THE LORD OF BURLEIGH
One morning at breakfast, the Kincton letters having arrived, Miss
Clara, who had only one, tossed it carelessly to her mamma, who, having
just closed one of her own, asked—
“Who is it?”
“Vane; he’s coming here he says on Thursday, instead of Wednesday,”
answered the young lady.
“Cool young gentleman!” observed Mrs. Kincton Knox. “He ought to know
that people don’t invite themselves to Kincton—any news?”
“Yes; there has been an awful battle, and young Maubray has gone off, no
one knows where, and everyone’s curious to find out—quite
irreconcilable, they say.”
“Does he say what about?” inquired the old lady, taking up the letter.
“No, nothing; only that,” answered Clara.
“Mamma, Mr. Herbert’s blushing all over, like fun,” cried Master Howard
from the other side of the table, with a great grin on his jam-bedaubed
mouth, and his spoon pointed at poor William’s countenance.
The ladies involuntarily glanced at William, who blushed more fiercely
than ever, and began to fiddle with his knife and fork. Miss Clara’s
glance only, as it were, touched him, and was instantly fixed on the
view through the window, in apparent abstraction. Mrs. Kincton Knox’s
prominent dark eyes rested gravely a little longer on poor William’s
face, and the boy waving his spoon, and kicking his chair, cried, “Ha,
ha!”
“Don’t Sir, that’s extremely rude—lay down your spoon; you’re never to
point at anyone, Sir. Mr. Herbert’s quite ashamed of you, and so am I.”
“Come here,” said William.
“Oh, no! you all want me to hold my tongue. It’s always so, and that
great beast of a Clara,” bawled “the hope of the house,” as his mamma
was wont to call him.
“Come to me,” said poor William, mildly.
“Or, if you permit _me_, Mr. Herbert,” said Mrs. Kincton Knox.
“_Howard!_ I can’t tolerate this. You are to sit quiet, and eat your
breakfast—do you hear—and do you like sardines?—Mr. Herbert, may I
trouble you—thanks; and no personalities, mind—never; Mr. Herbert, a
little more tea?”
The ladies fell into earnest conference that morning after breakfast, so
soon as William and his pupil had withdrawn.
“W. M.! Everything marked with W. M.—Winston Maubray. Don’t you see?”
said the old lady, with a nod, and her dark and prominent eyes fixed
suddenly on her daughter.
“Yes, of course; and did you look at his face when I mentioned the
quarrel with Sir Richard?” said the young lady.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” exclaimed her mother.
Miss Clara smiled mysteriously, and nodded her acquiescence.
“Why, my dear, it was the colour of that,” continued Mrs. Kincton Knox,
pointing her finger fiercely at the red leather back of the chair that
stood by them. “I don’t think there can be a doubt. I know there’s none
in _my_ mind.”
“It is very curious—very romantic. I only hope that we have not been
using him very ill,” said Miss Clara, and she laughed more heartily than
was her wont.
“Ill! I don’t know what you mean. I trust, Clara, no one is ever
ill-used at Kincton. It certainly would rather surprise me to hear
anything of the kind,” retorted the lady of Kincton, loftily.
“Well, I did not mean ill, exactly. I ought to have said rudely. I hope
we have not been treating him like a—a—_what_ shall I say?—all this
time,” and the young lady laughed again.
“We have shown him, Clara, all the kindness and consideration which a
person entering this house in the capacity he chose to assume could
possibly have expected. I don’t suppose he expected us to divine by
witchcraft who and what he was; and I am very certain that he would not
have thought as—as highly of us, if we had acted in the slightest degree
differently.”
But though she spoke so confidently, Mrs. Kincton Knox, that perfect
woman, was secretly troubled with misgivings of the same uncomfortable
kind, and would have given a good deal to be able to modify the past, or
even distinctly to call its incidents to mind.
“Of course, Clara, I shan’t observe upon those odd coincidences to
Mr.—Mr. _Herbert_ himself. It is his wish to be private for the present.
We have no right to pry. But there is certainly justifiable—I may say,
even _called_ for—some little modification of our own demeanour toward
him, in short; and knowing now—as I feel confident we do—who he is,
there is no need of the same degree of reserve and—and distance; and I
am very glad, if for this reason only, that you may more frequently, my
dear Clara, look in and see your little brother, who is so much shut up;
it would be only kind.”
In fact this old warrior, with the Roman nose and eagle eye, surveying
the position, felt, in Cromwell’s phrase, that the “Lord had delivered
him into her hand.” There he was domesticated, in what she might regard
as a romantic incognito, without parental authority to impede or
suspicion to alarm him! Could a more favourable conjuncture be fancied?
How a little real kindness would tell just now upon his young heart! and
he would have such an opportunity in his disguise of estimating and
being touched by the real amiability of the Kincton Knoxes; and the
Maubray estates and an old baronetage would close Miss Clara’s
campaigning with _eclat_.
The young lady did look into the school-room.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Herbert, you’ll think me very tiresome,” she said.
William had risen as she entered, with a bow.
“But mamma is thinking of taking Howard a drive, if you approve, and
Howard, we are going to Bolton Priory. Mamma wishes so much to know
whether you will allow him to come.”
“I can have no objection. He’s not now at his lessons. I’m sure it will
do him a great deal of good.”
Miss Clara, in a pretty attitude, leaning with one hand on the table,
was smiling down on Master Howard, and caressingly running her taper
fingers through his curls.
“Let my head be—will you!” he bawled, disengaging himself, with a bounce
and a thump at her hand.
The young lady smiled and shrugged plaintively at William, who said,
“Howard, I shall tell your mamma, if you are rude to Miss Knox, and I’ll
ask her not to take you out to-day.”
“That’s just it,” retorted Master Howard. “That’s the way you men always
take her part against me, because you think she’s young and pretty.
Ah-ha! I wish you’d ask her maid—Winter.”
“Be quiet, Sir,” said William, in so stern a tone, and with so angry a
flash of his blue eyes, that the young gentleman was actually overawed,
and returned lowering and muttering to the ship he had been rigging,
only making an ugly grimace over his shoulder, and uttering the word
“crocodile!”
Though Miss Clara smiled plaintively down upon the copy of Tennyson
which lay open on the table, and turned over a page or two with her
finger-tip, serenely, she inwardly quaked while Howard declaimed, and in
her soul wished him the fate of Cicero; and when she got to her room
planted her chair before the cheval glass with a crash, and exclaimed,
“I do believe that the fiendish imp is raised up expressly to torture
me! Other parents would beat such a brat into a mummy, and knock his
head off rather than their daughter should be degraded by him; but mine
seem to like it positively. I wish—oh! don’t I, just!” And the
aposiopesis and the look were eloquent.
But she had not yet left the school-room, and as she looked down on the
open pages, she murmured, sadly, “The Lord of Burleigh!” And looking up
she said to William, “I see you read my poet and my favourite poem, too,
only I think it too heart-rending. I can’t read it. I lose my spirits
for the whole day after, and I wonder whether the story is really true,”
she paused with a look of sad inquiry, and William answered that he had
read it was so.
And she said, with a little sigh, “That only makes it sadder,” and she
seemed to have something more to say, but did not; and after a moment,
with a little smile and a nod, she went from the room. And William
thought he had never seen her look so handsome, and had not before
suspected her of so much mind and so much feeling, and he took the book
up and read the poem through, and dreamed over it till the servant came
with a knock at the door, and his mistress’s compliments, to know if
Master Howard might go now.
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