CHAPTER VII.
FEARS AND SUSPICIONS.
'Well, Dulcie,' said Shafto, who, full of his own fears, contrived to confront her alone before the dinner, which was always a late one at Craigengowan, 'won't you even smile—now that we are for a little time apart—for old acquaintance sake?'
'How can I smile, feeling as I do—and knowing what I do?'
'What do you know?' he asked huskily, and changing colour at this new and stinging remark.
'That poor Florian is facing such perils in South Africa,' she replied in a low voice.
'Pooh! is that all?' said Shafto, greatly relieved; 'he'll get on, as well as he can expect, no doubt.'
'Amid all the wealth that surrounds you, could you not have done something for him?' asked the girl, wistfully and reproachfully.
'Poor relations are a deuced bother, and here they dislike his name somehow.'
As his fears passed away Shafto's aspect became menacing, and knowing her helplessness and her dependent position in the house to which he was the heir, for a moment or two the girl's spirit failed her.
'Well, what do you mean to say now?' he asked abruptly.
'About whom?' she asked softly and wonderingly.
'Me!'
'I shall say nothing, Shafto—nothing to injure you at least—with reference to old times.'
'What the devil could you say that would injure me in the eyes of my own family?'
Dulcie thought of the locket stolen from her so roughly, of his subsequent villainy therewith, and of his tampering with her long and passionate letter to Florian, but remained judiciously silent, while striving to look at him with defiant haughtiness.
'I am speaking to you, Dulcie; will you have the politeness to attend to me?'
'To what end and purpose?'
She eyed him with chilling steadiness now, though her heart was full of fear; but his shifty grey eyes quailed under the cold gaze he challenged, and thought how closely her bearing and her words resembled those of Finella.
'You don't like me, Dulcie,' said he with a bitter smile, 'that is pretty evident.'
'No, I simply hate you!' said she, losing all control over herself.
'You are charmingly frank, Miss Carlyon, but hate is a game that two can play at; so beware, I say, beware! I must hold the winning cards.'
'Oh, how brave and generous you are to threaten and torture a poor, weak girl whom you call an old friend, and under your own roof!'
'And the dear dove of Florian—Florian the private soldier!' he sneered fiercely.
'How horrible, how cruel!' she wailed, and covered her eyes with her hands.
'Never mind,' he resumed banteringly, 'you have got back your locket again.'
'I wonder how you dare to refer to it!' she exclaimed, and for a moment the angry gleam of her eyes was replaced by a soft, dreamy smile, as she recalled the time and place when Florian clasped the locket round her neck, when the bells of Revelstoke Church were heard on the same breeze that wafted around them the perfumes of the sweetbriar and wild apple blossoms in the old quarry near the sea, which was their trysting-place. How happy they were then, and how bright the future even in its utter vacuity, when seen through the rosy medium of young love!
Shafto divined her thoughts, for he said with jealous anger—
'You used the term dare with reference to your precious locket?'
'Yes; the locket of which you, Shafto Gyle, deprived me with coarse violence, like—like——'
'Well, what?'
'The garotters who are whipped in prison!'
His face grew very dark; then he said—
'We may as well have a truce to this sort of thing. A quarrel between you and me, Dulcie Carlyon, would only do me no harm, but you very much. The grandmater wouldn't keep you in the house an hour.'
'How chivalrous, how gentlemanly, you are!'
'Hush!' said he, with alarm, for at that instant the dinner-bell was clanging, and Finella with others came into the drawing-room, Lady Fettercairn luckily the last, though Shafto had warily withdrawn abruptly from Dulcie's vicinity at the first sound of it. Her first dinner in the stately dining-room of Craigengowan, with its lofty arched recess, where stood the massive sideboard arrayed with ancient plate, its hangings and full-length pictures, was a new experience—a kind of dream to Dulcie. The lively hum of many well-bred voices in easy conversation; the great epergne with its pyramid of fruit, flowers, ferns, and feathery grasses; the servants in livery, who were gliding noiselessly about, and seemed to be perpetually presenting silver dishes at her left elbow; old Mr. Grapeston, the solemn butler, presiding over the entire arrangements—all seemed part of a dream, from which she would waken to find herself in her old room at home, and see the waves rolling round the bleak promontory of Revelstoke Church and in the estuary of the Yealm; and, sooth to say, though used to all this luxury now, and though far from imaginative, Shafto had not been without some fears at first that he too might waken from a dream, to find himself once more perched on a tall stool in Lawyer Carlyon's gloomy office, and hard at work over an ink-spotted desk, the memory of which he loathed with a disgust indescribable.
Seeing that Dulcie looked sad and abstracted, Finella, who kindly offered a seat beside her, said softly and sweetly:
'I hope you won't feel strange among us; but I see you are full of thought. Did you leave many dear friends behind you—at home, I mean?'
'Many; oh yes—all the village, in fact,' said Dulcie, recalling the sad day of her departure; 'but, perhaps, I was selfish enough to regret one most—my pet.'
'What was it?'
'A dear little canary—only a bird.'
'And why didn't you bring it?'
'People said that a great lady like Lady Fettercairn would not permit one like me to have pets, and so—and so I gave him to our curate, dear old Mr. Pentreath. Oh, how the bird sang as I was leaving him!'
'Poor Miss Carlyon?' said Finella, touched by the girl's sweet and childlike simplicity.
For a moment—but a moment only—Dulcie was struck by the painful contrast between her own fate and position in life, and those of the brilliant Finella Melfort, and with it came a keen sense of inequality and injustice; but Finella, fortunately for herself, was an heiress of money, and not—as Lord Fettercairn often reminded her—an unlucky landed proprietor, in these days of starving crofters, failing tenants, Irish assassinations, and agricultural collapses, with defiant notices of impossibility to pay rent, and clamours for reduction thereof. She was heiress to nothing of that sort, but solid gold shaken from the Rupee Tree.
When the ladies withdrew to the drawing-room, Dulcie gladly accompanied them, instead of retiring (as perhaps Lady Fettercairn expected) to her own apartment; we say gladly, as she was as much afraid of the society of Shafto as he was of hers—and she had a great dread she scarcely knew of what.
How, if this cold, stately, and aristocratic lady, to whom she now owed her bread, and whose paid dependant she was, should discover that Shafto, the recovered 'grandson,' had ever made love to her once upon a time in her Devonshire home?
Dulcie, as it was her first experience of Craigengowan, did not sink into her position there, by withdrawing first, and, more than all, silently. She effusively shook hands with everyone in a kindly country fashion, but withdrew her slender fingers from Shafto's eager clasp with a haughty movement that Lady Fettercairn detected, and with some surprise and some anger, too; but to which she did not give immediate vent.
'Her hair is unpleasantly red,' said she to Finella after a time.
'Nay, grandmamma,' replied the latter; 'I should call it golden—and what a lovely skin she has!'
'Red I say her hair is; and she looks ill.'
'Well, even if it is, she couldn't help her hair, unless she dyed it; besides, she is in mourning for her father, poor thing, and has had a long, long journey. No one looks well after that—and she travelled third-class she told me, poor girl.'
'How shocking! Don't speak of it.'
Dulcie had indeed done so. Her exchequer was a limited one; and farewell gifts to some of her dear old people had reduced it to a minimum.
'She seems rather a Devonshire hoyden,' said Lady Fettercairn, slowly fanning herself; 'but I hope she will be able to make herself useful to me.'
'Grandmamma, I quite adore her!' exclaimed the impulsive Finella; 'we shall be capital friends, I am sure.'
'But you must never forget who she is.'
'An orphan—or a lawyer's daughter, do you mean?'
'What then?'
'My paid companion,' said Lady Fettercairn icily; but Finella was not to be repressed, and exclaimed:
'I am sure that she is, by nature, a very jolly girl.'
'Don't use such a phrase, Finella; it is positive slang.'
'It expresses a great deal anyway, grand-mamma,' said Finella, who was somewhat of an enthusiast; and added, 'There is something very pathetic at times in her dark blue eyes—something that seems almost to look beyond this world.'
'What an absurd idea!'
'She has evidently undergone great sorrow, poor thing.'
'All these folks who go out as companions and governesses, and so forth, have undergone all that sort of thing, if you believe them; but they must forget their sorrows, be lively, and make themselves useful. What else are they paid for?'
Lady Fettercairn had been quite aware at one time that Shafto had been in the employment of a Mr. Carlyon in Devonshire, and Dulcie wondered that no questions were asked her on the subject; but doubtless the distasteful idea had passed from the aristocratic mind of the matron, and Shafto (save to Dulcie in private) had no desire to revive Devonshire memories, so he never referred to it either.
Dulcie, her grief partially over and her fear of Shafto nearly so, revelled at first in the freedom and beauty of her surroundings. Craigengowan House (or Castle, as it was sometimes called, from its turrets and whilom moat) was situated, she saw, among some of the most beautiful mountain scenery of the Mearns; and, as she had spent all her life (save when at school) in Devonshire, the lovely and fertile surface of which can only be described as being billowy to a Scottish eye, she took in the sense of a complete change with wonder, and regarded the vast shadowy mountains with a little awe.
In the first few weeks after her arrival at Craigengowan she had plenty of occupation, but of a kind that only pleased her to a certain extent.
She had Lady Fettercairn's correspondence to attend to; her numerous invitations to issue and respond to; her lap-dog to wash with scented soaps—but Dulcie always doted dearly on pets; and she had to play and sing to order, and comprehensively to make herself 'useful;' yet she had the delight of Finella's companionship, friendship, and—she was certain—regard. But she was imaginative and excitable; and when night came, and she found herself alone in one of the panelled rooms near the old Scoto-French turrets, with their vanes creaking overhead, and she had to listen to the boisterous Scottish gales that swept through the bleak and leafless woods and howled about the old house, as a warning that winter had not yet departed, poor little English Dulcie felt eerie, and sobbed on her pillow for the dead and the absent; for the days that would return no more; for her parents lying at Revelstoke, and Florian—who was she knew not where!