“Who the deuce told you my name—who, now?”
He could hardly stand still in his fear and excitement; but kept pulling at the handle of the door in a nervous effort to turn it.
“Who told you?” he said. “Curse it! Can’t some one help me?”
“Go steady at it,” came Sir David’s voice. “We’re not tryin’ to overreach you, sir. ’Twas a friend—common to both of us, I understand—Mr. Tuke, who saw you in the coach at Egham.”
“Tuke—Tuke! I don’t know any one of the name. Here—give me a hand, will you?”
He plunged into the vehicle, and the door snapped on him. The listener retreated softly into the rearward shadows. He had forgotten that this undesirable acquaintance was amongst the passengers; and it was some amelioration of the tragedy to hear that he had been stripped clean. He waited silent while the chaise kept its place—which it did only a few minutes before the nobleman’s peevish voice sounded, cursing the postillions to a move.
Then he went to the help of the coach-driver; and, later, cantered out the rest of his journey in the tail of that gingerbread conveyance, that was become a mere hearse of death and sorrow.
“Ah!” he thought—“how, in all her after-days, will she love the memory of that chin-chuck, poor soul.”
“I haveno knowledge,” said Creel—“I have no knowledge whatever, Mr. Tuke, of this ‘Lake of Wine.’ Very probably it was as you suggest. I was acquainted with the man’s character by report, of course, and judge it infinitely likely that he would have been the principal in a fraud so masterly ingenious. But that goes for nothing.”
“Very well, sir. Then, by your permission, we will come to the matter which is of a greater private importance to me. Surely you cannot justify to yourself the fact of withholding evidence of my father’s integrity from my father’s son?”
“And surelyyouare hasty. Did I express such an intention. On the contrary, I am ready, at this date, to inform you of all the details I am in possession of as to Sir Robert’s bequest.”
“And why not earlier? May I not ask it?”
“Because, my ardent young sir, the time was not ripe. Because, having regard to the circumstances under which we first became intimate, I apprehended a distinct refusal on your part to accept of an advantage so strangely come by.”
“There is nothing shameful in the story?”
“Fie, sir, fie! Is this your tender concern for my old and honoured friend and patron? Be there shame, ’tis none of his.”
“Possibly of mine, you would say. Mr. Creel, I have grown very humble of late months.”
“Save us, save us!—Yet, I would not quench, but only control that fervid spirit. Go to! you shall have the history word for word as your father wrote it; and as such left it to my full discretion to acquaint you of or not. No doubt you have suffered and learnt since we last met, and are now in a state to appreciate the moral no less than the material value of your inheritance.”
He rose as he spoke, sparse and bent-backed and bowelless—like the figure 9, symbolic of the nine points of the law.
The other watched him with some amusement and a good deal of impatience, as he shuffled to a now familiar deed-box, unlocked it, and took thence a bundle of papers. These he brought to the table, sat himself down again, and selected two from the heap, as dryly deliberate as a monkey turning over a biscuit.
Presently he looked up, document in hand.
“This,” he said, “the full and true account of the late Sir Robert’s presentation to the property of ‘Delsrop,’ in the county of Hants, was writ down by him in this my office, and read over to me, and by me attested for its truth, inasmuch as I was nominated to act for both parties in the disposition of the estate. Albeit, Mr. Tuke, you must understand the testator was known to me hitherto but by report, the which would hardly have induced me to do his service but for the direction of his bequest—and that, without doubt, was his object in applying to me.”
“With favour, sir,” said Mr. Creel’s client; “and with all deference to the discriminatory acumen of the profession—might not this preface serve better as an epilogue?”
The attorney winced in his breath, looked over his spectacles which he had been slowly adjusting, and broke suddenly into a leathery smile.
“Sir,” said he, “the law stands so much in dead men’s shoes that, perhaps, itself hath lost the sensation to be ‘quick.’ But here’s for you, without more ado.”
And so he began his reading:—
“Rethe Estate of ‘Delsrop’ and in the matter of Sir Robert Linne, Bart.“In the winter of ’78, when I was home in England on furlough, being sick of a disordered spleen, I was crossing Bagshot Heath one night when I was stopped by a one-eyed gentleman of the road, who was set to coerce me with the usual menaces and braggadocio. But, looking in his face without fear—for it was a brilliant moonlit night and his features clear as print—I noticed them drawn and anguished in a manner beyond words, so that he seemed rather a ghost or boggle of my distemper, which gave me some concern. But quickly recovering myself: ‘My honest gentleman,’ says I, ‘meseems you are more in need of stand for yourself than me.’ Which hearing, he gave out a great groan, and so straightway dropped the muzzle of his pistol.“‘Can you read it so plain?’ says he. ‘Then I tell you I am in hell, and it were a merciful thing to slay me here and now’—and with that he rends his vest, and ‘shoot,’ says he, ‘and end it!’“Now I got talking to my man, and, to make a short story of it, found him to be a noted heath-cock, one Cutwater”—(Aye, sir—there you have him!)—“as he was called, who had drawn a free living from the road, but was now smitten of a morbid disease of the kidneys and like to die. However, in a clean retirement had he lived for a year—or perhaps two or more—till his disorder came like to madden him; when, with the hope to borrow surcease of agony from the distraction of his ancient calling, he made post to Bagshot and rode out on the heath.“Well, I took him back to my inn, and made him up a drug of my knowledge, and kept him by me for a day or two, thinking to mend the poor sinner before I set upon the Lord’s work with him. And he made a surprising recovery, and was ready to kiss my very feet out of his gratitude. But, so it happened, a summons coming to me from his Majesty’s Court at Windsor, I was to leave him perforce; and presently—my own complaint mending—forth I passed to the war again and from all thought of Master Cutwater.“And now, as worthy Mr. Creel will attest—which has conducted the business, and is my friend and an attorney (and this our same fellow of the road had discovered, it seems)—not three weeks ago, I being again in London this summer of the year ’79, was waited upon by him, and to my astonishment handed over the title deeds of an estate which I had never so much as heard named, being ‘Delsrop’ House in the County of Hants.“For thus it appeared my highwayman had died after all—yet not of his complaint but in some ruffianmêlée—having first, however, in gratitude at my service to him willed me this property, which I cannot but regard with perplexity as the wages of sin, inasmuch as it appeareth the reward designed,in totidem verbis, for prolonging of a rascal’s life.“But so am I resolved that by no means and on no condition will I soil my hands with its possession; for whether come by honestly or in fraud, it is and must be a mansion of the wicked. I take no concern for it, nor have I troubled to visit it, nor yet considered by what manner of agreement I am to dispose of the incubus.“Only this I set down here and now, in the presence of Mr. Creel, who will attest it, that, should occasion of dispute arise, it may be accepted a true and honourable statement of the matter, and that whether or no it passeth the understanding of the incredulous. And, moreover, I do solemnly asseverate that, whether the man Cutwater held the estate in fee-simple, justly and of his own right, or whether he held it the fruits of his ill-doing, or again whether, indeed, it represent the entire or but a portion of his property, I know not nor seek to know. For he was a rogue undoubted, of whose politic methods no Christian gentleman could deign to consider on equal terms.”
“Rethe Estate of ‘Delsrop’ and in the matter of Sir Robert Linne, Bart.
“In the winter of ’78, when I was home in England on furlough, being sick of a disordered spleen, I was crossing Bagshot Heath one night when I was stopped by a one-eyed gentleman of the road, who was set to coerce me with the usual menaces and braggadocio. But, looking in his face without fear—for it was a brilliant moonlit night and his features clear as print—I noticed them drawn and anguished in a manner beyond words, so that he seemed rather a ghost or boggle of my distemper, which gave me some concern. But quickly recovering myself: ‘My honest gentleman,’ says I, ‘meseems you are more in need of stand for yourself than me.’ Which hearing, he gave out a great groan, and so straightway dropped the muzzle of his pistol.
“‘Can you read it so plain?’ says he. ‘Then I tell you I am in hell, and it were a merciful thing to slay me here and now’—and with that he rends his vest, and ‘shoot,’ says he, ‘and end it!’
“Now I got talking to my man, and, to make a short story of it, found him to be a noted heath-cock, one Cutwater”—(Aye, sir—there you have him!)—“as he was called, who had drawn a free living from the road, but was now smitten of a morbid disease of the kidneys and like to die. However, in a clean retirement had he lived for a year—or perhaps two or more—till his disorder came like to madden him; when, with the hope to borrow surcease of agony from the distraction of his ancient calling, he made post to Bagshot and rode out on the heath.
“Well, I took him back to my inn, and made him up a drug of my knowledge, and kept him by me for a day or two, thinking to mend the poor sinner before I set upon the Lord’s work with him. And he made a surprising recovery, and was ready to kiss my very feet out of his gratitude. But, so it happened, a summons coming to me from his Majesty’s Court at Windsor, I was to leave him perforce; and presently—my own complaint mending—forth I passed to the war again and from all thought of Master Cutwater.
“And now, as worthy Mr. Creel will attest—which has conducted the business, and is my friend and an attorney (and this our same fellow of the road had discovered, it seems)—not three weeks ago, I being again in London this summer of the year ’79, was waited upon by him, and to my astonishment handed over the title deeds of an estate which I had never so much as heard named, being ‘Delsrop’ House in the County of Hants.
“For thus it appeared my highwayman had died after all—yet not of his complaint but in some ruffianmêlée—having first, however, in gratitude at my service to him willed me this property, which I cannot but regard with perplexity as the wages of sin, inasmuch as it appeareth the reward designed,in totidem verbis, for prolonging of a rascal’s life.
“But so am I resolved that by no means and on no condition will I soil my hands with its possession; for whether come by honestly or in fraud, it is and must be a mansion of the wicked. I take no concern for it, nor have I troubled to visit it, nor yet considered by what manner of agreement I am to dispose of the incubus.
“Only this I set down here and now, in the presence of Mr. Creel, who will attest it, that, should occasion of dispute arise, it may be accepted a true and honourable statement of the matter, and that whether or no it passeth the understanding of the incredulous. And, moreover, I do solemnly asseverate that, whether the man Cutwater held the estate in fee-simple, justly and of his own right, or whether he held it the fruits of his ill-doing, or again whether, indeed, it represent the entire or but a portion of his property, I know not nor seek to know. For he was a rogue undoubted, of whose politic methods no Christian gentleman could deign to consider on equal terms.”
“Now,” said the lawyer, when he had come to an end of the narrative, “you are in possession of the facts as related and witnessed. For you must know the testator discovered your father’s friendship to me, and visited me here and begged me to act for him in the matter. And this, under the circumstances, I agreed to do, having regard to my reputation in the respect that the transaction should be——”
“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Tuke a little irritably. His face had fallen grave and full of trouble. “I understand—I understand completely. And is that all?”
“No, sir—it is not all.” (He was secretly attentive of his client.) “There is a later document, from which it appears that Sir Robert abated, for any reasons of his own, the rigour of his resolve respecting this strange inheritance. For, by deed executed” (he had taken up and was referring to, and partly reading from, another paper) “the eleventh of October, 1779, he makes over the estate of ‘Delsrop’ to one Barnabas Creel—in trust, that is, and under certain conditions—said Barnabas Creel to have and enjoy said property without dispute, and until his benefactor’s son shall attain his majority (the which event is to happen, if he live, in the year 1790), and thereafter for all time, provided Sir Robert the junior comes not to bankruptcy of his affairs and threatened indigence. But in the latter event, if it happen any time between said son’s majority and his fortieth year—by which period of his life a man should be established whether for good or evil—the estate is to devolve upon said son, that he may take his profit of a cut-purse’s legacy (which is yet good enough for a gambler or rakehell) to reform his ways and live cleanly thenceforth; but on the sole condition that he foreswear his title—the which hath ever stood foremost in honour—and take the name of Tuke. For this name was borne by an honest woman, that shall shame her son to do it no discredit under his new conditions of fortune.”
As he here ended, the lawyer precisely refolded the papers, tied all together, put the packet aside, and crossing his hands over his crossed knees, waited for the other to speak.
A silence of some minutes succeeded. Then said the distitled legatee, rousing himself with a sigh:
“I thank you, Mr. Creel, for your kindly discernment in hitherto withholding from me this intelligence. I confess it comes bitter to me. I rejoice in that re-assurance of my father’s integrity—which my heart, in truth, little misdoubted—but I confess the nature of this revelation a little overcomes me. ’Tis a bone to a dog, in all sovereign contempt.”
“Nay, Sir Robert, Sir Robert. ’Tis the anxious medicine to a soul wounded of its own rashness.”
“Well, sir, well. Pride may follow a fall, I find. Yet, if I may question the methods of a virtuous man, I could discover a flaw in my father’s particular morality. For the Crown, by all custom, is entitled to the reversion of an outlaw’s estates.”
“No doubt,” answered Creel, with a little dry snigger, “that is strictly so. The man’s possessions were forfeit of right to the Crown, it being his good fortune only that he passed unhung of the law that he had defied. But—his guilt being conjectural, and not, as it were, brought home to him—your father, in one of those Canterbury-gallops of conscience wherewith honest souls sometimes over-ride our fears for their guilelessness, would consider it no duty of his to forego the estate quixotically, and for a supposition of which the law had failed to take cognizance. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I will not throw the first stone at him whose immunity is my profit. And, as to the estate, I can apply it—saving the grace of his majesty, whose means are not restricted—to some worthy purpose which was doubtless forecast by the Providence that hath conducted the matter so far.’ And in this he was firm—not to outlaw the dead man, though he took no personal advantage of his bequest. ‘For,’ he declared, ‘he meant well by me, when all is said and done.’”
Mr. Tuke rose, and the attorney with him.
“I suppose,” said the former, rather sadly, “that no man may profit by repentance so far as to lay the ghost of his past. ’Tis the privilege of the virtuous to hunt down reformed sinners with the spectre-hounds of their own dead passions. I have sought honestly to redeem my name, and to do my best with the new life offered me. Yet, should I have accepted the trust, had I known in what spirit its reversion to me was conceived?”
“I hope so,” said the other; “for love, under all the show of rigour, prompted the bequest.”
He spoke with some deprecation. Perhaps, in his heart, was a little protesting sympathy with his young friend’s point of view.
“Well, sir,” answered the latter, “I will e’en take your word for it—for that it is the word of as generous and self-sacrificing a soul as ever stood between a saint and a scamp.”
And with that they shook hands warmly and parted, Mr. Tuke going back to his lodgings in the “Adelphi,” where he had put up to be near his friends, who lay at the “Golden Cross” hard by.
Thus, at length, was Sir Robert the younger informed of the history of his inheritance. Thus, also, was it an aggravation of that wounding recital that, to all appearance, he might have earlier induced Mr. Creel to it—at a period when he himself was less bound to the conduct of a responsibility which he now knew he had undertaken upon terms that seemed to him unnecessarily humiliating, and which he could not but think he would surely otherwise have declined. For, if any love had dictated the gift—the new chance to a repentant prodigal—it was harder than Roman in its expression.
So he thought, smarting under the lash of his father’s prejudgment; and it was only by and by, in one of those elastic rebounds that were characteristic of the man and constitutional, that he came to consider that itwasa prejudgment, and that, had his father lived to see it verified, he might have modified at least the asperity of his language.
This was little comfort; but it was some.
At first he had had a wild temptation to reject, at the eleventh hour, a gift which only his ignorance had accepted. It passed, however, in the reflection that, whatever the pre-history of “Delsrop” (with which he had no concern), the property was indubitably his at the present moment to do with as he chose; that he had already incurred, in his management of it, responsibilities that he could not with honour repudiate; and that the manliness to assert himself in the world should be altogether independent of adventitious moral support.
Still, he was something depressed and unhappy; and was become, perhaps, an essentially graver man than he had been before his interview with the lawyer.
This interview had taken place on the day after his arrival in London. On his way to it, he had left a message at the “Golden Cross,” conveying his respects and his hopes that the travellers had rested well. But the travellers themselves he had no intention to intrude himself on, until convinced, if possible, that the nature of his inheritance offered no bar to his suit with Miss Royston.
Satisfied on this point, he had desired and obtained Mr. Creel’s consent to his using his new knowledge, if necessary, for the furtherance of his addresses—but to how great a degree must be left to his own discretion.
This matter he pondered on his way home; and, pondering it, he must acknowledge to himself that his position with the lady was scarcely improved on; for, whatever its extenuation, the fact of the case remained that he was a distitled beneficiary, whose tenure of his property must be held to rather justify the contempt that secured it to him.
So circumstanced, it was a relief to him, upon calling at the “Golden Cross,” in the dusk of the afternoon, to find that his fellow-travellers were gone visiting. But Sir David had left a message that they were to be at the Haymarket Theatre in the evening, to witness a performance of a new musical piece—in which the celebrated Mr. Fawcett was to appear in a popular part; together with the beautiful Miss De Camp, and Mrs. Mountain of Vauxhall Gardens fame—and that he hoped Mr. Tuke would make it his pleasure to join their party.
Mr. Tukewouldmake it his pleasure—or his duty. He felt that possibly the somewhat dramatic character of the explanation he was bidden to, would find its appropriate background more in “wings” and “flats” than in the walls of a drabby inn-parlour; that hautboys and fiddles—if he could seized an opportunity to speak out under cover of their harmonious gossip—might play a fitter accompaniment to the tale of his raptures than would the clank of dishes and bawling of ubiquitous waiters.
As to that risk he must run of recognition by old associates—why, he momently invited such acontretemps; and he could really not bother his head with idle speculations as to what he should do in so likely an eventuality. Truly, the main condition under which he held his estate made no provision for such accidents, and his sole concern was, not to escape identification, but to save himself the worry of beingquestionedas to the why and wherefore. Moreover, it must be confessed, he would claim a little malicious pleasure in denying Miss Angela that knowledge of his real position which would serve as a better argument to her favour, he shrewdly suspected, than any personal merit of his could advance; and he was resolved, if possible, to be taken—if taken he should be—for himself alone.
Therefore, with the determination to that very evening put his fortunes to the proof, he addressed himself to his careful toilet, dined daintily and deliberately, at the “Bedford” Coffee-house in Covent Garden, off “a little lobster, an apricot-puff or so, and some burnt champagne,” and in due time summoned a coach and was driven to the theatre.
In the vestibule he was treated to a brief scene of temper that was like alever de rideauto usher in the serious business of the evening. An arrogant-looking lady of a very vain and truculent expression of countenance, accompanied by a youth some eleven or twelve years of age, had entered the theatre at the same time as himself. This boy, a plump-faced, kimbo-eyed youngster, with well-oiled chestnut curls and a pugnacious mouth, limped slightly as he walked a little in advance of his companion.
“Tread over, Geordie!” said the latter peevishly, and in a pretty loud voice.
The boy took no notice; but he flushed up, for there was other company present. Thereupon the lady called louder, as if to advertise her authority over him:
“I’ll bid ye listen, ye vicious brat! Tread ye over, as Mr. Lavender directs.”
Now the boy turned round, with a scarlet face; and cried he—and we must not hold him excused: “D—n Mr. Lavender for a hav’rel quack!”
At that the lady came after him in a fury; and immediately he flung up his hand, with a lorgnette in it, and says he: “If ye touch me, I’ll hwhang this on to the floor!”
“Fie, young gentleman!” said Mr. Tuke, who was standing near. “Is that your challenge to a lady?”
He got no profit of his question, however; for, while the boy only stared at him with an angry scowl, the dame spoke up with a fine contempt of his interference.
“We’re beholden to ye, sir,” said she. “But the Lord Byron will have his schooling in manners from better than a pouther’d fribble”—and, catching at the boy’s arm, the two passed on together, making common cause against the enemy.
That person laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and went in search of his friends.
There were many empty boxes round the middle tier, and some with liveried fellows sitting back in them to keep the seats against their masters’ coming. Once and again a man of them, his attention caught by some new arrival, would incautiously project his head, with the result that a storm of nuts and orange-peel, flying from the gallery, would send it jerking in again, to the huge merriment of the house. Amongst these “retainers” was one who wore the Dunlone livery of blue and silver. Mr. Tuke recognized it from where he stood, and a sudden thought, half-comical, twitched at his risibilities.
“What,” he mused, “if Dunlone is baiting a little trap? He will hardly wantmeto walk into it.”
The fiddles had squeaked and the curtain gone up while he waited; and at this moment he saw the very party he was in search of enter my lord’s box in company with that gentleman.
Miss Royston came to the front, sparkling and radiant as a post-prandial Hebe. She glanced round the house (it was a tribute to her attractiveness that the self-important boy-lord who sat opposite forgot the play a minute while he plied her with his lorgnette); caught sight of Mr. Tuke, and, treating that gentleman to a little cold bow, turned and addressed her witchery to the nobleman behind her, who was taking his seat with an insolence of clatter and chatter that greatly disturbed the audience.
Not in the least desiring, under the circumstances, to obtrude himself on her further notice—and that for many reasons—Tuke retired into the background and gave his most suave attention to the play. Of this he was afterwards conscious of having a very hazy recollection; and only its title, “What a Blunder!” seemed to stick in his memory from a certain impression it had conveyed of appropriateness with his own condition of mind. The scene had lain in Valencia—he remembered that, as also the presence thereon of a dashing English officer, whose completemuftiof white satin tights, trunk hose slashed with purple, spencer of violet velvet, diamond shoe-buckles, and a grey brigand’s hat with three enormous ostrich plumes in it, had presented such acoup de théâtreas ought to have fully compensated him for the wasteful hour, he might have been otherwise inclined to think, he had spent in the house.
Somewhat in a dream, he heard the glorious Miss De Camp expound her melodious grievances to a baneful chorus of banditti, and withdraw into a cavern, the hostage of their mostbasso-profundocupidity. He was, indeed, forming his plans the while; and when the curtain fell on the first act, he made his way determinedly to a certain box—the prominent occupants of which had had, for the last half-hour, his particular attention—fully resolved to end one way or the other his period of suspense.
He tapped on the baize door, and was bidden gruffly by the nobleman to enter—which he did. My lord and Sir David were risen at the moment—the former to fetch a bag of oranges out of his laced surtout—and the baronet came at his friend with a genial greeting and his finest London manner.
“Where have you been?” quoth he. “My Lord Dunlone would insist to honour us with his invitation, or I would have acquainted you of our number, Tuke.”
“Tuke!” exclaimed the viscount. He stood staring, with his hand in the pocket.
“At your service, sir,” said the other gravely.
Miss Angela was turned, her face observant and a little flushed.
“My name,” said Mr. Tuke quickly, seeing the cub’s perplexity, “can be a matter of little importance in your lordship’s recollection. But we have been known to one another in the past, as you will doubtless remember.”
“Oh! very well, sir. ’Tis no concern of mine, as you observe,” said the lord; “and it is not every title that is worth the preserving. We came to a settlement at our last meeting, I believe, and I owe you small thanks for the terms of it; but I’m cursed if I knew the sale of your good name was included in the bargain.”
“Nor was it,” said Mr. Tuke.
He took no offence at the other’s insolence; but was quite urbane and good-humoured in the teeth of it. He even gave the nobleman an ironical bow, as, withdrawing his hand empty from the pocket, that fine creature seized Sir David’s arm, and walked the astounded little man out of the box.
No sooner were they vanished, than the intruder addressed himself to Miss Royston with the most perfect calmness and respect.
“I return,” said he, “to ‘Delsrop’ to-morrow.”
She vouchsafed him a lifted eyebrow of surprise.
“So soon?” said she. “Then your business is concluded—or postponed?”
“It is concluded.”
“To your satisfaction, I trust?”
“Assuredly. I am satisfied I came on a fool’s errand.”
“Indeed?”
She trifled with her fan. Suddenly she leaned back in the shadow of the curtains and looked up at him.
“Mr. Tuke,” she said—“were you ever my lord’s tailor?”
He could only stare his astonishment.
“Or his tool or his creature in any way?” she said, gathering vehemence with speech. “Oh, sir! why should you wonder? And whither were his innuendoes directed, and what the reason that he disavowed your claim of friendship?”
“Surely he did not!”
“Not—not? And you pass under an assumed name. Will you deny it?”
“No, madam.”
She gave a great sigh, and turned her attention to the orchestra, that was beginning to tune up for the second act.
“You will have a cold journey,” she said. “Good-bye!”
He echoed her adieu with a composed gallantry, and stepped from the box, a man of ice. Humming (horribly out of tune, it must be said) a fragment of some late-heard melody, he lounged through his tier of the auditorium, and even paused, before leaving the house, at a point whence he could obtain a comprehensive view of the assembly. Here, glancing down into the pit, his gaze was instantly riveted upon the figure of a man that sat, lolling in an ungainly manner, against the wooden partition that enclosed the orchestra.
“Now, by Heaven,” muttered the observer, “if you are not my old friend of the fishing-rod, there is no virtue in the name of Brander!”
As he thus spoke under his breath, the man below, moved by that telepathic force that is called sympathy, looked up, and catching the other’s eye, started violently, and immediately shifted his position so as to present nothing but a back of rusty broadcloth to the inquisition of the boxes.
“And so my suspicion is confirmed,” thought Tuke; and made his way to the vestibule.
Walking on the stilts, so as to speak, of a sort of incensed exaltation, he issued from the theatre to find a wet sleet falling. The loaded flakes hissed in the torches of the link boys; the whole pavement resounded with the clink of pattens.
“And here is the appropriate wet blanket,” muttered our friend, “to the bed of my own making. I will e’en back to broiled bones and a noggin of punch by the fire.”
Thereis a curious anomaly about the way in which a self-confidence, impervious to the stabs of ill-fortune, may be paralyzed in a moment by the little prick of a snub irresponsible. Now, I would not go so far as to say that thesang-froidshown by Mr. Tuke over his virtual dismissal by Miss Royston represented the real state of his feelings; or that he did not find his appetite for a certain fruit stimulated by his disappointment of it. But, without doubt, the sting that most rankled for the moment in his vanity was that tart little rebuke administered to him by the aristocratic carline in the theatre-lobby. It was absurd, it was inexplicable—but so it was. His sense of injury in the greater matter was quite overcrowded by his feeling of humiliation in the lesser. That was a little snake, but it swallowed all the rest—so elastic is a proud stomach.
Perhaps it was all very beneficial to him. No doubt it was too much his way toaffecta good-humoured tolerance of destiny; to repudiate responsibility, in speech or act, on the strength of a certain genial creed of fatality that assumed itself independent of the laws of obligation. To have that much of the vagabond in one, that one moves serenely indifferent to conventional restrictions, is excellent; but to insist upon one’s vagabondage is to be a didactic vagabond; and that is intolerable. For it is to assume that orthodox folk must accept vagabondage as the superior condition, which, being orthodox, they cannot.
Therefore it was that, upon the morning following his visit to the theatre, our gentleman started—as he had obstinately resolved he would do—upon his homeward journey, quite truculent with a sense of grievance.
There was little in the prospect about him that served to otherwise than confirm his depression. Winter, it was evident, was asserting itself with a despotic and merciless rigour that was deaf to all considerations of humanity. The sleet of the previous night had frozen into and made long icy crevasses of the road-ruts; the throat of the wind was hoarse with cold; the grey of utter lifelessness stretched from earth to sky—a grey that no fury of the stiff blast could rend or discompose.
Each hour linked itself to the next with a bolt of iron as, his teeth set to the driving chill, he urged his long way forward. The road clanked under him; the scarlet nostrils of his straining horse palpitated like blown coals against a background of ashes. He did not much care to think of anything but his own miserable discomfort; and in that he took some hard satisfaction, as if by enduring it he were shaming the callous soul who had bidden him away from his cosy fireside in the “Adelphi.”
It was at this climax of his meditations that humour and hunger ventured upon a little roguish assault on his epigastrium. Had the attack failed, he had been other than the man of this history. It did not, by any means. He sighed, drew himself up, twinkled over the collapse of his pondered heroics, broke into a laugh, half-vexed, half-jocund, and fairly plunged into that illuminating thought of the æsthetic value of appetite to a free man.
“For I am free!” he cried to the winds—“and responsible in all the world to nobody but myself!”
At the very next wayside inn he dismounted and called boisterously for food. Munching this, with a confident digestion, by a jolly fire, and delighting in every purple bead ofClos Vougeotthat swam to his glass rim, he would give his fancies, as the freeborn children of a Bohemian, rein to run as they listed, and would even humour them to the top bent of his inclination. Well, their order—or absence of it—might be this: Position and respectability; a park, a carriage-road, trim servants, nice-mannered children; a stake in the county and a sober reputation to prop it; an admirable cold wife, in whom an innate artificiality should be tuned to the musical pitch of sentiment; on every side a thickset hedge of formality and restriction, where-through one decent passage alone should be pierced—the stone-flagged way to the tremendously enduring family vault;—and at the last, the precise misrepresentation of a ruled epitaph. Good! And now from the olive to the wine: Life—the life that he understood and could rejoice in—away from the flint road and spurring on to the downs; the life of heath and water and wood, of the blown blue sky and the whirled pollen of flowers; of light and gloom, risk and effort and reward; of the great breath of change and freedom, and—ah! yes: of the sympathizing soft heart to be always waiting him at the blossoming corner; the spirit to often share with him the wanderings and the marvels, and to pull him down into the sweet-smelling brake at shut of eve, and so for both to make a common cause of dreams.
Which was the happier picture? And yet a very fragrant perfume would cling about the presentment of that white gentle-born Angela; and sometimes even now it would appear a profanation to him to hold her cheaply in his thoughts.
He would not. If a certain shame-faced exultation over his latest emancipation would stir oddly in him from time to time, he would not so far abuse the trust his own heart had placed in a recent sentiment as to set up a new idol in the niche of a fallen image. Angela might be deposed; but—for the present at least—no other should usurp her throne.
Momentarily firm in this respect, and secure in his own geniality from the carping criticisms of conscience, he turned from all tender retrospections, and lazily, as he sat, reviewed a little company of late incidents. From yesterday with its snubs and its petty hurts, to the melancholy and monotonous flight of this morning—even that now had its accents to be indulgently recalled. His thoughts went back along the wintry road he had traversed, and dwelt comically upon the figure of an old oddity he had seen peering down upon him from a leaf-ruined gazebo—an oddity, the personification of much inquisitiveness, that was muffled in many capes and that held a great blue umbrella between its old head and the blast. He remembered how a half-dozen snow-buntings had fled over a hedge-row as he went by; how down a certain swoop of meadow-land a flock of screaming gulls had dived; how, where in a roadside churchyard a sexton was toiling at a grave, the titlarks had bobbed and curtsied on the newly-turned mould, desperate in their freezing hunger;—and from all this he augured that such a winter was threatening as would make the country no desirable place to live in for some months to come.
Still, he was not sorry he was returning to it. In his new lust for freedom a veritable loathing for the gilded fetters of town-life was a first condition, and he would have no knowledge of passions that could only take breath in a vitiated atmosphere. If he must sin, he would sin in the woods; and of his wavering human soul “let the forest judge.”
It had been a desolate road he came by—black and gloomy with frost, and enlivened by but few passing vehicles. One of these—a post-chaise—there had been, going on monotonously before him at a distance ahead. Its steady progression (he could not tell why) annoyed and worried him. It was always there, a yellow blot in the perspective of highway; whipping down and up the hollows, swinging rhythmically in its straps, endlessly speeding on and holding him, as it were, in its wake. Once or twice he had been moved to cut past and outrun it; but the bitter push of wind in his front and an apathy bred of cold would dissuade him from the effort, and in the end he would always find himself jogging sombrely along in its rear. It was a satisfaction to him, as he came within sight of the inn at which he was to dismount, to see this persistent vehicle, its occupants and cattle refreshed, moving off on its further journey; for so, he comforted himself, he should resume his own way by and by unvexed of that aggravating accompaniment. This was all childish, of course; but so it was that it was always his habit to be impatient of anything that embarrassed his free forward outlook; and to be kept walking behind a pedestrian in the street he would regard as almost a personal affront.
However, for the rest of his day’s journey he had the road virtually to himself; and by sundown he had completed his forty-fifth mile, and was clanking into the High Street of Basingstoke.
At the “White Horse” in this town he woke on the following morning, with a sense of constriction at his heart, to find the water in his ewer a sheet of ice, and that smell of cold soot, that seems the prevailing atmosphere of hard winters, to proceed from everything about him.
His room looked upon the stable-yard, and glancing thereinto while in process of dressing, he broke into an oath at sight of a yellow chaise that stood below with horses attached, over one of which a red-nosed post-boy sprawled expectant, awaiting his fare.
“Now, by the lord!” he muttered—“if my Nemesis has not lain with me at mine own inn!”
He was scowlingly speculating as to the possibility of his having to tail a second day in the wake of this rumbling jaundice, when he uttered a startled exclamation and, drawing into the covert of the window curtains, stood peering down into the yard.
For the hirer of the chaise—to whom early rising would appear to be a right condition of posting—was at that moment issued from the inn, and was mounting, without any affectation of leisure, the step of the vehicle.
Mr. Tuke, thinking of that presentation to his view, two nights before, of a lank, long back in the pit of the theatre, came hurriedly from his hiding-place; and at that instant, the traveller turned and flashed an upward glance at the window. With the very movement, he gave a hoarse order to the post-boy, wrenched open the door of the carriage, plunged in, and, before peeping Tom could gather his perceptions, the chaise was rolling and clattering out of the yard.
So—ho! there was business afoot! Where hitherto was all avoidance and reluctance, now must be haste and scurry and pursuit. The squalid rogue Brander posting it like a lord! Surely there must be some momentous reason for the outlay.
The gentleman at this point, wild with eagerness and impatience, stood below presently on the yard-steps to bolt a mouthful of meat and bread while his horse was saddling. Ten minutes later he was off and set to the chase, pounding it along at what rate he durst on the icy roads.
“If they are pointed for Andover, well and good,” he murmured. “Do they take cross-tracks for the ‘Dog and Duck,’ I shall know what to apprehend.”
With the thought, he swerved from the main-road into the first of the homeward by-ways; cantered down a mile of close-set lanes; turned a corner leading to a stretch of open downs, and—there, going one before him, small in the distance, was the vehicle he pursued.
To overtake and constitute himself its rear-guard—such must be his object. An easily attained one, it would appear; but his horse was scarcely fresh, and a slip on those glassy ruts might ruin all.
He settled himself doggedly to the chase. Such veritably it became; for soon it was evident that the quarry knew itself to be pursued, and tactically wished to allure him on to a destructive speed. But, little by little the horseman gained on the other. He got near enough to mark Brander’s head thrust intermittently from the window—by and by to hear faintly the rascal’s voice cursing on his leaping postillion. Suddenly the leading party took an unexpected way, brought out on the high-road leading from Winchester to Stockbridge, and went careering for the latter place at a gallop.
“Ha!” cried Tuke to himself, “that double won’t draw me from the scent, my friend!”
It was all give-and-take country they raced by—desolate downland that dropped and rose like a flying sparrow. Over it the pace became terrific. The post-boy lashed his horses till they foamed; the rider galled the sides of his poor straining beast. Something, it was obvious, must happen shortly—to whom was the single question.
The pursuer was to triumph. At the crest of that very slope that led up to the high gallows-tree, the ridden post-horse shied at a dangling chain, threw his mount, brought his fellow to his knees—and in a moment carriage and cattle were a plunging tangle of confusion.
With a shout of jubilation, Tuke spurred up the hill and rode upon his enemy.
Beforethe other could reach him, the ready Mr. Brander had extricated himself from his perilous position and, leaving the bruised post-boy to manage his own, strode back a pace or two, his hands groping rigidly in the skirt-pockets of his mangy surtout. Mr. Tuke, apt at an emergency, came up pistol in hand, which seeing, the long rogue halted with a stony face, of which only the lurid eyes belied the expressionlessness. For some seconds the two men faced one another without a word. At length said the pursued:
“No doubt, sir, you are come to explain yourself.”
“I have nothing to explain,” said the other, stiff as the trigger of his own weapon and as deadly.
“To what, then, am I to attribute this pursuit and maltreatment of a harmless traveller using without offence the King’s highway?”
“Mr. Brander, I am not convinced my legitimate answer should not be a bullet through your brain. I may give it yet, if you do not take your fingers from that pistol butt.”
The rogue flung his hands in front of him, and clasped them there.
“This, you will admit,” he said quietly, “is a gross outrage. I have done nothing to deserve it. I take post on my own concerns, and am wantonly driven to this pass with any possibility of consequences.”
“For which you have yourself to thank. There must be two to a hunt. Had you not fled I had not driven.”
“Surely, sir, it is excusable to fly a danger, and for an innocent traveller to read evil in one who spurs after him along a lonely road?”
Mr. Tuke permitted himself a spirt of merriment.
“Ingeniously argued,” said he. “So I am the highwayman? Well, I call upon you to stand and deliver.”
“Indeed, sir, I have nothing worth your consideration.”
“Pardon me. Your sudden flight thitherwards, at the moment you imagined me established and occupied in London, is a matter very well worth my consideration.”
“You are mistaken. How could I know of your presence in London? You will observe I make no pretence of ignorance as to your identity.”
“That is modest of you.”
He gave no further answer; but he set to and whistled an air from the opera, “What a Blunder.”
“Now, Mr. Brander,” he said, “you have taken time by the forelock, but I have taken him by the nose; so you may e’en go back the way you came, and inform your graceful associates that the master of ‘Delsrop’ is returned to his own.”
He spoke with a very engagingsang-froid; but he was prepared for contingencies. To his surprise the other, after eying him for some moments in a manner of puzzled speculation, shrugged up his shoulders and broke into a gobble of laughter.
“Come,” said the thief, “I will be honest with you, for all themarchand forainI am.”
“A scholar?” said Tuke. “Then you have two weapons to my one. We must stand on even terms before I consent.”
“Bah!” exclaimed the respectable merchant; and, turning his back, he fetched a pistol out of either side-pocket and fired each in turn at the dangling chains of the gallows. Both bullets struck home with a clank; the horses, twenty yards away, started and reared, and the rogue, repouching the smoking barrels, slewed himself about once more.
“Does that satisfy you?” he said. “Now my only weapon is my tongue.”
“It shall carry further than a bullet with me, though I won’t swear it shall speed as true. You have a very pretty aim, Mr. Brander.”
“I learnt to hit a mark when I was a schoolmaster,” said the other dryly. “A settled fly is a fair test of skill. Well, sir, may I crave a confident word with you?”
“The post-boy is out of ear-shot, I think.”
“I thank you, and I premise that this little expedition is of my sole conception and at my own cost, and that the associates of whom you spoke know nothing of it.”
“I see. You would have stolen a march on them?”
“Precisely; and, if possible, secure for myself alone the booty that all desire to share.”
“You are candour itself.”
“I read in it my better policy. Believe me, necessity is my foster-mother and her vile children are my comrades. Once I was blameless, though a schoolmaster. The birch-rod was my business, the fishing-rod my recreation, a passion for Elzivirs my ruin. I stole to allay it—a crime as white as the theft of bread to a starving man. The law took cognizance, grudging me all but my dry bones of syntax. I have suffered, but I am no more vicious now than then. I desire no gauds or vanities, but means only to the satisfying of this scholarly craving for books.”
“To gorge on which you would pilfer a stone worth £70,000? You see I play out my hand squarely, making no pretence of misreading your motives.”
The tall rascal smiled.
“As to that,” he said, “I must do honour to your profound penetration. Yes, sir, the ‘Lake of Wine’ is what I am after; and, for the rest, a passion is none that halts on the hither side of satiety. You could understand spending a thousand, or fifty thousand pounds on horses; but horses die, sir, or breed-in and degenerate, whereas written words beget great thoughts that in their turn intermarry and beget greater.”
“Well, Mr. Brander—and do you propose that I give you this stone to buy books with?”
“I propose to come to terms with you on the subject.”
“Terms (you must really forgive my outspokenness) from a cut-purse and a cut-throat?—terms from one who has no shadow of a title to the gem, or, even if he had, has attempted to enforce it by means ridiculously illegal? Upon my word, sir, for a school-master——!”
Brander waved a tolerant but extremely dirty hand.
“I will question you, Mr. Tuke,” he said. “Why am I a cut-throat?”
“Ah! had I been a scholar of yours, I might answer, maybe.”
“A mere veil of satire to conceal a paucity of proof. Why, sir, why, I ask?”
“You are insistent. Shall we suggest—apart from reasonable surmise as to your general career—that you had a hand, say twenty years ago, in the murder of a colleague under these very gallows?”
“Twenty years ago I was acting usher at a school.”
“Oh! we won’t be particular to a day or two.”
Mr. Brander straddled his legs, knuckled one fist upon his hip under his coat-skirt, and with his other hand rasped his chin meditatively.
“Well,” said he, “give a dog a bad name. ’Tis all of second importance. Only, being so, ’tis scarce worth an untruth. Sir, I regard lies as strong waters—the more regularly indulged in, the weaker is their effect when needed. This is no particular occasion for one. I had no hand in the man Cutwater’s death. I had not then any shadowy knowledge, even, of the great stone or the concealment of it that brought about his fate.”
“Nor of the admirable Mr. Fern?”
“Nor of Jack Fern, who alone, I believe, of the original gang survives.”
“You interest me vastly. Then, I protest it is a fatuous policy of that gentleman to make him new confidants in the secret, when, had he worked alone, he might have aimed at securing all for himself—as you are doing. But you really flatter my credulity.”
“Let it pass, then.”
“And pray why did Mr. Fern never return to the assault?”
“I had the story in rough from him in Newgate (where we were confined together in ’86), that he was put in for an old affair before the other scandal had blown by, and that there he had remained ever since, his band dispersed or tied up;—and the year after, he went to Botany Bay along with Governor Phillip and his fleet of off-scourings, and——”
“Here he is back again—at the end of twenty years—an escaped convict, I presume, with an ex-pedagogue for lieutenant and a tradition to trade upon. Surely he is forfeit to the law at the outset; and, upon my word, Mr. Brander, your confidences are embarrassing.”
“Make him over to the hangman, sir. I give you my honour I’ll help you. Maybe I could prove his title to a fast place in Execution Dock.”
“I see. You are really a very admirable rascal. But, you’ll want your price?”
“Oh! without doubt.”
“And that is—no, no, Mr. Brander; not half the value of the stone?”
“It’s a damned risky business, Mr. Tuke. I play my life against a competence.”
“But, listen, my friend. What claim has any one of you to a share in the ruby?”
“If it comes to that, what claim have you?”
“None whatever.”
“See here, sir. The man was one of us. The stone was fair spoil for division—not the perquisite of a single master-rogue. It was no appendage, conditional on your acquisition of the property—now, was it?”
“You know all about it, I see. Well, Mr. Brander, your boy there’s getting impatient.”
The long man’s jaw hung slack while he rubbed it, and a very evil look came into his eyes.
“Is that tantamount to saying you decline to treat?” he said.
“Your boy, Mr. Brander. I yield you precedence of the road, sir.”
“I’ve given you my confidence, by God! You’ll know what that means.”
“I never asked for it, you’ll observe.”
The devil looked out of Mr. Tuke’s eyes, and he set his teeth.
“You dog!” he cried low. “What makes you dare presume thus upon my tolerance?”
His fingers were nervous with his pistol-stock. He took a quick step forward. At that Brander’s fury came with a clap.
“Presume!” he hissed, and cried it again with a scream. “A cursed broken gamester that daren’t show his face in public! A posted defaulter! A despicable and despised spendthrift, with a wilderness for his reversion! Oh! I understand you, sir—I understand you. You’re a woundy character, by God! and you’ll make disposition of the stone and think to patch your reputation with bank-notes. But, beware, sir! There’s no law of heaven or earth that gives you a title to the gem. To withhold it from the just processes of barter is to put yourself without the pale of consideration. Why, who are you—who are you, I——”
He choked with his very rage, and stood impotently quivering his clenched fists.
“Mr. Brander,” said the other, absolutely suave and unheated, “I give you two minutes to mount and be off.”
The click of his flint-lock cut in like the snap of teeth.
For a moment it looked as if a tragedy were near enacting. The gallows chains, swung by the wind, creaked with rusty laughter. High overhead a crow, lazily drifting down the valley, checked its course a speculative instant and resumed it with a peevish and contemptuous “Caw!”
Brander had turned abruptly and was stalking towards his chaise. Once only he looked back over his shoulder, and then there was no expression on his face but a smile; but that Mr. Tuke would have given a dozen rubies to obliterate with a bullet.
Forall the starkness of frost that now befell, it was not till the early days of February that the packed heavens began to discharge themselves of the congested stores of snow they had been long garnering. By then the ground was iron a foot deep; the last green thing was withered upon itself; dead birds hung in the hedgerows and rabbits were stuck stiff in their burrows. Familiar presentments of trees and buildings offered strange new aspects as seen from the middle of frozen ponds, and the very least sap of nature was so withdrawn as that it seemed a marvel the principle of life could endure, to hug itself with any promise of spring.
But to our gentleman waking one morning, there was earnest of the first white fall outside in the wan light struck rigidly from the ceiling. He rose and went to the window, and saw the cold sheet spread, pure and beautiful and hiding all his world; and at that he knew himself committed to such a prolonged hob-nobbing with hislaresas he had never before experienced.
He was hardly discomfited. This prospective imprisonment carried with it a picture of home occupations very peaceful and unvexed. Sheltered from the wind, he would study to make of himself a shepherd beloved of his flock. A vision of a sombre library, full of serious warmth and winking book-backs, with himself a quiet dreaming student, in the dusk afternoons, set in the midst, appealed pleasantly to his mind’s eye. It should be a period of pregnant repose, while thought and virtue should grow large within him and induce him to a nobler attitude towards life.
In the modest enthusiasm engendered of this prospect, he even wished it would snow ever more and more, until he and his were shut in beyond a last chance of present rescue; and if the desire proved him less foreseeing from the domestic point of view than he would have imagined, it did, at least, most fully avouch his honesty of purpose.
Since his return he had rather courted seclusion; nor had he gone much abroad, nor—be it marked—ventured within the radiated influence of the “First Inn.” He had, in consequence, no personal knowledge of those movements of Mr. Brander that were subsequent to his interview with him; but he kept Dennis, to whom he had given his confidence in the matter, on the alert, and that good serving-man reported that no information was in the neighbourhood of any recrudescence of blackguardism on the part of the “Dog and Duck.” Therefore he was fain to hope that the baffled ex-schoolmaster had for the time being succumbed to circumstance and withdrawn himself as he came.
Now, on that afternoon of the first snow, Mr. Tuke was busying himself in the room he had made his private and personal study, and Darda was helping him to the arrangement of his none too numerous volumes, when her brother came in to crave a word with his master.
“Sir,” said he, “I believe you would like to know that Sir David and Miss Royston are returned to ‘Chatters.’”
Tuke looked up in some surprise.
“Already?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Indeed, yes, sir. I had it from Betty Pollack.”
“Betty?”
“She drove over to-day, sir, with her father, for orders, hearing that you had come back; and she stated that young Gamble had happened upon Sir David and party posting over the high downs at six o’clock yesterday evening.”
“Oh, very well, Dennis.”
The man withdrew, and the master resumed his labours preoccupied. Presently he slapped a book down upon the table, and—“You must go on by yourself, Darda,” said he, and left the room.
For some minutes after his exit the girl remained motionless where she stood; her ear turned to the last echo of his retreating footstep, her face like a deep-cut cameo, stained with blue shadows, the glory of her hair flaming against a background of snow. From her whiteness and her quiet she might have been the very ghost of some burning thought awake for the first time to the winter of its desolation.
Presently she uttered a little heart-rending sigh, and went on forlornly with her occupation.
Her master, in the meanwhile, was gone abouthisbusiness; and that was no less than a visit to the returned travellers. His resolve to undertake this was not the fruit of any desperate hope. He had no natural inclination to hold himself cheaply in questions of moral treatment, and he was sensitive, in a manly way, to the insolences of feminine rebuke. But he had schooled himself into an attitude towards Miss Royston which only some real act of violence to his feelings should convince him was entirely unjustified, and he would not consent to yield his office at that lady’s little court unless he were to suffer an outspoken decree of banishment. He had made up his mind, in fact, like a little naughty but repentant boy, to be good, and good he would be if properly encouraged. Now he was to see if Angela would resume her former self with her accustomed life, and, desiring test of this, he would plunge once more into the fire. And here, I regret to say, all his eremitic visions dissolved into thin air, and he was decided that for him the “running brooks” must suffice for library.
He walked through the deep snow to “Chatters,” and was removing his coat in the hall thereof, after being admitted, when a lofty and languid figure came upon him, and paused in some fatigued surprise on its way to a room-door.
He uttered an exclamation, and, advancing upon this person, accosted him decidedly cavalierly.
“You here, Dunlone!” he said. “This is entirely unexpected.”
The viscount in his disdain looked particularly like a camel; but he gave no answer.
“Well,” said Tuke, “being here, I should like to ask you a question. Have you acquainted our friends of my real title?”
“Oh, curse it, no!” said the lord. “What the devil’s it got to do with me?”
“That’s right. I have my reasons for the change, of course, and I’ll ask you to respect them.”
“I give myself no cursed concern about it. I don’t know that it makes much difference,” cried my lord irritably. “You seem to think I’ve no affairs but yours to consider.”
“You’ll not be offensive, I know,” said Tuke. “It’s not your way.”
The other sniffed and preceded the visitor into the drawing-room. He, the latter, pondered profoundly on his short journey thither, and steeled himself against probabilities.
But here he was agreeably and quite surprisingly flattered. Miss Royston received him with a charmingnaïvetéof welcome, and seemed to encourage him to assume therôleof a familiar neighbour.
“Are you not astonished to see us back so soon?” she said. “You know how eagerly I grasp at any excuse for a return to the country. Through all the clash and sparkle of town I hear the birds singing and see the lambs frisking in the meadows.”
“They’re not so much as dropped in January,” said Dunlone seriously.
Miss Angela blushed.
“Mr. Tuke will understand me,” she said, with a plaintive glance at that gentleman.
He coughed and bowed, and was altogether wholly perplexed as to the nature of her present attitude towards him.
“And what was the excuse you grasped at?” said he.
She made a littlemouewith her lips—she was amazingly confidential—and shrugged her pretty shoulders at the oblivious viscount.
“Hewas returning to Cornwall,” she whispered, “and almost drove us home that he might make a half-way house of ‘Chatters.’ I vow we were forced to come.”
She was delightfully secretive. There was no mention of my lord’s tailor. Almost Tuke misdoubted that Dunlone had kept his aristocratic faith with him.
“Well,” said he, “we’re all beholden to him anyhow, whatever was his motive.”
She lifted her shoulders again at that. Her expression said plainly, “His motive? You know as well as I do, sir, what is the lure to any male creature in this house.”
“He is not a first example ofsavoir vivre,” she whispered; “but, if he is a cub, he is a tiger-cub.”
“Does that recommend him in your eyes?”
“What hypocrisy to pretend it does not in any. He may feed like a wolf, but he hath the royal coat, and his stripes shall cover a multitude of sins.”
“Or rib a whole vessel of emptiness.”
“No doubt,” she said, with a light laugh.
He sat silent some moments. Was she sincere, he pondered, or could it be possible she merely sought to play him into check with this insolent pawn?
Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that his own hitherto tactics might have lacked fairness. Miss Royston was very prettily instinct with the prudence of her class, and it could be nothing less than wrong-headedness that should hold her to blame for subordinating passion to a sense of refinement. Indeed, what better security against weakness or levity could she present him than this very reluctance of hers to submit herself to the suit of an uncertified admirer? If in the unacknowledged bitterness of his own degradation he had taken some savage pleasure in presenting his least admirable side to the world, was this uninterested lady to be called upon to discriminate in the question of his grievances, or not rather to be the more commended for tentatively holding his approaches in check? With such a prize to win, it had surely been his more honourable course, not to read inherreserve a force antagonistic to his own, but to inventory his every possession, and place all, with the truth, at her feet. Why, in short, should she, whose heart he could not flatter himself he had taken at once and by storm, be content to consign her long traditions of refinement to one who could give no assurance of his right position to maintain and honour the gift?
Then he thought: “I have Creel’s consent, and it only needs another kind word from her, and the truth shall come. I will tell her what are my real name and title, and so learn for once and for all if, satisfied on these points, she will be willing to forego both for the third item on the list—the man himself.”
And, at this pass, in pops Sir David, with his round face like a full-stop, and puts the period for the time being to a very promising situation.
The baronet, it must be said, showed some embarrassment over thecontretemps. “I ain’t responsible for this Dunlone business, you know,” his pained eyebrows pleaded to Tuke. “I don’t profess to understand Angel, and she’s as wilful as the deuce, she is.”
He would nevertheless have had his friend stay to dinner; but this Tuke would not consent to, pleading his riding-dress and boots for excuse, and protesting that he must go after he had drunk the dish of tea Miss Royston had promised him.
All the time he was there the lady made much of her visitor, while my lord sat by on a sofa, with his mouth like a slur-mark in music, sulkily employing himself in ripping the gold thread from a sword-knot. For this exquisite had brought his “drizzling” box with him—a beautiful tortoise-shell casket, with the Dunlone stork in silver on the lid, and within a neat array of hilt-bands, shoulder-straps, and galloons of tarnished lace—and would sit by the hour together, silent as a Trappist, while he unravelled his yarn and wound it upon wooden reels. Out of the sale of these, he would tell you, he made quite a little monthly income, for there was no outlay, the material being cajoled from easy friends or accepted from parasites; and without doubt the occupation and its moral fitted him like a glove.
He did not even look up when the other came to bid him good-evening, but Tuke thought he heard him murmur, “Oh, curse it!” under his breath, and was fain to accept this benediction as a negative testimony to the value put upon him as a rival, and to the capriciousness of the soft sex in general.
The short winter afternoon was closing in as our gentleman, profoundly cogitating on the policy it should be best to pursue with aravissantewho would thus humble or exalt him according to the whimsies of her mood, came down to his own gate in the hollow where the ruined lodge was situated. Here much had been redressed and improved, so that—though the building itself remained an enbowered wreck—the entrance and the drive presented an ordered appearance, and, indeed, to any lover of the picturesque, an aspect quite alluring in its sweet and lofty loneliness.
He had entered and clanked-to the gate behind him, when something glimmering to the back of a tree-trunk brought him to a pause, and immediately he advanced upon it, and, skirting the bole, jerked to a stop and cried, “Betty!”
She stood before him, her head hanging and her face gone a little white; and she knitted her fingers together and had not, it seemed, a word to say.
“Why, what are you doing here, in the dusk and the snow?” he said, in something of a stern voice. “I understood you had gone back with your grandfather?”
Her forehead, under its hood, took a line of pain, and her lips trembled. He thought he foresaw the coming shower, and his reluctance to encourage it made him assume a little harshness.
“Where is your grandfather?” he said coldly and brusquely.
At that she glanced up at him like a frightened child.
“Don’t—don’t be angry with me!” her looks said plainly.
“Betty?” he asked, reproachfully.
“Grandfather went on first,” she whispered, “and I was to follow.”
“Why? Why didn’t you go with him?”
At that her tears came thick and fast. She shook before him, trying to repress them.
“You can’t go that long way by yourself,” he said, more gently. “Why did you remain behind?”
He had to bend his head to catch the hurried, sobbing answer.
“I wanted to see you—only to see you and not be seen. You have been away—have kept away so long. Have I vexed you? It was what I thought was right. But I’m weak to hold by all I resolved. I only wanted to see you, and now I’ll go.”
She moved a quick step towards the gate. He let her retreat a pace or two. For the first time, I think, he realized what he had been doing. He struggled fiercely with himself; but, no, he could not part with her like this.
“Betty!” he cried again, softly. “You must come back to me.”
She hesitated, turned, and came. He put her in front of him, and took her face between his hands.
“Oh, my dear!” he said, “what have I done?”
She looked up piteously into his eyes.
“No, no,” she whispered, in a drowned voice, “you’re not to blame. You keep your word—you would have me keep mine, like the gentleman you are. It’s—it’s——”
“What, Betty?”
“Only let me see you now and then—see you, and not be spoken to or noticed.”
“How can I prevent you, if you will? But would it be wise?”
She drew herself away from him gently but forcibly.
“No, it would not,” she said, in a low voice; “but love is never that. Yes, love—why should I hide it? And I have found out what I wanted to know. I shall soon hear the bells ringing for your wedding, and—and—oh! why did you ever kiss me?”
And at that she ran from him. He called to her, hurried after her, but she was heedless. He saw her speed up the road, and he durst not follow. He knew that, country-bred girl as she was, she would make little of the miles to Stockbridge, even were her grandfather not awaiting her at a distance, which he thought improbable.
Then, retracing his steps with a groan, he went on to his house. He walked sternly. He was not only despicable in his own eyes, but cruel in a manner he had not thought was possible to his nature.
As he entered his hall, Dennis came upon him with startled eyes.
“Sir,” he said, eagerly, “may I have a word with you?”