LORD ASPENDELL'S DAUGHTER.
When the brilliant stream of carriages had poured out of Apsley Gate;
when the Serpentine blushed redly in the low western sunlight; when
the fashionable world had gone homeward in barouches and landaus,
britzskas and phaetons, to dash through the dusky park two hours hence
in tiny miniature broughams, with lamps that flash like meteors through
the night; when a solemn twilight calm had come down upon the dusky
greensward, and the tinkling of a sheep-bell made a rustic sound in
the stillness; when a town-bred Gray might have sat beside the placid
water meditating an elegy in a West-end park,--a lumbering old chariot
was very often to be seen creeping up and down the Lady's Mile. It
was a shabby old carriage, with a ponderous drab hammer-cloth which
the moths had eaten away in bare patches here and there, a faded old
carriage which might have been bright and splendid long ago, when
lovely Margaret, Countess of Blessington, was to be seen in the Lady's
Mile, and genial Lord Palmerston was called Cupid. But now in the still
gloaming this dismal equipage might have been mistaken for some phantom
chariot haunting the scene of departed glories. The pale face looking
out at the window would have assisted the delusion, so lifeless was its
changeless calm--a beautiful, melancholy, patrician face. You might
have fancied you beheld the unreal image of a forgotten belle, a ghost
of beauty gliding in her shadowy chariot beneath the spreading branches
which had looked down upon her triumphs years and years ago.
You might have thought this if you were prone to sentimental musings
in the tender twilight; but if you were a sober, practical person, you
would most likely have found out who the lady was, and all about her.
She was Lady Cecil Chudleigh, orphan daughter of Lord Aspendell; and
she was the unpaid companion, the unrecompensed dependant upon the
elderly dowager to whom the phantom chariot belonged, and who sat far
back in the vehicle, while her beautiful niece looked sadly out upon
the rosy bosom of the Serpentine.
In all the world Lady Cecil had no other friend or protector than
the dowager, who was the widow of an Anglo-Indian general, and only
surviving sister of the dead Countess of Aspendell. The Anglo-Indian
warrior had distinguished himself at more places ending with "pore"
and "bad" than can be numerated without weariness, had lived a life
of reckless and barbaric extravagance in despite of all feminine
remonstrance, and had died, leaving his widow very little except
his pension and a house-full of Indian shawls, embroidered muslins,
sandal-wood boxes, beetle-baskets, and Trichinopoly jewelry.
After the General's death, Mrs. MacClaverhouse--the warrior was
of Scottish extraction, and claimed kindred with the hero of
Killiecrankie,--after her husband's death the widow had sold the lease
of the great house in Portland Place, in whose pillared dining-room
the General had been wont to entertain all the notabilities of the
three presidencies, and beneath whose sheltering roof he had staggered
half tipsy to bed every night for the last ten years of his life. She
sold the lease, and the furniture, and the very curious old ports,
and constantias, and madeiras; but she kept all the bangles and
sandal-wood, the beetles' wings and gorgeous scarfs, and shawls and
table-covers, and a very nice little selection from the rare old wines,
and a small stock of the plate, and glass, and china, and table-linen,
which the magnificent General had chosen, of such splendid quality; and
with these she retired to furnished apartments on the quietest side
of Dorset Square. She kept the chariot in which she had driven and
visited for the last twenty years of her life, and the fat grey horses
that had drawn it; but she sent the equipage to a livery-stable in the
neighbourhood of her new abode, and she bargained with the proprietor
for a sober coachman at five-and-twenty shillings a week; a coachman
who wore the stable-yard livery, and was sometimes almost disreputable
about the legs and feet.
And then one day she went down to Brighton, where the Earl of Aspendell
and his only daughter had been living for the last tea years, is a tiny
cottage on the Dyke Road, with a little grass-plat before the windows,
and dimity curtains fluttering from the open casements--so poor, so
friendless, so dignified in their unpretending seclusion. There was
very little trouble connected with pecuniary misfortune which Cecil
Chudleigh had not known. The extravagance of a father's youth, repented
of too late; the wild follies of a brother's mad career--never repented
of at all, but cut suddenly short by a fatal false step on a frozen
mountain-side, amidst the desolate grandeur of the Alps; a cheerless
home; a mother's slow decay, half physical, half mental; and the weary
task of beguiling the monotonous days of a ruined and remorseful
spendthrift: sorrows such as these had darkened the young life, and
hushed the silvery laugh, and transformed the girl of seventeen into a
woman drooping under the burden of a woman's heaviest cares.
It was only when the Earl of Aspendell and his folly were buried
together in a corner of the little hill-side churchyard where Captain
Tattersall the loyal, and Phœbe Hessel the daring, sleep so quietly;
it was only when Cecil was quite desolate, and sat with the _Times_
newspaper in her lap, staring hopelessly at the advertisements, and
wondering whether she was clever enough to be a governess,--it was
then only that Marion MacClaverhouse thought fit to trouble herself
about the fate of her dead sister's only surviving child. Her
brother-in-law's death happened "fortunately," as she said herself,
in the Brighton season; and as she had no invitation for the current
month, Mrs. MacClaverhouse decided on paying a brief visit to Brighton.
The widow was of a prudent turn of mind, and contrived to save money
out of her limited income;--for a rainy day, she said. She had been
saving odd pounds and shillings and sixpences for this anticipated wet
weather ever since her marriage, and as yet Jupiter Pluvius had been
pitiful, and had restrained his fury.
She went to the little Dyke-Road cottage to see Cecil Chudleigh--to
inspect her, it may be said, so sharply did she scrutinise, so closely
did she interrogate the girl. But Lady Cecil's mind was too candid to
shrink from questioning; and she thought her aunt most nobly generous
when that lady proposed to adopt her henceforward as companion, reader,
amanuensis, and prop and comfort to her declining years. Lady Cecil
certainly did not happen to know that the widow had been for some time
on the look-out for a suitable person as companion and drudge, and had
only failed to suit herself because, in her own words, "the impertinent
creatures wanted such preposterous salaries, and asked if I allowed
port at luncheon, as their physicians had ordered it. Their physicians,
indeed! a dispensary-surgeon, or the parish apothecary, I should
think!" cried the widow, impatiently; for she was an energetic and
plain-speaking person, who was always proclaiming her want of "common
patience" with the failings and follies of her fellow-creatures.
Lady Cecil went home with the dowager, and ministered very patiently
to her wants and pleasures, and read the newspapers to her, and beat
down the tradespeople, and disputed about stray entries of mutton-chops
and half-pounds of tea that had or had not been supplied, and counted
the glass, and was responsible for the spoons, and trembled when the
widow's own parlour-maid chipped a morsel out of one of the General's
tumblers; for was it not her duty to see that neither glass nor china
was broken, and that the silver _entrèe_-dishes, salvers, butter-boats,
and tea-trays were rubbed with the hand only, and not scratched and
smudged with a greasy, gritty leather? Cecil's own pretty pink palms
helped to clean the dowager's plate sometimes when there was a
festival in Dorset Square.
Mrs. MacClaverhouse was very fond of society, and entertained
innumerable elderly warriors and judges of the Sudder, with their
wives and daughters, in her stuffy little dining-room. The splendid
silver and glass were set forth, the rare old wines were brought out
very often in the London season, and Lady Cecil bowed under the burden
of a new kind of care, and went to sleep oppressed by the terror of a
tablespoon missing from the plate-basket, or a butter-boat that had not
been put away.
Sometimes she felt a sick yearning for the old monotonous days with her
father; for when they were saddest there had been a tender quiet in
their sadness. In the new life there might be no sorrow, but then there
was such continual worry. The burdens laid upon her were very small
ones, but then there were so many of them; and every day it seemed as
if the last straw would be added to the heap, and she must sink down in
the dust and die.
The dowager was not unkind to her niece; for she was too much a woman
of the world not to know when she had a good servant, and to rejoice
in the fact that she possessed that treasure at the cheapest possible
rate. She was not unkind, but she was pitiless. She called Cecil "my
dear," and bought her pretty dresses--pretty dresses that were to be
had cheap after stock-taking at the West-end haberdashers', dainty
gauzes with the bloom off them, and muslins with soiled edges she gave
her good food, and persuaded her to take half-glasses of tawny port,
which the girl, in her secret soul, thought more nasty than physic; but
if Lady Cecil had been dying, Mrs. MacClaverhouse would have come to
her death-bed to demand the inventory of the china, and to ask if it
were six or eight shell-and-thread pattern salt-spoons that had been
intrusted to the parlour-maid for the last dinner-party.
For three years Lady Cecil had lived on the dullest side of Dorset
Square, and counted the glasses and spoons, and battled with the
Marylebone tradesmen, and ridden in the phantom chariot. In all those
three years there had been only one break in the drudgery of her life,
only one glimpse of sunshine; but then it was such a dazzling burst of
light, such a revelation of paradise. Ah, let my pen fall lightly on
the paper as I write the story of that tender dream.
It was the habit of Mrs. MacClaverhouse to spend as much of her time
in visiting as was thoroughly agreeable to her acquaintance. She
liked visiting because it was pleasant and cheap; but she was too
wise a woman to wear out her welcome, and no one had ever uttered
the obnoxious word 'sponge' in conjunction with her name. She was
lively and agreeable--rather vulgar perhaps, but then genteel people
are permitted to be vulgar--clever, well dressed, of high family, and
acknowledged position, and she gave cosy little dinners in the season;
so there were many houses in which she and her niece were favourite
guests in the cheery winter days when an old country-house is such a
paradise. Poor Cecil found herself sometimes looking anxiously after
other people's spoons and forks in these pleasant holiday times, or
taking a mental photograph of a cold sirloin or a raised pie as it was
removed from the breakfast-table; for one of her home duties was to
register the appearances of joints and poultry before they descended
into the territory of the landlady, who might or might not be honest.
Mrs. MacClaverhouse made a point of never quite believing in people's
honesty.
"Don't tell me that I have known them for years and never known them
rob me!" exclaimed the widow. "They may have robbed me without my
knowing it, or they may not have robbed me because I never gave them
the opportunity; and they may begin to rob me to-morrow if they get the
chance. Look at the Bishop of Northlandshire's butler, who had lived
with him thirteen years, and ran away with five hundred pounds' worth
of plate in the fourteenth. Look at Sir Harry Hinchliffe's valet, who
was such a faithful creature that his master left him an annuity of two
hundred a year; which he would have enjoyed very much, no doubt, if he
hadn't stripped the house while his benefactor's corpse was lying in
it, and had not been transported for life in consequence. Don't talk to
me about honesty, Cecil. If Mrs. Krewson is an honest woman, why do her
eyes sparkle so when I order a large joint, and why are two quarts of
Bisque barely enough for six?"
In the autumn Mrs. MacClaverhouse generally retired to some marine
retreat unfrequented by cockneys or fashionables, where lodgings were
to be had on reasonable terms, and where she could recruit herself and
her niece for the winter campaign.
"I really don't see why you shouldn't marry well, Cecil,--though Heaven
knows what will become of the General's diamond-cut glass when you
leave me,--and I sometimes wonder how it is you haven't made a good
match before now," said the widow. "I think it's that cold manner of
yours that keeps the men off; and then you don't talk slang, as some
of the women do nowadays. You're not dashing, you know, my love; but
you are very handsome, and elegant, and accomplished; and if any one of
those flippant minxes can sing Rossini's music or write an inventory of
china as well as you, I'll eat her--pearl-powder and all," added Mrs.
Mac, with a wry face.
It was very true that as yet no pretender of any importance had
appeared for Lady Cecil Chudleigh's hand. It might be that lovers were
kept off by the cold reserve of her manners, the shrinking dislike to
take any prominent part in society which is apt to affect those whom
poverty has always kept more or less at a disadvantage, or it might be
in consequence of that panic in the matrimonial market of which we have
heard so much in these latter days.
The dowager had been quite sincere when she spoke of her niece's
beauty. There were few handsomer faces to be seen in the Lady's Mile
than that which looked wistfully out of the phantom chariot. It
was a pale face--pale with no muddled sickly whiteness, or bilious
yellow, but that beautiful pallor which is so rare a charm,--a pensive
patrician face, with a slender aquiline nose, and dark hazel eyes.
People liked to see Lady Cecil in their rooms, even when she wore her
plainest white muslin, and kept herself most persistently in a shadowy
corner, so unmistakable were her rank and breeding. Young men who
complained that she had so little to say for herself, and lamented the
absence of a mysterious quality called "go" in her manners, confessed
that her profile was more beautiful than the finest cameo in the
Louvre, and her style unexceptionable.
"If polygamy were admissible, I'd marry Lady Cecil to-morrow," remarked
a gentleman of the genus Swell. "She is the woman of women to sit at
the head of a fellow's table and do him credit in society; but if I
were going home half-seas-over after a four-in-hand club-dinner at
Richmond, I'd as soon have Lady Macbeth sitting up for me as Lord
Aspendell's daughter. Not that she'd be coarse or low, like the
Scotchwomen, you know--not a bit of it. She'd receive me with a stately
curtsey, and freeze me to death with her classic profile. Egad! when
you come to think of it, you know, old fellow, there must be a hitch
somewhere in the matrimonial law. Society doesn't confine a man to one
horse; society doesn't compel him to ride his park-hack across country,
or harness his racing stud to his drag; and yet society limits an
unhappy beast to one wife; and if he marries a nice little indulgent
creature who won't look black at him when he goes home late or smokes
in the dining-room, the odds are that she'll freeze his marrow by
dropping her h's and talking of her par--who was something in the
soap-boiling way--at an archbishop's state-dinner."
In the second autumn of Lady Cecil's dependence the dowager carried her
niece and her parlour-maid to a pretty little village on the Hampshire
coast--a sleepy little village, where the fruit was blown off the trees
in farmers' orchards by the fresh breath of ocean breezes--a village
nestling under the shadow of brown, sun-burnt hills, a long, straggling
street of rustic cottages, with here and there a quaint old gabled
dwelling-place of a better class, shut in by moss-grown walls, and
nestling in such gardens as are to be seen on that south-western coast.
Very few cockney visitors ever invaded the drowsy hamlet of Fortinbras,
where the watering-place _habitué_ would have looked in vain for
the cliffs or the jetty, the brazen band and the buff slippers, the
Ethiopian serenaders and the wheel of fortune--so dear to his cockney
soul. At Fortinbras there were only two bathing-machines, and the sole
attraction which the place possessed for sightseers was a grand old
Norman castle, whose mighty keep towered high above the farmyards and
orchards, and within whose walls red-shirted cricketers met on sunny
summer afternoons, and whither village Sunday-school children came now
and then to feast on buns and tea.
The coast of Fortinbras was low and flat and weedy, and sometimes a
faint odour of stale seaweed floated up from the shining sands on
the evening air. Your cockney would have fled aghast from the place
as "un'ealthy;" but for Lady Cecil the rustic village and the weedy
coast had an odour of Longfellow and Tennyson that was delicious to
her soul, and she felt as if she would have been unutterably happy if
she could have bidden an eternal farewell to Dorset Square and Mrs.
MacClaverhouse's plate-chest and china-closet, to take up her abode
under the shelter of the Norman castle and the grassy hills for the
rest of her life.
She wandered alone on the wet sands while her aunt took an after-dinner
nap on the first evening of their arrival. She lingered by the cool
grey sea, and watched the changing glories of the low western sky in a
kind of rapture.
"And there are people who like Dorset Square better than this," she
thought. "Oh, dear, dear lonely place, how I love you!"
Was it only a sensuous delight in the beautiful sky, the cool breezy
atmosphere, the rustic calm? or was it because the happiest days of her
life were to be spent on this weedy shore? If a coming sorrow casts
its ominous shadow on the foredoomed creature who is to suffer it,
should no prophetic sunshine herald the coming of a joy? Lady Cecil was
happier that August evening than she ever remembered having been in her
life, and there was a faint bloom on her cheeks, like the pinky heart
of a wild rose, when she went home to the pretty cottage, half grange,
half villa, which Mrs. MacClaverhouse had hired for the season--"for
a mere song, my dear; and a duck, for which that extortionate Jiffles
would have the audacity to charge me four shillings, I get here for
half-a-crown," wrote the dowager to a friend and confidante.
Cecil found her aunt in very high spirits.
"You've heard me talk a good deal of my husband's nephew, Hector
Gordon, the only son of Andrew Gordon, the great contractor. Yes, I
know that a person who contracts seems something horribly vulgar,
and that's what Margaret MacClaverhouse's grand friends said when
she married him. But Andrew Gordon was as polished a gentleman as
ever sat in parliament--and he did sit there, my dear, and he does to
this day; and Scotchmen, whose pride has a good deal that's noble in
it, don't think it a more degrading thing to make money honestly by
straightforward commerce than to get rich by time-bargains and rigging
the market. I know there are people to this day who are inclined to
look down upon Hector, and when he joined the Eleventh there was one
man--a freckled, flaxen-haired creature with weak eyes, whose father
was a money-lending attorney--who tried to get up a laugh against our
boy by asking some questions about Andrew's business transactions. I
don't know _what_ Hector said or did, Cecil; but I know the young man
never tried to sneer at him again, and sold out shortly afterwards
because his sight was too weak for India. You've heard me talk about
the boy till you are almost tired of his name, I dare say, my dear."
Cecil smiled. She was thinking how many of Mrs. MacClaverhouse's pet
subjects she had grown weary of within the two years of her slavery,
and that this womanly talk of the favourite nephew was the least
obnoxious of them.
"It is only natural that you should be fond of him," she said.
"You'd have some reason to say so, Cecil, if you'd known him when
he was four years old," answered her aunt. "At four I think he was
the loveliest child that ever was created. Such blue eyes! not your
wishy-washy, milk-and-water colour that some parents call blue, but
as deep and dark as that purple convolvulus in the vase yonder." And
then the widow went on to relate to Cecil the very familiar legend of
how poor Margaret went off into a consumption soon after the infant's
birth, and how she, being alone in England at the time, took up her
abode in Andrew Gordon's house, to superintend the rearing of the
child,--"which saved my expenses elsewhere, and was doing a favour to
the poor helpless widower," said Mrs. MacClaverhouse parenthetically;
"and then, you know, my dear, the General, being particularly fond
of children, like most people who have none of their own, took a
tremendous fancy to his poor sister's child; so nothing would do but
that the boy must be continually in Portland Place whenever his uncle
was in England, and I'm sure I wonder that darling child's constitution
was not completely ruined by the mangoes and chutnee and raging hot
curries the General allowed him to eat. And when Hector was at Oxford,
and my husband had settled down after the last Affghan war, it was just
the same. I think the young man spent as much of his time in Portland
Place as at the University; and it was the General who put a military
career into his head, much to his father's annoyance; for Andrew would
have liked him to go into the house and preach about poor-laws, and
national surveys, and main-drainage and such-like. However, whatever
Hector wished was sure to be done sooner or later; for I do believe
there never was a young man so completely spoiled by every body
belonging to him; and the end of it was that his father bought him a
commission in the 11th Plungers, as you know."
Yes, the story was a very old one for Cecil. She had listened with
unfailing patience to her aunt's prosy discourses about Hector Gordon;
and as the dowager was generally in a good temper when she talked
of him, her niece had no unpleasant association with his name. But
familiar as his graces and merits had become to her, through the
praises of his aunt, Cecil felt no special interest in the young
Captain. She knew that he had been a good son and a brave soldier, but
then there are so many good sons and brave soldiers in the world. She
knew that he had distinguished himself in India by doing something
desperate in connection with a fort; but then young men in India are
always doing desperate things in connection with forts. If ever any
image of Hector Gordon presented itself to Lady Cecil's imagination, it
took the shape of a clumsy Scotchman, with high cheekbones and sandy
hair. Mrs. MacClaverhouse called his hair auburn; but then that word
auburn has such a wide signification.
Cecil listened to the old, old story of Hector's childhood to-night as
patiently as she had been wont to listen any time within the last two
years; but even calm queenly Lady Cecil Chudleigh was a little startled
when the dowager exclaimed:
"And now, my dear, I am going to surprise you. Hector Gordon will be
here to breakfast with us to-morrow morning----"
"Auntie!"
"He will arrive with the London papers, at a quarter before twelve
o'clock. We must have fried soles, and mutton cutlets, and Worcester
sauce, and potted game, and all those coarse high-seasoned things that
men like; and you can put a little fruit on the table to make it look
pretty; which, of course, will do for dessert afterwards; and you will
have to give out the tea and coffee service, and half-a-dozen large
forks. I only hope and pray the servants here are honest. If it wasn't
for that tiresome lion prancing upon every atom of silver, one might
persuade servants and people that it was all electro----"
"But, auntie," said Cecil, heedless of the housekeeping details, "I
thought Captain Gordon was in India."
"And so did I, my dear: but it seems he has come home on sick
leave--not ill, he tells me, but only knocked up by climate and hard
work; and he went to Dorset Square yesterday morning unannounced, on
purpose to surprise me--the consequence of which was that he found me
out of the way, as people generally do when they plan those romantic
surprises; and he has brought me an Indian shawl, because I am so fond
of Indian shawls, he says. That's always the way with people. If they
see you suffering from a plethora of any kind of property, they take
it into their heads that you have a passion for that especial class of
property, and rush to buy you more of it. I've no common patience with
such folly."
Perhaps Mrs. MacClaverhouse said this because it was her habit to be
sharp and unsparing, and she found herself too much inclined to melt
into weak motherly tenderness when she spoke of her nephew. Now the
hero of all the old nursery and schoolboy stories was so near at hand,
Cecil Chudleigh began to think of him a little more seriously than ever
she had done before. He was weak and ill, no doubt, his aunt said, in
spite of his assurances to the contrary; and in that case he must be
kept in the sleepy Hampshire village, and nursed till he was strong
again.
"And you must help to nurse him, Cecil," said the widow; "and if by any
chance he should happen to fall in love with you, be sure you remember
that he's a better match than one out of fifty of the young men you
meet in London--and Heaven knows they are scarce enough nowadays. If
you weren't my sister's own child I wouldn't throw you in his way, for
Hector might marry any woman in England; but at the worst it would
sound well for his wife's name to have a handle to it."
Lady Cecil's face was dyed with a hot, indignant blush.
"I am not the sort of person to be fascinated by Captain Gordon's
money, Aunt MacClaverhouse," she said.
"Perhaps not," answered the old lady, coolly; "but you may fall in love
with him."
Cecil was too angry to answer. That the dowager should talk coolly
of Hector Gordon, the contractor's son, as a great catch for the
descendant of Aspendells and Chudleighs who had helped to vanquish his
countrymen at Flodden, stung the Earl's daughter to the very heart.
She had so little but her grand old lineage left her, that it was
scarcely strange she should be proud of it. There came a time, not many
weeks after this August evening, when she looked back thought what a
delicious thing it must have been to have her name coupled with _his_,
and to be ignorant that there was any wrong in the association.
But to-night she was wounded and indignant, and though she went
out into the kitchen-premises by-and-by to give orders about the
cutlets, and the soles, and the potted meats for the Plunger Captain's
breakfast, her heart was not in the duty, and she sent none of those
little messages to the butcher which a woman would have done who loved
the coming cutlet-consumer. She thought how unpleasant it would be to
have a clumsy Scottish invalid lying on the sofa in the cosy little
drawing-room, where she had hoped to read Tennyson and Owen Meredith
all by herself in the warm, drowsy afternoons. And the time came, and
so soon, when no sofa that Gillow could devise would have seemed soft
enough for so dear a visitor; when every glimmer of sunshine or breath
of summer air in that cosy drawing-room was watched and calculated as
closely as if a valuable life had depended upon the adjustment of the
Venetians, or the opening and shutting of the French windows.
Lady Cecil went out upon the seashore after an early cup of tea on the
morning that was to witness Hector Gordon's arrival. She had arranged
a pile of dewy plums nestling in their dark green leaves, and a basket
of hothouse grapes, with her own hands, for she had the magical touch
whereby some women can impart beauty to common things. She had surveyed
the breakfast-table, and had given orders as to the moment at which the
tea and coffee were to be made, and the fish put into the frying-pan;
and she left a message for her aunt to the effect that she was gone for
a long walk, and would not be home to breakfast. It would be so much
better, she fancied, to leave the widow and her nephew _tête-à-tête_
on this first morning of the soldier's arrival. She had done her duty
conscientiously, and having done it, she went out to breathe the sweet
morning air, and shake off the unpleasant idea of the coming Scotchman.
"I have been tolerably comfortable with my aunt so far," she thought,
"in spite of the spoons and forks; but now I shall only interfere with
her enjoyment of this dreadful Scotchman's society. Oh, papa, papa,
how I miss you, and the dreary little house on the Dyke Road, where we
lived so peacefully together, with all the winds of heaven howling
round us, and rattling our windows in the dead of the night!"
She went under the ponderous archway beneath which a portcullis
still hung, and into the grassy enclosure which had once been the
muster-ground of the castle. At this early hour there were neither
Sunday-school children nor exploring visitors among the old grey ruins.
The fresh sea-breezes fluttered the little plume in Lady Cecil's hat,
and blew all thoughts of vexation out of her mind. She mounted the
winding stair of the keep--a dangerous, treacherous stair, which had
been worn by the tread of mailed feet in the days that were gone, and
the buff boots of excursionists from the Isle of Wight in this present
age. She went to the very top of the great Norman tower, high up above
all grievances about Hector Gordon and his breakfast, and emerged upon
the battlements, a fragile, fluttering little figure, amid that massive
mediæval stonework, whose grey ruin was grander than the most elaborate
glories of modern architecture.
She had heard the whistle of the engine as she entered the castle, and
she imagined that at this moment Hector Gordon must be installed at the
breakfast-table; "devouring chops," she thought, with a contemptuous
little grimace. It is so natural for a girl of nineteen to think meanly
of a man who is below her in social status. To Philip Foley, painting
in his Highbury lodging, and dressed in a threadbare shooting-jacket,
Lady Cecil Chudleigh would have been unspeakably gracious; but for a
scion of the Caledonian plutocracy she had nothing but good-natured
contempt.
"He is an invalid, poor fellow," she thought; "I am sure it is very
wicked of me to think his visit a bore."
She settled matters with her conscience by determining to be very
attentive to the physical comforts of her aunt's favourite.
"I dare say he would like some salmon for dinner," she thought; "I'll
call at the fishmonger's as I go home."
And then she took a volume of Victor Hugo's poetry from her pocket, and
began to read.
The noble verse carried her aloft on its mighty pinions, high up
into some mystic region a million miles above the battlements of the
Norman tower. She had an idea that she could not leave her aunt and
Captain Gordon too long undisturbed on this particular morning, and
she abandoned herself altogether to the delight of her book. It was so
seldom that she was able to entirely forget that there were such things
as silver forks and dishonest servants in the world.
Even to-day she was not allowed to be long unconscious of the outer
world, for when she had been reading about twenty minutes she heard a
voice close beside her exclaim:
"I am so glad you like Victor Hugo. Pray forgive me for being so
impertinent as to look over your shoulder; but I have been searching
for you every where, and I am to take you home to breakfast, please; if
you are Lady Cecil Chudleigh, and I am almost sure you are."
She started to her feet, and looked at the speaker. He was the
handsomest man she had ever seen--tall, and grand, and fair, the very
type of a classic hero, she fancied, as he stood before her on the
battlements, with the winds lifting the short auburn curls from his
bare forehead. He was no more like the traditional Scotchman than the
Duke d'Aumâle is like one of Gilray's Frenchmen. There was no more
odour of the parvenu about him than about a Bayard or a Napier. In all
her life she had never seen any one like him. It was not because he was
handsome that she was struck by his appearance; for she had generally
hated handsome men as the most obnoxious of their species. It was
because he was--himself.
For once in her life; Lord Aspendell's daughter, whose calm reserve was
so near akin to _hauteur_, was fairly startled.
"And are you really Captain Gordon?" she asked, amazed.
"I am indeed; and that question tells me that I was right, and you are
Lady Cecil, and we are--at least we ought to be--cousins, since dear
Aunt MacClaverhouse stands in the same relation to both of us."