BACK IN FAMILIAR HAUNTS.
A prettier country could hardly be imagined than that to which Grace
Ambleton and her brother were being swiftly conveyed, after a lengthy
absence abroad. They occupied, as a residence, a quaint, many-gabled
house, that lay, surrounded by its old-fashioned garden, just beyond
the cathedral boundaries and within sight of the close, in the old city
of Dynechester, and all around and about them were scattered relics
of a time dead and gone, covered over with that touch of unmistakable
age, half delicate because of its intangibility, yet none the less
indisputable.
Old trees stood like sentinels alone. The roof of Grace’s home was
moss-decorated, and the tiny streets that led to the residence were
narrow and ill-paved; ill-lit, too, Grace’s many girl friends would
declare, in the dark winter days, and though there was nothing ghostly
or cheerless once the doors of the Dower House were flung wide open,
there was some of these friends who declared frankly among themselves
that they would rather not live as Grace did in such a queer,
many-centuried home, built so close to the cathedral walls and the
cathedral burial ground.
Others there were who would most gladly have taken Grace’s place in
this quaint old house, some for the sake of Valentine, the elder
brother, and some for the sake of the laughing eyes and wonderfully
handsome face of Sacha, the youngest of the two Ambleton men.
Grace was perfectly well aware of this divided feeling among her
friends, but she was quite indifferent to all.
The Dower House was her home for as long as she chose to stay in it.
She knew that, and she told herself on the morning after her return
from her sojourn abroad, that she would be in no hurry to leave this
home again, either for a temporary or a permanent absence. For Grace
loved the house where she had been born, and where all her healthy
childhood had been passed; she loved every stick and stone about the
place.
There was a touch of welcome to her in the tall, gray, stately walls of
Dynechester’s old cathedral, a voice of greeting in the sound of the
familiar clock chimes and bells.
“I never want to go away any more,” she confessed to Bob, the Irish
terrier, and Nancy, the Ayrshire one, and both animals understood, and
were entirely of her opinion.
They had been brought from Dynechester two days before to greet their
beloved mistress in London. Val had been detained in town on business,
and Grace had remained with him, gratifying her longing for home by
summoning one of the servants to come to her with the dogs, which she
had been forced to leave behind when she had started for their long
tour in foreign countries.
“It is like heaven to be back in the dear old corners,” she told
herself more than once, and when she met Val later in the day she made
him smile by her ardent delight in, and enthusiasm for, her home.
“Not much good taking you everywhere and showing you the great wonders
of the world, Miss Grace!” her brother remarked, with a laugh.
Grace echoed the laugh.
“I never knew how much I loved dear old Dynechester till I saw it again
yesterday, Val.”
Valentine glanced affectionately at his sister.
They were an undemonstrative pair, but few people had a deeper, truer
love for one another than Val and Grace Ambleton. The girl’s love
had other elements in it besides mere sisterly affection and pride.
Valentine had been the only parent Grace had known.
It was true she had a shadowy memory of her mother, a woman who had
been in constant suffering, and who had leaned upon her eldest boy for
protection, but this mother had passed away before Grace had reached
five years of age, and such care and thought as the girl had had in the
succeeding years she had had from her brother, Valentine.
She was dear to Sacha too, and she loved her second brother devotedly,
but Sacha, though her senior by three years, had always fallen into the
position of being her baby and care, just as she had been Val’s.
Their mother had been a Wentworth, the only daughter of the old
lady who lived a perpetual invalid up at the large house beyond the
outskirts of the town.
There had been three sons born to this Lady Wentworth, and of these
three two had died in childhood and one had married and had begotten an
heir to the title and the estates.
Grace had a very vivid memory of her Uncle Ambrose, father of the
present baronet, Sir Mark Wentworth.
She had been very much attached to this uncle, and she had sorrowed
deeply at his sudden death. It had surprised no one to learn at the
time of that death, that by the will of Sir Ambrose, his nephew,
Valentine Ambleton, was appointed a co-trustee with an old legal
friend, to Mark Wentworth and his various properties.
Val, it was true, was not of the usual age for such a position, but
everybody knew that Sir Ambrose had placed more confidence in his
nephew’s sound wisdom and practical good sense than he did in most men;
and though Val was barely more than ten years his cousin’s senior,
it seemed to all the little world of Dynechester the wisest and best
arrangement Sir Ambrose could have made for his son’s future, when he
appointed his Nephew Valentine to act as guardian to that son.
Sir Ambrose had been dead a little over four years now, and his son had
attained his majority the year following his father’s decease.
Perhaps Grace alone, out of all the world, knew how much trouble and
anxiety her cousin was to her brother, and even she did not know all.
She had a certain weakness for Mark; he had appealed to her from the
first in the same way as Alexander, or Sacha as he was always called,
did.
Mark Wentworth had always been a handsome boy with endearing ways; he
had been adored by his father, and this adoration was carried on now
by his grandmother, whose only joy in her old age lay in the joy that
Mark’s mere existence gave her.
His mother Grace had never known, young Lady Wentworth having
died abroad many years before Grace could grasp much in her young
brain. There were pictures of this mother at Sunstead, and Mark was
wonderfully like her. He was so dark as to seem scarcely of English
birth. His face was handsome, passionate, attractive, and his nature
matched his face as to passion and attraction.
It was not until Grace had grown to womanhood—she was now about
twenty-two—that she learned the meaning of the shadow and the anxiety
that beset Val so much where Mark was concerned, and when she did learn
this she found it hard to grasp at first. But Val was not a man to make
a mistake. He had caught signs of Mark’s failings when his cousin had
been barely more than a lad, and then he had something more than fear
to lend proof to his discovery, for Val alone knew the true story of
his uncle’s marriage; he alone was aware that Mark’s mother, instead
of dying years before, had lived a wretched, lost existence, confined
in a home for drunkards, until a few months before the accident in
the hunting field that had brought Sir Ambrose Wentworth’s life to an
untimely end.
Besides the instructions left in his will, Sir Ambrose had written
a letter to Valentine, to be read after his death, in which the
unhappy father betrayed to the younger man the anguish that had lived
canker-like in his heart all the years that followed on his fatal
marriage.
He was bluntly frank with Val, and he entreated his nephew by every
means in his power to stand between Mark and his mother’s fate.
The trait of that mother’s horrible weakness had not been developed
sufficiently in the boy at the time the father wrote this letter to
cause him to regard Mark’s future as hopeless, and he relied on Mark’s
affection for Val to keep his loved child safe from all temptation.
The trust left to him had been accepted by Valentine Ambleton in
no half spirit. He had constituted himself Mark’s companion on
all possible occasions, and when his work—he was an architect by
profession—claimed him, then he looked to Grace to take his place.
He found it necessary for his scheme of protection to tell his brother
and sister briefly, the fear that Mark might inherit the failing that
had claimed his mother, and that came to him as a terrible legacy from
that mother’s family, and Grace, at least, had shared his anxiety over
their cousin to the fullest degree.
If Sacha was less moved about Mark’s possible fate, that was, perhaps,
natural, for Sacha had from the beginning of his life learned really
to trouble about no one but himself. He was of an utterly different
nature to either Grace or Val; there was less stolidity about him. He
was never very practical, and lived, for the most part of the time, in
happy dreams.
Contrary to the wishes of Val, and such of his kinsmen who in the
beginning had had a right to enter into the young Ambletons’ lives,
Sacha had followed no sound, practical profession; he had taken up art
instead, and it was not to be denied that he had marked talent as a
painter.
Val, when he found his brother resolved on adopting the brush as a
means of earning his living, sacrificed his own feelings in the matter,
and there was a very large room in the top floor of the Dower House
which had long ago been set apart as a studio for Sacha when he cared
to be at Dynechester.
The Dower House was practically a Wentworth property.
Most people imagined that the house and grounds had belonged actually
to Mrs. Ambleton when she arrived, widowed, years before, to take up
her abode in it; but this was not the case. Sir Ambrose had put the
house at his sister’s disposal when she returned to England from Russia
after her husband’s death.
There had not been too much money left to Mrs. Ambleton and her
children at this time. She had made, in a sense, a poor marriage. Eric
Ambleton had been a handsome young attaché when she had fallen in love
with him, and she had become his wife in the face of a good deal of
opposition, for most people realized that Eric Ambleton had been a man
of promise but of promise only, and most people proved to be right.
Advancement in diplomacy is proverbially slow, and Eric Ambleton
struggled on in an onerous and most difficult life, always hoping for
better things that never came.
He died while attached to the embassy in St. Petersburg, and his wife
had no other course open to her but to travel back to her old country
with her two handsome boys and accept all her brother offered to her.
After her death Sir Ambrose desired Valentine to continue to regard
the Dower House as a home for himself and his brother and sister—the
little Grace who had been born there so soon after her mother’s
widowhood.
“My mother will never claim it,” he had said, sadly enough. For his
wife was believed to be dead at that time, and his mother still reigned
at Sunstead, pouring out tender love on young Mark. There seemed to be
no reason why the Ambletons should not, therefore, regard themselves as
located at the old house for all their lives.
When his uncle died, Val had, however, spoken out very plainly to his
cousin, and had insisted upon putting matters on a very different
footing.
“I want you to remember that the Dower House is a valuable property,
Mark,” he had said, in his frank way. “If you were to let it to any
outside person you would get a very fair rental for it, and I propose
to pay you this rental. Your father was generous beyond all description
to let us come here in the beginning, and now he is dead, I don’t want
to continue living on that generosity; hence my reason for speaking to
you now. I don’t suppose you will be a hard landlord,” Val had added,
with his rare smile; “or that you will turn us out in a hurry, but I
want you to remember that you _are_ our landlord and of course, if you
ever have need of the house, you will let us know.”
Mark Wentworth’s answer had been characteristic.
“Don’t talk rot, Val,” he had remarked, in his strong-worded way. “As
if the Dower House could ever belong to anybody but you! I don’t want
any rent, and I won’t be your landlord, so you can settle it just
whichever way you please.”
So Val had settled it by paying each quarter a certain sum of money
into Sir Mark Wentworth’s account in Dynechester Bank, and Grace
approved of what he did.
They were not rich, but they had enough. Val was now beginning to earn
a fair income, and they inherited, further, the small income which had
belonged to their mother. Latterly, too, they had received news of a
possible source of good fortune from some property in Russia, which
their father had purchased years before in rather a haphazard fashion,
and which had lain dormant all these years.
It had been to investigate matters in connection with this property
that Val and Grace had gone abroad. Sacha had remained in England,
sometimes running down for a few days to Dynechester, but as a rule
living in London, in a pet circle of artists.
Sacha somehow never fell in wholly with the life of his brother and
sister.
Val had been sorry and glad to go. He had hesitated some time before
he did eventually leave home, but, added to the necessity of personal
investigation came an offer of work from a firm who employed him a good
deal, and who, chancing to hear of his suggested journey to Russia,
found this an excellent opportunity to utilize his services.
Val was glad to leave on this account, but he troubled to go solely
because matters had slipped gradually into rather a tangle between
Mark and himself. Val had always feared this, for he was above all
else sensible, and he had foreseen the time when Mark would resent
his interference and the fact of his trusteeship. How or why the bad
feeling on Mark’s side toward himself had arisen first Val did not
know, save that he imagined the younger man had resented certain plain
words he had been compelled to speak.
The fact was that Sir Mark, being a very handsome young fellow, with
very little mental ballast to keep him from follies, had quickly shown
a disposition to lead a life that Val held to be objectionable in every
sense of the word.
It was not merely that excitement and dissipation was bound to help the
young man on the road to a fatal end; it was because Val considered
there was very much indeed that his cousin could have found to occupy
him in connection with the various properties in and about Dynechester,
and in other places as well.
Val was as lenient as most men over the question of amusement, but
duty always came first with him, and Mark most assuredly neglected his
duties in the most pronounced way.
There were other things that made Val grave and anxious. Mark had a
predilection for the most questionable company, and already Dynechester
was beginning to look a trifle askance at the young man.
Grace of course was not enlightened as to the cause of the very sharp
quarrel that had taken place between her brother and Sir Mark, just
before they started abroad, but she felt without knowing anything that
Val must have been in the right.
It had been, as a matter of fact, a very nasty quarrel, and Mark had
said many hurtful things.
Up to this time Val had never breathed to his cousin that grim truth
about the mother whom Mark knew only as a memory; but when he saw how
fast Mark was drifting to the same miserable fate, he felt, cruel as it
was, that he must speak out.
The story he had to tell infuriated Mark Wentworth.
“I see your drift,” he said to Val, with a sneer; “finding you can’t
interfere with me and my amusements, and being frightened to death of
my getting married, you tell me this abominable thing simply to work
in your plan better. Of course a child could understand you! If I die
unmarried you come into my title and place through your mother’s right,
and so you are determined to keep me unmarried. Oh! I can see right
through you, my dear Cousin Val, and all your righteous disposal of the
present state of things is just a proof of your beastly selfishness. I
tell you frankly that if you say much more, I will make this woman you
are kicking up such a fuss about my wife to-morrow!”
Val had looked into the dark, passionate face.
“You are not an utter fool, Mark, so I shall not trouble to argue this
sort of point with you,” he said, quietly. “As to the other suggestion
you have made, I hope from my heart that the day will come when you
will be happy with a wife to love you, and children to call you father.
But that must not be yet, Mark, my lad,” Val had added quietly, but
sternly. “You have to take a good pull at yourself, Mark, and just
pause and look ahead of you. Why don’t you pack up your traps and come
abroad with us? We should be so jolly together, you, Grace and myself,
and——”
“And the Dean’s Chapter, too, I suppose, to shrive me perpetually of my
sins, eh?” Mark had queried with a pronounced sneer. Then he had used
a very bad word, and he had told Val to “go to the devil!” and he had
swung himself away to end further argument.
All this—save what concerned a certain woman about whom Val could not
bring himself to speak to his sister—had been told to Grace, and the
girl had only too well grasped the difficulties of the position.
“But you have done your best, you are doing all you can now, Val,”
she had said, consolingly. “You cannot make yourself Mark’s keeper.
Write to Mr. Baker and tell him he must fill your trust as well as his
own while you are abroad. I will write to Sacha and ask him to be
as much with Mark as he can. It is just possible,” Grace had added,
thoughtfully, “that Mark may take a little turn for the better if you
are away for a time. With some natures restraint has a bad effect if
urged too much. Mark has grown impatient lately. If you will let me
advise you, dear, you will say no more to him, but come away with me,
and trust to his own good sense to realize the danger of his position.”
And Val had accepted this counsel.
He had done all Grace had suggested, and he had gone abroad, with
a sigh of relief. Determined that no evil feeling between Mark and
himself should be fostered by any act of his, Val wrote frequently to
his cousin, as Grace did to her grandmother, poor old Lady Wentworth,
but Mark vouchsafed no answers, and such news as they had received of
him had come through Val’s fellow trustee, Mr. Baker, and from Sacha,
when he remembered to write at all.
The news was not cheering.
Mark had plunged headlong into a vortex of dissipation, and the end of
this had been a sharp illness, which his grandmother called fever, but
which Val knew, alas! only too well, had been an attack of delirium
tremens.
Grace and he had been too far away to return at that time, and indeed
he was kept abroad much longer than he had anticipated, owing to an
increase of work required of him by the firm.
When eventually they returned homewards and reached London, it was
to learn a sad and sordid story of Mark’s life during their absence,
ending in his announced marriage with a certain Miss Pennington,
a young lady whom he had met while she had been on a visit to
Dynechester, and who was, so Mr. Baker affirmed, apparently in utter
ignorance of the true character of the man she was about to marry.
Close investigation through other channels showed Val only too clearly
into what a state his cousin had drifted, and other inquiries elicited
the fact that Christina Pennington was undoubtedly a lady, and one who
was to be saved from a shocking fate.
The friends with whom she was staying in Dynechester were friends of
the Ambletons also, and from one of the heads of this family Val had
obtained all he wanted to know about the Penningtons.
His anger against his cousin was unbridled at this moment.
He had had the greatest pity for Mark in the beginning, but for the man
who had wantonly flung himself to ruin he had nothing but contempt.
On one point he was resolved. This marriage should not go forward.
He poured out all his heart to Grace, and told her of his resolve to
put the truth before Christina Pennington and her parents, and, as we
have seen, Grace had not wholly agreed with him in this.
“It is a delicate matter, Val dear,” she had said, gently, “and it must
be handled delicately.”
For Valentine had a way of rushing at things too suddenly.
He was so honest himself, he hardly understood the meaning of
diplomacy, and Grace not infrequently had to stand between people and
his blunt truth.
“It is an abominable business,” Val had said, hotly; and the matter
had dropped, to be revived only when the brother and sister met at the
railway station to start on their return journey to Dynechester.
Grace could see then that her brother was greatly upset by his
interview with Miss Pennington, and her homecoming was a little spoiled
by the fear of what would happen when Val and Sir Mark should meet.
It was with relief, therefore, that she learned from her servants that
Sir Mark was absent from Sunstead, and she gave herself up to the
pleasure of the moment, hoping a little against hope that things might
shape themselves better, and that the worst might be averted.