It was a fresh sunny morning, a soft west wind blowing up all the sweetness of the woods and leas. The cattle were grouped in lazy stillness on the dewy grass; the year's pigs, grown to the hobbledehoy stage of existence, were grubbing about contentedly among the furze-bushes; by the roadside, a matronly sow lay stretched flat upon her side in the sunshine, just where carriage-wheels must pass over her were carriages frequent in those parts.
Even the brightness of the morning had no charm for Vixen. There was no delight for her in the green solemnity of the forest glades, where the beechen pillars led the eye away into innumerable vistas, each grandly mysterious as a cathedral aisle. The sun shot golden arrows through dark boughs, patching the moss with translucent lights, vivid and clear as the lustre of emeralds. The gentle plash of the forest stream, rippling over its pebbly bed, made a tender music that was wont to seem passing sweet to Violet Tempest's ear. To-day she heard nothing, saw nothing. Her brain was clouded with angry thoughts.
She left the Forest by-and-by, following one of the familiar cart-tracks, and came out into the peaceful little colony of Beechdale, where it was a chance if the noonday traveller saw anything alive except a youthful family of pigs enjoying an oasis of mud in a dry land, or an intrusive dog rushing out of a cottage to salute the wayfarer with an inquiring bark. The children were still in school. The hum of their voices was wafted from the open windows. The church door stood open. The village graves upon the sunward-fronting slope were bright with common flowers; the dead lying with their feet to the west, ready to stand up and see their Lord at the resurrection morning.
Vixen hurried through the little village, not wanting to see Mrs. Scobel, or anyone she knew, this morning. There was a long rustic lane opposite the church, that led straight to the kennels.
"I will go and see the foxhounds," said Vixen. "They are true and faithful. But perhaps all those I love best have been sold, or are dead by this time."
It seemed to her ages since she had been to the kennels with her father. It had been his favourite walk, out of the hunting season, and he had rarely suffered a week to pass without making his visit of inspection. Since her return Violet had carefully avoided the well-known spot; but to-day, out of the very bitterness of her heart, came a desire to renew past associations. Bullfinch was gone for ever, but the hounds at least remained; and her father had loved them almost as well as he had loved Bullfinch.
Nothing was changed at the kennels. The same feeder in corduroy and fustian came out of the cooking-house when Vixen opened the five-barred gate. The same groom was lounging in front of the stables, where the horses were kept for the huntsman and his underlings. The whole place had the same slumberous out-of-season look she remembered so well of old in the days when hunting was over.
The men touched their caps to Miss Tempest as she passed them. She went straight to the kennels. There were the three wooden doors, opening into three square stone-paved yards, each door provided with a small round eye-hole, through which the authorities might scrutinise the assembly within. A loud yelping arose as Vixen's footsteps drew near. Then there were frantic snuffings under the doors, and a general agitation. She looked through the little eye-hole into the middle yard. Yes; there they were, fourteen or fifteen couple, tumultuously excited, as if they knew she was there: white and black and tan, pointed noses, beautiful intelligent eyes, bright tan spots upon marked brows, some with a streak of white running down the long sharp noses, some heavy in the jowl, some with muzzles sharp as a greyhound's, thirty tails erect and agitated.
The feeder remembered Miss Tempest perfectly, though it was more than three years since her last visit.
"Would you like to go in and see 'em, miss?" he said.
"Yes, if you please, Dawson. You have Gauntlet still, I see. That is Gauntlet, isn't it? And Dart, and Juno, and Ringlet, and Artful?"
"Yes, miss. There ain't many gone since you was here. But there's a lot o' poppies. You'd like to see the poppies, wouldn't you, miss? They be in the next kennel, if you'll just wait five minutes."
Cleanliness was the order of the day at the kennels, but to do the late master's daughter more honour, Dawson the feeder called a bright-looking lad, his subordinate, and divers pails of water were fetched, and the three little yards washed out vigorously before Miss Tempest was invited to enter. When she did go in, the yard was empty and clean as a new pin. The hounds had been sent into their house, where they were all grouped picturesquely on a bench littered with straw, looking as grave as a human parliament, and much wiser. Nothing could be more beautiful than their attitudes, or more intelligent than their countenances.
Vixen looked in at them through the barred window.
"Dear things," she exclaimed; "they are as lovely as ever. How fond papa was of them."
And then the kennel-huntsman, who had appeared on the scene by this time, opened the door and smacked his whip; and the fifteen couple came leaping helter-skelter out into the little yard, and made a rush at Vixen, and surrounded her, and fawned upon her, and caressed her as if their recognition of her after long years was perfect, and as if they had been breaking their hearts for her in the interval. Perhaps they would have been just as affectionate to the next comer, having a large surplus stock of love always on hand ready to be lavished on the human race; but Vixen took these demonstrations as expressive of a peculiar attachment, and was moved to tears by the warmth of this canine greeting.
"Thank God! there are some living things that love me," she exclaimed.
"Something that loves you!" cried a voice from the door of the yard. "Does not everything noble or worthy love you, as it loves all that is beautiful?"
Turning quickly, with a scared look, Violet saw Roderick Vawdrey standing in the doorway.
He stood quietly watching her, his dark eyes softened with a look of tender admiration. There could hardly have been a prettier picture than the tall girlish figure and bright chestnut head, the fair face bending over the upturned noses of the hounds as they clustered round her, some standing up with their strong white paws upon her shoulder, some nestling at her knees. Her hat had fallen off, and was being trampled under a multitude of restless feet.
Rorie came into the little yard. The huntsman cracked his whip, and the hounds went tumbling one over the other into their house, where they leaped upon their straw bed, and grouped themselves as if they had been sitting for their portraits to Sir Edwin Landseer. Two inquisitive fellows stood up with their paws upon the ledge of the barred window, and looked out at Violet and the new master.
"I did not know you were at Briarwood," she said, as they shook hands.
"I only came home last night. My first visit was naturally here. I wanted to see if everything was in good order."
"When do you begin to hunt?"
"On the first of October. You are going to be amongst us this year, of course."
"No. I have never followed the hounds since papa's death. I don't suppose I ever shall again."
"What, not with your stepfather?"
"Certainly not with Captain Winstanley."
"Then you must marry a hunting-man," said Rorie gaily. "We can't afford to lose the straightest rider in the Forest."
"I am not particularly in love with hunting—for a woman. There seems something bloodthirsty in it. And Bates says that if ladies only knew how their horses' backs get wrung in the hunting season, they would hardly have the heart to hunt. It was very nice to ride by papa's side when I was a little girl. I would have gone anywhere with him—through an Indian jungle after tigers—but I don't care about it now."
"Well, perhaps you are right; though I should hardly have expected such mature wisdom from my old playfellow, whose flowing locks used once to be the cynosure of the hunting-field. And now, Violet—I may call you Violet, may I not, as I did in the old days?—at least, when I did not call you Vixen."
"That was papa's name," she said quickly. "Nobody ever calls me that now."
"I understand; I am to call you Violet. And we are to be good friends always, are we not, with a true and loyal friendship?"
"I have not so many friends that I can afford to give up one who is stanch and true," answered Violet sadly.
"And I mean to be stanch and true, believe me; and I hope, by-and-by, when you come to know Mabel, you and she will be fast friends. You may not cotton to her very easily at first, because, you see, she reads Greek, and goes in for natural science, and has a good many queer ways. But she is all that is pure-minded and noble. She has been brought up in an atmosphere of adulation, and that has made her a little self-opinionated. It is the only fault she has."
"I shall be very glad if she will let me like her," Violet said meekly.
They had strolled away from the kennels into the surrounding forest, where the free horses of the soil were roaming from pasture to pasture, and a few vagabond pigs were stealing a march on their brethren, for whom the joys of pannage-time had not yet begun. They walked along idly, following a cart-track that led into the woody deeps where the earliest autumn leaves were dropping gently in the soft west wind. By-and-by they came to a fallen oak, lying by the side of the track, ready for barking, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit down side by side on this rustic seat, and talk of days gone by, lazily watching the flickering shadows and darting sunrays in the opposite thicket, or along the slanting stretch of open turf—that smooth emerald grass, so inviting to the eye, so perilous to the foot of man or beast.
"And now, Violet, tell me all about yourself, and about this second marriage of your mother's," Roderick began earnestly; "I hope you have quite reconciled yourself to the idea of it by this time."
"I have not reconciled myself; I never shall," answered Violet, with restrained anger. "I know that mamma has heaped up sorrow for herself in the days to come, and I pity her too much to be angry with her. Yes; I, who ought to look up to and respect my mother, can only look down upon her and pity her. That is a hard thing, is it not, Rorie? She has married a bad man—mean, and false—and tyrannical. Shall I tell you what he has done within these last few days?"
"Do. I hope it is not anything very bad."
Violet told how Bullfinch had been sold.
"It looks mean, certainly," said Mr. Vawdrey; "but I daresay to Captain Winstanley, as a man of the world, it might seem a foolish thing to keep a horse nobody rode; especially such a valuable horse as Bullfinch. Your father gave two hundred and fifty for him at Andover, I remember. And you really have too many horses at the Abbey House."
"Arion will be the next to be sold, I daresay."
"Oh, no, no. He could not be such an insolent scoundrel as to sell your horse. That would be too much. Besides, you will be of age in a year or two, and your own mistress."
"I shall not be of age for the next seven years. I am not to come of age till I am five-and-twenty."
"Phew!" whistled Rorie, "That's a long shot off. How is that?"
"Papa left it so in his will. It was his care of me, no doubt. He never would have believed that mamma would marry again."
"And for the next seven years you are to be in a state of tutelage, dependent on your mother for everything?"
"For everything. And that will really mean dependent upon Captain Winstanley; because I am very sure that as long as he lets mamma wear pretty dresses and drink orange pekoe out of old china, she will be quite contented to let him be master of everything else."
"But if you were to marry——"
"I suppose that would entangle or disentangle matters somehow. But I am not likely to marry."
"I don't see that," said Rorie. "I should think nothing was more likely."
"Allow me to be the best judge of my own business," exclaimed Vixen, looking desperately angry. "I will go so far as to say that I never shall marry."
"Oh, very well, if you insist upon it, let it be understood so. And now, Vix——Violet, don't you think if you could bring yourself to conciliate Captain Winstanley—to resign yourself, in fact, to the inevitable, and take things pleasantly, it would make your life happier for the next seven years? I really would try to do it, if I were you."
"I had made up my mind to an existence of hypocrisy before he sold Bullfinch," replied Vixen, "but now I shall hate him frankly."
"But, Violet, don't you see that unless you can bring yourself to live pleasantly with that man your life will be made miserable? Fate condemns you to live under the same roof with him."
"I am not sure about that. I could go out as a governess. I am not at all clever, but I think I could teach as much as would be good value for twenty pounds a year; or at the worst I might give my services in exchange for a comfortable home, as the advertisements say. How I wish I could read Greek and play Chopin, like Lady Mabel Ashbourne. I'll write to dear old McCroke, and ask her to get me a place."
"My dear Violet, how can you talk so absurdly. You, the future mistress of the Abbey House—you, with your youth and beauty and high spirit—to go meandering about the world teaching buttermen's or tea-dealers' children to spell B a, ba, and A b, ab?"
"It might be better than sitting at meat with a man I detest," said Vixen. "Am I to value the flesh-pots of Egypt more than my liberty and independence of mind?"
"You have your mother to think of," urged Roderick. "You owe duty and obedience to her, even if she has offended you by this foolish marriage. If you have so bad an opinion of Captain Winstanley, you are all the more bound to stand by your mother."
"That is an argument worth listening to," said Vixen. "It might be cruel to leave poor mamma quite at his mercy. I don't suppose he would actually ill-treat her. He knows his own interest too well for that. He would not lock her up in a cellar, or beat, or starve her. He will be content with making himself her master. She will have no more will of her own than if she were a prettily dressed doll placed at the head of the table for show. She will be lulled into a state of childish bliss, and go smiling through life, believing she has not a wish ungratified. Everybody will think her the happiest of women, and Captain Winstanley the best of husbands."
Vixen said all this with prophetic earnestness, looking straight forward into the green glade before her, where the beech-nuts and acorns were dropping in a gentle rain of plenty.
"I hope things won't be quite so bad as you anticipate. I hope you will be able to make yourself happy, in spite of Captain Winstanley. And we shall see each other pretty often, I hope, Violet, as we used in old times. The Dovedales are at Wiesbaden; the Duke only holds existence on the condition of deluging himself with German waters once a year; but they are to be back early in November. I shall make the Duchess call on Mrs. Winstanley directly she returns."
"Thanks; mamma will be very pleased. I wonder you are not with them."
"Oh, I had to begin my duties as M. F. H. I wouldn't have been away for the world."
Violet looked at her watch. It was a good deal later than she had supposed. Time goes quickly when one is talking over a new grievance with an old friend. She was a long way from the Abbey House.
"I must go home," she said; "mamma and Captain Winstanley may arrive at any moment. There is no time named in mamma's last telegram; she said only that they are moving gently homewards."
"Let us go then," said Rorie, rising from his rugged seat.
"But I am not going to take you out of your way. Every step of my journey home takes you further from Briarwood."
"Never mind if it does. I mean to walk to the Abbey House with you. I daresay, if I were very tired, Bates would lend me a mount home."
"You can have Arion, if you like."
"No, thanks. Arion shall not have my thirteen stone; I want a little more timber under me."
"You ought to have had Bullfinch," said Vixen regretfully.
"I would have had him, if I had known he was in the market. The writing of a figure or so more or less on a cheque should not have hindered me."
That walk through the Forest was very pleasant to Violet. It was a day on which mere existence was a privilege; and now that her spirits had been soothed by her confidential talk with Rorie, Vixen could enjoy those sights and sounds and sweet wild scents of the woodland that had ever been a rapture to her.
This Forest-born girl loved her native woods as Wordsworth loved his lakes and mountains, as Byron loved the bleak bare landscape round the city of Aberdeen. Their poetry and beauty filled her heart with a deep contentment. To walk or ride alone through pathless forest glades, or in the scented darkness of fir plantations, was enough for happiness. But it was comforting to-day—on this day when her heart had been so cruelly wounded—to have Roderick Vawdrey by her side. It was like a leaf out of the closed volume of the past.
They talked freely and happily during that long homewards walk, and their conversation was chiefly of bygone days. Almost every speech began with "Do you remember?" Vixen was gayer than she had been for a long time, save once or twice, when a pang shot through her heart at the idea that Bullfinch was being shaken about in a railway-box, oscillating helplessly with every vibration of the train, and panic-stricken in every tunnel.
The sun had declined from his meridian; he had put on his sober afternoon glory, and was sending shafts of mellower gold along the green forest aisles, when Miss Tempest and her companion drew near the Abbey House. They went in at the gate by the keeper's cottage, the gate which Titmouse had jumped so often in the days when he carried his childish mistress. They went through the wood of rhododendrons, and past the old archway leading to the stables, and round by the shrubbery to the porch. The door stood open as usual, and the Squire's old pointer was lying on the threshold; but within all was commotion. Dress-baskets, hat-cases, bonnet-boxes, gun-cases, travelling-bags, carriage-rugs, were lying about in every direction. Mrs. Winstanley was leaning back in the large chair by the fireplace, fanning herself with her big black fan; Pauline was standing by in attendance; and the silver tray, with the Swansee tea-set, was being brought in by Forbes the butler, whose honest old face wore a troubled aspect.
Captain Winstanley was standing with his back to the hearth, his countenance and whole figure wearing the unmistakable air of the master of a house who has returned to his domicile in an execrable temper.
Violet ran to Mrs. Winstanley, every other thought forgotten in the pleasure of seeing her mother again. These three weeks were the longest parting mother and daughter had ever known; and after all, blood is thicker than water; and there is a natural leaning in a child's mind even to the weakest of parents.
Mr. Vawdrey stood in the background, waiting till those affectionate greetings natural to such an occasion should be over.
But to his surprise there were no such greetings. Mrs. Winstanley went on fanning herself vehemently, with a vexed expression of countenance, while Violet bent over and kissed her. Captain Winstanley swayed himself slowly backwards and forwards upon the heels of his boots, and whistled to himself sotto voce, with his eyes fixed upon some lofty region of empty air. He vouchsafed not the faintest notice of his stepdaughter or Mr. Vawdrey.
"It's really too bad of you, Violet," the mother exclaimed at last.
"Dear mamma," cried Vixen, in blank amazement, "what have I done?"
"To go roaming about the country," pursued Mrs. Winstanley plaintively, "for hours at a stretch, nobody knowing where to find you or what had become of you. And my telegram lying there unattended to."
"Did you telegraph, mamma?"
"Did I telegraph? Should I come home without telegraphing? Should I be so mad as to expose myself knowingly to the outrage which has been offered to me to-day?"
"Dearest mamma, you alarm me. What has happened?"
"One of the deepest humiliations I ever had to endure. But you were roaming about the Forest. You were following the instincts of your wild nature. What do you care for my mortification? If I had telegraphed to my housekeeper, it would not have happened. But I trusted in my daughter."
"Dear mamma," pleaded Vixen, looking anxious and bewildered, "if you would only explain. You make me miserable. What has happened?"
"Violet, your stepfather and I had to drive home from the station in a fly!"
"Oh, mamma!" cried Vixen, with a gasp. "Is that all?"
"Is that all? Do you think that is not enough? Do you understand, child?—a fly—a common innkeeper's fly—that anybody may have for half-a-guinea; a fly with a mouldy lining, smelling of—other people! And on such an occasion, when every eye was upon us! No; I was never so degraded. And we had to wait—yes, a quarter of an hour, at least, and it seemed ages, while Pycroft's fly was got ready for us; yes, while a rough forest pony was dragged out of his wretched stable, and a man, whose face had not been washed for a week, shuffled himself into an old coachman's coat. And there were all the porters staring at me, and laughing inwardly, I know. And, as a last drop in the cup, Colonel Carteret drove up in his phaeton to catch the up-train just as we were getting into that disgraceful looking vehicle, and would stop to shake hands with us both, and insisted upon handing me into the horrid thing."
"Dear mamma, I am more sorry than I can say," said Vixen gently; "but I was afraid it was something much worse."
"Nothing could be worse, Vixen."
"Then the telegram was to order the carriage to meet you, I suppose?"
"Of course. We telegraphed from the Grosvenor at nine o'clock this morning. Who would imagine that you would be out of doors at such an hour?"
"I am not often out so early. But something happened this morning to put me out of temper, and I went for a ramble."
"A ramble lasting from ten in the morning till half-past four in the afternoon," remarked Captain Winstanley, with his gaze still fixed upon empty space. "Rather a long walk for a solitary young lady."
Vixen appeared unconscious that anyone had spoken. Roderick Vawdrey felt a burning desire to kick the new master of the Abbey House.
"Shall I pour out your tea, mamma?" asked Vixen meekly.
"If you like. I am utterly prostrate. To have no carriage to meet me on such an occasion! I daresay everybody in the Forest knows all about it by this time. When I came home from my honeymoon with your poor papa, the joy-bells rang all the afternoon, and the road was lined with people waiting to get a glimpse of us, and there were floral arches——"
"Ah, mamma, those things cannot happen twice in a lifetime," said Vixen, with irrepressible bitterness. "One happy marriage is as much as any woman can expect."
"A woman has the right to expect her own carriage," said Captain Winstanley.
"I am afraid I have paid my visit at rather at unfortunate moment," said Roderick, coming forward and addressing himself solely to Mrs. Winstanley; "but I could not go without saying How do you do? I hope you had a pleasant journey from Scotland—bar the fly."
"How do you do, Roderick? Yes; it was all pleasant except that last contretemps. Imagine the Duchess of Dovedale's feelings if she arrived at the station adjoining her own estate, and found no carriage to meet her!"
"My aunt would tuck up her petticoats and trudge home," answered Roderick, smiling. "She's a plucky little woman."
"Yes, perhaps on an ordinary occasion. But to-day it was so different. Everybody will talk about our return."
"Most people are still away," suggested Rorie, with a view to comfort.
"Oh, but their servants will hear it, and they will tell their masters and mistresses. All gossip begins that way. Besides, Colonel Carteret saw us, and what he knows everybody knows."
After this, Roderick felt that all attempts at consolation were hopeless. He would have liked to put Mrs. Winstanley into a better temper, for Violet's sake. It was not a pleasant home atmosphere in which he was obliged to leave his old playfellow on this the first day of her new life. Captain Winstanley maintained a forbidding silence; Mrs. Winstanley did not even ask anyone to have a cup of tea; Violet sat on the opposite side of the hearth, pale and quiet, with Argus at her knee, and one arm wound caressingly round his honest head.
"I've been inspecting the kennels this morning," said Roderick, looking at the new master of the Abbey House with a cheerful assumption that everything was going on pleasantly. "We shall begin business on the first. You'll hunt, of course?"
"Well, yes; I suppose I shall give myself a day occasionally."
"I shall not have a happy moment while you are out," said Mrs. Winstanley. "I used to be miserable about poor dear Edward."
Vixen winced. These careless references to the dead hurt her more than the silence of complete oblivion. To remember, and to be able to speak so lightly. That seemed horrible.
"I doubt if I shall hunt much this season," pursued Captain Winstanley, as much as to say that he was not going to be grateful to the new master of the foxhounds as a public benefactor, however many hundreds that gentleman might disburse in order to make up the shortcomings of a scanty subscription. "I shall have a great deal to occupy me. This place has been much neglected—naturally—within the last few years. There is no end of work to be done."
"Are you going to pull down the Abbey House and build an Italian villa on its site?" asked Vixen, her upper lip curling angrily. "That would be rather a pity. Some people think it a fine old place, and it has been in my father's family since the reign of Henry the Eighth."
To the Captain's ear this speech had a covert insolence. The Abbey House was to belong to Violet in the future. Neither he nor his wife had a right to touch a stone of it. Indeed, it was by no means clear to him that there might not be ground for a Chancery suit in his cutting down a tree.
"I hope I shall do nothing injudicious," he said politely.
"My aunt will be back in a week or two, Mrs. Winstanley," said Roderick. "I shall bring her over to see you directly she settles down at Ashbourne. And now I think I'd better be off; I've a long walk home, and you must be too tired to care about talking or being talked to."
"I am very tired," answered Mrs. Winstanley languidly; "but I should have liked to hear all your news."
"I'm afraid that's not much. I only came home last night; I have been shooting grouse in Renfrew."
"Plenty of birds this year?" inquired the Captain, with a languid interest.
"Pretty fair. The rainy spring killed a good many of the young birds."
"Do you remember any year in which that complaint was not made?" retorted Captain Winstanley.
Rorie took his departure after this, and contrived to give Violet's hand an encouraging squeeze at parting, accompanied with a straight steady look, which said as plainly as words: "You have one friend who will be stanch and true, come what may."
Vixen understood him, and sudden tears welled up to her eyes—the first that had clouded them since her parting with Bullfinch. She brushed them away hurriedly, but not so quickly as to escape Captain Winstanley's observation.
"If you'll excuse me, mamma. I'll run and dress for dinner," she said, "unless there is anything I can do for you. Your rooms are quite ready."
"I'm glad of that," replied Mrs. Winstanley fretfully; "for really after our reception at the railway-station, I expected to find everything at sixes and sevens."
"Dear mamma, you must know that was quite an accident."
"An accident very likely to occur when a young lady indulges in tête-à-tête forest rambles with an old friend, instead of waiting at home for her mother's letters and telegrams," remarked Captain Winstanley, caressing his neat whisker with his irreproachable hand.
"What do you mean?" said Vixen, turning sharply upon him. "I went out alone this morning. Mr. Vawdrey and I met at the kennels by accident."
"A chapter of accidents," sneered the Captain. "I have no objection to make, Miss Tempest, if your mamma has none. But I am rather sorry for the young lady Mr. Vawdrey is going to marry."
"Mr. Vawdrey was my father's friend, and will never cease to be mine," said Vixen, with flashing eyes. "There can be nothing offensive to Lady Mabel Ashbourne in our friendship."
She was gone before her stepfather could reply, or her mother reprove her want of respect for that new relative.
"I suppose I had better go and dress too," said Mrs. Winstanley, "and in the evening we can talk about our first dinner-party. I daresay we shall have a great many people calling to-morrow afternoon. It will be rather trying. There is such a painful feeling in being a bride and not a bride, as it were. People's congratulations hardly sound hearty."
"I daresay they have rather a vapid flavour, like a warmed-up dinner," said the Captain. "That is the result of living in a neighbourhood where your first husband was known and popular. If we went among strangers, their congratulations would be a great deal heartier. But I hope you don't begin to repent already, my dear Pamela."
"Conrad! How can you imagine such a thing?—after your delicate attentions, your devoted care of me during our tour. What dress shall I wear this evening? Do you like me best in blue or amber?"
"To my eye all colours suit you. But I think a woman"—he was going to say "of your age," but checked himself and substituted—"in the maturity of her beauty looks best in velvet, or some rich and heavy material that falls in massive folds, like the drapery in a portrait by Velasquez. A border of fur, too, is an artistic introduction in a woman's dress—you see it often in Velasquez. Heavy old laces are, of course, always admirable. And for colour I like the warmer hues best—wine-dark purples or deep glowing reds; rich ruddy browns, with a knot of amber now and then for relief."
"How beautifully you talk," cried Mrs. Winstanley, delighted. "I only wish Theodore could hear you. It would give her new ideas; for, after all, the best dressmakers arebornées. It is too early in the year for velvet. I shall put on my dark green brocade with the old Flanders lace. I am so glad you like lace. It is my chief weakness. Even dear Edward, who was so generous, thought me a little extravagant in the matter of lace. But when one once begins to collect, the study is so interesting. One is led on."
"Good Heavens! is my wife a collector?" thought Captain Winstanley, horrified. "That must be put a stop to, or she will ruin me."
And then he wont off to his dressing-room rather wearily, to put on full-dress for a home dinner, a sacrifice to his new state of existence which he found very irksome. He would have liked to dine in a shooting-jacket, and smoke all the evening. But his smoking now, instead of pervading the whole house, as it had done in his snug bachelor quarters, was an indulgence to be taken out of doors, or in a room appointed for the purpose. He was not even to smoke in the fine old hall, for it was one of the family sitting-rooms, and Mrs. Winstanley could not endure smoke.
"I am not at all fanciful or capricious," she told her husband early in the honeymoon, "but smoking is one of my horrors. I hope, dear Conrad, it is not too much to ask you never to smoke in any room I use."
Captain Winstanley pledged himself to respect this and every other wish of his wife's. It was his policy to be subservient in small matters, in order to be master in essentials. But that daily dressing for dinner was something of a bore; and the dinners themselves—tête-à-têtedinners, in which he had to take as much trouble to be amusing as at a dinner-party, had been apt to hang heavily upon him. He had even proposed dining at thetable-d'hôte, while they were on their Scotch travels, but this idea Mrs. Winstanley rejected with horror.
"I have never dined at atable-d'hôtein my life, Conrad," she exclaimed, "and I certainly should not begin during my wedding tour."
Captain Winstanley entered upon his new position with a fixed determination to make the best of it, and with a very clear view of its advantages and disadvantages. For seven years he was to be master of everything—or his wife was to be mistress, which, in his mind, was exactly the same. No one could question his use of the entire income arising from Squire Tempest's estates during that period. When Violet came of age—on her twenty-fifth birthday—the estates were to be passed over to herin toto;but there was not a word in the Squire's will as to the income arising during her minority. Nor had the Squire made any provision in the event of his daughter's marriage. If Violet were to marry to-morrow, she would go to her husband penniless. He would not touch a sixpence of her fortune until she was twenty-five. If she were to die during her minority the estate would revert to her mother.
It was a very nice estate, taken as a sample of a country squire's possessions. Besides the New Forest property, there were farms in Wiltshire and Dorsetshire; the whole yielding an income of between five and six thousand a year. With such a revenue, and the Abbey House and all its belongings rent free, Captain Winstanley felt himself in a land of Canaan. But then there was the edict that seven years hence he was to go forth from this land of milk and honey; or, at any rate, was to find himself living at the Abbey House on a sorely restricted income. Fifteen hundred a year in such a house would mean genteel beggary, he told himself despondently. And even this genteel beggary would be contingent on his wife's life. Her death would rob him of everything.
He had a mind given to calculation, and he entered upon theclosest calculations as to his future. He meant to enjoy life, of course. He had always done that to the best of his ability. But he saw that the chief duty he owed to himself was to save money; and to lay by against the evil inevitable day when Violet Tempest would despoil him of power and wealth. The only way to do this was by the cutting down of present expenses, and an immediate narrowing of the lines on which the Abbey House was being conducted; for the Captain had discovered that his wife, who was the most careless and incompetent of women as regards money matters, had been spending the whole of her income since her husband's death. If she had not spent her money on society, she had spent it on travelling, on lace, on old china, on dress, on hothouse flowers, on a stable which was three times larger than she could possibly require, on a household in which there were a good many more cats than were wanted to catch mice, on bounties and charities that were given upon no principle, not even from inclination, but only because Squire Tempest's widow had never been able to say No.
Captain Winstanley's first retrenchment had been the sale of Bullfinch, for which noble animal Lord Mallow, a young Irish viscount, had given a cheque for three hundred guineas. This money the Captain put on deposit at his banker's, by way of a nest-egg. He meant his deposit account to grow into something worth investing before those seven fat years were half gone.
He told his wife his views on the financial question one morning when they were breakfastingtête-à-têtein the library, where the Squire and his family had always dined when there was no company. Captain and Mrs. Winstanley generally had the privilege of breakfasting alone, as Violet was up and away before her mother appeared. The Captain also was an early riser, and had done half his day's work before he sat down to the luxurious nine-o'clock breakfast with his wife.
"I have been thinking of your ponies, pet," he said, in a pleasant voice, half careless, half caressing, as he helped himself to a salmon cutlet. "Don't you think it would be a very wise thing to get rid of them?"
"Oh, Conrad!" cried his wife, letting the water from the urn overflow the teapot in her astonishment; "you can't mean that! Part with my ponies?"
"My dear love, how often do you drive them in a twelvemonth?"
"Not very often, perhaps. I have felt rather nervous driving lately—carts and great waggon-loads of hay come out upon one so suddenly from cross-roads. I don't think the waggoners would care a bit if one were killed. But I am very fond of my gray ponies. They are so pretty. They have quite Arabian heads. Colonel Carteret says so, and he has been in Arabia."
"But, my dear Pamela, do you think it worth while keeping a pair of ponies because they are pretty, and because Colonel Carteret, who knows about as much of a horse as I do of a megalosaurus says they have Arabian heads? Have you ever calculated what those ponies cost you?"
"No, Conrad; I should hate myself if I were always calculating the cost of things."
"Yes, that's all very well in the abstract. But if you are inclined to waste money, it's just as well to know how much you are wasting. Those ponies are costing you at the least one hundred and fifty pounds a year, for you could manage with a man less in the stables if you hadn't got them."
"That's a good deal of money certainly," said Mrs. Winstanley, who hated driving, and had only driven her ponies because other people in her position drove ponies, and she felt it was a right thing to do.
Still the idea of parting with anything that appertained to her state wounded her deeply.
"I can't see why we should worry ourselves about the cost of the stables," she said; "they have gone on in the same way ever since I was married. Why should things be different now?"
"Don't you see that you have the future to consider, Pamela. This handsome income which you are spending so lavishly——"
"Edward never accused me of extravagance," interjected Mrs. Winstanley tearfully, "except in lace. He did hint that I was a little extravagant in lace."
"This fine income is to be reduced seven years hence to fifteen hundred a year, an income upon which—with mine added to it—you could not expect to be able to carry on life decently in such a house as this. So you see, Pamela, unless we contrive between us to put by a considerable sum of money before your daughter's majority, we shall be obliged to leave the Abbey House, and live in a much smaller way than we are living now."
"Leave the Abbey House!" cried Mrs. Winstanley with a horrified look. "Conrad, I have lived in this house ever since I was married."
"Am I not aware of that, my dear love? But, all the same, you would have to let this place, and live in a much smaller house, if you had only fifteen hundred a year to live upon."
"It would be too humiliating! At the end of one's life. I should never survive such a degradation."
"It may be prevented if we exercise reasonable economy during the next seven years."
"Sell my ponies, then, Conrad; sell them immediately. Why should we allow them to eat us out of house and home. Frisky shies abominably if she is in the least bit fresh, and Peter has gone so far as to lie down in the road when he has had one of his lazy fits."
"But if they are really a source of pleasure to you, my dear Pamela, I should hate myself for selling them," said the Captain, seeing he had gained his point.
"They are not a source of pleasure. They have given me some awful frights."
"Then we'll send them up to Tattersall's immediately, with the carriage."
"Violet uses the carriage with Titmouse." objected Mrs. Winstanley. "We could hardly spare the carriage."
"My love, if I part with your ponies from motives of economy, do you suppose I would keep a pony for your daughter?" said the Captain with a grand air. "No; Titmouse must go, of course. That will dispose of a man and a boy in the stables. Violet spends so much of her life on horseback, that she cannot possibly want a pony to drive."
"She is very fond of Titmouse," pleaded the mother.
"She has a tendency to lavish her affection on quadrupeds—a weakness which hardly needs fostering. I shall write to Tattersall about the three ponies this morning; and I shall send up that great raking brown horse Bates rides at the same time. Bates can ride one of my hunters. That will bring down the stable to five horses—my two hunters, Arion, and your pair of carriage-horses."
"Five horses," sighed Mrs. Winstanley pensively; "I shall hardly know those great stables with only five horses in them. The dear old place used to look so pretty and so full of life when I was first married, and when the Squire used to coax me to go with him on his morning rounds. The horses used to move on one side, and turn their heads so prettily at the sound of his voice—such lovely, sleek, shining creatures, with big intelligent eyes."
"You would be a richer woman if it had not been for those lovely, sleek, shining creatures," said Captain Winstanley. "And now, love, let us go round the gardens, and you will see the difference that young able-bodied gardeners are making in the appearance of the place."
Mrs. Winstanley gave a plaintive little sigh as she rose and rang the bell for Pauline. The good old gray-haired gardeners—the men who had seemed to her as much a part of the gardens as the trees that grew in them—these hoary and faithful servants had been cashiered, to make room for two brawny young Scotchmen, whose dialect was as Greek to the mistress of the Abbey House. It wounded her not a little to see these strangers at work in her grounds. It gave an aspect of strangeness to her very life out of doors. She hardly cared to go into her conservatories, or to loiter on her lawn, with those hard unfamiliar eyes looking at her. And it wrung her heart to think of the Squire's old servants thrust out in their old age, unpensioned, uncared for. Yet this was a change that had come about with her knowledge, and, seemingly, with her consent. That is to say, the Captain had argued her into a corner, where she stood, like the last forlorn king in a game of draughts, fenced round and hemmed in by opponent kings. She had not the strength of mind to assert herself boldly, and say: "I will not have it so. This injustice shall not be."
A change had come over the spirit of the Abbey House kitchen, which was sorely felt in Beechdale and those half-dozen clusters of cottages within a two-mile radius, which called themselves villages, and all of which had turned to the Abbey House for light and comfort, as the sunflower turns to the sun. Captain Winstanley had set his face against what he called miscellaneous charity. Such things should be done and no other. His wife should subscribe liberally to all properly organised institutions—schools, Dorcas societies, maternity societies, soup-kitchens, regulated dole of bread or coals, every form of relief that was given systematically and by line and rule; but the good Samaritan business—the picking up stray travellers, and paying for their maintenance at inns—was not in the Captain's view of charity. Henceforward Mrs. Winstanley's name was to appear with due honour upon all printed subscription-lists, just as it had done when she was Mrs. Tempest; but the glory of the Abbey House kitchen had departed. The beggar and the cadger were no longer sure of a meal. The villagers were no longer to come boldly asking for what they wanted in time of trouble—broth, wine, jelly, for the sick, allowances of new milk, a daily loaf when father was out of work, broken victuals at all times. It was all over. The kitchen-doors were to be closed against all intruders.
"My love, I do not wonder that you have spent every sixpence of your income," said Captain Winstanley. "You have been keeping an Irish household. I can fancy an O'Donoghue or a Knight of Glyn living in this kind of way; but I should hardly have expected such utter riot and recklessness in an English gentleman's house."
"I am afraid Trimmer has been rather extravagant," assented Mrs. Winstanley. "I have trusted everything to her entirely, knowing that she is quite devoted to us, poor dear soul."
"She is so devoted, that I should think in another year or so, at the rate she was going, she would have landed you in the bankruptcy court. Her books for the last ten years—I have gone through them carefully—show an expenditure that is positively ruinous. However, I think I have let her see that her housekeeping must be done upon very different lines in future."
"You made her cry very bitterly, poor thing," said his wife. "Her eyes were quite red when she came out of your study."
"Made her cry!" echoed the Captain contemptuously. "She is so fat that the slightest emotion liquefies her. It isn't water, but oil that she sheds when she makes believe to weep."
"She has been a faithful servant to me for the last twenty years," moaned Mrs. Winstanley.
"And she will be a much more faithful servant to you for the next twenty years, if she lives so long. I am not going to send her away. She is an admirable cook, and now she knows that she is not to let your substance run out at the back door, I daresay she will be a fairly good manager. I shall look after her rather sharply, I assure you. I was caterer for our mess three years, and I know pretty well what a household ought to cost per head."
"Oh, Conrad!" cried his wife piteously, "you talk as if we were an institution, or a workhouse, or something horrid."
"My love, a man of sense ought to be able to regulate a private establishment at least as well as a board of thick-headed guardians can regulate a workhouse."
Poor Mrs. Trimmer had left her new master's presence sorely bowed down in spirit. She was so abased that she could only retire to her own snug sitting-room, a panelled parlour, with an ancient ivy-wreathed casement looking into the stable-yard, and indulge herself with what she called "a good cry." It was not until later that she felt equal to communicating her grief to Forbes and Pauline, over the one-o'clock dinner.
She had had a passage of arms, which she denominated "a stand further," with the Captain; but it appeared that her own stand had been feeble. He had been going over the housekeeping accounts for the last ten years—accounts which neither the Squire nor his wife had ever taken the trouble to examine—accounts honestly, but somewhat carelessly and unskillfully made out. There had been an expenditure that was positively scandalous, Captain Winstanley told Mrs. Trimmer.
"If you're dissatisfied, sir, perhaps I'd better go," the old woman said, tremulous with indignation. "If you think there's anything dishonest in my accounts, I wouldn't sleep under this roof another night, though it's been my home near upon forty year—I was kitchen-maid in old Squire Tempest's time—no, I wouldn't stay another hour—not to be doubted."
"I have not questioned your honesty, Trimmer. The accounts are honest enough, I have no doubt, but they show a most unjustifiable waste of money."
"If there's dissatisfaction in your mind, sir, we'd better part. It's always best for both parties. I'm ready to go at an hour's notice, or to stay my month, if it's more convenient to my mistress."
"You are a silly old woman," said the Captain. "I don't want you to go. I am not dissatisfied with you, but with the whole system of housekeeping. There has been a great deal too much given away."
"Not a loaf of bread without my mistress's knowledge," cried Trimmer. "I always told Mrs. Tempest every morning who'd been for soup, or wine, or bread—yes, even to broken victuals—the day before. I had her leave and license for all I did. 'I'm not strong enough to see to the poor things myself, Trimmer,' she used to say, 'but I want them cared for. I leave it all to you.'"
"Very well, Trimmer. That kind of thing must cease from this very hour. Your mistress will contribute to all the local charities. She will give the Vicar an allowance of wine to be distributed by him in urgent cases; but this house will no longer be the village larder—no one is to come to this kitchen for anything.
"What, sir?—not in case of sickness?"
"No. Poor people are always sick. It is their normal state, when there is anything to be got by sickness. There are hospitals and infirmaries for such cases. My house is not to be an infirmary. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir; I understand that everything is to be different from what it was in my late master's time."
"Precisely. Expenses are to be kept within a certain limit. They are not to fluctuate, as they do in these books of yours. You must get rid of two or three women-servants. There are at least three too many. I am always seeing strange faces about upstairs. One might as well live in a hotel. Think it over, Trimmer, and make up your mind as to which you can best spare, and give them a month's wages, and pack them off. I don't care to have servants about me who are under notice to quit. They always look sulky."
"Is that all, sir?" inquired the housekeeper, drying her angry tears upon her linen apron.
"Well, yes, that is all at present. Stay. What wages has my wife given you?"
"Sixty pounds a year," replied Trimmer, quite prepared to be told that her stipend was to be reduced.
"Then I shall give you seventy."
At this unexpected grace Trimmer began to tremble with an excess of indignation. She saw in this bounty a bribe to meanness.
"Thank you, sir; but I have never asked to have my wages raised, and I am quite contented to remain as I am," she answered with dignity. "Perhaps, if the ways of the house are to be so much altered, I may not feel myself comfortable enough to stay."
"Oh, very well, my good soul; please yourself," replied the Captain carelessly; "but remember what I have told you about cadgers and interlopers; and get rid of two or three of those idle young women. I shall examine your housekeeping accounts weekly, and pay all the tradespeople weekly."
"They have not been used to it, sir."
"Then they must get used to it. I shall pay every account weekly—corn-merchant, and all of them. Bring me up your book on Saturday morning at ten, and let me have all other accounts at the same time."
Here was a revolution. Trimmer and Forbes and Pauline sat long over their dinner, talking about the shipwreck of a fine old house.
"I knew that things would be different," said Pauline, "but I didn't think it would be so bad as this. I thought it would be all the other way, and that there'd be grand doings and lots of company. What awful meanness! Not a drop of soup to be given to a poor family; and I suppose, if I ask my aunt and uncle to stop to tea and supper, anywhen that they call to ask how I am, it will be against the rules."
"From what I gather, there's not a bit nor a sup to be given to mortal," said Mrs. Trimmer solemnly.
"Well, thank Providence, I can afford to buy a bit of tea and sugar and a quart loaf when a friend drops in," said Pauline, "but the meanness isn't any less disgusting. He'll want her to sell her cast-off dresses to the secondhand dealers, I shouldn't wonder."
"And he'll be asking for the keys of the cellars, perhaps," said Forbes, "after I've kept them for five-and-twenty years."