CHAPTER XIII.HAZLEWOOD.
A phaetonand pair was in waiting for Mr. Monckton outside the Slough station. The vehicle was very plain, but had a certain quiet elegance of its own, and the horses had been sold at Tattersall’s for something over five hundred pounds.
Eleanor Vane’s spirits rose in spite of herself as she sat by the lawyer’s side, driving at a rapid rate through the pretty pastoral country. They crossed the river almost immediately after leaving Slough, and dashed into Berkshire. They skirted Windsor Park and Forest, leaving the black outline of the castle keep behind them; and then turned into a quiet country road, where the green banks were dotted by clumps of early primroses, and the white-thorns were bursting into flower.
Eleanor looked rapturously at all this rural beauty. She was a Cockney, poor child, and her experience of the country was confined to rambles in Greenwich Park, or on Richmond Terrace; happy rambles with her father, prior to expensive dinners at the Crown and Sceptre, or the Star and Garter, as the case might be.
But the country, the genuine country, the long roads and patches of common, the glimpses of wood and water, the great deserts of arable land, the scattered farm-houses, and noisy farm-yards; all these were strange and new to her, and her soul expanded in the unfamiliar atmosphere.
If that drive could have lasted for ever, it would have been very delightful; but she knew that those splendid chestnut horses were carrying her at a terrible rate to her new home. Her new home! What right had she to call Hazlewood by that name? She was not going home. She was going to her first situation.
All the pride of birth, the foolish and mistaken pride in shipwrecked fortune and squandered wealth which this girl’s weak-minded father had instilled into her, arose and rebelled against this bitter thought. What humiliation Mrs. Bannister’s cruelty had inflicted upon her!
She was thinking this when Mr. Monckton suddenly turned his horses’ heads away from the main road, and the phaeton entered a lane above which the branches of the still leafless trees made an overarching roof of delicate tracery.
At the end of this lane, in which the primroses seemed to grow thicker than in any other part of the country, there were some low wooden gates, and an old-fashioned iron lamp-post. On the other side of the gates there was a wide lawn shut inby a shrubbery and a grove of trees, and beyond the lawn glimmered the sunlit windows of a low white house; a rambling cottage, whose walls were half hidden by trellis-work and ivy, and not one of whose windows or chimneys owned a fellowship with the others.
Pigeons were cooing and hens clucking somewhere behind the house, a horse began to neigh as the carriage stopped, and three dogs, one very big, and two very little ones, ran out upon the lawn, and barked furiously at the phaeton.
Eleanor Vane could not help thinking the low-roofed, white-walled, ivy-covered irregular cottage very pretty, even though itwasHazlewood.
“While the dogs were barking their loudest, a delicate little figure, in fluttering draperies of white and blue, came floating out of a window under the shadow of a verandah, and ran towards the gates.
It was the figure of a young lady, very fragile-looking and graceful. A young lady whose complexion was fairer than a snow-drop, and whose loose floating hair was of the palest shade of flaxen.
“Be quiet, Julius Cæsar; be quiet, Mark Antony,” she cried to the dogs, who ran up to her and leaped and whirled about her, jumping almost higher than her head in an excess of canine spirits. “Be quiet, you big, wicked Julius Cæsar, or you shall go back to the stables, sir. Is this the way you behave yourself when I’ve had ever so much trouble to get you a half-holiday? Please, don’t mind them, Miss Vincent,” the young lady added, opening the gate, and looking up pleadingly at Eleanor; “they’re only noisy. They wouldn’t hurt you for the world; and they’ll love you very much by-and-by, when they come to know you. I’ve been watching for you such a time, Mr. Monckton. The train must have been slow this afternoon!”
“The train travelled at its usual speed, neither slower nor faster,” the lawyer said, with a quiet smile, as he handed Eleanor out of the phaeton. He left the horses in the care of the groom, and walked on to the lawn with the two girls. The dogs left off barking at a word from him, though they had made very light of Miss Mason’s entreaties. They seemed to know him, and to be accustomed to obey him.
“I know the afternoonseemeddreadfully long,” the young lady said. “I thought the trainmustbe behind its time.
“And, of course, you never thought of looking at your watch, Miss Mason,” the lawyer said, pointing to a quantity of jewelled toys which hung at the young lady’s blue sash.
“What’s the good of looking at one’s watch, if one’s watch won’t go?” said Miss Mason; “the sun has been going down ever so long, but the sun’s so changeable, there’s no relying onit. Mrs. Darrell has gone out in the pony-carriage to call upon some people near Woodlands.”
Eleanor Vane started at the sudden mention of a name which had been so familiar to her from her dead father’s lips.
“So I am all alone,” continued Miss Mason, “and I’m very glad of that; because we shall get to know each other so much better by ourselves, shan’t we, Miss Vincent?”
George Monckton had been walking between the two girls, but Laura Mason came round to Eleanor, and put her hand in that of Miss Vane. It was a fat little childish hand, but there were rings glittering upon it, small as it was.
“I think I shall like you very much,” Miss Mason whispered. “Do you think you shall like me?”
She looked up into Eleanor’s face, with an entreating expression in her blue eyes; they were really blue eyes, a bright forget-me-not, or turquoise blue, as different as possible from Eleanor’s clear grey ones, which were for ever changing, sometimes purple, sometimes brown, sometimes black.
How could Miss Vane reply to this childish question, except in the affirmative? She had every inclination to love the babyish young lady, who was so ready to cling to her and confide in her. She had expected to find a haughty heiress who would have flaunted her wealth before her penniless companion. But she had another reason for inclining tenderly towards this girl. She remembered what Mr. Monckton had said to her in the railway “However friendless or desolate you may be, you can never be so friendless and desolate as she is.”
“I’m sure I shall love you, Miss Mason, if you’ll let me.”
“And you’ll not be dreadful about triplets, and arpeggios, and syncopated passages?” the young lady said, piteously. “I don’t mind music a bit, in a general way, you know; but I never could play triplets in time.”
She led the way into a sitting-room under the verandah, as she talked. Eleanor went with her, hand-in-hand, and Mr. Monckton followed, keeping an attentive watch upon the two girls.
The sitting-room was, like the exterior of the cottage, very irregular and very pretty. It stood at one end of the house, and there were windows upon three sides of the room,—an oriel at the end opposite the door, a bay opening on to the verandah, and three latticed windows with deep oaken seats upon the other side.
The furniture was pretty, but very simple and inexpensive. The chintz curtains and chair-covers were sprinkled with rose-buds and butterflies; the chairs and tables were of shining maplewood; and there was a good supply of old china arrangedhere and there upon brackets and cabinets of obsolete form. The pale cream-coloured walls were hung with a few prints and water-coloured sketches; but beyond this the chamber had no adornments.
Laura Mason led Eleanor to one of the window-seats, where a litter of fancy-work, and two or three open books tumbled carelessly here and there amongst floss-silks and Berlin wools and scraps of embroidery, gave token of the young lady’s habits.
“Will you take off your things here,” she said, “or shall I show you your own room at once? It’s the blue room, next to mine. There’s a door between the two rooms, so we shall be able to talk to each other whenever we like. How dreadfully you must want something to eat after your journey! Shall I ring for cake and wine, or shall we wait for tea? We always drink tea at seven, and we dine very early; not like Mr. Monckton, who has a grand late dinner every evening.”
The lawyer sighed.
“Rather a desolate dinner, sometimes, Miss Mason,” he said, gravely; “but you remind me that I shall be hardly in time for it, and my poor housekeeper makes herself wretched when the fish is spoiled.”
He looked at his watch.
“Six o’clock, I declare; good-bye, Laura; good-bye, Miss Vincent. I hope you will be happy at Hazlewood.”
“I amsureI shall be happy with Miss Mason,” Eleanor answered.
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mr. Monckton, elevating his straight black eyebrows, “is she so very fascinating, then? I’m sorry for it,” he muttered under his breath, as he walked off after shaking hands with the two girls.
They heard the phaeton driving away three minutes afterwards.
Laura Mason shrugged her shoulders with an air of relief.
“I’m glad he’s gone,” she said.
“But you like him very much. He’s very good, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, very, very good, and I do like him. But I’m afraid of him, I think, because he’s so good. He always seems to be watching one and finding out one’s faults. And he seems so sorry because I’m frivolous, and I can’t help being frivolous when I’m happy.”
“And are you always happy?” Eleanor asked. She thought it very possible that this young heiress, who had never known any of those bitter troubles which Miss Vane had found associated with “money matters,” might indeed bealwayshappy. But Laura Mason shook her head.
“Always, except when I think,” she said; “but when I thinkabout papa and mamma, and wonder who they were, and why I never knew them, I can’t help feeling very unhappy.”
“They died when you were very young, then?” Eleanor said.
Laura Mason shook her head with a sorrowful gesture.
“I scarcely know when they died,” she answered; “I know that I can remember nothing about them; the first thing I recollect is being with a lady, far down in Devonshire—a lady who took the charge of several little girls. I stayed with her till I was ten years old, and then I was sent to a fashionable school at Bayswater, and I stayed there till I was fifteen, and then I came here, and I’ve been here two years and a half. Mr. Monckton is my guardian, you know, and he says I am a very lucky girl, and will have plenty of money by-and-by; but what’s the use of money if one has no relations in all the wide world? and he tells me to attend to my education, and not to be frivolous, or care for dress and jewellery, but to try and become a good woman. He talks to me very seriously, and almost frightens me sometimes with his grave manner; but for all that, he’s very kind, and lets me have almost everything I ask him for. He’s tremendously rich himself, you know, though he’s only a professional man, and he lives at a beautiful place four miles from here, called Tolldale Priory. I used to ask him questions about papa and mamma, but he would never tell me anything. So now I never speak to him about them.”
She sighed as she finished speaking, and was silent for some few minutes; but she very quickly recovered her spirits, and conducted Eleanor to a pretty rustic chamber with a lattice window looking on to the lawn.
“Mrs. Darrell’s man is gone to fetch your luggage,” Miss Mason said, “so you must have my brushes and combs, please, for your hair, and then we’ll go down to tea.”
She led Eleanor into the adjoining apartment, where the dressing-table was littered with all manner of womanly frivolities, and here Miss Vane re-arranged her luxuriant golden-brown hair, which no longer was allowed to fall about her shoulders in rippling curls, but was drawn simply away from her forehead, and rolled in a knot at the back of her head. She was a woman now, and had begun the battle of life.
A pony-carriage drove up to the gate while Eleanor was standing at the glass by the open window, and Mrs. Darrell got out and walked across the lawn towards the house.
She was a tall woman, unusually tall for a woman, and she was dressed in black silk, which hung about her angular limbs in heavy, lustreless folds. Eleanor could see that her face was pale and her eyes black and flashing.
The two girls went down stairs hand-in-hand. Tea was prepared in the dining-room, a long wainscoted apartment, olderthan the rest of the house, and rather gloomy-looking. Three narrow windows upon one side of this room looked towards the shrubbery and grove at the back of the house, and the trunks of the trees looked gaunt and black in the spring twilight. A fire was burning upon the low hearth, and a maid-servant was lighting a lamp in the centre of the table as the two girls went in.
Mrs. Darrell welcomed her dependant very politely; but there was a harshness and a stiffness in her politeness which reminded Eleanor of her half-sister, Mrs. Bannister. The two women seemed to belong to the same school, Miss Vane thought.
The lamplight shone full upon Mrs. Darrell’s face, and Eleanor could see now that the face was a handsome one, though faded and careworn. The widow’s hair was grey, but her eyes retained the flashing brightness of youth. They were very dark and lustrous, but their expression was scarcely pleasant. There was too much of the hawk or eagle in their penetrating glance.
But Laura Mason did not seem at all afraid of her protectress.
“Miss Vincent and I are good friends already, Mrs. Darrell,” she said, gaily, “and we shall be as happy together as the day is long, I hope.”
“And I hope Miss Vincent will teach you industrious habits, Laura,” Miss Darrell answered, gravely.
Miss Mason made a grimace with her pretty red under-lip.
Eleanor took the seat indicated to her, a seat at the end of the dining-table, and exactly opposite to Mrs. Darrell, who sat with her back to the fireplace.
Sitting here, Eleanor could scarcely fail to observe an oil painting—the only picture in the room—which hung over the mantel-piece. It was the portrait of a young man, with dark hair clustering about a handsome forehead, regular features, a pale complexion, and black eyes. The face was very handsome, very aristocratic, but there was a want of youthfulness, an absence of the fresh, eager spirit of boyhood in its expression. A look of listless hauteur hung like a cloud over the almost faultless features.
Mrs. Darrell watched Eleanor’s eyes as the girl looked at this picture.
“You are looking at my son, Miss Vincent,” she said; “but perhaps it is scarcely necessary to tell you so. People say there is a strong likeness between us.”
There was indeed a very striking resemblance between the faded face below and the pictured face above. But it seemed to Eleanor Vane as if the mother’s face, faded and careworn though it was, was almost the younger of the two. The listless indifference, the utter lack of energy in the lad’s countenance, was so much the more striking when contrasted with the youthfulness of the features.
“Yes,” exclaimed Laura Mason, “that is Mrs. Darrell’s only son, Launcelot Darrell. Isn’t that a romantic name, Miss Vincent?”
Eleanor started. This Launcelot Darrell was the young man she had heard her father speak of; the man who expected to inherit the De Crespigny estate. How often she had heard his name! It was he, then, who would have stood between her father and fortune, had that dear father lived; or whose claim of kindred would, perhaps, have had to make way for the more sacred right of friendship.
And this young man’s portrait was hanging in the room where she sat. He lived in the house, perhaps. Where should he live except in his mother’s house?
But Eleanor’s mind was soon relieved upon this point, for Laura Mason, in the pauses of the business of the tea-table, talked a good deal about the original of the portrait.
“Don’t you think him handsome, Miss Vincent?” she asked, without waiting for an answer. “But of course you do; everybody thinks him handsome; and then Mrs. Darrell says he’s so elegant, so tall, so aristocratic. He is almost sure to have Woodlands by-and-by, and all Mr. de Crespigny’s money. But of course you don’t know Woodlands or Mr. de Crespigny. How should you, when you’ve never been in Berkshire before? And he—not Mr. de Crespigny, he’s a nasty, fidgety, hypochon—what’s its name?—old man—but Launcelot Darrell issoaccomplished. He’s an artist, you know, and all the water-coloured sketches in the drawing-room and the breakfast-parlour are his; and he plays and sings, and he dances exquisitely, and he rides and plays cricket, and he’s a—what you may call it—a crack shot; and, in short, he’s an Admirable Crichton. You mustn’t fancy I’m in love with him, you know, Miss Vincent,” the young lady added, blushing and laughing, “because I never saw him in my life, and I only know all this by hearsay.”
“You never saw him!” repeated Eleanor.
Launcelot Darrell did not live at Hazlewood, then.
“No,” the widow interposed; “my son has enemies, I am sorry to say, amongst his own kindred. Instead of occupying the position his talents, to say nothing of his birth, entitle him to, he has been compelled to go out to India in a mercantile capacity. I do not wonder that his spirit rebels against such an injustice. I do not wonder that he cannot forgive.”
Mrs. Darrell’s face darkened as she spoke, and she sighed heavily. By-and-by, when the two girls were alone together in the breakfast room, Laura Mason alluded to the conversation at the tea-table.
“I don’t think I ought to have talked about Launcelot Darrell,” she said; “I know his mother is unhappy about him,though I don’t exactly know why. You see his two aunts, who live at Woodlands, are nasty, scheming old maids, and they contrived to keep him away from his great uncle, Mr. de Crespigny, who is expected to leave him all his money. Indeed, I don’t see who else he can leave it to now. There was an old man—a college friend of Mr. de Crespigny’s—who expected to get the Woodlands estate; but of course that was an absurd idea; and the old man—the father of that very Mrs. Bannister who recommended you to Mrs. Darrell, by the bye—is dead. So all chance of that sort of thing is over.
“And Mr. Launcelot Darrell is sure to have the fortune?” Eleanor said, interrogatively, after a very long pause.
“Well, I don’t know about that: but I’ve heard Mrs. Darrell say that Launcelot was a great favourite of Mr. de Crespigny’s when he was a boy. But those two cantankerous old maids, Mrs. Darrell’s sisters, are nagging at the old man night and day, and they may persuade him at last, or they may have succeeded in persuading him, perhaps, ever so long ago, to make a will in their favour. Of course all this makes Mrs. Darrell very unhappy. She idolizes her son, who is an only child, and was terribly spoiled when he was a boy, they say; and she does not know whether he will be a rich man or a pauper.”
“And in the meantime, Mr. Darrell is in India?”
“Yes. He went to India three years ago. He’s overseer to an indigo-planter up the country, at some place with an unpronounceable name, hundreds and hundreds of miles from Calcutta. He’s not at all happy, I believe, and he very seldom writes—not above once in a twelvemonth.”
“He is not a good son, then,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that! Mrs. Darrell never complains, and she’s very proud of him. She always speaks of him as ‘my son.’ But, of course, what with one thing and another, she is often very unhappy. So, if she is a little severe, now and then, we’ll try and bear with her, won’t we, Eleanor? I may call you Eleanor, mayn’t I?”
The pretty flaxen head dropped upon Miss Vane’s shoulder, as the heiress asked this question, and the blue eyes were lifted pleadingly.
“Yes, yes; I would much rather be called Eleanor than Miss Vincent.”
“And you’ll call me Laura. Nobody ever calls me Miss Mason except Mr. Monckton when he lectures me. We shall be very, very happy together, I hope, Eleanor.”
“I hope so, dear.”
There was a sudden pang of mingled fear and remorse at Eleanor Vane’s heart as she said this. Was she to be happy, and to forget the purpose of her life? Was she to be happy,and false to the memory of her murdered father? In this quiet country life; in this pleasant girlish companionship which was so new to her; was she to abandon that one dark dream, that one deeply-rooted desire which had been in her mind ever since her father’s untimely death?
She recoiled with a shudder of dread from the simple happiness which threatened to lull her to a Sybarite rest; in which that deadly design might lose its force, and, little by little, fade out of her mind.
She disengaged herself from the slight arms which had encircled her in a half-childish caress, and rose suddenly to her feet.
“Laura,” she cried, “Laura, you mustn’t talk to me like this. My life is not like yours. I have something to do,—I have a purpose to achieve; a purpose before which every thought of my mind, every impulse of my heart, must give way.”
“What purpose, Eleanor?” asked Laura Mason, almost alarmed by the energy of her companion’s manner.
“I cannot tell you. It is a secret,” Miss Vane replied.
Then sitting down once more in the deep window-seat by Laura’s side, Eleanor Vane drew her arm tenderly round the frightened girl’s waist.
“I’ll try and do my duty to you, Laura, dear,” she said, “and I know I shall be happy with you. But if ever you see me dull and silent, you’ll understand, dear, that there is a secret in my life, and that there is a hidden purpose in my mind that sooner or later must be achieved. Sooner or later,” she repeated, with a sigh, “but Heaven only knows when.”
She was silent and absent-minded during the rest of the evening, though she played one of her most elaborate fantasias at Mrs. Darrell’s request, and perfectly satisfied that lady’s expectations by the brilliancy of her touch. She was very glad when, at ten o’clock, the two women servants of the simple household and a hobbledehoyish young man, who looked after the pony and pigs and poultry-yard, and smelt very strongly of the stable, came in to hear prayers read by Mrs. Darrell.
“I know you’re tired, dear,” Laura Mason said, as she bade Eleanor good night at the door of her bedroom, “so I won’t ask you to talk to me to-night. Get to bed, and go to sleep at once, dear.”
But Eleanor did not go to bed immediately; nor did she fall asleep until very late that night.
She unfastened one of her trunks, and took from it a little locked morocco casket, which held a few valueless and old-fashioned trinkets that had been her mother’s, and the crumpled fragment of her father’s last letter.
She sat at the little dressing-table, reading the disjointedsentences in that melancholy letter, before she undressed, and then replaced the scrap of paper in the casket.
She looked at the lawn and shrubbery. The shining leaves of the evergreens trembled in the soft April breeze, and shimmered in the moonlight. All was silent in that simple rustic retreat. The bare branches of the tall trees near the low white gates were sharply defined against the sky. High up in the tranquil heavens the full moon shone out from a pale background of fleecy cloud.
The beauty of the scene made a very powerful impression upon Eleanor Vane. The window from which she had been accustomed to look in Bloomsbury abutted on a yard, a narrow gorge of dirt and disorder, between the dismal back walls of high London houses.
“I ought never to have come here,” Eleanor thought, bitterly, as she let fall her dimity window curtain and shut out the splendour of the night. “I ought to have stayed in London; there was some hope of my meeting that man in London, where strange things are always happening. But here——”
She fell into a gloomy reverie. Secluded in that quiet rustic retreat, what hope could she have of advancing, by so much as one footstep, upon the dark road she had appointed for herself to tread?
It was very long before she fell asleep. She lay for hours, tumbling and tossing feverishly upon her comfortable bed.
The memories of her old life mingled themselves with thoughts of her new existence. She was haunted now by the recollection of her father and her father’s death; now by her fresh experiences of Hazlewood, by the widow’s grey hair and penetrating gaze, and by the pictured face of Launcelot Darrell.