‘That’s stuff and nonsense,’ exclaimed Lady Carlyon; ‘I suppose you would like your daughter to make a good marriage?’
‘I should like her to marry a good man.’
‘Well, we’ll try to combine the two, though it isn’t the easiest thing in the world.’
This conversation took place in the Easter holidays, which Lady Carlyon spent with her brother and her niece, trying her hardest to inspire Lucille with a thirst for the amusements and delights of that privileged circle she was soon to enter, and making only a very faint impression upon the girl’s mind. A cup which is already full can hold no more; and Lucie’s life at Ingleshaw was completely happy. She adored her father — the father who had been all the world of kindred and affection to the motherless girl; she loved her good-natured old governess, Miss Marjorum, who had taught and trained her from her fifth year until now, She loved the historic old house, the romantic chase, the old gardens, lawns, and summer-houses, fish-pond, bowling-green, arbours, fountains — that happy blending of the Dutch and Italian style which gave such variety to the extensive grounds. She loved the grave gray old stable, the pretty little mouse-coloured Norwegian ponies which she drove, the senile white cob which she was permitted to ride unattended about the chase, and the handsome young bay mare, which she rode on rare and happy occasions, by her father’s side. She had dogs, cats, and pets of all kinds. Most of the servants had seen her grow up, and all of them worshipped her. She lived in an atmosphere of love, and had never any sense of dulness in the silent old house, to which so few visitors came.
Lord Ingleshaw was by no means a cipher in his world, although he held himself aloof from fashionable society. He was a stanch Conservative and a strong politician, voted upon all important measures, spoke occasionally, and had weight and influence in his party. He had a house in Grosvenor Square, where he occupied three darksome rooms on the ground-floor, leaving the upper and more splendid apartments to gloom and disuse. The brief, bright, happy period of his wedded life had been spent partly in this house; and the rooms were haunted by the sweet sad shadow of his young wife, who died of a fever caught in Venice six months after her baby’s birth. For the greater part of the year he lived at Ingleshaw, a bookworm and a recluse, caring very little for any society except that of his young daughter.
Father and child had breakfasted tête-à-tête this bright May morning in a pretty little room called the Painted Parlour — a cheery little room, with painted panels, all over flowers and butterflies, in a graceful fashion that savoured of the Pompadour period. May was fast melting into June, and the windows were wide open, and the room was filled with perfume from within and from without; flowers on tables, chimney-piece, window ledges, and a wilderness of flowers in the garden outside.
‘What are you going to do with yourself this morning, pet?’ asked the Earl, as his daughter hung over his chair. ‘Don’t go and mew yourself up with Miss Marjoram in this delicious weather. All the other butterflies are enjoying their lives in the garden.’
‘I hope you don’t think me quite so frivolous as the butterflies, father? Yes, it is a too delicious morning. I meant to read Dante with Miss Marjorum directly after breakfast; but I think I shall keep those poor things in the second circle waiting an hour or two while I have a ramble on Puck. Dear old Marjy won’t mind.’
She kissed her father, and was running off, when he stopped her.
‘O, by-the-bye, Lucie, I’ve some news for you. I had a telegram from Bruno last night.’
‘From Bruno!’ she cried with clasped hands, while a lovely roseate hue crept over the alabaster fairness of her face and throat; ‘and you never told me!’
‘Well, I suppose I wanted to keep this bit of news for a pleasant surprise: only I never could keep a secret from my girl. The telegram is from Florence, and Bruno is coming home almost directly. He will come straight here. You can tell Twyford to have his rooms got ready.’
‘Almost directly!’ repeated Lucille. ‘What does that mean, father? To-day?’
‘Hardly. He was in Florence yesterday.’
‘True, and Florence is at the other end of the world — a three days’ journey at least. To think of his coming home so soon! His last letter was so vague.’
‘Will you be glad to have him at Ingleshaw?’
‘Of course I shall be glad; but I shall see very little of him. He will be always rushing away somewhere — trout-fishing; or to London, or to Sevenoaks, or Tunbridge Wells. Thank goodness the hunting is all over. He can’t be riding off at nine o’clock every morning to come home at half-past seven, steeped in mud.’
‘Make the most of him while you have him,’ said her father. ‘He is a man now, and will have to take his place in the world as the future Lord Ingleshaw.’
The girl dropped lightly on her father’s knee, and nestled her head in his bosom.
‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘I can’t bear you to talk of anybody coming after you. God grant that Bruno’s head may be as white as snow before he is Lord Ingleshaw.’
‘That would be to doom your father to long years of senility. However, Bruno is in no hurry, and I am in no hurry. He has a fair fortune, considerable talents, and I hope he will distinguish himself as Mr. Challoner before he is Lord Ingleshaw. And now run away and have your ramble. I shall be off to catch the express in half an hour; and I have to see Morley before I go.’
Morley was his lordship’s land-steward and factotum.
‘Dear father, I am so sorry you must go to London. I hope you will be back before Sunday.’
‘Be sure I sha’n’t stop in town longer than I am obliged; but I must wait to see this measure through the House.’
‘How I hate measures and the House, when they take you away from me!’ said Lucille.
Now came tender farewell caresses; and then the girl raced off to the distant rooms which belonged to her and her governess. She had come to a delicious period of her life, in which the bondage of the schoolroom was done with, while the restraints of society had not yet begun. In her own small world, so safely hedged round by reverence and affection, she did very much as she liked, went where she liked, spent as much money as she liked, cultivated the people she liked. She was in some wise mistress of her father’s house. She ruled the trusty old governess who had once ruled her: but though somewhat wilful as to those things upon which her impetuous young heart set itself, she was as docile and easily governed by a light hand as a thoroughbred horse.
‘Marjy, Marjy!’ she cried, bursting into the old schoolroom, now morning-room and study, where Miss Marjoram sat with dictionaries and grammars and Italian histories laid out before her, ready for tackling Dante,—’such news! Bruno is coming. Bruno will be here to-morrow, or, at furthest, the day after to-morrow! “And the bells shall be rung, and mass shall be sung,” ‘sang Lucie at the top of her clear young voice, ‘for my Red-cross knight.’
‘This is indeed a surprise,’ said Miss Marjoram, without turning a hair. ‘Mr. Challoner coming to us after nearly two years’ absence! I have no doubt he will be grown.’
‘Don’t, Marjy; you mustn’t say such things. It’s actually insulting! Don’t you know that Bruno is four-and-twenty?’
‘Then he will have expanded,’ said Miss Marjoram. ‘It seems only yesterday that he came of age; and I know that up to that time he was continually growing in a perpendicular direction. After that he began to widen and spread horizontally, and he has been expanding ever since.’
‘Marjy, dearest, you talk as if he were Falstaff, or bluff King Hal,’ cried the girl.
‘My dear, all I wish to express is that he is a well-grown young man. And now, my love, let us attack our Dante. We are approaching one of the finest passages in the Inferno.’
‘Marjy, dear, it is such a delicious morning, and this news about Bruno is so exciting, I think if I were to ramble in the chase for an hour or so, it would compose my mind, and make me more equal to Dante.’
‘You must do as you like, my love; but
I never find your intellect so much on the alert after those rambles in the chase. There is a marked tendency to yawning and inattention.’
‘You shall find me attentive to-day, dearest. But I must have one peep at the bluebells in Hazel Hollow. Think what a little while they last!’
‘As you advance in life, Lady Lucille, you’ll find that all earthly pleasures are as brief as the bloom of wild hyacinths,’ said Miss Marjorum, who fancied it a part of her duty to be for ever repeating trite moral lessons, and scraps of old-world wisdom.
Lucille skipped off to her dressing-room to put on the short-skirted shabby old habit in which she rode Puck; and then, light and swift of foot, she ran down the broad oak staircase to a door that opened into the stable-yard, where a groom was waiting with Puck, a shaggy grey cob, of the Exmoor breed, stoutly built, strong as a house, with an eye which beamed with kindness. Lucille generally mounted at this door, preferring to escape the ceremony of going forth under the great Gothic archway, where the prim matron who lived in the gateway turret looked out at her through the lattice of the parlour where the visitors’ book was kept, or stood in the doorway to curtsey to her as she went by. The stable-yard opened into the park, and Lucille was away and out of sight of the Castle in five minutes.
It was one of those exquisite mornings when to live and breathe the sweetness of the air is rapture; when the old feel young, and the young can scarce tread soberly upon the dull earth, moved to dance-measures by the ecstasy of mere existence. The soft, warm, flowery air crept round Lucille like a caress, as she rode slowly along a grassy ride, under the broad spreading boughs of a line of horse chestnuts, the turf white with the fallen blossoms, and yet the trees bright with lingering bloom. Further on in the green heart of the chase came a little wood of Spanish chestnuts, leafy towers, their lowest boughs sweeping the grass, their summits aspiring to the blue bright sky. These grand old trees were planted wide apart, and the intervening ground was a sheet of azure bloom, save here and there where the drift of last year’s withered leaves showed a patch of golden brown starred with wood anemones.
Beyond this chestnut plantation there stretched an undulating expanse of open sward, with here a beech and there an oak, standing up against the summer sky in solitary grandeur, monarchs of the woodland; and then came those wide oak and fir plantations which bordered the chase for the breadth of half a mile or so throughout the seven miles of its circumference, rough and broken ground, full of gentle hollows and ridgy slopes, the paradise of squirrels, rabbits, and wild flowers. Puck knew every inch of those plantations, for he and his mistress had roamed about in them at all hours and in all weathers; sometimes when the snow lay deep in the hollows, and the first of the wild snowdrops showed pale on the topmost ridges where the sun had touched them.
Puck was accustomed to take his ease in these woods, tethered to a tree, while Lucille wandered on foot among the brown fir trunks, the gray lichen-clothed oaks, botanising, entomologising, sketching, or musing, as her fancy prompted. Her childhood and girlhood had been passing lonely, save for Bruno Challoner’s occasional companionship; and she had learnt to find her own amusements and her own occupations; more especially when the Earl was in London, or at Aix or Wiesbaden for his health, and life in the Castle meant a perpetual tête-à-tête with Miss Marjoram, who possessed every amiable quality except the power to amuse. In these woods Lucille had learned her lessons, day after day, from earliest spring to latest autumn; here she had read her favourite poets; here she had become familiar with all that is practical and interesting in the history of flowers and insects. The woods had been her playroom and study ever since she could remember. To-day she let Puck crawl his slowest pace along the grassy rides, stumbling a little now and then in a sleepy way, and recovering himself with a jerk. She was thinking of that distant cousin of hers, Bruno Challoner, heir presumptive to yonder gray old castle, and the only friend and playfellow she had ever known, since the Vicar’s four daughters, who were allowed to drink tea with her three or four times a year at the utmost, were a good deal older than herself, and could hardly be called companions.
Bruno had spent a considerable portion of all his summer holidays at Ingleshaw. He had come here in the Long Vacation when he was an undergraduate of Christ Church; had read here — or made belief to read — with ‘coaches,’ classical and mathematical, soberly clad gentlemen, in smoke-coloured spectacles, who had grown prematurely old in a perpetual grinding at Plato and Aristotle, or the integral and differential calculus; men who were steeped in stale tobacco, and who avoided Lucille as if she were a pestilence, so deep was their loathing of her sex. The classical coach was tall and thin, and wore his hair long. He had written poetry, and saw life on its Greek and ideal side. The mathematician was short, broad and florid, and believed in nothing that could not be expressed by signs and figures.
Bruno went in enthusiastically for the Greek plays and the higher mathematics, but did not come out very strongly in either branch of learning. He got his degree, but it was by the skin of his teeth, as his tutor told him candidly. Since those Oxford days he had travelled a good deal for the improvement of his mind, at the instigation of Lord Ingleshaw, who was his guardian as well as his cousin; and now he was four-and-twenty, had been free of his kinsman’s tutelage for the last three years, but was still beholden to him for counsel and friendship. He had made the tour of Europe, seen a little of Africa, and was coming home to begin the world as a man who, by the dignity of his future, and by all the traditions of his race, was constrained to make some figure on the stage of life.
‘Dear old Bruno,’ thought Lucille, as she moved slowly, with sauntering rhythmical motion, under the flickering lights and shadows, amidst the aromatic odours of the pines, ‘how glad I shall be to see him again! I wonder whether he will be as glad to see me?’
She remembered their last parting, when she was not quite sixteen, and still had something of the awkwardness and shyness of early girlhood. She remembered the grave tenderness of his farewell, and how he had entreated her to think of him while he was far away; promising that in every day of his wandering life some loving thought of her, like a winged invisible messenger, should fly homeward to dear old Ingleshaw. Her desk was full of his letters from strange and ever-changing places; her rooms were beautified with his gifts. He had given her substantial reason to know that she had not been forgotten.
A feeble shy from the old pony — Puck, who seldom shied — startled the girl from her reverie. The drooping eyelids were lifted; and there, beside the broad green track, lying in the hollow of a dry shallow ditch, among mosses and bluebells, and the last of the anemones, Lucille beheld the cause of Puck’s alarm.
A woman, quite a young woman — nay, a girl in what should have been the first fresh bloom of girlhood — lay asleep in that mossy hollow, the azure of wild hyacinths reflected on her wan pinched cheek, one wasted hand lying pale and deathlike among the flowers. The scanty cotton gown hardly concealed the shrunken outline of the figure. The feet, one bound in blood-stained rags, the other in a boot which was the veriest apology for covering, testified to long and weary tramping upon dusty high-roads.
Lucille slipped from her saddle, and, with Puck’s bridle hanging on her arm, went close up to the prostrate figure It was not the first time she had found a tramp asleep in Ingleshaw woods, nor the first time that her immediate impulse had been to relieve abject poverty, worthy or worthless, needing no higher claim upon her charity than its helplessness. She stood looking down at the sleeper, more keenly interested than she had ever felt before in any stray creature she had found in her domain.
The face lying among the flowers was exquisitely beautiful, even in its pinched and haggard condition. The low broad brow, the delicate Greek nose, the heavily-moulded eyelids, with their dark lashes, the oval cheek from which the rich growth of bronze-brown hair was swept back in a tangled mass, the melancholy lines of the pale lips, the modelling of the small dimpled chin — all were perfect, and on all there wa
s the stamp of sickness unto death. What could Lucille do? She had no purse with her; or perhaps she might have done no more than drop a sovereign into that shrunken hand, and pass upon her way. Yet there was something in the sleeper’s face that would have haunted her painfully afterwards, had her charity gone no further than this. As it was, she tied Puck to a tree, and sat down at the root of another, within a yard or so of the sleeper, patiently to await her waking, in order to see what could be done with her.
She had not long to wait. Before she had been seated five minutes, looking dreamily at the sulphur-hued butterflies flitting across the mossy hollows where the hyacinths made broad patches of azure light, the flies grew too tormenting for Puck’s patience. A sharp shake of his honest old gray head rattled bit and bridle, and at the sound that pale sleeper stirred uneasily, and the heavy lids were lifted from eyes darker than night.
Those dark velvety eyes looked up at Lucille, the pallid lips quivered faintly, and, as if with a painful effort, the wayfarer lifted herself into a sitting position.
‘Lady,’ she murmured in a low hoarse voice; and then the tears gathered in the large dark eyes and rolled slowly down the haggard cheeks.
‘Are you ill, or in pain?’ asked Lucille gently.
‘I have been ill, lady. I was laid up in the infirmary at the Union in London with a fever, and then I got a little better, and they turned me out; and I set out to walk to Dover, where I’ve a friend; but last night I was quite done, and I slept under a haystack a little way from here; and when I woke this morning I could hardly move, but I just crawled across a field, and in through a gap in the fence, and the place was cool and quiet, so I laid down to sleep, or to die — I didn’t much care which. You wouldn’t if you was me.’
‘You mustn’t talk like that,’ said Lucille. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not now, lady. I’m past that.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1102