She found herself comparing it with another, a thin, reserved face, with keen light eyes and a firm mouth; a mouth with a cigar in it at that moment on the lawn. The comparison, however, did not help her meditations much, being decidedly prejudicial to the "new broom;" and the faint chime of the clock on the dressing-table breaking in on them at the same moment, she dismissed them for the night, and proceeded to busy herself putting to bed her various little articles of jewellery before betaking herself there also.
Any doubts entertained by Evelyn about Dare's religious views were completely set at rest the following morning, which happened to be a Sunday. He appeared at breakfast in a black frock-coat, the splendor of which quite threw Ralph's ancient Sunday garment into the shade. He wore also a chastened, decorous aspect, which seemed unfamiliar to his mobile face, and rather ill suited to it. After breakfast, he inquired when service would be, and expressed a wish to attend it. He brought down a high hat and an enormous prayer-book, and figured with them in the garden.
"Who is going to Greenacre, and who is going to Slumberleigh?" called out Ralph, from the smoking-room window. "Because, ifany of you are going to foot it to Slumberleigh, you had better be starting. Which are you going to, Charles?"
"I am going where Molly goes. Which is it to be, Molly?"
"Slumberleigh," said Molly, with decision, "because it's the shortest sermon, and I want to see the little foal in Brown's field."
"Slumberleigh be it," said Charles. "Now, Miss Deyncourt," as Ruth appeared, "which church are you going to support—Greenacre, which is close in more senses than one, where they never open the windows, and the clergyman preaches for an hour; or Slumberleigh, shady, airy, cool, lying past a meadow with a foal in it? If I may offer that as any inducement, Molly and I intend to patronize Slumberleigh."
Ruth said she would do the same.
"Now, Dare,youwill be able to decide whether Greenacre, with a little fat tower, or Slumberleigh, with a beautiful tall steeple, suits your religious views best."
"I will also go to Slumberleigh," said Dare, without a moment's hesitation.
"I thought so. I suppose,"—to Ralph and Evelyn—"you are going to Greenacre with Aunt Mary? Tell her I have gone to church, will you? It will cheer her up. Sunday is a very depressing day with her, I know. She thinks of all she has done in the week, preparatory to doing a little more on Monday. Good-bye. Now then, Molly, have you got your prayer-book? Miss Deyncourt, I don't see yours anywhere. Oh, there it is! No, don't let Dare carry it for you. Give it to me. He will have enough to do, poor fellow, to travel with his own. Come, Molly! Is Vic chained up? Yes, I can hear him howling. The craving for church privileges of that dumb animal, Miss Deyncourt, is an example to us Christians. Molly, have you got your penny? Miss Deyncourt, can I accommodate you with a threepenny bit? Now,arewe all ready to start?"
"When this outburst of eloquence has subsided," said Ruth, "the audience will be happy to move on."
And so they started across the fields, where the grass was already springing faint and green after the haymaking. There was a fresh wandering air, which fluttered the ribbons in Molly's hat, as she danced on ahead, frisking in her short white skirt beside her uncle, her hand in his. Charles was the essence of wit to Molly, with his grave face that so seldom smiled, and the twinkle in the kind eyes, that always went before those wonderful, delightful jokes which he alone could make. Sometimes, as she laughed, she looked back atRuth and Dare, half a field behind, in pity at what they were missing.
"Shall we wait and tell them that story, Uncle Charles?"
"No, Molly. I dare say he is telling her another which is just as good."
"I don't think he knows any like yours."
"Some people like the old, old story best."
"Do I know the old, old one, Uncle Charles?"
"No, Molly."
"Can you tell it?"
"No. I have never been able to tell that particular story."
"And do you really think he is telling it to her now?" with a backward glance.
"Not at this moment. It's no good running back. He's only thinking about it now. He will tell it her in about a month or six weeks' time."
"I hope I shall be there when he tells it."
"I hope you may; but I don't think it is likely. And now, Molly, set your hat straight, and leave off jumping. I never jump when I go to church with Aunt Mary. Quietly now, for there's the church, and Mr. Alwynn's looking out of the window."
Dare, meanwhile, walking with Ruth, caught sight of the church and lych-gate with heart-felt regret. The stretches of sunny meadowland, the faint glamour of church bells, the pale refined face beside him, had each individually and all three together appealed to his imagination, always vivid when he himself was concerned. He suddenly felt as if a great gulf had fixed itself, without any will of his own, between his old easy-going life and the new existence that was opening out before him.
He had crossed from the old to the new without any perception of such a gulf, and now, as he looked back, it seemed to yawn between him and all that hitherto he had been. He did not care to look back, so he looked forward. He felt as if he were the central figure (when was henota central figure?) in a new drama. He was fond of acting, on and off the stage, and now he seemed to be playing a new part, in which he was not yet thoroughly at ease, but which he rather suspected would become him exceedingly well. It amused him to see himself going to church—to church—to hear himself conversing on flowers and music with a young English girl. The idea that he was rapidly falling in love was specially delightful. He called himself avieux scélérat, and watched the progress of feelingswhich he felt did him credit with extreme satisfaction. He and Ruth arrived at the church porch all too soon for Dare; and though he had the pleasure of sitting on one side of her during the service, he would have preferred that Charles, of whom he felt a vague distrust, had not happened to be on the other.
"My dear," said Mrs. Alwynn to her husband that morning, as they started for church across the glebe, "if any of the Atherstone party are in church, as they ought to be, for I hear from Mrs. Smith that they are not at all regular at Greenacre—only went once last Sunday, and then late—I shall just tell Ruth that she is to come back to me to-morrow. A few days won't make any difference to her, and it will fit in so nicely her coming back the day you go to the palace. After all I've done for Ruth—new curtains to her room, and the piano tuned and everything—I don't think she would like to stay there with friends, and me all by myself, without a creature to speak to. Ruth may be only a niece by marriage, but she will see in a moment—"
And in fact she did. When Mrs. Alwynn took her aside after church, and explained the case in the all-pervading whisper for which she had apparently taken out a patent, Ruth could not grasp any reason why she should return to Slumberleigh three days before the time, but she saw at once that return she must if Mrs. Alwynn chose to demand it; and so she yielded with a good grace, and sent Mrs. Alwynn back smiling to the lych-gate, where Mr. Alwynn and Mabel Thursby were talking with Dare and Molly, while Charles interviewed the village policeman at a little distance.
"No news of the tramp," said Charles, meeting Ruth at the gate; and they started homeward in different order to that in which they had come, in spite of a great effort at the last moment on the part of Dare, who thought the old way was better. "The policeman has seen nothing of him. He has gone off to pastures new, I expect."
"I hope he has."
"Mrs. Alwynn does not want you to leave Atherstone to-morrow, does she?"
"I am sorry to say she does."
"But you won't go?"
"I must not only go, but I must do it as if I liked it."
"I hope Evelyn won't allow it."
"While I am living with Mrs. Alwynn, I am bound to do what she likes in small things."
"H'm!"
"I should have thought, Sir Charles, that this particularly feminine and submissive sentiment would have met with your approval."
"It does; it does," said Charles, hastily. "Only, after the stubborn rigidity of your—shall I say your—week-day character, especially as regards money, this softened Sabbath mood took me by surprise for a moment."
"You should see me at Slumberleigh," said Ruth, with a smile half sad, half humorous. "You should see me tying up Uncle John's flowers, or holding Aunt Fanny's wools. Nothing more entirely feminine and young lady-like can be imagined."
"It must be a great change, after living with a woman like Lady Deyncourt—to whose house I often went years ago, when her son was living—to come to a place like Slumberleigh."
"Itisa great change. I am ashamed to say how much I felt it at first. I don't know how to express it; but everything down here seems so small and local, and hard and fast."
"I know," said Charles, gently; and they walked on in silence. "And yet," he said at last, "it seems to me, and I should have thought you would have felt the same, that life is very small, very narrow and circumscribed everywhere; though perhaps more obviously so in Cranfords and Slumberleighs. I have seen a good deal during the last fifteen years. I have mixed with many sorts and conditions of men, but in no class or grade of society have I yet found independent men and women. The groove is as narrow in one class as in another, though in some it is better concealed. I sometimes feel as if I were walking in a ball-room full of people all dancing the lancers. There are different sets, of course—fashionable, political, artistic—but the people in them are all crossing over, all advancing and retiring, with the same apparent aimlessness, or setting to partners."
"There is occasionally an aim in that."
Charles smiled grimly.
"They follow the music in that as in everything else. You go away for ten years, and still find them, on your return, going through the same figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are anypeople anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to heaven by rote afterwards?"
"I believe there are such people," said Ruth, earnestly; "I have had glimpses of them, but the real ones look like the shadows, and the shadows like the real ones, and—we miss them in the crowd."
"Or one thinks one finds them, and they turn out only clever imitations after all. In these days there is a mania for shamming originality of some kind. I am always imagining people I meet are real, and not shadows, until one day I unintentionally put my hand through them, and find out my mistake. I am getting tired of being taken in."
"And some day you will get tired of being cynical."
"I am very much obliged to you for your hopeful view of my future. You evidently imagine that I have gone in for the fashionable creed of the young man of the present day. I am not young enough to take pleasure in high collars and cheap cynicism, Miss Deyncourt. Cynical people are never disappointed in others, as I so often am, because they expect the worst. In theory I respect and admire my fellow-creatures, but they continually exasperate me because they won't allow me to do so in real life. I have still—I blush to own it—a lingering respect for women, though they have taken pains to show me, time after time, what a fool I am for such a weakness."
Charles looked intently at Ruth. Women are so terribly apt in handling any subject to make it personal. Would she fire up, or would she, like so many women, join in abuse of her own sex? She did neither. She was looking straight in front of her, absently watching the figures of Dare and Molly in the next field. Then she turned her grave, thoughtful glance towards him.
"I think respect is never weakness," she said. "It is a sign of strength, even when it is misplaced. There is not much to admire in cunning people who are never taken in. The best people I have known, the people whom it did me good to be with, have been those who respected others and themselves. Do not be in too great a hurry to get rid of any little fragment that still remains. You may want it when it is gone."
Charles's apathetic face had become strangely earnest. There was a keen, searching look in his tired, restless eyes. He was aboutto make some answer, when he suddenly became aware of Dare and Molly sitting perched on a gate close at hand waiting for them. Never had he perceived Molly's little brown face with less pleasure than at that moment. She scrambled down with a noble disregard of appearances, and tried to take his hand. But it was coolly withdrawn. Charles fell behind on some pretence of fastening the gate, and Molly had to content herself with Ruth's and Dare's society for the remainder of the walk.
Ruth had almost forgotten, until Molly suggested at luncheon a picnic for the following day, that she was returning to Slumberleigh on Monday morning; and when she made the fact known, Ralph had to be "hushed" several times by Evelyn for muttering opinions behind the sirloin respecting Mrs. Alwynn, which Evelyn seemed to have heard before, and to consider unsuited to the ears of that lady's niece.
"But if you go away, Cousin Ruth, we can't have the picnic. Can we, Uncle Charles?"
"Impossible, Molly. Rather bread and butter at home than a mixed biscuit in the open air without Miss Deyncourt."
"Is Mrs. Alwynn suffering?" asked Lady Mary, politely, down the table.
Ruth explained that she was not in ill-health, but that she did wish to be left alone; and Ralph was "hushed" again.
Lady Mary was annoyed, or, more properly speaking, she was "moved in the spirit," which in a Churchwoman seems to be the same thing as annoyance in the unregenerate or unorthodox mind. She regretted Ruth's departure more than any one, except perhaps Ruth herself. She had watched the girl very narrowly, and she had seen nothing to make her alter the opinion she had formed of her; indeed, she was inclined to advance beyond it. Even she could not suspect that Ruth had "played her cards well;" although she would have aided and abetted her in any way in her power, if Ruth had shown the slightest consciousness of holding cards at all, or being desirous of playing them. Her frank yet reserved manner, her distinguished appearance, her sense of humor (which Lady Mary did not understand, but which she perceived others did), and the quietsavoir faireof her treatment of Dare's advances, all enhanced her greatly in the eyes of her would-be aunt. She bade her good-bye with genuine regret; the only person who bore her departure without a shade of compunction being Dare, who stood by the carriage till the last moment, assuring Ruth that he hoped to come over tothe rectory very shortly; while Charles and Molly held the gate open meanwhile, at the end of the short drive.
"I know that Frenchman means business," said Lady Mary wrathfully to herself, as she watched the scene from the garden. Her mind, from the very severity of its tension, was liable to occasional lapses of this painful kind from the spiritual and ecclesiastical to the mundane and transitory. "I saw it directly he came into the house; and withhisopportunities, and living within a stone's-throw, I should not wonder if he were to succeed. Any man would fetch a fancy price at Slumberleigh; and the most fastidious woman in the world ceases to be critical if she is reduced to the proper state of dulness. He is handsome, too, in his foreign way. But she does not like him now. She is inclined to like Charles, though she does not know it. There is an attraction between the two. I knew there would be. And he likes her. Oh, what fools men are! He will go away; and Dare, on the contrary, will ride over to Slumberleigh every day, and by the time he is engaged to her Charles will see her again, and find out that he is in love with her himself. Oh, the folly, the density, of unmarried men! and, indeed," (with a sudden recollection of the deceased Mr. Cunningham), "of the whole race of them! But of all men I have ever known, I really think the most provoking is Charles."
"Musing?" inquired her nephew, sauntering up to her.
"I was thinking that we had just lost the pleasantest person of our little party," said Lady Mary, viciously seizing up her work.
"I am still here," suggested Charles, by way of consolation. "I don't start for Norway in Wyndham's yacht for three days to come."
"Do you mean to say you are going to Norway?"
"I forget whether it was to be Norway; but I know I'm booked to go yachting somewhere. It's Wyndham's new toy. He paid through the parental nose for it, and he made me promise in London to go with him on his first cruise. I believe a very charming Miss Wyndham is to be of the party."
"And how long, pray, are you going to yacht with Miss Wyndham?"
"It is with her brother I propose to go. I thought I had explained that before. I shall probably cruise about, let me see, for three weeks or so, till the grouse-shooting begins. Then I am due in Scotland, at the Hope-Actons', and several other places."
Lady Mary laid down her work, and rose to her feet, her thin hand closing tightly over the silver crook of her stick.
"Charles," she said, in a voice trembling with anger, looking him full in the face, "you are a fool!" and she passed him without another word, and hobbled away rapidly into the house.
"Am I?" said Charles, half aloud to himself, when the last fold of her garment had been twitched out of sight through the window.
"Am I?Molly," with great gravity, as Molly appeared, "yes, you may sit on my knee; but don't wriggle. Molly, what is a fool?"
"I think it's Raca, only worse," said Molly. "Uncle Charles, Mr. Dare is going away too. His dog-cart had just come into the yard."
"Has it? I hope he won't keep it waiting."
"You are not going away, are you?"
"Not for three days more."
"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Why, they will be gone in a moment."
But to Charles they seemed three very long days indeed. He was annoyed with himself for having made so many engagements before he left London. At the time there did not seem anything better to be done, and he supposed he must go somewhere; but now he thought he would have liked to stay on at Atherstone, though he would not have said so to Lady Mary for worlds. He was tired of rushing up and down. He was not so fond of yachting, after all; and he remembered that he had been many times to Norway.
"I would get out of it if I could," he said to Lady Mary on the last morning; "and of this blue serge suit, too (you should see Miss Wyndham in blue serge!); but it is not a question of pleasure, but of principle. I don't like to throw over Wyndham at the last moment, after what you said when I failed the Hope-Actons last year. Twins could not feel more exactly together than you and I do where a principle is involved. I see you are about to advise me to keep my engagement. Do not trouble to do so; I am going to Portsmouth by the mid-day train. Brown is at this moment packing my telescope and life-belt."
It was the end of August. The little lawn at Slumberleigh Rectory was parched and brown. The glebe beyond was brown; so was the field beyond that. The thirsty road was ash-white between its gray hedge-rows. It was hotter in the open air than in the house, but Ruth had brought her books out into the garden all the same, and had made a conscientious effort to read under the chestnut-tree.
For under the same roof with Mrs. Alwynn she had soon learned that application or study of any kind was an impossibility. Mrs. Alwynn had several maxims as to the conduct of herself, and consequently of every one else, and one of those to which she most frequently gave utterance was that "young people should always be cheery and sociable, and should not be left too much to themselves."
When in the winter Mr. Alwynn had brought home Ruth, quite overwhelmed for the time by the shock of the first real trouble she had known, Mrs. Alwynn was kindness itself in the way of sweet-breads and warm rooms; but the only thing Ruth craved for, to be left alone, she would not allow for a moment. No! Mrs. Alwynn was cheerful, brisk, and pious at intervals. If she found her niece was sitting in her own room, she bustled up-stairs, poked the fire, gave her a kiss, and finally brought her down to the drawing-room, where she told her she would be as quiet as in her own room. She need not be afraid her uncle would come in; and she must not allow herself to get moped. What would she, Mrs. Alwynn, have done, she would like to know, if, when she was in trouble—and she knew what trouble meant, if any one did—she had allowed herself to get moped. Ruth must try and bear up. And at Lady Deyncourt's age it was quite to be expected. And Ruth must remember she still had a sister, and that there was a happy home above. And now, if she would get that green wool out of the red plush iron (which really was a work-box—such a droll idea, wasn't it?), Ruth should hold the wool, and they would have a cosey little chat till luncheon time.
And so Mrs. Alwynn did her duty by her niece; and Ruth, in thedark days that followed her grandmother's death, took all the little kindnesses in the spirit in which they were meant, and did her duty by her aunt.
But after a time Mrs. Alwynn became more exacting. Ruth was visibly recovering from what Mrs. Alwynn called "her bereavement." She could smile again without an effort; she took long walks with Mr. Alwynn, and later in the spring paid a visit to her uncle, Lord Polesworth. It was after this visit that Mrs. Alwynn became more exacting. She had borne with half attention and a lack of interest in crewel-work while Ruth was still "fretting," as she termed it. But when a person lays aside crape, and goes into half-mourning, the time had come when she may—nay, when she ought to be "chatty." This time had come with Ruth, but she was not "chatty." Like Mrs. Dombey, she did not make an effort, and, as the months passed on, Mrs. Alwynn began to shake her head, and to fear that "there was some officer or something on her mind." Mrs. Alwynn always called soldiers officers, and doctors physicians.
Ruth, on her side, was vaguely aware that she did not give satisfaction. The small-talk, the perpetual demand on her attention, the constant interruptions, seemed to benumb what faculties she had. Her mind became like a machine out of work—rusty, creaking, difficult to set going. If she had half an hour of leisure she could not fix her attention to anything. She, who in her grandmother's time had been so keen and alert, seemed to have drifted, in Mrs. Alwynn's society, into a torpid state, from which she made vain attempts to emerge, only to sink the deeper.
When she stood once more, fresh from a fortnight of pleasant intercourse with pleasant people, in the little ornate drawing-room at Slumberleigh, on her return from Atherstone, the remembrance of the dulled, confused state in which she had been living with her aunt returned forcibly to her mind. The various articles of furniture, the red silk handkerchiefs dabbed behind pendent plates, the musical elephants on the mantle-piece, the imitation Eastern antimacassars, the shocking fate, in the way of nailed and glued pictorial ornamentation, that had overtaken the back of the cottage piano—indeed, all the various objects of luxury andvertuwith which Mrs. Alwynn had surrounded herself, seemed to recall to Ruth, as the apparatus of the sick-room recalls the illness to the patient, the stupor into which she had fallen in their company. With her eyes fixed upon the new brass pig (that was at heart a pen-wiper) which Mrs. Alwynn had pointed out as a gift of Mabel Thursby, who alwaysbrought her back some little "tasty thing from London"—with her eyes on the brass pig, Ruth resolved that, come what would, she would not allow herself to sink into such a state of mental paralysis again.
To read a book of any description was out of the question in the society of Mrs. Alwynn. But Ruth, with the connivance of Mr. Alwynn, devised a means of eluding her aunt. At certain hours of the day she was lost regularly, and not to be found. It was summer, and the world, or at least the neighborhood of Slumberleigh Rectory, which was the same thing, was all before her where to choose. In after-years she used to say that some books had always remained associated with certain places in her mind. With Emerson she learned to associate the scent of hay, the desultory remarks of hens, and the sudden choruses of ducks. Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus," which she read for the first time this year, always recalled to her afterwards the leathern odor of the box-room, with an occasionalsoupçonof damp flapping linen in the orchard, which spot was not visible from the rectory windows.
Gradually Mrs. Alwynn became aware of the fact that Ruth was never to be seen with a book in her hand, and she expressed fears that the latter was not keeping up her reading.
"And if you don't like to read to yourself, my dear, you can read to me while I work. German, now. I like the sound of German very well. It brings back the time when your Uncle John and I went up the Rhine on our honey-moon. And then, for English reading there's a very nice book Uncle John has somewhere on natural history, called 'Animals of a Quiet Life,' by a Mr. Hare, too—so comical, I always think. It's good for you to be reading something. It is what your poor dear granny would have wished if she had been alive. Only it must not be poetry, Ruth, not poetry."
Mrs. Alwynn did not approve of poetry. She was wont to say that for her part she liked only what was perfectlytrue, by which it is believed she meant prose.
She had no books of her own. In times of illness she borrowed from Mrs. Thursby (who had all Miss Young's works, and selections from the publications of the S.P.C.K.). On Sundays, when she could not work, she read, half aloud, of course, with sighs at intervals, a little manual called "Gold Dust," or a smaller one still called "Pearls of Great Price," which she had once recommended to Charles, whom she knew slightly, and about whom she affected to know a great deal, which nothing (except pressing) would induce her to repeat; which rendered the application of the "Pearls," to be followed by the "Dust," most essential to his future welfare.
On this particular morning in August, Ruth had slipped out as far as the chestnut-tree, the lower part of which was hidden from the rectory windows by a blessed yew hedge. It was too hot to walk, it was too hot to draw, it was even too hot to read. It did not seem, however, to be too hot toride, for presently she heard a horse's hoofs clattering across the stones of the stable-yard, and she knew, from the familiarity of the sound at that hour of the day, that Dare had probably ridden over, and, more probably still, would stay to luncheon.
The foreign gentleman, as all the village people called him, had by this time become quite an institution in the neighborhood of Vandon. Every one liked him, and he liked every one. Like the sun, he shone upon the just and unjust. He went to every tennis-party to which he was invited. He was pleased if people were at home when he called. He became in many houses a privileged person, and he never abused his privileges. Women especially liked him. He had what Mrs. Eccles defined as "such a way with him;" his way being to make every woman he met think that she was particularly interesting in his eyes—for the time being. Men did not, of course, care for him so much. When he stayed anywhere, it was vaguely felt by the sterner sex of the party that he stole a march upon them. While they were smoking, after their kind, in clusters on the lawn, it would suddenly be observed that he was sitting in the drawing-room, giving a lesson in netting, or trying over a new song encircled by young ladyhood. It was felt that he took an unfair advantage. What business had he to come down to tea in that absurd amber plush smoking-suit, just because the elder ladies had begged to see it? It was all the more annoying, because he looked so handsome in it. Like most men who are admired by women, he was not much liked by men.
But the house to which he came the oftenest was Slumberleigh Rectory. He was faithful to his early admiration of Ruth; and the only obstacle to his making her (in his opinion) happy among women, namely, her possible want of fortune, had long since been removed by the confidential remarks of Mrs. Alwynn. To his foreign habits and ideas fourteen or fifteen hundred a year represented a very large sum. In his eyes Ruth was an heiress, and in all good earnest he set himself to win her. Mr. Alwynn had now become the proper person to consult regarding his property; and at first, to Ruth's undisguised satisfaction, he consulted him nearly every other day, his horse at last taking the turn for Slumberleigh as a matter of course. Many a time, in these August days, might Mrs. Eccles and all the other inhabitants of Slumberleigh have seen Dare ride up the little street, taking as much active exercise as his horse, only skyward; the saddle being to him merely a point of rebound.
But if the object of his frequent visits was misunderstood by Ruth at first, Dare did not allow it to remain so long. And not only Ruth herself, but Mr. and Mrs. Alwynn, and the rectory servants, and half the parish were soon made aware of the state of his affections. What was the good of being in love, of having in view a social aim of such a praiseworthy nature, if no one were aware of the same? Dare was not the man to hide even a night-light under a bushel; how much less a burning and a shining hymeneal torch such as this. His sentiments were strictly honorable. If he raised expectations, he was also quite prepared to fulfil them. Miss Deyncourt was quite right to treat him with her adorable, placid assumption of indifference until his attentions were more avowed. In the mean while she was an angel, a lily, a pearl, a star, and several other things, animal, vegetable, and mineral, which his vivid imagination chose to picture her. But whatever Dare's faults may have been—and Ruth was not blind to them—he was at least head over ears in love with her, fortune or none; and as his attachment deepened, it burned up like fire all the little follies with which it had begun.
A clergyman has been said to have made love to the helpmeet of his choice out of the Epistle to the Galatians. Dare made his out of material hardly more promising—plans for cottages, and estimates of repairs. He had quickly seen how to interest Ruth, though the reason for such an eccentric interest puzzled him. However, he turned it to his advantage. Ruth encouraged, suggested, sympathized in all the little he was already doing, and the much that he proposed to do.
Of late, however, a certain not ungrounded suspicion had gradually forced itself upon her which had led her to withdraw as much as she could from her former intercourse with Dare; but her change of manner had not quite the effect she had intended.
"She thinks I am not serious," Dare had said to himself; "she thinks that I play with her feelings. She does not know me. To-morrow I ride over; I set her mind at rest. To-morrow I propose; I make an offer; I claim that adored hand; I—become engaged."
Accordingly, not long after the clatter of horse's hoofs in thestable-yard, Dare himself appeared in the garden, and perceiving Ruth, for whom he was evidently looking, informed her that he had ridden over to ask Mr. Alwynn to support him at a dinner his tenants were giving in his honor—a custom of the Vandon tenantry from time immemorial on the accession of a new landlord. He spoke absently; and Ruth, looking at him more closely as he stood before her, wondered at his altered manner. He had a rose in his button-hole. He always had a rose in his button-hole; but somehow this was more of a rose than usual. His mustaches were twirled up with unusual grace.
"You will find Mr. Alwynn in the study," said Ruth, hurriedly.
His only answer was to cast aside his whip and gloves, as possible impediments later on, and to settle himself, with an elegant arrangement of the choicest gaiters, on the grass at her feet.
It is probably very disagreeable to repeat in any form, however discreetly worded, the old phrase—
"The reason why I cannot tell,But I don't like you, Doctor Fell."
"The reason why I cannot tell,But I don't like you, Doctor Fell."
But it must be especially disagreeable, if a refusal is at first not taken seriously, to be obliged to repeat it, still more plainly, a second time. It was Ruth's fate to be obliged to do this, and to do it hurriedly, or she foresaw complications might arise.
At last Dare understood, and the sudden utter blankness of his expression smote Ruth to the heart. He had loved her in his way after all. It is a bitter thing to be refused. She felt that she had been almost brutal in her direct explicitness, called forth at the moment by an instinct that he would proceed to extreme measures unless peremptorily checked.
"I am so sorry," she said, involuntarily.
Poor Dare, who had recovered a certain amount of self-possession, now that he was on his feet again, took up his gloves and riding-whip in silence. All his jaunty self-assurance had left him. He seemed quite stunned. His face under his brown skin was very pale.
"I am so sorry," said Ruth again, feeling horribly guilty.
"It is I who am sorry," he said, humbly. "I have made a great mistake, for which I ask pardon;" and, after looking at her for a moment, in blank incertitude as to whether she could really be the same person whom he had come to seek in such happy confidence half an hour before, he raised his hat, his new light gray hat, and was gone.
Ruth watched him go, and when he had disappeared, she sat down again mechanically in the chair from which she had risen a few moments before, and pressed her hands tightly together. She ought not to have allowed such a thing to happen, she said to herself. Somehow it had never presented itself to her in its serious aspect before. It is difficult to take a vain man seriously. Poor Mr. Dare! She had not known he was capable of caring so much about anything. He had never appeared to such advantage in her eyes as he had done when he had left her the moment before, grave and silent. She felt she had misjudged him. He was not so frivolous, after all. And now that her influence was at an end, who would keep him up to the mark about the various duties which she knew now he had begun to fulfil only to please her? Oh, who would help and encourage him in that most difficult of positions, a land-owner without means sufficient for doing the best by land and tenantry? She instinctively felt that he could not be relied upon for continuous exertion by himself.
"I wish I could have liked him," said Ruth to herself. "I wish, I wish, I could!"
During the whole of the following week Dare appeared no more at Slumberleigh. Mrs. Alwynn, whose time was much occupied as a rule in commenting on the smallest doings of her neighbors, and in wondering why they left undone certain actions which she herself would have performed in their place, Mrs. Alwynn would infallibly have remarked upon his absence many times during every hour of the day, had not her attention been distracted for the time being by a one-horse fly which she had seen go up the road on the afternoon of the day of Dare's last visit, the destination of which had filled her soul with anxious conjecture.
She did not ascertain till the following day that it had been ordered for Mrs. Smith, of Greenacre; though, as she told Ruth, she might have known that, as Mr. Smith was going for a holiday with Mrs. Smith, and their pony lame in its feet; that they would have to have a fly, and with that hill up to Greenacre she was surprised one horse was enough.
When the question of the fly had been thus satisfactorily settled, and Mrs. Alwynn had ceased wondering whether the Smiths had gone to Tenby or to Rhyl (she always imagined people went to one or other of these two places), her whole attention reverted to a screen which she was making, the elegance and novelty of which supplied her with a congenial subject of conversation for many days.
"There is something so new in a screen, an entire screen of Christmas cards," Mrs. Alwynn would remark. "Now, Mrs. Thursby's new screen is all pictures out of theGraphic, and those colored Christmas numbers. She has put all her cards in a book. There is something ratherpassyabout those albums, I think. Now I fancy this screen will look quite out of the common, Ruth; and when it is done, I shall get some of those Japanese cranes and stand them on the top. Their claws are made to twist round, you know, and I shall put some monkeys—you know those droll chenille monkeys, Ruth—creeping up the sides to meet the cranes. I don't honestly think, my dear"—with complacency—"that many people will have anything like it."
Ruth did not hesitate to say that she felt certain very few would.
Mrs. Alwynn was delighted at the interest she took in her new work. Ruth was coming out at last, she told her husband; and she passed many happy hours entirely absorbed in the arrangement of the cards upon the panels. Ruth, thankful that her attention had been providentially distracted from the matter that filled her own thoughts, in a way that surprised and annoyed her, sorted, and snipped, and pasted, and decided weighty questions as to whether a goitred robin on a twig should be placed next to a smiling plum-pudding, dancing a polka with a turkey, or whether a congealed cross, with "Christian greeting" in icicles on it, should separate the two.
To her uncle Ruth told what had happened; and as he slowly wended his way to Vandon on the day fixed for the tenant's dinner, Mr. Alwynn mused thereon, and I believe, if the truth were known, he was sorry that Dare had been refused. He was a little before his time, and he stopped on the bridge, and looked at the river, as it came churning and sweeping below, fretted out of its usual calm by the mill above. I think that as he leaned over the low stone parapet he made many quiet little reflections besides the involuntary one of himself in the water below. He would have liked (he was conscious that it was selfish, but yet hewouldhave liked) to have Ruth near him always. He would have liked to see this strange son ofhis old friend in good hands, that would lead him—as it is popularly supposed a woman's hand sometimes can—in the way of all others in which Mr. Alwynn was anxious that he should walk; a way in which he sometimes feared that Dare had not made any great progress as yet. Mr. Alwynn felt at times, when conversing with him, that Dare's life could not have been one in which the nobler feelings of his nature had been much brought into play, so crude and unformed were his ideas of principle and responsibility, so slack and easy-going his views of life.
But if Mr. Alwynn felt an occasional twinge of anxiety and misgiving about his young friend, it speedily turned to self-upbraiding for indulging in a cynical, unworthy spirit, which was ever ready to seek out the evil and overlook the good; and he gradually convinced himself that only favorable circumstances were required for the blossoming forth of those noble attributes, of which the faintest indications on Dare's part were speedily magnified by the powerful lens of Mr. Alwynn's charity to an extent which would have filled Dare with satisfaction, and would have overwhelmed a more humble nature with shame.
And Ruth would not have him! Mr. Alwynn remembered a certain passage in his own youth, a long time ago, when somebody (a very foolish somebody, I think) would not have him either; and it was with that remembrance still in his mind that he met Dare, who had come as far as the lodge gates to meet him, and whose forlorn appearance touched Mr. Alwynn's heart the moment he saw him.
There was not time for much conversation. To his astonishment Mr. Alwynn found Dare actually nervous about the coming ordeal; and on the way to the Green Dragon, where the dinner was to be given, he reassured him as best he could, and suggested the kind of answer he should make when his health was drunk.
When, a couple of hours later, all was satisfactorily over, when the last health had been drunk, the last song sung, and Dare was driving Mr. Alwynn home in the shabby old Vandon dog-cart, both men were at first too much overcome by the fumes of tobacco, in which they had been hidden, to say a word to each other. At last, however, Mr. Alwynn drew a long breath, and said, faintly:
"I trust I may never be so hot again. Drive slowly under these trees, Dare. It is cooling to look at them after sitting behind that steaming volcano of a turkey. How is your head getting on? I saw you went in for punch."
"Was that punch?" said Dare. "Then I take no more punch in the future."
"You spoke capitally, and brought in the right sentiment, that there is no place like home, in first-rate style. You see, you need not have been nervous."
"Ah! but it was you who spoke really well," said Dare, with something of his old eager manner. "You know these people. You know their heart. You understand them. Now, for me, I said what you tell me, and they were pleased, but I can never be with them like you. I understand the words they speak, but themselves I do not understand."
"It will come."
"No," with a rare accession of humility. "I have cared for none of these things till—till I came to hear them spoken of at Slumberleigh by you and—and now at first it is smooth, because I say I will do what I can, but soon they will find out I cannot do much, and then—" He shrugged his shoulders.
They drove on in silence.
"But these things are nothing—nothing," burst out Dare at last, in a tremulous voice, "to the one thing I think of all night, all day—how I love Miss Deyncourt, and how," with a simplicity which touched Mr. Alwynn, "she does not love me at all."
There is something pathetic in seeing any cheerful, light-hearted animal reduced to silence and depression. To watch a barking, worrying, jovial puppy suddenly desist from parachute expeditions on unsteady legs, and from shaking imaginary rats, and creep, tail close at home, overcome by affliction, into obscurity, is a sad sight. Mr. Alwynn felt much the same kind of pity for Dare as he glanced at him, resignedly blighted, handsomely forlorn, who but a short time ago had taken life as gayly and easily as a boy home for the holidays.
"Sometimes," said Mr. Alwynn, addressing himself to the mill, and the bridge, and the world in general, "young people change their minds. I have known such things happen."
"I shall never change mine."
"Perhaps not; but others might."
"Ah!" and Dare turned sharply towards Mr. Alwynn, scanning his face with sudden eagerness. "You think—you think, possibly—"
"I don't think anything at all," interposed Mr. Alwynn, rather taken aback at the evident impression his vague words had made,and anxious to qualify them. "I was only speaking generally; but—ahem! there is one point, as we are on the subject, that—"
"Yes, yes?"
"Whether you consider any decision as final or not"—Mr. Alwynn addressed the clouds in the sky—"I think, if you do not wish it to be known that anything has taken place, you had better come and see me occasionally at Slumberleigh. I have missed your visits for the past week. The fact is, Mrs. Alwynn has a way of interesting herself in all her friends. She has a kind heart, and—you—understand—any little difference in their behavior might be observed by her, and might possibly—might possibly"—Mr. Alwynn was at a loss for a word—"be, in short, commented on to others. Suppose now you were to come back with me to tea to-day?"
And Dare went, nothing loath, and arrived at a critical moment in the manufacture of the screen, when all the thickest Christmas cards threatened to resist the influence of paste, and to curl up, to the great anxiety of Mrs. Alwynn.
One of the principle reasons of Dare's popularity was the way in which he threw his whole heart into whatever he was doing, for the time; never for a long time, certainly, for he rarely bored himself or others by adherence to one set of ideas after its novelty had worn off.
And now, as if nothing else existed in the world, and with a grave manner suggesting repressed suffering and manly resignation, he concentrated his whole mind on Mrs. Alwynn's recalcitrant cards, and made Ruth grateful to him by his tact in devoting himself to her aunt and the screen.
"Well, I never!" said Mrs. Alwynn, after he was gone. "I never did see any one like Mr. Dare. I declare he has made the church stick, Ruth, and 'Blessings on my friend,' which turned up at the corners twice when you put it on, and the big middle one of the kittens skating, too! Dear me! I am pleased. I hope Mrs. Thursby won't call till it's finished. But he did not look well, Ruth, did he? Rather pale now, I thought."
"He has had a tiring day," said Ruth.
At Slumberleigh you have time to notice the change of the seasons. There is no hurry at Slumberleigh. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter, each in their turn, take quite a year to come and go. Three months ago it was August; now September had arrived. It was actually the time of damsons. Those damsons which Ruth had seen dangling for at least three years in the cottage orchards were ripe at last. It seemed ages ago since April, when the village was a foaming mass of damson blossom, and the "plum winter" had set in just when spring really seemed to have arrived for good. It was a well-known thing in Slumberleigh, though Ruth till last April had not been aware of it, that God Almighty always sent cold weather when the Slumberleigh damsons were in bloom, to harden the fruit. And now the lame, the halt, and the aged of Slumberleigh, all with one consent, mounted on tottering ladders to pick their damsons, or that mysterious fruit, closely akin to the same, called "black Lamas ploums."
There were plum accidents, of course, in plenty. The Lord took Mrs. Eccles's own uncle from his half-filled basket to another world, for which, as a "tea and coffee totaller," he was no doubt well prepared. The too receptive organisms of unsuspecting infancy suffered in their turn. In short, it was a busy season for Mr. and Mrs. Alwynn.
Ruth had plenty of opportunities now for making her long-projected sketch of the ruined house of Arleigh, for the old woman who lived in the lodge close by, and had charge of the place, had "ricked" her back in a damson-tree, and Ruth often went to see her. She had been Ruth's nurse in her childhood, and having originally come from Slumberleigh, returned there when the Deyncourt children grew up, and lived happily ever after, with the very blind and entirely deaf old husband of her choice, in the gray stone lodge at Arleigh.
It was on her return from one of these almost daily visits that Mrs. Eccles pounced on Ruth as she passed her gate, and under pretence of inquiring after Mrs. Cotton, informed her that she herself was suffering in no slight degree. Ruth, who suddenly rememberedthat she had been remiss in "dropping in" on Mrs. Eccles of late, dropped in then and there to make up for past delinquencies.
"Is it rheumatism again?" she asked, as Mrs. Eccles seemed inclined to run off at once into a report of the goings on of Widow Jones's Sally.
"Not that, my dear, so much as a sinking," said Mrs. Eccles, passing her hand slowly over what seemed more like a rising than a depression in her ample figure. "But there! I've not been myself since the Lord took old Samiwell Price, and that's the truth."
Samuel Price was the relation who had entered into rest off a ladder, and Ruth looked duly serious.
"I have no doubt it upset you very much," she said.
"Well, miss," returned Mrs. Eccles, with dignity, "it's not as if I'd had my 'ealth before. I've had something wrong in the cistern" (Ruth wondered whether she meant system) "these many years. From a gell I suffered in my inside. But lor'! I was born to trouble, baptized in a bucket, and taken with collects at a week old. And how did you say Mrs. Cotton of the lodge might be, miss, as I hear is but poorly too?"
Ruth replied that she was better.
"She's no size to keep her in 'ealth," said Mrs. Eccles, "and so bent as she does grow, to be sure. Eh, dear, but it's a good thing to be tall. I always think little folks they're like them little watches, they've no room for their insides. And I wonder now"—Mrs. Eccles was coming to the point that had made her entrap Ruth on her way past—"I wonder now—"
Ruth did not help her. She knew too well the universal desire for knowledge of good and evil peculiar to her sex to doubt for a moment that Mrs. Eccles had begged her to "step in" only to obtain some piece of information, about which her curiosity had been aroused.
"I wonder, now, if Cotton at the lodge has heard anything of the poachers again this year, round Arleigh way?"
"Not that I know of," said Ruth, surprised at the simplicity of the question.
"Dear sakes! and to think of 'em at Vandon last night, and Mr. Dare and the keepers out all night after 'em."
Ruth was interested in spite of herself.
"And the doctor sent for in the middle of the night," continued Mrs. Eccles, covertly eying Ruth. "Poor young gentleman! For all his forrin ways, there's a many in Vandon as sets store by him."
"I don't think you need be uneasy about Mr. Dare," said Ruth, coldly, conscious that Mrs. Eccles was dying to see her change color. "If anything had happened to him Mr. Alwynn would have heard of it. And now," rising, "I must be going; and if I were you, Mrs. Eccles, I should not listen to all the gossip of the village."
"Me listen!" said Mrs. Eccles, much offended. "Me, as is too poorly so much as to put my foot out of the door! But, dear heart!" with her usual quickness of vision, "if there isn't Mr. Alwynn and Dr. Brown riding up the street now in Dr. Brown's gig! Well, I never! and Mr. Alwynn a-getting out, and a-talking as grave as can be to Dr. Brown. Poor Mr. Dare! Poor dear young gentleman!"
Ruth was conscious that she beat rather a hurried retreat from Mrs. Eccles's cottage, and that her voice was not quite so steady as usual when she asked the doctor if it were true that Mr. Dare had been hurt.
"All the village will have it that he is killed; but he is all right, I assure you, Miss Deyncourt," said the kind old doctor, so soothingly and reassuringly that Ruth grew pink with annoyance at the tone. "Not a scratch. He was out with his keepers last night, and they had a brush with poachers; and Martin, the head keeper was shot in the leg. Bled a good deal, so they sent for me; but no danger. I picked up your uncle here on his way to see him, and so I gave him a lift there and back. That is all, I assure you."
And Dr. Brown and Mrs. Eccles, straining over her geraniums, both came to the same conclusion, namely, that, as Mrs. Eccles elegantly expressed it, "Miss Ruth wanted Mr. Dare."
"And he'll have her, too, I'm thinking, one of these days," Mrs. Eccles would remark to the circle of her acquaintance.
Indeed, the match was discussed on numerous ladders, with almost as much interest as the unfailing theme of the damsons themselves.
And Dare rode over to the rectory as often as he used to do before a certain day in August, when he had found Ruth under the chestnut-tree—the very day before Mrs. Alwynn started on her screen, now the completed glory of the drawing-room.
And was Ruth beginning to like him?
As it had not occurred to her to ask herself that question, I suppose she wasnot.
Dare had grown very quiet and silent of late, and showed a growing tendency to dark hats. His refusal had been so unexpected that the blow, when it came, fell with all the more crushing force.His self-love and self-esteem had been wounded; but so had something else. Under the velvet corduroy waistcoat, which he wore in imitation of Ralph, he had a heart. Whether it was one of the very best of its kind or warranted to wear well is not for us to judge; but, at any rate, it was large enough to take in a very real affection, and to feel a very sharp pang. Dare's manner to Ruth was now as diffident as it had formerly been assured. To some minds there is nothing more touching than a sudden access of humility on the part of a vain man.
Whether Ruth's mind was one of this class or not we do not pretend to know.
It was Sunday morning at Atherstone. In the dining-room, breakfasting alone, for he had come down late, was Sir Charles Danvers. His sudden arrival on the previous Saturday was easily accounted for. When he had casually walked into the drawing-room late in the evening, he had immediately and thoroughly explained the reasons of his unexpected arrival. It seemed odd that he should have come to Atherstone, in the midland counties, "on his way" between two shooting visits in the north, but so it was. It might have been thought that one of his friends would have been willing to keep him two days longer, or receive him two days earlier; but no doubt every one knows his own affairs best, and Charles might certainly, "at his age," as he was so fond of saying, be expected to know his.
Anyhow, there he was, leaning against the open window, coffee-cup in hand, lazily watching the dwindling figures of Ralph and Evelyn, with Molly between them, disappearing in the direction of Greenacre church, hard by.
The morning mist still lingered on the land, and veiled the distance with a tender blue. And up across the silver fields, and across the standing armies of the yellowing corn, the sound of church bells came from Slumberleigh, beyond the river; bringing back to Charles, as to us all, old memories, old hopes, old visions of early youth, long cherished, long forgotten.
The single bell of Greenacre was giving forth a slow, persistent, cracked invitation to true believers, as an appropriate prelude to Mr. Smith's eloquence; but Charles did not hear its testimony.
He was listening to the Slumberleigh bells. Was that the first chime or the second?
Suddenly a thought crossed his mind. Should he go to church?
He smiled at the idea. It was a little late to think of that. Besides he had let the others start, and he disliked that refuge of mildew and dust, Greenacre.
There was Slumberleigh!
There went the bells again!
Slumberleigh! Absurd! Why, he should positively have to run to get there before the First Lesson; and that mist meant heat, or he was much mistaken.
Charles contemplated the mist for a few seconds.
Tang, teng, ting, tong, tung!
He certainly always made a point of going to church at his own home. A good example is, after all, just as important in one place as another.
Tang, tong, teng, tung,ting! went the bells.
"Why not run?" suggested an inner voice. "Put down your cup. There! Now! Your hat's in the hall, with your gloves beside it. Never mind about your prayer-book. Dear me! Don't waste time looking for your own stick. Take any. Quick! out through the garden-gate! No one can see you. The servants have all gone to church except the cook, and the kitchen looks out on the yew hedge."
"Over the first stile," said Charles to himself. "I am out of sight of the house now. Let us be thankful for small mercies. I shall do it yet. Oh, what a fool I am! I'm worse than Raca, as Molly said. I shall be rushing precipitately down a steep place into the sea next. Confound this gate! Why can't people leave them open? At any rate, it will remain open now. I am not going to have my devotions curtailed by a gate. I fancied it would be hot, but never anything half as hot as this. I hope I sha'n't meet Brown taking a morning stroll. I value Brown; but I should have to dismiss him if he saw me now. I could never meet his eye again. What on earth shall I say to Ralph and Evelyn when I get back? What a merciful Providence it is that Aunt Mary is at this moment intoning a response in the highest church in Scarborough!"
Ting, ting, ting!
"Mr. Alwynn is getting on his surplice, is he? Well, and if he is, I can make a final rush through the corn, can't I? There's not a creature in sight. The bell's down! What of that? There is the voluntary. Easy over the last fields. There are houses in sight, andthere may be wicked Sabbath-breakers looking out of windows. Brown's foal has grown since July. Here we are! I am not the only Christian hurrying among the tombs. I shall get in with 'the wicked man' after all."
Some people do not look round in church; others do. Mrs. Alwynn always did, partly because she wished to see what was going on behind her, and partly because, in turning back again, she could take a stealthy survey of Mrs. Thursby's bonnet, in which she always felt a burning interest, which she would not for worlds have allowed that lady to suspect.
If the turning round had been all, it would have mattered little; but Mrs. Alwynn suffered so intensely from keeping silence that she was obliged to relieve herself at intervals by short whispered comments to Ruth.
On this particular morning it seemed as if the comments would never end.
"I am so glad we asked Mr. Dare into our pew, Ruth. The Thursbys are full. That's Mrs. Thursby's sister in the red bonnet."
Ruth made no reply. She was following the responses in the psalms with a marked attention, purposely marked to check conversation, and sufficient to have daunted anybody but her aunt.
Mrs. Alwynn took a spasmodic interest in the psalm, but it did not last.
"Only two basses in the choir, and the newTe Deum, Ruth. How vexed Mr. Alwynn will be!"
No response from Ruth. Mrs. Alwynn took another turn at her prayer-book, and then at the congregation.
"'I am become as it were a monster unto—' Ruth!Ruth!"
Ruth at last turned her head a quarter of an inch.
"Sir Charles Danvers is sitting in the free seats by the font!"
Ruth nailed her eyes to her book, and would vouchsafe no further sign of attention during the rest of the service; and Dare, on the other side, anxious to copy Ruth in everything, being equally obdurate, Mrs. Alwynn had no resource left but to follow the service half aloud to herself, at the times when the congregation werenotsupposed to join in, putting great emphasis on certain words which she felt applicable to herself, in a manner that effectually prevented any one near her from attending to the service at all.
It was with a sudden pang that Dare, following Ruth out into the sunshine after service, perceived for the first time Charles, standing, tall and distinguished-looking, beside the rather insignificant heir ofall the Thursbys, who regarded him with the mixed admiration and gnawing envy of a very young man for a man no longer young.
And then—Charles never quite knew how it happened, but with the full intention of walking back to the rectory with the Alwynns, and staying to luncheon, he actually found himself in Ruth's very presence, accepting a cordial invitation to luncheon at Slumberleigh Hall. For the first time during the last ten years he had done a thing he had no intention of doing. A temporary long-lost feeling of shyness had seized upon him as he saw Ruth coming out, tall and pale and graceful, from the shadow of the church porch into the blaze of the mid-day sunshine. He had not calculated either for that sudden disconcerting leap of the heart as her eyes met his. He had an idiotic feeling that she must be aware that he had run most of the way to church, and that he had contemplated the burnished circles of her back hair for two hours, without a glance at the fashionably scraped-up head-dress of Mabel Thursby, with its hogged mane of little wire curls in the nape of the neck. He felt he still looked hot and dusty, though he had imagined he was quite cool the moment before. To his own astonishment, he actually found his self-possession leaving him; and though its desertion proved only momentary,inthat moment he found himself walking away with the Thursbys in the direction of the Hall. He was provoked, angry with himself, with the Thursbys, and, most of all, with Mr. Alwynn, who had come up a second later, and asked him to luncheon, as a matter of course, also Dare, who accepted with evident gratitude. Charles felt that he had not gone steeple-chasing over the country only to talk to Mrs. Thursby, and to see Ruth stroll away over the fields with Dare towards the rectory.
However, he made himself extremely agreeable, which was with him more a matter of habit than those who occasionally profited by it would have cared to know. He asked young Thursby his opinion on E.C. cartridges; he condoled with Mrs. Thursby on the loss of her last butler, and recounted some alarming anecdotes of his own French cook. He admired a pallid water-color drawing of Venice, in an enormous frame on an enormous easel, which he rightly supposed to be the manual labor of Mabel Thursby.
When he rose to take his leave, young Thursby, intensely flattered by having been asked for that opinion on cartridges by so renowned a shot as Charles, offered to walk part of the way back with him.
"I am afraid I am not going home yet," said Charles, lightly. "Duty points in the opposite direction, I have to call at therectory. I want Mr. Alwynn's opinion on a point of clerical etiquette, which is setting my young spiritual shepherd at Stoke Moreton against his principal sheep, namely, myself."
And Charles took his departure, leaving golden opinions behind him, and a determination to invite him once more to shoot, in spite of his many courteous refusals of the last few years.
Mrs. Alwynn always took a nap after luncheon in her smart Sunday gown, among the mustard-colored cushions of her high-art sofa. Mr. Alwynn, also, was apt at the same time to sink into a subdued, almost apologetic doze, in the old arm-chair which alone had resisted the march of discomfort, and so-called "taste," which had invaded the rest of the little drawing-room of Slumberleigh Rectory. Ruth was sitting with her dark head leaned against the open window-frame. Dare had not stayed after luncheon, being at times nervously afraid of giving her too much of his society; and she was at liberty to read over again, if she chose, the solitary letter which the Sunday post had brought her. But she did not do so; she was thinking.
And so her sister Anna was actually returning to England at last! She and her husband had taken a house in Rome, and had arranged that Ruth should join them in London in November, and go abroad with them after Christmas for the remainder of the winter. She had pleasant recollections of previous winters in Rome, or, on the Riviera with her grandmother, and she was surprised that she did not feel more interested in the prospect. She supposed she would like it when the time came, but she seemed to care very little about it at the present moment. It had become very natural to live at Slumberleigh, and although there were drawbacks—here she glanced involuntarily at her aunt, who was making her slumbers vocal by a running commentary on them through her nose—still she would be sorry to go. Mr. Alwynn gave the ghost of a miniature snore, and, opening his eyes, found Ruth bent affectionately upon him. Her mind went back to another point in Anna's letter. After dilating on the extreme admiration and regard entertained for herself by her husband, his readiness with shawls, etc., she went on to ask whether Ruth had heard any news of Raymond.
Ruth sighed. Would there ever be any news of Raymond? The old nurse at Arleigh always asked the same question. "Any news of Master Raymond?" It was with a tired ache of the heart that Ruth heard that question, and always gave the same answer. Once she had heard from him since Lady Deyncourt's death, after she had written to tell him, as gently as she could, that she and Anna hadinherited all their grandmother had to leave. A couple of months later she had received a hurried note in reply, inveighing against Lady Deyncourt's injustice, saying (as usual) that he was hard up for money, and that, when he knew where it might safely be sent, he should expect her and her sister to make up to him for his disappointment. And since then, since April—not a word. June, July, August, September. Four months and no sign. When he was in want of money his letters heretofore had made but little delay. Had he fallen ill and died out there, or met his death suddenly, perhaps in some wild adventure under an assumed name? Her lips tightened, and her white brows contracted over her absent eyes. It was an old anxiety, but none the less wearing because it was old. Ruth put it wearily from her, and took up the first book which came to her hand, to distract her attention.
It was a manual out of which Mrs. Alwynn had been reading extracts to her in the morning, while Ruth had been engaged in preparing herself to teach in the Sunday-school. She wondered vaguely how pleasure could be derived, even by the most religious persons, from seeing favorite texts twined in and out among forget-me-nots, or falling aslant in old English letters off bunches of violets; but she was old enough and wise enough to know that one man's religion is another man's occasion of stumbling. Books are made to fit all minds, and small minds lose themselves in large-minded books. The thousands in which these little manuals are sold, and the confidence with which their readers recommend them to others, indicates the calibre of the average mind, and shows that they meet a want possibly "not known before," but which they alone, with their little gilt edges, can adequately fill. Ruth was gazing in absent wonder at the volume which supplied all her aunt's spiritual needs when she heard the wire of the front door-bell squeak faintly. It was a stiff-necked and obdurate bell, which for several years Mr. Alwynn had determined to see about.
A few moments later James, the new and inexperienced footman, opened the door about half a foot, put in his head, murmured something inaudible, and withdrew it again.
A tall figure appeared in the door-way, and advanced to meet her, then stopped midway. Ruth rose hastily, and stood where she had risen, her eyes glancing first at Mr. and then at Mrs. Alwynn.
The alien presence of a visitor had not disturbed them. Mrs. Alwynn, her head well forward and a succession of chins undulating in perfect repose upon her chest, was sleeping as a stout person onlycan—all over. Mr. Alwynn, opposite, his thin hands clasped listlessly over his knee, was as unconscious of the two pairs of eyes fixed upon him as Nelson himself, laid out in Madame Tussaud's.
Charles's eyes, twinkling with suppressed amusement, met Ruth's. He shook his head energetically, as she made a slight movement as if to wake them, and stepping forward, pointed with his hat towards the open window, which reached to the ground. Ruth understood, but she hesitated. At this moment Mrs. Alwynn began a variation on the simple theme in which she had been indulging, and in so much higher a key that all hesitation vanished. She stepped hastily out through the window, and Charles followed. They stood together for a moment in the blazing sunshine, both too much amused to speak.
"You are bareheaded," he said, suddenly; "is there any"—looking round—"any shade we could take refuge under?"
Ruth led the way round the yew hedge to the horse-chestnut; that horse-chestnut under which Dare had once lost his self-esteem.