girl with the hawk on her wrist and long hair of your color? She lived
in Charles's time, and was a great beauty at the court. There were many
who would have lived and died for her, but the one who loved her best
was her cousin Guy. The story says that she had plighted herself to him
in these very woods; at any rate, he followed her when she went to join
the court, and she kept him on, luring him with vague promises, and
flirting with Goring, and Francis Egerton, and all the other gay
gentlemen. One night his endurance broke down: he asked her whether or
no she cared for him? He begged, as a sign, for the rosebud she had in
her dress. She laughed at him, and--gave the flower to Harry Carrew, a
young fellow in Lunsford's 'Babe-eaters.' Guy said no more, and left
her. Before dawn he shot Carrew through the heart, took the rosebud from
the boy's doublet, put it in his own breast, and fell upon his sword.
They say Muriel lost her senses. I don't believe it: no coquette ever
had so much feeling; but if you ask the old servants they will tell you,
and firmly credit the story too, that hers and Guy Vivian's ghosts still
are to be seen every midnight at Christmas-eve, the day that he fought
and killed little Harry Carrew."
He laughed, but Cecil shuddered.
"What a horrible story! But do you believe that any woman ever possessed
such power over a man?"
"I believe it since I have seen it. One of my best friends is now
hopelessly insane because a woman as worthless as this dead branch
forsook him. Poor fellow! they set it down to a coup de soleil, but it
was the falsehood of Emily Rushbrooke that did it. But, for myself, I
never should lose my head for any woman. I did once when I was a boy,
but I know better now."
A wild, desperate idea came into Cecil's mind. She contrasted the
passionless calm of his face with the tender gentleness of his tone a
few moments ago, and she would have given her life to see him "lose his
head for her" as he had done for that other. How she hated her, whoever
she had been! Cecil had seen too many men not to know that Syd's cool
exterior covered a stormy heart, and in the longing to rouse up the
storm at her incantation she resolved to play a dangerous game. The
ghost story did not warn her. As Mephistopheles to Faust came Horace Cos
to aid the impulse, and Cecil turned to him with one of her radiant
smiles. She never looked prettier than in her black hat; the wind had
only blown a bright flush into her cheeks--though it had turned Laura
blue and the Screechington red--and the Colonel looked up at her as he
put her skates on with something of the look Guy might have given Muriel
Vivian flirting gaily with the roistering cavaliers.
"Now, Sir Horace, show us some of those wonderful Serpentine figures,"
cried Cecil, balancing herself with the grace of a curlew, and whirling
here, there, and everywhere at her will as easily as if she were on a
chalked ball-room floor. She hadn't skated and sledged on the Ontario
for nothing. More than one man had lost his own balance looking after
her. Cos wasn't started yet; one pair of skates were too large, another
pair too small; if he'd thought of it he'd have had his own sent over.
He stood on the brink much as Winkle, of Pickwickian memory, trembled in
Weller's grasp. Cecil looked at him with laughing eyes, a shrewd
suspicion that he had planted her adorer, and that the quadrille on the
Serpentine was an offspring of the Cossetting poetic fancy. Thrice did
the luckless baronet essay the ice, and thrice did he come to grief with
heels in the air, and his dainty apparel disordered. At last, his
Canadian sorceress took compassion upon him, and declaring she was
tired, asked him to drive her across the pond. Cos, with an air of
languid martyrdom and a heavy sigh as he glanced at his Houbigants, torn
and soiled, grasped the back of the chair, and actually contrived to
start it. Once started, away went the chair and its Phaeton after it,
whether he would or no, its occupant looking up and laughing in the
dandy's heated, disconcerted, and anxious face. All at once there was a
crash, a plunge, and a shout from Vivian, who was on the opposite bank.
The chair had broken the ice, flung Cecil out into the water with the
shock, while her charioteer, by a lucky jump backwards, had saved
himself, and stood on the brink of the chasm unharmed. Cecil's crinoline
kept her from sinking; she stretched out her little hand with a cry--it
sounded like Vivian's name as it came to my ears on the keen north
wind--but before Vivian, who came across the ice like a whirlwind, could
get to her, Cos, valorously determining to wet his wristbands, stooped
down, and, holding by the chair, which was firmly wedged in, put his arm
round her and dragged her out. Vivian came up two seconds too late.
"Are you hurt?" he said, bending towards her.
"No," said Cecil, faintly, as her head drooped unconsciously on Cos's
shoulder. She had struck her forehead on the ice, which had stunned her
slightly. The Colonel saw the chestnut hair resting against Cos's arm;
he dropped the hand he had taken, and turned to the shore.
"Bring her to the bank," he said, briefly. "I will go home and send a
carriage. Good Heavens! that that fool should have saved her!" I heard
him mutter, as he brushed past me.
He drove the carriage down himself, and under pretext of holding on the
horses, did not descend from the box while Horace wrapped rugs and
cloaks round Cecil, who, having more pluck than strength, declared she
was quite well now, but nearly fainted when Horace lifted her out, and
she was consigned by Mrs. Vivian to her bedroom for the rest of the day.
"It is astonishing how we miss Cecil," remarked Blanche, at dinner.
"Isn't it dull without her, Sydney?"
"I didn't perceive it," said the Colonel, calmly; "but I am very sorry
for the cause of her absence."
"Well, by Jove! it sounds unfeeling; but I can't say I am," murmured
Horace. "It's something to have saved such a deuced pretty girl as
that."
"Curse that puppy," muttered Syd to his champagne glass. "A fool that
isn't fit for her to look at----"
Syd's and my room, in the bachelors' wing, adjoin each other; and as our
windows both possess the convenience of balconies, we generally smoke in
them, and hold a little chat before turning in. When I stepped out into
my balcony that night, Syd was already puffing away at his pipe. Perhaps
his Cavendish was unusually good, for he did not seem greatly inclined
to talk, but leant over the balcony, looking out into the clear frosty
night, with the winter stars shining on the wide white uplands and the
leafless glittering trees.
"What's that?" said he sharply, as the notes of a cornet playing, and
playing badly, Halevy's air, "Quand de la Nuit," struck on the night
air.
"A serenade, I suppose."
"A serenade in the snow. Who is romantic idiot enough for that?" said
Vivian contemptuously, nearly pitching himself over to see where the
cornet came from. It came from under Cecil's windows, where a light was
still burning. The player looked uncommonly like Cossetting wrapped up
in a cloak with a wide-awake on, under which the moonlight showed us
some fair hair peeping.
Vivian drew back with an oath he did not mean me to hear. He laughed
scornfully. "Milk-posset, of course! There is no other fool in the
house. His passion must be miraculously deep to drag him out of his bed
into the snow to play some false notes to his lady-love. It's rather
windy, don't you think, Ned. Good night, old fellow--and, I say, don't
turn little Blanche's head with your pretty speeches. You and I are
bound not to flirt, since we're sworn never to marry; and I don't want
the child played with, though possibly (being a woman) she'd very soon
recover it."
With which sarcasm on his sister and her sex, the Colonel shut down the
window with a clang; and I remained, smoking four pipes and a half,
meditating on his last words, for I _had_ been playing with the child,
and felt (inhuman brute! the ladies will say) that I should be sorry if
she _did_ recover it.
III.
SHOWING THAT LOVE-MAKING ON HOLY GROUND DOESN'T PROSPER.
Cecil came down the next morning looking very pretty after her ducking.
Vivian asked her how she was with his general air of calm courtesy,
helped her to some cold pheasant, and applied himself to his breakfast
and some talk with a sporting man about the chances of the frost
breaking up.
Horace, who looked upon himself as a preux chevalier, had had his left
arm put in a sling on the strength of a bruise as big as a
fourpenny-piece, and appeared to consider himself entitled to Cecil's
eternal gratitude and admiration for having gone the length of wetting
his coat sleeves for her.
"Do you like music by starlight?" he whispered, with a self-conscious
smile, after a course of delicate attentions throughout breakfast.
Syd fixed his eyes on Cecil's, steadily but impassively. The color rose
into her face, and she turned to Cos with a mischievous laugh.
"Very much, if--I am not too sleepy to hear it; and it isn't a cornet
out of tune."
"How cruel!" murmured Horace, as he passed her coffee. "You shouldn't
criticise so severely when a fellow tries to please you."
"That poor dear girl really thinks I turned out into the snow last night
to give her that serenade," observed Cos, with a languid laugh, when we
were alone in the billiard-room. "Good, isn't it, the idea of _my_
troubling myself?"
"Whose cracked cornet was it, then, that made that confounded row last
night?" I asked.
Horace laughed again; it was rarely he was so highly amused at anything:
"It was Cleante's, to be sure. He don't play badly when his hands are
not numbed, poor devil! Of course he made no end of a row about going
out into the snow, but I made him do it. I knew Cecil would think it was
I. Women are so vain, poor things!"
It was lucky I alone was the repository of his confidence, for if Vivian
had chanced to have been in the billiard-room, it is highly probable he
would then and there have brained his cousin with one of the cues.
Happily he was out of the reach of temptation, in the stables, looking
after Qui Vive, who had to "bide in stall," as much to that gallant
bay's disquiet as to her owner's; for I don't know which of the two
best loves a burst over a stiff country, or a fast twenty minutes up
wind alone with the hounds when they throw up their heads.
To the stables, by an odd coincidence, Cecil, putting the irresistible
black hat on the top of her chestnut braids, prevailed on Blanche to
escort her, vowing (which was nearly, but not quite, the truth) that she
loved the sweet pets of horses better than anything on earth. Where
Cecil went, Laura made a point of going too, to keep her enemy in sight,
I suppose; though Cecil, liking a fast walk on the frosty roads, a game
of battledore and shuttlecock with Blanche (when we were out of the
house), or anything, in short, better than working with her feet on the
fender, and the Caldecott inanities or Screechington scandals in her
ear, often led Laura many an unwelcome dance, and brought that luckless
young lady to try at things which did not sit well upon her as they did
upon the St. Aubyn, who had a knack of doing, and doing charmingly, a
thousand things no other woman could have attempted. So, as Vivian and
I, and some of the other men, stood in the stable-doors, smoking, and
talking over the studs accommodated in the spacious stalls, a strong
party of four young ladies came across the yard.
"I'm come to look at Qui Vive; will you show him to me?" said Cecil,
softly. Her gentle, childlike way was the most telling of all her
changing moods, but I must do her the justice to say that it was
perfectly natural, she was no actress.
"With great pleasure," said Syd, very courteously, if not
over-cordially; and to Qui Vive's stall Cecil went, alone in her glory,
for Laura was infinitely too terrified at the sight of the bay's strong
black hind legs to risk a kick from them, even to follow Syd. Helena
Vivian stayed with her, and Blanche came with me to visit my hunters.
Cecil is a tolerable judge of a horse; she praised Qui Vive's lean head,
full eye, and silky coat with discrimination, and Qui Vive, though not
the best-tempered of thorough-breds, let her pat his smooth sides and
kiss his strong neck without any hostile demonstration.
Vivian watched her as if she were a spoilt child who bewitched him, but
whom he knew to be naughty; he could not resist the fascination of her
ways, but he never altered his calm, courteous tone to her--the tone
Cecil longed to hear change, were it even into invectives against her,
to testify some deeper interest.
"Now show me the mount you will give me when the frost breaks up and we
take out the hounds," said Cecil, with a farewell caress of Qui Vive.
"You shall have the grey four-year-old; Billiard-ball, and he will suit
you exactly, for he is as light as a bird, checks at nothing, and will
take you safe over the stiffest bullfinch. I know you may trust him, for
he has carried Blanche."
Cecil threw back her head. "Oh, I would ride anything, Qui Vive himself,
if he would bear a habit. I am not like Miss Caldecott, who, catching
sight of his dear brown legs, vanished as rapidly as if she had seen
Muriel's ghost on Christmas-eve."
The Colonel smiled. "You are very unmerciful to poor Miss Caldecott.
What has she done to offend you?"
"Offend me! Nothing in the world. Though I heard her lament with Miss
Screechington in the music-room, that I was 'so fast,' and 'such slang
style;' I consider that rather a compliment, for I never knew any lady
pull to pieces my bonnet, or my bouquet, or my hat, unless it was a
prettier one than their own. That sounds a vain speech, but I don't mean
it so."
The Colonel looked down into her velvet eyes; she was most dangerous to
him in this mood. "No," he said, briefly, "no one would accuse you of
vanity, though they might, pardon me, of love of admiration."
Cecil laughed merrily. "Yes, perhaps so; it is pleasant, you know. Yet
sometimes I am tired of it all, and I want----"
"A more difficult conquest? To find a diamond, merely, like Cleopatra,
to show your estimate of its value by throwing it away."
A flush of vexation came into her cheeks. "Do you think me utterly
heartless?" she said impetuously. "No. I mean that I often tire of the
fulsome compliments, the flattery, the attention, the whirl of society!
I do like admiration. I tell you candidly what every other woman
acknowledges to herself but denies to the world; but often it is nothing
to me--mere Dead Sea fruit. I care nothing for the voices that whisper
it; the eyes that express it wake no response in mine, and I would give
it all for one word of true interest, one glance of real----"
Vivian looked down on her steadily with his searching eagle eyes, out of
which, when he chose, nothing could be read. "If I dare believe you----"
he said, half aloud.
Gentle as his tone was, the mere doubt stung Cecil to the quick.
Something of the wild, desperate feeling of the day previous rose in her
heart. The same feeling that makes men brave heaven and hell to win
their desires worked up in her. If she had been one of us, just at that
moment, she would have flinched at nothing; being a young lady, her
hands were tied. She could only go to Cos's stalls with him (Cos knows
as much about horseflesh as I do about the profound female mystery they
call "shopping"), and flirt with him to desperation, while Horace got
the steam up faster than he, with his very languid motor powers, often
did, being accustomed to be spared the trouble and have all the love
made to him--an indolence in which the St. Aubyn, who knows how to keep
a man well up to hand, never indulged him.
"Do have some pity on me," I heard Cos murmuring, as she stroked a great
brute of his, with a head like a fiddle-case, and no action at all. "I
assure you, Miss St. Aubyn, you make me wretched. I'd die for you
to-morrow if I only saw how, and yet you take no more notice of me
sometimes than if I were that colt."
Cecil glanced at him with a smile that would have driven Cos distracted
if he'd been in for it as deep as he pretended.
"I don't see that you are much out of condition, Sir Horace, but if you
have any particular fancy to suicide, the horse-pond will accommodate
you at a moment's notice; only don't do it till after our play, because
I have set my heart on that suit of Milan armor. Pray don't look so
plaintive. If it will make you any happier, I am going for a walk, and
you may come too. Blanche, dear, which way is it to the plantations?"
Now poor Horace hated a walk on a frosty morning as cordially as
anything, being altogether averse to any natural exercise: but he was
sworn to the St. Aubyn, and Blanche and I, dropping behind them, he had
a good hour of her fascinations to himself. I do not know whether he
improved the occasion, but Cecil at luncheon looked tired and teased. I
should think, after Syd's graphic epigrammatic talk, the baronet's
lisped nonsense must have been rather trying, especially as Cecil has a
strong leaning to intellect.
Vivian didn't appear at luncheon; he was gone rabbit-shooting with the
other fellows, and I should have been with them if I had not thought
lounging in the drawing-room, reading "Clytemnestra" to Blanche, with
many pauses, the greater fun of the two. I am keen about sport, too; but
ever since, at the age of ten, I conceived a romantic passion for my
mother's lady's-maid--a tall and stately young lady, who eventually
married a retail tea-dealer--I have thought the beaux yeux the best of
all games.
"Mrs. Vivian, Blanche and Helena and I want to be very useful, if you
will let us," said Cecil, one morning. She was always soft and playful
with that gentlest of all women, Syd's mother. "What do you smile in
that incredulous way for? We _can_ be extraordinarily industrious: the
steam sewing-machine is nothing to us when we choose! What do you think
we are going to do? We are going to decorate the church for Christmas.
To leave it to that poor little old clerk, who would only stick two
holly twigs in the pulpit candlesticks, and fancy he had done a work of
high art, would be madness. And, besides, it will be such fun."
"If you think it so, pray do it, dear," laughed Mrs. Vivian. "I can't
say I should, but your tastes and mine are probably rather different.
The servants will do as you direct them."
"Oh no," said Cecil; "we mean to do it all ourselves. The gentlemen may
help us if they like--those, at least, who prefer our society to that of
smaller animals, with lop-ears and little bushy tails, who have a
fascination superior sometimes to any of our attractions." She flashed a
glance at the Colonel, who was watching her over the top of _Punch_, as,
when I was a boy, I have watched the sun, though it pained my eyes to do
it. "You're the grand seigneur of Deerhurst," said Cecil, turning to
him; "will you be good, and order cart-loads of holly and evergreens
(and plenty of the Portugal laurel, please, because it's so pretty) down
to the church; and will you come and do all the hard work for me? The
rabbits would _so_ enjoy a little peace to-day, poor things!"
He smiled in spite of himself, and did her bidding, with a flush of
pleasure on his face. I believe at that moment, to please her, he would
have cut down the best timber on the estates--even the old oaks, in
whose shadow in the midsummer of centuries before Guy Vivian and Muriel
had plighted their troth.
The way to the church was through a winding walk, between high walls of
yew, and the sanctuary itself was a find old Norman place, whose _tout
ensemble_ I admired, though I could not pick it to pieces
architecturally.
To the church we all went, of course, with more readiness than we
probably ever did in our lives, regardless of the rose chains with which
we were very likely to become entangled, while white hands weaved the
holly wreaths.
Vivian had ordered evergreens enough to decorate fifty churches, and had
sent over to the neighboring town for no end of ribbon emblazonments and
illuminated scrolls, on which Cecil looked with delight. She seemed to
know by instinct it was done for _her_, and not for his sisters.
"How kind that is of you," she said, softly. "That is like what you were
in Toronto. Why are you not always the same?"
For a moment she saw passion enough in his eye to satisfy her, but he
soon mastered it, and answered her courteously:
"I am very glad they please you. Shall we go to work at once, for fear
it grow dusk before we get through with it?"
"Can I do anything to help you?" murmured Cos in her ear.
She did not want him, and laughed mischievously. "You can cut some holly
if you like. Begin on those large boughs."
"Better not, Cos," said the Colonel. "You will certainly soil your
hands, and you might chance to scratch them."
"And if you did you would never forgive me, so I will let you off duty.
You may go back to the dormeuse and the 'Lys de la Vallee' if you wish,"
laughed Cecil.
Horace looked sulky, and curled his blond whiskers in dudgeon, while
Cecil, with half a dozen satellites about her, proceeded to work with
vigorous energy, keeping Syd, however, as her head workman; and the
Colonel twisted pillars, nailed up crosses, hung wreaths, and put up
illuminated texts, as if he had been a carpenter all his life, and his
future subsistence entirely depended on his adorning Deerhurst church in
good taste. It was amusing to me to see him, whom the highest London
society, the gayest Paris life bored--who pronounced the most dashing
opera supper and the most vigorous debates alike slow--taking the
deepest interest in decorating a little village church! I question if
Eros did not lurk under the shiny leaves and the scarlet berries of
those holly boughs quite as dangerously as ever he did under the rose
petals consecrated to him.
I had my own affairs to attend to, sitting on the pulpit stairs at
Blanche's feet, twisting the refractory evergreens at her direction; but
I kept an occasional look-out at the Colonel and his dangerous Canadian
for all that. They found time (as we did) for plenty of conversation
over the Christmas decorations, and Cecil talked softly and earnestly
for once without any "mischief." She talked of her father's
embarrassments, her mother's trials, of Mrs. Coverdale, with honest
detestation of that widow's arts and artifices, and of her own tastes,
and ideas, and feelings, showing the Colonel (what she did not show
generally to her numerous worshippers) her heart as well as her mind. As
she knelt on the altar steps, twisting green leaves round the communion
rails, Syd standing beside her, his pale bronze cheek flushed, and his
eyes never left their study of her face as she bent over her work,
looking up every minute to ask him for another branch, or another strip
of blue ribbon.
When it had grown dusk, and the church was finished, looking certainly
very pretty, with the dark leaves against its white pillars, and the
scarlet berries kissing the stained windows, Cecil went noiselessly up
into the organ-loft, and played the Christmas anthem. Vivian followed
her, and, leaning against the organ, watched her, shading his eyes with
his hand. She went on playing--first a Miserere, then Mozart's Symphony
in E, and then improvisations of her own--the sort of music that, when
one stands calmly to listen to it, makes one feel it whether one likes
or not. As she played, tears rose to her lashes, and she looked up at
Vivian's face, bending over her in the gloaming. Love was in her eyes,
and Syd knew it, but feared to trust to it. His pulses beat fast, he
leaned towards her, till his mustaches touched her soft perfumy hair.
Words hung on his lips. But the door of the organ-loft opened.
"'Pon my life, Miss St. Aubyn, that's divine, delicious!" cried Cos. "We
always thought that you were divine, but we never knew till now that you
brought the angels' harmony with you to earth. For Heaven's sake, play
that last thing again!"
"I never play what I compose twice," said Cecil, hurriedly, stooping
down for her hat.