“I entirely concur,” said Mr. Foljambe, who always concurred with peers. “I only meant that it is a little curious that the vicarage of Roydon should have been always filled by a person of that stamp.”
“That is what I have been, I hope, endeavouring to say, or, rather, what I have not said, because I have endeavoured to say something different; in fact, that it is not curious. I’ll take some sherry, about it.” The concluding remark was addressed to the butler.
And so the conversation proceeded very agreeably.
But —
Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You pluck the flower, its bloom is shed.
The most agreeable dinner-party, its cutlets and conversation, its wit and its château-yquem, are transitory, and the hour inevitably arrives when people prefer their nightcaps and the extinguisher.
Lord Verney has uttered his last wise and lucid exposition for the evening, and the stately vicar, who would not object to a visit to Lord Verney’s hospitable house at Ware, has imbibed his latest draughts from that fountain of illumination. Lord Barroden has said his say to Lady Vernon, and enlivened by a nap, has made some agreeable sallies in conversation with Lady Grummelston, and to that happy lady, in the drawingroom, Mrs. Foljambe has told her story about the two young women in whom she took an interest, who left Roydon and set up a confectioner’s shop in Coventry, and prospered.
The pleasures of that festive evening are over; and Miss Max and Miss Vernon are having their little chat together, in their dressing-gowns.
Miss Max has a little bit of fire in her grate, for this is, thanks to our variable climate, by no means like last night; not at all sultry, rather chilly, on the contrary.
“Well, we shall soon hear something, I fancy, about mamma’s annual trip to town,” says Maud, speaking from a very low-cushioned chair, in a corner of which she is nestled, with her feet on the fender.
The young lady’s dressing-gown is of rose-coloured cashmere, some of the quilted silk lining of which, in her careless pose, appears. She is extremely pretty, looking up from her cushioned nook at the old lady, who sits, in her odd flannel garb, before the fire in a more formal armchair.
“And why do you think so? Have you heard anything?” asks the old lady.
“Only that Jones says that Latimer is making the usual preparations,” answers Miss Maud.
“Latimer’s her maid, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“And why doesn’t she ask Latimer directly?” demanded Miss Max.
“Because Latimer would be afraid to tell, and she would be afraid to ask. Mamma finds out everything she chooses to find out. You don’t know mamma as well as I do in this house. Whatever she chooses to be secret is secret, and whatever she chooses to know she does know; and the servants are awfully afraid of her. You might as well ask that picture as Latimer; and Jones would not be such a fool as to ask her, for she does not know the moment mamma might say, ‘Latimer, has any one been asking you anything about my going to London?’ and so sure as she did, Latimer would tell her the truth, for there is no fault she is so summary upon as a falsehood; and the servants think that she somehow knows everything.”
“Well, at all events, Jones thinks she is going in a week?” says Miss Max.
“Yes. Do you know what Mr. Coke said to me to-day?”
“No. What?” says Miss Max, looking drowsily into the fire.
“He said he thought, or had reason to think, or something of that kind, that mamma is going to marry.”
Miss Max turned, with a start, and looked for a few silent moments at Maud.
“Are you sure?”
“Perfectly sure.”
“Well, that is very odd. Do you know, I’ve been thinking that, this long time. Did he say why he thought so?”
“No.”
“Nor who the person is?”
“No; nothing. He only said that, and he looked very sly and mysterious.”
“Mr. Coke is a very shrewd man. I don’t think he had heard before of your mamma’s excursions, and when I told him to-day I saw that his mind was working on what I said, and I suspect he has connected something he may have learned from a different source with what I told him, and has put the whole case together, and formed his conclusions. I wonder you did not make him tell you all he knew. I wish he had said so much to me. I should have made him say a great deal more, I promise you.”
“He talks to me as if I were a child, and it came so much by surprise, and really I don’t think I could have asked him one word about it; I felt so insulted somehow, and disgusted.”
“Suppose she has fallen in love with some one of whom, for some reason or other, she is a little ashamed, and suppose there is an engagement? I don’t understand it. I have been suspecting something for some time, and I did not like to say so, but you see it has struck Mr. Coke the same way. If it is that, there is a disparity of some kind you may be sure.”
“I dare say. I don’t care,” says the young lady, who looks, nevertheless, as if she did care very much. “I shall have as much money as I want. Mr. Coke said I should have ten thousand a year, and I should go and live with you. You would take me in. Here nothing on earth should induce me to remain. People have told me she merely took a fancy to papa, soon grew tired of him, and ended by disliking him. But I shan’t stay here to see his place filled and his memory insulted, and to be hectored and ordered about by some low man.”
“I shall be only too glad to have you at any time as long as you will stay with me. But don’t be in too great a hurry. You are assuming a great deal; and even if she does marry, it may turn out very differently; and you know, my dear, widows will marry without intending any particular affront to the memory of their first husbands.”
“It is not a pleasant home to me as it is,” says the young lady, glancing fiercely along the hearth; “but if this takes place I shan’t stay here to see it; that I am resolved on.”
“In about a week she’ll go, Jones thinks?” asks Miss Max. “I have grown very curious. I should like to see what sort of swain she has chosen. You never know what fancy a woman may take. He may be a very third-rate man. I was thinking he may possibly be in the army. Mrs. Stonix swears she saw her alone in Chatham last year. But it is growing awfully late. Goodnight. We’ll get to our beds and dream it over.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
A GENTLEMAN IN BLACK.
They had both risen preparatory to Miss Maud’s flitting and a parting kiss and goodnight, when Miss Max said, suddenly:
“And what about Mr. Marston?”
“Well, what about him?” answered Miss Vernon, a little crossly, for she had not recovered the conversation that had just occurred.
“Nothing very particular — nothing at all, in fact — only I had intended talking about him fifty times to-day, and something always prevented. He’s coming to the ball at Wymering, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know; he said so. I don’t care,” said the handsome girl, drowsily. And she advanced her hand and her lips a little, as if for her final salutation.
But Miss Max had not quite done.
“I like him so much. I think him so clever, and so goodnatured, and so nice. I wish so much, Maud, that you and he were married,” said Miss Max, with audacious directness.
“And I wish so much that you and he were married,” retorted Maud, looking lazily at the flame of her bedroom candle, which she held in her hand. “That would be a more natural consequence, I think, of your liking and admiring.”
“You can’t deny that he is wildly in love with you,” said Miss Max.
“I can’t deny that he was perhaps wildly in love with a poor seamstress in a dark serge dress a few days ago, and may possibly be in love with another to-day. That is wildly in love, as you say. I don’t think there is anything very flattering in being the object of that kind of folly.”
“Well, he will be a good deal surprised, I venture to say, when he comes in quest of his seamstress to the Wymering cloak-ro
om,” remarked Miss Max, with a pleasant anticipation of the éclaircissement.
“That depends on two things: first, how his seamstress meets him; and, secondly, whether she meets him there at all. Goodnight. It is very late.”
And with these words she kissed her genial old friend, and was gone.
Miss Max looked after her, and shook her head with a smile.
“There goes impracticability itself!” she says, and throws up her hands and eyes with a shrug. “I pity that poor young man; Heaven only knows what’s in store for him. I shall engage in no more vagaries at all events. What an old fool I was to join in that madcap project of rambling over the country and concealing our names! What will Mr. Marston think of us?”
When she laid her busy, rheumatic little head, bound up in its queer nightcap, on her pillow, it began at once to construct all manner of situations and pictures.
Here was a romance in a delightful state of confusion! On this case her head may work all night long, for a year, without a chance of exhausting its fertile problems; for it presents what the doctors call a complication. Barbara Vernon, with her whole heart, hates the Warhamptons; and the Warhamptons, with all theirs, detest Barbara Vernon. It is too long a story to tell all the aggressions and reprisals which have carried the feud to the internecine point.
“I must certainly tell Maud. I’ll tell her in the morning,” thought Miss Max. “It’s only fair.”
Perhaps this incorrigible old matchmaker fancied that it might not prejudice Mr. Marston if Maud knew that her mother had placed him under anathema.
By noon next day Lord Verney and Lord Barroden, and their attorneys, had taken flight, and Miss Maximilla Medwyn had gone on to see friends at Naunton, with an uncertain promise of returning in a day or two to Roydon Hall.
There is no life in that grand house but the phantom life on its pictured walls. The hour is dull for Maud, who sits listlessly looking from one of the great drawingroom windows. Lady Vernon, who has seen, in succession, two deputations in the library, returns, and in stately silence sits down and resumes her examination of a series of letters from the late Bishop of Rotherham, and notes them for transmission to Mr. Coke.
Maud changes her posture, and glances at her mother. Why is there never any love in the cold elegance of that face? Why can’t she make up her mind and be patient? The throb of life will as soon visit that marble statue of Joan of Arc, by the door; Psyche at the other side, in her chill beauty, will as easily glow and soften into flesh.
Miss Vernon leans on her hand, listless, gloomy — in a degree indignant.
The room is darkening. The darker the better, she thinks. It is no metaphoric, but a real darkness; for clouds portending thunder, or heavy rain or hail, have, on a sudden, overcast the sky, and are growing thicker.
The light is dying out, the shadow blackens on Lady Vernon’s letters; she raises her eyes. One can hardly see to read.
Lady Vernon lays her letter on the table. She can no longer see the features of the Titian over the door, and the marble statues at either side have faded into vague white drifts. Some heavy, perpendicular drops fall, plashing on the smooth flags outside the window, and the melancholy rumble of distant thunder booms, followed by a momentarily aggravated downpour, and a sudden thickening of the darkness.
This was a rather sublime prelude to the footman’s voice, announcing:
“Mr. Dawe.”
Maud glanced toward the door, which was in obscurity, and then at Lady Vernon, who, sitting full in the light of the window, had turned, with a stare and a frown, as if she had heard something incredible and unwelcome, toward the person who was entering.
By no means an heroic figure, nor worthy of being heralded by thunder, has stepped in somewhat slowly and stiffly, and halts in the side-light of the window, relieved by the dark background. It is a small man, dark visaged, with a black wig, a grave, dull, mahogany face, furrowed with lines of reserve. Maud is certain that she never saw that small, insignificant-looking man before, who is staring with a very grave but not unfriendly countenance at her mother.
He is buttoned up in a black outside coat, with a cape to it; he holds a rather low-crowned hat in his hand, and wears those shining leather coverings for the legs, which are buckled up to the knees. Getting in and getting out of his posting carriage he has scrupulously avoided dust or mud. His boots are without a speck. His queer hat is nattily brushed, and, in stable phraseology, has not a hair turned. His black coat is the finest possible, but it has great pockets at either side, each of which seems laden with papers, mufflers, and other things, so that his hips seem to descend gradually, and culminate near his knees.
This man’s brown face, smoothly shaved, is furrowed and solemn enough for five-and-sixty. In his dress and air there is nothing of the careless queerness of a country gentleman. His singularities suggest rather the eccentricity of a precise and rich old city humorist.
There is something characteristic and queer enough, in the buttoned-up and black-wigged little man, to interest Maud’s curiosity.
He has not been ten seconds in the room, and stands poised on his leather-cased legs, looking gravely and quietly at Lady Vernon, and, like a ghost, says nothing till he is spoken to. One can reckon the tick, tick, tick of the Louis Quatorze clock on the bracket by the chimneypiece.
Lady Vernon stood up with an effort, still looking hard at him, and advancing a step, she said:
“Mr. Dawe? I’m so surprised. I could scarcely believe my ears. It is such an age since I have seen you here.”
And she put out her hand hospitably, and he took it in his brown old fingers, with the stiffness of a mummy, and as he shook it slightly, he said in his wooden tones, quietly:
“Yes, it is sixteen years and eight months. I was looking into my notes yesterday — sixteen years on the eighteenth of November last. You look well, Barbara. Your looks are not much altered; no — considering.”
“It is very good of you to come to see me; you mustn’t stay away so long again,” she replied in her silvery tones.
“This is your daughter?” he interrupted with a little wave of his dark, thin hand towards the young lady.
“Yes, that is she. Maud, shake hands with Mr. Dawe.”
“Maud Guendoline she was baptised,” he said, as he advanced two stiff steps toward her, with his small but prominent brown eyes fixed upon her. She rose and placed her pretty fingers on that hand of boxwood, which closed on them.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE COUNTY PAPER.
When he had inspected her features for a time, he turned to her mother and spoke.
“Not like her father,” he said, still holding her hand.
“Don’t you think so?” answered Lady Vernon, coldly. “I can see a look — very decidedly.”
Maud was wondering all this time who this Mr. Dawe could be, who seemed to assert a sort of dry intimacy with Lady Vernon and her family, very unusual in the girl’s experience.
“I think it is more than a look. I think her extremely like him,’’ insisted Lady Vernon, resuming in the same cold tone, and without looking at Maud, as if she had that resemblance by heart, and did not like it.
“She has some of the family beauty, wherever she got it,” said Mr. Dawe, deliberately, in his hard quiet tones, and he let go her hand and turned away his inflexible face and brown eyes, a good deal to the young lady’s relief.
Lady Vernon was still standing. She did not usually receive such guests standing. There was a hectic red in each cheek, also unusual, except when she was angry, and she had not been angry.
“Her eyes resemble yours,” said Mr. Dawe.
“Oh, no. Perhaps, indeed, the colour; but mere colour is not a resemblance,” answered Lady Vernon, with a cold little laugh, that, in Maud’s ear, rang with cruelty and disdain. “No, Maud’s good looks are all her own. She doesn’t, I think, resemble me in any one particular — not the least.”
Maud was wounded. She felt that tears were rising to her eyes. Bu
t her pride suppressed them.
“H’m!” Mr. Dawe hummed with closed lips.
“Of course, Mr. Dawe, you are come to stay a little? It is so long since you have been here.”
“I’m not so sure about staying. It is a long time — sixteen years and upwards. You have been well; you have been spared, and your daughter, and I. We have all reason to be grateful to the Almighty. Time is so important, and eternity so long!’’
“Very true,” she said, with a deep sigh, “and death so irremediable.’’
Mr. Dawe took his big silver snuff-box from his coatpocket, and tapped it. He nodded, in acquiescence in the sentiment, leaned a little forward, and took a large pinch, twiddling his fingers afterwards, to get rid of any snuff that might remain on their tips. Perhaps the little superfluous shower that fell to the carpet suggested unconsciously his funeral commentary.
“H’m! Dust to dust.”
Whereupon he applied his Indian silk handkerchief, not to his eyes, but lightly to his nose.
“By-and-bye, I shall have a word to say to you,” he said, with a solemn roll of his brown eyes.
She looked hard at him, though with a half flinching gaze, as if to read the character of his news. But the solemn reserve of his wooden face never changed.
“We shall be quite to ourselves in the library,” she said.
“Then suppose we go there now.”
“Very well; let us go,” she said, and led the way.
At the door he made, with his stiff backbone, a little inclination to Miss Maud.
The door closes, and the young lady is left to herself, with matter for speculation to amuse her.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 579
