CAPTAIN DALTON.
We have said that Tony Dalton--tall, dark, and handsome Tony, the
pattern officer of his corps--had promised little Netty Trelawney an
Indian necklet. He had duly called with it, and clasped round the
neck of the slender girl a gold Champac necklace from Delhi, and it
is difficult for those even acquainted with the _chef-d'œuvres_ of
the first European jewellers, to imagine the beautiful nature of
these necklaces, so called from the flowers whose petals they
resemble.
'I know not how to thank you, Captain Dalton, for your kindness to
Netty,' said the beautiful widow, with her brightest smile, 'it is
much too valuable a present for a child.'
'She will not always be a child, and in the years to come----'
'The years to come; she is barely nine, and at twenty it is difficult
to think of what life may be at thirty--still more at fifty,' said
she, with a curious emphasis, as her eyelids drooped.
'But, like myself, you are not yet thirty,' said Dalton, 'hence we
are both a long way off fifty.'
After this he rode over occasionally from the camp--it was rather an
idle time with him then, before the spring drills of the next year
commenced--and he seemed rapidly to establish himself at the Grange
as a friend, and on a better basis than the younger man, poor Jerry
Wilmot, had done, for the latter name was off even the lady's
visitors' list now.
In life and history passages seem to repeat themselves; thus, just as
Dalton arrived one evening, he heard, through the open window, the
voice of Laura Trelawney singing the old song before referred to, and
with the strain there came many a memory he had been striving to
forget.
'Strange!' he muttered; 'that song again!'
Sweet, clear, and sad, as if it was meant for him, and him alone, her
voice seemed to come floating to him in liquid melody, in pain and
pathos.
Then he heard some merry voice, with which he was familiar; and as he
was ushered into the pretty drawing-room, wherein Jerry met his doom,
for a man who was evidently fast conceiving a _tendresse_ for the
brilliant Mrs. Trelawney, it was curious that he should feel a kind
of relief--a kind of protection for himself, or from committing
himself too far--in the casual presence of Alison Cheyne and Bevil
Goring.
The former smiled brightly, and gave Bevil a glance of intelligence
as Dalton was ushered in. It was evidently, both thought, becoming a
case, and Alison was already beginning to see herself a prospective
bridesmaid and Bevil groomsman.
'How curious you should all three visit me just at the same time,'
said Mrs. Trelawney.
'I was visiting my poor,' said Alison.
'And came to comfort the widow and orphan on the way.'
'Have you many recipients of your bounty, Miss Cheyne?' said Dalton,
for lack of something else to say.
'I have little in my power; but they are all so grateful and so good.'
'Ah!' said Mrs. Trelawney, 'I don't take so charitable a view of
human nature as you do, child; if the poor are generally virtuous, it
is because they have not the guineas to be wicked with.'
'One of your wild speeches, Mrs. Trelawney, I hope,' said Goring; 'my
guineas are few--thus I have a fellow-feeling.'
And, leaving the last visitor and their hostess to discuss the point
_tête-à-tête_, the lovers strolled into the now somewhat desolate
garden, where the fallen leaves lay thick; but their own emotions
seemed to brighten it with all the flowers that ever grew in Eden,
and with the walks they were pretty familiar with now.
'And so you were dining _en famille_ at old Cadbury's place?' said
Goring, as he drew her hand over his arm and retained it there. 'Was
it a slow affair, darling?'
'Utterly slow,' said Alison, with a sigh, while looking into his face
with smiling eyes.
'Tell me all about it?'
'There is nothing to tell,' replied Alison, feeling the while
terribly conscious that there was far too much if inferences were to
be drawn; but she shrank from giving pain to her lover by relating
her father's desires and bluntly-expressed wishes, though she feared
that Bevil was quite sharp enough to suspect more than he or she
admitted, else whence his questions.
And now, lover-like, their conversation, interesting only to
themselves, drifted rapidly into the never-ending topic of their own
passionate regard for each other, their future hopes, and certainly
most vague plans, while dusk was closing round them--the soft
semi-darkness of an autumnal night; yet it was full of distant
sounds, and not a few sweet scents that mingled with the heavy odour
of the fallen leaves.
Alison had tied a little laced handkerchief over her hair, and her
eyes were beaming upward, sweetly and coquettishly, as they met the
glances of her lover, who thought she looked like the sweetest
picture ever painted, especially when her long lashes rested on the
paleness of her cheek when she cast them down.
'May I see you home when the time comes?' he asked.
'Not for worlds, Bevil darling.'
'It is so dark.'
'But Daisy Prune is to call for me, and we know all the roads and
lanes hereabout as well as if we had made them.'
They were very, very happy just then, these two--happy in the
security of each other's love, and could little foresee the turmoil
and misery a little time was to bring forth for both.
By the light of a softly-shaded lamp the other pair were
_tête-à-tête_ in the drawing-room, maintaining a curious and
disjointed conversation, as if some unuttered or unutterable secret
loaded the tongue of each; and, truth to tell, the officer, who had
led his men to the storming of more than one hill-fort on the vast
slopes of the Hindoo Koosh--who had been wont to pot his tiger and
stick his furious pig in the jungle--who had been all over India,
from the Sand Heads of the Hooghly to the gates of Cabul--if he had
now come on a love-making errand, was the less self-possessed of the
two.
Mrs. Trelawney possessed the rare art of dressing in such dainty
perfection as never woman did before, he thought; and all her
toilettes seemed to harmonise so much with the time and place in
which he saw them, and with his own taste.
As they conversed on indifferent subjects, a strange and subtle
magnetism drew their eyes to meet from time to time in a manner that
expressed or admitted much, and yet no particular word of
regard--still less of love--escaped Dalton; but little Netty by her
remarks sometimes made both feel very awkward, and wish that she was
relegated to the region of the nursery.
The child, encouraged by his tender manner to herself--more than all,
her beautiful necklet--often hung with confidence and familiarity
about him, and with pretty pertinacity questioned him about his past
adventures, where he had been and what he had seen, if he ever had a
wife, and much more to the same effect, as if his past life were of
interest to her, as it was no doubt beginning to be to her mamma; and
on this occasion, by a simple remark, she made both feel quite
uncomfortable.
Resting her elbows on his knee, and planting her little face between
her hands, she looked up in his eyes and said,
'Captain Dalton, do you come to see me or mamma?'
'I come to see both,' replied Dalton, smiling as he stroked her
bright hair.
'But you talk so much more to mamma than to me.'
'You are a little girl, Netty; well?'
'That I think--I think----'
'What? A penny for your thoughts.'
'That you are in love with mamma. Is it so?'
Strange to say, at this remark Dalton grew very pale, while Mrs.
Trelawney, though she coloured considerably, laughed excessively at
the situation thus created, but was rather surprised that Dalton
failed to take advantage of it, even to pay her, as he could easily
have done, a well-turned compliment.
'Netty seems to have quite a matrimonial interest in you, Captain
Dalton,' said she, still laughing.
'Yes; she has more than once asked me if I ever had a wife.'
Mrs. Trelawney, while her own bright eyes were partly hidden by the
shade on the globe of the lamp, was keenly scrutinizing the
half-averted face of her admirer.
'You have not been always a woman-hater?' she asked.
'I never was--far from it--the reverse,' said he, hastily.
'And yet in all those years you have never fallen in love?'
'I never thought of it till I came back to England. One does not
think of marriage up country in the land of brown squaws.'
'And so you never thought of it?'
'Never.'
Dalton was colouring deeply now, and she extracted his answers from
him 'as if she had been extracting his teeth,' as she afterwards told
Alison.
'Now, however, under better auspices, and at home, I may wish to
change,' he began.
'Change what?' interrupted Mrs. Trelawney, with a curious sharpness
of tone; 'to reform? I have read that we often hear of a woman
marrying a man to reform him, but that no one ever heard of a man
marrying a woman to reform _her_.'
Dalton felt that his love-making, if love-making it was, took a
strange turn now, and that she was infusing banter or rebuke into the
conversation.
'I cannot comprehend, Mrs. Trelawney, how it is that when I am with
you,' said Dalton, gravely, with a soft and half-broken voice, 'there
comes back upon me much of my past life, or rather a portion of it,
that I would fain forget.'
'How is this?'
'Because you have some strange and magnetic influence over me, to
which I have not as yet the key. I have sought to bury, to forget
that past I refer to--to live it down----'
'I have no wish to pry into your secrets, Captain Dalton, nor to act
the part of a Father Confessor, so pray don't confide in me,' said
Mrs. Trelawney, with a--for her--curious hardness in her usually
sweet voice. 'I have read somewhere that life itself, from the
cradle to the grave, is but a kind of gloaming hour, wherein mortals
grope dimly after happiness, and find it not.'
'I would that the happiness of my future life lay in your hands, Mrs.
Trelawney,' said Dalton, with an expression of eye and tone of voice
there was no mistaking.
Mrs. Trelawney did not reply, but she smiled with a curiously mingled
expression of triumph, pleasure, and, strange to say, disdain,
rippling over her bright face--emotions to which we shall ere long
have the key.
Her cheeks flushed, her lips curved with her smile, and for a moment
her whole mien was that of a young girl delighted with flattery.
Dalton was about to say something more, when the sudden disdain that
replaced the first expression prevented him, and she said, laughingly,
'I can give the ladies a capital addition to the creed, Captain
Dalton.'
'What is it?'
'Never to love any man, but make all men love you; as the song has
it, "Love not--the thing you love may change;" but here come Miss
Cheyne and Captain Goring.'
'A strange woman--an enigma, indeed,' thought Dalton, who had an
unpleasant suspicion that she was secretly deriding the avowal he
had, perhaps, been on the point of making.
'Oh, Alison,' she said, suddenly, 'you remember Bella Chevenix, the
handsome, dashing girl, who always wears rich dresses, but of green
or grey tints, a muslin fichu, with a yellow rose in it, and so
forth. You have heard what has happened, I suppose?'
'That she was engaged, or nearly so, to Colonel Graves?'
'Yes--but he has behaved disgracefully.'
'How?'
'What do you think her family found out?' she asked, addressing
Dalton, to his surprise.
'That he was no colonel at all, perhaps,' said he.
'Oh, worse than that.'
'Worse!--what could be worse?'
'I do not care to think, Mrs. Trelawney--not knowing the
parties--that he was a criminal, perhaps.'
'Worse still.'
'Good heavens, Laura!' exclaimed Alison.
'And he proposed for her?'
'Yes; was it not horrible, Captain Dalton?'
'Don't appeal to me,' he replied, abruptly.
'Bella was at a ball in Willis's Rooms, dancing with Wilmot, of
Captain Dalton's regiment, while the colonel was there _vis-à-vis_
with some one else, and Jerry, in the most casual way, asked her if
she knew Mrs. Graves. Bella thought he was talking nonsense, but it
turned out to be truth, as there is a Mrs. Graves; but, as Bella is a
professional beauty, luckily, her affections were not too deeply
engaged. However, such affairs are a warning to us all in society.
Don't you think so, Captain Dalton?'
But for the shaded lamp, the sudden paleness that overspread the
handsome face of Dalton would have been apparent to all at this
anecdote of Mrs. Trelawney, who saw that his eyes drooped, and that
not even his heavy moustache concealed the quiver of his lip as he
took his hat and prepared to retire.
'How strange Captain Dalton looks!' whispered Alison to Goring, as
they were parting.
'Yes; poor Tony has become a changed man, moody and irritable, since
he has known your friend, Mrs. Trelawney. He is no longer the quiet,
gentle, and easy-going fellow he used to be. And now, once again,
good-bye, my darling.'
And with a pressure of the hand, a kiss snatched, all the sweeter for
being so, they parted, knowing when and where they were to meet again.
Whatever was the secret, unrevealed yet, that hung on Dalton's heart,
he left the house of Mrs. Trelawney with a heaviness of soul and
gloom of manner that were but too apparent to Bevil Goring. There
was a baffled and dismayed expression in his face that made him all
unlike his old soldierly self, and on his lips there was an unuttered
vow that he would go near Chilcote Grange no more--a vow, however,
that he found himself unable to keep.