Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  The young man might have given some credit to Stubbs, but he did not; perhaps because time pressed, perhaps because he felt that his virtue in resisting a certain temptation deserved its reward. Instead he looked at Mary with a sympathy so ardent that her eyes fell. “Who would not have done as much?” he said. “If not for him — for you.”

  “Will you add one kindness then?” she answered. “Will you send Dr. Pepper as quickly as possible?”

  “Without the loss of a minute,” he said. “But one thing before I go. I cannot come here to inquire, yet I should like to know how he goes on. Will you walk a little way down the Riddsley road at noon to-morrow, and tell me how he fares?”

  Mary hesitated. But when he had done so much for them, when he had as good as saved her uncle’s life, how could she be churlish? How could she play the prude? “Of course I will,” she said frankly. “I hope I shall bring a good report.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Until to-morrow!”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  MASKS AND FACES

  Cherbuliez opens one of his stories with the remark that if the law of probabilities ruled, the hero and heroine would never have met, seeing that the one lived in Venice and the other seldom left Paris. That in spite of this they fell in with one another was enough to suggest to the lady that Destiny was at work to unite them.

  He put into words a thought which has entertained millions of lovers. If in face of the odds of three hundred and sixty-four to one Phyllis shares her birthday with Corydon, if Frederica sprains her ankle and the ready arm belongs to a Frederic, if Mademoiselle has a grain de beauté on the right ear, and Monsieur a plain mole on the left — here is at once matter for reverie, and the heart is given almost before the hands have met.

  This was the fourth occasion on which Audley had come to Mary’s rescue, and, sensible as she was, she was too thoroughly woman to be proof against the suggestion. On three of the four occasions the odds had been against his appearance. Yet he had come. To-day in particular, as if no pain that threatened her could be indifferent to him, as if no trouble approached her but touched a nerve in him, he had risen from the very ground to help and sustain her.

  Could the coldest decline to feel interest in one so strangely linked with her by fortune? Could the most prudent in such a case abstain from day dreams, in which love and service, devotion and constancy, played their parts?

  Sic itur ad astra! So men and women begin to love.

  She spent the morning between the room in which John Audley was making a slow recovery, and the deserted library which already wore a cold and unused aspect. In the one and the other she felt a restlessness and a disturbance which she was fain to set down to yesterday’s alarm. The old interests invited her in vain. Do what she would, she could not keep her mind off the appointment before her. Her eyes grew dreamy, her thoughts strayed, her color came and went. At one moment she would plunge into a thousand attentions to her uncle, at another she opened books only to close them. She looked at the clock — surely the hands were not moving! She looked again — it could not be as late as that! The truth was that Mary was not in love, but she was ready to be in love. She was glad and sorry, grave and gay, without reason; like a stream that dances over the shallows, and rippling and twinkling goes its way through the sunshine, knowing nothing of the deep pool that awaits it.

  Presently, acting upon some impulse, she opened a drawer in one of the tables. It contained a portrait in crayons of Peter Basset, which John Audley had shown her. She took out the sketch and set it against a book where the light fell upon it, and she examined it. At first with a smile — that he should have been so mad as to think what he had thought! And then with a softer look. How hard she had been to him! How unfeeling! Nay, how cruel!

  She sat for a long time looking at the portrait. But in fact she had forgotten that it was before her, when the clock, striking the half — hour before noon, surprised her. Then she thrust the portrait back into its drawer, and went with a composed face to put on her hat.

  The past summer had been one of the wettest ever known, for rain had fallen on five days out of seven. But to-day it was fine, and as Mary descended the road that led from the house towards Riddsley, a road open to the vale on one side and flanked on the other by a rising slope covered with brushwood, a watery sun was shining. Its rays, aided by the clearness of the air, brought out the colors of stubble and field, flood and coppice, that lay below. And men looking up from toil or pleasure, leaning on spades or pausing before they crossed a stile, saw the Gatehouse transformed to a fairy lodge, gray, clear — cut, glittering, breaking the line of forest trees — saw it as if it had stood in another world.

  Mary looked back, looked forward, admired, descended. She had made up her mind that Lord Audley would meet her at a turn near the foot of the hill, where a Cross had once stood, and where the crumbling base and moss-clothed steps still bade travellers rest and be thankful.

  He was there, and Mary owned the attraction of the big smiling face and the burly figure, that in a rough, caped riding-coat still kept an air of fashion. He on his side saw coming to meet him, through the pale sunshine, not as yesterday an Atalanta, but a cool Dian, with her hands in a large muff.

  “You bring a good report, I hope?” he cried before they met.

  “Very good,” Mary replied, sparkling a little as she looked at him — was not the sun shining? “My uncle is much better this morning. Dr. Pepper says that it was mainly exertion acting on a weak heart. He expects him to be downstairs in a week and to be himself in a fortnight. But he will have to be more careful in future.”

  “That is good!”

  “He says, too, that if you had not acted so promptly, my uncle must have died.”

  “Well, he was pretty far gone, I must say.”

  “So, as he will not thank you himself, you must let me thank you.” And Mary held out the hand she had hitherto kept in her muff. She was determined not to be a prude.

  He pressed it discreetly. “I am glad,” he said. “Very glad. Perhaps after this he may think better of me.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think that there is a chance of it,” she said.

  “No? Well, I suppose it was foolish, but do you know, I did hope that this might bring us together.”

  “You may dismiss it,” she answered, smiling.

  “Ah!” he said. “Then tell me this. How in the world did he come to be there? Without a hat? Without a coat? And so far from the house?”

  Mary hesitated. He had turned, they were walking side by side. “I am not sure that I ought to tell you,” she said. “What I know I gathered from a word that Mr. Audley let fall when he was rambling. He seems to have had some instinct, some feeling that you were there and to have been forced to learn if it was so.”

  “But forced? By what?” Lord Audley asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand either,” Mary answered.

  “He could not know that we were there?”

  “But he seems to have known.”

  “Strange,” he murmured. “Does he often stray away like that?”

  “He does, sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly.

  “Ah!” Audley was silent a moment. Then, “Well, I am glad he is better,” he said in the tone of one who dismisses a subject. “Let us talk of something else — ourselves. Are you aware that this is the fourth time that I have come to your rescue?”

  “I know that it is the fourth time that you have been very useful,” she admitted. She wished that she had been able to control her color, but though he spoke playfully there was meaning in his voice.

  “I, too, have a second sense it seems,” he said, almost purring as he looked at her. “Did you by any chance think of me, when you missed your uncle?”

  “Not for a moment,” she retorted.

  “Perhaps — you thought of Mr. Basset?”

  “No, nor of Mr. Basset. Had he been at the Gatehouse I might have. But he is away.”

  “A
way, is he? Oh!” He looked at her with a whimsical smile. “Do you know that when he met us the other evening I thought that he was a little out of temper? It was not a continuance of that which took him away, I suppose?”

  Mary would have given the world to show an unmoved face at that moment. But she could not. Nor could she feel as angry as she wished. “I thought we were going to talk of ourselves,” she said.

  “I thought that we were talking of you.”

  On that, “I am afraid that I must be going back,” she said. And she stopped.

  “But I am going back with you!”

  “Are you? Well, you may come as far as the Cross.”

  “Oh, hang the Cross!” he answered with a masterfulness of which Mary owned the charm, while she rebelled against it. “I shall come as far as I like! And hang Basset too — if he makes you unhappy!” He laughed. “We’ll talk of — what shall we talk of, Mary? Why, we are cousins — does not that entitle me to call you ‘Mary’?”

  “I would rather you did not,” she said, and this time there was no lack of firmness in her tone. She remembered what Basset had said about her name and — and for the moment the other’s airiness displeased her.

  “But we are cousins.”

  “Then you can call me cousin,” she answered.

  He laughed. “Beaten again!” he said.

  “And I can call you cousin,” she said sedately. “Indeed, I am going to treat you as a cousin. I want you, if not to do, to think of doing something for me. I don’t know,” nervously, “whether I am asking more than I ought — if so you must forgive me. But it is not for myself.”

  “You frighten me!” he said. “What is it?”

  “It’s about Mr. Colet, the curate whom you helped us to save from those men at Brown Heath. He has been shamefully treated. What they did to him might be forgiven — they knew no better. But I hear that because he preaches what is not to everybody’s taste, but what thousands and thousands are saying, he is to lose his curacy. And that is his livelihood. It seems most wicked to me, because I am told that no one else will employ him. And what is he to do? He has no friends — —”

  “He has one eloquent friend.”

  “Don’t laugh at me!” she cried.

  “I am not laughing,” he answered. He was, in fact, wondering how he should deal with this — this fad of hers. A little, too, he was wondering what it meant. It could not be that she was in love with Colet. Absurd! He recalled the look of the man. “I am not laughing,” he repeated more slowly. “But what do you want me to do?”

  “To use your influence for him,” Mary explained, “either with the rector to keep him or with some one else to employ him.”

  “I see.”

  “He only did what he thought was his duty. And — and because he did it, is he to pay with all he has in the world?”

  “It seems a hard case.”

  “It is more, it is an abominable injustice!” she cried.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “It seems so. It certainly seems hard. But let me — don’t be angry with me if I put another side.” He spoke with careful moderation. “It is my experience that good, easy men, such as I take the rector of Riddsley to be, rarely do a thing which seems cruel, without reason. A clergyman, for instance; he has generally thought out more clearly than you or I what it is right to say in the pulpit; how far it is lawful, and then again how far it is wise to deal with matters of debate. He has considered how far a pronouncement may offend some, and so may render his office less welcome to them. That is one consideration. Probably, too, he has considered that a statement, if events falsify it, will injure him with his poorer parishioners who look up to him as wiser than themselves. Well, when such a man has laid down a rule and finds a younger clergyman bent upon transgressing it, is it unreasonable if he puts his foot down?”

  “I had not looked at it in that way.”

  “And that, perhaps, is not all,” he resumed. “You know that a thing may be true, but that it is not always wise to proclaim it. It may be too strong meat. It may be true, for instance, that corn-dealers make an unfair profit out of the poor; but it is not a truth that you would tell a hungry crowd outside the corn-dealer’s shop on a Saturday night.”

  “No,” Mary allowed reluctantly. “Perhaps not.”

  “And again — I have nothing to say against Colet. It is enough for me that he is a friend of yours — —”

  “I have a reason for being interested in him. I am sure that if you heard him — —”

  “I might be carried away? Precisely. But is it not possible that he has seen much of one side of this question, much of the poverty for which a cure is sought, without being for that reason fitted to decide what the cure should be?”

  Mary nodded. “Have you formed any opinion yourself?” she asked.

  But he was too prudent to enter on a discussion. He saw that so far he had impressed her with what he had said, and he was not going to risk the advantage he had gained. “No,” he said, “I am weighing the matter at this moment. We are on the verge of a crisis on the Corn Laws, and it is my duty to consider the question carefully. I am doing so. I have hitherto been a believer in the tax. I may change my views, but I shall not do so hastily. As for your friend, I will consider what can be done, but I fear that he has been imprudent.”

  “Sometimes,” she ventured, “imprudence is a virtue.”

  “And its own reward!” he retorted. They had passed the Cross, they were by this time high on the hill, with one accord they came to a stand. “However, I will think it over,” he continued. “I will think it over, and what a cousin may, a cousin shall.”

  “A cousin may much when he is Lord Audley.”

  “A poor man in a fine coat! A butterfly in an east wind.” He removed his curly-brimmed hat and stood gazing over the prospect, over the wide valley that far and near gleamed with many a sheet of flood-water. “Have you ever thought, Mary, what that means?” he continued with feeling. “To be the shadow of a name! A ghost of the past! To have for home a ruin, and for lands a few poor farms — in place of all that we can see from here! For all this was once ours. To live a poor man among the rich! To have nothing but — —”

  “Opportunities!” she answered, her voice betraying how deeply she was moved — for she too was an Audley. “For, with all said and done, you start where others end. You have no need to wait for a hearing. Doors stand open to you that others must open. Your name is a passport — is there a Stafford man who does not thrill to it? Surely these things are something. Surely they are much?”

  “You would make me think so!” he exclaimed.

  “Believe me, they are.”

  “They would be if I had your enthusiasm!” he answered, moved by her words. “And, by Jove,” gazing with admiration at her glowing face, “if I had you by me to spur me on there’s no knowing, Mary, what I might not try! And what I might not do!”

  Womanlike, she would evade the crisis which she had provoked. “Or fail to do!” she replied. “Perhaps the most worthy would be left undone. But I must go now,” she continued. “I have to give my uncle his medicine. I fear I am late already.”

  “When shall I see you again?” he asked, trying to detain her.

  “Some day, I have no doubt. But good-bye now! And don’t forget Mr. Colet! Good-bye!”

  He stood awhile looking after her, then he turned and went down the hill. By the time he was at the place where he had met her he was glad that she had broken off the interview.

  “I might have said too much,” he reflected. “She’s handsome enough to turn any man’s head! And not so cold as she looks. And she spells safety. But there’s no hurry — and she’s inclined to be kind, or I am mistaken! That clown, Basset, too, has got his dismissal, I fancy, and there’s no one else!”

  Presently his thoughts took another turn. “What maggots women get into their heads!” he muttered. “That pestilent Colet — I’m glad the rector acted on my hint. But there it is; when a woman meddles
with politics she’s game for the first spouter she comes across! Fine eyes, too, and the Audley blood! With a little drilling she would hold her own anywhere.”

  Altogether, he found the walk to the place where he had left his carriage pleasant enough and his thoughts satisfactory. With Mary and safety on one side, and Lady Adela and a plum on the other — it would be odd if he did not bring his wares to a tolerable market.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE CORN LAW CRISIS

  He had been right in his forecast when he told Mary that a political crisis was at hand. That which had been long whispered, was beginning to be stated openly in club and market-place. The Corn Laws, the support of the country, the mainstay, as so many thought, of the Constitution, were in danger; and behind closed doors, while England listened without, the doctors were met to decide their fate.

  Potatoes! The word flew from mouth to mouth that wet autumn, from town to country, from village to village. Potatoes! The thing seemed incredible. That the lordly Corn Laws, the bulwark of the landed interest, the prop of agriculture, that had withstood all attacks for two generations, and maintained themselves alike against high prices and the Corn Law League — that these should go down because a vulgar root like the potato had failed in Ireland — it was a thing passing belief. It couldn’t be. With the Conservatives in power, it seemed impossible.

  Yet it was certain that the position was grave, if not hopeless. Never since the Reform Bill had there been such meetings of the Cabinet, so frequent, so secret. And strange things were said. Some who had supported Peel yet did not trust him, maintained that this was the natural sequel of his measures, the point to which he had been moving through all the years of his Ministry. Potatoes — bah! Others who still supported him, yet did not trust him, brooded nervously over his action twenty years before, when he had first resisted and then accepted the Catholic claims. Tories and Conservatives alike, wondered what they were there to conserve, if such things were in the wind; they protested, but with growing misgiving, that the thing could not be. While those among them who had seats to save and majorities to guard, met one another with gloomy looks, whispered together in corners and privately asked themselves what they would do — if he did. Happy in these circumstances were those who like Mottisfont, the father, were ready to retire; and still happier those who like Mottisfont, the son, knew the wishes of their constituents and could sing “John Barleycorn, my Joe, John,” with no fear of being jilted.