No one was astir yet. A faint morning haze lay upon the fresh spring foliage about the treetops, and the morning sun, as it tried to burst through the vapor which rose from the damp earth, turned the dewdrops on the grass to shimmering diamonds. Catching her skirts close to her, she ventured one slender foot over the ledge of the window, testing the strength of the support accorded by the ivy. Luckily for her, the roots of a great ivy tree started at a point exactly between the windows of her room, and the branches were strong enough to support a far heavier burden than her light frame. A few scrambling steps, a prodigious rustling of ivy leaves, some tiny stones displaced, and then, with a flushed face, a dusty dress, and the palms of her soft hands a little cut and scratched, Stella found herself standing on the terrace, free.
A few moments later, she was running like a startled hare in the direction of a weak point in the wall which surrounded the Chase enclosure, as she particularly wished to avoid awaking the lodge-keepers from their slumbers. By a quarter past six she had reached the inn where Hilary was staying. The window-blinds were all drawn down, and no one was stirring but her friend the hostler, who, whistling an air popular in London some months before, was pottering about the stable-yard.
Catching sight of the tall, slight, girlish figure in plain blue serge gown and close-fitting serge jacket, he dropped in surprise the great horse-sponge and the bucket with which he was laden, and uttered a prolonged whistle of astonishment.
“Miss Cranstoun, as I’m alive!” he exclaimed. “Why, who’d ha’ thought of seeing you so early, miss?”
“I have to go into Grayling as soon as possible, and I want you to lend me a horse,” she explained. “I will bring it back to your stables very shortly, and will take great care of it. I could not get one at home, as every one was asleep when I left.”
The man’s eyes twinkled. Not being a householder, and coming as he did from London, the hostler had none of the local dread of Sir Philip Cranstoun’s displeasure.
“How would you like to borrow our young gentleman’s Black Bess, that you admired so much, for a little spin?” he suggested. “She takes a bit of riding, but I lay you’ll manage her.”
The offer was one after Stella’s own heart, and after a short time spent in fitting upon Black Bess’ back the unaccustomed side-saddle, Stella sprang lightly into her seat, and stroking the mare’s glossy black neck, turned her head toward Grayling and started her off in a gallop.
At first the mare, who had never before been ridden by a lady, was sorely puzzled by the flapping of Stella’s gown, and curved her long neck every now and then in a vain attempt to bite at her rider’s skirts. Gradually, however, getting used to this phenomenon, and realizing the difference between Stella’s weight and Hilary’s, she put her head down and made one determined effort to run away with her unusual burden. Baffled in this attempt, she settled down to the inevitable, and carried Stella as the girl had never been carried before, skimming over the ground in a way which would have left even fleet-footed Zephyr far behind.
Grayling, at seven o’clock, was still chiefly asleep, but a red-cheeked Grayling boy, who was spinning a top in the principal thoroughfare, desisted from his occupation in order to stare at Stella, and to inform her, in a drawling Surrey dialect, of the whereabouts of Dr. Ernest Netherbridge’s house.
The little doctor was no longer a bachelor. A knowledge of the fact that many steady-going provincial patients preferred their doctors married, together with the extreme dulness of having “no one to come home to,” had induced him some few years before to relinquish his vague ideals of a beautiful and attractive helpmeet, and to satisfy his wish for companionship and a more extensive income in the person of a spinster of uncertain age who was popularly supposed in Grayling to have been “setting her cap at the doctor” for over fifteen years.
And this person it was, in brown woollen and a large white apron, who opened the door on lovely Stella Cranstoun and Black Bess, and waspishly demanded to know her business with the doctor.
“I haveto see Dr. Netherbridge on business,” said Stella, while the doctor’s wife peered out with disapproval at her matutinal visitor’s fresh young face.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Netherbridge, dryly. “Are you ill?”
“No.”
“My husband, Dr. Netherbridge, is not accustomed to receive visitors who do not come about illness at seven o’clock in the morning. He isn’t down yet. If you want to see him, you had better call again.”
And with that, Dr. Netherbridge’s helpmeet was shutting the door in Stella’s face, when a man’s voice from the floor above was heard inquiring who the visitor was.
“I am Miss Cranstoun, from the Chase, Dr. Netherbridge, and I shall be grateful if you can spare me a few minutes’ conversation.”
“Certainly—certainly. I will be down immediately. Letitia, show Miss Cranstoun into the drawing-room.”
The top-spinning boy, finding time hanging heavily on his hands, had followed Stella to the doctor’s house, and remained near, staring, while the young lady, holding Black Bess’ bridle, stood parleying with Mrs. Netherbridge by the open door. Stella caught sight of him now, and addressed him, with one of her charming smiles.
“Are you clever enough to hold this horse for me while I go inside the house for a few minutes?” she inquired. “You shall have sixpence for your trouble.”
The boy nodded, and Stella followed Mrs. Netherbridge, who, with frosty civility, showed her into a prim and old-maidish drawing-room, where she was soon joined by Dr. Netherbridge.
“Forgive me for disturbing you so early,” Stella began. The little doctor’s face inspired in her exactly the same feeling of confidence and friendliness which her mother had felt toward him years ago.
“I have come,” she continued, “because I think you are the only person who can and will tell me the truth on a most important point. Yesterday, when you saw me for the first time, you said you recognized me by my likeness to my mother. The present Lady Cranstoun and I are totally dissimilar; you cannot, therefore, have meanther.”
Her brilliant dark-blue eyes were fixed searchingly, imploringly upon his face. Dr. Netherbridge was too sincere not to change color and show some slight sign of embarrassment.
“Family likenesses are unaccountable things,” he was beginning, when she cut him short.
“There is no longer any need for concealment,” she said, eagerly. “Last night Sir Philip Cranstoun told me I was born in a hovel, and daughter of a gypsy. Are those things true?”
“You were certainly born in a small cottage on your father’s property in this neighborhood,” the doctor answered; “and your mother was of gypsy extraction.”
“Tell me all you can about her.”
“She must have been extremely beautiful when in good health. At the time when I first met her, she was very little older than you are now, but she was deliberately starving herself to death, and her beauty was necessarily impaired.”
“How did you come to know her?” she asked, hanging upon his words in deep anxiety. “Was she—was she allowed to come to the Chase?”
“Allowed to come? Surely. Lady Cranstoun lived there until a few weeks before your birth, when, presumably after a quarrel with your father, she fled from her home at night, and went back to her own people.”
Stella sank into a chair, her hands tightly clasped together. Dr. Netherbridge saw the unmistakable relief in her face, and hastened to remove any doubt which might still trouble her as to her position.
“Your mother’s maiden name was Clare Carewe. She herself told me her history. As a very little girl, she ran away from the caravan in which she was brought up, and her beauty having attracted the attention of a very rich lady, who was Sir Philip Cranstoun’s sister, she was educated and adopted by her; and from her house at Torquay, Sir Philip secretly married her. Their first child died, and, so far as I could judge, it was a most unhappy marriage. Finally, one night, when some of your mother’s relations made their way into the plantation to speak to her, they were savagely attacked by gamekeepers as poachers; one of the gypsies, who was unhappily Lady Cranstoun’s father, was accidentally shot, and her brother was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, in spite of Sir Philip’s efforts to save him.”
“How terrible!” burst from Stella’s lips. “How she must have suffered!”
“She did indeed. Very soon after your birth, I was sent for by a gypsy lad, and on the following day I accompanied two nursewomen to your father’s house. Your mother, meanwhile, had died, and the gypsies had removed her body. I broke the news to Sir Philip, but as soon as he heard that the child was a girl, he flew into a furious passion, and ordered the women to take you away; nor could I do more than insist that he should know the address in London to which you were taken and provide some money for your maintenance. From that day I never met you until yesterday. But I shall never forget your mother’s face, and at first sight of you the likeness impressed me so strongly that I spoke without thinking.”
“Thank you,” she said, after a pause, rising and giving him her hand. “Thank you for your kindness to my mother, and to me also. I must be getting back now.”
She paused a minute. Then she asked curiously:
“What were they like, these gypsy people, my mother’s relations?”
“Very big, handsome men, from what I remember, and evidently of very strong family affections. There was an old woman, too, reputed to be a witch. I believe she is still alive, and that the peasants about here actually go to her to have illnesses or scars and moles charmed away. I hope I have told you nothing to distress you,” he added, kindly.
“No; I am grateful to you,” she answered, rewarding him with a smile as she passed from the room, almost colliding with Mrs. Netherbridge, who was fluttering about in the passage outside suspiciously near the keyhole.
Stella threw a shilling to the boy who held Black Bess, and with very slight assistance from him, vaulted into the saddle and turned the mare’s head in the direction where her master lay. Black Bess flew like an arrow from a bow, and the journey occupied even less time than in coming. The blood rushed over Stella’s face and neck as she saw, standing in the courtyard of the inn, watching her ride up, the tall, massive figure of Hilary Pritchard, with one arm in a sling, the sun shining on his yellow curls.
Without a word, he helped her to dismount, and entered the coffee-room with her. It was but a little after eight o’clock, and no one was there except a servant, bustling in and out, laying the breakfast things. To her Hilary turned, and begged her not to trouble, as he should not want the meal for a long while yet, and the girl, with a demure nod that was almost a wink, left the room, and contented herself with peeping through the glass upper portion of the door.
Hilary led Stella to a seat and sat beside her, looking down into her lowered face. Until now she had been self-possessed and buoyed up by a determination to carry her mission through. Now she faltered and trembled, hardly daring to look into her lover’s face.
“You will forgive me for borrowing Black Bess?” she said at last.
“Forgive you! What a request! She has never carried a lady before, and never will again any other than you. But won’t your parents be angry with you for coming off here like this? It was my friend the hostler who woke me up to tell me that Miss Cranstoun had borrowed my mare to go into Grayling, and that at the pace she was going she would soon be back. I got up at once—there is nothing the matter with me to-day.”
“You look certainly better than you did yesterday night,” she said, and then stopped short, blushing deeply.
“I know about your goodness in coming to see how I was,” he said, lifting her hand to his lips. “Our good genius the hostler told me of it this morning. But, my dear girl, are you wise in coming this morning? It is all so hopeless. Look at the difference between us. It was the height of presumption on my part to dare to fall in love with you; and, indeed, nothing was farther from my intention.”
“I loved you the moment you laid your hand on Zephyr’s bridle and looked up into my face,” she murmured, nestling closer to him, and letting her hand steal into his. “I really wanted to obey you as soon as you spoke to me, but I suppose a spirit of perversity urged me the other way. When you were wounded, I was in an agony of anxiety and remorse; otherwise, I should never have dared to bring you to the house. But all that about our not being equals is done away with now. It is true that I am Sir Philip Cranstoun’s daughter, but my mother was his first wife, and she was nothing more than a beautiful gypsy, brought up on charity by a rich lady. So you see,” she added, triumphantly, “it is all the other way round, andIam not good enough foryou!”
He was silent for a few moments.
“Have you told Lord Carthew what you have told me?” he asked at length.
“No. But I mean to. He will soon take back his offer, then.”
“His offer?” he repeated, in surprise. “Has he made you an offer, then?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know? Oh, of course, I have never had an opportunity of telling you. Lord Carthew asked me to marry him while we were out riding yesterday morning.”
“What did you say?”
“I—oh—I said I would think about it, or something of that sort.”
“You did not say ‘No’ outright?”—in a disappointed tone. “Stella, was all that before, orafter, I woke up and saw you?”
“Oh, how can you ask me? It wasbefore, of course?”
“And you were ready to marry Carthew at the time?”
“Don’t—don’t—be hard on me, and don’t look so stern and cold. How can I make you understand? You had said things against me that I had overheard. I believed, I really and truly believed, that you couldn’t bear me. And it made me mad with myself to find that I couldn’t keep you out of my thoughts for one minute. It seemed so dreadful—so forward and unwomanly—to be always thinking of a man who cared nothing for me. Then, too, you must remember that I longed with all my heart to escape from the Chase. You don’t know what our lives have been, poor mamma’s and mine, ever since I can remember. Lord Carthew knows——”
“Oh, Lord Carthew knows?” interrupting her, jealously. “You could confide inhim, but not in me.”
She looked at him very sweetly for a moment, and then burst out laughing.
“Dear Hilary,” she said, “remember that it is only two days since we first met, and that this is the first chance of a real talk we have had together. Whereas Lord Carthew and I——”
“You have had many interesting talks, I have no doubt,” he said, morosely, his handsome face clouding. “He is far cleverer than I, and can talk well on any subject. The wonder is that you don’t prefer him to me.”
“Isn’t it?” she assented, demurely, rubbing her cheeks softly against his coat-sleeve. “But there is no accounting for tastes, and—it may be my mad gypsy origin—but I decidedly preferyou.”
He raised one of her little hands to his lips and covered the finger-tips with kisses, smiling in spite of himself at the coquetry which had come so naturally to her in so short a time.
“Go on with what you were saying about the sadness of your life,” he said. “I want to know everything that you told Carthew.”
Stella had had hardly any experience of men; but she was a true woman, and her keen feminine instinct taught her that this man she loved was of a totally different temperament from the man who loved her. Hilary’s mind was of a direct, practical, common-sense order. In all his life he had thought but little of love for women, and now that the feeling overmastered him, he was inclined to question its authority, as well as to fly into paroxysms of jealousy without sufficient reason. He was not in the least conceited, and rather overrated Lord Carthew’s higher mental endowments, together with his eloquent tongue, high rank and wealth, when pitted against his own dower from nature of bone, and muscle, and manly beauty. He knew that Carthew loved Stella, and it would have seemed very natural to him that his passion should be returned. Above all, he did not wish to act toward his friend in a dishonorable and disloyal manner. Against his will, his blood leaped in his veins, as the young girl leaned toward him, lifting her beautiful, innocent eyes, with the light of love shining in them, to his face. Against his will, he clasped his arm about her waist, and felt that the world before him, with all its hopes, was well lost for the sake of a kiss from her soft, red lips.
“I can’t talk to you if you stop me like that,” Stella remonstrated, with a happy little laugh; “and do, pray, remember that that door is partly of glass, and people can see through it. Another moment and they will be having breakfast at the Chase. If my father finds out where I have been, he will half kill me.”
“Is he so bad as that?” he asked, wonderingly.
“He is, indeed. You haven’t even seen him, and you cannot, therefore, understand. Hilary, hehatesme, and until this morning I have never been able to understand why, or why, try as I might to like him, and to feel dutifully toward him, a cold shudder of dislike creeps over me when he comes near. Last night he grew furiously angry with me because I refused to marry Lord Carthew, and he told me then for the first time, with the idea, I suppose, of humiliating me, that my dear mamma was not my mother at all, but that I was really the daughter of an ignorant gypsy woman. It seemed too strange to be believed, but it was all true. This morning at six o’clock I climbed out of my bedroom window, as he had locked me into my room, and came here to borrow a horse with which to find out Dr. Netherbridge at Grayling. He confirmed Sir Philip’s words. The first Lady Cranstoun was a lovely gypsy girl, brought up on charity by Sir Philip’s sister, with whom he fell in love, and made a most wretched marriage. Not many days before I was born, my mother, heart-broken at the treatment she received, ran back to her own people, and among them, in a tumble-down little cottage not far from here, I was born, eighteen and a half years ago. So now you understand,” she concluded, triumphantly, “that so far from being a great lady, I come from the class of people who are driven from town to town by the police, branded as thieves and poachers, with the band of every respectable man and woman against them.”
She spoke bitterly, and something in her words and tone shocked Hilary a little. He had none of the love for the original and the unexpected in woman which had probably come to Lord Carthew from his brilliant little American mother. Hilary’s mother was the pretty and graceful daughter of a country clergyman, who had in her youth revelled in lawn-tennis and crewel-work, and whose ideas on all subjects were equally orthodox and limited. Hilary was fond of his mother, and she had heretofore supplied his ideal of femininity; he had not yet had time to adjust his aspirations toward a different standard.
“Do you quite realize what you are doing, I wonder?” he asked her suddenly, turning and taking her face into his hand while he scrutinized it closely, with a half-angry, half-hungry look. “What you are doing, I mean, in throwing over a man like Carthew for the sake of a man like me? He is heir to an earldom; his father is well off, and in a very brilliant position; his mother is extremely wealthy; he distinguished himself so greatly at college that people expect great things of him. While, as for me, the higher education was wasted on me; I was never good for anything but athletics. I am leaving England to rough it in Canada, trying to make a farm pay. I can keep a wife, certainly, upon what I have, but not such a wife as you.”
“Don’t you want me?” she asked, simply, looking him straight in the eyes.
“Want you? Good heavens! I would give my soul for you! But I won’t be played with. By some magic of your own you have made me love you, and you must take the consequences. Stella, I love you, and if you plight me your troth now, Imustmarry you. If you now, in the face of what I have put before you and what you know, still choose to cling to me, I swear to you that I will marry no woman but you, and that you shall marry no man but me!”
She looked into his face, flushed and excited as it was, his brown eyes shining like her own.
“On my honor, I swear,” she said, solemnly, “that whatever pressure is brought to bear upon me, I will marry no one but you, Hilary Pritchard.”
Their lips met in that interminably long kiss of first love, given and returned, the kiss which comes once in a lifetime to a chosen few, and to many comes never at all—a kiss in which time and space are obliterated, and in which two spirits seem to meet in regions far beyond this work-a-day world of ours.
Moved out of herself, in an ecstasy of emotion, perhaps at the happiest, certainly at the first perfectly happy moment of her life, Stella felt rather than heard a harsh, low-pitched voice, asking for Miss Cranstoun in the hall immediately outside the coffee-room.
She turned instinctively toward Hilary for protection as she whispered:
“It is my father!”
He flung his arm round her and held her to him a moment. The next, the door was burst open, and Sir Philip Cranstoun stood before them, white and quivering with rage. For a moment he stared at the pair before him, taking in every detail of Hilary’s appearance. Then he addressed his daughter in tones of withering scorn.
“May I ask who is this person with whom you appear to be on such extremely familiar terms?”
Stella slipped her hand within Hilary’s and gained strength from the contact.
“It is Mr. Hilary Pritchard,” she said, “the gentleman I have promised to marry.”
Atseven o’clock that same morning, Sir Philip had been aroused from his slumbers by Dakin.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the spy, “but I can’t help thinking Miss Cranstoun has somehow got away. You see, you have taken away the key of her room, and I can see a good way in through the keyhole. And the bed’s empty; it doesn’t look as if it had been slept in, and I can’t see any sign of her walking about the room.”
With a muttered execration, Sir Philip dismissed Dakin, and, hastily dressing himself, repaired to the door of Stella’s room and rapped several times sharply upon the panels. Getting no answer, he turned the key in the lock and called to her to come out, before throwing the door open, to find that the bird had flown.
It was easy enough to see how she had escaped. The window was wide open, and the ivy a little below torn and disarranged. Rage and alarm combined to give Sir Philip an extremely bad quarter of an hour, as he turned over in his own mind all possible places to which she might have gone, while his horse was bearing him toward the nearest gates of the Chase enclosure.
Sir Philip had no idea of Hilary’s detention at the inn, but as the hostlery was on the direct road to Grayling, from which town he surmised that Stella would take the train for London, he resolved to stop for a moment to inquire whether anything had been seen of her.
Hilary’s friend, the hostler, was holding the bridle of Black Bess at the entrance, when the Squire rode up on his gray hunter, and Sir Philip noticed at once that the mare carried a side-saddle.
“So you have lady visitors here, I see?” he said, pulling up his horse before the archway.
Jim the hostler’s sympathies were all with the lovers, and he recognized at once the necessity for putting the angry father off the scent.
“Not as I knows on, sir,” he answered, pulling his forelock.
“Then what is the meaning of that side-saddle?”
“I suppose the missis is going for a ride, sir,” the man answered, with an affectation of stupidity in his face and manner.
“What! on that horse? That isn’t one of your animals?”
“No, sir. It’s been left here by a gentleman for a day or two, and we’ve got to exercise it every day.”
Still Sir Philip did not appear satisfied, and the hostler was wondering whether he could not by some means convey a warning to the young couple in the coffee-room, when, as ill-luck would have it, his master, the landlord, came out into the courtyard at that identical moment, and in answer to Sir Philip’s point-blank inquiry as to whether he had seen Miss Cranstoun, blurted out that she was at that moment within the house, talking to a friend in the coffee-room.
The landlord was thinking of his lease, and not of Stella’s love affair, and he volunteered the further information that Miss Cranstoun had only been there about ten minutes, having borrowed Mr. Pritchard’s horse to go to Grayling and back.
This was the first intimation which the baronet received that Hilary was not in London, and it made instantly clear to him Stella’s disappearance from the Chase in the evening of the preceding day. She, his own daughter, Miss Cranstoun of the Chase, was actually carrying on a love affair at his very lodge gates, and making appointments with a farming adventurer at an inn on her father’s land, under the eyes of hostlers, and potmen, and farm laborers.
Rage almost choked him as he laid his hand on the door of the coffee-room, and the sight which met his eyes as he opened it was hardly calculated to assuage his anger. A superbly handsome young giant, with one arm in a sling, was seated close to Stella in a window-seat at the farther end of the room. It was easy enough to see that they were lovers. He was speaking eagerly, and she was hanging on his words, with her two hands clasped in one of his.
On Sir Philip’s entrance they started, and both of them rose to their feet; but Hilary still retained Stella’s hand.
Sir Philip carefully closed the door behind him, and came close up to the other two occupants of the room. In spite of the storm which raged within him, he was beyond everything anxious to avoid any scene by which his private affairs would become known to the people of the inn.
It was therefore in a voice so low as to be inaudible to any possible listeners outside the room that he addressed himself to Hilary, fixing him with his cold, glittering, light eyes as he spoke.
“What is your name?”
“Hilary Pritchard.”
“And what are you doing here with my daughter?”
“I have been asking her to marry me, Sir Philip!”
“You are not aware, then, that she is already engaged to be married to Lord Carthew, by whose want of judgment a fellow like you got introduced into a respectable house.”
“You have made some mistake, I think,” returned the young man, resolutely keeping his temper in the face of provocation. “Your daughter loves me, and she will never marry Lord Carthew.”
“My daughter is under age, sir, and her folly and inexperience would make her an easy prey to the wiles of a cad and an adventurer such as you. Luckily, I have interfered to save her good name. You entered my house on sufferance, and taking advantage of my absence, and of your friend’s foolish confidence in you, you presumed to make love to this young lady in much the same rough-and-ready style as you would adopt toward the haymakers and farmhands in your own rank of life. You, a nobody, a penniless, intending emigrant, dared to try to steal my daughter’s affections from your friend, to whom she had pledged them. I have no hesitation in saying that your conduct has been mean, cowardly, treacherous, and unmanly in the extreme. I would rather see my daughter dead than lowered by any association with a low-born and ungrateful pauper such as you.”
As he spoke, by a sudden movement he wrenched their hands asunder, and seizing that of his daughter’s within his own, began to move toward the door.
Hilary Pritchard had grown very pale under Sir Philip’s fierce invective, but he did not condescend to defend himself against the latter’s accusations.
“I hold you to your promise, Stella,” he said, quietly.
“I swear to you I will marry no one but you,” she returned.
One last, long look was interchanged between them, and then Stella was dragged from the room by her father, who had pulled her hand through his arm, and who, as soon as he reached the courtyard, gave orders in an unconcerned voice that the side-saddle should be changed from Black Bess to a horse belonging to the inn, the loan of which he required for an hour or two.
“I fear we shall be late for breakfast,” he said, turning to his daughter with an assumption of geniality, and speaking in a raised tone of voice so that he might be overheard by all within range. “Stella, you managed to get through your business in Grayling with wonderful celerity. I never expected to find you back here so soon. I am glad we found Mr. Pritchard none the worse for his unlucky accident.”
Stella disdained to act up to his pretence of fatherly affection. It was nothing to her if the whole world knew that she loved Hilary Pritchard and that her father had come to part them. Sir Philip’s family pride was, from her point of view, equally incomprehensible and ridiculous. So she stood by his side, he detaining her hand in his arm with a grasp which, while it affected to be fatherly, was really vindictive and painful to bear, and which she endured with a set, white face, blazing eyes, and tightly compressed lips.
In much the same fashion they rode away, she sitting straight upon her horse, staring before her, unheeding the friendly talk he affected to address to her. But Jim the hostler noticed that all the while he spoke Sir Philip’s fingers touched his daughter’s bridle-rein.
“He’s a brute, that’s whatheis, for all his soft sawder,” was Jim’s comment.
More than once during the ride home a mad longing seized Stella to escape from her father’s tyranny. But Sir Philip’s gray would easily have outstripped in speed the sorry hack upon which she was mounted, even if her father’s hand had not held her bridle. Every cruel and bitter taunt which his brain could conceive was hurled at her on their progress between the inn and the Chase. But no words could provoke a response from her. She was trying to remind herself that he was her father, and that even if she could not love him she must at least endeavor not to hate him.
At the doors of the house she sprang from her horse and ran swiftly up the stairs to Lady Cranstoun’s room. Her stepmother was still in bed, sitting up, wrapped in a white woollen shawl, drinking her coffee. She had not quite recovered from the strain of the preceding day, and Dr. Graham had prescribed complete rest and freedom from all excitement.
“I was wondering you had not come to say good-morning to me,” she said, “but Margaret said Sir Philip had locked you in your room. Was that true?”
“Don’t let’s talk of him, dear,” returned the young girl, kissing her affectionately, and kneeling down at the bedside, caressing one of her hands. “Let’s try to think he doesn’t exist.”
“Something has happened!” exclaimed the poor lady, apprehensively. “You are dreadfully pale, and your hands are quivering. There are tears in your eyes, too. Tell me, Stella, quickly, what is the matter?”
“It is nothing,” she answered. “I am overtired after a bad night. That is all.”
“It was not true—what you said last night in fun—about not marrying Lord Carthew, was it, dear?”
“No; it was not true.”
Sir Philip’s voice broke sharply in upon their talk. He had entered the room unperceived, and was standing on the other side of the bed.
Stella rose at sight of him, but remained with her arm round Lady Cranstoun.
“The marriage will take place in the second week of May,” Sir Philip proceeded, fixing a threatening glance upon his daughter.
“I am so glad; oh, I am so glad, my dear, dear child!”
Stella did not speak. She dared not at the moment undeceive her or banish from her face that unwonted look of happiness and hope.
Lady Cranstoun kissed her affectionately, and then as though nerving herself for a great effort, and timidly retaining the girl’s hands in hers, she addressed her husband.
“I have not told you before, Philip,” she began, “in fact, I have not had an opportunity, that while you were away, feeling that I might die any minute, I sent to town for my father’s lawyer.”
“Without consultingme?”
“Yes. You see, there is that legacy of my Uncle Charles, which I came into last year——”
“Well?”
“It isn’t very much—only five thousand pounds, in fact—but I have left it by will to Stella when she attains the age of twenty-one. You see, the estates being entailed, I did not like the idea of my little girl being without pocket-money. And it will be a nice little sum for herself when she marries Lord Carthew.”
Sir Philip was for the moment struck dumb with surprise and indignation. That his colorless, obedient wife should dare in his absence to make a will, leaving money away from him to his rebellious daughter, struck him as a most unwifely and outrageous liberty, and the desire to sting and humiliate both his wife and daughter became too strong to be resisted.
“Yourlittle girl!” he repeated, with a hard laugh. “Haven’t you grown out of that silly delusion yet?Yourchild died years ago, as a weakly, miserable baby. That girl beside you, to whom you are so anxious to will your money, is no relation to you, but simply the daughter of my first wife, who died at her birth, exactly three months before I married you.”
“Philip! Stella! It is not true—say it is not true!” gasped Lady Cranstoun.
“How can you be so cruel?” exclaimed the young girl, turning in passionate reproach upon her father. “Don’t worry, and don’t listen, mamma, dear. You know that I am yours, and that I love you!”
“Your dutiful affection is not without its reward,” sneered Sir Philip. “Five thousand pounds is certainly a great deal more than you would ever get fromme. But it is time this mother and daughter nonsense was done away with, except for the purpose of giving the girl a more respectable ancestry than she could show as the daughter of a gypsy. Where did you suppose she got her beauty from? You Douglases have always been an ugly, high-cheekboned race. There is nothing of the Douglas abouther.”
Lady Cranstoun was moaning as if in pain, and her pale eyes had a hunted, terrified expression as she turned them helplessly from her husband to Stella.
“Not my child,” she whispered. “Not—my—child!” and as the words left her lips, she fell backward in Stella’s arms, cold and motionless, to all appearance dead already.
“You have killed her!” the latter cried, as she vainly tried to restore animation to the still figure, and for a few moments Sir Philip believed, not without a momentary pang of self-reproach, that she was right. Gradually, however, under Dr. Graham’s care, consciousness returned, but only feebly; and throughout the morning she fell from one fainting-fit into another. Stella never left her for a moment, and everything that skill and care could do was done to prolong the faint flicker of life within her wasted frame. A heart specialist was telegraphed for from London, and Lord Carthew, who had intended leaving for town early in the day, having heard no word of Hilary’s presence in the vicinity, delayed his journey until he could hear the doctor’s verdict.
It was unfavorable in a high degree. Lady Cranstoun was, so the great man agreed with Dr. Graham, slowly dying, and could not possibly last through the night. Toward evening she suddenly appeared to rally, recognized and spoke to Stella, and asked in a clear, distinct voice for Lord Carthew. When the young man came, she gave him her hand, and drew his toward that of Stella, which rested on the coverlet beside her.
“Be—very good—to her,” she murmured; and so, still occupied with thoughts for Stella’s future, she closed her eyes and fell asleep, never to open them on this world again.
To Stella the blow was terrible, overwhelming. The tie between her and her step-mother, as she now knew her to be, had been extremely strong, cemented by unselfishness on both sides, the girl patiently giving up the greater portion of her day in attendance and nursing, and the woman keeping silent about her sufferings, lest she might too greatly sadden her young companion. Such faults and foibles as Lady Cranstoun possessed, her intense timidity and cowardice, her limited intelligence, and excessive pride of birth, were but trifling when weighed against her kindly and affectionate nature. Stella’s own mother, had she lived, could not possibly have shown more sympathy and affection toward her child, whom she would probably have tormented by her violent and jealous nature.
Lord Carthew’s heart was deeply touched by the sight of Stella’s grief. He had no opportunity of speaking to her between the time of leaving the house and his attendance at Lady Cranstoun’s funeral four days later. Even then he did not see her. She was utterly prostrated by grief, Sir Philip informed him, and he did not think fit to add that from the hour of Lady Cranstoun’s death, the girl had been kept a close prisoner, the maid Ellen or Dakin sleeping in her room, which had been changed, so that no escape by the window was possible.
“I think the sooner you marry her and take her away with you the better,” Sir Philip said, as the two men were returning in the mourning-coach from the scene by the Cranstoun vault in Grayling Cemetery after the ceremony. “The poor child has cried herself ill; she will scarcely eat, and refuses to leave the house. I am really growing extremely anxious about her. Your letters are the only things that seem to give her any pleasure, although, as she says, she hasn’t the heart to answer them yet.”
As a matter of fact, Lord Carthew’s letters had been opened and read by Sir Philip on their arrival each day, and subsequently laid upon the dressing-table of Stella, for the amusement, apparently, of Dakin and Ellen, since the lady to whom they were addressed had never so much as touched one of them. They were good letters, too; full of affection and intelligence, if a little didactic in tone; too good by far to be wasted upon a cynical man of the world and two uneducated female spies.
“I am almost afraid for her reason,” continued Sir Philip. “A change of surroundings is imperative, so the doctor tells me. The attachment between mother and daughter was so great that the blow is proportionately heavy. In fact, my dear Carthew, it is now the twentieth of April, and I propose that the marriage, which, of course, will be strictly private, should take place at the date originally fixed—the tenth of May. It was her poor mother’s last wish, as you know, and under such circumstances should have with us the weight of a command.”
To this suggestion Lord Carthew agreed warmly. He was greatly disappointed at not seeing his fairfiancée, but was to some extent soothed by a fictitious message, brought to him by her maid Ellen, to the effect that Miss Cranstoun was so ill that she had not risen that day, but that she sent her love and asked him to excuse her.
Just for the few minutes while Ellen was repeating these words to Lord Carthew, in her master’s presence, having been previously taught them by Sir Philip himself, Stella was left alone in her bedroom, the door of which was carefully locked, and the window securely barred. It was her first moment of solitude since Lady Cranstoun’s death, and as luck would have it, Stephen Lee was standing on the terrace immediately beneath her window, which was situated in a turret on the third floor of the building.
For the past four days, although Stella knew it not, Stephen had taken every possible opportunity of hanging about the house, the serious illness of one of the collies—an illness so opportune for his plans that he might be almost suspected of having some hand in it—forming an excellent excuse for loitering near the house, young Stephen being renowned for his success as a horse and dog doctor.
As soon, therefore, as Stella’s pale face was pressed against her prison bars, her eyes fell upon the handsome, swarthy countenance and black beard of the young gamekeeper, and the words spoken by old Sarah, the gypsy fortune-teller, flashed back into her mind.
The hag had sworn to her that the “Romanys” were her friends, her people, and that they would help her to escape, if escape were necessary. At the time, her words seemed mere incomprehensible jargon, and her allusions to “Clare,” and assertions that Stella was “Clare’s child,” had seemed the idle chatter of a woman whose wits were wool-gathering in second childhood.
But now all that was changed. The key to the mystery was in Stella’s possession, and her cheeks flushed and her heart beat high with excitement and hope as she recalled the fact that her mother had escaped out of Sir Philip’s power back to her own people, if it was only to die, and that she, Stella, might well do the same. Old Sarah had told her what to do if she needed her help. She had but to place within the hands of Stephen Lee that little old coin, slung on a piece of red silk string, which she still carried about her, and succor would most certainly come.
In an instant she had made a rapid gesture to Stephen, whose eyes were upturned to her window. He glanced quickly round, and nodded; then noted, with the keen eye of a man who spent his life out of doors, the direction taken, in falling, by the little medal as it was cast down by Stella’s hand, caught it in his fingers, slipped it in his pocket, and walked leisurely away, as though nothing had happened.
Stella had just time to close the window and retire from its vicinity, when the maid Ellen returned. Her presence and that of Dakin were detestable to Stella, who could not even weep for Lady Cranstoun’s death free from their curious and vulgar gaze, nor would she ever exchange a word with either of them.
To-day, for the first time, buoyed up by this new hope of escape, she seemed indifferent to the woman’s presence.
Her hope lay in the gypsies, and with all the wild gypsy element in her blood, she was longing to be free.
Onleaving the terrace before the Chase, Stephen Lee struck immediately into the forest in a northerly direction.
The circumference of the Chase enclosure measured fully ten miles, but there was barely a yard of the space that was not known to the gypsy-bred lad, who had been familiarized with it in bygone poaching days of childhood long before the period when, as a decently dressed and apparently respectable lad, he had applied for and obtained a situation about the dairy farm on the property. Very soon his usefulness caused him to be promoted. He had “ways” with horses, dogs, cows, and sheep; could repair a fence or sow a field, break in a horse or administer medicine to a sick dog, with equal cleverness.
He was, so his fellow-servants decided, inordinately proud and unsociable, for what reason none of them could satisfactorily fathom. He broke in Sir Philip’s hunters and taught Miss Cranstoun to ride, being himself little more than three years older than she. He did not drink, and had, so far as others knew, neither sweetheart nor friends; yet now and then he would mysteriously disappear for hours together, nor would he afterward even attempt to explain his absences.
The evening was closing in as he made his way in and out the undergrowth in a direct cut through the wood; and it was only after more than an hour of very rapid walking that he began to slacken his speed.
The trees grew very closely together at this point, so closely, indeed, that it seemed impossible to force a path between them. But Stephen knew the track and could almost have found it blindfold, and after about a quarter of an hour more of difficult walking he came upon an open space of grassy mounds, crowned by the ruins of an ancient hunting tower, dating back to a very early period, of which, however, little more than four stout ivy-hung walls, and a portion of a low battlemented tower remained. The ruin was not large enough to be imposing, nor had it any known historical interest. Very few people knew of its existence, as it was not discernible over the tops of the tall trees by which it was surrounded; yet that it was known to at least one person was evident now, for from the ruined tower a thin blue line of smoke rose into the clear evening air.
No way of entering the ruin was visible, the base of the tower and of the low building attached to it being blocked up by rubble, by overgrown bushes, and by fallen masonry. But Stephen Lee made straight for a portion of the ruin heavily veiled with ivy, and removing this with one hand, he came upon a low archway of stonework completely blocked by a solid wooden door. Upon this he tapped with the handle of a knife he carried in his belt, and softly whistled. The signal was answered, and the sound of a rusty bolt being withdrawn was the prelude to the apparition of old Sarah Carewe’s face in the doorway.
Entering, Stephen found himself in an improvised chamber formed partly by the tower and partly by roughly hewn timber roofing to the adjacent walls. Dry leaves thickly covered the ground, and on a heap of them in front of the fire the brawny figure of a man in the prime of life was stretched, revelling in the smoky warmth of a fire of peat and sticks.
An oil lamp, hanging from the roof, lit up the scene, which was not wanting in elements of the picturesque. By its feeble illumination, assisted by the firelight, a few pieces of extempore furniture could be discerned, such as a wooden table, two or three stools, an iron pot, and some other cooking utensils, and in the far corner a long, shallow box of wood, upon which some rags and rugs were stretched to form a not unacceptable couch for such as needed not luxury to induce slumber.
To Stephen all these details were familiar, as was the bent and shrunken form of his great-grandmother, Sarah Carewe, of whom he stood in some considerable awe. In her seventy-ninth year, Mrs. Carewe might well have lived through the century with which she was popularly credited; her energy was boundless, and her brain as keen and cunning as when, nearly sixty years before, she had become the proud mother of Hiram Carewe, shot down by Sir Philip Cranstoun’s hand on that memorable evening eighteen and a half years ago.
“Baish down, lad,” she said, pointing to a stool by the fire. “Uncle Jim and me have been looking for you for the past two hours. What’s the news up at the house?”
He drew the token from his pocket and laid it in her hand.
“This,” he said. “She is a prisoner, as you know, and she threw it me from her room window. The lord was there to-day at the burying. They’re driving her close to marry him, curse him! He’s as ugly as a monkey, and I could throttle him with one hand.”
“Her fancy is a lot handsomer,” laughed the old crone. “I don’t blame Clare’s girl for fixing on a good-looking man.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, half-fearfully, half-savagely, pausing in the act of knocking the ashes out of a pipe he had taken from his pocket.
Sarah Carewe shook with creaking laughter, holding her hands to her sides as she looked at her angry descendant.
“Why, I mean as how you shot the right chap when you potted the big ’un,” she said. “That’s the one she’s set her mind on.”
“Who? That Pritchard cove? He’s left the place, and gone to the Cranstoun Arms and then to London——”
“A lotyouknow,” she cried, in her shaky treble. “He went to the Cranstoun Arms right enough, and Stella visited him there twice. The morning of the day that cursed Sir Philip’smortwent to glory, Stella was nabbed by her father, chatting with her spark, with his arm still tied up from your shot.”
“Hang him! I wish I’d killed him!” muttered Stephen. “And I would if I’d known what was coming. Something told me as he caught Zephyr’s rein, and stared up at her, that he’d be after her; that’s why I fired. But why didn’t you tell me all this before,mamiSarah? It’s all along of your promise to me about her that I’m working for you. You know right well you swore by your tricks and magic to make her come to me, and love me, and choose me for her mate before every one. And here I stand by to see her in love with one man, and married to another. I haven’t done your bidding, and your spying, ay, and yourchoaringand thieving too, if it comes to that, in the pay of a man whose throat I’d like to cut, all these years, to be hocused and laughed at now. I tell you,mamiSarah,” he added, starting from the stool, and stamping heavily upon the ground, having worked himself up to a frenzy, “I won’t be made a fool of any longer!”
The man by the fire rolled over, and looked up at him, speaking for the first time.
“You talk of wanting to cut Philip Cranstoun’s throat,” he began, slowly. “What call haveyouto hate him, like I have, andmamihere? For eighteen years, come last October, we’ve been waiting,mamiand me, to get our knife into him, and our chance has come at last! You’re young and green, lad; we don’t let you into all our secrets. You follow orders, and do as thenais norttells you—she’sgot her head screwed on right. Do you think a man forgets to pay a debt like mine? Think of it, lad! I was younger than you are now, and I loved my sister Clare—Sarah here can tell you how I loved her. When she was brought up grand as a regularbeen rawnie, she used to steal away to see brother Jim on the sly. The girl Stella you’re so sweet on ain’t a patch on her mother—my sister Clare. She’d a pair of eyes like stars dancing in a pool at moonlight, and teeth like little round dewdrops. And he married her, and broke her heart, and swore he’d shoot down any of her relations as he should find loitering about his place. But that night, which was to be my last in England afore I sailed to America, to a splendid opening there with uncle Pete, that’s long ago dead, says I to father, ‘I must have one more look at Clare, for maybe I’ll never come back again.’ Father was against it at first, but I’d take no advice, and he wanted badly to speak to her, seeing she’d written to say she was breaking her heart; so we went. Oh, you’ve heard the story of how, so soon as she’d crept over the grass to us, her father and brother, by the moonlight, all in white silks and satins, to wish us good-by, she was seized and blindfolded, and dragged away, while he, that double villain, that cursed Philip Cranstoun, shot my father down where he stood by my side! No call to tell you how I fought to punish them, nor how, when they’d nabbed me, being three to one, they made a pretence of a trial, and give me five years—five years in prison for seeing my father murdered in cold blood, and trying to get at them as shot him down. Well, I’ve lived through them five years; I’m a tough un to kill. You think of it, lad—you as lives as I lived for the most part, under the sky, with the free air blowing in your face all day—think what prison is: Four bare walls, a dog’s work in front of you, and a slave-driver to see as you do it; and all the while eating your heart out with knowing it was unjust, the cruel injustice of a titled scoundrel as had broken your sister’s heart, and made a jailbird of you, and murdered your father. And all for what? For his own dirty pride—pride of his family, as are no older than us Carewes; pride that I’ll humble in the dust yet, if I spend the rest of my life in quod for it.”
“There ain’t no talk of quod for this business of ours, dearie,” put in the old crone, as she stirred the fire with a bent iron stick. “You shall have your revenge, sure enough, and so will I. YourdadiHiram was my own first-born, that I’d seen grow up from the stoutest and prettiestkinchinto the finest man in the country-side. And my eyes have seen what yours have not: your sister, my bonny Clare, as she lay dying in my arms, making me swear on her child’s head that I would punish Philip Cranstoun. ‘He swore he would break my pride,’ she said, with the death-rattle in her throat. ‘Mami, break his. Disgrace is worse than death to him. He has brought death upon me; bring disgrace upon him.’ I seem to hear her voice now, and to see her glazing eyes light up for the last time as she said the words.”
She sat still for a while, staring into the flaming logs over the outstretched figure of James Carewe. A wonderful Rembrandtesque study they would have made, those three generations of gypsies, had any Dutch painter been there to fix the scene on canvas, with its sombre tone lit by the ruddy firelight. The woman, in her heavy cloak, the hood fallen back, and disclosing a faded red and yellow silk handkerchief wound round her head, from which scattered white elf locks fell over her wrinkled brow and sunken cheeks. Only a great artist could have reproduced the look in her glittering black eyes, a look that took in a past of wrongs and sufferings, and brooded in cruel, anticipative joy over a future of revenge.
The man at her feet was himself a model of rugged power and a certain swarthy beauty. His coal-black hair and beard were plentifully streaked with gray; his dark skin was unnaturally pallid, and in his sunken black eyes there lurked an expression not good to see, the look of a strong man deeply wronged, at war with society, and ripe for revenge. His dress was careless and dirty; long ago he had ceased to have any pride in his appearance, and those years of prison life, followed by the misery of police supervision, had changed him from a handsome, gallant lad, full of strength and possibilities, to a surly and brooding loafer, whose hand was against every man’s and whose whole nature was in sullen revolt against the established order of things.
The third member of the group by the fire added no little to the strange picturesqueness of the scene as he leaned with folded arms against the wall, listening eagerly while his elders recounted their past experiences. Stephen Lee was grandson to Sarah’s second child, a daughter, married to a gypsy of the name of Lee. But for some years past Stephen’s lines had fallen in comparatively pleasant places, and in his smart velveteen coat, corduroy breeches, and gaiters, he formed a strong contrast to the ragged and neglected appearance of his uncle, and to the tatters of old Sarah.
“You’ve got good cause to hate the gray wolf,” he said, after a pause. “I’ve been taught to hate him ever since I could speak, and I never set eyes on him without tingling to put a bullet through him. It’s the way he treats Stella as maddens me. You talked of prison just now; well, she’s imprisoned, shut in with two cursed women spies, one or the other, turn and turn about, watching her all the time. Lady Cranstoun was good to her, I will say that, for all she wasn’t her mother. But now she’s gone, that girl’s heart’s wellnigh broken; and when I pass the house at night and see the light up in her turret-window, I’m mad to burn the place down with everything and every one in it excepther. But you two don’t know her as I do. You haven’t watched her grow up each day. She’s a regular lady, and looks down on such as me, for all I’m her cousin if she but knew it. Say what you like,mami, she won’t love a fellow like me. And on the tenth of May they’re going to marry her to this lord. I heard the gray wolf tell the other so, coming from the burying. Stella’s sent you that token, and you’ve got to save her. Though how in thunder you’re going to do it, and bring the disgrace upon Philip Cranstoun’s name as you talk so much about, it beats me to imagine.”
Again the old woman laughed the mirthless, rattling laugh of old age, and this time James Carewe raised his head from his arms, exchanged a glance with her, and turned over on his side again to face the fire, with the nearest approach to a laugh he ever made. Their incomprehensible merriment annoyed Stephen greatly, and he muttered an oath or two under his breath as he watched them.
“Chee, chee, lad!” remonstrated the crone. “You will laugh too when we’ve done the trick, and spirited the girl away, and hocused her father and her bridegroom. Your part of the business now is, first, to carry her a letter I mean to write her; and next, to make believe you’ve fallen in love with one of them two women as spy upon her. Have you got paper and pencil about you?”
Stephen took from his pocket a thick leather-covered account-book, and, tearing out a sheet, handed it to her.
“Not me!” she returned, shaking her head. “I leave all that to boys like you. Write down what I say: ‘From Sarah Carewe to Stella Cranstoun—The Romanys have not forgotten. Pretend to agree to the marriage, so that the watch may be relaxed. On your wedding-eve help will come. Hope and trust. Your mother’s friends watch over you, and soon you will be free.’ And now,” old Sarah added, “you must contrive that this shall be given her. Hang about until you see Margaret. She’s timid, but she’s square. If Stella plays her part, and cods them into thinking she’s come round, we’ll cheat the gray wolf yet, and within a month—ay, less than that, Jim, my boy—you and me will have a laugh, a right good laugh together, and even Steve here can join in then!”
Thoroughly mystified, but accustomed from childhood to unquestioningly obey the orders of old Sarah, whose reputation for abnormal sagacity, together with her undoubted magnetic powers, had earned her a great reputation among her own class, as well as among credulous and open-handed members of the public, Stephen presently left the ruins and returned to the Chase. Joining the other servants at supper that night, and listening to their talk about the coming marriage, he contrived by a look to signify to Margaret that he had something to say to her. Greatly surprised, but ready-witted as women of all classes usually prove in an emergency, she presently, as she sat next to him at table, contrived to knock her supper-plate off on to the floor with a great clatter.
Down went her head under the table, and down went Stephen’s. The result was a collision, and under cover of the laughter which ensued, she felt him slip a tiny piece of folded paper into her hand, and heard him whisper:
“For the mistress.”
Housekeeper Margaretwas a quiet, reserved, and cautious woman with the caution bred of extreme nervousness and dread of being bullied.
Her fear of Sir Philip was extreme. She was a woman of limited intelligence, and much addicted in the privacy of her own room, when there was no one to observe her, to the consumption of cheap sensational literature. Ever since the night of Clare Lady Cranstoun’s disappearance Margaret had cherished the conviction that Sir Philip had secretly murdered her; luckily she kept this belief to herself, but it naturally did not lessen her fear of him.
She was not at all popular with her fellow-servants, and, strange to say, they were somewhat afraid of her. The fact that she was the only female servant who had been retained at the Chase more than a few years, together with her silent, reserved manners, really born of nervousness, made the others restrained and uncomfortable before her; even Dakin, the spy, did not know how far Margaret might be in her master’s confidence, and invariably treated her with elaborate respect, an example which was followed by all the other servants, the more willingly as Sir Philip doled out the housekeeping money both before and after his second wife’s death into Margaret’s hands.
In her secret heart Margaret was far from preserving the adamantine character with which she was credited. So far from it, indeed, she took an intense interest in Stella’s love affair, and considered Hilary Pritchard an ideal hero of romance, his splendid figure, handsome face, and genial, grateful manners having made a strong impression upon her during the short period while he remained under her care.
When, therefore, Stephen Lee handed her the note for Stella, under pretence of assisting her to pick up the plate she had purposely dropped from the kitchen table, Margaret instantly jumped to the conclusion that it must be another communication from Stella’s handsome sweetheart, Hilary, which the latter had contrived to transmit to the young gamekeeper.
It was very desirable, so Margaret decided, that Stella should receive the note that same night. “It will comfort the poor dear,” she said to herself, “and, maybe, make her sleep better to know that her young gentleman is thinking of her.”
But since her lady’s death, Margaret had had no opportunity of seeing Stella, and it would have provoked comment and inquiry had she tried to do so now. Presently, however, when Ellen, the lady’s maid, gave vent to a grumbling remark that she “supposed some supper would have to be taken up to Miss Stella, since she hadn’t touched anything that day, and she must be kept alive somehow until she was married and done for,” it occurred to Margaret that her chance had come. Miss Cranstoun’s supper consisted of a wing of a bird, some Camembert cheese and salad, and some Burgundy in a decanter, the doctor having ordered her that wine. Margaret decided intuitively that even if Stella ate nothing, long fasting would have made her so faint that she would probably sip a glass of wine. Risking detection, therefore, she contrived to slip the piece of folded paper she had received from Stephen under the decanter under pretence of smoothing the cloth under the tray in passing. Only Stephen Lee saw her do it; not much escaped his keen gypsy eyes. But in order to complete her work it was necessary that Ellen’s attention should be turned in some other direction than the tray she was about to carry up to her mistress, and towards that end he suddenly made a remark in an awkward shamefaced manner, all the more effective because it appeared spontaneous and genuine.
“If I was Lord Carthew,” he said, “it’s not the missus I’d be after, but the maid.”
The lie almost choked him as he mentally contrasted the limp, round back, colorless eyes, and retreating chin of Ellen with the willowy, supple form, delicate features, and luminous eyes of his adorable cousin. But the lady’s maid herself saw no inappropriateness in the compliment, which was the more valuable as the young gamekeeper seldom joined the kitchen circle and had never before paid the least attention to any of the women. Ellen therefore bridled with pride and satisfaction as she caught up the supper-tray and made her way to Miss Cranstoun’s room in the turret, the door of which was opened to her by Dakin.
“What a time you’ve been!” exclaimed the latter. “I’ve been just longing to get down to my supper.”
“Young Stephen Lee’s been in the servants’ hall,” said Ellen, in a loud whisper, and Stella, hearing the words, listened with all her ears.
“Lor’, he’s that complimentary,” giggled Ellen. “Says he, ‘If I was Lord Carthew,’ he says, ‘it’s not the mistress I’d be after, but the maid.’ I got that hot and uncomfortable at the way he said it and looked at me that I had to ketch up the tray and run upstairs out of the way. It never seemed to me he was a marrying sort of man; but there, perhaps he was only waiting until Miss Right came along.”
Dakin stared, with a striking absence of sympathy. She was wondering what a fine, handsome young fellow like Stephen could see in the pallid, watery-eyed, flabby-looking young woman before her. Only Stella, as she reclined on a sofa in the bedroom, to all appearance absorbed in listlessly turning over the pages of a novel, could guess at anything between the lines of Stephen Lee’s compliment. That Stephen should dare to lift his eyes as high as her, his master’s daughter, had not entered her mind. But she knew now that he was a gypsy of the same wild, untamed race as herself, and she guessed that his motive for entering the servants’ hall that night was to bring some message from old Sarah, and that his unwonted gallantry toward the far from comely Ellen was a trick to cover some scheme of his for the future.
It was therefore not without prescience of what might be in store for her that Stella watched the tray which was placed on a little table near her couch. She fully expected, indeed, that a communication of some kind would be lurking among the articles upon it, and when, presently, waiting her opportunity until Ellen, under pretence of rearranging the ornaments on the mantelpiece, became absorbed in the reflection of her own plain features in the looking-glass, she began to closely examine the contents of the supper-tray, the result was that her fingers speedily closed on Sarah’s message. Slipping it into the open pages of her book, with her heart beating high with excitement, Stella read the pencilled words with eager eyes. Not for one moment did she doubt the gypsy’s power to help her. “Your mother’s friends watch over you, and soon you will be free.” The words came as light in the darkness to the girl, drooping under the forced confinement to the house, and the detestable system ofespionageby which she was never for one moment free from Dakin’s or Ellen’s prying eyes. It was true that when she thought of Lord Carthew, and recalled his sympathetic talk on the morning when he had compared her to the “Lady of Shalott,” and the charm of his manner toward the late Lady Cranstoun, she was not so unjust or so prejudiced as to believe that he was a party to the system which was depriving her of her liberty and breaking down her health in order to force her into an uncongenial marriage. She believed, on the contrary, that could she only obtain an hour’s uninterrupted talk with the young Viscount, he would be the first to condemn her father’s drastic treatment and to yield his claim to her hand when she informed him that she was passionately in love with another man. She knew all this, but knew, too, that Sir Philip would never allow a meeting between her and Lord Carthew, whose town address she did not even know. Grief for Lady Cranstoun’s death, desperate anxiety as to her own future, a perpetual longing to see Hilary again and to be assured of his love and faithfulness, the impossibility of even communicating with him, the misery of her present situation, bereft of love, hope, sympathy, and even of seclusion, and above all, the terrible trial of absence of fresh air and outdoor exercise to a girl of her race and temperament, these things were seriously affecting her health. But for the hope held out in Sarah’s message Stella would hardly have lived through the twenty days that followed.
Her nights were sleepless, and what slumber she enjoyed came to her by day and by the use of opiates, which her father, who would allow no doctor to see her, caused to be administered to her in her tea and coffee; and it was in a deep sleep, brought on by a dose of this kind, that Lord Carthew saw her, lying fully dressed on the sofa, the window, which was open to allow the fresh spring air to blow through the room, letting in a torrent of clear, bright sunlight, which seemed absolutely to shine through the girl’s attenuated form as she lay resting among cushions, her cheeks of a marble whiteness under her long, black eyelashes.
Sir Philip himself brought his future son-in-law to see his daughter, as the latter, on his third visit, would not be denied.
“If you don’t let me see her, I shall think she is dead,” he said, half laughing, but half seriously, too.
“My dear Carthew, I have really been afraid of startling you. The poor child’s grief has been so excessive that she is wasted to a shadow. She is morbidly fearful lest you may be shocked at the change in her; but I will myself go and prepare her for your visit, and entreat her to receive you.”
“Seeing that we are to be married in a week, it would seem very strange if I could not see her for a few minutes,” observed Lord Carthew; and Sir Philip recognizing a certain doggedness in his tone, knew that he had made up his mind. Not for the first time the Baronet realized that his future son-in-law had a strong will of his own, and he rejoiced to see it manifested. A husband with a strong will, he told himself, was imperatively necessary in the case of a girl with Stella’s erratic and vagrant instincts. It was, indeed, almost pitiful to consider Sir Philip’s anxiety that the marriage between Lord Northborough’s heir and his daughter should come off without any hitch. The chatelain of the Chase was accustomed to be obeyed in fear and trembling, and he never once questioned the wisdom of his own decrees. It was of vital importance, so he told himself, that Stella should marry Lord Carthew, and he was placed in a position of extreme difficulty by the fact that if Stella and Claud once met before the ceremony, the girl would undoubtedly blurt out the terrible facts of her preference for Hilary Pritchard, and of her gypsy descent. The dread of such a contingency prevented Sir Philip from resting by night or by day. He did not like the Chase, but he remained in the house simply and solely to prevent his daughter from running away, as he felt sure she would do should the least opportunity present itself.
On the day, therefore, when he conducted Lord Carthew into the presence of his lovelyfiancée, Sir Philip ascertained first of all that the latter was under the influence of an opiate which would prevent her from recognizing and speaking to her future husband. Thus satisfied that no ill result could ensue, Sir Philip led Lord Carthew to the couch of his pale lady love, as she lay asleep, with her thin face on her thinner hand, Dakin, the black-browed and shifty-eyed, hovering in close attendance.