‘I have letters to write—one to the Lord-lieutenant in particular, on
county business,’ said the Earl, smiling, and addressing himself to
Captain Denzil; ‘otherwise I daresay that I too should have been able
to find something worth the showing you out of doors. As it is, you
young people must go without me.’
Jasper, who had a lazy man’s horror of improved implements, Dutch
dairies, new patent draining-tiles, and cattle-food, and who knew
the Earl’s passion for farming, felt inwardly grateful to the
Lord-lieutenant for detaining his noble host within doors. The Countess
had not the slightest intention of accompanying her guests in their
visit to the pheasantry. Except in a carriage, or in dry weather among
the well-rolled paths of the rose-garden, Lady Wolverhampton scarcely
ever left the house. Her age, though she looked younger, was within
a year or two of that of her lord, and he was by far the stronger of
the two. Indeed it was mainly due to her declining health and growing
incapacity for exertion that the High Tor family had for this year
foregone what most persons of their rank regard less as a pleasure than
as a duty, the passing of at least a portion of the season in London.
The party from Carbery Chase had been very cordially received. People
can afford yet to cultivate the old-fashioned quality of cordiality in
rural retirement, where it answers to detect hidden merits and to see
in the best light the things and persons in the midst of which and whom
our lives have to be passed.
‘I am glad,’ said the Countess, ‘that Captain Denzil was able to come
over with you to-day, my dears.’
With Sir Sykes’s two daughters the mistress of High Tor was on
sufficiently familiar terms; but their brother’s character was not
quite so much esteemed by the De Vere family as were theirs. Still, in
the country, a young man and an elder son is _per se_ a being of some
importance, and to Jasper, with his arm yet in the black silken sling,
there attached somewhat of romance, on account of his late accident
and the adventurous way in which he had incurred it. He had not been
expected, and his presence at High Tor was taken as a compliment.
Scarcely had the Ladies Maud and Gladys De Vere had time to don the
pretty hats that so well set off the comeliness of the one and the
bright beauty of the other, before their brother came into the room.
Lord Harrogate had a riding-whip in his hand, and a long ride over
the purple moorlands in prospect; but he was easily induced to defer
it, and to make one of the party, that presently sauntered across the
park towards a sunny sandy nook, screened from cold north winds by
a friendly belt of fir and pine, where the new pheasantry had been
established.
Near to the place where a footpath led to a sequestered dell, the
new governess Miss Gray and her pupil met the group of advancing
sight-seers. Ethel would have passed on with a quiet graceful bow of
recognition; but Lady Alice had no notion of being thus shelved.
‘You are going to look at the pheasants,’ she said; ‘and we have just
seen them. They seem rather frightened, but so very pretty!’
The words which young Lady Alice had employed when speaking of the
exotic birds would have been singularly appropriate to Ethel Gray. The
new governess looked timid and something more than pretty during the
general hand-shaking and interchange of civil conventional phrases
which now ensued. Jasper, whose acquaintance with Ethel was of the
slightest, had contented himself with lifting his hat; but he had
stared at her beautiful face with as cool a steadiness of gaze as
though she had been a picture or a statue. Why Lord Harrogate should
have resented this, it would have been no easy matter for his lordship
to explain; but there was scorn, and anger too, in the glance which he
shot at unconscious Jasper; while it was not without some embarrassment
that he addressed a word or two of polite commonplace to Miss Gray.
Then the governess and her pupil pursued their way to the house, and
the rest of the party strolled on towards the pheasantry.
‘How handsome she is!’ exclaimed honest Lucy Denzil, looking back after
the angular form of Lady Alice, and the graceful figure that contrasted
so strongly with the bony awkwardness of the school-girl; and Lady Maud
echoed the praise, and Lady Gladys smiled approval. The Earl’s second
daughter was, as has been said, very lovely, and her golden hair and
blue eyes had produced the usual effect of fascinating for the time
being Jasper’s fickle fancy. It is quite possible to be very hard and
at the same time very weak where women are concerned; and Captain
Denzil, wary man of the world as he boasted himself to be, and selfish
as he certainly was, could not at the moment resist the spell of the
enchantress.
‘Cripple as I am,’ said Jasper, glancing at his injured arm, ‘you see
that I could not resist the temptation to come when you asked me.’
‘They are not my pheasants; they are Maud’s, you know,’ returned Lady
Gladys, as though wilfully misunderstanding him.
‘Fortunate birds!—that is if you condescend to take an interest in
them,’ said the captain, nonchalant as ever, but contriving to throw
into his tone and look a something of suppressed tenderness, that
was not perhaps wholly feigned. Ruth Willis saw the look, although
she was not near enough to overhear the words, and her eyes flashed
and her white teeth closed sharply, almost savagely, on her pouting
lip. She felt the mortification which an angler might feel did he see
the half-hooked salmon, the silvery patriarch of the pool, desert
his bait, and leap provokingly at the artificial fly of some rival
disciple of Piscator. She could not forget how, an hour or two ago,
the heir of Carbery had deigned to devote to her service those very
tricks of manner—in her anger she mentally called them so—which now
before her very eyes he was practising for the benefit of another. She
did not care for him; but he piqued her, by the very effrontery of his
fickleness, into attaching to him a value which in calmer moments she
would never have set on one so intrinsically base as Jasper Denzil.
In spite of world-old experience and sage aphorisms, each sex remains
to some extent a standing problem to the other. So Ruth Willis,
nettled, baffled, wrathful, still did not fathom the depths of Jasper’s
worthless nature one half so clearly as she would have done had her
keen powers of observation been exercised at the expense of a woman.
She even felt angry with Lady Gladys, though most unreasonably, for the
proud beauty wore her most glacial armour of chilling haughtiness when
she perceived that Jasper was disposed to pay her what is popularly
known as ‘marked attentions.’
The innocent pheasants, the ostensible end and object of this
expedition, were duly inspected, and lavishly fed with the millet and
barley, the chopped eggs and crushed maize, which young pheasants
love. They were fair enough to look upon, these shy pretty captives,
still timorous and bewildered by their close confinement in the
darksome baskets wherein they had been crammed by the irreverent
poultry-merchant who had consigned them to High Tor; and not yet quite
at home in their new abode, which had been so freshly decorated for
their reception that the paint on the wood and the lacquer on the wires
were barely dry. Golden pheasants there were, and white or silver
pheasants, and pencilled pheasants, worthy descendants of a feathered
ancestry that had pecked and strutted in the gardens of coral-buttoned
mandarins, in far-off China.
The curious thing was, that except by their mistress Lady Maud and the
elder of the two Denzil girls, who was a kindred spirit, the pheasants
were scarcely looked at with regardful eyes. Is it not always so? At
launch or military review or polo-match, or when a princely trowel
of pure gold condescendingly applies a dab of sublime mortar to a
glorified foundation-stone of some new building, how very, very few of
the nominal spectators concentrate their thoughts and their vision on
the show, which the reporters will presently describe with such graphic
power! Private affairs, hopes, fears, interests, are all of them petty
magnets sufficient to neutralise the great avowed attraction of the
hour.
There was Ruth Willis, her whole attention stealthily concentrating
itself upon Captain Denzil at the side of the Earl’s second daughter;
there was Jasper, vainly trying to thaw the ice of Lady Gladys’
disdain; and Lord Harrogate, whose thoughts seemed at times to wander
away from the present scene and company. Add to these Blanche Denzil,
sorrowfully conscious that Lord Harrogate himself, in whose eyes she
would have given much to find favour, was thinking of anything rather
than of her preference for him, and it will be seen that the real
amateurs of fancy pheasants were but in a narrow minority.
A good girl who loves a man worthy of her esteem, yet who is
constrained by maiden modesty and the rules of good-breeding to hide
away the sentiment as though it were a sin, deserves more pity than
often falls to her lot. It is never Leap-year for her. She cannot
be the first to speak. And if there be one point upon which men are
exceptionally blind, it is to the perception that their merits may
be highly appreciated by some young lady to whom they never give a
thought when absent from her. Poor Blanche had trouble enough now and
then to keep down the rising tears that welled up to her eyes as she
noted twenty signs of the painful fact that Lord Harrogate regarded her
with that amicable indifference which cannot readily ripen, as dislike
sometimes can, into love. But Blanche was too gentle to grow bitter
over a disappointment, as did Ruth Willis, although for her too the
pleasure of the day was damped and dulled.
The visitors from Carbery would not, on getting back to the broad
gravelled drive where the basket-carriage awaited them, re-enter the
house. They had taken leave of the Earl and Countess, and declined all
hospitable proffers of luncheon beforehand. There was some kissing
among the girls and a good deal of hand-shaking, and then the ‘double
basket’ again received its living load, and ‘good-bye’ was said, and
off dashed the mettled Exmoor ponies under Lucy Denzil’s guidance.
Two of the party from the Chase carried back with them to Carbery
hearts that were heavier than when they had first set out for the
projected visit to the pheasantry at High Tor. Sir Sykes’s ward, so
talkative two hours ago, had become sullenly mute. Ruth Willis was
smarting under her defeat, for she had measured herself with Lady
Gladys, and could not but acknowledge to herself that her own elfish
piquancy was quite thrown into the shade by the superior charms of the
Earl’s daughter. Blanche was sad and thoughtful. Jasper, twisting his
well-waxed moustache, seemed unaware, in the preoccupation of his own
mind, that Ruth was resentful and Blanche melancholy, while Miss Denzil
frankly wondered why conversation languished as it did. Excellent Lucy
had had no by-play to distract her attention from the object of the
expedition; she had seen the birds and chatted with her friend, and
was mildly gratified with her outing. Nevertheless it was but a silent
party that the Exmoor ponies whisked back along the well-kept road that
led to Carbery Chase.