“My dear, what a turn you have given us!” he cried; “those silly children, to let you out of their sight! I don’t think a wood is a good place for Blindman’s Buff.”
“No more do I,” answered Vixen, very pale.
“You look as if you had been frightened, too,” said the Vicar.
“It did feel awfully lonely; not a sound, except the frogs croaking their vespers, and one dismal owl screaming in the distance. And how cold it has turned now the sun has gone down; and how ghostly the beeches look in their green mantles; there is something awful in a wood at sunset.”
She ran on in an excited tone, masking her agitation under an unnatural vivacity. Roderick watched her keenly. Mr. and Mrs. Scobel went back to their business of getting the children together, and the pots, pans, and baskets packed for the return-journey. The children were inclined to be noisy and insubordinate. They would have liked to make a night of it in this woody hollow, or in the gorse-clothed heights up yonder by Stony Cross. To go home after such a festival, and be herded in small stuffy cottages, was doubtless trying to free-born humanity, always more or less envious of the gipsies.
“Shall we walk up the hill together?” Roderick asked Violet humbly, “while the Scobels follow with their flock?”
“I am going to drive Mr. and Mrs. Scobel,” replied Vixen curtly.
“But where is your carriage?”
“I don t know. I rather think it was to meet us at the top of the hill.”
“Then let us go up together and find it — unless you hate me too much to endure my company for a quarter of an hour — or are too angry with me for my impertinence just now.”
“It is not worth being serious about,” answered Vixen quietly, after a little pause. “I was very angry at the moment, but after all — between you and me — who were like brother and sister a few years ago, it can’t matter very much. I daresay you may have kissed me in those days, though I have forgotten all about it.”
“I think I did — once or twice,” admitted Rorie with laudable gravity.
“Then let your impertinence just now go down to the old account, which we will close, if you please, to-night. But,” seeing him drawing nearer her with a sudden eagerness, “mind, it is never to be repeated. I could not forgive that.”
“I would do much to escape your anger,” said Rorie softly.
“The whole situation just now was too ridiculous,” pursued Vixen, with a spurious hilarity. “A young woman wandering blindfold in a wood all alone — it must have seemed very absurd.”
“It seemed very far from absurd — to me,” said Rorie.
They were going slowly up the grassy hill, the short scanty herbage looking gray in the dimness. Glow-worms were beginning to shine here and there at the foot of the furze-bushes. A pale moon was rising above the broad expanse of wood and valley, which sank with gentle undulations to the distant plains, where the young corn was growing and the cattle were grazing in a sober agricultural district. Here all was wild and beautiful — rich, yet barren.
“I’m afraid when we met last — at Lady Southminster’s ball — that I forgot to congratulate you upon your engagement to your cousin,” said Violet by-and-by, when they had walked a little way in perfect silence.
She was trying to carry out an old determination. She had always meant to go up to him frankly, with outstretched hand, and wish him joy. And she fancied that at the ball she had said too little. She had not let him understand that she was really glad. “Believe me, I am very glad that you should marry someone close at home — that you should widen your influence among us.”
“You are very kind,” answered Rorie, with exceeding coldness. “I suppose all such engagements are subjects for congratulation, from a conventional point of view. My future wife is both amiable and accomplished, as you know. I have reason to be very proud that she has done me so great an honour as to prefer me to many worthier suitors; but I am bound to tell you — as we once before spoke of this subject, at the time of your dear father’s death, and I then expressed myself somewhat strongly — I am bound to tell you that my engagement to Mabel was made to please my poor mother. It was when we were all in Italy together. My mother was dying. Mabel’s goodness and devotion to her had been beyond all praise; and my heart was drawn to her by affection, by gratitude; and I knew that it would make poor mother happy to see us irrevocably bound to each other — and so — the thing came about somehow, almost unawares, and I have every reason to be proud and happy that fate should have favoured me so far above my deserts.”
“I am very glad that you are happy,” said Violet gently.
After this there was a silence which lasted longer than the previous interval in their talk. They were at the top of the ill before either of them spoke.
Then Vixen laid her hand lightly upon her old playfellow’s arm, and said, with extreme earnestness:
“You will go into Parliament by-and-by, no doubt, and have great influence. Do not let them spoil the Forest. Do not let horrid grinding-down economists, for the sake of saving a few pounds or gaining a few pounds, alter and destroy scenes that are so beautiful and a delight to so many. England is a rich country, is she not? Surely she can afford to keep something for her painters and her poets, and even for the humble holiday-folks who come to drink tea at Rufus’s stone. Don’t let our Forest be altered, Rorie. Let all things be as they were when we were children.”
“All that my voice and influence can do to keep them so shall be done, Violet,” he answered in tones as earnest. “I am glad that you have asked me something to-night. I am glad, with all my heart, that you have given me something to do for you. It shall be like a badge in my helmet, by-and-by, when I enter the lists. I think I shall say: ‘For God and for Violet,’ when I run a tilt against the economic devastators who want to clear our woods and cut off our commoners.”
He bent down and kissed her hand, as in token of knightly allegiance. He had just time to do it comfortably before Mr. and Mrs. Scobel, with the children and their master and mistress, came marching up the hill, singing, with shrill glad voices, one of the harvest-home processional hymns.
“All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above,
Then thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord,
For all His love.”
“What a delicious night!” cried Mr. Scobel. “I think we ought all to walk home. It would be much nicer than being driven.”
This he said with a lively recollection of Titmouse’s performances on the journey out, and a lurking dread that he might behave a little worse on the journey home. A lively animal of that kind, going home to his stable, through the uncertain lights and shadows of woodland roads, and driven by such a charioteer as Violet Tempest, was not to be thought of without a shudder.
“I think I had better walk, in any case,” said Mr. Scobel thoughtfully. “I shall be wanted to keep the children together.”
“Let us all walk home,” suggested Roderick. “We can go through the plantations. It will be very jolly in the moonlight. Bates can drive your pony back, Violet.”
Vixen hesitated.
“It’s not more than four miles through the plantations,” said Roderick.
“Do you think I am afraid of a long walk?”
“Of course not. You were a modern Atalanta three years ago. I don’t suppose a winter in Paris and a season at Brighton have quite spoiled you.”
“It shall be as you like, Mrs. Scobel,” said Vixen, appealing to the Vicar’s wife.
“Oh, let us walk by all means,” replied Mrs. Scobel, divining her husband’s feelings with respect to Titmouse.
“Then, you may drive the pony home, Bates,” said Violet; “and be sure you give him a good supper.”
Titmouse went rattling down the hill at a pace that almost justified the Vicar’s objection to him. He gave a desperate shy in the hollow at sight of a shaggy donkey, with a swollen appearance about the head, suggestive, to the equine mind, of hobgoblins. Convulsed
at this appalling spectre, Titmouse stood on end for a second or two, and then tore violently off, swinging his carriage behind him, so that the groom’s figure swayed to and fro in the moonlight.
“Thank God we’re not sitting behind that brute!” ejaculated the Vicar devoutly.
The pedestrians went off in the other direction, along the brow of the hill, by a long white road that crossed a wide sweep of heathy country, brown ridges and dark hollows, distant groups of firs standing black against the moonlit sky, here and there a solitary yew that looked as if it were haunted — just such a landscape as that Scottish heath upon which Macbeth met the three weird women at set of sun, when the battle was lost and won. Vixen and Rorie led the way; the procession of school-children followed, singing hymns as they went with a vocal power that gave no token of diminution.
“Their singing is very melodious when the sharp edge is taken off by distance,” said Rorie; and he and Violet walked at a pace which soon left the children a good way behind them.
Mellowed by a quarter of a mile or so of interesting space, the music lent a charm to the tranquil, perfumed night.
By-and-by they came to the gate of an enclosure which covered a large extent of ground, and through which there was a near way to Beechdale and the Abbey House. They walked along a grassy track through a plantation of young pines — a track which led them down into a green and mossy bottom, where the trees were old and beautiful, and the shadows fell darker. The tall beech-trunks shone like silver, or like wonderful frozen trees in some region of eternal ice and snow. It was a wilderness in which a stranger would incontinently lose himself; but every foot of the way was familiar to Vixen and Rorie. They had followed the hounds by these green ways, and ridden and rambled here in all seasons.
For some time they walked almost in silence, enjoying the beauty of the night, the stillness only broken by the distant chorus of children singing their pious strains — old hymn-tunes that Violet had known and loved all her life.
“Doesn’t it almost seem as if our old childish days had come back?” said Roderick by-and-by. “Don’t you feel as if you were a little girl again, Vixen, going for a ramble with me — fern-hunting or primrose-gathering?”
“No,” answered Vixen firmly. “Nothing can ever bring the past back for me. I shall never forget that I had a father — the best and dearest — and that I have lost him.”
“Dear Violet,” Roderick began, very gently, “life cannot be made up of mourning for the dead. We may keep their images enshrined in our hearts for ever, but we must not shut our youth from the sunshine. Think how few years of youth God gives us; and if we waste those upon vain sorrow — —”
“No one can say that I have wasted my youth, or shut myself from the sunshine. I go to kettle-drums and dancing-parties. My mother and I have taken pains to let the world see how happy we can be without papa.”
“The dear old Squire!” said Rorie tenderly; “I think he loved me.”
“I am sure he did,” answered Vixen.
“Well, you and I seem to have entered upon a new life since last we rode through these woods together. I daresay you are right, and that it is not possible to fancy oneself back in the past, even for a moment. Consciousness of the present hangs so heavily upon us.”
“Yes,” assented Vixen.
They had come to the end of the enclosure, and stood leaning against a gate, waiting for the arrival of the children.
“And after all, perhaps, it is better to live in the present, and look back at the past, as at an old picture which we shall sooner or later turn with its face to the wall.”
“I like best to think of my old self as if it were someone else,” said Violet. “I know there was a little girl whom her father called Vixen, who used to ride after the hounds, and roam about the Forest on her pony; and who was herself almost as wild as the Forest ponies. But I can’t associate her with this present me,” concluded Violet, pointing to herself with a half-scornful gesture.
“And which is the better, do you think,” asked Rorie, “the wild Violet of the past, or the elegant exotic of the present?”
“I know which was the happier.”
“Ah,” sighed Rorie, “happiness is a habit we outgrow when we get out of our teens. But you, at nineteen, ought to have a year or so to the good.”
The children came in sight, tramping along the rutty green walk, singing lustily, Mr. Scobel walking at their head, and swinging his stick in time with the tuneful choir.
“He only is the Maker
Of all things near and far;
He paints the wayside flower,
He lights the evening star.”
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
“Shall I tell you the Secret?”
For the rest of the way Violet walked with Mrs. Scobel, and at the garden-gate of the Vicarage Roderick Vawdrey wished them both good-night, and tramped off, with his basket on his back and his rod on his shoulder, for the long walk to Briarwood.
Here the children separated, and ran off to their scattered homes, dropping grateful bob-curtsies to the last—”louting,” as they called it in their Forest dialect.
“You must come in and have some tea, Violet,” said Mrs. Scobel. “You must be very tired.”
“I am rather tired; but I think it’s too late for tea. I had better get home at once.”
“Ignatius shall see you home, my dear,” cried Mrs. Scobel. At which the indefatigable Vicar, who had shouted himself hoarse in leading his choir, protested himself delighted to escort Miss Tempest.
The church clock struck ten as they went along the narrow forest-path between Beechdale and the Abbey House.
“Oh,” cried Vixen, “I do hope mamma’s people will have gone home.”
A carriage rolled past them as they came out into the road.
“That’s Mrs. Carteret’s landau,” said Vixen. “I breathe more freely. And there goes Mrs. Horwood’s brougham; so I suppose everything is over. How nice it is when one’s friends are so unanimous in their leave-taking.”
“I shall try to remember that the next time I dine at the Abbey House,” said Mr. Scobel laughing.
“Oh, please don’t!” cried Violet. “You and Mrs. Scobel are different. I don’t mind you; but those dreadful stiff old ladies mamma cultivates, who think of nothing but their dress and their own importance — a little of them goes a very long way.”
“But, my dear Miss Tempest, the Carterets and the Horwoods are some of the best people in the neighbourhood.”
“Of course they are,” answered Vixen. “If they were not they would hardly venture to be so stupid. They take the full license of their acres and their quarterings. People with a coat-of-arms found yesterday, and no land to speak of, are obliged to make themselves agreeable.”
“Like Captain Winstanley,” suggested Mr. Scobel. “I don’t suppose he has land enough to sod a lark. But he is excellent company.”
“Very,” assented Vixen, “for the people who like him.”
They were at the gate by this time.
“You shan’t come any further unless you are coming in to see mamma,” protested Vixen.
“Thanks, no; it’s too late to think of that.”
“Then go home immediately, and have some supper,” said Vixen imperatively. “You’ve had nothing but a cup of weak tea since two o’clock this afternoon. You must be worn out.”
“On such an occasion as to-day a man must not think of himself,” said the Vicar.
“I wonder when you ever do think of yourself,” said Vixen.
And indeed Mr. Scobel, like many another Anglican pastor of modern times, led a life which, save for its liberty to go where he listed, and to talk as much as he liked, was but little less severe in its exactions upon the flesh and the spirit than that of the monks of La Trappe.
The Abbey House looked very quiet when Vixen went into the hall, whose doors stood open to the soft spring night. The servants were all at supper, treating themselves to som
e extra comforts on the strength of a dinner-party, and talking over the evening’s entertainment and its bearings on their mistress’s life. There was a feeling in the servants’ hall that these little dinners, however seeming harmless, had a certain bent and tendency inimical to the household, and household peace.
“He was more particular in his manner to-night than hever,” said the butler, as he dismembered a duck which had been “hotted up” after removal from the dining-room. “He feels hisself master of the whole lot of us already. I could see it in his hi. ‘Is that the cabinet ‘ock, Forbes?’ he says to me, when I was a-filling round after the bait. ‘No,’ says I, ‘it is not. We ain’t got so much of our cabinet ‘ocks that we can afford to trifle with ‘em.’ Of course I said it in a hundertone, confidential like; but I wanted him to know who was master of the cellar.”
“There’ll be nobody master but him when once he gets his foot inside these doors,” said Mrs. Trimmer, the housekeeper, with a mournful shake of her head. “No, Porline, I’ll have a noo pertater. Them canister peas ain’t got no flaviour with them.”
While they were enjoying themselves, with a certain chastening touch of prophetic melancholy, in the servants’ hall, Violet was going slowly upstairs and along the corridor which led past her mother’s rooms.
“I must go in and wish mamma good-night,” she thought; “though I am pretty sure of a lecture for my pains.”
Just at this moment a door opened, and a soft voice called “Violet,” pleadingly.
“Dear mamma, I was just coming in to say good-night.”
“Were you, darling? I heard your footstep, and I was afraid you were going by. And I want very particularly to see you to-night, Violet.”
“Do you, mamma? I hope not to scold me for going with the school-children. They had such a happy afternoon; and ate! it was like a miracle. Not so little serving for so many, but so few devouring so much.”
Pamela Tempest put her arm round her daughter, and kissed her, with more warmth of affection than she had shown since the sad days after the Squire’s death. Violet looked at her mother wonderingly. She could hardly see the widow’s fair delicate face in the dimly-lighted room. It was one of the prettiest rooms in the house — half boudoir half dressing-room, crowded with elegant luxuries and modern inventions, gipsy tables, book-stands, toy-cabinets of egg-shell china, a toilet table à la Pompadour, a writing-desk à la Sevigné. Such small things had made the small joys of Mrs. Tempest’s life. When she mourned her kind husband, she lamented him as the someone who had bought her everything she wanted.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 649
