FOR all the starkness of frost that now befell, it was not till the early days of February that the packed heavens began to discharge themselves of the congested stores of snow they had been long garnering. By then the ground was iron a foot deep; the last green thing was withered upon itself; dead birds hung in the hedgerows and rabbits were stuck stiff in their burrows. Familiar presentments of trees and buildings offered strange new aspects as seen from the middle of frozen ponds, and the very least sap of nature was so withdrawn as that it seemed a marvel the principle of life could endure, to hug itself with any promise of spring.
But to our gentleman waking one morning, there was earnest of the first white fall outside in the wan light struck rigidly from the ceiling. He rose and went to the window, and saw the cold sheet spread, pure and beautiful and hiding all his world; and at that he knew himself committed to such a prolonged hob-nobbing with his lares as he had never before experienced.
He was hardly discomfited. This prospective imprisonment carried with it a picture of home occupations very peaceful and unvexed. Sheltered from the wind, he would study to make of himself a shepherd beloved of his flock. A vision of a sombre library, full of serious warmth and winking book-backs, with himself a quiet dreaming student, in the dusk afternoons, set in the midst, appealed pleasantly to his mind’s eye. It should be a period of pregnant repose, while thought and virtue should grow large within him and induce him to a nobler attitude towards life.
In the modest enthusiasm engendered of this prospect, he even wished it would snow ever more and more, until he and his were shut in beyond a last chance of present rescue; and if the desire proved him less foreseeing from the domestic point of view than he would have imagined, it did, at least, most fully avouch his honesty of purpose.
Since his return he had rather courted seclusion; nor had he gone much abroad, nor—be it marked—ventured within the radiated influence of the “First Inn.” He had, in consequence, no personal knowledge of those movements of Mr. Brander that were subsequent to his interview with him; but he kept Dennis, to whom he had given his confidence in the matter, on the alert, and that good serving-man reported that no information was in the neighbourhood of any recrudescence of blackguardism on the part of the “Dog and Duck.” Therefore he was fain to hope that the baffled ex-schoolmaster had for the time being succumbed to circumstance and withdrawn himself as he came.
Now, on that afternoon of the first snow, Mr. Tuke was busying himself in the room he had made his private and personal study, and Darda was helping him to the arrangement of his none too numerous volumes, when her brother came in to crave a word with his master.
“Sir,” said he, “I believe you would like to know that Sir David and Miss Royston are returned to ‘Chatters.’”
Tuke looked up in some surprise.
“Already?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Indeed, yes, sir. I had it from Betty Pollack.”
“Betty?”
“She drove over to-day, sir, with her father, for orders, hearing that you had come back; and she stated that young Gamble had happened upon Sir David and party posting over the high downs at six o’clock yesterday evening.”
“Oh, very well, Dennis.”
The man withdrew, and the master resumed his labours preoccupied. Presently he slapped a book down upon the table, and—“You must go on by yourself, Darda,” said he, and left the room.
For some minutes after his exit the girl remained motionless where she stood; her ear turned to the last echo of his retreating footstep, her face like a deep-cut cameo, stained with blue shadows, the glory of her hair flaming against a background of snow. From her whiteness and her quiet she might have been the very ghost of some burning thought awake for the first time to the winter of its desolation.
Presently she uttered a little heart-rending sigh, and went on forlornly with her occupation.
Her master, in the meanwhile, was gone about his business; and that was no less than a visit to the returned travellers. His resolve to undertake this was not the fruit of any desperate hope. He had no natural inclination to hold himself cheaply in questions of moral treatment, and he was sensitive, in a manly way, to the insolences of feminine rebuke. But he had schooled himself into an attitude towards Miss Royston which only some real act of violence to his feelings should convince him was entirely unjustified, and he would not consent to yield his office at that lady’s little court unless he were to suffer an outspoken decree of banishment. He had made up his mind, in fact, like a little naughty but repentant boy, to be good, and good he would be if properly encouraged. Now he was to see if Angela would resume her former self with her accustomed life, and, desiring test of this, he would plunge once more into the fire. And here, I regret to say, all his eremitic visions dissolved into thin air, and he was decided that for him the “running brooks” must suffice for library.
He walked through the deep snow to “Chatters,” and was removing his coat in the hall thereof, after being admitted, when a lofty and languid figure came upon him, and paused in some fatigued surprise on its way to a room-door.
He uttered an exclamation, and, advancing upon this person, accosted him decidedly cavalierly.
“You here, Dunlone!” he said. “This is entirely unexpected.”
The viscount in his disdain looked particularly like a camel; but he gave no answer.
“Well,” said Tuke, “being here, I should like to ask you a question. Have you acquainted our friends of my real title?”
“Oh, curse it, no!” said the lord. “What the devil’s it got to do with me?”
“That’s right. I have my reasons for the change, of course, and I’ll ask you to respect them.”
“I give myself no cursed concern about it. I don’t know that it makes much difference,” cried my lord irritably. “You seem to think I’ve no affairs but yours to consider.”
“You’ll not be offensive, I know,” said Tuke. “It’s not your way.”
The other sniffed and preceded the visitor into the drawing-room. He, the latter, pondered profoundly on his short journey thither, and steeled himself against probabilities.
But here he was agreeably and quite surprisingly flattered. Miss Royston received him with a charming naïveté of welcome, and seemed to encourage him to assume the rôle of a familiar neighbour.
“Are you not astonished to see us back so soon?” she said. “You know how eagerly I grasp at any excuse for a return to the country. Through all the clash and sparkle of town I hear the birds singing and see the lambs frisking in the meadows.”
“They’re not so much as dropped in January,” said Dunlone seriously.
Miss Angela blushed.
“Mr. Tuke will understand me,” she said, with a plaintive glance at that gentleman.
He coughed and bowed, and was altogether wholly perplexed as to the nature of her present attitude towards him.
“And what was the excuse you grasped at?” said he.
She made a little moue with her lips—she was amazingly confidential—and shrugged her pretty shoulders at the oblivious viscount.
“He was returning to Cornwall,” she whispered, “and almost drove us home that he might make a half-way house of ‘Chatters.’ I vow we were forced to come.”
She was delightfully secretive. There was no mention of my lord’s tailor. Almost Tuke misdoubted that Dunlone had kept his aristocratic faith with him.
“Well,” said he, “we’re all beholden to him anyhow, whatever was his motive.”
She lifted her shoulders again at that. Her expression said plainly, “His motive? You know as well as I do, sir, what is the lure to any male creature in this house.”
“He is not a first example of savoir vivre,” she whispered; “but, if he is a cub, he is a tiger-cub.”
“Does that recommend him in your eyes?”
“What hypocrisy to pretend it does not in any. He may feed like a wolf, but he hath the royal coat, and his stripes shall cover a multitude of sins.”
“Or rib a whole vessel of emptiness.”
“No doubt,” she said, with a light laugh.
He sat silent some moments. Was she sincere, he pondered, or could it be possible she merely sought to play him into check with this insolent pawn?
Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that his own hitherto tactics might have lacked fairness. Miss Royston was very prettily instinct with the prudence of her class, and it could be nothing less than wrong-headedness that should hold her to blame for subordinating passion to a sense of refinement. Indeed, what better security against weakness or levity could she present him than this very reluctance of hers to submit herself to the suit of an uncertified admirer? If in the unacknowledged bitterness of his own degradation he had taken some savage pleasure in presenting his least admirable side to the world, was this uninterested lady to be called upon to discriminate in the question of his grievances, or not rather to be the more commended for tentatively holding his approaches in check? With such a prize to win, it had surely been his more honourable course, not to read in her reserve a force antagonistic to his own, but to inventory his every possession, and place all, with the truth, at her feet. Why, in short, should she, whose heart he could not flatter himself he had taken at once and by storm, be content to consign her long traditions of refinement to one who could give no assurance of his right position to maintain and honour the gift?
Then he thought: “I have Creel’s consent, and it only needs another kind word from her, and the truth shall come. I will tell her what are my real name and title, and so learn for once and for all if, satisfied on these points, she will be willing to forego both for the third item on the list—the man himself.”
And, at this pass, in pops Sir David, with his round face like a full-stop, and puts the period for the time being to a very promising situation.
The baronet, it must be said, showed some embarrassment over the contretemps. “I ain’t responsible for this Dunlone business, you know,” his pained eyebrows pleaded to Tuke. “I don’t profess to understand Angel, and she’s as wilful as the deuce, she is.”
He would nevertheless have had his friend stay to dinner; but this Tuke would not consent to, pleading his riding-dress and boots for excuse, and protesting that he must go after he had drunk the dish of tea Miss Royston had promised him.
All the time he was there the lady made much of her visitor, while my lord sat by on a sofa, with his mouth like a slur-mark in music, sulkily employing himself in ripping the gold thread from a sword-knot. For this exquisite had brought his “drizzling” box with him—a beautiful tortoise-shell casket, with the Dunlone stork in silver on the lid, and within a neat array of hilt-bands, shoulder-straps, and galloons of tarnished lace—and would sit by the hour together, silent as a Trappist, while he unravelled his yarn and wound it upon wooden reels. Out of the sale of these, he would tell you, he made quite a little monthly income, for there was no outlay, the material being cajoled from easy friends or accepted from parasites; and without doubt the occupation and its moral fitted him like a glove.
He did not even look up when the other came to bid him good-evening, but Tuke thought he heard him murmur, “Oh, curse it!” under his breath, and was fain to accept this benediction as a negative testimony to the value put upon him as a rival, and to the capriciousness of the soft sex in general.
The short winter afternoon was closing in as our gentleman, profoundly cogitating on the policy it should be best to pursue with a ravissante who would thus humble or exalt him according to the whimsies of her mood, came down to his own gate in the hollow where the ruined lodge was situated. Here much had been redressed and improved, so that—though the building itself remained an enbowered wreck—the entrance and the drive presented an ordered appearance, and, indeed, to any lover of the picturesque, an aspect quite alluring in its sweet and lofty loneliness.
He had entered and clanked-to the gate behind him, when something glimmering to the back of a tree-trunk brought him to a pause, and immediately he advanced upon it, and, skirting the bole, jerked to a stop and cried, “Betty!”
She stood before him, her head hanging and her face gone a little white; and she knitted her fingers together and had not, it seemed, a word to say.
“Why, what are you doing here, in the dusk and the snow?” he said, in something of a stern voice. “I understood you had gone back with your grandfather?”
Her forehead, under its hood, took a line of pain, and her lips trembled. He thought he foresaw the coming shower, and his reluctance to encourage it made him assume a little harshness.
“Where is your grandfather?” he said coldly and brusquely.
At that she glanced up at him like a frightened child.
“Don’t—don’t be angry with me!” her looks said plainly.
“Betty?” he asked, reproachfully.
“Grandfather went on first,” she whispered, “and I was to follow.”
“Why? Why didn’t you go with him?”
At that her tears came thick and fast. She shook before him, trying to repress them.
“You can’t go that long way by yourself,” he said, more gently. “Why did you remain behind?”
He had to bend his head to catch the hurried, sobbing answer.
“I wanted to see you—only to see you and not be seen. You have been away—have kept away so long. Have I vexed you? It was what I thought was right. But I’m weak to hold by all I resolved. I only wanted to see you, and now I’ll go.”
She moved a quick step towards the gate. He let her retreat a pace or two. For the first time, I think, he realized what he had been doing. He struggled fiercely with himself; but, no, he could not part with her like this.
“Betty!” he cried again, softly. “You must come back to me.”
She hesitated, turned, and came. He put her in front of him, and took her face between his hands.
“Oh, my dear!” he said, “what have I done?”
She looked up piteously into his eyes.
“No, no,” she whispered, in a drowned voice, “you’re not to blame. You keep your word—you would have me keep mine, like the gentleman you are. It’s—it’s——”
“What, Betty?”
“Only let me see you now and then—see you, and not be spoken to or noticed.”
“How can I prevent you, if you will? But would it be wise?”
She drew herself away from him gently but forcibly.
“No, it would not,” she said, in a low voice; “but love is never that. Yes, love—why should I hide it? And I have found out what I wanted to know. I shall soon hear the bells ringing for your wedding, and—and—oh! why did you ever kiss me?”
And at that she ran from him. He called to her, hurried after her, but she was heedless. He saw her speed up the road, and he durst not follow. He knew that, country-bred girl as she was, she would make little of the miles to Stockbridge, even were her grandfather not awaiting her at a distance, which he thought improbable.
Then, retracing his steps with a groan, he went on to his house. He walked sternly. He was not only despicable in his own eyes, but cruel in a manner he had not thought was possible to his nature.
As he entered his hall, Dennis came upon him with startled eyes.
“Sir,” he said, eagerly, “may I have a word with you?”