have exalted her into a heroine—a St. John’s Wood St. Helena. But she is a little too unconventional for my taste; though I certainly would rather be intimate with her than with her sister-in-law.”“Surely you have no fault to find with that most gentle creature?”“She is just a little too gentle for my taste,” replied Alicia, who usually took upon herself all expression of opinion, while Belinda fanned herself languidly, in an æstheticattitude, feeling that her chief mission in this life was to sit still and look likela belle dame sans merci. “She is just as much too quiet as Miss Leland is too boisterous. I have no liking for pensive young women who cast down their eyelids at the slightest provocation, and are only animated when they are flirting.”“The tongue is a little member,” quoted Mr. Colfox, taking up his hat, and holding out his hand in adieu.He was very unceremonious to these fair parishioners of his, and talked to them as freely as if he had been an old French Abbé in a country village. It is needless to say that they valued his opinion so much the more because he was entirely unaffected by their wealth or their good looks. They were naturally aggrieved at his marked admiration for Miss Leland.Those ripe months of harvest and vintage, July, August, and September, passed like a blissful dream for Martin Disney. He had snatched his darling from the jaws of death. He had her once more—fair to look upon, with sweet, smiling mouth and pensive eyes; and she was so tender and so loving to him, in fond gratitude for his devotion during her illness, so seemingly happy in their mutual love for their child, that he forgot all those aching fears which had gnawed his heart while he sat by her pillow through the long anxious nights—forgot that he had ever doubted her, or remembered his doubts only to scorn himself as a morbid, jealous fool. Could he doubt her, who was candour and innocence personified? Could he think for an instant that all those sweet, loving ways and looks of hers which beautified his commonplace existence, were so much acting—and that her heart was not his? No! True love has an unmistakable language; and true love spoke to him in every word and tone of his wife’s.The child made so close a bond between them. Both lives were seemingly bound and entwined about this fragile life of Isola’s firstborn. Mr. Baynham had no reason now to complain of his patient’s want of the maternal instinct.He had rather to restrain her in her devotion to the child. He had to reprove her for her sleepless nights and morbid anxieties.“Do you think your baby will grow any the faster or stronger for your lying awake half the night worrying yourself about him?” said the doctor, with his cheery bluntness. “He has a capital nurse—one of those excellent cow-women, who are specially created to rear other people’s babies; and he has a doctor who is not quite a fool about infant maladies. Read your novels, Mrs. Disney, and keep up your good looks; or else twenty years hence you will see your son blushing when he hears his mother mistaken for his grandmother.”After giving his patient this advice, Mr. Baynham told his wife, in confidence, that were anything to happen to the little one, Isola Disney would go off her head.“I’m afraid she is sadly hysterical,” replied Mrs. Baynham. “I am very fond of her, you know, Tom; but I have never been able to understand her. I can’t make out a young woman who has a pretty house and an indulgent husband, and who never seems quite happy.”“Every woman can’t have your genial disposition, Belle,” answered the doctor, admiringly. “Perpetual sunshine is the rarest thing in Nature.”The early western harvest had been gathered in. Upland and valley in that undulating land were clothed with the tawny hue of the stubble. Here and there the plough horses were moving slowly along the red ridges on the steep hillside. No touch of frost had dulled the rich hues of the autumnal flowers, and the red carnations still glowed in every cottage garden, while the pale pink trusses of hydrangea filled all the shrubberies with beauty. A keener breath came up at eventide from the salt sea beyond Point Neptune, and wilder winds crept across the inland valleys with the on-coming of night. Summer and the swallows were gone. October, a balmy season for the most part, was at hand;and there were no more tea-drinkings and afternoon gossipings in the garden at the Angler’s Nest. The lamps were lighted before dinner. The evenings were spent in the old library and the new drawing-room, the new room communicating with the old one by a curtained archway, so that of a night the curtains could be drawn back and Martin Disney could sit among his books by the fireplace in the library, and yet be within conversational reach of Isola and Allegra in the drawing-room, where they had piano and table-easel, work-baskets, and occupations of all kinds.Mr. Colfox sometimes dropped in of an evening, on parish business of course, took a cup of coffee, listened while Allegra played one of Mozart’s sonatas or sang a song by Gluck or Haydn or Handel. Mr. Colfox was not one of the advanced people who despise Mozart or Handel. Nor did he look down upon Haydn. Indeed, he sat and stroked his thin legs with a sheepish appreciation, wrinkling up his loose trousers, and showing a large amount of stocking, while Allegra sang “My mother bids me bind my hair,” in her clear, strong mezzo-soprano, which was of infinite use to him in his choir.He told everybody that Martin Disney’s was an ideal household—a home into which it was a privilege to be admitted.“I feel as if I never knew the beauty of domestic life till I knew the Angler’s Nest,” he said one evening after dinner at Glenaveril, when he and the village doctor had accepted one of Mr. Crowther’s pressing invitations to what he called “pot-luck,” the pot-luck of the man whose spirit burns within him at the thought of his hundred-guinea cook, and whose pride is most intolerable when it apes humility.“Really, now,” said Mr. Crowther, “you surprise me, for I have always fancied there was a screw loose there.”“What does that expression imply, Mr. Crowther?” asked the curate, coldly.“Oh, I don’t know! Nothing specific: only one’s notion of an ideal home doesn’t generally take the shape of a beautiful girl of twenty married to a man of forty-five. The disparity is just twice as much as it ought to be.”“Upon my soul,” cried the curate, “I don’t believe that wedded love is affected by any difference of years. Desdemona loved Othello, who was a man of mature age——”“And black,” interrupted Mr. Crowther, with a coarse laugh. “Well, let us be thankful that Colonel Disney is not a nigger; and that there is so much the less danger of a burst-up at the Angler’s Nest. And now, Baynham, with regard to this footpath across the wood, who the deuce will be injured if I shut it up?”“A good many people, and the people I think you would least like to injure,” answered the doctor, sturdily. “Old people, and feeble, ailing people, who find the walk to church quite far enough even with the help of that short cut.”“Short cut be hanged!” cried Mr. Crowther, helping himself to a bumper of port, and passing on the decanter with hospitable emphasis. “It can’t make a difference of a hundred yards.”“It does make a difference of over a quarter of a mile—and the proof is that everybody uses it, and that it goes by the name of the Church path. I wouldn’t try to stop it, if I were you, Mr. Crowther. You are a popular man in the parish, for you—well, you have spent a heap of money in this place, and you subscribe liberally to all our charities and what not; but, I don’t mind telling you, if you were to try and shut off that old footpath across your wood, you’d be about the most unpopular man within a radius of ten miles.”“Don’t talk about trying to shut it off, man,” said Mr. Crowther, arrogantly. “If I choose to lock the gates to-morrow, I shall do it, and ask nobody’s leave. The wood is my wood, and there’s no clause in my title-deeds as to any right of way through it; and I don’t see why I am to have my hazel bushes pulled about, and my chestnut trees damaged by a pack of idle boys, under the pretence of church-going. There’s the Queen’s highway for ’em, d—n ’em!” cried Mr. Crowther, growing more insolent, as he gulped his fifth glass of Sandemann. “If that ain’t goodenough, let ’em go to the Ranters’ Chapel at the other end of the village.”“I thought you were a staunch Conservative, Mr. Crowther, and an upholder of Church and State,” said Mr. Colfox. “Am I to believe my ears when I hear you advocating the Ranters’ Chapel?”“It’s good enough for such rabble as that, sir. What does it matter where they go?”“Prosecute the boys for trespass, if you like,” said the doctor; “though I doubt if you’ll get a magistrate to impose more than a nominal fine for the offence of taking a handful of nuts in a wood that has been open ever since I began to walk, and heaven knows how many years before; but let the old gaffers and goodies creep to church by the shortest path that can take them there. They’ll have to travel by the Queen’s highway later, when they go to the churchyard—but then they’ll be carried. Don’t interfere with the privileges of the poor, Mr. Crowther. No one ever did that yet and went scot free. There’s always somebody to take up the cudgels for them.”“I don’t care a doit for anybody’s cudgels, Baynham. I shall have a look at my title-deeds to-morrow; and if there’s no stipulation about the right of way, you’ll find the gates locked next Sunday morning.”Sunday morning came, and the gates at each end of the old footpath were still open, and nothing had come of Mr. Crowther’s threat. The gates had stood open so long, and were so old and rotten, their lower timbers so embedded in the soft, oozy soil, so entangled and overgrown with foxglove and fern, so encrusted with moss and lichen, that it is doubtful if anybody could have closed them. They seemed as much rooted in the ground as the great brown fir trunks which rose in rugged majesty beside them.CHAPTER XI.“WHERE THE COLD SEA RAVES.”In the keen, fresh October afternoons, there was no walk Allegra loved better than the walk to Neptune Point, and higher up by winding footpaths to the Rashleigh Mausoleum, fitting sepulchre for a race born and bred in the breath of the sea; a stately tomb perched on a rocky pinnacle at the end of a promontory, like a sea-bird’s nest overhanging the wave.Allegra was in raptures with that strange resting-place.“I like it ever so much better than your Cockneyfied cemetery,” she exclaimed. “Think how grand it must be to lie for ever within the sound of the sea—the terrible, inscrutable sea, whose anger means death—the calm, summer sea, whose waves come dancing up the sands like laughing water. I wonder whether the Rashleighs would let me have a little grave of my own somewhere among these crags and hillocks—a modest little grave, hidden under wild foliage, which nobody would ever notice? Only I should hear the sea just as well as they do in their marble tomb.”“Oh, Allegra, how can you talk so lightly of death?” said Isola, shocked at this levity. “To me it is always dreadful to think of—and yet it must come.”“Poor child!” said Allegra, with infinite pity, putting her arm round her sister-in-law’s slighter figure, as they stood by the railing of the Mausoleum, in the loveliness of an October sunset.The sun had just gone down, veiled in autumnal haze, and behind the long ridge of waters beyond the Dodman there glowed the deep crimson of the western sky. Eastward above the Polruan hills the moon moved slowly upward, amidst dark masses of cloud which melted and rolled away before her on-coming, till all the sky became of one dark azure. The two girls went down the hill in silence, Allegra holdingIsola’s arm, linked with her own, steadying those weaker footsteps with the strength of her own firm movements. The difference between the two in physical force was no less marked than the difference in their mental characteristics, and Allegra’s love for her sister-in-law was tempered with a tender compassion for something so much weaker than herself.“Poor child!” she repeated, as they moved slowly down the steep, narrow path, “and do you really shudder at the thought of death? I don’t. I have only a vast curiosity. Do you remember that definition of Sir Thomas Browne’s which Martin read to us once—’Death is the Lucina of life.’ Death only opens the door of the hidden worlds which are waiting for all of us to discover. It is only an appalling name for a new birth. I love to dream about the infinite possibilities of the future—just as a boy might dream of the time when he should become a man. Look, look, Isa, there’s a yacht coming in! Isn’t it a lovely sight?”It was a long, narrow vessel, with all her canvas spread, gleaming with a silvery whiteness in the moonlight. Slowly and with majestic motion she swept round towards Neptune Point and the mouth of the harbour. There was only the lightest wind, and the waves were breaking gently on the rocks at the base of the promontory—a night as calm and fair as June.“Look!” repeated Allegra, “isn’t she lovely? like a fairy boat. Whose yacht can she be, I wonder? She looks like a racer, doesn’t she?”Isola did not answer. She had seen such a yacht two years ago; had seen such a long, narrow hull lying in the harbour under repairs; had seen the same craft sailing out to Mevagissey on a trial trip in the wintry sunlight. Doubtless there were many yachts in this world of just the same build and character.They stood at an angle of the hill-path looking up the river, and saw the yacht take in her canvas as she came into the haven under the hill; that sheltered harbour, with itstwo rivers cleaving the hills asunder, one winding away to the right towards Lerrin, the other to the left towards Trelasco and Lostwithiel. It looked so perfect a place of shelter, so utterly safe from tempest or foul weather; and yet there were seasons when a fierce wind from the great Atlantic came sweeping up the deep valleys, and all the angry spirits of the ocean seemed at war in that narrow gorge. To-night the atmosphere was unusually calm, and Isola could hear the sailors singing at their work.Slowly, slowly the two young women went down the hill, Allegra full of speculation and wonderment about the unknown vessel, Isola curiously silent. As they neared the hotel a man landed from a dinghy, and came briskly up the slippery causeway—a tall, slim figure in the vivid moonlight, loose limbed, loosely clad, moving with easiest motion.Isola turned sick at the sight of him. She stopped, helplessly, hopelessly, and stood staring straight before her, watching him as he came nearer and nearer, nearer and nearer—like some awful figure in a nightmare dream, when the feet of the dreamer seem frozen to the ground, and flesh and blood seem changed to ice and stone.He came nearer, looked at them, and passed them by—passed as one who knew them not, and was but faintly curious about them. He passed and walked quickly up towards the Point, with the rapid swinging movements of one who was glad to tread the solid earth.No, it was not Lostwithiel. She had thought at first that no one else could look so like him at so short a distance; no one else could have that tall, slender figure, and easy, buoyant walk. But the face she saw in the moonlight was not his. It was like, but not the same: darker, with larger features, a face of less delicacy and distinction; but oh, God! how like the eyes that had looked at her, with that brief glance of casual inspection, were to those other eyes that had poured their passionate story into her own that unforgotten night when she sat out the after-supper waltzes in the ante-room at the Talbot. She could not have believed that any manliving could so recall the man whose name she never spoke of her own free will.There were some sailors standing about at the top of the steep little bit of road leading down to the granite causeway, and their voices sounded fresh and clear in the still evening, mixed with the rippling rush of the water as it came running up the stones. The moonlight shone full upon one of the men as he stood with his face towards the sea, and Isola read the name upon the front of his jersey.“Vendetta.”“Vendetta,” cried Allegra, quick to observe the name. “Why, is not that Lord Lostwithiel’s yacht?”“Yes—I think so,” faltered Isola.“Then that must have been Lord Lostwithiel who passed as just now; and yet you would have known him, wouldn’t you?”“That was not Lord Lostwithiel.”“A friend of his, I suppose; such a nice-looking man, too. There was something so frank and cheery in his look as he just glanced at us both and marched briskly on. He did not pay us the compliment of seeming curious. I wonder who he is?”Isola was wondering about something else. She was looking with a frightened gaze across the harbour, towards that one break in the long golden trail of the moonbeams where theVendettacast her shadow on the water. There were lamps gleaming brightly here and there upon the vessel—a look of occupation.“Is Lord Lostwithiel on board his yacht?” Allegra asked of one of the sailors, not ashamed to appear inquisitive.“No, ma’am; Mr. Hulbert is skipper.”“Who is Mr. Hulbert?”“His lordship’s brother.”“Was that he who went up towards the Point just now?”“Yes, ma’am.”“Is he going to stop here long, do you know?”“I don’t think he knows himself, ma’am. It’ll dependupon the weather most likely. If we get a fair wind we may be off to the Lizard at an hour’s notice, and away up north to the Hebrides.”“Doesn’t that seem inconsistent?” exclaimed Allegra, as they walked homewards. “What is the good of coming to Cornwall if he wants to go to the Hebrides? It must be very much out of his way.”“He may want to see his old home, perhaps. He was born at the Mount, you know.”“Indeed! I don’t know anything about him, but I want to know ever so much. I call it an interesting face.”Allegra was full of animation during the homeward walk. A stranger of any kind must needs be a God-send, as affording a subject for conversation; but such a stranger as Lostwithiel’s brother afforded a theme of strongest interest. She had heard so much about Lord Lostwithiel and all his works and ways—the pity of it that he did not marry; the still greater pity that he did not live at the Mount, and give shooting parties and spend money in the neighbourhood. She had heard in a less exalted key of his lordship’s younger brother, who had fought under Beresford in Egypt, and who had only lately left the navy. What more natural than that such a man should sail his brother’s yacht?Captain Hulbert was still unmarried; but no one talked about the pity of that. People took a severely sensible view of his case, and were unanimous in the opinion that he could not afford to marry, and that any inspiration in that line would be criminal on his part. There was an idea at Trelasco that the younger sons of peers of moderate fortune have been specially designed by Providence to keep up the race of confirmed bachelors. There must be bachelors; the world cannot get on without them; society requires them as a distinct element in social existence; and it would ill become the offshoots of the peerage to shrink from fulfilling their destiny.Allegra was not the less curious about Captain Hulbert, although his celibate mission had been frequently expoundedto her. She was interested in him because she liked his face, because he was Lostwithiel’s brother, because he was sailing a very beautiful yacht, because he had appeared in her life with a romantic suddenness, sailing out of the sea unheralded and unexpected, like a man who had dropped from the moon.She fell asleep that night wondering if she would ever see him again—if theVendettawould have vanished from the harbour to-morrow at noontide, like a boat that had only lived in her dreams; or whether the yacht would still be anchored there in the haven under the hill. And, if so, whether Captain Hulbert would call at the Angler’s Nest, and tell them about Lostwithiel’s South American adventures, and how he came to be skipper of his brother’s yacht.At breakfast next morning, Colonel Disney’s talk was chiefly about Captain Hulbert. The colonel had been for an early walk, and had seen theVendettafrom the little Quay at Fowey, by the Mechanics’ Institute, and had heard who was the skipper.“I remember him when he and his brother were at Eton together—nice boys—capital boys, both of them—but I liked Jack Hulbert better than Lostwithiel. He was franker, more spontaneous and impulsive. Yes, Jack was my favourite, and everybody else’s favourite, I think, when the two were boys. I saw very little of them after they grew up. I was away with my regiment, and Jack was away with his ship, and Lostwithiel was wandering up and down the earth, like Satan. I left a card for Captain Hulbert at the club, asking him to dinner this evening. You don’t mind, do you, Isola?”Isola had no objection to offer, and Allegra was delighted at the prospect of seeing more of the man with the nice frank countenance, and that seafaring air which most women like.“I am a dreadful person for being influenced by first impressions,” she said, “and that one glance at CaptainHulbert in the moonlight assures me that I shall like him.”“Don’t like him too well,” said Martin, laughingly, “for I’m afraid he’s a detrimental, and would make even a worse match than Colfox, who may be a bishop one day, while Hulbert has left the navy, and is never likely to be anything.”“Match! detrimental!” cried Allegra, indignantly. “Can it be my brother who talks in such a vulgar strain? As if a woman could not look at a man without thinking of marrying him!”“Some women can’t,” answered Martin. “With them every free man is a possible husband—indeed, I believe there are some who cannot look at a married man without estimating the chances of the divorce court—if the man is what they call a catch.”“That is your Indian experience!” exclaimed Allegra, scornfully. “I have heard that India is a sink of iniquity.”She went about her day’s varied work as usual—curious to see the new acquaintance—yet in no wise excited. Vivid and animated, enthusiastic and energetic as she was in all her thoughts and ways, gushing sentimentality made no part of Miss Leland’s character. Life at Trelasco flowed with such an even monotony, there was such a dearth of new interests, that it was only natural that a girl of vivacious temper should be curious about new-comers. At St. John’s Wood every day had brought some new element into the lives of the students, and almost every day had brought a new pupil, drawn thither by the growing renown of the school, pupils from the uttermost ends of the earth sometimes, pupils of swart complexion speaking unknown tongues, pupils patrician and pupils plebeian, each and all conforming to the same stringent rules of art, spending patient months in the shading of a brace of plums or a bunch of grapes, from a plaster cast, and toiling slowly up the gradual ascent which leads to the Royal Academy and the gold medal. Many there were who sickened at the slow rate of progress and who fell away. Only the faithful remained. And this goingand coming, this strife between faith and unfaith, patience and impatience, had made a perpetual movement in the life of the great school—to say nothing of such bodily activities as lawn tennis, for which the master had provided a court—a court for his girl-pupils, be it noted, where they played among themselves, as if they had been so many collegians in the college of Tennyson’s “Princess.”Allegra had liked her life at the great art school, but she had never regretted its abandonment. She loved her brother, and her brother’s wife, better even than she loved art. It was only now and then that she felt that existence at Trelasco was as monotonous as the flow of the river going up and coming down day by day between Lostwithiel and the sea.She spent the hours between breakfast and luncheon hard at work in her painting-room—a little room with a large window facing northward. She had the coachman’s girl and boy for her models, and was engaged upon a little water-colour picture after the school of Mrs. Allingham, a little picture which told its story with touching simplicity.It was not the first picture of the kind she had painted. Several of her works had been exhibited at the minor galleries which are hospitable to the new-comer in the world of art; and two small pictures had been bought at prices which seemed to promise her an easy road to fortune.The coachman’s children profited greatly by this new profession which had been devised for them. Allegra made their frocks in her leisure hours, when the active fingers must have something to do, while the active tongue ran on gaily in happy talk with Martin and Isola. Allegra made up to her little models for their hours of enforced idleness by extra tuition which kept them ahead of most of the other pupils in the village school; and Allegra supplied them with pocket-money.“I don’t know however the children got on before Miss Leland came,” said the coachman’s wife. “They seem to look to her for everything.”Allegra had other models, village children, and village girls—her beauty-girl, a baker’s daughter with a splendid semi-Greek face, like Mrs. Langtry’s, whom she dressed up in certain cast-off finery of her own, and painted in her genre pictures, now in this attitude, and now in that, imparting an air of distinction which elevated the Cornish peasant into a patrician. She it was, this baker’s fair-haired daughter, who stood for Allegra’s successful picture—“A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,” a little bit of finished painting which had brought the painter five and thirty guineas—boundless wealth as it seemed to her—and ever so many commissions.Art, even in despondency and failure, is a consolation; art successful is an intoxicating delight. Allegra was as happy a young woman as could be found in Cornwall that day, when she shut her colour-box, dismissed her little maiden, and ran down to lunch, where she found Isola more silent than usual, and made amends by her own light-hearted chatter for the morning’s absorption over the easel. After lunch she ran off to the village to pay her parish visits to the sick and old, and on her way to an outlying cottage she met Mr. Colfox, who immediately turned to accompany her, a way he had, but a way to which she had never attached any significance. He was a clever, well-read man, of somewhat original temper, who had to pass most of his life among unlettered or dull people; therefore it surprised Allegra in no wise that he should like to talk to her. A bright, attractive girl of three and twenty is very unsuspicious about the feelings of a homely looking man at least a dozen years her senior.“Your brother has been good enough to ask me to dinner,” he said, after a little talk about the Goodies and their ailments. “I met him at the club this morning.”“He wants you to meet Captain Hulbert. Perhaps you know him already?”“No, he has not been here within my time. He only left the navy a year ago, and he was generally stationed at theutmost ends of the earth, keeping guard over our remote possessions. Have you seen him?”“Only for an instant. He passed my sister and me yesterday evening in the moonlight. I thought he looked a nice person—but I think women have a natural leaning towards sailors. I could never imagine a seaman telling a falsehood or doing a mean action.”“There is a kind of open-air manner which suggests truthfulness,” admitted Mr. Colfox. “Yet there have been dark deeds done by sailors; there have been black sheep even in the Queen’s Navee. However, I believe Captain Hulbert is worthy of your good opinion. I have never heard anybody speak against him, and the old people who knew him as a lad seem to have liked him better than Lord Lostwithiel.”“Do tell me your opinion of Lord Lostwithiel. I am very curious about him. Mr. Crowther talked of him so much the night we were at Glenaveril.”“Mr. Crowther loves a lord.”“Please satisfy my curiosity. Is he really such a fascinating personage?”“He has very pleasant manners. I don’t know what constitutes fascination in a man, though I know pretty well what it means in a woman. Lord Lostwithiel’s manners are chiefly distinguished by repose without languor or affectation—and by an interest in other people so cleverly simulated that it deceives everybody. One finds him out by the way in which people boast of his friendship. He cannot be so attached to all the world. He has a manner which is generally described as sympathetic.”“Mr. Crowther enlarged a good deal upon his lordship’s admiration for my sister at the Hunt Ball. Was that so very marked?”Mr. Colfox coloured violently at this direct question—assuredly not easy to answer truthfully without hazard of offence.“I was not at the ball—I—I heard people talk a little—in the way people talk of everything—about Lostwithiel’sattention to Mrs. Disney, and about her prettiness—they all agreed that if not the loveliest woman in the room, she was at least the most interesting.”“It was very natural that he should admire her; but I don’t think Martin liked Mr. Crowther’s talking about it in that way, at the dinner-table. The man is horridly underbred. Has Lord Lostwithiel what you call—” she hesitated a little—“a good character?”“I don’t know about the present. I have heard that in the past his reputation was not altogether good.”“I understand,” said Allegra, quickly. “The admiration of such a man is an insult; and that is why Mr. Crowther harped upon the fact. I am sure he is a malevolent man.”“Don’t be hard upon him, Miss Leland. I believe he has only the misfortune to be a cad—a cad by birth, education, and associations. Don’t fling your stone at such a man—consider what an unhappy fate it is.”“Oh, but he does not think himself unhappy. He is bursting with self-importance and the pride of riches. He is the typical rich man of the Psalmist. He must be the happiest man in Trelasco, a thick-skinned man whom nothing can hurt.”“I am sorry you think so badly of poor Mr. Crowther, because I am really attached to his wife. She is one of the best women I know.”“So my sister tells me, and I was very much taken with her myself, but one cannot afford to be friendly with Mrs. Crowther at the cost of knowing her husband.”She spoke with some touch of the insolence of youth, which sets so high a value upon its own opinions and its own independence, and looks upon all the rest of humanity as upon a lower plane. And this arrogant youth, which thinks so meanly of the multitude, will make its own exceptions, and reverence its chosen ideals with a blind hero-worship—for its love is always an upward-looking love, “the desire of the moth for the star.”Mr. Colfox sighed, and smiled at the same moment, a sadlittle half-cynical smile. He was thinking how impossible it was to refrain from admiring this bright out-spoken girl, with her quick intellect, and her artistic instincts, so spiritual, so unworldly, and fresh as an April morning—how impossible not to admire, how difficult not to love her, and how hopeless to love.He thought of himself with scathing self-contempt—middle-aged, homely of feature and of figure, with nothing to recommend him except good birth, a small independence—just so much as enabled him to live where he pleased and serve whom he would, without reference to the stipend attached to the cure; and a little rusty, dry-as-dust learning. Nothing more than this; and he wanted to win and wed a girl whose image never recurred to his mind without the suggestion of a rose garden, or a summer morning. Yes, she reminded him of morning and dewy red roses, those old-fashioned heavy red roses, round as a cup, and breathing sweetest, purest perfume.He jogged on by her side in silence, and only awoke from his reverie to bid her good-bye at the gate of a cottage garden, in the lane that led up the hill to Tywardreath.CHAPTER XII.“FAR, TOO FAR OFF FOR THOUGHT OR ANY PRAYER.”Mr. Colfox and Allegra met again in the drawing-room of the Angler’s Nest at a quarter to eight. He was the first to arrive, and Isola had not yet appeared. Martin Disney was at his post in front of the library fireplace, library and drawing-room making one spacious room, lighted with candles here and there, and with one large shaded lamp on a table near the piano. Isola had been suffering from headache, and had been late in dressing. Captain Hulbert had been in the room nearly ten minutes before his hostess appeared, looking pale and ill in her black lace gown, and with an anxiousexpression in her eyes. He had been introduced to Allegra, and was talking to her as if he had known her for years, when his attention was called off by Isola’s appearance, and his introduction to her.Was this Martin Disney’s wife, he thought wonderingly—such a girlish fragile creature—so unlike the woman he had pictured to himself? Strange that Lostwithiel should not have told him of her delicate prettiness, seeing that he was a connoisseur in beauty, and hypercritical.“This is just the kind of beauty he would admire,” thought Hulbert, “something out of the common—a pale, spiritual beauty—not dependent upon colouring, or even upon regularity of feature—the kind of thing one calls soul, not having found a better name for it.”They went in to dinner presently, Captain Hulbert and Isola, Mr. Colfox and Allegra. The table was a small oval, at which five people made a snug little party. There was a central mass of white chrysanthemums, a cheerful glow of coloured Venetian glass, delicatest pink and jade-green, under the light of a hanging lamp. John Hulbert looked round him with a pleased expression, taking in the flowers, the glass, the cream-white china, the lamplight, everything; and then the two fair young faces, one pale and pensive, the other aglow with the delight of life, eagerly expectant of new ideas.They talked of theVendettaand the places at which she had touched lately. Captain Hulbert had spent his summer on the Eastern Liguria, between Genoa and Civita Vecchia.“Wasn’t it the wrong time of year for Italy?” asked Mr. Colfox.“No, it is the season of seasons in the land of the sun. If you want to enjoy a southern country, go there in the summer. The south is made for summer, her houses are built for hot weather, her streets are planned for shade; her wines, her food, her manners and customs have all been made for summer-time—not for winter. If you want to know Italy at her worst go there in cold weather.”“Where did you leave Lord Lostwithiel?” Disney asked presently.“I left him nowhere. He left me to rove about Southern Europe—left me on his way to Carinthia. He is like the wandering Jew. He used to be mad about yachting; but he got sick of theVendettaall of a sudden, and handed her over to me. Very generous on his part; but the boat is something of a white elephant for a man of my small means. I wanted him to sell her. Wouldn’t hear of it. To let her. Not to be thought of. ‘I’ll lend her to you,’ he said, ‘and you shall keep her as long as you like—sink her, if you like—provided you don’t go down in her. She is not a lucky boat.’”“Have you sailed her long?”“Nearly a year, and I love her as if she were bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Let us all go for a sail to-morrow, Mrs. Disney—to Mevagissey or thereabouts. We could do a little fishing. It will be capital fun. What do you say, Miss Leland?”“I should adore it,” said Allegra, beaming at him. “The sea is my passion—and I think it is my sister’s passion too. We are a kind of amphibious creatures, living more on water than on land. We venture as far as we dare in a row-boat—but oh, that is such a little way.”“I’m afraid that some day you will venture so far that you won’t be able to get back again, and will find yourselves drifting away to America,” said her brother.Isola answered never a word, until Captain Hulbert addressed her pointedly for the second time.“Will you go, Mrs. Disney—may we make up the party?”“I would rather not,” she answered, without looking at him.“But why not? Are you such a bad sailor—in spite of all Miss Leland says of you?”“I am a pretty good sailor in a row-boat—but not in a yacht. And I hate fishing—such a slow weary business. I would rather not go.”“I am so sorry; but you must not be worried about it,”said Hulbert, kindly, seeing the growing distress in her countenance. “We will not go in for fishing—or excursions—but you and Miss Leland will at least come to afternoon tea on theVendetta—to afternoon tea in the harbour. There used to be a comic song when I was a boy—’Come and drink tea in the arbour.’ You must come to the arbour with an aspirate. It is not so rustic or sentimental—but there will be no earwigs or creeping things to drop into your tea-cup. Mr. Colfox, you will come, won’t you?”“I shall be delighted,” answered the curate. “I have a sneaking kindness for all yachts.”The conversation drifted back to Lostwithiel and his works and ways, presently.“When he went home two years ago he gave me to understand he was going to settle down at the Mount, and spend the rest of his days in peace and respectability,” said Captain Hulbert. “Yet, very soon afterwards, he and his yacht were off again like theFlying Dutchman, and the next I heard of him was at Leghorn, and six months later he was coasting off Algiers; and the following spring he was in South America; and theVendettawas laid up at Marseilles, where he begged me to go and look after her, and take her to myself until such time as he should want her again. I was with him for a few days at Leghorn, where he seemed ill and out of spirits. I don’t think you can have used him over well in this part of the world, Mrs. Disney,” he added, half in jest. “I fancy some of you must have snubbed him severely, or his tenants must have worried him by their complaints and exactions. I could not get him to talk about his life at the Mount. He seemed to have taken a disgust for the old home.”“You must put that down to his roving temper,” said Disney, “for although I was away at the time, I can answer for it there was no such thing as snubbing in the case. Your brother is the only peer in these parts, and from the way people talk about him he might be the only peer in Great Britain—the Alpha and Omega of Debrett. Our parvenu neighbour, Mr. Crowther, talked of him one night with aslavish rapture which made me sick. I am a Tory by association and instinct, but I can’t stand the vulgarian’s worship of a lord.”Isola looked at her sister-in-law, and they both rose at this moment, the Church almost tumbling over the Navy in eagerness to open the door; Navy winning by a neck.They were not long alone in the drawing-room, not more than the space of a single cigarette, before the men followed. Then came music, and a good deal of talk, in the long, low, spacious room, which looked so bright and homely by candlelight, with all its tokens of domestic and intellectual life.“What a capital quarter-deck this is,” cried John Hulbert, after pacing up and down while he listened, and talked, and laughed at Allegra’s little jokes about the narrowness of village life. “It is delightful to stretch one’s legs in such a room as this, after six months upon a yacht.”“You will have room enough to stretch your legs at the Mount,” said Disney.Captain Hulbert had announced his intention of spending a week or two under the family roof-tree while theVendettaunderwent some slight repairs and renovations.“Room enough and to spare,” he said. “I shan’t feel half so jovial walking up and down those grim old rooms as I feel here. I shall fancy a ghost pacing behind me, clump, clump, clump—a slow, solemn footstep—only the echo of my own tread perhaps; but I shall never know, for I shall be afraid to look round.”“You ought not to make sport of weak people’s fancies, for I am sure you don’t believe in ghosts,” said Allegra, leaning with one elbow on the piano, turning over pieces of music absently, a graceful figure in a dark green velvet gown, cut just low enough to show the fine curves of a full, round throat, white and smooth as ivory.“Not believe in ghosts? Did you ever know a sailor who wasn’t superstitious? We are too often alone with the sea and the stars to be quite free from spectral fancies, Miss Leland. I can see in your eyes as you look at me thismoment that you believe in ghosts—believe and tremble. Tell me now, candidly—When do you most fear them? At what hour of the day or night does the unreal seem nearest to you?”“I don’t know,” she faltered, turning over the loose music with a faintly tremulous gesture, while Isola sat by the piano, touching the notes dumbly now and then.“Is it at midnight—in the gloaming—in the chill, mysterious dawn? You won’t answer! Shall I guess? If you are like me, it is in broad daylight—between two and three in the afternoon—when the servants are all idling after their dinner, and the house is silent. You are alone in a big, bright room, perhaps, with another room opening out of it, and a door a long way off. You sit writing at your table, and you feel all at once that the room is haunted—there must be something or some one stealing in at that remotest door. You daren’t look round. You go to the window and look out into garden or street—for a town house may be just as ghastly as a country one—and then with a great effort you turn slowly round and face your terror, in the broad, garish sunlight, in the business hours of the day. There is nothing there, of course; but the feeling has not been the less vivid. I know I shall be spectre-haunted at the Mount. You must all come and scare away the shadows. Mr. Colfox, are you fond of billiards?”“I own to a liking for the game. I play with Mr. Crowther and his youngest daughter whenever I dine at Glenaveril. Alicia is a very fine player, for a girl, and her father plays a good game.”“Then you will come up to the Mount two or three times a week and play with me, I hope. There’s a decent table—cushions as hard as bricks, I dare say, but we must make the best of it—and there’s plenty of sound claret in the cellars to say nothing of a keg or two of Schiedam that I sent home from the Hague.”“Mr. Colfox will not make much impression either on your claret or your schnapps,” said Disney, laughing. “Heis almost as temperate as one of those terrible anchorites in the novel we were reading the other day—’Homo Sum.’”“I am glad you put in the qualifying ‘almost,’” said the curate, “for I hope to taste Captain Hulbert’s Schiedam.”The captain expatiated upon what his three new friends—and his one old friend, Martin Disney—were to do to cheer him in his solitude at the Mount.“There is nothing of the anchorite about me,” he said. “I love society, I love life and movement, I love bright faces.”He would not leave until they had all promised to take tea on board the yacht on the following afternoon, an engagement which was kept by Allegra and the colonel; but not by Isola, whose headache was worse after the little dinner-party; nor by the curate, who had parish business to detain him on shore.CHAPTER XIII.“UNDER THE PINE-WOOD, BLIND WITH BOUGHS.”If Isola had any disinclination to visit Captain Hulbert’s yacht, her headache only served to defer the evil day, for after that first tea-drinking came other invitations and other arrangements, fishing-parties, luncheons off Mevagissey, entertainments in which Isola must needs share when she saw her husband and his sister bent upon the enjoyment of the hour, delighted with theVendettaand her warm-hearted skipper.They were not John Hulbert’s only friends in the neighbourhood. Everybody seemed glad to welcome the rover to his native village. Almost everybody had known him in his boyhood; and there was a general consensus of opinion that he was a much better fellow than his brother. He was less courted; but he was better liked. There had been a touch of cynicism about Lostwithiel which frightened matter-of-fact country people.“One could never feel sure he wasn’t laughing in his sleeve at our rustic ignorance,” said Mrs. Baynham. “I am more at my ease with Captain Hulbert, and my husband and he were great friends when he was a boy. They used to go fishing together, when Baynham’s practice wasn’t as good as it is now.”So the brief Indian summer passed in pleasant idlesse on a tranquil sea. The equinoctial gales had not begun to rage yet. There was a lull before the coming of the great winds which were to blow good ships on shore, and startle sleepers in the dead of night. All now was fair and placid—sunlit waters, golden evenings. They spent one bright, balmy day off Mevagissey, a day which was like a long dream to Isola, as she sat on deck in a low folding-chair, wrapped in a great feathery rug from the South Sea Islands, with her languid head reclining against a plush-covered cushion, one of the many effeminate luxuries which abounded in the cabins below. Everybody else was intent upon the nets. Everybody else was full of interest and movement and expectation; but she sat apart from all, with her ivory knitting-needles lying idle in her lap, amidst a soft mass of white wool, which her industry was to convert into a garment for the baby.Allegra was enraptured with the yacht. She would fain have taken Isola down to the cabins, to explore their wonders of luxury and contrivance, so much comfort and elegance in so restricted an area; but Isola refused to leave the deck.“I hate all cabins,” she said. “They are always suffocatingly hot.”So Mrs. Baynham went below with Allegra, and they two explored the two principal cabins with wondering admiration, and even peeped into the cook’s galley, and the odd little places where steward and sailors contrived to bestow themselves.The chief cabin, saloon, or whatever one liked to call it, was as daintily decorated as a lady’s boudoir. There were nests of richly bound books, Oriental bronzes, and all kindsof continental pottery, Japanese and Indian embroideries, Venetian mirrors, quaint little carved cupboards for wine or cigars. Every corner and cranny was utilized.“What a delicious drawing-room!” cried Allegra. “I could live here all my life. Fancy, how delightful! A floating life. No such thing as satiety. One might open one’s eyes every morning on a fresh coast, glorified, as one sees it across the bright, blue water. To explore the Mediterranean, for instance, floating from city to city—the cities of the past, the cities of the Gospel, the shores that were trodden by the feet of St. Paul and his companions—the cities of the Christian saints and martyrs, the island birthplaces of Greek gods and heroes. Think, Mrs. Baynham! A yacht like this is a master-key to open all the gateways of the world.”“I would rather have my own cosy little cottage on terra firma,” answered the doctor’s wife in a matter-of-fact mood; but this speech of Allegra’s set the good lady pondering upon the possibility of John Hulbert falling in love with this nice, clever girl, and making her mistress of his brother’s yacht.Her friendly fancy depicted the village wedding, and those two going forth over the great waters to spend their honeymoon amidst the wonder-world of the Mediterranean, which the banker’s daughter knew only in her Atlas.“He can’t be rich,” she thought, “but he must have a comfortable income. I know his mother had money. And Allegra can earn a good deal by her painting. She wouldn’t be an expensive wife. We ought all to do our best to bring it about. A girl has so few chances in such a place as Trelasco. She might almost as well be in a convent.”Mrs. Baynham was at heart a matchmaker, like most motherly women whom fate has left childless. She was very fond of Allegra, who was so much more companionable than Isola, so much more responsive to kindness and affection. As she sat on deck in the westering sunlight, somewhat comatose after a copious luncheon, Mrs. Baynham’sidea of helping Allegra took the form of a dinner-party which she had long been meditating, her modest return for numerous dinners which she had eaten at Glenaveril and at the Angler’s Nest. She considered that three or four times a year it behoved her to make a serious effort in the way of hospitality—a substantial and elaborate dinner, in which no good things in season should be spared, and which should be served with all due ceremony. The time was at hand when such a dinner would in a manner fall due; and she determined to hasten the date with a view to Allegra’s interests.“Captain Hulbert is sure to be off again before long,” she told herself, “so every evening they can spend together is of importance. I’m sure he is inclined to fall in love with her already.”There was not much doubt about his feelings as he stood by Allegra in the stern, directing the movements of her bare active hands while she hauled in the net; not much doubt that he was as deep in love as a man well can be after a fortnight’s acquaintance. He did not make any secret of his bondage, but let his eyes tell all the world that this girl was for him “the world’s one woman.”The invitation from Mrs. Baynham was delivered by post next morning, as ceremonious a card as if the place were Mayfair, and the inviter and invitees had not met since last season. A copper-plate card, with name and address filled in by the lady’s pen, a detail which distinguished her modest invitation from the Glenaveril cards, of which there were a variety, for at homes, tennis, dinner, luncheon, to accept, and to decline. A fortnight’s notice marked the dignity of the occasion—the hour the orthodox quarter to eight.“We can’t refuse, Isola,” said Disney, when his wife handed him the card, “although my past experience assures me that the evening will be a trifle heavy. Why will people in small houses insist upon giving dinner-parties, instead of having their friends in instalments? When we go to dine with the Baynhams we go for love of them, not the peoplethey bring together; and yet they insist upon seating twelve in a room that will just comfortably hold eight. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit.”“But Mrs. Baynham is so happy when she is giving a real dinner-party. I don’t think we can refuse, can we, Allegra?” asked Isola.“Mrs. Baynham is a darling, and I wouldn’t vex her for worlds,” replied her sister-in law. “And in a place like this one can’t pretend a prior engagement, unless it were in the moon.”The invitation was accepted forthwith, and when Captain Hulbert dropped in at teatime it was discovered that he, too, had been asked, and that he meant to accept, if his friends at the Angler’s Nest were to be there.A thunderbolt fell upon the little village on the following Sunday. When the old men and women, creeping to church a little in advance of younger legs, came to the church-path, they found the gate locked against them, locked and barricaded with bars which looked as if they were meant to last till the final cataclysm. The poor old creatures looked up wonderingly at a newly-painted board, on which the more intelligent among them spelt out the following legend—“This wood is the private property of J. Vansittart Crowther, Esq. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”Martin Disney and his wife and sister came up when a little crowd of men, women, and children, numbering about thirty, had assembled round the gate, all in their Sunday best.“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Disney.“Ah, colonel, that’s what we all want to know,” replied old Manley, the village carpenter, a bent and venerable figure, long past work. “I’m over eighty, but I never remember that gate being locked as long as I have lived at Trelasco, and that’s all my life, colonel. There’s always been a right of way through that wood.”“And there always shall be,” answered Martin Disney. “We won’t take any violent measures to-day, my friends—first because it is Sunday, and next because one should always try fair means before one tries foul. I shall write to Mr. Crowther to-morrow, asking him civilly to open that gate. If he refuses, I’ll have it opened for him, and I’ll take the consequences of the act. Now, my good friends, you’d better go to church by the road. You’ll get there after the service has begun. Wait till the congregation are standing up, and then go into church all together, so that everybody may understand why and by whose fault it is that you are late.”The appearance of this large contingent after the first lesson created considerable surprise, and much turning of heads and rustling of bonnet-strings in the echoing old stone church. Mr. Crowther stood in his pew of state on one side of the chancel, and felt that the war had begun. Everybody was against him in the matter, he knew; but he wanted to demonstrate the rich man’s right to do what he liked with the things which he had bought. The wood was his, and he did not mean to let the whole parish tramp across it.He received a stiffly polite letter from Colonel Disney, requesting him to re-open the church-path without loss of time, and informing him of the great inconvenience caused to the older and weaker members of the congregation by the illegal closing of the path during church hours.Mr. Crowther sent his reply by the colonel’s messenger. He asserted his right to shut up the wood which formed a part of his estate, and positively refused to re-open the gate at either end of the footpath in question.Captain Hulbert dropped in at his usual hour, eager to know the progress of the fight. Fight there must be, he was assured, having seen something of Mr. Crowther’s bulldog temper. Then, in the drawing-room of the Angler’s Nest, there was hatched a terrible plot—a Catiline conspiracy in a tea-cup—Allegra listening and applauding while the two men plotted.That night, when the village was hushed in sleep, a boatful of sailors landed at the little hard near the railwaystation at Fowey, and half a dozen stalwart blue-jackets might have been seen tramping along the old railway track to Trelasco, one carrying a crowbar, another a carpenter’s basket. And under the autumn stars that night in the woods of Glenaveril, while Vansittart Crowther slept the sleep of the just man who payeth his twenty shillings in the pound, there rose the sound of a sea-song and the cheery chorus of the sailors, with a rhythmic accompaniment of hammering; and lo, when the October morning visited those yellowing woods, and when Mr. Crowther’s gamekeeper went on his morning round, the gate at either end of the church path was wrenched off its hinges, and was lying on the ground. Staple and bolt, padlock and iron hinges, were lying among the dewy dock-leaves and the yellowing fern; and there was free passage between the village of Trelasco and the House of God.Vansittart Crowther went to Plymouth by the first train that could convey him, and there consulted the lawyer most in renown among the citizens; and that gentleman, after due thought and consideration, informed him that the closing of such an old-established right of way as that of the church-path was more than any landowner durst attempt. Whatever omission there might be in the title-deeds, he had bought the estate subject to that old right of way, which had been enjoyed by the parish from time immemorial. He could no more shut it off than he could wall out the sky.“But I can punish the person who pulled the locks off my gates, I conclude?” said Mr. Crowther, swelling with indignation.“That, of course, is a distinct outrage, for which you may obtain redress, if you can find out who did it.”“There can be no difficulty about that. The act must have been instigated by the writer of that impertinent letter.”He pointed to Martin Disney’s letter, lying open on the solicitor’s table.“Very probably. But you will have to be sure of proving his share in the act if you mean to take proceedings against him.”Vansittart Crowther was furious. How was he to bring the responsibility of this outrage home to anybody, when the deed had been done in the dead of night, and no mortal eye had seen the depredators at their felonious work? His locks and bolts and hinges, the best of their kind that Sheffield could supply, had been mocked at and made as naught; and all his dumb dogs of serving men and women had been lying in their too comfortable beds, and had heard never a sound of hammer clinking or crowbar striking on iron. There had not been so much as a kitchen-maid afflicted with the tooth-ache, and lying wakeful, to hear the far-off noise of that villainous deed.Mr. Crowther sent for the police authorities of Fowey, and set his wrongs before them.“I will give fifty pounds reward to the man who will get me credible evidence as to the person who planned that outrage,” he said. And next day there were bills pasted against divers doors at Fowey and Trelasco, against the Mechanics’ Institute, and against that curious old oaken door of a mediæval building opposite the club, which may once have been a donjon, and in sundry other conspicuous places, beginning with “Whereas,” and ending with Vansittart Crowther’s signature.Nothing came of this splendid offer, though there were plenty of people in the district to whom fifty pounds would have seemed a fortune. Whether no one had seen the crew of theVendettalanding or re-embarking in the night-time, or whether some wakeful eyes had seen, whose owners would not betray the doers of a deed done in a good cause, still remains unknown. Captain Hulbert was enchanted at the success of the conspiracy, and went to church next Sunday by the now notorious footpath, along which an unusual procession of villagers came streaming in the crisp, clear air, proud to assert a right that had been so boldly maintained by their unnamed but not unknown champion. Every one felt very sure that the flinging open of the gates had been somehow brought about by Martin Disney—Martin, whosegrandfather they could some of them remember, when he came home after the long war with the French, and took up his abode in an old house among the hills, and married a fair young wife. That had happened sixty-five years ago; but there were those in the village who could remember handsome Major Disney, with only one arm, and a face bronzed by the sun that shines on the banks of the Douro.
Yet now, sitting in the deep of night beside that bed which might be the bed of death, he told himself that his wife’s love was lost to him, had been lost from the hour of his return to Trelasco, when he went back to her with all the enthusiasm of a lover, forgetful of his mature years, of his long experience of life—hard fighting, hard knocks of all kinds in the great life-battle.He had gone back to her as Leander to Hero, a boy in heart and hopefulness; and what had he found in her? A placid, obedient wife, gentle almost to apathy, but with a strain of melancholy underlying all their relations which his devoted love could not conquer.To all his interrogations her answer had been the same. She was not unhappy. She had everything in life that she desired. There was nothing that he could give her, no possible change in their existence which could add to her content. All this should mean domestic peace, a heart at ease; yet all this was unsatisfying to Martin Disney; for his instinct told him that his wife was not happy—that the element of gladness was, for some inscrutable reason, banished from her life.She had seemed happier, or at least the little home had been brighter and gayer after Allegra’s coming; but as the time wore on it became clear to him that the life and gaiety were all in Allegra herself, and that Isola was spiritless and depressed. It was as if the spring of her life had snapped suddenly, and left her nerveless and joyless, a submissive, unhopeful creature. That sense of disappointment and loss which he had dimly felt, even when his home-coming had been a new thing, had grown and deepened with the passage of time. He had bought his land; he had added to the space and comfort of his house; he had enlarged the stables, and bought a couple of hunters, and a cob for harness; and while these things had been doing, the activity of his days, the fuss and labour of arrangement and supervision, had occupied his mind so pleasantly as to stifle those growing doubts for the time being. But when all was done; when the vine and the figtree had been planted, and he sat down to take his ease in their shade, then he began to feel very keenly that his wife’s part in all that he had done was the part of submission only. She liked this or that because he liked it. She was content, and that was all. And the line between contentment and resignation is so faint a demarcation that it seemed to him sometimes as if she were only resigned, as if she suffered life rather than lived—suffered life as holy women suffer some slow, wasting disease, in meek subjection to a mysterious decree.He sat beside her bed, while she battled with all the demons of delirium; and he wondered whether—when she had beenat her best, when her mind had been brightest and clearest—she had been any nearer to him than she was now in her madness; whether he had known any more of her inner self—the mystery of her heart and conscience—than he knew now, while those wild eyes stared at him without sight or knowledge.One summer morning, as he sat alone in his watch in that dull interval between darkness and dawn, the visions of the wandering mind took a more consecutive form than usual. She fancied herself in a storm at sea. The waves were rolling mountains high—were bearing down upon her with threatenings of instant death. She feared, and yet she courted the danger. In one minute she was recoiling from the wild rush of waters, clinging distractedly to the brass rail at the head of her bed, crouching against the wall as if to save herself from an advancing wave; and in the next minute she sprang out of bed, and rushed to the open window, wanting to throw herself out of it. Disney was only just quick enough to seize her in his arms, and carry her back to bed. He held her there, battling with him in a vehement effort to escape from his restraining arms.“Why do you stop me?” she cried, looking at him fiercely with her distracted eyes. “What else is there for me? What other refuge? what other hope? Let me go! let me go! Cruel! cruel! cruel! Let me throw myself into the sea! Don’t you understand? Oh, cruel! cruel! Cold and wicked, shameless and cruel! There is nothing else—only that refuge left! Let me hide myself in death! let me hide—hide!”Her voice rose to a shriek; and both the nurse and Allegra came hurrying in. The faint white dawn shone upon her livid face and on the scarlet spot upon each hollow cheek. Her eyes stared wildly, starting from their sockets in that paroxysm of her madness.Only a few days after that night of terror Isola was lying calm as a child. The fever had gone down—the enfeebled constitution had at last answered to the influence of medicine;and gradually, like the slow lifting of the darkness after a long night of cloud and fog, consciousness and reason came back. Sleep soothed the strained and weary nerves, and the exhausted frame, which a few days before had seemed endowed with a superhuman strength, lay like a log upon the bed of sickness.Recovery was slow, but there was no relapse. Slow as the dawning of day to the tired watcher, after the long, blank night, there came the dawn of maternal love. The young mother began to take delight in her child; and it was rapture to Martin Disney to see her sitting opposite him under the tulip-tree, in the low Madeira chair, with her baby in her lap. Allegra vied with her in her devotion to that over-praised infant; while the Shah and Tim, of the same opinion for the first time in their lives, were almost rabid with jealousy.They all lived in the garden in that happy summer season, as they had done the year before, when Allegra first came among them. It was in the garden they received their visitors, and it was there that Mr. Colfox came at least thrice a week, upon the flimsiest pretexts of parish business, to drink tea poured out for him by Allegra’s helpful hands, while Isola sat quietly by, listening to their talk, and watching every change in her child’s face; from smiles to frowns, from slumber to waking.Allegra had taken kindly to parish work, and, in Mr. Colfox’s own phraseology, was a tower of strength to him in his labours among the poor of Trelasco. She had started a series of mothers’ meetings in the winter afternoons, and had read to the women and girls while they worked, helping them a good deal with their work into the bargain. She had done wonders at penny readings, singing, reciting, drawing lightning caricatures of local celebrities with bits of coloured chalk on rough white paper. Her portrait of Vansittart Crowther had been applauded to the echo, although it was not a flattering portrait. She had visited the sick; she had taught in the night school. The curatehad been enthusiastic in his appreciation of her, and his praises had been listened to contemptuously by the two Miss Crowthers, each of whom at different periods had taken up these good works, only to drop them again after the briefest effort.“She will get tired as soon as we did,” said Alicia, “when she finds out how impossible these creatures are—unless she has an ulterior motive.”“What ulterior motive should she have?” asked Colfox, bluntly.“Who can tell? She may want to get herself talked about. As Miss Leland, of the Angler’s Nest, a sort of useful companion to her brother’s wife, she is a nobody. If she can get a reputation for piety and philanthropy, that will be better than nothing. Or she may be only angling for a husband.”“If you knew her as well as I do you would know that she is above all trivial and selfish motives, and that she is good to these people because her heart has gone out to them.”“Ah, but you see we don’t know her. Her brother has chosen to hold himself aloof from Glenaveril; and I must say I am very glad he has taken that line—for more than one reason.”“If any of your reasons concern Miss Leland you are very much mistaken in under-rating her. You could not have had a more delightful companion,” said Mr. Colfox, with some warmth.“Oh, we all know that you have exalted her into a heroine—a St. John’s Wood St. Helena. But she is a little too unconventional for my taste; though I certainly would rather be intimate with her than with her sister-in-law.”“Surely you have no fault to find with that most gentle creature?”“She is just a little too gentle for my taste,” replied Alicia, who usually took upon herself all expression of opinion, while Belinda fanned herself languidly, in an æstheticattitude, feeling that her chief mission in this life was to sit still and look likela belle dame sans merci. “She is just as much too quiet as Miss Leland is too boisterous. I have no liking for pensive young women who cast down their eyelids at the slightest provocation, and are only animated when they are flirting.”“The tongue is a little member,” quoted Mr. Colfox, taking up his hat, and holding out his hand in adieu.He was very unceremonious to these fair parishioners of his, and talked to them as freely as if he had been an old French Abbé in a country village. It is needless to say that they valued his opinion so much the more because he was entirely unaffected by their wealth or their good looks. They were naturally aggrieved at his marked admiration for Miss Leland.Those ripe months of harvest and vintage, July, August, and September, passed like a blissful dream for Martin Disney. He had snatched his darling from the jaws of death. He had her once more—fair to look upon, with sweet, smiling mouth and pensive eyes; and she was so tender and so loving to him, in fond gratitude for his devotion during her illness, so seemingly happy in their mutual love for their child, that he forgot all those aching fears which had gnawed his heart while he sat by her pillow through the long anxious nights—forgot that he had ever doubted her, or remembered his doubts only to scorn himself as a morbid, jealous fool. Could he doubt her, who was candour and innocence personified? Could he think for an instant that all those sweet, loving ways and looks of hers which beautified his commonplace existence, were so much acting—and that her heart was not his? No! True love has an unmistakable language; and true love spoke to him in every word and tone of his wife’s.The child made so close a bond between them. Both lives were seemingly bound and entwined about this fragile life of Isola’s firstborn. Mr. Baynham had no reason now to complain of his patient’s want of the maternal instinct.He had rather to restrain her in her devotion to the child. He had to reprove her for her sleepless nights and morbid anxieties.“Do you think your baby will grow any the faster or stronger for your lying awake half the night worrying yourself about him?” said the doctor, with his cheery bluntness. “He has a capital nurse—one of those excellent cow-women, who are specially created to rear other people’s babies; and he has a doctor who is not quite a fool about infant maladies. Read your novels, Mrs. Disney, and keep up your good looks; or else twenty years hence you will see your son blushing when he hears his mother mistaken for his grandmother.”After giving his patient this advice, Mr. Baynham told his wife, in confidence, that were anything to happen to the little one, Isola Disney would go off her head.“I’m afraid she is sadly hysterical,” replied Mrs. Baynham. “I am very fond of her, you know, Tom; but I have never been able to understand her. I can’t make out a young woman who has a pretty house and an indulgent husband, and who never seems quite happy.”“Every woman can’t have your genial disposition, Belle,” answered the doctor, admiringly. “Perpetual sunshine is the rarest thing in Nature.”The early western harvest had been gathered in. Upland and valley in that undulating land were clothed with the tawny hue of the stubble. Here and there the plough horses were moving slowly along the red ridges on the steep hillside. No touch of frost had dulled the rich hues of the autumnal flowers, and the red carnations still glowed in every cottage garden, while the pale pink trusses of hydrangea filled all the shrubberies with beauty. A keener breath came up at eventide from the salt sea beyond Point Neptune, and wilder winds crept across the inland valleys with the on-coming of night. Summer and the swallows were gone. October, a balmy season for the most part, was at hand;and there were no more tea-drinkings and afternoon gossipings in the garden at the Angler’s Nest. The lamps were lighted before dinner. The evenings were spent in the old library and the new drawing-room, the new room communicating with the old one by a curtained archway, so that of a night the curtains could be drawn back and Martin Disney could sit among his books by the fireplace in the library, and yet be within conversational reach of Isola and Allegra in the drawing-room, where they had piano and table-easel, work-baskets, and occupations of all kinds.Mr. Colfox sometimes dropped in of an evening, on parish business of course, took a cup of coffee, listened while Allegra played one of Mozart’s sonatas or sang a song by Gluck or Haydn or Handel. Mr. Colfox was not one of the advanced people who despise Mozart or Handel. Nor did he look down upon Haydn. Indeed, he sat and stroked his thin legs with a sheepish appreciation, wrinkling up his loose trousers, and showing a large amount of stocking, while Allegra sang “My mother bids me bind my hair,” in her clear, strong mezzo-soprano, which was of infinite use to him in his choir.He told everybody that Martin Disney’s was an ideal household—a home into which it was a privilege to be admitted.“I feel as if I never knew the beauty of domestic life till I knew the Angler’s Nest,” he said one evening after dinner at Glenaveril, when he and the village doctor had accepted one of Mr. Crowther’s pressing invitations to what he called “pot-luck,” the pot-luck of the man whose spirit burns within him at the thought of his hundred-guinea cook, and whose pride is most intolerable when it apes humility.“Really, now,” said Mr. Crowther, “you surprise me, for I have always fancied there was a screw loose there.”“What does that expression imply, Mr. Crowther?” asked the curate, coldly.“Oh, I don’t know! Nothing specific: only one’s notion of an ideal home doesn’t generally take the shape of a beautiful girl of twenty married to a man of forty-five. The disparity is just twice as much as it ought to be.”“Upon my soul,” cried the curate, “I don’t believe that wedded love is affected by any difference of years. Desdemona loved Othello, who was a man of mature age——”“And black,” interrupted Mr. Crowther, with a coarse laugh. “Well, let us be thankful that Colonel Disney is not a nigger; and that there is so much the less danger of a burst-up at the Angler’s Nest. And now, Baynham, with regard to this footpath across the wood, who the deuce will be injured if I shut it up?”“A good many people, and the people I think you would least like to injure,” answered the doctor, sturdily. “Old people, and feeble, ailing people, who find the walk to church quite far enough even with the help of that short cut.”“Short cut be hanged!” cried Mr. Crowther, helping himself to a bumper of port, and passing on the decanter with hospitable emphasis. “It can’t make a difference of a hundred yards.”“It does make a difference of over a quarter of a mile—and the proof is that everybody uses it, and that it goes by the name of the Church path. I wouldn’t try to stop it, if I were you, Mr. Crowther. You are a popular man in the parish, for you—well, you have spent a heap of money in this place, and you subscribe liberally to all our charities and what not; but, I don’t mind telling you, if you were to try and shut off that old footpath across your wood, you’d be about the most unpopular man within a radius of ten miles.”“Don’t talk about trying to shut it off, man,” said Mr. Crowther, arrogantly. “If I choose to lock the gates to-morrow, I shall do it, and ask nobody’s leave. The wood is my wood, and there’s no clause in my title-deeds as to any right of way through it; and I don’t see why I am to have my hazel bushes pulled about, and my chestnut trees damaged by a pack of idle boys, under the pretence of church-going. There’s the Queen’s highway for ’em, d—n ’em!” cried Mr. Crowther, growing more insolent, as he gulped his fifth glass of Sandemann. “If that ain’t goodenough, let ’em go to the Ranters’ Chapel at the other end of the village.”“I thought you were a staunch Conservative, Mr. Crowther, and an upholder of Church and State,” said Mr. Colfox. “Am I to believe my ears when I hear you advocating the Ranters’ Chapel?”“It’s good enough for such rabble as that, sir. What does it matter where they go?”“Prosecute the boys for trespass, if you like,” said the doctor; “though I doubt if you’ll get a magistrate to impose more than a nominal fine for the offence of taking a handful of nuts in a wood that has been open ever since I began to walk, and heaven knows how many years before; but let the old gaffers and goodies creep to church by the shortest path that can take them there. They’ll have to travel by the Queen’s highway later, when they go to the churchyard—but then they’ll be carried. Don’t interfere with the privileges of the poor, Mr. Crowther. No one ever did that yet and went scot free. There’s always somebody to take up the cudgels for them.”“I don’t care a doit for anybody’s cudgels, Baynham. I shall have a look at my title-deeds to-morrow; and if there’s no stipulation about the right of way, you’ll find the gates locked next Sunday morning.”Sunday morning came, and the gates at each end of the old footpath were still open, and nothing had come of Mr. Crowther’s threat. The gates had stood open so long, and were so old and rotten, their lower timbers so embedded in the soft, oozy soil, so entangled and overgrown with foxglove and fern, so encrusted with moss and lichen, that it is doubtful if anybody could have closed them. They seemed as much rooted in the ground as the great brown fir trunks which rose in rugged majesty beside them.CHAPTER XI.“WHERE THE COLD SEA RAVES.”In the keen, fresh October afternoons, there was no walk Allegra loved better than the walk to Neptune Point, and higher up by winding footpaths to the Rashleigh Mausoleum, fitting sepulchre for a race born and bred in the breath of the sea; a stately tomb perched on a rocky pinnacle at the end of a promontory, like a sea-bird’s nest overhanging the wave.Allegra was in raptures with that strange resting-place.“I like it ever so much better than your Cockneyfied cemetery,” she exclaimed. “Think how grand it must be to lie for ever within the sound of the sea—the terrible, inscrutable sea, whose anger means death—the calm, summer sea, whose waves come dancing up the sands like laughing water. I wonder whether the Rashleighs would let me have a little grave of my own somewhere among these crags and hillocks—a modest little grave, hidden under wild foliage, which nobody would ever notice? Only I should hear the sea just as well as they do in their marble tomb.”“Oh, Allegra, how can you talk so lightly of death?” said Isola, shocked at this levity. “To me it is always dreadful to think of—and yet it must come.”“Poor child!” said Allegra, with infinite pity, putting her arm round her sister-in-law’s slighter figure, as they stood by the railing of the Mausoleum, in the loveliness of an October sunset.The sun had just gone down, veiled in autumnal haze, and behind the long ridge of waters beyond the Dodman there glowed the deep crimson of the western sky. Eastward above the Polruan hills the moon moved slowly upward, amidst dark masses of cloud which melted and rolled away before her on-coming, till all the sky became of one dark azure. The two girls went down the hill in silence, Allegra holdingIsola’s arm, linked with her own, steadying those weaker footsteps with the strength of her own firm movements. The difference between the two in physical force was no less marked than the difference in their mental characteristics, and Allegra’s love for her sister-in-law was tempered with a tender compassion for something so much weaker than herself.“Poor child!” she repeated, as they moved slowly down the steep, narrow path, “and do you really shudder at the thought of death? I don’t. I have only a vast curiosity. Do you remember that definition of Sir Thomas Browne’s which Martin read to us once—’Death is the Lucina of life.’ Death only opens the door of the hidden worlds which are waiting for all of us to discover. It is only an appalling name for a new birth. I love to dream about the infinite possibilities of the future—just as a boy might dream of the time when he should become a man. Look, look, Isa, there’s a yacht coming in! Isn’t it a lovely sight?”It was a long, narrow vessel, with all her canvas spread, gleaming with a silvery whiteness in the moonlight. Slowly and with majestic motion she swept round towards Neptune Point and the mouth of the harbour. There was only the lightest wind, and the waves were breaking gently on the rocks at the base of the promontory—a night as calm and fair as June.“Look!” repeated Allegra, “isn’t she lovely? like a fairy boat. Whose yacht can she be, I wonder? She looks like a racer, doesn’t she?”Isola did not answer. She had seen such a yacht two years ago; had seen such a long, narrow hull lying in the harbour under repairs; had seen the same craft sailing out to Mevagissey on a trial trip in the wintry sunlight. Doubtless there were many yachts in this world of just the same build and character.They stood at an angle of the hill-path looking up the river, and saw the yacht take in her canvas as she came into the haven under the hill; that sheltered harbour, with itstwo rivers cleaving the hills asunder, one winding away to the right towards Lerrin, the other to the left towards Trelasco and Lostwithiel. It looked so perfect a place of shelter, so utterly safe from tempest or foul weather; and yet there were seasons when a fierce wind from the great Atlantic came sweeping up the deep valleys, and all the angry spirits of the ocean seemed at war in that narrow gorge. To-night the atmosphere was unusually calm, and Isola could hear the sailors singing at their work.Slowly, slowly the two young women went down the hill, Allegra full of speculation and wonderment about the unknown vessel, Isola curiously silent. As they neared the hotel a man landed from a dinghy, and came briskly up the slippery causeway—a tall, slim figure in the vivid moonlight, loose limbed, loosely clad, moving with easiest motion.Isola turned sick at the sight of him. She stopped, helplessly, hopelessly, and stood staring straight before her, watching him as he came nearer and nearer, nearer and nearer—like some awful figure in a nightmare dream, when the feet of the dreamer seem frozen to the ground, and flesh and blood seem changed to ice and stone.He came nearer, looked at them, and passed them by—passed as one who knew them not, and was but faintly curious about them. He passed and walked quickly up towards the Point, with the rapid swinging movements of one who was glad to tread the solid earth.No, it was not Lostwithiel. She had thought at first that no one else could look so like him at so short a distance; no one else could have that tall, slender figure, and easy, buoyant walk. But the face she saw in the moonlight was not his. It was like, but not the same: darker, with larger features, a face of less delicacy and distinction; but oh, God! how like the eyes that had looked at her, with that brief glance of casual inspection, were to those other eyes that had poured their passionate story into her own that unforgotten night when she sat out the after-supper waltzes in the ante-room at the Talbot. She could not have believed that any manliving could so recall the man whose name she never spoke of her own free will.There were some sailors standing about at the top of the steep little bit of road leading down to the granite causeway, and their voices sounded fresh and clear in the still evening, mixed with the rippling rush of the water as it came running up the stones. The moonlight shone full upon one of the men as he stood with his face towards the sea, and Isola read the name upon the front of his jersey.“Vendetta.”“Vendetta,” cried Allegra, quick to observe the name. “Why, is not that Lord Lostwithiel’s yacht?”“Yes—I think so,” faltered Isola.“Then that must have been Lord Lostwithiel who passed as just now; and yet you would have known him, wouldn’t you?”“That was not Lord Lostwithiel.”“A friend of his, I suppose; such a nice-looking man, too. There was something so frank and cheery in his look as he just glanced at us both and marched briskly on. He did not pay us the compliment of seeming curious. I wonder who he is?”Isola was wondering about something else. She was looking with a frightened gaze across the harbour, towards that one break in the long golden trail of the moonbeams where theVendettacast her shadow on the water. There were lamps gleaming brightly here and there upon the vessel—a look of occupation.“Is Lord Lostwithiel on board his yacht?” Allegra asked of one of the sailors, not ashamed to appear inquisitive.“No, ma’am; Mr. Hulbert is skipper.”“Who is Mr. Hulbert?”“His lordship’s brother.”“Was that he who went up towards the Point just now?”“Yes, ma’am.”“Is he going to stop here long, do you know?”“I don’t think he knows himself, ma’am. It’ll dependupon the weather most likely. If we get a fair wind we may be off to the Lizard at an hour’s notice, and away up north to the Hebrides.”“Doesn’t that seem inconsistent?” exclaimed Allegra, as they walked homewards. “What is the good of coming to Cornwall if he wants to go to the Hebrides? It must be very much out of his way.”“He may want to see his old home, perhaps. He was born at the Mount, you know.”“Indeed! I don’t know anything about him, but I want to know ever so much. I call it an interesting face.”Allegra was full of animation during the homeward walk. A stranger of any kind must needs be a God-send, as affording a subject for conversation; but such a stranger as Lostwithiel’s brother afforded a theme of strongest interest. She had heard so much about Lord Lostwithiel and all his works and ways—the pity of it that he did not marry; the still greater pity that he did not live at the Mount, and give shooting parties and spend money in the neighbourhood. She had heard in a less exalted key of his lordship’s younger brother, who had fought under Beresford in Egypt, and who had only lately left the navy. What more natural than that such a man should sail his brother’s yacht?Captain Hulbert was still unmarried; but no one talked about the pity of that. People took a severely sensible view of his case, and were unanimous in the opinion that he could not afford to marry, and that any inspiration in that line would be criminal on his part. There was an idea at Trelasco that the younger sons of peers of moderate fortune have been specially designed by Providence to keep up the race of confirmed bachelors. There must be bachelors; the world cannot get on without them; society requires them as a distinct element in social existence; and it would ill become the offshoots of the peerage to shrink from fulfilling their destiny.Allegra was not the less curious about Captain Hulbert, although his celibate mission had been frequently expoundedto her. She was interested in him because she liked his face, because he was Lostwithiel’s brother, because he was sailing a very beautiful yacht, because he had appeared in her life with a romantic suddenness, sailing out of the sea unheralded and unexpected, like a man who had dropped from the moon.She fell asleep that night wondering if she would ever see him again—if theVendettawould have vanished from the harbour to-morrow at noontide, like a boat that had only lived in her dreams; or whether the yacht would still be anchored there in the haven under the hill. And, if so, whether Captain Hulbert would call at the Angler’s Nest, and tell them about Lostwithiel’s South American adventures, and how he came to be skipper of his brother’s yacht.At breakfast next morning, Colonel Disney’s talk was chiefly about Captain Hulbert. The colonel had been for an early walk, and had seen theVendettafrom the little Quay at Fowey, by the Mechanics’ Institute, and had heard who was the skipper.“I remember him when he and his brother were at Eton together—nice boys—capital boys, both of them—but I liked Jack Hulbert better than Lostwithiel. He was franker, more spontaneous and impulsive. Yes, Jack was my favourite, and everybody else’s favourite, I think, when the two were boys. I saw very little of them after they grew up. I was away with my regiment, and Jack was away with his ship, and Lostwithiel was wandering up and down the earth, like Satan. I left a card for Captain Hulbert at the club, asking him to dinner this evening. You don’t mind, do you, Isola?”Isola had no objection to offer, and Allegra was delighted at the prospect of seeing more of the man with the nice frank countenance, and that seafaring air which most women like.“I am a dreadful person for being influenced by first impressions,” she said, “and that one glance at CaptainHulbert in the moonlight assures me that I shall like him.”“Don’t like him too well,” said Martin, laughingly, “for I’m afraid he’s a detrimental, and would make even a worse match than Colfox, who may be a bishop one day, while Hulbert has left the navy, and is never likely to be anything.”“Match! detrimental!” cried Allegra, indignantly. “Can it be my brother who talks in such a vulgar strain? As if a woman could not look at a man without thinking of marrying him!”“Some women can’t,” answered Martin. “With them every free man is a possible husband—indeed, I believe there are some who cannot look at a married man without estimating the chances of the divorce court—if the man is what they call a catch.”“That is your Indian experience!” exclaimed Allegra, scornfully. “I have heard that India is a sink of iniquity.”She went about her day’s varied work as usual—curious to see the new acquaintance—yet in no wise excited. Vivid and animated, enthusiastic and energetic as she was in all her thoughts and ways, gushing sentimentality made no part of Miss Leland’s character. Life at Trelasco flowed with such an even monotony, there was such a dearth of new interests, that it was only natural that a girl of vivacious temper should be curious about new-comers. At St. John’s Wood every day had brought some new element into the lives of the students, and almost every day had brought a new pupil, drawn thither by the growing renown of the school, pupils from the uttermost ends of the earth sometimes, pupils of swart complexion speaking unknown tongues, pupils patrician and pupils plebeian, each and all conforming to the same stringent rules of art, spending patient months in the shading of a brace of plums or a bunch of grapes, from a plaster cast, and toiling slowly up the gradual ascent which leads to the Royal Academy and the gold medal. Many there were who sickened at the slow rate of progress and who fell away. Only the faithful remained. And this goingand coming, this strife between faith and unfaith, patience and impatience, had made a perpetual movement in the life of the great school—to say nothing of such bodily activities as lawn tennis, for which the master had provided a court—a court for his girl-pupils, be it noted, where they played among themselves, as if they had been so many collegians in the college of Tennyson’s “Princess.”Allegra had liked her life at the great art school, but she had never regretted its abandonment. She loved her brother, and her brother’s wife, better even than she loved art. It was only now and then that she felt that existence at Trelasco was as monotonous as the flow of the river going up and coming down day by day between Lostwithiel and the sea.She spent the hours between breakfast and luncheon hard at work in her painting-room—a little room with a large window facing northward. She had the coachman’s girl and boy for her models, and was engaged upon a little water-colour picture after the school of Mrs. Allingham, a little picture which told its story with touching simplicity.It was not the first picture of the kind she had painted. Several of her works had been exhibited at the minor galleries which are hospitable to the new-comer in the world of art; and two small pictures had been bought at prices which seemed to promise her an easy road to fortune.The coachman’s children profited greatly by this new profession which had been devised for them. Allegra made their frocks in her leisure hours, when the active fingers must have something to do, while the active tongue ran on gaily in happy talk with Martin and Isola. Allegra made up to her little models for their hours of enforced idleness by extra tuition which kept them ahead of most of the other pupils in the village school; and Allegra supplied them with pocket-money.“I don’t know however the children got on before Miss Leland came,” said the coachman’s wife. “They seem to look to her for everything.”Allegra had other models, village children, and village girls—her beauty-girl, a baker’s daughter with a splendid semi-Greek face, like Mrs. Langtry’s, whom she dressed up in certain cast-off finery of her own, and painted in her genre pictures, now in this attitude, and now in that, imparting an air of distinction which elevated the Cornish peasant into a patrician. She it was, this baker’s fair-haired daughter, who stood for Allegra’s successful picture—“A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,” a little bit of finished painting which had brought the painter five and thirty guineas—boundless wealth as it seemed to her—and ever so many commissions.Art, even in despondency and failure, is a consolation; art successful is an intoxicating delight. Allegra was as happy a young woman as could be found in Cornwall that day, when she shut her colour-box, dismissed her little maiden, and ran down to lunch, where she found Isola more silent than usual, and made amends by her own light-hearted chatter for the morning’s absorption over the easel. After lunch she ran off to the village to pay her parish visits to the sick and old, and on her way to an outlying cottage she met Mr. Colfox, who immediately turned to accompany her, a way he had, but a way to which she had never attached any significance. He was a clever, well-read man, of somewhat original temper, who had to pass most of his life among unlettered or dull people; therefore it surprised Allegra in no wise that he should like to talk to her. A bright, attractive girl of three and twenty is very unsuspicious about the feelings of a homely looking man at least a dozen years her senior.“Your brother has been good enough to ask me to dinner,” he said, after a little talk about the Goodies and their ailments. “I met him at the club this morning.”“He wants you to meet Captain Hulbert. Perhaps you know him already?”“No, he has not been here within my time. He only left the navy a year ago, and he was generally stationed at theutmost ends of the earth, keeping guard over our remote possessions. Have you seen him?”“Only for an instant. He passed my sister and me yesterday evening in the moonlight. I thought he looked a nice person—but I think women have a natural leaning towards sailors. I could never imagine a seaman telling a falsehood or doing a mean action.”“There is a kind of open-air manner which suggests truthfulness,” admitted Mr. Colfox. “Yet there have been dark deeds done by sailors; there have been black sheep even in the Queen’s Navee. However, I believe Captain Hulbert is worthy of your good opinion. I have never heard anybody speak against him, and the old people who knew him as a lad seem to have liked him better than Lord Lostwithiel.”“Do tell me your opinion of Lord Lostwithiel. I am very curious about him. Mr. Crowther talked of him so much the night we were at Glenaveril.”“Mr. Crowther loves a lord.”“Please satisfy my curiosity. Is he really such a fascinating personage?”“He has very pleasant manners. I don’t know what constitutes fascination in a man, though I know pretty well what it means in a woman. Lord Lostwithiel’s manners are chiefly distinguished by repose without languor or affectation—and by an interest in other people so cleverly simulated that it deceives everybody. One finds him out by the way in which people boast of his friendship. He cannot be so attached to all the world. He has a manner which is generally described as sympathetic.”“Mr. Crowther enlarged a good deal upon his lordship’s admiration for my sister at the Hunt Ball. Was that so very marked?”Mr. Colfox coloured violently at this direct question—assuredly not easy to answer truthfully without hazard of offence.“I was not at the ball—I—I heard people talk a little—in the way people talk of everything—about Lostwithiel’sattention to Mrs. Disney, and about her prettiness—they all agreed that if not the loveliest woman in the room, she was at least the most interesting.”“It was very natural that he should admire her; but I don’t think Martin liked Mr. Crowther’s talking about it in that way, at the dinner-table. The man is horridly underbred. Has Lord Lostwithiel what you call—” she hesitated a little—“a good character?”“I don’t know about the present. I have heard that in the past his reputation was not altogether good.”“I understand,” said Allegra, quickly. “The admiration of such a man is an insult; and that is why Mr. Crowther harped upon the fact. I am sure he is a malevolent man.”“Don’t be hard upon him, Miss Leland. I believe he has only the misfortune to be a cad—a cad by birth, education, and associations. Don’t fling your stone at such a man—consider what an unhappy fate it is.”“Oh, but he does not think himself unhappy. He is bursting with self-importance and the pride of riches. He is the typical rich man of the Psalmist. He must be the happiest man in Trelasco, a thick-skinned man whom nothing can hurt.”“I am sorry you think so badly of poor Mr. Crowther, because I am really attached to his wife. She is one of the best women I know.”“So my sister tells me, and I was very much taken with her myself, but one cannot afford to be friendly with Mrs. Crowther at the cost of knowing her husband.”She spoke with some touch of the insolence of youth, which sets so high a value upon its own opinions and its own independence, and looks upon all the rest of humanity as upon a lower plane. And this arrogant youth, which thinks so meanly of the multitude, will make its own exceptions, and reverence its chosen ideals with a blind hero-worship—for its love is always an upward-looking love, “the desire of the moth for the star.”Mr. Colfox sighed, and smiled at the same moment, a sadlittle half-cynical smile. He was thinking how impossible it was to refrain from admiring this bright out-spoken girl, with her quick intellect, and her artistic instincts, so spiritual, so unworldly, and fresh as an April morning—how impossible not to admire, how difficult not to love her, and how hopeless to love.He thought of himself with scathing self-contempt—middle-aged, homely of feature and of figure, with nothing to recommend him except good birth, a small independence—just so much as enabled him to live where he pleased and serve whom he would, without reference to the stipend attached to the cure; and a little rusty, dry-as-dust learning. Nothing more than this; and he wanted to win and wed a girl whose image never recurred to his mind without the suggestion of a rose garden, or a summer morning. Yes, she reminded him of morning and dewy red roses, those old-fashioned heavy red roses, round as a cup, and breathing sweetest, purest perfume.He jogged on by her side in silence, and only awoke from his reverie to bid her good-bye at the gate of a cottage garden, in the lane that led up the hill to Tywardreath.CHAPTER XII.“FAR, TOO FAR OFF FOR THOUGHT OR ANY PRAYER.”Mr. Colfox and Allegra met again in the drawing-room of the Angler’s Nest at a quarter to eight. He was the first to arrive, and Isola had not yet appeared. Martin Disney was at his post in front of the library fireplace, library and drawing-room making one spacious room, lighted with candles here and there, and with one large shaded lamp on a table near the piano. Isola had been suffering from headache, and had been late in dressing. Captain Hulbert had been in the room nearly ten minutes before his hostess appeared, looking pale and ill in her black lace gown, and with an anxiousexpression in her eyes. He had been introduced to Allegra, and was talking to her as if he had known her for years, when his attention was called off by Isola’s appearance, and his introduction to her.Was this Martin Disney’s wife, he thought wonderingly—such a girlish fragile creature—so unlike the woman he had pictured to himself? Strange that Lostwithiel should not have told him of her delicate prettiness, seeing that he was a connoisseur in beauty, and hypercritical.“This is just the kind of beauty he would admire,” thought Hulbert, “something out of the common—a pale, spiritual beauty—not dependent upon colouring, or even upon regularity of feature—the kind of thing one calls soul, not having found a better name for it.”They went in to dinner presently, Captain Hulbert and Isola, Mr. Colfox and Allegra. The table was a small oval, at which five people made a snug little party. There was a central mass of white chrysanthemums, a cheerful glow of coloured Venetian glass, delicatest pink and jade-green, under the light of a hanging lamp. John Hulbert looked round him with a pleased expression, taking in the flowers, the glass, the cream-white china, the lamplight, everything; and then the two fair young faces, one pale and pensive, the other aglow with the delight of life, eagerly expectant of new ideas.They talked of theVendettaand the places at which she had touched lately. Captain Hulbert had spent his summer on the Eastern Liguria, between Genoa and Civita Vecchia.“Wasn’t it the wrong time of year for Italy?” asked Mr. Colfox.“No, it is the season of seasons in the land of the sun. If you want to enjoy a southern country, go there in the summer. The south is made for summer, her houses are built for hot weather, her streets are planned for shade; her wines, her food, her manners and customs have all been made for summer-time—not for winter. If you want to know Italy at her worst go there in cold weather.”“Where did you leave Lord Lostwithiel?” Disney asked presently.“I left him nowhere. He left me to rove about Southern Europe—left me on his way to Carinthia. He is like the wandering Jew. He used to be mad about yachting; but he got sick of theVendettaall of a sudden, and handed her over to me. Very generous on his part; but the boat is something of a white elephant for a man of my small means. I wanted him to sell her. Wouldn’t hear of it. To let her. Not to be thought of. ‘I’ll lend her to you,’ he said, ‘and you shall keep her as long as you like—sink her, if you like—provided you don’t go down in her. She is not a lucky boat.’”“Have you sailed her long?”“Nearly a year, and I love her as if she were bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Let us all go for a sail to-morrow, Mrs. Disney—to Mevagissey or thereabouts. We could do a little fishing. It will be capital fun. What do you say, Miss Leland?”“I should adore it,” said Allegra, beaming at him. “The sea is my passion—and I think it is my sister’s passion too. We are a kind of amphibious creatures, living more on water than on land. We venture as far as we dare in a row-boat—but oh, that is such a little way.”“I’m afraid that some day you will venture so far that you won’t be able to get back again, and will find yourselves drifting away to America,” said her brother.Isola answered never a word, until Captain Hulbert addressed her pointedly for the second time.“Will you go, Mrs. Disney—may we make up the party?”“I would rather not,” she answered, without looking at him.“But why not? Are you such a bad sailor—in spite of all Miss Leland says of you?”“I am a pretty good sailor in a row-boat—but not in a yacht. And I hate fishing—such a slow weary business. I would rather not go.”“I am so sorry; but you must not be worried about it,”said Hulbert, kindly, seeing the growing distress in her countenance. “We will not go in for fishing—or excursions—but you and Miss Leland will at least come to afternoon tea on theVendetta—to afternoon tea in the harbour. There used to be a comic song when I was a boy—’Come and drink tea in the arbour.’ You must come to the arbour with an aspirate. It is not so rustic or sentimental—but there will be no earwigs or creeping things to drop into your tea-cup. Mr. Colfox, you will come, won’t you?”“I shall be delighted,” answered the curate. “I have a sneaking kindness for all yachts.”The conversation drifted back to Lostwithiel and his works and ways, presently.“When he went home two years ago he gave me to understand he was going to settle down at the Mount, and spend the rest of his days in peace and respectability,” said Captain Hulbert. “Yet, very soon afterwards, he and his yacht were off again like theFlying Dutchman, and the next I heard of him was at Leghorn, and six months later he was coasting off Algiers; and the following spring he was in South America; and theVendettawas laid up at Marseilles, where he begged me to go and look after her, and take her to myself until such time as he should want her again. I was with him for a few days at Leghorn, where he seemed ill and out of spirits. I don’t think you can have used him over well in this part of the world, Mrs. Disney,” he added, half in jest. “I fancy some of you must have snubbed him severely, or his tenants must have worried him by their complaints and exactions. I could not get him to talk about his life at the Mount. He seemed to have taken a disgust for the old home.”“You must put that down to his roving temper,” said Disney, “for although I was away at the time, I can answer for it there was no such thing as snubbing in the case. Your brother is the only peer in these parts, and from the way people talk about him he might be the only peer in Great Britain—the Alpha and Omega of Debrett. Our parvenu neighbour, Mr. Crowther, talked of him one night with aslavish rapture which made me sick. I am a Tory by association and instinct, but I can’t stand the vulgarian’s worship of a lord.”Isola looked at her sister-in-law, and they both rose at this moment, the Church almost tumbling over the Navy in eagerness to open the door; Navy winning by a neck.They were not long alone in the drawing-room, not more than the space of a single cigarette, before the men followed. Then came music, and a good deal of talk, in the long, low, spacious room, which looked so bright and homely by candlelight, with all its tokens of domestic and intellectual life.“What a capital quarter-deck this is,” cried John Hulbert, after pacing up and down while he listened, and talked, and laughed at Allegra’s little jokes about the narrowness of village life. “It is delightful to stretch one’s legs in such a room as this, after six months upon a yacht.”“You will have room enough to stretch your legs at the Mount,” said Disney.Captain Hulbert had announced his intention of spending a week or two under the family roof-tree while theVendettaunderwent some slight repairs and renovations.“Room enough and to spare,” he said. “I shan’t feel half so jovial walking up and down those grim old rooms as I feel here. I shall fancy a ghost pacing behind me, clump, clump, clump—a slow, solemn footstep—only the echo of my own tread perhaps; but I shall never know, for I shall be afraid to look round.”“You ought not to make sport of weak people’s fancies, for I am sure you don’t believe in ghosts,” said Allegra, leaning with one elbow on the piano, turning over pieces of music absently, a graceful figure in a dark green velvet gown, cut just low enough to show the fine curves of a full, round throat, white and smooth as ivory.“Not believe in ghosts? Did you ever know a sailor who wasn’t superstitious? We are too often alone with the sea and the stars to be quite free from spectral fancies, Miss Leland. I can see in your eyes as you look at me thismoment that you believe in ghosts—believe and tremble. Tell me now, candidly—When do you most fear them? At what hour of the day or night does the unreal seem nearest to you?”“I don’t know,” she faltered, turning over the loose music with a faintly tremulous gesture, while Isola sat by the piano, touching the notes dumbly now and then.“Is it at midnight—in the gloaming—in the chill, mysterious dawn? You won’t answer! Shall I guess? If you are like me, it is in broad daylight—between two and three in the afternoon—when the servants are all idling after their dinner, and the house is silent. You are alone in a big, bright room, perhaps, with another room opening out of it, and a door a long way off. You sit writing at your table, and you feel all at once that the room is haunted—there must be something or some one stealing in at that remotest door. You daren’t look round. You go to the window and look out into garden or street—for a town house may be just as ghastly as a country one—and then with a great effort you turn slowly round and face your terror, in the broad, garish sunlight, in the business hours of the day. There is nothing there, of course; but the feeling has not been the less vivid. I know I shall be spectre-haunted at the Mount. You must all come and scare away the shadows. Mr. Colfox, are you fond of billiards?”“I own to a liking for the game. I play with Mr. Crowther and his youngest daughter whenever I dine at Glenaveril. Alicia is a very fine player, for a girl, and her father plays a good game.”“Then you will come up to the Mount two or three times a week and play with me, I hope. There’s a decent table—cushions as hard as bricks, I dare say, but we must make the best of it—and there’s plenty of sound claret in the cellars to say nothing of a keg or two of Schiedam that I sent home from the Hague.”“Mr. Colfox will not make much impression either on your claret or your schnapps,” said Disney, laughing. “Heis almost as temperate as one of those terrible anchorites in the novel we were reading the other day—’Homo Sum.’”“I am glad you put in the qualifying ‘almost,’” said the curate, “for I hope to taste Captain Hulbert’s Schiedam.”The captain expatiated upon what his three new friends—and his one old friend, Martin Disney—were to do to cheer him in his solitude at the Mount.“There is nothing of the anchorite about me,” he said. “I love society, I love life and movement, I love bright faces.”He would not leave until they had all promised to take tea on board the yacht on the following afternoon, an engagement which was kept by Allegra and the colonel; but not by Isola, whose headache was worse after the little dinner-party; nor by the curate, who had parish business to detain him on shore.CHAPTER XIII.“UNDER THE PINE-WOOD, BLIND WITH BOUGHS.”If Isola had any disinclination to visit Captain Hulbert’s yacht, her headache only served to defer the evil day, for after that first tea-drinking came other invitations and other arrangements, fishing-parties, luncheons off Mevagissey, entertainments in which Isola must needs share when she saw her husband and his sister bent upon the enjoyment of the hour, delighted with theVendettaand her warm-hearted skipper.They were not John Hulbert’s only friends in the neighbourhood. Everybody seemed glad to welcome the rover to his native village. Almost everybody had known him in his boyhood; and there was a general consensus of opinion that he was a much better fellow than his brother. He was less courted; but he was better liked. There had been a touch of cynicism about Lostwithiel which frightened matter-of-fact country people.“One could never feel sure he wasn’t laughing in his sleeve at our rustic ignorance,” said Mrs. Baynham. “I am more at my ease with Captain Hulbert, and my husband and he were great friends when he was a boy. They used to go fishing together, when Baynham’s practice wasn’t as good as it is now.”So the brief Indian summer passed in pleasant idlesse on a tranquil sea. The equinoctial gales had not begun to rage yet. There was a lull before the coming of the great winds which were to blow good ships on shore, and startle sleepers in the dead of night. All now was fair and placid—sunlit waters, golden evenings. They spent one bright, balmy day off Mevagissey, a day which was like a long dream to Isola, as she sat on deck in a low folding-chair, wrapped in a great feathery rug from the South Sea Islands, with her languid head reclining against a plush-covered cushion, one of the many effeminate luxuries which abounded in the cabins below. Everybody else was intent upon the nets. Everybody else was full of interest and movement and expectation; but she sat apart from all, with her ivory knitting-needles lying idle in her lap, amidst a soft mass of white wool, which her industry was to convert into a garment for the baby.Allegra was enraptured with the yacht. She would fain have taken Isola down to the cabins, to explore their wonders of luxury and contrivance, so much comfort and elegance in so restricted an area; but Isola refused to leave the deck.“I hate all cabins,” she said. “They are always suffocatingly hot.”So Mrs. Baynham went below with Allegra, and they two explored the two principal cabins with wondering admiration, and even peeped into the cook’s galley, and the odd little places where steward and sailors contrived to bestow themselves.The chief cabin, saloon, or whatever one liked to call it, was as daintily decorated as a lady’s boudoir. There were nests of richly bound books, Oriental bronzes, and all kindsof continental pottery, Japanese and Indian embroideries, Venetian mirrors, quaint little carved cupboards for wine or cigars. Every corner and cranny was utilized.“What a delicious drawing-room!” cried Allegra. “I could live here all my life. Fancy, how delightful! A floating life. No such thing as satiety. One might open one’s eyes every morning on a fresh coast, glorified, as one sees it across the bright, blue water. To explore the Mediterranean, for instance, floating from city to city—the cities of the past, the cities of the Gospel, the shores that were trodden by the feet of St. Paul and his companions—the cities of the Christian saints and martyrs, the island birthplaces of Greek gods and heroes. Think, Mrs. Baynham! A yacht like this is a master-key to open all the gateways of the world.”“I would rather have my own cosy little cottage on terra firma,” answered the doctor’s wife in a matter-of-fact mood; but this speech of Allegra’s set the good lady pondering upon the possibility of John Hulbert falling in love with this nice, clever girl, and making her mistress of his brother’s yacht.Her friendly fancy depicted the village wedding, and those two going forth over the great waters to spend their honeymoon amidst the wonder-world of the Mediterranean, which the banker’s daughter knew only in her Atlas.“He can’t be rich,” she thought, “but he must have a comfortable income. I know his mother had money. And Allegra can earn a good deal by her painting. She wouldn’t be an expensive wife. We ought all to do our best to bring it about. A girl has so few chances in such a place as Trelasco. She might almost as well be in a convent.”Mrs. Baynham was at heart a matchmaker, like most motherly women whom fate has left childless. She was very fond of Allegra, who was so much more companionable than Isola, so much more responsive to kindness and affection. As she sat on deck in the westering sunlight, somewhat comatose after a copious luncheon, Mrs. Baynham’sidea of helping Allegra took the form of a dinner-party which she had long been meditating, her modest return for numerous dinners which she had eaten at Glenaveril and at the Angler’s Nest. She considered that three or four times a year it behoved her to make a serious effort in the way of hospitality—a substantial and elaborate dinner, in which no good things in season should be spared, and which should be served with all due ceremony. The time was at hand when such a dinner would in a manner fall due; and she determined to hasten the date with a view to Allegra’s interests.“Captain Hulbert is sure to be off again before long,” she told herself, “so every evening they can spend together is of importance. I’m sure he is inclined to fall in love with her already.”There was not much doubt about his feelings as he stood by Allegra in the stern, directing the movements of her bare active hands while she hauled in the net; not much doubt that he was as deep in love as a man well can be after a fortnight’s acquaintance. He did not make any secret of his bondage, but let his eyes tell all the world that this girl was for him “the world’s one woman.”The invitation from Mrs. Baynham was delivered by post next morning, as ceremonious a card as if the place were Mayfair, and the inviter and invitees had not met since last season. A copper-plate card, with name and address filled in by the lady’s pen, a detail which distinguished her modest invitation from the Glenaveril cards, of which there were a variety, for at homes, tennis, dinner, luncheon, to accept, and to decline. A fortnight’s notice marked the dignity of the occasion—the hour the orthodox quarter to eight.“We can’t refuse, Isola,” said Disney, when his wife handed him the card, “although my past experience assures me that the evening will be a trifle heavy. Why will people in small houses insist upon giving dinner-parties, instead of having their friends in instalments? When we go to dine with the Baynhams we go for love of them, not the peoplethey bring together; and yet they insist upon seating twelve in a room that will just comfortably hold eight. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit.”“But Mrs. Baynham is so happy when she is giving a real dinner-party. I don’t think we can refuse, can we, Allegra?” asked Isola.“Mrs. Baynham is a darling, and I wouldn’t vex her for worlds,” replied her sister-in law. “And in a place like this one can’t pretend a prior engagement, unless it were in the moon.”The invitation was accepted forthwith, and when Captain Hulbert dropped in at teatime it was discovered that he, too, had been asked, and that he meant to accept, if his friends at the Angler’s Nest were to be there.A thunderbolt fell upon the little village on the following Sunday. When the old men and women, creeping to church a little in advance of younger legs, came to the church-path, they found the gate locked against them, locked and barricaded with bars which looked as if they were meant to last till the final cataclysm. The poor old creatures looked up wonderingly at a newly-painted board, on which the more intelligent among them spelt out the following legend—“This wood is the private property of J. Vansittart Crowther, Esq. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”Martin Disney and his wife and sister came up when a little crowd of men, women, and children, numbering about thirty, had assembled round the gate, all in their Sunday best.“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Disney.“Ah, colonel, that’s what we all want to know,” replied old Manley, the village carpenter, a bent and venerable figure, long past work. “I’m over eighty, but I never remember that gate being locked as long as I have lived at Trelasco, and that’s all my life, colonel. There’s always been a right of way through that wood.”“And there always shall be,” answered Martin Disney. “We won’t take any violent measures to-day, my friends—first because it is Sunday, and next because one should always try fair means before one tries foul. I shall write to Mr. Crowther to-morrow, asking him civilly to open that gate. If he refuses, I’ll have it opened for him, and I’ll take the consequences of the act. Now, my good friends, you’d better go to church by the road. You’ll get there after the service has begun. Wait till the congregation are standing up, and then go into church all together, so that everybody may understand why and by whose fault it is that you are late.”The appearance of this large contingent after the first lesson created considerable surprise, and much turning of heads and rustling of bonnet-strings in the echoing old stone church. Mr. Crowther stood in his pew of state on one side of the chancel, and felt that the war had begun. Everybody was against him in the matter, he knew; but he wanted to demonstrate the rich man’s right to do what he liked with the things which he had bought. The wood was his, and he did not mean to let the whole parish tramp across it.He received a stiffly polite letter from Colonel Disney, requesting him to re-open the church-path without loss of time, and informing him of the great inconvenience caused to the older and weaker members of the congregation by the illegal closing of the path during church hours.Mr. Crowther sent his reply by the colonel’s messenger. He asserted his right to shut up the wood which formed a part of his estate, and positively refused to re-open the gate at either end of the footpath in question.Captain Hulbert dropped in at his usual hour, eager to know the progress of the fight. Fight there must be, he was assured, having seen something of Mr. Crowther’s bulldog temper. Then, in the drawing-room of the Angler’s Nest, there was hatched a terrible plot—a Catiline conspiracy in a tea-cup—Allegra listening and applauding while the two men plotted.That night, when the village was hushed in sleep, a boatful of sailors landed at the little hard near the railwaystation at Fowey, and half a dozen stalwart blue-jackets might have been seen tramping along the old railway track to Trelasco, one carrying a crowbar, another a carpenter’s basket. And under the autumn stars that night in the woods of Glenaveril, while Vansittart Crowther slept the sleep of the just man who payeth his twenty shillings in the pound, there rose the sound of a sea-song and the cheery chorus of the sailors, with a rhythmic accompaniment of hammering; and lo, when the October morning visited those yellowing woods, and when Mr. Crowther’s gamekeeper went on his morning round, the gate at either end of the church path was wrenched off its hinges, and was lying on the ground. Staple and bolt, padlock and iron hinges, were lying among the dewy dock-leaves and the yellowing fern; and there was free passage between the village of Trelasco and the House of God.Vansittart Crowther went to Plymouth by the first train that could convey him, and there consulted the lawyer most in renown among the citizens; and that gentleman, after due thought and consideration, informed him that the closing of such an old-established right of way as that of the church-path was more than any landowner durst attempt. Whatever omission there might be in the title-deeds, he had bought the estate subject to that old right of way, which had been enjoyed by the parish from time immemorial. He could no more shut it off than he could wall out the sky.“But I can punish the person who pulled the locks off my gates, I conclude?” said Mr. Crowther, swelling with indignation.“That, of course, is a distinct outrage, for which you may obtain redress, if you can find out who did it.”“There can be no difficulty about that. The act must have been instigated by the writer of that impertinent letter.”He pointed to Martin Disney’s letter, lying open on the solicitor’s table.“Very probably. But you will have to be sure of proving his share in the act if you mean to take proceedings against him.”Vansittart Crowther was furious. How was he to bring the responsibility of this outrage home to anybody, when the deed had been done in the dead of night, and no mortal eye had seen the depredators at their felonious work? His locks and bolts and hinges, the best of their kind that Sheffield could supply, had been mocked at and made as naught; and all his dumb dogs of serving men and women had been lying in their too comfortable beds, and had heard never a sound of hammer clinking or crowbar striking on iron. There had not been so much as a kitchen-maid afflicted with the tooth-ache, and lying wakeful, to hear the far-off noise of that villainous deed.Mr. Crowther sent for the police authorities of Fowey, and set his wrongs before them.“I will give fifty pounds reward to the man who will get me credible evidence as to the person who planned that outrage,” he said. And next day there were bills pasted against divers doors at Fowey and Trelasco, against the Mechanics’ Institute, and against that curious old oaken door of a mediæval building opposite the club, which may once have been a donjon, and in sundry other conspicuous places, beginning with “Whereas,” and ending with Vansittart Crowther’s signature.Nothing came of this splendid offer, though there were plenty of people in the district to whom fifty pounds would have seemed a fortune. Whether no one had seen the crew of theVendettalanding or re-embarking in the night-time, or whether some wakeful eyes had seen, whose owners would not betray the doers of a deed done in a good cause, still remains unknown. Captain Hulbert was enchanted at the success of the conspiracy, and went to church next Sunday by the now notorious footpath, along which an unusual procession of villagers came streaming in the crisp, clear air, proud to assert a right that had been so boldly maintained by their unnamed but not unknown champion. Every one felt very sure that the flinging open of the gates had been somehow brought about by Martin Disney—Martin, whosegrandfather they could some of them remember, when he came home after the long war with the French, and took up his abode in an old house among the hills, and married a fair young wife. That had happened sixty-five years ago; but there were those in the village who could remember handsome Major Disney, with only one arm, and a face bronzed by the sun that shines on the banks of the Douro.
Yet now, sitting in the deep of night beside that bed which might be the bed of death, he told himself that his wife’s love was lost to him, had been lost from the hour of his return to Trelasco, when he went back to her with all the enthusiasm of a lover, forgetful of his mature years, of his long experience of life—hard fighting, hard knocks of all kinds in the great life-battle.
He had gone back to her as Leander to Hero, a boy in heart and hopefulness; and what had he found in her? A placid, obedient wife, gentle almost to apathy, but with a strain of melancholy underlying all their relations which his devoted love could not conquer.
To all his interrogations her answer had been the same. She was not unhappy. She had everything in life that she desired. There was nothing that he could give her, no possible change in their existence which could add to her content. All this should mean domestic peace, a heart at ease; yet all this was unsatisfying to Martin Disney; for his instinct told him that his wife was not happy—that the element of gladness was, for some inscrutable reason, banished from her life.
She had seemed happier, or at least the little home had been brighter and gayer after Allegra’s coming; but as the time wore on it became clear to him that the life and gaiety were all in Allegra herself, and that Isola was spiritless and depressed. It was as if the spring of her life had snapped suddenly, and left her nerveless and joyless, a submissive, unhopeful creature. That sense of disappointment and loss which he had dimly felt, even when his home-coming had been a new thing, had grown and deepened with the passage of time. He had bought his land; he had added to the space and comfort of his house; he had enlarged the stables, and bought a couple of hunters, and a cob for harness; and while these things had been doing, the activity of his days, the fuss and labour of arrangement and supervision, had occupied his mind so pleasantly as to stifle those growing doubts for the time being. But when all was done; when the vine and the figtree had been planted, and he sat down to take his ease in their shade, then he began to feel very keenly that his wife’s part in all that he had done was the part of submission only. She liked this or that because he liked it. She was content, and that was all. And the line between contentment and resignation is so faint a demarcation that it seemed to him sometimes as if she were only resigned, as if she suffered life rather than lived—suffered life as holy women suffer some slow, wasting disease, in meek subjection to a mysterious decree.
He sat beside her bed, while she battled with all the demons of delirium; and he wondered whether—when she had beenat her best, when her mind had been brightest and clearest—she had been any nearer to him than she was now in her madness; whether he had known any more of her inner self—the mystery of her heart and conscience—than he knew now, while those wild eyes stared at him without sight or knowledge.
One summer morning, as he sat alone in his watch in that dull interval between darkness and dawn, the visions of the wandering mind took a more consecutive form than usual. She fancied herself in a storm at sea. The waves were rolling mountains high—were bearing down upon her with threatenings of instant death. She feared, and yet she courted the danger. In one minute she was recoiling from the wild rush of waters, clinging distractedly to the brass rail at the head of her bed, crouching against the wall as if to save herself from an advancing wave; and in the next minute she sprang out of bed, and rushed to the open window, wanting to throw herself out of it. Disney was only just quick enough to seize her in his arms, and carry her back to bed. He held her there, battling with him in a vehement effort to escape from his restraining arms.
“Why do you stop me?” she cried, looking at him fiercely with her distracted eyes. “What else is there for me? What other refuge? what other hope? Let me go! let me go! Cruel! cruel! cruel! Let me throw myself into the sea! Don’t you understand? Oh, cruel! cruel! Cold and wicked, shameless and cruel! There is nothing else—only that refuge left! Let me hide myself in death! let me hide—hide!”
Her voice rose to a shriek; and both the nurse and Allegra came hurrying in. The faint white dawn shone upon her livid face and on the scarlet spot upon each hollow cheek. Her eyes stared wildly, starting from their sockets in that paroxysm of her madness.
Only a few days after that night of terror Isola was lying calm as a child. The fever had gone down—the enfeebled constitution had at last answered to the influence of medicine;and gradually, like the slow lifting of the darkness after a long night of cloud and fog, consciousness and reason came back. Sleep soothed the strained and weary nerves, and the exhausted frame, which a few days before had seemed endowed with a superhuman strength, lay like a log upon the bed of sickness.
Recovery was slow, but there was no relapse. Slow as the dawning of day to the tired watcher, after the long, blank night, there came the dawn of maternal love. The young mother began to take delight in her child; and it was rapture to Martin Disney to see her sitting opposite him under the tulip-tree, in the low Madeira chair, with her baby in her lap. Allegra vied with her in her devotion to that over-praised infant; while the Shah and Tim, of the same opinion for the first time in their lives, were almost rabid with jealousy.
They all lived in the garden in that happy summer season, as they had done the year before, when Allegra first came among them. It was in the garden they received their visitors, and it was there that Mr. Colfox came at least thrice a week, upon the flimsiest pretexts of parish business, to drink tea poured out for him by Allegra’s helpful hands, while Isola sat quietly by, listening to their talk, and watching every change in her child’s face; from smiles to frowns, from slumber to waking.
Allegra had taken kindly to parish work, and, in Mr. Colfox’s own phraseology, was a tower of strength to him in his labours among the poor of Trelasco. She had started a series of mothers’ meetings in the winter afternoons, and had read to the women and girls while they worked, helping them a good deal with their work into the bargain. She had done wonders at penny readings, singing, reciting, drawing lightning caricatures of local celebrities with bits of coloured chalk on rough white paper. Her portrait of Vansittart Crowther had been applauded to the echo, although it was not a flattering portrait. She had visited the sick; she had taught in the night school. The curatehad been enthusiastic in his appreciation of her, and his praises had been listened to contemptuously by the two Miss Crowthers, each of whom at different periods had taken up these good works, only to drop them again after the briefest effort.
“She will get tired as soon as we did,” said Alicia, “when she finds out how impossible these creatures are—unless she has an ulterior motive.”
“What ulterior motive should she have?” asked Colfox, bluntly.
“Who can tell? She may want to get herself talked about. As Miss Leland, of the Angler’s Nest, a sort of useful companion to her brother’s wife, she is a nobody. If she can get a reputation for piety and philanthropy, that will be better than nothing. Or she may be only angling for a husband.”
“If you knew her as well as I do you would know that she is above all trivial and selfish motives, and that she is good to these people because her heart has gone out to them.”
“Ah, but you see we don’t know her. Her brother has chosen to hold himself aloof from Glenaveril; and I must say I am very glad he has taken that line—for more than one reason.”
“If any of your reasons concern Miss Leland you are very much mistaken in under-rating her. You could not have had a more delightful companion,” said Mr. Colfox, with some warmth.
“Oh, we all know that you have exalted her into a heroine—a St. John’s Wood St. Helena. But she is a little too unconventional for my taste; though I certainly would rather be intimate with her than with her sister-in-law.”
“Surely you have no fault to find with that most gentle creature?”
“She is just a little too gentle for my taste,” replied Alicia, who usually took upon herself all expression of opinion, while Belinda fanned herself languidly, in an æstheticattitude, feeling that her chief mission in this life was to sit still and look likela belle dame sans merci. “She is just as much too quiet as Miss Leland is too boisterous. I have no liking for pensive young women who cast down their eyelids at the slightest provocation, and are only animated when they are flirting.”
“The tongue is a little member,” quoted Mr. Colfox, taking up his hat, and holding out his hand in adieu.
He was very unceremonious to these fair parishioners of his, and talked to them as freely as if he had been an old French Abbé in a country village. It is needless to say that they valued his opinion so much the more because he was entirely unaffected by their wealth or their good looks. They were naturally aggrieved at his marked admiration for Miss Leland.
Those ripe months of harvest and vintage, July, August, and September, passed like a blissful dream for Martin Disney. He had snatched his darling from the jaws of death. He had her once more—fair to look upon, with sweet, smiling mouth and pensive eyes; and she was so tender and so loving to him, in fond gratitude for his devotion during her illness, so seemingly happy in their mutual love for their child, that he forgot all those aching fears which had gnawed his heart while he sat by her pillow through the long anxious nights—forgot that he had ever doubted her, or remembered his doubts only to scorn himself as a morbid, jealous fool. Could he doubt her, who was candour and innocence personified? Could he think for an instant that all those sweet, loving ways and looks of hers which beautified his commonplace existence, were so much acting—and that her heart was not his? No! True love has an unmistakable language; and true love spoke to him in every word and tone of his wife’s.
The child made so close a bond between them. Both lives were seemingly bound and entwined about this fragile life of Isola’s firstborn. Mr. Baynham had no reason now to complain of his patient’s want of the maternal instinct.He had rather to restrain her in her devotion to the child. He had to reprove her for her sleepless nights and morbid anxieties.
“Do you think your baby will grow any the faster or stronger for your lying awake half the night worrying yourself about him?” said the doctor, with his cheery bluntness. “He has a capital nurse—one of those excellent cow-women, who are specially created to rear other people’s babies; and he has a doctor who is not quite a fool about infant maladies. Read your novels, Mrs. Disney, and keep up your good looks; or else twenty years hence you will see your son blushing when he hears his mother mistaken for his grandmother.”
After giving his patient this advice, Mr. Baynham told his wife, in confidence, that were anything to happen to the little one, Isola Disney would go off her head.
“I’m afraid she is sadly hysterical,” replied Mrs. Baynham. “I am very fond of her, you know, Tom; but I have never been able to understand her. I can’t make out a young woman who has a pretty house and an indulgent husband, and who never seems quite happy.”
“Every woman can’t have your genial disposition, Belle,” answered the doctor, admiringly. “Perpetual sunshine is the rarest thing in Nature.”
The early western harvest had been gathered in. Upland and valley in that undulating land were clothed with the tawny hue of the stubble. Here and there the plough horses were moving slowly along the red ridges on the steep hillside. No touch of frost had dulled the rich hues of the autumnal flowers, and the red carnations still glowed in every cottage garden, while the pale pink trusses of hydrangea filled all the shrubberies with beauty. A keener breath came up at eventide from the salt sea beyond Point Neptune, and wilder winds crept across the inland valleys with the on-coming of night. Summer and the swallows were gone. October, a balmy season for the most part, was at hand;and there were no more tea-drinkings and afternoon gossipings in the garden at the Angler’s Nest. The lamps were lighted before dinner. The evenings were spent in the old library and the new drawing-room, the new room communicating with the old one by a curtained archway, so that of a night the curtains could be drawn back and Martin Disney could sit among his books by the fireplace in the library, and yet be within conversational reach of Isola and Allegra in the drawing-room, where they had piano and table-easel, work-baskets, and occupations of all kinds.
Mr. Colfox sometimes dropped in of an evening, on parish business of course, took a cup of coffee, listened while Allegra played one of Mozart’s sonatas or sang a song by Gluck or Haydn or Handel. Mr. Colfox was not one of the advanced people who despise Mozart or Handel. Nor did he look down upon Haydn. Indeed, he sat and stroked his thin legs with a sheepish appreciation, wrinkling up his loose trousers, and showing a large amount of stocking, while Allegra sang “My mother bids me bind my hair,” in her clear, strong mezzo-soprano, which was of infinite use to him in his choir.
He told everybody that Martin Disney’s was an ideal household—a home into which it was a privilege to be admitted.
“I feel as if I never knew the beauty of domestic life till I knew the Angler’s Nest,” he said one evening after dinner at Glenaveril, when he and the village doctor had accepted one of Mr. Crowther’s pressing invitations to what he called “pot-luck,” the pot-luck of the man whose spirit burns within him at the thought of his hundred-guinea cook, and whose pride is most intolerable when it apes humility.
“Really, now,” said Mr. Crowther, “you surprise me, for I have always fancied there was a screw loose there.”
“What does that expression imply, Mr. Crowther?” asked the curate, coldly.
“Oh, I don’t know! Nothing specific: only one’s notion of an ideal home doesn’t generally take the shape of a beautiful girl of twenty married to a man of forty-five. The disparity is just twice as much as it ought to be.”
“Upon my soul,” cried the curate, “I don’t believe that wedded love is affected by any difference of years. Desdemona loved Othello, who was a man of mature age——”
“And black,” interrupted Mr. Crowther, with a coarse laugh. “Well, let us be thankful that Colonel Disney is not a nigger; and that there is so much the less danger of a burst-up at the Angler’s Nest. And now, Baynham, with regard to this footpath across the wood, who the deuce will be injured if I shut it up?”
“A good many people, and the people I think you would least like to injure,” answered the doctor, sturdily. “Old people, and feeble, ailing people, who find the walk to church quite far enough even with the help of that short cut.”
“Short cut be hanged!” cried Mr. Crowther, helping himself to a bumper of port, and passing on the decanter with hospitable emphasis. “It can’t make a difference of a hundred yards.”
“It does make a difference of over a quarter of a mile—and the proof is that everybody uses it, and that it goes by the name of the Church path. I wouldn’t try to stop it, if I were you, Mr. Crowther. You are a popular man in the parish, for you—well, you have spent a heap of money in this place, and you subscribe liberally to all our charities and what not; but, I don’t mind telling you, if you were to try and shut off that old footpath across your wood, you’d be about the most unpopular man within a radius of ten miles.”
“Don’t talk about trying to shut it off, man,” said Mr. Crowther, arrogantly. “If I choose to lock the gates to-morrow, I shall do it, and ask nobody’s leave. The wood is my wood, and there’s no clause in my title-deeds as to any right of way through it; and I don’t see why I am to have my hazel bushes pulled about, and my chestnut trees damaged by a pack of idle boys, under the pretence of church-going. There’s the Queen’s highway for ’em, d—n ’em!” cried Mr. Crowther, growing more insolent, as he gulped his fifth glass of Sandemann. “If that ain’t goodenough, let ’em go to the Ranters’ Chapel at the other end of the village.”
“I thought you were a staunch Conservative, Mr. Crowther, and an upholder of Church and State,” said Mr. Colfox. “Am I to believe my ears when I hear you advocating the Ranters’ Chapel?”
“It’s good enough for such rabble as that, sir. What does it matter where they go?”
“Prosecute the boys for trespass, if you like,” said the doctor; “though I doubt if you’ll get a magistrate to impose more than a nominal fine for the offence of taking a handful of nuts in a wood that has been open ever since I began to walk, and heaven knows how many years before; but let the old gaffers and goodies creep to church by the shortest path that can take them there. They’ll have to travel by the Queen’s highway later, when they go to the churchyard—but then they’ll be carried. Don’t interfere with the privileges of the poor, Mr. Crowther. No one ever did that yet and went scot free. There’s always somebody to take up the cudgels for them.”
“I don’t care a doit for anybody’s cudgels, Baynham. I shall have a look at my title-deeds to-morrow; and if there’s no stipulation about the right of way, you’ll find the gates locked next Sunday morning.”
Sunday morning came, and the gates at each end of the old footpath were still open, and nothing had come of Mr. Crowther’s threat. The gates had stood open so long, and were so old and rotten, their lower timbers so embedded in the soft, oozy soil, so entangled and overgrown with foxglove and fern, so encrusted with moss and lichen, that it is doubtful if anybody could have closed them. They seemed as much rooted in the ground as the great brown fir trunks which rose in rugged majesty beside them.
CHAPTER XI.
“WHERE THE COLD SEA RAVES.”
In the keen, fresh October afternoons, there was no walk Allegra loved better than the walk to Neptune Point, and higher up by winding footpaths to the Rashleigh Mausoleum, fitting sepulchre for a race born and bred in the breath of the sea; a stately tomb perched on a rocky pinnacle at the end of a promontory, like a sea-bird’s nest overhanging the wave.
Allegra was in raptures with that strange resting-place.
“I like it ever so much better than your Cockneyfied cemetery,” she exclaimed. “Think how grand it must be to lie for ever within the sound of the sea—the terrible, inscrutable sea, whose anger means death—the calm, summer sea, whose waves come dancing up the sands like laughing water. I wonder whether the Rashleighs would let me have a little grave of my own somewhere among these crags and hillocks—a modest little grave, hidden under wild foliage, which nobody would ever notice? Only I should hear the sea just as well as they do in their marble tomb.”
“Oh, Allegra, how can you talk so lightly of death?” said Isola, shocked at this levity. “To me it is always dreadful to think of—and yet it must come.”
“Poor child!” said Allegra, with infinite pity, putting her arm round her sister-in-law’s slighter figure, as they stood by the railing of the Mausoleum, in the loveliness of an October sunset.
The sun had just gone down, veiled in autumnal haze, and behind the long ridge of waters beyond the Dodman there glowed the deep crimson of the western sky. Eastward above the Polruan hills the moon moved slowly upward, amidst dark masses of cloud which melted and rolled away before her on-coming, till all the sky became of one dark azure. The two girls went down the hill in silence, Allegra holdingIsola’s arm, linked with her own, steadying those weaker footsteps with the strength of her own firm movements. The difference between the two in physical force was no less marked than the difference in their mental characteristics, and Allegra’s love for her sister-in-law was tempered with a tender compassion for something so much weaker than herself.
“Poor child!” she repeated, as they moved slowly down the steep, narrow path, “and do you really shudder at the thought of death? I don’t. I have only a vast curiosity. Do you remember that definition of Sir Thomas Browne’s which Martin read to us once—’Death is the Lucina of life.’ Death only opens the door of the hidden worlds which are waiting for all of us to discover. It is only an appalling name for a new birth. I love to dream about the infinite possibilities of the future—just as a boy might dream of the time when he should become a man. Look, look, Isa, there’s a yacht coming in! Isn’t it a lovely sight?”
It was a long, narrow vessel, with all her canvas spread, gleaming with a silvery whiteness in the moonlight. Slowly and with majestic motion she swept round towards Neptune Point and the mouth of the harbour. There was only the lightest wind, and the waves were breaking gently on the rocks at the base of the promontory—a night as calm and fair as June.
“Look!” repeated Allegra, “isn’t she lovely? like a fairy boat. Whose yacht can she be, I wonder? She looks like a racer, doesn’t she?”
Isola did not answer. She had seen such a yacht two years ago; had seen such a long, narrow hull lying in the harbour under repairs; had seen the same craft sailing out to Mevagissey on a trial trip in the wintry sunlight. Doubtless there were many yachts in this world of just the same build and character.
They stood at an angle of the hill-path looking up the river, and saw the yacht take in her canvas as she came into the haven under the hill; that sheltered harbour, with itstwo rivers cleaving the hills asunder, one winding away to the right towards Lerrin, the other to the left towards Trelasco and Lostwithiel. It looked so perfect a place of shelter, so utterly safe from tempest or foul weather; and yet there were seasons when a fierce wind from the great Atlantic came sweeping up the deep valleys, and all the angry spirits of the ocean seemed at war in that narrow gorge. To-night the atmosphere was unusually calm, and Isola could hear the sailors singing at their work.
Slowly, slowly the two young women went down the hill, Allegra full of speculation and wonderment about the unknown vessel, Isola curiously silent. As they neared the hotel a man landed from a dinghy, and came briskly up the slippery causeway—a tall, slim figure in the vivid moonlight, loose limbed, loosely clad, moving with easiest motion.
Isola turned sick at the sight of him. She stopped, helplessly, hopelessly, and stood staring straight before her, watching him as he came nearer and nearer, nearer and nearer—like some awful figure in a nightmare dream, when the feet of the dreamer seem frozen to the ground, and flesh and blood seem changed to ice and stone.
He came nearer, looked at them, and passed them by—passed as one who knew them not, and was but faintly curious about them. He passed and walked quickly up towards the Point, with the rapid swinging movements of one who was glad to tread the solid earth.
No, it was not Lostwithiel. She had thought at first that no one else could look so like him at so short a distance; no one else could have that tall, slender figure, and easy, buoyant walk. But the face she saw in the moonlight was not his. It was like, but not the same: darker, with larger features, a face of less delicacy and distinction; but oh, God! how like the eyes that had looked at her, with that brief glance of casual inspection, were to those other eyes that had poured their passionate story into her own that unforgotten night when she sat out the after-supper waltzes in the ante-room at the Talbot. She could not have believed that any manliving could so recall the man whose name she never spoke of her own free will.
There were some sailors standing about at the top of the steep little bit of road leading down to the granite causeway, and their voices sounded fresh and clear in the still evening, mixed with the rippling rush of the water as it came running up the stones. The moonlight shone full upon one of the men as he stood with his face towards the sea, and Isola read the name upon the front of his jersey.
“Vendetta.”
“Vendetta,” cried Allegra, quick to observe the name. “Why, is not that Lord Lostwithiel’s yacht?”
“Yes—I think so,” faltered Isola.
“Then that must have been Lord Lostwithiel who passed as just now; and yet you would have known him, wouldn’t you?”
“That was not Lord Lostwithiel.”
“A friend of his, I suppose; such a nice-looking man, too. There was something so frank and cheery in his look as he just glanced at us both and marched briskly on. He did not pay us the compliment of seeming curious. I wonder who he is?”
Isola was wondering about something else. She was looking with a frightened gaze across the harbour, towards that one break in the long golden trail of the moonbeams where theVendettacast her shadow on the water. There were lamps gleaming brightly here and there upon the vessel—a look of occupation.
“Is Lord Lostwithiel on board his yacht?” Allegra asked of one of the sailors, not ashamed to appear inquisitive.
“No, ma’am; Mr. Hulbert is skipper.”
“Who is Mr. Hulbert?”
“His lordship’s brother.”
“Was that he who went up towards the Point just now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is he going to stop here long, do you know?”
“I don’t think he knows himself, ma’am. It’ll dependupon the weather most likely. If we get a fair wind we may be off to the Lizard at an hour’s notice, and away up north to the Hebrides.”
“Doesn’t that seem inconsistent?” exclaimed Allegra, as they walked homewards. “What is the good of coming to Cornwall if he wants to go to the Hebrides? It must be very much out of his way.”
“He may want to see his old home, perhaps. He was born at the Mount, you know.”
“Indeed! I don’t know anything about him, but I want to know ever so much. I call it an interesting face.”
Allegra was full of animation during the homeward walk. A stranger of any kind must needs be a God-send, as affording a subject for conversation; but such a stranger as Lostwithiel’s brother afforded a theme of strongest interest. She had heard so much about Lord Lostwithiel and all his works and ways—the pity of it that he did not marry; the still greater pity that he did not live at the Mount, and give shooting parties and spend money in the neighbourhood. She had heard in a less exalted key of his lordship’s younger brother, who had fought under Beresford in Egypt, and who had only lately left the navy. What more natural than that such a man should sail his brother’s yacht?
Captain Hulbert was still unmarried; but no one talked about the pity of that. People took a severely sensible view of his case, and were unanimous in the opinion that he could not afford to marry, and that any inspiration in that line would be criminal on his part. There was an idea at Trelasco that the younger sons of peers of moderate fortune have been specially designed by Providence to keep up the race of confirmed bachelors. There must be bachelors; the world cannot get on without them; society requires them as a distinct element in social existence; and it would ill become the offshoots of the peerage to shrink from fulfilling their destiny.
Allegra was not the less curious about Captain Hulbert, although his celibate mission had been frequently expoundedto her. She was interested in him because she liked his face, because he was Lostwithiel’s brother, because he was sailing a very beautiful yacht, because he had appeared in her life with a romantic suddenness, sailing out of the sea unheralded and unexpected, like a man who had dropped from the moon.
She fell asleep that night wondering if she would ever see him again—if theVendettawould have vanished from the harbour to-morrow at noontide, like a boat that had only lived in her dreams; or whether the yacht would still be anchored there in the haven under the hill. And, if so, whether Captain Hulbert would call at the Angler’s Nest, and tell them about Lostwithiel’s South American adventures, and how he came to be skipper of his brother’s yacht.
At breakfast next morning, Colonel Disney’s talk was chiefly about Captain Hulbert. The colonel had been for an early walk, and had seen theVendettafrom the little Quay at Fowey, by the Mechanics’ Institute, and had heard who was the skipper.
“I remember him when he and his brother were at Eton together—nice boys—capital boys, both of them—but I liked Jack Hulbert better than Lostwithiel. He was franker, more spontaneous and impulsive. Yes, Jack was my favourite, and everybody else’s favourite, I think, when the two were boys. I saw very little of them after they grew up. I was away with my regiment, and Jack was away with his ship, and Lostwithiel was wandering up and down the earth, like Satan. I left a card for Captain Hulbert at the club, asking him to dinner this evening. You don’t mind, do you, Isola?”
Isola had no objection to offer, and Allegra was delighted at the prospect of seeing more of the man with the nice frank countenance, and that seafaring air which most women like.
“I am a dreadful person for being influenced by first impressions,” she said, “and that one glance at CaptainHulbert in the moonlight assures me that I shall like him.”
“Don’t like him too well,” said Martin, laughingly, “for I’m afraid he’s a detrimental, and would make even a worse match than Colfox, who may be a bishop one day, while Hulbert has left the navy, and is never likely to be anything.”
“Match! detrimental!” cried Allegra, indignantly. “Can it be my brother who talks in such a vulgar strain? As if a woman could not look at a man without thinking of marrying him!”
“Some women can’t,” answered Martin. “With them every free man is a possible husband—indeed, I believe there are some who cannot look at a married man without estimating the chances of the divorce court—if the man is what they call a catch.”
“That is your Indian experience!” exclaimed Allegra, scornfully. “I have heard that India is a sink of iniquity.”
She went about her day’s varied work as usual—curious to see the new acquaintance—yet in no wise excited. Vivid and animated, enthusiastic and energetic as she was in all her thoughts and ways, gushing sentimentality made no part of Miss Leland’s character. Life at Trelasco flowed with such an even monotony, there was such a dearth of new interests, that it was only natural that a girl of vivacious temper should be curious about new-comers. At St. John’s Wood every day had brought some new element into the lives of the students, and almost every day had brought a new pupil, drawn thither by the growing renown of the school, pupils from the uttermost ends of the earth sometimes, pupils of swart complexion speaking unknown tongues, pupils patrician and pupils plebeian, each and all conforming to the same stringent rules of art, spending patient months in the shading of a brace of plums or a bunch of grapes, from a plaster cast, and toiling slowly up the gradual ascent which leads to the Royal Academy and the gold medal. Many there were who sickened at the slow rate of progress and who fell away. Only the faithful remained. And this goingand coming, this strife between faith and unfaith, patience and impatience, had made a perpetual movement in the life of the great school—to say nothing of such bodily activities as lawn tennis, for which the master had provided a court—a court for his girl-pupils, be it noted, where they played among themselves, as if they had been so many collegians in the college of Tennyson’s “Princess.”
Allegra had liked her life at the great art school, but she had never regretted its abandonment. She loved her brother, and her brother’s wife, better even than she loved art. It was only now and then that she felt that existence at Trelasco was as monotonous as the flow of the river going up and coming down day by day between Lostwithiel and the sea.
She spent the hours between breakfast and luncheon hard at work in her painting-room—a little room with a large window facing northward. She had the coachman’s girl and boy for her models, and was engaged upon a little water-colour picture after the school of Mrs. Allingham, a little picture which told its story with touching simplicity.
It was not the first picture of the kind she had painted. Several of her works had been exhibited at the minor galleries which are hospitable to the new-comer in the world of art; and two small pictures had been bought at prices which seemed to promise her an easy road to fortune.
The coachman’s children profited greatly by this new profession which had been devised for them. Allegra made their frocks in her leisure hours, when the active fingers must have something to do, while the active tongue ran on gaily in happy talk with Martin and Isola. Allegra made up to her little models for their hours of enforced idleness by extra tuition which kept them ahead of most of the other pupils in the village school; and Allegra supplied them with pocket-money.
“I don’t know however the children got on before Miss Leland came,” said the coachman’s wife. “They seem to look to her for everything.”
Allegra had other models, village children, and village girls—her beauty-girl, a baker’s daughter with a splendid semi-Greek face, like Mrs. Langtry’s, whom she dressed up in certain cast-off finery of her own, and painted in her genre pictures, now in this attitude, and now in that, imparting an air of distinction which elevated the Cornish peasant into a patrician. She it was, this baker’s fair-haired daughter, who stood for Allegra’s successful picture—“A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,” a little bit of finished painting which had brought the painter five and thirty guineas—boundless wealth as it seemed to her—and ever so many commissions.
Art, even in despondency and failure, is a consolation; art successful is an intoxicating delight. Allegra was as happy a young woman as could be found in Cornwall that day, when she shut her colour-box, dismissed her little maiden, and ran down to lunch, where she found Isola more silent than usual, and made amends by her own light-hearted chatter for the morning’s absorption over the easel. After lunch she ran off to the village to pay her parish visits to the sick and old, and on her way to an outlying cottage she met Mr. Colfox, who immediately turned to accompany her, a way he had, but a way to which she had never attached any significance. He was a clever, well-read man, of somewhat original temper, who had to pass most of his life among unlettered or dull people; therefore it surprised Allegra in no wise that he should like to talk to her. A bright, attractive girl of three and twenty is very unsuspicious about the feelings of a homely looking man at least a dozen years her senior.
“Your brother has been good enough to ask me to dinner,” he said, after a little talk about the Goodies and their ailments. “I met him at the club this morning.”
“He wants you to meet Captain Hulbert. Perhaps you know him already?”
“No, he has not been here within my time. He only left the navy a year ago, and he was generally stationed at theutmost ends of the earth, keeping guard over our remote possessions. Have you seen him?”
“Only for an instant. He passed my sister and me yesterday evening in the moonlight. I thought he looked a nice person—but I think women have a natural leaning towards sailors. I could never imagine a seaman telling a falsehood or doing a mean action.”
“There is a kind of open-air manner which suggests truthfulness,” admitted Mr. Colfox. “Yet there have been dark deeds done by sailors; there have been black sheep even in the Queen’s Navee. However, I believe Captain Hulbert is worthy of your good opinion. I have never heard anybody speak against him, and the old people who knew him as a lad seem to have liked him better than Lord Lostwithiel.”
“Do tell me your opinion of Lord Lostwithiel. I am very curious about him. Mr. Crowther talked of him so much the night we were at Glenaveril.”
“Mr. Crowther loves a lord.”
“Please satisfy my curiosity. Is he really such a fascinating personage?”
“He has very pleasant manners. I don’t know what constitutes fascination in a man, though I know pretty well what it means in a woman. Lord Lostwithiel’s manners are chiefly distinguished by repose without languor or affectation—and by an interest in other people so cleverly simulated that it deceives everybody. One finds him out by the way in which people boast of his friendship. He cannot be so attached to all the world. He has a manner which is generally described as sympathetic.”
“Mr. Crowther enlarged a good deal upon his lordship’s admiration for my sister at the Hunt Ball. Was that so very marked?”
Mr. Colfox coloured violently at this direct question—assuredly not easy to answer truthfully without hazard of offence.
“I was not at the ball—I—I heard people talk a little—in the way people talk of everything—about Lostwithiel’sattention to Mrs. Disney, and about her prettiness—they all agreed that if not the loveliest woman in the room, she was at least the most interesting.”
“It was very natural that he should admire her; but I don’t think Martin liked Mr. Crowther’s talking about it in that way, at the dinner-table. The man is horridly underbred. Has Lord Lostwithiel what you call—” she hesitated a little—“a good character?”
“I don’t know about the present. I have heard that in the past his reputation was not altogether good.”
“I understand,” said Allegra, quickly. “The admiration of such a man is an insult; and that is why Mr. Crowther harped upon the fact. I am sure he is a malevolent man.”
“Don’t be hard upon him, Miss Leland. I believe he has only the misfortune to be a cad—a cad by birth, education, and associations. Don’t fling your stone at such a man—consider what an unhappy fate it is.”
“Oh, but he does not think himself unhappy. He is bursting with self-importance and the pride of riches. He is the typical rich man of the Psalmist. He must be the happiest man in Trelasco, a thick-skinned man whom nothing can hurt.”
“I am sorry you think so badly of poor Mr. Crowther, because I am really attached to his wife. She is one of the best women I know.”
“So my sister tells me, and I was very much taken with her myself, but one cannot afford to be friendly with Mrs. Crowther at the cost of knowing her husband.”
She spoke with some touch of the insolence of youth, which sets so high a value upon its own opinions and its own independence, and looks upon all the rest of humanity as upon a lower plane. And this arrogant youth, which thinks so meanly of the multitude, will make its own exceptions, and reverence its chosen ideals with a blind hero-worship—for its love is always an upward-looking love, “the desire of the moth for the star.”
Mr. Colfox sighed, and smiled at the same moment, a sadlittle half-cynical smile. He was thinking how impossible it was to refrain from admiring this bright out-spoken girl, with her quick intellect, and her artistic instincts, so spiritual, so unworldly, and fresh as an April morning—how impossible not to admire, how difficult not to love her, and how hopeless to love.
He thought of himself with scathing self-contempt—middle-aged, homely of feature and of figure, with nothing to recommend him except good birth, a small independence—just so much as enabled him to live where he pleased and serve whom he would, without reference to the stipend attached to the cure; and a little rusty, dry-as-dust learning. Nothing more than this; and he wanted to win and wed a girl whose image never recurred to his mind without the suggestion of a rose garden, or a summer morning. Yes, she reminded him of morning and dewy red roses, those old-fashioned heavy red roses, round as a cup, and breathing sweetest, purest perfume.
He jogged on by her side in silence, and only awoke from his reverie to bid her good-bye at the gate of a cottage garden, in the lane that led up the hill to Tywardreath.
CHAPTER XII.
“FAR, TOO FAR OFF FOR THOUGHT OR ANY PRAYER.”
Mr. Colfox and Allegra met again in the drawing-room of the Angler’s Nest at a quarter to eight. He was the first to arrive, and Isola had not yet appeared. Martin Disney was at his post in front of the library fireplace, library and drawing-room making one spacious room, lighted with candles here and there, and with one large shaded lamp on a table near the piano. Isola had been suffering from headache, and had been late in dressing. Captain Hulbert had been in the room nearly ten minutes before his hostess appeared, looking pale and ill in her black lace gown, and with an anxiousexpression in her eyes. He had been introduced to Allegra, and was talking to her as if he had known her for years, when his attention was called off by Isola’s appearance, and his introduction to her.
Was this Martin Disney’s wife, he thought wonderingly—such a girlish fragile creature—so unlike the woman he had pictured to himself? Strange that Lostwithiel should not have told him of her delicate prettiness, seeing that he was a connoisseur in beauty, and hypercritical.
“This is just the kind of beauty he would admire,” thought Hulbert, “something out of the common—a pale, spiritual beauty—not dependent upon colouring, or even upon regularity of feature—the kind of thing one calls soul, not having found a better name for it.”
They went in to dinner presently, Captain Hulbert and Isola, Mr. Colfox and Allegra. The table was a small oval, at which five people made a snug little party. There was a central mass of white chrysanthemums, a cheerful glow of coloured Venetian glass, delicatest pink and jade-green, under the light of a hanging lamp. John Hulbert looked round him with a pleased expression, taking in the flowers, the glass, the cream-white china, the lamplight, everything; and then the two fair young faces, one pale and pensive, the other aglow with the delight of life, eagerly expectant of new ideas.
They talked of theVendettaand the places at which she had touched lately. Captain Hulbert had spent his summer on the Eastern Liguria, between Genoa and Civita Vecchia.
“Wasn’t it the wrong time of year for Italy?” asked Mr. Colfox.
“No, it is the season of seasons in the land of the sun. If you want to enjoy a southern country, go there in the summer. The south is made for summer, her houses are built for hot weather, her streets are planned for shade; her wines, her food, her manners and customs have all been made for summer-time—not for winter. If you want to know Italy at her worst go there in cold weather.”
“Where did you leave Lord Lostwithiel?” Disney asked presently.
“I left him nowhere. He left me to rove about Southern Europe—left me on his way to Carinthia. He is like the wandering Jew. He used to be mad about yachting; but he got sick of theVendettaall of a sudden, and handed her over to me. Very generous on his part; but the boat is something of a white elephant for a man of my small means. I wanted him to sell her. Wouldn’t hear of it. To let her. Not to be thought of. ‘I’ll lend her to you,’ he said, ‘and you shall keep her as long as you like—sink her, if you like—provided you don’t go down in her. She is not a lucky boat.’”
“Have you sailed her long?”
“Nearly a year, and I love her as if she were bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Let us all go for a sail to-morrow, Mrs. Disney—to Mevagissey or thereabouts. We could do a little fishing. It will be capital fun. What do you say, Miss Leland?”
“I should adore it,” said Allegra, beaming at him. “The sea is my passion—and I think it is my sister’s passion too. We are a kind of amphibious creatures, living more on water than on land. We venture as far as we dare in a row-boat—but oh, that is such a little way.”
“I’m afraid that some day you will venture so far that you won’t be able to get back again, and will find yourselves drifting away to America,” said her brother.
Isola answered never a word, until Captain Hulbert addressed her pointedly for the second time.
“Will you go, Mrs. Disney—may we make up the party?”
“I would rather not,” she answered, without looking at him.
“But why not? Are you such a bad sailor—in spite of all Miss Leland says of you?”
“I am a pretty good sailor in a row-boat—but not in a yacht. And I hate fishing—such a slow weary business. I would rather not go.”
“I am so sorry; but you must not be worried about it,”said Hulbert, kindly, seeing the growing distress in her countenance. “We will not go in for fishing—or excursions—but you and Miss Leland will at least come to afternoon tea on theVendetta—to afternoon tea in the harbour. There used to be a comic song when I was a boy—’Come and drink tea in the arbour.’ You must come to the arbour with an aspirate. It is not so rustic or sentimental—but there will be no earwigs or creeping things to drop into your tea-cup. Mr. Colfox, you will come, won’t you?”
“I shall be delighted,” answered the curate. “I have a sneaking kindness for all yachts.”
The conversation drifted back to Lostwithiel and his works and ways, presently.
“When he went home two years ago he gave me to understand he was going to settle down at the Mount, and spend the rest of his days in peace and respectability,” said Captain Hulbert. “Yet, very soon afterwards, he and his yacht were off again like theFlying Dutchman, and the next I heard of him was at Leghorn, and six months later he was coasting off Algiers; and the following spring he was in South America; and theVendettawas laid up at Marseilles, where he begged me to go and look after her, and take her to myself until such time as he should want her again. I was with him for a few days at Leghorn, where he seemed ill and out of spirits. I don’t think you can have used him over well in this part of the world, Mrs. Disney,” he added, half in jest. “I fancy some of you must have snubbed him severely, or his tenants must have worried him by their complaints and exactions. I could not get him to talk about his life at the Mount. He seemed to have taken a disgust for the old home.”
“You must put that down to his roving temper,” said Disney, “for although I was away at the time, I can answer for it there was no such thing as snubbing in the case. Your brother is the only peer in these parts, and from the way people talk about him he might be the only peer in Great Britain—the Alpha and Omega of Debrett. Our parvenu neighbour, Mr. Crowther, talked of him one night with aslavish rapture which made me sick. I am a Tory by association and instinct, but I can’t stand the vulgarian’s worship of a lord.”
Isola looked at her sister-in-law, and they both rose at this moment, the Church almost tumbling over the Navy in eagerness to open the door; Navy winning by a neck.
They were not long alone in the drawing-room, not more than the space of a single cigarette, before the men followed. Then came music, and a good deal of talk, in the long, low, spacious room, which looked so bright and homely by candlelight, with all its tokens of domestic and intellectual life.
“What a capital quarter-deck this is,” cried John Hulbert, after pacing up and down while he listened, and talked, and laughed at Allegra’s little jokes about the narrowness of village life. “It is delightful to stretch one’s legs in such a room as this, after six months upon a yacht.”
“You will have room enough to stretch your legs at the Mount,” said Disney.
Captain Hulbert had announced his intention of spending a week or two under the family roof-tree while theVendettaunderwent some slight repairs and renovations.
“Room enough and to spare,” he said. “I shan’t feel half so jovial walking up and down those grim old rooms as I feel here. I shall fancy a ghost pacing behind me, clump, clump, clump—a slow, solemn footstep—only the echo of my own tread perhaps; but I shall never know, for I shall be afraid to look round.”
“You ought not to make sport of weak people’s fancies, for I am sure you don’t believe in ghosts,” said Allegra, leaning with one elbow on the piano, turning over pieces of music absently, a graceful figure in a dark green velvet gown, cut just low enough to show the fine curves of a full, round throat, white and smooth as ivory.
“Not believe in ghosts? Did you ever know a sailor who wasn’t superstitious? We are too often alone with the sea and the stars to be quite free from spectral fancies, Miss Leland. I can see in your eyes as you look at me thismoment that you believe in ghosts—believe and tremble. Tell me now, candidly—When do you most fear them? At what hour of the day or night does the unreal seem nearest to you?”
“I don’t know,” she faltered, turning over the loose music with a faintly tremulous gesture, while Isola sat by the piano, touching the notes dumbly now and then.
“Is it at midnight—in the gloaming—in the chill, mysterious dawn? You won’t answer! Shall I guess? If you are like me, it is in broad daylight—between two and three in the afternoon—when the servants are all idling after their dinner, and the house is silent. You are alone in a big, bright room, perhaps, with another room opening out of it, and a door a long way off. You sit writing at your table, and you feel all at once that the room is haunted—there must be something or some one stealing in at that remotest door. You daren’t look round. You go to the window and look out into garden or street—for a town house may be just as ghastly as a country one—and then with a great effort you turn slowly round and face your terror, in the broad, garish sunlight, in the business hours of the day. There is nothing there, of course; but the feeling has not been the less vivid. I know I shall be spectre-haunted at the Mount. You must all come and scare away the shadows. Mr. Colfox, are you fond of billiards?”
“I own to a liking for the game. I play with Mr. Crowther and his youngest daughter whenever I dine at Glenaveril. Alicia is a very fine player, for a girl, and her father plays a good game.”
“Then you will come up to the Mount two or three times a week and play with me, I hope. There’s a decent table—cushions as hard as bricks, I dare say, but we must make the best of it—and there’s plenty of sound claret in the cellars to say nothing of a keg or two of Schiedam that I sent home from the Hague.”
“Mr. Colfox will not make much impression either on your claret or your schnapps,” said Disney, laughing. “Heis almost as temperate as one of those terrible anchorites in the novel we were reading the other day—’Homo Sum.’”
“I am glad you put in the qualifying ‘almost,’” said the curate, “for I hope to taste Captain Hulbert’s Schiedam.”
The captain expatiated upon what his three new friends—and his one old friend, Martin Disney—were to do to cheer him in his solitude at the Mount.
“There is nothing of the anchorite about me,” he said. “I love society, I love life and movement, I love bright faces.”
He would not leave until they had all promised to take tea on board the yacht on the following afternoon, an engagement which was kept by Allegra and the colonel; but not by Isola, whose headache was worse after the little dinner-party; nor by the curate, who had parish business to detain him on shore.
CHAPTER XIII.
“UNDER THE PINE-WOOD, BLIND WITH BOUGHS.”
If Isola had any disinclination to visit Captain Hulbert’s yacht, her headache only served to defer the evil day, for after that first tea-drinking came other invitations and other arrangements, fishing-parties, luncheons off Mevagissey, entertainments in which Isola must needs share when she saw her husband and his sister bent upon the enjoyment of the hour, delighted with theVendettaand her warm-hearted skipper.
They were not John Hulbert’s only friends in the neighbourhood. Everybody seemed glad to welcome the rover to his native village. Almost everybody had known him in his boyhood; and there was a general consensus of opinion that he was a much better fellow than his brother. He was less courted; but he was better liked. There had been a touch of cynicism about Lostwithiel which frightened matter-of-fact country people.
“One could never feel sure he wasn’t laughing in his sleeve at our rustic ignorance,” said Mrs. Baynham. “I am more at my ease with Captain Hulbert, and my husband and he were great friends when he was a boy. They used to go fishing together, when Baynham’s practice wasn’t as good as it is now.”
So the brief Indian summer passed in pleasant idlesse on a tranquil sea. The equinoctial gales had not begun to rage yet. There was a lull before the coming of the great winds which were to blow good ships on shore, and startle sleepers in the dead of night. All now was fair and placid—sunlit waters, golden evenings. They spent one bright, balmy day off Mevagissey, a day which was like a long dream to Isola, as she sat on deck in a low folding-chair, wrapped in a great feathery rug from the South Sea Islands, with her languid head reclining against a plush-covered cushion, one of the many effeminate luxuries which abounded in the cabins below. Everybody else was intent upon the nets. Everybody else was full of interest and movement and expectation; but she sat apart from all, with her ivory knitting-needles lying idle in her lap, amidst a soft mass of white wool, which her industry was to convert into a garment for the baby.
Allegra was enraptured with the yacht. She would fain have taken Isola down to the cabins, to explore their wonders of luxury and contrivance, so much comfort and elegance in so restricted an area; but Isola refused to leave the deck.
“I hate all cabins,” she said. “They are always suffocatingly hot.”
So Mrs. Baynham went below with Allegra, and they two explored the two principal cabins with wondering admiration, and even peeped into the cook’s galley, and the odd little places where steward and sailors contrived to bestow themselves.
The chief cabin, saloon, or whatever one liked to call it, was as daintily decorated as a lady’s boudoir. There were nests of richly bound books, Oriental bronzes, and all kindsof continental pottery, Japanese and Indian embroideries, Venetian mirrors, quaint little carved cupboards for wine or cigars. Every corner and cranny was utilized.
“What a delicious drawing-room!” cried Allegra. “I could live here all my life. Fancy, how delightful! A floating life. No such thing as satiety. One might open one’s eyes every morning on a fresh coast, glorified, as one sees it across the bright, blue water. To explore the Mediterranean, for instance, floating from city to city—the cities of the past, the cities of the Gospel, the shores that were trodden by the feet of St. Paul and his companions—the cities of the Christian saints and martyrs, the island birthplaces of Greek gods and heroes. Think, Mrs. Baynham! A yacht like this is a master-key to open all the gateways of the world.”
“I would rather have my own cosy little cottage on terra firma,” answered the doctor’s wife in a matter-of-fact mood; but this speech of Allegra’s set the good lady pondering upon the possibility of John Hulbert falling in love with this nice, clever girl, and making her mistress of his brother’s yacht.
Her friendly fancy depicted the village wedding, and those two going forth over the great waters to spend their honeymoon amidst the wonder-world of the Mediterranean, which the banker’s daughter knew only in her Atlas.
“He can’t be rich,” she thought, “but he must have a comfortable income. I know his mother had money. And Allegra can earn a good deal by her painting. She wouldn’t be an expensive wife. We ought all to do our best to bring it about. A girl has so few chances in such a place as Trelasco. She might almost as well be in a convent.”
Mrs. Baynham was at heart a matchmaker, like most motherly women whom fate has left childless. She was very fond of Allegra, who was so much more companionable than Isola, so much more responsive to kindness and affection. As she sat on deck in the westering sunlight, somewhat comatose after a copious luncheon, Mrs. Baynham’sidea of helping Allegra took the form of a dinner-party which she had long been meditating, her modest return for numerous dinners which she had eaten at Glenaveril and at the Angler’s Nest. She considered that three or four times a year it behoved her to make a serious effort in the way of hospitality—a substantial and elaborate dinner, in which no good things in season should be spared, and which should be served with all due ceremony. The time was at hand when such a dinner would in a manner fall due; and she determined to hasten the date with a view to Allegra’s interests.
“Captain Hulbert is sure to be off again before long,” she told herself, “so every evening they can spend together is of importance. I’m sure he is inclined to fall in love with her already.”
There was not much doubt about his feelings as he stood by Allegra in the stern, directing the movements of her bare active hands while she hauled in the net; not much doubt that he was as deep in love as a man well can be after a fortnight’s acquaintance. He did not make any secret of his bondage, but let his eyes tell all the world that this girl was for him “the world’s one woman.”
The invitation from Mrs. Baynham was delivered by post next morning, as ceremonious a card as if the place were Mayfair, and the inviter and invitees had not met since last season. A copper-plate card, with name and address filled in by the lady’s pen, a detail which distinguished her modest invitation from the Glenaveril cards, of which there were a variety, for at homes, tennis, dinner, luncheon, to accept, and to decline. A fortnight’s notice marked the dignity of the occasion—the hour the orthodox quarter to eight.
“We can’t refuse, Isola,” said Disney, when his wife handed him the card, “although my past experience assures me that the evening will be a trifle heavy. Why will people in small houses insist upon giving dinner-parties, instead of having their friends in instalments? When we go to dine with the Baynhams we go for love of them, not the peoplethey bring together; and yet they insist upon seating twelve in a room that will just comfortably hold eight. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit.”
“But Mrs. Baynham is so happy when she is giving a real dinner-party. I don’t think we can refuse, can we, Allegra?” asked Isola.
“Mrs. Baynham is a darling, and I wouldn’t vex her for worlds,” replied her sister-in law. “And in a place like this one can’t pretend a prior engagement, unless it were in the moon.”
The invitation was accepted forthwith, and when Captain Hulbert dropped in at teatime it was discovered that he, too, had been asked, and that he meant to accept, if his friends at the Angler’s Nest were to be there.
A thunderbolt fell upon the little village on the following Sunday. When the old men and women, creeping to church a little in advance of younger legs, came to the church-path, they found the gate locked against them, locked and barricaded with bars which looked as if they were meant to last till the final cataclysm. The poor old creatures looked up wonderingly at a newly-painted board, on which the more intelligent among them spelt out the following legend—
“This wood is the private property of J. Vansittart Crowther, Esq. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”
Martin Disney and his wife and sister came up when a little crowd of men, women, and children, numbering about thirty, had assembled round the gate, all in their Sunday best.
“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Disney.
“Ah, colonel, that’s what we all want to know,” replied old Manley, the village carpenter, a bent and venerable figure, long past work. “I’m over eighty, but I never remember that gate being locked as long as I have lived at Trelasco, and that’s all my life, colonel. There’s always been a right of way through that wood.”
“And there always shall be,” answered Martin Disney. “We won’t take any violent measures to-day, my friends—first because it is Sunday, and next because one should always try fair means before one tries foul. I shall write to Mr. Crowther to-morrow, asking him civilly to open that gate. If he refuses, I’ll have it opened for him, and I’ll take the consequences of the act. Now, my good friends, you’d better go to church by the road. You’ll get there after the service has begun. Wait till the congregation are standing up, and then go into church all together, so that everybody may understand why and by whose fault it is that you are late.”
The appearance of this large contingent after the first lesson created considerable surprise, and much turning of heads and rustling of bonnet-strings in the echoing old stone church. Mr. Crowther stood in his pew of state on one side of the chancel, and felt that the war had begun. Everybody was against him in the matter, he knew; but he wanted to demonstrate the rich man’s right to do what he liked with the things which he had bought. The wood was his, and he did not mean to let the whole parish tramp across it.
He received a stiffly polite letter from Colonel Disney, requesting him to re-open the church-path without loss of time, and informing him of the great inconvenience caused to the older and weaker members of the congregation by the illegal closing of the path during church hours.
Mr. Crowther sent his reply by the colonel’s messenger. He asserted his right to shut up the wood which formed a part of his estate, and positively refused to re-open the gate at either end of the footpath in question.
Captain Hulbert dropped in at his usual hour, eager to know the progress of the fight. Fight there must be, he was assured, having seen something of Mr. Crowther’s bulldog temper. Then, in the drawing-room of the Angler’s Nest, there was hatched a terrible plot—a Catiline conspiracy in a tea-cup—Allegra listening and applauding while the two men plotted.
That night, when the village was hushed in sleep, a boatful of sailors landed at the little hard near the railwaystation at Fowey, and half a dozen stalwart blue-jackets might have been seen tramping along the old railway track to Trelasco, one carrying a crowbar, another a carpenter’s basket. And under the autumn stars that night in the woods of Glenaveril, while Vansittart Crowther slept the sleep of the just man who payeth his twenty shillings in the pound, there rose the sound of a sea-song and the cheery chorus of the sailors, with a rhythmic accompaniment of hammering; and lo, when the October morning visited those yellowing woods, and when Mr. Crowther’s gamekeeper went on his morning round, the gate at either end of the church path was wrenched off its hinges, and was lying on the ground. Staple and bolt, padlock and iron hinges, were lying among the dewy dock-leaves and the yellowing fern; and there was free passage between the village of Trelasco and the House of God.
Vansittart Crowther went to Plymouth by the first train that could convey him, and there consulted the lawyer most in renown among the citizens; and that gentleman, after due thought and consideration, informed him that the closing of such an old-established right of way as that of the church-path was more than any landowner durst attempt. Whatever omission there might be in the title-deeds, he had bought the estate subject to that old right of way, which had been enjoyed by the parish from time immemorial. He could no more shut it off than he could wall out the sky.
“But I can punish the person who pulled the locks off my gates, I conclude?” said Mr. Crowther, swelling with indignation.
“That, of course, is a distinct outrage, for which you may obtain redress, if you can find out who did it.”
“There can be no difficulty about that. The act must have been instigated by the writer of that impertinent letter.”
He pointed to Martin Disney’s letter, lying open on the solicitor’s table.
“Very probably. But you will have to be sure of proving his share in the act if you mean to take proceedings against him.”
Vansittart Crowther was furious. How was he to bring the responsibility of this outrage home to anybody, when the deed had been done in the dead of night, and no mortal eye had seen the depredators at their felonious work? His locks and bolts and hinges, the best of their kind that Sheffield could supply, had been mocked at and made as naught; and all his dumb dogs of serving men and women had been lying in their too comfortable beds, and had heard never a sound of hammer clinking or crowbar striking on iron. There had not been so much as a kitchen-maid afflicted with the tooth-ache, and lying wakeful, to hear the far-off noise of that villainous deed.
Mr. Crowther sent for the police authorities of Fowey, and set his wrongs before them.
“I will give fifty pounds reward to the man who will get me credible evidence as to the person who planned that outrage,” he said. And next day there were bills pasted against divers doors at Fowey and Trelasco, against the Mechanics’ Institute, and against that curious old oaken door of a mediæval building opposite the club, which may once have been a donjon, and in sundry other conspicuous places, beginning with “Whereas,” and ending with Vansittart Crowther’s signature.
Nothing came of this splendid offer, though there were plenty of people in the district to whom fifty pounds would have seemed a fortune. Whether no one had seen the crew of theVendettalanding or re-embarking in the night-time, or whether some wakeful eyes had seen, whose owners would not betray the doers of a deed done in a good cause, still remains unknown. Captain Hulbert was enchanted at the success of the conspiracy, and went to church next Sunday by the now notorious footpath, along which an unusual procession of villagers came streaming in the crisp, clear air, proud to assert a right that had been so boldly maintained by their unnamed but not unknown champion. Every one felt very sure that the flinging open of the gates had been somehow brought about by Martin Disney—Martin, whosegrandfather they could some of them remember, when he came home after the long war with the French, and took up his abode in an old house among the hills, and married a fair young wife. That had happened sixty-five years ago; but there were those in the village who could remember handsome Major Disney, with only one arm, and a face bronzed by the sun that shines on the banks of the Douro.