MASTER CHARLES.
There was a whispered colloquy outside the door, succeeded by the
entrance of a frank, open-faced young fellow, looking very comely in his
green coat, and yet retaining a comical likeness to Miss Kingscote.
The gentleman was coming up freely to Lady Bell, prepared to regard her
as an acquisition, in the profits of which he was entitled to a share.
He was not going to address her with the formal “I have the honour,” or
“Your servant,” but with a friendly jocular “Good morning to you, Miss
Barlowe, now that you have come to hand. Don’t let my sister and you put
out your bright eyes with fine stitching,” when he, too, was induced to
reverse the usual order of greeting to a companion, though making his
amendment on more intelligent principles than those which had influenced
Miss Kingscote.
Instead of speaking at all, he gave Lady Bell an amazed confused bow in
return for her perfectly calm curtsey, and turned aside muttering to
himself, “By George, she is a highflyer, and no mistake, she must be a
tragedy queen herself.”
Miss Kingscote was senselessly elated by the manner in which her
companion struck Master Charles. “Don’t you go for to contradict me
again,” said his sister, with a meaning chuckle, shaking her fat finger
at the lad; “mum’s the word, but we’ve all heard tell of pearls before
swine.”
Lady Bell, in spite of her former heroics, was rather pleased to see in
the dire dearth of sympathy which threatened to prevail in other
quarters at Nutfield, that Master Charles, as his sister generally
styled him, even in addressing him with simple honour and doting
fondness, was personable and companionable.
But he was no such likely mate for Lady Bell, even had she been free,
that she should be carried off her feet by his homespun attractions.
These had not been cultivated beyond the point to which their natural
manliness and intelligence had been brought by the parson of the parish,
who had volunteered to act as young Kingscote of Nutfield’s governor,
and by the country town’s fencing and dancing master, who had undertaken
to convey to the young fellow a version of the deportment and manners of
a gentleman. But Lady Bell had known fine gentlemen.
Lady Bell had been determined on keeping Master Charles at a distance.
She owed it to the sedateness with which she was bound to behave, and to
her knowledge of the real difference of their rank. So she began by
being very quiet and reserved, and by resisting the faint and finally
bashful advances of the master of the house.
But circumstances were tremendously against Lady Bell.
Nutfield was a country house where winter was approaching. Miss
Kingscote was a garrulous rustic, from whom neither edification nor
enlivenment, except of one kind, could be expected.
Master Charles was a gentleman, although of the plainer sort,
prepossessing in look and speech, not without parts, information, and
spirit, of an age not exceeding twenty-two.
Lady Bell was guileless, ingenuous as far as she dared to be ingenuous,
naturally animated and enterprising, trained in a school of refinement
and finish, and delicately handsome.
Lady Bell was unable to gainsay Master Charles in making friends with
him, so far as allowing him to be on cordial terms with her. Soon he
brought her trophies from the game preserves and hunting field. He
consulted her on his purchases in the little town.
“Look here, Miss Barlowe,” he would say, “my tailor tells me this
brocade, of which I have a pattern for a waistcoat, was brought right
from France on an order of Sir Peregrine Cust’s. Do you affect it? lend
me your taste.”
He told her of his engagements, and gave her a full account of his
sayings and doings, and those of his friends. “I was at Colonel
Barnard’s last night,” he would mention. “We had games, and the ladies
proposed riddles. I wish my plaguey memory had retained them for the
benefit of Deb and you, Miss Barlowe. What do you think? Miss Polly, the
colonel’s daughter, stood up and danced a jig first-rate with her
brother the sailor.”
He confessed that he had been longing desperately for his commission,
but he was not so impatient now that Miss Barlowe had kindly consented
to bear his sister company. They formed quite a little colony at home,
who could play cribbage, piquet, or Pope Joan, of an evening, and be
independent of the great world without—not that he was not going where
glory waited him, that he did not mean to earn his right to sit down
like an old man by his modest fire-side.
Lady Bell, though she had sufficient caution to keep her narratives
within bounds, repaid Master Charles’s confidences by fine stories out
of her short life with the players, out of the plays she had seen acted,
and the few books which she had read.
She took his advice seriously on the feather trimmings which she was
manufacturing for Miss Kingscote’s furbelows, whether the turkeys’
feathers did not “come in vastly pretty as a silver grey after the
golden brown of the pheasants’ feathers?”
With a little pressing she sang to him, as an appropriate echo of his
military aspirations, “Over the hills and far away;” she suffered him to
escort her—to be sure Miss Kingscote was generally with her—when he
overtook her on these country roads, which, in the shortening winter
days, were not only barely surmountable in their mud and mire, but which
were frequently forbidden to unattended women in the end of the last
century.
In short, Master Charles and Miss Barlowe were gliding fast into an
innocent, inconsiderate, highly perilous intimacy, which was almost
inevitable between the pair shut up together and shut out from the
world.
Young men were scarce about Lumley, and this young man was popular among
the neighbours who had rescued him. Master Charles was freely welcome,
where Miss Kingscote was merely tolerated and laughed at, in most of the
country houses, and in the best town houses of Lumley. He could go
a-visiting, if he chose, four evenings out of the seven.
Naturally it was otherwise with Miss Kingscote’s companion.
But all at once Lady Bell had her eyes opened to the precipice on the
edge of which she was unwarily walking.
In the first place Miss Kingscote’s manner changed. Her boisterous good
humour and rough hospitality gave way to a halting glumness and an
absolute rudeness. Her easiness grew uneasy, and testified itself in a
kind of alarmed, reproachful indulgence to the follies of mankind, as
distinct from, and preyed upon by, those of womankind.
There were “creeturs,” Miss Kingscote declared emphatically, who stole
into honourable houses and plotted against their credit. Miss Kingscote
seemed to become morbidly concerned with these “creeturs,” vain
peacocks, serpents in disguise, who aimed at occupying the seats of
their betters, but would never reach those seats, instead would “sup”
sorrow and disgrace, as the just punishment of their scandalous
lightness of head and unwarrantable ambition.
“But you would never be such a pagan, Miss,” Miss Kingscote would
protest relentingly, not without a warning in the relenting, “you’ve
been taken in and had the warmest corner here, as if you had been my
sister, indeed—though, Lud! no sister of mine—a Kingscote of Nutfield,
would have gone into service, rather starve, or live on the hards, as I
have lived many and many’s the day.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Kingscote,” Lady Bell defended
herself, too scornful in her surprise to be even sorely displeased. “I
think the best of us may go into service, and that the only truly
demeaning service is what we cannot honestly perform. Yes, you have been
very kind to me, but I do not know what you mean.”
“You wouldn’t be so horn mad,” persisted Miss Kingscote, looking Lady
Bell hard in the face, “as to force me to give you the back of the door,
Miss Barlowe, for misbehaviour, with the small chance it would give of a
rise in the world? As for them boobies of men,” added Miss Kingscote,
“they are good for nought save to breed strife. They’re as blind as bats
to their own goods, and as wild as tigerses when they’re crossed for
their goods, and after their toys is broke, ‘trample these toys under
foot’ is the order of the day.”
“You’re very hard on the men,” said Lady Bell, “but I have nothing to do
to defend them.”
“In course, Master Charles is among the best of his sort,” explained
Miss Kingscote, striving to speak loftily in her turn. “He’ll think
better on it. He’ll come out at the head of the cart yet, and conduct
himself conformable, not disappointing none of his friends and
well-wishers. He’ll cut a dash, and bring home a flag or two, or a gun,
like his forefathers did—his and mines. He’ll wait till then and mate
with his equal.”
“With all my heart, Miss Kingscote,” replied Lady Bell, and then she
remonstrated, “but good gracious! why should I have to come out at the
foot of the cart because he is to leap from the head?”
Miss Kingscote had no answer to that indignant demand save a sulky “You
know best, miss; it lies with you. I reckon your lot will be of your own
choosing.”
Lady Bell could have laughed bitterly; she could have packed up the
small wardrobe which she had gathered before her purse was stolen, and
seen her last of Nutfield and the Kingscotes.
But here was no laughing matter, and although it had not come to this
that Lady Bell Trevor, the forlorn young wife of Trevor of Trevor Court,
had entered into a rivalry, which would have been tenfold base on her
part, with Miss Polly Barnard and Miss Ironside, the daughters of the
mayor of Lumley, for the favour of so simple a country gentleman, still
she could ill dispense with the shelter of that gentleman’s roof and the
countenance of his sister.
Neither was Lady Bell’s conscience quite clear. Her prudence—the slender
prudence of sixteen—had slept, and the result threatened to be
altogether disastrous.
Master Charles was not satisfied with the amount of friendship which
Lady Bell had vouchsafed to him. He was pressing for more. His sister’s
clumsy opposition, which rendered him surly to her, only made him more
eager, open, and ostentatious in his approaches.
Lady Bell realised with a throb of apprehension that this task of
keeping Master Charles in order, was by no means the easy task which she
had conceitedly conceived beforehand, and set for herself without doubt
or fear.
She began to tremble at Master Charles’s youthful keenness, confidence,
and daring. He snatched her hand and kissed it before Miss Kingscote’s
face. He stole Miss Barlowe’s handkerchief behind Miss Kingscote’s back
and kept it. Trifles light as air these liberties were, but Lady Bell
could have cried over them with shame and vexation.
She commenced to experience the weakness of wrong-doing in trying to
summon up her dignity to repulse the assailant. Though desertion of duty
and deceit in a certain measure, were not called by such hard names in
Lady Bell’s day, and though those practices had been resorted to by her,
half in ignorance, yet she fell back on accusing herself, and was not
without a horrified intuition that the tendency of her conduct was to
act like a canker in corroding her moral nature.