“Mine, of course,” suggested Miss Max, raising her eyes for a moment. “Well:”
“ — Has ever interested me. Are you aware that the ball at Wymering is to come off nearly a fortnight earlier this year than usual? I have been so miserable lest the change of time should in any way endanger the certainty of Miss Maud Guendoline’s attendance at it. Your nature is so entirely kind, that I know you will pardon my entreating you to write two or three words, only to reassure me, and tell me my misgivings are groundless. Till I shall have heard from you that your beautiful friend is to be at Wymering on the evening of the ball, I cannot know an hour’s quiet.”
“Poor thing! I can’t bear to keep him in suspense another hour,” said Miss Max.
Maud said nothing — neither “Yes” nor “No,” not even “Read on.” Miss Max, however, went on diligently, thus:
“I am going, if you allow me, to make a confidence, and implore a great kindness. If you think you can do what I ask, and will kindly undertake it, I cannot describe to you how grateful I shall be. I am tortured with the idea that your young friend has undertaken too much. From some things she said, I fear that her life is but a dull and troubled one, beset with anxieties and embittered by conditions, for which she is utterly unfitted. You are our friend — hers and mine — and do, I implore, permit me to place at your disposal what will suffice to prevent this. You must not think me very coarse. I am only very miserable as often as I think of her troubles and vexations, and entreat you to intervene to prevent them, acting as if entirely from yourself, and on no account for another. If I were only assured that you would undertake this, I could wait with a lighter heart for the moment when I hope to meet her again. You can understand what I suffer, and how entirely I rely upon your kind secrecy, in the little commission I so earnestly implore of you to undertake.”
“And see how religiously I keep his secret!” said Miss Max. “But, poor fellow! doesn’t it do him honour? He thinks, at this moment, that you are living by the work of your fingers, and he not only lays his title and his title-deeds, with himself, at your feet, but he is miserable till he rescues you from the vexations of your supposed lot in life. I know very well that you think him an arrant fool. But I think him a hero — I know he’s a hero.”
“Did I say I thought him a fool?” said Maud. “I don’t know who is a fool and who is a sage in this world; and if he is a fool, I dare say I’m a greater one. I believe, Max, we are wise and foolish where we least suspect it. I think we are most foolish when we act entirely from our heads, and wisest when we act entirely from our feelings, provided they are good. I said so to Dr. Malkin, and he agreed; but, indeed, it is a dreadful life. I don’t know where there is happiness. I was thinking if I were really the poor girl he believes me, how wild with happiness all this would probably have made me.”
“It ought, as you are, to make you just as happy,” said Maximilla.
“It ought, perhaps, but it doesn’t. If I were that poor girl, gratitude and his rank would make me like him.”
“And you don’t like him?”
“No, I don’t like him.”
“Well. How inexpressibly pig-headed! How ungrateful!” exclaimed Miss Max, almost with a gasp. “There is everything! Such kindness, and devotion, and self-sacrifice. I never heard of such a lover — and no possible objection!”
“I don’t like him. I mean I don’t love him.”
“And I suppose you won’t go to the ball?” said Miss Max, aghast.
“I will go to the ball.”
“Do you know, Maud, I’m almost sorry I ever saw that poor young man. I’m sorry I ever beheld his face. One thing I am certain of, we must not go on mystifying him. I’ll write to him instantly, and tell him everything. I’ll not let him suppose I take a pleasure in fooling him; I like him too well for that. I don’t think, in this selfish world, I ever met any one like him. I shall wash my hands of the whole business; and I’m very sorry I ever took any part in practising this unlucky trick upon him. I must seem so heartless!”
“If you write any such letter I’ll not go.”
“Not go to the ball!” cried Maximilla. “Well, certainly, that will seem goodnatured — that is the climax!”
“I say to the ball I’ll not go if you write him any such letter,” said Maud.
“And you will go if I don’t?” persisted goodnatured Miss Max.
“Certainly,” said Maud, decisively.
“I don’t see why he should be mystified,” said Maximilla, after a considerable pause.
“He shall be mystified as long as I like. It is the only way by which we can ever know anything of him. What could you have known of him now, if it had not been that he was all in the dark about us? No; you shall write to him to-day, if to-day it must be, and tell him, in whatever way you like to put it, that you can’t think of accepting his offer of money, as I and my mother have, one way or other, quite enough.”
And at this point these two wise ladies, looking in one another’s eyes, laughed a little, and then very heartily, and Miss Max said: “It is a great shame. I don’t know how we can ever look him in the face again when he discovers how we have been deceiving him!”
“You have much too mean an opinion of your impudence, Max. At all events, if we can’t we can’t, and so the acquaintance ends.”
“Well? What more? What about your going to the ball?” says Maximilla.
“Say that we shall certainly be there — you and I. You know you must stay for it.”
“I suppose I must.”
“And, let me see, it will be on Thursday week?”
“Yes; I’ll tell him all that.”
“But wait a moment. I haven’t done yet. The ball begins at ten exactly. Yes, ten, and you and I shall be in the gallery at nine precisely.”
“In the gallery!”
“Yes, in the gallery,” repeated Miss Maud.
“Why, my dear Maud, no one sits in the gallery but townspeople, and musicians’ wives and dressmakers. I don’t know I’m sure what on earth you can mean.”
“You shall know, of course, everything I mean.”
“And, you know, I object to our having any more of that masquerading — remember that.”
“Perfectly; I’ll do nothing but exactly what you like. I promise to do nothing unless you agree to it. You shall know all my plans — isn’t that fair?”
“Yes; but what are they?”
“I have only a vague idea now; but we can talk them over when you have written your letter; recollect, in little more than half an hour the servant takes the letters to the post. But write on your own paper with the Hermitage at the top of the sheet, and — yes — if you can be very quick, I’ll send the letter to the postoffice at Dalworth; it will be better than the Roydon postmark.”
“Yes, Roydon might set him thinking, if you don’t want to tell him now.”
“No, nothing, except what I have said. I’ll never see him more if you do — you promise me that?”
“Certainly, you shall read the letter when it is written.”
“There now, you are a good girl, Max; I’ll stay here for it; and I’ll get Lexton to send a man riding to Dalworth.”
“Now you mustn’t talk, or make the least noise,” said Miss Max, as she opened her desk. “I must not make a mistake.”
And soon the scraping of her industrious pen was the only sound audible in the room.
In the mean time, Maud took Mr. Marston’s letter to the window, and leaning lightly with her shoulder to the angle of the wall, she looked it over, and thought what a gentlemanlike hand it was, and then she read and re-read it, and with a pretty glow in her cheeks, and her large eyes tired and saddened, she laid it on the table beside Maximilla, just as that romantic accomplice, having written the address on the envelope, turned round to place it in her hand.
“No, there isn’t time to read it. Shut it up now, and let me have it. Lexton will put a stamp on it.”
And with these words Maud kissed h
er with a fond little caress, and ran away with the note in her hand.
CHAPTER XXXII.
DRIFTING.
And now people begin to observe and whisper something strange. Now, in fact, begins an amazing infatuation. It shows itself in the cold, proud matron, Lady Vernon, at first covertly, afterwards with less disguise.
The young officer, Charles Vivian, is to make a stay of some weeks.
For a day or two Lady Vernon appears to take no particular interest in him. But gradually by the third day of his sojourn her manner, either disclosing a foregone liking, or indicating the growth of a new passion, changes.
It changes at first covertly; afterwards the signs that excite general comment show themselves with less disguise.
As Miss Max remarks to Maud, with a little pardonable exaggeration, “She can’t take her eyes off him, she can hear no one else speak, while he is talking in the same room to any one. She is quite rapt up in him.” As Miss Jones, Maud’s maid, phrases it in her confidential talk, she is “light on him,” meaning thereby, under the influence of a craze.
People who come in upon her solitude in her room, suddenly, say they find her agitated, and often in floods of tears. All agree that she has grown silent and absent, and seems never happy now but when she is near him.
It was one of those mysterious cases which honest Jack Falstaff would have accounted for by the hypothesis, “I’m bewitched with the rogue’s company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged; it could not be else; I have drunk medicines.”
I suppose she guarded her language very carefully, and even her looks, in actual conversation with Captain Vivian, for that which appeared plain enough to other people seemed hidden from him. It was discussed in the servants’ hall and in the housekeeper’s room.
The unanimous opinion was that Captain Vivian had only to speak and that the new year would see him the chosen of the handsome widow and lord of Roydon Hall. People wondered, indeed, how he could be so stupid as not to see what was so plain to every one else. But they could not know how cautious Lady Vernon was in her actual conversation with him, not, by sign or word, to commit herself in the least degree.
It was clear enough, however, to the household of Roydon in what direction all this was tending, and a general agitation and uneasiness trembled through every region and articulation of that huge and, hitherto, comfortable body.
Such was the attitude of affairs when Maud Vernon, with her cousin Maximilla, drove over to the Grange to pay the Tinterns a visit.
Mr. Dawe had taken his departure after a day or two with a promise, made upon consideration, as one might conjecture, for undivulged reasons of his own, to return in less than a week.
The prominent brown eyes and furrowed, inflexible face removed, a sense of liberty seemed to visit Captain Vivian suddenly. His spirits improved, and he evidently began to enjoy Maud Vernon’s society more happily. They took walks together; they talked over books; they compared notes about places they had visited, and she began to think that the intellectual resources of Roydon were improved, since the time when she used to insist that Dr. Malkin alone redeemed that region of the earth from Bœotian darkness.
“Take care, my dear, that our plaintive invalid doesn’t turn out instead a very robust lover,” said Miss Max, in one of her nocturnal conferences with Maud. “There will be a pretty comedy!”
“How can you like to make me uncomfortable?” said Maud.
“Upon my word, if I don’t, I think Barbara will,” replied Maximilla. “Don’t you see how she is devoted to him?”
“I can’t understand her. Sometimes I think she is, and sometimes I doubt it,” said Miss Vernon.
“Well — yes. She is, perhaps, in a state of vacillation — a state of struggle; but she thinks of nothing else, and, it seems to me, can scarcely hear, or even see, any other human being.”
“You may be very sure I shan’t allow him to make love to me,” said Maud, with proper dignity.
“Unless you wish to come to pulling of caps with your mamma, for the entertainment of the rest of the world, you had better not, I think,” answered Miss Max, with a laugh.
“But, I tell you, I should not permit it, and he never has made the slightest attempt to make love to me,” repeated Maud, blushing.
“Well, it is rather a good imitation. But Barbara does not seem to see it — I don’t think, indeed, she has had an opportunity — and if she’s happy why should I interfere?” said Miss Max.
And so that little talk ended.
Coming out of church on Sunday, the three ladies from Roydon and Captain Vivian, who felt strong enough for one of Mr. Foljambe’s sermons, and sat in the corner of the great Vernon pew, stood for a moment on the step of the side porch, while the carriage drove up to receive them. The grenadier footmen in blue and gold opened the door and let down the steps, and Lady Vernon, following Miss Max, stepped, lightly as a girl, into her carriage. The Tinterns, Mr., Mrs., and Miss, at the same moment emerged from the holy shadow under the stained and grooved gothic arch with a similar intent. Lady Vernon from the carriage bowed to them with her cold, haughty smile, which Mr. Tintern answered with his hat in his hand, high above his head in the ceremonious old fashion, and with a countenance beaming all over with manly servility.
The chocolate and gold liveries, standing at the flank, awaited the departure of the blue and gold to do their devoir by the more ponderous carriage of the humbler Grange family.
While Mr. and Mrs. Tintern made their smiling salutations, and answered the remark which Maximilla Medwyn called out to the effect that it was a charming day, Maud thought she remarked from pretty Ethel Tintern a quick and odd glance at Captain Vivian, who, not having been presented to the Tintern ladies, was industriously digging a tiny stalk of groundsel from a chink in the old worn step, at the flank of which he stood.
It was very natural that the young lady should steal that quick glance at the unobservant stranger. It was the undefinable character of it that struck Maud.
There seemed neither curiosity nor recognition. It was momentary — a dark look, pained and shrunken. It was gone, quite, in a moment, and Ethel, as Maud with a hurried pressure of her hand was about to take her place in the carriage, said softly:
“You must come to see me tomorrow or next day. You owe us a visit, you know. Do.”
“I will, certainly,” promised Maud, smiling. And in a moment more she was in her place, and, followed by Captain Vivian, the door closed upon her; and the smiling faces and stately liveries whirled away over the gritty gravel of the churchyard road.
“This has been your first Sunday at church since your illness. It was rather longer than usual. Mr. Foljambe’s sermons don’t often exceed twenty minutes. I hope you are not doing too much?”
This question of Lady Vernon’s, and Captain Vivian’s polite disclaimer, were the only contributions toward conversation which fell from the little party as they drove home.
“Mr. Mapleson told me that mamma said she would have the main street of the village watered every Sunday, and she hasn’t given any order, I suppose, about it. See what a state we are in! Covered with dust. I must ask Mr. Mapleson why,” said Maud to Miss Max in the hall.
“Well, it is a bore,” she answered; “we can’t sit down in these things. Come up. I want to tell you I’ve just found a note on the table. No, it’s not from the person you think. I see you’re blushing.”
“Now, don’t be a goose,” said Maud.
“Although it’s not so bad a guess, as you shall hear when you come to my room. I told you, you remember, that my gossiping maid said that Captain Vivian sent two letters to the Grange; Captain Vivian’s man told her, but she could make out nothing more. She has not an idea to whom they were written. He does not know Miss Tintern nor Mrs. Tintern, and I don’t see what he could write to old Tintern about; but the note I have got is from such a charming creature, younger than Barbara, and a widow — Lady Mardykes. She is a siste
r of Mr. Marston’s, and she has, besides her place at Golden Friars, such a pretty place, about five-and-thirty or forty miles from this, and she is one of my very dearest friends. She asks me to go and see her immediately, and I must introduce you. You will be charmed with her, and she, I know, with you.”
“Is there any chance of Mr. Marston’s being there? If there is, I certainly shan’t go,” said Maud.
“None in the world. He is to be with his father till Thursday, don’t you recollect, he tells us all about it in his letter, and on Friday he will be at the ball at Wymering. Suppose we go and see her tomorrow. Do you know I have been suspecting a little that Captain Vivian’s letter was to her. But she could not be such a fool as to throw herself away upon him.”
“Very well, then, let us take the carriage and go to the Grange tomorrow. So that’s agreed.”
In pursuance of this plan they did actually drive over to the Grange next day.
Artful Miss Max was rather anxious to induce Captain Vivian to accompany them. It would have amused her active mind to observe that gallant gentleman’s proceedings. But as if he suspected her design, he very adroitly, but politely, evaded the suggestion. So she and Maud went alone.
The Grange was a pretty house, a little later than the Tudor style. Driving up through the rather handsome grounds, they had hardly got a peep at the comfortable steep-gabled house, when Maud exclaims:
“There is Ethel — who is that with her?”
“Dear me! That is Lady Mardykes, I’m sure. I’m so glad to see her! They are looking at the flowers; suppose we get out.”
So down they got, and the ladies before the hall-door, among the flowers, looked up, and came towards them with smiles.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
A WARNING.
A great kissing ensued upon the grass, and a shaking of hands, and Maud was introduced to Lady Mardykes, whom she liked instantaneously.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 584
