AN UNWELCOME VISITOR.
"The fifth day, and no news of him yet--no trace, save the dead
horse! By Jove! what can have happened? I meant only to break a few
of his bones, or spoil his pretty face, perhaps, for Mary, and
nothing more. Where the devil can he have drifted to--the coast of
Holland perhaps? Handsome of the old boy to cash up the IOU. Wish
it had been for six hundred, though!"
Thus thought Ralph Rooke Chesters, when on the afternoon of the fifth
day--the Monday--after the disappearance of Cyril he dismounted at
Lonewoodlee, under the door which bore the quaint legend, and
presenting his card, asked for Miss Lennox.
"Miss Lennox was at home," Alison said, and ere long she received him
in the gloomy apartment which passed for her drawing-room, with its
chintz-covered furniture, its chiffounières of painted wood, its
old-fashioned girandoles, and the meagre finery of her mother's
bridal days, to which her own eyes had become accustomed. Her piano
stood open, for though her heart was full of grief, she had been
compelled to sing and play to amuse her father.
"To what do I owe the--the pleasure of this visit?" said Mary,
politely yet coldly, for the memory of yesterday's snare haunted her
unpleasantly, and secretly she resented it.
"My anxiety lest you should have suffered from the snow (now nearly
gone, by-the-bye) and the cold drive in an open waggonette," replied
Chesters, with as soft a smile as his face could assume.
"Thanks; I am well," said Mary, still more coldly, for there was
something in the manner of Chesters which inspired doubt and dislike.
Yet he placed his hat on the table, brushed a speck off his tweed
knickerbockers with his handkerchief, and quietly seated himself with
the air of a man who meant to remain.
"And the old gentleman. How is he?"
"As usual," sighed Mary; "very weak and ailing. I know not with
what; and I don't think that Doctor Squills knows either."
"Get some other skill than this cub of a parish doctor possesses.
Send to town--to London or Edinburgh."
But Mary shook her head and sighed again as she thought of their
slender means; and there was a pause, during which she hoped that he
would soon go, as she had to be at the railway station at a certain
hour to receive certain medicines which the Doctor had ordered from
Edinburgh for her father's use.
She was conscious that Chesters was regarding her earnestly; indeed,
he had been unable to get out of his evil mind the effect of her
pretty and ladylike little figure while she sat so many hours in his
dining-room last night; so he had come in the prosecution of his
nefarious suit; but old as he was in the ways of the world he lived
in, he felt an awkwardness in his mode of advancing it; for Mary
looked so provokingly calm and composed; and so exquisitely ladylike;
her beautifully dressed hair so gorgeous in colour and quantity, with
her plain but perfect toilette, and her only ornament, a simple
brooch, nestling at her pretty neck.
To Mary's eye he looked older to-day and less careful in his costume;
his nose was certainly redder, and the blotches on his cheeks were
deeper in colour; his watchful and sinister grey eyes were more
restless in expression, and it soon became evident that he had been
imbibing freely, though the day was yet young. Wine, or something
worse, alone could have made him depart from his policy of yesterday
and blunder on as he did while the young girl's grief was so fresh
and keen.
He rose, and coming close to the chair in which she was seated, laid
his hand on the back of it, touching her rounded shoulder as he did
so; and lowering his voice, he said--
"Miss Lennox; or may I call you Mary?"
"Yes, if you choose. You have known me since I was a mere child."
"I have served in India since then," said he, with an ill-concealed
grimace; for he winced at the remark, or what it inferred; and
oblivious of the tender scene he had witnessed in the thicket, and
the grief which filled her heart, he said--
"I am come to ask you if you will allow me to love you, Mary Lennox?"
"I can neither prevent people from loving or hating me," she replied,
evasively; for she remembered the bill which he possessed; the power
it gave him over her father, and she trembled in her heart.
"Ah, Mary, who could hate you?" he whispered, bending still nearer
her face.
"But I beg that you will not speak of love to me."
"Why?"
"For a reason I care not to give. Pray let that suffice," urged
Mary, as she bit her lip and kept her pale face averted to hide the
tears with which her eyes were filled.
"Then you love another?" said Chesters, bluntly.
"That is my affair, sir."
"But you do; or shall I say, did?"
"As you please," replied the girl, wearily, shrugging her shoulders,
and her words seemed to come from her heart.
"At least, I have a kind of admission from your own lips," he
resumed, with a half-muttered imprecation under his sandy grey
moustache, and with a dangerous gloom in his false and sinister eyes.
"But do you know your own mind?"
"I trust that I do," was the gentle reply.
"You are right to speak doubtfully."
Mary changed her seat to the other side of the fireplace; for, as his
face came nearer hers, a kind of shiver passed over her.
"I do not understand you, Captain Chesters," said she, haughtily, as
she erected her pretty head, and looked at him intently and steadily.
"I say you are right to speak doubtfully, for at your years a girl
scarcely knows her own mind," he resumed more tenderly, again drawing
near her and attempting to take her hand. "It is quite possible to
love one person at one time, and another much more at a future time;
and thus you might love me. Who is the writer that says, 'we may
love with but a part of our nature--for the heart must love
something--until we chance upon a being our every nature sympathizes
with; one that will awaken new faculties to love with; one that we
can love with all the love we gave the first, with still more
added--a being made for us, and us alone.'"
Chesters poured out this quotation at a breath, for he was sensible
that his utterance was becoming thicker, and a smile of disdain
passed over Mary's face.
"I don't know who the writer is," said she, with growing irritation,
as she rang the bell, "but it all sounds very French--like some of
the maxims of Jean Jacques Rousseau. One thing I am sure of, Captain
Chesters; my nature would never sympathize with yours, and I could
never--pardon me for saying so--marry a man old enough to be my
father."
Chesters ground his teeth at this reply, and a little hollow and
bitter laugh escaped him; for with all his open and secret admiration
of Mary, which was genuine enough--as the charms of her person and
manner were undeniable--a marriage with her formed no part of his
plans. He was about to renew the subject, when old Alison appeared,
in answer to the summons of her young mistress, who said--
"Ask, please, if my papa feels well enough to see Captain Chesters."
"He has just been inquiring for him, Miss."
"Good. Come with me, Captain Chesters, if you are so disposed. Papa
sees so few, that your visit will be quite an event."
Now Chesters, with all his suavity and plausibility, when he had an
object in view, could rarely give much sympathy to any one or
anything, and above all, he hated the boredom of illness or sickness
in himself or others, felt just then only anger at the quick mode in
which Mary cut short his intrusive love-making; but he bowed, and
followed her into the room where poor Oliver Lennox lay in the bed
from which, it was too probable, he never would rise. The oppressive
odour of the sick room in such a chill season, and in such a house,
where the walls were of such enormous thickness, was unpleasantly
perceptible to Chesters, and had the result of making his recent
potations more seriously affect his brain.
However, being withal a well-bred man, he shook the thin wan hand of
Mr. Lennox with apparent cordiality, made the usual polite but
conventional inquiries about his health, and received the same
unmeaning and querulous replies, which he had heard a score of times
in the same place.
Weak and worn though he was, could Oliver Lennox but have seen into
Chesters' heart, and read the plans he cherished there, he would have
smote him by his bedside!
Propped on pillows which his daughter's tender hand had arranged, Mr.
Lennox, looking twenty years older than his time of life warranted,
had been lying the whole forenoon with his clear blue restless eyes
bent on the muirland scene that stretched for miles away before his
window--the acres upon acres that were no longer his own; acres won
and held by his forefathers in the old stirring times of Scottish
raids and wars.
The snow of the unexpected storm had already disappeared; the day
really looked like one in spring; the sky a deep blue; the air soft
and ambient. The bulb roots were expanding amid the prepared mould
in Mary's little garden on the southern side of the Tower; the
primroses and wild violets were cropping up beneath the sprouting
hedgerows; the grass looked greener on the lonely hill sides and in
the meadows, over which the shadows of the clouds were passing
quickly; and even the bleak Lammermuir looked less bleak than was its
wont; for the day was of a kind to make one feel content for the
present, hopeful for the future, and prayerful to God.
Oliver Lennox felt its genial influence in his own fatuous way; but
not so his daughter, for her heart was rent by anguish for the loss
of Cyril, and mortification for the annoyance which the suit of
Chesters occasioned her.
"How kind of you to come and see an old broken-down fellow such as I
am," said the invalid, turning his sharp aquiline face to his
visitor, and presenting his hand for a second time.
"Not at all, my good friend. Glad to see you looking so well. Egad!
I shouldn't wonder to see you in the saddle again, scouring across
the country--the leading man in the field."
But Mr. Lennox only shook his head and sighed despondingly, while
Mary felt disgust for the untrue sympathy of Chesters, who stood
sucking the ivory handle of his whip, while she rearranged with her
quick hands the pillows under her father's head.
"It was just on such a breezy March day as this I hunted last,
Chesters," said the invalid, with a sad smile. "We all came at a
slapping pace through Oxendean, and round Buncle-edge, till, oddly
enough, a bed of sweet violets and primroses--only think of it!--in
Renton Wood quite threw the hounds off the scent, and the fox
escaped! Since that day Oliver Lennox has never been in the hunting
field, or backed aught but an old Galloway cob."
"Take courage. There is a good time coming, as the song has it."
"My Mary is the veritable 'Brownie' of Lonewoodlee, who cooks and
watches in the night, and all that, so I should not repine," said Mr.
Lennox, with a fond smile, as he played with her snowy and statuesque
fingers; "but her unwearying love, and all her tender kindness cannot
avert fate, or hide the out-stretching of the Shadowy Hand."
"Oh, papa, do not--do not pierce my heart!" implored the girl.
"How much more of life is there in this old grumbler yet?" thought
Chesters, as he actually gnawed the whip-handle with his teeth, while
watching admiringly the contour of Mary's bust, the taper form of her
white arms, and the high arch of her instep, as she hung about her
father's bed.
"You will be kind to her, Chesters, when I am gone," said Lennox, in
his usual querulous way; and the request was so much in unison with
Chesters' own thoughts, that the blotches deepened to scarlet in his
face.
"Kind to her, Mr. Lennox?" he faltered.
"Yes. I leave so few friends behind me now, that Mary's future fills
my heart with intense anxiety."
"Papa dearest, fear not for me," said Mary becoming deeply agitated.
"Had your brother Harry but been spared--"
"Don't talk of poor Harry, papa," urged Mary, as her father's mind
was apt to wander then, and to confound the past and the present
together; "do not talk thus, papa, when strangers are present. You
may live I hope and trust for many years to come. 'God alone decides
who shall live to suffer, or who shall suffer and die.' I, perhaps,
may be one of the latter."
A scarcely perceptible gesture of impatience escaped Chesters; but
slight though it was, the quick eye of the invalid detected it.
"Well, I daresay I weary you. Take Chesters into the dining-room,
Mary, and give him a glass of Madeira, or brandy-and-water, after the
ride. I always took a horn after a gallop in my day--the day that
will never come again. Lonewoodlee had ever a name for hospitality,
and it shall not lose it while I am above the turf, lassie."
"Thanks: then we shall adjourn to the dining-room," said Chesters,
and glad to escape from the sick chamber, he shook the hand of Oliver
Lennox, and ere long found himself in the sombre little dining-hall,
seated on one of the square-elbowed haircloth sofas, and looked down
upon by a few faded and gloomy portraits of the Lennoxes of past
times, in wigs, wide cuffs, and pasteboard skirts, or breastplates of
steel, just as Lely, Ramsay, or Medina had depicted them; and somehow
he thought that in all the faces of these dead men he could read
something of scorn and scrutiny, so his eye avoided them, and he
applied himself to mixing a stiff glass of brandy-and-water, while
Mary hovered irresolutely near. She was all anxiety that he should
depart, for in an hour now the train would be in, and she wished to
receive in person the medicines that were coming for her father. She
dreaded also to mention her errand or purpose, lest he might offer to
accompany her, and give the affliction of yet more of his society.
But Chesters found himself perfectly comfortable. His dinner-time
was three hours distant yet; the brandy-and-water proved quite to his
taste--so, too, was Mary--thus he at once resumed the thread of their
conversation, but in a more jocular, or as Mary justly deemed it,
more insolent tone; for helplessness and friendlessness encouraged
this _vaurien_, while her rare beauty inspired his worst passion.
"Ah, Mary, we might be so jolly if you would only learn to love me a
little." Then becoming maudlinly sentimental, he proceeded to quote
Shelley--
"See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower will be forgiven,
If it disdain its brother.
And the sunbeams kiss the earth:
And the moonbeams the sea.
What are all those kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?"
"The order of that line should be reversed; but, by Jove, my voice is
getting quite feathery!"
He was becoming inarticulate, and almost tipsy.
"Captain Chesters," said Mary, gravely, "do not go on thus, I implore
you! You would pity me if you knew all--the horror of living alone,
or nearly alone, in this dreary house; my sole occupation the sad,
sad one----"
"Of what?" said he, as tears choked her utterance.
"Soothing and amusing a dying father."
"Oh bosh! my dear girl," was the coarse response; "the old fellow may
live long enough yet; and I am sure that he would rather have me for
a son-in-law--I who know so thoroughly the points of a horse and the
secrets of the turf--a thoroughbred sportsman, who could take the
county pack in hand, and, had I the means, would hunt the Merse and
Lauderdale as they never were hunted before--than yonder mooning
fellow from whom you parted in the thicket on the night he
disappeared. Ah, you sly puss, you little knew that I saw you there!"
Mary felt herself grow deadly pale, and then she flushed to the
temples with anger, as these rude and almost fiercely spoken remarks,
so wounding to her delicacy, fell on her sensitive ear. Again her
hand went to the bell for the purpose of having Chesters shown to the
door at all hazards of the future, but ere she could ring Alison
Home's hard and wrinkled visage appeared, and she announced that
"Captain Chesters' servant, Trayner, wished to speak with him
immediately."
"Send him up then," said Chesters, sulkily. "Most singular, this!
What the deuce can the fellow want with me? I left him in the
stables."
"He says, sir, that he has something for your private ear," replied
the greyhaired domestic.
Now Chesters had so many strange involvements, and so many secrets to
keep, that he very palpably changed colour on hearing this, and felt
compelled to go to his servant, who had dismounted at the door, and
was now dressed in livery, with an orthodox cockade and brown leather
belt.
Mary only heard Chesters utter a fierce exclamation of astonishment
in reply to a communication made by Trayner, who was coolly smoking
one of his master's cigars, concerning "Willowdean and a telegram;"
and then, without the courtesy of returning to bid her adieu, or
making any explanation whatever, her unwelcome visitor rode off
towards Chesterhaugh, accompanied by his servant; and Mary could see
from her window that as they galloped along the road they were side
by side and in close and rapid conversation.
About what?