He was so persistent in his arguments that Hilary at length agreed, for peace and quiet, to fall in with his views, at least tacitly.
“But you must do all the lying,” he stipulated. “I lie with the most confounded clumsiness. Besides, I don’t like it. I’ll humor your whim so far as to call you Claud only and not Carthew, and to answer to my own name. And on your head be all the complications which may arise from your silly freak.”
The time had passed swiftly by in talk, and the shadows had grown longer in the lanes, where the air was sweet with budding hawthorn, and birds twittered in the hedges. For the past hour their way had led them alongside of a very spacious and thickly-wooded park, and at this point Lord Carthew, curious as to its ownership, questioned a passing field laborer, who looked at him in surprise.
“That’s the Chase, sir, Sir Philip Cranstoun’s place,” he said, with evident compassion for the inquirer’s ignorance as he passed on.
“Cranstoun?” Lord Carthew repeated the name meditatively. “He’s a Baronet, to be sure, and has a capital place, Cranstoun Hall, near Balmoral. Splendid shooting. He’s a distant connection of ours through his wife, who was Lady Gwendolen Douglas, daughter of the Duke of Lanark. She was my grandmother’s niece; consequently, she is some relation to me, but what I can scarcely define.”
“Are you going to look her up, too, on the strength of it?”
“Not exactly. I know other members of the family. The type is unmistakable. Long, lean, fair, with watery blue eyes, sandy hair, high noses, and the most extraordinary amount of pride and narrowness. I wish Sir Philip Cranstoun joy of his bargain.”
“Do you know him?”
“No. But I’ve heard about him from men who have shot at his Scotch place. Hard as nails and proud as Lucifer, that is the character his guests give him. He has some children, I believe, but I don’t know how many. They must be a most unpleasant lot, if there’s anything in heredity. For myself, I can’t imagine a more disagreeable blend than a Cranstoun and a Douglas.”
They had ridden many miles since lunch, and by six o’clock, when they arrived at a little wayside inn, the Cranstoun Arms, they were both hungry enough to be glad of the simple fare provided. The landlord had not been settled there for more than three years. He was a cheerful and garrulous person, and quite ready to chat about Sir Philip, whom, however, he had only seen on two occasions. As to Lady Cranstoun and the young lady, the former was an invalid, and never drove about except in a closed carriage accompanied by her daughter, and the landlord could not personally express an opinion concerning them.
Concerning Sir Philip’s hard, stern character he had much to impart. The Baronet was especially renowned for his rancor against gypsies. If any one of that nomadic tribe was found trespassing upon his land, he would invariably contrive to have them accused of poaching or thieving.
“Sir Philip, he’d go five miles to hang a gypsy, they say about here. It’s wonderful how he do hate them. There’s a story that some twenty odd years ago one of ’em cursed him in the market-place, nigh the court-house. Folks say a gypsy’s curse sticks. But lor’! what won’t people say?”
Byhalf-past six Lord Carthew and Hilary, having finished their improvised meal, strolled down the country road together, smoking, glad to stretch their legs after being so long in the saddle.
The former especially was in high glee because of mine host’s deferential manner toward Hilary when he was told by Claud that his name was Lord Carthew.
“Until that moment, as you saw,” he exclaimed, “the eggs and bacon and cold beef were supposed to be quite good enough for us. But as soon as the good man found that you had what cockneys call ‘a handle to your name,’ he promptly started profuse and tiresome apologies. It’s such a relief to have that sort of rubbish lavished on you instead of on me.”
“I think you make an absurd fuss about trifles,” observed Hilary, calmly.
One great reason for the warm affection cherished by “mad Lord Carthew” for his friend was Hilary’s utter absence of either arrogance or toadyism. The sturdy Yorkshire independence of young Pritchard never degenerated into the roughness which sometimes characterizes Northerners. He was proud of his family in his way. The Pritchards had farmed their own land for over two hundred and fifty years, and their present homestead had been built in the days of Elizabeth. Lord Carthew had had to make the first advances toward friendship, but once he had succeeded in winning Hilary’s respect and liking, the latter was too sensible to withdraw proudly from his companionship because he was not his equal in social position.
“You worry about things, trifles as it seems to me, in such an extraordinary way,” he said. “Now this evening, what can be pleasanter than this scene, the little wood by the roadside, where every tree is budding into leaf, the primroses in yellow patches among the ground ivy, and that fresh, delicious smell of spring in the air? I’m thankful I was sent away from home to Harrow and Oxford, and an accountant’s office in London. I suppose if I’d never left the country I should never have seen any beauty in it.”
“You would have felt it, but would have been unable to put it into words,” returned his friend. “Let’s explore this wood a bit, and see where it leads to.”
They struck in over the moss under the young trees. Straight ahead of them, as they pushed their way through the branches, they saw a high, precipitous bank, crowned by a low stone wall, and beyond more trees.
“That will be Sir Philip Cranstoun’s place again, I suppose,” observed the Viscount. “He’s got a good bit of land enclosed about here.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when both men heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs trampling over the dry leaves and young twigs behind them. Pressing a little forward, they came to a point where a passage seemed to have been made through the trees, not much more than four feet wide. Standing within the shadow of the woods so that their figures were hidden, both young men turned their gaze in the direction of the horse’s galloping feet, and through an opening in the trees both saw at the same moment a young girl, mounted on a beautiful little black thoroughbred, flying towards them.
She was making straight for the bank. Her small, half-childish face was pale, her mouth fast shut, while her great dark eyes shone with excitement. Under her soft felt hat her dark hair, tossed by the wind, fluttered in soft ringlets round her face, rebellious of the hairpins which held it in check in a coil at the back of her head. In figure she was very slender and youthful looking, and her plain dark green habit emphasized her lack of superfluous curves. Even though she passed so quickly, both the two friends received the same powerful impression of excitement, intensity, and enjoyment stamped upon her features.
“She can’t be going to jump that wall!”
The same exclamation was on the lips of both. At the foot of the bank rider and steed paused. The girl stooped over her horse’s neck, and murmured something in caressing tones. Then she lifted the reins, the little thoroughbred ran up the bank like a cat, lifted his forefeet, and disappeared with his rider over the wall.
“By Jove!”
“I never saw anything neater!”
Just an interchange of these remarks, and then Claud and Hilary instinctively made their way to the bank, and slowly and laboriously ascended its steep sides. The stone wall was about five feet high, and over the other side the ground shelved again in an awkward dip before what seemed the fringe of a dense wood.
Hilary paused by the wall, but found that Claud had already begun to climb it by means of the uneven stones.
“We can’t go any farther,” said the Yorkshireman, quietly; “this is private property.”
“What does that matter? We are out for adventures. I never saw any one with a seat like that child’s, did you?”
“She rides well, certainly,” Hilary returned, deliberately; “but she isn’t a child.”
“Fifteen, I should say.”
“Or a little more.”
“Anyhow, I am interested, and am going over.”
“I shall have to stand by you, and keep you out of mischief, I suppose.”
A few scrambling steps, a slide, and a roll, brought them to the base of the declivity, and within the precincts of Cranstoun Chase enclosure. The identity of the girl had not suggested itself to either of them; but simultaneously within their hearts the sight of her had aroused a strange feeling of interest and excitement. About that small, pale face, shining dark eyes and lithe, girlish form, there clung a fascination which both men felt powerless to resist. And although he had not yet had time to realize it, Lord Carthew, for his part, had fallen in love at first sight with the beauty and the daring of the thoroughbred’s rider.
Dusk was gathering about them; yet they pressed on, both filled with the overmastering desire to catch another glimpse of that charming vision. After forcing their way in silence through the thick undergrowth, they came upon a wide, grassy avenue ploughed by the recent tramp of horses’ feet. As they emerged from among the trees again, upon their ears came the sound of a horse’s flying feet tearing up the turf. A good way off yet they could see her, and see, too, the antics of the small, black horse, beside himself with excitement, rearing, plunging, and throwing up his heels in a way which would have unseated any but a clever and experienced rider.
Suddenly the thoroughbred paused, raised his head, sniffing the air, and then started off at a mad pace along the turf avenue. It seemed patent to the two spectators that he was running away with his daring rider, the more so as a little feminine shriek reached their ears.
Clearly it was their duty to stop him. The girl would most certainly break her neck if thrown at that rate of progress. Their plans were formed after a second’s deliberation. As the horse neared them, coming like the wind, with clods of earth torn up by his heels flying in the rear, Lord Carthew sprang into the open, waving the animal back, and in the moment’s pause of alarm, Hilary dashed forward and seized the reins, hanging on to them with all his weight.
Snorting, and quivering in every limb, the horse at length came to a standstill, and looked with wide-open, bloodshot eyes at his captor. He for his part had his gaze fixed upon the rider.
For a moment she stared down at his face, which was not so very far below her own, without speaking. Her great clear eyes were distended, like those of her horse, and in the twilight her face seemed to wear an unearthly pallor. His hand was still upon her bridle. She withdrew her eyes from his, and asked, petulantly:
“Why did you stop my horse?”
“He was running away with you.”
She laughed disdainfully as she repeated!
“Running away—withme!”
“I heard you scream.”
“Yes. Because I was enjoying myself.”
“No one ought to ride at such a pace as that,” he said, coolly, still with his brown eyes fixed upon hers. “It is dangerous.”
“Not to me. And who are you, and what right have you to lecture me? Take your hand off my bridle, and let me go.”
As she spoke she gave a sharp cut with her whip on her horse’s shoulder. The animal reared and plunged, and simultaneously the clear, sharp “ping” of a shot rang through the silent woods.
Hilary’s hand dropped from the bridle, and a short exclamation of pain escaped his lips as his arm dropped by his side. Through the sleeve of his shooting-coat near the shoulder the blood oozed out, and began rapidly pouring down his arm. Lord Carthew sprang to his assistance.
“I am shot,” Hilary said. “It serves me right for interfering with a woman. Carthew, let’s get out of this.”
The girl, whose horse had dashed on ahead as soon as Hilary’s restraining hand was withdrawn, returned now, and uttered a little cry of horror as she saw that Hilary was wounded.
“How did it happen?” she asked breathlessly.
“Some one in the woods over there shot him in the shoulder as he was holding your horse,” returned Lord Carthew. “I must get him to the nearest inn as soon as possible.”
“No,” she exclaimed, impulsively. “Look how the blood is pouring from his shoulder! It is all my fault. We have a doctor staying in the house. Your friend must be taken home.”
“Home! Where?”
“To the Chase. I am Miss Cranstoun.”
Even in the hurry of the moment and the anxiety he felt on his friend’s account, for Hilary was very pale and evidently in pain, Lord Carthew could hardly refrain from a look of surprise at the girl’s statement. She was so utterly unlike his ideal of what “the product of a union between a Douglas and a Cranstoun” would be. No “long, limp, watery-eyed fairness” was here, but a small face, eloquent in its every line, a sensitive white skin, mobile red lips whose expression changed constantly, and eyes more wonderful even by this imperfect light than any he had ever seen, eyes strangely luminous, dilated pupils, and a border to the iris of so dark a blue that it seemed almost black. He could not have said at that moment whether she was adorably beautiful or only supremely interesting. She had captured and chained his imagination, and her every movement seemed to him the perfection of grace. Without any assistance she sprang off her horse, and taking his bridle, approached Hilary timidly.
“If you feel faint,” she said, “will you not mount my horse, and let me lead him to the house? Indeed, I don’t think you can walk. And may I try to bind your shoulder?”
Her voice was very sweet, and her gentle, even humble manner of speaking delighted Claud. He was astonished to hear his friend answer so coldly:
“I require no assistance, thank you, Miss Cranstoun. I am only sorry I spoiled your ride. Claud, we must get back to the inn as soon as possible.”
With that he raised his hat with his left hand, and turning his back on the lady, began to make his way through the trees in the direction whence they had come.
“Go after him! Go after him!” the girl whispered to Lord Carthew, clasping her small hands impulsively, while tears sprang to her eyes. “He is not fit to be alone. I can see he is badly hurt.”
Her words were only too true. A few seconds later Claud, hurrying after his friend, found him leaning against a tree, with set, white face, and half-closed eyes.
“I’m all right,” Hilary muttered in response to Carthew’s anxious inquiry. “Let’s—get—on.”
His voice sounded faint and muffled. Under the trees, in the waning light, it was impossible to see his face, but Claud realized that he was in great pain.
Here was a predicament indeed! Hilary weighed nearly fourteen stone. A space of tangled underwood, a bank, a wall, a steep declivity, another wood, and a walk of half a mile, separated the young men from the nearest inn. Even could they contrive to reach it, one wounded and half-insensible man and his slenderly-built companion, the accommodation would be of the poorest, and they were several miles from the nearest town, that of Grayling. Miss Cranstoun had offered the hospitality of her home, but Hilary had refused it, and Claud knew him to be extremely obstinate. Clearly he could not remain where he was, trespassing in the grounds of the Chase, with the night fast approaching, and Lord Carthew tried to rouse him.
“Hilary, old boy,” he said, “remember where we are, and what a distance we have to go. Won’t it be better to accept Miss Cranstoun’s offer and go to her house, to get your wound dressed by the doctor there?”
Hilary suddenly raised his head, and spoke in tones of unexpected emphasis.
“I wish I’d let the little vixen break her neck!” he remarked, viciously. “And I certainly am not going to accept the hospitality of a man who takes snapshots at any stranger who is fool enough to try to oblige his daughter.”
There was a sound of quick footsteps over the dead leaves and twigs. Miss Cranstoun had joined them in time to overhear Hilary’s last words. It was too dark to see her face, but her tone was courteous, if cold.
“It was not my father who fired that shot,” she said, quietly, “but one of the keepers. Stephen!” she called, authoritatively, to some one behind her. “This is the gentleman whom you wounded by your stupid mistake.”
The squarely built figure of a young, black-bearded man, in the dress of a gamekeeper and carrying a gun, appeared in attendance on her.
“I am very sorry, gentlemen,” he said, in a dogged manner, without looking at them, “but in the half light I thought it was a tramp worrying the young mistress, and so I fired my gun off to frighten him. I hadn’t any thought to hit any one.”
“Your confounded carelessness may have very serious results,” said Lord Carthew. “My friend is half-unconscious now from loss of blood. You must help me to get him out of this wood, and to bind up his shoulder roughly until we can get a doctor for him.”
Hilary muttered an impatient protest as the gamekeeper, in obedience to a few hurried words of command from Miss Cranstoun, assisted Hilary back to the spot where they had left the horse, with his bridle fastened to a tree. The young Yorkshireman’s coat was already saturated with blood, and Miss Cranstoun stood by, silent and very white, while Lord Carthew and her father’s servant drew off the wounded man’s coat, and made with their handkerchiefs a temporary bandage for the injured shoulder.
“He must come to the house at once,” burst from her lips at last. “You can see quite well he can hardly walk. Stephen, alter the saddle, and help him on to Zephyr.”
“I can very well walk, Miss Cranstoun. There is not the slightest need for all this fuss and trouble,” said Hilary, still with the same coldness he had before shown in his manner towards her.
“Nonsense, man! Miss Cranstoun is perfectly right, and we are very much obliged to her. Now, help us all you can in getting on this horse, for lifting you is no light matter, I can tell you.”
A feeling of growing faintness did more than his friend’s injunctions in inducing Hilary to comply. Zephyr snorted and fidgeted. The difference between seven stone twelve and thirteen stone twelve was an appreciable one; but Stephen’s strong hand was on the bridle, and Zephyr’s mistress walked alongside, patting and caressing the animal, and reducing his nervous excitement into comparative quiet by the magic of her touch.
Lord Carthew followed in silence until, the short cut between the trees becoming narrow, Miss Cranstoun stepped back, and he found himself beside her.
It had grown too dark for him to see more than the outline of her slight figure and delicate profile as she walked behind the horse, lifting her riding-habit from the ground with the hand in which she carried her workmanlike-looking hunting-crop.
“I cannot tell you how sorry I am about this accident,” she said, addressing Lord Carthew suddenly. “I am sure your friend meant to be kind. But I thought there was no one about, and I screamed in that silly way from sheer enjoyment. It isn’t riding that I care for, butflying. And I did not guess that any one would be in the woods so late, so I was just having a gallop before dinner. I have never been thrown in my life. I am never so happy or so comfortable as when I am on horseback, and unless Zephyr is going as fast as he can, neither he nor I enjoy ourselves. But I can understand that to strangers it might look dangerous. And I am dreadfully sorry about the accident to your friend. Will you tell me his name?”
In this young girl’s whole manner there was something so simple, innocent, and frank that Claud was more than ever enchanted with her. That feeling of fate which had haunted him all through his recent tour was upon him now. Here were all the conditions of Kyro’s prophecy fulfilled. The lady whom he was to meet on a journey, and with whom he was to fall madly in love, was walking by his side, and speaking to him in a voice which went straight to his heart, awakening hitherto unknown chords of sweetness there. All the romance, the sentiment, and the poetry, dormant in the nature of this singular young man, started into life at the proximity of this charming creature, at once so daring as a rider, so maidenly and gentle as a woman. Here was an opportunity of applying his test. He remembered it, and said unhesitatingly, in answer to Miss Cranstoun’s question:
“My friend is Lord Carthew.”
“Oh!”
It must have been fancy, he told himself, but her ejaculation seemed to express disappointment; and he noticed that she did not, when they struck into a wider path, walk as before by the side of the horse, but remained in the rear, much to his own secret satisfaction.
“I am afraid we shall be disturbing your parents,” he said, after a few moments’ silence.
“My father is in London,” she answered; “and mamma is an invalid. Lately she has been more delicate than usual, and an old friend and doctor of hers is happily staying with us, Dr. Morland Graham. I hope he will be able to set your friend right again. I shall never forgive myself if the wound proves to be a serious one.”
“I can’t see where you are to blame. It was my stupid blundering into private property in the course of an evening stroll with my friend that was the origin of the mischief, and our officious interference during your ride. But your man was certainly too free with his powder and shot. Have you had him in your service long?”
“Four or five years. He is very clever with dogs and horses. My father has a special dislike against tramps, and Stephen, in his over-zeal just now, was only obeying orders. The men are all told to frighten away intruders from the grounds by any means in their power.”
“Still it’s rather drastic to shoot any chance stranger,” he suggested; “especially as I have heard that the Chase is a very interesting old historical mansion, and likely to attract antiquarians.”
“People say that,” she answered, thoughtfully. “But I can never see anything to admire in it myself. It is called mediæval, which makes me feel sorry for the Middle Ages.”
“You have the most wonderful legends in your family—have you not?—connected with your motto, ‘Cranstoun, Remember!’ I am greatly interested in antiquarian researches, and my family—I mean Lord Carthew’s family—being connected by marriage with your mother’s, has made the hunting out of these tales of interest to me.”
“Is Lord Carthew related to my mother?” she asked, with interest. “She will be very glad to welcome him and you also. You have not told me your name?”
“Oh! it is so entirely undistinguished as to be hardly worth mentioning. Claud Pritchard, farmer, from Yorkshire, on a short and last tour with my old college friend before leaving England to try and make my fortune in Canada.”
“Indeed!” she said. “You don’t look in the least like a farmer. But here is the Chase.”
The great, gloomy pile stood before them, occupying a considerable space of land, but hemmed in so closely with trees that its full dimensions were somewhat lost on the spectator. Lights burned here and there in the windows, but the whole impression given by the ivy-hung, gray stone building was one of prison-like silence and solitude.
Stephen Lee’s sturdy ringing of the deep-toned bell brought a man servant in sombre livery to the door, who, after exchanging a few words with the young gamekeeper, descended the broad, shallow steps between the grim-visaged stone wolves that guarded the entrance, and offered to assist Hilary into the house. Miss Cranstoun meanwhile had disappeared into the house. As Lord Carthew and his friend entered it, she returned to greet them on the threshold, accompanied by a portly, gray-haired man of between fifty and sixty, to whom she was rapidly explaining the situation.
The great bare hall, with its timbered roof, and four motionless figures in full armor ranged between the worn and faded tapestry on the walls, surmounted by trophies of arms and implements of the chase, which glittered as the firelight played on them, struck Lord Carthew as a perfectly fitting background for Miss Cranstoun’s slender figure and the strange ethereal beauty of her face. Amid petty or conspicuously modern surroundings she would have seemed, so he told himself, wholly out of place.
Other impressions crowded upon him. For one thing, the servants all looked bewildered and alarmed, and even in the fashionable London doctor’s manner there was a touch of constraint, as though he was not quite certain of his ground. As for Hilary the hall and every one in it seemed rocking round him. The pain in his shoulder was acute, and the action of riding had caused the blood to burst through the temporary bandages over the severe gunshot wound which Stephen Lee’s weapon had inflicted. He had hardly heard what was being said about him as they led him to a room, the library, as he afterwards learned, and laid him on a sofa, at which point he very quietly fainted.
When he came to, he was lying on an old-fashioned four-poster bedstead in a great, ghost-like apartment, hung with tapestry—as he afterwards learned, a guest-chamber of the Chase. A woman was on her knees trying to persuade a fire to burn in a seldom-used chimney, and another servant, elderly and dark-complexioned, stood near his bedside, attending to the instructions of Dr. Morland Graham, while Lord Carthew watched him from the foot of the bed.
“You place the bandage so,” the doctor was saying, “and as soon as he recovers consciousness, give him a dose of this. Your friend has had a nasty accident, Mr. Pritchard, but a man of his superb physique will soon get over a trifle of this kind, provided that fever does not intervene. What a magnificently made young man Lord Carthew is, to be sure! Quite unlike his father the Earl. I was dining with Lord Northborough a few weeks ago. I suppose you will let him know of his son’s accident?”
“Leave that to me,” returned Claud, promptly.
A voice from the bed attracted their attention at this point:
“What on earth are you two talking about? And where am I?”
“Hush, hush! my dear Lord Carthew! You really must not excite yourself. You are in very good hands indeed. I informed Lady Cranstoun that you must not be moved to-night, and she instantly insisted that you and Mr. Pritchard should be her guests until you have completely recovered. She is greatly distressed at your accident, I assure you. I must leave you now and join the ladies at dinner, which has been postponed for over an hour. You will soon be about again, believe me.”
“But why do you call me Lord Carthew?” Hilary inquired, trying to sit up.
The doctor exchanged a sympathetic glance with Claud.
“Poor fellow!” he murmured. “Loss of blood—consequent weakness. He is wandering in his mind.”
Assoon as the doctor had left the room, Hilary endeavored to struggle into a sitting position, from which he was restrained by Margaret, who had been told off to nurse him.
“Do, pray, keep quiet, my lord; you will undo all the doctor’s work. Now, take your medicine and lie still, please.”
“I’ll take the medicine if you like, but on condition that you go away then, nurse, if you please, and leave me to talk to my friend here.”
“Don’t let him talk too much and excite himself,” was Margaret’s parting admonition to Lord Carthew as she left the room.
As soon as they were alone, Hilary plunged into his subject, regardless of his friend’s warning gesture. From where he lay on the bed, the wounded man could not see the kneeling figure of the servant over the fire on the farther side of the great, bare room.
“What is all this foolery about changing names with me?” he began. “It must be stopped at once. I won’t stay for five minutes in the house under false pretences.”
“I am afraid you won’t be able to do much more with that fire,” Lord Carthew observed, raising his voice as he addressed the servant, while he glanced meaningly at his friend.
“I am afraid not, sir,” returned the woman, civilly. A few moments later she left the room, and carefully applied her ear to the keyhole outside, from which position she was enabled now and then to overhear scraps of the conversation within.
“Now let us talk this matter out quietly and in as few words as possible,” Lord Carthew began, drawing a chair to his friend’s bedside. “What does it matter to you for twenty-four hours what they call you? You will probably never see any of these people again. I have introduced us both in one set of names to Miss Cranstoun, and she has passed us on under those names to the doctor and to her mother. It’s impossible to go back now. You had agreed to the arrangement which we started earlier in the day. There is no reason why we should not play our little comedy out just because an unlucky accident has intervened.”
“I utterly decline to be a party to such nonsense,” exclaimed Hilary, angrily, the blood rushing to his face. “It’s all very well for you. A man who assumes a rank lower than his own is at worst a romantic fool; but a commoner who tries to pass himself off as a lord is a paltry cad, and it’s a situation I won’t fill for a single moment.”
“You can’t alter things now, as I said before,” Lord Carthew urged. “When it comes out—I should say, if it comes out at any time that we have changed places—I shall own up that it was a foolish freak of mine, carried out in spite of your opposition. Now lie still and try to go to sleep, there’s a good fellow. I can’t eat a second dinner, and I’m certainly not in drawing-room trim. Still I want to see as much of my—or rather of your—relatives as I can while we’re here, so that unless there’s anything I can do for you——”
“There’s certainly something you can do,” roared the wounded man, “and that at once. You must contradict your former ridiculous statement, and explain our true positions instantly to Miss Cranstoun and her mother. Otherwise, I shall get out of bed and go downstairs and do it myself, in spite of all the doctors in England.”
Almost before he had finished speaking, Lord Carthew had left the room, so quickly indeed that he barely escaped stumbling over the kneeling form of the servant outside the door, who immediately affected to be occupied in straightening the mat. He was extremely sorry for Hilary’s accident, and most anxious to see him well out of it. But he was also already fathoms deep in love, and longing to feast his eyes upon Miss Cranstoun again; besides had not the doctor declared that Hilary would be all right provided that fever did not follow, and that he must not be allowed to excite himself by talking?
In the oak-panelled dining-room, Lord Carthew found three persons seated at dinner, and he was instantly struck by the utter absence of resemblance between Lady Cranstoun and the young girl whom he supposed to be her daughter. The former was just such a Douglas as he had described to Hilary; tall, sandy-haired, and limp, with a thin face, a high nose and colorless blue-gray eyes under white lashes, a perfectly well-bred and entirely uninteresting personage of about eight-and-forty years of age, in gray silk, shrouded by a voluminous white knitted shawl of Shetland wool.
She gave Lord Carthew a long, nerveless, white hand in greeting, and inquired after his friend, expressing her regret at the accident. Even while answering her polite inquiries, Claud’s eyes involuntarily travelled to the face of Miss Cranstoun, who, dressed in a girlish dinner costume of ivory silk, sat beside Dr. Morland Graham. In the lamplight she looked even more attractive than in the half-obscurity in which he had before seen her. Her cheeks had but little color as contrasted with the vivid scarlet of her lips, but to Lord Carthew’s keenly observant eyes, this pallor, and the extraordinary brightness of her eyes, suggested in no way ill health, but rather a vivid and ardent nature under strong repression. Her gown was cut low about the throat, and the sleeves were little more than elbow length, showing off the fairness and purity of her skin and the delicacy of her slim wrists. A turquoise brooch was her only ornament, and seemed to carry out in color the intense blue of her eyes between the black pupils and the nearly purple borders to the iris. Her whole appearance was poetic and interesting in a high degree, but the young viscount remarked that her manner had lost something of its naïve frankness, and had become more sedate and restrained than before.
“I am the more interested in Lord Carthew,” Lady Cranstoun was saying, “because we are connections. Lord Northborough’s mother was a Douglas, and my aunt.”
She spoke in slow, unmusical tones, with a slight Scotch accent. Lord Carthew rightly judged that, being a Douglas, she would have an exaggerated pride of birth, which was indeed the poor lady’s chief weakness. A single question from him sufficed to start her on her favorite subject of the numerous marriages and relationships of her father, the Duke of Lanark’s, family. As her appetite was poor, and no one could be rude enough to interrupt her at her own table, she was soon deep in the intricacies of the Douglas ancestry and Douglas marriages, while Dr. Graham set himself steadily to enjoy the good fare before him, and Miss Cranstoun kept her eyes steadily fixed on her plate, her cheeks flushed, and her dark eyebrows contracted with annoyance.
The dinner was good, the wines were few but excellent, and the greater part of the table service was in solid old silver, adorned with the motto “Cranstoun, Remember,” and the mailed hand grasping a wolf’s head, which was the family device. Opposite Lord Carthew, as he sat at table, there hung a portrait of a man in armor, whose sinister light eyes seemed to follow his every movement. Look which way he would, from Stella Cranstoun’s beautiful face to the doctor’s plump, bland visage, or Lady Cranstoun’s washed-out countenance, Lord Carthew found his gaze fascinated and held by the pale, square, inscrutable face of the man in armor, about whose narrow, close-shut lips a bitter smile seemed to be playing.
“That is a wonderful picture opposite, Lady Cranstoun,” he felt compelled to say at last. “By this light and at this distance I can hardly distinguish whether it is really old, or only painted in the old manner.”
His hostess did not at once answer him, and he noted that she grew a shade or two paler, and that a frightened, furtive look came into her eyes. Miss Cranstoun ceased speaking to the doctor, and looked inquiringly toward her.
“The picture is modern,” Lady Cranstoun said at last, and paused again.
“It is a portrait of my father,” Stella added, with marked, even, as it seemed, defiant distinctness.
“An excellent piece of work, is it not?” Dr. Graham remarked, breaking in upon the silence which followed Miss Cranstoun’s statement. “The tone really reminds me of a Murillo—so dignified, and sombre, and mellow. Quite a harmony in gray, as we should call it in our latter-day studio slang. The work attracted considerable attention when it was hung in the Royal Academy five years ago. You see Sir Philip is represented in a suit of armor worn by a member of his own family at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In his hand he holds a sword with lowered point, and he stands as though waiting for an enemy to attack him. The manipulation of the armor is most dexterously rendered, the effect of a low light upon it from the sky being reproduced admirably, really admirably. Herkomer has never done anything better.”
Involuntarily, as the doctor rambled on in his deep mellifluous tones, Lord Carthew’s eyes left Sir Philip’s portrait, and fixed themselves upon the face of his daughter. For one brief moment he caught upon her lovely features a cold, mocking expression almost identical with that which distinguished her father’s; but almost before he had had time to feel shocked and astonished thereby, Stella had turned to the doctor, and was asking him if he knew anything of the pictures which would attract the most attention at the forthcoming Academy exhibition, and listening with apparent interest to his replies.
In answer to Claud’s inquiry whether she went often to London to see the pictures, Miss Cranstoun answered that she had only been in London three or four times in her life.
“I read all about pictures and music in the ladies’ papers,” she said. “Mamma is so delicate, the journey to London tires her. But next month I am to be presented by my grandmamma, the Duchess of Lanark, and then, I suppose, I shall be taken to see everything.”
“You must be looking forward to yourdébut, I imagine?” said Lord Carthew.
She looked across at him steadily, and then answered quietly:
“I suppose I ought to. But mamma will be dull without me.”
“Indeed I shall, my dear child,” Lady Cranstoun returned, with a look toward the young girl of so much kindness and affection that in Claud’s eyes it redeemed her plainness.
After the dessert had been served on heavy silver salvers, Lady Cranstoun rose, and followed by her daughter, glided quietly from the room. A pause attended their exit. Then Lord Carthew observed suddenly:
“If that portrait really resembles my absent host, he must be a man of very singular and striking appearance.”
“He is indeed,” returned Dr. Graham, with emphasis. “Shall we adjourn to the smoking-room? The tapestry in this room is liable to be injured by smoke.”
The smoking-room was the most genuinely comfortable room in the house which Claud had yet seen. Presumably Sir Philip, realizing that mediæval furniture did not blend with a proper enjoyment of Sir Walter Raleigh’s weed, had in this one instance adopted wholly modern and fashionable methods of decoration. The books which filled a case against the wall were nearly all French novels, the lounges were the perfection of comfort, and everything, from the shaded lamp to the liqueur stand, was from a London West-end firm.
As Dr. Graham closed the door upon them Lord Carthew unconsciously heaved a sigh of relief. He himself had been reared in a spacious ancestral home, and had spent his boyhood between Northborough Castle in the Isle of Wight, Belgrave Square in London, and the comfortable country seat which his father had built himself in Norfolk. But Lord Northborough was both a man of the world and a patron of the arts, while Claud’s American mother seized with avidity upon every new device for beautifying her homes. The solemn bareness of the Chase was wholly new to him, and being keenly sensitive, Lord Carthew was, moreover, oppressed by an indefinable sentiment in the air of chilly gloom and repression, which Lady Cranstoun’s dejected, nervous manners, and the compressed lips of her beautiful daughter, helped to accentuate.
“Now tell me, Dr. Graham,” he began, stretching his feet toward the pleasant warmth of the wood fire, “what manner of man is this Sir Philip Cranstoun? I have heard a good deal about him, and I am rather anxious to meet him.”
Dr. Graham stirred the fire, cleared his throat, and glanced somewhat apprehensively round the room.
“Sir Philip Cranstoun,” he began, “is a man of five or six and forty, in the prime of life, in fact, a stanch Conservative and belonging to one of the oldest families in England.”
“Yes, I know all about that. But what I mean is—what is he like in his own home, toward his family, for instance, and his servants?”
“Sir Philip,” returned the wary doctor, “is a good deal away, and Lady Cranstoun’s health does not permit her to accompany him to Scotland, or even to London. Miss Cranstoun, who is a most devoted daughter, invariably remains by her mother’s side, and has, I believe, never been out of England. But she has had every advantage of education; masters and mistresses have attended at the Chase ever since she was five years old, when I first made her acquaintance, to instruct her in English, French, German, Italian and Latin, music, singing, painting, dancing, and calisthenics; she is also an admirable horsewoman.”
“The last I know from personal observation,” returned Lord Carthew. “But we were speaking of her father. Is he not proud of such a lovely and accomplished daughter?”
The doctor glanced at him slyly out of the corners of his worldly, good-natured eyes.
“I presume, Mr. Pritchard,” he said, “that you are acquainted with some details of the daily life here and do not need any enlightenment from me?”
“Not at all,” Lord Carthew answered, frankly. “But I am of an observing disposition, and I have already formed an impression that every one in this house is cowed and dominated by its master, his daughter included.”
“You are perfectly right,” the doctor assented, after a short pause. “Miss Cranstoun is a charming girl; I like and admire her greatly. But it is useless to deny the friction which occasionally results from her father’s admonitions. Sir Philip is—er—well—he is not a popular man, and Miss Cranstoun, well-bred and affectionate as she most certainly is by nature, is not the kind of girl to endure beingdriven. She has a good deal of her father’s spirit, in short. Most certainly she does not get it from her mother, although when I knew Lady Gwendolen Douglas before her marriage, she was the handsomest and liveliest of the Duke of Lanark’s daughters. She has altered very greatly, very greatly indeed.”
Reading between the doctor’s words, Lord Carthew realized several things which the former left unsaid. For one, that Sir Philip was an intolerable tyrant and despot, who tried to grind the hearts of his amiable wife and lovely daughter under the iron heel of his will; for another, that between him and Stella Cranstoun an incessant struggle was waging; and for still another, that Dr. Morland Graham cordially disliked the baronet, although he was too politic to put his feelings into actual words.
“I very much hope,” Dr. Graham went on musingly, as he contemplated the glowing tip of his cigar, “that Miss Cranstoun will soon be happily married.”
A keen pang of jealousy shot through Lord Carthew’s heart.
“Has she any avowed admirer then?” he inquired, in would-be careless tones.
“Dear me, no! Beyond her French and German masters, and the old vicar of Grayling, and myself, she has hardly had any acquaintance with the other sex. A more absolutely fancy-free young lady, I should say, never existed. But she has so much charm and individuality, as well as beauty, that when once she enters into social life in London, under the judicious guardianship of her grandmother, the Duchess of Lanark, there is not much doubt that suitors will not long be lacking. Although I understand that the Chase is in strict entail to the heirs male of the Cranstoun family, as well as the Scotch property, Sir Philip’s daughter will no doubt be some day possessed of a very comfortable little income, which in these extravagant, money-loving days,” added the doctor, smiling, as he took a cup of coffee which a servant brought into the room at that moment on a silver salver, “is a thing which is supposed to enhance any young lady’s attraction.”
Lord Carthew said nothing, and remained for a short time plunged in thought. Not only had he fallen in love at first sight, but his instinct had happily guided his affections to exactly the right object. In spite of his thin veneer of almost revolutionary theories, Lord Northborough’s heir was at heart a Tory and an aristocrat, and Sir Philip’s daughter was a thousand times the more desirable in his eyes because she was a Cranstoun on her father’s side, and granddaughter to the Duke of Lanark. Had he experienced the same overmastering feeling of instantaneous love for a lowly-born girl, he would certainly have regretted it, and would possibly have done his best to conquer it. But in this case no such self-restraint was necessary. If only he could gain her affection, above all in the homely guise of Mr. Pritchard, son to a Yorkshire yeoman, perfect married happiness awaited him.
Dr. Morland Graham, leaning back in his chair, smoking, and enjoying an after-dinner mood of benevolent calm, watched his companion with some amusement, and wondered for what freak Lord Northborough’s son and heir, bearing a strong resemblance to his father and sporting on his finger a signet-ring upon which his family crest was plainly discernible as he held his cigar to his lips, was wandering about the county under the alias of Pritchard. Dr. Morland Graham liked to be on good terms with his aristocratic patients; he liked to know their little secrets, and they, being only mortal, were usually ready enough to confide them to “that dear kind, sympathetic Dr. Graham.” He knew quite well that the Earl and his wife were extremely anxious to see their only son, the “mad viscount,” married and settled, and it occurred to the worthy doctor that this might be an excellent opportunity for ameliorating the lot of Stella Cranstoun, who, once under the protecting care of a husband of wealth and position, would be free forever from the petty tyranny of her absolutely detestable father.
Lord Carthew knew nothing of the doctor’s musings. One thought alone possessed him. To see Stella as soon as possible, to talk to her, to draw her out of her reserve and gradually get her to confide in him. As if divining his wishes, Dr. Graham suggested an adjournment to the drawing-room, and proposed to Lady Cranstoun, who was reclining on a sofa, a game of chess.
The drawing-room was extremely large, and furnished in a chilly, old-fashioned style. The faded carpet belonged to the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign and was covered by day with a drugget, for Sir Philip Cranstoun was economical to stinginess in the appointment of his household. The walls were painted in white and gold, the furniture was of old-fashioned shape, covered by day with chintz, and resplendent at night in amber satin. A grand piano and a harp seemed lost in the distant and ill-lighted recesses of the room, which curtained four long windows opening on to a stone terrace at the back of the house. Near a tall standard lamp Lady Cranstoun’s sofa was standing, and close by, on a cushion on the hearthrug, her slender arms clasping her knees, and her eyes fixed on the fire, Stella Cranstoun was seated, with the head of a handsome collie dog resting on her knee.
As the two gentlemen entered the room, she looked up quickly, but did not speak, and it was only after the doctor had suggested the game of chess that Miss Cranstoun inquired eagerly:
“How is he now? Is he better?”
Lord Carthew flushed guiltily. In his desire to see Stella again he had forgotten his friend completely. But the doctor’s conscience was not so sensitive, and he answered, in his blandest professional tones, that Lord Carthew had been given a sedative before dinner, and that it was not advisable to disturb him at present.
“You haven’t been up then?” Stella murmured reproachfully to Claud, while Lady Cranstoun rang for the footman to remove her coffee-cup and to draw the chess-table up to her sofa.
“No. The nurse said he must not excite himself by talking.”
He felt it was rather a lame excuse, the more so as he felt her dark eyes fixed almost indignantly upon his face.
“You see,” she said, lowering her gaze, and slightly blushing, “I feel that the accident was all my fault, and that is what makes me so anxious.”
“I will go at once, and let you know how he is,” he returned, and left the room for that purpose after she had rewarded him with a smile of gratitude.
Hilary was not asleep. He was tossing in bed, with flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Margaret, the nurse, was in the room, so he addressed his friend in an indignant torrent of broken French.
“What possesses you to let the servants suppose you and I have changed places?” he burst out, angrily. “I simply won’t stand their ‘my lording’ me much longer. I didn’t come here to be made a fool of.”
His noisy, excited manner was so unlike his usual easy-going and pleasant disposition that Lord Carthew, watching him, could not but conclude that he was feverish, especially as Hilary seemed desperately thirsty. After handing him some ice, which by the doctor’s orders had been placed by the bedside, Lord Carthew took a seat near, and tried to calm him, while Margaret discreetly left the room.
“Look here, Hilary,” he said, “I will confess the truth. I have fallen in love at last, and Kyro’s prediction is fulfilled. That is why I so particularly wish to remain Mr. Pritchard for a few hours longer.”
Hilary became suddenly quiet.
“It’s that crazy girl who took the jump, and whose obstinacy and foolhardiness brought me this nice little charge of gunshot in my shoulder, I suppose?” he said.
“It is Miss Cranstoun certainly, but—”
“Oh! spare me a lover’s rhapsodies, old chap. Under the circumstances, you can scarcely expect me to regard her as you do.”
“She is more sorry about the accident than I can possibly tell you, and blames herself entirely——”
“Oh, I dare say. Well, go back and make love to her by all means. What is that?”
The sweet notes of a pure soprano voice were wafted up to them from the drawing-room immediately below. Some one was singing the Lorelei to the accompaniment of harp.
Lord Carthew crossed to the door and held it open. Something wild and plaintive in the quality of Stella’s voice, for he knew well the singer could be none other than she, touched him deeply, and seemed to draw him like a magnet to her side. Holding the door open, he glanced at the bed whereon Hilary lay with closed eyes and frowning brows, as though asleep, an impression which he carried out further by remaining silent when Claud addressed him.
Feeling his conscience freed from responsibility, Lord Carthew returned to the drawing-room. Lady Cranstoun and the doctor were deep in their game of chess, and in the half light he could see Stella seated at the harp, across the strings of which her delicate hands were straying, while the last note of the old Germanvolksliedlingered on her lips, a strangely poetic picture of beauty and harmony which Lord Carthew was destined to carry in his mind for all time.
AsLord Carthew approached, the girl ceased playing.
“Is he better?” she asked. “Will my singing disturb him?”
“It will soothe him, I should say. Only a faint sound of it can be heard in his room. He seemed to fall asleep just as I left.”
“Did you tell him,” she asked, with flushed cheeks and lowered lashes, while her fingers strayed over the strings without striking them, “how very, very sorry I am for my thoughtless folly?”
“You are too hard upon yourself,” he said, taking a seat near her, and drinking in every detail of the charming picture before him, “and to ease your mind I will make a confession. My friend and I—or, at least, I can answer for myself—were prompted by impertinent curiosity when we entered your grounds. It was not by accident that we strayed into them, but of malice prepense. The fact is, we are both devoted to horseflesh, and as we rambled about, smoking, in a wood by the wayside, you flashed past us on your black horse, and took a jump which seemed almost impossible. In our admiration and delight, we forgot the rules which hold good with regard to our neighbor’s landmark, and scrambling up the bank and over the wall, and down the bank again, we forced our way through the trees and sighted you again. Your horse was rearing and plunging; by the half light at that distance it seemed as though he had got the bit well between his teeth, and was running away with you, and your scream strengthened that impression. Then came our unlucky interference, and its deplorable result.”
“Did you think that jump impossible?” she asked, turning wide-open eyes upon him. “Zephyr and I often take it. Zephyr can jump almost anything. He goes out of his way to find jumps, and he is never happier than when he finds something that looks difficult.”
“Aren’t your people afraid lest some accident should befall you when you ride about the park unattended?”
“My people?”
She looked at him in surprise as she spoke, and then in some confusion struck several chords lightly on the harp.
“My father is a great deal away,” she said, in a somewhat constrained tone; “and of course, I do not make mamma nervous by telling her the pranks Zephyr and I enjoy together.”
“You are fond of riding?”
“Fond of it!” she repeated, slowly, while her face lit up with sudden enthusiasm; “I could not live without it. After a certain number of hours have passed in the house, my foot seems to tingle to be in the stirrup again, and my fingers burn to take hold of the reins. Whatever the weather it is the same; I want to be away and outside and in it! If I hear the wind wailing and sighing in the trees round the house, I long to feel it whirling round me, blowing sad thoughts away; and even when a thunderstorm is at its height, it seems to draw me like a magnet. I want to be part of the storm, drenched with the rain, wrapped round with the lightning, horse and I both stirred to the last touch of quivering excitement, driven along, with the thunder rumbling and crashing behind us! Then I feel alive and happy—so happy that I can rise in my saddle and scream like a child from sheer delight!”
In the low light where they sat, he could see the faint color come and go in her face as the eager words came softly from her parted lips. Her eyes shone out like sapphire stars and seemed to glow with some inner light. To him she was not a nineteenth century young English lady, but a princess from a fairy tale.
“What would you do,” he asked, half laughing and half tenderly, “if by some accident or illness you were kept a prisoner in the house?”
“I should die—if it were inthishouse,” she answered quietly, looking straight into his face for the first time. “I suppose to you, who are a stranger here, the Chase appears simply an interesting old historical mansion. To me it seems a prison, haunted by the spirits of all the women who have been unhappy here.”
“You have studied the records and legends of your family, no doubt?”
“They were given to me as soon as I could read. Before I heard of Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty, I had gone through those horrible tales of treachery and murder, and tyranny. Cranstouns of mediæval times hardly ever died in their beds, and the lives of their ladies were records of martyrdom, except in those cases when they also had some spirit, and turned against their brutal lords. Pride of race, cruelty, cunning, and revengefulness—there you have the dominant notes in the characters and lives of my ancestors, qualities which to me are all equally hateful.”
“Yet if there is anything in heredity, you should be intensely proud of your family on both sides,” he said. “The Douglases are to the full as proud as any Cranstoun can be.”
“But mamma wears her pride with a difference,” she said, quickly. “It is more like the interest any one might take in some heirloom, not because it is something peculiar to herself, and raising her above all other people. It is impossible to imagine any one more gentle and kind than mamma. She suffers a deal, and bears it beautifully. Her heart constantly troubles her, yet she must be in terrible pain before she utters a complaint. I am not a bit like her, I am sorry to say,” she added, humbly. “I shall never have her gentleness, her patience and resignation. When I am angry, I hate—mamma is incapable of hatred. I don’t know how I should have lived at all but for her constant kindness.”
Tears suddenly gathered in Miss Cranstoun’s eyes. Hastily brushing them away, she turned to Lord Carthew with a sweet smile.
“I ought to apologize,” she said, “for my very bad manners in talking of myself and my private affairs to you when I have never met you before to-day. But somehow I hardly feel that you are a stranger.”
She spoke in all simplicity, but the most practised coquette could hardly have chosen words better calculated to heighten the feelings of love and admiration which filled the young man’s heart.
She should be painted just so for the Academy, he was telling himself, seated at her harp, with one little hand showing off the supple wrist, slim fingers, and rosy nails, as it strayed over the strings. But what painter could reproduce her charm, the purity of her eyes and lips, the girlish grace of her form, and especially that light shining round her dilated pupils? Would Millais understand her temperament, and do her justice? Hardly. Sargent might. Yes, it must be painted by Sargent, this picture of a young girl in simple white silk dinner-dress, playing a harp before a hazy background; and the name of the picture should be “Portrait of Viscountess Carthew.”
Meanwhile, he was telling her that so far from boring, her talk had interested him greatly.
“I am honored by what you say,” he said, “when you tell me I do not seem wholly a stranger to you. It is the more amiable of you to treat me with such gracious cordiality as I am not at all in your own sphere of life, but just what is now called a ‘gentleman farmer,’ and in the old days before the term gentleman was invented, was simply yeoman, a name quite good enough for me. Altogether, a poor, struggling, and undistinguished person, whose parents denied themselves every luxury to give him a college education, by which he had not the wits to profit; just capable of those simple and ineffective qualities of gratitude, affection, and loyalty, and capable of very little else, believe me.”
She turned her sweetest smile upon him.
“Do you know,” she said, nodding confidentially towards him, “that I believe that is just the reason why I feel as if we were already friends? All my life I have had the value of birth and rank exaggerated to me. I have been taught to consider myself made of too fine a stuff to associate with any one in the neighborhood. I have never been allowed to play with other children, and when I was a baby child my nurses were constantly changed lest I should get too fond of any one so low and common as a nurse. I have been given the ‘Peerage,’ and the ‘County Families of England,’ and ‘Tales of Aristocratic Families,’ and ‘Legends of Ancestral Houses,’ and similar books, to amuse myself with ever since I could read; my German master was a decayed baron, and my French tutor the son of a marquis. I have always been forbidden to speak to the servants, except to give orders, and they also are very frequently changed. This is particularly so in the case of the lady’s maid who waits upon mamma and me; she never remains longer than a year, usually only a few months, just long enough to learn our ways and suit us. And do you know what the consequence of all this has been? As soon as I could be free from the presence of my nursery-governess—a very stiff person of over fifty, who could not forget she had once been in a duke’s family—I used to run away to my great, bare nursery, and dressing my dolls in rags, would pretend they were peasants, and hop-pickers, and beggars. And especially,” she added, her face lighting up with a mischievous gleam, “I loved making my dolls into poachers and tramps, and, best of all, gypsies. This was sheer naughtiness, I know, because Margaret had once told me that Sir Philip particularly detested gypsies, and that I was never on any account to mention them before him. I used to get up a little play in which a gypsy was unjustly accused of stealing and tried for it before my father, who was represented by a black-faced doll in a red coat. My father would try the gypsy and condemn him to be hanged, and then, just as the sentence was being carried out, a gallant young gentleman doll would come riding up on the shaft of an old wheelbarrow and cut him down. There was no game I enjoyed playing so much as that.”
Lord Carthew laughed with her, but was a good deal touched at the same time. The picture of the lonely child, snubbed and repressed and deprived of all healthy young companionship, secretly planning revolutionary dramas with her dolls, struck him as being equally original and pathetic. Stella Cranstoun’s utter dissimilarity from the young ladies of his acquaintance was a source of great delight to him. Her perfectly clear and distinct enunciation and sweet-toned voice came as a blessed relief after the fashionable high key and slipshod speech in vogue in London at that time, which had been aptly aped by the pretty Braithwaite girls. Stella’s somewhat old-fashioned method of speech, which was that of a well-educated girl who had heard little but read much, and her entire ignorance of slang and absence of self-consciousness, were equally charming to him, The one desire of fashionable women, as he knew well, is to speak, move, dress, and behave in precisely the same style as the known leaders of society. But Stella had no idea that it behooved her to mould herself on some one else’s model; she was consequently altogether modest, natural, and unaffected, and unlike any woman he had ever met before.
As to her strong natural sympathy with the poorer classes, the result, as he imagined, of the repressive system on which she had been reared, he himself affected and believed that he possessed the same quality. Theoretically, he looked upon a costermonger as a man and a brother, and failed to see the use of the House of Lords; practically, he regarded the lower orders as interesting curiosities, and strongly resented the admission of brewers into the peerage. Stella’s republican sympathies would impel her, no doubt, in the direction of soup-kitchens and schools when she became Lady Carthew, and soup-kitchens and schools were very desirable outlets for the generous instincts of a future countess. For under her gentle, graceful manner, it was impossible for any one unacquainted with her earliest history to detect an absolute hatred of aristocratic proclivities; in the granddaughter of a Duke her unconventional sentiments were piquant and interesting, and in no way suggestive of the fierce blood dormant in the veins of the daughter of a gypsy.
Stella herself had not the least suspicion of her Romany descent. Not a servant remaining at the Chase had seen the first Lady Cranstoun, or knew aught of her beyond a brief record in the local papers of her death, eighteen years ago, with the one exception of Margaret. And even Margaret knew very little. Only that on the thirteenth day of December, eighteen years ago, Dr. Ernest Netherbridge and two women had arrived at the Chase, immediately after a farmer’s cart had carried thither a certain bundle, from which feeble cries proceeded. For fully an hour the visitors were closeted with Sir Philip in his study, after which time they left in the carriage and were driven to Grayling railway station, where the two women entered a train for London. Three months later, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Sir Philip Cranstoun was married to the Lady Gwendolen Douglas, daughter of the Duke of Lanark, a woman of no particular beauty and rather over thirty years of age. The following Christmas the second Lady Cranstoun gave birth to a girl, a weakly creature who, after a few days of wailing remonstrance, faded out of this life altogether. The mind of Lady Cranstoun, never of the strongest order, gave way under the strain; in the care of nurses she was taken by her husband to London, whence she returned in a few months’ time with a lovely dark-haired and blue-eyed baby girl whom she persisted in regarding as her own, in which belief was upheld by her husband, and by all those about her.
Thus the infant child of Clare Carewe the gypsy made her second entry into the house of her ancestors, having been adopted in order to save her stepmother’s wandering wits. For years Sir Philip, after his wife’s complete recovery, hoped against hope that she might yet bring him an heir; but fate was against him, and the gypsy’s child was the only descendant he might now hope to possess.
Against this daughter, lovely and intelligent as she proved herself to be, the Lord of Cranstoun Chase cherished a deep-rooted and immovable dislike, which showed itself in every glance that he directed toward her. The resemblance which she undoubtedly bore to the woman who had defied him and fled from him intensified this feeling a hundredfold, and the girl’s proud if silent rebellion against his harshness and unkindness was a perpetual reminder of the untamable spirit which she had inherited from her Romany ancestors.
He was morbidly fearful, too, lest that bad strain, as he considered it, should some day break out in her, and prompt her to a course of conduct which might bring discredit upon his name. All that could be done in the way of conventional training, carefully supervised reading, and a closely watched and guarded existence, he had resorted to in her training. So far he could complain of nothing in Stella’s conduct, except indeed, the scornful curl of her lip and flashing of her dark eyes when he indulged in any fresh act of petty domestic tyranny. All that man could do to wipe out the disgraceful mistake of his first marriage he had already done. Not only had he chosen for second wife a duke’s daughter and a Douglas, but he had brought up his daughter Stella, the descendant of a long line of wild gypsy Carewes, in the belief that she also was a Douglas by descent, and that the Duke of Lanark’s daughter was her mother.
The excellent understanding which prevailed between Lady Cranstoun and her supposed daughter, so far from pleasing, annoyed and irritated him. The feeling he inspired in his wife was one of absolute terror. To a woman of Lady Cranstoun’s weak and delicate health, the very sound of her husband’s voice was painful. In his presence she was conscious of a guilty and apologetic feeling. He had wished for an heir to keep the estates among his children, and she had failed to give him one; he had never loved her, and now he wished her dead. Stella’s high spirit and determined will seemed a shield between her and her husband’s displeasure, and the two ladies formed a party in the house tacitly opposed to him, although forced to a show of obedience and resignation.
As to the servants at the Chase, there were three women besides Margaret and the lady’s maid, a butler and two footmen. Not one, except Margaret, had been in the house more than two years, and Margaret, the most discreet and silent of women, was retained chiefly because she was able to explain their business to the newcomers, and because of her notable expertness with her needle and as a sick-nurse. But in a household staff of eight, Sir Philip had seldom much difficulty in filling one post, that of spy. A quiet-mannered housemaid named Dakin, noiseless and freckled, and white about the eyelashes, was at present entrusted with the task of acquainting her master, by letter, telegram, or word of mouth, concerning all the details of home life at the Chase, and it was this person who had lit the fire in the bedroom apportioned to Hilary, and who had subsequently listened at the keyhole to scraps of the conversation between the patient and his friend.
The result of her observation she decided to transmit at once to her master, and during dinner she asked and obtained leave of absence from housekeeper Margaret and hurried down toward the lodge gates, close to which an inn and a few cottages were clustered about the small post and telegraph office of the nearest village.
In her pocket Dakin carried a piece of paper upon which a cipher was written, and by the aid of this she dispatched the following message to Sir Philip Cranstoun’s telegraphic address in London:
“This evening Stephen Lee shot a trespasser. Wounded man brought to house, also friend. Wounded man called Lord Carthew; friend called Mr. Pritchard. Staying here to be nursed. Have made discovery. Two men have exchanged names. Wounded man is Pritchard, friend Lord Carthew.“Dakin.”
“This evening Stephen Lee shot a trespasser. Wounded man brought to house, also friend. Wounded man called Lord Carthew; friend called Mr. Pritchard. Staying here to be nursed. Have made discovery. Two men have exchanged names. Wounded man is Pritchard, friend Lord Carthew.
“Dakin.”
While this message was being dispatched to her lord and master in London, Lady Cranstoun was peacefully enjoying her favorite diversion of a game of chess with the doctor. Just after the successful accomplishment of a somewhat difficult move, she remembered that her daughter and Mr. Pritchard were being left altogether intête-à-têteat the other end of the vast drawing-room. With her fingers nervously touching a bishop, she appealed to her old friend Dr. Graham.
“Ought I to leave Stella with a stranger?” she asked doubtfully. “She has hardly ever talked so much to any one before, and Sir Philip would be furious if there was any idea of a sentimental feeling between Stella and this gentleman. You see, from what he says, he has no money, or family, or anything. Sir Philip is so utterly bent upon Stella making a brilliant marriage. Now if it had been his friend, Lord Carthew—”
“Make your mind easy, my dear lady,” said the doctor, soothingly. “I don’t think there is much fear of anytendressebetween Stella and Mr. Pritchard. A little cheerful society will do her good.”
Thus reassured, Lady Cranstoun went on with her game, while Stella naïvely questioned Lord Carthew about his life at Oxford, and he, dropping for the moment hisrôleof undistinguished and unintellectual farmer, talked his best to her concerning his way of life and of study at the University.
“And Lord Carthew,” she asked softly; “was he a good scholar?”