FOR some seconds the diner sat, too astounded for speech or action. That either of his dependents should have dared to thus defy him!
At length he rose, and took a step or two towards the window. It was no trick of his fancy. There lay the abomination, its dry dead hair stirring in the draught, its stuft lid winking a dirty white, as if it cocked an eye at him in a hideous merriment.
He strode to the door and thundered for his henchman. The latter came immediately, apprehensive already, and doubly so when he marked the other’s face.
“You see that?” said his master, in a voice whose quiet was more appalling than any outburst of fury.
Whimple’s very lips went ghastly. He tried to answer, and broke down at the first syllable.
“I don’t accuse you of putting it there. Now, tell me—why didn’t you get rid of it as you undertook to do?”
He made out the man to say that he had—that he had removed it to his own room, intending later to find some means of disposing of it.
In the midst of his stammering explanations, Darda came softly into the hall. Her brother seized her arm with a shaking hand.
“How could you?” he muttered. “How could you do a thing so stupid and wicked?—and you have ruined us.”
She followed the direction of his wild eyes, and her own opened round in wonder.
“I didn’t put it there,” she said. “Does he say I did? It is a lie.”
He whispered “Hush!” in a fearful voice; but his master broke in at once.
“No matter who did it. One of you has thought fit to make a mock of me, and you must both pay the penalty.”
The girl laughed scornfully.
“You only wanted a pretext,” she said, “to get rid of us. I thought you would, sooner or later. Perhaps you put it there yourself.”
Her voice was rising to bitterer significance, when she heard a sound at her side, and, turning, made a frantic clutch at her brother as he slid to the floor. His head came with a little thwack on the boards; and there he lay with clinched teeth and a face like a stone.
Then—“Oh! oh!” she wailed, and threw herself down beside him.
Mr. Tuke was very embarrassed and a little shocked. He took no resentment over the girl’s spirit, though he still firmly believed she lied about the skull. But after all, it was patently unjust to hold the man responsible for the cantrips of so unmanageable a charge.
He seized a jug of water.
“Here—pour some of this over him,” he said. “He’s fainted like a woman.”
She looked up at him with fierce eyes; but she took the jug nevertheless.
“He’s a better man than you!” she cried. “He can suffer and endure; and fight too, when there’s need.”
She was human enough in her fearless championship of her own flesh and blood.
The gentleman laughed uneasily, and, feeling himself under the circumstances a little de trop, left the hall, with a certain consciousness of shame tingling in his heels.
Outside, he thought, “Did she get the better of me? If this sort of thing goes on, I shall lose the sense of how to be master in my house.”
Stung by the thought, he threw open the door once more and looked in.
“He’ll come round in a minute,” he said hardly. “Listen to me. I shall sleep out to-night. You can——”
He broke off suddenly; paused a moment in indecision—then tip-toed gently away.
The girl’s face had been drowned in tears as she bent over her brother.
He passed to the neglected stables, and was fain to saddle his own horse and lead him forth and mount in the weed-choked yard.
He rode down by way of the long slumberous drive. Its whole course was matted with woodland moss, smooth as green felt; and thereon the beeches, staking their aftermath of glory, flung golden counters softly, as if on a card-table. At the half-ruined lodge he paused, and dwelt upon its desolation curiously. Ivy, like a cluster of swarming snakes, held the writhed chimneys in a death-grip, and had fractured the spine of the gabled roof. The ribs of the structure showed through gaping rents, like those in a stranded ship. Not a melancholy window-place but gaped a black mouth, full of broken splints of teeth and dead sticks of sashes. The whole building seemed sunk into the moss and leafiness that engirdled it.
He went out through the iron gate, and spurred along the road that was yet unfamiliar to him. The air was at once soft and keen as the taste of olives, and as such stimulated his new appetite for Nature.
Life seems never so desirable as in typical days of autumn, when the year rallies of its disease and makes a brave effort to renew its thoughtless morning with a few withering leaves. Of all the motley months, none is so pathetic as October in its likeness to an aging lady, striving to salve by gentleness the unhealed wounds inflicted of her earlier pugnacity.
Mr. Tuke’s spirits rose as he advanced. He seemed already in touch with the world again—a butterfly of the second brood emerged from a buried larva. He met a few clowns, and acknowledged their salutations brightly. His voice rose and cracked in snatches of romantic song, and he greeted with pleasure whatever landmarks he remembered.
Of these, the “Dog and Duck” stood as unchanged as any tree or hillock; for on the window-sill of the tap the same figure lounged and smoked. The rider got a better view of the fellow as he stood broadly in the sunlight. He was built sturdily, with something of an air of the sea about him; and his coat was bedecked with trinketry of faded gold, like an old galley-foist. But his face, red as brick and patched with eyebrows like tags of wild clematis-down, was a cut-throat one by every sinister mark.
As before—the traveller past—he swung heavily out into the road to watch his going.
“I’ve an eye for you, my friend,” murmured the baronet. “What do you do in this happy valley, where winds and waters should be the only forces to strive with?”
He was pondering a little all the way to Stockbridge; and there Betty Pollack came upon him with a blush and a smile, like a posy of sweetbriar, and drew his honour a mug of ale. She knew him now by report, of course; and was curious, with the gossips of the neighbourhood, as to the history of his mysterious coming. Near all the years of her short life, “Delsrop,” unclaimed and deserted, had been lonely, enchanted ground for the builders of local tradition to lay their airy bricks on.
“Is your honour for Winchester?” she said. “The evenings draw in, and it’s well to be over the downs by sunset. There have been bad characters about of late.”
“Betty,” said he, “will you give me a curl to put over my heart for a charm?”
She laughed and then looked grave.
“I’m not that sort,” she said. “I keep my favours for my inferiors.”
“And what am I but one?”
“Well,” said she, “I think you are, to talk so.”
It was like a glimpse of an orchard through a wall-wicket to tarry with her a moment; but he must needs be up and onward if he wished to reach the old Burgh before dark fell.
Therefore he mounted and went his way, whereby we need not pursue him; for it was devoid of incident, and of much emotion but weariness.
He slept that night at the “George,” and the next morning sought out his agent and went deep into matters of business with him.
The upshot was so satisfactory, that he felt justified, then and there, in giving considerable commissions for furniture, and in arranging for the hire of such servants as were at least indispensable.
He dined early, and had made his return journey, with a heart considerably lightened and braced to content by three o’clock.
As he came within sight of the iron gate, he noticed to his surprise a horse tethered amongst the bushes off the road; and still more did he marvel upon nearing it, to see that it was a well-groomed animal and a lady’s, by token of the side-saddle.
He dismounted, and leading his own beast over the turf, pushed open the gate, and stood still to reconnoitre. No sign of the owner of the horse was there—no sound of voice or footstep in the green glooms beyond.
Uncertain what to do he remained a moment looking this way and that, when suddenly there broke upon his ear a shrill scream of terror. It seemed to issue not twenty paces away, from the direction of the ruined lodge.
He dropped the reins and sprang forward.
“Here!” he shouted. “What is it? Where are you?”
Crying, frenzied words came back to him—a woman’s voice, but inarticulate. Guided by it, however, he ran round by way of a little tangled garden that brought him to the rear of the low building.
Nothing was to be seen; but here the voice appealed to him in agony from out the very ground. He fell upon his knees by a sunk heap of rubbish—saw in a moment, and snapped vigorously at two gloved hands, that wavered up at him from a ruin of weeds and broken earth.
As he held on, frantically hauling, with his jaw set square, the matted ground shook and crumbled under his feet. He saw what was happening, and, throwing himself back with a mighty effort of resolution, drew slowly from the bowels of the earth, as it were, the collapsed and almost senseless form of a young woman. Then, scarcely might he stagger with her to a place of security, when a rent opened in the spot whence he had struggled, and a great pad of undergrowth went down with a roar and hollow splash of water to ugly depths.
Mr. Tuke laid his dainty salvage on the débris of a bench, and looked down upon it all amazed. It presented the form of a girl, of nineteen or twenty perhaps, with a quantity of pale golden hair dragged and tumbled over her very white face, and her dress and velvet spencer—both rich and fashionable—torn and stained in twenty places. Her eyes were closed, and her gloved hands daubed with mud and roots of grass.
He was quite at a loss as to what to do; and could only stand helplessly above her, wondering who she could be, and what the chance that had brought her into so perilous a position. Vaguely he recalled certain specifics for faintness, that seemed scrawled illegibly in the commonplace-book of his mind. Wringing her ears, or her nose—he could not remember which—suggested itself as a remedy dimly familiar. Burnt feathers, also—but whether for in- or external application, he had no recollection—fluttered faintly in the background of his fancy. Now he thought he would lay her flat, and now seat her upright like a limp Eastern idol, in the hope that the position most favourable to Nature’s purpose would induce recovery.
While he was speculating in great embarrassment, the young lady solved the problem for herself by opening her eyes, and giving out a little tremulous sigh, like the flutter of a scorched moth.
“Oh!” she whimpered—a line of pain coming across her brow—“where is my saltier?”
It was her chain, ending in a little medallion called a bréviaire—at that time fashionable—that she missed. Life devoid of this trinket was a petty possession.
“It must have gone whither you nearly followed, into a disused well,” said Mr. Tuke, becomingly grave.
He added with some humour of impertinence:
“How a foot, too light to bruise a daisy, could tread so heavy a measure, passes my comprehension.”
A little flush, as when a spoonful of red wine is dropped into a glass of milk, came to her cheek and delicate ear.
“I felt it going,” she whispered; “and screamed out. Did you save me? And are you the new squire of ‘Delsrop’? Oh, sir! I am ashamed.”
She broke off abruptly, and, blushing a more vivid pink, rose to a sitting posture, and put back the hair from her face in a bewildered manner.
“I hardly know what I say or do,” she said. “I was so frightened; and I have lost my saltier. My horse is somewhere outside. Will you help me to it?”
“You are not in a state to ride. Wait and rest, and I will escort you whither you wish by and by.”
“No; I must go now. My brother will be home from cock-fight and raging for his supper. It was wrong of me to venture in, and I have lost my saltier, and nearly my life. Will you have search made for it in the well? It is gold, and the bréviaire is shaped prettily like a ridicule.”
“It shall be found, if possible. If you must go, I will ride with you.”
“No, no.”
“Yes, indeed. And whither may I squire you, madam?”
“To ‘Chatters,’ if you must. ’Tis his house—my brother’s.”
“Your brother’s?”
“He is Sir David Blythewood, sir.”
“You must pardon me. I have only made my début in the neighbourhood this day or so.”
“Yes; I know.”
She looked at him with a vague little smile. Her eyes swam as pale a blue as plumbago flowers. Her features were cut to a sharpish pattern; but their complexion was of snow berries, and the softness of youth triumphed over all angles. Suddenly she put her hands to her rumpled hair.
“My hat!” she cried.
“I fear it has followed the saltier. We must make shift without it.”
She rose at once and took the arm he offered. The shock and the fright seemed to have confused her, so that her actions and most of her speech were mechanical.
When he had helped her to mount and was riding beside her, he had full opportunity, in the intermittent silences that fell awkwardly between them, to study her very dainty personality. She managed her “grey” like one finely educated in the science of horsemanship. All graces of mien and action seemed exhibited with the cultivated art that conceals art.
Now and again he would be conscious of an inquisitive glance shot in his direction, and the little confusion that followed upon discovery was skillfully expressed.
A long two miles they rode together, by further way of the “Delsrop” road; and presently, skirting a sweep of park-land—in ordered contrast with Mr. Tukes’ domain—came in view of a lodge and gates of the most admired substantiality.
Here the gentleman would insist upon delivering up his charge, and returning the way he had come. No pretty remonstrances would avail to make him spoil the romance of the situation by so much as a yard of anti-climax.
“I am too happy in having been the means of help,” said he. “If you are beholden to me at all, a word of thanks from your brother would make me a debtor instead of a creditor.”
She smiled back delightfully.
“He shall come in person,” she said, “and bring you a receipt of my safe custody.”
She laughed and waved to him, and was gone up the drive.
He stood hat in hand until she had disappeared. Then he mounted and rode back, with a heart full of sun and merriment.
Indeed, it was like a sail to a castaway, this vision in his waste of days. To know that refined civilization was within a couple of miles or so of his gates, did more to reconcile him to his embowered lot, than any philosophy of nature. He felt friendless and isolated no longer; but rather inspired to a pursuit that should make of his thickets a garden of Hesperus.
In this mood of exaltation he reached his own door, rapped on it with the butt of his riding-whip, and, as it was swung open, encountered the figures of Whimple and his sister arrayed as if for a journey.