Though not of the gay world, nor in it, Lady Maulevrier had contrived to keep herself thoroughly en rapport with society. Her few chosen friends, with whom she corresponded on terms of perfect confidence, were among the best people in London — not the circulators of club-house canards, the pickers-up of second-hand gossip from the society papers, but actors in the comedy of high life, arbiters of fashion and taste, born and bred in the purple.
Last season Lord Hartfield’s absence had cast a cloud over the matrimonial horizon. He had been a traveller for more than a year — Patagonia, Peru, the Pyramids, Japan, the North Pole — society cared not where — the fact that he was gone was all-sufficient. Bachelors a shade less eligible came to the front in his absence and became first favourites. Lady Maulevrier, well informed in advance, had deferred Lesbia’s presentation till next season, when she was told Lord Hartfield would certainly re-appear. His plans had been made for return before Christmas; and it would seem that his scheme of life was laid down with as much precision as if he had been a prince of the blood royal. Thus it happened, to Lesbia’s intense disgust, that her début was deferred till the verge of her twentieth birthday. It would never do, Lady Maulevrier told herself, for the edge to be taken off the effect which Lesbia’s beauty was to make on society during Lord Hartfield’s absence. He must be there, on the spot, to see this star rise gently and slowly above society’s horizon, and to mark how everybody bowed down and worshipped the new light.
‘I shall be an old woman before I appear in society,’ said Lesbia, petulantly; ‘and I shall be like a wild woman of the woods; for I have seen nothing, and know nothing of the civilised world.’
‘You will be ever so much more attractive than the young women I hear of, who have seen and known a great deal too much,’ answered the dowager; and as her granddaughter knew that Lady Maulevrier’s word was a law that altered not, there were no more idle repinings.
Her ladyship gave no reason for the postponement of Lesbia’s presentation. She was far too diplomatic to breathe a word of her ideas with regard to Lord Hartfield. Anything like a matrimonial scheme would have been revolting to Lesbia, who had grand, but not sordid views about matrimony. She thought it her mission to appear and to conquer. A crowd of suitors would sigh around her, like the loves and graces round that fair Belinda whose story she had read so often; and it would be her part to choose the most worthy. The days are gone when a girl would so much as look at such a fribble as Sir Plume. Her virgin fancy demands the Tennysonian ideal, the grave and knightly Arthur.
But when Lesbia thought of the most worthy, it was always of the worthiest in her own particular sphere; and he of course would be titled and wealthy, and altogether fitted to be her husband. He would take her by the hand and lead her to a higher seat on the dais, and place upon her head, or at least upon her letter-paper and the panels of her carriage, a coronet in which the strawberry leaves should stand out more prominently than in her brother’s emblazonment. Lesbia’s mind could not conceive an ignoble marriage, or the possibility of the most worthy happening to be found in a lower circle than her own.
And now it was the end of July, and the season which should have been glorified by Lady Lesbia’s début was over and done with. She had read in the society papers of all the balls, and birthdays, and race meetings, and regattas, and cricket matches, and gowns, and parasols, and bonnets — what this beauty wore on such an occasion, and how that other beauty looked on another occasion — and she felt as she read like a spell-bound princess in a fairy tale, mewed up in a battlemented tower, and deprived of her legitimate share in all the pleasures of earth. She had no patience with Mary — that wild, unkempt, ungraceful creature, who could be as happy as summer days are long, racing about the hills with her bamboo alpenstock, rioting with a pack of fox-terriers, practising long losers, rowing on the lake, doing all things unbecoming Lady Maulevrier’s granddaughter.
That long rainy day dragged its slow length to a close; and then came fine days, in which Molly and her fox-terriers went wandering over the sunlit hills, skipping and dancing across the mountain streamlets — gills, as they were called in this particular world — almost as gaily as the shadows of fleecy cloudlets dancing up yonder in the windy sky. Molly spent half her days among the hills, stealing off from governess and grandmother and the stately beauty sister, and sometimes hardly being missed by them, so ill did her young exuberance harmonise with their calmer life.
‘One can tell when Mary is at home by a perpetual banging of doors,’ said Lesbia, which was a sisterly exaggeration founded upon fact, for Molly was given to impetuous rushing in and out of rooms when that eager spirit of hers impelled the light lithe body upon some new expedition. Nor is the society of fox-terriers conducive to repose or stateliness of movement; and Maulevrier’s terriers, although strictly forbidden the house, were for ever breaking bonds and leaping in upon Molly’s retirement at all unreasonable hours. She and they were enchanted to get away from the beautiful luxurious rooms, and to go roving by hill-side and force, away to Easedale Tarn, to bask for hours on the grassy margin of the deep still water, or to row round and round the mountain lake in a rotten boat. It was here, or in some kindred spot, that Molly got through most of her reading — here that she read Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley, and Wordsworth — dwelling lingeringly and lovingly upon every line in which that good old man spoke of her native land. Sometimes she climbed to higher ground, and felt herself ever so much nearer heaven upon the crest of Silver Howe, or upon the rugged stony steep of Dolly Waggon pike, half way up the dark brow of Helvellyn; sometimes she disappeared for hours, and climbed to the summit of the hill, and wandered in perilous pathways on Striding Edge, or by the dark still water of the Red Tarn. This had been her life ever since she had been old enough to have an independent existence; and the hills and the lakes, and the books of her own choosing, had done a great deal more in ripening her mind than Fräulein Müller and that admirable series of educational works which has been provided for the tuition of modern youth. Grammars and geographies, primers and elementary works of all kinds, were Mary’s detestation; but she loved books that touched her heart and filled her mind with thoughts wide and deep enough to reach into the infinite of time and space, the mystery of mind and matter, life and death.
Nothing occurred to break the placid monotony of life at Fellside for three long days after that rainy morning; and then came an event which, although commonplace enough in itself, marked the beginning of a new era in the existence of Lady Maulevrier’s granddaughters.
It was evening, and the two girls were dawdling about on the sloping lawn before the drawing-room windows, where Lady Maulevrier read the newspapers in her own particular chair by one of those broad Tudor windows, according to her infallible custom. Remote as her life bad been from the busy world, her ladyship had never allowed her knowledge of public life and the bent of modern thought to fall into arrear. She took a keen interest in politics, in progress of all kinds. She was a staunch Conservative, and looked upon every Liberal politician as her personal enemy; but she took care to keep herself informed of everything that was being said or done in the enemy’s camp. She had an intense respect for Lord Bacon’s maxim: Knowledge is power. It was a kind of power secondary to the power of wealth, perhaps; but wealth unprotected by wisdom would soon dwindle into poverty.
Lady Lesbia sauntered about the lawn, looking very elegant in her cream-coloured Indian silk gown, very listless, very tired of her lovely surroundings. Neither lake nor mountain possessed any charm for her. She had had too much of them. Mary roamed about with a swifter footstep, looking at the roses, plucking off a dead leaf, or a cankered bud here and there. Presently she tore across the lawn to the shrubbery which screened the lawn and flower gardens from the winding carriage drive sunk many feet below, and disappeared in a thicket of arbutus and Irish yew.
‘What terribly hoydenish manners!’ murmured Lesbia, with a languid shrug of her shoulders, as she strolled back to the drawin
g-room.
She cared very little for the newspapers, for politics not at all; but anything was better than everlasting contemplation of the blue still water, and the rugged crest of Helm Crag.
‘What was the matter with Mary that she rushed off like a mad woman?’ inquired Lady Maulevrier, looking up from the Times.
‘I haven’t the least idea. Mary’s movements are quite beyond the limits of my comprehension. Perhaps she has gone after a bird’s-nest.’
Mary was intent upon no bird’s-nest. Her quick ear had caught the sound of manly voices in the winding drive under the pine wood; and surely, yes, surely one was a clear and familiar voice, which heralded the coming of happiness. In such a moment she seemed to have wings. She became unconscious that she touched the earth; she went skimming bird-like over the lawn, and in and out, with fluttering muslin frock, among arbutus and bay, yew and laurel, till she stood poised lightly on the top of the wooded bank which bordered the steep ascent to Lady Maulevrier’s gate, looking down at two figures which were sauntering up the drive.
They were both young men, both tall, broad-shouldered, manly, walking with the easy swinging movement of men accustomed to active exercise. One, the handsomer of the two in Mary’s eyes, since she thought him simply perfection, was fair-haired, blue-eyed, the typical Saxon. This was Lord Maulevrier. The other was dark, bronzed by foreign travel, perhaps, with black hair, cut very close to an intelligent-looking head, bared to the evening breeze.
‘Hulloa!’ cried Maulevrier. ‘There’s Molly. How d’ye do, old girl?’
The two men looked up, and Molly looked down. Delight at her brother’s return so filled her heart and mind that there was no room left for embarrassment at the appearance of a stranger.
‘O, Maulevrier, I am so glad! I have been pining for you. Why didn’t you write to say you were coming? It would have been something to look forward to.’
‘Couldn’t. Never knew from day to day what I was going to be up to; besides, I knew I should find you at home.’
‘Of course. We are always at home,’ said Mary; ‘go up to the house as fast as ever you can. I’ll go and tell grandmother.’
‘And tell them to get us some dinner,’ said Maulevrier.
Mary’s fluttering figure dipped and was gone, vanishing in the dark labyrinth of shrubs. The two young men sauntered up to the house.
‘We needn’t hurry,’ said Maulevrier to his companion, whom he had not taken the trouble to introduce to his sister. ‘We shall have to wait for our dinner.’
‘And we shall have to change our dusty clothes,’ added the other; ‘I hope that man will bring our portmanteaux in time.’
‘Oh, we needn’t dress. We can spend the evening in my den, if you like!’
Mary flew across the lawn again, and bounded up the steps of the verandah — a picturesque Swiss verandah which made a covered promenade in front of the house.
‘Mary, may I ask the meaning of this excitement,’ inquired her ladyship, as the breathless girl stood before her.
‘Maulevrier has come home.’
‘At last?’
‘And he has brought a friend.’
‘Indeed! He might have done me the honour to inquire if his friend’s visit would be agreeable. What kind of person?’
‘I have no idea. I didn’t look at him. Maulevrier is looking so well. They will be here in a minute. May I order dinner for them?’
‘Of course, they must have dinner,’ said her ladyship, resignedly, as if the whole thing were an infliction; and Mary ran out and interviewed the butler, begging that all things might be made particularly comfortable for the travellers. It was nine o’clock, and the servants were enjoying their eventide repose.
Having given her orders, Mary went back to the drawing-room, impatiently expectant of her brother’s arrival, for which event Lesbia and her grandmother waited with perfect tranquillity, the dowager calmly continuing the perusal of her Times, while Lesbia sat at her piano in a shadowy corner, and played one of Mendelssohn’s softest Lieder. To these dreamy strains Maulevrier and his friend presently entered.
‘How d’ye do, grandmother? how do, Lesbia? This is my very good friend and Canadian travelling companion, Jack Hammond — Lady Maulevrier, Lady Lesbia.’
‘Very glad to see you, Mr. Hammond,’ said the dowager, in a tone so purely conventional that it might mean anything. ‘Hammond? I ought to remember your family — the Hammonds of — —’
‘Of nowhere,’ answered the stranger in the easiest tone; ‘I spring from a race of nobodies, of whose existence your ladyship is not likely to have heard.’
* * *
CHAPTER VI.
MAULEVRIER’S HUMBLE FRIEND.
That faint interest which Lady Lesbia had felt in the advent of a stranger dwindled to nothing after Mr. Hammond’s frank avowal of his insignificance. At the very beginning of her career, with the world waiting to be conquered by her, a high-born beauty could not be expected to feel any interest in nobodies. Lesbia shook hands with her brother, honoured the stranger with a stately bend of her beautiful throat, and then withdrew herself from their society altogether as it were, and began to explore her basket of crewels, at a distant table, by the soft light of a shaded lamp, while Maulevrier answered his grandmother’s questions, and Mary stood watching him, hanging on his words, as if unconscious of any other presence.
Mr. Hammond went over to the window and looked out at the view. The moon was rising above the amphitheatre of hills, and her rays were silvering the placid bosom of the lake. Lights were dotted here and there about the valley, telling of village life. The Prince of Wales’s hotel yonder sparkled with its many lights, like a castle in a fairy tale. The stranger had looked upon many a grander scene, but on none more lovely. Here were lake and mountain in little, without the snow-peaks and awful inaccessible regions of solitude and peril; homely hills that one might climb, placid English vales in which English poets have lived and died.
‘Hammond and I mean to spend a month or six weeks with you, if you can make us comfortable,’ said Maulevrier.
‘I am delighted to hear that you can contemplate staying a month anywhere,’ replied her ladyship. ‘Your usual habits are as restless as if your life were a disease. It shall not be my fault if you and Mr. Hammond are uncomfortable at Fellside.’
There was courtesy, but no cordiality in the reply. If Mr. Hammond was a sensitive man, touchily conscious of his own obscurity, he must have felt that he was not wanted at Fellside — that he was an excrescence, matter in the wrong place.
Nobody had presented the stranger to Lady Mary. It never entered into Maulevrier’s mind to be ceremonious about his sister Molly. She was so much a part of himself that it seemed as if anyone who knew him must needs know her. Molly sat a little way from the window by which Mr. Hammond was standing, and looked at him doubtfully, wonderingly, with not altogether a friendly eye, as he stood with his profile turned to her, and his eyes upon the landscape. She was inclined to be jealous of her brother’s friend, who would most likely deprive her of much of that beloved society. Hitherto she had been Maulevrier’s chosen companion, at Fellside — indeed, his sole companion after the dismissal of his tutor. Now this brown, bearded stranger would usurp her privileges — those two young men would go roaming over the hills, fishing, otter-hunting, going to distant wrestling matches and leaving her at home. It was a hard thing, and she was prepared to detest the interloper. Even to-night she would be a loser by his presence. Under ordinary circumstances she would have gone to the dining-room with Maulevrier, and sat by him and waited upon him as he ate. But she dared not intrude herself upon a meal that was to be shared with a stranger.
She looked at John Hammond critically, eager to find fault with his appearence; but unluckily for her present humour there was not much room for fault-finding.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, well-built. His enemies would hardly deny that he was good-looking — nay, even handsome. The massive regular features were irrep
roachable. He was more sunburnt than a gentleman ought to be, Mary thought. She told herself that his good looks were of a vulgar quality, like those of Charles Ford, the champion wrestler, whom she saw at the sports the other day. Why did Maulevrier pick up a companion who was evidently not of his own sphere? Hoydenish, plain-spoken, frank and affectionate as Mary Haselden was, she knew that she belonged to a race apart, that there were circles beneath circles, below her own world, circles which hers could never touch, and she supposed Mr. Hammond to be some waif from one of those nethermost worlds — a village doctor’s son, perhaps, or even a tradesman’s — sent to the University by some benevolent busybody, and placed at a disadvantage ever afterwards, an unfortunate anomaly, suspended between two worlds like Mahomet’s coffin.
The butler announced that his lordship’s dinner was served.
‘Come along, Molly,’ said Maulevrier; ‘come and tell me about the terriers, while I eat my dinner.’
Mary hesitated, glanced doubtfully at her grandmother, who made no sign, and then slipped out of the room, hanging fondly on her brother’s arm, and almost forgetting that there was any such person as Mr. Hammond in existence.
When these three were gone Lady Lesbia expressed herself strongly upon Maulevrier’s folly in bringing such a person as Mr. Hammond to Fellside.
‘What are we to do with him, grandmother?’ she said, pettishly. ‘Is he to live with us, and be one of us, a person of whose belongings we know positively nothing, who owns that his people are common?’
‘My dear, he is your brother’s friend, and we have the right to suppose he is a gentleman.’
‘Not on that account,’ said Lesbia, more sharply than her wont. ‘Didn’t he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and of Ford, the wrestler. I have no confidence in Maulevrier’s ideas of fitness.’
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