CHAPTER XXVIIIBY THE SUNDIAL.
Laura Masoncame to live at Tolldale. Gilbert Monckton argued with himself that his most reasonable motive for marrying Eleanor Vane had lain in his desire to provide a secure home and suitable companionship for his ward. The girl was very glad to be with Eleanor; but a little sorry to leave Hazlewood, now that Mr. Launcelot Darrell’s presence gave a new charm to the place.
“Not that he is very lively, you know, Nelly,” Miss Mason remarked to her guardian’s wife in the course of a long discussion of Mr. Darrell’s merits. “He never seems happy. He’s always roaming about the place, looking as if he had something upon his mind. It makes him look very handsome, though, you know; I don’t think he’d look half so handsome if he hadn’t anything on his mind. He was awfully dull and gloomy after you went away, Nell; I’m sure he must have been in love with you. Mrs. Darrell says he wasn’t; and that he admires another person: quite a different person. Do you think I’m the person, Eleanor dear?” asked the young lady, blushing and smiling, as she looked shyly up at her companion’s grave face.
“I don’t know, Laura; but I almost hope not, for I should be very sorry if you were to marry Launcelot Darrell,” Eleanor said.
“But why should you be sorry, Nelly?”
“Because I don’t think he’s a good man.”
Miss Mason pouted her under lip and shrugged her shoulders, with the prettiest air of impatience.
“It’s very unkind of you to say so, Nell,” she exclaimed. “I’m sure he’s good! Or if he isn’t good, I like him all the better for it,” she added, with charming inconsistency. “I don’t want to marry a good man, like my guardian, or Mr. Neate, the curate of Hazlewood parish. The Corsair wasn’t good; but see how fond Gulnare and Medora were of him. I don’t suppose it was good of the Giaour to kill Hassan; but who could have had the heart to refuse to marry the Giaour?”
Mrs. Monckton did not attempt to argue with a young lady who expressed such opinions as these. Laura’s romantic infatuation only made Eleanor more impatient for the coming of that hour in which she should be able to denounce Launcelot Darrell as a cheat and a traitor.
“He shall be disappointed in his hope of a fortune, and through me,” she thought. “He shall be cast off by the woman who has loved him, and through me. And when he suffers mostI will be as pitiless to his suffering, as he was pitiless to the old man whom he cheated and abandoned to despair.”
A fortnight passed after Eleanor’s arrival at the Priory before she had any opportunity of seeing Launcelot Darrell. She had proposed going to Hazlewood several times, but upon each occasion Mr. Monckton had contrived to interpose some objection to her visit. She began to despair of entering upon the silent struggle with her father’s destroyer. It seemed as if she had come to Tolldale for no purpose. In her impatience she dreaded that Maurice de Crespigny would die, leaving his fortune to his nephew. She knew that the old man’s life hung by a slender thread, which at any moment might be severed.
But at last the opportunity she had so anxiously awaited arrived unexpectedly, not brought about by any scheming or foresight upon her part. Laura had been a few days at the Priory, and the two girls were walking in one of the sheltered pathways of the old-fashioned garden, waiting for Gilbert Monckton’s arrival, and the clanging summons of the great dinner-bell.
The October sunshine was bright and pleasant; the autumn flowers enlivened the dark luxuriance of the garden with their gaudy splendour. The tall hollyhocks waved in the breeze.
The two girls had walked up and down the smooth gravel path for some time in silence. Eleanor was absorbed in her own thoughts, and even Laura could not talk for ever without encouragement.
But presently this latter young lady stopped with a blush and a start, clasping her hand tightly about her companion’s wrist. At the other end of the sheltered walk, amongst the flickering patches of sunshine that trembled on the filbert-trees, she had perceived Launcelot Darrell advancing towards them.
Eleanor looked up.
“What is the matter, Laura?” she asked.
In the next moment she recognized Mr. Darrell. The chance had come at last.
The young man advanced to meet Mrs. Monckton and her companion. He was pale, and had a certain gravity in his face expressive of some hidden sorrow. He had been in love with Eleanor Vane, after his own fashion, and was very much disposed to resent her desertion of him. His mother had told him the reason of that desertion very frankly, after Eleanor’s marriage.
“I come to offer you my congratulations, Mrs. Monckton,” he said, in a tone which was intended to wound the young wife to the quick, but which, like everything else about this young man, had a certain spuriousness, an air of melodrama that robbed it of all force. “I should have accompanied my mother when she called on you the other day—but——”
He paused abruptly, looking at Laura with an air of ill-concealed vexation.
“Can I speak to you alone, Mrs. Monckton?” he asked; “I have something particular to say to you.”
“But you can say it before Laura, I suppose?”
“No, not before Laura, or before any one. I must speak to you alone.”
Miss Mason looked at the object of her admiration with a piteous expression in her childish face.
“How cruel he is to me,” she thought; “I do believe he is in love with Eleanor. How wicked of him to be in love with my guardian’s wife.”
Mrs. Monckton did not attempt to refuse the privilege which the young man demanded of her.
“I am quite willing to hear anything you may have to say to me,” she said.
“Oh, very well!” cried Laura. “I’m sure I’ll go away if you want to talk about secrets that I mustn’t hear. Only I don’t see how you can have any secrets. You haven’t known Mr. Darrell a day longer than I have, Eleanor; and I can’t imagine what he can have to say to you.”
After this protest Miss Mason turned her back upon her companions, and ran away towards the house. She shed a few silent tears behind the shelter of a great clump of chrysanthemums.
“He doesn’t care for me a bit,” she muttered, as she dried her eyes: “Mrs. Darrell is a wicked old story-teller. I feel just as poor Gulnare must have felt when the Corsair was so rude to her, after she’d committed a murder for his sake.”
Eleanor and Launcelot left the sheltered pathway, and walked slowly across the broad lawn towards an old sundial, quaint in shape, and covered with the moss that had slowly crept over the grey stonework. Here the young man stopped, lounging against the moss-grown pedestal, and resting his elbow upon the broken dial.
“I have come here to-day to tell you that you have treated me very ill, Eleanor Monckton,” he said.
The young wife drew herself up proudly.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean that you jilted me.”
“Jilted you!”
“Yes. You played fast and loose with me. You listened to my declaration of love. You suffered me to believe that you loved me.”
“Mr. Darrell!”
“You did more, Eleanor,” cried the young man, passionately; “youdidlove me. This marriage with Gilbert Monckton, aman twenty years your senior, is a marriage prompted by base and mercenary motives. You loved me, Eleanor; your silence admitted it that day, if your words did not. You had no right to be cajoled by my mother; you had no right to leave Hazlewood without a word of explanation to me. You are false-hearted and mercenary, Mrs. Monckton; and you have married this man here because he is the owner of a fine house, and can give you money to spend upon your womanly caprices—your selfish vanities.”
He pointed scornfully to her silk dress as he spoke, and to the golden trinkets that guttered at her waist.
She looked at him with a strange expression in her face.
“Think of me as you please,” she said; “think that I was in love with you, if you like.”
It was as if she had said to him, “Fall into a trap of your own setting, if you please. I am not base enough to lay such a snare for you.”
“Yes, Eleanor, you were false and mercenary. You were foolish, perhaps, as well: for I may be a rich man before very long. I may be master of the Woodlands property.”
“I don’t think you ever will inherit that fortune,” Eleanor said, slowly. “You talk of my being base and mercenary; you are at liberty to think so if you please. But haveyounever done base things for the sake of money, Launcelot Darrell?”
The man’s face darkened.
“Nobody is immaculate, I dare say,” he answered. “I have been very poor, and have been obliged to do what the rest of the world does when its purse is empty.”
As Eleanor watched his moody face she suddenly remembered that this was not the way her cards must be played. The task which she had set herself to perform was not to be accomplished by candour and openness. This man had betrayed her father, and she must betray him.
She held out her hand to Launcelot Darrell.
“Let us be friends,” she said; “I wish to be friends with you.”
There were two witnesses looking on at this gesture. Laura Mason was standing by her guardian, watching the group beside the sundial. Gilbert Monckton had returned from town, and had come into the garden in search of his wife.
“They sent me away from them,” Laura said, as her guardian looked at Launcelot and Eleanor. “He had something particular to say to her: so I wasn’t to hear it, and they sent me away. You’ll ask him to dinner, I suppose?”
“No,” answered the lawyer, sharply.
Launcelot Darrell held Eleanor’s hand some moments before he released it.
“I wish to be friends with you, Mr. Darrel!,” she said; “I’ll come to Hazlewood to-morrow to see your pictures, if you please. I want to see how the Rosalind and Celia goes on.”
She hated herself for her hypocrisy. Every generous impulse of her soul revolted against her falsehood. But these things were only a natural part of the unnatural task which she had set herself to perform.