“An oak stool all in that,” and she clapped her hands. “You never seen sich another smash in the dead-house. Tom Rose was nothing to it. Lauk! it was a turn! I couldn’t eat not that big o’ breakfast!”
Mercy saw the young lady coming in, and shifting her place, she said in a quick aside, “Here’s Miss Vernon.”
And with a glance at her, the broad-shouldered lass in housemaid’s uniform withdrew and closed the door.
“What was she talking of?” asked the young lady, when she had gone.
“An old story, miss; a man that was killed here years ago; poachers I dessay, or the like.”
“Oh, a keeper?”
“Well, yes; something that way, miss. Shall I pour you out tea or coffee, please, miss?”
Her breakfast equipage Maud thought a great deal handsomer than was required for the careless service of a bedroom. The china was old and quite exquisite; and the silver, an antique Dutch miniature service, was covered with grotesque figures, trees, windmills, cocks and hens. Every detail in the little breakfast service was pretty and even elegant, a great deal prettier, certainly, than her mamma would have allowed her at Roydon.
Looking down she saw from the window a very animated scene, people in gay dresses were walking on the terrace, and upon the gravel walks that surround the croquet-ground, on which were already assembled some lounging groups, who were knocking the balls about in a desultory way. The cheerful sounds of talking and laughing filled the air. Some of these people, foreigners she supposed, were very demonstrative in their talk and gestures. And a dozen or so of the heterogeneous company who were making the large square, with the background of old Dutch hedges, and lofty timber, as amusing for her to look at as a fair-green, or a racecourse, were dressed extremely oddly, not to say grotesquely. There were at least ninety or a hundred people in that pretty enclosure. Some might possibly be merely visitors for the hour, but still the number assembled testified to a very splendid hospitality.
As Maud was looking out, she saw Lady Mardykes enter the terrace from the door in the side of the house, almost directly under her window.
This, you may suppose, was a very welcome sight to her.
Antomarchi was walking at her side, and they seemed to be talking incessantly, as they walked slowly round the croquet-ground, and sometimes with very earnest gravity.
Did it strike her that Lady Mardykes was distinguishing this stern and striking man, in a very marked way? He seemed to engross her. She stopped and spoke to but one other person, as she walked round and round the quadrangle. She had seen her guests, no doubt, since her arrival, before now; but she seemed, at present, to have neither eye nor ear for any one but Antomarchi.
He seemed very devoted, she thought. Might he not possibly entertain hopes which she had not suspected before, respecting this rich and brilliant widow? What was the meaning of her delegating to him, as he had said she did, even playfully, a commission to see after the health and spirits of her guests, during her absence?
And now Maud remembered a laughing warning given to her by this same Lady Mardykes, in answer to some speculations of hers about mesmerism. She said, “Don’t allow any one to mesmerise you, unless you want to fall in love with him.” Then came her special mention of Doctor Antomarchi, in the letter in which she promised to have him at her house, to meet Maud, as a potent mesmeriser.
Was this clever foreigner really on the high road to fortune and social position? Things as strange had happened.
Some illustrated papers had been sent to her at the same time with her breakfast, and Maud, taking one of them up, looked into her room, intending to take her paper-cutter from the table beside her bed, but it was not there.
She had left it on the table herself, beside her book, and she had seen it there afterwards; and by one of those accidents that sometimes fix trifles in the memory, she had remarked it as it lay in the same place, on her return, after her long look-out from the window, the night before, to her bed.
“Mercy, did you take my paper-knife from the table beside my bed? I did not remove it; look for it, please, and fetch it to me.”
“Me move it! Certainly not me, miss. La! miss, I would ‘av’ knewed you put it there, but I wasn’t a step nearer than the window, till you woke up and called me.”
She was fidgeting about the table by this time.
“No, miss, I don’t see no sign of no knife, paper or hotherwise. No, miss, nothing.”
“But I would not lose that pretty little paper-knife on any account, and it must be there; no one has been in the room to take it, and you really must find it.”
But nowhere could the paper-knife be found. It was hardly the sort of thing which a thief would have selected for a prize, seeing on the table close by all the rings and trinkets that might have been as easily picked up.
“It was given me by a person I was very fond of, who is dead, and I won’t lose it,” said Miss Vernon, joining in the search, after an interval; but it did not turn up.
“La! miss, it must be a mistake. Where could it go to? If it was there, miss, last night, ‘twould be there still; there’s no signs on it; ’tis only worriting yourself, miss, to suppose it was ever there at all.”
“I happen to know it was,” said the young lady, nettled at this irritating line of reply, “and you must find it. I shan’t go downstairs till I am satisfied about it.”
“What was it like, please, miss?”
“It is a small mother-of-pearl paper-cutter, that answers as a marker beside, and it has my initials, M. G. V., on the side.”
Maud was really vexed, and having a regard for this trifle, was resolved not to lose it; her attention was, however, called to another quarter by a gentle but distinct knock at the dressing-room door. A visit from Lady Mardykes, she thought, with a smile, as she stepped into the dressing-room, and called to her visitor to come in.
It was Doctor Antomarchi who opened the door, and made her a grave and very ceremonious bow. Maud was a little surprised.
“I fancied it was Lady Mardykes who knocked at my door,” she said; “I was thinking of going out; I saw her from the window.”
“Oh? I’m commissioned to make this little visit, to inquire how you have passed the night. Your nerves were a little more disturbed than you would allow by the shock of that unlucky rencontre on the road. I’ll try your pulse, if you don’t mind. Yes — yes — still nervous. You can have your walk quite safely in the croquet-ground, but don’t think of taking a drive to-day, and you had better lunch and dine quietly upstairs; tomorrow you will be, I hope, all right, and then, of course, you command everything.”
Antomarchi remained for a few minutes, and chatted on agreeably upon other things. He is apparently anxious to please; nothing could be more polite; but his smile is not winning. There is something in it she can’t describe, deathlike and cruel. In his manner, soften it all he can, there is a latent sternness that might be prompt and terrible.
His large strange eyes, as if conscious of their power, he has not turned upon hers. In this slightly but studiously averted gaze, there is a hinting of treason.
When he is gone, Maud says to herself:
“Well! is it possible that nice creature can have taken a fancy to that horrible man? She certainly can’t see him as I do. However, I suppose there is a charm, if one could only see it, in the sinister as there is in the beautiful.”
“Well, miss, I have looked everywhere, and high and low, and I can’t find no sich a thing; you couldn’t have forgot it at Roydon, unbeknown to you?” said Mercy, returning from her search for the paper-knife.
Maud extinguished this theory peremptorily, and asked:
“Are you quite sure that no one was in that room except you and me?”
“Not a living soul, miss. Who could?”
Maud was now putting her things on for her little walk, and she called for her scissors from her dressing-case.
“You can have mine, miss, please.”
But the young l
ady preferred her own.
“I don’t see no scissors there, miss — — “
“Well, my penknife must do.”
“Nor no knife, miss; only a few things.”
Now came another alarm, another search, and a new disappointment.
“I can’t understand it!” exclaimed Maud. “It is just possible, to be sure, as you say, that Jones may have left them out, and forgotten them. I’ll write to her. But it is so unlikely, that I can’t believe it. I really don’t understand all this. I can’t account for these things.”
Maud’s fiery eyes were upon Mercy Creswell as she thus spoke.
The fat freckled maid, with her chin rather high, tossed her head, with an air rather of defiance, and an assumption of offended dignity. But her eyes could not bear the frank gaze of her young mistress, and were unsteady and confused. She looked, in fact, extremely put out.
“I hope, miss, you don’t suppose there’s no one about you, miss, as would do any sich a thing as to make free with a lady’s dressing-case. There never was none in this house but honest servants, nor none, I expects, as would so much as think of any sich things, no not for the minds of Peru! And as for myself, I hope, miss, you don’t think or imagine you’re not as safe as the queen’s jewels with Mercy Creswell, which I can get a character, as many as I likes from Lady Mardykes, or from your own mamma, miss, Lady Vernon of Roydon, not to mention a many a lady besides, as would travel a many a mile to say the same for me, if so it was I stood in need of any sich a thing.”
But Maud, not a bit daunted, had nothing more satisfactory to add.
“Charming!” thought Maud, “if in addition to her other accomplishments she should turn out a rogue! I wonder when mamma will allow me to have poor Jones back again.”
The young lady, with her hat and jacket on, was now ready to go down.
“I’m not sure, Mercy, that I should know the way; you must come with me to the top of the stairs. I shall find out the rest of the way myself.”
So they set out together, and Maud looked about her with some curiosity.
It was a vast house, and the gallery, the flooring of which was warped and ridged with age, was dark and dismal enough almost for an ogre’s dwelling. On the way to the head of the stairs other passages crossed, in gloomy perspective, and in them they passed, here and there, several housemaids, with something, she could not exactly say what, a little unusual about them. They were in a sort of uniform; all wearing exactly the same strong, plain, dark-blue dress, white aprons, and neat caps. Lady Mardykes, she thought, enlists her servants and rules her house with a military eye. Those servants looked reserved and thoughtful, but, for the most part, goodnatured; they were all above thirty, and some past forty, and all looked remarkably firmly knit and strong; an extremely serviceable corps.
Finally, Maud and her guide had to make several zigzags.
In one respect, among others, before reaching the great staircase, these lofty and sombre galleries differed very pointedly from those of Roydon; from end to end, not a single picture hung upon their dark panelling, and Maud felt relieved when she had escaped from this monotonous gloom, and stood at last at the broad stairhead.
She heard voices in the hall, and when more than halfway down the stairs, she saw a footman near the foot, and asked him:
“Can you tell me whether Lady Mardykes is in the drawingroom?”
“No, please, my lady. She’s not there. I think her ladyship’s in the croquet-garden.”
“Will you please show me the way?”
So the servant preceded her deferentially, and led her at last to the door in the side of this great house, and opened it.
Maud paused for a moment. The spectacle before her was very different indeed from that which she had seen issuing from the same door, by moonlight, on the night before.
As a mere picture nothing could be gayer or more amusing. Such brilliant costume, so much animation, such curious contrasts! Such very odd people.
CHAPTER LXV.
MAUD WALKS IN THE CROQUET GROUND.
Maud descended the steps, and took the direction of the door opening into the courtyard. She looked at the people as they approached, lest by accident Lady Mardykes should pass her by on the broad gravel walk. People who had made their mark in the world no doubt, many of them. She longed to meet her hostess, and learn who was who, in this curious assembly. In this distinguished and multitudinous company she was glad to perceive that she seemed to excite little or no attention. She was now near enough to the corner to be certain that Lady Mardykes was not upon this walk; at the end of it she turned to the right, down a new side of the square. Many groups, and many people walking singly, passed her. But neither did she see Lady Mardykes upon this walk.
She paused for a minute at its farther angle, and looked across the croquet-ground, where two or three games were by this time in full activity, and the hollow knock of the roquet, and the bounding balls, and all the animated sights and sounds that attend the croquet game, for a moment drew her thoughts from Lady Mardykes, and her eyes from the search.
Among the players or spectators about the hoops, Lady Mardykes was not visible. Maud was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. If Ethel Tintern had been there, or even Doctor Malkin, whom she had seen the night before, not to mention Maximilla Medwyn, she would have felt comparatively at her ease. But it was very awkward finding herself among such a crowd, without seeing a single face she knew.
She turned about. A very tall yew hedge, clipped in the old Dutch taste, rises there like a dark wall (those at the sides are comparatively low), and traverses the whole length of the quadrangle, opposite to the side of the house, high as the arcades of a cathedral aisle, with lofty and narrow doorways here and there, cut in this dark and thick partition. Possibly there is a walk within its shadow, and there she may at length discover her hostess.
As a little anxiously she is beginning to explore, intending to resume her search, she is accosted by a person whom she has observed before, as about the most singular if not the most grotesque of the figures she has passed.
He has been making a short promenade in the sun, backward and forward upon the walk close by, like a sentinel. He is one of the few persons there who seem to have observed her. He has bowed slightly, but very ceremoniously, as he passed her, but without raising his hat.
He is a man tall and well formed, with a short black cloak thrown Spanish fashion, in spite of the heat of the weather, across his breast and over his shoulder. He has a broadleafed black felt hat, looped at the front with something that looks like a little buckle of brilliants. His face is dark and handsome, with an expression of the most ineffable pride and self-complacency. His chin is high in the air, his movements are slow and graceful, he wears white kid gloves, and carries in his hand an ebony walking-cane, with a gold head, formed something like a crown, in which glimmers a brilliant. He is evidently dressed in “shorts,” for the more advantageous exhibition of his handsome legs; so far as they are visible, that is, nearly to the knees, they are cased in black silk stockings, and he turns out his toes as he walks like Sir Christopher Hatton.
In Spanish first, which Maud understood not at all, and then, with better fortune, in French, in which she had no difficulty in conversing, he, with a lofty but smiling courtesy, asked the young lady whether he could direct her, or give her any information which she might require.
Maud thanked him, and asked if he had seen Lady Mardykes, or could say where she was.
He had seen her a little time ago, but he deeply regretted he could not say whether she was now in the garden or not.
“May I now,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height with a smile of haughty urbanity, “venture a question in return?”
“Certainly,” said the young lady. They were conversing still in French.
“It is this. Have you observed, I entreat, any peculiarity in me? I anticipate your reply. You have. You remarked that in accosting you I merely touched, without remov
ing, my hat. The reason of that is not dishonourable. I have the very great honour to represent her majesty the Queen of Spain” (there was such a personage then) “at the court of St. James’s. I cannot therefore uncover to a subject. You understand. It is alike my painful prerogative and my loyal duty. I must in all but a royal presence retain my hat. I need not say more. I see, with infinite satisfaction, how fully you assent. My servants, if indeed they were in attendance, as they ought to be, I should send with pleasure in quest of Lady Mardykes; but, alas! here, in the country, they always claim a privilege of irregularity, and are never to be found.”
He made another stately bow, drew back a step or two to indicate that the audience was over, folded his arms, threw back his head, and smiled, with half-closed eyes, haughtily.
Miss Vernon passed under the tall arch in the dark green wall of yew, and found herself in a long and sombre walk, fenced in by two solemn hedges of shorn foliage, between which but a few groups were now to be seen in the perspective. Some were walking before her in the same direction, diminished in the distance; others slowly approaching. The people who made their promenade in this walk were, possibly, of a graver turn of mind than those who kept the sunnier haunts. Nevertheless, now and then they would pause in their sauntering walk to stand before one of the open archways, and look out upon the croquet-ground and its amusing vicissitudes and garrulous players.
A gentleman walking with two ladies, and conversing gravely, seemed to observe her solitary state and evident search for some missing friend, and politely inquired, taking off his hat, whether he could do anything for her. In reply to her question, he told her that it was more than half an hour since he had seen Lady Mardykes and rather thought she had left the croquet-ground, but could not be quite certain. If she would permit him, he added, perhaps prompted to this heroism by her striking beauty, he would have pleasure in assisting her in her search — an exertion which Maud, with many thanks, declined.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 603
