News reaches the servants' hall sooner than it does the drawing-room,
and before long it was known at Brackley that a wedding was in the air.
Cook let it off in triumph one day at dinner. She had been very silent
for some time, and then began to smile, till Morris, the butler, who had
noted the peculiarities of this lady for years, suddenly
exclaimed,--"Now then, what is it? Out with it, cook!"
"Oh, don't ask me; it's nothing."
"Yes, it is," said the butler, with a wink directed all round the table.
"What are you laughing at?"
"It does seem so rum," cried cook, laughing silently till her face was
peony-like in hue.
"Well, you might give us a bit, cook," said the major's valet. "What is
it?"
"They've--they've found the focus again," cried cook, laughing now quite
hysterically.
"Eh? Where?" cried Morris.
"Over at The Warren."
"What," cried the butler severely; "made it up? Cook, I should be sorry
to say unpleasant things to any lady, but if you were a man, I should
tell you that you were an old fool."
"Well, I'm sure!" cried cook, "that's polite, when I heered it only this
morning from the butcher, who'd just come straight from The Warren,
where he heered it all."
"What? That Captain Rolph had made it up with our Miss Glynne?
Rubbish, woman, rubbish! After the way he pitched the poor girl over
and went off shooting, that could never be."
"If people would not be quite so clever," said cook, addressing the
assembled staff of servants round the table, "and would not jump at
things before they know, perhaps they'd get on a little better in life.
As if I didn't know that she'd never marry now. I said as the captain
had made up matters with his cousin, that carrotty-headed girl who came
to be bridesmaid."
"You don't mean it," cried Morris.
"It's a fact," said cook, "and it's to come off at once."
"What, her? Disgraceful!"
Cook smiled again, with the quiet confidence of knowledge, and ignoring
the butler's remark, she fixed the maids in turn with her eye.
"Mrs Rolph has taken a furnished house in London for three months, and
they're going to it next week, and as Perkins' man says, it do seem
hard, after getting on for two years without delivering regular joints
at the house for them to be off again."
"Well," said Mason, Glynne's maid, contemptuously, "I wish the lady joy
of him. A low, common, racing and betting man. I wouldn't marry him if
he was made of gold."
"Right, Mrs Mason," said Morris. "I don't know what Nature was thinking
about to make him an officer. No disrespect meant to those in the
stables, but to my mind, if Captain Rolph--and I saw a deal of him when
he was here--had found his--his--"
"Focus," suggested cook, and there was a roar in which the butler
joined, by way of smoothing matters over with his fellow-servant.
"I meant to say level, cook. He would have been a helper, or the driver
of a cab. He was never fit for our young lady."
The servants' hall tattle proved to be quite correct, for within a week
The Warren was vacant again, Rolph being back at barracks, and Mrs Rolph
and her niece at a little house in one of the streets near Lowndes
Square, busily occupied in preparing the lady's _trousseau_, for the
marriage was to take place within a month.
It was not long after that the news reached The Firs, and Lucy became
very thoughtful, and ended by feeling glad. She hardly knew why, but
she was pleased at the idea of Captain Rolph being married and out of
the way.
And now, by no means for the first time, a great longing came over Lucy
to see Glynne Day again. She knew that the family had been for a year
and a half in Italy, and only heard by accident that they had returned
to Brackley, so quietly was everything arranged. Then, as the days
glided by, and she heard no more news, the longing to see Glynne again
intensified.
She felt the tears come into her eyes and trickle down her cheeks as she
thought of the terrible catastrophe--never even alluded to at The Firs--
a horror which had saved her from being Rolph's wife, but at what a
cost!
"Poor Moray!" she sighed more than once in her solitary communings.
"Poor Glynne! and they might have been by now happy husband and wife.
It is too horrible--too dreadful. How could Fate be so cruel!"
Lucy shivered at times as she mentally called up the careworn,
beautiful, white face of her old friend, who had never been seen outside
the walls of the house, so far as she could learn, since her return.
And at last, trembling the while, as if her act were a sin, instead of
true womanly love and charity, she wrote a simple little letter to
Glynne, asking to see her, for that she loved her very dearly, and that
the past was nothing to them, and ought not to separate two who had
always been dear friends.
She posted the letter secretly, feeling that mother and brother would
oppose the act, and that day the rustic postman was half-a-crown the
richer upon his promising to retain and deliver into her own hands any
letter addressed to her which might arrive.
Then she waited patiently for days in the grim, cheerless home, where
her brother seemed to be settling down into a thoughtful, dreamy man,
who was ageing rapidly, and whose eyes always looked full of some
terrible trouble, which was eating away his life, while, if possible,
Mrs Alleyne looked older, thinner, and more careworn than of yore.
Oldroyd came at intervals professionally, but there was a peculiar
distance observed between him and Lucy, who treated him with petulant
angry resentment, and he was reserved and cold.
But his visits did no good. There were no walks with the doctor, no
garden flowers bloomed at the astronomer's touch. Alleyne studied
harder than ever, and his name rose in reputation among the scientific,
but he received no visitors, paid no calls, and only asked for one thing
from those of his household--to be let alone.
A week had elapsed before the postman, with a great deal of mysterious
action, slipped a note into Lucy's hand, making her run to her room
trembling and feeling guilty, to hold the letter open, illegible for the
tears which veiled her eyes.