LADY MANORWATER'S GUESTS
When the afternoon train from the south drew into Gledsmuir station, a
girl who had been devouring the landscape for the last hour with eager
eyes, rose nervously to prepare for exit. To Alice Wishart the country
was a novel one, and the prospect before her an unexplored realm of
guesses. The daughter of a great merchant, she had lived most of her
days in the ugly environs of a city, save for such time as she had spent
at the conventional schools. She had never travelled; the world of men
and things was merely a name to her, and a girlhood, lonely and
brightened chiefly by the companionship of books, had not given her
self-confidence. She had casually met Lady Manorwater at some political
meeting in her father's house, and the elder woman had taken a strong
liking to the quiet, abstracted child. Then came an invitation to
Glenavelin, accepted gladly yet with much fear and searching of heart.
Now, as she looked out on the shining mountain land, she was full of
delight that she was about to dwell in the heart of it. Something of
pride, too, was present, that she was to be the guest of a great lady,
and see something of a life which seemed infinitely remote to her
provincial thoughts. But when her journey drew near its end she was
foolishly nervous, and scanned the platform with anxious eye.
The sight of her hostess reassured her. Lady Manorwater was a small
middle-aged woman, with a thin classical face, large colourless eyes,
and untidy fair hair. She was very plainly dressed, and as she darted
forward to greet the girl with entire frankness and kindness, Alice
forgot her fears and kissed her heartily. A languid young woman was
introduced as Miss Afflint, and in a few minutes the three were in the
Glenavelin carriage with the wide glen opening in front.
"Oh, my dear, I hope you will enjoy your visit. We are quite a small
party, for Jack says Glenavelin is far too small to entertain in. You
are fond of the country, aren't you? And of course the place is very
pretty. There is tennis and golf and fishing; but perhaps you don't
like these things? We are not very well off for neighbours, but we are
large enough in number to be sufficient to ourselves. Don't you think
so, Bertha?" And Lady Manorwater smiled at the third member of the
group.
Miss Afflint, a silent girl, smiled back and said nothing. She had been
engaged in a secret study of Alice's face, and whenever the object of
the study raised her eyes she found a pair of steady blue ones beaming
on her. It was a little disconcerting, and Alice gazed out at the
landscape with a fictitious curiosity.
They passed out of the Gled valley into the narrower strath of Avelin,
and soon, leaving the meadows behind, went deep into the recesses of
woods. At a narrow glen bridged by the road and bright with the spray
of cascades and the fresh green of ferns, Alice cried out in delight,
"Oh, I must come back here some day and sketch it. What a Paradise of a
place!"
"Then you had better ask Lewie's permission." And Lady Manorwater
laughed.
"Who is Lewie?" asked the girl, anticipating some gamekeeper or
shepherd.
"Lewie is my nephew. He lives at Etterick, up at the head of the glen."
Miss Afflint spoke for the first time. "A very good man. You should
know Lewie, Miss Wishart. I'm sure you would like him. He is a great
traveller, you know, and has written a famous book. Lewis Haystoun is
his full name."
"Why, I have read it," cried Alice. "You mean the book about Kashmir.
But I thought the author was an old man."
"Lewie is not very old," said his aunt; "but I haven't seen him for
years, so he may be decrepit by this time. He is coming home soon, he
says, but he never writes. I know two of his friends who pay a Private
Inquiry Office to send them news of him."
Alice laughed and became silent. What merry haphazard people were these
she had fallen among! At home everything was docketed and ordered.
Meals were immovable feasts, the hour for bed and the hour for rising
were more regular than the sun's. Her father was full of proverbs on
the virtue of regularity, and was wont to attribute every vice and
misfortune to its absence. And yet here were men and women who got on
very well without it. She did not wholly like it. The little
doctrinaire in her revolted and she was pleased to be censorious.
"You are a very learned young woman, aren't you?" said Lady Manorwater,
after a short silence. "I have heard wonderful stories about your
learning. Then I hope you will talk to Mr. Stocks, for I am afraid he
is shocked at Bertha's frivolity. He asked her if she was in favour of
the Prisons Regulation Bill, and she was very rude."
"I only said," broke in Miss Afflint, "that owing to my lack of definite
local knowledge I was not in a position to give an answer commensurate
with the gravity of the subject." She spoke in a perfect imitation of
the tone of a pompous man.
"Bertha, I do not approve of you," said Lady Manorwater. "I forbid you
to mimic Mr. Stocks. He is very clever, and very much in earnest over
everything. I don't wonder that a butterfly like you should laugh, but
I hope Miss Wishart will be kind to him."
"I am afraid I am very ignorant," said Alice hastily, "and I am very
useless. I never did any work of any sort in my life, and when I think
of you I am ashamed."
"Oh, my dear child, please don't think me a paragon," cried her hostess
in horror. "I am a creature of vague enthusiasms and I have the sense
to know it. Sometimes I fancy I am a woman of business, and then I take
up half a dozen things till Jack has to interfere to prevent financial
ruin. I dabble in politics and I dabble in philanthropy; I write review
articles which nobody reads, and I make speeches which are a horror to
myself and a misery to my hearers. Only by the possession of a sense of
humour am I saved from insignificance."
To Alice the speech was the breaking of idols. Competence,
responsibility were words she had been taught to revere, and to hear
them light-heartedly disavowed seemed an upturning of the foundation of
things. You will perceive that her education had not included that
valuable art, the appreciation of the flippant.
By this time the carriage was entering the gates of the park, and the
thick wood cleared and revealed long vistas of short hill grass, rising
and falling like moorland, and studded with solitary clumps of firs.
Then a turn in the drive brought them once more into shadow, this time
beneath a heath-clad knoll where beeches and hazels made a pleasant
tangle. All this was new, not three years old; but soon they were in
the ancient part of the policy which had surrounded the old house of
Glenavelin. Here the grass was lusher, the trees antique oaks and
beeches, and grey walls showed the boundary of an old pleasure-ground.
Here in the soft sunlit afternoon sleep hung like a cloud, and the peace
of centuries dwelt in the long avenues and golden pastures. Another
turning and the house came in sight, at first glance a jumble of grey
towers and ivied walls. Wings had been built to the original square
keep, and even now it was not large, a mere moorland dwelling. But the
whitewashed walls, the crow-step gables, and the quaint Scots baronial
turrets gave it a perfection to the eye like a house in a dream. To
Alice, accustomed to the vulgarity of suburban villas with Italian
campaniles, a florid lodge a stone's throw from the house, darkened too
with smoke and tawdry with paint, this old-world dwelling was a patch of
wonderland. Her eyes drank in the beauty of the place--the great blue
backs of hill beyond, the acres of sweet pasture, the primeval woods.
"Is this Glenavelin?" she cried. "Oh, what a place to live in!"
"Yes, it's very pretty, dear." And Lady Manorwater, who possessed half a
dozen houses up and down the land, patted her guest's arm and looked
with pleasure on the flushed girlish face.
* * * * *
Two hours later, Alice, having completed dressing, leaned out of her
bedroom window to drink in the soft air of evening. She had not brought
a maid, and had refused her hostess's offer to lend her her own on the
ground that maids were a superfluity. It was her desire to be a very
practical young person, a scorner of modes and trivialities, and yet she
had taken unusual care with her toilet this evening, and had spent many
minutes before the glass. Looking at herself carefully, a growing
conviction began to be confirmed--that she was really rather pretty.
She had reddish-brown hair and--a rare conjunction--dark eyes and
eyebrows and a delicate colour. As a small girl she had lamented
bitterly the fate that had not given her the orthodox beauty of the dark
or fair maiden, and in her school days she had passed for plain. Now it
began to dawn on her that she had beauty of a kind--the charm of
strangeness; and her slim strong figure had the grace which a wholesome
life alone can give. She was in high spirits, curious, interested, and
generous. The people amused her, the place was a fairyland and outside
the golden weather lay still and fragrant among the hills.
When she came down to the drawing-room she found the whole party
assembled. A tall man with a brown beard and a slight stoop ceased to
assault the handle of a firescreen and came over to greet her. He had
only come back half an hour ago, he explained, and so had missed her
arrival. The face attracted and soothed her. Abundant kindness lurked
in the humorous brown eyes, and a queer pucker on the brow gave him the
air of a benevolent despot. If this was Lord Manorwater, she had no
further dread of the great ones of the earth. There were four other
men, two of them mild, spectacled people, who had the air of students
and a precise affected mode of talk, and one a boy cousin of whom no one
took the slightest notice. The fourth was a striking figure, a man of
about forty in appearance, tall and a little stout, with a rugged face
which in some way suggested a picture of a prehistoric animal in an old
natural history she had owned. The high cheek-bones, large nose, and
slightly protruding eyes had an unfinished air about them, as if their
owner had escaped prematurely from a mould. A quantity of bushy black
hair--which he wore longer than most men--enhanced the dramatic air of his
appearance. It was a face full of vigour and a kind of strength,
shrewd, a little coarse, and solemn almost to the farcical. He was
introduced in a rush of words by the hostess, but beyond the fact that
it was a monosyllable, Alice did not catch his name.
Lord Manorwater took in Miss Afflint, and Alice fell to the dark man
with the monosyllabic name. He had a way of bowing over his hand which
slightly repelled the girl, who had no taste for elaborate manners. His
first question, too, displeased her. He asked her if she was one of the
Wisharts of some unpronounceable place.
She replied briefly that she did not know. Her grandfathers on both
sides had been farmers.
The gentleman bowed with the smiling unconcern of one to whom pedigree
is a matter of course.
"I have heard often of your father," he said. "He is one of the local
supports of the party to which I have the honour to belong. He
represents one great section of our retainers, our host another. I am
glad to see such friendship between the two." And he smiled elaborately
from Alice to Lord Manorwater.
Alice was uncomfortable. She felt she must be sitting beside some very
great man, and she was tortured by vain efforts to remember the
monosyllable which had stood for his name. She did not like his voice,
and, great man or not, she resented the obvious patronage. He spoke
with a touch of the drawl which is currently supposed to belong only to
the half-educated classes of England.
She turned to the boy who sat on the other side of her. The young
gentleman--his name was Arthur and, apparently, nothing else--was only
too ready to talk. He proceeded to explain, compendiously, his doings of
the past week, to which the girl listened politely. Then anxiety got
the upper hand, and she asked in a whisper, _a propos_ of nothing in
particular, the name of her left-hand neighbour.
"They call him Stocks," said the boy, delighted at the tone of
confidence, and was going on to sketch the character of the gentleman in
question when Alice cut him short.
"Will you take me to fish some day?" she asked.
"Any day," gasped the hilarious Arthur. "I'm ready, and I'll tell you
what, I know the very burn--" and he babbled on happily till he saw that
Miss Wishart had ceased to listen. It was the first time a pretty girl
had shown herself desirous of his company, and he was intoxicated with
the thought.
But Alice felt that she was in some way bound to make the most of Mr.
Stocks, and she set herself heroically to the task. She had never heard
of him, but then she was not well versed in the minutiae of things
political, and he clearly was a politician. Doubtless to her father his
name was a household word. So she spoke to him of Glenavelin and its
beauties.
He asked her if she had seen Royston Castle, the residence of his friend
the Duke of Sanctamund. When he had stayed there he had been much
impressed--
Then she spoke wildly of anything, of books and pictures and
people and politics. She found him well-informed, clever, and dogmatic.
The culminating point was reached when she embarked on a stray remark
concerning certain events then happening in India.
He contradicted her with a lofty politeness.
She quoted a book on Kashmir.
He laughed the authority to scorn. "Lewis Haystoun?" he asked. "What
can he know about such things? A wandering dilettante, the worst type
of the pseudo-culture of our universities. He must see all things
through the spectacles of his upbringing."
Fortunately he spoke in a low voice, but Lord Manorwater caught the
name.
"You are talking about Lewie," he said; and then to the table at large,
"do you know that Lewie is home? I saw him to-day."
Bertha Afflint clapped her hands. "Oh, splendid! When is he coming
over? I shall drive to Etterick to-morrow. No--bother! I can't go
to-morrow, I shall go on Wednesday."
Lady Manorwater opened mild eyes of surprise. "Why didn't the boy
write?" And the young Arthur indulged in sundry exclamations, "Oh,
ripping, I say! What? A clinking good chap, my cousin Lewie!"
"Who is this Lewis the well-beloved?" said Mr. Stocks. "I was talking
about a very different person--Lewis Haystoun, the author of a foolish
book on Kashmir."
"Don't you like it?" said Lord Manorwater, pleasantly. "Well, it's the
same man. He is my nephew, Lewie Haystoun. He lives at Etterick, four
miles up the glen. You will see him over here to-morrow or the day
after."
Mr. Stocks coughed loudly to cover his discomfiture. Alice could not
repress a little smile of triumph, but she was forbearing and for the
rest of dinner exerted herself to appease her adversary, listening to
his talk with an air of deference which he found entrancing.
Meanwhile it was plain that Lord Manorwater was not quite at ease with
his company. Usually a man of brusque and hearty address, he showed his
discomfort by an air of laborious politeness. He was patronized for a
brief minute by Mr. Stocks, who set him right on some matter of
agricultural reform. Happening to be a specialist on the subject and an
enthusiastic farmer from his earliest days, he took the rebuke with
proper meekness. The spectacled people were talking earnestly with his
wife. Arthur was absorbed in his dinner and furtive glances at his
left-hand neighbour. There remained Bertha Afflint, whom he had
hitherto admired with fear. To talk with her was exhausting to frail
mortality, and he had avoided the pleasure except in moments of
boisterous bodily and mental health. Now she was his one resource, and
the unfortunate man, rashly entering into a contest of wit, found
himself badly worsted by her ready tongue. He declared that she was
worse than her mother, at which the unabashed young woman replied that
the superiority of parents was the last retort of the vanquished. He
registered an inward vow that Miss Afflint should be used on the morrow
as a weapon to quell Mr. Stocks.
When Alice escaped to the drawing-room she found Bertha and her sister--a
younger and ruddier copy--busy with the letters which had arrived by the
evening post. Lady Manorwater, who reserved her correspondence for the
late hours, seized upon the girl and carried her off to sit by the great
French windows from which lawn and park sloped down to the moorland
loch. She chattered pleasantly about many things, and then innocently
and abruptly asked her if she had not found her companion at table
amusing.
Alice, unaccustomed to fiction, gave a hesitating "Yes," at which her
hostess looked pleased. "He is very clever, you know," she said, "and
has been very useful to me on many occasions."
Alice asked his occupation.
"Oh, he has done many things. He has been very brave and quite the
maker of his own fortunes. He educated himself, and then I think he
edited some Nonconformist paper. Then he went into politics, and became
a Churchman. Some old man took a liking to him and left him his money,
and that was the condition. So I believe he is pretty well off now and
is waiting for a seat. He has been nursing this constituency, and since
the election comes off in a month or two, we asked him down here to
stay. He has also written a lot of things and he is somebody's private
secretary." And Lady Manorwater relapsed into vagueness.
The girl listened without special interest, save that she modified her
verdict on Mr. Stocks, and allowed, some degree of respect for him to
find place in her heart. The fighter in life always appealed to her,
whatever the result of his struggle.
Then Lady Manorwater proceeded to hymn his excellences in an
indeterminate, artificial manner, till the men came into the room, and
conversation became general. Lord Manorwater made his way to Alice,
thereby defeating Mr. Stocks, who tended in the same direction. "Come
outside and see things, Miss Wishart," he said. "It's a shame to miss a
Glenavelin evening if it's fine. We must appreciate our rarities."
And Alice gladly followed him into the still air of dusk which made hill
and tree seem incredibly distant and the far waters of the lake merge
with the moorland in one shimmering golden haze. In the rhododendron
thickets sparse blooms still remained, and all along by the stream-side
stood stately lines of yellow iris above the white water-ranunculus.
The girl was sensitive to moods of season and weather, and she had
almost laughed at the incongruity of the two of them in modern clothes
in this fit setting for an old tale. Dickon of Glenavelin, the sworn
foe of the Lord of Etterick, on such nights as this had ridden up the
water with his bands to affront the quiet moonlight. And now his
descendant was pointing out dim shapes in the park which he said were
prize cattle.
"Whew! what a weariness is civilization!" said the man, with comical
eyes. "We have been making talk with difficulty all the evening which
serves no purpose in the world. Upon my word, my kyloes have the best
of the bargain. And in a month or so there will be the election and I
shall have to go and rave--there is no other word for it, Miss
Wishart--rave on behalf of some fool or other, and talk Radicalism which
would make your friend Dickon turn in his grave, and be in earnest for
weeks when I know in the bottom of my heart that I am a humbug and care
for none of these things. How lightly politics and such matters sit on
us all!"
"But you know you are talking nonsense," said the serious Alice. "After
all, these things are the most important, for they mean duty and courage
and--and--all that sort of thing."
"Right, little woman," said he, smiling; "that is what Stocks tells me
twice a day, but, somehow, reproof comes better from you. Dear me!
it's a sad thing that a middle-aged legislator should be reproved by a
very little girl. Come and see the herons. The young birds will be
everywhere just now."
For an hour in the moonlight they went a-sightseeing, and came back very
cool and fresh to the open drawing-room window. As they approached they
caught an echo of a loud, bland voice saying, "We must remember our
moral responsibilities, my dear Lady Manorwater. Now, for instance--"
And a strange thing happened. For the first time in her life Miss Alice
Wishart felt that the use of loud and solemn words could jar upon her
feelings. She set it down resignedly to the evil influence of her
companion.
In the calm of her bedroom Alice reviewed her recent hours. She
admitted to herself that she would enjoy her visit. A healthy and
active young woman, the mere prospect of an open-air life gave her
pleasure. Also she liked the people. Mentally she epitomized each of
the inmates of the house. Lady Manorwater was all she had pictured
her--a dear, whimsical, untidy creature, with odd shreds of cleverness
and a heart of gold. She liked the boy Arthur, and the spectacled
people seemed harmless. Bertha she was prepared to adore, for behind
the languor and wit she saw a very kindly and capable young woman
fashioned after her own heart. But of all she liked Lord Manorwater
best. She knew that he had a great reputation, that he was said to be
incessantly laborious, and she had expected some one of her father's
type, prim, angular, and elderly. Instead she found a boyish person
whom she could scold, and with women reproof is the first stone in the
foundation of friendship. On Mr. Stocks she generously reserved her
judgment, fearing the fate of the hasty.