Jasper Denzil, his arm, bruised and crushed as it had been beneath the
weight of the fallen horse, still needing the support of a sling, and
his pallid cheek and dim eye telling that he had not wholly regained
his strength, lounged among the cushions of a sofa in what was called
the White Room at Carbery. This room, which owed its name to the colour
of its panelled walls, sparely relieved by mouldings of gold and pale
blue, overlooked the park and adjoined the billiard-room; and Jasper,
with an invalid’s caprice, had chosen it for his especial apartment
during the period of his compulsory confinement to the house.
Time hung more heavily than ever on the captain’s hands since his
accident had cut him off from his ordinary habits of life. Of
intellectual resources he had few indeed, being one of those men (and
they are numerous amongst us) to whom reading is a weariness of spirit,
and thinking a laborious mental process, and who undergo tortures of
boredom when thrown helpless into that worst of all company—their own.
His sisters’ affection, his sisters’ innocent anxiety to anticipate
his wishes and soothe his pain, bored him more than it touched him. He
was not of a tender moral fibre, and barely tolerated at best those of
his own blood and name. He would very much have preferred as a nurse
bluff Jack Prodgers, to Blanche and Lucy. With Prodgers he had topics
and interests in common; the minds of the two captains ran nearly in
identical grooves; whereas his sisters did not fathom his nature or
partake his tastes. So dreary was the existence to which this once
brilliant cavalry officer was now condemned, that he had actually come
to look forward with a sort of languid excitement to the professional
visits of little Dr Aulfus from Pebworth, whose gig, to the great
disgust of Mr Lancetter, the High Tor surgeon, was daily to be seen
traversing the carriage-drive of Carbery Chase. With his father,
Jasper’s dealings were coldly decorous, no fondness and no trust
existing on either side. Sir Sykes had announced to Jasper that his
debts—of which the baronet, through a chance interview with Mr Wilkins
the attorney from London, had been made aware—had been paid in full.
‘I must ask you, Jasper,’ Sir Sykes had said, ‘for two assurances: one
to the effect that no more secret liabilities exist to start up at
unexpected moments; and the other, that you will never again ride a
steeplechase.’
‘For my own sake, sir, I’ll promise you that last willingly enough,’
said Jasper, with a sickly smile. ‘I didn’t use to mind that kind of
thing; but I suppose I am not so young in constitution as I was, and
don’t come up to time so readily. And as for more snakes in the grass,
such as those which that impudent cur Wilkins wheedled me into signing,
for his own benefit and that of his worthy allies, I give you my word
there’s not one. Some fresh tailor or liveryman may send a bill in one
day. A gentleman can’t always be quite sure as to how many new coats
and hired broughams may be totted up against him by those harpies at
the West End; but that is all. I should have won a hatful of money the
other day if anybody but Hanger had been on The Smasher’s back, when
that savage brute rushed at the wall; but I don’t owe any, except a
hundred and fifty which Prodgers lent me, and every farthing of which
I paid to the bookmakers before the race, in hope of receiving it back
with a tidy sum to boot.’
Sir Sykes had forthwith inclosed a cheque for a hundred and fifty
pounds to Captain Prodgers, with a very frigid acknowledgment of the
accommodation offered to his son.
‘I could wish that you had other friends, other pursuits too,’ he said
coldly to Jasper. ‘However, I will not lecture. You are of an age to
select your own associates.’
Captain Denzil then, being on terms of chilling civility with his
father, and an uncongenial companion for his sisters, yielded himself
the more readily to the singular fascination which Ruth Willis could,
when she chose, exert. Sir Sykes’s ward had a remarkable power of
pleasing when it suited her to please. She had at the first conciliated
the servants at Carbery—no slight feat, considering the dull weight
of stolid prejudice which she had to encounter—and had won the regard
of the baronet’s two daughters. Then Lucy and Blanche had felt the
ardour of their early girlish friendship for the Indian orphan cool
perceptibly, perhaps because the latter no longer gave herself the
same pains to win their suffrages. And now she laid herself out to
be agreeable to Jasper. Nothing could be more natural or befitting
than that a young lady, under deep obligations to the master of the
house, should shew her gratitude by doing little acts of kindness to
her guardian’s son when a prisoner; and without any apparent effort
or design, Ruth seemed to appropriate the invalid as her own. She
talked to him—she was by far better informed than the average of her
sex and age, and had a rare tact which taught her when to speak, and
of what—and she read to him. A more fastidious listener than Jasper
might have been charmed with that sweet untiring voice, so admirably
modulated that it assumed the tone most suited to the subject-matter,
be it what it might. The captain, whose boast it was, that with the
exception of racing calendars and cavalry manuals, he had not opened
a book since he left school, cared for nothing but newspapers, and
especially newspapers of a sporting turn, and such literature is not
generally very inviting to a feminine student; but Miss Willis shewed
no symptoms of weariness as she retailed to her hearer the cream of the
turf intelligence.
‘I don’t half like her. There are times when I could almost say, I hate
her!’ thought Jasper to himself once and again; ‘but she’s clever, and
has something about her which I don’t understand, for she never bores a
fellow.’
It was a burning day in early August. The windows of the White Room
were open, and the heavy hum of the bees, as they loaded themselves
with the plunder of the blossoms that clustered so thickly without, had
in itself a drowsy potency. Jasper, overcome by heat and lassitude, had
fallen asleep among his cushions, and Ruth Willis, who had been reading
to him, laid down the paper and slipped softly from the room, closing
the door behind her. She met no one, either on her way to her own
chamber or as, having donned her garden hat and jacket, she descended
the stairs. It was her practice on most fine days to leave the house
for a solitary ramble either in the park or among the woods that sloped
down to the river.
It was Ruth’s custom, when thus she sallied forth alone, to take with
her a book, which she could read when seated on some granite boulder
against which the swift stream chafed in vain, or amidst the gnarled
roots of the ancient trees in the Chase. Nor did she, like the majority
of young ladies, consider nothing worth her study save the contents
of the last green box of novels from a London circulating library,
preferring often the perusal of the quaint pretty old books that are
usually allowed to sleep unmolested on their shelves, here the verses
of a forgotten poet, there perhaps some idyl unsurpassed in its simple
sweetness of thought and diction.
With works of this description, well chosen once but now voted
obsolete, the library at Carbery Chase was richly stored; and Sir Sykes
had willingly given to his ward the permission which she asked, to
have free access to its treasures. He himself spent most of his time
while within doors in this same library, and there Ruth fully expected
to find him, when she entered it, accoutred for her walk. She had in
her hand a tiny tome, bound in tawny leather, and with a faded coat of
arms, on which might still be deciphered the De Vere wyverns stamped
upon the cover. To replace this and to select another volume, she
should have to pass Sir Sykes’s writing-table, in front of the great
stained glass window; but he would merely look up with a nod and smile
as the small slender form of his ward flitted by.
Sir Sykes, however, contrary to his habit at that hour, was not in the
library. He must but recently have quitted it, however, for the ink
in the pen that he had laid aside was yet wet, and the note which he
had been engaged in writing was unfinished. On a desk which occupied
the right-hand corner of the writing-table, a large old desk, the queer
inlaid-work of which, in ivory and tortoise-shell, had probably been
that of some Chinese or Hindu mechanic, lay an open letter, the bluish
paper and formal penmanship of which suggested the idea of business.
Now, it may seem trite to say that a regard for the sanctity of another
person’s correspondence is not merely innate in every honourable mind,
but so strongly inculcated upon us by education and example, that there
are many who are capable of actual crime, yet who would be degraded in
their own esteem by any prying into what was meant to meet no eyes but
those of the legitimate recipient. Yet Ruth Willis, the instant that
she perceived herself to be alone in the room, unhesitatingly drew near
to the table and took a brief survey of what lay upon it. As she caught
a glimpse of the letter, her very breathing seemed to stop, and a
strange glittering light came into her large eyes, and a crimson flush
mantled in her pale cheek.
‘I must have it!’ she exclaimed passionately. ‘At any risk I must know
all, must realise the extent of the danger, and whence it threatens.
There is not a moment to lose!’
Quick as thought the girl snatched up the letter from the desk on
which it lay, and darted towards the French window nearest to the now
empty fire-place. The window stood open. As she neared it, she heard a
man’s tread in the passage, a man’s hand upon the door of the library.
To avoid detection, her only chance was in her own promptitude and
coolness. She had but just time to pass through the opening and to
conceal herself among the rose-trees and flowering shrubs, before Sir
Sykes entered the room that she had so lately left. She thrust the
letter into her pocket and cowered down close to the wall, terror in
her eyes and quick-moving lips, for she knew but too well that in such
a case as this no social subterfuge, no fair seeming excuse could avail
her.
From her lair among the fragrant bushes Ruth could see the baronet
tossing over the papers that lay neatly arranged on his table, then
hurrying to and fro in evident excitement. That he was seeking for the
missing letter was clear.
‘Sooner or later,’ she murmured to herself, ‘he _must_ remember the
window, and should he but see me, all is lost. In such a plight,
boldness is safest.’
With a stealthy swiftness which had something feline in it, Ruth
Willis made her way past shrubs and sheltering trees and black hedges
of aged yew, trimmed, for generations past, by the gardener’s shears.
There were men at work among the lawns and flower-beds, men at work
too among the hothouses and conservatories. It would not be well,
should suspicion be rife and inquiry active, that these men should have
seen her. There was one place, however, where the trees of the garden
overhung the fence dividing it from the park, and here there was a
wicket, seldom used. To reach it she had to traverse one short stretch
of greensward exposed to the observation of the under-gardeners at
their work. Watching for a favourable moment, Ruth glided across the
dangerous piece of open ground, unseen by those who were busy at that
mowing and rolling, and weeding and pruning, which never seems to be
finished in a rich man’s pleasaunce. With the speed of a hunted deer
she threaded her way amidst the trees, opened the gate, and skirting
the southern angle of the park, fled through the new plantations to her
favourite resort, the woods beside the river.
No more peaceful and few prettier spots could easily have been found
than that which Ruth now sought, a place where the swift stream,
rushing down from its birthplace among the Dartmoor heights to end
its short career in the blue sea—of which, between the interlacing
boughs, a view could here and there be obtained—brawled among the
red rocks that half choked up the deep and narrow ravine. A welcome
coolness seemed to arise from where the spray of the pellucid water
was sprinkled over boulders worn smooth by time; and clefts where the
delicate lady-fern and many another dainty frond grew thickly. But
Ruth Willis for once was blind to the beauty of the scene, deaf to
the silvery music of the stream among the pebbles or to the carol of
the birds. With dilated eyes and lips compressed, but with trembling
fingers, she drew forth the stolen letter, and beneath the shadow of
the overhanging boughs, eagerly, almost fiercely, read and re-read the
words that it contained.