Something like a Ride.
It was impossible to go on hating Lord Mallow for ever. He was a man
whose overflowing good-nature would have conciliated the direst foe,
could that enemy have been exposed long enough to its softening
influence. He came upon the dull daily life of the Abbey House like a
burst of sudden sunshine on a gloomy plain. The long winter evenings,
when there was no company, had been sorely oppressive to Vixen. Out of
respect to her mother she had kept her place in the drawing-room,
reading, or working at some uninteresting strip of point-lace, which
she had no hope of ever finishing, though it had been promised to Mr.
Scobel for his church. Captain Winstanley read the newspapers or the
quarterlies, and paced the room thoughtfully at intervals. He talked to
his wife just enough to escape the charge of neglect, but rarely spoke
to or noticed Violet. Sometimes Mrs. Winstanley asked for a little
music; whereupon Violet went to the piano and played her scanty
recollections of Mozart or Beethoven--all "tuney" bits, remembered out
of the sonatas or symphonies Miss McCroke had taught her; or, if asked
to sing, the girl sang a ballad or two, to order, in her full round
mezzo-soprano, which had a thrilling expression at times, when feeling
got the better of her proud reserve, and all the pent-up sorrow of her
heart broke loose into her song. But Captain Winstanley took no notice
of these efforts, and even her mother's praises were not enthusiastic.
"Very sweet, very nice," was the most Vixen ever heard from those
maternal lips as she closed the piano.
But here was Lord Mallow, passionately fond of music and singing, and
the beauties of nature, and all things that appeal to the sensitive
Hibernian character. It seemed a new thing to Violet to have someone
standing by the piano, turning over the leaves, applauding rapturously,
and entreating for another and yet another Irish melody. When she sang
"The Minstrel Boy," he joined in with a rich baritone that harmonised
finely with her full ripe notes. The old room vibrated with the strong
gush of melody, and even Captain Winstanley was impelled to praise.
"How well your voices harmonise," he said. "You ought to try some
duets. I remember that fine baritone of yours in days of old, Mallow."
Thereupon Lord Mallow asked Miss Tempest if she had any duets, and
Vixen produced her small stock of vocal music. They tried one or two of
Mendelssohn's, "I would that my love," and "Greeting," and discovered
that they got on wonderfully well together. Vixen fell asleep that
night wondering at her own amiability.
"To think that I should sing sentimental duets with him," she said to
herself. "The man who has Bullfinch!"
Lord Mallow's presence at the Abbey House had a marked effect upon
Captain Winstanley's treatment of his stepdaughter. Hitherto there had
been a veiled bitterness in all his speeches, a constrained civility in
his manners. Now he was all kindness, all expansion. Even his wife, who
admired him always, and thought him the soul of wisdom in all he did,
could not be blind to the change, and a new sense of peacefulness stole
into her feeble mind. It was so pleasant to see dear Conrad so sweetly
kind to Violet.
"What are we going to do with Lord Mallow this morning, Violet?" asked
the Captain at breakfast, the day after the Irishman's arrival. "We
must try to amuse him somehow."
"I don't think I have much to do with it," Vixen answered coldly. "You
will find plenty of amusement, I daresay, in the billiard-room, in the
stables, or in showing Lord Mallow your improvements."
"That would do very well for a wet morning, but it would be a
profligate waste of fine weather. No; I propose that you should show
Mallow some of the prettiest bits in the Forest. I am not half so
accomplished a guide as you; but we'll all go. I'll order the horses at
once if you like my plan, Mallow," said Captain Winstanley, turning to
his friend, and taking Violet's consent for granted.
"I shall be quite too delighted, if Miss Tempest will honour us with
her company," replied the Irishman, with a pleasant look at Vixen's
fresh morning face, rosy-red with vexation.
It was the first time her stepfather had ever asked her to ride with
him, and she hated doing it. It was the first time she had ever been
asked to ride with anyone but her father or Roderick Vawdrey. Yet to
refuse would have been impossible, without absolute discourtesy to her
mother's husband and her mother's guest. So she sat in her place and
said nothing; and Lord Mallow mistook the angry carnation for the warm
red of happy girlhood, which blushes it knows not wherefore.
Captain Winstanley ordered the horses to be at the door in
half-an-hour: and then he took Lord Mallow off to look at the stables,
while Violet went upstairs to put on her habit. Why was the Captain so
unusually amiable? she speculated. Was his little soul so mean that he
put on better manners to do honour to an Irish peer?
She came tripping down the wide old staircase at the end of the
half-hour, in habit and hat of Lincoln green, with a cock's feather in
the neat little hat, and a formidable hooked hunting-crop for opening
gates, little feet daintily shod in patent leather, but no spur. She
loved her horse too well to run a needle into his sleek hide at the
slightest provocation.
There were three horses, held by Bates and Lord Mallow's groom.
Bullfinch, looking as if he had just taken a prize at Islington and was
inclined to be bumptious about it. Arion, tossing his delicately
modelled Greek head, and peering furtively after bogies in the adjacent
shrubbery. Captain Winstanley's well-seasoned hunter, Mosstrooper,
nodding his long bony head, and swaying his fine-drawn neck up and down
in a half-savage half-scornful manner, as if he were at war with
society in general, like the Miller of Dee.
Vixen, who had looked the picture of vexation at the breakfast-table,
was now all gaiety. Her hazel eyes sparkled with mischief. Lord Mallow
stood in the porch, watching her as she came down the shining oak
staircase, glorious in the winter sunlight. He thought her the
perfection of a woman--nay, more than a woman, a goddess. Diana, the
divine huntress, must have looked so, he fancied. He ran forward to
mount her on the fidgety Arion; but honest old Bates was too quick for
him; and she was looking down at Lord Mallow graciously from her perch
on the well-worn doeskin saddle before he had time to offer his
services.
She leaned over to pat Bullfinch's massive crest.
"Dear old horse," she murmured tenderly, remembering those winter
mornings of old when he had stood before the porch as he stood to-day,
waiting for the noble rider who was never more to mount him.
"Yet life goes on somehow without our beloved dead," thought Violet.
Her changeful face saddened at the idea, and she rode along the
shrubberied drive in silence.
"Where are you going to take us?" asked the Captain, when they had
emerged from the Abbey House grounds, crossed the coach-road, and made
their plunge into the first cart-track that offered itself.
"Everywhere," answered Vixen, with a mischievous laugh. "You have
chosen me for your guide, and all you have to do is to follow."
And she gave Arion a light touch with her hunting-crop, and cantered
gaily down the gently sloping track to a green lawn, which looked, to
Captain Winstanley's experienced eye, very much like a quaggy bog.
"Steer towards your left!" he cried anxiously to Lord Mallow.
If there was danger near Vixen managed to avoid it; she made a sweeping
curve, skirted the treacherous-looking lawn, and disappeared in another
cart-track, between silvery trunks of veteran beeches, self-sown in the
dark ages, with here and there a gnarled old oak, rugged and
lichen-mantled, with feathery tufts of fern nestling in the hollow
places between his gaunt limbs.
That was a ride! Lord Mallow could remember nothing like it, and he was
destined to carry this in his memory for a lifetime. The ghostly trees;
the silver-shining bark of the beeches, varying with a hundred
indescribable shades of green, and purple, and warmest umber; the
rugged gray of the grand old oaks; the lichens and mosses, the
mysterious wintry growths of toadstool and weed and berry; that awful
air of unearthliness which pervaded the thicker portions of the wood,
as of some mystic underworld--half shadow and half dream. No, Lord
Mallow could never forget it; nor yet the way that flying figure in
Lincoln green led them by bog and swamp, over clay and gravel--through
as many varieties of soil as if she had been trying to give them a
practical lesson in geology; across snaky ditches and pebbly fords;
through furze-bushes and thickets of holly; through everything likely
to prove aggravating to the temper of a wellbred horse; and finally,
before giving them breathing-time, she led them up the clayey side of a
hill, as steep as a house, on the top of which she drew rein, and
commanded them to admire the view.
"This is Acres Down, and there are the Needles," she said, pointing her
whip at the dim blue horizon. "If it were a clear day, and your sight
were long enough, I daresay you would see Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney,
and Sark. But, I think, to-day you must be content with the Needles.
Can you see them?" she asked Lord Mallow.
"See them!" exclaimed the Irishman. "I can see well enough to thread
one of them if I wanted."
"Now, you've seen the Isle of Wight," said Vixen. "That's a point
accomplished. The ardent desire of everyone in the Forest is to see the
Isle of Wight. They are continually mounting hills and gazing into
space, in order to get a glimpse at that chalky little island. It seems
the main object of everybody's existence."
"They might as well go and live there at once, if they're so fond of
it," suggested Lord Mallon.
"Yes; and then they would be straining their eyes in the endeavour to
see the Great Horse--that's a group of firs on the top of a hill, and
one of our Forest seamarks. That frantic desire to behold distant
objects has always seemed to me to be one of the feeblest tendencies of
the human mind. Now you have seen the Needles, we have accomplished a
solemn duty, and I may show you our woods."
Vixen shook her rein and trotted recklessly down a slippery path,
jumped a broad black ditch, and plunged into the recesses of the wood,
Bullfinch and Mosstrooper following meekly.
They went a wonderful round, winding in and out of Bratley Wood,
piercing deep into the wintry glories of Mark Ash; through mud and moss
and soft pitfalls, where the horses sank up to their hocks in withered
leaves; avoiding bogs by a margin of a yard or so; up and down, under
spreading branches, where the cattle line but just cleared the heads of
the riders; across the blackened bracken; by shining hollies, whose
silvery trunks stood up like obelisks out of a thicket of dwarf bushes:
through groves, where the tall beech-trunks had a solemn look like the
columns of some gigantic temple; then into wondrous plantations of
Scotch firs, where the air was balmy as in summer, and no breath of the
December wind penetrated the dense wall of foliage. Then to higher
ground, where the wintry air blew keen again, and where there was a
soft green lawn, studded with graceful conifers--cypress, deodora,
Douglas fir--tall with a growth of thirty years; the elegant
importations of an advanced civilisation. Anon by the gray lichened
walls of a deserted garden, which had a strangely-romantic look, and
was as suggestive of a dreamy idyllic world as a poem by Tennyson; and
so down into the green-and-gray depths of Mark Ash again, but never
returning over the same ground; and then up the hill to Vinny Ridge and
the Heronry, where Captain Winstanley cracked his whip to scare the
herons, and had the satisfaction of scaring his own and the other two
horses, while the herons laughed him to scorn from their cradles in the
tree-tops, and would not stir a feather for his gratification. Then by
a long plantation to a wild stretch of common, where Vixen told her
companions that they were safe for a good while, and set them an
example by starting Arion across the short smooth turf at a
hand-gallop. They pulled up just in time to escape a small gulf of moss
and general sponginess, waded a stream or two, splashed through a good
deal of spewy ground, and came to Queen's Bower; thence into the oak
plantations of New Park; then across Gretnam Wood; and then at a smart
trot along the road towards home.
"I hope I haven't kept you out too long?" said Vixen politely.
"We've only been five hours," answered the Captain with grim civility;
"but if Mallow is not tired, I shall not complain."
"I never enjoyed anything so much in my life, never," protested Lord
Mallow.
"Well, to-morrow we can shoot the pheasants. It will be a rest for us
after this."
"It will be dull work after the enchantments of to-day," said the
Irishman.
Captain Winstanley rode homewards a few paces in the rear of the other
two, smiling to himself grimly, and humming a little song of Heine's:
"Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu."