Several days passed away very quietly after Leonora's first day and
night at Lancaster Park. The girl stayed in the small rooms to which
she was restricted quite as closely as the housekeeper could have
desired. She did not even offer to go out, seeming to have tacitly
resigned herself to the situation.
She unpacked one of her trunks and showed Mrs. West the sketches she
had promised to show her; she took out all her pretty, simple black
dresses, and hung them on their pegs in the little dressing-closet her
aunt assigned her.
When she had nothing else to do she read or embroidered. Her aunt noted
with pleasure that she was seldom idle.
She did not know of the long hours Leonora spent, when alone, curled up
in a big easy-chair, with her milk-white hands folded in her lap, her
eyes half shut, with the dark lashes drooping against the pink cheeks,
and a thoughtful, puzzled expression on the fair face.
If she had seen her, Mrs. West would have wondered much what her niece
was thinking about.
In the meantime, the gay life of the great folks at Lancaster went on
from day to day.
Leonora saw no more of it, steadily declining the well-meant offers of
her aunt to provide her with surreptitious peeps at it.
"I do not care about it," Leonora would say, with an eloquent glance at
her black dress. "Gayety only jars upon me, auntie, dear. I should like
to go out in the fresh air a little; but if I can not do that, I have
no desire for the rest."
But Mrs. West, however willing she was, did not dare advise her niece
to go out into the grounds where the guests might be encountered at any
time, or even old Lady Lancaster herself.
She knew that Leonora's pretty face, once seen by the guests, would
excite remark. It had already won the admiration of the house-maids.
These latter persons, having caught occasional glimpses of Leonora
in their errands to the housekeeper's room, were disposed to be very
sociable with the fair American girl; but Mrs. West put an end to their
well-meant cordialities by saying, gently:
"My niece would rather not be disturbed; she is in great trouble; she
has recently lost her father."
After that the maids did not court Leonora's society any more. They
accepted her aunt's excuse good-naturedly and sympathetically, and
contented themselves by talking about her among themselves, and
praising her beauty, which they declared to each other was even greater
than that of the young ladies who were sojourning at Lancaster--greater
even than that of Lady Adela Eastwood, who, it was confidently
whispered, was to be the next mistress of Lancaster Park.
Mrs. West grew downright sorry for her pretty prisoner, whose pink
cheeks were fading in the close, dark rooms where she was kept. She
said to herself that this would not do. She must not have poor Dick's
orphan child pining for liberty and light and the blessed sunshine that
was free to all.
"I will not do it; no, not if I have to leave Lady Lancaster's service
and make a home for the girl elsewhere," she said to herself.
So one day she came into the little room where Leonora, sitting at the
window, gazed wistfully out at the green grass and the blue sky, with
an unconscious pathos on the sweet, girlish face.
"My dear, you are tired of this stuffy little chamber, I know," she
said.
"Not very," said the girl, a little drearily. "I suppose I ought to be
grateful to you for giving me such a home."
"Grateful to me for hiding you away in these little musty rooms, as
if you hadn't the sweetest face the sun ever shone on!" cried the good
woman, self-reproachfully. "Not a bit of it, my dear. I'm ashamed of
myself for treating you so. It mustn't go on so, or your health will
suffer, and so I shall tell Lady Lancaster; and if she won't allow you
the liberty of the grounds, I will go away from here and make us a snug
little home somewhere else, where we may come and go as we please; so
there!" said the good woman, with sudden independence.
Leonora rose impulsively and went and kissed the homely face of her
friend.
"Aunt West, would you really do that much for me?" she exclaimed,
delightedly.
"Yes, I would," Mrs. West answered, firmly. "Poor Dick left you to me
to take care of, and I'm bound to do the best I can for your happiness."
"Ah!" said Leonora, checking an impatient sigh.
"And I've come to tell you," Mrs. West continued, "that if you'd like
to go and sketch the Abbey ruins, you may go this morning, Leonora."
"If I'd like!" cried the girl. "Oh, Aunt West! it's just what I was
wishing for. I shall be so happy!"
"Yes; you shall go, dear, and stay all day, if you like. I'll put
you up a nice cold lunch in a little basket, and I'll hire the
lodge-keeper's boy to show you the way. I'll give him a shilling to go,
and he will stay all day to keep you from getting frightened."
"I shall not be frightened," said Leonora, radiant.
"I don't know; it's still and lonesome-like there, and the bats and
screech-owls might startle you. And there's an old dismantled chapel,
too--"
"Oh, how lovely! I shall sketch that, too!" Leonora exclaimed, clapping
her bands like a gleeful child.
"And a little old grave-yard," pursued Mrs. West. "Some of the old
Lancasters are buried there. You might be afraid of their ghosts."
"I am not afraid of the Lancasters, dead or living," the girl answered,
saucily, her spirits rising at the prospect before her.
She set forth happily under the convoy of little Johnnie Dale, the
lodge-keeper's lad, a loquacious urchin who plied her with small-talk
while he walked by her side with the lunch-basket Mrs. West had
prepared with as dainty care as if for Lady Lancaster herself.
She did not check the boy's happy volubility, although she did not heed
it very much, either, as they hurried through the grand old park, where
the brown-eyed deer browsed on the velvety green grass, and the great
oak-trees cast shadows, perhaps a century old, across their path.
When they had shut the park gates behind them, and struck into the
green country lanes, bordered with honeysuckle and lilac, Leonora drew
breath with a sigh of delight.
"How sweet it all is! My father's country, too," she said. "Ah! he was
right to love these grand old English homes, although he was but lowly
born. What a grand old park, what sweet, green lanes, what a sweet and
peaceful landscape! It is no wonder that the English love England!"
She remembered how her father, now dead and buried under the beautiful
American skies, had loved England, and always intended to return to it
some day with his daughter, that she might behold his native land.
She remembered how often he had quoted Mrs. Hemans' lines:
"The stately homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees
O'er all the pleasant land!
The deer across their greensward bound
Through shade and sunny gleam,
And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream."
"He loved the homes of England, although his fate was not cast with
them," she said to herself. "Poor papa! I must try to love England for
his sake; it was always dear to him, although he was fond of his kind
adopted home, too!"
When they reached the ruins, she studied them carefully on every side
to secure a picturesque view. She found that to get the best possible
one she would have to sit down among the graves close to the little
dismantled chapel.
"You bain't going to sit down amang them theer dead folk, missus?"
inquired Johnnie, round-eyed, and on the alert for ghosts.
"Yes, I am. Are you afraid to stay, Johnnie?" she asked, laughing.
"Ya'as, I be," he replied, promptly.
"Very well; you may go off to a distance and play," said Leonora.
"Don't let any one come this way to disturb me. And if you get hungry,
you may have a sandwich out of my basket."
"I'm hungry now," he answered, greedily.
"Already, you little pig!" she cried. "Very well; take your sandwich
now, then, and be off out of my way. I'm going to make a picture."
She sat down on the broken head-stone of an old grave, took out her
materials, and while she trimmed her pencils, glanced down and read the
name on the tomb beneath her.
It was Clive, Lord Lancaster.
Something like a shudder passed over her as this dead Lancaster, gone
from the ways of men more than a century ago, recalled to her the
living one.
"What do all the paltry aims and ambitions of our life matter, after
all?" the girl asked herself, soberly. "The grave awaits us all at last!
"'The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour;
The path of glory leads but to the grave.'"
Sitting there among the lonely green graves and broken, discolored
monuments, with the ivy creeping over their dim inscriptions, Leonora,
a little lonely black figure, began her sketch.
She worked industriously and skillfully, and nothing disturbed her for
several hours.
Johnnie had availed himself of the opportunity to make an excursion
into the woods on his own account, and she was quite alone; but nothing
alarmed her, and she worked on fearlessly amid the fragrant stillness
of the lovely June day, whose calmness was broken by nothing louder
than the hum of the bees among the flowers, or the joyous carol of the
sky-lark as it soared from earth to heaven, losing itself, as it were,
in the illimitable blue of the sky.
The midday sun climbed high and higher into the sky, and Leonora,
pausing over her nearly completed sketch, pushed back her wide hat from
her flushed face, and stopped to rest, glancing around at the quiet
graves that encompassed her.
"What a still and peaceful company we are!" she said, aloud, quaintly,
never thinking how strange it looked to see her sitting there--the only
living thing among the silent tombs.
Then all at once, as if the tenants of the grave had come to life,
Leonora heard a soft babel of voices and laughter.
With a start she turned her head.
A party of gay young ladies and gentlemen were strolling toward her
across the level greensward. Foremost among them was Lord Lancaster,
walking beside the earl's daughter.
It was too late for retreat.
Every eye turned on the graceful figure sitting there so quietly among
the graves of the dead and gone Lancasters.
As they passed the low stone wall that divided them, Lancaster lifted
his hat and bowed low and profoundly.
Then they were gone, but an eager hum of masculine voices was borne
back to her ears on the light breeze:
"By Jove! what a beauty!"
"Heavens! was that a ghost?"
"What a lovely being! Who is she, Lancaster?" She heard his deep,
musical voice answer carelessly:
"It is Miss West--a young lady who is staying in the neighborhood for
the sketching, I believe."
They went on toward the ruins.
Leonora, with a deeper color in her fair face, bent over her sketch and
rapidly put some finishing touches to it.
"Now I wonder where little Johnnie can be?" she thought.
She glanced up and saw Captain Lancaster coming back to her.