"I HAVE FORGOT WHAT LOVE AND LOVING MEANT."
Between 1710 and 1726 Fairmile Park had been growing year by year less
like a gentleman's park and more like a forest. The wild tangle of
underwood, the hollies and hawthorns, the wildernesses of beech and oak,
the deep ferny glades, and patches of furze and heather took a richer
beauty with every season, and throve and flourished under a _régime_ of
absolute neglect. And in this wilderness Irene roamed at large,
unfettered and uncontrolled as the spirit of the woods, and seeming to
tramp or villager who met her suddenly, amidst the glancing lights and
tremulous shadows of interwoven boughs, almost as ethereal as some
nameless being from another world. Never had peasant or tramp accosted
her rudely in all those years in which she had roamed alone, growing
from childhood to womanhood, ever in the same woodland seclusion, and
never knowing the shadow of weariness. Her childhood and girlhood had
been passing solitary since the waif's death, but those slow monotonous
years had been in no wise unhappy. Roland Bosworth had been an indulgent
father, desiring nothing so much as his daughter's happiness. Had he
seen her pine in her lonely life he would, at any sacrifice to himself,
have changed his habits; but as he saw her joyous and happy, in perfect
health and radiant beauty, he saw no reason to take her out of the
almost monastic seclusion in which she had been reared into the perils
and temptations of the outer world. For Mr. Bosworth's daughter, the
heiress of wealth which had become somewhat notorious by the mere
progress of years, there would be snares and traps, and it was well that
she should be guarded closely. When the time came for her to marry it
would be his business to find a fitting alliance; to mate wealth with
wealth, and thus guard against the possibility of mercenary feeling on
the part of the husband. Society in those days was thickly beset with
heiress-hunters; and the heiress-hunter of a hundred and fifty years
ago was an adventurer only less audacious than the highwayman who
stopped coaches on Hounslow Heath, or on the wild hills beyond the
Devil's Punchbowl.
For a year or more after the nameless orphan's death Rena had pined for
her little companion; but gradually the vividness of memory faded, the
sweet sister face, smiling back her own smiles like an image reflected
in a river, became a dream, and revisited her only in dreams; and then
came the awakening of the young mind to external beauty, the deep,
inborn love of Nature reviving in the expanding soul; the delight in
flowers, and sun, and clouds, and trees, and streamlets, and the still,
dark lakelet, upon whose placid surface the tracery of summer boughs
made such delicate shadows. The love of mute companions intensified with
the ripening years; the great Newfoundland dog with its massive head and
grave affectionate eyes; the ponies, and rabbits, and poultry-yard with
its ever-varying delights; the tame hare, the talking magpie: these were
her companions and friends, and provided occupation from January to
December.
Until her tenth year the Squire's daughter was allowed to riot in the
delight of ignorance. She ran wild from morn till eve, learnt no more
than Mrs. Bridget could teach her, whose scope in the actualities of
education did not go far beyond the alphabet and words of one syllable,
but whose imaginative powers were wide and memory particularly vivid.
From this teacher Rena learnt all the most famous fairy tales of the
world, and a good many old English and Scottish ballads. These furnished
her fancy with themes for thought and dreaming, and stimulated a
poetical feeling which seemed inborn, so early did it show itself.
When she was approaching her twelfth birthday the Squire, who had
allowed himself until now to be deterred by Mrs. Layburne's black looks
at the mention of a governess, suddenly lost patience.
"My only child is growing up as ignorant as a kitchen-wench through your
folly," he said. "I must hire a governess for her before the month is
out."
"So be it," answered Barbara, with a fretful shrug of her lean
shoulders; "but if you wish to keep your daughter clear of adventurers
and fortune-hunters, you had best beware of governesses, music-masters,
and all such cattle. They are mostly in league with some penniless
schemer on the look-out for a fortune."
"My daughter is too young to be in danger yet awhile."
"Too young to be married, perhaps, but not too young to be perverted by
sentimental tales about lovers; and a few years later the governess
whispers that the romance may be made earnest, and some fine afternoon
governess and pupil meet a young man in the park, who protests he has
seen Miss at her window one day and has been pining for her ever since.
Then come a post-chaise, pistols, and a helter-skelter drive to the
purleius of the Fleet Prison, and the pretty young pair are fast bound
in matrimonial fetters before the father can catch them."
"I'll warrant there shall be no folly of that kind," said Bosworth.
"How will you warrant it? Every adventurer in London knows that you made
a hundred thousand the other day in the South Sea Bubble, and that you
had made a handsome fortune on 'Change long before that great _coup_,
dabbling first in one stock, now in another; and they know that you have
an only child, like Shylock's Jessica. Do you suppose there will be no
Lorenzo to hunt after your daughter and your ducats? Perhaps among those
penniless wights there may be some who have been ruined by the South Sea
scheme, and who will bear no love to you who sold your stock when the
madness was at its height, and when every hundred-pound share realised
over a thousand to the speculator who was clever enough to profit by the
craziness of the mob."
"Lorenzo shall have no chance with my daughter."
"Ay, so long as she is guarded from crafty go-betweens; but admit a
governess and a fine Italian music-master, and look out for rope-ladders
and post-chaises. Why cannot I teach Rena? I am a better musician than
many of your Signors, and I can read and write English and French as
well as any chit of a governess you can hire."
"No," answered Bosworth sternly, "_that_ is out of the question. I will
not have my dead wife's daughter taught by you."
Barbara looked at him for a moment or two, white with fury; and then she
burst into a mocking laugh.
"Your dead wife's daughter! O, that is her new name, is it? Your wife's
daughter. It is well you should throw your wife's name in my face--the
name I once had."
"Never by any legal right, though you might have borne that name in
serious earnest, my brimstone beauty, had you kept a little tighter rein
on that diabolical temper of yours. Pshaw! why should we quarrel about
the past? It is a sealed book for both of us. Get a room ready against
this day week, Mrs. Layburne. I shall write to my sister-in-law, Lady
Tredgold, to find me a governess for my daughter."
There was a certain look in Roland Bosworth's countenance which Mrs.
Layburne knew meant the irrevocable. She subsided into her position of
obedient housekeeper, she who had once been sovereign ruler of this
man's life. It was so long ago, that golden age of beauty and power,
when Barbara Layburne's singing and Barbara Layburne's face were the
rage at the theatre in the Haymarket, where she had sung in English
opera, and for one brief season had been almost as much admired and
talked about as La Faustina or Cuzzoni were in later years. She looked
back across the mist of years, and wondered if she were verily the same
woman at whose feet lovers had been sighing when the century was young.
The gulf betwixt youth and age, betwixt loveliness and gray hairs, is
such a tremendous abyss, that it is not strange if a woman should half
doubt her own identity, looking across that terrible ravine and seeing
the vision of her past existence on the other side. No two women living
could be more different than that woman of the past and this woman of
the present.
Lady Tredgold was an energetic personage who lived at Bath for the
greater part of the year, gambled moderately, and contrived to support a
numerous family upon a small income, which her husband, a staunch
Walpolian, had improved by his senatorial opportunities. She had seen
very little of her sister's husband since his wife's death, Mr.
Bosworth having done his uttermost to keep his wife's relations at a
distance. She felt flattered at his application, and lost no time in
providing a governess for her niece, in the person of an elderly
Frenchwoman, small, shrivelled, and slightly lame, who had taught her
ladyship's four daughters, and prepared her three sons for Eton. The
opportunity thus afforded provided a home for Mademoiselle Latour, and
saved Lord Tredgold the pension which duty would have constrained him to
provide for the superannuated governess.
Rena was at first inclined to resent the introduction of a stranger into
her life, with authority to control her movements; but she found
Mademoiselle so thoroughly lovable and sympathetic, that her young heart
soon found room for a new affection. Lessons were made light and easy by
the experienced teacher, much instruction was imparted by way of
amusement, the pupil gaining knowledge unconsciously; nor was her
liberty severely curtailed. She still roved at will in the woodland
wilderness which was only in name a park, and in summertime her studies
were for the most part performed in the garden, where Mademoiselle had
a favourite seat in the shadow of a clipped yew hedge, a massive wall of
dense greenery ten feet high, and her rustic table on which writing and
drawing were managed in despite of all the summer insects that buzz in
the meridian sun. Mademoiselle was too lame to accompany her pupil in
her wanderings, but it was a point of honour with Rena not to go beyond
the park-fence, however temptingly those further wildernesses of pine
and larch to the east, or the undulating common-land to the south, might
beckon to a young explorer.
But Mademoiselle's chief hold upon her pupil, in the early days of their
association, was derived from a new pleasure which those withered little
hands of hers revealed to the Squire's daughter. At the governess's
request Mr. Bosworth ordered a new harpsichord from the best maker in
London, a harpsichord with all the last improvements, and as superior to
that old instrument which Mrs. Layburne had appropriated and carried off
to her own sitting-room, as Handel was superior to his sometime rival
Bononcini.
Mademoiselle touched the harpsichord exquisitely, with a light airy
style which harmonised perfectly with that old French music she mostly
affected. But she did not confine herself exclusively to the Gallic
masters: she had the airs from Rinaldo and all Handel's operas by heart,
and enraptured Rena by her varied stores of melody. It was the child's
introduction to a new world--the magical world of music. The little
fingers were quick to learn those easy movements with which a good
teacher begins the apprenticeship to that divine art: the quick young
mind soon grasped the elements of musical theory. Rena learned to read
music quicker than to read books, so eager was she to acquire power over
that wonderful keyboard which held all the melodies that had ever been
composed; and unwritten, unimagined melodies no less beautiful, could
she but find them. She had a natural bent for music which should have
been hereditary, so strongly did it reveal itself; yet neither Squire
Bosworth nor the gentle Lady Harriet had ever been distinguished by a
love of music, still less by any executive faculty.
For the rest, the little Frenchwoman's advent made but slight difference
in the life at Fairmile Court, save to bring two or three more of the
fine old rooms at the end of the house into occupation. Bridget was
still her nursling's friend and companion, was in no wise relegated to
the cold shade of mere domestic servitude. Mademoiselle Latour was too
good a woman to seek to wean her pupil's affections from her old nurse.
Mrs. Layburne lived her solitary life apart from the whole household,
directing and governing all things, keeping the keys and ruling the
servants, but holding companionship with no one. Squire Bosworth went
and came between London and Fairmile as of old. When he was at home his
daughter always dined with him, and spent an hour with him after dinner;
and as the quiet years drifted past him, Roland Bosworth hardly noted
how the child was developing into the woman, beautiful exceedingly in
her bright girlish loveliness, full of impulse and vivacity, loving her
life for its own sake, and desiring nothing beyond it. She had the
placid contentment of a cloistered nun who knows nothing of the world
outside her convent-walls, nor sighs to know it.
The Squire had given her a guitar, upon which she used to accompany
herself when she sang to him during his after-dinner musings over his
pint of claret. He used to look at her with thoughtful, dreamy eyes as
she sat in the afternoon sunlight, bending over her guitar with a
graceful curve of the slender throat, her soft brown hair piled over a
cushion on the top of the exquisitely shaped head, her gown of the
simplest, her snowy neck shrouded with a soft lace handkerchief, her
arms bare to the elbow, and the long delicate hands with slender
flexible fingers, roseate-tipped and as beautiful as the hands of St.
Cecilia in an old Italian picture.
It was perhaps more of his ducats than of his daughter Squire Bosworth
thought as he watched her dreamily, soothed by her sweet singing. He
could but think of that vast fortune which would be hers to deal with
when he was clay--a too convertible form of wealth, in stocks and
shares, which wanton extravagance might scatter as easily as a shower of
rose-petals.
"I almost wish I had locked it up in land," he said to himself; "but
land yields such a wretched return, and can always be mortgaged by a
spendthrift. There is no power on earth that can project itself into the
future, and secure the permanence of that which a man has toiled for
after he is clay."
And now, in this year of grace 1726, Rena was eighteen, tall, slim,
graceful, active as a young fawn, and without one impulse that rebelled
against her father's authority or the monotonous placidity of her life.
Mademoiselle Latour declared that in all her experience of the varieties
of girlhood she had never had to deal with so sweet a nature, or so
bright and teachable a mind. But this might be flattery, thought the
Squire, since Mademoiselle knew that her pupil was a great heiress.