CHAPTER III.BACK IN FAMILIAR HAUNTS.
A prettier country could hardly be imagined than that to which Grace Ambleton and her brother were being swiftly conveyed, after a lengthy absence abroad. They occupied, as a residence, a quaint, many-gabled house, that lay, surrounded by its old-fashioned garden, just beyond the cathedral boundaries and within sight of the close, in the old city of Dynechester, and all around and about them were scattered relics of a time dead and gone, covered over with that touch of unmistakable age, half delicate because of its intangibility, yet none the less indisputable.
Old trees stood like sentinels alone. The roof of Grace’s home was moss-decorated, and the tiny streets that led to the residence were narrow and ill-paved; ill-lit, too, Grace’s many girl friends would declare, in the dark winter days, and though there was nothing ghostly or cheerless once the doors of the Dower House were flung wide open, there was some of these friends who declared frankly among themselves that they would rather not live as Grace did in such a queer, many-centuried home, built so close to the cathedral walls and the cathedral burial ground.
Others there were who would most gladly have taken Grace’s place in this quaint old house, some for the sake of Valentine, the elder brother, and some for the sake of the laughing eyes and wonderfully handsome face of Sacha, the youngest of the two Ambleton men.
Grace was perfectly well aware of this divided feeling among her friends, but she was quite indifferent to all.
The Dower House was her home for as long as she chose to stay in it. She knew that, and she told herself on the morning after her return from her sojourn abroad, that she would be in no hurry to leave this home again, either for a temporary or a permanent absence. For Grace loved the house where she had been born, and where all her healthy childhood had been passed; she loved every stick and stone about the place.
There was a touch of welcome to her in the tall, gray, stately walls of Dynechester’s old cathedral, a voice of greeting in the sound of the familiar clock chimes and bells.
“I never want to go away any more,” she confessed to Bob, the Irish terrier, and Nancy, the Ayrshire one, and both animals understood, and were entirely of her opinion.
They had been brought from Dynechester two days before to greet their beloved mistress in London. Val had been detained in town on business, and Grace had remained with him, gratifying her longing for home by summoning one of the servants to come to her with the dogs, which she had been forced to leave behind when she had started for their long tour in foreign countries.
“It is like heaven to be back in the dear old corners,” she told herself more than once, and when she met Val later in the day she made him smile by her ardent delight in, and enthusiasm for, her home.
“Not much good taking you everywhere and showing you the great wonders of the world, Miss Grace!” her brother remarked, with a laugh.
Grace echoed the laugh.
“I never knew how much I loved dear old Dynechester till I saw it again yesterday, Val.”
Valentine glanced affectionately at his sister.
They were an undemonstrative pair, but few people hada deeper, truer love for one another than Val and Grace Ambleton. The girl’s love had other elements in it besides mere sisterly affection and pride. Valentine had been the only parent Grace had known.
It was true she had a shadowy memory of her mother, a woman who had been in constant suffering, and who had leaned upon her eldest boy for protection, but this mother had passed away before Grace had reached five years of age, and such care and thought as the girl had had in the succeeding years she had had from her brother, Valentine.
She was dear to Sacha too, and she loved her second brother devotedly, but Sacha, though her senior by three years, had always fallen into the position of being her baby and care, just as she had been Val’s.
Their mother had been a Wentworth, the only daughter of the old lady who lived a perpetual invalid up at the large house beyond the outskirts of the town.
There had been three sons born to this Lady Wentworth, and of these three two had died in childhood and one had married and had begotten an heir to the title and the estates.
Grace had a very vivid memory of her Uncle Ambrose, father of the present baronet, Sir Mark Wentworth.
She had been very much attached to this uncle, and she had sorrowed deeply at his sudden death. It had surprised no one to learn at the time of that death, that by the will of Sir Ambrose, his nephew, Valentine Ambleton, was appointed a co-trustee with an old legal friend, to Mark Wentworth and his various properties.
Val, it was true, was not of the usual age for such a position, but everybody knew that Sir Ambrose had placed more confidence in his nephew’s sound wisdom and practical good sense than he did in most men; and though Val was barely more than ten years his cousin’ssenior, it seemed to all the little world of Dynechester the wisest and best arrangement Sir Ambrose could have made for his son’s future, when he appointed his Nephew Valentine to act as guardian to that son.
Sir Ambrose had been dead a little over four years now, and his son had attained his majority the year following his father’s decease.
Perhaps Grace alone, out of all the world, knew how much trouble and anxiety her cousin was to her brother, and even she did not know all. She had a certain weakness for Mark; he had appealed to her from the first in the same way as Alexander, or Sacha as he was always called, did.
Mark Wentworth had always been a handsome boy with endearing ways; he had been adored by his father, and this adoration was carried on now by his grandmother, whose only joy in her old age lay in the joy that Mark’s mere existence gave her.
His mother Grace had never known, young Lady Wentworth having died abroad many years before Grace could grasp much in her young brain. There were pictures of this mother at Sunstead, and Mark was wonderfully like her. He was so dark as to seem scarcely of English birth. His face was handsome, passionate, attractive, and his nature matched his face as to passion and attraction.
It was not until Grace had grown to womanhood—she was now about twenty-two—that she learned the meaning of the shadow and the anxiety that beset Val so much where Mark was concerned, and when she did learn this she found it hard to grasp at first. But Val was not a man to make a mistake. He had caught signs of Mark’s failings when his cousin had been barely more than a lad, and then he had something more than fear to lend proof to his discovery, for Val alone knew the true storyof his uncle’s marriage; he alone was aware that Mark’s mother, instead of dying years before, had lived a wretched, lost existence, confined in a home for drunkards, until a few months before the accident in the hunting field that had brought Sir Ambrose Wentworth’s life to an untimely end.
Besides the instructions left in his will, Sir Ambrose had written a letter to Valentine, to be read after his death, in which the unhappy father betrayed to the younger man the anguish that had lived canker-like in his heart all the years that followed on his fatal marriage.
He was bluntly frank with Val, and he entreated his nephew by every means in his power to stand between Mark and his mother’s fate.
The trait of that mother’s horrible weakness had not been developed sufficiently in the boy at the time the father wrote this letter to cause him to regard Mark’s future as hopeless, and he relied on Mark’s affection for Val to keep his loved child safe from all temptation.
The trust left to him had been accepted by Valentine Ambleton in no half spirit. He had constituted himself Mark’s companion on all possible occasions, and when his work—he was an architect by profession—claimed him, then he looked to Grace to take his place.
He found it necessary for his scheme of protection to tell his brother and sister briefly, the fear that Mark might inherit the failing that had claimed his mother, and that came to him as a terrible legacy from that mother’s family, and Grace, at least, had shared his anxiety over their cousin to the fullest degree.
If Sacha was less moved about Mark’s possible fate, that was, perhaps, natural, for Sacha had from the beginning of his life learned really to trouble about no one but himself. He was of an utterly different nature to either Grace or Val; there was less stolidity about him.He was never very practical, and lived, for the most part of the time, in happy dreams.
Contrary to the wishes of Val, and such of his kinsmen who in the beginning had had a right to enter into the young Ambletons’ lives, Sacha had followed no sound, practical profession; he had taken up art instead, and it was not to be denied that he had marked talent as a painter.
Val, when he found his brother resolved on adopting the brush as a means of earning his living, sacrificed his own feelings in the matter, and there was a very large room in the top floor of the Dower House which had long ago been set apart as a studio for Sacha when he cared to be at Dynechester.
The Dower House was practically a Wentworth property.
Most people imagined that the house and grounds had belonged actually to Mrs. Ambleton when she arrived, widowed, years before, to take up her abode in it; but this was not the case. Sir Ambrose had put the house at his sister’s disposal when she returned to England from Russia after her husband’s death.
There had not been too much money left to Mrs. Ambleton and her children at this time. She had made, in a sense, a poor marriage. Eric Ambleton had been a handsome young attaché when she had fallen in love with him, and she had become his wife in the face of a good deal of opposition, for most people realized that Eric Ambleton had been a man of promise but of promise only, and most people proved to be right.
Advancement in diplomacy is proverbially slow, and Eric Ambleton struggled on in an onerous and most difficult life, always hoping for better things that never came.
He died while attached to the embassy in St. Petersburg,and his wife had no other course open to her but to travel back to her old country with her two handsome boys and accept all her brother offered to her.
After her death Sir Ambrose desired Valentine to continue to regard the Dower House as a home for himself and his brother and sister—the little Grace who had been born there so soon after her mother’s widowhood.
“My mother will never claim it,” he had said, sadly enough. For his wife was believed to be dead at that time, and his mother still reigned at Sunstead, pouring out tender love on young Mark. There seemed to be no reason why the Ambletons should not, therefore, regard themselves as located at the old house for all their lives.
When his uncle died, Val had, however, spoken out very plainly to his cousin, and had insisted upon putting matters on a very different footing.
“I want you to remember that the Dower House is a valuable property, Mark,” he had said, in his frank way. “If you were to let it to any outside person you would get a very fair rental for it, and I propose to pay you this rental. Your father was generous beyond all description to let us come here in the beginning, and now he is dead, I don’t want to continue living on that generosity; hence my reason for speaking to you now. I don’t suppose you will be a hard landlord,” Val had added, with his rare smile; “or that you will turn us out in a hurry, but I want you to remember that youareour landlord and of course, if you ever have need of the house, you will let us know.”
Mark Wentworth’s answer had been characteristic.
“Don’t talk rot, Val,” he had remarked, in his strong-worded way. “As if the Dower House could ever belong to anybody but you! I don’t want any rent, and I won’t be your landlord, so you can settle it just whichever way you please.”
So Val had settled it by paying each quarter a certainsum of money into Sir Mark Wentworth’s account in Dynechester Bank, and Grace approved of what he did.
They were not rich, but they had enough. Val was now beginning to earn a fair income, and they inherited, further, the small income which had belonged to their mother. Latterly, too, they had received news of a possible source of good fortune from some property in Russia, which their father had purchased years before in rather a haphazard fashion, and which had lain dormant all these years.
It had been to investigate matters in connection with this property that Val and Grace had gone abroad. Sacha had remained in England, sometimes running down for a few days to Dynechester, but as a rule living in London, in a pet circle of artists.
Sacha somehow never fell in wholly with the life of his brother and sister.
Val had been sorry and glad to go. He had hesitated some time before he did eventually leave home, but, added to the necessity of personal investigation came an offer of work from a firm who employed him a good deal, and who, chancing to hear of his suggested journey to Russia, found this an excellent opportunity to utilize his services.
Val was glad to leave on this account, but he troubled to go solely because matters had slipped gradually into rather a tangle between Mark and himself. Val had always feared this, for he was above all else sensible, and he had foreseen the time when Mark would resent his interference and the fact of his trusteeship. How or why the bad feeling on Mark’s side toward himself had arisen first Val did not know, save that he imagined the younger man had resented certain plain words he had been compelled to speak.
The fact was that Sir Mark, being a very handsomeyoung fellow, with very little mental ballast to keep him from follies, had quickly shown a disposition to lead a life that Val held to be objectionable in every sense of the word.
It was not merely that excitement and dissipation was bound to help the young man on the road to a fatal end; it was because Val considered there was very much indeed that his cousin could have found to occupy him in connection with the various properties in and about Dynechester, and in other places as well.
Val was as lenient as most men over the question of amusement, but duty always came first with him, and Mark most assuredly neglected his duties in the most pronounced way.
There were other things that made Val grave and anxious. Mark had a predilection for the most questionable company, and already Dynechester was beginning to look a trifle askance at the young man.
Grace of course was not enlightened as to the cause of the very sharp quarrel that had taken place between her brother and Sir Mark, just before they started abroad, but she felt without knowing anything that Val must have been in the right.
It had been, as a matter of fact, a very nasty quarrel, and Mark had said many hurtful things.
Up to this time Val had never breathed to his cousin that grim truth about the mother whom Mark knew only as a memory; but when he saw how fast Mark was drifting to the same miserable fate, he felt, cruel as it was, that he must speak out.
The story he had to tell infuriated Mark Wentworth.
“I see your drift,” he said to Val, with a sneer; “finding you can’t interfere with me and my amusements, and being frightened to death of my getting married, you tell me this abominable thing simply to work in your planbetter. Of course a child could understand you! If I die unmarried you come into my title and place through your mother’s right, and so you are determined to keep me unmarried. Oh! I can see right through you, my dear Cousin Val, and all your righteous disposal of the present state of things is just a proof of your beastly selfishness. I tell you frankly that if you say much more, I will make this woman you are kicking up such a fuss about my wife to-morrow!”
Val had looked into the dark, passionate face.
“You are not an utter fool, Mark, so I shall not trouble to argue this sort of point with you,” he said, quietly. “As to the other suggestion you have made, I hope from my heart that the day will come when you will be happy with a wife to love you, and children to call you father. But that must not be yet, Mark, my lad,” Val had added quietly, but sternly. “You have to take a good pull at yourself, Mark, and just pause and look ahead of you. Why don’t you pack up your traps and come abroad with us? We should be so jolly together, you, Grace and myself, and——”
“And the Dean’s Chapter, too, I suppose, to shrive me perpetually of my sins, eh?” Mark had queried with a pronounced sneer. Then he had used a very bad word, and he had told Val to “go to the devil!” and he had swung himself away to end further argument.
All this—save what concerned a certain woman about whom Val could not bring himself to speak to his sister—had been told to Grace, and the girl had only too well grasped the difficulties of the position.
“But you have done your best, you are doing all you can now, Val,” she had said, consolingly. “You cannot make yourself Mark’s keeper. Write to Mr. Baker and tell him he must fill your trust as well as his own while you are abroad. I will write to Sacha and ask him to beas much with Mark as he can. It is just possible,” Grace had added, thoughtfully, “that Mark may take a little turn for the better if you are away for a time. With some natures restraint has a bad effect if urged too much. Mark has grown impatient lately. If you will let me advise you, dear, you will say no more to him, but come away with me, and trust to his own good sense to realize the danger of his position.”
And Val had accepted this counsel.
He had done all Grace had suggested, and he had gone abroad, with a sigh of relief. Determined that no evil feeling between Mark and himself should be fostered by any act of his, Val wrote frequently to his cousin, as Grace did to her grandmother, poor old Lady Wentworth, but Mark vouchsafed no answers, and such news as they had received of him had come through Val’s fellow trustee, Mr. Baker, and from Sacha, when he remembered to write at all.
The news was not cheering.
Mark had plunged headlong into a vortex of dissipation, and the end of this had been a sharp illness, which his grandmother called fever, but which Val knew, alas! only too well, had been an attack of delirium tremens.
Grace and he had been too far away to return at that time, and indeed he was kept abroad much longer than he had anticipated, owing to an increase of work required of him by the firm.
When eventually they returned homewards and reached London, it was to learn a sad and sordid story of Mark’s life during their absence, ending in his announced marriage with a certain Miss Pennington, a young lady whom he had met while she had been on a visit to Dynechester, and who was, so Mr. Baker affirmed, apparently in utter ignorance of the true character of the man she was about to marry.
Close investigation through other channels showed Val only too clearly into what a state his cousin had drifted, and other inquiries elicited the fact that Christina Pennington was undoubtedly a lady, and one who was to be saved from a shocking fate.
The friends with whom she was staying in Dynechester were friends of the Ambletons also, and from one of the heads of this family Val had obtained all he wanted to know about the Penningtons.
His anger against his cousin was unbridled at this moment.
He had had the greatest pity for Mark in the beginning, but for the man who had wantonly flung himself to ruin he had nothing but contempt.
On one point he was resolved. This marriage should not go forward.
He poured out all his heart to Grace, and told her of his resolve to put the truth before Christina Pennington and her parents, and, as we have seen, Grace had not wholly agreed with him in this.
“It is a delicate matter, Val dear,” she had said, gently, “and it must be handled delicately.”
For Valentine had a way of rushing at things too suddenly.
He was so honest himself, he hardly understood the meaning of diplomacy, and Grace not infrequently had to stand between people and his blunt truth.
“It is an abominable business,” Val had said, hotly; and the matter had dropped, to be revived only when the brother and sister met at the railway station to start on their return journey to Dynechester.
Grace could see then that her brother was greatly upset by his interview with Miss Pennington, and her homecoming was a little spoiled by the fear of what would happen when Val and Sir Mark should meet.
It was with relief, therefore, that she learned from her servants that Sir Mark was absent from Sunstead, and she gave herself up to the pleasure of the moment, hoping a little against hope that things might shape themselves better, and that the worst might be averted.