by Ellen Wood
He had therefore been making up his mind to go over to Alnwick, much as he disliked to show himself amidst strangers. But for this news concerning Frederick which had so troubled him, and the expected arrival of his brother, he would have been already away 3 but now he had put it off for a day or two. This was Tuesday; and he thought, if all went well, and Frederick came to-day, he should go on Thursday. It was not the loss of the money that brought care to Isaac St. John; his coffers were deep; but the great fear that this young man, dear to him as ever son could be to father, might be falling into evil.
He was aroused from thought by the entrance of his attendant, Mr. Brumm. The master of Castle Wafer looked up wistfully: he had thought it might be another entering.
“Will you have luncheon brought in here to-day, sir, or take it with Mrs. St. John and Lady Anne?”
“Oh, I don’t know” — and the sweet voice bore its sound of weariness. “I will take it with them to-day, I think, Brumm: they say I neglect them. Is it one o’clock?”
“Hard upon it, sir.”
Mr. St. John rose. Ah, how changed from the delicate-faced man whose defects of form had been hidden! The hump was all too conspicuous now. Passing out of the room, he crossed the inner hall, so beautiful with its soft rose-coloured hues, its tesselated pavement, and opened a door on the other side, where luncheon was laid. Two ladies entered almost at the same moment. The one was a tall, fine, still elegant woman, not much older than Mr. St.
John himself, though she stood to him in the relation of stepmother; the other was an orphan daughter of the highest branch of the St. John family, the Lady Anne: a nice-looking girl of two or three and twenty, with dark-brown eyes and a pointed chin. Castle Wafer belonged exclusively to Isaac St. John; but his step-mother frequently resided at it. The utmost good-feeling and courtesy existed between them; and Frederick, her only son, and his half-brother, was the link that drew them together. Mrs. St. John never stayed there in the character of visitor: Isaac would not allow it: but as its undisputed mistress. At these times, however, he lived a good deal in his own rooms. She had been there about a month now, and had brought with her this young cousin, Lady Anne. It had been a cherished project in the St. John family, that Lady Anne St. John should become the wife of Frederick. All wished it. The relatives on both sides wished it: they were several degrees removed from each other in relationship, she was an heiress, he would inherit Castle Wafer: altogether it was very suitable. But the parties themselves — were they anxious for the tie? Ah, less was known about that.
Mrs. St. John gave an exclamation of pleasure, for the sight of her step-son amidst them was somewhat rare. He shook hands with her, and then Anne St. John came merrily up to be kissed. She was very fond of Isaac, and he of her. Nearly the only friend he had had in life, as these men of rare minds count friendship, had been the earl, Anne’s father.
“Mrs. St. John,” he said, as they were at table, Brumm alone being in the room in attendance on his master, for sometimes the merest trifle of exertion, even the lifting of a plate, the filling of a glass, was a trouble to Isaac, “will you believe that I am contemplating a journey?”
“A journey! You, Isaac!” exclaimed Lady Anne. “Is it a drive round the farm in your low carriage?”
“It is a longer journey than that. It will take me five or six hours’ hard posting, with good roads and four good horses.”
“Oh, Isaac! How can you continue to travel post when you can take the railway?”
“I do not like the railway,” said Isaac, quietly.
“Well, I hope you will find relays. I thought all the old posting horses were dead and buried.”
“I have not found any difficulty yet, Anne. Brumm sends on to secure them.”
“But where are you going, Isaac?” asked Mrs. St. John. “To Alnwick. I think I ought to go,” continued Isaac, speaking in his grave, earnest, thoughtful manner. “Poor George left his boy partly in my charge, as you know; but what with ill-health, and my propensity to shut myself up, which gets harder to break through every year, I have allowed too long a time to elapse without seeing him. It has begun to lie upon my conscience: and whenever a thing does that, I can’t rest until I take steps to remedy it.”
“The little boy is in his own home with his mother,” observed Mrs. St. John. “He is sure to be all right.”
“I do not fear that he is not. I should be very much surprised to find that he is not. But that probable fact does not remove from me the responsibility of ascertaining it. I think I shall go on Thursday, and return on Friday.”
“How dull we shall be without you,” said Lady Anne.
Mr. St. John smiled, and raised his soft dark eyes to hers. The fingers of one thin hand had been wandering amidst the crumbs of his bread, putting them into circles or squares: a habit of his when he talked at table, though perhaps an unconscious one. He did not eat much, and had generally finished long before others.
“I hope, Anne, you and Mrs. St. John will have some one here by Thursday, who will be a more effectual remedy for dulness than I could be at my best. Mrs. St John, I am expecting Frederick.”
“Oh!” The mother’s heart leaped within her; the bright flush of expectancy rose to her cheek; a fair and soft cheek still, for all her fifty years. “When?”
“I hope he will be here to-day. I think he may even have come by this morning’s train. I wish to see him on a little matter of business, and have written to him to come down. Are you glad, Anne?”
“lam more glad than I can tell you,” was the warm, eager answer. “I wish he could be here always.”
Ah, Isaac St. John, why that inward glow of satisfaction at the words? Are you so little skilled in the signs of love as not to read them more correctly? Don’t you know that if there were any love, of the sort you have been hoping, in that fair girl’s heart, she would go by the rules of contrary, and protest that it was a matter of perfect indifference to her whether Mr. Frederick came or not? There is no blush on her cheek; there is no faltering in her tone: why should you deceive yourself?
The surmise was correct: Frederick St. John had come down by the morning’s express train. You may see him as he walks out of the station at Lexington: it is that tall, slender, aristocratic man, with dark hair, pale refined features, and eyes of the deepest blue. The people at the station touch their hats to him and smile a greeting, and he smiles and nods at them in return, kindly, genially, as if he really thanked them for their welcome. There was neither heartlessness nor hypocrisy in Frederick St. John: he was a true gentleman at heart.
“Would you like a fly, sir? I don’t see any carriage come down for you.”
“No, thank you, Williams. I prefer walking such a day as this. Is Mr. St. John well, do you happen to know?”
“As well as usual, I think, sir,” was the man’s reply, who drove his own fly. “He walked through the fields to church on Sunday. The ladies came in the basket-carriage.”
“What a fine harvest you have had!”
“Beautiful, sir. Couldn’t be better. My little stock of corn never was finer.”
“By the way, Williams, I had a portmanteau somewhere in the train: the guard put it out, I suppose. You can bring it up if you like.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Frederick St. John walked on. Striking into a path on the left, he continued his way through the fields, and came in due course to the back of the Rectory. From thence the way was through the cultivated grounds, the lovely gardens of Castle Wafer: the whole way being not much more than a mile and a half. By the highway it was a good deal longer.
Seated under a projecting rock, a sketch-book and pencils lying beside her, was one of the fairest girls ever seen. She was reading. Going out to sketch, that mellow day, she had yielded to idleness (as she often did), and was passing the time in reading, instead of working. She was the Dean of Westerbury’s niece, Sarah Beauclerc: and the dean was wont to tell her that she should not take a book with her when she went out to sketch.
It might come to the same thing, so far as working went, she would answer in her independence: if she did not read, she might only sit and dream. But the dean was not at the Rectory just now: only his wife, daughter, and niece. This young lady’s home had been with them since the death of her mother, the Lady Sarah Beauclerc: her father was in India.
The soft bloom mantled in Sarah Beauclerc’s cheeks when she saw who had turned the corner and was upon her. His appearance took her by surprise: neither she nor any one else had known that he was coming. She put down her book and was about to rise: but he laid his hand upon her and sat down on the bench beside her. He kept her hand in his; he saw the blushes on her cheeks; and that her eyes fell beneath the gaze of his own.
But the liking between them was not destined to go on to love: though indeed on her part, and perhaps also on his, the feeling had been very like love once. In her behaviour to him she had been a finished coquette: he set it down to caprice, to a want of real affection for him; in reality it grew out of her love. She believed that, come what would, he was to marry Lady Anne St. John; she believed that he accepted the destiny, though he might not be unwilling to amuse himself before he entered on it: and, one moment she had been gentle, tender, yielding, in obedience to her secret love; the next she would be cold, repelling, the very essence of scorn. This had partially worked his cure: but in a meeting like the present, coming suddenly upon her in all her beauty, the old feelings would rise again in his heart. Ah! how different might things have been in this life for one other woman, had Sarah Beauclerc only known the real state of affairs between him and Lady Anne!
But she still retained enough of the past feeling to be confused — confused in manner as in mind. She put questions as to his unexpected appearance, not hearing one syllable of the answers; and Frederick St. John detected the secret joy, and his voice grew more low and tender as he bent over her, and a smile, than which earth could possess nothing sweeter, sat on his lips. Perhaps even now, had he remained at Castle Wafer — but of what use speculating upon what might have been?
“I think you are glad to see me, Sarah.”
One flash of answering avowal, and then the lovely consciousness on the face faded, the light of love died out of it; it grew hard, satirical, half angry. That she should so have betrayed herself! She raised her head, and looked out straight before her from the depths of her cold light-blue eyes.
“We are glad to see any one in this lonely desert, where the only gentleman of degree is Mr. St. John. Not but that I would rather see him than many others. Did you leave London this morning?”
Frederick St. John dropped the hand and rose.
“I shall never understand you, Sarah. Yes, I left it this morning. Where’s Georgina? She will be glad to welcome me, if you are not.”
“There’s one will be glad to welcome you at Castle Wafer,” she rejoined, laughing now, but the laugh sounded cold and cheerless. “Lady Anne has been wishing for you for some time.”
“Yes, I think she has. I must go on now. I shall see you again, no doubt, by-and-by.”
He hastened on his way, utterly unconscious that a pair of eyes, more lovely than those he had been gazing on, behind the grove of trees, had been unintentional witnesses to the interview. Georgina Beauclerc had been strolling about when she saw his approach through the trees. She was the dean’s daughter — a lithe, active girl of middle height with a pleasing, piquant, rather saucy face, these wide-open grey-blue eyes, light-brown hair, and a healthy blood mantling under the sunburnt skin of the dimpled cheeks — a daring, wild, independent young lady, but one all truth and ingenuousness; and that is saying a very great deal in these days of most detestable artificially. Georgina had no end of faults, but Dr. Beauclerc knew her heart, and he would not have exchanged his daughter for any girl in the world.
She, Georgina Beauclerc, had looked on from between the trees, all her veins throbbing, her pulses beating. A stronger, a purer, a more enduring love never made glad the heart of woman, than this one that filled Georgina Beauclerc’s for Frederick St. John. To hear his step was rapture; to touch his hand was as a ray of that unforgiven fire “filched for us from heaven;” to see him thus unexpectedly was as if the whole earth had become suddenly flooded with a brilliant, rose-coloured light. But, even as she watched that other meeting with her cousin, the sharp pain — often enough felt there before — seized her heart, the loving light faded from her face, and her lips paled with anguish. Of keen, discerning faculties, she had seen all along that it was not from Lady Anne danger was to be feared, but from Sarah herself. A faint, low cry, as of a bird in pain, escaped her as she watched the meeting, and drank in its signs.
Did anything in the world ever run so crookedly as this course of love? Every one — uncles, aunts, guardians — wanted Frederick St. John to wed Lady Anne. Frederick did not want to marry her at all; did not intend to marry her; and she, on her part, hoped to marry some one else. But that was a secret not yet to be breathed to the world; Frederick alone shared it; and if things came to a crisis he intended to take on himself the whole onus of declining the match, and so spare Anne. They understood each other perfectly; and that is more than can be said for any other two actors in our story. Nothing so very crooked there, you will say; but look a little further. Georgina loved Frederick St. John with her whole heart; and he never gave a thought to her. He must have known of her love; there had been things to reveal it to him — trifles in the past; but he passed her by, and felt all too inclined to give his love to her cousin. She, Sarah, could have made him her heart’s resting-place, ah! how willingly! but her head was filled ever with Lady Anne, and she met his incipient love with scorn. It was curing him, as I have told you; but if the whole truth could have been laid bare, the lives of some of them would have been widely different.
Georgina was obliged to come forth from her hiding-place, for his path lay through the shrubbery, and he must have seen her. Her colour went and came fitfully as she held out her hand; her bosom heaved beneath the thin summer dress, a flowing robe of muslin, adorned with blue ribbons. Her large straw hat was hanging from her arm; and she began to talk freely and wildly — anything to cover her agitation. Their intercourse was familiar as that of brother and sister, for they had been intimate from childhood.
“Well, Georgie! In the wars as usual, I see, amidst the brambles.”
He pointed to her robe, and she caught it up; a long bramble was trailing to it.
“It is your fault, sir. Hearing a strange voice, I came through the thorns to see who might be the intruder. What a strange, flighty way you have got into! Coming down by fits and starts, when no one expects you! We heard you were off to Finland, or some other of those agreeable spots. You’ll frighten Castle Wafer into fits.”
“Wrong, young lady. Castle Wafer sent for me.”
“That’s one of your stories,” politely returned Georgina. “I was at Castle Wafer after breakfast this morning, and Mrs. St. John was regretting that you did not come down this autumn; some one else also, I think, though she did not say it.”
He looked down at her as she spoke. There were times when he thought she divined the truth as regarded himself and Lady Anne St. John.
“I wonder,” she continued, “that you have kept away so long.”
“How is the dean?”
“He is not here — only mamma. Tell me; what has brought you down?”
“I have told you. I was sent for.”
“By—”
“Isaac. You are as curious as ever, Georgina. But now, can you tell me why I am sent for; for that is a puzzle to me. I fear—”
He stopped suddenly. Miss Beauclerc raised her eyes to his face. There was a shade of uneasiness in his tones, as if he were ill at ease.
“I know nothing about it,” she answered, earnestly. “I did not even know you were sent for. I would tell you if I did know.”
He nodded an acknowledgment, courteously enough, but very abstractedly, as if he thought little of Georgin
a or of anything she could tell him, and walked on alone, never once looking back. She leaned her forehead against a tree, and gazed after him; her wild love shining forth from her yearning blue eyes; her whole heart longing to call after him ere he should be quite beyond view, and the day’s sunshine have gone out in darkness: “Oh, stay with me, my love! stay with me!”
He went on to the house, straight into the presence of Isaac, who was then in his own room, and learnt why he had been summoned. That his embarrassments would, of necessity, become known to his brother some time, he had entertained no shadow of doubt; but he was one of those high-bred, honourable men who look upon debt as little less than crime; and now that the moment had come, it brought him terrible mortification.
“I have no excuse to offer,” he said. “But do not think worse of me than you can help. Not one shilling of it has gone in dishonour.”
That he spoke the truth Isaac knew, and his heart went out to him — him whom he had ever loved as a son.
“I will set you straight, only be more cautious in future,” he said, never speaking, in his generosity, one word of reproach. “And, Frederick, this had better be kept from your mother. It would pain her, and perhaps alarm Anne. Don’t you think it is time you married? There’s nothing to wait for. I’m sure — I fancy at least — that Anne is ready.”
And Frederick St. John, bound by a promise to Lady Anne, did not speak out openly, as he might have done, but evaded the question.
On the following Thursday, in the long, low room at the Rectory, its windows opening to the lawn, sat Sarah Beauclerc, practising a piece of difficult music. She and her cousin were contrasts. The one, cold, calm, calculating, did things by rule; the other did all by impulse, and could not be cold if she tried. Sarah was the least in the world artificial; Georgina was too natural.