Chapter Twenty One.Farewell.There was no shutting out from Hugh’s room after that day. A silent figure stood at the door, waiting, its very shadow mighty enough to sweep away bolts and bars. Whoever Hugh cared to see, came—except his sister. He asked often for his sister, but Wareham knew that there must have been difficulty in finding her, more difficulty in her reaching them. Besides, Sir Michael’s health was very precarious, and a telegram had mentioned increased illness. Hugh listened, and apparently understood, but weakness prevented his brain from grasping it except for a few minutes. When he wandered now, it was feebly.Spite of persuasions, Anne went no more on the yacht. More than once Wareham found her on the landing; outside Hugh’s room, her face drawn, her eyes red-lidded; she flung him imploring glances, yet he fancied that when a call drew her inside, she went reluctantly, and came out quickly.Once she cried to Wareham—“This is dreadful!”“As gentle as it can be,” he answered.“Don’t talk of gentleness—it is horrible, inexorable! To see him lying there, a grey shadow, when he used to be so splendidly living! It was that magnificent vitality of his which gave him his power. When he liked he could dominate. I am pagan, pagan, if you will. Death the friend? Not it. Death is the enemy, the hateful enemy, and we all tremble before him, like cowards!”She flung back her head, and her red eyes looked defiantly at Wareham. He said—“I am not a priest.”“No, but you are a man. Say what you feel.”“Enemy, then, yes. Conqueror, no.”“Oh!” She flung out her hands impatiently.“You are like the rest. What do youknow?”“You tell me that is the end.” He pointed to the door. “I see in it a beginning. ‘The power of an endless life.’ If hope were a phantom, it would fade before the face of death. Instead, it strengthens.”A great yearning looked at him from her soul through her sad eyes. He had never before seen such a look. She turned away.As she went down the stairs she said, hurriedly—“Call me if I am wanted.” Then she came back a step or two. “Not unless Iamwanted, mind.”He took this as a further hint that she dreaded these visits to the sick-room, and would avoid them when possible. As it fell out, she never went again. Hugh drifted into a semi-conscious state, the presence of Wareham appearing to give him a certain satisfaction, but no desire strong enough to require expression. Doctors, nurses, chaplain, friends, watched. Wareham wrote to his father—“He does not suffer. I do not think he wishes for anything. If I mention your name to him he smiles, but makes no attempt to speak more than an occasional disjointed word. The people here would do anything for us; his illness has confirmed my idea that the Norwegians are among the kindest people in the world, and the least mercenary. Comfort yourself with the thought that he could not have been better cared for even in his own home than here with strangers—but I know what you are feeling, ‘If only I could have seen him!’ More than once he has asked for his sister; he accepts, however, all that we tell him of the difficulties of getting here. Indeed, nothing appears to disturb him. There is an English yacht in the harbour, belonging to Lord Milborough, and he is as ready as others to be of use.“You will want a word as to Miss Dalrymple, for whom, I know, you have no kindly feeling. You would retract if you saw her now. I am sure she suffers. Whether she ever really loved Hugh, I cannot tell. Had she—but it is impossible to theorise. I am also sure that she liked him, and he is happy in the conviction that he would have won her. This parting is quite without the bitterness of the first. She is at hand to see him if he desires it, and this, though the friend she is with is urgent to return to England.“I am writing my letter in Hugh’s room, where there is something already of extraordinary peace. If the border-land of death were always so restful, it seems to me that half our dread would vanish.“An hour later. I have wondered more than once whether he realised his own position, or whether weakness permitted no consciousness beyond the consciousness of the moment, but he has just asked that he might be taken home. I told him there would never have been any question of this, and it seemed to satisfy him. My letter cannot go before to-morrow, and by that time I may have more to add.”What he added was written the next day in his own room.“He passed away at nine this morning. The peace of which I wrote to you has not been broken, and dying seemed as natural and simple an act as living. I feel that you will long to be told about the hours before, yet there is nothing for words. It was like a hand slackening its hold in quiet sleep, and no more.“I was with him throughout the night, and, of course, always one of the nurses; but I do not think he recognised either of us for many hours before his death. The doctors say that unconsciousness usually comes on at an earlier stage. Neither of us knew the exact moment at last; once or twice before we had thought him gone, and afterwards fancied that he breathed.“Now you will want to know what arrangements can be made, and I must tell you hastily, lest I lose the mail. To-day is Saturday. I am ignorant as to whether there are stringent rules as to the time of burial in Norway, but I do not doubt to arrange somehow, for no steamer leaves before Tuesday, when one goes to Newcastle. I do not telegraph to you until Monday. I should not do it then, were it not for the fear that Ella might be meaning to leave Hull on Tuesday, for, unless absolutely necessary, it always appears to me cruelty to inflict that length of waiting which lies between a foreign telegram and the details of a letter.“I wish you could see him.”Wareham spent a good deal of the day with Dr Sivertsen, going through necessary formalities and making the necessary arrangements. He was not sorry to accept the young man’s invitation to his house for supper. They talked of Hugh. Dr Sivertsen spoke of his frank simplicity.“Something in him,” he said, “resembled the best type among us Norwegians.”“That is for you to say, not me,” Wareham answered. “If we have learnt nothing else from your late revelations of yourselves, we have been, at least, taught not to classify so glibly as has been our custom.”“We have thought more than we have written,” mused Sivertsen, puffing at his cigar. “And when I was in England, some years ago, it appeared to me that English conception of the northern character was principally based upon the tales of Frederika Bremer and the stories of Hans Andersen. There they saw one side, and of the moral character, I allow, the best. But they can hardly be said to draw a complete picture. Moreover, you are a writing nation; perhaps are not without danger of writing yourselves out?”“Perhaps,” sighed Wareham wearily.“We have the charm you thirst for—novelty. Novelty stands with you for originality, especially when united to daring.”“Which you have never lacked.”“In action. Of old our habit was to send the deed before the word. We are changing. I do not say it is for the better; but I dare say we offer greater interest to the world. Your young English lady is of quite another type from Mr Forbes.”“Miss Dalrymple?” asked Wareham, with curiosity. “I hardly knew you had seen her.”“Yes. I was interested, understanding from Dr Scott that she was to marry him. Was that so?”“Hardly. It might have been so in time.”“It surprised me. She is much more modern, much more subtile. Is she greatly grieved?”“I cannot tell you. Probably I shall know to-night.”He rose. The young doctor walked with him as far as the head of the harbour. Lights twinkled here and there, people strolled about, and Wareham was perforce reminded of that evening in Stavanger, of Millie’s pleasure, of what now seemed like the beginning of all things; for what is the day when a man first sees the woman he loves, but, to him, the day of creation?He walked slowly. No need to hurry back. No one was waiting, no night-watch lay before him. Dr Scott had hurriedly packed, and got off by the Hull steamer, taking the English nurse with him. Wareham felt that he must see the others, and hear from them their plans; Colonel Martyn was the only one he had spoken with, and he had said they would at any rate make no movement that day. As Wareham came near the inn, a party of gentlemen turned out and came towards them, and an instinct of avoidance thrust him into the door of a shop. There he waited until they had passed; what gratitude it was necessary to express, he had a preference for enclosing in a letter. Laughter broke out as they came near. Sir Walter spoke in a drawl—“Clear deck for Mil at last. Worth waiting for, eh, Burnby?”“You’re an unfeeling dog,” muttered Lord Milborough.Wareham, within, saw that he alone was not smiling.“Wants condolences—” was all that reached Wareham’s ears, with a retreating laugh. He felt angry that even so much had been forced upon him. There was nothing astonishing in the words. Reason might have told him that theCamillawould not have furled her white wings in Bergen harbour unless some pretty strong attraction had influenced her owner. And further, that it was unconscionable to expect regret for Hugh from men to whom he was only a stranger and a rival. But many people, perhaps unconsciously, embody abstract qualities when they present them to their mind, and Wareham, the most reasonable of men, turned reason into an old woman with a shrewish face and an uplifted finger. There were times when he hated her.He looked into the salon at once, and would have escaped when he beheld only Mrs Martyn, but that young lady had her eye on the door.“Ah, Mr Wareham, we were expecting you,” she cried, in an injured voice. “Tom has been to look for you more than once, for really, with so many dreadful things happening, and so much to be thought of, I ammostanxious to get home.”Wareham refused to accept the responsibility of their stay. He merely asked—“When do you start?”“I hope you will induce Anne to leave at once. She is quite unnerved, unstrung—I do think she might show a little more consideration. But really, this has been the most unfortunate tour I ever made! Poor Mr Forbes ought never to have come out, ill as he must have been from the first. And, of course, Anne behaved very badly to him. I don’t wish for a moment to defend her, only it seems a little hard that Tom and I should be made to suffer for it, doesn’t it? Now the only thing for us to do is to go home as quickly as possible.”He expressed a hope that her wish would be carried out.“If Anne is sensible—”His heart went out to Anne. No, she was not heartless.“But, as I said, pray tell her that you quite agree with us. I must say I think her wishing to stay here is not, not quite—well, of course, it was all broken off, and itwillso attract attention again, just when it was to be hoped it was dying away. I am sure I don’t know how I shall face Lady Dalrymple, she will be so extremely annoyed!”It appeared to him unnecessary to offer either argument or consolation, and the only remark available was—“You go in the yacht?”She looked shrewdly at him, and withdrew her plaints.“How else? Besides, Lord Milborough is very pressing. But as we can’t expect the poor man to stay here day after day, Tom is anxious we should be off to-morrow. They have all just been here. Didn’t you meet them?”“They passed me in the street.”“I forgot. Of course you have been too much occupied to see anything of them. Besides, men rarely like each other. Don’t go. Anne will be here in a moment. The comfort that it will be to get back to properly-proportioned evenings and late dinners! You really wish to go? Then I will fetch Anne.” Remembrance of Hugh made it easy for him to beg her not to do this with an earnestness which perplexed her, but she was keen to carry her point.“You can’t refuse to see a lady, I suppose?” she said, jumping up. “I want you to tell her that she can do you no good by staying.”“Me!”“And herself harm. But that—”She rustled out of the room, with an air of filling space, which belonged to her. Vexed at this special interview, Wareham walked restlessly about the room, turning over fragmentary literature. Two Germans came in, stared at him, went out again. Then, to his relief, appeared Colonel Martyn. His sympathy was unaffected, and Wareham had never liked him so well; but at this moment his merit was the merit of being a third person.“I went to look for you a couple of hours ago,” he told Wareham, “thinking I might be of some little use, but you weren’t to be found. Sad time this, for you.”“Thank you. It is. But Sivertsen has been most useful, and in this country the officials don’t go out of their way to be overbearing, as I have found them in Germany. I believe that everything’s arranged. Mrs Martyn talks of your leaving to-morrow?”A gleam of unmistakable relief irradiated Colonel Martyn’s face. He hesitated over his “yes,” however, and added—“Unless you want any one?”Wareham hastened to repudiate such a need, looked at his watch, and yawned.“Turn in,” Colonel Martyn suggested benevolently, and spoke of the wakeful nights the other had spent.“Mrs Martyn asked me to wait for her.” He avoided Anne’s name.“I’ll go and hurry her up.”In spite of this fresh propelling force, long minutes passed before Mrs Martyn rustled back alone, but in high spirits.“I am really so sorry, Mr Wareham! Anne is such a strange girl, one never knows how to take her, and she says she can see no one more. But, after all, she has come to her senses about leaving, and agrees to go to-morrow. Congratulate me.”“I am only sorry my name should have been intruded on Miss Dalrymple,” said Wareham gravely. “She understood, I hope, that you imagined she had something to say to me?”“I dare say. It really does not matter,” Mrs Martyn returned airily, and he began to discern where the intention had lain. It annoyed him both then and when he afterwards thought of it.In the room of death, his last look at Hugh’s boyish quiet face made his promise take the form of a most willing offer. Nothing more remained that he could do to please him. Friendship and sympathy were closed for ever here. Only this was left, and it had already become sacred. The look in Hugh’s eyes, the touch of his hand, rose up before him—witnesses.He was determined to avoid so much as a word with Anne the next day, and as it fell out, had no difficulty in keeping his resolution. The start was made early, and Colonel Martyn, his face verging on cheerfulness, ran up to wish Wareham good-bye. The word said, he asked whether he would not come down to see the others, but men were waiting, and Wareham’s excuse natural. They had quitted the house some fifteen minutes, when he followed, telling himself that to see Anne leave the shores, himself unseen, would do no one harm. For three days past the weather had been heavy, and the coast colourless; now the sun shone out, a roughish wind was blowing, the water danced and sparkled, and the yacht looked like some beautiful creature straining to be free. The launch was on its way. Wareham’s eyes held it as it slipped over the bright waves, until he lost it round the vessel. Presently, almost imperceptibly, masts, lines, sails, began to move with the moving clouds, and—a white cloud herself—theCamillaglided swiftly out towards the open, carrying Anne.He and Hugh were left.
There was no shutting out from Hugh’s room after that day. A silent figure stood at the door, waiting, its very shadow mighty enough to sweep away bolts and bars. Whoever Hugh cared to see, came—except his sister. He asked often for his sister, but Wareham knew that there must have been difficulty in finding her, more difficulty in her reaching them. Besides, Sir Michael’s health was very precarious, and a telegram had mentioned increased illness. Hugh listened, and apparently understood, but weakness prevented his brain from grasping it except for a few minutes. When he wandered now, it was feebly.
Spite of persuasions, Anne went no more on the yacht. More than once Wareham found her on the landing; outside Hugh’s room, her face drawn, her eyes red-lidded; she flung him imploring glances, yet he fancied that when a call drew her inside, she went reluctantly, and came out quickly.
Once she cried to Wareham—
“This is dreadful!”
“As gentle as it can be,” he answered.
“Don’t talk of gentleness—it is horrible, inexorable! To see him lying there, a grey shadow, when he used to be so splendidly living! It was that magnificent vitality of his which gave him his power. When he liked he could dominate. I am pagan, pagan, if you will. Death the friend? Not it. Death is the enemy, the hateful enemy, and we all tremble before him, like cowards!”
She flung back her head, and her red eyes looked defiantly at Wareham. He said—
“I am not a priest.”
“No, but you are a man. Say what you feel.”
“Enemy, then, yes. Conqueror, no.”
“Oh!” She flung out her hands impatiently.
“You are like the rest. What do youknow?”
“You tell me that is the end.” He pointed to the door. “I see in it a beginning. ‘The power of an endless life.’ If hope were a phantom, it would fade before the face of death. Instead, it strengthens.”
A great yearning looked at him from her soul through her sad eyes. He had never before seen such a look. She turned away.
As she went down the stairs she said, hurriedly—
“Call me if I am wanted.” Then she came back a step or two. “Not unless Iamwanted, mind.”
He took this as a further hint that she dreaded these visits to the sick-room, and would avoid them when possible. As it fell out, she never went again. Hugh drifted into a semi-conscious state, the presence of Wareham appearing to give him a certain satisfaction, but no desire strong enough to require expression. Doctors, nurses, chaplain, friends, watched. Wareham wrote to his father—
“He does not suffer. I do not think he wishes for anything. If I mention your name to him he smiles, but makes no attempt to speak more than an occasional disjointed word. The people here would do anything for us; his illness has confirmed my idea that the Norwegians are among the kindest people in the world, and the least mercenary. Comfort yourself with the thought that he could not have been better cared for even in his own home than here with strangers—but I know what you are feeling, ‘If only I could have seen him!’ More than once he has asked for his sister; he accepts, however, all that we tell him of the difficulties of getting here. Indeed, nothing appears to disturb him. There is an English yacht in the harbour, belonging to Lord Milborough, and he is as ready as others to be of use.
“You will want a word as to Miss Dalrymple, for whom, I know, you have no kindly feeling. You would retract if you saw her now. I am sure she suffers. Whether she ever really loved Hugh, I cannot tell. Had she—but it is impossible to theorise. I am also sure that she liked him, and he is happy in the conviction that he would have won her. This parting is quite without the bitterness of the first. She is at hand to see him if he desires it, and this, though the friend she is with is urgent to return to England.
“I am writing my letter in Hugh’s room, where there is something already of extraordinary peace. If the border-land of death were always so restful, it seems to me that half our dread would vanish.
“An hour later. I have wondered more than once whether he realised his own position, or whether weakness permitted no consciousness beyond the consciousness of the moment, but he has just asked that he might be taken home. I told him there would never have been any question of this, and it seemed to satisfy him. My letter cannot go before to-morrow, and by that time I may have more to add.”
What he added was written the next day in his own room.
“He passed away at nine this morning. The peace of which I wrote to you has not been broken, and dying seemed as natural and simple an act as living. I feel that you will long to be told about the hours before, yet there is nothing for words. It was like a hand slackening its hold in quiet sleep, and no more.
“I was with him throughout the night, and, of course, always one of the nurses; but I do not think he recognised either of us for many hours before his death. The doctors say that unconsciousness usually comes on at an earlier stage. Neither of us knew the exact moment at last; once or twice before we had thought him gone, and afterwards fancied that he breathed.
“Now you will want to know what arrangements can be made, and I must tell you hastily, lest I lose the mail. To-day is Saturday. I am ignorant as to whether there are stringent rules as to the time of burial in Norway, but I do not doubt to arrange somehow, for no steamer leaves before Tuesday, when one goes to Newcastle. I do not telegraph to you until Monday. I should not do it then, were it not for the fear that Ella might be meaning to leave Hull on Tuesday, for, unless absolutely necessary, it always appears to me cruelty to inflict that length of waiting which lies between a foreign telegram and the details of a letter.
“I wish you could see him.”
Wareham spent a good deal of the day with Dr Sivertsen, going through necessary formalities and making the necessary arrangements. He was not sorry to accept the young man’s invitation to his house for supper. They talked of Hugh. Dr Sivertsen spoke of his frank simplicity.
“Something in him,” he said, “resembled the best type among us Norwegians.”
“That is for you to say, not me,” Wareham answered. “If we have learnt nothing else from your late revelations of yourselves, we have been, at least, taught not to classify so glibly as has been our custom.”
“We have thought more than we have written,” mused Sivertsen, puffing at his cigar. “And when I was in England, some years ago, it appeared to me that English conception of the northern character was principally based upon the tales of Frederika Bremer and the stories of Hans Andersen. There they saw one side, and of the moral character, I allow, the best. But they can hardly be said to draw a complete picture. Moreover, you are a writing nation; perhaps are not without danger of writing yourselves out?”
“Perhaps,” sighed Wareham wearily.
“We have the charm you thirst for—novelty. Novelty stands with you for originality, especially when united to daring.”
“Which you have never lacked.”
“In action. Of old our habit was to send the deed before the word. We are changing. I do not say it is for the better; but I dare say we offer greater interest to the world. Your young English lady is of quite another type from Mr Forbes.”
“Miss Dalrymple?” asked Wareham, with curiosity. “I hardly knew you had seen her.”
“Yes. I was interested, understanding from Dr Scott that she was to marry him. Was that so?”
“Hardly. It might have been so in time.”
“It surprised me. She is much more modern, much more subtile. Is she greatly grieved?”
“I cannot tell you. Probably I shall know to-night.”
He rose. The young doctor walked with him as far as the head of the harbour. Lights twinkled here and there, people strolled about, and Wareham was perforce reminded of that evening in Stavanger, of Millie’s pleasure, of what now seemed like the beginning of all things; for what is the day when a man first sees the woman he loves, but, to him, the day of creation?
He walked slowly. No need to hurry back. No one was waiting, no night-watch lay before him. Dr Scott had hurriedly packed, and got off by the Hull steamer, taking the English nurse with him. Wareham felt that he must see the others, and hear from them their plans; Colonel Martyn was the only one he had spoken with, and he had said they would at any rate make no movement that day. As Wareham came near the inn, a party of gentlemen turned out and came towards them, and an instinct of avoidance thrust him into the door of a shop. There he waited until they had passed; what gratitude it was necessary to express, he had a preference for enclosing in a letter. Laughter broke out as they came near. Sir Walter spoke in a drawl—
“Clear deck for Mil at last. Worth waiting for, eh, Burnby?”
“You’re an unfeeling dog,” muttered Lord Milborough.
Wareham, within, saw that he alone was not smiling.
“Wants condolences—” was all that reached Wareham’s ears, with a retreating laugh. He felt angry that even so much had been forced upon him. There was nothing astonishing in the words. Reason might have told him that theCamillawould not have furled her white wings in Bergen harbour unless some pretty strong attraction had influenced her owner. And further, that it was unconscionable to expect regret for Hugh from men to whom he was only a stranger and a rival. But many people, perhaps unconsciously, embody abstract qualities when they present them to their mind, and Wareham, the most reasonable of men, turned reason into an old woman with a shrewish face and an uplifted finger. There were times when he hated her.
He looked into the salon at once, and would have escaped when he beheld only Mrs Martyn, but that young lady had her eye on the door.
“Ah, Mr Wareham, we were expecting you,” she cried, in an injured voice. “Tom has been to look for you more than once, for really, with so many dreadful things happening, and so much to be thought of, I ammostanxious to get home.”
Wareham refused to accept the responsibility of their stay. He merely asked—
“When do you start?”
“I hope you will induce Anne to leave at once. She is quite unnerved, unstrung—I do think she might show a little more consideration. But really, this has been the most unfortunate tour I ever made! Poor Mr Forbes ought never to have come out, ill as he must have been from the first. And, of course, Anne behaved very badly to him. I don’t wish for a moment to defend her, only it seems a little hard that Tom and I should be made to suffer for it, doesn’t it? Now the only thing for us to do is to go home as quickly as possible.”
He expressed a hope that her wish would be carried out.
“If Anne is sensible—”
His heart went out to Anne. No, she was not heartless.
“But, as I said, pray tell her that you quite agree with us. I must say I think her wishing to stay here is not, not quite—well, of course, it was all broken off, and itwillso attract attention again, just when it was to be hoped it was dying away. I am sure I don’t know how I shall face Lady Dalrymple, she will be so extremely annoyed!”
It appeared to him unnecessary to offer either argument or consolation, and the only remark available was—“You go in the yacht?”
She looked shrewdly at him, and withdrew her plaints.
“How else? Besides, Lord Milborough is very pressing. But as we can’t expect the poor man to stay here day after day, Tom is anxious we should be off to-morrow. They have all just been here. Didn’t you meet them?”
“They passed me in the street.”
“I forgot. Of course you have been too much occupied to see anything of them. Besides, men rarely like each other. Don’t go. Anne will be here in a moment. The comfort that it will be to get back to properly-proportioned evenings and late dinners! You really wish to go? Then I will fetch Anne.” Remembrance of Hugh made it easy for him to beg her not to do this with an earnestness which perplexed her, but she was keen to carry her point.
“You can’t refuse to see a lady, I suppose?” she said, jumping up. “I want you to tell her that she can do you no good by staying.”
“Me!”
“And herself harm. But that—”
She rustled out of the room, with an air of filling space, which belonged to her. Vexed at this special interview, Wareham walked restlessly about the room, turning over fragmentary literature. Two Germans came in, stared at him, went out again. Then, to his relief, appeared Colonel Martyn. His sympathy was unaffected, and Wareham had never liked him so well; but at this moment his merit was the merit of being a third person.
“I went to look for you a couple of hours ago,” he told Wareham, “thinking I might be of some little use, but you weren’t to be found. Sad time this, for you.”
“Thank you. It is. But Sivertsen has been most useful, and in this country the officials don’t go out of their way to be overbearing, as I have found them in Germany. I believe that everything’s arranged. Mrs Martyn talks of your leaving to-morrow?”
A gleam of unmistakable relief irradiated Colonel Martyn’s face. He hesitated over his “yes,” however, and added—
“Unless you want any one?”
Wareham hastened to repudiate such a need, looked at his watch, and yawned.
“Turn in,” Colonel Martyn suggested benevolently, and spoke of the wakeful nights the other had spent.
“Mrs Martyn asked me to wait for her.” He avoided Anne’s name.
“I’ll go and hurry her up.”
In spite of this fresh propelling force, long minutes passed before Mrs Martyn rustled back alone, but in high spirits.
“I am really so sorry, Mr Wareham! Anne is such a strange girl, one never knows how to take her, and she says she can see no one more. But, after all, she has come to her senses about leaving, and agrees to go to-morrow. Congratulate me.”
“I am only sorry my name should have been intruded on Miss Dalrymple,” said Wareham gravely. “She understood, I hope, that you imagined she had something to say to me?”
“I dare say. It really does not matter,” Mrs Martyn returned airily, and he began to discern where the intention had lain. It annoyed him both then and when he afterwards thought of it.
In the room of death, his last look at Hugh’s boyish quiet face made his promise take the form of a most willing offer. Nothing more remained that he could do to please him. Friendship and sympathy were closed for ever here. Only this was left, and it had already become sacred. The look in Hugh’s eyes, the touch of his hand, rose up before him—witnesses.
He was determined to avoid so much as a word with Anne the next day, and as it fell out, had no difficulty in keeping his resolution. The start was made early, and Colonel Martyn, his face verging on cheerfulness, ran up to wish Wareham good-bye. The word said, he asked whether he would not come down to see the others, but men were waiting, and Wareham’s excuse natural. They had quitted the house some fifteen minutes, when he followed, telling himself that to see Anne leave the shores, himself unseen, would do no one harm. For three days past the weather had been heavy, and the coast colourless; now the sun shone out, a roughish wind was blowing, the water danced and sparkled, and the yacht looked like some beautiful creature straining to be free. The launch was on its way. Wareham’s eyes held it as it slipped over the bright waves, until he lost it round the vessel. Presently, almost imperceptibly, masts, lines, sails, began to move with the moving clouds, and—a white cloud herself—theCamillaglided swiftly out towards the open, carrying Anne.
He and Hugh were left.
Chapter Twenty Two.A Name in the Air.A fortnight later, Lady Fanny, having meanwhile paid a rapid visit to an uncle’s house, was again at Mrs Ravenhill’s. She had flung over her engagements in Scotland, remarking, and with reason, that until she could get hold of Milborough, and have things started on their proper lines, she would rather not encounter the rush of autumn country-house gaieties. She professed herself to be occupied in the study of economy, as although her fortune would be large, she declared that it would be all given away except a fragmentary residue.“I mean to shock him by my trousseau, though,” she announced one morning when she sat on the carpet in Millie’s bedroom. “I shall show him just a few of the bills, and see his face!”Justice to Mr Elliot obliged Millie to remark that she believed he would like Fanny to have the very best, but she was scouted.“The best, yes, but if you knew his ideas of what the best costs! Now, Millie, I’ll be quite fair, I’ll say nothing, and the next time you see him, get out of him what he supposes would be the expense of a wedding-dress. If his imagination conjures up a sum beyond five or six pounds, I’ll give you a silver frame for his photograph. There, is that comfortable?” She patted Millie’s ankle.“I’m sure it’s too tight. I couldn’t walk.”Lady Fanny consulted a small book on her lap, and began mournfully to unfasten a roller bandage.“I suppose itistoo tight, but I really don’t see why you should expect to walk about when you’re done up in strips. And that was my best figure of eight. However, of course if you insist upon such trifles—oh,whatis it, Millie? You shouldn’t shriek!”“Not with a pin running straight in? Oh!”Lady Fanny began, with shaking fingers, to search for the offending instrument. Found, it was discovered to have punctured a hole from which a small drop of blood was oozing. The girls looked at each other. Fanny got up and walked to the window. From that refuge she remarked—“You’d better bathe it.”“Aren’t you coming to assist?”“You can manage that by yourself.”Millie laughed.“You won’t do for the hospitals yet, Fanny! There! A bit of sticking-plaster is on, and I am quite tidy. Suppose we give up the bandaging, and try something else?”Lady Fanny came eagerly back.“Yes, something else. Will you have a broken collar-bone, or shall I take your temperature? Only—” with a sigh.“What?”“The thermometers do break so easily! This is my third. Please be careful.”Millie promised. The thermometer was inserted under Millie’s arm.“Now we can talk,” Lady Fanny remarked with satisfaction, stretching herself in a basket-chair. “Oh dear, oh dear, don’t you think it a little hard that I can’t get proper attention from Milborough? This waiting is horrid.”“Oh, horrid!” Millie agreed. “But you must hear soon. I suppose the fact is that he has been so busy since he came back, that he has not had the time to go into it.”“Busy! Milborough busy! Little you know him. Too idle to read his letters is more likely. But I do think he might take the trouble to open mine.”“I wonder whether he met the Martyns?” Millie said reflectively.“If he has, and if I know Milborough, he has fallen in love with Miss Dalrymple.” Fanny was too much concerned with meditation on her own affairs to notice that Millie made a quick movement before she said—“You forget—poor Mr Forbes! I do think it is so terribly sad!”“Ah, but I did not say that Miss Dalrymple had fallen in love. No, no, I think better of her. Even if she had not—but she must have cared! She would never have let him join them after all that had happened, unless she had intended to marry him. Her face is not like one of those horrid girls who lead men on just to throw them over. No, Millie. If you and Mr Wareham thought that of her, you were both shamefully unjust.”“He did not think so.” She spoke with difficulty. “Fanny, I don’t think you understand.Hewould never blame Miss Dalrymple.”A string of undecided questions ran through Lady Fanny’s mind, quick as lightning. “Shall I? Shan’t I?” She gave way, and inquired carelessly—“Do you mean to tell me, seriously, that Mr Wareham was smitten?”“Yes. The more I look back the more I think so.”Millie spoke in a low voice. Her friend jumped up and kissed her.“Goose!” A cry followed. “Good gracious! Millie! The thermometer!”“Safe, safe, where you put it.”“Oh, you’re a dear. You’re made to be experimented upon. Now let us see.”With heads close together, hair mingling, and the thermometer on a table before them as if it were something which would go off if meddled with, it was studied. First Millie said she could see nothing. Turned delicately, a thread-like line revealed itself.“Normal is 98 degrees—about.”“This looks like degrees!”“Then you must be very ill.”Lady Fanny turned a tragic face upon her friend, and Millie shuddered with a feeling of preliminary collapse. The practical instincts of her mother, however, came to her rescue.“What was it when you began?”“That!” Fanny pointed mournfully.“It hasn’t moved?”“It never does!”Suspicion began to twinkle in Millie’s eyes.“Which end do you put in?”Fanny pointed again, this time with dawning hesitation.“And the other is the bulb! Oh-h-h!” They fell upon each other, as young creatures do, with bubbling laughter. Fanny screwed up her thermometer vindictively, and tossed it into a basket; then, to get out of the reach of Millie’s mockery, skilfully turned the conversation to the point from which it had broken away. She produced Lord Milborough’s letter, and, for the twentieth time, took opinion upon its meaning—“Dear Fan—Don’t be a baby. I’ll write by and by,”—on her dignity as to the baby, and perplexed by being, as it were, set on the shelf, at a moment which for a woman is the one moment to which all time has been leading up.“It is so strange, so strange!” she repeated. “A whole week ago!”Millie, turned to sympathy at once by the droop of the mobile mouth, uttered her consolations.“Dear, you couldn’t expect him to like itverymuch, and perhaps it is better he should not write at once. Now he will have time to think it over, and be sensible.”“John has had no answer either, for I told him to telegraph.” She released herself from Millie, and sat up, fun sparkling in her eyes. “Though I knew that was asking too much. If I’d been an old woman to be got into a hospital now! But just for ourselves—oh, the extravagance of it!—he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he couldn’t! So perhaps Milborough’s had the decency to write to him.”“And, anyway, you’ll be your own mistress in a year.”“Yes.” She made a face. “A whole year! Besides, I want Milborough to be nice. And here he leaves me, not even telling me when he is to be at Thorpe again, or whether I’m to ask any one, or—I tell you what, Millie, perhaps we can see something in theWorld. I’ll run down-stairs and get it.”TheWorldgave the required information. Lord Milborough’s name figured in a list of visitors at a big Yorkshire country-house. There, it also appeared, were to be found Lady and Miss Dalrymple; and after the girls’ surmises, the names had a certain significance.“He has actually left the yacht! There is something, I am certain there is something! At another time I should write and ask him,” cried Lady Fanny. “Now, where is Mr Wareham?”His movements were not recorded.“Not there, at any rate. Millie, I told you you were a goose. But I have no patience with Miss Dalrymple! That poor man just dead, and here she is, amusing herself. Oh, yes, that explains! I know Milborough. But how can she turn from one to the other? Tell me quickly, Millie, is she the girl to marry him just for the position? Because—a marriage without love—I never before knew how horrible it must be! And poor Milborough, he isn’t very good, I know, but I do hope he will never have that fate.” Millie felt faithless to her friend—cruel—for the glad throb in her heart, and the instantaneous wish to extol Miss Dalrymple. She briskly argued that with the choice which lay before her, there was not the temptation to snatch at this world’s prizes which might beset an older or less beautiful woman. Besides—she smoothed over the fact of their being in the same house as possibly a mere coincidence. Fanny listened, shrewd enough to see something of the forces which pulled her friend’s reasons, and set the active puppets dancing, yet with her imagination captivated, as it had been all along, by dreams of Anne Dalrymple.Elsewhere the notice in theWorldwas remarked and commented upon. Wareham was still at Firleigh, with old Sir Michael. There he had taken Hugh, and there the young heir was laid by the side of old forefathers, youth stepping in to sleep between them as quietly as they. For centuries Forbes’ had lived and died there; they lay, cross-legged and mailed, in niches; knelt stiffly on brasses, with children in graduated rows behind; their names stared down from marble tablets, vaults held them closely; a few, Hugh’s young mother one, had prayed to be laid under the daisied grass of the churchyard, where the larks sang, and showers and sunshine fell. Wareham often thought of it as the most peaceful place he knew.The Hall itself had suffered many transformations. It stood, as always, in a cup of land, sheltered by ground and trees, but the demon of damp had only been exorcised by late generations at the cost of architectural beauty, and instead of the fine old red stone house, up rose a solid, substantial square. On one side a terrace flanked it, while the garden was out of sight of the windows, lying behind, and a little higher than the house. Through it the family passed to church, always on foot, for weddings and funerals alike; through it, with the summer flowers massed in gorgeous colour all round, Hugh was carried, three white wreaths lying on his breast, and Sir Michael watching from a bedroom window.The old man was very ill, so ill that they all knew there would be a second, what—from the ancient custom—the people round Firleigh called “carrying,” before long. But his spirit was still masterful, and his fingers clasped the reins he could not use. He was keen that Wareham should stay.“When you’re gone, I shall think of twenty questions I had to ask,” he said. “There’s no one but you, Dick, to answer them. Your room’s always kept for you. What d’ye want? Paper, ink, books? Miles will order down anything. And you’ll never need to come again. Stop two or three weeks, till—till it doesn’t all seem so raw.”Of course Wareham stopped.A sister of Sir Michael’s was there, a kindly woman, but a little precise, and Ella, Hugh’s only sister, a girl who required to be well-known before you could even in thought extract her from a crowd of other girls. Anything distinctive she appeared to shun. Hugh she adored, and Wareham admired the self-command which crushed back outward manifestations of grief, but it made conversation difficult, since one subject was uppermost in their hearts, and that Ella shrank from, as from a touch on a wound. Sir Michael tolerated no other. Wareham sat for hours in the window, the old man in a great chair by the fire, for fire was necessary for his chilled blood; long silences between them, then perhaps a dozen questions strung on end, each harping on the same note. Miss Dalrymple’s name was like a match to powder.“She’s the cause,” Sir Michael would violently burst out. “Without that woman, Hugh would have been living still. She should be branded as a jilt. Mark you, Dick, so sure as there’s a God above, it’ll come home to her one of these days. I shan’t forget my poor boy when he came down to tell his old dad that he’d got her to say she’d marry him. I heard him on the stairs. Up he came, three at a time, and into my room with a whoop.” He rambled away into details, where failing memory lost itself as bewilderingly as a traveller in a wood. But he never let go his clutch upon Anne’s sin. Wareham, whose heart smarted to hear her blamed, tried in vain to soften judgment.“Remember, sir, that if she had made a mistake, she went the best way to mend it.”“Mistake? What mistake?”“That of supposing she loved Hugh well enough to marry him.”Sir Michael smote his thigh weakly.“She would have, if she’d had a heart as big as a pea. Do you tell me he wasn’t the boy to make a girl love him? Why, there wasn’t man, woman, or child could stand out against Hugh when he set himself to win them. A heartless jade, Dick, a heartless jade!”Wareham eyed the carpet with a frown. Sir Michael’s anger was unreasonable, because based on imperfect knowledge, and its daily repetition irritated him. One argument, and one only, sometimes availed to check it.“He loved her to the last, sir. It would have cut him to the quick to think you hadn’t forgiven her.”The old man covered his face with his hand.“That was the boy all over. He had his mother’s kindly nature, sweet as sunshine. Never bore a grudge. If he and his cousin fell out and fought, Hugh would lend him his pony an hour afterwards, without a backward thought at his bruises. However badly she’d treated him, he’d have smoothed it over to you. Would she have married him?”“He thought so.”“Ay, ay, he would make the best of it. But what did you think, Dick?”The question he had never yet been able to answer. He muttered something to the effect that principals knew best in such a matter. It seemed to him likely.“Wrong, sir, wrong. Hugh has told me one thing, and you another, and my own sense, if it isn’t what it was, may be trusted for the rest. She’s one of those creatures that like to keep men dangling round them. Tell you what, Dick. When you write a book about them, call itThe World’s Curse.”When Wareham read the notice in theWorld, he tried to persuade himself that it was with an indifferently critical eye. If Anne could turn so swiftly from one to the other—let her! He even smiled over it, acknowledging the aptness of the possible marriage. If love were out of the question, as well one man or the other, the betterness consisted in the income, and he mentally took off his hat, and stepped aside. His persuasions, however, were open for his heart to argue with. Lord Milborough might love, but women such as Anne do not invariably carry out what the worlds judgment insists must be their action; the Anne he believed himself to have discovered was too complex to be counted upon. His heart wandered in meadows where hope sprang and budded, for if she held a thought of him, she would not be unfaithful to it, and in a few weeks’ time his lips would be unsealed. Free to love her—free to woo. Wareham’s blood leapt at the thought! Hitherto he had never seen her except in bonds, in fetters; a passion of wild words flew to his lips at the bare dream of permitted speech. Once he caught himself muttering, “I love you, I love you!” when Sir Michael was uttering his usual tirade against her, and something hasty which he uttered in defence gave the old man a suspicion. He thundered out—“You’re not playing the fool too, Dick?” Wareham pulled himself together.“I hope not, but if you saw her, you’d understand her charm.”“Saw her? Don’t let her come here. I couldn’t trust myself. D’ye hear?”There was difficulty in soothing him, and his suspicion died in the greater disturbance.Two or three large estates covered the neighbourhood, so that of actual neighbours Firleigh had not many. The houses had shooting-parties filling them, with whom the Forbes’ in their trouble had, of course, nothing to do; the ladies of the houses drove over to see Ella, who escaped from them as much as she could, clinging to solitude.Wareham used to take a gun and a dog and go across the fields, more by way of pleasing his host, who believed that here was enjoyment, than because he cared about it himself. He was not in the mood for sport; what, however, he did like was the rich ripeness of the time, the filmy cobwebs glittering on the grass, the pale yellow of the reaped corn-fields against the earth-brown. To sit on a log, and let fancy weave other cobwebs, blue and white smiling down upon him from above, had its pleasantness, and, what was more, its peace. Report of the birds he brought back did not satisfy Sir Michael, who was always wanting to bribe him into staying by the best inducements he could offer.“We must get Dick a day with Ormsleigh,” he said to his daughter, one day. “Pottering about here is miserable work for a young man. He’ll be off before we can look round.”“Catherine will be here to-day. I’ll tell her what you wish, father.”“Ay, do. Catherine, now,” he muttered. “There would have been a girl!”Ella vanished.The invitation came. Wareham would have refused, but that he saw old Sir Michael had set his heart upon the matter, for Lord Ormsleigh’s shooting was the best in the county.“I’ll go,” he said to Ella, “since your father won’t believe that I like sport better as an excuse than a pursuit.”“Dear old dad! His imagination is not strong enough to conceive that any one can find enjoyment except in the ways he liked himself.”She had overtaken him as he was strolling home across the park. Ella had been to the village, and had just turned in from the road, which at this point sank into a cutting, so as to be out of view of the house. They walked slowly, now and then standing still to look at an opening between the trees, revealing blue depths. For a woman, Ella was tall, and carried herself uprightly. Looking at her, you gathered an impression of force in reserve. To the outer world she was cold. Wareham knew her better, a medium intellect, but a strong true heart. He saw now that she had something to say, and waited. She said it as they stood still.“Dick,”—she turned and faced him, breathing hard—“let me hear about Miss Dalrymple.”“I expected you to ask.”“And I couldn’t before. I’ve been afraid.”“Of what?”“That I might not be able to go in and out to father without distressing him. I’ve been keeping everything back, pressing it down with a leaden weight. There, that will do. Don’t let us talk about myself, but—tell me—how was it between them? Would she have married him?”He had to fall back again on the same answer.“He thought so.”“And you thought not? I see it in your face.”“Then my face lies, for I cannot tell. Remember, I did not even see them together. A woman might have got to the bottom of it all, but I felt myself hopelessly floundering on the surface. He was content, isn’t that enough for you to remember?”Her eyes met his gravely.“Don’t think that I am like father in blaming her,” she said. “I believe I understand. And I am glad that Hugh was spared suffering, for he loved her with all his heart, and she would not have married him.”Wareham looked at her in surprise. Just then they heard steps and men’s voices coming along the hidden road: here and there a detached word or two reached their ears. Was it a trick of fancy which made two of these words sound like “Miss Dalrymple”? As the tramp died away, he looked at Ella, and lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.“Lord Ormsleigh’s party going home from shooting,” she said. “They sometimes cut across by the road when they have been at Langham.”“Did you hear a name?”“No.”“I could have sworn that one of them spoke of Miss Dalrymple.”“That is very unlikely. More probably she was in your thoughts just then.”He felt guiltily conscious that she was seldom long out of them. But whether his companion had heard or missed it, the more he thought about it the more positive he felt that those were no phantom words which had crossed his hearing. What should have brought her name into the men’s mouths? Common-sense, which sometimes becomes a very imp of mockery, burst out laughing in his face. Why not, as well as any other name? In these days, beauties unseen and untalked about hardly count as such, fierce lights beat everywhere, tongues discuss familiarly, a serenade is not the gentle tribute of one lover for one ear, but a whole band, drums, trumpets, waking the silence, banging, flaring, calling all men to listen. He had to own this, for he had often moralised upon it. But to feel and to moralise are different conditions, and he resented that careless twitter of Anne’s name in the road.
A fortnight later, Lady Fanny, having meanwhile paid a rapid visit to an uncle’s house, was again at Mrs Ravenhill’s. She had flung over her engagements in Scotland, remarking, and with reason, that until she could get hold of Milborough, and have things started on their proper lines, she would rather not encounter the rush of autumn country-house gaieties. She professed herself to be occupied in the study of economy, as although her fortune would be large, she declared that it would be all given away except a fragmentary residue.
“I mean to shock him by my trousseau, though,” she announced one morning when she sat on the carpet in Millie’s bedroom. “I shall show him just a few of the bills, and see his face!”
Justice to Mr Elliot obliged Millie to remark that she believed he would like Fanny to have the very best, but she was scouted.
“The best, yes, but if you knew his ideas of what the best costs! Now, Millie, I’ll be quite fair, I’ll say nothing, and the next time you see him, get out of him what he supposes would be the expense of a wedding-dress. If his imagination conjures up a sum beyond five or six pounds, I’ll give you a silver frame for his photograph. There, is that comfortable?” She patted Millie’s ankle.
“I’m sure it’s too tight. I couldn’t walk.”
Lady Fanny consulted a small book on her lap, and began mournfully to unfasten a roller bandage.
“I suppose itistoo tight, but I really don’t see why you should expect to walk about when you’re done up in strips. And that was my best figure of eight. However, of course if you insist upon such trifles—oh,whatis it, Millie? You shouldn’t shriek!”
“Not with a pin running straight in? Oh!”
Lady Fanny began, with shaking fingers, to search for the offending instrument. Found, it was discovered to have punctured a hole from which a small drop of blood was oozing. The girls looked at each other. Fanny got up and walked to the window. From that refuge she remarked—“You’d better bathe it.”
“Aren’t you coming to assist?”
“You can manage that by yourself.”
Millie laughed.
“You won’t do for the hospitals yet, Fanny! There! A bit of sticking-plaster is on, and I am quite tidy. Suppose we give up the bandaging, and try something else?”
Lady Fanny came eagerly back.
“Yes, something else. Will you have a broken collar-bone, or shall I take your temperature? Only—” with a sigh.
“What?”
“The thermometers do break so easily! This is my third. Please be careful.”
Millie promised. The thermometer was inserted under Millie’s arm.
“Now we can talk,” Lady Fanny remarked with satisfaction, stretching herself in a basket-chair. “Oh dear, oh dear, don’t you think it a little hard that I can’t get proper attention from Milborough? This waiting is horrid.”
“Oh, horrid!” Millie agreed. “But you must hear soon. I suppose the fact is that he has been so busy since he came back, that he has not had the time to go into it.”
“Busy! Milborough busy! Little you know him. Too idle to read his letters is more likely. But I do think he might take the trouble to open mine.”
“I wonder whether he met the Martyns?” Millie said reflectively.
“If he has, and if I know Milborough, he has fallen in love with Miss Dalrymple.” Fanny was too much concerned with meditation on her own affairs to notice that Millie made a quick movement before she said—
“You forget—poor Mr Forbes! I do think it is so terribly sad!”
“Ah, but I did not say that Miss Dalrymple had fallen in love. No, no, I think better of her. Even if she had not—but she must have cared! She would never have let him join them after all that had happened, unless she had intended to marry him. Her face is not like one of those horrid girls who lead men on just to throw them over. No, Millie. If you and Mr Wareham thought that of her, you were both shamefully unjust.”
“He did not think so.” She spoke with difficulty. “Fanny, I don’t think you understand.Hewould never blame Miss Dalrymple.”
A string of undecided questions ran through Lady Fanny’s mind, quick as lightning. “Shall I? Shan’t I?” She gave way, and inquired carelessly—
“Do you mean to tell me, seriously, that Mr Wareham was smitten?”
“Yes. The more I look back the more I think so.”
Millie spoke in a low voice. Her friend jumped up and kissed her.
“Goose!” A cry followed. “Good gracious! Millie! The thermometer!”
“Safe, safe, where you put it.”
“Oh, you’re a dear. You’re made to be experimented upon. Now let us see.”
With heads close together, hair mingling, and the thermometer on a table before them as if it were something which would go off if meddled with, it was studied. First Millie said she could see nothing. Turned delicately, a thread-like line revealed itself.
“Normal is 98 degrees—about.”
“This looks like degrees!”
“Then you must be very ill.”
Lady Fanny turned a tragic face upon her friend, and Millie shuddered with a feeling of preliminary collapse. The practical instincts of her mother, however, came to her rescue.
“What was it when you began?”
“That!” Fanny pointed mournfully.
“It hasn’t moved?”
“It never does!”
Suspicion began to twinkle in Millie’s eyes.
“Which end do you put in?”
Fanny pointed again, this time with dawning hesitation.
“And the other is the bulb! Oh-h-h!” They fell upon each other, as young creatures do, with bubbling laughter. Fanny screwed up her thermometer vindictively, and tossed it into a basket; then, to get out of the reach of Millie’s mockery, skilfully turned the conversation to the point from which it had broken away. She produced Lord Milborough’s letter, and, for the twentieth time, took opinion upon its meaning—“Dear Fan—Don’t be a baby. I’ll write by and by,”—on her dignity as to the baby, and perplexed by being, as it were, set on the shelf, at a moment which for a woman is the one moment to which all time has been leading up.
“It is so strange, so strange!” she repeated. “A whole week ago!”
Millie, turned to sympathy at once by the droop of the mobile mouth, uttered her consolations.
“Dear, you couldn’t expect him to like itverymuch, and perhaps it is better he should not write at once. Now he will have time to think it over, and be sensible.”
“John has had no answer either, for I told him to telegraph.” She released herself from Millie, and sat up, fun sparkling in her eyes. “Though I knew that was asking too much. If I’d been an old woman to be got into a hospital now! But just for ourselves—oh, the extravagance of it!—he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he couldn’t! So perhaps Milborough’s had the decency to write to him.”
“And, anyway, you’ll be your own mistress in a year.”
“Yes.” She made a face. “A whole year! Besides, I want Milborough to be nice. And here he leaves me, not even telling me when he is to be at Thorpe again, or whether I’m to ask any one, or—I tell you what, Millie, perhaps we can see something in theWorld. I’ll run down-stairs and get it.”
TheWorldgave the required information. Lord Milborough’s name figured in a list of visitors at a big Yorkshire country-house. There, it also appeared, were to be found Lady and Miss Dalrymple; and after the girls’ surmises, the names had a certain significance.
“He has actually left the yacht! There is something, I am certain there is something! At another time I should write and ask him,” cried Lady Fanny. “Now, where is Mr Wareham?”
His movements were not recorded.
“Not there, at any rate. Millie, I told you you were a goose. But I have no patience with Miss Dalrymple! That poor man just dead, and here she is, amusing herself. Oh, yes, that explains! I know Milborough. But how can she turn from one to the other? Tell me quickly, Millie, is she the girl to marry him just for the position? Because—a marriage without love—I never before knew how horrible it must be! And poor Milborough, he isn’t very good, I know, but I do hope he will never have that fate.” Millie felt faithless to her friend—cruel—for the glad throb in her heart, and the instantaneous wish to extol Miss Dalrymple. She briskly argued that with the choice which lay before her, there was not the temptation to snatch at this world’s prizes which might beset an older or less beautiful woman. Besides—she smoothed over the fact of their being in the same house as possibly a mere coincidence. Fanny listened, shrewd enough to see something of the forces which pulled her friend’s reasons, and set the active puppets dancing, yet with her imagination captivated, as it had been all along, by dreams of Anne Dalrymple.
Elsewhere the notice in theWorldwas remarked and commented upon. Wareham was still at Firleigh, with old Sir Michael. There he had taken Hugh, and there the young heir was laid by the side of old forefathers, youth stepping in to sleep between them as quietly as they. For centuries Forbes’ had lived and died there; they lay, cross-legged and mailed, in niches; knelt stiffly on brasses, with children in graduated rows behind; their names stared down from marble tablets, vaults held them closely; a few, Hugh’s young mother one, had prayed to be laid under the daisied grass of the churchyard, where the larks sang, and showers and sunshine fell. Wareham often thought of it as the most peaceful place he knew.
The Hall itself had suffered many transformations. It stood, as always, in a cup of land, sheltered by ground and trees, but the demon of damp had only been exorcised by late generations at the cost of architectural beauty, and instead of the fine old red stone house, up rose a solid, substantial square. On one side a terrace flanked it, while the garden was out of sight of the windows, lying behind, and a little higher than the house. Through it the family passed to church, always on foot, for weddings and funerals alike; through it, with the summer flowers massed in gorgeous colour all round, Hugh was carried, three white wreaths lying on his breast, and Sir Michael watching from a bedroom window.
The old man was very ill, so ill that they all knew there would be a second, what—from the ancient custom—the people round Firleigh called “carrying,” before long. But his spirit was still masterful, and his fingers clasped the reins he could not use. He was keen that Wareham should stay.
“When you’re gone, I shall think of twenty questions I had to ask,” he said. “There’s no one but you, Dick, to answer them. Your room’s always kept for you. What d’ye want? Paper, ink, books? Miles will order down anything. And you’ll never need to come again. Stop two or three weeks, till—till it doesn’t all seem so raw.”
Of course Wareham stopped.
A sister of Sir Michael’s was there, a kindly woman, but a little precise, and Ella, Hugh’s only sister, a girl who required to be well-known before you could even in thought extract her from a crowd of other girls. Anything distinctive she appeared to shun. Hugh she adored, and Wareham admired the self-command which crushed back outward manifestations of grief, but it made conversation difficult, since one subject was uppermost in their hearts, and that Ella shrank from, as from a touch on a wound. Sir Michael tolerated no other. Wareham sat for hours in the window, the old man in a great chair by the fire, for fire was necessary for his chilled blood; long silences between them, then perhaps a dozen questions strung on end, each harping on the same note. Miss Dalrymple’s name was like a match to powder.
“She’s the cause,” Sir Michael would violently burst out. “Without that woman, Hugh would have been living still. She should be branded as a jilt. Mark you, Dick, so sure as there’s a God above, it’ll come home to her one of these days. I shan’t forget my poor boy when he came down to tell his old dad that he’d got her to say she’d marry him. I heard him on the stairs. Up he came, three at a time, and into my room with a whoop.” He rambled away into details, where failing memory lost itself as bewilderingly as a traveller in a wood. But he never let go his clutch upon Anne’s sin. Wareham, whose heart smarted to hear her blamed, tried in vain to soften judgment.
“Remember, sir, that if she had made a mistake, she went the best way to mend it.”
“Mistake? What mistake?”
“That of supposing she loved Hugh well enough to marry him.”
Sir Michael smote his thigh weakly.
“She would have, if she’d had a heart as big as a pea. Do you tell me he wasn’t the boy to make a girl love him? Why, there wasn’t man, woman, or child could stand out against Hugh when he set himself to win them. A heartless jade, Dick, a heartless jade!”
Wareham eyed the carpet with a frown. Sir Michael’s anger was unreasonable, because based on imperfect knowledge, and its daily repetition irritated him. One argument, and one only, sometimes availed to check it.
“He loved her to the last, sir. It would have cut him to the quick to think you hadn’t forgiven her.”
The old man covered his face with his hand.
“That was the boy all over. He had his mother’s kindly nature, sweet as sunshine. Never bore a grudge. If he and his cousin fell out and fought, Hugh would lend him his pony an hour afterwards, without a backward thought at his bruises. However badly she’d treated him, he’d have smoothed it over to you. Would she have married him?”
“He thought so.”
“Ay, ay, he would make the best of it. But what did you think, Dick?”
The question he had never yet been able to answer. He muttered something to the effect that principals knew best in such a matter. It seemed to him likely.
“Wrong, sir, wrong. Hugh has told me one thing, and you another, and my own sense, if it isn’t what it was, may be trusted for the rest. She’s one of those creatures that like to keep men dangling round them. Tell you what, Dick. When you write a book about them, call itThe World’s Curse.”
When Wareham read the notice in theWorld, he tried to persuade himself that it was with an indifferently critical eye. If Anne could turn so swiftly from one to the other—let her! He even smiled over it, acknowledging the aptness of the possible marriage. If love were out of the question, as well one man or the other, the betterness consisted in the income, and he mentally took off his hat, and stepped aside. His persuasions, however, were open for his heart to argue with. Lord Milborough might love, but women such as Anne do not invariably carry out what the worlds judgment insists must be their action; the Anne he believed himself to have discovered was too complex to be counted upon. His heart wandered in meadows where hope sprang and budded, for if she held a thought of him, she would not be unfaithful to it, and in a few weeks’ time his lips would be unsealed. Free to love her—free to woo. Wareham’s blood leapt at the thought! Hitherto he had never seen her except in bonds, in fetters; a passion of wild words flew to his lips at the bare dream of permitted speech. Once he caught himself muttering, “I love you, I love you!” when Sir Michael was uttering his usual tirade against her, and something hasty which he uttered in defence gave the old man a suspicion. He thundered out—
“You’re not playing the fool too, Dick?” Wareham pulled himself together.
“I hope not, but if you saw her, you’d understand her charm.”
“Saw her? Don’t let her come here. I couldn’t trust myself. D’ye hear?”
There was difficulty in soothing him, and his suspicion died in the greater disturbance.
Two or three large estates covered the neighbourhood, so that of actual neighbours Firleigh had not many. The houses had shooting-parties filling them, with whom the Forbes’ in their trouble had, of course, nothing to do; the ladies of the houses drove over to see Ella, who escaped from them as much as she could, clinging to solitude.
Wareham used to take a gun and a dog and go across the fields, more by way of pleasing his host, who believed that here was enjoyment, than because he cared about it himself. He was not in the mood for sport; what, however, he did like was the rich ripeness of the time, the filmy cobwebs glittering on the grass, the pale yellow of the reaped corn-fields against the earth-brown. To sit on a log, and let fancy weave other cobwebs, blue and white smiling down upon him from above, had its pleasantness, and, what was more, its peace. Report of the birds he brought back did not satisfy Sir Michael, who was always wanting to bribe him into staying by the best inducements he could offer.
“We must get Dick a day with Ormsleigh,” he said to his daughter, one day. “Pottering about here is miserable work for a young man. He’ll be off before we can look round.”
“Catherine will be here to-day. I’ll tell her what you wish, father.”
“Ay, do. Catherine, now,” he muttered. “There would have been a girl!”
Ella vanished.
The invitation came. Wareham would have refused, but that he saw old Sir Michael had set his heart upon the matter, for Lord Ormsleigh’s shooting was the best in the county.
“I’ll go,” he said to Ella, “since your father won’t believe that I like sport better as an excuse than a pursuit.”
“Dear old dad! His imagination is not strong enough to conceive that any one can find enjoyment except in the ways he liked himself.”
She had overtaken him as he was strolling home across the park. Ella had been to the village, and had just turned in from the road, which at this point sank into a cutting, so as to be out of view of the house. They walked slowly, now and then standing still to look at an opening between the trees, revealing blue depths. For a woman, Ella was tall, and carried herself uprightly. Looking at her, you gathered an impression of force in reserve. To the outer world she was cold. Wareham knew her better, a medium intellect, but a strong true heart. He saw now that she had something to say, and waited. She said it as they stood still.
“Dick,”—she turned and faced him, breathing hard—“let me hear about Miss Dalrymple.”
“I expected you to ask.”
“And I couldn’t before. I’ve been afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That I might not be able to go in and out to father without distressing him. I’ve been keeping everything back, pressing it down with a leaden weight. There, that will do. Don’t let us talk about myself, but—tell me—how was it between them? Would she have married him?”
He had to fall back again on the same answer.
“He thought so.”
“And you thought not? I see it in your face.”
“Then my face lies, for I cannot tell. Remember, I did not even see them together. A woman might have got to the bottom of it all, but I felt myself hopelessly floundering on the surface. He was content, isn’t that enough for you to remember?”
Her eyes met his gravely.
“Don’t think that I am like father in blaming her,” she said. “I believe I understand. And I am glad that Hugh was spared suffering, for he loved her with all his heart, and she would not have married him.”
Wareham looked at her in surprise. Just then they heard steps and men’s voices coming along the hidden road: here and there a detached word or two reached their ears. Was it a trick of fancy which made two of these words sound like “Miss Dalrymple”? As the tramp died away, he looked at Ella, and lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.
“Lord Ormsleigh’s party going home from shooting,” she said. “They sometimes cut across by the road when they have been at Langham.”
“Did you hear a name?”
“No.”
“I could have sworn that one of them spoke of Miss Dalrymple.”
“That is very unlikely. More probably she was in your thoughts just then.”
He felt guiltily conscious that she was seldom long out of them. But whether his companion had heard or missed it, the more he thought about it the more positive he felt that those were no phantom words which had crossed his hearing. What should have brought her name into the men’s mouths? Common-sense, which sometimes becomes a very imp of mockery, burst out laughing in his face. Why not, as well as any other name? In these days, beauties unseen and untalked about hardly count as such, fierce lights beat everywhere, tongues discuss familiarly, a serenade is not the gentle tribute of one lover for one ear, but a whole band, drums, trumpets, waking the silence, banging, flaring, calling all men to listen. He had to own this, for he had often moralised upon it. But to feel and to moralise are different conditions, and he resented that careless twitter of Anne’s name in the road.
Chapter Twenty Three.A Walk.The next day Wareham spent his afternoon by walking into the small country town where was the nearest railway station. Something which Sir Michael wanted gave him the excuse without which a solitary walk becomes a burden in spite of conscientious evokings of the joys of solitude. And he undertook the further office of calling at post-office and station for letters and newspapers, to the disgust of the groom, who had his own Saturday afternoon diversions in view, and felt himself defrauded. In happy ignorance of his displeasure, Wareham whistled to Venom, Hugh’s fox-terrier, and started.The day was dark and still, life dragging heavily, as it does in September days, yet not without a sombre beauty. Masses of firs here and there relieved the monotony of foliage, and the gorse spread a burnish of gold on broken ground. In the road it was duller. Mud prevailed, and withering grasses coarsely fringed the mud, while autumn had not yet flaunted its yellows and reds to hide decay. Wareham, generally quick to notice nature, walked on unheeding.Reaching the town at last, it struck him as usual, as an ugly expression of man, varying between squalor and dull respectability, bare brick and slate in rows. The station was uglier, but more attractive in spite of blackness, something of magic still lingering about the sharp bright lines, the rushing monsters that whizz along them, the flaming eyes that glow in the night. Wareham turned towards it.He was too early. The London express was not due for ten minutes, and he went off to execute Sir Michael’s errand, promising to return later. It had been market morning, and farmers and farmers’ wives yet lingered in the streets, enjoying weekly greetings. One or two carriages drove about, and Wareham noticed the Ormsleigh brougham at the door of a shop. He went to the post-office, and stayed to send off a couple of telegrams in answer to the letters he found there. Then he walked round by the church, for the pleasure of looking at the noble lines of its tower, and, having by this time completely exhausted Venom’s patience, betook himself again to the station.Newspaper in pocket, he started for home. As dusk approached, the day cleared, and, facing the west as he walked, he noticed signs of preparation in the heavens, as if a pageant might presently disclose itself. The road was inextricably connected with thoughts of Hugh: as boys they had often ridden home under the oaks, and the absence of change in immaterial things is no less oppressive than its presence in material. Hugh’s vitality was so amazing that it was next to impossible to think of his life having gone out from among them.He was still a little distance from Firleigh when, with a curve of road beyond him, sounds reached his ears, remote, yet carrying something in them which hurried him forward. Venom in front was plainly puzzled; he had halted, and was considering matters with cocked ears and head on one side. A few moments brought Wareham within sight and quickened his steps to a run, for evidently there had been an accident.The brougham, which he had recognised as belonging to Lord Ormsleigh, was reclining angularly against the hedge, the horses were disengaged and held by a hatless groom, while a couple of other men, one of them the coachman, had apparently just succeeded in extricating two figures from imprisonment in the overturned carriage. It caused Wareham not the smallest astonishment to recognise in one of them Anne Dalrymple. He was by her side the next moment.“Tell me that you are not hurt!”Anne, who was very pale, showed more amazement.“Mr Wareham! Have you sprung out of the earth?”“Good fortune brought me here. My question first, please.”“I haven’t a finger-ache, but I am frightened to death, and poor Watkins is worse. Watkins, open your eyes, the danger is over, and the coachman is dying to get to the horses.”But Watkins insisted upon uttering short cries of terror, and requiring man’s support. Meanwhile Wareham questioned the coachman.“A broken pole? How’s that?”“Idon’t know, sir. I could have sworn it was sound, but the off-horse gave a bit of a shy, and it snapped like a twig. Never saw such a thing.”Further explanation put the credit of seizing the horses’ heads upon a young farmer who was passing, and showed all the necessary presence of mind. Anne’s exhortations at last induced Watkins to struggle to the bank, where she shut her eyes tightly to avoid seeing the horses.“Now, what’s to be done?” said Anne. “We were on our way to Oakwood.”“And you are two miles from the house.”“No more? We will walk.”“Would it not be better to send on the groom with the horses, and let a carriage come back for you?”“Thank you. No more carriages to-day. I had a momentary expectation of being kicked into splinters with the brougham. Come, Watkins, you are not really hurt, and I am sure you would rather walk. Think of the tea that waits for you.”But Watkins’ protestations became piteous. She described herself as all of a tremble, and as unable to stir. Anne tried arguments to no purpose until her patience failed.“If you like it best then,” she said, “you must stay here until we can send for you, for I am going to walk, and the coachman thinks they can get the carriage home by leading the horses.”“What, stay here by myself, ma’am, in this dismal road!” cried Watkins, roused to protest.“If you can’t walk. Unless you prefer to get into the brougham.”This she declared to be out of the question, and was melting into tears, when the young farmer, moved to compassion, stepped forward with a suggestion. A little way from the road, it appeared, there was a house. If the young lady felt herself able to walk so far, he would be happy to show her the way, and she could stop there until they sent a trap from Oakwood. Watkins, taking a good look at him, and recognising a preserver in a very personable young man, closed her eyes again, sighed, and consented.“The young lady being provided for, now for the young woman,” said Anne, turning with a smile to Wareham. “I am not so helpless as Watkins, but to walk in the rear of this melancholy procession is not particularly inviting. Is there no shorter way across the fields?”He glanced at her from head to foot.“You don’t look fit for walking,” he said, “except in the park.”“I don’t dress for the lanes,” she answered coolly.“And your shoes are absurdly thin.”“When you have finished your criticisms, perhaps you will answer my question. One no more expects criticism from a novel-writer than pepper from an oyster.”“Thank you. I accept the simile.”“One good turn deserves another, so will you tell me whether you are going to show me a pleasanter way than the road in company with a broken-down brougham? Or shall I ask the coachman?”“Certainly not,” said Wareham hastily. Anne’s question was by no means such a simple matter as she imagined. The shortest way to Oakwood took them, beyond a doubt, exactly in front of the house at Firleigh; it would, indeed, be necessary to pass directly before the window. And he dared not cause Sir Michael such a shock. Firleigh lay in the region where little events are chronicled. The appearance of Mr Wareham and a strange young lady, beautiful and beautifully dressed, would reach Sir Michael with the rapidity of an electric shock, and, require explanations. This, at any rate, must be avoided. He must take her into the grounds, but a circuit through a wood would have to be made. He explained that they need not follow the road for more than a quarter of a mile.“Come, then,” said Anne, “let us get over the quarter of a mile.”She was in high spirits, disposed to laughter as he had never before seen her, rippling with fun over Watkins, her preliminary look at the young farmer, and evident appreciation of his civility.“I shall hear so much about him to-night that I hope he may drive all that she felt and did in the carriage out of her head.”“You were not frightened yourself?”“Oh yes, as much as I had time to be. But as to nerves, Watkins usurped the display. The bump against the bank reassured me at once.”“I bless the farmer.”“Yes. Without him,”—Anne turned paler, she was perhaps more shaken than she knew.“I suppose that you?”“I,” said Wareham, deliberately uttering the last thing that he desired to say, “I was, as usual—too late.”She looked at him inquiringly; their eyes met, naturally she expected more. His mouth grew rigid, under a sudden impression of his own weakness, when he had thought himself absolutely safe, and he added hurriedly—“Do you see that gate? There we turn off.” Anne’s voice was a little colder than it had been.“I have not apologised. I may be taking you out of your way. Are you staying in the neighbourhood?”“At Firleigh.”There was a momentary pause before she asked—“And are we near Firleigh?”“We are going to cut across part of it now.” He opened the gate as he spoke, and she walked by his side for some minutes in silence. Then she said—“It is curious that we should have met. Of course, I knew that Oakwood and Firleigh were near each other, but—it seemed unlikely that you should be here. Poor Hugh!”“He would like to know he was remembered.”“He asked me to think of him sometimes. If that were all—it would be easier to satisfy the dead than the living, for who can help remembering?”“Not I,” said Wareham, with a sigh.“His grave?”“You must see it.”“And his father—?”“Sir Michael is too ill to receive visitors.” Wareham spoke hastily.“Ah, poor old man! But I must drive over and see his sister.” A touch of hesitation reaching her, she said sharply, “No?”“Remember that they were irritated, rather, I should say, Sir Michael was irritated, by your dismissal of Hugh. Something of displeasure you must expect.”They faced the west and a fir wood as they walked. Grey clouds covered and contracted the sky, but at the horizon lifted sufficiently to show a fiercely burning line of red, cut by the stems of the fir-trees. Anne stared before her, with her head thrown back. Wareham let his fancy skip to possible futures when they two should walk together, side by side, with no shadows between them. But he would keep faith with Hugh, control voice and look.“They are unjust,” slowly said Anne, at last, and he started, brought back from rapturous dreams.“He is an old man, very feeble, and had but one son,” he pleaded. “Ella, I am sure, judges more fairly.”“Unlike a woman, then. If that is their feeling, I wish I had not come here. I assure you, though you may not believe it, that there was some—sentiment in my visit. I believed I should be welcomed. I should be, if they understood. That was the one time in my life in which I acted unselfishly. And if I had been left alone—if you, for instance, had not taken upon yourself to set poor Hugh upon my track—it would all have died gently away. Friends meddling. When has it not brought mischief!” Anger suited her, and the darkening of her eyes. Wareham felt no uneasiness from her wrath, so lost was he in admiration. “And for a man to meddle! As if his fingers were delicate enough for the task of dealing with our vanity!” She laughed shortly, disdainfully. Suddenly she flashed out—“What did he tell you?”“He?”“He. Hugh.” As he hesitated, she added impatiently—“He must have spoken of me?”“He told me”—Wareham spoke measuredly—“that he believed he should have won you.”Her face softened, she turned dewy eyes towards him.“I am glad, I am glad. He deserved to be happy. It is so dreadful to die, and, poor fellow, I have thought since that I might have given him more comfort. Dear Hugh!”“You loved him!” Wareham exclaimed involuntarily.Anne flung him another glance.“Almost,” she said.“If he could only hear you!”“Ah,” she said, with a movement of her head, “almost would not have satisfied him or—” She paused.“Or?”“Or me.”There was another silence, silence more significant than speech. When Wareham spoke, his voice was hoarse.“You have given up, then, that fiction that you are heartless?”“I do not know,” said Anne quietly. “Was it not you that tried to argue me out of it?”“You must learn it by something different from argument,” he replied slowly.She made no answer. In one hand he carried a newspaper, unconscious that he held it in a grasp like that of a vice. They reached the wood at this moment, and stepped under the firs. Anne asked whether they could see the house.“By coming a little to the right. It lies in a hollow.”She stood still and looked.“And I am not permitted to go there?”“Illness excuses everything. I assure you Sir Michael’s condition is such that we don’t know what a day may bring. That has kept me here.”“One hears of nothing but death,” said Anne restlessly. “I do not like the house. I cannot fancy Hugh in it. It is gloomy.”“You see it on a dark day, and saddened. It may be fancy, but I always think that old family places share the feelings of their owners.”“Then Oakwood should be cheerful?”“It is.”“You come there sometimes?” Anne asked. She had turned her back sharply upon Firleigh, and was walking on.“Sometimes. I shoot with Lord Oakleigh on Monday.”“That will not be of much use to us women.”“But I shall venture to call, and inquire for—”“For Watkins,” Anne broke in with a laugh. “Hers will be the sufferings. We mistresses are made of sterner stuff. Well, we all have what we ask for, and depend upon it, Watkins will get her sympathy.”He inquired whether her stay would be long. She smiled at the idea.“You know what these autumn campaigns are like. A flying two or three days, then, bag and baggage, away to the next station. A ‘prest’ day no longer exists. You would discomfit your host and hostess very much by staying.”“Where has the change come from?”“From superhuman efforts to exorcise the fiend—dullness. He is the only evil power which the century has not whitewashed, and he takes advantage of his position to keep us all in thraldom. The very flutter of his shadow is enough.”She lapsed into silence. The wood by this time lay behind them, and before, a rich country of broad outlines. The sky had lost its fire, heavy clouds menaced, once or twice Wareham thought he felt a drop of rain. Saying this to Anne, she turned her face upward. “Have we much further to go?”“A quarter of a mile to the lodge, half to the house. You can just see the red chimneys.”“By walking fast, I dare say we shall escape it.” She did not, however, increase her pace. Her next remark was to suggest that he should turn back. “Aren’t you afraid that Sir Michael may hear that you have been walking with me? And through part of his own land!”“It is very probable that he will hear of it,” said Wareham quietly.“And you will be in disgrace!” She aimed at light ridicule, but there was a touch of sharpness in her tone, which told him that the old man’s ill opinion had stung her. The next moment she owned it. “If only I could see him! He must have got a distorted notion into his mind. Perhaps you share it still?” Gladly would he have accepted these invitations to the personal. All he dared say was that it was not unnatural that Hugh’s father should have brooded over his son’s disappointment.“And his death has fixed it indelibly in his mind.”Anne moved a little faster.“Perhaps helaysthat also to my charge?”“He could not be so unjust.”Suddenly she stood still and faced him, soft entreaty in her eyes.“Mr Wareham, are you my friend?”Was it the pallor of the gathering clouds which whitened his face? He stammered—“That—” “And more,” was on his lips, when he succeeded in turning it into, “That I think you know.”“The only one, then, that I have here. Try to make them feel more forgivingly. Once, I know, you felt as they do; now, if my heart is to be trusted, you are kinder. After—what has past, it hurts to be so harshly judged. Please be on my side.”Pride, worldliness had all vanished. She spoke like a child, and looked at him beseechingly—so beseechingly that his heart rose in a wild clamour of desire to take her into his arms. The force with which he had to hold back this desire left him staring stupidly, only able to stammer out—“You need not ask me!”Perhaps Anne read the turmoil in his face, for her eyes smiled at him, but the next moment she turned away, and walked on silently. When she spoke it was to say—“Here is the lodge, and your labour ended.”“I can’t leave you till we reach the house.”“Oh, very well.” Her tone was indifferent, but presently she put an unexpected question—“You remember Lord Milborough?”“Certainly,” said Wareham, wondering what he was to hear.“He hopes you will come to Thorpe next month, when he has some big shoots.”“Big shoots are not at all in my way.”“So I supposed. Still, as Lady Dalrymple and I and many other delightful people will be there, your highness may perhaps condescend to find attraction, if not in pheasants?”Her tone was bantering, but did he dream when he read in it a touch of pressure? Prudence shook a warning finger, Love laughed.“It is very good of you to suggest it,” said Wareham, “but I really think you must be mistaken, for Lord Milborough and I only exchanged a few words, and—”“He is even less in your way than big shoots, you would like to say,” broke in Anne, with a laugh. “Well, I own one may have too much of his society.”“Then why go there?” asked Wareham bluntly.“Can one choose just what one likes? When I can, I do.” She quickened her pace. “Here is the rain at last.”“And in three minutes the house.”The door was open, lights streamed out; evidently another arrival had just taken place, and there was some amazement on the face of the servants at seeing Miss Dalrymple appear in the dusk, escorted by Mr Wareham.“You will come in?” she said.“Thank you, no. Sir Michael will be expecting me. I hope you won’t be the worse for your misadventure.”From the hall she waved her hand without answering. Wareham turned away.His walk back was mechanical, and he was scarcely conscious of the rain. It was as if Hugh was by his side, asking if his promise had been kept, demanding an inquiry into words and looks. If thoughts had been in the compact, miserable failure would have been the verdict; as it was, Wareham did not believe that he had betrayed himself. But was ever man so hampered! From first to last since he had known Anne, Love and Honour had struggled; there never had been a moment in which he felt himself free to say, “Dear, I love you!” and yet all the bonds were unseen, some might even say, fantastical. And now, at last, when Death had stepped in between the combatants, even Death could not avail. What must Anne think, if Anne thought at all about the matter? He counted the days. A month had passed.Nearing the house, he resolved that Sir Michael should hear from him who it was to whom the accident had happened, for chance mention of her name, which might very well occur, would give him a distrust of Wareham. But he found that there had been an increase of illness which made all speech impossible, and Ella was so much occupied with her father that he did not see her until late, when she came in to the drawing-room to find him sitting there with Mrs Newbold. The rain had increased to a wild storm, and a log fire was burning. Ella slipped into a three-cornered chair, close by the hearth.“Better,” she said, in answer to her aunt’s inquiry, “and asking for you.”Mrs Newbold bustled off. Wareham said something about the storm.“And you were caught in it?”“That was no hardship. I simply walked home and changed, and it did not come on till late.”“But tell me about the accident.”“Ah, you’ve heard of it?”“We hear everything,” and she laughed. “If you would like to know how, in this particular case, understand that the stable-boy’s father lives at a house where the lady’s-maid was taken to rest, and she related that her mistress was walking to Oakwood with a gentleman, whose description Jem recognised as yours. He brought home the lady’s name, and my maid conveyed it to me.”“It is all true,” Wareham said gravely, “and I should have taken Miss Dalrymple by the short cut in front of the house, but that I was afraid of annoying Sir Michael. We went round by the wood instead.”“And she was not hurt?” asked the girl, spreading out her hands to the blaze. “I should like to see her—to talk to her.”“That is what she wishes very much. What do you think? Can she come?”Ella shook her head. It was impossible.“Perhaps,” she said, “she may be at church to-morrow, and if father is well enough I shall go. Did she speak of—Hugh?”“And of Hugh’s family. Evidently when she came here she meant to have seen you all. But—as you say—it’s impossible.”Wareham had also thought about the coming day, its delights and its dangers. Dear delight to look at her, danger lest he should fail in his promise. But here, he told himself, that could not happen; here, where Hugh’s face met him everywhere, here, where Hugh himself lay at rest, neither friend nor love could forget him. When the day arrived it was blustering and wet: Ella and he walked to church under drenched trees, and she wondered whether Miss Dalrymple would be there. Wareham could not doubt it. Nature would draw her to look at a grave. He felt it. He had a curious desire, too, for her to see the lines of old Forbes’ linking past centuries to present, from whom Hugh drew his brave blood. The Oakwood estates doubled, trebled the Firleigh ones, but Oakwood was a mushroom compared to Firleigh, and Lord Oakleigh’s a new title, while the other belonged to the soil.Anne, however, was not there. He was disappointed, but excuses tripped promptly up. No other ladies came from the house, and to have seen Hugh’s grave in company with her jovial host would have been like sitting with a jester to view a tragedy. He was sure that Anne had done well to avoid it. Could he have taken her there! And a whisper suggested that Anne could generally arrange what she liked. He flung it from him. Here, after all that had passed, she must have walked warily, or have attracted curious eyes. Ella, too, Ella would have been jealous if Hugh had not his due. And the due meant much.What Ella thought she did not say. The girl had a curiously reserved nature; it seemed so impossible for her to express her feelings, that she was not credited with many. Their walk back was silent; wind-driven rain beat in their faces, and splashed heavily from the trees, sodden flowers lay prostrate in the garden, an old grey dial turned its weatherbeaten face vainly upwards. Wareham tried to shake off the gloom.“You don’t mind rain, Ella,” he said. “Come for a stretch this afternoon.”“Perhaps, if father keeps better. But he may want me to sit with him.”“You don’t get air enough.”“I find one can live very well without it.”“Live, but not thrive. We’ll take the dogs, and get to the top of Slopton ridge.” The next moment she stopped, all the colour out of her face.“Dick—look!” she cried with anguish.For all the blinds were down, and one more Forbes had joined his forefathers.
The next day Wareham spent his afternoon by walking into the small country town where was the nearest railway station. Something which Sir Michael wanted gave him the excuse without which a solitary walk becomes a burden in spite of conscientious evokings of the joys of solitude. And he undertook the further office of calling at post-office and station for letters and newspapers, to the disgust of the groom, who had his own Saturday afternoon diversions in view, and felt himself defrauded. In happy ignorance of his displeasure, Wareham whistled to Venom, Hugh’s fox-terrier, and started.
The day was dark and still, life dragging heavily, as it does in September days, yet not without a sombre beauty. Masses of firs here and there relieved the monotony of foliage, and the gorse spread a burnish of gold on broken ground. In the road it was duller. Mud prevailed, and withering grasses coarsely fringed the mud, while autumn had not yet flaunted its yellows and reds to hide decay. Wareham, generally quick to notice nature, walked on unheeding.
Reaching the town at last, it struck him as usual, as an ugly expression of man, varying between squalor and dull respectability, bare brick and slate in rows. The station was uglier, but more attractive in spite of blackness, something of magic still lingering about the sharp bright lines, the rushing monsters that whizz along them, the flaming eyes that glow in the night. Wareham turned towards it.
He was too early. The London express was not due for ten minutes, and he went off to execute Sir Michael’s errand, promising to return later. It had been market morning, and farmers and farmers’ wives yet lingered in the streets, enjoying weekly greetings. One or two carriages drove about, and Wareham noticed the Ormsleigh brougham at the door of a shop. He went to the post-office, and stayed to send off a couple of telegrams in answer to the letters he found there. Then he walked round by the church, for the pleasure of looking at the noble lines of its tower, and, having by this time completely exhausted Venom’s patience, betook himself again to the station.
Newspaper in pocket, he started for home. As dusk approached, the day cleared, and, facing the west as he walked, he noticed signs of preparation in the heavens, as if a pageant might presently disclose itself. The road was inextricably connected with thoughts of Hugh: as boys they had often ridden home under the oaks, and the absence of change in immaterial things is no less oppressive than its presence in material. Hugh’s vitality was so amazing that it was next to impossible to think of his life having gone out from among them.
He was still a little distance from Firleigh when, with a curve of road beyond him, sounds reached his ears, remote, yet carrying something in them which hurried him forward. Venom in front was plainly puzzled; he had halted, and was considering matters with cocked ears and head on one side. A few moments brought Wareham within sight and quickened his steps to a run, for evidently there had been an accident.
The brougham, which he had recognised as belonging to Lord Ormsleigh, was reclining angularly against the hedge, the horses were disengaged and held by a hatless groom, while a couple of other men, one of them the coachman, had apparently just succeeded in extricating two figures from imprisonment in the overturned carriage. It caused Wareham not the smallest astonishment to recognise in one of them Anne Dalrymple. He was by her side the next moment.
“Tell me that you are not hurt!”
Anne, who was very pale, showed more amazement.
“Mr Wareham! Have you sprung out of the earth?”
“Good fortune brought me here. My question first, please.”
“I haven’t a finger-ache, but I am frightened to death, and poor Watkins is worse. Watkins, open your eyes, the danger is over, and the coachman is dying to get to the horses.”
But Watkins insisted upon uttering short cries of terror, and requiring man’s support. Meanwhile Wareham questioned the coachman.
“A broken pole? How’s that?”
“Idon’t know, sir. I could have sworn it was sound, but the off-horse gave a bit of a shy, and it snapped like a twig. Never saw such a thing.”
Further explanation put the credit of seizing the horses’ heads upon a young farmer who was passing, and showed all the necessary presence of mind. Anne’s exhortations at last induced Watkins to struggle to the bank, where she shut her eyes tightly to avoid seeing the horses.
“Now, what’s to be done?” said Anne. “We were on our way to Oakwood.”
“And you are two miles from the house.”
“No more? We will walk.”
“Would it not be better to send on the groom with the horses, and let a carriage come back for you?”
“Thank you. No more carriages to-day. I had a momentary expectation of being kicked into splinters with the brougham. Come, Watkins, you are not really hurt, and I am sure you would rather walk. Think of the tea that waits for you.”
But Watkins’ protestations became piteous. She described herself as all of a tremble, and as unable to stir. Anne tried arguments to no purpose until her patience failed.
“If you like it best then,” she said, “you must stay here until we can send for you, for I am going to walk, and the coachman thinks they can get the carriage home by leading the horses.”
“What, stay here by myself, ma’am, in this dismal road!” cried Watkins, roused to protest.
“If you can’t walk. Unless you prefer to get into the brougham.”
This she declared to be out of the question, and was melting into tears, when the young farmer, moved to compassion, stepped forward with a suggestion. A little way from the road, it appeared, there was a house. If the young lady felt herself able to walk so far, he would be happy to show her the way, and she could stop there until they sent a trap from Oakwood. Watkins, taking a good look at him, and recognising a preserver in a very personable young man, closed her eyes again, sighed, and consented.
“The young lady being provided for, now for the young woman,” said Anne, turning with a smile to Wareham. “I am not so helpless as Watkins, but to walk in the rear of this melancholy procession is not particularly inviting. Is there no shorter way across the fields?”
He glanced at her from head to foot.
“You don’t look fit for walking,” he said, “except in the park.”
“I don’t dress for the lanes,” she answered coolly.
“And your shoes are absurdly thin.”
“When you have finished your criticisms, perhaps you will answer my question. One no more expects criticism from a novel-writer than pepper from an oyster.”
“Thank you. I accept the simile.”
“One good turn deserves another, so will you tell me whether you are going to show me a pleasanter way than the road in company with a broken-down brougham? Or shall I ask the coachman?”
“Certainly not,” said Wareham hastily. Anne’s question was by no means such a simple matter as she imagined. The shortest way to Oakwood took them, beyond a doubt, exactly in front of the house at Firleigh; it would, indeed, be necessary to pass directly before the window. And he dared not cause Sir Michael such a shock. Firleigh lay in the region where little events are chronicled. The appearance of Mr Wareham and a strange young lady, beautiful and beautifully dressed, would reach Sir Michael with the rapidity of an electric shock, and, require explanations. This, at any rate, must be avoided. He must take her into the grounds, but a circuit through a wood would have to be made. He explained that they need not follow the road for more than a quarter of a mile.
“Come, then,” said Anne, “let us get over the quarter of a mile.”
She was in high spirits, disposed to laughter as he had never before seen her, rippling with fun over Watkins, her preliminary look at the young farmer, and evident appreciation of his civility.
“I shall hear so much about him to-night that I hope he may drive all that she felt and did in the carriage out of her head.”
“You were not frightened yourself?”
“Oh yes, as much as I had time to be. But as to nerves, Watkins usurped the display. The bump against the bank reassured me at once.”
“I bless the farmer.”
“Yes. Without him,”—Anne turned paler, she was perhaps more shaken than she knew.
“I suppose that you?”
“I,” said Wareham, deliberately uttering the last thing that he desired to say, “I was, as usual—too late.”
She looked at him inquiringly; their eyes met, naturally she expected more. His mouth grew rigid, under a sudden impression of his own weakness, when he had thought himself absolutely safe, and he added hurriedly—
“Do you see that gate? There we turn off.” Anne’s voice was a little colder than it had been.
“I have not apologised. I may be taking you out of your way. Are you staying in the neighbourhood?”
“At Firleigh.”
There was a momentary pause before she asked—
“And are we near Firleigh?”
“We are going to cut across part of it now.” He opened the gate as he spoke, and she walked by his side for some minutes in silence. Then she said—
“It is curious that we should have met. Of course, I knew that Oakwood and Firleigh were near each other, but—it seemed unlikely that you should be here. Poor Hugh!”
“He would like to know he was remembered.”
“He asked me to think of him sometimes. If that were all—it would be easier to satisfy the dead than the living, for who can help remembering?”
“Not I,” said Wareham, with a sigh.
“His grave?”
“You must see it.”
“And his father—?”
“Sir Michael is too ill to receive visitors.” Wareham spoke hastily.
“Ah, poor old man! But I must drive over and see his sister.” A touch of hesitation reaching her, she said sharply, “No?”
“Remember that they were irritated, rather, I should say, Sir Michael was irritated, by your dismissal of Hugh. Something of displeasure you must expect.”
They faced the west and a fir wood as they walked. Grey clouds covered and contracted the sky, but at the horizon lifted sufficiently to show a fiercely burning line of red, cut by the stems of the fir-trees. Anne stared before her, with her head thrown back. Wareham let his fancy skip to possible futures when they two should walk together, side by side, with no shadows between them. But he would keep faith with Hugh, control voice and look.
“They are unjust,” slowly said Anne, at last, and he started, brought back from rapturous dreams.
“He is an old man, very feeble, and had but one son,” he pleaded. “Ella, I am sure, judges more fairly.”
“Unlike a woman, then. If that is their feeling, I wish I had not come here. I assure you, though you may not believe it, that there was some—sentiment in my visit. I believed I should be welcomed. I should be, if they understood. That was the one time in my life in which I acted unselfishly. And if I had been left alone—if you, for instance, had not taken upon yourself to set poor Hugh upon my track—it would all have died gently away. Friends meddling. When has it not brought mischief!” Anger suited her, and the darkening of her eyes. Wareham felt no uneasiness from her wrath, so lost was he in admiration. “And for a man to meddle! As if his fingers were delicate enough for the task of dealing with our vanity!” She laughed shortly, disdainfully. Suddenly she flashed out—“What did he tell you?”
“He?”
“He. Hugh.” As he hesitated, she added impatiently—“He must have spoken of me?”
“He told me”—Wareham spoke measuredly—“that he believed he should have won you.”
Her face softened, she turned dewy eyes towards him.
“I am glad, I am glad. He deserved to be happy. It is so dreadful to die, and, poor fellow, I have thought since that I might have given him more comfort. Dear Hugh!”
“You loved him!” Wareham exclaimed involuntarily.
Anne flung him another glance.
“Almost,” she said.
“If he could only hear you!”
“Ah,” she said, with a movement of her head, “almost would not have satisfied him or—” She paused.
“Or?”
“Or me.”
There was another silence, silence more significant than speech. When Wareham spoke, his voice was hoarse.
“You have given up, then, that fiction that you are heartless?”
“I do not know,” said Anne quietly. “Was it not you that tried to argue me out of it?”
“You must learn it by something different from argument,” he replied slowly.
She made no answer. In one hand he carried a newspaper, unconscious that he held it in a grasp like that of a vice. They reached the wood at this moment, and stepped under the firs. Anne asked whether they could see the house.
“By coming a little to the right. It lies in a hollow.”
She stood still and looked.
“And I am not permitted to go there?”
“Illness excuses everything. I assure you Sir Michael’s condition is such that we don’t know what a day may bring. That has kept me here.”
“One hears of nothing but death,” said Anne restlessly. “I do not like the house. I cannot fancy Hugh in it. It is gloomy.”
“You see it on a dark day, and saddened. It may be fancy, but I always think that old family places share the feelings of their owners.”
“Then Oakwood should be cheerful?”
“It is.”
“You come there sometimes?” Anne asked. She had turned her back sharply upon Firleigh, and was walking on.
“Sometimes. I shoot with Lord Oakleigh on Monday.”
“That will not be of much use to us women.”
“But I shall venture to call, and inquire for—”
“For Watkins,” Anne broke in with a laugh. “Hers will be the sufferings. We mistresses are made of sterner stuff. Well, we all have what we ask for, and depend upon it, Watkins will get her sympathy.”
He inquired whether her stay would be long. She smiled at the idea.
“You know what these autumn campaigns are like. A flying two or three days, then, bag and baggage, away to the next station. A ‘prest’ day no longer exists. You would discomfit your host and hostess very much by staying.”
“Where has the change come from?”
“From superhuman efforts to exorcise the fiend—dullness. He is the only evil power which the century has not whitewashed, and he takes advantage of his position to keep us all in thraldom. The very flutter of his shadow is enough.”
She lapsed into silence. The wood by this time lay behind them, and before, a rich country of broad outlines. The sky had lost its fire, heavy clouds menaced, once or twice Wareham thought he felt a drop of rain. Saying this to Anne, she turned her face upward. “Have we much further to go?”
“A quarter of a mile to the lodge, half to the house. You can just see the red chimneys.”
“By walking fast, I dare say we shall escape it.” She did not, however, increase her pace. Her next remark was to suggest that he should turn back. “Aren’t you afraid that Sir Michael may hear that you have been walking with me? And through part of his own land!”
“It is very probable that he will hear of it,” said Wareham quietly.
“And you will be in disgrace!” She aimed at light ridicule, but there was a touch of sharpness in her tone, which told him that the old man’s ill opinion had stung her. The next moment she owned it. “If only I could see him! He must have got a distorted notion into his mind. Perhaps you share it still?” Gladly would he have accepted these invitations to the personal. All he dared say was that it was not unnatural that Hugh’s father should have brooded over his son’s disappointment.
“And his death has fixed it indelibly in his mind.”
Anne moved a little faster.
“Perhaps helaysthat also to my charge?”
“He could not be so unjust.”
Suddenly she stood still and faced him, soft entreaty in her eyes.
“Mr Wareham, are you my friend?”
Was it the pallor of the gathering clouds which whitened his face? He stammered—
“That—” “And more,” was on his lips, when he succeeded in turning it into, “That I think you know.”
“The only one, then, that I have here. Try to make them feel more forgivingly. Once, I know, you felt as they do; now, if my heart is to be trusted, you are kinder. After—what has past, it hurts to be so harshly judged. Please be on my side.”
Pride, worldliness had all vanished. She spoke like a child, and looked at him beseechingly—so beseechingly that his heart rose in a wild clamour of desire to take her into his arms. The force with which he had to hold back this desire left him staring stupidly, only able to stammer out—
“You need not ask me!”
Perhaps Anne read the turmoil in his face, for her eyes smiled at him, but the next moment she turned away, and walked on silently. When she spoke it was to say—
“Here is the lodge, and your labour ended.”
“I can’t leave you till we reach the house.”
“Oh, very well.” Her tone was indifferent, but presently she put an unexpected question—“You remember Lord Milborough?”
“Certainly,” said Wareham, wondering what he was to hear.
“He hopes you will come to Thorpe next month, when he has some big shoots.”
“Big shoots are not at all in my way.”
“So I supposed. Still, as Lady Dalrymple and I and many other delightful people will be there, your highness may perhaps condescend to find attraction, if not in pheasants?”
Her tone was bantering, but did he dream when he read in it a touch of pressure? Prudence shook a warning finger, Love laughed.
“It is very good of you to suggest it,” said Wareham, “but I really think you must be mistaken, for Lord Milborough and I only exchanged a few words, and—”
“He is even less in your way than big shoots, you would like to say,” broke in Anne, with a laugh. “Well, I own one may have too much of his society.”
“Then why go there?” asked Wareham bluntly.
“Can one choose just what one likes? When I can, I do.” She quickened her pace. “Here is the rain at last.”
“And in three minutes the house.”
The door was open, lights streamed out; evidently another arrival had just taken place, and there was some amazement on the face of the servants at seeing Miss Dalrymple appear in the dusk, escorted by Mr Wareham.
“You will come in?” she said.
“Thank you, no. Sir Michael will be expecting me. I hope you won’t be the worse for your misadventure.”
From the hall she waved her hand without answering. Wareham turned away.
His walk back was mechanical, and he was scarcely conscious of the rain. It was as if Hugh was by his side, asking if his promise had been kept, demanding an inquiry into words and looks. If thoughts had been in the compact, miserable failure would have been the verdict; as it was, Wareham did not believe that he had betrayed himself. But was ever man so hampered! From first to last since he had known Anne, Love and Honour had struggled; there never had been a moment in which he felt himself free to say, “Dear, I love you!” and yet all the bonds were unseen, some might even say, fantastical. And now, at last, when Death had stepped in between the combatants, even Death could not avail. What must Anne think, if Anne thought at all about the matter? He counted the days. A month had passed.
Nearing the house, he resolved that Sir Michael should hear from him who it was to whom the accident had happened, for chance mention of her name, which might very well occur, would give him a distrust of Wareham. But he found that there had been an increase of illness which made all speech impossible, and Ella was so much occupied with her father that he did not see her until late, when she came in to the drawing-room to find him sitting there with Mrs Newbold. The rain had increased to a wild storm, and a log fire was burning. Ella slipped into a three-cornered chair, close by the hearth.
“Better,” she said, in answer to her aunt’s inquiry, “and asking for you.”
Mrs Newbold bustled off. Wareham said something about the storm.
“And you were caught in it?”
“That was no hardship. I simply walked home and changed, and it did not come on till late.”
“But tell me about the accident.”
“Ah, you’ve heard of it?”
“We hear everything,” and she laughed. “If you would like to know how, in this particular case, understand that the stable-boy’s father lives at a house where the lady’s-maid was taken to rest, and she related that her mistress was walking to Oakwood with a gentleman, whose description Jem recognised as yours. He brought home the lady’s name, and my maid conveyed it to me.”
“It is all true,” Wareham said gravely, “and I should have taken Miss Dalrymple by the short cut in front of the house, but that I was afraid of annoying Sir Michael. We went round by the wood instead.”
“And she was not hurt?” asked the girl, spreading out her hands to the blaze. “I should like to see her—to talk to her.”
“That is what she wishes very much. What do you think? Can she come?”
Ella shook her head. It was impossible.
“Perhaps,” she said, “she may be at church to-morrow, and if father is well enough I shall go. Did she speak of—Hugh?”
“And of Hugh’s family. Evidently when she came here she meant to have seen you all. But—as you say—it’s impossible.”
Wareham had also thought about the coming day, its delights and its dangers. Dear delight to look at her, danger lest he should fail in his promise. But here, he told himself, that could not happen; here, where Hugh’s face met him everywhere, here, where Hugh himself lay at rest, neither friend nor love could forget him. When the day arrived it was blustering and wet: Ella and he walked to church under drenched trees, and she wondered whether Miss Dalrymple would be there. Wareham could not doubt it. Nature would draw her to look at a grave. He felt it. He had a curious desire, too, for her to see the lines of old Forbes’ linking past centuries to present, from whom Hugh drew his brave blood. The Oakwood estates doubled, trebled the Firleigh ones, but Oakwood was a mushroom compared to Firleigh, and Lord Oakleigh’s a new title, while the other belonged to the soil.
Anne, however, was not there. He was disappointed, but excuses tripped promptly up. No other ladies came from the house, and to have seen Hugh’s grave in company with her jovial host would have been like sitting with a jester to view a tragedy. He was sure that Anne had done well to avoid it. Could he have taken her there! And a whisper suggested that Anne could generally arrange what she liked. He flung it from him. Here, after all that had passed, she must have walked warily, or have attracted curious eyes. Ella, too, Ella would have been jealous if Hugh had not his due. And the due meant much.
What Ella thought she did not say. The girl had a curiously reserved nature; it seemed so impossible for her to express her feelings, that she was not credited with many. Their walk back was silent; wind-driven rain beat in their faces, and splashed heavily from the trees, sodden flowers lay prostrate in the garden, an old grey dial turned its weatherbeaten face vainly upwards. Wareham tried to shake off the gloom.
“You don’t mind rain, Ella,” he said. “Come for a stretch this afternoon.”
“Perhaps, if father keeps better. But he may want me to sit with him.”
“You don’t get air enough.”
“I find one can live very well without it.”
“Live, but not thrive. We’ll take the dogs, and get to the top of Slopton ridge.” The next moment she stopped, all the colour out of her face.
“Dick—look!” she cried with anguish.
For all the blinds were down, and one more Forbes had joined his forefathers.