"Fading in Music."
"Mrs. Winstanley, on her marriage, by the Duchess of Dovedale."
That was the sentence that went on repeating itself like a cabalistic
formula in Pamela Winstanley's mind, as her carriage drove through the
dark silent woods to Ashbourne on the last night of the year.
A small idea had taken possession of her small mind. The Duchess was
the fittest person to present her to her gracious mistress, or her
gracious mistress's representative, at the first drawing-room of the
coming season. Mrs. Winstanley had old friends, friends who had known
her in her girlhood, who would have been happy to undertake the office.
Captain Winstanley had an ancient female relative, living in a fossil
state at Hampton Court, and vaguely spoken of as "a connection," who
would willingly emerge from her aristocratic hermitage to present her
kinsman's bride to her sovereign, and whom the Captain deemed the
proper sponsor for his wife on that solemn occasion. But what social
value had a fossilised Lady Susan Winstanley, of whom an outside world
knew nothing, when weighed in the balance with the Duchess of Dovedale?
No; Mrs. Winstanley felt that to be presented by the Duchess was the
one thing needful to her happiness.
It was a dinner of thirty people; quite a state dinner. The finest and
newest orchids had been brought out of their houses, and the
dinner-table looked like a tropical forest in little. Vixen went in to
dinner with Lord Ellangowan, which was an unappreciated honour, as that
nobleman had very little to say for himself, except under extreme
pressure, and in his normal state could only smile and look
good-natured. Roderick Vawdrey was ever so far away, between his
betrothed and an enormous dowager in sky-blue velvet and diamonds.
After dinner there was music. Lady Mabel played a dreary minor melody,
chiefly remarkable for its delicate modulation from sharps to flats and
back again. A large gentleman sang an Italian buffo song, at which the
company smiled tepidly; a small young lady sighed and languished
through "Non e ver;" and then Miss Tempest and Lord Mallow sang a duet.
This was the success of the evening. They were asked to sing again and
again. They were allowed to monopolise the piano; and before the
evening was over everyone had decided that Lord Mallow and Miss Tempest
were engaged. Only the voices of plighted lovers could be expected to
harmonise as well as that.
"They must have sung very often together," said the Duchess to Mrs.
Winstanley.
"Only within the last fortnight. Lord Mallow never stayed with us
before, you know. He is my husband's friend. They were
brother-officers, and have known each other a long time. Lord Mallow
insists upon Violet singing every evening. He is passionately fond of
music."
"Very pleasant," murmured the Duchess approvingly: and then she glided
on to shed the sunshine of her presence upon another group of guests.
Carriages began to be announced at eleven--that is to say, about
half-an-hour after the gentlemen had left the dining-room--but the Duke
insisted that people should stop till twelve.
"We must see the old year out," he said. "It is a lovely night. We can
go out on the terrace and hear the Ringwood bells."
This is how Violet and Lord Mallow happened to sing so many duets.
There was plenty of time for music during the hour before midnight.
After the singing, a rash young gentleman, pining to distinguish
himself somehow--a young man with a pimply complexion, who had said
with Don Carlos, "Three-and-twenty years of age, and nothing done for
immortality"--recited Tennyson's "Farewell to the Old Year," in a voice
which was like anything but a trumpet, and with gesticulation painfully
suggestive of Saint Vitus.
The long suite of rooms terminated in the orangery, a substantial stone
building with tesselated pavement, and wide windows opening on the
terrace. The night was wondrously mild. The full moon shed her tender
light upon the dark Forest, the shining water-pools, the distant
blackness of a group of ancient yew-trees on the crest of a hill.
Ashbourne stood high, and the view from the terrace was at all times
magnificent, but perhaps finest of all in the moonlight.
The younger guests wandered softly in and out of the rooms, and looked
at the golden oranges glimmering against their dark leaves, and put
themselves into positions that suggested the possibility of flirtation.
Young ladies whose study of German literature had never gone beyond
Ollendorff gazed pensively at the oranges, and murmured the song of
Mignon. Couples of maturer growth whispered the details of unsavoury
scandals behind perfumed fans.
Vixen and Rorie were among these roving couples. Violet had left the
piano, and Roderick was off duty. Lady Mabel and Lord Mallow were deep
in the wrongs of Ireland. Captain Winstanley was talking agriculture
with the Duke, whose mind was sorely exercised about guano.
"My dear sir, in a few years we shall have used up all the guano, and
then what can become of us?" demanded the Duke. "Talk about our
exhausting our coal! What is that compared with the exhaustion of
guano? We may learn to exist without fires. Our winters are becoming
milder; our young men are going in for athletics; they can keep
themselves warm upon bicycles. And then we have the gigantic
coal-fields of America, the vast basin of the Mississippi to fall back
upon, with ever-increasing facilities in the mode of transport. But
civilisation must come to a deadlock when we have no more guano. Our
grass, our turnips, our mangel, must deteriorate, We shall have no more
prize cattle. It is too awful to contemplate."
"But do you really consider such a calamity at all probable, Duke?"
asked the Captain.
"Probable, sir? It is inevitable. In 1868 the Chincha Islands were
estimated to contain about six million tons of guano. The rate of
exportation had at that time risen to four hundred thousand tons per
annum. At this rate the three islands will be completely exhausted by
the year 1888, and England will have to exist without guano. The glory
of the English people, as breeders of prize oxen, will have departed."
"Chemistry will have discovered new fertilisers by that time,"
suggested the Captain, in a comforting tone.
"Sir," replied the Duke severely, "the discoveries of modern science
tend to the chimerical rather than the practical. Your modern
scientists can liquefy oxygen, they can light a city with electricity,
but they cannot give me anything to increase the size and succulence of
my turnips. Virgil knew as much about agriculture as your modern
chemist."
While the Duke was holding forth about guano, Vixen and Rorie were on
the terrace, in the stillness and moonlight. There was hardly a breath
of wind. It might have been a summer evening. Vixen was shrouded from
head to foot in a white cloak which Rorie had fetched from the room
where the ladies had left their wraps. She looked all white and solemn
in the moonlight, like a sheeted ghost.
Although Mr. Vawdrey had been civil enough to go in quest of Violet's
cloak, and had seemed especially desirous of bringing her to the
terrace, he was by no means delightful now he had got her there. They
took a turn or two in silence, broken only by a brief remark about the
beauty of the night, and the extent of the prospect.
"I think it is the finest view in the Forest," said Vixen, dwelling on
the subject for lack of anything else to say. "You must be very fond of
Ashbourne."
"I don't exactly recognise the necessity. The view is superb, no doubt;
but the house is frightfully commonplace. It is a little better than
Briarwood. That is about all which an enthusiastic admirer could
advance in its favour. How much longer does Lord Mallow mean to take up
his abode with you?"
Vixen shrugged her cloaked shoulders with an action that seemed to
express contemptuous carelessness.
"I haven't the least idea. That is no business of mine, you know."
"I don't know anything of the kind," retorted Rorie captiously. "I
should have thought it was very much your business."
"Should you, really?" said Vixen mockingly.
If the gentleman's temper was execrable, the lady's mood was not too
amiable.
"Yes. Are not you the load-star? It is your presence that makes the
Abbey House pleasant to him. Who can wonder that he protracts his stay?"
"He has been with us a little more than a fortnight."
"He has been with you an age. Mortals who are taken up to Paradise
seldom stay so long. Sweet dreams are not so long. A fortnight in the
same house with you, meeting with you at breakfast, parting with you at
midnight, seeing you at noontide and afternoon, walking with you,
riding with you, singing with you, kneeling down to family prayer at
your side, mixing his 'Amen' with yours; why he might as well be your
husband at once. He has as much delight in your society."
"You forget the hours in which he is shooting pheasants and playing
billiards."
"Glimpses of purgatory, which make his heaven all the more divine,"
said Rorie. "Well, it is none of my business, as you said just now.
There are people born to be happy, I suppose; creatures that come into
the world under a lucky star."
"Undoubtedly, and among them notably Mr. Vawdrey, who has everything
that the heart of a reasonable man can desire."
"So had Solomon, and yet he made his moan."
"Oh, there is always a crumpled rose-leaf in everybody's bed. And if
the rose-leaves were all smooth, a man would crumple one on purpose, in
order to have something to grumble about. Hark, Rorie!" cried Vixen,
with a sudden change of tone, as the first silvery chime of Ringwood
bells came floating over the woodland distance--the low moon-lit hills;
"don't be cross. The old year is dying. Remember the dear days that are
gone, when you and I used to think a new year a thing to be glad about.
And now, what can the new years bring us half so good as that which the
old ones have taken away?"
She had slipped her little gloved hand through his arm, and drawn very
near to him, moved by tender thoughts of the past. He looked down at
her with eyes from which all anger had vanished. There was only love in
them--deep love; love such as a very affectionate brother might
perchance give his only sister--but it must be owned that brothers
capable of such love are rare.
"No, child," he murmured sadly. "Years to come can bring us nothing so
good or so dear as the past. Every new year will drift us farther."
They were standing at the end of the terrace farthest from the orangery
windows, out of which the Duchess and her visitors came trooping to
hear the Ringwood chimes. Rorie and Vixen kept quite apart from the
rest. They stood silent, arm-in-arm, looking across the landscape
towards the winding Avon and the quiet market-town, hidden from them by
intervening hill. Yonder, nestling among those grassy hills, lies
Moyles Court, the good old English manor-house where noble Alice Lisle
sheltered the fugitives from Sedgemoor; paying for that one act of
womanly hospitality with her life. Farther away, on the banks of the
Avon, is the quiet churchyard where that gentle martyr of Jeffreys's
lust for blood takes her long rest. The creeping spleenwort thrives
amidst the gray stones of her tomb. To Vixen these things were so
familiar, that it was as if she could see them with her bodily eyes, as
she looked across the distance, with its mysterious shadows, its
patches of silver light.
The bells chimed on with their tender cadence, half joyous, half
sorrowful. The shallower spirits among the guests chattered about the
beauty of the night, and the sweetness of the bells. Deeper souls were
silent, full of saddest thoughts. Who is there who has not lost
something in the years gone by, which earth's longest future cannot
restore? Only eternity can give back the ravished treasures of the dead
years.
Violet's lips trembled and were dumb. Roderick saw the tears rolling
down her pale cheeks, and offered no word of consolation. He knew that
she was thinking of her father.
"Dear old Squire," he murmured gently, after an interval of silence.
"How good he was to me, and how fondly I loved him."
That speech was the sweetest comfort he could have offered. Vixen gave
his arm a grateful hug.
"Thank God there is someone who remembers him, besides his dogs and
me!" she exclaimed; and then she hastily dried her tears, and made
herself ready to meet Lord Mallow and Lady Mabel Ashbourne, who were
coming along the terrace towards them, talking gaily. Lord Mallow had a
much wider range of subjects than Mr. Vawdrey. He had read more, and
could keep pace with Lady Mabel in her highest flights; science,
literature, politics, were all as one to him. He had crammed his
vigorous young mind with everything which it behoved a man panting for
parliamentary distinction to know.
"Where have you two people been hiding yourselves for the last half
hour?" asked Lady Mabel. "You were wanted badly just now for 'Blow,
Gentle Gales.' I know you can manage the bass, Rorie, when you like."
"'Lo, behold a pennant waving!'" sang Rorie in deep full tones. "Yes, I
can manage that much, at a push. You seem music mad to-night, Mabel.
The old year is making a swan-like end--fading in music."
Rorie and Vixen were still standing arm-in-arm; rather too much as if
they belonged to each other, Lady Mabel thought. The attitude was
hardly in good taste, according to Lady Mabel's law of taste, which was
a code as strict as Draco's.
The bells rang on.
"The new year has come!" cried the Duke. "Let us all shake hands in the
friendly German fashion."
On this there was a general shaking of hands, which appeared to last a
long time. It seemed rather as if the young people of opposite sexes
shook hands with each other more than once. Lord Mallow would hardly
let Violet's hand go, once having got it in his hearty grasp.
"Hail to the first new year we greet together," he said softly. "May it
not be the last. I feel that it must not, cannot be the last."
"You are wiser than I, then," Vixen answered coldly; "for my feelings
tell me nothing about the future--except"--and here her face beamed at
him with a lovely smile--"except that you will be kind to Bullfinch."
"If I were an emperor I would make him a consul," answered the Irishman.
He had contrived to separate Roderick and Vixen. The young man had
returned to his allegiance, and was escorting Lady Mabel back to the
house. Everybody began to feel chilly, now that the bells were silent,
and there was a general hurrying off to the carriages, which were
standing in an oval ring round a group of deodoras in front of the
porch on the other side of the house.
Rorie and Vixen met no more that night. Lord Mallow took her to her
carriage, and sat opposite her and talked to her during the homewards
drive. Captain Winstanley was smoking a cigar on the box. His wife
slumbered peacefully.
"I think I may be satisfied with Theodore," she said, as she composed
herself for sleep; "my dress was not quite the worst in the room, was
it, Violet?"
"It was lovely, mamma. You can make yourself quite happy," answered
Vixen truthfully; whereupon the matron breathed a gentle sigh of
content, and lapsed into slumber.
They had the Boldrewood Road before them, a long hilly road cleaving
the very heart of the Forest; a road full of ghosts at the best of
times, but offering a Walpurgis revel of phantoms on such a night as
this to the eye of the belated wanderer. How ghostly the deer were, as
they skimmed across the road and flitted away into dim distances,
mixing with and melting into the shadows of the trees. The little gray
rabbits, sitting up on end, were like circles of hobgoblins that
dispersed and vanished at the approach of mortals. The leafless old
hawthorns, rugged and crooked, silvered by the moonlight, were most
ghostlike of all. They took every form, from the most unearthly to the
most grotesquely human.
Violet sat wrapped in her furred white mantle, watching the road as
intently as if she had never seen it before. She never could grow tired
of these things. She loved them with a love which was part of her
nature.
"What a delightful evening, was it not?" asked Lord Mallow.
"I suppose it was very nice," answered Violet coolly; "but I have no
standard of comparison. It was my first dinner at Ashbourne."
"What a remarkably clever girl Lady Mabel is. Mr. Vawdrey ought to
consider himself extremely fortunate."
"I have never heard him say that he does not so consider himself."
"Naturally. But I think he might be a little more enthusiastic. He is
the coolest lover I ever saw."
"Perhaps you judge him by comparison with Irish lovers. Your nation is
more demonstrative than ours."
"Oh, an Irish girl would cashier such a fellow as Mr. Vawdrey. But I
may possibly misjudge him. You ought to know more about him than I. You
have known him----"
"All my life," said Violet simply. "I know that he is good, and stanch
and true, that he honoured his mother, and that he will make Lady Mabel
Ashbourne a very good husband. Perhaps if she were a little less clever
and a little more human, he might be happier with her; but no doubt
that will all come right in time."
"Any way it will be all the same in a century or so," assented Lord
Mallow. "We are going to have lovely weather as long as this moon
lasts, I believe. Will you go for a long ride to-morrow--like that
first ride of ours?"
"When I took you all over the world for sport?" said Vixen laughing. "I
wonder you are inclined to trust me, after that. If Captain Winstanley
likes I don't mind being your guide again to-morrow."
"Captain Winstanley shall like. I'll answer for that. I would make his
life unendurable if he were to refuse."