Fatherand daughter faced each other under the delicate spring foliage, both pale, set, and determined.
Sir Philip spoke first.
“If Lord Carthew has done you the honor to ask you to marry him,” he said, “you will most certainly accept him.”
“That I shall never do,” she answered, her heart beating high with excitement at her own temerity.
“What imbecile school-girl freak is this?” he asked, harshly. “This morning you were encouraging him.”
“I did not know my own mind this morning,” she said, blushing deeply; “and I did not know Lord Carthew’s real position. He belongs to a class I greatly dislike.”
“He belongs to the class from which your husband will come, or you will die an old maid. You have been reared, trained, educated, solely for this end, and you will be presented at Court next month as Viscountess Carthew on her marriage.”
“I will never marry Lord Carthew.”
He took her roughly by the shoulder. He hated her proud, pale face, so like her dead mother’s at that moment that he could almost hear Clare’s voice speaking to him from the dead. He longed to strike those firmly shut lips, to bring a look of fear into those dauntless eyes. But he contented himself by gripping her shoulder with all his strength, so that for days afterward five dark bruise-marks showed the clutch of his cruel fingers.
“You have never yet set your will up in opposition to mine,” he said, in a low voice. “And I warn you not to try. In dealing with me it is better to bend, to avoid being broken. Go back to the house now, to your own room, and think over what I have said. Before this month is over you will marry Lord Carthew.”
“That I shall never do!”
Her voice rang out in clear defiance, accentuated a little by the sharp pain of his grasp upon her arm. He threw her roughly off, and proceeded on his walk through the grounds, while she retraced her steps, trembling with indignation and anger, toward the house. As she emerged from among the trees, she came upon Stephen Lee, the keeper. His face was flushed, and his eyes shone so strangely that the idea occurred to her that he must have been drinking, and she was walking quickly past him when he stopped her.
“I beg your pardon, miss. But may I make so bold as to ask whether he—Sir Philip, I mean—was hurting you in any way just now? It seemed to me he gripped your arm that tight he must have hurt you.”
“My father, do you mean?” Stella asked in cold surprise. “Certainly not, Stephen. Why did you ask such a thing?”
“Because,” answered Stephen, with a sudden half-suppressed savagery of manner, “if he laid a finger upon you to really hurt you like, I’d shoot him down like a dog!”
“You must be mad!” the girl exclaimed, with a fine mixture of pity and disdain. “Quite mad!”
“Maybe, miss. But not so mad as you think, and not so much beneath you as you think, neither. Anyway, I’m not too mad to have heard and understood every word as you and Sir Philip were saying just now under the trees. And if you are going to be tormented by this Lord Carthew as I shot in the shoulder—lord or no lord, I’d put another lot of shot through him as soon as look at him.”
Stella was intensely surprised by the man’s method of address, and still inclined to the belief that he had probably been drinking. But it occurred to her on the instant that there might be danger to the man she loved in allowing Stephen to continue in the dark as to his identity.
“The gentleman who was wounded by your clumsiness last night was not Lord Carthew, but a friend of his, named Mr. Pritchard,” she said. “And please understand, Stephen, that the interest you appear to take in my affairs is neither pleasant nor desirable to me. I must ask you to say no more on the subject, and not to offend in this way again.”
The young man ground his teeth with anger as she passed him on her way to the house, with heightened color, and her proud little head more erect than usual.
“I oughtn’t to ha’ said so much,” he muttered to himself, as he watched her. “But when I see the gray wolf grip her shoulder, I could ha’ murdered him. It would take her haughtiness down a bit to learn as she and me are second cousins, come of the same old gypsy stock. But Granny Sarah will tell her the truth some day, she swears, and bring her pride a peg lower. Sarah’s got some deep game in her wicked old head lately; I can see that by her nods and grins, and mutterings to herself. She and Uncle James are hatching a plot together, I’ll be bound; and between them they’ll serve the gray wolf out, if they swing for it!”
Lord Carthew was still chatting comfortably with Lady Cranstoun in the library when Stella returned to the house. On the floor above, she noticed in passing that the two rooms which had been used by Hilary were wide open and empty. Her heart sank at the sight, and she turned eagerly toward Margaret, whom she saw approaching down the corridor.
“Has he gone?” the girl asked, anxiously. “And when did he go? And oh, Margaret, do you think it was safe for him to be moved yet?”
“Of course it wasn’t safe,” the woman answered, rather crossly. “But, dear me, when young gentlemen get notions in their heads there’s no stopping them. If you’ll come into your room, miss, I notice the hem of your dress is frayed, and I’ll see to it for you.”
Stella passed into her bedroom, and Margaret, following her, carefully closed the door. Then she came over to where her young mistress stood, and whispered in her ear:
“There’s spies about. One can’t be too careful. Here’s a bit of a note was left for you. Read it, while I pretend to see to your dress.”
With trembling fingers, Stella tore open the envelope, and read the following words, written in pencil on a half-sheet of paper:
“Good-by, my dear and only love. Try to forgive me. And forget me as fast as possible. I shall think of you always, but as of one far above me, meant to make some better fellow happy. I must not see you again, and I must not write to you. It would not be fair or honest. Good-by, dear, again.“Hilary.”
“Good-by, my dear and only love. Try to forgive me. And forget me as fast as possible. I shall think of you always, but as of one far above me, meant to make some better fellow happy. I must not see you again, and I must not write to you. It would not be fair or honest. Good-by, dear, again.
“Hilary.”
Stella gave a little cry of pain.
“Where has he gone, Margaret?” she whispered, while the tears started to her eyes. “To London, or to Yorkshire? Can you tell me?”
“He didn’t say a word, miss; but he seemed in a great hurry to get off. If I was you I wouldn’t trouble my head about him. Handsome is as handsome does,Isay.”
“Surely he ought not to be alone. Lord Carthew should go after him!” Stella exclaimed. “I must speak to him!”
She made a quick movement toward the door, and then checked herself. It was impossible, she felt, to face Lord Carthew at this moment. She had forgotten until now her half-promise of the morning, but it recurred to her as she realized the difficulty of explaining to the Viscount the knowledge she possessed of Hilary’s movements. She must trust to chance for Lord Carthew to find out that his friend had left the house. Meantime, resentment against her father kept her from going downstairs lest she should meet him. Anxiety on Hilary’s account made her restless. Putting on her hat and cloak, she ran lightly downstairs at about five o’clock, and stealthily out by the front entrance. The wind had freshened, and a little rain was blown into her face. She hurried on beneath the thickly planted trees in the park, urged by she knew not what impulse, until, as she neared the lodge gates, she met coming in her direction a horsey-looking man, whom she at once recognized as the hostler of the inn where Hilary’s Black Bess and Lord Carthew’s chestnut cob were put up.
The man recognized her and touched his cap. She stopped him at once.
“Are you going to the house?” she asked. “Have you a message for some one? And has anything happened?”
“Well, miss, the fact is that Lord Carthew, one of the young gentleman as was staying up at the Chase, we think as he’d got a bit of fever over his wound, for about two o’clock this afternoon in he staggers to the inn-yard all alone, and pale as a co’pse. ‘Hullo, my lord, is it you?’ I begins, being the first to see him, when he cuts me short like, telling me it ain’t his name, and that he’s called plain Mr. Pritchard. Then he orders me to saddle Black Bess at once, and be quick about it. I thought he looked a bit queer and feverish, so I makes a long job of it, but I had to get it through at last. When mounted, he was that weak he could hardly hold the reins, but he chucks me a sovereign and rides out of the yard, sitting as upright as you or me could do—begging your pardon, miss. I felt sort of anxious about him, but I’d a deal of work on hand, being market-day in Grayling, when about an hour later who should come clattering back into the yard but bonny Black Bess, with her master hanging half unconscious over her neck, and his shoulder all covered with blood, owing to his wound having broken out again. I never did see a sensibler animal nor that mare. It’s my belief that Lord Carthew had nothing to do with it, but that that there animal’s own instinct told him to make the best of his way back to us. My master, he wanted to drive his lordship back here to the Chase, miss; but Lord Carthew, he was conscious by that time, and he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Send for a doctor,’ he said; ‘any one about here will do. Let him patch up this wretched scratch so that I can get on with my journey to London.’ So, as they couldn’t spare me, our boy was sent to Grayling in the cart to fetch Dr. Netherbridge, as has been settled in the town twenty years or more, and is a very good doctor as doctors go, though I don’t much believe in ’em myself. The boy he couldn’t find the doctor at first, and when at last he brings him, his lordship was pretty bad, particular when he was called by his own name. Dr. Netherbridge he takes the boss aside and asks him a few questions. Then he says, ‘Send some sensible person to the Chase to inform Lord Carthew’s friend of his condition.’ Says the boss, hemming and ha’ing, ‘Sir Philip’s my landlord,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want to be party to nothing that’ll put his back up. He’s a very difficult gentleman to deal with.’ Says Dr. Netherbridge, with a queer sort o’ smile to himself like, ‘I don’t need to be told,’ says he, ‘of what Sir Philip Cranstoun is like. I’ve had some dealings with him a good many years ago. Don’t send a message by a boy,’ he says, ‘but by some one you can trust.’ With that the boss asks me to do the office, as I ain’t specially afraid of anything, living or dead, miss, saving your presence, and away I comes.”
They were nearing the lodge gates now, Stella having turned in that direction as soon as the man had arrived at his recital of what had befallen Hilary.
“I will come with you,” she said, in tones that allowed of no opposition. “I must see how he is. He is my mother’s guest, and it was partly my fault that the accident happened to him. He stopped my horse last night, thinking it was running away with me, and one of the keepers fired to frighten him and accidentally hit him. And what he says about his name is not a proof of fever, but perfectly true. Lord Carthew, his friend, had changed names with him in jest; his name is Mr. Hilary Pritchard.”
“Well, young gentlemen are up to queer larks certainly,” the man observed, but Stella’s manner did not encourage him to talk, and she walked so fast that it was all he could do to hasten his slow, bow-legged, stableman’s gait sufficiently to keep up with her.
Dusk was falling fast as they reached the inn. Before the door stood the light cart in which the doctor had arrived, ready for his return journey. Already Stella was beginning to feel nervous and self-conscious, as she noted the curious glances of the farming folk gathered under the old-fashioned arched entrance to the yard. The bar stood on one side of the building, the coffee-room on the other; the latter room was empty as Miss Cranstoun was shown into it, and she glanced around in some curiosity. It was a low-ceilinged apartment of considerable antiquity, but marred and vulgarized by a cheap varnished paper above the dark wood wainscoting round the walls, by flaming gas-jets, the light from which flickered on colored prints of racing scenes and tradesmen’s calendars, and by a small, mean fireplace, totally inadequate to the size of the room.
A man’s gloves and walking-stick lay on the long wooden table, stained with the rings left by glasses and pots, and almost as soon as Stella entered the room a gentleman came in hastily to claim them.
The newcomer was short and pale, with brown hair and beard plentifully streaked with gray, and a face redeemed from plainness by thoughtful and penetrating blue eyes.
He came in with his hat on, but at sight of Stella he removed it, exclaiming as he did so, in evident surprise:
“Miss Cranstoun!”
“That is my name. Do you know me?”
“I knew you directly, by your remarkable likeness to your mother,” he answered, and then suddenly stopped and blushed very red.
For he had seen the look of astonishment in her face, and remembered that every one in Grayling supposed Miss Cranstoun to be the daughter of Lady Gwendolen, a rumor which, as he had never seen the young lady, he was not in a position to discredit, though he often wondered what had been the fate of the infant girl whom he himself had seen conveyed to her father’s house and sent away from thence in the nurse’s care, one winter’s morning eighteen years ago.
The mystery was solved now. She stood there before him, a slimmer, more fairy-like, and more refined version of her mother; even her voice, in its rich, soft intonation, recalled to his mind the unhappy Clare Lady Cranstoun.
“No one has ever called me like my mother before,” she was saying. “I did not know you had ever met her. She is a great invalid.”
“What can I do for you now?” he asked, to change the dangerous subject.
“A man from the stables here met me in the park,” she answered, her color rising high, “and told me of an accident to a gentleman who was staying at our house last night. I suppose you know all about it—about how it happened, I mean, and how the wound broke out again. You have just come from seeing him, have you not? How is he? Pray tell me!”
Dr. Ernest Netherbridge was a man of extremely observant mind, and he drew his own conclusions from the evident interest shown by the young lady before him for the handsome young giant upstairs.
“He is very feverish, and has a nasty wound in the shoulder, which has not been improved by the shaking and jolting he has gone through to-day. I understand that he was your father’s guest last night?”
“My father has never seen him; he only returned home to-day, and Mr. Pritchard left before luncheon. He seemed very anxious to get back to London,” faltered Stella, conscious that she was blushing crimson under the steady gaze of Dr. Netherbridge’s blue eyes. “You have not told me yet whether there is any danger, and whether—whether I can see him.”
“I should not say there was any absolute danger except the risk that fever might supervene after the very unwise exertions of to-day. I intended going myself to Grayling to fetch a reliable nurse of my acquaintance. As to seeing him——” he paused, and looked at her doubtfully. “May I ask,” he inquired, abruptly, “whether the sight of you is likely to disturb him?”
She blushed deeper still.
“It might perhaps excite him a little,” she stammered; “but I would be very quiet, and would not speak more than you let me.”
“I am afraid it would be inadvisable,” said the little doctor, shaking his head. “Quiet is so essential. With rest and care, and obedience to orders, he ought to be as right as possible within a week. But any excitement to-night might produce the worst possible effect.”
Tears started to Stella’s eyes.
“Dr. Netherbridge,” she said, humbly, “I have an idea that I shall not have another opportunity of seeing Mr. Pritchard, perhaps, for a very long time. If I write something on a slip of paper, will you let him have it when he is better, and will you yourself tell him that I came, and that I may not be allowed to do so again? And may I see him just for one moment, without his seeing me?”
The doctor reflected a moment.
“He was sitting in an arm-chair when I left him,” he said. “He had refused strenuously to go to bed, and persisted in declaring he must get on to London to-night. If you will promise not to let your presence be known, you might come with me now, and see him at least.”
She stole up the stairs after the doctor, her heart beating wildly. Before a half-open door on the floor above he paused, and beckoned to her to join him. She was so much taller than he that she easily saw over his shoulder into the room. Hilary was leaning back in an old chintz-covered arm-chair. His coat was half off, and his wounded arm was resting in a sling fastened round his neck. His eyes were closed, and his brows contracted as if in pain. Tears rolled down Stella’s face as she looked at him. The room was lit by a single candle, and where she stood she was in semi-darkness, and undistinguishable. Something seemed to tell her that it might be long, very long, before she looked upon his face again, and that this love which had so suddenly sprung up within her heart was destined to be “tried by pain” indeed. A sob rose in her throat, and turning quickly away, that it might not be overheard by Hilary, she groped her way down to the coffee-room through her tears, and taking pen and paper from a side table, she scribbled the following lines:
“Pleasewrite to me. I have just seen you, but dared not let you know I was here. Please do not forget me, for I shall not forget you. And pray do not leave off loving me, for I cannot leave off loving you.“Stella Cranstoun.”
“Pleasewrite to me. I have just seen you, but dared not let you know I was here. Please do not forget me, for I shall not forget you. And pray do not leave off loving me, for I cannot leave off loving you.
“Stella Cranstoun.”
She folded the note, placed it in an envelope addressed to “Hilary Pritchard, Esq.,” and placed it in Dr. Netherbridge’s hands.
“You will give it to him, won’t you?” she asked, and he promised.
“Thank you, Dr. Netherbridge, and good-by!”
“You are surely not returning to the Chase alone? It must be half an hour’s walk, and it is so late.”
“Twenty minutes, as I walk it. And it isn’t half-past six yet. I will send Lord Carthew to his friend. Good-night!”
Before he could say another word she had fled from the room, passed swiftly out from the arched entrance to the inner yard on to the road, and disappeared in a bend of the way, leaving Dr. Netherbridge to ponder on the strange chance which had made him acquainted with the girl whom he had first seen as a helpless infant of not more than two days old, more than eighteen years before.
“Letme cross your hand with a bit of silver, my pretty lady! Let me tell your fortune, deary—all about the fair young gentleman you love so true, and the dark one you won’t have, for all his gold and rank.”
The words, uttered in a hoarse, croaking voice close to Stella’s ear, as she sped through the trees of the park in the darkness, made her start and utter a little cry of fright. The terms, too, were so strangely appropriate to her own circumstances that it seemed as though they were spoken in response to her thoughts. Turning in considerable alarm, she perceived a few steps behind her the small, bent form of a very old woman, in appearance almost a centenarian, wrapped in a hooded cloak of some dark woollen material. From under the scattered white locks straying over her wrinkled brow an extraordinarily brilliant pair of eyes gleamed out, belying her apparent decrepitude, and carrying out still further the weird and witch-like effect of her whole appearance as she stood before Stella, leaning heavily on a stick, with skinny, trembling fingers.
Stella Cranstoun possessed the instinctive reverence for age which exists in all generous-minded young people. The uncanny appearance of the old woman considerably startled her in her overwrought state of mind; but she easily forgot her temporary alarm in an unselfish fear as to what might befall the aged creature before her should Sir Philip chance to hear of her presence within his grounds.
“Are you a gypsy?” Stella asked, stopping short, and looking fixedly at the old woman.
“Ay, my deary; I’m a gypsy, sure enough. Old Sarah is a true Romany. But the Romanys are your friends, my pretty. You’ve got no call to be afraid of them.”
“Do you know who I am, then?” the young girl asked, fascinated in spite of herself by those strangely bright eyes.
Sarah Carewe burst into a hoarse, mirthless laugh, which reminded Stella more of a raven’s croak than of the ordinary way of expressing amusement.
“Do I know my Clare’s girl when I see her?” she asked. “My Clare, that died in my arms when you was a little, helpless baby. You’ve got her eyes, my pretty, and her face; for all you’re not so round anddimberas she was in her prime.”
“You are making some mistake,” Stella said. “I am the daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun, of the Chase. If you want money I will give you what I have about me with pleasure; but you must get out of the park as soon as possible, for my father is dreadfully bitter against tramps and gypsies, especially gypsies.”
An evil scowl contracted the hag’s white eyebrows.
“Sallah!” she muttered, under her breath; and although Stella did not understand her, she easily guessed that the expression conveyed a malediction. “He’s hard on us, is he? Let him wait a bit.” Then, changing suddenly to a wheedling tone, she begged again to be allowed to tell Stella’s fortune. In vain the girl pressed money upon her, and tried by warnings and entreaties to get rid of her, while she hurried on toward the house. Old Sarah was not to be shaken off, and professed herself fearless as to the consequences which might befall her if seen by one of Sir Philip’s keepers. Stella began to be seriously frightened at length lest the woman might come to some harm, knowing her father’s orders.
“Now, pray, take this half-sovereign,” she urged, “and go back out of the park at once. In a few seconds we shall be in sight of the house, and the dogs are trained to fly at any one who is not smartly dressed. And only yesterday Stephen Lee, one of the keepers, shot a gentleman, who was accidentally trespassing, in the shoulder, and wounded him very seriously.”
“Don’t I know, my pretty? And isn’t Stephen Lee son to my own daughter’s child, and am I not his oldmami? He won’t hurt me, never fear. Cross my hand with the bit of gold, and I’ll go.”
In order to rid herself of her, as it was now close on the dinner-hour at the Chase, Stella let her soft white hand be clutched within Sarah’s lean fingers, and stood watching, impatient, and yet a little interested in spite of herself, as the gypsy took a box of matches and a dirty end of candle from her pocket, and peered into her victim’s palm under the lightly falling rain.
“I see a prison, my deary, and a marriage forced upon you—marriage with a dark gentleman, who loves you, dear, and who is a great lord; but your heart is given to the fair man. I see starvation and a death, and only one way of help for you.”
She droned the words monotonously, as though some inner force were dictating them to her, doubtless a trick of her trade, but none the less impressive to an imaginative young girl.
“Go on!” whispered Stella. “And pray make haste. Imustget home.”
“You must ask your own people to save you,” said the old woman, raising the forefinger of her right hand impressively. “Only the Romanys can help you. Trust no one else, and when despair comes, send this token to me—to old Sarah Carewe, that held you in her arms when you first opened your eyes on this wicked world.”
Suddenly blowing out the candle, she fumbled in her pocket, and then thrust into Stella’s hand what appeared to be a small silver coin strung on a piece of dirty red silk cord.
“When you want my help,” she said, “give this to Stephen Lee, and I will save you. You shall marry the man you love, and live a life of freedom and happiness, as a Romanydoxyshould; and the black lord and the gray wolf may go hang together. Good-night, my pretty.Beenship rat.And remember old Sarah!”
She waved her shrivelled hand in token of parting benediction, and slunk away among the trees with a swiftness astonishing in a woman of her years, leaving Stella, with her brain filled by bewildering questions and ideas, to make the best of her way to the house.
The first dinner-bell had already rung as she entered her room to dress for dinner. The lady’s maid, who attended both upon her and Lady Cranstoun, was full of comments upon her moist dress and boots.
“Dear me, miss! how wet your things are! And you seem all flushed as though you had hurried. I do hope you won’t have taken a chill.”
Stella disliked the girl—a tall, shifty-eyed creature, with a retreating chin and a tendency to gossip, who had only been in Sir Philip’s service a short time.
“Don’t waste time in remarks, Ellen,” she said, quietly, “but help me into my white silk dress.”
Fortunately, she was able to enter the dining-room at a quarter past seven, on the last stroke of the gong, but by the peculiarly cold and evil gleam of Sir Philip’s eyes as they rested upon her she knew that he was already greatly angered against her. This she attributed to the fact of their conversation in the shrubbery that morning; but what she did not guess at was a certain short interview which had taken place between her father and the housemaid Dakin a few minutes before dinner, while Lady Cranstoun and Lord Carthew were still dressing for that meal.
Dakin knew that Sir Philip, who carried punctuality to an excess extremely uncomfortable for other people, would be in his study long before dinner; she therefore tapped at the door discreetly, and on being admitted, stated that she had “something to say which she thought Sir Philip might like to hear.”
She was a plain, sallow-faced woman of forty, with a slight cast in her dark eyes, and extremely quiet in dress and manner, and she stood, rolling a little corner of her snowy muslin apron over and over in her fingers while she spoke.
“It was before lunch, sir,” she said, in a low, apologetic voice. “I was passing along the corridor, when, as I was walking by the rooms of the young gentleman that was wounded, and that first of all called himself Lord Carthew, what did I see by accident, but——”
“Spare me all this circumlocution, Mrs. Dakin. You were spying, as I pay you to do, and you saw—what?”
“Only Miss Stella, sir, hugging and kissing the young gentleman,” returned Dakin, with humble vindictiveness.
“The young gentleman! What young gentleman?”
“Mr. Pritchard, sir, that got his arm shot. You didn’t see him, I think. He was very big and very handsome, and he was calling Miss Stella his dear and his darling, which, begging your pardon, sir, she seemed quite to like and encourage him.”
Sir Philip muttered an oath under his breath, and stamped his heel on the carpet.
“When did this happen?” he asked sharply. “Before or after her ride?”
“After, sir; oh, some time after. Miss Cranstoun had had time to change into her serge housedress. Indeed, it was just before luncheon, for it was the first luncheon-bell that gave them a fright. You see, sir, it was rather indiscreet, for they stood in the sitting-room quite near the door, which was wide open, so as I couldn’t help seeing them.”
“What happened then?”
“He said he would write, sir, and then he kissed her again, and she him; and they said good-by. And during luncheon he went away, after giving me orders not to tell any one he had gone until an hour or two had passed, and half a sovereign. And he gave a pound to Margaret, and two letters, one for Lady Cranstoun, and one for Lord Carthew.”
“Have they received those letters yet?”
“I placed them on the dressing-tables in Lady Cranstoun’s and in Lord Carthew’s rooms, sir. But neither of them went upstairs after lunch until just now to dress for dinner.”
“No letter was left for Miss Cranstoun, then?”
“Not so far as I know, sir. Directly after lunch Miss Cranstoun went out in the grounds for a short time. Then she came back to her own room, but she wasn’t there at six o’clock, as I found out from her maid, who couldn’t tell me what had become of her.”
“Go upstairs and find out quietly if she’s in her room now.”
He almost trembled with apprehension during the few minutes of Dakin’s absence. Her news had very seriously disturbed him, coming as it did after Stella’s defiant declaration in the shrubbery that she would never marry Lord Carthew. Her words, taken by themselves, had affected him but little; but in conjunction with the fact that she had had the audacity and the folly to choose a lover for herself, they became very serious indeed. Was it possible that she had already actually eloped with this farmer’s son, whom she had only met for the first time yesterday evening? Was all his cunning concealment of her mother’s humble origin to be wasted if once the wild gypsy blood in her had a chance of asserting itself? Was his name to be disgraced, after the pains he had taken to clear it from all possible taint of his miserable first marriage? That old gypsy hag, when she cursed him before the court-house eighteen years ago, had prophesied that his children should bring disgrace upon his name. Were her words coming true already?
The housemaid’s entrance set his fears at rest for the time.
“I listened outside the bedroom door, sir,” the woman said, “and Ellen was dressing Miss Cranstoun, and remarking that her serge gown and her boots are wet. So she must have been out walking.”
Sir Philip was puzzled. Could the fellow be hanging about the grounds still? he wondered. But if he wished to make love to Stella, why had he, hampered as he was by a wounded limb, already left the shelter of the Chase?
“Understand,” he said, to the woman, sternly, “I am extremely annoyed that you should have let Miss Cranstoun give you the slip this afternoon. Every movement of hers must be watched at this point and reported tome. Either you or the lady’s maid, Ellen, must dog her footsteps everywhere. She must never be again allowed to leave the house alone.”
At dinner Lord Carthew informed his host that he was much disturbed by a letter he had just read which had been left for him by his friend.
“I dropped into his sitting-room a little before luncheon,” he explained, “and found him lying, fully dressed, asleep on the sofa. I didn’t like to disturb him, and half hoped to see him at lunch. After lunch, I was so pleasantly employed talking to Lady Cranstoun, chiefly about you, Miss Stella, that the afternoon flew by I can’t tell how. Then when I went just now to see my friend, I found that he had flown, leaving only a note in which he asks me to make his excuses to Lady Cranstoun, and to thank her for her kindness, but that as he is quite well, he will not trespass upon it any longer, but will at once return to London, where a doctor of his acquaintance will soon set him up again.”
“Mr. Pritchard left a note for me also,” put in Lady Cranstoun, “in which he said much the same thing. It seems so curious that he should have been our guest, and yet that I have never seen him. But I very much hope that he will come to no hurt through making a move so suddenly. He is a very dear friend of yours, is he not?” She turned to Lord Carthew with almost an affectionate touch in her manner. She was slightly flushed this evening, and her pale blue eyes positively shone. It had always been a subject of dread with her lest her beloved Stella should be forced into some marriage totally distasteful to her by her father’s tyranny. But her short interview with Stella that morning, and her long talk with Lord Carthew in the afternoon, had convinced her that here was the ideal husband for her daughter—rich, titled, a connection of her own, and at the same time intellectual, generous, affectionate, and of a singularly high character. His manner to her was perfect. After so many wretched years of slighting and snubbing and terrorizing which she had patiently endured from her husband, the gentle deference and kindly sympathy of Lord Carthew came to her as something altogether new and delightful. If only she herself at Stella’s age had had the good fortune to secure the affection of such a man, she felt that her lot would have been different indeed. Knowing something, too, of the volcanic depths of Stella’s nature, of her determination, her impulsiveness, and her powers of loving and hating in what seemed to poor Lady Cranstoun an exaggerated and incomprehensible degree, her motherly heart was the more rejoiced that a man of originality and evident force of character had seen fit to throw the handkerchief to her.
What Lady Cranstoun, unfortunately, altogether failed to take into account was that strange magnetism which occasional members of opposite sexes exercise over each other, not always with the happiest results. Beautiful, luckless Clare Carewe had aroused such a passion in the breast of even the cold and calculating Sir Philip twenty years ago, and at the present moment Sir Philip’s daughter was consumed by just such an unreasoning and overwhelming love for Hilary Pritchard, who, after all, had done little more than look into her eyes, speak somewhat disparagingly about her, catch her in his arms in that one mad embrace, and then leave the house, apparently without the wish or the intention to see her again. Hilary had neither rank, nor fortune, nor family; he was not Lord Carthew’s equal in intelligence, nor was he a man of such original and large-minded views. He had sometimes flirted with nice and pretty girls of his acquaintance, but he had seldom devoted much thought to any woman, a good run to hounds being in his opinion far better than the most fascinating courtship, and no woman in the world the equal of his mare, Black Bess.
As to marriage, Hilary had no wish for such a binding and fettering arrangement for many years to come. There was the Canadian legacy to be made into a profitable investment first. In time, no doubt, a wife and children would be nice to come home to on winter evenings, but he had scarcely ever regarded even their remote possibilities except as so much more or less ornamental and expensive furniture in his future homestead.
He had not meant to fall in love with Stella Cranstoun. Nothing was, in fact, further from his thoughts than to fall in love with anybody. Against his will, her personality affected him, and from the moment when he laid his hand upon her bridle-rein until he parted from her in the corridor, through all the physical pain of his wound, the thought of her beauty haunted his mind, try as he would to cast it out. She was altogether unsuited to him, and marriage with her would be impossible. What was there in common between the granddaughter of a Duke, the child of one of the proudest men in England, and himself, the son of a plain yeoman, of neither family nor fortune?
Stella, of course, could not guess that this was her lover’s state of mind, but something of it she gathered from Lord Carthew’s talk when, in answer to Lady Cranstoun’s inquiry as to whether Hilary was a particular friend of his, he said, warmly:
“I am extremely attached to him. I attribute his sudden departure to-day to his intense independence of character, which he sometimes carries even to an aggressive extent. He was very angry over what he chose to consider as the false position in which he was placed by my whim in changing names with him, for which trick I have not yet sufficiently apologized to you or to Miss Cranstoun.”
He turned eagerly to Stella as he spoke, but she rewarded him only by a frigid bend of the head.
“I have already told you,” he went on, a little chilled by her manner, “of my disgust at the snobbishness of those people who, because of my superior rank, loaded me with attentions, and almost ignored the existence of my handsome friend. At a house where we recently visited, four pretty girls, set on, I suppose, by their parents, hardly so much as talked to him, and made a dead set at me. Now, this was ridiculously unnatural, for my friend is the most superbly handsome man I have ever seen, a giant in height, and one of the finest athletes in the University, with a face, too, which cannot fail to attract women, to whom, however, I must own, he is extremely indifferent.”
“Your friend, then,” interposed Sir Philip, who was keenly watching the effect of this talk upon his daughter, “has no intention of marrying at present, I presume?”
“So far from it,” Lord Carthew returned, “he has not the slightest wish to settle down in matrimony for many years to come. He has the bad taste, indeed, not to think about women at all; which is, perhaps,” he added, with a laugh, “considering Hilary’s remarkable natural advantages, a very good thing for us plain little fellows.”
Lord Carthewspoke as he did of his friend’s prospects and intentions with perfect frankness and loyalty, never for one moment suspecting the effect which his words might produce in the mind of Stella Cranstoun.
He really believed that Hilary had the bad taste to dislike that young lady, and he was certainly not ill-pleased by such a manifestation of feeling on the part of his handsome friend. Not for an instant did the suspicion cross his mind that two persons present were listening with intense, even breathless, interest to his careless words.
“I must go up to town the first thing to-morrow morning,” he said, presently, “to find out how Hilary is. Of course he is enormously strong, but for that very reason he is the more likely to overestimate his powers of recuperation. Early in the autumn he will be going out to settle in Canada on a farm which has been left to him, and I believe he proposes to spend some years there, so that we shall not long have a chance of being together. He is a capital business man, as long-headed and keen-sighted over a bargain as most Yorkshiremen are, and I have no doubt that he will carry out his expressed determination, and make the property pay.”
“By which time, probably, he will modify his views on the marriage state sufficiently to permit of his mating with some honest, robust person in his own rank of life, who will rear for him a squarely built and solid brood of Anglo-Canadian olive-branches,” remarked Sir Philip, still with his eyes furtively watching his daughter.
“Here is to your friend the farmer’s health and prosperity,” he added, sipping his brown sherry with the air of a connoisseur. “A man in that position is very wise in deferring marriage as long as possible. In the case of the lower middle-class, too often ‘a young man married is a man that’s marred.’ ”
“One must always take Anne Hathaway into consideration when one recalls Shakespeare’s reflections on the marriage state,” observed Lord Carthew. “A man who at eighteen marries a woman of six-and-twenty, beneath him in rank, and of questionable character, is hardly likely to entertain a high opinion of wedded life. Speaking for myself, I have always looked forward with out-of-date eagerness and interest to the day when I should bring home my bride. And I am most anxious to see my father and mother on the subject at the present time.”
His eyes rested lovingly upon Stella, but as he had not directly used her name, she could hardly utter a disclaimer. The blood rushed to her cheeks as she realized that she was being placed in a wrong position altogether. Lord Carthew treated her, spoke to her, and alluded to her, as though there were some compact between them; and yet, as she had promised nothing, there was nothing to retract. If she were to assure him again privately, after dinner, that she did not love him, that would but be repeating what she had said to him before; he had said that he did not expect her love, and was glad to be content as yet with merely her liking. How could she say:
“This morning I hardly knew that I had fallen in love with your friend at first sight, and I believed he disliked me extremely; also, the prospect of an escape from the Chase, and from my father’s tyranny, for both my mother and myself, seemed too good to be missed. But after you had spoken to me, and I had more than half encouraged you, your friend kissed me, and instantly I knew that I loved him with all my heart, as he loved me, and that marriage with you was absolutely impossible.”
Clearly she could not make such a statement, especially in the face of what Lord Carthew himself had said of Hilary’s rooted aversion against marriage, together with the significant fact of his hasty departure from the Chase, without so much as telling her in so many words that he loved her.
Stella was intensely miserable that evening. Every now and then she told herself, in passionate self-reproach, that hers was the fault, that Hilary had not loved her, had not meant to kiss her. It was merely, as he himself had said, like a part of his dream; it was that little gesture of hers toward him which had hastened that one quick embrace of which he had already so plainly repented. She almost cried aloud in humiliation at the thought, and the blushes coursed over her cheeks under her lowered lashes so swiftly and unaccountably that poor Lord Carthew was to be pardoned if he began to lay the dear delight to his soul that she was thinking of him. Of what else, indeed, could she be thinking? he asked himself, as he noted her evident abstraction, her strange reserve, and those sudden changes of color.
When Lady Cranstoun and Stella retired to the drawing-room, the former, settling herself upon her sofa, motioned to the young girl to draw her low stool up beside her, and tenderly stroked her hair.
“I am so glad, my dear,” she murmured, while her gentle eyes filled with tears, “so very, very glad. And I like him extremely. He is the ideal son I always wished to have. I cannot tell you what a relief it all is to my mind. He is my own relation, too. I have not felt so happy for many, many years.”
“What do you mean, mamma dear?” stammered Stella, feeling terribly guilty.
“Ah, my child, you know well enough. And now I will tell you something, dear; if I have often seemed rather selfish in the way in which I have taken care of myself, and tried to avoid excitement and ward off attacks of illness, it has been because of my awful dread of leaving you withhim—your father. Heaven knows, I have been always a poor companion for a lovely, bright, young girl, and not much protection for you against his anger. But still, you have always felt, have you not, that your mother was with you, that she loved you, and sympathized with you, and suffered with you? You have never felt the bitter loneliness of being without a friend to love you among enemies? When I have been feeling tired, ill, and worn out, I have said to myself, ‘I must not give way; I must not die until my Stella is happily provided for.’ I could not die and leave you withhim. But now if, as Lord Carthew suggests, the marriage takes place almost immediately—and, indeed, what is there to hinder it?—I shall have my mind at peace, knowing that you will be safe under the protection of a good man’s love. I can die quietly, happily, and thankfully, remembering that.”
“Don’t, don’t talk about dying!” cried Stella, bursting into a flood of tears, and covering Lady Cranstoun’s wasted hands with kisses. “I could not lose you—you must not die! And—and I don’t love Lord Carthew. I never shall. I know he is good and clever, and all that you say, but—but I cannot marry him!”
Lady Cranstoun sat upright on her sofa, looking very white and wan.
“Don’t, darling, for my sake, be capricious any more,” she whispered. “As to disliking him because he is a viscount instead of a farmer, as you thought at first, that is foolish and beneath you. You are only joking, my dear, are you not? You would not disappoint me so bitterly, after all our talk this morning, about that voyage to the Cape, and how I was to come and stay with you, and—and——”
The words died upon her lips. An ashen gray tint spread over her face, and she fell back among her cushions in a fainting-fit. Her feeble frame was not equal to the strain of the day’s excitement, culminating in the shock of Stella’s refusal to carry out the contract to which she seemed so willing a party in the morning, and on which Lady Cranstoun had set her heart.
Stella overwhelmed herself with reproaches as she assisted Margaret to restore the invalid to consciousness. The gentlemen were still in the dining-room; they were, indeed, discussing the question of marriage settlements in a highly amicable manner. But to Stella’s great relief, Dr. Morland Graham returned from town just at the moment when his patient recovered consciousness, and by his advice she was taken off to bed, where she soon fell asleep, worn out by the fatigue and excitement of the day.
“I want to talk to you about your dear mamma,” said Dr. Graham, in his most benevolent professional manner, as he accompanied Miss Cranstoun back to the drawing-room. “I don’t think even you quite realize her extreme weakness. Her heart is in such an enfeebled state that she must on no account be exposed to the slightest shock. She may die in a fainting-fit similar to the one she had to-night, and the finest medical skill in the world would not save her. She must not be thwarted or disappointed, if her life is to be prolonged, say for a year or two longer. May I ask whether there was any apparent reason for her last seizure?”
“Yes,” answered Stella, after a moment’s hesitation. “We—we were talking about an offer of marriage which I have just received.”
“Indeed! That is most interesting. May I be allowed to congratulate you? And who is the happy man?”
“Wait, please! The man is Lord Carthew, who for some silly freak changed names with his friend when he came here last night.”
The doctor laughed, a long, low, comfortable, and self-satisfied laugh.
“The young gentleman did not deceiveme,” he said, complacently. “I know Lord Northborough well, and the family likeness between him and his son is remarkable.”
“Apparently,” said the young lady, angrily, “Iwas the only person whom it was deemed necessary to deceive. In the name of Pritchard, Lord Carthew asked me to marry him, and I told him I would think about it. Ididthink about it, and I decided against him, but in the mean time he had had interviews with my father and mother in which he appears to have presented himself in the light of an accepted suitor. But I haven’t the slightest intention of marrying him. In fact,” she added, vigorously, “the very idea of it makes mehatehim!”
“I really,” began the doctor, “can see nothing in the young gentleman’s manners or style to justify your dislike——”
“It isn’t that!” she interrupted, eagerly. “Dr. Graham, you are a clever man—you understand men and women. Don’t you know quite well that it is possible to like people very much as friends, but toloathethem in the suggested capacity of husbands or wives?”
“Certainly, certainly. But in this case the match appears so exceptionally happy—however, the subject in discussion is your mamma’s health. You tell me you were talking over the proposed marriage with her. I suppose that she is in favor of it?”
“She has set her heart upon it,” said Stella, with a sigh. “And as soon as I told her my objections she fainted.”
“One thing is quite certain,” said Dr. Graham, emphatically. “If you wish to preserve her life, you must at least affect to fall in with her views for the present.”
“But they want to marry me off at once,” she cried, desperately, “even before I am presented at Court!”
“Well, well!” returned the doctor, soothingly, “I shouldn’t think your fate such averyhard one, after all. The Earl of Northborough is one of the most distinguished statesmen in England, in high favor at Court, with a wife who brought him about a million, and Lord Carthew is the only son. All the beautiful and well-bred girls in London have been setting their caps at him for the past two years.”
“You don’t understand!” she cried. “These things are nothing, less than nothing, to me. So far from coveting wealth and rank, I would avoid them. My ideal of marriage is quite—quite different.”
She stopped short and blushed deeply.
“I cannot make you understand,” she said again, and turned away.
“I can understand two things, Miss Stella,” he answered, gravely; “caprice on the one hand, and duty on the other.”
She turned sharply round and faced him.
“Duty!” she repeated, coldly. “I don’t understand you.”
“The daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun and granddaughter of the Duke of Lanark is not in a position to marry for mere caprice any person she may happen to take a fancy to,” he said. “Noblesse oblige.You must keep up the traditions of your family and marry some one in your own rank of life. It is a duty which you owe to your family, your training, and your parents. In your case, the duty is all the more clearly marked out for you, as Lady Cranstoun’s health depends entirely upon your fulfilment of her clearly expressed wishes; if you disappoint her in her very natural and loving wish to see you happily married to so intellectual and high-minded a nobleman as Lord Carthew, her death may lie at your door.”
Stella rose from her chair and walked away from him toward the window. She felt that a net was being drawn about her feet, and her former liking for Lord Carthew turned to a resentful dislike. With her heart throbbing in her bosom at the very thought of another man, with every fibre of her being tingling with passionate love for him, how could she tamely endure the suggestions that, even for her mother’s sake, she must marry Lord Carthew? It was useless to reason with her. The gypsy Carewe blood in her veins was burning with unreasoning passion. She loved Hilary Pritchard, loved him with such unquestioning ardor that she would only too gladly have left her home that night to follow him, penniless and barefooted, throughout the world. Arguments were wasted upon such a nature. There was no trace of the cold and proud Douglas element inhertemperament; eccentric, strong-willed Cranstoun, and wild, lawless Carewe had united to produce this strange, half-tamed creature, with only a coating of education and repressive training over the primeval passions, the wandering instincts, and the marked rebellion against all constituted authority which characterize her race.
All the gypsy in her was dominant to-night as, with flushed cheeks and glittering eyes, she went up to her harp, and striking a few effective chords, sat down before it, and broke into a Hungarian air, which had greatly taken her fancy among some new music which had arrived from town during her father’s absence. Perhaps her strange meeting with old Sarah Carewe had put the thought of the gypsy race into her head; or else it was that in her present excitable, rebellious, and agitated mood, the wild Zingari music appealed to her feelings; certain it is that she threw all the repressed intensity of her nature into the song. She was an excellent musician, and played from memory, suggesting the air, now wild, now plaintive, by a succession of chords. The words, too, a lament supposed to be uttered by a dying “Egyptian,” chimed in with her own frame of mind sufficiently well to enable her to throw her whole soul into her voice.
Even that well-regulated person, Dr. Morland Graham, was astonished and excited by her performance. How came the daughter of Lady Gwendolen to possess such dramatic intensity and fire? he asked himself, while the girl’s sweet soprano notes clove the air, and the strange wailing pathos of her tones brought actual tears to his eyes.
Two other listeners had entered the room. Stella sang on, unheeding them, while Lord Carthew watched her, entranced in admiration, and her father regarded her with a heavy scowl of intense disapprobation.
The picture she made, sitting there in her slender, girlish beauty, her cheeks pale with excitement, her eyes aglow, her dusky hair framing her small, sensitive face, and that sweet, pathetic voice ringing out the wild love, the longing for liberty, and the loneliness of the dying gypsy—all these things, which filled the other two men present with wondering admiration, irritated Sir Philip beyond measure. How dared she sing gypsy songs in his presence? Above all, how dared she reveal in her singing that warm southern nature which he so strongly mistrusted, and the possession of which in his daughter he regarded as something in the light of a disgrace?
The song ceased. The singer drooped her head, as though exhausted by the effort, while her fingers still lingered about the strings. A burst of applause, coming simultaneously from Lord Carthew and Dr. Graham, caused her to start violently. She had completely forgotten that she was not quite alone.
“I have never heard singing like yours,” the young viscount said, coming to her side. “You made me cry, and I am not very easily moved. It is not only your voice which is lovely, but your expression. Do you know what you made me think of as you sat there, telling of your longing for fresh air and freedom, and the joys of life?”
“No.”
“Of that line I told you of this morning, when Tennyson’s heroine saw the lovers pass:
“ ‘ “I am half sick of shadows,” saidThe Lady of Shalott.’ ”
“ ‘ “I am half sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott.’ ”
She looked up at him, and smiled involuntarily. He certainly understood at least a portion of what was in her mind.
“Your daughter is a most accomplished musician, and a beautiful singer,” Dr. Graham was saying to Sir Philip.
“I do not approve of that class of song,” Sir Philip’s rasping voice made answer. “It is theatrical and tawdry in sentiment, and in my opinion not a song for a gentlewoman to sing.”
Stella glanced at her father. Seeing that he appeared to be engaged in conversation by Dr. Graham, she resolved to tell Lord Carthew that his friend Hilary Pritchard was not in London, but lying at the inn near the lodge gates of the Chase.
“I have something I want to say to you,” she began, speaking very softly, lest her father might overhear her. But she was not quick enough for the gray wolf. In an instant he had left the doctor and joined her.
“I understand,” he said, addressing Lord Carthew with an affectation of geniality, “that you are a good chess-player. Dr. Graham here is a great authority on chess, and one of the best players in London. Will you and he have a game while I go with my daughter to see how my wife is now?”
His guests could do no less than follow his suggestion, while Stella, her heart beating fast with apprehension, followed her father out of the room.
As soon as the door was closed, he turned upon her harshly.
“Come to my study,” he said. “I have something to say to you.”
Inthe study, Sir Philip Cranstoun assumed his favorite position, with his back to the fire, and his feet planted firmly on the hearth-rug.
Stella stood at a little distance, her hands folded over the back of a tall, carved oak chair. Looking at her under his heavy black eyebrows, her father was instantly reminded of another scene which had taken place in that same house more than eighteen years ago, on the night when Clare Lady Cranstoun first learned of her father’s murder.
“I called you in here,” the Baronet began, abruptly, “to speak of your forthcoming marriage.”
Stella tightened her lips, and held fast to the back of the chair, but she did not speak.
“Your forthcoming marriage,” reiterated Sir Philip, “with my friend, Lord Carthew.”
Still no word came from Stella. Her disdainful silence irritated her father.
“Carthew is noted for his eccentricity,” he sneered. “Hence, no doubt, his lucky admiration for you. Very few men would have forgiven the exhibition you made of yourself just now over that silly and vulgar song.”
The color came faintly into her cheeks, but she still kept silent. Silence was her best weapon against her father, as she knew well.
“The marriage will take place early in May,” he proceeded; “so you must make your preparations, and name a date for the ceremony not later than the sixteenth of the month. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” she answered, raising her eyes at length, and steadily meeting his gaze, “I hear you; but I shall not marry Lord Carthew.”
“You will marry him,” he said, a dark flush spreading under his pallid skin. “So surely as you stand there you will marry him!”
“I shall not!”
Her voice rang out now clear and sharp, and into her fair face came a look of dogged resistance, at sight of which Sir Philip’s smouldering wrath broke into a flame.
“You will do as I tell you!” he swore, the veins in his forehead starting into ugly prominence. “You, a beggar’s brat, born in a hovel, dare to set your will against mine! You should by rights be tramping from door to door at the heels of some filthy caravan, selling brooms, and stealing chickens, with a hedge to sleep under, and the police on your track! Do you know what you are—you, with your white face, and your defiant airs and graces, who do not consider an earl’s son good enough for you, but must needs disgrace yourself by a servant-girl flirtation in the corridor with a man who will make your folly a smoking-room jest? You think yourself a duke’s grandchild, a Douglas by descent, and daughter to my wife, Lady Gwendolen. But you came into this world some months before I ever saw that lady; you were born in a miserable cabin, and your mother was a wayside tramp, a common gypsy!”
He hurled the words at her with stinging emphasis. She stood before him, pale as ashes, her eyes distended, quivering in every limb. But for the support of the chair she would have fallen to the ground. A hundred little incidents seemed to start simultaneously to prominence in her mind as she listened to him, chief among them being the old fortune-teller’s assurance that she was a “Romany,” and that the gypsies would befriend her.
Stephen Lee, too, through whom she was to communicate if necessary with old Sarah, had he not told her only that day that there was not so much difference between her rank and his as she supposed? And Dr. Netherbridge’s strange recognition of her by her “likeness to her mother,” was not that also a link in the chain?
The room seemed to rock round her, and the ground to give way under her feet. Something told her that her father was speaking the truth, and her heart contracted with pain as she realized that gentle, affectionate Lady Cranstoun, from whom she had received the only tenderness and kindness which had as yet warmed her young life, might not really be her mother after all.
But whatever she felt, however great her astonishment, dismay, and even horror at his words, it was chiefly necessary to retain her self-control, and no cry, no exclamation escaped her lips as she mutely waited for her father to say more.
“When my wife, Lady Gwendolen, lost her child,” Sir Philip went on, mercilessly, “you were sent for and admitted into this house on sufferance, lest she should lose her reason. The poor, weak-witted thing chose to believe that you were hers, and partly to humor her, partly to conceal your disgraceful origin, I allowed the deception to be kept up until now. You would never have known from what beggar’s stock you sprang but from your folly and pride, which to me, who know the truth about your origin, is equally offensive and ridiculous.”
“Will you tell me one thing?” she asked, in an unnaturally steady voice. “You say I am not Lady Cranstoun’s child; am I yours?”
She could not keep the eagerness she felt out of her tones. He glanced at her curiously, ignoring her reason for the question.
“You are a gypsy’s child,” he answered, hoping to humiliate her.
“Not yours?” she cried, a ray of unmistakable relief flashing into her face. “Not yours! Oh, thank Heaven!”
In an instant he saw his mistake. The thought that she owed him neither reverence nor respect had come as a joyful relief to her.
“You are my daughter,” he said, harshly, “and you have to obey me. Fortunately for you, no one suspects the truth, or you would certainly not have been honored by an offer of marriage from the heir to Lord Northborough.”
He had purposely chosen such words in alluding to her mother that Stella might infer that she had no legal title to the name she bore. The object he had in view was to humble her pride, and whether or not he broke her heart at the same time was a matter of perfect indifference to him.
As he finished speaking, she began to move toward the door. A mist seemed to hang before her eyes, and she was trembling so much that her feet could hardly bear her weight; but she was as proud as he, and fully resolved that he should not see the full effect of his words upon her.
“Understand,” he called after her, “your marriage will take place early in May.”
She turned and faced him at the door.
“Lord Carthew shall hear to-night every word that you have said to me. Then, as you suggest, he will cease from troubling me.”
“I forbid you to exchange one word with him on the subject.”
Joining her by the door, he gripped her arm in his fingers as he had done in the morning. The pain of his clutch was intense, but she never winced under it.
“It is my duty to tell him, Sir Philip,” she said, as though she were addressing a stranger.
“Go to your room at once, and do not presume to leave it until you have my permission.”
“As you please. But as soon as I meet Lord Carthew, he shall hear every word.”
Baffled and furious, he released his hold on her arm, and following her upstairs, he watched her enter her own room, and drawing out the key, turned it on the outside, and slipped it into his pocket. He had totally miscalculated the effect upon her of the announcement he had made. He imagined that it would lower her pride to the dust, and break down once and forever her opposition to his will. But she had gone from the study with head erect and flashing eyes; and so far from dreading lest the secret of her humble birth should become known, she had instantly decided upon sharing it with the last person in the world who ought to be made aware of it.
More than ever it was necessary to hurry on this match with Lord Carthew. In such a spirit as that in which Stella now found herself, it was impossible to say what reckless step she might take. On returning to the drawing-room, therefore, Sir Philip pretended to read a newspaper, while his two guests finished their game, and he afterward contrived, in the course of a short talk with Lord Carthew, to strongly encourage that young gentleman’s hopes, and indeed to turn them to certainties.
“I have been having a little talk with my daughter,” he began, as the gentlemen sipped their grog and enjoyed a parting smoke before retiring for the night. “She is quite willing that the wedding shall take place during the second week in May. I haven’t a doubt that this house is extremely lonely for Stella, and that in her secret heart she is overjoyed at the thought of leaving it. The only difficulty is that she has never been separated from her mother, and I rather fancy that that is what she wanted to speak to you about just when I came up and interrupted her.”
“I shall be delighted if Lady Cranstoun will come with us when we set up housekeeping in town,” Lord Carthew answered, his plain face radiant with happiness. “I will talk over all arrangements with my mother when I go up to town to-morrow. I ought to go up early, because I am really anxious about my friend Hilary. Dr. Graham has been declaring how extremely rash it was for him to leave the shelter of your roof at present, and I am most anxious to find out whether he has suffered any ill effects from the journey.”
Lord Carthew retired to his room that night with a light heart, which not even the recollection of the palmist Kyro’s prediction could depress. “A passionate love affair, a hasty marriage, followed speedily by overwhelming misfortunes,” such were the terms of the prophecy made for his future a few weeks before. But now, in the belief that he had secured at least the warm friendship and willing consent of a lovely, high-born, fascinating, and gifted bride, Claud felt that he could laugh such gloomy predictions to scorn. Stella liked him, and would soon grow to love him, for Lord Carthew fully believed, as do so many men, that love is a plant which can be induced to grow in any woman’s heart with proper care and trouble.
Not for one moment did he suspect that the beautiful girl whom he hoped so shortly to make his wife was at that moment pacing up and down the boards of her bedchamber, completely dressed, with all idea of slumber banished from her mind, and her head in a whirl of passionate and rebellious thoughts, of which not one was devoted to him.
Her father’s statements had affected her to the full as much as he intended, but in a totally different direction from that which he had expected. So far from the knowledge of her mother’s humble origin inclining her to gratefully accept Lord Carthew’s offer, it seemed to her to place an insuperable and not unwelcome barrier between them.
“Hilary thought I was his superior in position,” she said to herself; “and oh, how glad I am that that is altered now! He was so humble, he begged my pardon so earnestly for having taken me into his arms; and I am only a poor gypsy’s daughter after all—beneath him, not above him! He must know that. I must tell him, and as soon as possible, before he has time to leave the neighborhood.
“And my mother—what became of her? Is she dead? Can any one tell me of her? Would Margaret know? She has been in the house many years, but she would not tell, I think. But there was the little doctor, who knew I was Miss Cranstoun because I was so like my mother. He must have known her, then. Did not the hostler tell me that when Dr. Netherbridge sent him here last night he told him that he knew the Chase, and knew Sir Philip, and had been here years ago? I must see this doctor privately, and at once must find out who and what my mother was. If she ever loved my father—and could any one love him, I wonder?—she must have been very, very miserable.”
Until the day broke, Stella remained lost in excited thought, wide-awake, and either walking restlessly up and down the room, or rocking herself backward and forward in a rocking-chair. Her desire to see Hilary immediately grew stronger every moment. She fully believed that when he knew her to be of humble birth, he would no longer avoid her, but would give his love as frankly as he would accept hers. Yet she felt that she must first of all see Dr. Netherbridge, and learn from him the truth about her mother. Her cheeks grew hot with shame at the thought that she had perhaps no right to bear the name of Cranstoun. The idea was so inexpressibly painful that she tried to banish it from her mind; but it returned again and again with a persistency not to be denied. Could she once ascertain that to be a fact, she decided, in an outburst of grief and humiliation, that she would escape from the Chase, and hide herself as far away as possible, unknown to any one. If she was indeed without either legal father or mother, she would no longer live upon grudgingly doled-out charity, but would go into the world and earn a living for herself, as many other poor and friendless girls were doing daily, banishing from her mind forever all thoughts of love and marriage.
She was fully resolved of one thing: that no man but Hilary Pritchard should be her husband; but she would never come to him with a stain upon her name.
Then, again, her reflections were disturbed by the memory of the gentle lady who believed her to be her daughter. How could she possibly desert her under any circumstances? Whatever the amount of her obligation toward Sir Philip, Stella realized that the love and duty she owed to Lady Gwendolen were none the less, but rather the more, urgent, should there, indeed, be no blood relationship between them. The more she pondered, the more troubled her mind became, and she longed above all things for the daybreak in order that she might put into action some of the plans which were formulating in her brain.
Meantime, she was locked in, and could only be let out at Sir Philip’s pleasure. This reflection filled her with a deep annoyance, and she set about evolving methods of escape.
There were two windows in her room, both tall and wide, divided by woodwork into squares about a foot high. She was only on the first floor, and the ivy which clung about every part of the walls would appear to offer a tolerably easy means of descent to one as light and agile as she. By half-past five o’clock she could endure her attitude of waiting and thinking no longer. Performing her toilet hastily, she changed her white silk evening gown into her serge morning costume, donned her hat and jacket, and pushing up the heavy sash of one of the windows, looked down on the terrace below and across at the trees to see whether her movements were observed.